We Americans tend to react with great vigor, when the machine does not give us our food or coins back. Additionally, due to the denominations of coins America uses, it is difficult to sell things of value more than a dollar from a vending machine. Bill acceptors rarely take bills that are creased badly. Also, I would guess that American labor is cheaper than Japanese and European labor. Which is why its cheaper to staff a convience store than set up a bank of vending machines.
That is what I learned to type on, I loved the reveal codes command, which allowed you to view the formatting characters, it made editing much easier than current WYSIWYG editors. I think it was 4 or 5, ugliest thing on the planet, but you could customize the colors, so later typers couldn't use it. I found an old hard drive that still had a copy, it was wonderfully nostalgic to fire up that word processor, even if I could barely read it in the tiny window on my 16000x1200 desktop.
Not so with a patent, as a prior poster explained (I cannot find the orignial post, sorry), a patent is the legally closest thing to physical property in the I.P. world, just because you let your neighbor borrow something from you, does not relinquish your right to that object if someone else steals it.
192 kbps Ogg? I usually encode mine at quality level 8 which usually ends up varying between 192 and 256 kbps last time I checked, and it is easy to hear the difference between the ogg and the CD. Especially in the sub 50Hz range or quick non repetitive instruments like flutes, violin, some drums, oggs are good, but not the equal of a CD, at least on my stereo. I don't even have that much of an audiophile system, Aiwa CD, Technics receiver, 4 Paradigm Titans and a Paradigm sub.
The funny part of this, is that the after aid prices for those colleges has grown at about the rate of inflation for the past decade or two. I think US News' rating took tuition into account when determining their rankings.
Just like if any of us open up price watch and saw 2.8 GHz P4 for $100 from someone you have never heard of, would you buy? If you did buy, would you be watching your credit card/bank account/paypal closely to make sure you got charged the right amount, and would you examine the processor closely to ensure it was correct? When something is far from the norm humans tend to get suspicious of a rip-off. I don't mind saving 10-20%, but saving 60+% for no apparent reason rases my hackles.
Ads on slashdot, I hear they are cheap now, if you want a significant developer base to see them, this might not be a bad way, I occasionally click on them.
That is one of the reasons they have the monopoly that they do, they see it as a cheap investment in ensuring that there is lots of software for Windows. If you show Microsoft that you develop on your own, and are a little bit creative (being a poor student helps here), you can get copies of most of their development tools, at least at a greatly reduced rate.
I had Quake III without eye candy running fine on my PII 266 with 256 MB Ram and a GeForce2 MX, in large open rooms with more than a dozen players it would bog down, but other than that it was fine (30+ fps).
I think you have to get the Xeon version of the P4. They are pretty pricy, even on the grey market, but are more avalible than their P3 predicessors were to system builders. Of course all the major manufacturers sell P4 Xeon systems, but one with a few bells and whistles will cost you at least $3,000 last time I checked. You could probably build one yourself for a little more than a Dual Athlon, but the SuperMicro boards from Broadcom are usually a little nicer than the ones from Tyan.
If you decide to go with dual P4s don't try to get a bargin on remanufactured dell boards, they look cheap, but you need Dell's case, powersupply, and VRMs to make them work, as they have a special connector. The VRMs are cheap, but the case/powersupply are a single unit, and is pretty pricey.
It usually involves a nasty proxy battle, that is between current manamgement and a wealthy investor (who came up with the idea of liquidating the company for its cash horde). For those who do not know, proxy battles are what HP went through prior to the Compaq merger. Management does not usually want to do this, because it means losing your job, and you have to give up your company's dream, which most executives hopefully believe. The proxy battle is between managment's chosen directors, who would be against the liquidation, and one or several (in this case three) large shareholders who ususally buy a big stake at low prices in the hope of liquidating and making money on the cash payment over their cost.
The hard part about this for investors, is estimating how much cash will be spent by the company fighting the proxy battle, and on severance, lease termination clauses, etc. These can bleed the cash position enough so that the investor who bought a large stake, to accomplish the liquidation, loses money. The last one I recall, was Buffett bought up a REIT, sold all the properties, and distributed the cash, share holders made a pretty penny, almost 30% in about half a year.
Not knowing anything about the congressman from NC, I would guess he is just marking time to get to a better committee. Unless he has sufficient seniority to have some choice, in that case he either feels that the increased campaign contributions that can come from a media committee outweigh the contributions/votes that could come from a committee that was more directly tied to NC. Media companies are more consolidated, which increases costs to free riders. However the above is simply a guess, made by looking at the possible incetives.
What exactly does visio do that is so special, I won a copy at a Microsoft presentation about a year ago, and haven't seen any use for it. Our PHB uses it to layout prospective buildings, guy really should have been an architect. However, I don't see how its better than other CAD software, what am I missing?
The chairs are elected positions, which usually end up being appointed by each party, ususlly on seniority. People with an interest can usually get a committee that they wish to, with the execption if House Ways & Means, House Rules, Senate Finance, and Both Oversight there are others but they are similarly powerful committees. Those are the ones that usually decide funding for a large part of the government, so everyone wants to be on them. The newly elected congresswoman, if she were to win the election would not inherit the commitees of the outgoing congressman, since they usually have quite a bit less seniority. Also since the senate has fewer commitees, senators ususally serve on several, while house memebers only have a few committees they sit.
I think the damages were around 20 million, while OJ had considerably less than that, the judgement was designed to ensure that OJ would not profit from selling his story after the fact.
DeTocqueville said "America will be great until it ceases to be good." I think it was Marx or Lenin who said the one about voting oursevles bread.
Re:If songs were a quarter... (Revenue!=Profit)
on
Napster Not To Blame
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· Score: 2
I have not seen any studies that tried to measure the elasticity of demand for music, but since there are not many new companies offering music at this price, I doubt it is 1. It is probably between, 1.5 and 2 over that large a price range. Things that are not neccessities are unlikely to have elasticities below 1 (meaning you spend more of your income on them as prices increase, food staples are a good example of this) and as you move toward the extreems of demand curves constant elasticites do not hold. (Demand curves become more elastic as you lower prices, because you usually don't need an infinite number of anything.)
Also, music still isn't free to produce, if you release 5 times as much music, its going to cost you five times as much to produce. While production costs are still low, that much of an increase is going to eat into your profits. Keep in mind the only part of the overhead you removed with online distribution was the wholesale and retail parts, while they are costly, they are not 75% of the cost of your music. You would probably have to buy more than 100 songs before profits would be similar.
I think online distribution is only really an improvment for less known groups that already have low enough overhead that $0.25 per song is enough to provide a reasonable profit.
They also got the end of the CD replacement cycle boom, as users across the spectrum finished replacing all of their old tapes and LPs with CDs. I recall an article from 1996 or 97 that was predicting a really poor outlook for the music companies then. That was long before anyone, but a few FTPers were swapping really poor quality songs.
I would guess that your lack of downloads can be attributed to several factors besides relative popularity. First, most classical music fans are likely to be on average wealthier and less technical than your average bubble gum pop, hip hop, or rap fan. Second, classical music is less forgiving to bad compression. While I would guess that your rips are probably pretty high data rate, and sound good, but I prefer to buy a CD than risk someone's 64 kbps stream of "The Four Seasons." Even a casual listener could tell the difference between a quality 8 ogg and a CD. Wealthier listers are also more likely to go to the symphony or get SA-CDs, vinyl, or other high fidelity mediums. Also the time it takes to download a high bit rate stream it is getting close to the time reqired to rip your own copy.
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We Americans tend to react with great vigor, when the machine does not give us our food or coins back. Additionally, due to the denominations of coins America uses, it is difficult to sell things of value more than a dollar from a vending machine. Bill acceptors rarely take bills that are creased badly. Also, I would guess that American labor is cheaper than Japanese and European labor. Which is why its cheaper to staff a convience store than set up a bank of vending machines.
That is what I learned to type on, I loved the reveal codes command, which allowed you to view the formatting characters, it made editing much easier than current WYSIWYG editors. I think it was 4 or 5, ugliest thing on the planet, but you could customize the colors, so later typers couldn't use it. I found an old hard drive that still had a copy, it was wonderfully nostalgic to fire up that word processor, even if I could barely read it in the tiny window on my 16000x1200 desktop.
Not so with a patent, as a prior poster explained (I cannot find the orignial post, sorry), a patent is the legally closest thing to physical property in the I.P. world, just because you let your neighbor borrow something from you, does not relinquish your right to that object if someone else steals it.
192 kbps Ogg? I usually encode mine at quality level 8 which usually ends up varying between 192 and 256 kbps last time I checked, and it is easy to hear the difference between the ogg and the CD. Especially in the sub 50Hz range or quick non repetitive instruments like flutes, violin, some drums, oggs are good, but not the equal of a CD, at least on my stereo. I don't even have that much of an audiophile system, Aiwa CD, Technics receiver, 4 Paradigm Titans and a Paradigm sub.
The funny part of this, is that the after aid prices for those colleges has grown at about the rate of inflation for the past decade or two. I think US News' rating took tuition into account when determining their rankings.
Just like if any of us open up price watch and saw 2.8 GHz P4 for $100 from someone you have never heard of, would you buy? If you did buy, would you be watching your credit card/bank account/paypal closely to make sure you got charged the right amount, and would you examine the processor closely to ensure it was correct? When something is far from the norm humans tend to get suspicious of a rip-off. I don't mind saving 10-20%, but saving 60+% for no apparent reason rases my hackles.
Ads on slashdot, I hear they are cheap now, if you want a significant developer base to see them, this might not be a bad way, I occasionally click on them.
That is one of the reasons they have the monopoly that they do, they see it as a cheap investment in ensuring that there is lots of software for Windows. If you show Microsoft that you develop on your own, and are a little bit creative (being a poor student helps here), you can get copies of most of their development tools, at least at a greatly reduced rate.
I had Quake III without eye candy running fine on my PII 266 with 256 MB Ram and a GeForce2 MX, in large open rooms with more than a dozen players it would bog down, but other than that it was fine (30+ fps).
I think you have to get the Xeon version of the P4. They are pretty pricy, even on the grey market, but are more avalible than their P3 predicessors were to system builders. Of course all the major manufacturers sell P4 Xeon systems, but one with a few bells and whistles will cost you at least $3,000 last time I checked. You could probably build one yourself for a little more than a Dual Athlon, but the SuperMicro boards from Broadcom are usually a little nicer than the ones from Tyan.
If you decide to go with dual P4s don't try to get a bargin on remanufactured dell boards, they look cheap, but you need Dell's case, powersupply, and VRMs to make them work, as they have a special connector. The VRMs are cheap, but the case/powersupply are a single unit, and is pretty pricey.
Hasn't Moore's law been pretty accurate at predicting processor speeds, as well? In addition to hard drive densities, and other micro technologies.
It usually involves a nasty proxy battle, that is between current manamgement and a wealthy investor (who came up with the idea of liquidating the company for its cash horde). For those who do not know, proxy battles are what HP went through prior to the Compaq merger. Management does not usually want to do this, because it means losing your job, and you have to give up your company's dream, which most executives hopefully believe. The proxy battle is between managment's chosen directors, who would be against the liquidation, and one or several (in this case three) large shareholders who ususally buy a big stake at low prices in the hope of liquidating and making money on the cash payment over their cost.
The hard part about this for investors, is estimating how much cash will be spent by the company fighting the proxy battle, and on severance, lease termination clauses, etc. These can bleed the cash position enough so that the investor who bought a large stake, to accomplish the liquidation, loses money. The last one I recall, was Buffett bought up a REIT, sold all the properties, and distributed the cash, share holders made a pretty penny, almost 30% in about half a year.
Well, I thinks so Brain, but me and Pipi Longstockings? I mean, what would the children look like.
Not knowing anything about the congressman from NC, I would guess he is just marking time to get to a better committee. Unless he has sufficient seniority to have some choice, in that case he either feels that the increased campaign contributions that can come from a media committee outweigh the contributions/votes that could come from a committee that was more directly tied to NC. Media companies are more consolidated, which increases costs to free riders. However the above is simply a guess, made by looking at the possible incetives.
We had a fraternity with a party that was devoted to dropping stuff, mostly electronics, off of their 4 story building.
What exactly does visio do that is so special, I won a copy at a Microsoft presentation about a year ago, and haven't seen any use for it. Our PHB uses it to layout prospective buildings, guy really should have been an architect. However, I don't see how its better than other CAD software, what am I missing?
The chairs are elected positions, which usually end up being appointed by each party, ususlly on seniority. People with an interest can usually get a committee that they wish to, with the execption if House Ways & Means, House Rules, Senate Finance, and Both Oversight there are others but they are similarly powerful committees. Those are the ones that usually decide funding for a large part of the government, so everyone wants to be on them. The newly elected congresswoman, if she were to win the election would not inherit the commitees of the outgoing congressman, since they usually have quite a bit less seniority. Also since the senate has fewer commitees, senators ususally serve on several, while house memebers only have a few committees they sit.
I think the damages were around 20 million, while OJ had considerably less than that, the judgement was designed to ensure that OJ would not profit from selling his story after the fact.
That's because insightful is flamebait the moderator agrees with, and those of us that browse at -1 are a small and mellow lot.
Criminal acts are one of the few things that can, but do not have to pierce the corporate veil and allow debts to carry through to owners.
DeTocqueville said "America will be great until it ceases to be good." I think it was Marx or Lenin who said the one about voting oursevles bread.
I have not seen any studies that tried to measure the elasticity of demand for music, but since there are not many new companies offering music at this price, I doubt it is 1. It is probably between, 1.5 and 2 over that large a price range. Things that are not neccessities are unlikely to have elasticities below 1 (meaning you spend more of your income on them as prices increase, food staples are a good example of this) and as you move toward the extreems of demand curves constant elasticites do not hold. (Demand curves become more elastic as you lower prices, because you usually don't need an infinite number of anything.)
Also, music still isn't free to produce, if you release 5 times as much music, its going to cost you five times as much to produce. While production costs are still low, that much of an increase is going to eat into your profits. Keep in mind the only part of the overhead you removed with online distribution was the wholesale and retail parts, while they are costly, they are not 75% of the cost of your music. You would probably have to buy more than 100 songs before profits would be similar.
I think online distribution is only really an improvment for less known groups that already have low enough overhead that $0.25 per song is enough to provide a reasonable profit.
They also got the end of the CD replacement cycle boom, as users across the spectrum finished replacing all of their old tapes and LPs with CDs. I recall an article from 1996 or 97 that was predicting a really poor outlook for the music companies then. That was long before anyone, but a few FTPers were swapping really poor quality songs.
I would guess that your lack of downloads can be attributed to several factors besides relative popularity. First, most classical music fans are likely to be on average wealthier and less technical than your average bubble gum pop, hip hop, or rap fan. Second, classical music is less forgiving to bad compression. While I would guess that your rips are probably pretty high data rate, and sound good, but I prefer to buy a CD than risk someone's 64 kbps stream of "The Four Seasons." Even a casual listener could tell the difference between a quality 8 ogg and a CD. Wealthier listers are also more likely to go to the symphony or get SA-CDs, vinyl, or other high fidelity mediums. Also the time it takes to download a high bit rate stream it is getting close to the time reqired to rip your own copy.
Slate is free, they have a lot of ads, but no subscription, or am I missing part of it?