Eternally collapsing.... Never reaches the final state.... I think they are talking about Microsoft Vista. Please retag the thread as MS with that cool cyborg morph of BGates as the icon.
Come on, You dont even have to be a script kiddie to write malware for Linux.
This is how it works:
First create an executable that will do bad things. It could even be a csh script.
Then send emails to all and sundry like this and attach that file"
Dear Linuxuser,
This is a virus/trojan/worm/malware for Linux. It works on the honor system. Please forward the attachment to all addresses in your.mailrc first and then save it to disk, chmod +x and sudo it. Thank you.
Sometimes they do it on a large piece of blotting paper and carefully place it on a large bowl of water. The paper soaks the water and sinks, leaving behind patterns floating on the surface of water.
No need to understand Bessel functions and Legendre Polynomials.
I think humans have an innate fear of snakes. The posters in this thread might have overcome theirs by over exposure to snake documentaries in Discovery channel or something.
I very clearly remember the day I was walking down an unpaved street in Bangalore, I thought I saw a snake out of the corner of my eye and I stopped dead in my tracks, with adreneline pumping, face flushed and heart rate shooting up. Turned out to be a piece of rope being "rolled" along the ground by the brisk wind. Nothing has produce that strong a fear response in me ever. It was purely a reflex action without any conscious thought. Conciously, I dont feel scared at all to watch all the snake, lion, cheetah documentaries in TV and am not scared to see real snakes in zoos and herepetoria.
I cant explain other baby primates not showing fear response to real snakes. But I am very much convinced that H. Sapiens have a natural, innate fear response to snakes at unconscious level.
The scientist "Professor V Renugopalakrishnan" said he needs that much storage to save his full name,
Angirasa Bharatwaja Yajursahidyayi Rajashekara Yerlangadi Venkata Samba Siva Rao....
Already there is a huge infrastructure to burn methane to produce electricity or heat homes. So it is relatively easy to sell the cow manure derived methane into this market. So Vermont trying to peddle electricity from cow manure is understandable. But from energy security point of view, there are alternative energy sources for electricity generation. Coal and nuclear energy are not very green, but atleast we (USA) are self sufficient in them.
But when it comes to energy sources for the automotive sector, we are so dependant on middle east oil.
So it would be wise to encourage our cars and trucks to run on methane. It is not a very difficult conversion to make gasoline engines to run on methane. Infact many bus/truck fleets in many US cities have done it. Heck, even New Delhi, India, has completely outlawed diesel engines within the city. All the buses and trucks there run on methane. From energy independance and security standpoint, it makes sense to encourage conversion of our automobiles to run on methane than to produce electricity from methane.
It draws lots of fart jokes. But infact cow manure methane is very much viable and very green.
It does not stink. Infact all the gases emitted by rotting maure are captured and thus it actually reduces stink of the dairy farms for the neighbors.
The manure has two componants. Combustible methane and non-combustible fertilizer. By separating the two, and organic, non-chemical fertilizer is available to the farms.
USA has 100 million cows. Six cows produce enough methane in a year to run one car for a year. There is potential to bump off 15 million cars off middle east oil into a fully renewable energy source. If you include pig and chicken wastes, we could cut middle east oil imports by 30 to 40%!! The key is using the CH4 for transportation, not electricity generation.
There are plenty of sources for electricity, coal, nuclear, wind, etc. But our transportation infrastructure is too heavily dependant on foreign oil. That dependance threatens both our security and prosperity.
Instead of trying to make electricity out of the cow-manure methane, Vermont should simply bottle it and supply it to bus/truck fleets. It should encourage conversion of farm machinery to run on methane.
One counter-terrorism source told the Daily News it was doubtful a plot to blow it up would be feasible, saying huge amounts of explosives and a detailed knowledge of blast effect would be necessary.
I am surprised he did not go on to precisely estimate the amount of explosives needed and identify the
specific point where the blast would be most effective. Most of these so-called experts cant keep their mouth shut once a media microphone is shoved in front of them.
Damn those Washington spinwallahs. Their president cant spell half the words he speaks and does not understand what he could spell. So in a evil Microsoftian way they declare the misspellings by Bushes and Quayles to be the standard.:-)
Am quite skeptical. It is meant to be for the political consumption within India. I am sure IBM honcho was assured that he can quote the highest possible amount IBM is planning to invest over the next 45 years and he can add tons of fine print and ifs and buts. "Just say '6 billion' so that I can get through this election cycle, would you? please please pretty please...." What makes you think Indian politicians are any better than American ones?
Employee count is would naturally be high, since they have to run bus services, restaraunts, hospitals, residences, schools...
All the big Indian companies in Bangalore, Hindustan Machine Tools, Bharat Electronics Limited,
Indian Telephone Industries Limite, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Indian Space Research Organization, National Aeronautical Laboratories, Aeronautical Developement Establishment, Radar Development Establishment, Gas Turbine Development Establishment... All fat cat state owned stupid white elephants who have pampered their not-so-world-class employees, are mismanaged by bureaucrats who have surrendered completely to the union and political muscle. These pampered employees set the standard prevailing working conditions.
If IBM pays that much, it would lose money. If it does not, it will be plagued by strikes and job-actions and will lose money.
Nah, Cant rely on the grid for power, you need to build your own powerplant. And the backup powerplant too. It is hot there, so build the A/C plant with backup too. The norm there is to provide subsidized meals in canteens, and busing in workers, including the secondaries diesl mechanics and HVAC technicians, and thirtieries like cooks and dishwashers and so on. And real estate is as expensive. Building materials are extremely expensive. But for cheap labour, India has nothing to offer here. And since amount of labour required is so high, there is really no cost advantage in India for data centers.
Energy is extremely cheap in USA. Real estate too is quite cheap once you factor in infrastructure costs.
I have to concede that MS has been quite faithful to Office97 formats till date. But it is also true that MS-Office has not been seriously threatened till date. It did it to DR-DOS. It did it to Netscape. Just look at all the backward compatibility issues with the Windows Media Player.
You will be surprised how many people dont know about the Office97 file format. The Big Honcho gets a new lap top every six months. He gets the latest version of MSOffice. Big Honcho is so big he does not know or would not stoop to set the default save format to Office97. Every one else in the company including the mail delivery boy upgrades to the latest version of Office while still running four year old PCs. Big Honcho shrugs it off, it it ever registers at that level. "We pay a flat fee for unlimited upgrades. No big deal", except the IT dept spends three weeks remote-installing new software all over the company. Remote salsemen ship by FedEx their laptops to HQ for software upgrade instead of HQ shipping them CDs because, "they do sales. they dont do stupid things like software installations". More importantly they play golf because "their laptops are at the shop". Cant VPN and do net install because these "enterprise edition" suite is 1.5 GB.
Some company someday would opt out of this maddening cycle. It would mandate ODF or Office97 as the default. One of the many will make a small profit. It would become a "case study" in a MBA program in Harvard or CMU or Kelloggs. Then there will be lemmings like mad rush to switch. When that happens, MS would stop support of Office97.
I am really frustrated that so many people confuse Open Standards with Open Source and Open Source with Free Software. I can understand people not believing in Open Source. Some believe in security by obscurity. Others believe their source code is their intellectual property that they dont want to disclose. I may not agree with them, but atleast their rationale is somewhat logical and understandable .
But how can anyone even argue honestly that Closed Standards owned by a profit-making company that has abused its monopoly power in the past is better than Open Standards? Why am I a smaller minority tha the people who buy 7.99$ replacement coffee carafes. Why they immediately accuse me of anti-Microsoft fanatic? Beats me.
Well, Web based spreadsheets are here. Nothing new, but what is new is the full faith and credit of Google brand behind it.
What is the real strategy here? I dont think companies would trust a system that is constantly phoning home to manage their sensitive financial data. So MS's corporate clients would not switch to this. But one of the standard operating procedures for MS is to keep changing the file formats, macro language syntax etc continually to keep moving the "targets". Thus the competitors like OpenOffice are always at a disadvantage . Years of coding by the competitors get negated by simple format changes by MS. Forcing MS to support a constant file format is extremely important if anyone hopes to peel customers away from MS.
I think the real strategy is to force MS to consider interop. If Google signs up lots vocal consumers who use Office97 file format for data exchange, then MS cant abandon that format that easily. That would keep OpenOffice etc viable.
Fact is substantial portion of the profit of MS comes from Office. Substantial portion of their user base sticks to MS Office solely for compatibility with their business partners. When was the last time any one you saw a feature in MS Office that is a "must have" and "upgrade at any cost"? The 10 to 15% of the market share for FireFox is enough to force most of the webservers to change their coding practices to some standard rather than whatever MS is dishing out. Similarly 10 to 15% of the users using Office97 file formats routinely would be enough to force MS to keep supporting it till real alternatives develop.
True, people who are happy with MS Office today and dont worry about things like vendor lock-in have no reason to switch, RIGHT NOW
But for how long? When switching costs are insignificant, the freemarket provides that product or service at its most efficient price. Car tires, garden hoses,... When switching cost is high, the product will sell at substantial premium. Most cofee makers cost between 10 and 20$. If it uses a carafe that is specifically designed to fit a particular coffee maker, the cost of replacement carafe is usually 7.99$ + 3.99 for "shipping and handling" allow three weeks for delivery. Look at the prices of rechargebale Ni-Metal hydride batteries. The standard form AA, and AAA ones and those that fit specific cordless phone models. Look at the price of SD/MMC cards and memory sticks and xD cards.
If it would cost a company X$ to replace MS-Office with a competing product, MS would happily charge them (X-1)$. I wont blame MS for it. MS is not a charity. Reducing the switching cost of a product to less than the cost of manufacturing is the best strategy for any consumer. Then, it is a buyers market. If the switching cost is more than manufacturing cost, then it is sellers market. The consumer cant dictate the cost of manufacturing. All the consumer can do is to reduce the switching cost.
So even people who are presently very happy with MSOffice, have a good reason to switch. But looks like most of them dont know it. yet.
The general public does not seem to value privacy as much as the techno geeks do. You just promise them 25 cents off a loaf of bread and they let you link their home address (how else can they mail you those 25 cents off coupons?) to a unique machine readable id, and flash it everytime they shop. And this id is linked to credit cards and they can track all their purchases from medicines to pasta sauce to cheese.
The computers will alert the store, "Jane Q has stopped renewing her pills prescription, order diapers in June". Web 2.0, a threat to privacy? Come on, they aint got nothing compared to your local grocery store or your credit card. Funny thing is they dont even try to be coy. BP visa card sent me an year end statement running over several pages, summarizing how much I spent on grocery stores, restaraunts, gas stations, auto-repair shops etc etc. I cancelled that card immediately, but I am sure all the cards collect the data. They just dont tell you.
They know my purchasing habits down pat, they dont have to track me in Web2.0.
Re:What would happen if their dream comes true?
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Death By DMCA
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... who would pour their coffee into their doughnuts and dunk their cups in the soggy mess and look surprised. They are topologists. They cant tell a cup from a doughnut. When they need a ball in a hurry they will break off the handle of their coffee cup and try to bounce it on the court. These topologists are the most confused/confusing mathematicians around.;-) They could make their math easier for us lesser mortals to understand. But they would rather knot.
What would happen if their dream comes true?
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Death By DMCA
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Let us for a moment imagine what would happen if MPAA's dream comes true. People cant skip ads. The broadcast stream cant be copied endlessly. The analog hole is plugged. And digital content will be sold with encryption that will playback only on the authorized display devices. Then what? Would it be neccessarily bad?
Some content provider would skip all these layers of transmission and try to sell content directly to the customer for a fee with no ads. As iTunes showed, if it is possible for the customers to buy exactly what they want, they will buy rather than steal or pirate. If you have broadband you can get 151 Gb [1] of data streamed in per week, that is 34 hours of DVD quality video. That is more than enough video for most families. Cancel cable, save 40 to 60 $/month, pay it directly to the content authors, get shows with no commercial breaks that get downloaded to the family hard-disk, which you can watch when it is convenient...
Suddenly the content providers would be listening to YOU! Not to some suit in the network HQ. Not to the advertisers. Not to FCC and its rules. The cost of entry to this market would be minimal. They dont need huge broadcast towers and such things. They will do what it takes to retain you as a customer. Think how HBO produced less number of shows with higher quality compared to the broadcast networks and ate their lunch. This would be likely scenario for the households with decent disposable income. These nimble small players will cherry pick them out of the general market.
The households at the low end of the income spectrum will be stuck with ad supported broadcast TV. Once the purchasing power of the broadcast TV watching population erodes, the ad revenue also will diminish. They will have more ads, worse quality shows and will eventually become irrelevant.
It could happen. What would prevent such a scenario from unfolding?
[1] For a 2 Mbps connection 7x24x3600x2.0e06 bits=151Gb.
Well, if you pick just one item, the result can be very skewed.
True, you can dine out very cheaply as you said. A maid to scrub the floors with Dettol, do the dishes and wash clothes for 10 to 20$ a month. Hair cut is 1$. No body has health insurance, but doctor consultation is about 1$ and may be 2$ if you get an injection at the clinic. But on the other hand...
... how much did you spend on voltage stabilizers last year? yup. Small transformers to buck or boost the line voltage from the grid, that could vary from 180V to 260V, so that your 220 V appliance does not burn out. My cousin has a whole-house UPS. Really, the whole damn house is wired to these large truck batteries (12V lead-acid for the curious), except for the A/C and the fridge, all the fans and lights in the house are on UPS!!! My dad uses an ultra-violet water disinfecting system (brand name AquaGuard) to treat the municipal water supply. My uncle has a reverse-osmosis based water treatment system (Brandname Rivera) to produce 4 gallons of potable water from his well.
If you compare how many days one has to work to earn a washing machine, a fridge, an a/c, a digital camcorder or a digital camera you would find that these things balace out the cheap maid, medical service, hair cuts etc.
As a rule, all labour intensive services/products are very very cheap. All material intensive things are high priced or down right unaffordable. Especially imported things like dental drills or digital cameras. My brother-in-law pays the full exchange price of 45 Rs/$ to import dental drills and other dental equipment. His patients pay him hardly 1$ per cleaning or 2$ per extraction. Ouch!
That is why the economists use a basket of goods and services and they hope, statistically, with a comprehensive basket, they can figure the true "purchasing power" of local currencies. Since they are economists, they argue endlessly over every component of the basket and the weightages.
"I am a developer in India. All my college buddies are too. Not one of us gets less than $800 per month."
That's interesting. But to put the number in context, maybe you could tell us a bit about your cost of living? What is a flat per moth? What about cars and computers?
I assume the original poster converted his rupee salary into USD using the bank exchange rate, some 45 Rs to 1 US$. There is another way to do the conversion, called Purchase Power Parity. [1]. Basically define a basket of goods and services, calculate how much it would cost to buy it in each country and calculate an PPP exchange rate. The economist defined Big Mac Index [2] and found it matched the PPP numbers. I am finding it difficult to find the actual PP exchange rate between USD(ollar) and INR(upee). From my personal experience I would rate it to be 10 Rs/Dollar. The PPP correction for that salary would be a factor of 4.5. So he is making 3600 PPP-USD/month.
Domestic servants, hair cuts, medical service etc would be very very cheap. He would pay higher percentage of his salary than his US counterpart for things like diapers, rubber foam inner coil mattresses, cars, electronics, etc.
If any of you find a good source of PPP conversion factors for countries, especially with historical trends and fluctuations, please do post. Most of the links make assertions like "India is the fourth largest economy after adjusting for PPP" or "China jumps from fourth to second position after adjusting for PPP", without actually specifying the number. The PPP figure seems to be mostly popular with macro economists. In US one can find the cost-of-living adjustment numbers for any city quite easily. May be once a mobile global workforce develops such numbers will be availble for all countries and cities.
Come on, what do you want? A Computer or a Clairvoyant? Circle is a very generic word with so many meanings. Even LaTeX, though you are taught to pronounce TeX as tech by Donald Knuth and Leslie Lamport allows both lateks and latech, is more commonly known as a rubber compound used to make gloves and paint [FN1]. Thus shorn of context circle, even with punctuations does not give enough hints to help the search engine figure what you want. Heck, most human beings wont recognize what you are talking about if you just said "\circle \circle*". If I know you are writing a thesis/paper with LaTeX I might guess, otherwise you will have most humans asking, "pardon moi, what did you say?". So why do you want the computer/search engine to figure it out?
May be you will sneer at google for not bringing up this link as number one and highlighting the command syntax in the first page as the summary. Someday I will get a search engine where I could type "my thesis" and it will figure out what I am thinking and type out the whole damn dissertation, but I am not holding my breath. In the meantime, I could be legitimately amazed that google found the manual for LaTeX in the top three hits.
[FN1] Did you rewind and read that sentence again because of the suddenness with which I went from LaTeX context to paint and gloves? Context is that important to a human brain. And you want google to print you the command summary on hearing \circle in 0.21 seconds? Geez, have a heart buddy, and give google a break.
One of my friends did a project for masters. Some simple code that will read the submitted source, count the number of code lines, comment lines, average number of lines per function etc and print out some stats about "quality of the code". His prof ran his project code source itself as the input! It flunked itself for not having enough comments, for having functions that were too long, not breaking up large source files, for using too many nested levels of code etc
Microsoft sells collaboration software and project management software. And its products are not shipping any faster.
These guys are touting alloy and tools, sounds like a old CASE wine in new bottle. Did they use these tools to design the tools? Atleast would they use these tools and alloy to create the next version? Could they demonstrate that these tools can handle a project of that complexity? And produce provably better code with no bugs?
It is six years since Finding Nemo was released? Looks like it was yesterday I saw the movie. [quick googling "finding nemo year release"] 2003. How long would it have taken the "tool" to find this contradiction in your posting?
Slashdot Mirror
Eternally collapsing.... Never reaches the final state .... I think they are talking about Microsoft Vista. Please retag the thread as MS with that cool cyborg morph of BGates as the icon.
This is how it works:
First create an executable that will do bad things. It could even be a csh script. Then send emails to all and sundry like this and attach that file"
Dear Linuxuser,
This is a virus/trojan/worm/malware for Linux. It works on the honor system. Please forward the attachment to all addresses in your .mailrc first and then save it to disk, chmod +x and sudo it. Thank you.
Attachment: malware
Sometimes they do it on a large piece of blotting paper and carefully place it on a large bowl of water. The paper soaks the water and sinks, leaving behind patterns floating on the surface of water.
No need to understand Bessel functions and Legendre Polynomials.
Tried Akimbo? (Warning: I dont even know if it is still up and running) http://www.akimbo.com/
I think humans have an innate fear of snakes. The posters in this thread might have overcome theirs by over exposure to snake documentaries in Discovery channel or something. I very clearly remember the day I was walking down an unpaved street in Bangalore, I thought I saw a snake out of the corner of my eye and I stopped dead in my tracks, with adreneline pumping, face flushed and heart rate shooting up. Turned out to be a piece of rope being "rolled" along the ground by the brisk wind. Nothing has produce that strong a fear response in me ever. It was purely a reflex action without any conscious thought. Conciously, I dont feel scared at all to watch all the snake, lion, cheetah documentaries in TV and am not scared to see real snakes in zoos and herepetoria. I cant explain other baby primates not showing fear response to real snakes. But I am very much convinced that H. Sapiens have a natural, innate fear response to snakes at unconscious level.
The scientist "Professor V Renugopalakrishnan" said he needs that much storage to save his full name, Angirasa Bharatwaja Yajursahidyayi Rajashekara Yerlangadi Venkata Samba Siva Rao ....
But when it comes to energy sources for the automotive sector, we are so dependant on middle east oil. So it would be wise to encourage our cars and trucks to run on methane. It is not a very difficult conversion to make gasoline engines to run on methane. Infact many bus/truck fleets in many US cities have done it. Heck, even New Delhi, India, has completely outlawed diesel engines within the city. All the buses and trucks there run on methane. From energy independance and security standpoint, it makes sense to encourage conversion of our automobiles to run on methane than to produce electricity from methane.
It does not stink. Infact all the gases emitted by rotting maure are captured and thus it actually reduces stink of the dairy farms for the neighbors.
The manure has two componants. Combustible methane and non-combustible fertilizer. By separating the two, and organic, non-chemical fertilizer is available to the farms.
USA has 100 million cows. Six cows produce enough methane in a year to run one car for a year. There is potential to bump off 15 million cars off middle east oil into a fully renewable energy source. If you include pig and chicken wastes, we could cut middle east oil imports by 30 to 40%!! The key is using the CH4 for transportation, not electricity generation.
There are plenty of sources for electricity, coal, nuclear, wind, etc. But our transportation infrastructure is too heavily dependant on foreign oil. That dependance threatens both our security and prosperity.
Instead of trying to make electricity out of the cow-manure methane, Vermont should simply bottle it and supply it to bus/truck fleets. It should encourage conversion of farm machinery to run on methane.
I am surprised he did not go on to precisely estimate the amount of explosives needed and identify the specific point where the blast would be most effective. Most of these so-called experts cant keep their mouth shut once a media microphone is shoved in front of them.
Damn those Washington spinwallahs. Their president cant spell half the words he speaks and does not understand what he could spell. So in a evil Microsoftian way they declare the misspellings by Bushes and Quayles to be the standard. :-)
Employee count is would naturally be high, since they have to run bus services, restaraunts, hospitals, residences, schools...
All the big Indian companies in Bangalore, Hindustan Machine Tools, Bharat Electronics Limited, Indian Telephone Industries Limite, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Indian Space Research Organization, National Aeronautical Laboratories, Aeronautical Developement Establishment, Radar Development Establishment, Gas Turbine Development Establishment ... All fat cat state owned stupid white elephants who have pampered their not-so-world-class employees, are mismanaged by bureaucrats who have surrendered completely to the union and political muscle. These pampered employees set the standard prevailing working conditions.
If IBM pays that much, it would lose money. If it does not, it will be plagued by strikes and job-actions and will lose money.
Energy is extremely cheap in USA. Real estate too is quite cheap once you factor in infrastructure costs.
You will be surprised how many people dont know about the Office97 file format. The Big Honcho gets a new lap top every six months. He gets the latest version of MSOffice. Big Honcho is so big he does not know or would not stoop to set the default save format to Office97. Every one else in the company including the mail delivery boy upgrades to the latest version of Office while still running four year old PCs. Big Honcho shrugs it off, it it ever registers at that level. "We pay a flat fee for unlimited upgrades. No big deal", except the IT dept spends three weeks remote-installing new software all over the company. Remote salsemen ship by FedEx their laptops to HQ for software upgrade instead of HQ shipping them CDs because, "they do sales. they dont do stupid things like software installations". More importantly they play golf because "their laptops are at the shop". Cant VPN and do net install because these "enterprise edition" suite is 1.5 GB.
Some company someday would opt out of this maddening cycle. It would mandate ODF or Office97 as the default. One of the many will make a small profit. It would become a "case study" in a MBA program in Harvard or CMU or Kelloggs. Then there will be lemmings like mad rush to switch. When that happens, MS would stop support of Office97.
But how can anyone even argue honestly that Closed Standards owned by a profit-making company that has abused its monopoly power in the past is better than Open Standards? Why am I a smaller minority tha the people who buy 7.99$ replacement coffee carafes. Why they immediately accuse me of anti-Microsoft fanatic? Beats me.
I think the real strategy is to force MS to consider interop. If Google signs up lots vocal consumers who use Office97 file format for data exchange, then MS cant abandon that format that easily. That would keep OpenOffice etc viable.
Fact is substantial portion of the profit of MS comes from Office. Substantial portion of their user base sticks to MS Office solely for compatibility with their business partners. When was the last time any one you saw a feature in MS Office that is a "must have" and "upgrade at any cost"? The 10 to 15% of the market share for FireFox is enough to force most of the webservers to change their coding practices to some standard rather than whatever MS is dishing out. Similarly 10 to 15% of the users using Office97 file formats routinely would be enough to force MS to keep supporting it till real alternatives develop.
But for how long? When switching costs are insignificant, the freemarket provides that product or service at its most efficient price. Car tires, garden hoses, ... When switching cost is high, the product will sell at substantial premium. Most cofee makers cost between 10 and 20$. If it uses a carafe that is specifically designed to fit a particular coffee maker, the cost of replacement carafe is usually 7.99$ + 3.99 for "shipping and handling" allow three weeks for delivery. Look at the prices of rechargebale Ni-Metal hydride batteries. The standard form AA, and AAA ones and those that fit specific cordless phone models. Look at the price of SD/MMC cards and memory sticks and xD cards.
If it would cost a company X$ to replace MS-Office with a competing product, MS would happily charge them (X-1)$. I wont blame MS for it. MS is not a charity. Reducing the switching cost of a product to less than the cost of manufacturing is the best strategy for any consumer. Then, it is a buyers market. If the switching cost is more than manufacturing cost, then it is sellers market. The consumer cant dictate the cost of manufacturing. All the consumer can do is to reduce the switching cost.
So even people who are presently very happy with MSOffice, have a good reason to switch. But looks like most of them dont know it. yet.
The computers will alert the store, "Jane Q has stopped renewing her pills prescription, order diapers in June". Web 2.0, a threat to privacy? Come on, they aint got nothing compared to your local grocery store or your credit card. Funny thing is they dont even try to be coy. BP visa card sent me an year end statement running over several pages, summarizing how much I spent on grocery stores, restaraunts, gas stations, auto-repair shops etc etc. I cancelled that card immediately, but I am sure all the cards collect the data. They just dont tell you.
They know my purchasing habits down pat, they dont have to track me in Web2.0.
They can pry my internet from my cold dead hands.
Some content provider would skip all these layers of transmission and try to sell content directly to the customer for a fee with no ads. As iTunes showed, if it is possible for the customers to buy exactly what they want, they will buy rather than steal or pirate. If you have broadband you can get 151 Gb [1] of data streamed in per week, that is 34 hours of DVD quality video. That is more than enough video for most families. Cancel cable, save 40 to 60 $/month, pay it directly to the content authors, get shows with no commercial breaks that get downloaded to the family hard-disk, which you can watch when it is convenient...
Suddenly the content providers would be listening to YOU! Not to some suit in the network HQ. Not to the advertisers. Not to FCC and its rules. The cost of entry to this market would be minimal. They dont need huge broadcast towers and such things. They will do what it takes to retain you as a customer. Think how HBO produced less number of shows with higher quality compared to the broadcast networks and ate their lunch. This would be likely scenario for the households with decent disposable income. These nimble small players will cherry pick them out of the general market.
The households at the low end of the income spectrum will be stuck with ad supported broadcast TV. Once the purchasing power of the broadcast TV watching population erodes, the ad revenue also will diminish. They will have more ads, worse quality shows and will eventually become irrelevant.
It could happen. What would prevent such a scenario from unfolding?
[1] For a 2 Mbps connection 7x24x3600x2.0e06 bits=151Gb.
True, you can dine out very cheaply as you said. A maid to scrub the floors with Dettol, do the dishes and wash clothes for 10 to 20$ a month. Hair cut is 1$. No body has health insurance, but doctor consultation is about 1$ and may be 2$ if you get an injection at the clinic. But on the other hand ...
If you compare how many days one has to work to earn a washing machine, a fridge, an a/c, a digital camcorder or a digital camera you would find that these things balace out the cheap maid, medical service, hair cuts etc.
As a rule, all labour intensive services/products are very very cheap. All material intensive things are high priced or down right unaffordable. Especially imported things like dental drills or digital cameras. My brother-in-law pays the full exchange price of 45 Rs/$ to import dental drills and other dental equipment. His patients pay him hardly 1$ per cleaning or 2$ per extraction. Ouch!
That is why the economists use a basket of goods and services and they hope, statistically, with a comprehensive basket, they can figure the true "purchasing power" of local currencies. Since they are economists, they argue endlessly over every component of the basket and the weightages.
Domestic servants, hair cuts, medical service etc would be very very cheap. He would pay higher percentage of his salary than his US counterpart for things like diapers, rubber foam inner coil mattresses, cars, electronics, etc.
If any of you find a good source of PPP conversion factors for countries, especially with historical trends and fluctuations, please do post. Most of the links make assertions like "India is the fourth largest economy after adjusting for PPP" or "China jumps from fourth to second position after adjusting for PPP", without actually specifying the number. The PPP figure seems to be mostly popular with macro economists. In US one can find the cost-of-living adjustment numbers for any city quite easily. May be once a mobile global workforce develops such numbers will be availble for all countries and cities.
[1] http://internationalecon.com/v1.0/Finance/ch30/F30 -1.html
[2] http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/displaySto ry.cfm?story_id=2708584
All I did was to add a unique string/word to give google a sense of the context. I said google "Latex leslie lamport \circle \circle*" and see for yourself what you get. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all& q=Latex+Leslie+Lamport++%5Ccircle+%5Ccircle*&btnG= Search
First link was bio of leslie, looked like. Second one was a pdf file. The third link gave you http://ftp.mendelu.cz/TeX/CTAN/obsolete/systems/vm -cms/texshell/latex.help
May be you will sneer at google for not bringing up this link as number one and highlighting the command syntax in the first page as the summary. Someday I will get a search engine where I could type "my thesis" and it will figure out what I am thinking and type out the whole damn dissertation, but I am not holding my breath. In the meantime, I could be legitimately amazed that google found the manual for LaTeX in the top three hits.
[FN1] Did you rewind and read that sentence again because of the suddenness with which I went from LaTeX context to paint and gloves? Context is that important to a human brain. And you want google to print you the command summary on hearing \circle in 0.21 seconds? Geez, have a heart buddy, and give google a break.
Microsoft sells collaboration software and project management software. And its products are not shipping any faster.
These guys are touting alloy and tools, sounds like a old CASE wine in new bottle. Did they use these tools to design the tools? Atleast would they use these tools and alloy to create the next version? Could they demonstrate that these tools can handle a project of that complexity? And produce provably better code with no bugs?
Please forgive me if I am underwhlemed.
It is six years since Finding Nemo was released? Looks like it was yesterday I saw the movie. [quick googling "finding nemo year release"] 2003. How long would it have taken the "tool" to find this contradiction in your posting?