Bob Pittman may be the darling of Wall Street, but their decision to dogfood themselves was the kind of shortsighted, Dilbert-esque decision that only a suit with no connection with technical reality could make. I suspect nobody ever bothered to talk to the people who admin the various systems that were replaced - heck, it wouldn't surprise me if the CTO (whoever that is) wasn't even involved.
Even if they had switched in the long term, they tackled this project way too quickly (it's been just over a year since the merger went through) and it's glaringly obvious that they didn't think things through very well. Messaging on that kind of scale (multiple operating companies with differing hardware/OS standards, tens of thousands of employees) is not trivial to implement or manage and the suits upstairs should have either known better or had advisors to listen to who could have told them it was a bad idea.
This'll probably wind up in a business textbook someday in the "how not to integrate merged companies" chapter.
It wasn't quite as bad a disaster as that - PS/2 sold fairly well, but not well enough to kill the cloners. And there was a 386 in the line from the get-go, though ALR and Compaq had released the first 386 PC's a few months prior. The actual release of the PS/2 was in early 1987. Micro Channel was a much more advanced bus than ISA represented - mind you, this was before the whole industry coalesced around the (not yet invented) PCI bus. Feeling the pressure from IBM, the rest of the industry got together and devised EISA (extending ISA to 32-bit goodness and backwards-compatibility) - a decent Micro Channel competitor that carried the clone market for a few years in the interim before Intel pushed PCI out.
The goal was definitely to lock up a new standard, though. At first. IBM offered to license Micro Channel, but at very high royalty rates that effectively left no room for competitiors. OS/2 started out as a vaporware project that relied heavily on Microsoft to manage big chunks of it, and ultimately became IBM's flagship OS and their "open" competition to a rising Microsoft. Windows 3.0, OTOH, started out as a way for Microsoft to hedge their bets against slow adoption of OS/2 - after the first couple of years IBM had opened up to the reality that they needed to support the cloners, too. When Windows took off and the big MS/IBM split happened, Microsoft got to keep the OS/2 3.0 project that was being planned at that point. IBM decided their future was in porting OS/2 to their new Power series chips. Which ultimately fizzled out.
The Microsoft part of the project became Windows NT. OS/2 itself (Warp was a marketroid decision to add the codename to the product) had wonderful Win16 capabilities back in the Windows 3.x days - but Windows 95 came out conveniently after IBM's license to Windows source expired and that was the commercial death of OS/2.
I think the last PS/2 was canned around 1995 or so, maybe a hair later. There were some good products made for the MCA bus, mostly connectivity products. It was a far better bus than ISA, but the market (and IBM) killed it easily.
The legacy that PS/2 left us in the end was mainly the mini-DIN connectors for keyboards and mice. IBM sold a decent number, but not enough to justify a separate line of PC from the mainstream. Apple's really the only folks who have ever pulled off a different standard over the long term.
(This is also a good argument as to why Apple should never go to Intel as chip vendor - IBM had a good alternative OS, a neat box, and a better mousetrap, but couldn't differentiate themselves enough to thrive.)
I may be slightly off on a detail or two, but I think my recollection is fairly clear on this. Feel free to correct specifics, folks!
Interesting. Since 0.98, I've all but dumped IE in favor of Mozilla (I keep up to date on the OmniWeb sneakypeeks, too). Though Mozilla sometimes feels a little bit sluggish, my general experience has been been that Mozilla both renders a little faster than IE and, more importantly - it doesn't block all activities in other windows while it renders.
The one thing I'll say in IE's defense, though, is that when OS X came out it wasn't a bad first cut at a native carbonized browser (OmniWeb was much nicer, but died horribly on lots of sites). The problem is that MS fixed a lot of bugs over the next couple of releases, but they really haven't done that much to improve the browser outside of the basic bugfixes. Mozilla and OmniWeb have both passed it by since then.
BTW, the box I'm using to compare these is a TiBook 667, 768MB RAM, OS X 10.1.3. My wife uses an old iMac (a DV450), and she prefers to use IE.
PGP Desktop is a well-integrated application that has a nice file protection app (PGP disk), makes PGP signing your mail a lot easier (it integrates to most e-mail clients I've used), has a good IPSec VPN component, and runs on Mac and Windows (1 more platform than most products do, though there's no Linux desktop version). NAI never did a very good job of selling the product, though - it was always one of those "semi-orphan" packages. NAI couldn't figure out if it was meant to be a business package or a home use package, and pricing was never set in stone.
Ironically, it's probably an easier sell now than it's ever been, given that organizations are finally getting a little more security-conscious.
GPG is probably the best hope for a cross-platform replacement, but there's still a need for better snazzy front-ends on most platforms (I'm using it on MacOS X) to help Joe Average, and there's no easy PGP VPN or PGP Disk equivalent.
NAI - if anyone's listening, why not re-open the PGP codebase and let the marketplace solve the problem? Nobody wants to buy it, you don't want to sell it, so give it away!
You can't take as many newspapers as you like, but there's no specific limit to how big the newspaper gets. Though there are costs, the big cost is producing the paper (which, of course, is mainly underwritten by the advertisers) itself - page count is a minor factor in determining cost (if it weren't, the price of your newspaper would fluctuate daily).
Cable TV is a pretty good example, though - you pay a tiered rate depending on how much information (number of channels) you wish to consume. Besides that, there are "bonus" features or extras, and that's analogous to pay-per-view programming.
Bandwidth, though, is best suited to flat-rate cost for two reasons - firstly, you do not entirely control how much data is pumped through the pipe, and secondly the system (meaning the Internet) is designed without an infrastructure to handle metered pricing (some individual services/servers can, but not the whole backbone per se). If I provide a pipe of a certain width to a customer, it doesn't inherently cost me any more for the customer to saturate the pipe versus if they just used it occasionally at peak speeds. I just need to make sure my infrastructure is designed in such a way that I can service the customers well enough to retain them and recover my costs if they actually dare to use the resource (bandwidth) they purchase from me.
Slashdot isn't in that kind of position since they are a server/service (they aren't infrastructure, despite what some of us may believe!), and they are in a position to be metered by their ISP as a result.
With taxicabs, the biggest thing you pay for is time, not gas (that's less of a cost). When the taxi drives you 5 miles, during that time they can't go drive anyone else - you are the only income. Though some places do have flat-rate cabs (rides to certain locations are fixed cost).
In a way, a good thing would be comparing the economics of a cab to a bus. The cab takes one person directly where they want to go, at a metered variable price. A city bus also takes you where you want to go, but you share the bus with other people and make stops to pick up and drop off those people on the way - at a fixed price.
Slashdot's economics are more like a cab's, while we surfers are mainly bus riders. If you want to ride in the cab, you have to pay one way or another for how much you use the cab.
It's not a matter of not being able to afford it. I could buy a nice big HDTV and not miss the money (a plasma display, OTOH, would set me back a ways...). It's that I don't see the value proposition for most people.
There will always be for virtually any product, no matter how expensive:
- some people who can afford it
- some people who get enough value from it to justify it
-a few people who need it so badly it's worth any price
But are those enough to make something a commercial success? Often, that's not the case.
Being able to afford something doesn't necessarily make it worthwhile. I (and most of us) can afford a lot of things that have no value, so we don't buy them. I could afford to buy a really nice outdoor gas grill with multiple burners and all sorts of cool stuff. But I don't like to barbecue that much, so I just have a small old Weber charcoal kettle that I use for the one or two times a year that I use it.
But I do have a very expensive over-the-range microwave oven that does about everything you can imagine. I use it very often and get great utility from it, so it's worth the money to me.
I think the TV set is the same kind of thing to most people - a $500 (or less) NTSC set displays broadcast TV fine, is OK for VCR/DVD playback, and is a better value than the $2000 (or up) HDTV. Enthusiasts will disagree, but that's a small percentage of the market.
Re:I STILL don't see the point of HDTV (yet)
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
·
· Score: 2
Personally, I don't like the RPTV's that much. They're usually darker, and I don't think they view as well at angles. But if you're going to go over about 36-40 inches, that's pretty much the only thing short of flat panel.
Re:I STILL don't see the point of HDTV (yet)
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree with you as far as what you get for your $500 not being particularly nice - but a 32" tube isn't bad for TV viewing, even if the set is kinda big. And it's what the average joe can afford.
If you're in the market for a higher-end set, it does make sense to consider HDTV instead, but the market for $1200+ analog sets is a lot smaller to begin with than the market for $500 sets - and the HDTV market is in turn a subset of the smaller premium market.
But your point is spot-on. HDTV is ideal for the heavy DVD user, and many of the early sets have circuitry to improve the sharpness of NTSC video as well, so there is a benefit for those premium users. The problem is that it's a small market, and will probably remain so for quite some time to come.
Why did DVD take off so quickly? Because player prices dropped to around the same prices as VCRs. That fueled the explosion. I think it'll be the same thing with HDTV.
I STILL don't see the point of HDTV (yet)
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
HDTV is still a solution in search of a problem, as far as I can see. When a set + decoder costs over $2k (and up, as opposed to conventional TV sets being well under $500 for a nice one), there's no compelling advantage that makes it worth the extra money. There's a lot better things the average person can do with that money.
The problem is that HDTV is nice for the enthusiast, but useless for most people. Improved quality of DVD playback is nice, but despite the success of the DVD format, typical viewers are not trying to replicate the theater experience at home. Heck, most of them wouldn't know how if they wanted to (and could afford it). I just can't see people who don't know how to set the clock on their VCR being able to find the sweet spot for a 5.1 speaker system.
Does HDTV have a shot? Of course it does. But the networks need to get serious about it (and soon), prices on the equipment need to plummet (no more than a 20% price difference between an HDTV monitor and the equivalent NTSC TV) to the point where folks are willing to shell out the cash, and the issues with cable companies need to be worked out pronto. And consumers need to demand high-quality video, otherwise all we'll wind up getting someday is 4 channels of the same crap on an HDTV frequency. Yippee.
I should be a perfect target customer for HDTV. I'm a technically-oriented person. I make a good living. I have not one, but two DVD players (one is in the bedroom), several computers, surround sound in the living room, and I only have a 27" set to go with it. I ought to be heading for upgrade city, but I'm not.
I've looked longingly at a 40" widescreen set that I see every time I go to Best Buy, but I just can't justify $2200 for a TV set, no matter how hard I try. Other than the DVD film I watch every couple of weeks, there's just no advantage to the big set. One of my friends has a huge widescreen projection HDTV set (he did well in the stock option roulette game), and I've watched movies on it - they look great. But TV looks just as crappy, only bigger. So what's the point? Guys who made a lot with stock options are far from an ideal market, especially nowadays.
Maybe in a couple more years this'll be worth revisiting, but HDTV is dead in the water for now, and justifiably so. There just isn't any real benefit that makes it worth your disposable income - unless you have a ridiculous amount of income to dispose of.
Not to defend EB, but a sales number like that could be because of pre-orders. It's been a long time since I was in the computer retail biz (over 10 years), but that was pretty common back then, and I know a lot of "blockbuster" titles still get pre-sold today.
This isn't meant to be a lament, not entirely. The Net was intended as an individualistic medium; it was inevitable that it would grow beyond a single focal point. Individualists still use it to chatter around the clock via mailing lists, blogs, vanity sites and IRC. But mostly, they appear to be speaking to ever smaller increments, like one another, rather to the larger world. The notion of the Net as a new kind of common ground is nearly over.
The "Net" wasn't designed to be a "medium" of any sort, individualistic or not. It was simply a way for users of computer systems to access resources on other systems - a throwback to the days when most serious computers were military and/or academic and resources were scarce and widely scattered. It was also designed to be more reliable than traditional communications methods.
That's pretty much the original design goal, Jon. Everything else, even e-mail (even TCP/IP itself), is just a function that was grafted on to the original design. The Web? An accident, really. Tim Berners-Lee was looking for an easy navigation system for researchers and created the Web. The uses we've come up with for it are something else entirely.
There's also a lot more to the Internet than the Web though, Jon. And things like the specialized communities of Usenet, the P2P file sharing systems like Gnutella, and such add to the experiences you speak of. The Internet has become an entertainment medium, but it's not just about that, even though you write about it as if all Web content is now provided by Disney.
It's not the case at all. All the quirky individual sites still exist, though some have gone and others appeared. There's still communities out there - hell, Slashdot is really one of them. They're more lost in the noise than they were in the days when there were a few hundred websites and they were all listed on Netscape's "What's Cool" page, but you can still find what you want without too much trouble.
So I don't buy this one, Jon. Just because AOL has a lot of users who type with one hand doesn't mean the Net has become a different medium. It's just that not everyone has the same high-minded hopes and lofty goals you do. Most people probably are just looking to read (or watch) news, buy stuff, get some amusement, find people like them to talk to, and (sorry) get their rocks off once in a while. The Net isn't just a place for the elite anymore, and that's fine, because the "elite" can still do what they want to do.
Though that number _includes_ the 33 million AOL users, I think...
So maybe the real number is somewhat less than half?
Seriously, it's obvious at this point that a large number of the population is online to some degree or another, just as it is obvious that broadband use has increased highly in the last couple of years (though not enough to stave off a slew of bankruptcies). The Internet has, for better or worse, gone from just being a playground for those "in the know" to a part of popular culture, with all the dumbing-down that goes along with the change. We just have to deal with it.
We're also probably getting close to the saturation point - I think there will always be about a quarter of the population that doesn't have or necessarily want anything to do with the Internet. So other than people moving to broadband for a few more years, I'd say the days of explosive growth are long gone.
i refuse to support corporations who practice bad business ethics.
where would science be today if Isaac Newton or Einstein failed to share their discoveries to other scientists?
As much as these (and many others non cited in your post) are giants of science, they discovered fundamental principles. Most fundamental science today is still shared in much the same way.
Would Newton and Einstein have been so generous to the world if their discoveries had been readily exploitable for commercial use and financial gain? I'm not so sure. Look at another giant - Edison. On the one hand, he did a tremendous amount of research, but on the other hand he tried to aggressively market his work and was a heavy user of the patent system.
Imagine if Einstein's discoveries led him directly to the design of the first atomic powerplant. I suspect he would have patented the sucker as fast as he could have.
The real issue is that fundamental discoveries (like gravity and E=MC squared) typically aren't the same as applied ones (like OpenGL, Java, and almost anything in computing since the early days). The fundamental discoveries lay the groundwork for the applied discoveries - but the applied discoveries are where the money is.
Not to disagree with your premise (because I also doubt that Amazon is anywhere near out of the woods), but in their defense I'd say that Amazon's costs are also proabaly highest in the holiday quarter. They stock more merchandise directly on-hand, expand their staff to handle the increased volume, and ship more items at promotional rates. They also will generally incur higher advertising costs as well.
The model for retailers seems to be a couple of mediocre quarters, with a big profit during the holidays. Amazon seems to be on their way there, as the losses have been slowing down, but the next year is really the make-or-break year for them, I think.
If their model is to be a catalog reseller, they're screwed. Just look at Fingerhut as a good example. One day they were the shining e-commerce wing of a major brick-and-mortar retailer chain. Now they're being shut down.
I can see LL Bean being a better example, but even they've had tough times. They recently laid off a couple of hundred people, and they've diversified into storefronts and alternative brands (like Freeport Studio for women) to keep the business going. And they're private - Wall Street isn't a factor for them, either.
Well, it differentiates the Pro Macs from the iMac, for the short term. The price has nudged down, and the features have gotten boosted. All this is good.
However, the chipset hasn't been updated yet (ergo no ATA100 or DDR support yet), it's the same FireWire (meaning the newer high-speed FireWire isn't ready for Prime Time yet), and the top-end speed isn't quite as fast as I had hoped/expected. I was thinking the speeds would be more like 933/1000/dual 1133 this time out.
But all in all, it's a good short-term move assuming the G5 is available in the next couple of months. But despite the specs, it reminds me of the original "Yikes!" G4 towers, which were just Yosemite towers tweaked for a G4 to hold the line while Apple got more of the high-speed chips that their real G4 was designed for. Yikes only lasted a few months before the Sawtooth version took over.
This is the Palm that they were afraid to release before Xmas? Whoopdee-doo. The one thing it has going for it is a fairly compact form factor relative to other wireless PDA's. But other than that, it's pretty underwhelming and at an expensive price. I'd at least expect to see color for the price.
I mean, to compare it to other wireless platforms, I really don't think it stacks up too well. A Palm Vx/Omnisky (or Go America) unit is less expensive and not much larger (with detachable wireless modem), an iPaq with an expansion sleeve is far more versatile, capable and way faster, and a Blackberry is smaller and easier to use as an e-mail device (the larger x57 has web capabilities similar to Palm's) - they only lack a touch screen. And the big deal is, I guess, that this comes in white?
I had been using Palm devices since the old Pilot 5000 (it replaced a MessagePad), with a Palm III and a Vx in my collection over time. My wife has an M100 - it's a nice, cheap, reasonably rugged PDA for what it is. I've been an adherent to the "simpler is better" school of PDA usage. But a couple of months ago I bought an iPaq 3765, and I started using my Palm less and less. In fact, my Vx hasn't left the cradle in over a month now. The iPaq isn't that much bigger, and I can (and do) use it with an 802.11b card to take advantage of my homenet. Windows CE is klunky, but the 2002 version doesn't suck nearly as bad as my old (free, elsewise I'd never have owned it) HP Jornada did, and I can use it with my Mac now thanks to some slick third-party software. As the Linux distro (Familiar) for the iPaq matures, I'll probably switch to it eventually.
Looking at the new Palm, they just plain seem to have missed the boat. Hopefully the new generation of Palm devices after this one will catch up with the rest of the world, and soon. Palm pretty much invented the modern PDA market, and it's a shame to see them shooting themselves in the foot like this.
Re:Cool, Now Apple Can Compete With Dell!
on
Woz's New Startup
·
· Score: 2
No - he's not on the board. Larry Ellison is, though. The list is here, off Apple's corp. investor site. Woz did have a "minister without portfolio"-type position in recent years, though - I'm not sure if he still has it or not.
Raj knows his co-worker/fellow temps. He forms relationships with them. But there's only a small group (relatively) that he works with. He doesn't know most of the other temps, nor does he know the workers on the other shifts, nor most of the full-timers, or anyone at their other facilities.
He might know _of_ them, but to Raj they aren't part of his world. If something happens to them, it won't really register on his radar screen because he no personal connection with them. This is important - it's part of why the management at HP (or Amazon) can easily deal with cutting workers to boost profits. These workers aren't part of their world. They're just statistics on a P&L sheet. They don't have a direct relationship with the people their fates depend on.
Is this necessarily bad? I'm not sure. I think depersonalization is a necessary evil to go with growth - people only have room for x amount of connections in their own "personal network". managers can only handle a certain number of direct reports on average before things become inefficient (not enough time to maintain the connections or devote enough attention to each person). That's where middle management, sub-groups, and smaller organizational units come into play - to preserve as much of that as possible.
The largest company I've worked for (where I am now) employs 152 people directly. But for the last two years we've also been a part of a much larger "virtual" organization (through a pool with several other insurance companies of equivalent or larger size). Once we leave the cozy confines of my 152-person location, a lot of these issues come into play - decisions have been made that affected people that probably would have been made differently in a smaller company.
That's not all bad here, though. We've formed a lot of official and quasi-official working groups within the combined organization that are as small as possible - the objective being to try whenever feasible to keep decisions from happening in a vacuum and to preserve the personal aspect of working together as much as one can. Has it been perfect? Of course not. But it hasn't been too bad either, thankfully.
In the end, people need to be aware that they are ultimately responsible for their own fates. Raj can go work elsewhere, or go to another part of the country, or learn a skill that will allow him to escape the permatemping world. Or he can settle for what he has now. Some of his co-workers, sadly, will never do better - perhaps a few of them are handling the most they are capable of. As another poster to this thread said when quoting Judge Smails (the reference was from Caddyshack, BTW), "The world needs ditch-diggers, too". But most can eventually go as far as their skills will take them, provided they make sure that the skills they have are always needed enough to ensure relatively high-paying work.
Being a human and a capitalist aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. But the bigger the organization, the tougher it is. People also get torn between their connections to others and their own fates - it's tough for the manager of a temporary workforce to form any lasting attachment to their workers when your own job may depend on being able to dicipline and/or terminate workers on the instructions of the people your own job depends on.
If you're the person in those shoes, and you feel uncomfortable with it, then I'd definitely say you're human.
The Duron _is_ the Athlon - albeit the earlier "T-Bird" version, and with half the cache.
The biggest reason (IMHO) that AMD switched numbering systems once the Athlon XP hit the market is because for the time being, they can't keep up in raw clock speed. We all know that clock speed isn't the only thing in chip architecture (as Hannibal has highlighted so well over at Ars), cache and pipeline depth are also significant - and Athlon more than keeps up with the P4 as a result.
At the low end, clock=clock for more direct comparison, and since the Celery is just a lobotomized P3, the Durons can be marketed against them at their actual clock speeds.
Once AMD is building Athlons on a 0.13 micron process like Intel builds P4 chips, expect the Athlon clock speeds to catch up quickly and the XP "ratings" to conveniently vanish...
Uh, yes I have, unfortunately... Several of the licenses we're under put those kind of burdens on us - and most of the mainframe licenses we hold.
I think the likelihood of a super-restrictive enterprise license is directly proportional to the amount of competition the vendor has and the cost of the software in question.
Our Microsoft Enterprise agreement is similar in some ways, but the trade-off is a low per-seat cost and no need to deal with "activation" or any of that other phone-home crud. We get license keys that can be tracked back to us if they get out, but those keys allow us to install the products in a completely unrestricted form. We have other products that are handled that way, too.
But I do not agree that it should be GPL'd if it was built with public money. Rather, I think that software built with public funds should be given to the public domain. Once released to the public domain, if you want to use the source code in your own proprietary product, though, that's an acceptable re-use - provided that the underlying public source code is never removed from the public record.
It's a question of where the line should be drawn. I believe in the GPL on principle, and I would not shed any tears if all software developed through government funding were GPL. But the forced opening of software that is derived from the GPL'd root program isn't necessarily the best way to go about things. If you release software developed by government grant as PD, then the basic tools are free to the community and there's an opportunity for commercial interests to build upon it - hopefully using an Open Source license at the very least, but perhaps not. At that point it's up to the marketplace to reward companies that keep their software open.
If an institution develops it without using government dollars, what they do with the subsequent code is their business. But what they do with our money is everyone's business. If we don't like what a private company does, we are welcome to not consume their products or services, steering our dollars away from them. But when it's our tax dollars, we do not get the same choice. And I, for one, see a line between people using a free product (obtained out of the public domain) to make money, and people building a profitable product that I can't have, using my tax money to build it. I definitely feel the latter is worse.
I wish I could pay $30 for the cable modem - I do rent my modem ($10/month), but it's still $40/month here even if I own the modem. My parents are served by Cablevision in Connecticut, and they do have the $30/month rate from Optimum Online. Better still - since Cablevision owns the "Nobody Beats The Wiz" electronics chain, they took advantage of a promotion that let them get a $100 gift card when they bought the $100 modem. Net modem cost - $0. We have no such cross-ownership deals in Eastern Massachusetts, where I live.
The local telephone price includes unlimited usage anywhere in MA except for the 413 (Western MA) LATA. No per-minute charges. The long distance price is the average monthly bill. The fee is $4, but usage drives it up, of course. I'm married, and both my wife and I have plenty of friends out-of-state (and all of our families). Between us, that usage is an average month. I mostly communicate via computer (lots o' e-mail), but she uses the phone a lot. And I mean a lot.
As for cable TV, I've tried the antenna. In fact, for the first 7 years I owned my house, I refused to get cable. I finally got tired of crappy reception and gave in. I also get $5 off my cable modem bill for having TV service, too. Otherwise it would be $55. Even at $50 it's still the cheapest broadband I've used thus far.
Now, do I _need_ everything I buy for communications service? Of course not. But I can afford it, and I like some of the conveniences these services give me. The average Slashdot reader is not who AOLTW is thinking of when they set rates. There's a lot of TV addiction out there and people who think nothing of paying $80/month for digital everything cable TV. That's who AOLTW figures will see that $230 bill in the end.
Besides - based on the articles here I read, a lot of the Slashdot readers get their TV by hacking DirecTV dishes... Cost - $0!
I look, for instance, at the menu of services we consume here:
Cable Internet (AT&T) - $50
Local telephone (with all the services but voicemail - Verizon) - $60
Long distance (AT&T) - $50
Cable television (AT&T - local channels only) $14)
Alarm monitoring (ADT) $26
That's $200/month worth of services that are coming in on two wires to my house. And we don't get any of the more advanced cable services - just analog antenna service. If I want analog basic cable, it's another $20. If I want premium channels, the total bill hits that $230 mark and only goes up from there.
What I don't really do at this point, though, is take advantage of any service bundling yet - though AT&T has been pushing real hard in this area to get local and long distance bundled with my cable line. I haven't bitten yet but if I do it'll save me about $15/month. It's just not worth the trouble yet. So I use two wires instead of one.
I have no issue with the total price, so long as they save me money over the cost of buying all the services I need separately from separate vendors. I'll stick to multiple bills if there's no price reason to switch.
I guess the real interesting thing is how much communications takes out of the monthly budget. I look at that $200 figure I cited above, and that doesn't include our cell phone ($35), OmniSky ($29, but it's getting dumped this spring), and my Blackberry ($40, paid by my work). All together, that's a lot of money for communications service of one sort or another. And remember, my cable TV bill is tiny. A lot of people pay for premium services - equivalent to adding my OmniSky to the cable bill.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that the average household communications total bill comes close to that $200 mark already. If AOL starts offering things like security monitoring over their wire as well, the $230 is probably a reasonable goal.
Re:Wicked cool, but not as much as I hoped...
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 2
I actually agree with you, pretty much. I think the iMac G4 is pretty close to what an equivalent machine from a top-tier manufacturer would cost (though the equivalent PC will be way ahead in raw CPU clock, of course - but otherwise pretty comparable). It's just that that price point is attainable in the Wintel market - even in stripped machines from the big companies.
The other thing is that Apple has been offering iMacs as low as $800 (though they were admittedly ultra-wimpy iMac models), and now they've dropped out of that market entirely, at least for the time being. They need some sort of presence in the lower-end, though Apple can't (and shouldn't) try to go toe-to-toe on price with all the Wintel bottom-feeders.
I do think Apple needs something in the $900-$1000 price point, even if it means keeping a version of the classic iMac around a while longer than they otherwise would like.
Slashdot Mirror
Bob Pittman may be the darling of Wall Street, but their decision to dogfood themselves was the kind of shortsighted, Dilbert-esque decision that only a suit with no connection with technical reality could make. I suspect nobody ever bothered to talk to the people who admin the various systems that were replaced - heck, it wouldn't surprise me if the CTO (whoever that is) wasn't even involved.
Even if they had switched in the long term, they tackled this project way too quickly (it's been just over a year since the merger went through) and it's glaringly obvious that they didn't think things through very well. Messaging on that kind of scale (multiple operating companies with differing hardware/OS standards, tens of thousands of employees) is not trivial to implement or manage and the suits upstairs should have either known better or had advisors to listen to who could have told them it was a bad idea.
This'll probably wind up in a business textbook someday in the "how not to integrate merged companies" chapter.
It wasn't quite as bad a disaster as that - PS/2 sold fairly well, but not well enough to kill the cloners. And there was a 386 in the line from the get-go, though ALR and Compaq had released the first 386 PC's a few months prior. The actual release of the PS/2 was in early 1987. Micro Channel was a much more advanced bus than ISA represented - mind you, this was before the whole industry coalesced around the (not yet invented) PCI bus. Feeling the pressure from IBM, the rest of the industry got together and devised EISA (extending ISA to 32-bit goodness and backwards-compatibility) - a decent Micro Channel competitor that carried the clone market for a few years in the interim before Intel pushed PCI out.
The goal was definitely to lock up a new standard, though. At first. IBM offered to license Micro Channel, but at very high royalty rates that effectively left no room for competitiors. OS/2 started out as a vaporware project that relied heavily on Microsoft to manage big chunks of it, and ultimately became IBM's flagship OS and their "open" competition to a rising Microsoft. Windows 3.0, OTOH, started out as a way for Microsoft to hedge their bets against slow adoption of OS/2 - after the first couple of years IBM had opened up to the reality that they needed to support the cloners, too. When Windows took off and the big MS/IBM split happened, Microsoft got to keep the OS/2 3.0 project that was being planned at that point. IBM decided their future was in porting OS/2 to their new Power series chips. Which ultimately fizzled out.
The Microsoft part of the project became Windows NT. OS/2 itself (Warp was a marketroid decision to add the codename to the product) had wonderful Win16 capabilities back in the Windows 3.x days - but Windows 95 came out conveniently after IBM's license to Windows source expired and that was the commercial death of OS/2.
I think the last PS/2 was canned around 1995 or so, maybe a hair later. There were some good products made for the MCA bus, mostly connectivity products. It was a far better bus than ISA, but the market (and IBM) killed it easily.
The legacy that PS/2 left us in the end was mainly the mini-DIN connectors for keyboards and mice. IBM sold a decent number, but not enough to justify a separate line of PC from the mainstream. Apple's really the only folks who have ever pulled off a different standard over the long term.
(This is also a good argument as to why Apple should never go to Intel as chip vendor - IBM had a good alternative OS, a neat box, and a better mousetrap, but couldn't differentiate themselves enough to thrive.)
I may be slightly off on a detail or two, but I think my recollection is fairly clear on this. Feel free to correct specifics, folks!
Interesting. Since 0.98, I've all but dumped IE in favor of Mozilla (I keep up to date on the OmniWeb sneakypeeks, too). Though Mozilla sometimes feels a little bit sluggish, my general experience has been been that Mozilla both renders a little faster than IE and, more importantly - it doesn't block all activities in other windows while it renders.
The one thing I'll say in IE's defense, though, is that when OS X came out it wasn't a bad first cut at a native carbonized browser (OmniWeb was much nicer, but died horribly on lots of sites). The problem is that MS fixed a lot of bugs over the next couple of releases, but they really haven't done that much to improve the browser outside of the basic bugfixes. Mozilla and OmniWeb have both passed it by since then.
BTW, the box I'm using to compare these is a TiBook 667, 768MB RAM, OS X 10.1.3. My wife uses an old iMac (a DV450), and she prefers to use IE.
PGP Desktop is a well-integrated application that has a nice file protection app (PGP disk), makes PGP signing your mail a lot easier (it integrates to most e-mail clients I've used), has a good IPSec VPN component, and runs on Mac and Windows (1 more platform than most products do, though there's no Linux desktop version). NAI never did a very good job of selling the product, though - it was always one of those "semi-orphan" packages. NAI couldn't figure out if it was meant to be a business package or a home use package, and pricing was never set in stone.
Ironically, it's probably an easier sell now than it's ever been, given that organizations are finally getting a little more security-conscious.
GPG is probably the best hope for a cross-platform replacement, but there's still a need for better snazzy front-ends on most platforms (I'm using it on MacOS X) to help Joe Average, and there's no easy PGP VPN or PGP Disk equivalent.
NAI - if anyone's listening, why not re-open the PGP codebase and let the marketplace solve the problem? Nobody wants to buy it, you don't want to sell it, so give it away!
You can't take as many newspapers as you like, but there's no specific limit to how big the newspaper gets. Though there are costs, the big cost is producing the paper (which, of course, is mainly underwritten by the advertisers) itself - page count is a minor factor in determining cost (if it weren't, the price of your newspaper would fluctuate daily).
Cable TV is a pretty good example, though - you pay a tiered rate depending on how much information (number of channels) you wish to consume. Besides that, there are "bonus" features or extras, and that's analogous to pay-per-view programming.
Bandwidth, though, is best suited to flat-rate cost for two reasons - firstly, you do not entirely control how much data is pumped through the pipe, and secondly the system (meaning the Internet) is designed without an infrastructure to handle metered pricing (some individual services/servers can, but not the whole backbone per se). If I provide a pipe of a certain width to a customer, it doesn't inherently cost me any more for the customer to saturate the pipe versus if they just used it occasionally at peak speeds. I just need to make sure my infrastructure is designed in such a way that I can service the customers well enough to retain them and recover my costs if they actually dare to use the resource (bandwidth) they purchase from me.
Slashdot isn't in that kind of position since they are a server/service (they aren't infrastructure, despite what some of us may believe!), and they are in a position to be metered by their ISP as a result.
With taxicabs, the biggest thing you pay for is time, not gas (that's less of a cost). When the taxi drives you 5 miles, during that time they can't go drive anyone else - you are the only income. Though some places do have flat-rate cabs (rides to certain locations are fixed cost).
In a way, a good thing would be comparing the economics of a cab to a bus. The cab takes one person directly where they want to go, at a metered variable price. A city bus also takes you where you want to go, but you share the bus with other people and make stops to pick up and drop off those people on the way - at a fixed price.
Slashdot's economics are more like a cab's, while we surfers are mainly bus riders. If you want to ride in the cab, you have to pay one way or another for how much you use the cab.
It's not a matter of not being able to afford it. I could buy a nice big HDTV and not miss the money (a plasma display, OTOH, would set me back a ways...). It's that I don't see the value proposition for most people.
There will always be for virtually any product, no matter how expensive:
- some people who can afford it
- some people who get enough value from it to justify it
-a few people who need it so badly it's worth any price
But are those enough to make something a commercial success? Often, that's not the case.
Being able to afford something doesn't necessarily make it worthwhile. I (and most of us) can afford a lot of things that have no value, so we don't buy them. I could afford to buy a really nice outdoor gas grill with multiple burners and all sorts of cool stuff. But I don't like to barbecue that much, so I just have a small old Weber charcoal kettle that I use for the one or two times a year that I use it.
But I do have a very expensive over-the-range microwave oven that does about everything you can imagine. I use it very often and get great utility from it, so it's worth the money to me.
I think the TV set is the same kind of thing to most people - a $500 (or less) NTSC set displays broadcast TV fine, is OK for VCR/DVD playback, and is a better value than the $2000 (or up) HDTV. Enthusiasts will disagree, but that's a small percentage of the market.
Personally, I don't like the RPTV's that much. They're usually darker, and I don't think they view as well at angles. But if you're going to go over about 36-40 inches, that's pretty much the only thing short of flat panel.
I agree with you as far as what you get for your $500 not being particularly nice - but a 32" tube isn't bad for TV viewing, even if the set is kinda big. And it's what the average joe can afford.
If you're in the market for a higher-end set, it does make sense to consider HDTV instead, but the market for $1200+ analog sets is a lot smaller to begin with than the market for $500 sets - and the HDTV market is in turn a subset of the smaller premium market.
But your point is spot-on. HDTV is ideal for the heavy DVD user, and many of the early sets have circuitry to improve the sharpness of NTSC video as well, so there is a benefit for those premium users. The problem is that it's a small market, and will probably remain so for quite some time to come.
Why did DVD take off so quickly? Because player prices dropped to around the same prices as VCRs. That fueled the explosion. I think it'll be the same thing with HDTV.
HDTV is still a solution in search of a problem, as far as I can see. When a set + decoder costs over $2k (and up, as opposed to conventional TV sets being well under $500 for a nice one), there's no compelling advantage that makes it worth the extra money. There's a lot better things the average person can do with that money.
The problem is that HDTV is nice for the enthusiast, but useless for most people. Improved quality of DVD playback is nice, but despite the success of the DVD format, typical viewers are not trying to replicate the theater experience at home. Heck, most of them wouldn't know how if they wanted to (and could afford it). I just can't see people who don't know how to set the clock on their VCR being able to find the sweet spot for a 5.1 speaker system.
Does HDTV have a shot? Of course it does. But the networks need to get serious about it (and soon), prices on the equipment need to plummet (no more than a 20% price difference between an HDTV monitor and the equivalent NTSC TV) to the point where folks are willing to shell out the cash, and the issues with cable companies need to be worked out pronto. And consumers need to demand high-quality video, otherwise all we'll wind up getting someday is 4 channels of the same crap on an HDTV frequency. Yippee.
I should be a perfect target customer for HDTV. I'm a technically-oriented person. I make a good living. I have not one, but two DVD players (one is in the bedroom), several computers, surround sound in the living room, and I only have a 27" set to go with it. I ought to be heading for upgrade city, but I'm not.
I've looked longingly at a 40" widescreen set that I see every time I go to Best Buy, but I just can't justify $2200 for a TV set, no matter how hard I try. Other than the DVD film I watch every couple of weeks, there's just no advantage to the big set. One of my friends has a huge widescreen projection HDTV set (he did well in the stock option roulette game), and I've watched movies on it - they look great. But TV looks just as crappy, only bigger. So what's the point? Guys who made a lot with stock options are far from an ideal market, especially nowadays.
Maybe in a couple more years this'll be worth revisiting, but HDTV is dead in the water for now, and justifiably so. There just isn't any real benefit that makes it worth your disposable income - unless you have a ridiculous amount of income to dispose of.
Not to defend EB, but a sales number like that could be because of pre-orders. It's been a long time since I was in the computer retail biz (over 10 years), but that was pretty common back then, and I know a lot of "blockbuster" titles still get pre-sold today.
The "Net" wasn't designed to be a "medium" of any sort, individualistic or not. It was simply a way for users of computer systems to access resources on other systems - a throwback to the days when most serious computers were military and/or academic and resources were scarce and widely scattered. It was also designed to be more reliable than traditional communications methods.
That's pretty much the original design goal, Jon. Everything else, even e-mail (even TCP/IP itself), is just a function that was grafted on to the original design. The Web? An accident, really. Tim Berners-Lee was looking for an easy navigation system for researchers and created the Web. The uses we've come up with for it are something else entirely.
There's also a lot more to the Internet than the Web though, Jon. And things like the specialized communities of Usenet, the P2P file sharing systems like Gnutella, and such add to the experiences you speak of. The Internet has become an entertainment medium, but it's not just about that, even though you write about it as if all Web content is now provided by Disney.
It's not the case at all. All the quirky individual sites still exist, though some have gone and others appeared. There's still communities out there - hell, Slashdot is really one of them. They're more lost in the noise than they were in the days when there were a few hundred websites and they were all listed on Netscape's "What's Cool" page, but you can still find what you want without too much trouble.
So I don't buy this one, Jon. Just because AOL has a lot of users who type with one hand doesn't mean the Net has become a different medium. It's just that not everyone has the same high-minded hopes and lofty goals you do. Most people probably are just looking to read (or watch) news, buy stuff, get some amusement, find people like them to talk to, and (sorry) get their rocks off once in a while. The Net isn't just a place for the elite anymore, and that's fine, because the "elite" can still do what they want to do.
Though that number _includes_ the 33 million AOL users, I think...
So maybe the real number is somewhat less than half?
Seriously, it's obvious at this point that a large number of the population is online to some degree or another, just as it is obvious that broadband use has increased highly in the last couple of years (though not enough to stave off a slew of bankruptcies). The Internet has, for better or worse, gone from just being a playground for those "in the know" to a part of popular culture, with all the dumbing-down that goes along with the change. We just have to deal with it.
We're also probably getting close to the saturation point - I think there will always be about a quarter of the population that doesn't have or necessarily want anything to do with the Internet. So other than people moving to broadband for a few more years, I'd say the days of explosive growth are long gone.
As much as these (and many others non cited in your post) are giants of science, they discovered fundamental principles. Most fundamental science today is still shared in much the same way.
Would Newton and Einstein have been so generous to the world if their discoveries had been readily exploitable for commercial use and financial gain? I'm not so sure. Look at another giant - Edison. On the one hand, he did a tremendous amount of research, but on the other hand he tried to aggressively market his work and was a heavy user of the patent system.
Imagine if Einstein's discoveries led him directly to the design of the first atomic powerplant. I suspect he would have patented the sucker as fast as he could have.
The real issue is that fundamental discoveries (like gravity and E=MC squared) typically aren't the same as applied ones (like OpenGL, Java, and almost anything in computing since the early days). The fundamental discoveries lay the groundwork for the applied discoveries - but the applied discoveries are where the money is.
Not to disagree with your premise (because I also doubt that Amazon is anywhere near out of the woods), but in their defense I'd say that Amazon's costs are also proabaly highest in the holiday quarter. They stock more merchandise directly on-hand, expand their staff to handle the increased volume, and ship more items at promotional rates. They also will generally incur higher advertising costs as well.
The model for retailers seems to be a couple of mediocre quarters, with a big profit during the holidays. Amazon seems to be on their way there, as the losses have been slowing down, but the next year is really the make-or-break year for them, I think.
If their model is to be a catalog reseller, they're screwed. Just look at Fingerhut as a good example. One day they were the shining e-commerce wing of a major brick-and-mortar retailer chain. Now they're being shut down.
I can see LL Bean being a better example, but even they've had tough times. They recently laid off a couple of hundred people, and they've diversified into storefronts and alternative brands (like Freeport Studio for women) to keep the business going. And they're private - Wall Street isn't a factor for them, either.
Well, it differentiates the Pro Macs from the iMac, for the short term. The price has nudged down, and the features have gotten boosted. All this is good.
However, the chipset hasn't been updated yet (ergo no ATA100 or DDR support yet), it's the same FireWire (meaning the newer high-speed FireWire isn't ready for Prime Time yet), and the top-end speed isn't quite as fast as I had hoped/expected. I was thinking the speeds would be more like 933/1000/dual 1133 this time out.
But all in all, it's a good short-term move assuming the G5 is available in the next couple of months. But despite the specs, it reminds me of the original "Yikes!" G4 towers, which were just Yosemite towers tweaked for a G4 to hold the line while Apple got more of the high-speed chips that their real G4 was designed for. Yikes only lasted a few months before the Sawtooth version took over.
This is, I hope, pretty much the same thing.
This is the Palm that they were afraid to release before Xmas? Whoopdee-doo. The one thing it has going for it is a fairly compact form factor relative to other wireless PDA's. But other than that, it's pretty underwhelming and at an expensive price. I'd at least expect to see color for the price.
I mean, to compare it to other wireless platforms, I really don't think it stacks up too well. A Palm Vx/Omnisky (or Go America) unit is less expensive and not much larger (with detachable wireless modem), an iPaq with an expansion sleeve is far more versatile, capable and way faster, and a Blackberry is smaller and easier to use as an e-mail device (the larger x57 has web capabilities similar to Palm's) - they only lack a touch screen. And the big deal is, I guess, that this comes in white?
I had been using Palm devices since the old Pilot 5000 (it replaced a MessagePad), with a Palm III and a Vx in my collection over time. My wife has an M100 - it's a nice, cheap, reasonably rugged PDA for what it is. I've been an adherent to the "simpler is better" school of PDA usage. But a couple of months ago I bought an iPaq 3765, and I started using my Palm less and less. In fact, my Vx hasn't left the cradle in over a month now. The iPaq isn't that much bigger, and I can (and do) use it with an 802.11b card to take advantage of my homenet. Windows CE is klunky, but the 2002 version doesn't suck nearly as bad as my old (free, elsewise I'd never have owned it) HP Jornada did, and I can use it with my Mac now thanks to some slick third-party software. As the Linux distro (Familiar) for the iPaq matures, I'll probably switch to it eventually.
Looking at the new Palm, they just plain seem to have missed the boat. Hopefully the new generation of Palm devices after this one will catch up with the rest of the world, and soon. Palm pretty much invented the modern PDA market, and it's a shame to see them shooting themselves in the foot like this.
No - he's not on the board. Larry Ellison is, though. The list is here, off Apple's corp. investor site. Woz did have a "minister without portfolio"-type position in recent years, though - I'm not sure if he still has it or not.
Please, no! I live and work in Salem, and the last thing I need is someone like him getting on my case about my hacked-up AirPort Base Station!
Though now that I think about it, if he's that sensitive inviting him to my house should help take care of the problem...
You're spot-on, but there's a catch:
Raj knows his co-worker/fellow temps. He forms relationships with them. But there's only a small group (relatively) that he works with. He doesn't know most of the other temps, nor does he know the workers on the other shifts, nor most of the full-timers, or anyone at their other facilities.
He might know _of_ them, but to Raj they aren't part of his world. If something happens to them, it won't really register on his radar screen because he no personal connection with them. This is important - it's part of why the management at HP (or Amazon) can easily deal with cutting workers to boost profits. These workers aren't part of their world. They're just statistics on a P&L sheet. They don't have a direct relationship with the people their fates depend on.
Is this necessarily bad? I'm not sure. I think depersonalization is a necessary evil to go with growth - people only have room for x amount of connections in their own "personal network". managers can only handle a certain number of direct reports on average before things become inefficient (not enough time to maintain the connections or devote enough attention to each person). That's where middle management, sub-groups, and smaller organizational units come into play - to preserve as much of that as possible.
The largest company I've worked for (where I am now) employs 152 people directly. But for the last two years we've also been a part of a much larger "virtual" organization (through a pool with several other insurance companies of equivalent or larger size). Once we leave the cozy confines of my 152-person location, a lot of these issues come into play - decisions have been made that affected people that probably would have been made differently in a smaller company.
That's not all bad here, though. We've formed a lot of official and quasi-official working groups within the combined organization that are as small as possible - the objective being to try whenever feasible to keep decisions from happening in a vacuum and to preserve the personal aspect of working together as much as one can. Has it been perfect? Of course not. But it hasn't been too bad either, thankfully.
In the end, people need to be aware that they are ultimately responsible for their own fates. Raj can go work elsewhere, or go to another part of the country, or learn a skill that will allow him to escape the permatemping world. Or he can settle for what he has now. Some of his co-workers, sadly, will never do better - perhaps a few of them are handling the most they are capable of. As another poster to this thread said when quoting Judge Smails (the reference was from Caddyshack, BTW), "The world needs ditch-diggers, too". But most can eventually go as far as their skills will take them, provided they make sure that the skills they have are always needed enough to ensure relatively high-paying work.
Being a human and a capitalist aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. But the bigger the organization, the tougher it is. People also get torn between their connections to others and their own fates - it's tough for the manager of a temporary workforce to form any lasting attachment to their workers when your own job may depend on being able to dicipline and/or terminate workers on the instructions of the people your own job depends on.
If you're the person in those shoes, and you feel uncomfortable with it, then I'd definitely say you're human.
The Duron _is_ the Athlon - albeit the earlier "T-Bird" version, and with half the cache.
The biggest reason (IMHO) that AMD switched numbering systems once the Athlon XP hit the market is because for the time being, they can't keep up in raw clock speed. We all know that clock speed isn't the only thing in chip architecture (as Hannibal has highlighted so well over at Ars), cache and pipeline depth are also significant - and Athlon more than keeps up with the P4 as a result.
At the low end, clock=clock for more direct comparison, and since the Celery is just a lobotomized P3, the Durons can be marketed against them at their actual clock speeds.
Once AMD is building Athlons on a 0.13 micron process like Intel builds P4 chips, expect the Athlon clock speeds to catch up quickly and the XP "ratings" to conveniently vanish...
Uh, yes I have, unfortunately... Several of the licenses we're under put those kind of burdens on us - and most of the mainframe licenses we hold.
I think the likelihood of a super-restrictive enterprise license is directly proportional to the amount of competition the vendor has and the cost of the software in question.
Our Microsoft Enterprise agreement is similar in some ways, but the trade-off is a low per-seat cost and no need to deal with "activation" or any of that other phone-home crud. We get license keys that can be tracked back to us if they get out, but those keys allow us to install the products in a completely unrestricted form. We have other products that are handled that way, too.
But I do not agree that it should be GPL'd if it was built with public money. Rather, I think that software built with public funds should be given to the public domain. Once released to the public domain, if you want to use the source code in your own proprietary product, though, that's an acceptable re-use - provided that the underlying public source code is never removed from the public record.
It's a question of where the line should be drawn. I believe in the GPL on principle, and I would not shed any tears if all software developed through government funding were GPL. But the forced opening of software that is derived from the GPL'd root program isn't necessarily the best way to go about things. If you release software developed by government grant as PD, then the basic tools are free to the community and there's an opportunity for commercial interests to build upon it - hopefully using an Open Source license at the very least, but perhaps not. At that point it's up to the marketplace to reward companies that keep their software open.
If an institution develops it without using government dollars, what they do with the subsequent code is their business. But what they do with our money is everyone's business. If we don't like what a private company does, we are welcome to not consume their products or services, steering our dollars away from them. But when it's our tax dollars, we do not get the same choice. And I, for one, see a line between people using a free product (obtained out of the public domain) to make money, and people building a profitable product that I can't have, using my tax money to build it. I definitely feel the latter is worse.
I wish I could pay $30 for the cable modem - I do rent my modem ($10/month), but it's still $40/month here even if I own the modem. My parents are served by Cablevision in Connecticut, and they do have the $30/month rate from Optimum Online. Better still - since Cablevision owns the "Nobody Beats The Wiz" electronics chain, they took advantage of a promotion that let them get a $100 gift card when they bought the $100 modem. Net modem cost - $0. We have no such cross-ownership deals in Eastern Massachusetts, where I live.
The local telephone price includes unlimited usage anywhere in MA except for the 413 (Western MA) LATA. No per-minute charges. The long distance price is the average monthly bill. The fee is $4, but usage drives it up, of course. I'm married, and both my wife and I have plenty of friends out-of-state (and all of our families). Between us, that usage is an average month. I mostly communicate via computer (lots o' e-mail), but she uses the phone a lot. And I mean a lot.
As for cable TV, I've tried the antenna. In fact, for the first 7 years I owned my house, I refused to get cable. I finally got tired of crappy reception and gave in. I also get $5 off my cable modem bill for having TV service, too. Otherwise it would be $55. Even at $50 it's still the cheapest broadband I've used thus far.
Now, do I _need_ everything I buy for communications service? Of course not. But I can afford it, and I like some of the conveniences these services give me. The average Slashdot reader is not who AOLTW is thinking of when they set rates. There's a lot of TV addiction out there and people who think nothing of paying $80/month for digital everything cable TV. That's who AOLTW figures will see that $230 bill in the end.
Besides - based on the articles here I read, a lot of the Slashdot readers get their TV by hacking DirecTV dishes... Cost - $0!
I look, for instance, at the menu of services we consume here:
Cable Internet (AT&T) - $50
Local telephone (with all the services but voicemail - Verizon) - $60
Long distance (AT&T) - $50
Cable television (AT&T - local channels only) $14)
Alarm monitoring (ADT) $26
That's $200/month worth of services that are coming in on two wires to my house. And we don't get any of the more advanced cable services - just analog antenna service. If I want analog basic cable, it's another $20. If I want premium channels, the total bill hits that $230 mark and only goes up from there.
What I don't really do at this point, though, is take advantage of any service bundling yet - though AT&T has been pushing real hard in this area to get local and long distance bundled with my cable line. I haven't bitten yet but if I do it'll save me about $15/month. It's just not worth the trouble yet. So I use two wires instead of one.
I have no issue with the total price, so long as they save me money over the cost of buying all the services I need separately from separate vendors. I'll stick to multiple bills if there's no price reason to switch.
I guess the real interesting thing is how much communications takes out of the monthly budget. I look at that $200 figure I cited above, and that doesn't include our cell phone ($35), OmniSky ($29, but it's getting dumped this spring), and my Blackberry ($40, paid by my work). All together, that's a lot of money for communications service of one sort or another. And remember, my cable TV bill is tiny. A lot of people pay for premium services - equivalent to adding my OmniSky to the cable bill.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that the average household communications total bill comes close to that $200 mark already. If AOL starts offering things like security monitoring over their wire as well, the $230 is probably a reasonable goal.
I actually agree with you, pretty much. I think the iMac G4 is pretty close to what an equivalent machine from a top-tier manufacturer would cost (though the equivalent PC will be way ahead in raw CPU clock, of course - but otherwise pretty comparable). It's just that that price point is attainable in the Wintel market - even in stripped machines from the big companies.
The other thing is that Apple has been offering iMacs as low as $800 (though they were admittedly ultra-wimpy iMac models), and now they've dropped out of that market entirely, at least for the time being. They need some sort of presence in the lower-end, though Apple can't (and shouldn't) try to go toe-to-toe on price with all the Wintel bottom-feeders.
I do think Apple needs something in the $900-$1000 price point, even if it means keeping a version of the classic iMac around a while longer than they otherwise would like.