This is a pretty black and white question. Clearly people who would chose death over {insert your least-favorite non-consentual sexual act here} have some level of the same type of psychological issues that people who choose to commit suicide have. Sure {your least-favorite non-consentual sex act} is really, really terrible, but think about it... Could anybody ever have a rational conversation with you where at the end you would say "No, you're right, your life sucks so much you should kill yourself", other than perhaps somebody who is terminally ill already?
that most likely brings the costs way up from where the article puts them!
Actually, why do people keep believing articles like this where "expert analysts" predict the manufacturing costs of some given electronic product? There is almost never documentable evidence that they are right, and frequently they can be shown to be horribly wrong in hindsight.
The fact of the matter is that when a successful company brings a product to market, it's usually because they figured out how to make it cheaper than was generally possible before, thus enabling them to turn a profit. Apple has a tremendous history of this, and almost every time an analyst predicts that an Apple product costs a small fortune to manufacture, Apple turns around and posts industry high profit margins that blow away the analyst predictions.
Analysts pull this same crap with video game consoles, and all sorts of other next-generation electronic equipment made up of multiple components. Any manufacturer that ships any signifigant volume of product doesn't pay anywhere near the bulk prices that component manufacturers publish. Do you think Dell is paying Intel anywhere near their published thousand-unit prices? Then why should this analyst think apple is?
plus the physical plant
Apple doesn't own the plant.
R&D
Research and Development aren't manufacturing costs.
Oh, and how the hell did you trick me into defending Micro$oft?
I don't know, but you use some intereesting logic...
You need to ease a user into an application, make them feel like it's simple and easy to use and then slowly unveil the more advanced features.
Fair enough...
Then, later on, when the user wants more advanced features they assume those features don't exist in the application they were using because of course they would have seen it!
Ok, now you lost me. Why does it have to be hard to make a user see that there are more advanced features available that you're just not using yet? Even if you can come up with a good reason why, what's a good reason for making it nearly impossible to figure out on your own how to use the more advanced features, or even what those features are? The interface should point the user in the direction of the more advanced features as part of basic interaction with the application. This can be done without intimidating the novice user, or annoying the advanced user simply by having uniformity in the interface design. Unfortunatly, Excel (which, admitedly was once an incredible tool that I made a healthy living with) has become a morass of hastily implemented modern UI design bolted on top of layers and layers of legacy crap. There are even features in there for backwards compatible support with older worksheets implemented in such a way that those older features run, but you can't change, disable, or interact with them. I don't know why they bothered, because in general backwards compatibility in Excel is pretty much a joke, but... Try unlinking worksheets that were linked in Excel 4 under Excel 2000 or XP. Even an expert would be hard pressed to do it, and that's just one example. Microsoft seems to be so rushed to push it's customers through the forced upgrade cycle that they have destroyed the product. It's pretty depressing, because you could take Excel from 10 years ago and it would be a Best-in-Class product today. I'm not sure I can say that about the current version, and if I could it would only be because the competition has all died off.
Its useless. In fact all change is. What can you really buy for less than a buck? If its less than a buck, splurge and get two.
How about you round all your transactions up to the nearest dollar and send me the difference. I'll pay shipping.
Really though, save all your change for 6 months and put it in a jar. Now count it. See how much it would cost you if you rounded everything up?
The change from six months of cash transactions regularly adds up to $300 in my change jar. That's 3% of a minimum wage salary in the US. If you've gotten rich enough to think change is useless, you make too much money.
Websites can do all that stuff with a redirect script on the server side and the user has no control or knowledge of who is being notified. If site developers start using the ping tag instead we can selectively disable it with an extension. It gives the user control where before there was none.
Yeah, but if you can't get one from gamestop until the shortage is over anyway, why should they get to keep your $50 in the meantime. You could have your $50, and stick it to them a little bit, and still get your console on practically the same day you would have otherwise.
If you're not going to get your console until the shortage is over, why should they get to keep your money until then. These stores should be punished for selling pre-orders before they knew the final pricing of the console, the release date, or whether they were going to be able to fulfill those pre-orders. Don't let them get away with it, and ask for your money back.
Also, next time, if they can't tell you exactly what day you're going to get your item when they're selling you the pre-order, don't buy the pre-order! These stores only get away with this shit because we let them.
The less popular channels run commercials just as well as other channels do, and if they command lower rates, well, they also happen to have lower costs (e.g., Sears doesn't need to be paid off in order for This Old House to run, but by contrast
It has nothing to do with funding the channels, it has to do with funding the company's subscription fee for the channels. If they offered everything a-la-carte, the less popular channels may not get enough subscribers for your cable company to pay the flat fee required for them to carry the channel. By bundling them with the popular channels, the people who like the popular stuff are forced to pay for the less popular stuff.
The current system artificially raises home & garde user rates to the level of sports channel users.
Not so. Without the current system, the home and garden channel viewers would have to either pay the cost the channel charges to the station divided by the number of viewers in your area, or not have the channel available at all. Your average cost of the channel would actually go up for the less popular channels, and down for the more popular channels if they were all unbundled. That cost may even be higher when you add up all the channels you like that aren't very popular than the cost for the package is, because all those sports channel watchers wouldn't be part of the pool paying for you H&G channel anymore.
It's all irrelevant though, because the company is going to charge you just under you maximum monthly tolerance for cash outlay no matter how they structure it. You're going to get some subset of the channels you want for the most you're willing to pay whether you get the channels you don't want along with them or not.
They're so sorry that ESPN happens to be in the same package as the Home & Garden network - really, if they could, they'd split those up so that people with zero interest in sports don't need to pay for the most expensive channels.
The more expensive channels are the more popular channels. You realize that they do that so the sports watchers subsidize the home and garden channels, and not the other way around, right?
Well, that and to make as much profit as possible...
You assume that everybody is a geek, and needs high speed access one way or another. They aren't, and they don't. If the only high speed option that people have is Bell South, and Bell South doesn't give them improved access to sites they want to go to, they'll cancel and either have nothing, or go back to dialup. Why pay Bell South for high speed access if, from the customer's perspective, the sites they want to go to aren't fast? The customer will blame the company they're paying, not the site they're trying to visit.
Plus, this may not require any customer interaction at all. Bell South will call site operators up to tell them they're going to throttle traffic to their site unless they pay, and the content provider will counter with blocking access to Bell South subscribers unless Bell South pays the content provider or removes the block. Sites will start showing up with "Bell South subscribers can't access this site. Please call your ISP to have them resolve this problem" messages for Bell South users untill Bell South is forced to relent. There is no last mile competition required, because there is *plenty* of competition at the other end.
What you get is a message that says "If your ISP subscribed to ESPN360.com, you would have access to thousands of videos for free" "Ask your internet provider to sign up." etc... As far as I know there aren't any ISPs that subscribe yet. Verizon and Comcast certainly don't.
This is a perfect example of what is going to happen here. First, only a few stupid companies will pay Bell South (Even SCO got some takers). Then the content providers will start charging Bell South to allow users of the Bell South internet service to access their web sites. It's already started. The content providers know that they're in charge. There are so many ISPs out there that the ISP needs the content more than the content providers need any single ISP. Bell South will figure this out, or they will lose customers. Once again, the free market works.
What should happen here is that big websites should start charging Bell South, or they'll start blocking access to their website for Bell South customers. It's already started. Check out ESPN360.com. This won't last. The content providers have the upper hand.
Ah, yes, the "hypothetical that proves my point is true if my point is true".
What?
[...]especially over the web[...]
You're sending the data out into a series of unencrypted networks that you have no control over, and you're worried that your access point doesn't have WPA? You have some interesting priorities. If the data you're transporting is sensitive you should be encrypting it at the application layer so it stays encrypted when it leaves your network. If it's not, then why should you care that it isn't encrypted over your wireless? Your security is only as secure as your weakest link, so add all the encryption you'd like to your wireless access point... You're not making your transfers any more secure.
I'd be more concerned about the developers who will start releasing buggy apps, and then blame the bugs on the user's machine. It's a staple of the PC gaming world. Some developers always blame their bugs on the user's non-standard configuration, then, if you're lucky, they quietly patch the problem months later when they get their heads out of their asses. On a Mac, that problem is impossible.
You want freedom? Nobody is stopping you from buying non-Apple stuff.
My point was that you shouldn't need WPA at all, ever, if you already have application layer encryption. All it does is lower the compatability of your network with available devices. Why encrypt traffic that is already encrypted? Mildly informed pseudo-geeks seem to get their jollys off of feeling like they have things "secured", even if it means that they're spending a ton of CPU time re-encrypting already encrypted data.
Should be fairly easy to make one... Most USB 1.44" floppy drives already use a USB->MFM adapter to connect the archaic 1.44MB floppy drive to USB systems. The signaling hasn't changed since way back in the 8" floppy days. Your only problem may be powering the beast. I bet they suck more juice than USB can provide.
Linux already supports EFI, and the chipset in these things. I believe there is no contest. Linux probably works on them already, and has for a long while.
Slashdot Mirror
What's worse: killing someone, or defiling them?
This is a pretty black and white question. Clearly people who would chose death over {insert your least-favorite non-consentual sexual act here} have some level of the same type of psychological issues that people who choose to commit suicide have. Sure {your least-favorite non-consentual sex act} is really, really terrible, but think about it... Could anybody ever have a rational conversation with you where at the end you would say "No, you're right, your life sucks so much you should kill yourself", other than perhaps somebody who is terminally ill already?
that most likely brings the costs way up from where the article puts them!
Actually, why do people keep believing articles like this where "expert analysts" predict the manufacturing costs of some given electronic product? There is almost never documentable evidence that they are right, and frequently they can be shown to be horribly wrong in hindsight.
The fact of the matter is that when a successful company brings a product to market, it's usually because they figured out how to make it cheaper than was generally possible before, thus enabling them to turn a profit. Apple has a tremendous history of this, and almost every time an analyst predicts that an Apple product costs a small fortune to manufacture, Apple turns around and posts industry high profit margins that blow away the analyst predictions.
Analysts pull this same crap with video game consoles, and all sorts of other next-generation electronic equipment made up of multiple components. Any manufacturer that ships any signifigant volume of product doesn't pay anywhere near the bulk prices that component manufacturers publish. Do you think Dell is paying Intel anywhere near their published thousand-unit prices? Then why should this analyst think apple is?
plus the physical plant
Apple doesn't own the plant.
R&D
Research and Development aren't manufacturing costs.
Oh, and how the hell did you trick me into defending Micro$oft?
I don't know, but you use some intereesting logic...
You need to ease a user into an application, make them feel like it's simple and easy to use and then slowly unveil the more advanced features.
Fair enough...
Then, later on, when the user wants more advanced features they assume those features don't exist in the application they were using because of course they would have seen it!
Ok, now you lost me. Why does it have to be hard to make a user see that there are more advanced features available that you're just not using yet? Even if you can come up with a good reason why, what's a good reason for making it nearly impossible to figure out on your own how to use the more advanced features, or even what those features are? The interface should point the user in the direction of the more advanced features as part of basic interaction with the application. This can be done without intimidating the novice user, or annoying the advanced user simply by having uniformity in the interface design. Unfortunatly, Excel (which, admitedly was once an incredible tool that I made a healthy living with) has become a morass of hastily implemented modern UI design bolted on top of layers and layers of legacy crap. There are even features in there for backwards compatible support with older worksheets implemented in such a way that those older features run, but you can't change, disable, or interact with them. I don't know why they bothered, because in general backwards compatibility in Excel is pretty much a joke, but... Try unlinking worksheets that were linked in Excel 4 under Excel 2000 or XP. Even an expert would be hard pressed to do it, and that's just one example. Microsoft seems to be so rushed to push it's customers through the forced upgrade cycle that they have destroyed the product. It's pretty depressing, because you could take Excel from 10 years ago and it would be a Best-in-Class product today. I'm not sure I can say that about the current version, and if I could it would only be because the competition has all died off.
The number of PC game releases was down in 2005.
The rest of the top ten is made up of a mixture of the mass-market accessible games
Shocker.
No matter how well you think you know the program, you most likely have more to learn.
Yup, that speaks volumes to how well the user interface was designed. Kudos!
Its useless. In fact all change is. What can you really buy for less than a buck? If its less than a buck, splurge and get two.
How about you round all your transactions up to the nearest dollar and send me the difference. I'll pay shipping.
Really though, save all your change for 6 months and put it in a jar. Now count it. See how much it would cost you if you rounded everything up?
The change from six months of cash transactions regularly adds up to $300 in my change jar. That's 3% of a minimum wage salary in the US. If you've gotten rich enough to think change is useless, you make too much money.
# More complex
# Dangerous failure mode
# Uses lots of electricity
# Difficult to maintain (no elevator technicians know maglev)
Irrational fear of technology before you understand it....
Here's your luddite card. Go stand with the people who don't understand why there's no big deal having fuel cells on airplanes.
Does this feature track and retain your surfing habits without your consent?
No.
Can you not opt-out of it?
Disable the feature. Easy.
It's not spyware by your definition. It has the added benefit of giving the user some control instead of being secretly tracked by the server side.
Websites can do all that stuff with a redirect script on the server side and the user has no control or knowledge of who is being notified. If site developers start using the ping tag instead we can selectively disable it with an extension. It gives the user control where before there was none.
Yeah, but if you can't get one from gamestop until the shortage is over anyway, why should they get to keep your $50 in the meantime. You could have your $50, and stick it to them a little bit, and still get your console on practically the same day you would have otherwise.
Ask for a refund.
If you're not going to get your console until the shortage is over, why should they get to keep your money until then. These stores should be punished for selling pre-orders before they knew the final pricing of the console, the release date, or whether they were going to be able to fulfill those pre-orders. Don't let them get away with it, and ask for your money back.
Also, next time, if they can't tell you exactly what day you're going to get your item when they're selling you the pre-order, don't buy the pre-order! These stores only get away with this shit because we let them.
The less popular channels run commercials just as well as other channels do, and if they command lower rates, well, they also happen to have lower costs (e.g., Sears doesn't need to be paid off in order for This Old House to run, but by contrast
It has nothing to do with funding the channels, it has to do with funding the company's subscription fee for the channels. If they offered everything a-la-carte, the less popular channels may not get enough subscribers for your cable company to pay the flat fee required for them to carry the channel. By bundling them with the popular channels, the people who like the popular stuff are forced to pay for the less popular stuff.
The current system artificially raises home & garde user rates to the level of sports channel users.
Not so. Without the current system, the home and garden channel viewers would have to either pay the cost the channel charges to the station divided by the number of viewers in your area, or not have the channel available at all. Your average cost of the channel would actually go up for the less popular channels, and down for the more popular channels if they were all unbundled. That cost may even be higher when you add up all the channels you like that aren't very popular than the cost for the package is, because all those sports channel watchers wouldn't be part of the pool paying for you H&G channel anymore.
It's all irrelevant though, because the company is going to charge you just under you maximum monthly tolerance for cash outlay no matter how they structure it. You're going to get some subset of the channels you want for the most you're willing to pay whether you get the channels you don't want along with them or not.
Wow, what the hell is the point? Leave it sealed and put whatever price you want on it? What does unsealing the package acomplish?
They're so sorry that ESPN happens to be in the same package as the Home & Garden network - really, if they could, they'd split those up so that people with zero interest in sports don't need to pay for the most expensive channels.
The more expensive channels are the more popular channels. You realize that they do that so the sports watchers subsidize the home and garden channels, and not the other way around, right?
Well, that and to make as much profit as possible...
With flashblock installed you get the good of flash while leaving the bad behind...
I'm not missing anything.
You assume that everybody is a geek, and needs high speed access one way or another. They aren't, and they don't. If the only high speed option that people have is Bell South, and Bell South doesn't give them improved access to sites they want to go to, they'll cancel and either have nothing, or go back to dialup. Why pay Bell South for high speed access if, from the customer's perspective, the sites they want to go to aren't fast? The customer will blame the company they're paying, not the site they're trying to visit.
Plus, this may not require any customer interaction at all. Bell South will call site operators up to tell them they're going to throttle traffic to their site unless they pay, and the content provider will counter with blocking access to Bell South subscribers unless Bell South pays the content provider or removes the block. Sites will start showing up with "Bell South subscribers can't access this site. Please call your ISP to have them resolve this problem" messages for Bell South users untill Bell South is forced to relent. There is no last mile competition required, because there is *plenty* of competition at the other end.
All you should need is flash.
What you get is a message that says "If your ISP subscribed to ESPN360.com, you would have access to thousands of videos for free" "Ask your internet provider to sign up." etc... As far as I know there aren't any ISPs that subscribe yet. Verizon and Comcast certainly don't.
It's about making the software valuable to it's users and contributors by giving them freedom
If you use very limited definitions of the words "value", "user", and "freedom", this is a perfectly valid statement. Otherwise, not so much.
Go check out espn360.com.
I'll wait...
Back? Good.
This is a perfect example of what is going to happen here. First, only a few stupid companies will pay Bell South (Even SCO got some takers). Then the content providers will start charging Bell South to allow users of the Bell South internet service to access their web sites. It's already started. The content providers know that they're in charge. There are so many ISPs out there that the ISP needs the content more than the content providers need any single ISP. Bell South will figure this out, or they will lose customers. Once again, the free market works.
And I bet you were only half serious.
It's like inverse cable.
What should happen here is that big websites should start charging Bell South, or they'll start blocking access to their website for Bell South customers. It's already started. Check out ESPN360.com. This won't last. The content providers have the upper hand.
Ah, yes, the "hypothetical that proves my point is true if my point is true".
What?
[...]especially over the web[...]
You're sending the data out into a series of unencrypted networks that you have no control over, and you're worried that your access point doesn't have WPA? You have some interesting priorities. If the data you're transporting is sensitive you should be encrypting it at the application layer so it stays encrypted when it leaves your network. If it's not, then why should you care that it isn't encrypted over your wireless? Your security is only as secure as your weakest link, so add all the encryption you'd like to your wireless access point... You're not making your transfers any more secure.
I'd be more concerned about the developers who will start releasing buggy apps, and then blame the bugs on the user's machine. It's a staple of the PC gaming world. Some developers always blame their bugs on the user's non-standard configuration, then, if you're lucky, they quietly patch the problem months later when they get their heads out of their asses. On a Mac, that problem is impossible.
You want freedom? Nobody is stopping you from buying non-Apple stuff.
My point was that you shouldn't need WPA at all, ever, if you already have application layer encryption. All it does is lower the compatability of your network with available devices. Why encrypt traffic that is already encrypted? Mildly informed pseudo-geeks seem to get their jollys off of feeling like they have things "secured", even if it means that they're spending a ton of CPU time re-encrypting already encrypted data.
Should be fairly easy to make one... Most USB 1.44" floppy drives already use a USB->MFM adapter to connect the archaic 1.44MB floppy drive to USB systems. The signaling hasn't changed since way back in the 8" floppy days. Your only problem may be powering the beast. I bet they suck more juice than USB can provide.
Linux already supports EFI, and the chipset in these things. I believe there is no contest. Linux probably works on them already, and has for a long while.