Personally I think that a buck a song is totally out of line, and a "fair" price is closer to 50 cents in such a store front setting. And that allocates 25 cents to the store front.
This scheme still has the problem of media (fixed costs), and all the lame and intrusive restrictions and security hacks that will be installed on that media.
A cheaper per Song price and allowing you to down load it to your lap top from the store's wireless network would make more money at less cost.
Pushing the price down will eventually eliminate the attraction of tradeing songs on line (and waiting two weeks for the only guy in the world with that last block you need to come back on line).
Once we have the infrastructure in place (and with wireless hot spots in more and more shops we almost DO have it all in place) the marginal cost of the next song sold can be depressed even further. Ultimatly 25 cents per song would still make them more money than $16 per CD in the music stores or 6.99 for 5 songs.
Apple has sold roughly half as many songs as they expected at roughly a buck a song over the last year. I would expect that if they cut the price in half they would have quadrupled the sales.
Striking out with Baseball
on
Real's Reality
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Perhaps these practices are why REAL has reportedly lost the single biggest contract they ever had which was broadcasting Major League Baseball play by play for $10 per season per listener/viewer. While no huge amount of money for REAL, it was one of the single largest revenue sources, much of the rest of the revenue stream was from individual purchases of the player.
Well he wrote fetchmail too, and the documentation there-of has to be the best example of starting in the middle and working toward both ends.
How many thousands of man-hours have been wasted by how many hundreds of users trying to figure out what the heck he meant and why someone capable of writing it in the first place would be so incapable of orginaizing the docs.
So what. There are more and more people who no longer buy into the "progressive" tax scheme. Mostly people who read the constitution. You should try it sometime.
Why is it that when we have a Supreme Court that can create entire governmental organizations based on a single phrase in the constitution that no one seems to remember one of the clearest statements in the entire document:
Article I
Section 9...
"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."
Any functionality solely in the hands of the sender does nothing to create trusted mailers.
In 5 minutes I can set up a bogus one-time pgp sig and send you spam that you could positivly prove came from bogus-Me.
SMTP is broke and needs to be fixed. MTAs need to insert traceable headers that are standardized so as to be traceable by automated means.
MTAs need to be sure they could reply to the envelop sender if they needed to, and that reply would go back to the machine attempting to send. This alone would keep SoBig from spamming the net, by allowing the first receiving MTA to verify that they could send an email back to the sender before accepting any mail.
Bogus or contrived headers need to be detected and mail rejected till fixed.
There is nothing worse than the possibility that an ISP will filter out a real email in their spam system.
Yes there IS something worse than that, its getting all the spam!
Most people are willing to accept an occasional lost mail to be free of spam. We have no idea how many mails are lost in the system anyway (without filtering). Its far from perfect.
And the ligitimate mail lost or unseen in all the spam in the inbox is just as lost as the one filtered by your ISP.
(About here is where some cluck chirps up and says "what about when you are notified you won the lottery and the email is filtered?". I'll take my chances.
The killer, as I see it, is still that getting a Linux installation up and running can be a nightmare. The situation is getting much better, with many distros now shipping with excellent installation software and/or package managers for later changes. Yet, it still requires at least "guru" status to fix a problem when it does go wrong, particularly where things like hardware and device drivers, or configuring the GUI, are concerned.
They said it was SuSE 8.2, and SuSE installs virtully perfectly for desktop use on any harware windows XP will run on. And when windows XP installs go bad its every but as much of a nightmare.
But the point is, most office users do not install their own systems and never have.
There are still people who think Linux is all command line. Then we have advocates (like you) who run around flinging out terms like "nightmare". Do you do this to hype your own Guru-ship for having conqurored the nightmare?
Try this test: give you neighbor's 13 year old kid SuSE 8.2 boxed set and a empty computer. Stand back and be watch.
Yes, things are expensive and buggy when they first hit the scene, but give them a few years and they will go down in cost and go up in reliability.
The Idea is not to take two steps backward while attempting to take one step forward?
If you pay a penalty in terms of both COST and Functionality to get a feature that you will have little chance to use (because no one else has compatible equipment) then you will wait until it becomes more popular, cheaper, and does not penalize you in other areas (battery life, etc).
Simply asserting that they will get it right someday does not make me want to part with my money. Look how many years cell phones were available before they took off and went mainstream (really less than 5 years ago).
I don't want to watch a movie trailer on my friggin phone. I don't want to sit in on a meeting and have half the poeple waveing phones at me so their buddies back at the office can watch me spill coffe on my shirt or pick my nose.
I would pay for a phone i could think to instead of punching tiny buttons on. My Doc gives me and EKG and tells me what I had for breakfast. Why can't the phone dial Fred when I think "FRED" to it? I'd pay for that.
Further, the media you purchased (CDRs tapes, etc) for storing your downloaded stuff already included in their price a royalty to the music industry, so you ALREADY PAID FOR IT.
4hours drive time is right next door!! The Mariners claim all of ALASKA, and have a lot of local fans here. I was never able to watch even ONE Mariner game on the trial project last World Series, because they were Broadcasting in Seattle.
I watched a spring training NYY game this afternoon on high bandwidth. Fairly good picture too. But the want over $14 per month, AND YOU STILL HAVE TO WATCH THE ADS....
And just think of the weapon uses!!!
A super hard and slippery M1 Abrams tank...
projectiles, bullet proof vests etc.
Might as well face it, thats where this
technology is headed.
And Microsoft has too much to lose if AOL moves over to a Netscape-based client.
Like What? The MS browser is GIVEN away, they make no money on it, it carries no advertising. Its already on the platform, so just what does MS have to lose?
No, not novell, you would have had to take it
down to upgrade the os from 3x to 4 or 5.
If it was 4.x I can easily see it running
4 years without being touched.
No doubt posted from a machine with an ethernet card. All of which have unique burned in serial numbers traceable whereever you go on the web. Do you ever read the news?
"And you know what, this sort of work doesn't need Billions of dollars worth of equipment to do. Yet, in today's Russia, top notch scientists and mathemeticians are having a very hard time making a decent living for their families. A Billion dollars buys a lot of science if spent right."
Just what did you think the billion was spent on?
Less than $500 of scrap steel and plastic was launched. The rest was spent here on earth.
Sometime science has to produce. This is production.
" I'd rather have systematic (unmanned) infrastructure in space for exploration. "
Perhaps your ideal is somewhere closer to the last two Mars landers that have never been heard from....?
There is no point in exploring space for robots.
Robots neither care nor need to go. We do. At best robots are like the dog trotting beside the Conestoga wagon. Serveing no purpose EXCEPT by accompaning humans.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think that a buck a song is totally out of line, and a "fair" price is closer to 50 cents in such a store front setting. And that allocates 25 cents to the store front.
This scheme still has the problem of media (fixed costs), and all the lame and intrusive restrictions and security hacks that will be installed on that media.
A cheaper per Song price and allowing you to down load it to your lap top from the store's wireless network would make more money at less cost.
Pushing the price down will eventually eliminate the attraction of tradeing songs on line (and waiting two weeks for the only guy in the world with that last block you need to come back on line).
Once we have the infrastructure in place (and with wireless hot spots in more and more shops we almost DO have it all in place) the marginal cost of the next song sold can be depressed even further. Ultimatly 25 cents per song would still make them more money than $16 per CD in the music stores or 6.99 for 5 songs.
Apple has sold roughly half as many songs as they expected at roughly a buck a song over the last year. I would expect that if they cut the price in half they would have quadrupled the sales.
Well some people like baseball more than they hate Real. Sue Us.
I can't bet anything to play unless go to my windows
computer, but I work on Linux and I like to listen to a ball game now and then.
I would not have paid $14 to MLB for a season pass to listen to the games if i knew I couldn't use my primary computer - linux.
Supposidly there are MS media player alternatives for linux buy so far nothing work for MLB streams.
Windows only. (puke)
Perhaps these practices are why REAL has reportedly lost the single biggest contract they ever had which was broadcasting Major League Baseball play by play for $10 per season per listener/viewer.
i nv estor/hellweg/
While no huge amount of money for REAL, it was one of the single largest revenue sources, much of the rest of the revenue stream was from individual purchases of the player.
Supposedly this year its gone to someone else.
http://money.cnn.com/2004/02/10/technology/tech
Well he wrote fetchmail too, and the documentation there-of has to be the best example of starting in the middle and working toward both ends.
How many thousands of man-hours have been wasted by how many hundreds of users trying to figure out what the heck he meant and why someone capable of writing it in the first place would be so incapable of orginaizing the docs.
"The new series will begin a few days after the miniseries that aired a few months back."
That would either qualify this as OLD news, or
one of the most tortured sentences I've seen in a while....
"Sales tax is inherently regressive. "
So what. There are more and more people who
no longer buy into the "progressive" tax scheme.
Mostly people who read the constitution. You should try it sometime.
Why is it that when we have a Supreme Court that can create entire governmental organizations based on a single phrase in the constitution that no one seems to remember one of the clearest statements in the entire document:
...
Article I
Section 9
"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."
BZZZZT, Wrong, but thanks for playing...
Any functionality solely in the hands of the
sender does nothing to create trusted mailers.
In 5 minutes I can set up a bogus one-time pgp sig and send you spam that you could positivly prove came from bogus-Me.
SMTP is broke and needs to be fixed.
MTAs need to insert traceable headers that are standardized so as to be traceable by automated means.
MTAs need to be sure they could reply to the envelop sender if they needed to, and that reply
would go back to the machine attempting to send.
This alone would keep SoBig from spamming the net, by allowing the first receiving MTA to verify that they could send an email back to the sender before accepting any mail.
Bogus or contrived headers need to be detected
and mail rejected till fixed.
Yes there IS something worse than that, its getting all the spam!
Most people are willing to accept an occasional lost mail to be free of spam. We have no idea how many mails are lost in the system anyway (without filtering). Its far from perfect.
And the ligitimate mail lost or unseen in all the spam in the inbox is just as lost as the one filtered by your ISP.
(About here is where some cluck chirps up and says "what about when you are notified you won the lottery and the email is filtered?". I'll take my chances.
They said it was SuSE 8.2, and SuSE installs virtully perfectly for desktop use on any harware windows XP will run on. And when windows XP installs go bad its every but as much of a nightmare.
But the point is, most office users do not install their own systems and never have.
There are still people who think Linux is all command line. Then we have advocates (like you) who run around flinging out terms like "nightmare". Do you do this to hype your own Guru-ship for having conqurored the nightmare?
Try this test: give you neighbor's 13 year old kid SuSE 8.2 boxed set and a empty computer. Stand back and be watch.
The Idea is not to take two steps backward while attempting to take one step forward?
If you pay a penalty in terms of both COST and Functionality to get a feature that you will have little chance to use (because no one else has compatible equipment) then you will wait until it becomes more popular, cheaper, and does not penalize you in other areas (battery life, etc).
Simply asserting that they will get it right someday does not make me want to part with my money. Look how many years cell phones were available before they took off and went mainstream (really less than 5 years ago).
I don't want to watch a movie trailer on my friggin phone. I don't want to sit in on a meeting and have half the poeple waveing phones at me so their buddies back at the office can watch me spill coffe on my shirt or pick my nose.
I would pay for a phone i could think to instead of punching tiny buttons on. My Doc gives me and EKG and tells me what I had for breakfast. Why can't the phone dial Fred when I think "FRED" to it? I'd pay for that.
And why would home owners insurance pay for that?
Further, the media you purchased (CDRs tapes, etc) for storing your downloaded stuff already included in their price a royalty to the music industry, so you ALREADY PAID FOR IT.
Except you forgot to read the constitution.
The goods an services of one state may not be
taxed by another state.
Even if such tax bills were passed they would
be overturned.
4hours drive time is right next door!!
The Mariners claim all of ALASKA, and have a
lot of local fans here. I was never able to watch
even ONE Mariner game on the trial project
last World Series, because they were
Broadcasting in Seattle.
I watched a spring training NYY game this afternoon
on high bandwidth. Fairly good picture too.
But the want over $14 per month, AND YOU STILL HAVE TO WATCH THE ADS....
And just think of the weapon uses!!!
A super hard and slippery M1 Abrams tank...
projectiles, bullet proof vests etc.
Might as well face it, thats where this
technology is headed.
Like What? The MS browser is GIVEN away, they make no money on it, it carries no advertising. Its already on the platform, so just what does MS have to lose?
No, not novell, you would have had to take it down to upgrade the os from 3x to 4 or 5. If it was 4.x I can easily see it running 4 years without being touched.
No doubt posted from a machine with an ethernet card. All of which have unique burned in serial numbers traceable whereever you go on the web. Do you ever read the news?
"And you know what, this sort of work doesn't need Billions of dollars worth of equipment to
do. Yet, in today's Russia, top notch scientists and mathemeticians are having a very hard time making a
decent living for their families.
A Billion dollars buys a lot of science if spent right."
Just what did you think the billion was spent on?
Less than $500 of scrap steel and plastic was
launched. The rest was spent here on earth.
Sometime science has to produce. This is production.
" I'd rather have systematic (unmanned) infrastructure in space for exploration. "
Perhaps your ideal is somewhere closer to
the last two Mars landers that have never
been heard from....?
There is no point in exploring space for
robots.
Robots neither care nor need to go. We do.
At best robots are like the dog trotting beside the Conestoga wagon. Serveing no purpose EXCEPT
by accompaning humans.
In US lay, a copyright only exists if asserted. You have to claim it, by simply stating that it is copyrighted it becomes so.