You don't need a scientific study to figure some of this stuff out. My bullshit detector lights up whenever some random dothead posts a quote from a random website to Slashdot that "no such studies have been done". People who claim no such studies have been done usually have no clue exactly how many graduate students there are in the world (a lot... I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that more than one had independently studied the relative incidence of cold and flu among two groups of people, one of which pluck their nose hairs when they get too long, the other which trim). Someday Google will make it easier to find and evaluate studies on all manner of things. For now, it's a bit harder than it should be.
And sure, sometimes no good studies have been done on a random topic or another, even important topics that might surprise you. Freakonomics (chapter 4) had an interesting discussion of the measurable affect of various public policy on crime rates, and it appears that the topic was not well studied and certainly the results of the studies which had been done were not well synthesized. As much energy and money as it receives, you would think that would be studied more rigorously and more often. Alas, it is not.
One moment please while I google for you... Here's a nice (rigorously referenced) summary which draws upon several studies, and which includes a section on lighting, which has been studied and shown to be effective as a measure in reducing crime. Presuming Canadian criminals do not have some unique national aversion to well-lit areas at night, then these results might be of interest to others, eh?
On the other hand, sure, maybe most of these studies are too localized, and what's happening on the larger scale is a shell game: a fixed amount of crime in a city is moving from well-lit areas to less-well-lit areas.
In any case, I'm definitely in favor of shielding and motion sensors and reduction of night lighting that's not useful. However, security lighting is a real concern, and it entails more than simply crime, it's really about insurance liability and inventory loss. Business owners will tell you that gangs of kids don't hang out in their parking lots at night as often (or at all) when they are well lit. They will also tell you that incidents of break-ins went down after they started lighting up the place at night. In some situations, their insurance companies may require certain lighting improvements, and you can bet the actuaries have some idea of the cost/benefit of lighting in certain situations. Installing and running lights isn't free, after all, and it's quite likely that businesses wouldn't do it if they were not pretty well convinced that it's effective at saving them money in some way which exceeds the cost. They might be wrong, but that wouldn't be for a complete lack of evidence supporting their current belief.
Look, dude, it's like this. Chicks dig stars. Countless generations of guys got laid by showing chicks stars. What are you gonna do, now that you can't even see the stars? This is all about trying to help guys like you score. Get with the program. Shield your bloody lights.
Well, the point is that even in rural areas it's getting quite difficult to see the night sky. You must travel many, many miles from a big city to see much of a sky at all. Even in rural areas there is too much light pollution. There are compromise solutions, for example shields that prevent photons from streetlights from going *up* into the sky. This seems so obvious that it's amazing this is controversial at all. Just Fraking Do It.
Lighting in those situations may seem excessive, but it's often based on security concerns. Well-lit areas tend to see less crime. They ought to use shields and direct the photons down, but they probably can't turn them off without risking break-ins and whatnot.
A few minutes with Google shows clearly that the corporation filed chapter 11, and that those proceedings protected the assets of corporate officers and other significant assets worth at least 900 million dollars, and furthermore the bankruptcy court denied compensation to over a half a million victims who apparently missed a filing deadline.
According to NASA, in Soviet Russia radiation reflects tinfoil hats, while tinfoil hats in North Korea are only used by old people, you insensitive clod.
yeah, those were the days... picnic blanket spread on the ground in the shadow of the sign with the universal symbol for "Don't feed the gators" which was a guy with one arm, and the other arm, off, and in a gator's mouth...
TMI and Chernobyl revealed classes of nuclear disasters that the industry had said were not supposed to occur. There were so many safeguards and so much redundancy that meltdowns simply couldn't happen. Well, they did. The reactor designs (two very different designs in these cases) both implied that meltdown and release of radioactive gas, water vapor, (and in the case of a full meltdown the radioactive elements used as fuel) was inevitable if the redundant cooling systems failed.
The human cost of Chernobyl was quite a bit higher than people realize. Given that both of these disasters were far smaller than they could have been, that cost should be sobering.
New reactor designs might make the risk/reward trade off for fission power more reasonable. (See: New use for nuclear waste) However, the designs from the sixties and seventies that are running today really ought not be near cities or in areas where it would suck to have to fence off a couple hundred square miles for a few centuries after a disaster.
Sure, it could be both true that Apple sold every phone they could make in the first couple months, and that they'll sell less than a million phones in the first quarter. The article you link appears to be hosted at a site concerned less with accurate technology reporting than some other sources. I'm amused to note the first link in their popular articles section:
MOST POPULAR ARTICLES ON M&C TODAY
1. Vanessa Hudgens nude photo surfaces
They appear to have selectively quoted an article about an iSuppli report. Here's an article which provides more details from that same report:
IPhone Becomes Leading U.S. Smart Phone Model in July
"Based on consumer demand, Apple's brand image, industry anticipation and iSuppli's estimates of volume shipments by manufacturers and the market segment, iSuppli is maintaining its projection that 4.5 million iPhones will ship in 2007, rising to more than 30 million units in 2011, as presented in the attached figure."
Given they sold 270,000 phones in the first 30 hours of sales, and given that stores continued to be often "sold out" despite the fact that new shipments were delivered to the stores every day, it seems more likely that a million iPhone have already been sold. Certainly I wouldn't bet against that strong possibility.
No, private computers not linked to a network suffered malware plagues, too. The virus was born in the pre-network days and spread, albeit slowly, from machine to machine on diskettes.
Yes, networks make a difference, a really big difference, in the malware primordial soup. To circle back to the original point, we have examples in Linux and Mac OS X of systems that are widely enough deployed to be potentially interesting targets, and completely engaged in the internet and various local networks (as are Windows systems) yet we don't see malware plagues on those platforms. The longer that situation persists the more interesting it becomes. People used to say that it was because the Macintosh ran on the PowerPC. Well, now there exist millions, probably about ten or twelve million, intel-based Macintosh systems, and nearly all the Linux systems in the world run on processors with the x86 instruction set. The IT industry is running out of excuses to make for Windows. "It's on more machines" is the last excuse, and the rise of Linux and Macintosh are eating into that excuse every day. When will we as an industry stop making excuses for Windows?
Users are not interested in how their refrigerators work, either, but they work reliably for years. Computers should be able to work without users needing to learn all manner of ever-changing and imperfect rules for how to tell a phishing web site from a bank web site (and by the time they are looking at a web page it's too late anyway).
The magnitude and rapidity of the iPhone price drop is probably not exactly matched in the cell phone industry, but the pattern of rapid and substantial price drops in new cutting edge cell phones (and other electronic gadgets) is quite common. One well-documented example is the Motorola RAZR, which started out with a very high price and was all but unavailable even at that price for months after its release. There was a scalper market for the things in the early *months* because Motorola couldn't make enough of them. For a while people paid something like eight hundred bucks to get one. When the manufacturing ramp up kicked into gear, the price fell, and fell and fell and now they are only a step or two away from giving the things away with a contract. There was no big internet whine-fest when that happened, and the initial price drops were large and rapid. Oh, the list price maybe didn't fall that fast, but people were getting between a hundred and two hundred and fifty dollars in rebates if they bought from Amazon and signed a year contract with the carrier, by the time all the various rebates were added up. It was a big, rapid drop in price.
There is something strange and different going on here, but it's not the rapid price drop, it's the reaction to it.
I think it has something to do with the trade press. Nobody can make any money writing stories about how pissed off Motorola RAZR customers are because they bought it early and the price fell, because nobody really cares about Motorola because they so seldom do anything interesting. They look like a one-hit wonder with the RAZR. Nobody even knows anything about, let alone carries in their pocket, the newer Motorola phones. The SLVR (shortly after the RAZR) and the KRZR (more recent EDGE entry) for example were basically flops, by the standards of the RAZR. Nobody would write stories like this about Motorola dropping RAZR prices:
Poked in the i (which is still linked on their front page).
So the trade press is using the John Dvorak model of Apple coverage to generate advertising revenue, and work early iPhone customr up into a lather with righteous indignation for having... I'm still confused by this... bought the coolest phone ever made in the early days before the inevitable and expected price drop?
The interesting question really is whether Apple structured the drop and timing on purpose to exploit the free publicity engine, or if they were caught by surprise.
I'm not convinced that the monopoly presence of Windows accounts for enormous Windows based botnets. There are what, something like 25 million Macintosh computers running Mac OS X, and most of those are running the same version of Mac OS X. That's a big enough pool, yet we don't see botnets on the Macintosh at all.
Suppose the market were evenly divided, 1/4 Windows, 1/4 Linux, 1/4 Macintosh, and 1/4 online game consoles that are always connected to the internet. Where would the botnets be hosted? Probably Windows. Botnets will begin to run on other platforms within about 48 hours after the security of Windows systems rises to a level equivalent to the other available platforms.
"By all indications, sales is going slower than Apple preferred at the $600 price point."
I'm not sure what indications you're looking at. Judging by the fact that stores continued to sell out of iPhone for several weeks after the launch, it looked more like Apple were selling every single iPhone they could make at the $600 price point. I think the indications point more to an increase in manufacturing capacity which will allow Apple to sell more units, which will be demanded at the lower price point. Where are you seeing the stories about piles and piles of iPhone waiting to be sold at AT&T and Apple stores with no customers in sight (which one would expect under your hypothesis)?
That's an interesting observation. I've seen a lot of people give their used cell phones to shelters, or to students or friends. I think the "market" for them exists, but its lubricated more by social currency rather than dollars.
I think the concern is that Slashdot has become a fraud. Four out of the last five stories that I've submitted were rejected. Some of those showed up as approved when submitted by others many hours later. In some cases the approved versions had over hyped and inaccurate article summaries pointing to secondary sources. I try to take care to get a link to a source as close to an original article as reasonable (say, an article in a magazine which was presumably fact checked, rather than an original research paper which may be too tedious or a breathless adver-blog. Watching my own low rate of success, and hearing the complaints of many others, I've basically stopped my little experiment and no longer waste my time submitting articles. Lots of other people are doing that, too. That makes Slashdot less interesting. Collapse is inevitable. It will become just another digg clone.
Well, I'd have to say they totally missed out on their chance to get conversations started with hot babes by whipping out their iPhone and showing off. If they'd been on that train it never would have occurred to them that they paid too much for the thing.
Apple has never entered the cell phone market before, under rapidly evolving market conditions which threaten to make one of their core business units obsolete within five years if they don't, as music players get built into cell phones from their competitors. Apple never introduced a product that had such potential for insanely high demand before, either. Perhaps Apple's sales models predicted massive consumer unhappiness at not being able to get an iPhone at the lower price, resulting in tremendous bad publicity and product failure in the market. Deferring some demand with a higher price initially is a reasonable and rational strategy for a product introduction like this. The price drop might simply reflect a rapid ramp up of manufacturing capacity. Apple now believe they can make enough to meet demand at the lower price point. There might also be economies of scale involved. Apple might be getting a better deal on components, or might have a more secure supply of 8GB flash at a lower price than they had last week. Basically, it's not about Apple hating and screwing their customers. Its about Apple working as hard as they can to aggressively move into a new market.
Finally, 69 days isn't ironic unless perhaps you, as a straight guy, gave some dude a hummer for your iPhone (which would be incongruous... iPhone==hummer by itself, nor an random occurrence of the number 69 isn't irony). If you're a straight guy and you gave some chick a mustache ride for your iPhone while she polished your knob, that's also not ironic, even though it was 69 days after the iPhone was released because a mustache ride in that situation is not incongruous, except perhaps that we might not expect some chick to give up her iPhone for something she can get anywhere. See how that works?
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need a scientific study to figure some of this stuff out. My bullshit detector lights up whenever some random dothead posts a quote from a random website to Slashdot that "no such studies have been done". People who claim no such studies have been done usually have no clue exactly how many graduate students there are in the world (a lot... I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that more than one had independently studied the relative incidence of cold and flu among two groups of people, one of which pluck their nose hairs when they get too long, the other which trim). Someday Google will make it easier to find and evaluate studies on all manner of things. For now, it's a bit harder than it should be.
And sure, sometimes no good studies have been done on a random topic or another, even important topics that might surprise you. Freakonomics (chapter 4) had an interesting discussion of the measurable affect of various public policy on crime rates, and it appears that the topic was not well studied and certainly the results of the studies which had been done were not well synthesized. As much energy and money as it receives, you would think that would be studied more rigorously and more often. Alas, it is not.
One moment please while I google for you... Here's a nice (rigorously referenced) summary which draws upon several studies, and which includes a section on lighting, which has been studied and shown to be effective as a measure in reducing crime. Presuming Canadian criminals do not have some unique national aversion to well-lit areas at night, then these results might be of interest to others, eh?
EVIDENCE-BASED CRIME PREVENTION: SCIENTIFIC BASIS, TRENDS, RESULTS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR CANADA
On the other hand, sure, maybe most of these studies are too localized, and what's happening on the larger scale is a shell game: a fixed amount of crime in a city is moving from well-lit areas to less-well-lit areas.
In any case, I'm definitely in favor of shielding and motion sensors and reduction of night lighting that's not useful. However, security lighting is a real concern, and it entails more than simply crime, it's really about insurance liability and inventory loss. Business owners will tell you that gangs of kids don't hang out in their parking lots at night as often (or at all) when they are well lit. They will also tell you that incidents of break-ins went down after they started lighting up the place at night. In some situations, their insurance companies may require certain lighting improvements, and you can bet the actuaries have some idea of the cost/benefit of lighting in certain situations. Installing and running lights isn't free, after all, and it's quite likely that businesses wouldn't do it if they were not pretty well convinced that it's effective at saving them money in some way which exceeds the cost. They might be wrong, but that wouldn't be for a complete lack of evidence supporting their current belief.
Look, dude, it's like this. Chicks dig stars. Countless generations of guys got laid by showing chicks stars. What are you gonna do, now that you can't even see the stars? This is all about trying to help guys like you score. Get with the program. Shield your bloody lights.
Well, the point is that even in rural areas it's getting quite difficult to see the night sky. You must travel many, many miles from a big city to see much of a sky at all. Even in rural areas there is too much light pollution. There are compromise solutions, for example shields that prevent photons from streetlights from going *up* into the sky. This seems so obvious that it's amazing this is controversial at all. Just Fraking Do It.
Lighting in those situations may seem excessive, but it's often based on security concerns. Well-lit areas tend to see less crime. They ought to use shields and direct the photons down, but they probably can't turn them off without risking break-ins and whatnot.
A few minutes with Google shows clearly that the corporation filed chapter 11, and that those proceedings protected the assets of corporate officers and other significant assets worth at least 900 million dollars, and furthermore the bankruptcy court denied compensation to over a half a million victims who apparently missed a filing deadline.
An apparently well researched and well respected source of information on the corporate fiasco that was the Dalkon Shield is this book:
Bending the Law: The Story of the Dalkon Shield Bankruptcy (by Richard B. Sobol. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.)
A review of the book containing enough details to confirm that a simplistic interpretation "AH Robins went out of business" is not sufficiently detailed to be a meaningful contribution to the discussion:
Reviewed by Cary Coglianese, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
An article from the day that bankruptcy was filed:
Robins, in Bankruptcy Filing, Cites Dalkon Shield Claims
A band named after the fiasco, with MP3 files online:
Dalkon Shield
Please, get a login, use it, and post under your real name. It might help provide you with incentive to read more and mouth off less.
Nah, all the cool kids say "ar-fids".
According to NASA, in Soviet Russia radiation reflects tinfoil hats, while tinfoil hats in North Korea are only used by old people, you insensitive clod.
There. Just thought I'd improve that a bit.
yeah, those were the days... picnic blanket spread on the ground in the shadow of the sign with the universal symbol for "Don't feed the gators" which was a guy with one arm, and the other arm, off, and in a gator's mouth...
TMI and Chernobyl revealed classes of nuclear disasters that the industry had said were not supposed to occur. There were so many safeguards and so much redundancy that meltdowns simply couldn't happen. Well, they did. The reactor designs (two very different designs in these cases) both implied that meltdown and release of radioactive gas, water vapor, (and in the case of a full meltdown the radioactive elements used as fuel) was inevitable if the redundant cooling systems failed.
The human cost of Chernobyl was quite a bit higher than people realize. Given that both of these disasters were far smaller than they could have been, that cost should be sobering.
Chernobyl Legacy, a photo essay by Paul Fusco
New reactor designs might make the risk/reward trade off for fission power more reasonable. (See: New use for nuclear waste) However, the designs from the sixties and seventies that are running today really ought not be near cities or in areas where it would suck to have to fence off a couple hundred square miles for a few centuries after a disaster.
Dude. Don't scare me like that.
According to NASA...
I appear to have struck a nerve. Did you just out yourself as a member of the MS WIndows development team?
No, private computers not linked to a network suffered malware plagues, too. The virus was born in the pre-network days and spread, albeit slowly, from machine to machine on diskettes.
Yes, networks make a difference, a really big difference, in the malware primordial soup. To circle back to the original point, we have examples in Linux and Mac OS X of systems that are widely enough deployed to be potentially interesting targets, and completely engaged in the internet and various local networks (as are Windows systems) yet we don't see malware plagues on those platforms. The longer that situation persists the more interesting it becomes. People used to say that it was because the Macintosh ran on the PowerPC. Well, now there exist millions, probably about ten or twelve million, intel-based Macintosh systems, and nearly all the Linux systems in the world run on processors with the x86 instruction set. The IT industry is running out of excuses to make for Windows. "It's on more machines" is the last excuse, and the rise of Linux and Macintosh are eating into that excuse every day. When will we as an industry stop making excuses for Windows?
Users are not interested in how their refrigerators work, either, but they work reliably for years. Computers should be able to work without users needing to learn all manner of ever-changing and imperfect rules for how to tell a phishing web site from a bank web site (and by the time they are looking at a web page it's too late anyway).
The magnitude and rapidity of the iPhone price drop is probably not exactly matched in the cell phone industry, but the pattern of rapid and substantial price drops in new cutting edge cell phones (and other electronic gadgets) is quite common. One well-documented example is the Motorola RAZR, which started out with a very high price and was all but unavailable even at that price for months after its release. There was a scalper market for the things in the early *months* because Motorola couldn't make enough of them. For a while people paid something like eight hundred bucks to get one. When the manufacturing ramp up kicked into gear, the price fell, and fell and fell and now they are only a step or two away from giving the things away with a contract. There was no big internet whine-fest when that happened, and the initial price drops were large and rapid. Oh, the list price maybe didn't fall that fast, but people were getting between a hundred and two hundred and fifty dollars in rebates if they bought from Amazon and signed a year contract with the carrier, by the time all the various rebates were added up. It was a big, rapid drop in price.
There is something strange and different going on here, but it's not the rapid price drop, it's the reaction to it.
I think it has something to do with the trade press. Nobody can make any money writing stories about how pissed off Motorola RAZR customers are because they bought it early and the price fell, because nobody really cares about Motorola because they so seldom do anything interesting. They look like a one-hit wonder with the RAZR. Nobody even knows anything about, let alone carries in their pocket, the newer Motorola phones. The SLVR (shortly after the RAZR) and the KRZR (more recent EDGE entry) for example were basically flops, by the standards of the RAZR. Nobody would write stories like this about Motorola dropping RAZR prices:
Poked in the i (which is still linked on their front page).
Apple Slashes iPhone Prices: slaps 1 million idiots
So the trade press is using the John Dvorak model of Apple coverage to generate advertising revenue, and work early iPhone customr up into a lather with righteous indignation for having... I'm still confused by this... bought the coolest phone ever made in the early days before the inevitable and expected price drop?
The interesting question really is whether Apple structured the drop and timing on purpose to exploit the free publicity engine, or if they were caught by surprise.
I'm not convinced that the monopoly presence of Windows accounts for enormous Windows based botnets. There are what, something like 25 million Macintosh computers running Mac OS X, and most of those are running the same version of Mac OS X. That's a big enough pool, yet we don't see botnets on the Macintosh at all.
Suppose the market were evenly divided, 1/4 Windows, 1/4 Linux, 1/4 Macintosh, and 1/4 online game consoles that are always connected to the internet. Where would the botnets be hosted? Probably Windows. Botnets will begin to run on other platforms within about 48 hours after the security of Windows systems rises to a level equivalent to the other available platforms.
That's an interesting observation. I've seen a lot of people give their used cell phones to shelters, or to students or friends. I think the "market" for them exists, but its lubricated more by social currency rather than dollars.
I think the concern is that Slashdot has become a fraud. Four out of the last five stories that I've submitted were rejected. Some of those showed up as approved when submitted by others many hours later. In some cases the approved versions had over hyped and inaccurate article summaries pointing to secondary sources. I try to take care to get a link to a source as close to an original article as reasonable (say, an article in a magazine which was presumably fact checked, rather than an original research paper which may be too tedious or a breathless adver-blog. Watching my own low rate of success, and hearing the complaints of many others, I've basically stopped my little experiment and no longer waste my time submitting articles. Lots of other people are doing that, too. That makes Slashdot less interesting. Collapse is inevitable. It will become just another digg clone.
Well, I'd have to say they totally missed out on their chance to get conversations started with hot babes by whipping out their iPhone and showing off. If they'd been on that train it never would have occurred to them that they paid too much for the thing.
Apple has never entered the cell phone market before, under rapidly evolving market conditions which threaten to make one of their core business units obsolete within five years if they don't, as music players get built into cell phones from their competitors. Apple never introduced a product that had such potential for insanely high demand before, either. Perhaps Apple's sales models predicted massive consumer unhappiness at not being able to get an iPhone at the lower price, resulting in tremendous bad publicity and product failure in the market. Deferring some demand with a higher price initially is a reasonable and rational strategy for a product introduction like this. The price drop might simply reflect a rapid ramp up of manufacturing capacity. Apple now believe they can make enough to meet demand at the lower price point. There might also be economies of scale involved. Apple might be getting a better deal on components, or might have a more secure supply of 8GB flash at a lower price than they had last week. Basically, it's not about Apple hating and screwing their customers. Its about Apple working as hard as they can to aggressively move into a new market.
An economist would point out that your iPhone was worth what you were willing to pay for it when you paid for it. Today you might be willing to pay less. Yesterday you were willing to pay more, or you would not have paid. More importantly, to Apple, demand for iPhone will likely increase as the price has dropped. Supply and Demand. I bet you'll see a lot of one-iPhone families convert to two-iPhone families now that price has gone down.
Finally, 69 days isn't ironic unless perhaps you, as a straight guy, gave some dude a hummer for your iPhone (which would be incongruous... iPhone==hummer by itself, nor an random occurrence of the number 69 isn't irony). If you're a straight guy and you gave some chick a mustache ride for your iPhone while she polished your knob, that's also not ironic, even though it was 69 days after the iPhone was released because a mustache ride in that situation is not incongruous, except perhaps that we might not expect some chick to give up her iPhone for something she can get anywhere. See how that works?
Dude. I'm not parroting Theo, and I didn't say anything about GPL taking away "freedoms". Why do you hate America?
oligopoly
Ooops, skipped a level following the thread back. Plutonite is clearly punished by moron moderators. Sarcasm is still dead.