Posts by Davidoff 255 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Aug 2010
Usually it's stock-listed companies who work with short-term strategies as this is what the city honors. On the other side, privately held businesses tend to rely more on long-term planning.
It's remarkable that most of the companies that did (and still do) well during the recession are privately held companies.
Your analysis is flawed. But lets talk about your points in more detail:
A) I can agree with that.
B) I doubt Americans see their state as enemy, and most of them probably don't even see the government (which I assume is what you actually meant, as "state" would be the equivalent of 'Bayern', 'Niedersachen' or 'Baden-Wuerttemberg' in Germany). But the political and electoral system of the US is quite different from Germany (or most European counties, that is), with most direct relevant decisions happening on a state level.
C) Nationalizing banks doesn't solve the problem, as even then losses would be put onto the taxpayer. What is necessary are tougher laws and restrictions for the financial market.
D) While I agree that investing in education is necessary, the companies you list are a bad example, as the majority of jobs has been outsourced to short-term employment agencies which pay low wages and keep their staff on short-term contracts. And this is not limited to Joe Average who puts the seats in BMWs, it also includes most of the engineers that design the cars and aircraft made by those companies.
E) This is nonsense. Yes, the US lost some information (and the fuzz they are now creating is even more embarrassing than the content of the cables they lost), but having worked with the Americans for many years I can tell you that they are very good into keeping actual secrets secret. You probably forgot about Rudolf Sharping, a former Minister of Defense of Germany, who told the press including live TV all about the secret plans of moving troops of the German Forces, including their route. Or the UK government who is used to loose data on USB sticks and laptops left in the public.
BTW, in case you missed that: Germany's "success" is based on government-subsidized short-term employment, constantly decreasing real salaries, and an export politics on the back of other EU member countries. The German "success story" doesn't lead to appropriate wealth for its citizens, in fact the standard of living has been gradually declining for over a decade. But (to use your own words) what is really Kafkaesque is that many Germans still vote for the same retards that caused the mess, mostly the three major parties CDU/CSU, SPD and FDP, while others "vote" by not voting, thus actually empowering the parties they hate. Instead of making a change, they swallow the crap they get served by those parties and BILD (for non-Germans: 'BILD' is a newspaper, something like the 'Sun', just in really really bad; 'BILD' is used by certain politicians and basically dictates the public opinion).
I suggest you do a real thorough analysis of your own country first.
I think you should probably try to understand the current law a bit better, but as the responses show you're not alone with this.
FYI: most software purchases by consumers are *sales*, no *licensing* or anything like that. Yes, software vendors like to talk about licensing and stuff and how they just provide a right to use, but in the majority of cases where software is purchased this is irrelevant. If you go to a shop and buy say a copy of Windows, there is no legal contract (and no legal obligations beyond what the current law dictates, i.e. re copyright) between the buyer and the manufacturer. The only contract is between the seller (the shop) and the buyer, and the object of sale is a cardboard box with a DVD with software on it, a product key sticker, and some paper. The EULAs (MS term for their "licensing agreement") are irrelevant because they are not part of the contract (as they are hidden in the box and can't be recognized by all parties and therefore can never become part of the contract) and because there is no legal relation between the buyer and the manufacturer. However, this is not true for licensing contracts (which specifically state at the time they are closed that its about licensing, not purchasing), something which would apply to the case discussed in the article.
So yes, unless you specifically agree to a licensing contract the majority of software sales are just that - sales. There is no licensing involved, and what the "licensing agreement" in the box says is highly irrelevant.
The Radeon 9700 in your Mac doesn't do any H.264 decoding because it doesn't have the capabilities for it.
The reason why some H.264 videos run fine on your old G4 while others don't is more due to differences in the videos itself. Low bitrate videos with HD720 or less usually play fine on older hardware, however your old G4 will have a very hard time playing H.264-encoded Full HD videos at 15+Mbps.
As to hardware acceleration in Mac OS X and Flash, this only works with intel Macs anyways. There is no GPU acceleration for H.264 on PPC Macs.
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