That $2 slice of pizza implies - along with much else - the ability to move dairy and produce quickly and efficiently from the farms to the wholesale market or directly to the processing plant and from there to the fast-food outlet.
Try negotiating all the intermediate steps by cash or barter - with no telephone - telegraph - telex - fax or e-mail to monitor the traffic and speed it along.
The first and most obvious impact is that costs skyrocket. You need to field armies of commission agents, clerks and couriers.
The second is that the quality and supply of the fresh product becomes unpredictable - the tomatoes now come from a can.
I'm mystified by the "cheap hydro power from the Niagara River" part.
Yahoo chose to build new here - a $150 million dollar investment.
It's a bit of a adjustment to think of "cheap hydro" as being as significant to the data center as to the mile long chemical plants that line the upper Niagara River.
Lockport is where the Erie Canal climbs the Niagara Escarpment.
The canal itself was and is a source of hydro-power - think of it as a 350 mile nineteenth century industrial corridor cut across upstate New York. The work of self-taught engineers and Irish immigrant labor - with no better tools available than the pick axe and black powder.
Lockport is a small city of about 20,000 that has been spared the frauds and fancies that have plagued the redevelopment of Niagara Falls. It is about 16 miles northeast of the SUNY Amherst campus.
OSX is $129 when Vista is $300+ thats a giant WTF since OSX is so much better.
The geek always quotes retail list for the most expensive boxed version he can find.
The reality is the OEM Windows system bundle.
Users upgrade hardware and software when they feel that the time and the price is right. The Windows OS is usually a one-time purchase for the life of the system.
Some will always be looking - as I am looking - for a deal on a close-out or refurbished special that is a plausible candidate for the Win 7 upgrade at $50-$100.
If you are running XP on the Mac it is because your core apps haven't been ported to the Mac.
But most users spend their time engaged with applications - not with the OS.
They will never warm to the idea of trying to maintain two or three operating systems, software libraries and skill sets.
The fundamental problem for OEM's is that Windows means either +tax or -hardware spec.
There are enormous economies of scale in building for the Windows market.
The Atom netbook running Windows XP delivered solid performance at a very good price. It effortlessly drove Linux off the shelves of your favorite big box retailer.
There is no negative on hardware. Talk of the Microsoft Tax is nonsense. The OEM is crying all the way to the bank.
The change of the user interface in Office 2007 is one huge hidden cost.
The simplest response to this may be to look at the sales charts at Amazon.com.
It's fair to assume that most of these users are on their own - no help desk to call for support. Their time. Their money.
1 Office Home & Student 918 Days In The Top 100 3 Office Home & Student Mac. 596 Days 9 Office Standard Full Version 903 Days 10 Office Small Business Upgrade 562 Days 16 Office Pro Full Version 481 Days 19 Office Small Business Full Version 387 Days 23 Office Pro Full Version 917 Days 24 Microsoft Office Mac Media Edition 230 Days
I believe it's a cross between a moose and a goblin.
Which pretty much sums up how this story will play out at Walmart.
The fundamental problem for OEM Linux in deep discount retail is that a competitively priced Windows product is never more than a few months down the road.
It will be a viable platform for older Windows games - and the games themselves are dirt cheap. Gog.com ["Good Old Games"]
So now can we get off this delusion that the owners of the pirate bay are heroes somehow out to protect our rights in the face of evil corporations?
The production costs for WALL-E: $180 million.
Double that for marketing and distribution.
The number of studios producing CGI feature animation at this level: 1. The Amazon price for the three-disk Blu-Ray edition of WALL-E with BD Live and digital download copy: $24.99 Wall-E
That is - at least theoretically - 150 GB of content for about one half the cost of one month of broadband cable.
Pixar's return from the geek who links to Pirate Bay: $0
Do searches and seizures at airport security require warrants?
The short answer is "probably not."
The traveler's rights have always been limited.
Whatever limited rights are are available to stops and searches of automobiles, fewer are available to boats. A warrant is not required. Probable cause is not required. Reasonable, articulable suspicion is not rquired. Authorized by a statute promulgated by the First Congress (1789-1791), and sustained in United States vs. Villamonte-Marquez (1983), customs agents may without any suspicion of wrongdoing, hail and board any vessel on the high seas or in U.S. territorial waters for purposes of examining documentation and conducting safety inspections. Once on board, authorities may visit the vessel's public areas and draw reasonable conclusions from observations of those areas. These observations may in turn justify a more intrusive search.Unreasonable searches and seizures
What it comes down in the end is that securing the border and protecting the transportation network comes first.
Linux may lack the marketing that both Microsoft and Apple have, but the word is spreading.
To hear the geek tell the tale, he has converted everyone within leash - within reach. But when you look at the charts - the trend line remains as flat as his Dad's putting green. Top Operating Systems Share Trends
Back when Microsoft didn't have a stranglehold on the market, people were happy enough pirating 95 and 98, while ignoring things like BeOS and OS/2 (both competitively priced and more powerful)
BeOS first appears on PPC Mac clones in 1996.
BeOS was ported to X86 in March 1998.
BeOS was optimized for digital media work... Through the late 1990s, BeOS managed to create a niche of followers, but the company failed...BeOS
16 MB RAM and 150 MB of hard disk storage was recommended - and more - much more - would be desirable.
The list of supported hardware was very short - and you could forget the portable or laptop PC.
These info pages from 1998-1999 come straight from Be itself.
There were strong, competitive, MS-DOS machines on the market before the cloning of IBM PC BIOS.
Win 3.1 anchored the franchise. Win 95 took off like a rocket.
The convenience and economy of the OEM system install solves so many problems for the user, for the manufacturer, for the retailer, the service technician, that it is no longer possible to imagine an OS gaining traction in the mass consumer market without it.
I mean, think about it. You can get new machines for what? 500 Euros? Do they really think that a, almost, 60% bonus for the OS will fly? I realize that OEM deals will look decidedly different, but come on...
The geek always quotes retail list for the most expensive version of Windows he can find.
But that is a very thin slice of the market.
If you are home or SOHO user, what matters is the OEM bundle or the upgrade package. You might be shopping for the close-out price on a high-end system no one wants gathering dust on a pallet until October.
For a student, there are, typically, even better deals: The Ultimate Steal
You forgot to say "among windows users". Moving from 1 windows version to another is not equivalent to moving from windows to linux. So what was your point again ?
That there has been no significant migration to Linux even with the Live Distro to help pave the way?
Net Applications is, as I said, mass market.
The push behind Win 7 can't all be coming from the MSDN side - the developer, the IT pro.
The power users have to be out in force as well - the users comfortable downloading and installing an RC - and for Linux they should be the low-hanging fruit.
There is surely the potential for civil liability:
Your device catches fire and incinerates your cousin's $56,000 daysailer. You taser-shock your girl friend. Your faulty navigational display sends your mother-in-law off a cliff.
Are you sure you're not suffering from stockholm syndrome?
Microsoft offers a bundle of products and services which have become the de facto global standard for office work.
That solves many problems for your employer.
He can open an office anywhere south of the Arctic Circle - an office of any size - with perfect confidence that an MS Office solution will scale to his needs and that local recruitment and training will present no particular difficulty.
It is rather typical of the geek to focus on something like the "openness" of a file format - and miss the significance of The Ribbon.
The Ribbon speaks directly to the productivity of the office worker - and nothing lies closer to the heart and wallet of the office manager.
I suggest you look no farther than slashdot's "borg Gates" image they use for any microsoft related story. For better or worse, slashdot does have a bias and anyone thinking otherwise is quite foolish.
Bias I can live with.
But the Borg icon and the stained glass Window are simply flamebait from the nineties - and by now looking rather gray around the temples.
If Star Trek can reboot the franchise to restore some of it's integrity, perhaps it's time for Slashot to do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
See that wasn't so hard.
That $2 slice of pizza implies - along with much else - the ability to move dairy and produce quickly and efficiently from the farms to the wholesale market or directly to the processing plant and from there to the fast-food outlet.
Try negotiating all the intermediate steps by cash or barter - with no telephone - telegraph - telex - fax or e-mail to monitor the traffic and speed it along.
The first and most obvious impact is that costs skyrocket. You need to field armies of commission agents, clerks and couriers.
The second is that the quality and supply of the fresh product becomes unpredictable - the tomatoes now come from a can.
I'm mystified by the "cheap hydro power from the Niagara River" part.
Yahoo chose to build new here - a $150 million dollar investment.
It's a bit of a adjustment to think of "cheap hydro" as being as significant to the data center as to the mile long chemical plants that line the upper Niagara River.
Dig to there, and the rest of the day you have off and can drink your wiskey.
a single barrel seems scarcely enough for the true Irish working man's thirst.
one story that probably didn't make your Social Studies class:
planting the black powder charges meant working in very tight places. so a local farmer's kid - a very young kid - would be hired on for the job.
Which is why a typical Google search returns 16 million hits.
Lockport is where the Erie Canal climbs the Niagara Escarpment.
The canal itself was and is a source of hydro-power - think of it as a 350 mile nineteenth century industrial corridor cut across upstate New York. The work of self-taught engineers and Irish immigrant labor - with no better tools available than the pick axe and black powder.
Lockport is a small city of about 20,000 that has been spared the frauds and fancies that have plagued the redevelopment of Niagara Falls. It is about 16 miles northeast of the SUNY Amherst campus.
I can wait for a sale and pick up MS Student and Home for 50 bucks and I get 3 licenses for that price...
If you are a student with an .edu address you can have it all for $60. The Ultimate Steal
If your employer participates in Microsoft's Home User program, it's all yours on disk for the price of S&H.
These are just three of the reasons why the free-as-in-beer office suite just doesn't generate all that much excitement.
OSX is $129 when Vista is $300+ thats a giant WTF since OSX is so much better.
The geek always quotes retail list for the most expensive boxed version he can find.
The reality is the OEM Windows system bundle.
Users upgrade hardware and software when they feel that the time and the price is right. The Windows OS is usually a one-time purchase for the life of the system.
Some will always be looking - as I am looking - for a deal on a close-out or refurbished special that is a plausible candidate for the Win 7 upgrade at $50-$100.
If you are running XP on the Mac it is because your core apps haven't been ported to the Mac.
But most users spend their time engaged with applications - not with the OS.
They will never warm to the idea of trying to maintain two or three operating systems, software libraries and skill sets.
The fundamental problem for OEM's is that Windows means either +tax or -hardware spec.
There are enormous economies of scale in building for the Windows market.
The Atom netbook running Windows XP delivered solid performance at a very good price. It effortlessly drove Linux off the shelves of your favorite big box retailer.
There is no negative on hardware. Talk of the Microsoft Tax is nonsense. The OEM is crying all the way to the bank.
The change of the user interface in Office 2007 is one huge hidden cost.
The simplest response to this may be to look at the sales charts at Amazon.com.
It's fair to assume that most of these users are on their own - no help desk to call for support. Their time. Their money.
1 Office Home & Student 918 Days In The Top 100
3 Office Home & Student Mac. 596 Days
9 Office Standard Full Version 903 Days
10 Office Small Business Upgrade 562 Days
16 Office Pro Full Version 481 Days
19 Office Small Business Full Version 387 Days
23 Office Pro Full Version 917 Days
24 Microsoft Office Mac Media Edition 230 Days
Software Best Sellers in Business & Office
I believe it's a cross between a moose and a goblin.
Which pretty much sums up how this story will play out at Walmart.
The fundamental problem for OEM Linux in deep discount retail is that a competitively priced Windows product is never more than a few months down the road.
It will be a viable platform for older Windows games - and the games themselves are dirt cheap. Gog.com ["Good Old Games"]
So now can we get off this delusion that the owners of the pirate bay are heroes somehow out to protect our rights in the face of evil corporations?
The production costs for WALL-E: $180 million.
Double that for marketing and distribution.
The number of studios producing CGI feature animation at this level: 1.
The Amazon price for the three-disk Blu-Ray edition of WALL-E with BD Live and digital download copy: $24.99 Wall-E
That is - at least theoretically - 150 GB of content for about one half the cost of one month of broadband cable.
Pixar's return from the geek who links to Pirate Bay: $0
Do searches and seizures at airport security require warrants?
The short answer is "probably not."
The traveler's rights have always been limited.
Whatever limited rights are are available to stops and searches of automobiles, fewer are available to boats. A warrant is not required. Probable cause is not required. Reasonable, articulable suspicion is not rquired. Authorized by a statute promulgated by the First Congress (1789-1791), and sustained in United States vs. Villamonte-Marquez (1983), customs agents may without any suspicion of wrongdoing, hail and board any vessel on the high seas or in U.S. territorial waters for purposes of examining documentation and conducting safety inspections. Once on board, authorities may visit the vessel's public areas and draw reasonable conclusions from observations of those areas. These observations may in turn justify a more intrusive search. Unreasonable searches and seizures
What it comes down in the end is that securing the border and protecting the transportation network comes first.
Unless there's a way to blow up the aircraft with said papers their content shouldn't matter.
If the papers suggest or expose a conspiracy to blow up a plane they do matter. The examiner isn't obliged to take your word at face value.
Step 2) spread story over /.
Step 3) Profit!
This does not compute. Profit implies sales. Money changing hands. Not a link to a torrent.
Linux may lack the marketing that both Microsoft and Apple have, but the word is spreading.
To hear the geek tell the tale, he has converted everyone within leash - within reach. But when you look at the charts - the trend line remains as flat as his Dad's putting green. Top Operating Systems Share Trends
Back when Microsoft didn't have a stranglehold on the market, people were happy enough pirating 95 and 98, while ignoring things like BeOS and OS/2 (both competitively priced and more powerful)
BeOS first appears on PPC Mac clones in 1996.
BeOS was ported to X86 in March 1998.
BeOS was optimized for digital media work... Through the late 1990s, BeOS managed to create a niche of followers, but the company failed... BeOS
16 MB RAM and 150 MB of hard disk storage was recommended - and more - much more - would be desirable.
The list of supported hardware was very short - and you could forget the portable or laptop PC.
BeOS Ready Systems -- Intel, BeOS Probably Compatible List -- Intel
These info pages from 1998-1999 come straight from Be itself.
There were strong, competitive, MS-DOS machines on the market before the cloning of IBM PC BIOS.
Win 3.1 anchored the franchise. Win 95 took off like a rocket.
The convenience and economy of the OEM system install solves so many problems for the user, for the manufacturer, for the retailer, the service technician, that it is no longer possible to imagine an OS gaining traction in the mass consumer market without it.
I mean, think about it. You can get new machines for what? 500 Euros? Do they really think that a, almost, 60% bonus for the OS will fly? I realize that OEM deals will look decidedly different, but come on...
The geek always quotes retail list for the most expensive version of Windows he can find.
But that is a very thin slice of the market.
If you are home or SOHO user, what matters is the OEM bundle or the upgrade package. You might be shopping for the close-out price on a high-end system no one wants gathering dust on a pallet until October.
For a student, there are, typically, even better deals: The Ultimate Steal
The distribution right encompasses distribution to the public.
I can loan a DVD to a my neighbor. I can sell the disk or give it away.
What I can't do is scan it into the ultimate copy machine for the convenience of 15,000 of my closest friends on the P2P nets.
--- or the twelve on my Dark Net.
"Distribution to the Public" is a diversion, a red herring, and in NYCL's argument it has a particularly rancid smell.
You forgot to say "among windows users". Moving from 1 windows version to another is not equivalent to moving from windows to linux. So what was your point again ?
That there has been no significant migration to Linux even with the Live Distro to help pave the way?
Net Applications is, as I said, mass market.
The push behind Win 7 can't all be coming from the MSDN side - the developer, the IT pro.
The power users have to be out in force as well - the users comfortable downloading and installing an RC - and for Linux they should be the low-hanging fruit.
Many of the most successful FOSS projects have corporate contributors, so this "design conundrum" doesn't really exist.
For "many," I would be strongly tempted to substitute "all."
Especially for apps which must find anchorage in the needs and values of the non-technical end user.
Thing is apple laptops are usually pretty good in design
They are also built on a rock-solid UNIX foundation. Tell me why you need Linux for Open Source.
It is perfectly legal to do whatever you fucking want with an electronic device you own, at least in most countries.
Never without qualifications. For example:
Microwave radiation.
Basic electrical safety.
Eavesdropping on protected frequencies. {Cell phones][Radar]
RFI
There is surely the potential for civil liability:
Your device catches fire and incinerates your cousin's $56,000 daysailer.
You taser-shock your girl friend.
Your faulty navigational display sends your mother-in-law off a cliff.
Are you sure you're not suffering from stockholm syndrome?
Microsoft offers a bundle of products and services which have become the de facto global standard for office work.
That solves many problems for your employer.
He can open an office anywhere south of the Arctic Circle - an office of any size - with perfect confidence that an MS Office solution will scale to his needs and that local recruitment and training will present no particular difficulty.
It is rather typical of the geek to focus on something like the "openness" of a file format - and miss the significance of The Ribbon.
The Ribbon speaks directly to the productivity of the office worker - and nothing lies closer to the heart and wallet of the office manager.
Rape doesn't simply mean forced sexual intercourse. As a verb... well...
But that remains its prime meaning.
To use the word in any other context pretty much ends the conversation.
I'd say they have abused their dominance in the tech world to the extreme more than once.
The same could be said of every other company that is strongly positioned in tech - or in any other sector of the economy.
Corporate hardball - not Base Ball - to use the old spelling - has always been the American national game.
I suggest you look no farther than slashdot's "borg Gates" image they use for any microsoft related story. For better or worse, slashdot does have a bias and anyone thinking otherwise is quite foolish.
Bias I can live with.
But the Borg icon and the stained glass Window are simply flamebait from the nineties - and by now looking rather gray around the temples.
If Star Trek can reboot the franchise to restore some of it's integrity, perhaps it's time for Slashot to do the same.