That's just it. I have a feeling that these companies feel the market justifies a high price and so there is probably a ton of premium baked into these things. With the craze going around the hp touchpad, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the lesser manufacturers takes a hint and drops their price for high end tablet hardware to ride the same wave.
I have to say, I used vi for a long time but then switched to vim for syntax highlighting and deletion of history. People seem to get bent out of shape with it but my guess is that it just doesn't match the format of the file they are editing, so fair enough, disable it for those files. I still can't stand emacs, though, even though I work with an army of developers that use it and need to use it for their IDE. Maybe if people just used your phrase, but with a small alteration, they would not hate vim so much:
I use vim to write code, and vi to edit config files.
Considering the number or patches and updates that come out on a regular basis, it really isn't a bad habit to reboot weekly. Besides, you collapse your expectations that everything is working correctly on an actualized understanding that everything is working correctly every time you do a change in your environment that has any unforeseen potential of impacting your machines.
Try to sell your dad on a spending rate. You can't guarantee a computer to last 15 years, but if you can figure out his risk tolerance and try to maintain his spending allowance. If he bought two 486s in 1994 and each were $2000 and the value of the dollar being about 1.3 what it is now, so he spent $5200 in today's currency back in 1994, that's about $350/year. Do you think with these numbers, you could convince him that it would be worth buying two netbooks for about $350 each, with the high chance they would last two years? If they last an unheard of 3 years, he would actually be spending less per year 700/3 ~ 250. If they last more he will actually be saving money over his old setup.
In fact, if he took the same amount of money, $5200. Invested $700 in hardware. Put the remaining 4500 into bonds at 5%, over 15 years he could almost buy a new netbook every year on interest alone.
-Bjorn
Even if they had a similar algorithm, it was still either created by a student or staff member. If it's staff than it's rightful the college's property but if it's a student's I think there is a contradiction. The student is paying to use college resources so doesn't that fall under the copyright ownership of "for hire" works so that the student would actually have a claim to the work?
This is just a really good strategy. Microsoft "hires" SCO to test the legal expertise of FOSS. Then attacks using a different angle as an educated litigator. Microsoft now knows its enemy, FOSS may need some new tricks.
I think the biggest failure of the Dock is it's dynamic resizing. Minimizing and maximizing or opening applications will cause the Dock and the items on the dock to change their position. I subconciously remember where things are located but when they move, I constantly have to remember the new location. It's very disconcerting and it's something I wish they would change.
I remember really liking this company in the Quake1 days. The *world.com sites where great community sites. They were the source for mods, skins, console commands, quakemovies, etc.
Then they switched and became a really unappealing, money grubbing company. I even bought one of their for-life gamespy 3d licenses which they want me to upgrade. They switched to a for pay product and I don't think they put any money into the old one.
Use to be a great source as well for downloads, now it's waiting in line for a public ftp server. Why haven't they embraced torrents?
What a lot of people don't understand is that this has already happened. I once bought an axis and allies game that worked over e-mail. The stupid thing is that it needed to contact their games's publisher's ip. They didn't exist anymore and they didn't opensource it.
People say, "If this company is a responsible company blah blah."
If there is no financial incentive to opensource old games. There is no responsibility of the managers of the company to opensource the product. What they did with Doom III was a nice thing to do and probably got them some goodwill, but try writing that down on a quarterly report.
The only saving grace is that if Valve does eventually die out, I can use a crack to disable the authentication for the product (which I do own and have paid with real $$!!!). I definately won't buy through stream (not that I would buy this game anyway).
"It's got to be pay to work, because the scarcity properties of digital artifacts and our understanding of economics makes paying a hefty price more difficult than it would be normally. "
Are you kidding? Programmers don't understand economics.
"Honestly, the good artists will give their stuff away eventually...if they don't, they aren't artists. If they aren't artists, their work means nothing and requires no memory."
This is a shocking statement. You are saying good artists give their stuff away, eventually? What, after they die? Current Copyright ends 70 years after someones death. This does not mean that it is given away. Most main stream artists will not give away profitable art (I am using mainstream because they are the artists that most people think are good, "good artists" is such an arguable term). This does not mean that they are bad, it just means that they are entrepreneurial.
Regardless, why is it so difficult for people to accept piracy as a part of the business. The benefits are near zero distribution costs the disadvantage is piracy. Most people would rather be legitimate, which results in the success of services like itunes. You will always have people that will try to get by, which you refer to as "rebels." The part where I diverge from you is that the term rebels depends on the price of the product. I feel that there are a lot more "rebels" where adobe is concerned. Adobe prices their products for something that is acceptable for a corporation but is ourtrageously pricely for an independant designer. For the designer to stay competive they muse use adobe products but it doesn't make sense for them to pay the same price as their computer costs for an Adobe product every time a new version comes out. If Adobe wants to charge their price they must realize that companies will always pay for licenses for fear of being audited whereas independents will generally pirate. This actually helps Adobe because those indepents that get hired by a company will request what they know: Adobe products.
Anyways, I think I am becoming incoherent, it's getting late. My apologies if I was too critical of your last statement but this whole thread just boiled me up.
One thing more about the copyrights. Imagine if the First Testament had been copyrighted. Then the copyright holders blocked the Christians and Muslims. This sort of stifling comes out of not giving to the public domain.
For this given level of production the price has increased for MS (if MS did not have an illegal monopoly, they would be selling at a smaller quantity).
You are partially right here, costs have gone up for MS but it is not based on a level of production. The lawyer fees are the same whether Microsoft sells 500 thousand or 500 million copies of Windows.
MS does not need PERFECT elasticity to make it worth while to increase their price. They merely need the increase in additional revenue gained to be greater than the loss due to the additional amount of consumers whose price reserve is now lower than the actual price. They will not be able to recover 100%, but they will be able to recover more than any other non-government entity in existence today.
Microsoft has already set the price of Windows to an amount that produces the most profit. Raising it a little bit will lower profits. If Microsoft raises the price, less people will buy it.
In a competitive market, a firm's marginal revenue will stay pretty much the same as their quantity of production increases. Since Microsoft has a monopoly, they control the quantity of Windows (let's just worry about legal copies). If Microsoft wants to sell more copies of Windows they have to lower price. Microsoft "picks" the price based on the amount of quantity supplied that will produce the most profit. This quantity is where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. They then pick the price demanded at this quantity (which is above marginal revenue and cost).
An interesting segway, marginal cost for Windows and software in general is very low and flat: producing 1,000 more copies after you have already produced 1,000 is very cheap. This could explain why Windows has become cheaper over the years. Since Microsoft's marginal cost is really low and flat, they can choose a quantity where marginal revenue is near 0. This means that the price Microsoft sets is a really close direct relationship to how many people are in the market to purchase an OS. This means Windows will become cheaper the more people buy it. It also makes their monopoly that much more "perfect." They don't need to work as hard as, say, a manufacturer to find ways to cut production costs.
How about glue in widgets? That is DEFINETLY a marginal cost, right? However, the company does not buy a portion of glue for each widget, right? They buy a tank of glue and allocate the COST to each widget, but the actual tank of glue is not bought but once a month, year, decade, whatever. The more widget they build, the more glue they must buy, but the actual timing of the cash flowing out is usually fixed. Hence, it is how this cost influences their decisions that is important.
Their monopoly has a slightly higher cost for each additional product they sell. The more products they sell due to their monopolistic practices, the higher the monetary penality will be when it comes time to pay. Finally, if MS BELIEVES this will increase their price per product in the SHORTTERM (which we can probably assume to be so since they are evaluated quarterly, so we can make such assumptions unless explicity indicated otherwise) then that means they are treating this like a marginal cost, just as if it were a container of glue in their packaging factory.
Hmm, this is an interesting point. The lawyer fees cannot be considered per-unit costs since they are tied to per/hour salaries, but what you say about the monetary penalty being applied to a per-unit cost may be true. This would mean that Microsoft is assuming to incur more penalties that will be based on how many copies of Windows they sell. I am not sure, though, that they would be able to get enough accurate data to estimate how much loss per copy of Windows sold in the future they will incur. It would be interesting to find the total amount of damages based on per copy of Windows sold over the past few years.
Looking at the California case, the court put the price Microsoft overcharged
1. Erh . . . I don't know about your company, but my company sells ABOVE the cost of each unit (aka, COGS) in order to cover their fixed costs, one time costs (like, legal fees), and opportunity costs (which can be seen as the investors' opportunity costs in investing their money in MS). I.E., rent does not increase per unit costs (talking variable, not COGS here), but if your rent goes up, you better create more revenue to cover that cost
You can't sell what people won't buy. You can't just increase profit by increasing price if you are already selling at an optimum price per quantity.
2. Right, and now that the cost of windows has increased, they must compensate by INCREASING the price in order to maintain their optimal level of profits. Since the consumers don't have much choice (definition of a monopoly), roughly the same amount gets consumed (a little less, but not enough less that their revenue does not increase). In a competivite market, MS would have no choice but to have its optimal level of profis decrease since a large enough amount of consumer would flock elsewhere if their price were to increase (since price elasticity would be high).
The users have a choice as some others on Slashdot have noted. They can choose to not purchase Windows (stick with an older version or purchase a substitute).
The result is that MS pays the legal fees and is able to maintain its profit targets by passing the costs down to the consumer.
No they don't. Less people will buy a product if the price goes up unless it's perfectly inelastic, which Windows is not.
You are confusing accounting "variable costs" with economic "marginal cost." These legal costs ARE part of economic marginal cost, as well as are opportunity costs. Think about it, if MS were to STOP producing Windows, would they still be incurring these legal costs? That is how economists distinguish between marginal and fixed costs.
First off, variable and marginal costs are both terms used in Economics. These legal costs are definitely not part of marginal cost, does every Windows product Microsoft produce cause lawyer fees to go up? No Opportunity costs are what Microsoft is losing for not putting their resources in another market. Yes, if Microsoft were to stop producing Windows they would still incur legal costs. This is a variable cost in the long run and a fixed cost in the short run. This has nothing to do with the price Microsoft sets for Windows; it just decides their exit strategy.
The lawyer fees are not adding to a per unit cost on Windows for Microsoft.
Microsoft has priced their software to maximize their profits at an optimum quantity sold. Microsoft will lose money by increasing the price of Windows, since it will lead to reduced quantity being sold.
The result is it's Microsoft who is paying for the lawyer fees, not the customer. This is true with any cost not related to per-unit costs. These costs only affect Microsoft's exit condition in it's market, and I highly doubt the lawyer fees are high enough to cause Microsoft exit the OS market.
What you may be getting at is that Microsoft is artificially raising the price to retaliate against the California government, but this leads to conspiracy theories that I am not ready to go along with. Ultimately, Microsoft is obligated to make profit, not dabble in politics.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just it. I have a feeling that these companies feel the market justifies a high price and so there is probably a ton of premium baked into these things. With the craze going around the hp touchpad, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the lesser manufacturers takes a hint and drops their price for high end tablet hardware to ride the same wave.
I have to say, I used vi for a long time but then switched to vim for syntax highlighting and deletion of history. People seem to get bent out of shape with it but my guess is that it just doesn't match the format of the file they are editing, so fair enough, disable it for those files. I still can't stand emacs, though, even though I work with an army of developers that use it and need to use it for their IDE. Maybe if people just used your phrase, but with a small alteration, they would not hate vim so much:
I use vim to write code, and vi to edit config files.
Not only that, but if you disagree with this article you aren't considered cool.
Considering the number or patches and updates that come out on a regular basis, it really isn't a bad habit to reboot weekly. Besides, you collapse your expectations that everything is working correctly on an actualized understanding that everything is working correctly every time you do a change in your environment that has any unforeseen potential of impacting your machines.
Try to sell your dad on a spending rate. You can't guarantee a computer to last 15 years, but if you can figure out his risk tolerance and try to maintain his spending allowance. If he bought two 486s in 1994 and each were $2000 and the value of the dollar being about 1.3 what it is now, so he spent $5200 in today's currency back in 1994, that's about $350/year. Do you think with these numbers, you could convince him that it would be worth buying two netbooks for about $350 each, with the high chance they would last two years? If they last an unheard of 3 years, he would actually be spending less per year 700/3 ~ 250. If they last more he will actually be saving money over his old setup. In fact, if he took the same amount of money, $5200. Invested $700 in hardware. Put the remaining 4500 into bonds at 5%, over 15 years he could almost buy a new netbook every year on interest alone. -Bjorn
Even if they had a similar algorithm, it was still either created by a student or staff member. If it's staff than it's rightful the college's property but if it's a student's I think there is a contradiction. The student is paying to use college resources so doesn't that fall under the copyright ownership of "for hire" works so that the student would actually have a claim to the work?
This is just a really good strategy. Microsoft "hires" SCO to test the legal expertise of FOSS. Then attacks using a different angle as an educated litigator. Microsoft now knows its enemy, FOSS may need some new tricks.
-Bjorn
I would love to play Super Mario Brothers on my mac!
Especially since Safari has a spellchecker for forms built in.
Firefox has a form spellchecker via a plugin.
I think the biggest failure of the Dock is it's dynamic resizing. Minimizing and maximizing or opening applications will cause the Dock and the items on the dock to change their position. I subconciously remember where things are located but when they move, I constantly have to remember the new location. It's very disconcerting and it's something I wish they would change.
-Bjorn
Here here
Your right, I forgot. Do you remember what the game said when you finished refreshing the server list? It's been a while.
-Bjorn
I remember really liking this company in the Quake1 days. The *world.com sites where great community sites. They were the source for mods, skins, console commands, quakemovies, etc.
Then they switched and became a really unappealing, money grubbing company. I even bought one of their for-life gamespy 3d licenses which they want me to upgrade. They switched to a for pay product and I don't think they put any money into the old one.
Use to be a great source as well for downloads, now it's waiting in line for a public ftp server. Why haven't they embraced torrents?
What happened at this company?
I mean what ID did with Doom and Quake
also, the point of the Axis and Allies game is that I bought it and it didn't work because the publisher wasn't around.
What a lot of people don't understand is that this has already happened. I once bought an axis and allies game that worked over e-mail. The stupid thing is that it needed to contact their games's publisher's ip. They didn't exist anymore and they didn't opensource it.
People say, "If this company is a responsible company blah blah."
If there is no financial incentive to opensource old games. There is no responsibility of the managers of the company to opensource the product. What they did with Doom III was a nice thing to do and probably got them some goodwill, but try writing that down on a quarterly report.
The only saving grace is that if Valve does eventually die out, I can use a crack to disable the authentication for the product (which I do own and have paid with real $$!!!). I definately won't buy through stream (not that I would buy this game anyway).
this is absurd.
You can't charge more to make more money. Your price should be set to maximize profit. If your costs are too high, exit the market.
"It's got to be pay to work, because the scarcity properties of digital artifacts and our understanding of economics makes paying a hefty price more difficult than it would be normally. "
Are you kidding? Programmers don't understand economics.
"Honestly, the good artists will give their stuff away eventually...if they don't, they aren't artists. If they aren't artists, their work means nothing and requires no memory."
This is a shocking statement. You are saying good artists give their stuff away, eventually? What, after they die? Current Copyright ends 70 years after someones death. This does not mean that it is given away. Most main stream artists will not give away profitable art (I am using mainstream because they are the artists that most people think are good, "good artists" is such an arguable term). This does not mean that they are bad, it just means that they are entrepreneurial.
Regardless, why is it so difficult for people to accept piracy as a part of the business. The benefits are near zero distribution costs the disadvantage is piracy. Most people would rather be legitimate, which results in the success of services like itunes. You will always have people that will try to get by, which you refer to as "rebels." The part where I diverge from you is that the term rebels depends on the price of the product. I feel that there are a lot more "rebels" where adobe is concerned. Adobe prices their products for something that is acceptable for a corporation but is ourtrageously pricely for an independant designer. For the designer to stay competive they muse use adobe products but it doesn't make sense for them to pay the same price as their computer costs for an Adobe product every time a new version comes out. If Adobe wants to charge their price they must realize that companies will always pay for licenses for fear of being audited whereas independents will generally pirate. This actually helps Adobe because those indepents that get hired by a company will request what they know: Adobe products.
Anyways, I think I am becoming incoherent, it's getting late. My apologies if I was too critical of your last statement but this whole thread just boiled me up.
One thing more about the copyrights. Imagine if the First Testament had been copyrighted. Then the copyright holders blocked the Christians and Muslims. This sort of stifling comes out of not giving to the public domain.
-Bjorn
have you tried the calculator in OS X?
Running freebsd on 1650's just fine. Remind me why we are replying to this troll?
AC, this sounds more like basic assinomics
For this given level of production the price has increased for MS (if MS did not have an illegal monopoly, they would be selling at a smaller quantity).
You are partially right here, costs have gone up for MS but it is not based on a level of production. The lawyer fees are the same whether Microsoft sells 500 thousand or 500 million copies of Windows.
MS does not need PERFECT elasticity to make it worth while to increase their price. They merely need the increase in additional revenue gained to be greater than the loss due to the additional amount of consumers whose price reserve is now lower than the actual price. They will not be able to recover 100%, but they will be able to recover more than any other non-government entity in existence today.
Microsoft has already set the price of Windows to an amount that produces the most profit. Raising it a little bit will lower profits. If Microsoft raises the price, less people will buy it.
In a competitive market, a firm's marginal revenue will stay pretty much the same as their quantity of production increases. Since Microsoft has a monopoly, they control the quantity of Windows (let's just worry about legal copies). If Microsoft wants to sell more copies of Windows they have to lower price. Microsoft "picks" the price based on the amount of quantity supplied that will produce the most profit. This quantity is where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. They then pick the price demanded at this quantity (which is above marginal revenue and cost).
An interesting segway, marginal cost for Windows and software in general is very low and flat: producing 1,000 more copies after you have already produced 1,000 is very cheap. This could explain why Windows has become cheaper over the years. Since Microsoft's marginal cost is really low and flat, they can choose a quantity where marginal revenue is near 0. This means that the price Microsoft sets is a really close direct relationship to how many people are in the market to purchase an OS. This means Windows will become cheaper the more people buy it. It also makes their monopoly that much more "perfect." They don't need to work as hard as, say, a manufacturer to find ways to cut production costs.
How about glue in widgets? That is DEFINETLY a marginal cost, right? However, the company does not buy a portion of glue for each widget, right? They buy a tank of glue and allocate the COST to each widget, but the actual tank of glue is not bought but once a month, year, decade, whatever. The more widget they build, the more glue they must buy, but the actual timing of the cash flowing out is usually fixed. Hence, it is how this cost influences their decisions that is important.
Their monopoly has a slightly higher cost for each additional product they sell. The more products they sell due to their monopolistic practices, the higher the monetary penality will be when it comes time to pay. Finally, if MS BELIEVES this will increase their price per product in the SHORTTERM (which we can probably assume to be so since they are evaluated quarterly, so we can make such assumptions unless explicity indicated otherwise) then that means they are treating this like a marginal cost, just as if it were a container of glue in their packaging factory.
Hmm, this is an interesting point. The lawyer fees cannot be considered per-unit costs since they are tied to per/hour salaries, but what you say about the monetary penalty being applied to a per-unit cost may be true. This would mean that Microsoft is assuming to incur more penalties that will be based on how many copies of Windows they sell. I am not sure, though, that they would be able to get enough accurate data to estimate how much loss per copy of Windows sold in the future they will incur. It would be interesting to find the total amount of damages based on per copy of Windows sold over the past few years.
Looking at the California case, the court put the price Microsoft overcharged
1. Erh . . . I don't know about your company, but my company sells ABOVE the cost of each unit (aka, COGS) in order to cover their fixed costs, one time costs (like, legal fees), and opportunity costs (which can be seen as the investors' opportunity costs in investing their money in MS). I.E., rent does not increase per unit costs (talking variable, not COGS here), but if your rent goes up, you better create more revenue to cover that cost
You can't sell what people won't buy. You can't just increase profit by increasing price if you are already selling at an optimum price per quantity.
2. Right, and now that the cost of windows has increased, they must compensate by INCREASING the price in order to maintain their optimal level of profits. Since the consumers don't have much choice (definition of a monopoly), roughly the same amount gets consumed (a little less, but not enough less that their revenue does not increase). In a competivite market, MS would have no choice but to have its optimal level of profis decrease since a large enough amount of consumer would flock elsewhere if their price were to increase (since price elasticity would be high).
The users have a choice as some others on Slashdot have noted. They can choose to not purchase Windows (stick with an older version or purchase a substitute).
The result is that MS pays the legal fees and is able to maintain its profit targets by passing the costs down to the consumer.
No they don't. Less people will buy a product if the price goes up unless it's perfectly inelastic, which Windows is not.
You are confusing accounting "variable costs" with economic "marginal cost." These legal costs ARE part of economic marginal cost, as well as are opportunity costs. Think about it, if MS were to STOP producing Windows, would they still be incurring these legal costs? That is how economists distinguish between marginal and fixed costs.
First off, variable and marginal costs are both terms used in Economics. These legal costs are definitely not part of marginal cost, does every Windows product Microsoft produce cause lawyer fees to go up? No
Opportunity costs are what Microsoft is losing for not putting their resources in another market. Yes, if Microsoft were to stop producing Windows they would still incur legal costs. This is a variable cost in the long run and a fixed cost in the short run. This has nothing to do with the price Microsoft sets for Windows; it just decides their exit strategy.
I believe you are confusing your terms.
This is Eco 101, this class should be mandatory for anyone able to vote.
- The lawyer fees are not adding to a per unit cost on Windows for Microsoft.
- Microsoft has priced their software to maximize their profits at an optimum quantity sold. Microsoft will lose money by increasing the price of Windows, since it will lead to reduced quantity being sold.
The result is it's Microsoft who is paying for the lawyer fees, not the customer. This is true with any cost not related to per-unit costs. These costs only affect Microsoft's exit condition in it's market, and I highly doubt the lawyer fees are high enough to cause Microsoft exit the OS market.What you may be getting at is that Microsoft is artificially raising the price to retaliate against the California government, but this leads to conspiracy theories that I am not ready to go along with. Ultimately, Microsoft is obligated to make profit, not dabble in politics.