t was really interesting to see how different the posts were when I mentioned that a couple of years later. I can't find that post now, but by that time, Linux had journaled filesystems. We had a fairly interesting commentary back and forth about how NT 4.0 didn't really have journaling, and that it wasn't until 2K that NTFS was truly robust. But everyone agreed that journaling was good, now that Linux had it. Pretty significant shift in stance, eh?
Very insightful. Something analogous is the MS press writers' stances of how the previous versions of Windows truly sucked...but while they were current they were being touted by them to the high heavens. It was only when they became obsolete did they admit to (at least in their press) all of the shortcomings that everyone else had pointed out all along. That sort of 1984'ness never ceases to amuse me....that along with "the next version will fix all of the problems" til the next version gets here and then the cycle starts all over.
From the article: "There were a few more posts in the "Fred is lying/hiding" vein, but most of those died out when the participants in the discussion saw that the sound system indeed should have worked."
How can they see that it "should have worked" when Fred still won't Name That Hardware?
Didn't he say he named it in the forums and THEN the comments died out?
The author also entirely misses another related point. That is that people wanted to know exactly what hardware he was trying to get working so that they could verify the problem and fix it. The community aspect cuts both ways, and if he isn't willing to share then he isn't helping.
If he paid $90 for his distro, doesn't that relieve him of any (unwritten) obligations to "the community"?
How are the Information Week articles FUD*? They looked to me to be well-documented and logical. Plus, he could have flamed the idiots that flamed him in...and didn't. He actually gave them a respect they didn't deserve.
Now, online gambling is of questionable legality in all fifty states and many other places in the world where real gambling is prohibited or heavily restricted.
Questionable legality? Isn't it totally illegal which is why unfair trade practices complaints were filed against the US by the fleabag offshore casino operators in Costa Rica and other such countries?
Anybody who says that Michael Powell is in the pocket of the broadcasters or any other major company doesn't know what they're talking about, and this is the proof for anybody who doubts that.
Even a blind squirrel will find a nut every now and again.... Powell's bought and paid for. I don't know whether this is a good idea or not, but if he's for it, I'm inclined to to be against it. Sure, it's a knee-jerk reaction, but I don't think I've agreed with anything he's done yet.
...it was a big surprise upset? In the US elections last fall when it happened, they're still saying that the upset was due to the machines being misprogrammed/miscalibrated/0wned.
This is just a case of assigning a different icon to an application. Could be as simple as an rm -rf / shell script with a word icon.
That's exactly what it is. An Applescript calling rm -rf in a shell script with an MS icon on the Applescript applet. But, since it's UNIX, not windows, the only damage is self-inflicted by default. Now if the writer was mo' clever, he could have added authentication ("with administrator privileges") so the stupid person could have totally eradicated himself after supplying the administrator password.
According to Richter, more than 100 million emails are sent every day from his servers which are all located the US.
And every one of those people opted in. Surrrrrrrrre. Most of my spam comes to an email address that was used only on usenet in the mid '90's. I'm sure I opted in with that. Not.
Novell has in public beta a GroupWise client for Linux and Mac OS X...and then they give away a connector to make a free client talk to the enemy's mail/calendaring system?
Makes me glad I don't have Novell stock. GroupWise earns them money. This does what?
...getting a phone that....merely makes phone calls. No camera, no ring tones, no games, no color, no translators, no nothing.... I'll never be able to buy another of those again.:(
The motto is "News for nerds. Things that matter". Not pre-adolescent drug induced ramblings for the technically inclined.
Technically inclined? More like the humor-impaired. All it was missing was l33t spelling, too. What a waste of bandwidth... {also shakes head; also shoulda previewed. Didn't like a period closing the/i tag for some strange reason.]
First, according to the grandparent, Apple only pays 70 cents to the labels per track. This leaves 30 cents as the gross margin.
Credit card processing cannot be more than about 5%, probably closer to 2%. Even small sites can get a pretty good deal with a credit card processor, and Apple is not a small site. If the charges are too high because each transaction is only 99 cents, may I suggest the obvious solution of billing people once a month?
Server farm? Bandwidth? That cannot run more than a couple of cents a track. After all, there are plenty of ad-supported sites that have bigger bandwidth requirements than the apple store. Think about it. A track is only 3-4 megabytes. A quick googling shows that most colo sites charge a couple of bucks a gigabyte. One gigabyte is therefore about 300 tracks. $2.00 / 300 = less than a cent. Add another two cents for equipment, and we come out with 3 cents as a fairly conservative bandwidth/server marginal cost.
So far, the basic expenses are covered by about 5 cents. There are some fixed costs left, and we can (very) conservatively allocate a dime for them. That totals out to about 15 cents. The other 15 cents is the net profit margin. That's a pretty high net profit margin.
If you are going to argue about fixed costs, keep this in mind. iTunes is already done, they don't need to do major development work on it, and what they do is done as part of the OS. The CD ripping is probably 100% automatic, I'm sure the RIAA is capable of providing them a database of CD tracklists, information, and cover images. The store itself? Codemonkeys are cheap and can easily handle the job, it's not much different from any other e-commerce store (except that you don't have to pack, ship, and track orders, you just need to provide a download link).
Okay, let's pick apart the pick apart.:-) Let's go backwards.
Codemonkey's are cheap...if you outsource to India which Apple thankfully hasn't done. Look to Quark to see the quality of Mac software that came from there--yes, I can extrapolate a trend from one data point! If you pay them a real US salary, they aren't cheap...and secure, custom e-stores aren't a dime-a-dozen. You're not going to be getting your average DreamWeaver jockey to work on it.
The CD ripping is automatic...on what equipment paid for by what and tended by whom?
iTunes is part of Windows now? Wonder if Redmond knows that!
I can't argue the fixed costs because neither of us has a clue on that. My sense though, is that your estimate is too low just because of the DB requirements
Re billing more frequently they kinda do. Yep. I think it's everything during one calendar day is billed together. Not as bad as it could be; could be more optimal though.
I do know that Jobs has said the store is a break-even proposition now...but I dunno how much credence to give that statement.
I do know that >.99 tracks will curb my impulse shopping for sure.
First, 10 cents out of every 99 is a very good profit margin, considering that Apple does not do anything other than distribute the tracks. In fact, that's an excellent profit margin
Dunno, but you should go track him down and find him to get some....
Out of that dime comes the R and D of iTunes for two platforms, the server farm, the massive pipes to said farm, the store itself and the ripping of the tracks for the store. And you think they're rolling in profits after paying that? Not likely....
Do remember that Diebold is waging a 500k/month PR war and they're no doubt buying off whoever can be bought.
OTOH, I wonder how the results would have skewed if the poll question was preceded by "Who is Diebold?" and the question had to be answered correctly. Americans (of which I'm one) are uniformly ignorant of anything that doesn't happen on Survivor XXXVIII. It's easy to give a yes or no answer when you don't have to prove that you know anything about the subject!
I guess the supposition was that everyone should know what it is, especially when it was mentioned along with the ACLU. I don't, though, but I guess it has something to do with the UT camera system they mentioned?
Slashdot Mirror
t was really interesting to see how different the posts were when I mentioned that a couple of years later. I can't find that post now, but by that time, Linux had journaled filesystems. We had a fairly interesting commentary back and forth about how NT 4.0 didn't really have journaling, and that it wasn't until 2K that NTFS was truly robust. But everyone agreed that journaling was good, now that Linux had it. Pretty significant shift in stance, eh?
Very insightful. Something analogous is the MS press writers' stances of how the previous versions of Windows truly sucked...but while they were current they were being touted by them to the high heavens. It was only when they became obsolete did they admit to (at least in their press) all of the shortcomings that everyone else had pointed out all along. That sort of 1984'ness never ceases to amuse me....that along with "the next version will fix all of the problems" til the next version gets here and then the cycle starts all over.
From the article:
"There were a few more posts in the "Fred is lying/hiding" vein, but most of those died out when the participants in the discussion saw that the sound system indeed should have worked."
How can they see that it "should have worked" when Fred still won't Name That Hardware?
Didn't he say he named it in the forums and THEN the comments died out?
The author also entirely misses another related point. That is that people wanted to know exactly what hardware he was trying to get working so that they could verify the problem and fix it. The community aspect cuts both ways, and if he isn't willing to share then he isn't helping.
If he paid $90 for his distro, doesn't that relieve him of any (unwritten) obligations to "the community"?
This is Linux FUD week it seems
How are the Information Week articles FUD*? They looked to me to be well-documented and logical. Plus, he could have flamed the idiots that flamed him in...and didn't. He actually gave them a respect they didn't deserve.
*by the MS definition, of course.
Now, online gambling is of questionable legality in all fifty states and many other places in the world where real gambling is prohibited or heavily restricted.
Questionable legality? Isn't it totally illegal which is why unfair trade practices complaints were filed against the US by the fleabag offshore casino operators in Costa Rica and other such countries?
OS is still used today in many automation control and assorted embedded systems.
:-)
Wow...I said something incorrect and I got a pair of reasonable replies and no flamage.
Slashdot never ceases to surprise me.
...why else would anyone by a DOS in 1996 except to use it to sue? I think the world had moved on by that point.
Anybody who says that Michael Powell is in the pocket of the broadcasters or any other major company doesn't know what they're talking about, and this is the proof for anybody who doubts that.
Even a blind squirrel will find a nut every now and again....
Powell's bought and paid for. I don't know whether this is a good idea or not, but if he's for it, I'm inclined to to be against it. Sure, it's a knee-jerk reaction, but I don't think I've agreed with anything he's done yet.
My first thought on what this was involved Steve Jobs and black boxes!
...it was a big surprise upset? In the US elections last fall when it happened, they're still saying that the upset was due to the machines being misprogrammed/miscalibrated/0wned.
Who really knows?
4,096 Itanium 2 processors in 1,024 nodes
So THAT'S what's causing our heat wave!
Most of the Mac users I support don't even know their administrator password.
That's as it should be. And I bet they're not using Limewire, either!
This is just a case of assigning a different icon to an application. Could be as simple as an rm -rf / shell script with a word icon.
That's exactly what it is. An Applescript calling rm -rf in a shell script with an MS icon on the Applescript applet. But, since it's UNIX, not windows, the only damage is self-inflicted by default.
Now if the writer was mo' clever, he could have added authentication ("with administrator privileges") so the stupid person could have totally eradicated himself after supplying the administrator password.
Why would a Fair Use hating Mac zealot need to be reminded of that?
Fair Use hating? Since when? Oh right, it's because my definition of Fair Use doesn't include 100k of my closest friends in addition to me....
According to Richter, more than 100 million emails are sent every day from his servers which are all located the US.
And every one of those people opted in. Surrrrrrrrre. Most of my spam comes to an email address that was used only on usenet in the mid '90's. I'm sure I opted in with that.
Not.
...to never give the FSF a penny. Or a rupee, in this particular case.
Novell has in public beta a GroupWise client for Linux and Mac OS X...and then they give away a connector to make a free client talk to the enemy's mail/calendaring system?
Makes me glad I don't have Novell stock. GroupWise earns them money. This does what?
...getting a phone that....merely makes phone calls. No camera, no ring tones, no games, no color, no translators, no nothing.... :(
I'll never be able to buy another of those again.
The motto is "News for nerds. Things that matter". Not pre-adolescent drug induced ramblings for the technically inclined.
/i tag for some strange reason.]
Technically inclined? More like the humor-impaired. All it was missing was l33t spelling, too. What a waste of bandwidth... {also shakes head; also shoulda previewed. Didn't like a period closing the
The motto is "News for nerds. Things that matter". Not pre-adolescent drug induced ramblings for the technically inclined.
OK, let's pick this apart now.
:-) Let's go backwards.
First, according to the grandparent, Apple only pays 70 cents to the labels per track. This leaves 30 cents as the gross margin.
Credit card processing cannot be more than about 5%, probably closer to 2%. Even small sites can get a pretty good deal with a credit card processor, and Apple is not a small site. If the charges are too high because each transaction is only 99 cents, may I suggest the obvious solution of billing people once a month?
Server farm? Bandwidth? That cannot run more than a couple of cents a track. After all, there are plenty of ad-supported sites that have bigger bandwidth requirements than the apple store. Think about it. A track is only 3-4 megabytes. A quick googling shows that most colo sites charge a couple of bucks a gigabyte. One gigabyte is therefore about 300 tracks. $2.00 / 300 = less than a cent. Add another two cents for equipment, and we come out with 3 cents as a fairly conservative bandwidth/server marginal cost.
So far, the basic expenses are covered by about 5 cents. There are some fixed costs left, and we can (very) conservatively allocate a dime for them. That totals out to about 15 cents. The other 15 cents is the net profit margin. That's a pretty high net profit margin.
If you are going to argue about fixed costs, keep this in mind. iTunes is already done, they don't need to do major development work on it, and what they do is done as part of the OS. The CD ripping is probably 100% automatic, I'm sure the RIAA is capable of providing them a database of CD tracklists, information, and cover images. The store itself? Codemonkeys are cheap and can easily handle the job, it's not much different from any other e-commerce store (except that you don't have to pack, ship, and track orders, you just need to provide a download link).
Okay, let's pick apart the pick apart.
Codemonkey's are cheap...if you outsource to India which Apple thankfully hasn't done. Look to Quark to see the quality of Mac software that came from there--yes, I can extrapolate a trend from one data point! If you pay them a real US salary, they aren't cheap...and secure, custom e-stores aren't a dime-a-dozen. You're not going to be getting your average DreamWeaver jockey to work on it.
The CD ripping is automatic...on what equipment paid for by what and tended by whom?
iTunes is part of Windows now? Wonder if Redmond knows that!
I can't argue the fixed costs because neither of us has a clue on that. My sense though, is that your estimate is too low just because of the DB requirements
Re billing more frequently they kinda do. Yep. I think it's everything during one calendar day is billed together. Not as bad as it could be; could be more optimal though.
I do know that Jobs has said the store is a break-even proposition now...but I dunno how much credence to give that statement.
I do know that >.99 tracks will curb my impulse shopping for sure.
What the hell are you smoking?
First, 10 cents out of every 99 is a very good profit margin, considering that Apple does not do anything other than distribute the tracks. In fact, that's an excellent profit margin
Dunno, but you should go track him down and find him to get some....
Out of that dime comes the R and D of iTunes for two platforms, the server farm, the massive pipes to said farm, the store itself and the ripping of the tracks for the store. And you think they're rolling in profits after paying that? Not likely....
Do remember that Diebold is waging a 500k/month PR war and they're no doubt buying off whoever can be bought.
OTOH, I wonder how the results would have skewed if the poll question was preceded by "Who is Diebold?" and the question had to be answered correctly. Americans (of which I'm one) are uniformly ignorant of anything that doesn't happen on Survivor XXXVIII. It's easy to give a yes or no answer when you don't have to prove that you know anything about the subject!
I guess the supposition was that everyone should know what it is, especially when it was mentioned along with the ACLU. I don't, though, but I guess it has something to do with the UT camera system they mentioned?
Indeed. If it was'nt for hardware costing twice as much ...
We're not prone to exaggeration, are we?