By the time they know it's a flop, isn't a bit late? They've already spent pretty much all the money. At best, it might persuade some theaters to *not* show the movie.
It doesn't really help to find out that the oncoming light in the tunnel is a train 30 seconds earlier than you might have realized otherwise...
If we're talking about self-published books, it seems likely that the median self-pub book makes about 100 sales. The median for a published book is probably about 2-3K. (Hard figures are almost impossible to come by.)
I've long stopped equating popular with good. They're not opposite, but if you ignore the not-publishable-quality books, I'd say it's orthogonal. As for sales, the main problem for self-publishers is that there's 100,000 books self-published each month. A book that sells 30 copies is not necessarily bad, it's that not enough people will read it (even for free) for it to ever get word-of-mouth, even if it would be good enough to succeed.
A fundamental problem for the industry is that hard-cover books only cost a little more to print than a trade paperback. The main reason for hard-covers at all is that many readers can't handle the fact that they're paying three times a much to read the book immediately. The HC gives the rabid fan who's willing to pay to read it right away an excuse to themselves as to why they're willing to pay so much. (You'll note that they stop selling HCs as soon as a paperback comes out.)
With e-books, it's harder to get consumers to pay a substantial amount up front for what will be the same good in a year. There's no convenient myth that the reader can latch their willingness to pay onto, and thus there's a lot more resistance to paying a substantial amount up front. And unfortunately, the extra money from hardcover is what keeps the industry alive.
Almost everyone I know with an e-book reader went nuts buying cheap books until they had a few hundred book in the unread pile. Unfortunately, they've got adult jobs, and thus limited time to read. Their book buying went from 10 times normal rate back down to the normal rate.
I think a lot of people in the industry were hoping that revenue per reader was going to stay constant, even if the readers were buying 5 times as many books at 1/5 the price. Now reality is sinking in. With cheap e-books, people *might* buy 50% more books, which is still a huge decrease in industry income. This is not a merry time to be a publisher, an author, or to have anything to do with the book industry.
However, once the publishers are gone, Amazon should do very well in the self-published market. Not with readers, of course - who has time to sift through hundreds of books to find the odd readable one. But with desperate authors who want to get promoted. I figure $25K to get a book to show up decently in the Amazon listings is going to make a lot more revenue than Amazon did from selling books.
I will say that this also comes from many, many users, who will consistently rate a page that has everything tuned to perfection as "more professional" and thus more trustworthy.
It's not just stupid designers. There really is a customer-experience trade-off that is valued by the customers, as long as they have exactly the right screen size. It's one of the disadvantages that Android lives with. The flexibility means that it's not practical to offer the same customer experience that people find on the iDevice, and a lot of customers value that experience. (Personally, I don't, but I'm exactly 1 customer opinion.)
If they're smart, they'll let Google continue to pay for updating Android, but demand a percentage of sales (or a set fee per handset) to keep using Android. The whole point of being the dominant retailer is to take the manufacturer's profits, and leave them with the expenses. Samsung should spend just enough on Tizen to make it a plausible threat (including releasing the occasional Tizen phone), and not a penny more.
They make money on hardware, they can't make money on search but google can.
Have you ever read any corporate histories of Sears, Walmart, et al?
As soon as you are the dominant market for any manufacturer's product, you take over their profits.
Now this is usually done be either by demanding lower prices until the manufacturer had almost no profits left, or in the case of family companies that felt loyalty to the workers, until the family could no longer afford to run the company (there are some dramatic anecdotes of frantic owner's giving up and trying to hand the keys to the sellers. Of course the sellers refused - the manufacturers would be the only ones capable of wringing out those last few dollars).
In Samsung's case, it only makes sense to demand that Google start handing over either a percentage of their mobile sales or simply paying Samsung a set amount per handset. (Of course, it might make sense to start smaller. For example, giving Samsung first access to new releases for 6 months to eventually demanding exclusive access to Android on platforms for which they have products.)
If you've got enough profits to be worth worrying about, you never, *ever* want to have just one viable customer.
Honestly, I don't think Samsung is quite at that point, but it's getting pretty close. Outside of the slashdot-crowd (which, let's face it, is noise in the sales figures), almost everybody I know thinks of themselves as buying a "Samsung", not an "Android phone".
As a Canadian who is very happy with our health-care system, can I please remind you that our health-care is *not* free.
It is single-payer (the government) and we are not charged based on use. It is also much cheaper on a per-capita basis for roughly equivalent care in the US, although for fortunate people like myself, it's probably more expensive than in the US, as my taxes probably cover the health-care expenditures for 1.5 - 2 other less fortunate families.
But to call it free is to ignore the fact that the "rest of the world" also pays for health-care, just through our taxes or other insurance schemes.
If you are interested in software sales, the only thing that matters is how many people are going to actually *buy* your app.
The real question is how many dollars a year users of each version are spending on apps (and if developers are considering iOS, how the dollars per year compare with Apple users).
My completely anecdotal guess is developers can pretty safely forget v.2.x of Android without hugely harming sales.
The real question (and I don't have enough info) is should developers who are trying to make a living from apps forget about Android apps altogether? (i.e. is it like writing and selling Linux applications - can be done, but you don't do it for the $ alone)?
Ah, the DG. My first job was working on a Data General.
I always wondered why there was a long pause whenever I called technical support and introduced myself as Tom West (at least until I read "Soul of a New Machine").
Of course, while entertaining, that book wrecked ego surfing for me, as it was used for decades in every Computers and Society course on the planet.
Statistically, you're looking at it all wrong. Lots of companies innovate, including the big ones. But any given innovation only has a 1 in 10,000 chance of succeeding.
If you get it right, then you've a decent shot at hitting the big leagues like Apple, Google, MS and FB.
But assuming because they managed a successful innovation once means they've got a greater chance of finding a second one is ludicrous. It's like expecting a lottery winner has a better chance of winning a second prize.
Of course, having said that, there are some companies that *have* managed multiple successful innovations, but they're *exceedingly* rare.
(I'd give Apple the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. I'd give MS MS-DOS, Windows and Office. At this point, Google and FB are still one trick ponies. But they're magnificent tricks. Criticizing such companies is like criticizing someone for only holding one world record.)
> I thought the only valid business model (unless you're on the super-popular end of the power curve distribution) was ad-based apps.
Ow!
As a typical iPad owner who's spent $100+ on apps (not a lot, but still), I thought the stories of Android app-sales wasteland were overblown (that salesperson notwithstanding).
You're telling me it's not?
That *is* depressing.
I guess for the sake of my customer experience, Apple's *does* manage to stop jail-breaking.
Reminds me of overhearing a salesperson trying to convince a customer to put down the iPhone she was holding and buy an Android phone (I suspect higher commission on the Android).
"And another advantage is you don't have to pay for any applications unlike the iPhone. It's really easy and everyone does it."
I think you've got it the wrong way around. The would-be terrorists are betraying the Muslim community in every possible way.
I'm certain that the immigrant communities understand that the extremists would be overjoyed to see them sacrificed to angry mobs in order to further the their agenda. There's not a lot of love lost between these groups.
(Of course, you're always going to be able to find some angry young men ready to sacrifice everything and everybody to their rage. But the community at large? No.)
... why are mission critical devices connected to the internet
Because being connected to the internet saves a *lot* of money. Instead of having to have an entire emergency team on site at all hours, you can get away with a minimal team at nights/weekends, and workers who can, in an emergency, connect from home.
It takes a very capable manager who can persuade the higher ups that its necessary to continue spending a few millions dollars in wage costs every year to avoid what (at least until very recently) seemed to be a very illusionary threat. Besides, surely with a few precautions like multi-factor authentication, there's no possible way that anyone could break in:-).
Note, it's even harder if you're bidding for contracts. Try telling prospective clients that the reason your prices are double are because you refuse to enter the Internet age... Especially when those you are bidding against are assuring the customer that they're taking all the necessary precautions.
It's a sad fact of life that it's rarely worthwhile to spend a lot of money to protect against rare disasters if your competitors aren't doing the same. (Note, normal disaster planning adds a few percent to cost - we're talking about making yourself bullet proof, which may double or triple your costs.) The odds are fairly high that with much higher costs, you'll be bankrupt before the disaster hits, and moreover, if all your competitors are being hit by the same disaster, the general sentiment becomes "no-one could have predicted it" and everyone keeps their jobs anyway.
Not "the essence" - *an* essence. A mere shadow of this error handler.
You and I might be content with "recycle" and a sad little notification in an error log somewhere, but not this error handler.
When it detected the CPU was failing, it would comb the register for life signs, route around the dying CPU, say last rites, mournfully bury it, and continue on its mission (as well as sending an email to accounting to order a new CPU). If the disk drive had been hit by lightning, it moved fast enough that it would outpace the bolt traveling down the electrical cord, rewire the junction box to send it current into the ground, power up the secondary backup drive, and send a work order to building maintenance to repair the malfunctioning lightening rod on the building's roof.
The database being converted to EBCDIC? Hah! The error handler converted it to Armenian, just to show it could, before converting it Aramaic, then English, then Unicode, and then sending an email to project manager to let him know he could remove the Unicode phase in our legacy database update project.
The error handler's philosophy was clear and built for an earlier age that even then, realized that man would in time become a lesser, diminished being, incapable of understanding the intricacies of exactly how the error should be recovered. As such, it did not depend upon the fallible hands of men to repair an unexpected error condition. It simply handled them *all*.
Alas, even the programmer, in his wisdom, could not foresee the changes that would one day occur, and for those of us who held but a hundredth of the knowledge that he had accumulated in his years of service, we could no more alter his code than a gorilla could rebuild a finely tuned Swiss watch.
And so his code was lost to the knowledge of men (except the revision control system).
I'm sorry. All you have there is good, maintainable, effective program.
What we had, and then threw away, was art made code.
I have. The coder handled every possible exception intelligently, handled the possible exceptions in the exception handlers, handled the possible exceptions in the exception exception handlers, etc. It was phenomenal. His code could practically handle a CPU burning out at the same time as the primary disk had been hit by lightening while the database had been accidentally converted into EBCDIC.
Unfortunately, it was also completely unmaintainable. No human being, outside of the original programmer, could possibly grok all the conditions, sub-conditions, and contingencies. The code was also 3000 lines of error handling for about 25 lines of normal execution.
It was my privilege to gaze upon the world's most complete error handling before I fulfilled my responsibility of burning it to the ground.
My apologies, I missed your point. I thought you were asserting that you can't classify something as a mental disease unless you can describe the physical mechanism behind it. I was pointing out that we can't describe the physical mechanisms of many physical diseases either.
> My only point is that some mental disorders we don't understand well may well turn out to have physical causes.
Being a materialist, I believe that all mental behavior (both beneficial and adverse) has physical causes. However, I think we're a long way from getting a handle on the mechanisms (I'm not looking for the singularity this century...)
So your fear of losing what you have is making you afraid of what you could possibly gain?
Who is you?
My son's characteristics are classified as Asperger's, but really, I'd just call it personality. If one could recode someone's personality, would they still be, well..., them?
The question of identity is always tricky (Would you volunteer for a Star Trek transporter? Is the person who's reassembled really you?), and the alteration of characteristics by which we define ourselves is always going to be a very personal decision.
I've often wondered about what would happen if we could cure some forms of mental retardation. For significant jumps in neural ability, wouldn't we have really essentially killed of the old person and replaced them with a new one? Every thing that defined the original subject in his or her own mind would likely change. All are tough questions with no obvious answers.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time they know it's a flop, isn't a bit late? They've already spent pretty much all the money. At best, it might persuade some theaters to *not* show the movie.
It doesn't really help to find out that the oncoming light in the tunnel is a train 30 seconds earlier than you might have realized otherwise...
If we're talking about self-published books, it seems likely that the median self-pub book makes about 100 sales. The median for a published book is probably about 2-3K. (Hard figures are almost impossible to come by.)
I've long stopped equating popular with good. They're not opposite, but if you ignore the not-publishable-quality books, I'd say it's orthogonal. As for sales, the main problem for self-publishers is that there's 100,000 books self-published each month. A book that sells 30 copies is not necessarily bad, it's that not enough people will read it (even for free) for it to ever get word-of-mouth, even if it would be good enough to succeed.
A fundamental problem for the industry is that hard-cover books only cost a little more to print than a trade paperback. The main reason for hard-covers at all is that many readers can't handle the fact that they're paying three times a much to read the book immediately. The HC gives the rabid fan who's willing to pay to read it right away an excuse to themselves as to why they're willing to pay so much. (You'll note that they stop selling HCs as soon as a paperback comes out.)
With e-books, it's harder to get consumers to pay a substantial amount up front for what will be the same good in a year. There's no convenient myth that the reader can latch their willingness to pay onto, and thus there's a lot more resistance to paying a substantial amount up front. And unfortunately, the extra money from hardcover is what keeps the industry alive.
Almost everyone I know with an e-book reader went nuts buying cheap books until they had a few hundred book in the unread pile. Unfortunately, they've got adult jobs, and thus limited time to read. Their book buying went from 10 times normal rate back down to the normal rate.
I think a lot of people in the industry were hoping that revenue per reader was going to stay constant, even if the readers were buying 5 times as many books at 1/5 the price. Now reality is sinking in. With cheap e-books, people *might* buy 50% more books, which is still a huge decrease in industry income. This is not a merry time to be a publisher, an author, or to have anything to do with the book industry.
However, once the publishers are gone, Amazon should do very well in the self-published market. Not with readers, of course - who has time to sift through hundreds of books to find the odd readable one. But with desperate authors who want to get promoted. I figure $25K to get a book to show up decently in the Amazon listings is going to make a lot more revenue than Amazon did from selling books.
It'll just suck if you want to read anything.
Unfortunately, since most books are selling less ~3,000 copies, almost very few books, e-book or otherwise, make a profit.
I will say that this also comes from many, many users, who will consistently rate a page that has everything tuned to perfection as "more professional" and thus more trustworthy.
It's not just stupid designers. There really is a customer-experience trade-off that is valued by the customers, as long as they have exactly the right screen size. It's one of the disadvantages that Android lives with. The flexibility means that it's not practical to offer the same customer experience that people find on the iDevice, and a lot of customers value that experience. (Personally, I don't, but I'm exactly 1 customer opinion.)
If they're smart, they'll let Google continue to pay for updating Android, but demand a percentage of sales (or a set fee per handset) to keep using Android. The whole point of being the dominant retailer is to take the manufacturer's profits, and leave them with the expenses. Samsung should spend just enough on Tizen to make it a plausible threat (including releasing the occasional Tizen phone), and not a penny more.
They make money on hardware, they can't make money on search but google can.
Have you ever read any corporate histories of Sears, Walmart, et al?
As soon as you are the dominant market for any manufacturer's product, you take over their profits.
Now this is usually done be either by demanding lower prices until the manufacturer had almost no profits left, or in the case of family companies that felt loyalty to the workers, until the family could no longer afford to run the company (there are some dramatic anecdotes of frantic owner's giving up and trying to hand the keys to the sellers. Of course the sellers refused - the manufacturers would be the only ones capable of wringing out those last few dollars).
In Samsung's case, it only makes sense to demand that Google start handing over either a percentage of their mobile sales or simply paying Samsung a set amount per handset. (Of course, it might make sense to start smaller. For example, giving Samsung first access to new releases for 6 months to eventually demanding exclusive access to Android on platforms for which they have products.)
If you've got enough profits to be worth worrying about, you never, *ever* want to have just one viable customer.
Honestly, I don't think Samsung is quite at that point, but it's getting pretty close. Outside of the slashdot-crowd (which, let's face it, is noise in the sales figures), almost everybody I know thinks of themselves as buying a "Samsung", not an "Android phone".
I doubt there's enough money on the planet to persuade Raymond Chen to become CEO.
and mostly free Heatlh Care
As a Canadian who is very happy with our health-care system, can I please remind you that our health-care is *not* free.
It is single-payer (the government) and we are not charged based on use. It is also much cheaper on a per-capita basis for roughly equivalent care in the US, although for fortunate people like myself, it's probably more expensive than in the US, as my taxes probably cover the health-care expenditures for 1.5 - 2 other less fortunate families.
But to call it free is to ignore the fact that the "rest of the world" also pays for health-care, just through our taxes or other insurance schemes.
If you are interested in software sales, the only thing that matters is how many people are going to actually *buy* your app.
The real question is how many dollars a year users of each version are spending on apps (and if developers are considering iOS, how the dollars per year compare with Apple users).
My completely anecdotal guess is developers can pretty safely forget v.2.x of Android without hugely harming sales.
The real question (and I don't have enough info) is should developers who are trying to make a living from apps forget about Android apps altogether? (i.e. is it like writing and selling Linux applications - can be done, but you don't do it for the $ alone)?
there is only one Black Friday
Heh. "Black Friday" is a piece of marketing fluff that accidentally happened to catch on. Trying to lend it gravitas beyond that is just silly.
Ah, the DG. My first job was working on a Data General.
I always wondered why there was a long pause whenever I called technical support and introduced myself as Tom West (at least until I read "Soul of a New Machine").
Of course, while entertaining, that book wrecked ego surfing for me, as it was used for decades in every Computers and Society course on the planet.
Statistically, you're looking at it all wrong. Lots of companies innovate, including the big ones. But any given innovation only has a 1 in 10,000 chance of succeeding.
If you get it right, then you've a decent shot at hitting the big leagues like Apple, Google, MS and FB.
But assuming because they managed a successful innovation once means they've got a greater chance of finding a second one is ludicrous. It's like expecting a lottery winner has a better chance of winning a second prize.
Of course, having said that, there are some companies that *have* managed multiple successful innovations, but they're *exceedingly* rare.
(I'd give Apple the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. I'd give MS MS-DOS, Windows and Office. At this point, Google and FB are still one trick ponies. But they're magnificent tricks. Criticizing such companies is like criticizing someone for only holding one world record.)
> I thought the only valid business model (unless you're on the super-popular end of the power curve distribution) was ad-based apps.
Ow!
As a typical iPad owner who's spent $100+ on apps (not a lot, but still), I thought the stories of Android app-sales wasteland were overblown (that salesperson notwithstanding).
You're telling me it's not?
That *is* depressing.
I guess for the sake of my customer experience, Apple's *does* manage to stop jail-breaking.
Reminds me of overhearing a salesperson trying to convince a customer to put down the iPhone she was holding and buy an Android phone (I suspect higher commission on the Android).
"And another advantage is you don't have to pay for any applications unlike the iPhone. It's really easy and everyone does it."
I wept for Android developers.
I have to say, at least for the mono-rail track, 3-D printing seems the clear way to avoid prowling E-Bay for hard to find and expensive pieces.
I wonder if owners would consent to have their pieces scanned to produce a blue-print.
(Of course, then we'd see whether Lego wants to dare the bad publicity of preventing a trade in replica pieces that Lego no longer sells.)
Capitol gains
I'm pretty certain the Republicans don't believe they exist.
Bitcoin tax evasion. It's a commodity just like any other, and the CRA is going to treat it as such. Sorry, no villains here, move along.
Ok, I'll take the bait. How in the hell is JavaScript *not* a programming language?
It's not LISP.
> Why would they betray their own community?
I think you've got it the wrong way around. The would-be terrorists are betraying the Muslim community in every possible way.
I'm certain that the immigrant communities understand that the extremists would be overjoyed to see them sacrificed to angry mobs in order to further the their agenda. There's not a lot of love lost between these groups.
(Of course, you're always going to be able to find some angry young men ready to sacrifice everything and everybody to their rage. But the community at large? No.)
... why are mission critical devices connected to the internet
Because being connected to the internet saves a *lot* of money. Instead of having to have an entire emergency team on site at all hours, you can get away with a minimal team at nights/weekends, and workers who can, in an emergency, connect from home.
It takes a very capable manager who can persuade the higher ups that its necessary to continue spending a few millions dollars in wage costs every year to avoid what (at least until very recently) seemed to be a very illusionary threat. Besides, surely with a few precautions like multi-factor authentication, there's no possible way that anyone could break in :-).
Note, it's even harder if you're bidding for contracts. Try telling prospective clients that the reason your prices are double are because you refuse to enter the Internet age... Especially when those you are bidding against are assuring the customer that they're taking all the necessary precautions.
It's a sad fact of life that it's rarely worthwhile to spend a lot of money to protect against rare disasters if your competitors aren't doing the same. (Note, normal disaster planning adds a few percent to cost - we're talking about making yourself bullet proof, which may double or triple your costs.) The odds are fairly high that with much higher costs, you'll be bankrupt before the disaster hits, and moreover, if all your competitors are being hit by the same disaster, the general sentiment becomes "no-one could have predicted it" and everyone keeps their jobs anyway.
I did the essence of this with much less code.
Not "the essence" - *an* essence. A mere shadow of this error handler.
You and I might be content with "recycle" and a sad little notification in an error log somewhere, but not this error handler.
When it detected the CPU was failing, it would comb the register for life signs, route around the dying CPU, say last rites, mournfully bury it, and continue on its mission (as well as sending an email to accounting to order a new CPU). If the disk drive had been hit by lightning, it moved fast enough that it would outpace the bolt traveling down the electrical cord, rewire the junction box to send it current into the ground, power up the secondary backup drive, and send a work order to building maintenance to repair the malfunctioning lightening rod on the building's roof.
The database being converted to EBCDIC? Hah! The error handler converted it to Armenian, just to show it could, before converting it Aramaic, then English, then Unicode, and then sending an email to project manager to let him know he could remove the Unicode phase in our legacy database update project.
The error handler's philosophy was clear and built for an earlier age that even then, realized that man would in time become a lesser, diminished being, incapable of understanding the intricacies of exactly how the error should be recovered. As such, it did not depend upon the fallible hands of men to repair an unexpected error condition. It simply handled them *all*.
Alas, even the programmer, in his wisdom, could not foresee the changes that would one day occur, and for those of us who held but a hundredth of the knowledge that he had accumulated in his years of service, we could no more alter his code than a gorilla could rebuild a finely tuned Swiss watch.
And so his code was lost to the knowledge of men (except the revision control system).
I'm sorry. All you have there is good, maintainable, effective program.
What we had, and then threw away, was art made code.
I have not ever seen that done
I have. The coder handled every possible exception intelligently, handled the possible exceptions in the exception handlers, handled the possible exceptions in the exception exception handlers, etc. It was phenomenal. His code could practically handle a CPU burning out at the same time as the primary disk had been hit by lightening while the database had been accidentally converted into EBCDIC.
Unfortunately, it was also completely unmaintainable. No human being, outside of the original programmer, could possibly grok all the conditions, sub-conditions, and contingencies. The code was also 3000 lines of error handling for about 25 lines of normal execution.
It was my privilege to gaze upon the world's most complete error handling before I fulfilled my responsibility of burning it to the ground.
My apologies, I missed your point. I thought you were asserting that you can't classify something as a mental disease unless you can describe the physical mechanism behind it. I was pointing out that we can't describe the physical mechanisms of many physical diseases either.
> My only point is that some mental disorders we don't understand well may well turn out to have physical causes.
Being a materialist, I believe that all mental behavior (both beneficial and adverse) has physical causes. However, I think we're a long way from getting a handle on the mechanisms (I'm not looking for the singularity this century...)
So your fear of losing what you have is making you afraid of what you could possibly gain?
Who is you?
My son's characteristics are classified as Asperger's, but really, I'd just call it personality. If one could recode someone's personality, would they still be, well..., them?
The question of identity is always tricky (Would you volunteer for a Star Trek transporter? Is the person who's reassembled really you?), and the alteration of characteristics by which we define ourselves is always going to be a very personal decision.
I've often wondered about what would happen if we could cure some forms of mental retardation. For significant jumps in neural ability, wouldn't we have really essentially killed of the old person and replaced them with a new one? Every thing that defined the original subject in his or her own mind would likely change. All are tough questions with no obvious answers.