Do they really need to go out of business? Heck, if the company is "solvent", it seems to me they could find a way to survive
Maybe they just thought, it's not worth it. Why work your ass off to build a company if people, maybe even some of your own customers, are just going to pointlessly destroy it? There are easier, saner ways to earn a living.
Reading an article like this does nothing but make me feel quite weak and ill. Thinking that people in a country like the USA are treated like nothing more then a pair of hands really really bothers me.
I hate to put this so bluntly, but here goes: there are many people whose sole economic skill is the ability to perform repetitive work.
Now, these may be great people with interesting lives and many talents, but everyone's got to put bread on the table, and to do that, you need to be able to do something that someone is willing to pay you to do.
As I said in another post, a bad job and some money is better than no job and no money.
but have they ever really just taken a step back and wondered how much BETTER production would be if they were to treat their workers with respect and give them the security they need and desire?!?
Despite what you might like to think, corporations are not stupid, and if they really could get better productivity (and higher profits) by doing so, they would.
One in particular has to do with foriegn programmers who are brought in with work visas. The hiring company holds both the visa and their passport. The programmers are threaten that if they don't work 12hrs a day, they'll be sent back. Typically, the programmers are paid 1/4-1/2 the wages of a citizen.
Yeah, I've heard these stories too, and they're mostly from foreigners-are-stealing-our-jobs and unionize-programming types. For a start, it's illegal to pay an H1B holder much less than an American doing the same job (either 90% or 75%, I can't remember offhand). H1B visas are bound to a company, true, but it is possible to transfer a visa between companies, and L1 visas require that you've worked for the company overseas for at least a year, unlikely if they treat their people badly. Finally, I don't believe that passports could be held. I've lived and worked in the US (I'm British) and frequently needed to present ID (for example, going into a bar, getting on a plane, etc) and I can tell you, you can't do much in the US without some form of ID, most Americans use their driving licences, and if you don't have one, you need your passport.
Let's face it, paying minimum wage to people is cheaper than automating a production line (and of course, they can argue that they are providing valuable jobs).
There are plenty of people who believe capitalism can do no right, to wit:
They're automating the factories, driving workers out of their jobs!
They're employing workers to do menial repetitive tasks better left to machines!
The fact is, even in the developed world, there are lots of jobs that don't require anything more than repetition. Another fact is, the most you can earn is the economic value you produce, minus the cost of doing business. Third, the seller sets the price no more or no less than the buyer - for a transaction to take place, there must be mutual agreement.
I've done the temping thing for a while, and there was certainly variety (like I'd be in a different job every week), but you are also treated as little more than 'an extra body'
Well, that's what you are, an extra pair of hands to do the work. You show up, you do the job, you get paid, you go home. A lot of work is necessary, but very simple, and varies in demand - look at the Amazon story about seasonal rush. The alternative is to have very slow service during peak times, and/or high prices during the slow season, to support an idle workforce.
It's heavy handed and unethical (IHMO) but companies (with a _few_ limited exceptions) are only interested in the bottom line.
The market - the customers, you and I - have indicated by our behavior as market participants, that we want good prices and fast service. The only way to do this is with a flexible workforce.
Another point made in the article was that many temps come from countries where there is no economy to speak of. Many Westerners are spoilt; a bad job and a little money is much, much better than no job and no money.
Just because you broke some method of encryption doesn't necessarily make you a good computer science student. What about good design or object oriented techniques? How about math skills and knowledge of discrete mathmatics and its relation to programing language design
No, but that's what you're going to study to learn. The test is looking for logical deduction and reasoning skills that can't be learnt through academic study, but are necessary for it.
As a comment on your fast food analogy, the only reason the high school dropout can be so productive is that he is following a process designed by several people who were not high school droputs. These people have optimized everything from how far ahead of time to order frozen burgers, to whether the order screen should be on the left or right of the fry bin. The fact that the process designed for this guy was using weak crypto IS telling of the organization that was supporting him. Some of the communication have been reported to have used PGP, but obviously not everyone has been trained to fully cover their tracks.
That's a great point, and something I'd overlooked. I guess it all depends on al-Queda's structure, whether individual cells are "franchises" or local subsidiaries.
We're not talking about restricting domestic encryption here. The issue is specifically about export restrictions.
You might have a point if US citizens never traveled on non-US airlines. That simply isn't true. Terrorism is a global problem.
What I see here is an instance where, because of our export restrictions, we WERE able to crack terrorist comms. The old argument of "They won't use handicapped software" doesn't seem to hold as much water as it used to.
It's very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that al-Queda are stupid. I am not committing sedition by saying they are in all likelihood just as smart as the law enforcers hunting them. With no technology, and (relatively) little money, massively outnumbered and outgunned, Osama and his people are still free. No-one knows where he as, and he is able to communicate with his organization at will.
Let me give you an analogy. The minimum wage high-school dropout flipping hamburgers doesn't mean that the global fast-food corporation isn't run by Harvard MBAs. The Shoebomber was a pawn in this, nothing more.
I have some familiarity with cryptography, because of my work, but it's not a life-or-death thing for me. You can bet every terrorist with a computer is googling for "crypto" right now.
Legislation is pointless, and even damaging in this case. The cryptography playing field is fairly level. That's not inherently a good or a bad thing; just as al-Queda can encrypt their files, they are equally prevented from intercepting sensitive information by the same technology. If legislation restricts crypto, we will find ourselves in a situation in which the FBI can't crack terrorist comms, yet terrorists can intercept commercial data. Airline security information, oilrig blueprints, whatever.
They sure seem to be are all about profit, and not about judicious, regulated management of domains.
You're right; what I mean is that by not regulating, they have put short term profit ahead of building value long term.
This often happens in capitalist systems, but that's because capitalism leaves the decisions up to you. I just happen to think that the corporate strategy of NSI was flawed, for the above reason.
NSI should have rigorously regulating domain registrations? Sorry, not in a capitalist society. This is America. NSI makes much more money letting every freak register any domain they want.
I'd have to disagree with you there. Look at Verisign. They could probably do quite well in the short time just issuing certificates to anyone who wanted one, but that would devalue their products. Their whole business is based around transitive trust, the browser trusts the CA, the CA trusts the merchant, therefore the browser trusts the merchant.
Back in the old days, NSI could charge $70 for a domain registration and people were willing to pay that price, nowadays you can register a domain for $5.
it's been clearly shown that such trivialities as domain names (among other things internet-related) are of dubious real value.
Even on the internet, domain names were never important. Think about it, who is the best-known web-based book retailer, bookstore.com or Amazon? The biggest ISP isn't isp.com, it's AOL or MSN. Even Google or Yahoo, not search.com.
I blame NSI et al - they should have been a lot more rigorous with registrations, as the NICs in some other countries are - no registering of.com unless you are a legitimate business, no generic words, and so on.
I've barely been able to watch it since Duchovny left. Yeah, Gillian Anderson is great, but it was the chemistry between the two that did it for me. For me, he really defined the show, and when he left, it was pretty much over, I think
Mu Bai and Shu Lien are the new Mulder and Scully:0)
We should know that this is more than just a simple PR move by Microsoft. I mean, don't they normally release information to the press in order to let their employees know how they're changing their focus?
The last time Microsoft made an annoucement like this, they refocused the company on the Internet, and started hammering out MSIE into a Netscape-killer. For all his faults, once Gates and his people get an idea in their heads, they can turn on a dime and they won't stop until they do what they want to do.
Well, yes and no. Oracle is developed in two layers, VOS or "Virtual Operating System" abstracts all the primitives like threads, pipes, file handling etc from the underlying OS, and Oracle itself, which is written to VOS APIs. So the core Oracle engineering team code for pure functionality, and the VOS teams keep their APIs in sync with each other on different platforms. If Oracle want to target a new OS or platform, they simply develop a VOS for it.
I believe the Oracle engineers work on Suns, but they are targetting VOS, not Solaris directly.
That's why you have to start the service before you can start the instance on NT. Win32 is sufficiently different from Unix-like systems to need an environment in place before starting Oracle, whereas Unix-like systems can just link the VOS into the main binary. It needs to work like this because Oracle is Oracle, on any platform, once you log into SQL*Plus, it's exactly the same. Oracle is more complex than many operating systems, it provides its own scheduling, resource quotas (storage and CPU), IPC mechanisms (AQ, DBMS_PIPE, DBMS_ALERT, etc), programming languages (PL/SQL and Java) and a whole lot more. It is a platform in its own right.
If there were reasonable alternatives (yes *we* know there are, but most companies are pretty clueless wrt actual computer-based solutions), there would be NO NEED for this law, as the better software *should* do better in the marketplace
But it's not. Which suggests that it isn't actually better. Remember, "better" is relative, and what you look for may not be what someone else looks for in a product.
Well, the argument is that there is a problem where public-funded code is taken proprietary and used in a way that doesn't benefit the people who foot the bill.
Two points:
Corporations pay tax, and in fact without corporations employing people, individuals wouldn't pay tax (at least, not income tax). Therefore, saying that public-funded code is somehow stolen if a corporation makes propreitary modifications to it is missing the point.
You also have to think about who is paying the tax. Neither BSD nor GPL licences in their present form a suitable. The most appropriate license would in fact be BSD for taxpayers residing in the territory of the government who funded the code being developed, and GPL for everyone else.
I hardly ever want to travel 'from LHR to CDG' (ie specific airports). I'm usually able to get to any airport with in 50 miles using public transport.
You can say LON (London Any) which covers Heathrow, Gatwick, City and Luton, IIRC. There are similar codes for New York, Toyko etc. Obviously, BOS is only Logan and AMS is only Schiphol.
CDG is fairly crap as airports go, I'd rather go via Orly or Eurostar to Gare du Nord:0)
It's as though software design is a bit of an afterthought, which is fine, but the book could have been richer had it focused more on this aspect of UML implementation rather than, for instance, how to use the UML to model a soda machine.
Well, of course it does. Remember that everything in RUP starts with a Use Cases - something useful that someone will actually do with your system. There is no point in developing software before you get this down. The usual way this is taught is through machines that are well-defined and familiar to the student, for example an ATM or a drinks machine.
As a UML user, I wish more people in the software industry would think about the what and the who for rather than the how, which is what most programmers are preoccupied with.
The question is - why didn't the Government swallow the national infrastructure of bandwidth through cables, phone copper lines, exchanges, the whole lot -- and just sell off the operational company? Such an arrangement would mean that the government could restrict the possibility of monopolistic or oligopolistic behaviour should it ever emerge, while leaving the market to decide how it was going to self-assemble when competitors were introduced?
You are correct; but I am operating on the assumption that the government would not be operating any sort of monopoly in the sector.
In some cases, taxes maintain roads, and in some cases there is a toll.
In situations where economies of scale apply, the first company to grow big can beat out any smaller company.
That isn't what happened here. In this case, no-one could compete with the state-sponsored monopoly, because if they did, the state would forcibly prevent it. Your tax dollars at work.
This is the "free market" in action (government-sponsored monopolies crushing independents), and therefore unquestionable in the US today
It's not a free market. A free market would mean that government-sponsored monopolies would have been stripped of their protected status, and had to compete on equal terms with wholly-private enterprises. The matter is somewhat complicated by the fact that a lot of the existing infrastructure was created and is controlled by the state monopolies. There's no straightforward way to transfer that to the private sector, and no straightforward way to replace it, because that would mean that every operator would have to lay their own cable infrastructure. That's just not economically viable.
I suspect that the majority of the bad press free market capitalism gets is because people bandy the term about without understanding it. This isn't a problem of the free market, it's a problem of the government. But somehow, the free market gets blamed and the government called to intervene - again. And it's odd that the GPL-loving slashbots would oppose free - not as in speech or as in beer, but freedom to enter into business relationships - just as important.
What good is free speech, Mr Andersen, if you can't act on your words?
Apple wants to distinguish itself from the rest of the PC market, not cater to it. Making the iPod Mac-exclusive serves as an incentive for users to go Mac.
Variations on this theme have been Apple's strategy for the last decade, and it hasn't served them well. They often launch an innovative product well ahead of there being a real market for it, are too snooty to cater to the PC-owning proletariat, and sell a few to the Mac die-hards (who've bought into the Apple marketing line that only dullards use PCs).
Companies cater to early adopters only to get feedback to ready a push into the mass market. No-one makes money directly from early adopters. New product development is expensive. The best you can hope for is that they are influential enough to act as walking ads for your product, but don't count on it.
Six months later, there are similar products from other manufacturers, targeting mass consumers, almost as good for half the price. Apple could never win anything when competition boiled down to price. By now, all the people who thought, isn't it cool, shame it only works with a Mac, are ready to buy, and they do so in large volumes.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they really need to go out of business? Heck, if the company is "solvent", it seems to me they could find a way to survive
Maybe they just thought, it's not worth it. Why work your ass off to build a company if people, maybe even some of your own customers, are just going to pointlessly destroy it? There are easier, saner ways to earn a living.
Reading an article like this does nothing but make me feel quite weak and ill. Thinking that people in a country like the USA are treated like nothing more then a pair of hands really really bothers me.
I hate to put this so bluntly, but here goes: there are many people whose sole economic skill is the ability to perform repetitive work.
Now, these may be great people with interesting lives and many talents, but everyone's got to put bread on the table, and to do that, you need to be able to do something that someone is willing to pay you to do.
As I said in another post, a bad job and some money is better than no job and no money.
but have they ever really just taken a step back and wondered how much BETTER production would be if they were to treat their workers with respect and give them the security they need and desire?!?
Despite what you might like to think, corporations are not stupid, and if they really could get better productivity (and higher profits) by doing so, they would.
One in particular has to do with foriegn programmers who are brought in with work visas. The hiring company holds both the visa and their passport. The programmers are threaten that if they don't work 12hrs a day, they'll be sent back. Typically, the programmers are paid 1/4-1/2 the wages of a citizen.
Yeah, I've heard these stories too, and they're mostly from foreigners-are-stealing-our-jobs and unionize-programming types. For a start, it's illegal to pay an H1B holder much less than an American doing the same job (either 90% or 75%, I can't remember offhand). H1B visas are bound to a company, true, but it is possible to transfer a visa between companies, and L1 visas require that you've worked for the company overseas for at least a year, unlikely if they treat their people badly. Finally, I don't believe that passports could be held. I've lived and worked in the US (I'm British) and frequently needed to present ID (for example, going into a bar, getting on a plane, etc) and I can tell you, you can't do much in the US without some form of ID, most Americans use their driving licences, and if you don't have one, you need your passport.
There are plenty of people who believe capitalism can do no right, to wit:
The fact is, even in the developed world, there are lots of jobs that don't require anything more than repetition. Another fact is, the most you can earn is the economic value you produce, minus the cost of doing business. Third, the seller sets the price no more or no less than the buyer - for a transaction to take place, there must be mutual agreement.
I've done the temping thing for a while, and there was certainly variety (like I'd be in a different job every week), but you are also treated as little more than 'an extra body'
Well, that's what you are, an extra pair of hands to do the work. You show up, you do the job, you get paid, you go home. A lot of work is necessary, but very simple, and varies in demand - look at the Amazon story about seasonal rush. The alternative is to have very slow service during peak times, and/or high prices during the slow season, to support an idle workforce.
It's heavy handed and unethical (IHMO) but companies (with a _few_ limited exceptions) are only interested in the bottom line.
The market - the customers, you and I - have indicated by our behavior as market participants, that we want good prices and fast service. The only way to do this is with a flexible workforce.
Another point made in the article was that many temps come from countries where there is no economy to speak of. Many Westerners are spoilt; a bad job and a little money is much, much better than no job and no money.
Just because you broke some method of encryption doesn't necessarily make you a good computer science student. What about good design or object oriented techniques? How about math skills and knowledge of discrete mathmatics and its relation to programing language design
No, but that's what you're going to study to learn. The test is looking for logical deduction and reasoning skills that can't be learnt through academic study, but are necessary for it.
Talk to world champion boxer lennox lewis about how he feels when he beats the shit out of someone
Incidentally, Lennox Lewis is known for being a chess player. He's a thinking man's fighter, unlike someone like Mike Tyson, who'd just a thug.
As a comment on your fast food analogy, the only reason the high school dropout can be so productive is that he is following a process designed by several people who were not high school droputs. These people have optimized everything from how far ahead of time to order frozen burgers, to whether the order screen should be on the left or right of the fry bin. The fact that the process designed for this guy was using weak crypto IS telling of the organization that was supporting him. Some of the communication have been reported to have used PGP, but obviously not everyone has been trained to fully cover their tracks.
That's a great point, and something I'd overlooked. I guess it all depends on al-Queda's structure, whether individual cells are "franchises" or local subsidiaries.
We're not talking about restricting domestic encryption here. The issue is specifically about export restrictions.
You might have a point if US citizens never traveled on non-US airlines. That simply isn't true. Terrorism is a global problem.
What I see here is an instance where, because of our export restrictions, we WERE able to crack terrorist comms. The old argument of "They won't use handicapped software" doesn't seem to hold as much water as it used to.
It's very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that al-Queda are stupid. I am not committing sedition by saying they are in all likelihood just as smart as the law enforcers hunting them. With no technology, and (relatively) little money, massively outnumbered and outgunned, Osama and his people are still free. No-one knows where he as, and he is able to communicate with his organization at will.
Let me give you an analogy. The minimum wage high-school dropout flipping hamburgers doesn't mean that the global fast-food corporation isn't run by Harvard MBAs. The Shoebomber was a pawn in this, nothing more.
I have some familiarity with cryptography, because of my work, but it's not a life-or-death thing for me. You can bet every terrorist with a computer is googling for "crypto" right now.
Should the US prohibit the export of high-encryption software?
Sure, why not? It isn't as if there are any cryptographers in any other countries in the world, is it?
Legislation is pointless, and even damaging in this case. The cryptography playing field is fairly level. That's not inherently a good or a bad thing; just as al-Queda can encrypt their files, they are equally prevented from intercepting sensitive information by the same technology. If legislation restricts crypto, we will find ourselves in a situation in which the FBI can't crack terrorist comms, yet terrorists can intercept commercial data. Airline security information, oilrig blueprints, whatever.
They sure seem to be are all about profit, and not about judicious, regulated management of domains.
You're right; what I mean is that by not regulating, they have put short term profit ahead of building value long term.
This often happens in capitalist systems, but that's because capitalism leaves the decisions up to you. I just happen to think that the corporate strategy of NSI was flawed, for the above reason.
NSI should have rigorously regulating domain registrations? Sorry, not in a capitalist society. This is America. NSI makes much more money letting every freak register any domain they want.
I'd have to disagree with you there. Look at Verisign. They could probably do quite well in the short time just issuing certificates to anyone who wanted one, but that would devalue their products. Their whole business is based around transitive trust, the browser trusts the CA, the CA trusts the merchant, therefore the browser trusts the merchant.
Back in the old days, NSI could charge $70 for a domain registration and people were willing to pay that price, nowadays you can register a domain for $5.
it's been clearly shown that such trivialities as domain names (among other things internet-related) are of dubious real value.
.com unless you are a legitimate business, no generic words, and so on.
Even on the internet, domain names were never important. Think about it, who is the best-known web-based book retailer, bookstore.com or Amazon? The biggest ISP isn't isp.com, it's AOL or MSN. Even Google or Yahoo, not search.com.
I blame NSI et al - they should have been a lot more rigorous with registrations, as the NICs in some other countries are - no registering of
I've barely been able to watch it since Duchovny left. Yeah, Gillian Anderson is great, but it was the chemistry between the two that did it for me. For me, he really defined the show, and when he left, it was pretty much over, I think
:0)
Mu Bai and Shu Lien are the new Mulder and Scully
Yes, MS is working very hard on creating software to support rival operating systems
Office for Macintosh, anyone?
We should know that this is more than just a simple PR move by Microsoft. I mean, don't they normally release information to the press in order to let their employees know how they're changing their focus?
The last time Microsoft made an annoucement like this, they refocused the company on the Internet, and started hammering out MSIE into a Netscape-killer. For all his faults, once Gates and his people get an idea in their heads, they can turn on a dime and they won't stop until they do what they want to do.
Other are just ports.
Well, yes and no. Oracle is developed in two layers, VOS or "Virtual Operating System" abstracts all the primitives like threads, pipes, file handling etc from the underlying OS, and Oracle itself, which is written to VOS APIs. So the core Oracle engineering team code for pure functionality, and the VOS teams keep their APIs in sync with each other on different platforms. If Oracle want to target a new OS or platform, they simply develop a VOS for it.
I believe the Oracle engineers work on Suns, but they are targetting VOS, not Solaris directly.
That's why you have to start the service before you can start the instance on NT. Win32 is sufficiently different from Unix-like systems to need an environment in place before starting Oracle, whereas Unix-like systems can just link the VOS into the main binary. It needs to work like this because Oracle is Oracle, on any platform, once you log into SQL*Plus, it's exactly the same. Oracle is more complex than many operating systems, it provides its own scheduling, resource quotas (storage and CPU), IPC mechanisms (AQ, DBMS_PIPE, DBMS_ALERT, etc), programming languages (PL/SQL and Java) and a whole lot more. It is a platform in its own right.
If there were reasonable alternatives (yes *we* know there are, but most companies are pretty clueless wrt actual computer-based solutions), there would be NO NEED for this law, as the better software *should* do better in the marketplace
But it's not. Which suggests that it isn't actually better. Remember, "better" is relative, and what you look for may not be what someone else looks for in a product.
Two points:
I hardly ever want to travel 'from LHR to CDG' (ie specific airports). I'm usually able to get to any airport with in 50 miles using public transport.
:0)
You can say LON (London Any) which covers Heathrow, Gatwick, City and Luton, IIRC. There are similar codes for New York, Toyko etc. Obviously, BOS is only Logan and AMS is only Schiphol.
CDG is fairly crap as airports go, I'd rather go via Orly or Eurostar to Gare du Nord
It's as though software design is a bit of an afterthought, which is fine, but the book could have been richer had it focused more on this aspect of UML implementation rather than, for instance, how to use the UML to model a soda machine.
Well, of course it does. Remember that everything in RUP starts with a Use Cases - something useful that someone will actually do with your system. There is no point in developing software before you get this down. The usual way this is taught is through machines that are well-defined and familiar to the student, for example an ATM or a drinks machine.
As a UML user, I wish more people in the software industry would think about the what and the who for rather than the how, which is what most programmers are preoccupied with.
The question is - why didn't the Government swallow the national infrastructure of bandwidth through cables, phone copper lines, exchanges, the whole lot -- and just sell off the operational company? Such an arrangement would mean that the government could restrict the possibility of monopolistic or oligopolistic behaviour should it ever emerge, while leaving the market to decide how it was going to self-assemble when competitors were introduced?
You are correct; but I am operating on the assumption that the government would not be operating any sort of monopoly in the sector.
In some cases, taxes maintain roads, and in some cases there is a toll.
In situations where economies of scale apply, the first company to grow big can beat out any smaller company.
That isn't what happened here. In this case, no-one could compete with the state-sponsored monopoly, because if they did, the state would forcibly prevent it. Your tax dollars at work.
This is the "free market" in action (government-sponsored monopolies crushing independents), and therefore unquestionable in the US today
It's not a free market. A free market would mean that government-sponsored monopolies would have been stripped of their protected status, and had to compete on equal terms with wholly-private enterprises. The matter is somewhat complicated by the fact that a lot of the existing infrastructure was created and is controlled by the state monopolies. There's no straightforward way to transfer that to the private sector, and no straightforward way to replace it, because that would mean that every operator would have to lay their own cable infrastructure. That's just not economically viable.
I suspect that the majority of the bad press free market capitalism gets is because people bandy the term about without understanding it. This isn't a problem of the free market, it's a problem of the government. But somehow, the free market gets blamed and the government called to intervene - again. And it's odd that the GPL-loving slashbots would oppose free - not as in speech or as in beer, but freedom to enter into business relationships - just as important.
What good is free speech, Mr Andersen, if you can't act on your words?
And did you really mean "unquestionable"?
What do you mean "flamebait"? You might not agree, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Apple wants to distinguish itself from the rest of the PC market, not cater to it. Making the iPod Mac-exclusive serves as an incentive for users to go Mac.
Variations on this theme have been Apple's strategy for the last decade, and it hasn't served them well. They often launch an innovative product well ahead of there being a real market for it, are too snooty to cater to the PC-owning proletariat, and sell a few to the Mac die-hards (who've bought into the Apple marketing line that only dullards use PCs).
Companies cater to early adopters only to get feedback to ready a push into the mass market. No-one makes money directly from early adopters. New product development is expensive. The best you can hope for is that they are influential enough to act as walking ads for your product, but don't count on it.
Six months later, there are similar products from other manufacturers, targeting mass consumers, almost as good for half the price. Apple could never win anything when competition boiled down to price. By now, all the people who thought, isn't it cool, shame it only works with a Mac, are ready to buy, and they do so in large volumes.