The greatest lie of our market-based system is that time equals money
I'm sure someone else has covered this, but the point is not that
time == money
but that
time != free
, in that the time you spend working on an open source could be spent doing something else and can't ever be gotten back once it is used. Economists will then say the easiest way to quantify this "opportunity cost" [economics-speak] is in monetary units, since you could in their minds exchange money for anything. If you prefer, and some do, you could use a less provocative unit of measure such as "utility units".
Also, and this is secondary, a lot of people (who went to college and read Marx) seem to think that economics and capitalism were "invented" and then imposed on everyone (refering to capitalism's "lies"). Economics is only a science intended to describe how people behave in terms of costs and benefits (not necessarily in monetary terms, don't get excited), and capitalism is the natural system that occurs when nobody imposes any alternative system on you.
Shouldn't broadband be getting cheaper, with improvements in technology?
It's only been around for a couple of years now, dude. The way to lower costs is presumably to increase the size of the network: as the number of users of a given provider grow, the cost per user drops and the provider may then lower prices to further that effect. This has not happened, since most people are perfectly content with AOL service. If they all switched maybe the cost of broadband would decrease to the same level as your typical dial-up account, but that would be a chicken-egg problem.
The new FCC ruling is identical to the Tauzin-Dingell bill a few months back, which was shot down. It affects DSL service only. Regional phone companies have always had to open their lines up to competitors at cost -- since the natural monopoly condition only affects the physical lines, not the phone service itself -- including DSL and ISDN lines. The idea was that DSL service providers should be able to compete with Cable service on equal grounds, without that requirement. Congress didn't buy it, but the FCC did.
What I find most alarming about the comments posted here is that everyone seemed to take the "For the good of humanity" phrase at face value. Since when does the Chinese government care about the good of humanity?
The Chinese system government now resembles fascism much more than communism. That is, it relies on appeals to nationalism and its superiority to legitimize itself. Sound familiar with anything else? They have openly stated that their ambitious space program is an attempt in this aim.
The reaction here is, "What a cool idea. They should go for it!" without, without thinking for a second what the consequences of that action would be.
Good IT people can always find jobs, but with less demand companies won't be willing to pay them more money to separate them from the idiots. Good IT people will get paid less : (.
Don't forget that gross margins are not evenly distributed across all products.
In other words, the margin on an iMac (targeted at more price-sensitive consumers) is probably way, way less than that of a TiBook. So keep that in mind.
Problem with emulation on the mac is, you don't just emulate the OS, you have to emulate the entire 486 chipset such that every single processing instruction has to be translated to PPC on the fly. In other words, it's really, really slow.
The demand for oil will not increase as the price of oil drops due to a decrease in the demand for oil. That makes absolutely, absolutely no sense.
Anyway, the problem is not as simple as just the marginal cost per unit of energy. The problem is that the world economy has already invested a huge amount in oil-based energy consumption which can never be recovered, such as 100+ years of gasoline engine development, millions of individual cars, hundreds of car factories, millions of gas stations, etc. etc. Since the costs are "sunk", to a certain extent the economy will be willing to bear higher costs per unit even if there are cheaper alternatives available.
Furthermore, there are high network externalities in many kinds of energy consumption. In other words, you buy an unleaded gasoline powered car because everyone else does and so there is a sufficient supply of unleaded gasoline distribution and other services to meet your needs. If you really wanted a butane powered car, for instance, you probably wouldn't bother because you would have a lot of trouble finding gas for it. So even if everyone would be better off with butane cars, individually nobody would be the first in line to buy one.
Indeed open source is in some ways better documented, because you can find out exactly what it does.
Sure "in some ways." But that's a pretty weak statement. A few dozen hours of work by a highly-trained professional to munge through the source to figure out how something works is in no ways better than nothing to the average consumer.
There is no such thing as a "norm" in pricing. Assuming there is competition and that search and switch costs are low, competitors will be all too eager to whittle away at that price. Haven't you ever seen any commercials for long distance service? Those prices have been steadily going up since AT&T got broken up, no?
Free software isn't capitalism, at least strictly. Since no money is exchanged, producers have no incentive to produce what consumers demand, just what they derive the most pleasure from producing which is typically for their own consumption. Have you ever noticed that free software is almost invariably a huge pain to install and comes with poor, if any documentation?
Capitalism ensures efficiency because producers have to produce what consumers want. Free software producers only produce what they want themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure someone else has covered this, but the point is not that
but that , in that the time you spend working on an open source could be spent doing something else and can't ever be gotten back once it is used. Economists will then say the easiest way to quantify this "opportunity cost" [economics-speak] is in monetary units, since you could in their minds exchange money for anything. If you prefer, and some do, you could use a less provocative unit of measure such as "utility units".Also, and this is secondary, a lot of people (who went to college and read Marx) seem to think that economics and capitalism were "invented" and then imposed on everyone (refering to capitalism's "lies"). Economics is only a science intended to describe how people behave in terms of costs and benefits (not necessarily in monetary terms, don't get excited), and capitalism is the natural system that occurs when nobody imposes any alternative system on you.
Steve J. said at a stockholder meeting recently that he wanted to do that, but it simply wasn't technically feasible.
It's only been around for a couple of years now, dude. The way to lower costs is presumably to increase the size of the network: as the number of users of a given provider grow, the cost per user drops and the provider may then lower prices to further that effect. This has not happened, since most people are perfectly content with AOL service. If they all switched maybe the cost of broadband would decrease to the same level as your typical dial-up account, but that would be a chicken-egg problem.
The new FCC ruling is identical to the Tauzin-Dingell bill a few months back, which was shot down. It affects DSL service only. Regional phone companies have always had to open their lines up to competitors at cost -- since the natural monopoly condition only affects the physical lines, not the phone service itself -- including DSL and ISDN lines. The idea was that DSL service providers should be able to compete with Cable service on equal grounds, without that requirement. Congress didn't buy it, but the FCC did.
The Chinese system government now resembles fascism much more than communism. That is, it relies on appeals to nationalism and its superiority to legitimize itself. Sound familiar with anything else? They have openly stated that their ambitious space program is an attempt in this aim.
The reaction here is, "What a cool idea. They should go for it!" without, without thinking for a second what the consequences of that action would be.
If you think that good of humanity == surge in Chinese nationalism == illusion of legitimacy for Chinese gov't
Once we have colonies independent of earth, the liklihood of our extinction goes way down. This is a Good Thing(tm)
How could our species' continued existence possibly be a good thing?
Good IT people can always find jobs, but with less demand companies won't be willing to pay them more money to separate them from the idiots. Good IT people will get paid less : (.
why did i have to pick next weekend to be graduating college?
In other words, the margin on an iMac (targeted at more price-sensitive consumers) is probably way, way less than that of a TiBook. So keep that in mind.
Problem with emulation on the mac is, you don't just emulate the OS, you have to emulate the entire 486 chipset such that every single processing instruction has to be translated to PPC on the fly. In other words, it's really, really slow.
Anyway, the problem is not as simple as just the marginal cost per unit of energy. The problem is that the world economy has already invested a huge amount in oil-based energy consumption which can never be recovered, such as 100+ years of gasoline engine development, millions of individual cars, hundreds of car factories, millions of gas stations, etc. etc. Since the costs are "sunk", to a certain extent the economy will be willing to bear higher costs per unit even if there are cheaper alternatives available.
Furthermore, there are high network externalities in many kinds of energy consumption. In other words, you buy an unleaded gasoline powered car because everyone else does and so there is a sufficient supply of unleaded gasoline distribution and other services to meet your needs. If you really wanted a butane powered car, for instance, you probably wouldn't bother because you would have a lot of trouble finding gas for it. So even if everyone would be better off with butane cars, individually nobody would be the first in line to buy one.
Sure "in some ways." But that's a pretty weak statement. A few dozen hours of work by a highly-trained professional to munge through the source to figure out how something works is in no ways better than nothing to the average consumer.
There is no such thing as a "norm" in pricing. Assuming there is competition and that search and switch costs are low, competitors will be all too eager to whittle away at that price. Haven't you ever seen any commercials for long distance service? Those prices have been steadily going up since AT&T got broken up, no?
Capitalism ensures efficiency because producers have to produce what consumers want. Free software producers only produce what they want themselves.