Perhaps someone out there knows the answer to this... if I were to fly over this region would I (briefly) be able to access the internet from my laptop? If the Access Points have miles of range, does that range extend *up* as well as *out*? Just curious. And of course, by extension, as more and more cities roll these things out, will we have access to the net wherever we fly? Assuming the answer to my question is yes, could this begin to impact airplane design (especially small planes), by assuming net access? Planes could report their position (on board GPS tells them where they are, then they use the wireless net to communicate to "Air Traffic Controller" servers, which could then send back flight instructions). Just a few random thoughts for a Monday morning...
Mark my words - totalitarianism and capitalism do not mix; one or the other will disappear. And it is almost always the former. Once people get a taste of property rights and property ownership, they never want to go back.
As regards distribution of the news having nothing to do with economic systems, the OP said that this whole Google-AP exchange was an example of how "capitalism works - taking things that are available to everyone and putting a fence around it". It was the OP that began this thread by bashing capitalism. I merely pointed out the obvious - as bad as capitalism can be, communism is orders of magnitude worse. And happily the example we are both using, which is the topic of this thread - news distribution - fits my argument very nicely. Unless you think the method of news dissemination in communist countries is better than that found in capitalistic countries?
And my point is... as bad as capitalism is, communism is much worse. Sure, there are shades of gray between those two extremes (unfettered property rights versus no property rights [the state owns everything]), but the OP was not being subtle in his/her criticism of capitalism. The comment was meant to reflect negatively on capitalism in general (whatever socialistic flavor one practices) because it criticized the notion of property rights, the fundamental underpinning of any capitalistic system.
Typical. Ad hominem attacks. Why am I not surprised that when I say something bad about communism around here I am immediately called disparaging names.
For the record, Communism is an economic system, as is Capitalism. The comment was about how Capitalism works, specifically as it applies to the dissemination of the news. My comment merely pointed out how every country that uses communism as its economic system uses a different, much less desirable technique, for distributing news. True, those countries also tend to be totolitarian regimes -- pretty much they have to be to keep people from leaving such a bankrupt economic system. The fact that you are unable to connect those dots suggests perhaps an intelligence deficit on your part, I'm afraid. The fact that you posted anonymously shows that you might also realize this and did not want it well known.
I think it is always important to remind people of the tried-and-true *alternatives* to capitalism. These boards are highly critical of capitalism, and I agree it has its share of "warts", but, as Churchill so eloquently said:
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
This is how capitalism works, you take something availiable to everybody and put a fence around it.
Yeah, I much prefer how news is handled in a communist system. They don't put a fence around it, they just shoot the messenger, or put him in prison for the rest of his life.
Imagine if this is a special version of Vista that keeps detailed logs that can somehow find their way back to MS. This could give them a nice window (no pun intended) into the black hats' methods. Probably the black hats would be all over that, though.
Or, imagine that the Vista they get is not the one the rest of us will get -- MS could, for example, purposely insert a bunch of security problems of varying severity and type to see how sophisticated the black hats are.
That disease that has so infected business - talking about process (how) rather than products (what) - is readily apparent in Congress as well. I added up the percentages of the "Procedural [HouseKeeping]" categories (egads, there were 6 different line items - not sure what the distinctions were), and it was 50%!!! So, for half the time Congress is talking about *how* they are going to talk about things. Ugggh. I suppose, as one who believes that the less the government does, the better, I should be happy. But oh, the global warming from all that hot air!
Well you're forgetting that any system needs feedback to work properly.
I agree. However, I think that in many cases sales can provide that feedback. And this is especially true in the online ad world, since there is no latency in the delivery channel, unlike the print media. Also, online ads are "on demand" unlike the broadcast media where, if you weren't listening/watching at the time, you miss it, so there is a timing element. Anyhow, I guess what I'm saying is that sales are a pretty good metric to provide ad feedback, and uniquely with online ads, that feedback can even be quite timely.
If you read the article, one of the things they say is how hard it is to determine the "intent" of the person clicking the ad. Are they serious shoppers, casual browsers, or even one of those teenagers who sign up for those click-for-profit type schemes. Well duh! Of course you can never know this. To me it's all quite silly. The point of online advertising is the same as the point of any other advertising medium - drive up sales (or, notoriety). And that information is readily available to the client companies. They know what their ad budget is and they know what their sales are (and polls tell them what their notioriety is). In the end they should have enough data to make their own determinations as to how valuable online ads are to them, and then they should pay accordingly. I know this is all easier said than done when the prefered pricing model seems to be click-based. But, at some point the numbers should tell the story, and if it means the online ads aren't worth what they are costing, then spend they should reallocate their ad dollars elsewhere. Eventually the pricing will align with value.
Am I the only one who kind of wonders about these cost estimates? First, to update 70,000 machines for 190,000 Euros means 3 Euros/machine. Does this include labor? Second, $18,000,000 divided by 70,000 is $257 per machine. Those are some expensive office licenses they have there (I presume those 70,000 machines already have Windows so they shouldn't have to re-buy those licenses). Isn't there some sort of middle ground that would be just as cheap, like using Open Office on Windows - this would sidestep all the compatibility issues with printers and such while reaping most of the cost benefits? While I don't doubt there could be significant savings, at least in the initial project costs, it looks to me like these estimates are way off-base.
A pirated copy of Windows 95 will work on any white-box PC. System 7, Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X only ever worked on Apple hardware.
And so will a *legally* purchased copy of Windows - and that is exactly my point - Windows works (and always has) on any "white-box" system *because* that was what they were about from the beginning (insisting in negotiations with IBM that they maintain distribution rights for MSDOS rather than being locked into an exclusive with IBM). They viewed themselves as a pure software company, which set them apart from almost every other OS vendor at the time (almost all of which were hardware vendors selling bundled "captive" OS's). That was a bold, high-risk strategy that has paid off handsomely. Yes, they got lucky - any small company that becomes as successful as they have needs luck. And yes, they sometimes promised things they didn't have, but again, having worked at several startups, that is completely typical, and perhaps even necessary. Small companies simply don't have the resources to speculatively develop a host of products, hoping one will hit. So instead they try to land a big fish by signing up for "impossible deadlines", and then work like crazy to meet them.
Surely you are not suggesting that just because people pirated Windows, that's why they achieved dominant marketshare. True, there are many pirated copies of Windows around, but it is not a huge percentage of the installed base as you imply. According to an ARStechnica article I just read, about 1 in 5 systems fail the WGA license validation, and of those, about 80% are categorized as "stolen volume licenses" - so that rolls up to about 16% of the installed base of the 300 million machines running the WGA.
Well said. There just aren't many folks around these parts that will admit that MS did *some* things right - especially in the early days. It wasn't all done with sleaze and leveraging a monopoly because they had no monopoly to leverage at the time. First they had to become a monopoly before they could *leverage* their dominance. Yes folks, once upon a time Microsoft was the beloved small company "David" against a bunch of "Goliaths" (IBM, Tandy, Atari, Sperry, CDC, DEC, Data General, HP, etc). But now, 30 years later, everyone seems to assume they have always been dominant, always leveraging/abusing their size and market presence.
Oh my god! You are SOOOOO blind. Microsoft FORCED competition?
They forced competition among the hardware vendors. As a software company, they recognized that hardware competition was to their advantage. That is why they were prescient enough to not give IBM exclusive control over MSDOS. They reserved the right to sell it to other hardware vendors. IBM, in their arrogance or ignorance or both, ultimately paid the price for that mistake. Once there were entrenched 3rd party applications that required MSDOS (and later Windows), like WordPerfect and Lotus 123, and Flight Simulator, this forced the hardware vendors to "toe the line" and make sure their new-fangled hardware was compatible with DOS/Windows. I was there. I remember going to computer shows and reading computer ads where hardware vendors (you know, like Gateway, Dell, Osborne, Compaq) were selling their gear, stating: "IBM Compatible. Runs Flight Simulator. Runs Lotus 123". That was the spec that defined a PC - a collection of binaries, one of which was DOS/Windows.
But, 'superior value?' Not by any real metric I've ever seen.
Ummm, getting to 90+% marketshare is a pretty good metric of value. Now you might argue they were the only game in town, but then you would be forgetting the Apple II, Atari computers, the TRS-80 (they had big marketshare at one time), the Commodore machines, OS/Warp, and a host of others. The fact is, Microsoft emerged the victor amongst all of those choices. That is a pretty good metric for value, in my mind.
Microsoft has been a regulatory force on the industry
And there you have stumbled upon the main value they provided. They forced all the disparate hardware vendors to support a common OS - MSDOS, and then later Windows, so that hardware became interchangeable. This brought on competition, which led to dramatically lower prices. And I submit the reason they could do this when nobody else did was because (look at the list of competitors above), they were the only company that did not have a hardware axe to grind. They were hardware agnostic. Everyone else was pushing their own hardware, bundled with their own OS. Apple missed out on most of this because they did not adopt (until much later) the ubiquitous hardware that was being used in the PC industry. In essence, Microsoft basically broke the lock the hardware vendors (like IBM) had on their customers. And, yes, IBM was an (unwitting) accomplice.
The real fact is, however, that today's low-end and mid-range Macs are less expensive than yesterday's PCs.
And today's low end PCs are less expensive than today's low-end Macs. You make a non-point. In fact, you support my assertion. Windows boxes are still the least expensive (from an initial purchase perspective, anyhow, which is how most people juge the cost, especially those with very little money to spend).
Yes, Macs were also more expensive than PCs back then, but your point is moot because you're basically saying that "PC users back then were snobs compared to the inferior slobs who didn't even have a PC at all."
Wow! Where did I say anybody was inferior to anybody else? I didn't even imply such a thing! Please quote my post so I can be enlightened. I said people should not refer to anybody else as superior or inferior based on their purchase choices because matters like (factors of 2 in) price have a big impact on what people choose to buy.
Ummm, no. Your claim is specious. You seem to be saying that Microsoft got 95% of the market by leveraging their market dominance in an "illegal" way. You don't get 95% marketshare by being a monopoly; you become a monopoly by getting 95% marketshare. The "illegal anti-trust" activities are only "illegal" and "anti-trust" once you already have dominant marketshare, which they achieved by providing superior value (in conjunction with the hardware vendors) to the consumers.
With Apple, they pay attention to the sense of style their users are embued with by their superiority to Wintel slobs.
It seems to me that there is always a cost-benefit tradeoff. Maybe I can't *afford* to pay double for my computer, just so people like you will not think badly of me. Are you suggesting that people who don't own BMW's (or insert *your* prefered brand here, as you seem to profess to be the arbiter of product goodness) are inferior slobs?
Look, Apple has historically occupied the "high end" of the PC marketplace, along with several other niches (eg graphics artists); that doesn't make its customers superior anymore than living in a ritzy suburb makes those people superior. They just had more money. You really need to avoid throwing around words like "superior" and "slobs" to describe 95% of the PC-buying public, just because they aren't as careless with their money as you are (or don't have as much to spend).
Hey, we were recording television. The quality was more than adequate considering the signal source - remember this even predates the widespread use of cable - people had rabbit ears on these things. The quality of the recording technology was a non issue.
Then please explain MS's 95% marketshare versus Apple's 5%? Shiny only wins when all else is equal. Most consumers are bang-for-the-buck types, and Windows boxes win that battle hands down. It never ceased to amaze me how add-ons for Macs were always twice (or more) expensive than their "PC" counterparts. I would submit that Apple finally "got it" when they started using standard DIMMs (versus proprietary), PCI-based graphics (versus proprietary), IDE drives (versus SCSI), USB (in addition to firewire), standard monitors, and now Intel CPUs. If anything Apple has moved much closer to a Windows PC, and so it is only natural, to combat the threat, that MS attempt to close the "shiny-ness" gap.
Interestingly, I think VHS won because it too had higher capacity (6 hrs vs 5 hrs). I remember giving that alot of weight back in the day, since blank tapes were between $10-$20 at the time. I could fit 3 movies on a tape instead of 2 - a big savings.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps someone out there knows the answer to this ... if I were to fly over this region would I (briefly) be able to access the internet from my laptop? If the Access Points have miles of range, does that range extend *up* as well as *out*? Just curious. And of course, by extension, as more and more cities roll these things out, will we have access to the net wherever we fly? Assuming the answer to my question is yes, could this begin to impact airplane design (especially small planes), by assuming net access? Planes could report their position (on board GPS tells them where they are, then they use the wireless net to communicate to "Air Traffic Controller" servers, which could then send back flight instructions). Just a few random thoughts for a Monday morning ...
Mark my words - totalitarianism and capitalism do not mix; one or the other will disappear. And it is almost always the former. Once people get a taste of property rights and property ownership, they never want to go back.
As regards distribution of the news having nothing to do with economic systems, the OP said that this whole Google-AP exchange was an example of how "capitalism works - taking things that are available to everyone and putting a fence around it". It was the OP that began this thread by bashing capitalism. I merely pointed out the obvious - as bad as capitalism can be, communism is orders of magnitude worse. And happily the example we are both using, which is the topic of this thread - news distribution - fits my argument very nicely. Unless you think the method of news dissemination in communist countries is better than that found in capitalistic countries?
When they hijack worthwhile threads in order to parrot the same nonsensical stereotype-driven propaganda
I know just what you mean. That is why I had to say something to him. Thanks for backing me up, though. Appreciate it.
And my point is ... as bad as capitalism is, communism is much worse. Sure, there are shades of gray between those two extremes (unfettered property rights versus no property rights [the state owns everything]), but the OP was not being subtle in his/her criticism of capitalism. The comment was meant to reflect negatively on capitalism in general (whatever socialistic flavor one practices) because it criticized the notion of property rights, the fundamental underpinning of any capitalistic system.
Typical. Ad hominem attacks. Why am I not surprised that when I say something bad about communism around here I am immediately called disparaging names.
For the record, Communism is an economic system, as is Capitalism. The comment was about how Capitalism works, specifically as it applies to the dissemination of the news. My comment merely pointed out how every country that uses communism as its economic system uses a different, much less desirable technique, for distributing news. True, those countries also tend to be totolitarian regimes -- pretty much they have to be to keep people from leaving such a bankrupt economic system. The fact that you are unable to connect those dots suggests perhaps an intelligence deficit on your part, I'm afraid. The fact that you posted anonymously shows that you might also realize this and did not want it well known.
I think it is always important to remind people of the tried-and-true *alternatives* to capitalism. These boards are highly critical of capitalism, and I agree it has its share of "warts", but, as Churchill so eloquently said:
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
Choose your poison.
This is how capitalism works, you take something availiable to everybody and put a fence around it.
Yeah, I much prefer how news is handled in a communist system. They don't put a fence around it, they just shoot the messenger, or put him in prison for the rest of his life.
Imagine if this is a special version of Vista that keeps detailed logs that can somehow find their way back to MS. This could give them a nice window (no pun intended) into the black hats' methods. Probably the black hats would be all over that, though.
Or, imagine that the Vista they get is not the one the rest of us will get -- MS could, for example, purposely insert a bunch of security problems of varying severity and type to see how sophisticated the black hats are.
Actually they are not forcing you to do anything because, you, like everyone else, will stay away in droves (Yogi Berra).
That disease that has so infected business - talking about process (how) rather than products (what) - is readily apparent in Congress as well. I added up the percentages of the "Procedural [HouseKeeping]" categories (egads, there were 6 different line items - not sure what the distinctions were), and it was 50%!!! So, for half the time Congress is talking about *how* they are going to talk about things. Ugggh. I suppose, as one who believes that the less the government does, the better, I should be happy. But oh, the global warming from all that hot air!
Be prepared to pay tolls as you pass through the Commonwealth ;-)
Well you're forgetting that any system needs feedback to work properly.
I agree. However, I think that in many cases sales can provide that feedback. And this is especially true in the online ad world, since there is no latency in the delivery channel, unlike the print media. Also, online ads are "on demand" unlike the broadcast media where, if you weren't listening/watching at the time, you miss it, so there is a timing element. Anyhow, I guess what I'm saying is that sales are a pretty good metric to provide ad feedback, and uniquely with online ads, that feedback can even be quite timely.
If you read the article, one of the things they say is how hard it is to determine the "intent" of the person clicking the ad. Are they serious shoppers, casual browsers, or even one of those teenagers who sign up for those click-for-profit type schemes. Well duh! Of course you can never know this. To me it's all quite silly. The point of online advertising is the same as the point of any other advertising medium - drive up sales (or, notoriety). And that information is readily available to the client companies. They know what their ad budget is and they know what their sales are (and polls tell them what their notioriety is). In the end they should have enough data to make their own determinations as to how valuable online ads are to them, and then they should pay accordingly. I know this is all easier said than done when the prefered pricing model seems to be click-based. But, at some point the numbers should tell the story, and if it means the online ads aren't worth what they are costing, then spend they should reallocate their ad dollars elsewhere. Eventually the pricing will align with value.
!taht tneser I ,yeH
Am I the only one who kind of wonders about these cost estimates? First, to update 70,000 machines for 190,000 Euros means 3 Euros/machine. Does this include labor? Second, $18,000,000 divided by 70,000 is $257 per machine. Those are some expensive office licenses they have there (I presume those 70,000 machines already have Windows so they shouldn't have to re-buy those licenses). Isn't there some sort of middle ground that would be just as cheap, like using Open Office on Windows - this would sidestep all the compatibility issues with printers and such while reaping most of the cost benefits? While I don't doubt there could be significant savings, at least in the initial project costs, it looks to me like these estimates are way off-base.
A pirated copy of Windows 95 will work on any white-box PC. System 7, Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X only ever worked on Apple hardware.
And so will a *legally* purchased copy of Windows - and that is exactly my point - Windows works (and always has) on any "white-box" system *because* that was what they were about from the beginning (insisting in negotiations with IBM that they maintain distribution rights for MSDOS rather than being locked into an exclusive with IBM). They viewed themselves as a pure software company, which set them apart from almost every other OS vendor at the time (almost all of which were hardware vendors selling bundled "captive" OS's). That was a bold, high-risk strategy that has paid off handsomely. Yes, they got lucky - any small company that becomes as successful as they have needs luck. And yes, they sometimes promised things they didn't have, but again, having worked at several startups, that is completely typical, and perhaps even necessary. Small companies simply don't have the resources to speculatively develop a host of products, hoping one will hit. So instead they try to land a big fish by signing up for "impossible deadlines", and then work like crazy to meet them.
Surely you are not suggesting that just because people pirated Windows, that's why they achieved dominant marketshare. True, there are many pirated copies of Windows around, but it is not a huge percentage of the installed base as you imply. According to an ARStechnica article I just read, about 1 in 5 systems fail the WGA license validation, and of those, about 80% are categorized as "stolen volume licenses" - so that rolls up to about 16% of the installed base of the 300 million machines running the WGA.
Well said. There just aren't many folks around these parts that will admit that MS did *some* things right - especially in the early days. It wasn't all done with sleaze and leveraging a monopoly because they had no monopoly to leverage at the time. First they had to become a monopoly before they could *leverage* their dominance. Yes folks, once upon a time Microsoft was the beloved small company "David" against a bunch of "Goliaths" (IBM, Tandy, Atari, Sperry, CDC, DEC, Data General, HP, etc). But now, 30 years later, everyone seems to assume they have always been dominant, always leveraging/abusing their size and market presence.
Oh my god! You are SOOOOO blind. Microsoft FORCED competition?
They forced competition among the hardware vendors. As a software company, they recognized that hardware competition was to their advantage. That is why they were prescient enough to not give IBM exclusive control over MSDOS. They reserved the right to sell it to other hardware vendors. IBM, in their arrogance or ignorance or both, ultimately paid the price for that mistake. Once there were entrenched 3rd party applications that required MSDOS (and later Windows), like WordPerfect and Lotus 123, and Flight Simulator, this forced the hardware vendors to "toe the line" and make sure their new-fangled hardware was compatible with DOS/Windows. I was there. I remember going to computer shows and reading computer ads where hardware vendors (you know, like Gateway, Dell, Osborne, Compaq) were selling their gear, stating: "IBM Compatible. Runs Flight Simulator. Runs Lotus 123". That was the spec that defined a PC - a collection of binaries, one of which was DOS/Windows.
But, 'superior value?' Not by any real metric I've ever seen.
Ummm, getting to 90+% marketshare is a pretty good metric of value. Now you might argue they were the only game in town, but then you would be forgetting the Apple II, Atari computers, the TRS-80 (they had big marketshare at one time), the Commodore machines, OS/Warp, and a host of others. The fact is, Microsoft emerged the victor amongst all of those choices. That is a pretty good metric for value, in my mind.
Microsoft has been a regulatory force on the industry
And there you have stumbled upon the main value they provided. They forced all the disparate hardware vendors to support a common OS - MSDOS, and then later Windows, so that hardware became interchangeable. This brought on competition, which led to dramatically lower prices. And I submit the reason they could do this when nobody else did was because (look at the list of competitors above), they were the only company that did not have a hardware axe to grind. They were hardware agnostic. Everyone else was pushing their own hardware, bundled with their own OS. Apple missed out on most of this because they did not adopt (until much later) the ubiquitous hardware that was being used in the PC industry. In essence, Microsoft basically broke the lock the hardware vendors (like IBM) had on their customers. And, yes, IBM was an (unwitting) accomplice.
The real fact is, however, that today's low-end and mid-range Macs are less expensive than yesterday's PCs.
And today's low end PCs are less expensive than today's low-end Macs. You make a non-point. In fact, you support my assertion. Windows boxes are still the least expensive (from an initial purchase perspective, anyhow, which is how most people juge the cost, especially those with very little money to spend).
Yes, Macs were also more expensive than PCs back then, but your point is moot because you're basically saying that "PC users back then were snobs compared to the inferior slobs who didn't even have a PC at all."
Wow! Where did I say anybody was inferior to anybody else? I didn't even imply such a thing! Please quote my post so I can be enlightened. I said people should not refer to anybody else as superior or inferior based on their purchase choices because matters like (factors of 2 in) price have a big impact on what people choose to buy.
Ummm, no. Your claim is specious. You seem to be saying that Microsoft got 95% of the market by leveraging their market dominance in an "illegal" way. You don't get 95% marketshare by being a monopoly; you become a monopoly by getting 95% marketshare. The "illegal anti-trust" activities are only "illegal" and "anti-trust" once you already have dominant marketshare, which they achieved by providing superior value (in conjunction with the hardware vendors) to the consumers.
With Apple, they pay attention to the sense of style their users are embued with by their superiority to Wintel slobs.
It seems to me that there is always a cost-benefit tradeoff. Maybe I can't *afford* to pay double for my computer, just so people like you will not think badly of me. Are you suggesting that people who don't own BMW's (or insert *your* prefered brand here, as you seem to profess to be the arbiter of product goodness) are inferior slobs?
Look, Apple has historically occupied the "high end" of the PC marketplace, along with several other niches (eg graphics artists); that doesn't make its customers superior anymore than living in a ritzy suburb makes those people superior. They just had more money. You really need to avoid throwing around words like "superior" and "slobs" to describe 95% of the PC-buying public, just because they aren't as careless with their money as you are (or don't have as much to spend).
Hey, we were recording television. The quality was more than adequate considering the signal source - remember this even predates the widespread use of cable - people had rabbit ears on these things. The quality of the recording technology was a non issue.
Then please explain MS's 95% marketshare versus Apple's 5%? Shiny only wins when all else is equal. Most consumers are bang-for-the-buck types, and Windows boxes win that battle hands down. It never ceased to amaze me how add-ons for Macs were always twice (or more) expensive than their "PC" counterparts. I would submit that Apple finally "got it" when they started using standard DIMMs (versus proprietary), PCI-based graphics (versus proprietary), IDE drives (versus SCSI), USB (in addition to firewire), standard monitors, and now Intel CPUs. If anything Apple has moved much closer to a Windows PC, and so it is only natural, to combat the threat, that MS attempt to close the "shiny-ness" gap.
Interestingly, I think VHS won because it too had higher capacity (6 hrs vs 5 hrs). I remember giving that alot of weight back in the day, since blank tapes were between $10-$20 at the time. I could fit 3 movies on a tape instead of 2 - a big savings.