Typography is practically its own branch of science at this point. Yet in all that time, no one has grasped hold of this method of formatting.
Maybe not, but the basic concepts behind it are as old as dirt in technical writing. Any tech writer with any training whatsoever will tell you that blocks of text are bad for comprehension and that breaking things apart into bulleted lists, titled sections, and including interspersed diagrams improves reading comprehension.
This just appears to be an extension on that concept.
That's a good point, I hadn't considered that. It is less of a problem in my neck of the woods at this point in time, so it completely slipped my mind.
If the price goes up 10%/year, compounding annually and starting at $1500/year, then you will recoup the investment vs. a 5% interest rate in 15 years.
Assuming you save $1500 a year after the first year with a $28100 initial investment (and assuming my back-of-the-envelope math is right), it would take you 57 years to beat a 5% annualized rate of return (and assuming no expenses). You could do it in 19 years, however, if you could find a way to get $2400 in savings either directly or by selling energy back.
Okay, let's take zip codes as an example, since you mention it. Now I can't discriminate by region, so there is no reason for someone not to live in a higher insurance risk area for natural disasters, thus raising the rates for the entire country. Whoops, I can't even reduce my risk in a state that is a high insurance risk, because I can't charge a differential premium.
Whoops, also can't charge a differential premium for auto insurance based on your risk of an accident inferred from where you live. Also can't charge a differential premium for males and females (thus dramatically raising the rates for a lower risk group--men then buy better insurance given that they are more likely to have an accident, which raises the outlays for the company, thus further raising the average required insurance rates for everyone above what they would be otherwise).
Let's say that we have an item where for $7 200 items would be demanded, $8 180, $9 150, $10 110, and $11 60. Assume that I can't produce it for less than $7 due to fees, negotiated agreements, or whatever other reasons.
How much should I charge, assuming minimal distribution/creation fees, to maximize my profit?
Well, I'm looking at making the following in revenue, case-by-case:
$1400 $1440 $1350 $1100 $660
In this case, all else being equal, I'd want to sell the product for $8. Sure, I'd lose some customers this way, but the overall revenue is higher. If someone else can undercut me successfully, then all else being equal (this is an important phrase, it comes up a lot in these kinds of discussions), then customers will naturally gravitate towards that individual (this is where the concepts of a perfectly competitive market and market efficiency kick in--competitors can lower the value of "what the market will bear" by affecting that curve).
If I can beat that number selling for less, and all else is equal, then naturally I should sell for less. If I can beat that number selling for more, and all else is equal, then I naturally should charge more unless there is a compelling reason not to. This is a simplified view, of course, but it carries the point: you price an object based on what the market, as a whole, will bear.
You'll note I never said it would be a raving success, only that your points tend to be in error if not outright logical fallacies.
Uh, no. Shiny no longer gets it. Functionality gets it. Why are there so many ugly Treo 650s out there? Because it's cute? We're talking businesses here. Cute lasts about 30 seconds.
Because, of course, the iPod was the most feature-rich digital audio player on the market. It had wireless, more space than the nomad, and many more features, right? The zune is a big hit right now because of all of those extra features? "Shiny" sells--particularly when its coupled with good integration and a good interface, both of which tend to be Apple strong points.
And it renders as fast as Safari does? Egads. Sure, I'm going to browse with no keys and my thumbs. While driving.
I sincerely hope you do not use one of the most dangerous legal weapons while surfing the web at the same time. That said, I have no evidence one way or the other to know how fast it will render. Neither do you.
No, you don't get it. It's pretty easy to snarf a 1G GSM phone. Take your 'logical fallacy' argument and buy a sub to 2600.
First, GSM is by definition 2G ne? Second, you are still committing a logical fallacy. Try again.
Oh yeah, fast enough. A network substrate that can support a blistering 20K/sec. MMmmm. HD on that would be well, a frame per fortnight.
For the purpose of email and a little web surfing, most of which can be done over 801.11b/g? You keep asserting it will be "too slow," but really, the questions are "for what purpose" and "will they have access to a faster network?
Most airports and hotels these days have high speed connections, and hotspots are cropping up everywhere.
Sure. Vista support will come out before iTunes Vista support. Lots of time to work on it. No other projects have been put off for it, either (don't look at that Leopard in the corner). You get sucked in so dearly by PR.
None of the moving projects around mean anything to me in terms of Vista support. You are basing this entire set of assumptions on exactly zero evidence and lots of meaningless supposition, unless you are hiding something you haven't shared yet. Even if it doesn't support it immediately, but picks it up within a couple of months, so what? Vista is not exactly flying off the shelves.
Sync and replace are two different concepts. Outlook is a moving target, if you haven't noticed. Or maybe it'll be an AT&T 'option'. Mmmmm Options.
...and what does the price of tea in China have to do with anything? There are separate questions here: 1) Will it sync with Outlook? 2) Does it matter if it syncs with Outlook? 3) Will it provide a separate equivalent service such that outlook is not required for Calendar/Contact/etc management, which may or may not sync with Outlook? The answer is 1) We do not know yet. 2) To some yes, to some no. I've worked at both kinds of companies. 3) Most certainly. Proclaiming the death of a product you haven't seen for features it may or may not have and which may or may not matter to a sufficiently significant part of the population seems a little premature.
Use as your first clue the shelf space dedicated at the Big Box retailers for battery widgets. Then pull out your imaginary stats.
Actually that tells me nothing re this product. There are two major reasons for having interchangeable batteries: 1) To extend battery life. For this there are plenty of attachments for the iPod which extend battery life, if such is needed for this device I'm sure there will be at least a few. 2) When a battery dies. In which case any reasonably competent tech should be able to change it, or you will undoubtedly be able to pay a small fee to apple to
1) it's not even a 3.5g phone-- it's a 1st generation phone
Which won't matter a whit for most businesses out there. "Shiny" will matter.
2) there's little room for third party apps unless you want to play Apple's usary for the privilege
Full featured web browser.
3) the phone has inherent security problems because of #1 (think old GSM phones and how easily they're cracked)
Your logic is truly dizzying. First, saying that "its new, and thus will have inherent security problems" is a logical fallacy. There will no doubt be bugs, but I haven't seen any evidence that they won't be easily fixable software bugs instead of 'inherent security problems.' Second, while there are certainly companies out there that care about security, very few are likely to think in terms of 'its new, thus security will be a problem.' They will ask if the feature list for security matches up with their requirements and probably leave it at that. Those that care about the stability of the platform will wait, but that has nothing to do with security.
4) you can't get high speed anything on the phone, not even GPRS speed, let alone UMTS/Edge, or even something reasonably kewl
The only question that matters in this regard is: "will it be fast enough." "Something reasonably 'kewl'" does not fit into it.
5) No Outlook. No SmackBerry. And I'm only betting here, but no Vista support (iTunes-- hello???)
Considering when it comes out, I am willing to bet on Vista support. iTunes has fairly well understood problems with running on Vista, none of which I can think of will apply to the iPhone. They also have several more months to work on it, and most environments don't seem to be switching to vista anyways.
A lack of Outlook support is more of a problem, but also not guaranteed to be the case. It may also not be that big of a deal: some companies it will matter and in some it will not, and it does promise to sync with the computer.
6) Poorly designed UI-- no key depression feedback as there are no keys; and no 'say command' apps in this generation
You are kidding, right?
7) Can't get at the battery??!!??? Who are these guys fooling???
I would love to see stats on how many people, percentage wise, actually ever change the batter on their phone. How many among business users would also be an interesting stat.
8) Can't change the SIM!!!!!! Imagine, every EU roamer will throw the iPhone under a train!
Why would anyone buy advertisements that they knew could be easily bypassed?
They seem to buy television advertising space all of the time, despite that it can be easily skipped or ignored or, in some cases, circumvented entirely by downloading from the iTS or a similar service. They do it because it can be less trouble to watch the add than to skip it.
Figures, I would copy the wrong line when I was copying it >_>
It required the addition of "This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors." That was the line that was rescinded.
BSD does not require attribution (in fact, that clause was specifically removed.)
From the BSD License:
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
That screams "requires attribution" to me. The line you are referring to, which was removed in 1999, is as follows:
Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
First, MP3 is embroiled in multiple licensing and patent issues that make it legally more murky than AAC. Second, as you point out, AAC is superior technically to mp3 while still being an open standard. It has a standardized tagging system, is better at lower bitrates, more channels, etc. All of which make it significantly more desirable than mp3 from the standpoint of a content provider, as well as from our standpoint as consumers.
Oh, and stop using betamax as a comparison point. Please, just stop it. Betamax lost the format war more because of bad marketing, licensing, and format confusion than because of lockin. Even to the degree that it could be path dependency, such is not a relevant comparison point here since AAC is already a widely adopted standard (not as widely as mp3, I'll grant, but I'll ask one simple question: what percentage of players in the hands of consumers can play AAC? Considering that it includes the iPod, the Zune, the PSP, and a great many phones its probably quite high).
The product will be offered as a "premium" variety, so it should be easy to distinguish what is and is not being offered at the higher bitrate/without DRM.
I imagine Apple will probably make it quite easy to search "only premium (and thus DRM free) content" as well.
It will have a higher encoding (256 kbps), so that means it will cost Apple more to store it and more in bandwidth charges. Since they also probably have to product differentiation for contractual reasons, this is a way to keep the other labels from screaming bloody murder (it offers a carrot instead of just a stick for bringing the other labels on board).
Second, I tried PureTracks for a while, and having DRM content mixed with non-drm content is a real pain if you are only looking for non-drm content.
Just because PureTracks has a sucky interface for it does not mean that Apple will.
1) How many of those vulnerabilities on MacOS X are impossible to exploit?
2) How many of them deal with applications which are bundled but disabled by default (e.g., Apache, OpenSSH)?
3) What constitutes a "critical" vulnerability? What is the relative threat level?
4) How many of those exploits were "in the wild" in terms of use?
Your method of generating "unpatched days" is also suspect. First, severity doesn't factor into the number of days and is a *really* bad multiplier in this case. It exaggerates without providing any useful information.
Second, if I have a trivial "vulnerability" that is impossible to exploit and a real show stopper arrive on my desk at the same time, and I fix the critical one first but let the other linger for 4 months, it gives me an average right between the two... despite that one of them was a trivial issue that never gets exploited in the wild.
My competitor, on the other hand, fixes the trivial bug first and the critical bug in two months. In the meantime an exploit goes into the wild. His "average" is better than mine and he'll show up as better using the pseudometrics you are using with multipliers. Which is more secure?
Attempting to generate bad metrics from bad metrics doesn't seem like the way to go here.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not, but the basic concepts behind it are as old as dirt in technical writing. Any tech writer with any training whatsoever will tell you that blocks of text are bad for comprehension and that breaking things apart into bulleted lists, titled sections, and including interspersed diagrams improves reading comprehension.
This just appears to be an extension on that concept.
That's a good point, I hadn't considered that. It is less of a problem in my neck of the woods at this point in time, so it completely slipped my mind.
If the price goes up 10%/year, compounding annually and starting at $1500/year, then you will recoup the investment vs. a 5% interest rate in 15 years.
Assuming you save $1500 a year after the first year with a $28100 initial investment (and assuming my back-of-the-envelope math is right), it would take you 57 years to beat a 5% annualized rate of return (and assuming no expenses). You could do it in 19 years, however, if you could find a way to get $2400 in savings either directly or by selling energy back.
You have no clue how insurance works, do you?
Okay, let's take zip codes as an example, since you mention it. Now I can't discriminate by region, so there is no reason for someone not to live in a higher insurance risk area for natural disasters, thus raising the rates for the entire country. Whoops, I can't even reduce my risk in a state that is a high insurance risk, because I can't charge a differential premium.
Whoops, also can't charge a differential premium for auto insurance based on your risk of an accident inferred from where you live. Also can't charge a differential premium for males and females (thus dramatically raising the rates for a lower risk group--men then buy better insurance given that they are more likely to have an accident, which raises the outlays for the company, thus further raising the average required insurance rates for everyone above what they would be otherwise).
To blatantly steal an example.
Let's say that we have an item where for $7 200 items would be demanded, $8 180, $9 150, $10 110, and $11 60. Assume that I can't produce it for less than $7 due to fees, negotiated agreements, or whatever other reasons.
How much should I charge, assuming minimal distribution/creation fees, to maximize my profit?
Well, I'm looking at making the following in revenue, case-by-case:
$1400
$1440
$1350
$1100
$660
In this case, all else being equal, I'd want to sell the product for $8. Sure, I'd lose some customers this way, but the overall revenue is higher. If someone else can undercut me successfully, then all else being equal (this is an important phrase, it comes up a lot in these kinds of discussions), then customers will naturally gravitate towards that individual (this is where the concepts of a perfectly competitive market and market efficiency kick in--competitors can lower the value of "what the market will bear" by affecting that curve).
If I can beat that number selling for less, and all else is equal, then naturally I should sell for less. If I can beat that number selling for more, and all else is equal, then I naturally should charge more unless there is a compelling reason not to. This is a simplified view, of course, but it carries the point: you price an object based on what the market, as a whole, will bear.
Yes, its amazing if you steal something how cheaply you can then sell it for.
Less flippantly: an item is worth what the market will pay for it.
You'll note I never said it would be a raving success, only that your points tend to be in error if not outright logical fallacies.
Because, of course, the iPod was the most feature-rich digital audio player on the market. It had wireless, more space than the nomad, and many more features, right? The zune is a big hit right now because of all of those extra features? "Shiny" sells--particularly when its coupled with good integration and a good interface, both of which tend to be Apple strong points.
I sincerely hope you do not use one of the most dangerous legal weapons while surfing the web at the same time. That said, I have no evidence one way or the other to know how fast it will render. Neither do you.
First, GSM is by definition 2G ne? Second, you are still committing a logical fallacy. Try again.
For the purpose of email and a little web surfing, most of which can be done over 801.11b/g? You keep asserting it will be "too slow," but really, the questions are "for what purpose" and "will they have access to a faster network?
Most airports and hotels these days have high speed connections, and hotspots are cropping up everywhere.
None of the moving projects around mean anything to me in terms of Vista support. You are basing this entire set of assumptions on exactly zero evidence and lots of meaningless supposition, unless you are hiding something you haven't shared yet. Even if it doesn't support it immediately, but picks it up within a couple of months, so what? Vista is not exactly flying off the shelves.
...and what does the price of tea in China have to do with anything? There are separate questions here: 1) Will it sync with Outlook? 2) Does it matter if it syncs with Outlook? 3) Will it provide a separate equivalent service such that outlook is not required for Calendar/Contact/etc management, which may or may not sync with Outlook? The answer is 1) We do not know yet. 2) To some yes, to some no. I've worked at both kinds of companies. 3) Most certainly. Proclaiming the death of a product you haven't seen for features it may or may not have and which may or may not matter to a sufficiently significant part of the population seems a little premature.
Actually that tells me nothing re this product. There are two major reasons for having interchangeable batteries: 1) To extend battery life. For this there are plenty of attachments for the iPod which extend battery life, if such is needed for this device I'm sure there will be at least a few. 2) When a battery dies. In which case any reasonably competent tech should be able to change it, or you will undoubtedly be able to pay a small fee to apple to
Eclipse w/ PyDev is fairly killer and not difficult to set up. Objective-C w/ XCode and Interface Builder is also very nice to work with.
Which won't matter a whit for most businesses out there. "Shiny" will matter.
Full featured web browser.
Your logic is truly dizzying. First, saying that "its new, and thus will have inherent security problems" is a logical fallacy. There will no doubt be bugs, but I haven't seen any evidence that they won't be easily fixable software bugs instead of 'inherent security problems.' Second, while there are certainly companies out there that care about security, very few are likely to think in terms of 'its new, thus security will be a problem.' They will ask if the feature list for security matches up with their requirements and probably leave it at that. Those that care about the stability of the platform will wait, but that has nothing to do with security.
The only question that matters in this regard is: "will it be fast enough." "Something reasonably 'kewl'" does not fit into it.
Considering when it comes out, I am willing to bet on Vista support. iTunes has fairly well understood problems with running on Vista, none of which I can think of will apply to the iPhone. They also have several more months to work on it, and most environments don't seem to be switching to vista anyways.
A lack of Outlook support is more of a problem, but also not guaranteed to be the case. It may also not be that big of a deal: some companies it will matter and in some it will not, and it does promise to sync with the computer.
You are kidding, right?
I would love to see stats on how many people, percentage wise, actually ever change the batter on their phone. How many among business users would also be an interesting stat.
Which matters for most US-based businesses why?
How many viruses are in the wild for OS X?
They seem to buy television advertising space all of the time, despite that it can be easily skipped or ignored or, in some cases, circumvented entirely by downloading from the iTS or a similar service. They do it because it can be less trouble to watch the add than to skip it.
I seem to recall they were making those claims with exactly zero evidence from Apple whatsoever.
Comparing this to the constant cycle of delays and dropped features that vista went through is disingenuous.
Could we have at least one discussion on this without the words "But Clinton!" or any variant on the theme?
The iPod was a wild success before the iTMS. What made it so was the form factor, the ease of use, and clean software integration.
Every stat I've heard only supports this. The iTMS is supportive because of its ease of use and integration, but not because of FairPlay.
Figures, I would copy the wrong line when I was copying it >_>
It required the addition of "This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors." That was the line that was rescinded.
From the BSD License:
That screams "requires attribution" to me. The line you are referring to, which was removed in 1999, is as follows:
At least in terms of encoding vs. those purchased from the iTS:
An unencumbered AAC file has the ending m4a.
An encumbered one has the ending m4p.
1) Because the licensing of mp3s is a mess compared to AAC, which is an open standard with much cleaner and easier to understand licensing.
2) AAC offers technical advantages to MP3s that are not insignificant (not to mention a saner tagging scheme).
3) Most players currently in the hands of the market (which is dominated by the iPod) play AACs and not ogg.
This may be a shock, I know, but you != the market.
What percentage of the players currently in use support AAC?
Not the ones in you and your friends personal collections, what percentage of them in the market?
First, MP3 is embroiled in multiple licensing and patent issues that make it legally more murky than AAC. Second, as you point out, AAC is superior technically to mp3 while still being an open standard. It has a standardized tagging system, is better at lower bitrates, more channels, etc. All of which make it significantly more desirable than mp3 from the standpoint of a content provider, as well as from our standpoint as consumers.
Oh, and stop using betamax as a comparison point. Please, just stop it. Betamax lost the format war more because of bad marketing, licensing, and format confusion than because of lockin. Even to the degree that it could be path dependency, such is not a relevant comparison point here since AAC is already a widely adopted standard (not as widely as mp3, I'll grant, but I'll ask one simple question: what percentage of players in the hands of consumers can play AAC? Considering that it includes the iPod, the Zune, the PSP, and a great many phones its probably quite high).
It was like beep beep beep...
Did you even remember to add an optical drive to that?
The product will be offered as a "premium" variety, so it should be easy to distinguish what is and is not being offered at the higher bitrate/without DRM.
I imagine Apple will probably make it quite easy to search "only premium (and thus DRM free) content" as well.
It will have a higher encoding (256 kbps), so that means it will cost Apple more to store it and more in bandwidth charges. Since they also probably have to product differentiation for contractual reasons, this is a way to keep the other labels from screaming bloody murder (it offers a carrot instead of just a stick for bringing the other labels on board).
Just because PureTracks has a sucky interface for it does not mean that Apple will.
1) How many of those vulnerabilities on MacOS X are impossible to exploit?
2) How many of them deal with applications which are bundled but disabled by default (e.g., Apache, OpenSSH)?
3) What constitutes a "critical" vulnerability? What is the relative threat level?
4) How many of those exploits were "in the wild" in terms of use?
Your method of generating "unpatched days" is also suspect. First, severity doesn't factor into the number of days and is a *really* bad multiplier in this case. It exaggerates without providing any useful information.
Second, if I have a trivial "vulnerability" that is impossible to exploit and a real show stopper arrive on my desk at the same time, and I fix the critical one first but let the other linger for 4 months, it gives me an average right between the two... despite that one of them was a trivial issue that never gets exploited in the wild.
My competitor, on the other hand, fixes the trivial bug first and the critical bug in two months. In the meantime an exploit goes into the wild. His "average" is better than mine and he'll show up as better using the pseudometrics you are using with multipliers. Which is more secure?
Attempting to generate bad metrics from bad metrics doesn't seem like the way to go here.