They have in fact succeeded by not going after the middle of the market, where they would have been creamed.
They're missing the middle of market, where they are being creamed. You can see right into a company's marketing strategy by its ad campaign--in Apple's case, lots of horizontal marketing: TV ads, corporate stores at the mall, cheesy magazines, etc. Their bread and butter right now is that loyal user base in the design space, but who wants all of their eggs in one basket? Jobs wants a mac on Joe and Tina Everyday's desk, and hasn't been able to pull it off with the flash, glamour, expense, and proprietary nature of the Mac line.
Every time some nitnoid sends me an Email w/ Word attachments, I usually add suggested revisions to the document, which are highlighted and able to be implemented by the document owner after I've sent it back.
Really, Word is a decent package for document collaboration. There might be better tools out there, but none so universally accepted and used. It might suffer from featureitis, but don't think it's only useful for pictures and tables.
Actually, we've been their mommy and daddy since 1951, when the US-Japan security treaty was signed, at the Japanese government's request. We provide Japan with complete military protection, ever since we rather completely thwarted their attempts to take over the Eastern Hemisphere in the middle of the last century.
Even today, 50 years since the treaty was instated, every major political party in Japan supports our military presence, in spite of some of the awful blunders of our GIs in Okinawa. This support allowed them to rebuild their economy post-WWII, and keeps the huge burden of policing the Pacific Rim off of the shoulders of their government.
This is why we get a rather amplified voice in their doings.
I totally agree that Microsoft's anti open source rants help the movement, but I can't agree with you on the IBM comment.
IBM is still the biggest player in the world on the IT front, usually more than tripling EDS's annual revenue. They're annual sales are _10 times_ Microsoft's, and about double Dell's. They still dominate the server market, and will for the foreseeable future.
Anyway, what market share they did lose in this arena, allowing these lesser players in during the 80s was due to the excessive amount of resource they put into defending the government's arguably baseless anti-trust suit. This suit was never resolved as far as an MS-type settlement, but the government took IBM's eye off the ball just long enough to let all the other players in the market. It is arguable but possible that IBM would still be the _only_ significant hardware player if this hadn't happened.
So don't think the gov't won't manipulate the situation no matter the court outcome. And don't think that, although they might lose some market share to smaller players after the fallout, MS won't be the dominate OS force into the next couple of decades.
There's been much talk here and elsewhere of having the government promote/require standards and practices for OS manufacturers, ostensibly to promote competitive advancements in the field.
Do you fear, though, that the government might wrest too much control from the industry? The Fed doesn't exactly have a grand track record thusfar with regards to digital rights.
I don't think BK is fraught with LOTR fans. A friend of mine said he asked for one of the glasses there the other day, and the pimply faced kid behind the counter said (in your best Simpsons fast-food guy voice):
C'mon. I get so tired of these 'America is so self-centric and aggressive' posts that automatically get modded up.
Firstly, the USA is commonly referred to as 'America' because it is, to the best of my knowledge, the only country on these two continents that includes the word 'America' in its title. People would quickly grow tired of calling us "United States of Americans" or "YouEssAyans" instead of just "Amercians". This is the only descriptor I've run across, in my fairly wide travels anyway, for people from these United States. All of the Australians, Brits, Chinese, and Japanese I know refer to the American continents as "The Americas", and would never assume that 'America' includes countries north and south.
Secondly, oh yes, our 'predilection towards violence' and aggression is so unique in the world. The countries of Africa, Asia and Europe are just flower carrying peace lovers compared to America. Every country has their violent little toys, and likes to use them. Just because America can afford the most and the best right now doesn't make them any worse or better than any country of the often parental 1st world on down.
It seems to me money would be better spent getting the next-generation Internet going
It seems to me this would evolve just the way the Internet did before; it would at first be used just by government agencies, next given to the large defense contractors, eventually adopted by the research universities, and then swallowed whole by Joe Public. This, IMHO, is the best way to get the next-gen Internet.
I'm certainly not a Wintel advocate, but there is a tangeable increase the in the use of Windows in the engineering and graphic arts industry.
I can talk a little more authoratatively about the engineering space. FEMAP, an FE Analysis tool, is widely used from small shops to Lockheed, and is an NT-only product. Nastran, Abaqus, and all the other FE solver companies have big NT sales. All of the MCAD packages you mentioned, I-DEAS, Catia, ProE, Autocad, have equal or greater sales in the Windows space.
Alias Wavefront, 3D Studio Max, and many of the other rendering packages are getting hotter on the Windows OS's, too.
I think it comes down to hardware cost. Hopefully Linux will continue to grow in the engineering and effects space, because big companies are just growing sicker and sicker of paying tens of thousands of $ for Unix-native boxes like SGI (check their stock lately?). Luckily it looks like the art industry is adopting Linux ( Maya has a RedHat release), and I'm seeing some of it in the engineering space (Nastran has a cool distributed-process solutions package), but don't think that the non-PC *nix packages are going to continue to thrive. WinNT+cheap Intel hardware is MUCH cheaper than Irix+Octane.
Would it then be illegal to create a message board with frontpage, if it was used without the knowledge of the creator to post anti-microsoft propaganda? This would, theoretically, allow MS to moderate discussion sites created with frontpage.
snip from a Yahoo! news item---
Elat estimates 100 to 200 people are killed every year by one of the 100 million bolts it says hit Brazil annually and make the country the world champion of lightning strikes.
Do you really think this is a good place to visit for people who sit at computers all day?!
Brothers and sisters, AIDS is our problem. It makes the bubonic plague look like a bad case of hiccups.
You sound like someone who was afraid to sit next to Ryan White during the ignorant 80s. Last time I checked, the Plague was caused by Yersinia pestis, and spread through fleas, coughs, sneezes, and other easily communicated methods. AIDS, to the best of my knowledge, can only be spread through sexual transmission and direct exposure to infected blood; it is significantly more difficult to acquire. This is why a majority of the population still treats this disease with relative apathy; they avoid it by the very nature of their lifestyles.
This isn't to say that I think situations like that of Africa and many other third-world countries doesn't need to be solved _now_. There is a difficult road to pave by grassroots education campaigns, volunteering, and the like. The easy, unfair way to defeat AIDS is by hijacking the pharms, a solution that may come back to haunt these would-be heroes.
I would answer your fireman analogy by saying that if enough people purposely light their curtains on fire just to see them glow, the local counsel will disband the fire department before there's even a chance to steal one truck.
...doesn't this whole article sound a whiney, bad version of an Andy Rooney rant? I mean, this guy who wants his computer to be like a typewriter, but doesn't like to use it for writing, is going to use an eyepiece-LCD, speech driven device? Uh-huh.
This should read "if Nintendo's few third party developers aren't happy with the development platform, Nintendo shouldn't bother producing the Gamecube." It's been Nintendo's dismal support of their third parties that have hurt them so much.
As for people's rants about Nintendo not catering to the adult market, are you really informed on this issue, or just talking through Playstation- inspired ruby glasses? Rare might be--granted it's arguable, I agree that there're many fine Sony houses out there--the best game developer out there today. With games like Goldeneye, PD, Jet Force Gemini, and Conker, these are all adult games, and all can be described with superlatives. As an adult game player of Sony, PC, and Sega experience, IMHO Nintendo has the best 'feel' of any console out there. The previously mentioned 4 games alone made the price of the console worth it. If Gamecube's the same way, so be it. Nintendo just has to stop raping their 3rd parties, and they're good to go.
Oh, I'm inflammatory? Did you read your own post subject? And by the way, I have dealt directly with estate taxes, the estate size was about $2 million dollars (carefully saved by my relatives, very average blue-collar types), the cap was $600k at the time, and the estate was split amongst 10 family members who payed a total of about _$800,000_ to uncle sam. I paid my credit cards off and had enough when I was done to set up a nice trust for my kids' education. I still drive a Chevy, and you are a worthless coward for delivering such bitter, insulting criticism as an AC. Too afraid to put your own name to your own opinion?
Why does everyone who talks about this topic only mention family businesses and farms? THERE IS A VAST AMOUNT OF PRIVATELY HELD WEALTH IN THE US. This is not quantified by the cute charts you're pulling up from google, and the average estate size is a little bit over the tax cap limit--THAT'S WHY IT'S THERE. And anyway, if someone's dad wants to buy them a Porsche, do you want to take that right away just because yours never did?
That 4% figure does not include private individuals who have squirreled away their money since the market crash. And yes, there are a significant number who have. The greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the US (even adjusting for inflation) is happening right now, primarily depression era workers who are dying and leaving vast amounts of money, all greatly affected by the $600,000 cap on trust protection, to their benefactors. And no, they haven't saved all that money under their beds, but built it with faith in an economy whose stock market has averaged more than 10% a year for the last 50. So these people who have bolstered the American market with their own investment dollars should have to give it up when they die?
And the 'preventing an aristocracy' idea might be nice, but totally goes against the ideals of this country. Jefferson himself said that even the rich can be subject to prejudice and injustice by unfair taxation. Not to mention, again, the founders and the robber barons supported this tax because they have more money than God; why would they care about ~70% over 600k? It's just keeping the average man where they believe he belongs. Try making the death tax percentage increasingly graduate as the estate increases, and then see what the robber barons and old money families have to say about it.
I can't believe that people are moderating this down. This is a valid point, and the 'limousine liberal', aka Jane Fonda, is a very real occurance.
I see replies to this post threatening that nobody can be taken seriously in this forum if they have a conservatively slanted post or sig--so what, now this is 'hooray for Linux and liberalism website? Can we have no rational discussion that disagrees with/.'s status quo? You all can look forward to mediocre, static existences if you choose this path.
Now to add my own defense to this idea: the estate tax is social engineering. In the Salon article referred to in the original post, one of the billionaires even admits that it's about not transferring power directly from one generation to the next. Well guess what, if Gate's and Buffet's kids only have 30 billion dollars to spend instead of a 100, they're still going to have a few politicians in their pockets. It's the average WWII era blue-collar worker that saved for his/her whole life, and only wants to see their kids benefit, that is hurt the most. The estate tax is an easy way for the ultra rich to keep a large segment of the population from climbing the economic ladder. It is social engineering at its worst, and it hurts people like you--and those with less money--the most. You don't have to be dirt poor to get screwed by the government.
Using 0.18-micron design rules, the latest Graphics Synthesizer is an astounding 21.7 x 21.3-square-millimeters and contains 287.5 million transistors
(snip)
I assume the mean that the wafer is 21.7x21.3mm^2, this is a little under an inch to a side. At first read I thought they meant total package size, which isn't that impressive considering even the size of an old PII.
Did I miss something? Why all the absolutes about 'we will fight China'?
I think the interdependence of our economies will grow so extreme as to make war with a country like China simply imprudent. Let's face it--we fight economically prudent wars. If we have significant business interests in China and the rest of the formerly unfriendly world, war would actually cost us more than it would ever benefit us. Not to mention we have more US citizens in these countries than in any other time in history--as do they have in our country. Who would let war happen? Battle will continue to happen Cold War style; we aren't a divided enough world to fight anymore. Satellites will be used to spy on business deals rather than mass troop movements.
Absolutely. Intentionally. If anything, Card was shocked by so many people's problem with this parallel. It illustrates perfectly his point: the people of Ender's future can't see anything about Ender but the act. Genocide has obscured anything else important about Wiggin's humanity. But being critized for daring to draw parallels to ol' Adolph...well, that just reminds me of the kind of criticism that resulted in no new Salinger masterpieces.
***Disclaimer: I'm not at all saying Hitler wasn't the most evil SOB in history***
But I am saying that our culture has made it impossible to even explore, even as just an excercise, any other possibility. This is scarier than anything else, IMHO.
A good analysis of the book can be found at this link. In it, Collings discusses the obvious Christ parallels in Ender's Game. The twelve 'apostles' following Ender in the end battle. His descent into the 'underworld' (the bugger world) after he saves humanity. His sacrifice for Man, etc. Now, as I see it, Hitler had about as big a Christ complex as anyone. Any surprise that there might be some parallels between Hitler and any messianic tale? Could work just as easily for Dune...
It is the top complaint from customers, and the complaints have reached 250,000 on a single day, the company said. While this is a small percentage of the 166 million emails sent every day through AOL, company representatives said one unhappy message is one too many.
If one is too many, why did it take 250k complaints before AOheLl cracked down!? They've really got their fingers on the pulse.
IMDB, where there's good cast info, as there're outstanding character descriptions here.
I'm fairly disapointed, tho', that Arwen (Liv Tyler) is being given such a big part--she's even on the promo logo. I don't think they have to go with traditional 'pop' themes to make this film successful. (ie, overemphasizing Aragorn and Arwen's love story).
Slashdot Mirror
They have in fact succeeded by not going after the middle of the market, where they would have been creamed.
They're missing the middle of market, where they are being creamed. You can see right into a company's marketing strategy by its ad campaign--in Apple's case, lots of horizontal marketing: TV ads, corporate stores at the mall, cheesy magazines, etc. Their bread and butter right now is that loyal user base in the design space, but who wants all of their eggs in one basket? Jobs wants a mac on Joe and Tina Everyday's desk, and hasn't been able to pull it off with the flash, glamour, expense, and proprietary nature of the Mac line.
Really, Word is a decent package for document collaboration. There might be better tools out there, but none so universally accepted and used. It might suffer from featureitis, but don't think it's only useful for pictures and tables.
Even today, 50 years since the treaty was instated, every major political party in Japan supports our military presence, in spite of some of the awful blunders of our GIs in Okinawa. This support allowed them to rebuild their economy post-WWII, and keeps the huge burden of policing the Pacific Rim off of the shoulders of their government.
This is why we get a rather amplified voice in their doings.
BTW, it's 'comtemplating'.
IBM is still the biggest player in the world on the IT front, usually more than tripling EDS's annual revenue. They're annual sales are _10 times_ Microsoft's, and about double Dell's. They still dominate the server market, and will for the foreseeable future.
Anyway, what market share they did lose in this arena, allowing these lesser players in during the 80s was due to the excessive amount of resource they put into defending the government's arguably baseless anti-trust suit. This suit was never resolved as far as an MS-type settlement, but the government took IBM's eye off the ball just long enough to let all the other players in the market. It is arguable but possible that IBM would still be the _only_ significant hardware player if this hadn't happened.
So don't think the gov't won't manipulate the situation no matter the court outcome. And don't think that, although they might lose some market share to smaller players after the fallout, MS won't be the dominate OS force into the next couple of decades.
Do you fear, though, that the government might wrest too much control from the industry? The Fed doesn't exactly have a grand track record thusfar with regards to digital rights.
"Did you want the old dude or the girl?"
Firstly, the USA is commonly referred to as 'America' because it is, to the best of my knowledge, the only country on these two continents that includes the word 'America' in its title. People would quickly grow tired of calling us "United States of Americans" or "YouEssAyans" instead of just "Amercians". This is the only descriptor I've run across, in my fairly wide travels anyway, for people from these United States. All of the Australians, Brits, Chinese, and Japanese I know refer to the American continents as "The Americas", and would never assume that 'America' includes countries north and south.
Secondly, oh yes, our 'predilection towards violence' and aggression is so unique in the world. The countries of Africa, Asia and Europe are just flower carrying peace lovers compared to America. Every country has their violent little toys, and likes to use them. Just because America can afford the most and the best right now doesn't make them any worse or better than any country of the often parental 1st world on down.
It seems to me this would evolve just the way the Internet did before; it would at first be used just by government agencies, next given to the large defense contractors, eventually adopted by the research universities, and then swallowed whole by Joe Public. This, IMHO, is the best way to get the next-gen Internet.
The Brown Box of Destruction
I'm certainly not a Wintel advocate, but there is a tangeable increase the in the use of Windows in the engineering and graphic arts industry.
I can talk a little more authoratatively about the engineering space. FEMAP, an FE Analysis tool, is widely used from small shops to Lockheed, and is an NT-only product. Nastran, Abaqus, and all the other FE solver companies have big NT sales. All of the MCAD packages you mentioned, I-DEAS, Catia, ProE, Autocad, have equal or greater sales in the Windows space.
Alias Wavefront, 3D Studio Max, and many of the other rendering packages are getting hotter on the Windows OS's, too.
I think it comes down to hardware cost. Hopefully Linux will continue to grow in the engineering and effects space, because big companies are just growing sicker and sicker of paying tens of thousands of $ for Unix-native boxes like SGI (check their stock lately?). Luckily it looks like the art industry is adopting Linux ( Maya has a RedHat release), and I'm seeing some of it in the engineering space (Nastran has a cool distributed-process solutions package), but don't think that the non-PC *nix packages are going to continue to thrive. WinNT+cheap Intel hardware is MUCH cheaper than Irix+Octane.
Wakka wakka wakka!
Would it then be illegal to create a message board with frontpage, if it was used without the knowledge of the creator to post anti-microsoft propaganda? This would, theoretically, allow MS to moderate discussion sites created with frontpage.
snip from poster---
Maybe it's time to visit Rio?
snip from a Yahoo! news item---
Elat estimates 100 to 200 people are killed every year by one of the 100 million bolts it says hit Brazil annually and make the country the world champion of lightning strikes.
Do you really think this is a good place to visit for people who sit at computers all day?!
Brothers and sisters, AIDS is our problem. It makes the bubonic plague look like a bad case of hiccups.
You sound like someone who was afraid to sit next to Ryan White during the ignorant 80s. Last time I checked, the Plague was caused by Yersinia pestis, and spread through fleas, coughs, sneezes, and other easily communicated methods. AIDS, to the best of my knowledge, can only be spread through sexual transmission and direct exposure to infected blood; it is significantly more difficult to acquire. This is why a majority of the population still treats this disease with relative apathy; they avoid it by the very nature of their lifestyles.
This isn't to say that I think situations like that of Africa and many other third-world countries doesn't need to be solved _now_. There is a difficult road to pave by grassroots education campaigns, volunteering, and the like. The easy, unfair way to defeat AIDS is by hijacking the pharms, a solution that may come back to haunt these would-be heroes.
I would answer your fireman analogy by saying that if enough people purposely light their curtains on fire just to see them glow, the local counsel will disband the fire department before there's even a chance to steal one truck.
As for people's rants about Nintendo not catering to the adult market, are you really informed on this issue, or just talking through Playstation- inspired ruby glasses? Rare might be--granted it's arguable, I agree that there're many fine Sony houses out there--the best game developer out there today. With games like Goldeneye, PD, Jet Force Gemini, and Conker, these are all adult games, and all can be described with superlatives. As an adult game player of Sony, PC, and Sega experience, IMHO Nintendo has the best 'feel' of any console out there. The previously mentioned 4 games alone made the price of the console worth it. If Gamecube's the same way, so be it. Nintendo just has to stop raping their 3rd parties, and they're good to go.
Why does everyone who talks about this topic only mention family businesses and farms? THERE IS A VAST AMOUNT OF PRIVATELY HELD WEALTH IN THE US. This is not quantified by the cute charts you're pulling up from google, and the average estate size is a little bit over the tax cap limit--THAT'S WHY IT'S THERE. And anyway, if someone's dad wants to buy them a Porsche, do you want to take that right away just because yours never did?
And the 'preventing an aristocracy' idea might be nice, but totally goes against the ideals of this country. Jefferson himself said that even the rich can be subject to prejudice and injustice by unfair taxation. Not to mention, again, the founders and the robber barons supported this tax because they have more money than God; why would they care about ~70% over 600k? It's just keeping the average man where they believe he belongs. Try making the death tax percentage increasingly graduate as the estate increases, and then see what the robber barons and old money families have to say about it.
I see replies to this post threatening that nobody can be taken seriously in this forum if they have a conservatively slanted post or sig--so what, now this is 'hooray for Linux and liberalism website? Can we have no rational discussion that disagrees with /.'s status quo? You all can look forward to mediocre, static existences if you choose this path.
Now to add my own defense to this idea: the estate tax is social engineering. In the Salon article referred to in the original post, one of the billionaires even admits that it's about not transferring power directly from one generation to the next. Well guess what, if Gate's and Buffet's kids only have 30 billion dollars to spend instead of a 100, they're still going to have a few politicians in their pockets. It's the average WWII era blue-collar worker that saved for his/her whole life, and only wants to see their kids benefit, that is hurt the most. The estate tax is an easy way for the ultra rich to keep a large segment of the population from climbing the economic ladder. It is social engineering at its worst, and it hurts people like you--and those with less money--the most. You don't have to be dirt poor to get screwed by the government.
(snip)
I assume the mean that the wafer is 21.7x21.3mm^2, this is a little under an inch to a side. At first read I thought they meant total package size, which isn't that impressive considering even the size of an old PII.
When the US and China fight in 20 years
Did I miss something? Why all the absolutes about 'we will fight China'?
I think the interdependence of our economies will grow so extreme as to make war with a country like China simply imprudent. Let's face it--we fight economically prudent wars. If we have significant business interests in China and the rest of the formerly unfriendly world, war would actually cost us more than it would ever benefit us. Not to mention we have more US citizens in these countries than in any other time in history--as do they have in our country. Who would let war happen? Battle will continue to happen Cold War style; we aren't a divided enough world to fight anymore. Satellites will be used to spy on business deals rather than mass troop movements.
C'mon, if it was blatant, why is it so debated?
Ender parallels Hitler
Absolutely. Intentionally. If anything, Card was shocked by so many people's problem with this parallel. It illustrates perfectly his point: the people of Ender's future can't see anything about Ender but the act. Genocide has obscured anything else important about Wiggin's humanity. But being critized for daring to draw parallels to ol' Adolph...well, that just reminds me of the kind of criticism that resulted in no new Salinger masterpieces.
***Disclaimer: I'm not at all saying Hitler wasn't the most evil SOB in history***
But I am saying that our culture has made it impossible to even explore, even as just an excercise, any other possibility. This is scarier than anything else, IMHO.
A good analysis of the book can be found at this link. In it, Collings discusses the obvious Christ parallels in Ender's Game. The twelve 'apostles' following Ender in the end battle. His descent into the 'underworld' (the bugger world) after he saves humanity. His sacrifice for Man, etc. Now, as I see it, Hitler had about as big a Christ complex as anyone. Any surprise that there might be some parallels between Hitler and any messianic tale? Could work just as easily for Dune...
If one is too many, why did it take 250k complaints before AOheLl cracked down!? They've really got their fingers on the pulse.
;-)
I'm fairly disapointed, tho', that Arwen (Liv Tyler) is being given such a big part--she's even on the promo logo. I don't think they have to go with traditional 'pop' themes to make this film successful. (ie, overemphasizing Aragorn and Arwen's love story).