Well, I can approach this in either of two ways...
First, that personally, I'll bet my bottom dollar that you'd really love having an 8-core Mac Pro(tm). Imagine the speed with which it crunches data, the envious glances you'd get from your friends, the gorgeous 30" monitor for just $1,750 more, and so on. Apple sells these things because they know their computer power loving customers really, really want them, bad.
Right now, I'm using a PowerMac G5 that I paid $3,000 for in 2003. It's still a fantastic workhorse and I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of it. You might spend a lot of money for that Mac Pro, but it would also give you a long service life. I am running current software (Leopard, Aperture, etc) and it does just fine. A 2003 Windows machine would have long since been tossed in the attic.
Now, I must say that when you look at Pystar's option list, and compare it to what Apple provides, the Pystar value proposition looks a lot less attractive then you are thinking.
MacOS X Leopard costs $155. A wireless PCI card costs $90. FireWire is $50. Your total is $694.99. Add a cheap Wal*Mart 20" monitor for $250 and you have $845.
Visit the Apple Store. Click on "Refurbished Mac". The previous generation iMac is on sale for $949. It has a real graphics card, which the base Pystar does not. Despite the "millions of colors" controversy, I think the monitor's a lot nicer than the Wal*Mart blue light special. And it has a keyboard and mouse included. If you wanted Apple's keyboard and mouse set for your Pystar it would cost you $90, and with that the much more appealing Apple product is within $15 or so of your Pystar.
You would need an external drive, but external drives aren't that much more than internal ones nowadays.
Even if you say, well, I don't need FireWire or Wireless networking, you're still talking about $555 for the cheapest model with no options save the OS. Add that $250 monitor and you have $705. A 1/3 price premium over $705 is about $900. So you can see that really, Apple - at least at their Refurb store - is giving you what you want at a more than fair close to 30% premium.
That being said, I still want a 8-core Mac Pro. With the $1,750 30" monitor. Guess I'm a sad case:-).
I was not saying it was costing Wal*Mart that much. I was in fact assuming that Wal*Mart's overheads for CD sales are virtually zero, so I can subtract that figure off from the original cost estimates. In a real record store, you have to set it up in a more expensive location than Wal*Mart, such as a shopping mall, and you hopefully will hire employees who have at least some knowledge of music, and who will actually want to help customers. Finally, you want to present your music in an attractive, well organized way so people will actually look at it. All of those things push overhead way higher than Wal*mart, which is the point I was trying to make.
The label's share of expenses was a lot more fair 10 years ago, when they actually had to provide very expensive recording studio time. I remember looking at the credits of Steely Dan's excellent "Gaucho" album and finding that something like 100 people and four different recording studios participated in this. I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that the label picked up the tab for all those flights from NYC to LA to Hawaii to make that recording, and the salaries and travel expenses of all those other nice folks who worked on the album. That was probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and of course after spending all that money the label deserved the lion's share of the income.
Now that you can block out a room in your house, buy a 2.8ghz 8-core Mac Pro and either Logic Pro or Protools(*), a microphone and a few other odds and ends and have a recording studio, I have to assume that the label's profit margins have soared. It looks like they must have put most of that soaring into overhead instead of profits, or they wouldn't be in such bad shape today.
D
(*) For the sake of all that is holy, don't buy Protools. My rant, but there are plenty of others.
Annoying, granted, but a way to differentiate the products you buy at independent retailers from the Wal*Mart product.
The actual cost of bleeping out the music, or re-mixing it to remove profanity is likely to be only a couple of hours of studio time, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.
I am no supporter of the profanity-laced stuff I hear that seems like an attack on the customer more than music, but if the customers like it it's surely a good way to keep independents alive with "uncensored" music. But they will only survive if the difference is reasonble - 20%, not 50%.
All very reasonable costs, but if they're on the road, they are selling concert tickets, and if they are selling concert tickets they are making more than enough money to cover these expenses and far more.
If you have one concert a month and it sells out a 15,000 seat venue at $50 a ticket you're grossing $750,000 a month. I don't know what the venue deal is like but I'm sure you get to keep at least half the money and clearly $100,000 a month is going to be money well spent, and I'll bet most bands could do a concert a week, not a concert a month.
They don't need a dime from CD sales to cover any of that.
What strikes me is that if you go with Wal*Mart, a lot of those expenses vanish - Wal*Mart is going to buy these CDs for $9.72 to sell them at $9.72. So you should not have to pay distribution fees ($0.90), retailer profit ($0.80) or retailer overhead ($3.89). The total of that is $5.59. $15.99 - $5.59 = $10.40.
Marketing/Promotion costs $ 2.40 per CD? That seems like an awful lot. I would think that if Wal*Mart automatically gave the $9.72 CDs good positioning in the store, you would not have to pay any of that. These are going to be acts with name recognition so no promotion should be necessary. So your total costs go down to $ 8 a CD and you are actually making a respectable profit on $9.72, especially since $1.70 of that $ 8 is "Label profit" already.
So if you can sell a CD for $ 9.72 and it costs you (8-1.70) to make, then you're actually making a profit of $3.42, which is actually more than what you make on that $ 15.99 retail price.
I think Wal*Mart's position is very reasonable.
But in the mean time, the labels might consider that by not dropping prices they charge independents they have killed the independents. If they want to not have to deal with ruthless, relentless Wal*Mart, selling to independents at the same price they sell to Wal*Mart would help them exist. Then promotion consists of giving independents a few extra copies of albums to keep for themselves and recommend to customers. No way something like that costs $2.40 per CD.
If people see the same CD they could buy for $15.99 for $9.99 at Wal*Mart, they are going to buy at Wal*Mart. But I'll bet that for a lot of people if they could buy for $11.99 at an independent or $9.99 at Wal*Mart they would go for the independent because they like going there. The independent doesn't have to beat Wal*Mart, it just has to be somewhat competitive and offer a more pleasant buying experience. If you could see labels selling the music for $9, giving Wal*Mart $1 in profit and the independents $3, then that would be fine, and people would start buying at independent stores again.
D
Re:Can some kind soul explain REST?
on
Advanced Rails
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· Score: 1
Maybe the question I really wanted to ask was, what is the benefit of mashups from the point of view of the application being called?
For example, what does Flickr gain from the availability of the Flickr API?
In other words, I'm not saying "Hey, I'm against Mashups", I'm saying "Look, I don't understand Mashups. They seem downright deadly from a business perspective. Why are people eager to create software that can be involved in mashups when the business case looks like I should run and hide?"
I'd like to know what I'm missing, in other words.
Any clues?
D
One more thought: Come to think of it, the myspace worm, which disrupted myspace for weeks and made Samy a hero, albiet a hero with a criminal record, could be thought of as a mashup. It used services made available by myspace in what I think even myspace would consider a highly creative, albiet demented, manner. Is that the future of computing? Should we want it to be?
Can some kind soul explain REST?
on
Advanced Rails
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think I understand what it is - a way to standardize information retrieval and posting via URLs.
But what's the excitement all about? I would think that for most site owners, this would be a disaster, not a boon.
It sounds like a graven invitation for others to do stuff with your site... which means they take your site's functionality, put their ads around it and suck out all the revenue.
Furthermore, it seems like something that makes trying to break your site much easier since crack efforts can be done using standard methods for which the weaknesses are well known. So some smart guy can find a weakness in the REST code and all of a sudden everyone who's followed the rules can be automatically exploited.
Google encourages you to use their maps, because it builds loyalty to them, and you are probably using their ad network anyway so they don't lose much revenue. But for most sites, mashups are going to virtually eliminate revenue, cost bandwidth and overall make your life miserable. They are the modern equivalent of linking to images on someone else's site... and we are supposed to encourage this? Are we nuts?
So tell me, what does REST do for me, as a site owner and developer, as opposed to what it does for others, such as people creating mashups and the like?
Are there any ways in which mashups can be made profitable or worth encouraging, for people who don't own their own ad networks?
A former boss of mine owned a Mooney prop plane (a bit faster than the Cessna, I think about 170 knots) and I found the routine at private airports refreshingly easy - go to the plane, walk around it to make sure nothing's fallen off, run up the engine and take off. The checklist isn't that hard, and much of it can be done during the brief wait for a take off slot.
I loved the freedom associated with being able to take off and land at any time, at any airport. In this particular case, he could leave out of Van Nuys airport, about 15 minutes from his home, instead of LAX which would have taken a grinding hour and a half to get to.
I will admit that flying a private plane is disappointingly non-luxurious - his interior felt more like a Subaru than a Mercedes - but even though I was not very good at physically flying the plane I enjoyed changing the frequencies on the radios and navigation systems. (This was before GPS took off in a big way - we used the old beacon system.)
I would have surely preferred a jet but I liked flying private better than commercial. As I remember it cost him about $55 per flight hour to run, including overhauls, and he certainly believed it penciled out for him economically. He had to carry fairly heavy amounts of baggage for the trade shows we went to and that definitely helped.
It's very possible that companies like Adobe or TurboTax would do well with that kind of arrangement. For TurboTax or Adobe software, I'll bet the cost of the packaging + the retail markup they give Amazon or CompUSA is 30% or more of the price. And they still have to pay for advertising, to make people aware of the product.
In the case of iPhone applications, Apple's handling the advertising, the promotion, the packaging (well, it's not necessary anymore, but you get the idea), the retail markup and credit card fees. It's a solid deal - neither a ripoff for them nor a freebee for developers, but a good honest deal benefitting both sides.
I strongly suspect that if there was TurboTax(tm) for iPhone(tm) that was sold for a similar price to TurboTax for Mac or PC, Intuit would make about the same overall margin for it.
So I have now concluded, reasonably in my view, that Apple's proposed monopoly is fair - they are not abusing their position by charging above market for their services. Now, we address the question of why we couldn't simply have unfettered freedom to develop phone software.
I am one of the few Slashdotters who has witnessed the painful effects of a phone virus. It's no joke since phone software can make calls on your behalf to high-toll numbers or send expensive text messages. The virus I encountered sent MMS messages continuously to everyone in the phone owner's address book. My friend, who got it on her phone in the Philippines, was faced with a $300 phone bill when it was all over - and being a middle class person in a very poor country, that would be like a $3,000 phone bill for us -- just impossible to pay.
This situation is not the RIAA. The analogy would be if someone created a song designed to destroy your stereo, so you would have to buy a new one, or that would sneak advertisements in your music stream and cause your stereo to crash. As far as I know, nobody has yet created a song that would do either of those things, and so there is no reason to censor songs in order to protect your stereo equipment. But people have, and will, created software that will do very similar things to this example, and so Apple has to step in to make sure its customers are protected. In practice, it's not unlike including anti-virus software in the OS, except that anti-virus software is horribly ineffective, so the focus is on keeping evil software out of your phone in the first place.
So I can see both sides. As a developer, of course I don't want to pay for the certificate. But from the point of view of a phone maker who needs to protect his brand, It's genuinely necessary for any submitted software to be checked before it goes on a phone. This is a very small price to pay to avoid harmful software, which does exist. Nokia, the maker of my friend's phone, fixed this problem by requiring developer certificates in the same way Apple is, and so you don't hear much about harmful phone software. But without the certificates and other precautions, there's the real possibility of bad problems ahead.
Apple's system protects everyone involved and ensures a dynamic, powerful market for phone software. We have to sacrifice a little freedom because we are being allowed to tamper with people's phones, which are their lives. If you think otherwise, OpenMoko and Android beckon.
It was a Nokia 6600. Interesting phone. As I remember the hardware was very attractive but the UI was confusing. I remember it taking more time to figure out where the web browser was in the thing than to actually download and eradicate the virus.
You are clearly wrong that no phone virus causing monetary harm has ever existed. MMS messages cost money to send. This virus sent hundreds of them. I will admit I only have her word that the virus caused her a $300 phone bill. But I believe MMS messages cost about two Philippine pesos (at the time $ 0.20) to send. When she discovered the problem, her phone was continuously sluggish and so I have no problem thinking she might have sent a thousand or so messages, so close to $300 in MMS.
I am not an expert about virus propagation, but I suspect you need millions of users for it to be financially worthwhile to write a virus. Nokia/Symbian does have that critical mass. I do not believe there are enough jailbroken iPhones to be a sufficiently fertile market for a virus, but if you could do it on all iPhones it might be. Furthermore, if you jailbreak you iPhone, you and not Apple are responsible for your acts. So you could get a virus on your phone but Apple would not be liable in any way.
Curiously enough, the iPhone's third party software development is done through a model surprisingly similar to what we expect Apple to do. Installer.app is a centralized repository for iPhone software. I would certainly assume that if someone added a virus to installer.app's list of software it would be rapidly removed and the developer blacklisted. Most people are relying on installer.app instead of searching the Internet for software.
While the existing mechanism is probably very safe, I think Apple is right in being concerned about viruses,especially as adding software to the iPhone spreads from what is probably a community of a few hundred thouand at most to a community of millions.
The security question is not a red herring. I have witnesses a phone virus and the results are not pretty.
A good friend of mine lives in the Philippines, where expensive cellphones are status symbols. In 1996, when I was paying her a visit, she had the latest, fanciest Nokia. It got a virus, and the virus started sending hundreds of X-rated advertising MMS messages to everyone she knew. It was both embarrassing and expensive, since the phone companies over there charge for each individual message.
Fortunately, I was with her at the time and was able to fix the problem with f-secure's anti-virus software for the phone, but the result was a $300 phone bill the phone company refused to write off. My friend is in the upper middle class in the Philipines, and that means a $1,000 monthly income. The phone bill devastated her.
So don't ignore the cellphone virus threat. It can cost real people real money and genuine embarassment thanks to the annoyance and subject matter of those messages. Fortunately for her, most of her friends didn't have the fancy cellphones needed to receive those messages (and catch the virus) but it was still no fun at all explaining them to people.
So don't understate the virus threat. Steve definitely doesn't want stuff like that happening to his beloved iPhone, and as a happy iPhone owner, I can't blame him one bit.
I think you overestimate the rationality of people.
Guys tend to write the hot chicks, no matter what. And they get rejected by the hot chicks. Eventually they get bored and stop writing.
Nobody writes the homely chicks except those who think the homely chicks are hot chicks. (They are the people who get luckiest, I think.)
Match never showed enough distinctive about the person to make me know what would be a good thing to write them. OKCupid seems a lot better since you can learn quite a bit about people from their various tests, quizzes and questions.
When I was loaned the computer in question, it had one of those horrible spyware programs that directs you to worthless search pages spontaneously every five minutes or so.
It took me about four hours to figure out how to get rid of it.
After that, you can guess that I was not frightfully keen on giving the program a chance or figuring out the good features it had.
However, thanks for the tips. I will use them next time I have to use IE.
I think it's likely that Donald Knuth will be dead before he finishes The Art of Computer Programming, so if you think that is his most valuable work you might consider his typography obsession an unfortunate loss.
On the other hand, for many people his typography obsession was of great value to them, since there are millions of TeX-formatted papers around that would have had to use some other tool if it weren't for Knuth.
And he pulled the exact same university salary either way. Did he make more money on The Art of Computer Programming than The TeXbook? I'm going to guess that he lives comfortably either way, so that aspect probably doesn't matter.
Bennett Hazelton was in fact a recent high school graduate, if I have his chronology right. A few years back he was about 15 years old and very involved in anti-censorware causes and unless I miss my boat, that's why he's a Slashdot contributor in the first place. If my memory serves, he made some solid contributions to that cause, and so I don't think it's appropriate to put him down as a teenager. He's a teenager with a track record.
So I am happy to defend the guy, even though I don't know him personally.
His essay makes an excellent point that Vista gratuitously changed things that were working fine before. A lot of corporate types have found the changes in IE 7 annoying, and when I use IE to make sure my web sites work on it, I have to agree with them. The removal of the menu is extremely annoying to anyone who's wanted to click "View Source". Sure, you can bring it back (go to the View menu to do it), but there's no question that the removal of the menu was not the best idea.
I think it's important for Slashdot readers to hear from intelligent people like him who are not necessarily computer experts. This is a giant echo chamber of computer experts who all pass around opinions forged from a common bond we feel as technical guys. Every once in a while, it's a good idea to face the world of people outside our tech bubble. By confronting them and understanding more about them, we can make better software.
As for Bennett's observations about Vista, the guy should get a Mac. If you want sleek elegance that works, Apple has it covered. Go to an Apple Store, young man, and enjoy.
Didn't the Chinese release an iPhone clone weeks after the iPhone was released, with added functionality? They released something that looked vaguely like an iPhone with absolutely appalling software. To give you an idea of the attention to detail we're talking about, when you boot it up you hear a Windows startup chime!
I'm usually much more keen on reading text on the screen than watching videos, but in this case you really have to see the fake iPhone demo to get an idea for the sheer awfulness of the thing.
Apple took two and a half years, 200 engineers and many millions of dollars to build iPhone. You really can't expect that to be replicated quickly. Ironically enough, I believe the fake iPhone was on the street before the real thing! It's most likely a cosmetic variation on an already existing phone, although I was unable to identify the software's origin. (Perhaps someone can clue me in - it seemed like it was probably Chinese designed.)
You are correct, however, that the Chinese did listen to some of the complaints. The fake iPhone has a removable battery and will work on any network. After seeing that video, however, I think you'll agree that is pretty thin gruel compared to the enormous advantages the real thing has in other areas.
D
Disclaimer: The author loves his iPhone. Best thing since sliced bread, etc.
The thought occurs to me that the audience of O'Reilly books is people who at least are curious enough to take a stab at tinkering with their machines. It sounds like this is meant for people who are ambitious enough to move in that direction but don't know where to start. It actually sounds like a good idea for me.
As a member of the Apple camp, I'll probably check out a copy just to laugh at all the problems the other side is having, but I do think this is a useful book for those stuck on the other side.
Editing the registry is quite painful even to someone like me who's quite experienced with computers. As an Apple loyalist, I've done quite well in ignoring Microsoft products for the last half decade or so, but occasionally I need to use Windows to check out how IE mangles my web sites. A friend loaned me his PC and it took about a day of steady work to eradicate enough spyware to make his copy of IE usable. (When I saw how bad a problem he is I got him to use FireFox). If this book helps people in this kind of situation I think it would be well worth its purchase price.
Well, you can justify a Windows upgrade by saying that you have to stay competitive as an operating system company, but it is difficult to defend this when the new product is as heartily disliked as Vista seems to be. Then you've just spent billions of dollars going backwards. Maybe that's why Bill is gone.
I think a lot of corporations would love to see client access licenses go away. Those things are bloody expensive and moving to Linux or even MacOS X on the server side is enormously cost effective for that reason.
I know Apple has come up with some kind of turnkey Exchange substitute on Leopard Server - have you heard anything about it?
Well, if those prices are authentic, Apple looks pretty good. You can get an 8-core Mac Pro for $2,799 and it's a pretty usable machine (including 2GB RAM) but not including the huge disk space your system has). It has a lovely, easily expandable case and of course a great OS that pretty much everyone loves.
But if you want enough computing horsepower to run Vista on a brand new machine, how about this? It has a quad core processor, 2gb RAM and a 500gb hard drive for $709.99. It does have an integrated video card but you could always buy that $60 card you mentioned and deactivate the onboard video. And amazingly enough, a whole bunch of people (see the reviews) got it for $550. What's not to like?
This certainly confirms your idea of buying Vista with a new computer - Vista Home Premium is about $200, right? Why buy that when for $350-500 more you can have a new, bang-up to date computer? You'd spend more trying to upgrade your old machine.
However, one of the reviewers mentioned the achilles heel of this computer. I have to quote it:
"Outside of hating Vista,this is the best computer purchase I've ever made !"
I'll stick with Apple. Yep, they're expensive. But their hardware and software combination is the best there is.
A few years back, I worked for a mid-sized corporation (about 200 employees), and we bought computers when the old ones fell apart. I'm sure big corporations are similar except they might have a 3-year replacement cycle instead of "when the HD fails". Whenever a computer dies, its operating system license generally dies with it, and so whenever you buy a new computer you are giving MS revenue.
In light of this, does it really matter whether companies upgrade to Vista at all? If they simply replace their computers with XP computers, and keep on using them for the same period, won't MS get basically the same revenue no matter what?
Microsoft probably did shoot themselves in the foot since there is no cost-effective way to upgrade a machine built before (roughly) January 1, 2007 to Vista. So you will never sell any significant number of Vista upgrades, no matter what happens. Vista will eventually come in when support for XP is dropped by hardware manufactures, which clearly is not going to be any time soon.
Of course if the big corporations change their upgrade cycles from three years to four, then Microsoft really is in trouble...
I think you should be able to build a less high screen when you attach it to a thinner notebook. When I see a MacBook Air at the Apple Store I will try comparing it and see if the total height is slightly lower than the MacBook.
I'm surprised there is so much of an uproar over this machine. To me, the two most important things about a computer's usability are the quality of its keyboard and display, and nobody seems to be disputing that they are both first-rate. For my lamentably aging eyes, I think a 13" screen would have to be considered an absolute minimum. I haven't hooked up Ethernet to my laptops in years, and while I would really prefer more storage, this is obviously a great machine for shuttling yourself between airports. I can imagine myself carrying a stylish attache case instead of an ugly computer bag thanks to this computer.
I won't buy it, though, because I need a desktop replacement with a big screen. I think most people who have been reviewing this machine really want it but in the end are similar types of users to me. This machine isn't meant for us, it's meant for the guy who spends half of his time around airports, and to that person, being able to slip a computer into a manila envelope happens to be pure gold.
Perhaps he really does understand children as a sort of fork();? That call, as it happens, does create an identical child process!
This is an age-old problem and is not confined to computer geeks. Many fathers who want to "pass on their own line" have had similar problems.
Geeks tend to be more flexible than that, though - more so in practice than in theory. We're talking theory here so we can start as we want and then adopt to conditions.
I have to say he is truly looking at a tiny number of females likely to understand his ad and want to respond, though. And that is not meant as an insult to the wonderful geek females around - they are just 10% of the geek population!
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the order backlog on a Tesla appears to be a year or more.
They have made only one and have had quite a bit of difficulty ramping up production.
So even $110k won't actually get you a Tesla, at least not until late next year or thereabouts.
Well, I can approach this in either of two ways ...
:-).
First, that personally, I'll bet my bottom dollar that you'd really love having an 8-core Mac Pro(tm). Imagine the speed with which it crunches data, the envious glances you'd get from your friends, the gorgeous 30" monitor for just $1,750 more, and so on. Apple sells these things because they know their computer power loving customers really, really want them, bad.
Right now, I'm using a PowerMac G5 that I paid $3,000 for in 2003. It's still a fantastic workhorse and I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of it. You might spend a lot of money for that Mac Pro, but it would also give you a long service life. I am running current software (Leopard, Aperture, etc) and it does just fine. A 2003 Windows machine would have long since been tossed in the attic.
Now, I must say that when you look at Pystar's option list, and compare it to what Apple provides, the Pystar value proposition looks a lot less attractive then you are thinking.
MacOS X Leopard costs $155. A wireless PCI card costs $90. FireWire is $50. Your total is $694.99. Add a cheap Wal*Mart 20" monitor for $250 and you have $845.
Visit the Apple Store. Click on "Refurbished Mac". The previous generation iMac is on sale for $949. It has a real graphics card, which the base Pystar does not. Despite the "millions of colors" controversy, I think the monitor's a lot nicer than the Wal*Mart blue light special. And it has a keyboard and mouse included. If you wanted Apple's keyboard and mouse set for your Pystar it would cost you $90, and with that the much more appealing Apple product is within $15 or so of your Pystar.
You would need an external drive, but external drives aren't that much more than internal ones nowadays.
Even if you say, well, I don't need FireWire or Wireless networking, you're still talking about $555 for the cheapest model with no options save the OS. Add that $250 monitor and you have $705. A 1/3 price premium over $705 is about $900. So you can see that really, Apple - at least at their Refurb store - is giving you what you want at a more than fair close to 30% premium.
That being said, I still want a 8-core Mac Pro. With the $1,750 30" monitor. Guess I'm a sad case
D
I'm going to guess that the ponies was so memorable he knew he could not possibly top that. Heck, I still remember that blazing pink.
But it IS lame to have no funny stories. At all. Nothing. Every story I have read checks out as obviously true.
As far as I remember, that is unprecedented - there was always something a little crazy on Slashdot for April Fools'.
Well, hopefuly Cmdr Taco et al will know that aspect of Slashdot is missed.
I wonder what happened.
D
I was not saying it was costing Wal*Mart that much. I was in fact assuming that Wal*Mart's overheads for CD sales are virtually zero, so I can subtract that figure off from the original cost estimates. In a real record store, you have to set it up in a more expensive location than Wal*Mart, such as a shopping mall, and you hopefully will hire employees who have at least some knowledge of music, and who will actually want to help customers. Finally, you want to present your music in an attractive, well organized way so people will actually look at it. All of those things push overhead way higher than Wal*mart, which is the point I was trying to make.
The label's share of expenses was a lot more fair 10 years ago, when they actually had to provide very expensive recording studio time. I remember looking at the credits of Steely Dan's excellent "Gaucho" album and finding that something like 100 people and four different recording studios participated in this. I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that the label picked up the tab for all those flights from NYC to LA to Hawaii to make that recording, and the salaries and travel expenses of all those other nice folks who worked on the album. That was probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and of course after spending all that money the label deserved the lion's share of the income.
Now that you can block out a room in your house, buy a 2.8ghz 8-core Mac Pro and either Logic Pro or Protools(*), a microphone and a few other odds and ends and have a recording studio, I have to assume that the label's profit margins have soared. It looks like they must have put most of that soaring into overhead instead of profits, or they wouldn't be in such bad shape today.
D
(*) For the sake of all that is holy, don't buy Protools. My rant, but there are plenty of others.
Annoying, granted, but a way to differentiate the products you buy at independent retailers from the Wal*Mart product.
The actual cost of bleeping out the music, or re-mixing it to remove profanity is likely to be only a couple of hours of studio time, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.
I am no supporter of the profanity-laced stuff I hear that seems like an attack on the customer more than music, but if the customers like it it's surely a good way to keep independents alive with "uncensored" music. But they will only survive if the difference is reasonble - 20%, not 50%.
D
All very reasonable costs, but if they're on the road, they are selling concert tickets, and if they are selling concert tickets they are making more than enough money to cover these expenses and far more.
If you have one concert a month and it sells out a 15,000 seat venue at $50 a ticket you're grossing $750,000 a month. I don't know what the venue deal is like but I'm sure you get to keep at least half the money and clearly $100,000 a month is going to be money well spent, and I'll bet most bands could do a concert a week, not a concert a month.
They don't need a dime from CD sales to cover any of that.
What strikes me is that if you go with Wal*Mart, a lot of those expenses vanish - Wal*Mart is going to buy these CDs for $9.72 to sell them at $9.72. So you should not have to pay distribution fees ($0.90), retailer profit ($0.80) or retailer overhead ($3.89). The total of that is $5.59. $15.99 - $5.59 = $10.40.
Marketing/Promotion costs $ 2.40 per CD? That seems like an awful lot. I would think that if Wal*Mart automatically gave the $9.72 CDs good positioning in the store, you would not have to pay any of that. These are going to be acts with name recognition so no promotion should be necessary. So your total costs go down to $ 8 a CD and you are actually making a respectable profit on $9.72, especially since $1.70 of that $ 8 is "Label profit" already.
So if you can sell a CD for $ 9.72 and it costs you (8-1.70) to make, then you're actually making a profit of $3.42, which is actually more than what you make on that $ 15.99 retail price.
I think Wal*Mart's position is very reasonable.
But in the mean time, the labels might consider that by not dropping prices they charge independents they have killed the independents. If they want to not have to deal with ruthless, relentless Wal*Mart, selling to independents at the same price they sell to Wal*Mart would help them exist. Then promotion consists of giving independents a few extra copies of albums to keep for themselves and recommend to customers. No way something like that costs $2.40 per CD.
If people see the same CD they could buy for $15.99 for $9.99 at Wal*Mart, they are going to buy at Wal*Mart. But I'll bet that for a lot of people if they could buy for $11.99 at an independent or $9.99 at Wal*Mart they would go for the independent because they like going there. The independent doesn't have to beat Wal*Mart, it just has to be somewhat competitive and offer a more pleasant buying experience. If you could see labels selling the music for $9, giving Wal*Mart $1 in profit and the independents $3, then that would be fine, and people would start buying at independent stores again.
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Maybe the question I really wanted to ask was, what is the benefit of mashups from the point of view of the application being called?
For example, what does Flickr gain from the availability of the Flickr API?
In other words, I'm not saying "Hey, I'm against Mashups", I'm saying "Look, I don't understand Mashups. They seem downright deadly from a business perspective. Why are people eager to create software that can be involved in mashups when the business case looks like I should run and hide?"
I'd like to know what I'm missing, in other words.
Any clues?
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One more thought: Come to think of it, the myspace worm, which disrupted myspace for weeks and made Samy a hero, albiet a hero with a criminal record, could be thought of as a mashup. It used services made available by myspace in what I think even myspace would consider a highly creative, albiet demented, manner. Is that the future of computing? Should we want it to be?
I think I understand what it is - a way to standardize information retrieval and posting via URLs.
... which means they take your site's functionality, put their ads around it and suck out all the revenue.
... and we are supposed to encourage this? Are we nuts?
But what's the excitement all about? I would think that for most site owners, this would be a disaster, not a boon.
It sounds like a graven invitation for others to do stuff with your site
Furthermore, it seems like something that makes trying to break your site much easier since crack efforts can be done using standard methods for which the weaknesses are well known. So some smart guy can find a weakness in the REST code and all of a sudden everyone who's followed the rules can be automatically exploited.
Google encourages you to use their maps, because it builds loyalty to them, and you are probably using their ad network anyway so they don't lose much revenue. But for most sites, mashups are going to virtually eliminate revenue, cost bandwidth and overall make your life miserable. They are the modern equivalent of linking to images on someone else's site
So tell me, what does REST do for me, as a site owner and developer, as opposed to what it does for others, such as people creating mashups and the like?
Are there any ways in which mashups can be made profitable or worth encouraging, for people who don't own their own ad networks?
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A former boss of mine owned a Mooney prop plane (a bit faster than the Cessna, I think about 170 knots) and I found the routine at private airports refreshingly easy - go to the plane, walk around it to make sure nothing's fallen off, run up the engine and take off. The checklist isn't that hard, and much of it can be done during the brief wait for a take off slot.
I loved the freedom associated with being able to take off and land at any time, at any airport. In this particular case, he could leave out of Van Nuys airport, about 15 minutes from his home, instead of LAX which would have taken a grinding hour and a half to get to.
I will admit that flying a private plane is disappointingly non-luxurious - his interior felt more like a Subaru than a Mercedes - but even though I was not very good at physically flying the plane I enjoyed changing the frequencies on the radios and navigation systems. (This was before GPS took off in a big way - we used the old beacon system.)
I would have surely preferred a jet but I liked flying private better than commercial. As I remember it cost him about $55 per flight hour to run, including overhauls, and he certainly believed it penciled out for him economically. He had to carry fairly heavy amounts of baggage for the trade shows we went to and that definitely helped.
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It's very possible that companies like Adobe or TurboTax would do well with that kind of arrangement. For TurboTax or Adobe software, I'll bet the cost of the packaging + the retail markup they give Amazon or CompUSA is 30% or more of the price. And they still have to pay for advertising, to make people aware of the product.
In the case of iPhone applications, Apple's handling the advertising, the promotion, the packaging (well, it's not necessary anymore, but you get the idea), the retail markup and credit card fees. It's a solid deal - neither a ripoff for them nor a freebee for developers, but a good honest deal benefitting both sides.
I strongly suspect that if there was TurboTax(tm) for iPhone(tm) that was sold for a similar price to TurboTax for Mac or PC, Intuit would make about the same overall margin for it.
So I have now concluded, reasonably in my view, that Apple's proposed monopoly is fair - they are not abusing their position by charging above market for their services. Now, we address the question of why we couldn't simply have unfettered freedom to develop phone software.
I am one of the few Slashdotters who has witnessed the painful effects of a phone virus. It's no joke since phone software can make calls on your behalf to high-toll numbers or send expensive text messages. The virus I encountered sent MMS messages continuously to everyone in the phone owner's address book. My friend, who got it on her phone in the Philippines, was faced with a $300 phone bill when it was all over - and being a middle class person in a very poor country, that would be like a $3,000 phone bill for us -- just impossible to pay.
This situation is not the RIAA. The analogy would be if someone created a song designed to destroy your stereo, so you would have to buy a new one, or that would sneak advertisements in your music stream and cause your stereo to crash. As far as I know, nobody has yet created a song that would do either of those things, and so there is no reason to censor songs in order to protect your stereo equipment. But people have, and will, created software that will do very similar things to this example, and so Apple has to step in to make sure its customers are protected. In practice, it's not unlike including anti-virus software in the OS, except that anti-virus software is horribly ineffective, so the focus is on keeping evil software out of your phone in the first place.
So I can see both sides. As a developer, of course I don't want to pay for the certificate. But from the point of view of a phone maker who needs to protect his brand, It's genuinely necessary for any submitted software to be checked before it goes on a phone. This is a very small price to pay to avoid harmful software, which does exist. Nokia, the maker of my friend's phone, fixed this problem by requiring developer certificates in the same way Apple is, and so you don't hear much about harmful phone software. But without the certificates and other precautions, there's the real possibility of bad problems ahead.
Apple's system protects everyone involved and ensures a dynamic, powerful market for phone software. We have to sacrifice a little freedom because we are being allowed to tamper with people's phones, which are their lives. If you think otherwise, OpenMoko and Android beckon.
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No wonder I got modded down!
A slip of the finger.
The described incident occureed in 2006.
Sorry about that.
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It was a Nokia 6600. Interesting phone. As I remember the hardware was very attractive but the UI was confusing. I remember it taking more time to figure out where the web browser was in the thing than to actually download and eradicate the virus.
Here's your proof that this virus exists:
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/commwarrior.shtml
You are clearly wrong that no phone virus causing monetary harm has ever existed. MMS messages cost money to send. This virus sent hundreds of them. I will admit I only have her word that the virus caused her a $300 phone bill. But I believe MMS messages cost about two Philippine pesos (at the time $ 0.20) to send. When she discovered the problem, her phone was continuously sluggish and so I have no problem thinking she might have sent a thousand or so messages, so close to $300 in MMS.
I am not an expert about virus propagation, but I suspect you need millions of users for it to be financially worthwhile to write a virus. Nokia/Symbian does have that critical mass. I do not believe there are enough jailbroken iPhones to be a sufficiently fertile market for a virus, but if you could do it on all iPhones it might be. Furthermore, if you jailbreak you iPhone, you and not Apple are responsible for your acts. So you could get a virus on your phone but Apple would not be liable in any way.
Curiously enough, the iPhone's third party software development is done through a model surprisingly similar to what we expect Apple to do. Installer.app is a centralized repository for iPhone software. I would certainly assume that if someone added a virus to installer.app's list of software it would be rapidly removed and the developer blacklisted. Most people are relying on installer.app instead of searching the Internet for software.
While the existing mechanism is probably very safe, I think Apple is right in being concerned about viruses,especially as adding software to the iPhone spreads from what is probably a community of a few hundred thouand at most to a community of millions.
Hope that was of interest.
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The security question is not a red herring. I have witnesses a phone virus and the results are not pretty.
A good friend of mine lives in the Philippines, where expensive cellphones are status symbols. In 1996, when I was paying her a visit, she had the latest, fanciest Nokia. It got a virus, and the virus started sending hundreds of X-rated advertising MMS messages to everyone she knew. It was both embarrassing and expensive, since the phone companies over there charge for each individual message.
Fortunately, I was with her at the time and was able to fix the problem with f-secure's anti-virus software for the phone, but the result was a $300 phone bill the phone company refused to write off. My friend is in the upper middle class in the Philipines, and that means a $1,000 monthly income. The phone bill devastated her.
So don't ignore the cellphone virus threat. It can cost real people real money and genuine embarassment thanks to the annoyance and subject matter of those messages. Fortunately for her, most of her friends didn't have the fancy cellphones needed to receive those messages (and catch the virus) but it was still no fun at all explaining them to people.
So don't understate the virus threat. Steve definitely doesn't want stuff like that happening to his beloved iPhone, and as a happy iPhone owner, I can't blame him one bit.
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I think you overestimate the rationality of people.
Guys tend to write the hot chicks, no matter what. And they get rejected by the hot chicks. Eventually they get bored and stop writing.
Nobody writes the homely chicks except those who think the homely chicks are hot chicks. (They are the people who get luckiest, I think.)
Match never showed enough distinctive about the person to make me know what would be a good thing to write them. OKCupid seems a lot better since you can learn quite a bit about people from their various tests, quizzes and questions.
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When I was loaned the computer in question, it had one of those horrible spyware programs that directs you to worthless search pages spontaneously every five minutes or so.
It took me about four hours to figure out how to get rid of it.
After that, you can guess that I was not frightfully keen on giving the program a chance or figuring out the good features it had.
However, thanks for the tips. I will use them next time I have to use IE.
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I think it's likely that Donald Knuth will be dead before he finishes The Art of Computer Programming, so if you think that is his most valuable work you might consider his typography obsession an unfortunate loss.
On the other hand, for many people his typography obsession was of great value to them, since there are millions of TeX-formatted papers around that would have had to use some other tool if it weren't for Knuth.
And he pulled the exact same university salary either way. Did he make more money on The Art of Computer Programming than The TeXbook? I'm going to guess that he lives comfortably either way, so that aspect probably doesn't matter.
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Bennett Hazelton was in fact a recent high school graduate, if I have his chronology right. A few years back he was about 15 years old and very involved in anti-censorware causes and unless I miss my boat, that's why he's a Slashdot contributor in the first place. If my memory serves, he made some solid contributions to that cause, and so I don't think it's appropriate to put him down as a teenager. He's a teenager with a track record.
So I am happy to defend the guy, even though I don't know him personally.
His essay makes an excellent point that Vista gratuitously changed things that were working fine before. A lot of corporate types have found the changes in IE 7 annoying, and when I use IE to make sure my web sites work on it, I have to agree with them. The removal of the menu is extremely annoying to anyone who's wanted to click "View Source". Sure, you can bring it back (go to the View menu to do it), but there's no question that the removal of the menu was not the best idea.
I think it's important for Slashdot readers to hear from intelligent people like him who are not necessarily computer experts. This is a giant echo chamber of computer experts who all pass around opinions forged from a common bond we feel as technical guys. Every once in a while, it's a good idea to face the world of people outside our tech bubble. By confronting them and understanding more about them, we can make better software.
As for Bennett's observations about Vista, the guy should get a Mac. If you want sleek elegance that works, Apple has it covered. Go to an Apple Store, young man, and enjoy.
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I don't think even the most radid Apple partisans say that Apple or Steve Jobs are without flaw.
They merely have fewer flaws than the competition.
Sadly, that doesn't mean people like your friend don't occasionally get burned.
I feel your pain, and that of your friend.
That being said, I have every confidence that you have had similar Linux problems that stole comparable amounts of time from your life.
Operating systems are imperfect, sadly, just like the people who build them.
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I'm usually much more keen on reading text on the screen than watching videos, but in this case you really have to see the fake iPhone demo to get an idea for the sheer awfulness of the thing.
Apple took two and a half years, 200 engineers and many millions of dollars to build iPhone. You really can't expect that to be replicated quickly. Ironically enough, I believe the fake iPhone was on the street before the real thing! It's most likely a cosmetic variation on an already existing phone, although I was unable to identify the software's origin. (Perhaps someone can clue me in - it seemed like it was probably Chinese designed.)
You are correct, however, that the Chinese did listen to some of the complaints. The fake iPhone has a removable battery and will work on any network. After seeing that video, however, I think you'll agree that is pretty thin gruel compared to the enormous advantages the real thing has in other areas.
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Disclaimer: The author loves his iPhone. Best thing since sliced bread, etc.
The thought occurs to me that the audience of O'Reilly books is people who at least are curious enough to take a stab at tinkering with their machines. It sounds like this is meant for people who are ambitious enough to move in that direction but don't know where to start. It actually sounds like a good idea for me.
As a member of the Apple camp, I'll probably check out a copy just to laugh at all the problems the other side is having, but I do think this is a useful book for those stuck on the other side.
Editing the registry is quite painful even to someone like me who's quite experienced with computers. As an Apple loyalist, I've done quite well in ignoring Microsoft products for the last half decade or so, but occasionally I need to use Windows to check out how IE mangles my web sites. A friend loaned me his PC and it took about a day of steady work to eradicate enough spyware to make his copy of IE usable. (When I saw how bad a problem he is I got him to use FireFox). If this book helps people in this kind of situation I think it would be well worth its purchase price.
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Well, you can justify a Windows upgrade by saying that you have to stay competitive as an operating system company, but it is difficult to defend this when the new product is as heartily disliked as Vista seems to be. Then you've just spent billions of dollars going backwards. Maybe that's why Bill is gone.
I think a lot of corporations would love to see client access licenses go away. Those things are bloody expensive and moving to Linux or even MacOS X on the server side is enormously cost effective for that reason.
I know Apple has come up with some kind of turnkey Exchange substitute on Leopard Server - have you heard anything about it?
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Well, if those prices are authentic, Apple looks pretty good. You can get an 8-core Mac Pro for $2,799 and it's a pretty usable machine (including 2GB RAM) but not including the huge disk space your system has). It has a lovely, easily expandable case and of course a great OS that pretty much everyone loves.
But if you want enough computing horsepower to run Vista on a brand new machine, how about this? It has a quad core processor, 2gb RAM and a 500gb hard drive for $709.99. It does have an integrated video card but you could always buy that $60 card you mentioned and deactivate the onboard video. And amazingly enough, a whole bunch of people (see the reviews) got it for $550. What's not to like?
This certainly confirms your idea of buying Vista with a new computer - Vista Home Premium is about $200, right? Why buy that when for $350-500 more you can have a new, bang-up to date computer? You'd spend more trying to upgrade your old machine.
However, one of the reviewers mentioned the achilles heel of this computer. I have to quote it:
"Outside of hating Vista,this is the best computer purchase I've ever made !"
I'll stick with Apple. Yep, they're expensive. But their hardware and software combination is the best there is.
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I'm actually a little confused about something.
...
A few years back, I worked for a mid-sized corporation (about 200 employees), and we bought computers when the old ones fell apart. I'm sure big corporations are similar except they might have a 3-year replacement cycle instead of "when the HD fails". Whenever a computer dies, its operating system license generally dies with it, and so whenever you buy a new computer you are giving MS revenue.
In light of this, does it really matter whether companies upgrade to Vista at all? If they simply replace their computers with XP computers, and keep on using them for the same period, won't MS get basically the same revenue no matter what?
Microsoft probably did shoot themselves in the foot since there is no cost-effective way to upgrade a machine built before (roughly) January 1, 2007 to Vista. So you will never sell any significant number of Vista upgrades, no matter what happens. Vista will eventually come in when support for XP is dropped by hardware manufactures, which clearly is not going to be any time soon.
Of course if the big corporations change their upgrade cycles from three years to four, then Microsoft really is in trouble
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I think you should be able to build a less high screen when you attach it to a thinner notebook. When I see a MacBook Air at the Apple Store I will try comparing it and see if the total height is slightly lower than the MacBook.
I'm surprised there is so much of an uproar over this machine. To me, the two most important things about a computer's usability are the quality of its keyboard and display, and nobody seems to be disputing that they are both first-rate. For my lamentably aging eyes, I think a 13" screen would have to be considered an absolute minimum. I haven't hooked up Ethernet to my laptops in years, and while I would really prefer more storage, this is obviously a great machine for shuttling yourself between airports. I can imagine myself carrying a stylish attache case instead of an ugly computer bag thanks to this computer.
I won't buy it, though, because I need a desktop replacement with a big screen. I think most people who have been reviewing this machine really want it but in the end are similar types of users to me. This machine isn't meant for us, it's meant for the guy who spends half of his time around airports, and to that person, being able to slip a computer into a manila envelope happens to be pure gold.
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Perhaps he really does understand children as a sort of fork();? That call, as it happens, does create an identical child process!
This is an age-old problem and is not confined to computer geeks. Many fathers who want to "pass on their own line" have had similar problems.
Geeks tend to be more flexible than that, though - more so in practice than in theory. We're talking theory here so we can start as we want and then adopt to conditions.
I have to say he is truly looking at a tiny number of females likely to understand his ad and want to respond, though. And that is not meant as an insult to the wonderful geek females around - they are just 10% of the geek population!
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