You can and they did (incidently I wasn't personally involved, just watched the scene from afar, though I am in the industry),
However once people get a taste of the "very low price", it's a bit tricky to get them back to eating the higher price be it legitimate or not in a reasonable time span.
Ultimately the debate comes down into a couple of camps;
1) The theoretical market equilibrium / idealism / no-restrictive-laws-or-boundaries / unlimited-market view 2) The "I'm working in the messed up world and as nice as #1 is it's just not working like that at the moment and there's a market saturation point" view 3) ??? 4) PROFIT;)
Anti dumping laws generally take care of that, of course assuming they're within a jurisdiction where the law can reach;) Unfortunately the smaller companies are long since dead from it before the law yanks on the collar of the offender and usually then it's all factored in as the "cost of doing business".
The difference to notice though is that there's a higher cost involved in maintaining a support infrastructure for the product, as apposed to dumping the product and running with the (slimmer) profits.
Essentially the "ultra low cost seller" takes a higher effective profit because they pay no contribution towards maintaining the support network (advertising, support, repairs etc).
You can remove the MAP's, yes, what you'll see then is a lot of retailers refusing to take on the products at the risk of margins going too low to warrant carrying the stock and the after-sale responsibilities.
The problem is in the form of the rogue trader who sells today and is gone 14 days later and yes, customers will and do go and find one of the other resellers to scream and yell when it doesn't work, whom -will- then get shafted if they don't support the item in terms of bad-mouthing (by the customer) or financially (by taking on the problem above and beyond their responsibility - simply to keep the good name). If stores don't like the MAP enforcement then they shouldn't buy the stock to sell. If no one buys the stock then your market has sorted itself out.
MAPs are a minor assurance, from the factory, that when you hand over your money to buy their stock you're not going to end up with something worthless in your hands two weeks later because of some fly by night jerk who submarines the market to make a quick buck and leaves the existing sellers to clean up the mess (as if there aren't already enough market forces pushing against you).
Enforcing MAPs is often more about maintaining supply chain and sales stability than explicitly trying to be profiteering.
Recently in the model-aircraft world, we had one large online, offshore (Asia) store acquire a large lump of stock from a supplier via proxy (because the supplier explicitly didn't want this online retailer selling their stock), the store promptly dumped the stock into the market at a price within 10~15% of the supplier cost price which was about 30% below MAP (on a $400~$600 item).
This had a couple of immediate effects; 1) Everyone bought stock from the one online store 2) Other major US/Europe stores couldn't match due to legal issues with going below the MAP 3) Said US/European stores stopped purchasing from the factory 4) Existing customers became enraged at the "huge profiteering" (many electronics goods are retailed at roughly 400% of their factory cost or higher)
Ultimately, the factory goes into a situation where they're between a hard place and a rock.
Certainly quite an effective way to crush some competitors in your market space.
We don't like to think that people are carving out huge profits on the items we buy, however the reality is that a lot of what we pay for items -is- profit that pays the wages of people like us who need to buy things to keep on living.
> C/C++ are the languages you'd want to go for. They can do *everything*, have great support, are fast etc.
One thing to make clear, the 'speed' of a language is primarily about the implementation of it, not the specification. If the language specification defined the speed, then we'd not have compilers generating different performance code.
Sometimes this happens because you bring out a fully featured, single level product with a certain price tag and people are buying it. A little later on you get messages from other interested parties along the lines of "I really like your product - but I don't need features X, Y or Z, could you provide a cheaper product without those features?", and so it happens.
Further to the fact that Mr Howard was pretty much doing his best to turn AU into another US state, I think that they would have tried to bring in exactly the same policy for internet filtering anyhow (I do seem to recall hearing about it raising its head in parliment more than once before).
The Howard government needed to be turned over for more than one reason, even if Rudd only stays in for a single term the cooling effect against the profound arrogance that was taking hold in the Howard camp will be worth it. A lot changed in the world over the previous decade, it would seem that the Liberals weren't able to shift their policies quickly enough to suit. What's also interesting how ever is to see that the state/local governments have also started to swap around, so we're fortunately heading back to having a fairly good mix of parties through the political strata.
He should have just submitted the 16 page paper anonymously. If he was truly trying to do a purely good deed so there shouldn't have been any need for his name to appear on it for the purposes of fame or positive retribution.
Given the number of previous incidents similar to this, one would have thought he'd have been aware that this is almost always the outcome. Try entering into a store after hours (when closed) without due permission, without stealing anything and reporting how you did it. Compare the outcome.
For sure there's a lot of work involved, I don't think anyone with a sensible grip on business would expect them to do this overnight, however I've been watching Google Checkout now for quite some time and there just does not seem to be any movements beyond their existing setup. One gets the impression that they got it started and then when "*Meh*, this is boring, let's move along to something shiney!"
Don't forget they already take and give payments to many countries via the AdSense and AdWords programs, agreeably it's not exactly the same as a consumer-google-business sale but the inroads have already been started.
If they allowed sellers in countries other than just the US and UK to be involved, until they expand that a bit more (Australia, NewZealand, even Canada?) things could be different.
For now I guess the commissions will just have to go to PayPal and my local merchant provider.
Come on Google, pull your finger out and expand that service.
Unlike India with it's various classes and such things as "untouchables" at least in Australia there is a genuine continuing effort to -try- and improve things for the Aboriginals. The issues surrounding the disproportionate level of poverty, disease, crime etc with Aboriginals are complex to say the very least but at least we're trying to find a way to make things better. I know around here there have been many success stories.
Also in North QLD here... also suffering because the person who built this house didn't bother to even put in the basic blue/silver foil. God awful in summer, though I've nearly managed to finish fitting the foil into the ceilings again. Next step is painting the walls, growing more trees etc etc. Still can't believe they built a solid block house and didn't think to insulate it - they should have simply called this place "The Kiln".
Anyone bothered to look at the massive composite photo they created with a few soldiers running out to the CG generated drone? You'd think for $4 million a pop they'd at least spend another $1000 to make the photos -look- realistic.
I see quite a lot of these sorts of getups happening, someone gets some specs, waves their hands about, generates some crappy CG and utters a price of a few million. Couple of years later there's nothing really to show for it except some rudimentary framework and an empty office.
The sad thing is, it wasn't Iraq or its people who crashed the planes into the twin towers (Afghanistan - Al Qaeda), but then the Bush administration did a mighty fine job pinning them together.
...ubuntu has done very little that isnt just tying loose ends together, very little high quality coding. And that's precisely the stuff that most coders don't bother to finish off. A lot of open-source projects are written to scratch an itch and when that 'itch' is scratched sufficiently the coder generally stops. The trouble is, the point where the itch stops and the point where software is usable to a more widespread audience (beyond people who live/work with similar stuff) is usually not the same. So if all that Ubuntu does is add a bit of spit/polish to bring it up to shine then that's still worth having.
No no, you've got it wrong. It's Windows that won't run with Wifi gear, instead it just keeps on running around in circles asking you to stop using the card-makers' management software but then saying it needs the software until you just throw it through a window and burn the machine.
Eight (8) Ubuntu machines here, 7.10, all running WiFi with various makes of cards including a laptop with a mini-PCI wifi and a desktop machine out in the workshop using a PCI-PCMCIA + PCMCIA Wifi card, all working.
-Some- Wifi cards just won't work with Linux but then I'm sure a lot of people have had their share of the same with Windows (including myself).
Only reason they appear 'close' according to that 'designer' is because of the limited resolution and a big slice of wishful thinking. There's a lot of differences in the curve outline between the two;
* the right hand bottom/mid side where the infinity symbol bulges out * the right hand top side the infinity logo again is on the inside of the apple logo * the left hand side the curve infinity symbol is on the -inside- of the apple logo * the bottom bumps of the infinity curve have a lesser curvature
Sorry, but that guys reasoning of similarities is about as useful as saying "If you squint, then this Ford car looks clearly like this Chevy, see, it even has 4 wheels!".
Now that I'd love to see happen, especially for rural areas. Currently paying a fair bit for Skymesh 2-way satellite along with another $60/mth or so for NextG for on the road. It's a sad state of affairs, that's for sure.... at least the 2-way satellite is cheaper than NextG.
LyX comes practically close to this. Provides a nice balance between pure WYSIWIG and raw.
Have written many software manuals as well as assembly guides using it, it's great stuff and you don't have to entwine yourself with the LaTeX side of things.
Syntax can be an important thing but it's fairly personal too, I found the Lua syntax to be more pleasing than Python -personally- (much like I found PHP easier to read than Perl, others will be the other way around).
The big gain I had with Lua over Python was the incredibly small interpreter footprint, making it very easy to transport with packages. Coupling Lua with SQLite makes for a very versatile, quick and compact system. Lua has its own set of "ARUGH!!!" moments, things like 1-based arrays/lists when you're used to 0-based, other things like not being able to pull lists out in the insertion order (because they're hashed in etc). There's a nice #lua community on freenode IRC as well.
Of course, if you find the syntax too "at odds" with your mind then stick with Python. For me, Lua matched my requirements better.
For sure, too many people write too many programs in C when there are more appropriate alternatives. One of the really nice ones out is "Lua", I was using Python for a while and I ditched (mostly) in favor of Lua.
That's all nice and fine for bugs such as memory allocation and pointer faults etc but no matter what language you write in you will still run into logic-faults, faults caused by you believing the code does one thing while the interpreter does another.
Don't get me wrong here - C is a horrid little language, I've even written a small booklet on its bad quirks and how to potentially step around them but that all said the biggest fault/bug generator is still the assumption that what your write is going to do what you think it does. Most memory/pointer faults can be nailed down fairly quickly using valgrind or other electric-fence type environments, it's the logic faults that really get you pulling your hair out.
Slashdot Mirror
You can and they did (incidently I wasn't personally involved, just watched the scene from afar, though I am in the industry),
However once people get a taste of the "very low price", it's a bit tricky to get them back to eating the higher price be it legitimate or not in a reasonable time span.
Ultimately the debate comes down into a couple of camps;
1) The theoretical market equilibrium / idealism / no-restrictive-laws-or-boundaries / unlimited-market view ;)
2) The "I'm working in the messed up world and as nice as #1 is it's just not working like that at the moment and there's a market saturation point" view
3) ???
4) PROFIT
Anti dumping laws generally take care of that, of course assuming they're within a jurisdiction where the law can reach ;) Unfortunately the smaller companies are long since dead from it before the law yanks on the collar of the offender and usually then it's all factored in as the "cost of doing business".
The difference to notice though is that there's a higher cost involved in maintaining a support infrastructure for the product, as apposed to dumping the product and running with the (slimmer) profits.
Essentially the "ultra low cost seller" takes a higher effective profit because they pay no contribution towards maintaining the support network (advertising, support, repairs etc).
You can remove the MAP's, yes, what you'll see then is a lot of retailers refusing to take on the products at the risk of margins going too low to warrant carrying the stock and the after-sale responsibilities.
The problem is in the form of the rogue trader who sells today and is gone 14 days later and yes, customers will and do go and find one of the other resellers to scream and yell when it doesn't work, whom -will- then get shafted if they don't support the item in terms of bad-mouthing (by the customer) or financially (by taking on the problem above and beyond their responsibility - simply to keep the good name). If stores don't like the MAP enforcement then they shouldn't buy the stock to sell. If no one buys the stock then your market has sorted itself out.
MAPs are a minor assurance, from the factory, that when you hand over your money to buy their stock you're not going to end up with something worthless in your hands two weeks later because of some fly by night jerk who submarines the market to make a quick buck and leaves the existing sellers to clean up the mess (as if there aren't already enough market forces pushing against you).
Enforcing MAPs is often more about maintaining supply chain and sales stability than explicitly trying to be profiteering.
Recently in the model-aircraft world, we had one large online, offshore (Asia) store acquire a large lump of stock from a supplier via proxy (because the supplier explicitly didn't want this online retailer selling their stock), the store promptly dumped the stock into the market at a price within 10~15% of the supplier cost price which was about 30% below MAP (on a $400~$600 item).
This had a couple of immediate effects;
1) Everyone bought stock from the one online store
2) Other major US/Europe stores couldn't match due to legal issues with going below the MAP
3) Said US/European stores stopped purchasing from the factory
4) Existing customers became enraged at the "huge profiteering" (many electronics goods are retailed at roughly 400% of their factory cost or higher)
Ultimately, the factory goes into a situation where they're between a hard place and a rock.
Certainly quite an effective way to crush some competitors in your market space.
We don't like to think that people are carving out huge profits on the items we buy, however the reality is that a lot of what we pay for items -is- profit that pays the wages of people like us who need to buy things to keep on living.
> C/C++ are the languages you'd want to go for. They can do *everything*, have great support, are fast etc.
One thing to make clear, the 'speed' of a language is primarily about the implementation of it, not the specification. If the language specification defined the speed, then we'd not have compilers generating different performance code.
Sometimes this happens because you bring out a fully featured, single level product with a certain price tag and people are buying it. A little later on you get messages from other interested parties along the lines of "I really like your product - but I don't need features X, Y or Z, could you provide a cheaper product without those features?", and so it happens.
Further to the fact that Mr Howard was pretty much doing his best to turn AU into another US state, I think that they would have tried to bring in exactly the same policy for internet filtering anyhow (I do seem to recall hearing about it raising its head in parliment more than once before).
The Howard government needed to be turned over for more than one reason, even if Rudd only stays in for a single term the cooling effect against the profound arrogance that was taking hold in the Howard camp will be worth it. A lot changed in the world over the previous decade, it would seem that the Liberals weren't able to shift their policies quickly enough to suit. What's also interesting how ever is to see that the state/local governments have also started to swap around, so we're fortunately heading back to having a fairly good mix of parties through the political strata.
He should have just submitted the 16 page paper anonymously. If he was truly trying to do a purely good deed so there shouldn't have been any need for his name to appear on it for the purposes of fame or positive retribution.
Given the number of previous incidents similar to this, one would have thought he'd have been aware that this is almost always the outcome. Try entering into a store after hours (when closed) without due permission, without stealing anything and reporting how you did it. Compare the outcome.
For sure there's a lot of work involved, I don't think anyone with a sensible grip on business would expect them to do this overnight, however I've been watching Google Checkout now for quite some time and there just does not seem to be any movements beyond their existing setup. One gets the impression that they got it started and then when "*Meh*, this is boring, let's move along to something shiney!"
Don't forget they already take and give payments to many countries via the AdSense and AdWords programs, agreeably it's not exactly the same as a consumer-google-business sale but the inroads have already been started.
If they allowed sellers in countries other than just the US and UK to be involved, until they expand that a bit more (Australia, NewZealand, even Canada?) things could be different.
For now I guess the commissions will just have to go to PayPal and my local merchant provider.
Come on Google, pull your finger out and expand that service.
Unlike India with it's various classes and such things as "untouchables" at least in Australia there is a genuine continuing effort to -try- and improve things for the Aboriginals. The issues surrounding the disproportionate level of poverty, disease, crime etc with Aboriginals are complex to say the very least but at least we're trying to find a way to make things better. I know around here there have been many success stories.
Also in North QLD here... also suffering because the person who built this house didn't bother to even put in the basic blue/silver foil. God awful in summer, though I've nearly managed to finish fitting the foil into the ceilings again. Next step is painting the walls, growing more trees etc etc. Still can't believe they built a solid block house and didn't think to insulate it - they should have simply called this place "The Kiln".
This has been done on large scales by a couple of power plants in the past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage
Anyone bothered to look at the massive composite photo they created with a few soldiers running out to the CG generated drone? You'd think for $4 million a pop they'd at least spend another $1000 to make the photos -look- realistic.
;)
I see quite a lot of these sorts of getups happening, someone gets some specs, waves their hands about, generates some crappy CG and utters a price of a few million. Couple of years later there's nothing really to show for it except some rudimentary framework and an empty office.
Only wish I had gotten in there first
Totally agree - I keep this book as a permanent fixture in the bathroom... many hours have passed and many things learned with that book in hand.
The sad thing is, it wasn't Iraq or its people who crashed the planes into the twin towers (Afghanistan - Al Qaeda), but then the Bush administration did a mighty fine job pinning them together.
...ubuntu has done very little that isnt just tying loose ends together, very little high quality coding. And that's precisely the stuff that most coders don't bother to finish off. A lot of open-source projects are written to scratch an itch and when that 'itch' is scratched sufficiently the coder generally stops. The trouble is, the point where the itch stops and the point where software is usable to a more widespread audience (beyond people who live/work with similar stuff) is usually not the same. So if all that Ubuntu does is add a bit of spit/polish to bring it up to shine then that's still worth having.No no, you've got it wrong. It's Windows that won't run with Wifi gear, instead it just keeps on running around in circles asking you to stop using the card-makers' management software but then saying it needs the software until you just throw it through a window and burn the machine.
Eight (8) Ubuntu machines here, 7.10, all running WiFi with various makes of cards including a laptop with a mini-PCI wifi and a desktop machine out in the workshop using a PCI-PCMCIA + PCMCIA Wifi card, all working.
-Some- Wifi cards just won't work with Linux but then I'm sure a lot of people have had their share of the same with Windows (including myself).
Only reason they appear 'close' according to that 'designer' is because of the limited resolution and a big slice of wishful thinking. There's a lot of differences in the curve outline between the two;
* the right hand bottom/mid side where the infinity symbol bulges out
* the right hand top side the infinity logo again is on the inside of the apple logo
* the left hand side the curve infinity symbol is on the -inside- of the apple logo
* the bottom bumps of the infinity curve have a lesser curvature
Sorry, but that guys reasoning of similarities is about as useful as saying "If you squint, then this Ford car looks clearly like this Chevy, see, it even has 4 wheels!".
Now that I'd love to see happen, especially for rural areas. Currently paying a fair bit for Skymesh 2-way satellite along with another $60/mth or so for NextG for on the road. It's a sad state of affairs, that's for sure.... at least the 2-way satellite is cheaper than NextG.
LyX comes practically close to this. Provides a nice balance between pure WYSIWIG and raw.
Have written many software manuals as well as assembly guides using it, it's great stuff and you don't have to entwine yourself with the LaTeX side of things.
It's commercial - but I bought and use MainActor (made/sold by Main Concept - there is a demo version too, leaves a watermark on the output).
Syntax can be an important thing but it's fairly personal too, I found the Lua syntax to be more pleasing than Python -personally- (much like I found PHP easier to read than Perl, others will be the other way around).
The big gain I had with Lua over Python was the incredibly small interpreter footprint, making it very easy to transport with packages. Coupling Lua with SQLite makes for a very versatile, quick and compact system. Lua has its own set of "ARUGH!!!" moments, things like 1-based arrays/lists when you're used to 0-based, other things like not being able to pull lists out in the insertion order (because they're hashed in etc). There's a nice #lua community on freenode IRC as well.
Of course, if you find the syntax too "at odds" with your mind then stick with Python. For me, Lua matched my requirements better.
For sure, too many people write too many programs in C when there are more appropriate alternatives. One of the really nice ones out is "Lua", I was using Python for a while and I ditched (mostly) in favor of Lua.
That's all nice and fine for bugs such as memory allocation and pointer faults etc but no matter what language you write in you will still run into logic-faults, faults caused by you believing the code does one thing while the interpreter does another.
Don't get me wrong here - C is a horrid little language, I've even written a small booklet on its bad quirks and how to potentially step around them but that all said the biggest fault/bug generator is still the assumption that what your write is going to do what you think it does. Most memory/pointer faults can be nailed down fairly quickly using valgrind or other electric-fence type environments, it's the logic faults that really get you pulling your hair out.