Well, except the "Intermediate" tasks, which they omitted. If you ask me, playing video isn't such an "advanced task" though -- rendering it, yeah, but playing it back? Isn't that more of a GPU task?
I always thought it was funny to see the phrase "industrial-strength steel" -- as though there was steel on the market that *wasn't* produced by heavy industry... "Oh yeah, sure, I have a little smelter in my basement, but I only use that for light applications, you wanna do this job right you gotta use industrial strength steel!"
Not to mention the fact that if they had brought water with them, it would have raised the question of any water-detecting experiments getting a false-positive from the reservoir they brought with them contaminating the experiment somehow.
Yeah, but everyone's imperfect film prints are safely tucked away in photo albums where the public will never have to look at them. With digital images being so easy to distribute via email and http, it's becoming akin to a form of literacy. If you're going to play around with an artistic medium and plan on letting the world look at it, pride will dictate that you learn how to do a decent job.
It kindof mirrors the way that the original photographic revolution sparked a revolution in personal grooming and appearance consciousness. Bad hair, teeth, and not smiling suddenly became unfashionable once your appearance could be captured and preserved for posterity.
I understand very well that business wants to maximize profits. However, a company can only make a profit AT ALL by keeping its customers happy, or by selling products that customers cannot live without.
In an information vaccuum, re-using your R&D to bring a crippled version of some product to market for the sole purpose of protecting a high-end product's price point makes total sense.
However, we are not in an information vaccuum. If customers learn about this practice, and care, it is easy to predict that they will not like it very much. This could eventually bring about a situation in which the company's profitability is negatively impacted. In such a situation, the company's strategy will have backfired.
Hi, I'm in the market, and I'm here to tell you I won't bear this. Perhaps enough others will that you can stay in business with that attitude. But I think if I'm able to get the facts out to people, you'll have to change your practices or be run out of town.
That's a good point about some users wanting simplicity and not needing a full-featured general purpose solution when they really only want to do one basic task.
I tend to think that this is more of a problem for user interface design. But I can also appreciate that for some people, all they really need to do what they want might be included in, say, WordPad.exe, and such a user might consider MSOffice to be grossly bloated and unnecessary.
I also tend to think that "professionals" might also tend to fear what would happen to their industries if the tools they use to get their work done suddenly became cheaply available to the masses. I woule expect see a lot more people taking a DIY approach rather than pay for an expert to do the work. But this is really a win because it enables more people to do things they otherwise might not be able to afford, and would serve to reduce the cost of services and/or improve productivity, and this is after all what tools are supposed to do for us. For the forseeable future, for truly good results when it counts, I don't think you can beat an experienced professional sitting in the driver's seat. The good ones will still find their services in demand.
For your example, an "acceptable" solution might be a script or plug-in designed to work with a fully-featured Photoshop or GIMP which would automate his specific task and make the process simple and easy. This would be preferrable to stripping the components away (assuming that the system he's running is not strapped for hardware requirements and could actually benefit from a leaner app). It would also be better than the self-modifying "basic/advanced" user interface that tends to annoy and get in the way of actually using the software
There's certainly much to be said against a one-size fits all solution -- it depends not just on what the user's actual problem is, but what their system limitations are, as well. A camera phone might not be the best place to run Photoshop, but would still benefit from some very basic and lightweight tool that could perform rudimentary image adjustments.
...it's cheaper to make a million of the same chip, and break half of them, then to make half a million of two separate designs.
I don't deny that. BUT, it's not about whether it's cheaper to produce them, is it? I see it as a question of how the manufacturer believes they can best maximize their revenue.
To do this, they produce a high end version which they sell at a premium price to a limited customer base. To protect that price point, they also sell a dumbed down/crippled version of the same product, or something very close but with some minimal, minor differences that aren't really worth the difference in suggested retail price for most consumers. Where this gets irritating is when the high-end mode's extra features aren't enough to justify the premium markup, or when the low-end model's crippling is so cheaply avoidable or makes the model pretty much unacceptable for anyone who wants to own more than a toy.
Now, it could be that the low-end product that's aimed at the mass market is a loss leader, and the company really only makes its money off of the high end product. But that's highly unlikely, because what would be the incentive of producing the cheaper version at all if that were the case?
Clearly, the low-end model *is* profitable, then. It's just that the high-end model is *more* profitable. BUT, if the manufacturer would eliminate the low-end model from the product line entirely, and move the high-end model down to the price point of the vanquished crippled version, or maybe just slightly higher, they could provide better quality to a much broader market. But they don't, and as a result only the wealthy can afford the "luxury" of high-quality, and the masses have to accept whatever they can afford.
What's *wrong* about this is that it wouldn't take much to align the economy in such a way that the high quality features were available to all equally and at a more reasonable price than the premiums charged for the limited market products due to the benefits of the economies of scale that you mention.
Situations such as (my favorite example) $500 MS Office for the corporate world/$99 MS Works for the home market should simply not exist. Instead, we should see a $150 MS Office for EVERYONE, and no interoperability problems created by two incompatible solutions to the same problem. You shouldn't have a $700 Photoshop for graphic artist professionals and a $99 Photoshop Lite, which is the same product but for certain features being disabled when the binaries are compiled, for home users. Instead should have a $200 Photoshop for everyone.
I never said it was a good argument, only that it's what they'd come back with. I'd come back with that there are many activities I can choose to engage in which don't add to their bottom line, yet that doesn't meant I'm stealing from them.
CWRU has had its fiber network since the 1980's or early 90's at the latest. I imagine they've probably gone through some expansion and upgrading in the intervening years, but back when I was looking at colleges this was one of the features they touted highly during the campus tour.
The point of this discovery is not that you can get a higher-end product for cheaper if you know a few tricks.
It's that companies are selling the masses crippled products that are identical to their high-end line but for some software lockout. Assuming they can sell the crippled item at a lower cost and still make a profit, there's no reason they couldn't sell the full-featured version at the same price and still make a profit.
Consumers are getting the shaft any time they buy these crippled products. They shouldn't HAVE to hack something to unlock built-in features. Products like the Canon Digital Rebel, and Microsoft Works, have no true place in the market. They only serve to keep the prices of better products artificially high.
They'll come back at you with the argument that every minute spent playing a free game of Pac Man or Bump N Jump is a minute spent depriving their currently-marketed games of revenue.
I have 54,000 miles on my car right now. I've had it about five years, which, I guess, could be considered a long time. But if my car wasn't any good after 40,000 miles I'd be pretty pissed.
I know some people do the 3-year lease thing and get a new car every 40,000 miles -- it's pretty wasteful compared to buying a car to drive it for 100,000+ miles. As long as you do regular maintenance and fix small problems before they get big, keeping a car for its full lifetime is very advantageous from an economics standpoint.
1 - Data backup. Your data is probably the most valuable thing on the equipment you carry. Back it up so you don't lose it. Encrypt it so no one else can get it if they do get your equipment.
2 - Insurance. No matter what happens, a good insurance policy is going to be your best defense. Damage, theft, whatever, insurance can cover it.
3 - Go armed. You may need permits, and it may be illegal in many places, but if you're serious about self defense, you should arm yourself. Criminals by and large do NOT expect to find their target armed, and if they see that you are will more than likely seek another target.
I think Dell wouldn't want the other companies to stop innovating. I think they'd want to them to stop competing with Dell by bringing those innovations to the market. Dell would rather have the innovators bring their innovations directly to Dell, who could then perfect, package, market, and support them to Dell's customers.
To put it another way, the days of the 70's and 80's when people would be content to buy a computer that you need to solder together yourself, and then figure out how to program are pretty much never coming back. People want stuff that works and works reliably, not something that supposedly works but actually won't for another few years because the innovations are too new and the bugs and user interface issues haven't all been ironed out completely yet.
Dell has a track record of doing the above somewhat well, but has succeeded in large part by doing it cheaper and supporting it better than the competition.
Of course, even Dell is prone to trying to undercut costs too much and ending up shooting themselves in the foot by buying poor quality parts or outsourcing their support centers to cheap labor countries.
The Oscars don't have a category for commentary or polemic, but his film was noteworthy enough that it got recognition for the category that it most closely fit.
It wouldn't be that hard to set up filters and scripts to auto-reply to properly formatted requests for files by sending the requested file, zipped and broken up into 10MB chunks. Think listserve.
It's a number. You can't trademark or copyright or patent a number.
It's not even spelled the same way! At least google didn't go the 80's hair metal way and spell it "gügyl".
Google connotes in my own mind oogle, which means to "look". If you look through a googol (not that we're anywhere close to that, yet) data resources for a bit of information, what other word better describes that than "googling"?
The family hasn't done anything to contribute to the success of Google the business entity.
This is a totally frivolous, bogus lawsuit. I hope the plaintiffs fall flat on their faces.
Google is a good, fun to say name that doesn't sound evil or harmful or too serious. The name "google" gives me a happy feeling.
Slashdot Mirror
"HUH?"
Well, except the "Intermediate" tasks, which they omitted. If you ask me, playing video isn't such an "advanced task" though -- rendering it, yeah, but playing it back? Isn't that more of a GPU task?
I always thought it was funny to see the phrase "industrial-strength steel" -- as though there was steel on the market that *wasn't* produced by heavy industry... "Oh yeah, sure, I have a little smelter in my basement, but I only use that for light applications, you wanna do this job right you gotta use industrial strength steel!"
This is neither amusing nor is it a fix.
Not to mention the fact that if they had brought water with them, it would have raised the question of any water-detecting experiments getting a false-positive from the reservoir they brought with them contaminating the experiment somehow.
Yeah, but everyone's imperfect film prints are safely tucked away in photo albums where the public will never have to look at them. With digital images being so easy to distribute via email and http, it's becoming akin to a form of literacy. If you're going to play around with an artistic medium and plan on letting the world look at it, pride will dictate that you learn how to do a decent job.
It kindof mirrors the way that the original photographic revolution sparked a revolution in personal grooming and appearance consciousness. Bad hair, teeth, and not smiling suddenly became unfashionable once your appearance could be captured and preserved for posterity.
I think the bigger story is how did this guy manage to get 8 hours of sleep every night? I'm lucky if I get six, most weekdays...
Or building an OS around NT Technology.
I understand very well that business wants to maximize profits. However, a company can only make a profit AT ALL by keeping its customers happy, or by selling products that customers cannot live without.
In an information vaccuum, re-using your R&D to bring a crippled version of some product to market for the sole purpose of protecting a high-end product's price point makes total sense.
However, we are not in an information vaccuum. If customers learn about this practice, and care, it is easy to predict that they will not like it very much. This could eventually bring about a situation in which the company's profitability is negatively impacted. In such a situation, the company's strategy will have backfired.
Hi, I'm in the market, and I'm here to tell you I won't bear this. Perhaps enough others will that you can stay in business with that attitude. But I think if I'm able to get the facts out to people, you'll have to change your practices or be run out of town.
That's a good point about some users wanting simplicity and not needing a full-featured general purpose solution when they really only want to do one basic task.
I tend to think that this is more of a problem for user interface design. But I can also appreciate that for some people, all they really need to do what they want might be included in, say, WordPad.exe, and such a user might consider MSOffice to be grossly bloated and unnecessary.
I also tend to think that "professionals" might also tend to fear what would happen to their industries if the tools they use to get their work done suddenly became cheaply available to the masses. I woule expect see a lot more people taking a DIY approach rather than pay for an expert to do the work. But this is really a win because it enables more people to do things they otherwise might not be able to afford, and would serve to reduce the cost of services and/or improve productivity, and this is after all what tools are supposed to do for us. For the forseeable future, for truly good results when it counts, I don't think you can beat an experienced professional sitting in the driver's seat. The good ones will still find their services in demand.
For your example, an "acceptable" solution might be a script or plug-in designed to work with a fully-featured Photoshop or GIMP which would automate his specific task and make the process simple and easy. This would be preferrable to stripping the components away (assuming that the system he's running is not strapped for hardware requirements and could actually benefit from a leaner app). It would also be better than the self-modifying "basic/advanced" user interface that tends to annoy and get in the way of actually using the software
There's certainly much to be said against a one-size fits all solution -- it depends not just on what the user's actual problem is, but what their system limitations are, as well. A camera phone might not be the best place to run Photoshop, but would still benefit from some very basic and lightweight tool that could perform rudimentary image adjustments.
...it's cheaper to make a million of the same chip, and break half of them, then to make half a million of two separate designs.
I don't deny that. BUT, it's not about whether it's cheaper to produce them, is it? I see it as a question of how the manufacturer believes they can best maximize their revenue.
To do this, they produce a high end version which they sell at a premium price to a limited customer base. To protect that price point, they also sell a dumbed down/crippled version of the same product, or something very close but with some minimal, minor differences that aren't really worth the difference in suggested retail price for most consumers. Where this gets irritating is when the high-end mode's extra features aren't enough to justify the premium markup, or when the low-end model's crippling is so cheaply avoidable or makes the model pretty much unacceptable for anyone who wants to own more than a toy.
Now, it could be that the low-end product that's aimed at the mass market is a loss leader, and the company really only makes its money off of the high end product. But that's highly unlikely, because what would be the incentive of producing the cheaper version at all if that were the case?
Clearly, the low-end model *is* profitable, then. It's just that the high-end model is *more* profitable. BUT, if the manufacturer would eliminate the low-end model from the product line entirely, and move the high-end model down to the price point of the vanquished crippled version, or maybe just slightly higher, they could provide better quality to a much broader market. But they don't, and as a result only the wealthy can afford the "luxury" of high-quality, and the masses have to accept whatever they can afford.
What's *wrong* about this is that it wouldn't take much to align the economy in such a way that the high quality features were available to all equally and at a more reasonable price than the premiums charged for the limited market products due to the benefits of the economies of scale that you mention.
Situations such as (my favorite example) $500 MS Office for the corporate world/$99 MS Works for the home market should simply not exist. Instead, we should see a $150 MS Office for EVERYONE, and no interoperability problems created by two incompatible solutions to the same problem. You shouldn't have a $700 Photoshop for graphic artist professionals and a $99 Photoshop Lite, which is the same product but for certain features being disabled when the binaries are compiled, for home users. Instead should have a $200 Photoshop for everyone.
I never said it was a good argument, only that it's what they'd come back with. I'd come back with that there are many activities I can choose to engage in which don't add to their bottom line, yet that doesn't meant I'm stealing from them.
CWRU has had its fiber network since the 1980's or early 90's at the latest. I imagine they've probably gone through some expansion and upgrading in the intervening years, but back when I was looking at colleges this was one of the features they touted highly during the campus tour.
No, no, no.
The point of this discovery is not that you can get a higher-end product for cheaper if you know a few tricks.
It's that companies are selling the masses crippled products that are identical to their high-end line but for some software lockout. Assuming they can sell the crippled item at a lower cost and still make a profit, there's no reason they couldn't sell the full-featured version at the same price and still make a profit.
Consumers are getting the shaft any time they buy these crippled products. They shouldn't HAVE to hack something to unlock built-in features. Products like the Canon Digital Rebel, and Microsoft Works, have no true place in the market. They only serve to keep the prices of better products artificially high.
They'll come back at you with the argument that every minute spent playing a free game of Pac Man or Bump N Jump is a minute spent depriving their currently-marketed games of revenue.
The rebuild project was initiated in 1993, so a 486 they used at the time was a high-end workstation.
Yes. And if it's secure, and you can crack the security, then it's open. ;)
I have 54,000 miles on my car right now. I've had it about five years, which, I guess, could be considered a long time. But if my car wasn't any good after 40,000 miles I'd be pretty pissed.
I know some people do the 3-year lease thing and get a new car every 40,000 miles -- it's pretty wasteful compared to buying a car to drive it for 100,000+ miles. As long as you do regular maintenance and fix small problems before they get big, keeping a car for its full lifetime is very advantageous from an economics standpoint.
1 - Data backup. Your data is probably the most valuable thing on the equipment you carry. Back it up so you don't lose it. Encrypt it so no one else can get it if they do get your equipment.
2 - Insurance. No matter what happens, a good insurance policy is going to be your best defense. Damage, theft, whatever, insurance can cover it.
3 - Go armed. You may need permits, and it may be illegal in many places, but if you're serious about self defense, you should arm yourself. Criminals by and large do NOT expect to find their target armed, and if they see that you are will more than likely seek another target.
I think Dell wouldn't want the other companies to stop innovating. I think they'd want to them to stop competing with Dell by bringing those innovations to the market. Dell would rather have the innovators bring their innovations directly to Dell, who could then perfect, package, market, and support them to Dell's customers.
To put it another way, the days of the 70's and 80's when people would be content to buy a computer that you need to solder together yourself, and then figure out how to program are pretty much never coming back. People want stuff that works and works reliably, not something that supposedly works but actually won't for another few years because the innovations are too new and the bugs and user interface issues haven't all been ironed out completely yet.
Dell has a track record of doing the above somewhat well, but has succeeded in large part by doing it cheaper and supporting it better than the competition.
Of course, even Dell is prone to trying to undercut costs too much and ending up shooting themselves in the foot by buying poor quality parts or outsourcing their support centers to cheap labor countries.
The Oscars don't have a category for commentary or polemic, but his film was noteworthy enough that it got recognition for the category that it most closely fit.
Yeah, maybe, but if you look at the prequels through a child's eye, they still suck.
It wouldn't be that hard to set up filters and scripts to auto-reply to properly formatted requests for files by sending the requested file, zipped and broken up into 10MB chunks. Think listserve.
It's a number. You can't trademark or copyright or patent a number.
It's not even spelled the same way! At least google didn't go the 80's hair metal way and spell it "gügyl".
Google connotes in my own mind oogle, which means to "look". If you look through a googol (not that we're anywhere close to that, yet) data resources for a bit of information, what other word better describes that than "googling"?
The family hasn't done anything to contribute to the success of Google the business entity.
This is a totally frivolous, bogus lawsuit. I hope the plaintiffs fall flat on their faces.
Google is a good, fun to say name that doesn't sound evil or harmful or too serious. The name "google" gives me a happy feeling.