Well this can happen a number of ways, for example, on a consumer buy 2 get 3rd free for example, the customer probabily doesnt get the free 3rd item (that we gave away, so our margins are lower) or they buy up grey market destined for example, eastern europe, at lower prices. Also if people buy in big quantities, you get large (HUGE) discounts. so if you were to buy 2000 widgets, you would get 1000 widgets for free, so you can sell at a lower price and still make a profit. Then there are people authorised to buy our surplus, for export or similar, but they dump it in the local market, and if they pay 10% of retail, and sell it for 30% of retail, thats a good margin, for just listing them! Obviously as I said, when we find em, we dump em, but gotta find em first.
Not me personally you understand, but the company I work for. We were having a problem with a lot of our stock (especially seconds) turning up on ebay at sometimes less than 1/3 the SRP. We would also get lumbered with damaged returns that had found their way into the channel. Because our company knows most of the customers personally, we did some digging, whois.sc is your friend, then when the companies selling the cheap/returned goods came to order more stock, there was mysteriously no stock left for them. No stock, nothing to sell, at least non of our stock. However a lot of other people who were not selling too cheaply were just "cautioned" and "its ok as long as the prices are good"
I guess it depends on your organisation, some like ours are big enough to be the one of thebiggest manufacturers of this product but small enough to know every retail customer we deal with, and can therefore control the distribution channels quite effectively.
And before anyone moans that the market should dictate prices etc, bear this in mind. If one of your customers is worth over $60,000,000 a year, and they are working on small margins, retail sites and are getting undercut by some guy flogging stuff in the back of his van/ebay, how long till they turn round and stop selling your product, and therefore you potentially just lost $60 million.
Well being a fetishist and living in the UK I can tell you that this law, if passed, wont stop anything.
It is a short easyjet flight from here to Amsterdam. There you can get all manner of really screwed up fetish porn there.
Want an example, my ex GF used to live in Amsterdam and we were both kinksters so we went video shopping. We bought some beastie videos, some extreme SM (By extreme I mean real extreme) etc and I brought it back to the UK. Didnt get stopped at customs, there wasnt even a cop on duty.
So what difference is this going to make, when a real hardcore person wants get some of the most extreme porn round? Not much, just get an Easyjet flight for $100 or so and visit some of the backstreets and get more than most (note I said most) sites offer and at better quality and not just short movie clips but over 1.5 hours of extreme HD porn.
Am I the only one to think that the author should have paused for two seconds before blasting this out. Not due to any security issues, just at the end of his rant, he decided to take shots at Intel and AMD "Becoming less helpful by the day" Now if you were the chap at intel that did his best to get stuff sorted for Linux/BSD/Whatever oss project, going out on a limb to help, you would think "Fu*k you Theo" and be a lot less inclined to help and devote more support time to support contracts that potentially earn money.
I am a british citizen, and as such I like my liberty (not that we have much left either but hey ho!)
The GF wants to go to Disneyland. I have been there before, years ago, it was good!
However I do not want some foreign nation to have all my biodata. Therefore I will be voting with my wallet. I was going to book us a trip to Disneyland but now I don't think I will. I am also aware of the grasping nature of disney, but I can't force my opinions on my GF just to keep the moral high ground.
I'll just go to france and go to Euro Disney. Ok its not the same, but its closer, cheaper, and no giving up my freedoms or indeed biometric markers.
This means that although Disney will not loose money (it all flows back to Disney in some form) the surrounding people and businesses will not get my money, so they are a few hundred short on what they could have made. Now I am only one person, but imagine if 10,000 people felt the same way. Thats a lot of money that is NOT flowing into the US economy. That makes your economy even poorer. Did it increase security by getting my biodata, doubt it a lot!
The American government needs to understand this is not the way to increase either global relations OR tourism. One hand is saying oh come to america, its great, its fun. The other is saying come over here and the bover boys in the uniforms will make you give them anything they want, in the name of security.
At the end of the day, America has to wake up to itself and realise it is being left behind. It has an obsession with *total* control of its drones, sorry, citizens.
We have factories in china, and we often use video conferancing to discuss certain things. Now the speed of our line is in muli megabit leased. Our factory in china has 10Mbit, however the connection between china and the rest of the world is appauling. It makes it almost impossible to have a conferance with them because the few pipes that are in use are so congested, and I guess, monitored, that real time VC goes out the window. Every other site in the world we connect with is fine. Just inside China.
It just occured to me now that $5Million if written off allows a lot of people "off the hook" but on the other hand, can you imagine how many QUALITY linux/FOSS software coders that money could buy. I'm not looking to be a troll but it could benefit a lot more people than some school district that wants to flop on a contract.
As to the other question, some tech guy prolly has all these 486s in his shed;)
Now we may see no less than a battle between two MAJOR internet players. It will get v dirty v quick. Basically I predict a last man standing type scenario.
It was only a matter of time before someone pulled the trigger because you cant have two major companies, with 2 sets of shareholders co-existing for very long. One will inevitably get greedy.
Could Sun make it any plainer to the would be thief "High quality, expensive computers in here". Its the exact opposite of what it should be, ie non discript so all the scrotes don't even think to try and bust it open.
However, has it occured to anyone else the MASSIVE R & D, testing, tooling costs that would be involved in reinventing it all, even if some of it is already written.
It would also effectively create two versions of TIVO, a old, unmaintained one, and a shiny new DRM infected one. Guess which one will get pushed out more. That is, unless they are going to "reflash" everyones box with a huge multi megabyte update over the phoneline.
Where I work we have a small 100 user network, running Netware 6.5. It works. However we thought "Right chaps, time to upgrade" so we duly contacted Novell and were absolutly gobsmacked to find they want $12,000-14,000 for an upgrade from 6.5 to 7. It might not have been so bad if there were some new decent features but there arent! So we were not gonna pay $12,000 for nothing new. If we wanted to upgrade Groupwise to version also, it was MORE money than the OS.
Thing is, Netware is dying. Novell arent even attempting to do anything much with it these days except milk the cash cow for all its worth (read tied in users) and trying to get people to migrate to SUSE.
There is no sparkle or pazzaz anymore in anything Netware. It has only one advantage over Windows, and that is stability/uptime.
They have essentially bet the farm on Suse and stopped pushing anything else new or significant out the door a long time ago. Years ago they owned the networking space, now its just a matter of time till they are gone.
Years ago we bought 100 copies of O2K3, we didn't renew our software subscription. We still use it. Nothing new to get excited about. As someone said before Office suites were "done" 10 years ago.
Surely the GOVERNMENT in question wouldn't be stupid enough to use what is essentially time bombed pay to play software, ie Did it have a clause saying "Do not use if you do not renew?"
Im not saying I am for this at all. I like the choice of being anonymous. However, say you have a website that you want to see how your visitors got to you, rather than just seeing the referrer link, this could be just the stuff you want. As we know, when we surf, we use hyperLINKS to move from one site to another. How valuable would it be to know that before visiting your store, they searched for an item on MSN.com (eughhh) that sent them to a site that linked to you, so you can track the history from search to them landing on your site.
People,
Don't forget that with this OLPC system, not only does M$ crap itself at the thought of millions of linux competent kids, as intel does in chips, but Intel could loose out in another way, as could M$
OLPC is a paradigm shift in computing. There are NO licence costs, everything is useable, for free, Everything has been designed from the ground up, its a new legacy free, tightly tuned computer that has thrown out all the old PC baggage and nastyness, with a new light, useable OS, that can fly on a 350ish MHz machine.
If it works, there is no reason why they cant make desktop systems using the same code, optimised, open source components. Imagine an OLPC desktop with 512MB RAM and a hard drive, and perhaps an 800MHz chip. It could potentially change home desktop computing in developing worlds forever.
Who, really, wants speeds of 160Mb/s and not want to download ISOs etc. However depending on which ISP you use (most) your limit is gonna be a fraction of the potential of the device. I mean for web browsing and other low to medium bandwidth applications, 1Mb is plenty fast enough
We all know how Americans have like 5 mins program 5 minute ads, and sure you can go make a drink but can you really cope with 6 pints of coffee an hour. Not only will you have a huge bladder, but you will be buzzing off the caffine for weeks! This is all in jest btw!
I've just read the article and if it adds Suse in addition to Redhat, that means that on quite a lot of hardware you will have the choice of Redhat, suse and ubuntu. That is in addition to M$ stuff. So thats a whole lot of choice. 3 potential linux's leaving the factories installed.
Is it me or is quite obvious that they are not making large amounts of money with VOIP. It' a distuptive technology. It is challenging what were high profit revenue models. Therefore they are not making as much money. Therefore they dont like it.
Man, I'm lookng!
Problem is, although the tech is uber poor, the wages arent bad. Although yes, im looking. It's so broken I dont even try to fix it because its a case of ego of upper management over sanity. I have a mail server with 2% free disk space, which will crash in the next 48 hours but no one will give me the go ahead to either purge 4 year old accounts (I kid you not) or add extra disks, as it costs money.
Im waiting for the fallout. Upper management have known for 3 weeks it was heading a bad way, but they just arent interested.
Slashdot Mirror
Well this can happen a number of ways, for example, on a consumer buy 2 get 3rd free for example, the customer probabily doesnt get the free 3rd item (that we gave away, so our margins are lower) or they buy up grey market destined for example, eastern europe, at lower prices. Also if people buy in big quantities, you get large (HUGE) discounts. so if you were to buy 2000 widgets, you would get 1000 widgets for free, so you can sell at a lower price and still make a profit. Then there are people authorised to buy our surplus, for export or similar, but they dump it in the local market, and if they pay 10% of retail, and sell it for 30% of retail, thats a good margin, for just listing them! Obviously as I said, when we find em, we dump em, but gotta find em first.
Not me personally you understand, but the company I work for. We were having a problem with a lot of our stock (especially seconds) turning up on ebay at sometimes less than 1/3 the SRP. We would also get lumbered with damaged returns that had found their way into the channel. Because our company knows most of the customers personally, we did some digging, whois.sc is your friend, then when the companies selling the cheap/returned goods came to order more stock, there was mysteriously no stock left for them. No stock, nothing to sell, at least non of our stock. However a lot of other people who were not selling too cheaply were just "cautioned" and "its ok as long as the prices are good"
I guess it depends on your organisation, some like ours are big enough to be the one of thebiggest manufacturers of this product but small enough to know every retail customer we deal with, and can therefore control the distribution channels quite effectively.
And before anyone moans that the market should dictate prices etc, bear this in mind. If one of your customers is worth over $60,000,000 a year, and they are working on small margins, retail sites and are getting undercut by some guy flogging stuff in the back of his van/ebay, how long till they turn round and stop selling your product, and therefore you potentially just lost $60 million.
We are already the most watched nation on earth. Things can only get worse. Free society my ass
Call Microsoft, and £200 later maybe get a solution , if you get a decent tech?
Well being a fetishist and living in the UK I can tell you that this law, if passed, wont stop anything.
It is a short easyjet flight from here to Amsterdam. There you can get all manner of really screwed up fetish porn there.
Want an example, my ex GF used to live in Amsterdam and we were both kinksters so we went video shopping. We bought some beastie videos, some extreme SM (By extreme I mean real extreme) etc and I brought it back to the UK. Didnt get stopped at customs, there wasnt even a cop on duty.
So what difference is this going to make, when a real hardcore person wants get some of the most extreme porn round? Not much, just get an Easyjet flight for $100 or so and visit some of the backstreets and get more than most (note I said most) sites offer and at better quality and not just short movie clips but over 1.5 hours of extreme HD porn.
Am I the only one to think that the author should have paused for two seconds before blasting this out. Not due to any security issues, just at the end of his rant, he decided to take shots at Intel and AMD "Becoming less helpful by the day" Now if you were the chap at intel that did his best to get stuff sorted for Linux/BSD/Whatever oss project, going out on a limb to help, you would think "Fu*k you Theo" and be a lot less inclined to help and devote more support time to support contracts that potentially earn money.
I am a british citizen, and as such I like my liberty (not that we have much left either but hey ho!)
The GF wants to go to Disneyland. I have been there before, years ago, it was good!
However I do not want some foreign nation to have all my biodata. Therefore I will be voting with my wallet. I was going to book us a trip to Disneyland but now I don't think I will. I am also aware of the grasping nature of disney, but I can't force my opinions on my GF just to keep the moral high ground.
I'll just go to france and go to Euro Disney. Ok its not the same, but its closer, cheaper, and no giving up my freedoms or indeed biometric markers.
This means that although Disney will not loose money (it all flows back to Disney in some form) the surrounding people and businesses will not get my money, so they are a few hundred short on what they could have made. Now I am only one person, but imagine if 10,000 people felt the same way. Thats a lot of money that is NOT flowing into the US economy. That makes your economy even poorer. Did it increase security by getting my biodata, doubt it a lot!
The American government needs to understand this is not the way to increase either global relations OR tourism. One hand is saying oh come to america, its great, its fun. The other is saying come over here and the bover boys in the uniforms will make you give them anything they want, in the name of security.
At the end of the day, America has to wake up to itself and realise it is being left behind. It has an obsession with *total* control of its drones, sorry, citizens.
We have factories in china, and we often use video conferancing to discuss certain things. Now the speed of our line is in muli megabit leased. Our factory in china has 10Mbit, however the connection between china and the rest of the world is appauling. It makes it almost impossible to have a conferance with them because the few pipes that are in use are so congested, and I guess, monitored, that real time VC goes out the window. Every other site in the world we connect with is fine. Just inside China.
Do they not realise all we have to do is fire up bittorent ?
It just occured to me now that $5Million if written off allows a lot of people "off the hook" but on the other hand, can you imagine how many QUALITY linux/FOSS software coders that money could buy. I'm not looking to be a troll but it could benefit a lot more people than some school district that wants to flop on a contract.
;)
As to the other question, some tech guy prolly has all these 486s in his shed
Now its down to who blinks first, im guessing that Google either have:
A) An ebay alternative (Killer? )
B) The resources to create one pretty quick.
We will have to see what countermeasures Ebay can conjour up. My guess is not a lot because Ebay, to my mind at least, is a one trick pony.
Now we may see no less than a battle between two MAJOR internet players. It will get v dirty v quick. Basically I predict a last man standing type scenario.
It was only a matter of time before someone pulled the trigger because you cant have two major companies, with 2 sets of shareholders co-existing for very long. One will inevitably get greedy.
Could Sun make it any plainer to the would be thief "High quality, expensive computers in here". Its the exact opposite of what it should be, ie non discript so all the scrotes don't even think to try and bust it open.
We are all saying how they can transfer to BSD.
However, has it occured to anyone else the MASSIVE R & D, testing, tooling costs that would be involved in reinventing it all, even if some of it is already written.
It would also effectively create two versions of TIVO, a old, unmaintained one, and a shiny new DRM infected one. Guess which one will get pushed out more. That is, unless they are going to "reflash" everyones box with a huge multi megabyte update over the phoneline.
Where I work we have a small 100 user network, running Netware 6.5. It works. However we thought "Right chaps, time to upgrade" so we duly contacted Novell and were absolutly gobsmacked to find they want $12,000-14,000 for an upgrade from 6.5 to 7. It might not have been so bad if there were some new decent features but there arent! So we were not gonna pay $12,000 for nothing new. If we wanted to upgrade Groupwise to version also, it was MORE money than the OS.
Thing is, Netware is dying. Novell arent even attempting to do anything much with it these days except milk the cash cow for all its worth (read tied in users) and trying to get people to migrate to SUSE.
There is no sparkle or pazzaz anymore in anything Netware. It has only one advantage over Windows, and that is stability/uptime.
They have essentially bet the farm on Suse and stopped pushing anything else new or significant out the door a long time ago. Years ago they owned the networking space, now its just a matter of time till they are gone.
Years ago we bought 100 copies of O2K3, we didn't renew our software subscription. We still use it. Nothing new to get excited about. As someone said before Office suites were "done" 10 years ago.
Surely the GOVERNMENT in question wouldn't be stupid enough to use what is essentially time bombed pay to play software, ie Did it have a clause saying "Do not use if you do not renew?"
Im not saying I am for this at all. I like the choice of being anonymous. However, say you have a website that you want to see how your visitors got to you, rather than just seeing the referrer link, this could be just the stuff you want. As we know, when we surf, we use hyperLINKS to move from one site to another. How valuable would it be to know that before visiting your store, they searched for an item on MSN.com (eughhh) that sent them to a site that linked to you, so you can track the history from search to them landing on your site.
Just a thought.
People, Don't forget that with this OLPC system, not only does M$ crap itself at the thought of millions of linux competent kids, as intel does in chips, but Intel could loose out in another way, as could M$
OLPC is a paradigm shift in computing. There are NO licence costs, everything is useable, for free, Everything has been designed from the ground up, its a new legacy free, tightly tuned computer that has thrown out all the old PC baggage and nastyness, with a new light, useable OS, that can fly on a 350ish MHz machine.
If it works, there is no reason why they cant make desktop systems using the same code, optimised, open source components. Imagine an OLPC desktop with 512MB RAM and a hard drive, and perhaps an 800MHz chip. It could potentially change home desktop computing in developing worlds forever.
Yeah but it doesnt cost you over $1000, just a worn out F5 key. Unless of course you use a per byte setup.
Can I come and play with it, sounds super sexy geeky!
Who, really, wants speeds of 160Mb/s and not want to download ISOs etc. However depending on which ISP you use (most) your limit is gonna be a fraction of the potential of the device. I mean for web browsing and other low to medium bandwidth applications, 1Mb is plenty fast enough
We all know how Americans have like 5 mins program 5 minute ads, and sure you can go make a drink but can you really cope with 6 pints of coffee an hour. Not only will you have a huge bladder, but you will be buzzing off the caffine for weeks! This is all in jest btw!
I've just read the article and if it adds Suse in addition to Redhat, that means that on quite a lot of hardware you will have the choice of Redhat, suse and ubuntu. That is in addition to M$ stuff. So thats a whole lot of choice. 3 potential linux's leaving the factories installed.
Is it me or is quite obvious that they are not making large amounts of money with VOIP. It' a distuptive technology. It is challenging what were high profit revenue models. Therefore they are not making as much money. Therefore they dont like it.
Man, I'm lookng! Problem is, although the tech is uber poor, the wages arent bad. Although yes, im looking. It's so broken I dont even try to fix it because its a case of ego of upper management over sanity. I have a mail server with 2% free disk space, which will crash in the next 48 hours but no one will give me the go ahead to either purge 4 year old accounts (I kid you not) or add extra disks, as it costs money.
Im waiting for the fallout. Upper management have known for 3 weeks it was heading a bad way, but they just arent interested.