In the UK, the unit is a government defined measure. Roughly equivalent to one glass of 12% wine, of a size of which there are 6 to the standard 750ml bottle. Or a half pint of ordinary strength beer - under 4%.
It is however getting harder for the ordinary person to measure his/her intake in the UK, because the average pub wine glass is now much bigger than this, and the average beer/lager is stronger. In addition, the young are drinking large quantities of 'alcopops' - basically a mixture of fruit flavourings and water with alcohol, and its impossible to tell by intuition how much you are getting. Not that they care.
The results of all this, and other sellouts to the drinks industry, and the demolition of educational standards in British State Schools, can be seen on British city sidwalks every Friday and Saturday night. And in emergency rooms later in the evening. And in the road accident reports in provincial newspapers on Sunday and Monday. And in the clumps of dying flowers that increasingly decorate accident sites along our country roads.
It is very common in the world of Apple to answer a question starting with 'why would I want to do X' with a rhetorical question explaining why Apple would want me to do X. Its not an answer. He knows why Apple wants it. What he doesn't understand is why he should want it even though Apple wants him to want it. The question is not why Apple is selling various things in various ways, the question is, how are they making this method of selling attractive to the customer? Answer: they are not, and only if you think that what Apple wants is the only thing that matters, will you fail to see that.
In a similar vein, why should I pay over the odds for an underpowered Mini? Answer: because Apple's strategy is to sell it to you. Yes, but what about me? It is my money, right?
Well, you forgot part of it, which is even more bizarre. Back then when the predictions were of oil running out, there were also predictions of dramatic die-offs in the US population by the year 2000, and it was also being predicted that we would be seeing global cooling on a scale grand enough to cause massive crop failures and famines....
And no-one ever held up their hand, apologized, and said they had been just wrong. Instead the same people seamlessly started talking about the dangers of global warming.
You don't understand at all. Its about the viability of MacOS as a business platform. If you cannot, in a business environment, reliably exchange files, you don't have a viable platform. It may not matter to you personally, but it will matter to your coworkers and your employer. Its another step in the exclusion of Macs from the business world.
The slow unravelling of Yahoo is a warning. If you want to make money in "growth" companies, there are three ways to do it.
1) Buy on the way up, hold on until after the point of fear until complacency arrives, then sell.
2) After the first crash, buy at the bottom and hold until the second crest. It will then crash again.
3) Wait then until it sells for 10 times last year's earnings and pays a dividend and is out of fashion.
Who knows whether Yahoo will make it to stage three. But if it does, and only then, will it deserve to be considered an possible investment. Until then, its a wild speculation. You can make and lose fortunes on wild speculations. Its not investment.
The point of OpenXML is to raise the entry barriers for competitors. It is a huge complicated spec, that only an organization the size of MS will be able to fully implement. In addition, users will be encouraged to save their data in a format that is itself open, but which incorporates large elements that are not open, and which are not available for other platforms than Windows.
However, the problem is not that Novell has decided to support it. The problem is that the standards bodies accepted it as a standard.
Save your documents in something else. Doesn't matter what - pdf or odf will be fine. Not this.
Hitler to General Staff: We are going to bomb New York.
General Staff: Our planes can't get there, if they could get there, they couldn't get there and carry bombs, if they could get there and carry bombs, they then couldn't get back.
Hitler: Don't bother me with details, I am thinking strategically.
OO macros however, its not sweet, its simply diabolical. No chance for a non-programmer. You may not approve of non-programmers using MS Office macros. But fact is, there are a few small things lots of people want to automate, which they can do easily in MS Office, and not at all in OO. Like, for instance, having a character input, any character input, which would operate the toolbar total button... Easier to write your own application from scratch than try to figure out how to write an OO macro to do this.
The UK Language Ministry admitted in response to questioning that it was investigating the possibility that pirated copies of English may have been exported to the US, Canada and New Zealand in previous centuries. 'All we are interested in doing' said a spokesperson 'is making sure our citizens get the proper returns on their intellectual property' She went on to explain that the UK had devoted millions of man years of development into raising English to its present expressive levels from its Germanic, Anglo Saxon and Norman roots.
She agreed that what was probably needed was a test case to clarify the matter. 'We would pick some arbitrary person, like a mother in Kalamazoo, who has been observed and recorded teaching her child an illegally copied version of our language. Then we will sue the hell out of her. Win or lose, that will encourage others to pay proper royalties to the UK, and ensure that further development of our language can be properly funded'.
We are getting there slowly. BECTA in the UK has already mandated that all Office type software used in the education sector in the UK must be able to save in open formats. It will then be a fairly short step to mandating the use of formats which must already be available. So we will get there. BECTA has woken up to the fear of losing access to data. Once this fear bites, a solution will emerge, and it will be open. It is very funny to have little chats with vendors who are struck dumb with horror at the prospect of having to provide for csv exports. They tell you what a terrible format it is. You smile sweetly and say, yes, isn't it awful.
Used license sales? Yes, there was a case in the UK a while back, and a company doing it. It is lawful. Of course, you have to make sure that what you are reselling really is a right to the software. And if you sell it and keep and run a copy, you are breaking copyright. But it is indeed legal to resell a retail copy of Office, XP or whatever.
Whether its a drag on the new book sale business, that used books can be sold? Well, its just the way it is.
Agreed, but probably some companies do license software. They enter into a contract for a defined term, after which the right to use expires, and they have the right to deploy on an indefinite number of machines. That probably really is a license. But you must be right about individual or bulk retail copies.
Its the difference between a university library, having the right for students and faculty to access online materials, in exchange for an annual subscription, and you or me buying a copy of the journal in the store. Software retail purchases are much more like the second.
I agree that intangibles do not have to be depreciated. However, we are not talking intangibles here, we are not talking trademarks, we are talking this particular copy, on this CD, serial number nnn which I just bought in Best Buy, source MS. Either MS or Best Buy owns this, or I do. Which is it? I'm not an expert, but have come on one UK case in which this question was tested in the courts for tax purposes, and it was held that the lack of any continuing financial interest by the seller, and the lack of any continuing financial obligations by the buyer, meant that it was a purchase and not a license - which made a difference to the tax treatment.
Yes, earlier post abut site license with a defined term, probably so. That probably really is a license not a sale.
Did I license my copy of the World According to Garp? Regardless of what it says in the Eula in the front cover, the answer is no, I bought it. I can read it in the bath if I want.
Ask the hard question: what exactly is it about banking and brokering ONLINE that is so attractive and necessary? This is what should worry you, the motivation about finance sites. Some people lose all sense of danger as they age.
To give a real Internet appliance, do a minimal install of Debian with Windowmaker. Large icons in top right for web, mail, word processor, maybe photo app. People with previous computer phobias react astonishingly well to this setup, comments like, of course I can use THAT are normal. Not a fashionable choice, not what everyone else has, but its a real appliance, and it will be super fast. Ephipany will be better than firefox. Evolution or Kmail are nice because they do addresses, calendar, notes and so on. Evolution in particular can give new users a sense of it helping them organize their lives. Abiword is better than OO. If shopping is an issue, set up the shopping sites in the toolbar bookmarks under 'shopping'.
Strongly discourage banking and brokering unless there is some real extraordinary reason why phone calls to a known person will not do. How many transactions? What's the problem this solves, exactly?
But even with an appliance, its only safer, its not safe.
"The first problem is, you may think you bought a copy of the operating system. Actually, the OS is still owned by Microsoft."
Not at all sure this is true. Not that, maybe, it makes all that much difference in practice in this particular instance.
If they own it, its an asset, it must have value, be on their books, be depreciated. None of which is true. But it is on your books, and you can depreciate it, write it off against taxes and so on. If we're saying, it is theirs, you have licensed it, by a one time payment with no further obligations to them, how does it differ from a sale except in name?
I suspect that legally what is going on is that you have bought your copy alright. Its just that what you have bought is a product with certain features/limitations, of which activation is one.
This probably doesn't matter when it comes to the present situation, because product activation and so on are just part of the product. But if it were a case of stopping you from moving it from machine A to B to C, it might. If they were to tell you what machine to install it on, it might matter also. Or, whether you can run it under Wine. In all those cases the difference between them and you owning your copy might matter a lot. But not in terms of what features it has.
All the same, I think you bought your copy, and you really do own it.
Re:Not this guy again...
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Think you have given too much credit. Its not ignorance, its wilful. If you read the chart, he says he thinks there is a market where share numbers are as follows:
48.3% MS 15.9% Dell 9.4$ HP 4.6% Apple.....and so on.
Apparently 'other' have 19% of this market.
Now, you just have to ask what the units are to see this is nuts. Suppose there are 100 of these things being shipped. He is saying MS shipped 48, and Dell 16. It must follow that none of the Dell ones were MS ones, whereas in fact we know that all of the Dell ones were ALSO MS ones. However, Eran is not stupid, and knows this as well as everyone here does. But he says it anyway.
Its just cult behaviour. You used to find the same thing in old hardline Communists, who would explain to you how the labour theory of value worked, and that if you just understood correctly you would see that the Soviet economy was far bigger than the US. Or that the Hungarians had invited in the Russians in '56 to support their working class comrades.
Obviously you do not do market share like this. Here's an example. In the lawnmower business, Honda makes lawnmowers and also engines for lawnmowers. Now, what is Honda's market share?
If we add up all LM engines sold, and all LMs sold, and count every Honda LM twice (because its an LM and an engine both), does this give us a better picture of Honda's share than the conventional method? Of course it doesn't, because it mixes up two distinct things of which Honda's shipments can vary independently.
The correct and conventional approach would be to say that there are two markets: LM engines, and LMs. And you can have different and independent shares of each one. And Honda can do great in engines and not so great in LMs. Or it can only ship its engines with its own LMs. None of this makes any difference to the fact that there are two product markets, and that Honda, shipping its own engines in its own LMs, has x% share of the LM market.
The interesting thing about the Apple fanatics is not their arguments on this, which are obviously nuts. The issue is their trustworthiness and credibility, given that they keep trying this stuff, when they must know it is wrong.
Eran and Co are the best reason anyone would want for never having anything to do with Apple.
The problem you will have if you clone an existing passport and use it is the same problem you have if you clone an existing credit card and use it. Patterns of use are a giveaway. In fact, what you would really like as law enforcement is for it to be very easy for a resourceful and determined group to clone, but impossible for anyone to alter. That way at every use you would pick up the patterns. You would rapidly know whether a passport was being used fraudulently. You would then have options for surveillance or detention at will. The criminal would simply see that his passport appeared to work flawlessly.
If you are worried about terrorists in particular using cloned passports, this is exactly what you want. If a retired bank manager, John Jones of Tunbridge Wells, suddenly starts flying to the Sudan and Pakistan, you know you are onto something....
Yes this is right. If you find your chosen organizational/management structure requires IT projects of this size, and using custom components, you have the wrong organization/management structure. Think again, find a way to make it smaller and more decentralized.
In military terms, if your chosen plan requires more men to be landed on beaches than you have ships to land them...think again.
It is a refusal, despite experience, to acknowledge that the issues with large custom IT projects are as real as material constraints.
I search quite a lot, on a variety of topics, never for porn, and can't remember coming on porn on the first page of results, ever. So the answer to your question (2) in at least one person's experience is, almost impossible for this to happen. I do (1) too occasionally to have a firm opinion - Slate for instance, or the Washington Post. Answer is the same, but this may not be representative.
Its a fine argument, but its not backed up by the facts. If it were true, MRSA rates should be lower where cleaners worked for the NHS directly. They are not. Where MRSA rates are lower in the UK is in the private sector. Cleaning in the sense of floor cleaning is not the real problem by the way, though cleaners get blamed for what is absolutely not their fault.
MRSA mainly results in the UK from two causes. One is that nurses, who are immune to disciplinary action being like all NHS staff members of the Public Sector Union, do not wash their hands between patients, and nothing is ever going to make them. This is a general symptom of the total lack of management at ground level in the NHS. There are analogies in the State Education Sector, where teachers for many years successfully campaigned against any measurements of pupil learning, and fiercely resisted any teaching methods which would actually produce improved literacy.
Second is that the NHS is trying to keep bed occupancy over 90% and would like to reach 100% were it possible, something no private sector hospital would ever attempt, because the consequences in terms of hospital spread infections are too great for the private sector to afford. The people who direct the policy in the NHS never see the costs of dealing with its consequences.
As to the IT debacle now under way, you have to realise that the NHS is one employer from a labor and contract and union perspective. From a management perspective it is totally fragmented. From a patient perspective it is regional. The IT debacle, like the endless numbers of targets set by Government, are efforts to overcome the consequences of this for patient care. Like similar initiatives in the former Soviet Union, they all fail. Just like similar initiatives in the Education sector all fail.
The NHS is a compulsory membership, defined contribution, discretionary benefits scheme. You will always be cared for by a Unison member nurse. What treatment you may receive, what drugs you get, how long you wait, will always be a function of non-medical considerations, like the state of the local budget, your local rules on what is available. You cannot tell in advance for any given illness whether you are covered in practice. In principle you are covered, its just that, as in the former Soviet Union, there may not be any in stock right now. You don't believe it? Why are old ladies in droves taking second mortgages on their houses, travelling to the Continent to get hip operations which they have already paid for once via the NHS? Because they are covered, but not for any particular treatment in any particular place in any particular timescale. Consider the case of Ipswich. A state owned hospital was denied funding for operations by its local State Health Authority because it had violated the rules on MININUM waiting times. It was doing operations too soon, and too many of them.
The NHS systematically transfers the risk of financially catastrophic illness onto the patient, by refusing to treat, on budgetary grounds.
If you want to see how social health care can work, deliver equitable and reasonably cost effective care, and not leave the poor out, look across the channel at the Benelux countries. Centralised, state run insurance coupled with decentralised non-state run delivery does it. No waiting lists, low infection rates, well defined entitlements.
The main obstacle to this in the UK is the focus on doing centrally what is of least importance to patients - having one unionized work force all working for the same organisation. And doing locally what is positively harmful - determining entitlements.
If the NHS were a home insurer, and you had a fire, this is how it would go. You'd present yourself to the local office with a claim. You'd be told that of course you were covered. Now, lets see what you need. Ah yes, those kinds of joists have not yet been approved by the National Institue of Roofing Excellence for this kind of remedial work. Sorry abou
The NHS is the largest employer in the world, except maybe for the Indian and Chinese militaries.
You probably do have to have an IT system this big, if you are going to have an organisation this big.
Sensible people see this is one of many reasons not to have an organisation this big. But not the British Government. They really like big centralised organisations. They are the solution.
No, you are not living in some bizzaro world. Most people hate these commercials. But no, Apple are not shooting themselves in the foot. Your reaction is exactly what Cupertino is trying to produce, or rather, its exactly half of what they are trying to produce.
The message is supposed to do two things: encourage the faithful and irritate those outside the cult. It is necessary to irritate those outside, so that they can express their irritation. This will increase the sense that the faithful have that they are a superior minority under attack by yahoos. But the faithful are told how much better they are than their attackers. The message is that the number of the elect is small, that everyone outside their number is silly and ignorant, and probably low class rednecks in addition.
The problem with this as a marketing approach is the requirements it starts to place on the product itself. The Mini had to be different in some way physically. The dysfunctional form factor and terrible price performance ratio is a consequence. But, you walk into a store, and it is different. The all-in-one design is dysfunctional - it leads to replacement not upgrading and you are always throwing out perfectly good screens. But it is different. And you can then argue that people who don't see the great superiority of the designs are just idiots, which will irritate them, and keep the cycle going.
Apple is a terrible company, not because of the products, not even because of DRM, not because of overpricing, but because of the way it engages in cult marketing in collusion with the MacFanatics. It has deliberately tried and considerably succeeded in persuading people to have feelings for a company that would be better felt towards something higher, and one of the worst aspects of this strategy is its continual efforts to irritate outsiders. Its as if some tiny church were to continually take out ads portraying all non-members as degenerates. It would certainly cement the devotion of the faithful. But at what cost?
This is really just a replay of the format wars that crippled earlier media/player ventures. Its a bit harder to see because its technical incompatibility based on DRM rather than on physical design. But it will have the same effect: it will slow down adoption. What made the CD work was the standard. That's also what made the DVD work.
In a way, those of us with a deep interest in intellectual freedom should applaud this. The only thing likely to destry DRM'd media is consumer resistance, and that is only likely to come from perceived inconvenience. The greatest contributor to a perception of inconvenience is multiple incompatible coding schemes.
So, good for MS for introducing not one but two. More power to them! Lets hope they make a real dent in iPod/iTunes. Enough to make people stop trying to tie media to their own hardware and move into the present century.
Not at all sure about the legal rights and wrongs of this in the EU. If you are Dell, you are in exactly the same position as Apple. You are not technically a monopoly, as you have less than 25% market share. On the other hand, unlike Apple, you are engaging in linked sales with a product (Windows) which is technically a monopoly. But can you be guilty of anti competitive conduct without monopoly share, just because one of your suppliers has monopoly share? I would have thought not.
Dell or Apple surely did the same thing: they simply made a choice of supplier of OS. The supplier of the OS might well be guilty of anti competitive practices and abuse of market power if, for instance, he charged a royalty on every PC shipped, instead of every copy of the OS shipped. Note that Apple could not be guilty of this because it doesn't have monopoly share of OS.
The supplier of the OS, MS, appears to have given the guarantee that if you don't want "the product", which in this case seems to mean the software, that you can return it to your distributor and get a refund. Probably then, for the supplier of the OS to charge the distributor for all software shipped, rather than software shipped net of returns, might be anti-competitive behaviour.
Its a bit of a minefield, and what one really needs is advice from someone in the legal profession specialising in this issue.
I am not at all sure that the people who argue earlier that a retailer must give you a refund, and must unbundle sales, are correct. They are perfectly entitled, for instance, to sell dining room sets. They are under no obligation to sell you the chairs separately. It may be smart to make some arrangement to this effect, but I'm very doubtful that it is legally obligatory, particularly if they are able to argue that by restricting their range, they get a better deal and offer better prices. There are lots of people selling dining room sets and other furniture in the UK whose whole method of operation is, this is a package, take it or leave it. I don't think its unlawful.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK, the unit is a government defined measure. Roughly equivalent to one glass of 12% wine, of a size of which there are 6 to the standard 750ml bottle. Or a half pint of ordinary strength beer - under 4%.
It is however getting harder for the ordinary person to measure his/her intake in the UK, because the average pub wine glass is now much bigger than this, and the average beer/lager is stronger. In addition, the young are drinking large quantities of 'alcopops' - basically a mixture of fruit flavourings and water with alcohol, and its impossible to tell by intuition how much you are getting. Not that they care.
The results of all this, and other sellouts to the drinks industry, and the demolition of educational standards in British State Schools, can be seen on British city sidwalks every Friday and Saturday night. And in emergency rooms later in the evening. And in the road accident reports in provincial newspapers on Sunday and Monday. And in the clumps of dying flowers that increasingly decorate accident sites along our country roads.
It is very common in the world of Apple to answer a question starting with 'why would I want to do X' with a rhetorical question explaining why Apple would want me to do X. Its not an answer. He knows why Apple wants it. What he doesn't understand is why he should want it even though Apple wants him to want it. The question is not why Apple is selling various things in various ways, the question is, how are they making this method of selling attractive to the customer? Answer: they are not, and only if you think that what Apple wants is the only thing that matters, will you fail to see that.
In a similar vein, why should I pay over the odds for an underpowered Mini? Answer: because Apple's strategy is to sell it to you. Yes, but what about me? It is my money, right?
Well, you forgot part of it, which is even more bizarre. Back then when the predictions were of oil running out, there were also predictions of dramatic die-offs in the US population by the year 2000, and it was also being predicted that we would be seeing global cooling on a scale grand enough to cause massive crop failures and famines....
And no-one ever held up their hand, apologized, and said they had been just wrong. Instead the same people seamlessly started talking about the dangers of global warming.
Its called being of an hysterical disposition.
You don't understand at all. Its about the viability of MacOS as a business platform. If you cannot, in a business environment, reliably exchange files, you don't have a viable platform. It may not matter to you personally, but it will matter to your coworkers and your employer. Its another step in the exclusion of Macs from the business world.
The slow unravelling of Yahoo is a warning. If you want to make money in "growth" companies, there are three ways to do it.
1) Buy on the way up, hold on until after the point of fear until complacency arrives, then sell.
2) After the first crash, buy at the bottom and hold until the second crest. It will then crash again.
3) Wait then until it sells for 10 times last year's earnings and pays a dividend and is out of fashion.
Who knows whether Yahoo will make it to stage three. But if it does, and only then, will it deserve to be considered an possible investment. Until then, its a wild speculation. You can make and lose fortunes on wild speculations. Its not investment.
The point of OpenXML is to raise the entry barriers for competitors. It is a huge complicated spec, that only an organization the size of MS will be able to fully implement. In addition, users will be encouraged to save their data in a format that is itself open, but which incorporates large elements that are not open, and which are not available for other platforms than Windows.
However, the problem is not that Novell has decided to support it. The problem is that the standards bodies accepted it as a standard.
Save your documents in something else. Doesn't matter what - pdf or odf will be fine. Not this.
Hitler to General Staff: We are going to bomb New York.
General Staff: Our planes can't get there, if they could get there, they couldn't get there and carry bombs, if they could get there and carry bombs, they then couldn't get back.
Hitler: Don't bother me with details, I am thinking strategically.
OO macros however, its not sweet, its simply diabolical. No chance for a non-programmer. You may not approve of non-programmers using MS Office macros. But fact is, there are a few small things lots of people want to automate, which they can do easily in MS Office, and not at all in OO. Like, for instance, having a character input, any character input, which would operate the toolbar total button... Easier to write your own application from scratch than try to figure out how to write an OO macro to do this.
The UK Language Ministry admitted in response to questioning that it was investigating the possibility that pirated copies of English may have been exported to the US, Canada and New Zealand in previous centuries. 'All we are interested in doing' said a spokesperson 'is making sure our citizens get the proper returns on their intellectual property' She went on to explain that the UK had devoted millions of man years of development into raising English to its present expressive levels from its Germanic, Anglo Saxon and Norman roots.
She agreed that what was probably needed was a test case to clarify the matter. 'We would pick some arbitrary person, like a mother in Kalamazoo, who has been observed and recorded teaching her child an illegally copied version of our language. Then we will sue the hell out of her. Win or lose, that will encourage others to pay proper royalties to the UK, and ensure that further development of our language can be properly funded'.
We are getting there slowly. BECTA in the UK has already mandated that all Office type software used in the education sector in the UK must be able to save in open formats. It will then be a fairly short step to mandating the use of formats which must already be available. So we will get there. BECTA has woken up to the fear of losing access to data. Once this fear bites, a solution will emerge, and it will be open. It is very funny to have little chats with vendors who are struck dumb with horror at the prospect of having to provide for csv exports. They tell you what a terrible format it is. You smile sweetly and say, yes, isn't it awful.
But you see, our trustees....
Yes, this is the usual practice in the UK. In Belgium the practice (and law) is that all phones sell at full price and are unlocked.
Used license sales? Yes, there was a case in the UK a while back, and a company doing it. It is lawful. Of course, you have to make sure that what you are reselling really is a right to the software. And if you sell it and keep and run a copy, you are breaking copyright. But it is indeed legal to resell a retail copy of Office, XP or whatever.
Whether its a drag on the new book sale business, that used books can be sold? Well, its just the way it is.
Agreed, but probably some companies do license software. They enter into a contract for a defined term, after which the right to use expires, and they have the right to deploy on an indefinite number of machines. That probably really is a license. But you must be right about individual or bulk retail copies.
Its the difference between a university library, having the right for students and faculty to access online materials, in exchange for an annual subscription, and you or me buying a copy of the journal in the store. Software retail purchases are much more like the second.
I agree that intangibles do not have to be depreciated. However, we are not talking intangibles here, we are not talking trademarks, we are talking this particular copy, on this CD, serial number nnn which I just bought in Best Buy, source MS. Either MS or Best Buy owns this, or I do. Which is it? I'm not an expert, but have come on one UK case in which this question was tested in the courts for tax purposes, and it was held that the lack of any continuing financial interest by the seller, and the lack of any continuing financial obligations by the buyer, meant that it was a purchase and not a license - which made a difference to the tax treatment.
Yes, earlier post abut site license with a defined term, probably so. That probably really is a license not a sale.
Did I license my copy of the World According to Garp? Regardless of what it says in the Eula in the front cover, the answer is no, I bought it. I can read it in the bath if I want.
Ask the hard question: what exactly is it about banking and brokering ONLINE that is so attractive and necessary? This is what should worry you, the motivation about finance sites. Some people lose all sense of danger as they age.
To give a real Internet appliance, do a minimal install of Debian with Windowmaker. Large icons in top right for web, mail, word processor, maybe photo app. People with previous computer phobias react astonishingly well to this setup, comments like, of course I can use THAT are normal. Not a fashionable choice, not what everyone else has, but its a real appliance, and it will be super fast. Ephipany will be better than firefox. Evolution or Kmail are nice because they do addresses, calendar, notes and so on. Evolution in particular can give new users a sense of it helping them organize their lives. Abiword is better than OO. If shopping is an issue, set up the shopping sites in the toolbar bookmarks under 'shopping'.
Strongly discourage banking and brokering unless there is some real extraordinary reason why phone calls to a known person will not do. How many transactions? What's the problem this solves, exactly?
But even with an appliance, its only safer, its not safe.
"The first problem is, you may think you bought a copy of the operating system. Actually, the OS is still owned by Microsoft."
Not at all sure this is true. Not that, maybe, it makes all that much difference in practice in this particular instance.
If they own it, its an asset, it must have value, be on their books, be depreciated. None of which is true. But it is on your books, and you can depreciate it, write it off against taxes and so on. If we're saying, it is theirs, you have licensed it, by a one time payment with no further obligations to them, how does it differ from a sale except in name?
I suspect that legally what is going on is that you have bought your copy alright. Its just that what you have bought is a product with certain features/limitations, of which activation is one.
This probably doesn't matter when it comes to the present situation, because product activation and so on are just part of the product. But if it were a case of stopping you from moving it from machine A to B to C, it might. If they were to tell you what machine to install it on, it might matter also. Or, whether you can run it under Wine. In all those cases the difference between them and you owning your copy might matter a lot. But not in terms of what features it has.
All the same, I think you bought your copy, and you really do own it.
Think you have given too much credit. Its not ignorance, its wilful. If you read the chart, he says he thinks there is a market where share numbers are as follows:
48.3% MS
15.9% Dell
9.4$ HP
4.6% Apple.....and so on.
Apparently 'other' have 19% of this market.
Now, you just have to ask what the units are to see this is nuts. Suppose there are 100 of these things being shipped. He is saying MS shipped 48, and Dell 16. It must follow that none of the Dell ones were MS ones, whereas in fact we know that all of the Dell ones were ALSO MS ones. However, Eran is not stupid, and knows this as well as everyone here does. But he says it anyway.
Its just cult behaviour. You used to find the same thing in old hardline Communists, who would explain to you how the labour theory of value worked, and that if you just understood correctly you would see that the Soviet economy was far bigger than the US. Or that the Hungarians had invited in the Russians in '56 to support their working class comrades.
Obviously you do not do market share like this. Here's an example. In the lawnmower business, Honda makes lawnmowers and also engines for lawnmowers. Now, what is Honda's market share?
If we add up all LM engines sold, and all LMs sold, and count every Honda LM twice (because its an LM and an engine both), does this give us a better picture of Honda's share than the conventional method? Of course it doesn't, because it mixes up two distinct things of which Honda's shipments can vary independently.
The correct and conventional approach would be to say that there are two markets: LM engines, and LMs. And you can have different and independent shares of each one. And Honda can do great in engines and not so great in LMs. Or it can only ship its engines with its own LMs. None of this makes any difference to the fact that there are two product markets, and that Honda, shipping its own engines in its own LMs, has x% share of the LM market.
The interesting thing about the Apple fanatics is not their arguments on this, which are obviously nuts. The issue is their trustworthiness and credibility, given that they keep trying this stuff, when they must know it is wrong.
Eran and Co are the best reason anyone would want for never having anything to do with Apple.
The problem you will have if you clone an existing passport and use it is the same problem you have if you clone an existing credit card and use it. Patterns of use are a giveaway. In fact, what you would really like as law enforcement is for it to be very easy for a resourceful and determined group to clone, but impossible for anyone to alter. That way at every use you would pick up the patterns. You would rapidly know whether a passport was being used fraudulently. You would then have options for surveillance or detention at will. The criminal would simply see that his passport appeared to work flawlessly.
If you are worried about terrorists in particular using cloned passports, this is exactly what you want. If a retired bank manager, John Jones of Tunbridge Wells, suddenly starts flying to the Sudan and Pakistan, you know you are onto something....
Yes this is right. If you find your chosen organizational/management structure requires IT projects of this size, and using custom components, you have the wrong organization/management structure. Think again, find a way to make it smaller and more decentralized.
In military terms, if your chosen plan requires more men to be landed on beaches than you have ships to land them...think again.
It is a refusal, despite experience, to acknowledge that the issues with large custom IT projects are as real as material constraints.
I search quite a lot, on a variety of topics, never for porn, and can't remember coming on porn on the first page of results, ever. So the answer to your question (2) in at least one person's experience is, almost impossible for this to happen. I do (1) too occasionally to have a firm opinion - Slate for instance, or the Washington Post. Answer is the same, but this may not be representative.
Its a fine argument, but its not backed up by the facts. If it were true, MRSA rates should be lower where cleaners worked for the NHS directly. They are not. Where MRSA rates are lower in the UK is in the private sector. Cleaning in the sense of floor cleaning is not the real problem by the way, though cleaners get blamed for what is absolutely not their fault.
MRSA mainly results in the UK from two causes. One is that nurses, who are immune to disciplinary action being like all NHS staff members of the Public Sector Union, do not wash their hands between patients, and nothing is ever going to make them. This is a general symptom of the total lack of management at ground level in the NHS. There are analogies in the State Education Sector, where teachers for many years successfully campaigned against any measurements of pupil learning, and fiercely resisted any teaching methods which would actually produce improved literacy.
Second is that the NHS is trying to keep bed occupancy over 90% and would like to reach 100% were it possible, something no private sector hospital would ever attempt, because the consequences in terms of hospital spread infections are too great for the private sector to afford. The people who direct the policy in the NHS never see the costs of dealing with its consequences.
As to the IT debacle now under way, you have to realise that the NHS is one employer from a labor and contract and union perspective. From a management perspective it is totally fragmented. From a patient perspective it is regional. The IT debacle, like the endless numbers of targets set by Government, are efforts to overcome the consequences of this for patient care. Like similar initiatives in the former Soviet Union, they all fail. Just like similar initiatives in the Education sector all fail.
The NHS is a compulsory membership, defined contribution, discretionary benefits scheme. You will always be cared for by a Unison member nurse. What treatment you may receive, what drugs you get, how long you wait, will always be a function of non-medical considerations, like the state of the local budget, your local rules on what is available. You cannot tell in advance for any given illness whether you are covered in practice. In principle you are covered, its just that, as in the former Soviet Union, there may not be any in stock right now. You don't believe it? Why are old ladies in droves taking second mortgages on their houses, travelling to the Continent to get hip operations which they have already paid for once via the NHS? Because they are covered, but not for any particular treatment in any particular place in any particular timescale. Consider the case of Ipswich. A state owned hospital was denied funding for operations by its local State Health Authority because it had violated the rules on MININUM waiting times. It was doing operations too soon, and too many of them.
The NHS systematically transfers the risk of financially catastrophic illness onto the patient, by refusing to treat, on budgetary grounds.
If you want to see how social health care can work, deliver equitable and reasonably cost effective care, and not leave the poor out, look across the channel at the Benelux countries. Centralised, state run insurance coupled with decentralised non-state run delivery does it. No waiting lists, low infection rates, well defined entitlements.
The main obstacle to this in the UK is the focus on doing centrally what is of least importance to patients - having one unionized work force all working for the same organisation. And doing locally what is positively harmful - determining entitlements.
If the NHS were a home insurer, and you had a fire, this is how it would go. You'd present yourself to the local office with a claim. You'd be told that of course you were covered. Now, lets see what you need. Ah yes, those kinds of joists have not yet been approved by the National Institue of Roofing Excellence for this kind of remedial work. Sorry abou
The NHS is the largest employer in the world, except maybe for the Indian and Chinese militaries.
You probably do have to have an IT system this big, if you are going to have an organisation this big.
Sensible people see this is one of many reasons not to have an organisation this big. But not the British Government. They really like big centralised organisations. They are the solution.
Now, what was the problem?
No, you are not living in some bizzaro world. Most people hate these commercials. But no, Apple are not shooting themselves in the foot. Your reaction is exactly what Cupertino is trying to produce, or rather, its exactly half of what they are trying to produce.
The message is supposed to do two things: encourage the faithful and irritate those outside the cult. It is necessary to irritate those outside, so that they can express their irritation. This will increase the sense that the faithful have that they are a superior minority under attack by yahoos. But the faithful are told how much better they are than their attackers. The message is that the number of the elect is small, that everyone outside their number is silly and ignorant, and probably low class rednecks in addition.
The problem with this as a marketing approach is the requirements it starts to place on the product itself. The Mini had to be different in some way physically. The dysfunctional form factor and terrible price performance ratio is a consequence. But, you walk into a store, and it is different. The all-in-one design is dysfunctional - it leads to replacement not upgrading and you are always throwing out perfectly good screens. But it is different. And you can then argue that people who don't see the great superiority of the designs are just idiots, which will irritate them, and keep the cycle going.
Apple is a terrible company, not because of the products, not even because of DRM, not because of overpricing, but because of the way it engages in cult marketing in collusion with the MacFanatics. It has deliberately tried and considerably succeeded in persuading people to have feelings for a company that would be better felt towards something higher, and one of the worst aspects of this strategy is its continual efforts to irritate outsiders. Its as if some tiny church were to continually take out ads portraying all non-members as degenerates. It would certainly cement the devotion of the faithful. But at what cost?
This is really just a replay of the format wars that crippled earlier media/player ventures. Its a bit harder to see because its technical incompatibility based on DRM rather than on physical design. But it will have the same effect: it will slow down adoption. What made the CD work was the standard. That's also what made the DVD work.
In a way, those of us with a deep interest in intellectual freedom should applaud this. The only thing likely to destry DRM'd media is consumer resistance, and that is only likely to come from perceived inconvenience. The greatest contributor to a perception of inconvenience is multiple incompatible coding schemes.
So, good for MS for introducing not one but two. More power to them! Lets hope they make a real dent in iPod/iTunes. Enough to make people stop trying to tie media to their own hardware and move into the present century.
Not at all sure about the legal rights and wrongs of this in the EU. If you are Dell, you are in exactly the same position as Apple. You are not technically a monopoly, as you have less than 25% market share. On the other hand, unlike Apple, you are engaging in linked sales with a product (Windows) which is technically a monopoly. But can you be guilty of anti competitive conduct without monopoly share, just because one of your suppliers has monopoly share? I would have thought not.
Dell or Apple surely did the same thing: they simply made a choice of supplier of OS. The supplier of the OS might well be guilty of anti competitive practices and abuse of market power if, for instance, he charged a royalty on every PC shipped, instead of every copy of the OS shipped. Note that Apple could not be guilty of this because it doesn't have monopoly share of OS.
The supplier of the OS, MS, appears to have given the guarantee that if you don't want "the product", which in this case seems to mean the software, that you can return it to your distributor and get a refund. Probably then, for the supplier of the OS to charge the distributor for all software shipped, rather than software shipped net of returns, might be anti-competitive behaviour.
Its a bit of a minefield, and what one really needs is advice from someone in the legal profession specialising in this issue.
I am not at all sure that the people who argue earlier that a retailer must give you a refund, and must unbundle sales, are correct. They are perfectly entitled, for instance, to sell dining room sets. They are under no obligation to sell you the chairs separately. It may be smart to make some arrangement to this effect, but I'm very doubtful that it is legally obligatory, particularly if they are able to argue that by restricting their range, they get a better deal and offer better prices. There are lots of people selling dining room sets and other furniture in the UK whose whole method of operation is, this is a package, take it or leave it. I don't think its unlawful.