1. Cost Apple's BOM costs aren't meaningfully higher than any of their competitors. I'm guessing their vig to the media conglomerates is about the same. They are working on the same cost structure which means microsoft has no advantage going in. It is very likely the zune will never operate as a profitable project by itself. It may be around for a while and they will destroy all of their OEM vendors business along the way. But, legitimate business that threatens the ipod it won't ever be.
2. Marketing I had the great pleasure of seeing a zune poster pasted onto the temporary wall of a construction. Apple-class marketing it was not. I don't doubt that MS will throw a ton of money at the zune and it will have meaningful market share. But only because it will be cheap.
I recently discovered this doing a little compliance work. I double-checked the EULA.txt on a couple of XP Pro machines, they were the same and do not mention transfer of any sort. So, we can't give away old PC's with XP to employees who may want them as a CYA. (I use Kubuntu to solve this. And they are quite happy users.)
It may be a very serious issue for groups like Freecycle (http://www.freecycle.org/) where there are many people giving away computers on a regular basis. Probably not XP right now, but soon enough. I see a big fat litigation target on their back.
Seriously though, I think this is another sign that Sun isn't focused. Yes they have product and technology, but I don't see them turning it into sales. Company hasn't kept up with market changes in this way.
Warm and fuzzy this may be, but show me the money!
What you fail to understand is the liabilities involved in letting another organization use a proprietary logo.
If the unauthorized use of logos were not prosecuted by a company I could do lots of fun things. For example, I could repackage the gimp, throw photoshop's splash image in it and call it photoshopper. Maybe the name of my company would be AdobeHut too. Better still, I'll put a "circle R" next to all of it and make it look official.
If Adobe doesn't throw every last lawyer at me, then lots of other people could do it. The courts would see it as essentially public domain. Meanwhile, I can drag Adobe into court for using my logo. Crazy right?
Both parties are doing the right thing here. I doubt it really consumed very much time/energy on the part of the project as these kinds of details must be addressed and that's about it.
Stories like this tend to make a figurative fire where there is none.
Clearly Spamhaus does not have enough friends in high places. If they -had- K Street influence, (Cha-Ching! $$) their dire court situation would be relieved to a great extent by legislative or some other branch of gov't giving them a way out.
Look at how long and how much money it took for the Crackberry developer to get the federal gov't to do things like the "emergency review" and subsequent invalidation of the submarine patent owner that went after them while they were clearly set to lose in court to the submarine patent holder.
I would be very interested to see/hear if there isn't K Street pressure to kill spamhaus off so other companies that DO legislate can make consumers pay more for the "luxury" of good spam filtering.
The studios controlling the distribution of these films are the big winners again.
Retail DVD costs: Media, replication, packaging, distribution, slotting fees, spoils and other logistics problems, and varying amounts of advertising. Throw in the loss of control of the DVD content. That's your priviledge to make and keep personal copies, freedom to play the movie when and where you want. Don't forget the graft required to get stuff on the shelves of your average big box retailer, loss of control of the distribution channel once it hits the retailer's dock and a million other tiny headaches.
Retail Download: Zero duplication costs, nominal distribution costs, advertising. *Total* control of distribution, ability to control when and where the consumer can play the content. (windows media player 11 has this feature) Beyond that granular control of the rights conferred upon the consumer through DRM.
Consumers are willing and happy to trade their freedom for $2. The studio pocket millions of extra dollars.
For every j@ck@ss that thinks this is the "free market" at work, will they please explain where the innovation is in this model? How is the consumer market for movies -more- competitive as a result? I can't see how consumers benefit in an industry controlled by an oligopoly.
Will someone please tell me what the infatuation with standardized testing is about?
You get to rank kids, but you also get kids that have trained for the test. I have two sisters that are teachers that quite specifically teach to the test-du-jour. I mean not just a couple of weeks, but every single day's learning plan is oriented around the test the kids take that year.
So, we've got kids being trained for a test, which is certainly not an "education." Or maybe that's what passes for an education for the unwashed, shrinking middle-class masses in America?
The analyst is captures the essence of American big-business, "Don't do anything new." Just remix something already on the shelf. It's better."
This is low-cost producer corporateThink. America cannot be the low-cost producer. So the obligation is to innovate.
But the wealthiest 2% can't stand innovation because it is a direct threat to their wealth. They go to Washington and legislate innovation away.
I left the environment that this analyst describes because it rotten. It rots the brain!
Now I work in a company where my superiors have the same disregard for this kind of thinking and we're doing well. The sky is not the limit though. They are small enough no competitors care, but definitely delivering value to our customers.
On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with this.
Practically every country in the world would lobby for a company the size of MS if it was in their backyard. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is a good thing(TM). America has to aggressively expand trade of it's goods and services worldwide.
We all know that the underlying issue is what makes it/. headline. Microsoft's reach is greater, gov't acts quickly to their requests while other industries suffer a kind of benign neglect until they pay to play. That's political shock and awe in action!
Whatever they claim just doesn't sound right because, you know... That whole Napster thing... And, you know, those napster users were probably smoking teh pot too. Criminals. All of them.
The judge is thinking there's no way files can be legitimately shared... Who makes their own music? Why would they want to give it away? Smells like some kind of crazy thing my weird liberal parents might have done.
Let's not forget the judge has a windows desktop using totally proprietary software with antivirus and antispyware and anti-this and anti-that run by a system administrator who babysits the judge when the computer has a hic-up.
The judge experiences it all as working and working well, so where's the crime here?
get ASICs and whatnot that do the job faster than software
I agree with you in principal(sp?) but I have a question:
As we upgrade some machines, I've got dual cpu (1.5ghz =/-) and 2+GB RAM being replaced by dual cores. Would server hardware be able to handle as much, if not more than the cisco asics (2800's mostly) I've got?
I get a damn good router for free. And I've got a spare parts inventory + redundancy. What am I missing?
Summary: Works great, supposed problem sounds like it was a driver issue more than an application issue.
Reads like a well-placed article-vertisement.
The "as long as we're not switching half the US" comment are the one's I grow tired of. It's a well-wrapped insult.
I'm not saying Linux is the best tool for routing half the nation, but the comment points out some things that do prevent more linux adoption.
1. "free" is not as good as something I paid for 2. Don't fsck with the status quo.
I admin a company 100% cisco routers/firewalls and I know for a fact Linux can do what gets done.
I'm not going to tell the boss to "just" switch or evangelize too much because of the social/economic implications of doing so may impact my future. I like my employer, they like me, so when we need another router, it's a cisco. I am personally disappointed by this, but I think it explains why innovation takes -so- long to come to the data center. (at least in the U.S.)
Let's not forget that cisco can fire most of their software devs and use a linux-based router project if it ever got close to competing with some Cisco products. Does that qualify as innovation? I'd say no. It's not cheaper or better.
I think I'd say the same thing if I was talking to a reporter.
I seriously doubt ethics suddenly kicked in at some threshold number of sites. Instead, I would argue there is some kind of point beyond which managing so many parked domains stops getting really profitable.
Between the cheating story from a couple of days ago and this, I'd say trying to earn an honest day's pay is much harder. It is for me anyway.
In these situations, the people pushing the project through is intentionally unclear.
This is the beauty of most structured proposal systems that local/state/federal gov'ts. From a citizens perspective, they look like they control graft and corruption. It only creates a level of obscurity.
1. How does keynote benefit? Keynote's VoIP Competitive Monitoring Solution addresses the need of marketing and operations executives to understand their performance relative to competitors, and to gauge the impact on the end-user experience of both their infrastructure investments in new markets and their enhancements to services in existing markets.
They have a pretty big incentive to excite some potential customers.
2. What was the methodology? Keynote placed local and long distance VoIP calls to destination phone numbers on a standard (PSTN) phone service. Calls were placed from San Francisco and New York once every 30 minutes on every VoIP provider and network carrier combination. A total of 125,000 calls were placed over a month-long period. Calls placed using competing VoIP services were compared to traditional phone "toll quality" standards to determine what residential customers can expect when switching from traditional phone lines to VoIP.
Who is -every- VOIP provider?
My personal experience with VOIP over cable was definitely worse service than POTS for the same price as POTS. Where's the value the cableco was supposed to be providing?
This is more plausible deniability on NASDAQ's part. It looks like they are playing "Tough Electronic Market Enforcer." Like most policies and procedures: 1. Some Admin Assistant at each company gets to fill out forms and write letters to the Exchange for someone else to sign. 2. Forms are sent to NASDAQ for "review" which takes a remarkably long time. So long in fact that Dell gets the SEC matter resolved through political donations to a couple of PAC's and their local reps. 3. And in the nick of time so both companies get to stay on the exchange!
The -only- people that get the book thrown at them are egregious and stupid violators that don't knuckle under or don't pay to play. Martha Stewart is an excellent example. Complicated schemes like back-dating options will catch 1 maybe two of at least dozens of companies that did it. The proverbial "mission accomplished."
The good news may be that Microsofties may have reached that state in a mega-corp where the sycophants essentially create a reality distortion field of their own so things like:
Team of Analysts and 10-slide powerpoint: "Ipod price is so high and our margin would be so good we can dominate this market." (actually said with convoluted marketing speak as to create plausible deniability) PHB's: Nod. Say nothing. "Okay, thank you." Analysts leave room.
PHB's continue: "We can leverage our synergies and create new markets....." "Get a product development team together and get started right away! Bob, I'm putting you in charge of this. Make sure it complies with Restricted Media Systems group policies."
Fastforward 6 months: Bob says to his PHB: "I'm shocked, -shocked- I tell you that Apple can lower their prices like this. Don't worry Boss project MP3 player it's going to be great it's got a cool wireless feature for sharing. Retail Sales group is very excited." Boss: "Does it comply with Restricted Media Systems group policies?" Bob: "Oh yes sir!"
Fast forward 3 months: Bob revises resume. 200X-2006 Zune Project Manager. Maximized Profits, Opened new markets, Created Dynamic Synergies with global partners. Leaves MS to join web 2.0 startup selling AJAX GUI's.
Fast forward another year: Zune product $9.99 at your nearest pc inventory liquidator. Project is buried and never spoken of again. Bob's boss is promoted to Senior Executive Vice-President of Security Products. Bob gets another job at another startup as the last organization "..failed to satisfy market synergies."
Seriously, Microsoft doesn't have a chance when the BOM on the flash-based units is about $10. Probably less. The Flash RAM is likely the most expensive thing in there. The disk based models are less than $10 before paying for the disk. So maybe $20 tops BOM cost? The advertising/hype will be clever and everywhere and they'll lower the price like crazy to get it off the shelf at Worst Buy.
and it lives up to the Debian standard of reliable running, even in testing.
They've got a nice fully functioning gui net installer for etch that worked perfectly for me on a Dell 2300 server with raided SCSI drives. I did a basic LAMP+desktop install. They changed the default sshd install to use keys. (as in public key in ~/.ssh/known_hosts file) Excellent! I'm looking forward to finding more of my usual security tweeks configured as default.
It's testing, so the usual security warnings apply.
I think that there may be a little more sense of urgency at the Debian project with some legitimate competition from deep-pockets Shuttleworth. My etch install suggests they are responding with better product and new ideas to accelerate the development pace.
1. Napster is right where the labels want them. The red-headed step child nobody wants. 2. This is exactly what happens in markets with wealthy, powerful companies unfettered by regulation. Price fixing, absurd litigation, even more absurd legislation. 3. Let's not forget their outdated business model which, in 2006 looks good for another 25 years. It took them 3-5 years as enforcer to force consumers to treat mp3's like vinyl.
If one studio attempts to license the proposed CD format, how will it get made in a low cost manner? More specifically, you will need at least one manufacturer to build the machine to burn the media on a large scale.
Who in their right mind will build the production equipment for a -single- studio owned technology? Say they don't make the manufacturer pay extortion, what cd production house will invest in the hardware for a -single- studio?
At this point some joker must have the patent for 4:3 on one side, 16:9 on the other.
and most countries do it to their citizens in order to achieve some end.
Now, companies and people can do it to each other!
Seriously though, take a step back for a moment and ask yourself a couple of questions:
1. Why should I trust anything on the site in question? They don't say they are purveyors of trustworthy data. I think the problem is that "trustworthy videos" may not be an expectation they want to meet.
2. What does anyone gain by visiting the site in question?
It's not patient care that is responsible for the bloat in Healthcare job creation, it's all of the backend BS that our current system requires to keep those care providers paid.
I would argue the one major bottleneck is at the doctor level. But you bring up another good point because that backend BS is all proprietary and sorely in need of standardization.
There are a lot of various, standard industry tools which can be used to automate these data entry type jobs. This is where you are wrong. Every insurance entity has a different and intentionally very complex billing system that burdens the entire system. And then, ask a doctor how far out his Insurance Co. Accounts Recievables have become over the last 10 years.
When you go see a doctor for any old cold, bruise, cracked rib I agree that the vast majority of the time, it is in fact a wasted visit. However, because of the design of American medical care, there isn't an alternative to seeing a doctor. Maybe the ideal here is a first-level practitioner who is not a doctor, but can weed out the common cold cases? Again, the medical system is NOT set up like that.
Since those on insurance or socialized healthcare don't have to pay the doctor much if anything I agree that medical care is like freeways, there is infinite demand for consumption. To extend/abuse the analogy, freeways aren't stuffed with cars 24/7. Neither are public health systems. No public health care system is perfect. But some offer a great deal more services than others AND reduce the social cost of sickness in a country.
you increase the demand for a doctor's service Temporarily. You conveniently forget the temporary spike in demand while medical colleges pump out more doctors to satisfy demand. But, in the U.S. the system is not designed like this. Maybe you get more doctors, but the system is designed to support -only- doctors dispensing medical care. So there is no way to innovate/automate care.
Healthcare is not a right, it's an industry I agree that health care is not a -right- per se, but more of an expectation that the wealthiest country in the world should provide health insurance as kind of a basic service like sewage and electricity. Sadly we provide it to less than 50% of it's population. That's without even approaching the issue of what passes for "health insurance." And yet, we manage to provide electricity reliably through a very regulated industry. Hmmm. So -maybe- regulated markets work sometimes?
To provide healthcare, you need: Yes to the first item, no to the rest. How is innovation lowering my health care costs? It hasn't.
attachment to good health As a barometer of the relative prosperity of a nation, health statistics are an important way to compare and contrast. Pretending it's not important is just being foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
Cost and Marketing:
1. Cost
Apple's BOM costs aren't meaningfully higher than any of their competitors. I'm guessing their vig to the media conglomerates is about the same. They are working on the same cost structure which means microsoft has no advantage going in. It is very likely the zune will never operate as a profitable project by itself. It may be around for a while and they will destroy all of their OEM vendors business along the way. But, legitimate business that threatens the ipod it won't ever be.
2. Marketing
I had the great pleasure of seeing a zune poster pasted onto the temporary wall of a construction. Apple-class marketing it was not. I don't doubt that MS will throw a ton of money at the zune and it will have meaningful market share. But only because it will be cheap.
I recently discovered this doing a little compliance work. I double-checked the EULA.txt on a couple of XP Pro machines, they were the same and do not mention transfer of any sort. So, we can't give away old PC's with XP to employees who may want them as a CYA. (I use Kubuntu to solve this. And they are quite happy users.)
It may be a very serious issue for groups like Freecycle (http://www.freecycle.org/) where there are many people giving away computers on a regular basis. Probably not XP right now, but soon enough. I see a big fat litigation target on their back.
and it wants it's bubble back.
Seriously though, I think this is another sign that Sun isn't focused. Yes they have product and technology, but I don't see them turning it into sales. Company hasn't kept up with market changes in this way.
Warm and fuzzy this may be, but show me the money!
What you fail to understand is the liabilities involved in letting another organization use a proprietary logo.
If the unauthorized use of logos were not prosecuted by a company I could do lots of fun things. For example, I could repackage the gimp, throw photoshop's splash image in it and call it photoshopper. Maybe the name of my company would be AdobeHut too. Better still, I'll put a "circle R" next to all of it and make it look official.
If Adobe doesn't throw every last lawyer at me, then lots of other people could do it. The courts would see it as essentially public domain. Meanwhile, I can drag Adobe into court for using my logo. Crazy right?
Both parties are doing the right thing here. I doubt it really consumed very much time/energy on the part of the project as these kinds of details must be addressed and that's about it.
Stories like this tend to make a figurative fire where there is none.
Clearly Spamhaus does not have enough friends in high places. If they -had- K Street influence, (Cha-Ching! $$) their dire court situation would be relieved to a great extent by legislative or some other branch of gov't giving them a way out.
Look at how long and how much money it took for the Crackberry developer to get the federal gov't to do things like the "emergency review" and subsequent invalidation of the submarine patent owner that went after them while they were clearly set to lose in court to the submarine patent holder.
I would be very interested to see/hear if there isn't K Street pressure to kill spamhaus off so other companies that DO legislate can make consumers pay more for the "luxury" of good spam filtering.
The studios controlling the distribution of these films are the big winners again.
Retail DVD costs: Media, replication, packaging, distribution, slotting fees, spoils and other logistics problems, and varying amounts of advertising. Throw in the loss of control of the DVD content. That's your priviledge to make and keep personal copies, freedom to play the movie when and where you want. Don't forget the graft required to get stuff on the shelves of your average big box retailer, loss of control of the distribution channel once it hits the retailer's dock and a million other tiny headaches.
Retail Download: Zero duplication costs, nominal distribution costs, advertising. *Total* control of distribution, ability to control when and where the consumer can play the content. (windows media player 11 has this feature) Beyond that granular control of the rights conferred upon the consumer through DRM.
Consumers are willing and happy to trade their freedom for $2. The studio pocket millions of extra dollars.
For every j@ck@ss that thinks this is the "free market" at work, will they please explain where the innovation is in this model? How is the consumer market for movies -more- competitive as a result? I can't see how consumers benefit in an industry controlled by an oligopoly.
Will someone please tell me what the infatuation with standardized testing is about?
You get to rank kids, but you also get kids that have trained for the test. I have two sisters that are teachers that quite specifically teach to the test-du-jour. I mean not just a couple of weeks, but every single day's learning plan is oriented around the test the kids take that year.
So, we've got kids being trained for a test, which is certainly not an "education." Or maybe that's what passes for an education for the unwashed, shrinking middle-class masses in America?
The analyst is captures the essence of American big-business, "Don't do anything new." Just remix something already on the shelf. It's better."
This is low-cost producer corporateThink. America cannot be the low-cost producer. So the obligation is to innovate.
But the wealthiest 2% can't stand innovation because it is a direct threat to their wealth. They go to Washington and legislate innovation away.
I left the environment that this analyst describes because it rotten. It rots the brain!
Now I work in a company where my superiors have the same disregard for this kind of thinking and we're doing well. The sky is not the limit though. They are small enough no competitors care, but definitely delivering value to our customers.
On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with this.
/. headline. Microsoft's reach is greater, gov't acts quickly to their requests while other industries suffer a kind of benign neglect until they pay to play. That's political shock and awe in action!
Practically every country in the world would lobby for a company the size of MS if it was in their backyard. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is a good thing(TM). America has to aggressively expand trade of it's goods and services worldwide.
We all know that the underlying issue is what makes it
Whatever they claim just doesn't sound right because, you know... That whole Napster thing... And, you know, those napster users were probably smoking teh pot too. Criminals. All of them.
The judge is thinking there's no way files can be legitimately shared... Who makes their own music? Why would they want to give it away? Smells like some kind of crazy thing my weird liberal parents might have done.
Let's not forget the judge has a windows desktop using totally proprietary software with antivirus and antispyware and anti-this and anti-that run by a system administrator who babysits the judge when the computer has a hic-up.
The judge experiences it all as working and working well, so where's the crime here?
End of LimeWire.
get ASICs and whatnot that do the job faster than software
I agree with you in principal(sp?) but I have a question:
As we upgrade some machines, I've got dual cpu (1.5ghz =/-) and 2+GB RAM being replaced by dual cores. Would server hardware be able to handle as much, if not more than the cisco asics (2800's mostly) I've got?
I get a damn good router for free. And I've got a spare parts inventory + redundancy. What am I missing?
Summary: Works great, supposed problem sounds like it was a driver issue more than an application issue.
Reads like a well-placed article-vertisement.
The "as long as we're not switching half the US" comment are the one's I grow tired of. It's a well-wrapped insult.
I'm not saying Linux is the best tool for routing half the nation, but the comment points out some things that do prevent more linux adoption.
1. "free" is not as good as something I paid for
2. Don't fsck with the status quo.
I admin a company 100% cisco routers/firewalls and I know for a fact Linux can do what gets done.
I'm not going to tell the boss to "just" switch or evangelize too much because of the social/economic implications of doing so may impact my future. I like my employer, they like me, so when we need another router, it's a cisco. I am personally disappointed by this, but I think it explains why innovation takes -so- long to come to the data center. (at least in the U.S.)
Let's not forget that cisco can fire most of their software devs and use a linux-based router project if it ever got close to competing with some Cisco products. Does that qualify as innovation? I'd say no. It's not cheaper or better.
and they want their dot-com bubble back.
Is the "value" here equivalent to television? Something to flush time down the toilet?
Please enlighten me.
I think I'd say the same thing if I was talking to a reporter.
I seriously doubt ethics suddenly kicked in at some threshold number of sites. Instead, I would argue there is some kind of point beyond which managing so many parked domains stops getting really profitable.
Between the cheating story from a couple of days ago and this, I'd say trying to earn an honest day's pay is much harder. It is for me anyway.
She's doing a great job taking the heat on this.
In these situations, the people pushing the project through is intentionally unclear.
This is the beauty of most structured proposal systems that local/state/federal gov'ts. From a citizens perspective, they look like they control graft and corruption. It only creates a level of obscurity.
Something to consider:
1. How does keynote benefit?
Keynote's VoIP Competitive Monitoring Solution addresses the need of marketing and operations executives to understand their performance relative to competitors, and to gauge the impact on the end-user experience of both their infrastructure investments in new markets and their enhancements to services in existing markets.
They have a pretty big incentive to excite some potential customers.
2. What was the methodology?
Keynote placed local and long distance VoIP calls to destination phone numbers on a standard (PSTN) phone service. Calls were placed from San Francisco and New York once every 30 minutes on every VoIP provider and network carrier combination. A total of 125,000 calls were placed over a month-long period. Calls placed using competing VoIP services were compared to traditional phone "toll quality" standards to determine what residential customers can expect when switching from traditional phone lines to VoIP.
Who is -every- VOIP provider?
My personal experience with VOIP over cable was definitely worse service than POTS for the same price as POTS. Where's the value the cableco was supposed to be providing?
Okay, I'm not so much the grammer freak, but this one is not good.
"students confessed cheating" maybe?
No. Hardly.
This is more plausible deniability on NASDAQ's part. It looks like they are playing "Tough Electronic Market Enforcer." Like most policies and procedures:
1. Some Admin Assistant at each company gets to fill out forms and write letters to the Exchange for someone else to sign.
2. Forms are sent to NASDAQ for "review" which takes a remarkably long time. So long in fact that Dell gets the SEC matter resolved through political donations to a couple of PAC's and their local reps.
3. And in the nick of time so both companies get to stay on the exchange!
The -only- people that get the book thrown at them are egregious and stupid violators that don't knuckle under or don't pay to play. Martha Stewart is an excellent example. Complicated schemes like back-dating options will catch 1 maybe two of at least dozens of companies that did it. The proverbial "mission accomplished."
The good news may be that Microsofties may have reached that state in a mega-corp where the sycophants essentially create a reality distortion field of their own so things like:
Team of Analysts and 10-slide powerpoint:
"Ipod price is so high and our margin would be so good we can dominate this market." (actually said with convoluted marketing speak as to create plausible deniability)
PHB's:
Nod. Say nothing. "Okay, thank you." Analysts leave room.
PHB's continue:
"We can leverage our synergies and create new markets....." "Get a product development team together and get started right away! Bob, I'm putting you in charge of this. Make sure it complies with Restricted Media Systems group policies."
Fastforward 6 months:
Bob says to his PHB: "I'm shocked, -shocked- I tell you that Apple can lower their prices like this. Don't worry Boss project MP3 player it's going to be great it's got a cool wireless feature for sharing. Retail Sales group is very excited."
Boss: "Does it comply with Restricted Media Systems group policies?"
Bob: "Oh yes sir!"
Fast forward 3 months:
Bob revises resume. 200X-2006 Zune Project Manager. Maximized Profits, Opened new markets, Created Dynamic Synergies with global partners. Leaves MS to join web 2.0 startup selling AJAX GUI's.
Fast forward another year:
Zune product $9.99 at your nearest pc inventory liquidator. Project is buried and never spoken of again. Bob's boss is promoted to Senior Executive Vice-President of Security Products. Bob gets another job at another startup as the last organization "..failed to satisfy market synergies."
Seriously, Microsoft doesn't have a chance when the BOM on the flash-based units is about $10. Probably less. The Flash RAM is likely the most expensive thing in there. The disk based models are less than $10 before paying for the disk. So maybe $20 tops BOM cost? The advertising/hype will be clever and everywhere and they'll lower the price like crazy to get it off the shelf at Worst Buy.
This looks and smells like a DOA.
and it lives up to the Debian standard of reliable running, even in testing.
They've got a nice fully functioning gui net installer for etch that worked perfectly for me on a Dell 2300 server with raided SCSI drives. I did a basic LAMP+desktop install. They changed the default sshd install to use keys. (as in public key in ~/.ssh/known_hosts file) Excellent! I'm looking forward to finding more of my usual security tweeks configured as default.
It's testing, so the usual security warnings apply.
I think that there may be a little more sense of urgency at the Debian project with some legitimate competition from deep-pockets Shuttleworth. My etch install suggests they are responding with better product and new ideas to accelerate the development pace.
Install it today! http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
1. Napster is right where the labels want them. The red-headed step child nobody wants.
2. This is exactly what happens in markets with wealthy, powerful companies unfettered by regulation. Price fixing, absurd litigation, even more absurd legislation.
3. Let's not forget their outdated business model which, in 2006 looks good for another 25 years. It took them 3-5 years as enforcer to force consumers to treat mp3's like vinyl.
It's like punk rock was in the 80's. Only with fiddles and twangy stuff
http://www.crowmedicine.com/
for next-gen media.
If one studio attempts to license the proposed CD format, how will it get made in a low cost manner? More specifically, you will need at least one manufacturer to build the machine to burn the media on a large scale.
Who in their right mind will build the production equipment for a -single- studio owned technology? Say they don't make the manufacturer pay extortion, what cd production house will invest in the hardware for a -single- studio?
At this point some joker must have the patent for 4:3 on one side, 16:9 on the other.
and most countries do it to their citizens in order to achieve some end.
Now, companies and people can do it to each other!
Seriously though, take a step back for a moment and ask yourself a couple of questions:
1. Why should I trust anything on the site in question? They don't say they are purveyors of trustworthy data. I think the problem is that "trustworthy videos" may not be an expectation they want to meet.
2. What does anyone gain by visiting the site in question?
It's not patient care that is responsible for the bloat in Healthcare job creation, it's all of the backend BS that our current system requires to keep those care providers paid.
I would argue the one major bottleneck is at the doctor level. But you bring up another good point because that backend BS is all proprietary and sorely in need of standardization.
There are a lot of various, standard industry tools which can be used to automate these data entry type jobs.
This is where you are wrong. Every insurance entity has a different and intentionally very complex billing system that burdens the entire system. And then, ask a doctor how far out his Insurance Co. Accounts Recievables have become over the last 10 years.
Myths debunked, one at a time:
When you go see a doctor for any old cold, bruise, cracked rib
I agree that the vast majority of the time, it is in fact a wasted visit. However, because of the design of American medical care, there isn't an alternative to seeing a doctor. Maybe the ideal here is a first-level practitioner who is not a doctor, but can weed out the common cold cases? Again, the medical system is NOT set up like that.
Since those on insurance or socialized healthcare don't have to pay the doctor much if anything
I agree that medical care is like freeways, there is infinite demand for consumption. To extend/abuse the analogy, freeways aren't stuffed with cars 24/7. Neither are public health systems. No public health care system is perfect. But some offer a great deal more services than others AND reduce the social cost of sickness in a country.
you increase the demand for a doctor's service
Temporarily. You conveniently forget the temporary spike in demand while medical colleges pump out more doctors to satisfy demand. But, in the U.S. the system is not designed like this. Maybe you get more doctors, but the system is designed to support -only- doctors dispensing medical care. So there is no way to innovate/automate care.
Healthcare is not a right, it's an industry
I agree that health care is not a -right- per se, but more of an expectation that the wealthiest country in the world should provide health insurance as kind of a basic service like sewage and electricity. Sadly we provide it to less than 50% of it's population. That's without even approaching the issue of what passes for "health insurance." And yet, we manage to provide electricity reliably through a very regulated industry. Hmmm. So -maybe- regulated markets work sometimes?
To provide healthcare, you need:
Yes to the first item, no to the rest. How is innovation lowering my health care costs? It hasn't.
attachment to good health
As a barometer of the relative prosperity of a nation, health statistics are an important way to compare and contrast. Pretending it's not important is just being foolish.