The irony being that if you run their "for Intel CPU" code on AMD, you also get performance benefits, implying that perhaps the optimizations are not founded in design but rather business relationships.
Right, but I thought better of bringing up non-Euclidian geometry. Perhaps I erred in refusing the topic of that which had eluded the best mathematical minds of bountiful generations.
Even if Apple can afford to drop prices significantly, expect them to continue this "high margin hardware" game. I don't think a lot of people are going to consider OSX a no brainer, even at zero dollar markup. Whether real or not, people perceive there to be a learning gap about Macs. And I don't think many people are gonna jump up and dual boot OSX and Windows, so calling it OSX-able is a somewhat shallow opinion.
It's possible that Apple perceives this as a way to drop prices to where someone might try to experiment with Apple's OSX. But Apple really is in a tight spot here. They can't abandon their hardware line, since that's their key delivery path of OSX. Without it, they'd be forced to deal with the inadaqacies of dual booting Linux and windows, and introduce many of the same problems people criticize Linux for. But they can't risk their brand name with a direct competition to the startups who cut every corner (eMachines comes to mind) and have little to lose when their computers fail one or two years later.
how do we determine that someone has been encircled? If I recall correctly, you are not immune to your own walls, so there's always the mathematical possibility that someone can escape, barring the fuzziness of GPS.
And if you say, once the person has been "wrapped around" once, doesn't that imply a rectangular grid? Last I checked we live on a sphere-like planet, which means I could drive in a small circle and claim to have enveloped the opponent!
Actually, there's a solid argument for stopping the free flow to countries like India. They've got incredibly high tariffs on imports while benefiting from the rest of the world's relatively open markets. It would make sense to recipricate tariff reductions, and punish those who sway before local producers. This is one of the goals of the WTO and it's how we get to "liberalized markets" that ultimately benefit consumers in both markets. The side effect of taxing their own base like this is a reduced demand for their own labor. So taxing commodities like diesel does play into the labor debate (I'm willing to give agriculture a pass).
Also, in classical economics, a shift in the supply curve doesn't directly impact the demand curve. It does alter the equalibrium point, which is the optimal pricing in a free market.
Honestly, it sounds like your mind was made up before the system ever came out. I mean, as amazing as the PSPninja video is, you have to deliberately contort the device to accomplish that goal.
But then I recognize the name tepples and instantly realize that of course you're a fellow Nintendo fanboy. You forgot to point out that UMD is another example of how Sony foists its own pointless technology via consumer electronics, or how connectivity with the PS3 is exactly the same thing derided as a failure with the GBA!
Ironically, if you pay via check or other secured one time means, then frequently it happens that you keep getting their rag long past your year. Why? Because even though wresting 20 bucks via relucantance to cancel or stop subscriptions can be profitable, there's still a good piece of value in it for the advertisers. The subscription is typically seen as a signal of reader interest. If you pay 20 bucks a year, you must be somewhat interested in what's on the pages inside.
Although, I suppose its possible that some magazines are going through several rounds of belt tightening and see this sort of behavior as the next best thing to folding shop. But that's to be expected as the internet does everything you do, only faster and cheaper, while the "market" you cover becomes more and more niche.
Well, if your company isn't keen on hiring recent grads, an internship program seems like a bit of a waste. Probably someone's idea of proving "why we don't hire new grads"?
I never stated that custom software was "small changes to standard software." That was implicated elsewhere. My current boss used to work for Sprint as the guy who managed the deployment of servers for every IT project they came up with. My father used to be a contract consultant. They've discussed in some detail some of their former projects. But for many companies, a custom application will only provide a small edge, especially when their competitors are doing the same thing. The anecdote about selling software to competitors comes from a proffessor of mine, via his daughter, employed at a large national consulting firm, likely Accenture. Of course, they have to make changes to fit each business's invidivual way of doing things, but apparently the industry their client was in was self-similar enough to make it worth their while.
Also, thank you for pointing out Accenture's new name. I'd always wondered why they wanted to change the name; my father theorized it was because they didn't have a very good reputation (even before the enron scandal), but the official story is that Arthur Anderson didn't want the overlapping name. Ironic case of 20/20 foresight, I guess.
Actually, a lot of medium sized companies do invest in customized software, and they view it as a competitive measure; by customizing their software, it gives them a small edge over their competition. Giving it away via BSD or GPL would quickly erode this private advantage. That's how they justify spending the whatever millions of dollars on a large consulting project.
Of course, within the last twenty years, there's been a shift to contractors keeping the rights to the code. Places like Anderson (I forget their new name) start putting in cheaper offers, thinking they'll just wait a year and approach their client's competitors, having had the R&D financed on the first company's dime. I would hope the companies are wising up, since they're essentially getting duped.
Finally, the GPL is not a very strong barrier to outright piracy. We've already seen a number of small (ie stupid) businesses abuse the availablility of the code, and I can only imagine how many smarter businesses have gotten away with it, imagining their situation somehow outside the provisions. For 99 percent of the software, it's not a large deal, although it would be amusing to see PearPC recieve compensation for sales.
Everyone makes clumsy mistakes. If you're too pompus to admit it, then you're part of the problem, and I wouldn't hire you. It's not like programming is as easy as writing perfect English, and even if it was, there's still a strong need for editors to check them.
Part of being adept at business is being able to address a problem without prompting, and the same is true for software development. It's rare for someone to not have chased down the wrong tree when attempting to solve a problem.
I'm no lawyer, but I presume that AMD may wish to use this lawsuit to sell to Dell. If they truely are getting a fringe benefit for playing Intel exclusive, I would imagine there is some law out there that punishes them as well for participating. At the very least, an ongoing suit with Intel suggests that Dell start offering AMD computers unless they WANT to be added to the list...
Unfortunately, there's still plenty of less progressive administrators, especially within budget constrained universities. I know that near the end of my 4 year degree they began filtering out BT, fearing a return to the Napster-era plateaus. In such a situation, direct downloads usually go faster for me, although at a higher expense to the content provider.
Grocery stores don't exactly make a ton of money, although they typically pay you minimum wage. The markup on most items is maybe five cents if it's a premium brand.
Fast food, you're on the money. It's even worse in movie theaters, where the markup is easily in the hundred of percents and the lines don't care.
Now unpaid internships, that's just crass commercialism. The worst deal I've seen so far is medical transcription. As part of their Community College degree, they have to get an internship. Unpaid, which is legal as long as the student is getting "college credit." And of course, half the teachers own their own transcription service. I think it's ridiculus and if you can't afford to pay your interns, I'm not sure why they'd expect a bright future with your company. These people are doing substantial work and the only serious cost to the employer is the time it takes one of their employees to verify that you've accurately done your job. I wonder how many people can pick up a job somewhere else with an internship like that...
And to a lesser (and former) extent, fatbabies.com. Not that anybody stops purchasing from them, but they might stop sending resumes. I don't think a site can attract consumers interested in the fair treatment of the people involved in making it; we just don't care. What would probably work better is consumer complaints, along the lines of resellerratings.
Ironically, there was a time when Counter-Strike and Quake were considered independent games. CS started as a free mod to a different game, and Quake was shareware, for pete's sake!
What you're really pointing out is that games are a social construct. Without an opponent, games are closer to a puzzle. It's only after the advent of the computer and video game that the idea of a single player game really took off. PC games that reintroduce this concept quite often last a long time. There's still plenty of people playing Starcraft, and
But a lot of the games on the list are shorter games. Five minute solo games. I tried out Oasis, and it's okay. It's definately not the spend all night building a starship to Alpha Centauri kind of game, but it does have a certain appeal. Those Kenta Cho abstract shooters are fun for a few minutes at a time as well, but don't hold up well over a few spare hours (lets just say I've got a boring and simple job that underwhelms me).
I donno. Just because the distribution is different than the mass market games, doesn't mean they aren't targeted at the average (ie casual) person. I'd call the Yahoo! games casual games, after all. The gender balance is either equal or in favor of women players, and the hardware investment is minimal. These are pick up and play games, not go out and buy 20 dollars worth of hardware games.
This would be in contrast to say, Battlefield 2, a game that has most people asking the message boards "Does my video card run this okay?" And yet, it's not like there's any monthly fee that pushes you to play competitively. I'm sure there's plenty of people who play Counter-Strike and BF2 "casually."
Interestingly enough, I work as a computer lab assistant at a local college. After spending a few months here, I have learned that 1. MS Office is not intuitive 2. Many people have difficulties operating a mouse at "high efficiencies."
What I mean is that many people can't move it very quickly, and that lots of people can't even move it in a straight line easily (such as when navigating that start menu with narrow bars to get to submenus with).
Dumping laws are awful for consumers. But consumers don't have a lobbyist group, like Business Software or the Kansas wheat farmers or other American producers have. At best, we get "watchdogs." Dumping essentially provides low cost goods to consumers, reguardless of the reasons why the provider is doing so.
As a result, dumping laws exist. The nefarious globalizing force named the World Trade Organization is responsible for deciding whether it's dumping or not. Some people feel the WTO is beholden to the US, though recently it's decided a few notable complaints against the US. Steel was the big ticket item during the last Presidential election, and it's partly why our manufacturing economy had been sucking.
Anyways, dumping is usually about either selling "below cost" or selling something overseas cheaper than domestically. Hyenix or whatever was found to be improperly subsidized by pricing. By compelling banks to bail the company out, they had subverted free market principles which would otherwise have corrected the mistake in the long term. Frankly, I'm suprised the US agricultural policy hasn't come up more often within the WTO. Perhaps that's what the critics of the WTO are implying...
Not that I think you have done anything wrong, but I'm trying to consider how one can distinguish a geniune case of trade secret theft from what you've done. Judging from the company's accounts, they suspect you've downloaded far more than what would be needed for a typical day's work; perhaps you've been mirroring their whole source tree as a form of personal evidence?
Of course, even a normal use of CVS would create conditions wherein you would download more than upload, unless you somehow managed to write more code than they had written the past however many years. There's a 99 percent chance that this is simply a case of using fraudulent claims to counter the case.
The good news is that you've got them in an excellent position. Either they lay claim to material involved in felonious computer crimes, or they've filed false reports against an employee. Barring outside collusion with the police, they won't be walking away from this without bruises. I hope they learn from them.
The other situation that is prohibited is for a monopoly to sell a product at a price below cost in order to destroy the competition. In such situations, the monopoly aims to destroy the competition so that the monopoly can, at a later point in time, dramatically raise the price of the product to reap monopoly profits. Such actions also hurt the American economy.
Is it even possible for a monopoly to sustain that sort of behavior long term? The argument I'd heard goes like this: the current pricing scheme has created enough incentive to produce a few competitors; in order to keep them out, the monopoly lowers its price by say ten dollars for X months. In order to make that up, the monopoly must raise prices by twenty dollars (ten over the older number) for X months at some point. At this point there is now ten dollars MORE incentive to create a competing business!
Slashdot Mirror
McDonalds is more expensive, if you don't value your time.
The irony being that if you run their "for Intel CPU" code on AMD, you also get performance benefits, implying that perhaps the optimizations are not founded in design but rather business relationships.
Right, but I thought better of bringing up non-Euclidian geometry. Perhaps I erred in refusing the topic of that which had eluded the best mathematical minds of bountiful generations.
Even if Apple can afford to drop prices significantly, expect them to continue this "high margin hardware" game. I don't think a lot of people are going to consider OSX a no brainer, even at zero dollar markup. Whether real or not, people perceive there to be a learning gap about Macs. And I don't think many people are gonna jump up and dual boot OSX and Windows, so calling it OSX-able is a somewhat shallow opinion.
It's possible that Apple perceives this as a way to drop prices to where someone might try to experiment with Apple's OSX. But Apple really is in a tight spot here. They can't abandon their hardware line, since that's their key delivery path of OSX. Without it, they'd be forced to deal with the inadaqacies of dual booting Linux and windows, and introduce many of the same problems people criticize Linux for. But they can't risk their brand name with a direct competition to the startups who cut every corner (eMachines comes to mind) and have little to lose when their computers fail one or two years later.
how do we determine that someone has been encircled? If I recall correctly, you are not immune to your own walls, so there's always the mathematical possibility that someone can escape, barring the fuzziness of GPS.
And if you say, once the person has been "wrapped around" once, doesn't that imply a rectangular grid? Last I checked we live on a sphere-like planet, which means I could drive in a small circle and claim to have enveloped the opponent!
Actually, there's a solid argument for stopping the free flow to countries like India. They've got incredibly high tariffs on imports while benefiting from the rest of the world's relatively open markets. It would make sense to recipricate tariff reductions, and punish those who sway before local producers. This is one of the goals of the WTO and it's how we get to "liberalized markets" that ultimately benefit consumers in both markets. The side effect of taxing their own base like this is a reduced demand for their own labor. So taxing commodities like diesel does play into the labor debate (I'm willing to give agriculture a pass).
Also, in classical economics, a shift in the supply curve doesn't directly impact the demand curve. It does alter the equalibrium point, which is the optimal pricing in a free market.
Honestly, it sounds like your mind was made up before the system ever came out. I mean, as amazing as the PSPninja video is, you have to deliberately contort the device to accomplish that goal.
But then I recognize the name tepples and instantly realize that of course you're a fellow Nintendo fanboy. You forgot to point out that UMD is another example of how Sony foists its own pointless technology via consumer electronics, or how connectivity with the PS3 is exactly the same thing derided as a failure with the GBA!
Ironically, if you pay via check or other secured one time means, then frequently it happens that you keep getting their rag long past your year. Why? Because even though wresting 20 bucks via relucantance to cancel or stop subscriptions can be profitable, there's still a good piece of value in it for the advertisers. The subscription is typically seen as a signal of reader interest. If you pay 20 bucks a year, you must be somewhat interested in what's on the pages inside.
Although, I suppose its possible that some magazines are going through several rounds of belt tightening and see this sort of behavior as the next best thing to folding shop. But that's to be expected as the internet does everything you do, only faster and cheaper, while the "market" you cover becomes more and more niche.
Well, if your company isn't keen on hiring recent grads, an internship program seems like a bit of a waste. Probably someone's idea of proving "why we don't hire new grads"?
I never stated that custom software was "small changes to standard software." That was implicated elsewhere. My current boss used to work for Sprint as the guy who managed the deployment of servers for every IT project they came up with. My father used to be a contract consultant. They've discussed in some detail some of their former projects. But for many companies, a custom application will only provide a small edge, especially when their competitors are doing the same thing. The anecdote about selling software to competitors comes from a proffessor of mine, via his daughter, employed at a large national consulting firm, likely Accenture. Of course, they have to make changes to fit each business's invidivual way of doing things, but apparently the industry their client was in was self-similar enough to make it worth their while.
Also, thank you for pointing out Accenture's new name. I'd always wondered why they wanted to change the name; my father theorized it was because they didn't have a very good reputation (even before the enron scandal), but the official story is that Arthur Anderson didn't want the overlapping name. Ironic case of 20/20 foresight, I guess.
Actually, a lot of medium sized companies do invest in customized software, and they view it as a competitive measure; by customizing their software, it gives them a small edge over their competition. Giving it away via BSD or GPL would quickly erode this private advantage. That's how they justify spending the whatever millions of dollars on a large consulting project.
Of course, within the last twenty years, there's been a shift to contractors keeping the rights to the code. Places like Anderson (I forget their new name) start putting in cheaper offers, thinking they'll just wait a year and approach their client's competitors, having had the R&D financed on the first company's dime. I would hope the companies are wising up, since they're essentially getting duped.
Finally, the GPL is not a very strong barrier to outright piracy. We've already seen a number of small (ie stupid) businesses abuse the availablility of the code, and I can only imagine how many smarter businesses have gotten away with it, imagining their situation somehow outside the provisions. For 99 percent of the software, it's not a large deal, although it would be amusing to see PearPC recieve compensation for sales.
Everyone makes clumsy mistakes. If you're too pompus to admit it, then you're part of the problem, and I wouldn't hire you. It's not like programming is as easy as writing perfect English, and even if it was, there's still a strong need for editors to check them.
Part of being adept at business is being able to address a problem without prompting, and the same is true for software development. It's rare for someone to not have chased down the wrong tree when attempting to solve a problem.
I'm no lawyer, but I presume that AMD may wish to use this lawsuit to sell to Dell. If they truely are getting a fringe benefit for playing Intel exclusive, I would imagine there is some law out there that punishes them as well for participating. At the very least, an ongoing suit with Intel suggests that Dell start offering AMD computers unless they WANT to be added to the list...
I hate to hear what you go through with new hires!
Unfortunately, there's still plenty of less progressive administrators, especially within budget constrained universities. I know that near the end of my 4 year degree they began filtering out BT, fearing a return to the Napster-era plateaus. In such a situation, direct downloads usually go faster for me, although at a higher expense to the content provider.
Grocery stores don't exactly make a ton of money, although they typically pay you minimum wage. The markup on most items is maybe five cents if it's a premium brand.
Fast food, you're on the money. It's even worse in movie theaters, where the markup is easily in the hundred of percents and the lines don't care.
Now unpaid internships, that's just crass commercialism. The worst deal I've seen so far is medical transcription. As part of their Community College degree, they have to get an internship. Unpaid, which is legal as long as the student is getting "college credit." And of course, half the teachers own their own transcription service. I think it's ridiculus and if you can't afford to pay your interns, I'm not sure why they'd expect a bright future with your company. These people are doing substantial work and the only serious cost to the employer is the time it takes one of their employees to verify that you've accurately done your job. I wonder how many people can pick up a job somewhere else with an internship like that...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2000-10- 23&res=l
And to a lesser (and former) extent, fatbabies.com. Not that anybody stops purchasing from them, but they might stop sending resumes. I don't think a site can attract consumers interested in the fair treatment of the people involved in making it; we just don't care. What would probably work better is consumer complaints, along the lines of resellerratings.
Ironically, there was a time when Counter-Strike and Quake were considered independent games. CS started as a free mod to a different game, and Quake was shareware, for pete's sake!
What you're really pointing out is that games are a social construct. Without an opponent, games are closer to a puzzle. It's only after the advent of the computer and video game that the idea of a single player game really took off. PC games that reintroduce this concept quite often last a long time. There's still plenty of people playing Starcraft, and
But a lot of the games on the list are shorter games. Five minute solo games. I tried out Oasis, and it's okay. It's definately not the spend all night building a starship to Alpha Centauri kind of game, but it does have a certain appeal. Those Kenta Cho abstract shooters are fun for a few minutes at a time as well, but don't hold up well over a few spare hours (lets just say I've got a boring and simple job that underwhelms me).
I donno. Just because the distribution is different than the mass market games, doesn't mean they aren't targeted at the average (ie casual) person. I'd call the Yahoo! games casual games, after all. The gender balance is either equal or in favor of women players, and the hardware investment is minimal. These are pick up and play games, not go out and buy 20 dollars worth of hardware games.
This would be in contrast to say, Battlefield 2, a game that has most people asking the message boards "Does my video card run this okay?" And yet, it's not like there's any monthly fee that pushes you to play competitively. I'm sure there's plenty of people who play Counter-Strike and BF2 "casually."
Interestingly enough, I work as a computer lab assistant at a local college. After spending a few months here, I have learned that 1. MS Office is not intuitive 2. Many people have difficulties operating a mouse at "high efficiencies."
What I mean is that many people can't move it very quickly, and that lots of people can't even move it in a straight line easily (such as when navigating that start menu with narrow bars to get to submenus with).
Dumping laws are awful for consumers. But consumers don't have a lobbyist group, like Business Software or the Kansas wheat farmers or other American producers have. At best, we get "watchdogs." Dumping essentially provides low cost goods to consumers, reguardless of the reasons why the provider is doing so.
As a result, dumping laws exist. The nefarious globalizing force named the World Trade Organization is responsible for deciding whether it's dumping or not. Some people feel the WTO is beholden to the US, though recently it's decided a few notable complaints against the US. Steel was the big ticket item during the last Presidential election, and it's partly why our manufacturing economy had been sucking.
Anyways, dumping is usually about either selling "below cost" or selling something overseas cheaper than domestically. Hyenix or whatever was found to be improperly subsidized by pricing. By compelling banks to bail the company out, they had subverted free market principles which would otherwise have corrected the mistake in the long term. Frankly, I'm suprised the US agricultural policy hasn't come up more often within the WTO. Perhaps that's what the critics of the WTO are implying...
Not that I think you have done anything wrong, but I'm trying to consider how one can distinguish a geniune case of trade secret theft from what you've done. Judging from the company's accounts, they suspect you've downloaded far more than what would be needed for a typical day's work; perhaps you've been mirroring their whole source tree as a form of personal evidence?
Of course, even a normal use of CVS would create conditions wherein you would download more than upload, unless you somehow managed to write more code than they had written the past however many years. There's a 99 percent chance that this is simply a case of using fraudulent claims to counter the case.
The good news is that you've got them in an excellent position. Either they lay claim to material involved in felonious computer crimes, or they've filed false reports against an employee. Barring outside collusion with the police, they won't be walking away from this without bruises. I hope they learn from them.
The other situation that is prohibited is for a monopoly to sell a product at a price below cost in order to destroy the competition. In such situations, the monopoly aims to destroy the competition so that the monopoly can, at a later point in time, dramatically raise the price of the product to reap monopoly profits. Such actions also hurt the American economy.
Is it even possible for a monopoly to sustain that sort of behavior long term? The argument I'd heard goes like this: the current pricing scheme has created enough incentive to produce a few competitors; in order to keep them out, the monopoly lowers its price by say ten dollars for X months. In order to make that up, the monopoly must raise prices by twenty dollars (ten over the older number) for X months at some point. At this point there is now ten dollars MORE incentive to create a competing business!
Plus they can charge you for the box you'll need! Its a win-lose situation!