The price difference might be caused by the different level of services attached to a product.
Hmm, possibly. Take the Leica D2 and the Panasonic DMC-LC1. Identical cameras, one branded Leica (a "prestige" brand) and one Panasonic (a "consumer" brand). They are identical - same lens, same sensor, etc, yet one is 300 more. Leica justifies this saying that their after-sales support is better - but how much after sales support do you really need with a point-and-shoot camera?
With their film cameras, Leica guarantees that parts will be available 30 years after a camera is released, and their equipment does have a reputation of being extremely long-lasting, so maybe their high prices are justified there. But with a 5MP non-upgradeable digicam? You're just paying for the brand there, IMHO.
Yah, we'd only be able to destroy the Soviet Union 4 times over instead of 8 times over. I'm sure the extra destructive capability was such a greater deterrant than what we already had.
Bet you're the kinda person who thinks RAID is a waste of money, and never backs up your files to offline storage either?
The reason for the multiple was to make sure that the Soviet Empire knew that there was no way they could take out the West's nuclear weapons by launching a surprise first attack.
Do you honestly think the Soviets would attack us, knowing they'd still have their country destroyed?
Study the history of the Soviet Empire, particularly the second world war. It demonstrated that it was perfectly happy to sacrifice millions of its own citizens in order to win a war. Those scenes in the movie Stalingrad where they sent men into battle unarmed, telling them to pick up rifles when their comrades where killed really happened. Before the battle of Kursk, the Soviets had no real strategy other than throwing barely-trained men at the Wehrmacht and hoping for the best, and when they failed, there were more to take their place. The idea that the Soviets would attempt a first strike to take out the majority of Western nuclear weapons then just soak up what was left was entirely plausible during the Cold War.
But you know as well as I do that if I am successful then inevitably some kid in his parents' basement will write his own Open Source version of the thing, for free.
For a long time it was hard to get backing for software development on the PC because of the "Microsoft version" - the idea that if your idea was successful, MS would include it in the next version of Windows, undermining your market. Now, are we going to see that it's hard to get funding because someone will write a free version?
Whether or not they will, or whether it will be any good, isn't really relevant. I doubt that GIMP has hurt Photoshop's sales much, or MySQL is making a dent in Oracle. It's the perception in the mind of VCs and investors that matters.
So you're saying that they should have fired the reporter who wrote that article?
I'm saying that if that was the problem, they would have. The idea that you would sell an entire business unit because one junior employee in that unit did something you didn't like is perfectly ridiculous.
As far as I know, the employee hasn't been, so I guess that wasn't the problem after all. I wonder if VA would sack Taco if he said something anti-Linux for example?
If an employee misbehaves to that extent, sack 'em for gross misconduct. Selling a company is difficult and expensive to do (have a look at what investment banks charge to "advise" you). You'd be cutting off your nose to spite your face if you sold a company to get rid of one (probably quite junior) employee.
Because there are things with a small ship setting that you can't do with a land setting. For instance, once they're "in space" there's nowhere for anyone to go; characters are forced to deal with interpersonal problems, which means more involved dialogue. It would have been difficult IMHO to make a series where the characters were in a small sailing ship trading up and down the west coast of the US in the 1800s. For a start, if they're never far from the coast, you lose the plot device of isolation - events in one location are far less separate when people can move on land almost as fast as a ship can sail.
Remember, Firefly isn't Star Trek. There is no stupid technobabble, this is a show about PEOPLE not technology. There isn't always a happy ending and a moral to the story. It's no Babylon 5 with pretensions at deciding the entire fate of the species then wrapping up neatly at the end of the series, it's just about the lives and fate of ordinary folk living on the outskirts of civilization. It's no "weird for the sake of weird" Farscape or Lexx. Whedon is to be applauded to the originality he'd brought to both Western and sci-fi genres.
I mean, if the ultimate goal is to draw crowds large enough for the network to bring back the series (is it?)
The terms of the contract are that the movies and the TV series can't coexist - only when the movie(s) are finished can a(nother) TV series go into production. If the movie does well, then there'll be another, that's how Hollywood works, which will push any possibility of another series further back.
because they're getting paid slave wages while working twice the hours that we do.
You are assuming that the cost of living is the same everywhere in the world. But that simply isn't true. A salary of USD 20,000 isn't much in San Francisco or Manhattan but you could live pretty well on it in Bangkok or Bangalore, because the USD.THB or USD.IRR exchange rate is favorable.
In the US, working in a call centre is one step above unskilled labour in a factory. In India, graduates of good colleges compete for job in a call centre because, in local terms, it's very well paid.
Now, maybe some workers are exploited. But in reality, most aren't. Bowing to Western pressure, Nike closed an Indonesian factory... the employees turned to prostitution and drugs, because without Nike, there were no jobs. If you're "anti-exploitation" you're pro-starvation, and that's a fact.
tend to think that the photos will have more soul and personal value if they're taken by my friends.
The mother of the bride doesn't give a stuff about the soul and personal values of your friends (who she probably doesn't approve of either). She wants perfectly lit, perfectly posed, crystal clear images of her family looking healthy and prosperous that she can impress her friends with at the bridge club. That's why people hire pros who've done this hundreds of time before, bring studio lighting with them, have a good hand for retouching, etc.
Funny... the company still keeps its copyright. It's called a work for hire. Get over yourself - we're all professionals - and when we're getting paid, we're serving our employers
If the bride and groom provided the photographer's camera and film/media, computer, etc, hired a darkroom/Mac on his behalf, paid him hourly to operate them, you might have a point.
But, the photographer provides his own equipment, and the deliverable is an album full of prints. It's more like shrinkwrap software than code.
So, you get over yourself. What is it about Slashbots that they think knowing how to operate a computer makes them experts on every topic?
Examine the David Cutler case, where Microsoft hired away one of the core developers of VMS to help create a new, server class operating system.
Umm, Cutler quit DEC in a fit of pique over the amount of autonomy he had to run projects. He took his team with him.
Now, Microsoft aren't above poaching staff. They did it to Borland, everyone knows. But Cutler is a different story.
NT on Alpha actually never worked well due to its lack of support.
NT on Alpha didn't get much support 'cos no-one bought it! All the Alpha users were running their windows apps under FX!32 and running OpenVMS to use their CAD and CFD packages and whatnot. Same story with NT on MIPS and PowerPC, no-one bought 'em.
Don't even argue with me on this, 'cos I was one of those people. I-DEAS and Fluent most of the time, the occasional Word doc, that's how people used their Alphas.
OpenVMS is still alive and well. The largest electronic financial futures and options exchange in the world still runs it
Yeah, my esteemed employer has a data centre packed with VMS boxes running applications written in VAX Pascal.
Every few years, some bright spark tries to port the whole lot to C++ on Unix, they always fail. Presently some genius is trying to port it to NT... I don't want to name names, but there is a whole book, in stores right now, that chronicles the many expensive disasters that have befallen the company due mostly to this.
If you sell something that works from the start, and invest in good enginering, how are you supposed to build a succesfull business ?
Well, DEC had a big service (systems integration/consulting/support) business too.
The mistake they made was that the engineers believed that the system was so good there was no need to actively sell it - and the engineers ran the show at DEC. Meanwhile, Sun, SGI, et al, were all about their brands, and that worked great for them. Set the industry back 10 years in the process, tho'.
Funny how those obsolete VAX/VMS systems just keep on going. No crashes or reboots, flawless clustering (remember how the Dutch police moved to a new building with ZERO downtime, just by migrating processes from node to node?), rock-solid security, and tools that let admins manage huge networks of servers and workstations with ease. So-called modern systems, like Unix, are now where VAX/VMS was, what, 10 years ago, 15 years ago in some cases. Sun clusters? A joke! The failure of VAX/VMS is one of DEC's marketing department, not their engineers.
No no no! No government messing with Wikipedia! Of course if they give money, they have some kind of right to say what to write there
In Britain, we have a National Lottery that in addition to handing out prizes makes donations to various worthy causes. It is effectively the government, since it is a legal monopoly (we call this a Quango, in England: quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization). They frequently give huge wads of cash to crackpot groups (one-legged lesbian single mothers, and the like). No reason they wouldn't give money to this (unless of course it was a sane and useful public resource, in which case they wouldn't touch it with a bargepole). I don't play the lottery so it's neither here nor there to me, just a suggestion.
I have to ask, who cares? Pros and serious amateurs are using Canon and Nikon (with very serious pros using Phase One and Sinar). Casual snappers are using Sony Cybershots. Who actually uses a Minolta? I shoot a lot and hang out with other photographers, I've never actually seen one 'cept in a store. And even then, no-one was buying 'em.
This is the future.. it would be nice for fields like electrical engineering, where the core material was discovered and published several hundred years ago - but you still have to pay $200 every year or so for the texts.
It cuts both ways, tho'. Kreyzig's book Advanced Engineering Mathematics is an GBP 50 book. When I was an undergrad, I got the previous edition, brand new, for GBP 3. The bookstore, despite being on campus, obviously had no idea that maths books don't change much, I found it among the leftover books for obsolete operating systems and the like, which were similarly priced.
If you're smart, you can leverage the fact that you know more about your chosen subject than the average bookseller does, and hunt out bargains that way.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that next year, there'll be another special edition, a widescreen edition, a directors cut... how many times can you get the same people to buy the same movie with just a few tweaks? I don't know but George Lucas must have a pretty good idea by now, and the Wachowskis are his best students.
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The price difference might be caused by the different level of services attached to a product.
Hmm, possibly. Take the Leica D2 and the Panasonic DMC-LC1. Identical cameras, one branded Leica (a "prestige" brand) and one Panasonic (a "consumer" brand). They are identical - same lens, same sensor, etc, yet one is 300 more. Leica justifies this saying that their after-sales support is better - but how much after sales support do you really need with a point-and-shoot camera?
With their film cameras, Leica guarantees that parts will be available 30 years after a camera is released, and their equipment does have a reputation of being extremely long-lasting, so maybe their high prices are justified there. But with a 5MP non-upgradeable digicam? You're just paying for the brand there, IMHO.
The heater you describe in French MREs sounds like it has to be lit, which is very bad in a combat environment.
I don't think French MREs have ever been in a combat environment...
they are going to find themselves without water, food, fuel, or ammo
Guess you've never heard of the Berlin Airlift?
Yah, we'd only be able to destroy the Soviet Union 4 times over instead of 8 times over. I'm sure the extra destructive capability was such a greater deterrant than what we already had.
Bet you're the kinda person who thinks RAID is a waste of money, and never backs up your files to offline storage either?
The reason for the multiple was to make sure that the Soviet Empire knew that there was no way they could take out the West's nuclear weapons by launching a surprise first attack.
Do you honestly think the Soviets would attack us, knowing they'd still have their country destroyed?
Study the history of the Soviet Empire, particularly the second world war. It demonstrated that it was perfectly happy to sacrifice millions of its own citizens in order to win a war. Those scenes in the movie Stalingrad where they sent men into battle unarmed, telling them to pick up rifles when their comrades where killed really happened. Before the battle of Kursk, the Soviets had no real strategy other than throwing barely-trained men at the Wehrmacht and hoping for the best, and when they failed, there were more to take their place. The idea that the Soviets would attempt a first strike to take out the majority of Western nuclear weapons then just soak up what was left was entirely plausible during the Cold War.
Whether or not they will, or whether it will be any good, isn't really relevant. I doubt that GIMP has hurt Photoshop's sales much, or MySQL is making a dent in Oracle. It's the perception in the mind of VCs and investors that matters.
So you're saying that they should have fired the reporter who wrote that article?
I'm saying that if that was the problem, they would have. The idea that you would sell an entire business unit because one junior employee in that unit did something you didn't like is perfectly ridiculous.
As far as I know, the employee hasn't been, so I guess that wasn't the problem after all. I wonder if VA would sack Taco if he said something anti-Linux for example?
Who wouldn't?
Ermm, anyone with a brain?
If an employee misbehaves to that extent, sack 'em for gross misconduct. Selling a company is difficult and expensive to do (have a look at what investment banks charge to "advise" you). You'd be cutting off your nose to spite your face if you sold a company to get rid of one (probably quite junior) employee.
why did he set it in space
Because there are things with a small ship setting that you can't do with a land setting. For instance, once they're "in space" there's nowhere for anyone to go; characters are forced to deal with interpersonal problems, which means more involved dialogue. It would have been difficult IMHO to make a series where the characters were in a small sailing ship trading up and down the west coast of the US in the 1800s. For a start, if they're never far from the coast, you lose the plot device of isolation - events in one location are far less separate when people can move on land almost as fast as a ship can sail.
Remember, Firefly isn't Star Trek. There is no stupid technobabble, this is a show about PEOPLE not technology. There isn't always a happy ending and a moral to the story. It's no Babylon 5 with pretensions at deciding the entire fate of the species then wrapping up neatly at the end of the series, it's just about the lives and fate of ordinary folk living on the outskirts of civilization. It's no "weird for the sake of weird" Farscape or Lexx. Whedon is to be applauded to the originality he'd brought to both Western and sci-fi genres.
I mean, if the ultimate goal is to draw crowds large enough for the network to bring back the series (is it?)
The terms of the contract are that the movies and the TV series can't coexist - only when the movie(s) are finished can a(nother) TV series go into production. If the movie does well, then there'll be another, that's how Hollywood works, which will push any possibility of another series further back.
have a goddamned low UID because I read slashdot when EVERYONE was anonymous
Damn right!
As long as the experiment isn't too long, you should be able to take it out, use it, and return it to the freezer for the next round
Then the problem becomes controlling condensation and humidity in the lab as you move it from the freezer to the experiment...
because they're getting paid slave wages while working twice the hours that we do.
You are assuming that the cost of living is the same everywhere in the world. But that simply isn't true. A salary of USD 20,000 isn't much in San Francisco or Manhattan but you could live pretty well on it in Bangkok or Bangalore, because the USD.THB or USD.IRR exchange rate is favorable.
In the US, working in a call centre is one step above unskilled labour in a factory. In India, graduates of good colleges compete for job in a call centre because, in local terms, it's very well paid.
Now, maybe some workers are exploited. But in reality, most aren't. Bowing to Western pressure, Nike closed an Indonesian factory... the employees turned to prostitution and drugs, because without Nike, there were no jobs. If you're "anti-exploitation" you're pro-starvation, and that's a fact.
tend to think that the photos will have more soul and personal value if they're taken by my friends.
The mother of the bride doesn't give a stuff about the soul and personal values of your friends (who she probably doesn't approve of either). She wants perfectly lit, perfectly posed, crystal clear images of her family looking healthy and prosperous that she can impress her friends with at the bridge club. That's why people hire pros who've done this hundreds of time before, bring studio lighting with them, have a good hand for retouching, etc.
Funny... the company still keeps its copyright. It's called a work for hire. Get over yourself - we're all professionals - and when we're getting paid, we're serving our employers
If the bride and groom provided the photographer's camera and film/media, computer, etc, hired a darkroom/Mac on his behalf, paid him hourly to operate them, you might have a point.
But, the photographer provides his own equipment, and the deliverable is an album full of prints. It's more like shrinkwrap software than code.
So, you get over yourself. What is it about Slashbots that they think knowing how to operate a computer makes them experts on every topic?
Examine the David Cutler case, where Microsoft hired away one of the core developers of VMS to help create a new, server class operating system.
Umm, Cutler quit DEC in a fit of pique over the amount of autonomy he had to run projects. He took his team with him.
Now, Microsoft aren't above poaching staff. They did it to Borland, everyone knows. But Cutler is a different story.
NT on Alpha actually never worked well due to its lack of support.
NT on Alpha didn't get much support 'cos no-one bought it! All the Alpha users were running their windows apps under FX!32 and running OpenVMS to use their CAD and CFD packages and whatnot. Same story with NT on MIPS and PowerPC, no-one bought 'em.
Don't even argue with me on this, 'cos I was one of those people. I-DEAS and Fluent most of the time, the occasional Word doc, that's how people used their Alphas.
going to write a new TPS/response-time monitor using it.
Did you get the memo about the cover sheet?
OpenVMS is still alive and well. The largest electronic financial futures and options exchange in the world still runs it
Yeah, my esteemed employer has a data centre packed with VMS boxes running applications written in VAX Pascal.
Every few years, some bright spark tries to port the whole lot to C++ on Unix, they always fail. Presently some genius is trying to port it to NT... I don't want to name names, but there is a whole book, in stores right now, that chronicles the many expensive disasters that have befallen the company due mostly to this.
If you sell something that works from the start, and invest in good enginering, how are you supposed to build a succesfull business ?
Well, DEC had a big service (systems integration/consulting/support) business too.
The mistake they made was that the engineers believed that the system was so good there was no need to actively sell it - and the engineers ran the show at DEC. Meanwhile, Sun, SGI, et al, were all about their brands, and that worked great for them. Set the industry back 10 years in the process, tho'.
You are describing the IBM AS/400.
Modern systems, eh?
Funny how those obsolete VAX/VMS systems just keep on going. No crashes or reboots, flawless clustering (remember how the Dutch police moved to a new building with ZERO downtime, just by migrating processes from node to node?), rock-solid security, and tools that let admins manage huge networks of servers and workstations with ease. So-called modern systems, like Unix, are now where VAX/VMS was, what, 10 years ago, 15 years ago in some cases. Sun clusters? A joke! The failure of VAX/VMS is one of DEC's marketing department, not their engineers.
No no no! No government messing with Wikipedia! Of course if they give money, they have some kind of right to say what to write there
In Britain, we have a National Lottery that in addition to handing out prizes makes donations to various worthy causes. It is effectively the government, since it is a legal monopoly (we call this a Quango, in England: quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization). They frequently give huge wads of cash to crackpot groups (one-legged lesbian single mothers, and the like). No reason they wouldn't give money to this (unless of course it was a sane and useful public resource, in which case they wouldn't touch it with a bargepole). I don't play the lottery so it's neither here nor there to me, just a suggestion.
I have to ask, who cares? Pros and serious amateurs are using Canon and Nikon (with very serious pros using Phase One and Sinar). Casual snappers are using Sony Cybershots. Who actually uses a Minolta? I shoot a lot and hang out with other photographers, I've never actually seen one 'cept in a store. And even then, no-one was buying 'em.
This is the future.. it would be nice for fields like electrical engineering, where the core material was discovered and published several hundred years ago - but you still have to pay $200 every year or so for the texts.
It cuts both ways, tho'. Kreyzig's book Advanced Engineering Mathematics is an GBP 50 book. When I was an undergrad, I got the previous edition, brand new, for GBP 3. The bookstore, despite being on campus, obviously had no idea that maths books don't change much, I found it among the leftover books for obsolete operating systems and the like, which were similarly priced.
If you're smart, you can leverage the fact that you know more about your chosen subject than the average bookseller does, and hunt out bargains that way.
Yeah, because I can't count the number of Star Wars boxsets that have been released on DVD.
Lucas is merely waiting for VHS sales of the 4 or so different Star Wars box sets to dry up, then he can repeat the sequence on DVD.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that next year, there'll be another special edition, a widescreen edition, a directors cut... how many times can you get the same people to buy the same movie with just a few tweaks? I don't know but George Lucas must have a pretty good idea by now, and the Wachowskis are his best students.