Yeah, not really an action packed kind of book. More of a "world building" book. Once I started looking at it from that perspective, it seemed less slow.

In any case, real science fiction is getting harder and harder to find.

The Wind Up Girl was a pretty good read. :)

To understand that if a company is making zero profit, it's only worth what you can get by selling all of its resources (servers, desktops, office space, etc).

Anything more than that is speculation. And speculation is the life blood of bubbles.

I'm a true blue *nix junky. I only use windows if absolutely necessary and I've worked as a Linux and OSX sysadmin. But I must admit that Windows one shining strength is just how turnkey it can be. There's really not much fiddling to be done at all. In fact, the entire Windows client OS model revolves around preventing fiddling. An ethos that is the polar opposite of the Linux model of being designed around facilitating fiddling by the user.

This seems like some real bass ackwards logic.

• There are no known dangers and the OS has a history of not having any known dangers
• Company is not partaking in behaviors that protect against known dangers
• There may, one day, be dangers in the future
• Therefore this OS is more dangerous than other OS's that have known dangers and a history of poor security.

Um. Suurrree captain logic.

What determines if something is risky or not is both the protection and the threat. If I don't have a roof on my porch, but it's *never* rained in my area that doesn't make the risk of getting wet is 100%. It's 0%.

Explain the GPL, that your work is based on pre-existing GPL source and what that means (that modifications to it are also GPL). Make it clear that they are not required to expose/distribute the source unless they distribute it. If they're still staunchly against GPL'ing the code. Proceed to explain that in order to break away from the GPL code, you'll have to start from scratch and find lgpl or bsd libraries to replace the gpl ones or write them yourself. Give an honest assessment of how long it would take you to start the project over like this. They're your employer, if they're willing to pay for closed source and absorb the overhead of not leveraging open source libraries then go for it! More money for you. :)

You are confused over the term "OEM". That's ok, it can be unintuitive. You should stop by your friendly wikipedia to learn what one is.

Dell, Apple, HP, Gateway are all OEM's. Though your confusion also seems to lead to an extremely narrow view of OEM. It implies that Intel and other chip manufacturers like AMD are the only computer OEM's in existence. Very odd indeed.

Apple workstations are also the cheapest work station available with the same hardware specifications.

So, to tally it up:

• You don't know what OEM means (look it up to avoid this mistake in the future)
• Cheapest workstation on the market
• Better case/cooling design than any other (more expensive) competitor
• Can run any operating system I want which gives me more freedom in selecting the appropriate application for the job
• Higher value retention over time, so when I upgrade my workstation the used one sells for more and reduces the over all cost of upgrading.
• My workstation uses all standard interconnects and works with any off the shelf product I wish to use.
• I get to sip cappuccino with turtle neck wearing beatniks and dance to my iPod by myself surrounded by psychedelic colors because that's why I bought a dual octo core workstation.

Seems to me that the fools are the ones so blinded by anti-fanboyism that they can't see the best deal in town staring them in the face.

Apple seems to be doing quite well, in fact better than any other competitor in their market sector. Apple is an OEM computer and consumer electronics company.

For example, Apple's market cap is greater than the next two competitors combined (hp + dell). Apple vs. HP vs. Dell Market Cap

It really needs to be drilled home that Apple is a hardware OEM, not a pure software company. They should be compared to other hardware oem's that provide similar services and have have similar user support and manufacturing infrastructures. They are not even anti-competitive with Microsoft besides on the marketing hype front. They've put decent engineering effort into support Microsoft operating systems out of the box. . . unlike the "oops there goes your mbr" method of MS installs if you dared to install your alternative OS's first.

So the solution is??????

The solution is rather simple. Provide users with an easy to obtain, uninhibited access experience for a reasonable cost.

Most people want to be honest, unless there's a clear win for being dishonest. Right now, the process for getting videos onto your TV go something like:

• Torrent/usenet/whatever the video
• pray that it doesn't have badly done foreign subtitles
• Pray that if it does have subtitles because it's a foreign film that your convertor handles them correctly
• convert to a media format that's playable on your TV or watch the flick on your less than ideal monitor.
• Hope that the video, in general, is of acceptable quality.

Now, that's a lot of trouble to go through just to watch a video. Why are people doing it? Is it really to save the 4 bucks or is it the convenience of doing most of this at home, in the background, provides greater flexibility in the end.

Downloading music isn't quite as bad, but there's often issues of tags to deal with or the occasional bad rip. If you're on a premium tracker, then you have to make sure you maintain good ratios and in some cases purchases music to rip and upload as well.

Digital media is so cheap to reproduce it's practically free. That's the rub, even non-technical people understand this. That's why they don't feel guilty "stealing" something that's virtually free to create. The expense incurred is now approximately 0 for distribution. However, the media conglomerates don't want to adjust their prices. Even non-technical people see this. When they moved form tapes to CD's, everyone was excited because it was supposed to be a much cheaper distribution media, but the price went up. Now they're moving from CD's to digital, a zero cost media to distributers, and yet....the price remains the same.

The only way the media companies are going to catch this dragon by the tail is if they adjust to meet the market's new demands. Provide a subscription service, charge some reasonable base price and let people download all they want in an uninhibited, high quality format. I guarantee they have enormous amounts of market analysis that tells them what the average consumer spends on media a month and differences between "power consumers" and "normal consumers". I'd wager that most people, even before the internet download craze, spent less than 20 dollars per month on music and maybe 10 to 20 bucks a month on renting movies.

So for the cost of cable, why not provide unlimited access? Who cares if the occasional obsessive compulsive teenager downloads 100's of gigs of music that would take him 5 years to listen to if he didn't sleep and holed up in his basement 24/7 with the stereo on?

It's about service and quality now. The copies of the media itself are negligible. What the media companies need to focus on is providing a better service then their competitors (trackers, usenet, etc). Fast downloads (no waiting a week for a torrented movie), centralized searching, guaranteed quality, no hassle viewing, and a warm, fuzzy feeling that the company you're purchasing from is actually trying to provide you with value instead of fuck you in the ass.

But maybe people who make better grades, on average, have less time to pursue more frivolous activities whether those be Facebook or pocket pool.

I'd put money on finding out that on average the members of virtually any activity that doesn't directly relate to getting better grades have lower gpa's then those people who spend most of their free time.....attempting to get better grades.

There's a reason why most of the students who are in the 3.5 and up range constantly joke about "having no life".