I think the main problem there was a very poor-quality RF converter. RF and composite aren't that different if the TV set is even halfway decent. The RF signal is the composite signal shifted up from the baseband and with audio added in on a different frequency. Sounds like either the RF modulator was crap or the TV has a piss-poor comb filter (if it's an HDTV, that's pretty much a given -- the RF inputs on those are an afterthought). If I have to use a TV without composite inputs, it's best to use a VCR for the conversion, those generally have much better video circuitry than cheap RF modulators.
VGA is an analog standard, DVI/HDMI is digital. This does not necessarily mean a quality difference, although substandard VGA cables and D/A converters can make a huge difference.
Because you can't get cheaper than "free", and anything else costs more.
Licensing fees are not the only cost. I would imagine the staff costs are greater than the licensing costs.
No need to port, it's already been ported. The microcontrollers in these devices are MIPS based, which has been supported for many years.
BS. Yeah, you don't have to port it to the architecture, but you do have to port it to each particular chip. These routers use ASICs for this stuff, they come out with new ones like every 6 months. It does involve quite a bit of work to do this, and probably quite a bit of money too. Not to mention, companies like Broadcom don't like to deal with GPL'd code; they like their drivers to stay proprietary.
I'm sure you have to do some of this with VxWorks also, but doing it on something that's supported and well-documented makes a lot more sense than hacking largely undocumented Linux code. Not to mention, there are lots of engineers familiar with VxWorks. I doubt you can find very many embedded Linux kernel hackers.
Besides, no other Linksys products use Linux, they all use either VxWorks or something else. I'm sure they would rather have a common codebase and possibly get additional discounts from their suppliers.
How do you know they are paying more for the firmware now? I would think they did this to save money. Maybe they license VxWorks for a flat fee that is less than what it costs to have a staff of engineers working on constantly porting the Linux kernel to different chips, and then doing QA on that firmware. That costs a lot of money, too. Not to mention, if a memory chip costs $5 and VxWorks costs $3 per unit, it makes sense to use VxWorks and eliminate one memory chip.
The people that market VxWorks are not idiots, and they can figure out the price point that Linksys is willing to pay. It also gives Linksys more flexibility if they decide to switch to less expensive system-on-a-chip devices; finally, their other routers already use VxWorks or something similar, so it would make their code less fragmented.
I don't think it's purposefully crippled. Nobody is going to buy a Linksys instead of a Cisco router; the reliability difference is obvious even for a home user. It's probably more the case of saving money. If VxWorks can run with half the RAM and half the Flash, that's considerable savings.
Not to mention, they don't have to deal with hacking Linux to work on their hardware, they can have an OS company deal with that. Sometimes, rolling your own just doesn't make much business sense.
You are basically saying it would be OK if Dell called their music player an iPod, but did not claim that it was made by Apple. Not to mention, "Windows" is a trademark just like "Microsoft" or "iPod".
If the government decides how to spend your money for you, you no longer have the ability to choose how spend your money.
True, if the tax rate is 100% for everybody. Completely false otherwise. If you have enough money to be a developer, you are probably not paying very much in taxes, anyway.
What you do is provide lower quality goods at a lower price.
The problem is, housing is largely a fixed cost. It does not cost that much more to build a really nice mansion or perhaps a strip mall than it does to build a crappy apartment building. The mansion/strip mall will be worth a lot more than low-income housing.
You see this with cars, too: it's a hell of a lot more profitable to build SUVs than it is to build economy cars. The main cost is labor, it stays the same regardless of size. SUVs sell for about 3x as much. If the government didn't mandate fuel economy standards, automakers would simply stop producing economy cars, because it would not be profitable.
Basically, the government has to step in whenever something that needs to be done is not economical. You see that with roads, low-income housing, the space program, environmental regulations, and countless other examples. Of course, some people (the right-wing nutjobs) seem to think that anything that is not profitable is not worth doing. IMO, that's a simplistic view.
Um, because when government spends a dollar, it must take that dollar from a taxpayer, preventing him from spending the dollar himself.
Um, no. The government takes that dollar from a large number of taxpayers, and does not greatly impact any given taxpayer's income. It's not like the government takes $10 million from one person and uses it to build low-income housing.
that government spending crowds out the private sector is practically a tautology.
If you are a right-wing nutjob, that is. You are basically saying that because you paid an extra $10 a year in taxes, your ability to build, say, an apartment complex has been negatively impacted?
Government spending crowds out private spending, thereby reducing options.
Do you buy your drugs from Bill O'Reilly? You are making about as much sense as he usually does. How exactly does government spending "crowd out" private spending?
If you think it would make financial sense to build low-income housing with your own money, go ahead and do it. The problem is, trying to make money from people who don't have any money is not a good business plan.
Well, maybe that is because X11 is ugly, slow, complex, and obsolete? It is a technology that really should have died a long time ago. Of course, with OpenOffice, a large part of the problem is that it does not use system libraries for anything, which makes it rather difficult to customize the look and feel for each individual system.
I don't see the profit numbers for the iPod on the quarterly report, just the income. However, Apple's gross margin across the board is 30%, so my guess is not too far off. Products like the mac mini and the shuffle do not have large margins, but the regular-price iPods have been estimated to have a bill of materials cost of about 1/2 their retail price, so a 30% margin on them is quite realistic.
As far as competitors eating their lunch: it doesn't happen, mainly because Apple has much larger volumes than any of them, so it can get better deals on components.
One may suspect that with less government involvement in the matter, there might be more options for the immigrants.
Explain, in a coherent fashion, how the government reduces the immigrants' options by providing low-cost housing. Yeah, I guess they don't get to live on the street in a cardboard box, but I don't see how giving someone one more option reduces the number of said options.
That is called "lying" since he was not infringing their trademark.
Huh? Seems like he was obviously infringing their trademark, given that the guy didn't even try to fight them. Let's see, Microsoft uses the trademark 'Windows' to market their products. Guy also uses 'Windows' to market his (competing) products. This is known as trademark infringement. How was Microsoft lying?
CD-based players really offer no benefits other than a somewhat lower price. Unlike the iPod, they typically take a while to boot up and often don't remember where you last stopped.
While Apple does make a profit on the iPod hardware, it is relatively small compared to the profit made filling the iPod with songs downloaded from iTunes.
You got this one backwards. Apple has a >>50% margin on the iPods. They make very little from the music store, it's barely above break-even.
Great idea -- if you only listen to one playlist at a time, or you like carrying a binder around. Sorry, you don't get the point. Not to mention, with the iPod, you don't have to organize 30 gigs of your music manually. Unlike other crappy players, it actually catalogs your music and lets you dynamically create playlists. Still, my point is, don't diss something if you have absolutely no clue about what it does or how to use it.
Technically, moving stuff off the iPod violates the warranty.
Where'd you get this one from? Unless Apple can prove that the third-party software damaged the hardware, this cannot possibly void the warranty. Besides, they can't track it anyway. You can get at the files without any program, they are just renamed something funny in a hidden folder. The iPod isn't smart enough to know what you are accessing. When you plug it into a USB port, it switches to USB hard drive mode and basically gives you unlimited access to the internal hard drive.
But when a company "dies" it may not necessarily have a "next-of-kin".
Companies don't "die", there is no "next of kin", and everything you said is completely wrong. A company can go bankrupt, which means it liquidates. Liquidation consists of selling its assets to whoever wants to buy them in order to settle the company's debt to its creditors.
If you live on a piece of land for twelve years, and during that time nobody tries to evict you or charge you rent, you own it.
Maybe in the UK, but the UK has a fucked-up legal system. Not true practically anywhere else in the world, especially in the US.
The same doctrine probably could be held to cover the legal fiction of "intellectual property", especially as there is now precedent for compulsory purchase of IP.
What the hell are you talking about? The whole concept of 'property', intellectual or otherwise, is a legal fiction.
Beside which, nVidia is not innovating much nowadays.
Really? It would be hard to find a company which innovates _more_.
It's a matter of time now before either their graphics cards are reverse-engineered, or a law is passed somewhere in the world making full disclosure mandatory.
Yeah, right when the government makes Microsoft release the source code for Windows and prohibits making money off of software.
Why are some people (like you) so damn stupid? Nvidia will never release an open-source driver for the same reason it will never release the blueprints for its chips, and the same reason GM won't give you a car for free. The drivers are a crucial part of the videocard. They are valuable intellectual property. There is nothing for nVidia to gain by releasing them as open-source, and everything to lose. Therefore, they will never do that.
You are making an idiotic assumption that nVidia actually wants to release the drivers as open-source and someone else keeps them from doing it. That is not the case at all.
Not to mention, property can never enter the public domain as a result of bankruptcy. If a company goes bankrupt, all assets are sold to the highest bidder, they aren't just given away for free.
The sentences following the first one in that paragraph were supposed to support your contention that it's 'one of the cheapest.'
They do support my contention. Read my post. Which other player provides the same features for a lower cost? Every one I've seen was larger, heavier, uglier, had a bad interface and bad sound quality -- for pretty much the same price as the iPod.
There are many, MANY mp3 players that are MUCH lower cost then the iPod.
Oh yeah? How much do other hard drive based MP3 players cost? Care to list a few prices? Compare features?
For my money, I prefer a CD-based player.
Hey, if you don't get the whole point of the ipod, it's your own loss. Am I supposed to feel sad or something? I still have one of the best CD-based players (iRiver slimx), it's a total piece of crap compared to the ipod. It's large, fragile, gets shitty battery life, and you have to worry about burning CDs. Not to mention, how the hell do you organize 30 gigs worth of music on CDs? I like the ability to listen to anything I want, and I can afford to pay $100 extra for that capability.
Obscure niche language? Objective-C was the basis for Java. It actually supports C fully, unlike C++, and it supports run-time dynamic typing.
Yeah, and Smalltalk was the basis for C++. How is Smalltalk not an obscure niche language? Besides, you could equally well argue that C++ was the basis for Java. Java borrowed heavily from existing languages.
How is Gnustep a backwards step in time?
It attempts to emulate a 12-year-old architecture, for one. Besides, have you seen the screenshots? They look like a UNIX workstation, circa 1993. More importantly, having many crappy desktop environments fractures the Linux platform way too much. I don't want to maintain 3 different desktop environments on my machine just to use a couple of apps written for each one.
GTK and QT absolutely suck and feel like 1998 all over again.
1998 is better than 1993. Besides, how are GTK or QT actually different from Gnustep? I mean, apart from not forcing you to adopt some weird language...
In fact, for you to actually claim the C-based GTK is "object-oriented" is hilarious.
You can write object-oriented code in any language. You do realize that C++ was initially a preprocessor for C, right? If you want to use C++, gtkmm does the job just fine and gives you an object-oriented API, C++-style.
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I think the main problem there was a very poor-quality RF converter. RF and composite aren't that different if the TV set is even halfway decent. The RF signal is the composite signal shifted up from the baseband and with audio added in on a different frequency. Sounds like either the RF modulator was crap or the TV has a piss-poor comb filter (if it's an HDTV, that's pretty much a given -- the RF inputs on those are an afterthought). If I have to use a TV without composite inputs, it's best to use a VCR for the conversion, those generally have much better video circuitry than cheap RF modulators.
VGA is an analog standard, DVI/HDMI is digital. This does not necessarily mean a quality difference, although substandard VGA cables and D/A converters can make a huge difference.
Or go to wal-mart and get them in one hour without shipping charges, for i think 18 cents per print. The quality is as good as anywhere.
Because you can't get cheaper than "free", and anything else costs more.
Licensing fees are not the only cost. I would imagine the staff costs are greater than the licensing costs.
No need to port, it's already been ported. The microcontrollers in these devices are MIPS based, which has been supported for many years.
BS. Yeah, you don't have to port it to the architecture, but you do have to port it to each particular chip. These routers use ASICs for this stuff, they come out with new ones like every 6 months. It does involve quite a bit of work to do this, and probably quite a bit of money too. Not to mention, companies like Broadcom don't like to deal with GPL'd code; they like their drivers to stay proprietary.
I'm sure you have to do some of this with VxWorks also, but doing it on something that's supported and well-documented makes a lot more sense than hacking largely undocumented Linux code. Not to mention, there are lots of engineers familiar with VxWorks. I doubt you can find very many embedded Linux kernel hackers.
Besides, no other Linksys products use Linux, they all use either VxWorks or something else. I'm sure they would rather have a common codebase and possibly get additional discounts from their suppliers.
How do you know they are paying more for the firmware now? I would think they did this to save money. Maybe they license VxWorks for a flat fee that is less than what it costs to have a staff of engineers working on constantly porting the Linux kernel to different chips, and then doing QA on that firmware. That costs a lot of money, too. Not to mention, if a memory chip costs $5 and VxWorks costs $3 per unit, it makes sense to use VxWorks and eliminate one memory chip.
The people that market VxWorks are not idiots, and they can figure out the price point that Linksys is willing to pay. It also gives Linksys more flexibility if they decide to switch to less expensive system-on-a-chip devices; finally, their other routers already use VxWorks or something similar, so it would make their code less fragmented.
I don't think it's purposefully crippled. Nobody is going to buy a Linksys instead of a Cisco router; the reliability difference is obvious even for a home user. It's probably more the case of saving money. If VxWorks can run with half the RAM and half the Flash, that's considerable savings.
Not to mention, they don't have to deal with hacking Linux to work on their hardware, they can have an OS company deal with that. Sometimes, rolling your own just doesn't make much business sense.
You are basically saying it would be OK if Dell called their music player an iPod, but did not claim that it was made by Apple. Not to mention, "Windows" is a trademark just like "Microsoft" or "iPod".
If the government decides how to spend your money for you, you no longer have the ability to choose how spend your money.
True, if the tax rate is 100% for everybody. Completely false otherwise. If you have enough money to be a developer, you are probably not paying very much in taxes, anyway.
What you do is provide lower quality goods at a lower price.
The problem is, housing is largely a fixed cost. It does not cost that much more to build a really nice mansion or perhaps a strip mall than it does to build a crappy apartment building. The mansion/strip mall will be worth a lot more than low-income housing.
You see this with cars, too: it's a hell of a lot more profitable to build SUVs than it is to build economy cars. The main cost is labor, it stays the same regardless of size. SUVs sell for about 3x as much. If the government didn't mandate fuel economy standards, automakers would simply stop producing economy cars, because it would not be profitable.
Basically, the government has to step in whenever something that needs to be done is not economical. You see that with roads, low-income housing, the space program, environmental regulations, and countless other examples. Of course, some people (the right-wing nutjobs) seem to think that anything that is not profitable is not worth doing. IMO, that's a simplistic view.
Um, because when government spends a dollar, it must take that dollar from a taxpayer, preventing him from spending the dollar himself.
Um, no. The government takes that dollar from a large number of taxpayers, and does not greatly impact any given taxpayer's income. It's not like the government takes $10 million from one person and uses it to build low-income housing.
that government spending crowds out the private sector is practically a tautology.
If you are a right-wing nutjob, that is. You are basically saying that because you paid an extra $10 a year in taxes, your ability to build, say, an apartment complex has been negatively impacted?
Unless you ground the tinfoil, it will not do jack shit. The magnetic field will still get through, and it won't attenuate the signal.
Government spending crowds out private spending, thereby reducing options.
Do you buy your drugs from Bill O'Reilly? You are making about as much sense as he usually does. How exactly does government spending "crowd out" private spending?
If you think it would make financial sense to build low-income housing with your own money, go ahead and do it. The problem is, trying to make money from people who don't have any money is not a good business plan.
Well, maybe that is because X11 is ugly, slow, complex, and obsolete? It is a technology that really should have died a long time ago. Of course, with OpenOffice, a large part of the problem is that it does not use system libraries for anything, which makes it rather difficult to customize the look and feel for each individual system.
I don't see the profit numbers for the iPod on the quarterly report, just the income. However, Apple's gross margin across the board is 30%, so my guess is not too far off. Products like the mac mini and the shuffle do not have large margins, but the regular-price iPods have been estimated to have a bill of materials cost of about 1/2 their retail price, so a 30% margin on them is quite realistic.
As far as competitors eating their lunch: it doesn't happen, mainly because Apple has much larger volumes than any of them, so it can get better deals on components.
One may suspect that with less government involvement in the matter, there might be more options for the immigrants.
Explain, in a coherent fashion, how the government reduces the immigrants' options by providing low-cost housing. Yeah, I guess they don't get to live on the street in a cardboard box, but I don't see how giving someone one more option reduces the number of said options.
That is called "lying" since he was not infringing their trademark.
Huh? Seems like he was obviously infringing their trademark, given that the guy didn't even try to fight them. Let's see, Microsoft uses the trademark 'Windows' to market their products. Guy also uses 'Windows' to market his (competing) products. This is known as trademark infringement. How was Microsoft lying?
CD-based players really offer no benefits other than a somewhat lower price. Unlike the iPod, they typically take a while to boot up and often don't remember where you last stopped.
While Apple does make a profit on the iPod hardware, it is relatively small compared to the profit made filling the iPod with songs downloaded from iTunes.
You got this one backwards. Apple has a >>50% margin on the iPods. They make very little from the music store, it's barely above break-even.
Great idea -- if you only listen to one playlist at a time, or you like carrying a binder around. Sorry, you don't get the point. Not to mention, with the iPod, you don't have to organize 30 gigs of your music manually. Unlike other crappy players, it actually catalogs your music and lets you dynamically create playlists. Still, my point is, don't diss something if you have absolutely no clue about what it does or how to use it.
Technically, moving stuff off the iPod violates the warranty.
Where'd you get this one from? Unless Apple can prove that the third-party software damaged the hardware, this cannot possibly void the warranty. Besides, they can't track it anyway. You can get at the files without any program, they are just renamed something funny in a hidden folder. The iPod isn't smart enough to know what you are accessing. When you plug it into a USB port, it switches to USB hard drive mode and basically gives you unlimited access to the internal hard drive.
But when a company "dies" it may not necessarily have a "next-of-kin".
Companies don't "die", there is no "next of kin", and everything you said is completely wrong. A company can go bankrupt, which means it liquidates. Liquidation consists of selling its assets to whoever wants to buy them in order to settle the company's debt to its creditors.
If you live on a piece of land for twelve years, and during that time nobody tries to evict you or charge you rent, you own it.
Maybe in the UK, but the UK has a fucked-up legal system. Not true practically anywhere else in the world, especially in the US.
The same doctrine probably could be held to cover the legal fiction of "intellectual property", especially as there is now precedent for compulsory purchase of IP.
What the hell are you talking about? The whole concept of 'property', intellectual or otherwise, is a legal fiction.
Beside which, nVidia is not innovating much nowadays.
Really? It would be hard to find a company which innovates _more_.
It's a matter of time now before either their graphics cards are reverse-engineered, or a law is passed somewhere in the world making full disclosure mandatory.
Yeah, right when the government makes Microsoft release the source code for Windows and prohibits making money off of software.
Why are some people (like you) so damn stupid? Nvidia will never release an open-source driver for the same reason it will never release the blueprints for its chips, and the same reason GM won't give you a car for free. The drivers are a crucial part of the videocard. They are valuable intellectual property. There is nothing for nVidia to gain by releasing them as open-source, and everything to lose. Therefore, they will never do that.
You are making an idiotic assumption that nVidia actually wants to release the drivers as open-source and someone else keeps them from doing it. That is not the case at all.
Not to mention, property can never enter the public domain as a result of bankruptcy. If a company goes bankrupt, all assets are sold to the highest bidder, they aren't just given away for free.
There are programs that will let you do (2). gtkpod for Linux can do it, for instance. There are several for windows.
The sentences following the first one in that paragraph were supposed to support your contention that it's 'one of the cheapest.'
They do support my contention. Read my post. Which other player provides the same features for a lower cost? Every one I've seen was larger, heavier, uglier, had a bad interface and bad sound quality -- for pretty much the same price as the iPod.
There are many, MANY mp3 players that are MUCH lower cost then the iPod.
Oh yeah? How much do other hard drive based MP3 players cost? Care to list a few prices? Compare features?
For my money, I prefer a CD-based player.
Hey, if you don't get the whole point of the ipod, it's your own loss. Am I supposed to feel sad or something? I still have one of the best CD-based players (iRiver slimx), it's a total piece of crap compared to the ipod. It's large, fragile, gets shitty battery life, and you have to worry about burning CDs. Not to mention, how the hell do you organize 30 gigs worth of music on CDs? I like the ability to listen to anything I want, and I can afford to pay $100 extra for that capability.
Obscure niche language? Objective-C was the basis for Java. It actually supports C fully, unlike C++, and it supports run-time dynamic typing.
Yeah, and Smalltalk was the basis for C++. How is Smalltalk not an obscure niche language? Besides, you could equally well argue that C++ was the basis for Java. Java borrowed heavily from existing languages.
How is Gnustep a backwards step in time?
It attempts to emulate a 12-year-old architecture, for one. Besides, have you seen the screenshots? They look like a UNIX workstation, circa 1993. More importantly, having many crappy desktop environments fractures the Linux platform way too much. I don't want to maintain 3 different desktop environments on my machine just to use a couple of apps written for each one.
GTK and QT absolutely suck and feel like 1998 all over again.
1998 is better than 1993. Besides, how are GTK or QT actually different from Gnustep? I mean, apart from not forcing you to adopt some weird language...
In fact, for you to actually claim the C-based GTK is "object-oriented" is hilarious.
You can write object-oriented code in any language. You do realize that C++ was initially a preprocessor for C, right? If you want to use C++, gtkmm does the job just fine and gives you an object-oriented API, C++-style.