The cost of something in a capitalist system is ultimately not based on its production cost, but on its value to the end user.
The fact that MS could put the XML in the home version at no cost is irrelevent. The important thing is that there exist people who will pay more money to get the functionality offered in the Professional version of office over the Home version.
The reason you don't have all versions of Office be identical is that then you wouldn't need different versions.
The Standard versions of programs contain fewer features than the Professional and other shiny versions. This is to help justify charging more for the professional versions.
This is not unreasonable. As with much of capitalism, paying more gets you more.
Jesus, some days I think MS could liquidate and give all their money to the EFF and still get flamed by you people.
And we learned with Metroid Prime that the GC controller works very nicely for a FPS. And the GC already, frankly, owns the horror genre with RE and Eternal Darkness both...
As I said in the last thread on this exact same issue, this is really more about stopping TiVo from jumping into the mainstream than anything else. Probably not something they actually have to worry about, considering how much difficulty TiVo has had persuading people that they really want one. I mean, once you have one you're hooked, but it's hard to get the initial adoption.
Personally, I really like the theory that what this is about is creating a VOD system for old television content. It's a real step in what I would consider the optimal direction for TV - subscription TV.
Instead of paying an obscene cable bill for access to all channels, I'd really love to pay per show I watch, commercial free. Probably with some kind of preview system where I can watch a show for two weeks with commercials, and then decide if I want to order the whole season. I imagine this would also cause a tendency for special features on TV. "For $3 extra, you can see the special features for this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including writer's commentary, outtakes, and the script."
I don't even care if the shows Macrovisioned so I can't tape them to my VCR without an added charge (Though at that point, I'd prefer, rather than VCR, if I could just instantly order DVDs of episodes). I suspect this is a model that would be wildly more profitable for everyone involved, but, ultimately, more convenient to the consumer.
Then again, I may be underestimating the power of channel surfing.
Does anyone have any figures for how Princess Mononoke did? I imagine that it would be the best indicator for what this will do.
I know Mononoke's theatrical release was lackluster, but that's largely because there were only 8 prints of the movie, and so it slowly wound its way through the country instead of having a real "release" per se. But how were the sales/rentals on the Mononoke DVD?
More accurately, it'll run half as fast as everything else, but come in six different flavors. Of course, since it'll bein the case, you won't be able to see it, so they'll put a tiny digital camera inside the case so that you can pull up a picture of your colorful processor on your desktop at any time.
The second version of the processor will use multiple processors at once, so you can have all six flavors running simultaneously.
My hope is that, after a dozen or so of these crap patents are thrown out, companies will realize that this isn't actually an effective way to scam money. So far we've had the hyperlink thrown out, and I'm sure we'll have one-click buying, targetted ads, and cookies thrown out... so only 8 more incedents of blinding stupidity left!
Incidentally, and only slightly off-topic, I hope (Or, at least, my karma hopes), can we have less hyperlinking in stories? It shouldn't take more than one guess to figure out which link is the actual news. The "patent madness" link was unnecessary, and only served to waste precious mouseclicks.
I'm hitting submit now before I turn into a crotchety old man at 21.
There's no law against sending unsolicited postal mail, so far as I know. Why should there be against faxes and e-mails?
The only argument I can think of is that faxes and e-mails are transmitted at a loss to the carrier or recipient. E-mails take up bandwidth that the sender doesn't pay for. Faxes take up ink and paper, and also tie up the phone line and thus choke out signal in favor of noise.
The fax problem is pretty insurmountable, so this is probably a good law. But I wonder about the e-mail. How long before Yahoo or Microsoft decide, in light of the anti-spam laws, to open their pipelines to spam companies for a cost. i.e. you may spam to Yahoo addresses for $500 a mailing, or whatever. Especially since consumers can opt out?
In the end, that would be both a good and a bad thing, I suspect. On the bad side, it would pretty much permanantly entrench spam into the culture. But I suspect that's already happened. The good side would be that it would, assuming anyone ever figures out a way to enforce the laws, crack down on Nigerian money scandals, and at least promote spam offered by quasi-reputable companies.
I say we combine the standard rumors.
Apple is being bought by Intel!
Apple will go out of business shortly after using Intel chips!
Or, perhaps, for maximum efficiency of rumor:
Apple will go bankrupt, be bought by Intel, which will then be bought by Microsoft!
Excuse me, my tinfoil hat needs adjusting.
That's largely because it's an amazingly old one that gets applied to just about every "primitive" culture there is. It's ultimately a piece of slanderous propaganda to set up the claim that group X, where group X is someone that you want to position as backwards, so fundamentally misunderstands modern technology as to ascribe mystical/supernatural explanations to even simple science like a camera.
The issue is that they censored Stormfront because, if they didn't, the German government would sue their ass.
That's very different from a moral censorship. As the post you totally ignored while replying to pointed out, if it were a moral censorship, why would they block it only in Germany?
The real problem people had with Majestic, I think, was that it wasn't a game, it was an AOL Instant Messager window and some websurfing. There was virtually no "game" aspect to it. And so EA dropped it.
Why would I want to watch a baseball game streamed and compressed on a computer monitor when I could watch it in far better quality on my television?
I mean, for the games that aren't shown locally, that'd be cool. But the rest? I can't imagine there would be demand to cheat the system...
Refuse.
Not just because of the students who are going to enter the real world, and need to be fluent in the Microsoft products that, like it or not, are the cornerstone of business.
Don't do it because your faculty and administration already knows Microsoft products. I assure you, it was a headache to get your faculty and admin as computer literate as they are, however literate or illiterate that might be. It will be fifty times worse to change them over to something new.
As video game companies continue consolidating wildly, and more and more buy into the EA strategy of either buying out successful development houses to run their best franchises into the ground (Ultima, C&C, in time Sim Anything), or releasing media tie-ins (Harry Potter, LoTR), I think we're going to see another video game bust. Probably not quite on the level of the Atari bust, though it wouldn't surprise me if PC gaming is hit about that hard. But it'll be a lot worse than the last one, which seems to have been a little micro-bust right between the SNES and the PSX.
Both of these previous busts have been marked by a clear shift in the central location of game production. In the Atari era video games were centered in the US. When they busted, the industry centered in Japan, based on trans-Pacific marketing (Nintendo). When Nintendo busted after the SNES, it realligned again to support both US (GTA3) and Japanese (FFX) development, with little focus on worldwide marketing on the whole. (Let's face it, most of the deeply Japanese titles for Sony systems are just quietly released here without fanfaire, on the assumption that the fans of Japanese-style games will find them on their own).
My guess, then, is that what we'll see is a shift towards European developers, particularly as the EU and the Euro consolidates Europe and makes it possible for Europe as a whole to host a power-developer.
SETI is miles from serious or useful science. It's odds of success are, pardon the pun, astronomical. It's methods are questionable. The fact that it's rechecking some data isn't even remotely significant. I mean, I suppose with six billion people in the world, it's not that big a waste of time to have a few of them looking for space aliens. I'm less fond of SETI@Home, but only because there are so many more productive applications of the same theory. Punch data on medical research, for Christ's sake. Much better thing to do with your spare CPU cycles.
As for the slam on Sagan... the fact of the matter is that Sagan, although a very good writer, made a nasty habit of blurring the line between science and politics. He is less a scientist and more an entertainer who positioned himself as a scientist. His audience was never academics and scholars. SETI was a project designed for armchair scientists and people watching TV. Not for serious study.
There. Maybe that one'll just be "troll" instead of "flamebait".
Look into the Panasonic Showstopper. It's not, iirc, still actually manufactured, but you can find one on Froogle, and on eBay.
The Showstopper is a ReplayTV, only without a subscription fee. Be warned, they're old models (Unless you get one of the ones built into a TV, which I think are current), and thus you're somewhat likely to have to send it for a costly repair to get the newest version of the software in it, so that it can actually work. So the costs, especially for one "still in the box, never opened", are about $200 higher than they look.
That said, I can honestly say that, despite the repair costs, it's one of the best purchases I've ever made. You can't really grasp how awesome these things are til you've tried one.
SETI following its 150 most probable leads is only of slightly more serious interest than Weekly World News doing follow-ups to its 150 most believable stories. SETI isn't science. It's another part of the vast Carl Sagan empire of science remade for the ten o'clock news.
TiVo is not wildly popular, and never will be. It will remain the province of a relative handful of dedicated geeks like us.
This, in and of itself, does not bother the networks. The networks are largely aware that there is a limited subclass of the population that is going to find ways out of their pay schemes.
Their primary interest is not actually to eliminate this subclass. It's to make sure that they remain a subclass, and that their newfangled PVRs and the like don't spill out into the mainstream. It's only when they fail miserably at this (c.f. mp3s) that they will begin cracking down wildly.
No one really pretends that they can get rid of technological innovation like this. Geeks will always be ahead of the curve. The interest of the networks and corporations in general is in making sure that the mass population doesn't catch up with these foul innovations.
That's what MystroTV is about. Getting the mainstream to avoid fancy stuff like TiVos. The handful of us who already have TiVos? We're only of interest to them in that we'll show them the next innovation they have to keep limited to the elite.
TiVo's data is in no way more accurate than the Nielsens.
TiVo data tells you what geeks and early adopters of technology watch. On the whole, that's miles from what the hoi polloi watch. Sadly, the hoi polloi is where the bling bling is.
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of something in a capitalist system is ultimately not based on its production cost, but on its value to the end user.
The fact that MS could put the XML in the home version at no cost is irrelevent. The important thing is that there exist people who will pay more money to get the functionality offered in the Professional version of office over the Home version.
Therefore the Professional version costs more.
The reason you don't have all versions of Office be identical is that then you wouldn't need different versions. The Standard versions of programs contain fewer features than the Professional and other shiny versions. This is to help justify charging more for the professional versions. This is not unreasonable. As with much of capitalism, paying more gets you more. Jesus, some days I think MS could liquidate and give all their money to the EFF and still get flamed by you people.
You could always port it to GC.
Then I'd actually play it, at least.
And we learned with Metroid Prime that the GC controller works very nicely for a FPS. And the GC already, frankly, owns the horror genre with RE and Eternal Darkness both...
But in England, the franchise is called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, not Ninja Turtles...
As I said in the last thread on this exact same issue, this is really more about stopping TiVo from jumping into the mainstream than anything else. Probably not something they actually have to worry about, considering how much difficulty TiVo has had persuading people that they really want one. I mean, once you have one you're hooked, but it's hard to get the initial adoption.
Personally, I really like the theory that what this is about is creating a VOD system for old television content. It's a real step in what I would consider the optimal direction for TV - subscription TV.
Instead of paying an obscene cable bill for access to all channels, I'd really love to pay per show I watch, commercial free. Probably with some kind of preview system where I can watch a show for two weeks with commercials, and then decide if I want to order the whole season. I imagine this would also cause a tendency for special features on TV. "For $3 extra, you can see the special features for this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including writer's commentary, outtakes, and the script."
I don't even care if the shows Macrovisioned so I can't tape them to my VCR without an added charge (Though at that point, I'd prefer, rather than VCR, if I could just instantly order DVDs of episodes). I suspect this is a model that would be wildly more profitable for everyone involved, but, ultimately, more convenient to the consumer.
Then again, I may be underestimating the power of channel surfing.
Does anyone have any figures for how Princess Mononoke did? I imagine that it would be the best indicator for what this will do.
I know Mononoke's theatrical release was lackluster, but that's largely because there were only 8 prints of the movie, and so it slowly wound its way through the country instead of having a real "release" per se. But how were the sales/rentals on the Mononoke DVD?
More accurately, it'll run half as fast as everything else, but come in six different flavors. Of course, since it'll bein the case, you won't be able to see it, so they'll put a tiny digital camera inside the case so that you can pull up a picture of your colorful processor on your desktop at any time.
The second version of the processor will use multiple processors at once, so you can have all six flavors running simultaneously.
My hope is that, after a dozen or so of these crap patents are thrown out, companies will realize that this isn't actually an effective way to scam money. So far we've had the hyperlink thrown out, and I'm sure we'll have one-click buying, targetted ads, and cookies thrown out... so only 8 more incedents of blinding stupidity left!
Incidentally, and only slightly off-topic, I hope (Or, at least, my karma hopes), can we have less hyperlinking in stories? It shouldn't take more than one guess to figure out which link is the actual news. The "patent madness" link was unnecessary, and only served to waste precious mouseclicks.
I'm hitting submit now before I turn into a crotchety old man at 21.
There's no law against sending unsolicited postal mail, so far as I know. Why should there be against faxes and e-mails?
The only argument I can think of is that faxes and e-mails are transmitted at a loss to the carrier or recipient. E-mails take up bandwidth that the sender doesn't pay for. Faxes take up ink and paper, and also tie up the phone line and thus choke out signal in favor of noise.
The fax problem is pretty insurmountable, so this is probably a good law. But I wonder about the e-mail. How long before Yahoo or Microsoft decide, in light of the anti-spam laws, to open their pipelines to spam companies for a cost. i.e. you may spam to Yahoo addresses for $500 a mailing, or whatever. Especially since consumers can opt out?
In the end, that would be both a good and a bad thing, I suspect. On the bad side, it would pretty much permanantly entrench spam into the culture. But I suspect that's already happened. The good side would be that it would, assuming anyone ever figures out a way to enforce the laws, crack down on Nigerian money scandals, and at least promote spam offered by quasi-reputable companies.
I say we combine the standard rumors. Apple is being bought by Intel! Apple will go out of business shortly after using Intel chips! Or, perhaps, for maximum efficiency of rumor: Apple will go bankrupt, be bought by Intel, which will then be bought by Microsoft! Excuse me, my tinfoil hat needs adjusting.
That's largely because it's an amazingly old one that gets applied to just about every "primitive" culture there is. It's ultimately a piece of slanderous propaganda to set up the claim that group X, where group X is someone that you want to position as backwards, so fundamentally misunderstands modern technology as to ascribe mystical/supernatural explanations to even simple science like a camera.
I've also heard that a part of your soul is stolen every time you spread an urban legend.
The issue is that they censored Stormfront because, if they didn't, the German government would sue their ass.
That's very different from a moral censorship. As the post you totally ignored while replying to pointed out, if it were a moral censorship, why would they block it only in Germany?
The real problem people had with Majestic, I think, was that it wasn't a game, it was an AOL Instant Messager window and some websurfing. There was virtually no "game" aspect to it. And so EA dropped it.
There's also a cute urban legend that, the first time they ran the AI program, the "smart" mobs simply fled the battle instead of fighting.
Nah, I've just been TiVoing long enough that I no longer understand why you'd want to see anything that isn't Buffy the moment it airs. =)
Everything is data intensive when you let geeks near it.
Why would I want to watch a baseball game streamed and compressed on a computer monitor when I could watch it in far better quality on my television? I mean, for the games that aren't shown locally, that'd be cool. But the rest? I can't imagine there would be demand to cheat the system...
Refuse. Not just because of the students who are going to enter the real world, and need to be fluent in the Microsoft products that, like it or not, are the cornerstone of business. Don't do it because your faculty and administration already knows Microsoft products. I assure you, it was a headache to get your faculty and admin as computer literate as they are, however literate or illiterate that might be. It will be fifty times worse to change them over to something new.
Both of these previous busts have been marked by a clear shift in the central location of game production. In the Atari era video games were centered in the US. When they busted, the industry centered in Japan, based on trans-Pacific marketing (Nintendo). When Nintendo busted after the SNES, it realligned again to support both US (GTA3) and Japanese (FFX) development, with little focus on worldwide marketing on the whole. (Let's face it, most of the deeply Japanese titles for Sony systems are just quietly released here without fanfaire, on the assumption that the fans of Japanese-style games will find them on their own).
My guess, then, is that what we'll see is a shift towards European developers, particularly as the EU and the Euro consolidates Europe and makes it possible for Europe as a whole to host a power-developer.
SETI is miles from serious or useful science. It's odds of success are, pardon the pun, astronomical. It's methods are questionable. The fact that it's rechecking some data isn't even remotely significant. I mean, I suppose with six billion people in the world, it's not that big a waste of time to have a few of them looking for space aliens. I'm less fond of SETI@Home, but only because there are so many more productive applications of the same theory. Punch data on medical research, for Christ's sake. Much better thing to do with your spare CPU cycles.
As for the slam on Sagan... the fact of the matter is that Sagan, although a very good writer, made a nasty habit of blurring the line between science and politics. He is less a scientist and more an entertainer who positioned himself as a scientist. His audience was never academics and scholars. SETI was a project designed for armchair scientists and people watching TV. Not for serious study.
There. Maybe that one'll just be "troll" instead of "flamebait".
The Showstopper is a ReplayTV, only without a subscription fee. Be warned, they're old models (Unless you get one of the ones built into a TV, which I think are current), and thus you're somewhat likely to have to send it for a costly repair to get the newest version of the software in it, so that it can actually work. So the costs, especially for one "still in the box, never opened", are about $200 higher than they look.
That said, I can honestly say that, despite the repair costs, it's one of the best purchases I've ever made. You can't really grasp how awesome these things are til you've tried one.
SETI following its 150 most probable leads is only of slightly more serious interest than Weekly World News doing follow-ups to its 150 most believable stories. SETI isn't science. It's another part of the vast Carl Sagan empire of science remade for the ten o'clock news.
This, in and of itself, does not bother the networks. The networks are largely aware that there is a limited subclass of the population that is going to find ways out of their pay schemes.
Their primary interest is not actually to eliminate this subclass. It's to make sure that they remain a subclass, and that their newfangled PVRs and the like don't spill out into the mainstream. It's only when they fail miserably at this (c.f. mp3s) that they will begin cracking down wildly.
No one really pretends that they can get rid of technological innovation like this. Geeks will always be ahead of the curve. The interest of the networks and corporations in general is in making sure that the mass population doesn't catch up with these foul innovations.
That's what MystroTV is about. Getting the mainstream to avoid fancy stuff like TiVos. The handful of us who already have TiVos? We're only of interest to them in that we'll show them the next innovation they have to keep limited to the elite.
TiVo data tells you what geeks and early adopters of technology watch. On the whole, that's miles from what the hoi polloi watch. Sadly, the hoi polloi is where the bling bling is.