I'm wrong all the time, and I'm one of the least arrogant people I've ever met. If you think that arrogance equates to wrongness (if you will), then you must be pretty arrogant by your own standards!
Oh, and a further note: while my grandfather is doing OK with his social security and some help from the family, that Enron loss represented the majority of what he'd saved from the time he started his first business, an upholsterer at age 14 living on his own in Chicago, until he finally sold his business at the age of 85.
Foolhardy, yes. Wealthy enough not to miss $600K? Hell no.
Good point, although there are mechanisms which allow for transactions like this to end up similar to handing over a jacket for general shareholders to divvy up while a company's executive team walks away with millions for what are nominally the same stocks.
One of my own personal lessons: when WaMu was in the dumper, I bought a few hundred shares of their stock, feeling quite certain that they would be purchased by one of the more solvent banks, and at the worst, my stocks would retain their value in a trade for the new parent company's.
I was half-right. Chase bought WaMu, paid off their executives handsomely (one guy who'd been there three weeks got $18M), and then somehow said, "We're buying all the assets, but not the liabilities." The stock that was held by John Q. Public (i.e. me) was associated with the organization which retained all the liabilities, and is now worth just a few pennies. I would offload it, but the cost of the transaction ($9.99) would eclipse the value of my WaMu stock.
So it's all well and good to say that execs' fortunes are tied to those of their companies, but as it turns out, even that is not entirely true. There's always a way to game the system, and unless you're in the board room when it happens, there are very few protections out there.
The cost of the lesson to me? $600.00. Luckily, I could afford it. On the flip side, my grandfather was heavily invested in Enron based on his retirement fund manager's advice, and when they went down, he lost a thousand times that while their execs walked away richer than Croesus.
Retailer costs can drop, but most retailers still need to make a profit, even selling ebooks (servers cost money).
Servers do cost money, but how exactly does it cost more to sell an e-book than it does to sell a song? Somehow, Apple manages to sell lots and lots of individual songs for some fraction of the $0.99 retail price (I think they get 10-15c each), and happily covering their costs if not profiting.
Basically, it's a bundle of bits (the content) and another bundle of bits (the database entries that allow you to find, view and purchase the content from the store), but the infrastructure costs for storage and delivery of a book shouldn't be significantly different from those associated with a song.
Perhaps there's a lower per-book sale volume than there is for songs, and perhaps the profit requirement for songs on iTunes isn't high because of all those iPods/iPhones they're selling, but there's no reason why the retailer needs 1000% more reimbursement for an ebook if they're doing things correctly.
I say new books, if you want them right away, should be OK in the $10-$20 range, quickly dropping off to the $3-$5 range to reach the masses. And by the time they hit the bottom of that range, 50% should be going to the author, 40% to the publisher and 10% to the retailer.
And while we're at it, let's make it go into the public domain within five years.:D
If I remember my lore correctly, when Gates first set up a meeting with IBM over QDOS, he actually invited the guy who was responsible for it (Gary Kildall?), which person didn't show up. Surfing or something. Wasn't interested in meeting the suits.
So Gates made a deal: bought it outright for $25,000 cash which I'm sure seemed like quite a bit to Kildall at the time, but was certainly a song in comparison to what IBM ended up paying for it, not to mention other vendors paying for later versions.
I'm not so sure I buy the "reluctant monopolist". I'm sure that Gates always had the best of intentions, but like many genii, I'm sure he doesn't suffer idiots well, and doesn't mind riding roughshod over them. And compared to him, the great majority of humanity are idiots.
You should check out Too Much Coffee Man. It's awesome. OK, I'm just a huge fan, but I think it's great. The current incarnation is called "How To Be Happy", but The old coffee drinking superhero still shows up every once in a while.
Some people need a spoon, some people need a shovel. If you've got an iPhone and it meets your needs, great. If you've got a Core 2 Duo laptop or an even more capable desktop and it meets your needs, that's great, too.
But some people don't want a spoon or a shovel. If you're a chef, a ladle is much more useful. Apple feel they've just introduced the ladle in this metaphor. It's not for everyone, but that doesn't mean that people who think they'll use it are suckers. It's a well designed piece of hardware which does exactly what it says it does.
Should you buy it if you want to do 20-layer photoshop editing? No. Should you buy it if you're writing heaps of code? No. But there are lots of reasons you might want to display your work on a different device than what you use to create it. In the GP's example, a netbook wouldn't cut the mustard, and if they have some kind of pro desktop that they can't haul around, this is a reasonably-priced alternative to a laptop.
Two more thoughts on netbooks:
1- They're cramped and uncomfortable to use. There may be some nice fast ones, but the few I've tried out didn't impress me at all in overall usability.
2- What netbook can you get that has 3G wireless built in for $629?
RSS, nothing. I think of Twitter as being a sort of web-based, persistent version of IRC. It's just a bunch of people chatting with each other, or with nobody at all.
Well, even if other forms come before us, looking at the damage humans do to each other and the environment, I think it's fair to say that there's a good chance that other intelligent species that have already arisen may indeed be extinct if and when we discover them.
Wouldn't it be sad if we discovered a signal, and we got enough data to analyze it semantically and came up with a translation similar to, "Help; our planet is dying."
That full-album thing KSHE does sounds cool. A few years back I thought about writing a system that let you record music from an analog audio source (i.e. a radio), and it would recognize segments that were near-identical (i.e. the same song playing multiple times with different DJ lead-ins or different songs overlapping at the beginning or end, and), and then use an error correction algorithm to remove overlapping songs or lead-ins.
But then napster came in and everyone just started sharing music for free, so I figured there wouldn't be enough return.
But KSHE's solution appears to solve that problem as well:)
No one (or at least, no one in the general population) had heard of global warming / climate change until we had politicians saying "If you don't elect me so that I can pass X laws to stop GW / climate change, we will all die!" - and right from the beginning it was all a matter of politicians using it to get elected so that they can pass other laws that suit their personal views.
That is patently untrue. I was a child in the 1970s and even back then, people were talking about global warming, the greenhouse effect and so on. The folks who were talking about it the most were known as "environmentalists", and most people in the main stream treated them as hippie freaks; they were to be laughed at over cocktails.
In this particular post, I'm not going to argue about the merits of peer-reviewed science, nor the "scandals" that some believe have affected the legitimacy of claims of humankind's influence on the climate. But the topic of global warming was indeed in the common lexicon at least 30+ years ago, at least for anyone who was paying attention.
I'd suggest it's a cost-benefit analysis. Having to label the same switch 100 different ways for appropriate localization would add a few dollars to the cost of the car. It's not just the printing, but the planning and QA, too. Using an icon may put the burden on the buyer to figure out the meaning of that icon, but once the buyer has been in the car a few times, he or she will know where the switches are and will operate them by feel.
The labels could wear off at that point, and it won't matter what language they're in. So on a car, while the incremental cost may not seem to be much, the long-term benefit is tiny.
It may be a bigger help on other things...like an air conditioner unit or some such...but then the added cost of label localization becomes a much bigger percentage of the cost of the item, and as such, sales and profits would take a much bigger hit.
I'm sure that for every person who has complained about crappy labeling, there is a group who has done the testing, surveyed their client base, calculated the ROI and determined that improvements are not worthwhile from a bottom-line perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
and pretty arrogant, to be so wrong.
I'm wrong all the time, and I'm one of the least arrogant people I've ever met. If you think that arrogance equates to wrongness (if you will), then you must be pretty arrogant by your own standards!
;D
Arbeit macht frei.
Ouch.
Apparently, each buck is now considered a person with its own first amendment rights.
Oh, and a further note: while my grandfather is doing OK with his social security and some help from the family, that Enron loss represented the majority of what he'd saved from the time he started his first business, an upholsterer at age 14 living on his own in Chicago, until he finally sold his business at the age of 85.
Foolhardy, yes. Wealthy enough not to miss $600K? Hell no.
Good point, although there are mechanisms which allow for transactions like this to end up similar to handing over a jacket for general shareholders to divvy up while a company's executive team walks away with millions for what are nominally the same stocks.
One of my own personal lessons: when WaMu was in the dumper, I bought a few hundred shares of their stock, feeling quite certain that they would be purchased by one of the more solvent banks, and at the worst, my stocks would retain their value in a trade for the new parent company's.
I was half-right. Chase bought WaMu, paid off their executives handsomely (one guy who'd been there three weeks got $18M), and then somehow said, "We're buying all the assets, but not the liabilities." The stock that was held by John Q. Public (i.e. me) was associated with the organization which retained all the liabilities, and is now worth just a few pennies. I would offload it, but the cost of the transaction ($9.99) would eclipse the value of my WaMu stock.
So it's all well and good to say that execs' fortunes are tied to those of their companies, but as it turns out, even that is not entirely true. There's always a way to game the system, and unless you're in the board room when it happens, there are very few protections out there.
The cost of the lesson to me? $600.00. Luckily, I could afford it. On the flip side, my grandfather was heavily invested in Enron based on his retirement fund manager's advice, and when they went down, he lost a thousand times that while their execs walked away richer than Croesus.
Retailer costs can drop, but most retailers still need to make a profit, even selling ebooks (servers cost money).
Servers do cost money, but how exactly does it cost more to sell an e-book than it does to sell a song? Somehow, Apple manages to sell lots and lots of individual songs for some fraction of the $0.99 retail price (I think they get 10-15c each), and happily covering their costs if not profiting.
:D
Basically, it's a bundle of bits (the content) and another bundle of bits (the database entries that allow you to find, view and purchase the content from the store), but the infrastructure costs for storage and delivery of a book shouldn't be significantly different from those associated with a song.
Perhaps there's a lower per-book sale volume than there is for songs, and perhaps the profit requirement for songs on iTunes isn't high because of all those iPods/iPhones they're selling, but there's no reason why the retailer needs 1000% more reimbursement for an ebook if they're doing things correctly.
I say new books, if you want them right away, should be OK in the $10-$20 range, quickly dropping off to the $3-$5 range to reach the masses. And by the time they hit the bottom of that range, 50% should be going to the author, 40% to the publisher and 10% to the retailer.
And while we're at it, let's make it go into the public domain within five years.
If I remember my lore correctly, when Gates first set up a meeting with IBM over QDOS, he actually invited the guy who was responsible for it (Gary Kildall?), which person didn't show up. Surfing or something. Wasn't interested in meeting the suits.
So Gates made a deal: bought it outright for $25,000 cash which I'm sure seemed like quite a bit to Kildall at the time, but was certainly a song in comparison to what IBM ended up paying for it, not to mention other vendors paying for later versions.
I'm not so sure I buy the "reluctant monopolist". I'm sure that Gates always had the best of intentions, but like many genii, I'm sure he doesn't suffer idiots well, and doesn't mind riding roughshod over them. And compared to him, the great majority of humanity are idiots.
If you're going to mis-spell it, mis-spell it right: fr1st ps0t!
Maybe this is some sort of reference I just don't get, but I am having trouble trying to understand why it was modded "funny".
You should check out Too Much Coffee Man. It's awesome. OK, I'm just a huge fan, but I think it's great. The current incarnation is called "How To Be Happy", but The old coffee drinking superhero still shows up every once in a while.
ROFLCOPTER!
It's also an anagram for PDA, and it's a nice homage to PA Semiconductor, the company they bought which made it all possible.
Some people need a spoon, some people need a shovel. If you've got an iPhone and it meets your needs, great. If you've got a Core 2 Duo laptop or an even more capable desktop and it meets your needs, that's great, too.
But some people don't want a spoon or a shovel. If you're a chef, a ladle is much more useful. Apple feel they've just introduced the ladle in this metaphor. It's not for everyone, but that doesn't mean that people who think they'll use it are suckers. It's a well designed piece of hardware which does exactly what it says it does.
Should you buy it if you want to do 20-layer photoshop editing? No. Should you buy it if you're writing heaps of code? No. But there are lots of reasons you might want to display your work on a different device than what you use to create it. In the GP's example, a netbook wouldn't cut the mustard, and if they have some kind of pro desktop that they can't haul around, this is a reasonably-priced alternative to a laptop.
Two more thoughts on netbooks:
1- They're cramped and uncomfortable to use. There may be some nice fast ones, but the few I've tried out didn't impress me at all in overall usability. 2- What netbook can you get that has 3G wireless built in for $629?
RSS, nothing. I think of Twitter as being a sort of web-based, persistent version of IRC. It's just a bunch of people chatting with each other, or with nobody at all.
OK, I can speak from personal knowledge: the Jews are NOT responsible for your SPAM.
Well, even if other forms come before us, looking at the damage humans do to each other and the environment, I think it's fair to say that there's a good chance that other intelligent species that have already arisen may indeed be extinct if and when we discover them.
Wouldn't it be sad if we discovered a signal, and we got enough data to analyze it semantically and came up with a translation similar to, "Help; our planet is dying."
...or alien for "First Post". Or, most likely second or third.
That full-album thing KSHE does sounds cool. A few years back I thought about writing a system that let you record music from an analog audio source (i.e. a radio), and it would recognize segments that were near-identical (i.e. the same song playing multiple times with different DJ lead-ins or different songs overlapping at the beginning or end, and), and then use an error correction algorithm to remove overlapping songs or lead-ins.
:)
But then napster came in and everyone just started sharing music for free, so I figured there wouldn't be enough return.
But KSHE's solution appears to solve that problem as well
The patent was in the encoder
Thank you for clarifying for "IntlHarvester". I can't believe I left that out. You have it exactly right.
Glad you appreciated the idea.
LOL. Your sig puts your comments in context. Do you think Obama is a Communist?
Social Justice: A right-winger being forced to read a book.
No one (or at least, no one in the general population) had heard of global warming / climate change until we had politicians saying "If you don't elect me so that I can pass X laws to stop GW / climate change, we will all die!" - and right from the beginning it was all a matter of politicians using it to get elected so that they can pass other laws that suit their personal views.
That is patently untrue. I was a child in the 1970s and even back then, people were talking about global warming, the greenhouse effect and so on. The folks who were talking about it the most were known as "environmentalists", and most people in the main stream treated them as hippie freaks; they were to be laughed at over cocktails.
In this particular post, I'm not going to argue about the merits of peer-reviewed science, nor the "scandals" that some believe have affected the legitimacy of claims of humankind's influence on the climate. But the topic of global warming was indeed in the common lexicon at least 30+ years ago, at least for anyone who was paying attention.
I'd suggest it's a cost-benefit analysis. Having to label the same switch 100 different ways for appropriate localization would add a few dollars to the cost of the car. It's not just the printing, but the planning and QA, too. Using an icon may put the burden on the buyer to figure out the meaning of that icon, but once the buyer has been in the car a few times, he or she will know where the switches are and will operate them by feel.
The labels could wear off at that point, and it won't matter what language they're in. So on a car, while the incremental cost may not seem to be much, the long-term benefit is tiny.
It may be a bigger help on other things...like an air conditioner unit or some such...but then the added cost of label localization becomes a much bigger percentage of the cost of the item, and as such, sales and profits would take a much bigger hit.
I'm sure that for every person who has complained about crappy labeling, there is a group who has done the testing, surveyed their client base, calculated the ROI and determined that improvements are not worthwhile from a bottom-line perspective.
Awesome. I was going to make a joke about unobtanium, but I think unicorn horn trumps that. Wish I could push you to +6 ZOMG Awesome.
Does anyone use monitors under 24" these days? My laptop is 30", FFS.