Gartner used to be a respectible organization - but now they seem to be towing the "Windows Uber Alles" line, similar to CapGemini. I wonder how much Microsoft paid to get this report....
Honestly, I don't know - I just know that I've never noticed the flight crew outside the cockpit or the door to the flight deck open while the plane is in flight.
Have you flown in the US lately? Since 9/11, the flight deck door is locked closed from just before the cabin door is closed until the plane has stopped at the gate at the destination.
I fly about every other week (on Delta, most of the time) and in all the flights I've flown on, the flight door has never been opened in-flight.
I think in the end, I think our difference of opinion is summed up by your statement:
(ignoring transient local changes)
I'm not ignoring those, because in the real world, you really can't ignore them. But I can see your point of view as a correct point of view in that the phase change from solid to liquid does require energy, that is correct. But only in the theoretical universe can you disregard the transient local changes because there is an ultimate effect on the liquid water and the air as well.
It has been a while since I studied theororetical physics, and that was one of the things that bothered me about the subject - disregarding wind resistance (for example) when calculating the rate of decent of an object in the real world is something that was just counterintuitive to me.
Yes, but we're not talking about a state change here, at least not for the liquid water. The ice does go through a state change in order to transition to liquid water, but the liquid water has to get from 0 C to 100 C, and it does so, but in this case it does so very, very slowly because of the dispersal of the thermodynamic change.
Energy must be conserved, but nothing necessarily has to get hot, at least in the short term. If you put you can into an ice/water bath, the can will cool down, and the temperature of the ice/water bath will not change.
That's not really true - in an icewater bath, the differentiation in temperature is dispersed throughout the bath (= a larger volume), so the overall change for the entire bath is very very small, but it does in fact still exist.
The icewater bath just increases in a proportion to the difference in size between the size of the can and the size of the bath - if you discount the thermodynamic exchange between the bath and the air and tub that surround it.
Considering that CD's is an accepted plural form, I wouldn't look for that happening any time soon.
According to the American Heritage Book of English Usage:
"Usage with regard to forming the plurals of letters, numbers, and abbreviations varies somewhat. In some cases you have a choice between adding -s or -'s, although the trend is increasingly to add -s alone: three As or three A's; the ABCs or the ABC's; the 1900s or the 1900's; PhDs or PhD's; several IOUs or several IOU's. With lowercase letters, symbols, abbreviations with periods, and in cases where confusion might arise without an apostrophe, use -'s to form the plural: p's and q's; +'s; -'s; M.A.'s; A's and I's; 2's. Mainly your goal is to be as clear as possible and avoid confusion."
I would disagree, and RIAA's citing of "rampant piracy" would seem to support my point of view in this.
Legal or not, there is an alternative means to getting their product. While I don't download music myself (there not being much worth acquiring at this time IMNSHO), if it were more cost effective for me to go to the store and purchase it than waste time downloading it, then it would be a no-brainer decision how to acquire the product.
I don't see CDs moving to the point that the supply is being moved quickly. Maybe it's just the market I'm in, but it seems that there is sufficient stagnant inventory on the shelves of the music stores.
When there is healthy competition, a lowering in cost of production is passed along simply to compete more effectively. When there isn't, the cost of product can be maintained at an artificially high price. That's the situation the music industry is in right now - and RIAA doesn't want that to change because they can't adapt to deal with sales in an internet-connected world.
There's a very old principle in retail. Adapt or Die. It's time they did one or the other.
Yes, cheaper to produce. Typically, you make customers happy by passing that savings along to them. Basic retail principles. And happy customers are returning customers - which are a lot less expensive to get in the door than new customers.
I worked in the IT department for one of the largest (and most successful) food & drug retailers in the US for 6 years. The business wanted to ensure that the IT workers designing systems understood how the business actually works, and as a result, my job was predicated upon understanding how this works. So yes, I do in fact get it.
The economic principles of supply and demand are that you look for the price point that allows you to sell your inventory, keeping less stale inventory (which costs money - not moving stock is quite expensive). Now, if you have a situation where you have too much stock on hand, you lower your price to move the stock. If you have too little on hand, you increase the price or you increase your inventory. Both can make you more money in the short term and potentially in the long term.
Now if consumers have an alternative, and the alternitave is less expensive than your product, some will still shop with you, but many will go to the competitor.
When an alternative appears on the scene, and you have a means of lowering your cost of production, you can compete more effectively by lowering your price by passing along that savings.
Now, when CDs first hit the mass market back in the mid-to-late 80's, the industry needed to achieve critical mass in order to lower their costs of production. Now there's more inventory to be moved, but the market size has stayed relatively the same. Principles of economics dictate that with a decreasing demand, you lower prices in order to entice consumers to purchase your product - especially if you have an excess of inventory - but if consumers aren't buying, lowering your prices is the way to move your inventory. The retailers do have to make a profit, because they have bills to pay - so RIAA keeping their price point high in order to continue to live like 'fat cats' means the retailers are stuck with the short end of the stick. They *have* to charge enough to make a margin that lets them pay their bills, or they go out of business. The supply chain for music is seriously bloated, and that needs to be dealt with.
Instead of doing what basic economic principles dictate they should do, RIAA starts suing their customers, blaming downloads/p2p networks for their current sales "slump" - as if they're OWED a living. They're not, any more than I am.
When consumers know your margin is high, it does nothing more than piss them off. Pissed off customers are customers who don't return. The cost of acquiring new customers is significantly higher than the cost of retaining old customers.
RIAA has pissed off a significant portion of their customer base by not passing savings along to consumers.
While I find what you wrote to actually be interesting and informative, it still does not address the underlying issue of RIAA charing prices that the market simply will not bear - as shown by their own sales figures - in spite of the fact that it's cheaper to press CDs than it is to duplicate cassettes.
If they did not charge ridiculously high prices, the music-only stores could do better business. The mega-super-ultramarts of the world are a huge problem in the retail space, but the problem with them has to be addressed outside of any particular industry. They treat their employees like crap, they ship manufacturing jobs outside the country, but people shop there because of the lower prices. If RIAA wanted to help out with that, they could put some of the vast amount of money in their coffers into legislation that protects the smaller businesses all around, rather than using schemes that are patently illegal.
No, I know what you mean. Hatch has been in office so long, it's absurd. He voted against ERA, and that was how long ago?
Our other representatives, Jim Matheson, for example, aren't much better either. On the national level, Utah is very poorly represented when it comes to individual interests. Matheson sees INDUCE as a good thing as well, even though he stated in his letter back to me that fair use was very important. He then went on to talk about how important a piece of legislation INDUCE is. Talk about two-faced. *sigh*
Local government in Salt Lake City is pretty decent, though - the mayors of SLC and of Salt Lake County are both not republican, so we get some balance in the city. But it sucks knowing that when I cast my vote for "the other guy", it isn't going to influence the electors one iota.
CD prices are fine? Then why were they convicted of price fixing?
The promise of CDs back when they first came out was that they were cheaper to produce than cassettes. Yet the cost of CDs has consistently - since the release of the CD as a format - has been higher than cassettes.
RIAA have the nerve to claim piracy is cutting into their profits, yet they are convicted of price fixing. Could it possibly be that the prices they've fixed are not prices the market will bear for the crap they produce? No, it has to be pirates, it couldn't be that RIAA turns out total crap and then tries to charge a price that the market simply won't bear.
Myself, I stopped buying large amounts of CDs years ago. I don't download, and I don't pirate songs, I just haven't found much worth paying any amount of money for in probably the last 5 years, and those that were worth paying for weren't worth the asking price. The few CDs I've purchased in the last few years have been used, because those prices are a lot more reasonable and in line with the actual value of the content on the discs.
Every year I vote against Hatch (I live in Utah) and every year that bastard continues to get elected.
Re:Some people filter both ways ...
on
Are You Annoying?
·
· Score: 1
That people have a 'tact' filter. Some people filter inbound, some people filter outbound, some people filter both ways (rare), and some people don't filter at all.
Non-IT people tend to filter outbound - they don't say something for fear of offending someone. Not always the case, certainly, but by and large that's my experience.
IT people tend to filter inbound. In the days of yore, it wasn't uncommon to see discussions where "What are you, stupid?" was said, and generally it wasn't taken personally. It was just one of those things that was understood.
These days, there's more of a mix of people fitting the inbound vs. outbound filtering groups, and that leads to problems in business.
This article does a pretty decent job of highlighting one of the things I find to be the most ironic about IT personnel (and I have been one for almost 15 years now) - they tend to get into the business because they don't have to deal with people and don't want to. Yet IT work these days requires more interaction with people, not less.
Take Directory Services technology; according to Burton Group's studies, implementation of directory services technologies is 80% politics and 20% technology. The technology isn't really that difficult, but getting agreement between the various groups who own parts of the data about who owns particular pieces of data requires a fair amount of negotiation and people skills.
Yeah, it seems that Yahoo News doesn't really understand what's going on here, does it?
It's pretty straightforward....Autozone was granted the stay, with 90 day review periods (just like the RedHat case). Their 90 day review takes place after the RedHat review because the Autozone case depends on the RedHat case being decided as well.
The transfer wasn't even discussed in depth because until the stay is lifted, it's moot.
A short term gain at best, though - the "fan" base largely deserted RedHat, and the customers who decided that this was a good thing became the new "fans".
It's really just a semantic discussion, though. Customers that aren't fans of a technology eventually look to other technology solutions.
No, I think you have a valid question here - violation of the GPL (for example) is something that's actionable, though it hasn't been done yet as far as I know. I know the author of nmap revoked SCO's license to distribute his software with their new license agreement attached to it, and they haven't, but I don't know if he intends to do anything about it (or if he has, for that matter).
Insightful, yes, I agree with that, but with open source there is such a thing as piracy, if you read the terms of the license agreement (GPL, for example). It is possible to pirate OSS by violating the terms of the license and then continuing to distribute under a different license.
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Arguably, when they used to say things I agreed with.
Gartner used to be a respectible organization - but now they seem to be towing the "Windows Uber Alles" line, similar to CapGemini. I wonder how much Microsoft paid to get this report....
Honestly, I don't know - I just know that I've never noticed the flight crew outside the cockpit or the door to the flight deck open while the plane is in flight.
Have you flown in the US lately? Since 9/11, the flight deck door is locked closed from just before the cabin door is closed until the plane has stopped at the gate at the destination.
I fly about every other week (on Delta, most of the time) and in all the flights I've flown on, the flight door has never been opened in-flight.
I'm not ignoring those, because in the real world, you really can't ignore them. But I can see your point of view as a correct point of view in that the phase change from solid to liquid does require energy, that is correct. But only in the theoretical universe can you disregard the transient local changes because there is an ultimate effect on the liquid water and the air as well.
It has been a while since I studied theororetical physics, and that was one of the things that bothered me about the subject - disregarding wind resistance (for example) when calculating the rate of decent of an object in the real world is something that was just counterintuitive to me.
Yes, but we're not talking about a state change here, at least not for the liquid water. The ice does go through a state change in order to transition to liquid water, but the liquid water has to get from 0 C to 100 C, and it does so, but in this case it does so very, very slowly because of the dispersal of the thermodynamic change.
That's not really true - in an icewater bath, the differentiation in temperature is dispersed throughout the bath (= a larger volume), so the overall change for the entire bath is very very small, but it does in fact still exist.
The icewater bath just increases in a proportion to the difference in size between the size of the can and the size of the bath - if you discount the thermodynamic exchange between the bath and the air and tub that surround it.
Seems appropriate - it's loaded with collisions.
Considering that CD's is an accepted plural form, I wouldn't look for that happening any time soon.
According to the American Heritage Book of English Usage:
"Usage with regard to forming the plurals of letters, numbers, and abbreviations varies somewhat. In some cases you have a choice between adding -s or -'s, although the trend is increasingly to add -s alone: three As or three A's; the ABCs or the ABC's; the 1900s or the 1900's; PhDs or PhD's; several IOUs or several IOU's. With lowercase letters, symbols, abbreviations with periods, and in cases where confusion might arise without an apostrophe, use -'s to form the plural: p's and q's; +'s; -'s; M.A.'s; A's and I's; 2's. Mainly your goal is to be as clear as possible and avoid confusion."
I would disagree, and RIAA's citing of "rampant piracy" would seem to support my point of view in this.
Legal or not, there is an alternative means to getting their product. While I don't download music myself (there not being much worth acquiring at this time IMNSHO), if it were more cost effective for me to go to the store and purchase it than waste time downloading it, then it would be a no-brainer decision how to acquire the product.
I don't see CDs moving to the point that the supply is being moved quickly. Maybe it's just the market I'm in, but it seems that there is sufficient stagnant inventory on the shelves of the music stores.
When there is healthy competition, a lowering in cost of production is passed along simply to compete more effectively. When there isn't, the cost of product can be maintained at an artificially high price. That's the situation the music industry is in right now - and RIAA doesn't want that to change because they can't adapt to deal with sales in an internet-connected world.
There's a very old principle in retail. Adapt or Die. It's time they did one or the other.
Yes, cheaper to produce. Typically, you make customers happy by passing that savings along to them. Basic retail principles. And happy customers are returning customers - which are a lot less expensive to get in the door than new customers.
I worked in the IT department for one of the largest (and most successful) food & drug retailers in the US for 6 years. The business wanted to ensure that the IT workers designing systems understood how the business actually works, and as a result, my job was predicated upon understanding how this works. So yes, I do in fact get it.
The economic principles of supply and demand are that you look for the price point that allows you to sell your inventory, keeping less stale inventory (which costs money - not moving stock is quite expensive). Now, if you have a situation where you have too much stock on hand, you lower your price to move the stock. If you have too little on hand, you increase the price or you increase your inventory. Both can make you more money in the short term and potentially in the long term.
Now if consumers have an alternative, and the alternitave is less expensive than your product, some will still shop with you, but many will go to the competitor.
When an alternative appears on the scene, and you have a means of lowering your cost of production, you can compete more effectively by lowering your price by passing along that savings.
Now, when CDs first hit the mass market back in the mid-to-late 80's, the industry needed to achieve critical mass in order to lower their costs of production. Now there's more inventory to be moved, but the market size has stayed relatively the same. Principles of economics dictate that with a decreasing demand, you lower prices in order to entice consumers to purchase your product - especially if you have an excess of inventory - but if consumers aren't buying, lowering your prices is the way to move your inventory. The retailers do have to make a profit, because they have bills to pay - so RIAA keeping their price point high in order to continue to live like 'fat cats' means the retailers are stuck with the short end of the stick. They *have* to charge enough to make a margin that lets them pay their bills, or they go out of business. The supply chain for music is seriously bloated, and that needs to be dealt with.
Instead of doing what basic economic principles dictate they should do, RIAA starts suing their customers, blaming downloads/p2p networks for their current sales "slump" - as if they're OWED a living. They're not, any more than I am.
When consumers know your margin is high, it does nothing more than piss them off. Pissed off customers are customers who don't return. The cost of acquiring new customers is significantly higher than the cost of retaining old customers.
RIAA has pissed off a significant portion of their customer base by not passing savings along to consumers.
While I find what you wrote to actually be interesting and informative, it still does not address the underlying issue of RIAA charing prices that the market simply will not bear - as shown by their own sales figures - in spite of the fact that it's cheaper to press CDs than it is to duplicate cassettes.
If they did not charge ridiculously high prices, the music-only stores could do better business. The mega-super-ultramarts of the world are a huge problem in the retail space, but the problem with them has to be addressed outside of any particular industry. They treat their employees like crap, they ship manufacturing jobs outside the country, but people shop there because of the lower prices. If RIAA wanted to help out with that, they could put some of the vast amount of money in their coffers into legislation that protects the smaller businesses all around, rather than using schemes that are patently illegal.
I should've finished the sentence, which was "every time he's up for re-election".
No, I know what you mean. Hatch has been in office so long, it's absurd. He voted against ERA, and that was how long ago?
Our other representatives, Jim Matheson, for example, aren't much better either. On the national level, Utah is very poorly represented when it comes to individual interests. Matheson sees INDUCE as a good thing as well, even though he stated in his letter back to me that fair use was very important. He then went on to talk about how important a piece of legislation INDUCE is. Talk about two-faced. *sigh*
Local government in Salt Lake City is pretty decent, though - the mayors of SLC and of Salt Lake County are both not republican, so we get some balance in the city. But it sucks knowing that when I cast my vote for "the other guy", it isn't going to influence the electors one iota.
CD prices are fine? Then why were they convicted of price fixing?
The promise of CDs back when they first came out was that they were cheaper to produce than cassettes. Yet the cost of CDs has consistently - since the release of the CD as a format - has been higher than cassettes.
RIAA have the nerve to claim piracy is cutting into their profits, yet they are convicted of price fixing. Could it possibly be that the prices they've fixed are not prices the market will bear for the crap they produce? No, it has to be pirates, it couldn't be that RIAA turns out total crap and then tries to charge a price that the market simply won't bear.
Myself, I stopped buying large amounts of CDs years ago. I don't download, and I don't pirate songs, I just haven't found much worth paying any amount of money for in probably the last 5 years, and those that were worth paying for weren't worth the asking price. The few CDs I've purchased in the last few years have been used, because those prices are a lot more reasonable and in line with the actual value of the content on the discs.
Every year I vote against Hatch (I live in Utah) and every year that bastard continues to get elected.
I like it......
That people have a 'tact' filter. Some people filter inbound, some people filter outbound, some people filter both ways (rare), and some people don't filter at all.
Non-IT people tend to filter outbound - they don't say something for fear of offending someone. Not always the case, certainly, but by and large that's my experience.
IT people tend to filter inbound. In the days of yore, it wasn't uncommon to see discussions where "What are you, stupid?" was said, and generally it wasn't taken personally. It was just one of those things that was understood.
These days, there's more of a mix of people fitting the inbound vs. outbound filtering groups, and that leads to problems in business.
This article does a pretty decent job of highlighting one of the things I find to be the most ironic about IT personnel (and I have been one for almost 15 years now) - they tend to get into the business because they don't have to deal with people and don't want to. Yet IT work these days requires more interaction with people, not less.
Take Directory Services technology; according to Burton Group's studies, implementation of directory services technologies is 80% politics and 20% technology. The technology isn't really that difficult, but getting agreement between the various groups who own parts of the data about who owns particular pieces of data requires a fair amount of negotiation and people skills.
You use a PC, or you use the Windows calculator?
This one would end up being 34% Flamebait, 33% Troll, and 33% Funny.
Damn, no mod points for me.
Yeah, it seems that Yahoo News doesn't really understand what's going on here, does it?
It's pretty straightforward....Autozone was granted the stay, with 90 day review periods (just like the RedHat case). Their 90 day review takes place after the RedHat review because the Autozone case depends on the RedHat case being decided as well.
The transfer wasn't even discussed in depth because until the stay is lifted, it's moot.
A short term gain at best, though - the "fan" base largely deserted RedHat, and the customers who decided that this was a good thing became the new "fans".
It's really just a semantic discussion, though. Customers that aren't fans of a technology eventually look to other technology solutions.
For many tech companies, fan base = customer base. Or at the very least, the fan base strongly influences the purchases made from the customer base.
Lose the fan base, there's a very good chance you'll lose your customer base. Customers are fans, too.
Huh? Reports are that SCO is being investigated by the SEC...
See This story on Newsforge for some info about it, reported back in March...
No, I think you have a valid question here - violation of the GPL (for example) is something that's actionable, though it hasn't been done yet as far as I know. I know the author of nmap revoked SCO's license to distribute his software with their new license agreement attached to it, and they haven't, but I don't know if he intends to do anything about it (or if he has, for that matter).
Perhaps someone else here knows.
Insightful, yes, I agree with that, but with open source there is such a thing as piracy, if you read the terms of the license agreement (GPL, for example). It is possible to pirate OSS by violating the terms of the license and then continuing to distribute under a different license.
SCO, anyone?