You wonder why your phone service is expensive? Well, asside from the taxes and the "Universal Service" fees (have to make sure that poor people have phones, being that it's a constitutionally-guaranteed right, and all... oh, wait...), you're paying a lot of money to get dial-tone to that sheep 15 miles away from the CO up on the top of some mountain.
And you wonder why the CLECs target the lucrative business markets (where there's density) and ignore the painfully-lossy consumer market. The only reason the Bells profit from it is they've had the infrastructure in place for so long. It's an incredibly capital-intensive business.
At $29.99, they're most likely (at least through my 9 years of experience working for ISPs and Telcos) selling this service at a loss for promotional purposes.
There's a marketing advantage in selling this at a loss to consumers if you lock them in to a contract (or assume your churn rate is low enough that you're likely to recover your losses in the long term).
There is not, however, a market advantage for them to sell whole DSL to ISPs at a loss, except for maybe trying to swing users to stay on telco-based services versus cable-modem based services. However, the margins are so razor thin on wholesale DSL, that there is not really a strategic advantage to be found in that.
...but then again, we have not gotten any closer to real competition yet.
...which is probably due to people not being able to acquire capital to enter an already comoditized market. Unless someone can bring something new to the table that either (a) dramatically increases the value of the service to the customer or (b) dramatically reduces the cost of providing the service, there's not much of a compelling reason to enter into a market with razor-thin margins.
It could mean that your installed DSL line could have several different choices of ISP's instead of just the ISP officially supported by the telephone company, which will lead to price competition and eventually monthly pricing more akin to dial-up pricing (e.g., US$20 to US$22 per month unlimited access).
This is already how it is.
The telco's resell DSL lines wholesale to ISPs who then provide the retail service for the customer. The problem is the cost structure is still high for providing the DSL access to the home, which is why you won't see prices in the realm of dial-up in the near term.
This is really a revolution of epic proportion no matter what one thinks. We're not talking P2P only. We're talking about our rights more than anything else here and that's the genesis of the argument IMHFO!
What rights are you losing? The right to distribute content that you don't have the license to distribute? To violate someone else's copyright?
While I strongly believe that the likes of the RIAA should not be able to shut down P2P services just because some of the content is illegal, I also strongly believe that if you are personally distributing copyrighted material without permission, you are breaking the law, and if someone wants to enforce it upon you, then so be it, that's what you've earned yourself.
If you surf the web, you are vulnerable, because I seriously doubt you check the copyright status of each and every piece of content you download. So wipe that smug smile off your face, because it's just a matter of time before your IP shows up on a federal subpoena.
Ok, difference here. The RIAA is not going after people downloading music, they're going after people sharing the music. If the provider of the content is illegally distributing copyrighted material, then they are breaking the law and someone should go after them.
If you owned the license to something, and someone was violating your license, would you not want to protect it?
Perhaps, but RedHat seems to be positioning themselves as the "enterprise Linux," so I'm not sure that the "mom n' pop" end user is really who they're targetting. They've also majorly scaled back the availablity of consumer-level support, and I believe it's just 30 days of install support via e-mail now.
I bet Microsoft's happy to see another competitor dying, though.
I can't imagine that Microsoft really gives too much of a damn. I don't know if I'd really even call it a "competitor," considering Netscape/Mozilla is free, and IE is "free" (since it comes with the OS.
I don't really see much of an impact on Microsoft (AOL contracts excepted).
Burn it to a CD then re-rip it, capture it digitally and re-rip it, hell you can even make a tape of it if you want. I think think this is a good test of "is it still possible to P2P the stuff," because well, obviously it is. Look at how much material comes out pre-release when it gets leaked from the companies themselves.
There will ALWAYS be a way to pirate things, it's just a tradeoff of quality, time, and cost. At $.99 for the original high-quality (AAC 128k arguments aside), I think I'd rather just buy music I'm interested in than mess around with the P2P alternatives.
I can't imagine them phasing out the iBooks right now. This being the "year of the laptop" and all, the price point on the iBooks is just right for competing with low-end PC offerings.
The iBook is also a more durable machine, designed to better hold up to the kind of abuse you'd expect from students and whatnot.
Well, you could do that, but Photoshop and Quark XPress fill two pretty seperate niches. Page layout has a unique set of requirements as compared to bitmap graphic composition.
* Do you want to recompile each package every time you want to update it, or do you want to do rpm -i?
* Do you want to backport source patches to your current version, and then install it, or do you want to do rpm -i?
* Do you want to have to watch every mailing list for possible security problems on your software, or do you just want to look in the errata section of the RedHat web site?
It's not so much of a question of "do you want to," as it a question of does your management want to pay for you to spend the time to.
This is where I think a lot of the Linux community fails, is that they can't look at things from a business perspective. If you've got a data center with 4,000+ UNIX machines, you don't have time to fiddle around with every little cool tool that comes out. You don't want to be doing weekly upgrades on all of those machines. The costs would be too high.
Running an enterprise data center is not like running your desktop at home.
Actually you can already do the Ken Burns effect. Import a still frame at a large resolution, and then keyframe it to slide across the viewport so it looks like the "camera" is panning across the image. Not as point-and-clicky as in iMovie, but gets the job done!
As far as a star wipe goes... I think I could live without;)
Not a whole lot left...
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
C&W pulling out, UUNet/WorldCom not doing real well, BBN getting sucked up by GTE... not much of the original backbones left it seems. Wonder how long until the US Internet is just an interconnection of all the telcos?
I didn't mean "it just works" as in context of its richness in functionality, I meant "it just works" in the sense that it *always* works, as compared to Windoze machines melting down.
Because it would ruin the entire Apple user experience of "it just works" that they can deliver on their own hardware platform. They'd be years behind Windows in driver compatibility, simply because they haven't had the legacy Windows has had in developing it.
Not to mention, hardware is where they really make their money. Everyone would probably just end up pirating the OS, anyway:)
And what about the cases where you have a blog, but you also host some useful information on the same site. I'd hate for people to not find some of my "static content" because Google has "blacklisted" me for having a blog...
Even companies who source their desktop support to EDS have support contracts with Microsoft. Desktop support for moves, adds, changes, etc., is much different than technical support that a vendor provides.
And I suppose you won't be happy unless the music is entirely free, and playing on a portable player you built in your garage.
I think you're unfairly vilifying Apple, in a Microsoft-ish fashion.
Apple is playing pretty fair. They're playing nice with the open source community. They're building quality products. But keep in mind -- they're a company, and we live in a market economy, they have to make a profit to survive. Welcome to America, if you don't enjoy your standard of living here, might I recommend moving to a socialist/fascist state?
I can't even begin to imagine how difficult it would be to assess and collect on these taxes. Yeah -- spam sucks -- but not enough to start paying more taxes for it. You would begin to unnaturally add costs to something that's supposed to be a cost-saver.
...it's not about taxing something that wasn't taxed, it's about enforcing a tax that's already there. So the only people who will be affected are already criminals anyway.
That is not correct. From the article:
But the Supreme Court has ruled that states can't tax sales from electronic retailers that do not have a physical presence within their jurisdiction.
These sales are currently not able to be taxed by the states (assuming there is no physical presence in the state). Nothing illegal going on here.
Slashdot Mirror
Well you've hit the nail on the head there.
You wonder why your phone service is expensive? Well, asside from the taxes and the "Universal Service" fees (have to make sure that poor people have phones, being that it's a constitutionally-guaranteed right, and all... oh, wait...), you're paying a lot of money to get dial-tone to that sheep 15 miles away from the CO up on the top of some mountain.
And you wonder why the CLECs target the lucrative business markets (where there's density) and ignore the painfully-lossy consumer market. The only reason the Bells profit from it is they've had the infrastructure in place for so long. It's an incredibly capital-intensive business.
At $29.99, they're most likely (at least through my 9 years of experience working for ISPs and Telcos) selling this service at a loss for promotional purposes.
There's a marketing advantage in selling this at a loss to consumers if you lock them in to a contract (or assume your churn rate is low enough that you're likely to recover your losses in the long term).
There is not, however, a market advantage for them to sell whole DSL to ISPs at a loss, except for maybe trying to swing users to stay on telco-based services versus cable-modem based services. However, the margins are so razor thin on wholesale DSL, that there is not really a strategic advantage to be found in that.
...which is probably due to people not being able to acquire capital to enter an already comoditized market. Unless someone can bring something new to the table that either (a) dramatically increases the value of the service to the customer or (b) dramatically reduces the cost of providing the service, there's not much of a compelling reason to enter into a market with razor-thin margins.
This is already how it is.
The telco's resell DSL lines wholesale to ISPs who then provide the retail service for the customer. The problem is the cost structure is still high for providing the DSL access to the home, which is why you won't see prices in the realm of dial-up in the near term.
Can they use a cookie to remember whether or not the user wants to use cookies or not? :)
"The prices are too high! We couldn't possibly make any money! There's got to be someone we can blame [read: sue] for it!"
Waaaaah.What rights are you losing? The right to distribute content that you don't have the license to distribute? To violate someone else's copyright?
While I strongly believe that the likes of the RIAA should not be able to shut down P2P services just because some of the content is illegal, I also strongly believe that if you are personally distributing copyrighted material without permission, you are breaking the law, and if someone wants to enforce it upon you, then so be it, that's what you've earned yourself.
Ok, difference here. The RIAA is not going after people downloading music, they're going after people sharing the music. If the provider of the content is illegally distributing copyrighted material, then they are breaking the law and someone should go after them.
If you owned the license to something, and someone was violating your license, would you not want to protect it?
Perhaps, but RedHat seems to be positioning themselves as the "enterprise Linux," so I'm not sure that the "mom n' pop" end user is really who they're targetting. They've also majorly scaled back the availablity of consumer-level support, and I believe it's just 30 days of install support via e-mail now.
I bet Microsoft's happy to see another competitor dying, though.
I can't imagine that Microsoft really gives too much of a damn. I don't know if I'd really even call it a "competitor," considering Netscape/Mozilla is free, and IE is "free" (since it comes with the OS.
I don't really see much of an impact on Microsoft (AOL contracts excepted).
Well we already know how to get around it...
Burn it to a CD then re-rip it, capture it digitally and re-rip it, hell you can even make a tape of it if you want. I think think this is a good test of "is it still possible to P2P the stuff," because well, obviously it is. Look at how much material comes out pre-release when it gets leaked from the companies themselves.
There will ALWAYS be a way to pirate things, it's just a tradeoff of quality, time, and cost. At $.99 for the original high-quality (AAC 128k arguments aside), I think I'd rather just buy music I'm interested in than mess around with the P2P alternatives.
YMMV, of course.
I can't imagine them phasing out the iBooks right now. This being the "year of the laptop" and all, the price point on the iBooks is just right for competing with low-end PC offerings.
The iBook is also a more durable machine, designed to better hold up to the kind of abuse you'd expect from students and whatnot.
I'd be curious to see what their tax levels look like...
;)
Nothing is "free," I'm guessing you might be better off footing the bill for your own Internet access
Well, you could do that, but Photoshop and Quark XPress fill two pretty seperate niches. Page layout has a unique set of requirements as compared to bitmap graphic composition.
It's not so much of a question of "do you want to," as it a question of does your management want to pay for you to spend the time to.
This is where I think a lot of the Linux community fails, is that they can't look at things from a business perspective. If you've got a data center with 4,000+ UNIX machines, you don't have time to fiddle around with every little cool tool that comes out. You don't want to be doing weekly upgrades on all of those machines. The costs would be too high.
Running an enterprise data center is not like running your desktop at home.
You can never tell... some people have a fetish for transitions that the rest of us consider wanky!
Actually you can already do the Ken Burns effect. Import a still frame at a large resolution, and then keyframe it to slide across the viewport so it looks like the "camera" is panning across the image. Not as point-and-clicky as in iMovie, but gets the job done!
;)
As far as a star wipe goes... I think I could live without
C&W pulling out, UUNet/WorldCom not doing real well, BBN getting sucked up by GTE... not much of the original backbones left it seems. Wonder how long until the US Internet is just an interconnection of all the telcos?
I didn't mean "it just works" as in context of its richness in functionality, I meant "it just works" in the sense that it *always* works, as compared to Windoze machines melting down.
Because it would ruin the entire Apple user experience of "it just works" that they can deliver on their own hardware platform. They'd be years behind Windows in driver compatibility, simply because they haven't had the legacy Windows has had in developing it.
:)
Not to mention, hardware is where they really make their money. Everyone would probably just end up pirating the OS, anyway
And what about the cases where you have a blog, but you also host some useful information on the same site. I'd hate for people to not find some of my "static content" because Google has "blacklisted" me for having a blog...
Even companies who source their desktop support to EDS have support contracts with Microsoft. Desktop support for moves, adds, changes, etc., is much different than technical support that a vendor provides.
And I suppose you won't be happy unless the music is entirely free, and playing on a portable player you built in your garage.
I think you're unfairly vilifying Apple, in a Microsoft-ish fashion.
Apple is playing pretty fair. They're playing nice with the open source community. They're building quality products. But keep in mind -- they're a company, and we live in a market economy, they have to make a profit to survive. Welcome to America, if you don't enjoy your standard of living here, might I recommend moving to a socialist/fascist state?
I can't even begin to imagine how difficult it would be to assess and collect on these taxes. Yeah -- spam sucks -- but not enough to start paying more taxes for it. You would begin to unnaturally add costs to something that's supposed to be a cost-saver.
That is not correct. From the article:
These sales are currently not able to be taxed by the states (assuming there is no physical presence in the state). Nothing illegal going on here.