The "Death of Microsoft" is the kind of "socialist" daydream the old time reporter would have cynically dismissed as filler. Something to be written when propped up by a bottle. Reworked when necessary and put in the bank for a slow news day. Knowing that your readers wouldn't look beyond the repetition of the tale and a moral as reassuring as the sunrise.
Microsoft's stock has become a widows and orphans fund since 2002
The widows and orphans are still banking dividend checks as the American economy goes south.
60% of Microsoft's revenues come from outside the U.S.
Microsoft is seeing 20%-30% growth in these markets each quarter. The EU bureaucracy can fine Microsoft $1 billion dollars without having the slightest impact on these numbers whatever.
Microsoft is debt free with $20 billion in liquid reserves.
Happy days are here again, the skies are bright and clear again.
In 1920, electric and steam were still competitive engine technologies.
Steam held a very small niche in the luxury market in 1920, the Stanley brothers producing around 500 cars a year. Compared to the 20 million or so Fords on the roads.
The electric could be a practical town car or utility vehicle. But it was not something you could take beyond the city limits.
Until now, the received wisdom has been that GNU/Linux will never take off with general users because it's too complicated.
It is the intractable "Geekness" of Linux that drives users away.
Open the Linspire CNR library.
Take a look - a long, hard look - at the 25,000 or so applications in the repository.
How many of these apps would be of the slightest interest to the shopper at Best Buy or Wal-Mart?
Now open Download.com and ask yourself the same question.
The Windows platform demands no religious ideological commitment to anything. You are not shunned because you installed the Blu Ray drive with the licensed and closed source Windows driver.
The holy wars fought out on Slashdot are out of sight and out of mind.
You want subscription radio, you can have subscription radio. You want Photoshop, you can have Photoshop. If you want Paint.NET, you can have Paint.NET.
Microsoft positions product for every market segment.
If Moore's law has any meaning in the discussion, it implies that it won't be long before the $200 PC will be perfectly capable of running Vista with the Aero GUI enabled.
The $500 PC with DX10 becomes a viable entry-level gaming platform.
Vista Home Basic dies and is reincarnated as Vista SE for the OLPC market abroad.
The OEM Windows install remains a one-time purchase for the life of the system. The Premium or Ultimate install continues to dominate at higher - and more profitable - price points.
The poor will not be buying computers even at a discount.
The $200 Windows PC becomes simply the second, third or fourth PC in the middle class home or office. Look at the reviews of the gPC posted at Walmart.com and it becomes perfectly clear who actually buys these things.
No one else has the slightest desire to muck around "under the hood."
Users like a consistent "look and feel" across applications. You develop for Windows or the Mac you know what your clients want to see. Go your own way and you are hobbled like the GIMP.
The UI is the "public face" of the operating system. That one billion users world-wide have settled on the Windows GUI with minimal customization ought to tell him something.
10th Amendment to the Constitution reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." IOW, if the Constitution doesn't explicitly grant an authority, the Federals can't do it. What a quaint notion.
Anyone who has ever read a state constitution will tell you that the federal constitution is a very different sort of beast.
The deliberations were in secret. Discerning the "intent" of the Founders is little more than divination. Nothing is sketched out in detail. Amendment is difficult and rare.
The eighteenth century language of the Constitution has to be given a modern meaning.
The Founders were dead or in retirement before the canal and the steamboat transformed interstate commerce. Jefferson saw and understood almost nothing of the Industrial Revolution.
The Civil War Amendments ratified a profound change in the relationship between the federal government and the states, the federal government and the individual.
Beta was introduced before most television sets had comb filtering or a composite video input.
It predates closed captioning, MTS stereo audio, affordable projection TV. The first Beta VCRs could not record movies or sports on a single tape.
You have to see the system and the environment as a whole.
Blu Ray entered a market where the buyer had a substantial existing investment in HD and digital audio. It began with support from almost all the major studios. That implied a major artistic and technical investment in Blu Ray content.
Blu Ray entered a market when the two-disk video or big boxed set really became popular and the 50 GB disk began to make a lot of sense and the 100 GB disk even more.
The HD-DVD video did not sell or rent at a significant discount. For the serious viewer or collector, the price of the player quickly becomes irrelevant.
Frankly, I think it's WAY too early to be replacing DVDs--presently, only about 15% of U.S. households even own an HDTV!
"The Nielsen numbers...estimate that 13.7 million homes have HDTV and high-def tuners. That's roughly 15-16 million homes -- or about 50 percent of the 30 million homes that have high-def sets.
Los Angeles has the highest penetration of HD-capable homes with 20.4 percent, followed by Washington, D.C. with 19.4 percent. New York is third with 18.1 percent."
HDTV is digital video, new display technologies, large screen, wide screen projection. Multicast video. Multichannel digital audio. That is a lot to swallow in one bite.
I wouldn't mind having a 20% share of the major urban markets.
Particularly if the product I am selling also sells the HT receiver, digital radio and surround sound audio. The premium cable or satellite service. The DVR. The theater lounge chair and the popcorn machine.
Gas is approaching $4 a gallon. Blu-Ray rentals from Netflix are $20/mo.
HD-DVD was on the road to nowhere without Disney on board. I'll take the odds that your kids are being drawn into a local production of "High School Musical." That "Ratatouille" was the only Oscar winner to sell out at the multiplex.
Virtually everyone could have one. So if each person managed their own would it really be that bad? ts cheaper to spend $35 one time and take some ownership in this new interweb thingy then pay $40 a month for high speed access that is throttled to death by our communications overlords.
"I don't do ladders and I don't dig trenches." In this town the odds are two in three that you are an upper income professional or a retiree who can afford the condo on the river and winters in Florida.
This would be a boon to those of us that are maintaining a community wifi setup.
To test in the Australian outback sounds like a test under ideal conditions. No RFI. No natural or man-made obstructions. No problems with climate or weather.
Maintaining "hundreds repeaters" through a Buffalo winter presents a somewhat greater challenge.
they instead blew their 5 million buying buses that kneel to let disabled passengers on
No one remains 20-something forever.
Not everyone lives in an environment that is benign year round.
The heat and humidity here last summer was punishing and dangerous even for those in fit condition. Last week the temperature fell to five degrees with winds gusting to 45.
The rail corridor or loop doesn't solve the "last mile" problem.
You have to deliver a realistic alternative to the automobile as point-to-point transportation.
I'm sure many people in that thread made claims about this never happening in a "modern" country like the US.
I suspect that in most of the developed world there is more profit to be made in concealing a death: disability and pension benefits, legal settlements, life estates and so on.
The mortality among adults under age 45 is much lower, of course, but still run about 3500 each week. In 1/5 of those cases, the cause of death may be most simply defined as "Other."
I just hope that when you take your custom painted car to service you don't complain when other side of car is wiped clean.
You take your antiques and collectibles to a specialist. Someone who knows what needs to be done and what can be done without impairing their value. You negotiate a contract and get everything in writing. You pay whatever it costs to get the job done right.
What does "economically relevant" mean to a J.R.R. Tolkien who has a thirty year investment in the creation of Middle Earth? To U.S. Grant, dying of cancer. whose "Memoirs" are his only means of providing an estate to support his widow?
Outfits like Disney can afford to buy and maintain properties on spec. Hold them in storage for decades if necessary, until the story and production problems are solved. Fifty years for The Chronicles of Narnia.
Here a few examples I could show you in a fifteen minute drive:
seasonal roads
privately maintained farm roads, service roads, gated communities, government reservations and the like. which share nothing in common but distrust of strangers.
long-obscured, missing or unreadable road signs
names too long for the standard-length sign. abbreviations that are more misleading than helpful
names the locals never use themselves
--- the outer ring of development known since 1934 as "Poverty Ridge."
--- the three block stretch on the south end of Third Street renamed for a beloved centenarian who died in 1956
It is really shameful how religious leaders continue to try to impress their own (private) values on the rest of the world
and what of the Geek who tries to impose his ideas on the world? particularly when they touch on the core values of a religion and a society which he doesn't understand?
What you see isn't what you get
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
I should like to take this opportunity to introduce you to a friend of mine.......
The Paragraph break.
Have you ever tired of HTML editing a Slashdot post? The sort of thing that chat clients like AIM did away with years ago?
I'll double the Microsoft deal and offer them $6M in perl scripts and an infinite value of free OS software if they let me (or Google or any other honest company) publish their collections in free formats.
The LOC collections:
30 million books in 470 languages, including the largest rare book collection in the states.
58 million manuscripts
1 million government publications
1 million issues of the world's newspapers dating back 300 years. 30,000 bound volumes of newspapers
500,000 reels of microfilm
4.8 million maps, 2.7 million audio recordings
legal documents, films, photographs, about 100 years of original slides and negatives from National Geographic alone, sheet music, comic books, etc., etc., etc.
These records are fragile.
They need expert handling at every stage. Restoration presents complex artistic and technical challenges.
This isn't a software problem. It's a manpower problem.
You need an exceptionally skilled labor force. Which makes it a money problem - you need a lot of money to be a player in this game.
Slashdot Mirror
The "Death of Microsoft" is the kind of "socialist" daydream the old time reporter would have cynically dismissed as filler. Something to be written when propped up by a bottle. Reworked when necessary and put in the bank for a slow news day. Knowing that your readers wouldn't look beyond the repetition of the tale and a moral as reassuring as the sunrise.
The widows and orphans are still banking dividend checks as the American economy goes south.
60% of Microsoft's revenues come from outside the U.S.
Microsoft is seeing 20%-30% growth in these markets each quarter. The EU bureaucracy can fine Microsoft $1 billion dollars without having the slightest impact on these numbers whatever.
Microsoft is debt free with $20 billion in liquid reserves.
Happy days are here again, the skies are bright and clear again.
Steam held a very small niche in the luxury market in 1920, the Stanley brothers producing around 500 cars a year. Compared to the 20 million or so Fords on the roads.
The electric could be a practical town car or utility vehicle. But it was not something you could take beyond the city limits.
It is the intractable "Geekness" of Linux that drives users away.
Open the Linspire CNR library.
Take a look - a long, hard look - at the 25,000 or so applications in the repository.
How many of these apps would be of the slightest interest to the shopper at Best Buy or Wal-Mart?
Now open Download.com and ask yourself the same question.
The Windows platform demands no religious ideological commitment to anything. You are not shunned because you installed the Blu Ray drive with the licensed and closed source Windows driver.
The holy wars fought out on Slashdot are out of sight and out of mind.
You want subscription radio, you can have subscription radio. You want Photoshop, you can have Photoshop. If you want Paint.NET, you can have Paint.NET.
Microsoft positions product for every market segment.
If Moore's law has any meaning in the discussion, it implies that it won't be long before the $200 PC will be perfectly capable of running Vista with the Aero GUI enabled.
The $500 PC with DX10 becomes a viable entry-level gaming platform.
Vista Home Basic dies and is reincarnated as Vista SE for the OLPC market abroad.
The OEM Windows install remains a one-time purchase for the life of the system. The Premium or Ultimate install continues to dominate at higher - and more profitable - price points.
The poor will not be buying computers even at a discount.
The $200 Windows PC becomes simply the second, third or fourth PC in the middle class home or office. Look at the reviews of the gPC posted at Walmart.com and it becomes perfectly clear who actually buys these things.
and collectively these alternatives have won less than a 1% share of the desktop. Operating System Market Share for February, 2008
Three things the Geek will never understand:
No one else has the slightest desire to muck around "under the hood."
Users like a consistent "look and feel" across applications. You develop for Windows or the Mac you know what your clients want to see. Go your own way and you are hobbled like the GIMP.
The UI is the "public face" of the operating system. That one billion users world-wide have settled on the Windows GUI with minimal customization ought to tell him something.
Perhaps because it is far more worried about migration to a fully integrated Windows Live! and Yahoo! IM client.
How many "good" movies see a big theatrical box office?
No Country For Old Men grossed $64 million in the U.S., Ratatouille $206 million.
Both are fine films, but play to a very different audience.
Anyone who has ever read a state constitution will tell you that the federal constitution is a very different sort of beast.
The deliberations were in secret. Discerning the "intent" of the Founders is little more than divination. Nothing is sketched out in detail. Amendment is difficult and rare.
The eighteenth century language of the Constitution has to be given a modern meaning.
The Founders were dead or in retirement before the canal and the steamboat transformed interstate commerce. Jefferson saw and understood almost nothing of the Industrial Revolution.
The Civil War Amendments ratified a profound change in the relationship between the federal government and the states, the federal government and the individual.
Beta was introduced before most television sets had comb filtering or a composite video input.
It predates closed captioning, MTS stereo audio, affordable projection TV. The first Beta VCRs could not record movies or sports on a single tape.
You have to see the system and the environment as a whole.
Blu Ray entered a market where the buyer had a substantial existing investment in HD and digital audio. It began with support from almost all the major studios. That implied a major artistic and technical investment in Blu Ray content.
Blu Ray entered a market when the two-disk video or big boxed set really became popular and the 50 GB disk began to make a lot of sense and the 100 GB disk even more.
The HD-DVD video did not sell or rent at a significant discount. For the serious viewer or collector, the price of the player quickly becomes irrelevant.
"The Nielsen numbers...estimate that 13.7 million homes have HDTV and high-def tuners. That's roughly 15-16 million homes -- or about 50 percent of the 30 million homes that have high-def sets. Los Angeles has the highest penetration of HD-capable homes with 20.4 percent, followed by Washington, D.C. with 19.4 percent. New York is third with 18.1 percent."
HDTV is digital video, new display technologies, large screen, wide screen projection. Multicast video. Multichannel digital audio. That is a lot to swallow in one bite.
I wouldn't mind having a 20% share of the major urban markets.
Particularly if the product I am selling also sells the HT receiver, digital radio and surround sound audio. The premium cable or satellite service. The DVR. The theater lounge chair and the popcorn machine.
Gas is approaching $4 a gallon. Blu-Ray rentals from Netflix are $20/mo.
HD-DVD was on the road to nowhere without Disney on board. I'll take the odds that your kids are being drawn into a local production of "High School Musical." That "Ratatouille" was the only Oscar winner to sell out at the multiplex.
"I don't do ladders and I don't dig trenches." In this town the odds are two in three that you are an upper income professional or a retiree who can afford the condo on the river and winters in Florida.
To test in the Australian outback sounds like a test under ideal conditions. No RFI. No natural or man-made obstructions. No problems with climate or weather.
Maintaining "hundreds repeaters" through a Buffalo winter presents a somewhat greater challenge.
No one remains 20-something forever.
Not everyone lives in an environment that is benign year round.
The heat and humidity here last summer was punishing and dangerous even for those in fit condition. Last week the temperature fell to five degrees with winds gusting to 45.
The rail corridor or loop doesn't solve the "last mile" problem.
You have to deliver a realistic alternative to the automobile as point-to-point transportation.
I suspect that in most of the developed world there is more profit to be made in concealing a death: disability and pension benefits, legal settlements, life estates and so on.
The Average Daily Mortality in the U.S. for Victims of All Ages, 2002 was 6706.
That implies an error rate of about 1/2 of 1%.
The mortality among adults under age 45 is much lower, of course, but still run about 3500 each week. In 1/5 of those cases, the cause of death may be most simply defined as "Other."
You take your antiques and collectibles to a specialist. Someone who knows what needs to be done and what can be done without impairing their value. You negotiate a contract and get everything in writing. You pay whatever it costs to get the job done right.
I'll take it as given that you don't live in a border town.
I'll take it as given that you have never taken a small boat out into open water or gone hiking in a national park...
This reads like the textbook definition of a sociopath.
Outfits like Disney can afford to buy and maintain properties on spec. Hold them in storage for decades if necessary, until the story and production problems are solved. Fifty years for The Chronicles of Narnia.
Here a few examples I could show you in a fifteen minute drive:
seasonal roads
privately maintained farm roads, service roads, gated communities, government reservations and the like. which share nothing in common but distrust of strangers.
long-obscured, missing or unreadable road signs
names too long for the standard-length sign. abbreviations that are more misleading than helpful
names the locals never use themselves
--- the outer ring of development known since 1934 as "Poverty Ridge."
--- the three block stretch on the south end of Third Street renamed for a beloved centenarian who died in 1956
Good lord.
The NGS has been mapping the U.S. for 200 years. National Geodetic Surevy The U.S. Geological Durvey is an essential resource: Maps, Imagery and Publications
and what of the Geek who tries to impose his ideas on the world? particularly when they touch on the core values of a religion and a society which he doesn't understand?
Have you ever tired of HTML editing a Slashdot post? The sort of thing that chat clients like AIM did away with years ago?
The LOC collections:
30 million books in 470 languages, including the largest rare book collection in the states.
58 million manuscripts
1 million government publications
1 million issues of the world's newspapers dating back 300 years. 30,000 bound volumes of newspapers
500,000 reels of microfilm
4.8 million maps, 2.7 million audio recordings
legal documents, films, photographs, about 100 years of original slides and negatives from National Geographic alone, sheet music, comic books, etc., etc., etc.
These records are fragile.
They need expert handling at every stage. Restoration presents complex artistic and technical challenges.
This isn't a software problem. It's a manpower problem.
You need an exceptionally skilled labor force. Which makes it a money problem - you need a lot of money to be a player in this game.