Sure we do. We negotiate for toothpaste, gas, etc. all the time. I drive to a gas station that has a lower price than another gas station. Voila, I just negotiated a better price. I think the price of toothpaste is too high at the grocery store, I drive to another grocery store and find it for a cheaper price there - voila, I just negotiated a better price.
This kind of negotiation will likely not go well for Reddit, since instead of working for Reddit, people who don't like the offer will just work for someone else. The problem is that companies aren't good at high-balling, they always low-ball, and as a result they'll end up with people who accept low balls... which are usually the less qualified individuals.
Someone I used to work with got hired as an IT manager because they accepted the low-ball offer. The problem? They didn't know the first thing about IT. They were working as a product tester at our workplace. The most IT knowledge they had was how to turn on a system. They tried to get me to come over and basically run their shop, but I had another six months of work left until my (negotiated) severance package kicked in so hell if I was going to mess that up. He imploded their IT operations within the first year. He was a great bullshitter, but they didn't need that... they needed someone who could do the work.
Russian engines have primarily been high-pressure designs, while American engines have primarily been low-pressure designs.
However with the full design and build specifications in-hand, with trial engines already built to verify the specifications and designs were correct, the US can build high pressure engines.
Will they? That's a good question. Russia has effectively been giving away engines for cost to keep their space industry from collapsing. Under those conditions I don't see how it's economically feasible to not buy them from Russia, since being wonderful capitalists the US military would buy them from companies who build subcomponents for a profit to the general contractors who put the subcomponents together into the basic components who turns around and sells them to... and the very far end of that chain is the military, who pays Lockheed and Boeing for the completed product.
I sincerely hope SpaceX succeeds financially, as it really represents a change from the subcontractors of subcontractors of subcontractors pyramid that represents the traditional US space industry.
It can, but it'll only happen once the media companies get serious about computers. Right now they're content to let their software divisions bring in profits without any need to legislate laws to protect their antiquated, broken business models.
Once they realize their software divisions are doing poorly due to, well, because they're the ones running the companies, they'll start prodding their lobbyists with sharp sticks to "protect" their software divisions too.
The other cameras were on the recovery ship, which couldn't reach the recovery area without, you know, sinking. They'd have ended up roughly where the master recording currently is, resting on the ocean floor.
The problem isn't the camera, it's that the data was garbled during transmission. In part because both the source and destination locations were in constant (and, given the storm, quite random) motion. It's hard to hit the side of the barn when you're aiming from mid-air in the center of a tornado.
This comment reminds me of the people on Apple Support Communities who insisted that FlashBack was not actually a thing, that it was not infecting any systems, anywhere, and it was all just a big myth created by AV companies to sell product.
Meanwhile I was spending a day each week clearing FlashBack off dozens of infected student systems because the kids were too &*(@#$ stupid to not whack the monkey or whatever stupid thing they did in order to get infected (and god help us if we didn't give them administrative privileges, you don't want to hear the caterwauling they make at the slightest hint of restrictions).
See, apparently I'm in the employ of AV companies and didn't know it. My bank account never noticed it either.
A company I used to work for held negotiations with music & movie companies over a product we wanted to bring to the market which would let customers listen to music, watch videos, etc. while sitting in a restaurant or similar location. Essentially it took the place of a jukebox but since everything was in digital form it could have additional functionality.
This was back at the height of the xxAA's anti-P2P "Napster" hysteria, when they had their heads lodged firmly in the sand that everything digital was evil. Before the iTunes Music Store proved they were being completely asinine.
In any case, the only way they said they would work with us is if we helped them, at our expense, figure out how to charge all movie & music customers, everywhere, for every time they viewed a movie or listened to a song. And they'd own the rights.
As you can imagine, my employer decided to kill the project. Multi-billion dollar companies expected a small business to foot the bill for their asinine product development plan...
If Apple has the margins of a fashion company, does that make Cisco even more fashionable since their margins are higher?
The market they sell into is meaningless, your original statement said absolutely nothing about their customer base, just their profit margins. Since Cisco's profit margins are higher than Apple's, therefore they must be even more of a fashion company than Apple, according to your original statement.
Changing your statement now, to try to make it mean something completely different, isn't helping. What you said is right there for all the world to see.
All to have the same functionality of a laptop in a docked (home/office) setting. In a mobile setting you have a tablet, instead of a (larger, heavier, etc.) laptop.
Listen, I don't even believe in laptops because they're less powerful than desktops, nor do I own a tablet. But I can understand the appeal of a light, responsive "mobile" device that can accomplish what needs to be accomplished on the go while docking to get extended functionality when you get home or to the office. And it's not like (better, not bottom-of-the-barrel netbook-esque models) laptops don't also have docks to gain ports and slots and additional functionality when you reach the same places. Arguing against docks when docks exist for both platforms is just silly.
Frankly the largest thing I want to be hauling around is a smartphone or similar pocketable device. I'm not thrilled with the current mobile iDevices because their screens are just a bit too small, but if the iPhone 5 comes out with a larger screen it may make a suitable replacement for my current mobile device. And no, the iPad isn't a mobile device in my book - if I can't fit it in my pocket, it isn't mobile. But that's for me, others can use their own value system and still be perfectly rational, even if the result doesn't match mine.
Now that you're done sitting down editing your documents with a keyboard and screen, pick up your computing device. Remove the keyboard. Remove the video output. Strip it down to the bare, lightest, minimum for mobile use.
You can't do that with a touch-screen laptop. You're stuck lugging around extra equipment you don't need in a mobile setting. That extra equipment carries a power penalty. A weight penalty. Penalties you don't have to pay with a tablet solution.
Just because a tablet can be expanded doesn't mean a touchscreen laptop can be contracted.
If those online video sites are smart they'll use HTML5 and "encourage" individuals of older browsers (e.g. IE 5.5) to upgrade to HTML5-capable ones (e.g. Chrome/Firefox).
To be fair, when a lot of those classic toons were made, Flash was pretty streamlined and lean, capable of running on low-end machines. Current versions struggle to run on quad core CPUs with GPU acceleration.
If Adobe had stayed focused on keeping their product streamlined and lean, it would have had a fighting chance on mobile platforms, but instead... bloated code, security holes caused by bloated code, and update after update after update after update after update to fix the security holes. Bloated code hurts battery life and the constant updates eat up bandwidth that wireless providers loathe to increase.
Flash was a great product. It could become a great product again. But it would take someone with balls stepping up at Adobe and changing the culture so they don't push out products until they've actually gone through rounds and rounds and rounds of optimization, instead of just pushing them out after adding features.
The case wasn't the look & feel lawsuit, that was ruled on ages before the public investment press event.
It was about the Quicktime for Windows lawsuit, wherein Microsoft & Intel hired the Quicktime for Windows developer, then ordered the developer to copy Quicktime for Windows source code and put it into Video for Windows.
And you're right to be skeptical about the 4 billion figure, since Apple had over 8 billion in cash and short term investments a couple years before the investment. That number was on a steady downward trend however, but there's no way it got slashed in half by the time of the lawsuit.
The real smoking gun of the Apple/Microsoft settlement is the cross licensing agreement, wherein Apple got access to a huge array of Microsoft source code, and Apple didn't end up owning Microsoft because they were finally legally authorized to have the Quicktime code inside Windows (Microsoft had since gone on to use DCI for other things, derive other technologies using the techniques, etc.).
As for there not being software patents at the time, holy crap you must be young. Do you think we rode around on dinosaurs?
Apple paid a developer to create Quicktime for Windows for them. Their latest version used an innovative method to copy video to the screen that was light-years faster than what Microsoft was doing with Video for Windows at the time. Since Apple paid the developer, the code in question did not belong to the developer, it belonged to Apple. If I hire you to produce shovels for me, you don't get to come along later and grab a shovel out of my inventory because you made it. The fruit of your labor is owned by the person who paid you to do the labor. That's why you're getting paid.
As part of the lawsuit, interviews with the individuals in question were performed as well as legal discovery of documents, emails, etc. End of the day Intel and Microsoft met with the developer and told them in no uncertain terms to copy the code from Quicktime to put in DCI, and proof of it came out during discovery. Both Intel and Microsoft quietly settled the lawsuit in Apple's favor. How do you know this? Because a very short time after the lawsuit was settled Microsoft made their public endorsement, bought Apple stock, formed a Macintosh Business Unit, and (this is key) cross-licensed source code.
Microsoft re-distributed it because the individuals responsible for the act thought nobody would ever find out, because they kept the knowledge of the act compartmentalized. The rest of Microsoft didn't realize what the managerial team responsible for producing DCI did, they just realized they needed to compete and these guys pulled off a hail mary play that would help them nail those &*(@#&*($# bastards over at Apple to a wall.
As for what was so great about the technology, it literally quadrupled (or more) the framerate of videos displayed on screen while simultaneously requiring less CPU time. Apple paid their Windows developer handsomely to develop this technology and expressly forbid them from sharing this work with other companies.
PowerPC is also still around, you need look no further than a Playstation 3 or XBox 360 to find a mass-market example of one. And they're still huge in the embedded market.
Pray tell, how can one "flood" a market which is based on intangible goods whose duplication cost is near zero?
So packaging, manuals, distribution, development, advertising, warehousing, and all the other work that went into software in the 80s & 90s cost "near zero?"
My god man, custom runs of floppy disks alone were $1 or more, and most products included multiple floppies. When CDs first came out there were substantial mastering costs involved in pressed discs, and the per-disc price was also measured in dollars, not cents.
You really need to realize that Steam wasn't available in 1986.
Windows 7 is not a "low quality product."
No it isn't, but Vista, the preceding product, was. It was such a low quality product that Microsoft was forced to roll up their sleeves and fix all the problems in it, then had the gall to charge us all for it.
When they did the same thing in Windows 98 Second Edition, at least they released a megapatch that updated long-suffering Windows 98 owners to Windows 98 SE. Similarly, when Apple released OS X 10.1 they gave it away free to everyone who owned OS X 10.0.
Seriously, what the hell.
Really? Bill Gates held a gun to their heads and forced them, did he?
If by gun you mean requiring them to pay him money for a Windows license even if they didn't ship a copy of Windows with the system or, if they didn't want to agree to those terms, pay a substantially inflated price for Windows licenses that would have made their business uncompetitive... then yes he did.
Indeed, the investment didn't matter at all. The public support was what was important.
Of course the actual reason for the support was due to Microsoft (and Intel) being on the losing end of the QuickTime for Windows lawsuit. When you hire your competitor's third party developer to develop the next generation of your competing product, then explicitly tell them that the developer needs to copy the source code from your competitor and put it in your next gen product, you damn well better believe you'll be on the losing end of a lawsuit. Once the evidence of that was uncovered a settlement in Apple's favor was inevitable.
So when you go out and build a better mousetrap, patent it so you can get a reasonable return for your vast amounts of research, design, & engineering on the mousetrap, it's okay for Samsung to rush a competing product to the market that rips off all the work you put into designing a better product, cut into your sales, and financially threaten your ability to produce future improvements?
We, as in human beings, can only create better products by being able to profit off the product of our labor. If you allow competitors to wander in after-the-fact and release a design for less (which they can do because their investment was less, copying a design costs less than creating something new), there's no incentive to design a better product, and the end result is stagnation.
You aren't just allowed to use information that was provided during trial, legal terms can be thrown around in court yet never get explained to the jury. The juror should have asked the judge for clarification about the topic, at which point the judge would have provided background material that was legally sound or at least neutral. Any reference material that wasn't cleared by the judge would have been equally bad, it's not just Wikipedia being singled out.
In theory this is the kind of thing (ignorance of key parts of the trial) that jury selection is supposed to cover, but these days they waste time trying to gerrymander a win based on statistics and don't actually bother to ask jurors useful questions - like whether they know what sexual assault when the individual has been charged with sexual assault.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure we do. We negotiate for toothpaste, gas, etc. all the time. I drive to a gas station that has a lower price than another gas station. Voila, I just negotiated a better price. I think the price of toothpaste is too high at the grocery store, I drive to another grocery store and find it for a cheaper price there - voila, I just negotiated a better price.
This kind of negotiation will likely not go well for Reddit, since instead of working for Reddit, people who don't like the offer will just work for someone else. The problem is that companies aren't good at high-balling, they always low-ball, and as a result they'll end up with people who accept low balls... which are usually the less qualified individuals.
Someone I used to work with got hired as an IT manager because they accepted the low-ball offer. The problem? They didn't know the first thing about IT. They were working as a product tester at our workplace. The most IT knowledge they had was how to turn on a system. They tried to get me to come over and basically run their shop, but I had another six months of work left until my (negotiated) severance package kicked in so hell if I was going to mess that up. He imploded their IT operations within the first year. He was a great bullshitter, but they didn't need that... they needed someone who could do the work.
Russian engines have primarily been high-pressure designs, while American engines have primarily been low-pressure designs.
However with the full design and build specifications in-hand, with trial engines already built to verify the specifications and designs were correct, the US can build high pressure engines.
Will they? That's a good question. Russia has effectively been giving away engines for cost to keep their space industry from collapsing. Under those conditions I don't see how it's economically feasible to not buy them from Russia, since being wonderful capitalists the US military would buy them from companies who build subcomponents for a profit to the general contractors who put the subcomponents together into the basic components who turns around and sells them to... and the very far end of that chain is the military, who pays Lockheed and Boeing for the completed product.
I sincerely hope SpaceX succeeds financially, as it really represents a change from the subcontractors of subcontractors of subcontractors pyramid that represents the traditional US space industry.
It can, but it'll only happen once the media companies get serious about computers. Right now they're content to let their software divisions bring in profits without any need to legislate laws to protect their antiquated, broken business models.
Once they realize their software divisions are doing poorly due to, well, because they're the ones running the companies, they'll start prodding their lobbyists with sharp sticks to "protect" their software divisions too.
The other cameras were on the recovery ship, which couldn't reach the recovery area without, you know, sinking. They'd have ended up roughly where the master recording currently is, resting on the ocean floor.
The problem isn't the camera, it's that the data was garbled during transmission. In part because both the source and destination locations were in constant (and, given the storm, quite random) motion. It's hard to hit the side of the barn when you're aiming from mid-air in the center of a tornado.
That they got even this much is remarkable.
This comment reminds me of the people on Apple Support Communities who insisted that FlashBack was not actually a thing, that it was not infecting any systems, anywhere, and it was all just a big myth created by AV companies to sell product.
Meanwhile I was spending a day each week clearing FlashBack off dozens of infected student systems because the kids were too &*(@#$ stupid to not whack the monkey or whatever stupid thing they did in order to get infected (and god help us if we didn't give them administrative privileges, you don't want to hear the caterwauling they make at the slightest hint of restrictions).
See, apparently I'm in the employ of AV companies and didn't know it. My bank account never noticed it either.
A company I used to work for held negotiations with music & movie companies over a product we wanted to bring to the market which would let customers listen to music, watch videos, etc. while sitting in a restaurant or similar location. Essentially it took the place of a jukebox but since everything was in digital form it could have additional functionality.
This was back at the height of the xxAA's anti-P2P "Napster" hysteria, when they had their heads lodged firmly in the sand that everything digital was evil. Before the iTunes Music Store proved they were being completely asinine.
In any case, the only way they said they would work with us is if we helped them, at our expense, figure out how to charge all movie & music customers, everywhere, for every time they viewed a movie or listened to a song. And they'd own the rights.
As you can imagine, my employer decided to kill the project. Multi-billion dollar companies expected a small business to foot the bill for their asinine product development plan...
(small voice) But I like pretzel buns...
Scan in the card, scan in the $20, throw both into the trash, then recover all the $20 bills later that night after they hit the dumpster.
Look deep into your heart, you know it to be true.
Really, I don't know what all the fuss is about. So I threw a few chairs, haven't we all?
Well, if you were in one of the states where she wasn't on the ballot, it would have to be a figment.
If Apple has the margins of a fashion company, does that make Cisco even more fashionable since their margins are higher?
The market they sell into is meaningless, your original statement said absolutely nothing about their customer base, just their profit margins. Since Cisco's profit margins are higher than Apple's, therefore they must be even more of a fashion company than Apple, according to your original statement.
Changing your statement now, to try to make it mean something completely different, isn't helping. What you said is right there for all the world to see.
Just take your lumps. We all make mistakes.
I bought the chair. It's mine, I can do what I want with it.
And if I want to run around on stage holding it on top of my head while chanting "Developers" over and over...
This is just a guess, but I suspect he meant a chain link failure.
All to have the same functionality as a laptop.
All to have the same functionality of a laptop in a docked (home/office) setting. In a mobile setting you have a tablet, instead of a (larger, heavier, etc.) laptop.
Listen, I don't even believe in laptops because they're less powerful than desktops, nor do I own a tablet. But I can understand the appeal of a light, responsive "mobile" device that can accomplish what needs to be accomplished on the go while docking to get extended functionality when you get home or to the office. And it's not like (better, not bottom-of-the-barrel netbook-esque models) laptops don't also have docks to gain ports and slots and additional functionality when you reach the same places. Arguing against docks when docks exist for both platforms is just silly.
Frankly the largest thing I want to be hauling around is a smartphone or similar pocketable device. I'm not thrilled with the current mobile iDevices because their screens are just a bit too small, but if the iPhone 5 comes out with a larger screen it may make a suitable replacement for my current mobile device. And no, the iPad isn't a mobile device in my book - if I can't fit it in my pocket, it isn't mobile. But that's for me, others can use their own value system and still be perfectly rational, even if the result doesn't match mine.
No, it's still a tablet. Want to know why?
Now that you're done sitting down editing your documents with a keyboard and screen, pick up your computing device. Remove the keyboard. Remove the video output. Strip it down to the bare, lightest, minimum for mobile use.
You can't do that with a touch-screen laptop. You're stuck lugging around extra equipment you don't need in a mobile setting. That extra equipment carries a power penalty. A weight penalty. Penalties you don't have to pay with a tablet solution.
Just because a tablet can be expanded doesn't mean a touchscreen laptop can be contracted.
The only websites I really notice being built entirely in flash are car company websites, but they all have sensible mobile sites.
If those online video sites are smart they'll use HTML5 and "encourage" individuals of older browsers (e.g. IE 5.5) to upgrade to HTML5-capable ones (e.g. Chrome/Firefox).
To be fair, when a lot of those classic toons were made, Flash was pretty streamlined and lean, capable of running on low-end machines. Current versions struggle to run on quad core CPUs with GPU acceleration.
If Adobe had stayed focused on keeping their product streamlined and lean, it would have had a fighting chance on mobile platforms, but instead... bloated code, security holes caused by bloated code, and update after update after update after update after update to fix the security holes. Bloated code hurts battery life and the constant updates eat up bandwidth that wireless providers loathe to increase.
Flash was a great product. It could become a great product again. But it would take someone with balls stepping up at Adobe and changing the culture so they don't push out products until they've actually gone through rounds and rounds and rounds of optimization, instead of just pushing them out after adding features.
The case wasn't the look & feel lawsuit, that was ruled on ages before the public investment press event.
It was about the Quicktime for Windows lawsuit, wherein Microsoft & Intel hired the Quicktime for Windows developer, then ordered the developer to copy Quicktime for Windows source code and put it into Video for Windows.
And you're right to be skeptical about the 4 billion figure, since Apple had over 8 billion in cash and short term investments a couple years before the investment. That number was on a steady downward trend however, but there's no way it got slashed in half by the time of the lawsuit.
The real smoking gun of the Apple/Microsoft settlement is the cross licensing agreement, wherein Apple got access to a huge array of Microsoft source code, and Apple didn't end up owning Microsoft because they were finally legally authorized to have the Quicktime code inside Windows (Microsoft had since gone on to use DCI for other things, derive other technologies using the techniques, etc.).
As for there not being software patents at the time, holy crap you must be young. Do you think we rode around on dinosaurs?
Apple paid a developer to create Quicktime for Windows for them. Their latest version used an innovative method to copy video to the screen that was light-years faster than what Microsoft was doing with Video for Windows at the time. Since Apple paid the developer, the code in question did not belong to the developer, it belonged to Apple. If I hire you to produce shovels for me, you don't get to come along later and grab a shovel out of my inventory because you made it. The fruit of your labor is owned by the person who paid you to do the labor. That's why you're getting paid.
As part of the lawsuit, interviews with the individuals in question were performed as well as legal discovery of documents, emails, etc. End of the day Intel and Microsoft met with the developer and told them in no uncertain terms to copy the code from Quicktime to put in DCI, and proof of it came out during discovery. Both Intel and Microsoft quietly settled the lawsuit in Apple's favor. How do you know this? Because a very short time after the lawsuit was settled Microsoft made their public endorsement, bought Apple stock, formed a Macintosh Business Unit, and (this is key) cross-licensed source code.
Microsoft re-distributed it because the individuals responsible for the act thought nobody would ever find out, because they kept the knowledge of the act compartmentalized. The rest of Microsoft didn't realize what the managerial team responsible for producing DCI did, they just realized they needed to compete and these guys pulled off a hail mary play that would help them nail those &*(@#&*($# bastards over at Apple to a wall.
As for what was so great about the technology, it literally quadrupled (or more) the framerate of videos displayed on screen while simultaneously requiring less CPU time. Apple paid their Windows developer handsomely to develop this technology and expressly forbid them from sharing this work with other companies.
PowerPC is also still around, you need look no further than a Playstation 3 or XBox 360 to find a mass-market example of one. And they're still huge in the embedded market.
Pray tell, how can one "flood" a market which is based on intangible goods whose duplication cost is near zero?
So packaging, manuals, distribution, development, advertising, warehousing, and all the other work that went into software in the 80s & 90s cost "near zero?"
My god man, custom runs of floppy disks alone were $1 or more, and most products included multiple floppies. When CDs first came out there were substantial mastering costs involved in pressed discs, and the per-disc price was also measured in dollars, not cents.
You really need to realize that Steam wasn't available in 1986.
Windows 7 is not a "low quality product."
No it isn't, but Vista, the preceding product, was. It was such a low quality product that Microsoft was forced to roll up their sleeves and fix all the problems in it, then had the gall to charge us all for it.
When they did the same thing in Windows 98 Second Edition, at least they released a megapatch that updated long-suffering Windows 98 owners to Windows 98 SE. Similarly, when Apple released OS X 10.1 they gave it away free to everyone who owned OS X 10.0.
Seriously, what the hell.
Really? Bill Gates held a gun to their heads and forced them, did he?
If by gun you mean requiring them to pay him money for a Windows license even if they didn't ship a copy of Windows with the system or, if they didn't want to agree to those terms, pay a substantially inflated price for Windows licenses that would have made their business uncompetitive... then yes he did.
Indeed, the investment didn't matter at all. The public support was what was important.
Of course the actual reason for the support was due to Microsoft (and Intel) being on the losing end of the QuickTime for Windows lawsuit. When you hire your competitor's third party developer to develop the next generation of your competing product, then explicitly tell them that the developer needs to copy the source code from your competitor and put it in your next gen product, you damn well better believe you'll be on the losing end of a lawsuit. Once the evidence of that was uncovered a settlement in Apple's favor was inevitable.
So when you go out and build a better mousetrap, patent it so you can get a reasonable return for your vast amounts of research, design, & engineering on the mousetrap, it's okay for Samsung to rush a competing product to the market that rips off all the work you put into designing a better product, cut into your sales, and financially threaten your ability to produce future improvements?
We, as in human beings, can only create better products by being able to profit off the product of our labor. If you allow competitors to wander in after-the-fact and release a design for less (which they can do because their investment was less, copying a design costs less than creating something new), there's no incentive to design a better product, and the end result is stagnation.
You aren't just allowed to use information that was provided during trial, legal terms can be thrown around in court yet never get explained to the jury. The juror should have asked the judge for clarification about the topic, at which point the judge would have provided background material that was legally sound or at least neutral. Any reference material that wasn't cleared by the judge would have been equally bad, it's not just Wikipedia being singled out.
In theory this is the kind of thing (ignorance of key parts of the trial) that jury selection is supposed to cover, but these days they waste time trying to gerrymander a win based on statistics and don't actually bother to ask jurors useful questions - like whether they know what sexual assault when the individual has been charged with sexual assault.