Microsoft's business isn't operating systems (most of their customers don't know that's what they are selling) they actually sell a marketplace. They offer developers the largest potential market of users, and users the largest potential market of compatible software.
Like all infastructure, market places are exceedingly valuable businesses.
Because Microsoft understands this they guard against all threats to their marketplace vigilantly. When Netscape proposed to replace them they essentially did everything they could to stop them (even breaking the law).
Google is now the most likely to challenge them in delivering a better market for developers to deliver software products to users. Microsoft is aware of this and will pour bilions into choking off Google's current revenue stream (just as they did with Netscape) to prevent them from developing a competing market (as the market works best if there is only one to use).
Piracy (albeit more high tech than the old kind) is a fairly major problem in certain parts of the world, the straights of Malacca in particular. They board from small speedboats carrying hand or very light weaponry and typically target the containers that have the good stuff, they also go after crew valuables.
Re:right back at ya, fascisst pig!
on
EA Spouse Outed
·
· Score: 1
I think most people would rather have a job, humans are wired to appreciate accomplishments and pretty much need to have a useful task (the Nazis did experments in the death camps and within weeks of being given an obviously pointless job all the particpants had killed themsselves). I do tire of the rolling out of the relativly rare heartbreaking stories when by all accounts I've seen the majority are not nearly as provacative (case workers and auditors have a ton of cases that are sad because there is no effort on the part of the recipients to do much of anything).
It's not so much that I dislike helping others, but the execution of how we accomplish it doesn't work very well at all. Your friend really only needs the government's medical insurance not living expenses, unfortunatly they seem to be tied so she is stuck. That's what I get tired of, all these rules designed to fix the last implimentation of the rules creates entire classes of people who do nothing but game the new set of rules (not just welfare, government consulting/contracting, tax code). Those are all require effort but add little to the overall productivity of society. That's where my issue lies.
I'd rather see social saftey nets be a localized service rather than a federalized service. Even if less efficient the controls would be much better.
Go smack your economics teacher in the head and demand a refund. Tell them to make you listen next time. Demand is measured along a curve, in any market (diamonds, water, there is a maximum that Bill Gates would pay for a single produced item, then as the price declines more and more people are willing to purchase the item, continuing until the last person is so overly satisfied that even they would not pay a fraction penny for an additional unit. Supply and demand are matching in that market place as long as there is even a single transaction.
Now you bring up a second market that sells at a lower price but carries additional risk. Which some users percieve as having less cost than $1. This is the same as saying that because I can buy a DVD player from a crackhead for $20 there is not a market in legitimately traded DVD players. It's still the same market there's just a discount associated with the risk bundled in the grey (or black) market transactions. People can evaluate the risk and potential cost and choose to pay more with no risk or less with an element of risk bundled in. The risk isn't entirely being sued, its also the risk of poor data quality (think if the whole file was just goatse images), which is non-zero.
I think what you meant was that a large portion of music customers price those risks at well below a dollar, but no one really knows what the volume is on pirated sites (I'd be nothing more than guessing that P2P distributes far more songs than iTunes). Even if the grey market were larger, it seems likely that a very large portion of sub $1 demand is less elastic than you appear to be projecting. The credit card companies probably take at least a dime, and if 90% of the grey market values their downloads at less than a dime (in percieved risk reduction), lowering prices to 11 cents would greatly reduce total revenues due to the price reductions more than offseting the increasing volume.
Re:right back at ya, fascisst pig!
on
EA Spouse Outed
·
· Score: 1
That's sort of his back handed point. It's a play on words, the statement is implying that you have to work hard so the government can tax you more and redistribute those taxes to welfare recipients who may well be able bodied but prefer life on the government teat. My favorite version is, "The governement that robs Peter to pay Paul... can always depend on the support of Paul."
Who said my farm had to be within the jurisdiction of Ms Reno:) Although I certainly see your point. I'm not exactly planing to bring 50 cultists with me, perhaps my ole dog.
I'd say it's related to that, say you have a given budget for a film that can be allocated to script, director, actors, story (IP). If you pay more than 0 for the right to use the characters then your script, director, and actors must be less well compensated to offset. Not that pay always goes with talent (Randy Quaid as a recently noted example generally works cheap for low budget art house films).
While not with babies (who don't seem to me to be that fussy unless they are sick or a basic need isn't being met), toddlers are generally the fussier ones. The trick there is consistency and aligning their incentives with yours. Look at the problem of inconsistent enforcement of the rules (speeding). Almost everyone I know (and most of the cars on the beltway) go very different speeds on the highway. Almost all above the posted speed limit. Humans naturally test their boundries all the time, if parents are inconsistent with their toddlers, than they will be tested all the time. If you say no, mean no, not ask me again in five minutes and I might say yes then. This is free advice (and common sense) but pretty costly to impliment so it gets frequently ignored.
One of the best ways to align incentives is to give kids an allowance. Even little kids are ruthless utilitarians. They know exactly the order of things that they want (or can usually reach it with a bit of coaxing). Consistentcy and aligned incentives makes going to the store not a chance to get a toy, but similar to your trip, the potential to exchange a limited medium of exchange for a potential needed or desired item and they are much less stressful.
I will always wonder how much effort was mischannelled and misaligned because the really smart people rarely rise to the decison making level. I'll miss McNealy and hope that he ends up somewhere with some influence. Considering he seems to be the driving force behind SUN's iconoclastism, he's certainly been a more valuable contributor than most give him credit for being. While Schwarts and Zander could explain things to Wall St, I'd rather have McNealy and Joy at my company.
That's ex ante, they'd already ordered the components by the time they should have had a pretty good idea what supply capacity was going to be, and demand at varying prices would be. Raising the pre-Xmas price wouldn't have impacted compontent orders (as they couldn't have ordered more in time). They could lower the price post Christmas and maintained their volume price break agreements.
It's not so much where they make money, rather why were several hundred dollars per console/future game revenue streams left on the table? There was ample supply of xBoxs going for $500-$700 on eBay, which suggests that they would have sold out with a $500 price tag, that's $100 bucks more than they got. The problem was that the price and their launch inventory/capacity were badly out of whack which suggests that one of three things happened:
Someone messed up ($50-$100 million is a pretty expensive mistake)
The value of long term sell outs will exceed the lower than market clearing price in future console sales (The missing amount was at least in part spent on games/MS licensed accessories which could have dampened the blow).
There is something odd here (there aren't very many good reasons for a firm to under price something (out side of government restrictions when was the last time you waited more than a day for a mainstream product to arrive).
The people hiring them were profs, so I'm not sure if Pr0n compatabilty was the first thing checked. Sounds like a pretty fun job. I did the same for a traditional rental company for a few months (I was friends with the manager) it was a great way to see a ton of movies (old people in Montana can't operate DVD players to save their lives).
They complained about poorly laid out cases and difficult to find HP only drivers for common stuff like video cards and NICs that should have been able to use the standard drivers but couldn't. Their workstation lines (PC and proprietary were all solid as rocks. My main computer for the longest time was an ancient Kayak that I used for years and sold for essentially what I paid for it. It was a beautiful machine even without the extra processor. I'd guess that it is still going strong for my old boss' folks, too.
Thank you!
I started my college career in EE. I hacked all the way through the math (not with great grades but I passed DiffEq and Linear Algebra) but realized that I really didn't have any love for what I was doing at some point in Circuits II. It was interesting but not my passion. So I dropped out of the engineering school I was at and transferred to a broadline university where I graduated in Economics and Finance (which all the math I'd done was a nice bonus in the interviews). I finished with not the greatest jobs in the world, but I certainly can't complain, they have left me prosperous (which I've best heard defined as able to meet all your needs and still have something left to give away). It seems to me that that that is what really drives the good jobs these days, not so much getting the degree (as that is becoming pretty easy), but really enjoying what you are doing. If you don't have that joy, then well all the money in the world won't make up the difference.
There's a huge amount of difference between the EVO workstation line and the Pavillion home line. One is a well thought out machine with hard drives that rival the best things out there today in consumerland (which is probably why it is so fast), the other is a flaming piece of crap. I had lots of friends who did tech support calls on the side in college. Each after their first encounter with a Pavillion could not be paid enough to go back and work on one again.
Two questions:
Why does the existance of the cosmic watch maker mean an end to all research? That would seem to be a subject of much further study, who is this watch maker why create this cosmic watch, etc. I'll stick with Saladin's view of how religion and learning should interact. I believe we were created, but we were created with brains that learn. Due to that, it is one of our chief purposes to learn everything we can about the world around us. As it stands now, we aren't quite able to definitivly establish how everything came to be, so keep studying it. Anyone who can keep the middle east under relative peace for their lifetime gets a gold star in my book. /Flame away
Second question is, why does/. now randomly center all the items on a page? I'm guessing that an ad isn't closing a center tag, but it seems to affect everything. Is this some sort of IE exception? I'm at work.
I think Murdoch paid $600 million for myspace. Even if we presume the next media billionare is only half as demented, unless they got well under 10% of the company $25 million will probably do very well. The VCs weren't buying this for the profits and dividends.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's business isn't operating systems (most of their customers don't know that's what they are selling) they actually sell a marketplace. They offer developers the largest potential market of users, and users the largest potential market of compatible software.
Like all infastructure, market places are exceedingly valuable businesses.
Because Microsoft understands this they guard against all threats to their marketplace vigilantly. When Netscape proposed to replace them they essentially did everything they could to stop them (even breaking the law).
Google is now the most likely to challenge them in delivering a better market for developers to deliver software products to users. Microsoft is aware of this and will pour bilions into choking off Google's current revenue stream (just as they did with Netscape) to prevent them from developing a competing market (as the market works best if there is only one to use).
What's wrong with Desparate Housewives? Teri Hatcher is still quite a looker.
Piracy (albeit more high tech than the old kind) is a fairly major problem in certain parts of the world, the straights of Malacca in particular. They board from small speedboats carrying hand or very light weaponry and typically target the containers that have the good stuff, they also go after crew valuables.
I think most people would rather have a job, humans are wired to appreciate accomplishments and pretty much need to have a useful task (the Nazis did experments in the death camps and within weeks of being given an obviously pointless job all the particpants had killed themsselves). I do tire of the rolling out of the relativly rare heartbreaking stories when by all accounts I've seen the majority are not nearly as provacative (case workers and auditors have a ton of cases that are sad because there is no effort on the part of the recipients to do much of anything).
It's not so much that I dislike helping others, but the execution of how we accomplish it doesn't work very well at all. Your friend really only needs the government's medical insurance not living expenses, unfortunatly they seem to be tied so she is stuck. That's what I get tired of, all these rules designed to fix the last implimentation of the rules creates entire classes of people who do nothing but game the new set of rules (not just welfare, government consulting/contracting, tax code). Those are all require effort but add little to the overall productivity of society. That's where my issue lies.
I'd rather see social saftey nets be a localized service rather than a federalized service. Even if less efficient the controls would be much better.
I wish I would have know about that that would have been a much better link than my static picture.
Go smack your economics teacher in the head and demand a refund. Tell them to make you listen next time. Demand is measured along a curve, in any market (diamonds, water, there is a maximum that Bill Gates would pay for a single produced item, then as the price declines more and more people are willing to purchase the item, continuing until the last person is so overly satisfied that even they would not pay a fraction penny for an additional unit. Supply and demand are matching in that market place as long as there is even a single transaction.
Now you bring up a second market that sells at a lower price but carries additional risk. Which some users percieve as having less cost than $1. This is the same as saying that because I can buy a DVD player from a crackhead for $20 there is not a market in legitimately traded DVD players. It's still the same market there's just a discount associated with the risk bundled in the grey (or black) market transactions. People can evaluate the risk and potential cost and choose to pay more with no risk or less with an element of risk bundled in. The risk isn't entirely being sued, its also the risk of poor data quality (think if the whole file was just goatse images), which is non-zero.
I think what you meant was that a large portion of music customers price those risks at well below a dollar, but no one really knows what the volume is on pirated sites (I'd be nothing more than guessing that P2P distributes far more songs than iTunes).
Even if the grey market were larger, it seems likely that a very large portion of sub $1 demand is less elastic than you appear to be projecting. The credit card companies probably take at least a dime, and if 90% of the grey market values their downloads at less than a dime (in percieved risk reduction), lowering prices to 11 cents would greatly reduce total revenues due to the price reductions more than offseting the increasing volume.
That's sort of his back handed point. It's a play on words, the statement is implying that you have to work hard so the government can tax you more and redistribute those taxes to welfare recipients who may well be able bodied but prefer life on the government teat. My favorite version is, "The governement that robs Peter to pay Paul... can always depend on the support of Paul."
Just reuse this one.
You can send the laptop to:
Troll, inc
Under your bridge
Mid-town, USA 00192
Who said my farm had to be within the jurisdiction of Ms Reno :) Although I certainly see your point. I'm not exactly planing to bring 50 cultists with me, perhaps my ole dog.
Than I for one will quit, cash out my 401(k) and IRA and buy an acre or two of farmland someplace quiet and happily live out my days.
I'd say it's related to that, say you have a given budget for a film that can be allocated to script, director, actors, story (IP). If you pay more than 0 for the right to use the characters then your script, director, and actors must be less well compensated to offset. Not that pay always goes with talent (Randy Quaid as a recently noted example generally works cheap for low budget art house films).
Gia was quite good, perhaps that is the exception that proves the rule.
While not with babies (who don't seem to me to be that fussy unless they are sick or a basic need isn't being met), toddlers are generally the fussier ones. The trick there is consistency and aligning their incentives with yours. Look at the problem of inconsistent enforcement of the rules (speeding). Almost everyone I know (and most of the cars on the beltway) go very different speeds on the highway. Almost all above the posted speed limit. Humans naturally test their boundries all the time, if parents are inconsistent with their toddlers, than they will be tested all the time. If you say no, mean no, not ask me again in five minutes and I might say yes then. This is free advice (and common sense) but pretty costly to impliment so it gets frequently ignored.
One of the best ways to align incentives is to give kids an allowance. Even little kids are ruthless utilitarians. They know exactly the order of things that they want (or can usually reach it with a bit of coaxing). Consistentcy and aligned incentives makes going to the store not a chance to get a toy, but similar to your trip, the potential to exchange a limited medium of exchange for a potential needed or desired item and they are much less stressful.
I will always wonder how much effort was mischannelled and misaligned because the really smart people rarely rise to the decison making level. I'll miss McNealy and hope that he ends up somewhere with some influence. Considering he seems to be the driving force behind SUN's iconoclastism, he's certainly been a more valuable contributor than most give him credit for being. While Schwarts and Zander could explain things to Wall St, I'd rather have McNealy and Joy at my company.
Considering how well the collections of Atari 2600 era games sold (even with very poor emulations) perhaps it's time to dust off a few more 2600s.
That's ex ante, they'd already ordered the components by the time they should have had a pretty good idea what supply capacity was going to be, and demand at varying prices would be. Raising the pre-Xmas price wouldn't have impacted compontent orders (as they couldn't have ordered more in time). They could lower the price post Christmas and maintained their volume price break agreements.
It's not so much where they make money, rather why were several hundred dollars per console/future game revenue streams left on the table? There was ample supply of xBoxs going for $500-$700 on eBay, which suggests that they would have sold out with a $500 price tag, that's $100 bucks more than they got.
The problem was that the price and their launch inventory/capacity were badly out of whack which suggests that one of three things happened:
Someone messed up ($50-$100 million is a pretty expensive mistake)
The value of long term sell outs will exceed the lower than market clearing price in future console sales (The missing amount was at least in part spent on games/MS licensed accessories which could have dampened the blow).
There is something odd here (there aren't very many good reasons for a firm to under price something (out side of government restrictions when was the last time you waited more than a day for a mainstream product to arrive).
I'll give you two future second posts and a funny sig.
The people hiring them were profs, so I'm not sure if Pr0n compatabilty was the first thing checked. Sounds like a pretty fun job. I did the same for a traditional rental company for a few months (I was friends with the manager) it was a great way to see a ton of movies (old people in Montana can't operate DVD players to save their lives).
They complained about poorly laid out cases and difficult to find HP only drivers for common stuff like video cards and NICs that should have been able to use the standard drivers but couldn't. Their workstation lines (PC and proprietary were all solid as rocks. My main computer for the longest time was an ancient Kayak that I used for years and sold for essentially what I paid for it. It was a beautiful machine even without the extra processor. I'd guess that it is still going strong for my old boss' folks, too.
Thank you!
I started my college career in EE. I hacked all the way through the math (not with great grades but I passed DiffEq and Linear Algebra) but realized that I really didn't have any love for what I was doing at some point in Circuits II. It was interesting but not my passion. So I dropped out of the engineering school I was at and transferred to a broadline university where I graduated in Economics and Finance (which all the math I'd done was a nice bonus in the interviews). I finished with not the greatest jobs in the world, but I certainly can't complain, they have left me prosperous (which I've best heard defined as able to meet all your needs and still have something left to give away).
It seems to me that that that is what really drives the good jobs these days, not so much getting the degree (as that is becoming pretty easy), but really enjoying what you are doing. If you don't have that joy, then well all the money in the world won't make up the difference.
There's a huge amount of difference between the EVO workstation line and the Pavillion home line. One is a well thought out machine with hard drives that rival the best things out there today in consumerland (which is probably why it is so fast), the other is a flaming piece of crap. I had lots of friends who did tech support calls on the side in college. Each after their first encounter with a Pavillion could not be paid enough to go back and work on one again.
Two questions: Why does the existance of the cosmic watch maker mean an end to all research? That would seem to be a subject of much further study, who is this watch maker why create this cosmic watch, etc. I'll stick with Saladin's view of how religion and learning should interact. I believe we were created, but we were created with brains that learn. Due to that, it is one of our chief purposes to learn everything we can about the world around us. As it stands now, we aren't quite able to definitivly establish how everything came to be, so keep studying it. Anyone who can keep the middle east under relative peace for their lifetime gets a gold star in my book.
/. now randomly center all the items on a page? I'm guessing that an ad isn't closing a center tag, but it seems to affect everything. Is this some sort of IE exception? I'm at work.
/Flame away
Second question is, why does
I think Murdoch paid $600 million for myspace. Even if we presume the next media billionare is only half as demented, unless they got well under 10% of the company $25 million will probably do very well. The VCs weren't buying this for the profits and dividends.
Are they a semi pro hockey team that oddly splits its season in Sacremento and San Jose?