Pity they couldn't simply return the unsold goods.
Why? We're talking about infinitely copyable strings of bits, not physical goods. If this involved a fleet of vehicles then I could understand Microsoft demanding payment because they were out the materials and construction costs. However, they're just out the cost of electricity for running the key generator.
And the practices they carried over from the Radio Shack days - always asking for your name and phone number so they could sell it to marketers - always pissed me off.
"I can't divulge that," and pay in cash. Look nervous. You might as well have fun with their dumb rules.
I don't know why people expect to find low priced cables at these kind of stores - they're bulky items, don't necessarily sell in large amounts, and the margins aren't that great on the low priced items.
And yet the local grocery store carries pickled pigs' feet for what seems (to my gleeful ignorant eye) to be a reasonable price. They're bulky and sell in small amounts and the margins aren't that great.
The computer was simply too infected to allow the Symantec software to install. This is not an abnormal occurrence. Symantec offered to have an engineer remotely access the system and clean it, which naturally costs money, since you're paying for a person's time to fix your computer, in addition to the license for the software.
That's a load of crap. They advertise that it will fix your computer, not that it might fix it as long as your computer's not really all that broken. Do you also have weird parsings of "all you can eat" and "flat rate"?
Welcome to Colorado, 49th in funding for schools. Perhaps there is a correlation, then again, I was educated exclusively in this state so maybe I'm just an idiot.
Bumpers in Colorado must be longer than the ones we have here.
Now where did you get that from man I was making a joke.
Nice try, but I'm not buying it.
The main point is for a normal home user these prices don't make sense.
You're wrong, based on market performance. They might not make sense to you, but a lot of people thought they seemed reasonable.
Car analogy time: any car will get you from point A to point B, but many people spend extra to do it comfortably in a nice-looking vehicle. Your Ford Focus might be a great car - I'm fond of my Oldsmobile - but BMW is selling plenty of upscale models. Even down to the low end of the price scale, you might think generic ketchup is just fine and that Hunt's is ridiculously overpriced. In either example, your opinions simply don't matter: the price difference is worthwhile to a sizable market segment.
People that want the Apple name in their house and dont understand the the the price they are paying is not worth the equipment they are getting.
...to you. As their market share is still increasing, and quickly, it's objectively true that their equipment is worth what people are paying. Whether you think that's fair or reasonable is irrelevant: the market has spoken.
Hold on what am I thinking this is Apple the all mighty and great the fans will flock to them and pay what ever they want.
I'm not a fanboy. I have a Mac only because a friend was practically giving one away. Still, when it up and dies, it will probably be replaced by another one.
I spend all day managing FreeBSD and OpenBSD servers from a heavily-hacked Linux desktop. I don't like the Mac because I'm not capable of anything else, or because I can't build my own (like the handmade home server sitting next to it), but because when I get home at night I just don't to mess around to get the thing working. I like doing normal-people things like making home movies of the kids, and playing with my iPod, and playing closed-source video games. If I can afford a Mac that lets me spend more of my free time doing the things I want to do, then it's my own business if I choose to buy one.
Looking down on others because you can't comprehend psychology and economics doesn't make you elite. It makes you an uneducated snot who's far more pretentious than the people you're looking down on.
An imac quad core would be a great virtualization machine.
First, I totally understand what you're saying. I'm one of the many who wish they had at least one mid-range hackable model because none of their offerings really match what I'd want.
Having said that, I think their logic is this: iMacs are meant for regular desktop users. They're not supposed to be workstations or high-end systems, even the higher-end models. If you want to do stuff more advanced than the average person, you're supposed to get the Mac Pro.
While I don't fully agree with them, I can understand them not wanting to cannibalize their most expensive systems by putting the same capabilities in their middling models.
The last time I confronted this, I used a little Simple Green and a bristle brush. The part looked brand new in seconds. I guess I could've waited a decade for someone to invent a workalike, but it didn't occur to me.
The problem with both Chrome and Safari is a lack of an add-on community.
Not really. Outside the geek community and their immediate friends and family, few people go out of their way to install extensions. I ran the numbers once and posted them on Slashdot, and although I'm too lazy to find a link, the end result was that something like.3% of Firefox users download them (based on estimates of Firefox installations and the stats for the most popular extensions).
You and I like the web developer add-ons, NoScript, etc. Most of the people around us have never even heard of them and wouldn't be interested if they had.
The whole point is that many physicians are doing things, such as pap smears for women without cervixes, which are contrary to both science and common sense -- and they react badly when informed that what they're doing is unscientific and nonensical.
Not to mention: impossible. How were they supposed to have done an anatomy-specific procedure on anatomy that's not present? Frankly, that seems like hyperbole.
It's the sending a message to angel and venture capital investors, that they should invest in a different industry and stay far away from digital music, that they enjoy.
I'd generalize that to all investors and the entire music industry. They're saying that this is an extremely poor time to own stock in an RIAA member company.
By driving the cost of software to zero, OSS developers have made it difficult for many people to act creatively due to the high cost of development.
"By driving the cost of $good to $smallnum, $industry have made it difficult for..."
Oh, I give up. That's just a dumb argument, regardless of what industry you apply it to. This is a basic fact of humanity: whenever you can make a product more cheaply that other people can, you trade it for other products that you can't make as efficiently as someone else. If someone cheaper than you comes along, they get your customers until you can lower your prices. This always happens, everywhere. It's inescapable. Whether you're trading energy for computing, or rice for a haircut, there is always market pressure for things to get cheaper.
The fact that this has happened is an indicator that the economy is working. Furthermore, this is a good thing for the 99.9% of companies that develop custom software for internal use. We needed a better way to convert FoxPro tables to PostgreSQL than we could find, so I wrote one. My boss has zero interest in selling this software because that's not what we do and we're not set up to deal with support, license management, etc. By giving my work away, sure, we've undercut people who would try to sell the commercial equivalent. Can you make a legitimate argument that this is bad?
I just don't accept that. Say there are a billion Windows installations. I don't think that one out of every 400 of them has a unique piece of hardware.
Actually, that's not the same. In the current cultural context, you are assumed to be straight.
In all fairness, you are also assumed to be at least functionally literate, fluent in the local language, and not homeless. People assume that other people are mostly like themselves (which is a reasonable default), and sexuality is just one of many of the properties that applies to.
Reverend Phelps, on the other hand, goes around to funerals of gays all over the US with his inbred clan and they hold up signs and chant things like, "God hates fags!" without being stopped. At FUNERALS.
That's not quite right. Of all people, it turns out that bikers are pretty patriotic and respectful, and it's fairly common for packs of bikers to park in front of Phelps and his cretins to shield the funeral-goers from the filth. Phelps doesn't (routinely) get assaulted, but I think that has a lot more to do with people simply looking away in disgust than even the remotest acceptance of his position.
Fact: When someone says "I don't want to hear about [a gay person's] sexual orientation" what they are really saying is "Stop breaking my comfortable assumption that everyone is straight".
Fact: You're wrong. For example, there was a guy on Hell's Kitchen this year who wore a gay pride pin. Now, I couldn't care less if he was into men, women, or stuffed animals. I just thought it terribly crass to advertise his inclinations to the whole world. Two men or two women holding hands aren't throwing their sexuality in society's face, no matter if some people get upset by it, because that's what people do when they're walking with someone they love. Wearing a gay pride pin and telling everyone about it is another story, just as wearing a "straight pride" pin would be tacky.
Yes, I know there are gay people in the world. That doesn't bother me. However, I truly don't want to know anyone's sexual orientation because it's none of my business and not my top-level category for sorting people.
However some things make a lot of sense that seem squirrelly- like adjusting your back to fix a stomach problem- because the nerves leading to your stomach were being pinched.
Well, it's not helped by certain chiropractors who claim it can cure almost anything. A neighbor once told me, with a perfectly straight face, that he could have cured my appendicitis and that he'd had good luck with viruses. I can understand the basis behind mis-aligned bones pinching nerves and causing pain and other symptoms, but I'm not willing to throw out germ theory just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. The cold meds seem to have disabled my humor detector.
Pity they couldn't simply return the unsold goods.
Why? We're talking about infinitely copyable strings of bits, not physical goods. If this involved a fleet of vehicles then I could understand Microsoft demanding payment because they were out the materials and construction costs. However, they're just out the cost of electricity for running the key generator.
I'm pretty sure that someone made this story up as a way of characterizing the poor customer service at the individual stores.
This is the keen insight that keeps me coming back for more.
And the practices they carried over from the Radio Shack days - always asking for your name and phone number so they could sell it to marketers - always pissed me off.
"I can't divulge that," and pay in cash. Look nervous. You might as well have fun with their dumb rules.
I don't know why people expect to find low priced cables at these kind of stores - they're bulky items, don't necessarily sell in large amounts, and the margins aren't that great on the low priced items.
And yet the local grocery store carries pickled pigs' feet for what seems (to my gleeful ignorant eye) to be a reasonable price. They're bulky and sell in small amounts and the margins aren't that great.
The computer was simply too infected to allow the Symantec software to install. This is not an abnormal occurrence. Symantec offered to have an engineer remotely access the system and clean it, which naturally costs money, since you're paying for a person's time to fix your computer, in addition to the license for the software.
That's a load of crap. They advertise that it will fix your computer, not that it might fix it as long as your computer's not really all that broken. Do you also have weird parsings of "all you can eat" and "flat rate"?
Welcome to Colorado, 49th in funding for schools. Perhaps there is a correlation, then again, I was educated exclusively in this state so maybe I'm just an idiot.
Bumpers in Colorado must be longer than the ones we have here.
He's actually a fairly nice guy when you meet him in person.
His students might disagree.
Now where did you get that from man I was making a joke.
Nice try, but I'm not buying it.
The main point is for a normal home user these prices don't make sense.
You're wrong, based on market performance. They might not make sense to you, but a lot of people thought they seemed reasonable.
Car analogy time: any car will get you from point A to point B, but many people spend extra to do it comfortably in a nice-looking vehicle. Your Ford Focus might be a great car - I'm fond of my Oldsmobile - but BMW is selling plenty of upscale models. Even down to the low end of the price scale, you might think generic ketchup is just fine and that Hunt's is ridiculously overpriced. In either example, your opinions simply don't matter: the price difference is worthwhile to a sizable market segment.
People that want the Apple name in their house and dont understand the the the price they are paying is not worth the equipment they are getting.
...to you. As their market share is still increasing, and quickly, it's objectively true that their equipment is worth what people are paying. Whether you think that's fair or reasonable is irrelevant: the market has spoken.
Hold on what am I thinking this is Apple the all mighty and great the fans will flock to them and pay what ever they want.
I'm not a fanboy. I have a Mac only because a friend was practically giving one away. Still, when it up and dies, it will probably be replaced by another one.
I spend all day managing FreeBSD and OpenBSD servers from a heavily-hacked Linux desktop. I don't like the Mac because I'm not capable of anything else, or because I can't build my own (like the handmade home server sitting next to it), but because when I get home at night I just don't to mess around to get the thing working. I like doing normal-people things like making home movies of the kids, and playing with my iPod, and playing closed-source video games. If I can afford a Mac that lets me spend more of my free time doing the things I want to do, then it's my own business if I choose to buy one.
Looking down on others because you can't comprehend psychology and economics doesn't make you elite. It makes you an uneducated snot who's far more pretentious than the people you're looking down on.
An imac quad core would be a great virtualization machine.
First, I totally understand what you're saying. I'm one of the many who wish they had at least one mid-range hackable model because none of their offerings really match what I'd want.
Having said that, I think their logic is this: iMacs are meant for regular desktop users. They're not supposed to be workstations or high-end systems, even the higher-end models. If you want to do stuff more advanced than the average person, you're supposed to get the Mac Pro.
While I don't fully agree with them, I can understand them not wanting to cannibalize their most expensive systems by putting the same capabilities in their middling models.
Toss a couple of bucks to the defendant instead of winning is not exactly an eternity having your liver eaten while chained to a rock*.
No, but it's possibly jail time from any of the other hundreds of judges dragged into this fiasco who would now have solid evidence of barratry.
The last time I confronted this, I used a little Simple Green and a bristle brush. The part looked brand new in seconds. I guess I could've waited a decade for someone to invent a workalike, but it didn't occur to me.
The problem with both Chrome and Safari is a lack of an add-on community.
Not really. Outside the geek community and their immediate friends and family, few people go out of their way to install extensions. I ran the numbers once and posted them on Slashdot, and although I'm too lazy to find a link, the end result was that something like .3% of Firefox users download them (based on estimates of Firefox installations and the stats for the most popular extensions).
You and I like the web developer add-ons, NoScript, etc. Most of the people around us have never even heard of them and wouldn't be interested if they had.
The whole point is that many physicians are doing things, such as pap smears for women without cervixes, which are contrary to both science and common sense -- and they react badly when informed that what they're doing is unscientific and nonensical.
Not to mention: impossible. How were they supposed to have done an anatomy-specific procedure on anatomy that's not present? Frankly, that seems like hyperbole.
It's the sending a message to angel and venture capital investors, that they should invest in a different industry and stay far away from digital music, that they enjoy.
I'd generalize that to all investors and the entire music industry. They're saying that this is an extremely poor time to own stock in an RIAA member company.
A list of "best" console games without SMB3 at one of the top positions
It was alright, but not groundbreaking.
By driving the cost of software to zero, OSS developers have made it difficult for many people to act creatively due to the high cost of development.
"By driving the cost of $good to $smallnum, $industry have made it difficult for ..."
Oh, I give up. That's just a dumb argument, regardless of what industry you apply it to. This is a basic fact of humanity: whenever you can make a product more cheaply that other people can, you trade it for other products that you can't make as efficiently as someone else. If someone cheaper than you comes along, they get your customers until you can lower your prices. This always happens, everywhere. It's inescapable. Whether you're trading energy for computing, or rice for a haircut, there is always market pressure for things to get cheaper.
The fact that this has happened is an indicator that the economy is working. Furthermore, this is a good thing for the 99.9% of companies that develop custom software for internal use. We needed a better way to convert FoxPro tables to PostgreSQL than we could find, so I wrote one. My boss has zero interest in selling this software because that's not what we do and we're not set up to deal with support, license management, etc. By giving my work away, sure, we've undercut people who would try to sell the commercial equivalent. Can you make a legitimate argument that this is bad?
that's the B*t*h.
Bandwidth? Birdbath? Buckteeth? Be clear, man.
K.I.S.S, How about nntpd
I'll be darned - just when you think you've seen everything.
2.8 million pieces of different hardware
I just don't accept that. Say there are a billion Windows installations. I don't think that one out of every 400 of them has a unique piece of hardware.
Actually, that's not the same. In the current cultural context, you are assumed to be straight.
In all fairness, you are also assumed to be at least functionally literate, fluent in the local language, and not homeless. People assume that other people are mostly like themselves (which is a reasonable default), and sexuality is just one of many of the properties that applies to.
Reverend Phelps, on the other hand, goes around to funerals of gays all over the US with his inbred clan and they hold up signs and chant things like, "God hates fags!" without being stopped. At FUNERALS.
That's not quite right. Of all people, it turns out that bikers are pretty patriotic and respectful, and it's fairly common for packs of bikers to park in front of Phelps and his cretins to shield the funeral-goers from the filth. Phelps doesn't (routinely) get assaulted, but I think that has a lot more to do with people simply looking away in disgust than even the remotest acceptance of his position.
Fact: When someone says "I don't want to hear about [a gay person's] sexual orientation" what they are really saying is "Stop breaking my comfortable assumption that everyone is straight".
Fact: You're wrong. For example, there was a guy on Hell's Kitchen this year who wore a gay pride pin. Now, I couldn't care less if he was into men, women, or stuffed animals. I just thought it terribly crass to advertise his inclinations to the whole world. Two men or two women holding hands aren't throwing their sexuality in society's face, no matter if some people get upset by it, because that's what people do when they're walking with someone they love. Wearing a gay pride pin and telling everyone about it is another story, just as wearing a "straight pride" pin would be tacky.
Yes, I know there are gay people in the world. That doesn't bother me. However, I truly don't want to know anyone's sexual orientation because it's none of my business and not my top-level category for sorting people.
However some things make a lot of sense that seem squirrelly- like adjusting your back to fix a stomach problem- because the nerves leading to your stomach were being pinched.
Well, it's not helped by certain chiropractors who claim it can cure almost anything. A neighbor once told me, with a perfectly straight face, that he could have cured my appendicitis and that he'd had good luck with viruses. I can understand the basis behind mis-aligned bones pinching nerves and causing pain and other symptoms, but I'm not willing to throw out germ theory just yet.