Yes, lots of people are incapable of leaving their DRM bubble. The MAFIAA is happy to keep them safely crippled -- that's a lot of "lost sales avoided", according to their way of thinking.
But don't forget that DRM also suffers from the "broke once, broken everywhere" problem. If only one smart person figures out how to break DRM, he or she can publish his or her findings. A few others will use those findings to develop a tool. Many people will then use the tool to rip and republish the media in other ways: torrents, pirate sites, etc.
Ultimately, even if Joe Sixpack thinks JHymn is just a song about Lil' Baby Jeebus, he's still capable of typing "download brittany spears song" into Google and clicking on whatever shows up. The only reason he doesn't succeed very often is the diligence of the mafioso lawyers at sending Cease and Desist notices.
We have Shrub the Malevolent in office, and he's protected himself with a ring of thugs and illegitimate executive orders. His willful ignorance is legend, his rape of the rights of both U.S. citizens and prisoners is well documented, his economic policies are driving this country straight down through "second-world" status (except for those who own the large corporations), his foreign policies have put Americans everywhere in danger (as well as making a mockery of American "freedom" when viewed from abroad,) his energy policies were written for him by energy companies interested only in profit (and kept secret), and he lied to Congress to quagmire us into a war we didn't need to fight. I don't think it's possible for a worse leader to rise up through the democratic process and still get elected, unless you convince everyone everywhere to support one of those third-party nut jobs like Jesse Ventura.
He didn't just lead this country into the toilet, he shoved us down the bowl with a plunger and flushed it with a firehose. And since he hasn't already been led out of the Oval Office in handcuffs or by a mob armed with torches and pitchforks, your idea has thus been demonstrated to be incorrect. Please don't encourage people to waste their votes on his successor.
Thanks, that was very interesting. Ethanol being a "net energy loss" was one of the figures I had heard earlier, which is why 1.3 sounded pretty good to me. What I didn't know is "who" did the research that calculated a loss, and I often wondered who paid for it as it sounded very much like the results you'd expect from an oil-company-funded study.
One of the reasons biofuels might still be worth it is as an "energy converter". Liquids are very desirable as fuels from a materials handling standpoint -- they're storeable, they're pumpable and flow through pipelines easily, they're directly measurable, they allow for readings of the quantities sold or stored, they have a fairly high energy density, most of them are stable enough, and they're already well understood by people. We already have a giant liquid fuel infrastructure in place (tankers, trucks, pipelines, storage tanks and filling stations.) And we already have millions of engines designed to burn liquid fuels.
If electrical energy could be used as inputs to the ethanol equation and especially in the production of fertilizer, the electricity could be produced by nuclear or solar power and turned into liquid fuels by this (very inefficient and obtuse) route. Plus, every efficiency gain in biomass-to-fuel conversion is solar powered, and results in "free" energy to us. These are all pretty new technologies, and I expect there are a lot of unexplored ways to improve the processes.
Economics aside, we are going to run out of fossil fuels at some point in the future, and the other replacement technologies just aren't there yet in terms of storage and usability.
This isn't the first time I've read that corn yields 1.3 units of energy out for each unit put in (or some factor other than 1.3) But where does this number come from? And really, how far back does it go -- gas in the farmer's 4x4 inspecting his fields? Energy used to produce the fertilizer? The energy to produce the food the farmer ate?
I'd like to know because it's so hard to compare with oil at that level. It's much easier for a consumer to simply look at the price on the pump. But that only tells us what the market is willing to bear (what the fuel is worth), not the true costs of production.
Don't worry. There will be an open-source version of this available for Ubuntu sometime in the next month, long before the patent is approved. But it'll be a lame version like 0.89 and only show "Hello, I'm a Mac" ads.
How can you tell in a reply to the first post, whether or not Slashdot readers actually _are_ believing it?
Aren't you making a large assumption there?
And you are incapable of reading all the comments before posting a reply to the most relevant? How's that philosophy of "Ready! FIRE! Aim!" working out for you? I suppose it's a good thing your foot was in your mouth or else you might have shot yourself in it.
I must be tired. I'm replying to anonymous trolls.
I think the bigger question is "why is any/. reader suddenly believing anything from Forrester?" Usually they're spewing out the pro-Microsoft stance that most readers here seem to reject on principle, rather than fact. But now there's a research article that shows a trend away from Microsoft and it's suddenly gospel?
As you seem to be implying, Forrester (and Gartner et al) take their surveys and extrapolate wildly, and not always with thought to the subject. I'd say this is as trustworthy a report as anything else they've produced -- which is saying pretty much nothing at all.
I think they've programmed it to "favor" expressways over local streets, but I'm not sure how it figures the payoff -- when is a square of three highways routing around a straight central local road a good idea vs a bad idea? They could have added the concept of beltways, or it could simply be that the beltway is a single road as opposed to a straight local street drive. Or it could be they've "decreased" the cost of expressways as compared to local streets, perhaps trying to keep unwitting travelers from further congesting city streets.
I just tested Google with my old commute. I live just off a six-lane highway that turns into a city street five miles from downtown, and my old workplace was on that same city street near downtown. The highway route dodges a mile to the west on three different multi-lane freeways before it hooks back to the city street, where, due to some odd ramp placements, I have to double back about half a mile to arrive at the location. The highway route was still Google's first choice, even though the time was the same for both and the mileage was over two miles shorter for the straight path. So Google must be heavily favoring highway travel. As for me, I usually chose the city streets only during rush hour and took the highways all other times. As a bonus, I never had any windows shot out while taking the highway. Now, if Google considered traffic, time-of-day, and crime statistics...:-)
No, Gene Roddenberry was right when he made "Mirror, Mirror". We get to see George Bush and Condi Rice with moustaches and goatees.
Re:I like my privacy, so please, no email ID
on
The Internet Of Things
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Unfortunately, I don't believe enough other people do care about the issue.
Take shopper loyalty cards, for example. For a benefit of perhaps 1% of the value of the transaction, people are glad to give away their private information. From that, they learn that "it's not so bad, I get a discount, and I always shop there." The industry might even spin the issue to say something completely factually incorrect, like "this privacy law will mean the end of frequent shopper cards!"
People are sheep. They can be led around like cattle for one penny on the dollar. Don't count on them to pass any legislation protecting themselves.
Re:I like my privacy, so please, no email ID
on
The Internet Of Things
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I am not sure that i want anyone but those i tell to know if darren@yahoo.com and darren@gmail.com is read by the same person.
The problem we'll encounter is that if everything is tagged individually then relationships can be made between tagged items.
We're seeing this with hypothetical RFID scenarios. If you have RFID tagged car keys (like a SpeedPass token) and a credit card, when you walk into a store and buy something those keys can be read and associated with your credit card number. If those same car keys come back but you use a different credit card, a relationship between the two credit cards can be discovered. Any RFID tagged merchandise can be used in the same manner, and associated with you. Eventually a whole "cloud" of your tagged stuff will be related, so that even if you pay for "Catcher in the Rye" with cash, they can still figure out that you're ion++. And that's just with today's technology.
Today, only your IP address is associated with downloading a copy of Shrek 3. IPv6 is going to make sure that your cable modem, your computer, your RAM and your hard disk are all associated with downloading a copy of Shrek 4.
If those "cowboy coders" are the ones responsible for the poor code that MS was known for? Then why flip-flop and lament those "innovative spirits" and say that MS will never be a "great" choice unless it retains them?
Innovation is about new ideas and new approaches. Quality is about predictability, stability, and security. Innovation does not imply quality in any way, positive or negative.
The traditional "cowboy approach" has been along the lines of "given an innovative base product created by the cowboys, let's test it and fix it until it's full of quality." We know how well that works; as the old joke goes, "At Microsoft, quality is job 3.1!" But the "quality first" approach tends to isolate the developers out of the creative process, meaning the people who know the language and tools best are left with very little say in the final product. Even if there is innovation added by the development teams, it seems to be only on a small scale, and not at the product level.
And perhaps it was unfair to say Microsoft will never be a "great" choice for innovation -- they've certainly been successful at purchasing innovative small companies, and bringing their innovations to the Windows world with their giant marketing machine.
Ready to ship? More debugging? Certainly this is the point where MS would ship it...
While that's funny 'round these parts, Microsoft is really pushing hard for quality code on the inside. They're implementing processes on top of processes to create new processes to improve the quality of their software (or so they think.) And they're succeeding in a lot of ways -- the code they ship now as "1.0" is far better than any of their previous 1.0 offerings.
Internally they're killing off the cowboy coders that got them to where they are today. They've shifted the focus from brilliant coders to creative marketers and competent managers, and hire code monkeys to grind out exactly what the specs require. The cowboys who used to make giant leaps (like Miguel's leap here) are being neutered by best practices and architecture boards.
Yes, it's the way of the industry. What it really means is that the innovative spirits are likely to continue jumping ship for effective positions in small companies, and that Microsoft will remain a "competent" choice, but never a "great" choice. But that's what the rest of industry wants, anyway.
I don't care how insightful somebody's work may be. If it is too painful to read, it isn't worth it. Come back when you can present your ideas in a coherent, professional manner.
We had a similar issue at work this year. Our business process owner decided that our GUI's language was too formal and therefore too tough for our users to navigate, so he organized a project to rework the GUI more around the end users. For example, "Enter the amount of the check" became "How much is the check for?"
I was personally appalled, but also curious as to how the end users would receive the changes. Almost all were very receptive -- only the "older" employees (those who have more seniority) were put off by the changes. This paper was worthwhile in that it now has me considering formal vs colloquial language in the computing domain as yet another form of class distinction, and what that might mean.
Obviously one of the keys to acceptance is to write in an acceptable language. Language has long been used as a distinction -- even accents can be used as the basis for discrimination. But we still have to acknowledge that different languages exist. Who knows? This could be a clever management ploy to "leverage" the language distinction in the corporate environment -- data entry positions don't command the same paychecks as management. If language is just another distinction to "keep the classes down", it'll be that much harder for "them" to climb up if we don't encourage them to use "our" language in their jobs, all under the guise of "ease of use".
"Implement" is kind of a strong word here. Sure, they've gotten through the first rounds of coding, and have a product that others can test with. But they're still a lot further from "ready-to-ship" than Microsoft.
Regardless, this is absolutely freaking impressive. Microsoft has been pimping Silverlight pretty hard around our shop, and to be honest the only reason I ever saw for Microsoft to create.net is good old fashioned "vendor lock-in". I saw Silverlight as more of the same, and I am just impressed as hell that Miguel's team cranked out a competitor so quickly.
The paper wasn't saying that the web sites are the sole determiner of class, or that the sites were being used to somehow "navigate" class (hey, if I sign up for Facebook I am suddenly a member of the Millionaire's Club!), only that class distinctions are becoming apparent based on samples of each site.
I think the distinctions the paper's author has noted are simply reflections of class that are held by the participants. The separations are much deeper than a simple web site. As a comedian recently noted with respect to Brittney Spears, "you can take the trash out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the trash."
I would be much more interested if the paper's author found people who successfully used social networking sites to actually "change classes". Can you climb the ladder of success by ingratiating yourself with your hegemons, or will you always be snubbed as an "upstart"?
They're just tapping the wrong wires. They should be tapping their surveillance target's power lines, too. Save them the problem of coming up with the extra power, and keeps the budget low, too.
Yes, the surveys have value -- to the survey-taking firms. That's their bread and butter, and it's vitally important for a survey firm to maintain the fiction of their value to their customers, otherwise they'll quickly go out of business.
However, surveys are far from scientific studies, and should never be accorded the same respect.
First, there is no trusting the actual source of the data. Humans lie for amusement. Humans lie for profit. Humans lie because they're lazy. Humans lie to computers because computers don't know the difference. When taking a survey, some people I know answer "C.", because we all learned in school that C is usually the right answer. Others pick the most outlandish answer. Look at the 2001 New Zealand census -- 1.5% of all New Zealanders are practicing Jedi. (OK, some of them are Reformed Jedi.) Does that mean you throw away those 1.5% from your data? Does that mean the other 98.5% are telling the truth? Did the Jedi answer other questions faithfully? Strangely enough, the New Zealand census removed all references to Jedi from their published figures, masking the very existence of the false data and making it that much harder to understand.
Second, the source of data is skewed. You may think it's a random sampling of the population, but there is an increasingly large percent of well educated, affluent people who have demanded to be added to "do not call" lists. They have neither the time nor the inclination to answer some random series of questions, and so have removed themselves voluntarily from the pool. That's going to skew answers in the direction of the uneducated poorer segments of society. Are the surveys adjusted for shifts like these? Hardly, as advertisers typically aim "low", and these skewed surveys provide only confirmations of the answers they want to hear, rather than the data they deserve. The answers might be fine if you're researching whether you really need Clydesdales to sell Budweiser or if you could get away with airbrushed appaloosas, but might be horribly misleading if you're selling Lexuses (Lexii?)
Science is about observation. Surveys are about asking opinions. Statistics are used to try to give surveys the air of science, but they're still originated on false premises.
why not just sell the damn printer at a profit and then stop going so anal about the ink?
Because you sell the printer only once. You sell ink on an ongoing basis. By "giving away" the printers at or below cost, you create a steady market for your ink. So mark the ink up above cost (even a little would be a lot of profit over time) and you're making more money than you ever would if pricing were fair.
And even if they wanted to, they couldn't change the pricing model now because every vendor would have to collude to make it work, and that would violate anti-trust rules!
The model is what it is. Market forces keep it a viable model -- it obviously works, because they obviously are making money. So as a wise consumer, you should take advantage of the market, and look for less expensive alternatives -- buy refilled ink tanks, use photo services and Kinko's instead of printing yourself, switch to a laser printer instead of an inkjet, reduce your amount of printing, etc. And if you still want to print inkjet at home, you just have to suck it up and pay to play.
A better alternative for photo printing is to have prints made at a one-hour shop, like Target or Walgreens. The cost is around $0.18 - $0.22 per print, as compared to $0.35 and up for printing on your own equipment. The colors are usually very faithful. And you can go to a professional photo house for larger images, if you need to.
I also find that I can print quantities of pictures faster by driving to Target, giving them my SD card, and coming back in an hour. At over two minutes each to print at home, it only takes about 30 or so prints to make the whole process faster. Plus I'm not cautiously stacking damp ink prints all over the desk, hand-feeding tiny glossy sheets into the printer, and watching the ink tanks run dry. It's a lot more convenient.
The biggest advantage, though, is the images are exposed on photographic paper and chemically processed just like a film image. The reason this is an advantage is the longevity of photographic paper is well understood. When properly cared for, color photographs are expected to last 75 years or more. Inkjet is a relatively new technology (only about 20 years old), and picture durability is still fairly unknown; although recent tests are estimating properly cared-for inkjet prints will last only 25 years, maybe less. It's definitely variable by manufacturer, paper and ink.
I second this. I bought a Pixma i6000 a few years ago specifically because it has separate ink tanks for each color, and does not have an integrated print head in the tanks (one of the giant HP/Lexmark cost factors.) And it was fairly cheap.
While it does give me the annoying "ink low" warning dialog fairly early, I see that only as a reminder note to hit Office Depot, not to replace a half-full tank. There is a separate dialog for "out of ink" that actually means it.
Slashdot Mirror
But don't forget that DRM also suffers from the "broke once, broken everywhere" problem. If only one smart person figures out how to break DRM, he or she can publish his or her findings. A few others will use those findings to develop a tool. Many people will then use the tool to rip and republish the media in other ways: torrents, pirate sites, etc.
Ultimately, even if Joe Sixpack thinks JHymn is just a song about Lil' Baby Jeebus, he's still capable of typing "download brittany spears song" into Google and clicking on whatever shows up. The only reason he doesn't succeed very often is the diligence of the mafioso lawyers at sending Cease and Desist notices.
We have Shrub the Malevolent in office, and he's protected himself with a ring of thugs and illegitimate executive orders. His willful ignorance is legend, his rape of the rights of both U.S. citizens and prisoners is well documented, his economic policies are driving this country straight down through "second-world" status (except for those who own the large corporations), his foreign policies have put Americans everywhere in danger (as well as making a mockery of American "freedom" when viewed from abroad,) his energy policies were written for him by energy companies interested only in profit (and kept secret), and he lied to Congress to quagmire us into a war we didn't need to fight. I don't think it's possible for a worse leader to rise up through the democratic process and still get elected, unless you convince everyone everywhere to support one of those third-party nut jobs like Jesse Ventura.
He didn't just lead this country into the toilet, he shoved us down the bowl with a plunger and flushed it with a firehose. And since he hasn't already been led out of the Oval Office in handcuffs or by a mob armed with torches and pitchforks, your idea has thus been demonstrated to be incorrect. Please don't encourage people to waste their votes on his successor.
Whose sex was exceedingly brisk.
So fast was his action
That the Lorentz Contraction
Reduced his tool to a disk.
One of the reasons biofuels might still be worth it is as an "energy converter". Liquids are very desirable as fuels from a materials handling standpoint -- they're storeable, they're pumpable and flow through pipelines easily, they're directly measurable, they allow for readings of the quantities sold or stored, they have a fairly high energy density, most of them are stable enough, and they're already well understood by people. We already have a giant liquid fuel infrastructure in place (tankers, trucks, pipelines, storage tanks and filling stations.) And we already have millions of engines designed to burn liquid fuels.
If electrical energy could be used as inputs to the ethanol equation and especially in the production of fertilizer, the electricity could be produced by nuclear or solar power and turned into liquid fuels by this (very inefficient and obtuse) route. Plus, every efficiency gain in biomass-to-fuel conversion is solar powered, and results in "free" energy to us. These are all pretty new technologies, and I expect there are a lot of unexplored ways to improve the processes.
Economics aside, we are going to run out of fossil fuels at some point in the future, and the other replacement technologies just aren't there yet in terms of storage and usability.
I'd like to know because it's so hard to compare with oil at that level. It's much easier for a consumer to simply look at the price on the pump. But that only tells us what the market is willing to bear (what the fuel is worth), not the true costs of production.
Don't worry. There will be an open-source version of this available for Ubuntu sometime in the next month, long before the patent is approved. But it'll be a lame version like 0.89 and only show "Hello, I'm a Mac" ads.
I must be tired. I'm replying to anonymous trolls.
As you seem to be implying, Forrester (and Gartner et al) take their surveys and extrapolate wildly, and not always with thought to the subject. I'd say this is as trustworthy a report as anything else they've produced -- which is saying pretty much nothing at all.
I just tested Google with my old commute. I live just off a six-lane highway that turns into a city street five miles from downtown, and my old workplace was on that same city street near downtown. The highway route dodges a mile to the west on three different multi-lane freeways before it hooks back to the city street, where, due to some odd ramp placements, I have to double back about half a mile to arrive at the location. The highway route was still Google's first choice, even though the time was the same for both and the mileage was over two miles shorter for the straight path. So Google must be heavily favoring highway travel. As for me, I usually chose the city streets only during rush hour and took the highways all other times. As a bonus, I never had any windows shot out while taking the highway. Now, if Google considered traffic, time-of-day, and crime statistics ... :-)
No, Gene Roddenberry was right when he made "Mirror, Mirror". We get to see George Bush and Condi Rice with moustaches and goatees.
Take shopper loyalty cards, for example. For a benefit of perhaps 1% of the value of the transaction, people are glad to give away their private information. From that, they learn that "it's not so bad, I get a discount, and I always shop there." The industry might even spin the issue to say something completely factually incorrect, like "this privacy law will mean the end of frequent shopper cards!"
People are sheep. They can be led around like cattle for one penny on the dollar. Don't count on them to pass any legislation protecting themselves.
We're seeing this with hypothetical RFID scenarios. If you have RFID tagged car keys (like a SpeedPass token) and a credit card, when you walk into a store and buy something those keys can be read and associated with your credit card number. If those same car keys come back but you use a different credit card, a relationship between the two credit cards can be discovered. Any RFID tagged merchandise can be used in the same manner, and associated with you. Eventually a whole "cloud" of your tagged stuff will be related, so that even if you pay for "Catcher in the Rye" with cash, they can still figure out that you're ion++. And that's just with today's technology.
Today, only your IP address is associated with downloading a copy of Shrek 3. IPv6 is going to make sure that your cable modem, your computer, your RAM and your hard disk are all associated with downloading a copy of Shrek 4.
Innovation is about new ideas and new approaches. Quality is about predictability, stability, and security. Innovation does not imply quality in any way, positive or negative.
The traditional "cowboy approach" has been along the lines of "given an innovative base product created by the cowboys, let's test it and fix it until it's full of quality." We know how well that works; as the old joke goes, "At Microsoft, quality is job 3.1!" But the "quality first" approach tends to isolate the developers out of the creative process, meaning the people who know the language and tools best are left with very little say in the final product. Even if there is innovation added by the development teams, it seems to be only on a small scale, and not at the product level.
And perhaps it was unfair to say Microsoft will never be a "great" choice for innovation -- they've certainly been successful at purchasing innovative small companies, and bringing their innovations to the Windows world with their giant marketing machine.
While that's funny 'round these parts, Microsoft is really pushing hard for quality code on the inside. They're implementing processes on top of processes to create new processes to improve the quality of their software (or so they think.) And they're succeeding in a lot of ways -- the code they ship now as "1.0" is far better than any of their previous 1.0 offerings.
Internally they're killing off the cowboy coders that got them to where they are today. They've shifted the focus from brilliant coders to creative marketers and competent managers, and hire code monkeys to grind out exactly what the specs require. The cowboys who used to make giant leaps (like Miguel's leap here) are being neutered by best practices and architecture boards.
Yes, it's the way of the industry. What it really means is that the innovative spirits are likely to continue jumping ship for effective positions in small companies, and that Microsoft will remain a "competent" choice, but never a "great" choice. But that's what the rest of industry wants, anyway.
We had a similar issue at work this year. Our business process owner decided that our GUI's language was too formal and therefore too tough for our users to navigate, so he organized a project to rework the GUI more around the end users. For example, "Enter the amount of the check" became "How much is the check for?"
I was personally appalled, but also curious as to how the end users would receive the changes. Almost all were very receptive -- only the "older" employees (those who have more seniority) were put off by the changes. This paper was worthwhile in that it now has me considering formal vs colloquial language in the computing domain as yet another form of class distinction, and what that might mean.
Obviously one of the keys to acceptance is to write in an acceptable language. Language has long been used as a distinction -- even accents can be used as the basis for discrimination. But we still have to acknowledge that different languages exist. Who knows? This could be a clever management ploy to "leverage" the language distinction in the corporate environment -- data entry positions don't command the same paychecks as management. If language is just another distinction to "keep the classes down", it'll be that much harder for "them" to climb up if we don't encourage them to use "our" language in their jobs, all under the guise of "ease of use".
Regardless, this is absolutely freaking impressive. Microsoft has been pimping Silverlight pretty hard around our shop, and to be honest the only reason I ever saw for Microsoft to create .net is good old fashioned "vendor lock-in". I saw Silverlight as more of the same, and I am just impressed as hell that Miguel's team cranked out a competitor so quickly.
I think the distinctions the paper's author has noted are simply reflections of class that are held by the participants. The separations are much deeper than a simple web site. As a comedian recently noted with respect to Brittney Spears, "you can take the trash out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the trash."
I would be much more interested if the paper's author found people who successfully used social networking sites to actually "change classes". Can you climb the ladder of success by ingratiating yourself with your hegemons, or will you always be snubbed as an "upstart"?
They're just tapping the wrong wires. They should be tapping their surveillance target's power lines, too. Save them the problem of coming up with the extra power, and keeps the budget low, too.
Reminds me of a line from the TV show "Cheers":
"There's no difference between flammable and inflammable. Boy, that was a painful lesson."
However, surveys are far from scientific studies, and should never be accorded the same respect.
First, there is no trusting the actual source of the data. Humans lie for amusement. Humans lie for profit. Humans lie because they're lazy. Humans lie to computers because computers don't know the difference. When taking a survey, some people I know answer "C.", because we all learned in school that C is usually the right answer. Others pick the most outlandish answer. Look at the 2001 New Zealand census -- 1.5% of all New Zealanders are practicing Jedi. (OK, some of them are Reformed Jedi.) Does that mean you throw away those 1.5% from your data? Does that mean the other 98.5% are telling the truth? Did the Jedi answer other questions faithfully? Strangely enough, the New Zealand census removed all references to Jedi from their published figures, masking the very existence of the false data and making it that much harder to understand.
Second, the source of data is skewed. You may think it's a random sampling of the population, but there is an increasingly large percent of well educated, affluent people who have demanded to be added to "do not call" lists. They have neither the time nor the inclination to answer some random series of questions, and so have removed themselves voluntarily from the pool. That's going to skew answers in the direction of the uneducated poorer segments of society. Are the surveys adjusted for shifts like these? Hardly, as advertisers typically aim "low", and these skewed surveys provide only confirmations of the answers they want to hear, rather than the data they deserve. The answers might be fine if you're researching whether you really need Clydesdales to sell Budweiser or if you could get away with airbrushed appaloosas, but might be horribly misleading if you're selling Lexuses (Lexii?)
Science is about observation. Surveys are about asking opinions. Statistics are used to try to give surveys the air of science, but they're still originated on false premises.
10. Chump.
9. Chumpette.
8. Yours.
7. Up.
6. Pimpmobile.
5. Bite.
4. My.
3. Shiny.
2. Blogosphere.
1. Ass.
And even if they wanted to, they couldn't change the pricing model now because every vendor would have to collude to make it work, and that would violate anti-trust rules!
The model is what it is. Market forces keep it a viable model -- it obviously works, because they obviously are making money. So as a wise consumer, you should take advantage of the market, and look for less expensive alternatives -- buy refilled ink tanks, use photo services and Kinko's instead of printing yourself, switch to a laser printer instead of an inkjet, reduce your amount of printing, etc. And if you still want to print inkjet at home, you just have to suck it up and pay to play.
I also find that I can print quantities of pictures faster by driving to Target, giving them my SD card, and coming back in an hour. At over two minutes each to print at home, it only takes about 30 or so prints to make the whole process faster. Plus I'm not cautiously stacking damp ink prints all over the desk, hand-feeding tiny glossy sheets into the printer, and watching the ink tanks run dry. It's a lot more convenient.
The biggest advantage, though, is the images are exposed on photographic paper and chemically processed just like a film image. The reason this is an advantage is the longevity of photographic paper is well understood. When properly cared for, color photographs are expected to last 75 years or more. Inkjet is a relatively new technology (only about 20 years old), and picture durability is still fairly unknown; although recent tests are estimating properly cared-for inkjet prints will last only 25 years, maybe less. It's definitely variable by manufacturer, paper and ink.
While it does give me the annoying "ink low" warning dialog fairly early, I see that only as a reminder note to hit Office Depot, not to replace a half-full tank. There is a separate dialog for "out of ink" that actually means it.