Amazon doesn't win on price, they win on selection.
This is why whining about sales taxes are also so bogus. The price tag isn't even the real selling point. The fact that I can actually get what I want is the driving factor. It doesn't matter if it's books, movies, or grocery items.
If Amazon doubled it's wages and propagated the costs, it likely wouldn't change anything.
The real problem is wage disparity between the people running the place and the ones on the bottom rung.
It's a useful baseline as the term middle class has been distorted to the point where it has no meaning whatsoever anymore.
If you are working for all of your money, you simply aren't middle class and weren't ever really. That's just a lie that people in power like to tell to keep the huddling masses from getting discontent.
If people realized they were really part of the underclass they might be more inclined to act out or just differently.
A lot of higher paid wage slaves have themselves convinced that they are something different than people that fill Amazon orders and that's not really the case.
> Most of the people that I know that support him honestly assume that he struggled and grew up in the deep south (instead of Hawaii) like them.
What rock have you been hiding under? Blacks aren't restricted to the deep south. Neither are bigots that think they aren't bigots despite an eagerness to assume some goofy kid is a dangerous criminal.
> Shit like this. No wonder everything's going BSD.
You wish.
While it sound like a silly juvenile retort, it really is the case.
Why would anyone with a pathological need to "win in the market" or "be associated with the cool brand" bother with BSD to begin with?
> Did anyone try to work things out with the company?
No. People just like to litigate for fun. They like to waste the money.
Don't be such an idiot. If anything gets in front of a judge it's because one or both sides refused to compromise. The FSF has a long history of quickly dispensing these things by allowing the offending party to come into compliance.
You mean the swine flu that was easy enough for the Mexicans to contain by simply killing off livestock? When your animals are large, slow, and not capable of flight, it makes them a hell of a lot easier to contain.
The same goes for mad cow.
Even avian flu is more likely to be spread by humans than a bunch of chickens flying off into countryside to contaminate all of their wild friends.
Shit won't get done if it's not profitable. If you engage in a bunch of communist nonsense to devalue the work of doctors, people will stop becoming doctors. It's an expensive and time consuming process and you can't expect everyone to take it all on just to get shat on by the likes of you.
This applies to anything. The cost of overhead doesn't pay itself.
No one futzes with SD cards like they were floppies.
They simply allow expansion of the storage on the device. This can be very handy when you don't want your overpriced electronic toy to be obsolete just because of lack of storage.
This seems an obvious thing in other electronic devices (like cameras) but seems like such a revelation for phones.
Being able to increase your available storage by 50% is not trivial a trivial thing. If this thing is not lame, it could be future proofed to accomodate even larger SD cards when they become available and affordable.
128G? Whoop-de-doo. I have an aging Archos with 500G.
The truth is that you can in fact pay HALF for the same product without the need to compromise. You simply buy the brand that isn't over-hyped all to hell.
It's a pretty trivial thing to do with cars.
Plus the "generic" allows you avoid lots of highly proprietary expensive to maintain components that jack up your TCO as well as your entry price.
The same reason Linux is unknown outside places like Slashdot.
Marketing does matter. It doesn't matter how good your product is if it doesn't have some good sleazy salesmen out there hocking it. You will be eclipsed by the companies with money enough to buy ads or prime shelf space in retail.
> Why do we care about 300GB optical disks, when I can fit a terabyte of data onto something the size of a fingernail?
Do you have one of those? How much did it cost you?
How does that compare to the bulk unit price of stamped optical media or even BDR blanks?
The real truth of the matter is that you can't fit a terabyte onto something the size of a fingernail. Even if you could, you would never be able to afford it.
Streaming hasn't even caught up to the current set of legacy consumer media.
So there's still a problem of content delivery. Networks generally aren't fast enough and they also tend to be owned by competing media companies. Do you really think that Time Warner is going to let someone else stream 4K media to you?
Good luck with that bandwidth cap.
Just the monopoly aspects of the situation make it likely that there will continue to be a need for a consumer media format.
Like with virtual DVD jukeboxes, the problem isn't the tech but all of the companies actively trying to hold the tech back.
Someone else was blithering about all of the bells and whistles of an Apple charger. Perhaps Apple has just created an engineering failure here out of unnecessary added complexity.
They have made their devices so complex that they fail in strange and lethal ways.
No. They still owe the public something. I realize this is a quaint idea in a world where corporations have nothing but rights and don't have any legal responsibilities at all. But it's true.
Putting commercials in the broadcast and then getting to ream cable providers is getting paid twice for the same thing and should be tolerated by no one outside that doesn't own a TV station.
You might as well tatoo your ass with a "please abuse me sign".
There was never a "tacit agreement". There was only just wishful thinking.
Anyone attempting to make apocalyptic pronouncements simply hasn't been paying attention. There have been alternate payment models going back to the 70s.
What's going to get squeezed out (if anything) will be all of the mediocre crud that sits between PBS and HBO.
Windows is a legacy support OS and always has been. It thrives purely on the fact that everyone bought into the idea that they needed it to run MS-DOS programs that are long forgotten.
It's a vicious cycle that causes everything else to be cast aside and this effect predates Linux entirely.
Re:They shot themselves in the foot
on
The Last GUADEC?
·
· Score: 1
It was an imminently practical response.
You can't have a gratis product dependent on commercial components. It's a competitive death sentence in a market where none of the commercial alternatives have the same limitations.
This is the same reason that proprietary Motif, CDE, X servers, and OpenGL were all discarded.
The GPL is often portrayed as anti-business but that's nothing compared to expensive per-seat developer licenses.
Every household in America has at least one expensive MPEG2 decoder (if not many) that likely won't be replaced until the issue is forced.
Other non-h264 devices continue to linger in the marketplace as they continue to function and are able to generate new content. This tends to create conflict with crippled devices that are limited to a particular subset of h264.
Even these force fed h264 devices come into conflict with other h264 content that assumes a more robust h264 decoding is available. The format is so complex that you would be hard pressed to create any "easy" UI to address it all.
So even pure h264 by itself is a bit of a quagmire. This is an issue that certain people seem to go out of their way to ignore or deny.
You know what's really here to stay? MPEG2. Stuff lingers because content is available in that format. Until that happens, fanish pronoucements are all premature.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon doesn't win on price, they win on selection.
This is why whining about sales taxes are also so bogus. The price tag isn't even the real selling point. The fact that I can actually get what I want is the driving factor. It doesn't matter if it's books, movies, or grocery items.
If Amazon doubled it's wages and propagated the costs, it likely wouldn't change anything.
The real problem is wage disparity between the people running the place and the ones on the bottom rung.
It's a useful baseline as the term middle class has been distorted to the point where it has no meaning whatsoever anymore.
If you are working for all of your money, you simply aren't middle class and weren't ever really. That's just a lie that people in power like to tell to keep the huddling masses from getting discontent.
If people realized they were really part of the underclass they might be more inclined to act out or just differently.
A lot of higher paid wage slaves have themselves convinced that they are something different than people that fill Amazon orders and that's not really the case.
> Most of the people that I know that support him honestly assume that he struggled and grew up in the deep south (instead of Hawaii) like them.
What rock have you been hiding under? Blacks aren't restricted to the deep south. Neither are bigots that think they aren't bigots despite an eagerness to assume some goofy kid is a dangerous criminal.
> Shit like this. No wonder everything's going BSD.
You wish.
While it sound like a silly juvenile retort, it really is the case.
Why would anyone with a pathological need to "win in the market" or "be associated with the cool brand" bother with BSD to begin with?
> Did anyone try to work things out with the company?
No. People just like to litigate for fun. They like to waste the money.
Don't be such an idiot. If anything gets in front of a judge it's because one or both sides refused to compromise. The FSF has a long history of quickly dispensing these things by allowing the offending party to come into compliance.
You mean the swine flu that was easy enough for the Mexicans to contain by simply killing off livestock? When your animals are large, slow, and not capable of flight, it makes them a hell of a lot easier to contain.
The same goes for mad cow.
Even avian flu is more likely to be spread by humans than a bunch of chickens flying off into countryside to contaminate all of their wild friends.
Spoiling the milk gets rid of all of the lactose that will give those Chinese the biggest bellyache and case of the runs they've ever had.
That is why humans consume a wide variety of fermented milk products (not just cheese).
Fermentation is not bad and it's not just limited to dairy.
No. It is your responsibility as a consumer.
Shit won't get done if it's not profitable. If you engage in a bunch of communist nonsense to devalue the work of doctors, people will stop becoming doctors. It's an expensive and time consuming process and you can't expect everyone to take it all on just to get shat on by the likes of you.
This applies to anything. The cost of overhead doesn't pay itself.
You're an idiot.
No one futzes with SD cards like they were floppies.
They simply allow expansion of the storage on the device. This can be very handy when you don't want your overpriced electronic toy to be obsolete just because of lack of storage.
This seems an obvious thing in other electronic devices (like cameras) but seems like such a revelation for phones.
Being able to increase your available storage by 50% is not trivial a trivial thing. If this thing is not lame, it could be future proofed to accomodate even larger SD cards when they become available and affordable.
128G? Whoop-de-doo. I have an aging Archos with 500G.
Time for you lame rubes to catch up already.
> My yugo was cheaper than a mercedes.
The usual Apple fanboy mentality bullshit.
The truth is that you can in fact pay HALF for the same product without the need to compromise. You simply buy the brand that isn't over-hyped all to hell.
It's a pretty trivial thing to do with cars.
Plus the "generic" allows you avoid lots of highly proprietary expensive to maintain components that jack up your TCO as well as your entry price.
That fruity logo does have a price.
> Why?
The same reason Linux is unknown outside places like Slashdot.
Marketing does matter. It doesn't matter how good your product is if it doesn't have some good sleazy salesmen out there hocking it. You will be eclipsed by the companies with money enough to buy ads or prime shelf space in retail.
The world is not some idealized meritocracy.
> Why do we care about 300GB optical disks, when I can fit a terabyte of data onto something the size of a fingernail?
Do you have one of those? How much did it cost you?
How does that compare to the bulk unit price of stamped optical media or even BDR blanks?
The real truth of the matter is that you can't fit a terabyte onto something the size of a fingernail. Even if you could, you would never be able to afford it.
Streaming hasn't even caught up to the current set of legacy consumer media.
So there's still a problem of content delivery. Networks generally aren't fast enough and they also tend to be owned by competing media companies. Do you really think that Time Warner is going to let someone else stream 4K media to you?
Good luck with that bandwidth cap.
Just the monopoly aspects of the situation make it likely that there will continue to be a need for a consumer media format.
Like with virtual DVD jukeboxes, the problem isn't the tech but all of the companies actively trying to hold the tech back.
Apple chargers are nothing special. Much of what Apple does is nothing special.
Your attempt to help perpetuate the mindless hype is not convincing.
Someone else was blithering about all of the bells and whistles of an Apple charger. Perhaps Apple has just created an engineering failure here out of unnecessary added complexity.
They have made their devices so complex that they fail in strange and lethal ways.
You mean that I can't transfer data with my USB cable?
What kind of Apple fanboy retard are you?
> They don't owe you jack
No. They still owe the public something. I realize this is a quaint idea in a world where corporations have nothing but rights and don't have any legal responsibilities at all. But it's true.
It's time to get your head out of Ayn Rand's ass.
PBS gets a vanishingly small minority of it's funding from taxes.
This gets continually chopped away by noisy Republicans.
PBS now gets about 10% of it's budget from federal support.
Putting commercials in the broadcast and then getting to ream cable providers is getting paid twice for the same thing and should be tolerated by no one outside that doesn't own a TV station.
You might as well tatoo your ass with a "please abuse me sign".
Really? I never noticed.
I was distracted by all of the Zombies in various states of decay trying to eat the main characters.
> The tacit agreement is being changed.
There was never a "tacit agreement". There was only just wishful thinking.
Anyone attempting to make apocalyptic pronouncements simply hasn't been paying attention. There have been alternate payment models going back to the 70s.
What's going to get squeezed out (if anything) will be all of the mediocre crud that sits between PBS and HBO.
> still, one has to consider what a broadcast entity dependent upon advertising revenues will do if those ads no longer generate cash
That's not the court's problem.
Heinlein has a very nice quote along these lines from 1939.
Although the best stuff already seems to be coming from those channels that already have an ad free subscription model.
Windows is a legacy support OS and always has been. It thrives purely on the fact that everyone bought into the idea that they needed it to run MS-DOS programs that are long forgotten.
It's a vicious cycle that causes everything else to be cast aside and this effect predates Linux entirely.
It was an imminently practical response.
You can't have a gratis product dependent on commercial components. It's a competitive death sentence in a market where none of the commercial alternatives have the same limitations.
This is the same reason that proprietary Motif, CDE, X servers, and OpenGL were all discarded.
The GPL is often portrayed as anti-business but that's nothing compared to expensive per-seat developer licenses.
The same is still true of MPEG2 hardware.
Every household in America has at least one expensive MPEG2 decoder (if not many) that likely won't be replaced until the issue is forced.
Other non-h264 devices continue to linger in the marketplace as they continue to function and are able to generate new content. This tends to create conflict with crippled devices that are limited to a particular subset of h264.
Even these force fed h264 devices come into conflict with other h264 content that assumes a more robust h264 decoding is available. The format is so complex that you would be hard pressed to create any "easy" UI to address it all.
So even pure h264 by itself is a bit of a quagmire. This is an issue that certain people seem to go out of their way to ignore or deny.
It isn't even really here yet.
You know what's really here to stay? MPEG2. Stuff lingers because content is available in that format. Until that happens, fanish pronoucements are all premature.