It is unlikely that a virus could wipe out 1/3 of a human population with modern medical facilities. Why? Because if there were a disease as you posited - more virulent and infectious than smallpox and the plague, but without a cure, like HIV, we would respond with quarantines. If HIV were air-infectious, you'd see the response to HIV increased accordingly.
The plague could kill 1/3 of Europe because people would carry the plague to their local source of drinking water, and then infect the source of drinking water, and thereby transfer it to everyone else. Seems unlikely that the government wouldn't take precautions against the like if an airborne-transmitted disease of terrible power began.
Remember, HIV is a problem because it is infectious but doesn't kill right away. Ebola is not because it is infectious but incredibly powerful, and once an outbreak occurs it is immediatley limited to where it begins, because everyone gets scared of the people who has it and stays the hell away from them. A virus is successful if it doesn't provoke too strong a response - a response that would prevent it from spreading.
The New Republic is not, repeat, not a conservative magazine. It used to be a very liberal magazine, now it is what they call "neo-liberal." Neo-liberal politics amount to, roughly:
Support for government intervention in the economy, with a recognition that the government needs to correct free market mistakes, NOT get rid of the free market.
Support for environmental protection.
Concerned with race relations, and supporting some economic measures to help overcome America's history of racism, but strongly opposed to racial-politics (like Al Sharpton's) and skeptical of simple race-based schemes (like affirmative action).
Support for a strong American foreign policy. In other words, America is right to have a strong military and ignore European concerns, because America's foreign policy is in fact more moral and correct than Europe's.
I could go on, but you get the idea. In many ways, The New Republic has shifted along with the ascendance of the Democratic Leadership Council's in the Democratic party.
The similarities between neo-conservatives (who came first) and neo-liberals are obvious - strong foreign policy, willingness to criticize the extremists on their own side, fondness for McCain. That's how the term neo-liberal got invented.
As a former Amiga and Mac user, and current Windows user, I have to say that while I have considered switching back to the Mac, I will not do so while the MacOS X GUI is so flawed. I agree with the concerns expressed by pudge in this review, and with the reservations expressed on asktog.com and by other UI experts about OS X's interface. The one great thing about MacOS classic, the one thing that made it worth its many flaws, was its incredibly correct GUI. Everything was set up right. In MacOS X, a lot of things are wrong.
Two things are most integral to my computing experience: speed and GUI ease. Right now, the PC offers a much better price/performance ratio. Unless MacOS X returns to the Mac legacy of a superior UI, I will not switch back.
Salon is not published by MSNBC, Salon is an independent magazine that has been extremely critical of Microsoft and very supportive of Open Source Software.
While supporting standards may be preferable, your argument that we should support standards because then they won't have to make their code bug-compatible with the latest version of IE is not.
Quote:
Look, dammit, specs are good because they don't change with every minor revision of the program. Do you really want a web that Microsoft can lead around by the nose? News flash - IE has bugs. Should developers make their markup bug-compatible with IE, then change all their sites every time Microsoft releases a new version or bug fix?
Even if web developers follow the specs perfectly, if Internet Explorer still has 95% market share, they still have to make their code compatible with IE, in order for their audience to view the sites correctly.
Hell, we could all start coding web standard tomorrow, and the market could switch to 95% Mozilla, but if Mozilla had a bug in how it rendered CSS 2 (and there are Mozilla CSS 2 bugs) then all developers would have to make the pages bug-compatible with Mozilla.
Whether web developers have to account for browser bugs is a question of market share, not of web standards. Having everyone follow web standards might make the situation better, if web developers were willing to stick with their code even if a major browser didn't render it correctly, and if users were will to switch browsers because of a rendering bug, but both seem unlikely.
If your point - many others have already made this - is that the EFF is purposely exaggerating the dangers posed by DMCA in order to get the attention of lawmakers and the public, well, ok, if that's "the mechanics of our political system," so be it. But at the same time, journalists have a right and duty to debunk the outrageous claims made by the associations.
If all associations make outrageous claims because it's the only way to get attention - and because their competitors are making outrageous claims, and they can't afford not to - then it is absolutely the responsibility or the media to find the truth, and to debunk the exaggerations, so that the public can make an informed decision, and not one based on hysteria (i.e., "if the DMCA is overturned, all media companies will go out of business and there will be no more entertainment" vs. "if the DMCA exists you can kiss goodbye to all the rights and liberties you've ever had.").
So, just because these are the mechanics of the political system, as you put it, doesn't mean that the EFF isn't exaggerating its causes.
Will [the end of the world because of technology] happen? Maybe. Can we do anything about it if it does? No; so who the fuck cares?
The question is not whether we can do anything about the end of the world after it happens, the question is whether we can prevent the end of the world before it happens. That is, believe it or not, what this ex-Microsoft guy is now trying to do. You might not agree that the end of the world is coming if we don't work to prevent it, but it's foolish to say "Who cares if the end of the world is coming, once it happens we won't be able to do anything about it anyway."
I agree that part of Microsoft's motivation in this whole mess is "to kill Mac sales, by making potential customers think that maybe MS-Office will disappear in the future." But I don't think that's the only factor. The truth of matter is, I wouldn't be surprised if sales of the new MacOffice for X haven't been that good. I don't blame that on Apple - I happen to hear a lot of Mac users getting tired of paying exhorbitant fees to get a new version of Office that doesn't have any new features that they need. I know I feel that way! But, if Mac sales of Office drag, for whatever reason, it would not be unfair of Microsoft to stop developing Office for the Mac, and keep developing it for Windows (where there are just a greater number of people who really need those new features, or of dumb people who don't pirate Office, because the user base is bigger).
It is unfair of Microsoft to change the god damn Word document format with every release of Office. But I don't think it's wrong of them to stop development of Office again for the Mac, if Mac sales don't justify the cost. And hey, maybe then OpenOffice for the Mac will become a popular alternative.
Macs have 20% market share? Right. Let's see, according to the newest IDC report (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0207/03.marke tshare.php) Macs have a 3.48% market share in the US and 2.4% worldwide. Apple's Middle Eastern division recently claimed 5-6% worldwide market share, again, going off IDC numbers (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0207/03.apple me.php).
But, you say, IDC numbers are grossly undercounting Macs. First of all, you claim, IDC ignores sales through the Apple stores and through small retailers, focusing instead on the number of Macs that pass through wholesalers. Well, where do you think the small Mac stores get their Macs from if not from wholesalers or from Apple directly? And why do you think that IDC can't get numbers on the Apple stores and Apple's online store. The approximate percentage of Apple's sales that goes through the Apple store online is well known even to the general public, and the number of Macs sold a quarter is known to the general public as well. I see no reason why IDC cannot get those numbers, or why Apple wouldn't make them available to IDC - particularly given that IDC does rank Dell, which does a much higher percentage of sales direct than does Apple. If IDC were incapable of taking direct sales into account, then Gateway and Dell would not show up in IDC's list - and they do.
Your other reason why Macs have more market share than people realize is that Macs "last a lot longer in use than PCs- at least twice as long." I have heard this bandied around a lot by the Mac community, but I don't think this is nearly as prominent an effect as they make it out to be. First of all, I would like to see statistics backing up the "twice as long" claim. Secondly, I have a hard time believing that Macs have had much of an advantage over PCs in the last three or four years. I owned an iMac, and that definitely was too slow and limited in hard drive space to use for more than a couple years. Now that MacOS X is out, forget about it - there are lots of complaints about how MacOS X has been slow on older machines. On the other hand, all the PC owners I have known are still happy with the 400 Mhz machines they've had for the last four years, unless they are hard-core gamers. Finally, even if it is true that people use Macs for longer than they use PCs, I believe that the percentage of Mac owners that own multiple machines is much higher than the percentage of PC owners than own multiple PCs, and this will mitigate the market-share effect of Macs being in use for longer, since a person with 5 Macs all still in use will still only buy one copy of Photoshop and one copy of Office.
Jobs is not being ironic when he talks about the "other 95 percent." What reason does he have to be ironic? To make an in joke to the Mac community? I don't think so. Jobs has one basic goal as head of Apple: to make a profit. The way he'll make a profit is by raising market share while keeping prices high (Apple has very good margins on its computers). It will keep prices high because it is selling a differentiated product. A simple econ textbook will show you why Apple will never sell Macs for as cheap as PCs, and why Apple will never take the whole market. This is not necessarily bad for Apple - if it can find the sweet point where it's getting the right number of sales at the right profit margin, it can be extremely profitable. It just won't ever take over the world that way. Jobs understands that, and that's why he's been positioning Apple as the computer for the fashionable elite - because he doesn't need lots of sales at Walmarts, he needs a decent number of sales at 27% margins.
The problem is, you need to have a large enough market share to woo software developers and hardware developers, and you also need to convince your stockholders that you are selling as many machines as you can at the high margins. The "other 95 percent" campaign fits these needs perfectly. It makes consumers understand that they don't need to fear Macs just because it has small market share, because after all, BMW and Mercedes Benz have small market share too. And it tells stockholders and developers that there's lots of potential for growth, and that Apple intends to enlarge the Mac market.
If your arguments were correct, there would be no reason for Apple not to use the 20% number. Because 20% would make developers happier, would encourage more consumers to buy Macs (since they'd see a larger community already existing), and would keep stockholder expectations realistic. After all, if Apple raises stockholder expectations by saying "we only have 5% market share, it'll be so easy to expand it by going after the other 95%," and then fails, management will be held responsible. On the other hand, if it says to stockholders, "We have 20%, it's just that Macs last longer, but we are slowly growing this community and steadily strengthening the company," they'd be hailed as doing a good job.
But that 20% is just not correct. Otherwise, why does Google show a 4% browser share for Macs? Why do software developers see such small sales for Macs?
I don't understand why Mac fans refuse to accept that Macs have a small user base now. It's not a value-judgment on the computer, it just means that Apple needs to do a better job selling the things. And I think Apple has been doing a much better job selling Macs over the last couple years, and I think they will continue to improve and gain more market share. But lying about the situation doesn't change it.
How is this manipulation? You say that "Manipulation is when something is falsely influenced or pushed. This is manipulation. Making OSX seem strong makes Microsoft look less like a monopoly." But the whole point of the story is that Microsoft is saying that MacOS X is not selling and is not strong. So, by your standard, what Microsoft is doing is not manipulation, it's the truth.
Slashdot is so anti-MS, even being anti-MS when it makes no sense gets a score of 4.:)
But hey, I'm a former Amiga and then Mac user, so I'm guilty of a lot of anti-MS hatred and bias myself.:)
You don't sidestep a ban on getting a press pass by using a different address to sign up. This isn't some web form you just fill out and get confirmation from an automatic e-mailer. To get a press pass, you need to show IDG/Apple which media organization you are from. Otherwise, anyone could sign up for a press pass, obviously. So, if someone from MacOSRumors signs up for a press pass, using a fake address will make no difference. Unless that reporter can show credentials from MacWorld, and not MacOSRumors, he's still not getting in.
The rest of the world finds the fetish the US makes over its flag somewhat peculiar. The scenes of schoolchildren making loyalty oaths to the flag every day remind Europeans such as myself more of the types of society that Stalin and Hitler tried to impose than the values of liberal democracy.
On the one hand, I agree with you that the US does have what may be an immature or peculiar fetish with patriotism, loyalty, etc. But on the other hand, I think one of the advantages the US has had during the past 100 years over Europe is its ability to walk the middle ground between the feelings of the elites and the feelings of the masses. Europe has seemingly swayed between the two - communism and fascim as the expression of the masses, which is responded to by a stifling rule of the liberal elites who fear any display of patriotism, religion, nationalism, etc. So you get fascism followed by a refusal to allow any political party to seriously disagree with the EU. I think America's middle ground is safer - elite protection against too much populist sentiment, but also letting populist sentiment like the pledge of allegiance stand too.
The original post asks: if it is true that the computer market is still fine, it's just that sales are shifting from brand-name makers to white-box makers, why don't the statistics we are seeing from Intel and AMD reflect a healthy market? If it's just the brand-name makers who have a weak computer market, but white-box sales are up and are making up for the weakness in the brand-name market, why are overall CPU sales still weak?
Ok, that gets modded 4, Insightful, as it should.
dboyles responds that the reason CPU sales are weak is because people no longer need to upgrade - they can do everything they want with a four year old machine still.
This is a good point, but it is not at all related to the point originally being made, which is that if white-box sales really are making up for weak brand-name sales, the CPU makers' statistics should show this, but are not. Moreover, dboyles' point isn't even related to the point in the article.
dboyles' posts gets a 5, Insightful, higher than the original post.
MtViewGuy responds by reiterating dboyles' point that old computers are already fast enough for most computers, and then makes the additional point that if you do need a faster computer, you can just upgrade your existing computer instead of buying a new one. This is a valid point, except that it does not actually explain the weakness in the computer market. After all, are upgrades cheaper relative to the cost of a new computer now than they used to be? Are more people comfortable with upgading their own computers now than used to be? These factors would have to be determined (SlugLord speaks to one of them in another thread) before we could know if the ability to upgrade our computers had anything to do with the weakness in the computer market.
Moreover, because MtViewGuy specifically mentions upgrading by buying a new CPU, he doesn't answer to blair1q's original post - which is that if only the brand-name market is weak, then why are CPU makers' sales weak too. If people are upgrading by buying new CPUs, then CPU makers' sales would still be strong even though brand name sales of boxen were down.
MtViewGuy's post is moderated as 3, Informative.
jedrek posts saying that existing computers are already powerful enough for most people, repeating the point made by MtViewGuy and dboyle.
jedrek gets moderated 3, Insightful.
asv108 tries to contradict blair1q's original post by saying that people who build custom boxes use AMD, not Intel, therefore the fact that Intel's sales are weak does not show that the overall computer market is weak, not just brand-name manufacturers. This would be an ok point, except that he relies on selective quoting. He quotes blair1q saying "Intel should be overselling its predictable sales by 100% if half the computers are jobbed." But he ignores blair1q's next sentence: "AMD's doing no better (and may be losing market share, meaning it's losing unit sales even faster than Intel)." This sentence, of course, disproves asv108's whole point.
>There already are. Do you think the War on >Afghanistan was about fighting terrorism?
Yup. Don't know how Brits would have taken it, but most Americans I knew were pretty upset about the whole planes flying into our buildings thing. People having nightmares for a month, crying at work, fearful of another attack, etc. They were demanding a response. If the US government just wanted to attack Afghanistan to set up a government to allow oil pipelines, it could have done so. The reason it attacked after 9/11 is because the American people were demanding it.
Let's not be conspiracy-theory idiots. There's a very simple explanation for the War on Afghanistan (people tend to respond to violence with violence, e.g., the whole history of the freaking world) and a very stupid, paranoid explanation. Which side are you on, boy, which side are you on?:)
I agree with the original poster - Dilbert did get old and tired. And it has nothing to do with whether I work in a cubicle or not. I've had a lot of people tell me that I just don't find Cathy or Dilbert funny because I'm not a woman or because I'm not a cubicle-jockey. But neither is true. I used to find Cathy and Dilbert very funny, and now I found them dull. Nothing has changed in my life - but something has changed in then.
That's a good idea. But I'm not sure how it would be implemented in practice. The reason it works for pet drugs vs. human drugs is that most people don't realize that they could just take the pet drugs, so the consumers are differentiated. But there's not an obvious way to differentiate between those who can afford to pay and those who can't.
Or, in all likelihood, the bigger problem is that it's not easy to prevent the people who can buy them cheap from reselling them to the people who are supposed to buy them for a lot - i.e., to stop a black market from forming. Sure, it seems like a good idea to charge the rich more for drugs than the poor, but what's to prevent the rich from simply buying their drugs from the poor or from doctors serving the poor? Then, instead of differentiating the market, the price of drugs has simply been reduced greatly, the drug companies make less money, and the incentive to make new drugs is decreased.
I'm not saying it's not a good idea, just that it may be hard in practice.
I'm actually fairly pleased at the current system of drug R&D. It's not perfect, but as others have pointed out, it has led to great advances in the last 50 years. Drug patents stink for the poor in need, but they also only last 20 years. Once they're up, everyone gains the benefits of that research for the rest of eternity.
Another escrow service people may want to check out is eDeposit (guess the URL, come on, you can do it!:)).
Just so you know I'm not trying to spam, I did used to work for them (I have moved onto more interesting things). But they are a good company, and escrow for online auctions is all they do.
A statement like this is just the excuse that hard line factions in any one of these countries (along with half the arab world) need to take power.
Ziang Zemin has already picked a successor in China. Putin is in very firm control in Russia. There are no signs of regime instability in North Korea, and besides, there's really no way that the North Korean regime could get more hard-line than it already is (what, will 1/2 the country be in the army now, instead of 1/3?). Hussein has not been seriously threatened at all, and he's not going to get more hard-line (he can't kick the UN inspectors out again, now can he?). Bashar Assad is firmly in power in Syria. I'm not sure what's going on in Libya, but Qaddafi certainly has survived for long enough, I don't think our "secret" plans will change that regime one way or another.
The only regime this could effect would be Iran, where there is a struggle going on.
Russia is going through enough trouble as it is. They're fighting internal difficulties and are still hot at the US over the olympics.
Russia is not about to fight us because of Olympic figure skating. Jesus, if their reaction to our pulling out of the ABM treaty was muted, why do we expect them to become our enemy over figure skating?
People are right to be concerned about what other countries will think and do. But we have to be realistic too.
At least two of the countries (China and Russia) are two of the most powerful countries on the planet and are supposedly on somewhat nice terms with the US.
Russia and China are on "somewhat nice terms" because they know that they have to live with us. That is the same reason that we are on "somewhat nice terms" with China. China and the US certainly don't love each other. They are certainly competitors, and disagree on MANY issues. But the US wants China as a market and knows that it can't bully China around, and China wants the US as a market (China has a trade surplus with the US that funds China's continued industrialization) and knows that it can't bully the US around. Therefore, they are very cold "friends." As for Russia, it has disagreements with both the US and China (though not as great as the disagreements between the US and China), but it is weak now and so needs to be friendly to both to help itself. That is why Putin has been friendly to the US - not because he loves the US, but because he wants to strengthen Russia, and Russia will not be helped by a confrontation, diplomatically or military, with either China or Russia at the moment.
You've got to love political discussions on a computer message board. Yes, your ten leading questions are all valid and true - but they all tell only one part of the story. You introduce no context.
1. Which is the only country on the planet that's used a nuclear weapon on civilians?
Ignoring the context of a war in which the aggressors (Japan and Germany) committed the most horrible atrocities ever witnessed, ignoring the fact that both sides had already attacked civilian populations, ignoring the fact that the firebombing of Dresden caused more deaths than those nuclear weapons, ignoring the fact that it was believed (and justifiably) that ending the war with two massive bombs would cause fewer deaths than a ground invasion.
2. Have more Americans been killed at the hands of Iraqis, or have more Iraqis been killed at the hands of Americans?
Ignoring the context of why there are sanctions, who is really responsible for those Iraqi deaths (in the northern region of Iraq, governed by the UN since the end of the war, infant mortality rates and so forth have gone down, not up, even though they are under the same sanctions regime), why other nations oppose the US removing Saddam Hussein and thereby removing a threat to other nations and allowing us to end the sanctions and return weapon inspectors.
3. Who's killed more innocent civilians? Al Quaeda in the United States, or the United States military in Afghanistan?
Ignoring the fact that the one study showing that the US has killed 4,000 in Afghanistan has been called into heavy question (Human Rights Watch and Reuters both came up with much lower number of casualties), ignoring the fact that Al Qaeda purposely targetted civilians and the US did not, ignoring the fact that Al Qaeda wants to create Islamic fundamentalist rule and the US has removed the Taliban and organized aid to Afghanistan, etc.
I could go into more detail on all these points, and also cover your other points, but I think you get the idea. The point is, don't accept bon mots or witticisms as replacements for actually thinking through the whole issue.
The situations in Korea and the Middle East hardly deteriorated since 9/11. The Second Intifada has been ongoing and escalating for 17 months, and North Korea had done little to reciprocate South Korea's sunshine policy before 9/11 as well. Now, 9/11 and the Axis of Evil may have made these situations worse, but they certainly weren't too great before 9/11 either.
You say that:
In the last couple years, Israel/Palestine and North and South Korea were at the table discussing. (It may or may not have actually developed a peace plan, but the important part was the ability to discuss)..
One popular view in conflict resolution is all that is required to end conflicts is to get both sides to talk until they recognize the humanity of each other, gain trust in their enemy, and moderate their own positions. This is the left-wing position - everyone has shared humanity, and if we just talk enough we can resolve our problems. There's an older, more conservative position, which disagrees. That position says that people stop fighting when one side beats the shit out of the other, or at least when there is enough violence that both sides gets tired of fighting.
Now, I admit that the left-wing position is nicer. But I am not convinced that it is always correct. The Palestinians for years did not just want their own state, but wanted to destroy Israel as well. It was Israel's military strength that made them change their goal - not frank discussions with Israelis that made them recognize shared humanity. Similarly, Israelis don't want to keep the territories any more because they know it will cost them too many lives.
Meanwhile, both Israelis and Palestinians hate the idea of a peace "process" now, because they see it as all "process" and no "peace." In other words, too much talking.
Actually, according to an article in The Atlantic Monthly, some scholars believe that as many as 113 million Native Americans may have lived in North America before the Europeans arrived.
Re:villain's accents
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To The Pain
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Klingons were not Nazis, they were the Soviets, and the Romulans were the Chinese. Hence, in Star Trek 6, the Cold War ends because the Soviet Empire falls apart (shades of Chernobyl).
The Klingons in 60s Star Trek bear great resemblance to the Krushchev-era Soviets - belligerant, aggressive, bombastic, but not actually willing to start a full war. There are no Nazi-elements to them.
Some of you may remember Peter Olafson for writing the gaming column for AmigaWorld magazine, the major American Amiga magazine. In my book, this makes him very, very cool. Nice to see he's writing for the New York Times now. Amiga users were obviously an extremely talented bunch.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It is unlikely that a virus could wipe out 1/3 of a human population with modern medical facilities. Why? Because if there were a disease as you posited - more virulent and infectious than smallpox and the plague, but without a cure, like HIV, we would respond with quarantines. If HIV were air-infectious, you'd see the response to HIV increased accordingly.
The plague could kill 1/3 of Europe because people would carry the plague to their local source of drinking water, and then infect the source of drinking water, and thereby transfer it to everyone else. Seems unlikely that the government wouldn't take precautions against the like if an airborne-transmitted disease of terrible power began.
Remember, HIV is a problem because it is infectious but doesn't kill right away. Ebola is not because it is infectious but incredibly powerful, and once an outbreak occurs it is immediatley limited to where it begins, because everyone gets scared of the people who has it and stays the hell away from them. A virus is successful if it doesn't provoke too strong a response - a response that would prevent it from spreading.
Support for government intervention in the economy, with a recognition that the government needs to correct free market mistakes, NOT get rid of the free market.
Support for environmental protection.
Concerned with race relations, and supporting some economic measures to help overcome America's history of racism, but strongly opposed to racial-politics (like Al Sharpton's) and skeptical of simple race-based schemes (like affirmative action).
Support for a strong American foreign policy. In other words, America is right to have a strong military and ignore European concerns, because America's foreign policy is in fact more moral and correct than Europe's.
I could go on, but you get the idea. In many ways, The New Republic has shifted along with the ascendance of the Democratic Leadership Council's in the Democratic party.
The similarities between neo-conservatives (who came first) and neo-liberals are obvious - strong foreign policy, willingness to criticize the extremists on their own side, fondness for McCain. That's how the term neo-liberal got invented.
As a former Amiga and Mac user, and current Windows user, I have to say that while I have considered switching back to the Mac, I will not do so while the MacOS X GUI is so flawed. I agree with the concerns expressed by pudge in this review, and with the reservations expressed on asktog.com and by other UI experts about OS X's interface. The one great thing about MacOS classic, the one thing that made it worth its many flaws, was its incredibly correct GUI. Everything was set up right. In MacOS X, a lot of things are wrong.
Two things are most integral to my computing experience: speed and GUI ease. Right now, the PC offers a much better price/performance ratio. Unless MacOS X returns to the Mac legacy of a superior UI, I will not switch back.
The world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who think groupware is useful, and those who don't.
:)
I guess this puts you into the "those who think groupware is useful" type, huh?
Har har.
Sorry about that.
Salon is not published by MSNBC, Salon is an independent magazine that has been extremely critical of Microsoft and very supportive of Open Source Software.
While supporting standards may be preferable, your argument that we should support standards because then they won't have to make their code bug-compatible with the latest version of IE is not.
Quote:
Look, dammit, specs are good because they don't change with every minor revision of the program. Do you really want a web that Microsoft can lead around by the nose? News flash - IE has bugs. Should developers make their markup bug-compatible with IE, then change all their sites every time Microsoft releases a new version or bug fix?
Even if web developers follow the specs perfectly, if Internet Explorer still has 95% market share, they still have to make their code compatible with IE, in order for their audience to view the sites correctly.
Hell, we could all start coding web standard tomorrow, and the market could switch to 95% Mozilla, but if Mozilla had a bug in how it rendered CSS 2 (and there are Mozilla CSS 2 bugs) then all developers would have to make the pages bug-compatible with Mozilla.
Whether web developers have to account for browser bugs is a question of market share, not of web standards. Having everyone follow web standards might make the situation better, if web developers were willing to stick with their code even if a major browser didn't render it correctly, and if users were will to switch browsers because of a rendering bug, but both seem unlikely.
If your point - many others have already made this - is that the EFF is purposely exaggerating the dangers posed by DMCA in order to get the attention of lawmakers and the public, well, ok, if that's "the mechanics of our political system," so be it. But at the same time, journalists have a right and duty to debunk the outrageous claims made by the associations.
If all associations make outrageous claims because it's the only way to get attention - and because their competitors are making outrageous claims, and they can't afford not to - then it is absolutely the responsibility or the media to find the truth, and to debunk the exaggerations, so that the public can make an informed decision, and not one based on hysteria (i.e., "if the DMCA is overturned, all media companies will go out of business and there will be no more entertainment" vs. "if the DMCA exists you can kiss goodbye to all the rights and liberties you've ever had.").
So, just because these are the mechanics of the political system, as you put it, doesn't mean that the EFF isn't exaggerating its causes.
How in God's name is this insightful?
Will [the end of the world because of technology] happen? Maybe. Can we do anything about it if it does? No; so who the fuck cares?
The question is not whether we can do anything about the end of the world after it happens, the question is whether we can prevent the end of the world before it happens. That is, believe it or not, what this ex-Microsoft guy is now trying to do. You might not agree that the end of the world is coming if we don't work to prevent it, but it's foolish to say "Who cares if the end of the world is coming, once it happens we won't be able to do anything about it anyway."
I agree that part of Microsoft's motivation in this whole mess is "to kill Mac sales, by making potential customers think that maybe MS-Office will disappear in the future." But I don't think that's the only factor. The truth of matter is, I wouldn't be surprised if sales of the new MacOffice for X haven't been that good. I don't blame that on Apple - I happen to hear a lot of Mac users getting tired of paying exhorbitant fees to get a new version of Office that doesn't have any new features that they need. I know I feel that way! But, if Mac sales of Office drag, for whatever reason, it would not be unfair of Microsoft to stop developing Office for the Mac, and keep developing it for Windows (where there are just a greater number of people who really need those new features, or of dumb people who don't pirate Office, because the user base is bigger).
It is unfair of Microsoft to change the god damn Word document format with every release of Office. But I don't think it's wrong of them to stop development of Office again for the Mac, if Mac sales don't justify the cost. And hey, maybe then OpenOffice for the Mac will become a popular alternative.
Macs have 20% market share? Right. Let's see, according to the newest IDC report (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0207/03.marke tshare.php) Macs have a 3.48% market share in the US and 2.4% worldwide. Apple's Middle Eastern division recently claimed 5-6% worldwide market share, again, going off IDC numbers (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0207/03.apple me.php).
But, you say, IDC numbers are grossly undercounting Macs. First of all, you claim, IDC ignores sales through the Apple stores and through small retailers, focusing instead on the number of Macs that pass through wholesalers. Well, where do you think the small Mac stores get their Macs from if not from wholesalers or from Apple directly? And why do you think that IDC can't get numbers on the Apple stores and Apple's online store. The approximate percentage of Apple's sales that goes through the Apple store online is well known even to the general public, and the number of Macs sold a quarter is known to the general public as well. I see no reason why IDC cannot get those numbers, or why Apple wouldn't make them available to IDC - particularly given that IDC does rank Dell, which does a much higher percentage of sales direct than does Apple. If IDC were incapable of taking direct sales into account, then Gateway and Dell would not show up in IDC's list - and they do.
Your other reason why Macs have more market share than people realize is that Macs "last a lot longer in use than PCs- at least twice as long." I have heard this bandied around a lot by the Mac community, but I don't think this is nearly as prominent an effect as they make it out to be. First of all, I would like to see statistics backing up the "twice as long" claim. Secondly, I have a hard time believing that Macs have had much of an advantage over PCs in the last three or four years. I owned an iMac, and that definitely was too slow and limited in hard drive space to use for more than a couple years. Now that MacOS X is out, forget about it - there are lots of complaints about how MacOS X has been slow on older machines. On the other hand, all the PC owners I have known are still happy with the 400 Mhz machines they've had for the last four years, unless they are hard-core gamers. Finally, even if it is true that people use Macs for longer than they use PCs, I believe that the percentage of Mac owners that own multiple machines is much higher than the percentage of PC owners than own multiple PCs, and this will mitigate the market-share effect of Macs being in use for longer, since a person with 5 Macs all still in use will still only buy one copy of Photoshop and one copy of Office.
Jobs is not being ironic when he talks about the "other 95 percent." What reason does he have to be ironic? To make an in joke to the Mac community? I don't think so. Jobs has one basic goal as head of Apple: to make a profit. The way he'll make a profit is by raising market share while keeping prices high (Apple has very good margins on its computers). It will keep prices high because it is selling a differentiated product. A simple econ textbook will show you why Apple will never sell Macs for as cheap as PCs, and why Apple will never take the whole market. This is not necessarily bad for Apple - if it can find the sweet point where it's getting the right number of sales at the right profit margin, it can be extremely profitable. It just won't ever take over the world that way. Jobs understands that, and that's why he's been positioning Apple as the computer for the fashionable elite - because he doesn't need lots of sales at Walmarts, he needs a decent number of sales at 27% margins.
The problem is, you need to have a large enough market share to woo software developers and hardware developers, and you also need to convince your stockholders that you are selling as many machines as you can at the high margins. The "other 95 percent" campaign fits these needs perfectly. It makes consumers understand that they don't need to fear Macs just because it has small market share, because after all, BMW and Mercedes Benz have small market share too. And it tells stockholders and developers that there's lots of potential for growth, and that Apple intends to enlarge the Mac market.
If your arguments were correct, there would be no reason for Apple not to use the 20% number. Because 20% would make developers happier, would encourage more consumers to buy Macs (since they'd see a larger community already existing), and would keep stockholder expectations realistic. After all, if Apple raises stockholder expectations by saying "we only have 5% market share, it'll be so easy to expand it by going after the other 95%," and then fails, management will be held responsible. On the other hand, if it says to stockholders, "We have 20%, it's just that Macs last longer, but we are slowly growing this community and steadily strengthening the company," they'd be hailed as doing a good job.
But that 20% is just not correct. Otherwise, why does Google show a 4% browser share for Macs? Why do software developers see such small sales for Macs?
I don't understand why Mac fans refuse to accept that Macs have a small user base now. It's not a value-judgment on the computer, it just means that Apple needs to do a better job selling the things. And I think Apple has been doing a much better job selling Macs over the last couple years, and I think they will continue to improve and gain more market share. But lying about the situation doesn't change it.
How is this manipulation? You say that "Manipulation is when something is falsely influenced or pushed. This is manipulation. Making OSX seem strong makes Microsoft look less like a monopoly." But the whole point of the story is that Microsoft is saying that MacOS X is not selling and is not strong. So, by your standard, what Microsoft is doing is not manipulation, it's the truth.
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Slashdot is so anti-MS, even being anti-MS when it makes no sense gets a score of 4.
But hey, I'm a former Amiga and then Mac user, so I'm guilty of a lot of anti-MS hatred and bias myself.
You don't sidestep a ban on getting a press pass by using a different address to sign up. This isn't some web form you just fill out and get confirmation from an automatic e-mailer. To get a press pass, you need to show IDG/Apple which media organization you are from. Otherwise, anyone could sign up for a press pass, obviously. So, if someone from MacOSRumors signs up for a press pass, using a fake address will make no difference. Unless that reporter can show credentials from MacWorld, and not MacOSRumors, he's still not getting in.
The rest of the world finds the fetish the US makes over its flag somewhat peculiar. The scenes of schoolchildren making loyalty oaths to the flag every day remind Europeans such as myself more of the types of society that Stalin and Hitler tried to impose than the values of liberal democracy.
On the one hand, I agree with you that the US does have what may be an immature or peculiar fetish with patriotism, loyalty, etc. But on the other hand, I think one of the advantages the US has had during the past 100 years over Europe is its ability to walk the middle ground between the feelings of the elites and the feelings of the masses. Europe has seemingly swayed between the two - communism and fascim as the expression of the masses, which is responded to by a stifling rule of the liberal elites who fear any display of patriotism, religion, nationalism, etc. So you get fascism followed by a refusal to allow any political party to seriously disagree with the EU. I think America's middle ground is safer - elite protection against too much populist sentiment, but also letting populist sentiment like the pledge of allegiance stand too.
An interesting tale of moderate in this thread:
The original post asks: if it is true that the computer market is still fine, it's just that sales are shifting from brand-name makers to white-box makers, why don't the statistics we are seeing from Intel and AMD reflect a healthy market? If it's just the brand-name makers who have a weak computer market, but white-box sales are up and are making up for the weakness in the brand-name market, why are overall CPU sales still weak?
Ok, that gets modded 4, Insightful, as it should.
dboyles responds that the reason CPU sales are weak is because people no longer need to upgrade - they can do everything they want with a four year old machine still.
This is a good point, but it is not at all related to the point originally being made, which is that if white-box sales really are making up for weak brand-name sales, the CPU makers' statistics should show this, but are not. Moreover, dboyles' point isn't even related to the point in the article.
dboyles' posts gets a 5, Insightful, higher than the original post.
MtViewGuy responds by reiterating dboyles' point that old computers are already fast enough for most computers, and then makes the additional point that if you do need a faster computer, you can just upgrade your existing computer instead of buying a new one. This is a valid point, except that it does not actually explain the weakness in the computer market. After all, are upgrades cheaper relative to the cost of a new computer now than they used to be? Are more people comfortable with upgading their own computers now than used to be? These factors would have to be determined (SlugLord speaks to one of them in another thread) before we could know if the ability to upgrade our computers had anything to do with the weakness in the computer market.
Moreover, because MtViewGuy specifically mentions upgrading by buying a new CPU, he doesn't answer to blair1q's original post - which is that if only the brand-name market is weak, then why are CPU makers' sales weak too. If people are upgrading by buying new CPUs, then CPU makers' sales would still be strong even though brand name sales of boxen were down.
MtViewGuy's post is moderated as 3, Informative.
jedrek posts saying that existing computers are already powerful enough for most people, repeating the point made by MtViewGuy and dboyle.
jedrek gets moderated 3, Insightful.
asv108 tries to contradict blair1q's original post by saying that people who build custom boxes use AMD, not Intel, therefore the fact that Intel's sales are weak does not show that the overall computer market is weak, not just brand-name manufacturers. This would be an ok point, except that he relies on selective quoting. He quotes blair1q saying "Intel should be overselling its predictable sales by 100% if half the computers are jobbed." But he ignores blair1q's next sentence: "AMD's doing no better (and may be losing market share, meaning it's losing unit sales even faster than Intel)." This sentence, of course, disproves asv108's whole point.
asv108's post has a score of 2.
>There already are. Do you think the War on
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>Afghanistan was about fighting terrorism?
Yup. Don't know how Brits would have taken it, but most Americans I knew were pretty upset about the whole planes flying into our buildings thing. People having nightmares for a month, crying at work, fearful of another attack, etc. They were demanding a response. If the US government just wanted to attack Afghanistan to set up a government to allow oil pipelines, it could have done so. The reason it attacked after 9/11 is because the American people were demanding it.
Let's not be conspiracy-theory idiots. There's a very simple explanation for the War on Afghanistan (people tend to respond to violence with violence, e.g., the whole history of the freaking world) and a very stupid, paranoid explanation. Which side are you on, boy, which side are you on?
I agree with the original poster - Dilbert did get old and tired. And it has nothing to do with whether I work in a cubicle or not. I've had a lot of people tell me that I just don't find Cathy or Dilbert funny because I'm not a woman or because I'm not a cubicle-jockey. But neither is true. I used to find Cathy and Dilbert very funny, and now I found them dull. Nothing has changed in my life - but something has changed in then.
That's a good idea. But I'm not sure how it would be implemented in practice. The reason it works for pet drugs vs. human drugs is that most people don't realize that they could just take the pet drugs, so the consumers are differentiated. But there's not an obvious way to differentiate between those who can afford to pay and those who can't.
Or, in all likelihood, the bigger problem is that it's not easy to prevent the people who can buy them cheap from reselling them to the people who are supposed to buy them for a lot - i.e., to stop a black market from forming. Sure, it seems like a good idea to charge the rich more for drugs than the poor, but what's to prevent the rich from simply buying their drugs from the poor or from doctors serving the poor? Then, instead of differentiating the market, the price of drugs has simply been reduced greatly, the drug companies make less money, and the incentive to make new drugs is decreased.
I'm not saying it's not a good idea, just that it may be hard in practice.
I'm actually fairly pleased at the current system of drug R&D. It's not perfect, but as others have pointed out, it has led to great advances in the last 50 years. Drug patents stink for the poor in need, but they also only last 20 years. Once they're up, everyone gains the benefits of that research for the rest of eternity.
Another escrow service people may want to check out is eDeposit (guess the URL, come on, you can do it! :)).
Just so you know I'm not trying to spam, I did used to work for them (I have moved onto more interesting things). But they are a good company, and escrow for online auctions is all they do.
I use a Celeron 466 with 256 megs of RAM, and Mozilla is still noticeably slower than IE 5.5.
A statement like this is just the excuse that hard line factions in any one of these countries (along with half the arab world) need to take power.
Ziang Zemin has already picked a successor in China. Putin is in very firm control in Russia. There are no signs of regime instability in North Korea, and besides, there's really no way that the North Korean regime could get more hard-line than it already is (what, will 1/2 the country be in the army now, instead of 1/3?). Hussein has not been seriously threatened at all, and he's not going to get more hard-line (he can't kick the UN inspectors out again, now can he?). Bashar Assad is firmly in power in Syria. I'm not sure what's going on in Libya, but Qaddafi certainly has survived for long enough, I don't think our "secret" plans will change that regime one way or another.
The only regime this could effect would be Iran, where there is a struggle going on.
Russia is going through enough trouble as it is. They're fighting internal difficulties and are still hot at the US over the olympics.
Russia is not about to fight us because of Olympic figure skating. Jesus, if their reaction to our pulling out of the ABM treaty was muted, why do we expect them to become our enemy over figure skating?
People are right to be concerned about what other countries will think and do. But we have to be realistic too.
At least two of the countries (China and Russia) are two of the most powerful countries on the planet and are supposedly on somewhat nice terms with the US.
Russia and China are on "somewhat nice terms" because they know that they have to live with us. That is the same reason that we are on "somewhat nice terms" with China. China and the US certainly don't love each other. They are certainly competitors, and disagree on MANY issues. But the US wants China as a market and knows that it can't bully China around, and China wants the US as a market (China has a trade surplus with the US that funds China's continued industrialization) and knows that it can't bully the US around. Therefore, they are very cold "friends." As for Russia, it has disagreements with both the US and China (though not as great as the disagreements between the US and China), but it is weak now and so needs to be friendly to both to help itself. That is why Putin has been friendly to the US - not because he loves the US, but because he wants to strengthen Russia, and Russia will not be helped by a confrontation, diplomatically or military, with either China or Russia at the moment.
You've got to love political discussions on a computer message board. Yes, your ten leading questions are all valid and true - but they all tell only one part of the story. You introduce no context.
1. Which is the only country on the planet that's used a nuclear weapon on civilians?
Ignoring the context of a war in which the aggressors (Japan and Germany) committed the most horrible atrocities ever witnessed, ignoring the fact that both sides had already attacked civilian populations, ignoring the fact that the firebombing of Dresden caused more deaths than those nuclear weapons, ignoring the fact that it was believed (and justifiably) that ending the war with two massive bombs would cause fewer deaths than a ground invasion.
2. Have more Americans been killed at the hands of Iraqis, or have more Iraqis been killed at the hands of Americans?
Ignoring the context of why there are sanctions, who is really responsible for those Iraqi deaths (in the northern region of Iraq, governed by the UN since the end of the war, infant mortality rates and so forth have gone down, not up, even though they are under the same sanctions regime), why other nations oppose the US removing Saddam Hussein and thereby removing a threat to other nations and allowing us to end the sanctions and return weapon inspectors.
3. Who's killed more innocent civilians? Al Quaeda in the United States, or the United States military in Afghanistan?
Ignoring the fact that the one study showing that the US has killed 4,000 in Afghanistan has been called into heavy question (Human Rights Watch and Reuters both came up with much lower number of casualties), ignoring the fact that Al Qaeda purposely targetted civilians and the US did not, ignoring the fact that Al Qaeda wants to create Islamic fundamentalist rule and the US has removed the Taliban and organized aid to Afghanistan, etc.
I could go into more detail on all these points, and also cover your other points, but I think you get the idea. The point is, don't accept bon mots or witticisms as replacements for actually thinking through the whole issue.
The situations in Korea and the Middle East hardly deteriorated since 9/11. The Second Intifada has been ongoing and escalating for 17 months, and North Korea had done little to reciprocate South Korea's sunshine policy before 9/11 as well. Now, 9/11 and the Axis of Evil may have made these situations worse, but they certainly weren't too great before 9/11 either.
You say that:
In the last couple years, Israel/Palestine and North and South Korea were at the table discussing. (It may or may not have actually developed a peace plan, but the important part was the ability to discuss)..
One popular view in conflict resolution is all that is required to end conflicts is to get both sides to talk until they recognize the humanity of each other, gain trust in their enemy, and moderate their own positions. This is the left-wing position - everyone has shared humanity, and if we just talk enough we can resolve our problems. There's an older, more conservative position, which disagrees. That position says that people stop fighting when one side beats the shit out of the other, or at least when there is enough violence that both sides gets tired of fighting.
Now, I admit that the left-wing position is nicer. But I am not convinced that it is always correct. The Palestinians for years did not just want their own state, but wanted to destroy Israel as well. It was Israel's military strength that made them change their goal - not frank discussions with Israelis that made them recognize shared humanity. Similarly, Israelis don't want to keep the territories any more because they know it will cost them too many lives.
Meanwhile, both Israelis and Palestinians hate the idea of a peace "process" now, because they see it as all "process" and no "peace." In other words, too much talking.
Actually, according to an article in The Atlantic Monthly, some scholars believe that as many as 113 million Native Americans may have lived in North America before the Europeans arrived.
The Klingons were not Nazis, they were the Soviets, and the Romulans were the Chinese. Hence, in Star Trek 6, the Cold War ends because the Soviet Empire falls apart (shades of Chernobyl).
The Klingons in 60s Star Trek bear great resemblance to the Krushchev-era Soviets - belligerant, aggressive, bombastic, but not actually willing to start a full war. There are no Nazi-elements to them.
Some of you may remember Peter Olafson for writing the gaming column for AmigaWorld magazine, the major American Amiga magazine. In my book, this makes him very, very cool. Nice to see he's writing for the New York Times now. Amiga users were obviously an extremely talented bunch. :)