Heh heh... well, there ARE exceptions in the price-to-value-go-round:)
Full set of The Prisoner for $50 was still a little beyond what I thought fair -- retail is actually $90; $50 was a special deal that ya never know, it might not come again, at least any time soon. So I held my nose and went for it.
Tho I've still not been able to convince myself to cough up $40 a season for Stargate, which I love beyond all rationality! (when I can get TV at all, SG-1 is presently the only series I watch. I suppose someone should climb up on the roof and replace the dead antenna, Real Soon Now*...)
* RSN, adj., faanish: "slightly less urgent than mañana".
Yep, that was some of my point -- you gotta taste-test price points to find out where the sweet spot is. Otherwise, you just can't know, and no amount of "Our prices are so high that we *must* be making lots of money!" will change that.
There was a retail store near here which did exactly that: the new owner set overly-high prices on all his goods, then stood back admiring how much profit he was going to rake in. The reality was that all the old established customers betook themselves to stores with better prices, and his store soon went out of business.
As to Apple... Indeed, it's a roaring success just like the **AA -- yeah, Apple still makes a ton of money, but their relative marketshare keeps shrinking. Likewise, the **AA makes tons of money, but their relative marketshare is also shrinking as alternate distribution methods take over the world.
These alternate distribution methods are going to be like PCs -- cheap, available, and ubiquitous. The **AA methods are on the road to being a niche market, just like Apple.
So, folks, make up our minds: Do you want 3% of a huge and growing market, or 100% of a market that's starting to seem cramped??
As to the side effects and historical forces -- too late, we already have the DMCA and its kinfolk:(
I paid $50 for a complete boxed set of The Prisoner a while back (retail was $90) and thought that was a bit much -- after all, it works out to about $5 per hour (that's more than first-run theatre tickets, at $9 for about 2 hrs).
At a guess, 75% of the cost of retail DVDs is in warehousing, advertising, distributor markup, and other intermediary expenses. The balance includes royalties, media manufacturing, and profit. Yeah, cheap distribution ($1 DVDs, burn on demand, etc.) puts the intermediaries out of business, but it's either accept that and move on to new methods of selling your product, and gain consumer goodwill in the process, or fight an endless and losing battle against 'piracy', lose your business anyway, and meanwhile everyone hates you.
I'd guess roughly doubling or tripling current volume would be about sufficient to make up what they'd lose in profits at the current gouging prices, but IMO counting on merely doubled or tripled volume is ridiculously conservative. This has the potential to be 100+ times the size of the current market. Remember the explosion in VHS sales once they dropped the average price from $100 per film, to more like $20 per film?? (Which in its era wasn't so absurd, since *good* VHS tape used to be very expensive. In 1985 I was still driving 60 miles r/t and paying $14 apiece for high-end tapes, and that was a bargain.)
You *gotta* sound like a bean-counter to get any of these people to listen! And come to think of it, I wonder if the people to convince aren't the **AA cartel, but the syndication networks. Know where I first saw ads for Star Trek-TOS on home media? as ads on syndicated TV, *during* an episode of ST-TOS. Get 'em while they're hot!!
Egads... no wonder I gave all the CP/M and Amiga diskettes away!!
Nifty gadget, tho. Considering how companies are now being court-ordered to retrieve antique data, they may become more popular in the future. (Get a load of the prices on MFM HDs needed for data recovery -- I've seen $900 for a 40mb Rodine!)
"On the other hand, if we input a lot of energy we can fuse two hydrogen atoms into a helium atom (just out of curiosity, have we managed to fuse any larger atoms?)"
Well, just fuse a whole lot of hydrogen atoms, and you should wind up with gold, right?;)
[Scientists everywhere report instruments going haywire, as all the hydrogen is suddenly sucked out of the universe]
Exactly so... besides, that one-buck DVD serves as your best backup medium.
Here's another thought: a buck an hour (thus one or two eps. per DVD) for all the television series that thus far they don't find worth selling -- yeah, there's some market among the fanatics for full-season sets at high prices, but think of how huge the market COULD be, if they were priced at the impulse-buying level??
Also, ISTM that small-market films and series TV is a massive buy-on-demand market just itching to be exploited (much as music ought to be). I can readily imagine an automated burn-on-demand system, where you cherry-pick whatever you want, which is then burned to DVD, stuffed into a case with a matching label slapped on, and mailed to your house ("Buy ten DVDs and shipping is free!") Yeah, it wouldn't be fancy, but it wouldn't require any warehousing or distribution system, and there'd be essentially zero waste (no returned product, no overstocks). Just a website, an automated data/duping facility (could be a good side business for data warehousers), credit card processing, and the Postal Service.
The trick is to make it the easiest possible route for the consumer, at a price that makes it worthwhile to let someone else do the work.
I've seen quite a few classics, from both film and TV, in these one-buck-DVD bargain bins. A few that I recall off the top of my head:
--Jungle Book, starring Sabu --episodes from the original Superman TV series --various Sherlock Holmes films (with Basil Rathbone)
Some were in standard DVD cases with nice labels, some in cheap cello and cardboard. But for a buck, who cares?
And I think the guy quoted in the article is wrong about silent movies -- the same audience that is interested in the above are also interested in silents, especially serials.
Even if I had broadband, and even when the file is free and legal, I certainly couldn't be bothered to locate, download, and burn a film that I could buy for a buck. IMO their only mistake is in not making their catalogs cover a sufficiently broad range of titles and eras.
"i-before-e rules are weird and unscientific"...except after C, or when sounded as A.;)
[2nd grade phonics coming back to haunt me.]
I'd extend your good point somewhat, as your grandfather clearly did: it's not how much education a person has that counts. It's what *use* they make of whatever education they have. A lot of folks who had little opportunity for education intuitively understand this, and try their best to communicate effectively (they may get it wrong from simple ignorance, but they make the *effort* regardless). I forgive this, just as I forgive non-native speakers their mistakes.
But blowing off good communication methods, when someone clearly knows better, shows me that they don't really care if I understand them or not. (In parallel, one has to wonder if they care whether their compiler understands them or not, and whether some of the more pervasive bugs may have their root in a habit of sloppiness.)
But a lot of it is a kid thing -- kids like to sound "different" to brand themselves as being their own tribe, distinct from the adult tribe. Hence the perverse pride in sounding like morons (as discussed in the first post on the page, http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=154444&cid =12954073, by TripMasterMonkey).
... if when someone reads your post, their first thought is "Didn't Jeff Foxworthy once say that?"
Seriously, that's a good point. The "accent" someone writes with is indeed how we as readers will come to believe they'd sound in person, since that is the ONLY point of reference we have. (At least until text-to-speech software gets somewhat more sophisticated. Tho I'm not so sure I want to actually *hear* 1337speak... it's liable to make my ears bleed.)
You got a link to Gates' "letter of intent"?? Would be interesting to see. Does sound like his M.O.
And one does have to wonder about that "personalization software" -- why do we need more than the user's registered name and the software's serial number, unless the intent is to exert more control over users' machines?
M$ has said repeatedly at their seminars (which I attend whenever I can) that they envision what amounts to a return to the dumb terminal, where you rent use of applications, and store your documents on a remote server -- for a suitable monthly fee. (Reaction from the all-IT-pros audience? Uniformly unhappy scowls.) It occurs to me that "personalization software" that works over the web is the gateway to making this reality.
It occurred to me as I read your post that "the needs of the many" is exactly analogous to corporations being treated as "persons" -- they are effectively a "person" made up of "the many". Under the concept of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" this means that what's good for corporations would trump individual rights every time.
This ruling is perfectly in parallel with what's been happening wrt such artificial "persons".
Methinks we're a LOT further down the road to socialism than most folk realize...:(
You say, "I see a need to force land owners to make effective economic use of the land".
How is this freedom to do as I please with my own property?
I bought 10 acres (which happened to be in four lots) of mostly-nothing because I have a strong need for empty space around me. Should I be forced to develop my two vacant lots, just because as empty desert, they're an inadequate tax base?
Since then, its market value has almost quadrupled, thanks to California's runaway real estate market (which can't go on forever -- average wage earners, and even more upscale folk, can't afford to pay $4000 a month for an AVERAGE mortgage on a perfectly ordinary house!!)
If taxes were allowed to rise along with market value, as was the case pre-Prop13, in just four years my annual property tax would have increased from $2000 (1% plus a shitload of add-ons) to $8000!!! That's almost as much as the annual *total* of my mortgage payments.
Without Prop13, I'd already have been forced to sell and move out of state, because I can't afford to pay twice what I do now; and even at current market value, my place is bottom-end -- so what I could get for it wouldn't be enough to buy another place.
I have a better idea: when gov't runs out of money, they can just stop spending, same as everyone else has to do. As it is now, when they run out of money, they find some new way to tax it out of citizens.
My sister (an architect for major developments, who nonetheless found the decision unconscionable) wrote this about it: "At greatest risk are older neighborhoods, regardless of condition, that front onto very valuable amenities... lakes, view properties in urban centers. Those are the locations that the city can now argue "highest and best use" and take their property to densify and increase tax revenue. It is actually the description of the case that went all the way to the supreme court."
[laughing] I was going to point out the same thing. Why pay a marketing department, when half a million slashdot-smitten geeks will do it for you, for free?!
Like yourself, I want stability in my email address. I've had my BBS and Earthlink addys since 1996, and my Yahoo and Hotmail addys since 1998 (tho the Hotmail addy is pretty useless due to spamflooding. Conversely my Yahoo addy never gets spam.) I also have email thru GMail, AIM, and my own domain, but seldom use any of those. Yahoo's main advantage as webmail goes, is that it still works fine in an old browser, with javascript and images disabled. (GMail is fairly good that way now too, tho)
The main problem with Yahoo is that their email is intermittently unreliable, sometimes for months at a time. -- One reason why I'd keep my ELN account even if I had another ISP (if fixed wireless ever gets here, our only hope of broadband) is because ELN email is nearly 100% reliable, per my running cross-check of stuff that's carboned to the BBS.
Exactly. As to the comparison with newspapers -- well, the newspaper ads don't make the rest of the paper stick together and refuse to let me turn a page until I've read the current ad, which is what internet advertising tries to do, with invasive popups and the like.
And I'm completely free to ignore newspaper ads. But online advertising often doesn't give up until you've done something proactive, even if that's just chase down and close the damned popup (or block it entirely).
If online advertising were billboards, they would be planted in the middle of the road like a roadblock, and refuse to let you drive on until you'd paid a toll.
If they'd stuck to text and small graphics (akin to the majority of newspaper ads), no one would mind the presence of online ads, and might even find them useful. Such as having an ad section geared toward people who want to buy a car, but that everyone else is free to bypass -- EXACTLY as in a newspaper.
So, yes indeed, let's make online advertising MORE like newspaper ads!!
Slashdot Mirror
Heh heh... well, there ARE exceptions in the price-to-value-go-round :)
Full set of The Prisoner for $50 was still a little beyond what I thought fair -- retail is actually $90; $50 was a special deal that ya never know, it might not come again, at least any time soon. So I held my nose and went for it.
Tho I've still not been able to convince myself to cough up $40 a season for Stargate, which I love beyond all rationality! (when I can get TV at all, SG-1 is presently the only series I watch. I suppose someone should climb up on the roof and replace the dead antenna, Real Soon Now*...)
* RSN, adj., faanish: "slightly less urgent than mañana".
Yep, that was some of my point -- you gotta taste-test price points to find out where the sweet spot is. Otherwise, you just can't know, and no amount of "Our prices are so high that we *must* be making lots of money!" will change that.
... Indeed, it's a roaring success just like the **AA -- yeah, Apple still makes a ton of money, but their relative marketshare keeps shrinking. Likewise, the **AA makes tons of money, but their relative marketshare is also shrinking as alternate distribution methods take over the world.
:(
There was a retail store near here which did exactly that: the new owner set overly-high prices on all his goods, then stood back admiring how much profit he was going to rake in. The reality was that all the old established customers betook themselves to stores with better prices, and his store soon went out of business.
As to Apple
These alternate distribution methods are going to be like PCs -- cheap, available, and ubiquitous. The **AA methods are on the road to being a niche market, just like Apple.
So, folks, make up our minds: Do you want 3% of a huge and growing market, or 100% of a market that's starting to seem cramped??
As to the side effects and historical forces -- too late, we already have the DMCA and its kinfolk
I paid $50 for a complete boxed set of The Prisoner a while back (retail was $90) and thought that was a bit much -- after all, it works out to about $5 per hour (that's more than first-run theatre tickets, at $9 for about 2 hrs).
At a guess, 75% of the cost of retail DVDs is in warehousing, advertising, distributor markup, and other intermediary expenses. The balance includes royalties, media manufacturing, and profit. Yeah, cheap distribution ($1 DVDs, burn on demand, etc.) puts the intermediaries out of business, but it's either accept that and move on to new methods of selling your product, and gain consumer goodwill in the process, or fight an endless and losing battle against 'piracy', lose your business anyway, and meanwhile everyone hates you.
I'd guess roughly doubling or tripling current volume would be about sufficient to make up what they'd lose in profits at the current gouging prices, but IMO counting on merely doubled or tripled volume is ridiculously conservative. This has the potential to be 100+ times the size of the current market. Remember the explosion in VHS sales once they dropped the average price from $100 per film, to more like $20 per film?? (Which in its era wasn't so absurd, since *good* VHS tape used to be very expensive. In 1985 I was still driving 60 miles r/t and paying $14 apiece for high-end tapes, and that was a bargain.)
You *gotta* sound like a bean-counter to get any of these people to listen! And come to think of it, I wonder if the people to convince aren't the **AA cartel, but the syndication networks. Know where I first saw ads for Star Trek-TOS on home media? as ads on syndicated TV, *during* an episode of ST-TOS. Get 'em while they're hot!!
Egads... no wonder I gave all the CP/M and Amiga diskettes away!!
Nifty gadget, tho. Considering how companies are now being court-ordered to retrieve antique data, they may become more popular in the future. (Get a load of the prices on MFM HDs needed for data recovery -- I've seen $900 for a 40mb Rodine!)
"On the other hand, if we input a lot of energy we can fuse two hydrogen atoms into a helium atom (just out of curiosity, have we managed to fuse any larger atoms?)"
;)
Well, just fuse a whole lot of hydrogen atoms, and you should wind up with gold, right?
[Scientists everywhere report instruments going haywire, as all the hydrogen is suddenly sucked out of the universe]
Exactly so... besides, that one-buck DVD serves as your best backup medium.
Here's another thought: a buck an hour (thus one or two eps. per DVD) for all the television series that thus far they don't find worth selling -- yeah, there's some market among the fanatics for full-season sets at high prices, but think of how huge the market COULD be, if they were priced at the impulse-buying level??
Also, ISTM that small-market films and series TV is a massive buy-on-demand market just itching to be exploited (much as music ought to be). I can readily imagine an automated burn-on-demand system, where you cherry-pick whatever you want, which is then burned to DVD, stuffed into a case with a matching label slapped on, and mailed to your house ("Buy ten DVDs and shipping is free!") Yeah, it wouldn't be fancy, but it wouldn't require any warehousing or distribution system, and there'd be essentially zero waste (no returned product, no overstocks). Just a website, an automated data/duping facility (could be a good side business for data warehousers), credit card processing, and the Postal Service.
The trick is to make it the easiest possible route for the consumer, at a price that makes it worthwhile to let someone else do the work.
I've seen quite a few classics, from both film and TV, in these one-buck-DVD bargain bins. A few that I recall off the top of my head:
--Jungle Book, starring Sabu
--episodes from the original Superman TV series
--various Sherlock Holmes films (with Basil Rathbone)
Some were in standard DVD cases with nice labels, some in cheap cello and cardboard. But for a buck, who cares?
And I think the guy quoted in the article is wrong about silent movies -- the same audience that is interested in the above are also interested in silents, especially serials.
Even if I had broadband, and even when the file is free and legal, I certainly couldn't be bothered to locate, download, and burn a film that I could buy for a buck. IMO their only mistake is in not making their catalogs cover a sufficiently broad range of titles and eras.
[eyeing junkpile from the recycle yard ... I'm the local user group's hardware guru] Like this one??
"Apple 5.25 Drive Controller, 655-101-1-D", with attached 19-wire cable (19...?! [counts again] yep, 19. What kind of number is that??)
You mean in OSXSpeak? :)
[Try saying THAT three times fast!]
[eyeing nominal topic] Am I the only person left who still routinely puts 5" floppies in new systems??
This is why I perversely call the letter W "wuh". Why should W have three syllables, when all the other Latin letters have to make do with just one?
Though if you're using some other alphabet, your syllables may vary.
"i-before-e rules are weird and unscientific" ...except after C, or when sounded as A. ;)
d =12954073, by TripMasterMonkey).
[2nd grade phonics coming back to haunt me.]
I'd extend your good point somewhat, as your grandfather clearly did: it's not how much education a person has that counts. It's what *use* they make of whatever education they have. A lot of folks who had little opportunity for education intuitively understand this, and try their best to communicate effectively (they may get it wrong from simple ignorance, but they make the *effort* regardless). I forgive this, just as I forgive non-native speakers their mistakes.
But blowing off good communication methods, when someone clearly knows better, shows me that they don't really care if I understand them or not. (In parallel, one has to wonder if they care whether their compiler understands them or not, and whether some of the more pervasive bugs may have their root in a habit of sloppiness.)
But a lot of it is a kid thing -- kids like to sound "different" to brand themselves as being their own tribe, distinct from the adult tribe. Hence the perverse pride in sounding like morons (as discussed in the first post on the page, http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=154444&ci
... if when someone reads your post, their first thought is "Didn't Jeff Foxworthy once say that?"
Seriously, that's a good point. The "accent" someone writes with is indeed how we as readers will come to believe they'd sound in person, since that is the ONLY point of reference we have. (At least until text-to-speech software gets somewhat more sophisticated. Tho I'm not so sure I want to actually *hear* 1337speak... it's liable to make my ears bleed.)
Don't worry, that'll be the NEXT case to make it to SCOTUS. :/
Same thing as when some local cop dresses up as a hooker and goes looking for johns to arrest.
[reads] "Hobby software", eh? Methinks he was a bit weak on the concept of "hobby".
Anyway, thanks -- interesting to see this old article.
Macs don't have device drivers and TSRs either.. they have extensions and inits. ;)
You got a link to Gates' "letter of intent"?? Would be interesting to see. Does sound like his M.O.
And one does have to wonder about that "personalization software" -- why do we need more than the user's registered name and the software's serial number, unless the intent is to exert more control over users' machines?
M$ has said repeatedly at their seminars (which I attend whenever I can) that they envision what amounts to a return to the dumb terminal, where you rent use of applications, and store your documents on a remote server -- for a suitable monthly fee. (Reaction from the all-IT-pros audience? Uniformly unhappy scowls.) It occurs to me that "personalization software" that works over the web is the gateway to making this reality.
Coolness. Wear it with pride (or perhaps with a flak vest when going near city hall).
It occurred to me as I read your post that "the needs of the many" is exactly analogous to corporations being treated as "persons" -- they are effectively a "person" made up of "the many". Under the concept of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" this means that what's good for corporations would trump individual rights every time.
:(
This ruling is perfectly in parallel with what's been happening wrt such artificial "persons".
Methinks we're a LOT further down the road to socialism than most folk realize...
[BTW, I entirely agree with your post.]
You say, "I see a need to force land owners to make effective economic use of the land".
How is this freedom to do as I please with my own property?
I bought 10 acres (which happened to be in four lots) of mostly-nothing because I have a strong need for empty space around me. Should I be forced to develop my two vacant lots, just because as empty desert, they're an inadequate tax base?
Or not even "way back when".
I bought my house not quite four years ago.
Since then, its market value has almost quadrupled, thanks to California's runaway real estate market (which can't go on forever -- average wage earners, and even more upscale folk, can't afford to pay $4000 a month for an AVERAGE mortgage on a perfectly ordinary house!!)
If taxes were allowed to rise along with market value, as was the case pre-Prop13, in just four years my annual property tax would have increased from $2000 (1% plus a shitload of add-ons) to $8000!!! That's almost as much as the annual *total* of my mortgage payments.
Without Prop13, I'd already have been forced to sell and move out of state, because I can't afford to pay twice what I do now; and even at current market value, my place is bottom-end -- so what I could get for it wouldn't be enough to buy another place.
I have a better idea: when gov't runs out of money, they can just stop spending, same as everyone else has to do. As it is now, when they run out of money, they find some new way to tax it out of citizens.
See http://www.freestarmedia.com/ for a fightback effort; specifically, they want to apply this new law of the land to one of the justices who endorsed it: http://www.freestarmedia.com/hotellostliberty2.htm l
My sister (an architect for major developments, who nonetheless found the decision unconscionable) wrote this about it: "At greatest risk are older neighborhoods, regardless of condition, that front onto very valuable amenities... lakes, view properties in urban centers. Those are the locations that the city can now argue "highest and best use" and take their property to densify and increase tax revenue. It is actually the description of the case that went all the way to the supreme court."
[feel free to plagiarize this post.]
[laughing] I was going to point out the same thing. Why pay a marketing department, when half a million slashdot-smitten geeks will do it for you, for free?!
Like yourself, I want stability in my email address. I've had my BBS and Earthlink addys since 1996, and my Yahoo and Hotmail addys since 1998 (tho the Hotmail addy is pretty useless due to spamflooding. Conversely my Yahoo addy never gets spam.) I also have email thru GMail, AIM, and my own domain, but seldom use any of those. Yahoo's main advantage as webmail goes, is that it still works fine in an old browser, with javascript and images disabled. (GMail is fairly good that way now too, tho)
The main problem with Yahoo is that their email is intermittently unreliable, sometimes for months at a time. -- One reason why I'd keep my ELN account even if I had another ISP (if fixed wireless ever gets here, our only hope of broadband) is because ELN email is nearly 100% reliable, per my running cross-check of stuff that's carboned to the BBS.
Exactly. As to the comparison with newspapers -- well, the newspaper ads don't make the rest of the paper stick together and refuse to let me turn a page until I've read the current ad, which is what internet advertising tries to do, with invasive popups and the like.
And I'm completely free to ignore newspaper ads. But online advertising often doesn't give up until you've done something proactive, even if that's just chase down and close the damned popup (or block it entirely).
If online advertising were billboards, they would be planted in the middle of the road like a roadblock, and refuse to let you drive on until you'd paid a toll.
If they'd stuck to text and small graphics (akin to the majority of newspaper ads), no one would mind the presence of online ads, and might even find them useful. Such as having an ad section geared toward people who want to buy a car, but that everyone else is free to bypass -- EXACTLY as in a newspaper.
So, yes indeed, let's make online advertising MORE like newspaper ads!!
I was under the impression that Opera is sold primarily in the embedded market, for handhelds and suchlike...??