They are successful for one reason-they market what consumers want.
They are sucessful for 2 reasons. 1) They stock everything. Many people have the philosophy "If they don't sell it at walmart, you don't need it" 2) They capitalize on poor, younger and middle aged, people and other penny pinchers, by offering them the illusion that "You can get more for less!".
First, I've never ever known someone that has ever "saved" money by paying less for something. All the people that I know that talk all the time about "saving money" are either poor or they act and think they are poor. The only loyal walmart customer that I know recently filed for bankruptcy and saves all the time by buying worthless crap at places like walmart and biglots. They have absolutely no money, owe most of their friends money, borrow money from their parents, but they are square with walmart and are so happy that they have saved so much money on trinkets at walmart while avoiding thier friends.
If people were that concerned with "saving" money, convenience stores would not exist. These places easily have 200% plus markup, and do quite well. If people were that concerned with "saving" money, why do they tip at restaurants or go to restaurants? Why do people pay the outragous prices for snacks and drinks at places like movie theaters and concert venues? Why do they pay ticketmaster at all???
What I am getting at is that there is a difference between value and price. Walmart offers and strives for the lowest price, but what it is actually doing is degrading the value of the product, the people that supply the product, and the walmart employees and the community surrounding walmart stores.
Look at the "after" and "black" market. That is where real value happens. You can get a used car for hundreds of thousands of dollars to practically nothing, and the markup is anywhere from many times the original price to a small fraction of it. Look at illegal goods and services like drugs and prostitution. The hooker on the corner does not have leadin pricing or illusions of being cheaper than the other whore by advertising 24.99 for a blowjob because the others are charging $25.
Walmart and other retailers are almost exclusively record label's customers, not you and me. Yeah, you can get some stuff directly from sony, but I would guess that is much less than 1% of sony's sales.
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charging $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
I'm not shure who you think is gouging here, the wholesaler or retailer. To me a wholesale price of $12 is outrageous, but a $4 markup on a $12 item is only a 33% markup, most retail markups are in the 100% and up range.
Seeing how the "war against drugs" and the "war against terror" went I would be quite worried if I was an american.
Yeah, especially since we are really the only ones tha suffer the casualties of these wars. Its nuts to consider that Apartheid was maintained with as many or fewer of South Africa's population in jail or prison.
For those of you that don't know almost 1% of the human population is incarcerated, its over 1% when you consider those who are on probation and parole. Land of the free and home of the brave. Most Americans are scared shitless, and freedom is eroding on a daily basis.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal"
Our screenshots include Gnome, KDE, and XPce interfaces.
And people wonder "Why Linux isn't on the desktop?"
The Linux kernel is _almost_ ready for the desktop, but someone needs to put a stop to this "Desktop" insanity of 2 main "desktop environments" with some unknown number of other widgets and toolkits.
If RH, or some other company would just say we are only going to support Gnome or KDE or preferably something else besides a windows knockoff, then we will have progress. And then only progress.
Someone needs to figure out how to install software on a Linux system, some logical and good separation between "root" and "normal guy", and so on.
A good start would be to look at what Apple has done with UNIX as well as their GUI enhancements, but please don't ship a knockoff that either.
Yes, but not everyone has everything they need right there. In my company it is almost impossible since we have windows only software that we can't port, or use wine for (believe me I've tried)
This comes up all the time. "We can't switch OSes because we have always used Microsoft based stuff".
Not true. MS didn't exist before 1975. MS didn't have a real product until 1992 or so when Windows 3.11 (aka Windows for workgroups) came out.
If I were a bank, I would demand that my vendor supply me a computer with an OS without known holes in it, but logic does not apply to computer purchases or computing in general.
A more logical transition would be to run Macs with "Remote Desktop" or whatever terminal server thing allows you to run Windows apps on your Mac, and code new apps and port the old ones to a more standard UNIX based environment. But then again, logic does not apply to compting, so go ahead and throw a Linux box on people's desk and explain to them why not being able to do what they have always done before is better now that they can't do it. They will listen, and like it, trust me. I'm always right and I never lie.
Wow. I knew Bush was bad, but he successfully avoided answering all the questions and replying with bullshit.
Yeah, but the bullshit was good stuff for most Americans to hear. It went: "What do you think of this important issue?" "It is an important issue that is why I supported/voted/increased budget for similar thing while I was in office".
At this stage in the game there is little new that Bush can say or do to "sway the undecided" people. But knowing that people blindly stick with the status quo is a good thing to use at this time. Hollywood does it sucessfully all the time.
The only advantage is that if you redistribute or sell software that is GPLed, you have to provide source code - with BSD you don't.
Yup. And the number commercial products with BSD derived code in them is much greater than GPLed code because of this.
Why wouldn't Merkey use FreeBSD for the application he wants to sell? Almost all linux software is available for FreeBSD, and then he wouldn't have to pay $50,000 for a license.
Or can someone explain this to me?
1st, he wants the kernel not almost all linux software.
Maybe FreeBSD does not run on all or any of the desired hardware platforms, maybe he likes (some aspects) of Linux better than FreeBSD, maybe I should start charging a large fee to rationalize irrational human behavior?
Oh, I guess you meant what positive comments do we have with this product... well, it sort of renders most Word documents half-way decently, although checkboxes and such look like crap compared to the real Word from Microsoft. Basically it's a usable free word processor, but it's definitely no Office 2003 replacement.
ITS FREE! As in speech and beer, but if anyone seriously considers this as a viable office suite, well, did I mention that it was free?
.... The spreadsheet native format takes an age to save. Writer is way too slow on my P266 laptop. Menus are unintuitive, user interface design is lacklustre. Presenter is a pain. They've even managed to clone Clippy, with an annoying lightbulb thing that gives you pointless advice. (Oh, and the help system for that advice takes an age to load.)
BUT it allows me to use Linux on the desktop, and for that I am truly grateful.
If that makes you happy, I'd hate to see what you would do if you considered yourself a masochist.
Now, if it were $500 and had a decent d/a converter and audio output, I'd be all over these things. But for about 2x the cost of a nice 12" laptop, I think I'm much more likely to buy a laptop.
Re:Submitted by Timothy...
on
OQO For Sale
·
· Score: 1
Actually it was/.ed during the "subscriber preview". I was going to mail daddypants about it, but since noone reads and/or does anything with mails to daddypants its kinda worthless.
Another interesting feature I would like to see on/. is a 10 minute or so delay before anyone can post to an article. That way people might read the article or think before they post. This would make for a "flatter" discussion instead of the first person that has something to say get replied to with every tangent under the sun.
The reason Hondas and Fords are running around more is that most people cannot afford a Mercedes or Lexus.
Ahh, I thought it was the price/performance thing that I mentioned. I can afford a Mercedes or a Lexus as I would guess that 1/2 of the US population could do as well*, but I drive a 13 year old SUV because it works and its paid for.
* I would have to seriously adjust other expenses to make this happen as would most people. But I'd rather pay for an appreciating piece of property vs a depreciating transportation machine, as would most others as well.
I know that at least the Honda Element has an 1/8" input to the stereo, and my aftermarket expensive car stereo head unit has RCA inputs that come in as an AUX input. I've had the car stereo over a year and I'm still waiting for a decent portable unit to plug into it. If you build it it will come kind of thing.
Any market can be regarded as "wide open" if you have products of superior quality.
OK, then lets define the superior quality thing here and see how wide open the market becomes.
A HD based player that has 1) Wireless and wired connectivity (don't care, ethernet, usb, firewire) 2) Upgradeable/hackable firmware 3) ogg/wma/flac/ normal formats 4) RCA and optical lines out/in 5) gapless/crossfaded playback 6) random playback by folder/album 7) less than $500.
1st one that does this gets my money.
Oh, and the "wide open if you have products of superior quality" is not at all true. There is the price/performance tradeoff. Arguably, Mercedes and Lexus make superior cars to Honda and Ford, but I sure see many more Hondas and Fords when I'm driving around.
I too agree that this could be seen as wasting tax money. But what is wrong with just asking the guy not to do it any more?
I've run SETI on servers before, and it helped me write my first threaded program in order to start, stop, and get the status of them. Also, how do you know the responsiveness of a system when you have a completely CPU bound program pounding the CPU? Its nice to know the limits of your machines.
I mean how many extra "hits" and wasted cycles have hit their webservers since this? Lets keep firing people until the cycles stop!
...that we can choose Miss America from 50 contestants, but we just can't handle six legitimate candidates for President (who are on the ballot in enough states to win a majority of the Electoral College) in a debate?
The rules and the scores that the Miss America contestants compete with are clear and predefined. Each contestant gets scored for doing some simple behavior like walk in a dress and heels. The score is on a 1-10 basis with 10 being highest by a panel of people that were chosen by some unknown method. The contestant with the highest average score wins. The general population generally accepts the winner as the winner, even if they really wanted another person to win.
The rules are fairly clear with debates, but the scoring is much more subjective, and the winner of a debate does not mean that they win the election. Its just a different game.
Plus, its been proven that the human capacity for subjectively rank order available women in one evening is about 50 women +- 7, noone has done any research into rank ordering men. Plus its generally more pleasing to look at women.
Browers have been around a long time, and everybody's got one. For the past 3 years or so, I've demanded that my browser support tabbed browsing, control over popup windows, and preferably a useful download manager. Everything else is something I can do with or without or may be nice, but not a necessary feature.
On OSX, I use Safari with the KDE KHTML backend driving it. Its OK. One really cool, but unnecessary thing is that I can right click on any words in this dialog box and check the spelling for it, obviously not a desired feature for most/.ers and editors:) I also have on my Mac, Camino a native frontend to mozilla's gecko backend, and firefox and mozilla. All of these satisfy my needs.
On Linux/Solaris and co, there's at least Galeon, Mozilla, and Konquerer. Oh, and every browser that I have mentioned is free.
So what is there to war about? Just surf the web with whatever you want, there's plenty of choices.
Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?"
Innocent until proven guilty is an ideal and a legal technicality, but its much less than that in reality. Although you are legally "innocent", if you do not post bail or bond or the judge determines that your crime does not warrent bail or bond, you stay in jail until you are proven guilty. Yes, that means that an innocent person is expected to stay in jail right beside the guilty and convicted people.
Another thing that kills me is when the press says that the accused is "pleading innocent", and there is no such plea, your innocent by default, you can plea not guilty, but not innocent.
The fact that an "independent" (as in not company-owned) news resource was forced offline and its equipment seized *is* the newsworthy information.
Not necessarily. It could be that the admin of the box nocked off his crack dealer so he did not have to pay him what he owed him. Nothing too interesting with that.
Slashdot Mirror
They are successful for one reason-they market what consumers want.
They are sucessful for 2 reasons. 1) They stock everything. Many people have the philosophy "If they don't sell it at walmart, you don't need it" 2) They capitalize on poor, younger and middle aged, people and other penny pinchers, by offering them the illusion that "You can get more for less!".
First, I've never ever known someone that has ever "saved" money by paying less for something. All the people that I know that talk all the time about "saving money" are either poor or they act and think they are poor. The only loyal walmart customer that I know recently filed for bankruptcy and saves all the time by buying worthless crap at places like walmart and biglots. They have absolutely no money, owe most of their friends money, borrow money from their parents, but they are square with walmart and are so happy that they have saved so much money on trinkets at walmart while avoiding thier friends.
If people were that concerned with "saving" money, convenience stores would not exist. These places easily have 200% plus markup, and do quite well. If people were that concerned with "saving" money, why do they tip at restaurants or go to restaurants? Why do people pay the outragous prices for snacks and drinks at places like movie theaters and concert venues? Why do they pay ticketmaster at all???
What I am getting at is that there is a difference between value and price. Walmart offers and strives for the lowest price, but what it is actually doing is degrading the value of the product, the people that supply the product, and the walmart employees and the community surrounding walmart stores.
Look at the "after" and "black" market. That is where real value happens. You can get a used car for hundreds of thousands of dollars to practically nothing, and the markup is anywhere from many times the original price to a small fraction of it. Look at illegal goods and services like drugs and prostitution. The hooker on the corner does not have leadin pricing or illusions of being cheaper than the other whore by advertising 24.99 for a blowjob because the others are charging $25.
Don't know where the blojob thing came from...
How about making the customers happy?
Walmart and other retailers are almost exclusively record label's customers, not you and me. Yeah, you can get some stuff directly from sony, but I would guess that is much less than 1% of sony's sales.
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charging $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
I'm not shure who you think is gouging here, the wholesaler or retailer. To me a wholesale price of $12 is outrageous, but a $4 markup on a $12 item is only a 33% markup, most retail markups are in the 100% and up range.
Is there anything or anyone the US is not actually at war with at the moment?
"America has never gone to war with a country that has McDonalds restaurants."
-- US Marine, Fallujah
oops
Don't they understand that they are rich because we are the customers?
Yup, and they keep being rich because we keep being their customers.
Keep bitchin and do nothing about it, it works!
Seeing how the "war against drugs" and the "war against terror" went I would be quite worried if I was an american.
Yeah, especially since we are really the only ones tha suffer the casualties of these wars. Its nuts to consider that Apartheid was maintained with as many or fewer of South Africa's population in jail or prison.
For those of you that don't know almost 1% of the human population is incarcerated, its over 1% when you consider those who are on probation and parole. Land of the free and home of the brave. Most Americans are scared shitless, and freedom is eroding on a daily basis.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal"
-- Adolf Hitler
Our screenshots include Gnome, KDE, and XPce interfaces.
And people wonder "Why Linux isn't on the desktop?"
The Linux kernel is _almost_ ready for the desktop, but someone needs to put a stop to this "Desktop" insanity of 2 main "desktop environments" with some unknown number of other widgets and toolkits.
If RH, or some other company would just say we are only going to support Gnome or KDE or preferably something else besides a windows knockoff, then we will have progress. And then only progress.
Someone needs to figure out how to install software on a Linux system, some logical and good separation between "root" and "normal guy", and so on.
A good start would be to look at what Apple has done with UNIX as well as their GUI enhancements, but please don't ship a knockoff that either.
Yes, but not everyone has everything they need right there. In my company it is almost impossible since we have windows only software that we can't port, or use wine for (believe me I've tried)
This comes up all the time. "We can't switch OSes because we have always used Microsoft based stuff".
Not true. MS didn't exist before 1975. MS didn't have a real product until 1992 or so when Windows 3.11 (aka Windows for workgroups) came out.
If I were a bank, I would demand that my vendor supply me a computer with an OS without known holes in it, but logic does not apply to computer purchases or computing in general.
A more logical transition would be to run Macs with "Remote Desktop" or whatever terminal server thing allows you to run Windows apps on your Mac, and code new apps and port the old ones to a more standard UNIX based environment. But then again, logic does not apply to compting, so go ahead and throw a Linux box on people's desk and explain to them why not being able to do what they have always done before is better now that they can't do it. They will listen, and like it, trust me. I'm always right and I never lie.
The truly amazing part is that Darl actually believes that there are individuals out there who buy his story.
If this is true then Darl has serious psychological/psychiatric problems and should be treated accordingly. Seriously.
OK, we all knew the SCO guys were lacking a few parts of brain mass that most others posess,
like a cerebrum?
What marketing guy said "let's launch a site called ProSCO under the flag of 'fair coverage of the events', everyone will believe us!"?
The only marketing guy they have to push their only "product". Hint, lawsuits until pump and dump is done.
Oh, and Darl if this were the "Wild West" you would have been shot at least once by now.
Wow. I knew Bush was bad, but he successfully avoided answering all the questions and replying with bullshit.
Yeah, but the bullshit was good stuff for most Americans to hear. It went: "What do you think of this important issue?" "It is an important issue that is why I supported/voted/increased budget for similar thing while I was in office".
At this stage in the game there is little new that Bush can say or do to "sway the undecided" people. But knowing that people blindly stick with the status quo is a good thing to use at this time. Hollywood does it sucessfully all the time.
The only advantage is that if you redistribute or sell software that is GPLed, you have to provide source code - with BSD you don't.
Yup. And the number commercial products with BSD derived code in them is much greater than GPLed code because of this.
Why wouldn't Merkey use FreeBSD for the application he wants to sell? Almost all linux software is available for FreeBSD, and then he wouldn't have to pay $50,000 for a license.
Or can someone explain this to me?
1st, he wants the kernel not almost all linux software.
Maybe FreeBSD does not run on all or any of the desired hardware platforms, maybe he likes (some aspects) of Linux better than FreeBSD, maybe I should start charging a large fee to rationalize irrational human behavior?
Oh, I guess you meant what positive comments do we have with this product... well, it sort of renders most Word documents half-way decently, although checkboxes and such look like crap compared to the real Word from Microsoft. Basically it's a usable free word processor, but it's definitely no Office 2003 replacement.
ITS FREE! As in speech and beer, but if anyone seriously considers this as a viable office suite, well, did I mention that it was free?
.... The spreadsheet native format takes an age to save. Writer is way too slow on my P266 laptop. Menus are unintuitive, user interface design is lacklustre. Presenter is a pain. They've even managed to clone Clippy, with an annoying lightbulb thing that gives you pointless advice. (Oh, and the help system for that advice takes an age to load.)
BUT it allows me to use Linux on the desktop, and for that I am truly grateful.
If that makes you happy, I'd hate to see what you would do if you considered yourself a masochist.
Thanks for the price info.
Now, if it were $500 and had a decent d/a converter and audio output, I'd be all over these things. But for about 2x the cost of a nice 12" laptop, I think I'm much more likely to buy a laptop.
Actually it was /.ed during the "subscriber preview". I was going to mail daddypants about it, but since noone reads and/or does anything with mails to daddypants its kinda worthless.
/. is a 10 minute or so delay before anyone can post to an article. That way people might read the article or think before they post. This would make for a "flatter" discussion instead of the first person that has something to say get replied to with every tangent under the sun.
Another interesting feature I would like to see on
The reason Hondas and Fords are running around more is that most people cannot afford a Mercedes or Lexus.
Ahh, I thought it was the price/performance thing that I mentioned. I can afford a Mercedes or a Lexus as I would guess that 1/2 of the US population could do as well*, but I drive a 13 year old SUV because it works and its paid for.
* I would have to seriously adjust other expenses to make this happen as would most people. But I'd rather pay for an appreciating piece of property vs a depreciating transportation machine, as would most others as well.
I know that at least the Honda Element has an 1/8" input to the stereo, and my aftermarket expensive car stereo head unit has RCA inputs that come in as an AUX input. I've had the car stereo over a year and I'm still waiting for a decent portable unit to plug into it. If you build it it will come kind of thing.
Any market can be regarded as "wide open" if you have products of superior quality.
OK, then lets define the superior quality thing here and see how wide open the market becomes.
A HD based player that has 1) Wireless and wired connectivity (don't care, ethernet, usb, firewire) 2) Upgradeable/hackable firmware 3) ogg/wma/flac/ normal formats 4) RCA and optical lines out/in 5) gapless/crossfaded playback 6) random playback by folder/album 7) less than $500.
1st one that does this gets my money.
Oh, and the "wide open if you have products of superior quality" is not at all true. There is the price/performance tradeoff. Arguably, Mercedes and Lexus make superior cars to Honda and Ford, but I sure see many more Hondas and Fords when I'm driving around.
I too agree that this could be seen as wasting tax money. But what is wrong with just asking the guy not to do it any more?
I've run SETI on servers before, and it helped me write my first threaded program in order to start, stop, and get the status of them. Also, how do you know the responsiveness of a system when you have a completely CPU bound program pounding the CPU? Its nice to know the limits of your machines.
I mean how many extra "hits" and wasted cycles have hit their webservers since this? Lets keep firing people until the cycles stop!
...that we can choose Miss America from 50 contestants, but we just can't handle six legitimate candidates for President (who are on the ballot in enough states to win a majority of the Electoral College) in a debate?
The rules and the scores that the Miss America contestants compete with are clear and predefined. Each contestant gets scored for doing some simple behavior like walk in a dress and heels. The score is on a 1-10 basis with 10 being highest by a panel of people that were chosen by some unknown method. The contestant with the highest average score wins. The general population generally accepts the winner as the winner, even if they really wanted another person to win.
The rules are fairly clear with debates, but the scoring is much more subjective, and the winner of a debate does not mean that they win the election. Its just a different game.
Plus, its been proven that the human capacity for subjectively rank order available women in one evening is about 50 women +- 7, noone has done any research into rank ordering men. Plus its generally more pleasing to look at women.
So technically you could preside in the White House after doing a stint in the Big House.
Yeah, but you couldn't vote for yourself.
Browers have been around a long time, and everybody's got one. For the past 3 years or so, I've demanded that my browser support tabbed browsing, control over popup windows, and preferably a useful download manager. Everything else is something I can do with or without or may be nice, but not a necessary feature.
/.ers and editors :) I also have on my Mac, Camino a native frontend to mozilla's gecko backend, and firefox and mozilla. All of these satisfy my needs.
On OSX, I use Safari with the KDE KHTML backend driving it. Its OK. One really cool, but unnecessary thing is that I can right click on any words in this dialog box and check the spelling for it, obviously not a desired feature for most
On Linux/Solaris and co, there's at least Galeon, Mozilla, and Konquerer. Oh, and every browser that I have mentioned is free.
So what is there to war about? Just surf the web with whatever you want, there's plenty of choices.
Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?"
Innocent until proven guilty is an ideal and a legal technicality, but its much less than that in reality. Although you are legally "innocent", if you do not post bail or bond or the judge determines that your crime does not warrent bail or bond, you stay in jail until you are proven guilty. Yes, that means that an innocent person is expected to stay in jail right beside the guilty and convicted people.
Another thing that kills me is when the press says that the accused is "pleading innocent", and there is no such plea, your innocent by default, you can plea not guilty, but not innocent.
The fact that an "independent" (as in not company-owned) news resource was forced offline and its equipment seized *is* the newsworthy information.
Not necessarily. It could be that the admin of the box nocked off his crack dealer so he did not have to pay him what he owed him. Nothing too interesting with that.
There is simply no information to go on here.