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Insightful? For someone who not only doesn't know the approximate values of major currencies but is so useless at googling that they can't find online currency converters.

• * Also tiger sharks and sea-snakes; welcome to Australia. (-:
• ** 383km and 334km respectively.

It think you should take a look at how well the Canadian Dollar is doing.

As of 18 Dec, 2005, that's only an extra $1581 according to XE. Seems like a lot, but we're currently at $0.86 USD, up over $0.26 from a couple of years ago.

Use http://www.xe.com/ucc

But this is Slashdot, shouldn't we use Google instead? :-)

38,500,000,000.00 JPY = 334,047,807.86 USD
32,300,000,000.00 JPY = 280,239,409.58 USD
410,000,000,000.00 JPY = 3,556,690,039.42 USD
356,800,000,000.00 JPY = 3,095,187,819.67 USD


Thanks xe.com

There. Now go run out and buy one!

http://xe.com/ for all other currencies apart from USD. It looks like Google only converts to USD, even the non-.com. I'd expect the .co.uk to convert to GBP and the .fr or .de to convert to EUR. But no:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=85+million+kronor
http://www.google.fr/search?q=85+million+kronor
http://www.google.de/search?q=85+million+kronor
OK, so the French one doesn't work (presumably the French for Kronor isn't Kronor).

xe.com has done this for oh about since the internet existed - how is this something new?

http://www.xe.com/ucc/

Are you actually aware of the current exchange rate? A quick glance at http://www.xe.com/ucc/ would tell you that the $299 price tag is more like £165.26. Therefore, £210 is a £45 ($81.41) difference.

For reference, as of today (17th Aug 2005) the exchange rate is 1 GBP = 1.80906 USD.

$60 = 50. New games normally cost 60 at launch here in Ireland.

Are we talking about americans ego or real currencies? For those who cares, http://www.xe.com/ucc/

When did you last check the fuel price here in England? I'm paying ~90p per litre at the moment and it will probably continue to rise.

There are 3.79 litres to a US gallon, so that is:
0.90*3.79 = £3.41 per US gallon.

According to xe.com, £1 = $1.77.

£3.41*1.77 = $6.04.

That is somewhat less than the $10 another poster mentioned, but it should give American readers some idea of just how cheap (relatively) their fuel is. Of course a large proportion of our fuel price is made up of tax. This has encouraged some of us to purchase small, fuel efficient cars whilst others can afford to drive around in large SUVs.

Here's an example: 10ml of HP black ink is over 15 british pounds. 1 USD is about 1.8 british pounds. There is 3785.4118 ml in 1 US gallon.

If you do the math (378.5 ink carts per gal * $27) that means that a gallon of black ink is $10,219 if you buy the manufacture's ink cartridges. You can buy a gallon of black ink for less than $100.

I'd say a 100x mark-up is a bit excessive, can you imagine if even the cheapest cars were over a million dollars?

I think they should be sued, that's absurd, and now they even have a built-in expiration date. As if 1000% profit isn't enough....

Since the EU is just about to pass legislation that will force ISP's to Telecommunication firms to hold data on time/location/recipient of phone calls and what IP you have used. I really dont think these ID cards are that bad. BUT... I do not see why I should have to pay something like £90 when (as a studnet) the governments olny gives me £3000 to live off for a whole year!

Just for curiosity, you say in the UK you pay £4 for a gallon, Now, 1 imperial gallon is 4.5 liters ok?

That means you are paying like £0.89 per liter right?

Now for the interesting part (for me). This means you are paying like MX$19.866 * £0.89 = MX$17.68 Mexican pesos per liter (see xe.com for prices conversion)

Let me tell you that seems incredibley really fucking expensive... In mexico the price of the gas is from MX$5 to MX$6.00 for liter. (that is like £0.3 x liter

I am living in UK now (Liverpool) and everytime I saw the price in a gas station I just saw this .89 or .9x but I didnt know what was it about, and I was reluctant to believe that it was the price in pences for liter... but now that you confirm this I can conclude that I certainly wont get a car =oS.

I would appreciate if you can confirm my calculations
cheers.

The overheads are the same, the price difference is pure profit for apple.

Ah good. Let's use your own math to figure out how much apple is making. Assuming the same overhead, and we will assume the price difference is pure profit.

I know in the UK they make an overall 5p profit per song, which is probably about 7 or 8 cents.

Okey dokey. The UK iTunes price is 79p per song. Profit is 5p per song. 'Overhead' 74p per song.

Now, how many songs do they sell in the UK? I don't know. But lets be generous and assume that the brand new UK sales are doing just as well as the long established US sales. The US has about 5 times the population, so we'll conservatively estimate that US sales are only 5 times as large as UK sales.

Now lets figure out how much Apple is making in the US. You've already provided the overhead figures - 74p per song. Lets run an exchange rate and subtract that from the US price. What's left will be "pure profit".

According to the current exchange rate I get 74p = $1.38.

US iTunes price is $0.99. They leaves a "pure profit" of NEGATIVE THIRTY NINE CENTS per US sale. And since US sales are at least 5 times as many as UK sales, for each 9 cents they make in the UK they lose $1.95 in the US. Total profit per UK sale, negative $1.86.

Obviously that's all wrong. The fact is that iTunes is making a 'decent' profit in the UK because you guys are getting severly price gouged. I would also wager that the music industry is gouging Apple on the UK licensing fees - meaning Apple's "overhead" is higher in the UK than here in the US. Which is why US iTunes obviously isn't losing the massive figures per song as calculated above.

If you were to buy from the US iTunes store, based on the exchange rate you'd be paying 53p. By paying 79p you're getting gouged 26p more than Americans.

I haven't found exact profit figures, but Apple is on the record that iTunes was a net negative prior to the first quarter of 04. In the year+ since then it has made a profit, but that profit is minimal.

Not much on its own, but multiply it by the number of songs they're selling and it's huge.

Prior to 04 we were losing money on each sale, but we make up for it in volume! In the 5 quarters since then we make on average zero per sale (UK sales being a drop in the averaging bucket), but we make up for it on volume!

Lets look at actual figures (all US based and US prices)...

Of the 99 cents, on average 53 cents goes to the label, 35 cents goes to Apple, and 11 cents goes to the Artist.

Of course Apple's 35 cents has to cover all of the credit card transaction fees and actually running the store and promotional costs and other actual overhead. In other words Apple is breaking even on downloads. Oh, and that 35 cents also has to cover the fees Apple is paying to license FairPlay from Veridisc. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that? Apple is a licensee of FairPlay, and their license from Veridisc probably does not allow them to sublicense it to anyone else.

But heay, that 11 cents to the artists doesn't look to shabby, right? Oh wait... the artist doesn't actually get any of that until after the RIAA recoups all the production and recording costs and every other fee and expense the labels stuff under "recoupable costs".

And 53 cents of each sale goes to the label. All music expenses and sales expenses are already taken out of other people's shares. I guess it wouldn't be fair to call that 53 cents to the label to be pure profit. I'm sure they have overhead too. Some of taht money needs to be funneled to radiostations as payola. Some of that money needs to be funneled to lobbying and campaign contributions to buy new copyright laws. Some of that money needs to be funneled to school programs and youth groups to properly educate kids with outright industry propaganda misrepresenting of what copyright law is and should be.

Oh yeah, that ma

First off, not to nitpick but the title of the article is misleading. The laptop is not sub-$200, 10,000INR is $230 http://www.xe.com/ucc/

The PC penetration in India is very low, at a measly 13 million, due to the high costs involved

Although a $230 laptop is great for people in developed nations unfortunately it is still in the realm of high cost for someone in India.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ us.html
The GDP per capita in America - $40,000

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ in.html
GDP per capita in India - $3,100

For someone in America, hell a $2,000 computer would be 1/20th of income, while a $230 computer in India is 1/13th.

Not sure where you got the £200 figure for a new Dell from, however.

Ummm, xe currency conversion And Dell A new Dell starts under USD $400 depending on the season. At present the base PC with monitor and printer is $299 + $100 shipping +$30 tax... so today £225.00. Sometimes shipping is free, sometimes it's not. Sometimes rebates sometimes not.

Late last December however, I caved in and bought a 2.0GHz Semperon with accompanying motherboard and RAM. ... something like £150 all together

My point exactly. The text book slashdot fanboy (pardon the term) is far more likely to spend £150 on an upgrade than £225 on a new base machine. So getting someone like Dell to sponsor a slashdot fanboy show (pardon the term) would be silly. But someone like intel, AMD, HP, or Asus would be more likely to sponsor a show who's audience fits into their demographic. Like your self they spend money, just not on pre-packaged solutions.

"Where are all of these $75.96 games you're buying?!"
In Europe
$75 = €60

Sure, but about.com for $690 million in 2000, sell for $410 million in 2005.

Well, most people who had $690 million in 2000 have about $410 million today, so doesn't that mean it's square?

0.76 to the Euro huh? It's gonna be zany mayhem if/when the US Dollar is no longer the standard of currency. Never happen? Too tough? Simpler than inventing the Euro, and, in fact, one of the goals of the Euro.

Ok is he listing real USD, or is he doing some kind of comparison of what it would be if it compared to the average American salary?

If he's gonna use USD he needs to specify what the average korean makes in USD. According to about.com the average korean makes between 20,000,000 and 50,000,000 WON, which converts to about $20,000 to $50,000 USD (although xe.com has a more accurate conversion, but that's pretty close.

Here's a teacher's salary, about $2,200 a month. That site also claims taxes are only 5 to 10% which is much lower than what I'm currently paying in the US, I'm paying about 15% right now.

Considering that's probably what the average american salary is I'd have to say $19/mo DSL isn't a bad deal, but Yahoo/SBC offers "Up to 1.5 Mbps" DSL for $26.95/mo with a one year commitment so I don't see why his "I pay $30 myself, for a 1.5-megabits-per-second (mbps) connection" is so great, he's paying more for DSL than it is here!

Is this a great example of "move along folks, nothing to see here"?

If you want to see the prices in other currencies use the XE Universal Currency Converter.

If you want to see the prices in other currencies use the XE Universal Currency Converter.

You daft bugger, £40 is $75.3495 USD according to XE Universal currency converter.

Anyways the bigger picture here is that this so called 8mb is only available to a *very* small ammount of the population, and upon closer inspection it seems to be a scam to use the promise of faster downloads (namely pr0n and warez no doubt) to advertise their 500k and 1mb products.

Yes I am in the UK, yes I have tried to sign up, yes I have read their TOS, I didnt even hear about this on slashdot, I saw an advert for it on the tube yesterday.

http://www.xe.com/ucc/

xe.com Universal Currency Converter ® Results

Live mid-market rates as of 2005.01.18 18:23:38 GMT.

0.02 CAD = 0.0163793 USD

1 CAD = 0.818966 USD
1 USD = 1.22105 CAD

Additionally, I remember seeing some of the GB people posting that theirs was working out cheaper (GBP) than the US pricing was. Go figure.

• Mac mini US price: 599 USD
• Mac mini UK price: 339 GBP

Take away 17.5 percent VAT from UK price:

• Mac mini US price: 599 USD
• Mac mini UK price: 288.52 GBP

Convert to US dollars using XE.com rates (1 GBP = 1.88196 USD / 1 USD = 0.531361 GBP at 15:13:38 GMT on Jan 13th 2005):

• Mac mini US price: 599 USD
• Mac mini UK price: 542.98 GBP

Looks like you're right.

XE.com - Universal Currency Converter

You would pay for someone to work on it to improve it and make it into the program that looks and feels the way you want it to. Apparently sitting around and waiting for someone to do the work isn't producing code fast enough for you. Hence you would hire someone to do the job. You would draw up a contract which stipulates the work to be done, the time frame in which it would be done, and list the negotiated price for the job--like any other for-hire work.

Since you haven't cited any quotes, I suspect you too don't know how much money it would take to get this done. You also appear to have not done any work on pitching this to the community of people who complain about a lack of native Mac OS X OO.o. Hence, it makes no sense to conclude that the price is too high for you to pay or to raise from a community of others. The folks who bought Blender (the now free software rendering program) bought the program for 100,000 EUR which strikes me as a lot of money (about $133,839.67, according to xe.com's money converter as of the time/date stamp on this post).

I somehow suspect that most reputable companies would be reluctant to give out their source code as well as porting, probably adding an extra cost.

Not at all, the source code to OO.o is already freely available under a license which allows sharing and modification. The programmers porting OO.o would get paid for the job of porting, not distributing proprietary binaries to people (nor would the license on OO.o allow them to do so). Assuming you hired programmers in a country which honors contract law and copyright law like the US, the programmers would not have the option of violating either your contract or copyright law. You could make it a condition of the donations from the public that the software would be released as free software, thus making it possible to be merged into the OO.o tree.

Even if the software were proprietary, the programmers would have no incentive for doing anything beyond the contract. Take Omni's porting of FrameMaker to NeXTSTEP 3.x (if I recall correctly): years ago, they got paid (what I assume was) 100% of the money they would ever make on this job by porting the software to what was the latest NS API. They did the work, and then they were done. The fruits of that labor are wholly owned by whomever hired them (Frame, I'd guess, which was later bought by Adobe, but my memory on this is hazy). I suspect that none of Omni's pay hinged on how many copies of that program were sold; I'm guessing Omni got a flat fee for their work. Omni wasn't distributing the software, only porting it. They were hired probably because of their understanding of the NS API.

In the beginning of the popularity of the Internet, finding an ISP wasn't that easy. Today you can flip open a phone book and find an ISP, but it was not always this way. That doesn't mean finding one was impossible or not worthwhile. A comparable situation exists for programmers today. If MacOS X users are unwilling to do the work of writing a proper port of OO.o, hiring someone is another option. Finding excuses to wait for someone else to do the heavy lifting without pay, and complaining about their lack of progress often doesn't produce the kinds of results one would like, but hope springs eternal.

Seriously, for those of you who don't RTFA, You could live in one while your permanent house is being built or renovated, for emergency housing, or for short-term accommodation. That's about what it looks like, too. You wouldn't spend the rest of your life in one of these.

But the real question is, how much does this MacGyver house cost? At a purchase price of just $35,000 this is a genuine short-term housing option that could be used in a variety of applications. It is lightweight, transportable, requires no more skill to erect than an Ikea product, and is very affordable. That's about $27,000 US dollars.

Nice concept. Wake me when they're mass-produced.

It would be really cool if google made a TV guide search. For example, if I could go to Google UK and type "BBC1 NOW" - google would tell me what was on BBC1 at the moment. It would be even better if it allowed to specifiy a date and time eg "BBC1 24/12/04 22:00". Now that would be really useful:)

On the subject of useful things for google - how about a currency converter? The convenience of being able to go to Google and type "$10 in £" rather than using XE.com would be pretty cool as well.

You forgot the URL: xe.com currency calculator

According to the UCC, the 416 million is 293 USD, not 293 million.

Basically, the patent covers automatic conversion of charges to the currency chosen by the user, and calculation of all additional charges (e.g. transport costs) before authorising the order.

Thats easy then. You can just switch it so that conversion takes place after authorisation of the order, put a link to XE.com so they can do their own conversion beforehand; and include a table detailing shipment costs.

Just to help out, that's about $375 US.

So what's the problem? 100 pounds is certainly over $100.

Way to go Steve-o

~Dan
photos

For the non-UK people may be, but £121 a year (or roughly $206 American dollars per year) That's a lot of money for a lot of people. When my mother staid in London, she didn't have a TV, but she still had some BBC hoodlum banging on her door and try to force his way in to make her pay the fee.

If I'm not mistaken, most American stores would still be selling the bundlle with a Cube and Metroid Prime for $100. Donkey Konga is $50 at most stores.

Obviously, two games for $10 less is a much better bargain.

Here's hoping that Nintendo drops the price if they decide to release an American version of the bundle...

It's possible to get Doom 3 playing fairly decently on very modest hardware. On my setup:

• 1.4 GHz Pentium IV
• 384 MB RAM
• GeForce2 Ultra

...I was able to lower the settings and tweak away until I got Doom 3 benching at a steady 25 fps average. That's without pulling out the übertweaks, and I'm sure that others could do better anyway.

I then bought an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro based on performance/price advice (thanks be to AnandTech) for £70.98 (~$128.04, plus we're ripped off here in the UK), and I'm now getting ~30 fps benchmark averages on higher settings, with a modest overclock (ATITool be praised). In-game is jumping between ~20-60 fps. Looks like I'm a bit CPU-bound here from here on though.

Really the IPOD, and this thing are overpriced, toys. For a poor Canadian like myself, here's how it plays out:

1 USD = 1.31762 CAD (according to XE.com)

249.99 * 1.31762 = 329.39

329.39 * 1.15 = 378.80 (taxes)

The 40gb iPod is selling for 634.95 after taxes.

This for a music player/portable hard-drive. I don't care what the cool factor is, this is a lot of money. And if you think that Apple or others price for their international markets, fuggit it.

You forgot to mention CVS (http://www.cvshome.org/). Usually database developers commit their changes to their stored procedures directly into the only database, where they are stored. That is not good, because other Java developers are using the same database at the same time, so they see intermittent bugs.

It is better if all code goes into CVS, even stored procedures. Not to mention that every developer must have a copy of the database in their own machine, usually MySql (http://www.mysql.com/) or HSQL (http://hsqldb.sourceforge.net/) is better for that.

Then from CVS you take out a build (you use CruiseControl to generated builds that are compiled and unit tested using JUnit http://www.junit.org/) so you know all the Java code works with the stored procedures, the database model and the example data. Then you can add your code, with your unit tests, into CVS.

My $0.02 CLP (= $0.0000318238 USD according to http://www.xe.com/ucc/)

Here

Just in case you're wondering if you can afford this camera: According to a PDF called "Press release 11-6-2004 (42 kB)" in the article (no direct links permitted), the price is 9600 Swiss francs (CHF). This converts to 7,642.71 USD.

More confusing: "Presentation to the press 11-6-2004 (1,059 kB)" indicates that shooting a full cylinder takes 20 to 120 seconds. However, the data output rate is only 1 MBps, and it can shoot only 5 high-resolution (4.5 MB) images per day or 80 low-resolution (100 KB) images per day. Who can make sense out of these conflicting rates?

I'll just wait till they roll out iTunes Turkey, where you'll get songs for 0.99 Turkish Lire.

I use Yahoo for two things; News (via Google and Fark) and currency conversion. That's it.

Here you go, 50% reduction in yahoo use and the url's easier to type

It is interesting to note that the Canadians have it cheaper than the US. According to this currency converter, 1.19 CAD is .87 USD and 9.99 CAD is 7.23 USD. Perhaps a lack of litigation is to blame?

R would be Rand.

18 Million Rand = about 2.56 million dollars (US).

(According to xe.com)

"No, it makes you a moron. Of course, that's what you get for paying $700 over list price on the 1.6 GHz PowerMac."

A moron eh? You must have missed it when I said, "here in Canada". Let me explain something to you. Various countries use different currencies. In this example, Canada uses Canadian currency in which the prices listed at www.apple.ca are in. At www.apple.com the listed prices are in U.S. currency.

Now, let me introduce you to the concept of currency conversion. When comparing one currency to another, often their value differs so that one (or 1 if that works better for you) Canadian dollar is not equivalent in value to one (1) U.S. dollar. In fact, it usually has a lower comparitive value. Thus, when something is listed at say, $1000 USD, the converted price in Canadian dollars might be something like $1351.75. Visit www.xe.com to view a real-time example.

Now if you could help me to be no longer a moron how else would I have qualified the prices without stating "here in Canada"? Please. I really do need your help.

I found this to be a good online Currency Converter.

that should make it 80 quid, which would compete with the Gamecube here (normally ~75). fat chance though, things never seem to even come close to what the exchange rate says they "should" be. Anyway I'd still take the 'Cube, even if they were the same price.. i thought the x-box might make me a nice media-player but by the time it does reach that price it'll probably be underpowered for mpeg4 :/ oh well.