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NYT 12/20/04 Economics Wilt 'Moneyball' Fantasy
THOSE of us who do not subscribe to the "Moneyball" approach to baseball, the theories laid out in the book that celebrates Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, have been quick to point to the real strength of the Athletics in recent years, the pitching triumvirate of Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito.
The Yankees add Johnson; the Athletics subtract Hudson and Mulder. That's the difference between having an unlimited payroll and a severely restricted payroll. Nobody said baseball economics were fair.
Why did Beane shred his vaunted starting rotation?
"We needed to," he said in a telephone interview yesterday.
"We're constantly playing a shell game here," he added. "The status quo was not within our means. We need to be in a situation where our team is getting progressively better, and the status quo could have put us in a position where we'd be worse."
The Athletics had a payroll of about $58 million this year. They could not keep all of their star players and maintain that payroll. Hudson's salary was $5 million this year and goes to $6.75 million next year. Mulder was at $4.45 million this year and will go to $6.5 million next year. Together, they will escalate from less than $10 million to more than $13 million.
If the Yankees' rotation is Johnson, Mike Mussina, Kevin Brown, Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright, the combined 2005 salaries of the starters will be $67 million. That total is more than the 2004 payrolls of 18 of the other 29 teams.
The anticipated Oakland rotation would fall a little short of that total. It doesn't figure to earn much above $6.7 million, let alone $67 million. And Zito's $5.6 million will account for most of it. The other four projected starters - Rich Harden, Danny Haren, Dan Meyer and Joe Blanton - have a combined major league service of two and a half years, with all but Harden less than a year each.
"It's a risky thing, but we've taken risks before," Beane said.
Could any three younger members of the starting corps evolve into Hudson, Mulder and Zito?
"The three guys we had together were pretty historical," Beane said. "If they became half of those guys, they'd be pretty good pitchers. But it's not fair to make that comparison. We had a pretty historical group. Nevertheless, we feel they can be very good big league pitchers."
必読記事・論考(IT)
WSJ 12/20/04 The Second Coming of Apple
Apple Computer has been reborn -- and now it's on the verge of a renaissance.
IFTF's Future Now 12/20/04 Flickr and "folksonomies"
http://blogger.iftf.org/Future/000664.html
Salon 12/20/04 The Friendster of photo sites
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/12/20/flickr/index_np.html
Newsweek 12/27/04 Google's Two Revolutions By Steven Levy
Google's IPO is important not because of the billions of bucks involved, but as a symbol of the impact of the two revolutions its founders fomented.
Google's goal is to have everything at your fingertips, all the world's information digitized and instantly available to all who have a right to see it. It's a task hardily joined by heavyweights Microsoft and Yahoo, along with an ever-expanding list of smaller players. So we can expect Google's growing family of currently or potentially searchable applications—which include news, images, social networking, academic citations, catalogs, personal photos and maps—to be duplicated by others, if not leapfrogged. (Just last week Yahoo introduced its beta version of video search, allowing instant access to the millions of clips stored on the Web.)
ソニーPSP
Yahoo! News 12/20/04 ソニーが安い、ＰＳＰ人気による株価上昇は続かず
http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20041220-00000006-tcb-biz
当初、好調な滑り出しと報じられたＰＳＰとなるが、その後、ネット上の掲示板などに操作ボタン部分に設計上の欠陥があり初期ロットには問題があるといった風評が広まってきており、ネット上の掲示板などで頻繁に情報交換を行う個人投資家を中心に手仕舞い売りに動く向きもでてきているようだ。
発熱地帯 12/20/04
http://amanoudume.s41.xrea.com/cgi-bin/mt/archives/000257.html
ところがこの時期、任天堂は社長交代が起こり、水面下で若返りが起こっていたわけです。一方で、PS1から10年、かつての若者は今ではすっかり親父化していました。親父は鏡で自分自身の姿を見ることなく、虚像の中の老人をあざ笑って、のんびりのんびり計画を進めました。そして今年のE3、東京ゲームショウ、年末商戦、と時間が経つにつれ、両者の本当の姿が明らかになっていきました。舞台には、若返りを果たした企業といつのまにか親父化していた企業がいた、というわけです。
