>Having owned a few modern cars, I know that these run better than anything on the road today.
As a VW enthusiast, I will chime in. I've had gas mileage in the mid 20s on various beetles, low 20s on my Kombi, and a quarter mile in 2.8 gallons in my '66 Type 3;-)
But whenever any VW (I've had 7 different Aircooled VWs) was my main transportation, and I drove a rental or any other late model, unthrashed car, I'd have to describe the experience as "embarrassingly nice." And if you keep your foot out of it, these cars will do much better in gas mileage, and if you really look at the emissions on a 1600 Type I or whatever, it's not honest to say it's superior.
I sold my last VW (a 61 custom Kombi, which I really miss) after I got my Volvo. So now my daily driver and only vehicle is a '91 Volvo with about 245,000 miles on it. It doesn't run like new, but it runs exactly like it did with 100,000 miles on it, and that is to say it more than gets the job done. I've seen VW crashes and I've seen Volvo crashes and I don't have any problem making the choice, BTW.
Plus, I live in Arizona and now I think of Air Conditioning as something essential, and the ability to accelerate to 85-90 while going 70 is pretty useful, it turns out.
>At the very least you have a FORD impression in your forehead for the next year:O
Yes, the dashboard of a '59 Chevy is not something you'd want to eat. I always had this awareness when I was driving mine that the bezel over the speedometer would easily decapitate me. I knew from rebuilding it, that the steering wheel didn't have any kind of steel core and would break and so the fear was not unfounded...
I understand that some '59s had lap belts but that it was an option only in the 2-door and 4-door with post models, but not on convertibles and hardtops ("hardtop" being the popular sedan model that has no post between the front and back doors, which made for a *very* neat effect, especially with the curved glass.)
I miss that car, but I don't miss it being my only transportation.
Some idiot in a late 80s Firebird decided to T-Bone my 1959 Impala.
The results were pretty much the opposite of what's in TFA.
There wasn't much left of the front of the Firebird. The side of my Impala was dented pretty badly, but smooth enough to be recoverable. It screwed up my transmission mounts which turned out to be *very* expensive, but otherwise ok.
What stopped me from driving that 59 Chevy was the cost of gasoline. I stopped being able to afford it at about $1.17/gal I think, and I bought a Hyundai. I don't know who has my old Chevy today, but I think it's still in the family, so to speak.
No kidding. 59 Impala/BelAir/Biscaynes are pretty rare and really highly sought after cars in any condition. I had a 59 Impala in the 80s, and even though I participated in quite a few Chevy enthusiast activities, I never saw another car with the same options as mine, and I saw a *lot* of 59's. Lots more 60's. The 59's had bit of late-blooming popularity -- they sold well after they dropped the price. So they simplified the construction for 60, where they stamped out the sheet metal on machines instead of hand shaping. It's quite an obvious, stark contrast to look at a 59 and a 60 Chevy side by side.
Anyway I'm pretty sure this is my all-time favorite car (maybe the 1973 Buick Riveria is a tie). I hate to see one destroyed, but somebody obviously doesn't mind taking a stack of 1000 dollar bills, setting it on fire, filming it and putting it on the internet. That's all I see here.
Want my $60? Publish a grand strategy, turn-based hex map game with a great AI.
War In Russia was great. East Front / EF2 / Panzer General / PG2 were mostly excellent. I really enjoyed Fantasy General and wanted *much* more like that.
Of course "they need to." But you're looking at it wrong. They *can't* because of a number of reasons, mostly related to competition in the marketplace.
>We provided a lot of custom tools to help small business owners set up an online storefront, and found that more people wanted our services at $79/month than $19, $29, $39, etc.
Yes. I'm sorry if you had to learn this by trial and error, but you might not have believed it if a business consultant had told you directly.
The price point must be the highest price while remaining a better value than your target competition.
There are a whole lot of tenets in marketing that turn out to be important but so counter-intuitive, especially to us computer geeks, that I no longer have any doubt that marketing salaries are justified. This is just one in a LONG list of jaw-dropping realizations that I have learned over the past few decades that I would NEVER have accepted without seeing the results for myself.
>$49 in 1979 is the same as $143.90 in today's dollars
This is rarely the clean, simple linear relation that it's made out to be.
$40 computer game dollars are not strictly equivalent to $40 gasoline dollars or $40 milk dollars.
I once made a hobby out of saving things like old grocery ads, because I found it amusing to find cheaper prices in the mid 1980s than ad prices literally in the same store from the mid 1960s. An economist can say whatever he'd like about inflation and so on, but I will still say it depends on your universe of discourse, once you move past the academic abstractions.
Re:The $60 price is the #1 reason for P2P piracy
on
Why Games Cost $60
·
· Score: 1
>Explain to me
There's really not enough space to give a crash course on marketing, even an industry-specific one. Also by your wording I suspect you already know the answers to some of your questions.
>People. Catch a wake up. You are selling your games for far, far, far more than people (That's your market) think they are worth. DROP YOUR PRICES. You'll: > >a) Sell more games. > >b) Make more money due to increased volume. > >c) Reduce the piracy that you are so concerned about.
I think you underestimate the sophistication and breadth of the market research that demonstrates otherwise to the people who make these decisions.
It is often the case, and certainly the case in my (completely different) industry, that lowering prices on certain classes of product can adversely affect sales. This is a counterintuitive proposition, I realize, but it is true.
Yes, it was like the time I visited Rome, and realized that Americans weren't the only people in the world with a visibly prevalent proportion of morbidly obese people, including the fattest woman I have ever seen in my life.
I spent some time in BC a couple of years ago and realized that a lot of Canadians are also fat.
So I've stopped accepting the premise that it's only "Americans" who are fat.
Like any other retail product, the price is a function of what the market will bear.
There are some interesting social phenomena that affect the demand curve, that allow (or even *require*) a product to be priced arbitrarily higher than the marginal cost of production and distribution, because in some marketplaces, lower priced goods are regarded, probably unconsciously, by consumers as inferior.
It is also the case that when pricing a product with respect to a competitor's product, it is advantageous to price the product at the highest price possible while still being perceived as a better value than the target competition. I've seen reproducible studies that show the same product from the same supplier, if priced significantly lower, can be less popular.
Retail pricing is a bizarre non-linear non-deterministic function. It boils down to: If you aren't willing to pay the retail price of a product, and aren't able or willing to negotiate a lower price from a given supplier, then don't buy it.
Both. Just because you have to receive plaintext passwords in PAP, doesn't mean your authentication system must store them in a database. It doesn't even mean you have to send plaintext over the wire in your network. I'm not even sure why people think PAP requires storing a password at all, but it's been a common claim in this slashdot thread. Yes, with PAP, the client sends the password and you have to receive it, but it's not like you have to send it *back*.
Well, it requires cleartext passwords at one layer but you can still do encrypted passwords in RADIUS or whatever you use. Just because the device has to take in a cleartext password at the first step doesn't mean the second step isn't to encrypt that password and check it against the hashed string in your database.
Don't tell me this is hard. It's how I did it as long ago as 1993 with Livingston Portmasters and *my own* radiusd, and for somebody like the size of Demon there are *far* better options today.
Besides all that, we're not talking about dialup access passwords in the first place. These were login passwords to an HTTPS billing system.
>Apparently you've never worked at an office.Apparently you've never worked at an office.
I've worked in an office where you get fired for doing stupid things. In particular, I've worked at an ISP where I'd be the one firing you for doing this particular stupid thing.
Slashdot Mirror
>I'm not sure how anyone could think that modern cars are made of heavier materials. It's all plastic and fiberglass nowadays.
I think you'd be surprised at how much steel is in your "plastic/fiberglass" car and where it is found.
>Having owned a few modern cars, I know that these run better than anything on the road today.
As a VW enthusiast, I will chime in. I've had gas mileage in the mid 20s on various beetles, low 20s on my Kombi, and a quarter mile in 2.8 gallons in my '66 Type 3 ;-)
But whenever any VW (I've had 7 different Aircooled VWs) was my main transportation, and I drove a rental or any other late model, unthrashed car, I'd have to describe the experience as "embarrassingly nice." And if you keep your foot out of it, these cars will do much better in gas mileage, and if you really look at the emissions on a 1600 Type I or whatever, it's not honest to say it's superior.
I sold my last VW (a 61 custom Kombi, which I really miss) after I got my Volvo. So now my daily driver and only vehicle is a '91 Volvo with about 245,000 miles on it. It doesn't run like new, but it runs exactly like it did with 100,000 miles on it, and that is to say it more than gets the job done. I've seen VW crashes and I've seen Volvo crashes and I don't have any problem making the choice, BTW.
Plus, I live in Arizona and now I think of Air Conditioning as something essential, and the ability to accelerate to 85-90 while going 70 is pretty useful, it turns out.
>At the very least you have a FORD impression in your forehead for the next year :O
Yes, the dashboard of a '59 Chevy is not something you'd want to eat. I always had this awareness when I was driving mine that the bezel over the speedometer would easily decapitate me. I knew from rebuilding it, that the steering wheel didn't have any kind of steel core and would break and so the fear was not unfounded...
I understand that some '59s had lap belts but that it was an option only in the 2-door and 4-door with post models, but not on convertibles and hardtops ("hardtop" being the popular sedan model that has no post between the front and back doors, which made for a *very* neat effect, especially with the curved glass.)
I miss that car, but I don't miss it being my only transportation.
>I bet same thing applies to modern cars in 50 years.
DRM means they can basically be expired.
>Just out of curiosity, what light, agile, well-built car would you buy to transport 3 young kids given the rules about car seats?
I don't know, but there have been discovered some simple and effective methods to prevent reproduction. Would you like information on that?
Some idiot in a late 80s Firebird decided to T-Bone my 1959 Impala.
The results were pretty much the opposite of what's in TFA.
There wasn't much left of the front of the Firebird. The side of my Impala was dented pretty badly, but smooth enough to be recoverable.
It screwed up my transmission mounts which turned out to be *very* expensive, but otherwise ok.
What stopped me from driving that 59 Chevy was the cost of gasoline. I stopped being able to afford it at about $1.17/gal I think, and I bought a Hyundai. I don't know who has my old Chevy today, but I think it's still in the family, so to speak.
>IIHS doesn't consider it pointless to demonstratably show how far we've come since they started improving vehicle safety way back when.
Why not burn a Renaissance painting to show how far art supplies have come?
Or is that different somehow?
No kidding. 59 Impala/BelAir/Biscaynes are pretty rare and really highly sought after cars in any condition.
I had a 59 Impala in the 80s, and even though I participated in quite a few Chevy enthusiast activities, I never saw another car with the same options as mine, and I saw a *lot* of 59's. Lots more 60's. The 59's had bit of late-blooming popularity -- they sold well after they dropped the price. So they simplified the construction for 60, where they stamped out the sheet metal on machines instead of hand shaping. It's quite an obvious, stark contrast to look at a 59 and a 60 Chevy side by side.
Anyway I'm pretty sure this is my all-time favorite car (maybe the 1973 Buick Riveria is a tie). I hate to see one destroyed, but somebody obviously doesn't mind taking a stack of 1000 dollar bills, setting it on fire, filming it and putting it on the internet. That's all I see here.
Want my $60? Publish a grand strategy, turn-based hex map game with a great AI.
War In Russia was great. East Front / EF2 / Panzer General / PG2 were mostly excellent. I really enjoyed Fantasy General and wanted *much* more like that.
>They probably don't really need to.
Of course "they need to." But you're looking at it wrong. They *can't* because of a number of reasons, mostly related to competition in the marketplace.
>We provided a lot of custom tools to help small business owners set up an online storefront, and found that more people wanted our services at $79/month than $19, $29, $39, etc.
Yes. I'm sorry if you had to learn this by trial and error, but you might not have believed it if a business consultant had told you directly.
The price point must be the highest price while remaining a better value than your target competition.
There are a whole lot of tenets in marketing that turn out to be important but so counter-intuitive, especially to us computer geeks, that I no longer have any doubt that marketing salaries are justified. This is just one in a LONG list of jaw-dropping realizations that I have learned over the past few decades that I would NEVER have accepted without seeing the results for myself.
>$49 in 1979 is the same as $143.90 in today's dollars
This is rarely the clean, simple linear relation that it's made out to be.
$40 computer game dollars are not strictly equivalent to $40 gasoline dollars or $40 milk dollars.
I once made a hobby out of saving things like old grocery ads, because I found it amusing to find cheaper
prices in the mid 1980s than ad prices literally in the same store from the mid 1960s. An economist can say whatever he'd like about inflation and so on, but I will still say it depends on your universe of discourse, once you move past the academic abstractions.
>Explain to me
There's really not enough space to give a crash course on marketing, even an industry-specific one.
Also by your wording I suspect you already know the answers to some of your questions.
>People. Catch a wake up. You are selling your games for far, far, far more than people (That's your market) think they are worth. DROP YOUR PRICES. You'll:
>
>a) Sell more games.
>
>b) Make more money due to increased volume.
>
>c) Reduce the piracy that you are so concerned about.
I think you underestimate the sophistication and breadth of the market research that demonstrates otherwise to the people who make these decisions.
It is often the case, and certainly the case in my (completely different) industry, that lowering prices on certain classes of product can adversely affect sales.
This is a counterintuitive proposition, I realize, but it is true.
Yes, it was like the time I visited Rome, and realized that Americans weren't the only people in the world with a visibly prevalent proportion of morbidly obese people, including the fattest woman I have ever seen in my life.
I spent some time in BC a couple of years ago and realized that a lot of Canadians are also fat.
So I've stopped accepting the premise that it's only "Americans" who are fat.
>Unfortunately, I was unable to purchase one at Coles as they are a dangerous and hazardous product(so was explained to me).
It's not clear whether they had one but would not sell it to you, or whether they didn't have one at all but you still wanted to buy it there.
Make a segway-like vehicle that can do halfpipe tricks / go airborne / go fast.
People will buy those.
Like any other retail product, the price is a function of what the market will bear.
There are some interesting social phenomena that affect the demand curve, that allow (or even *require*) a product to be priced arbitrarily higher than the marginal cost of production and distribution, because in some marketplaces, lower priced goods are regarded, probably unconsciously, by consumers as inferior.
It is also the case that when pricing a product with respect to a competitor's product, it is advantageous to price the product at the highest price possible while still being perceived as a better value than the target competition. I've seen reproducible studies that show the same product from the same supplier, if priced significantly lower, can be less popular.
Retail pricing is a bizarre non-linear non-deterministic function. It boils down to: If you aren't willing to pay the retail price of a product, and aren't able or willing to negotiate a lower price from a given supplier, then don't buy it.
Both. Just because you have to receive plaintext passwords in PAP, doesn't mean your authentication system must store them in a database. It doesn't even mean you have to send plaintext over the wire in your network. I'm not even sure why people think PAP requires storing a password at all, but it's been a common claim in this slashdot thread. Yes, with PAP, the client sends the password and you have to receive it, but it's not like you have to send it *back*.
"...when a corporate is involved it always is a MISTAKE.
When an individual hacker exposes weak security, he is a terrorist."
Solution: Instead of being an individual hacker, form a security corporation.
Well, it requires cleartext passwords at one layer but you can still do encrypted passwords in RADIUS or whatever you use.
Just because the device has to take in a cleartext password at the first step doesn't mean the second step isn't to encrypt that password and check it against the hashed string in your database.
Don't tell me this is hard. It's how I did it as long ago as 1993 with Livingston Portmasters and *my own* radiusd, and for somebody like the size of Demon there are *far* better options today.
Besides all that, we're not talking about dialup access passwords in the first place. These were login passwords to an HTTPS billing system.
>Apparently you've never worked at an office.Apparently you've never worked at an office.
I've worked in an office where you get fired for doing stupid things. In particular, I've worked at an ISP where I'd be the one firing you for doing this particular stupid thing.
They lost the time value of the revenue over 18 months. If you were smart, and anticipated it, you paid the debt *and* collected interest.
I still play Super Star Trek.
Battery life and wireless support are the two main reasons I switched from Linux to Mac, for notebook use anyway.