As Steve Jobs only gets paid $1 a year, if he has to take a pay cut to keep the company afloat, well, they'd have to really be hurting...
He also turned down a ridiculously sweet options package offered to him by the Board of Directors. (Because I just know some idiot was going to come back and say that he was getting paid in stock instead of cash.)
Say what you like about him, but he's definitely not in it for the money.
I don't think they're selling them anymore, but just before Christmas I got a `refurbished' 3G iPod, 40GB, for $249. This was with the educational pricing on top of the refurb price, I think.
Although I love it, I'm a little jealous of the first- and second-generation iPods which can now accept the 12-hour aftermarket replacement batteries. The 3G's battery is less than half the size, so until some really significant increase in power density occurs, it's going to need a recharge every few hours.
And for the record, I think was one of the LAST people on my campus I think to get one. And although I think the trend is further advanced in college students than it probably is in the general population, the last time I went to a mall, there were a fair number of definitely post-college-age people sporting the distinctive `white wires'...
Actually I think the older, borderline tech-savvy consumer is a market segment that's often neglected by Apple's advertising, but that their products (in my limited experience) seem to appeal to. I suppose that's a topic for another post, though.
"FCC rules prohibit local governments, landlords, community associations, or similar groups from restricting a resident from installing and using an antenna that is covered under the OTARD rules. These rules only apply to properties or areas of properties that the antenna user owns, leases or rents and areas where the user has exclusive use or control. The rules apply to properties used for commercial purposes just as they apply to residential properties."
Wait... maybe I'm missing something here, but how can a non-networked workstation be insecure? Any system that's air-gapped from everything except the AC power line ought to be by default "secure," because the only way you're going to get anything into or out of it is via physical access to the workstation.
And once you have physical access to the CPU and main console, security is sort of a moot point, isn't it?
I recently (for reasons not relevant to go into here) got to take a tour of a ballistic missile submarine. Although the tour avoided anything that was specifically classified, we did get to go into the missile launch control room.
Anyway, there on the monitor of the computer used to calculate the firing solutions for the nuclear missiles was... drumroll please... you guessed it, a Post-It with a magic-markered log/pass combination.
Now, before you get worried, door to said control room is constantly guarded inside and outside by people with guns, and is located inside the center of a secure area inside a naval base, behind two security checkpoints....so I guess the screensaver password or whatever the Post-It note went to just isn't part of the big picture plan. (Also there is a very specific process involved in the missile launch obviously, the computer really wouldn't help you.)
But anyway, I thought the irony involved was pretty good. Even in the (theoretically) most secure areas in the world, people are still finding ways around security measures that are obnoxious and not perceived as useful. I would have gotten a photo, if I'd been able, just for fun... but my camera and cell phone battery were both gone two checkpoints ago at that point.
If there's a lesson here, it's that your users will find ways to get around security that isn't both useful and convenient.
This is true. Come to think of it, there are quite a few of these left exits on the stretch of highway I was thinking of. Not enough to completely justify the number of people who drive in the left and pass in the center, but it is part of the problem.
I was going to suggest something like this a bit further up in the thread; glad someone else thought of it also.
Having them based on speed would be fair on a number of accounts: driving faster is statistically less safe (less reaction time, greater forces upon impact), wears the road faster (look up if you want, the lifetimes of the original interstates when driven on at 55MPH and 65MPH), and also uses much more fuel and creates air pollution. Although the air pollution problem really should be taken care of with the fuel taxes, unfortunately the politicians love to raid it to fund all the rest of their glorious little programs, leaving little left over for what should be it's first purpose: fixing the negative externalities of the item it taxes.
Also, you could charge more during peak periods to discourage traffic jams, and even have seasonally adjusted rates.
And if safety becomes an issue, you could charge more (much more) for chronically unsafe drivers. Maybe you could even do this instead of giving tickets; do something stupid and get caught on camera? Enjoy paying $1 a mile for the next year. This money could be used to provide fire and rescue coverage to the highway, so as not to burden the services belonging to the communities that it runs through.
Also, because it would be possible for a person to travel a very great distance in a short amount of time--perfect if you're on the run in a stolen car--I'd like to see some sort of system that automatically ran license plates against a stolen-vehicle database in real time as they went through the toll gates. If you were feeling particularly vindictive, perhaps you could even put in an automatic Severe Tire Damage device that would pop up to disable a vehicle that came up as stolen. Sort of like the ATM machines that 'eat' hot or stolen cards.
Although before you generalize too badly, there are places in the country where people do seem to realize that you drive as far to the right as you can stay while maintaining your speed, and then pass on the left. They just tend to be in my experience, more rural states.
A short example / rant: Drive from Bangor down to Boston and you can see the quality of the driving steadily decline the further you go. My apologies to any Massachusettans, but your state deserves the reputation for driving that it has. I have to drive through it more often then I'd like, and I'm white-knuckled from the New Hampshire to the Connecticut border. And a very large part of that problem is people who drive in the left hand lane. If you move slowly and refuse to move to one of the travel lanes, other cars tend to try to pass you on the right, which creates a dangerous situation for other drivers, who may not themselves be doing anything illegal. And if you have trucks in the center lane, then you get drivers slaloming in and out from gaps between the trucks in the center lane, and gaps between slow drivers in the left lane.
I don't think that the problem is "my time is more important than yours," it's the general urban lack of courtesy being applied to large pieces of steel moving at high speeds. And 'courtesy' on the road translates directly into 'safety,' at least in my experience.
Based on some of the horror stories I've heard of the traffic jams on I-35, I would pay a LOT of money to take a highway that ran constantly at 75 MPH with insignificant traffic, and no trucks (or trucks separate from cars).
Just make sure they have EZ-Pass, or something like it, so I don't even have to stop going through the toll booths...
Also, it'd be nice if they let you get on and off free, for an hour or two. Say to make a pit stop for gas and food. It always irks me that you have to pay the toll all over again, just to get off and refuel. With a computerized toll system that just read an ID number off of a transponder, this wouldn't be hard to do.
This isn't necessarily true. The better smartcards are not just memory chips, but contain embedded microprocessors as well, capable of handling asymmetric key encryption.
So you type the username and password into a program, which encrypts it and sends it to the smartcard, using its public key. It decrypts it with a private key which is hardwired, in such a way that it's very difficult to recover from the ROM. The card then reencrypts the data, with a password you supply, the passsword "to the card." This is also transmitted to the card with asymmetric encryption.
When you want to login to a site, you stick the card into the reader and type the ONE password that goes to the card. It gets encrypted on the computer, sent to the card, decrypted, and used to try and decrypt the stored passwords. If it succeeds, then you can retrieve the stored data.
At no point -- except perhaps inside the card itself -- is the data ever transmitted in an unencrypted form. And it is never stored that way. And the cards are designed in such a way so that any attempt to open them (to inset wires and tap into the connection, or get the private key from ROM) destroys them and the resident data.
Providing technical support, even to a limited number of people, can quickly become an all-consuming job. So unless you're going to charge these people enough to make it worth your while (think of the opportunity cost of your time--all your leisure time), it might be good to actively discourage everyone who can't do their own technical support from signing on.
But hey, it's your life. If you haven't got anything better to do then become your neighborhood help desk, go for it.
Point taken -- but where would a person go to hire out a programmer for a day or two, at a rate that a 'garage band' could afford?
This is OT, but I've often thought it would be cool to have a website where individuals could post GPL "feature requests" and programmers could bid on them. The resulting code would go into the open-source code base. I was sort of inspired by looking at the Google Answers site, and thinking of how the same thing might work for code as it does for fact-finding and research.
It would be a great way for people to get custom code written cheap, and would give a lot of talented but un-credentialed programmers a way to gain skills and make some money on the side, without committing to a big project. It would sort of be the programmers' version of the "Work Today - Paid Today" labor agencies. Have a long weekend free and need a project? Log on, find something in your area of expertise, and make an offer; if it's at or below what the client is offering, the charge gets debited from them and moved into escrow. When you complete the project and post the code (publicly), you get paid.
There are a bunch of issues that'd need to be worked out, like dispute resolutions, trust and reputation building, but it's nothing that hasn't been dealt with before.
I personally know that there are a bunch of little things that I'd be willing to pay a programmer some money to do (mainly porting some obscure UNIX software over to Mac OS X) if I knew of someone who was interested in doing it. They're just not so critical that they're worth the opportunity cost for me to do them myself right now.
This is quite an insightful post, possibly one of the best I've seen in a while.
Frankly it says in very concise terms a lot of things that have been in the front of my mind for a while now, while reading on Slashdot and K5. People constantly treat corporations as if they had "feelings," which is simply ridiculous.
Corporations make money -- period. If corporations do perverse things, then it should be a sign to us that we have created a system where perverse behaviors are rewarded, and we should labor to change this, not demonize what is essentially an inanimate legal device in order to feel better about ourselves.
Sorry, but I'm not buying that the great number of people who are downloading music are doing it because they can't afford CDs. Granted, I haven't taken any broad surveys, but I have sufficient anecdotal evidence.
First, take a look at what it takes to be able to download music: a reasonably modern computer, and most importantly: an internet connection. And realistically, you need broadband. Ever tried downloading music over a 28.8 dialup? I have, and it's painful. And if you want to listen to that anywhere off your computer, you need a CD burner. None of these things are as rare as they were even a few years ago, but they're not cheap either.
I'm pretty sure that if you were to check the demographics on households with broadband and CD burners, it's not exactly a low-income segment. Certainly not the sort of low-income, can't-shell-out-$14.95 households you're implying. If you can afford broadband internet access, you can probably pay for a CD every once in a while.
The only exception to this that I can think of might be college students: I can think of a lot of basically broke college students who have broadband internet provided to them and have computers left from graduation presents or parents, and no disposable income.
Let's face it: the majority of the people who download probably COULD pay for CDs, but don't, because if you can get it free, why bother? And furthermore, you can only buy a few CDs for $40 a month... but if you use that same money for broadband, you can download a dozen albums.
The average downloader can afford a CD--but why would he want to, when the alternative is a better deal?
Re:$33 cd? It is going to decrease profit
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RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
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I think this is a pretty good idea. One of the things that has always struck me about CDs is how the prices never seem to go down, or go down only slightly, even after a few years after the initial release.
I have no problem with charging a premium for a hot new CD, in fact, if I were an artist / record company I wouldn't be opposed to charging even more for the first few days or weeks of a really popular release: it's just supply and demand.
But as the weeks go on, and production exceeds demand, the price should go down, and continue to go down as time passes. It simply makes no sense that we should have to pay the same price to within a few dollars for a CD that came out years ago and is not longer anywhere near as popular as it was.
Furthermore, there's no reason why CDs couldn't be produced in "paperback" or low-cost versions later: something like this already happens with the Columbia House and BMG music club discs. But I would make it more extreme: initially sell "collector" or full-price CDs, in nice jewel cases with liner notes, bonus tracks, etc. But after 6 months or a year, distribute it at a vastly reduced price, basically as a bare disc in a cardboard sleeve.
If these "paperback" discs were released in the $10 price range, they would be comparable to MP3s and would provide additional justification for simultaneous digital release with the discount discs.
I believe the book you are talking about is this one, which I found just by Googling for the title...it was written in 1917, so it's a bit newer than you were thinking, though.
It's part one of a two-book set, apparently: "The Theory of Machines" is the whole thing, then broken into "Part I The Principles of Mechanism" and "Part II Elementary Mechanics of Machines."
Seems fairly interesting, although I'm not going to run right out and buy a copy (sorry, I'm broke) but if anyone does, and finds that it's beyond copyright, perhaps they'd like to scan some pages for us? Those old mechanical engineering books are fascinating, to me at least. I love the old pen-and-ink illustrations especially.
OT: Anyone who is similarly interested might also want to check out a book called "Steam" published by the Babcock and Wilcox boiler company. It was published annually starting I believe in the 1930s, although my edition is from the very early 50s. It's pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about making steam from burning stuff. (No, not exactly environmentally friendly, but it does work.)
Nope, it runs on top of some Ham radio bands. The power companies just shoved it through the FCC against protests by basically everyone else who uses those bands, it's basically going to ruin them in areas where BPL goes in.
Supposedly there will be capabilities to notch out specific interfering frequencies, but we'll see, I'm very skeptical.
And just to answer questions before they get asked, yes cable television also overlaps frequencies for a lot of other services, but cable television signals are contained in a shielded coax cable, separate from the rest of the universe. BPL signals will not be, instead they'll basically be running on huge, miles-long random-wire antennas.
On the other hand, I'm curious as to whether someone with the correct radio equipment could monitor the BPL signal -- wouldn't be able to "use" it for internet access because injecting the upstream signal would be a problem, but you could at least see everything that was flowing up and down the wire. Like a wireless packet sniffer.
I once worked at a MediaPlay store, and all floor employees were either patted-down by the manager at the end of every shift or had to expose the tops of their shoes and belt-line to make sure they weren't smuggling any merchandise out of the store. I guess they had a problem with massive inventory 'shrinkage' at the time, and needed a stopgap until they could install WalMart-style saturation CCTV.
Personally, it just got me thinking of new and different ways to smuggle merchandise, rather than sticking it down your pants on the way out the door. Didn't ever do any of them, and never had any intention of stealing in the first place, but the point is their searches are what motivated me to really consider how I'd go about stealing. In many ways a weak deterrent is worse than no deterrent at all.
Now I suppose they just use RFID tags, never mind the pat-downs or CCTV.
I think you may be wrong about the odds. I've read that basic strategy will put your odds at around -.05%, and with counting you can get just slightly over, to around +.02%. I'm pulling those numbers from memory so don't quote me on them, but the figure for card-counting was definitely into positive territory.
My source is this site, which is a great site if you're interested in reading the mathematics behind blackjack from someone who isn't trying to sell you a system. Specifically a paper called "The Optimum Strategy In Blackjack," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol 51, 429 - 439 (1956) [PDF], although I think it may only deal with the percentages from traditional decks (most houses now use 6- or 8-deck progressively shuffled shoes.)
Some things it does, IMHO. The things that Apple tries very hard to integrate on a Mac work very smoothly, and there is an "it just works" factor that I've rarely seen replicated on Wintel systems. Benefits of having a hardware/software/OS monopoly.
Example: Bought a digital camera, took some pictures with it. Plugged digital camera into Mac. iPhoto opens, imports photos (no drivers, no software install). Select half dozen photos, click "Web Page," photos are scaled down for thumbnails, nice index page with slideshow created, whole thing uploaded to web server. Email sent to inbox with URL of site, for you to forward to friends. This has a hell of a 'wow' factor involved.
I can personally attest to the fact that it is possible to have photos from a digital camera on a custom-generated website within 30 seconds of connecting the camera. Even to someone who's used to this stuff, it's fairly impressive. Of course, for this to work you need to have a recent Macintosh computer, a recent version of the OS, and a subscription to.Mac service ($99/year) for the webspace and email. (You can use your own server but it requires configuration.)
Is it worth the extra expense to have that work out of the box and without configuration? If you're reading this site, then probably not. In fact, probably a fair number of people on Slashdot would enjoy the challenge of writing a script to do everything that iTunes does, without paying a thing. If that's you, then it's fairly safe to assume you're not part of Apple's target market.
But there are a lot of people who have a "short fuse" for technology, and if something doesn't work the very first time they plug it in, they're done with it. These are a core market of Apple's, I believe: people with money to spend but little patience.
Now a smart thinker at apple would have said,
"Hey, we can do this miniature thing and pick up the jogging crowd, and we can ship the unit at a low price and get a bunch of the casual/impulse buy crowd interested in it."
Yes, but then some other smart thinker would have said, "Hey, we can sell it for $249 and pick up the jogging crowd, and once they're saturated then we can ship the unit at a low price and get a bunch of the casual/impulse buy crowd....and make a killing on the early adopters."
Apple can only produce so many of these things per month, and it seems pretty obvious that even if they could turn them out for $99, they would be stupid to sell them for significantly less than they are already, given the backorder list that exists at the current price. If people will buy it for $249, you can bet they're going to sell it for $249, that much is obvious.
The Mini is selling for $249 because that's the highest price it can sell for, before it runs into the bottom of the "big" iPod line in price. If the 15GB iPod wasn't already $299, then that's the price the Mini probably would sell at initially, regardless of how little it costs to manufacture. Once sales begin to slow at that price point, and production increases, they'll ratchet it down and target a wider market.
Your logic would make sense, if Apple was sitting on millions of units in a warehouse somewhere, and running up debt all the time. Then you'd want to unload them as quickly as possible. But in this case, Apple doesn't even have the devices yet, and people are already buying.
Apple isn't interested in marketshare. It's interested in profit.
I think this (and the other responses to this comment) illustrate something interesting about the iPod. It wasn't built for geeks.
If the interface had been designed by `computer people' for `computer people,' there probably would have been a Nintendo-style rocker switch, or arrow directional keys, or maybe a little joystick and cursor.
But it wasn't designed for that market, it was designed for people who are approaching it with no preconceived notions about the interface. And those people seem to find it fairly intuitive, or can figure it out fairly quickly.
This, to me, seems like good design. It shows that at some level, someone began with a clean slate and worked up from there, and I'm always a fan of that, even if it does require a little relearning for those of us who are familiar with the more traditional interfaces. Otherwise, where would better interfaces come from, if not from someone rethinking the question from its basic assumptions?
It's less complicated even than that. iTunes drives iPod sales, and iPod sales are profit. Period.
iPods don't necessarily drive Mac sales, now that iTunes exists for Windows. iPods are an end product in their own right. The profit margin on iPods is huge, I've heard figures that are above $100, although I find that a bit doubtful I'm sure it's fairly significant. The point is that iPods are just as profitable to make as computers, at least now when there's very little competition.
If Apple can maintain a steady stream of trendy consumer electronic goods, which are highly profitable, it could end up that the "peripheral" arm of Apple is subsidizing the "computer" arm. Things would have to continue in their current direction for a long time for this to be true, which is never a safe bet in the ever-changing marketplace, but it's an interesting idea to contemplate anyway.
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He also turned down a ridiculously sweet options package offered to him by the Board of Directors. (Because I just know some idiot was going to come back and say that he was getting paid in stock instead of cash.)
Say what you like about him, but he's definitely not in it for the money.
or just `Podcasting' for the rest of us.
Although I love it, I'm a little jealous of the first- and second-generation iPods which can now accept the 12-hour aftermarket replacement batteries. The 3G's battery is less than half the size, so until some really significant increase in power density occurs, it's going to need a recharge every few hours.
And for the record, I think was one of the LAST people on my campus I think to get one. And although I think the trend is further advanced in college students than it probably is in the general population, the last time I went to a mall, there were a fair number of definitely post-college-age people sporting the distinctive `white wires'...
Actually I think the older, borderline tech-savvy consumer is a market segment that's often neglected by Apple's advertising, but that their products (in my limited experience) seem to appeal to. I suppose that's a topic for another post, though.
Well ... there's always C-Band...
http://ftp.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/consumerdish
"FCC rules prohibit local governments, landlords, community associations, or similar groups from restricting a resident from installing and using an antenna that is covered under the OTARD rules. These rules only apply to properties or areas of properties that the antenna user owns, leases or rents and areas where the user has exclusive use or control. The rules apply to properties used for commercial purposes just as they apply to residential properties."
And once you have physical access to the CPU and main console, security is sort of a moot point, isn't it?
Anyway, there on the monitor of the computer used to calculate the firing solutions for the nuclear missiles was
Now, before you get worried, door to said control room is constantly guarded inside and outside by people with guns, and is located inside the center of a secure area inside a naval base, behind two security checkpoints....so I guess the screensaver password or whatever the Post-It note went to just isn't part of the big picture plan. (Also there is a very specific process involved in the missile launch obviously, the computer really wouldn't help you.)
But anyway, I thought the irony involved was pretty good. Even in the (theoretically) most secure areas in the world, people are still finding ways around security measures that are obnoxious and not perceived as useful. I would have gotten a photo, if I'd been able, just for fun
If there's a lesson here, it's that your users will find ways to get around security that isn't both useful and convenient.
This is true. Come to think of it, there are quite a few of these left exits on the stretch of highway I was thinking of. Not enough to completely justify the number of people who drive in the left and pass in the center, but it is part of the problem.
I was going to suggest something like this a bit further up in the thread; glad someone else thought of it also.
Having them based on speed would be fair on a number of accounts: driving faster is statistically less safe (less reaction time, greater forces upon impact), wears the road faster (look up if you want, the lifetimes of the original interstates when driven on at 55MPH and 65MPH), and also uses much more fuel and creates air pollution. Although the air pollution problem really should be taken care of with the fuel taxes, unfortunately the politicians love to raid it to fund all the rest of their glorious little programs, leaving little left over for what should be it's first purpose: fixing the negative externalities of the item it taxes.
Also, you could charge more during peak periods to discourage traffic jams, and even have seasonally adjusted rates.
And if safety becomes an issue, you could charge more (much more) for chronically unsafe drivers. Maybe you could even do this instead of giving tickets; do something stupid and get caught on camera? Enjoy paying $1 a mile for the next year. This money could be used to provide fire and rescue coverage to the highway, so as not to burden the services belonging to the communities that it runs through.
Also, because it would be possible for a person to travel a very great distance in a short amount of time--perfect if you're on the run in a stolen car--I'd like to see some sort of system that automatically ran license plates against a stolen-vehicle database in real time as they went through the toll gates. If you were feeling particularly vindictive, perhaps you could even put in an automatic Severe Tire Damage device that would pop up to disable a vehicle that came up as stolen. Sort of like the ATM machines that 'eat' hot or stolen cards.
Although before you generalize too badly, there are places in the country where people do seem to realize that you drive as far to the right as you can stay while maintaining your speed, and then pass on the left. They just tend to be in my experience, more rural states.
A short example / rant: Drive from Bangor down to Boston and you can see the quality of the driving steadily decline the further you go. My apologies to any Massachusettans, but your state deserves the reputation for driving that it has. I have to drive through it more often then I'd like, and I'm white-knuckled from the New Hampshire to the Connecticut border. And a very large part of that problem is people who drive in the left hand lane. If you move slowly and refuse to move to one of the travel lanes, other cars tend to try to pass you on the right, which creates a dangerous situation for other drivers, who may not themselves be doing anything illegal. And if you have trucks in the center lane, then you get drivers slaloming in and out from gaps between the trucks in the center lane, and gaps between slow drivers in the left lane.
I don't think that the problem is "my time is more important than yours," it's the general urban lack of courtesy being applied to large pieces of steel moving at high speeds. And 'courtesy' on the road translates directly into 'safety,' at least in my experience.
Based on some of the horror stories I've heard of the traffic jams on I-35, I would pay a LOT of money to take a highway that ran constantly at 75 MPH with insignificant traffic, and no trucks (or trucks separate from cars).
Just make sure they have EZ-Pass, or something like it, so I don't even have to stop going through the toll booths...
Also, it'd be nice if they let you get on and off free, for an hour or two. Say to make a pit stop for gas and food. It always irks me that you have to pay the toll all over again, just to get off and refuel. With a computerized toll system that just read an ID number off of a transponder, this wouldn't be hard to do.
So you type the username and password into a program, which encrypts it and sends it to the smartcard, using its public key. It decrypts it with a private key which is hardwired, in such a way that it's very difficult to recover from the ROM. The card then reencrypts the data, with a password you supply, the passsword "to the card." This is also transmitted to the card with asymmetric encryption.
When you want to login to a site, you stick the card into the reader and type the ONE password that goes to the card. It gets encrypted on the computer, sent to the card, decrypted, and used to try and decrypt the stored passwords. If it succeeds, then you can retrieve the stored data.
At no point -- except perhaps inside the card itself -- is the data ever transmitted in an unencrypted form. And it is never stored that way. And the cards are designed in such a way so that any attempt to open them (to inset wires and tap into the connection, or get the private key from ROM) destroys them and the resident data.
Providing technical support, even to a limited number of people, can quickly become an all-consuming job. So unless you're going to charge these people enough to make it worth your while (think of the opportunity cost of your time--all your leisure time), it might be good to actively discourage everyone who can't do their own technical support from signing on.
But hey, it's your life. If you haven't got anything better to do then become your neighborhood help desk, go for it.
This is OT, but I've often thought it would be cool to have a website where individuals could post GPL "feature requests" and programmers could bid on them. The resulting code would go into the open-source code base. I was sort of inspired by looking at the Google Answers site, and thinking of how the same thing might work for code as it does for fact-finding and research.
It would be a great way for people to get custom code written cheap, and would give a lot of talented but un-credentialed programmers a way to gain skills and make some money on the side, without committing to a big project. It would sort of be the programmers' version of the "Work Today - Paid Today" labor agencies. Have a long weekend free and need a project? Log on, find something in your area of expertise, and make an offer; if it's at or below what the client is offering, the charge gets debited from them and moved into escrow. When you complete the project and post the code (publicly), you get paid.
There are a bunch of issues that'd need to be worked out, like dispute resolutions, trust and reputation building, but it's nothing that hasn't been dealt with before.
I personally know that there are a bunch of little things that I'd be willing to pay a programmer some money to do (mainly porting some obscure UNIX software over to Mac OS X) if I knew of someone who was interested in doing it. They're just not so critical that they're worth the opportunity cost for me to do them myself right now.
Frankly it says in very concise terms a lot of things that have been in the front of my mind for a while now, while reading on Slashdot and K5. People constantly treat corporations as if they had "feelings," which is simply ridiculous.
Corporations make money -- period. If corporations do perverse things, then it should be a sign to us that we have created a system where perverse behaviors are rewarded, and we should labor to change this, not demonize what is essentially an inanimate legal device in order to feel better about ourselves.
Sorry, but I'm not buying that the great number of people who are downloading music are doing it because they can't afford CDs. Granted, I haven't taken any broad surveys, but I have sufficient anecdotal evidence.
First, take a look at what it takes to be able to download music: a reasonably modern computer, and most importantly: an internet connection. And realistically, you need broadband. Ever tried downloading music over a 28.8 dialup? I have, and it's painful. And if you want to listen to that anywhere off your computer, you need a CD burner. None of these things are as rare as they were even a few years ago, but they're not cheap either.
I'm pretty sure that if you were to check the demographics on households with broadband and CD burners, it's not exactly a low-income segment. Certainly not the sort of low-income, can't-shell-out-$14.95 households you're implying. If you can afford broadband internet access, you can probably pay for a CD every once in a while.
The only exception to this that I can think of might be college students: I can think of a lot of basically broke college students who have broadband internet provided to them and have computers left from graduation presents or parents, and no disposable income.
Let's face it: the majority of the people who download probably COULD pay for CDs, but don't, because if you can get it free, why bother? And furthermore, you can only buy a few CDs for $40 a month
The average downloader can afford a CD--but why would he want to, when the alternative is a better deal?
I have no problem with charging a premium for a hot new CD, in fact, if I were an artist / record company I wouldn't be opposed to charging even more for the first few days or weeks of a really popular release: it's just supply and demand.
But as the weeks go on, and production exceeds demand, the price should go down, and continue to go down as time passes. It simply makes no sense that we should have to pay the same price to within a few dollars for a CD that came out years ago and is not longer anywhere near as popular as it was.
Furthermore, there's no reason why CDs couldn't be produced in "paperback" or low-cost versions later: something like this already happens with the Columbia House and BMG music club discs. But I would make it more extreme: initially sell "collector" or full-price CDs, in nice jewel cases with liner notes, bonus tracks, etc. But after 6 months or a year, distribute it at a vastly reduced price, basically as a bare disc in a cardboard sleeve.
If these "paperback" discs were released in the $10 price range, they would be comparable to MP3s and would provide additional justification for simultaneous digital release with the discount discs.
I believe the book you are talking about is this one, which I found just by Googling for the title...it was written in 1917, so it's a bit newer than you were thinking, though.
It's part one of a two-book set, apparently: "The Theory of Machines" is the whole thing, then broken into "Part I The Principles of Mechanism" and "Part II Elementary Mechanics of Machines."
Seems fairly interesting, although I'm not going to run right out and buy a copy (sorry, I'm broke) but if anyone does, and finds that it's beyond copyright, perhaps they'd like to scan some pages for us? Those old mechanical engineering books are fascinating, to me at least. I love the old pen-and-ink illustrations especially.
OT: Anyone who is similarly interested might also want to check out a book called "Steam" published by the Babcock and Wilcox boiler company. It was published annually starting I believe in the 1930s, although my edition is from the very early 50s. It's pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about making steam from burning stuff. (No, not exactly environmentally friendly, but it does work.)
Supposedly there will be capabilities to notch out specific interfering frequencies, but we'll see, I'm very skeptical.
And just to answer questions before they get asked, yes cable television also overlaps frequencies for a lot of other services, but cable television signals are contained in a shielded coax cable, separate from the rest of the universe. BPL signals will not be, instead they'll basically be running on huge, miles-long random-wire antennas.
On the other hand, I'm curious as to whether someone with the correct radio equipment could monitor the BPL signal -- wouldn't be able to "use" it for internet access because injecting the upstream signal would be a problem, but you could at least see everything that was flowing up and down the wire. Like a wireless packet sniffer.
Personally, it just got me thinking of new and different ways to smuggle merchandise, rather than sticking it down your pants on the way out the door. Didn't ever do any of them, and never had any intention of stealing in the first place, but the point is their searches are what motivated me to really consider how I'd go about stealing. In many ways a weak deterrent is worse than no deterrent at all.
Now I suppose they just use RFID tags, never mind the pat-downs or CCTV.
My source is this site, which is a great site if you're interested in reading the mathematics behind blackjack from someone who isn't trying to sell you a system. Specifically a paper called "The Optimum Strategy In Blackjack," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol 51, 429 - 439 (1956) [PDF], although I think it may only deal with the percentages from traditional decks (most houses now use 6- or 8-deck progressively shuffled shoes.)
Example: Bought a digital camera, took some pictures with it. Plugged digital camera into Mac. iPhoto opens, imports photos (no drivers, no software install). Select half dozen photos, click "Web Page," photos are scaled down for thumbnails, nice index page with slideshow created, whole thing uploaded to web server. Email sent to inbox with URL of site, for you to forward to friends. This has a hell of a 'wow' factor involved.
I can personally attest to the fact that it is possible to have photos from a digital camera on a custom-generated website within 30 seconds of connecting the camera. Even to someone who's used to this stuff, it's fairly impressive. Of course, for this to work you need to have a recent Macintosh computer, a recent version of the OS, and a subscription to
Is it worth the extra expense to have that work out of the box and without configuration? If you're reading this site, then probably not. In fact, probably a fair number of people on Slashdot would enjoy the challenge of writing a script to do everything that iTunes does, without paying a thing. If that's you, then it's fairly safe to assume you're not part of Apple's target market.
But there are a lot of people who have a "short fuse" for technology, and if something doesn't work the very first time they plug it in, they're done with it. These are a core market of Apple's, I believe: people with money to spend but little patience.
Yes, but then some other smart thinker would have said, "Hey, we can sell it for $249 and pick up the jogging crowd, and once they're saturated then we can ship the unit at a low price and get a bunch of the casual/impulse buy crowd....and make a killing on the early adopters."
Apple can only produce so many of these things per month, and it seems pretty obvious that even if they could turn them out for $99, they would be stupid to sell them for significantly less than they are already, given the backorder list that exists at the current price. If people will buy it for $249, you can bet they're going to sell it for $249, that much is obvious.
The Mini is selling for $249 because that's the highest price it can sell for, before it runs into the bottom of the "big" iPod line in price. If the 15GB iPod wasn't already $299, then that's the price the Mini probably would sell at initially, regardless of how little it costs to manufacture. Once sales begin to slow at that price point, and production increases, they'll ratchet it down and target a wider market.
Your logic would make sense, if Apple was sitting on millions of units in a warehouse somewhere, and running up debt all the time. Then you'd want to unload them as quickly as possible. But in this case, Apple doesn't even have the devices yet, and people are already buying.
Apple isn't interested in marketshare. It's interested in profit.
If the interface had been designed by `computer people' for `computer people,' there probably would have been a Nintendo-style rocker switch, or arrow directional keys, or maybe a little joystick and cursor.
But it wasn't designed for that market, it was designed for people who are approaching it with no preconceived notions about the interface. And those people seem to find it fairly intuitive, or can figure it out fairly quickly.
This, to me, seems like good design. It shows that at some level, someone began with a clean slate and worked up from there, and I'm always a fan of that, even if it does require a little relearning for those of us who are familiar with the more traditional interfaces. Otherwise, where would better interfaces come from, if not from someone rethinking the question from its basic assumptions?
iPods don't necessarily drive Mac sales, now that iTunes exists for Windows. iPods are an end product in their own right. The profit margin on iPods is huge, I've heard figures that are above $100, although I find that a bit doubtful I'm sure it's fairly significant. The point is that iPods are just as profitable to make as computers, at least now when there's very little competition.
If Apple can maintain a steady stream of trendy consumer electronic goods, which are highly profitable, it could end up that the "peripheral" arm of Apple is subsidizing the "computer" arm. Things would have to continue in their current direction for a long time for this to be true, which is never a safe bet in the ever-changing marketplace, but it's an interesting idea to contemplate anyway.