Of course they have the big stick and they control supply. They always have.
I think it's a mistake to look at this like something that might eventually endanger Apple's bottom line because this is "a guy" who wants to make some "Mac Clones" which won't really be anything more than a glorified and incomplete case mod. He won't sell more than a thousand of them and probably not even more than 500.
I don't think he's going to even register on the Apple radar.
Yeah this did cross my mind as I was buying them. Like I said I felt like a thief picking them up. Not enough of one to stop and make a scene about government waste of course but I thought about it.
I work for county government here in the engineering department and I've seen some strange things when it comes to watching how tax dollars are spent on hardware. The county doesn't do everything the same way across the board.
One department is busy buying new computers after waiting forever to get the money to do it with while another department that's overfunded to the extreme is retiring computers that are easily up to what the first department needed.
Now technically you can check with the warehouse and see if they have some equipment you were planning to buy and instead just go get it transferred to your inventory. They even deliver it to you.
Only problem is the guys in the warehouse get kudos for recovering "x" amount of dollars of our taxes by auctioning off stuff and the more money the auction makes the better the county commissioners think we are doing at being efficient. This leads to the department responsible for the auction never making any effort to let anyone know what they have because then there wouldn't be anything left over that could fetch any reasonable money on the auction. It's a friggin mess!
Ditto on the lasers blowing the inks out of the water. I've got two lasers at home I picked up on my local county online auction. I picked up an Apple 12/640 for $40 and a Lexmark Optra Lxn+ for $68. Both of them are still on the toner cartridge that was sitting in them when I bought them and print flawlessly. The Apple printer had 6800 pages on it and the Lexmark had 32,000 and they sold them for small change. I felt like a thief picking them up from the county warehouse.
Last inkjet printer I bought sits in the closet waiting for it's next set of cartridges. Every time I think I need to print something in color I price the carts and say "nevermind". That's what cheap printers with expensive ink create. A customer who you make nothing (or next to nothing) off of when you sell him the printer and who never can bring himself to pay for the expensive refills.
Plus the guy writing the article left out one of the major things. Monkeys flying out Bill Gates ass. That's something that will happen before Microsoft goes OS.
I love Anime but I don't honestly think I've seen a single one all the way through that didn't get a little crazy by the end. I think he just described every single Anime series ever produced!
You misunderstand me I think. More clearly there are easier and cheaper ways to get oil than going to war for it.
It would be easier and cheaper to look the other way at what a despot he is and simply buy it from him.
For that matter we could have allowed him to keep Kuwait when he took it and we could have said "Sucks to be you" to the Saudi's if he had decided to take their country as well. Seems like it would be easier to deal with just one guy for all of our petroleum needs wouldn't it?
refurbmaddness.com has them pretty regularly. Their best price right now appears to be $599 so I don't know if I would consider this a particularly good deal but then I think you can find one on ebay fairly easy. Original iMacs (slower obviously) can be had for much less than that and are fairly plentiful.
See that's nothing like my experience. I've got two machines I spend most of my time on at home. A 2x 1Ghz G4 PowerMac (Quicksilver model so PC133 RAM with that) and a 1.2Ghz Athlon box, also with same RAM and amount. I find the Mac to be quicker. Not like I've done a bunch of benchmarks or anything this is merely my opinion.
OS's are Jaguar (10.2.4) on the Mac and XP Pro on the Athlon. The only thing that stands out between the two is the Mac has a GF4 Titanium and the Athlon is using my older GF2 Ultra card. I don't game on the PC so I can't say what the fps difference would be between the two. Just in day to day use I prefer the speed of the Mac.
When I was running 10.1 then yeah, I feel like it was behind the PC (especially since the PC was running Win2k then)
Well you make some good points. At this time I think that what you are seeing is a situation where people are indeed saying that the CD isn't worth the $15 and that if the labels won't sell me the 3 tracks I want for the $4.50 I'm willing to pay then I'll download them and to hell with the labels. It is stealing, I'm not about to argue that it isn't. That would be futile. People running around saying that what they are doing isn't really harming anything are lying to themselves to feel better about it. I can only speak for myself when I say that I have no trouble sleeping at night. I know exactly what I'm doing and have no qualms about it.
What I am going to say though is that this is so widespread and so damaging to the labels current business model that it's going to force them to change the way they sell music. There will be jobs lost and there will be people who no longer make the kind of money they were able to. This happens in every industry that undergoes traumatic change. It's probably going to be a little uglier and a little more painful in the music industry because it's been held in a sort of artificial bubble for so long. It's a system that's become an institution and those always break the hardest.
Unlimited bandwidth not being presently available I still see your point. It makes me think of the recent case of Eminem's latest album (it might have actually been the one before it, I am not a fan and don't keep up much with him) but I recall reading in a couple of different places that the album I'm referring to was called "the most downloaded album of all time". It was also the best selling album that year.
The next step, where the labels finally break down and meet the listeners halfway is going to be the real dealbreaker in my mind. If the plan is sound and the labels are willing to sell people music, the way the people want to buy music, and for a price that people are willing to pay and people continue to steal the music instead at the rate they do today then that's dead wrong. Again I can only speak for myself but all I'm waiting for is an online service that lets me do this legally but is reasonable. We will see how many people who spout that same line are serious when it appears.
On drugs and software I only want to point out that if the product costs "x" and the market will accept that then the product will sell. If the product exceeds what the market is willing to pay for it then it's not going to sell as well. If it exceeds that amount by too much it won't sell at all. That's true where software is concerned 100% and alternatives will always be turned to when something gets just a little too insane in the price tag. I don't think it's a great idea to go out and simply download everything and never pay for anything as that would have the kind of effect you are talking about. I do think that prices of software are high enough that I want to be far more selective in what I pay that $50 for. I want to take it for a spin and if the download is going to take all night but my buddy has a copy I feel no guilt over ripping his.
Drug companies are a whole different nut to crack. They make a product that costs an arm and a leg to develop but people don't just "want" the product. Sometimes they need it desperately. They walk a fine line between charging what they have to in order to make it worth developing and trying to not appear too greedy and pricing themselves into PR hell. That's a whole other thread by itself.
I been down this exact same road before. I got an aunt who I no longer speak with because I finally had to draw the line when warranty work reached the 5 year mark on the computer that she absolutely refused to upgrade.
I learned a similar lesson at work. Now normally I wouldn't even consider building a computer for a co-worker but my boss asked me if I could do it for a guy in another section he was friends with and I was new here so I kind of felt like there was some pressure involved. I did the deed and I'll be damned if he didn't turn out to be the "customer from hell". At three years I just told him that he should go buy a Dell.
It's been said several times already but it bears repeating. It's just not worth.
Well, the way I see this it's not about MY price scheme at all. It's about the "value" of a song undergoing change.
This is really an interesting thing to watch happen because for the first time in my life I'm watching an industry fighting to keep their product from losing it's value while at the same time a huge number of people are using file sharing to redefine what that product is worth.
This is so much different than someone stealing cars and paying what they can afford for them. First of all a Dodge Viper (your example) is clearly worth vastly more $20. That's completely lopsided. At this point lets take a $15 CD (again your example) and then lets say it has 10 tracks to keep my math challenged brain from thinking too much so we're talking about a buck and a half a track. Good track, bad track, it all breaks down the same way.
Go back to your Dodge Viper and say for instance it's a $60,000 car. I admit to not having a clue what they get for a Dodge Viper so let's use that number for conversations sake. Now if the Dodge Neon also was priced at $60,000, and so was every other model of truck Dodge made then do you think many people would buy the Neon? Do you think many people would even buy Dodge products at all? Surely not enough of them to allow Dodge to keep charging such a ridiculous price for a Neon.
The thing is a lot of people will buy a Neon at a reasonable price. A lot of people will buy music at a reasonable price too. I'd be happy to pay the $1.50/track price I mentioned if I could buy three of the songs I like and pass on the crap. That's what it's going to be. If they don't like it their entire industry will slip out from under them.
Software is a completely different matter. OSS is going to do (and is doing) to retail software what file sharing is doing to record labels. It's going to take the field and level it, albeit without having to resort to obviously illegal means in order to do so.
In either case it's going to change. You can change with it or get run over by it but it's going to change.
The difference is simple. This is priced in a reasonable manner for what it is. Actually it's priced very attractively if you are a fan of the strip. It's compelling.
Niether music nor software are priced in accordance with their value to the people who are supposed to be doing the buying. The typical CD is immensely overpriced unless you are a fan of that artist and enjoy everything he/she/they record. For most of us it's just not worth the price for a couple of tracks. Microsoft Office for example isn't worth half of what they price it at and a $50 game is just flat out stupid in my opinion.
Where games are concerned I play the demo sometimes. Other times I'll clone a friends copy to check it out. Legality has nothing to do with it. If it's more convienient to borrow and clone then I go that way.
If it's worth buying I'll buy it. In the past year or so I've bought 5 or 6 games like that. I still think they're overpriced at $50 a pop but if it's a good game I give them their reward.
The same thing goes for new music. Old music I don't pay for. In almost every case where I have older music on my hard drive that I've downloaded or borrowed/ripped then I once owned that LP/8-track/Cassette. The way I see it that music has been paid for. I'm not 100% compliant but for the most part I am.
New music on the other hand is all about not getting ripped off.
As a patriotic and loyal Texan who is required by my personal honor to defend the dignity and good name of the Texas Legislature I feel it is my duty to point out that you sir have made a most grave mistake in your amusing little jest.
You left out the Jalapeno Peppers. You want this taken care of asap don't you?
For the record I hope he does too. Having said that though I would say that it's easy enough to prove that MS is worse than Apple or any number of other huge corporations. For one thing there is the little matter of their being ruled against in their recent anti-trust case.
If Apple was in the same dominant position that Microsoft is in then I can't say they wouldn't be as bad as Microsoft. They are not nor are they likely to be anytime soon. As things stand I can make my decisions based on nothing more than what's transpired to date and to date Microsoft is clearly the greater of two evils. Any fool can see that so why can't you?
You are rude and do not have any grounds to base your assertion that I am a "moron".
I bought Virtual PC with PC-DOS and I run Red Hat and OS/2 4 on it. I have copies of Windows I could install on it (I also own a number of PC's that came with the obligatory copy of Windows installed) but I choose not to.
You had to check to see if Windows was a certified MS product?
How so? He's got a game console. It cost him nothing. the games that go in it also cost him nothing. He's got clothes on his back, food in his stomach, and a pretty decent pile of stuff IMO. And he's loved. He's got more than many kids out there and as I pointed out in another reply on this thread if he wants to go out and earn himself enough money to get an Xbox I'm not going to make an issue over it. I'm not going to contribute to it obviously but that would be his money, not mine.
Not an issue, your point is well made. I did explain to him why we were going with one of the other two consoles. I also tried to make it fairly clear to him that when he's buying his own game console it's his money so he can buy what he wants without my point of view getting in his way.
If he goes out and makes the money to buy an Xbox he's welcome to it. If his grandparents (ahhh, the old end-run around your pig headed parents. I remember it well) drop a windfall in his lap he can buy an Xbox with it. He's not going to be getting games for that system from me but he's free to buy one with his money, and he does have money that he can clearly call his own.
Completely fair. One company is repeatedly in court and already convicted of abusing their monopoly. The other isn't snow white either granted but I don't their "sins" rate nearly as high as Microsofts.
We all make our own choices. You go with what seems right to you. I'm good with that.
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Of course they have the big stick and they control supply. They always have.
I think it's a mistake to look at this like something that might eventually endanger Apple's bottom line because this is "a guy" who wants to make some "Mac Clones" which won't really be anything more than a glorified and incomplete case mod. He won't sell more than a thousand of them and probably not even more than 500.
I don't think he's going to even register on the Apple radar.
Yeah this did cross my mind as I was buying them. Like I said I felt like a thief picking them up. Not enough of one to stop and make a scene about government waste of course but I thought about it.
I work for county government here in the engineering department and I've seen some strange things when it comes to watching how tax dollars are spent on hardware. The county doesn't do everything the same way across the board.
One department is busy buying new computers after waiting forever to get the money to do it with while another department that's overfunded to the extreme is retiring computers that are easily up to what the first department needed.
Now technically you can check with the warehouse and see if they have some equipment you were planning to buy and instead just go get it transferred to your inventory. They even deliver it to you.
Only problem is the guys in the warehouse get kudos for recovering "x" amount of dollars of our taxes by auctioning off stuff and the more money the auction makes the better the county commissioners think we are doing at being efficient. This leads to the department responsible for the auction never making any effort to let anyone know what they have because then there wouldn't be anything left over that could fetch any reasonable money on the auction. It's a friggin mess!
Ditto on the lasers blowing the inks out of the water. I've got two lasers at home I picked up on my local county online auction. I picked up an Apple 12/640 for $40 and a Lexmark Optra Lxn+ for $68. Both of them are still on the toner cartridge that was sitting in them when I bought them and print flawlessly. The Apple printer had 6800 pages on it and the Lexmark had 32,000 and they sold them for small change. I felt like a thief picking them up from the county warehouse.
Last inkjet printer I bought sits in the closet waiting for it's next set of cartridges. Every time I think I need to print something in color I price the carts and say "nevermind". That's what cheap printers with expensive ink create. A customer who you make nothing (or next to nothing) off of when you sell him the printer and who never can bring himself to pay for the expensive refills.
This "Ridiculously Brief" explanation was brought to you by the letter "A" and the number "9".
"Smeagol hates rolls, nasty tricksy rolls with sesame seeds give Smeagol indigestion.....What's donuts?"
Plus the guy writing the article left out one of the major things. Monkeys flying out Bill Gates ass. That's something that will happen before Microsoft goes OS.
I love Anime but I don't honestly think I've seen a single one all the way through that didn't get a little crazy by the end. I think he just described every single Anime series ever produced!
You misunderstand me I think. More clearly there are easier and cheaper ways to get oil than going to war for it.
It would be easier and cheaper to look the other way at what a despot he is and simply buy it from him.
For that matter we could have allowed him to keep Kuwait when he took it and we could have said "Sucks to be you" to the Saudi's if he had decided to take their country as well. Seems like it would be easier to deal with just one guy for all of our petroleum needs wouldn't it?
"The Spice Must Flow"
Seriously though the "This is a war for oil" argument is tired and weak. There are significantly easier and less expensive ways to get oil than this.
refurbmaddness.com has them pretty regularly. Their best price right now appears to be $599 so I don't know if I would consider this a particularly good deal but then I think you can find one on ebay fairly easy. Original iMacs (slower obviously) can be had for much less than that and are fairly plentiful.
See that's nothing like my experience. I've got two machines I spend most of my time on at home. A 2x 1Ghz G4 PowerMac (Quicksilver model so PC133 RAM with that) and a 1.2Ghz Athlon box, also with same RAM and amount. I find the Mac to be quicker. Not like I've done a bunch of benchmarks or anything this is merely my opinion.
OS's are Jaguar (10.2.4) on the Mac and XP Pro on the Athlon. The only thing that stands out between the two is the Mac has a GF4 Titanium and the Athlon is using my older GF2 Ultra card. I don't game on the PC so I can't say what the fps difference would be between the two. Just in day to day use I prefer the speed of the Mac.
When I was running 10.1 then yeah, I feel like it was behind the PC (especially since the PC was running Win2k then)
Well you make some good points. At this time I think that what you are seeing is a situation where people are indeed saying that the CD isn't worth the $15 and that if the labels won't sell me the 3 tracks I want for the $4.50 I'm willing to pay then I'll download them and to hell with the labels. It is stealing, I'm not about to argue that it isn't. That would be futile. People running around saying that what they are doing isn't really harming anything are lying to themselves to feel better about it. I can only speak for myself when I say that I have no trouble sleeping at night. I know exactly what I'm doing and have no qualms about it.
What I am going to say though is that this is so widespread and so damaging to the labels current business model that it's going to force them to change the way they sell music. There will be jobs lost and there will be people who no longer make the kind of money they were able to. This happens in every industry that undergoes traumatic change. It's probably going to be a little uglier and a little more painful in the music industry because it's been held in a sort of artificial bubble for so long. It's a system that's become an institution and those always break the hardest.
Unlimited bandwidth not being presently available I still see your point. It makes me think of the recent case of Eminem's latest album (it might have actually been the one before it, I am not a fan and don't keep up much with him) but I recall reading in a couple of different places that the album I'm referring to was called "the most downloaded album of all time". It was also the best selling album that year.
The next step, where the labels finally break down and meet the listeners halfway is going to be the real dealbreaker in my mind. If the plan is sound and the labels are willing to sell people music, the way the people want to buy music, and for a price that people are willing to pay and people continue to steal the music instead at the rate they do today then that's dead wrong. Again I can only speak for myself but all I'm waiting for is an online service that lets me do this legally but is reasonable. We will see how many people who spout that same line are serious when it appears.
On drugs and software I only want to point out that if the product costs "x" and the market will accept that then the product will sell. If the product exceeds what the market is willing to pay for it then it's not going to sell as well. If it exceeds that amount by too much it won't sell at all. That's true where software is concerned 100% and alternatives will always be turned to when something gets just a little too insane in the price tag. I don't think it's a great idea to go out and simply download everything and never pay for anything as that would have the kind of effect you are talking about. I do think that prices of software are high enough that I want to be far more selective in what I pay that $50 for. I want to take it for a spin and if the download is going to take all night but my buddy has a copy I feel no guilt over ripping his.
Drug companies are a whole different nut to crack. They make a product that costs an arm and a leg to develop but people don't just "want" the product. Sometimes they need it desperately. They walk a fine line between charging what they have to in order to make it worth developing and trying to not appear too greedy and pricing themselves into PR hell. That's a whole other thread by itself.
I been down this exact same road before. I got an aunt who I no longer speak with because I finally had to draw the line when warranty work reached the 5 year mark on the computer that she absolutely refused to upgrade.
I learned a similar lesson at work. Now normally I wouldn't even consider building a computer for a co-worker but my boss asked me if I could do it for a guy in another section he was friends with and I was new here so I kind of felt like there was some pressure involved. I did the deed and I'll be damned if he didn't turn out to be the "customer from hell". At three years I just told him that he should go buy a Dell.
It's been said several times already but it bears repeating. It's just not worth.
Well, the way I see this it's not about MY price scheme at all. It's about the "value" of a song undergoing change.
This is really an interesting thing to watch happen because for the first time in my life I'm watching an industry fighting to keep their product from losing it's value while at the same time a huge number of people are using file sharing to redefine what that product is worth.
This is so much different than someone stealing cars and paying what they can afford for them. First of all a Dodge Viper (your example) is clearly worth vastly more $20. That's completely lopsided. At this point lets take a $15 CD (again your example) and then lets say it has 10 tracks to keep my math challenged brain from thinking too much so we're talking about a buck and a half a track. Good track, bad track, it all breaks down the same way.
Go back to your Dodge Viper and say for instance it's a $60,000 car. I admit to not having a clue what they get for a Dodge Viper so let's use that number for conversations sake. Now if the Dodge Neon also was priced at $60,000, and so was every other model of truck Dodge made then do you think many people would buy the Neon? Do you think many people would even buy Dodge products at all? Surely not enough of them to allow Dodge to keep charging such a ridiculous price for a Neon.
The thing is a lot of people will buy a Neon at a reasonable price. A lot of people will buy music at a reasonable price too. I'd be happy to pay the $1.50/track price I mentioned if I could buy three of the songs I like and pass on the crap. That's what it's going to be. If they don't like it their entire industry will slip out from under them.
Software is a completely different matter. OSS is going to do (and is doing) to retail software what file sharing is doing to record labels. It's going to take the field and level it, albeit without having to resort to obviously illegal means in order to do so.
In either case it's going to change. You can change with it or get run over by it but it's going to change.
The difference is simple. This is priced in a reasonable manner for what it is. Actually it's priced very attractively if you are a fan of the strip. It's compelling.
Niether music nor software are priced in accordance with their value to the people who are supposed to be doing the buying. The typical CD is immensely overpriced unless you are a fan of that artist and enjoy everything he/she/they record. For most of us it's just not worth the price for a couple of tracks. Microsoft Office for example isn't worth half of what they price it at and a $50 game is just flat out stupid in my opinion.
Where games are concerned I play the demo sometimes. Other times I'll clone a friends copy to check it out. Legality has nothing to do with it. If it's more convienient to borrow and clone then I go that way.
If it's worth buying I'll buy it. In the past year or so I've bought 5 or 6 games like that. I still think they're overpriced at $50 a pop but if it's a good game I give them their reward.
The same thing goes for new music. Old music I don't pay for. In almost every case where I have older music on my hard drive that I've downloaded or borrowed/ripped then I once owned that LP/8-track/Cassette. The way I see it that music has been paid for. I'm not 100% compliant but for the most part I am.
New music on the other hand is all about not getting ripped off.
As a patriotic and loyal Texan who is required by my personal honor to defend the dignity and good name of the Texas Legislature I feel it is my duty to point out that you sir have made a most grave mistake in your amusing little jest.
You left out the Jalapeno Peppers. You want this taken care of asap don't you?
I think they sound like Decepticons personally but maybe that's just too much time spent watching Transformers as a kid.
Priceless. I bow to your economy of words and your comment that cuts straight to the point. (bows)
How did that go in the movie "Excalibur" when Merlin was explaining the situation to Uther?
"You killed the king, you stole his wife, you took his castle...now no one trusts you. You're not the one"
Apple "Would be" far worse than MS?
"Would be" meaning that they aren't at this time right?
For the record I hope he does too. Having said that though I would say that it's easy enough to prove that MS is worse than Apple or any number of other huge corporations. For one thing there is the little matter of their being ruled against in their recent anti-trust case.
If Apple was in the same dominant position that Microsoft is in then I can't say they wouldn't be as bad as Microsoft. They are not nor are they likely to be anytime soon. As things stand I can make my decisions based on nothing more than what's transpired to date and to date Microsoft is clearly the greater of two evils. Any fool can see that so why can't you?
You are rude and do not have any grounds to base your assertion that I am a "moron".
I bought Virtual PC with PC-DOS and I run Red Hat and OS/2 4 on it. I have copies of Windows I could install on it (I also own a number of PC's that came with the obligatory copy of Windows installed) but I choose not to.
You had to check to see if Windows was a certified MS product?
How so? He's got a game console. It cost him nothing. the games that go in it also cost him nothing. He's got clothes on his back, food in his stomach, and a pretty decent pile of stuff IMO. And he's loved. He's got more than many kids out there and as I pointed out in another reply on this thread if he wants to go out and earn himself enough money to get an Xbox I'm not going to make an issue over it. I'm not going to contribute to it obviously but that would be his money, not mine.
Not an issue, your point is well made. I did explain to him why we were going with one of the other two consoles. I also tried to make it fairly clear to him that when he's buying his own game console it's his money so he can buy what he wants without my point of view getting in his way.
If he goes out and makes the money to buy an Xbox he's welcome to it. If his grandparents (ahhh, the old end-run around your pig headed parents. I remember it well) drop a windfall in his lap he can buy an Xbox with it. He's not going to be getting games for that system from me but he's free to buy one with his money, and he does have money that he can clearly call his own.
Completely fair. One company is repeatedly in court and already convicted of abusing their monopoly. The other isn't snow white either granted but I don't their "sins" rate nearly as high as Microsofts.
We all make our own choices. You go with what seems right to you. I'm good with that.