Probably what happened is that Circuit City bought that memory way back when it was hot stuff and they could sell it for that kind of money, and some of it ended up languished on the shelves for a while.
That's always possible, and did happen where I worked too. I know is that when I was a salesman, several years ago now (before most people decided they trust online stores), we sold, often by special order only, very old, very expensive ram to very desparate people. It wasn't exactly a booming market, I myself might have sold two or three sticks the three years I was there. It was a tiny niche that someone decided we could fill.
I can't imagine how preying on the desperate and unprepared makes for a good business plan. Which is probably why they're going out of business.
Well, it's not a good business plan on its own. What is a good business plan in electronics is to sell as much high-margin (not necessarily high priced) stuff as you can. Thus the expensive cables, constant pitches for batteries and blank media, etc.
As for selling expensive ram to businesses who rely on unique configurations, well I never felt too bad for them. After all, if I didn't have the ram to sell them, they'd be shelling out however many thousands of dollars to replace that obsolete system and retrain their staff.
I suspect CC is going out of business in large part because they laid off their best salespeople. That would be the obvious big thing they did wrong. Having knowledge is pretty critical for an electronics salesperson. People simply won't buy stuff from you if you don't know your stuff, know how to tell them things without making them feel stupid, or lie to them.
I never shopped at a CC (I live in Canada) so I don't know if they fell victim to over-pricing or possibly under-pricing, but likely they weren't able to find that balance between low prices and high margins. In the store I worked at (a Radio Shack in Canada), the push was ferocious to sell MIB -- media, ink, batteries. Success was rewarded with spiffs and great commission. Failure to sell MIB consistently and well was worth your job. Funny enough, before the market tanked, The Source (owned by CC, and formerly Radio Shack) was actually increasing profits and revenues. I wonder who's going to buy out the chain. Too bad CC didn't learn the lesson from The Source, they might still be in business.
$109 for a stick of obsolete ram isn't that unusual. I worked in retail some time ago, and the rule of thumb then was that the price of stick of a given type of ram would decrease as it aged, bottom out at between $30-50 (Canadian, mind), and then slowly start to rise again. The reason? If you're shopping for ram that old you probably really need that ram, and will pay a premium to get it.
The market for a stick of SDRAM isn't your nephew who's rebuilding your old box for a server, it's the company who has multiple thousands of dollars sunk into a machine/os combination that is increasingly obsolete, but for which there is no available substitute. If you lose a stick of ram from that box, replacing it at $110 is cheaper than re-investing in your irreplaceable software/hardware combination.
Also, the RIAA, as far as I know, doesn't have to meet the "reasonable doubt" standard, but the "preponderance of evidence" standard, which basically means that they have to prove that their story is more likely than the other side's.
I think that if they had to meet the "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" test, they would fail. It is certainly reasonable that a third party infected her computer and used it for their purposes, if her computer was a bot- and virus-infested nightmare, as I suspect it was.
The real risk for MediaSentry here is that their methods don't seem to have any rigour at all, and may not actually qualify as evidence at all. I'm more interested in the lack of time stamps, investigator's licenses, or protocols for preservation of evidence than in the possible attack vectors available to a third party.
If the MediaSentry evidence is all they have, and it gets thrown out because of Dr. Kim's expert testimony, the RIAA won't have anything left.
Well, actually, these results are no more valid than Bush's results, if they were conducted with the same machine. One of the strongest arguments for a transparent voting system is that both parties can point to the system and say, "see, I didn't cheat. There's your evidence." With systems like the Diebold machines still being used, any election run on those systems is suspect, whether one party actually took advantage of the flaws to cheat or not.
The upshot is, that really, Obama's election isn't any more valid than Bush's.
This of course doesn't apply to all the other monkeying around with voters that happened in the Bush elections, like giving voters false requirements, asking for advance poll requests to be submitted on card stock, having "broken down" machines in pre-dominantly Democratic precincts, etc.
As to Palin, I'm hoping for a Palin/Limbaugh ticket in 2012, I think that would be great!
people who don't shop at corporate bookstores, and restrict their business to small bookstores that offer much better service, friendlier environments, usually more eclectic selection, etc. I like my bookstore, and I shop there instead of going online because of the value added by the owners.
Clearly I misspoke. What I meant that both an engineer and a lawyer would have useful comments to make about a patent, given that it's a legal instrument that generally describes technical processes, inventions, etc. Thinking that only technically-minded people can have important opinions about patents is to miss the legal nature of the instrument (and the technical nature of the law, particularly when it comes to patents).
While neither are formally qualified, I guess I'm more interested in the opinion of an engineer that knows little about law than a lawyer that knows little about the technology.
At the risk of being insulting, that's a pretty small-minded attitude. Does it arise from a dislike of the lawyering profession, or do you think that only engineers have anything worthwhile to say?
No, you're right, but it does mean that you won't get much more out of lawyers than very vague generalizations, as the lawyers don't feel informed enough to comment on cases unless they're actually working on them (in which case, they wouldn't comment on them anyway).
Courts can and do compel parties to reveal their closed source code to the Court. Usually the code does not go into the public record, but the judge (and jury, if it's a jury trial) can examine the code if necessary. Microsoft has been sued in the past for patent infringements, I believe, and if any of those cases came to court (unlikely, they would have settled) then the code was probably examined by the judge, and probably expert witnesses for both sides, as well. That part of the system isn't broken.
What is broken, as you suggest, is that the rest of us can't see the closed code, so we have no idea what the hell is really going on, and have to take someone else's word for it.
Only an Engineer can soundly, accurately, and properly judge whether the patent should apply or not.
That's a troubling statement, because you're right, but also wrong. A patent is a description of a (supposedly novel) technical process, and thus should be evaluated by engineers. But a patent is also a legal device that, if accepted, grants specific kinds of legal rights, and as such must also be evaluated by lawyers.
It sure would be nice if we all lived in a world where everything requiring analysis could be put in its appropriate pigeon-hole, but alas, we don't. Engineers need to know something about the law as part of their functioning in their work, and similarly lawyers must know something about technology and how it affects their work. And, as stated above by another poster, it's not at all uncommon for people with degrees in Engineering or Computer Science to later enroll in law school. I myself studied Computer Science for a couple of years, before Combinatorics convinced me that I wasn't quite ready for that carreer path.
There's also the fact that most lawyers know that giving any kind of legal opinion based on someone's article (or worse yet, a summary) is a mug's game. I'm in law school, and I've noticed that some of the hardest concepts for us new students to internalize is that
1) matters like this are almost always more complicated than they appear to be from the outside, 2) there are likely unseen (by us) details that may be crucial in determining the case, 3) ultimately, the law is what a judge and jury says it is (within certain limits that vary depending on circumstances), and 4) there are many, many situations where there isn't really a right answer.
Lawyers learn painfully that in a situation like this, looking in from the outside, one has to make so many assumptions about facts, law, etc, that an opinion rendered here is practically meaningless. With that being the case, why bother stating anything here more complicated than a basic background of the law? Especially when your opinion is going to be accorded a great deal of weight by the others here, which leads to the kind of problems you suggested to the GP.
Maybe 1) re-writing the firefox JS engine is too much work or 2) would be too disruptive to a well-established open-source project, or 3) wouldn't be as supa-cool awesome as starting from scratch (I'm assuming that Chrome began as a %20 time project), or 4) they felt the Firefox dev team would have simply ignored the work done by the Chrome people, or 5) they would have to've reworked the whole browser, and not just the JS engine.
I'm sure I could think of more reasons why the Chrome developers would want to do their own thing rather than submit changes to the Firefox engine, but I hope you get the point. Nothing about the bazaar forces you to join a current project and push updates, or even makes that practise logically necessary. Sometimes it's a good idea, sometimes not.
I think you're looking at a big part of the problem, but most people don't see the real problem with the rational/emotional dichotomy. here it is:
marxism: a rational actor will behave for the benefit of society, and in so will benefit herself more in the long run.
free market capitalism: a rational actor will act for her benefit, and in doing so will benefit her society in the long run.
Now if you look at these two statements, they say two things about human nature, specifically that people might behave "nobly" or "selfishly", and that how they behave will affect society at large. The problem with marxism is, that it doesn't work. People don't always behave "nobly", for the benefit of society. They do behave greedily. The problem with free-market capitalism is that people do sometimes act "nobly", and put their own self-interest below the good of society, even when they're being rational in their decision-making.
But there's a much bigger problem that both those theories are equally vulnerable to, and it's this:
People are not rational actors.
Think about it. How many people do you know, who actually sit down and think through even a fraction of the decisions they make on a daily basis? Most people, most of the time, make decisions based on their heart and their gut, and if they think rationally at all, they justify their irrational decisions after the fact. Another common decision strategy is rule-based: you follow a set of rules that you've been given, and act on the answer generated by the rules. Real, rational, critical thought is pretty rare, and requires training and practise. How many people do you know that actually practise thinking? You and I are doing it right now, but we both know that here on slashdot where one would expect the mean IQ to be higher than average, a vast number of flame wars, debates, tirades and arguments revolve around the conflicting guts and hearts of the combatants.
Any system that fails to take this into account will fail.
Maybe the problem isn't so much with scalability as it is with discrepancies of scale between different balancing powers. For example, I see corporations as being too powerful, compared to governments and people in general. Is there some other power that can increase, to balance out the corporate power? Or can the corporate power be reduced to match the current levels of government power? I think balancing powers off against one another works much better than having the corporations and the governments (and unions) all getting into bed together and fleecing the people.
Of course, you're partly right about corrupt leadership growing with scale, that's probably due to the community values, or rather lack of them, as populations grow. It's much harder to rip off people you know. For example, I come from a small town of about 10,000 people in Ontario, Canada. I know most of the people sitting on our city council, and worked with many of them at one time or another. I am acquainted with my Members of Parliament and Provincial Parliament, and will chat with them if I see them in the street. Consequently, I feel much more confident that they're representing my interests, because I can call them on it if I think they're scamming me.
Further, and especially at the local level, everyone knows everyone else. If the Council makes a decision that will put 50 people out of work, it's a good chance that almost everyone on the council knows someone who lost their job. That makes them more cautious when it comes to handling economic matters (sometimes too cautious).
So, if the key to fixing unions is making a one company/one union world, then maybe the key to controlling government and corporations is parcelling them up in different ways, fragmenting them. Put caps on the market value of a corporation, or make a one-product/one corporation rule. And for government, maybe the best thing is to eliminate levels. Place the emphasis on local governments, and weaken the powers of both federal and state governments. Or, and this is a really crazy idea, have only two levels of government: local and national(and probably eventually global) with nothing in between.
Anyway, just more meanderings that have been floating around my brain, don't make me actually defend any of this because I don't know if I'm even right. All I know is that the left/right, bigger/smaller debate doesn't seem to be getting anywhere, and I think it's because our problems are more subtle than that.
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Probably what happened is that Circuit City bought that memory way back when it was hot stuff and they could sell it for that kind of money, and some of it ended up languished on the shelves for a while.
That's always possible, and did happen where I worked too. I know is that when I was a salesman, several years ago now (before most people decided they trust online stores), we sold, often by special order only, very old, very expensive ram to very desparate people. It wasn't exactly a booming market, I myself might have sold two or three sticks the three years I was there. It was a tiny niche that someone decided we could fill.
And probably worth every penny, to that poor Alpha owner with the custom software. Off-the-shelf or popular OSS community solutions, that's my motto.
I can't imagine how preying on the desperate and unprepared makes for a good business plan. Which is probably why they're going out of business.
Well, it's not a good business plan on its own. What is a good business plan in electronics is to sell as much high-margin (not necessarily high priced) stuff as you can. Thus the expensive cables, constant pitches for batteries and blank media, etc.
As for selling expensive ram to businesses who rely on unique configurations, well I never felt too bad for them. After all, if I didn't have the ram to sell them, they'd be shelling out however many thousands of dollars to replace that obsolete system and retrain their staff.
I suspect CC is going out of business in large part because they laid off their best salespeople. That would be the obvious big thing they did wrong. Having knowledge is pretty critical for an electronics salesperson. People simply won't buy stuff from you if you don't know your stuff, know how to tell them things without making them feel stupid, or lie to them.
I never shopped at a CC (I live in Canada) so I don't know if they fell victim to over-pricing or possibly under-pricing, but likely they weren't able to find that balance between low prices and high margins. In the store I worked at (a Radio Shack in Canada), the push was ferocious to sell MIB -- media, ink, batteries. Success was rewarded with spiffs and great commission. Failure to sell MIB consistently and well was worth your job. Funny enough, before the market tanked, The Source (owned by CC, and formerly Radio Shack) was actually increasing profits and revenues. I wonder who's going to buy out the chain. Too bad CC didn't learn the lesson from The Source, they might still be in business.
$109 for a stick of obsolete ram isn't that unusual. I worked in retail some time ago, and the rule of thumb then was that the price of stick of a given type of ram would decrease as it aged, bottom out at between $30-50 (Canadian, mind), and then slowly start to rise again. The reason? If you're shopping for ram that old you probably really need that ram, and will pay a premium to get it.
The market for a stick of SDRAM isn't your nephew who's rebuilding your old box for a server, it's the company who has multiple thousands of dollars sunk into a machine/os combination that is increasingly obsolete, but for which there is no available substitute. If you lose a stick of ram from that box, replacing it at $110 is cheaper than re-investing in your irreplaceable software/hardware combination.
but you didn't buy a tv for them, they bought their own tv's. You bought them (a tiny fraction of) a tv converter box.
I thought he was referring to Apple's price for a Mac Mini with OS X installed.
Okay, guys, we're not supposed to talk about Usenet, remember?
Also, the RIAA, as far as I know, doesn't have to meet the "reasonable doubt" standard, but the "preponderance of evidence" standard, which basically means that they have to prove that their story is more likely than the other side's.
I think that if they had to meet the "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" test, they would fail. It is certainly reasonable that a third party infected her computer and used it for their purposes, if her computer was a bot- and virus-infested nightmare, as I suspect it was.
The real risk for MediaSentry here is that their methods don't seem to have any rigour at all, and may not actually qualify as evidence at all. I'm more interested in the lack of time stamps, investigator's licenses, or protocols for preservation of evidence than in the possible attack vectors available to a third party.
If the MediaSentry evidence is all they have, and it gets thrown out because of Dr. Kim's expert testimony, the RIAA won't have anything left.
of course, that doesn't exonerate Diebold from responsibility for the products they manufacture and sell, regardless of whether they designed it.
well it's a good thing they caught all the errors then, isn't it? Right? They did catch all the errors, right?
Well, actually, these results are no more valid than Bush's results, if they were conducted with the same machine. One of the strongest arguments for a transparent voting system is that both parties can point to the system and say, "see, I didn't cheat. There's your evidence." With systems like the Diebold machines still being used, any election run on those systems is suspect, whether one party actually took advantage of the flaws to cheat or not.
The upshot is, that really, Obama's election isn't any more valid than Bush's.
This of course doesn't apply to all the other monkeying around with voters that happened in the Bush elections, like giving voters false requirements, asking for advance poll requests to be submitted on card stock, having "broken down" machines in pre-dominantly Democratic precincts, etc.
As to Palin, I'm hoping for a Palin/Limbaugh ticket in 2012, I think that would be great!
I didn't realize concepts were gendered.
people who don't shop at corporate bookstores, and restrict their business to small bookstores that offer much better service, friendlier environments, usually more eclectic selection, etc. I like my bookstore, and I shop there instead of going online because of the value added by the owners.
Clearly I misspoke. What I meant that both an engineer and a lawyer would have useful comments to make about a patent, given that it's a legal instrument that generally describes technical processes, inventions, etc. Thinking that only technically-minded people can have important opinions about patents is to miss the legal nature of the instrument (and the technical nature of the law, particularly when it comes to patents).
While neither are formally qualified, I guess I'm more interested in the opinion of an engineer that knows little about law than a lawyer that knows little about the technology.
At the risk of being insulting, that's a pretty small-minded attitude. Does it arise from a dislike of the lawyering profession, or do you think that only engineers have anything worthwhile to say?
No, you're right, but it does mean that you won't get much more out of lawyers than very vague generalizations, as the lawyers don't feel informed enough to comment on cases unless they're actually working on them (in which case, they wouldn't comment on them anyway).
The human as rational animal was always a myth.
...which wouldn't be an issue if TomTom used WinCE on their GPS units, instead of linux.
Courts can and do compel parties to reveal their closed source code to the Court. Usually the code does not go into the public record, but the judge (and jury, if it's a jury trial) can examine the code if necessary. Microsoft has been sued in the past for patent infringements, I believe, and if any of those cases came to court (unlikely, they would have settled) then the code was probably examined by the judge, and probably expert witnesses for both sides, as well. That part of the system isn't broken.
What is broken, as you suggest, is that the rest of us can't see the closed code, so we have no idea what the hell is really going on, and have to take someone else's word for it.
no, I don't think you're wrong.
Only an Engineer can soundly, accurately, and properly judge whether the patent should apply or not.
That's a troubling statement, because you're right, but also wrong. A patent is a description of a (supposedly novel) technical process, and thus should be evaluated by engineers. But a patent is also a legal device that, if accepted, grants specific kinds of legal rights, and as such must also be evaluated by lawyers.
It sure would be nice if we all lived in a world where everything requiring analysis could be put in its appropriate pigeon-hole, but alas, we don't. Engineers need to know something about the law as part of their functioning in their work, and similarly lawyers must know something about technology and how it affects their work. And, as stated above by another poster, it's not at all uncommon for people with degrees in Engineering or Computer Science to later enroll in law school. I myself studied Computer Science for a couple of years, before Combinatorics convinced me that I wasn't quite ready for that carreer path.
There's also the fact that most lawyers know that giving any kind of legal opinion based on someone's article (or worse yet, a summary) is a mug's game. I'm in law school, and I've noticed that some of the hardest concepts for us new students to internalize is that
1) matters like this are almost always more complicated than they appear to be from the outside,
2) there are likely unseen (by us) details that may be crucial in determining the case,
3) ultimately, the law is what a judge and jury says it is (within certain limits that vary depending on circumstances), and
4) there are many, many situations where there isn't really a right answer.
Lawyers learn painfully that in a situation like this, looking in from the outside, one has to make so many assumptions about facts, law, etc, that an opinion rendered here is practically meaningless. With that being the case, why bother stating anything here more complicated than a basic background of the law? Especially when your opinion is going to be accorded a great deal of weight by the others here, which leads to the kind of problems you suggested to the GP.
Maybe 1) re-writing the firefox JS engine is too much work or 2) would be too disruptive to a well-established open-source project, or 3) wouldn't be as supa-cool awesome as starting from scratch (I'm assuming that Chrome began as a %20 time project), or 4) they felt the Firefox dev team would have simply ignored the work done by the Chrome people, or 5) they would have to've reworked the whole browser, and not just the JS engine.
I'm sure I could think of more reasons why the Chrome developers would want to do their own thing rather than submit changes to the Firefox engine, but I hope you get the point. Nothing about the bazaar forces you to join a current project and push updates, or even makes that practise logically necessary. Sometimes it's a good idea, sometimes not.
incidentally, you may be unaware of the distinction made in the UK between pants and trousers, i.e. that pants are what one wears under trousers.
I think you're looking at a big part of the problem, but most people don't see the real problem with the rational/emotional dichotomy. here it is:
marxism: a rational actor will behave for the benefit of society, and in so will benefit herself more in the long run.
free market capitalism: a rational actor will act for her benefit, and in doing so will benefit her society in the long run.
Now if you look at these two statements, they say two things about human nature, specifically that people might behave "nobly" or "selfishly", and that how they behave will affect society at large. The problem with marxism is, that it doesn't work. People don't always behave "nobly", for the benefit of society. They do behave greedily. The problem with free-market capitalism is that people do sometimes act "nobly", and put their own self-interest below the good of society, even when they're being rational in their decision-making.
But there's a much bigger problem that both those theories are equally vulnerable to, and it's this:
People are not rational actors.
Think about it. How many people do you know, who actually sit down and think through even a fraction of the decisions they make on a daily basis? Most people, most of the time, make decisions based on their heart and their gut, and if they think rationally at all, they justify their irrational decisions after the fact. Another common decision strategy is rule-based: you follow a set of rules that you've been given, and act on the answer generated by the rules. Real, rational, critical thought is pretty rare, and requires training and practise. How many people do you know that actually practise thinking? You and I are doing it right now, but we both know that here on slashdot where one would expect the mean IQ to be higher than average, a vast number of flame wars, debates, tirades and arguments revolve around the conflicting guts and hearts of the combatants.
Any system that fails to take this into account will fail.
Maybe the problem isn't so much with scalability as it is with discrepancies of scale between different balancing powers. For example, I see corporations as being too powerful, compared to governments and people in general. Is there some other power that can increase, to balance out the corporate power? Or can the corporate power be reduced to match the current levels of government power? I think balancing powers off against one another works much better than having the corporations and the governments (and unions) all getting into bed together and fleecing the people.
Of course, you're partly right about corrupt leadership growing with scale, that's probably due to the community values, or rather lack of them, as populations grow. It's much harder to rip off people you know. For example, I come from a small town of about 10,000 people in Ontario, Canada. I know most of the people sitting on our city council, and worked with many of them at one time or another. I am acquainted with my Members of Parliament and Provincial Parliament, and will chat with them if I see them in the street. Consequently, I feel much more confident that they're representing my interests, because I can call them on it if I think they're scamming me.
Further, and especially at the local level, everyone knows everyone else. If the Council makes a decision that will put 50 people out of work, it's a good chance that almost everyone on the council knows someone who lost their job. That makes them more cautious when it comes to handling economic matters (sometimes too cautious).
So, if the key to fixing unions is making a one company/one union world, then maybe the key to controlling government and corporations is parcelling them up in different ways, fragmenting them. Put caps on the market value of a corporation, or make a one-product/one corporation rule. And for government, maybe the best thing is to eliminate levels. Place the emphasis on local governments, and weaken the powers of both federal and state governments. Or, and this is a really crazy idea, have only two levels of government: local and national(and probably eventually global) with nothing in between.
Anyway, just more meanderings that have been floating around my brain, don't make me actually defend any of this because I don't know if I'm even right. All I know is that the left/right, bigger/smaller debate doesn't seem to be getting anywhere, and I think it's because our problems are more subtle than that.