Right now, if you get a nook you're largely stuck buying your books from Barnes & Noble. You can't just go to any ebook retailer and pick up whatever you want.
Nook supports a number of common formats for DRM-free ebooks (including epub and PDF, which seem to be the two most used by independent vendors), supports Sony reader store ebooks, and supports Adobe DRM for epub, so, actually, you can go to just about any independent (that is, not associated with a particular e-reader vendor) ebook retailer and pick up whatever you want, as well as using books from either the Sony or B&N stores.
Somebody seems a little threatened by Apple's 'slate' introduction next week...
Or, concerned that the Kindle isn't making as much money as they'd like, and that there are lots of existing, available mobile products that can be used as ebook readers and app platforms (netbooks, smartphones, tablets that consumers can buy today) that compete with it for consumers attention (and, more importantly, money), as well as a number of new announcements of such products that have recently been made (e.g., at CES).
The massive consolidation the industry has already undergone in the last few decades is one of the reasons print papers are failing; while it cut costs, it also turned "local" papers into redundant outlets repeating the same stories with almost no distinct reporting or content (other than local ads.) This was an efficiency in terms of the market that existed before the consolidation, but it also killed any advantage that the papers had over many different kinds of online news distribution with access to the same wire services from which the papers were getting most of their stories, just in time for access to the internet to reach the tipping point where getting news online was accessible to the masses.
The newspapers became very specifically adapted to an environment just as that environment radically changed.
Other than parts of Asia where it might I guess be considered an insult in many cases 'tipping' is pretty standard or it is automatically appended to the bill for you.
A service charge that is added to you bill automatically and which you have no option as to the amount and whether or not to pay is a very different thing than a tip.
The idea that the usual, expected service is not included in the charge to the customer (or the wages of the server), but is something which the customer is socially expected (but not obligated) to pay in addition to the bill, in a variable amount, based on their satisfaction with the service involved is far from universal (and, particularly, the situations in which that idea applies vary a lot from place to place.)
In one respect, that's certainly true; that is what they're selling for revenue. What the reader is paying to read, however, is also a product (and is of fine quality).
If it was of "fine quality", they'd be able to sell it at a price that covered the cost to produce, rather than selling it at a pittance that doesn't make a dent in that cost and making the vast majority of their revenue (and still, not enough to have a sustainable business model -- which is why newspapers are dying) from advertising. Newspapers may reform their business model in a way which results in them having a valuable product to sell readers that is of "fine quality", but they don't now.
My feeling is that the price-per-view for online ads will increase as credible online content becomes more prolific and the economies of scale will be sufficient to sustain high revenues (case-in-point: Google).
It only works for Google because they don't produce any of the content, all they provide is access.
Newspapers and Magazines are the buggy whips of our times, fighting to stay relevant in an age that has passed them by.
I don't think that's really true; I think that paid professional newsgathering, filtering, writing, and analysis will continue to be important, and that the newspapers and newsmagazines are the institutions best positioned to do that. OTOH, doing that means doing a 180 from the direction they've been heading for most of the last several decades, where they've sought efficiencies by reducing in-house content (especially investigative and analytical content) and focussing on selling ads, and outsourcing much of the newsgathering to wire services whose articles they just reprint. They've lost, first to TV and then to social media on the internet, their place in the universe of mass advertising, which means that they'll need to focus on providing value to a more narrowly-targetted audience that can pay for the work directly.
The product is certainly of high quality but ad revenues seem to work better online.
The product they provide in exchange for ad revenues is reader eyeballs to advertisers. If that was high enough quality to be profitable in that marketplace, newspapers, including the NY Times, wouldn't be struggling and desparately looking for ways to avoid sliding into complete oblivion.
Frankly, it's about time. They spend millions a year to produce a product (written news stories) and they have two delivery formats for said product: One, a pay product printed on dead trees, which accounts for the vast majority of their revenue. And two, a free digital product that doesn't make shit, with the added bonus that it makes their paying product worthless.
This makes the critical mistake of seeing "printed news stories" as the primary product of a newspaper. They are, historically, not. The primary product on which newspapers make money is selling readers eyeballs to advertisers. Charging readers for the dead-tree edition of the paper usually doesn't even pay for the cost of printing it, much less actually producing the content -- it is done almost entirely because advertisers see "paid circulation" numbers as a better indicator of people who are likely to actually read the paper (and be exposed to ads) than any estimates of distribution of free papers, which lets papers that charge reader also more for ad space than free papers can.
Online, there are much more precise measures of exposure to (and utility of) ads than paid circulation, so the primary reason newspapers charge for dead-tree editions doesn't exist.
OTOH, the existing newspaper business models are generally failing for the pay dailies, and some of them are trying to focus their business more on serving readers as their primary customers than serving advertisers; the degree to which this succeeds will depend on whether they do enough to bring in revenue from readers to offset the money lost to advertisers. Simply charging for content online alone isn't going to do that, its just going to hasten the collapse of online readership.
Charging more regardless of medium -- online or print -- reducing the volume of advertising, and improving content by doing more original reporting and less relaying of wire service stories that are relayed through many other online, broadcast, and print outlets, and doing more investigative reporting might work to make newspapers profitable, though it'll mean a much smaller readership. And if you narrow the audience that much, you probably don't hurt yourself by ditching the whole expensive print infrastructure altogether and going online only. The kind of people that are going to pay enough to be the primary support of the news business rather than advertisers doing that are pretty plugged-in as a group.
One thing is for sure. If it works out for them, you're going to see tons of print outlets following suit.
As noted, several print outlets have already done this -- the NY Times is following, not leading -- and most of those that have are still desperately seeking ways to keep afloat.
While buzzword compliant it doesn't really mean anything.
I think what it is trying to get at is that the IT shop should have expertise in IT in the same way that the business shop has expertise in the business, and that the IT shop should be proactive in offering alternatives that are more efficient and useful as to the how of getting things done.
I think its stated poorly -- not merely because it is vague and awkwardly worded, but also in the sense that this is still "reacting to users" and "building software to meet requirements". The difference is, really, that the business analysis is done correctly so that the business requirements are properly elicited from the business shop without improperly inserting implementation parameters that are not real requirements but which instead represent the businesses perception of the best implementation method.
But what is stated well is that this is can be different from running IT as a business -- it is not an arms-length affair where the IT has no investment in the success of the project beyond meeting contractual requirements, it is one where IT has a responsibility for acheiving excellence in the implementation within the requirements, and particularly for questioning requirements that appear not to be business requirements but instead to reflect be the business side's assumptions about technical matters (this is especially the case when, as is sometimes the case, project management and business analysis -- at least for projects with a major IT component -- are functions located within the IT shop [while an IT shop should have resources for these roles, they are really cross-cutting functions that are just as necessary for business process reengineering projects with no or incidental IT impact, but lots of organizations, if they have dedicated resources at all for these functions, have them within their IT shops.])
It is not true that if Google doesn't patent it, a troll will. A technique that is well known, such as MapReduce, is the property of the general public and is unpatentable.
If it was unpatentable in practice Google would obviously not have been granted a patent on it; since they were granted a patent on it, the inescapable conclusion is that, in practice, MapReduce is in the category of things which can be patented (whether it should be or not), and therefore, it is not at all inconceivable that if Google had failed to patent it, some patent troll would have.
I doubt Google will forsake FF yet. Their market share plus competition with MS makes them an attractive ally. Until chrome gains substantial share(and I think it will) supporting FF is in Google's best interest.
Supporting FF is in Google's best interest as long as FF is an open-source browser that supports the standard technologies that Google services rely on, even if Chrome gains significant marketshare. Google's services being usable in a wide variety of competing browsers, rather than being tied to a particular (even if popular) browser are a big marketing point for Google's services, after all.
Private corporations can go under with just a couple of bad years. Or even months, particularly if they're new businesses. Governments just have to raise taxes.
Governments can fail quickly, too. Sure, they usually fall to different problems than private entities do -- governments usually that fail early generally due so, if it is early in their life, because of violent reactions by existing governments, and otherwise (early or not) because they so fail the populace that they see a violent reaction from them.
New attempts to start governments probably fail about as frequently as attempts to start businesses.
And, like any other government policy, raising taxes only works to the extent that the governed populace is willing to accept it.
For the casual user, installing Linux and then configuring Wine in order to run their Windows programs is not trivial.
The only thing I've needed to do to "configure Wine" to run Windows programs in Ubuntu 9.10 is to go to the package manager and install it. While I suppose that might be non-trivial for some users, the simplest solution to that problem is to make a Linux distro on which Wine is installed by default.
Imagine just having to install Ubuntu and then being able to install and run your Windows programs on top of it. That would seriously shake up the OS landscape, no?
Maybe, though the relevance of desktop OS choice is probably waning anyway, particularly for "casual users". But, even granting that that is a worthwhile goal, writing a new OS from scratch -- even drawing on Wine in the process -- is not the most reasonable (or most likely to succeed) way of reaching that objective.
JavaScript uses prototypes instead of classes for inheritance. It is possible to simulate many class-based features with prototypes in JavaScript.
You are mimicking some of the utility, but that's not OO.
Prototype-based object-oriented languages and class-based object-oriented langauges are both legitimately object-oriented; they are two different means of enabling object-oriented programming style. "Object-oriented" doesn't mean "class-based".
Go ahead and show me is-a, has-a, and as-a inheritance in Javascript.
Its trivial to implement class-like, is-a style relationships in JavaScript, though since it is a dynamic language, there's little need to; "has-a" relationships are delegation, not inheritance--and are implemented in JavaScript in pretty much the same way they are in popular class-based OO lnaguages. I'm not sure what you mean by "as-a" -- that sounds like casting, which is zero-effort in JavaScript.
The problem is going to be, without the threat of obsolesence, how to "drive everything that can be moved to Jetpacks to that model".
If Jetpacks are easier to develop and maintain, and its reasonably easy to move from the existing extension model to Jetpacks if the features provided by extensions that aren't supported by Jetpacks aren't needed, then, over time, most of what doesn't need the old extension model will naturally move to Jetpacks.
From the article "In 26 statements of "contemplated relief" contained in its complaint, the FTC described what Intel's must do and not do to preserve competition."
Right, because when I think of people who know how to run a business (ya know, an entity with 10 trillion dollars in debt), I think of the Federal government.
"Preserving competition", which is what the FTC is saying what must be done to do, and "running a business" are distinctly different, and often opposed, goals. Someone running a business wants to eliminate their competition, not preserve it.
Give IBM 700 billion dollars and I guarantee that the unemployment would be well below 10% (or 17% real unemployement).
Your personal guarantee might be worth something for that proposition if you had the capacity and a legally binding obligation to repay the $700 billion if IBM failed to deliver. But even then, it would be an inducement to try the experiment by mitigating the cost if you were wrong, not a basis for believeing the claim that you make. If you want people to believe that claim, an actual argument with reasoning and/or evidence (preferably, both) would be better than a your personal "guarantee".
According to the TFA, Google had about 65.6% of searches in November, and gained 0.2% additional in December; Microsoft had 10.3% in November, and gained 0.4% additional in December. So who is doing better? Well, if you operationalize that question as "who is converting a greater share of the searches that they don't already have?":
Google gained 0.2% of searches in December, out of the 34.4% of searches that weren't already being done on Google sites -- converting just about 0.58% of non-Google searches.
Microsoft gained 0.4% of searches in December, out of the 89.7% of searches that weren't already being done on Microsoft sites -- converting 0.45% of non-Microsoft searches.
What purpose does it serve to skip version numbers, except for some political or media-relations reason?
The difference between doing a 3.7 minor version release and a series of 3.6.x point releases as features are completed means that there aren't a set of "must-do" features for the 3.7 version, main "roadmapped" development can shift to 4.0, and individual enhancements to 3.6 that get completed get pushed out as point releases rather than getting aggregated into a combined minor version release. It also means that, essentially, anything not in 3.6 isn't committed to be done in the 3.x series at all.
You're missing this: (3) Mozilla does individual security fixes and feature updates for 3.6 as they are completed (maybe grouping the two together in an update if they happen to be ready at the same time, but not holding either to wait for the other), but doesn't have one big list of featur updates that must be complete for a "v3.7" that are released all at once. The "feature updates that will be rolled out with security updates", in this case, would mean that the feature updates are rolled into the usual chain of flowing, as-completed security update point releases rather than bundled together into a minor version release, not that each individual feature update must accompany at least one security fix.
IMO, the perfect keyboard was the Mac Classic one, before they made it all PC-compatible.
My favorite feature was that "Enter" and "Return" were two different keys, so you didn't have to do that retarded "use control-Enter to actually do return" crap that we do all the time now. ("Return" added a new line and "Enter" entered information.)
IIRC, the original 101-key PC (AT?) keyboard actually had Enter (on the numeric keypad) and Return (on the main "typewriter" part) labelled differently, and they had different scan codes, though most applications gave them the same effect, so the difference you describe may have been a platform UI convention difference, and not an actual keyboard difference.
No game generation has ever been "for forever". It'd be kind of silly to expect the 360 to be the last Xbox they ever make.
The first sentence is obviously true. The second may be justifiable, but isn't justified by the first. A console manufacturer can have a last generation even if the industry doesn't.
Atari, Mattel, Coleco, and Sega -- at one time serious console manufacturers -- aren't really represented in the current generation, and don't show much sign of returning.
The only reason I say "Happy Holidays" is because I don't want to assume the religion of the person I'm saying it to.
Insofar as wishing someone has a happy/merry/etc. holiday on a particular holiday (e.g., "Merry Christmas", "Happy Hannukah", etc.) assumes anything about the religion of the person to whom it is directed, "Happy Holidays" does as well: it assumes that the person adheres to a tradition which, at a minimum, does not find the concept of "holidays" offensive (IIRC, Jehovah's Witnesses and some theologically-related groups do this) and which observes holidays in the season in which the greeting is given.
I think that anyone offended by someone saying "Happy Holidays" is actually offended that there are other people who may be of a different faith than they are.
I think that is no less true about anyone who would find someone saying "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hannukah" offensive.
Conservatives *should* be the champions of small government, and by extension individual liberties... but those calling themselves conservatives in the US these days are way off base.
Why should "conservatives", particularly, be those things? Government limited by respect for individual liberties is the defining classical liberal position, "conservatives" were originally the people who defended unlimited, authoritarian government dominated by hereditary and religious elites against liberalism.
Slashdot Mirror
And even that doesn't excuse not supporting epub (the Adobe extensions and Adobe DRM, sure), which is completely free.
Nook supports a number of common formats for DRM-free ebooks (including epub and PDF, which seem to be the two most used by independent vendors), supports Sony reader store ebooks, and supports Adobe DRM for epub, so, actually, you can go to just about any independent (that is, not associated with a particular e-reader vendor) ebook retailer and pick up whatever you want, as well as using books from either the Sony or B&N stores.
Or, concerned that the Kindle isn't making as much money as they'd like, and that there are lots of existing, available mobile products that can be used as ebook readers and app platforms (netbooks, smartphones, tablets that consumers can buy today) that compete with it for consumers attention (and, more importantly, money), as well as a number of new announcements of such products that have recently been made (e.g., at CES).
Not everything in the world is about Apple.
The massive consolidation the industry has already undergone in the last few decades is one of the reasons print papers are failing; while it cut costs, it also turned "local" papers into redundant outlets repeating the same stories with almost no distinct reporting or content (other than local ads.) This was an efficiency in terms of the market that existed before the consolidation, but it also killed any advantage that the papers had over many different kinds of online news distribution with access to the same wire services from which the papers were getting most of their stories, just in time for access to the internet to reach the tipping point where getting news online was accessible to the masses.
The newspapers became very specifically adapted to an environment just as that environment radically changed.
A service charge that is added to you bill automatically and which you have no option as to the amount and whether or not to pay is a very different thing than a tip.
The idea that the usual, expected service is not included in the charge to the customer (or the wages of the server), but is something which the customer is socially expected (but not obligated) to pay in addition to the bill, in a variable amount, based on their satisfaction with the service involved is far from universal (and, particularly, the situations in which that idea applies vary a lot from place to place.)
If it was of "fine quality", they'd be able to sell it at a price that covered the cost to produce, rather than selling it at a pittance that doesn't make a dent in that cost and making the vast majority of their revenue (and still, not enough to have a sustainable business model -- which is why newspapers are dying) from advertising. Newspapers may reform their business model in a way which results in them having a valuable product to sell readers that is of "fine quality", but they don't now.
It only works for Google because they don't produce any of the content, all they provide is access.
I don't think that's really true; I think that paid professional newsgathering, filtering, writing, and analysis will continue to be important, and that the newspapers and newsmagazines are the institutions best positioned to do that. OTOH, doing that means doing a 180 from the direction they've been heading for most of the last several decades, where they've sought efficiencies by reducing in-house content (especially investigative and analytical content) and focussing on selling ads, and outsourcing much of the newsgathering to wire services whose articles they just reprint. They've lost, first to TV and then to social media on the internet, their place in the universe of mass advertising, which means that they'll need to focus on providing value to a more narrowly-targetted audience that can pay for the work directly.
The product they provide in exchange for ad revenues is reader eyeballs to advertisers. If that was high enough quality to be profitable in that marketplace, newspapers, including the NY Times, wouldn't be struggling and desparately looking for ways to avoid sliding into complete oblivion.
This makes the critical mistake of seeing "printed news stories" as the primary product of a newspaper. They are, historically, not. The primary product on which newspapers make money is selling readers eyeballs to advertisers. Charging readers for the dead-tree edition of the paper usually doesn't even pay for the cost of printing it, much less actually producing the content -- it is done almost entirely because advertisers see "paid circulation" numbers as a better indicator of people who are likely to actually read the paper (and be exposed to ads) than any estimates of distribution of free papers, which lets papers that charge reader also more for ad space than free papers can.
Online, there are much more precise measures of exposure to (and utility of) ads than paid circulation, so the primary reason newspapers charge for dead-tree editions doesn't exist.
OTOH, the existing newspaper business models are generally failing for the pay dailies, and some of them are trying to focus their business more on serving readers as their primary customers than serving advertisers; the degree to which this succeeds will depend on whether they do enough to bring in revenue from readers to offset the money lost to advertisers. Simply charging for content online alone isn't going to do that, its just going to hasten the collapse of online readership.
Charging more regardless of medium -- online or print -- reducing the volume of advertising, and improving content by doing more original reporting and less relaying of wire service stories that are relayed through many other online, broadcast, and print outlets, and doing more investigative reporting might work to make newspapers profitable, though it'll mean a much smaller readership. And if you narrow the audience that much, you probably don't hurt yourself by ditching the whole expensive print infrastructure altogether and going online only. The kind of people that are going to pay enough to be the primary support of the news business rather than advertisers doing that are pretty plugged-in as a group.
As noted, several print outlets have already done this -- the NY Times is following, not leading -- and most of those that have are still desperately seeking ways to keep afloat.
I think what it is trying to get at is that the IT shop should have expertise in IT in the same way that the business shop has expertise in the business, and that the IT shop should be proactive in offering alternatives that are more efficient and useful as to the how of getting things done.
I think its stated poorly -- not merely because it is vague and awkwardly worded, but also in the sense that this is still "reacting to users" and "building software to meet requirements". The difference is, really, that the business analysis is done correctly so that the business requirements are properly elicited from the business shop without improperly inserting implementation parameters that are not real requirements but which instead represent the businesses perception of the best implementation method.
But what is stated well is that this is can be different from running IT as a business -- it is not an arms-length affair where the IT has no investment in the success of the project beyond meeting contractual requirements, it is one where IT has a responsibility for acheiving excellence in the implementation within the requirements, and particularly for questioning requirements that appear not to be business requirements but instead to reflect be the business side's assumptions about technical matters (this is especially the case when, as is sometimes the case, project management and business analysis -- at least for projects with a major IT component -- are functions located within the IT shop [while an IT shop should have resources for these roles, they are really cross-cutting functions that are just as necessary for business process reengineering projects with no or incidental IT impact, but lots of organizations, if they have dedicated resources at all for these functions, have them within their IT shops.])
If it was unpatentable in practice Google would obviously not have been granted a patent on it; since they were granted a patent on it, the inescapable conclusion is that, in practice, MapReduce is in the category of things which can be patented (whether it should be or not), and therefore, it is not at all inconceivable that if Google had failed to patent it, some patent troll would have.
Supporting FF is in Google's best interest as long as FF is an open-source browser that supports the standard technologies that Google services rely on, even if Chrome gains significant marketshare. Google's services being usable in a wide variety of competing browsers, rather than being tied to a particular (even if popular) browser are a big marketing point for Google's services, after all.
Governments can fail quickly, too. Sure, they usually fall to different problems than private entities do -- governments usually that fail early generally due so, if it is early in their life, because of violent reactions by existing governments, and otherwise (early or not) because they so fail the populace that they see a violent reaction from them.
New attempts to start governments probably fail about as frequently as attempts to start businesses.
And, like any other government policy, raising taxes only works to the extent that the governed populace is willing to accept it.
The only thing I've needed to do to "configure Wine" to run Windows programs in Ubuntu 9.10 is to go to the package manager and install it. While I suppose that might be non-trivial for some users, the simplest solution to that problem is to make a Linux distro on which Wine is installed by default.
Maybe, though the relevance of desktop OS choice is probably waning anyway, particularly for "casual users". But, even granting that that is a worthwhile goal, writing a new OS from scratch -- even drawing on Wine in the process -- is not the most reasonable (or most likely to succeed) way of reaching that objective.
Prototype-based object-oriented languages and class-based object-oriented langauges are both legitimately object-oriented; they are two different means of enabling object-oriented programming style. "Object-oriented" doesn't mean "class-based".
Its trivial to implement class-like, is-a style relationships in JavaScript, though since it is a dynamic language, there's little need to; "has-a" relationships are delegation, not inheritance--and are implemented in JavaScript in pretty much the same way they are in popular class-based OO lnaguages. I'm not sure what you mean by "as-a" -- that sounds like casting, which is zero-effort in JavaScript.
If Jetpacks are easier to develop and maintain, and its reasonably easy to move from the existing extension model to Jetpacks if the features provided by extensions that aren't supported by Jetpacks aren't needed, then, over time, most of what doesn't need the old extension model will naturally move to Jetpacks.
"Preserving competition", which is what the FTC is saying what must be done to do, and "running a business" are distinctly different, and often opposed, goals. Someone running a business wants to eliminate their competition, not preserve it.
Your personal guarantee might be worth something for that proposition if you had the capacity and a legally binding obligation to repay the $700 billion if IBM failed to deliver. But even then, it would be an inducement to try the experiment by mitigating the cost if you were wrong, not a basis for believeing the claim that you make. If you want people to believe that claim, an actual argument with reasoning and/or evidence (preferably, both) would be better than a your personal "guarantee".
According to the TFA, Google had about 65.6% of searches in November, and gained 0.2% additional in December; Microsoft had 10.3% in November, and gained 0.4% additional in December. So who is doing better? Well, if you operationalize that question as "who is converting a greater share of the searches that they don't already have?":
Google gained 0.2% of searches in December, out of the 34.4% of searches that weren't already being done on Google sites -- converting just about 0.58% of non-Google searches.
Microsoft gained 0.4% of searches in December, out of the 89.7% of searches that weren't already being done on Microsoft sites -- converting 0.45% of non-Microsoft searches.
The difference between doing a 3.7 minor version release and a series of 3.6.x point releases as features are completed means that there aren't a set of "must-do" features for the 3.7 version, main "roadmapped" development can shift to 4.0, and individual enhancements to 3.6 that get completed get pushed out as point releases rather than getting aggregated into a combined minor version release. It also means that, essentially, anything not in 3.6 isn't committed to be done in the 3.x series at all.
You're missing this:
(3) Mozilla does individual security fixes and feature updates for 3.6 as they are completed (maybe grouping the two together in an update if they happen to be ready at the same time, but not holding either to wait for the other), but doesn't have one big list of featur updates that must be complete for a "v3.7" that are released all at once. The "feature updates that will be rolled out with security updates", in this case, would mean that the feature updates are rolled into the usual chain of flowing, as-completed security update point releases rather than bundled together into a minor version release, not that each individual feature update must accompany at least one security fix.
IIRC, the original 101-key PC (AT?) keyboard actually had Enter (on the numeric keypad) and Return (on the main "typewriter" part) labelled differently, and they had different scan codes, though most applications gave them the same effect, so the difference you describe may have been a platform UI convention difference, and not an actual keyboard difference.
The first sentence is obviously true. The second may be justifiable, but isn't justified by the first. A console manufacturer can have a last generation even if the industry doesn't.
Atari, Mattel, Coleco, and Sega -- at one time serious console manufacturers -- aren't really represented in the current generation, and don't show much sign of returning.
Insofar as wishing someone has a happy/merry/etc. holiday on a particular holiday (e.g., "Merry Christmas", "Happy Hannukah", etc.) assumes anything about the religion of the person to whom it is directed, "Happy Holidays" does as well: it assumes that the person adheres to a tradition which, at a minimum, does not find the concept of "holidays" offensive (IIRC, Jehovah's Witnesses and some theologically-related groups do this) and which observes holidays in the season in which the greeting is given.
I think that is no less true about anyone who would find someone saying "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hannukah" offensive.
Why should "conservatives", particularly, be those things? Government limited by respect for individual liberties is the defining classical liberal position, "conservatives" were originally the people who defended unlimited, authoritarian government dominated by hereditary and religious elites against liberalism.
The State Department will talk—that's what the State Department exists to do.
For anything beyond that, there are other agencies.