it is worth pointing out that Amazon will start COLLECTING sales tax not PAYING sales tax. The consumer is the one who will PAY the tax.

nope, nothing to worry about - unless you happen to like/work for/own stock in RIM. this is just the handset market maturing

two examples of market consolidation:
once upon a time there were a lot of car companies in the United States
I'm sure a lot of /.s remember multiple computer manufacturers from the 1990's that aren't around

RIM might be in a death spiral but I wouldn't write them off yet. As far as I can tell they have the "corporate email" market cornered - which is a nice thing to have, but tiny compared to Apple's iPhone dominance.

I'd like an iPhone 4s myself (and when upgrade time rolls around I'll probably get one - but I'll wait for the prices to drop when Apple releases iPhone 5). Unless my employer requires it I'm not going to get anything from RIM ...

competition is usually good for consumers (drives innovation, lowers prices) but that it also means there will be "winning" and "losing" companies in the marketplace

So once again the "/. question in the subject header == False" - Apple and Samsung are simply making superior products and/or out competing RIM (and/or using the patent system better)

the "cloud" is the latest (in a long line) of over used buzz words

are you running a few virtual machines on a couple of midlevel servers? probably not "cloud computing"

are you considering virtualizing a large number of servers to achieve high performance/high availability/infrastructure as a service/or some other "as a service" buzzword? probably "cloud computing"

where your "cloud configuration" exists is another issue. there was an article (Forbes maybe) that pointed out how much less money is required to start/run an "Internet startups." With the "public cloud provider" being Amazon Web Services (i.e. just because you are using the "cloud" doesn't mean you outsourced everything)

remember that "I.T." is about helping a company do whatever it is they do - the need for "I.T. people" (especially in security, virtualization, and developers) is not going away, but if you are a "hardware only" tech, spending your day replacing power supplies and installing new hard drives, you don't have a future in corporate IT departments ...

Bill Gates was famously competitive about everything, and at times it looked as if he didn't just want Microsoft to win but also wanted to destroy other companies that might be a threat to Microsoft (or he might make them an offer they can't refuse)

so saying that he is "less cut-throat" than Bill Gates doesn't mean that Steve Ballmer won't do what he thinks is in Microsoft's best interest (which is kind of his job)

I'm sure Stephen Elop has done/is doing what he thinks is in Nokia's best interest (and if Elop isn't "looking out for Nokia" he should be fired)...

the big concern is that Microsoft has a history of not playing well with others, but that was with Bill Gates running the show

Steve Ballmer (who dropped out of Stanford's business school to join Microsoft - i.e. he is a "businessman" in the good sense) is probably a little less cut-throat (or inclined to "compliance with raised middle finger") than Bill Gates - which is obviously just my opinion - and I'd gladly work for either Microsoft or Red Hat (I've used both company's software for years, but I'm not religious about either)

anyway, I'm still not convinced that "UEFI" is the next big thing, I'm willing to listen/try it - but taking a "trust but verify" attitude toward the whole thing

I don't think Microsoft will actually be able to do what the article is worried about - and it probably requires a history lesson on how the PC (and PC "clones") came about in the first place to fully explain "why" - but I'll just point everyone at Triumph of the Nerds

and does anyone remember IBM's "microchannel"?

the lesson from Microchannel was that people don't HAVE to pay you royalties just because you are the industry leader and come up with something new - they can form a gang of nine and do it another way...

this sounds a lot like Microsoft saying "pay us and get in the box" - I don't think they have that kind of power (and if you were working on PC's in the mid-late 90's you probably saw IBM PS/2's getting sold by the skid to be melted down for the gold in the connectors MCA used)

Shelley's "Ozymandias" is probably relevant ("My name is Microsoft, king of software/Look on my operating systems, ye competitiors, and despair") :-)

but we will always need desk bunny's

First let me say that I agree with everyone who is saying some form of "passing more laws won't make people better" and this is probably an example of pointless legislation, etc.

if I'm guessing at the intent of this legislation - then it looks a lot like what we used to require of the "old media." If someone writes a letter to the editor of the New York Times, they aren't going to print it unless they have a name and address, and claiming "anonymous sources" only goes so far.

As readers we take it on faith that the reporter went to some effort to verify the claims/reputation of the source. The difference between the New York Times ("All the news that's fit to print") and the National Enquirer ("Enquiring minds want to know") used to boil down to how rigorously they checked their sources.

oh, and we don't have complete "freedom of speech" - which would be say whatever you want about anything at anytime. examples: yelling "bomb" at an airport, "fire" in a crowded theater, or write threatening letters to someone in office - claiming "freedom of speech" in those cases isn't going to keep you from getting into some form of trouble with the man

we also have laws against libel and slander - and that whole "thou shall not bear false witness" thing kind of illustrates that this isn't a new problem. anyway, they illustrate the concept of "freedom within the law"...

the stock is being publically traded - so the price going down means that there are more "sellers" than "buyers" at the moment - what will be interesting is where the stock ends up in a year

remember, the underlying value of the company in question is a big factor in stock valuation, but the stock market is not a rational place, and people buy and sell for any number of reasons.

Facebook, Inc made its money on the i.p.o. (earlier posting said $16 billion) - the day to day fluctuations of the stock price don't directly impact its "bottom line"

for those who remember the dotcom bubble - the status symbol at that time was how much the stock price would rise, over the i.p.o. price ("Revolution OS" has a few examples of this near the end). I specifically remember RedHat's initial offering

notice that RedHat only offered 6 million shares (today RedHat, now RHT, is slightly above that price) - I haven't checked the numbers but if the $16 billion dollar number is correct then FB must have offered over 421 million shares...

in any case I'm happy to see the Mark Zuckerberg could FINALLY afford to get married - it is so hard to support a family on a couple million dollars (estimate is that he is now the 29th richest human being on the face of the earth)

good points - but would that be bad? is the person taking pictures at the "Walmart portrait" studio a "professional photographer?"

What about a wedding where they forego the "professional photographer" and just give guests digital cameras? A professional job would be easier, I'm sure the median quality of the pictures would be terrible, but they get a unique (and memorable) wedding album (anyone ever been part of a wedding that did that?).

the Jimmy Olsen's of the world probably don't have to worry about their job - if their job is going to dangerous places and documenting what is going on (which is the point that the article eventually gets to) - but then we are on the whole citizen journalism/blogging vs "old media" argument

what all of the software tools do is make the amatuer photographer better (my point and shoot photos look a lot better than they did 20 years ago), they don't threaten "professional photographers."

I'll point everyone at the excellent CNBC documentary on Pixar if you want to see the impact computers have had on the animation industry (just different tools for the artists, you still need artists). "Waking Sleeping Beauty" is also a good look at the traditional animation industry. compare and contrast :-)

anyway, a huge part of photography is what the photographer "sees" not the tools that they use, that fact isn't going to change anytime soon

yes, the profession has been changed (when did "photoshop" become a verb? Kodak declared bankruptcy) and is being changed by technology but photographers won't be "replaced" anytime soon.

the dead Greek guy thought (Aristotle) is that there must be a root cause for all human action. Why do people get up and go to work? They need money. Why do they need money? They have bills to pay. Why do they have bills to pay? They need things. - and so on, until you get to the root motivator. Aristotle argued that this root motivator is "happiness."

so the reason people do things is because (they think) it will make them happy (please remember that philosophers/psychologists/lovers have been arguing over this subject for as long as people have been arguing - we are dealing with the ultimate "black box" in the human mind)

the practical advice is that people want to do useful work that has a purpose. if you feel that your job is pointless ("yeah, about the cover on the tps reports"), giving you a gold star for turning in your pointless work on time isn't going to help. If you feel that your work is important and you are emotionally involved in the process then you might think that putting explosives in your underwear is a good idea - and then the gold star is really pointless.

my personal opinion is that "gamification" might work for certain people/certain jobs - but not as a long term motivator

"old tech" sticks around because it is doing something useful AND because upgrading a complicated system is never easy or cheap. Users who were experts at the "old way" of doing things need be trained (or replaced by "younger, less experienced, cheaper, but already trained in the new tech workers")

we could wander into the "creative destruction" economic discussion but then the Marcus Aurelius quote (paraphresed by Hannibal Lecter) "This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole..." came to mind, and something about the "nature of tech" equalling "performing useful work" made me realize that I was using way to many quotation marks and should be doing something else ...