eBooks are 100% about convenience, and 0% about price. It's instant gratification.
That is obviously nonsense, or people wouldn't be selling so many $0.99 e-books and this case wouldn't exist because Amazon wouldn't have been cutting prices on e-books to sell more.
The cost of ebooks is not $0. You have to maintain a server farm to store, sell and distribute those ebooks.Those servers have to have power, cooling, networking, and floorspace. And you need people to maintain it all.
Which costs... basically nothing. You could fill all the e-books on Amazon onto a 1TB hard drive, so one rack of servers could handle redundant storage on redundant servers for many times more e-books than Amazon currently sells.
The last book I bought, the DRM-infested e-book was $20 and the paperback was $12.
Either publishers have no clue, or they're trying to keep selling paper books rather than e-books. The funny part is that by demanding DRM on the e-books Amazon sell, they're helping to tie Amazon customers to their Kindles so they can't buy from other stores.
Wow. I had completely encrypted email in 1993... just click the encrypt button on the compose window and off it went.
The problem is that encryption has to be built into your email software or it won't get used; no-one wants to be having to type pgp commands into a terminal to ensure their email is encrypted. And most people don't really care that the NSA know their cat is barfing in the kitchen.
If I remember correctly, comparative studies have shown that a joystick is a better way to steer a car than a steering wheel. So they were probably right.
In all likely hood, they would come to colonize the Earth since it is the perfect distance to the host star to support liquid water and an existing ecosystem that isn't dependent on any one species that would resist colonization.
So they're going to burn more energy than the human race has used since the beginning of time to come here and colonize Earth, when they could just dismantle a planet in their own system and build a Dyson sphere?
The only thing Earth has that aliens couldn't find elsewhere is Earth life. And after all that cattle mutilation and anal probing, they should have plenty enough DNA to rebuild that wherever they want to live.
Due to the sheer size of the known universe, it is inevitable that there is sentient life beyond earth.
[citation needed]
Yeah, it's possible that there are other creatures like us in other galaxies, but our galaxy appears to be a wilderness. Since we could colonise it within ten million years, that's a pretty good sign that there aren't any others here.
The problem with colonizing is basically the radiation in space pretty much kills everything given the time frames involved at sub-light speeds..
Uh, the answer to radiation in space is... shielding. If you're building a colony ship you can live in for a century while traveling between stars, the mass of required shielding will be small compared to the mass of the ship.
huh? i have a transformer prime and my wife has an infinity, and both of them balance properly.
Then you must have differently shaped legs to mine. It's far more top-heavy than our Asus netbook, which is about the same size and power, and takes very little force to knock over.
It's a novel design but functionally, other convertible designs seem to do the job better - e.g. Asus Transformer, Dell Inspiron Duo, HP envy x2.
The Transformer makes a crappy laptop too. You just can't make a laptop work on your lap when all the heavy parts are behind the screen, unless you put a lot more weight in the keyboard dock. Even the extra battery Asus put in there for the Transformer isn't heavy enough to stop it wanting to tip over all the time.
It isn't a laptop and you aren't going to use it as a laptop.
But the fanboys keep saying 'hey, this is great, I can use it as a tablet and a laptop'.
Sure, it has a keyboard, but if you're sitting on the couch with you feet up, you'd be using it in tablet mode.
Unless you want to do actual work with it, as you would with a laptop.
But I'm not going to use the Surface keyboard cover as my keyboard because it doesn't provide the laptop clamshell footprint --- which works quite well.
So, uh, why buy one when there are much better tablets available for less?
Nobody can argue that XBox was not a huge success.
Last I looked, the Xbox was still down a billion dollars or two over the course of its life. And that's 'a huge success'? No wonder Microsoft is in the crap.
Taking the money they blew on Xbox and spending it buying Apple shares at that time... now that would have been 'a huge success'.
Right now, MS OEMs aren't ready to invest a dime in a 2% business with lower margins and worse perpectives than Android; heance they just put out handsets that are cut-down variants of their Android ones, with little marketing support.
What good would marketing do?
Most people have been using Windows for years. They're used to bugs, forced upgrades and blue screens. If they wanted Windows on a phone, they'd buy it. But they don't.
Windows is a cheap, crappy brand. No-one buys cheap, crappy brands if they can afford something better.
This has been answered in the branch above. You can easily exceed your hosted bandwidth quota (with zero ad-generated revenue) by having a high-rez photo from your site pop up in a google image search, especially in a situation where something you have on file becames the topic of a high number of searches.
And that was answered in my comment above. If you don't want people using image search, block them.
In fact, it causes reduced bandwidth usage because you don't have to download some stupid ad-filled (and possibly malware-infested) web page that you don't want to see, the way the old image search did.
If they don't like it, block any requests with a Google referrer string.
We haven't a major increase in HDD capacity for a long time. That means, instead of paying $300-500 for a high-capacity drive as we did when drive capacity seemed to be doubling every year, we've been paying $100-150.
Back before there were native Sinclair Spectrum emulators for unix, I used to run a DOS Spectrum emulator in a PC emulator on a Sparc. Worked OK, there were enough extra CPU cycles to handle all the translation from Z80 to 8086 to Sparc and still play the games at full speed.
You are aware that AMD's current CPUs are bigger, hotter and slower than Intel's, right? I'd guess AMD gave them a better deal because they need the money.
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Do these politicians understand what they are doing?
They understand that passing laws will bring in campaign contributions, and that money will get them re-elected.
I'm not sure why you'd think people are buying Kindles to get cheaper books, but it just isn't true, and that's not the attraction.
Uh, let's see. Maybe it could be because I know a ton of Kindle owners and many of them bought those Kindles to get cheaper books?
eBooks are 100% about convenience, and 0% about price. It's instant gratification.
That is obviously nonsense, or people wouldn't be selling so many $0.99 e-books and this case wouldn't exist because Amazon wouldn't have been cutting prices on e-books to sell more.
The cost of ebooks is not $0. You have to maintain a server farm to store, sell and distribute those ebooks.Those servers have to have power, cooling, networking, and floorspace. And you need people to maintain it all.
Which costs... basically nothing. You could fill all the e-books on Amazon onto a 1TB hard drive, so one rack of servers could handle redundant storage on redundant servers for many times more e-books than Amazon currently sells.
The last book I bought, the DRM-infested e-book was $20 and the paperback was $12.
Either publishers have no clue, or they're trying to keep selling paper books rather than e-books. The funny part is that by demanding DRM on the e-books Amazon sell, they're helping to tie Amazon customers to their Kindles so they can't buy from other stores.
Wow. I had completely encrypted email in 1993... just click the encrypt button on the compose window and off it went.
The problem is that encryption has to be built into your email software or it won't get used; no-one wants to be having to type pgp commands into a terminal to ensure their email is encrypted. And most people don't really care that the NSA know their cat is barfing in the kitchen.
If I remember correctly, comparative studies have shown that a joystick is a better way to steer a car than a steering wheel. So they were probably right.
With that argument you kill off a lot of innovation. We don't need cars, we had horse buggies for centuries, right?
You didn't cut off your legs when you got a horse. You didn't shoot all the horses when you got a car.
The console is there to fix the system when someone fscks it up. Making it reliant on a ton of user-space code is a really bad idea.
In all likely hood, they would come to colonize the Earth since it is the perfect distance to the host star to support liquid water and an existing ecosystem that isn't dependent on any one species that would resist colonization.
So they're going to burn more energy than the human race has used since the beginning of time to come here and colonize Earth, when they could just dismantle a planet in their own system and build a Dyson sphere?
The only thing Earth has that aliens couldn't find elsewhere is Earth life. And after all that cattle mutilation and anal probing, they should have plenty enough DNA to rebuild that wherever they want to live.
Due to the sheer size of the known universe, it is inevitable that there is sentient life beyond earth.
[citation needed]
Yeah, it's possible that there are other creatures like us in other galaxies, but our galaxy appears to be a wilderness. Since we could colonise it within ten million years, that's a pretty good sign that there aren't any others here.
The problem with colonizing is basically the radiation in space pretty much kills everything given the time frames involved at sub-light speeds..
Uh, the answer to radiation in space is... shielding. If you're building a colony ship you can live in for a century while traveling between stars, the mass of required shielding will be small compared to the mass of the ship.
huh? i have a transformer prime and my wife has an infinity, and both of them balance properly.
Then you must have differently shaped legs to mine. It's far more top-heavy than our Asus netbook, which is about the same size and power, and takes very little force to knock over.
It's a novel design but functionally, other convertible designs seem to do the job better - e.g. Asus Transformer, Dell Inspiron Duo, HP envy x2.
The Transformer makes a crappy laptop too. You just can't make a laptop work on your lap when all the heavy parts are behind the screen, unless you put a lot more weight in the keyboard dock. Even the extra battery Asus put in there for the Transformer isn't heavy enough to stop it wanting to tip over all the time.
It isn't a laptop and you aren't going to use it as a laptop.
But the fanboys keep saying 'hey, this is great, I can use it as a tablet and a laptop'.
Sure, it has a keyboard, but if you're sitting on the couch with you feet up, you'd be using it in tablet mode.
Unless you want to do actual work with it, as you would with a laptop.
But I'm not going to use the Surface keyboard cover as my keyboard because it doesn't provide the laptop clamshell footprint --- which works quite well.
So, uh, why buy one when there are much better tablets available for less?
Nobody can argue that XBox was not a huge success.
Last I looked, the Xbox was still down a billion dollars or two over the course of its life. And that's 'a huge success'? No wonder Microsoft is in the crap.
Taking the money they blew on Xbox and spending it buying Apple shares at that time... now that would have been 'a huge success'.
Right now, MS OEMs aren't ready to invest a dime in a 2% business with lower margins and worse perpectives than Android; heance they just put out handsets that are cut-down variants of their Android ones, with little marketing support.
What good would marketing do?
Most people have been using Windows for years. They're used to bugs, forced upgrades and blue screens. If they wanted Windows on a phone, they'd buy it. But they don't.
Windows is a cheap, crappy brand. No-one buys cheap, crappy brands if they can afford something better.
Ballmer, why don't you go home and throw some chairs? It will make you feel better.
This has been answered in the branch above. You can easily exceed your hosted bandwidth quota (with zero ad-generated revenue) by having a high-rez photo from your site pop up in a google image search, especially in a situation where something you have on file becames the topic of a high number of searches.
And that was answered in my comment above. If you don't want people using image search, block them.
In fact, it causes reduced bandwidth usage because you don't have to download some stupid ad-filled (and possibly malware-infested) web page that you don't want to see, the way the old image search did.
If they don't like it, block any requests with a Google referrer string.
We haven't a major increase in HDD capacity for a long time. That means, instead of paying $300-500 for a high-capacity drive as we did when drive capacity seemed to be doubling every year, we've been paying $100-150.
So I'm shocked that revenue might be dropping.
Back before there were native Sinclair Spectrum emulators for unix, I used to run a DOS Spectrum emulator in a PC emulator on a Sparc. Worked OK, there were enough extra CPU cycles to handle all the translation from Z80 to 8086 to Sparc and still play the games at full speed.
There is just no way to ever solve the latency problem.
You could put a server in every house with a direct connection to a monitor, then you only get one frame latency.
You are aware that AMD's current CPUs are bigger, hotter and slower than Intel's, right? I'd guess AMD gave them a better deal because they need the money.
Ha-ha. I caught a fanboy.
My netbook boots Ubuntu in about fifteen.