"Yes, but what people WILL pay (because their only other choice is missing out), and what people WANT to pay are not the same thing, as you initially suggested."
Regarding non first necesity goods, "want" and "would" are basically the same. Of course, everybody would *prefer* a lower price (for every price above zero. And even then, everybody would prefer to be paid *and* have the good instead of having it "just for free"), but since you don't need it, whatever you end paying, is the price you wanted to pay.
I'd like to own a Ferrari, but since I don't want to pay the price I don't have one. But if I buyed one, whatever the price I paid, is the price I wanted to, since I have no need to get the Ferrari.
"They will charge whatever their accountants predict will be the maximum price a person will pay"
And that's exactly the point: for some (not yet explained) reasons, Europeans do accept higher prices than North American, that's a fact or else those companies would be selling at lower prices. We are not talking here about first necessity goods where in some situations a producer can extort the buyer almost any price (think about water in the middle of a desert).
"As an Australian who is in the same boat as the Europeans, I can categorically say we don't want higher prices."
You can say all you want but facts show otherwise.
"Those of us who vote with our wallets try to get the message across"
*ALL* of us vote with our wallets. And the ones that, like you, vote "no" are a minority compared with those that vote "yes".
"providing argument to the developers to claim that decreased sales are all piracy's fault"
I previously said that you can say all you want but facts show otherwise. That's equally true regarding vendors. They can claim what they want (that high prices is due to piracy, for example) but the fact is that they sell they price they do because they understand that's the price they'll get maximum profits (or else, they'd sell even more expensively).
"shareholders they are beholden to which requires that they deliver quality products"
How can someone be so disinformed in this day and age???
Shareholders require to deliver *sellable* products. Sometimes the way to produce a sellable product is by means of its quality. More often than not this is not only unnecesary (marketing usually makes for a better output than quality) but even a liability (on pure market forces in order to oversell a product yours must be even better so if you are already selling a wonderful product your are in fact hurting your tomorrow's sells for a new product).
"No, because if paying customers do not follow the upgrade path because a particular upgrade was bad, Microsoft will be required to address that because they have to make a living. That's why Windows XP support was extended to 2014."
Or is it because *computer* vendors, due to a growing *competency* from other OS vendors like Apple or the Linux distributions pressed Microsoft that way? NT/2000 to XP upgrade mill based mainly on NT's lack of support did work properly.
"so if you are an unhappy customer, they will be obligated to please you."
Yeah, that's true in the country of free market cotton-sugar and capitalistic candy-houses. In the real world unhappy customers are not a problem as long as you can find another (and hopefully -for the vendor, cheaper) way to lock them in.
"In the end this mean they had three different product codes for almost identical boxes all of which had to be manufactured and kept in stock, one for Europe with, one for Europe without, and one for everywhere else. Tell me that
oesn't add some overhead cost?"
Yeah, well, Ms Office comes with Terminator instead of Clippy, here in Europe.
"Version localizations cost extra time and money. Localizing products are a logistical nightmare, all of the redoing everything, all of the retesting and then you have to have a separate distribution system to make sure that they can get the localized version they need."
So what?
It's still a market decision. Even if you were right (you are not: it's only more expensive to localize a software package to, say, Italian, if you are not an Italian shop for a starter, as it is not more expensive to localize to, say, Italian, than English if your software is designed to be localizable from the start) it is still a market decision how to leverage those costs. If it is percived that an European market will pay 100 money units for a software and USA is willing to pay 80 you won't win market share selling in the USA at 70 and in Europe at 110 even if those were the production costs while you'd have a deal sharing your production costs and selling in the USA at 80 and in Europe at 100.
It's Market Practices 101: you don't sell at your production costs; you sell the most expensive your market will allow for. The interesting thing to study is then why Europe is wanting to pay so higher prices for the same goods.
Will this work on searchs or if you trac-link from a wiki page or ticket?
Regarding ACLs, I'm afraid is an all or nothing bussines. Current status (while I didn't look at 0.11 yet) means we cannot have a "private" section for our developers (yes, I'm aware of the "private" egg, but it doesn't work -shows "private" results on search, for instance), or "private" comments on tickets, etc.
By the way, there's Redmine that seems trying to be to Trac what Subversion is to CVS (in that it clearly builds up on Trac experiencies trying to do it better). It is multiproject for one, but I really didn't have the time to play with it (what about user management integration with LDAP, ACLs, threaded tickets, mailbox management, etc.).
That said, Redmine is based on RoR, so I really don't know what will happen when/if they find the limits of the framework (and on my environment it seems easier to find people with Python experience than Ruby). To me and by now, I'd enjoy if Redmine/Trac is the base for a sane competition between them.
Back on topic, not exactly what it was asked but one of the best open source ticket tracking tools over there I think is OTRS (no SVN integration and Perl based, though).
Big problems with trac (to the point to be showstoppers to us): 1) Support for only one project/product per install 2) Tickets don't support hierarchies 3) No real ACLs
Not that there are no (more or less dirty) workarounds but for us, Trac is "almost there" but still not on target (and so has been for about two years).
"Here's a better example, and one which would have happened if my company deleted emails (which they don't):"
Yours is quite a different situation. I by no means am saying deleting so much useful e-mail is intelligent nor it should be a "company policy" but that *if* that's the policy there's no good, neither immediate nor long term on breaking it (on the short term you are exposing yourself to be fired; on the long term, since everything seems to be working as expected, it must be that the policy was a good one, opening the door for the next stupid policy to be pushed from management).
"If you think I'm going to sacrifice myself on the altar of blind obedience to authority, you are naive."
Yeah, sure, it's much better to be sacrificed yourself on the altar of the "but I did it for the good of the company" when it's discovered you are breaking company policies on a bad day.
"While I'm sure it made the lawyers happy, it made life difficult for anyone who was trying to actually do work."
This is the part I can't get. How is deleting mail making difficult to do the work? It might result into your work being ineffective but how is it that you can't do the work?
Let's see the stupidest scenario I can come to: -Please, can you e-mail me a price list I'll need in fortyfive days? -Of course. (fortyfive days after that) -OK, so let's see the price list. Damn retention policy! It's deleted. Now, I'll have to re-schedule the job to be run in fortyfive days from now! -Please, can you e-mail me a price list I'll need in fortyfive days? -Of course...
See? Nothing stops you for doing the work you are being paid for. At most, the policy avoids you to be an effective worker but since you are not on a decision-making position it's not up to you to decide how you should expend your payed-by-the-company time nor how. If you feel your company's policy is nuts, you certainly should point this up to your managers and ask them for the proper way to do the job; if it still so, time to polish your resume and look for a new job, but do not break the policies stablished for those that sign your paychecks.
"This is exactly what I do too - only, in addition to passwords the document is about 4 pages long and lays out everything someone coming in from the outside would need to know to run our network and servers."
Well, that's probably too much. I only have on paper documentation to recover the main backup machine and the server that holds the documentation wiki (from the backup machine and tapes). Once you get to this point everything else can be gotten from there.
"KDE 3.5.8 is perfectly usable, stable and in my opinion the sharpest desktop out there. So the KDE devs don't owe it to anyone to come up with a second stable desktop in one years time."
That's a matter of opinion. On one hand, KDE is both free as in speech and free as in beer, so certainly no developer owes absolutly nothing to anyone (hey, you can ask your money returned!). On the other hand, KDE developers have by all practical means stopped accepting bugs against 3.5 (at least those that are said to be resolved on 4 branch), so they "owe" people branch 4 going "end-user-usable" ASAP.
"And a quick note about giving an unstable version a new number - it's because af the massive rewrite of the tehcnology. It would be much more confusing to call the new software KDE 3.6, because many of the libraries and apps would be incompatible."
I know what KDE 4.0 meant as I think know by now everybody interested (on the other hand, why on hell is an end user that doesn't take the time to understand what is he doing using anything but what comes properly packed and tested with his distribution of choice?). But the point still exists that as results clearly shows, KDE 4.0 wasn't properly "marketeed". It could have been "kdelibs 4.0 (KDE 4 edition)" for instance, or the KDE team could put more brainpower to their numbering scheme (using a variant of the "odd numbering scheme", for instance which would have made clear that x.0 was not for public consumption -but then make sure that 4.1 was a complete substitution for 3.5, no matter how long into 4.0.x would it take), or... whatever it takes so that bad "press coverage" is not repeated again in the future.
"No, apparently they motivate you just enough to whine about them in the comments section of the post that you supposedly have no interest in."
Why not? If this ends up with editors learning these kind of questions are not welcome by "the Slashdot crowd" then maybe they stop bringing them up to head page making place for more interesting questions instead.
"My original point about the article was that there was zero proof that Microsoft paid Foxconn."
So what? Police wouldn't ever start an investigation following your criteria: -Humm... Mr. Capone seems suspicious; let's investigate him -But you have zero proof about Mr. Capone! -Yeah, but there's enough to make us suspicious; that's why we should investigate him -But you have zero proof -You are right; I'm convinced; let's do not investigate.
Is there zero proof about Foxconn? Yeah right, but there are enough facts to become quite suspicious about its behaviour.
"But the coup de grace is that you come along and make the EXACT same mistake - having absolutely no proof"
Maybe your problem is you don't understand English language. Certainly you don't understand what a conditional statement is.
"The underlying issue here is a cultural one: a naively simple "us vs. them""
"Until you grow up and realize that this isn't some "epic battle between good and evil," you are not qualified to make informed decisions about technology platforms -- you're just running off of pure emotion."
Bullshit. This has nothing to do with "technology platforms" nor I'm running this off pure emotion. This is more about "them", big greedy corporations and the way our current legal and social system allows them to go their way, vs "us" average citizens and the way "we" need to be active regarding such abuses. On this general framework this is a particular case that certainly is very serious and demands further investigation. It is as serious as the case itself that people like you find it "bussiness as usual". Your assertion "We just don't know, and if you don't know for sure, it is better to keep your mouth shut" just goes from serious to plainly stupid. Surely corporations like Microsoft will be delighted with people like you -for one they never would have gone through a monopoly abuse case... and lost, since, hey, before the trial noone knew for sure, so better we do nothing.
"In short, crappy mobo manufacturer makes crappy BIOS and then doesn't want to support small operating system thus it MUST be a conspiracy!"
Surely you have problems understanding English language. Maybe it's not your mother language or something like this. Anyway, here comes a hint: When I say in my previous post "The point being here not that Foxconn produces "obviously wrong BIOS" but that Foxconn might be producing "maliciously wrong BIOS"" you should understand that "MIGHT" is not the same as "MUST"; I think any dictionary will show you the differences.
"If you think those odds are realistic, you just make sure to make the fine you pay in court at least 101 times the value of an individual sale. Problem solved."
So it would...if things worked that way. Sorrily they don't. The abuser will only pay for direct damages. Most of the time it means returning whatever the customer payed for the product/service and maybe a short ammount to cover damages. With a big enough customer base, that's peanuts against the benefits. It's not per chance that (at least in my country) Telecomms are the biggest abusers: with maybe one out of a million sueing benefits are orders of magnitude over damages.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yes, but what people WILL pay (because their only other choice is missing out), and what people WANT to pay are not the same thing, as you initially suggested."
Regarding non first necesity goods, "want" and "would" are basically the same. Of course, everybody would *prefer* a lower price (for every price above zero. And even then, everybody would prefer to be paid *and* have the good instead of having it "just for free"), but since you don't need it, whatever you end paying, is the price you wanted to pay.
I'd like to own a Ferrari, but since I don't want to pay the price I don't have one. But if I buyed one, whatever the price I paid, is the price I wanted to, since I have no need to get the Ferrari.
"I dunno, what's a metafor you?"
That's easy: it's like... well, nevermind.
"That's exactly what was said, tard."
Thank you for your inspired and highly informative post, Mr. Overly Critical Guy.
"They will charge whatever their accountants predict will be the maximum price a person will pay"
And that's exactly the point: for some (not yet explained) reasons, Europeans do accept higher prices than North American, that's a fact or else those companies would be selling at lower prices. We are not talking here about first necessity goods where in some situations a producer can extort the buyer almost any price (think about water in the middle of a desert).
"As an Australian who is in the same boat as the Europeans, I can categorically say we don't want higher prices."
You can say all you want but facts show otherwise.
"Those of us who vote with our wallets try to get the message across"
*ALL* of us vote with our wallets. And the ones that, like you, vote "no" are a minority compared with those that vote "yes".
"providing argument to the developers to claim that decreased sales are all piracy's fault"
I previously said that you can say all you want but facts show otherwise. That's equally true regarding vendors. They can claim what they want (that high prices is due to piracy, for example) but the fact is that they sell they price they do because they understand that's the price they'll get maximum profits (or else, they'd sell even more expensively).
"By asking the users what they did NOT like about the original... & guess what?"
What they disliked the most where your awfull usage of grammar and strange caps and signs. Wasn't it?
"Ask the users."
To recall Henry Ford: we would be trying to make faster horses instead of cars, then.
"And that is the kind of attitude that will ensure that desktop Linux will not gain acceptance."
So what?
No, I meant it: so what?
"shareholders they are beholden to which requires that they deliver quality products"
How can someone be so disinformed in this day and age???
Shareholders require to deliver *sellable* products. Sometimes the way to produce a sellable product is by means of its quality. More often than not this is not only unnecesary (marketing usually makes for a better output than quality) but even a liability (on pure market forces in order to oversell a product yours must be even better so if you are already selling a wonderful product your are in fact hurting your tomorrow's sells for a new product).
"No, because if paying customers do not follow the upgrade path because a particular upgrade was bad, Microsoft will be required to address that because they have to make a living. That's why Windows XP support was extended to 2014."
Or is it because *computer* vendors, due to a growing *competency* from other OS vendors like Apple or the Linux distributions pressed Microsoft that way? NT/2000 to XP upgrade mill based mainly on NT's lack of support did work properly.
"so if you are an unhappy customer, they will be obligated to please you."
Yeah, that's true in the country of free market cotton-sugar and capitalistic candy-houses. In the real world unhappy customers are not a problem as long as you can find another (and hopefully -for the vendor, cheaper) way to lock them in.
"When you sell at one place..."
The World
"...and produce at some other..."
The World
"...it doesn't take a world class economist to tell that this doesn't look good for the consuming economy."
Thus, since The World is the producer and The World is the consumer, The World's economy must look good.
Did I get the candy?
"In the end this mean they had three different product codes for almost identical boxes all of which had to be manufactured and kept in stock, one for Europe with, one for Europe without, and one for everywhere else. Tell me that
oesn't add some overhead cost?"
Yeah, well, Ms Office comes with Terminator instead of Clippy, here in Europe.
Was that your point?
"Version localizations cost extra time and money. Localizing products are a logistical nightmare, all of the redoing everything, all of the retesting and then you have to have a separate distribution system to make sure that they can get the localized version they need."
So what?
It's still a market decision. Even if you were right (you are not: it's only more expensive to localize a software package to, say, Italian, if you are not an Italian shop for a starter, as it is not more expensive to localize to, say, Italian, than English if your software is designed to be localizable from the start) it is still a market decision how to leverage those costs. If it is percived that an European market will pay 100 money units for a software and USA is willing to pay 80 you won't win market share selling in the USA at 70 and in Europe at 110 even if those were the production costs while you'd have a deal sharing your production costs and selling in the USA at 80 and in Europe at 100.
It's Market Practices 101: you don't sell at your production costs; you sell the most expensive your market will allow for. The interesting thing to study is then why Europe is wanting to pay so higher prices for the same goods.
"Technically speaking Semantics is about the meaning of a given word or sign."
Technically speaking, not all Semantics are about the meaning of a given word or sign, only those akeen to the Kabalah.
Or so I was told.
"For ACL to source, you can use SVN perms"
Will this work on searchs or if you trac-link from a wiki page or ticket?
Regarding ACLs, I'm afraid is an all or nothing bussines. Current status (while I didn't look at 0.11 yet) means we cannot have a "private" section for our developers (yes, I'm aware of the "private" egg, but it doesn't work -shows "private" results on search, for instance), or "private" comments on tickets, etc.
By the way, there's Redmine that seems trying to be to Trac what Subversion is to CVS (in that it clearly builds up on Trac experiencies trying to do it better). It is multiproject for one, but I really didn't have the time to play with it (what about user management integration with LDAP, ACLs, threaded tickets, mailbox management, etc.).
That said, Redmine is based on RoR, so I really don't know what will happen when/if they find the limits of the framework (and on my environment it seems easier to find people with Python experience than Ruby). To me and by now, I'd enjoy if Redmine/Trac is the base for a sane competition between them.
Back on topic, not exactly what it was asked but one of the best open source ticket tracking tools over there I think is OTRS (no SVN integration and Perl based, though).
Big problems with trac (to the point to be showstoppers to us):
1) Support for only one project/product per install
2) Tickets don't support hierarchies
3) No real ACLs
Not that there are no (more or less dirty) workarounds but for us, Trac is "almost there" but still not on target (and so has been for about two years).
"Here's a better example, and one which would have happened if my company deleted emails (which they don't):"
Yours is quite a different situation. I by no means am saying deleting so much useful e-mail is intelligent nor it should be a "company policy" but that *if* that's the policy there's no good, neither immediate nor long term on breaking it (on the short term you are exposing yourself to be fired; on the long term, since everything seems to be working as expected, it must be that the policy was a good one, opening the door for the next stupid policy to be pushed from management).
"If you think I'm going to sacrifice myself on the altar of blind obedience to authority, you are naive."
Yeah, sure, it's much better to be sacrificed yourself on the altar of the "but I did it for the good of the company" when it's discovered you are breaking company policies on a bad day.
"While I'm sure it made the lawyers happy, it made life difficult for anyone who was trying to actually do work."
This is the part I can't get. How is deleting mail making difficult to do the work? It might result into your work being ineffective but how is it that you can't do the work?
Let's see the stupidest scenario I can come to: ...
-Please, can you e-mail me a price list I'll need in fortyfive days?
-Of course.
(fortyfive days after that)
-OK, so let's see the price list. Damn retention policy! It's deleted. Now, I'll have to re-schedule the job to be run in fortyfive days from now!
-Please, can you e-mail me a price list I'll need in fortyfive days?
-Of course
See? Nothing stops you for doing the work you are being paid for. At most, the policy avoids you to be an effective worker but since you are not on a decision-making position it's not up to you to decide how you should expend your payed-by-the-company time nor how. If you feel your company's policy is nuts, you certainly should point this up to your managers and ask them for the proper way to do the job; if it still so, time to polish your resume and look for a new job, but do not break the policies stablished for those that sign your paychecks.
"This is exactly what I do too - only, in addition to passwords the document is about 4 pages long and lays out everything someone coming in from the outside would need to know to run our network and servers."
Well, that's probably too much. I only have on paper documentation to recover the main backup machine and the server that holds the documentation wiki (from the backup machine and tapes). Once you get to this point everything else can be gotten from there.
"KDE 3.5.8 is perfectly usable, stable and in my opinion the sharpest desktop out there. So the KDE devs don't owe it to anyone to come up with a second stable desktop in one years time."
That's a matter of opinion. On one hand, KDE is both free as in speech and free as in beer, so certainly no developer owes absolutly nothing to anyone (hey, you can ask your money returned!). On the other hand, KDE developers have by all practical means stopped accepting bugs against 3.5 (at least those that are said to be resolved on 4 branch), so they "owe" people branch 4 going "end-user-usable" ASAP.
"And a quick note about giving an unstable version a new number - it's because af the massive rewrite of the tehcnology. It would be much more confusing to call the new software KDE 3.6, because many of the libraries and apps would be incompatible."
I know what KDE 4.0 meant as I think know by now everybody interested (on the other hand, why on hell is an end user that doesn't take the time to understand what is he doing using anything but what comes properly packed and tested with his distribution of choice?). But the point still exists that as results clearly shows, KDE 4.0 wasn't properly "marketeed". It could have been "kdelibs 4.0 (KDE 4 edition)" for instance, or the KDE team could put more brainpower to their numbering scheme (using a variant of the "odd numbering scheme", for instance which would have made clear that x.0 was not for public consumption -but then make sure that 4.1 was a complete substitution for 3.5, no matter how long into 4.0.x would it take), or... whatever it takes so that bad "press coverage" is not repeated again in the future.
"No, apparently they motivate you just enough to whine about them in the comments section of the post that you supposedly have no interest in."
Why not? If this ends up with editors learning these kind of questions are not welcome by "the Slashdot crowd" then maybe they stop bringing them up to head page making place for more interesting questions instead.
I'd say that would be quite a good outcome.
"My original point about the article was that there was zero proof that Microsoft paid Foxconn."
So what? Police wouldn't ever start an investigation following your criteria:
-Humm... Mr. Capone seems suspicious; let's investigate him
-But you have zero proof about Mr. Capone!
-Yeah, but there's enough to make us suspicious; that's why we should investigate him
-But you have zero proof
-You are right; I'm convinced; let's do not investigate.
Is there zero proof about Foxconn? Yeah right, but there are enough facts to become quite suspicious about its behaviour.
"But the coup de grace is that you come along and make the EXACT same mistake - having absolutely no proof"
Maybe your problem is you don't understand English language. Certainly you don't understand what a conditional statement is.
"The underlying issue here is a cultural one: a naively simple "us vs. them""
"Until you grow up and realize that this isn't some "epic battle between good and evil," you are not qualified to make informed decisions about technology platforms -- you're just running off of pure emotion."
Bullshit. This has nothing to do with "technology platforms" nor I'm running this off pure emotion. This is more about "them", big greedy corporations and the way our current legal and social system allows them to go their way, vs "us" average citizens and the way "we" need to be active regarding such abuses. On this general framework this is a particular case that certainly is very serious and demands further investigation. It is as serious as the case itself that people like you find it "bussiness as usual". Your assertion "We just don't know, and if you don't know for sure, it is better to keep your mouth shut" just goes from serious to plainly stupid. Surely corporations like Microsoft will be delighted with people like you -for one they never would have gone through a monopoly abuse case... and lost, since, hey, before the trial noone knew for sure, so better we do nothing.
"In short, crappy mobo manufacturer makes crappy BIOS and then doesn't want to support small operating system thus it MUST be a conspiracy!"
Surely you have problems understanding English language. Maybe it's not your mother language or something like this. Anyway, here comes a hint: When I say in my previous post "The point being here not that Foxconn produces "obviously wrong BIOS" but that Foxconn might be producing "maliciously wrong BIOS"" you should understand that "MIGHT" is not the same as "MUST"; I think any dictionary will show you the differences.
"If you think those odds are realistic, you just make sure to make the fine you pay in court at least 101 times the value of an individual sale. Problem solved."
So it would ...if things worked that way. Sorrily they don't. The abuser will only pay for direct damages. Most of the time it means returning whatever the customer payed for the product/service and maybe a short ammount to cover damages. With a big enough customer base, that's peanuts against the benefits. It's not per chance that (at least in my country) Telecomms are the biggest abusers: with maybe one out of a million sueing benefits are orders of magnitude over damages.
"No more lame-ass programming"
I only wish you were true...