I got to play with a Raytheon RF ID tracker on one of my co-op work terms. It is just a single antenna that you can can hide pretty much anywhere (as long as it's not in an RF shielded box or something), and the range can be anywhere from a few inches to 50 feet. The one I used was intended to track vehicles as they drive along an expressway.
Yes, but when you go back to walmart 6 months later wearing what you bought there before, they'll know who you are (if you bought it on your credit card), and they'll know exactly where you go throughout the store and how long you spend in each location.
What's to stop other businesses from tracking their customers using the tags from other stores too. It's just an arbitrary number stored on the card.
Real property. Personally, I don't see any reason to have it. It ties you down geographically; you have to spend your own time maintaining it; and it saddles you with monstrous debt. I prefer to rent, myself
What happens when your landlord decides he wants to double your rent, or throw you out so his friend's son can live there? If you own the property, that can't happen. At the very least, real estate always goes up in value over the long term. If you buy now, then in 10 years your property is worth more so you've profited just by living there. If you rent, then in 10 years, you've helped your landlord afford to pay the mortgage on property that is now worth more for him...and he thanks you by raising the rent because the property is worth more.
Besides, getting it "for the kids" isn't especially realistic. Most people I know who have lost their parents sold the house as soon as the bodies were in the ground. Cut out the middle man and give them the money directly (preferably while you're still around, so you can share in whatever they spend it on).
The point is not to deprive myself of the use of what I work for, it's so that I can use it and it will still be left for my kids. With real estate, they'll have almost as much left as if I'd put the money in a CD, but I'll have been able to enjoy it my whole life. If they want to sell it for the money, that's fine with me; I want it to benefit them, not tie them down. I also expect to live long enough that they'll own homes of their own so they won't need mine anyway, but the money could help them with their mortgages. When I move out of my condo, I don't even plan to sell it, I'll rent it out and use the rent money to pay down the mortgage on my new home; in 20 years, the condo will have paid for itself so it will be like I got to keep it for free, and it will be worth a lot more than it is now.
Well said. Don't forget to add that if I can't pass my real property to my children, then where is my incentive to work for it in the first place? Why should I work for my whole life to accumulate real assets if I have nothing to show for it? I will just choose to live off of welfare because in the end, the result of my life is the same, but I can enjoy it more without having to work.
A lot of people will have that attitude; enough so that the few who still work won't be able to support everyone, and the whole system will come crashing down.
The original Palms and the ones with roman numeral numbers were nice looking. The M-series and now the tungsten ones are ugly. I agree palm needs to put a lot more effort into the look of their handhelds. So does Handspring; Treo is a huge step down from Visor.
Stealing someone's in game assets is not the same as stealing something in the real world. It is just computer cracking and there's already laws to prosecute it.
Is it still a viable option to buy a ReplayTV? I thought they were in receivership right now, and if they do shut down, the ReplayTV boxes are useless because there will be no service.
If they sell below their cost to produce to hurt their competition, that is dumping. If they bring down their production costs, then they are competing.
Selling a product below cost or giving it away for free to make it difficult for competitors to get a foothold is called dumping, and it violates anti-trust laws.
This is exactly why Standard Oil and AT&T were split up.
When you say a company should do anything within their power to make their software as widespread as possible, do you include illegal things? Maybe a campaign of assassinating prominant open source developers until nobody is willing to work on Linux.
The problem with that is that it's Sony, and they make the rest of the RIAA and MS look pro-fair use.
I'm very tempted to a MZ-NE410 minidisc player. It's $120 at costco with an extra 5-pack of media, which is incredibly cheap. The only thing in the "con" column is that it's Sony, so there are silly DRM features that ruin it.
Is anybody else tired of having multiple (completely identical feature wise) discs to choose from? Is this not lunacy?
I'm still waiting for there to one standard for DVD?R before I buy. It sounds like by the time there is a single standard for the 4.7G discs, it will be a moot point anyway because I'll just switch to waiting for a 36G standard.
Apparently it has to be 'a specific set of operations in a specific sequence with specific data.
This sounds similar to the way they described the floating point divide error in the original pentium. How long until they start giving odds on the chances of someone seeing the problem in normal use.
Typecasting is a tool -- do you really trust the compiler to recognize exactly what you mean in every scenario, throughout your hundereds of thousands of lines of code?
A technique I frequenly use in C++ is to typecast an object to a string, then pass the string across a communications channel (like TCP/IP), and then typecast it back to an object. You can't do that in a strongly typecast language, so you have to do a lot more work.
It's a tool that you're forced to use, even for the wrong job. It's like being forced to use a hammer to install screws.
I can only play for 10 hours/week because I have to spend 40 making money so I can pay for the service. They can't cater exclusively to people who get mommy to pay for them can they?
AOL did not lose $99 billion by distributing their CDs. In fact they did not lose a cent.
In 1999, AOL had a larger market capitalization than GM and Ford combined. When they merged with Time Warner, the AOL division was on the books of the combined company as having that large value. When the dotcom bubble burst, the market value of AOL plunged. The $99 billion was a write-down of the value of the AOL division as the stocks dropped. Their core operations are still making money, and they can't be blamed for how stupid their investors are in bidding them up during the boom.
Historically, there's been no signup fee, only monthly fees.
My first internet account in 1993 charged a sign-up fee, and then when I switched to high-speed in 1997, there was an other sign-up fee. It's only more recently that customers have smartened up and will refuse to pay it. It's too bad they're still making the same stupid mistake again. I will never pay another activation fee. I don't have a land-line because my phone company does have a fee. They also offer satellite TV, high-speed internet, and cellular phone service, all three of which I get from other companies because this one changes an activation fee on their land lines. In all, I spend over $150/month with other companies that I would spend with the phone company if they didn't have the one-shot $50 activation fee, I have also talked dozens of people into going with their competition.
EQ is not interchangeable with DAOC, Star Wars Galaxies, or The Sims Online.
You're wrong here too, it may not be the exact same service, but it fills the same market. These games are in direct competition with each other. If someone signs up with Sims Online, it drastically decreases their chances of signing up with EverQuest. People only have so many hours a week to play the games, and only want to incur so many of the monthly fees. If EQ offers a better deal, they will steal business from SWG, even if the player would prefer SWG.
That's exactly the same mistake Polariod made and that's why polariod is in receivership right now. They thought they were in the "self-developing picture" market and had a monopoly, but in reality they are in the "instant picture" market and are competing with digital cameras.
If someone has to pay $50 for the MMO, they are taking a big risk that they might hate the game. If they just have to pay the $10 fee for the first month, a lot of people who would never consider risking the $50 will try the game, and a lot will decide they like it and keep playing (and paying).
If the game was free, how do the customers get it?
I answered this earlier. Sell the for the price of the first month of service and include the first month free. They will probably break even on the discs, and then have to eat the first month of service, but they will make up for it many times over in more customers.
Surely they must have thought of this model as well; perhaps there's some good reasons why they don't use it.
Surely the book publishers must realize that a lof of people enjoy reading on their PDAs, and that is a great opportunity.
Surely the RIAA must realize that people like having their entire music library on their computer so they don't have to deal with swapping discs, so copy protection is a bad thing and electronic distribution is good.
300,000 copies at a more realistic $50, 20% of which might go to the developer
So you're saying that the developer only gets the value of the one month of service out of the game anyway and the rest is lost in the distribution channel. That means the publisher doesn't even get any benefit from charging the customers but they've introduced a huge dis-incentive to potential customers.
Then why don't I have to pay AOL a huge upfront fee to buy their disc since they put so much dev work into all their new versions? AOL's monthly fee is only double the cost of most of the online games, and they have to pay for phonelines to provide a dial up connection plus the backend connection, and they offer a lot of their own content that has to be paid for.
It costs a lot more to build a cellular phone network than make a video game, and yet the cell companies will allow me to connect to their networks without paying a startup fee to offset the costs to build their network. If I don't have a phone that will work with their network, they'll even provide me with one at a heavily subsidized price, or even for free.
Earthlink's email station hardware is free even though it must cost them the first 6 months of your service cost.
These companies and most others understand that their main revenue stream is from the service. Initial costs such as activation fees or hardware and software costs are barriers to people becoming customers and that is a bad thing.
What is better for the software company: if 100,000 people buy the software for $30 and 50% decide to keep the account for a year at $10/month, or 2 million people sign up for free and just 10% keep their accounts for a year? That's exactly why barriers are bad; even if you have a lower turnover rate, you still have less total customers
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I got to play with a Raytheon RF ID tracker on one of my co-op work terms. It is just a single antenna that you can can hide pretty much anywhere (as long as it's not in an RF shielded box or something), and the range can be anywhere from a few inches to 50 feet. The one I used was intended to track vehicles as they drive along an expressway.
Jason
ProfQuotes
With current technology? It doesn't take a battery, the power comes from the RF field generated by the reader.
It would be useless for inventory tracking if all your 6 month old inventory just disappeared off your inventory system.
If you think Wal-Mart clothing doesn't last 6 months, then you have a different problem
Jason
ProfQuotes
Yes, but when you go back to walmart 6 months later wearing what you bought there before, they'll know who you are (if you bought it on your credit card), and they'll know exactly where you go throughout the store and how long you spend in each location.
What's to stop other businesses from tracking their customers using the tags from other stores too. It's just an arbitrary number stored on the card.
Jason
ProfQuotes
It's 3 stories tall over an area the size of 4 tennis courts. When you fit that much computing power into a notebook, let me know.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Then there would be nothing to report.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Real property. Personally, I don't see any reason to have it. It ties you down geographically; you have to spend your own time maintaining it; and it saddles you with monstrous debt. I prefer to rent, myself
What happens when your landlord decides he wants to double your rent, or throw you out so his friend's son can live there? If you own the property, that can't happen. At the very least, real estate always goes up in value over the long term. If you buy now, then in 10 years your property is worth more so you've profited just by living there. If you rent, then in 10 years, you've helped your landlord afford to pay the mortgage on property that is now worth more for him...and he thanks you by raising the rent because the property is worth more.
Besides, getting it "for the kids" isn't especially realistic. Most people I know who have lost their parents sold the house as soon as the bodies were in the ground. Cut out the middle man and give them the money directly (preferably while you're still around, so you can share in whatever they spend it on).
The point is not to deprive myself of the use of what I work for, it's so that I can use it and it will still be left for my kids. With real estate, they'll have almost as much left as if I'd put the money in a CD, but I'll have been able to enjoy it my whole life. If they want to sell it for the money, that's fine with me; I want it to benefit them, not tie them down. I also expect to live long enough that they'll own homes of their own so they won't need mine anyway, but the money could help them with their mortgages. When I move out of my condo, I don't even plan to sell it, I'll rent it out and use the rent money to pay down the mortgage on my new home; in 20 years, the condo will have paid for itself so it will be like I got to keep it for free, and it will be worth a lot more than it is now.
Jason
ProfQuotes I thought
Well said. Don't forget to add that if I can't pass my real property to my children, then where is my incentive to work for it in the first place? Why should I work for my whole life to accumulate real assets if I have nothing to show for it? I will just choose to live off of welfare because in the end, the result of my life is the same, but I can enjoy it more without having to work.
A lot of people will have that attitude; enough so that the few who still work won't be able to support everyone, and the whole system will come crashing down.
Jason
ProfQuotes
The original Palms and the ones with roman numeral numbers were nice looking. The M-series and now the tungsten ones are ugly. I agree palm needs to put a lot more effort into the look of their handhelds. So does Handspring; Treo is a huge step down from Visor.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Stealing someone's in game assets is not the same as stealing something in the real world. It is just computer cracking and there's already laws to prosecute it.
Jason
ProfQuotes
'DDDDF' sounds like a report card.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Is it still a viable option to buy a ReplayTV? I thought they were in receivership right now, and if they do shut down, the ReplayTV boxes are useless because there will be no service.
Jason
ProfQuotes
MS isn't taking the hint because their customers haven't complained, people seem willing to accept a lot more from MS.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Apples to Apples is a great game
If they sell below their cost to produce to hurt their competition, that is dumping. If they bring down their production costs, then they are competing.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Most companies have no morals that's a given, but as I stated in my post, this is illegal, not just immoral.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Selling a product below cost or giving it away for free to make it difficult for competitors to get a foothold is called dumping, and it violates anti-trust laws.
This is exactly why Standard Oil and AT&T were split up.
When you say a company should do anything within their power to make their software as widespread as possible, do you include illegal things? Maybe a campaign of assassinating prominant open source developers until nobody is willing to work on Linux.
Jason
ProfQuotes
The problem with that is that it's Sony, and they make the rest of the RIAA and MS look pro-fair use.
I'm very tempted to a MZ-NE410 minidisc player. It's $120 at costco with an extra 5-pack of media, which is incredibly cheap. The only thing in the "con" column is that it's Sony, so there are silly DRM features that ruin it.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Is anybody else tired of having multiple (completely identical feature wise) discs to choose from? Is this not lunacy?
I'm still waiting for there to one standard for DVD?R before I buy. It sounds like by the time there is a single standard for the 4.7G discs, it will be a moot point anyway because I'll just switch to waiting for a 36G standard.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Apparently it has to be 'a specific set of operations in a specific sequence with specific data.
This sounds similar to the way they described the floating point divide error in the original pentium. How long until they start giving odds on the chances of someone seeing the problem in normal use.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Typecasting is a tool -- do you really trust the compiler to recognize exactly what you mean in every scenario, throughout your hundereds of thousands of lines of code?
A technique I frequenly use in C++ is to typecast an object to a string, then pass the string across a communications channel (like TCP/IP), and then typecast it back to an object. You can't do that in a strongly typecast language, so you have to do a lot more work.
It's a tool that you're forced to use, even for the wrong job. It's like being forced to use a hammer to install screws.
Jason
ProfQuotes
He just mirrored the image.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I can only play for 10 hours/week because I have to spend 40 making money so I can pay for the service. They can't cater exclusively to people who get mommy to pay for them can they?
Jason
ProfQuotes
AOL did not lose $99 billion by distributing their CDs. In fact they did not lose a cent.
In 1999, AOL had a larger market capitalization than GM and Ford combined. When they merged with Time Warner, the AOL division was on the books of the combined company as having that large value. When the dotcom bubble burst, the market value of AOL plunged. The $99 billion was a write-down of the value of the AOL division as the stocks dropped. Their core operations are still making money, and they can't be blamed for how stupid their investors are in bidding them up during the boom.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Historically, there's been no signup fee, only monthly fees.
My first internet account in 1993 charged a sign-up fee, and then when I switched to high-speed in 1997, there was an other sign-up fee. It's only more recently that customers have smartened up and will refuse to pay it. It's too bad they're still making the same stupid mistake again. I will never pay another activation fee. I don't have a land-line because my phone company does have a fee. They also offer satellite TV, high-speed internet, and cellular phone service, all three of which I get from other companies because this one changes an activation fee on their land lines. In all, I spend over $150/month with other companies that I would spend with the phone company if they didn't have the one-shot $50 activation fee, I have also talked dozens of people into going with their competition.
EQ is not interchangeable with DAOC, Star Wars Galaxies, or The Sims Online.
You're wrong here too, it may not be the exact same service, but it fills the same market. These games are in direct competition with each other. If someone signs up with Sims Online, it drastically decreases their chances of signing up with EverQuest. People only have so many hours a week to play the games, and only want to incur so many of the monthly fees. If EQ offers a better deal, they will steal business from SWG, even if the player would prefer SWG.
That's exactly the same mistake Polariod made and that's why polariod is in receivership right now. They thought they were in the "self-developing picture" market and had a monopoly, but in reality they are in the "instant picture" market and are competing with digital cameras.
If someone has to pay $50 for the MMO, they are taking a big risk that they might hate the game. If they just have to pay the $10 fee for the first month, a lot of people who would never consider risking the $50 will try the game, and a lot will decide they like it and keep playing (and paying).
If the game was free, how do the customers get it?
I answered this earlier. Sell the for the price of the first month of service and include the first month free. They will probably break even on the discs, and then have to eat the first month of service, but they will make up for it many times over in more customers.
Surely they must have thought of this model as well; perhaps there's some good reasons why they don't use it.
Surely the book publishers must realize that a lof of people enjoy reading on their PDAs, and that is a great opportunity.
Surely the RIAA must realize that people like having their entire music library on their computer so they don't have to deal with swapping discs, so copy protection is a bad thing and electronic distribution is good.
300,000 copies at a more realistic $50, 20% of which might go to the developer
So you're saying that the developer only gets the value of the one month of service out of the game anyway and the rest is lost in the distribution channel. That means the publisher doesn't even get any benefit from charging the customers but they've introduced a huge dis-incentive to potential customers.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Then why don't I have to pay AOL a huge upfront fee to buy their disc since they put so much dev work into all their new versions? AOL's monthly fee is only double the cost of most of the online games, and they have to pay for phonelines to provide a dial up connection plus the backend connection, and they offer a lot of their own content that has to be paid for.
It costs a lot more to build a cellular phone network than make a video game, and yet the cell companies will allow me to connect to their networks without paying a startup fee to offset the costs to build their network. If I don't have a phone that will work with their network, they'll even provide me with one at a heavily subsidized price, or even for free.
Earthlink's email station hardware is free even though it must cost them the first 6 months of your service cost.
These companies and most others understand that their main revenue stream is from the service. Initial costs such as activation fees or hardware and software costs are barriers to people becoming customers and that is a bad thing.
What is better for the software company: if 100,000 people buy the software for $30 and 50% decide to keep the account for a year at $10/month, or 2 million people sign up for free and just 10% keep their accounts for a year? That's exactly why barriers are bad; even if you have a lower turnover rate, you still have less total customers
Jason
ProfQuotes