I hear ya. Same for Satellite radio. Bought my first new car with one two months back and I was quite surprised to hear commercials on the non-native channels (Fox, CNN, etc).
Why would that surprise you? What did you expect, dead air? If they are rebroadcasting a channel that broadcasts 24 hours a day with commercials, it's awfully hard to fill 24 hours by skipping those commercials.
Wait... $40 million dollars, a quarter of which ($10 million) was advertising. The rest was $30 million dollars of which $0 went to Facebook (accounts are free). Where did the rest go, does it really take $30 million dollars of payroll expenses to have a couple of people post status updates and photos? I realize they probably had review teams, photographers, marketing folks, customer service, etc - but $30 million dollars seems absurd.
Doesn't Dish already pay licensing fees to the networks as well?
Exactly.
Dish pays millions of dollars a year to the networks for the "right" to carry their programs. If Dish completely cuts out commercials on every channel they carry, the networks still get money.
This would lead to higher costs, of course. Right now channels make money by selling retransmission rights and ad slots. They spend money by producing shows or licensing syndicated programs. If you remove some of the income but none of the expenditures, they'll no doubt raise prices to the cable and satellite firms, who guess what - will raise rates to you!
I've lost a few channels on DirecTV for short periods of time (a couple of weeks) while they fought over retransmission rights. I'm sure that's happened to Dish as well. Yes and Cablevision went at it very publically a few years ago. I think it's safe to say the channels will want higher fees from Dish, to offset the lower ad revenue once advertisers realize a few million potential customers no longer see their ads across the board on one carrier.
Someone will pay. Either Dish customers will routinely lose local channels during drawn out negotiations, or the cost of service will go up. But I doubt your local affiliate will just lie down and say "ok, it was fun while we made money off ads, have a good one...."
Cable companies are just distributors, not show producers, yet they're always referring to their pay-TV as a "product". How is that any different than pirates offering the same "product" as television without ads delivered over the Internet for free?
Other than this being Slashdot, I'm not sure why you are currently modded +4 Insightful, but probably because Cable companies are licensed distributors, paying and receiving retransmission rights. They in turn recoup their cost through charging the recipients, as well as some of the ads which are local slots, available for them to sell.
The pirates do none of that, they take something, strip out the ads, and redistribute it without permission. People like it, because it's free, but that doesn't make it the same as what cable companies do.
How quickly will students learn to game the system to get perfect scores with perfect gibberish?
Spammers with poor spelling and grammar figured out combinations of gibberish to get around Bayesian spam filtering, I can only imagine relatively smart students will figure out ways to beat the software in time. But hopefully, if people implement systems like this, there will be some checks and balances. Fear of receiving a '0' for a test coupled with having essays randomly graded (smaller numbers) and reviewed / skimmed quickly (larger numbers) ought to be a good start.
I work in the upgrades department, which means that people buy phones from me. I can tell you from personal experience, no one ever comes on the phone and asks "You got any of those windows phones?" My current ratio is 20 iphones for every 17 android devices to every 1 windows phone. Nobody buys them, and here's the reason: they're all inferior, by a long shot. HTC released the one series of phones a couple weeks back, android to the core. Where are the quad core phones for windows? I dont see them.
I'm not sure about your numbers. Besides being slightly anecdotal, you went from nobody wants Windows, to 1 in 38 want Windows. All joking aside, nobody is going to release a quad core phone for Windows, the OS isn't ready for it, and the spec doesn't call for it. Nokia is capable of slapping a better processor in a case, there's just really no reason to do so at this time.
Nobody in this thread said anything about being on the Internet through Compuserve in 1983, or indeed anything about the Internet whatsoever during that time frame. The claim was that CIS did not exist in 1983, which I refuted, albeit with a different name (but the Wikipedia page didn't date the name change and I can't be arsed to look it up at 3am). CIS, previously known as MicroNET, goes back further than 1983.
Actually the claim was that he didn't recall CompuServe in 1983. That's okay. I don't recall what I ate for dinner last week, but that doesn't mean I didn't have dinner.
I was online in 1983. It was CumpuServe and it really sucked. At 300 baud it was text-only and there was little there.
BBSes were better. They were 9600 baud and FREE!
I wasn't on the real internet until 1997. 33k modem, WOW What speed!
Man, it was primitive...
While our first modem was 300 baud, one of the first BBSes I connected to was 110 baud. My dad had a CompuServe account, but it was expensive, so he rarely let me use it. Later, I would buy $25 introductory kits to CompuServe in the book store, since the 5 hours free they came with were a bargain compared to the hourly rate. I'd get a new UID every 5 hours of use. I also remember they charged variable rates for awhile depending on connect speed, so I settled on a speed compromise, since the fastest available was too expensive, but I could read faster than 300 baud.
Soon, there were enough local BBSes with large file libraries, good conversations, and FidoNet that I could stay entertained without paying by the hour, and I usually ran a BBS myself as well. I did hang out on Prodigy years after that when it came out... till I got banned for joining the uproar over the email limit with the 25 cent charge for going above 30 messages sent in a month.
If you're buying plasma (LCD picture quality is crap in comparison), 3d is still double the price - or more, so no, it's not worth the extra $$$.
Perhaps that's all true. I'm quite happy with a $650 TV and a $80 sound bar. Looks great, sounds great. I am aware that $2500 TVs and $1000 surround sound systems probably sound better and look better.
I think the technology is definitely immature. The glasses is an issue and the content available today is kind of force-fed to showcase 3D for no good reason (wow factor). What ultimately is needed is some 3D that is just subtle enough to aid real vision, not the kind of 3D effect that you see a missile flying at you. I.e. when you are watching a football game in person, you don't actually see the linebacker jumping into you, or do you?
I recently went to a NHL game and for the first time in my life had 1st row seats. If not for the plexiglass, and it moved more than I thought it would, yes, actually, someone was about to jump into me. Ok, not jump, but be knocked into me by someone else shoving him with all his strength. Sports in 3D is actually rather fun.
Want some real advice? Do not buy a 3D tv. There's almost no content, the technology is immature, and the price will only go lower for better technology as time goes on.
Perhaps they are even cheaper now, but six months ago I got a 42" (needed a TV for the bedroom, didn't want/need bigger than 42") Vizio for $650, two pairs of cheap passive glasses in the box. Never bought more glasses, you can just keep the ones at the movie theater to add to your collection. While not wireless, I have Ethernet handy in that spot, and it even does Pandora, Netflix, etc. Even today, looking at non-3D prices it's hardly a premium. Is there a ton of content? Who cares, it's absurd to think it would double, triple or quadruple over the next couple of years. Don't go buy a 3D TV just to buy one, but if you need a TV, there's no reason not to consider them. And ESPN 3D has been quite enjoyable, as have the few BluRays I've played with, DirecTV has a few other offerings besides ESPN, and Vudu rentals are hardly a fortune.
BTW - this guy is no expert.
Alfred has a fairly extensive history in the business. PS: You're probably no expert either. Heck, I'm certainly no expert.
So Apple's bill of materials went up 6% expressed as a fraction of selling price. That translates to roughly $38 extra cost against Apple's gross margin of $319. That is 12% profit decrease. So Apple needs a 12% increase in volume just to stay flat. And with Apple's stratospheric stock price, breaking even is nowhere near good enough. See what I mean? This is already heading in the direction of Apple as a shrink stock, even faster than I expected.
Let's see:
3Q 2010 - 3.27 million sold. 4Q 2010 - 4.19 million sold. (28% increase) 1Q 2011 - 7.33 million sold. (75% increase) 2Q 2011 - 4.69 million sold. (64% decrease) 3Q 2011 - 9.25 million sold. (97% increase quarter over quarter, 182% year over year)) 4Q 2011 - 11.12 million sold. (20% increase quarter over quarter, 165% year over year) 1Q 2012 - 15.43 million sold. (39% increase quarter over quarter, 111% year over year)
With 2Q 2011 widely attributed to supply chain issues (a problem they rarely have), I suspect they may cover your 12% increase. A casual glance at the 2-3 week backorder delay on new orders of iPads, it would seem the continuation of tens of millions of iPads being made, can't make them fast enough is continuing.
The iPod scaled similarly, with huge gains. Once it saturated the market, it began to decrease, but by then, replacement products were already on a meteoric rise, specifically the iPhone and iPad.
I think the market for tablets is neither saturated, nor is the iPad the last product Apple thinks it will ever have to produce. I'm sure their people are already working on concepts for future products. All throughout this, the Mac laptop business has been steadily increasing as well.
Will their stock ever dip? Probably. Is it imminent? No, of course not.
...customers may well find their libraries vanishing, and what copies they have unplayable with the DRM servers disappeared. It wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened.
Excellent point! Although for me, DIVX worked out great! I bought a DIVX player on sale late into the experiment (just before they canned the whole thing) for about $40 more than a non-DIVX player. I paid for one rental, out of curiosity. Then they killed it all and sent me $100.
The recommended donation (according to shortformblog) is $2 for 15 minutes of Wi-Fi access, but BBH Labs says it’s officially pay-what-you-wish. Whatever is paid goes to the homeless MiFi manager — either directly if you pay cash, or every two weeks if you use PayPal.
Right after that paragraph is:
Here is a video of Clarence, one of the Homeless Hotspots managers in Austin, explaining how the program works:
The recommended donation (according to shortformblog) is $2 for 15 minutes of Wi-Fi access, but BBH Labs says it’s officially pay-what-you-wish. Whatever is paid goes to the homeless MiFi manager — either directly if you pay cash, or every two weeks if you use PayPal.
They call them "MiFi Managers", and apparently, if you read the article, you'll note they do give them the proceeds. You can also donate on the BBH web site directly, that funds their shelter, but when you hand cash to the homeless "MiFi Manager" or donate via Paypal to that same person, they get the proceeds. Every two weeks via PayPal, and immediately via cash.
That's nice but irrelevant as I never mentioned your laptop.
You mentioned "a laptop", which either means laptops in general, which is obviously false, as many cost more, or perhaps you meant your laptop. And I suspect most people care about the cost of your laptop about as much as you care about the cost of mine.
So don't buy a Bluetooth keyboard or plug a USB keyboard into the Camera Connection Kit, and don't get a compatible wireless printer (or download an app that makes every printer compatible). If you don't get any of that stuff, you can still complain that it doesn't do any of that stuff.
While I'll likely stick to Aperture, the fact is, iPhoto on the iPad now appears to have more functionality than it's Mac counterpart. Aside from once when I needed support for tracking revisions in a Word document someone had sent, iWork has always done just fine for simple documents. GarageBand is wasted on me, as would be Autodesk, but that's not iPads fault, it's my lack of musical and artistic abilities. iMovie works just fine for editing 2 minutes of video of my kids, and I always have the ability to transfer video back to the Mac if i needed something more.
Has my iPad replaced owning a laptop? Heck no. But it has replaced it on several trips, I just don't always need it. You can create plenty of content, but no, of course it's not the one device to replace everything. I still have TVs in the house, cell phones in the pocket and laptops in the bag.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear ya. Same for Satellite radio. Bought my first new car with one two months back and I was quite surprised to hear commercials on the non-native channels (Fox, CNN, etc).
Why would that surprise you? What did you expect, dead air? If they are rebroadcasting a channel that broadcasts 24 hours a day with commercials, it's awfully hard to fill 24 hours by skipping those commercials.
I think you are confusing Motorola with General Motors.
Yeah. I hate GM, but I'd LOVE their page for a car.
Wait... $40 million dollars, a quarter of which ($10 million) was advertising. The rest was $30 million dollars of which $0 went to Facebook (accounts are free). Where did the rest go, does it really take $30 million dollars of payroll expenses to have a couple of people post status updates and photos? I realize they probably had review teams, photographers, marketing folks, customer service, etc - but $30 million dollars seems absurd.
Doesn't Dish already pay licensing fees to the networks as well?
Exactly.
Dish pays millions of dollars a year to the networks for the "right" to carry their programs. If Dish completely cuts out commercials on every channel they carry, the networks still get money.
This would lead to higher costs, of course. Right now channels make money by selling retransmission rights and ad slots. They spend money by producing shows or licensing syndicated programs. If you remove some of the income but none of the expenditures, they'll no doubt raise prices to the cable and satellite firms, who guess what - will raise rates to you!
I've lost a few channels on DirecTV for short periods of time (a couple of weeks) while they fought over retransmission rights. I'm sure that's happened to Dish as well. Yes and Cablevision went at it very publically a few years ago. I think it's safe to say the channels will want higher fees from Dish, to offset the lower ad revenue once advertisers realize a few million potential customers no longer see their ads across the board on one carrier.
Someone will pay. Either Dish customers will routinely lose local channels during drawn out negotiations, or the cost of service will go up. But I doubt your local affiliate will just lie down and say "ok, it was fun while we made money off ads, have a good one...."
Cable companies are just distributors, not show producers, yet they're always referring to their pay-TV as a "product". How is that any different than pirates offering the same "product" as television without ads delivered over the Internet for free?
Other than this being Slashdot, I'm not sure why you are currently modded +4 Insightful, but probably because Cable companies are licensed distributors, paying and receiving retransmission rights. They in turn recoup their cost through charging the recipients, as well as some of the ads which are local slots, available for them to sell.
The pirates do none of that, they take something, strip out the ads, and redistribute it without permission. People like it, because it's free, but that doesn't make it the same as what cable companies do.
I'm sure the carriers will just love this and push windows phones even harder in their stores.
Yeah. They will push other phones, without Skype. Oh wait...
How quickly will students learn to game the system to get perfect scores with perfect gibberish?
Spammers with poor spelling and grammar figured out combinations of gibberish to get around Bayesian spam filtering, I can only imagine relatively smart students will figure out ways to beat the software in time. But hopefully, if people implement systems like this, there will be some checks and balances. Fear of receiving a '0' for a test coupled with having essays randomly graded (smaller numbers) and reviewed / skimmed quickly (larger numbers) ought to be a good start.
Not every "creed" or political system is a religion. There are plenty of liberal Christians for instance.
Jesus was fairly liberal for His time.
I work in the upgrades department, which means that people buy phones from me. I can tell you from personal experience, no one ever comes on the phone and asks "You got any of those windows phones?" My current ratio is 20 iphones for every 17 android devices to every 1 windows phone. Nobody buys them, and here's the reason: they're all inferior, by a long shot. HTC released the one series of phones a couple weeks back, android to the core. Where are the quad core phones for windows? I dont see them.
I'm not sure about your numbers. Besides being slightly anecdotal, you went from nobody wants Windows, to 1 in 38 want Windows. All joking aside, nobody is going to release a quad core phone for Windows, the OS isn't ready for it, and the spec doesn't call for it. Nokia is capable of slapping a better processor in a case, there's just really no reason to do so at this time.
Nobody in this thread said anything about being on the Internet through Compuserve in 1983, or indeed anything about the Internet whatsoever during that time frame. The claim was that CIS did not exist in 1983, which I refuted, albeit with a different name (but the Wikipedia page didn't date the name change and I can't be arsed to look it up at 3am). CIS, previously known as MicroNET, goes back further than 1983.
Actually the claim was that he didn't recall CompuServe in 1983. That's okay. I don't recall what I ate for dinner last week, but that doesn't mean I didn't have dinner.
What about my group? I didn't grow up with computers, Computers grew up with me.
I was online in 1983. It was CumpuServe and it really sucked. At 300 baud it was text-only and there was little there.
BBSes were better. They were 9600 baud and FREE!
I wasn't on the real internet until 1997. 33k modem, WOW What speed!
Man, it was primitive...
While our first modem was 300 baud, one of the first BBSes I connected to was 110 baud. My dad had a CompuServe account, but it was expensive, so he rarely let me use it. Later, I would buy $25 introductory kits to CompuServe in the book store, since the 5 hours free they came with were a bargain compared to the hourly rate. I'd get a new UID every 5 hours of use. I also remember they charged variable rates for awhile depending on connect speed, so I settled on a speed compromise, since the fastest available was too expensive, but I could read faster than 300 baud.
Soon, there were enough local BBSes with large file libraries, good conversations, and FidoNet that I could stay entertained without paying by the hour, and I usually ran a BBS myself as well. I did hang out on Prodigy years after that when it came out... till I got banned for joining the uproar over the email limit with the 25 cent charge for going above 30 messages sent in a month.
If you're buying plasma (LCD picture quality is crap in comparison), 3d is still double the price - or more, so no, it's not worth the extra $$$.
Perhaps that's all true. I'm quite happy with a $650 TV and a $80 sound bar. Looks great, sounds great. I am aware that $2500 TVs and $1000 surround sound systems probably sound better and look better.
I think the technology is definitely immature. The glasses is an issue and the content available today is kind of force-fed to showcase 3D for no good reason (wow factor). What ultimately is needed is some 3D that is just subtle enough to aid real vision, not the kind of 3D effect that you see a missile flying at you. I.e. when you are watching a football game in person, you don't actually see the linebacker jumping into you, or do you?
I recently went to a NHL game and for the first time in my life had 1st row seats. If not for the plexiglass, and it moved more than I thought it would, yes, actually, someone was about to jump into me. Ok, not jump, but be knocked into me by someone else shoving him with all his strength. Sports in 3D is actually rather fun.
Want some real advice? Do not buy a 3D tv. There's almost no content, the technology is immature, and the price will only go lower for better technology as time goes on.
Perhaps they are even cheaper now, but six months ago I got a 42" (needed a TV for the bedroom, didn't want/need bigger than 42") Vizio for $650, two pairs of cheap passive glasses in the box. Never bought more glasses, you can just keep the ones at the movie theater to add to your collection. While not wireless, I have Ethernet handy in that spot, and it even does Pandora, Netflix, etc. Even today, looking at non-3D prices it's hardly a premium. Is there a ton of content? Who cares, it's absurd to think it would double, triple or quadruple over the next couple of years. Don't go buy a 3D TV just to buy one, but if you need a TV, there's no reason not to consider them. And ESPN 3D has been quite enjoyable, as have the few BluRays I've played with, DirecTV has a few other offerings besides ESPN, and Vudu rentals are hardly a fortune.
BTW - this guy is no expert.
Alfred has a fairly extensive history in the business. PS: You're probably no expert either. Heck, I'm certainly no expert.
So Apple's bill of materials went up 6% expressed as a fraction of selling price. That translates to roughly $38 extra cost against Apple's gross margin of $319. That is 12% profit decrease. So Apple needs a 12% increase in volume just to stay flat. And with Apple's stratospheric stock price, breaking even is nowhere near good enough. See what I mean? This is already heading in the direction of Apple as a shrink stock, even faster than I expected.
Let's see:
3Q 2010 - 3.27 million sold.
4Q 2010 - 4.19 million sold. (28% increase)
1Q 2011 - 7.33 million sold. (75% increase)
2Q 2011 - 4.69 million sold. (64% decrease)
3Q 2011 - 9.25 million sold. (97% increase quarter over quarter, 182% year over year))
4Q 2011 - 11.12 million sold. (20% increase quarter over quarter, 165% year over year)
1Q 2012 - 15.43 million sold. (39% increase quarter over quarter, 111% year over year)
With 2Q 2011 widely attributed to supply chain issues (a problem they rarely have), I suspect they may cover your 12% increase. A casual glance at the 2-3 week backorder delay on new orders of iPads, it would seem the continuation of tens of millions of iPads being made, can't make them fast enough is continuing.
The iPod scaled similarly, with huge gains. Once it saturated the market, it began to decrease, but by then, replacement products were already on a meteoric rise, specifically the iPhone and iPad.
I think the market for tablets is neither saturated, nor is the iPad the last product Apple thinks it will ever have to produce. I'm sure their people are already working on concepts for future products. All throughout this, the Mac laptop business has been steadily increasing as well.
Will their stock ever dip? Probably. Is it imminent? No, of course not.
...customers may well find their libraries vanishing, and what copies they have unplayable with the DRM servers disappeared. It wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened.
Indeed.
Excellent point! Although for me, DIVX worked out great! I bought a DIVX player on sale late into the experiment (just before they canned the whole thing) for about $40 more than a non-DIVX player. I paid for one rental, out of curiosity. Then they killed it all and sent me $100.
without looking fooling.
Personally, I refuse to looking fooling wherever possible.
Bad click on moderating. Posting to undo. Sorry!
homeless guy ... on eBay
Um, what?
Hey... he already has 4G Internet access... he's just one iPad short of being able to do that!
The recommended donation (according to shortformblog) is $2 for 15 minutes of Wi-Fi access, but BBH Labs says it’s officially pay-what-you-wish. Whatever is paid goes to the homeless MiFi manager — either directly if you pay cash, or every two weeks if you use PayPal.
Right after that paragraph is:
Here is a video of Clarence, one of the Homeless Hotspots managers in Austin, explaining how the program works:
Also if you visit their home page you'll see:
All proceeds paid for access go directly to the person selling you access. This is a form of income for them.
The recommended donation (according to shortformblog) is $2 for 15 minutes of Wi-Fi access, but BBH Labs says it’s officially pay-what-you-wish. Whatever is paid goes to the homeless MiFi manager — either directly if you pay cash, or every two weeks if you use PayPal.
They call them "MiFi Managers", and apparently, if you read the article, you'll note they do give them the proceeds. You can also donate on the BBH web site directly, that funds their shelter, but when you hand cash to the homeless "MiFi Manager" or donate via Paypal to that same person, they get the proceeds. Every two weeks via PayPal, and immediately via cash.
That's nice but irrelevant as I never mentioned your laptop.
You mentioned "a laptop", which either means laptops in general, which is obviously false, as many cost more, or perhaps you meant your laptop. And I suspect most people care about the cost of your laptop about as much as you care about the cost of mine.
I want a keyboard and USB and printing and...
So don't buy a Bluetooth keyboard or plug a USB keyboard into the Camera Connection Kit, and don't get a compatible wireless printer (or download an app that makes every printer compatible). If you don't get any of that stuff, you can still complain that it doesn't do any of that stuff.
While I'll likely stick to Aperture, the fact is, iPhoto on the iPad now appears to have more functionality than it's Mac counterpart. Aside from once when I needed support for tracking revisions in a Word document someone had sent, iWork has always done just fine for simple documents. GarageBand is wasted on me, as would be Autodesk, but that's not iPads fault, it's my lack of musical and artistic abilities. iMovie works just fine for editing 2 minutes of video of my kids, and I always have the ability to transfer video back to the Mac if i needed something more.
Has my iPad replaced owning a laptop? Heck no. But it has replaced it on several trips, I just don't always need it. You can create plenty of content, but no, of course it's not the one device to replace everything. I still have TVs in the house, cell phones in the pocket and laptops in the bag.