I am on the internet several hours a day between work and home and a voracious reader of sources from all ends of the ideological spectrum and my conservatism, if anything, is re-enforced.
Under the old model I could buy the game for $59 and sell it for $19. Net cost is $40. Also, I could share the game on all the consoles or PC's in my household (Family plan). Now the game is $59 and the family plan is over $118 or higher. Now add the inconvenience of the DRM and the effective playability (i.e. value has been decreased). Take all this together and ask: Is this game still worth buying? Some people will still buy at this "higher price" some won't. If they made the right choice they will have higher profits, if the didn't the result will be lower profits. Getting all upset because they "screwed up" the product is like getting all pissed off because the new Ford Mustang only has a 100HP engine and they are charging the same price for it. You probably won't like it, won't buy it, and Ford will have lower earnings.
The problem is that I am not being "supervised" to the level that I am being checked multiple times per hour. I am fortunate that I work for a company that evaluates me on my results and compares me to others for ranking and frankly doesn't care how I achieve those results as long as it is ethical/legal. This means, that if I want to browse Slashdot all day long and then work at night-- not a problem. This invasive supervision also creates an environment where the smart people will find a job elsewhere and all you will have left are lower performing people that need the supervision.
The 16C is one of my most prized tech possessions. There hasn't been a programmer's calculator that has even come close to this since. I just did a quick look on eBay and it looks like the 11C, 15C, and 16C are turning into some valuable collector's items.
To get my $7 I set my MSRP at $35, Amazon, sells for $10 and everyone is happy. No one looks at MSRP when they shop Amazon, anyway. And in the best(OK, admittedly wishful) case it might even sell at a higher price than $10.
I fully agree that you need to design in quality. I go by the adage "You can't test in quality". Regardless, you WILL test. The question is whether it is more economical to test before you release the product or once its in the customer hands. Some failures can have significant financial impacts(for example, how about a defect in a car engine control module that causes the engine to shut down -- VERY expensive). In the less impactful consumer market you will have degradation in sells if the quality falls below a certain point. It comes down to a tradeoff between risk to business vs. cost to test pre-release. One lower way to mitigate the risk is to turn up/down the depth of testing depending on the change. For example, if you are making some minor UI changes, you might want to do a very light regression test but if you are doing some fundamental refactoring of a core part of the product then you might want to have a more involved set of unit/subsystem/integration tests that cover as much of the product as possible.
One method we use is to err on the conservative side and to over-test initially and if the defect density is low enough then back off on later releases as the quality level is much better known and the resulting post-release risk is lower.
Bottom line, there is no hard rule, you have to know your costs and your risks and make daily tradeoffs between the two.
Yes, those insurance companies need to maintain their awesome 3-4% profit margin. Disconnect the consumer purchase decision from the product pricing and pricing becomes irrational.
No reason you can't dither your address a bit. Pick an address of someone 1/2 mile from you or so and choose a phony name. You district still gets the money and you didn't give away anything (except your taxes). Why do I get the feeling that this will be just as successful as the stimulus bill.
It more than total weight. Its weight AND balance in an airplane. As a private pilot I can understand the thought process that might have gone on in the captain's head. He needed to reduce weight(either total or from that part of the airplane). He could unload multiple lighter people or one bigger person. Since we have no idea where the weight of the luggage and the location of his seat it is unclear whether unloading luggage would have worked. In the ideal case the one person (and only his luggage) would cause less business damage than multiple people or just leaving people's luggage behind. Of course, in this case, he was wrong.
The key to having a pay-walled site is that you have content that people cannot live with. The Wall Street Journal is one such site that has been profitable almost from day one. The NYT already tried to pay-wall the editorials once and they nearly had the writers quit because they had lost their audience. This could be a serious mistake for the NYT.
Next, he'll invent a bomb that doesn't look like a science project.
My friends and I used to carry our BB guns around the suburban neighborhood. By today's standards we would be considered, if not terrorists, at least in serious needs of counseling and immediate suspension from school.
It is true that the lower end inkjets overwhelming make their profits via supplies and cost per page is not overly competitive (as in NOT). It is also true that the higher end business inkjet products are designed for low cost per page. They generally have longer life print heads and larger ink supplies. There have been some claims in the marketplace that these higher end products can have lower cost per page than equivalent color laserjets. However, if you just need monochrome there are some inexpensive laserjets that can't be beat when you look at overall cost of ownership.
Unless both network reliability AND latency can be guaranteed at a reasonable price, the risks of placing the whole business on the Cloud will be excessive. I work for a large fortune 500 company where we have all of our IT services centralized and even in this case where we control the intranet we have 2-3 short outages/mo and long latencies during certain hours and days.
Bottom line, I expect the Cloud to coexist with more traditional computing. Less critical services could go to the Cloud, essential services will remain in more conventional locations(or fully owned/controlled Clouds/SSAS infrastructures).
And I don't want to pay for all you people that keep breaking bones and such on your bikes. I have a deal. I'll pay for my health care and you pay for yours.
I can remember a time when there were a few companies like IBM, Honeywell, Sperry, and Univac which totally dominated computing. Mainframes were getting bigger and more expensive and only an "ivory tower" set of individuals truly had access these devices. Then these upstarts in the Silicon Valley came up with these new-fangled personal computer things/toys and the whole industry went on a 20 year restructuring where the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, etc. made fortunes. When I first saw an Apple II, I had no idea where personal computing would end up. It looks interesting, it was cool from a techie perspective, but who could imagine how it would change the world as we know it. Then you get things like the internet which took close to 20 years to ignite and another discontinuity occurred. The internet by itself would have been nothing. The personal computer by itself would have been relegated as a smart typewriter. The two together -- WOW!. We are definitely in a period of relative stability and huge growth is not happening. Globalization is depressing salaries. However, even that will equalize at some point. I work daily with people in Singapore and they used to be the "cheap" engineers. Now we both commiserate how China and India are getting more jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
http://xkcd.com/378/
I am on the internet several hours a day between work and home and a voracious reader of sources from all ends of the ideological spectrum and my conservatism, if anything, is re-enforced.
Under the old model I could buy the game for $59 and sell it for $19. Net cost is $40. Also, I could share the game on all the consoles or PC's in my household (Family plan). Now the game is $59 and the family plan is over $118 or higher. Now add the inconvenience of the DRM and the effective playability (i.e. value has been decreased). Take all this together and ask: Is this game still worth buying? Some people will still buy at this "higher price" some won't. If they made the right choice they will have higher profits, if the didn't the result will be lower profits. Getting all upset because they "screwed up" the product is like getting all pissed off because the new Ford Mustang only has a 100HP engine and they are charging the same price for it. You probably won't like it, won't buy it, and Ford will have lower earnings.
The problem is that I am not being "supervised" to the level that I am being checked multiple times per hour. I am fortunate that I work for a company that evaluates me on my results and compares me to others for ranking and frankly doesn't care how I achieve those results as long as it is ethical/legal. This means, that if I want to browse Slashdot all day long and then work at night-- not a problem. This invasive supervision also creates an environment where the smart people will find a job elsewhere and all you will have left are lower performing people that need the supervision.
This is so scary, it's surreal.
I better buy some black electrical tape.
The 16C is one of my most prized tech possessions. There hasn't been a programmer's calculator that has even come close to this since. I just did a quick look on eBay and it looks like the 11C, 15C, and 16C are turning into some valuable collector's items.
My apps don't need to know where I was last year.
To get my $7 I set my MSRP at $35, Amazon, sells for $10 and everyone is happy. No one looks at MSRP when they shop Amazon, anyway. And in the best(OK, admittedly wishful) case it might even sell at a higher price than $10.
You obviously took the blue pill.
I fully agree that you need to design in quality. I go by the adage "You can't test in quality". Regardless, you WILL test. The question is whether it is more economical to test before you release the product or once its in the customer hands. Some failures can have significant financial impacts(for example, how about a defect in a car engine control module that causes the engine to shut down -- VERY expensive). In the less impactful consumer market you will have degradation in sells if the quality falls below a certain point. It comes down to a tradeoff between risk to business vs. cost to test pre-release. One lower way to mitigate the risk is to turn up/down the depth of testing depending on the change. For example, if you are making some minor UI changes, you might want to do a very light regression test but if you are doing some fundamental refactoring of a core part of the product then you might want to have a more involved set of unit/subsystem/integration tests that cover as much of the product as possible.
One method we use is to err on the conservative side and to over-test initially and if the defect density is low enough then back off on later releases as the quality level is much better known and the resulting post-release risk is lower.
Bottom line, there is no hard rule, you have to know your costs and your risks and make daily tradeoffs between the two.
The average was getting skewed upward and they had to be exported. Can't wreck a perfectly good stereo-type.
Is it possible that this is, already, the influence of Mark Hurd? If there are no $'s coming into a group, it gets cut. Show me
Yes, those insurance companies need to maintain their awesome 3-4% profit margin. Disconnect the consumer purchase decision from the product pricing and pricing becomes irrational.
No reason you can't dither your address a bit. Pick an address of someone 1/2 mile from you or so and choose a phony name. You district still gets the money and you didn't give away anything (except your taxes). Why do I get the feeling that this will be just as successful as the stimulus bill.
Actually if you look at who is paying the bulk of the taxes, this is mostly true already. The top 25% pay 85% of the taxes.
Well after reading the Southwest blog posting, it appears to me more of size rather than weight consideration.
http://www.blogsouthwest.com/blog/not-so-silent-bob
It more than total weight. Its weight AND balance in an airplane. As a private pilot I can understand the thought process that might have gone on in the captain's head. He needed to reduce weight(either total or from that part of the airplane). He could unload multiple lighter people or one bigger person. Since we have no idea where the weight of the luggage and the location of his seat it is unclear whether unloading luggage would have worked. In the ideal case the one person (and only his luggage) would cause less business damage than multiple people or just leaving people's luggage behind. Of course, in this case, he was wrong.
The key to having a pay-walled site is that you have content that people cannot live with. The Wall Street Journal is one such site that has been profitable almost from day one. The NYT already tried to pay-wall the editorials once and they nearly had the writers quit because they had lost their audience. This could be a serious mistake for the NYT.
Next, he'll invent a bomb that doesn't look like a science project.
My friends and I used to carry our BB guns around the suburban neighborhood. By today's standards we would be considered, if not terrorists, at least in serious needs of counseling and immediate suspension from school.
It is true that the lower end inkjets overwhelming make their profits via supplies and cost per page is not overly competitive (as in NOT). It is also true that the higher end business inkjet products are designed for low cost per page. They generally have longer life print heads and larger ink supplies. There have been some claims in the marketplace that these higher end products can have lower cost per page than equivalent color laserjets. However, if you just need monochrome there are some inexpensive laserjets that can't be beat when you look at overall cost of ownership.
Private peer-to-peer network...
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
...SAAS infrastructures. Geez my spelling stinks today.
Unless both network reliability AND latency can be guaranteed at a reasonable price, the risks of placing the whole business on the Cloud will be excessive. I work for a large fortune 500 company where we have all of our IT services centralized and even in this case where we control the intranet we have 2-3 short outages/mo and long latencies during certain hours and days.
Bottom line, I expect the Cloud to coexist with more traditional computing. Less critical services could go to the Cloud, essential services will remain in more conventional locations(or fully owned/controlled Clouds/SSAS infrastructures).
And I don't want to pay for all you people that keep breaking bones and such on your bikes. I have a deal. I'll pay for my health care and you pay for yours.
I can remember a time when there were a few companies like IBM, Honeywell, Sperry, and Univac which totally dominated computing. Mainframes were getting bigger and more expensive and only an "ivory tower" set of individuals truly had access these devices. Then these upstarts in the Silicon Valley came up with these new-fangled personal computer things/toys and the whole industry went on a 20 year restructuring where the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, etc. made fortunes. When I first saw an Apple II, I had no idea where personal computing would end up. It looks interesting, it was cool from a techie perspective, but who could imagine how it would change the world as we know it. Then you get things like the internet which took close to 20 years to ignite and another discontinuity occurred. The internet by itself would have been nothing. The personal computer by itself would have been relegated as a smart typewriter. The two together -- WOW!. We are definitely in a period of relative stability and huge growth is not happening. Globalization is depressing salaries. However, even that will equalize at some point. I work daily with people in Singapore and they used to be the "cheap" engineers. Now we both commiserate how China and India are getting more jobs.