This is a stupid act of desparation. I submit that nearly all of the RIAA so-called piracy "problems" would go away if CD's were just US$5.
Their sales would explode.
No incentive to buy the cheap pirated ones.
CD's are cheaper to make than when they were introduced yet they cost the same. Heck, I'd go out and buy 5 tomorrow. Right now I don't buy any, just once in a blue moon because the whole stinking CD better be friggin great if I'm going to spend $17 for it new.
Screw those market researchers who fixed the price.
I've grown a large appreciation for Python. If it would just incorporate a few syntactic conveniences from Perl I would use nothing else. I was very resistant at first but now after writing a script in python, I somehow feel clean, like I've taken a shower.
As for this book... I have the first edition and they're programming python book. I consider them both lousy and don't deserve the same names as the perl equivalent books in the same series. Other better books are available fortunately.
Why? Because those HDD mp3 players (nomad, ipod) have crap for battery life. Portable mp3 CD players are nice but don't fit in my pocket nicely like my NetMD. Minidiscs are also more robust than CDRW for carrying around and re-writing to. Plus you don't need a computer to record.
I'll admit that Sony did practically destroy it's own creation with all of it's annoying restrictions including the inability use the media as data storage. It would have made the perfect replacement for the floppy disc, zip disc, etc.
Time for inflamatory reasoning. The statistical approach will beat out the grammar and rule based ones, at least for English, is for the simple reason:
English is not a language
Or rather, it resembles one but is more not than is, IMO. It is a large collection of idiomatic expressions that changes quite rapidly (and not only in colloquial forms, just look at what the political-correctness movement has done to phraseology). You know the story... more exceptions than rules, things that are legitimate to say language-wise are considered incorrect anyways, and vice versa, etc. etc.
That's not to say it doesn't have advantages; it's relatively easy to learn the basics of communication since it's weakly conjugated, has genderless articles, fairly simple uncased sentence structure. But, it is monstrous to master and I suspect most native speakers aren't true masters (not to mention the orthographical nightmare; is English the only language with spelling bee contests?)
The reason it's the new lingua franca (or should it be lingua angla now?) is techno-socio-political as is always the case. Stop harping on Americans for being largely mono-lingual. "Why didn't the Romans learn the local languages when they controlled Europe? Because they didn't have to." If every state spoke a different language, which would be more akin to Europe, then there would be need.
I suspect this tactic will only be used to find out where to raise prices. If the goal is to sell the most items to consumers, then the optimal strategy is to set it at the lowest price across the board. NO, this experiment would see how much they could get away with charging. For it not to be, they would have to charge some people more to people who would pay more so they could sell it under cost to people who wouldn't. This is highly suspect since people who would pay more would probably buy more if the prices were lower. On the other extreme, they could offer a discount to people who buy more. That's reasonable. Is this experiment to determine that? I think not.
Slashdot Mirror
Their sales would explode.
No incentive to buy the cheap pirated ones.
CD's are cheaper to make than when they were introduced yet they cost the same.
Heck, I'd go out and buy 5 tomorrow. Right now I don't buy any, just once in a blue moon because the whole stinking CD better be friggin great if I'm going to spend $17 for it new.
Screw those market researchers who fixed the price.
I've grown a large appreciation for Python. If it would just incorporate a few syntactic conveniences from Perl I would use nothing else. I was very resistant at first but now after writing a script in python, I somehow feel clean, like I've taken a shower.
As for this book... I have the first edition and they're programming python book. I consider them both lousy and don't deserve the same names as the perl equivalent books in the same series. Other better books are available fortunately.
Why? Because those HDD mp3 players (nomad, ipod) have crap for battery life. Portable mp3 CD players are nice but don't fit in my pocket nicely like my NetMD. Minidiscs are also more robust than CDRW for carrying around and re-writing to. Plus you don't need a computer to record.
I'll admit that Sony did practically destroy it's own creation with all of it's annoying restrictions including the inability use the media as data storage. It would have made the perfect replacement for the floppy disc, zip disc, etc.
Time for inflamatory reasoning. The statistical approach will beat out the grammar and rule based ones, at least for English, is for the simple reason:
English is not a language
Or rather, it resembles one but is more not than is, IMO. It is a large collection of idiomatic expressions that changes quite rapidly (and not only in colloquial forms, just look at what the political-correctness movement has done to phraseology). You know the story... more exceptions than rules, things that are legitimate to say language-wise are considered incorrect anyways, and vice versa, etc. etc.
That's not to say it doesn't have advantages; it's relatively easy to learn the basics of communication since it's weakly conjugated, has genderless articles, fairly simple uncased sentence structure. But, it is monstrous to master and I suspect most native speakers aren't true masters (not to mention the orthographical nightmare; is English the only language with spelling bee contests?)
The reason it's the new lingua franca (or should it be lingua angla now?) is techno-socio-political as is always the case. Stop harping on Americans for being largely mono-lingual. "Why didn't the Romans learn the local languages when they controlled Europe? Because they didn't have to." If every state spoke a different language, which would be more akin to Europe, then there would be need.
I suspect this tactic will only be used to find out where to raise prices. If the goal is to sell the most items to consumers, then the optimal strategy is to set it at the lowest price across the board. NO, this experiment would see how much they could get away with charging. For it not to be, they would have to charge some people more to people who would pay more so they could sell it under cost to people who wouldn't. This is highly suspect since people who would pay more would probably buy more if the prices were lower. On the other extreme, they could offer a discount to people who buy more. That's reasonable. Is this experiment to determine that? I think not.