That they are doing something that decreases costs for both companies while increasing performance for their customers, while still being fair to their competitors, in no way suggests that they will next decide to be unfair to their competitors and decrease performance for their competitor's customers (who are also their customers as well).
Making that leap is stupid, because there are a number of significant disincentives for doing so. The most significant is the fact that Verizon's customers may choose a different internet provider if their favorite websites become slow, thus wasting all of Google and Verizon's investment/savings.
And you're an idiot for buying into the "99" bullshit. The cheapest iPad is, for all intents and purposes, $500, and it only goes up from there (hence the "+").
Would it really make you feel better if they had said $499+ instead?
Are you really that locked into the consumer mindset?
Here's some perspective, from the creators of Ricochet Infinity, which has a 92% piracy rate (taken directly from this Gamasutra article). Pay particular attention to the second half, which has their conclusions. The emphasis is mine:
Below are the results of Reflexive.com sales and downloads immediately following each update:
Fix 1 – Existing Exploits & Keygens made obsolete – Sales up 70%, Downloads down 33%
Fix 2 – Existing Keygens made obsolete – Sales down slightly, Downloads flat
Fix 4 – Keygens made game-specific – Sales up 13%, Downloads down 16% (note: fix made after the release of Ricochet Infinity)
From the results above, it seems clear that eliminating piracy through a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales – but sometimes it can have no benefit at all. So what does that mean for the question about whether a pirated copy means a lost sale? The decreases in downloads may provide a clue to that
As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.
Though many of the pirates may be simply shifting to another source of games for their illegal activities, the number is nonetheless striking and poignant. The sales to download ratio found on Reflexive implies that a pirated copy is more similar to the loss of a download (a poorly converting one!) than the loss of a sale.
Though that doesn’t make a 92% piracy rate of one of our banner products any less distressing, knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective.
In other words, the easy barriers to piracy, like being clever with storing state information and keys, can be well worth the effort. Beyond that, though, it's probably not worth the money you spend trying to stop the piracy for most games. For Ricochet Infinity, only 0.1% of pirateers were willing to purchase the game.
DRM works for Steam because the prices are very reasonable (unlike most retail games), and the DRM is very non-intrusive. This provides very little incentive to pirate the game, it's so much easier to use Steam than to pirate it makes it worth it to buy it.
If you buy a game on Steam, you can use it on any computer you want - you just have to re-download it. That is how you add value to a game. With most DRM schemes these days, if you buy a game and upgrade your computer, you're screwed. If you buy the game but don't have a fast internet connection, you're screwed (see any recent games by EA - I pirate them on principle, I wouldn't even buy them normally).
The piracy rates for retail games that are both DRM and non-DRM are strikingly similar (in the 80-90% range for all casual games, with many non-DRM games at the low end), so you must assume the non-DRM games come out slightly ahead because of fewer resources spent creating the DRM scheme.
Ricochet Infinity is a similar type of casual game that has DRM and also had a 92% piracy rate. World of Goo is a similar type of game with no DRM and an 82% piracy rate.
So, is the DRM doing anything? There's actually really no telling. Maybe R.I.'s piracy would have been 98% without the DRM? Maybe the DRM does nothing, and if they dropped the price they'd have a 40% piracy rate?
It is impossible to prove what might have been. These types of decisions are leaps of faith on the company's part, and if they read the tea leaves right they can make huge piles of cash - Valve showed that by chopping the price of Left 4 Dead. If they read the tea leaves wrong, though, they can go out of business. It's a lot easier to read the tea leaves wrong than right.;)
The problem is with the argument that DRM does not increase sales while decreasing value.
You can still be against DRM for other reasons, but games like Machinarium and World of Goo are providing some evidence against that particular argument.
(neither World of Goo nor Machinarium are crappy games and so the argument that crappy games don't get legit sales isn't very applicable)
That seems reasonable, in a vacuum. But there is solid evidence that DRM has no positive effects on the sales, and it absolutely has a negative effect on the cost to produce the game. Ricochet Infinity is another popular casual game that did have DRM and has a 92% piracy rate, which is the same as Machinarium's 92% rate and significantly higher than World of Goo's 82% piracy rate.
With just these three games as samples, it seems that the piracy rate for DRM games is as high or higher than that of non-DRM games.
Obviously someone needs to take a serious look at the numbers - comparing similar games of similar quality and popularity and see if the DRM is actually doing anything for the revenues of the game. Also, how much piracy can be mitigated by lowering the price of the game? I for one would never pay $20 for Machinarium or World of Goo, no matter how good they are. I might pay $10 though (emphasis on 'might'). How much of the piracy is just an indication that the price is too high?
There is still no real evidence to suggest those who pirated the game would have bought it instead if they couldn't get it for free. It makes sense to assume that at least some portion of the people who pirated the game would have found a way to purchase it instead, but how many? There's no telling, and that's the real problem with the DRM debate.
For mainstream titles like MW2, however, that there's no way in hell a mid-income family's computer would run sometime this decade, the "pirates" have no excuse so feel free to flame them instead.
Are you serious? A $50 video card will let you run a game like that on modest settings on a $300 computer. A $100 video card will let you crank most of the important settings all the way up, but that might be a bit out of reach.
Hell, my $500 Costco computer with just the shitty Intel integrated graphics can handle a game like Settlers 7 (which is surprisingly incredibly detailed and complex) on low settings. If I felt like playing it more, I'd go buy a $50 video card and crank shit up.
Pretty much the only PC games I play are those with insane DRM schemes, and I pirate them, just to screw over the company that thought so little of me that they'd spend all that money on a scheme that will last less than a month. Philosophical differences really, and I want to stick it to them. I'm not one of the ones who would have ever bought the game in the first place though, even though I do have plenty of money for it.
I don't play games much any more though, I've pretty much grown out of it. I tried WOW for a while, but just couldn't get into it, if that tells you anything about me.
You've missed the point: did they sell more than they would have without the piracy, or less?
It's nearly impossible to answer. I've never heard of Machinarium, but I've heard "World of Goo" is incredibly addictive. Still, how many, if any, of the 82% who pirated World of Goo would have bought it on their own?
The World of Goo guys had an 82% piracy rate, and it's pretty much expected. Another, similar class game with DRM had a 92% piracy rate. So what's the difference? 10% lower piracy rate and none of the cost to implement the DRM.
Frankly, the piracy rate doesn't seem to change at all unless the DRM is insanely complicated. Implementing such a DRM scheme is incredibly expensive, and still won't eliminate the piracy.
World of Goo also has a $20 price tag. How many of those pirateers would have bought it instead if it were only $10? Valve showed that by dropping the price in half on the right game you can quadruple the sales, doubling your money.
It's a tough call to make, but it's my gut feeling that the high piracy rate is an indication that their prices are too high, not that non-DRM games are doomed to failure. I'll bet with a $10 price tag they'd have gotten more than a 100% increase in legitimate sales.
Vitamin D is not an energy source, which is what you said here:
Organisms can perfectly draw energy directly from the sun, and animals and humans still do (such as vitamine D production).
That's total bullshit, and shows incredible ignorance about how the body works. Not one joule of energy an animal's body uses comes from the sun. We use the sun in vitamin D production because a proton can split the molecule, and it's cheaper to let the sun do it than to do it ourselves.
So the sun does save a little energy, but it does not, in any way, shape, or form, produce energy for animals to use. The only way animals get energy from the sun is by eating plants, or eating animals that eat plans. It is an indirect transfer of energy, not a direct one.
Reptiles don't get their energy from the sun. If left to bake out in the sand they would die in short order - they die when their fat reserves, obtained by consuming other animals, run out - not when the sun goes down. The sun adds absolutely nothing to their life-sustaining processes. Again, what it does is save energy by bringing the body up to to a good temperature to facilitate the body's chemical reactions - which are the source of all the energy reptiles use.
In both cases, the sun is acting as a facilitator, it is not acting as a source of life-sustaining energy. Claiming the sun is a direct source of energy for reptiles is like claiming a room's ambient heat is a source of energy for a chemical reaction. It's stupid. The reaction may occur more easily at a given temperature, but you can't say it's adding energy to the reaction. The energy all animals use comes from disassembling the ATP molecule in the cells. It's a chemical process, the fuel for which comes from other animals or plants. Period.
Note that plants also use ATP, but they create it from sugar generated via photosynthesis. Animals either get their sugar directly from plants, or they create it from the tissue of other animals. No photosynthesis involved.
In-N-Out Burger is another one you've probably never heard of if you haven't been to the southwest. Easily the most popular fast food joint in several large cities, yet there are only a handful of them because it isn't just privately owned, it's family owned. No franchising, and probably never will be any.
They treat their employees like gold too. Have you ever heard of a fast food place that pays its managers $100,000 a year to start? Assistant managers start at a little under $60,000. Part-time workers start at $10 an hour.
If you've never been, and you happen to be in Arizon, California, or Nevada, you should definitely hit up an In-N-Out Burger.
Indeed, you need about 20 people to run those websites, at most, and maybe $2 million a year, tops. I don't expect ad revenue to be more than about $3 million - $4 million a year, which is enough for a couple people to get rich.
They still have about 5,000 employees, though.
That's 4,980 too many to be supported by their website revenues, and is why they are losing billions with a 'b' dollars every year.
It will take a few years, Jupiter is 8 times as far away from Earth as Mars, so however long it took to get to Mars, it will probably be about 8 times that (maybe less, depending on how long it can accelerate).
I didn't look up past missions to compare, but if I had to guess I'd say about 4-6 years to get there.
Do you have any idea the forces that are involved? Jupiter's tidal forces are so strong they may warp its moons enough to generate significant amounts of heat inside its moons - moons that are the size of planets (Ganymede is bigger than Mercury, and nearly as big as Mars).
We're not talking about just orbiting Jupiter either - we've done that before. We're talking going down into low-Jupiter orbit to study it up close and personal like. It's almost 320 times as massive as the Earth, so it's going to be hit with those insane tidal forces. It's also generating incredible amounts of radiation which will easily fry all the electronics on-board.
I mean, for heaven's sake, they've built it out of 500 pounds of titanium to withstand the radiation and crushing gravity. That's not exactly a heavy metal. They'll be ending the mission by diving it into the surface, and they are not even expect it to survive to the surface with all that protection.
Check the prices too, the Dell and Lenovo are seriously overpriced, and two of the Macs are actually cheaper than the cheapest Dell or Lenovo the University sells.
I just did a side-by-side comparison of the cheapest Mac and the cheapest Dell, and the major difference is really the warranty. In fact, the discount for the machines only really seems to cover the software - I was able to get about the same prices sans-software on both. The warranty the University chose for the Dell, though, is frankly far superior to Apple's warranty. Dell's basic warranty is about the same as Apple's warranty, but they chose the most expensive Dell warranty instead, which accounts for the $200 difference in price (completely, actually).
The Dell has better memory, hard drive, and video, but the Macbook has a beefier processor.
It just seems strange to me that they chose to sell the mid-grade Dell and Lenovo business laptops instead of the much cheaper consumer grade laptops. I was able to put together a 14" (couldn't get a consumer grade 13", only 11" or 14") Dell Inspiron that beats the pants off the Mac for less than $1200. You can't get Dell's killer warranty with these laptops, though, which is really probably the only reason UVA chose the business class instead of the consumer class laptops. Still, they should have put one up there at least, with their school discount they could have gotten them for under $1000 easy.
So the big deal at the store is the Macs happen to be the cheapest they sell, based solely on the limited models they offer.
You're basically just turning your mac into a windows machine or a linux terminal based on the situation, neither of which is "using a mac".
You've got to admit though, it's damn fine security practice!
Though, there's no real intrinsic value to using the Mac, you could do the same scheme with a Windows PC (Windows inside Windows) and be just as secure for 3/4-1/2 the price of the Mac.
Except you can't use any new software after 3 years anyway, since Apple gives fuck all about backwards compatibility. Who cares if your laptop is a rock if you can't upgrade the software it runs?
I have a Windows 7 machine running a Windows 98 application - try that with a Mac and tell me how it works out for you.
I don't know if you're sarcastic, but I can't stand the stupidity of your comment.
I know you're just trolling, but I can't stand the stupidity of your comment. The term "Personal Computer" has nothing at all to do with IBM. It refers to consumer-based computers, and the term was around a full decade before IBM shipped their first PC (frankly, IBM did not believe the PC would ever take off - they thought it was just a fad).
The first complete personal computer (not an electronics kit) was the Commodor PET. The first commercially successful personal computer was the Apple ][. The best selling PC model of all time, the Commodore 64, was released just a year after the first IBM-PC, and the IBM machine didn't touch the Commadore's 17 million unit sales figure (obviously).
IBM, frankly, was almost a decade late to the party. They sold a very expensive desktop in the mid 70's for scientific and business use, but nothing at all targeted to the home user until the early 80's.
The association between the IBM compatible PC and the term "PC" was gradual. It was fueled by IBM's growing popularity in the 80's, and cemented by Microsoft's business savvy - in particular, by not selling their OS to IBM, allowing it to be licensed for use on any compatible hardware. Since hardware had to be made compatible with the IBM to use DOS, and DOS was the only real OS a hardware manufacturer could buy without writing their own, the IBM compatible PC and Microsoft took off like a rocket ship.
Eventually, PC became synonymous with IBM compatible PC, but it has absolutely nothing at all to do with the name of the first IBM PC. It was simply because the IBM PC was so popular in the 80s, that if you were going to buy a "PC", you were going to buy an IBM or IBM compatible PC.
In other words, you're an idiot, so why don't you please die instead?
I don't. I've used all three systems (Mac least of all, primarily Windows and Linux quite a bit) and I'd pay extra for a Mac (even though I despise Apple) before I'd use a Linux laptop again (really I'll take Windows and have it all;).
In a vacuum, Linux is fine. It can do anything Windows or Mac can do just fine. In fact, if you know what you're doing, you can do most things as well or better with Linux. The problem is, Linux is not fundamentally better in any way, and it is a hell of a lot harder to use, even when you do know what you're doing. So you save $100 in exchange for years of difficulty. Since I value my time, just a couple hours of extra difficulty completely eliminates any monetary savings (and really there are none anyway, unless you're choosing against a Mac - you can't buy a Linux PC for less than a Windows PC).
Vista, for all its problems, was still easier to use than Linux. And I'm talking the nice, user friendly distros like Ubuntu.
People have been saying for over a decade now that the year of Linux on the desktop is just around the corner, but the fact is it will always be just around the corner. Linux just can't keep up the pace the commercial guys set, plain and simple.
There's the basic problem all phones have of the human body (the hand, specifically) reducing the signal quality by a very small amount. This is physics, and is absolutely unavoidable.
Then there's the much more serious problem of bridging a contact on the iPhone's case, which de-tunes the antenna and thereby reduces the signal quality far beyond the usual signal loss caused by holding a phone in your hand.
Jobs tried to cover up the problem specific only to iPhones by confusing it with a problem all phones have. Without the bumper case (which prevents your hand from bridging the antenna) the iPhone's antenna performance is significantly worse than any other phone on the market. Period.
That's not exactly what I call "making it better". They had a serious, and frankly stupid, design flaw caused by Apple wanting metal on the outside of the case for aesthetic purposes. Jobs basically called his customers stupid for pointing out there was a problem, and then fired the guy ultimately responsible (though not directly to blame for the problem).
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Classic slippery-slope logical fallacy.
That they are doing something that decreases costs for both companies while increasing performance for their customers, while still being fair to their competitors, in no way suggests that they will next decide to be unfair to their competitors and decrease performance for their competitor's customers (who are also their customers as well).
Making that leap is stupid, because there are a number of significant disincentives for doing so. The most significant is the fact that Verizon's customers may choose a different internet provider if their favorite websites become slow, thus wasting all of Google and Verizon's investment/savings.
And you're an idiot for buying into the "99" bullshit. The cheapest iPad is, for all intents and purposes, $500, and it only goes up from there (hence the "+").
Would it really make you feel better if they had said $499+ instead?
Are you really that locked into the consumer mindset?
Hehe, no kidding, me too. I was about to write a snarky reply when I realized the GP was talking about J.C. Penny, not K-Mart.
Except the Android source is freely available. Your PHONE might be locked down, but Android's source code is not.
Do you even know what "Open Source" means?
Here's some perspective, from the creators of Ricochet Infinity, which has a 92% piracy rate (taken directly from this Gamasutra article). Pay particular attention to the second half, which has their conclusions. The emphasis is mine:
Below are the results of Reflexive.com sales and downloads immediately following each update:
Fix 1 – Existing Exploits & Keygens made obsolete – Sales up 70%, Downloads down 33%
Fix 2 – Existing Keygens made obsolete – Sales down slightly, Downloads flat
Fix 3 – Existing Cracks made obsolete – Sales flat, Downloads flat
Fix 4 – Keygens made game-specific – Sales up 13%, Downloads down 16% (note: fix made after the release of Ricochet Infinity)
From the results above, it seems clear that eliminating piracy through a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales – but sometimes it can have no benefit at all. So what does that mean for the question about whether a pirated copy means a lost sale? The decreases in downloads may provide a clue to that
As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.
Though many of the pirates may be simply shifting to another source of games for their illegal activities, the number is nonetheless striking and poignant. The sales to download ratio found on Reflexive implies that a pirated copy is more similar to the loss of a download (a poorly converting one!) than the loss of a sale.
Though that doesn’t make a 92% piracy rate of one of our banner products any less distressing, knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective.
In other words, the easy barriers to piracy, like being clever with storing state information and keys, can be well worth the effort. Beyond that, though, it's probably not worth the money you spend trying to stop the piracy for most games. For Ricochet Infinity, only 0.1% of pirateers were willing to purchase the game.
The full article is worth reading.
DRM works for Steam because the prices are very reasonable (unlike most retail games), and the DRM is very non-intrusive. This provides very little incentive to pirate the game, it's so much easier to use Steam than to pirate it makes it worth it to buy it.
If you buy a game on Steam, you can use it on any computer you want - you just have to re-download it. That is how you add value to a game. With most DRM schemes these days, if you buy a game and upgrade your computer, you're screwed. If you buy the game but don't have a fast internet connection, you're screwed (see any recent games by EA - I pirate them on principle, I wouldn't even buy them normally).
The piracy rates for retail games that are both DRM and non-DRM are strikingly similar (in the 80-90% range for all casual games, with many non-DRM games at the low end), so you must assume the non-DRM games come out slightly ahead because of fewer resources spent creating the DRM scheme.
I think you mean DRM games.
Ricochet Infinity is a similar type of casual game that has DRM and also had a 92% piracy rate. World of Goo is a similar type of game with no DRM and an 82% piracy rate.
So, is the DRM doing anything? There's actually really no telling. Maybe R.I.'s piracy would have been 98% without the DRM? Maybe the DRM does nothing, and if they dropped the price they'd have a 40% piracy rate?
It is impossible to prove what might have been. These types of decisions are leaps of faith on the company's part, and if they read the tea leaves right they can make huge piles of cash - Valve showed that by chopping the price of Left 4 Dead. If they read the tea leaves wrong, though, they can go out of business. It's a lot easier to read the tea leaves wrong than right. ;)
The problem is with the argument that DRM does not increase sales while decreasing value.
You can still be against DRM for other reasons, but games like Machinarium and World of Goo are providing some evidence against that particular argument.
(neither World of Goo nor Machinarium are crappy games and so the argument that crappy games don't get legit sales isn't very applicable)
That seems reasonable, in a vacuum. But there is solid evidence that DRM has no positive effects on the sales, and it absolutely has a negative effect on the cost to produce the game. Ricochet Infinity is another popular casual game that did have DRM and has a 92% piracy rate, which is the same as Machinarium's 92% rate and significantly higher than World of Goo's 82% piracy rate.
With just these three games as samples, it seems that the piracy rate for DRM games is as high or higher than that of non-DRM games.
Obviously someone needs to take a serious look at the numbers - comparing similar games of similar quality and popularity and see if the DRM is actually doing anything for the revenues of the game. Also, how much piracy can be mitigated by lowering the price of the game? I for one would never pay $20 for Machinarium or World of Goo, no matter how good they are. I might pay $10 though (emphasis on 'might'). How much of the piracy is just an indication that the price is too high?
There is still no real evidence to suggest those who pirated the game would have bought it instead if they couldn't get it for free. It makes sense to assume that at least some portion of the people who pirated the game would have found a way to purchase it instead, but how many? There's no telling, and that's the real problem with the DRM debate.
For mainstream titles like MW2, however, that there's no way in hell a mid-income family's computer would run sometime this decade, the "pirates" have no excuse so feel free to flame them instead.
Are you serious? A $50 video card will let you run a game like that on modest settings on a $300 computer. A $100 video card will let you crank most of the important settings all the way up, but that might be a bit out of reach.
Hell, my $500 Costco computer with just the shitty Intel integrated graphics can handle a game like Settlers 7 (which is surprisingly incredibly detailed and complex) on low settings. If I felt like playing it more, I'd go buy a $50 video card and crank shit up.
Pretty much the only PC games I play are those with insane DRM schemes, and I pirate them, just to screw over the company that thought so little of me that they'd spend all that money on a scheme that will last less than a month. Philosophical differences really, and I want to stick it to them. I'm not one of the ones who would have ever bought the game in the first place though, even though I do have plenty of money for it.
I don't play games much any more though, I've pretty much grown out of it. I tried WOW for a while, but just couldn't get into it, if that tells you anything about me.
You've missed the point: did they sell more than they would have without the piracy, or less?
It's nearly impossible to answer. I've never heard of Machinarium, but I've heard "World of Goo" is incredibly addictive. Still, how many, if any, of the 82% who pirated World of Goo would have bought it on their own?
The World of Goo guys had an 82% piracy rate, and it's pretty much expected. Another, similar class game with DRM had a 92% piracy rate. So what's the difference? 10% lower piracy rate and none of the cost to implement the DRM.
Frankly, the piracy rate doesn't seem to change at all unless the DRM is insanely complicated. Implementing such a DRM scheme is incredibly expensive, and still won't eliminate the piracy.
World of Goo also has a $20 price tag. How many of those pirateers would have bought it instead if it were only $10? Valve showed that by dropping the price in half on the right game you can quadruple the sales, doubling your money.
It's a tough call to make, but it's my gut feeling that the high piracy rate is an indication that their prices are too high, not that non-DRM games are doomed to failure. I'll bet with a $10 price tag they'd have gotten more than a 100% increase in legitimate sales.
Vitamin D is not an energy source, which is what you said here:
Organisms can perfectly draw energy directly from the sun, and animals and humans still do (such as vitamine D production).
That's total bullshit, and shows incredible ignorance about how the body works. Not one joule of energy an animal's body uses comes from the sun. We use the sun in vitamin D production because a proton can split the molecule, and it's cheaper to let the sun do it than to do it ourselves.
So the sun does save a little energy, but it does not, in any way, shape, or form, produce energy for animals to use. The only way animals get energy from the sun is by eating plants, or eating animals that eat plans. It is an indirect transfer of energy, not a direct one.
Reptiles don't get their energy from the sun. If left to bake out in the sand they would die in short order - they die when their fat reserves, obtained by consuming other animals, run out - not when the sun goes down. The sun adds absolutely nothing to their life-sustaining processes. Again, what it does is save energy by bringing the body up to to a good temperature to facilitate the body's chemical reactions - which are the source of all the energy reptiles use.
In both cases, the sun is acting as a facilitator, it is not acting as a source of life-sustaining energy. Claiming the sun is a direct source of energy for reptiles is like claiming a room's ambient heat is a source of energy for a chemical reaction. It's stupid. The reaction may occur more easily at a given temperature, but you can't say it's adding energy to the reaction. The energy all animals use comes from disassembling the ATP molecule in the cells. It's a chemical process, the fuel for which comes from other animals or plants. Period.
Note that plants also use ATP, but they create it from sugar generated via photosynthesis. Animals either get their sugar directly from plants, or they create it from the tissue of other animals. No photosynthesis involved.
In-N-Out Burger is another one you've probably never heard of if you haven't been to the southwest. Easily the most popular fast food joint in several large cities, yet there are only a handful of them because it isn't just privately owned, it's family owned. No franchising, and probably never will be any.
They treat their employees like gold too. Have you ever heard of a fast food place that pays its managers $100,000 a year to start? Assistant managers start at a little under $60,000. Part-time workers start at $10 an hour.
If you've never been, and you happen to be in Arizon, California, or Nevada, you should definitely hit up an In-N-Out Burger.
Does anybody still use AIM? Wow. That's like using ICQ.
Indeed, you need about 20 people to run those websites, at most, and maybe $2 million a year, tops. I don't expect ad revenue to be more than about $3 million - $4 million a year, which is enough for a couple people to get rich.
They still have about 5,000 employees, though.
That's 4,980 too many to be supported by their website revenues, and is why they are losing billions with a 'b' dollars every year.
Certainly not the last one - apple lost $1.8bn two years running in the mid 90s, and that's not even adjusted for inflation.
There you go, it's the exception that proves the rule.
(It's a good thing nobody actually knows what that expression means, or I'd sound like an idiot!)
It will take a few years, Jupiter is 8 times as far away from Earth as Mars, so however long it took to get to Mars, it will probably be about 8 times that (maybe less, depending on how long it can accelerate).
I didn't look up past missions to compare, but if I had to guess I'd say about 4-6 years to get there.
Compared to Jupiter, they were a cakewalk.
Do you have any idea the forces that are involved? Jupiter's tidal forces are so strong they may warp its moons enough to generate significant amounts of heat inside its moons - moons that are the size of planets (Ganymede is bigger than Mercury, and nearly as big as Mars).
We're not talking about just orbiting Jupiter either - we've done that before. We're talking going down into low-Jupiter orbit to study it up close and personal like. It's almost 320 times as massive as the Earth, so it's going to be hit with those insane tidal forces. It's also generating incredible amounts of radiation which will easily fry all the electronics on-board.
I mean, for heaven's sake, they've built it out of 500 pounds of titanium to withstand the radiation and crushing gravity. That's not exactly a heavy metal. They'll be ending the mission by diving it into the surface, and they are not even expect it to survive to the surface with all that protection.
Really, we've done nothing like it before.
Check the prices too, the Dell and Lenovo are seriously overpriced, and two of the Macs are actually cheaper than the cheapest Dell or Lenovo the University sells.
I just did a side-by-side comparison of the cheapest Mac and the cheapest Dell, and the major difference is really the warranty. In fact, the discount for the machines only really seems to cover the software - I was able to get about the same prices sans-software on both. The warranty the University chose for the Dell, though, is frankly far superior to Apple's warranty. Dell's basic warranty is about the same as Apple's warranty, but they chose the most expensive Dell warranty instead, which accounts for the $200 difference in price (completely, actually).
The Dell has better memory, hard drive, and video, but the Macbook has a beefier processor.
It just seems strange to me that they chose to sell the mid-grade Dell and Lenovo business laptops instead of the much cheaper consumer grade laptops. I was able to put together a 14" (couldn't get a consumer grade 13", only 11" or 14") Dell Inspiron that beats the pants off the Mac for less than $1200. You can't get Dell's killer warranty with these laptops, though, which is really probably the only reason UVA chose the business class instead of the consumer class laptops. Still, they should have put one up there at least, with their school discount they could have gotten them for under $1000 easy.
So the big deal at the store is the Macs happen to be the cheapest they sell, based solely on the limited models they offer.
You're basically just turning your mac into a windows machine or a linux terminal based on the situation, neither of which is "using a mac".
You've got to admit though, it's damn fine security practice!
Though, there's no real intrinsic value to using the Mac, you could do the same scheme with a Windows PC (Windows inside Windows) and be just as secure for 3/4-1/2 the price of the Mac.
Except you can't use any new software after 3 years anyway, since Apple gives fuck all about backwards compatibility. Who cares if your laptop is a rock if you can't upgrade the software it runs?
I have a Windows 7 machine running a Windows 98 application - try that with a Mac and tell me how it works out for you.
I don't know if you're sarcastic, but I can't stand the stupidity of your comment.
I know you're just trolling, but I can't stand the stupidity of your comment. The term "Personal Computer" has nothing at all to do with IBM. It refers to consumer-based computers, and the term was around a full decade before IBM shipped their first PC (frankly, IBM did not believe the PC would ever take off - they thought it was just a fad).
The first complete personal computer (not an electronics kit) was the Commodor PET. The first commercially successful personal computer was the Apple ][. The best selling PC model of all time, the Commodore 64, was released just a year after the first IBM-PC, and the IBM machine didn't touch the Commadore's 17 million unit sales figure (obviously).
IBM, frankly, was almost a decade late to the party. They sold a very expensive desktop in the mid 70's for scientific and business use, but nothing at all targeted to the home user until the early 80's.
The association between the IBM compatible PC and the term "PC" was gradual. It was fueled by IBM's growing popularity in the 80's, and cemented by Microsoft's business savvy - in particular, by not selling their OS to IBM, allowing it to be licensed for use on any compatible hardware. Since hardware had to be made compatible with the IBM to use DOS, and DOS was the only real OS a hardware manufacturer could buy without writing their own, the IBM compatible PC and Microsoft took off like a rocket ship.
Eventually, PC became synonymous with IBM compatible PC, but it has absolutely nothing at all to do with the name of the first IBM PC. It was simply because the IBM PC was so popular in the 80s, that if you were going to buy a "PC", you were going to buy an IBM or IBM compatible PC.
In other words, you're an idiot, so why don't you please die instead?
I don't. I've used all three systems (Mac least of all, primarily Windows and Linux quite a bit) and I'd pay extra for a Mac (even though I despise Apple) before I'd use a Linux laptop again (really I'll take Windows and have it all ;).
In a vacuum, Linux is fine. It can do anything Windows or Mac can do just fine. In fact, if you know what you're doing, you can do most things as well or better with Linux. The problem is, Linux is not fundamentally better in any way, and it is a hell of a lot harder to use, even when you do know what you're doing. So you save $100 in exchange for years of difficulty. Since I value my time, just a couple hours of extra difficulty completely eliminates any monetary savings (and really there are none anyway, unless you're choosing against a Mac - you can't buy a Linux PC for less than a Windows PC).
Vista, for all its problems, was still easier to use than Linux. And I'm talking the nice, user friendly distros like Ubuntu.
People have been saying for over a decade now that the year of Linux on the desktop is just around the corner, but the fact is it will always be just around the corner. Linux just can't keep up the pace the commercial guys set, plain and simple.
There's the basic problem all phones have of the human body (the hand, specifically) reducing the signal quality by a very small amount. This is physics, and is absolutely unavoidable.
Then there's the much more serious problem of bridging a contact on the iPhone's case, which de-tunes the antenna and thereby reduces the signal quality far beyond the usual signal loss caused by holding a phone in your hand.
Jobs tried to cover up the problem specific only to iPhones by confusing it with a problem all phones have. Without the bumper case (which prevents your hand from bridging the antenna) the iPhone's antenna performance is significantly worse than any other phone on the market. Period.
That's not exactly what I call "making it better". They had a serious, and frankly stupid, design flaw caused by Apple wanting metal on the outside of the case for aesthetic purposes. Jobs basically called his customers stupid for pointing out there was a problem, and then fired the guy ultimately responsible (though not directly to blame for the problem).
Perhaps because the already refer to it as uPenis?