Letters to the Editor
sunspot
Published Letters: 349 Editor's Choice: 43
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What's sex got to do with it?
[Read the article: Staph infections: The right call]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There may be plenty of gay men out there having sex with other men, but it's also true that plenty of them are in a relationship. Hard to see how two guys boffing each other exclusively are gonna be spreading anything other than their legs.
If you want to look for an infection vector, look to all of the gym queens in places like West Hollywood and the Castro. Those guys could be celibate and still be at risk of spreading staph, due to contact at the gym, which they'd practically have to live at in order to maintain their physiques. A certain sub population of gay men spend as much or more time working out than many high school athletes - I'm not surprised we're seeing staph spread thru that population at a heavy clip.
I wonder if crystal meth makes you more susceptible to staph infections as well . . .
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Sometimes people make mistakes when they're sick.
[Read the article: Remembering Heath Ledger]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Unless you are lazy or illiterate, there's no excuse for not paying attention and following them to the letter
His family says he's been really sick, and we know he hadn't been sleeping well from his own statements. When people are sick and tired, believe it or not sometimes they make mistakes.
Whoda thunk it?
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Ownership of a Worthless Market
[Read the article: Will they call it Microhoo? Yahosoft? ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Microsoft may in fact end up continuing to own the desktop and the office, but it's clear to anyone paying attention that:
A) Those markets are going to be worth substantially less at some point in the not-too-distant future and that
B) The real growth areas are going to be outside of those two markets
This is not an appealing landscape for today's dominant tech player.
Right now laptops are dropping into the $500 price range, and desktops are falling into the $300 price range. These aren't junky machines, either - they're pretty capable, certainly of running most typical office or home applications (apart from cutting-edge gaming). Microsoft has traditionally made its money by charging something like $100 a copy for Windows and $300 for its Office suite, which was a fairly small percentage of the cost of a $2000 computer. But in a world of $300 computes Windows is suddenly the most expensive component of many perfectly capable, brand new PCs, and Office alone costs more than some desktops.
Computer prices are going to continue to fall, putting additional downward price pressure on Microsoft's products. At some point corporate bean counters are gonna look at the price difference between a company full of new PCs with Windows and Office, and a company full of new PCs with Linux and Google Apps. They're gonna dump Windows - and especially Office, which is Microsoft's real cash cow - when they see that the other options cost less than half as much, while providing similar functionality for 95% of their users (word processing, spreadsheets and e-mail is all most users ever touch).
Due to the declining price of computing power - and its increasing miniaturization - the real action in the software world is going to be off the desktop and out of the office. The iPhone is a preview of what's to come in that space, which demands tighter integration between the software and the hardware designs, something Microsoft has never been any good at. Companies like Apple, Google and Nintendo are going to dominate this consumer-driven arena, and as these devices proliferate by the billions (literally) MS will find itself increasingly marginalized.
Microsoft isn't going away, but like IBM in the 1990s they're going to gradually become a less and less prominent player in the technology space.
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Why Not?
[Read the article: Why Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is an act of surrender]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]MS has poured some incredible sum of money into their videogame division - I recall reading somewhere an estimate on the order of $30 billion, although some tiny percent also went to developing duds like the Zune. In return for this massive investment over the past 7 or so years they've earned something like a paltry $200 million in profits. They could have burned $30 billion worth of $1 bills to generate electricity and made a similar return on their colossal investment. Or they could have bought Apple stock in 2001, and watched it go from something like $5 a share to around $200 earlier this year - that would have been a good investment.
I see this Yahoo! investment as a similar boneheaded waste of their shareholder's money. Yahoo! is clearly locked in a death spiral - there's a good blog entry about one specific problem which illustrated their decline at http://www.carelessnotions.blogspot.com/ - and the confusion and disruption inherent in being purchased by Microsoft will only accelerate the brand's demise.
I'll bet they're dancing in their cubicles over at Google today. Their biggest competitor essentially just bit the dust.
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Billions & Billions
[Read the article: Will they call it Microhoo? Yahosoft? ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]>Apple has a long way to go before it has numbers
>in the billions, literally. Won't be on our
>lifetimes.
If you'd bothered to read my post, you'll note that Apple isn't the ONLY company in that list I made - I said companies like Apple, Google and Nintendo. Perhaps you should bone up on your reading comprehension before you make boneheaded criticisms.
That having been said, there are 3.3 billion cell phone accounts worldwide already, according to this website:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/22410
Assuming Apple can capture a 10% share of that market - not unreasonable, as hardware prices continue to plummet - that's 330 million devices sold. Assuming people replace them every 3 years - again, not an unreasonable assumption - that's a billion mobile phones over the next decade.
This doesn't even include all of the other devices we're gonna see crop up running full-fledged computer operating systems like OSX over the next decade. There are gonna be home media receivers, automotive devices, a new generation of video cameras, e-books, videogame systems, and probably quite a few devices nobody has even though of . . . yet.