The phone business has gone through many levels of obsolescence. It used to be they could charge large amounts of money for each phone in a house, not each line, but each phone. Then they could charge large amounts of money to call your neighbor 15 miles away. Then they could charge large amounts of money for caller id, and more money to block caller id. The bells have always been able to come up with services to keep themselves profitable.
In fact the phone company can and do still do all these things, but cell phones and other competition is holding them at bay. The interesting thing is that even though a full service competitor can give all the treats for half the cost, the big bells are still in business. Even though cell phones can give nation access for free, and calling cards cards can give cheap service, people still pay huge amounts of money to call next door.
The phone industry is not the profiteering heathens they once were, but they by no means have been put out to pasture. They bought up the cell phone companies and then added the customer hostile fees we had on land lines. They destroyed the last mile internet access industry, which was growing 10 years ago, to the point the shining example of the industry, Speakeasy, has now been subsumed by the customer service hostile mass sales driven Best Buy, and as an extension MS.
I have no idea why ATT does not want to do VOIP. It will likely just drive those customers to cable. Perhaps ATT has plans to convert VOIP to their cable service. What I do know is that the bells have never really been behind DSL, and it appears even more likely now that thier intention has always been to destroy internet access at the consumer. Fortunately, I live in a place where last mile access will soon be wireless.
OTOH, from what I have seen with VOIP, it is not the most reliable communication method. It is cheap, but fraught with complexities that makes it unreliable. If we take the positive perspective, perhaps it was just not making any money for ATT, and they did not see how it could. They know that a serious business is going to worry more about reliability than the communication costs, which are most not that significant. For example, I recall many years ago trying to convert an office from a dedicated fax machine, with the truly expensive paper, to a computer and printer. Since the fax was so reliable, and the risk of losing a single order so grave, a new even more fancy fax machine was bought, even though the computer solution would have resulted in nearly zero initial and operating costs.
First, any country can choose to make laws as it pleases. For instance, the United States can make laws that deny the person of the pursuit happiness simply because of the person's name sounds like a wanted persons name. The laws can then be arbitrated in national and international courts and tribunals.
On the other hand, South America, unlike Africa, another AIDS epidemic area, is not really poor. They have resources. They have major exports that they exchange for hard currency, both legal and illegal. Much of the poverty is the result of extremely unequal distribution of wealth, something that the United States is falling victim to, with it's gated communities, overflowing jails, and laws specifically aimed at keeping untouchables off the street. A robust economy depends on freely moving capital, and how can capital move freely if it is concentrated in one place. The current pipe can only be so big.
And then there is the growing sex trade in Brazil, particularly children. It is one thing to say all our ills are caused by the greedy drug companies, and companies certainly have some blame, especially when they push for short term gains that hurt the long term viability of society, but where are the jobs? Brazil seems to do a good job with educating the populous, but with double digit unemployment where is a girl to work?
Really, I can imagine how these talks went. Brazil wanted drugs at cost. Merk asked if brazil sold cannabis at cost. Brazil said drug use was voluntary. Merk said unsafe sex was voluntary, except for the girls and boys trafficked for sex. Brazil said it had no money, merk said the average income was nearly 10K USD, and had the hard currency to pay subsidize the cost of the drug for it's people. Brazil then just decided to ignore the patent.
In the end, Brazil just probably decided it would be cheaper to make the drug itself than buy it, and this way Merk does not have to deal with deflation in the price of drug due to third wold pressures.
Oh my, what might congress do. Use this as an excuse to cut taxes even more to the improvised super upper class. Or allow even more banks to cheat students in their quest for education, while increasing the public subsidies to said banks. Or perhaps, they will just take a lesson from Kent State.
My best hope is that they simply shut down all access to the commercial music that today's kid enjoy so much, so the kids will have to learn to survive on college made jam, and the labels will receive no revenue whatsoever.
A scientific calculator in the US costs $79-$200. How can they make a laptop for just $100. One supposes no profit margin, the cheaper scientific calculators are merely graphing.
I know. With googles take over of doubleclick, i was wondering if I should move back to yahoo. If MS takes over yahoo, should we be looking to see what altavista is up to?
A teacher puts her purse in a drawer, and a student steals the purse. Is the student defense that the teacher should have locked up her purse? Equipment is locked in a room, but the window is left unlatched. Is the student defense that the school should have made sure to latch the window? A student plagiarizes a paper. Is the students defense that the teacher should have set the rules more clearly? A student gets drunk on spiked punch and then raped at a party. Is the defense of the rapist that the school have controlled the alcohol better? A student brings a gun to school and shoots 20 people. Is the shooter innocent if the school did not have metal detectors?
Such defenses smells mildly of the sociopath, not the lack of a sense of right and wrong, but the sense that such rules do not apply, and a clear attempt to rationalize the behavior as the fault of a third party. In this case, the school set up a resource, and in exchange for the resource, demands some rules be follows, and set up token support for those rules. Such token support could be the honor system, a barrier, or a lock. None of these are unbreachable, nor should they be. After all, we are trying to teach the children to be responsible and respectable citizens. We are not, in fact, trying to raise sociopaths who leech off society. We are not trying to create a citizenry that requires constant surveillance to insure order. At least in the US we use the honor system, or other forms of token defense, to keep the society in order. We do not want heavily armed police on every corner.
So, to answer the question, no. You know the rules, and choose to break them. As an honorable person, the thing to do is accept the consequence and try not to break the rules again. Putting aside the technical feat, which given todays kiddie tools require almost no intelligence whatsoever, the network is provided for a specific purpose, and using it outside that purpose is not a right, any more than using sudafed to make meth is a right.
I know that much of this thinking is just a lack of maturity, and will go away as the consequences are applied, just like the magical thinking the very young child. What is frightening is when such justifications are used an supported by persons who should be old enough to know better.
One wonders if the publicity caused by the major strip willingness to publish soldiers story had something to do with this. The other reason is to protect soldiers from themselves. Some young people have a need to gain attention by publishing even detail of thier lives, such as bondage photos torturing a prisoner.
No, by this logic it means that few would conduct such attacks for money. However we know that people conduct attacks for many other reasons. The assumption that attacks occur only for direct cash rewards results in miscalculations that cause significant holes in security systems and can even start wars.
On the relative benign side we know that people crack security just to see if it can be done, to test their wits against a verified expert. On the less benign side, fanatics might attack because they think the act will give them some other reward. For instance, if we take a purely hypothetical example, religious fanatics might be told by their Pastor to attack the web site of some godless politician so the preferred candidate might have a better chance of winning and installing other fanatics in traditionally secular positions. Such attacks would have a defined timeframe, and therefore predictable costs and risk, and win or lose, would have at least have a terroristic effect. Such an attack would be clearly logical, profitable, and effective.
In the MS philosophy, success of a new product is not that it generates a profit, but that it has market share. Just take a look at xbox. Even MSN is more concerned with market share than profit. This is the old we will make in volume what we lose in profit. This business plan is not unreasonable. it is often the case that some product are primarily sold to cover fixed costs. Such products, however, are often the low end or old models, not the high end marquee products. The advisability of such plan also has fallen from grace due to the bankruptcy of some many companies that ascribed to such magical thinking. Apple, fortunately, has generally put forth a more naturalistic bussinees model of selling good products at a a reasonable sustainable profit.
In any case, given the MS philosophy of socializing the computer market through direct private investment, it is no wonder that radical idea of selling a competative product at a profit does not seem viable. How can Apple possibly imagine that it can survive if it sells a mere hundred thousand phones at a $100 profit, when in fact it should try to ship one million units at little or no profit, or even a $126 loss. Such a loss will be made up in volume.
The $10 per album on itunes is cheaper than most CDs, so the reduction in quality, and the inconvenience to remove the DRM, can well be justified.
However, $13 per album is on the order of a CD. So, for the same money I can get a bad copy with no DRM, or a good copy with DRM, the only hassle is the 3 minutes that it takes to rip, and the need to physically purchase the product. Though iTunes is still a reasonably good deal, it is no longer the great deal it once was.
I will admit for single track purchases the money for the DRM free is compelling. I can see them moving toward a 100% DRM free collection, with a $1.29 price tag. This in a time when the value of CDs are plummeting. WHat did Steve Jobs say? iTunes has to compete with free? How exactly does this scheme do this?
I agree with this, and it points to what may be the overwhelming issue. The problem with any particular publication, online or off, is not the ability to manipulate the stories or otherwise blur the line between original and advertising content, but if the publications meet the need of the people who use it. Some publications are 100% advertising, and people pay for it. Some publications are more sensitive to paid content
The question is then do the readers of digg care if content is paid or not? It really sounds like the primary concern is that the content is interesting, and if the content is not, it will quickly be buried. Sure, some money might be made in the process, but profit is perhaps the best reason to change a model. Perhaps Digg readers will get better stories, and less politics, if more content is promoted in this way. As the article stated, the biggest danger of paid promotion is that it will push other content out. This also means that in the absence of paid promotion, the best and brightest might be pushed out for the drivel that the masses enjoy, like Star Search and it's progeny American Idol.
In any case the most interesting part of the article was at the very bottom. If the digg accounts are private, there would be no way to know if a user was actually voting an item up, and the entire paid promotion gig would be up.
I would guess this would be a redundant/upgraded link. I would also guess that the $500 million price tag, if they can get it done for that, is a relative bargain. Such money might only pay for 10-20 tons of launch capability, not counting design and construction costs.
The US is working on other communication projects that will be sattilite based, at costs that will likely exceed 20 billion.
There is also an issue of habit. Most people expect the standard items to be in the same place all the time. Just think of what happens when you switch cars and the windshield wiper is in a different place. This is also why the Macintosh specs said the top menu items had to be a standard order, with standard options under the same pull down. Recall the Apple innovation was the intuitive WMP interface across the entire OS, where intuitive meant that one a user learned certain basic skills, those skills could be applied to any application. Applications that break those rules, see a certain major word processor, are harder for a user to learn as the new basic skills must be mastered. This is also why Mac OS X was so confusing at first, because Apple updated some rules as we had to learn a lot of new skills.
The menu thing can get annoying when the screen real estate is large, but this is no new thing. Developers often used two screens even back in the early 90's, and dealt with having to go half way across texas to get a menu item. Developers also used keyboard shortcuts a lot, showing that menu items are best used to help a new user and for infrequently used operations.
I wish I could find the citation and name of this law. I believe it is detailed in the 'Humane Interface'. A related design law is that the smaller the space, the harder it is for the user to select, and the difficulty increases non linearly as the size decreases. I notice that some web designers delight in creating widgets that are infinitesimally small, thereby wasting an infinite amount of user time. Go figure.
To use a favorite reason that command economies do not work, economics theories are difficult because people are not bacteria. Optimizing price for "consumer behavior" is nontrivial at best, and maybe intractable. This is why setting prices using a competitive environment, while not ideal, does often work.
Typically, people only have a limited tolerance for "perceived value", especially on commodities. One might occasionally go to the corner market and pay 50% more an equivalent product, but if people have a choice they will often go a larger store where they do not have to pay for "perceived value". It is the same thing with clothes and all other items.
I would go so far to say that people are not bacteria and therefore can have quite a bit of irrational reaction to any price manipulation that in the end has a higher overall cost. To counteract this irrationality, vendors provide coupons, and retialers affinity clubs, that makes the consumer feel as if prices are not being maximized. However, Walmart has shown that even this optimization is imperfect, and the success of target has shown that walmarts optimation is imperfect. Sometime people will respond to percieve value, sometimes they won't. A lot of people just go to the dollar store.
In the end pricing for perceived value is as dangerous as anything else. Apples 30% profit margin does not make it a market favorite, but Prada has no such difficulty. People are complaining that gas at $3 a gallon is insane, but will pay a dollar for a can of Coke, or three for a cup of coffee, which, if normalized, is 6 and 18 dollars respectively, for water. That we pump out of the ground, not in a war zone. Again, people are not bacteria.
my feeling here is that such writing needs attention, but getting rid of the student might be overkill. Most schools should have staff to hear a student out, and if there are genuine psychological issues, deal with those. If there is a danger, contain the student. If the student does something physical, be prepared to remove the student. All too often students are removed merely because they are annoying, which is not in the spirit of public educations. Many of us on this site can remember being annoying. I would not have lasted past grade nine if these standards were applied to me.
In the aftermath of recent events, and i do not want to make this a constitutional debate, the only thing we learned is that perhaps people who have been deemed to have significant mental instabilities should not be allowed the opportunity to trivially apply lethal force and perhaps universities should have increased cognition of the campus so that students are less easily confined to a space by an attacker. Interpreting the events as an excuse to destroy free expression, while consistent with the current culture, is certainly counterproductive.
I suppose this depends on your perspective. Since the 1960's Kodak has been pioneering the concept of selling the printer cheap, i.e. instamatic camera, and reaping the profit on the ink, i.e. film. Certainly HP did not set this trend. If anything, Xerox set this trend by primarily selling toner and service.
One thing I want to know, knowing how Kodak is some times, is if the plan is sell low quality printers at a relatively high price, knowing full well they will break in a year or two. I would much rather throw away printer cartridges rather than printers. OTOH, I know that will expensive cartridges, and cheap printer, people throw away printers when the cartridge is empty.
In the end people do seem to buying the wrong printer for the job. If you are printing a ream a week, it is insane to buy an inkjet, yet I see people doing so all the time. For a few pages a day, though, an inkjet can be a very good value.
Although i am a mac user, I often wonder why a company would intentionally want to introduce a Mac into the enterprise. The MS PC can be a relative inexpensive, interchangeable cog for the worker bees. It is a tool, and for the most part one supplies the cheapest tool that will do the job. For some applications that is the Mac, and for others it is Unix, but for many applications it is a PC. In most cases, a firm will not shell out for Snap-On or Rigid hand tools for every worker bee.
What I find frustrating is that in many cases a Mac cannot be used, and there is really no legitimate reason. To continue the above analogy, while their may not be Snap-On tools for all, certain persons might use such tools, and some persons might wish to buy such tools. There is nothing that says "only Stanley tools can be used in this shop". And I am not talking about application or support issues. Those have been dealt with for a very long time through end user experience and emulation. What I am talking about are decisions made to reduce short term costs that prevent long term flexibility. These decisions prevent the use of Macs much more than support or applications issues. In fact the I bet the custom development is most likely due to previous ill fated short term development decisions.
The thing I noticed the first time I used XP was it did not seem to broken. Some of the UI decisions were different than I would have made, but it did work. It was like the first time I used NT, except that NT was probably not consumer prime time game playing ready.
XP is a version of Windows that I could get behind, as it generally was OK. Just like Windows 95.
I am not sure if vista does anything interesting. The way it was promised two years ago was compelling. I am not surprised they were not able to make the dream come true.
Exactly, the average camera owner does not care about representation, or how the camera gets a "good" picture. They just want a sufficiently representational automatically touched up photo from a camera that is does not cost too much and is not too big. That is why a pinhole camera, the instamatic, was one of the best selling cameras around. What was amazing is that for a time so many people were willing to pay real money for a machine they did not need and really did not know how to use.
The average person just want to have a camera around to snap a picture of a kids first step, first day of school, etc. For these people a camera phone makes a lot of sense, and in fact will perform better than the pin hole camera. I have to agree that for the average person, a camera phone makes a lot of sense, in many cases better sense than a separate digital.
p.
The only thing I find silly is that the n95 is not a small form factor, and 10 megapixels is much more than the average person needs. At the 750 price tag, the average person can wait to spend $500 on an iPhone, and then $250 a camera with real optics.
Truly, a naive sense of reality is overrated. What we think of reality is solidly based in our personal experience. Second hand experience just isn't the same. For instance, if one has never seen a black swan, then the black swan does not exist, no matter how many times others tell you it does. Even if I see pictures of a spheroid earth, and watch the shuttle, or even my own project, orbit the spheroid earth, do I truly internalize that reality, or continue with my everyday experience of a flat earth?
I think the current generation of scientist, having grown up in a quantum world with the standard model, is growing even more distant from the common person. As much so as the astronaut who has seen the spheroid earth and the common person like myself. Students of the physical science has grown up measuring the speed of light, determining the mass charge ration of a single electron, observing quantum effects not only noticing the collapsing wave when the path is known, but also observing quantum effects in a scanning tunneling microscope. And while these are not necessarily direct experiences, they do satisfy the goals of primary experiences. There are, so to speak, more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
In the end, it seems to that reality changes as we expand our experiences. Assuming that reality is what we currently believe to be true is certainly convenient, but hardly leads to progress. Spooky action a distance, though not ideal, might be what is real. The same for truly randomness at some level. Denying either of these is like denying the validity of special relativity in the hope of saving the simple, deterministic, newtonian mechanics.
So, according the parent, it is perfectly acceptable to put someone in jail on faulty evidence. I like this thinking. We can use all our resources arresting and holding persons with no intent of committing a crime, while allowing alleged terrorist to walk free. After all the most important thing to make people feel like the government is protecting them, not provided verifiable protection.
While I do not believe in moderating comments down simply because they are inane, this comment was probably moded down because it is not true. The lack of truth is proven by your statement
I used to -hate- the GPL.
The fact that someone has such strong feelings about a voluntary document is what makes politics. Politics often happens when one not only believe that it is a bad choice for oneself, but a bad choice for everyone. We then engage in a process to insure that no one has the choice. That is certainly one side of politics.
Technology, like most things, exists inside a political framework. By implying that this is a new development, one is also implying that it might once again be independent. This is a dangerous and naive inference. Political and market forces have brought us the technology we have today. To keep what we have, we must be part of those political forces.
It is like sex and marriage, and the presumption that the political process should stay out of it, and that such invasions are recent. The truth is that sex and marriage form the basis of civilization, and the control of it forms that basis of the stability of a predominant regime. Just look at how many ancient cultures from of marrying outside the clan.
What you are talking about here is money. Physical copies are thrown out because there simply is no money to store and maintain them. Library are cleared out all the time. One have a collection of movies, the movies over there have not generated significant revenue in 20 years, one needs to store old movies, what is one to do? Build a new facility, or throw out obsolete products.
With 100% digital stock, the money might be less, but the issues just as real. Perhaps no footage must be left on the cutting room floor to be swept up, but the data must be stored somewhere. If it is stored on the hardisk, the hardisks must be stored an appropriate chamber, power down, and occasionally checked for integrity. And is one copy going to be enough? Hardisks are unreliable compared to film, so I would say two, at least. I would say the temptation to reuse or throw out hard drives is going to quite strong.
As far as upgrading, I don't think anyone is going to do that without strong retail demand. I am sure any number of classic movies will be lost due the fact that there is no longer machines to read the data. Unfortunately, I suspect, the Scary Movie franchise will not be one of them.
I think most people just want to print, and the replacement cartage is not such a big deal unless they are printing 10 pages every day. Most people want color because they have color screens, and they think the printer should reproduce what is on the screen. Or they want to print pictures every once in a while. It is not a matter of cost, and it certainly is not important enough to search ebay for a printer, not to mention most would not know enough to chooses, or do the maintenance. Then the other considerations, like how much power the printer uses. I know that old printers use at least twice as much stand by power as the new ones. Not really a big deal to some people, but eating 30 watts, 24 hours a day, and then the cooling to remove it, can be significant. Not to mention the ports.
For the most, part, most people could live without a printer. They could send their photos out, and go down and make prints at the copy shop cheaper than buying a printer and cartridges. For those that do want a printer, a laser printer for document and dye sublimation printer for photos is not a bad deal. The later is a cheap for a few single prints as the photo shops.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact the phone company can and do still do all these things, but cell phones and other competition is holding them at bay. The interesting thing is that even though a full service competitor can give all the treats for half the cost, the big bells are still in business. Even though cell phones can give nation access for free, and calling cards cards can give cheap service, people still pay huge amounts of money to call next door.
The phone industry is not the profiteering heathens they once were, but they by no means have been put out to pasture. They bought up the cell phone companies and then added the customer hostile fees we had on land lines. They destroyed the last mile internet access industry, which was growing 10 years ago, to the point the shining example of the industry, Speakeasy, has now been subsumed by the customer service hostile mass sales driven Best Buy, and as an extension MS.
I have no idea why ATT does not want to do VOIP. It will likely just drive those customers to cable. Perhaps ATT has plans to convert VOIP to their cable service. What I do know is that the bells have never really been behind DSL, and it appears even more likely now that thier intention has always been to destroy internet access at the consumer. Fortunately, I live in a place where last mile access will soon be wireless.
OTOH, from what I have seen with VOIP, it is not the most reliable communication method. It is cheap, but fraught with complexities that makes it unreliable. If we take the positive perspective, perhaps it was just not making any money for ATT, and they did not see how it could. They know that a serious business is going to worry more about reliability than the communication costs, which are most not that significant. For example, I recall many years ago trying to convert an office from a dedicated fax machine, with the truly expensive paper, to a computer and printer. Since the fax was so reliable, and the risk of losing a single order so grave, a new even more fancy fax machine was bought, even though the computer solution would have resulted in nearly zero initial and operating costs.
On the other hand, South America, unlike Africa, another AIDS epidemic area, is not really poor. They have resources. They have major exports that they exchange for hard currency, both legal and illegal. Much of the poverty is the result of extremely unequal distribution of wealth, something that the United States is falling victim to, with it's gated communities, overflowing jails, and laws specifically aimed at keeping untouchables off the street. A robust economy depends on freely moving capital, and how can capital move freely if it is concentrated in one place. The current pipe can only be so big.
And then there is the growing sex trade in Brazil, particularly children. It is one thing to say all our ills are caused by the greedy drug companies, and companies certainly have some blame, especially when they push for short term gains that hurt the long term viability of society, but where are the jobs? Brazil seems to do a good job with educating the populous, but with double digit unemployment where is a girl to work?
Really, I can imagine how these talks went. Brazil wanted drugs at cost. Merk asked if brazil sold cannabis at cost. Brazil said drug use was voluntary. Merk said unsafe sex was voluntary, except for the girls and boys trafficked for sex. Brazil said it had no money, merk said the average income was nearly 10K USD, and had the hard currency to pay subsidize the cost of the drug for it's people. Brazil then just decided to ignore the patent.
In the end, Brazil just probably decided it would be cheaper to make the drug itself than buy it, and this way Merk does not have to deal with deflation in the price of drug due to third wold pressures.
My best hope is that they simply shut down all access to the commercial music that today's kid enjoy so much, so the kids will have to learn to survive on college made jam, and the labels will receive no revenue whatsoever.
A scientific calculator in the US costs $79-$200. How can they make a laptop for just $100. One supposes no profit margin, the cheaper scientific calculators are merely graphing.
I know. With googles take over of doubleclick, i was wondering if I should move back to yahoo. If MS takes over yahoo, should we be looking to see what altavista is up to?
Such defenses smells mildly of the sociopath, not the lack of a sense of right and wrong, but the sense that such rules do not apply, and a clear attempt to rationalize the behavior as the fault of a third party. In this case, the school set up a resource, and in exchange for the resource, demands some rules be follows, and set up token support for those rules. Such token support could be the honor system, a barrier, or a lock. None of these are unbreachable, nor should they be. After all, we are trying to teach the children to be responsible and respectable citizens. We are not, in fact, trying to raise sociopaths who leech off society. We are not trying to create a citizenry that requires constant surveillance to insure order. At least in the US we use the honor system, or other forms of token defense, to keep the society in order. We do not want heavily armed police on every corner.
So, to answer the question, no. You know the rules, and choose to break them. As an honorable person, the thing to do is accept the consequence and try not to break the rules again. Putting aside the technical feat, which given todays kiddie tools require almost no intelligence whatsoever, the network is provided for a specific purpose, and using it outside that purpose is not a right, any more than using sudafed to make meth is a right.
I know that much of this thinking is just a lack of maturity, and will go away as the consequences are applied, just like the magical thinking the very young child. What is frightening is when such justifications are used an supported by persons who should be old enough to know better.
One wonders if the publicity caused by the major strip willingness to publish soldiers story had something to do with this. The other reason is to protect soldiers from themselves. Some young people have a need to gain attention by publishing even detail of thier lives, such as bondage photos torturing a prisoner.
On the relative benign side we know that people crack security just to see if it can be done, to test their wits against a verified expert. On the less benign side, fanatics might attack because they think the act will give them some other reward. For instance, if we take a purely hypothetical example, religious fanatics might be told by their Pastor to attack the web site of some godless politician so the preferred candidate might have a better chance of winning and installing other fanatics in traditionally secular positions. Such attacks would have a defined timeframe, and therefore predictable costs and risk, and win or lose, would have at least have a terroristic effect. Such an attack would be clearly logical, profitable, and effective.
In any case, given the MS philosophy of socializing the computer market through direct private investment, it is no wonder that radical idea of selling a competative product at a profit does not seem viable. How can Apple possibly imagine that it can survive if it sells a mere hundred thousand phones at a $100 profit, when in fact it should try to ship one million units at little or no profit, or even a $126 loss. Such a loss will be made up in volume.
However, $13 per album is on the order of a CD. So, for the same money I can get a bad copy with no DRM, or a good copy with DRM, the only hassle is the 3 minutes that it takes to rip, and the need to physically purchase the product. Though iTunes is still a reasonably good deal, it is no longer the great deal it once was.
I will admit for single track purchases the money for the DRM free is compelling. I can see them moving toward a 100% DRM free collection, with a $1.29 price tag. This in a time when the value of CDs are plummeting. WHat did Steve Jobs say? iTunes has to compete with free? How exactly does this scheme do this?
The question is then do the readers of digg care if content is paid or not? It really sounds like the primary concern is that the content is interesting, and if the content is not, it will quickly be buried. Sure, some money might be made in the process, but profit is perhaps the best reason to change a model. Perhaps Digg readers will get better stories, and less politics, if more content is promoted in this way. As the article stated, the biggest danger of paid promotion is that it will push other content out. This also means that in the absence of paid promotion, the best and brightest might be pushed out for the drivel that the masses enjoy, like Star Search and it's progeny American Idol.
In any case the most interesting part of the article was at the very bottom. If the digg accounts are private, there would be no way to know if a user was actually voting an item up, and the entire paid promotion gig would be up.
The US is working on other communication projects that will be sattilite based, at costs that will likely exceed 20 billion.
The menu thing can get annoying when the screen real estate is large, but this is no new thing. Developers often used two screens even back in the early 90's, and dealt with having to go half way across texas to get a menu item. Developers also used keyboard shortcuts a lot, showing that menu items are best used to help a new user and for infrequently used operations.
I wish I could find the citation and name of this law. I believe it is detailed in the 'Humane Interface'. A related design law is that the smaller the space, the harder it is for the user to select, and the difficulty increases non linearly as the size decreases. I notice that some web designers delight in creating widgets that are infinitesimally small, thereby wasting an infinite amount of user time. Go figure.
Typically, people only have a limited tolerance for "perceived value", especially on commodities. One might occasionally go to the corner market and pay 50% more an equivalent product, but if people have a choice they will often go a larger store where they do not have to pay for "perceived value". It is the same thing with clothes and all other items.
I would go so far to say that people are not bacteria and therefore can have quite a bit of irrational reaction to any price manipulation that in the end has a higher overall cost. To counteract this irrationality, vendors provide coupons, and retialers affinity clubs, that makes the consumer feel as if prices are not being maximized. However, Walmart has shown that even this optimization is imperfect, and the success of target has shown that walmarts optimation is imperfect. Sometime people will respond to percieve value, sometimes they won't. A lot of people just go to the dollar store.
In the end pricing for perceived value is as dangerous as anything else. Apples 30% profit margin does not make it a market favorite, but Prada has no such difficulty. People are complaining that gas at $3 a gallon is insane, but will pay a dollar for a can of Coke, or three for a cup of coffee, which, if normalized, is 6 and 18 dollars respectively, for water. That we pump out of the ground, not in a war zone. Again, people are not bacteria.
In the aftermath of recent events, and i do not want to make this a constitutional debate, the only thing we learned is that perhaps people who have been deemed to have significant mental instabilities should not be allowed the opportunity to trivially apply lethal force and perhaps universities should have increased cognition of the campus so that students are less easily confined to a space by an attacker. Interpreting the events as an excuse to destroy free expression, while consistent with the current culture, is certainly counterproductive.
Or simply call it the £100 laptop.
One thing I want to know, knowing how Kodak is some times, is if the plan is sell low quality printers at a relatively high price, knowing full well they will break in a year or two. I would much rather throw away printer cartridges rather than printers. OTOH, I know that will expensive cartridges, and cheap printer, people throw away printers when the cartridge is empty.
In the end people do seem to buying the wrong printer for the job. If you are printing a ream a week, it is insane to buy an inkjet, yet I see people doing so all the time. For a few pages a day, though, an inkjet can be a very good value.
What I find frustrating is that in many cases a Mac cannot be used, and there is really no legitimate reason. To continue the above analogy, while their may not be Snap-On tools for all, certain persons might use such tools, and some persons might wish to buy such tools. There is nothing that says "only Stanley tools can be used in this shop". And I am not talking about application or support issues. Those have been dealt with for a very long time through end user experience and emulation. What I am talking about are decisions made to reduce short term costs that prevent long term flexibility. These decisions prevent the use of Macs much more than support or applications issues. In fact the I bet the custom development is most likely due to previous ill fated short term development decisions.
XP is a version of Windows that I could get behind, as it generally was OK. Just like Windows 95.
I am not sure if vista does anything interesting. The way it was promised two years ago was compelling. I am not surprised they were not able to make the dream come true.
The average person just want to have a camera around to snap a picture of a kids first step, first day of school, etc. For these people a camera phone makes a lot of sense, and in fact will perform better than the pin hole camera. I have to agree that for the average person, a camera phone makes a lot of sense, in many cases better sense than a separate digital. p. The only thing I find silly is that the n95 is not a small form factor, and 10 megapixels is much more than the average person needs. At the 750 price tag, the average person can wait to spend $500 on an iPhone, and then $250 a camera with real optics.
I think the current generation of scientist, having grown up in a quantum world with the standard model, is growing even more distant from the common person. As much so as the astronaut who has seen the spheroid earth and the common person like myself. Students of the physical science has grown up measuring the speed of light, determining the mass charge ration of a single electron, observing quantum effects not only noticing the collapsing wave when the path is known, but also observing quantum effects in a scanning tunneling microscope. And while these are not necessarily direct experiences, they do satisfy the goals of primary experiences. There are, so to speak, more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
In the end, it seems to that reality changes as we expand our experiences. Assuming that reality is what we currently believe to be true is certainly convenient, but hardly leads to progress. Spooky action a distance, though not ideal, might be what is real. The same for truly randomness at some level. Denying either of these is like denying the validity of special relativity in the hope of saving the simple, deterministic, newtonian mechanics.
So, according the parent, it is perfectly acceptable to put someone in jail on faulty evidence. I like this thinking. We can use all our resources arresting and holding persons with no intent of committing a crime, while allowing alleged terrorist to walk free. After all the most important thing to make people feel like the government is protecting them, not provided verifiable protection.
I used to -hate- the GPL.
The fact that someone has such strong feelings about a voluntary document is what makes politics. Politics often happens when one not only believe that it is a bad choice for oneself, but a bad choice for everyone. We then engage in a process to insure that no one has the choice. That is certainly one side of politics.
Technology, like most things, exists inside a political framework. By implying that this is a new development, one is also implying that it might once again be independent. This is a dangerous and naive inference. Political and market forces have brought us the technology we have today. To keep what we have, we must be part of those political forces.
It is like sex and marriage, and the presumption that the political process should stay out of it, and that such invasions are recent. The truth is that sex and marriage form the basis of civilization, and the control of it forms that basis of the stability of a predominant regime. Just look at how many ancient cultures from of marrying outside the clan.
With 100% digital stock, the money might be less, but the issues just as real. Perhaps no footage must be left on the cutting room floor to be swept up, but the data must be stored somewhere. If it is stored on the hardisk, the hardisks must be stored an appropriate chamber, power down, and occasionally checked for integrity. And is one copy going to be enough? Hardisks are unreliable compared to film, so I would say two, at least. I would say the temptation to reuse or throw out hard drives is going to quite strong.
As far as upgrading, I don't think anyone is going to do that without strong retail demand. I am sure any number of classic movies will be lost due the fact that there is no longer machines to read the data. Unfortunately, I suspect, the Scary Movie franchise will not be one of them.
For the most, part, most people could live without a printer. They could send their photos out, and go down and make prints at the copy shop cheaper than buying a printer and cartridges. For those that do want a printer, a laser printer for document and dye sublimation printer for photos is not a bad deal. The later is a cheap for a few single prints as the photo shops.