Well, it's not always as easy as the letters you get in the mail might seem. I've made some credit mistakes in the past and had pretty much trashed my credit score, yet I still had credit card companies sending me "pre-approved" credit card offers constantly. I actually applied to one or two of them and got turned down. It's a pretty bad feeling getting turned down for a supposedly pre-approved credit card. Anyway, point being just because you are getting offers doesn't mean that you can get a credit card through those offers, although, there are plenty of secure cards and such designed for people with poor credit to rebuild credit and all that I'm sure just about anybody can get.
It was the Rio and RCA units that were posted a while back. I did some searching and found some references to the numbers here.
From that article:
Still, Apple's iPod, which is available for the Mac and Windows operating systems, is rapidly emerging as the preferred music player among digital media aficionados. During the fourth quarter, Apple's dollar market share reached 27 percent compared with about 10 percent for second-ranked Rio, according to NPDTechworld. In terms of unit sales, Apple captured 11.2 percent market share, following closely behind Rio at 11.3 percent and top-ranked RCA at 13 percent.
That article was from April, and I'm not sure if the quarter they refer to is the last quarter of 2002 or some companies fiscal year, but I can't imagine iPod sales haven't overtaken the other two by now, although, I would love to see the figures on it.
That's too bad, I was hoping you had some recent numbers from some reliable reference. They were the leader in sales by monetary measures last I saw, but there was another device that I can't even remember the name of now leading in sales by units sold. Regardless, I think most would agree its the leader from in the sense that it's the bar everybody else is measured against. I know it's the only player I'll sit and drool over when I'm in Best Buy. I just wish it was more economically feasible to buy one for me.
Do you have a source for it being the "leading" player or is that just a perception? I can't find the reference, but last time I saw it posted Apple was #2 in units sold.
nope, the RIAA says that each CD pressed has minute flaws unique to a given CD and therefore the MP3's I create and those created by somone else are different entities, in effect that the MP3 is not so perfect a digital copy
If each CD is different (has unique flaws), then each digital copy of that CD, assuming their contention that it is perfect, will be unique to that CD, which means that it will be different from your neighbors perfect copy of his CD. They aren't contradicting themselves at all by saying that. Their claim might be inaccurate, but it's not contradictory or counter as you put it.
If that comparison is accurate, then they REALLY need to change the rules to just be something to the effect of the highest floor and not include the spires on top. Considering Petronas was considered the tallest before, and the Sears Tower appears to be MUCH taller than them when you are looking at them side by side.
If their intent is to convert Windows users by releasing apps like this, wouldn't it make more sense to make the app as pleasant as possible to use and not "awkward"? I'm certainly not going to be persuaded to switch to another OS if their applications come across as awkward.
Apple has plenty to offer users. They don't need to resort to making the small number of apps they might release for Windows awkward to encourage people to switch, and if anything, it may have a negative impact on the perceived quality of Apple applications.
Have you actually looked at the webpage for the G5? If that is something being marketed to "ordinary people", then I've severely underestimated the general public's grasp on computers. That page is very much geared toward professionals. It is splattered with benchmarks showing floating point performance and photoshop performance. Not to mention their price point, which is well beyond what "ordinary people" will be paying for a computer to check email and browse the web with.
I won't argue that their terminology is wrong b/c the line between desktop and workstation has at the very least been a gray area in recent history. But if they want to use that gray area to include their machine, which they market to professionals and geeks, in the realm of desktops, then I think it's reasonable that that same expansion encompass other computers that are marketed to the same segment of users. If the Opteron is indeed faster, then they were not the fastest in their class when they came to market, regardless of what they want to call that class.
Of course, it's all typical marketing fodder. The G5 is a sweet machine. Who cares if it's fastest in its class or not?
I disagree. While murder among other issues have been picked up into the moral fabric of society, I don't think those rights are defined by morality.
Frankly, I don't know how you prove that a concept exists or doesn't exists in the first place. It either does or it doesn't. Human rights are a concept. The fact we're discussing it is proof enough that the concept exists.
Human rights are not so much concerned with the right or wrong; although, they do tend to travel in close circles. I can believe that people have the basic right to live which would in turn imply a moral belief that murder is wrong, but the existance of that right is not dependent on me or anybody else holding a moral opinion of it.
Murder is refusing a person the right to live. That is a basic human right, and not so much an issue of morality. Is there another example you'd like to present? I can't really think of anything offhand, but I'm tired and may be overlooking the obvious.
It really bothers me when the government tries to legislate morality. Everything is up for interpretation, and what I may feel is ok for my child to view may not be the same as what the legislature has in mind. Reading through the COPA, it has vague statements such as:
(C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
or this:
(A) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest
What is art is certainly debateable. Magazines such as Playboy come across as more artsy to me than pornographic. Although, I'm sure if we apply "contemporary community standards" the law would be in disagreement with me. As for how they are to attain those standards, or whether the opinions of the community should dictate what every kid is exposed to is questionable at best.
In this case and probably in most cases, they are using it as an example of something that just about everybody agrees was/is horribly wrong. They don't need to know what it was like to use it for that means. I fail to see why that would irk you.
"There are numerous options, and each buyer is encouraged to seek the one they believe is most likely to function properly. As someone familiar with the field, I do not believe that anyone can honestly form the opinion that IE is that option."
To the vast majority of users, a web browser functioning properly means one thing, properly displaying the pages they frequent. If that is the test, then IE IS the best option. There are a lot of reasons to choose alternative browsers, but just functioning properly isn't one of them.
"If it's only worth half of what you charged a week ago, why didn't you drop the price earlier?"
What the PS2 and most products are worth is largely based on what the market will bare. Sony's business depends on them trying to find an optimum price point for their products. This is tempered somewhat by their cost of manufacturing, R&D, etc. They could sell their products at rock bottom prices that just cover their expenses with a little profit on the side, but from their perspective and a general business perspective it just makes sense to try to find that optimum price point. If you can sell widgets to 100 people for $5 or 90 widgets to people at $20, which price point are you going to choose to sell your widgets at?
Sony is the market leader in console sales by a large margin from most of the figures I've seen, so they really had no good incentive to lower their prices. Nintendo lowering their console prices and then exceeding Sony sales gives Sony that incentive.
I'm honestly not even sure what you would consider artificially inflated. I doubt you bought the console thinking that the manufacturing costs were even in the same ballpark as the price you were paying. From the sounds of it, you wouldn't have been bothered if Sony had gradually reduced the price of the PS2, which would have had the effect of keeping it at a higher profit margin longer. That wouldn't exactly be consumer friendly either. Sony isn't trying to bilk their current customers here, they are trying to maintain their sales.
Like you, I'd LOVE for things to be based on what the materials and such were worth, but most things on the shelves are not based on that and will never be based on that. It's not a matter of a disregard for customers; it's a matter of business.
"If this is how Sony wants to treat their installed customer base"
How is Sony lowering prices having any negative effect on their installed user base? What you you prefer that they raise prices to show loyalty to their installed customer base?
It's kind of silly to get upset about a price cut. If they had purposely mislead you or somehow cheated you out of your money then I could see you having some resentment over it, but they're just lowering prices in response to their competition which is a good thing.
It becomes a network problem when its effecting the network. Since you like the car analogy, it's like a car running into a gas pump at a gas station. It's not the pumps fault the car ran into it, yet they still surround pumps with rather large pillars to try to prevent things actually making it to the pump.
It wouldn't be a good idea to use firewalls or other preventative measures and not try to fix the underlying problem of insecure OSes, but to discount other security measures would be negligent. Improving the security of OSes should be a priority for all OS developers, but firewalls should play an important part in security as well.
While MS is operating at a loss in an effort to gain market share in the gaming console industry, they are FAR from crushing Sony. Sony expects to have sold 3-4 times the number of PS2s to XBoxes this fiscal year (source).
Furthermore, MS is going to have a hard time crushing a company that brings in double it's revenue (Sony revenue in yenMS revenue), so if it comes down to a battle of who can sustain operating at a loss longer Sony has a decided edge.
Regardless, you are talking about their size and ability to operate at a loss. I was addressing specifically the claim that their "monopoly" would assist in the adoption of their codec over some other companies. They aren't a major player in the DVD industry in either consumer products or media production. They don't have the same advantage as they have in the software industry to force computer manufacturers and hardware manufacturers to bend to their will. The MPAA members, who will be the primary intenties to decide what codec is adopted, are not dependent on MS products for their sales, and they are not succeptable to the same pressures that MS uses in its backyard to gain an advantage in the OS and Office suite market.
So instead of insulting me, care to enlighten me as to how their "monopoly" will influence this decision? Instead of giving me comparisons based on their economic resilience.
Maybe, I'm missing your point here. Where is MS's monopoly with regards to codecs, DVDs, or DVD players? I fail to see how their "monopoly" in the desktop OS market or Office suites has any bearing on their ability to penetrate this market.
I dual boot Gentoo and Windows XP on my laptop. I generally use Windows most of the time only booting into Gentoo when I need to do PHP development or just to mess around with things. Given that I haven't had any projects to work on in a while, I don't spend a lot of time in Gentoo.
Out of the two operating systems, I've experienced more crashes in Gentoo. These were caused by misconfiguring power management on the laptop. I can't remember the last time Windows crashed or did anything "flaky", although, I'm sure it was also caused by something that was either misconfigured or some other thing that I did. I'm not about to argue that Linux is less stable than Windows based on these experiences. There are a lot of people on here who can go back and forth with crashes/quirks they've experienced on Windows 2000/XP and on Linux. The vast majority of those crashes will have been the result of something being misconfigured, a hardware problem, or some application doing something crazy. Most modern OSes are stable for those using them in a desktop environment. People will and do have problems, but personal accounts are really not a good way to refute or support the stability of an operating system.
That would just force the client to be careful when hiring advertising companies, and I'm sure they could include a clause that would make the company liable for any spam they send without the consent of the client. So if the client was prosecuted, they could then turn around and sue the company doing the spamming.
As Lenski already pointed out in another branch of this thread, the twin towers WERE designed to withstand a plane crash. Unfortunately, when designing for this, they didn't take into account the sheer heat of the burning fuel likely to be present in a crash of that nature. It wasn't the crash itself that caused the towers to collapse, it was the heat from the burning fuel that caused the steel in the building to melt and eventually collapse. It was an unfortunate way to discover an oversight in design.
I didn't get a chance to search the site to see if they had any reasoning for it listed. I see the domain lists a Denmark address in the registration so is this just a matter of it being inconvenient to ship over here, shipping cost, or something of that nature? Or is there some other reason for it?
Eliminating markets outside of Europe is a pretty large number of possible consumers to alienate.
I guess maybe I'm reading too much into this part of your original post:
"even if the element that protects the data was not originally designed as a security device"
The way I read that particular part would mean that while probably not realistic, a record company could sue someone for repairing a scratched CD because those scratches had inadvertently become an "effective security device", assuming they were preventing the play of said CD in the first place. Given that the record industry hasn't always been real positive towards the sale of used CDs, I was thinking that the broadness of including unintended security devices could extend to something like scratches and allow them an avenue to at least constrain some used CD sales.
This has been discussed on previous threads on this matter, but I'll touch on it again.
People are saying do not call me or I don't WANT to buy anything which doesn't mean they wouldn't buy something. I liken it to a bum pestering you for money on the street. A lot of people just aren't good at saying no to people when they are pressured, so they end up buying spray on hair or whatever crap the telemarketer might be selling that day. People are stupid. Telemarketing firms know this, and that is why they are fighting to maintain access to said people.
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Well, it's not always as easy as the letters you get in the mail might seem. I've made some credit mistakes in the past and had pretty much trashed my credit score, yet I still had credit card companies sending me "pre-approved" credit card offers constantly. I actually applied to one or two of them and got turned down. It's a pretty bad feeling getting turned down for a supposedly pre-approved credit card. Anyway, point being just because you are getting offers doesn't mean that you can get a credit card through those offers, although, there are plenty of secure cards and such designed for people with poor credit to rebuild credit and all that I'm sure just about anybody can get.
From that article:
That article was from April, and I'm not sure if the quarter they refer to is the last quarter of 2002 or some companies fiscal year, but I can't imagine iPod sales haven't overtaken the other two by now, although, I would love to see the figures on it.
That's too bad, I was hoping you had some recent numbers from some reliable reference. They were the leader in sales by monetary measures last I saw, but there was another device that I can't even remember the name of now leading in sales by units sold. Regardless, I think most would agree its the leader from in the sense that it's the bar everybody else is measured against. I know it's the only player I'll sit and drool over when I'm in Best Buy. I just wish it was more economically feasible to buy one for me.
Do you have a source for it being the "leading" player or is that just a perception? I can't find the reference, but last time I saw it posted Apple was #2 in units sold.
nope, the RIAA says that each CD pressed has minute flaws unique to a given CD and therefore the MP3's I create and those created by somone else are different entities, in effect that the MP3 is not so perfect a digital copy
If each CD is different (has unique flaws), then each digital copy of that CD, assuming their contention that it is perfect, will be unique to that CD, which means that it will be different from your neighbors perfect copy of his CD. They aren't contradicting themselves at all by saying that. Their claim might be inaccurate, but it's not contradictory or counter as you put it.
If that comparison is accurate, then they REALLY need to change the rules to just be something to the effect of the highest floor and not include the spires on top. Considering Petronas was considered the tallest before, and the Sears Tower appears to be MUCH taller than them when you are looking at them side by side.
If their intent is to convert Windows users by releasing apps like this, wouldn't it make more sense to make the app as pleasant as possible to use and not "awkward"? I'm certainly not going to be persuaded to switch to another OS if their applications come across as awkward.
Apple has plenty to offer users. They don't need to resort to making the small number of apps they might release for Windows awkward to encourage people to switch, and if anything, it may have a negative impact on the perceived quality of Apple applications.
Have you actually looked at the webpage for the G5? If that is something being marketed to "ordinary people", then I've severely underestimated the general public's grasp on computers. That page is very much geared toward professionals. It is splattered with benchmarks showing floating point performance and photoshop performance. Not to mention their price point, which is well beyond what "ordinary people" will be paying for a computer to check email and browse the web with.
I won't argue that their terminology is wrong b/c the line between desktop and workstation has at the very least been a gray area in recent history. But if they want to use that gray area to include their machine, which they market to professionals and geeks, in the realm of desktops, then I think it's reasonable that that same expansion encompass other computers that are marketed to the same segment of users. If the Opteron is indeed faster, then they were not the fastest in their class when they came to market, regardless of what they want to call that class.
Of course, it's all typical marketing fodder. The G5 is a sweet machine. Who cares if it's fastest in its class or not?
I disagree. While murder among other issues have been picked up into the moral fabric of society, I don't think those rights are defined by morality.
Frankly, I don't know how you prove that a concept exists or doesn't exists in the first place. It either does or it doesn't. Human rights are a concept. The fact we're discussing it is proof enough that the concept exists.
Human rights are not so much concerned with the right or wrong; although, they do tend to travel in close circles. I can believe that people have the basic right to live which would in turn imply a moral belief that murder is wrong, but the existance of that right is not dependent on me or anybody else holding a moral opinion of it.
Murder is refusing a person the right to live. That is a basic human right, and not so much an issue of morality. Is there another example you'd like to present? I can't really think of anything offhand, but I'm tired and may be overlooking the obvious.
It really bothers me when the government tries to legislate morality. Everything is up for interpretation, and what I may feel is ok for my child to view may not be the same as what the legislature has in mind. Reading through the COPA, it has vague statements such as:
(C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
or this:
(A) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest
What is art is certainly debateable. Magazines such as Playboy come across as more artsy to me than pornographic. Although, I'm sure if we apply "contemporary community standards" the law would be in disagreement with me. As for how they are to attain those standards, or whether the opinions of the community should dictate what every kid is exposed to is questionable at best.
In this case and probably in most cases, they are using it as an example of something that just about everybody agrees was/is horribly wrong. They don't need to know what it was like to use it for that means. I fail to see why that would irk you.
"There are numerous options, and each buyer is encouraged to seek the one they believe is most likely to function properly. As someone familiar with the field, I do not believe that anyone can honestly form the opinion that IE is that option."
To the vast majority of users, a web browser functioning properly means one thing, properly displaying the pages they frequent. If that is the test, then IE IS the best option. There are a lot of reasons to choose alternative browsers, but just functioning properly isn't one of them.
"If it's only worth half of what you charged a week ago, why didn't you drop the price earlier?"
What the PS2 and most products are worth is largely based on what the market will bare. Sony's business depends on them trying to find an optimum price point for their products. This is tempered somewhat by their cost of manufacturing, R&D, etc. They could sell their products at rock bottom prices that just cover their expenses with a little profit on the side, but from their perspective and a general business perspective it just makes sense to try to find that optimum price point. If you can sell widgets to 100 people for $5 or 90 widgets to people at $20, which price point are you going to choose to sell your widgets at?
Sony is the market leader in console sales by a large margin from most of the figures I've seen, so they really had no good incentive to lower their prices. Nintendo lowering their console prices and then exceeding Sony sales gives Sony that incentive.
I'm honestly not even sure what you would consider artificially inflated. I doubt you bought the console thinking that the manufacturing costs were even in the same ballpark as the price you were paying. From the sounds of it, you wouldn't have been bothered if Sony had gradually reduced the price of the PS2, which would have had the effect of keeping it at a higher profit margin longer. That wouldn't exactly be consumer friendly either.
Sony isn't trying to bilk their current customers here, they are trying to maintain their sales.
Like you, I'd LOVE for things to be based on what the materials and such were worth, but most things on the shelves are not based on that and will never be based on that. It's not a matter of a disregard for customers; it's a matter of business.
"If this is how Sony wants to treat their installed customer base"
How is Sony lowering prices having any negative effect on their installed user base? What you you prefer that they raise prices to show loyalty to their installed customer base?
It's kind of silly to get upset about a price cut. If they had purposely mislead you or somehow cheated you out of your money then I could see you having some resentment over it, but they're just lowering prices in response to their competition which is a good thing.
It becomes a network problem when its effecting the network. Since you like the car analogy, it's like a car running into a gas pump at a gas station. It's not the pumps fault the car ran into it, yet they still surround pumps with rather large pillars to try to prevent things actually making it to the pump.
It wouldn't be a good idea to use firewalls or other preventative measures and not try to fix the underlying problem of insecure OSes, but to discount other security measures would be negligent. Improving the security of OSes should be a priority for all OS developers, but firewalls should play an important part in security as well.
While MS is operating at a loss in an effort to gain market share in the gaming console industry, they are FAR from crushing Sony. Sony expects to have sold 3-4 times the number of PS2s to XBoxes this fiscal year (source).
Furthermore, MS is going to have a hard time crushing a company that brings in double it's revenue (Sony revenue in yen MS revenue), so if it comes down to a battle of who can sustain operating at a loss longer Sony has a decided edge.
Regardless, you are talking about their size and ability to operate at a loss. I was addressing specifically the claim that their "monopoly" would assist in the adoption of their codec over some other companies. They aren't a major player in the DVD industry in either consumer products or media production. They don't have the same advantage as they have in the software industry to force computer manufacturers and hardware manufacturers to bend to their will. The MPAA members, who will be the primary intenties to decide what codec is adopted, are not dependent on MS products for their sales, and they are not succeptable to the same pressures that MS uses in its backyard to gain an advantage in the OS and Office suite market.
So instead of insulting me, care to enlighten me as to how their "monopoly" will influence this decision? Instead of giving me comparisons based on their economic resilience.
Maybe, I'm missing your point here. Where is MS's monopoly with regards to codecs, DVDs, or DVD players? I fail to see how their "monopoly" in the desktop OS market or Office suites has any bearing on their ability to penetrate this market.
I dual boot Gentoo and Windows XP on my laptop. I generally use Windows most of the time only booting into Gentoo when I need to do PHP development or just to mess around with things. Given that I haven't had any projects to work on in a while, I don't spend a lot of time in Gentoo.
Out of the two operating systems, I've experienced more crashes in Gentoo. These were caused by misconfiguring power management on the laptop. I can't remember the last time Windows crashed or did anything "flaky", although, I'm sure it was also caused by something that was either misconfigured or some other thing that I did. I'm not about to argue that Linux is less stable than Windows based on these experiences. There are a lot of people on here who can go back and forth with crashes/quirks they've experienced on Windows 2000/XP and on Linux. The vast majority of those crashes will have been the result of something being misconfigured, a hardware problem, or some application doing something crazy. Most modern OSes are stable for those using them in a desktop environment. People will and do have problems, but personal accounts are really not a good way to refute or support the stability of an operating system.
That would just force the client to be careful when hiring advertising companies, and I'm sure they could include a clause that would make the company liable for any spam they send without the consent of the client. So if the client was prosecuted, they could then turn around and sue the company doing the spamming.
As Lenski already pointed out in another branch of this thread, the twin towers WERE designed to withstand a plane crash. Unfortunately, when designing for this, they didn't take into account the sheer heat of the burning fuel likely to be present in a crash of that nature. It wasn't the crash itself that caused the towers to collapse, it was the heat from the burning fuel that caused the steel in the building to melt and eventually collapse. It was an unfortunate way to discover an oversight in design.
What innovations has TSL made? I'm genuinely curious, and you didn't list any examples of what you are referring to.
I didn't get a chance to search the site to see if they had any reasoning for it listed. I see the domain lists a Denmark address in the registration so is this just a matter of it being inconvenient to ship over here, shipping cost, or something of that nature? Or is there some other reason for it?
Eliminating markets outside of Europe is a pretty large number of possible consumers to alienate.
I guess maybe I'm reading too much into this part of your original post:
"even if the element that protects the data was not originally designed as a security device"
The way I read that particular part would mean that while probably not realistic, a record company could sue someone for repairing a scratched CD because those scratches had inadvertently become an "effective security device", assuming they were preventing the play of said CD in the first place. Given that the record industry hasn't always been real positive towards the sale of used CDs, I was thinking that the broadness of including unintended security devices could extend to something like scratches and allow them an avenue to at least constrain some used CD sales.
This has been discussed on previous threads on this matter, but I'll touch on it again.
People are saying do not call me or I don't WANT to buy anything which doesn't mean they wouldn't buy something. I liken it to a bum pestering you for money on the street. A lot of people just aren't good at saying no to people when they are pressured, so they end up buying spray on hair or whatever crap the telemarketer might be selling that day. People are stupid. Telemarketing firms know this, and that is why they are fighting to maintain access to said people.