The guy who runs donotreply.com is Chet Faliszek, one half of the "Chet and Erik" who ran the gaming humor site Old Man Murray and then went on to write the dialogue for Portal.
Incidentally, they never did send me a prize for winning that CrateMaster contest. Bastards!
But presumably someone who pirates the game and plays it won't buy the game. That's not a bad argument. It's not the same argument at all. You can't presume that someone who can't pirate the game will buy it.
Here's the deal sparky. Money spent on copy protection sees some pretty high diminishing marginal returns. The first few bucks (say, on actually having a CD key) stop the 8-12 year olds who would just download it and play it. How many 8 year olds have the money to go out and buy games? If they aren't going to be customers anyway, it doesn't matter whether they download it or not.
That is... it doesn't matter to you, the profit-minded game publisher, how many people play your game. All that matters is how many people buy the game. If spending money on copy protection doesn't actually increase sales, then that money has been wasted: you would've been better off using it to make the game better, or just keeping it in the bank.
Strong copy protection might stop people from playing games they haven't paid for, but that doesn't mean it makes them go out and buy legitimate copies of those games. It might just make them move on to a different game (freeware or more easily cracked payware), or spend their time watching TV instead.
Yeah, HSAs are great if you're young and have a high income, but that's hardly a good assumption to base your advice on. The rest of us have to rely on insurance because a spare $1200 takes months, not days, to put together.
Somehow, I don't think many people -- or the courts, if it ever gets that far -- are going to give Apple a free pass on the grounds that their anticompetitive actions were done for a noble purpose.
There is actually one good reason to refuse to license FairPlay; to prevent DRM from succeeding. Yes, how noble of them. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that refusing to license FairPlay also hurts the competition and encourages people to use Apple's store (which, in turn, encourages studios and labels to sell their content through Apple's store), because Apple is all about charity.
Of course, if that were true, they'd also be pushing for DRM-free video.
The competitors only allowed you to play on a single computer, you had to copy license files to another computer if you wanted to transfer tracks to another machine, you had to back up both licenses and music, and you had no ability to transfer to an iPod at all. Heh. You had no ability to transfer to an iPod because Apple refused to license FairPlay! That's Apple's fault, not Microsoft's. (You can blame the labels for refusing to let the music be transcoded to a DRM-free format, but that doesn't absolve Apple.)
Even worse, was license requirements that prohibited non Microsoft formats (such as AAC!) on P4S devices. Er, MP3 was certainly supported, despite being a non-Microsoft format, and AAC is supported on at least some PlaysForSure devices.
Furthermore, what keeps getting lost here is that Apple is still doing the same thing today. The iPod is unquestionably the king of the market now, and Apple is still using their FairPlay lock-in to prevent other stores from selling video content for it. (Again, you can blame the studios for insisting on DRM, but that doesn't let Apple off the hook.)
Right... they can just make you pay $1.99 per megabyte for data connections, like they're doing to everyone who signs up with their new "nationwide" plans.
You almost always have the option of picking a carrier who uses a truly open network (GSM). It might be truly open, but it sucks for data. I'll take EVDO over EDGE any day.
I think it's pretty slimy that verizon does things like disable USB on devices in order to force users to transfer their pictures over their pay-per-transfer type service. I don't think they've done that for quite some time now. They do disable some Bluetooth features, but with a USB data cable (available from Verizon or eBay), you can use free software like BitPim to transfer pictures, ringtones, and contact lists. Or, since most of the new phones have microSD slots, you can just save your pictures directly onto a memory card.
Verizon already has a separate wireless video network using Qualcomm's MediaFLO in the 716-722 MHz range. It's been deployed for several months in some parts of the US; there's a map buried in the Flash crap here.
A high deductible like I have..is only $1200. That isn't that high, and I have more than that amount of money in my HSA (remember the Health Savings Account I mentioned earlier?). Your HSA didn't start out with $1200 in it, though. If something happens to you before you fill up the account, you're screwed. Relying on an HSA basically means gambling that you won't have any serious medical expenses for the next 6-12 months (or however long it takes to save up your deductible).
they did not license the DRM because there was no reason to license it No reason? People were offering them money for licenses. That seems like a good enough reason, if we assume that Apple likes money, which seems like a fair assumption. There was no reason for to refuse except to stifle competition.
(the iPod didn't have anything close to a monopoly in 2004, since they had only like 40% of the market). You might want to double-check that figure. The NPG Group said the iPod and iPod Mini had an 82% market share of hard-drive based players during 2004, which was up from 64% the year before and 33% the year before that. The nearest competitor was Creative, with a whopping 3.7% market share.
If you include flash-based players, then the number drops to 42%, but I don't think it's unreasonable to consider that a separate market. (And even if you consider them all together, Apple still had over 4 times the market share of their nearest competitor.)
So are you saying it was the DRM that made the iPod popular? Or was it the DRM that made the iTunes store popular? The latter. The iTunes store's popularity was boosted by the fact that it was the only online store that was able to sell name-brand music for the most popular MP3 player - thanks to Apple's refusal to license FairPlay to anyone else.
If they hadn't used that anticompetitive practice to lock people into iTMS, who knows, maybe other stores would've gotten popular enough that we'd have more than one place to buy all those TV episodes today. Maybe even some real price competition!
How do you reconcile your viewpoint with Apple's continued push for DRM-free music, which they and Amazon both happen to sell? Well, I have my doubts as to how sincere that push was. I suspect they were as surprised as the rest of us when the labels started to cave... but that's beside the point.
Even if Apple honestly didn't want to have to use DRM, there was still a period of years where the only way to sell the tracks people wanted to buy was to use DRM, and Apple exploited their position to prevent anyone else from selling those tracks for the iPod. The same thing is still happening today with video DRM.
Anyone can sell music for the iPod -- just not DRM'd music. Emusic, Amazon, Walmart, and MagnaTunes all sale music compatible with the iPod. Yes, now they do, because (coincidentally) now the labels have changed their minds. But for several years -- when iTunes Music Store wasn't already so entrenched -- the only way to sell the popular tracks that people wanted to buy was to use DRM.
That meant no one else could sell those popular tracks except Apple, which gave iTMS a boost over competing stores, and now the same thing's happening with video. Try finding a store that'll sell you DRM-free, name-brand movies and TV shows to put on your iPod: it doesn't exist. Copyright holders won't let them be sold without DRM, and Apple won't let anyone else sell them with DRM that's iPod-compatible.
Apple is primarily a hardware company and makes most of its money selling hardware like the iPod, iPhone, computers, etc. They created the iTunes store to spur more sales of hardware while forgoing any real profits from selling the music Then look at it the other way: licensing FairPlay to other music stores would boost hardware sales, but Apple refuses to do that too, and in fact has gone out of their way to prevent Real from selling DRM'd music for use on iPods.
Just because it's not how you would like it to be doesn't make it anticompetitive. You're right. It's not anticompetitive just because I don't like it, it's anticompetitive because it promotes vendor lock-in and artificially raises the barrier of entry for competitors.
It's called a communications network, and the whole concept is designed around the assumption that this is the most efficient way of using any limited amount of bandwidth. We call all get full speed most of the time as long as none of us can get full speed all of the time. As the other response pointed out, no one is saying we all need to get full speed all of the time.
The problem is this: ISP builds out a network with a total shared capacity of (let's say) 100 Mbps. They sell internet service to a bunch of customers, capping the rate at (let's say) 5 Mbps. Now, if everyone used it all the time, this network would only handle 20 customers. But the ISP knows that not everyone will use 5 Mbps all the time, so they estimate an average load -- let's say 10% -- and they sign up 200 customers on this network instead.
That's all fine, as long as the average load stays the same. But now what's happened is the average load has gone up: more people want to use the capacity they're paying for.
The ISP's response should be to either add capacity to their network (so it can support the same number of customers at the higher load), or reduce the number of customers using it (split it up into two networks), or lower the maximum bandwidth per user (cap everyone at 4 Mbps instead of 5).
But instead, what they're doing is trying to keep the load capacity where it is -- at the level that was only an estimate in the first place -- by blocking the applications that use a lot of bandwidth.
Do you see how counterintuitive that is? It's like dealing with a traffic problem on the highway by saying "OK, most of the people on the road at this hour are going to the beach, so let's close down the beach and then the traffic will be gone." The highway is there to serve drivers, not the other way around: if the beach is where everyone wants to go, the highway system has to adapt to handle that.
I can get a 1.5MB internet connection for $29.95 including taxes,etc. What do you have to pay for a 6-12 Mbit connection, like the one Comcast offers for $20 more?
In the first case, Apple may have a monopoly in MP3 players. However they have done nothing anticompetitive [...] Anticompetitive means it hurts Apple but it hurts their competitors more. You mean like how Apple has refused to license their DRM system to competitors, which would boost iTunes Music Store sales but also open the iPod up to competition?
I for one like private companies owning the lines as it is one more barrier to improper spying by the government. It could be exactly the opposite. Remember, the Fourth Amendment only restricts the government, not private companies. The government can, and has, asked private companies to do the kind of snooping that the government itself is forbidden to do.
The aluminium case, the LED backlight, the great keyboard, the expresscard slot. The entire slick package. The oversized trackpad. I'll give you most of those, but the ExpressCard slot is hardly an Apple exclusive.
Yes, you may not NEED all of that. If you don't you're welcome to buy the HP at half the price. Just don't say/imply that the MB Pro isn't worth the 2K they're asking. Well, that's an interesting statement. Let's say Apple decided to raise the top-end MBP's price to $10,000, but a few people who absolutely needed its features were still willing to buy it. Would it be "worth" ten grand?
One might argue that yes, it would be, because there's no other laptop that provides all the same features. In purely economic terms, it's worth whatever they charge for it, as long as someone's willing to pay that much. On the other hand, in populist terms, it wouldn't be worth it: the cost of the model wouldn't have gone up, but the price would've more than doubled, and the extra $6000 or so they'd be charging would be pure profit.
Now look at the list of features you mentioned: an aluminum case, backlit keyboard, slick design, and larger trackpad. Is it "worth" paying an extra $1000 for those? In one sense, yes, because people are clearly willing to pay it, and they think they're getting a good deal. But in another sense, it isn't, because the price difference far outweighs any reasonable estimate of what it costs to provide those features. You might be willing to pay $10 for a soda in the middle of a theme park on a hot summer day, but if the guy selling the soda is only paying 50 cents a gallon for it, he's clearly taking advantage of you.
Of course, you can't really talk about what a product is "worth" without considering who's buying it. In a vacuum, nothing has any value; products only have value when you add customers to the equation. The MacBook Pro certainly isn't worth $2000 to me (or, I'd wager, to the vast majority of notebook purchasers). Maybe it is to you. If so, enjoy!
Now that aside, the other problem I find is that while their prices are often comparable for a system at a given point, they don't actually offer what many want. The towers are a good example. Notebooks are another good example. If you want a 15" screen, the least expensive Apple model you can get is the low-end MacBook Pro for $2000. Meanwhile, you can get a 15" notebook from a competitor like HP for less than half as much, with the same or better RAM, CPU, optical drives and hard drive -- hell, last I checked, you could even get a built-in camera and remote control while still saving over $1000.
So where does the price difference come from? A slightly better graphics card, a couple of rarely-used ports, a slicker design, a few ounces less weight, and a handful of bells and whistles like the backlit keyboard. Sure, the MBP is a good deal if you need all those (for example, the weight difference might add up if you're bench-pressing entire stacks of laptops)... but most people will do just fine with the competing models.
I didn't say the two-party system was a good thing, only that it's a natural consequence of the voting system we use. The two-party system sucks and we should put an end to it, but that will mean switching to proportional representation, or at least another way to run the elections in each district (e.g. approval voting or ranked choice voting).
And for as much as you don't like the two party system, voting in this country is pretty linear -- you get to choose exactly one candidate for each job, and all those jobs are tied to geographic regions only. That's exactly why we have a two-party system, it's Duverger's Law:
A two-party system often develops spontaneously from the single-member district plurality voting system (SMDP), in which legislative seats are awarded to the candidate with a plurality of the total votes within his or her constituency, rather than apportioning seats to each party based on the total votes gained in the entire set of constituencies. This trend develops out of the inherent qualities of the SMDP system that discourage the development of third parties and reward the two major parties.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy who runs donotreply.com is Chet Faliszek, one half of the "Chet and Erik" who ran the gaming humor site Old Man Murray and then went on to write the dialogue for Portal.
Incidentally, they never did send me a prize for winning that CrateMaster contest. Bastards!
I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it.
TFA says "stopping piracy" is irrelevant.
That is... it doesn't matter to you, the profit-minded game publisher, how many people play your game. All that matters is how many people buy the game. If spending money on copy protection doesn't actually increase sales, then that money has been wasted: you would've been better off using it to make the game better, or just keeping it in the bank.
Strong copy protection might stop people from playing games they haven't paid for, but that doesn't mean it makes them go out and buy legitimate copies of those games. It might just make them move on to a different game (freeware or more easily cracked payware), or spend their time watching TV instead.
Yeah, HSAs are great if you're young and have a high income, but that's hardly a good assumption to base your advice on. The rest of us have to rely on insurance because a spare $1200 takes months, not days, to put together.
Somehow, I don't think many people -- or the courts, if it ever gets that far -- are going to give Apple a free pass on the grounds that their anticompetitive actions were done for a noble purpose.
Of course, if that were true, they'd also be pushing for DRM-free video.
Furthermore, what keeps getting lost here is that Apple is still doing the same thing today. The iPod is unquestionably the king of the market now, and Apple is still using their FairPlay lock-in to prevent other stores from selling video content for it. (Again, you can blame the studios for insisting on DRM, but that doesn't let Apple off the hook.)
Right... they can just make you pay $1.99 per megabyte for data connections, like they're doing to everyone who signs up with their new "nationwide" plans.
Verizon already has a separate wireless video network using Qualcomm's MediaFLO in the 716-722 MHz range. It's been deployed for several months in some parts of the US; there's a map buried in the Flash crap here.
If you include flash-based players, then the number drops to 42%, but I don't think it's unreasonable to consider that a separate market. (And even if you consider them all together, Apple still had over 4 times the market share of their nearest competitor.)
If they hadn't used that anticompetitive practice to lock people into iTMS, who knows, maybe other stores would've gotten popular enough that we'd have more than one place to buy all those TV episodes today. Maybe even some real price competition!
Even if Apple honestly didn't want to have to use DRM, there was still a period of years where the only way to sell the tracks people wanted to buy was to use DRM, and Apple exploited their position to prevent anyone else from selling those tracks for the iPod. The same thing is still happening today with video DRM.
That meant no one else could sell those popular tracks except Apple, which gave iTMS a boost over competing stores, and now the same thing's happening with video. Try finding a store that'll sell you DRM-free, name-brand movies and TV shows to put on your iPod: it doesn't exist. Copyright holders won't let them be sold without DRM, and Apple won't let anyone else sell them with DRM that's iPod-compatible.
The problem is this: ISP builds out a network with a total shared capacity of (let's say) 100 Mbps. They sell internet service to a bunch of customers, capping the rate at (let's say) 5 Mbps. Now, if everyone used it all the time, this network would only handle 20 customers. But the ISP knows that not everyone will use 5 Mbps all the time, so they estimate an average load -- let's say 10% -- and they sign up 200 customers on this network instead.
That's all fine, as long as the average load stays the same. But now what's happened is the average load has gone up: more people want to use the capacity they're paying for.
The ISP's response should be to either add capacity to their network (so it can support the same number of customers at the higher load), or reduce the number of customers using it (split it up into two networks), or lower the maximum bandwidth per user (cap everyone at 4 Mbps instead of 5).
But instead, what they're doing is trying to keep the load capacity where it is -- at the level that was only an estimate in the first place -- by blocking the applications that use a lot of bandwidth.
Do you see how counterintuitive that is? It's like dealing with a traffic problem on the highway by saying "OK, most of the people on the road at this hour are going to the beach, so let's close down the beach and then the traffic will be gone." The highway is there to serve drivers, not the other way around: if the beach is where everyone wants to go, the highway system has to adapt to handle that.
One might argue that yes, it would be, because there's no other laptop that provides all the same features. In purely economic terms, it's worth whatever they charge for it, as long as someone's willing to pay that much. On the other hand, in populist terms, it wouldn't be worth it: the cost of the model wouldn't have gone up, but the price would've more than doubled, and the extra $6000 or so they'd be charging would be pure profit.
Now look at the list of features you mentioned: an aluminum case, backlit keyboard, slick design, and larger trackpad. Is it "worth" paying an extra $1000 for those? In one sense, yes, because people are clearly willing to pay it, and they think they're getting a good deal. But in another sense, it isn't, because the price difference far outweighs any reasonable estimate of what it costs to provide those features. You might be willing to pay $10 for a soda in the middle of a theme park on a hot summer day, but if the guy selling the soda is only paying 50 cents a gallon for it, he's clearly taking advantage of you.
Of course, you can't really talk about what a product is "worth" without considering who's buying it. In a vacuum, nothing has any value; products only have value when you add customers to the equation. The MacBook Pro certainly isn't worth $2000 to me (or, I'd wager, to the vast majority of notebook purchasers). Maybe it is to you. If so, enjoy!
So where does the price difference come from? A slightly better graphics card, a couple of rarely-used ports, a slicker design, a few ounces less weight, and a handful of bells and whistles like the backlit keyboard. Sure, the MBP is a good deal if you need all those (for example, the weight difference might add up if you're bench-pressing entire stacks of laptops)... but most people will do just fine with the competing models.
Why limit yourself to only two candidates?
I didn't say the two-party system was a good thing, only that it's a natural consequence of the voting system we use. The two-party system sucks and we should put an end to it, but that will mean switching to proportional representation, or at least another way to run the elections in each district (e.g. approval voting or ranked choice voting).