Actually, the numbers may be in worse shape that you suggest. Most browsers, other than IE, allow you to specify your preferred agent identifier. Additionally most modern browsers, other than IE, can be easily set up to reject certain cookies of images. Therefore if the count depends on the id tag, or acceptance of a cookie, or the loading of an image, certain users will not be counted correctly. These systematic errors in methodology will tend to over-count the IE user, or the non tech savvy user that will tend not set these limits. In the end, one has to assume that the IE share has never been as high as the surveys suggest. One can also infer that the increase points to an increase in the number of average users switching to Mozilla, which is especially good news.
but...but...Tritium is the most valuable material in on earth. There is only 25 pounds of it. I think every new company is going have tritium or some variation of it in thier name. It so exudes power and value.
I know very few mac owners, but every I know does. In fact I have had a person switch because I let them use my tower G4.
I don't know if the economics of the consumer products would allow a test drive program. The machines are just so much cheaper now. Obviously sampling the XServe makes a lot of sense because it is a much more expensive machines and will often be bought in quantity.
What I think Apple is doing is letting the Apple Store serve this purpose. When I have been in there, the customers were just working on the mac. The salespeople were there to help, but mostly it was just watched the people get to know the machines. Standing up, sitting down, relaxing on the sofa. All this is a large open well designed boutique. Resellers may complain about the Apple Store, but I do not see any of them setting up a try it out salon.
MS was the underdog. The continuation of that mentality is why many of their products are by many metrics inferior. They have been reduced to paranoid tin foil hat wearing fanatics.
MS does not try to create innovate products for customers. All MS does is look at where it is losing market share, then quickly hack a barely functional product that will keep customers from leaving. The world went GUI, a year later MS had a GUI. The Internet happened, a year later MS had a browser. Customer started putting servers on commodity hardware, much later MS had server software. This has been the case with media players, music services, nearly everything. Even the wonderful Excel was based on other popular products.
MS needs to give up the browser. It was a ill thought out reaction to the fear of losing market share, and all the problems result from the bad engineering that occurs when people are in a hurry. IE makes a fine application frontend, and they should concentrate on promoting it for that use. Data servers on the back end, the local IE rendering the GUI.
This will not happen because MS quality cannot compete in the open marketplace, and though many will continue to use IE due to the tight integration with other MS products, others will use the change as an opportunity to move to more reliable solutions.
Type that into start/run on a Windows box - it works. Type it into the Address bar of IE - it works. Toss it into a webpage on the local machine and click on it - it works. Toss that webpage onto a remote server and click on it - it doesn't work any more. Different behaviors for different levels of trust
This is where is unclear who gets it wrong. Assuming that there is a legitimate need to run a local command from the browser line, where is "the single, unambiguous, authoritative representation" of the security protocol to reside. Is the check for security clearance within MS Windows accessible to every local program? If this is the case then Mozilla was written incorrectly because it duplicates knowledge. Or is the check for security protocols within IE and not available to every other browser. In this case MS is at fault because it promotes the duplication of standard bits of knowledge.
Dropping the previous assumption, why do we need to run arbitrary local programs from within a browser, especially without a bullet proof sandbox.
Why do we still get daily stories about how bad MS Windows programs are. It is just flamebait. Anyone on/. who still uses MS Windows knows that they need to check bug reports hourly and download updates daily. By the time it gets posted to/. it is too late to help. Half the internet has already been devastated.
I say no more! We gain nothing by making fun of those poor souls that must use MS Windows. We should have sympathy for these misguided children and not publicly air their misfortunes.
Stop the Madness! We, like Fox News, must limit ourselves to positive MS stories. But we can do even more. We can actively search for negative *nix stories in hope that our misfortune will make those hapless lusers feel better.
There was a time you could do simple things on simple machines. On an Apple ][, in a very few lines of code, I could do all sort of cool graphic manipulations with shape tables. All I needed was the built in basic.
At the same time, to do real coding I had to learn to log into the DEC machines, learn the command line, learn ed(no vi for us), learn Fortran, learn the compiler, learn the linker, learn the debugger. All this and no cool graphics. ASCII art doesn't count.
'Hello World' in Cocoa is like 5 lines. A black screen can be drawn in Interface Builder, which I believe generates no code, then a few lines of code to instantiate it.
I have a little nostalgia for the old days. OTOH I would hate to have to build a GUI using shape tables, or, god help us, the convoluted grapics of MS DOS. Now that I think of it, i did build a GUI in DOS. Never again.
It would be a different model, maybe not new. Your access to the network would have to be controlled somehow. Hourly rates, smart card subscription of various lengths, centralized passwords. Presumable there would be a range of access model for purchase. The purchase price would include all basic licenses, which would simplify things greatly. Perhaps advance apps would be licensed separately, perhaps using different smart cards or whatever.
As far as OS, we are getting beyond the OS, into application appliances, which would merely require an interface layer between the central server running the core apps and the local terminal running the GUI. The OS on these machines can be anything, as long as there is a layer to interface with the constant user elements. This is why it is so important that MS have a viable embedded system. At some point most of the market is going to be divided into servers, which may mostly be *nix based, and gloried dumb terminals that will have to work with the servers. It would limit the availability of software, but that is happening now anyway.
It will not be a service for everyone, but I can think of many people who might buy it. For instance, people now pay a few hundred dollars for a TV and $100 bucks a month for content. 30 years ago that was almost unheard of. You just bought and managed your own satellite dish.
For the sectors of server side applications that MS dominates, there is no room for Moz. If the execs want an MS only solution, then there is no reason to waste time or money trying to give something that isn't. There is little reason not to use IE in a controlled corporate Intranet.
The problem is giving the general public something they can use. Many servers on the Internet are not MS based. Most content on the Internet can be viewed using any reasonable browser. Most people use IE, which is a reasonable browser, becuase it comes with their machine and have been trained to think of it as synomous with the Internet. Therefore firms can code to IE and only risk losing a marginal number of customers.
The problem for Moz is the one site that will not work with Moz. Moz can be modified, but the MS will break it again on the next update. No matter how much we try, we cannot get the average user to run Moz in general and switch to IE for the one important site. That level of abstraction just does not exist for the average person.
The most useful xpi I have found is Flash Click to Play, formally and still listed as Flashblock. It lets me install Flash, which is becoming increasingly necessary in this image driven world, while letting me filter out the 99% of flash content that are gratuitous, ads, or simply bad animation.
BTW, Camino does not install this automatically, but is relatively simple to go into your chrome folder and hack it yourself.
You know, I violated copyright in high school. During college I got everything cut rate. After college I bought a lot of software. But in the past few years I have neither had to buy much software or violate copyright. It is so much easier to use what I have or download a free solution, or buy new hardware that comes with everything. It is not just worth the effort to steal. I doubt the kids who are just downloading (in my day it was strictly sneaker net) would buy the stuff anyway. Of course the best way to build the market is to let kids take it. I certainly bought the stuff as soon as I was able.
I used to spend some money on software. I don't anymore. It is not P2P, it is the massive integration of software in the OS, the lack of interesting innovation, and availability of free software. These factors mean that I pay significant money to Apple, but not much to anyone else. The most relevent is that most sofware people need comes with the computer. Most people are not to pay to upgrade software. They will just buy a new machine in a couple years. The upgrade fees will be half the cost of the machine!
But the most interesting of these to me is the lack of useful innovation, the corollary to which is the inclusion of stupid or harmful features. The best example is Quicken. I I still use my copy from many year ago. They haven't really done anything new that I need, and they keep pissing me off with their anti-customer scheme. Instead of continuing to build a good product, they wasted time on websites intended to squeeze more money from customers. I need to buy a new copy for OS X, but I don't trust them anymore. I will probably try an OSS instead.
Any Microsoft cure will include an EULA holding MS harmless for any side effects, even those caused by negligence, such as loss of limb, insanity, sexual dysfunction or death. The user is responsible for all expenses incurred in the care for the illnesses, even those caused by MS.
Health service providers will receive significant discounts if they furnish MS only solutions. These providers will not be able to diagnose any sickness for which a MS cure is not available. They will be forced to state that no virus exists prior to the MS cure. Since, according to the provider agreement, the dying patient is not physically sick, the provider may only refer the patient to a MS psychologist to treat the psychosomatic causes.
In addition, a licensing fee, to be renegotiated no less than every year, must be paid for as long as the body is in use. The prepaid fee will not be prorated. Special 100 year prepaid plans are available to protect the occupant of the body from violating license.
Any part transfered from a licensed body to a body, licensed or unlicensed, will require the full licensing fee to be paid for the receiving body. This will not affect the licensing fee required by the donor body. This will hold even if the donor body is no longer under active license.
A license will be required for each cure, and each transplant. If any license is shown to be invalid, the license and body will deemed and caused to become inactive. Special implanted electronics are available to help manage the licensing fee and insure the user of the body enjoys it's maximum use. A special 200 year full body licensing program may be purchased prior to the third trimester of pregnancy. It allows the user of the new body access to all current programs, and the option access future programs at member only fees. As part of the program, standard electronics must be implanted in the child's brain within 24 hours of birth.
First, the person who has the money always controls the person who wants it. That is the basis of the American economy. It is up to the individual to decide how much of that control is exercised, but the site of control is constant.
Second, most firms want to train consumers so the firm has all the control. The firm, of course, controls the employees and often exercise that control with extreme prejudice. But I, as the consumer, am in control of a sales situation. The firm is not doing me a favor by selling me a product, even if that sale is at a 'loss'. I am doing the firm a favor by purchasing the product, although I will admit that civility dictates I not take that control too far.
The problems in retail are almost always caused by the retailer creating promotions that are too complicated. For instance, three similar products are on the shelf, one is on sales, the other two, which has not been properly displayed, are not. Or you might get a discount for purchasing several of the same thing, but the quantity discount in in bold, while the real price is purposefully subdued.
These are often premeditated deceptive practices. It is the retailer that is wrong. The intelligent consumer will try to get back rightful control of the situation by manipulating the complexity of the terms to his or her advantage. The firm has devised the rules of engagement by creating complex terms. The consumer is merely making the best of bad situation.
Specifically addressing your example, which I assume comes from a movie house. The rules of engagement, as create by the business model, is one of the most convoluted and dishonest in history. I know theater managers. Charging for toppings that are not purchased. Advertising free refills that you know will seldom be used. Having prices so high and wages so low that the customer is put at risk because the kid can make more money reselling used cups and popcorn containers that working for a week. Setting up an adversarial relationship from the time the customer enters the premisses. The terms of sale are not misunderstood. The customer is merely trying to equalize a situation created by your boss. They have every right to do so. Your boss has said if they want food they have to buy it there. The price paid is always up for negotiation. Unfortunately, as a assigned flunky, you are not able to carry out such duties.
Negotiation is the basis for business. The problem is in retail, owners and managers tend to believe the customer is some inferior organism and not deserving of the respect that is necessary for negotiation.
First, the post is not talking about loading, it is talking about the locally compiled code running faster, which, presuming it is true, will result in some cost savings.
However, whether this is a real economy was the first thing I thought of. There is issue of computer time, labor, and even quality control. Such cacluations are extremely complicated, but estimates are generally possible.
Given the estimate, one can say how long the program will have to run to payback the initial outlay. Once done we can ask if the software be running that long? For instance, will an update, that will require a new build, be released prior to the payback date?
BTW, I do not undersand the statements elsewhere about buying a faster CPU. The CPU would likely speed up some of the program, but might no take into acount stream optimization, for instance. Also, a faster CPU would certainly make the build faster, which would reduce the payback time. It would seem both of these would work in tandem to help the firm design a suitable solution. The cost of the CPU, and installation, testing, ets, would have to be justified, just like the cost of the local build. Perhaps the local build is cheaper that the new kit.
The walkman succeeded due to copyright violation, and what many would consider fair use. Sure we sometimes bought the tape, but often we would just buy vinyl. Then we would buy cheap blank tapes and copy the album to use on the Walkman. If someone else had a copy, then we would make a copy. Of course even the cheap blank tapes were expensive, which made it hard to have money for the records, which made us copy other peoples albums. We certainly would have had no money for a walkman if we had to buy the recorded tape and vinyl for every album we wanted. It was also cool to trade the home recorded tapes.
Now Sony, like all labels, are obsessed with making every conceivable penny out of every recording. There is no longer the freedom to say that we will make some money here, some money there, and, overall we, will be fuckin' rich men.
This is why Apple has the popular media player and no one else does. It is not just design. It is that they are doing exactly what Sony did. Create a really great product without worrying about the consequences. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote about working at, i think, GE. One of the managers had the buggy whip cartoon on the door. You know, the one where the buggy whip manufacturer are lamenting declining sales. Vonnegut noted that GE did not realize that in many respects they were the buggy whip people.
Certainly the horseless carriage manufacturers did not worry about the buggy whip people. I am sure the buggy whip people would have like to sure the new fangled technology out of existence. I doubt that the Sony executives would want to travel to work in a horse drawn carriage.
Beyond the number of security alerts, one has to look at default setup and the time available to apply updates. MS does release patches quikcly, but that has not been a issue for A Long Time.
The traditional default setup of Windows is insecure. The new service pack will make the defualt setup secure, but will make IE and Outlook incompatable with legacy web apps. The decision to make IE insecure was surely a decision to put commercial interest ahead of consumer safety. MS has been forced to change, but it is not clear that consumers will follow. All it will take is a fraction of percent of users disabling the safegaurds to make the whole thing useless.
Also, most patches need to be installed immidiately. This is the biggest problem. MS always complains taht they released the patch a month ago and blame users. However, it is silly to assume that 100% of the users will ever install all patches. The math models tell us this will never be so, and complaining about is just another sign of math illiteracy. The percent that has unpatched machines are deadly.
So we must ask why everyone uses a machine that must be fixed immidiately or cause damage. This is what is called bad engineering. We should not accept such behavior from what should be a mature and commodity product.
So why is the x86 so important? It is clearly not the platform for the serious power user. I mean really. When MS wanted to revise the XBox in hopes of not only making it the most powerful game console, but also marketable, where did they turn? Intel? I think not. No, they went to the most powerful CPU on the planet. The PowerPC. MS is hoping to correct past mistakes by leaving the Intel legacy hardware. When MS designs thier own hardware, they use the PowerPC. Why should Apple do anything less.
If one wants a cheap solution, there are plenty of OSS solutions availble for the cheap x86. If one wants the Apple solution, buy the Apple hardware.
Moore can do this for two reasons. First, he never had to worry about people watching the downloads, then deciding the movie was not worth paying for. Moviemakers have gotten into the habit of creating a buzz to get people intot the theaters on the first weekend, and the hope the buzz would carry the movie no matter how bad the film acutally was. No refunds for a bad product. Now people can not only text the lameness of the movie, but can also download it and prove the inferior quality. The studios have made a lot of money but pissed of a lot of customers.
Second, this is a movie people want to see in a theater, and a movie people probably want to have a decent copy of to show friends. Although this is a movie one might see to be in with a peer group, that is not the only reason.
And so I think, politics aside, this is the way movies should be made. The buzz should be consistant with the movie, and should create a community of viewers that will propel the product. It would also be nice if studios would make the theater more of a partnet, so that the theaters once more cared about the viewing experience, instead of how much popcorn they can sell, or how many viewing they can fit in a day.
First, everyone is saying this is useless because the movie can still be copied. That is not the point. People, think about what the academy is trying to prevent. They are trying to prevent the DVD from walking out of of someones house and appearing on the street where just anyone can play the DVD. This sytem effectively crushes the market for Academy DVD.
My understanding is that the DVD and player are matched. Each DVD can only be played on one player. This means that even if a DVD escapes, it likely cannot easily be played elsewhere. If a copy of the movie is made, then it was probably off the Academy Member's machine, and there is probably some way to identifiy the member based on artifacts within the movie.. This is quite different from the current situation in which a member can just claim that the disk was 'lost',
And yet one must wonder about the reason to go through such expense. Buying $6,0000 customizable DVD player that are hardened against attack cannot be cheap. Making sure that none of the unassigned DVD players hit the street must be expensive. Producing 60000 custom DVD cannot be cheap. From a bidness point of view, is there a real ROI from these costs? The theaters continue to rack up sales at astronimical rates. DVD sales continue at equal an equal nerve wrenching pace. But for some reason the Academy wants to concentrate on the management of custom DVD players rather than the creative act of making film. Madness.
Windows 2000 = WinNT 5.0
Windows XP Pro= WinNT 5.1
Windows XP Home=Windows ME + bug fixes + eye candy
Apple has released one update per year. The price for the full single user license is about 1/2 the price of the equivalent upgrade MS Windows License. For the same price of the windows product, I can fully license five machines on Mac OS.
And as far as CPU cycles. MS has always wasted those. It is a little game they play. Planned obsolence for hardware and software. something Apple only does when they change the fundementals in the OS.
Probably the same as the number of opera houses, or vaudeville theathers, or movie theaters, or radio shows. They will still exist. And the very young, very old, or simply nostalgic, will think them groovy.
'Oh, a tv. Can we watch a while!'
'No, dear, we better just leave quietly. I hear that it makes you fat.'
Many years ago Radio shack had the perfect remote control. It was programmable for 6 or 8 devices, it had a LCD screen to indicate device selection and status, had a clock, and was scriptable. The scripts could be set to execute at certain times.
It was a little hard to set up because all the commands had to programmed in from an existing remote. This was bad because this unit would not replace a lost remote, but good because it was expandle to work with all devices.
Unfortunately, it broke and I have seen nothing like it, at least for the price(less than $100) and with the level of simplicity that characterized the remote. I wish they would bring it back.
One reason they may not is becuase the remote had no planned obsolescence. It was built to last, and you did not have to buy a replacement when the manufacturers changed thier codes.
I do not believe the marketing department drives MS. Ms is driven by an compusive desire to maintain market share. I think that MS, like many religions, believe that they are the single path to salvation, and all others lead the ignorant astry to eternal suffering.
Ok, that may be a little over the top, but MS has really done little innovation wrt to serving customers in over 5 years, and, since it missed the begining of the Internet, it main mission has been to control the marketplace. This energy, which would be better spent creating useful products, has caused damage that we will only fully catagorize once MS is no longer a monopoly.
So I believe it has to do with deadlines or marketing. MS cam write good code, and, before it's decline into senility wrote some of the best books on programming. Now, hoever they seem to live in a culture of fear. Thier money dependemt on market share, not products.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not irony. That is what happened.
Actually, the numbers may be in worse shape that you suggest. Most browsers, other than IE, allow you to specify your preferred agent identifier. Additionally most modern browsers, other than IE, can be easily set up to reject certain cookies of images. Therefore if the count depends on the id tag, or acceptance of a cookie, or the loading of an image, certain users will not be counted correctly. These systematic errors in methodology will tend to over-count the IE user, or the non tech savvy user that will tend not set these limits. In the end, one has to assume that the IE share has never been as high as the surveys suggest. One can also infer that the increase points to an increase in the number of average users switching to Mozilla, which is especially good news.
but...but...Tritium is the most valuable material in on earth. There is only 25 pounds of it. I think every new company is going have tritium or some variation of it in thier name. It so exudes power and value.
Or is it a coincidence that record downloaded coincides with record ticket and DVD sales.?
I don't know if the economics of the consumer products would allow a test drive program. The machines are just so much cheaper now. Obviously sampling the XServe makes a lot of sense because it is a much more expensive machines and will often be bought in quantity.
What I think Apple is doing is letting the Apple Store serve this purpose. When I have been in there, the customers were just working on the mac. The salespeople were there to help, but mostly it was just watched the people get to know the machines. Standing up, sitting down, relaxing on the sofa. All this is a large open well designed boutique. Resellers may complain about the Apple Store, but I do not see any of them setting up a try it out salon.
MS does not try to create innovate products for customers. All MS does is look at where it is losing market share, then quickly hack a barely functional product that will keep customers from leaving. The world went GUI, a year later MS had a GUI. The Internet happened, a year later MS had a browser. Customer started putting servers on commodity hardware, much later MS had server software. This has been the case with media players, music services, nearly everything. Even the wonderful Excel was based on other popular products.
MS needs to give up the browser. It was a ill thought out reaction to the fear of losing market share, and all the problems result from the bad engineering that occurs when people are in a hurry. IE makes a fine application frontend, and they should concentrate on promoting it for that use. Data servers on the back end, the local IE rendering the GUI.
This will not happen because MS quality cannot compete in the open marketplace, and though many will continue to use IE due to the tight integration with other MS products, others will use the change as an opportunity to move to more reliable solutions.
This is where is unclear who gets it wrong. Assuming that there is a legitimate need to run a local command from the browser line, where is "the single, unambiguous, authoritative representation" of the security protocol to reside. Is the check for security clearance within MS Windows accessible to every local program? If this is the case then Mozilla was written incorrectly because it duplicates knowledge. Or is the check for security protocols within IE and not available to every other browser. In this case MS is at fault because it promotes the duplication of standard bits of knowledge.
Dropping the previous assumption, why do we need to run arbitrary local programs from within a browser, especially without a bullet proof sandbox.
I say no more! We gain nothing by making fun of those poor souls that must use MS Windows. We should have sympathy for these misguided children and not publicly air their misfortunes.
Stop the Madness! We, like Fox News, must limit ourselves to positive MS stories. But we can do even more. We can actively search for negative *nix stories in hope that our misfortune will make those hapless lusers feel better.
At the same time, to do real coding I had to learn to log into the DEC machines, learn the command line, learn ed(no vi for us), learn Fortran, learn the compiler, learn the linker, learn the debugger. All this and no cool graphics. ASCII art doesn't count.
'Hello World' in Cocoa is like 5 lines. A black screen can be drawn in Interface Builder, which I believe generates no code, then a few lines of code to instantiate it.
I have a little nostalgia for the old days. OTOH I would hate to have to build a GUI using shape tables, or, god help us, the convoluted grapics of MS DOS. Now that I think of it, i did build a GUI in DOS. Never again.
As far as OS, we are getting beyond the OS, into application appliances, which would merely require an interface layer between the central server running the core apps and the local terminal running the GUI. The OS on these machines can be anything, as long as there is a layer to interface with the constant user elements. This is why it is so important that MS have a viable embedded system. At some point most of the market is going to be divided into servers, which may mostly be *nix based, and gloried dumb terminals that will have to work with the servers. It would limit the availability of software, but that is happening now anyway.
It will not be a service for everyone, but I can think of many people who might buy it. For instance, people now pay a few hundred dollars for a TV and $100 bucks a month for content. 30 years ago that was almost unheard of. You just bought and managed your own satellite dish.
The problem is giving the general public something they can use. Many servers on the Internet are not MS based. Most content on the Internet can be viewed using any reasonable browser. Most people use IE, which is a reasonable browser, becuase it comes with their machine and have been trained to think of it as synomous with the Internet. Therefore firms can code to IE and only risk losing a marginal number of customers.
The problem for Moz is the one site that will not work with Moz. Moz can be modified, but the MS will break it again on the next update. No matter how much we try, we cannot get the average user to run Moz in general and switch to IE for the one important site. That level of abstraction just does not exist for the average person.
BTW, Camino does not install this automatically, but is relatively simple to go into your chrome folder and hack it yourself.
I used to spend some money on software. I don't anymore. It is not P2P, it is the massive integration of software in the OS, the lack of interesting innovation, and availability of free software. These factors mean that I pay significant money to Apple, but not much to anyone else. The most relevent is that most sofware people need comes with the computer. Most people are not to pay to upgrade software. They will just buy a new machine in a couple years. The upgrade fees will be half the cost of the machine!
But the most interesting of these to me is the lack of useful innovation, the corollary to which is the inclusion of stupid or harmful features. The best example is Quicken. I I still use my copy from many year ago. They haven't really done anything new that I need, and they keep pissing me off with their anti-customer scheme. Instead of continuing to build a good product, they wasted time on websites intended to squeeze more money from customers. I need to buy a new copy for OS X, but I don't trust them anymore. I will probably try an OSS instead.
Health service providers will receive significant discounts if they furnish MS only solutions. These providers will not be able to diagnose any sickness for which a MS cure is not available. They will be forced to state that no virus exists prior to the MS cure. Since, according to the provider agreement, the dying patient is not physically sick, the provider may only refer the patient to a MS psychologist to treat the psychosomatic causes.
In addition, a licensing fee, to be renegotiated no less than every year, must be paid for as long as the body is in use. The prepaid fee will not be prorated. Special 100 year prepaid plans are available to protect the occupant of the body from violating license.
Any part transfered from a licensed body to a body, licensed or unlicensed, will require the full licensing fee to be paid for the receiving body. This will not affect the licensing fee required by the donor body. This will hold even if the donor body is no longer under active license.
A license will be required for each cure, and each transplant. If any license is shown to be invalid, the license and body will deemed and caused to become inactive. Special implanted electronics are available to help manage the licensing fee and insure the user of the body enjoys it's maximum use. A special 200 year full body licensing program may be purchased prior to the third trimester of pregnancy. It allows the user of the new body access to all current programs, and the option access future programs at member only fees. As part of the program, standard electronics must be implanted in the child's brain within 24 hours of birth.
No refunds.
Second, most firms want to train consumers so the firm has all the control. The firm, of course, controls the employees and often exercise that control with extreme prejudice. But I, as the consumer, am in control of a sales situation. The firm is not doing me a favor by selling me a product, even if that sale is at a 'loss'. I am doing the firm a favor by purchasing the product, although I will admit that civility dictates I not take that control too far.
The problems in retail are almost always caused by the retailer creating promotions that are too complicated. For instance, three similar products are on the shelf, one is on sales, the other two, which has not been properly displayed, are not. Or you might get a discount for purchasing several of the same thing, but the quantity discount in in bold, while the real price is purposefully subdued.
These are often premeditated deceptive practices. It is the retailer that is wrong. The intelligent consumer will try to get back rightful control of the situation by manipulating the complexity of the terms to his or her advantage. The firm has devised the rules of engagement by creating complex terms. The consumer is merely making the best of bad situation.
Specifically addressing your example, which I assume comes from a movie house. The rules of engagement, as create by the business model, is one of the most convoluted and dishonest in history. I know theater managers. Charging for toppings that are not purchased. Advertising free refills that you know will seldom be used. Having prices so high and wages so low that the customer is put at risk because the kid can make more money reselling used cups and popcorn containers that working for a week. Setting up an adversarial relationship from the time the customer enters the premisses. The terms of sale are not misunderstood. The customer is merely trying to equalize a situation created by your boss. They have every right to do so. Your boss has said if they want food they have to buy it there. The price paid is always up for negotiation. Unfortunately, as a assigned flunky, you are not able to carry out such duties.
Negotiation is the basis for business. The problem is in retail, owners and managers tend to believe the customer is some inferior organism and not deserving of the respect that is necessary for negotiation.
However, whether this is a real economy was the first thing I thought of. There is issue of computer time, labor, and even quality control. Such cacluations are extremely complicated, but estimates are generally possible.
Given the estimate, one can say how long the program will have to run to payback the initial outlay. Once done we can ask if the software be running that long? For instance, will an update, that will require a new build, be released prior to the payback date?
BTW, I do not undersand the statements elsewhere about buying a faster CPU. The CPU would likely speed up some of the program, but might no take into acount stream optimization, for instance. Also, a faster CPU would certainly make the build faster, which would reduce the payback time. It would seem both of these would work in tandem to help the firm design a suitable solution. The cost of the CPU, and installation, testing, ets, would have to be justified, just like the cost of the local build. Perhaps the local build is cheaper that the new kit.
The walkman succeeded due to copyright violation, and what many would consider fair use. Sure we sometimes bought the tape, but often we would just buy vinyl. Then we would buy cheap blank tapes and copy the album to use on the Walkman. If someone else had a copy, then we would make a copy. Of course even the cheap blank tapes were expensive, which made it hard to have money for the records, which made us copy other peoples albums. We certainly would have had no money for a walkman if we had to buy the recorded tape and vinyl for every album we wanted. It was also cool to trade the home recorded tapes.
Now Sony, like all labels, are obsessed with making every conceivable penny out of every recording. There is no longer the freedom to say that we will make some money here, some money there, and, overall we, will be fuckin' rich men.
This is why Apple has the popular media player and no one else does. It is not just design. It is that they are doing exactly what Sony did. Create a really great product without worrying about the consequences. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote about working at, i think, GE. One of the managers had the buggy whip cartoon on the door. You know, the one where the buggy whip manufacturer are lamenting declining sales. Vonnegut noted that GE did not realize that in many respects they were the buggy whip people.
Certainly the horseless carriage manufacturers did not worry about the buggy whip people. I am sure the buggy whip people would have like to sure the new fangled technology out of existence. I doubt that the Sony executives would want to travel to work in a horse drawn carriage.
The traditional default setup of Windows is insecure. The new service pack will make the defualt setup secure, but will make IE and Outlook incompatable with legacy web apps. The decision to make IE insecure was surely a decision to put commercial interest ahead of consumer safety. MS has been forced to change, but it is not clear that consumers will follow. All it will take is a fraction of percent of users disabling the safegaurds to make the whole thing useless.
Also, most patches need to be installed immidiately. This is the biggest problem. MS always complains taht they released the patch a month ago and blame users. However, it is silly to assume that 100% of the users will ever install all patches. The math models tell us this will never be so, and complaining about is just another sign of math illiteracy. The percent that has unpatched machines are deadly.
So we must ask why everyone uses a machine that must be fixed immidiately or cause damage. This is what is called bad engineering. We should not accept such behavior from what should be a mature and commodity product.
If one wants a cheap solution, there are plenty of OSS solutions availble for the cheap x86. If one wants the Apple solution, buy the Apple hardware.
Second, this is a movie people want to see in a theater, and a movie people probably want to have a decent copy of to show friends. Although this is a movie one might see to be in with a peer group, that is not the only reason.
And so I think, politics aside, this is the way movies should be made. The buzz should be consistant with the movie, and should create a community of viewers that will propel the product. It would also be nice if studios would make the theater more of a partnet, so that the theaters once more cared about the viewing experience, instead of how much popcorn they can sell, or how many viewing they can fit in a day.
My understanding is that the DVD and player are matched. Each DVD can only be played on one player. This means that even if a DVD escapes, it likely cannot easily be played elsewhere. If a copy of the movie is made, then it was probably off the Academy Member's machine, and there is probably some way to identifiy the member based on artifacts within the movie.. This is quite different from the current situation in which a member can just claim that the disk was 'lost',
And yet one must wonder about the reason to go through such expense. Buying $6,0000 customizable DVD player that are hardened against attack cannot be cheap. Making sure that none of the unassigned DVD players hit the street must be expensive. Producing 60000 custom DVD cannot be cheap. From a bidness point of view, is there a real ROI from these costs? The theaters continue to rack up sales at astronimical rates. DVD sales continue at equal an equal nerve wrenching pace. But for some reason the Academy wants to concentrate on the management of custom DVD players rather than the creative act of making film. Madness.
Windows 2000 = WinNT 5.0
Windows XP Pro= WinNT 5.1
Windows XP Home=Windows ME + bug fixes + eye candy
Apple has released one update per year. The price for the full single user license is about 1/2 the price of the equivalent upgrade MS Windows License. For the same price of the windows product, I can fully license five machines on Mac OS.
And as far as CPU cycles. MS has always wasted those. It is a little game they play. Planned obsolence for hardware and software. something Apple only does when they change the fundementals in the OS.
'Oh, a tv. Can we watch a while!'
'No, dear, we better just leave quietly. I hear that it makes you fat.'
It was a little hard to set up because all the commands had to programmed in from an existing remote. This was bad because this unit would not replace a lost remote, but good because it was expandle to work with all devices. Unfortunately, it broke and I have seen nothing like it, at least for the price(less than $100) and with the level of simplicity that characterized the remote. I wish they would bring it back.
One reason they may not is becuase the remote had no planned obsolescence. It was built to last, and you did not have to buy a replacement when the manufacturers changed thier codes.
Ok, that may be a little over the top, but MS has really done little innovation wrt to serving customers in over 5 years, and, since it missed the begining of the Internet, it main mission has been to control the marketplace. This energy, which would be better spent creating useful products, has caused damage that we will only fully catagorize once MS is no longer a monopoly.
So I believe it has to do with deadlines or marketing. MS cam write good code, and, before it's decline into senility wrote some of the best books on programming. Now, hoever they seem to live in a culture of fear. Thier money dependemt on market share, not products.