Sorry, I wasn't trying to rip on IIT, it is a fantastic school. At my company, we had a graduate from there interview with us last year and we were very quick to make him an offer that luckily he accepted. I was just pointing out that there is a difference between the type of education one would receive at top American universities amd IIT. I'm not saying the way of Caltech is better than the way of IIT, just different and that it is crazy to say (as the parent to my post did) that IIT rejects go to Caltech or MIT. I do think that difference in philosopies between American and Indian institutions will also show itself as the two economies become more and more intertwined, similar to how the author of the article suggested.
Do yourself a favor and look up the IIT, Indian Institute of Technology. It's _the_ technical school in the world. MIT, Berkeley, CalTech, CWRU, Carnegie Melon, etc. take those who can't get accepted into this school
First off, it's Caltech, not CalTech. Caltech (and to a lesser degree some of the other schools you listed) concentrates on what Teddy Roosevelt called the "100th man." The term comes from a speach by Roosevelt at Caltech where he talked about producing 100 graduates: 99 being "mean who are to do given pieces of industrial work better than any one else can do them" but the 100th being the kind with "the cultural and scientific training that will make him and his fellows the matrix out which you can develop a man like the great astronomer George Ellery Hale" i.e. creative thinkers instead of commodity engineers. That is the difference between Caltech (as well as some other American universities) and IIT. That is also the point that the Wired article wanted to make too. America can produce the 100th man and let others produce the other 99.
While I take offense and you trying to rank IIT above Caltech (as I'm sure the many Nobel prize winners from Caltech would as well,) I think you hit on an important aspect of American culture. We have a culture that does not promote education. We ridicule our smartest people (look at how many words we have in our vernacular for making fun of smart people.) We praise athletes or singers or pleasant looking people, but not scientists or mathematicians...
Large corporations (HP and Intel immediately come to mind) are fond of saying that they 1.) have to offshore to stay compettitive but 2.) America needs better education system because they can't find quality engineers here. These two thing seemingly contradictory at first, but they're not once you realize that maybe Intel would outsource to Arkansas if it was possible. Don't you think that if Corporation XYZ could open a new office in Arkansas, or South Carolina, or Wyoming, i.e. a place with lower cost of living and lower pay scales, then they would've done that before they "sent" their jobs to India? For that matter, even here in California you'd have a hard time hiring 100 programmers in Fresno, which is only a few hours from Silicon Valley and has 500,000 people living there. Of course there's no shortage of programmers in Silicon Valley, all needing $70K just to pay rent, but you cannot go to less expensive parts of the country and find skilled labor.
the speed of that replacement will be porportional to the improvement of the new site
What are you envious of Moore and trying to come up with your own Law? How does one measure "the improvement of the new site"???
google meant nothing 5 years ago
Five years ago the Net was very new to majority of the world. I agree that it is less stable than mediums that have long been matured (television, newspapers, radio.) However, as it matures more, it will resemble those mediums, i.e. the most popular, established sources will stay the same over long periods of time. Right now five years is a huge amount of time in the history of the Net. Two years is pretty long too, and look how stable things have been in the last two years.
This couldn't be more wrong. What ten (or twenty or whatever) websites get the most traffic today? How much different is this list from a year ago? Two years ago? Sure, there are definitely differences, but much is the same. Why do people go to the same website over and over again? Does said website offer a unique service? Hardly, name any website that offers a unique service. No, they go because of the brand, whether that brand is Wal-Mart, Amazon, CNN, Google, The Weather Channel, or Yahoo.
On the Internet, information can be dissemented from trusted sources directly to the people who need or want to hear it.
Yeah, and you can get info from trusted sources on HAM radio too, there is nothing unique to the Internet here. Plus, how many of the millions of people on the Net could/would chat with somebody from Kuwait to get "trusted" information? Now how many of the millions on the Net would instead go to CNN.com or MSNBC.com, or Google News to get information about whatever. Just because it's possible to do something with the Net doesn't mean that anybody (== statistically significant number of poeple) does it.
The people who are "subverting corporations by using the internet" are really just people downloading music for free. That's not about people wanting to subvert anything, it's about people being greedy and wanting to get something of value for free. Nobody is using P2P to get information about Iraq.
You are right on. Where I went to college our homeworks were collaborative and our tests were take home and usually open book. We had a student body of 800 though. If I went from there to any large college and took a test, I would probably have felt like there was a given level of distrust because of tests being held in lecture halls and monitored by the professors or teaching assistants. However most people would argue that this is necesarry. I think the McGill students submitting their papers to the plagiarism website is really an identical albeit new practice.
The quote about tech people working for less than minimum wage was not from Carly, it was some wannbe tech labor union guy. What HP and others (especially Intel) are saying is that the reason they are offshoring is because of the lack of skilled workers here in the US. They say they are looking at how American students score on math and science scores and find it to be a lot lower than how students in India, China, Russia, etc. score on similar tests. They want the US gov to put more money into high tech education. Intel's CEO points out how there are 3 times as much money spent on farm subsidies than on science education.
Now I'm not going to speculate on how truthful these folks are being in the "reasons" they supply as justification for offshoring. However, I do think they bring up a good point. If the average American students sucks at math and science, then how can they expect the average American tech worker to be any good at these things. Now sure, the top American students may score as high or higher than top students elsewhere, but one could argue that the future jobs of top students are not the type of jobs being offshored. Clearly the dot-com age produced a lot of "tech" workers who were woefully underqualified. Many of them are now out of work and blaming their situation on offshoring.
It is a fundamental problem in America that we do not value intelligence like other cultures do. We value success and fame, but we ridicule nerds and geeks. It was just a matter of time before this began to really hurt us, and I think offshoring is a logical consequence of our culture.
You're way off, on several accounts. It's always fun to try and blame everything on corporate greed, but sometimes the facts just don't support it. Other posters have pointed out
how Sun plans to use similar technology and
how IBM plans to implement it. Do you think that they are just copying Intel blindly? They are all attacking the same problem: increasing throughput for fast CPUs. As you yourself pointed out, memory speed cannot come close to keeping up with modern CPUs. Increasing cache size is one way to combat this, but it is a very brute force way to do it. You increase the size, cost, and power consumption of the CPU when doing this. SMT and multi-core SMP systems allow for work to get done while waiting for memory to catch up. HT is just the tip of the iceberg, the stuff that Sun and IBM are working on is pretty amazing.
As for your knowledge of Intel, it is humorous at best. The Itanium was never meant to be the CPU of the future. It was never meant to be in home systems. It was designed to give Intel a way to compete with 64-bit servers that were all the rage in the late 90's. That's why Intel was willing to completely break with x86 instruction sets. If they were planning on trying to transition from PentiumXYZ to Itanium, then they would have never done that. Plus, for all its initial problems, the modern Itanium has put up some impressive numbers.
IBM will have SMT in the Power5. Their approach looks even better than Intel's, but part of that is the Power architecture and part of that is IBM learning from what Intel did. SMT is really the best way to get past the limiting reagents of modern processors : bandwidth.
From my own experience with developing search technologies for an e-content site, these guys are on the right track. Compared to a lot of search technologies out there, Google is dumb. But it is blazing fast, general purpose, and smarter than most of its (former) compettitors. Part of why it is dumb is that it is so general purpose. To make a search engine smarter, you have to add context. Specialized search engines can do this by standardizing their inputs. Google could do this too, but it would require complex parsing of everything that it spiders.
Another thing that Google really lacks is detection of duplicates. Google tries to do this, but does it poorly. I remember recently doing a search on Google for an obscure DB2 error code, and getting the same page out of the IBM manual over and over again, all on different college websites.
This is another area where linguistic/statistical analysis could really help. Most knowledge-base products offer a "More Like This" feature that is an index of linguistic similarities between items. An easy way to detect duplicates with such a system is to have a fine scale and place an uppler limit on similarities, i.e. any two items with a similarity > N are likely to be duplicates.
All of this being said, I would be surprised if Google does not address these issues in the very near future. I do not think they have gone down the path that many large companies go down where they stop trying to innovate and instead just try to protect their turf.
The article is not about programming/software engineering but is about "vanishing jobs." These are jobs that are eliminated by technology or other means. It treats programming just as it would textiles or steel. That's not a fair thing to do because in terms of maturity, programming is like a teenager whereas everything else on the list are older adults. If you want to automate Task A either with a machine or unskilled labor, you better understand Task A really well. This is just not the case with programming.
On the other hand, programming should be under a lot of pressure to scale back. Right now if you are some large business that needs some kind of system, the most expensive part is the programming. Hardware is super cheap. Networking ditto. Some of the core enterprise software (dbs, app servers) are still a little expensive, but that is coming down quickly, and open source is becoming a viable alternative. But programming is really expensive.
You know who has known this for a long time now? Microsoft. They've been trying to dumb down programming so that unskilled people could do it for a long time. Now we are really seeing the major Java players (Sun, BEA, and especially IBM) start along the same path with Java. Obviously this kind of thing makes outsourcing much easier. So it's only natural to expect that the number of programming jobs will (already has?) plateau and then decline, and the remaining jobs will feel a lot of price pressure. If you are planning on being a programmer ten years from now, you better make sure you can write better code that "Visual Tools for Java++" will be able to write...
The point of the sanctions was not to prevent Saddam from having a nice palace, but to prevent Saddam from waging war. It actually did a great job at this, far better than the Bush & Co. would like to admit. That's why the Iraqi army was trivially defeated earlier this year and that's a big reason why there were no WMDs in Iraq.
The reason that so many Iraqis died of starvation in Iraq was because of the failure of the "Oil for Food" program. This was intended to be a way for Iraq to raise money by selling oil, and using this money to buy food for its people. Saddam instead took the money and bought palaces, cars, etc. Of course Saddam apologists would argue that since "we knew" how he would spend the money then we should have lifted the sanctions so that he had much more money and would have then found it in his heart to spend some of it on his people.
You should let iTunes organize your music for you. It will copy everything into the iTunes directory and organizer by artist/album. You could then setup rsync between the two computers... Hmm, sounds like I've got a new project for this weekend.
All this thing does is copy the stream that is coming across Rendezvous. That stream is limited at 64 kbps. Even if you were streaming non-protected AAC files, this is a pretty power quality copy, similar to copying a CD to a tape.
Nobody is going to argue that Sun has not made a lot of mistakes, but these are not the ones! In the early 90's, Sun was in a similar 'crisis' because they were no longer dominating workstations. The move to servers over workstations is what saved Sun. It was definitely not a mistake, it was just the opposite.
By the late 90's, Sun made billions by concentrating on high end servers for large IT and telecoms. They concentrated on the market that they had the biggest advantage, least compettition, and highest margins. Again, this is not a mistake, it is just the opposite.
Sun's mistakes all happened 2000 and onward. Solaris x86 was mostly a novelty that Sun has ignored until recently. Given how lightly used it is, it's hard to argue that it cut into Sparc. Nobody has moved off Sparc to x86 and stuck with Solaris. People have definitely moved to x86, but they are running Windows or Linux, not Solaris. Sun's mistakes are not that they ignored their low end Sparcs or workstations, these things would've made no money for them anyways. A low end Sparc cannot compete in terms of performance with x86, and will always be more expensive.
Sun's mistake is that their hardware fell behind in performance, thus making it impossible for them to compete in the hottest market in the last four years. If a low-end Sparc could outperform the best x86 chip, then they could've leveraged Solaris/Java and their support for enterprise software like Oracle to compete in the low end markets, even with a premium. If their high end Sparc chips could blow away x86, then there would have been a lot less market share loss in the high end.
Do you want to leave actually finding cures up to purely governmental/good will efforts? Especially when a lot of the best are going to go into private industry because the pay is better?
Here's an idea, eliminate (nationalize) said private industry (drug research.) Health care is clearly a case of capitalism failing, for many of the reasons listed in the parent. It makes no economic sense for a large corporation to pursue actual cures to particularly bad diseases. Economic forces will force to research more profitable drugs, particularly "treatments" that have to be taken over and over ad inifinitum (can you say cash flow?) or drugs for non-life threatening conditions (heartburn, hair loss, impotence) that would not be threatened with nationalization. No economic incentive to produce "miracle" drugs implies no miracle drugs and this is exactly what we have seen in the US over the last 40+ years.
IRBs are yet another licensure driven device of the AMA used to keep the cost of health care absurdly high. Gotta make sure *insert new procedure here* is carried out in the proper way (i.e. by people with big degrees regardless of what's involved.)
It's all about the IPO. That's where a company raises cash. There is a lot less info about a new company that is just opening up its books (as much as required by the SEC) so it's like attaching a random multiplier to its value. Let's call this multiplier The Hype Multiplier (THM.) THM was >> 1 from 1997-2000, but was close to 0 from 2001-2003. It would have been stupid for Google to go public during that time, because they would have raised less cash than they "should" have. Now THM > 1 once again, and so they will raise a lot of money. The founders of the company probably have to wait at least six months until after the IPO before they can sell their shares in the company. So if you were a bored founder, that would be your first opportunity to really cash in on your success.
This is the worst example of amateur economics I've seen in awhile. The most common measure of how expensive a stock is, is its price-to-earnings ration (P/E). The historical P/E for the S&P 500 (the 500 most valuable companies at any time) is
about 20, but has generally increased over time (more people can buy stock, thus more demand, higher premium.) For tech companies, with their high growth potential, the value is usually more like 25-35. Yahoo's P/E is currently at 130, eBay's is 92, Intel's is 48, and Microsoft's is 28. The high premium, the more perceived potential growth there is. This has nothing to do with dividends, as few tech companies pay dividends (MS and Intel just started this year.) Anyways, if Google is netting $150M as the article claims, then a $15B market cap would give a P/E of 100, inline with eBay and below Yahoo.
This is not a good comparison. During the "2.0 browser days" there were what, maybe a couple million people online worldwide? Many of those people were at colleges or were in technical fields. So the "dominance" of Netscape was really paper thin. Most households were not online and had no idea about Netscape (did they even have computers?) When the net took off, Microsoft had established IE and all those people buying new computers already found IE on the computer, as the only browser.
Right now there are already hundreds of millions of people using Google. Maybe their percentage of the market is not as high as Netscape's was, but the number of people using it is much higher and it is known by everybody from kids to grandparents.
If Microsoft were to kill Google now, it would be like if he they had waited until 1999 to come out with IE and then killed Netscape. Acutally it would be more like if they had waited until 1999, and Netscape had come out with Firebird in 1998... There's really no chance of them killing Google, unless Google does some really stupid things (very possible with them going public and having to constantly fret about "profit growth.") Integrating a search engine into Longhorn is a worthless measure, given that Longhorn won't be out until 2006. Coming out with a search engine of their own that is just as good as Google (which isn't going to happen because MS will always distort results) won't matter either because of Google being so established already. They have to come out with something that is better than Google. Maybe a search engine that weeds out things like porn, blogs, etc. ? Microsoft does not have a history of innovation, so this seems unlikely.
Skilled tech workers are in a double bind. Their jobs are being replaced by H1-B's
WTF!? Go to the job board of your choice (Monster, Dice, craigslist, whatever) and search for "No H1-B." You'll find lots of hits. There's nothing more damning you can put on your resume these days than that you need sponsorship! Stop being such a racist demagouge trying to blame all your problems on "foreigners."
I hate reading snobbish comments like this, especially when the writer's need to sound elite causes him to make overstatement after overstatement. I don't know what's more annoying, talking about "knowing how to properly use" (with the italics to emphasize the snobbery) or talking about all those "amateurs" out there and their misconceptions.
You know who needs to buy an SLR or a digital SLR or *insert expensive/complex device here* ? Anybody who can afford it and wants to give it a try. If somebody wants to buy an SLR and take pictures of their kids with it, so what? If they don't know what they are doing, maybe they will get help, read a book, or give up and sell the camera on eBay. Screw the elite, if you got the dough, you are as elite as you wanna be.
Personally, I don't know squat about photography. My wife does though. She has a 3MP digital camera I bought her about two years ago and a Cannon SLR with a couple of lenses. She greatly prefers the SLR and she uses it for everything from taking pictures of friends and family to pictures of Yosemite Falls. I don't know if she has the best possible lense or if her pics are expert quality. I know that she is pleased with the results, and that is what matters. The consumer is always right and the elitist/technophile is always a bore.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh so this server OS sucks because of poor drivers... Um yeah that's really what a server OS is all about.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to rip on IIT, it is a fantastic school. At my company, we had a graduate from there interview with us last year and we were very quick to make him an offer that luckily he accepted. I was just pointing out that there is a difference between the type of education one would receive at top American universities amd IIT. I'm not saying the way of Caltech is better than the way of IIT, just different and that it is crazy to say (as the parent to my post did) that IIT rejects go to Caltech or MIT. I do think that difference in philosopies between American and Indian institutions will also show itself as the two economies become more and more intertwined, similar to how the author of the article suggested.
While I take offense and you trying to rank IIT above Caltech (as I'm sure the many Nobel prize winners from Caltech would as well,) I think you hit on an important aspect of American culture. We have a culture that does not promote education. We ridicule our smartest people (look at how many words we have in our vernacular for making fun of smart people.) We praise athletes or singers or pleasant looking people, but not scientists or mathematicians...
Large corporations (HP and Intel immediately come to mind) are fond of saying that they 1.) have to offshore to stay compettitive but 2.) America needs better education system because they can't find quality engineers here. These two thing seemingly contradictory at first, but they're not once you realize that maybe Intel would outsource to Arkansas if it was possible. Don't you think that if Corporation XYZ could open a new office in Arkansas, or South Carolina, or Wyoming, i.e. a place with lower cost of living and lower pay scales, then they would've done that before they "sent" their jobs to India? For that matter, even here in California you'd have a hard time hiring 100 programmers in Fresno, which is only a few hours from Silicon Valley and has 500,000 people living there. Of course there's no shortage of programmers in Silicon Valley, all needing $70K just to pay rent, but you cannot go to less expensive parts of the country and find skilled labor.
Five years ago the Net was very new to majority of the world. I agree that it is less stable than mediums that have long been matured (television, newspapers, radio.) However, as it matures more, it will resemble those mediums, i.e. the most popular, established sources will stay the same over long periods of time. Right now five years is a huge amount of time in the history of the Net. Two years is pretty long too, and look how stable things have been in the last two years.
Yeah, and you can get info from trusted sources on HAM radio too, there is nothing unique to the Internet here. Plus, how many of the millions of people on the Net could/would chat with somebody from Kuwait to get "trusted" information? Now how many of the millions on the Net would instead go to CNN.com or MSNBC.com, or Google News to get information about whatever. Just because it's possible to do something with the Net doesn't mean that anybody (== statistically significant number of poeple) does it.
The people who are "subverting corporations by using the internet" are really just people downloading music for free. That's not about people wanting to subvert anything, it's about people being greedy and wanting to get something of value for free. Nobody is using P2P to get information about Iraq.
You are right on. Where I went to college our homeworks were collaborative and our tests were take home and usually open book. We had a student body of 800 though. If I went from there to any large college and took a test, I would probably have felt like there was a given level of distrust because of tests being held in lecture halls and monitored by the professors or teaching assistants. However most people would argue that this is necesarry. I think the McGill students submitting their papers to the plagiarism website is really an identical albeit new practice.
The quote about tech people working for less than minimum wage was not from Carly, it was some wannbe tech labor union guy. What HP and others (especially Intel) are saying is that the reason they are offshoring is because of the lack of skilled workers here in the US. They say they are looking at how American students score on math and science scores and find it to be a lot lower than how students in India, China, Russia, etc. score on similar tests. They want the US gov to put more money into high tech education. Intel's CEO points out how there are 3 times as much money spent on farm subsidies than on science education.
Now I'm not going to speculate on how truthful these folks are being in the "reasons" they supply as justification for offshoring. However, I do think they bring up a good point. If the average American students sucks at math and science, then how can they expect the average American tech worker to be any good at these things. Now sure, the top American students may score as high or higher than top students elsewhere, but one could argue that the future jobs of top students are not the type of jobs being offshored. Clearly the dot-com age produced a lot of "tech" workers who were woefully underqualified. Many of them are now out of work and blaming their situation on offshoring.
It is a fundamental problem in America that we do not value intelligence like other cultures do. We value success and fame, but we ridicule nerds and geeks. It was just a matter of time before this began to really hurt us, and I think offshoring is a logical consequence of our culture.
You're way off, on several accounts. It's always fun to try and blame everything on corporate greed, but sometimes the facts just don't support it. Other posters have pointed out how Sun plans to use similar technology and how IBM plans to implement it. Do you think that they are just copying Intel blindly? They are all attacking the same problem: increasing throughput for fast CPUs. As you yourself pointed out, memory speed cannot come close to keeping up with modern CPUs. Increasing cache size is one way to combat this, but it is a very brute force way to do it. You increase the size, cost, and power consumption of the CPU when doing this. SMT and multi-core SMP systems allow for work to get done while waiting for memory to catch up. HT is just the tip of the iceberg, the stuff that Sun and IBM are working on is pretty amazing.
As for your knowledge of Intel, it is humorous at best. The Itanium was never meant to be the CPU of the future. It was never meant to be in home systems. It was designed to give Intel a way to compete with 64-bit servers that were all the rage in the late 90's. That's why Intel was willing to completely break with x86 instruction sets. If they were planning on trying to transition from PentiumXYZ to Itanium, then they would have never done that. Plus, for all its initial problems, the modern Itanium has put up some impressive numbers.
IBM will have SMT in the Power5. Their approach looks even better than Intel's, but part of that is the Power architecture and part of that is IBM learning from what Intel did. SMT is really the best way to get past the limiting reagents of modern processors : bandwidth.
From my own experience with developing search technologies for an e-content site, these guys are on the right track. Compared to a lot of search technologies out there, Google is dumb. But it is blazing fast, general purpose, and smarter than most of its (former) compettitors. Part of why it is dumb is that it is so general purpose. To make a search engine smarter, you have to add context. Specialized search engines can do this by standardizing their inputs. Google could do this too, but it would require complex parsing of everything that it spiders.
Another thing that Google really lacks is detection of duplicates. Google tries to do this, but does it poorly. I remember recently doing a search on Google for an obscure DB2 error code, and getting the same page out of the IBM manual over and over again, all on different college websites.
This is another area where linguistic/statistical analysis could really help. Most knowledge-base products offer a "More Like This" feature that is an index of linguistic similarities between items. An easy way to detect duplicates with such a system is to have a fine scale and place an uppler limit on similarities, i.e. any two items with a similarity > N are likely to be duplicates.
All of this being said, I would be surprised if Google does not address these issues in the very near future. I do not think they have gone down the path that many large companies go down where they stop trying to innovate and instead just try to protect their turf.
Ah, to be satisfied with the status quo, how quaint. If only all of mankind was so, then we could still be drawing on cave walls...
The article is not about programming/software engineering but is about "vanishing jobs." These are jobs that are eliminated by technology or other means. It treats programming just as it would textiles or steel. That's not a fair thing to do because in terms of maturity, programming is like a teenager whereas everything else on the list are older adults. If you want to automate Task A either with a machine or unskilled labor, you better understand Task A really well. This is just not the case with programming.
On the other hand, programming should be under a lot of pressure to scale back. Right now if you are some large business that needs some kind of system, the most expensive part is the programming. Hardware is super cheap. Networking ditto. Some of the core enterprise software (dbs, app servers) are still a little expensive, but that is coming down quickly, and open source is becoming a viable alternative. But programming is really expensive.
You know who has known this for a long time now? Microsoft. They've been trying to dumb down programming so that unskilled people could do it for a long time. Now we are really seeing the major Java players (Sun, BEA, and especially IBM) start along the same path with Java. Obviously this kind of thing makes outsourcing much easier. So it's only natural to expect that the number of programming jobs will (already has?) plateau and then decline, and the remaining jobs will feel a lot of price pressure. If you are planning on being a programmer ten years from now, you better make sure you can write better code that "Visual Tools for Java++" will be able to write...
The point of the sanctions was not to prevent Saddam from having a nice palace, but to prevent Saddam from waging war. It actually did a great job at this, far better than the Bush & Co. would like to admit. That's why the Iraqi army was trivially defeated earlier this year and that's a big reason why there were no WMDs in Iraq.
The reason that so many Iraqis died of starvation in Iraq was because of the failure of the "Oil for Food" program. This was intended to be a way for Iraq to raise money by selling oil, and using this money to buy food for its people. Saddam instead took the money and bought palaces, cars, etc. Of course Saddam apologists would argue that since "we knew" how he would spend the money then we should have lifted the sanctions so that he had much more money and would have then found it in his heart to spend some of it on his people.
Since they've optimized Final Cut Pro 4, hopefully Final Cut Express won't be too far behind.
You should let iTunes organize your music for you. It will copy everything into the iTunes directory and organizer by artist/album. You could then setup rsync between the two computers... Hmm, sounds like I've got a new project for this weekend.
All this thing does is copy the stream that is coming across Rendezvous. That stream is limited at 64 kbps. Even if you were streaming non-protected AAC files, this is a pretty power quality copy, similar to copying a CD to a tape.
Nobody is going to argue that Sun has not made a lot of mistakes, but these are not the ones! In the early 90's, Sun was in a similar 'crisis' because they were no longer dominating workstations. The move to servers over workstations is what saved Sun. It was definitely not a mistake, it was just the opposite.
By the late 90's, Sun made billions by concentrating on high end servers for large IT and telecoms. They concentrated on the market that they had the biggest advantage, least compettition, and highest margins. Again, this is not a mistake, it is just the opposite.
Sun's mistakes all happened 2000 and onward. Solaris x86 was mostly a novelty that Sun has ignored until recently. Given how lightly used it is, it's hard to argue that it cut into Sparc. Nobody has moved off Sparc to x86 and stuck with Solaris. People have definitely moved to x86, but they are running Windows or Linux, not Solaris. Sun's mistakes are not that they ignored their low end Sparcs or workstations, these things would've made no money for them anyways. A low end Sparc cannot compete in terms of performance with x86, and will always be more expensive.
Sun's mistake is that their hardware fell behind in performance, thus making it impossible for them to compete in the hottest market in the last four years. If a low-end Sparc could outperform the best x86 chip, then they could've leveraged Solaris/Java and their support for enterprise software like Oracle to compete in the low end markets, even with a premium. If their high end Sparc chips could blow away x86, then there would have been a lot less market share loss in the high end.
IRBs are yet another licensure driven device of the AMA used to keep the cost of health care absurdly high. Gotta make sure *insert new procedure here* is carried out in the proper way (i.e. by people with big degrees regardless of what's involved.)
The top two listings are paid listings. You can buy the top spots on MSN, unlike Google.
It's all about the IPO. That's where a company raises cash. There is a lot less info about a new company that is just opening up its books (as much as required by the SEC) so it's like attaching a random multiplier to its value. Let's call this multiplier The Hype Multiplier (THM.) THM was >> 1 from 1997-2000, but was close to 0 from 2001-2003. It would have been stupid for Google to go public during that time, because they would have raised less cash than they "should" have. Now THM > 1 once again, and so they will raise a lot of money. The founders of the company probably have to wait at least six months until after the IPO before they can sell their shares in the company. So if you were a bored founder, that would be your first opportunity to really cash in on your success.
This is the worst example of amateur economics I've seen in awhile. The most common measure of how expensive a stock is, is its price-to-earnings ration (P/E). The historical P/E for the S&P 500 (the 500 most valuable companies at any time) is about 20, but has generally increased over time (more people can buy stock, thus more demand, higher premium.) For tech companies, with their high growth potential, the value is usually more like 25-35. Yahoo's P/E is currently at 130, eBay's is 92, Intel's is 48, and Microsoft's is 28. The high premium, the more perceived potential growth there is. This has nothing to do with dividends, as few tech companies pay dividends (MS and Intel just started this year.) Anyways, if Google is netting $150M as the article claims, then a $15B market cap would give a P/E of 100, inline with eBay and below Yahoo.
This is not a good comparison. During the "2.0 browser days" there were what, maybe a couple million people online worldwide? Many of those people were at colleges or were in technical fields. So the "dominance" of Netscape was really paper thin. Most households were not online and had no idea about Netscape (did they even have computers?) When the net took off, Microsoft had established IE and all those people buying new computers already found IE on the computer, as the only browser.
Right now there are already hundreds of millions of people using Google. Maybe their percentage of the market is not as high as Netscape's was, but the number of people using it is much higher and it is known by everybody from kids to grandparents.
If Microsoft were to kill Google now, it would be like if he they had waited until 1999 to come out with IE and then killed Netscape. Acutally it would be more like if they had waited until 1999, and Netscape had come out with Firebird in 1998... There's really no chance of them killing Google, unless Google does some really stupid things (very possible with them going public and having to constantly fret about "profit growth.") Integrating a search engine into Longhorn is a worthless measure, given that Longhorn won't be out until 2006. Coming out with a search engine of their own that is just as good as Google (which isn't going to happen because MS will always distort results) won't matter either because of Google being so established already. They have to come out with something that is better than Google. Maybe a search engine that weeds out things like porn, blogs, etc. ? Microsoft does not have a history of innovation, so this seems unlikely.
I hate reading snobbish comments like this, especially when the writer's need to sound elite causes him to make overstatement after overstatement. I don't know what's more annoying, talking about "knowing how to properly use" (with the italics to emphasize the snobbery) or talking about all those "amateurs" out there and their misconceptions.
You know who needs to buy an SLR or a digital SLR or *insert expensive/complex device here* ? Anybody who can afford it and wants to give it a try. If somebody wants to buy an SLR and take pictures of their kids with it, so what? If they don't know what they are doing, maybe they will get help, read a book, or give up and sell the camera on eBay. Screw the elite, if you got the dough, you are as elite as you wanna be.
Personally, I don't know squat about photography. My wife does though. She has a 3MP digital camera I bought her about two years ago and a Cannon SLR with a couple of lenses. She greatly prefers the SLR and she uses it for everything from taking pictures of friends and family to pictures of Yosemite Falls. I don't know if she has the best possible lense or if her pics are expert quality. I know that she is pleased with the results, and that is what matters. The consumer is always right and the elitist/technophile is always a bore.