Gee you seem to have a much better knowledge of the projected global market for large passenger liners than Airbus has, even though they are experts who know the market, study it fulltime, and spend millions on analysing actual graphs and data from all over the world using sophisticated software/statistically modelled projections etc. Yet your 1-minute thumbsuck based on no data but rather a "gut feel" with Sep 11 biasing you makes you think you know more than them?
To anyone who even vaguely follows information about air traffic and airport growth all over the world it is blatantly obvious that global air traffic is growing incredibly rapidly, and bar something like an all-out global nuclear war it is going to continue to do so for well more than the next 20 years. September 11 may have seemed major at the time, but put it in perspective, it was but a tiny blip that held back airline growth for perhaps a couple of years at most - it is MORE than back on track growing very rapidly again. All another September 11 style attack would mean is that their 20-year expected ROI becomes a 22-year expected ROI. Yawn. I don't think they'd lose much sleep over that, considering they'd already be making profit far sooner than that.
Airbus need to sell only 250 of these to break even. Their upper sales projections (not a 1-minute thumbsuck based on no actual data at all) are over 1300. Even Boeing's own FAR more pessimistic 20-year projected sales of aircraft in this market exceed 250. Airbus will almost certainly make some money from this even if Boeing's own calculations are correct. This is not a big gamble at all. Airbus can make profit here even based on the calculations of BOTH of the world's major passenger liner manufacturers (and Boeing also spent millions on proper market studies, as they had plans to produce a competing aircraft until they decided to rather focus on the domestic flight market, which is also growing very rapidly in most countries all over the world).
The OS X paradigm of encapsulating applications and documents in a directory instead of some gigantic kludgy single file means you can go into a.key file and see all the images and movies you've added to the presentation, as well as a single "presentation.apxl" file that contains the presentation itself in a completely obvious xml format.
You just roughly described the OpenOffice file format. An OO file is just a gzip containing an organized directory hierarchy that uses "completely obvious" XML files for the data and saves images separately and obviously under e.g. "Pictures".. and with virtually any half-decent file manager (Windows Explorer is the worst file manager ever created so it doesn't count) you can simply browse right into a gzip file. This is one of the things I really like about the OpenOffice file format - a single, optimally compressed data file but still highly transparent and open. There is nothing kludgy about it, it's about as un-kludgy a file format as you can get on Windows and *nix platforms.
Hmm.. sounds like Boeing is likely to increase share in 'many, smaller domestic markets' while Airbus is likely to increase share in single large international flights market.
No, not really, not if you also factor in the fact that Windows PCs are SHAIT. They suck. So if you want to spend a little less and have a much worse experience using computers, go for it. You're comparing the price of an apple (no pun intended) to the price of an orange, I'm afraid. I won't make the usual cliched car analogies but they do apply too. I don't see how you can compare a clunky, poorly designed, hacky, boring, Windows XP, virus and spyware-ridden character-less plain high-maintenance machine that drains the life spirit out of you and makes using a computer about as much fun as having your teeth drilled, to using a well-designed, well-engineered, aesthetically pleasing machine that actually helps make the frikkin 8+ hours a day I have to spend behind a computer more enjoyable. You can spend less on cheaper anything in life, but you get what you pay for. You can't even compare the two as you're trying to do. And if you don't believe me, then you haven't even used a Mac have you. Try it out for a month. Man, you have to pay me to use Windows, and that's not even a joke, seriously, I wouldn't be touching Windows unless my boss was paying me to do it.
Language barriers don't really matter; when the American cultural imperialism struck Europe with Jazz, Swing and Rock, few of the listeners understood what the artists were singing.
Actually, language matters even less than you think: most Western listeners don't listen to what the artists are singing even when the words are in plain English. I think of all the people I've seen dancing and singing along to songs like, for example, OMD(/Sash) Enola Gay (about the bombing of Hiroshima) without a clue in the world of what the song is about. Likewise "99 Red Balloons" is about the accidental triggering of the apocalypse, but most listeners think it's about nothing more than balloons. There are plenty of other examples.
China is friends with the US, foreign-policy-wise, in spite of being a massive aggressive communist country with ongoing gross human rights violations and a stated desire to invade other democratic countries. The US government seemingly has no pro-democracy agenda whatsoever, nor are they 'defenders of democracy and human rights' in any sense, in spite of what they claim are amongst the main reasons for spending billions of dollars of tax-payer money, sending thousands of Americans to die, and killing many thousands more innocent foreign civilians.
It's ultimately a management problem. I wouldn't expect the average programmer anywhere in the world (other than e.g. India) to know these things, but "head of geopolitical strategy" of the world's largest software company better damn know these "details". It's his job to know these things and make sure the programmers know what to do and what not to do, and frankly, for someone in that position, these are not "basic" mistakes, they're huge, stupid mistakes. I mean, you'd think if you're selling millions of copies of some software system for a country as big as India, that you'd at least do some basic testing and liasing with actual Indians before going to press with the CDs. Microsoft are not new at exporting software, and they're not new to evaluating all the specific laws pertinent to specific countries and ensuring compliance with them - they don't just 'translate and ship' - so to miss something this huge and this basic is just inexcusably bad management.
(That said, Americans are, on average, more ignorant of the "rest of the world" than just about anyone else, but yes, that is probably besides the point here. Let's face it, Microsoft don't just miss "obscure details" like these: they still make the mistake of *globally* announcing *global* software releases as being "this fall" or "this summer" - for such a 'global' company, it's incredible that ignorance of such basic things is rife from top to bottom and in every corner of the entire organization.)
RTA: 'g' decreases slightly under this effect. (Also, the effect starts immediately once the eclipse is underway; hopefully the molten metals in Earth don't move that quickly.)
Which in my mind only casts doubt on its existance.
Indeed. An economist making a valuable contribution to science... that's almost as absurd as, oh, I don't know, a patent clerk making a valuable contribution to science.
Oh wow, you're soooo clever, much smarter than all the physicists studying this and the people who wrote the article and the person who submitted it to slashdot and all the rest of us reading this. You're so clever you thought of this (obvious, well-known) explanation that all those people just couldn't think of. NOT. Now go RTFA, which has nothing to do with what you're referring to.
Not to knock your US-centric veiwpoint or anything, but the Olympics never had anything to do with the cold war. The modern Olympics began LONG before the cold war existed, and is basically a Euro-centric event having little to do with the US; US political issues have no bearing on the Olympics, nor on its focus, and certainly not its existence. Even if every person in the US lost interest in the games, the games would continue almost unchanged.
What bothers me though is that there is also a large segment of the "anti-environmental-zealot" crowd that is equally Luddite, blanketly rejecting anything anyone vaguely pro-environment says as 'tree-hugging liberal crap' and then believing that no arguments at all for more environmentally-friendly development have any point at all, that we can or should just do what we want on this planet totally ignoring or denying the consequences (in fact many/. posters say things like "so what if the planet becomes incapable of supporting life" in response to the topic of climate change, now that is just f*cking dumb - just as dumb as advocating less technology). I get the impression that the majority of people in both camps are mindless zealots, rational people don't see everything in black and white this way but rather look at the facts and arguments for all sides of any development decision, and then find the most sensible compromise.
Way to paint all environmentalists with the same paranoid brush. If you actually got to know some, you'd find many who simply rationally want to find optimal solutions.
So if we wait until Microsoft develops and releases these features in Internet Explorer, then we get to do everything that we.. uh.. already can do today in browsers like Firefox. Thanks, but no thanks, we can get now what they're offering next year.
Microsoft are truly amazing: Can any other IT company consistently generate excitement and buzz amongst their customer base by announcing that they are going to add features that everyone else has had for years already???
OK, did some googling; according to this: http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2001/04/30/sch ools/... Macs have an average TCO of $400 LESS per year than PCs. Googling around, this seems to be the trend too, not the exception. I guess you should be the one taking Economics 101 then;)
but go take Economics 101 and figure out why that's not likely anytime soon.
I know everyone always blasts Mac as being expensive since your initial costs are high, but I'm wondering, are there actual (independent) studies comparing TCO of Macs and PCs as desktop systems? I have this hunch when you add all the additional support and virus and spyware etc. problems with PCs, and all the other 'extras' like anti-virus software subscriptions, factor in lower training costs for Mac and corresponding additional efficiency/productivity gains of using more intuitive and trouble-free systems, I suspect that TCO of Macs (as a desktop system) might easily be lower than PCs.
That's in "end-user-land", and even for CS students Macs seem like a good idea because of (a) the standards-based underpinnings, (b) the good design of the system and APIs etc, which set a much better example for CS students to follow that the Windows API, which no matter how you look at it, is a totally utterly crap API, and the only people I've ever met who think it's not a bad API are people who've never really been exposed to any other OS/widgets API, ever, so they have nothing to compare it to.
The fact that you can make it work is irrelevant, there is absolutely no good reason for it to not work 'out of the box'. None. None whatsoever. I'd like to see anyone argue that it's a good idea not to fix what is obviously really just a bug to anyone except the "it is this way because it's always been this way" crowd. It's frankly retarded. What is it that prevents people from simply admitting it's not a sensible default, and just fixing it? Is there some rational reason to keep it broken? Imagine backspace didn't work by default on Windows, and you had to edit an obscure registry key to make it work. Come on, that's ridiculous no matter how you cut it, especially as this is 2004, not 1974.
the 2nd ammendment caused 9/11? video games caused the Columbine shootings?
Holy crap, which Bowling for Columbine did you see? I didn't realise they made more than one, because the one I saw didn't even remotely approach your analysis.
So when something agrees with your viewpoint, it's fine, but when something disagrees with your viewpoint, it's rejected outright as being just "propaganda", regardless of whether or not there is any truth in the material? OK, got it, thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Odd, works perfectly in my Firefox.
Gee you seem to have a much better knowledge of the projected global market for large passenger liners than Airbus has, even though they are experts who know the market, study it fulltime, and spend millions on analysing actual graphs and data from all over the world using sophisticated software/statistically modelled projections etc. Yet your 1-minute thumbsuck based on no data but rather a "gut feel" with Sep 11 biasing you makes you think you know more than them? To anyone who even vaguely follows information about air traffic and airport growth all over the world it is blatantly obvious that global air traffic is growing incredibly rapidly, and bar something like an all-out global nuclear war it is going to continue to do so for well more than the next 20 years. September 11 may have seemed major at the time, but put it in perspective, it was but a tiny blip that held back airline growth for perhaps a couple of years at most - it is MORE than back on track growing very rapidly again. All another September 11 style attack would mean is that their 20-year expected ROI becomes a 22-year expected ROI. Yawn. I don't think they'd lose much sleep over that, considering they'd already be making profit far sooner than that. Airbus need to sell only 250 of these to break even. Their upper sales projections (not a 1-minute thumbsuck based on no actual data at all) are over 1300. Even Boeing's own FAR more pessimistic 20-year projected sales of aircraft in this market exceed 250. Airbus will almost certainly make some money from this even if Boeing's own calculations are correct. This is not a big gamble at all. Airbus can make profit here even based on the calculations of BOTH of the world's major passenger liner manufacturers (and Boeing also spent millions on proper market studies, as they had plans to produce a competing aircraft until they decided to rather focus on the domestic flight market, which is also growing very rapidly in most countries all over the world).
The OS X paradigm of encapsulating applications and documents in a directory instead of some gigantic kludgy single file means you can go into a .key file and see all the images and movies you've added to the presentation, as well as a single "presentation.apxl" file that contains the presentation itself in a completely obvious xml format.
You just roughly described the OpenOffice file format. An OO file is just a gzip containing an organized directory hierarchy that uses "completely obvious" XML files for the data and saves images separately and obviously under e.g. "Pictures" .. and with virtually any half-decent file manager (Windows Explorer is the worst file manager ever created so it doesn't count) you can simply browse right into a gzip file. This is one of the things I really like about the OpenOffice file format - a single, optimally compressed data file but still highly transparent and open. There is nothing kludgy about it, it's about as un-kludgy a file format as you can get on Windows and *nix platforms.
Hmm .. sounds like Boeing is likely to increase share in 'many, smaller domestic markets' while Airbus is likely to increase share in single large international flights market.
Compare to This ... Apple is still overpriced
No, not really, not if you also factor in the fact that Windows PCs are SHAIT. They suck. So if you want to spend a little less and have a much worse experience using computers, go for it. You're comparing the price of an apple (no pun intended) to the price of an orange, I'm afraid. I won't make the usual cliched car analogies but they do apply too. I don't see how you can compare a clunky, poorly designed, hacky, boring, Windows XP, virus and spyware-ridden character-less plain high-maintenance machine that drains the life spirit out of you and makes using a computer about as much fun as having your teeth drilled, to using a well-designed, well-engineered, aesthetically pleasing machine that actually helps make the frikkin 8+ hours a day I have to spend behind a computer more enjoyable. You can spend less on cheaper anything in life, but you get what you pay for. You can't even compare the two as you're trying to do. And if you don't believe me, then you haven't even used a Mac have you. Try it out for a month. Man, you have to pay me to use Windows, and that's not even a joke, seriously, I wouldn't be touching Windows unless my boss was paying me to do it.
Language barriers don't really matter; when the American cultural imperialism struck Europe with Jazz, Swing and Rock, few of the listeners understood what the artists were singing.
Actually, language matters even less than you think: most Western listeners don't listen to what the artists are singing even when the words are in plain English. I think of all the people I've seen dancing and singing along to songs like, for example, OMD(/Sash) Enola Gay (about the bombing of Hiroshima) without a clue in the world of what the song is about. Likewise "99 Red Balloons" is about the accidental triggering of the apocalypse, but most listeners think it's about nothing more than balloons. There are plenty of other examples.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to handle Chinese character searches correctly.
China is friends with the US, foreign-policy-wise, in spite of being a massive aggressive communist country with ongoing gross human rights violations and a stated desire to invade other democratic countries. The US government seemingly has no pro-democracy agenda whatsoever, nor are they 'defenders of democracy and human rights' in any sense, in spite of what they claim are amongst the main reasons for spending billions of dollars of tax-payer money, sending thousands of Americans to die, and killing many thousands more innocent foreign civilians.
Because in this case, said America-bashing happens to be pretty much true, so most snicker knowingly while others in denial feel insulted.
It's ultimately a management problem. I wouldn't expect the average programmer anywhere in the world (other than e.g. India) to know these things, but "head of geopolitical strategy" of the world's largest software company better damn know these "details". It's his job to know these things and make sure the programmers know what to do and what not to do, and frankly, for someone in that position, these are not "basic" mistakes, they're huge, stupid mistakes. I mean, you'd think if you're selling millions of copies of some software system for a country as big as India, that you'd at least do some basic testing and liasing with actual Indians before going to press with the CDs. Microsoft are not new at exporting software, and they're not new to evaluating all the specific laws pertinent to specific countries and ensuring compliance with them - they don't just 'translate and ship' - so to miss something this huge and this basic is just inexcusably bad management.
(That said, Americans are, on average, more ignorant of the "rest of the world" than just about anyone else, but yes, that is probably besides the point here. Let's face it, Microsoft don't just miss "obscure details" like these: they still make the mistake of *globally* announcing *global* software releases as being "this fall" or "this summer" - for such a 'global' company, it's incredible that ignorance of such basic things is rife from top to bottom and in every corner of the entire organization.)
RTA: 'g' decreases slightly under this effect. (Also, the effect starts immediately once the eclipse is underway; hopefully the molten metals in Earth don't move that quickly.)
Which in my mind only casts doubt on its existance.
Indeed. An economist making a valuable contribution to science ... that's almost as absurd as, oh, I don't know, a patent clerk making a valuable contribution to science.
Oh wow, you're soooo clever, much smarter than all the physicists studying this and the people who wrote the article and the person who submitted it to slashdot and all the rest of us reading this. You're so clever you thought of this (obvious, well-known) explanation that all those people just couldn't think of. NOT. Now go RTFA, which has nothing to do with what you're referring to.
Not to knock your US-centric veiwpoint or anything, but the Olympics never had anything to do with the cold war. The modern Olympics began LONG before the cold war existed, and is basically a Euro-centric event having little to do with the US; US political issues have no bearing on the Olympics, nor on its focus, and certainly not its existence. Even if every person in the US lost interest in the games, the games would continue almost unchanged.
What bothers me though is that there is also a large segment of the "anti-environmental-zealot" crowd that is equally Luddite, blanketly rejecting anything anyone vaguely pro-environment says as 'tree-hugging liberal crap' and then believing that no arguments at all for more environmentally-friendly development have any point at all, that we can or should just do what we want on this planet totally ignoring or denying the consequences (in fact many /. posters say things like "so what if the planet becomes incapable of supporting life" in response to the topic of climate change, now that is just f*cking dumb - just as dumb as advocating less technology). I get the impression that the majority of people in both camps are mindless zealots, rational people don't see everything in black and white this way but rather look at the facts and arguments for all sides of any development decision, and then find the most sensible compromise.
Way to paint all environmentalists with the same paranoid brush. If you actually got to know some, you'd find many who simply rationally want to find optimal solutions.
Likewise, my ISP uses a transparent proxy, so every one of their customers appears to be at the same IP address from google's viewpoint.
So if we wait until Microsoft develops and releases these features in Internet Explorer, then we get to do everything that we .. uh .. already can do today in browsers like Firefox. Thanks, but no thanks, we can get now what they're offering next year.
Microsoft are truly amazing: Can any other IT company consistently generate excitement and buzz amongst their customer base by announcing that they are going to add features that everyone else has had for years already???
A "bit of an overstatement"? That's putting it mildly, GP post was completely moronic (or just a troll), I'm surprised it isn't -1 already.
More: http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/4520-6033_16-4206930. html.
OK, did some googling; according to this: http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2001/04/30/sch ools/ ... Macs have an average TCO of $400 LESS per year than PCs. Googling around, this seems to be the trend too, not the exception. I guess you should be the one taking Economics 101 then ;)
but go take Economics 101 and figure out why that's not likely anytime soon.
I know everyone always blasts Mac as being expensive since your initial costs are high, but I'm wondering, are there actual (independent) studies comparing TCO of Macs and PCs as desktop systems? I have this hunch when you add all the additional support and virus and spyware etc. problems with PCs, and all the other 'extras' like anti-virus software subscriptions, factor in lower training costs for Mac and corresponding additional efficiency/productivity gains of using more intuitive and trouble-free systems, I suspect that TCO of Macs (as a desktop system) might easily be lower than PCs.
That's in "end-user-land", and even for CS students Macs seem like a good idea because of (a) the standards-based underpinnings, (b) the good design of the system and APIs etc, which set a much better example for CS students to follow that the Windows API, which no matter how you look at it, is a totally utterly crap API, and the only people I've ever met who think it's not a bad API are people who've never really been exposed to any other OS/widgets API, ever, so they have nothing to compare it to.
The fact that you can make it work is irrelevant, there is absolutely no good reason for it to not work 'out of the box'. None. None whatsoever. I'd like to see anyone argue that it's a good idea not to fix what is obviously really just a bug to anyone except the "it is this way because it's always been this way" crowd. It's frankly retarded. What is it that prevents people from simply admitting it's not a sensible default, and just fixing it? Is there some rational reason to keep it broken? Imagine backspace didn't work by default on Windows, and you had to edit an obscure registry key to make it work. Come on, that's ridiculous no matter how you cut it, especially as this is 2004, not 1974.
the 2nd ammendment caused 9/11? video games caused the Columbine shootings?
Holy crap, which Bowling for Columbine did you see? I didn't realise they made more than one, because the one I saw didn't even remotely approach your analysis.
So when something agrees with your viewpoint, it's fine, but when something disagrees with your viewpoint, it's rejected outright as being just "propaganda", regardless of whether or not there is any truth in the material? OK, got it, thanks.