Posts by Rich of Observationz
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When Kurt Cobain did what he did, were NZers told it was just typical US carelessness with firearms?
And that the Japanese Kamikaze were just really bad pilots?
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I believe that on stage passive smoking may have been responsible for the "Curse of Dads Army" by which most of the actors in the classic English sitcom are now dead.
Or it may be that it was made a while ago, and was about old people.
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Yeah, it occurs to me that English was talking last week about saving a couple of million bucks on advisers, when better advice would have saved a billion plus.
Still, most people don't know the difference between a million and a billion.
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You' d like to determine the whole industry ' s
business model for it?…Isn't that what all the antitrust actions against Microsoft were about? Stopping them adopting a business model that exploited market dominance to lock out competition?
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I'd rather that gaming consoles were open (which would turn them into game-oriented computers) and that we lost the cross-subsidy between consoles and games.
However, consoles only play games (mostly because they are restricted) and hence it doesn't matter as much.
With pad form factor devices, it's possible that they *will* become the standard individual computing device. It's also possible that Apple and Microsoft will try and move the walled garden model up the food chain to conventional systems like PC and Mac.
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Before about 1980, if you wanted to program computers, you had to work for an institution that could afford one, and get approval for what you wanted to do
Since then, its been possible to buy a cheap computer, program it, and distribute that program to an increasing population of people who could use it. There've been no a priori restrictions on what or how you did it.My fear is that we're now moving away from that into a space where that isn't the case, and the population who can run any program will fall. I don't want to see a world where programming freedom is something that happened between 1980 and 2020.
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Also, I notice the government is going to try and dump the whole deposit guarantee scheme.
This is dumb, because basically the real banks have an implied state guarantee. If a major bank failed and people couldn't access their funds, then things would be so stuffed that the government would *have* to bail them out.
So they have a guarantee, and it's better to make it explicit and charge for it.
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Like I said way back, if a finance company had a reasonable proposition, they wouldn't take retail deposits. It's cheaper and easier to borrow on global markets than to chase thousands of small deposits.
http://observationz.blogspot.com/2005/03/accidents-waiting-to-happen.html
If they're after the dumb money, it's because the smart money won't touch them. -
Don, you have a substantial business in OSS development, right?
I guess everyone has some sort of axe to grind - sometimes it's financial, sometimes its about being in with the cool kids.
Personally, mine is that I do Android apps as a private venture and corporate software development as a day job.
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What Tom said.
If the sewer commentators are generally employed in the secondary finance industry (as opposed to living with their parents at the age of 37, which I thought to be the norm) it explains a lot.