Consequently, iPod owners will eventually be replacing their existing equipment. And more than a fair number will be buying the newer, sleeker version to replace their still working models.
Think of it like buying a new car. It is more common for people to buy new cars because they want a new car than because they need a new car.
But you're dead on about appearences being subjective. I'd only observe that (1) the set of people that don't care about what devices look like is fairly small and (2) Apple seems to have visual designers that are in synch with the overwhelming majority of people who buy personal music players. I'm of the opinion that both of these factors will negatively impact the sales of the DJ Ditty.
iPods can be put into one of two modes: player mode and storage mode.
In storage mode, it becomes an external hard drive. Music files copied to the iPod in storage mode cannot be played when the iPod is put into player mode. Unless, that is, one uploads one of the many third party pieces of software that allows you to do just this.
In player mode, one does have to use something akin to iTunes to transfer files. But that something does not have to be iTunes. There are many third part programs that will suffice. This is how iPods can be used with Linux, which doesn't have iTunes available.
So, out of the box, your friend is correct. But one can easily fix the problem by installing third party tools.
You ought to fault them for not adding in a hand crank so that the device can be recharged if the power does indeed fail and the batteries run down.
Or maybe, Apple is trying to make a device that does/one/ thing and does it well.
And Coke doesn't charge $1 per can. Grocery stores, gas stations, convenience stores and vending companies are the ones charging $1 per can. The price per can that the Coke company charges is almost always determined as function of costs. Costs + Mark up = Price, where Mark up is the normal profit margin of a given industry which is almost universally figured as a percentage of the amount of money invested into production, R&D, marketing, etc.
Sure, the company charges whatever they can, but if that number is less than the production costs, the company won't stay in business very long.
Capitalism has litte, if anything, to do with neo-classical supply/demand price theory. One can assume that a greatly different economic theory is true, such as neo-Ricardianism, and still have capitalism.
Further, you're entirely leaving out the supply side of supply/demand price theory. Most economists hold to some version of this theory. But the theory holds that prices are set by the equilibrium between what suppliers are will to sell for and what consumers are willing to buy for. But again, this isn't the premise behind capitalism, it is the premise behind a single economic theory and one that has yet to be empirically proven.
Capitalism, in a nutshell, is merely the belief that the owner of the means of production is entitled to control the fruits of production. This says nothing about how prices in the market are set.
That is the cost of making one additional chip given that they've already sunk the money into R&D, chip foundries, etc. It also doesn't probably ignores the costs of selling that chip, negotiating contracts with resellers, marketing, shipping, packaging.
To stay in business, Intel needs to sell their chips for a price higher than the sum of their amortized fixed costs of production, their marginal costs of production, and the average costs involved with selling that chip. They don't have to worry about all of that for chips they use internally because the chips they're selling absorb the fixed costs and they don't have any significant costs of selling the chips to themselves.
The most widely accepted economic theory, neo-classicaly supply/demand price theory, claims that market prices are set by the equilibrium between what consumers are willing to pay (the demand curve) and what producers are willing to sell for (the supply curve). If you think that the supply curve is not a function (at least in part) of the costs of production, you're a moron. Quite simply, a producer that continually sells a product at below the costs of production quickly goes out of business.
Further, most economic theories that are seriously vying against neo-classical economics, such as neo-Ricardian economics, suggest that market prices are entirely a function of costs of production, chiefly labor.
Either way you slice it, costs are a large part of the final price of a product.
Also, you're quite wrong about a good company's goal being to find the highest price that will still outsell their competitors and avoid creating a black market. In a capitalist system, the goal of any firm is simply to maximize profits. That may or may not entail outselling one's competitors or avoiding the creation of black markets. In many industries, black markets increase the over-all profit of the companies whose goods are being sold illicitly.
Estimates range from twenty cents to a buck fifty in subsidies per gallon of gasoline. The subsidies come in the form form of grants, no-interest loans, tax breaks, and other incentives for oil exploration, pipeline building, refinery expansion and other activities.
I don't know about Europe, but it seems to me that one ought to take any subsidies into account before one starts trying to calculate the ``true'' cost of gasoline.
It does have a time and place, but not as often as many people would believe. Bruce Schneier makes the point succinctly:
Say the secret police arrest you and start going through your hard drive. You've got a bunch of pornographic pictures on your hard drive, so you've got a decent cover story. But you've also got the steganographic program on your hard drive, so the secret police are suspicious. They might try to download the same pictures from the net and look for the telltale differences that indicate a hidden message. Or they might just assume that you've got some messages hidden somewhere.
Steganography: Truths and Fictions
In your example, the court could as easily order you to explain the steganographic system as they could order the keys to the cryptographic system. The difference being, that unless you use cryptography within your steganography, that anyone who figures out where to look can figure out your unencrypted data in a steganographic system.
BTW, systems such as StegFS are cryptographic systems at heart. They use steganography to hide the fact that the encryption is there, but their strength is the fact that the data is encrypted, not that the data is hidden. The data being hidden just makes it harder to unencrypt.
Most portable music players in the eighties, with their underpowered amp and chintzy headphones, did not deliver the same dB to the ear canal as most modern portable music players with their more powerful amps and earbud style headphones.
Want to know the BIGGEST, best-kept secret in data forensics? The most effective way to forever put your data beyond the reach of cops and courts is:...
Actually, the best kept secret is that the best way to keep something secret is not commit it to any storage medium outside of your head.
Your tip is the second best kept secret.
The third is the use of cryptographic file systems.
Windows XP also comes in Starter (mandated by the EU anti-trust suit) and Embedded editions.
But to be fair, most retail consumers won't be seeing the Starter, Embedded, Media Center, Tablet PC, or Professional x64 editions on the retail shelves or even as pre-load options for most consumer PCs. That's what makes this amusing is that Best Buy is likely going to carry 2 editions (both upgrade and full pack) of each of Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, and Small Business. In addition, MS might sell upgrades from one to the other.
And that's not counting various OEM versions. I suspect that the OEM version of XP is quite different than the retail version of the `same' edition of XP.
... and ask him or her to start (1) a car with an automatic transmission, (2) a car with a manual transmission, and (3) a car with a manual choke. And then ask that average driver to explain what the differences between them are. Quite a few people wouldn't get very far past saying, `well, this one has a strange little doohickey, but I'm not real sure what it does...'
Sun coined the slogan that the Network IS the computer, but Apple was the first to seriously begin to deliver that idea to the home. It just so happens that sometimes it takes a while for technology to get to the point where it makes sense for Apple to enter into the market. I think that Apple is one of the few companies that's really preparing itself for universal network access.
And in the meantime, every phone that sells that is compatible with iTunes is essentially a commercial for Apple. But Apple needs to tread carefully here. They need to not step on the toes of the big mobile providers until wireless networking is ubiquitous. If they piss off the Cingulars and the Verizons, who will be some of the major players in providing wireless networking, Apple will be dead in the water.
But in either case, I'm not quite certain that its valid to assume that all/. readers agree with everything that either Linus or Hans has to say. There are technical arguments for each point of view. You'll find/. adherents on both sides of the issue.
Aside from which, please don't claim that Microsoft has released a true micro-kernel architecture. They haven't.
Once WI-FI or some other wireless networking technology, I bet Apple will release an iPod that does VOIP.
But Apple can't do that now. The only way to get into the mobile phone market right now is to partner with providers who aren't willing to launch the sorts of services that would make an Apple phone an Apple phone.
Consequently, Apple is now trying to merely put its name out in the mobile arena. It is essentially creating iTunes for providers to integrate into their non-Apple phones. This avoids stepping on the providers toes.
But this is also a temporary step. Ubiquitous wireless will eliminate the need of Apple to partner with the mobile providers.
The tropics don't exactly lack energy. In most cases, the lack of infrastructure is far more of a barrier than an actual lack of energy. A device with few (if any) moving parts, no hazardous chemicals and no sophisticated circuitry probably has a greater benefit than a highly efficient device that is far more temperamental.
If the article is correct, the important parts of this invention are: zero operating costs and no chemical refridgerants. The device is so simple that there are very few things can break. Consequently, it ought to be a good deal more reliable than freon based systems or Peltier systems. Further, without the chemical refridgerants, the device is much less hazardous to the environment.
If one were, say, to be carting fish from the ocean to the market in the next town over, you don't need to make your ice from potable water. You can put the ice in the bottom of your cart, put down a tarp, and load the fish on top of that. The fish arrives much fresher than it would otherwise. Such uses of ice would vastly improve life in many parts of the world.
They're nice machines, but mine only lasted about a year and half (maybe two years). After which it needed a scanner bulb replacement and HP didn't offer the part for sale. Rather, one had to purchase the whole scanner assembly in order to fix the multifunction device. Worse, not even the print function works when the device reports a scanner error.
Prior to this meltdown, I was pretty pleased with the unit. Getting it to play nice with OS X Panther was a royal bear, but that problem was fixed by the time that Panther had been out about a year.
I wanted to buy one of the Canon or Samsung models to replace it, but neither offered OS X drivers for their multifunction devices. If I didn't have such a limited amount of space, I would have bought a separate printer, copier, and scanner. Separately, they wouldn't have had much of a premium over all-in-one units.
I ended up buying another HP. Unless you want to spend a couple thousand on industrial grade machines, they're pretty much the only game in town for laser all-in-ones for OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
Consequently, iPod owners will eventually be replacing their existing equipment. And more than a fair number will be buying the newer, sleeker version to replace their still working models.
Think of it like buying a new car. It is more common for people to buy new cars because they want a new car than because they need a new car.
But you're dead on about appearences being subjective. I'd only observe that (1) the set of people that don't care about what devices look like is fairly small and (2) Apple seems to have visual designers that are in synch with the overwhelming majority of people who buy personal music players. I'm of the opinion that both of these factors will negatively impact the sales of the DJ Ditty.
iPods can be put into one of two modes: player mode and storage mode.
In storage mode, it becomes an external hard drive. Music files copied to the iPod in storage mode cannot be played when the iPod is put into player mode. Unless, that is, one uploads one of the many third party pieces of software that allows you to do just this.
In player mode, one does have to use something akin to iTunes to transfer files. But that something does not have to be iTunes. There are many third part programs that will suffice. This is how iPods can be used with Linux, which doesn't have iTunes available.
So, out of the box, your friend is correct. But one can easily fix the problem by installing third party tools.
You ought to fault them for not adding in a hand crank so that the device can be recharged if the power does indeed fail and the batteries run down. Or maybe, Apple is trying to make a device that does /one/ thing and does it well.
And Coke doesn't charge $1 per can. Grocery stores, gas stations, convenience stores and vending companies are the ones charging $1 per can. The price per can that the Coke company charges is almost always determined as function of costs. Costs + Mark up = Price, where Mark up is the normal profit margin of a given industry which is almost universally figured as a percentage of the amount of money invested into production, R&D, marketing, etc.
Sure, the company charges whatever they can, but if that number is less than the production costs, the company won't stay in business very long.
That's one .mp3 player that everyone I know who has an iPod would never buy. Dell needs to find some designers that know how to make things look good.
Capitalism has litte, if anything, to do with neo-classical supply/demand price theory. One can assume that a greatly different economic theory is true, such as neo-Ricardianism, and still have capitalism.
Further, you're entirely leaving out the supply side of supply/demand price theory. Most economists hold to some version of this theory. But the theory holds that prices are set by the equilibrium between what suppliers are will to sell for and what consumers are willing to buy for. But again, this isn't the premise behind capitalism, it is the premise behind a single economic theory and one that has yet to be empirically proven.
Capitalism, in a nutshell, is merely the belief that the owner of the means of production is entitled to control the fruits of production. This says nothing about how prices in the market are set.
That is the cost of making one additional chip given that they've already sunk the money into R&D, chip foundries, etc. It also doesn't probably ignores the costs of selling that chip, negotiating contracts with resellers, marketing, shipping, packaging.
To stay in business, Intel needs to sell their chips for a price higher than the sum of their amortized fixed costs of production, their marginal costs of production, and the average costs involved with selling that chip. They don't have to worry about all of that for chips they use internally because the chips they're selling absorb the fixed costs and they don't have any significant costs of selling the chips to themselves.
The most widely accepted economic theory, neo-classicaly supply/demand price theory, claims that market prices are set by the equilibrium between what consumers are willing to pay (the demand curve) and what producers are willing to sell for (the supply curve). If you think that the supply curve is not a function (at least in part) of the costs of production, you're a moron. Quite simply, a producer that continually sells a product at below the costs of production quickly goes out of business.
Further, most economic theories that are seriously vying against neo-classical economics, such as neo-Ricardian economics, suggest that market prices are entirely a function of costs of production, chiefly labor.
Either way you slice it, costs are a large part of the final price of a product.
Also, you're quite wrong about a good company's goal being to find the highest price that will still outsell their competitors and avoid creating a black market. In a capitalist system, the goal of any firm is simply to maximize profits. That may or may not entail outselling one's competitors or avoiding the creation of black markets. In many industries, black markets increase the over-all profit of the companies whose goods are being sold illicitly.
Estimates range from twenty cents to a buck fifty in subsidies per gallon of gasoline. The subsidies come in the form form of grants, no-interest loans, tax breaks, and other incentives for oil exploration, pipeline building, refinery expansion and other activities.
I don't know about Europe, but it seems to me that one ought to take any subsidies into account before one starts trying to calculate the ``true'' cost of gasoline.
Which means that I left out at least one version of XP. Although, I don't think Starter or N will be showing up on most retail shelves.
In your example, the court could as easily order you to explain the steganographic system as they could order the keys to the cryptographic system. The difference being, that unless you use cryptography within your steganography, that anyone who figures out where to look can figure out your unencrypted data in a steganographic system.
BTW, systems such as StegFS are cryptographic systems at heart. They use steganography to hide the fact that the encryption is there, but their strength is the fact that the data is encrypted, not that the data is hidden. The data being hidden just makes it harder to unencrypt.
Most portable music players in the eighties, with their underpowered amp and chintzy headphones, did not deliver the same dB to the ear canal as most modern portable music players with their more powerful amps and earbud style headphones.
Actually, the best kept secret is that the best way to keep something secret is not commit it to any storage medium outside of your head.
Your tip is the second best kept secret.
The third is the use of cryptographic file systems.
Windows XP also comes in Starter (mandated by the EU anti-trust suit) and Embedded editions.
But to be fair, most retail consumers won't be seeing the Starter, Embedded, Media Center, Tablet PC, or Professional x64 editions on the retail shelves or even as pre-load options for most consumer PCs. That's what makes this amusing is that Best Buy is likely going to carry 2 editions (both upgrade and full pack) of each of Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, and Small Business. In addition, MS might sell upgrades from one to the other.
XP Embedded
XP 64
And that's not counting various OEM versions. I suspect that the OEM version of XP is quite different than the retail version of the `same' edition of XP.
All your files always get saved whether you click on save or not.
... and ask him or her to start (1) a car with an automatic transmission, (2) a car with a manual transmission, and (3) a car with a manual choke. And then ask that average driver to explain what the differences between them are. Quite a few people wouldn't get very far past saying, `well, this one has a strange little doohickey, but I'm not real sure what it does...'
Sun coined the slogan that the Network IS the computer, but Apple was the first to seriously begin to deliver that idea to the home. It just so happens that sometimes it takes a while for technology to get to the point where it makes sense for Apple to enter into the market. I think that Apple is one of the few companies that's really preparing itself for universal network access.
And in the meantime, every phone that sells that is compatible with iTunes is essentially a commercial for Apple. But Apple needs to tread carefully here. They need to not step on the toes of the big mobile providers until wireless networking is ubiquitous. If they piss off the Cingulars and the Verizons, who will be some of the major players in providing wireless networking, Apple will be dead in the water.
You'd have a few sub editions:
Vista Reformed Edition: once saved, always saved.
Vista Millenial Edition: never saves in preperation for the end times.
Vista Catholic Edition: you need to perform your penance before you can save.
Vista Jabez Edition: once you save, you get rich.
Vista Eastern Orthodox Edition: you never know whether you've saved.
Vista Watchtower Edition: you have to save all your neighbors' files before your files are saved.
But in either case, I'm not quite certain that its valid to assume that all /. readers agree with everything that either Linus or Hans has to say. There are technical arguments for each point of view. You'll find /. adherents on both sides of the issue.
Aside from which, please don't claim that Microsoft has released a true micro-kernel architecture. They haven't.
Once WI-FI or some other wireless networking technology, I bet Apple will release an iPod that does VOIP. But Apple can't do that now. The only way to get into the mobile phone market right now is to partner with providers who aren't willing to launch the sorts of services that would make an Apple phone an Apple phone. Consequently, Apple is now trying to merely put its name out in the mobile arena. It is essentially creating iTunes for providers to integrate into their non-Apple phones. This avoids stepping on the providers toes. But this is also a temporary step. Ubiquitous wireless will eliminate the need of Apple to partner with the mobile providers.
The tropics don't exactly lack energy. In most cases, the lack of infrastructure is far more of a barrier than an actual lack of energy. A device with few (if any) moving parts, no hazardous chemicals and no sophisticated circuitry probably has a greater benefit than a highly efficient device that is far more temperamental.
If the article is correct, the important parts of this invention are: zero operating costs and no chemical refridgerants. The device is so simple that there are very few things can break. Consequently, it ought to be a good deal more reliable than freon based systems or Peltier systems. Further, without the chemical refridgerants, the device is much less hazardous to the environment.
If one were, say, to be carting fish from the ocean to the market in the next town over, you don't need to make your ice from potable water. You can put the ice in the bottom of your cart, put down a tarp, and load the fish on top of that. The fish arrives much fresher than it would otherwise. Such uses of ice would vastly improve life in many parts of the world.
They're nice machines, but mine only lasted about a year and half (maybe two years). After which it needed a scanner bulb replacement and HP didn't offer the part for sale. Rather, one had to purchase the whole scanner assembly in order to fix the multifunction device. Worse, not even the print function works when the device reports a scanner error.
Prior to this meltdown, I was pretty pleased with the unit. Getting it to play nice with OS X Panther was a royal bear, but that problem was fixed by the time that Panther had been out about a year.
I wanted to buy one of the Canon or Samsung models to replace it, but neither offered OS X drivers for their multifunction devices. If I didn't have such a limited amount of space, I would have bought a separate printer, copier, and scanner. Separately, they wouldn't have had much of a premium over all-in-one units.
I ended up buying another HP. Unless you want to spend a couple thousand on industrial grade machines, they're pretty much the only game in town for laser all-in-ones for OS X.