Though I haven't looked yet, I'd be willing to bet large sums of money that it's just hosting shdocvw.dll, which is the entire rendering engine for IE, including the scripting containers, etc. It's pretty much IE without the buttons, menus and other UI elements.
One of the "classic" examples VB advocates have used for several years for how easy VB programming is is to embed shdocvw.dll into a form, throw a few menu items and a text box for URL's and you have a complete browser.
It's definitely not just current movies. I just searched for the movie I'm watching right now and it brings back the right result from 1995. Search for Desperado (the prequel to Once Upon a Time in Mexico).
1. Just because you get the album art, booklet, etc. doesn't mean they have to sit out on a shelf or that you have to keep them in the jewel cases. Put on spindles or in binders you can probably store at least 1000 CD's in a single office box (the kind given to people to pack their desk). The booklets can either be kept in the same box or handed over to the recycling truck/garbage truck/burned to cook your food.
2. Everything but the rarest of stuff or brand new albums go for under $6-7 with many going for under $2-3 when bought on Half.com or Amazon's used sections, much less looking a little harder for better deals.
3. Ripping an album takes me about 5 minutes of effort, tops. Given that it probably takes 10-15 to make a decision to buy the darn thing in the first place, that's not much time. I set up EAC and LAME once and all I do is put the disc in, hit ALT-G, glance at the track names to make sure they're right and hit rip to MP3. If even that is too much effort to get DRM-free digital files ripped to my your *exact* specifications (meaning files that can be used on ANY computer or ANY portable/console player I have run into) there are services which will take a spindle of CD's and do it for you for about $1 a piece. Since you're starting with $6 CD's, adding $1 *still* puts you under the iTunes price, gives you whatever quality you want, leaves you with the media as a backup, a chance to read all of the liner notes, etc.
4. In the hundreds of CD's I've ripped, I've NEVER run into any copy-protection that got in the way. Sure, there are some out there, but there are lists if you really want to avoid them and think that every 3rd CD is going to be unrippable if you don't watch out.
5. Don't lose your iTunes files. I bought an audiobook from them, downloaded it to a PC that was struck by lightning the next day, before I had a chance to back the files up to CD. This was in the early iTunes days and I just figured I could go back and they'd have a record of the purchase and let me download again. Wrong. I had to practically beg and plead to get them to let me download those files again on an "exception" to the rule. That sealed the deal for used CD's.
"Apple does know that there are other browsers on Windows platforms other than MSIE, right?"
Yes, they do. Hence the SDK. It's pretty likely that there will be plugins for the rest shortly via the SDK.
See, when you're putting out a tool for a new platform, you tend to focus on the biggest target and work from there. The alternative is to hold on to things until absolutely everyone can possibly be covered, which results in NO ONE getting it for Windows at all.
The DirecTV Tivo's are $5/month for all of the Tivo's in your house. The boxes are $99 at full price. However, $200 just got me 3 DirecTV Tivos, 1 regular receiver, all 7 coax runs installed and the rest of the installation. If I'd only wanted 1 Tivo instead of 3, it would have all been free for taking a $40/month TV package which I pay for anyway.
Exactly. I'm also surprised that someone hasn't yet responded with the tired "It doesn't matter, you should be willing anyway if you really want a job" response. Of course, ask them to move to Bangalore or Shanghai or Argentina or somewhere like Nome Alaska from the Bay Area or New York (where so many of the high horses seem to be ridden) and suddenly a double standard shows up.
We are lazy and to be blamed if we won't move 1000 miles for a job, but make it 5000 and make the location somewhere undesirable for living their hip urban lifestyle and their own willingness goes down pretty sharply.
I personally would face divorce if I asked my wife to move to any number of "good" job cities.
Those who say things like the above frequently live such a modular life that their entire existance can be packed up and moved with little more than 2 days notice. They frequently either still live at home or rent a bedroom in a shared house. The only real impact to people outside the individual in these situations is a new phone number and possibly longer trips to visit friends and family. There's usually no spouse, no kids, no pets, no 24 foot truck full of furniture and belongings, etc.
The fact that they'd need to find an equally rewarding (financially and task-wise) job for their spouse, pull their kids out of school and move them as well, sell their house (it just took me 9 months to sell mine), find new housing in a new city (families of 4 need more than a shared house), pay for moving costs, trips to interview as well as to find housing or an advance apartment, etc. never enters into the picture before offering such "advice". Costs for finding and moving to the new job can easily run $15,000-25,000 or more. I know that I can't afford to be that eager to find a job in another city. And, that assumes you pick the right city the first time.
It's also not like we had 3.8Ghz 32 bit processors with 4GB of RAM and 400GB drives when the first 32 bit versions of Windows showed up circa 1995. Heck, the Win95 requirements could be satisfied with a 386 and math coprocessor, 8MB of RAM and 30MB of hard drive space. The upper limits of 32 bit computing sounded just about as high back then.
When you release a completely new platform, it had BETTER have some room for technology that doesn't exist right now.
The typical 486 or 1st generation Pentium was running at a clock speed less than 1% of the 64 bit procesors of today, 16MB of RAM similar, etc.
Those numbers put these ceilings pretty easily in range and possibly too conservative.
Sometimes you have to plan for really big numbers. I'm not thrilled with what cars, food, etc. are going to cost (with nothing more than normal inflation) in 35 years when I'm 65, but that doesn't change the fact that I should really plan for about 4 million in assets to completely retire at that age. Saying that $125,000 will be a modest salary equivalent to $45,000 this year matches up pretty well.
Ahh. But, you see, that doesn't let them collect the full $0.002 as the market penetration of e-gold means that, while an individual consumer of the content is able to spend micro-amounts, the paltry number of e-gold-enabled consumers means that, to make the same $300 a month (that has already been established as an amount that provides incentive enough to create the content) would require that those who *are* holding e-gold accounts would actually need to pay at a level that would hardly be called "micro" any more.
E-gold and the other existing micropayment systems all suffer from a lack of critical mass. However, advertising never really suffered from this (hence it's explosion and longstanding use) as it accomplished the spreading of price across large populations without the overhead that actually trying to collect the micropayment from each consumer. To collect the $0.25/hr (that I recall recently being bandied about as the amount for a TV viewer's consumption of programming) from all of the viewers of a prime time drama would be ridiculous. Advertising, by contrast, collects that same figure by only requiring each network/station to negotiate with a few individual companies and even then, the negotiations cover ad runs that cover weeks or months worth of programming. So, with a matter of probably an average of 10 or so (wild-ass guess) checks, they collect the aggregated contributions of millions of viewers. Or, they can try to collect $0.125 from each of several million viewers for that 22 minute sitcom.
In such discussions, those who have historically been most vocal in this venue tend to regurgitate platitudes that are just as inaccurate (in the real world) as those they criticize, albeit on the other end of the spectrum: RIAA, MPAA, etc.
When Jack Valenti declares that downloading is starving set carpenters, Slashdotters retort that theft can only exist when someone is deprived of physical property. Both sides are attempting to paint the issue as a black and white matter. Reality is ALWAYS more complex than a simple binary view.
It's overly optimistic to believe that the advertising model that dominated the 20th century will continue, unaltered into the distant future. Likewise, a belief that a sudden army of creative altruists will instantly rise up after the collapse of traditional advertising and create $400 million movies, weekly dramas, novels, a wide variety of music, etc. *including* sorting, filtering and bringing to consumers' attention all of that content is a naive position as well. They point to independent film and music as alternatives. Indeed, there is great content to be had there. However, having watched my fair share of indy films, I'm no longer that interested in watching another movie about people sitting around a coffee house table, spouting nihilist dogma for 2 hours. Similarly, indy music tends to focus on pretty specific genres and the filtering of that music to find the quality requires some hefty time dedication.
Most intellectual property has high development/creation cost with 2nd - n copies having extremely low distribution costs. These low costs of distribution are what Slashdotters tend to focus on, arguing that, given the cost of the plastic disc, DVD's should be under $1 and tickets in the theater should be priced similarly.
However, movies, music, etc. are all rely heavily on spreading the money that they are seeking by doing the work across a large audience. If either the audience will be too small, the method of aggregating to risky or uncertain, the market-tolerated pricing too low, etc. the incentive will not be there and the work will not be done.
Note, that I did not mention cost because what is probably the biggest misunderstanding about price is that costs have nothing to do with it except to define a numeric floor, below which not only is it not worth selling a product or service, but it costs more than you can obtain. Price is a function of demand in relation to supply. Period.
Napster, Bittorrent sites, etc. have all changed the supply end of things, creating a bit of instability by increasing the supply of given albums and movies. However, if this continues (with no alterations to the way these businesses do business), those filesharers will be left sharing an ever decreasing pool of content.
And, you're missing the fact that "worth paying for" currently has a literal floor value of (in American currency) $0.01 and in practical terms more like $1.00 for single transactions.
I have several content-based sites that do OK with Google Ads (covering expenses). On a typical day the amount that an average visitor "pays" $0.002 to view a bit of content by a certain percentage clicking on an ad. Through advertising, that bit of content has a value of $0.002.
Exactly which revenue collection source enables me to collect the $0.002 that the current advertising market has indicated that my content is worth (a price that is viable and workable under the current system)?
A really good content site might have 4 heavily viewed articles/tutorials and generate numbers like I mentioned above. With current ad participation, a site like that could easily have 5000 article "reads" and would make somewhere in the ballpark of $300/month. That's a clear indication that those 4 articles have actual market value. However, take away the aggregated payment via advertisement and you lose the ability to effectively collect the already determined price for the articles since even a full-pass, reading all 4 articles still falls under the $0.01 that hard currency handles and well below any practical online payment mechanism.
And, before you think that, again, this is some great conspiracy of people who just don't understand the difference between physical and electronic items, I'd like to point out that this type of aggregated payment happens all over the place for both tangible items and non-tangible items.
Lots of people (and governments) rely on this type of payment to provide entirely viable products and services. Consider city water. I pay a couple of dollars per 1000 gallons. Between my household use and my lawn, etc. I use enough to generate a bill of $60 or so every couple of months. Each gallon has an actual cost, but it's entirely unpractical to try to buy each gallon from the city individually. Remove the water meters and aggregated billing/payment and it's not like the cost of delivering clean city water went away or that the value of doing so went away, it's just the the mechanism for collecting payment per unit consumed fell apart and stopped the system from working.
Do you think your individual taxes pay for even 1 police officer to keep your neighborhood safe? Does that mean that a police officer's salary and benefit to the community isn't a "viable product"? Absolutely not. Rather, it means that the value per citizen is low enough while the cost of providing is high enough that the cost needs to be spread out across a population of people.
And, if you think that competing with Walmart on price is a way to stay alive as a business, you deserve what you get as a Walmart customer.
Any pricewar with Walmart is a race to the bottom with Walmart on top. If Netflix did, indeed, match this price, Walmart would offer it at $9.95. Walmart's economy's of scale, ruthless business practices and willingness to leverage gigantic loss-leaders means that you have to compete on things *other* than price when Walmart is involved.
Also keep in mind that in EVERY market segment and local market trading area, there can be only 1 lowest price. Several companies can share that spot, but there is always business being done at much higher prices. Why? Because price is not the only variable in a purchasing decision. In fact, for many consumers, it's not even the most important. Many consumers (myself included) tend to actually AVOID the lowest priced vendor because of the problems that frequently come with choosing them. The psychology of pricing is much more complicated than "Lowest price good. Any higher price bad."
If you do some market research, you'll find that oftentimes, one of the best ways to boost both sales numbers (actually sell more units) and profit per unit simultanously is to *increase* prices.
If you're only competitive advantage is price, you had either better be REALLY good and keep that advantage or you need to watch out for anyone who can do it more cheaply because they will obliterate your advantage. A business needs a competitive advantage *other* than price in order to survive in the long term.
As I'm not sure that mail-order DVD rental has already turned into a commodity product/service, I'm don't know how much the Walmart->Netflix price difference really is playing into decisions.
Shhh. Quiet. We don't want all of those San-Francisco-is-the-center-of-the-universe folks coming here complaining about the weather and constantly comparing Minneapolis to everywhere else.
We like it here and part of the appeal is that people *don't* flock here from everywhere else because it's trendy.
But, if these magazine surveys keep putting the Twin Cities in the top 10 for things and that's going to change. So, keep a lid on the good news about MN.
"It's not hard, pay attention to what your spending"
Isn't that what Americans say to Europeans who complain about our currency being all the same color?
Oh, that's right. When an American messes up a non-American system, he's ignorant. When a non-American messes up an American system, the American system is ignorant and not nearly as sophisticated as the non-American setup.
Apparently, they don't teach respect in your non-American "world-class university". The United States have (yes, I still hold on to the older plural use of United States) literally *thousands* of colleges and universities. And, like everywhere else in the world, they range from world-class to the terrible. I've personally attended schools at several different levels: community college, state university and private university. They were all within the same state and varied greatly.
They also must not teach drawing clear analogies either as your parallel needs work. If you had said "I was at a world-class university *in Europe*", your pointing to "America" as your contrast might have made college-educated sense. However, you didn't. Rather, you revealed your open hostility and likely ignorance by saying that your one, anecdotal instance of a non-American university supplies enough evidence to damn the whole American post-secondary education system.
2:00 am is when it technically happens for everyone, not just computers. When I was in college, I worked at a fast food restaurant that was open until 2:00am. We had to argue with our boss to not have to stay open the extra hour at 2:00.
Absolutely. When you remove everything except exactly what you're likely to want to keep, you get a much nicer disc. I know that I'm an oddity, but I dramatically prefer the Superbit, Criterion, etc. discs without all of the extras, photos, menu's etc. I hate having to go through half a dozen movies to set the audio to DTS (which I always choose if it's available), setting the subtitles to "English for non-English dialog" etc. on every single viewing of some of my favorites. Unfortunately, some of these same movies basically require a dual-layer burn if I want to keep the audio and video quality anywhere near where I like it.
Yes, I used my address initially, but wasn't exactly looking to post my home address on Slashdot. If you zoom out a bit from that address and go east a bit to the Regal 20 movie theater (the big pink ugly one) at: 6420 Camden Ave N,Minneapolis, MN, you'll see the big difference. There's literally a stripe of low res images running north and south through there.
Slashdot Mirror
Though I haven't looked yet, I'd be willing to bet large sums of money that it's just hosting shdocvw.dll, which is the entire rendering engine for IE, including the scripting containers, etc. It's pretty much IE without the buttons, menus and other UI elements.
One of the "classic" examples VB advocates have used for several years for how easy VB programming is is to embed shdocvw.dll into a form, throw a few menu items and a text box for URL's and you have a complete browser.
It's definitely not just current movies. I just searched for the movie I'm watching right now and it brings back the right result from 1995. Search for Desperado (the prequel to Once Upon a Time in Mexico).
3 A+ Desperado&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=movie%
Can you even get an MCE2005 machine for less than $1500?
1. Just because you get the album art, booklet, etc. doesn't mean they have to sit out on a shelf or that you have to keep them in the jewel cases. Put on spindles or in binders you can probably store at least 1000 CD's in a single office box (the kind given to people to pack their desk). The booklets can either be kept in the same box or handed over to the recycling truck/garbage truck/burned to cook your food.
2. Everything but the rarest of stuff or brand new albums go for under $6-7 with many going for under $2-3 when bought on Half.com or Amazon's used sections, much less looking a little harder for better deals.
3. Ripping an album takes me about 5 minutes of effort, tops. Given that it probably takes 10-15 to make a decision to buy the darn thing in the first place, that's not much time. I set up EAC and LAME once and all I do is put the disc in, hit ALT-G, glance at the track names to make sure they're right and hit rip to MP3. If even that is too much effort to get DRM-free digital files ripped to my your *exact* specifications (meaning files that can be used on ANY computer or ANY portable/console player I have run into) there are services which will take a spindle of CD's and do it for you for about $1 a piece. Since you're starting with $6 CD's, adding $1 *still* puts you under the iTunes price, gives you whatever quality you want, leaves you with the media as a backup, a chance to read all of the liner notes, etc.
4. In the hundreds of CD's I've ripped, I've NEVER run into any copy-protection that got in the way. Sure, there are some out there, but there are lists if you really want to avoid them and think that every 3rd CD is going to be unrippable if you don't watch out.
5. Don't lose your iTunes files. I bought an audiobook from them, downloaded it to a PC that was struck by lightning the next day, before I had a chance to back the files up to CD. This was in the early iTunes days and I just figured I could go back and they'd have a record of the purchase and let me download again. Wrong. I had to practically beg and plead to get them to let me download those files again on an "exception" to the rule. That sealed the deal for used CD's.
"Apple does know that there are other browsers on Windows platforms other than MSIE, right?"
Yes, they do. Hence the SDK. It's pretty likely that there will be plugins for the rest shortly via the SDK.
See, when you're putting out a tool for a new platform, you tend to focus on the biggest target and work from there. The alternative is to hold on to things until absolutely everyone can possibly be covered, which results in NO ONE getting it for Windows at all.
The DirecTV Tivo's are $5/month for all of the Tivo's in your house. The boxes are $99 at full price. However, $200 just got me 3 DirecTV Tivos, 1 regular receiver, all 7 coax runs installed and the rest of the installation. If I'd only wanted 1 Tivo instead of 3, it would have all been free for taking a $40/month TV package which I pay for anyway.
Exactly. I'm also surprised that someone hasn't yet responded with the tired "It doesn't matter, you should be willing anyway if you really want a job" response. Of course, ask them to move to Bangalore or Shanghai or Argentina or somewhere like Nome Alaska from the Bay Area or New York (where so many of the high horses seem to be ridden) and suddenly a double standard shows up.
We are lazy and to be blamed if we won't move 1000 miles for a job, but make it 5000 and make the location somewhere undesirable for living their hip urban lifestyle and their own willingness goes down pretty sharply.
I personally would face divorce if I asked my wife to move to any number of "good" job cities.
"Then that's not eager enough in my book."
Those who say things like the above frequently live such a modular life that their entire existance can be packed up and moved with little more than 2 days notice. They frequently either still live at home or rent a bedroom in a shared house. The only real impact to people outside the individual in these situations is a new phone number and possibly longer trips to visit friends and family. There's usually no spouse, no kids, no pets, no 24 foot truck full of furniture and belongings, etc.
The fact that they'd need to find an equally rewarding (financially and task-wise) job for their spouse, pull their kids out of school and move them as well, sell their house (it just took me 9 months to sell mine), find new housing in a new city (families of 4 need more than a shared house), pay for moving costs, trips to interview as well as to find housing or an advance apartment, etc. never enters into the picture before offering such "advice". Costs for finding and moving to the new job can easily run $15,000-25,000 or more. I know that I can't afford to be that eager to find a job in another city. And, that assumes you pick the right city the first time.
It's also not like we had 3.8Ghz 32 bit processors with 4GB of RAM and 400GB drives when the first 32 bit versions of Windows showed up circa 1995. Heck, the Win95 requirements could be satisfied with a 386 and math coprocessor, 8MB of RAM and 30MB of hard drive space. The upper limits of 32 bit computing sounded just about as high back then.
When you release a completely new platform, it had BETTER have some room for technology that doesn't exist right now.
The typical 486 or 1st generation Pentium was running at a clock speed less than 1% of the 64 bit procesors of today, 16MB of RAM similar, etc.
Those numbers put these ceilings pretty easily in range and possibly too conservative.
Sometimes you have to plan for really big numbers. I'm not thrilled with what cars, food, etc. are going to cost (with nothing more than normal inflation) in 35 years when I'm 65, but that doesn't change the fact that I should really plan for about 4 million in assets to completely retire at that age. Saying that $125,000 will be a modest salary equivalent to $45,000 this year matches up pretty well.
Ahh. But, you see, that doesn't let them collect the full $0.002 as the market penetration of e-gold means that, while an individual consumer of the content is able to spend micro-amounts, the paltry number of e-gold-enabled consumers means that, to make the same $300 a month (that has already been established as an amount that provides incentive enough to create the content) would require that those who *are* holding e-gold accounts would actually need to pay at a level that would hardly be called "micro" any more.
E-gold and the other existing micropayment systems all suffer from a lack of critical mass. However, advertising never really suffered from this (hence it's explosion and longstanding use) as it accomplished the spreading of price across large populations without the overhead that actually trying to collect the micropayment from each consumer. To collect the $0.25/hr (that I recall recently being bandied about as the amount for a TV viewer's consumption of programming) from all of the viewers of a prime time drama would be ridiculous. Advertising, by contrast, collects that same figure by only requiring each network/station to negotiate with a few individual companies and even then, the negotiations cover ad runs that cover weeks or months worth of programming. So, with a matter of probably an average of 10 or so (wild-ass guess) checks, they collect the aggregated contributions of millions of viewers. Or, they can try to collect $0.125 from each of several million viewers for that 22 minute sitcom.
In such discussions, those who have historically been most vocal in this venue tend to regurgitate platitudes that are just as inaccurate (in the real world) as those they criticize, albeit on the other end of the spectrum: RIAA, MPAA, etc.
When Jack Valenti declares that downloading is starving set carpenters, Slashdotters retort that theft can only exist when someone is deprived of physical property. Both sides are attempting to paint the issue as a black and white matter. Reality is ALWAYS more complex than a simple binary view.
It's overly optimistic to believe that the advertising model that dominated the 20th century will continue, unaltered into the distant future. Likewise, a belief that a sudden army of creative altruists will instantly rise up after the collapse of traditional advertising and create $400 million movies, weekly dramas, novels, a wide variety of music, etc. *including* sorting, filtering and bringing to consumers' attention all of that content is a naive position as well. They point to independent film and music as alternatives. Indeed, there is great content to be had there. However, having watched my fair share of indy films, I'm no longer that interested in watching another movie about people sitting around a coffee house table, spouting nihilist dogma for 2 hours. Similarly, indy music tends to focus on pretty specific genres and the filtering of that music to find the quality requires some hefty time dedication.
Most intellectual property has high development/creation cost with 2nd - n copies having extremely low distribution costs. These low costs of distribution are what Slashdotters tend to focus on, arguing that, given the cost of the plastic disc, DVD's should be under $1 and tickets in the theater should be priced similarly.
However, movies, music, etc. are all rely heavily on spreading the money that they are seeking by doing the work across a large audience. If either the audience will be too small, the method of aggregating to risky or uncertain, the market-tolerated pricing too low, etc. the incentive will not be there and the work will not be done.
Note, that I did not mention cost because what is probably the biggest misunderstanding about price is that costs have nothing to do with it except to define a numeric floor, below which not only is it not worth selling a product or service, but it costs more than you can obtain. Price is a function of demand in relation to supply. Period.
Napster, Bittorrent sites, etc. have all changed the supply end of things, creating a bit of instability by increasing the supply of given albums and movies. However, if this continues (with no alterations to the way these businesses do business), those filesharers will be left sharing an ever decreasing pool of content.
And, you're missing the fact that "worth paying for" currently has a literal floor value of (in American currency) $0.01 and in practical terms more like $1.00 for single transactions.
I have several content-based sites that do OK with Google Ads (covering expenses). On a typical day the amount that an average visitor "pays" $0.002 to view a bit of content by a certain percentage clicking on an ad. Through advertising, that bit of content has a value of $0.002.
Exactly which revenue collection source enables me to collect the $0.002 that the current advertising market has indicated that my content is worth (a price that is viable and workable under the current system)?
A really good content site might have 4 heavily viewed articles/tutorials and generate numbers like I mentioned above. With current ad participation, a site like that could easily have 5000 article "reads" and would make somewhere in the ballpark of $300/month. That's a clear indication that those 4 articles have actual market value. However, take away the aggregated payment via advertisement and you lose the ability to effectively collect the already determined price for the articles since even a full-pass, reading all 4 articles still falls under the $0.01 that hard currency handles and well below any practical online payment mechanism.
And, before you think that, again, this is some great conspiracy of people who just don't understand the difference between physical and electronic items, I'd like to point out that this type of aggregated payment happens all over the place for both tangible items and non-tangible items.
Lots of people (and governments) rely on this type of payment to provide entirely viable products and services. Consider city water. I pay a couple of dollars per 1000 gallons. Between my household use and my lawn, etc. I use enough to generate a bill of $60 or so every couple of months. Each gallon has an actual cost, but it's entirely unpractical to try to buy each gallon from the city individually. Remove the water meters and aggregated billing/payment and it's not like the cost of delivering clean city water went away or that the value of doing so went away, it's just the the mechanism for collecting payment per unit consumed fell apart and stopped the system from working.
Do you think your individual taxes pay for even 1 police officer to keep your neighborhood safe? Does that mean that a police officer's salary and benefit to the community isn't a "viable product"? Absolutely not. Rather, it means that the value per citizen is low enough while the cost of providing is high enough that the cost needs to be spread out across a population of people.
And, if you think that competing with Walmart on price is a way to stay alive as a business, you deserve what you get as a Walmart customer.
Any pricewar with Walmart is a race to the bottom with Walmart on top. If Netflix did, indeed, match this price, Walmart would offer it at $9.95. Walmart's economy's of scale, ruthless business practices and willingness to leverage gigantic loss-leaders means that you have to compete on things *other* than price when Walmart is involved.
Also keep in mind that in EVERY market segment and local market trading area, there can be only 1 lowest price. Several companies can share that spot, but there is always business being done at much higher prices. Why? Because price is not the only variable in a purchasing decision. In fact, for many consumers, it's not even the most important. Many consumers (myself included) tend to actually AVOID the lowest priced vendor because of the problems that frequently come with choosing them. The psychology of pricing is much more complicated than "Lowest price good. Any higher price bad."
If you do some market research, you'll find that oftentimes, one of the best ways to boost both sales numbers (actually sell more units) and profit per unit simultanously is to *increase* prices.
If you're only competitive advantage is price, you had either better be REALLY good and keep that advantage or you need to watch out for anyone who can do it more cheaply because they will obliterate your advantage. A business needs a competitive advantage *other* than price in order to survive in the long term.
As I'm not sure that mail-order DVD rental has already turned into a commodity product/service, I'm don't know how much the Walmart->Netflix price difference really is playing into decisions.
Next thing you know, they'll be counting how many people visit web pages.
Shhh. Quiet. We don't want all of those San-Francisco-is-the-center-of-the-universe folks coming here complaining about the weather and constantly comparing Minneapolis to everywhere else.
We like it here and part of the appeal is that people *don't* flock here from everywhere else because it's trendy.
But, if these magazine surveys keep putting the Twin Cities in the top 10 for things and that's going to change. So, keep a lid on the good news about MN.
Well, Samuel L. Jackson is a cast member and no one can utilize an extended vocabularly like Mr. Jackson...
"It's not hard, pay attention to what your spending"
Isn't that what Americans say to Europeans who complain about our currency being all the same color?
Oh, that's right. When an American messes up a non-American system, he's ignorant. When a non-American messes up an American system, the American system is ignorant and not nearly as sophisticated as the non-American setup.
Sorry, I forgot.
"Maybe things are different in America. "
Apparently, they don't teach respect in your non-American "world-class university". The United States have (yes, I still hold on to the older plural use of United States) literally *thousands* of colleges and universities. And, like everywhere else in the world, they range from world-class to the terrible. I've personally attended schools at several different levels: community college, state university and private university. They were all within the same state and varied greatly.
They also must not teach drawing clear analogies either as your parallel needs work. If you had said "I was at a world-class university *in Europe*", your pointing to "America" as your contrast might have made college-educated sense. However, you didn't. Rather, you revealed your open hostility and likely ignorance by saying that your one, anecdotal instance of a non-American university supplies enough evidence to damn the whole American post-secondary education system.
Perhaps your world-class university wasn't.
2:00 am is when it technically happens for everyone, not just computers. When I was in college, I worked at a fast food restaurant that was open until 2:00am. We had to argue with our boss to not have to stay open the extra hour at 2:00.
Absolutely. When you remove everything except exactly what you're likely to want to keep, you get a much nicer disc. I know that I'm an oddity, but I dramatically prefer the Superbit, Criterion, etc. discs without all of the extras, photos, menu's etc. I hate having to go through half a dozen movies to set the audio to DTS (which I always choose if it's available), setting the subtitles to "English for non-English dialog" etc. on every single viewing of some of my favorites. Unfortunately, some of these same movies basically require a dual-layer burn if I want to keep the audio and video quality anywhere near where I like it.
Yeah, I live in the middle of one of those blurry green stripes.
Yes, I used my address initially, but wasn't exactly looking to post my home address on Slashdot. If you zoom out a bit from that address and go east a bit to the Regal 20 movie theater (the big pink ugly one) at: 6420 Camden Ave N,Minneapolis, MN, you'll see the big difference. There's literally a stripe of low res images running north and south through there.
"Intentionally"? So, that stripe through my city is intentional?
As confirmation, check out my city: Brooklyn Center, MN.
N
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Brooklyn+Center,M
There's a stripe running north and south that has terrible resolution. Incidentally, I live right in that stripe.
I believe it actually depends on the location. You can see your neighbor and I can't see individual houses on my street.