It's a stupid rant. Look at the market for PC software.
There are a lot of *free* applications. Lots. More than I can every use.
Then there are inexpensive shareware stuff. $5-15
Then there are the mainstream shareware apps. $40-60
From there, applications go as high as you want to pay.... $100-500 $1000, $5000
All are available on the internet. Do free applications limit the abilities of developers to churn out $50 software? Or $100 software? No. People will pay what the software is worth.
This guy seems to be making the argument that somehow a low price sets the expectation of low prices. It's a dumb argument. If developers come up with an application that's worth $500 guess what... they will pay $500.
What he's really saying that the $1 applications are so good that he can't compete. And that's probably true. What he needs to do is make his applications worth more than $1. It's not the platform that's holding him back. It's not the price of cheap software holding him back, it's his own inability to write valuable software that commands a premium price. Seriously. Does he even understand that you can't write a general purpose iPhone app and expect to get $50 for it? He's going to have to hit some vertical market software (highly specialized) to command premium dollars. How about a full-blown VST/Softsynth app that will accept plugins for the iPhone? I'd pay $200 for that. How about working with a high-end electronics company to write apps to control lighting/music for home-automation? He could probably get $300-500 for that.
Just being a good programmer isn't good enough. He should know better.
"They want to have a place for you to take your unit back to for support."
This is an old argument; I remember back in the early days of computers, this came up over and over. The argument was something like this:
"If you buy from the mail-order guy, then you don't get the kind of great support you get from your local dealer"
Okay. So you'd go in and ask about a particular piece of software, that you'd need support with. The local merchant's answer?
"How can you expect us to be an expert in each of these packages! They're quite difficult, and I'd have to devote a lot of staff to it!"
So. I still don't get it.
Let's take your store. I've bought high-end audio. It's usually sold with no return. If you complain about it, they'll fix it, but since you probably don't have repairmen on premises, you send it back to the manufacturer.
Let me ask you this. When I buy any TV or audio equipment from your store, can I return it for any reason within 90 days? That $2500 high-end receiver, can I try it for a week and bring it back? Because that's Costco's policy.
It's been my experience that small merchants have the worst return policies because they'll tell you they can't afford to take returns. Or if they take it, it's a big hassle. They argue, they'll point to a policy on the wall which says if you open the box it cannot be refunded. They'll only take returns if it's broken.
Rarely do small merchants offer great return policies. At best, they'll offer you good advice before you buy.
Recently, I went looking for a high-end keyboard, every place on the internet and locally sells it for $2,500. I figured the local store (very large) would tell me all about it. The manager said "These keyboards, it's hard to keep them all straight. It's hard to really go through it. XXXXXXX company rep will be in here Wednesday, maybe he can show it to you". Would they discount it? "Sorry sir, we only sell a few of these a year and the markup isn't great". So I did a little digging and I found 2 large stores that indeed sell below MAP ($2000, free shipping). And they were more helpful, they offered all kinds of great advice. Now they didn't offer returns, but it turns out nobody does on high-end stuff like this.
So tell me again what value the local guy is bringing me? If he went out of business tomorrow, how would that harm the consumer?
"It seems that the current generation thinks that charging for software is a bad thing."
That could only be true if the RATE of piracy is higher than in the past. And what you'd need to do is to study what is being pirated and how it compares to 5 or 10 years ago. You could do lots of interesting research in this area provided you have the data.
What we're lacking is facts, and the people providing them have a vested interest in doing research only as long as the outcome they're paying for.
The real shame is that so many people *who should know better* say that online anonymity is a bad thing and that only "criminals" try to remain anonymous.
What they don't realize is the person making the laws and appointing judges gets to define who is a criminal. That's pretty much true everywhere.
They are, but your console doesn't get hosed by a bad implementation of DRM, and better, you can sell your console games when you're done. You can also loan them to your friends if they want to play.
"As well, despite the fact that the steam version has no packaging costs, no printing costs, no warehousing costs, no stocking, shipping, or handling costs, you are still paying the same for the game as everyone else who bought it in the store."
Which highlights that games are priced for what people will pay; the cost has nothing whatsoever to do with the costs of production/development.
The corollary to this, of course, is that piracy drives up the cost of games. In fact, piracy drives down the revenue of game producers, but has no impact on price. If you think about this, it makes sense. But people still think selling price is directly related to production price, and they're really not related.
They didn't want to have one version. I suspect the Home/Pro version of XP convinced them there was a way to segment the market to maximize profit.
The truth is, as a monopoly, MS is mainly committed to finding ways of charging more for it's products. And to be fair, if I owned MS, I'd do the same thing. It's about maximizing profits, since they really don't have any competition to their desktop monopoly.
What a clever photoshop job. I'll bet they had to use advanced computational imagery techniques (only available in CSI and 24) to detect this subtle fakery.
"Unless there is large scale commercial piracy going on the police just won't care, and until then it's a civil dispute that to go before the courts."
Right, and they have the tools already in hand to do a correct job, but they want to push the cost of their enforcement on somebody else.
They have the right and ability to go to court, ask the court to compel the ISP to tie the IP address with a person's name, and then start a lawsuit against the person who they allege was infringing on their copyright. That's the way copyright is intended to work. But what they're asking is that everybody else should bear that cost of enforcing copyright simply because it's cheaper to force other people to do it.
That doesn't make sense on so many levels. It gives copyright holder basically rights over any sort of communication on the theory that it might be something that would infringe their copyright. It's madness. Worse, in this day and age, *everything is copyrighted*. This post is copyrighted. How does an ISP even know what is okay to not filter?
It's nonsensical. Unfortunately, the RIAA (and others) won't soon come to their senses because it's not in their interest to come to their senses.
I think what the poster parent was trying to say (perhaps unclearly) was that the fact that Australia is a democratic republic has nothing to do with a court case. Perhaps what was meant was "thank heavens Australia is a country of laws where cases are based on law and not some autocratic ruler's opinion".
As long as he's implying the guy is too old, he might as well ask him his religion and who he voted for in the last election.
Make some crack about the person's sexual orientation, and then for good measure, tell him that people of his racial group are untrustworthy. Heck if they have long hair, ask them if they ever wash.
If you want to have an interesting life, you've got to ask the hard questions!
"When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."
Which is like putting someone in a space ship, have them look back at the earth, and understand how small earth is, and how small each of us are compared with the earth.
One of the three big lies is "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you".
I'd remind you that every time the government gets involved in IP law at every level, it ends up worse for consumers. Every time. So you should be scared when you see this. We'll end up like crazy canadian laws where an entrenched monopoly gets a tax on anything that poses a threat to that monopoly (taxes on ipods, black CD's, and likely ISP taxes).
And that isn't the worst thing that could happen. The monopolies will be pushing for chips inside devices that can "tell" when media isn't authorized. In the name of helping the people of course.
I realize I'm giving worst case scenarios here, but ask yourself this... Is the FTC likely to say "Goodness, none of the current laws are very consumer friendly, therefore, copyright/patent will be reduced in time and scope, there can be no more DRM, and people should be able to use music and video wherever they want, whenever they want". Won't happen, because the FTC doesn't have the authority to make it better. They do have the authority to make things *worse* for consumers though in terms of mandates and taxes.
When people speak of "profit", sometimes they speak of the gross margin (as you are).
Companies only care a little about this. They care a lot more about a rate of return. The telco probably put in some equipment 10 years ago, they're getting 10% return. Laying fiber would take a lot of capital, and the rate of return would be less for a considerable amount of time. So they decline to upgrade their infrastructure.
So the original poster was right. It's not a matter of making a profit or not, it's "This pays less money than what I'm doing right now".
The government might be willing to take a 1% rate of return. A business might decide it wants more. It's a matter of more profit or less profit.
A few years back, Consumer Reports took some malware and made some trivial changes and almost all the AV vendors failed that simple test.
If you recall the AV vendors criticized Consumer Reports because they claimed it was the equivalent of producing new malware and that it was irresponsible.
Bottom line... this pretty much proves that AV has little or no value. You use it because everybody tells you that you have to use it, not because it provides any sort of comprehensive security (it doesn't even come close).
Based on the "hopes" of a lot of people, the poor guy is going to disappoint a lot of people.
His supporters who think he'll change everything.
His detractors who think he'll change everything.
Take a look at a list of presidents for the past 40 years and you'll see no one president fundamentally changes everything. Can't be done. A president doesn't have that sort of power.
As I tell everyone, whoever gets elected you hope he/she does well for our country, because then everyone wins.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a stupid rant. Look at the market for PC software.
There are a lot of *free* applications. Lots. More than I can every use.
Then there are inexpensive shareware stuff. $5-15
Then there are the mainstream shareware apps. $40-60
From there, applications go as high as you want to pay.... $100-500 $1000, $5000
All are available on the internet. Do free applications limit the abilities of developers to churn out $50 software? Or $100 software? No. People will pay what the software is worth.
This guy seems to be making the argument that somehow a low price sets the expectation of low prices. It's a dumb argument. If developers come up with an application that's worth $500 guess what... they will pay $500.
What he's really saying that the $1 applications are so good that he can't compete. And that's probably true. What he needs to do is make his applications worth more than $1. It's not the platform that's holding him back. It's not the price of cheap software holding him back, it's his own inability to write valuable software that commands a premium price. Seriously. Does he even understand that you can't write a general purpose iPhone app and expect to get $50 for it? He's going to have to hit some vertical market software (highly specialized) to command premium dollars. How about a full-blown VST/Softsynth app that will accept plugins for the iPhone? I'd pay $200 for that. How about working with a high-end electronics company to write apps to control lighting/music for home-automation? He could probably get $300-500 for that.
Just being a good programmer isn't good enough. He should know better.
Seriously, he's all wet.
"They want to have a place for you to take your unit back to for support."
This is an old argument; I remember back in the early days of computers, this came up over and over. The argument was something like this:
"If you buy from the mail-order guy, then you don't get the kind of great support you get from your local dealer"
Okay. So you'd go in and ask about a particular piece of software, that you'd need support with. The local merchant's answer?
"How can you expect us to be an expert in each of these packages! They're quite difficult, and I'd have to devote a lot of staff to it!"
So. I still don't get it.
Let's take your store. I've bought high-end audio. It's usually sold with no return. If you complain about it, they'll fix it, but since you probably don't have repairmen on premises, you send it back to the manufacturer.
Let me ask you this. When I buy any TV or audio equipment from your store, can I return it for any reason within 90 days? That $2500 high-end receiver, can I try it for a week and bring it back? Because that's Costco's policy.
It's been my experience that small merchants have the worst return policies because they'll tell you they can't afford to take returns. Or if they take it, it's a big hassle. They argue, they'll point to a policy on the wall which says if you open the box it cannot be refunded. They'll only take returns if it's broken.
Rarely do small merchants offer great return policies. At best, they'll offer you good advice before you buy.
Recently, I went looking for a high-end keyboard, every place on the internet and locally sells it for $2,500. I figured the local store (very large) would tell me all about it. The manager said "These keyboards, it's hard to keep them all straight. It's hard to really go through it. XXXXXXX company rep will be in here Wednesday, maybe he can show it to you". Would they discount it? "Sorry sir, we only sell a few of these a year and the markup isn't great". So I did a little digging and I found 2 large stores that indeed sell below MAP ($2000, free shipping). And they were more helpful, they offered all kinds of great advice. Now they didn't offer returns, but it turns out nobody does on high-end stuff like this.
So tell me again what value the local guy is bringing me? If he went out of business tomorrow, how would that harm the consumer?
"It seems that the current generation thinks that charging for software is a bad thing."
That could only be true if the RATE of piracy is higher than in the past. And what you'd need to do is to study what is being pirated and how it compares to 5 or 10 years ago. You could do lots of interesting research in this area provided you have the data.
What we're lacking is facts, and the people providing them have a vested interest in doing research only as long as the outcome they're paying for.
The real shame is that so many people *who should know better* say that online anonymity is a bad thing and that only "criminals" try to remain anonymous.
What they don't realize is the person making the laws and appointing judges gets to define who is a criminal. That's pretty much true everywhere.
"but consoles are completely locked!"
They are, but your console doesn't get hosed by a bad implementation of DRM, and better, you can sell your console games when you're done. You can also loan them to your friends if they want to play.
"As well, despite the fact that the steam version has no packaging costs, no printing costs, no warehousing costs, no stocking, shipping, or handling costs, you are still paying the same for the game as everyone else who bought it in the store."
Which highlights that games are priced for what people will pay; the cost has nothing whatsoever to do with the costs of production/development.
The corollary to this, of course, is that piracy drives up the cost of games. In fact, piracy drives down the revenue of game producers, but has no impact on price. If you think about this, it makes sense. But people still think selling price is directly related to production price, and they're really not related.
Sure, what this guy did is cool, but this is the real Rocketman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN3MGN899yE
"He was recently let go with the current downsizing that is running wild in the company"
I'm fascinated given Comcast's revenue growth over the past years why they would be downsizing.
Never mind, silly question. This is Comcast.
PETA = People Eating Tasty Animals
Remember, there's room for all of god's creatures... on the plate right next to the mashed potatoes and green beans.
Speed cameras will gladly ticket all the drivers, and you won't realize until too late.
They didn't want to have one version. I suspect the Home/Pro version of XP convinced them there was a way to segment the market to maximize profit.
The truth is, as a monopoly, MS is mainly committed to finding ways of charging more for it's products. And to be fair, if I owned MS, I'd do the same thing. It's about maximizing profits, since they really don't have any competition to their desktop monopoly.
What a clever photoshop job. I'll bet they had to use advanced computational imagery techniques (only available in CSI and 24) to detect this subtle fakery.
Thank God AP was being vigilent.
"Unless there is large scale commercial piracy going on the police just won't care, and until then it's a civil dispute that to go before the courts."
Right, and they have the tools already in hand to do a correct job, but they want to push the cost of their enforcement on somebody else.
They have the right and ability to go to court, ask the court to compel the ISP to tie the IP address with a person's name, and then start a lawsuit against the person who they allege was infringing on their copyright. That's the way copyright is intended to work. But what they're asking is that everybody else should bear that cost of enforcing copyright simply because it's cheaper to force other people to do it.
That doesn't make sense on so many levels. It gives copyright holder basically rights over any sort of communication on the theory that it might be something that would infringe their copyright. It's madness. Worse, in this day and age, *everything is copyrighted*. This post is copyrighted. How does an ISP even know what is okay to not filter?
It's nonsensical. Unfortunately, the RIAA (and others) won't soon come to their senses because it's not in their interest to come to their senses.
I think what the poster parent was trying to say (perhaps unclearly) was that the fact that Australia is a democratic republic has nothing to do with a court case. Perhaps what was meant was "thank heavens Australia is a country of laws where cases are based on law and not some autocratic ruler's opinion".
As long as he's implying the guy is too old, he might as well ask him his religion and who he voted for in the last election.
Make some crack about the person's sexual orientation, and then for good measure, tell him that people of his racial group are untrustworthy. Heck if they have long hair, ask them if they ever wash.
If you want to have an interesting life, you've got to ask the hard questions!
They're all from Hawaii (or related to Hawaii), and they were taken all in 1941 or 1945. Like WWII didn't exist.
The photos are really cool, but I guess they've either held back the WWII archive or it's separated out of the 40's pictures.
"The transportation board's worry is that there will be a bunch of amateur, unregulated bus/cab drivers running around."
That makes sense. You wouldn't want the bus drivers to have to share the road with a bunch of untrained amateur drives on the road.
Oh...wait....
Regulations like this are never for consumer benefit; they are always to protect the incumbent providing service.
Whether or not this is a good thing depends very much why this is being done.
The Total Perspective Vortex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Gold_(spaceship)#Total_Perspective_Vortex
Think of what it does. From the book:
"When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."
Which is like putting someone in a space ship, have them look back at the earth, and understand how small earth is, and how small each of us are compared with the earth.
He was hoping you wouldn't bring those incidents up.
One of the three big lies is "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you".
I'd remind you that every time the government gets involved in IP law at every level, it ends up worse for consumers. Every time. So you should be scared when you see this. We'll end up like crazy canadian laws where an entrenched monopoly gets a tax on anything that poses a threat to that monopoly (taxes on ipods, black CD's, and likely ISP taxes).
And that isn't the worst thing that could happen. The monopolies will be pushing for chips inside devices that can "tell" when media isn't authorized. In the name of helping the people of course.
I realize I'm giving worst case scenarios here, but ask yourself this... Is the FTC likely to say "Goodness, none of the current laws are very consumer friendly, therefore, copyright/patent will be reduced in time and scope, there can be no more DRM, and people should be able to use music and video wherever they want, whenever they want". Won't happen, because the FTC doesn't have the authority to make it better. They do have the authority to make things *worse* for consumers though in terms of mandates and taxes.
No thanks.
When people speak of "profit", sometimes they speak of the gross margin (as you are).
Companies only care a little about this. They care a lot more about a rate of return. The telco probably put in some equipment 10 years ago, they're getting 10% return. Laying fiber would take a lot of capital, and the rate of return would be less for a considerable amount of time. So they decline to upgrade their infrastructure.
So the original poster was right. It's not a matter of making a profit or not, it's "This pays less money than what I'm doing right now".
The government might be willing to take a 1% rate of return. A business might decide it wants more. It's a matter of more profit or less profit.
A few years back, Consumer Reports took some malware and made some trivial changes and almost all the AV vendors failed that simple test.
If you recall the AV vendors criticized Consumer Reports because they claimed it was the equivalent of producing new malware and that it was irresponsible.
Bottom line... this pretty much proves that AV has little or no value. You use it because everybody tells you that you have to use it, not because it provides any sort of comprehensive security (it doesn't even come close).
Based on the "hopes" of a lot of people, the poor guy is going to disappoint a lot of people.
His supporters who think he'll change everything.
His detractors who think he'll change everything.
Take a look at a list of presidents for the past 40 years and you'll see no one president fundamentally changes everything. Can't be done. A president doesn't have that sort of power.
As I tell everyone, whoever gets elected you hope he/she does well for our country, because then everyone wins.
Don't tell them. They seem pretty happy with 5GB/month and a poke in the eye to go with it. ;)