For serious work, where someone is going to take the time to learn the application beyond the hobby user level, how easy it is to perform common tasks is going to trump easy to learn every time.
Somewhat true but - as the overwhelming evidence shows - Adobe has somehow managed to do both with Photoshop. Its the tool of choice for serious professionals, and easy enough for Ma and Pa Kettle to use. Surely that deserves a little credit.
It would freak teachers out at school when I'd hand in my perfectly typeset, smooth-font report... when all the other students had crappy pixilated faded dot-matrix printouts.
I had an Amiga. Out of the box, it could tweak ~300dpi out of a crappy dot-matrix printer by going over lines many times with minor positioning changes. It looked great, but took about 50 minutes per page if I remember correctly. It was truly painful to realize that you'd made a mistake somewhere that would involve repagination.
Why would Apple retard the development of its software because it has retarded the development of its hardware (seriously, I want to know)? If the whole purpose of iTunes is to sell more iPods why doesn't Apple make the iPod a more attractive player by adding more file-support while also making iTunes a more attractive piece of software by doing the same?
Well, let's see. Apple has a vested interest in people having large AAC/Fairplay collections, because it locks them into the iPod. So they're not likely to support WMA any time soon, because it would significantly reduce the number of people going the AAC route.
As for the rest - well, no matter what you (or even I) might think, almost nobody cares. Support MP3 and most people are happy. Add AAC and iTMS users are happy. Support WMA and Windows users are happy. So now you have most people, plus most of the remainder, happy. Except that they won't support WMA for other reasons (above).
This is a good place for them to stop. Adding new features to the iPod that increase code complexity and possibly the necessary hardware level without increasing market share is dumb, from a business point of view.
ple's reason for this ridiculous file-support system has to be more than "the iPod doesn't support it", right?
Why? The iPod is the only music-related initiative that Apple does that makes them any kind of money. And it makes them a $hitload of money. Why wouldn't they set things up to support their current cash cow?
You're missing one very real business point here. The iTMS exists to get people to use iTunes, and to get people to buy AAC files. iTunes and AAC files exist to get people to buy iPods. Selling iPods is where Apple makes its money in the music arena.
MPC/FLAC/SHN/APE/etc. support. If applications like Foobar, Winamp, and QCD can pull it off, why can't iTunes, with it's beefy 19.5 MB download, play simple file formats like these that've been around for years? Wouldn't it work in their favor to allow their users more choice, to let their users listen to their music in whatever format they've chosen to encode them in?
Because listening to something in iTunes that you couldn't then sync to your iPod would defeat the purpose, which is to provide the complete iPod experience and sell more iPods.
Support for competing MP3 portables. I think I read somewhere that iTunes may support another mp3 player besides the iPod, but that really isn't enough. Once again, I think it'd be beneficial the popularity of the program if they supported other players. Have they released an SDK for their community to toy with? The Foobar and Nullsoft teams did this, and they got great results.
Right... but iTunes is free, and if they're not selling iPods it doesn't make any sense to go after that market. Even if they made a little money on the iTMS, those tracks wouldn't play on the competitive players so again you're missing out on the integration, which is iTMS' strength.
Don't get me wrong - some of your points, like that about Speed and Gapless Playback, make a lot of sense. But you have to look at this from a business perspective when you ask, "Why doesn't Apple..."
In this case, the money is in the software companies so law enforcement works for them right now, not the average american citizen, who will not see any real benefit from busting video game pirates.
I'll even give you the answer - its the "average american citizen" that you talk about in your post. Do you have a 401(k) fund? Do you own any kind of mutual funds? If so, you are almost certainly a partial stockholder of Microsoft. Do you own any technology funds? If so, then you would probably see some benefit from "busting video game pirates."
Corporations, while they do have a separate legal existance, are at the same time nothing more than a vehicle for their stockholders to transact business. Oh, wait a second, you say that you want your investments (and your bank's, etc) to do well? You do want the companies you own to defend their property using every legal method? You get annoyed and agitated at the idea of corporate malfeisance that costs the shareholders their hard earned money?
And yet, you expect an arbitrary punishment of Microsoft to be a Good Thing for the average american citizen? It doesn't exist in a vacuum, you know. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be benefits, or even that those benefits wouldn't outweigh the costs, but its a long way from the slam-dunk that you suggest.
Or do you just not have any savings, and expect those of us who do to take it in the balls for those of you who don't?
Well, sure it is within a song, but saying that the order of songs within an album is important to the "aesthetic effect", is like saying that if I read a book by J. Random Author without reading all of his other books, in the order they were written, that I'm missing the effect.
Not quite. In fact, I think that you were close when you said: A song, like a book (or book series), is a discrete unit of art.
A song is like a book, or a short-story. A good album is like a good book series - each episode makes sense and, while it may stand alone, gains depth and richness when enjoyed in its proper context. And just as some books are simple collections of short stories that don't suffer from being read piecemeal, some albums are just collections of singles. But not all of them.
Lately, radio has helped to drive the emphasis towards the single. There are still some good albums being made though (many of which contain equally good singles), and a lot of the older albums are much better in sequence than listened to as a collection of singles.
I'll agree that the claims are bizarre though. And hey, I use shuffle alot myself. But not for everything.
At least in ths USA, what this comes down to is the right not to incriminate yourself in court. The question is this: Since the car's data belongs to me (my car, my data,) does forcing presentation in court violate my 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination? Some people would say yes, including me. Automatically stripping you of the right not to incriminate yourself when you turn that key is a good step towards eliminating in totality for everyone, which would be an ugly situation indeed.
Here's a thought - how would that change if the car you were driving was leased, rather than owned by you? I don't see that leins would have much of an effect, but a lease or rental would be a completely different legal animal.
Re:At least I'm not the only one!
on
GNOME for Grandma
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Most of what you say, I agree with. Execpt...
It doesn't matter if Open Office has "a squirrely install" - so does Microsoft Office.
I just installed Office 2003 on my laptop here:
1. Put the CD in the drive
2. Enter the registration key
3. Select "Complete Installation"
4. Wait and watch the blinkenlights
That was it. Nothing squirrely there, I'm afraid. Yes, MSFT is an easy target - but there's no reason to blame them or their products inaccurately. It just reflects poorly on the rest of some very good points.
If the blackbox was used to check if someone went over the speed limit (but committed no crime) just to give him a speed ticket without other evidence, then I would called that an invasion of privacy.
You mean, no other crime, I assume. Violating a posted speed limit is a crime in and of itself.
Don't get me wrong, I happen to agree with your points, but this specific example was incorrect.
they want to see it yet still want to "vote with their dollars" so they don't give the Industry money for this type of film to convince them to make more
[Emphasis added] Come on now. They want to see it, but they don't want to pay? Oh, that makes sense to me - they shouldn't have to! Sheesh...
"Try before they buy" They've been burned one too many times by a good preview, but shitty movie, and want to check it out before they give the industry money for tricking them with their marketing and boring the hell out of them for two hours
So... you're saying that if they liked it, they'll go down to the theater it was taped from and pay them their ticket money, then turn away and leave? That's what "try before they buy" means, you know. Before, not instead.
Not all that impressive. I mean, its obtrusive while not being terribly convenient to use while driving. If you want to see some truly ingenious fabrication though, a truly topline car show is the place to see it. And you can usually find a regional one closer to you than SEMA, which is where the best toys are. Adding the mini to a car? Neat idea. But just like the recent running gadget thread, this just proves that the average/. geek isn't that up to date on what's available, and gets impressed easily - kind of like the way that non-geeks get impressed by what/. considers "trivial" product modifications or improvements.
Don't get me wrong, its not bad - just not all that newsworthy. Now, if it included things like tying the existing steering wheel radio controls into the iPod when it was plugged in, and rerouting them back to the radio when it wasn't, then I'd start getting interested. Systems integration can be a lot of work, and a lot of fun - and when you do it right, nobody even thinks about it. That's cool.
Now, IANAL but we covered this at a previous place of employment that used to record all customer conversations. In Texas, if one party is aware of the recording they can record it. But that still doesn't allow them to broadcast it. If you record a conversation in this manner, you can use it internally or paraphrase comments from it - kind of a personal memory aid - but you don't even have the right to resend it to another party like you would if both parties were aware that it was being recorded.
No, but you're assuming in your post that chamomille has absolutely no inherently soothing ingredients, that somehow it works even though it shouldn't. Few people are arguing that. A lot of "homeopathic remedies" have been studied and shown to have substantial medical evidence supporting them and how they work. Many have been studied and shown to have no medically redeeming characteristics whatsoever. Chamomille simply falls into the first category. Without making this distinction, you could label anything (say, willow bark tea) as "homeopathic" and then, by proving that it does indeed have a provable effect, claim that anything labelled as homeopathic works as well. This is obviously not the case.
Also, it's almost universally accepted in religious circles that the Bible must be interpreted. Even christians understand that the bible was written by humans with the intention of converting people to christianity. With that in mind it's obvious that there are going to be some artistic leaps taken. That's the point of sermons at church, to talk about how the bible is interpreted and applied to our world.
Take a step back and look at that last paragraph, would you? If I was to go purely from what you just said, the Bible is a piece of propoganda. WTF would we gain much by then taking that admitted piece of propoganda and applying it to our world?
Reminds me of the old joke: An oilman goes to the pearly gates and is told that the section reserved for oilmen is full. He yells through the gates, "Oil found in hell!" All of the oilmen rush out and down to the pit. St. Peter opens up the gates for him, and he says, "Well, thanks, but I think I'll just follow them down - there might be some truth to that rumor after all!"
Its the same thing, really. You concede that the Bible was written with one intent - to convince people to believe in Christianity. Why then, if this is true, should they then start believing their own marketing hype? That, to me, makes very little sense.
Hey, when I can get the performance eq. of a dual proc 1.42 G4 mac with 1gb RAM hosted for $79 a month, I will. This is a co-loc box. Cheap, headless, plentiful bandwdith, et cetera. I'm a big mac fan, but they're not cost-effective in this situation.
Aargh - and I hate it when other people assume country of origin. My fault entirely. The schedule that I used is online here - it may or may not be appropriate for you.
Good training strategy, basically. I hooked up with AustinFIT, a member group of USA FIT, a national level training organization. And I also did get injured - although in retrospect that was my own fault for not following the program as closely as I should have for such a significant goal. I know better now, and I'm a lot more informed about the warning signs and what preventative measures I need to take.
What part of the country are you in? I've become fairly familiar with a lot of the more common training programs, and I'd be happy to offer any advice (or not, as you prefer)... getting fit through running is, to me at least, surprisingly fun and a great social activity.
Re:Bouncing hardware (and other questions)
on
Running for Geeks
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· Score: 1
I use the ForeRunner, as do a lot of other people in my running circle. Its pretty darn accurate, even with pretty heavy tree cover. If you're running heavily treed trails with a lot of twisty singletrack you'll be off by a bit, but for normal trail or road running they're good to well within a percent. Which, quite frankly, is good enough for me.
Its also cheap, comfortable, easy to read while running, and has all of the nifty running screens, such as being able to see your distance, time, and current pace (in minutes/mile) all at once. Customizable, too. Its not a very good general purpose unit, which is fine by me since I just use it for running (and occasionally biking). It also takes your mile splits automatically (or whatever other lap point you want), which is pretty handy during a race.
Very cool goal. That was mine as well - I started about six months before my 30th birthday when I could barely run two miles - took me 21.5 minutes and I was anerobic almost the whole time - sweating, shaky, the whole nine yards. Less than a week before my birthday, I ran the Motorola Marathon here in Austin. I did a fitness log, but regrettably only started it about 3 months into the program.
Its amazing what you can do with the right support and, more importantly, a positive attitude. Go for it!
But I spent all my mod points. Of course, it could easily have a natural cause instead of a military one - stranger things have happened, and we have such a complex system here that even staggeringly high amounts of sporadic interference can almost disappear in the noise.
Not really. This way its completely unintrusive. Indeed, even if there were different builds of the game, as long as the user experience was unaltered the hack would continue to work. That's a good thing.
Oh, agreed - there'd be no point to doing this with checked baggage. But a large majority of business travel is for less than a week and doesn't require anyone to check bags.
That's because pricing has nothing to do with cost. You price to what the market will bear while providing the best overall return. Only then do you compare that price to your cost. If the price is more than the cost, you do it. If not, you don't. Simple as that, and where most small business really screw up.
We had to fly to new england from Dallas a few months ago. The price out of D/FW was about $1400 for a direct flight on AA, because lots of people want to fly out of Dallas. The price out of Austin was about $350. Southwest from Dallas to AUS was about $40. So a hop from Dallas to AUS, then AUS to Dallas to transfer to the same flight as the $1400 tickets. On the way back, we just "missed" the final leg of our flight.
Actually, I say "we" - I actually live in Austin, which is how I knew about the cheaper flight. So I kept on, but the others got off in Dallas. Weird, but true.
Slashdot Mirror
For serious work, where someone is going to take the time to learn the application beyond the hobby user level, how easy it is to perform common tasks is going to trump easy to learn every time.
Somewhat true but - as the overwhelming evidence shows - Adobe has somehow managed to do both with Photoshop. Its the tool of choice for serious professionals, and easy enough for Ma and Pa Kettle to use. Surely that deserves a little credit.
Alright, more than a little...
It would freak teachers out at school when I'd hand in my perfectly typeset, smooth-font report... when all the other students had crappy pixilated faded dot-matrix printouts.
I had an Amiga. Out of the box, it could tweak ~300dpi out of a crappy dot-matrix printer by going over lines many times with minor positioning changes. It looked great, but took about 50 minutes per page if I remember correctly. It was truly painful to realize that you'd made a mistake somewhere that would involve repagination.
Hey, he already said it was a mac with a single-button mouse...
*ducks*
Why would Apple retard the development of its software because it has retarded the development of its hardware (seriously, I want to know)? If the whole purpose of iTunes is to sell more iPods why doesn't Apple make the iPod a more attractive player by adding more file-support while also making iTunes a more attractive piece of software by doing the same?
Well, let's see. Apple has a vested interest in people having large AAC/Fairplay collections, because it locks them into the iPod. So they're not likely to support WMA any time soon, because it would significantly reduce the number of people going the AAC route.
As for the rest - well, no matter what you (or even I) might think, almost nobody cares. Support MP3 and most people are happy. Add AAC and iTMS users are happy. Support WMA and Windows users are happy. So now you have most people, plus most of the remainder, happy. Except that they won't support WMA for other reasons (above).
This is a good place for them to stop. Adding new features to the iPod that increase code complexity and possibly the necessary hardware level without increasing market share is dumb, from a business point of view.
ple's reason for this ridiculous file-support system has to be more than "the iPod doesn't support it", right?
Why? The iPod is the only music-related initiative that Apple does that makes them any kind of money. And it makes them a $hitload of money. Why wouldn't they set things up to support their current cash cow?
You're missing one very real business point here. The iTMS exists to get people to use iTunes, and to get people to buy AAC files. iTunes and AAC files exist to get people to buy iPods. Selling iPods is where Apple makes its money in the music arena.
MPC/FLAC/SHN/APE/etc. support. If applications like Foobar, Winamp, and QCD can pull it off, why can't iTunes, with it's beefy 19.5 MB download, play simple file formats like these that've been around for years? Wouldn't it work in their favor to allow their users more choice, to let their users listen to their music in whatever format they've chosen to encode them in?
Because listening to something in iTunes that you couldn't then sync to your iPod would defeat the purpose, which is to provide the complete iPod experience and sell more iPods.
Support for competing MP3 portables. I think I read somewhere that iTunes may support another mp3 player besides the iPod, but that really isn't enough. Once again, I think it'd be beneficial the popularity of the program if they supported other players. Have they released an SDK for their community to toy with? The Foobar and Nullsoft teams did this, and they got great results.
Right... but iTunes is free, and if they're not selling iPods it doesn't make any sense to go after that market. Even if they made a little money on the iTMS, those tracks wouldn't play on the competitive players so again you're missing out on the integration, which is iTMS' strength.
Don't get me wrong - some of your points, like that about Speed and Gapless Playback, make a lot of sense. But you have to look at this from a business perspective when you ask, "Why doesn't Apple..."
In this case, the money is in the software companies so law enforcement works for them right now, not the average american citizen, who will not see any real benefit from busting video game pirates.
I'll even give you the answer - its the "average american citizen" that you talk about in your post. Do you have a 401(k) fund? Do you own any kind of mutual funds? If so, you are almost certainly a partial stockholder of Microsoft. Do you own any technology funds? If so, then you would probably see some benefit from "busting video game pirates."
Corporations, while they do have a separate legal existance, are at the same time nothing more than a vehicle for their stockholders to transact business. Oh, wait a second, you say that you want your investments (and your bank's, etc) to do well? You do want the companies you own to defend their property using every legal method? You get annoyed and agitated at the idea of corporate malfeisance that costs the shareholders their hard earned money?
And yet, you expect an arbitrary punishment of Microsoft to be a Good Thing for the average american citizen? It doesn't exist in a vacuum, you know. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be benefits, or even that those benefits wouldn't outweigh the costs, but its a long way from the slam-dunk that you suggest.
Or do you just not have any savings, and expect those of us who do to take it in the balls for those of you who don't?
Very nice - a fun and smooth project. Nice hack.
Well, sure it is within a song, but saying that the order of songs within an album is important to the "aesthetic effect", is like saying that if I read a book by J. Random Author without reading all of his other books, in the order they were written, that I'm missing the effect.
Not quite. In fact, I think that you were close when you said: A song, like a book (or book series), is a discrete unit of art.
A song is like a book, or a short-story. A good album is like a good book series - each episode makes sense and, while it may stand alone, gains depth and richness when enjoyed in its proper context. And just as some books are simple collections of short stories that don't suffer from being read piecemeal, some albums are just collections of singles. But not all of them.
Lately, radio has helped to drive the emphasis towards the single. There are still some good albums being made though (many of which contain equally good singles), and a lot of the older albums are much better in sequence than listened to as a collection of singles.
I'll agree that the claims are bizarre though. And hey, I use shuffle alot myself. But not for everything.
At least in ths USA, what this comes down to is the right not to incriminate yourself in court. The question is this: Since the car's data belongs to me (my car, my data,) does forcing presentation in court violate my 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination? Some people would say yes, including me. Automatically stripping you of the right not to incriminate yourself when you turn that key is a good step towards eliminating in totality for everyone, which would be an ugly situation indeed.
Here's a thought - how would that change if the car you were driving was leased, rather than owned by you? I don't see that leins would have much of an effect, but a lease or rental would be a completely different legal animal.
Most of what you say, I agree with. Execpt...
It doesn't matter if Open Office has "a squirrely install" - so does Microsoft Office.
I just installed Office 2003 on my laptop here:
1. Put the CD in the drive
2. Enter the registration key
3. Select "Complete Installation"
4. Wait and watch the blinkenlights
That was it. Nothing squirrely there, I'm afraid. Yes, MSFT is an easy target - but there's no reason to blame them or their products inaccurately. It just reflects poorly on the rest of some very good points.
If the blackbox was used to check if someone went over the speed limit (but committed no crime) just to give him a speed ticket without other evidence, then I would called that an invasion of privacy.
You mean, no other crime, I assume. Violating a posted speed limit is a crime in and of itself.
Don't get me wrong, I happen to agree with your points, but this specific example was incorrect.
they want to see it yet still want to "vote with their dollars" so they don't give the Industry money for this type of film to convince them to make more
[Emphasis added] Come on now. They want to see it, but they don't want to pay? Oh, that makes sense to me - they shouldn't have to! Sheesh...
"Try before they buy" They've been burned one too many times by a good preview, but shitty movie, and want to check it out before they give the industry money for tricking them with their marketing and boring the hell out of them for two hours
So... you're saying that if they liked it, they'll go down to the theater it was taped from and pay them their ticket money, then turn away and leave? That's what "try before they buy" means, you know. Before, not instead.
Not all that impressive. I mean, its obtrusive while not being terribly convenient to use while driving. If you want to see some truly ingenious fabrication though, a truly topline car show is the place to see it. And you can usually find a regional one closer to you than SEMA, which is where the best toys are. Adding the mini to a car? Neat idea. But just like the recent running gadget thread, this just proves that the average /. geek isn't that up to date on what's available, and gets impressed easily - kind of like the way that non-geeks get impressed by what /. considers "trivial" product modifications or improvements.
Don't get me wrong, its not bad - just not all that newsworthy. Now, if it included things like tying the existing steering wheel radio controls into the iPod when it was plugged in, and rerouting them back to the radio when it wasn't, then I'd start getting interested. Systems integration can be a lot of work, and a lot of fun - and when you do it right, nobody even thinks about it. That's cool.
Now, IANAL but we covered this at a previous place of employment that used to record all customer conversations. In Texas, if one party is aware of the recording they can record it. But that still doesn't allow them to broadcast it. If you record a conversation in this manner, you can use it internally or paraphrase comments from it - kind of a personal memory aid - but you don't even have the right to resend it to another party like you would if both parties were aware that it was being recorded.
IIRC, anyway. It was a few years ago.
No, but you're assuming in your post that chamomille has absolutely no inherently soothing ingredients, that somehow it works even though it shouldn't. Few people are arguing that. A lot of "homeopathic remedies" have been studied and shown to have substantial medical evidence supporting them and how they work. Many have been studied and shown to have no medically redeeming characteristics whatsoever. Chamomille simply falls into the first category. Without making this distinction, you could label anything (say, willow bark tea) as "homeopathic" and then, by proving that it does indeed have a provable effect, claim that anything labelled as homeopathic works as well. This is obviously not the case.
Also, it's almost universally accepted in religious circles that the Bible must be interpreted. Even christians understand that the bible was written by humans with the intention of converting people to christianity. With that in mind it's obvious that there are going to be some artistic leaps taken. That's the point of sermons at church, to talk about how the bible is interpreted and applied to our world.
Take a step back and look at that last paragraph, would you? If I was to go purely from what you just said, the Bible is a piece of propoganda. WTF would we gain much by then taking that admitted piece of propoganda and applying it to our world?
Reminds me of the old joke: An oilman goes to the pearly gates and is told that the section reserved for oilmen is full. He yells through the gates, "Oil found in hell!" All of the oilmen rush out and down to the pit. St. Peter opens up the gates for him, and he says, "Well, thanks, but I think I'll just follow them down - there might be some truth to that rumor after all!"
Its the same thing, really. You concede that the Bible was written with one intent - to convince people to believe in Christianity. Why then, if this is true, should they then start believing their own marketing hype? That, to me, makes very little sense.
Hey, when I can get the performance eq. of a dual proc 1.42 G4 mac with 1gb RAM hosted for $79 a month, I will. This is a co-loc box. Cheap, headless, plentiful bandwdith, et cetera. I'm a big mac fan, but they're not cost-effective in this situation.
Aargh - and I hate it when other people assume country of origin. My fault entirely. The schedule that I used is online here - it may or may not be appropriate for you.
Good training strategy, basically. I hooked up with AustinFIT, a member group of USA FIT, a national level training organization. And I also did get injured - although in retrospect that was my own fault for not following the program as closely as I should have for such a significant goal. I know better now, and I'm a lot more informed about the warning signs and what preventative measures I need to take.
What part of the country are you in? I've become fairly familiar with a lot of the more common training programs, and I'd be happy to offer any advice (or not, as you prefer)... getting fit through running is, to me at least, surprisingly fun and a great social activity.
I use the ForeRunner, as do a lot of other people in my running circle. Its pretty darn accurate, even with pretty heavy tree cover. If you're running heavily treed trails with a lot of twisty singletrack you'll be off by a bit, but for normal trail or road running they're good to well within a percent. Which, quite frankly, is good enough for me.
Its also cheap, comfortable, easy to read while running, and has all of the nifty running screens, such as being able to see your distance, time, and current pace (in minutes/mile) all at once. Customizable, too. Its not a very good general purpose unit, which is fine by me since I just use it for running (and occasionally biking). It also takes your mile splits automatically (or whatever other lap point you want), which is pretty handy during a race.
Very cool goal. That was mine as well - I started about six months before my 30th birthday when I could barely run two miles - took me 21.5 minutes and I was anerobic almost the whole time - sweating, shaky, the whole nine yards. Less than a week before my birthday, I ran the Motorola Marathon here in Austin. I did a fitness log, but regrettably only started it about 3 months into the program.
Its amazing what you can do with the right support and, more importantly, a positive attitude. Go for it!
But I spent all my mod points. Of course, it could easily have a natural cause instead of a military one - stranger things have happened, and we have such a complex system here that even staggeringly high amounts of sporadic interference can almost disappear in the noise.
Not really. This way its completely unintrusive. Indeed, even if there were different builds of the game, as long as the user experience was unaltered the hack would continue to work. That's a good thing.
Oh, agreed - there'd be no point to doing this with checked baggage. But a large majority of business travel is for less than a week and doesn't require anyone to check bags.
That's because pricing has nothing to do with cost. You price to what the market will bear while providing the best overall return. Only then do you compare that price to your cost. If the price is more than the cost, you do it. If not, you don't. Simple as that, and where most small business really screw up.
We had to fly to new england from Dallas a few months ago. The price out of D/FW was about $1400 for a direct flight on AA, because lots of people want to fly out of Dallas. The price out of Austin was about $350. Southwest from Dallas to AUS was about $40. So a hop from Dallas to AUS, then AUS to Dallas to transfer to the same flight as the $1400 tickets. On the way back, we just "missed" the final leg of our flight.
Actually, I say "we" - I actually live in Austin, which is how I knew about the cheaper flight. So I kept on, but the others got off in Dallas. Weird, but true.