assume fixed (by which I mean everything but the bandwidth) was, say, $12(making this up), and the multiplier is.5. So, for cable, let's say the fixed cost is, what, $12 still? they don't have to pay for business phone lines, all they really do is maintain the existing infrastructure that they have, which they're already doing anyway. So it should be less. Let's say $10.
So, X =.5 * (50 - 10) X = 20 20k/sec.
Of course, I'm sure there are a million other factors, but the bottom line is, if the fixed costs the same amount to maintain, you're buying another $30/month worth of bandwidth. If $1 =.5k/sec, that's 15k/sec.
Let's say that 20k/sec is what you've purchased, but that you can average it out over a month. That'd work really well; it would allow them to uncap your line until it looked like you were going to go over your quota, then slow you down so that you ended up averaging 20k/sec over a month. During peak times, they could cap it to prevent congestion, but when you needed 400k/sec for 5 minutes at 3am, they could give it to you. That's what they should really do. Because when they buy bandwidth, they don't buy it by the gig, they buy it by the kbps. Therefore, you should get it by the kbps. The trick is, to get it to where what you're paying and what you're getting is fair. They're trying to do this, and they may be acting in good faith, but they're going about it the wrong way. They need to charge you:
We don't need laws that give the government any control over the internet, but we need them to be able to prosecute spammers like they prosecute child pornographers, scam artists, or whatever. They don't need to own more of the internet, all they need is our UCE. And a huge pat on the back when they do right by us.
Meanwhile, the cost of this is billions of dollars a year. Lots of/. people don't want laws, because they're afraid of the government getting their dirty paws on us. But what do you propose we do in the meantime? What do you propose we do now? Because despite the fact that you only get ten spams a day, I get about 75. Three months ago I only got 50, and it's only going to get worse.
We have to figure out how to fix this, tomorrow, or we have to ask the government to do it. It has to be fixed. Technical solutions may work, but may doesn't mean jack--they're not working now, and that's all I care about.
If you (the collective you, the people who say "we need a technical solution") can't fix it, STFU. I'm not talking about filtering or RBL lists, I'm talking about putting the spammers out of business. If they're sending spam, your job is not done. And if you can't stop them, again, STFU and let the government take care of it. It has to be done; the costs are too high, and it really gets me worked up.
Until I can post my e-mail address on slashdot without obfuscation and without fear of harvesting, until I can telnet into my POP server and read my mail without getting pissed off, until the primary meaning of Spam is once again spiced ham, you "we need a technical solution" people may not sleep. Billions of $$$ a year.
SPAM is the equivalent of your TIVO recording infomercials for you. You can delete them if you want, but they still take up space, and you didn't ask for them.
Good god yes. My mom started a business and decided to use email@att.net as the address for the business. She wrote a book and that e-mail address is in the book. Now she can never ever ever stop paying AT&T. Meanwhile, I drop $15/year and I can give everybody different addresses (yourcompany@mydomain.com) so that if somebody spams me I can redirect that address back to them. I could just block it, but it's more fun to redirect it's destination to abuse@yourcompany.com. Life is good. No spam, complete control, easier filtering (mailing lists automatically filtered to specific folders), no more fear. Aaah.
They charge ~$50/month, dial-up ISPs charge ~$20/month for unlimited access. Since there are no other benefits to you other than faster speeds and always-on access, you're basically paying $30/month for bandwidth, for using a fat piece of their pipe (versus 5k/sec if you're dialup). So, how much bandwidth does $30/month buy?
I believe the track times are something they go by if there's no unique identifier. IE track 1 is 2m48s, track 2 3m5s, etc. That's a pretty easy way to determine what CD it is...
Good point. I can buy an old movie on DVD for ten bucks, because it was released a long time ago, the number of people willing to buy it have decreased, so the price goes down to try to get more people to buy it. Meanwhile, the price of a new CD is often less than that of an old CD. I should be able to get Nirvana's Nevermind for less than a newly released CD, but it works the other way around. The new CDs go on sale, and everything else is more expensive. Maybe they have a good reason for this, but what could it be? I guess it drives people to buy new music and forget old music, but why would they want to do this? Support new artists? Why, when they can make money off of existing artists? The distribution costs of sending someone an MP3 are near zero. I should be able to buy an old CD in MP3 format off the web for three bucks. The artist already made most of the money they were going to make, and I'd be likely to buy more at $3/CD than at $15/CD. I understand that new artists need to make money, and that they wouldn't be making as much at $3/CD, so why not release old music in MP3 format and only sell CDs for the newer music. People would still buy them, even if their only use would be to rip the CD to MP3 and store the CD in a cool, dry place.
It would be exactly like hardcover books, gaming consoles, and other new tech. Get the early adopters to pay more at first, then lower the price later to get more people to buy it.
I like the program too. My favorite feature is the client and the scheduler were separate. I could schedule downloads from work, go home, and there they were. Simple. Effective. Also lots of songs. The RIAA will win if they can use the Napster rulings here. Audiogalaxy blocks songs that are copyrighted, but there are always more songs with different titles, and whoever is in charge of blocking songs only gets the popular (eminem and the like) artists. The less popular, and IMO better artists, are untouched.
There was controversy a couple of years back about the new superbikes Suzuki and Kawasaki were putting out. The Suzuki Hayabusa did like 189mph, Kawasaki was issuing press releases all the time saying their new bike (the ZX-12R) was going to be faster than that. It was a back-and-forth thing for awhile, but eventually some government people, without passing any laws, said, "okay, this is getting out of hand" and asked motorcycle manufacturers to speed-limit their bikes, effectively eliminating the MPH race. The fuel-mapping basically leans out the mixture at... What was it? 184mph, something in the 180s. 300KPH, basically. Both manufacturers decided it was in their best interests, and the MPH race was over. You can easily change the fuel mapping not to do this, but they(gov't) did create change. Nobody really complains, because everybody agrees that 300kph is plenty fast enough, but if it were 200kph, you know there'd be people complaining. I guess the story doesn't directly apply, but it's interesting, nevertheless. I suspect that the manufacturers were losing money trying to one-up each other and decided that tied for first place was better for the ol' wallet.
That's true, and a good point, but how else can we make them see the light? Maybe we need to let it be known more publicly that we're not buying out of rebellion, not out of greed. I don't think we're at a point yet where piracy is affecting cinema attendance, though. I've never watched a movie I've downloaded that was in theaters that I would have otherwise seen. I once saw a great cam of Toy Story 2 that I watched, but I wasn't going to go see that anyway. At most, I might've rented it or something, but theaters? naw.
they are perfectly justified in getting out a blanket law right away and then tweaking it to allow certain behaviors afterwards.
I would say that we are perfectly justified in opposing a blanket law. If they want to pass a law that we feel would infringe on our rights, we shouldn't say, "oh, it'll be alright, they'll give us our rights back later when they realize that we really need them." Don't believe me? Income Tax. Social Security numbers. I'm sure there are more. The government doesn't like to change laws if the laws give them more power, or if they give those who they are indebted to more power. If we let Uncle Sam into our houses or our computers today, he's not going to leave, and he's going to help himself to all our Bawlz and Code Red while he's there.
There are solid state microcassette-style recorders. They record the data, compress it, and store it in flash memory, or something like it. They're actually quite common.
more of the production costs integrated into the price of the CD (because people will pay it)
But people *won't* pay it. A lot of them anyway. If they would, people wouldn't go out of their way, spend hours finding and downloading mp3s over their modem, versus going to the store and getting reference quality, guaranteed. That's the issue. Drop the price of the CD, and a lot of the people that don't feel like paying so much and spend their time downloading MP3s will decide that their time is worth more than the money. When the cost of downloading MP3s is greater than the cost of buying CDs, people will buy CDs. But in the meanwhile, CDs are too expensive. Maybe more people were willing to buy CDs before the advent of the MP3, or maybe they're just getting more music now than they were before and buying about the same amount(on balance, that is -- the economy kinda sucks and I'm sure that's cutting into the number of CDs sold). In the end, there will always be people who will pay for music, and there will always be people who will not. The trick is finding the right price to get lots of people to pay for music without giving it to them too cheap, thereby maximizing profits. Economics 101.
If small startups can make CDs cheaper, then logically the big businesses are less efficient. Why buy from big business when you're only supporting their big business, supporting those high prices? There's lots of music you can enjoy that's not on MTV. You just have to look. And if you're too lazy to look for good music, to spend some time at the local used-CD shop sampling new bands and new sounds, then go ahead and buy that $20 CD from your local Virgin Megastore.
Amen. It's like this: you can either say, please buy my product, or you can say, BUY MY F****** PRODUCT!. Which is more effective, the soft-sell or the hard-sell? When you're fully aware that the hard sell is in effect and it's pissing you off and you can do something about it, well, what did they expect?
I don't get it... Why would they charge you 75 cents when they could give it to you for free? If you're wavering on paying that 75 cents a day ($275/year, give or take--granted most papers I know of cost less), they could definately increase their readership by providing you with the paper free, meaning more advertising $$, so why don't they?
Where I disagree, Mr. Fantastic, is that listening to angry music and violent games necessarily makes one angry and violent. I am neither, and while I don't listen to Anthrax, the occasional Eminem song entertains me, and the occasional game of Q3A relaxes me. Loathsome, dark arts, all these are judgements. You judge that the game is loathsome. Why? That's your own thing, but to put it on other people is to assume that others agree with you, which is not often (and in my experience, rarely) true. I play Quake not to kill people, but to beat them. It doesn't hurt them when I blast a rocket at their feet and send them off a ledge into an abyss. It's not about violence, it's about skill. Granted, they do blow up into a million pieces, but you should realize that most people don't take it seriously. If you are unable to separate the skill from the violence, fine, don't play FPS games. But don't assume that other people are unable to do the same. I'd be interested, however, to know what you define as dark arts, and loathsome.
I don't play paintball, but I imagine that it's mostly running around and you only shoot a couple of times.
Where I come from, we have this thing called Accuracy through Volume. The logic is that if you take ten shots that have a 10% chance of hitting, or if you take those ten shots and then take another 100 that have a 1% chance of hitting, you've essentially doubled your chances. Unless I'm bad at math; a definite possibility. But if you came to the match with 500 paintballs and you leave with 450, chances are you suck at paintball. Either that or you're perfect. Either way, it's more fun to go off the deep end and rain death upon your opponent kamikaze-style than to camp out and snipe at them.
When you're running for your life because your friend has a rocket launcher and you're all out of machine gun ammo, if you can be made to believe sufficiently that you're in peril, you won't even notice the exercise part of it. That's the beauty of it. Ever play paintball? Your lungs become less important and not getting hit with a 125mph paintball becomes paramount. And in the end, it's a great workout. which is a good thing, because it allows you to eat more doritos.
My concern is that I'd trip or something and land on the computer, or the glasses, and break 'em.
Maybe it would be like Q-zar games, you know, lasertag, where you wouldn't be able to shoot for like 5 seconds, but you could be shot. That would make you run off and hide somewhere, lest someone track you down and shoot you while you were defenseless.
For a second I thought you were a troll, but you're 100% right... In the end, it's not how special you are so much as how special your actions are. It's what you do that separates you from the rest of the pack. Just because you did better in school and on your SATs than your friend doesn't mean that you're going to go and make more money than him. If I sit around the house all day in my underwear eating doritos, how special am I? If I come up with a great idea for a new invention, then decide not to take a risk and implement it, how special am I? That said, I need to go do something special.
Eventually it's going to be impractical to have the bare discs, and people will have to go back to those little cases, like back in the day with your 1x CD-ROM drives, where you had to put the Cd in the case and insert the case into the drive. Optical discs also came in these cases, iirc. Kinda like zip discs, only with CDs inside. Costs will be higher, but storage will be large enough that you can carry your entire world with you on a couple of discs, so you won't worry about it so much. Now, if it takes 6 hours to fill one of these things up, if they're even recordable/rewriteable, they're going to suck. But almost all new tech does, at first, it's just a matter of patience until things like this start to change the world.
Re:Why would they want to "own" everything?
on
XBox Live Network
·
· Score: 1
http://www.xboxmaniak.com/?page=video2&nbr=7
MS Troll or not, that *is* a pretty cool commercial-type thing. They should buy some TV spots and air it.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. If the fixed/infrastructure costs were the same, the formula should be something like
.5. So, for cable, let's say the fixed cost is, what, $12 still? they don't have to pay for business phone lines, all they really do is maintain the existing infrastructure that they have, which they're already doing anyway. So it should be less. Let's say $10.
.5 * (50 - 10)
.5k/sec, that's 15k/sec.
bandwidth = multiplier * (monthly charge - fixed costs)
for dial-up, it'd be
4k/s = multiplier * (20 - (i. cost))
assume fixed (by which I mean everything but the bandwidth) was, say, $12(making this up), and the multiplier is
So, X =
X = 20
20k/sec.
Of course, I'm sure there are a million other factors, but the bottom line is, if the fixed costs the same amount to maintain, you're buying another $30/month worth of bandwidth. If $1 =
Let's say that 20k/sec is what you've purchased, but that you can average it out over a month. That'd work really well; it would allow them to uncap your line until it looked like you were going to go over your quota, then slow you down so that you ended up averaging 20k/sec over a month. During peak times, they could cap it to prevent congestion, but when you needed 400k/sec for 5 minutes at 3am, they could give it to you. That's what they should really do. Because when they buy bandwidth, they don't buy it by the gig, they buy it by the kbps. Therefore, you should get it by the kbps. The trick is, to get it to where what you're paying and what you're getting is fair. They're trying to do this, and they may be acting in good faith, but they're going about it the wrong way. They need to charge you:
(fixed costs + bandwidth costs)* (1 + (%profit margin))
That's it, that's all there is to it.
Is that not a good idea? I really think it is. Critique it if you disagree.
We don't need laws that give the government any control over the internet, but we need them to be able to prosecute spammers like they prosecute child pornographers, scam artists, or whatever. They don't need to own more of the internet, all they need is our UCE. And a huge pat on the back when they do right by us.
Maybe in 10, 20 years... I hope.
/. people don't want laws, because they're afraid of the government getting their dirty paws on us. But what do you propose we do in the meantime? What do you propose we do now? Because despite the fact that you only get ten spams a day, I get about 75. Three months ago I only got 50, and it's only going to get worse.
Meanwhile, the cost of this is billions of dollars a year. Lots of
We have to figure out how to fix this, tomorrow, or we have to ask the government to do it. It has to be fixed. Technical solutions may work, but may doesn't mean jack--they're not working now, and that's all I care about.
If you (the collective you, the people who say "we need a technical solution") can't fix it, STFU. I'm not talking about filtering or RBL lists, I'm talking about putting the spammers out of business. If they're sending spam, your job is not done. And if you can't stop them, again, STFU and let the government take care of it. It has to be done; the costs are too high, and it really gets me worked up.
Until I can post my e-mail address on slashdot without obfuscation and without fear of harvesting, until I can telnet into my POP server and read my mail without getting pissed off, until the primary meaning of Spam is once again spiced ham, you "we need a technical solution" people may not sleep. Billions of $$$ a year.
SPAM is the equivalent of your TIVO recording infomercials for you. You can delete them if you want, but they still take up space, and you didn't ask for them.
Good god yes. My mom started a business and decided to use email@att.net as the address for the business. She wrote a book and that e-mail address is in the book. Now she can never ever ever stop paying AT&T. Meanwhile, I drop $15/year and I can give everybody different addresses (yourcompany@mydomain.com) so that if somebody spams me I can redirect that address back to them. I could just block it, but it's more fun to redirect it's destination to abuse@yourcompany.com.
Life is good. No spam, complete control, easier filtering (mailing lists automatically filtered to specific folders), no more fear. Aaah.
They charge ~$50/month, dial-up ISPs charge ~$20/month for unlimited access. Since there are no other benefits to you other than faster speeds and always-on access, you're basically paying $30/month for bandwidth, for using a fat piece of their pipe (versus 5k/sec if you're dialup). So, how much bandwidth does $30/month buy?
I believe the track times are something they go by if there's no unique identifier. IE track 1 is 2m48s, track 2 3m5s, etc. That's a pretty easy way to determine what CD it is...
Good point. I can buy an old movie on DVD for ten bucks, because it was released a long time ago, the number of people willing to buy it have decreased, so the price goes down to try to get more people to buy it. Meanwhile, the price of a new CD is often less than that of an old CD. I should be able to get Nirvana's Nevermind for less than a newly released CD, but it works the other way around. The new CDs go on sale, and everything else is more expensive.
Maybe they have a good reason for this, but what could it be?
I guess it drives people to buy new music and forget old music, but why would they want to do this? Support new artists? Why, when they can make money off of existing artists?
The distribution costs of sending someone an MP3 are near zero. I should be able to buy an old CD in MP3 format off the web for three bucks. The artist already made most of the money they were going to make, and I'd be likely to buy more at $3/CD than at $15/CD. I understand that new artists need to make money, and that they wouldn't be making as much at $3/CD, so why not release old music in MP3 format and only sell CDs for the newer music. People would still buy them, even if their only use would be to rip the CD to MP3 and store the CD in a cool, dry place.
It would be exactly like hardcover books, gaming consoles, and other new tech. Get the early adopters to pay more at first, then lower the price later to get more people to buy it.
I like the program too. My favorite feature is the client and the scheduler were separate. I could schedule downloads from work, go home, and there they were. Simple. Effective. Also lots of songs.
The RIAA will win if they can use the Napster rulings here. Audiogalaxy blocks songs that are copyrighted, but there are always more songs with different titles, and whoever is in charge of blocking songs only gets the popular (eminem and the like) artists. The less popular, and IMO better artists, are untouched.
There was controversy a couple of years back about the new superbikes Suzuki and Kawasaki were putting out. The Suzuki Hayabusa did like 189mph, Kawasaki was issuing press releases all the time saying their new bike (the ZX-12R) was going to be faster than that. It was a back-and-forth thing for awhile, but eventually some government people, without passing any laws, said, "okay, this is getting out of hand" and asked motorcycle manufacturers to speed-limit their bikes, effectively eliminating the MPH race. The fuel-mapping basically leans out the mixture at... What was it? 184mph, something in the 180s. 300KPH, basically. Both manufacturers decided it was in their best interests, and the MPH race was over. You can easily change the fuel mapping not to do this, but they(gov't) did create change. Nobody really complains, because everybody agrees that 300kph is plenty fast enough, but if it were 200kph, you know there'd be people complaining.
I guess the story doesn't directly apply, but it's interesting, nevertheless. I suspect that the manufacturers were losing money trying to one-up each other and decided that tied for first place was better for the ol' wallet.
That's true, and a good point, but how else can we make them see the light? Maybe we need to let it be known more publicly that we're not buying out of rebellion, not out of greed.
I don't think we're at a point yet where piracy is affecting cinema attendance, though. I've never watched a movie I've downloaded that was in theaters that I would have otherwise seen. I once saw a great cam of Toy Story 2 that I watched, but I wasn't going to go see that anyway. At most, I might've rented it or something, but theaters? naw.
they are perfectly justified in getting out a blanket law right away and then tweaking it to allow certain behaviors afterwards.
I would say that we are perfectly justified in opposing a blanket law. If they want to pass a law that we feel would infringe on our rights, we shouldn't say, "oh, it'll be alright, they'll give us our rights back later when they realize that we really need them."
Don't believe me?
Income Tax.
Social Security numbers.
I'm sure there are more.
The government doesn't like to change laws if the laws give them more power, or if they give those who they are indebted to more power. If we let Uncle Sam into our houses or our computers today, he's not going to leave, and he's going to help himself to all our Bawlz and Code Red while he's there.
There are solid state microcassette-style recorders. They record the data, compress it, and store it in flash memory, or something like it. They're actually quite common.
more of the production costs integrated into the price of the CD (because people will pay it)
But people *won't* pay it. A lot of them anyway. If they would, people wouldn't go out of their way, spend hours finding and downloading mp3s over their modem, versus going to the store and getting reference quality, guaranteed. That's the issue. Drop the price of the CD, and a lot of the people that don't feel like paying so much and spend their time downloading MP3s will decide that their time is worth more than the money. When the cost of downloading MP3s is greater than the cost of buying CDs, people will buy CDs. But in the meanwhile, CDs are too expensive. Maybe more people were willing to buy CDs before the advent of the MP3, or maybe they're just getting more music now than they were before and buying about the same amount(on balance, that is -- the economy kinda sucks and I'm sure that's cutting into the number of CDs sold).
In the end, there will always be people who will pay for music, and there will always be people who will not. The trick is finding the right price to get lots of people to pay for music without giving it to them too cheap, thereby maximizing profits. Economics 101.
If small startups can make CDs cheaper, then logically the big businesses are less efficient. Why buy from big business when you're only supporting their big business, supporting those high prices? There's lots of music you can enjoy that's not on MTV. You just have to look. And if you're too lazy to look for good music, to spend some time at the local used-CD shop sampling new bands and new sounds, then go ahead and buy that $20 CD from your local Virgin Megastore.
This is an interesting thread. Please respond to zsmooth, I too want to know. I wish I had mod points.
How'd you get to +0?
Here's another hint: LOUDER ISN'T BETTER!
Amen. It's like this: you can either say, please buy my product, or you can say, BUY MY F****** PRODUCT!. Which is more effective, the soft-sell or the hard-sell? When you're fully aware that the hard sell is in effect and it's pissing you off and you can do something about it, well, what did they expect?
I don't get it... Why would they charge you 75 cents when they could give it to you for free? If you're wavering on paying that 75 cents a day ($275/year, give or take--granted most papers I know of cost less), they could definately increase their readership by providing you with the paper free, meaning more advertising $$, so why don't they?
Where I disagree, Mr. Fantastic, is that listening to angry music and violent games necessarily makes one angry and violent. I am neither, and while I don't listen to Anthrax, the occasional Eminem song entertains me, and the occasional game of Q3A relaxes me.
Loathsome, dark arts, all these are judgements. You judge that the game is loathsome. Why? That's your own thing, but to put it on other people is to assume that others agree with you, which is not often (and in my experience, rarely) true.
I play Quake not to kill people, but to beat them. It doesn't hurt them when I blast a rocket at their feet and send them off a ledge into an abyss. It's not about violence, it's about skill. Granted, they do blow up into a million pieces, but you should realize that most people don't take it seriously.
If you are unable to separate the skill from the violence, fine, don't play FPS games. But don't assume that other people are unable to do the same.
I'd be interested, however, to know what you define as dark arts, and loathsome.
I don't play paintball, but I imagine that it's mostly running around and you only shoot a couple of times.
Where I come from, we have this thing called Accuracy through Volume. The logic is that if you take ten shots that have a 10% chance of hitting, or if you take those ten shots and then take another 100 that have a 1% chance of hitting, you've essentially doubled your chances. Unless I'm bad at math; a definite possibility. But if you came to the match with 500 paintballs and you leave with 450, chances are you suck at paintball. Either that or you're perfect. Either way, it's more fun to go off the deep end and rain death upon your opponent kamikaze-style than to camp out and snipe at them.
When you're running for your life because your friend has a rocket launcher and you're all out of machine gun ammo, if you can be made to believe sufficiently that you're in peril, you won't even notice the exercise part of it. That's the beauty of it. Ever play paintball? Your lungs become less important and not getting hit with a 125mph paintball becomes paramount. And in the end, it's a great workout. which is a good thing, because it allows you to eat more doritos.
My concern is that I'd trip or something and land on the computer, or the glasses, and break 'em.
Maybe it would be like Q-zar games, you know, lasertag, where you wouldn't be able to shoot for like 5 seconds, but you could be shot. That would make you run off and hide somewhere, lest someone track you down and shoot you while you were defenseless.
For a second I thought you were a troll, but you're 100% right...
In the end, it's not how special you are so much as how special your actions are. It's what you do that separates you from the rest of the pack. Just because you did better in school and on your SATs than your friend doesn't mean that you're going to go and make more money than him.
If I sit around the house all day in my underwear eating doritos, how special am I? If I come up with a great idea for a new invention, then decide not to take a risk and implement it, how special am I?
That said, I need to go do something special.
Eventually it's going to be impractical to have the bare discs, and people will have to go back to those little cases, like back in the day with your 1x CD-ROM drives, where you had to put the Cd in the case and insert the case into the drive. Optical discs also came in these cases, iirc. Kinda like zip discs, only with CDs inside. Costs will be higher, but storage will be large enough that you can carry your entire world with you on a couple of discs, so you won't worry about it so much.
Now, if it takes 6 hours to fill one of these things up, if they're even recordable/rewriteable, they're going to suck. But almost all new tech does, at first, it's just a matter of patience until things like this start to change the world.
http://www.xboxmaniak.com/?page=video2&nbr=7
MS Troll or not, that *is* a pretty cool commercial-type thing. They should buy some TV spots and air it.