What the hell are you talking about? I have never seen a program that would refuse to run on a newer version of Windows than it was designed for. Wine will never be 100% compatible, but even 80% compatiblity is great. Who cares if it can't run a program WinXP can't run?
Page numbering and footers work fine for me - even importing them works. What version are you using?
How can you configure it to number everything except the first page? I played around with it for at least 30 minutes and could not figure out how to do that. Maybe I'm just retarded, but if you deleted the page number on one page, it deletes them on all pages.
Look, unless you run a very small shop, OOffice simply does not have the required functionality. I tried using it recently for a report, and it can't even properly do things as basic as page numbering and footers. I am not even talking about the revision control features, security features, and other stuff that is totally missing from OpenOffice. If you think OpenOffice can completely replace MS Office, you don't know anything about MS Office.
Guess what: if you buy from Microsoft, you are already on a subscription model. Their new volume licensing deals pretty much obligate you to upgrade. A large enterprise will almost always be using a volume licensing discount, so they are already on a subscription model.
Besides, businesses typically want software with official support from the vendor. So either you buy a bunch of copies of the software and then sign a support contract, or you simply buy a subscription. Obviously, buying a subscription is easier and cheaper.
Finally, I wouldn't say that a word processor is already too feature-rich. While you may simply not know how to use a word processor, don't extrapolate that to everybody. Microsoft has put some very nice improvements into MS Office in the last few releases. If you compare Office XP to Office 95, there's a very significant difference.
Well, keep using Word 6.0 then. I hear it works real well on modern systems, and besides, it would be far below Microsoft to change the format every 2 years, right?
Besides, a subscription model for software is the only one that makes sense, especially for businesses (that have to upgrade every year or so anyway).
How the hell is using/opt logical? How is it logical to put X in/usr and KDE and Mozilla in/opt?/opt should not be used for anything, it just needs to disappear. The standard UNIX place for putting programs is/usr, and there is no reason why KDE, Gnome, and Mozilla can't live there./opt is a Solaris abomination and deserves to die its rightful death.
Guess what: email is NOT a secure medium. Any relay server can save copies of your email if it feels like it. Anyone can read it. If you send sensitive information over e-mail without using encryption, you are an idiot. And anyone who has a guessable password on their account deserves whatever they get.
Also, I wouldn't put that much trust into Hushmail. It's like putting a massive lock on a canvas tent. Email is simply not secure.
If enough people actually WANTED to listen to them, they would have no trouble getting a high-power license. My point is that clearchannel PLAYS STUFF MOST PEOPLE WANT TO HEAR. Why the hell would they play anything else? On the other hand, "microbroadcasters" usually play stuff few people like.
Besides, what's the point of pirate radio? If you think you have something people like, start a webcasting station. It's cheap and it's legal, unlike pirate radio.
Considering that some hackers recently made an iTunes-compatible client, I would venture to guess that the protocol is simple and that iTunes acts mostly as a somewhat intelligent frontend to the HTTP and XML-based store.
That actually makes it easier to develop, because making a functional web-based application is an order of magnitude more complex than making a local application. After all, something as simple as form validation requires a sophisticated transaction-based mechanism with HTTP, but only a simple function with any reasonable toolkit. Basically, you don't have to try to fit the program into the limited capabilties of a web browser.
If there are so many gaping holes in the FM spectrum, then why is it so hard to get a license? The only reason the FCC auctions off licenses instead of just giving them out for a nominal fee is because there are many takers for every empty spot.
The truth is, while your alarm clock may not pick up all the stations perfectly, the slot is probably occupied in the sense that you would interfere with a legitimate station if you try to broadcast on it. Otherwise, you should be able to easily get an LPFM license and legally broadcast in the empty spot.
And there is definitely not much capacity in the FM band. First, you have to space stations 800KHz apart to prevent interference. That means that you only have about 25 channels to choose from. Some of them cannot be used at the same time because intermodulation products would interfere with communications in the aircraft band, television, or would result in some other undesirable frequencies that will interfere with reception. Allocation of spectrum space is a very complex topic, and it's not as simple as finding a quiet spot on the dial and blasting away.
Codemonkey's are cheap...if you outsource to India which Apple thankfully hasn't done.
Even a US-based programmer is pretty cheap when you spread out the cost across millions of tracks downloaded. It doesn't take that much to develop and maintain a web-based e-commerce thing. Let's see, what's the business logic for a music store. You need to let people browse, search, and download. Very complex, I tell you.
Get a nice large web cluster of cheap webservers running Linux, a decent database server, a big NAS server capable of storing a few terabytes, and you are in business. It isn't THAT expensive.
The CD ripping is automatic...on what equipment paid for by what and tended by whom?
I don't think they spent more than a million dollars on creating the song database. Let's see, 700,000 tracks. Assuming each CD costs $10 (reasonable if you buy them in quantity) and contains 10 tracks (average ballpark figure), they spent $700,000 to buy CDs. Add in $150K for the automatic equipment to rip them and $150K for some workers to shovel in CDs. Comes out to about a million dollars.
Now spread out one million dollars over 70 million tracks sold to date. If you do the math, it comes out to 1/70th of a dollar per track. That's about 1.5 cents. Even if they spent twice what I quoted (unlikely), that's still less than a nickel a track.
In short, if they spend more than 10 cents a track on amortization/maintenance, they are inefficient. It's that simple.
These people are definitely ordinary radio pirates. The FM band has licensing for a reason -- because there is not enough space for everyone. I cannot find an empty spot on the FM band even in a college town with less than 20,000 people. The band is crowded, and there is not enough room for everyone and their dog.
Besides, has anybody else noticed that the reason most "microbroadcasters" are "micro" is because nobody wants to listen to them? After all, if everyone is dissatisfied with clearchannel and likes some random local broadcaster, they can always persuade the FCC to give the small station a license instead. After all, that works for college stations, NPR stations, and many local stations. So, the pirate stations have to resort to tactics like interfering with a legitimate broadcaster in order to promote their crappy and unpopular format.
I don't know how an application can be quicktime-based. Quicktime is a codec for video and an associated player. I don't see how it has anything to do with iTMS.
I am pretty sure that the store uses some kind of web-based XML protocol with iTunes as the frontend. That's why there are all these web-based PHP scripts that emulate iTunes. That means the site can be developed by webmonkeys that just know how to make websites.
Apple's $0.10 on the dollar is not profit, it's revenue.
Well, maybe you need to also take a reading comprehension class. This is Apple's net profit assuming the grandparent post is correct. Read what you wrote half an hour before.
Here is a quote: At the 99-cent price, only about 10 cents from each song sale goes to Apple's bottom line, with about 70 cents going to the record labels and the other 20 cents paying for credit-card fees and distribution costs, sources say.
This means that 10 cents is the pure profit, and that 30 cents is the gross margin.
Dell's 6% profit is mostly profit.
It's ALL profit. It's the net margin (total revenues - total costs).
First, according to the grandparent, Apple only pays 70 cents to the labels per track. This leaves 30 cents as the gross margin.
Credit card processing cannot be more than about 5%, probably closer to 2%. Even small sites can get a pretty good deal with a credit card processor, and Apple is not a small site. If the charges are too high because each transaction is only 99 cents, may I suggest the obvious solution of billing people once a month?
Server farm? Bandwidth? That cannot run more than a couple of cents a track. After all, there are plenty of ad-supported sites that have bigger bandwidth requirements than the apple store. Think about it. A track is only 3-4 megabytes. A quick googling shows that most colo sites charge a couple of bucks a gigabyte. One gigabyte is therefore about 300 tracks. $2.00 / 300 = less than a cent. Add another two cents for equipment, and we come out with 3 cents as a fairly conservative bandwidth/server marginal cost.
So far, the basic expenses are covered by about 5 cents. There are some fixed costs left, and we can (very) conservatively allocate a dime for them. That totals out to about 15 cents. The other 15 cents is the net profit margin. That's a pretty high net profit margin.
If you are going to argue about fixed costs, keep this in mind. iTunes is already done, they don't need to do major development work on it, and what they do is done as part of the OS. The CD ripping is probably 100% automatic, I'm sure the RIAA is capable of providing them a database of CD tracklists, information, and cover images. The store itself? Codemonkeys are cheap and can easily handle the job, it's not much different from any other e-commerce store (except that you don't have to pack, ship, and track orders, you just need to provide a download link).
First, 10 cents out of every 99 is a very good profit margin, considering that Apple does not do anything other than distribute the tracks. In fact, that's an excellent profit margin. I can probably see why the labels want to charge more -- because Apple's profit margin is pretty fat. For instance, Dell has a profit margin of only 6% on the computers they sell -- that would correspond to about 6 cents for a song. Try taking an Economics 101 class sometime.
Second, how the hell are the labels "doing absolutely no work to get it"? They MAKE THE DAMN MUSIC that Apple sells. Therefore, they have every right to dictate what price they will license the tracks for.
Now, I will agree that jacking up the price to the point where nobody will buy the tracks is a poor business decision for the labels, but it's THEIR decision. I am sure they have done their homework, so there must be a reason behind it.
Don't seem to be catching on? Opterons are HOT in the server market, and the reason we don't see too many desktop 64-bit systems is because they are more expensive and Microsoft doesn't have 64-bit windows yet.
You need to know some computer science to write GNU make. It has stuff like lexical parsing and a language interpreter. It has quite a few innovative elements. I mean, you could actually write pseudocode for some algorithms in make.
You don't need to know any CS in order to write web frontends, various simple GUI apps, and so on (which is what many programming positions are for). You just need to know a programming language and an API. The reason those tasks are not trivial is because nobody came up with a really good set of prefab pieces for web apps, not because there is some intrnsic complexity.
Well, nobody says they should know what a flip-flop or a shift register or even a system bus is. People just need to know HOW TO USE THE OPERATING SYSTEM. That's what is generally meant by knowing how to use a computer. And yes, that does include fixing minor problems when they pop up (viruses/patches come to mind).
After all, if you drive a car you better darn well know how to properly steer, accelerate, and use brakes. You should also know how to fill the tank, change a tire, check the oil level, and know what the gauges mean.
Also, your analogy is pathetic. If you own a nuclear reactor, you BETTER DAMN WELL know how it works.
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Get with the program, retard. That wasn't playfair, it was some other retarded utility. Playfair actully decrypts the encrypted files.
That is simply an example of an extremely badly written program. I don't see how you can fault Windows, WINE, or anyone but the software maker.
What the hell are you talking about? I have never seen a program that would refuse to run on a newer version of Windows than it was designed for. Wine will never be 100% compatible, but even 80% compatiblity is great. Who cares if it can't run a program WinXP can't run?
Dude, PC gaming is just about dead. Buy an Xbox or a PS2 and you won't have to worry about emulating PC games ever again.
Page numbering and footers work fine for me - even importing them works. What version are you using?
How can you configure it to number everything except the first page? I played around with it for at least 30 minutes and could not figure out how to do that. Maybe I'm just retarded, but if you deleted the page number on one page, it deletes them on all pages.
Look, unless you run a very small shop, OOffice simply does not have the required functionality. I tried using it recently for a report, and it can't even properly do things as basic as page numbering and footers. I am not even talking about the revision control features, security features, and other stuff that is totally missing from OpenOffice. If you think OpenOffice can completely replace MS Office, you don't know anything about MS Office.
Guess what: if you buy from Microsoft, you are already on a subscription model. Their new volume licensing deals pretty much obligate you to upgrade. A large enterprise will almost always be using a volume licensing discount, so they are already on a subscription model.
Besides, businesses typically want software with official support from the vendor. So either you buy a bunch of copies of the software and then sign a support contract, or you simply buy a subscription. Obviously, buying a subscription is easier and cheaper.
Finally, I wouldn't say that a word processor is already too feature-rich. While you may simply not know how to use a word processor, don't extrapolate that to everybody. Microsoft has put some very nice improvements into MS Office in the last few releases. If you compare Office XP to Office 95, there's a very significant difference.
Well, keep using Word 6.0 then. I hear it works real well on modern systems, and besides, it would be far below Microsoft to change the format every 2 years, right?
Besides, a subscription model for software is the only one that makes sense, especially for businesses (that have to upgrade every year or so anyway).
How the hell is using /opt logical? How is it logical to put X in /usr and KDE and Mozilla in /opt? /opt should not be used for anything, it just needs to disappear. The standard UNIX place for putting programs is /usr, and there is no reason why KDE, Gnome, and Mozilla can't live there. /opt is a Solaris abomination and deserves to die its rightful death.
Guess what: email is NOT a secure medium. Any relay server can save copies of your email if it feels like it. Anyone can read it. If you send sensitive information over e-mail without using encryption, you are an idiot. And anyone who has a guessable password on their account deserves whatever they get.
Also, I wouldn't put that much trust into Hushmail. It's like putting a massive lock on a canvas tent. Email is simply not secure.
Oh well. Learn to spell. It's worth it.
Ever hear of .zip?
If enough people actually WANTED to listen to them, they would have no trouble getting a high-power license. My point is that clearchannel PLAYS STUFF MOST PEOPLE WANT TO HEAR. Why the hell would they play anything else? On the other hand, "microbroadcasters" usually play stuff few people like.
Besides, what's the point of pirate radio? If you think you have something people like, start a webcasting station. It's cheap and it's legal, unlike pirate radio.
Considering that some hackers recently made an iTunes-compatible client, I would venture to guess that the protocol is simple and that iTunes acts mostly as a somewhat intelligent frontend to the HTTP and XML-based store.
That actually makes it easier to develop, because making a functional web-based application is an order of magnitude more complex than making a local application. After all, something as simple as form validation requires a sophisticated transaction-based mechanism with HTTP, but only a simple function with any reasonable toolkit. Basically, you don't have to try to fit the program into the limited capabilties of a web browser.
If there are so many gaping holes in the FM spectrum, then why is it so hard to get a license? The only reason the FCC auctions off licenses instead of just giving them out for a nominal fee is because there are many takers for every empty spot.
The truth is, while your alarm clock may not pick up all the stations perfectly, the slot is probably occupied in the sense that you would interfere with a legitimate station if you try to broadcast on it. Otherwise, you should be able to easily get an LPFM license and legally broadcast in the empty spot.
And there is definitely not much capacity in the FM band. First, you have to space stations 800KHz apart to prevent interference. That means that you only have about 25 channels to choose from. Some of them cannot be used at the same time because intermodulation products would interfere with communications in the aircraft band, television, or would result in some other undesirable frequencies that will interfere with reception. Allocation of spectrum space is a very complex topic, and it's not as simple as finding a quiet spot on the dial and blasting away.
Codemonkey's are cheap...if you outsource to India which Apple thankfully hasn't done.
Even a US-based programmer is pretty cheap when you spread out the cost across millions of tracks downloaded. It doesn't take that much to develop and maintain a web-based e-commerce thing. Let's see, what's the business logic for a music store. You need to let people browse, search, and download. Very complex, I tell you.
Get a nice large web cluster of cheap webservers running Linux, a decent database server, a big NAS server capable of storing a few terabytes, and you are in business. It isn't THAT expensive.
The CD ripping is automatic...on what equipment paid for by what and tended by whom?
I don't think they spent more than a million dollars on creating the song database. Let's see, 700,000 tracks. Assuming each CD costs $10 (reasonable if you buy them in quantity) and contains 10 tracks (average ballpark figure), they spent $700,000 to buy CDs. Add in $150K for the automatic equipment to rip them and $150K for some workers to shovel in CDs. Comes out to about a million dollars.
Now spread out one million dollars over 70 million tracks sold to date. If you do the math, it comes out to 1/70th of a dollar per track. That's about 1.5 cents. Even if they spent twice what I quoted (unlikely), that's still less than a nickel a track.
In short, if they spend more than 10 cents a track on amortization/maintenance, they are inefficient. It's that simple.
These people are definitely ordinary radio pirates. The FM band has licensing for a reason -- because there is not enough space for everyone. I cannot find an empty spot on the FM band even in a college town with less than 20,000 people. The band is crowded, and there is not enough room for everyone and their dog.
Besides, has anybody else noticed that the reason most "microbroadcasters" are "micro" is because nobody wants to listen to them? After all, if everyone is dissatisfied with clearchannel and likes some random local broadcaster, they can always persuade the FCC to give the small station a license instead. After all, that works for college stations, NPR stations, and many local stations. So, the pirate stations have to resort to tactics like interfering with a legitimate broadcaster in order to promote their crappy and unpopular format.
I don't know how an application can be quicktime-based. Quicktime is a codec for video and an associated player. I don't see how it has anything to do with iTMS.
I am pretty sure that the store uses some kind of web-based XML protocol with iTunes as the frontend. That's why there are all these web-based PHP scripts that emulate iTunes. That means the site can be developed by webmonkeys that just know how to make websites.
Apple's $0.10 on the dollar is not profit, it's revenue.
Well, maybe you need to also take a reading comprehension class. This is Apple's net profit assuming the grandparent post is correct. Read what you wrote half an hour before.
Here is a quote: At the 99-cent price, only about 10 cents from each song sale goes to Apple's bottom line, with about 70 cents going to the record labels and the other 20 cents paying for credit-card fees and distribution costs, sources say.
This means that 10 cents is the pure profit, and that 30 cents is the gross margin.
Dell's 6% profit is mostly profit.
It's ALL profit. It's the net margin (total revenues - total costs).
OK, let's pick this apart now.
First, according to the grandparent, Apple only pays 70 cents to the labels per track. This leaves 30 cents as the gross margin.
Credit card processing cannot be more than about 5%, probably closer to 2%. Even small sites can get a pretty good deal with a credit card processor, and Apple is not a small site. If the charges are too high because each transaction is only 99 cents, may I suggest the obvious solution of billing people once a month?
Server farm? Bandwidth? That cannot run more than a couple of cents a track. After all, there are plenty of ad-supported sites that have bigger bandwidth requirements than the apple store. Think about it. A track is only 3-4 megabytes. A quick googling shows that most colo sites charge a couple of bucks a gigabyte. One gigabyte is therefore about 300 tracks. $2.00 / 300 = less than a cent. Add another two cents for equipment, and we come out with 3 cents as a fairly conservative bandwidth/server marginal cost.
So far, the basic expenses are covered by about 5 cents. There are some fixed costs left, and we can (very) conservatively allocate a dime for them. That totals out to about 15 cents. The other 15 cents is the net profit margin. That's a pretty high net profit margin.
If you are going to argue about fixed costs, keep this in mind. iTunes is already done, they don't need to do major development work on it, and what they do is done as part of the OS. The CD ripping is probably 100% automatic, I'm sure the RIAA is capable of providing them a database of CD tracklists, information, and cover images. The store itself? Codemonkeys are cheap and can easily handle the job, it's not much different from any other e-commerce store (except that you don't have to pack, ship, and track orders, you just need to provide a download link).
What the hell are you smoking?
First, 10 cents out of every 99 is a very good profit margin, considering that Apple does not do anything other than distribute the tracks. In fact, that's an excellent profit margin. I can probably see why the labels want to charge more -- because Apple's profit margin is pretty fat. For instance, Dell has a profit margin of only 6% on the computers they sell -- that would correspond to about 6 cents for a song. Try taking an Economics 101 class sometime.
Second, how the hell are the labels "doing absolutely no work to get it"? They MAKE THE DAMN MUSIC that Apple sells. Therefore, they have every right to dictate what price they will license the tracks for.
Now, I will agree that jacking up the price to the point where nobody will buy the tracks is a poor business decision for the labels, but it's THEIR decision. I am sure they have done their homework, so there must be a reason behind it.
Don't seem to be catching on? Opterons are HOT in the server market, and the reason we don't see too many desktop 64-bit systems is because they are more expensive and Microsoft doesn't have 64-bit windows yet.
the head produced could just vaporize the silicon
The Pentium may be a great processor, but I do not believe it can give head, despite its greatness.
You need to know some computer science to write GNU make. It has stuff like lexical parsing and a language interpreter. It has quite a few innovative elements. I mean, you could actually write pseudocode for some algorithms in make.
You don't need to know any CS in order to write web frontends, various simple GUI apps, and so on (which is what many programming positions are for). You just need to know a programming language and an API. The reason those tasks are not trivial is because nobody came up with a really good set of prefab pieces for web apps, not because there is some intrnsic complexity.
Well, nobody says they should know what a flip-flop or a shift register or even a system bus is. People just need to know HOW TO USE THE OPERATING SYSTEM. That's what is generally meant by knowing how to use a computer. And yes, that does include fixing minor problems when they pop up (viruses/patches come to mind).
After all, if you drive a car you better darn well know how to properly steer, accelerate, and use brakes. You should also know how to fill the tank, change a tire, check the oil level, and know what the gauges mean.
Also, your analogy is pathetic. If you own a nuclear reactor, you BETTER DAMN WELL know how it works.