A bigger problem is that companies that outsource manufacturing tend to lose touch with the underlying technologies that make their products possible. If you're not very careful (and Apple is more the exception here than the rule - and I speak as an ex-Apple engineer:-) you'll eventually find that your "designers" have no idea of what's going to be possible in the next generation of technology.
Apple is the exception because the elements of consumer technology are familiar to most American trained engineers from their experience as budding consumers. The same does not apply to aerospace, heavy manufacturing, and most other high tech areas. If you're not building the stuff in those areas you'll soon run out of people who have any idea of what they're doing...
Note that the story only suggests that the vaccine doesn't help the elderly and weak. They even admit this themselves in a q&a:
"One of the most compelling arguments for flu vaccination is to provide herd immunity. In other words, by keeping young healthy people from getting sick it is believed that we can slow the spread of the disease to others. That could help to protect those who can’t benefit from a vaccine due to a weak immune system. Studies in nursing homes suggest that there is benefit to the elderly when caretakers are immunized along with residents."
I think they're being dishonest when they conflate two claims:
* the vaccine may not help the elderly and weak
with
* the vaccine has no value (a much stronger claim and one that they don't make a good case for).
Herd immunity is pretty much the whole point of mass immunization. Ignoring that make them guilty of exactly what they accuse the other side of. Not pretty....
Those "cryptic" commands are one of the few advantages that Linux desktops have at the moment. Right now I'm using a Ubuntu machine which displaying applications from a nearby Suse Enterprise laptop and often displays distant (via NX if its over a VPN or straight remote X otherwise) apps from various servers running other Linux variants.
The inability of OSX or Windows to this sort of thing actually matters in an enterprise setting. Whatever issues X has supporting games matters somewhat less. And seeing as Linux is hardly going to beat XBox et al in the games area, maybe the enterprise would be a good place to focus?
Freeman is a very nice guy and was a good physicist, but he's a lousy politician and an even poorer risk manager. Freeman makes an argument that the biophysics of climate change are complicated and the idiotic "interesting" parent pretty much sums makes my argument for me:-)
1) The fact that the models may be wrong only means we have to lean *harder* on carbon output. We now know from the ice core records that the climate is not metastable and can in fact shift rapidly when you push it like we are *right now*. The fact that the models aren't perfect doesn't *decrease* the risk it *increases* it. If you're driving on a road where a bridge may have collapsed (e.g. let's say you're in the US on an interstate and the president is a Republican:-) the fact that it's foggy doesn't mean you can speed up.
2) The business with top soil is amusing but hardly very useful. There's lots of complicated data about topsoil out there (go google young man...) but pretty much all of it suggests that we're loosing megatons of it in the US. In the rest of the world we're loosing it much faster. So what's Freeman's suggestion? Increase topsoil. Really helpful that one. By saying "saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated" he's going to get the giant corrupt corp. agribusiness interests of the world to change all their short-term profit-oriented processes to increase topsoil? No. They'll point to the "what me worry?" part of his article and ignore the rest just like the parent.
I hope we get really lucky and somehow there's some hidden feedback loop in the climate that bails us out. Cause the way every off the reservation comment by some cranky old scientist gets played up by the media means there's no way in hell we're gonna get out of this by rational planning:-)
One final word:
No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land. Actually you don't need a computer model. Just work for a big corporation (instead of say, the eden-like Institute for Advanced Studies for most of your life), know that large corporations are who are going to be managing that land, and the answer is clear. We're gonna *rape* it. Cause next year's topsoil doesn't effect this quarter's profits so it's not material.
When you're a sociopath waiting for marriage don't enter into the equation, if you know what I mean...
Oh good lord. Look at you. The fact is, the entire environmental movement is part of an overall socialist agenda to try and deindustrialize western nations so that the third world can be "equal". You guys on the left have your zealots too. Why else would the first world have to pay the third world for the "right to pollute". The whole argument is absurd. Okay - here's a simple reason. We (the first world) pumped most of the excess carbon that is in the system. The third world is gonna take it in the chin from that excess. So why shouldn't we pay them? (Except we're currently powerful and they're not. So don't worry your tiny little head:-)
(And yes, smoking does cause cancer, diesel particulates are bad for you, and big increases in CO2 can change the climate. Massive corporate spending on scammy PR doesn't change the science. It just makes it harder to see:-)
I think this is not a feature, because we know all the iPhone users will respond to the difficulty of making a call in the car with the thing by NOT MAKING CELL PHONE CALLS IN THE CAR. Or more likely not.
(And yes, I notice folks driving their Ford Exterminator Grand Toddler-Backing Over Special Edition SUVs erratically while making cell phone calls all the time. So I'm not in favor of bad driving while talking. I'm just thinking that those folks aren't exactly the type to spend $600 on a phone and then not use it while driving cause it makes them even more dangerous. What part of "my truck is specifically designed to be better at squashing other people without making me any safer" don't you understand???)
At least if the phone had voice dialing we'd get the satisfaction of watching his Steveness try and come up with a solution to the whole bluetooth headset ass-dialing problem. (Which is probably why the phone doesn't support voice dialing, now that I think about it...)
You seemed to have missed the point somewhat. They are asking him to commit a crime. An employer can not ask you to do that, and fire you when you refuse. If they did, you would have the option of going to court and suing for wrongful termination, but its probably not worth the effort. So you are right in some respects, but you still have legal recourse in this situation. So I'm curious (not really knowing) as to what the reality is. Is the reality
1) "They'll fire your ass for insubordination and if you complain about it they'll bury you. Sure you can, in theory, sue them for "wrongful termination" but you'll probably never get another job in the US if you do. And they have more money than you do, so they'll likely win in court, anyway"
Or is it
2) "If you refuse the illegal order and they fire you, you'll be fine. Most companies actually try to follow the law and expect their employees to, also. They'd be happy to hire someone who draws the line at violating the law when ordered to by a superior. And the court will frown on a company retaliating on a law-abiding employee and will compensate you accordingly."
I've been lucky enough (and picked my employers carefully enough, perhaps:-) to never have to find out. But reading the WSJ suggests that maybe #1 is closer to reality than #2. But I don't really know. I imagine the OP would like to know for sure before he makes his next move....
And don't discount the value of doing what's right for right's sake. There's a lot to be said for maintaining personal integrity simply because it's part of who you are (to yourself even if no one else acknowledges it)...
[Cue monkey boy dance]. The biggest benefit that could come out of this for *all* Linux users would be better hardware support. If manufactures think that "Hey, no Linux driver means we're not supporting part of Dell's consumer line" they might get serious about writing (open?) drivers or at least making it easier for the community to support their stuff.
And if Linux can end up being 5% of Dell's consumer sales (though even that might be optimistic) it's going to have a huge effect - because Dell is more likely to bundle stuff that will work with their entire line, not just 95% of it. Supporting one type of hardware is cheaper than two. (Though, of course, so it supporting only one kind of OS, which is how we got here:-) It would be so great if you could just assume that any random printer would totally work with Linux...
The original CU numbers were bad - the revised report signals that even if you don't care about your impact on your neighbors, they still make simple economic sense...
This is a variant of what I call the "Argument from Plumbing". When the plumber comes and fixes your drains, he isn't taking away your free will. He's enabling you to exercise your free will to do other things than suffer crappy plumbing. An omniscient good God would have created a world different in too many ways to count.
There's more interesting ways to exercise your free will as a healthy well fed buddist than as weak starving christian, to boot:-)
"Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered," Ballmer said. This "is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability."
(He's not saying which bits, but certainly Mono isn't exactly excluded, if you know what I mean:-)
I appreciate De Icaza's contributions, but sadly there is no future for Mono or Novell. (Don't blame him, it's not really his fault.)
Microsoft knows what they are doing and Novell's leadership is the typical short-term driven corp types. Charles Ferguson's line about Apple and MS in in his book (High Stakes No Prisoners) comes to mind:
"Watching Sculley go up against Gates was rather like watching a rich playboy who was ordering his yacht to attack a carrier battle group."
Substitute Novell's current leadership for Sculley and you have the current picture. MS saw a chance to split the open source world in two and cripple Novell for a few hundred million measly (to them) dollars.
In the short run, nothing much spectacular is going to happen. In fact Big Co's (like the one I work in) will lean a bit preferentially to Suse (I'm likely to be running Suse at work shortly on my desktop, in fact). But in the long run, a number of things are going to happen:
* Key parts of Linux *will* go GPL v3 (that wasn't so likely before, but is a done deal now) * Novell will not be able to use those parts without renouncing the MS deal (What do want to bet that Novell doesn't even have the right to do so without giving back all the MS money?) * GPL/Classpath exception Java is going to look more and more like a safer choice than Mono if you're not under the Suse umbrella (Ballmer will grow only more strident about this stuff over time)
The OS world will be divided into Novell and everyone else and corporate users will turn back away from Novell. This will be bad for OS not good (Novell actually does much useful stuff - I like Beagle in particular), but I don't see how it can work out any other way. Novell screwed up. Now we all pay.
If you want a statically typed runtime for Gnome, I'd start looking carefully at those GTK bindings for Java...
All (especially software) technology is possibly patent-infected technology. Especially anything that does anything vaguely modern. MS and friends are filing something like 100k soft patents a year. If not stopped, it's going to kill all innovation market by market (because no small entrant will be able to do anything disruptive without getting squashed). So there will be no incentive for big co's to ship real innovations.
No more WWW's. (We would have gotten some sort of giant MS BBS, maybe.)
No more googles. (In the giant MS BBS we would have gotten the equivalent of XP's "find" - yum!)
No more wikis. (Inside the giant MS BBS there would be some lame ass collaboration facility. Probably vaguely based on Word's track changes feature, but really broken.)
And definitely no more linux's. (The reaction to the introduction of the equivalent in 2015? - "Stop Thief!")
Big companies only innovate when threatened. When you have a big enough patent portfolio and a monopoly position nobody will be able to threaten you. So once anyone gets that kind of position (and, of course, no one ever gets any monopolies on tech markets:-) it'll be game over for that market.
Lather, rinse, repeat, and pretty soon it's the Big MS BBS everywhere.
So let's hope pain of the Altcatel theft gets MS reconsidering - maybe the short term pain of such rip offs isn't worth the future lure of total MS hegemony.
Apple's dominance of the iPod isn't nearly as threatening as MS's dominance over the desktop. There isn't as interesting a set of apps that someone could build on top of an iPod-like device as there are on the desktop. The iPhone is being rolled out into an existing market with very strong competitors. In Apple's wildest dreams they might end up with a similar share in phones to the one they have in computers. That'd be good for competition, not a threat to it.
If you can keep it virus free, sure. But the risk of getting your machine owned is pretty high.
I work for a very large company with a very aggressive IT security department. The windows boxes are tightly locked down, run firewalls, virus scanners, pretty much the state of the art for windows machine security (and of course the company has pretty decent perimeter controls). The result? A co-worker's machine got infected (probably via IE).
Your mileage may vary, but be assured past success is no guarantee. Plus, all that constant scanning for viruses kills performance and battery life. (If yours isn't, it isn't agressive enough:-)
"That's why half the people who show up to buy a Toyota Corolla drive away with a Prius. ("Hmm... $5000 more and I have a hybrid AND get bluetooth and that neato screen")"
That neato screen is a major reason why I drive a Jetta instead and is likely to be the big issue for me with the iPhone. Sure it means that Toyota can put a lot more functionality into the control UI (just like Steve said!) but it sucks if you have to do anything in a hurry (especially if you don't want to stop looking at the road).
There's a reason for all those buttons on phones. Tactile feedback rules.
I await all the reports of car crashes caused by people trying multitouch moves on their iPhones in heavy traffic....
[satire on] Only when you consider that the project is planning to run on child labor (the idea is that kids will be an integral part of the training support and repair system) and that the kids may well be spending more than 40 hours a week using these things does the real cost of this "$100" laptops come through. Any fair-minded person is going to have to cost out all this "free" labor that these kids are providing. And don't tell me that just because these kids live in poorer countries that their labor shouldn't be costed out at 1st world rates. So that means the *real* cost of these laptops is more like $100k per year. $100k per year. $100k per year. OMG!
Or is it that you hate children? [satire off]
Seriously, while this project has some pretty high hurdles to overcome, I believe they have the right idea.
Create something to think with - make it so that the kids themselves can embrace and extend the things themselves, roll it out aggressively but in stages and keep learning as you go. The only way that it can possibly work is to rely on the kids themselves for much of the work.
While everyone else is spreading FUD about the project, OLPC is going to be learning what's really possible and they're going to open the eyes of a lot of kids to a wider, more interesting world.
These people get the Maker/Hacker ethic - they're worth supporting IMHO.
The NYT business section recently noted that "...wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960's. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as "the golden era of profitability"
So it certainly looks like the current setup is rigged against workers. No doubt there are a lot of explanations, but certainly globablization seems to put most of the cards in the hands of big money.
Continuing to vote in favor of more of it doesn't seem very smart unless you're in the 1% who own the country (to a first approximation.)
(And yes Smalltalk had a great IDE (and framework) in it's day (and Squeak is still fun, fun, fun), but for building non-trivial web apps, the tooling on the Java side beats anything else I know of...)
So what do you think the citizens of Burlington will be more able to control - the democratically elected officials of a small government entity like the City of Burlington (staff 400 people, FY 2005 budget $200M) or Adelphia Communications (2003 numbers 14,300 people and something like $4G)?
Or differently still - there are good arguments that these kinds of services are a natural monopoly (which might well explain why almost no one in the US has them, BTW) - in which case you may have the choice of one unelected corporation or an elected government.
I mean who wants to invest that much money on something where someone else can easily compete with you? That's why most people only have one phone line or cable line to their house. Phone and cable "competition" haven't delivered high speed services (like the 50/50 M service mentioned in the article, anyway) to US households yet.
RTFA and RTFB and you'll see that what pushed him over the top really is central to WinTel. It's the separation in responsibility between hardware and software vendor. His Sony laptop was on the fritz but his hardware vendor (Sony) blamed it on the software.
That cost him three months of constant annoyance before they'd admit it was a hardware problem.
"3 months into this, Sony says, "OK, it must be the HW."
The sheer amount of time I wasted was extraaordinary - to get a WinTel vendor to cop to the fact that HW does break, and all I needed was a HW fix - NOT reinstall XP Pro.
That was me. I like to think my time is valuable. So, if I spent 100 hours (conservatively) on this, how much is that worth? To me - I would have bought ANYTHING to make WinTel go away."
Apple isn't as likely to do this, so his switch is entirely rational.
Most people don't value their own time rationally - if they did WinTel would be in far bigger trouble. (Free software isn't time efficient either, unless you care about the "free" part - which is rational for at least some folks to care about)
Slashdot Mirror
A bigger problem is that companies that outsource manufacturing tend to lose touch with the underlying technologies that make their products possible. If you're not very careful (and Apple is more the exception here than the rule - and I speak as an ex-Apple engineer :-) you'll eventually find that your "designers" have no idea of what's going to be possible in the next generation of technology.
Apple is the exception because the elements of consumer technology are familiar to most American trained engineers from their experience as budding consumers. The same does not apply to aerospace, heavy manufacturing, and most other high tech areas. If you're not building the stuff in those areas you'll soon run out of people who have any idea of what they're doing...
Note that the story only suggests that the vaccine doesn't help the elderly and weak. They even admit this themselves in a q&a:
"One of the most compelling arguments for flu vaccination is to provide herd immunity. In other words, by keeping young healthy people from getting sick it is believed that we can slow the spread of the disease to others. That could help to protect those who can’t benefit from a vaccine due to a weak immune system. Studies in nursing homes suggest that there is benefit to the elderly when caretakers are immunized along with residents."
from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910u/h1h1-qa
I think they're being dishonest when they conflate two claims:
* the vaccine may not help the elderly and weak
with
* the vaccine has no value (a much stronger claim and one that they don't make a good case for).
Herd immunity is pretty much the whole point of mass immunization. Ignoring that make them guilty of exactly what they accuse the other side of. Not pretty....
Those "cryptic" commands are one of the few advantages that Linux desktops have at the moment. Right now I'm using a Ubuntu machine which displaying applications from a nearby Suse Enterprise laptop and often displays distant (via NX if its over a VPN or straight remote X otherwise) apps from various servers running other Linux variants.
The inability of OSX or Windows to this sort of thing actually matters in an enterprise setting. Whatever issues X has supporting games matters somewhat less. And seeing as Linux is hardly going to beat XBox et al in the games area, maybe the enterprise would be a good place to focus?
It's worth looking at Chandler (fat client) and Cosmo (server) from
http://www.osafoundation.org/
It's been a long time coming, but it's finally approaching a useable release and it's quite interesting. I think it will be a real choice in 2008...
1) The fact that the models may be wrong only means we have to lean *harder* on carbon output. We now know from the ice core records that the climate is not metastable and can in fact shift rapidly when you push it like we are *right now*. The fact that the models aren't perfect doesn't *decrease* the risk it *increases* it. If you're driving on a road where a bridge may have collapsed (e.g. let's say you're in the US on an interstate and the president is a Republican
2) The business with top soil is amusing but hardly very useful. There's lots of complicated data about topsoil out there (go google young man...) but pretty much all of it suggests that we're loosing megatons of it in the US. In the rest of the world we're loosing it much faster. So what's Freeman's suggestion? Increase topsoil. Really helpful that one. By saying "saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated" he's going to get the giant corrupt corp. agribusiness interests of the world to change all their short-term profit-oriented processes to increase topsoil? No. They'll point to the "what me worry?" part of his article and ignore the rest just like the parent.
I hope we get really lucky and somehow there's some hidden feedback loop in the climate that bails us out. Cause the way every off the reservation comment by some cranky old scientist gets played up by the media means there's no way in hell we're gonna get out of this by rational planning
One final word: No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land. Actually you don't need a computer model. Just work for a big corporation (instead of say, the eden-like Institute for Advanced Studies for most of your life), know that large corporations are who are going to be managing that land, and the answer is clear. We're gonna *rape* it. Cause next year's topsoil doesn't effect this quarter's profits so it's not material.
When you're a sociopath waiting for marriage don't enter into the equation, if you know what I mean...
(And yes, smoking does cause cancer, diesel particulates are bad for you, and big increases in CO2 can change the climate. Massive corporate spending on scammy PR doesn't change the science. It just makes it harder to see
I think this is not a feature, because we know all the iPhone users will respond to the difficulty of making a call in the car with the thing by NOT MAKING CELL PHONE CALLS IN THE CAR. Or more likely not.
(And yes, I notice folks driving their Ford Exterminator Grand Toddler-Backing Over Special Edition SUVs erratically while making cell phone calls all the time. So I'm not in favor of bad driving while talking. I'm just thinking that those folks aren't exactly the type to spend $600 on a phone and then not use it while driving cause it makes them even more dangerous. What part of "my truck is specifically designed to be better at squashing other people without making me any safer" don't you understand???)
At least if the phone had voice dialing we'd get the satisfaction of watching his Steveness try and come up with a solution to the whole bluetooth headset ass-dialing problem. (Which is probably why the phone doesn't support voice dialing, now that I think about it...)
1) "They'll fire your ass for insubordination and if you complain about it they'll bury you. Sure you can, in theory, sue them for "wrongful termination" but you'll probably never get another job in the US if you do. And they have more money than you do, so they'll likely win in court, anyway"
Or is it
2) "If you refuse the illegal order and they fire you, you'll be fine. Most companies actually try to follow the law and expect their employees to, also. They'd be happy to hire someone who draws the line at violating the law when ordered to by a superior. And the court will frown on a company retaliating on a law-abiding employee and will compensate you accordingly."
I've been lucky enough (and picked my employers carefully enough, perhaps
And don't discount the value of doing what's right for right's sake. There's a lot to be said for maintaining personal integrity simply because it's part of who you are (to yourself even if no one else acknowledges it)
[Cue monkey boy dance]. The biggest benefit that could come out of this for *all* Linux users would be better hardware support. If manufactures think that "Hey, no Linux driver means we're not supporting part of Dell's consumer line" they might get serious about writing (open?) drivers or at least making it easier for the community to support their stuff.
:-) It would be so great if you could just assume that any random printer would totally work with Linux...
And if Linux can end up being 5% of Dell's consumer sales (though even that might be optimistic) it's going to have a huge effect - because Dell is more likely to bundle stuff that will work with their entire line, not just 95% of it. Supporting one type of hardware is cheaper than two. (Though, of course, so it supporting only one kind of OS, which is how we got here
Dell can simply license the DVD playback software for their machines. It's not like they don't have any lawyers or something.
People may be stupid, but probably not so much about the fuel-stingy hybrids (Prius and Civic)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11637968/
The original CU numbers were bad - the revised report signals that even if you don't care about your impact on your neighbors, they still make simple economic sense...
This is a variant of what I call the "Argument from Plumbing". When the plumber comes and fixes your drains, he isn't taking away your free will. He's enabling you to exercise your free will to do other things than suffer crappy plumbing. An omniscient good God would have created a world different in too many ways to count.
:-)
There's more interesting ways to exercise your free will as a healthy well fed buddist than as weak starving christian, to boot
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/17/ballmer_linux _users_.html
:-)
"Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered," Ballmer said. This "is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability."
(He's not saying which bits, but certainly Mono isn't exactly excluded, if you know what I mean
I appreciate De Icaza's contributions, but sadly there is no future for Mono or Novell. (Don't blame him, it's not really his fault.)
Microsoft knows what they are doing and Novell's leadership is the typical short-term driven corp types. Charles Ferguson's line about Apple and MS in in his book (High Stakes No Prisoners) comes to mind:
"Watching Sculley go up against Gates was rather like watching a rich playboy who was ordering his yacht to attack a carrier battle group."
Substitute Novell's current leadership for Sculley and you have the current picture. MS saw a chance to split the open source world in two and cripple Novell for a few hundred million measly (to them) dollars.
In the short run, nothing much spectacular is going to happen. In fact Big Co's (like the one I work in) will lean a bit preferentially to Suse (I'm likely to be running Suse at work shortly on my desktop, in fact). But in the long run, a number of things are going to happen:
* Key parts of Linux *will* go GPL v3 (that wasn't so likely before, but is a done deal now)
* Novell will not be able to use those parts without renouncing the MS deal (What do want to bet that Novell doesn't even have the right to do so without giving back all the MS money?)
* GPL/Classpath exception Java is going to look more and more like a safer choice than Mono if you're not under the Suse umbrella (Ballmer will grow only more strident about this stuff over time)
The OS world will be divided into Novell and everyone else and corporate users will turn back away from Novell. This will be bad for OS not good (Novell actually does much useful stuff - I like Beagle in particular), but I don't see how it can work out any other way. Novell screwed up. Now we all pay.
If you want a statically typed runtime for Gnome, I'd start looking carefully at those GTK bindings for Java...
All (especially software) technology is possibly patent-infected technology. Especially anything that does anything vaguely modern. MS and friends are filing something like 100k soft patents a year. If not stopped, it's going to kill all innovation market by market (because no small entrant will be able to do anything disruptive without getting squashed). So there will be no incentive for big co's to ship real innovations.
:-) it'll be game over for that market.
No more WWW's. (We would have gotten some sort of giant MS BBS, maybe.)
No more googles. (In the giant MS BBS we would have gotten the equivalent of XP's "find" - yum!)
No more wikis. (Inside the giant MS BBS there would be some lame ass collaboration facility. Probably vaguely based on Word's track changes feature, but really broken.)
And definitely no more linux's. (The reaction to the introduction of the equivalent in 2015? - "Stop Thief!")
Big companies only innovate when threatened. When you have a big enough patent portfolio and a monopoly position nobody will be able to threaten you. So once anyone gets that kind of position (and, of course, no one ever gets any monopolies on tech markets
Lather, rinse, repeat, and pretty soon it's the Big MS BBS everywhere.
So let's hope pain of the Altcatel theft gets MS reconsidering - maybe the short term pain of such rip offs isn't worth the future lure of total MS hegemony.
Apple's dominance of the iPod isn't nearly as threatening as MS's dominance over the desktop. There isn't as interesting a set of apps that someone could build on top of an iPod-like device as there are on the desktop. The iPhone is being rolled out into an existing market with very strong competitors. In Apple's wildest dreams they might end up with a similar share in phones to the one they have in computers. That'd be good for competition, not a threat to it.
If you can keep it virus free, sure. But the risk of getting your machine owned is pretty high.
:-)
I work for a very large company with a very aggressive IT security department. The windows boxes are tightly locked down, run firewalls, virus scanners, pretty much the state of the art for windows machine security (and of course the company has pretty decent perimeter controls). The result? A co-worker's machine got infected (probably via IE).
Your mileage may vary, but be assured past success is no guarantee. Plus, all that constant scanning for viruses kills performance and battery life. (If yours isn't, it isn't agressive enough
"That's why half the people who show up to buy a Toyota Corolla drive away with a Prius. ("Hmm... $5000 more and I have a hybrid AND get bluetooth and that neato screen")"
That neato screen is a major reason why I drive a Jetta instead and is likely to be the big issue for me with the iPhone. Sure it means that Toyota can put a lot more functionality into the control UI (just like Steve said!) but it sucks if you have to do anything in a hurry (especially if you don't want to stop looking at the road).
There's a reason for all those buttons on phones. Tactile feedback rules.
I await all the reports of car crashes caused by people trying multitouch moves on their iPhones in heavy traffic....
And don't forget
4) SUV's are very effective
* at terrorizing other drivers to drive SUV's
* and killing pedestrians and bicyclists
So there's another large externality associated with them (on the order of 1k dead per year - sort of a constant Iraq war going on at home)
[satire on]
Only when you consider that the project is planning to run on child labor (the idea is that kids will be an integral part of the training support and repair system) and that the kids may well be spending more than 40 hours a week using these things does the real cost of this "$100" laptops come through. Any fair-minded person is going to have to cost out all this "free" labor that these kids are providing. And don't tell me that just because these kids live in poorer countries that their labor shouldn't be costed out at 1st world rates. So that means the *real* cost of these laptops is more like $100k per year. $100k per year. $100k per year. OMG!
Or is it that you hate children?
[satire off]
Seriously, while this project has some pretty high hurdles to overcome, I believe they have the right idea.
Create something to think with - make it so that the kids themselves can embrace and extend the things themselves, roll it out aggressively but in stages and keep learning as you go. The only way that it can possibly work is to rely on the kids themselves for much of the work.
While everyone else is spreading FUD about the project, OLPC is going to be learning what's really possible and they're going to open the eyes of a lot of kids to a wider, more interesting world.
These people get the Maker/Hacker ethic - they're worth supporting IMHO.
The NYT business section recently noted that "...wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960's. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as "the golden era of profitability"
So it certainly looks like the current setup is rigged against workers. No doubt there are a lot of explanations, but certainly globablization seems to put most of the cards in the hands of big money.
Continuing to vote in favor of more of it doesn't seem very smart unless you're in the 1% who own the country (to a first approximation.)
The $20 figure is only if you get the "premium" earthlink version. The Google version is free.
To paraphrase Jonathan Edwards, I used to be a language bigot and now I'm a tool bigot.
(And yes Smalltalk had a great IDE (and framework) in it's day (and Squeak is still fun, fun, fun), but for building non-trivial web apps, the tooling on the Java side beats anything else I know of...)
silly cs majors - the last remaining job will be, of course, to sue everyone else for violating software patents
So what do you think the citizens of Burlington will be more able to control - the democratically elected officials of a small government entity like the City of Burlington (staff 400 people, FY 2005 budget $200M) or Adelphia Communications (2003 numbers 14,300 people and something like $4G)?
Or differently still - there are good arguments that these kinds of services are a natural monopoly (which might well explain why almost no one in the US has them, BTW) - in which case you may have the choice of one unelected corporation or an elected government.
I mean who wants to invest that much money on something where someone else can easily compete with you? That's why most people only have one phone line or cable line to their house. Phone and cable "competition" haven't delivered high speed services (like the 50/50 M service mentioned in the article, anyway) to US households yet.
Why does anyone think it's going to?
RTFA and RTFB and you'll see that what pushed him over the top really is central to WinTel. It's the separation in responsibility between hardware and software vendor. His Sony laptop was on the fritz but his hardware vendor (Sony) blamed it on the software.
That cost him three months of constant annoyance before they'd admit it was a hardware problem.
"3 months into this, Sony says, "OK, it must be the HW."
The sheer amount of time I wasted was extraaordinary - to get a WinTel vendor to cop to the fact that HW does break, and all I needed was a HW fix - NOT reinstall XP Pro.
That was me. I like to think my time is valuable. So, if I spent 100 hours (conservatively) on this, how much is that worth? To me - I would have bought ANYTHING to make WinTel go away."
Apple isn't as likely to do this, so his switch is entirely rational.
Most people don't value their own time rationally - if they did WinTel would be in far bigger trouble. (Free software isn't time efficient either, unless you care about the "free" part - which is rational for at least some folks to care about)