I've read your post (this parent) and some of your replies to other followups, and I don't get what you're arguing -- are you in fact arguing that Apple is *subsidizing* the iPod's cost via iTunesMS, and that somehow Real is breaking Apple's revenue model by getting their music to play on the iPod?
If so, that's about the most ludicrous argument I've ever heard. iTunes/IMS is the lure for Apple's high-buck iPods. If I buy an iPod and never use iTunes until then, Apple's already "won" -- I didn't use their free app without the hardware.
I own an iPod and haven't bought anything from IMS (strike that -- I did buy a book, but I burned it to CD, ripped to MP3 and tossed the AAC file, and only used it in my car CD player).
Furthermore, Apple nor any other company should be able to "enforce" a multiproduct revenue model of any kind. If they're stupid enough to sell some item independent of other items and they do so below cost, too bad -- this will always be the economic motivation for someone to figure out how to hack it to get the product's value without having to buy the entire package.
Didn't we see that in the 90s with those PCs sold for $199 where they thought you'd buy a service package forever? The XBox? Tivo?
Just as I find the election so amusing for offering the public the choice of one millionaire over the other for some trivial differences largely boiling down to which hole you like it stuck in and who you like sticking it there, this whole Apple/Real iPod fracas is equally amsuing.
Anti-Real/Pro-Apple zealots are probably slightly more amusing than the Pro-Real/Pro-Open zealots, since it's not clear what they're supporting other than Apple's right to an unfettered monopoly over the entire life cycle of a product, and people who might be in favor of real's hack can make a plausable argument that more openness on the iPod platform is a good thing.
Beyond that, it's just a fight between two millionaires...
I'd be thrilled to see Netware 3.11's ACLs and groups move to UNIX space.
By the time I used Linux seriously (1.2.13 kernel), I had a ton of Netware experience and I was like "WTF is up with these permissions...". It was and still is stone age compared to Netware of a decade ago.
I guess I presume that most "stable" corporations (those out of their high growth phases) don't raise cash that often via increasing their outstanding shares, but instead go through the bond market or other lines of credit (banks or suppliers).
You can only print stock if your stock value is fast rising, and that's not that many companies. Otherwise it has the same effect as printing money -- devaluing the existing shareholder's shares.
Regardless, heavy trade in a corporation's stock actually does very little to raise capital for the company.
I'm not a market whiz by any means, but how does a low stock price (assuming other, positive indicators) influence whether a company can survive or not? Once the stock is sold by the company, they don't make any further money on its continued sale.
A stock whose price continues to climb can allow the company to essentially print money by issuing new stock (if the price climbs fast enough existing shareholders don't generally notice or care that you're diluting the pool), but beyond that, how does share price influence the company's actual operations?
Going further OT, I think Apple should have bought SGI. They could have gained credibility in the scientific visualation and industrial sectors and had a tidy little OS and GUI that could have spanned from the receptionist desk to the research machine room, in addition to gaining some high-end server solutions far beyond their XServes.
Somehow it seems that something like this could have develped into a really cool desktop solution that would allow users to run applications locally and remotely on big iron (yes, X-windows style) but with the ease of use and friendliness Apple's known for.
I've noticed that this is far more common in stores frequented by low income people than wealthy people.
In fact, a friend and I were shopping at a food store near his house and we stopped to buy some tomato sauce. The economy size was more than 2x the price of the smaller size, despite being only 2x the product.
We were staring at the same products with an African American woman, and as we grabbed our smaller size cans we told her "the smaller ones are a better deal". She looked at us like we were lying to her, grabbed 3 economy size and walked away!
I do most of my shopping at a higher end grocery store near my house, and it's really unusual for large quantities to be priced unproportionately higher than their small quantities. I'd guess that this gimmick would work even better there, since I'm assuming that wealthier shoppers are less inclined to look at prices.
But isn't it so that they shoud be sued for exactly this, instead of some law which obviously does not apply to them?
Paypal's problem is that they want it both ways. They want to act like a financial instution when it suits them, yet they want to be exempted from financial institution rules when it suits them.
Visa/MC could put them out of business if they would issue one-time credit card numbers, associated with specific dollar amounts, thet could be sent via email or whatever and then redeemed at a Visa/MC web site.
So you're saying that they made a mistake, you raised the issue, and they corrected it.
The horror:-)
So Apple's mistakes are OK, and your sarcasm implies everyone else's are part of a global conspiracy and ineptitude?
This just makes me doubt any self-reported surveys dealing with Apple products; there's so much bias on their part that you have to wonder if Apple's getting knocked where they deserve to be knocked.
54GB, while a tad on the small side compared to hard disks, is a meaningful amount of data storage. Dual-layer DVD might have cut it 3 years ago, but not anymore -- it's just a bigger floppy and better movie copy medium.
It'd be nice to see the better data storage medium win this time.
Does the system have on-board hardware RAID? "A small RAID array" might not even be honest if all you can do is software RAID across your non-boot partition and a second HDD.
I can't help but think we'll have a "next stage" in the world of drugs where the pharmaceutical companies sell drugs that technically get you high, but in ways that the man finds worthwhile. Imagine "Glaxo Endeavor" -- the morale of cocaine, the energy of meth, but the calm of atavan, and none of the side effects of the others.
I sometimes think that the anti-depressants are partway there, especially the way their advertised. I'm just surprised that the pharmaceutical companies aren't farther along in making "socially good" drugs, as well as manufacturing the societal approval for taking them.
Although maybe we'll never get there -- law enforcement benefits from it being illegal (both in above-board budgets and in inherent corruption), the "moral authorities" gain a power base by promoting their puritan ideals, and the dealers and manufacturers just look at illegality as another business factor to manage.
The first one is where the blade rests on the side of the handle, and then flips out of the handle through a 180 degree arc at the press of a button/flip of a catch. This type is legal most everywhere in the States.
Then why can't you buy them most everywhere in the States? "Automatic knives" of any sort are illegal to buy and sell in my state, but OK to posess by "collectors".
The second type of switch blade has the blade of the knife compacted into what is essentially a barrel inside the handle of the knife. Pressing a little button on the grip ejects the blade strait out of the handle, like a bullet leaving a gun.
An eggregious metaphor, wouldn't you say? The problem with knives like that isn't the law, but the complexity of the mechanism required to reliably get the knife out and keep it in. I've seen some contemporary ones for sale, and they were big and had weird mechanisms. Not really convenient for belt carry.
Most states allow them for "collectors" but prohibit their sale or purchase. Oregon allows them for anybody, Florida allows them for concealed-carry permit holders.
There's also a FEDERAL law which prohibits interstate transport/sale except to military and police.
Apparently they don't care enough about the potential savings to make the change
There's probably a bunch of secret contractual language that mandates a "hands off" approach to Slashdot's editorial content and its code development and keeps OSDN from hammering them about their bandwidth usage.
What I love are the hidden KB articles that detail real, known problems but can't be searched by public users, even by specifying the specific KB article. It's madness.
You get a debit card as standard with most bank accounts.
This is a marketing ploy with US banks as well -- bank debit cards that are also Visa/MCs earn the bank a spiff from the transaction fee, so they want those to be used, which is why they are standard.
At least at my bank (and perhaps others) you can request an ATM-only card. It *is* usable at limited retail locations (mainly grocery stores), but the transaction is PIN based like an ATM withdrawal.
I'd prefer if they would move all credit card transactions to a PIN basis.
This *existed* in the 80s, but I don't know whether it was used on ATMs or not.
I guess that was my central question; given the computational cost of encryption and the dollar cost of computation, how likely were banks to have used encryption on ATM links in the early 80s?
Of course even a weak substitution or XOR cipher would have been like magic to us at the time, and given the lame computing power at our disposal (we'd have been lugging an IBM PC or Apple ][ on-site), probably not easily brute-forcable.
I don't get cash from ATMs with my credit card, for that I use my ATM card. The advantage there, though, is that its protected by a PIN number. No PIN, no cash.
While I realize a debit card is as well, the debit card has the nasty ability to be used as a no-PIN-required Visa/MC and can thus drain your account if stolen as if you had written your PIN on an ATM card with a sharpie.
There was an ATM in the student union when I was in college (early 80s) that was a freestanding model. For whatever reason, the telecomm line and the modem were both exposed.
The naive idea we had was to monitor the line and then perform a man-in-the-middle attack and continuously withdraw money, the idea being that we would spoof the machine into thinking we had more money in our accounts than we did.
It was dumb for a number of reasons -- using our own bank cards, assuming it was a 'normal' 1200 baud modem, assuming the transaction wasn't encrypted, etc.
But could it have worked even if we had more of the technical details worked out? Given the state of technology in the early 80s, how likely was it they were running the comm links unencrypted? I'd assume now that the whole communications session is encrypted with long keys and that the individual transactions are signed or checksummed as well as time/date stamped to prevent this kind of thing.
I got mailed a debit card back when they first became available from my bank. Trouble is, the card was mailed unsolicited and the Visa portion of it was pre-activated. All I had to do according to the letter that accompanied it was go out and start spending.
I was outraged, naturally, and cut the card into small bits and told the bank I would not accept a debit card. I ranted on misc.consumers about it and ultimately got quoted in a story about debit cards in US News. (My 0:00.15 of fame).
The thing I dislike about debit cards is that if you were a victim of fraud, you're out cash money until the bank refunds you. Most banks have upped their fraud agreements to match those of credit cards, but there's often little replacement for cash when you need it *now*.
What I don't get, though, is if you're a huge fan of debit cards, why wouldn't you just use a credit card? Let the *bank* take the credit risk, you earn interest on your own cash and they eat the interest for 30 days, plus you can pick up frequent flier miles or some other trivial bennie at the same time.
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I've read your post (this parent) and some of your replies to other followups, and I don't get what you're arguing -- are you in fact arguing that Apple is *subsidizing* the iPod's cost via iTunesMS, and that somehow Real is breaking Apple's revenue model by getting their music to play on the iPod?
If so, that's about the most ludicrous argument I've ever heard. iTunes/IMS is the lure for Apple's high-buck iPods. If I buy an iPod and never use iTunes until then, Apple's already "won" -- I didn't use their free app without the hardware.
I own an iPod and haven't bought anything from IMS (strike that -- I did buy a book, but I burned it to CD, ripped to MP3 and tossed the AAC file, and only used it in my car CD player).
Furthermore, Apple nor any other company should be able to "enforce" a multiproduct revenue model of any kind. If they're stupid enough to sell some item independent of other items and they do so below cost, too bad -- this will always be the economic motivation for someone to figure out how to hack it to get the product's value without having to buy the entire package.
Didn't we see that in the 90s with those PCs sold for $199 where they thought you'd buy a service package forever? The XBox? Tivo?
Just as I find the election so amusing for offering the public the choice of one millionaire over the other for some trivial differences largely boiling down to which hole you like it stuck in and who you like sticking it there, this whole Apple/Real iPod fracas is equally amsuing.
Anti-Real/Pro-Apple zealots are probably slightly more amusing than the Pro-Real/Pro-Open zealots, since it's not clear what they're supporting other than Apple's right to an unfettered monopoly over the entire life cycle of a product, and people who might be in favor of real's hack can make a plausable argument that more openness on the iPod platform is a good thing.
Beyond that, it's just a fight between two millionaires...
...and charging $129 for subsequent point upgrades thereafter.
I'd be thrilled to see Netware 3.11's ACLs and groups move to UNIX space.
By the time I used Linux seriously (1.2.13 kernel), I had a ton of Netware experience and I was like "WTF is up with these permissions...". It was and still is stone age compared to Netware of a decade ago.
One-time card numbers? Where/how can I get this feature?
I guess I presume that most "stable" corporations (those out of their high growth phases) don't raise cash that often via increasing their outstanding shares, but instead go through the bond market or other lines of credit (banks or suppliers).
You can only print stock if your stock value is fast rising, and that's not that many companies. Otherwise it has the same effect as printing money -- devaluing the existing shareholder's shares.
Regardless, heavy trade in a corporation's stock actually does very little to raise capital for the company.
I'm not a market whiz by any means, but how does a low stock price (assuming other, positive indicators) influence whether a company can survive or not? Once the stock is sold by the company, they don't make any further money on its continued sale.
A stock whose price continues to climb can allow the company to essentially print money by issuing new stock (if the price climbs fast enough existing shareholders don't generally notice or care that you're diluting the pool), but beyond that, how does share price influence the company's actual operations?
Going further OT, I think Apple should have bought SGI. They could have gained credibility in the scientific visualation and industrial sectors and had a tidy little OS and GUI that could have spanned from the receptionist desk to the research machine room, in addition to gaining some high-end server solutions far beyond their XServes.
Somehow it seems that something like this could have develped into a really cool desktop solution that would allow users to run applications locally and remotely on big iron (yes, X-windows style) but with the ease of use and friendliness Apple's known for.
I've noticed that this is far more common in stores frequented by low income people than wealthy people.
In fact, a friend and I were shopping at a food store near his house and we stopped to buy some tomato sauce. The economy size was more than 2x the price of the smaller size, despite being only 2x the product.
We were staring at the same products with an African American woman, and as we grabbed our smaller size cans we told her "the smaller ones are a better deal". She looked at us like we were lying to her, grabbed 3 economy size and walked away!
I do most of my shopping at a higher end grocery store near my house, and it's really unusual for large quantities to be priced unproportionately higher than their small quantities. I'd guess that this gimmick would work even better there, since I'm assuming that wealthier shoppers are less inclined to look at prices.
But isn't it so that they shoud be sued for exactly this, instead of some law which obviously does not apply to them?
Paypal's problem is that they want it both ways. They want to act like a financial instution when it suits them, yet they want to be exempted from financial institution rules when it suits them.
Visa/MC could put them out of business if they would issue one-time credit card numbers, associated with specific dollar amounts, thet could be sent via email or whatever and then redeemed at a Visa/MC web site.
So you're saying that they made a mistake, you raised the issue, and they corrected it.
:-)
The horror
So Apple's mistakes are OK, and your sarcasm implies everyone else's are part of a global conspiracy and ineptitude?
This just makes me doubt any self-reported surveys dealing with Apple products; there's so much bias on their part that you have to wonder if Apple's getting knocked where they deserve to be knocked.
54GB, while a tad on the small side compared to hard disks, is a meaningful amount of data storage. Dual-layer DVD might have cut it 3 years ago, but not anymore -- it's just a bigger floppy and better movie copy medium.
It'd be nice to see the better data storage medium win this time.
Actually, you can do Intel's goofy Matrix RAID with the ICH6R chip -- RAID 1 and RAID 0 on the same two drives at the same time.
I don't know what performance in this situation is really like, but it's an interesting idea.
Does the system have on-board hardware RAID? "A small RAID array" might not even be honest if all you can do is software RAID across your non-boot partition and a second HDD.
I can't help but think we'll have a "next stage" in the world of drugs where the pharmaceutical companies sell drugs that technically get you high, but in ways that the man finds worthwhile. Imagine "Glaxo Endeavor" -- the morale of cocaine, the energy of meth, but the calm of atavan, and none of the side effects of the others.
I sometimes think that the anti-depressants are partway there, especially the way their advertised. I'm just surprised that the pharmaceutical companies aren't farther along in making "socially good" drugs, as well as manufacturing the societal approval for taking them.
Although maybe we'll never get there -- law enforcement benefits from it being illegal (both in above-board budgets and in inherent corruption), the "moral authorities" gain a power base by promoting their puritan ideals, and the dealers and manufacturers just look at illegality as another business factor to manage.
It's not that the Army isn't doing it in some R&D lab, but regular army is pretty constrained by all that bureaucracy.
It's kind of like how hikers and campers often have gear the regular army doesn't have.
The first one is where the blade rests on the side of the handle, and then flips out of the handle through a 180 degree arc at the press of a button/flip of a catch. This type is legal most everywhere in the States.
Then why can't you buy them most everywhere in the States? "Automatic knives" of any sort are illegal to buy and sell in my state, but OK to posess by "collectors".
The second type of switch blade has the blade of the knife compacted into what is essentially a barrel inside the handle of the knife. Pressing a little button on the grip ejects the blade strait out of the handle, like a bullet leaving a gun.
An eggregious metaphor, wouldn't you say? The problem with knives like that isn't the law, but the complexity of the mechanism required to reliably get the knife out and keep it in. I've seen some contemporary ones for sale, and they were big and had weird mechanisms. Not really convenient for belt carry.
Most states allow them for "collectors" but prohibit their sale or purchase. Oregon allows them for anybody, Florida allows them for concealed-carry permit holders.
There's also a FEDERAL law which prohibits interstate transport/sale except to military and police.
I think it's a patently idiotic law.
Apparently they don't care enough about the potential savings to make the change
There's probably a bunch of secret contractual language that mandates a "hands off" approach to Slashdot's editorial content and its code development and keeps OSDN from hammering them about their bandwidth usage.
What I love are the hidden KB articles that detail real, known problems but can't be searched by public users, even by specifying the specific KB article. It's madness.
fnord fnord fnord.
You get a debit card as standard with most bank accounts.
This is a marketing ploy with US banks as well -- bank debit cards that are also Visa/MCs earn the bank a spiff from the transaction fee, so they want those to be used, which is why they are standard.
At least at my bank (and perhaps others) you can request an ATM-only card. It *is* usable at limited retail locations (mainly grocery stores), but the transaction is PIN based like an ATM withdrawal.
I'd prefer if they would move all credit card transactions to a PIN basis.
This *existed* in the 80s, but I don't know whether it was used on ATMs or not.
I guess that was my central question; given the computational cost of encryption and the dollar cost of computation, how likely were banks to have used encryption on ATM links in the early 80s?
Of course even a weak substitution or XOR cipher would have been like magic to us at the time, and given the lame computing power at our disposal (we'd have been lugging an IBM PC or Apple ][ on-site), probably not easily brute-forcable.
I don't get cash from ATMs with my credit card, for that I use my ATM card. The advantage there, though, is that its protected by a PIN number. No PIN, no cash.
While I realize a debit card is as well, the debit card has the nasty ability to be used as a no-PIN-required Visa/MC and can thus drain your account if stolen as if you had written your PIN on an ATM card with a sharpie.
There was an ATM in the student union when I was in college (early 80s) that was a freestanding model. For whatever reason, the telecomm line and the modem were both exposed.
The naive idea we had was to monitor the line and then perform a man-in-the-middle attack and continuously withdraw money, the idea being that we would spoof the machine into thinking we had more money in our accounts than we did.
It was dumb for a number of reasons -- using our own bank cards, assuming it was a 'normal' 1200 baud modem, assuming the transaction wasn't encrypted, etc.
But could it have worked even if we had more of the technical details worked out? Given the state of technology in the early 80s, how likely was it they were running the comm links unencrypted? I'd assume now that the whole communications session is encrypted with long keys and that the individual transactions are signed or checksummed as well as time/date stamped to prevent this kind of thing.
I got mailed a debit card back when they first became available from my bank. Trouble is, the card was mailed unsolicited and the Visa portion of it was pre-activated. All I had to do according to the letter that accompanied it was go out and start spending.
I was outraged, naturally, and cut the card into small bits and told the bank I would not accept a debit card. I ranted on misc.consumers about it and ultimately got quoted in a story about debit cards in US News. (My 0:00.15 of fame).
The thing I dislike about debit cards is that if you were a victim of fraud, you're out cash money until the bank refunds you. Most banks have upped their fraud agreements to match those of credit cards, but there's often little replacement for cash when you need it *now*.
What I don't get, though, is if you're a huge fan of debit cards, why wouldn't you just use a credit card? Let the *bank* take the credit risk, you earn interest on your own cash and they eat the interest for 30 days, plus you can pick up frequent flier miles or some other trivial bennie at the same time.