It depends:-) Some products are sold as loss leaders, with intent to promote other, more expensive products. Other software is just cheap by design, and thus costs less. Other software is mass marketed (games are in this category), and the high volume allows you to drop costs.
Basically, there are only few factors that stand in your way when you want to sell your software through retail channels. Some are listed below:
Store chains love to get exclusivity on your product. And they will get away with that if you are small.
Store chains want 50% or more of sale price. You negotiate. If your volume is low, you get nothing.
Stores won't buy the boxes outright, but want them on consignment instead. You are stuck with ownership.
Boxes get damaged, returned, etc. You have to repackage and repair them.
Unsold merchandise does not bode well with your balance sheets.
There are minimum quantities of everything - boxes, CDs, plastic inserts, books / leaflets, etc. You can't just go and order 100 aluminum CDs stamped - you have to order something like 100,000 and that is a lot of money.
If you insist in lower quantity, prices shoot through the roof. Instead of chinese factory, your boxes will be made in Mexico or in USA, and the costs are much higher.
Product support. Like it or not, people will be calling with stupid questions. You'd better allocate some staff to answer them.
... there are more. I am not even aware of all of them.
Some of that $25 software that you see on the shelves is triply discounted already, slated to be sold at any cost or just be thrown away. Shelf space costs money, and no store owner will waste it.
If we apply these constraints to RedHat, for example, then we see that they invested into lots of real CDs, and made a lot of cheap boxes. So they avoided those two pitfalls. But the low sales and high returns bit them very painfully. Myself, I bought RedHat boxed set only once, and that is probably not that bad compared to the rest of computer users.
So again, everything depends on the type of software, on the target market, on the advertising, on the cost, on the perceived need for the software... and still companies make pricing and product development mistakes all the time.
There is yet another reason. If the software is popular, it will be cracked. Your expense on dongles won't help you at all.
Normally, dongles are used with a very low volume, specialty software. Crackers are not interested in such software; imagine, for example, a package to control a sophisticated CNC or some industrial robot. A cracker won't ever get his hands on the set of software and hardware necessary to run the thing. Here the dongle serves as a barrier against owner of a herd of CNCs, so that he should buy a license for every machine he controls, instead of getting one and helping himself with the rest. A machine shop owner is not a cracker, and he won't even know how to contact one.
So dongles are a social solution to a social problem. They can not be applied mindlessly.
Yes, I was referring to boxed products. If you have only soft copy to sell then you don't have that overhead, and any price > 0 would be profitable.
But big companies like Adobe don't like this approach. First of all, their overhead is extreme. Your $50 will go through ten accountants, this alone will cost more than $50. Then there are tons of support people (HR etc.), they want their salaries too. Then the company probably owns the building and the land, so taxes and loans come into play. Productivity of developers also drops, since they are constantly at meetings discussing nothing.
All said and done, a large company needs large income. A company of size of Adobe won't even see your $50, it would evaporate before reaching the bank account, very much like rain in a desert. You also must consider the cost of technical support which is usually provided on a limited basis (30 days or so). A product that is available as download only may generate a lot of support calls.
Yet another catch is that most mature companies have to compete with their own products of earlier release. Photoshop 7, as people say, is as good as it should be. Same with Windows 2000. So what is the reason to upgrade? Companies have to come up with all kinds of schemes to force the customer to buy newer stuff. But proliferation of low cost copies will be working against this desired pattern - more and more little people will have the older, but still functional software, and they definitely won't upgrade - thus holding you back. You can't offer upgrade incentives to little people as you can do to big companies.
Yet another reason I can think of at the moment is how do you tell a difference between a hobbyist and not a hobbyist? From legal POV, once you buy a product you can use it to its full capacity (without cracking it.) So if someone buys Photoshop for $50 and then starts printing commercial materials and earning big money, Adobe would want to have a piece of the action. Now they do it by selling Photoshop for a lot of money. What will they do if they already made a $50 sale? They can't go back and undo the deal. Even if they put some conditions into the license, it is not likely to be enforceable given millennia of practice of using tools for any purpose you want as long as you bought them. So it's trouble however you put it.
It costs more than $50 to make the box with a CD, to ship it to stores, and to sell it to you. In other words, they would have loss on every box sold. Remember how RedHat abandoned retail recently? Same reason - not profitable. Too few people buy, not enough volume to get even.
Nowadays if something is cheap, it has been made overseas. I bought speakers for $4.65 - and they even work! Incredible. In USA it would cost $2 only for the labor to package them, not counting even making the speakers:-)
An average hardware USB dongle is sold to ISVs for about $50 apiece. I'd say it seriously affects prices of any software that is iself sold below $500. Business-wise, even that 10% overhead is significant.
Actually, it is done frequently in software business, regardless of who asks for it. You can not do everything; you can not write TCP or Bluetooth or WAP stacks, you can not write your own routing implementation, you can not do many things. What you can do is your "core competency" - something that you do better than anyone else. You buy the rest, and include these 3rd party components into your product. Look at a splash screen of any software, and you will see how many 3rd party copyrights are mentioned there - because the vendor used their IP. And once you do that, you fully support the resulting product (though the components' vendors will support you, in turn.)
Even in this scenario manned spacecraft is not very practical. The problem is that it can "shoot down" only LEO satellites; but most of real satellites are on elliptical orbits, or are geostationary. Quite a few satellites are on polar orbits, also out of reach of any manned spacecraft.
If you recall, Shuttle was used a few times to launch military satellites, and once the payload was released the engine on the satellite was activated and the whole thing moved onto much higher orbit.
Anti-satellite weapons, if they are to be developed, would be just one-shot, multi-stage rockets. You can launch them to any orbit and reach any satellite; man can not be easily launched anywhere but onto the LEO. This simple solution also allows you to shoot at multiple satellites at the same time (and not one after another - which in a war would be kind of counterintuitive). And you don't have to rely upon your only asset (the shuttle) to do the job.
All this said, I believe that direct military value of a shuttle is overrated. Sure, the space program contributes to rocket science, and through it to the army. But there is no direct benefit.
The russians started their Buran project to copy the space shuttle because they thought it could/would be used as a strategic nuclear arms platform (almost zero detection time because there would be no missile launches)
Buran, as well as Shuttle, would be mostly useless as a weapon. It is too visible, carries very little weight compared to regular rockets, and has to be launched ahead of time in case of war. That alone makes it a very poor weapon platform.
Also, would anyone explain to me how could one drop a bomb from the spacecraft sitting on LEO? And preferrably so that the bomb falls to the surface in a reasonable time, hits the "landing site" with 100 meters precision, and does not burn up while blazing through the atmosphere:-)
It's not as bad as you paint it. Every other country manages it just fine, why US can't? Is it cursed, or what?
The longstanding US policy of interfering in everyone's else affairs is the worst offender. Cancel that, and most of the problems disappear. Pull the troops out of foreign locations, and the rest of the problems is gone. Stop being a world policeman (without anyone asking) and you will be safe. Stop teaching others how to live, and you will be respected. And nothing of that requires "doing more to solve the problems" - all the problems are of US's own making and reside primarily in Washington, DC.
The decline actually stopped years ago, it's just the news haven't reached CNN yet. Putin is smart, unlike Yeltsin, and he knows his job.
With regard to space exploration, nobody knows what will happen in 10 years, but just few days ago Russia announced that it is capable and willing to support and maintain the ISS for as long as it takes, many years if need be. Given that Salyut and Mir stations were manned since 1975, there is little doubt in this promise. Currently we expect Shuttles to fly in one year, but who knows what the engineers will find once they open them up for the mandatory inspection...
"Boldly go where no man has gone before" - does it ring any bell?
Or maybe you think that Starfleet will be magically formed by millions of chinese ballet dancers who got the money after the space program got canceled?
If you don't take risks you stagnate. I refer you to ST:{TOS,TNG,...} - replace all instances of risk taking with, say, hightailing, and try to imagine how different the stories will be!
There is no harm in going through checklists again and again, especially if your life depends on it, and if you have absolutely nothing else to do for nearest 20 hours:-) That flight manual is probably the only book he got up there.
But isn't it curious - the only government capable of doing the right thing (to build the moon base) is not a democracy but an aristocracy...
It only proves once more the observation of ancients: democracy dies as soon as the voters figure out that they can vote to give money to themselves... past that point it's all downhill. Such a "democracy" will never invest into a risky endeavor; it would rather spend its resources on something more close to the ground, something safer, something traditional...
It takes a person with power and desire to use that power to take risks. The society is risk-averse, and there would be no flights to the Moon if the fate of the program would be voted on.
What you say is true. Please say thanks to your government for all that wonderful job they are doing recently, in Yugoslavia, in Sudan, in Iraq, and elsewhere. That's why you get treated so badly, though -you- as a person do not deserve any of that.
The problem is that americans as a collective organism deserve all that. Americans vote, americans agree to attack countries, americans support apartheid... so americans as a class get the beating, for they have the power to stop a bad government and they don't use it. It means they agree with the government. And in fact polls are right, most do agree (who don't know any better.)
What to do about it? I hope the answer is obvious, and it begins with a well educated voter and well functioning democracy. None of that is in evidence at the moment, sadly, and none expected to show up next year.
National pride won't allow that. Otherwise Soyuz capsules would be sold by dozens (cheap, compared to Shuttle, and would be only cheaper in volume.)
Also, Soyuz capsules don't perfectly fit the requirements of the ISS (where most of the traffic is going to be.) NASA wants more people, and Soyuz can't house more than three without a major redesign (such as making it longer, which will affect aerobraking, so more formulas to crunch...)
However, NASA's desires don't play well with realities either. Larger capsules require larger life support systems, and weight starts pulling you down. Soyuz has its size not just because some engineer threw a coin and it ended up on its edge:-)
One of more realistic plans is to refurbish old american capsules and reuse them (or make more of those.) At least that is safe because it was tested, so it will work for sure. Anything else means risky development when you have no position to fall back (or even to stand while you are biulding the new stuff - shuttles are not flying anywhere any time soon.)
I don't think it is wise to divide the world into two categories - one of "dangerous" countries, and another of conquered countries. China is not dangerous at all; it is simply powerful. There are lots of other countries (Pakistan & India, Israel, North Korea, and don't forget USA itself) which are far more dangerous.
the central planners decided that they needed economists, and that she should be one of them
Every cloud has a silver lining. By hhoosing the recommended occupation she has a better chance to find a job. Even the worst government planner can reasonably predict future demand for certain professions given the necessary data. Even I can tell that a good accountant won't starve in any country, especially in a fast growing one.
The opposite is evident in the USA. Many people study social sciences (and universities readily take their money and teach them), but there is no demand, so where do these art majors end up?
Of course, if she was given an ultimatum "become an accountant, or be shot" then that wouldn't be nice. But I doubt very much that this was the case. Large, bureaucratic governments don't pay that close attention to mere people.
Probably the ticket to University of Colorado had this requirement attached; but that is hardly unexpected - they pay for her tuition, so they get to choose what she studies. Otherwise she is free to switch to anything she desires, as long as she can pay for the pleasure. Or she could stay at home and be intellectually free; that would work too.
you, for what you promote today as a person, and not India who erred almost a century ago as a collective entity. Back then what historical experience of comparable magnitude could they draw upon? Not much. But today, having seen numerous dictators and tyrants and shauvinists of all colors and of all countries, a reasonable person should know better than to paint a fairly large (I'd say) country with the widest brush imaginable.
What really matters is not who someone's grandfather fought (being forced to do so by his undemocratic government) almost a century ago. What matters is who _you_ fight today, and on what merit. And do not forget, you will be treated the same way you treat others; this law of nature seems to be a universal ancient wisdom.
Terminals are 10x if not 100x cheaper than a PC even if you don't count the maintenance. A terminal needs no ongoing maintenance (it either works or it doesn't); a PC requires you know what.
If you have 1000 workers at 1000 work positions, and if you care about the data, then dumb terminals are the way to do it. IBM sells AS/400 of all sizes, and they are hugely popular - because they are cheap on per terminal basis, and they are very reliable.
Russia (and many russians) is currently wary of the USA. Too many threats and unfriendly moves come from North American continent recently. For example, NATO expansion, military alliance with Georgia, military bases in Central Asia, Iraq and Afghanistan... whether you like it or not, Rissia sees itself surrounded, because it is. Why those restless, emire-building americans can't just stay at home and be happy, like everyone does?
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Basically, there are only few factors that stand in your way when you want to sell your software through retail channels. Some are listed below:
Some of that $25 software that you see on the shelves is triply discounted already, slated to be sold at any cost or just be thrown away. Shelf space costs money, and no store owner will waste it.
If we apply these constraints to RedHat, for example, then we see that they invested into lots of real CDs, and made a lot of cheap boxes. So they avoided those two pitfalls. But the low sales and high returns bit them very painfully. Myself, I bought RedHat boxed set only once, and that is probably not that bad compared to the rest of computer users.
So again, everything depends on the type of software, on the target market, on the advertising, on the cost, on the perceived need for the software... and still companies make pricing and product development mistakes all the time.
Normally, dongles are used with a very low volume, specialty software. Crackers are not interested in such software; imagine, for example, a package to control a sophisticated CNC or some industrial robot. A cracker won't ever get his hands on the set of software and hardware necessary to run the thing. Here the dongle serves as a barrier against owner of a herd of CNCs, so that he should buy a license for every machine he controls, instead of getting one and helping himself with the rest. A machine shop owner is not a cracker, and he won't even know how to contact one.
So dongles are a social solution to a social problem. They can not be applied mindlessly.
But big companies like Adobe don't like this approach. First of all, their overhead is extreme. Your $50 will go through ten accountants, this alone will cost more than $50. Then there are tons of support people (HR etc.), they want their salaries too. Then the company probably owns the building and the land, so taxes and loans come into play. Productivity of developers also drops, since they are constantly at meetings discussing nothing.
All said and done, a large company needs large income. A company of size of Adobe won't even see your $50, it would evaporate before reaching the bank account, very much like rain in a desert. You also must consider the cost of technical support which is usually provided on a limited basis (30 days or so). A product that is available as download only may generate a lot of support calls.
Yet another catch is that most mature companies have to compete with their own products of earlier release. Photoshop 7, as people say, is as good as it should be. Same with Windows 2000. So what is the reason to upgrade? Companies have to come up with all kinds of schemes to force the customer to buy newer stuff. But proliferation of low cost copies will be working against this desired pattern - more and more little people will have the older, but still functional software, and they definitely won't upgrade - thus holding you back. You can't offer upgrade incentives to little people as you can do to big companies.
Yet another reason I can think of at the moment is how do you tell a difference between a hobbyist and not a hobbyist? From legal POV, once you buy a product you can use it to its full capacity (without cracking it.) So if someone buys Photoshop for $50 and then starts printing commercial materials and earning big money, Adobe would want to have a piece of the action. Now they do it by selling Photoshop for a lot of money. What will they do if they already made a $50 sale? They can't go back and undo the deal. Even if they put some conditions into the license, it is not likely to be enforceable given millennia of practice of using tools for any purpose you want as long as you bought them. So it's trouble however you put it.
Nowadays if something is cheap, it has been made overseas. I bought speakers for $4.65 - and they even work! Incredible. In USA it would cost $2 only for the labor to package them, not counting even making the speakers :-)
An average hardware USB dongle is sold to ISVs for about $50 apiece. I'd say it seriously affects prices of any software that is iself sold below $500. Business-wise, even that 10% overhead is significant.
You still may love apples, but hate the only store where you can buy them.
Actually, it is done frequently in software business, regardless of who asks for it. You can not do everything; you can not write TCP or Bluetooth or WAP stacks, you can not write your own routing implementation, you can not do many things. What you can do is your "core competency" - something that you do better than anyone else. You buy the rest, and include these 3rd party components into your product. Look at a splash screen of any software, and you will see how many 3rd party copyrights are mentioned there - because the vendor used their IP. And once you do that, you fully support the resulting product (though the components' vendors will support you, in turn.)
If you recall, Shuttle was used a few times to launch military satellites, and once the payload was released the engine on the satellite was activated and the whole thing moved onto much higher orbit.
Anti-satellite weapons, if they are to be developed, would be just one-shot, multi-stage rockets. You can launch them to any orbit and reach any satellite; man can not be easily launched anywhere but onto the LEO. This simple solution also allows you to shoot at multiple satellites at the same time (and not one after another - which in a war would be kind of counterintuitive). And you don't have to rely upon your only asset (the shuttle) to do the job.
All this said, I believe that direct military value of a shuttle is overrated. Sure, the space program contributes to rocket science, and through it to the army. But there is no direct benefit.
Buran, as well as Shuttle, would be mostly useless as a weapon. It is too visible, carries very little weight compared to regular rockets, and has to be launched ahead of time in case of war. That alone makes it a very poor weapon platform.
Also, would anyone explain to me how could one drop a bomb from the spacecraft sitting on LEO? And preferrably so that the bomb falls to the surface in a reasonable time, hits the "landing site" with 100 meters precision, and does not burn up while blazing through the atmosphere :-)
The longstanding US policy of interfering in everyone's else affairs is the worst offender. Cancel that, and most of the problems disappear. Pull the troops out of foreign locations, and the rest of the problems is gone. Stop being a world policeman (without anyone asking) and you will be safe. Stop teaching others how to live, and you will be respected. And nothing of that requires "doing more to solve the problems" - all the problems are of US's own making and reside primarily in Washington, DC.
With regard to space exploration, nobody knows what will happen in 10 years, but just few days ago Russia announced that it is capable and willing to support and maintain the ISS for as long as it takes, many years if need be. Given that Salyut and Mir stations were manned since 1975, there is little doubt in this promise. Currently we expect Shuttles to fly in one year, but who knows what the engineers will find once they open them up for the mandatory inspection...
Or maybe you think that Starfleet will be magically formed by millions of chinese ballet dancers who got the money after the space program got canceled?
If you don't take risks you stagnate. I refer you to ST:{TOS,TNG,...} - replace all instances of risk taking with, say, hightailing, and try to imagine how different the stories will be!
FYI: There is no Statue of Liberty in Canada. But there is liberty. These two facts are orthogonal.
What did you expect from a military guy? You'd get the same answer from any soldier, in any country. That's their job.
There is no harm in going through checklists again and again, especially if your life depends on it, and if you have absolutely nothing else to do for nearest 20 hours :-) That flight manual is probably the only book he got up there.
It only proves once more the observation of ancients: democracy dies as soon as the voters figure out that they can vote to give money to themselves... past that point it's all downhill. Such a "democracy" will never invest into a risky endeavor; it would rather spend its resources on something more close to the ground, something safer, something traditional...
It takes a person with power and desire to use that power to take risks. The society is risk-averse, and there would be no flights to the Moon if the fate of the program would be voted on.
The problem is that americans as a collective organism deserve all that. Americans vote, americans agree to attack countries, americans support apartheid... so americans as a class get the beating, for they have the power to stop a bad government and they don't use it. It means they agree with the government. And in fact polls are right, most do agree (who don't know any better.)
What to do about it? I hope the answer is obvious, and it begins with a well educated voter and well functioning democracy. None of that is in evidence at the moment, sadly, and none expected to show up next year.
Also, Soyuz capsules don't perfectly fit the requirements of the ISS (where most of the traffic is going to be.) NASA wants more people, and Soyuz can't house more than three without a major redesign (such as making it longer, which will affect aerobraking, so more formulas to crunch...)
However, NASA's desires don't play well with realities either. Larger capsules require larger life support systems, and weight starts pulling you down. Soyuz has its size not just because some engineer threw a coin and it ended up on its edge :-)
One of more realistic plans is to refurbish old american capsules and reuse them (or make more of those.) At least that is safe because it was tested, so it will work for sure. Anything else means risky development when you have no position to fall back (or even to stand while you are biulding the new stuff - shuttles are not flying anywhere any time soon.)
I don't think it is wise to divide the world into two categories - one of "dangerous" countries, and another of conquered countries. China is not dangerous at all; it is simply powerful. There are lots of other countries (Pakistan & India, Israel, North Korea, and don't forget USA itself) which are far more dangerous.
Every cloud has a silver lining. By hhoosing the recommended occupation she has a better chance to find a job. Even the worst government planner can reasonably predict future demand for certain professions given the necessary data. Even I can tell that a good accountant won't starve in any country, especially in a fast growing one.
The opposite is evident in the USA. Many people study social sciences (and universities readily take their money and teach them), but there is no demand, so where do these art majors end up?
Of course, if she was given an ultimatum "become an accountant, or be shot" then that wouldn't be nice. But I doubt very much that this was the case. Large, bureaucratic governments don't pay that close attention to mere people.
Probably the ticket to University of Colorado had this requirement attached; but that is hardly unexpected - they pay for her tuition, so they get to choose what she studies. Otherwise she is free to switch to anything she desires, as long as she can pay for the pleasure. Or she could stay at home and be intellectually free; that would work too.
you, for what you promote today as a person, and not India who erred almost a century ago as a collective entity. Back then what historical experience of comparable magnitude could they draw upon? Not much. But today, having seen numerous dictators and tyrants and shauvinists of all colors and of all countries, a reasonable person should know better than to paint a fairly large (I'd say) country with the widest brush imaginable.
What really matters is not who someone's grandfather fought (being forced to do so by his undemocratic government) almost a century ago. What matters is who _you_ fight today, and on what merit. And do not forget, you will be treated the same way you treat others; this law of nature seems to be a universal ancient wisdom.
Neanderthals never developed agriculture because they wanted to solve their hunting problems first.
Obviously, the government of China sees farther than its own nose. Good for them, good for us all.
I didn't know that you wrote (or lovingly own) the "Mein Kampf" :-(
If you have 1000 workers at 1000 work positions, and if you care about the data, then dumb terminals are the way to do it. IBM sells AS/400 of all sizes, and they are hugely popular - because they are cheap on per terminal basis, and they are very reliable.
Russia (and many russians) is currently wary of the USA. Too many threats and unfriendly moves come from North American continent recently. For example, NATO expansion, military alliance with Georgia, military bases in Central Asia, Iraq and Afghanistan... whether you like it or not, Rissia sees itself surrounded, because it is. Why those restless, emire-building americans can't just stay at home and be happy, like everyone does?