Sure, because it isn't like Walmart management is going to reduce their multi-million dollar salaries, their enormous benefits package, and their huge profit margins just to give their employees a fair deal.
Like that would even make a dent, I don't know the exact statistics but I'd suspect that for every VP & above at Wal-Mart there are 800 or more high school dropouts, meth users and unwed mothers in vests in the stores. Even if all the executives decided to work for minimum wage and split that money among all "assiciates" it wouldn't be enough to raise the typical workers pay pay more than a few pennies. It's easy to point to admittedly overpaid executives and say it's all because of them but it's never that simple.
In any case, it isn't their choice to unionize or not; that's up to the employees. No industry voluntarily chooses unionization; unionization has been forced by the workers, and sometimes by the community.
I could possibly agree with you except for one thing, it's not up to the empployees, if a simple majority (50% +1) of employees in a shop decide to go union they then will force 100% of the employees to join that union (or pay the vast majority of union dues to the union without having voting rights) or find another job. If you feel your pay should be determined based on your job performance instead of your date of hire your'e SOL.
If Walmart's employees unionize, it is Walmart's own fault for being an abusive employer, and they deserve it. It would survive if the management learned to be less greedy, and if it didn't... well, you'd just have to learn to live without your $3.00 one-gallon jar of pickles.
Perhaps you missed the part where I said I don't shop at Wal-Mart (15 years & counting) because I don't like them as a company. In any case I'm not saying I'm against the destruction of Wal-Mart (or for it) but people who are advocating the unionization of Wal-Mart need to understand that the destruction of Wal-Mart would be the end result.
Say what? Walmart is extremely profitable, and there are a lot of people getting rich off it. Just not the people who actually do any work there. If Walmart didn't fuck their employees, they could still afford lower prices by cutting their profit margin, or their executive salaries, or their executive's benefits.
Just because they are making serious profits doesn't mean they are high margin, the amount of profit that Wal-Mart makes on each item sold is very very small, but the sheer volume is what results in the total accumulate proftis. Where a typical store might "mark up" a particular product 10-20% over cost, Wal-Mart is closer to 2-3% (I forget the exact amount).
Seriously; this is Walmart we're talking about. IBM executives make a butt-load of money, but their employees do pretty well, too. The disparity between the Walmart benefits for the executives and the employees is so huge, it isn't anything but absurd.
IBM is primarily a software & services company, which is super high margin, the few tangible goods they do sell are expensive high end computers that are also high margin. Plus IBM relies on a highly skilled workforce while Wal-Mart generally employes the most unskilled workers this nation has to offer. To compare Wal-Mart to IBM isn't like comparing apples and oranges, it's like comparing apples and airplanes.
Lets compare Wal-Mart & Target shall we, Target employees are paid better and likely have better benefits but everyone knows that Target is more expensive for the consumer, and there are less Targets and thus less Target empployees. Personally I dirive past Wal-Mart to get to Target where I know I'll pay more but there are too many American's who wouldn't dream of doing something like that.
Of course Wal-Mart as people know it could not exist if it were unionized, it's not like there are fat margins that can be eroded to come up with increased pay and benefits. Wal-Mart is an extremely low margin operation that is successful because of excellent efficiency and incredible volume.
Were Wal-Mart to unionize prices would raise an immediate 10-15%, efficiency would also take a hit as the employee culture shifted from performance based to seniority based. Volume would plummet (who would really shop at Wal-Mart if Target were the same price), stores would close like crazy.
No doubt the workers would be better off but there would definitely be a lot less of them.
Now in such a scenario society would likely benefit ultimately because Wal-Mart really is killing America.
But what people need to understand, and generally they don't, is that to unionize Wal-Mart is to destroy (effectively) Wal-Mart. I really think there are a lot of people who believe that if Wal-Mart were union friendly that the workers would be better paid and be treated better but that the low prices would remain and that nothing else would change.
Where was this? Usually walmart avoids severely depressed high crime areas. They like suburbia and small towns best. I would be very interested in knowing which severely depressed high crime area walmart wanted to go into. That seems to go against the walmart business plan.
There was an instace a year or so ago in Inglewood, California, which is very near Los Angeles. There is another smallish city in SoCal where Wal-Mart didn't try quite as hard as they did in Inglewood, I forget the name.
What's strange is that they have been able to move into areas in Los Angeles city limits and super powerful city workers unions only put up token resistance. Though Los Angeles city government is notorious for it's pay to play environment so there's likely more to that than meets the eye. In fact they opened up one less than 1/2 mile from my house, and I live in an otherwise decent area, I think when they moved in we were given the choice of putting a derilict car on our front lawn or installing a meth lab in the garage:).
Smaller class size isn't just about improving education (though that can dfinitely be a benefit). It also has a major impact on workload and working conditions for teachers, my wife has 5 classes of ~40 kids each, that means 200 students wirth of papers/tests to grade and she ends up working several hours almost every night to get everytging graded & recorded.
More students means more work for teachers at the same pay, I've seen it first hand.
As for the unions health care demands, obviously the teachers should get heath care but really who gets 100% company paid for health care anymore? The unions are willing to let education suffer so their members won't even to pay $50/mo for health care for their entire family, at a time when most people are spending $300/mo or more.
Remember since my wife is a teacher I'm currently enjoying these ridiculous benefits, that doesn't mean I think they are remotely reasonable or that they should be in place. It would definitely benefit my families quality of life and my wifes happiness to kick in $50 or $100 a month for health care if I could get my wife back or my kids could get their mother back for a few extra hours a week.
The truly ironic, and truly sad thing is that the unions who have been able to hold onto free health care are partially responsible for the ridulous costs of health care these days in their alignment of themselves with lawyers in their overwhelming support of Democratic politicians.
The UPS strike was in 1996 or 1997, UPS wanted to take over manegement of the pension program for their employees. UPS didn't like that they were paying a lot more into the fund than their employees/retiress were using (UPS was subsidizing the entire fund for all teamsters). The Teamsters weren't about to give up their ginormous pool of money in the fund (at the time UPS was the single largest contributor to the Teamsters fund) and they struck.
I worked for a VAR at the time and our business, along with most of our customers businesses nearly ground to a halt because products weren't bveing shipped, or we bing shipped by FedEx & the USPS with major delays.
It wasn't about wages, or about working condiitons, it was about money that the Union did not want to give up control over.
The union tried to spin it for the public saying the major issue was about part time workers, in the end the percentage of part time workers didn't change, the union only cared about the pension fund.
My wife is a teacher and believe me her union controls the school board because almost all the mebers of the board are nad picked by the union. The union presiddent has been known to pass noted to board members during meetings telling them what to say or how to vote. Wha's worse is the union refuses to push for things that would make life better for the teachers (and improve education), like reduction in class size, and instead obsesses on ridiculous points like 100% free health care.
Remeber what the teamsters did with the UPS strike? They inflicted significant damage on the entire U.S. economy just so they could keep control of their slush^H^H^H^H^H pension fund.
Or recently in California we had a special election and the unions spent many millions of dollars (raised through dues assessments from people like my wife) on a largely false negative campaign that successfully stopped initiatives that could have broken their stranglehold on state & local governments.
Admittedly the power of the union is rightfully waining, recently here we have had a transit strike and a grocery workers strike and in both cases the unions got their butts handed to them and ended up accepting pretty much what the companies were offering before the strike began.
But unions still hold way too much power, especially in the public sector where their control is so absolute that they are in effect one of the most power forces in local & state government.
Oh, and to be specific, Wal-Mart doesn't try to and could not force any employee to not join a union, any Wal-Mart employee could join and pay dies to the UFCW or whatever other union they wanted, what Wal-Mart has been successful at has been preventing groups of workers from organizing and forcing the company to enter into a collective bargianing agreement (while forcing every worker in the store to join/pay the union bosses whether they want to or not).
I'll agree with you in general, though there have been a couple of recent incidences recently where Wal-Mart has wanted to open a store in a severely depressed area that already has super high unemployment and most businesses wouldn't consider going into (because of high crime rates - we got your vicious cycle right here).
Sure the Wal-Mart jobs would be shitty McJobs but personally I'd rather have a shitty McJob than be on welfare.
In any case the times it's happened around here the unions (which pretty much control most city governments in this area) got legislation passed that pretty effectively blocked Wal-Mart from moving in, I guess they think it's better to have unemployment than have non-union jobs.
Maybe his long term goal is Muslim rule (though I'm not conviced he's anything more than a power hungry madman who's merely using Islam) but his short term goals generally revolve around hurting/killing people and the general undermining of societies he doesn't like.
He doesn't like our way of life, with our quasi-democracy and capitalism and relative tolerance of different faiths. And every time we change our way of life, every time we give up one of our rights in the name of "fighting terrorism" we are delivering a victory to him and people like him.
So if Cisco were to buy TiVo what would be the result? Here are some possibilities: 1. Mandatory Jazz music soundtrack while in Menus and while fast forwarding. 2. Higher cost (everything is worth more with a Cisco label on it). 3. Different TiVo features will now be ala-carte, pay extra for HMF (again), pay extra for IR Blaster funcionality. 4. The only networking configurations that will be supported is if EVERY piece networking & voice component in your house is a Cisco product, your'e on your own if you have a D-Link or SMC broadband router or a Motorla set top box.
It's not about the providers, it's about the customers.
It looks as if TiVo doesn't care about the roughly 1/3 of households that subscribe to Satellite TV.
Presumably they will still offer the Series2 but if you want the features that Series3 has that your satellite subscription would support (like the extrernal SATA storage, the integrated Ethernet adapter or the increased storage capacity (without the need for hacking)) you are definitely SOL.
I guess us satellite users can just sit on a tack. There are no S-Video or even composite imputs on this box nor is there serial control or IR blaster support.
Not that being a satellite user (Dish Network) I could use the dual tuner features (would need two satellite recievers) or of coruse the CableCARD but it would be nice to buy a Series3 because it would be more future proof, like maybe if Dish miraculously became CableCARD compible in a few years) or I switched to a different provider (less likely)
One of the things I REALLY love about my Stand Alone Series2 is that it's provider independent, and that it works with satellite, analog or digital cable, whatever I've got.
Of course once they make the new "express" lanes it reduces capacity for all the other lanes making them slower. Don't like going slower than you used to? Then you should use the express lane.
But the more sinister reality is that it would be worse than that. It would be more like setting up the express lane, setting the speed limit to 65Mph, and then lowering the speed limit in the other lanes to 25Mph.
I remember running tests and findiing that 233Mhz and 266Mhz PIIs were noticably slower than a 200Mhz Pentium Pro, the 300Mhz PII's were about the same speed as a 200Mhz Pentium Pro and it wasn't until the PII was at 350Mhz that it was noticably fatser.
The PII was a design change just to make it so AMD (& Cyrix at the time) had to start reverse engineering all over again. The same thing with the fancy new slot packaging that was such a success. They also wanted to ramp up the clock speed without paying the premium to have full speed cache memory like the Pentium Pro.
Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.
I've said it before but I really don't see the advantage of having an OSS product if you are still dependent on a definitively non-open product. Ofr course I know it's completely different sice Sun isn't evil like Microsoft is.
AMD should be touting its own Performance per Watt figures right now, rather than waiting for Intel to eventually catch up.
Maybe, though I wonder if the Pentium M (AKA Pentium 3 but they can't call it that anymore) still holds the title for P/W. The mobile stuff seems to be Intels last technological lead over AMD.
Intel's problem is that the Pentium 4 architecture isn't very good, they had a really great chip design in the Pentium Pro, then when downhill with the Pentium II, when the Pentium 3 came out it fixed most of the PIIs shortcomings and was a very good chip (which is why it's at the heart of the Pentium M today). The Pentium 4 was a huge leap backwards. I wonder if Intel thought that the world would have switched to Itanium by now and so didn't put resources into fixing the P4s shortcomings like they fixed the PIIs shortcomings. Now they are playing catchup trying to implement what is effectively AMDs 64 bit architecture, I'm guessing they still aren't working on fixing the P4, figuring that the world is going 64 bit (probably true).
I'm sure they are under no delusions that they can even make a dent in Piracy. Any technology that would represent even a speed bump for pirates would make the "product" unusable for the average consumer.
All that the implemented "anti-piracy" technologies do, indeed all they are intended to do is make it harder for people to exercise their fair use rights.
That was the first thing I was thinking too! Can't wait to pick one of these up in the sto'or.
Seriously though, most of the rest of the global technology already exists, essentiall it's a video/camera phone with the roll-up display. Of course the real time video phone technology as well as the truly global (& orbital) range are a long ways off practicality wise.
It's definitely reasonable to expect a device very similar to the EFC Global within our lifetimes.
Of course people still buy them
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Comnpanies will continue to make products with restrictions and implement policies/tactics like this because they still sell.
If nobody bought PSPs because they don't let you run himebrew code or nobody bought DRM'd music the companies would be forced to change their policies.
The desire to avoid an endless cat & mouse game with Sony to run whatever software I want on the hardware I bought, along with their use of the effectvly poprietary and therefore outrageously espnesive Memory Stick are the main reasons I don't own a PSP today.
My RSS reader (feedreader) Is currently configured for 3-4 dozen different RSS feeds, some news sites, some home pages ("blogs"). Some of them are updated multiple times a day, some updated daily, some updated infrequently.
Really I don't have time to check all of them even once a day but with an RSS reader I just have to start and tell it to check all the feeds and I know where there is new stuff.
Then I can look at the subject lines and see what looks interesting, then I look at the summaries and then only actually read ~5% of all the new stuff that pops up. I can effectively check several dozen sites and get the information I want out of them in only a few minutes. Without RSS checking that many sites would take at least an hour and would be difficult to manage.
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Sure, because it isn't like Walmart management is going to reduce their multi-million dollar salaries, their enormous benefits package, and their huge profit margins just to give their employees a fair deal.
Like that would even make a dent, I don't know the exact statistics but I'd suspect that for every VP & above at Wal-Mart there are 800 or more high school dropouts, meth users and unwed mothers in vests in the stores. Even if all the executives decided to work for minimum wage and split that money among all "assiciates" it wouldn't be enough to raise the typical workers pay pay more than a few pennies. It's easy to point to admittedly overpaid executives and say it's all because of them but it's never that simple.
In any case, it isn't their choice to unionize or not; that's up to the employees. No industry voluntarily chooses unionization; unionization has been forced by the workers, and sometimes by the community.
I could possibly agree with you except for one thing, it's not up to the empployees, if a simple majority (50% +1) of employees in a shop decide to go union they then will force 100% of the employees to join that union (or pay the vast majority of union dues to the union without having voting rights) or find another job. If you feel your pay should be determined based on your job performance instead of your date of hire your'e SOL.
If Walmart's employees unionize, it is Walmart's own fault for being an abusive employer, and they deserve it. It would survive if the management learned to be less greedy, and if it didn't... well, you'd just have to learn to live without your $3.00 one-gallon jar of pickles.
Perhaps you missed the part where I said I don't shop at Wal-Mart (15 years & counting) because I don't like them as a company. In any case I'm not saying I'm against the destruction of Wal-Mart (or for it) but people who are advocating the unionization of Wal-Mart need to understand that the destruction of Wal-Mart would be the end result.
Say what? Walmart is extremely profitable, and there are a lot of people getting rich off it. Just not the people who actually do any work there. If Walmart didn't fuck their employees, they could still afford lower prices by cutting their profit margin, or their executive salaries, or their executive's benefits.
Just because they are making serious profits doesn't mean they are high margin, the amount of profit that Wal-Mart makes on each item sold is very very small, but the sheer volume is what results in the total accumulate proftis. Where a typical store might "mark up" a particular product 10-20% over cost, Wal-Mart is closer to 2-3% (I forget the exact amount).
Seriously; this is Walmart we're talking about. IBM executives make a butt-load of money, but their employees do pretty well, too. The disparity between the Walmart benefits for the executives and the employees is so huge, it isn't anything but absurd.
IBM is primarily a software & services company, which is super high margin, the few tangible goods they do sell are expensive high end computers that are also high margin. Plus IBM relies on a highly skilled workforce while Wal-Mart generally employes the most unskilled workers this nation has to offer. To compare Wal-Mart to IBM isn't like comparing apples and oranges, it's like comparing apples and airplanes.
Lets compare Wal-Mart & Target shall we, Target employees are paid better and likely have better benefits but everyone knows that Target is more expensive for the consumer, and there are less Targets and thus less Target empployees. Personally I dirive past Wal-Mart to get to Target where I know I'll pay more but there are too many American's who wouldn't dream of doing something like that.
Of course Wal-Mart as people know it could not exist if it were unionized, it's not like there are fat margins that can be eroded to come up with increased pay and benefits. Wal-Mart is an extremely low margin operation that is successful because of excellent efficiency and incredible volume.
Were Wal-Mart to unionize prices would raise an immediate 10-15%, efficiency would also take a hit as the employee culture shifted from performance based to seniority based. Volume would plummet (who would really shop at Wal-Mart if Target were the same price), stores would close like crazy.
No doubt the workers would be better off but there would definitely be a lot less of them.
Now in such a scenario society would likely benefit ultimately because Wal-Mart really is killing America.
But what people need to understand, and generally they don't, is that to unionize Wal-Mart is to destroy (effectively) Wal-Mart. I really think there are a lot of people who believe that if Wal-Mart were union friendly that the workers would be better paid and be treated better but that the low prices would remain and that nothing else would change.
Where was this? Usually walmart avoids severely depressed high crime areas. They like suburbia and small towns best. I would be very interested in knowing which severely depressed high crime area walmart wanted to go into. That seems to go against the walmart business plan.
There was an instace a year or so ago in Inglewood, California, which is very near Los Angeles. There is another smallish city in SoCal where Wal-Mart didn't try quite as hard as they did in Inglewood, I forget the name.
What's strange is that they have been able to move into areas in Los Angeles city limits and super powerful city workers unions only put up token resistance. Though Los Angeles city government is notorious for it's pay to play environment so there's likely more to that than meets the eye. In fact they opened up one less than 1/2 mile from my house, and I live in an otherwise decent area, I think when they moved in we were given the choice of putting a derilict car on our front lawn or installing a meth lab in the garage :).
Smaller class size isn't just about improving education (though that can dfinitely be a benefit). It also has a major impact on workload and working conditions for teachers, my wife has 5 classes of ~40 kids each, that means 200 students wirth of papers/tests to grade and she ends up working several hours almost every night to get everytging graded & recorded.
More students means more work for teachers at the same pay, I've seen it first hand.
As for the unions health care demands, obviously the teachers should get heath care but really who gets 100% company paid for health care anymore? The unions are willing to let education suffer so their members won't even to pay $50/mo for health care for their entire family, at a time when most people are spending $300/mo or more.
Remember since my wife is a teacher I'm currently enjoying these ridiculous benefits, that doesn't mean I think they are remotely reasonable or that they should be in place. It would definitely benefit my families quality of life and my wifes happiness to kick in $50 or $100 a month for health care if I could get my wife back or my kids could get their mother back for a few extra hours a week.
The truly ironic, and truly sad thing is that the unions who have been able to hold onto free health care are partially responsible for the ridulous costs of health care these days in their alignment of themselves with lawyers in their overwhelming support of Democratic politicians.
Yes you are reading me incorrectly
The UPS strike was in 1996 or 1997, UPS wanted to take over manegement of the pension program for their employees. UPS didn't like that they were paying a lot more into the fund than their employees/retiress were using (UPS was subsidizing the entire fund for all teamsters). The Teamsters weren't about to give up their ginormous pool of money in the fund (at the time UPS was the single largest contributor to the Teamsters fund) and they struck.
I worked for a VAR at the time and our business, along with most of our customers businesses nearly ground to a halt because products weren't bveing shipped, or we bing shipped by FedEx & the USPS with major delays.
It wasn't about wages, or about working condiitons, it was about money that the Union did not want to give up control over.
The union tried to spin it for the public saying the major issue was about part time workers, in the end the percentage of part time workers didn't change, the union only cared about the pension fund.
My wife is a teacher and believe me her union controls the school board because almost all the mebers of the board are nad picked by the union. The union presiddent has been known to pass noted to board members during meetings telling them what to say or how to vote. Wha's worse is the union refuses to push for things that would make life better for the teachers (and improve education), like reduction in class size, and instead obsesses on ridiculous points like 100% free health care.
Remeber what the teamsters did with the UPS strike? They inflicted significant damage on the entire U.S. economy just so they could keep control of their slush^H^H^H^H^H pension fund.
Or recently in California we had a special election and the unions spent many millions of dollars (raised through dues assessments from people like my wife) on a largely false negative campaign that successfully stopped initiatives that could have broken their stranglehold on state & local governments.
Admittedly the power of the union is rightfully waining, recently here we have had a transit strike and a grocery workers strike and in both cases the unions got their butts handed to them and ended up accepting pretty much what the companies were offering before the strike began.
But unions still hold way too much power, especially in the public sector where their control is so absolute that they are in effect one of the most power forces in local & state government.
Oh, and to be specific, Wal-Mart doesn't try to and could not force any employee to not join a union, any Wal-Mart employee could join and pay dies to the UFCW or whatever other union they wanted, what Wal-Mart has been successful at has been preventing groups of workers from organizing and forcing the company to enter into a collective bargianing agreement (while forcing every worker in the store to join/pay the union bosses whether they want to or not).
I'll agree with you in general, though there have been a couple of recent incidences recently where Wal-Mart has wanted to open a store in a severely depressed area that already has super high unemployment and most businesses wouldn't consider going into (because of high crime rates - we got your vicious cycle right here).
Sure the Wal-Mart jobs would be shitty McJobs but personally I'd rather have a shitty McJob than be on welfare.
In any case the times it's happened around here the unions (which pretty much control most city governments in this area) got legislation passed that pretty effectively blocked Wal-Mart from moving in, I guess they think it's better to have unemployment than have non-union jobs.
I'm not a Wal-Mart fan, haven't shopped there in 15 years. I don't like what they do to the small businesses in the areas they move into.
Setill I have to admire them as the ultimate example of a capitalist success story, I also like their ability to stand up to the unions.
So I guess you could say that in some ways I am "sympathetic" to Wal-Mart, I certinaly don't think they should be destroyed, as many people do.
Not that I'm about the start posting their press releases on my web site, grant you.
Maybe his long term goal is Muslim rule (though I'm not conviced he's anything more than a power hungry madman who's merely using Islam) but his short term goals generally revolve around hurting/killing people and the general undermining of societies he doesn't like.
He doesn't like our way of life, with our quasi-democracy and capitalism and relative tolerance of different faiths. And every time we change our way of life, every time we give up one of our rights in the name of "fighting terrorism" we are delivering a victory to him and people like him.
http://www.snopes.com/medical/emergent/redcross.as p
I know Snopes isn't infallible but I've yet to see any proof of this persistent accusation.
So if Cisco were to buy TiVo what would be the result? Here are some possibilities:
1. Mandatory Jazz music soundtrack while in Menus and while fast forwarding.
2. Higher cost (everything is worth more with a Cisco label on it).
3. Different TiVo features will now be ala-carte, pay extra for HMF (again), pay extra for IR Blaster funcionality.
4. The only networking configurations that will be supported is if EVERY piece networking & voice component in your house is a Cisco product, your'e on your own if you have a D-Link or SMC broadband router or a Motorla set top box.
It's not about the providers, it's about the customers.
It looks as if TiVo doesn't care about the roughly 1/3 of households that subscribe to Satellite TV.
Presumably they will still offer the Series2 but if you want the features that Series3 has that your satellite subscription would support (like the extrernal SATA storage, the integrated Ethernet adapter or the increased storage capacity (without the need for hacking)) you are definitely SOL.
I guess us satellite users can just sit on a tack. There are no S-Video or even composite imputs on this box nor is there serial control or IR blaster support.
Not that being a satellite user (Dish Network) I could use the dual tuner features (would need two satellite recievers) or of coruse the CableCARD but it would be nice to buy a Series3 because it would be more future proof, like maybe if Dish miraculously became CableCARD compible in a few years) or I switched to a different provider (less likely)
One of the things I REALLY love about my Stand Alone Series2 is that it's provider independent, and that it works with satellite, analog or digital cable, whatever I've got.
Of course once they make the new "express" lanes it reduces capacity for all the other lanes making them slower. Don't like going slower than you used to? Then you should use the express lane.
But the more sinister reality is that it would be worse than that. It would be more like setting up the express lane, setting the speed limit to 65Mph, and then lowering the speed limit in the other lanes to 25Mph.
Where the CEO of Pepsi published a book talking about how Pepsi won the cola wars.
When all else fails, declare victory and erect a statue.
I remember running tests and findiing that 233Mhz and 266Mhz PIIs were noticably slower than a 200Mhz Pentium Pro, the 300Mhz PII's were about the same speed as a 200Mhz Pentium Pro and it wasn't until the PII was at 350Mhz that it was noticably fatser.
The PII was a design change just to make it so AMD (& Cyrix at the time) had to start reverse engineering all over again. The same thing with the fancy new slot packaging that was such a success. They also wanted to ramp up the clock speed without paying the premium to have full speed cache memory like the Pentium Pro.
I have the distinct feeling I'll be losing some Karma for saying this but I'm REALLY disappointed that they didn't solve the Java issue.
According to the System Requirements page it still requires the Sun JVM.
Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.
I've said it before but I really don't see the advantage of having an OSS product if you are still dependent on a definitively non-open product. Ofr course I know it's completely different sice Sun isn't evil like Microsoft is.
AMD should be touting its own Performance per Watt figures right now, rather than waiting for Intel to eventually catch up.
Maybe, though I wonder if the Pentium M (AKA Pentium 3 but they can't call it that anymore) still holds the title for P/W. The mobile stuff seems to be Intels last technological lead over AMD.
Intel's problem is that the Pentium 4 architecture isn't very good, they had a really great chip design in the Pentium Pro, then when downhill with the Pentium II, when the Pentium 3 came out it fixed most of the PIIs shortcomings and was a very good chip (which is why it's at the heart of the Pentium M today). The Pentium 4 was a huge leap backwards. I wonder if Intel thought that the world would have switched to Itanium by now and so didn't put resources into fixing the P4s shortcomings like they fixed the PIIs shortcomings. Now they are playing catchup trying to implement what is effectively AMDs 64 bit architecture, I'm guessing they still aren't working on fixing the P4, figuring that the world is going 64 bit (probably true).
For Firefox 1.0.8 to be released
They actually think they can stop piracy
I'm sure they are under no delusions that they can even make a dent in Piracy. Any technology that would represent even a speed bump for pirates would make the "product" unusable for the average consumer.
All that the implemented "anti-piracy" technologies do, indeed all they are intended to do is make it harder for people to exercise their fair use rights.
DBAN does indeed work with SATA drives, at least with my few months old Dell.
I believe it was a fairly recently added feature at the time.
That was the first thing I was thinking too! Can't wait to pick one of these up in the sto'or.
Seriously though, most of the rest of the global technology already exists, essentiall it's a video/camera phone with the roll-up display. Of course the real time video phone technology as well as the truly global (& orbital) range are a long ways off practicality wise.
It's definitely reasonable to expect a device very similar to the EFC Global within our lifetimes.
Comnpanies will continue to make products with restrictions and implement policies/tactics like this because they still sell.
If nobody bought PSPs because they don't let you run himebrew code or nobody bought DRM'd music the companies would be forced to change their policies.
The desire to avoid an endless cat & mouse game with Sony to run whatever software I want on the hardware I bought, along with their use of the effectvly poprietary and therefore outrageously espnesive Memory Stick are the main reasons I don't own a PSP today.
My RSS reader (feedreader) Is currently configured for 3-4 dozen different RSS feeds, some news sites, some home pages ("blogs"). Some of them are updated multiple times a day, some updated daily, some updated infrequently.
Really I don't have time to check all of them even once a day but with an RSS reader I just have to start and tell it to check all the feeds and I know where there is new stuff.
Then I can look at the subject lines and see what looks interesting, then I look at the summaries and then only actually read ~5% of all the new stuff that pops up. I can effectively check several dozen sites and get the information I want out of them in only a few minutes. Without RSS checking that many sites would take at least an hour and would be difficult to manage.
Unmolested version - get it while it lasts