Lousy, badly-written and biased article; if Torvalds, Jobs, Grove or, indeed, any luminary other than Ballmer had made these comments, the article would have presented them in a more professional manner.
No! You must adhere to the social contract by which you surrender all of your important personal information forever just for the sake of some article which might just say the same as the first one.
It's worse than that, these guys actually want... *gasp*... money!!!
I'd like to read the Fortune piece but they seem to changed their login requirements in order to thwart BugMeNot (subscribers have to enter their name, email and postal address rather than the username and password BugMeNot shares).
So, could someone with a subscription do us all a favor and cut n' paste?
Yeah, the irish government are paragons of virtue.
The Ukranian problem would be that they're not as GOOD at corruption as our wonderful Bertieriffic parliament. I've worked in that part of the world - it's not that they're corrupt, it's that they're really poor at being cheating bastards compared to Irish people.
Well, in a sense, that's my point; countries have to reach a point of maturity where the leading politicians realise that they can better bolster their power and line their pockets by being corrupt from the top on behalf of business rather than having layer after chaotic layer of petty corruption that prevents business taking root. Rather than seek bribes from corporations wanting to set up in Ireland, successive Irish governments craftily reversed the bribe and channeled undisclosed amounts of tax-payer money into free factories and campuses for corporations and, in turn, used the jobs created to persuade the electorate that they were doing a great job. I remember a particularly aware friend working for Corel being dismayed that practically his entire salary was actually paid by the Irish people.
In terms of revenue, Ireland is already Europe's biggest exporter of software, not bad for a country with 1/16th of the UK's population.
They got there by having a well-educated, English-speaking workforce, a large number of returning emigres with experience working in America etc and a government willing to offer generous welcome packages to international corporations and Europe's lowest rate of corporate tax.
India hopes to emulate that because the middle classes there are also English-speaking. Sort of.
The Ukraine will never become a serious contender because
1) How many Ukrainians emigres, once they've got out, would want to return there?
2) Judging by the spam originating in the Ukraine, their English isn't that hot.
3) Having a good Mathematical education isn't as much of a plus for software production as you might think, I'd rate widespread, in-the-home computer usage and exposure to the Internet far higher.
4) The biggee, government corruption. I, and most other entrepreneurs, simply won't do business in countries where the government doesn't have a serious commitment to tackling corruption. That automatically rules out the Russian Federation countries as Kleptocracies, by definition, cannot tackle corruption.
Readers in the UK should note that Sainsburys (one of the UK's major supermarket chains) are currently selling the old Sega GT/Jet Set Radio Xbox bundle for GBP 75, not bad when you consider that Amazon.co.uk are currently selling the console for GBP 120 without bundled software.
No idea if this applies to all branches of Sainsburys, my local one in Edinburgh had them, phone ahead.
You can also your Xbox on the high street from Game, Dixons etc bundled with more recent games for more money but, hey, if you are going to mod your box, who needs to buy games.
Way Too EXPENISIVE
on
GPS for GBA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This company have are betting that people will pay roughly TWICE the price of a standard GPS unit purely for the novelty of being able to use their Gameboy.
Yet another company that just Doesn't Get It.
Seriously, someone should set up a forum where clueless, middle-aged marketing men can float their pricing strategies before shooting themselves in the foot like this.
Nacturation, your Eliza dialogue is pure genius, you should submit that to a magazine as a short story, seriously, it's better written than most of the stuff that does get published.
Donnacha.
Isn't that a man's hand holding the mirror to allow lipstick to be applied to a woman's face??
No, despite their glamourous reputation, Swedish women all have manly hands, feet and elbows. It's really quite disturbing but not as bad as Thailand where, as I discovered to my horror, many of the women have penises.
Although most of us will see the mirror display as, at best, a novel cosmetic touch, I've shown these pictures to a girl I happened to have about the place and her response was instant enthusiasm.
She pointed out that it's always good to have a mirror handy, especially in situations where you aren't carrying your usual bag-of-tricks, such as when you're jogging - with one of these and a tube of lippy in her pocket, a girl would be ready for anything.
Her one criticism was that that small mic hole, right in the middle of that otherwise unobstructed stretch, would be an irritating distraction for anyone giving their make-up a quick check. I figure that such an infrequently used feature could have been placed elsewhere without affecting its utility. Also, I think they should have extended the right up to or even around the corners, increasing the mirror's ease of use (I presuming that the mirror is just a protective fascia placed over the actual OLED display).
At the right price point (and I think it is), this could seriously challenge Apple's mostly female targetted Mini ipod.
Okay, here's how the whole DELL pricing thing works and how, if you know what you're doing, you can get your hands on top-of-ranges machines (like the one I bought this morning and detailed in the parent post) at prices that completely undercut all the other manufacturers.
At first glance, Dell simply appears to have an out-of-control pricing system, with a bewildering array of conflicting and overlapping offers, often resulting in some people paying 50% more on exactly the same machine, ordered on the same day
There's actually method to Dell's madness, an ingenious, market-based logic to why certain people get certain prices and it's quite easy to place yourself in the lower-paying category.
To get the very best deal, you start online. Use Google to find a good, currently active forum dedicated to discussing laptops. A good example in the UK is whatlaptop.co.uk, your region will undoubtedly have something similar.
You'll soon notice that the forum is abuzz with talk of E-value codes. These are codes that Dell stick on everything from adverts to hardware magazine reviews. Entering the code into Dell's site will bring you directly to the configuration page of the model featured in the advert or review but with the important difference that the details will include the special offer mentioned in the advert. If you go directly to the same model without entering a code, you will get whatever that month's general special offer is (a rebate or double memory or whatever) but you won't get the special offer mentioned in the advert. With the code, you get both.
The massive public awareness of Dell's brand means that most people go straight to their site and buy without using a code. Dell make their highest margins on that clueless majority. The next level of customer are slightly more clueful, keeping an eye open for ads featuring special offers. E-value codes carried in newspaper ads tend to be better value than those on TV because people who are most comfortable getting their information from TV are considered to be less sophisticated. Likewise, the relative sophistication of a magazine or newspaper's readership will be reflected in the relative value-for-money of their E-value offers. Regardless of the media, however, you NEVER get the best codes from adverts of any kind.
The E-value codes included in magazine reviews are considerably better value than those in adverts, but still not the best deal possible. Magazines insist that machines submitted for review must be available to the general public with the same configuration and at the stated price. Getting top marks from a reputable magazine does wonders for a manufacturer's reputation and, of course, there's tremendous competition to present the best value package. Each manufacturer has to slash their margins drastically.
Obviously, they don't want to offer such good deals to ALL their customers, not when the vast majority of people are happy to just roll up to the website and pay much more. Dell's solution is to specify that the review bundle IS available to the public but, to find that exact package, they must enter a particular E-value. Of course, thousands of people do and Dell doesn't make huge amounts of money on them but, the way they see it, those clued-up bargain hunters wouldn't otherwise be Dell customers anyway, they'd be giving oxygen to Dell's competitors.
The real plus for Dell in this scenario is that, when they win that magazine's coveted "PC of the Month" award or whatever, they can plaster that logo all over their adverts, impressing tens of thousands of people who don't actually bother to read the magazines. They come away with the idea that, "Hell, if Dell is winning all these awards, they must be the best, I'll be safe spending my money on their site" - lot's more high-margin customers.
Surprisingly, review codes aren't the very best deals. On the forums you'll discover that there is a whole other category of codes that beats even them. These particularly
The same configuration, not including delivery or sales tax, comes to $3,331.00 which is GBP 1,803.33. With delivery and NY sales tax your looking at GBP 1,932 but there is a $100 mail-in rebate which, if you can arrange a US post box for that too, will eventually bring the price down to GBP 1,878, almost GBP 500 more than I'm paying Dell UK.
Admittedly, there are no doubt lots of coupons and codes you can use to get the US price down further (as I did with the UK price) but I doubt any combination of codes will be able to shave off $900.
I have know idea how low you can get the price of the Precision you want, I had no interest in getting one of those, but I strongly suspect that you'll save more money by spending a night researching the forums rather than flying off to America.
Although I haven't researched US prices, I live in the UK and ordered a laptop from Dell this morning, using promotional codes to get a low price that I suspect isn't all that much more than the US equivalent.
While it might make sense to fly over and buy something simple like an MP3 player, I feel that a laptop is simply too complicated, too many parts any one of which might go wrong. You're better off not dicking around with hare-brained schemes to save money, get it in your own country and use the next business day onsite warranty if anything goes wrong. Don't forget that your time is valuable too.
This is want I ordered today, I will be receiving it next week:
I'm paying GBP 1391.51 inc. VAT (UK sales tax, 17.5%) and delivery, a saving of GBP 667.09 on the GBP 2,058.60 list price. GBP 1391.51 is currently $2,570.23. Here's what that bought me this morning in the UK:
Dell Inspiron 8600 1.7M
60GB 7200 HDD 1024MB DDR PC2700 (333mhz) (2x512mb)
15.4" WUXGA Ultra-Sharp Wide-Aspect Screen 1920x1200
128MB ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 Turbo Pro
4x DVD+RW
TM1300 WLAN 802.11 a/b/g 54Mbps MPCI
Integrated 10/100 Network card
Internal Bluetooth 3 Yrs International Next Business Day On-Site
MS XP Home SP1
MS Works 7
Norton Anti-Virus 2004
DVD Cyberlink decoder software
I'm also paying an extra GBP 96.35 inc. VAT for the Deluxe Leather Carry Case AND the Rucksack Pro (one for business, the other for cycling to the beach and working there) but that didn't affect the basic GBP 1391.51 deal.
If I have time later I'll write a follow-up post explaining step-by-step exactly how I got that price.
But when I was shopping for a dedicated host, I took one breeze through their site and left it. They don't show any prices, they only say, "Contact a sales agent now!!!" If they can't show the prices up front, then they don't deserve my business. I'll speak to someone when I'm ready to speak to someone. That was one of the great things about shopping on the web: the ability to make deliberate, informed decisions without any pressure.
Same here, Rackspace recently lost my prospective business because of that tacky little hidden pricing scam!
Funnily enough, the equivalent pages on their European site do show their prices, so, I estimated their American prices based upon that. Of course, there's a good chance that their European prices are more expensive and perhaps that left them at an unfair disadvantage against other US managed hosts I was price-researching but, hey, if they're going to pull this sort of tacky "call-us-for-the-latest-pricing" shit, that's their look-out.
In an information age, we customers want our information and we want it NOW.
... haven't you watched how the anti-gun nuts use that same stance to sue gun manufacturers and make it extremely difficult for legitimate gun buyers to buy guns?...
The anti-gun nuts? Yeah, all those psychos alarmed by the widespread, practically unregulated availability of fire-arms, they really scare me. They're nutty, just plain nutty. There oughta be a law.
... and make it extremely difficult for legitimate gun buyers to buy guns?
Okaaay. I presume you mean the proposed law to prevent men convicted of violent assault against their wifes from obtaining semi-automatics? Do you feel that law might inconvenience you in some way?
Slashdot Mirror
Lousy, badly-written and biased article; if Torvalds, Jobs, Grove or, indeed, any luminary other than Ballmer had made these comments, the article would have presented them in a more professional manner.
From Microsoft's poster:
"So how would you feel if you saw your hard work being passed off as the property of someone else?"
Gee, I don't know, maybe you could ask the guys who wrote the BSD stack?
Thanks.
I asked for someone to post the Fortune article, this guy did it anonmously.
Could someone with points please mod that post up so that other people can find it.
I'd like to read the Fortune piece but they seem to changed their login requirements in order to thwart BugMeNot (subscribers have to enter their name, email and postal address rather than the username and password BugMeNot shares).
So, could someone with a subscription do us all a favor and cut n' paste?
Ploppers
In terms of revenue, Ireland is already Europe's biggest exporter of software, not bad for a country with 1/16th of the UK's population.
They got there by having a well-educated, English-speaking workforce, a large number of returning emigres with experience working in America etc and a government willing to offer generous welcome packages to international corporations and Europe's lowest rate of corporate tax.
India hopes to emulate that because the middle classes there are also English-speaking. Sort of.
The Ukraine will never become a serious contender because
1) How many Ukrainians emigres, once they've got out, would want to return there?
2) Judging by the spam originating in the Ukraine, their English isn't that hot.
3) Having a good Mathematical education isn't as much of a plus for software production as you might think, I'd rate widespread, in-the-home computer usage and exposure to the Internet far higher.
4) The biggee, government corruption. I, and most other entrepreneurs, simply won't do business in countries where the government doesn't have a serious commitment to tackling corruption. That automatically rules out the Russian Federation countries as Kleptocracies, by definition, cannot tackle corruption.
How come this O'Reilly guy finds it so easy to get his stuff published?
Readers in the UK should note that Sainsburys (one of the UK's major supermarket chains) are currently selling the old Sega GT/Jet Set Radio Xbox bundle for GBP 75, not bad when you consider that Amazon.co.uk are currently selling the console for GBP 120 without bundled software.
No idea if this applies to all branches of Sainsburys, my local one in Edinburgh had them, phone ahead.
You can also your Xbox on the high street from Game, Dixons etc bundled with more recent games for more money but, hey, if you are going to mod your box, who needs to buy games.
This company have are betting that people will pay roughly TWICE the price of a standard GPS unit purely for the novelty of being able to use their Gameboy.
Yet another company that just Doesn't Get It.
Seriously, someone should set up a forum where clueless, middle-aged marketing men can float their pricing strategies before shooting themselves in the foot like this.
Nacturation, your Eliza dialogue is pure genius, you should submit that to a magazine as a short story, seriously, it's better written than most of the stuff that does get published.
Donnacha.
Although most of us will see the mirror display as, at best, a novel cosmetic touch, I've shown these pictures to a girl I happened to have about the place and her response was instant enthusiasm.
She pointed out that it's always good to have a mirror handy, especially in situations where you aren't carrying your usual bag-of-tricks, such as when you're jogging - with one of these and a tube of lippy in her pocket, a girl would be ready for anything.
Her one criticism was that that small mic hole, right in the middle of that otherwise unobstructed stretch, would be an irritating distraction for anyone giving their make-up a quick check. I figure that such an infrequently used feature could have been placed elsewhere without affecting its utility. Also, I think they should have extended the right up to or even around the corners, increasing the mirror's ease of use (I presuming that the mirror is just a protective fascia placed over the actual OLED display).
At the right price point (and I think it is), this could seriously challenge Apple's mostly female targetted Mini ipod.
Now that's what I call a superior worm!Imagine my shock this morning when I read the BBC's article on Sasser which claimed:
"Gee, that's an awful nice "yro" you got there. Be an awful shame if anything were to happen to it."
Okay, here's how the whole DELL pricing thing works and how, if you know what you're doing, you can get your hands on top-of-ranges machines (like the one I bought this morning and detailed in the parent post) at prices that completely undercut all the other manufacturers.
At first glance, Dell simply appears to have an out-of-control pricing system, with a bewildering array of conflicting and overlapping offers, often resulting in some people paying 50% more on exactly the same machine, ordered on the same day
There's actually method to Dell's madness, an ingenious, market-based logic to why certain people get certain prices and it's quite easy to place yourself in the lower-paying category.
To get the very best deal, you start online. Use Google to find a good, currently active forum dedicated to discussing laptops. A good example in the UK is whatlaptop.co.uk, your region will undoubtedly have something similar.
You'll soon notice that the forum is abuzz with talk of E-value codes. These are codes that Dell stick on everything from adverts to hardware magazine reviews. Entering the code into Dell's site will bring you directly to the configuration page of the model featured in the advert or review but with the important difference that the details will include the special offer mentioned in the advert. If you go directly to the same model without entering a code, you will get whatever that month's general special offer is (a rebate or double memory or whatever) but you won't get the special offer mentioned in the advert. With the code, you get both.
The massive public awareness of Dell's brand means that most people go straight to their site and buy without using a code. Dell make their highest margins on that clueless majority. The next level of customer are slightly more clueful, keeping an eye open for ads featuring special offers. E-value codes carried in newspaper ads tend to be better value than those on TV because people who are most comfortable getting their information from TV are considered to be less sophisticated. Likewise, the relative sophistication of a magazine or newspaper's readership will be reflected in the relative value-for-money of their E-value offers. Regardless of the media, however, you NEVER get the best codes from adverts of any kind.
The E-value codes included in magazine reviews are considerably better value than those in adverts, but still not the best deal possible. Magazines insist that machines submitted for review must be available to the general public with the same configuration and at the stated price. Getting top marks from a reputable magazine does wonders for a manufacturer's reputation and, of course, there's tremendous competition to present the best value package. Each manufacturer has to slash their margins drastically.
Obviously, they don't want to offer such good deals to ALL their customers, not when the vast majority of people are happy to just roll up to the website and pay much more. Dell's solution is to specify that the review bundle IS available to the public but, to find that exact package, they must enter a particular E-value. Of course, thousands of people do and Dell doesn't make huge amounts of money on them but, the way they see it, those clued-up bargain hunters wouldn't otherwise be Dell customers anyway, they'd be giving oxygen to Dell's competitors.
The real plus for Dell in this scenario is that, when they win that magazine's coveted "PC of the Month" award or whatever, they can plaster that logo all over their adverts, impressing tens of thousands of people who don't actually bother to read the magazines. They come away with the idea that, "Hell, if Dell is winning all these awards, they must be the best, I'll be safe spending my money on their site" - lot's more high-margin customers.
Surprisingly, review codes aren't the very best deals. On the forums you'll discover that there is a whole other category of codes that beats even them. These particularly
I did a quick check on Dell's US site.
The same configuration, not including delivery or sales tax, comes to $3,331.00 which is GBP 1,803.33. With delivery and NY sales tax your looking at GBP 1,932 but there is a $100 mail-in rebate which, if you can arrange a US post box for that too, will eventually bring the price down to GBP 1,878, almost GBP 500 more than I'm paying Dell UK.
Admittedly, there are no doubt lots of coupons and codes you can use to get the US price down further (as I did with the UK price) but I doubt any combination of codes will be able to shave off $900.
I have know idea how low you can get the price of the Precision you want, I had no interest in getting one of those, but I strongly suspect that you'll save more money by spending a night researching the forums rather than flying off to America.
Although I haven't researched US prices, I live in the UK and ordered a laptop from Dell this morning, using promotional codes to get a low price that I suspect isn't all that much more than the US equivalent.
While it might make sense to fly over and buy something simple like an MP3 player, I feel that a laptop is simply too complicated, too many parts any one of which might go wrong. You're better off not dicking around with hare-brained schemes to save money, get it in your own country and use the next business day onsite warranty if anything goes wrong. Don't forget that your time is valuable too.
This is want I ordered today, I will be receiving it next week:
I'm paying GBP 1391.51 inc. VAT (UK sales tax, 17.5%) and delivery, a saving of GBP 667.09 on the GBP 2,058.60 list price. GBP 1391.51 is currently $2,570.23. Here's what that bought me this morning in the UK:
Dell Inspiron 8600 1.7M
60GB 7200 HDD
1024MB DDR PC2700 (333mhz) (2x512mb)
15.4" WUXGA Ultra-Sharp Wide-Aspect Screen 1920x1200
128MB ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 Turbo Pro
4x DVD+RW
TM1300 WLAN 802.11 a/b/g 54Mbps MPCI
Integrated 10/100 Network card
Internal Bluetooth
3 Yrs International Next Business Day On-Site
MS XP Home SP1
MS Works 7
Norton Anti-Virus 2004
DVD Cyberlink decoder software
I'm also paying an extra GBP 96.35 inc. VAT for the Deluxe Leather Carry Case AND the Rucksack Pro (one for business, the other for cycling to the beach and working there) but that didn't affect the basic GBP 1391.51 deal.
If I have time later I'll write a follow-up post explaining step-by-step exactly how I got that price.
Same here, Rackspace recently lost my prospective business because of that tacky little hidden pricing scam!
Funnily enough, the equivalent pages on their European site do show their prices, so, I estimated their American prices based upon that. Of course, there's a good chance that their European prices are more expensive and perhaps that left them at an unfair disadvantage against other US managed hosts I was price-researching but, hey, if they're going to pull this sort of tacky "call-us-for-the-latest-pricing" shit, that's their look-out.
In an information age, we customers want our information and we want it NOW.
The anti-gun nuts? Yeah, all those psychos alarmed by the widespread, practically unregulated availability of fire-arms, they really scare me. They're nutty, just plain nutty. There oughta be a law.
Okaaay. I presume you mean the proposed law to prevent men convicted of violent assault against their wifes from obtaining semi-automatics? Do you feel that law might inconvenience you in some way?... who is that horrendous chick on the concluding page of the review?
Bleeeuuuuuurrgh, makes me want to wash my mouth out with cpu coolant paste.
Me too, me too!!!
Mod the above up, this is exactly what they're doing, this will undoubtedly cause a run on variations of existing domain names.