no-one is now saying Apple is going bankrupt. What they are now saying is, they don't like Apple's behaviour, and they doubt others will over time. Its different.
Also, if you go back your 30 years, which would be 1975 by the way, you will find that until well into the nineties everyone thought Apple had a great future. Buying the stock was the making of at least one legendary reputation in fund management. However, there was a general consensus that when it started losing money hand over fist in the nineties that it was in danger. If you look at the net income numbers from 1996, maybe earlier, to 2003, the results were absolutely dismal. It really was in danger. Only an idiot would conclude there was nothing wrong and that it could go on like that.
The standard way in which all comments critical of Apple in any way are met by the recitation of three or four standard, mostly false, and mostly irrelevant mantras is more reminiscent of religious fanaticism than contributions to a reasoned debate on the issues, and is turning more people against Apple and its products than any other single cause.
"Because outside the geek community, nobody upgrades their motherboard."
No. But they do upgrade their screens or their base unit independently, an that is why they do not like all-in-ones. You have a perfectly good 19 inch screen, which you upgraded to a couple years after you bought the new base unit. Why should you throw it out just because you now want a new faster base unit?
There is a real problem with the product line. And the only alternative is the Mini, which in terms of price/performance is a joke, unless you insist on that particular form factor.
The issue isn't personal. Its not about my choices, and knowing what I'm buying. It is about the conduct of the industry leader in engaging in linked sales and restricting competition. This is not bad for me personally as a user. But it is bad for us, society. This is why linked sales and anti competitive practices are generally condemned.
The only reason tying the Mac OS to Apple branded hardware is tolerable is because they have 3% market share. But iTunes has 70% share of online music. So its not tolerable. Technically its a monopoly, aabusing monopoly powers to do linked sales.
Its a complete mystery why the fans defend conduct by Apple that by any other company would rightly be condemnned.
What exactly is 'Apple Hardware'? Care to list some? Start with the Asus W2jb and compare it to the Pro, and then go on to the AOpen mini and compare it to the Apple version.
Mandriva is still one of the only distros one can install for a naive user, and be sure that any issues that come up can be handled by you and him/her over the phone - thanks to the drak tools. Its the real strength. Backup, printers, networking, everything is available simply and immediately.
"Over the age of 65 around 3 people in 100 will have Alzheimers and that risk doubles every five years."
Maybe, but its irrelevant, most of them are at home or in nursing homes. What proportion of over 65s in CW are demented? That is what counts. I don't expect its more than 1%, which is going to be close to the proportion of delinquent teenagers they see. Work in retail in high traffic environments, and you discover that every day you meet someone who doesn't have both oars in the water for one reason or another.
What they should be doing is training their staff to make sure they sign people up appropriately, whether they are 20 or 80, male or female, black or white, and even if they wear little crucifixes in their jacket buttonholes.
The UK law on these matters is considerably more subtle and worthy of respect than most correspondents seem to realise. It makes the possession of some materials a strict liability offence. These include child pornography. It makes it an offence to sell or distribute, but not to possess, others. It is not obsessed with sexual content - it covers, and treats similar material in similar ways, material which promotes racial hatred and cruelty to animals. It distinguishes between acts and conspiracy to commit acts.
The UK record on civil liberties in recent years is appalling, but on the specific matter of material calculated to promote the commission of crimes of a sexual nature, it is pretty good.
The point of PCBSD is probably not that it is BSD as opposed to Linux. For the average user who is in the market for this sort of OS, whether he uses PCLinux or PCBSD is probably going to make little difference to him. KDE is going to work pretty much the same on both. The interesting thing is more whether PCBSD is suitable for a fairly new user, and it is, very much so. Wouldn't waste much time debating about whether it is better or worse than PCLinux. The differences from a user point of view, such as they are, are not really about whether one is Linux and the other BSD, but more about how they've been configured.
Yes, true. But if you look at PC BSD, its interesting, and the enthusiasm expressed is probably valid. There seem to be three distributions that are roughly comparable in terms of the end user experience, PCLinux, PCBSD and DesktopBSD. Its not a Windows look and feel experience, but it is Windows-like in the sense of shipping with a controlled set of applications. Not like say Mandriva, where the naive user will often stare in disbelief and wonder why they have abiword, KOffice and Open Office, not to mention half a dozen text editors.
If you're looking for a stable non-MS distribution for people who are basically looking for Office, photo management, Internet, one of these is probably the simplest fastest and most user friendly way to get there.
It seems more likely that it is connected to the growing spread of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in the Middle East, which is becoming a true public health menace and cause for serious alarm.
One comes to this conclusion because it is clear that no sane person would think there is any connection between events in the Middle East, or in any other part of the world, Patagonia for example, and blowing up transatlantic passenger flights. There is really no connection. One is not going to help the other or have any effect at all on it.
It is exactly like a guy washing his hands 500 times a day. He says, he is afraid of catching Aids. You explain that this making no difference to his prospects of getting Aids. He becomes furious with you, and says he has to do something. For an insight into the state of mind have a look at
It sounds just like virtual desktops on Gnome or KDE have been working for years. Its nice, sure, nothing wrong with it, but its a bit like holding a conference to announce your car has intermittent wipers. Finally.
If it were a guaranteed rise, it would already have prompted buying, and so there would be no point buying now because the rise would already have happened. I have no idea whether AAPL will rise or fall on Monday. What is certain is that you cannot make a good risk adjusted return on the basis of what is now publicly available to us about what will be announced then.
For some reason technical people seem to have trouble grasping this, but it is really simple. What is known, really known, is discounted in the price. What is suspected, probable and so on is also discounted in the price. Emotions are also in the price.
If you are speculating on the basis of publicly available information, you are betting that you know better than the pros what the implications of it are. You don't. You may be right in a particular case about how the price moves. This however does not show you have the ability to make money on public information. The only thing that can show this, and rule out chance, is actually doing it over time. Otherwise, you have gotten right by chance, and you will be following a rule that over time will lose.
The argument has been made by a couple of people that a sure fire way to make money is, buy at the open on the last trading day before the WWDC and sell at the close on the day of it. Well, if you think that is really true, show us the numbers. Take account of trading costs while at it. It is not. If it were, people would be trading options like crazy at this very moment. They are not.
As to what they will announce at the WWDC, apparently there is going to be an amazing and dramatic innovation which will affect computer ease of use: its called virtual desktops. Yes, in the latest version of OSX it appears you can have more than one desktop. This will drive them wild! The stock price will soar on this one!
You may be right, it may turn out to be trivial. But all you can say at the moment is that financial statements going back 4 years cannot be relied on. To what extent or in what direction they are misleading is unknown. There are no grounds for optimism or despair so far.
But there is grounds for a rise in the risk premium.
Classic. One long repetition of the party line that if they do not buy Macs it is because they are idiots. There is nothing wrong with the product, the marketing, the support. No, the customers are all idiots.
The great thing about this argument is how comforting it is. There is nothing you can do. We are all better because we are smarter and know what to buy and immune to group think. It is probably a matter of genes, actually. They are all fools and there is nothing that can be done for them.
Notice the similarity to certain fringe religious doctrines. The number of the elect is tiny, and the majority are predestined to hell, and there is nothing to be done about it.
This sort of attitude in Cupertino is a guarantee of flat sales. If you really want to sell more, figure out what the customer wants, stop calling him/her an idiot, and just supply it. Hint: it will be different from what you are supplying right now.
In two related stories from the UK, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence explained that this was not a cost effective treatment for early stage Alzheimers, but was endorsed for use by the National Health Service for extreme late stage cases with a life expectancy not exceeding 6 months. The news was applauded by the Ministry of Health, who released a statement yesterday in which they said that just as it was inappropriate to treat macular degeneration until it has caused the loss of sight in at least one eye, so it could not be a national priority to treat Alzheimers patients until they were well and truly demented.
The second story followed a day later, and consisted of a chorus of local health authorities explaining that they were not proposing to prescribe the drug in cases endorsed by NICE because it was too expensive and they were running out of budget, and of course, they would find it impossible to prescribe for cases where NICE had not endorsed it.
However, they encouraged the British public who felt that they would benefit from this and other treatments which they chose not to provide, or not to provide in a timely manner, to remortgage their houses, and pay for the treatments themselves. This after all was the general practice in the UK for other rare and exotic treatments for uncommon conditions, such as hip replacements, tamoxifen for breat cancer, diagnostic scans following accidents and so on.
Members of the British public, interviewed on the BBC, said they were delighted to be living in the UK and looked after by the NHS. It was after all the envy of the world, and free at the point of use. Many of them volunteered that they had been looked after in a most caring fashion by the staff of their local hospital, who had cured them of difficult cases of MRSA, doubtless contracted by their relatives not washing their hands before visiting the ward.
It depends if you are looking for a printer or a publisher.
Suppose you are, for instance, a maritime museum. You have a sort of book already, which you copy onto A4 loose sheets and bind in those little plastic hole-though covers. People are buying it in this form, but you know you could sell more if it were properly printed and bound. You have a collection of boat plans and photos of boats, and you have a local rapidly aging two or three former boat builders who worked on such boats and who can give you their reminiscences and lore. You have visitors, around a hundred or so a year, who would happily buy a book of plans and brief descriptions if only you had one. You have a slack winter season and a copy of Scribus or OO in which to do it all, and output pdfs. What you are looking for is a relatively low cost printer, and you don't want to take the financial risk of offset and a huge number of copies that may not sell.
There are lots of little voluntary organisations across the country in this situation, wanting to document their efforts or collections or some local history. POD is a dream come true for them.
The classic sign of a top in a trend. Of course, it always seems that way just at the point of reversal. Now if only we could have a Business Week cover proclaiming that Apple is unstoppable, that would be a decisive indicator of a turn.
What will happen to make it turn, and who will do it? No idea. Really no idea at all. But something will.
The fundamental question you have to ask is simple. If something is so bad, why is it not a straightforward criminal offense, and why is it not prosecuted in the normal way?
For hundreds of years now, Englishmen have had a defined set of things which were forbidden, and a defined set of penalties, together with defined procedures for proving violations. Now all of a sudden in the last 6 or 7 years, none of this seems fit for purpose. All of a sudden we have to give enormous discretionary powers to all kinds of bodies. We don't need juries. We don't need proof. We can predict who is going to commit offenses. We gesticulate favourably in the direction of 'peoples courts'.
If anyone had introduced the body of legislation that this Government has enacted, as a whole, and if there had been a national debate on it, it would have been thrown out.
Is it a coincidence, do you think, that the Cabinet that has introduced this legislation step by step is disporportionately composed of former members of the authoritarian left? Is it a coincidence that our former Home Secretary called Sheffield, when he was leader of local government there, the Peoples Republic of South Yorkshire, and twinned his city with Donetsk? Do you think he had their great human rights record in mind when he did that?
What we have here is a legislative framework which permits Soviet style authoritarianism. Not implemented in practice, but all the legislative underpinnings are there. Think South Africa as it moved into ever more authoritarian forms of apartheid. We still think we are free. We still are free. But we are free in practice, not by right.
1) What is complained of does not have to be unlawful. It just has to cause complaints.
2) The remedy does not have to prohibit the behaviour which causes the complaints. It can prohibit almost anything that has the effect of making the behaviour difficult or impossible.
3) The prohibition has the effect of making things unlawful for an individual which are not unlawful for anyone else.
From the Guardian : "A teenager has become the first youth in Britain to receive an anti-social behaviour order that bans him from going to school. The two-year Asbo on Gary Addy, 16, stops him from going within 50 metres of any educational premises in the east London borough of Newham unless he has prior permission from the headteacher."
He seems not to have broken the law in school. He is prohibited from going within 50 meters of one, which is not whatever was complained of, and is not otherwise illegal. He is the only one to whom this prohibition applies.
You have to see this in connection with a number of other proposals, laws and institutions in the UK. Proposed reforms to the Mental Health Act would enable people with the wrong personalities to be locked up as a crime prevention measure. There have also been proposals to allow compulsory medication. There is a proposal for SCPOs (serious crime prevention orders) which will be a sort of super ASBO for gangsters. There have been proposals to track and intervene in dysfunctional families, to prevent future crime by children at risk. We already have Family Courts with wide ranging powers to break up families and put children into care and regulate access. They meet in secret, their decisions are not subject to appeal, and to reveal the name of anyone who has been before them is an offence. The proposed ID card scheme and DNA database will make almost all data any agency has on an individual, including health, available to any government agency. The various Terrorism laws permit confinement without trial of foreign nationals, and have started to be used to permit lengthier detention of citizens. Nor should we forget the recent proposals on the Civil Contingencies Act, which would allow any government to declare a state of emergency and rule by decree or the Regulatory Reform Bill, which would allow rule by decree without an emergency.
Henry Porter has written well on the subject. Have a look at his exchange with Tony Blair at
We do not have a police state in Britain. That is sometimes argued, but its quite mistaken. The laws are still administered by an independent judiciary with a strong tradition of individual liberties, and abuse seems uncommon and is remarked on and sometimes overturned. What we have is two things.
First, we have the most far reaching and thorough assault on the legal basis of individual liberties and parliamentary democracy since Charles I.
Second, we have now the basis for any future authoritarian regime to implement the basic structure of the former Soviet Union. It could implement preventive detention, classification of dissidents as mentally ill, compulsory medication, internal exile, separation of families, withdrawal of passports, suppression of freedom of association, prohibitions on publication or public speaking.
We don't have a Police State. However, the only thing standing between Britain and a Police State at this point is tradition and the goodwill of its government. Its not law or constitution. This is a lot, don't underestimate it. The question is whether it will prove enough.
It is simply impossible to have around a 2% share of shipments, which is what global Apple share has been for the last few years, and a 15% share of the user base. If you really want, I'll post the numbers. The problem is the market is rising all the time. The only way to get to 15% share of the installed base is to assume every Mac sold for the last 5 years is still in service, and that the average life of a Windows machine is around 6 months. You can get the numbers yourself from Gartner and the Ars Technical article on share and shipments for earlier years.
The Apple share of the installed base is no more than one percentage point higher than their share of the shipments, at most 3% worldwide. The contrary argument is MacFud.
You are all too negative about this idiotic little piece. Its value is enormous, not in what it says, but that it appears at all. What it is telling you is: it is too early to buy, and not too late to sell. As long as pieces like this are coming out and being linked to, we know that sentiment is absurdly optimistic. Don't worry, it will change.
So, Editors, pay not attention, keep linking to them as long as there are any to be found. When there are none, that's the interesting time. The rest of us will await with interest the arrival of the cluster of really negative ones. There was one swallow recently, Herb Greenberg's postings on his CBS blog. But it was only one. We need to see a whole flock....
No. The Macmaniacs are far too happy and cheerful. The time to buy, the only time to buy, is when the Mac newsgroups are full of gloom, and your mac using friends walk around with long faces and say diffidently about the latest Windows catastrophe that of course Macs don't suffer from it, but there again no-one cares. The headlines are about possible takeovers or chapter 11. Wait for it, then buy.
Then wait until the enthusiasts are euphoric, talking (as now) about competing with MS, raising share dramatically, lots of conversions, just one more push.
Then sell, and wait for gloom to reach fever pitch.
Right now we are not in gloom. We are in euphoric denial on the way down. Pretty soon gloom will start to rise. Wait a bit longer. What you want to pick up is despair.
This may be the most reliable indicator in Western stock markets for the last 15+ years. Infallible.
The thing that handed Windows its share was that it had no competition. No OS which will not run on third party hardware is ever going to make a dent in Windows.
As to the marketing image. its important to a lot of people, but perhaps its not just the image as put out by Cupertino of the products. Its also the image put out by the Mac people, the attitudes struck and so on. Its something that a lot of people do not want to be associated with. Something that has been commented on in the Mac online community fairly often. Enthusiasts who are their chosen platform's worst enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
no-one is now saying Apple is going bankrupt. What they are now saying is, they don't like Apple's behaviour, and they doubt others will over time. Its different.
Also, if you go back your 30 years, which would be 1975 by the way, you will find that until well into the nineties everyone thought Apple had a great future. Buying the stock was the making of at least one legendary reputation in fund management. However, there was a general consensus that when it started losing money hand over fist in the nineties that it was in danger. If you look at the net income numbers from 1996, maybe earlier, to 2003, the results were absolutely dismal. It really was in danger. Only an idiot would conclude there was nothing wrong and that it could go on like that.
The standard way in which all comments critical of Apple in any way are met by the recitation of three or four standard, mostly false, and mostly irrelevant mantras is more reminiscent of religious fanaticism than contributions to a reasoned debate on the issues, and is turning more people against Apple and its products than any other single cause.
"Because outside the geek community, nobody upgrades their motherboard."
No. But they do upgrade their screens or their base unit independently, an that is why they do not like all-in-ones. You have a perfectly good 19 inch screen, which you upgraded to a couple years after you bought the new base unit. Why should you throw it out just because you now want a new faster base unit?
There is a real problem with the product line. And the only alternative is the Mini, which in terms of price/performance is a joke, unless you insist on that particular form factor.
The issue isn't personal. Its not about my choices, and knowing what I'm buying. It is about the conduct of the industry leader in engaging in linked sales and restricting competition. This is not bad for me personally as a user. But it is bad for us, society. This is why linked sales and anti competitive practices are generally condemned.
The only reason tying the Mac OS to Apple branded hardware is tolerable is because they have 3% market share. But iTunes has 70% share of online music. So its not tolerable. Technically its a monopoly, aabusing monopoly powers to do linked sales.
Its a complete mystery why the fans defend conduct by Apple that by any other company would rightly be condemnned.
What exactly is 'Apple Hardware'? Care to list some? Start with the Asus W2jb and compare it to the Pro, and then go on to the AOpen mini and compare it to the Apple version.
Mandriva is still one of the only distros one can install for a naive user, and be sure that any issues that come up can be handled by you and him/her over the phone - thanks to the drak tools. Its the real strength. Backup, printers, networking, everything is available simply and immediately.
If Bootcamp is beyond awesome, Grub must be, what, superfantabulous?
"Over the age of 65 around 3 people in 100 will have Alzheimers and that risk doubles every five years."
Maybe, but its irrelevant, most of them are at home or in nursing homes. What proportion of over 65s in CW are demented? That is what counts. I don't expect its more than 1%, which is going to be close to the proportion of delinquent teenagers they see. Work in retail in high traffic environments, and you discover that every day you meet someone who doesn't have both oars in the water for one reason or another.
What they should be doing is training their staff to make sure they sign people up appropriately, whether they are 20 or 80, male or female, black or white, and even if they wear little crucifixes in their jacket buttonholes.
The UK law on these matters is considerably more subtle and worthy of respect than most correspondents seem to realise. It makes the possession of some materials a strict liability offence. These include child pornography. It makes it an offence to sell or distribute, but not to possess, others. It is not obsessed with sexual content - it covers, and treats similar material in similar ways, material which promotes racial hatred and cruelty to animals. It distinguishes between acts and conspiracy to commit acts. The UK record on civil liberties in recent years is appalling, but on the specific matter of material calculated to promote the commission of crimes of a sexual nature, it is pretty good.
There are cheaper ways, but one foolproof way is to get Acronis.
The point of PCBSD is probably not that it is BSD as opposed to Linux. For the average user who is in the market for this sort of OS, whether he uses PCLinux or PCBSD is probably going to make little difference to him. KDE is going to work pretty much the same on both. The interesting thing is more whether PCBSD is suitable for a fairly new user, and it is, very much so. Wouldn't waste much time debating about whether it is better or worse than PCLinux. The differences from a user point of view, such as they are, are not really about whether one is Linux and the other BSD, but more about how they've been configured.
Yes, true. But if you look at PC BSD, its interesting, and the enthusiasm expressed is probably valid. There seem to be three distributions that are roughly comparable in terms of the end user experience, PCLinux, PCBSD and DesktopBSD. Its not a Windows look and feel experience, but it is Windows-like in the sense of shipping with a controlled set of applications. Not like say Mandriva, where the naive user will often stare in disbelief and wonder why they have abiword, KOffice and Open Office, not to mention half a dozen text editors.
If you're looking for a stable non-MS distribution for people who are basically looking for Office, photo management, Internet, one of these is probably the simplest fastest and most user friendly way to get there.
It seems more likely that it is connected to the growing spread of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in the Middle East, which is becoming a true public health menace and cause for serious alarm.
& mod=RSS_Opinion_Journal&ojrss=frontpage
One comes to this conclusion because it is clear that no sane person would think there is any connection between events in the Middle East, or in any other part of the world, Patagonia for example, and blowing up transatlantic passenger flights. There is really no connection. One is not going to help the other or have any effect at all on it.
It is exactly like a guy washing his hands 500 times a day. He says, he is afraid of catching Aids. You explain that this making no difference to his prospects of getting Aids. He becomes furious with you, and says he has to do something. For an insight into the state of mind have a look at
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008768
Bernard Lewis knows what he is writing about.
It sounds just like virtual desktops on Gnome or KDE have been working for years. Its nice, sure, nothing wrong with it, but its a bit like holding a conference to announce your car has intermittent wipers. Finally.
If it were a guaranteed rise, it would already have prompted buying, and so there would be no point buying now because the rise would already have happened. I have no idea whether AAPL will rise or fall on Monday. What is certain is that you cannot make a good risk adjusted return on the basis of what is now publicly available to us about what will be announced then. For some reason technical people seem to have trouble grasping this, but it is really simple. What is known, really known, is discounted in the price. What is suspected, probable and so on is also discounted in the price. Emotions are also in the price. If you are speculating on the basis of publicly available information, you are betting that you know better than the pros what the implications of it are. You don't. You may be right in a particular case about how the price moves. This however does not show you have the ability to make money on public information. The only thing that can show this, and rule out chance, is actually doing it over time. Otherwise, you have gotten right by chance, and you will be following a rule that over time will lose. The argument has been made by a couple of people that a sure fire way to make money is, buy at the open on the last trading day before the WWDC and sell at the close on the day of it. Well, if you think that is really true, show us the numbers. Take account of trading costs while at it. It is not. If it were, people would be trading options like crazy at this very moment. They are not. As to what they will announce at the WWDC, apparently there is going to be an amazing and dramatic innovation which will affect computer ease of use: its called virtual desktops. Yes, in the latest version of OSX it appears you can have more than one desktop. This will drive them wild! The stock price will soar on this one!
You may be right, it may turn out to be trivial. But all you can say at the moment is that financial statements going back 4 years cannot be relied on. To what extent or in what direction they are misleading is unknown. There are no grounds for optimism or despair so far.
But there is grounds for a rise in the risk premium.
Classic. One long repetition of the party line that if they do not buy Macs it is because they are idiots. There is nothing wrong with the product, the marketing, the support. No, the customers are all idiots.
The great thing about this argument is how comforting it is. There is nothing you can do. We are all better because we are smarter and know what to buy and immune to group think. It is probably a matter of genes, actually. They are all fools and there is nothing that can be done for them.
Notice the similarity to certain fringe religious doctrines. The number of the elect is tiny, and the majority are predestined to hell, and there is nothing to be done about it.
This sort of attitude in Cupertino is a guarantee of flat sales. If you really want to sell more, figure out what the customer wants, stop calling him/her an idiot, and just supply it. Hint: it will be different from what you are supplying right now.
In two related stories from the UK, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence explained that this was not a cost effective treatment for early stage Alzheimers, but was endorsed for use by the National Health Service for extreme late stage cases with a life expectancy not exceeding 6 months. The news was applauded by the Ministry of Health, who released a statement yesterday in which they said that just as it was inappropriate to treat macular degeneration until it has caused the loss of sight in at least one eye, so it could not be a national priority to treat Alzheimers patients until they were well and truly demented.
The second story followed a day later, and consisted of a chorus of local health authorities explaining that they were not proposing to prescribe the drug in cases endorsed by NICE because it was too expensive and they were running out of budget, and of course, they would find it impossible to prescribe for cases where NICE had not endorsed it.
However, they encouraged the British public who felt that they would benefit from this and other treatments which they chose not to provide, or not to provide in a timely manner, to remortgage their houses, and pay for the treatments themselves. This after all was the general practice in the UK for other rare and exotic treatments for uncommon conditions, such as hip replacements, tamoxifen for breat cancer, diagnostic scans following accidents and so on.
Members of the British public, interviewed on the BBC, said they were delighted to be living in the UK and looked after by the NHS. It was after all the envy of the world, and free at the point of use. Many of them volunteered that they had been looked after in a most caring fashion by the staff of their local hospital, who had cured them of difficult cases of MRSA, doubtless contracted by their relatives not washing their hands before visiting the ward.
It depends if you are looking for a printer or a publisher.
Suppose you are, for instance, a maritime museum. You have a sort of book already, which you copy onto A4 loose sheets and bind in those little plastic hole-though covers. People are buying it in this form, but you know you could sell more if it were properly printed and bound. You have a collection of boat plans and photos of boats, and you have a local rapidly aging two or three former boat builders who worked on such boats and who can give you their reminiscences and lore. You have visitors, around a hundred or so a year, who would happily buy a book of plans and brief descriptions if only you had one. You have a slack winter season and a copy of Scribus or OO in which to do it all, and output pdfs. What you are looking for is a relatively low cost printer, and you don't want to take the financial risk of offset and a huge number of copies that may not sell.
There are lots of little voluntary organisations across the country in this situation, wanting to document their efforts or collections or some local history. POD is a dream come true for them.
"With the iPods, they seem to be unstoppable"
The classic sign of a top in a trend. Of course, it always seems that way just at the point of reversal. Now if only we could have a Business Week cover proclaiming that Apple is unstoppable, that would be a decisive indicator of a turn.
What will happen to make it turn, and who will do it? No idea. Really no idea at all. But something will.
The fundamental question you have to ask is simple. If something is so bad, why is it not a straightforward criminal offense, and why is it not prosecuted in the normal way?
For hundreds of years now, Englishmen have had a defined set of things which were forbidden, and a defined set of penalties, together with defined procedures for proving violations. Now all of a sudden in the last 6 or 7 years, none of this seems fit for purpose. All of a sudden we have to give enormous discretionary powers to all kinds of bodies. We don't need juries. We don't need proof. We can predict who is going to commit offenses. We gesticulate favourably in the direction of 'peoples courts'.
If anyone had introduced the body of legislation that this Government has enacted, as a whole, and if there had been a national debate on it, it would have been thrown out.
Is it a coincidence, do you think, that the Cabinet that has introduced this legislation step by step is disporportionately composed of former members of the authoritarian left? Is it a coincidence that our former Home Secretary called Sheffield, when he was leader of local government there, the Peoples Republic of South Yorkshire, and twinned his city with Donetsk? Do you think he had their great human rights record in mind when he did that?
What we have here is a legislative framework which permits Soviet style authoritarianism. Not implemented in practice, but all the legislative underpinnings are there. Think South Africa as it moved into ever more authoritarian forms of apartheid. We still think we are free. We still are free. But we are free in practice, not by right.
Here are the essential things about ASBOs.
9 344,00.html
1 129827.ece
1) What is complained of does not have to be unlawful. It just has to cause complaints.
2) The remedy does not have to prohibit the behaviour which causes the complaints. It can prohibit almost anything that has the effect of making the behaviour difficult or impossible.
3) The prohibition has the effect of making things unlawful for an individual which are not unlawful for anyone else.
From the Guardian : "A teenager has become the first youth in Britain to receive an anti-social behaviour order that bans him from going to school. The two-year Asbo on Gary Addy, 16, stops him from going within 50 metres of any educational premises in the east London borough of Newham unless he has prior permission from the headteacher."
He seems not to have broken the law in school. He is prohibited from going within 50 meters of one, which is not whatever was complained of, and is not otherwise illegal. He is the only one to whom this prohibition applies.
You have to see this in connection with a number of other proposals, laws and institutions in the UK. Proposed reforms to the Mental Health Act would enable people with the wrong personalities to be locked up as a crime prevention measure. There have also been proposals to allow compulsory medication. There is a proposal for SCPOs (serious crime prevention orders) which will be a sort of super ASBO for gangsters. There have been proposals to track and intervene in dysfunctional families, to prevent future crime by children at risk. We already have Family Courts with wide ranging powers to break up families and put children into care and regulate access. They meet in secret, their decisions are not subject to appeal, and to reveal the name of anyone who has been before them is an offence. The proposed ID card scheme and DNA database will make almost all data any agency has on an individual, including health, available to any government agency. The various Terrorism laws permit confinement without trial of foreign nationals, and have started to be used to permit lengthier detention of citizens. Nor should we forget the recent proposals on the Civil Contingencies Act, which would allow any government to declare a state of emergency and rule by decree or the Regulatory Reform Bill, which would allow rule by decree without an emergency.
Henry Porter has written well on the subject. Have a look at his exchange with Tony Blair at
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,,175
or his piece on ID cards at
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article
We do not have a police state in Britain. That is sometimes argued, but its quite mistaken. The laws are still administered by an independent judiciary with a strong tradition of individual liberties, and abuse seems uncommon and is remarked on and sometimes overturned. What we have is two things.
First, we have the most far reaching and thorough assault on the legal basis of individual liberties and parliamentary democracy since Charles I.
Second, we have now the basis for any future authoritarian regime to implement the basic structure of the former Soviet Union. It could implement preventive detention, classification of dissidents as mentally ill, compulsory medication, internal exile, separation of families, withdrawal of passports, suppression of freedom of association, prohibitions on publication or public speaking.
We don't have a Police State. However, the only thing standing between Britain and a Police State at this point is tradition and the goodwill of its government. Its not law or constitution. This is a lot, don't underestimate it. The question is whether it will prove enough.
It is simply impossible to have around a 2% share of shipments, which is what global Apple share has been for the last few years, and a 15% share of the user base. If you really want, I'll post the numbers. The problem is the market is rising all the time. The only way to get to 15% share of the installed base is to assume every Mac sold for the last 5 years is still in service, and that the average life of a Windows machine is around 6 months. You can get the numbers yourself from Gartner and the Ars Technical article on share and shipments for earlier years.
The Apple share of the installed base is no more than one percentage point higher than their share of the shipments, at most 3% worldwide. The contrary argument is MacFud.
You are all too negative about this idiotic little piece. Its value is enormous, not in what it says, but that it appears at all. What it is telling you is: it is too early to buy, and not too late to sell. As long as pieces like this are coming out and being linked to, we know that sentiment is absurdly optimistic. Don't worry, it will change.
So, Editors, pay not attention, keep linking to them as long as there are any to be found. When there are none, that's the interesting time. The rest of us will await with interest the arrival of the cluster of really negative ones. There was one swallow recently, Herb Greenberg's postings on his CBS blog. But it was only one. We need to see a whole flock....
No. The Macmaniacs are far too happy and cheerful. The time to buy, the only time to buy, is when the Mac newsgroups are full of gloom, and your mac using friends walk around with long faces and say diffidently about the latest Windows catastrophe that of course Macs don't suffer from it, but there again no-one cares. The headlines are about possible takeovers or chapter 11. Wait for it, then buy.
Then wait until the enthusiasts are euphoric, talking (as now) about competing with MS, raising share dramatically, lots of conversions, just one more push.
Then sell, and wait for gloom to reach fever pitch.
Right now we are not in gloom. We are in euphoric denial on the way down. Pretty soon gloom will start to rise. Wait a bit longer. What you want to pick up is despair.
This may be the most reliable indicator in Western stock markets for the last 15+ years. Infallible.
The thing that handed Windows its share was that it had no competition. No OS which will not run on third party hardware is ever going to make a dent in Windows.
As to the marketing image. its important to a lot of people, but perhaps its not just the image as put out by Cupertino of the products. Its also the image put out by the Mac people, the attitudes struck and so on. Its something that a lot of people do not want to be associated with. Something that has been commented on in the Mac online community fairly often. Enthusiasts who are their chosen platform's worst enemy.