My grandmother used to wrap pieces of pizza at the Gatti's buffet and put them in her purse. She would then offer us cold pizza from her purse when she came to visit.
Just for the people that are, too ignorant, too lazy, or too risk adverse (yeah, yeah, or "think steewing is wong" -- joke, k?). As long as this group is signifcant, then so will the returns from investments in DRM.
#1 Well, yeah but isn't it much more likely that content providers will agree with a closed set-top solution than a PC with some DRM features? MS is pushing the latter, so I guess they are at least in a better position than MS is . ..
#2 Couldn't they just create some kind of closed bittorrent software within Tivio to deal with this? They control the hardware, so they probably could make it pretty secure from leachers. That way, the more demand, the more bandwidth.
#3 Uh, yeah but it is probably not going to be DVD quality (couple Gb download for 1 movie?). And if it is, maybe they are expecting people to eventually delete the movies (I though Netflix was like a rental service, or something)?
They want to close the PC with DRM, but the pc is already open. They have a lot of power so they are slowly getting the industry to cooperate, but, meanwhile, the vendors of content specialized hardware are simply light years ahead and just need to make some tweaks to get the content providers to go along. Ironically, Linux is being leveraged to make content specialized hardware cheaper to implement, making it even harder for MS and company to compete.
Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought that was going to be the next big road block MS was going to use to keep consumers from jumping to Linux. By adding DRM to Windows, MS could convince the proprietary content providers to sell their content through Windows. Since Linux is open source, it would be much harder to get large corps to trust a DRM solution for it. Then MS could use DRM as an excuse to force the hardware industry to only create DRM enabled hardware which would not be compatible with Linux. Not only would people not be able to legally watch downloaded movies on Linux, soon it would become increasing diffcult to find good, cheap hardware that was compatible with Linux.
However, it appears that it is simply going to be easier to sell such content services through hardware specifically created for such purposes and not through modified pcs. Not even MS was able to get the PC industry to do a 180 (go from general to specialized hardware by limiting the user's control) fast enough. And, ironically, the specialized hardware approach to content services is being propelled even more quickly by the economics that embedded Linux is making possible.
One might even get the feeling that an imaginary hand is leading Linux/Open Source to wider and wider adoption . ..
Those slashbots, first they want the GPL to be enforced, but they also want music copyright to NOT BE enforced. Then, they complain about their contradictions. THEN, they complain about the complaining of the contradiction . ..etc.
I don't know about you, but I think when things go into an infinite loop, it might be time to reevaluate the logic that has gone into that idea (not that the moderators seem to care . ..)
For this given level of production the price has increased for MS (if MS did not have an illegal monopoly, they would be selling at a smaller quantity).
MS does not need PERFECT elasticity to make it worth while to increase their price. They merely need the increase in additional revenue gained to be greater than the loss due to the additional amount of consumers whose price reserve is now lower than the actual price. They will not be able to recover 100%, but they will be able to recover more than any other non-government entity in existence today.
How about glue in widgets? That is DEFINETLY a marginal cost, right? However, the company does not buy a portion of glue for each widget, right? They buy a tank of glue and allocate the COST to each widget, but the actual tank of glue is not bought but once a month, year, decade, whatever. The more widget they build, the more glue they must buy, but the actual timing of the cash flowing out is usually fixed. Hence, it is how this cost influences their decisions that is important.
Their monopoly has a slightly higher cost for each additional product they sell. The more products they sell due to their monopolistic practices, the higher the monetary penality will be when it comes time to pay. Finally, if MS BELIEVES this will increase their price per product in the SHORTTERM (which we can probably assume to be so since they are evaluated quarterly, so we can make such assumptions unless explicity indicated otherwise) then that means they are treating this like a marginal cost, just as if it were a container of glue in their packaging factory.
Economics is clearly based on perception. When the stock market crashes actual wealth is not destroyed. However, perceived wealth is and consumers react accordingly.
MS perceives this as a marginal cost and is raising its price to maintain optimal profit.
Yes, but let's put this in perspective. Even if we were to add up all these costs, a high estimate would only be 1 billion dollars. At 32B Revenue last year, we are looking at a 1/32nds or roughly only a 3% increase would be needed to cover that entire cost is just one year (when it really took decades of monopolistic behavior to incur that cost).
Yes, some people will change their plans to purchase MS products if they were to increase by around 3%, but the gain in revenue would be far greater. Perhaps they would need to raise the price to 4% to compensate and attain maximum profitablity (where profit equals marginal revenue).
Actually, I see this fine as a tax on a MS for selling x number of goods over x number of years. You could even argue that MS's illegal monopoly and resulting fine was part of the per unit cost of adding the utility of "compability" to each unit, which they should have been accruing as a liability for each additional product sold for a given period (half joke, but it shows the "quasi" nature of this cost).
Anyway, ALL costs can be considered marginal costs if you widen the scope of what "longterm" means in your economic model.
But, regardless, we are looking at very small changes in the price and most of this is just MS using FUD to try to scare governments from trying to prevent it from further damaging free markets.
1. Erh . . . I don't know about your company, but my company sells ABOVE the cost of each unit (aka, COGS) in order to cover their fixed costs, one time costs (like, legal fees), and opportunity costs (which can be seen as the investors' opportunity costs in investing their money in MS). I.E., rent does not increase per unit costs (talking variable, not COGS here), but if your rent goes up, you better create more revenue to cover that cost
2. Right, and now that the cost of windows has increased, they must compensate by INCREASING the price in order to maintain their optimal level of profits. Since the consumers don't have much choice (definition of a monopoly), roughly the same amount gets consumed (a little less, but not enough less that their revenue does not increase). In a competivite market, MS would have no choice but to have its optimal level of profis decrease since a large enough amount of consumer would flock elsewhere if their price were to increase (since price elasticity would be high).
The result is that MS pays the legal fees and is able to maintain its profit targets by passing the costs down to the consumer.
You are confusing accounting "variable costs" with economic "marginal cost." These legal costs ARE part of economic marginal cost, as well as are opportunity costs. Think about it, if MS were to STOP producing Windows, would they still be incurring these legal costs? That is how economists distinguish between marginal and fixed costs.
One of the unique aspects of a monopoly is the inelasticity of demand on the price of their products. In other words, MS can change the price of their products and, since they have a monopoly, roughly the same quantity of their products will be consumed. Of course, this is not black and white. They cannot make their products 100 times more and expect the same amount to be consumed (though, I know of some MS shops that would have no choice . ..). However, they can raise their prices much more than probably any other company without having a significant amount of revenue decrease.
This means that additional costs to Windows can pretty much be passed 100% down to the consumer, and the EU's monetary penalty is really just another form of tax on the consumer. Perhaps we could call it an "excise" tax on windows.
No, the real way to punish MS is to break up the monopoly and introduce competition, then charge a monetary penalty that cannot simply be passed on to the consumer, because if the new MS enitity/entities were to raise their price so many people would buy the competitions' products that MS would actually experience a decrease in revenue.
"Later on I googlesearched my name and found a messageboard post with my name mentioned. It turned out that one of those workers was venting about something I said at work, under a nickname on some private message-board."
Look, if an anti-social 19 year old can create such a devasting worm, I am afraid the odds are against this strategy of fighting the problem. What, there must be a 100 MILLION other kids just like him, playing away on their windows computer, looking to be more than just a pimple faced teenager.
Let's see, ingredients to a killer windows worm:
1. Anti-social teenager 2. windows computer 3. internet connection 4. some free time (see 1.)
Sorry, this is just not the way to resolve the problem. It is just too easy, not even worth celebrating. No wonder MS is ONLY investing 5M in this method (what is 5M to MS?).
1. Write worm 2. Find someone in severe financial trouble 3. Have that person release the worm from home computer 4. Turn that person in and collect the reward 5. Place 75% in a high interest foreign account and keep the rest 6. After the guy gets out of jail, send him a key to a safety deposit with all the information he needs to start a new life 7. Profit
Here, I will keep it simple (for my poor English and your poor logic):
1) Scoble complains to Mozilla about their code ---> Mozilla developers code out of the goodness of their hearts ---> complaining about such code not supporing your product is absurd because you are implying that volunteers should devote their time to your profitable gain, for free.
2) I complain about Scoble's statements ---> this has nothing to do with his code not supporting my product ---> hence, there is no hypocrisy by me not submitting code because my complaint has nothing to do with code, an open source project, or my product not being supported.
Regardless of my poor English, your logic is clearly flawed and reflects how your perspective of the world has become warped. If you are American, I am not suprised of this because it is the essence of the current administration who lies to its citizens. The citizens then lie to themselves and support products of corporations that lie and abuse them, and it all starts as flawed logic, not imperfect English.
Slashdot Mirror
Reckless endangerment? Wanka, wanka, wanka . . .
Oh. You have a pretty cool grandmother.
My grandmother used to wrap pieces of pizza at the Gatti's buffet and put them in her purse. She would then offer us cold pizza from her purse when she came to visit.
When there are similar posts against the administration and they are getting 5 interesting and what not . . .
Why, thankyou . . .
Just for the people that are, too ignorant, too lazy, or too risk adverse (yeah, yeah, or "think steewing is wong" -- joke, k?). As long as this group is signifcant, then so will the returns from investments in DRM.
How much money does your grandmother spend on movies?
#1 Well, yeah but isn't it much more likely that content providers will agree with a closed set-top solution than a PC with some DRM features? MS is pushing the latter, so I guess they are at least in a better position than MS is . . .
#2 Couldn't they just create some kind of closed bittorrent software within Tivio to deal with this? They control the hardware, so they probably could make it pretty secure from leachers. That way, the more demand, the more bandwidth.
#3 Uh, yeah but it is probably not going to be DVD quality (couple Gb download for 1 movie?). And if it is, maybe they are expecting people to eventually delete the movies (I though Netflix was like a rental service, or something)?
They want to close the PC with DRM, but the pc is already open. They have a lot of power so they are slowly getting the industry to cooperate, but, meanwhile, the vendors of content specialized hardware are simply light years ahead and just need to make some tweaks to get the content providers to go along. Ironically, Linux is being leveraged to make content specialized hardware cheaper to implement, making it even harder for MS and company to compete.
How do you like THEM apples!
Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought that was going to be the next big road block MS was going to use to keep consumers from jumping to Linux. By adding DRM to Windows, MS could convince the proprietary content providers to sell their content through Windows. Since Linux is open source, it would be much harder to get large corps to trust a DRM solution for it. Then MS could use DRM as an excuse to force the hardware industry to only create DRM enabled hardware which would not be compatible with Linux. Not only would people not be able to legally watch downloaded movies on Linux, soon it would become increasing diffcult to find good, cheap hardware that was compatible with Linux.
.
However, it appears that it is simply going to be easier to sell such content services through hardware specifically created for such purposes and not through modified pcs. Not even MS was able to get the PC industry to do a 180 (go from general to specialized hardware by limiting the user's control) fast enough. And, ironically, the specialized hardware approach to content services is being propelled even more quickly by the economics that embedded Linux is making possible.
One might even get the feeling that an imaginary hand is leading Linux/Open Source to wider and wider adoption . .
If the local goverments of those cities switch to open source pased platforms, I will seriously consider . . .
Cheney was the one you should have been watching. . . and both arms were busy.
How 'bout this:
.etc.
.)
Those slashbots, first they want the GPL to be enforced, but they also want music copyright to NOT BE enforced. Then, they complain about their contradictions. THEN, they complain about the complaining of the contradiction . .
I don't know about you, but I think when things go into an infinite loop, it might be time to reevaluate the logic that has gone into that idea (not that the moderators seem to care . .
I'm moving to Munich, Germany!
Or is that too easy to be considered "geek" worthy (or maybe wind is a factor?).
For this given level of production the price has increased for MS (if MS did not have an illegal monopoly, they would be selling at a smaller quantity).
MS does not need PERFECT elasticity to make it worth while to increase their price. They merely need the increase in additional revenue gained to be greater than the loss due to the additional amount of consumers whose price reserve is now lower than the actual price. They will not be able to recover 100%, but they will be able to recover more than any other non-government entity in existence today.
How about glue in widgets? That is DEFINETLY a marginal cost, right? However, the company does not buy a portion of glue for each widget, right? They buy a tank of glue and allocate the COST to each widget, but the actual tank of glue is not bought but once a month, year, decade, whatever. The more widget they build, the more glue they must buy, but the actual timing of the cash flowing out is usually fixed. Hence, it is how this cost influences their decisions that is important.
Their monopoly has a slightly higher cost for each additional product they sell. The more products they sell due to their monopolistic practices, the higher the monetary penality will be when it comes time to pay. Finally, if MS BELIEVES this will increase their price per product in the SHORTTERM (which we can probably assume to be so since they are evaluated quarterly, so we can make such assumptions unless explicity indicated otherwise) then that means they are treating this like a marginal cost, just as if it were a container of glue in their packaging factory.
Economics is clearly based on perception. When the stock market crashes actual wealth is not destroyed. However, perceived wealth is and consumers react accordingly.
MS perceives this as a marginal cost and is raising its price to maintain optimal profit.
Yes, but let's put this in perspective. Even if we were to add up all these costs, a high estimate would only be 1 billion dollars. At 32B Revenue last year, we are looking at a 1/32nds or roughly only a 3% increase would be needed to cover that entire cost is just one year (when it really took decades of monopolistic behavior to incur that cost).
Yes, some people will change their plans to purchase MS products if they were to increase by around 3%, but the gain in revenue would be far greater. Perhaps they would need to raise the price to 4% to compensate and attain maximum profitablity (where profit equals marginal revenue).
Actually, I see this fine as a tax on a MS for selling x number of goods over x number of years. You could even argue that MS's illegal monopoly and resulting fine was part of the per unit cost of adding the utility of "compability" to each unit, which they should have been accruing as a liability for each additional product sold for a given period (half joke, but it shows the "quasi" nature of this cost).
Anyway, ALL costs can be considered marginal costs if you widen the scope of what "longterm" means in your economic model.
But, regardless, we are looking at very small changes in the price and most of this is just MS using FUD to try to scare governments from trying to prevent it from further damaging free markets.
1. Erh . . . I don't know about your company, but my company sells ABOVE the cost of each unit (aka, COGS) in order to cover their fixed costs, one time costs (like, legal fees), and opportunity costs (which can be seen as the investors' opportunity costs in investing their money in MS). I.E., rent does not increase per unit costs (talking variable, not COGS here), but if your rent goes up, you better create more revenue to cover that cost
2. Right, and now that the cost of windows has increased, they must compensate by INCREASING the price in order to maintain their optimal level of profits. Since the consumers don't have much choice (definition of a monopoly), roughly the same amount gets consumed (a little less, but not enough less that their revenue does not increase). In a competivite market, MS would have no choice but to have its optimal level of profis decrease since a large enough amount of consumer would flock elsewhere if their price were to increase (since price elasticity would be high).
The result is that MS pays the legal fees and is able to maintain its profit targets by passing the costs down to the consumer.
You are confusing accounting "variable costs" with economic "marginal cost." These legal costs ARE part of economic marginal cost, as well as are opportunity costs. Think about it, if MS were to STOP producing Windows, would they still be incurring these legal costs? That is how economists distinguish between marginal and fixed costs.
One of the unique aspects of a monopoly is the inelasticity of demand on the price of their products. In other words, MS can change the price of their products and, since they have a monopoly, roughly the same quantity of their products will be consumed. Of course, this is not black and white. They cannot make their products 100 times more and expect the same amount to be consumed (though, I know of some MS shops that would have no choice . . .). However, they can raise their prices much more than probably any other company without having a significant amount of revenue decrease.
This means that additional costs to Windows can pretty much be passed 100% down to the consumer, and the EU's monetary penalty is really just another form of tax on the consumer. Perhaps we could call it an "excise" tax on windows.
No, the real way to punish MS is to break up the monopoly and introduce competition, then charge a monetary penalty that cannot simply be passed on to the consumer, because if the new MS enitity/entities were to raise their price so many people would buy the competitions' products that MS would actually experience a decrease in revenue.
the wooden steering wheel.
"Later on I googlesearched my name and found a messageboard post with my name mentioned. It turned out that one of those workers was venting about something I said at work, under a nickname on some private message-board."
How do I mode you up without destroying the joke?
Look, if an anti-social 19 year old can create such a devasting worm, I am afraid the odds are against this strategy of fighting the problem. What, there must be a 100 MILLION other kids just like him, playing away on their windows computer, looking to be more than just a pimple faced teenager.
Let's see, ingredients to a killer windows worm:
1. Anti-social teenager
2. windows computer
3. internet connection
4. some free time (see 1.)
Sorry, this is just not the way to resolve the problem. It is just too easy, not even worth celebrating. No wonder MS is ONLY investing 5M in this method (what is 5M to MS?).
"A: release it to the news/public and risk MS ire
or
B: Submit it confidentially to the MS bug track for a hefty reward"
That system already exists.It is called "Black Mail."
1. Write worm
2. Find someone in severe financial trouble
3. Have that person release the worm from home computer
4. Turn that person in and collect the reward
5. Place 75% in a high interest foreign account and keep the rest
6. After the guy gets out of jail, send him a key to a safety deposit with all the information he needs to start a new life
7. Profit
Here, I will keep it simple (for my poor English and your poor logic):
1)
Scoble complains to Mozilla about their code ---> Mozilla developers code out of the goodness of their hearts ---> complaining about such code not supporing your product is absurd because you are implying that volunteers should devote their time to your profitable gain, for free.
2)
I complain about Scoble's statements ---> this has nothing to do with his code not supporting my product ---> hence, there is no hypocrisy by me not submitting code because my complaint has nothing to do with code, an open source project, or my product not being supported.
Regardless of my poor English, your logic is clearly flawed and reflects how your perspective of the world has become warped. If you are American, I am not suprised of this because it is the essence of the current administration who lies to its citizens. The citizens then lie to themselves and support products of corporations that lie and abuse them, and it all starts as flawed logic, not imperfect English.