Mac Beach

Microsoft to step up Google battle

2009-07-13T11:09:00.000-04:00

Microsoft is set to broaden its battle with Google this week as it pushes ahead with online versions of some of its core software, including final plans for a “cloud” operating system designed to extend Windows to the internet. The news comes days after Google took aim at Microsoft with the announcement of a PC operating system of its own, dubbed Chrome OS.

The rival moves point to an intensification of the battle between the technology giants, with Google trying to extend its internet platform to PCs, and Microsoft moving in the opposite direction. While Google’s PC operating system is not due to appear in new computers until the second half of 2010, Microsoft’s cloud operating system will be launched formally this year.

Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me - Cringely on technology

2009-07-13T11:00:00.000-04:00

I agree with much that has been said here... the value of having competition particularly, the relative strengths of the two companies, and the importance of Apple in the dynamic. Here are some nuances:

Google is more vulnerable, and Bing could easily displace enough Google income to cause large cutbacks on the Google side leading to a downward spiral of Google innovation, and more especially, the Google infrastructure, which allows it to host so much content at prices so low that advertising can pay for it.

More importantly, who is Microsoft's largest customer? Without seeing their books, it would almost certainly be the Federal government who buys thousands of copies of Windows and Office on a fairly regular basis for each of the thousands of smaller organizations that make it up. This forces the the purchase of those products by all the contractors working for the Federal government, all but forces States to follow suit, then localities, and then the myriad of companies doing business with those. If the federal government today announced a policy to use web based services over Windows (not necessarily Google, but perhaps using internal servers) then the Windows/Office franchise would be over in months, generating too little revenue for it to be worth Microsoft pursuing other than as a money losing side project such as Xbox.

This could actually happen, and should. A server-centric OS and Office capability, even from Microsoft, would save billions of dollars in staffing costs for the federal government. It would initially produce far less revenue for whoever the vendor of these services might be too, but then it is a growing market, and as more people the world over use computers, one of the biggest disincentives is still the total cost of the proposition, which needs to come down one way or another.

Microsoft is said today to be announcing their own online alternative to Office. If not today, eventually, and when it happens it will mark the start of Microsoft eating into its own profit margins.

And THAT, my friends, is the importance of the Google moves, not just this one, but all of them . Google, Apple, and others, particularly web-based products have forced Microsoft to think outside of its comfort zone.

A few years ago a government executive could threaten to have me fired for suggesting any alternative to Windows/Office in any of the organizations meeting. Today, I don't think that attitude would fly (nor should it have then, but it did). What individuals use at home, and what kids at schools are exposed to, and what the trade publications continue to drone on about has, eventually an overwhelming impact one what gets discussed in strategy sessions within our massive federal bureaucracy. Some day, just as the switch was flipped to favor Word over Wordperfect, our countries biggest “business” will wake up to an alternative to Windows (and it may well be a Microsoft alternative so as to stay in their comfort zone) but it is almost certainly true that that alternative will not be as profitable to Microsoft, while at the same time will have little or no effect on Google. Whatever Google can do to accelerate this shift is to their benefit.

The bigger shift, what the world, particularly China and India decide to do with their computing infrastructure is even more important in the long run and one thing is almost certain, that is that they will not buy the Windows/Office paradigm as it is currently constructed. As much as Microsoft doesn't like the coming change, they will be forced to take part in it.

OBAMA WILL REPEAL MEDICARE at DickMorris.com

2009-07-11T15:26:00.000-04:00

Obama’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it. The elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access. Indeed, the principal impact of the Obama health care program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered.

It is so ironic that the elderly - who were so vigilant when Bush proposed to change Social Security - are so relaxed about the Obama health care proposals. Bush’s Social Security plan, which did not cut their benefits at all, aroused the strongest opposition among the elderly. But Obama’s plan, which will totally gut Medicare and replace it with government-managed care and rationing, has elicited little more than a yawn from most senior citizens.

George F. Will - Liberal Policies Paving Way for Higher Taxes - washingtonpost.com

2009-07-11T14:23:00.000-04:00

Economic policy, which became startling when Washington began buying automobile companies, has become surreal now that disappointment with the results of the second stimulus is stirring talk about the need for a . . . second stimulus. Elsewhere, it requires centuries to bleach mankind's memory; in Washington, 17 months suffices: In February 2008, President George W. Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who normally were at daggers drawn, agreed that a $168 billion stimulus -- this was Stimulus I -- would be the "booster shot" the economy needed. Unemployment then was 4.8 percent.

Justice Ginsburg Says She Originally Thought Roe v. Wade Was Designed to Limit 'Populations That We Don’t Want to Have Too Many Of'

2009-07-10T17:15:00.000-04:00

And I've certainly had self proclaimed liberals tell me that this was their desire as well.

Joe Biden update: No 'private meetings,' just meetings closed to the press | Top of the Ticket | Los Angeles Times

2009-07-10T16:39:00.000-04:00

OK, so figure an hour for the roundtable, maybe 75 minutes max. You can only talk about that stuff so long before requiring healthcare yourself. Fifteen minutes for handshaking, cellphone photos and congratulations on the excellent roundtable. The VP should be outta there by 12:30.

That leaves -- what? -- five, maybe six hours to make it a seven-hour workday.

According to the White House schedule, Biden will not spend the remainder of the workday in private meetings that are closed press.

Instead: "The Vice President will spend the remainder of the day in meetings that are closed press."

You get the difference, right?

Mean Street: Human Nature and the Coming Failure of Obamanomics - Deal Journal - WSJ

2009-07-08T18:43:00.000-04:00

And herein lies the real shortcoming of Obamanomics. It is an invention of academics and bureaucrats. And it takes little account of human behavior — how individuals and businesses operate in the real economy.

As I tried to illustrate in my columns, the economy is the sum of billions of individual decisions. Should I modify my mortgage or walk away? Should I buy the car or wait until I really need a new one? Should I fire more staff or take a hit to this quarter’s earnings?

Our behavior may be unpredictable, but it’s not that complicated. Individuals fight to protect their own interests. Businesses fight to protect their profits. That’s what we do — and what we’re supposed to do.

So why did the White House believe that new income and capital gains taxes on the wealthy would keep them spending and investing?

Can Palin ever come back? | Salon

2009-07-08T14:36:00.000-04:00

Unfortunately, it's pretty obvious that Palin still lacks that cadre of trusted pros who are the invisible elves behind every successful national politician -- the assistants who gather and vet material and who filter proposals and plan logistics. In a way, this is part of her virtues -- her complete freedom from routine micromanagement and business as usual. She does her own thing with seat-of-the-pants gusto. It's why she remains hugely popular with the Republican grass-roots base -- as I know from listening to talk radio. Callers coming fresh from her rallies are always heady with infectious enthusiasm.

Of course you'd never know that from reading hit jobs like Todd Purdum's sepulchral piece on Palin in the current Vanity Fair. Scurrying around Alaska with his notepad, Purdum still managed to find comically little to indict her with. Anyone with a gripe is given the floor; fans are shut out. This exercise in faux objectivity is exposed at key points such as Purdum's failure to identify the actual instigator of Palin's extravagant clothing bills (a crazed, credit-card-abusing stylist appointed by the McCain campaign) and his prissy characterization of Palin's performance at the vice-presidential debate as merely "adequate." Hey, wake up -- Palin cleaned Biden's clock! By the end, Biden was sighing and itching to split.

George F. Will - Timeless Lessons From McNamara - washingtonpost.com

2009-07-08T09:23:00.000-04:00

The death of Robert McNamara at 93 was less a faint reverberation of a receding era than a reminder that mentalities are the defining attributes of eras, and certain American mentalities recur with, it sometimes seems, metronomic regularity. McNamara came to Washington from a robust Detroit -- he headed Ford when America's swaggering automobile manufacturers enjoyed 90 percent market share -- to be President John Kennedy's secretary of defense. Seemingly confident that managing the competition of nations could be as orderly as managing competition among the three members of Detroit's oligopoly, McNamara entered government seven months before the birth of the current president, who is the owner and, he is serenely sure, fixer of General Motors.

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

2009-07-08T04:03:00.000-04:00

"Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve."

Official Gmail Blog Gmail leaves beta launches "Back to Beta" Labs feature

2009-07-08T00:38:00.000-04:00

Funny.

Obama visit gets lukewarm welcome from Russian media | Reuters

2009-07-07T11:53:00.000-04:00

Gawker - iPhone to Revolutionize How Municipal Bureaucrats Ignore Residents - iPhone

2009-07-07T00:03:00.000-04:00

"In San Francisco, citizens complain to the city over Twitter. Bostonians have it even better: they got an iPhone application just for carping at City Hall. It's never been easier to funnel your complaint into a Kafkaesque black hole!"

Beware the Hidden Costs

2009-07-06T20:43:00.000-04:00

Supporters of government-run medical care frequently point to the "affordability" of this type of system, but such terms are inherently misleading. What pundits really mean by slogans about "bringing down the cost of healthcare" often involve programs or policies that lower the price paid out-of-pocket by the patient. This is not to be confused with the actual lowering of the total cost of medical treatment.

Thomas Sowell explains it best in his recently revised book, Applied Economics (2009 edition):

"Since governments get their resources used for medical care by taking those resources from the general population through taxation, there is no net reduction in the cost of maintaining health or curing sicknesses simply because the money is routed through...government bureaucracies, rather than being paid by patients and doctors."

In fact, it's bureaucracy-either a government bureaucracy or a private insurance company bureaucracy-that raises the cost of medical care.

Leading “Progressive” Describes Obama-Chavez Axis

2009-07-06T20:40:00.001-04:00

According to an article in The Militant, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, the forum included presentations by "Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and president of Pathfinder Press; Eva Golinger, a Venezuelan-American lawyer and author of The Chávez Code; Chris Carlson, a contributor to the venezuelanalysis.com website; and Tufara Waller, cultural program coordinator of the Highlander Center in Tennessee."

Other panelists were identified as "Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela's ambassador to the United States; former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill; August Nimtz, a University of Minnesota political science professor; William Blum, an author who has written a number of books opposing U.S. foreign policy; ex-Maryknoll priest Charles Hardy; and Dada Maheshvarananda, yoga instructor and founder of the Prout Institute."

The communist paper reported that, before there could be a revolution in the United States, Marxist forces would have to take control of Latin America. "Another idea frequently expressed by speakers from the floor and by a few panelists was that 'change has to come from the South,'" referring to Latin America, the paper said.

Almost two years later, that "change" has come to America and is threatening Honduras.

My Way News - Post publisher apologizes for paid dinner plan

2009-07-06T08:25:00.000-04:00

"Critics of the program say the newspaper's promise of exclusivity for Washington insiders is at odds with the newspaper's mission to its readers.

Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said the small-scale dinners were a mistake."

US manned space flight in doubt 40 years after moon walk

2009-07-06T08:20:00.000-04:00

Inconvenient Science | The New Ledger

2009-07-04T01:12:00.000-04:00

One of the largest dead-horse memes of the last eight years was the “Republican war on science,” so much so that President Obama made a point of saying that with his inauguration, “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.” Animated primarily by the Bush administration’s policy positions on funding for two key areas — stem cells and global warming — it’s a descriptive term that becomes laughable upon closer inspection. Just five years after Vice Presidential nominee John Edwards claimed that “when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again,” the president’s stem cell policy has been thoroughly vindicated, and is now so obviously the correct decision that Obama’s much-heralded path may be even more restrictive on research funding. And incidents like Alan Carlin’s show that when it comes to the environment, this has never been about involving the broadest range of intelligent, non-partisan voices on science, but instead driving a consistent public relations meme to the people, tolerating no dissent.

Antitrust by Alan Greenspan

2009-07-02T22:08:00.000-04:00

The railroads developed in the East, prior to the Civil War, in stiff competition with one another as well as with the older forms of transportation -- barges, riverboats, and wagons. By the 1860's there arose a political clamor demanding that the railroads move west and tie California to the nation: national prestige was held to be at stake. But the traffic volume outside of the populous East was insufficient to draw commercial transportation westward. The potential profit did not warrant the heavy cost of investment in transportation facilities. In the name of "Public policy" it was, therefore, decided to subsidize the railroads in their move to the West.

Between 1863 and 1867, close to one hundred million acres of public lands were granted to the railroads. Since these grants were made to individual roads, no competing railroads could vie for traffic in the same area in the West. Meanwhile, the alternative forms of competition (wagons, riverboats, etc.) could not afford to challenge the railroads in the West. Thus, with the aid of the federal government, a segment of the railroad industry was able to "break free' from the competitive bounds which had prevailed in the East.

As might be expected, the subsidies attracted the kind of promoters who always exist on the fringe of the business community and who are constantly seeking an "easy deal." Many of the new western railroads were shabbily built: they were not constructed to carry traffic, but to acquire land grants. The western railroads were true monopolies in the textbook sense of the word. They could, and did, behave with an aura of arbitrary power. But that power was not derived from a free market. It stemmed from governmental subsidies and governmental restrictions.

Nothing much has changed since. Except it's gotten worse.

Congress's Travel Tab Swells - WSJ.com

2009-07-02T09:31:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON -- Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands.

The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That's a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.

YouTwitFace Goes From Late-Night Joke to New Site Idea - Digits - WSJ

2009-07-01T13:48:00.000-04:00

Mr. Kay, a 44-year-old accountant, said he got the idea during a March dinner party, when friends were talking about the absurdities of the Internet era. “We decided to come up with a new site that would just poke fun at our use of technology,” he said. “We threw around every possible combination of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, sites like that, and just as we were leaving, the teenager in the family, who was sort of half-listening to our conversation, blurted out, ‘You guys, it has to be called YouTwitFace.”

Low End Linux Netbook Prices Continue To Drop - O'Reilly Broadcast

2009-06-30T00:14:00.000-04:00

"Last month I wrote about netbooks powered by the MIPS processor, originally developed by SGI. I also pointed out that the price for the Belco Alpha 400 had dropped to $149 last December and January. That is now the regular price for the lowest of low end Linux netbooks at Geeks.com. Last week they had a special and the price dropped to $139."

Mother, daughter, file $100M suit in fatal Metro crash | Washington Examiner

2009-06-30T00:10:00.000-04:00

Well, that didn' take long.

Sen. Inhofe Calls for Inquiry Into 'Suppressed' Climate Change Report - Political News - FOXNews.com

2009-06-29T19:32:00.000-04:00

The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin's report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.

"He came out with the truth. They don't want the truth at the EPA," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he's ordered an investigation. "We're going to expose it."

Last Days of the Republicans Part 16 - What's News Tonight

2009-06-29T15:14:00.000-04:00

"This is a personal issue, unless tax-payer funds were used for the travel."

Bull.

Lefties listen to their candidates express a belief in God and, nudge-nudge, know big-tent politics when they see it: "Give us free, government-paid everything, get church out of my face for my strange sexual practices, but allow me to claim a need for pot and peyote for my special rites I invented yesterday."

Conservatives, and I'd say, even not-religious conservatives actually expect their candidates to live by some sort of moral compass. That moral compass doesn't have to match their (the voter's) own precisely, but there has to be something there that serves as a foundation for the candidate's belief system so that when the candidate says "read my lips..." you have some basis to think they mean it.

What does it mean when an avowed atheist takes an oath on a Bible? To me it means nothing, and I'm sure it means nothing to them as well. When our country was founded, most people, even politicians, were religious in one way or another. An oath, to tell the truth, or serve the public meant something. Today's politicians, as well as much of the public that vote for them believe in nothing that can't be touched, worn to a nightclub, switched on, or driven around the block. The only thing that concerns them is not getting caught in their lies and thievery. Concerns about what God may do to them don't enter into it, I assure you. Otherwise, we'd all be hard pressed to explain their actions, which in this case go way beyond a simple affair and in the case of other politicians go way beyond stealing pencils from the supply cabinet. One hundred thousand dollars found in your freezer is just the entry fee for corruption in todays political market. But the fact is, if you are a liberal Democrat, your misdeeds will fade a lot more quickly than if you are a Republican.

After all, if you are a Republican you are supposed to believe in something beyond the tangible, and your misdeeds to the non-believing public smack of the only sin they know about: hypocrisy. Democrats, nudge-nudge, can't be guilty of this mortal sin.

In the future, I'm quite sure that missing a few candidates like Sanford will not be our biggest problem. Our problem will be with what, if anything, the electorate believes in. And from my canvasing, the answer is: precious little.