Can you say AMT (alternative minimum tax)? It basically limits your deductions. The AMT kicks in at around $150K. There are other ways to get around it, but in no case do you get a 1-for-1 deduction on charitable giving.
I think Costco has lowered the price to $.19 or ($.17 in some markets). Don't forget the opportunity to buy a cheap slice (of pizza) along with your lunchtime trip.
I just don't see the benefit of home printing--if you don't print frequently you waste the ink when the printer "warms up". If you need a lot of prints and are in a hurry, then a trip to a costco/drug store is probably faster (20 minute drive each way, 30 minutes waiting for prints=70) which for a quantity of 100 is less than 1 minute per print. Some photoshops do a good job on color--and if you're unhappy with the color balance you can usually ask them to re-run them.
What I don't like about Costco (and most other 1 hour print labs) is that they don't do 4xX's. They resize to 4x6 by chopping off the ends.
I once saw an advertisement for an audio CD player that used a heavy flywheel to ensure accurate rotational speed. Of course, the read rate of a CD player is entirely controlled by the clock and a stable rotational speed has almost nothing to do with quality. It's nice to know that it doesn't take much to separate an audiophile and his (or her) money.
Remember on OEM purchases, Microsoft doesn't pick up any support costs. The retail purchases include Microsoft support. The cost of sales of selling to Dell is much less than selling through the retail channel. In many of the consumer versions of Dell machines you don't even get a Microsoft OS disk. The cost of Windows is spread over millions of PCs. Not too surprising that Dell's cost is less than $50. (I suspect that they don't pay more than $100 for Office.)
There are some benefits to be a high volume box pusher.
Except you still have to pay for the "included with purchase" copy of teh OS. The equivalent would be your local reseller offering to install Linux a box, but by the way you are required to buy a Windows operating system. With Microsoft you have the choice to buy an operating system from them or not--it's not a condition of buying the hardware.
Apple will not sell a Mac without the OS (you or your vendor can remove it, but there isn't any discount. Several posters have pointed out that the price from Dell with and without Windows is almost the same. The same is 100% true for Apple.
This isn't news (Dell has always had OS options). The real news will be when Apple offers machines with a choice of operating systems. Then we will be able to see how much the cost of the OS tax is on the Mac.
Remember... in slashdot land:
Lack of Microsoft choice = bad Lack of Apple choice = brilliant
For home/student use the Office Suite is quite cheap (I've seen Office 2003 for around $100 at Staples for a three-home user license). Microsoft is competing with stealing by pricing Office very low. Even for SMB and Enterprise users, sticking office isn't that much--on the purchase of a new machine Office Small Business (Word, Excel, PPT, Publisher and Outlook) costs about $190; I suspect enterprise customers are paying less than $100. At that price it's not worth looking at alternatives that are "nearly as good".
Other than not supporting Microsoft, what's the benefit to the alternatives.
Actually if you look at the total annual revenues (Apple: rev $12.6 Bil, 5 yr growth 8.1%; Dell: $52.8 Bil, 5 yr 11.5%) Dell must be selling something. Dell moves more "stuff" in one quarter than Apple sells in an entire year. The 5 year growth comparison is telling to. Growing 11% annually on $50 billion is tough.
I believe if you are conducting a public performance (e.g., for your neighborhood) you need a ASCAP license. An emergencey is no excuse for violating the law. (It's ok to perform music in private without a license.)
Actually city and zip code are not tied together. The post office frequently recognizes multiple cities for a single zip. Letting users specify their preference for city is important as some zips have tonier city names. Not worth trying to explain to a user why the official city name slumville when they bought a condo in oceanview.
Of course the iPod comes in at least 6 flavors (not counting colors). To the slahdot crowd choice from Apple is good, from MS bad. And from linux devine.
At my company we block email based on country blacklists for countries that we don't do business with. It certainly cuts down on spam... and has no false positives. If employees need to send/receive email from these countries for personal correspondence they can do it from home. It seems like a relatively no-brainer, not unlike having a receptionist screen calls or visitors.
If our firewall could easily block IP addresses, I'd do that too.
Don't forget the cost of training and supporting employees. It's reasonable to expect every new professional employee to have fair to good skill in MS office programs and Windows. If the office uses something else, the training costs for new employees is probable a week or two. If business transactions (documents, presentations, email) need to be compatible with those of business partner's the cost of OSS becomes very high. The $250 of so for an Office license (for small businss) is small compared to the training costs or the difficulty in trying to send an almost compatible document to a client or customer.
At the end of the day, for most home users buying licensed MS software isn't that expensive. XP Home comes with most machines and probably adds a $30 MS tax to the cost (the retail price is significantly more, but most large assemblers probably pay around $30.) Works (a generally lousy program, except it includes a full version of Word) adds about $30 to the purchase price. If you need to step up to full office (Word, PPT, Excel & Outlook) the student/teacher version is available for $100 for a three-pack. Add $50 for anti-virus software and whatever you want for games and you're set.
As much as I'm not a fan of MS, it's pretty easy for most users to get the system up and running...no incompatible drivers and no need to install or compile anything.
If your average user doesn't modify the software or attempt to upgrade drivers it all works out of the box.
I was thinking of the corporate environments...rather than the home or creative-type users. In the corporatate (companies with greater than 50 employees) environment Office is almost a standard. If you want to share documents with business partners or other employees at the firm, Office is nearly required. To grow the Mac share, Apple will need to grow its corporate business--thus the need for Office.
The home market I guess can do fine with the Mac equivalant of Wordpad...
Actually it's a giant boost for Microsoft. Currently, on every Mac sold, MS gets the revenue for a copy of Office. Office on the Mac is rarely as cheap as pre-installed Office on the PC. Now, with every Mac sold, MS will not only get the revenue of a copy of Mac Office, but they can get the revenue of a retail copy of Windows XP (or Windows Vista). If MS is lucky, not only will each Mac owner buy Mac Office, Windows, but they may also buy a copy of Offic for Windows--so the Mac owner can be fully compatible with Office. Great news for MS-- nearly tripple the revenue from each Mac.
Remember MS doesn't make the hardware...they only sell the software. It will also be interesting to see how many of the Mac users decide that dual booting is too much trouble, and just stick with Windows. Windows running on a Mac will give all the panache of the Mac hardware...without any of the incompatiblities.
Prediction: Apple stops supporting their own OS and becomes a high-end hardware vendor and iPod seller. More margin, less investment. More profit
Can anyone name a Fortune 500 comapny (other than Apple) that is all Mac? Can someone even suggest a company that is more than 50% Macs? I suspect every very large company has a hidden Mac or two--maybe even a hidden Mac of 100... Macs get bought for a variety of reasons... a department needs to run some specific software, a piece of equipment bought from some vendor is driven by a Mac. Someone in a graphics department needs to check the corporate web site on a Mac...
Any Fortune 500 employees who can announce that their firm's standard platform is Macs? (even as AC).
Have you noticed that apple doesn't offer their extended warrantee in your state? WTF? Too many lightning strikes or gov't that they actually include stuff in the contract?
If you really are looking for $300 solution or so...look into the Linksys RV082 series; Not the most sophisticated pices of hardware ever, but includes a stateful packet inspection, load balancing, 50 VPN tunnels and a bunch of other features. Internally it runs some version of IPTables but harder to hack as it's hardware-based. Look on Toms hardware for an indepth review.
MS also offers a low-end DTP program--Publisher. It's an also ran, but included for free in some versions of office. A surprising number of small businesses use it for internally-generated direct mail, brochures, etc. This has forced printers to learn to live with it.
The "software only" model seems to have been successful for Microsoft. They sell almost no hardware and make money on their software. If you can get the software sales volume up high enough you can have a moderately profitable business. Also the margin on each unit of software sold is much higher than that of hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I left my car door unlocked and the keys in the ignition. After someone stole my car I'm blaming toyota fault for not making a secure vehicle.
If you're totally clueless, don't run applications like CuteFTP.
Can you say AMT (alternative minimum tax)? It basically limits your deductions. The AMT kicks in at around $150K. There are other ways to get around it, but in no case do you get a 1-for-1 deduction on charitable giving.
I think Costco has lowered the price to $.19 or ($.17 in some markets). Don't forget the opportunity to buy a cheap slice (of pizza) along with your lunchtime trip.
I just don't see the benefit of home printing--if you don't print frequently you waste the ink when the printer "warms up". If you need a lot of prints and are in a hurry, then a trip to a costco/drug store is probably faster (20 minute drive each way, 30 minutes waiting for prints=70) which for a quantity of 100 is less than 1 minute per print. Some photoshops do a good job on color--and if you're unhappy with the color balance you can usually ask them to re-run them.
What I don't like about Costco (and most other 1 hour print labs) is that they don't do 4xX's. They resize to 4x6 by chopping off the ends.
I once saw an advertisement for an audio CD player that used a heavy flywheel to ensure accurate rotational speed. Of course, the read rate of a CD player is entirely controlled by the clock and a stable rotational speed has almost nothing to do with quality. It's nice to know that it doesn't take much to separate an audiophile and his (or her) money.
Remember on OEM purchases, Microsoft doesn't pick up any support costs. The retail purchases include Microsoft support. The cost of sales of selling to Dell is much less than selling through the retail channel. In many of the consumer versions of Dell machines you don't even get a Microsoft OS disk. The cost of Windows is spread over millions of PCs. Not too surprising that Dell's cost is less than $50. (I suspect that they don't pay more than $100 for Office.)
There are some benefits to be a high volume box pusher.
Except you still have to pay for the "included with purchase" copy of teh OS. The equivalent would be your local reseller offering to install Linux a box, but by the way you are required to buy a Windows operating system. With Microsoft you have the choice to buy an operating system from them or not--it's not a condition of buying the hardware.
Apple will not sell a Mac without the OS (you or your vendor can remove it, but there isn't any discount. Several posters have pointed out that the price from Dell with and without Windows is almost the same. The same is 100% true for Apple.
This isn't news (Dell has always had OS options). The real news will be when Apple offers machines with a choice of operating systems. Then we will be able to see how much the cost of the OS tax is on the Mac.
Remember... in slashdot land:
Lack of Microsoft choice = bad
Lack of Apple choice = brilliant
For home/student use the Office Suite is quite cheap (I've seen Office 2003 for around $100 at Staples for a three-home user license). Microsoft is competing with stealing by pricing Office very low. Even for SMB and Enterprise users, sticking office isn't that much--on the purchase of a new machine Office Small Business (Word, Excel, PPT, Publisher and Outlook) costs about $190; I suspect enterprise customers are paying less than $100. At that price it's not worth looking at alternatives that are "nearly as good".
Other than not supporting Microsoft, what's the benefit to the alternatives.
I think outlooks been doing this since version 2003 (or earlier)
Actually if you look at the total annual revenues (Apple: rev $12.6 Bil, 5 yr growth 8.1%; Dell: $52.8 Bil, 5 yr 11.5%) Dell must be selling something. Dell moves more "stuff" in one quarter than Apple sells in an entire year. The 5 year growth comparison is telling to. Growing 11% annually on $50 billion is tough.
I believe if you are conducting a public performance (e.g., for your neighborhood) you need a ASCAP license. An emergencey is no excuse for violating the law. (It's ok to perform music in private without a license.)
Actually city and zip code are not tied together. The post office frequently recognizes multiple cities for a single zip. Letting users specify their preference for city is important as some zips have tonier city names. Not worth trying to explain to a user why the official city name slumville when they bought a condo in oceanview.
You mean just repackaging bug fixes are upgrades isn't enough? Or is it buying a upgrade that is nothing but bugs?
Of course the iPod comes in at least 6 flavors (not counting colors). To the slahdot crowd choice from Apple is good, from MS bad. And from linux devine.
At my company we block email based on country blacklists for countries that we don't do business with. It certainly cuts down on spam ... and has no false positives. If employees need to send/receive email from these countries for personal correspondence they can do it from home. It seems like a relatively no-brainer, not unlike having a receptionist screen calls or visitors.
If our firewall could easily block IP addresses, I'd do that too.
Don't forget the cost of training and supporting employees. It's reasonable to expect every new professional employee to have fair to good skill in MS office programs and Windows. If the office uses something else, the training costs for new employees is probable a week or two. If business transactions (documents, presentations, email) need to be compatible with those of business partner's the cost of OSS becomes very high. The $250 of so for an Office license (for small businss) is small compared to the training costs or the difficulty in trying to send an almost compatible document to a client or customer.
At the end of the day, for most home users buying licensed MS software isn't that expensive. XP Home comes with most machines and probably adds a $30 MS tax to the cost (the retail price is significantly more, but most large assemblers probably pay around $30.) Works (a generally lousy program, except it includes a full version of Word) adds about $30 to the purchase price. If you need to step up to full office (Word, PPT, Excel & Outlook) the student/teacher version is available for $100 for a three-pack. Add $50 for anti-virus software and whatever you want for games and you're set.
As much as I'm not a fan of MS, it's pretty easy for most users to get the system up and running...no incompatible drivers and no need to install or compile anything.
If your average user doesn't modify the software or attempt to upgrade drivers it all works out of the box.
And which company (companies) would that be in reference to?
I was thinking of the corporate environments...rather than the home or creative-type users. In the corporatate (companies with greater than 50 employees) environment Office is almost a standard. If you want to share documents with business partners or other employees at the firm, Office is nearly required. To grow the Mac share, Apple will need to grow its corporate business--thus the need for Office.
The home market I guess can do fine with the Mac equivalant of Wordpad...
Actually it's a giant boost for Microsoft. Currently, on every Mac sold, MS gets the revenue for a copy of Office. Office on the Mac is rarely as cheap as pre-installed Office on the PC. Now, with every Mac sold, MS will not only get the revenue of a copy of Mac Office, but they can get the revenue of a retail copy of Windows XP (or Windows Vista). If MS is lucky, not only will each Mac owner buy Mac Office, Windows, but they may also buy a copy of Offic for Windows--so the Mac owner can be fully compatible with Office. Great news for MS-- nearly tripple the revenue from each Mac.
Remember MS doesn't make the hardware...they only sell the software. It will also be interesting to see how many of the Mac users decide that dual booting is too much trouble, and just stick with Windows. Windows running on a Mac will give all the panache of the Mac hardware...without any of the incompatiblities.
Prediction: Apple stops supporting their own OS and becomes a high-end hardware vendor and iPod seller. More margin, less investment. More profit
Can anyone name a Fortune 500 comapny (other than Apple) that is all Mac? Can someone even suggest a company that is more than 50% Macs? I suspect every very large company has a hidden Mac or two--maybe even a hidden Mac of 100... Macs get bought for a variety of reasons... a department needs to run some specific software, a piece of equipment bought from some vendor is driven by a Mac. Someone in a graphics department needs to check the corporate web site on a Mac...
Any Fortune 500 employees who can announce that their firm's standard platform is Macs? (even as AC).
Have you noticed that apple doesn't offer their extended warrantee in your state? WTF? Too many lightning strikes or gov't that they actually include stuff in the contract?
If you really are looking for $300 solution or so...look into the Linksys RV082 series; Not the most sophisticated pices of hardware ever, but includes a stateful packet inspection, load balancing, 50 VPN tunnels and a bunch of other features. Internally it runs some version of IPTables but harder to hack as it's hardware-based. Look on Toms hardware for an indepth review.
MS also offers a low-end DTP program--Publisher. It's an also ran, but included for free in some versions of office. A surprising number of small businesses use it for internally-generated direct mail, brochures, etc. This has forced printers to learn to live with it.
The "software only" model seems to have been successful for Microsoft. They sell almost no hardware and make money on their software. If you can get the software sales volume up high enough you can have a moderately profitable business. Also the margin on each unit of software sold is much higher than that of hardware.