Rotary Rocket doesn't need a large investor, they need 1,000,000 small investors. I'd kick in US $20 to get them off the ground and I would bet that they could raise the necessary money off the Internet user base of SETI@home. If only a quarter of the 2.1 million users would contribute a $20 it would raise over $10 million and get the Roton off the ground.
Unfortunately, they don't seem to be interested in harnessing this as a funding source so they remain on the drawing board.
I'm actually in the middle of trying that (quadra 700 w/NetBSD), but I can't get the darn thing to proxy and I'm running into problems recompiling the kernel. My weekend project is reloading the thing from scratch.
Or I could just buy an $89 Mac proxy for my 3-5 node network. I'm poor, but the time wasted on getting BSD working is quickly getting too much.
You actually mean drugs invented in the US, not necessarily produced here. The reason they cost less in Canada (can't say about Mexico) is that there is a set of price controls there which would make it illegal to charge the US price. This has left the Canadian drug industry hamstrung as far as R&D goes. If you compare Canada to the US, the Canadian drug research investment is pitiful, even taking into account the smaller population & GDP.
BTW: Canada charges less for generic drugs, not for new & name brand drugs. On balance, Canadian drug expenditures are slightly higher. It is just that the legally mandated price disparities on the generics get the press.
The GOP is (rightly) concerned with anti-trust as a legal concept. Put simply, this particular legal theory is horrible and should be done away with.
What actually should have been done with MS is for them to be convicted of the criminal conspiracy to commit fraud on their ISVs and their customers under enough counts to trigger criminal RICO sanctions. This is multi-billion dollar fraud and this kind of law enforcement would have no Republican detractors. But Clinton-Gore decided to go the anti-trust route because they knew that they would be making partisan points and reviving a moribund liberal theory, that corporations are the enemy and only Dems will protect the 'little guys'.
When Clinton came in he immediately fired all federal district attorneys. No replacements, some posts were unfilled for over a year, and all that happened was a bunch of conservatives got their panties in a bunch.
Republicans will never punish MS? Judge Jackson is a Reagan appointee and from what I can tell is a fairly standard specimen of that administration's judicial picks.
I would guess that the lack of remorse (which is standard stuff for judges to take notice of in sentencing) is only the last of Judge Jackson's problems with MS.
I would guess the brazen falsified testimony of the videotape, the 'screw you judge' compliance response when the order came down to temporarily provide Windows without IE were probably two attitude problems that got the judge's robe in a bunch. The problem is that if everybody were to act like that in court, the entire judicial system were to break down so judges have a longstanding habit in general to smack down people who try to pull stunts like that.
The only alternative is to end up w/judge Ito. Bleah.
Actually, MS is in deep water in any case. Let's say they 'get off on a technicality' and the findings of fact are accepted (they don't prove their innocence) but the findings of law are modified or rejected. This is a huge loss for MS.
MS ends up in the same state as IBM during its legal hell period. The followup lawsuits can all use the findings of fact to screw MS every which way.
Try reading Article II Section 2 Paragraph 2 of the US Constitution especially the last sentance. Congress need make no amendment to get the Court to butt out of any area. They only have to pass simple legislation.
The problem with your example is that it ignores new entrants into the market. The future in power generation is not from building a few big centralized plants, it's from building lots of little backyard plants that can eliminate the monopoly profits you outline.
Monopoly profit = Normal price + (cost of next cheapest alternative-1). When the next cheapest alternative is close to the normal price there isn't much that can be done to extract monopoly profit. The solution is more private enterprise and fairer rules for small generators to feed into the grid. If it becomes plug and play to have a relatively inexpensive, low maintenance generator, backyard power generation will render your old-line analysis moot. Monopoly profits only exist when there is a monopoly. The cure is to encourage new entrants, not to encourage socialism.
Preferential treatment of some stockholders (those holding both MS-OS and MS-App) over others (holders of one or the other firm) is illegal under US law. If anybody were so stupid as to actually do this, they would quickly land their butts in jail and the firm that acted against a group of its owners would find itself the subject of a very lucrative shareholder lawsuit.
The nature of public companies is that they have a duty to maximize shareholder value. If the board violates this, they are held liable, even to the point of jail time.
With MS as 1 company, the sort of cross-subsidy reasoning that lead to such otherwise incomprehensible decisions as spending gobs of money to make IE and then give it away for free made a certain sense for the interests of the shareholders. But to take actions that hurt your shareholders (no office ports) in order to benefit somebody else's shareholders (MS Windows Corp) is a breach of the board's responsibilities and somebody is going to jail for that conspiracy to defraud the stockholders.
In other words modern US capitalism is going to force the ports because the alternative is personally horrific for the board of MS Apps.
OS 9 is properly compared to Win95/98, not NT. Do you want to limit it to shipping products and not 'the next generation'? Go take a look at Mac OS X Server 1.2 to compare to NT/2000 not OS 9.
From what I understand the currently shipping server is all BSD with its greatest 'weakness' being how much it looks like a unix box.
Come back and talk when you decide to give a fair comparison.
Currently, Mac OS X server is being sold without charging for CALs, which are actually the bulk of the cost when you buy NT Server. Web Objects also comes with OS X server right now, and certainly it is something that is much more competitive now that they dropped the price from ~$15k to $700. The current OS X is probably going to come shipping with an enhanced server pack out of the box. If it doesn't, there's certainly a quick opportunity to make an OS X 'distro' of the OS X consumer specially tuned and bundled with all the appropriate server goodies for a few bucks more. The stock OSX pack can be included like Connectix includes Win98 when it sells its Windows emulator.
One of the ways that they could shift their model is to go into cloning. No, not a retread of Power Computing, something a bit different. What does AIX offer the 20k+ RS/6000 workstations that Mac OS X couldn't do? If they offer the OS to run on IBM's hardware, they could control it and keep it from cannibalizing Apple sales on their own hardware.
I'm sure there are other fairly obvious vendors who might like an easier to use Unix in their product mix so their own hardware can sell better.
Actually, I thought that Amelio got booted because he was trying to shine a turd to put it up for sale. Jobs took the turd and turned it back into what it could have been all along, a good software company that gives good value and might even change the world every random Tuesday.
Why not just get a Crusoe, with a nice PPC flash upgrade. With IBM coming out with a Crusoe based Thinkpad it would just be the icing on the cake if they are also helping them write the PPC instruction set layer. At that point, they can provide the most flexible laptops on the planet with IT departments being able to reflash a programmer's W2k laptop to make a nice MacOS creative department machine and vice versa.
The only portions of OS X that have even the remotest thing to do with Adobe is Quartz, the display system based on Adobe's PDF. Contrary to what you said the spec is available.
There is nothing stopping people from taking the same open spec and creating a compatible display system but the ability to reverse engineer Apple's effort.
If the server is configured correctly, the computer shouldn't be logged in while the admin isn't running. At that point, I don't think much of the GUI overhead is even loaded. All you have on NT is the computer waiting for ctrl+alt+delete to be pressed to start winlogon. Is this such a big deal?
If you hit command-? on the Mac version of Myst the program came back asking where was Hypercard Help? For the obviousness impaired, Myst was a Hypercard App that is arguably one of the most successful apps of all time in its category.
Heck there are still people clamoring for updates to Hypercard today to update some of those old apps.
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Rotary Rocket doesn't need a large investor, they need 1,000,000 small investors. I'd kick in US $20 to get them off the ground and I would bet that they could raise the necessary money off the Internet user base of SETI@home. If only a quarter of the 2.1 million users would contribute a $20 it would raise over $10 million and get the Roton off the ground.
Unfortunately, they don't seem to be interested in harnessing this as a funding source so they remain on the drawing board.
DB
I'm actually in the middle of trying that (quadra 700 w/NetBSD), but I can't get the darn thing to proxy and I'm running into problems recompiling the kernel. My weekend project is reloading the thing from scratch.
Or I could just buy an $89 Mac proxy for my 3-5 node network. I'm poor, but the time wasted on getting BSD working is quickly getting too much.
DB
It isn't just you. I can't wait to move 8 G3 powerbooks I'm managing over to OS X
DB
You actually mean drugs invented in the US, not necessarily produced here. The reason they cost less in Canada (can't say about Mexico) is that there is a set of price controls there which would make it illegal to charge the US price. This has left the Canadian drug industry hamstrung as far as R&D goes. If you compare Canada to the US, the Canadian drug research investment is pitiful, even taking into account the smaller population & GDP.
BTW: Canada charges less for generic drugs, not for new & name brand drugs. On balance, Canadian drug expenditures are slightly higher. It is just that the legally mandated price disparities on the generics get the press.
DB
I stopped reading that right after the section where they complain that a server OS has poor support on portables. Duh!
DB
The GOP is (rightly) concerned with anti-trust as a legal concept. Put simply, this particular legal theory is horrible and should be done away with.
What actually should have been done with MS is for them to be convicted of the criminal conspiracy to commit fraud on their ISVs and their customers under enough counts to trigger criminal RICO sanctions. This is multi-billion dollar fraud and this kind of law enforcement would have no Republican detractors. But Clinton-Gore decided to go the anti-trust route because they knew that they would be making partisan points and reviving a moribund liberal theory, that corporations are the enemy and only Dems will protect the 'little guys'.
DB
DB
DB
OK, let's take this forward, the DOJ stops and then what? 19 state anti-trust suits go forward without the DOJ. Big whoop.
DB
When Clinton came in he immediately fired all federal district attorneys. No replacements, some posts were unfilled for over a year, and all that happened was a bunch of conservatives got their panties in a bunch.
Why would Bush firing Boies mean a hill of beans?
DB
Republicans will never punish MS? Judge Jackson is a Reagan appointee and from what I can tell is a fairly standard specimen of that administration's judicial picks.
DB
I would guess that the lack of remorse (which is standard stuff for judges to take notice of in sentencing) is only the last of Judge Jackson's problems with MS.
I would guess the brazen falsified testimony of the videotape, the 'screw you judge' compliance response when the order came down to temporarily provide Windows without IE were probably two attitude problems that got the judge's robe in a bunch. The problem is that if everybody were to act like that in court, the entire judicial system were to break down so judges have a longstanding habit in general to smack down people who try to pull stunts like that.
The only alternative is to end up w/judge Ito. Bleah.
DB
Actually, MS is in deep water in any case. Let's say they 'get off on a technicality' and the findings of fact are accepted (they don't prove their innocence) but the findings of law are modified or rejected. This is a huge loss for MS.
MS ends up in the same state as IBM during its legal hell period. The followup lawsuits can all use the findings of fact to screw MS every which way.
DB
Try reading Article II Section 2 Paragraph 2 of the US Constitution especially the last sentance. Congress need make no amendment to get the Court to butt out of any area. They only have to pass simple legislation.
DB
The problem with your example is that it ignores new entrants into the market. The future in power generation is not from building a few big centralized plants, it's from building lots of little backyard plants that can eliminate the monopoly profits you outline.
Monopoly profit = Normal price + (cost of next cheapest alternative-1). When the next cheapest alternative is close to the normal price there isn't much that can be done to extract monopoly profit. The solution is more private enterprise and fairer rules for small generators to feed into the grid. If it becomes plug and play to have a relatively inexpensive, low maintenance generator, backyard power generation will render your old-line analysis moot. Monopoly profits only exist when there is a monopoly. The cure is to encourage new entrants, not to encourage socialism.
DB
Preferential treatment of some stockholders (those holding both MS-OS and MS-App) over others (holders of one or the other firm) is illegal under US law. If anybody were so stupid as to actually do this, they would quickly land their butts in jail and the firm that acted against a group of its owners would find itself the subject of a very lucrative shareholder lawsuit.
DB
The nature of public companies is that they have a duty to maximize shareholder value. If the board violates this, they are held liable, even to the point of jail time.
With MS as 1 company, the sort of cross-subsidy reasoning that lead to such otherwise incomprehensible decisions as spending gobs of money to make IE and then give it away for free made a certain sense for the interests of the shareholders. But to take actions that hurt your shareholders (no office ports) in order to benefit somebody else's shareholders (MS Windows Corp) is a breach of the board's responsibilities and somebody is going to jail for that conspiracy to defraud the stockholders.
In other words modern US capitalism is going to force the ports because the alternative is personally horrific for the board of MS Apps.
DB
OS 9 is properly compared to Win95/98, not NT. Do you want to limit it to shipping products and not 'the next generation'? Go take a look at Mac OS X Server 1.2 to compare to NT/2000 not OS 9.
From what I understand the currently shipping server is all BSD with its greatest 'weakness' being how much it looks like a unix box.
Come back and talk when you decide to give a fair comparison.
DB
Currently, Mac OS X server is being sold without charging for CALs, which are actually the bulk of the cost when you buy NT Server. Web Objects also comes with OS X server right now, and certainly it is something that is much more competitive now that they dropped the price from ~$15k to $700. The current OS X is probably going to come shipping with an enhanced server pack out of the box. If it doesn't, there's certainly a quick opportunity to make an OS X 'distro' of the OS X consumer specially tuned and bundled with all the appropriate server goodies for a few bucks more. The stock OSX pack can be included like Connectix includes Win98 when it sells its Windows emulator.
DB
One of the ways that they could shift their model is to go into cloning. No, not a retread of Power Computing, something a bit different. What does AIX offer the 20k+ RS/6000 workstations that Mac OS X couldn't do? If they offer the OS to run on IBM's hardware, they could control it and keep it from cannibalizing Apple sales on their own hardware.
I'm sure there are other fairly obvious vendors who might like an easier to use Unix in their product mix so their own hardware can sell better.
DB
Actually, I thought that Amelio got booted because he was trying to shine a turd to put it up for sale. Jobs took the turd and turned it back into what it could have been all along, a good software company that gives good value and might even change the world every random Tuesday.
DB
Why not just get a Crusoe, with a nice PPC flash upgrade. With IBM coming out with a Crusoe based Thinkpad it would just be the icing on the cake if they are also helping them write the PPC instruction set layer. At that point, they can provide the most flexible laptops on the planet with IT departments being able to reflash a programmer's W2k laptop to make a nice MacOS creative department machine and vice versa.
Now *that* is value.
DB
There is nothing stopping people from taking the same open spec and creating a compatible display system but the ability to reverse engineer Apple's effort.
DB
If the server is configured correctly, the computer shouldn't be logged in while the admin isn't running. At that point, I don't think much of the GUI overhead is even loaded. All you have on NT is the computer waiting for ctrl+alt+delete to be pressed to start winlogon. Is this such a big deal?
DB
If you hit command-? on the Mac version of Myst the program came back asking where was Hypercard Help? For the obviousness impaired, Myst was a Hypercard App that is arguably one of the most successful apps of all time in its category.
Heck there are still people clamoring for updates to Hypercard today to update some of those old apps.
DB