We have tiered pricing in the UK too. I think British Telecom and Virgin Media (formally NTL) are the biggest players. I don't see anything wrong with tiered pricing.
On a side note, dial up internet access. It used to be possible to have unmetered dial up internet access for a monthly fee, but as the price of broadband has come down, and availability improved (I think most broadband is over phone wires in the UK, ISDN?), dial up internet access seems to have shifted to a metered, local phone rate package.
Second, MS will then offer cut rate advertisement (or perhaps a new click model which is deeply discounted), which will force Google to react or lose market share.
Remember that Google is primarily a advertisement firm with some killer search technology, not a technology firm that also does ads- so to use a Ballmer quote from the past, to kill a company, you "cut out the air supply". Google's air is adverts.
Advertising with Google Adwords is already cheap.
The main competitive advantage Adwords has over competitors is that its adverts reach more people, and so get more results.
Microsoft/Yahoo would need to attract advertisers, to attract publishers (Google Adsense), to attract advertisers. Tricky.
Slashdot has an international audience, I used the term 'British Navy' for clarity, I see nothing wrong in that.
By 'the last war' I was referring to the 'cold war', if you'd read the article I was talking about that would have been clear. In Britain what you call the 'Falkland Islands War' was called the 'Falkland Islands Conflict' at the time.
As I recall the General Belgrano was sunk by a submarine, the Sheffield by an Exocet missile fired by an aeroplane. Neither event conflicts with Mr Lewis' conclusions:
To sum up: the most significant threat our ships face is air attack. The only utility of frigates in air defence is as sacrificial shields, and our current destroyers are obsolete. Our fighter screen is cleverly improvised but only works in cold weather. New destroyers may be available in a few years, but we will be without fleet fighters for some time, and will be very weak in airborne radar, which could solve so many of our problems. There wasn't much chance, it turns out, for me to have a career as a useful fighting man aboard escorts. The only combat action these ships are really capable of is the shelling of targets on shore, and even at this their capability is marginal.
We have 30 escorts, costing from GBP170m to GBP600m each. They are a waste of effort. I wouldn't be abandoning 11 years of my life and a decent financial package if I could find a shred of justification for staying. The British taxpayer is forking out immense sums to run warships whose only real use is as venues for diplomatic cocktail parties. How appropriate that the other meaning of "escort" should be a person to whom one pays large sums for some brief entertainment. I don't mind hosting cocktail parties, but I don't want it to be my only useful contribution. I was proud to wear the blue suit, and I would like to be comfortably pensioned off at an early age. But I have to face myself in the mirror. If my only career option is to become an escort officer, it is time to leave.
There is a place for escorts in the Royal Naval order of battle, but only for a few, and those few should be powerful destroyers, heavily armed with anti-aircraft, anti-ship and cruise missiles, and large calibre long-range guns. The Type 45s now on order would do fine if upgraded; there is no need for the planned second batch. Nor is there any requirement whatever for our dozens of toothless, pricey frigates, or our current long-obsolete destroyers. We would lose no significant capability by decommissioning them all right now. At a stroke, we would have plenty of sailors and helicopters for our third, mothballed carrier. A lot of people would have to be let go. But it's supposed to be a navy, not a job creation scheme. There are also big savings to be made ashore, among the support infrastructure for these ships.
With the money saved, we could build effective armed forces and be the terror of the world's dictators and ethnic cleansers, as we should be. Britain would have a capability independent of the US, a situation more dignified than relying on the Americans, while moaning about how they manage each crisis.
From sea-based aircraft to submarines to mine clearance to the Royal Marine Commandos and their amphibious assault ships - the fighting people of the navy are second to none on the face of the watery globe. The policymakers are less worthy of respect. They love surface escorts for their own sweet sake. Service in escorts is the sine qua non of a successful career. Given the obvious reluctance of anyone to admit that he has wasted his time, high-ranking officers will always advocate them. The plans are already laid. The Type 45 is not alone on the drawing boards: there is also a planned replacement for the Type 23. It is called the "Future Surface Combatant." Nobody even asks whether tomorrow's maritime combats could be better fought by other things.
There's a very good article, from 2004, on the British Navy "Wasted Warships" which suggests that technology changes have not been considered in purchasing decisions taken by the top brass. Preparing to fight the last war etc.
One of the reasons for the high taxes in the UK for fuel is that they want to keep traffic numbers down. Pushing the price up should discourage people from driving so much in theory.
As I recall, during the fuel protests a few years back, some bod from BP/Shell was quizzed about the effects of petrol prices, and he said they made very little difference to people's driving habits. They buy more efficient cars, but that's it.
And the main reason that the UK has so much tax on petrol, is the oil shocks of the 70s. The recent rise in crude oil prices, has not caused dramatic increases in petrol/transport prices in the UK because tax is the major part of the final price.
in the UK if you drive a diesel fueled by used cooking oil, a waste product which would normally be dumped, the government expect you to pay tax on it
If 85% of your sales come from Google, and your adwords>sales conversion rate is reducing, I'd you're the ones with the problem, not 'the GOOGmeister'.
Slashdot seems to have a decent handle on ads. They exist, I see them, and occasionally I click on them because they actually happen to be relevant. They're unobtrusive, and even the flash based ones seem to load relatively quickly. Rarely, if ever, do I have any problems with the advertising here.
Just to add to the Slashdot love-in for a mo'
If you use dial-up internet, Slashdot can take an age to load. Knowing this, the good eggs at Slashdot have a 'dial-up' preference in your account options that tinkers with the CSS to show you a smaller homepage, (I think with fewer adverts than the default) and the page load times become bearable again.
The Register suggests IBM is just trying to keep their customers happy.
" IBM's move appears to confirm that there is strong demand for the OS among corporate customers. It's hard to imagine IBM agreeing to this arrangement without customers applying serious pressure."
From this data, he shows, far more clearly than has been possible before, that the economy was locked in a Malthusian trap _ -- each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level.
This income was pitifully low in terms of the amount of wheat it could buy. By 1790, the average person's consumption in England was still just 2,322 calories a day, with the poor eating a mere 1,508. Living hunter-gatherer societies enjoy diets of 2,300 calories or more.
"Primitive man ate well compared with one of the richest societies in the world in 1800," Dr. Clark observes.
So the article acknowledges that a hunter gatherer society has a better diet than a subsistance agriculture society.
Your comment about poverty:
"The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status."
seems to misunderstand the article. Poverty here is not relative-poverty, it's empty-belly-poverty.
The Industrial Revolution, the first escape from the Malthusian trap, occurred when the efficiency of production at last accelerated, growing fast enough to outpace population growth and allow average incomes to rise.
I don't think they let you take drinks or other things and pay like that do they?
I think that's probably more not trusting people's mental arithmatic, than their honesty. The supermarkets seem to be experimenting with 'scan your own trolley' checkouts.
but I can't imagine it working with the average British person, who would just see it as a way to avoid paying for the service.
Businesses already trust us to pay what we owe
If you go into WH Smith, you'll see a big plastic 'pay here' plastic drum near the newspapers, where WH Smith Ltd trust the average british person to put the correct money for their newspapers.
4. idiots who want to convince other idiots that OOXML is an open format (versus straight XML serialization of the whatever binary DOC was in the source code base at the time in MS)
"The agreement between the National Archives and Microsoft centres on the use of virtualisation."
The
Except that if Yahoo weren't so lazy, they could re-code all those games in Flash and work on more a lot more users' computers by default. It's not like Yahoo Games is using that Java to do anything that you couldn't do in Flash.
They could recode all their games in Flash, they could recode all their games in Javascript - BUT THEY DON'T NEED TO.
I also forgot to mention that the crappier Sun's Java VM becomes, the less likely people are to download it. Right now it's like 130 MB.
I don't see why you say java on the web is dead. Yahoo games, which I use daily, uses java, and is just one existing site that uses java.
Websites aren't going to replace their applets just because you think they should, and as long as the content is compelling, people will download the plugin.
I wonder what the price will be when it hits the streets.
I thought VMWare made their money off their server products, while their players were free? But I suppose on the Mac they don't have to consider a free Virtual PC, we'll find out if that makes a difference - I daresay the Parallels team are praying it does:)
We hear the parts are going to be closer to 150W than 120W initially. If you think about it, Kentsfield at 120W is 2x 65W 2.67GHz Conroes. 2.93 Conroes are 80W, so two of them minus a little is about 150W. The math works out.
The real QX6800s will come out in Q3 with a new stepping of the core Core number core numeral 2. This new stepping will drop power we are told 'substantially', and pave the way for volume QX6800 production.
I don't know about corporate Scrooges but a couple of years ago my brother, who earns over 200,000USD, gave me a multi-function penknife for Chrismas that had been a freebie sample to his company from a clutch manufacturer.
You get new Widgets plus the ability to turn any webpage into a widget
I have a little web-app, so I didn't much care for the sound of this. A trip to Apple tells me more:
Clips and flicks
Create your own Web site widget using Web Clip in Safari for Leopard. Just visit your favourite site and click the "Open in Dashboard" button in Safari. Dashboard launches a new clip of the site in a customisable widget. From there, you can resize your Web Clip and choose from a handful of window themes. And since your Web Clip is always live, it acts just like the Web site it was clipped from. Dashboard for Leopard also introduces a movie widget that finds cinema schedules in less time than it takes to make popcorn.
Is there a "meta" tag I can use to ask OSX not to do this?
Slashdot Mirror
We have tiered pricing in the UK too. I think British Telecom and Virgin Media (formally NTL) are the biggest players. I don't see anything wrong with tiered pricing.
On a side note, dial up internet access. It used to be possible to have unmetered dial up internet access for a monthly fee, but as the price of broadband has come down, and availability improved (I think most broadband is over phone wires in the UK, ISDN?), dial up internet access seems to have shifted to a metered, local phone rate package.
Advertising with Google Adwords is already cheap.
The main competitive advantage Adwords has over competitors is that its adverts reach more people, and so get more results.
Microsoft/Yahoo would need to attract advertisers, to attract publishers (Google Adsense), to attract advertisers. Tricky.
Slashdot has an international audience, I used the term 'British Navy' for clarity, I see nothing wrong in that.
By 'the last war' I was referring to the 'cold war', if you'd read the article I was talking about that would have been clear. In Britain what you call the 'Falkland Islands War' was called the 'Falkland Islands Conflict' at the time.
As I recall the General Belgrano was sunk by a submarine, the Sheffield by an Exocet missile fired by an aeroplane. Neither event conflicts with Mr Lewis' conclusions:
There's a very good article, from 2004, on the British Navy "Wasted Warships" which suggests that technology changes have not been considered in purchasing decisions taken by the top brass. Preparing to fight the last war etc.
As I recall, during the fuel protests a few years back, some bod from BP/Shell was quizzed about the effects of petrol prices, and he said they made very little difference to people's driving habits. They buy more efficient cars, but that's it.
And the main reason that the UK has so much tax on petrol, is the oil shocks of the 70s. The recent rise in crude oil prices, has not caused dramatic increases in petrol/transport prices in the UK because tax is the major part of the final price.
News to me, can you cite your source?
The Sony Reader has an e-ink screen too.
If 85% of your sales come from Google, and your adwords>sales conversion rate is reducing, I'd you're the ones with the problem, not 'the GOOGmeister'.
Just to add to the Slashdot love-in for a mo'
If you use dial-up internet, Slashdot can take an age to load. Knowing this, the good eggs at Slashdot have a 'dial-up' preference in your account options that tinkers with the CSS to show you a smaller homepage, (I think with fewer adverts than the default) and the page load times become bearable again.
The Register suggests IBM is just trying to keep their customers happy.
So the article acknowledges that a hunter gatherer society has a better diet than a subsistance agriculture society.
Your comment about poverty:
"The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status."
seems to misunderstand the article. Poverty here is not relative-poverty, it's empty-belly-poverty.
I think that's probably more not trusting people's mental arithmatic, than their honesty. The supermarkets seem to be experimenting with 'scan your own trolley' checkouts.
Businesses already trust us to pay what we owe
If you go into WH Smith, you'll see a big plastic 'pay here' plastic drum near the newspapers, where WH Smith Ltd trust the average british person to put the correct money for their newspapers.
Most people are honest, trust your neighbours.
They could recode all their games in Flash, they could recode all their games in Javascript - BUT THEY DON'T NEED TO.
No idea where you get your 130MB figure, the (MS Windows) figure from Sun is 7MB-13MB.
I don't see why you say java on the web is dead. Yahoo games, which I use daily, uses java, and is just one existing site that uses java.
Websites aren't going to replace their applets just because you think they should, and as long as the content is compelling, people will download the plugin.
I thought VMWare made their money off their server products, while their players were free? But I suppose on the Mac they don't have to consider a free Virtual PC, we'll find out if that makes a difference - I daresay the Parallels team are praying it does :)
Well, the beta's available. I've been using it a little without coming up against any bugs, and, unlike Parallels, it's free :)
Forgive me if this sounds stupid, but couldn't you just save yourself the aggro by using VMWare's Mac OS player?
I came across a March 2005 article from The Register that said S.Korea hosted 3% of zombie PCs.
Far behind the UK & USA in the zombie league :-)
I don't know about corporate Scrooges but a couple of years ago my brother, who earns over 200,000USD, gave me a multi-function penknife for Chrismas that had been a freebie sample to his company from a clutch manufacturer.
Ho, ho, ho.
As I recall they billed XP the same way, and in the middle of their "most secure ever" ad/launch campaign, the FBI (I think on prime time TV) warned USA computer users of the terrible security vulnerability of XP's plug and play facility which should be disabled before it caused the computer to morph into a flesh eating zombie (or words to that effect :-) ).
Doesn't sound like the Amazon and Ebay sites I visit on my 56K modem.
I ran a little test using Safari's show page test load window option from the debug menu, results below.
I have a little web-app, so I didn't much care for the sound of this. A trip to Apple tells me more:
Is there a "meta" tag I can use to ask OSX not to do this?