Yep. Basically, they have always charged what the market will bear. At last it seems to be seeping into someone's brain that the market won't bear the current prices.
However, given that cassettes cost more to manufacture than CDs, yet have MSRP of $8.98, there is obviously still some more room for movement.
Depends what you mean. The product that became "Windows 95" slipped so many times that it was renamed "Windows 95" in order to force it to ship in 1995.
Windows and Windows NT were supposed to converge after 98/NT 4. They didn't. Finally we have Windows XP, how many years later?
Agreed, latterly they have shipped something on time, rather than delay, but the something more often than not has been another interim release, rather than the product actually PowerPointed several years earlier.
The "we had to use GCC" argument is a little strange though; is there any other good compiler available for the PPC at the moment?
I'm glad they are using gcc, rather than something else. That way, any improvements end up benefiting everyone. Even if they are doing them for their own 'selfish' commercial reasons.
If gcc code generation sucks, compared to something else, they have the spur to improve it. And everyone benefits. In fact, if the improvements are made to the high-level optimization rather than the low-level code generation, even X86 benefits. And this is all A Good Thing. Even for Apple.
Amen. The aim of speakers should be to be sonicly invisible. If you can 'hear' your speakers, if they make the music sound 'better', then they are not doing their job. Good reference speakers make the walls go away---it's like there is nothing between you and the performance. And the weird thing is that they aren't even particularly expensive. However, they don't sound impressive in the shop. In fact, not sounding impressive is their entire aim in life!
Of course, if you want to play with the sound---pump up the bass, effectively remix the music, go for it, but it's a whole lot easier if your hi-fi is uncritically passing the sound through rather than 'helping' at various stages by adding treble or damping extremes.
Protection against neutron radiation has always been through very thick concrete walls,
Actually, tin cans full of water.
That was what surrounded the linear accelerator at my university. Parafin and other hydrocarbons also work. Basically, anything with lots of hydrogen atoms. Since a neutron is very close in mass to a proton, when a neutron hits a hydrogen atom you get a good chance of
H + n -> D
and deuterium is good and stable. Of course the D + n -> Tritium, which is radioactive, but can be dealt with reasonably easily.
Beta radiation, being charged, just needs some tinfoil. Gamma though needs lots and lots of concrete, or lead.
No, neutrons are easy to deal with, and anyway, my children find their extra limbs surprisingly useful.
Well, as Apple is well known for setting trends, how long before some other companies start doing the same? Which politicians will we soon be seeing at?
And if a state legislature were, for instance, to pass a law declaring that PI=3.2? you would propose hanging the malefactors by their toenails for years until they pull them out? (Isn't that illegal most places by the way?)
Yes, but you can't buy a Thinkpad or an IBM desktop with an IBM chip in it. Just think what might have happened if IBM had ported OS/2 to the PowerPC.
The trouble is that at one time the internal divisions of IBM spent most of their time bayoneting each other rather than competing with the outside world. The result? the "IBM PC" is defined as a machine that runs a Microsoft OS!
On the press release, they actually call it Altivec(TM), which is interesting in its own right. Assuming that it didn't just slip by (you assume that someone meticulously checks press releases, but then again they refer to Power und Intel) you have to assume they have now licensed the name.
Yes, it does line numbers (can be turned on or off), and it lets you run the Perl from a menu. (Ditto Python). Allows you to syntax check Perl programs too.
Not universally true, at least not for all genres.
I understand the country circuit has artists who spend their professional lives touring. I know of at least two folkies (Martin Carthy and Andy Irvine) who prefer touring in small venues to recording or stadium gigs. They may not be mega rich, but they evidentially love their work, and make eoungh money to be happy. Andy even wrote a song called Never Tire of the Road---on Rain on the Roof, an album noted on the web site as
Andy self-produced and independently released this album in 1996 and has since only sold it at live shows
Musicians that play in symphony orchestras also get paid a living wage for their job.
So what's with the 'pop/rock' industry? My guess is that it is perceived as being grossly unfair that the musician makes so little money, and that the record company makes so much.
Not quite. FTP mandates DIR, and HTTP doesn't say anything about it at all.
Part of the trouble with FTP is that it has a whole bunch of options, with variable support on different servers. E.G. while restart capability is in the standard, it's not mandated that it be supported. Even if the server supports it, the client may not.
FTP is an essentially interactive protocol. Log onto the box, navigate to the correct directory, put/fetch the file, log off.
It embeds port numbers into the data (actually control) stream, so is NAT unfriendly (but then, it predates NAT). Since it is ubiquitous, every NAT implementation supports FTP, but if you are behind a particularly NAT unfriendly firewall you are not going to get through.
HTTP, as mentioned, does nearly everything that FTP does, and moreover mandates much more than FTP. Of course, performance may differ, but that ultimately comes down to server and client implmentations, not the underlying efficiency of the protocols themselvs. When it comes to transfering data, both of them are using TCP.
HTTP does have one more advantage though: it's more likely to be cached. So if your client is behind a cache and someone else has already got a copy, they will get dramatically better performance. Some caches will also handle FTP, but not as many.
Probably not. It's likely responsible for heat in the mantle though. This Scientific American article gives more detail.
The core is hot because... it hasn't cooled down yet. The earth is a very poor conductor of heat, so it takes a very long time for the heat at the core to radiate out to space. I remember doing the math as an excerise to show that the 4Gy age of the earth was not great enough to account for a significant radiative transfer of heat from the core---which is why volcanos and such have to get their energy from somewhere else. Friction and fission being the most likely candidates.
As to safety, well, let us rather look at cost effectiveness, for total lifetime cost. Against the value of the energy produced, set the cost of:
Building the reactor
Fueling the reactor
Running the reactor
Maintaining the reactor
Assuring 'other people' that you are not making bombs
Disposing of the waste
Decommisioning the reactor when its done with
The last three items are not usually significant with 'conventional' energy sources. Or rather, it's not nearly as expensive to render acceptable the output of an oil-fired generator as it is radioactive isotopes with ky half-lives.
So, which is cheaper? Note, I don't know. There is so much mis- and dis-information on both sides it's tough to decide.
Seriously, though -- Opera must have a smaller "market share" than iCab, let alone OmniWeb, IE, Gecko-flavors or...well, smaller than ANYthing that browses on the Mac.
You mean like the Mac version of Halo? Originally developed by Bungie on and for the Mac with PC port to follow? Now only on XBox, with Mac and PC ports still nowhere in evidence. With Halo 2 supposed to be XBox only with no PC or Mac port at all!
As for Ghost, well, better buy an XBox, 'cause it's not coming out on any other console if MS buys Blizzard. That, after all, is the whole point, isn't it? To kill the other platforms?
Profit is a reward, a byproduct and indicator of success.
Profit cannot be a goal, as it cannot be directly produced.
Profit arises from successful business practices, which are the motives of business.
If I set out to be The Richest Person On Earth, a business plan that says:
Profit
isn't really much help. Profit indicates business success, but a company that says their chief goal is to make a profit has actually lost the plot.
Re:What about satellite users?
on
Review: EyeTV
·
· Score: 2
I don't believe any tweaks etc have been done to MPEG-2. OTOH, there is lots of room in MPEG to put the stuff the CATV people need, namely conditional access and guide/interactivity.
There are a very few CA systems. Moto have their own, nearly every one else uses one of two other vendors. This is the Smart Card stuff. It's 'standard', but they are very paranoid about revealing how it works, as if it is broken it costs tens of millions of $ to fix.
The other bit is middleware. Rather than write for every processor in every model of every STB, most manufacturers now use one of two or three middleware systems. At least one of these is Java based, but most are not (although they will run Java). MS tried to own this space with WinCE but so far has been laughed at.
So, what you want is what is already in place, but the target system isn't quite what you expect maybe. BTW, the OS on most of these STBs is VxWorks from Wind River.
Re:What about satellite users?
on
Review: EyeTV
·
· Score: 2
The digital TV stuff is very standard. It's MPEG-2.Of course, it's also very scrambled to prevent piracy. Each company tends to use its own standard (well, there are three or four in total that are in use).
Now, MPEG-2 is standard, but not terribly 'open', as it encumbered with patents. If you want to sell someone an MPEG-2 decoder, you need to pay licence fees to the patent holders. That's been one of the problems with releasing free MPEG-2 decoders for Quicktime, since Apple would have to pay royalties per player.
The STBs are made in Taiwan, in the millions. Economy of scale, heavy automation, and very low wages, combine to ensure that your STB cost the CATV company less than $200. I'd say that even so, at $8/month, it takes them at least 13 months to make any money off you.
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However, given that cassettes cost more to manufacture than CDs, yet have MSRP of $8.98, there is obviously still some more room for movement.
Windows and Windows NT were supposed to converge after 98/NT 4. They didn't. Finally we have Windows XP, how many years later?
Agreed, latterly they have shipped something on time, rather than delay, but the something more often than not has been another interim release, rather than the product actually PowerPointed several years earlier.
As announced here. It's written in Java.
If gcc code generation sucks, compared to something else, they have the spur to improve it. And everyone benefits. In fact, if the improvements are made to the high-level optimization rather than the low-level code generation, even X86 benefits. And this is all A Good Thing. Even for Apple.
The real question of course is: what is it that they really don't want us to notice while they mount this ridiculous distraction?
Go to go now, there's someone at the door...
Of course, if you want to play with the sound---pump up the bass, effectively remix the music, go for it, but it's a whole lot easier if your hi-fi is uncritically passing the sound through rather than 'helping' at various stages by adding treble or damping extremes.
Hey, Alfa Romeo hasn't even made it as far as Beta yet, and it's a pretty fair car...
That was what surrounded the linear accelerator at my university. Parafin and other hydrocarbons also work. Basically, anything with lots of hydrogen atoms. Since a neutron is very close in mass to a proton, when a neutron hits a hydrogen atom you get a good chance of
H + n -> D
and deuterium is good and stable. Of course the D + n -> Tritium, which is radioactive, but can be dealt with reasonably easily.
Beta radiation, being charged, just needs some tinfoil. Gamma though needs lots and lots of concrete, or lead.
No, neutrons are easy to deal with, and anyway, my children find their extra limbs surprisingly useful.
And the reaction from the one ring web site is...
Um, I thought the comment was supposed to be ironic, surely?
I think I'll vote the Cowboy Neal option myself.
And if a state legislature were, for instance, to pass a law declaring that PI=3.2? you would propose hanging the malefactors by their toenails for years until they pull them out? (Isn't that illegal most places by the way?)
The trouble is that at one time the internal divisions of IBM spent most of their time bayoneting each other rather than competing with the outside world. The result? the "IBM PC" is defined as a machine that runs a Microsoft OS!
On the press release, they actually call it Altivec(TM), which is interesting in its own right. Assuming that it didn't just slip by (you assume that someone meticulously checks press releases, but then again they refer to Power und Intel) you have to assume they have now licensed the name.
Yes, it does line numbers (can be turned on or off), and it lets you run the Perl from a menu. (Ditto Python). Allows you to syntax check Perl programs too.
I understand the country circuit has artists who spend their professional lives touring. I know of at least two folkies (Martin Carthy and Andy Irvine) who prefer touring in small venues to recording or stadium gigs. They may not be mega rich, but they evidentially love their work, and make eoungh money to be happy. Andy even wrote a song called Never Tire of the Road---on Rain on the Roof, an album noted on the web site as
Musicians that play in symphony orchestras also get paid a living wage for their job.
So what's with the 'pop/rock' industry? My guess is that it is perceived as being grossly unfair that the musician makes so little money, and that the record company makes so much.
Part of the trouble with FTP is that it has a whole bunch of options, with variable support on different servers. E.G. while restart capability is in the standard, it's not mandated that it be supported. Even if the server supports it, the client may not.
FTP is an essentially interactive protocol. Log onto the box, navigate to the correct directory, put/fetch the file, log off.
It embeds port numbers into the data (actually control) stream, so is NAT unfriendly (but then, it predates NAT). Since it is ubiquitous, every NAT implementation supports FTP, but if you are behind a particularly NAT unfriendly firewall you are not going to get through.
HTTP, as mentioned, does nearly everything that FTP does, and moreover mandates much more than FTP. Of course, performance may differ, but that ultimately comes down to server and client implmentations, not the underlying efficiency of the protocols themselvs. When it comes to transfering data, both of them are using TCP.
HTTP does have one more advantage though: it's more likely to be cached. So if your client is behind a cache and someone else has already got a copy, they will get dramatically better performance. Some caches will also handle FTP, but not as many.
Probably not. It's likely responsible for heat in the mantle though. This Scientific American article gives more detail.
The core is hot because... it hasn't cooled down yet. The earth is a very poor conductor of heat, so it takes a very long time for the heat at the core to radiate out to space. I remember doing the math as an excerise to show that the 4Gy age of the earth was not great enough to account for a significant radiative transfer of heat from the core---which is why volcanos and such have to get their energy from somewhere else. Friction and fission being the most likely candidates.
As to safety, well, let us rather look at cost effectiveness, for total lifetime cost. Against the value of the energy produced, set the cost of:
The last three items are not usually significant with 'conventional' energy sources. Or rather, it's not nearly as expensive to render acceptable the output of an oil-fired generator as it is radioactive isotopes with ky half-lives.
So, which is cheaper? Note, I don't know. There is so much mis- and dis-information on both sides it's tough to decide.
As for Ghost, well, better buy an XBox, 'cause it's not coming out on any other console if MS buys Blizzard. That, after all, is the whole point, isn't it? To kill the other platforms?
Apple promised an update to QT 6.0 before the end of 2002, which did not happen (the update that is, I do seem to recall the end of 2002).
If I set out to be The Richest Person On Earth, a business plan that says:
- Profit
isn't really much help. Profit indicates business success, but a company that says their chief goal is to make a profit has actually lost the plot.There are a very few CA systems. Moto have their own, nearly every one else uses one of two other vendors. This is the Smart Card stuff. It's 'standard', but they are very paranoid about revealing how it works, as if it is broken it costs tens of millions of $ to fix.
The other bit is middleware. Rather than write for every processor in every model of every STB, most manufacturers now use one of two or three middleware systems. At least one of these is Java based, but most are not (although they will run Java). MS tried to own this space with WinCE but so far has been laughed at.
So, what you want is what is already in place, but the target system isn't quite what you expect maybe. BTW, the OS on most of these STBs is VxWorks from Wind River.
Now, MPEG-2 is standard, but not terribly 'open', as it encumbered with patents. If you want to sell someone an MPEG-2 decoder, you need to pay licence fees to the patent holders. That's been one of the problems with releasing free MPEG-2 decoders for Quicktime, since Apple would have to pay royalties per player.
The STBs are made in Taiwan, in the millions. Economy of scale, heavy automation, and very low wages, combine to ensure that your STB cost the CATV company less than $200. I'd say that even so, at $8/month, it takes them at least 13 months to make any money off you.