I'm fairly convinced that Microsoft set the state of the art back by at least a decade. That's an awful lot in computer years.
And there's no reason to require a single giant monopoly in order to have compatibility. Sure, all the platforms in the 80s were mutually incompatible, but they could have just as easily grown together to be mutually interoperable rather than being destroyed.
What a stupid thing to say! Nobody had to "win". We had a perfectly good PC ecosystem in the 80s, with at least half a dozen viable platforms. That is what we should have today. Being glad that Microsoft won the PC war would be like being glad that the United States won World War III. Yeah, we won, but the world is still a poisoned nuclear wasteland.
It's not throttling, it's prioritization. There's a big difference. If you don't understand it, please spare all of us your ignorance and refrain from commenting. The number of people posting complaints who utterly fail to understand what this proposal actually says just astounds me, and I have extremely low expectations from Slashdot in general.
If you include VoIP in a list of bandwidth-intensive uses, you are automatically disqualified as a clueful person. Please refrain from commenting on any Comcast-related stories until you have remedied your ignorance.
Video chat? Seriously? You think that a video chat session is going to occupy over 70-80% of your connection for 15 minutes continuously?
Here's an idea: if you don't know anything about networking and have no idea how much bandwidth various activities take up, don't comment. I'm fed up with morons complaining about how things like VoIP will trigger caps and countermeasures when they take up absurdly little bandwidth.
Why do you hate to say it? I'm sure we all hate Comcast, but this is a really good idea, at least it sounds that way to me. It solves the problem neatly with minimal impact and with the consequences going to the people causing the problem. It deserves to be called a good thing.
Yeah, if you were going to max out all eight RAM slots on your new Mac Pro that might actually be a problem here. Given the $1800 you'd have to spend to do that, having to remove the $50 worth that comes with the machine doesn't strike me as all that significant.
That "you" was the plural you, meaning your organization. I didn't mean to imply that you paid them personally.
A friend tells a classic story of consulting. He shows up for a job, getting paid $BIGNUM/hour writing software. They sit him down in front of the crappiest computer you could imagine and tell him to go to work.
The thing takes so long to build the project that he finds himself spending more time by the coffee machine than in front of the computer. Meanwhile the manager has a shiny new multi-kilobuck machine collecting dust as his personal computer.
At the end of day 1 he points out that he's wasting a ton of time because his computer is so slow, and that the cost of a shiny new machine like the manager's would, at his hourly rate, pay for itself in something like two business days out of his multi-week contract.
The request is of course denied.
So yeah, there are dysfunctional organizations out there that are penny wise and pound foolish, paying top-notch people a lot of money and then not paying relatively trivial amounts for the equipment they need to be most productive. But I think we need to realize that the major fault there lies with the organizations, not in equipment suppliers who don't offer a slightly cut-rate version of their stuff.
And I don't think it has anything to do with being "flush". At the rate a decent engineer makes, counting benefits and other overhead, buying him a shiny new Mac Pro every two years would come out to be something like one half of one percent of the total cost of that engineer. It's also likely to make him more than one half of one percent more productive compared to some cut-rate machine, so the cost pays for itself. This is true no matter how much money the organization has.
How little do you pay your engineers that the price difference between a $3000 machine and an $1800 machine is even noticeable compared to their salaries and benefits? How little do you pay them that the difference between a $2300 4-core Mac Pro and a $1800 mini-tower is noticeable?
10 cents is the real number for Apple. Don't believe it? Not my fault. It's commonly known. For example, here.
The reason this does not square with your numbers is two-fold. First, Apple batches purchases whenever possible, so that the per-transaction fees get divided amongst many different tracks. Second, Apple is a large company with more money and clout than you or I can even imagine, and is therefore able to negotiate better deals than most.
Why? If you had done that then perhaps two or three students per class would have passed. Education is supposed to be about learning. Why do you think it should be about work? If I go to school I expect to learn. If I want to work, I get a job.
I think that you've confused the means with the goal. It's true that most people need to work in order to learn well. But that doesn't mean that the work is what you want to achieve. Some people don't need to work but can still achieve learning anyway.
I assume that "cost of sale" would refer to things like paying the credit card companies, bandwidth, and so forth? If so, that is easy to overlook, but it's also quite a small cost. For example, from what I've read about Apple's iTunes store, a $1 track puts something like 10 cents into the transaction costs and the rest goes to either the record companies or to paying off Apple's fixed costs. And this could be made a lot smaller with a better payment processing system, although I will freely admit that such a thing is essentially pie-in-the-sky right now.
I'm going to be charitable and assume that your brain was busy with something else when you wrote that post.
We were discussing warning dialogs where the user is asked to either confirm or deny a particular action. That is a completely different question from how to present errors. Since an error only has one possible action, "I accept that this error happened, now let's continue in whatever capacity we can", there is no real problem if the user fails to read it, so no real problem with presenting one so that the users who do want to read it can.
Your analogy is wrong. It's not even a rope pulling up the stragglers. It's leaving them at the bottom of the cliff, but with a new map which declares the canyon floor to be "halfway up".
It sounds like utter crap anyway. If you think grades are useful, then it's obviously a stupid idea. If you think grades aren't useful, then this just makes the system even dumber without letting people ignore grades. Either way, crap.
It may amplify your overall point but the fact remains that the per-download costs of a track are essentially zero. Basically all of the costs are up-front. Obviously that up-front cost gets amortized into whatever price they charge for the product, but that doesn't make it suddenly magically transform into a per-download cost.
Your example at the end about piracy and shooting mice into orbit perfectly illustrates this. If it were truly a per-unit cost then that cost would be borne over every unit produced, even the ones pirated, stolen, or launched into the Sun. But it's actually an up-front cost which gets factored into the end price of the goods, so it only applies to the ones that they charge for.
Case in point: I once donated some software I wrote to schools. As I'm sure you know, you can deduct the cost of such donations from your taxes when the recipient is properly qualified. In the case of my software, which was done all electronically, the amount I was able to deduct was a big fat zero. Seems the tax men only care about the actual per-unit costs, even though the stuff sells for a distinctly non-zero amount, and a lot of that amount is to take care of the up-front costs of development.
Actually, in order for it to be profitable, it HAS to apply to the cost per download SOMEHOW.
No, it has to apply to the price per download.
Cost and price are different beasts. You can't say that there was a big up-front cost and then just magically call that some sort of per-download cost.
Yes, they need to charge a certain amount of money as part of the per-download price to make up for the up-front costs. But that does not change the simple fact that their per-download cost is very nearly zero.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fairly convinced that Microsoft set the state of the art back by at least a decade. That's an awful lot in computer years.
And there's no reason to require a single giant monopoly in order to have compatibility. Sure, all the platforms in the 80s were mutually incompatible, but they could have just as easily grown together to be mutually interoperable rather than being destroyed.
On the subject of their NDA, I'm not an insider, but it seems stupid, unnecessary, and harmful to me.
Just so you know, I am an insider, and I and every other insider I know all think that it's stupid, unnecessary, and harmful too.
Well, Wikipedia does. Do you have information to the contrary?
What a stupid thing to say! Nobody had to "win". We had a perfectly good PC ecosystem in the 80s, with at least half a dozen viable platforms. That is what we should have today. Being glad that Microsoft won the PC war would be like being glad that the United States won World War III. Yeah, we won, but the world is still a poisoned nuclear wasteland.
That's nice, except we're talking about the cost of third-party Mac Pro memory, not first-party MacBook Pro memory.
It's not throttling, it's prioritization. There's a big difference. If you don't understand it, please spare all of us your ignorance and refrain from commenting. The number of people posting complaints who utterly fail to understand what this proposal actually says just astounds me, and I have extremely low expectations from Slashdot in general.
Don't cancel your service. It's hardly Comcast's fault that you don't understand the concept of QoS and prioritization.
Got a link to where they include "unlimited" in their plans? From what I've seen, they have not used this word for quite some time.
If you include VoIP in a list of bandwidth-intensive uses, you are automatically disqualified as a clueful person. Please refrain from commenting on any Comcast-related stories until you have remedied your ignorance.
Video chat? Seriously? You think that a video chat session is going to occupy over 70-80% of your connection for 15 minutes continuously?
Here's an idea: if you don't know anything about networking and have no idea how much bandwidth various activities take up, don't comment. I'm fed up with morons complaining about how things like VoIP will trigger caps and countermeasures when they take up absurdly little bandwidth.
Why do you hate to say it? I'm sure we all hate Comcast, but this is a really good idea, at least it sounds that way to me. It solves the problem neatly with minimal impact and with the consequences going to the people causing the problem. It deserves to be called a good thing.
Yeah, if you were going to max out all eight RAM slots on your new Mac Pro that might actually be a problem here. Given the $1800 you'd have to spend to do that, having to remove the $50 worth that comes with the machine doesn't strike me as all that significant.
That "you" was the plural you, meaning your organization. I didn't mean to imply that you paid them personally.
A friend tells a classic story of consulting. He shows up for a job, getting paid $BIGNUM/hour writing software. They sit him down in front of the crappiest computer you could imagine and tell him to go to work.
The thing takes so long to build the project that he finds himself spending more time by the coffee machine than in front of the computer. Meanwhile the manager has a shiny new multi-kilobuck machine collecting dust as his personal computer.
At the end of day 1 he points out that he's wasting a ton of time because his computer is so slow, and that the cost of a shiny new machine like the manager's would, at his hourly rate, pay for itself in something like two business days out of his multi-week contract.
The request is of course denied.
So yeah, there are dysfunctional organizations out there that are penny wise and pound foolish, paying top-notch people a lot of money and then not paying relatively trivial amounts for the equipment they need to be most productive. But I think we need to realize that the major fault there lies with the organizations, not in equipment suppliers who don't offer a slightly cut-rate version of their stuff.
And I don't think it has anything to do with being "flush". At the rate a decent engineer makes, counting benefits and other overhead, buying him a shiny new Mac Pro every two years would come out to be something like one half of one percent of the total cost of that engineer. It's also likely to make him more than one half of one percent more productive compared to some cut-rate machine, so the cost pays for itself. This is true no matter how much money the organization has.
How little do you pay your engineers that the price difference between a $3000 machine and an $1800 machine is even noticeable compared to their salaries and benefits? How little do you pay them that the difference between a $2300 4-core Mac Pro and a $1800 mini-tower is noticeable?
$100 for 4GB. Seems to compare favorably with other types of RAM.
10 cents is the real number for Apple. Don't believe it? Not my fault. It's commonly known. For example, here.
The reason this does not square with your numbers is two-fold. First, Apple batches purchases whenever possible, so that the per-transaction fees get divided amongst many different tracks. Second, Apple is a large company with more money and clout than you or I can even imagine, and is therefore able to negotiate better deals than most.
That's nice, but I'm not sure what sort of point you're trying to make.
Why? If you had done that then perhaps two or three students per class would have passed. Education is supposed to be about learning. Why do you think it should be about work? If I go to school I expect to learn. If I want to work, I get a job.
I think that you've confused the means with the goal. It's true that most people need to work in order to learn well. But that doesn't mean that the work is what you want to achieve. Some people don't need to work but can still achieve learning anyway.
I assume that "cost of sale" would refer to things like paying the credit card companies, bandwidth, and so forth? If so, that is easy to overlook, but it's also quite a small cost. For example, from what I've read about Apple's iTunes store, a $1 track puts something like 10 cents into the transaction costs and the rest goes to either the record companies or to paying off Apple's fixed costs. And this could be made a lot smaller with a better payment processing system, although I will freely admit that such a thing is essentially pie-in-the-sky right now.
How fascinating, and empty-headed, and irrelevant.
I'm going to be charitable and assume that your brain was busy with something else when you wrote that post.
We were discussing warning dialogs where the user is asked to either confirm or deny a particular action. That is a completely different question from how to present errors. Since an error only has one possible action, "I accept that this error happened, now let's continue in whatever capacity we can", there is no real problem if the user fails to read it, so no real problem with presenting one so that the users who do want to read it can.
Your analogy is wrong. It's not even a rope pulling up the stragglers. It's leaving them at the bottom of the cliff, but with a new map which declares the canyon floor to be "halfway up".
It sounds like utter crap anyway. If you think grades are useful, then it's obviously a stupid idea. If you think grades aren't useful, then this just makes the system even dumber without letting people ignore grades. Either way, crap.
It may amplify your overall point but the fact remains that the per-download costs of a track are essentially zero. Basically all of the costs are up-front. Obviously that up-front cost gets amortized into whatever price they charge for the product, but that doesn't make it suddenly magically transform into a per-download cost.
Your example at the end about piracy and shooting mice into orbit perfectly illustrates this. If it were truly a per-unit cost then that cost would be borne over every unit produced, even the ones pirated, stolen, or launched into the Sun. But it's actually an up-front cost which gets factored into the end price of the goods, so it only applies to the ones that they charge for.
Case in point: I once donated some software I wrote to schools. As I'm sure you know, you can deduct the cost of such donations from your taxes when the recipient is properly qualified. In the case of my software, which was done all electronically, the amount I was able to deduct was a big fat zero. Seems the tax men only care about the actual per-unit costs, even though the stuff sells for a distinctly non-zero amount, and a lot of that amount is to take care of the up-front costs of development.
Actually, in order for it to be profitable, it HAS to apply to the cost per download SOMEHOW.
No, it has to apply to the price per download.
Cost and price are different beasts. You can't say that there was a big up-front cost and then just magically call that some sort of per-download cost.
Yes, they need to charge a certain amount of money as part of the per-download price to make up for the up-front costs. But that does not change the simple fact that their per-download cost is very nearly zero.