Commodification of a product reduces profit to "normal" returns. Economic profit and accounting aren't the same; "normal" accounting profits are "zero" economic profit.
Being the first out with something yields a short-term economic profit. As it becomes a commodity, profits drop to normal rates.
Look at memory prices--the first one out with a new sized gets to charge a high price, wich drops as others leap in.
I knew those new-fangled sixteen bit machines with their wait states were a bad idea. Back to the 8 bit machines! No wait states! In fact, we can pair the 6502 with the 650 and have *two* processors running all ot on the same memory.
64k should be enough for anyone. Especially if you have a second double sided, double density 5.25 drive.
hawk, glancing around for his cane and rocking chair
Fortunately, Penn State's license allows us to install on a single home machine, and it's with the unmetered copies.
Otherwise, I'd need a new one by march.
My XP installation lasted a week before it needed nuking. The machine spent about 20 hours on in that time.
It scrambled the accounts when I told it to remove administrative privileges from my account--it removed login privileges as well, and apparently the account, which no longer showed up. But I couldn't recreate it, since the missing account also still existed.
But wait, there's more!
The installed programs ceased working. I nuked them and reinstalled them, but it was apparently putting pieces in places that it couldn't find at runtime. Yes, these were the same games that worked the week before . ..
This is the *last* machine allowed to run windows in my household.
Even with incredibly complicated programs (I think OpenOffice was one), it has been reported that telling make that you're running FreeBSD is sufficient to compile on a mac . ..
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you get your legal advice on slashdot, your real need is for psychiatric care.
The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too."
This came up in the shaving cream dispensor patent litigation. The design was challenged as obvious. The court ruled that while it may be obvious having seen it, the fact that the other companies had spent millions trying to achieve the same result proved that it wasn't obvious.
Heck, when I started, most people would have been happy with a single killfile entry--there was only one troll spread over all of usenet (the 30 someodd groups).
I think I was the first to suggest a killfile like device, though my proposal was to have a program scan the newsfeed and mark any posts by this particular author as read. When I returned ten year laters, kilfiles were reasonably well developed.
Except that when economicsts went back and lookded at the data with Standard Oil, the mythology didn't hold up.
SO certainly did move into markets and cut retail prices below the competitors' production costs. Mythology claims that hey then raised prices. An examination of the data found abaolutely no evidence of this--they so much more efficient that they were making a profit. (Also, a price increase would have invited new competition).
Even in the 80's, Macintosh was (generally) only significantly more expensive than the cheap brands. If you compared it to the better built and more expensive brands fitted with comparable video and sound, there wasn't much difference (in most cases).
The 5 year typical service life of a mac compared to 3 years for dos/windows typically made it less expensive than even the cheap brands over the long term.
And once you factored in support costs in a business, the mac made up for the purchase price difference in the first year or two (there was about a 4:1 factor there!)
There were *many* competing keyboard layouts. Fast typists were hired by the companies for travelling demonstrations to prove the superiority of their layouts, and competed with each other.
*This* was the environment in which QWERTY defeated its competitors.
On that note - does anyone know of a good keyboard produced today that has that old springy-clicky feel that I am talking about (preferably with a split keyboard layout like the natural keyboard)?
Try http://www.pckeyboard.com/ for the Unicomp keyboards. These *are* the old IBM keyboards, spun off firts through Lexmark, and then again. I'm typing one right now.
The feel of a "buckling spring" keyboard has no peer.
See the Pruneyard decision, in which the California Court ruled that the shopping center was obliged to allow the protesters (or were they signature gatherers?)
I'm sure that the loss of theoretical potential business from customers who think they have an obligation to bear costs related to a customer in excess of the fees paid by the hards will have them just crying in their beer . ..
This is done by registering your domain and hosting it, or getting your email through someone who does this for you. Forcing every domain to forward for you in perpetuity would be cumbersom e at best . ..
having been there since before the septembers started . ..
The "imminent death of the usenet" *did* happen. Most of it is now a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The grops tha surived pretty much consist of those that were one or more of 1) moderated, 2) had many regulars complaining about every spam and troll, 3) stayed with the traditional method of flaming nonconforming newbies to a crisp, in wpite of the whines of "netcop."
Alkaline batteries provice significantly more power for a given size vs. any type of rechargable battery.
perhaps under certain drainage patterns. They're not even close to NiMH in many applications, including (at least some) digital cameras.
My 2000 and 2300 mAH NiMH cells provide more than twice the life of alkalines in my Minolta Dimage 2. The instruction manual actually warns not to bother with Alkalines or NiCads due to shorter life. My father didn't read that, and discovered that it ate them--rapidly.
Anyway, one of the reasons I insisted on a digital camera was that I was fed up with buying the 123A batteries that my IS-1 and my wife's camera ate. It seems to me that a pair of those, to the tune of $10, would last for about three 36 exposure rolls. Rechargables were mandatory.
And it seems to me that that dual AA type battery was only good for about twice as many picures as NiMH, whose capacity is ever increasing.
We were in canoes in Missouri, and it was travelling in a ziplock bag. As I was taking a picture, my wife started screaming--our oldest was pulling one of the twins out of an eddy (which was pulling back) after they'd capsized. I just shoved it in my pocket and headed strait for them.
Getting ashore, things went nuts again as their oars and cushions headed downriver. I hurried back to the canoe, and ended up waste deep.
*sigh*
We even set it out in the desert air to dry, but it's never come back
And then about two weeks later, my daughter ran the little radio shack flatphoto through the washer in her pants. Surprisingly, they replaced it, without even asking what I meant by "unfortunate incident."
I'm a hard sell on those Li-Ion specialized batteries. They usually require chargin in the camera, right?
Yep, and they're awefully expensive with less capacity than the NiMH AA cells.
I would have bought the Kodak a couple of months before my Minolta had it used AA. The Minolta not only uses them, but they warn you that you *should* use NiMH as alkalines and nicad don't pack enough juice.
Because they don't want you keeping their cameras for several years. They want you to upgrade every year or, at most, every two. Most digital cameras are all-in-one affairs -- a one-time purchase. It's not like the days of old when Kodak could sell a 35mm point-and-shoot and count on film sales for years to come.
Ahh, but it *is*. You may *take* the pictures without film, but Kodak has a staggering share of the store printing business.
At this point, it isn't clear to me that it costs less to print photos on my own printer instead of Wally-world. I think it's about a dollar a page at home, and.26c for a 4x6 at WW. I suspect that they're using better paper & ink, too, when they use the Kodak machine.
There is an article, I belive on page B1, of last Thursday's or Friday's Wall Street Journal about litigation over verizon phones. (or was it page A1?)
It seems that verizon ordered the phones that it distributes with features, primarily bluetooth, disabled, instead trying to collect fees for passing these "services" through verizon.
The basis for the litigation is (as I understood it) that this model of phone is advertised independently by the manufacturer, and the buyers didn't get the feature set.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an economicst, maybe I can help.
Commodification of a product reduces profit to "normal" returns. Economic profit and accounting aren't the same; "normal" accounting profits are "zero" economic profit.
Being the first out with something yields a short-term economic profit. As it becomes a commodity, profits drop to normal rates.
Look at memory prices--the first one out with a new sized gets to charge a high price, wich drops as others leap in.
hawk
>A modern CPU has to wait as many cycles for a word
>from RAM as an ancient 8086 would have if you ran it
>with a HDD instead of RAM.
"ancient"? *gasp* [*insert chest-clutching sequence here*]
I knew those new-fangled sixteen bit machines with their wait states were a bad idea. Back to the 8 bit machines! No wait states! In fact, we can pair the 6502 with the 650 and have *two* processors running all ot on the same memory.
64k should be enough for anyone. Especially if you have a second double sided, double density 5.25 drive.
hawk, glancing around for his cane and rocking chair
OTOH, maybe they've stored it with all that missing source code . . . :)
hawk
Fortunately, Penn State's license allows us to install on a single home machine, and it's with the unmetered copies.
.
Otherwise, I'd need a new one by march.
My XP installation lasted a week before it needed nuking. The machine spent about 20 hours on in that time.
It scrambled the accounts when I told it to remove administrative privileges from my account--it removed login privileges as well, and apparently the account, which no longer showed up. But I couldn't recreate it, since the missing account also still existed.
But wait, there's more!
The installed programs ceased working. I nuked them and reinstalled them, but it was apparently putting pieces in places that it couldn't find at runtime. Yes, these were the same games that worked the week before . .
This is the *last* machine allowed to run windows in my household.
hawk
>Take an ashtray--they got plenty.
:)
Wow! Just where do you work???
hawk, with a hopelessly amerocentric response
Next time, don't use a British team . . . :)
hawk
Even with incredibly complicated programs (I think OpenOffice was one), it has been reported that telling make that you're running FreeBSD is sufficient to compile on a mac . . .
hawk
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you get your legal advice on slashdot, your real need is for psychiatric care.
The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too."
This came up in the shaving cream dispensor patent litigation. The design was challenged as obvious. The court ruled that while it may be obvious having seen it, the fact that the other companies had spent millions trying to achieve the same result proved that it wasn't obvious.
Heck, when I started, most people would have been happy with a single killfile entry--there was only one troll spread over all of usenet (the 30 someodd groups).
I think I was the first to suggest a killfile like device, though my proposal was to have a program scan the newsfeed and mark any posts by this particular author as read. When I returned ten year laters, kilfiles were reasonably well developed.
hawk
Except that when economicsts went back and lookded at the data with Standard Oil, the mythology didn't hold up.
SO certainly did move into markets and cut retail prices below the competitors' production costs. Mythology claims that hey then raised prices. An examination of the data found abaolutely no evidence of this--they so much more efficient that they were making a profit. (Also, a price increase would have invited new competition).
hawk
For that matter, very few are closed at 4 A.M. (which is what I originally read the poster to mean).
hawk
Even in the 80's, Macintosh was (generally) only significantly more expensive than the cheap brands. If you compared it to the better built and more expensive brands fitted with comparable video and sound, there wasn't much difference (in most cases).
The 5 year typical service life of a mac compared to 3 years for dos/windows typically made it less expensive than even the cheap brands over the long term.
And once you factored in support costs in a business, the mac made up for the purchase price difference in the first year or two (there was about a 4:1 factor there!)
hawk
> No, it's just a half-truth.
Mixed with deliberate falsehood, at that.
There were *many* competing keyboard layouts. Fast typists were hired by the companies for travelling demonstrations to prove the superiority of their layouts, and competed with each other.
*This* was the environment in which QWERTY defeated its competitors.
hawk
On that note - does anyone know of a good keyboard produced today that has that old springy-clicky feel that I am talking about (preferably with a split keyboard layout like the natural keyboard)?
Try http://www.pckeyboard.com/ for the Unicomp keyboards. These *are* the old IBM keyboards, spun off firts through Lexmark, and then again. I'm typing one right now.
The feel of a "buckling spring" keyboard has no peer.
hawk
See the Pruneyard decision, in which the California Court ruled that the shopping center was obliged to allow the protesters (or were they signature gatherers?)
.
In the other 49 states and DC, however . .
hawk
I'm sure that the loss of theoretical potential business from customers who think they have an obligation to bear costs related to a customer in excess of the fees paid by the hards will have them just crying in their beer . . .
hawk
>but not political cook free
:)
Watch it there! Without the political cooks, there would be noone to bring the brownies to our VRWC meetings!
>But with the playstation2 group, it's 99%
>cross-posted-to-other-groups flamewars between
>ps2 and xbox users
*shrug*
RUn a killfile on the headers.
hawk
This is done by registering your domain and hosting it, or getting your email through someone who does this for you. Forcing every domain to forward for you in perpetuity would be cumbersom e at best . . .
hawk
having been there since before the septembers started . . .
The "imminent death of the usenet" *did* happen. Most of it is now a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The grops tha surived pretty much consist of those that were one or more of
1) moderated,
2) had many regulars complaining about every spam and troll,
3) stayed with the traditional method of flaming nonconforming newbies to a crisp, in wpite of the whines of "netcop."
hawk
Alkaline batteries provice significantly more power for a given size vs. any type of rechargable battery.
perhaps under certain drainage patterns. They're not even close to NiMH in many applications, including (at least some) digital cameras.
My 2000 and 2300 mAH NiMH cells provide more than twice the life of alkalines in my Minolta Dimage 2. The instruction manual actually warns not to bother with Alkalines or NiCads due to shorter life. My father didn't read that, and discovered that it ate them--rapidly.
hawk
(I hit submit before I was done!)
Anyway, one of the reasons I insisted on a digital camera was that I was fed up with buying the 123A batteries that my IS-1 and my wife's camera ate. It seems to me that a pair of those, to the tune of $10, would last for about three 36 exposure rolls. Rechargables were mandatory.
And it seems to me that that dual AA type battery was only good for about twice as many picures as NiMH, whose capacity is ever increasing.
hawk
I had a DX4320. Well, I suppose I still had it.
We were in canoes in Missouri, and it was travelling in a ziplock bag. As I was taking a picture, my wife started screaming--our oldest was pulling one of the twins out of an eddy (which was pulling back) after they'd capsized. I just shoved it in my pocket and headed strait for them.
Getting ashore, things went nuts again as their oars and cushions headed downriver. I hurried back to the canoe, and ended up waste deep.
*sigh*
We even set it out in the desert air to dry, but it's never come back
And then about two weeks later, my daughter ran the little radio shack flatphoto through the washer in her pants. Surprisingly, they replaced it, without even asking what I meant by "unfortunate incident."
hawk
I'm a hard sell on those Li-Ion specialized batteries. They usually require chargin in the camera, right?
Yep, and they're awefully expensive with less capacity than the NiMH AA cells.
I would have bought the Kodak a couple of months before my Minolta had it used AA. The Minolta not only uses them, but they warn you that you *should* use NiMH as alkalines and nicad don't pack enough juice.
hawk
Because they don't want you keeping their cameras for several years. They want you to upgrade every year or, at most, every two. Most digital cameras are all-in-one affairs -- a one-time purchase. It's not like the days of old when Kodak could sell a 35mm point-and-shoot and count on film sales for years to come.
.26c for a 4x6 at WW. I suspect that they're using better paper & ink, too, when they use the Kodak machine.
Ahh, but it *is*. You may *take* the pictures without film, but Kodak has a staggering share of the store printing business.
At this point, it isn't clear to me that it costs less to print photos on my own printer instead of Wally-world. I think it's about a dollar a page at home, and
hawk
There is an article, I belive on page B1, of last Thursday's or Friday's Wall Street Journal about litigation over verizon phones. (or was it page A1?)
It seems that verizon ordered the phones that it distributes with features, primarily bluetooth, disabled, instead trying to collect fees for passing these "services" through verizon.
The basis for the litigation is (as I understood it) that this model of phone is advertised independently by the manufacturer, and the buyers didn't get the feature set.
hawk