I could see Ben Franklin spending about 5 minutes being amazed by a laptop before taking it apart to see how it worked. If he lived today, he would be a pony-tailed uberhacker.
Back then, Microsoft had versions of BASIC for various platforms, including the Apple ][ plus I had, and for the C64. Back before they started trying to kill the rest of the computing world, they had stuff that would run on different platforms. I even had a version of MS Flight Simulator for the Apple. Mmmm, sweet monochrome wireframe graphics. Ah, memories...
Well, helpdesk personnel are often expected to be psychic in order to diagnose problems where the end user has no clue, so if he's been in Tech Support, I really don't see a problem with the clairvoyance part.
Although the first sentence is true, the last is certainly not true - even if the more expensive product has a lower markup in proportion to cost, it may still have a higher margin.
It may have more gross profit dollars, but the margin will be lower. Margin is a ratio. Specifically, it is gross profits divided by revenue. The gross profit dollars on a large item may be larger than the gross profit dollars on a small item with a larger markup, but the margin itself will be lower.
Example:
Cost of $9, markup of $1, GP $1, revenue of $10
Margin = $1/$10, or 10%
Cost of $95, markup of $5, GP $5, revenue of $100
Margin = $5/$100, or 5%
I might make more GP dollars on the big-ticket items, but I for every dollar I invest in big-ticket inventory, I make less profit back as a percentage of my investment. Items with lower cost but higher markup (like cables and service plans) help bring the overall margin% on the deal up.
If Company A needs overall margins of 6% to survive, but competition on its big-ticket items drives margins down below that, the only way they can afford to justify selling that item and stay in business is if the sale of the big-ticket item drags along enough add-on sales to bring the overall margin to an acceptable level.
In computer distribution, I've often seen Windows sold or even below cost, with back-end rebates making the disty partner almost whole at the end. The Windows 95 launch had some shenanigans like that.
I don't know what'd be funnier: Microsoft actually paying people to spend time on Slashdot, or people like you who believe this is even a plausible story. It makes Slashdot appear very important, I know. But it isn't.
They in fact do pay a PR firm (Waggener Edstrom) handsome amounts of money to do lots of stuff, including recruiting shills to "independently" review and blog favorably about their products, including conducting pro-MS Twitter campaigns, and the list goes on. Microsoft's history of astroturfing various forums in an attempt to influence opinion (directly or through PR lackeys) is well-known. The idea that they wouldn't deign to waste their time on slashdot is either deceitful, disingenuous, or naive. We may not be as big or important as Microsoft, but yeah, they've heard of us.
Based on years of reading/posting here, I'd say the above-mentioned mods were out of the norm. They might be just statistical noise, or quite likely enthusiastic MS fanbois, but there is a reasonable chance that MS or their flunkys had something to do with it. There isn't much difference between a fanboi and an astroturfer anyway.
Slashdot stories and commenters have screamed MS is going down for years, and they're doing better than ever now.
Better than ever? Their flagship desktop OS is a flop and losing ground to competitors on all sides; their profitable Office offerings are under attack from several entities such as Sun, Google, and what may be a patent troll lawsuit; their merger/takeover attempt with Yahoo was repeatedly spurned; the EU's ankle-biting has gotten fiercer as of late; their browser, despite a recent and belated decision to properly support industry standards, is steadily losing marketshare; in a booming world of online music distribution their music service failed miserably; and their overhyped mobile platforms aren't gaining much traction.
They may still be the 800 pound gorilla, but that doesn't mean they are a healthy gorilla
Exactly... advertise a loss leader, and make up for it by selling a $2 cable for $35 plus a $200 service plan that does little more than cover the warranty period plus a little. The margins in most hardware was gone a long time ago.
These are stories because in an industry saturated with kool-aid and known for marketing gross exaggerations and lies, Microsoft stands out as the worst.
I really don't think you and I are that far apart. My somewhat informed opinion is that MS is worse than the others. Also, you seem to have moved in Mac in place of Linux, which was the focus of the earlier comments.
No, I'm referring to a practice from the 90's when NT was trying to unseat Netware. There was an incentive to ship extra Client Access Licenses to boost the total of "deployed" NT users. I'm sure that the resulting numbers found their way into a marketing slide showing NT "dominance". MS used a number of BS marketing tricks to create the appearance of success, and kept at it until fiction became reality. Of course, if Novell's distribution strategy wasn't completely retarded at the time, they might have given themselves a fighting chance.
I noticed several mild comments in this thread hit with -1, Troll. I think the MS astroturfers have mod points. The joke is on them; if they use up their points now, there will be nothing left later when the really nasty anti-MS stuff comes out.
Who is to say which OS is safer for example? It entirely depends on what metric you use to measure it
Like, say, which is more prone to being part of a trojan-infected zombie botnet scamming info for identity fraud and/or spreading spam?
I don't blame Microsoft for selling their products. That is what a software company SHOULD do.
If they can't sell their product without bullshitting (or at least keeping it to a tasteful minimum), isn't that a condemnation of their own product?
The only reason these are "stories" is because people [incorrectly] feel Linux is a community effort...
Actually, they are stories because this is an attempt to bullshit people, and people hate being bullshitted. People on slashdot especially hate seeing people who might not know any better being bullshitted by a cynical, self-serving marketing group. I don't mean to absolve other tech companies (most, if not all, do the same or similar), but Microsoft has long occupied a special place in tech history as one of the most blatant bullshit-marketing organizations ever. I personally have been involved in tech distribution for about 15 years, and no other vendor comes close to their level of arrogance or deceit. I've been to an RSA conference where Microsoft astroturfed a whole session that was promoted as a balanced and impartial hack-off, but instead was a scripted Windows lovefest. I've seen Microsoft flat-out lie to peoples' faces. I've seen them ship free product to people who didn't order it to inflate their "install base" of a particular item.
These are stories because in an industry saturated with kool-aid and known for marketing gross exaggerations and lies, Microsoft stands out as the worst.
... but this is SOP. Every tech company out there mixes batches of kool-aid to serve to their customers and retail partners. Of course, most aren't this pathetically bad at it.
your answer specifically implies that alcohol should be banned
Not at all. I homebrew beer, and firmly believe in my right to consume alcohol. Plus, prohibition has been tried and didn't work. My point is that I see no value in letting more genies out of the bottle (har har, no pun intended). There is a vast world of difference between having a drink or two and sucking on a crackpipe.
the mess the current situation has created is a RESULT of prohibition. not the existence of any given drug.
I disagree. Many drug problems exist independent of prohibition. Addiction does not depend on prohibition. In fact, the point I was trying to make with alcohol was not that it should be banned, but that legalization DOES NOT eliminate the problems. Here is an example of a legal drug causing lots of problems. Do we really need to multiply that? Alcohol and pot are baby aspirin compared to coke, meth, heroin.
like meth, sure, it's got a lotta downsides, i know from personal experience. but what alternative is there?
Soo... you're saying that a lack of legally available meth is the problem? What alternative is there? How about not taking it? Works for most people.
do you even comprehend how big the legal drug abuse problem is now?
Okay, I'll bite. I'll admit I'm no nuclear expert; all comments below are strictly IMHO/AFAIK.
Let me clarify my original comment. In the US, we seem intent on burying the waste we produce. It seems to me that since most of a conventional "used" reactor rod is usable fuel, reprocessing our "waste" first is a good idea. Too bad our government is slow to support it.
Also, alternative reactor designs offer the ability to burn what was once considered waste, leaving stuff that has a shorter half-life, meaning that the length time required for sequestering it is less, which seems like a good thing.
Right. Because we need more potent alternatives to crystal meth.
Look, if you want to legalize pot, go for it. No big deal. But sweeping up all "psychoactive drugs" together and legalizing them is a dumb fucking idea, and yes, there are a lot of people to stupid to manage taking psychoactive drugs responsibly. You want an example? Look at alcohol. Look at the deaths resulting from the widespread legal use of said drug, and tell me with a straight face that the answer is to unleash big pharma to make and market more chemical toys to play with.
And I'll bet that the same folks who are saying "The government should just, like, legalize drugs, dude" today are the ones who would be raving about a government/big pharma conspiracy to enslave our minds and empty our wallets with a flood of psychoactive drugs if your Utopian fantasy came to pass.
Operation, perhaps. But the long-term waste storage problem is a real bitch. Of course, without outdated government concern over proliferation, we might have fuel reprocessing coupled with more advanced reactors, leaving us with waste that is nasty for a shorter term, and a whole lot less of it overall.
Training a special ops soldier will require exposure to dangers which may generally require pain sensitivity as a survival factor. Hence, creating the CIPA soldier would likely kill him/her.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably exactly what they are looking for. Say, 1 guy in the middle east buying 19 tickets or so, none for himself ...
I could see Ben Franklin spending about 5 minutes being amazed by a laptop before taking it apart to see how it worked. If he lived today, he would be a pony-tailed uberhacker.
The billing address lets them know where to mail your remains.
Back then, Microsoft had versions of BASIC for various platforms, including the Apple ][ plus I had, and for the C64. Back before they started trying to kill the rest of the computing world, they had stuff that would run on different platforms. I even had a version of MS Flight Simulator for the Apple. Mmmm, sweet monochrome wireframe graphics. Ah, memories ...
Well, helpdesk personnel are often expected to be psychic in order to diagnose problems where the end user has no clue, so if he's been in Tech Support, I really don't see a problem with the clairvoyance part.
Although the first sentence is true, the last is certainly not true - even if the more expensive product has a lower markup in proportion to cost, it may still have a higher margin.
It may have more gross profit dollars, but the margin will be lower. Margin is a ratio. Specifically, it is gross profits divided by revenue. The gross profit dollars on a large item may be larger than the gross profit dollars on a small item with a larger markup, but the margin itself will be lower.
Example:
Cost of $9, markup of $1, GP $1, revenue of $10
Margin = $1/$10, or 10%
Cost of $95, markup of $5, GP $5, revenue of $100
Margin = $5/$100, or 5%
I might make more GP dollars on the big-ticket items, but I for every dollar I invest in big-ticket inventory, I make less profit back as a percentage of my investment. Items with lower cost but higher markup (like cables and service plans) help bring the overall margin% on the deal up.
If Company A needs overall margins of 6% to survive, but competition on its big-ticket items drives margins down below that, the only way they can afford to justify selling that item and stay in business is if the sale of the big-ticket item drags along enough add-on sales to bring the overall margin to an acceptable level.
In computer distribution, I've often seen Windows sold or even below cost, with back-end rebates making the disty partner almost whole at the end. The Windows 95 launch had some shenanigans like that.
Hey, I'm not saying you can't screw Linux up if you try hard enough. ;)
I don't know what'd be funnier: Microsoft actually paying people to spend time on Slashdot, or people like you who believe this is even a plausible story. It makes Slashdot appear very important, I know. But it isn't.
They in fact do pay a PR firm (Waggener Edstrom) handsome amounts of money to do lots of stuff, including recruiting shills to "independently" review and blog favorably about their products, including conducting pro-MS Twitter campaigns, and the list goes on. Microsoft's history of astroturfing various forums in an attempt to influence opinion (directly or through PR lackeys) is well-known. The idea that they wouldn't deign to waste their time on slashdot is either deceitful, disingenuous, or naive. We may not be as big or important as Microsoft, but yeah, they've heard of us.
Based on years of reading/posting here, I'd say the above-mentioned mods were out of the norm. They might be just statistical noise, or quite likely enthusiastic MS fanbois, but there is a reasonable chance that MS or their flunkys had something to do with it. There isn't much difference between a fanboi and an astroturfer anyway.
Slashdot stories and commenters have screamed MS is going down for years, and they're doing better than ever now.
Better than ever? Their flagship desktop OS is a flop and losing ground to competitors on all sides; their profitable Office offerings are under attack from several entities such as Sun, Google, and what may be a patent troll lawsuit; their merger/takeover attempt with Yahoo was repeatedly spurned; the EU's ankle-biting has gotten fiercer as of late; their browser, despite a recent and belated decision to properly support industry standards, is steadily losing marketshare; in a booming world of online music distribution their music service failed miserably; and their overhyped mobile platforms aren't gaining much traction.
They may still be the 800 pound gorilla, but that doesn't mean they are a healthy gorilla
Exactly ... advertise a loss leader, and make up for it by selling a $2 cable for $35 plus a $200 service plan that does little more than cover the warranty period plus a little. The margins in most hardware was gone a long time ago.
I'm not saying this to flame, I'm just stating that no group's hands are clean in advertisement.
What I said:
These are stories because in an industry saturated with kool-aid and known for marketing gross exaggerations and lies, Microsoft stands out as the worst.
I really don't think you and I are that far apart. My somewhat informed opinion is that MS is worse than the others. Also, you seem to have moved in Mac in place of Linux, which was the focus of the earlier comments.
Over it? Naw. This is going to be the year of the Linux desktop. You wait and see. I just know it ...
No, I'm referring to a practice from the 90's when NT was trying to unseat Netware. There was an incentive to ship extra Client Access Licenses to boost the total of "deployed" NT users. I'm sure that the resulting numbers found their way into a marketing slide showing NT "dominance". MS used a number of BS marketing tricks to create the appearance of success, and kept at it until fiction became reality. Of course, if Novell's distribution strategy wasn't completely retarded at the time, they might have given themselves a fighting chance.
I noticed several mild comments in this thread hit with -1, Troll. I think the MS astroturfers have mod points. The joke is on them; if they use up their points now, there will be nothing left later when the really nasty anti-MS stuff comes out.
More expensive doesn't always mean higher margins. That's only the same if the markup is proportional to the cost, which it often isn't.
Linux vendors would do exactly the same thing
Except that they don't. Not like this.
Who is to say which OS is safer for example? It entirely depends on what metric you use to measure it
Like, say, which is more prone to being part of a trojan-infected zombie botnet scamming info for identity fraud and/or spreading spam?
I don't blame Microsoft for selling their products. That is what a software company SHOULD do.
If they can't sell their product without bullshitting (or at least keeping it to a tasteful minimum), isn't that a condemnation of their own product?
The only reason these are "stories" is because people [incorrectly] feel Linux is a community effort ...
Actually, they are stories because this is an attempt to bullshit people, and people hate being bullshitted. People on slashdot especially hate seeing people who might not know any better being bullshitted by a cynical, self-serving marketing group. I don't mean to absolve other tech companies (most, if not all, do the same or similar), but Microsoft has long occupied a special place in tech history as one of the most blatant bullshit-marketing organizations ever. I personally have been involved in tech distribution for about 15 years, and no other vendor comes close to their level of arrogance or deceit. I've been to an RSA conference where Microsoft astroturfed a whole session that was promoted as a balanced and impartial hack-off, but instead was a scripted Windows lovefest. I've seen Microsoft flat-out lie to peoples' faces. I've seen them ship free product to people who didn't order it to inflate their "install base" of a particular item.
These are stories because in an industry saturated with kool-aid and known for marketing gross exaggerations and lies, Microsoft stands out as the worst.
... but this is SOP. Every tech company out there mixes batches of kool-aid to serve to their customers and retail partners. Of course, most aren't this pathetically bad at it.
"Kickbacks" is a dirty word. The Microsoft world prefers "back-end rebates" and "spiffs".
If it weren't for the OS X reference, I'd say that sounded like Steve Ballmer off his meds and trolling AC.
Huh ... would you look at that. I stand corrected. I should have known that, too.
your answer specifically implies that alcohol should be banned
Not at all. I homebrew beer, and firmly believe in my right to consume alcohol. Plus, prohibition has been tried and didn't work. My point is that I see no value in letting more genies out of the bottle (har har, no pun intended). There is a vast world of difference between having a drink or two and sucking on a crackpipe.
the mess the current situation has created is a RESULT of prohibition. not the existence of any given drug.
I disagree. Many drug problems exist independent of prohibition. Addiction does not depend on prohibition. In fact, the point I was trying to make with alcohol was not that it should be banned, but that legalization DOES NOT eliminate the problems. Here is an example of a legal drug causing lots of problems. Do we really need to multiply that? Alcohol and pot are baby aspirin compared to coke, meth, heroin.
like meth, sure, it's got a lotta downsides, i know from personal experience. but what alternative is there?
Soo ... you're saying that a lack of legally available meth is the problem? What alternative is there? How about not taking it? Works for most people.
do you even comprehend how big the legal drug abuse problem is now?
Better than you think.
Okay, I'll bite. I'll admit I'm no nuclear expert; all comments below are strictly IMHO/AFAIK.
Let me clarify my original comment. In the US, we seem intent on burying the waste we produce. It seems to me that since most of a conventional "used" reactor rod is usable fuel, reprocessing our "waste" first is a good idea. Too bad our government is slow to support it.
Also, alternative reactor designs offer the ability to burn what was once considered waste, leaving stuff that has a shorter half-life, meaning that the length time required for sequestering it is less, which seems like a good thing.
Your thoughts?
Right. Because we need more potent alternatives to crystal meth.
Look, if you want to legalize pot, go for it. No big deal. But sweeping up all "psychoactive drugs" together and legalizing them is a dumb fucking idea, and yes, there are a lot of people to stupid to manage taking psychoactive drugs responsibly. You want an example? Look at alcohol. Look at the deaths resulting from the widespread legal use of said drug, and tell me with a straight face that the answer is to unleash big pharma to make and market more chemical toys to play with.
And I'll bet that the same folks who are saying "The government should just, like, legalize drugs, dude" today are the ones who would be raving about a government/big pharma conspiracy to enslave our minds and empty our wallets with a flood of psychoactive drugs if your Utopian fantasy came to pass.
Operation, perhaps. But the long-term waste storage problem is a real bitch. Of course, without outdated government concern over proliferation, we might have fuel reprocessing coupled with more advanced reactors, leaving us with waste that is nasty for a shorter term, and a whole lot less of it overall.
Feral ghouls?
Training a special ops soldier will require exposure to dangers which may generally require pain sensitivity as a survival factor. Hence, creating the CIPA soldier would likely kill him/her.