Not to carp, but as far as I know none of the Ennead ever got paid.
This is naive at best - and disingenuous at worst. Greek drama was framed within the context of a religious festival. But it was also a competitive exhibition for the playwrights and the winner did not go home empty-handed.
The only "Clippy" jokes I remember were those posted - endlessly - to Slashdot. It left me wondering - and not for the first time - whether the geek lived in a little world of his own. How many users simply accepted - even welcomed - a touch of humor, color and animation on their office desktop.
I just ordered my first computer yesterday: 4GB RAM, a 250 GB SATA 3gb/s hard drive, a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a Nvidia 9800 graphics card, and a comfortable 20 monitor. But while these were all expensive (especially the video card), none of them compared to one item on the list: Windows. That's the hope that Linux companies must look forward to.
Quad Core AMD CPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 Bit Vista Premium, NVIDIA DX 10 graphics, a 640 GB HDD, an HDTV tuner and the combo Blu-Ray drive and DVD Burner for $1K.
Monitor extra.
The truth of it is that Walmart has never been able to sell OEM Linux at a significant discount.
Though every now and again the big W will unload a few carloads of junk it picked up on the cheap on the ever-so-naive and hopeful Linux Geek.
Linux distributions need to start sponsoring companies like the old Loki Software. Companies like Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell would do well to sponsor some of that work.
The port is what you get when you are the PS3. The original big-budget production is for the Wii and the XBox 360. The port simply keeps you in the game. It is not the winning hand.
The commercial Linux distros are shamelessly enterprise oriented. There is no intelligible reason for Novell or Red Hat to go into the high risk, high stakes, game business.
MS' choice to build an R+D facility I'm sure had much more to do with low cost of skilled and specialized labor than by how many copies of MS Office were sold in Baking.
To be strongly positioned in Beijing is to be strongly positioned in Asia. Microsoft was the first foreign company to be admitted into China's software trade association.
It was at that time I also looked closely at the fine print of the terms of service and realized that by posting pictures I had been giving Facebook the unrestricted right to reproduce my pictures without payment or permission.
How can Facebook display or distribute your photos without "reproducing" them?
It seems to me that when you accepted Faceback's TOS you agreed to license your submissions to Facebook without fees for in exchange for their exposure to a world-wide social network - and for no other purpose.
I'll travel to meet up with some hunter friends of mine who have guns and wilderness survival skills... we'll shoot you and your newly found progressive buddies, eat your vegetables, and have a long pig BBQ
Which will keep you alive for what?
Six weeks, six months?
Guns need powder and ammunition. Lubricating oils. Spare parts.
Game becomes hard to find. Edible plants, fruits, nut and berries become hard to find.
You will need to forage constantly across greater and greater distances.
Are you sure that mushroom is safe to eat?
Captain John Smith, who knew something about survival, published a list of provisions he thought essential for every immigrant to Virginia: basically, a year's supply of everything.
Enough food to eat, so you will never be tempted to dip into to your seed stocks. The hunt will be hard work, not sport, and you are not as good with a gun as you think you are.
Bring fishooks. Learn how to fish.
Bring clothes for all seasons. Hammer and nails, axes, planes and saws. Build quickly and build well. The winter will be longer and harsher than any you have known.
And buying Microsoft software takes money out of local economies and sends it to Redmond. (And buying Apple software does the same thing, but to Cupertino).
Microsoft is building a $300 million dollar research campus in Baking's university district.
Microsoft is a multinational with employees, facilities, and investments across the globe. To understand its impact you need to look beyond the comic-book economics of Scrooge McDuck and the Money Bin.
Shouldn't that be nautical miles? 6,076 ft. Oh, well. I think you are right about the math. It's just hard to get a fix on anything so big. 2 {or is it 4?] 40' containers to each car. 100 cars. 30 trains. All to be loaded on a single vessel...
There's demonstrable energy savings to be had, and a measureable lifespan increase simply due to the physics of CFL versus incandescent.
You can also dramatically reduce labor costs and accidents. I personally don't mind having an excuse to leave the ladder and the step-stool in the garage.
PG&E is getting rich making people feel like they are helping the environment buying CFLs made in China that are shipped to the US using a lot more fossil fuels than they save.
Hmmm...
Container ships now carry up to 15,000 TEU (approximately equivalent to 35 100-car double-stack intermodal freight trains) on a voyage.
Since the distance from China to the US West Coast is roughly 6000 miles, a cargo ship fill-up would have set you back at least $8.5 million bucks in April 2008.
How much fuel does a container ship burn?
It strikes me that shipping a light bulb will cost the about same whether it is incandescent, florescent or LED.
Little practical difference in weight or bulk or fragility.
But you won't making as many runs if the florescent or LED lasts five to ten years.
It also strikes me that 15,000 TEU translates into a hell of a lot of bulbs.
Here's a crazy idea. Instead of raising taxes in a tough economy, how about you do what everyone else is doing and tighten belt and reduce spending? Nah, you're right, that will never work...
Roads and bridges do not maintain themselves.
There are fundamental limits on how far you can reduce spending and not slide into a downward spiral in which a weak economy grows weaker.
Events like Hurricane Katrina demonstrate how close to the margins years of neglect and folly at all levels of government can take you.
Microsoft is for sure the major player in the proprietary desktop market. They got there not through promoting/developing product quality, but through marketing techniques (hooking first-time users by shipping pre-installed in most every PC shipped) and its incompatibility with other OS's/media.
Microsoft remains the major player on the desktop - period.
Microsoft writes operating systems for hardware that will be mid-line at the time of release and entry level a year or two later.
This isn't "perfection" as the geek understands it.
But it is shrewd and sophisticated marketing and to get it right demands a great deal of technical sophistication. This is how Henry Ford managed to get 22 million cars on US roads by 1920 - and why the Ford V8 became the sensation of the Great Depression.
---and it sucks the air out of the room for OEM Linux.
Linux share increases 30% over the course of a year and this is supposed to be bad?
0.64% to 0.83%. Big Whoop. The Linux stats move up and down, in fits and starts all year. To me, that suggests "margin of error." Vista shows steady growth from 12% to 20%. Those numbers I am prepared to trust.
MS will continue to force OEM installations on the market
If there is any mass market retailer in the states that has tried to make a go of OEM Linux, it is Walmart.
There isn't a distro, form factor, brand name or price point that Walmart hasn't tried.
Nothing ever comes of it.
The Netbook for sale in Walmart's big box stores has a 9" screen, an ATOM CPU, 1 GB RAM a 120 GB HDD and costs $350.
This holiday season the OS is XP, next year it could be Vista or Win-7. The hardware requirements for the Windows OS are no barrier - in the long run, the hardware requirements for the Windows OS are never a barrier.
Walmart stocks Windows because Windows is what sells. The OEM installs Windows because Windows is what sells.
Meanwhile, just because they're the biggest company doesn't mean they're relevant. It just means they WERE relevant. Past tense.
This is fantasy - and fantasies are dangerous. Toyota doesn't become irrelevant in heavy industry because its shows its first loss in 71 years. Microsoft doesn't become irrrelevant in tech because its revenues and profits continue to grow in good times and bad.
The jury in the case only has to decide whether it is more likely than not that the defendant infringed on the plaintiff's copyright.
. Let us say that the files in dispute were downloads from the net - something that no one ever really disputed - downloads that weren't purchased through iTunes or any other legitimate source
- and that the jury wasn't buying the argument that she was not the responsible party.
She was the head of household. It was her account with the ISP. Her P2P nickname. Her machine.
That the defendant came across as a liar - arrogant as all hell - and that re-imaging herself "on stage" as a poster child for the FSF wasn't doing her much good.
Central planning will always lead to ditches to nowhere.
The legislation that launched the TVA was signed in 1933.
In ten years the TVA was generating the limitless amounts of electric power demanded by Oak Ridge and Alcoa.
Oak Ridge alone drawing down as much power as New York City at its peak - 1/6 of all the electric power being generated in the U.S.
The TVA was about rural electrification, flood control and conservation. None of which promised a quick return to commercial developers then or now.
The only way to maximize the efficient use of resources is to remove government coercion from the marketplace, and let voluntary cooperation and aggregate individual choices locate the closet to optimally possible solution to any problem.
The market solution often has a way of shifting its costs to the public.
That is why you can't breathe the air in Beijing.
The market solution assumes that you are part of the decision-making process.
That is why you sometimes get a glimpse of an invisible economy built on peonage and child labor.
Why the WalMart worker doesn't get a bathroom break.
The market has no memory and no imagination. It lives wholly in the moment.
That is why when there is a lock-up or a crash the damage cuts so deep. There are no inherent safety mechanisms.
The optimal solution for - a - market is not always the optimal solution for society as a whole.
i believe some dams release water through the turbines during peak times, then pump it back up off peak at night with excess cheap electricity ready for the next day
What you are thinking of are the storage reservoirs of the Niagara hydroelectric power plants. At night, pump-generators draw off some of the water from intakes above the falls - powered by the much larger plants at the base of the gorge. In the day, the water is released.
I remember that flywheels were considered for electric cars as well.
I remember coming across a cutaway view of a 50's Gyrobus in an old copy of Popular Mechanics. The idea dates back to the '40s. What was wanted was the 3 minute quick-charge tram for lightly-traveled routes that didn't warrant the expense of overheads. The name hints of the problems you'll encounter mounting a 3 ton flywheel in a 20 ton bus.
OpenOffice.org has every feature that any practical user would ever want or need. Microsoft Office has these, too, but it also has the ability to generate charts in seventeen dimensions, which for some reason is the one feature absolutely essential to whoever you happen to be trading documents with.
This gets modded up as "funny," but cuts close to the truth.
It doesn't matter if you have a clerical staff of five, fifty, or five thousand. The work has to get out the door before the close of business.
You find a desk and chair for the temp and expect her to be productive.
If the "obscure" functionality she needs is integrated into MS Office - and it almost certainly will be - you are halfway home.
The geek is fundamentally a loner.
He'll consider an app "bloated" if it includes anything he doesn't need. That makes it very hard for him to conceptualize anything as amorphous as an office suite.
He can also be afflicted with a kind of tunnel vision.
He'll see Word or Excel but only rarely the MS Office environment - the MS Office system - as a whole.
Resources, third-party apps and so on.
While SharePoint - strictly speaking - wasn't an "Office" app it very quietly generated a billion dollars in sales for Microsoft - and helped strengthen its position.
Slashdot Mirror
This is naive at best - and disingenuous at worst. Greek drama was framed within the context of a religious festival. But it was also a competitive exhibition for the playwrights and the winner did not go home empty-handed.
The only "Clippy" jokes I remember were those posted - endlessly - to Slashdot. It left me wondering - and not for the first time - whether the geek lived in a little world of his own. How many users simply accepted - even welcomed - a touch of humor, color and animation on their office desktop.
This is too pathetic for words.
Walmart.com will gladly sell you a HP Pavilion Slimline
Quad Core AMD CPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 Bit Vista Premium, NVIDIA DX 10 graphics, a 640 GB HDD, an HDTV tuner and the combo Blu-Ray drive and DVD Burner for $1K.
Monitor extra.
The truth of it is that Walmart has never been able to sell OEM Linux at a significant discount.
Though every now and again the big W will unload a few carloads of junk it picked up on the cheap on the ever-so-naive and hopeful Linux Geek.
Linux distributions need to start sponsoring companies like the old Loki Software. Companies like Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell would do well to sponsor some of that work.
The port is what you get when you are the PS3. The original big-budget production is for the Wii and the XBox 360. The port simply keeps you in the game. It is not the winning hand.
The commercial Linux distros are shamelessly enterprise oriented. There is no intelligible reason for Novell or Red Hat to go into the high risk, high stakes, game business.
To be strongly positioned in Beijing is to be strongly positioned in Asia. Microsoft was the first foreign company to be admitted into China's software trade association.
How can Facebook display or distribute your photos without "reproducing" them?
It seems to me that when you accepted Faceback's TOS you agreed to license your submissions to Facebook without fees for in exchange for their exposure to a world-wide social network - and for no other purpose.
Which will keep you alive for what?
Six weeks, six months?
Guns need powder and ammunition. Lubricating oils. Spare parts.
Game becomes hard to find. Edible plants, fruits, nut and berries become hard to find.
You will need to forage constantly across greater and greater distances.
Are you sure that mushroom is safe to eat?
Captain John Smith, who knew something about survival, published a list of provisions he thought essential for every immigrant to Virginia: basically, a year's supply of everything.
Enough food to eat, so you will never be tempted to dip into to your seed stocks. The hunt will be hard work, not sport, and you are not as good with a gun as you think you are.
Bring fishooks. Learn how to fish.
Bring clothes for all seasons. Hammer and nails, axes, planes and saws. Build quickly and build well. The winter will be longer and harsher than any you have known.
Bring animals. Layers. Breeding stock. Shelter them. Protect them.
Microsoft is building a $300 million dollar research campus in Baking's university district.
China's "Silicon Valley."
100,000 square meters of floor space.
5,000 scientists and engineers. Microsoft Breaks Ground on New R&D Campus
Microsoft is a multinational with employees, facilities, and investments across the globe. To understand its impact you need to look beyond the comic-book economics of Scrooge McDuck and the Money Bin.
But the editors are on the job.
What would $la$hdot be without a Borg piñata to bash on the main page?
Mind you, I think both the Borg icon and the stained glass window became tiresome quite some time back now.
Shouldn't that be nautical miles? 6,076 ft. Oh, well. I think you are right about the math. It's just hard to get a fix on anything so big. 2 {or is it 4?] 40' containers to each car. 100 cars. 30 trains. All to be loaded on a single vessel...
When you are convicted of a crime there are certain consequences.
Your life is never going to be the same.
When the crime is a felony - when the crime is a sexual offense - when the victim is a child - these consequences loom larger.
Much larger -
- and that isn't going to change.
It can be instructive to take a hard look at the registry of sex offenders for your county.
Who they are.
Where they are.
How they made the list - and why - in all likelihood - they will never leave it.
You will learn something about their victims.
The crimes can be unfathomable - the rape of an infant.
Nothing in their world is as the geek imagines it - and you will end the session farther to the right politically than when you began.
This is partly an interior design problem.
Color and texture.
Paint and paper.
The gas light wasn't oil or candlelight.
The incandescent lamp was harsher and stranger still. The Victorians had to think creatively about how to use these new forms of illumination.
You can also dramatically reduce labor costs and accidents. I personally don't mind having an excuse to leave the ladder and the step-stool in the garage.
Hmmm...
Container ships now carry up to 15,000 TEU (approximately equivalent to 35 100-car double-stack intermodal freight trains) on a voyage.
Since the distance from China to the US West Coast is roughly 6000 miles, a cargo ship fill-up would have set you back at least $8.5 million bucks in April 2008. How much fuel does a container ship burn?
It strikes me that shipping a light bulb will cost the about same whether it is incandescent, florescent or LED.
Little practical difference in weight or bulk or fragility.
But you won't making as many runs if the florescent or LED lasts five to ten years.
It also strikes me that 15,000 TEU translates into a hell of a lot of bulbs.
Roads and bridges do not maintain themselves.
There are fundamental limits on how far you can reduce spending and not slide into a downward spiral in which a weak economy grows weaker.
Events like Hurricane Katrina demonstrate how close to the margins years of neglect and folly at all levels of government can take you.
Microsoft remains the major player on the desktop - period.
Microsoft writes operating systems for hardware that will be mid-line at the time of release and entry level a year or two later.
This isn't "perfection" as the geek understands it.
But it is shrewd and sophisticated marketing and to get it right demands a great deal of technical sophistication. This is how Henry Ford managed to get 22 million cars on US roads by 1920 - and why the Ford V8 became the sensation of the Great Depression.
---and it sucks the air out of the room for OEM Linux.
Walmart will gladly sell you an XP ATOM netbook for $350. The dual-core HP laptop with 64 Bit Vista Premium with 4 GB RAM will set you back $800.
In a sense, there are no "first time" users.
I know families who began with MSDOS, Win 3 or Win 95 whose grandkids are starting out with Vista.
The OEM system install is the gold standard here.
That will never change. The out-of-the-box experience is everything.
0.64% to 0.83%. Big Whoop. The Linux stats move up and down, in fits and starts all year. To me, that suggests "margin of error." Vista shows steady growth from 12% to 20%. Those numbers I am prepared to trust.
If there is any mass market retailer in the states that has tried to make a go of OEM Linux, it is Walmart.
There isn't a distro, form factor, brand name or price point that Walmart hasn't tried.
Nothing ever comes of it.
The Netbook for sale in Walmart's big box stores has a 9" screen, an ATOM CPU, 1 GB RAM a 120 GB HDD and costs $350.
This holiday season the OS is XP, next year it could be Vista or Win-7. The hardware requirements for the Windows OS are no barrier - in the long run, the hardware requirements for the Windows OS are never a barrier.
Walmart stocks Windows because Windows is what sells. The OEM installs Windows because Windows is what sells.
Period.
End of story.
This is fantasy - and fantasies are dangerous. Toyota doesn't become irrelevant in heavy industry because its shows its first loss in 71 years. Microsoft doesn't become irrrelevant in tech because its revenues and profits continue to grow in good times and bad.
Object Lesson #1: Michael Meeks Says OO.o Project is "Profoundly Sick"
Object Lesson #2: The Moz Foundation and Google.
Life and death by the add-click.
Object Lesson #3:The Netbook at WalMart
Object Lesson #4: Operating system market share, Top Operation systems versions trend
For Microsoft or for Sun?
Michael Meeks Says OO.o Project is "Profoundly Sick"
.
Let us say that the files in dispute were downloads from the net - something that no one ever really disputed - downloads that weren't purchased through iTunes or any other legitimate source
- and that the jury wasn't buying the argument that she was not the responsible party.
She was the head of household. It was her account with the ISP. Her P2P nickname. Her machine.
That the defendant came across as a liar - arrogant as all hell - and that re-imaging herself "on stage" as a poster child for the FSF wasn't doing her much good.
The legislation that launched the TVA was signed in 1933.
In ten years the TVA was generating the limitless amounts of electric power demanded by Oak Ridge and Alcoa.
Oak Ridge alone drawing down as much power as New York City at its peak - 1/6 of all the electric power being generated in the U.S.
The TVA was about rural electrification, flood control and conservation. None of which promised a quick return to commercial developers then or now.
The only way to maximize the efficient use of resources is to remove government coercion from the marketplace, and let voluntary cooperation and aggregate individual choices locate the closet to optimally possible solution to any problem.
The market solution often has a way of shifting its costs to the public.
That is why you can't breathe the air in Beijing.
The market solution assumes that you are part of the decision-making process.
That is why you sometimes get a glimpse of an invisible economy built on peonage and child labor.
Why the WalMart worker doesn't get a bathroom break.
The market has no memory and no imagination. It lives wholly in the moment.
That is why when there is a lock-up or a crash the damage cuts so deep. There are no inherent safety mechanisms.
The optimal solution for - a - market is not always the optimal solution for society as a whole.
What you are thinking of are the storage reservoirs of the Niagara hydroelectric power plants. At night, pump-generators draw off some of the water from intakes above the falls - powered by the much larger plants at the base of the gorge. In the day, the water is released.
I remember coming across a cutaway view of a 50's Gyrobus in an old copy of Popular Mechanics. The idea dates back to the '40s. What was wanted was the 3 minute quick-charge tram for lightly-traveled routes that didn't warrant the expense of overheads. The name hints of the problems you'll encounter mounting a 3 ton flywheel in a 20 ton bus.
Sun is Big Daddy Warbucks, your prime source for funding.
Full-time management. Full-time development.
The geek - the volunteer developer - sees everything as code.
If the problem is not in the code he is fucked.
Microsoft can afford to employ experts in office management, workflow and training, psychologists, physicians...
Experts in layout and design.
Typography.
If his GUI is - to the uninitiated - as unintelligible and crippled as The GIMP is alleged to be, the problem can't be fixed.
This gets modded up as "funny," but cuts close to the truth.
It doesn't matter if you have a clerical staff of five, fifty, or five thousand. The work has to get out the door before the close of business.
You find a desk and chair for the temp and expect her to be productive.
If the "obscure" functionality she needs is integrated into MS Office - and it almost certainly will be - you are halfway home.
The geek is fundamentally a loner.
He'll consider an app "bloated" if it includes anything he doesn't need. That makes it very hard for him to conceptualize anything as amorphous as an office suite.
He can also be afflicted with a kind of tunnel vision.
He'll see Word or Excel but only rarely the MS Office environment - the MS Office system - as a whole.
Resources, third-party apps and so on.
While SharePoint - strictly speaking - wasn't an "Office" app it very quietly generated a billion dollars in sales for Microsoft - and helped strengthen its position.