Ist es leicht, wenn mann Deutsch spricht, Schweizedeutsch zu lernen? Oder ist es so schwer als Niederlaendisch oder Englisch? It is about as easy or difficult as any foreign language. As a German listening to a conversation in Swiss German you don't have the slightest clue what is being talked about.
Somehow, you can produce a record for $50k privately but it costs a million for the studio to do it. The last time I checked this was more than 15 years ago. At that time, eight hours studio time + two engineers + 1000 CDs was offered for 2500 (well it wasn't Euros back then). Cheap enough if you do concerts and want to flog CDs afterwards, even if you make music just for fun and want to give free records to all your friends and family:-)
HE IS PROVEN GUILTY TO ME. Not to me in any way. Not only not "proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt", not even "sounds guilty to me, even though there isn't much evidence.".
Nina's gone. From what I read, she had good reason to go, having skimmed off money from Reiser's company. And as we heard just last week, it is not difficult to hide in the USA for 35 years. And although we know now that the police will try to find escaped convicted murderers after 35 years, I doubt the will check that any "murder victims" are alive after 35 years.
Hans's attempting to flee the country. What, with $9000 in his pocket? Don't be ridiculous.
He's trying to hide something... What evidence do you have for that?
... but they still find her blood on his person. I didn't hear of any of her blood on his person. And I am quite sure that you would find my blood, my wife's blood, and some other people's blood at my home.
What more do you really need? What about evidence?
By the way: How would you feel if you were on a jury and found out later, after the trial was over, that the judge had decided not to worry your head with a minor little detail like the fact that one of the people in the story was a confessed serial killer?
The police seems to believe that Reiser's (ex) friend is not a "confessed serial killer" but an idiot who made a false confession of being a serial killer.
you know, let's say the phone costs $150 to actually make in labor and parts. I dunno if it's higher or lower, that's just a guess. They'd make $250 profit on each phone. So if let's say 1 million people want an iphone. But 500,000 won't buy one because they hate AT&T. They're making $682 per person on 500,000 people and missing $250 per person on the other 500,000 people. So they're making $341 million instead of $466 million if they sold unlocked ones. That's a pretty significant loss of income!!! Whether they want to admit it or not, the profit they make per phone isn't insignificant and some people absolutely will not ever settle for AT&T as a carrier and they're losing those potential customers.
With your numbers, which you pulled out of thin air anyway, selling locked phones makes $341mil while selling unlocked phones makes $250mil, not the $466mil that you suggest.
iSupply's numbers are supposed to represent gross margin. The problem is that the denizens of the intarweb incorrectly deduce that it's the net profit when it's not. The numbers they give out are reasonable, the problem is that it's woefully taken out of context. And the fact that they put down four significant figures, that's obviously silly, two is sufficient.
It is worse than you think. iSupply's numbers don't represent gross margin. They are just the sum of costs for all the parts. Gross margin is the difference between what you pay for an iPhone, minus the total cost for Apple to put that one iPhone into your hands. That cost is the parts, what Apple pays some company in China to turn all these parts into a working iPhone, shipping cost, cost of selling to you, and reserves for support cost and warranty cost. All these bits add up, so gross margin is much less than iSupply suggests.
The math is wrong. You believed the "$18 per month" without investigating where it came from.
Munster took the numbers from Apple's last financial statements. They include the number of iPhones sold in this and the previous quarter, and the revenue attributed directly and indirectly to iPhones. Apple uses a rather complicated way to report iPhone revenues: The revenue is recognised over 24 months, so for an iPhone sold on the first day of last quarter 1/8th of the sales price is counted, for one sold on the last day only 1/720th is counted. So here you can start making guessing games how much revenue from iPhone sales Apple has counted. This is made more complicated by the change in sales price from $599 to $399, unknown number of 4GB iPhones sold at $499, and $100 rebates which have been counted in an unknown way (do they reduce revenue or are they added to the cost?).
Apple adds to this unknown number all the revenues for iPhone accessories (unknown number) and money received from AT&T. The sum of all these unknown numbers is a known quantity published by Apple in its quarterly report. So Munster made their best guesses for all these unknown numbers, and calculate based on these guesses that Apple must get $18 per month and iPhone from AT&T so that the numbers come out correctly. For my taste, there is much too much guesswork involved here.
Furthermore, it is unknown what deal Apple has with AT&T. The deal could be "x dollars per month for the next 24 months". Or the deal could be "x dollars total, paid in three installments over the first three months". In the latter case, Apple would get $54 from AT&T per iPhone in total, not $432 (apart from the fact that $18 per month was a guess).
Wouldn't the GPS only tell your air seed? How would the GPS know if you were traveling at an incline? The Officer's radar gun measures the velocity on the road. The GPS probably compares your coordinates over a short time period and computes your velocity -- hardly accurate if you're traveling at an angle. Unless it's somehow able to factor this in as well. Anyone know? Pythagoras comes to your aid - remember a squared plus b squared equals c squared? A simple calculation shows that on a 10 percent incline, the difference between horizontal and actual speed is only one percent.
However, you forget that (1) you don't know what speed the GPS reports - your GPS _knows_ your three-dimensional position and can easily take vertical movements into account. It is actually much easier that way, exactly because it _knows_ the three-dimensional position and has to calculate your position on a map from that, which is not trivial. And second, do the relevant laws actually specify horizontal or three-dimensional speed in the speed limits?
Well, drag racing on a deserted road isn't going to cause much damage even in a worse case scenario, the most you can do is kill yourself or wreck your own car. And none of that is covered by the required third-party insurance anyway. From an insurance point of view, killing yourself is not a problem. That is cheap. Injuring yourself can be very, very expensive.
Apple needs to sell the current mini at rock bottom sub $400 prices and then offer a very nicely designed PC at $600. Why? Seriously, what makes you think Apple would sell significantly more computers at those prices than at current prices, and what makes you think Apple would have the slightest chance in hell to make the same revenue or the same profit that way?
Well, what a nonsense. What you learn from this is that the number of people accessing this one site with a browser that identifies itself as a Mac browser has changed slighly. That could have all kinds of reasons. Like Mac users using different information sources than this website. Mac users changing their browser to identify as something else. Natural fluctuation - how many visitors do they have?
Trying to draw any conclusions from visits on a specialised website is completely ridiculous.
Im considering switching back to a PC for my next computer.
Why? Because Apple doesn't offer accidental damage protection in their extended warranty, and Dell does. The last two laptops I've owned have ended up with broken LCDs - including the one I'm typing on right now via an external monitor. (Yes, obviously I'm a klutz, but that's something I'm pretty much stuck working around.) The way you describe it, that's bad news for some PC manufacturer.
Apple can not one up Microsoft. With parallels and boot camp Windows runs very well on Apple hardware. Apple users are now buying Windows, so called "switchers" are replacing their hardware vendor and still buying Windows. Microsoft is not losing sales. Apple is only hurting Dell, HP, etc. I think Apple is nowhere near hurting for example Dell. HP is hurting Dell ten times more than Apple does, and Toshiba/Acer hurt them three times more than Apple.
That is one huge advantage that Apple has against the PC manufacturers: None of them can afford to try and beat Apple, because if they did, they would lose ten times more customers against the other PC manufacturers than they would steal from Apple.
Interestingly, whenever someone tries to beat Apple (and it is rare), like Gateway recently with their all-in-one computer, they don't come anywhere close to Apple. I don't think Apple could build a cheap PC at the price that Dell can, but I also don't think Dell could build something like the iMac for the same cost as Apple does.
The hardware is flaky but pretty, and very expensive. Not in my experience, except for the "pretty".
The CEO and company seem neurotic. Not in my experience. I have never heard that Steve Jobs has been throwing any chairs around, or threatened to cut off someone's air supply, or similar.
Most of the users are self-indulgent, arty, smug, pretentious types. In my experience (and I know quite a few of them) that is utter bullshit.
The average person wants nothing to do with this. Don't take your average pimpled PC sales person or IT man with a hate for end users as "average person".
The real question is, if Apple got all of these people to start running a desktop UNIX, what can Linux do to follow that lead? The usual answer is: Don't follow the lead. Change the rules. No idea how Linux should go about this vs. Apple, but then there are ten times more Windows users, and they are ten times more unhappy with their OS than Mac users, so maybe Linux should concentrate on beating Windows.
How does the third-party software signing work? How does this make a Mac safer? How does it prevent malicious software developers from signing their software and making it look nice and pretty?
For example, if you install a copy of Acrobat Reader, you still have to trust Adobe. But you don't need to trust the source that gave you that copy anymore; if the software says it is made by Adobe then it _is_ made by Adobe, not some malicious third party.
Interestingly, by enforcing digital signing Apple is guaranteeing the survivial of an iPhone developer's "underground" -- instead of writing hacks to jailbreak and unlock iPhones, they'll be writing hacks to get unsigned apps running on the iPhone.
Can we rate this as completely ignorant? Every web page that you access through https is already digital signed, with a "web of trust" and all the underlying infrastructure firmly in place. "Digital signing" need not be more complicated and more expensive than getting a certificate.
Creating self signed certificates is already built into the "Keychain Access" application on Tiger, so installing any application on your own phone would be no problem. No hacking required. Just sign it yourself.
There is no way for anybody but Microsoft to adequately implement the OOXML 'standard'
There is no way for anybody _including_ Microsoft to implement to OOXML 'standard'. Any such implementation would be sufficiently incompatible with Microsoft Office that nobody would buy it.
Umm...no offense, but this isn't exactly a problem the average user is going to encounter. Sure, it's dumb. Sure, there's no good reason for this to be happening. But tell me, when was the last time you copied 16,400 files using XP's built in copier? I think I may have copied 200 files once, and I copied about 15 gigs of data once, but I've never even come close to this limit. The "Developer" folder in my MacBook contains about 85,000 files. I would assume that >50% of all Slashdot readers with a Macintosh have installed XCode, so not being able to copy 16,400 files is absolutely inexcusable. And yes, the MacBook handles that without any problems.
Although I'd prefer she pay 150 bones rather than 220K, I'm not so sure the $9,000/song are meant to represent actual damages from her conduct, rather, it's meant to deter her (as well as others) from engaging in such hideously vile conduct in the future!
No, it is statutory damages. In many cases, it would be hard to prove exactly how much damages were done, even though it looks quite obvious that damages _were_ done. In a case like this, if we considered that anyone downloading a song from her computer causes $0.99 in damages, even if we could find out exactly how many downloads there were, finding the exact number might be more expensive than the actual damages.
For that situation, the law lets the plaintiff claim statutory damages, which means the jury is allowed and required to make a good guess how much the actual damages were.
Here the jury made a gross mistake: They apparently assumed, like you do, that there is a punishment payment between $750 and $150,000 per song. That is wrong. They were supposed to come up with a reasonable guess at damages, between $750 and $150,000.
The amazing thing is that $750 per song is also extremely unreasonable yet that passes below the radar.
The punishment for breaking copyright is in many cases worse than the fines for many other harsher crimes.
A more reasonable "punitive" fine would have been maybe $50 per song.
I imagine there will be at least a hundred people who will never ever buy records again because of this case. The law has obviously been made with corporate copyright infringement. Let's say Sony taking a record that Universal records has the rights to, and starting to sell it. In that case the $750 to $150,000 seems quite reasonable; if Sony sold ten million records that way then Universal would have to prove actual damages to get more than the $150,000 per song.
It just doesn't take the actual situation into account. Statutory damages are used because precise actual damages may be hard to prove. On the other hand, I think that in a situation where the copyright holder is actually selling something to anyone who wants it, no questions asked, the damages should always be limited to the sales price.
An interesting question would be how many illegally copied songs are in the possession of congress members or their immediate family. Multiply that by $9,250 and you will get an awful big number.
Apple bricking the phone is not illegal, nor should it be. When Apple sold the phone, they were crystal clear that its only supported use was with AT&T and Apple-approved apps.
To be fair they only became crystal clear about the bricking long after people have started patching their phones and several patch providers have been selling "mods" for weeks. The first poster sounds a bit like he is saying that intentionalbricking would be legal. It most certainly is not. However, I assume that this happened unintentional, and in that case, Apple could only give a warning about this _after_ people had been unlocking their phones and Apple's firmware upgrade was finished and went into testing. Apple didn't anticipate the method for unlocking the iPhone (clearly, if they had known the method, then they would have prevented it from working in the first place), so they couldn't possibly know how this would interact with an upgrade that wasn't written yet.
I stand to be corrected here, but is there any *actual* evidence (apart from hearsay) that the bricking was deliberate. I don't think there has been even hearsay. "Hearsay" would be if I posted here that some Apple engineer with actual knowledge of the matter told me something. But that has not happened. What we have are just completely unfounded assumptions.
Why is he modded as troll? The summary says they're $100 and he's pointing out they're not, even in Uruguay. Look, he cites a source and everything.
You may not have noticed, but the US dollar has lost lots of value in the last two or three years. So the cost in US$ has gone up a lot.
But three years ago, this thing could have been announced as a "150 Euro laptop" and today that would be spot on.
Slashdot Mirror
... but they still find her blood on his person. I didn't hear of any of her blood on his person. And I am quite sure that you would find my blood, my wife's blood, and some other people's blood at my home. What more do you really need? What about evidence?The police seems to believe that Reiser's (ex) friend is not a "confessed serial killer" but an idiot who made a false confession of being a serial killer.
With your numbers, which you pulled out of thin air anyway, selling locked phones makes $341mil while selling unlocked phones makes $250mil, not the $466mil that you suggest.
It is worse than you think. iSupply's numbers don't represent gross margin. They are just the sum of costs for all the parts. Gross margin is the difference between what you pay for an iPhone, minus the total cost for Apple to put that one iPhone into your hands. That cost is the parts, what Apple pays some company in China to turn all these parts into a working iPhone, shipping cost, cost of selling to you, and reserves for support cost and warranty cost. All these bits add up, so gross margin is much less than iSupply suggests.
The math is wrong. You believed the "$18 per month" without investigating where it came from.
Munster took the numbers from Apple's last financial statements. They include the number of iPhones sold in this and the previous quarter, and the revenue attributed directly and indirectly to iPhones. Apple uses a rather complicated way to report iPhone revenues: The revenue is recognised over 24 months, so for an iPhone sold on the first day of last quarter 1/8th of the sales price is counted, for one sold on the last day only 1/720th is counted. So here you can start making guessing games how much revenue from iPhone sales Apple has counted. This is made more complicated by the change in sales price from $599 to $399, unknown number of 4GB iPhones sold at $499, and $100 rebates which have been counted in an unknown way (do they reduce revenue or are they added to the cost?).
Apple adds to this unknown number all the revenues for iPhone accessories (unknown number) and money received from AT&T. The sum of all these unknown numbers is a known quantity published by Apple in its quarterly report. So Munster made their best guesses for all these unknown numbers, and calculate based on these guesses that Apple must get $18 per month and iPhone from AT&T so that the numbers come out correctly. For my taste, there is much too much guesswork involved here.
Furthermore, it is unknown what deal Apple has with AT&T. The deal could be "x dollars per month for the next 24 months". Or the deal could be "x dollars total, paid in three installments over the first three months". In the latter case, Apple would get $54 from AT&T per iPhone in total, not $432 (apart from the fact that $18 per month was a guess).
However, you forget that (1) you don't know what speed the GPS reports - your GPS _knows_ your three-dimensional position and can easily take vertical movements into account. It is actually much easier that way, exactly because it _knows_ the three-dimensional position and has to calculate your position on a map from that, which is not trivial. And second, do the relevant laws actually specify horizontal or three-dimensional speed in the speed limits?
Well, what a nonsense. What you learn from this is that the number of people accessing this one site with a browser that identifies itself as a Mac browser has changed slighly. That could have all kinds of reasons. Like Mac users using different information sources than this website. Mac users changing their browser to identify as something else. Natural fluctuation - how many visitors do they have?
Trying to draw any conclusions from visits on a specialised website is completely ridiculous.
Why? Because Apple doesn't offer accidental damage protection in their extended warranty, and Dell does. The last two laptops I've owned have ended up with broken LCDs - including the one I'm typing on right now via an external monitor. (Yes, obviously I'm a klutz, but that's something I'm pretty much stuck working around.) The way you describe it, that's bad news for some PC manufacturer.
That is one huge advantage that Apple has against the PC manufacturers: None of them can afford to try and beat Apple, because if they did, they would lose ten times more customers against the other PC manufacturers than they would steal from Apple.
Interestingly, whenever someone tries to beat Apple (and it is rare), like Gateway recently with their all-in-one computer, they don't come anywhere close to Apple. I don't think Apple could build a cheap PC at the price that Dell can, but I also don't think Dell could build something like the iMac for the same cost as Apple does.
The CEO and company seem neurotic. Not in my experience. I have never heard that Steve Jobs has been throwing any chairs around, or threatened to cut off someone's air supply, or similar.
Most of the users are self-indulgent, arty, smug, pretentious types. In my experience (and I know quite a few of them) that is utter bullshit.
The average person wants nothing to do with this. Don't take your average pimpled PC sales person or IT man with a hate for end users as "average person".
The real question is, if Apple got all of these people to start running a desktop UNIX, what can Linux do to follow that lead? The usual answer is: Don't follow the lead. Change the rules. No idea how Linux should go about this vs. Apple, but then there are ten times more Windows users, and they are ten times more unhappy with their OS than Mac users, so maybe Linux should concentrate on beating Windows.
For example, if you install a copy of Acrobat Reader, you still have to trust Adobe. But you don't need to trust the source that gave you that copy anymore; if the software says it is made by Adobe then it _is_ made by Adobe, not some malicious third party.
Can we rate this as completely ignorant? Every web page that you access through https is already digital signed, with a "web of trust" and all the underlying infrastructure firmly in place. "Digital signing" need not be more complicated and more expensive than getting a certificate.
Creating self signed certificates is already built into the "Keychain Access" application on Tiger, so installing any application on your own phone would be no problem. No hacking required. Just sign it yourself.
There is no way for anybody _including_ Microsoft to implement to OOXML 'standard'. Any such implementation would be sufficiently incompatible with Microsoft Office that nobody would buy it.
No, it is statutory damages. In many cases, it would be hard to prove exactly how much damages were done, even though it looks quite obvious that damages _were_ done. In a case like this, if we considered that anyone downloading a song from her computer causes $0.99 in damages, even if we could find out exactly how many downloads there were, finding the exact number might be more expensive than the actual damages.
For that situation, the law lets the plaintiff claim statutory damages, which means the jury is allowed and required to make a good guess how much the actual damages were.
Here the jury made a gross mistake: They apparently assumed, like you do, that there is a punishment payment between $750 and $150,000 per song. That is wrong. They were supposed to come up with a reasonable guess at damages, between $750 and $150,000.
The punishment for breaking copyright is in many cases worse than the fines for many other harsher crimes.
A more reasonable "punitive" fine would have been maybe $50 per song.
I imagine there will be at least a hundred people who will never ever buy records again because of this case. The law has obviously been made with corporate copyright infringement. Let's say Sony taking a record that Universal records has the rights to, and starting to sell it. In that case the $750 to $150,000 seems quite reasonable; if Sony sold ten million records that way then Universal would have to prove actual damages to get more than the $150,000 per song. It just doesn't take the actual situation into account. Statutory damages are used because precise actual damages may be hard to prove. On the other hand, I think that in a situation where the copyright holder is actually selling something to anyone who wants it, no questions asked, the damages should always be limited to the sales price. An interesting question would be how many illegally copied songs are in the possession of congress members or their immediate family. Multiply that by $9,250 and you will get an awful big number.
The second and last Apple Inc. vs Apple Corps settlement allows Apple Inc. to do pretty much anything that they want.
Apple Inc. now owns all the trademarks to the Apple name. Probably cost them a penny or two.
See http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/02/05apple.html
To be fair they only became crystal clear about the bricking long after people have started patching their phones and several patch providers have been selling "mods" for weeks. The first poster sounds a bit like he is saying that intentionalbricking would be legal. It most certainly is not. However, I assume that this happened unintentional, and in that case, Apple could only give a warning about this _after_ people had been unlocking their phones and Apple's firmware upgrade was finished and went into testing. Apple didn't anticipate the method for unlocking the iPhone (clearly, if they had known the method, then they would have prevented it from working in the first place), so they couldn't possibly know how this would interact with an upgrade that wasn't written yet.
See, the very first sentence in your post is a completely unproven statement with no evidence whatsoever, and most probably both untrue and libel.
You may not have noticed, but the US dollar has lost lots of value in the last two or three years. So the cost in US$ has gone up a lot.
But three years ago, this thing could have been announced as a "150 Euro laptop" and today that would be spot on.