I thought that was 10% of the gross over the years of the offence until when it was ceased.
In other words, the year they're found guilty, they have a money losing year (and possibly for a few years thereafter) and then they get their margins lowered by 10% until they quit it.
This would be a huge hit for their stock price and their strategy of hiring people with dreams of stock options dancing in their heads.
Hey, if it weren't for the fraud of MS breaking competitor's implementations and then lying about what happened, selling ISV kits as providing full access to the Windows API when they did not, and deliberate attempts to pollute things like Java and Kerberos, I wouldn't have much of a problem with MS.
The problem is that they're usually very good and when they can't win, they cheat. Cheating is just not acceptable as a core business practice.
3M is in a completely different category, a huge company that doesn't cheat. And who's complaining about them? Nobody. It's not the size, it's the behavior.
Let's see, the repeated instances of gross fraud come to mind. They lie as part of their standard business practice. From selling ISVs dev kits that claim to be the same as those used internally in MS (they aren't, MS app programmers have access to a few extra tools), to purposefully sabotaging interoperability with competitors (DR-DOS, Lotus, Java, numerous others) in such a way as to put the blame on the competitor, Microsoft has proven itself to be a company who doesn't mind lying and destroying economic value as long as its complicated and is only found out years to late to save the competitor's viability.
Fraud is something that is inimical to the free enterprise system, nobody short of outright anarchists defends it. Stopping fraud is a basic, core mission of government. When fraud is used as a core element of a business plan people should start going to jail until fraud ceases to be part of the business plan. If that's taking too long, the business should be shut down entirely.
MS is a pathologic case, genius combined with immoral disregard for the truth. Anti-trust is just an indirect way to get at the results of this problem.
This would be 10% of its gross that it's already spent in dividends and subsidizing other things. It would make the stock substantially less attractive and would personally impact all those options holders.
If MS has an overall profit margin of 30%, 10% of the gross would be a third of its profits. Plus the fine would have to be paid at once, making the fine levy year possibly MS's first loss year as the XP fines would be 10% of the gross over several years payable in one year.
All in all a very draconian penalty. Too bad they have to use anti-trust to achieve the good result of stopping MS illegality.
Or perhaps they're in a 100% Windows shop and can't afford the cost of 50 client licenses? Apple's much easier than linux and much cheaper than windows. There's a market for that segment. These servers hit it quite well.
How many windows clients are hitting those Xeon boxes?
Not everybody is like you Not everybody is technically savvy or comfortable enough to work with Linux Macs offer easy integration with Windows and much lower costs due to licensing.
There is a market for xServes in Windows shops, just not with cheap managers who expect you to pirate client licenses.
For those who don't want to cut a check for the standard $999 for OS X server, they put out a cut rate 10 client only license that you can throw on your old iMac. However, no xServe ships with the cut rate version. They all ship with the standard unlimited version and because of it are a compelling buy against a Windows server.
Why wait for next day? Apple offers a kit of user replaceable parts that's just shy of a spare server. Depending on how fast you turn the no tools screws, replacing parts might just be a 15 min job.
In competition for anything above 5-10 users, the licensing costs dwarf the hardware price differences. You betcha the Xserves compete with Windows and not Linux.
If you're a Windows shop with a semi-literate techie running 25 clients and shopping for your first server, Xserve has a *very* good price/performance story over Windows. Since there are a *lot* of businesses in this category, I expect them to be pushing a significant amount of boxes among the price conscious but not ready for Linux set.
I'd guess that as they roll these out their corporate sales department will start hammering on the engineers to update the UFS code so it's speed comparable to other implementations. I expect that UFS performance will eventually catch up but for network bound operations, does it matter even today?
A Dell server running Red Hat with little HD space is cheaper but a Dell server running Windows or maxing out its hard drive space is more expensive (about $300). The Dell, can't match the Xserve for storage density either (top disk size is 143 v. 180 for the Apple machine and the Dell only has 3 bays).
Dell doesn't even give prices out on its powervault storage line (read, it's much more expensive). You do find out from their site that they run 7U to provide something slightly less than double the storage of the Xserve RAID.
I own an 8600/200. A few facts, 1. It's running a 604e chip, competitor to a Pentium II 200. 2. It's most likely running Mac OS 7,8, or 9 as it's not certified for Mac OS X and runs it like a pig, especially for graphic work.
You've been wasting money by not upgrading because the 18 minutes you waste by having your machine unusable is time you can't bill. Multiply that out by the numerous large file operations you get daily and you've quickly justified the price of an OS X capable Mac.
File copy using the new code base has become much faster, crashes have become much less severe, and unless you're stuck using Quark, pretty much everything's native at this point. Quark's supposedly in late alpha/early beta about now.
I've supported graphic artists using Windows and Mac over the years. People interested in efficiency generally don't want to go into the PC swamp with no Open Firmware and lots of unfulfilled claims of compatiiblity and speed. If you've read BillG's licensing terms lately, there are red flags in that arena as well.
The biggest reason to continue in the mac camp v. Windows is the vast treasure trove of unix software out there. The KDE group puts out a browser core, Apple polishes it and turns it into Safari, a new player in the browser wars. The GNU group puts out a compiler, Apple polishes PPC efficiency and puts a great front end on it called project builder. The pattern is clear. A lot of great tools that have only been accessible to engineers are going to become usable to Mac users but not their similarly skilled windows based competitors. Which camp do you want to be in?
Would that be South Africa, Morocco, or Ethiopia? Hey, because I live in North America, I can hold myself out as an expert in Panama (a country I've never been in)?
The numbers are there, feel free to look them up. If you weren't an AC, I might even have done the work for you.
btw: I looked up dry sex. If you aren't sleeping around before marriage (the A in Uganda's ABC program) or are faithful (the B in the same program) it won't matter that your condom breaks (the C in the program) because of dry sex because neither partner will be carrying the virus.
The liberal solution is to make a tougher condom (I'm sure the materials scientists are at work) or to change well entrenched cultural sexual practices. But wait, that sounds like what they've been making fun of the christians over. Isn't changing sexual practices impossible?
The only difference is that those conservative christians are working to strengthen families which have numerous benefits, including stopping lots of STD transmission, the liberal solution takes just as much effort but won't provide any benefits other than the strictly biological one of reducing STD transmission.
Actually I never read the Rolling Stone article but got my information from the much less sensational (and unrepudiated) article in National Review (dead tree edition) that ran months earlier.
The problem isn't only bug chasing per se but the attitude that surrounds it. Bug chasers are being hidden and protected by the gay establishment as much as promiscuous homosexual behavior in gay baths was at the start of the epidemic. It's the complete lack of self-policing that really scares me.
Sure, gays want us to stay out of their bedrooms but when they condone pathological (from a public health perspective) behavior and refuse to clean up their own community, they lose any right to the benefit of the doubt.
As for the size of the gay lobby v. the christian lobby, you have to take into account two things, the diffusion of christians in all political points of view compared to the relative concentration of politically active gays on the left. Unlike blacks, gays are diverse enough to credibly threaten to leave, but their targetted influence in Dem primaries make them a force in the US. For them, creating an image of innocuous, friendly people, just like us is their number one priority. Thus the coddling of their nutcases. Since they perceive faith groups as being their enemy they also have as high up on their list trying to exclude, and where that is impossible limit, religious perspectives from public policy discourse.
Look at the christian lobby. Heck, Catholics who are heirarchical and have made abortion a top priority can't even bring in line a large number of catholic politicians. Do you really suppose that christians are enough to have a cohesive lobby across churches? Frankly, they aren't and haven't been for quite a long time. Get some unitarians, episcopalians, catholics, baptists, evangelicals, and a few orthodox into the same room and you won't have long to wait before trouble starts. And these are all christians.
Actually, the US has one resource against politicians turned tyrants that has been stripped from pretty much all of Europe, the right to bear arms.
I'm not some militia cook who thinks that a militia will win out against the US Army but we have so many arms in this country that a true tyrant would be constantly in fear of his life in a way that most are not since they disarmed their populace long, long ago. The talent for making things that go boom is widespread in the US and many explosives must be made available for their perfectly lawful civilian uses otherwise a huge chunk of the economy goes flat. Oh, by the way, do you know that castor beans are native US plants and ricin production from the plants is fairly straightforward?
No, I'm not so worried about tyranny in the US as very farsighted patriots of generations past have made adequate provision for last ditch removal when the political system breaks down.
As far as I can tell, we've killed or captured somewhere in the range of 8-10% of the number of people who went through Al Queda training camps in Afghanistan. Another unknown percentage have changed their politics either through fear or prudence of future US response. I expect that this war *will* eventually end and I will hold my elected leadership to the fire until they back a plan that has a reasonable end point. Like I said before, the key is enhancing Islam's ability to shut down their own radicals before they bother the rest of us. We're not at a point at which it is prudent for major political figures to do more than hint at this (Bush's state of the union speech last year talking about religious freedom in the ME is one such hint) but I expect it will come out into the open after Iraq is liberated.
I don't expect this war to last longer than the Barbary Pirates campaigns.
I somewhat lucked out in that/sw was a link for me (linking to an external drive formatted in UFS) and it didn't respect it and overwrote the link instead of following it and screwing my entire fink install.
Mosquitos tend to rest on walls, the current strategy for DDT use is to have light spraying indoors in your own house.
Certainly DDT is only one part of an anti-malarial strategy but I've seen world maps of malaria areas before DDT was discovered, right before it was banned and today. DDT reduced malaria areas radically and today malaria is making a comeback. That's in part because replacement chemicals aren't as good and in part because they are more expensive.
My point stands, I think. If we're going to take care of problems at home before space, we at least ought to untie our hands from behind our back and really solve them.
The gays are at fault in Africa not for their sexual practices but for their political practices which are reflexively anti-christian. This bigotry has led to the suppression of a great AIDS success story due to the gay lobby's influence in the AIDS establishment.
In the case of 1st world AIDS, promiscuous homosexuality is more directly at fault. Can we at least condemn the bug chasers who want to be HIV+?
In case you haven't figured it out, exclusive lesbianism isn't something everybody can do, especially the half of the population that's male. Let's just give up on half the human race, shall we?
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I thought that was 10% of the gross over the years of the offence until when it was ceased.
In other words, the year they're found guilty, they have a money losing year (and possibly for a few years thereafter) and then they get their margins lowered by 10% until they quit it.
This would be a huge hit for their stock price and their strategy of hiring people with dreams of stock options dancing in their heads.
Hey, if it weren't for the fraud of MS breaking competitor's implementations and then lying about what happened, selling ISV kits as providing full access to the Windows API when they did not, and deliberate attempts to pollute things like Java and Kerberos, I wouldn't have much of a problem with MS.
The problem is that they're usually very good and when they can't win, they cheat. Cheating is just not acceptable as a core business practice.
3M is in a completely different category, a huge company that doesn't cheat. And who's complaining about them? Nobody. It's not the size, it's the behavior.
Let's see, the repeated instances of gross fraud come to mind. They lie as part of their standard business practice. From selling ISVs dev kits that claim to be the same as those used internally in MS (they aren't, MS app programmers have access to a few extra tools), to purposefully sabotaging interoperability with competitors (DR-DOS, Lotus, Java, numerous others) in such a way as to put the blame on the competitor, Microsoft has proven itself to be a company who doesn't mind lying and destroying economic value as long as its complicated and is only found out years to late to save the competitor's viability.
Fraud is something that is inimical to the free enterprise system, nobody short of outright anarchists defends it. Stopping fraud is a basic, core mission of government. When fraud is used as a core element of a business plan people should start going to jail until fraud ceases to be part of the business plan. If that's taking too long, the business should be shut down entirely.
MS is a pathologic case, genius combined with immoral disregard for the truth. Anti-trust is just an indirect way to get at the results of this problem.
This would be 10% of its gross that it's already spent in dividends and subsidizing other things. It would make the stock substantially less attractive and would personally impact all those options holders.
If MS has an overall profit margin of 30%, 10% of the gross would be a third of its profits. Plus the fine would have to be paid at once, making the fine levy year possibly MS's first loss year as the XP fines would be 10% of the gross over several years payable in one year.
All in all a very draconian penalty. Too bad they have to use anti-trust to achieve the good result of stopping MS illegality.
Yes, and by that logic, a corvette is just a modified GEO Metro. Perhaps it might clarify that there are people looking to further develop the SCSI interface (like Dell, HP, & Intel) and they're not looking to convert to Firewire but move SCSI in their own vision of the next generation.
Or perhaps they're in a 100% Windows shop and can't afford the cost of 50 client licenses? Apple's much easier than linux and much cheaper than windows. There's a market for that segment. These servers hit it quite well.
How many windows clients are hitting those Xeon boxes?
Not everybody is like you
Not everybody is technically savvy or comfortable enough to work with Linux
Macs offer easy integration with Windows and much lower costs due to licensing.
There is a market for xServes in Windows shops, just not with cheap managers who expect you to pirate client licenses.
For those who don't want to cut a check for the standard $999 for OS X server, they put out a cut rate 10 client only license that you can throw on your old iMac. However, no xServe ships with the cut rate version. They all ship with the standard unlimited version and because of it are a compelling buy against a Windows server.
Isn't it nice that the new Xserves don't actually require tools?
Why wait for next day? Apple offers a kit of user replaceable parts that's just shy of a spare server. Depending on how fast you turn the no tools screws, replacing parts might just be a 15 min job.
In competition for anything above 5-10 users, the licensing costs dwarf the hardware price differences. You betcha the Xserves compete with Windows and not Linux.
If you're a Windows shop with a semi-literate techie running 25 clients and shopping for your first server, Xserve has a *very* good price/performance story over Windows. Since there are a *lot* of businesses in this category, I expect them to be pushing a significant amount of boxes among the price conscious but not ready for Linux set.
For uses like those, there's always Format->UFS
I'd guess that as they roll these out their corporate sales department will start hammering on the engineers to update the UFS code so it's speed comparable to other implementations. I expect that UFS performance will eventually catch up but for network bound operations, does it matter even today?
Wow, where's that scsi bus that can handle 63 peripherals? Or how about the SCSI bus that can be used for TCP/IP communication?
Firewire (IEEE-1394) has major, significant differences with the SCSI spec and the improvements in firewire have never made it into the SCSI spec.
A Dell server running Red Hat with little HD space is cheaper but a Dell server running Windows or maxing out its hard drive space is more expensive (about $300). The Dell, can't match the Xserve for storage density either (top disk size is 143 v. 180 for the Apple machine and the Dell only has 3 bays).
Dell doesn't even give prices out on its powervault storage line (read, it's much more expensive). You do find out from their site that they run 7U to provide something slightly less than double the storage of the Xserve RAID.
I own an 8600/200. A few facts,
1. It's running a 604e chip, competitor to a Pentium II 200.
2. It's most likely running Mac OS 7,8, or 9 as it's not certified for Mac OS X and runs it like a pig, especially for graphic work.
You've been wasting money by not upgrading because the 18 minutes you waste by having your machine unusable is time you can't bill. Multiply that out by the numerous large file operations you get daily and you've quickly justified the price of an OS X capable Mac.
File copy using the new code base has become much faster, crashes have become much less severe, and unless you're stuck using Quark, pretty much everything's native at this point. Quark's supposedly in late alpha/early beta about now.
I've supported graphic artists using Windows and Mac over the years. People interested in efficiency generally don't want to go into the PC swamp with no Open Firmware and lots of unfulfilled claims of compatiiblity and speed. If you've read BillG's licensing terms lately, there are red flags in that arena as well.
The biggest reason to continue in the mac camp v. Windows is the vast treasure trove of unix software out there. The KDE group puts out a browser core, Apple polishes it and turns it into Safari, a new player in the browser wars. The GNU group puts out a compiler, Apple polishes PPC efficiency and puts a great front end on it called project builder. The pattern is clear. A lot of great tools that have only been accessible to engineers are going to become usable to Mac users but not their similarly skilled windows based competitors. Which camp do you want to be in?
Would that be South Africa, Morocco, or Ethiopia? Hey, because I live in North America, I can hold myself out as an expert in Panama (a country I've never been in)?
The numbers are there, feel free to look them up. If you weren't an AC, I might even have done the work for you.
btw: I looked up dry sex. If you aren't sleeping around before marriage (the A in Uganda's ABC program) or are faithful (the B in the same program) it won't matter that your condom breaks (the C in the program) because of dry sex because neither partner will be carrying the virus.
The liberal solution is to make a tougher condom (I'm sure the materials scientists are at work) or to change well entrenched cultural sexual practices. But wait, that sounds like what they've been making fun of the christians over. Isn't changing sexual practices impossible?
The only difference is that those conservative christians are working to strengthen families which have numerous benefits, including stopping lots of STD transmission, the liberal solution takes just as much effort but won't provide any benefits other than the strictly biological one of reducing STD transmission.
Actually I never read the Rolling Stone article but got my information from the much less sensational (and unrepudiated) article in National Review (dead tree edition) that ran months earlier.
The problem isn't only bug chasing per se but the attitude that surrounds it. Bug chasers are being hidden and protected by the gay establishment as much as promiscuous homosexual behavior in gay baths was at the start of the epidemic. It's the complete lack of self-policing that really scares me.
Sure, gays want us to stay out of their bedrooms but when they condone pathological (from a public health perspective) behavior and refuse to clean up their own community, they lose any right to the benefit of the doubt.
As for the size of the gay lobby v. the christian lobby, you have to take into account two things, the diffusion of christians in all political points of view compared to the relative concentration of politically active gays on the left. Unlike blacks, gays are diverse enough to credibly threaten to leave, but their targetted influence in Dem primaries make them a force in the US. For them, creating an image of innocuous, friendly people, just like us is their number one priority. Thus the coddling of their nutcases. Since they perceive faith groups as being their enemy they also have as high up on their list trying to exclude, and where that is impossible limit, religious perspectives from public policy discourse.
Look at the christian lobby. Heck, Catholics who are heirarchical and have made abortion a top priority can't even bring in line a large number of catholic politicians. Do you really suppose that christians are enough to have a cohesive lobby across churches? Frankly, they aren't and haven't been for quite a long time. Get some unitarians, episcopalians, catholics, baptists, evangelicals, and a few orthodox into the same room and you won't have long to wait before trouble starts. And these are all christians.
Actually, the US has one resource against politicians turned tyrants that has been stripped from pretty much all of Europe, the right to bear arms.
I'm not some militia cook who thinks that a militia will win out against the US Army but we have so many arms in this country that a true tyrant would be constantly in fear of his life in a way that most are not since they disarmed their populace long, long ago. The talent for making things that go boom is widespread in the US and many explosives must be made available for their perfectly lawful civilian uses otherwise a huge chunk of the economy goes flat. Oh, by the way, do you know that castor beans are native US plants and ricin production from the plants is fairly straightforward?
No, I'm not so worried about tyranny in the US as very farsighted patriots of generations past have made adequate provision for last ditch removal when the political system breaks down.
As far as I can tell, we've killed or captured somewhere in the range of 8-10% of the number of people who went through Al Queda training camps in Afghanistan. Another unknown percentage have changed their politics either through fear or prudence of future US response. I expect that this war *will* eventually end and I will hold my elected leadership to the fire until they back a plan that has a reasonable end point. Like I said before, the key is enhancing Islam's ability to shut down their own radicals before they bother the rest of us. We're not at a point at which it is prudent for major political figures to do more than hint at this (Bush's state of the union speech last year talking about religious freedom in the ME is one such hint) but I expect it will come out into the open after Iraq is liberated.
I don't expect this war to last longer than the Barbary Pirates campaigns.
I somewhat lucked out in that /sw was a link for me (linking to an external drive formatted in UFS) and it didn't respect it and overwrote the link instead of following it and screwing my entire fink install.
Sorry to disappoint but there are lots of articles backing up both points. Google around and you'll find them.
Mosquitos tend to rest on walls, the current strategy for DDT use is to have light spraying indoors in your own house.
Certainly DDT is only one part of an anti-malarial strategy but I've seen world maps of malaria areas before DDT was discovered, right before it was banned and today. DDT reduced malaria areas radically and today malaria is making a comeback. That's in part because replacement chemicals aren't as good and in part because they are more expensive.
My point stands, I think. If we're going to take care of problems at home before space, we at least ought to untie our hands from behind our back and really solve them.
The gays are at fault in Africa not for their sexual practices but for their political practices which are reflexively anti-christian. This bigotry has led to the suppression of a great AIDS success story due to the gay lobby's influence in the AIDS establishment.
In the case of 1st world AIDS, promiscuous homosexuality is more directly at fault. Can we at least condemn the bug chasers who want to be HIV+?
In case you haven't figured it out, exclusive lesbianism isn't something everybody can do, especially the half of the population that's male. Let's just give up on half the human race, shall we?