But, like airplane seats and hotel rooms, unsold bandwidth is a 100% loss. Bandwidth that went unsold yesterday can not be sold tomorrow. The trick is always selling all of the inventory at as good a price as you can get for it.
Exactly, that's why I'm a big fan of paying the big bucks for guaranteed bandwidth, and flat rateing all the rest. Of corse I don't know any ISPs that really do that...
It's ok to say that obscurity is not sufficient security on its own, but "no security at all" is nonsense.
Sure, it is a bit safer and the typical phrase is an overstatement, but most common phrases are. Security through obscurity tends to make things feel more secure then they are, so shocking people out of that is useful.
Definitely XORing your valuable data with 0xdeadbeaf makes it a lot harder for most people to read. Sure if you come up against most programmers it may be one of the things they try in the first hour, but it will take a bit. Sure against a cryptographer *any* XORing with any short string will buy you about 15 seconds of safety, but that's 15 seconds better then nothing against a trained opponent, maybe hours against a talented but untrained one, and a very very very long time against an unskilled opponent.
However a whole lot of people who apply security through obscurity think it buys them a lot more then an hour. People who use the phrase forget that it buys you at least the hour, and that is way better then zip. (or of corse they use it as shorthand)
Does the GPL allow the creator to grant liscense to certain commercial vendors?
Short answer - yes look at ghostscript for example.
Long answer - yes, by not denying it. By default you can release the same thing under different terms. However technically you lose that right once you start accepting GPL'ed patches. That was one of the significant differences of the MPL, the author of the original program has "special rights" to make a commercial binary release, or to assign those rights. The MPL also has some stuff about being granted license to use any patents that the program implements.
Other reasons include access to all of the source of your OS and better support for certain things (pcmcia 802.11b card support? Better filesystems. More software already working)
Er, you do know you get the source code for everything that doesn't have a GUI, or isn't actually the rendering system, don't you? That includes device drivers (other then the displays). So you can put in support for better filesystems if you like (FFS+checkpoints anyone?), or PCMCIA 802.11 (I think Cisco and Oranoco are available).
I personally run Debian on my laptop 99% of the time because my environment is the same everywhere
That sounds like a pretty good reason to run something other then OSX...
You can read the mail after it's been irradiated - but forget listening to these CDs in your computer unless you happen to have the right CD ROM in your computer.
Depends on what the mail was, if it use to be unprocessed negatives you sent to A&I because they do a better job then your local photofinisher, well, let's just say you aren't getting your pictures back. Or if it was Kodachrome you sent to Kodak because you don't live close to the few places that still process it you won't get back nice subtle tones, but blank frames.
Oh, and if you send Compact Flash not only do you get no data, you may never be able to use those cards again...(this may also hit normal FLASH, so don't let 'em anthrax process your next motherboard!)
Of course, these days if the "video tape" was an.MPEG file it would be a no-brainer to change the numbers with an editor like Photoshop.
That is pretty much exactly what I was thinking...except I had a small perl script an pnmtext in mind (plus pnm-some-other-stuff), but that's because I have the script for some time lapse stuff I did last year..or maybe two years ago.
Er, not just I, but I did do the time stamping part, a friend did a lot of other stuff, including building a box for one of the cameras...and having the good idea of making a video of the building they were making just outside our office window...
If you build it yourself you have to prove that you didn't tamper with the evidence (should you ever charge someone with a crime based on the recordings...or fire them and then they contest it).
If someone else builds it a large part of their business plan is how they defend the thing in court. Plus that is something they would pay for.
That's not to say a system you make yourself is significantly more prone to tampering, but it is likely to be perceived as such (esp. if you build one for your home).
When I was traveling through MSP this December, I fired up my Mac to set up a Airport network with my brother's Mac, peer-to-peer style. I happened to notice the Airport's network ID in the Airport menu, and selected it. Everything worked automatically through DHCP, except, I didn't get a router address. So, not having any packet sniffers, I gave up on that idea.
FYI, if you are running OSX you do have a sniffer. Open the terminal and try "tcpdump -X -s 1600 -vv -i en1"...
Well, no but it doesn't really solve this problem. I know BitMover's CVS like thing was designed to help though with a hierarchy of approved trees so Linus could (say) have three or four people feeding patches up to his tree for approval.
However that is still just a tool, what it really requires is for him to find a few people that sort out patches he won't like and ones he probably will... that's harder then finding a tool.
Pure 100% laissez faire capitalism will result in "When Animals Attack Millionares Part VI".
It will, because some people want it. It will also produce the History Channel, Discovery, TLC, A&E, and many others that answer the question "If not PBS, who?"
Of corse I think PBS is much less of a bad idea then pretty much everthing else the goverment does... (or more accuratly 90% of it)
Comparisions with PC hardware are moot since Final Cut Pro only runs on Macs.
On the other hand there are comparisons with the Avid video editing system "$50,000 Video Editing System, 95% off" is the one that sticks in my mind:-)
Now if apple can just get one more feature in one application to be faster than a pc... they... well.. will still be lightyears behind. But hey! more cheap ass marketing for them!
Last time I saw Steve do his Reality Distortion thing he had 3 apps. PhotoShop (doing a lot more then one filter), VideoCleaner (doing a de-interlace and something else), and the Sorensen Qt encoder.
I wish that I could go to the store, buy the components, and put one together myself, just like
I can with a PC. I know I can't as a result of
Apple owning much of the hardware.
Actually you can, not with the current generation Mac (I think) but places like Macresq will sell you the older G4 tower logic boards (i.e. motherboards) and other parts. It's not a very effective use of money though since they are not all that cheap.
I read this article [lowendmac.com] and I agree with the author. It'd be nice if apple sold barebones G4s. That would make owning a Macintosh cheaper and more fun since you could easily customize by yourself.
It also makes support harder since Apple can no longer be sure what kind of machine you are calling about (or at least if it is put together right). One of hte nice things about Apple owning the whole process is they are on the hook for much more support. They don't get to point their finger at the hardware maker or OS maker because they are both, they frequently don't even get to point their finger at the app maker because they make (or at least brand) a lot of software for their own machines. As a result you can normally actually get them to help which is rather unlike my experiences with Wintel boxes.
Is it a good trade off? I donno, Jobs thinks it is, so there isn't a lot we can do to change it:-)
For a machine of this performance potential, there is no substitute for a really good scsi drive, like the Fujitsu MAN series.
If it is anything like the old G4 towers you can order them with SCSI (or FireWire) drives.
Considering Apple is marketing this to graphics/music/multimedia pros, who really use bandwidth, this box needs SCSI
Depends on what they are doing, 1G of RAM might be a better choice for many things. For DV editing an external FireWire RAID might be better (there is this really cool portable RAID that even has room for a battery...)
Subjectively, I have to disagree. My couple of weeks of experience with OS X on my new TiBook and my new (used) dual-G4 is that while the OS is extremely slick, and the integration between something that feels like Unix on the command line and something that feels like Mac OS on the desktop, it's not rock solid. It crashes about as often as Windows does.
Interesting. I have been using OS X for quite some time and on my PB G3 after 10.1 I never got an crashes or panics. Before 10.1 doing 'umount -f' could cause a kernel panic, and I had a few random failures to unsuspend.
After getting my TiBook (PB G4) I have had a few more of what looked like failure to unsuspend, but after poking ay the brightness keys and stuff for a while when one hand happened I noticed the caps lock and numlock lights still responded, so I left it along for maybe 2 minutes and it came back. That doesn't make me happy, but at least it wasn't a crash (for people not use to OS X it normally unsuspends in less then a second -- like before you get the lid of a laptop all the way open). I have had one other failure when I was fiddling with IrDA and a friends phone.
What have you done that pisses OS X off so much? Or have you not been able to narrow it down?
(Note I'm not trying to say it is as stable as FreeBSD, but it is more stable then Winblows or Mac OS 9 (the one week I ran it) has ever been for me)
Finally, we can buy PowerPC motherboards without dealing with Apple
Moto (and many others) have been selling PPC motherboards for many years, maybe close to a decade by now. They are used for a fair number of embedded projects. The two downsides are cost, and every frickn' one of them seems to have another way to interface with PCI, or to deal with the boot sequence, or something. So all the not-so-fun parts of porting an OS have to be done again and again while the rest of it "just works" (or tends to).
P.S. for a (slow) PowerPC, just buy an old TiVo. Linux comes with it, and NTSC out. Of corse it is only 50Mhz, but it works (don't get a new TiVo by mistake, they try to rip you off with one of those 200ishMhz MIPS CPUs...)
Going a little bit OT here, but does anybody else think that AOL being able to run free ads on such high-profile stations as CNN is a huuuuuuuuuge anti-trust problem? Remember, they own the network. They can run whatever they want on it and not have to be charged a cent. And anybody who watches CNN at all will know that they run lots and lots of AOL ads
Well they are not exactly free. If CNN is running an AOL ad they are not running a paying ad, nor are they running content that keeps people thinking it is worth watching CNN. So even if they don't internally charge money, they are at least foregoing other revenue (and I assume they are internally charging money, maybe at a discount -- and at some point the discount will get killed when the business unit selling the discounted product has to tighten it's budget...)(
Consider what might happen if everyone skipped all the ads via Tivo.
FYI, no one I know with a TiVo (including me) skips all the commercials. I watch some of the VW commercials, some of the chocolate milk ones, and some others I find amusing. Sometimes I watch a few because I'm busy typing on slashdot, or forgot where the remote was, or am busy with the dog.
Skipping commercials is a big part of what TiVo is useful for, but not the whole thing. Being able to tell it what shows I like best and having it pick up as many as fit in the schedule (including taking into account whether the shows are new or repeats, or schedule changes).
As nice as watching TV commercial free, it's nicer to be able to sit down and watch a TV show I like no matter what time or day it is (well, unless it has been a rainy weekend, then my TiVo looks pretty bare by Sunday night...).
The US Government does fund public broadcasting, including both PBS and NPR
They have been doing this less and less over the years, esp. all the lean times (and the public funding part never goes back up). Just look at the sponsored by parts of a PBS show, they started out with none, then a simple (single!) voice over at the start of a show, later one at start and end, then multiple voice overs with the logo but no ad text. Then subtle ad text. Then a still of whatever the company wants. Now we practically have commercials starting each PBS show. Of corse that is far far better then commercials interrupting the show...
The biggest source of government PBS funding is the government not charging for the air space. The actual money given is a pretty small percentage of their operating costs, and at the current rate will be $0 by 2010 (not that I think that's a bad thing).
One approach was broadening the currency base: 100 copper = 1 silver, 100 silver = 1 gold, and so on up through mithral
That doesn't have a real effect (unless they let the exchange rate between say copper and silver float). The USA econ would be the same if we got rid of dollars and priced everything in pennies.
Item decay does sound like the kind of thing that can make a huge difference. This makes the item supply more or less finite, assuming monsters take time between respawn.
Not sure the money sinks would help that much, but my econ theory is a bit weak.
Mythic's approach isn't perfect, but it does point out that there are techniques for balancing a virtual economy and thereby improve game play.
One thing the paper didn't focus on is whether having a "more realistic" econ would actually make the game more fun ("more realistic" in quotes because VW's have their own economies each perfectly realistic for their worlds, they just don't happen to mimic the physical world economies very well).
stole the idea from Ebay who has been profitable since the beginning...b/c of VERY low overhead costs
Sort of, but it is fixed cost vs. an auction, and the sellers don't make the product description amazon/half does. Not that auctions or classified ads are new...
True, but shipping 5000 desks to 5000 locations will cost *a whole lot* less than shipping 5000 desks to 1 location. Desks aren't the kind of item that goes well online. It's more movies, electronics, books, etc.
Well, (a) I was only really picking something to talk about real estate costs, and (b) did you know many places don't stock a whole lot of furnature?
I bought a bedroom set recently (well my wife&I picked one out, it gets delevered tommrow). It wasn't in stock, and in fact pretty much nothing is at that store, but they do have lots on the show room floor, and good prices.
Online stores I'd imagine get a *much* higher rate of chargebacks, and without a signiture there isn't very much they can do about them.
Beats me. I don't know if the fraud rate is higher, or if it is still easier to deal with it with a signiture.
Also the Wal Marts do have idle checkout clerks, esp close to closing time.
I totally agree with you. For almost all items I buy I'd much rather shop for them online. But then I'd like to go pick the item up, not have to wait a week.
It depends on what you buy. Most things I can wait a week for, and in fact would much rather wait a week and not have to drive off somewhere. On the other hand there are things I would rather have now. Unfortunitly the most recent one for me was a TiBook, but despite working walking distance from an Apple Store, I can't buy it there. It is only build to order. So I'm still waiting for the thing.
If you're buying 1 CD, or 1 book, around here it's about the same, when factoring in shipping costs. If you're buying more you can get a small discount from shopping online. Fairly small, though.
I tend to buy books in a bunch anyway (buy a bunch, keep track of what I want next, then when I'm down to only one or two left buy the next bunch). DVDs sometimes I get singles, sometimes in small groups. I don't really get a whole lot of CDs, mostly my wife buys them (locally, she is not fond of online shopping). When I do buy CDs it tends to be in batches, for no real reason.
Certainly not with the current shipping models, though I believe we will one day be able to do our grocery shopping online and then either go pick it up or have it delivered in a matter of hours. And I believe that will be the cheapest way to get your groceries, at least for all but the most rural areas.
I don't see how that would be the cheap way, not without labor and/or shipping costs dropping quite a bit. Plus it's going to be harder to have the right bit of fruit or meat delivered if you are picky about such things ("No blemishes on my peach, soft but not too soft..."; "Banana just a little green"...)
[fulfillment service]...
The problem with that idea is of course sales tax. This is especially sad because it's effectively a tax on brick and mortar businesses. I'm not sure how or if the government is going to solve that problem. Perhaps a federal sales tax on interstate commerce, remitted to the state in which the product is purchased, which the state can choose to refund to consumers (on their income tax forms) in states which have low or no sales/use tax. But there is a lot of fear that would eventually get stolen away from the states, a fear which is quite justified.
Try it in a state without sales tax. Plus try it two years ago when you could get VC just by having a pulse:-)
You could also try to see if you could get the billing to go directly through the online retailer, then maybe you don't need to charge sales tax (except on the $0.25?). See a lawyer, they may be able to find a way to do this (or let you know that it just can't be done). Oh, and the $0.25 might have to vary depending on the size/weight of the item. It sounds like it might be OK for CD/DVD, but not for a piano...
Actually this one may not be too costly to try, you don't have inventory costs, just rent, salery, and insurance. Better your money then mine though:-)
NYSE and NASDAQ are far from efficient markets.
Thus my comments about being able to make money as middlemen, at least for a while.
I guess I really shouldn't talk about those complexities until I've done it myself, and at the moment no one is willing to loan me a few million to try. Which leads to another inefficiency with brick and mortar stores: barriers to entry. But barriers to entry just lead to profits, so I guess I *am* trying to argue that I do know half the story.
It doesn't cost a few mil to run a B&M store, look at all the people who run their own "Quickie Mart", it "just" requires a bit of risk and a ton of hard work. Getting a franchise of a chain is harder, but by no means does it cost millions.
Re:Backing store vs Double buffering
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
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· Score: 2
As far as I can tell XFree86 is putting back the unchanged version but failing to send the expose event. Either that or when my software responds to the expose event the area is still obscured by the overlapping window so the update is thrown away, or some other bug causes it to draw the saved buffer a second time after I update. I gave up using save behind because of this but I could experiment some more to find out what is going on...
Do you have a small sample program? I don't recall seeing that on XFree86 at work, or on VNC at home (the VNC server is a modifyed XFree86 server). It may just be nothing used the save unders, or the problem might be specific to your display driver...
(or you could try running your program under VNC and seeing if you have the same trouble).
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Exactly, that's why I'm a big fan of paying the big bucks for guaranteed bandwidth, and flat rateing all the rest. Of corse I don't know any ISPs that really do that...
That's my (exactly) one bit of obscurity...
Sure, it is a bit safer and the typical phrase is an overstatement, but most common phrases are. Security through obscurity tends to make things feel more secure then they are, so shocking people out of that is useful.
Definitely XORing your valuable data with 0xdeadbeaf makes it a lot harder for most people to read. Sure if you come up against most programmers it may be one of the things they try in the first hour, but it will take a bit. Sure against a cryptographer *any* XORing with any short string will buy you about 15 seconds of safety, but that's 15 seconds better then nothing against a trained opponent, maybe hours against a talented but untrained one, and a very very very long time against an unskilled opponent.
However a whole lot of people who apply security through obscurity think it buys them a lot more then an hour. People who use the phrase forget that it buys you at least the hour, and that is way better then zip. (or of corse they use it as shorthand)
Short answer - yes look at ghostscript for example.
Long answer - yes, by not denying it. By default you can release the same thing under different terms. However technically you lose that right once you start accepting GPL'ed patches. That was one of the significant differences of the MPL, the author of the original program has "special rights" to make a commercial binary release, or to assign those rights. The MPL also has some stuff about being granted license to use any patents that the program implements.
Er, you do know you get the source code for everything that doesn't have a GUI, or isn't actually the rendering system, don't you? That includes device drivers (other then the displays). So you can put in support for better filesystems if you like (FFS+checkpoints anyone?), or PCMCIA 802.11 (I think Cisco and Oranoco are available).
That sounds like a pretty good reason to run something other then OSX...
Depends on what the mail was, if it use to be unprocessed negatives you sent to A&I because they do a better job then your local photofinisher, well, let's just say you aren't getting your pictures back. Or if it was Kodachrome you sent to Kodak because you don't live close to the few places that still process it you won't get back nice subtle tones, but blank frames.
Oh, and if you send Compact Flash not only do you get no data, you may never be able to use those cards again...(this may also hit normal FLASH, so don't let 'em anthrax process your next motherboard!)
That is pretty much exactly what I was thinking...except I had a small perl script an pnmtext in mind (plus pnm-some-other-stuff), but that's because I have the script for some time lapse stuff I did last year..or maybe two years ago.
Er, not just I, but I did do the time stamping part, a friend did a lot of other stuff, including building a box for one of the cameras...and having the good idea of making a video of the building they were making just outside our office window...
If you build it yourself you have to prove that you didn't tamper with the evidence (should you ever charge someone with a crime based on the recordings...or fire them and then they contest it).
If someone else builds it a large part of their business plan is how they defend the thing in court. Plus that is something they would pay for.
That's not to say a system you make yourself is significantly more prone to tampering, but it is likely to be perceived as such (esp. if you build one for your home).
FYI, if you are running OSX you do have a sniffer. Open the terminal and try "tcpdump -X -s 1600 -vv -i en1"...
Well, no but it doesn't really solve this problem. I know BitMover's CVS like thing was designed to help though with a hierarchy of approved trees so Linus could (say) have three or four people feeding patches up to his tree for approval.
However that is still just a tool, what it really requires is for him to find a few people that sort out patches he won't like and ones he probably will... that's harder then finding a tool.
It will, because some people want it. It will also produce the History Channel, Discovery, TLC, A&E, and many others that answer the question "If not PBS, who?"
Of corse I think PBS is much less of a bad idea then pretty much everthing else the goverment does... (or more accuratly 90% of it)
On the other hand there are comparisons with the Avid video editing system "$50,000 Video Editing System, 95% off" is the one that sticks in my mind :-)
Last time I saw Steve do his Reality Distortion thing he had 3 apps. PhotoShop (doing a lot more then one filter), VideoCleaner (doing a de-interlace and something else), and the Sorensen Qt encoder.
Actually you can, not with the current generation Mac (I think) but places like Macresq will sell you the older G4 tower logic boards (i.e. motherboards) and other parts. It's not a very effective use of money though since they are not all that cheap.
It also makes support harder since Apple can no longer be sure what kind of machine you are calling about (or at least if it is put together right). One of hte nice things about Apple owning the whole process is they are on the hook for much more support. They don't get to point their finger at the hardware maker or OS maker because they are both, they frequently don't even get to point their finger at the app maker because they make (or at least brand) a lot of software for their own machines. As a result you can normally actually get them to help which is rather unlike my experiences with Wintel boxes.
Is it a good trade off? I donno, Jobs thinks it is, so there isn't a lot we can do to change it :-)
If it is anything like the old G4 towers you can order them with SCSI (or FireWire) drives.
Depends on what they are doing, 1G of RAM might be a better choice for many things. For DV editing an external FireWire RAID might be better (there is this really cool portable RAID that even has room for a battery...)
Interesting. I have been using OS X for quite some time and on my PB G3 after 10.1 I never got an crashes or panics. Before 10.1 doing 'umount -f' could cause a kernel panic, and I had a few random failures to unsuspend.
After getting my TiBook (PB G4) I have had a few more of what looked like failure to unsuspend, but after poking ay the brightness keys and stuff for a while when one hand happened I noticed the caps lock and numlock lights still responded, so I left it along for maybe 2 minutes and it came back. That doesn't make me happy, but at least it wasn't a crash (for people not use to OS X it normally unsuspends in less then a second -- like before you get the lid of a laptop all the way open). I have had one other failure when I was fiddling with IrDA and a friends phone.
What have you done that pisses OS X off so much? Or have you not been able to narrow it down?
(Note I'm not trying to say it is as stable as FreeBSD, but it is more stable then Winblows or Mac OS 9 (the one week I ran it) has ever been for me)
It was after XFS, or at least after I read an SGI XFS paper.
Moto (and many others) have been selling PPC motherboards for many years, maybe close to a decade by now. They are used for a fair number of embedded projects. The two downsides are cost, and every frickn' one of them seems to have another way to interface with PCI, or to deal with the boot sequence, or something. So all the not-so-fun parts of porting an OS have to be done again and again while the rest of it "just works" (or tends to).
P.S. for a (slow) PowerPC, just buy an old TiVo. Linux comes with it, and NTSC out. Of corse it is only 50Mhz, but it works (don't get a new TiVo by mistake, they try to rip you off with one of those 200ishMhz MIPS CPUs...)
Well they are not exactly free. If CNN is running an AOL ad they are not running a paying ad, nor are they running content that keeps people thinking it is worth watching CNN. So even if they don't internally charge money, they are at least foregoing other revenue (and I assume they are internally charging money, maybe at a discount -- and at some point the discount will get killed when the business unit selling the discounted product has to tighten it's budget...)(
FYI, no one I know with a TiVo (including me) skips all the commercials. I watch some of the VW commercials, some of the chocolate milk ones, and some others I find amusing. Sometimes I watch a few because I'm busy typing on slashdot, or forgot where the remote was, or am busy with the dog.
Skipping commercials is a big part of what TiVo is useful for, but not the whole thing. Being able to tell it what shows I like best and having it pick up as many as fit in the schedule (including taking into account whether the shows are new or repeats, or schedule changes).
As nice as watching TV commercial free, it's nicer to be able to sit down and watch a TV show I like no matter what time or day it is (well, unless it has been a rainy weekend, then my TiVo looks pretty bare by Sunday night...).
They have been doing this less and less over the years, esp. all the lean times (and the public funding part never goes back up). Just look at the sponsored by parts of a PBS show, they started out with none, then a simple (single!) voice over at the start of a show, later one at start and end, then multiple voice overs with the logo but no ad text. Then subtle ad text. Then a still of whatever the company wants. Now we practically have commercials starting each PBS show. Of corse that is far far better then commercials interrupting the show...
The biggest source of government PBS funding is the government not charging for the air space. The actual money given is a pretty small percentage of their operating costs, and at the current rate will be $0 by 2010 (not that I think that's a bad thing).
That doesn't have a real effect (unless they let the exchange rate between say copper and silver float). The USA econ would be the same if we got rid of dollars and priced everything in pennies.
Item decay does sound like the kind of thing that can make a huge difference. This makes the item supply more or less finite, assuming monsters take time between respawn.
Not sure the money sinks would help that much, but my econ theory is a bit weak.
One thing the paper didn't focus on is whether having a "more realistic" econ would actually make the game more fun ("more realistic" in quotes because VW's have their own economies each perfectly realistic for their worlds, they just don't happen to mimic the physical world economies very well).
Sort of, but it is fixed cost vs. an auction, and the sellers don't make the product description amazon/half does. Not that auctions or classified ads are new...
Well, (a) I was only really picking something to talk about real estate costs, and (b) did you know many places don't stock a whole lot of furnature?
I bought a bedroom set recently (well my wife&I picked one out, it gets delevered tommrow). It wasn't in stock, and in fact pretty much nothing is at that store, but they do have lots on the show room floor, and good prices.
Beats me. I don't know if the fraud rate is higher, or if it is still easier to deal with it with a signiture.
Also the Wal Marts do have idle checkout clerks, esp close to closing time.
It depends on what you buy. Most things I can wait a week for, and in fact would much rather wait a week and not have to drive off somewhere. On the other hand there are things I would rather have now. Unfortunitly the most recent one for me was a TiBook, but despite working walking distance from an Apple Store, I can't buy it there. It is only build to order. So I'm still waiting for the thing.
I tend to buy books in a bunch anyway (buy a bunch, keep track of what I want next, then when I'm down to only one or two left buy the next bunch). DVDs sometimes I get singles, sometimes in small groups. I don't really get a whole lot of CDs, mostly my wife buys them (locally, she is not fond of online shopping). When I do buy CDs it tends to be in batches, for no real reason.
I don't see how that would be the cheap way, not without labor and/or shipping costs dropping quite a bit. Plus it's going to be harder to have the right bit of fruit or meat delivered if you are picky about such things ("No blemishes on my peach, soft but not too soft..."; "Banana just a little green"...)
Try it in a state without sales tax. Plus try it two years ago when you could get VC just by having a pulse :-)
You could also try to see if you could get the billing to go directly through the online retailer, then maybe you don't need to charge sales tax (except on the $0.25?). See a lawyer, they may be able to find a way to do this (or let you know that it just can't be done). Oh, and the $0.25 might have to vary depending on the size/weight of the item. It sounds like it might be OK for CD/DVD, but not for a piano...
Actually this one may not be too costly to try, you don't have inventory costs, just rent, salery, and insurance. Better your money then mine though :-)
Thus my comments about being able to make money as middlemen, at least for a while.
It doesn't cost a few mil to run a B&M store, look at all the people who run their own "Quickie Mart", it "just" requires a bit of risk and a ton of hard work. Getting a franchise of a chain is harder, but by no means does it cost millions.
Do you have a small sample program? I don't recall seeing that on XFree86 at work, or on VNC at home (the VNC server is a modifyed XFree86 server). It may just be nothing used the save unders, or the problem might be specific to your display driver...
(or you could try running your program under VNC and seeing if you have the same trouble).