Well, that's sort of the point, isn't it? You don't know what's being stored in there.
I believe Virgin America or Jet Blue allow you to order food from your seat--and you pay with a credit card. I don't remember if they have a credit card swipe at the seat or if you have to give it to the FA. Nowadays, also, they don't necessarily have free movies--you have to pay for them at the seat.
Now is it just taking the credit card info and authorizing immediately and calling itself done? Or is it recording your credit card so that if you order something else--some snacks with your movie, perhaps--you don't need to swipe it again? Or is it holding onto the information and waiting until the flight is over before submitting everybody's charges?
I'll admit, I don't know the answer to this. But I could easily believe that somebody's system holds onto credit card information...
While I don't necessarily disagree with you in regards to the benefits of free downloads, if I wrote the book, shouldn't I be the one who decides how it is going to be distributed and marketed? Or at the very least, someone that I have decided will have that responsibility (i.e., a publisher)?
Actually, it wasn't bad if you had a less powerful Mac. I remember watching videos on my black and white Mac Plus--dithered appropriately to create faux greyscale at 320x240 (since the screen was 512x384, it took up better than half the screen!).
I am nearsighted. I have no problem reading my phone but I have problems seeing things that are far away. So I wear my glasses when I drive, bike, or go to movies. It's not too bad--I have driven without my glasses by mistake before with no major collisions. I've seen movies without my glasses and I can tell what's happening on the screen. But having glasses on definitely helps.
So if I'm nearsighted, why would I need this?
Because, with my glasses on, I have a hard time focusing on close things--like, say, my phone. Yes, I know, the answer is bifocals. But wouldn't it be cool if my phone could look at my face, go "Oh, look, he's got his glasses on!" and adjust the screen appropriately for my eyes behind the glasses?
Well, you mention the vast increase in game sales on Steam. The question isn't "did you sell more games at the lower price point." As a company, I'm not interested in customers--I'm interested in money. As the dot-bomb taught us, having lots of customers doesn't mean a thing unless you're making money off of them.
Someone below had an entertaining post about a city that had floated a bond to pay for a bridge and had set up a toll on the bridge. As the bond was paid off, they lowered the price of the toll and made more money because more people used the bridge more often. So they lowered it again and made still more money! They lowered it a third time and made less. So the whole "lower prices equals more money" doesn't work--like I said, if it were free, you should have an infinite amount of money. There is a point where you're leaving money on the table.
Setting a price is usually based on assumptions of how many people actually want this thing. For example, when movie studios started selling movies on VHS, they priced them around $80. They figured that only a small number of movie-buffs would actually want to own a particular movie. So the prices were set for the rental market--they knew that Blockbuster and local video stores were the ones buying the movies and that they were going to make money off the rentals. But when the video store bought 50 copies of a new release and, six months later, sold 40 of those copies cheap, people snapped them up. So the studios tried lowering the prices to catch those people and they made more money.
Now you look at that example and say, "See? You're making more money by selling for less!" I look at that example and I say, "Their assumption as to the size of the market was incorrect."
Assuming that developers are making more money by selling their game for $5 versus $20 (you state that sales increased, but did they increase more than 4x?), I'd be curious as to what assumptions they made causing them to set the price so high to begin with.
Agreed. By the logic of some people, if I gave the product away, I'd have an infinite amount of money. Obviously it doesn't work that way.
For example, consider this $14.99 book. If I reduced the price to $13.99, would I make more money than if it was $14.99? I might actually make less money because the price different isn't enough to make me buy it. But at $9.99, I've crossed a psychological barrier--under $10--and I might see more sales and more revenue than at $14.99.
Both sides are huge, publicly traded companies required by law to care more about profits than anything else, both sides are doing whatever they can to protect their shareholder's interests and CEO's egos.
A little off-topic, but I sometimes get a big grumpy about the whole, "Publicly traded companies are required by law to care more about profits than anything else." You get it right in the second sentence fragment, though.
Publicly traded companies are required by law to protect their shareholders' interests.
If their shareholders care about immediate profit and stock price more than anything else, then you're right. If their shareholders care more about not damaging the environment more than anything else, then you're wrong.
I'd agree that shareholders are mostly concerned about ROI, share price, dividends, and the like, so it kind of works out the same way.
[...] Apple's success with lower iTunes prices [...]
When iTunes first came out, of course, their prices were cheaper. You could usually get the whole CD for $9.99.
The interesting thing is that when Apple allowed the music companies to set the price to $1.29, the companies that did so made more money. While some people were not going to pay $1.29 for a song, there were plenty of others who said, "Yeah, okay."
Again, the whole, "lower prices mean more money" is not always true. By that logic, selling something for $0.00 would give you an infinite amount of money. Obviously that's not true.
What's interesting with digital items, of course, is that the cost of what you're selling is low. It costs money to print a book and ship it stores. It costs significantly less money to ship bits of data to a customer. So those cost-savings can be passed on to the consumer. However, other costs--like actually generating the content--haven't necessarily gone down.
What we've seen from Steam sales is that lower prices mean more revenue - often vastly more.
By that logic, if it were free, I'd have an infinite amount of money!
It doesnt quite work that way. We've also seen that if you raise music prices from 99 cents to $1.29, revenue increases as well. So in "mass-market," the trick is to find where that magic price point is. Am I more likely to buy a book that sells for $9.99 than I am to buy one that is $14.99? If I made it $8.99 instead of $9.99, would I sell more copies to make up for the price difference?
It can also depend on what you're selling. If I write a good pulp-fiction novel, I may do pretty well selling it for $4.99 because lots of people will buy it. On the other hand, an insightful treatise on the condition of the economy of Lithuania and how it relates to grain costs in Poland probably would need to be priced a bit higher if I'm to eke out a living off of it because there will be fewer buyers.
Seaplanes only land on water. Amphibious planes usually have retractable landing gear that goes into a water-tight compartment so that they can land on either water or on an appropriate runway.
As always, it depends on a few things. I have no problems renting movies from Netflix and not owning them, but there are some movies I prefer to own. I can imagine the same thing--I've bought some "throw-away" books for airplanes and such and would be fine with the idea of just being able to pull up one to read. But there are some books that I've read that I enjoy and I want to keep and re-read every now and then. So Apple wins both ways--you "rent" the book, read it, decide you like it, and then overpay to get the book from Apple's Store.
Except that the iPads will inevitably fall behind on the technology curve and need to be replaced [...]
Depends on what you're using it for. If you've got your standard courseware, why would you need to upgrade the iPad? So it's running iOS 5 instead of iOS 8, that doesn't affect your courseware.
I'd also point out that an iPad 2 from 2011 is compatible with iOS 8 from 2015. So there's four years right there.
One of the things I always like to point out in the "Manned versus Unmanned" arguments is comparing the amount of lunar material brought back. The Apollo program returned something like 800 KG of moon rocks. The Soviet Union's landers returned something like 0.8 Grams of moon dust. And those rocks were brought back because an astronaut (who in later missions was trained in geology) actually thought they were interesting, whereas the moon dust returned by the Luna probes was whatever happened to be within reach.
So it costs a lot more. The question is, do you get more value out of a manned mission versus a robotic mission? Apollo brought back 1,000,000x the amount of lunar material for 1000x the cost. So if you're just calculating based on those numbers, Apollo gave a better return than the Luna program. But that initial cost was pretty off-putting.
As people at NASA and others have pointed out, what the rovers have accomplished on Mars could have been done by an astronaut in a couple of days.
An analogous issue is time versus money. I could buy a ticket on the Concorde way back when and get from New York to London in three hours for $6000. I could buy a ticket nowadays on a non-supersonic transport for maybe $1500 that would get me there in 8 hours. The question is, is it worth the extra $4500 to get there five hours earlier?
Mars isn't really changing. There's really nothing about Mars we need to know right now, such that it would be worth spending that initially large amount of money to find out.
Actually, the flight was beginning to go off course and they couldn't reach the pilots so they shot it down and spared the world another month of "What Happened to Flight 17?" stories.
Heaven is where: The police are British The mechanics are German The cooks are French The lovers are Italian The teenagers are Japanese The movie makers are American The musicians are Russian The women are Swedish And the whole thing is organized by the Swiss;
Hell is where: The police are German The mechanics are French The cooks are British The lovers are Swiss The teenagers are American The movie makers are Japanese The musicians are Swedish The women are Russian And the whole thing is organized by the Italians...
There's also a good one where heaven is "An American Salary, a Chinese Cook, a British House, and a Japanese Wife" whereas hell is "A Chinese Salary, a British Cook, a Japanese House, and an American Wife."
Good point. I get in my automated car to take me to the airport. Then my automated car goes home, where it has a nice parking spot with inductive charging that doesn't cost me $20 a day. When I get back from my trip, I signal my car to come get me and it drives back to the airport by itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
Well, that's sort of the point, isn't it? You don't know what's being stored in there.
I believe Virgin America or Jet Blue allow you to order food from your seat--and you pay with a credit card. I don't remember if they have a credit card swipe at the seat or if you have to give it to the FA. Nowadays, also, they don't necessarily have free movies--you have to pay for them at the seat.
Now is it just taking the credit card info and authorizing immediately and calling itself done? Or is it recording your credit card so that if you order something else--some snacks with your movie, perhaps--you don't need to swipe it again? Or is it holding onto the information and waiting until the flight is over before submitting everybody's charges?
I'll admit, I don't know the answer to this. But I could easily believe that somebody's system holds onto credit card information...
Uh, no, that's baseball.
And the only thing in the cockpit that may tie into the wifi system is the pilot's iPad.
Dun-dun-dun...
"We can't communicate with the pilots!"
"Why not?"
"Somebody hacked the WiFi network and put 'Plants vs. Zombies' on the pilots' iPads!"
Now we know what happened to MH370...
Credit card data, perhaps? I assume they want you to pay for that infotainment, not to mention any food or drinks you're ordering.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you in regards to the benefits of free downloads, if I wrote the book, shouldn't I be the one who decides how it is going to be distributed and marketed? Or at the very least, someone that I have decided will have that responsibility (i.e., a publisher)?
...and I assume your next complaint will be how inefficient government is and why the hell should you have to pay for inefficient government?!
Actually, it wasn't bad if you had a less powerful Mac. I remember watching videos on my black and white Mac Plus--dithered appropriately to create faux greyscale at 320x240 (since the screen was 512x384, it took up better than half the screen!).
I would love this for my phone.
I am nearsighted. I have no problem reading my phone but I have problems seeing things that are far away. So I wear my glasses when I drive, bike, or go to movies. It's not too bad--I have driven without my glasses by mistake before with no major collisions. I've seen movies without my glasses and I can tell what's happening on the screen. But having glasses on definitely helps.
So if I'm nearsighted, why would I need this?
Because, with my glasses on, I have a hard time focusing on close things--like, say, my phone. Yes, I know, the answer is bifocals. But wouldn't it be cool if my phone could look at my face, go "Oh, look, he's got his glasses on!" and adjust the screen appropriately for my eyes behind the glasses?
Well, you mention the vast increase in game sales on Steam. The question isn't "did you sell more games at the lower price point." As a company, I'm not interested in customers--I'm interested in money. As the dot-bomb taught us, having lots of customers doesn't mean a thing unless you're making money off of them.
Someone below had an entertaining post about a city that had floated a bond to pay for a bridge and had set up a toll on the bridge. As the bond was paid off, they lowered the price of the toll and made more money because more people used the bridge more often. So they lowered it again and made still more money! They lowered it a third time and made less. So the whole "lower prices equals more money" doesn't work--like I said, if it were free, you should have an infinite amount of money. There is a point where you're leaving money on the table.
Setting a price is usually based on assumptions of how many people actually want this thing. For example, when movie studios started selling movies on VHS, they priced them around $80. They figured that only a small number of movie-buffs would actually want to own a particular movie. So the prices were set for the rental market--they knew that Blockbuster and local video stores were the ones buying the movies and that they were going to make money off the rentals. But when the video store bought 50 copies of a new release and, six months later, sold 40 of those copies cheap, people snapped them up. So the studios tried lowering the prices to catch those people and they made more money.
Now you look at that example and say, "See? You're making more money by selling for less!" I look at that example and I say, "Their assumption as to the size of the market was incorrect."
Assuming that developers are making more money by selling their game for $5 versus $20 (you state that sales increased, but did they increase more than 4x?), I'd be curious as to what assumptions they made causing them to set the price so high to begin with.
Agreed. By the logic of some people, if I gave the product away, I'd have an infinite amount of money. Obviously it doesn't work that way.
For example, consider this $14.99 book. If I reduced the price to $13.99, would I make more money than if it was $14.99? I might actually make less money because the price different isn't enough to make me buy it. But at $9.99, I've crossed a psychological barrier--under $10--and I might see more sales and more revenue than at $14.99.
Both sides are huge, publicly traded companies required by law to care more about profits than anything else, both sides are doing whatever they can to protect their shareholder's interests and CEO's egos.
A little off-topic, but I sometimes get a big grumpy about the whole, "Publicly traded companies are required by law to care more about profits than anything else." You get it right in the second sentence fragment, though.
Publicly traded companies are required by law to protect their shareholders' interests.
If their shareholders care about immediate profit and stock price more than anything else, then you're right. If their shareholders care more about not damaging the environment more than anything else, then you're wrong.
I'd agree that shareholders are mostly concerned about ROI, share price, dividends, and the like, so it kind of works out the same way.
[...] Apple's success with lower iTunes prices [...]
When iTunes first came out, of course, their prices were cheaper. You could usually get the whole CD for $9.99.
The interesting thing is that when Apple allowed the music companies to set the price to $1.29, the companies that did so made more money. While some people were not going to pay $1.29 for a song, there were plenty of others who said, "Yeah, okay."
Again, the whole, "lower prices mean more money" is not always true. By that logic, selling something for $0.00 would give you an infinite amount of money. Obviously that's not true.
What's interesting with digital items, of course, is that the cost of what you're selling is low. It costs money to print a book and ship it stores. It costs significantly less money to ship bits of data to a customer. So those cost-savings can be passed on to the consumer. However, other costs--like actually generating the content--haven't necessarily gone down.
What we've seen from Steam sales is that lower prices mean more revenue - often vastly more.
By that logic, if it were free, I'd have an infinite amount of money!
It doesnt quite work that way. We've also seen that if you raise music prices from 99 cents to $1.29, revenue increases as well. So in "mass-market," the trick is to find where that magic price point is. Am I more likely to buy a book that sells for $9.99 than I am to buy one that is $14.99? If I made it $8.99 instead of $9.99, would I sell more copies to make up for the price difference?
It can also depend on what you're selling. If I write a good pulp-fiction novel, I may do pretty well selling it for $4.99 because lots of people will buy it. On the other hand, an insightful treatise on the condition of the economy of Lithuania and how it relates to grain costs in Poland probably would need to be priced a bit higher if I'm to eke out a living off of it because there will be fewer buyers.
Mmm...tantalizing enchiladas...
Apple didn't come from behind in the smartphone market. They created the market.
Popularized it, perhaps, but I wouldn't say created it.
That said, I think the GP may have been talking about the Mac.
Yeah, except this piece of junk is tiny.
According to the article, it's larger than a Boeing 737. For a seaplane, that's pretty impressive.
The Martin JRM-1 Mars in 1942 was much heavier.
And heavier in an airplane is better...how?
Seaplanes only land on water. Amphibious planes usually have retractable landing gear that goes into a water-tight compartment so that they can land on either water or on an appropriate runway.
Well, to each their own.
As always, it depends on a few things. I have no problems renting movies from Netflix and not owning them, but there are some movies I prefer to own. I can imagine the same thing--I've bought some "throw-away" books for airplanes and such and would be fine with the idea of just being able to pull up one to read. But there are some books that I've read that I enjoy and I want to keep and re-read every now and then. So Apple wins both ways--you "rent" the book, read it, decide you like it, and then overpay to get the book from Apple's Store.
Except that the iPads will inevitably fall behind on the technology curve and need to be replaced [...]
Depends on what you're using it for. If you've got your standard courseware, why would you need to upgrade the iPad? So it's running iOS 5 instead of iOS 8, that doesn't affect your courseware.
I'd also point out that an iPad 2 from 2011 is compatible with iOS 8 from 2015. So there's four years right there.
One of the things I always like to point out in the "Manned versus Unmanned" arguments is comparing the amount of lunar material brought back. The Apollo program returned something like 800 KG of moon rocks. The Soviet Union's landers returned something like 0.8 Grams of moon dust. And those rocks were brought back because an astronaut (who in later missions was trained in geology) actually thought they were interesting, whereas the moon dust returned by the Luna probes was whatever happened to be within reach.
So it costs a lot more. The question is, do you get more value out of a manned mission versus a robotic mission? Apollo brought back 1,000,000x the amount of lunar material for 1000x the cost. So if you're just calculating based on those numbers, Apollo gave a better return than the Luna program. But that initial cost was pretty off-putting.
As people at NASA and others have pointed out, what the rovers have accomplished on Mars could have been done by an astronaut in a couple of days.
An analogous issue is time versus money. I could buy a ticket on the Concorde way back when and get from New York to London in three hours for $6000. I could buy a ticket nowadays on a non-supersonic transport for maybe $1500 that would get me there in 8 hours. The question is, is it worth the extra $4500 to get there five hours earlier?
Mars isn't really changing. There's really nothing about Mars we need to know right now, such that it would be worth spending that initially large amount of money to find out.
Otherwise, quite literally, you would die camping in the Antarctic with only clothes and a little tent to keep you warm.
With appropriate equipment, you can camp in Antarctica...
Actually, the flight was beginning to go off course and they couldn't reach the pilots so they shot it down and spared the world another month of "What Happened to Flight 17?" stories.
We should be grateful to the Russians...
My favorite additions:
Heaven is where:
The police are British
The mechanics are German
The cooks are French
The lovers are Italian
The teenagers are Japanese
The movie makers are American
The musicians are Russian
The women are Swedish
And the whole thing is organized by the Swiss;
Hell is where:
The police are German
The mechanics are French
The cooks are British
The lovers are Swiss
The teenagers are American
The movie makers are Japanese
The musicians are Swedish
The women are Russian
And the whole thing is organized by the Italians...
There's also a good one where heaven is "An American Salary, a Chinese Cook, a British House, and a Japanese Wife" whereas hell is "A Chinese Salary, a British Cook, a Japanese House, and an American Wife."
Good point. I get in my automated car to take me to the airport. Then my automated car goes home, where it has a nice parking spot with inductive charging that doesn't cost me $20 a day. When I get back from my trip, I signal my car to come get me and it drives back to the airport by itself.