I'm guessing you can't sell Intel-based Macs until they are demonstrably faster than the fastest PPC Mac being sold. The way to accomplish this is to screw the Mac community by:
1: No speed increases in PPC Macs for the next year, unless they are very expensive models that won't compete with mainstream Intel boxes when they're introduced.
2: Give Intel a year to catch up, which is a generation in computer processor years.
Clue: It's IBM who is doing the screwing and #1 and #2 are happening today and this is the prime reason that Jobs is ditching PowerPC.
Apple would love to sell super fast high-end Macs which blow away the Pentia. The G5's were quite fast when introduced, but it is IBM---not Apple---who has been unable or unwilling to ramp up the speed and in enough volume.
There is nothing wrong at all with the PowerPC architecture and there are lots of things very right with it. It's far less crufty than x86, though the iAMD 64 bit mode does improve things somewhat (finally no register starvation and antideluvian 387 FP)
The problem is that IBM was apparently unwilling to make economically competitive CPU chips in the middle of the market and maintain the incremental gains to always stay competitive with Intel.
They made their choice to go for high volume, static performance embedded (Cell + microcontrollers) and on the other end, very expensive chips for their high end $10K+ servers. And nothing really for competitive laptops, which are a big, and growing, part of Apple's business.
Today, the Pentium 4 "netburst" ultradeep pipelined processors suffer in comparison to PPC and AMD in real-world real-software tests, but this isn't going to last long.
Intel has finally woken up and realized that netburst is a turd like Itanic, but the poor widdle Pentium M (evolved from the 10 year old Pentium Pro core) has been rocking. Back to the future at intel, as their mainstream dual core desktops and laptops will use 64 bit versions of these chips with the marketing cripple removed (i.e. 64 bit instructions + SSE3).
Cringely can find no logical reason for Apple to choose Intel over AMD
but other SMRT people can. Other than your obvious point, which is clearly the #1 driving motivation, as Jobs could see IBM devoting more and more effort to game boxes and embedded and its own POWER servers.
(2) AMD is associated with "#2", "loser", etc. There's a big advantage for Apple to be seen with the Winner---finally!
Shit, big companies won't buy AMD based computers even though they are 99% Intel compatible. On the other hand, many of them are tired of getting raped by Microsoft. Maybe there's something to the OSX thing---they'll think "not Windows, but without Linux geek crap".
(3) Intel has MONEY that it gives to hardware manufacturers when they use that dorky "intel inside" ding dong ding dong in their advertisements
(4) Intel has other chips, like networking, that AMD may nto.
(5) Intel has mediocre desktop chips, but great low-power laptop chip*sets*.
Guess who really sells lots of nifty notebooks with fancy well-integrated hardware?
(At my latest scientific conference, I'd say that >40% of presenters had a Powerbook/iBook).
(5) Apple gets almost half its revenue from iPods now. What stuff does AMD make, besides flash, that's really good for iPod?
Wild ass crackhead prediction:
Apple will never allow Dell or Compaq or beige boxes to run OSX.
But there may eventually be a OSX-box, and especially "blade servers" which do make it into Windows-centric company rooms: they will say Intel on it, as Intel becomes a high end *systems* maker. Yup, the other companies will scream when their supplier starts competing against them.
Intel's response: OK, you go ahead and bitch. If y'all want, you can open up a few dozen of your own multi-billion chip fab plants. But I think we'll be seeing ya back around here.
It all works because of chip making economics. The capital required is now so immense that not only is there a huge barrier to entry, there's a huge barrier to even just increasing capacity.
AMD doesn't have the capacity. Even if Sun and HP and Dell get all huffy and got to AMD they can't get enough supply there, and since the margins on the boxes are so low, the clients can't supply AMD with enough capital to greatly increase capacity either.
And Intel has a habit of busting down the price just when AMD looks like it's starting to get ahead (financially). So AMD and its bankers won't take the risk of massive new expansion.
The new realignment:
Team 1 --------------------- Intel, Apple
Intel produces chips, Apple produces OSX and Macs for the consumer, and Intel Systems produces boring server boxes and desktops. Because it "owns" or has a "special deal" for OSX, it can undersell the Windows-based monopoly servers.
And finally Intel can have good looking "sexy innovative demo hardware" which WORKS---i.e. a Mac---instead of that embarassing crap they've pushed before.
Team 2: Sun, Dell, Microsoft, AMD
Microsoft can't put too much favoritism towards AMD (like cutting out Intel support) because AMD can't supply anywhere near enough capacity. Sun and Microsoft are congential competitors too and despite the detente, they don't know how to work together, as Microsoft's impulse is 'crush'. Dell gets pissy as Intel starts competing against them, but again, AMD can't supply big enough volumes, so they're stuck too. And don't forget those low margins, so how much strategic power do they have?
Centrifugal forces will push away all but Dell+Microsoft, slave and master.
Team "L is for loser": HP/Compaq
More expensive than Dell, no distinguishing features, innovation controlled by Microsoft
Itanic's dead and Carly obliterated their geek cred--Agilent is gone and printers are boring. Linux is strangling HPUX and IBM has services locked up.
Sun will probably end up here too but they may hang on a little longer.
You get a beautiful program full of object-oriented highly encapsulated buzzword prettified heavy weight infrastructure.
But the computations don't conserve momentum. Or money.
I.e. a "bad" program which does approximately the right thing to solve the problem is better than a beautiful program which does positively the wrong thing.
And fetch me a fresh Nubian virgin on your way out.
Microsofties like Sergey and hate Bill 'n' Steve
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The answer is simple, I believe.
The real Microsoft hackers, in their hearts, really like Sergey and his attitude much better than they like Gates and Ballmer.
Before Google, I guess they sold out to the Dark Side because they thought 'OK, in order to pay for my hard core hacking, I guess the sales part of the company has to be Evil. Since it pays for my check and stock options, I'll deal with it."
But Google isn't. They're not Doing Evil: they're Doing Cool. Getting a job at google must feel like cleanliness and liberation.
The MS hackers are tired of expending all their energy making non-innovative products merely to Protect The Empire:.NET versus Java Xbox versus PS2 Longhorn versus OSX MS Search versus Google
They don't want to be the last ones protecting a giant EDS.
For all Bill's BS about Research and Innovation, they really haven't done squat, and the employees are sick of it.
Thanks to Russell, you do not need to even understand what the formulas mean or anything of the kind, as long as your mathematical syntax is flawless. This for some reason gives free regin to teachers to hammer the syntax into students without them, us, ever knowing what it means. We become, quite literally, educated fools
Thanks to modern mathematics, it is mathematically proven that mathematics is NOT just syntax and logic.
There are many deep and fundamental concepts in mathematics. Syntax is the necessary assistant to express them.
Since the concepts are especially subtle and abstract in mathematics, you need complicated syntax.
Do you think that research math professors have no intuitive idea about the concepts? Suppose they don't: then where do all the new ideas come from?
Any attempt to pick apart what they are saying results in fierce opposition as if you are trying to slay their holy cow.
I have a guess as to what could be happening: you really aren't getting what the professors are trying to tell you, and you're annoyingly self-righteous about it.
Yes, you do have to rely on other people's solutions in mathematics because the sum progress of the smartest people of civilization for hundreds of years is going to be more than your own.
Mathematics is centrally about the inter-relationships between abstract concepts.
There are other aspects at work: that some of the reasons behind mathematical definitions don't become apparent until more knowledge.
In 9th grade you may hear and see about sines and cosines and have to remember all sorts of useless identites. What's the point of sin and cos? Why radians?
It becomes much more apparent when you know calculus and differential equations, when they are elementary solutions to x'' + x = 0 and how the formulas and series expansions only work in radians.
In college level mathematics the same thing happens---there may not be obvious reasons for "why" things are the way they are until you know some serious analysis---how the 19th century systematized and rigorized (and found mistakes) in previous, more 'intuitively' discovered mathematics. Abstract algebra and topology aren't easy to swallow in one gulp either.
(1) uncertainty principle, otherwise known as non-commuting quantum mechanical operators. As that, it is very likely to be an immutable fundamental part of QM. Nothing random about it however.
(2) the 'projection' of mixed states to eigenstates of classical observables and a "random" choice thereof. Now, this may not be "right" in a fundamental sense. If you had full Laplacian knowledge of the wavefunction of the Universe and integrated it as an initial value problem, where does the "random" come in? That is an added "hack" to fundamental QM.
I personally believe that it is nothing other than the practical impossibility of observing all the quantum mechanical phases of all the particles in a macroscopic (classical) device that us humans use to measure things with. But this randomness then has the same theoretical structure as "random" in a roulette wheel. Is roulette random? No, it obeys classical Newton's laws of mechanics extremely well. But it has a very large Lyapunov exponent (measure of divergence of initial conditions) with respect to the final ball position. Most humans can't integrate forward from the initial conditions (spin of the wheel, initial velocity from the croupier) to any level of profitability. Unless you have a computer on you. (which people have done, and which is now banned in casinos).
QM: Lots of quantum mechanical roulette wheels spinning very fast, and then you interact it with an object with 10^23 things of its own. Physical chaos not "intrinsic random" but damn good approximation thereof.
(1) Obeying the licensing terms for "Metro" will intrinsically violate GPL and LGPL,
(2) GPL/LGPL/other reasonable open source licensed software will be legally *unable* to make Metro documents, because it will be patented.
(3) Microsoft undercuts Adobe fees for printer manufacturers. Printer manufacturers (on small hardware margins) gleefully sign up with Microsoft. Not suprisingly the agreements will prevent them from making Linux drivers, but this will be kept secret.
(4) Linux becomes unable to print on most common printers. This becomes common meme in business, just as the common meme 10 years ago was "Macs can't live on a network with Windows machines".
Think about Microsoft's push with secretive BIOSes.
What's the goal there? To prevent Linux from working on ordinary cheap PC hardware. That was how Windows was succesful---barnacled to Moore's law and a deep hardware market.
This is the same goal. They can't kill Linux by software pricing---but they will try to kill it by hardware pricing and availability.
That is their strategic goal. The idea has to be that the easy hardware that everybody gets on-line or at Fry's or COMPusa will be Linux incompatible---that "everything works" with Windows, and is very difficult with Linux.
but large scale societal policies, attitudes and investment to enable people who tugged on their footwear to get good jobs which contributed to a fundmentally higher standard of living for all.
There is no evidence that people now work less hard or are any less smart.
Despite the propaganda, there is no evidence there is any shortage of US scientists and engineers. There is a shortage of US science and engineering *careers*.
The brands with the highest customer satisfaction in, of all places, Germany? Toyota and Honda.
In the rest of the planet, it is Japanese model cars almost everywhere, with a few rich potentates owning Benzes.
Here in California, practically the only American cars (not trucks) are rentals.
Now with oil and gasoline getting expensive to match geophysical truth, people aren't buying the idiot trucks for city commuting. And who's way ahead in hybrids and efficiency? Toyota and Honda.
Here in SoCal, I practically see as many new Priuses (a single model in short supply) as all new american passenger cars which aren't rentals.
Japan dominates the global car industry in power, efficiency, execution and innovation and the gap continues to grow.
The facts are that the USA recruits students heavily internationally as well as faculty, to a degree that other major universities do not reciprocate.
It is rather difficult, for instance, for a student from the USA to attend a major research university in Europe (much less Japan or China though the language problems are far more difficult).
In faculty hiring, again the USA opens the pool to everybody, but nearly all other nations significantly favor their own (in Europe, it is usually pan-European favoritism).
In the USA, the Universities get significantly more money from foreign students (they have to pay full tuition), and in addition, the foreign students are entirely dependent on staying in the good graces of their department and advisor in order to avoid being deported. Hence they are favored institutionally and professionally.
The foreign students often get their own source of money from their own governments to study in the USA. There is far less of this available for US students to study abroad---at least for lengthy graduate technical education as opposed to one semester of "personal enrichment".
However, the primary reasons the foreigners are going back is very simple: there are jobs for scientists overseas, and there are fewer and fewer here, most especially if you don't want to work on new ways to kill or spy on people.
Lack of competitiveness in the USA is NOT in technical education, it is in technical employment!
US students go for technical education precisely to the level the rewards are worth the very heavy costs.
Beefing up primary and college science education only will generate only more disillusioned graduate students, not more US productivity.
Industrial labs are sending jobs to India and deleting them in the US. Indian students don't need a work permit to work in India---they are citizens.
You mean to say "programmers using the patent in software which follows an OSI-certified open source license" (and does that include hardware-software combinations?
The wording has to be clear.
Why would it be desirable to restrict the royalty-free nature to only OSI-certified open licenses?
Google is planning on writing many web-based applications. Obviously google search and gmail are the first and second ones, with gmail doing a fair amount of client-side processing.
Google wants want them to Not Suck.
Microsoft can Make Them Suck via Internet Explorer. Microsoft is doing the job of making IE suck on its own.
Hence Google wants to make sure Firefox stays healthy and Mr Goodger doesn't get absorbed by the Borg when he wants to get married and has a mortgage payment.
What is Google's business plan?
The same as Marc Andressen's at Netscape, except plus a billion dollars in cash, a stunningly profitable advertising busines, even more PhDs---minus a browser and a Microsoft division dedicating to killing it (so far).
the Google Home Page is replacing the Netscape Home Page. Remember that? How Netscape was going to make money off that after the browser had its air supply sucked out?
the Google API and platforms are going to fight the Windows API and platforms, just as Netscape was going to do.
Yes, if you work in the US for a company or government and get paid a salary, your taxes---approximated---are taken out of your paycheck and paid to the Federal and State tax authorities.
If your situation is as simple as you describe in the EU (no business, no substantial other income, no substantial deductions), the US tax forms are extremely simple.
Of course, many people gain significant income via their own businesses, for example consulting or other activities. And there you have to be honest and say what you made and calculate what you owe. In fact you are obligated to pay "estimated" taxes every quarter based on that quarter's income.
In either case (working for company or yourself), if at the end of the year, your detailed tax return shows you owe substantially more than what you already paid---either by estimated tax payments or by automatic withholding---you will pay an additional penalty.
At the end of the year when you submit your tax form, you will reconcile all the possible deductions and extra taxes you might owe.
For example, if you make money during the year on your stock market investments and sell during that year, you will incur tax on that. Your brokerage does not usually submit witheld money from this for US residents, but it does tell the tax authorities how much you sold, when, and what the proceeds were.
When you fill out your tax forms you have to reconcile this too.
Tax-inclusive prices in the EU are more consumer-friendly on the calculation. The argument used against this here is that (1) taxes vary by locality (2) by building the tax rate into the price it makes tax increases easier politically.
Oh really? Microsoft engineered an enormous loophole in the DOJ settlement letting them get away with all sorts of secret and proprietary things as long as it was in the name of "security".
Especially given the current pro-corporatist mentality in the Administration, all Microsoft needs to do is to come up with one miniscule cover and technology regarding doing this for "security" and they have legal cover to do all sorts of things which "just happen" to have the side effect of being commercially very valuable.
Oh, and don't forget the magic phrase, "we're doing this to stop terrorists!"
Slashdot Mirror
"I, for one and speaking for MicroWalSoftxxon Corp, welcome our new Chinese Communist overlords."
-- Steve Ballmer.
don't moderate this as "Funny" either
It was the 'new' netburst architecture which sucks for power and computation per megahertz.
Pentium M's are good, and Intel finally realizes it.
I'm guessing you can't sell Intel-based Macs until they are demonstrably faster than the fastest PPC Mac being sold. The way to accomplish this is to screw the Mac community by:
1: No speed increases in PPC Macs for the next year, unless they are very expensive models that won't compete with mainstream Intel boxes when they're introduced.
2: Give Intel a year to catch up, which is a generation in computer processor years.
Clue: It's IBM who is doing the screwing and #1 and #2 are happening today and this is the prime reason that Jobs is ditching PowerPC.
Apple would love to sell super fast high-end Macs which blow away the Pentia. The G5's were quite fast when introduced, but it is IBM---not Apple---who has been unable or unwilling to ramp up the speed and in enough volume.
There is nothing wrong at all with the PowerPC architecture and there are lots of things very right with it. It's far less crufty than x86, though the iAMD 64 bit mode does improve things somewhat (finally no register starvation and antideluvian 387 FP)
The problem is that IBM was apparently unwilling to make economically competitive CPU chips in the middle of the market and maintain the incremental gains to always stay competitive with Intel.
They made their choice to go for high volume, static performance embedded (Cell + microcontrollers) and on the other end, very expensive chips for their high end $10K+ servers.
And nothing really for competitive laptops, which are a big, and growing, part of Apple's business.
Today, the Pentium 4 "netburst" ultradeep pipelined processors suffer in comparison to PPC and AMD in real-world real-software tests, but this isn't going to last long.
Intel has finally woken up and realized that netburst is a turd like Itanic, but the poor widdle Pentium M (evolved from the 10 year old Pentium Pro core) has been rocking. Back to the future at intel, as their mainstream dual core desktops and laptops will use 64 bit versions of these chips with the marketing cripple removed (i.e. 64 bit instructions + SSE3).
Cringely can find no logical reason for Apple to choose Intel over AMD
but other SMRT people can. Other than your obvious point, which is clearly the #1 driving motivation, as Jobs could see IBM devoting more and more effort to game boxes and embedded and its own POWER servers.
(2) AMD is associated with "#2", "loser", etc. There's a big advantage for Apple to be seen with the Winner---finally!
Shit, big companies won't buy AMD based computers even though they are 99% Intel compatible. On the other hand, many of them are tired of getting raped by Microsoft. Maybe there's something to the OSX thing---they'll think "not Windows, but without Linux geek crap".
(3) Intel has MONEY that it gives to hardware manufacturers when they use that dorky "intel inside" ding dong ding dong in their advertisements
(4) Intel has other chips, like networking, that AMD may nto.
(5) Intel has mediocre desktop chips, but great low-power laptop chip*sets*.
Guess who really sells lots of nifty notebooks with fancy well-integrated hardware?
(At my latest scientific conference, I'd say that >40% of presenters had a Powerbook/iBook).
(5) Apple gets almost half its revenue from iPods now. What stuff does AMD make, besides flash, that's really good for iPod?
Wild ass crackhead prediction:
Apple will never allow Dell or Compaq or beige boxes to run OSX.
But there may eventually be a OSX-box, and especially "blade servers" which do make it into Windows-centric company rooms: they will say Intel on it, as Intel becomes a high end *systems* maker. Yup, the other companies will scream when their supplier starts competing against them.
Intel's response: OK, you go ahead and bitch. If y'all want, you can open up a few dozen of your own multi-billion chip fab plants. But I think we'll be seeing ya back around here.
It all works because of chip making economics.
The capital required is now so immense that not only is there a huge barrier to entry, there's a huge barrier to even just increasing capacity.
AMD doesn't have the capacity. Even if Sun and HP and Dell get all huffy and got to AMD they can't get enough supply there, and since the margins on the boxes are so low, the clients can't supply AMD with enough capital to greatly increase capacity either.
And Intel has a habit of busting down the price just when AMD looks like it's starting to get ahead (financially). So AMD and its bankers won't take the risk of massive new expansion.
The new realignment:
Team 1
---------------------
Intel, Apple
Intel produces chips, Apple produces OSX and Macs for the consumer, and Intel Systems produces boring server boxes and desktops. Because it "owns" or has a "special deal" for OSX, it can undersell the Windows-based monopoly servers.
And finally Intel can have good looking "sexy innovative demo hardware" which WORKS---i.e. a Mac---instead of that embarassing crap they've pushed before.
Team 2: Sun, Dell, Microsoft, AMD
Microsoft can't put too much favoritism towards AMD (like cutting out Intel support) because AMD can't supply anywhere near enough capacity. Sun and Microsoft are congential competitors too and despite the detente, they don't know how to work together, as Microsoft's impulse is 'crush'. Dell gets pissy as Intel starts competing against them, but again, AMD can't supply big enough volumes, so they're stuck too. And don't forget those low margins, so how much strategic power do they have?
Centrifugal forces will push away all but Dell+Microsoft, slave and master.
Team "L is for loser": HP/Compaq
More expensive than Dell, no distinguishing features, innovation controlled by Microsoft
Itanic's dead and Carly obliterated their geek cred--Agilent is gone and printers are boring. Linux is strangling HPUX and IBM has services locked up.
Sun will probably end up here too but they may hang on a little longer.
You get a beautiful program full of object-oriented highly encapsulated buzzword prettified heavy weight infrastructure.
But the computations don't conserve momentum.
Or money.
I.e. a "bad" program which does approximately the right thing to solve the problem is better than a beautiful program which does positively the wrong thing.
coca-cola
rock 'n' roll
microprocessor
Internet
surfing
and gives them an offer that They Can't Refuse.
Back to work, slave!
And fetch me a fresh Nubian virgin on your way out.
The answer is simple, I believe.
.NET versus Java
The real Microsoft hackers, in their hearts, really like Sergey and his attitude much better than they like Gates and Ballmer.
Before Google, I guess they sold out to the Dark Side because they thought 'OK, in order to pay for my hard core hacking, I guess the sales part of the company has to be Evil. Since it pays for my check and stock options, I'll deal with it."
But Google isn't. They're not Doing Evil: they're Doing Cool. Getting a job at google must feel like cleanliness and liberation.
The MS hackers are tired of expending all their energy making non-innovative products merely to Protect The Empire:
Xbox versus PS2
Longhorn versus OSX
MS Search versus Google
They don't want to be the last ones protecting a giant EDS.
For all Bill's BS about Research and Innovation, they really haven't done squat, and the employees are sick of it.
Thanks to Russell, you do not need to even understand what the formulas mean or anything of the kind, as long as your mathematical syntax is flawless. This for some reason gives free regin to teachers to hammer the syntax into students without them, us, ever knowing what it means.
We become, quite literally, educated fools
Thanks to modern mathematics, it is mathematically proven that mathematics is NOT just syntax and logic.
There are many deep and fundamental concepts in mathematics. Syntax is the necessary assistant to express them.
Since the concepts are especially subtle and abstract in mathematics, you need complicated syntax.
Do you think that research math professors have no intuitive idea about the concepts? Suppose they don't: then where do all the new ideas come from?
Any attempt to pick apart what they are saying results in fierce opposition as if you are trying to slay their holy cow.
I have a guess as to what could be happening: you really aren't getting what the professors are trying to tell you, and you're annoyingly self-righteous about it.
Yes, you do have to rely on other people's solutions in mathematics because the sum progress of the smartest people of civilization for hundreds of years is going to be more than your own.
Mathematics is centrally about the inter-relationships between abstract concepts.
There are other aspects at work: that some of the reasons behind mathematical definitions don't become apparent until more knowledge.
In 9th grade you may hear and see about sines and cosines and have to remember all sorts of useless identites. What's the point of sin and cos? Why radians?
It becomes much more apparent when you know calculus and differential equations, when they are elementary solutions to x'' + x = 0 and how the formulas and series expansions only work in radians.
In college level mathematics the same thing happens---there may not be obvious reasons for "why" things are the way they are until you know some serious analysis---how the 19th century systematized and rigorized (and found mistakes) in previous, more 'intuitively' discovered mathematics. Abstract algebra and topology aren't easy to swallow in one gulp either.
There are two issues which are distinct:
(1) uncertainty principle, otherwise known as non-commuting quantum mechanical operators. As that, it is very likely to be an immutable fundamental part of QM. Nothing random about it however.
(2) the 'projection' of mixed states to eigenstates of classical observables and a "random" choice thereof. Now, this may not be "right" in a fundamental sense. If you had full Laplacian knowledge of the wavefunction of the Universe and integrated it as an initial value problem, where does the "random" come in? That is an added "hack" to fundamental QM.
I personally believe that it is nothing other than the practical impossibility of observing all the quantum mechanical phases of all the particles in a macroscopic (classical) device that us humans use to measure things with. But this randomness then has the same theoretical structure as "random" in a roulette wheel. Is roulette random? No, it obeys classical Newton's laws of mechanics extremely well. But it has a very large Lyapunov exponent (measure of divergence of initial conditions) with respect to the final ball position. Most humans can't integrate forward from the initial conditions (spin of the wheel, initial velocity from the croupier) to any level of profitability. Unless you have a computer on you. (which people have done, and which is now banned in casinos).
QM: Lots of quantum mechanical roulette wheels spinning very fast, and then you interact it with an object with 10^23 things of its own. Physical chaos not "intrinsic random" but damn good approximation thereof.
(Yes, I am a computational scientist).
There are two issues:
(1) can Fortress link to Fortran libraries---and today this means Fortran 95 and Fortran 2000?
One obvious issue is using natural Fortran memory layout for (single processor non-distributed) arrays.
(2) is the Fortress programming langauge *source code* compatible with Fortran?
They are saying the answer to "2" is "no". The answer to '1' ought to be 'yes'.
I think that just getting Fortran 95 up to wide prevalance, and people realizing it's definitely better than C or Java in many cases, is hard enough.
My guess:
.
(1) Obeying the licensing terms for "Metro" will intrinsically violate GPL and LGPL,
(2) GPL/LGPL/other reasonable open source licensed software will be legally *unable* to make Metro documents, because it will be patented.
(3) Microsoft undercuts Adobe fees for printer manufacturers. Printer manufacturers (on small hardware margins) gleefully sign up with Microsoft. Not suprisingly the agreements will prevent them from making Linux drivers, but this will be kept secret.
(4) Linux becomes unable to print on most common printers. This becomes common meme in business, just as the common meme 10 years ago was "Macs can't live on a network with Windows machines".
Think about Microsoft's push with secretive BIOSes
What's the goal there? To prevent Linux from working on ordinary cheap PC hardware. That was how Windows was succesful---barnacled to Moore's law and a deep hardware market.
This is the same goal. They can't kill Linux by software pricing---but they will try to kill it by hardware pricing and availability.
That is their strategic goal. The idea has to be that the easy hardware that everybody gets on-line or at Fry's or COMPusa will be Linux incompatible---that "everything works" with Windows, and is very difficult with Linux.
that's right, George, there's rivers and rivers of LIQUID HYDROCARBONS down there, and America's got the mineral rights!
Step 1: steal identity and get credit card mailed to oneself, shameless thief.
Step 2: record your voice onto some shmoe's card.
Step 3: PROFIT!
but large scale societal policies, attitudes and investment to enable people who tugged on their footwear to get good jobs which contributed to a fundmentally higher standard of living for all.
There is no evidence that people now work less hard or are any less smart.
Despite the propaganda, there is no evidence there is any shortage of US scientists and engineers. There is a shortage of US science and engineering *careers*.
The brands with the highest customer satisfaction in, of all places, Germany? Toyota and Honda.
In the rest of the planet, it is Japanese model cars almost everywhere, with a few rich potentates owning Benzes.
Here in California, practically the only American cars (not trucks) are rentals.
Now with oil and gasoline getting expensive to match geophysical truth, people aren't buying the idiot trucks for city commuting. And who's way ahead in hybrids and efficiency? Toyota and Honda.
Here in SoCal, I practically see as many new Priuses (a single model in short supply) as all new american passenger cars which aren't rentals.
Japan dominates the global car industry in power, efficiency, execution and innovation and the gap continues to grow.
From: ()S/\M/\ (47/M/cave)
To: infidel@localhost
Reply-To: 72virgnluvr@hotmail.com
where are the well-covered NUB1LE H0USEW1VES in
my area who wanted to meet me?
i declare it a pagan and Crusader lie!!!!!!
DEATH TO HVHAKAK@18j987.bdx.com.in!!!!
Windows is legally a monopoly. They're not supposed to do this.
I'm an academic researcher professionally.
The facts are that the USA recruits students heavily internationally as well as faculty, to a degree that other major universities do not reciprocate.
It is rather difficult, for instance, for a student from the USA to attend a major research university in Europe (much less Japan or China though the language problems are far more difficult).
In faculty hiring, again the USA opens the pool to everybody, but nearly all other nations significantly favor their own (in Europe, it is usually pan-European favoritism).
In the USA, the Universities get significantly more money from foreign students (they have to pay full tuition), and in addition, the foreign students are entirely dependent on staying in the good graces of their department and advisor in order to avoid being deported. Hence they are favored institutionally and professionally.
The foreign students often get their own source of money from their own governments to study in the USA. There is far less of this available for US students to study abroad---at least for lengthy graduate technical education as opposed to one semester of "personal enrichment".
However, the primary reasons the foreigners are going back is very simple: there are jobs for scientists overseas, and there are fewer and fewer here, most especially if you don't want to work on new ways to kill or spy on people.
Lack of competitiveness in the USA is NOT in technical education, it is in technical employment!
US students go for technical education precisely to the level the rewards are worth the very heavy costs.
Beefing up primary and college science education only will generate only more disillusioned graduate students, not more US productivity.
Industrial labs are sending jobs to India and deleting them in the US. Indian students don't need a work permit to work in India---they are citizens.
These days, you need PhD to be a narcotics gangster!
You mean to say "programmers using the patent in
software which follows an OSI-certified open source license" (and does that include hardware-software combinations?
The wording has to be clear.
Why would it be desirable to restrict the royalty-free nature to only OSI-certified open licenses?
Exactly. Usually the simple answer is right.
Google is planning on writing many web-based applications. Obviously google search and gmail are the first and second ones, with gmail doing a fair amount of client-side processing.
Google wants want them to Not Suck.
Microsoft can Make Them Suck via Internet Explorer. Microsoft is doing the job of making IE suck on its own.
Hence Google wants to make sure Firefox stays healthy and Mr Goodger doesn't get absorbed by the Borg when he wants to get married and has a mortgage payment.
What is Google's business plan?
The same as Marc Andressen's at Netscape, except plus a billion dollars in cash, a stunningly profitable advertising busines, even more PhDs---minus a browser and a Microsoft division dedicating to killing it (so far).
the Google Home Page is replacing the Netscape Home Page. Remember that? How Netscape was going to make money off that after the browser had its air supply sucked out?
the Google API and platforms are going to fight the Windows API and platforms, just as Netscape was going to do.
Yes, if you work in the US for a company or government and get paid a salary, your taxes---approximated---are taken out of your paycheck and paid to the Federal and State tax authorities.
If your situation is as simple as you describe in the EU (no business, no substantial other income, no substantial deductions), the US tax forms are extremely simple.
Of course, many people gain significant income via their own businesses, for example consulting or other activities. And there you have to be honest and say what you made and calculate what you owe. In fact you are obligated to pay "estimated" taxes every quarter based on that quarter's income.
In either case (working for company or yourself), if at the end of the year, your detailed tax return shows you owe substantially more than what you already paid---either by estimated tax payments or by automatic withholding---you will pay an additional penalty.
At the end of the year when you submit your tax form, you will reconcile all the possible deductions and extra taxes you might owe.
For example, if you make money during the year on your stock market investments and sell during that year, you will incur tax on that. Your brokerage does not usually submit witheld money from this for US residents, but it does tell the tax authorities how much you sold, when, and what the proceeds were.
When you fill out your tax forms you have to reconcile this too.
Tax-inclusive prices in the EU are more consumer-friendly on the calculation. The argument used against this here is that (1) taxes vary by locality (2) by building the tax rate into the price it makes tax increases easier politically.
Oh really? Microsoft engineered an enormous loophole in the DOJ settlement letting them get away with all sorts of secret and proprietary things as long as it was in the name of "security".
:(
Especially given the current pro-corporatist mentality in the Administration, all Microsoft needs to do is to come up with one miniscule cover and technology regarding doing this for "security" and they have legal cover to do all sorts of things which "just happen" to have the side effect of being commercially very valuable.
Oh, and don't forget the magic phrase, "we're doing this to stop terrorists!"
it's in the can.