The ARM one will certainly be locked - MS requires that as a condition of other manufacturers of Windows RT devices, and I can imagine no reason they wouldn't do so themselves. The x86... maybe, maybe not. I don't know.
The specs for Windows Logo compatibility require that the x86 boot loader NOT be locked. I doubt that MS would create a tablet that does not meet their own compatibility requirements. Not impossible, but seems like a marketing black eye.
My experience in multiple huge corporations is completely different. Cost is the major factor in hiring. Cost of salaries and health care. H1-B's are much cheaper in both respects and are usually contractors.
And I agree with that. My experience is that a contractor is easy to approve, but full time headcount is very difficult, because headcount represents a huge expense over time while a contractor is a temporary expense. But once the decision has been made to allow a hire, we aren't quibbling over nickels.
And for all the vitriol that my original post has generated, I don't believe I have ever hired an H-1B. I've sponsored people for a green card, but most of my team is US citizens. I will hire the best person I can find, regardless of origin, and within reasonable limits, regardless of price.
Increasing the size of the labor pool does drive down wages, no doubt about it. But I was addressing the perception that at the point of hire all that matters is the price tag, and not the applicant. In my experience it is the opposite - get the best candidate you can, even if you have to spend more than planned.
The company I work at has skipped annual raises twice now since the great recession. They don't ask people to taken an explicit pay cut, but by eliminating raises they have effectively done the same thing. On a personal level I don't like it, but it is one of the only ways that companies have to address their labor costs, because if you do push through pay cuts all the top talent will head for the door. This is the corporate equivalent of inflation - fix wages and let everything else rise, so wages take a lesser bite.
Just admit it. You hire whoever does a good enough job for the least amount of money. Can you at least be honest about this? It's generally how business works.
In my experience with several medium to large companies, the mantra is always "get the best person you can". I've never had *any* pressure to settle for the candidate who wants $80K instead of $90K. But the person that wants (and may well deserve) $125K isn't going to fit my budget. HR doesn't get involved as long as the offer I am making is within the salary range for the position, and finance doesn't get involved unless I am clearly blowing my budget - but no one is going after me because I budgeted the position at $88K and spent $90K. A bigger issue for me is that I don't want to bring in somebody making $120K if the average salary is $90K, because unless it is clear to everybody that the person is really worth the extra bump, I am creating an equity issue that leads to a bunch of unhappy people down the road.
I have no opinion about the quality of H-1B visas versus local candidates. To get hired they have to be good enough to make up for any language difficulties, so the bar may be a little higher overall. But I will say that someone who has the ambition and drive to leave their home country and culture and come to the US has already shown more ambition and willingness to take a risk than most local candidates. Not a knock on the locals, just a recognition that the immigrants are a self selected pool that have already demonstrated willingness to go to some lengths for their career.
And I think one of the things that really kills the brick and mortar stores are the people that go there to touch the keyboard or play with the camera, and then turn around and order it online.
I can't say I've never done it myself, and I don't think anything can be done about it, but the reality is that retail stores often serve as the showroom for all the internet only stores.
Total speculation here, but I wonder if the retirement of the shuttle has an impact here? Is it possible that these telescopes were sized to fit in the shuttle launch bay, and with no more shuttle that requirement has been dropped and they can build in a larger primary mirror?
I can certainly imagine that at some point in the last 20 years (which is probably when the authorization for these scopes happened), that somebody put in a requirement that they had to be compatible with the shuttle.
I would apply Occam's Razor and say that if the US wanted to conduct overhead surveillance within the borders of the US it would be an order of magnitude cheaper to use airplanes or drones. Orbital recon is preferable only when you can't easily overfly the target.
I was in China last week, and tried to go to Facebook (which is a blocked site in China). I don't remember the specific error, but it was something along the lines of "server not responding". It didn't tell me it was blocked or chide me for looking or anything like that.
That reminded me that I was behind the great firewall, so I didn't go looking for any other questionable content, and I was unaware of anything else getting blocked/filtered in the time I was there.
For at least 10 years now I have worn a Seiko Kinetic Auto Relay (http://www.seikowatches.com/technology/kinetic/kinetic_ar.html) Mechanical self winding mechanism actually charges a battery. Take it off for a few days and the hands stop moving but the electronics inside are still keeping correct time. Pick it up, shake it a few times, and it will wake up and advance the hands to the correct time. Supposedly that power saving mode is good for up to 2 years.
Not as tech heavy as the modern geek watch, but still a stylish watch, and I haven't had to set it outside of daylight time/time zone changes since I got it, and I have never had to replace a battery.
A product I have worked on for years goes back to the mid-80s. Originally DOS, then Win 3.1, now Win32. With some very minor exceptions, files created by the DOS version are still automatically recognized and upgraded to the current format at load time.
Every time we think we can drop the Version 1 file format reader, we hear about some customer (almost always outside the US) that just upgraded their old DOS system to the current system. And usually that happened because the PC or attached hardware had failed and the new replacement required newer software.
OTOH, I was lobbying to drop support for an ancient file format converter, and googled on the device whose format we were matching - the first page that popped up was how someone had just donated their device to a museum. So far no customers have complained that we dropped that support.
The true irony here is that he's spending his own money and not giving it to the MPAA, when the MPAA could have likely donated the same amount of material and gotten tax breaks, likely increasing their bottom line.
They could potentially take a writeoff for donating them, but the write-off would be capped at their cost, so I don't see how it would help the bottom line.
Suppose they get to deduct $100,000 as the cost. This reduces their tax bill by something like $30,000.
For the government to set arbitrarily complex tax rules, and then force you to pay third party suppliers to clean up the mess it forces on you is wrong.
Everyone should have a free, government supplied and transparent way of completing their taxes.
Everyone does have a free, government supplied way of doing their taxes - paper tax forms and the instruction book. I did my taxes that way for years, and millions of people still do. For most people it isn't even that hard.
My first Kindle had a problem in hot sunlight - reading by the pool in Vegas, I learned I had to put it face down (i.e. in the shade) during page flips, or it would have trouble redrawing the screen - washed out and partially missing text.
I went to the 3rd generation Kindle and it has never had that problem.
You can also get cases with lights built into them specifically designed for the kindle. This is a welcome addition, but seems more evolutionary than revolutionary.
I agree that this is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but I would snap one of these up in a heartbeat. I already have the reading light case for my Kindle, and while it is nice, it means that the device has to be in its case to be of use. Having one built in to the display surface seems like a big step up, assuming that it has no more power drain than the existing external lights, and has an on/off switch.
As someone who has aging eyes and a preference for overall low light levels at home at night, a lit Kindle would be very welcome.
Auto graders could check spelling and grammar, and to some extent plagiarism, but without a human reviewing the content, students will learn be gaming the algorithms from day 1.
But if you learn to game the algorithms, and if the algorithms have some correlation to good writing, gaming the algorithm is actually improving your writing.
I also seem to recall that many of the Polish codebreakers ended up in Bletchley Park after Poland was overrun, where they continued to be critical to the ongoing efforts to keep up with changes to Enigma.
No, not guilty until proven innocent. Accused of something by someone outside the the law enforcement system, with no police powers, and no ability to compel you to do anything short of going to the legal system. Exactly like any other civil court proceeding.
Since you say you're not trolling I'll take you at your word and give you my best answer.
It's not the "what", it's the "how".
The "what" is someone getting fairly paid for their work. Which they have every right to do. Microsoft, the artists represented by the RIAA, everyone. You produce something of value and ask a price for it, you deserve to be paid. Or not be paid if the price is too high. Let the market decide. But either way you deserve to be in that marketplace and not sidestepped illegally.
The "how" is the problem.
I can't get too worked up about this. You get a letter from a a business organization that says someone has accused you of not being in compliance. They want you to prove you are in compliance, and if you don't cooperate, they might take you to court.
At its heart, this sounds like virtually every letter written by every attorney - we want you to do X, and if you don't do X, we reserve the right to go to court.
Take the letter seriously or not as you like. But know that just like a plea bargain, you are rolling the dice. If they believe that they have credible evidence against you, you might find them coming back with a court order and a sheriff. Even then, if everything is properly licensed, all you are out is the time it takes to do the audit.
You can even write them a letter back. "We are in compliance. Show us your evidence, or pay our standard consulting rate of $225/hr for us to do the audit you have asked for. If we find any software not in compliance we will refund the cost of the audit." Let them put their money where their mouth is.
Point is, a letter from an attorney, or a business organization, simply isn't very scary, especially if you are in compliance with your licenses.
I think you missed the point. If you make a copy of a dollar bill, you can't use the copy. It is by definition not as valuable as the original. If you make a copy of a CD, you can use the copy. It is just as valuable as the original. Only a moron wouldn't see the difference.
If I make a perfect, bit for bit copy of a dollar bill, it is worth almost exactly as much as the original. Because by saying I made it perfectly, I have said that it is undetectable and I can pass it without fear of getting caught. It is worth ever so imperceptibly less than the original, because I have increased the money supply, leading to some inflation. And note that I didn't just devalue my new shiny dollar bill, I devalued all the money in circulation.
Put in those terms, the government's anti-counterfeiting laws and the MPAA/RIAA anti-copying campaigns seem very much equivalent - both are designed to preserve the scarcity of something that has little intrinsic value, but instead has value in part because of its scarcity. Allowing unrestrained production of either leads to devaluation.
So I think that this publicity stunt of sending images of currency to the RIAA is just proving their point - copying is bad, m'kay?
Blizzard, Valve and all of the bigger game developers used to have an self imposed mantra of releasing games "when it's done". It seems to me that fewer and fewer of the Triple A developers are actually adhering to it. Id software graced us last year with Rage, what must have been one of the most pathetic first person tech demos I've ever seen, and now Blizzard is suggesting that a game is finished when they've removed a substantial number of features out to make it "ready" for release.
I am 99% sure that things got pulled from D1/D2 to make it done. Everybody does it. You start with a bunch of must have and nice to have features, then marketing adds a bunch more must haves halfway through the product, then you fall behind, and you push the release date out, but now the thought process is that if sales has to wait for 4 more months, suddenly 3 of the nice to haves are now must haves.
Then 4 months later reality strikes, and you realize that the only way you are going to ship in any reasonable period is by reclassifying half of your must haves as nice to haves, and immediately deferring all the nice to haves. Then you start triaging the bug lists, deciding which ones you can live with in release.
Blizzard and Valve seem remarkably insensitive to release pressures, so hopefully it is not nearly as bad in those companies, but at some point your team simply can't take it any more and you have to release or burn out all your employees.
instead of releasing a version people don't want and "culling valuable feedback", why release what people don't want in the first place?
Who's asking for this stuff?
"If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses." -- Henry Ford
Abso-fricking-lutely!
In a previous job I worked on a product with a very active user community. When we asked people what they wanted to see in a new version of our product, we were able to boil about 99% of their responses into 2 categories:
1. Steal feature Y from competitor X 2. Anti-gravity paint. By which we meant any feature that was impossible.
You do glean some info from both of those types of requests, but the reality is that customers (in general) are not going to come up with something transformative. And when you do show them something distinctly new and different, their immediate reaction is "It's different, I don't like it.".
To do something new, you have to take risks, and you have to accept that some number of your customers won't come with you.
The alternative is to do nothing new, and to eventually lose all of your customers to your competitors that did do something.
We put a lot of effort into keeping our hardcore fan base happy, but the more we catered to that group the more we alienated the wider population. For a company like Microsoft, with hundreds of millions of customers, this is an extremely challenging line to walk.
Once upon a time some Motorola rep convinced our management that PowerPC was going to be the next big thing, and we did some development using NT4 running on PowerPC chips. This would have been mid-90s if memory serves. May have even been NT 3.51.
The project never went anywhere, but not because of any instability in the OS. Don't recall any BSOD or strange crashes. But the amount of software available for a PowerPC/NT combo was extremely limited.
Were it not for collusion, the competetion would ensure that ebook prices were far loawer than the price of a physical book.
I think you need evidence for that claim. Classical economics looks at pure markets. The ones they always used when I was in college were money and gasoline. The reason is that if you really don't care about anything except the price - dollars from one bank are identical to dollars from a different bank, and for the most part gas is gas.
Books and music are completely the opposite. If I want to buy a copy of a particular book, I will buy *that* book, regardless of the price of *other* books. Since the same person controls the price of the paper book and the ebook, there is no collusion in that instance, and what publisher A charges for an ebook doesn't really affect my purchase decision regarding publisher B.
And note that much of the self published ebooks on Amazon are available for only a dollar or two. Apparently no collusion there either.
Slashdot Mirror
The ARM one will certainly be locked - MS requires that as a condition of other manufacturers of Windows RT devices, and I can imagine no reason they wouldn't do so themselves. The x86... maybe, maybe not. I don't know.
The specs for Windows Logo compatibility require that the x86 boot loader NOT be locked. I doubt that MS would create a tablet that does not meet their own compatibility requirements. Not impossible, but seems like a marketing black eye.
My experience in multiple huge corporations is completely different. Cost is the major factor in hiring. Cost of salaries and health care. H1-B's are much cheaper in both respects and are usually contractors.
And I agree with that. My experience is that a contractor is easy to approve, but full time headcount is very difficult, because headcount represents a huge expense over time while a contractor is a temporary expense. But once the decision has been made to allow a hire, we aren't quibbling over nickels.
And for all the vitriol that my original post has generated, I don't believe I have ever hired an H-1B. I've sponsored people for a green card, but most of my team is US citizens. I will hire the best person I can find, regardless of origin, and within reasonable limits, regardless of price.
Increasing the size of the labor pool does drive down wages, no doubt about it. But I was addressing the perception that at the point of hire all that matters is the price tag, and not the applicant. In my experience it is the opposite - get the best candidate you can, even if you have to spend more than planned.
The company I work at has skipped annual raises twice now since the great recession. They don't ask people to taken an explicit pay cut, but by eliminating raises they have effectively done the same thing. On a personal level I don't like it, but it is one of the only ways that companies have to address their labor costs, because if you do push through pay cuts all the top talent will head for the door. This is the corporate equivalent of inflation - fix wages and let everything else rise, so wages take a lesser bite.
Just admit it. You hire whoever does a good enough job for the least amount of money. Can you at least be honest about this? It's generally how business works.
In my experience with several medium to large companies, the mantra is always "get the best person you can". I've never had *any* pressure to settle for the candidate who wants $80K instead of $90K. But the person that wants (and may well deserve) $125K isn't going to fit my budget. HR doesn't get involved as long as the offer I am making is within the salary range for the position, and finance doesn't get involved unless I am clearly blowing my budget - but no one is going after me because I budgeted the position at $88K and spent $90K. A bigger issue for me is that I don't want to bring in somebody making $120K if the average salary is $90K, because unless it is clear to everybody that the person is really worth the extra bump, I am creating an equity issue that leads to a bunch of unhappy people down the road.
I have no opinion about the quality of H-1B visas versus local candidates. To get hired they have to be good enough to make up for any language difficulties, so the bar may be a little higher overall. But I will say that someone who has the ambition and drive to leave their home country and culture and come to the US has already shown more ambition and willingness to take a risk than most local candidates. Not a knock on the locals, just a recognition that the immigrants are a self selected pool that have already demonstrated willingness to go to some lengths for their career.
And I think one of the things that really kills the brick and mortar stores are the people that go there to touch the keyboard or play with the camera, and then turn around and order it online.
I can't say I've never done it myself, and I don't think anything can be done about it, but the reality is that retail stores often serve as the showroom for all the internet only stores.
Total speculation here, but I wonder if the retirement of the shuttle has an impact here? Is it possible that these telescopes were sized to fit in the shuttle launch bay, and with no more shuttle that requirement has been dropped and they can build in a larger primary mirror?
I can certainly imagine that at some point in the last 20 years (which is probably when the authorization for these scopes happened), that somebody put in a requirement that they had to be compatible with the shuttle.
I would apply Occam's Razor and say that if the US wanted to conduct overhead surveillance within the borders of the US it would be an order of magnitude cheaper to use airplanes or drones. Orbital recon is preferable only when you can't easily overfly the target.
I was in China last week, and tried to go to Facebook (which is a blocked site in China). I don't remember the specific error, but it was something along the lines of "server not responding". It didn't tell me it was blocked or chide me for looking or anything like that.
That reminded me that I was behind the great firewall, so I didn't go looking for any other questionable content, and I was unaware of anything else getting blocked/filtered in the time I was there.
For at least 10 years now I have worn a Seiko Kinetic Auto Relay (http://www.seikowatches.com/technology/kinetic/kinetic_ar.html) Mechanical self winding mechanism actually charges a battery. Take it off for a few days and the hands stop moving but the electronics inside are still keeping correct time. Pick it up, shake it a few times, and it will wake up and advance the hands to the correct time. Supposedly that power saving mode is good for up to 2 years.
Not as tech heavy as the modern geek watch, but still a stylish watch, and I haven't had to set it outside of daylight time/time zone changes since I got it, and I have never had to replace a battery.
A product I have worked on for years goes back to the mid-80s. Originally DOS, then Win 3.1, now Win32. With some very minor exceptions, files created by the DOS version are still automatically recognized and upgraded to the current format at load time.
Every time we think we can drop the Version 1 file format reader, we hear about some customer (almost always outside the US) that just upgraded their old DOS system to the current system. And usually that happened because the PC or attached hardware had failed and the new replacement required newer software.
OTOH, I was lobbying to drop support for an ancient file format converter, and googled on the device whose format we were matching - the first page that popped up was how someone had just donated their device to a museum. So far no customers have complained that we dropped that support.
The true irony here is that he's spending his own money and not giving it to the MPAA, when the MPAA could have likely donated the same amount of material and gotten tax breaks, likely increasing their bottom line.
They could potentially take a writeoff for donating them, but the write-off would be capped at their cost, so I don't see how it would help the bottom line.
Suppose they get to deduct $100,000 as the cost.
This reduces their tax bill by something like $30,000.
So in the end they are out $70,000
Boyd Crowder, is that you?
For the government to set arbitrarily complex tax rules, and then force you to pay third party suppliers to clean up the mess it forces on you is wrong.
Everyone should have a free, government supplied and transparent way of completing their taxes.
Everyone does have a free, government supplied way of doing their taxes - paper tax forms and the instruction book. I did my taxes that way for years, and millions of people still do. For most people it isn't even that hard.
My first Kindle had a problem in hot sunlight - reading by the pool in Vegas, I learned I had to put it face down (i.e. in the shade) during page flips, or it would have trouble redrawing the screen - washed out and partially missing text.
I went to the 3rd generation Kindle and it has never had that problem.
You can also get cases with lights built into them specifically designed for the kindle. This is a welcome addition, but seems more evolutionary than revolutionary.
I agree that this is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but I would snap one of these up in a heartbeat. I already have the reading light case for my Kindle, and while it is nice, it means that the device has to be in its case to be of use. Having one built in to the display surface seems like a big step up, assuming that it has no more power drain than the existing external lights, and has an on/off switch.
As someone who has aging eyes and a preference for overall low light levels at home at night, a lit Kindle would be very welcome.
Auto graders could check spelling and grammar, and to some extent plagiarism, but without a human reviewing the content, students will learn be gaming the algorithms from day 1.
But if you learn to game the algorithms, and if the algorithms have some correlation to good writing, gaming the algorithm is actually improving your writing.
nobody expects the spanish inquisition!
Come now, I think this is an opportunity for "In other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead"
I also seem to recall that many of the Polish codebreakers ended up in Bletchley Park after Poland was overrun, where they continued to be critical to the ongoing efforts to keep up with changes to Enigma.
No, not guilty until proven innocent. Accused of something by someone outside the the law enforcement system, with no police powers, and no ability to compel you to do anything short of going to the legal system. Exactly like any other civil court proceeding.
Since you say you're not trolling I'll take you at your word and give you my best answer.
It's not the "what", it's the "how".
The "what" is someone getting fairly paid for their work. Which they have every right to do. Microsoft, the artists represented by the RIAA, everyone. You produce something of value and ask a price for it, you deserve to be paid. Or not be paid if the price is too high. Let the market decide. But either way you deserve to be in that marketplace and not sidestepped illegally.
The "how" is the problem.
I can't get too worked up about this. You get a letter from a a business organization that says someone has accused you of not being in compliance. They want you to prove you are in compliance, and if you don't cooperate, they might take you to court.
At its heart, this sounds like virtually every letter written by every attorney - we want you to do X, and if you don't do X, we reserve the right to go to court.
Take the letter seriously or not as you like. But know that just like a plea bargain, you are rolling the dice. If they believe that they have credible evidence against you, you might find them coming back with a court order and a sheriff. Even then, if everything is properly licensed, all you are out is the time it takes to do the audit.
You can even write them a letter back. "We are in compliance. Show us your evidence, or pay our standard consulting rate of $225/hr for us to do the audit you have asked for. If we find any software not in compliance we will refund the cost of the audit." Let them put their money where their mouth is.
Point is, a letter from an attorney, or a business organization, simply isn't very scary, especially if you are in compliance with your licenses.
I think you missed the point. If you make a copy of a dollar bill, you can't use the copy. It is by definition not as valuable as the original. If you make a copy of a CD, you can use the copy. It is just as valuable as the original. Only a moron wouldn't see the difference.
If I make a perfect, bit for bit copy of a dollar bill, it is worth almost exactly as much as the original. Because by saying I made it perfectly, I have said that it is undetectable and I can pass it without fear of getting caught. It is worth ever so imperceptibly less than the original, because I have increased the money supply, leading to some inflation. And note that I didn't just devalue my new shiny dollar bill, I devalued all the money in circulation.
Put in those terms, the government's anti-counterfeiting laws and the MPAA/RIAA anti-copying campaigns seem very much equivalent - both are designed to preserve the scarcity of something that has little intrinsic value, but instead has value in part because of its scarcity. Allowing unrestrained production of either leads to devaluation.
So I think that this publicity stunt of sending images of currency to the RIAA is just proving their point - copying is bad, m'kay?
Blizzard, Valve and all of the bigger game developers used to have an self imposed mantra of releasing games "when it's done". It seems to me that fewer and fewer of the Triple A developers are actually adhering to it. Id software graced us last year with Rage, what must have been one of the most pathetic first person tech demos I've ever seen, and now Blizzard is suggesting that a game is finished when they've removed a substantial number of features out to make it "ready" for release.
I am 99% sure that things got pulled from D1/D2 to make it done. Everybody does it. You start with a bunch of must have and nice to have features, then marketing adds a bunch more must haves halfway through the product, then you fall behind, and you push the release date out, but now the thought process is that if sales has to wait for 4 more months, suddenly 3 of the nice to haves are now must haves.
Then 4 months later reality strikes, and you realize that the only way you are going to ship in any reasonable period is by reclassifying half of your must haves as nice to haves, and immediately deferring all the nice to haves. Then you start triaging the bug lists, deciding which ones you can live with in release.
Blizzard and Valve seem remarkably insensitive to release pressures, so hopefully it is not nearly as bad in those companies, but at some point your team simply can't take it any more and you have to release or burn out all your employees.
instead of releasing a version people don't want and "culling valuable feedback", why release what people don't want in the first place?
Who's asking for this stuff?
"If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses." -- Henry Ford
Abso-fricking-lutely!
In a previous job I worked on a product with a very active user community. When we asked people what they wanted to see in a new version of our product, we were able to boil about 99% of their responses into 2 categories:
1. Steal feature Y from competitor X
2. Anti-gravity paint. By which we meant any feature that was impossible.
You do glean some info from both of those types of requests, but the reality is that customers (in general) are not going to come up with something transformative. And when you do show them something distinctly new and different, their immediate reaction is "It's different, I don't like it.".
To do something new, you have to take risks, and you have to accept that some number of your customers won't come with you.
The alternative is to do nothing new, and to eventually lose all of your customers to your competitors that did do something.
We put a lot of effort into keeping our hardcore fan base happy, but the more we catered to that group the more we alienated the wider population. For a company like Microsoft, with hundreds of millions of customers, this is an extremely challenging line to walk.
Once upon a time some Motorola rep convinced our management that PowerPC was going to be the next big thing, and we did some development using NT4 running on PowerPC chips. This would have been mid-90s if memory serves. May have even been NT 3.51.
The project never went anywhere, but not because of any instability in the OS. Don't recall any BSOD or strange crashes. But the amount of software available for a PowerPC/NT combo was extremely limited.
Were it not for collusion, the competetion would ensure that ebook prices were far loawer than the price of a physical book.
I think you need evidence for that claim. Classical economics looks at pure markets. The ones they always used when I was in college were money and gasoline. The reason is that if you really don't care about anything except the price - dollars from one bank are identical to dollars from a different bank, and for the most part gas is gas.
Books and music are completely the opposite. If I want to buy a copy of a particular book, I will buy *that* book, regardless of the price of *other* books. Since the same person controls the price of the paper book and the ebook, there is no collusion in that instance, and what publisher A charges for an ebook doesn't really affect my purchase decision regarding publisher B.
And note that much of the self published ebooks on Amazon are available for only a dollar or two. Apparently no collusion there either.