I believe Sony was the first to sell its PS1 consoles at a loss, to gain marketshare
There is a big difference, form a business standpoint, between selling at a loss and so called "pricing behind the curve". Selling at a loss to make up elswhere, the "razor blade model", is not what Sony was doing with the PS1.
Sony, and every other console maker, has been pricing behind the curve. This means that they project the average cost of the machine over the lifetime of the machine and use that as the market price. The reason this is much lower than the initial cost at launch is because there are considerable scale effects and longer term gains that can be had down the road. Prices of hardware fall, for example.
So they are spending more cash then they get back initially, but in the books they are not selling at a loss.
Forty million elephants. That means the water in one hurricane weighs more than all the elephants on the planet. Perhaps even more than all the elephants that have ever lived on the planet.
I think that Elephants would have been around for more than 40 million years so it seems unlikely that less than 40 million have ever lived on the planet.
Why do they want to build another space shuttle, albeit an improved one? It would make more sense to pursue another way to get up there.
This article claims a space elevator could be had for as little as $10 B: http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/space_elevator_020327-1.html
Could you provide links to a credible source debunking this theory?
Encyclopedia of Misconceptions, page 42: The word "salarium" was already used as a figure of speech in Roman days. Historic sources such as Tacitus indicate that soldiers received regular coins from early on. Although payment in kind is documented it usually was with grain.
The other latin word for money "pecunia" stems form herd, it is equally unlikely they were paid in cows.
(The enclopedia I have is in Dutch, I translated and abbreviated)
Hard to believe the romans actually paid soldiers with salt.
That is hard believe and it also a very common misconception. Frequently the words "and our word salary stems from that" are added. This is also not true appearantly.
It's one of those "Eskimo's have 17 words for snow" thing, repeated by everyone until it becomes common wisdom.
I find it hard to believe that no one at the Royal Canadian Airforce noticed that 5BX is only about half a chracter away from another good exercise that can be done in 11 minutes a day... 5EX;-)
It could not be done with ordinary files - They had to be a directory
The OS did indeed also have files that were not folders, and also folders that were not files. That's only logical, who would want to give them up?
Besides programs disguised as folders, there were also applications on the platform ("Impression" for instance) that used folders disguised as files. This was neat: You could click into a wordprocessor file to get at the pictures in the file.
Good old Acorn RISC OS already supported the use of directories as files back in the eighties. E.g.: Click on a file to open it, shift click to show a directory of sub-files (recurse at will).
Market forces can be a mixed blessing, there were quite a few brilliant innovations in there that never made it onto the Wintel platform.
jm
The "1 other" e-mail is up on the website, and it is interesting indeed. It is addressed to a person by the name of Martijn. Could this be the same Martijn Bevelander who denies having anything to do with CyberAngels? Investigation by NLIP (Dutch service provider association) into the operations of Mr Bevelander is pending...
As the great man said: Computers are to CS just as telescopes are to astronomy. I think you could claim something similar for programming.
I've got a Masters in CS and can code well enough (I won a programming contest once). However, except for my first year on the job, I hardly ever used my prgramming skills. I think many CS masters have the same experience, they're just too expensive to program.
I've used a Psion 5 for years now and have never had a single crash or data loss. I installed several games on it, some of those have crashed, but it never did anything to the OS, my data, or the other apps.
So, it can be done.
...also has a legacy power plug. Several different versions of which still exist around the world adding a lot of cost to manufacturing and inventory keeping. When are we finally going to sort that one out?
Metal lattice is probably out of the question, as is any other "tower of babel" for structural reasons, but I can imagine that part of the answer maybe in using a tower for the first few miles.
If we build a huge tower on top of the mount Everest that will already help us along for the first 15 miles or so with conventional technology, and this may help reduce a lot of the problems with the cable. Air is thinner so less wind, less cable needed (the last part is always the most expensive part), etc.
Then again, building on top of mount Everest may be just as hard as building a space elevator.
I've gone to school in both the US and Europe. In the US everyone goes to the same highschool, in Europe (the Netherlands in my case) kids get split into 5 different school types at age 12.
The relative difference between the smart and the average kids is much bigger in the US, causing the "nerd" problems. I've heard arguments that the egalitarian US system is actually a useful educational experience for kids. I don't buy it. Kids are happier and learn better if they are not feeling they are an outlier (on either end of the scale), otherwise they spend a lot of time trying to be like the average kids.
Sure, there are downsides to splitting kids up too: it is difficult to predict a kid's development at 12. But this is mitigated by the fact that the smartest/worst kids can change school after a year.
Egalitarity is a noble intention. It doesn't work very well in highscool.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a big difference, form a business standpoint, between selling at a loss and so called "pricing behind the curve". Selling at a loss to make up elswhere, the "razor blade model", is not what Sony was doing with the PS1.
Sony, and every other console maker, has been pricing behind the curve. This means that they project the average cost of the machine over the lifetime of the machine and use that as the market price. The reason this is much lower than the initial cost at launch is because there are considerable scale effects and longer term gains that can be had down the road. Prices of hardware fall, for example.
So they are spending more cash then they get back initially, but in the books they are not selling at a loss.
I think that Elephants would have been around for more than 40 million years so it seems unlikely that less than 40 million have ever lived on the planet.
This article claims a space elevator could be had for as little as $10 B: http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /space_elevator_020327-1.html
Not very likely. I would be far more worried about the altruistic intentions of people that feel they have been oppressed by the US (through Isreal).
Think about it: Once the software is popular enough the automatic update feature might just do something far less friendly than update...
Encyclopedia of Misconceptions, page 42: The word "salarium" was already used as a figure of speech in Roman days. Historic sources such as Tacitus indicate that soldiers received regular coins from early on. Although payment in kind is documented it usually was with grain.
The other latin word for money "pecunia" stems form herd, it is equally unlikely they were paid in cows.
(The enclopedia I have is in Dutch, I translated and abbreviated)
That is hard believe and it also a very common misconception. Frequently the words "and our word salary stems from that" are added. This is also not true appearantly.
It's one of those "Eskimo's have 17 words for snow" thing, repeated by everyone until it becomes common wisdom.
Besides programs disguised as folders, there were also applications on the platform ("Impression" for instance) that used folders disguised as files. This was neat: You could click into a wordprocessor file to get at the pictures in the file.
Market forces can be a mixed blessing, there were quite a few brilliant innovations in there that never made it onto the Wintel platform. jm
The "1 other" e-mail is up on the website, and it is interesting indeed. It is addressed to a person by the name of Martijn. Could this be the same Martijn Bevelander who denies having anything to do with CyberAngels? Investigation by NLIP (Dutch service provider association) into the operations of Mr Bevelander is pending...
I've got a Masters in CS and can code well enough (I won a programming contest once). However, except for my first year on the job, I hardly ever used my prgramming skills. I think many CS masters have the same experience, they're just too expensive to program.
I've used a Psion 5 for years now and have never had a single crash or data loss. I installed several games on it, some of those have crashed, but it never did anything to the OS, my data, or the other apps. So, it can be done.
True. Once a year is regular :-/
...also has a legacy power plug. Several different versions of which still exist around the world adding a lot of cost to manufacturing and inventory keeping. When are we finally going to sort that one out?
Metal lattice is probably out of the question, as is any other "tower of babel" for structural reasons, but I can imagine that part of the answer maybe in using a tower for the first few miles. If we build a huge tower on top of the mount Everest that will already help us along for the first 15 miles or so with conventional technology, and this may help reduce a lot of the problems with the cable. Air is thinner so less wind, less cable needed (the last part is always the most expensive part), etc. Then again, building on top of mount Everest may be just as hard as building a space elevator.
The relative difference between the smart and the average kids is much bigger in the US, causing the "nerd" problems. I've heard arguments that the egalitarian US system is actually a useful educational experience for kids. I don't buy it. Kids are happier and learn better if they are not feeling they are an outlier (on either end of the scale), otherwise they spend a lot of time trying to be like the average kids.
Sure, there are downsides to splitting kids up too: it is difficult to predict a kid's development at 12. But this is mitigated by the fact that the smartest/worst kids can change school after a year.
Egalitarity is a noble intention. It doesn't work very well in highscool.