Your assumption here is that other capitalist greats were somehow more purely meritocratic. Look at Carnegie's involvement in the 1892 Homestead strike which resulted in about half a dozen deaths or Rockefeller, Jr.'s involvement in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, in which 66 people were killed. The perfect competition you are describing is more an economist's model than a description of real capitalism. Gates's tactics are not unusual for a robber baron.
What is it exactly that makes the quality worse? Is the ink less good? You would think they could fix that and add a buck or two - and still slap the HP and Lexmark on their fingers...
There was a story in the NYT a couple of years ago that described the research HP puts into their inks. Apparently the formula for these is very complicated and a closely-guarded secret, so any third-party manufacturer is going to have to reverse-engineer the ink. It sounded as though HP designs each printer to use a specific kind of ink that may differ from cartridge to cartridge. So you put all this together and a third-party ink cartridge isn't going to work as precisely at making all those tiny dots and may clog up those tiny ink jets.
Here's the story: Steve Lohr, "The Distributor vs. the Innovator," New York Times, May 24, 2004.
"Yet the printing group at Hewlett-Packard reported nearly $23 billion in revenue last year. It sold 43.6 million printers, more than double its nearest rival, Epson, reports IDC, a research firm. The business is big and immensely profitable: it accounted for about 30 percent of Hewlett-Packard's sales last year, but 80 percent of its earnings....
Hewlett-Packard invests $1 billion a year in research and development for its printer division, and that spending is on display at its laboratory in San Diego. Jars and canisters of experimental ink rest alongside the chromatographs, the scanning tunnel microscopes and the thermotron environmental chambers. Anything that is not patented -- Hewlett-Packard's printing group holds 9,000 -- is protected by trade secrets.
Every day, physicists, chemists and fluid-mechanics engineers puzzle over ways to make the symphony of nanoscale ink explosions more efficient and precise. They speak of co-solvents, surfactants, polymers, humectants, friction coefficients and tailhooking (when the trailing tail of a misfired droplet splats wildly).
The hundreds of nozzles crammed onto the slender silicon face of the printhead march to the nanosecond beat of an integrated circuit inside the cartridge. Yet the hardware of the cartridge is only half the story. The ''software'' of this technology is the ink. Hewlett-Packard has more than 100 different ink formulations on the market. Three years or more of research, development and testing go into each ink variety.
Since its commercial introduction two decades ago, the inkjet printer has improved at a pace equal to Moore's Law in semiconductors -- its performance doubling every 18 months. Hewlett-Packard printheads, with up to 500 nozzles, put ink on paper at the rate of 18 million droplets a second, and its labs are on track to reach 1 billion tiny drops a second before 2010. Many other companies, including Canon, Epson and Lexmark (Dell's partner and main supplier), make inkjet printers today, but Hewlett-Packard, the early pioneer, is still the technology leader, most analysts agree....
The really good news for the printer industry, though, is that a digital photo is an ink-eating glutton. And the ink is where the money is in printing -- a classic razor and razor blade business. The manufacturers lose money on the standard home printer, but make hefty profits on all the replacement ink cartridges people buy."
Also, from the WSJ article for this Slashdot story:
"In 2001, all of H-P's $624 million in profit came from sales of ink and toner supplies. Since then that share of profit has slid, but ink and toner-supply sales still account for more than two-thirds of profit.
So in other words HP spends billions to generate monopoly profits by segmenting the market into innumerable ink cartridges that cannot be commodified, i.e. replaced with generic cartridges. This is the source of most of the company's profit.
"The price of ink per milliliter from the big printer shops such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lexmark International Inc. has been steadily rising, at about 1% a year"
Excuse me, but wtf? It is supposed to be cheaper to produce a product as time goes on, and dont give me that "they are innovating the way things are printed". There hasnt been any corresponding 1% increase in quality over the years.
Here's why:
"In 2001, all of H-P's $624 million in profit came from sales of ink and toner supplies. Since then that share of profit has slid, but ink and toner-supply sales still account for more than two-thirds of profit."
The ink and ink cartridges are made to unique or near-unique specifications for each model of printer, hence the manufacturers are able to segment the market to produce monopoly profits. In 2001 this was the _only_ source of profit for HP in an increasingly commodified space of PC box manufacture.
As you note the price of ink isn't declining even as its cost should be according to econ theory, but the price of PCs, notebooks, and displays is. This is because there is effective commodification of these items and their parts.
To try to make up for this near-perfect price competition companies are taking several routes: consolidation (Compaq and HP), outsourcing of manufacture and applying only a monopolized brand sticker (IBM-Lenovo), software monopolization (MS Windows, Office, and to some extent Apple OSX), and printer ink cartridges. These are eddies of monopoly profits in a competitive market.
The Intel chip performs particularly well if several tasks are running at the same time; under these circumstances, the Pentium 4 can outpace its AMD rival even if the latter is quicker at performing the tasks on their own. Thanks to HyperThreading (HT), the Pentium 4 distributes processing tasks across two virtual cores, resulting in more efficient utilisation of CPU resources. Such scenarios are found ever more frequently in the real world. For example, no-one should venture onto the Internet without firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware protection. These services are constantly active and need appropriate resources. Likewise, operations such as data encryption or hard disk defragmentation can load the processor, while the user compresses streaming video or audio data. Under such usage patterns, the advantage of HT is particularly apparent.
Why is it necessary to do this at the hardware level? Shouldn't a multitasking OS like linux or OS/2 or in theory NT/XP make us of processing power to make this reasonable efficient for something like running a virus scanner while surfing the Internet?
Actually they didn't because it could have meant it was your own opinion--as opposed to one you heard from someone else--based on some sort of evidence.
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD.
Can't IMMs just snoop any mort they want no matter where they are in the MUD?
Those countries were are non-competitive with have much higher unionization rates and much more extensive regulation. Unions are not the cause of the loss of competitiveness in those industries.
It's truly awful. My gf had to read some material on e-books this term. Either had to use a computer at school or VPN, which required Windows 98SE or Windows XP (supposedly the software will work on Redhat 9 but it wouldn't compile correctly). Can't print it except one page at at time because each is a separate PDF, and when you view it there's frames and other crap so you get it in about a 14" square section of a 17" screen.
All in all it's an incredible scam to get you to buy thousands of dollars in hardware and software to do the same thing that you can do for $20.00 in cash or for free by checking out a book from the library.
Quality doesn't matter much for desktops for most consumers because of software bloat and the need for upgrades before most mechanical failures. For laptops it's closer but still the idea is you can afford to buy a replacement after a couple of years when something breaks for the time-discounted value of the difference between initial purchase of IBM over Dell.
NB I am a mossback using p-ii 266 w/512 ram and 30gb desktop and a 486 notebook so don't get me wrong.
Hm. Power port went on mine too, a 2505CDS given to me by a customer. Also the mouse/pointer. Pretty shoddy if you ask me. I have a 1993 vintage Compaq Contura that still runs with no mechanical problems.
Recession started in 2001. Stock market didn't cause the recession, and neither did 9/11, it was because Greenspan raised interest rates. Kerry was right to oppose the war and army soldiers did commit atrocities over there. The 'aid and comfort' argument is vague and impossible to quantify, and furthermore doesn't outweigh legitimate criticism of the U.S. First round of tax cuts were not a stimulus as they were back-loaded, and at any rate none of the tax cuts were an efficient stimulus because they were tilted toward those with less marginal propensity to spend. That wasn't the purpose for the tax cuts they were to allow the wealthy to hold on to more of their money. Iraq was a lie and is an incredible disaster. Afghanistan is marginally better but now there's a CIA agent in power.
You are swallowing the administration's propaganda hook line and sinker.
I used to work at Law Journal Extra, which was a gopher system run on Pipeline software, later bought by Law.com. There I read that the Internet was based on open protocols and was basically insecure and highly susceptible to malicious activity, which would become a big problem as it became commercialized. Then I became an editor at Foreign Affairs magazine and tried to get them to run an article about cyberterrorism. They didn't have much interest in that although they did run several articles about terrorism and the threat of WMD in the hands of terrorists. Since then there have of course been billions of dollars in damage due to viruses, and the security situation has gotten so bad that a teenager in the Philippines could put together a virus using tools that could bring down major web sites that handle tons of commercial activity, but they've still only run one piece addressing this to my knowledge. Notably the administration has been wrongly focused on the threat of WMD and not basic infrastructure security. This is because of a general lack of understanding about computers among journalists and policymakers IMO.
actually you can set the page offset.
R-Click - Fields (last context menu item) fill in the box for offset. (set as a negative number to start numbering on a page greater than one)
When I do this the page number disappears. If I use a positive number it has the desired effect, but it must be a number lower than the total number of pages in the document for some weird reason, otherwise again the number disappears. This is what referred to above.
It's great, except there's no good way to change the starting page number. Unless the starting page doesn't exceed the length of the document, you have to force a page to do it, so if you have any serious editing left to do, you have to edit it without the actual page numbers if the document is part of a larger project (e.g. a dissertation chapter). This is quite ridiculous and I just can't understand why it hasn't been done better.
Thank you for pointing out what a piece of crap multifinder was. What is all this about how the Mac was more stable than Windows 3.1 and 9x? They both bit for multitasking.
This is such a good point--bravo. I can't tell you how many people I have worked with or know who have done exactly what you described here. "I can get a new PC for $500." Do they pay $500? No. They pay $1500 or $2000. But they still feel as though they got a deal, even though they could have had the same configuration for $1000, or salvaged pieces of their old system or just upgraded to save even more.
This is not rocket science people, there is no need to use a computer to make a small mark on a piece of paper.
I'm with you, but I think most/.ers are of the belief that a computer is always better for every situation because it somehow gets rid of human error. HAL was right, the problem was due to human error. And even if he wasn't right, he did the right thing to save the mission.
Cheating is going to run rampant if there is no manual backup mechanism available. Why the hell was this written into law?
My hypothesis is that it's part of the argument which said that the recounts were an effort to distort the electoral outcome, rather than clarify it. The "recounts of recounts" until you get the desired result argument that Cheney started putting forward to halt the recount in 2000. This despite the fact that recounts are normal if elections are very close. So they're prohibiting recounts with the idea that they are fundamentally an effort to distort the voting outcome. This is of course an insincere argument, but it's very popular among conservatives and I would guess a shibboleth among Republican Florida officials.
In other words, they want to preven a repeat of 2000 too, and avoid any mischief. But in their view, the recount of the vote was the mischief.
Where is that big red bouncing icon that appears when starting FF, which says that "you need to install this/these updates immediately to keep your machine secure"?
On my gf's machine the default homepage is mozilla.org and it came up to the patch with an announcement on startup yesterday morning. One click on the link and one click on permission and it was done (although apparently a restart was also necessary, which should have been announced).
I think the other problem is that regardless of who is at fault, it's a public relations disaster for Mozilla at precisely the moment when it had an opportunity to score big-time over Microsoft in the court of public opinion. Mozilla is more secure than IE, and it had been watching and waiting for years for an opportunity to make this matter to the public.
This shell extension could do just as much harm when running under a root Linux account (and there are plenty of those out there!)
But it's not smart to browse the Internet as root. And if you're not browsing as root anything that requires root access will also require the root password. In XP on the other hand you have root access by default.
If you get infected that badly--especially the bit about the executables downloading more malware--you should pull the plug on the Internet until you get the system cleaned up.
Slashdot Mirror
Your assumption here is that other capitalist greats were somehow more purely meritocratic. Look at Carnegie's involvement in the 1892 Homestead strike which resulted in about half a dozen deaths or Rockefeller, Jr.'s involvement in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, in which 66 people were killed. The perfect competition you are describing is more an economist's model than a description of real capitalism. Gates's tactics are not unusual for a robber baron.
What is it exactly that makes the quality worse? Is the ink less good? You would think they could fix that and add a buck or two - and still slap the HP and Lexmark on their fingers...
There was a story in the NYT a couple of years ago that described the research HP puts into their inks. Apparently the formula for these is very complicated and a closely-guarded secret, so any third-party manufacturer is going to have to reverse-engineer the ink. It sounded as though HP designs each printer to use a specific kind of ink that may differ from cartridge to cartridge. So you put all this together and a third-party ink cartridge isn't going to work as precisely at making all those tiny dots and may clog up those tiny ink jets.
Here's the story: Steve Lohr, "The Distributor vs. the Innovator," New York Times, May 24, 2004.
"Yet the printing group at Hewlett-Packard reported nearly $23 billion in revenue last year. It sold 43.6 million printers, more than double its nearest rival, Epson, reports IDC, a research firm. The business is big and immensely profitable: it accounted for about 30 percent of Hewlett-Packard's sales last year, but 80 percent of its earnings....
Hewlett-Packard invests $1 billion a year in research and development for its printer division, and that spending is on display at its laboratory in San Diego. Jars and canisters of experimental ink rest alongside the chromatographs, the scanning tunnel microscopes and the thermotron environmental chambers. Anything that is not patented -- Hewlett-Packard's printing group holds 9,000 -- is protected by trade secrets.
Every day, physicists, chemists and fluid-mechanics engineers puzzle over ways to make the symphony of nanoscale ink explosions more efficient and precise. They speak of co-solvents, surfactants, polymers, humectants, friction coefficients and tailhooking (when the trailing tail of a misfired droplet splats wildly).
The hundreds of nozzles crammed onto the slender silicon face of the printhead march to the nanosecond beat of an integrated circuit inside the cartridge. Yet the hardware of the cartridge is only half the story. The ''software'' of this technology is the ink. Hewlett-Packard has more than 100 different ink formulations on the market. Three years or more of research, development and testing go into each ink variety.
Since its commercial introduction two decades ago, the inkjet printer has improved at a pace equal to Moore's Law in semiconductors -- its performance doubling every 18 months. Hewlett-Packard printheads, with up to 500 nozzles, put ink on paper at the rate of 18 million droplets a second, and its labs are on track to reach 1 billion tiny drops a second before 2010. Many other companies, including Canon, Epson and Lexmark (Dell's partner and main supplier), make inkjet printers today, but Hewlett-Packard, the early pioneer, is still the technology leader, most analysts agree....
The really good news for the printer industry, though, is that a digital photo is an ink-eating glutton. And the ink is where the money is in printing -- a classic razor and razor blade business. The manufacturers lose money on the standard home printer, but make hefty profits on all the replacement ink cartridges people buy."
Also, from the WSJ article for this Slashdot story:
"In 2001, all of H-P's $624 million in profit came from sales of ink and toner supplies. Since then that share of profit has slid, but ink and toner-supply sales still account for more than two-thirds of profit.
So in other words HP spends billions to generate monopoly profits by segmenting the market into innumerable ink cartridges that cannot be commodified, i.e. replaced with generic cartridges. This is the source of most of the company's profit.
"The price of ink per milliliter from the big printer shops such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lexmark International Inc. has been steadily rising, at about 1% a year"
Excuse me, but wtf? It is supposed to be cheaper to produce a product as time goes on, and dont give me that "they are innovating the way things are printed". There hasnt been any corresponding 1% increase in quality over the years.
Here's why:
"In 2001, all of H-P's $624 million in profit came from sales of ink and toner supplies. Since then that share of profit has slid, but ink and toner-supply sales still account for more than two-thirds of profit."
The ink and ink cartridges are made to unique or near-unique specifications for each model of printer, hence the manufacturers are able to segment the market to produce monopoly profits. In 2001 this was the _only_ source of profit for HP in an increasingly commodified space of PC box manufacture.
As you note the price of ink isn't declining even as its cost should be according to econ theory, but the price of PCs, notebooks, and displays is. This is because there is effective commodification of these items and their parts.
To try to make up for this near-perfect price competition companies are taking several routes: consolidation (Compaq and HP), outsourcing of manufacture and applying only a monopolized brand sticker (IBM-Lenovo), software monopolization (MS Windows, Office, and to some extent Apple OSX), and printer ink cartridges. These are eddies of monopoly profits in a competitive market.
From the article:
The Intel chip performs particularly well if several tasks are running at the same time; under these circumstances, the Pentium 4 can outpace its AMD rival even if the latter is quicker at performing the tasks on their own. Thanks to HyperThreading (HT), the Pentium 4 distributes processing tasks across two virtual cores, resulting in more efficient utilisation of CPU resources. Such scenarios are found ever more frequently in the real world. For example, no-one should venture onto the Internet without firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware protection. These services are constantly active and need appropriate resources. Likewise, operations such as data encryption or hard disk defragmentation can load the processor, while the user compresses streaming video or audio data. Under such usage patterns, the advantage of HT is particularly apparent.
Why is it necessary to do this at the hardware level? Shouldn't a multitasking OS like linux or OS/2 or in theory NT/XP make us of processing power to make this reasonable efficient for something like running a virus scanner while surfing the Internet?
Actually they didn't because it could have meant it was your own opinion--as opposed to one you heard from someone else--based on some sort of evidence.
Personally, I think the only reason they hired her is because she's a chick and they wanted to appear "progressive" and "diverse."
Do you have any evidence for this opinion or is it your own theory?
I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring my mage as it talks to your cleric in some obscure, nearly impossible to reach (unless you're level 50) corner of our favorite MUD.
Can't IMMs just snoop any mort they want no matter where they are in the MUD?
Those countries were are non-competitive with have much higher unionization rates and much more extensive regulation. Unions are not the cause of the loss of competitiveness in those industries.
It's truly awful. My gf had to read some material on e-books this term. Either had to use a computer at school or VPN, which required Windows 98SE or Windows XP (supposedly the software will work on Redhat 9 but it wouldn't compile correctly). Can't print it except one page at at time because each is a separate PDF, and when you view it there's frames and other crap so you get it in about a 14" square section of a 17" screen.
All in all it's an incredible scam to get you to buy thousands of dollars in hardware and software to do the same thing that you can do for $20.00 in cash or for free by checking out a book from the library.
Quality doesn't matter much for desktops for most consumers because of software bloat and the need for upgrades before most mechanical failures. For laptops it's closer but still the idea is you can afford to buy a replacement after a couple of years when something breaks for the time-discounted value of the difference between initial purchase of IBM over Dell.
NB I am a mossback using p-ii 266 w/512 ram and 30gb desktop and a 486 notebook so don't get me wrong.
Hm. Power port went on mine too, a 2505CDS given to me by a customer. Also the mouse/pointer. Pretty shoddy if you ask me. I have a 1993 vintage Compaq Contura that still runs with no mechanical problems.
Recession started in 2001. Stock market didn't cause the recession, and neither did 9/11, it was because Greenspan raised interest rates. Kerry was right to oppose the war and army soldiers did commit atrocities over there. The 'aid and comfort' argument is vague and impossible to quantify, and furthermore doesn't outweigh legitimate criticism of the U.S. First round of tax cuts were not a stimulus as they were back-loaded, and at any rate none of the tax cuts were an efficient stimulus because they were tilted toward those with less marginal propensity to spend. That wasn't the purpose for the tax cuts they were to allow the wealthy to hold on to more of their money. Iraq was a lie and is an incredible disaster. Afghanistan is marginally better but now there's a CIA agent in power.
You are swallowing the administration's propaganda hook line and sinker.
Recession, war, torture, repression. I don't like these things. I vote against Bush.
I used to work at Law Journal Extra, which was a gopher system run on Pipeline software, later bought by Law.com. There I read that the Internet was based on open protocols and was basically insecure and highly susceptible to malicious activity, which would become a big problem as it became commercialized. Then I became an editor at Foreign Affairs magazine and tried to get them to run an article about cyberterrorism. They didn't have much interest in that although they did run several articles about terrorism and the threat of WMD in the hands of terrorists. Since then there have of course been billions of dollars in damage due to viruses, and the security situation has gotten so bad that a teenager in the Philippines could put together a virus using tools that could bring down major web sites that handle tons of commercial activity, but they've still only run one piece addressing this to my knowledge. Notably the administration has been wrongly focused on the threat of WMD and not basic infrastructure security. This is because of a general lack of understanding about computers among journalists and policymakers IMO.
actually you can set the page offset. R-Click - Fields (last context menu item) fill in the box for offset. (set as a negative number to start numbering on a page greater than one)
When I do this the page number disappears. If I use a positive number it has the desired effect, but it must be a number lower than the total number of pages in the document for some weird reason, otherwise again the number disappears. This is what referred to above.
It's great, except there's no good way to change the starting page number. Unless the starting page doesn't exceed the length of the document, you have to force a page to do it, so if you have any serious editing left to do, you have to edit it without the actual page numbers if the document is part of a larger project (e.g. a dissertation chapter). This is quite ridiculous and I just can't understand why it hasn't been done better.
Thank you for pointing out what a piece of crap multifinder was. What is all this about how the Mac was more stable than Windows 3.1 and 9x? They both bit for multitasking.
This is such a good point--bravo. I can't tell you how many people I have worked with or know who have done exactly what you described here. "I can get a new PC for $500." Do they pay $500? No. They pay $1500 or $2000. But they still feel as though they got a deal, even though they could have had the same configuration for $1000, or salvaged pieces of their old system or just upgraded to save even more.
This is not rocket science people, there is no need to use a computer to make a small mark on a piece of paper.
/.ers are of the belief that a computer is always better for every situation because it somehow gets rid of human error. HAL was right, the problem was due to human error. And even if he wasn't right, he did the right thing to save the mission.
I'm with you, but I think most
Cheating is going to run rampant if there is no manual backup mechanism available. Why the hell was this written into law?
My hypothesis is that it's part of the argument which said that the recounts were an effort to distort the electoral outcome, rather than clarify it. The "recounts of recounts" until you get the desired result argument that Cheney started putting forward to halt the recount in 2000. This despite the fact that recounts are normal if elections are very close. So they're prohibiting recounts with the idea that they are fundamentally an effort to distort the voting outcome. This is of course an insincere argument, but it's very popular among conservatives and I would guess a shibboleth among Republican Florida officials.
In other words, they want to preven a repeat of 2000 too, and avoid any mischief. But in their view, the recount of the vote was the mischief.
And run Word 2005 on it.
Where is that big red bouncing icon that appears when starting FF, which says that "you need to install this/these updates immediately to keep your machine secure"?
On my gf's machine the default homepage is mozilla.org and it came up to the patch with an announcement on startup yesterday morning. One click on the link and one click on permission and it was done (although apparently a restart was also necessary, which should have been announced).
I think the other problem is that regardless of who is at fault, it's a public relations disaster for Mozilla at precisely the moment when it had an opportunity to score big-time over Microsoft in the court of public opinion. Mozilla is more secure than IE, and it had been watching and waiting for years for an opportunity to make this matter to the public.
This shell extension could do just as much harm when running under a root Linux account (and there are plenty of those out there!)
But it's not smart to browse the Internet as root. And if you're not browsing as root anything that requires root access will also require the root password. In XP on the other hand you have root access by default.
If you get infected that badly--especially the bit about the executables downloading more malware--you should pull the plug on the Internet until you get the system cleaned up.