This is nothing more than proof that supply side economics is voodoo. Comcast (and most cable companies) spent a boatload to retrofit their infrastructure to support 2-way digital communications. It looked great. Internet, Digital Cable, Pay-per-view, video on demand, home shopping, it was the sort of thing everyone would want, right? Build it and they will come!
Guess what.. Nobody came. All those estimates they had about number of homes passed that will want Cable Internet, how many current customers will upgrade to digital cable, all wrong. We didn't need cable internet where DSL came to market first, people don't really want 12 HBOs and 14 Showtimes, and PPV pricing is a joke.
Now they've got this huge debt and huge over-supply. With the debt, they can't afford to lower prices, so they need to get demand and supply to meet by going in the other direction. They're cutting back supply and raising prices until they meet demand. It's that simple.
I mean, is it just me, or when the rest of you read these statements from RMS, do you also get the feeling that in wandering around MIT, RMS spent too much time with Chomsky?
You forgot to mention the vast right-wing conspiracy to disprove the theory of evolution. Fundamentalist Christians purchase bible-thumping politicians and force them to pass laws to prevent natural selection. Once this results in an America which has regressed to the point where it is inhabited only by slack-jawed droolmeisters, they will declare victory.
And everyone will be a Fundamentalist Christian to boot!
57? ha! I can do better than that! There are 0! zero! cases of me ever punching you in the nose. Statistically speaking, I simply do not punch you in the nose! Continued law enforcement activities preventing me from punching you in the nose are a waste of time! Why should my tax dollars be used to prevent me from punching you in the nose? Why don't we focus on a real problem?
This message paid for by the Coalition to Legalize Punching Moronic Libertarians in the Nose. No Libertarians were harmed in the posting of this comment.
I always thought it would be really cool to have trillions of MEMS powered by naturally occurring thermal gradients at the microscopic level.
I get the feeling Maxwell's Demon might get jealous and throw a spanner into this idea. At the very least, Demon would unionize the engines and the efficiency would go up in smoke.
My immediate thoughts when it came to notebooks, was cooling.
In another article I read somewhere else (sorry, can't remember where), this is indeed a big problem. As they increase the performance of the device, the space devoted to cooling increases [quickly.] IIRC, this is the current #1 stumbling block in designing a device which has an output/weight/size ratio that makes the device useful. Pity I can't remember where that article was, maybe someone else will know.
Good gravy what a bunch of self-righteous ZEALOTS live here!
Welcome to Earth.
You may rest assured that our planet has plenty of happy people in the middle ground. It's just that we don't have people constantly going around saying "I'm happy with things the way they are!" (1) and so all you mostly see is a bunch of extremists shouting amongst themselves. Just learn to ignore these people or occassionally point and laugh at them (2) and you'll enjoy your visit to our planet.
(1) - Well, there are some, but they usually get modded down or medicated. (2) - Don't laugh at the ones who are secretly working for the Orcs in hiding, they have really obnoxious lawyers.
This isn't terribly surprising. When you press that button to cancel your account, you hit the membership retention group where you're thrown into a pool of sharks specially trained to use any number of tricks to keep you as a customer. It's not just ISPs, it's discount memberships, road-side service programs, damn near any sort of product based on perpetual automatic credit card charges.
You know how cops are trained to trick suspects into confessing and such? These membership retention people have the same training. Your best response is the same as well: don't answer their questions, and instead of repeating "I want a lawyer", just keep saying "I want to cancel my account."
Once they've established who you are and admit that they've got your account up on the screen, do not allow them to engage you in further conversation. If you think the scripts outbound telemarketers use are obnoxious, you should see the flowcharts these people have. They are the special forces of telemarketing, the uber-telemarketer, the inbound telemarker. Sure, you called them, and that's what makes them so aggressive -- not only do they know that you don't want their service, they also know that you can't just hang up on them. They have dozens of methods to stall you and for every question they ask, they've got a response for each and every one of the possible answers you might give. They have nothing to lose.
"I want to cancel my account" is your mantra. Why do you want to leave us? "I want to cancel my account." Is it the price? "I want to cancel my account." Who did you switch your service to? "I want to cancel my account." Did your mother-in-law make you call us? "I want to cancel my account." How about if we give you 3 months free membership as our thanks for being a valued member and let you think it over? "I want to cancel my account."
They're not stupid, and since their time is money, as soon as they realize that you're not going to talk, they'll cancel your account.
Or youngsters aren't constantly told that they need to stay in the children's section of the library, because some of the other books aren't appropriate for them?
Ah, so it's not so much that you expect me to pay $1 as well, but that you believe the plan would still work even if they charged only those who used the service?
Just wait another 10 years, Taco. The damage you did to your digestive tract while sitting in front of the Atari for hours at a time will give you a completely different "Montezuma's Revenge" memory.
Novel concept indeed, except that there's more to the Internet than downloading music and I'm not going to opt-out of the whole Internet just so you can rock on. Or did you miss that they want $1/mo for every Internet user and not just those who suck down mp3s?
Imagine that you were an artist with a song that you published on the Net. Someone takes your song, runs it through a distortion engine and adds bleating goats and calls it their song. It sells a million copies.
You're obviously living in an alternate universe. In my universe, the record industry hires talent scouts and producers who look for distorted bleating goat music on purpose because that's what sells a million copies.
Your record company and the RIAA could get you your contractually agreed royalty from the goat pirate, but you can't afford to do so on your own.
Sure, the RIAA could get the money. So could the mafia. What's your point?
Compulsory is bad. Verizon is evil. It's bad enough we get charged extra for blank media, but now they want to charge us for blank Internet connections? Verizon's only motivation is to skim off the top of the fees and profit from the bottom with increased bandwidth demand. Verizon's already very good at ripping people off and they already have plenty of protectionary laws keeping it that way. You should feel compelled to just say no anyways, but Verizon's involvement should clinch it.
I'm probably suffering from a temporary lack of imagination, but what's the point to putting handwriting recognition into a desktop OS?
My best guess is that it's to go after the market of people who haven't ever gotten any computer simply because they don't know how/can't type. (I'm thinking of the elderly mostly, but anybody who's "afraid" of computers in general would fit.) Maybe at some point iMacs will start coming with a small digitizing tablet that would eventually become as common as keyboards and mice?
I can't decide if it's just pointless code bloat or part of a major strategy to go after a huge untapped market. Any other ideas?
This reminds me of old passbook bank savings accounts. Give the teller your deposit and your book, and they give you back the book with the deposit and your new balance added to it.
They got killed off by ATM machines and "shareholder value." Why encourage customers to keep a book that leaves no questions when you can give them a receipt that most fools just leave behind or throw away at first chance? Bank error in your favour? Yeah, right.
To protect the digital world, what we really need to do is start a campaign for the defence of analog. When Hollings introduced S.2048 he made a big deal about the "analog hole", saying that it was a danger because people could convert the analog signal between the digital box and the analog tv back to a digital signal. Now this guy's saying PVRs are evil because they let you skip commercials.
The thing is that they use the newness of digital to paint everything as a new threat that needs immediate and scorched-earth legislative response. Then they use examples like these that aren't really new. Even without digital content being broadcast through the air, I can convert an analog signal into digital. My groovy (but analog!) VCRs with the shuttle controls make it trivial to skip over commercials. There's nothing new with digital added in. Sure, it's easier, sure, picture quality might be nicer, but it's not new, it's just progress.
We must not let them continue to create this perception of newness that requires legislation. Every time they go out and say "this new digital stuff is bad because it lets evil pirates board our ships and steal our gold and then use that gold to fund terrorism", we need to point out that the evil pirates could steal their gold even when it was analog gold.
When they start to spew about how digital makes it easier and makes the stolen gold shine brighter, we need to point out that it's just progress. It's always been that more expensive equipment was easier to use and had better quality. If the "digital revolution" hadn't come we'd just have something different like 12x speed read/write (analog) laserdisks. It'd be expensive and thus rare, but it's still the same thing. Digital made things cheaper and more common, that's all.
Laws are not just for the common things. Every time they say a law is needed, we need to ask them why they didn't need a law for the analog version. They need a better answer than "we tried and failed" or "the amount was too small to worry about," but they won't have any answers.
Digital makes everything cheaper, easier and better for everyone, not just the pirates. Manufacturing is cheaper, customers like the better picture and not rewinding a tape. But it's nothing new, just progress. If they want the advantages of digital, they'll have to accept that everyone else gets the advantages too.
The Company's website didn't even survive 15 minutes past the story being posted. I guess their "enterprise content management" product works about as well as their cash management.
Obviously this seems bad in the short-term but the long-term prospects are even dimmer. Pay cuts are usually beyond last resort, "temporary one-time" cuts are unheard of. If the company believes it will survive and be able to continue paying the original salaries, they should have credit to avoid this situation. Any employees willing to put up with this should ask themselves what the bank knows and what they're not being told.
The second memo (the long-winded "explanation" one) talks alot about venture capitalists and cash coming from an acquisition, but completely avoids the topic of simple old-fashioned short-term debts. VC money isn't real until you have it and if the cash from the acquisition is such a sure thing, why can't they access an existing line of credit until that money becomes real?
The whole thing smells very fishy. They say the bottom line is they want to show profits to make customers feel safe. The customers are not going to feel safe knowing that the profits came from driving talent away.
To me, the bottom line looks like they have a business model that isn't profitable with current staff and also can't survive without it. So now they're casting around just trying to keep alive until they can work out another model, if they're lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
This is nothing more than proof that supply side economics is voodoo. Comcast (and most cable companies) spent a boatload to retrofit their infrastructure to support 2-way digital communications. It looked great. Internet, Digital Cable, Pay-per-view, video on demand, home shopping, it was the sort of thing everyone would want, right? Build it and they will come!
Guess what.. Nobody came. All those estimates they had about number of homes passed that will want Cable Internet, how many current customers will upgrade to digital cable, all wrong. We didn't need cable internet where DSL came to market first, people don't really want 12 HBOs and 14 Showtimes, and PPV pricing is a joke.
Now they've got this huge debt and huge over-supply. With the debt, they can't afford to lower prices, so they need to get demand and supply to meet by going in the other direction. They're cutting back supply and raising prices until they meet demand. It's that simple.
I mean, is it just me, or when the rest of you read these statements from RMS, do you also get the feeling that in wandering around MIT, RMS spent too much time with Chomsky?
It's been done. Ask Google.
You forgot to mention the vast right-wing conspiracy to disprove the theory of evolution. Fundamentalist Christians purchase bible-thumping politicians and force them to pass laws to prevent natural selection. Once this results in an America which has regressed to the point where it is inhabited only by slack-jawed droolmeisters, they will declare victory.
And everyone will be a Fundamentalist Christian to boot!
57? ha! I can do better than that! There are 0! zero! cases of me ever punching you in the nose. Statistically speaking, I simply do not punch you in the nose! Continued law enforcement activities preventing me from punching you in the nose are a waste of time! Why should my tax dollars be used to prevent me from punching you in the nose? Why don't we focus on a real problem?
This message paid for by the Coalition to Legalize Punching Moronic Libertarians in the Nose. No Libertarians were harmed in the posting of this comment.
I did not go see AotC and I will probably watch it the same way I watched Ep. 1: tape it off of broadcast tv and skip over the commercials.
So? Who says mechanical computing is still dead once you go nano?
I always thought it would be really cool to have trillions of MEMS powered by naturally occurring thermal gradients at the microscopic level.
I get the feeling Maxwell's Demon might get jealous and throw a spanner into this idea. At the very least, Demon would unionize the engines and the efficiency would go up in smoke.
My immediate thoughts when it came to notebooks, was cooling.
In another article I read somewhere else (sorry, can't remember where), this is indeed a big problem. As they increase the performance of the device, the space devoted to cooling increases [quickly.] IIRC, this is the current #1 stumbling block in designing a device which has an output/weight/size ratio that makes the device useful. Pity I can't remember where that article was, maybe someone else will know.
Good gravy what a bunch of self-righteous ZEALOTS live here!
Welcome to Earth.
You may rest assured that our planet has plenty of happy people in the middle ground. It's just that we don't have people constantly going around saying "I'm happy with things the way they are!" (1) and so all you mostly see is a bunch of extremists shouting amongst themselves. Just learn to ignore these people or occassionally point and laugh at them (2) and you'll enjoy your visit to our planet.
(1) - Well, there are some, but they usually get modded down or medicated.
(2) - Don't laugh at the ones who are secretly working for the Orcs in hiding, they have really obnoxious lawyers.
This isn't terribly surprising. When you press that button to cancel your account, you hit the membership retention group where you're thrown into a pool of sharks specially trained to use any number of tricks to keep you as a customer. It's not just ISPs, it's discount memberships, road-side service programs, damn near any sort of product based on perpetual automatic credit card charges.
You know how cops are trained to trick suspects into confessing and such? These membership retention people have the same training. Your best response is the same as well: don't answer their questions, and instead of repeating "I want a lawyer", just keep saying "I want to cancel my account."
Once they've established who you are and admit that they've got your account up on the screen, do not allow them to engage you in further conversation. If you think the scripts outbound telemarketers use are obnoxious, you should see the flowcharts these people have. They are the special forces of telemarketing, the uber-telemarketer, the inbound telemarker. Sure, you called them, and that's what makes them so aggressive -- not only do they know that you don't want their service, they also know that you can't just hang up on them. They have dozens of methods to stall you and for every question they ask, they've got a response for each and every one of the possible answers you might give. They have nothing to lose.
"I want to cancel my account" is your mantra. Why do you want to leave us? "I want to cancel my account." Is it the price? "I want to cancel my account." Who did you switch your service to? "I want to cancel my account." Did your mother-in-law make you call us? "I want to cancel my account." How about if we give you 3 months free membership as our thanks for being a valued member and let you think it over? "I want to cancel my account."
They're not stupid, and since their time is money, as soon as they realize that you're not going to talk, they'll cancel your account.
You don't think books are routinely banned?
Or youngsters aren't constantly told that they need to stay in the children's section of the library, because some of the other books aren't appropriate for them?
Comic books?
Ah, so it's not so much that you expect me to pay $1 as well, but that you believe the plan would still work even if they charged only those who used the service?
Just wait another 10 years, Taco. The damage you did to your digestive tract while sitting in front of the Atari for hours at a time will give you a completely different "Montezuma's Revenge" memory.
Novel concept indeed, except that there's more to the Internet than downloading music and I'm not going to opt-out of the whole Internet just so you can rock on. Or did you miss that they want $1/mo for every Internet user and not just those who suck down mp3s?
You're obviously living in an alternate universe. In my universe, the record industry hires talent scouts and producers who look for distorted bleating goat music on purpose because that's what sells a million copies.
Sure, the RIAA could get the money. So could the mafia. What's your point?
I'm happy you're happy to pay $1/mo to download music legit. However, I'm not happy to pay $1/mo for you to download music legit.
Might as well just vote yourself a free lunch.
Compulsory is bad. Verizon is evil. It's bad enough we get charged extra for blank media, but now they want to charge us for blank Internet connections? Verizon's only motivation is to skim off the top of the fees and profit from the bottom with increased bandwidth demand. Verizon's already very good at ripping people off and they already have plenty of protectionary laws keeping it that way. You should feel compelled to just say no anyways, but Verizon's involvement should clinch it.
Say, aren't we supposed to boycott Sony for screwing up our iMacs?
I'm probably suffering from a temporary lack of imagination, but what's the point to putting handwriting recognition into a desktop OS?
My best guess is that it's to go after the market of people who haven't ever gotten any computer simply because they don't know how/can't type. (I'm thinking of the elderly mostly, but anybody who's "afraid" of computers in general would fit.) Maybe at some point iMacs will start coming with a small digitizing tablet that would eventually become as common as keyboards and mice?
I can't decide if it's just pointless code bloat or part of a major strategy to go after a huge untapped market. Any other ideas?
This reminds me of old passbook bank savings accounts. Give the teller your deposit and your book, and they give you back the book with the deposit and your new balance added to it.
They got killed off by ATM machines and "shareholder value." Why encourage customers to keep a book that leaves no questions when you can give them a receipt that most fools just leave behind or throw away at first chance? Bank error in your favour? Yeah, right.
To protect the digital world, what we really need to do is start a campaign for the defence of analog. When Hollings introduced S.2048 he made a big deal about the "analog hole", saying that it was a danger because people could convert the analog signal between the digital box and the analog tv back to a digital signal. Now this guy's saying PVRs are evil because they let you skip commercials.
The thing is that they use the newness of digital to paint everything as a new threat that needs immediate and scorched-earth legislative response. Then they use examples like these that aren't really new. Even without digital content being broadcast through the air, I can convert an analog signal into digital. My groovy (but analog!) VCRs with the shuttle controls make it trivial to skip over commercials. There's nothing new with digital added in. Sure, it's easier, sure, picture quality might be nicer, but it's not new, it's just progress.
We must not let them continue to create this perception of newness that requires legislation. Every time they go out and say "this new digital stuff is bad because it lets evil pirates board our ships and steal our gold and then use that gold to fund terrorism", we need to point out that the evil pirates could steal their gold even when it was analog gold.
When they start to spew about how digital makes it easier and makes the stolen gold shine brighter, we need to point out that it's just progress. It's always been that more expensive equipment was easier to use and had better quality. If the "digital revolution" hadn't come we'd just have something different like 12x speed read/write (analog) laserdisks. It'd be expensive and thus rare, but it's still the same thing. Digital made things cheaper and more common, that's all.
Laws are not just for the common things. Every time they say a law is needed, we need to ask them why they didn't need a law for the analog version. They need a better answer than "we tried and failed" or "the amount was too small to worry about," but they won't have any answers.
Digital makes everything cheaper, easier and better for everyone, not just the pirates. Manufacturing is cheaper, customers like the better picture and not rewinding a tape. But it's nothing new, just progress. If they want the advantages of digital, they'll have to accept that everyone else gets the advantages too.
Dunno, but it's certainly not a good sign that the most recent job listing is for a bill collector.
The Company's website didn't even survive 15 minutes past the story being posted. I guess their "enterprise content management" product works about as well as their cash management.
Obviously this seems bad in the short-term but the long-term prospects are even dimmer. Pay cuts are usually beyond last resort, "temporary one-time" cuts are unheard of. If the company believes it will survive and be able to continue paying the original salaries, they should have credit to avoid this situation. Any employees willing to put up with this should ask themselves what the bank knows and what they're not being told.
The second memo (the long-winded "explanation" one) talks alot about venture capitalists and cash coming from an acquisition, but completely avoids the topic of simple old-fashioned short-term debts. VC money isn't real until you have it and if the cash from the acquisition is such a sure thing, why can't they access an existing line of credit until that money becomes real?
The whole thing smells very fishy. They say the bottom line is they want to show profits to make customers feel safe. The customers are not going to feel safe knowing that the profits came from driving talent away.
To me, the bottom line looks like they have a business model that isn't profitable with current staff and also can't survive without it. So now they're casting around just trying to keep alive until they can work out another model, if they're lucky.