I think your wife will be amazed at the performance difference between the G4-1ghz Mac Mini and pretty much any Intel Mac Mini. Based on my experience moving from a G4-1.2ghz to a 2.2ghz Intel Core Duo, "About 6 times faster" is probably a drastic understatement.
Interesting math there - a sales total of 1.693%. How exactly does that work?
Considering that 0.993% of first week pirates "eventually" bought the app and currently 50% of his user base legally acquired the app, then there is a potential sales impact of less than 2% over the long-term. I would concur that it didn't impact his sales by much.
What astounds me is how terrible Toyota is at "stalking." Seriously, an email saying "Hey Amanda Old Friend, I need to crash at your place while this crap blows over" is a pretty pathetic attempt at threatening someone with bodily harm. I had much scarier responses to "roommate wanted" ads in college.
The PBS article below expands on the details of the case. Prior to publishing her "letter to the editor" the paper was fully aware that it was a post from Myspace, not a true letter to the editor. In fact, the editor was the person who added her name to the letter, not the principal as stated in the/. piece. The author was made aware that her now deleted rant would be published as a letter to the editor. The author was assured by the paper that the "letter" would not run, but then they ran it anyway.
I think this is a prime "what not to do" example of journalistic ethics.
"Macs are over priced, but people pay that premium because they want an Apple product."
Your statement seems to contradict itself. If something were overpriced then it would cost more than the market would pay for it, slowly leading to the demise of the manufacturer. But as you note, Apple products seem sell reasonably well, even at a perceived price premium. That would lead me to conclude that, from a market perspective, their products are not truly overpriced.
If a company offers a product that the market percieves as superior, people will pay more for it. This applies to everything from dairy products to automobiles to consumer electronics. The fact that Apple is able to sell products for a reasonable profit isn't really much of an argument against them or their products.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to drive my over-priced Honda home and watch my trendy, over-priced and fashionable Sony HDTV. (no, not really)
I recently overheard a web developer raving about this new online classifieds website he was launching in a few months. From what I could tell, it was solely focused on competing with Cragislist and they were going to achieve this by having very slick, graphical interface and unlimited sub-categorization. They were spending big money on this website and it was going to show!
Right then and there I knew their website, whatever it was called, was doomed to fail because they had missed the point. People neither need nor want a graphically slick, over-produced, banner-ad infested place to trade their toaster for a case of panty hose.
To boil your post (and maybe mine) down to a Han Solo quote "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."
Most of that is OSX, not the hardware. I have 2 seemingly ancient G4 Macs that are running Leopard quite nicely. Any Intel Mac would kill them on video encoding and the like, but for basic day-to-day tasks they are plenty fast.
In the end, the whole "price" argument against Macs is getting a little long in the tooth. Similar Nike's cost more than Starbury's. Sony TV's cost more than Olevia's for the same size/features. A house in one area is cheaper than the same house 5 miles away.
Every day millions of people spend slightly more for an item that they perceive to be superior/more popular/cooler than a similar item. I have a feeling this has been going on since the dawn of mankind.
It might be worth pointing out that hardly anyone experiences a free market in the purest sense of the term. Even so, MAP does not impede a free market. In the majority of market segments there are multiple tiers and multiple marketers within each of those tiers. If Brand X requires a MAP contract and Brand Y does not the market is still free because there are multiple choices available at the wholesale and retail level.
If Sony (for example) wants to enforce a MAP with those retailers/wholesalers they have signed contracts with, I have no problem with it as long as there are other brands available in the marketplace.
Like you, I could care less about his choice of digital music player. But I'd love to see a Presidential-elect playlist.
When is Barrack going to start uploading his playlists to Last.fm? The citzens are clamoring to know their musical compatibility with Obama!
Re:"soon-to-be Leader of the Free World"
on
Obama's "ZuneGate"
·
· Score: 1
Judging from here, Americans may have a messed up sense of morality, but I'll say this for them: if they feel that their liberty is threatened they are much more inclined to take action. We, we just moan a little and then carry on. What have you done to defend these freedoms you enjoy?
Are you talking about Canadian Americans? Because in the United States of America, our citizenry will bitch up a big storm but then do absolutely nothing as their liberties are degraded and taken away in the name of "progress" and "security."
I was watching the news coverage of the post-Mumbai-terror-attack protests the other day and thought "this is how we should've responded to 9/11." Instead we quietly gave up a bunch of rights then pointed our military to a non-involved third world country. Anyone who complained about it was labelled "unpatriotic" and chided for not supporting the President. As further punishment you'd probably be added to a no-fly list, so traveling became a nightmarish ordeal. No one is taking to the streets or attempting to defend anything. At most, we're posting screeds on blogs (or Slashdot, in my case) and shrugging our shoulders.
Why does eBay need help? If anything they need more direct competition and a loss of revenue that forces them to address the multitude of complaints regarding their service. Until that happens eBay will continue to slowly alienate the grassroots users (hobbyists, individuals) that made eBay what it is today.
At one point I thought Craigslist might be the catalyst for change at eBay. Craigslist seems to be where former eBayers end up, but that mild exodus hasn't slowed down eBay at all.
Every time I see that "Honda/road" analogy I just want to grab the guy from Psystar who said it by the collar and shake him senseless for making such a craptacular analogy.
A more apt analogy might be "Imagine that Honda created some ECU programming that yields 15% better fuel efficiency. Instead of developing their own programming, Hyundai backwards-engineers the Honda ECU into their cars and buys the Honda ECU's on the aftermarket. Hyundai then advertises that they are running the Honda ECU efficiency program and Honda takes them to court."
It doesn't even have to be efficiency. Maybe the ECU makes the motor spew fire or something, but it makes a lot more sense than the ill-formed "Honda/Road" analogy.
But it still is not nearly as humid as it should be. The dehumidifer I run year round in the crawl space hasn't been doing a lot of work over the last 2 years. Pre-drought it kicked on at least once an hour and ran for 10 minutes. Now it kicks on handful of times a day and I've even dropped the threshold down to 40% from 50%.
I'm not sure users of such software are going to drive any faster outside of the tagged zones. In most places I drive the average traffic flow outpaces the posted speed limit by 10-15MPH. The POI's I have on my GPS for speed traps and red-light cameras aren't to help me speed/run red lights, they are to reduce my chances of getting a ticket. I find it even more helpful when I am driving in a new city or unfamiliar area. I generally go with the flow of traffic, but if I get an alert I slow down about 2MPH to make myself less of an obvious target in middle of the herd. I rarely speed up more than I slowed down after I get through the tagged zone.
Besides, there's always a sprinter in the herd that decides the flow is for chumps, and weaves in and out of traffic while going 20-25MPH over the speed limit. I think those are the folks who would exploit it to drive faster in non-tagged zones but I rarely see any technology on their dashboards that might assist their speeding habit. I assume it is because the idiot demographic aren't exactly early adopters.
And you forgot about the Tennessee Board of Regents budget cuts that are sending state universities and even downstream community colleges scrambling to cut programs and raise tuitions to cover the gap.
I suspect the folks who will end up paying for this are the very students that are being policed. They can just slip it into the "Technology Access Fee" or some such nonesense that students are already forced to pay even if they don't access any technologies.
Seriously guys, great job on such wonderfully timed legislation. I expect in the next 2 years we'll be seeing more embarassing stories like this about the Tennessee State Legislature given the direction it went in the last election.
What does being a communist regime have to do with it? We've got the same attitudes in the US.
Attitudes maybe, but systems no. The last time I checked the US Government had not purchased a house for the impoverished and uneducated parents of Shawn Johnson. Nor did they whisk Shawn away to a Government sponsored program when she was a toddler, seperated from her family and living in a sort of "Gymanstic Orphanage" with no proper education or alternative. In fact, just the opposite as occured - they have mortgaged their home, the home in which she also lives, to pay for her training in a sport she has continually chosen to do.
Certainly one could find some fault with the US (presumably Western) way of developing gymnasts, but when compared to the Gymnast Mills of countries like China, it is a much more positive system.
You are probably correct, however the correlation between my issue and the FSF's "protest" has already been made. Most likely my issue isn't your fault, but my negative feelings regarding the FSF community are.
So are you one of the asshats who has gummed up all of the reservations at my local Apple store? Because I really, really need to get my DC IO board replaced, but I can't make an appointment at the Genius Bar to put it in for service. Meanwhile, my laptop is non-functional and school starts in a week and I really need to get it back rather quickly.
Instead I have some piss ant whining Linux losers trying to make some sort of misguided point about something that seems meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Could you give me your home phone number, I'd love to constantly call your house and ask you questions as to why your organization supports such asinine policies. Better yet, I can adopt your tactics and hound your wife/mom/husband/life-partner as to why you have have adopted this lame tactic, as I'm sure she/he is exactly the person I should be venting towards. I figure I can call every hour while I wait for a reservation to free up, that only seems fair.
I've been at a handful of Fortune 500 companies and my experience is exactly the opposite of yours. The desktop computer is dead, replaced by laptops which have lower TCO's and offer a better ROI. Apple would be wasting their time to build a mid-tower for this market as this market is small and getting much smaller.
What Apple really needs to compete in the corporate laptop market is a laptop dock. Most laptop users are sporting external monitors, mice, scanners, external storage and keyboards these days. Not having an easy way to hook and unhook all of that stuff twice a day is a deal killer.
I specifically mentioned licensed handguns to lessen the statistics. The reality is, completely legal and licensed handguns are occasionally used to commit a crime. In fact, I think the number of licensed handguns that are used in crime are vastly underreported. It seems recently a number of high profile shootings involved licensed firearms - VA Tech, for example. So yes, it happens far more frequently than the average NRA fanboy would like to admit and my odds of being shot by a licensed handgun is greater than my odds of dying as a result of a terrorists actions.
While I am no radiochemist, I have to call bullshit on the "one atom" theory. My grandfather did gaseous diffusion work on the Manhattan Project. He has worked directly with weapons grade plutonium, uranium and copious amounts of cesium in his long lifetime and hasn't had any issues with any type of cancer. This would've been in the dark ages of radiochemistry when few precautions were taken for worker safety. The levels of exposure that his team experienced are probably thousands of times higher than the average human, yet many of them are still alive and quite healthy some 60 years later.
I understand HD output, I just don't see a true need for HD capacity storage in gaming. I should've been more clear in my post. I've read that a few PS3 titles have filled Blu-Ray discs to capacity, but I don't see the payoff in the content or playability. Meanwhile, games that fit on a paltry DVD are still quite good.
In the coming years, I think HD capacity storage will be necessary for gaming, but right now it isn't being used to its fullest and the teeming masses haven't seen the real payoff. Until the masses have the "Wow, that looks amazing"/HDTV/must-have realization, Microsoft has no need to bother going to Blu-Ray.
How many games on the market for either the PS3 or the 360 actually utilize the HD capabilities for gaming? Are there any yet? I think we are years away from HD gaming content becoming commonplace, in which case Microsoft could roll out Blu-Ray or whatever HD delivery spec is ideal in 4 or so years when they release their next gen device. Waiting it out might not be such a bad strategy for Microsoft and the Xbox team if they are viewing the current Xbox primarily as a gaming device and not a full-blown media hub.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your wife will be amazed at the performance difference between the G4-1ghz Mac Mini and pretty much any Intel Mac Mini. Based on my experience moving from a G4-1.2ghz to a 2.2ghz Intel Core Duo, "About 6 times faster" is probably a drastic understatement.
Interesting math there - a sales total of 1.693%. How exactly does that work?
Considering that 0.993% of first week pirates "eventually" bought the app and currently 50% of his user base legally acquired the app, then there is a potential sales impact of less than 2% over the long-term. I would concur that it didn't impact his sales by much.
What astounds me is how terrible Toyota is at "stalking." Seriously, an email saying "Hey Amanda Old Friend, I need to crash at your place while this crap blows over" is a pretty pathetic attempt at threatening someone with bodily harm. I had much scarier responses to "roommate wanted" ads in college.
The PBS article below expands on the details of the case. Prior to publishing her "letter to the editor" the paper was fully aware that it was a post from Myspace, not a true letter to the editor. In fact, the editor was the person who added her name to the letter, not the principal as stated in the /. piece. The author was made aware that her now deleted rant would be published as a letter to the editor. The author was assured by the paper that the "letter" would not run, but then they ran it anyway.
I think this is a prime "what not to do" example of journalistic ethics.
Media Shift @ PBS
"Macs are over priced, but people pay that premium because they want an Apple product."
Your statement seems to contradict itself. If something were overpriced then it would cost more than the market would pay for it, slowly leading to the demise of the manufacturer. But as you note, Apple products seem sell reasonably well, even at a perceived price premium. That would lead me to conclude that, from a market perspective, their products are not truly overpriced.
If a company offers a product that the market percieves as superior, people will pay more for it. This applies to everything from dairy products to automobiles to consumer electronics. The fact that Apple is able to sell products for a reasonable profit isn't really much of an argument against them or their products.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to drive my over-priced Honda home and watch my trendy, over-priced and fashionable Sony HDTV. (no, not really)
I recently overheard a web developer raving about this new online classifieds website he was launching in a few months. From what I could tell, it was solely focused on competing with Cragislist and they were going to achieve this by having very slick, graphical interface and unlimited sub-categorization. They were spending big money on this website and it was going to show!
Right then and there I knew their website, whatever it was called, was doomed to fail because they had missed the point. People neither need nor want a graphically slick, over-produced, banner-ad infested place to trade their toaster for a case of panty hose.
To boil your post (and maybe mine) down to a Han Solo quote "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."
Most of that is OSX, not the hardware. I have 2 seemingly ancient G4 Macs that are running Leopard quite nicely. Any Intel Mac would kill them on video encoding and the like, but for basic day-to-day tasks they are plenty fast.
In the end, the whole "price" argument against Macs is getting a little long in the tooth. Similar Nike's cost more than Starbury's. Sony TV's cost more than Olevia's for the same size/features. A house in one area is cheaper than the same house 5 miles away.
Every day millions of people spend slightly more for an item that they perceive to be superior/more popular/cooler than a similar item. I have a feeling this has been going on since the dawn of mankind.
It might be worth pointing out that hardly anyone experiences a free market in the purest sense of the term. Even so, MAP does not impede a free market. In the majority of market segments there are multiple tiers and multiple marketers within each of those tiers. If Brand X requires a MAP contract and Brand Y does not the market is still free because there are multiple choices available at the wholesale and retail level.
If Sony (for example) wants to enforce a MAP with those retailers/wholesalers they have signed contracts with, I have no problem with it as long as there are other brands available in the marketplace.
Like you, I could care less about his choice of digital music player. But I'd love to see a Presidential-elect playlist.
When is Barrack going to start uploading his playlists to Last.fm? The citzens are clamoring to know their musical compatibility with Obama!
Judging from here, Americans may have a messed up sense of morality, but I'll say this for them: if they feel that their liberty is threatened they are much more inclined to take action. We, we just moan a little and then carry on. What have you done to defend these freedoms you enjoy?
Are you talking about Canadian Americans? Because in the United States of America, our citizenry will bitch up a big storm but then do absolutely nothing as their liberties are degraded and taken away in the name of "progress" and "security."
I was watching the news coverage of the post-Mumbai-terror-attack protests the other day and thought "this is how we should've responded to 9/11." Instead we quietly gave up a bunch of rights then pointed our military to a non-involved third world country. Anyone who complained about it was labelled "unpatriotic" and chided for not supporting the President. As further punishment you'd probably be added to a no-fly list, so traveling became a nightmarish ordeal. No one is taking to the streets or attempting to defend anything. At most, we're posting screeds on blogs (or Slashdot, in my case) and shrugging our shoulders.
Why does eBay need help? If anything they need more direct competition and a loss of revenue that forces them to address the multitude of complaints regarding their service. Until that happens eBay will continue to slowly alienate the grassroots users (hobbyists, individuals) that made eBay what it is today.
At one point I thought Craigslist might be the catalyst for change at eBay. Craigslist seems to be where former eBayers end up, but that mild exodus hasn't slowed down eBay at all.
Every time I see that "Honda/road" analogy I just want to grab the guy from Psystar who said it by the collar and shake him senseless for making such a craptacular analogy.
A more apt analogy might be "Imagine that Honda created some ECU programming that yields 15% better fuel efficiency. Instead of developing their own programming, Hyundai backwards-engineers the Honda ECU into their cars and buys the Honda ECU's on the aftermarket. Hyundai then advertises that they are running the Honda ECU efficiency program and Honda takes them to court."
It doesn't even have to be efficiency. Maybe the ECU makes the motor spew fire or something, but it makes a lot more sense than the ill-formed "Honda/Road" analogy.
1.) 3.0882 times better? 2.) -13.6 meters. The resulting Baconator heart attack would burn more energy than exists in the Subway sandwich.
But it still is not nearly as humid as it should be. The dehumidifer I run year round in the crawl space hasn't been doing a lot of work over the last 2 years. Pre-drought it kicked on at least once an hour and ran for 10 minutes. Now it kicks on handful of times a day and I've even dropped the threshold down to 40% from 50%.
Yes, that's exactly what they has to do.
Or maybe the cops would just pull over the other 93.5678% of the speeding population that doesn't own an iPhone.
I'm not sure users of such software are going to drive any faster outside of the tagged zones. In most places I drive the average traffic flow outpaces the posted speed limit by 10-15MPH. The POI's I have on my GPS for speed traps and red-light cameras aren't to help me speed/run red lights, they are to reduce my chances of getting a ticket. I find it even more helpful when I am driving in a new city or unfamiliar area. I generally go with the flow of traffic, but if I get an alert I slow down about 2MPH to make myself less of an obvious target in middle of the herd. I rarely speed up more than I slowed down after I get through the tagged zone.
Besides, there's always a sprinter in the herd that decides the flow is for chumps, and weaves in and out of traffic while going 20-25MPH over the speed limit. I think those are the folks who would exploit it to drive faster in non-tagged zones but I rarely see any technology on their dashboards that might assist their speeding habit. I assume it is because the idiot demographic aren't exactly early adopters.
And you forgot about the Tennessee Board of Regents budget cuts that are sending state universities and even downstream community colleges scrambling to cut programs and raise tuitions to cover the gap.
I suspect the folks who will end up paying for this are the very students that are being policed. They can just slip it into the "Technology Access Fee" or some such nonesense that students are already forced to pay even if they don't access any technologies.
Seriously guys, great job on such wonderfully timed legislation. I expect in the next 2 years we'll be seeing more embarassing stories like this about the Tennessee State Legislature given the direction it went in the last election.
What does being a communist regime have to do with it? We've got the same attitudes in the US.
Attitudes maybe, but systems no. The last time I checked the US Government had not purchased a house for the impoverished and uneducated parents of Shawn Johnson. Nor did they whisk Shawn away to a Government sponsored program when she was a toddler, seperated from her family and living in a sort of "Gymanstic Orphanage" with no proper education or alternative. In fact, just the opposite as occured - they have mortgaged their home, the home in which she also lives, to pay for her training in a sport she has continually chosen to do.
Certainly one could find some fault with the US (presumably Western) way of developing gymnasts, but when compared to the Gymnast Mills of countries like China, it is a much more positive system.
You are probably correct, however the correlation between my issue and the FSF's "protest" has already been made. Most likely my issue isn't your fault, but my negative feelings regarding the FSF community are.
So are you one of the asshats who has gummed up all of the reservations at my local Apple store? Because I really, really need to get my DC IO board replaced, but I can't make an appointment at the Genius Bar to put it in for service. Meanwhile, my laptop is non-functional and school starts in a week and I really need to get it back rather quickly.
Instead I have some piss ant whining Linux losers trying to make some sort of misguided point about something that seems meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Could you give me your home phone number, I'd love to constantly call your house and ask you questions as to why your organization supports such asinine policies. Better yet, I can adopt your tactics and hound your wife/mom/husband/life-partner as to why you have have adopted this lame tactic, as I'm sure she/he is exactly the person I should be venting towards. I figure I can call every hour while I wait for a reservation to free up, that only seems fair.
I've been at a handful of Fortune 500 companies and my experience is exactly the opposite of yours. The desktop computer is dead, replaced by laptops which have lower TCO's and offer a better ROI. Apple would be wasting their time to build a mid-tower for this market as this market is small and getting much smaller.
What Apple really needs to compete in the corporate laptop market is a laptop dock. Most laptop users are sporting external monitors, mice, scanners, external storage and keyboards these days. Not having an easy way to hook and unhook all of that stuff twice a day is a deal killer.
Yes I can, thanks for asking!
What, you want more than that? Nevermind then, I use an abacus and carve my sales figures into stone tablets at the end of the day.
I specifically mentioned licensed handguns to lessen the statistics. The reality is, completely legal and licensed handguns are occasionally used to commit a crime. In fact, I think the number of licensed handguns that are used in crime are vastly underreported. It seems recently a number of high profile shootings involved licensed firearms - VA Tech, for example. So yes, it happens far more frequently than the average NRA fanboy would like to admit and my odds of being shot by a licensed handgun is greater than my odds of dying as a result of a terrorists actions.
While I am no radiochemist, I have to call bullshit on the "one atom" theory. My grandfather did gaseous diffusion work on the Manhattan Project. He has worked directly with weapons grade plutonium, uranium and copious amounts of cesium in his long lifetime and hasn't had any issues with any type of cancer. This would've been in the dark ages of radiochemistry when few precautions were taken for worker safety. The levels of exposure that his team experienced are probably thousands of times higher than the average human, yet many of them are still alive and quite healthy some 60 years later.
I understand HD output, I just don't see a true need for HD capacity storage in gaming. I should've been more clear in my post. I've read that a few PS3 titles have filled Blu-Ray discs to capacity, but I don't see the payoff in the content or playability. Meanwhile, games that fit on a paltry DVD are still quite good.
In the coming years, I think HD capacity storage will be necessary for gaming, but right now it isn't being used to its fullest and the teeming masses haven't seen the real payoff. Until the masses have the "Wow, that looks amazing"/HDTV/must-have realization, Microsoft has no need to bother going to Blu-Ray.
How many games on the market for either the PS3 or the 360 actually utilize the HD capabilities for gaming? Are there any yet? I think we are years away from HD gaming content becoming commonplace, in which case Microsoft could roll out Blu-Ray or whatever HD delivery spec is ideal in 4 or so years when they release their next gen device. Waiting it out might not be such a bad strategy for Microsoft and the Xbox team if they are viewing the current Xbox primarily as a gaming device and not a full-blown media hub.