I was thinking SMB as well, but it was not at all clear to me that they were limiting the number of connections by protocol or service. This looked (looks) to me like a windows-based licensing scheme. That is why I was surprised. If I want BSD and/or linux based file servers, there's no fricking way I am paying for client access licenses. I think Apple should clarify this if this is only "Mac file sharing".
I'm not particularly an Apple lover, but they are putting together a nice suite of workstations, laptops, and servers. The only thing is, what is up with this:
I just finished moving all of an eMachine into a slick looking little VCR-style case with a cheap TV out card. Makes a nifty media player.
What case did you use? TV card? Did you add an IR unit of some kind for a remote or just a wireless mouse/keyboard?
I think your idea is pretty cool, and I have considered doing the same, only I'm thinking alng the lines of a via chip/mobo in a low-profile case. That or an x-box with the new mod chip.
When you are self-employed, you are essentially paying quarterly to make up for the withholding that would ordinarily be done by an employer if you worked for someone else. This has nothing to do with the amount of tax you pay on April 15, except that you are required to make quarterly payments that approximate your income -- there are different ways to do this, but simply put, quarterly payments have nothing to do with determining the amount of tax you pay.
As far as calculating your tax, I am sure that you are familiar with the idea that your first X dollars are taxed at rate A. Your next Y dollars are taxed at rate B. Your next Z dollars are taxed at rate C. The tax rates in each bracket apply only to dollars "in" that bracket.
Let's use some numbers. All are hypothetical.
Here is your income: X = first 10,000 dollars Y = your next 10,000 dollars (or 10,001- 20,000) Z = all the rest of your income (or 20,001 to infinity - I will assume that you earned 30,000)
Tax rates: A = 10% B = 25% C = 50%
Your tax paid on the X tranche of income is 10% x $10,000, or $1,000.
Your tax on the Y tranche of income is 25% x $10,000, or $2,500. The amount of tax you are required to pay on dollars 0-10,000 does not change. It remains $1,000.
Your tax on the Z tranche of income is 50% x $10,000, or $5,000. The amount of tax you are required to pay on dollars 0-10,000 does not change. It remains $1,000. The amount of tax you are required to pay on dollars 10,001-20,000 does not change. It remains $2,500.
The fact that you may make $10,001 will not cause all of your income to be taxed at 25%. Only the $1 above $10,000 will be taxed at the "marginal rate" of 25%. Your "marginal rate" is the rate your next dollar of income will be taxed at. This depends on how much you have already earned in a year. Your effective tax rate is the total tax you pay as a percentage of your taxable income.
So, if you earn the following amounts, here are the useful tax facts:
Withholding (or the self-employed version of this, which is payments of quarterly estimates) has nothing to do with the calculation of your total taxes you must pay or your marginal tax rate.
...or, the extra income pushes him into AMT land. Oooh, fun. One issue of _Forbes Magazine_ quite some time ago (a year or more) mentioned a few instances where people encountered, effectively, a >100% marginal tax rate because of this phenomenon. It's rare, but AFAIK it's still theoretically possible.
You make two good points.
1. AMT could cause this kind of behavior, and 2. It is rare.
I suspect that, given the money I've seen web designers making (and the "normal" levels of income associated with AMT) that this is probably not likely to be the situation in this case.
FWIW, AMT is becoming more of an issue as credits/deductions pile up. If you have beaucoup itemized deductions, it is surprising how low the AMT levels get these days. The AMT needs to be fixed.
It's amazing how hard people will work... if you let them keep the proceeds. I had a web designer friend who would work until about half-way through October, and then take the rest of the year off FOR NO OTHER REASON than to avoid being put in a higher tax bracket.
No. He stopped working because he was either (1) truly at the very margin of preferring leisure to work or (2) stupid.
"Being put in a higher tax bracket" does not mean that every dollar you make is taxed at (say) 28% just because you pass the 15% bracket (or whatever they are now after the tax cut). It is only the marginal dollars that get taxed at the new rate.
So, for each dollar earned, he would end up with 72 cents instead of 85 cents, just considering federal income tax. I am ignoring state income tax, local income tax, payroll deductions, etc. Throw those in where I live, and you're looking at a difference between keeping about 60 cents and about 73 cents per dollar earned. It is conceivable that he would not choose to work based on that 13 cent difference, but I think that is highly unlikely, given the reason you say he gave to you.
If your web designer friend is truly on the margin between working and being idle, fine. I suspect he probably thinks that every dollar is subject to the 28% rate once he hits the lower end of that bracket. That is not fine, because it is erroneous.
Our tax code is fscking horrific.
No argument there. I used to do tax work for Ernst & Young. Now, I'm back to an honest business as a personal injury lawyer.
Let's just have a flat sales tax or a flat income tax, and quit the bullshit.
I prefer the sales tax for privacy reasons and because it is harder to politicize it and split the voting public by having a "progressive" tax base. It also taxes drug dealers and criminals, who currently avoid taxation, for the most part.
Income tax still requires the gub'ment to have its fingers in your financial records.
Our country would return to incredible prosperity if we could just do that.
I think that more transactions would reflect reality (although surprisingly few transactions are based solely on tax considerations now -- they are usually an influence, but not the raison de etre for doing a deal). Also, tons of time could be spent on business planning rather than tax issues. Lots of very smart people would be put to work doing something more directly useful (although by keeping would-be tax dollars in the private sector versus allowing the government to take them, tax professionals are probably making the economy more efficient by helping money flow to "natural" locations rather than being redirected to less efficient uses (from a market perspective) than the government would use the money for). Try parsing that one.
OverPeer even managed to procure a USPTO patent on (a) producing an advertising digital music file by deteriorating or damaging a sound quality of an original music file of a record of a cooperating record corporation; and (b) distributing the advertising digital music file through the communication network."
You however, come across as some southerner who's sore about them damn federalists mucking around with the "South's' states rights.
Or maybe one of the current Supreme Court justices that is trying to roll back the excesses of federal power exerted under the Commerce Clause. See Wickard v. Fillburn for an extreme example of the Commerce Clause in action.
Shall I compare thee to a Troll? Thou art more vile and more obstinate: Rough words not the slightest bit droll, And your IP's lease hath all too long a date: Sometime too hot may mine own posts be, And often is mine post modded "flamebait"; And every metamod from "fair" sometime declines, By chance or unfair metamoderation; But thy eternal Trollness shall not fade Nor gain karma points for being "Interesting"; Nor shall you be "Funny" or "Insightful", When eternally you bait the Flame In a most Offtopic way for your own reasons, So long as you do thus, you remain a Troll
Massive apologies to W.S. Oh, and mark the parent "Offtopic" please.
"Credit Card sized 5GB HD to become late this year"
So...:
1. Is it coming late this year, or 2. Is it on target but is going to become late sometime later this year, or 3. Is it going through a transcendant, life-changing experience sometime during this year, or...
In Massachussetts, we've had 11-digit dialing required for at least a year.
You forget that New York is a reality unto itself, and that something isn't "news" in "the City" unless it affects "the City." Just because something has happened somewhere else about a million years ago, New Yorkers won't realize it until it happens in Manhattan, or at least on "the Island." Bunch of navel-gazing self-abusers, IMHO.
I expect the following call from one of my NYC friends any day now: "Hey! Dijoos muddafuckas know dat weez got to dial 11 numbas to make a cawl now?"
I think that the main thrust of the article was essentially that size doesn't matter -- it's how you use what you've got.
One thing that sort of made me think though, was the focus on being able to deliver massive numbers of "pages" and "hits". For most sites, this is not an issue -- their bandwidth would be hosed before the server would be. You can only stuff eight great tomatoes into that itty-bitty can. It doesn't take much to saturate a T-1.
If you have nearly unlimited bandwidth, then these server-tuning issues start to become important. I think it is a good idea to focus on how applications are built and used when thinking about performance of servers. Too often, the sole focus is "can I do task X" and not "what is the most-efficient way I can do task X".
Microsoft lawyers may be able to either stall it, get it reviewed, or even get it overturned. That's the way the law works. Likewise, there may be other avenues outside of the Courts that Microsoft may take.
Such as guerilla commando raids?
Or gorilla commando raids (Monkey-boy Ballmer leads attack on Sun)?
Gosh, CEO positions can be had in India for less than $100,000 a year. Why aren't more CEOs living in India?
Because India sucks if you're really rich. No shit, Sherlock.
It's not about competition. It's about people at the top relentlessly trying to force the people at the bottom further and further down the standard of living scale.
It's never about making someone else poorer. It's about becoming relatively richer. That is an extremely important difference.
Why are CEO wages still rising while everyone else's are falling right now? Have you stopped to think about this?
Are their companies making money? CEO skills are not as transferrable as are line worker skills. Not many people can run GE like Jack Welch did. Many people can program in C.
I think that in today's society, you have a couple of choices.
The first is to own the means of production and lay claim to a share of corporate profits. This means spending less than you earn and saving your ass off.
The second is to innovate and have skills that make you relatively more valuable than your neighbor. If you can't justify why your salary is higher than someone with the same skills, you've answered any question about whether you are replaceable.
This is a free agent world. You are competing against everybody. The winners are going to take more and more of the earnings as jobs and skills in the middle and at the bottom become more and more interchangeable.
Is this fair? Maybe not. Is it "good"? Maybe not. Is it the real world? You bet your ass it is.
This is the real world that steel workers and auto workers and textile workers have dealt with for the past couple of generations. The IT business had better look at that and decide how to avoid a similar fate.
If people want to continue to earn their big fat paychecks and live at lifestyles grossly exceeding those in other countries, then they have to prove that they are economically worth it.
Why does anyone born here in the US have an entitlement to a lifestyle while someone in Bangalore doesn't? If they are putting out quality work at half the price, then too fricking bad. Being in the US doesn't mean a lifetime entitlement to a lifestyle far exceeding that found in other countries just by the virtue of the accident of your birth.
If the US wants to stay on top, you'd better stop crying when you find out that someone overseas can do your job just as well you can only for a bowl of rice and a fish a day (or a bowl of rice and curry a day) instead of $75,000. Get used to it. Textile workers, assembly plant workers, etc., have all had to deal with that for years. Why are tech jobs so different?
You want paid well? You earn it in the marketplace. And guess what -- competition is global, and your fat paycheck is a fat target. Remember that each day you go to work.
Last year, someone posted a story of this nature. I recall, because I suggested that the exercise should be "self-abuse" instead of riding an exercise bike. True to/. form, someone had already made the suggestion, so my post was marked "Redundant."
I think that the only responsible thing to do here is to mark my current reply "redundant" as well, since it is doubly so.
"I wasn't talking about price competition. I'm talkinb about COST.!"
How, praytell, do you propose separating the cost of selling a marginal unit of software from the corpus of the up-front development cost? Maybe MS sinks an assload of money into developing a product and then it fails to sell at the originally planned price-point. Then MS does the rational thing and sells at a lower price point in order to recover as much as possible. The difference between the cost of each marginal unit and the sales price is likely to be enormous under either scenario, while the overall profit picture could well be terrible. Is MS to be forced to sell the product at the higher price point anyway, thereby preventing marginal consumers from having access to a product that they might otherwise want at a lower price point?
You are essentially telling monopolists that they must ignore the market. The economic inefficiencies likely to be spawned under such a regime are not inconsiderable.
Nothing in anything I wrote said that I wanted to stop MS from lowering prices. The issue is whether a company is engaging in illegal below-cost pricing. This isn't something limited to just MS.
It is implicitly stated that you want to prevent them from lowering prices. You want to stop "dumping" which means that they are not allowed to lower prices as low as they might like to under some circumstances.
In addition, everything is reducible to changes in value to a product. Nominal price change tells very little about that story -- look at the "price" of an Apple ][ vs. a new desktop Dell. Price says little.
A nominal change in value is what is commonly called a price change, or price cutting, as in the case at hand. Absolute price cutting invovles adding additional features while keeping the same nominal price for a product.
To avoid "price cutting", which can actually be restated as "improving value", Microsoft must avoid, by your standard of stopping the price cutting to avoid dumping, both a nominal price cut and an increase in value at the same nominal price. In other words, if Microsoft must stop cutting prices, it must also stop improving the product.
Think about it for a second. If the only criteria for product competition was price then why did we break up Standard Oil?
Speak for yourself, Lazarus Long, but I didn't break up Standard Oil. Since you asked my opinion, I think it was broken up primarily because of envy rather than to satisfy some worthwhile economic or political principle.
They were offerring prices far below the competition whenever they moved into a new market.
No. Actually, they controlled the distribution networks for oil transportation on the eastern seaboard and in the upper midwest. They owned the pipelines and coerced the railroads into sweetheart rebate deals. Predatory pricing had very little to do with Standard Oil's success. In fact, Standard Oil had a long and glorious history of lowering nominal and real prices in the marketplace permanently because of their efficient use of technology and their economies of scale.
Standard actually began to have difficulties when Russian oil became cheaply available. Also, Standard failed to exploit discoveries in Texas, which was bringing them under further competitive pressure.
(Of course they subsequently raised those prices and used the higher prices in other markets to subsidize their price competition in the local market...)
This is demonstrably false. Even Ida Tarbell recognized that Standard's dominance resulted from ruthless efficiencies (but high wages) and control of the distribution network (rails and waterways). A sampling: (from "History of Standard Oil" by Ida Tarbell, Chapter 18: Conculsion":
"And what are we going to do about it? for it is our business. We, the people of the United States, and nobody else, must cure whatever is wrong in the industrial situation, typified by this narrative of the growth of the Standard Oil Company. That our first task is to secure free and equal transportation privileges by rail, pipe and waterway is evident. It is not an easy matter. It is one which may require operations which will seem severe but the whole system of discrimination has been nothing but violence, and those who have profited by it cannot complain if the curing of the evils they have wrought bring hardship in turn on them. At all events, until the transportation matter is settled, and settled right, the monopolistic trust will be with us, a leech on our pockets, a barrier to our free efforts."
Again, the MPEG group may or may not have a valid complaint. They could just be crying about sour grapes or trying to get some free PR. (If you think.NET naming is confusing then look at MPEG. MP3 == MPEG 1 Layer 3, and now they have MPEG4 to repace MPEG 1?!?)
It's not confusing at all. MPEG 1 was a standard for multimedia, originally for CD-ROMs. It contains three layers. One is video (MPEG 1 layer 1). One is A/V synchronization (MPEG 1 layer 2). One is audio (MPEG 1 layer 3). Simple.
There are other MPEG standards for use in different circumstances, BTW. MPEG 4 is for low-bandwidth/low-processor power environments, which is why it is such a big deal right now:
MPEG-2 Higher Bandwidth (up to 40Mbits/sec) Up to 5 audio channels (i.e. surround sound) Wider range of frame sizes (including HDTV) Can deal with interlaced video
MPEG-3 MPEG-3 was for HDTV application with dimensions up to 1920 x 1080 x 30Hz, however, it was discovered that the MPEG-2 and MPEG-2 syntx worked very well for HDTV rate video. Now HDTV is a part of MPEG-2 High-1440 Level and High Level toolkit.
MPEG-4 Very Low Bandwidth (64Kbits/sec) 176 x 144 x 10Hz Optimized for videophones
There are plans for others as well. Google reveals all.
So, please let the whole MS part of this drop. My point was that the people who said "this is the way the market works" were simply wrong. The market is nowhere near that simple.
No problem with dropping MS. That wasn't my point particularly, and I am not a MS-loving drone. My primary point is that if a company is forced to sell a product at a certain price point and it is not allowed to alter its price, then this must therefore mean that the quality of the product must remain unchanged as well. If you want to stop dumping, you have to watch for value, not for nominal price data. My secondary point is that stagnant technology is not very good for consumers or for competition. I don't think that is in dispute.
Let me state, arguendo, that we are in agreement that price dumping is a practice that should be curtailed. From a practical standpoint, there are a number of reasons why this may be nearly impossible to do it in this case. Here is my best reason:
In software, the marginal costs per unit are negligible. This puts MS in the position of being required to keep selling a product for a higher price than the market is be willing to bear if they estimate the front-end development costs wrong. Under your analysis, I believe MS would be required to continue to sell at a price which the market is unwilling to pay. This will artificially move the intersection of the supply and demand curve up and to the left, resulting in less profit, fewer units sold, and disappointed marginal consumers who would like to have purchased the product at or above the equilibrium price, but which were prevented from doing so by (presumably) government regulation.
In addition, knowing that they would have decreased pricing flexibility down the road, the rational mega software producer would stop sinking as much money in to development projects if it knew that the regulators would prevent it from changing its pricing strategy down the road (either up or down), because the risks would be too big.
Innovation from the admittedly largest software business in the world would likely be severely curtailed. Is it good for the software business to not have to worry about beating MS? Is it good for the software business for MS to rest on its laurels? Is it good for consumers?
Dumping simply has no analogy in software that holds up quite the same way as it does with physical goods or personal services.
On a final note, do you think GM and Ford should lay off workers right now because they are producing cars which they are selling below cost (because it is cheaper to keep the lines going at a small loss than it is to shut a factory)? Together, they probably have a monopoly position. Are they trying to supress the profits of the smaller (presumably "weaker") auto manufacturers?
Just for the record, my smart-arse response wasn't meant as any kind of defense of MPEG-4 or its licensing; I simply used this opportunity to take a cheap shot at Microsoft.
Understood, which is why I didn't go as far off the deep end as I normally might. FWIW, gratuitous MS shots are welcome anytime, as far as I am concerned. I just thought it was funny to see people jumping out to defend the MPEG-4 scoundrels.
Something like Sun-Tzu, who I think was the one to say, "The enemy of my friend is my friend" except that he didn't speak english, and he probably said something like, "Yoo chi mao lo gingo, gingo, mao lo chi".
Yes we are. Every aspect of competition in the marketplace is reducible to price. Whether a company adds features to a product or slashes its price, the effect is price competition.
I understnad your point to be that MS is (maybe) cutting its price below its cost of production in the short term with the goal of maximizing market share in the future with the ultimate goal of generating greater profits thereby.
I just don't agree with you that this is a risk in this case. There are too many potential competitors for MS to pull off something like this, and, honestly, the technological issues are not insurmountable for a small OSS project to eat Microsoft's lunch if licensing costs are unreasonable.
I never said I want to stop any customers from buying anything. My concern is when one company (not just Microsoft mind you) breaks the law to drive out competitors.
You cannot have one without the other. If you want to stop MS from lowering prices, you are, at the margins, stopping some consumers from buying a product that they might otherwise have bought. Just because your intention may be one which is a "good" one doesn't mean that there will not be other "bad" consequences which are less obvious.
As to your ending riposte: Show me a specific case where AOL/Time Warner or Sony has been found to be selling items below cost to drive out competitors. (Sony doesn't even sell the PS2 below cost anymore.) Heck, the main complaint about AOL is that they're MORE expensive than everyone else.
I was referring to companies with the wherewithal and motive to compete with MS on the media encoder/decoder issue if MS lets their product become stagnant.
BTW, you used "riposte" in a/. post. You are to be commended.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking SMB as well, but it was not at all clear to me that they were limiting the number of connections by protocol or service. This looked (looks) to me like a windows-based licensing scheme. That is why I was surprised. If I want BSD and/or linux based file servers, there's no fricking way I am paying for client access licenses. I think Apple should clarify this if this is only "Mac file sharing".
GF.
I'm not particularly an Apple lover, but they are putting together a nice suite of workstations, laptops, and servers. The only thing is, what is up with this:
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/specs.html#
(at bottom)
Client licensing fees? WTF?
GF.
Send out agent Markoff to bring back his body!
GF.
I just finished moving all of an eMachine into a slick looking little VCR-style case with a cheap TV out card. Makes a nifty media player.
What case did you use? TV card? Did you add an IR unit of some kind for a remote or just a wireless mouse/keyboard?
I think your idea is pretty cool, and I have considered doing the same, only I'm thinking alng the lines of a via chip/mobo in a low-profile case. That or an x-box with the new mod chip.
GF.
When you are self-employed, you are essentially paying quarterly to make up for the withholding that would ordinarily be done by an employer if you worked for someone else. This has nothing to do with the amount of tax you pay on April 15, except that you are required to make quarterly payments that approximate your income -- there are different ways to do this, but simply put, quarterly payments have nothing to do with determining the amount of tax you pay.
As far as calculating your tax, I am sure that you are familiar with the idea that your first X dollars are taxed at rate A. Your next Y dollars are taxed at rate B. Your next Z dollars are taxed at rate C. The tax rates in each bracket apply only to dollars "in" that bracket.
Let's use some numbers. All are hypothetical.
Here is your income:
X = first 10,000 dollars
Y = your next 10,000 dollars (or 10,001- 20,000)
Z = all the rest of your income (or 20,001 to infinity - I will assume that you earned 30,000)
Tax rates:
A = 10%
B = 25%
C = 50%
Your tax paid on the X tranche of income is 10% x $10,000, or $1,000.
Your tax on the Y tranche of income is 25% x $10,000, or $2,500. The amount of tax you are required to pay on dollars 0-10,000 does not change. It remains $1,000.
Your tax on the Z tranche of income is 50% x $10,000, or $5,000. The amount of tax you are required to pay on dollars 0-10,000 does not change. It remains $1,000. The amount of tax you are required to pay on dollars 10,001-20,000 does not change. It remains $2,500.
The fact that you may make $10,001 will not cause all of your income to be taxed at 25%. Only the $1 above $10,000 will be taxed at the "marginal rate" of 25%. Your "marginal rate" is the rate your next dollar of income will be taxed at. This depends on how much you have already earned in a year. Your effective tax rate is the total tax you pay as a percentage of your taxable income.
So, if you earn the following amounts, here are the useful tax facts:
Earnings: Tax Due: Marginal Rate: Effective rate:
10000 1000 25% 10%
20000 3500 50% 17.5%
30000 8500 50% 28.33%
Withholding (or the self-employed version of this, which is payments of quarterly estimates) has nothing to do with the calculation of your total taxes you must pay or your marginal tax rate.
GF
...or, the extra income pushes him into AMT land. Oooh, fun. One issue of _Forbes Magazine_ quite some time ago (a year or more) mentioned a few instances where people encountered, effectively, a >100% marginal tax rate because of this phenomenon. It's rare, but AFAIK it's still theoretically possible.
You make two good points.
1. AMT could cause this kind of behavior, and
2. It is rare.
I suspect that, given the money I've seen web designers making (and the "normal" levels of income associated with AMT) that this is probably not likely to be the situation in this case.
FWIW, AMT is becoming more of an issue as credits/deductions pile up. If you have beaucoup itemized deductions, it is surprising how low the AMT levels get these days. The AMT needs to be fixed.
GF.
It's amazing how hard people will work... if you let them keep the proceeds. I had a web designer friend who would work until about half-way through October, and then take the rest of the year off FOR NO OTHER REASON than to avoid being put in a higher tax bracket.
No. He stopped working because he was either (1) truly at the very margin of preferring leisure to work or (2) stupid.
"Being put in a higher tax bracket" does not mean that every dollar you make is taxed at (say) 28% just because you pass the 15% bracket (or whatever they are now after the tax cut). It is only the marginal dollars that get taxed at the new rate.
So, for each dollar earned, he would end up with 72 cents instead of 85 cents, just considering federal income tax. I am ignoring state income tax, local income tax, payroll deductions, etc. Throw those in where I live, and you're looking at a difference between keeping about 60 cents and about 73 cents per dollar earned. It is conceivable that he would not choose to work based on that 13 cent difference, but I think that is highly unlikely, given the reason you say he gave to you.
If your web designer friend is truly on the margin between working and being idle, fine. I suspect he probably thinks that every dollar is subject to the 28% rate once he hits the lower end of that bracket. That is not fine, because it is erroneous.
Our tax code is fscking horrific.
No argument there. I used to do tax work for Ernst & Young. Now, I'm back to an honest business as a personal injury lawyer.
Let's just have a flat sales tax or a flat income tax, and quit the bullshit.
I prefer the sales tax for privacy reasons and because it is harder to politicize it and split the voting public by having a "progressive" tax base. It also taxes drug dealers and criminals, who currently avoid taxation, for the most part.
Income tax still requires the gub'ment to have its fingers in your financial records.
Our country would return to incredible prosperity if we could just do that.
I think that more transactions would reflect reality (although surprisingly few transactions are based solely on tax considerations now -- they are usually an influence, but not the raison de etre for doing a deal). Also, tons of time could be spent on business planning rather than tax issues. Lots of very smart people would be put to work doing something more directly useful (although by keeping would-be tax dollars in the private sector versus allowing the government to take them, tax professionals are probably making the economy more efficient by helping money flow to "natural" locations rather than being redirected to less efficient uses (from a market perspective) than the government would use the money for). Try parsing that one.
GF.
OverPeer even managed to procure a USPTO patent on (a) producing an advertising digital music file by deteriorating or damaging a sound quality of an original music file of a record of a cooperating record corporation; and (b) distributing the advertising digital music file through the communication network."
So...they take an ogg file and convert it to mp3?
GF.
Yeah, right.
Open Source databases are just as good for enterprise level applications as Gimp is for professional photo processing.
Shut up, Larry.
GF.
You however, come across as some southerner who's sore about them damn federalists mucking around with the "South's' states rights.
Or maybe one of the current Supreme Court justices that is trying to roll back the excesses of federal power exerted under the Commerce Clause. See Wickard v. Fillburn for an extreme example of the Commerce Clause in action.
GF.
Sonnet 18
William Trollspeare
Shall I compare thee to a Troll?
Thou art more vile and more obstinate:
Rough words not the slightest bit droll,
And your IP's lease hath all too long a date:
Sometime too hot may mine own posts be,
And often is mine post modded "flamebait";
And every metamod from "fair" sometime declines,
By chance or unfair metamoderation;
But thy eternal Trollness shall not fade
Nor gain karma points for being "Interesting";
Nor shall you be "Funny" or "Insightful",
When eternally you bait the Flame
In a most Offtopic way for your own reasons,
So long as you do thus, you remain a Troll
Massive apologies to W.S. Oh, and mark the parent "Offtopic" please.
GF.
"Credit Card sized 5GB HD to become late this year"
So...:
1. Is it coming late this year, or
2. Is it on target but is going to become late sometime later this year, or
3. Is it going through a transcendant, life-changing experience sometime during this year, or...
GF.
GF.
In Massachussetts, we've had 11-digit dialing required for at least a year.
You forget that New York is a reality unto itself, and that something isn't "news" in "the City" unless it affects "the City." Just because something has happened somewhere else about a million years ago, New Yorkers won't realize it until it happens in Manhattan, or at least on "the Island." Bunch of navel-gazing self-abusers, IMHO.
I expect the following call from one of my NYC friends any day now: "Hey! Dijoos muddafuckas know dat weez got to dial 11 numbas to make a cawl now?"
GF.
Where's that old "if cars were like computers" email when we need it? Here we are, finally.
GF.
I think that the main thrust of the article was essentially that size doesn't matter -- it's how you use what you've got.
One thing that sort of made me think though, was the focus on being able to deliver massive numbers of "pages" and "hits". For most sites, this is not an issue -- their bandwidth would be hosed before the server would be. You can only stuff eight great tomatoes into that itty-bitty can. It doesn't take much to saturate a T-1.
If you have nearly unlimited bandwidth, then these server-tuning issues start to become important. I think it is a good idea to focus on how applications are built and used when thinking about performance of servers. Too often, the sole focus is "can I do task X" and not "what is the most-efficient way I can do task X".
A nifty article, all in all.
GF.
Microsoft lawyers may be able to either stall it, get it reviewed, or even get it overturned. That's the way the law works. Likewise, there may be other avenues outside of the Courts that Microsoft may take.
Such as guerilla commando raids?
Or gorilla commando raids (Monkey-boy Ballmer leads attack on Sun)?
Or maybe just gorilla Komando raids?
GF.
Gosh, CEO positions can be had in India for less than $100,000 a year. Why aren't more CEOs living in India?
Because India sucks if you're really rich. No shit, Sherlock.
It's not about competition. It's about people at the top relentlessly trying to force the people at the bottom further and further down the standard of living scale.
It's never about making someone else poorer. It's about becoming relatively richer. That is an extremely important difference.
Why are CEO wages still rising while everyone else's are falling right now? Have you stopped to think about this?
Are their companies making money? CEO skills are not as transferrable as are line worker skills. Not many people can run GE like Jack Welch did. Many people can program in C.
I think that in today's society, you have a couple of choices.
The first is to own the means of production and lay claim to a share of corporate profits. This means spending less than you earn and saving your ass off.
The second is to innovate and have skills that make you relatively more valuable than your neighbor. If you can't justify why your salary is higher than someone with the same skills, you've answered any question about whether you are replaceable.
This is a free agent world. You are competing against everybody. The winners are going to take more and more of the earnings as jobs and skills in the middle and at the bottom become more and more interchangeable.
Is this fair? Maybe not. Is it "good"? Maybe not. Is it the real world? You bet your ass it is.
This is the real world that steel workers and auto workers and textile workers have dealt with for the past couple of generations. The IT business had better look at that and decide how to avoid a similar fate.
GF.
If people want to continue to earn their big fat paychecks and live at lifestyles grossly exceeding those in other countries, then they have to prove that they are economically worth it.
Why does anyone born here in the US have an entitlement to a lifestyle while someone in Bangalore doesn't? If they are putting out quality work at half the price, then too fricking bad. Being in the US doesn't mean a lifetime entitlement to a lifestyle far exceeding that found in other countries just by the virtue of the accident of your birth.
If the US wants to stay on top, you'd better stop crying when you find out that someone overseas can do your job just as well you can only for a bowl of rice and a fish a day (or a bowl of rice and curry a day) instead of $75,000. Get used to it. Textile workers, assembly plant workers, etc., have all had to deal with that for years. Why are tech jobs so different?
You want paid well? You earn it in the marketplace. And guess what -- competition is global, and your fat paycheck is a fat target. Remember that each day you go to work.
First off RTFA
Look at the timestamp.
I only want a human fondling my brain, thank you.
GF.
Last year, someone posted a story of this nature. I recall, because I suggested that the exercise should be "self-abuse" instead of riding an exercise bike. True to /. form, someone had already made the suggestion, so my post was marked "Redundant."
I think that the only responsible thing to do here is to mark my current reply "redundant" as well, since it is doubly so.
GF.
"I wasn't talking about price competition. I'm talkinb about COST.!"
.NET naming is confusing then look at MPEG. MP3 == MPEG 1 Layer 3, and now they have MPEG4 to repace MPEG 1?!?)
How, praytell, do you propose separating the cost of selling a marginal unit of software from the corpus of the up-front development cost? Maybe MS sinks an assload of money into developing a product and then it fails to sell at the originally planned price-point. Then MS does the rational thing and sells at a lower price point in order to recover as much as possible. The difference between the cost of each marginal unit and the sales price is likely to be enormous under either scenario, while the overall profit picture could well be terrible. Is MS to be forced to sell the product at the higher price point anyway, thereby preventing marginal consumers from having access to a product that they might otherwise want at a lower price point?
You are essentially telling monopolists that they must ignore the market. The economic inefficiencies likely to be spawned under such a regime are not inconsiderable.
Nothing in anything I wrote said that I wanted to stop MS from lowering prices. The issue is whether a company is engaging in illegal below-cost pricing. This isn't something limited to just MS.
It is implicitly stated that you want to prevent them from lowering prices. You want to stop "dumping" which means that they are not allowed to lower prices as low as they might like to under some circumstances.
In addition, everything is reducible to changes in value to a product. Nominal price change tells very little about that story -- look at the "price" of an Apple ][ vs. a new desktop Dell. Price says little.
A nominal change in value is what is commonly called a price change, or price cutting, as in the case at hand. Absolute price cutting invovles adding additional features while keeping the same nominal price for a product.
To avoid "price cutting", which can actually be restated as "improving value", Microsoft must avoid, by your standard of stopping the price cutting to avoid dumping, both a nominal price cut and an increase in value at the same nominal price. In other words, if Microsoft must stop cutting prices, it must also stop improving the product.
Think about it for a second. If the only criteria for product competition was price then why did we break up Standard Oil?
Speak for yourself, Lazarus Long, but I didn't break up Standard Oil. Since you asked my opinion, I think it was broken up primarily because of envy rather than to satisfy some worthwhile economic or political principle.
They were offerring prices far below the competition whenever they moved into a new market.
No. Actually, they controlled the distribution networks for oil transportation on the eastern seaboard and in the upper midwest. They owned the pipelines and coerced the railroads into sweetheart rebate deals. Predatory pricing had very little to do with Standard Oil's success. In fact, Standard Oil had a long and glorious history of lowering nominal and real prices in the marketplace permanently because of their efficient use of technology and their economies of scale.
Standard actually began to have difficulties when Russian oil became cheaply available. Also, Standard failed to exploit discoveries in Texas, which was bringing them under further competitive pressure.
(Of course they subsequently raised those prices and used the higher prices in other markets to subsidize their price competition in the local market...)
This is demonstrably false. Even Ida Tarbell recognized that Standard's dominance resulted from ruthless efficiencies (but high wages) and control of the distribution network (rails and waterways). A sampling: (from "History of Standard Oil" by Ida Tarbell, Chapter 18: Conculsion":
"And what are we going to do about it? for it is our business. We, the people of the United States, and nobody else, must cure whatever is wrong in the industrial situation, typified by this narrative of the growth of the Standard Oil Company. That our first task is to secure free and equal transportation privileges by rail, pipe and waterway is evident. It is not an easy matter. It is one which may require operations which will seem severe but the whole system of discrimination has been nothing but violence, and those who have profited by it cannot complain if the curing of the evils they have wrought bring hardship in turn on them. At all events, until the transportation matter is settled, and settled right, the monopolistic trust will be with us, a leech on our pockets, a barrier to our free efforts."
Again, the MPEG group may or may not have a valid complaint. They could just be crying about sour grapes or trying to get some free PR. (If you think
It's not confusing at all. MPEG 1 was a standard for multimedia, originally for CD-ROMs. It contains three layers. One is video (MPEG 1 layer 1). One is A/V synchronization (MPEG 1 layer 2). One is audio (MPEG 1 layer 3). Simple.
There are other MPEG standards for use in different circumstances, BTW. MPEG 4 is for low-bandwidth/low-processor power environments, which is why it is such a big deal right now:
MPEG-2
Higher Bandwidth (up to 40Mbits/sec)
Up to 5 audio channels (i.e. surround sound)
Wider range of frame sizes (including HDTV)
Can deal with interlaced video
MPEG-3
MPEG-3 was for HDTV application with dimensions up to 1920 x 1080 x 30Hz, however, it was discovered that the MPEG-2 and MPEG-2 syntx worked very well for HDTV rate video. Now HDTV is a part of MPEG-2 High-1440 Level and High Level toolkit.
MPEG-4
Very Low Bandwidth (64Kbits/sec)
176 x 144 x 10Hz
Optimized for videophones
There are plans for others as well. Google reveals all.
So, please let the whole MS part of this drop. My point was that the people who said "this is the way the market works" were simply wrong. The market is nowhere near that simple.
No problem with dropping MS. That wasn't my point particularly, and I am not a MS-loving drone. My primary point is that if a company is forced to sell a product at a certain price point and it is not allowed to alter its price, then this must therefore mean that the quality of the product must remain unchanged as well. If you want to stop dumping, you have to watch for value, not for nominal price data. My secondary point is that stagnant technology is not very good for consumers or for competition. I don't think that is in dispute.
Let me state, arguendo, that we are in agreement that price dumping is a practice that should be curtailed. From a practical standpoint, there are a number of reasons why this may be nearly impossible to do it in this case. Here is my best reason:
In software, the marginal costs per unit are negligible. This puts MS in the position of being required to keep selling a product for a higher price than the market is be willing to bear if they estimate the front-end development costs wrong. Under your analysis, I believe MS would be required to continue to sell at a price which the market is unwilling to pay. This will artificially move the intersection of the supply and demand curve up and to the left, resulting in less profit, fewer units sold, and disappointed marginal consumers who would like to have purchased the product at or above the equilibrium price, but which were prevented from doing so by (presumably) government regulation.
In addition, knowing that they would have decreased pricing flexibility down the road, the rational mega software producer would stop sinking as much money in to development projects if it knew that the regulators would prevent it from changing its pricing strategy down the road (either up or down), because the risks would be too big.
Innovation from the admittedly largest software business in the world would likely be severely curtailed. Is it good for the software business to not have to worry about beating MS? Is it good for the software business for MS to rest on its laurels? Is it good for consumers?
Dumping simply has no analogy in software that holds up quite the same way as it does with physical goods or personal services.
On a final note, do you think GM and Ford should lay off workers right now because they are producing cars which they are selling below cost (because it is cheaper to keep the lines going at a small loss than it is to shut a factory)? Together, they probably have a monopoly position. Are they trying to supress the profits of the smaller (presumably "weaker") auto manufacturers?
GF.
Uh, yeah. That was pretty stupid. How about:
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
GF.
Just for the record, my smart-arse response wasn't meant as any kind of defense of MPEG-4 or its licensing; I simply used this opportunity to take a cheap shot at Microsoft.
Understood, which is why I didn't go as far off the deep end as I normally might. FWIW, gratuitous MS shots are welcome anytime, as far as I am concerned. I just thought it was funny to see people jumping out to defend the MPEG-4 scoundrels.
Something like Sun-Tzu, who I think was the one to say, "The enemy of my friend is my friend" except that he didn't speak english, and he probably said something like, "Yoo chi mao lo gingo, gingo, mao lo chi".
GF.
We're not talking about price competition.
/. post. You are to be commended.
Yes we are. Every aspect of competition in the marketplace is reducible to price. Whether a company adds features to a product or slashes its price, the effect is price competition.
I understnad your point to be that MS is (maybe) cutting its price below its cost of production in the short term with the goal of maximizing market share in the future with the ultimate goal of generating greater profits thereby.
I just don't agree with you that this is a risk in this case. There are too many potential competitors for MS to pull off something like this, and, honestly, the technological issues are not insurmountable for a small OSS project to eat Microsoft's lunch if licensing costs are unreasonable.
I never said I want to stop any customers from buying anything. My concern is when one company (not just Microsoft mind you) breaks the law to drive out competitors.
You cannot have one without the other. If you want to stop MS from lowering prices, you are, at the margins, stopping some consumers from buying a product that they might otherwise have bought. Just because your intention may be one which is a "good" one doesn't mean that there will not be other "bad" consequences which are less obvious.
As to your ending riposte:
Show me a specific case where AOL/Time Warner or Sony has been found to be selling items below cost to drive out competitors. (Sony doesn't even sell the PS2 below cost anymore.) Heck, the main complaint about AOL is that they're MORE expensive than everyone else.
I was referring to companies with the wherewithal and motive to compete with MS on the media encoder/decoder issue if MS lets their product become stagnant.
BTW, you used "riposte" in a
GF.