Why don't they vary the price according to demand? i.e., the movies most in demand would be more expensive. They could then drop the price as demand tails over time. There are mathematic models they could use to maximise revenues this way.
A big benefit of this type of pricing is that it maxmimises revenues, whilst at the same time feels fair to the consumer.
Considering that the english version of Wikipedia is adding over 1 new page every minute, there's no way that a small cabal of editors could properly filter everything.
But they wouldn't have to do everything, just the core info.
Excellent idea - there should be a "stable" and "development" version of each page.
What wikipedia needs is a few good "benevolent dictators" like Linux has that can create stable versions of articles. Perhaps all wikipedia editors should be able to vote for, say, half a dozen chief editors.
I always thought Sun had a bit of a death wish when it came to Java. It has amazing publicity when the web was booming, and they managed to screw it up bigtime.
For instance, in order to install Java so that you could use a java app on the web you had to go to their web site and hunt around to find the download, even then you had to choose between whether you wanted to download the Java SQW1.2 or ZXY4.2 - it was as if they didn't really want normal people to be able to use it. Java was an amazing opportunity for Sun which they completely screwed up.
Penguin have a good reputation in the UK. However, I found out that they actually use every legal means to protect IP as their own, even when legally that IP is legally in the Public Domain.
Case in point - Beatrix Potter - the cute bunny children's stories - Penguin owns the company that publishes Beatrix Potter books.
Nearly all of these stories are in the public domain, and even a lot of the artwork. However, you try to publish any of it... They have trademarks on all the character names and images, so although the copyright is public domain, the character names count and images count as trademarks of the company so you can't use them.
Doesn't seem right to me that a company should be able to prevent public domain works being published because they have trademarked the character names...
Those who know a lot about technology build their own machines
I think you're talking about a different kind of technology journalist...
Apple computers have never been geared toward the tech savvy; they have always been marketed to the artistic technophobe.
I consider myself pretty tech savvy and I use a Mac.
Yesterday in about ten mintues I set up Mac machine so I could click on a button, it would take a photo with the attached camera, convert it to several different formats, open them it Photoshop, remove the greenscreen, resave it, and then convert a sequence of those images into a movie file. All of this was done using the normal tools that come with OSX (apart from photoshop), was very easily done all via the OSX GUI.
Now, I could of course have done the same thing in Linux. There are some Linux apps that can remotely control a camera, I could have written some scripts for the Gimp to do the processing, and I could tie it all together with a batch script. But it would have taken me a lot longer, there would probably be some stupid frustrating problem I would have to spend ages trying to solve, and the final result would have been the same. So as a professional I prefer to do these things with a Mac. If that makes me an "artistic technophobe" in your eyes then so be it!
Is it bias? Apple are on a roll at the moment, they're coming out with great new products very frequently. If that is reported in the press then is it bias?
If Microsoft was doing the same they would get lots of press too, possibly more (you just wait until Vista launches)...
People who write about technology are going to know a lot about it, and so they are going to be in a better informed position to choose what is best because they have both seen a lot of technology and thought about it a lot. They choose Macs.
I would love to agree with you but unfortunately I can't. There are lots of people in senior IT purchasing positions who really don't understand the technology at all and just know buzzwords and are easily swayed by sales people.
Just a couple of days ago I was talking to a senior IT person explaining the advantages of a particular web server configuration. I went to demonstrate something on a terminal monitor, and the guy started laughing said "What, it doesn't have a Windows interface? And you're trying to tell me that this is advanced server technology? We're not going to use primitive Unix systems here. We're a state of the art Microsoft shop. You've got to admire Bill Gates, haven't you? You Unix guys crack me up..." and carried on like that for about half an hour. I didn't say anything and decided to just forget ever talking to this guy again.
I've looked at the screenshots and it just looks like they're messing around to me. They're nothing so special.
I was on Windows for about ten years, until just a few months ago. I brought a Mac mini just to try out OSX because I was getting bored with XP. It blew me away.
Well, actually for the first week I didn't like it much - I thought it was pretty and clever but there were things I could do easily in Windows that I couldn't do with the Mac. But then I bothered to read the documentation, and found out about things like expose and automator, and how easy it is to change menus and shortcut keys, stuff like that, and now I love it. The way all the applications are integrated and programmable from Automator is just so powerful, and way better than what is possible with XP.
So Microsoft, it will take more than pretty interfaces to draw me back to windows - OSX totally rocks once you get to know and understand it.
This happened to me. I couldn't post to Slashdot for about a year - I think anyone using Telefonica in Spain was banned, which is pretty much anyone in Spain. I emailed Slashdot about it but got no reply.
Actually I was pleased because it stopped me wasting so much time posting rubbish to Slashdot. Damn you Slashdot for banning me! And damn you for not banning me now!
Doesn't anyone care that our politicians accept bribes (aka; campaign donations) to pass laws that are against the interest public interest (ie; the people the politicians are supposed to represent)?
Speaking as a Euroweenie, it always amazes me how blind many Americans are to the corruption in their system. I find you get one of three responses:
1) Everything is transparent, so its all ok.
2) It's not illegal, and so it must be ok.
3) You're a European and everyone knows Europe is more corrupt than the USA so shut up.
You can go to France and ship it back yourself. What you can't do is get it shipped to you direct from France.
I expect the Italian company you gave as an example in your other post has warehouses in the UK so although you are buying italian wine you are not buying it direct from the suppliers, you are essentially buying it from the UK and the company you buy from will have to deal with paying UK duties etc.
If you buy a CD from France, the French company does not have to worry about UK VAT (unless they do over quite a high level of trade with the UK). However, a small French vineyard cannot sell wine in the same way.
No it isn't. Which would you prefer, 500 pounds or 800 euro? I expect the answer isn't immediately obvious to you. And what about the man in the street in the UK - do most people even know what the Euro/Pound exchange rate is?
With price transparency comes customer pressure. Of course, it doesn't help that markets are locked so that for instance you can't buy from the French itunes store in the UK. But one of the main functions of the EU is to remove that kind of market barrier.
Unfortunately the UK often blocks proposals that would make things cheaper for UK consumers. Did you know that the EU proposed to remove market barriers to alcohol sales in the EU, i.e. you would be able to order a box of your favourite wine directly from the vineyard with great savings. Personally I think that would be great. Guess who opposed and derailed this measure? That's right, the UK...
We're getting ripped off out here, and that's contrary to the whole point of the single market.
Well, one of the points of the Euro was to make pricing differences between countries transparent to consumers. The UK didn't join the Euro and so don't get the benefits of it.
I find it increadibly annoying that people accept their "proofs".
Sorry, but they are idiots compared to the intelligence of Arhimedes. Not only that, but if they had done some research they would have found that this experiement has been done many times before, in many variation, some of which have been very successful.
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of the bandwidth probably isn't as great as you think it is - at least not when you are buying massive amounts of bandwidth.
Why don't they vary the price according to demand? i.e., the movies most in demand would be more expensive. They could then drop the price as demand tails over time. There are mathematic models they could use to maximise revenues this way.
A big benefit of this type of pricing is that it maxmimises revenues, whilst at the same time feels fair to the consumer.
Considering that the english version of Wikipedia is adding over 1 new page every minute, there's no way that a small cabal of editors could properly filter everything.
But they wouldn't have to do everything, just the core info.
Excellent idea - there should be a "stable" and "development" version of each page.
What wikipedia needs is a few good "benevolent dictators" like Linux has that can create stable versions of articles. Perhaps all wikipedia editors should be able to vote for, say, half a dozen chief editors.
Because music has far more inherent replay value than video.
So? Since when does the cost of an item relate to how many times the purchaser uses it?
Car salesman: This car is $20,000.
Man: But I'm not planning on using it very often.
Car salesman: Ok, in that case it's $15,000.
In the Queen's English, the correct response to such as statement is "You're full of bollocks".
In total I've examined around 32 million requests to the BBC servers - although some of these have been discounted as 'unknowns'
I would be interested to know what percentage were discounted as 'unknowns'
That's not the point. They seemed to make the process very difficult.
I always thought Sun had a bit of a death wish when it came to Java. It has amazing publicity when the web was booming, and they managed to screw it up bigtime.
For instance, in order to install Java so that you could use a java app on the web you had to go to their web site and hunt around to find the download, even then you had to choose between whether you wanted to download the Java SQW1.2 or ZXY4.2 - it was as if they didn't really want normal people to be able to use it. Java was an amazing opportunity for Sun which they completely screwed up.
Penguin have a good reputation in the UK. However, I found out that they actually use every legal means to protect IP as their own, even when legally that IP is legally in the Public Domain.
Case in point - Beatrix Potter - the cute bunny children's stories - Penguin owns the company that publishes Beatrix Potter books.
Nearly all of these stories are in the public domain, and even a lot of the artwork. However, you try to publish any of it... They have trademarks on all the character names and images, so although the copyright is public domain, the character names count and images count as trademarks of the company so you can't use them.
Doesn't seem right to me that a company should be able to prevent public domain works being published because they have trademarked the character names...
Those who know a lot about technology build their own machines
I think you're talking about a different kind of technology journalist...
Apple computers have never been geared toward the tech savvy; they have always been marketed to the artistic technophobe.
I consider myself pretty tech savvy and I use a Mac.
Yesterday in about ten mintues I set up Mac machine so I could click on a button, it would take a photo with the attached camera, convert it to several different formats, open them it Photoshop, remove the greenscreen, resave it, and then convert a sequence of those images into a movie file. All of this was done using the normal tools that come with OSX (apart from photoshop), was very easily done all via the OSX GUI.
Now, I could of course have done the same thing in Linux. There are some Linux apps that can remotely control a camera, I could have written some scripts for the Gimp to do the processing, and I could tie it all together with a batch script. But it would have taken me a lot longer, there would probably be some stupid frustrating problem I would have to spend ages trying to solve, and the final result would have been the same. So as a professional I prefer to do these things with a Mac. If that makes me an "artistic technophobe" in your eyes then so be it!
The bias for Apple
Is it bias? Apple are on a roll at the moment, they're coming out with great new products very frequently. If that is reported in the press then is it bias?
If Microsoft was doing the same they would get lots of press too, possibly more (you just wait until Vista launches)...
"less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer"
This just cracks me up. We are talking about technology journalists here.
Looks to me like Dvorak is the dumbass to me, not the people he is criticising.
This says a lot.
People who write about technology are going to know a lot about it, and so they are going to be in a better informed position to choose what is best because they have both seen a lot of technology and thought about it a lot. They choose Macs.
Dvorak writes for a Windows magazine...
any serious manager
unfortunately "serious managers" aren't as common as they should be.
Most serious users will mock such sassery.
I would love to agree with you but unfortunately I can't. There are lots of people in senior IT purchasing positions who really don't understand the technology at all and just know buzzwords and are easily swayed by sales people.
Just a couple of days ago I was talking to a senior IT person explaining the advantages of a particular web server configuration. I went to demonstrate something on a terminal monitor, and the guy started laughing said "What, it doesn't have a Windows interface? And you're trying to tell me that this is advanced server technology? We're not going to use primitive Unix systems here. We're a state of the art Microsoft shop. You've got to admire Bill Gates, haven't you? You Unix guys crack me up..." and carried on like that for about half an hour. I didn't say anything and decided to just forget ever talking to this guy again.
I've looked at the screenshots and it just looks like they're messing around to me. They're nothing so special.
I was on Windows for about ten years, until just a few months ago. I brought a Mac mini just to try out OSX because I was getting bored with XP. It blew me away.
Well, actually for the first week I didn't like it much - I thought it was pretty and clever but there were things I could do easily in Windows that I couldn't do with the Mac. But then I bothered to read the documentation, and found out about things like expose and automator, and how easy it is to change menus and shortcut keys, stuff like that, and now I love it. The way all the applications are integrated and programmable from Automator is just so powerful, and way better than what is possible with XP.
So Microsoft, it will take more than pretty interfaces to draw me back to windows - OSX totally rocks once you get to know and understand it.
This happened to me. I couldn't post to Slashdot for about a year - I think anyone using Telefonica in Spain was banned, which is pretty much anyone in Spain. I emailed Slashdot about it but got no reply.
Actually I was pleased because it stopped me wasting so much time posting rubbish to Slashdot. Damn you Slashdot for banning me! And damn you for not banning me now!
Doesn't anyone care that our politicians accept bribes (aka; campaign donations) to pass laws that are against the interest public interest (ie; the people the politicians are supposed to represent)?
Speaking as a Euroweenie, it always amazes me how blind many Americans are to the corruption in their system. I find you get one of three responses:
1) Everything is transparent, so its all ok.
2) It's not illegal, and so it must be ok.
3) You're a European and everyone knows Europe is more corrupt than the USA so shut up.
You can also import your own wine.
You can go to France and ship it back yourself. What you can't do is get it shipped to you direct from France.
I expect the Italian company you gave as an example in your other post has warehouses in the UK so although you are buying italian wine you are not buying it direct from the suppliers, you are essentially buying it from the UK and the company you buy from will have to deal with paying UK duties etc.
If you buy a CD from France, the French company does not have to worry about UK VAT (unless they do over quite a high level of trade with the UK). However, a small French vineyard cannot sell wine in the same way.
The pricing is transparent.
No it isn't. Which would you prefer, 500 pounds or 800 euro? I expect the answer isn't immediately obvious to you. And what about the man in the street in the UK - do most people even know what the Euro/Pound exchange rate is?
With price transparency comes customer pressure. Of course, it doesn't help that markets are locked so that for instance you can't buy from the French itunes store in the UK. But one of the main functions of the EU is to remove that kind of market barrier.
Unfortunately the UK often blocks proposals that would make things cheaper for UK consumers. Did you know that the EU proposed to remove market barriers to alcohol sales in the EU, i.e. you would be able to order a box of your favourite wine directly from the vineyard with great savings. Personally I think that would be great. Guess who opposed and derailed this measure? That's right, the UK...
De Gaulle was right from the beginning; for the sake of the union, throw us out, NOW.
So that USA readers understand what you are saying you should make clear that you are referring to removing the UK from the EU.
We're getting ripped off out here, and that's contrary to the whole point of the single market.
Well, one of the points of the Euro was to make pricing differences between countries transparent to consumers. The UK didn't join the Euro and so don't get the benefits of it.
This story is proof that the Slashdot editors don't even bother to read the links of the stories they post.
The linked articles have nothing to do with the subject of the post.
Come on Slashdot editors, wake up!
I find it increadibly annoying that people accept their "proofs".
Sorry, but they are idiots compared to the intelligence of Arhimedes. Not only that, but if they had done some research they would have found that this experiement has been done many times before, in many variation, some of which have been very successful.