the average long term cost to all consumers who subscribe has to be at least equal to the costs of having the station exist, so the cost to each individual is lower the more people there are to distribute those overhead costs with. If the station can't cover its overhead in the long run then it will not exist.
This is correct, and yet misses the point.
The production costs of the station are not related to what consumers will pay for the station. The supply is essentially infinite once the channel is on the network the cost to the network is the same whether they have no subscribers or all of them. The demand is elastic, ranging from 0 to the number of households in the market.
The a la carte, price, as I said, will be the revenue maximizing price for the market, and it has no bearing on what the channel costs to produce.
Now your are right that if that isn't enough revenue for the channel, the channel goes away. But there is no escaping that. If they raise the price to try and keep producting the channel, they'll LOSE even more money -- because we started out with revenue maximizing price. Raising the price will cost subscribers faster then the revenue will increase. So the station is boned, (unless it can reduce its production costs, or reprogramm to attract a wider market).
I am confident the revenue maximizing price for a niche channel is going to be low. You'll grab 10s of thousands of people who will say "yeah whatever for $.25 cents" than you will get from the 20 die hards who will pay $2000/mo for the "gameshows from the 70s".
Whereas with ESPN, the revenue maximizing price might well be up around 10 or 20 or 30$ with the large majority of households buying in.
However, if a popular channel like ESPN tried to raise its price very high [...]
Fair enough. But even so the equilibrium price for ESPN will be far higher than 70s-gameshows.
The exception is foreign language/foreign market channels. These do tend to be very high a la carte, but the same revenue maximizing applies -- the demand there is both small AND relatively inelastic. Even though it has a small viewership, lowering the price of the greek channel won't substantially increase its market.
Reality is that the supply of ESPN and crappy channel are both unlimited once the channel is 'added' to the network, so the a la carte price is what the market will bear -- ie what is highest price they can charge for it where charging more will lose them more subscribers than the extra revenue will cover.
For a channel like ESPN, they can raise the price pretty high and lots of people will continue to pony up to keep getting it. For a channel like "gameshow reruns from the 70s"... not so much so it will be much much lower.
A lot of places are very wary of the GPL. Especially GPLv3.
And the wariness is unfounded ignorant FUD. That's my point. I don't disagree with you that many places are very wary, but its generally ridiculous.
Other licenses, like BSD, Apache, MIT, no problem - those tend to sail through the legal license audit easily. They even went out to say no new GPL code would be accepted - look for alternatives.
For code going into anything you are going to release as proprietary this makes perfect sense. The GPL stuff won't be usable, so there no point looking at it.
Oh, and by codebase, that includes the tools as well. Because some tools emit code, or otherwise touch code, and it's better to be safe than sorry.
Has anyone ever "been sorry"? Ever? I mean, is there really an actual example of someone using a GPL tool to work on their project that released GPL code, that wasn't completely obvious to anyone with a shred of common sense?
Because this argument has always seemed like FUD to me.
Me personally, I release code under the 3-clause BSD or GPLv2. I don't agree with the GPLv3
I respect that, but I don't agree with tivoization either or people doing an end run around the community intent by providing SaaS etc; so I think GPLv3 and AGPL have their place and are appropriate responses.
And I guess Crytek feels the same - they don't mind anyone using it, just not locking it up under the GPL.
Well, the MIT license is GPL compatible. So anyone can link it to GPL code and release it as GPL.
I've got nothing against BSD or MIT
The GPL is intended for developers who want to share their work, and have other people who benefited from it share their work back.
The MIT/BSD/Apache licenses are for developers who don't need or care about that reciprocity.
Whilst it might not be for everyone, here I am sitting at my PC looking at my Computer Science books (purchased between 1995 and 1998)
I've referred to my calculus text several times over the years, along with my discrete and combinatorial mathematics stuff.
For CS specifically, I've got a big white Algorithms and data structures book, "A book on C", a couple on relational databases and relational calculus, and a book on design patterns, and a book on complexity theory I've referred to.
Sure I recently sent my "Event driven programming in Windows 95" and a book I had on Red Hat Linux (think it was for v3?) to the recyler but the majority of my actual text books I still consider valuable, especially the theoretical stuff.
A lot of AAA development houses (including the one I work for) have a no-GPL policy for game engine code (you can only use in tools and then you still have to be careful).
And this is a debugger. So what are you on about? Do you normally ship the debugger with your game?
have a no-GPL policy for game engine code
Well duh. If you don't want to release a GPL product, you don't want to incorporate GPL code in it since you don't have permission to release it under a proprietary license.
But that's true of all 3rd party code -- you need to vet and document that you have licensing for all of it, to redistribute it in the manner you wish to redistribute it. GPL is easy because its one license and the terms are simple (and if you want to release a proprietary license its trivial -- the answer is don't use it). But the proprietary libraries you might use with your code -- those are a lot more work to sort out; as each one has its own payment structure -- some want per unit royalties, others are sold in tiers, others are buy-once-and-forget, others are priced differently based on the size of your development team, or whether its commercial or non-commercial or research use, some are licensed to your company for all products you release while others are licensed per "product you release"... and on and on. Proprietary code is the labyrinth -- the GPL is dead simple.
(you can only use in tools and then you still have to be careful).
Careful how? Because if you use 7-zip or Notepad++ you'll somehow not be able to release your game? Do you worry obsessively about using Microsoft Excel or Visual Studio or Photoshop? Because you can't ship any of that with your game either.
I never said they couldn't be. I merely said that if playing Eve thrills you, its the abstract ideas doing it, because the actual game itself is tedious and boring, even in the middle of the biggest space battle in the history of the game.
Nothing wrong with getting wrapped up in the excitement and tension of the Eve metagame -- but its unfortunate that anyone has to suffer with playing Eve to enjoy it. And really, when I last played it, or other games where all the real excitement is in the metagame... Travian comes to mind for example. I discovered playing the game itself was a chore; and it was actually more fun to play entirely in the meta-game.
And in fact I'd expect that some of the most influential eve "players" don't actually play. They live completely on the meta game -- strategy, planning, negotiations. They leave the tedium of actually mining, shipping, manufacturing, fighting, and otherwise actually playing Eve to the "peons".;)
As for the fantasy iPad Nintendo clone. Not going to happen. Why would they downgrade their offering to cater to the "Too cool for Nintendo" crowd?
They could rake in the cash though by supporting android games. Even if they didn't allow access to the play store, but just opened up their store to the same content and pricing, and made their indie dev process that friendly.
Then all those ipad games that are eating into their market would be 3ds games giving them a 30% cut. I think a lot of the best selling games for android would re-release in a nintendo store if it were easier for the devs.
Add in youtube support, messengers that send send / receive messages to other platforms, and the kids won't need or want a tablet.
AI War, Monaco, Limbo, Machinarium, Botanicula, Giana Sisters, Spelunky, Sword of the Stars: The Pit, Hotline Miami, Organ Trail, Defense Grid, Terraria
Any battle where supercaps explode is a thrill. death2allsupercaps
See "explode" conjures images of force violent and sudden -- when it happens in agnonizing slo-motion time dilation with high latency and framerates in the single digits the "explosion"...like the participation itself are more abstract ideas than visceral.
Oh i dunno... there is still a niche for 6 to 12 year old kids before they merit getting a phone. Right now tablets are eating heavily into that niche... but the right device could still find a home.
A handheld gaming tablet from nintendo... ipad form factor + some physical controls + a cart slot ? I don't know N would need to allow it to load and play android games or soemthing though to really hit a home run... and that's not really in their corporate culture. But for them to hold off the tablets they need to let go of their iron fist over the store; and the high prices.
People will still drop $40 bucks for a new Pokemon title; and add the Play store to the 3DS XL and my kids wouldn't even care about ipads.
Ah, so your saying you just don't need your cell phone to be able to make calls, not that you don't ever need to make calls.
I guess that's fair.
The only scenarios i can think of where 'cellphone calls' are really necessary over 'regular phones':
driving - pretty easy to take or make a handsfree call. Virtually impossible to do the same via text. But arguably even handsfree calls should be eliminated.
emergencys - I'd hate have to try and text someone to get a locksmith or a towtruck or to report a robbery-in-progress, or what have you, and locating a landline in these cases isn't always viable. In theory, there's nothing preventing these sorts of things to be done via apps and texts etc... but its not quite here yet.
Well, yeah but that's only because with the VLA you're paying a lot extra for a lot less insane license key management compared to the retail version. They've made license key management for retail copies essentially impossible, it's that impractical and why people pay more per unit for a VLA.
This.
And that's I think why I find it SO offensive. I'm paying extra, like close to double, for the same damned thing simply to avoid 'license key management' grief.
But I'm buying in volume; its a VLA; and usually buying in volume gives you a price break, but in the case of Microsoft Office -- not so.
If I'm looking to buy 100 users of MS Office in a VLA for a small/medium office it should not cost twice as much as buying 100 boxes of MS Office Home and Business at BestBuy. Yes, I benefit from the VLA key and ease of license management, but I shouldn't be paying twice as much for that, if anything it should be CHEAPER, especially when I'm looking to hand you tens of thousands in licensing in one transaction.
She has an iPad, but wanted to write docs and track cases for her local hobby group (ghost-hunting).
Depending on how much writing she's doing - an ipad with a wireless keyboard would be sufficient.
Not that I'm disparaging your use of Linux -- I'm just making the point that most home users that can switch to linux can switch to a tablet instead (and for most of them its probably the smarter move -- nartually as your wife has linux expertise living in the house it works fine for you.
Basically though tablets are killing any chance for a home linux-desktop-in-the-home revolution... because a few years ago the idea was... "If all you do is facebook, and gmail, and twitter, and youtube... hey you don't need windows you can get linux. And that's true... but if that's all you do you don't need a computer anymore either.
I already had a Windows 7 install disk (well,.iso - I ripped it years ago), so no cost there really. As for the rest, my use case is highly atypical (hence the "but it works well for me." bit.)
Windows 7 isos aren't the tricky part. Windows 7 licenses are. And unless you happened to own an otherwise unused FULL RETAIL license of Windows 7 your usage, strictly speaking, is in violation of the license agreement.
The OEM sticker on your (I'm taking a guess here) previous windows 7 laptop technically isn't transferable to a vm on your new Mac.
So your solution, to do it legit, requires a retail license purchase of windows 7, which is usually upwards of $250 for the pro version.
...err, not really. I mean, seriously - my missus looked at the same situation and decided that she really didn't need Windows for anything.
In my recent experience most "home" users who can make the switch to linux can probably switch to a tablet, and forego a computer entirely.
For my own new laptop, I found my own slightly costlier solution, but it works well for me. It has been working like a champ for almost year now, in spite of the abuse I regularly give it (which is, so far, longer than most laptops hold up under my not-so-tender mercies.) I keep Windows 7 around on a VMWare Fusion partition, but that's about it.
So your solution to the windows 7 vs windows 8 price dilemma was to buy a Mac with OSX, then bought VMWare Fusion, and then bought Windows 7 anyway?
I routinely engage in 5 minute phone calls that would take hours to resolve via text messaging.
I like email and text as much as anyone, but the speed and efficiency of two-way information transfer over either is far lower than a voice call -- even if the voice call does force both parties to engage simultaneously in realtime.
I prefer to do as much as I can via email etc myself, because i prefer the written record, and the asynchronous nature -- but to suggest a voice call is unnecessary completely, ever, is ridiculous to me.
Yes, from win95 thru winxp it was standard practice anytime windows shat itself. In fact, it was standard practice for many to reinstall windows from scratch once are year just to head off it completely shitting itself.
It really depends on the software. Windows itself, negligible.
Yeah, provided you are buying PCs with it installed OEM, and you time your migration to the hardware refresh cycle its not even something to think about.
Office, not much more.
See... I find Office VLAs stupidly expensive for what it is: Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Outlook; Software Assurance is bonkers on top of that, and I hate dealing with VARs instead of directly with MS (or just doing it via the bloody website) on top of that. And now Office 365... I HATE subscription access.
What? I like Stella on a hot day. Its a light crisp lager that's readily available... I'm sure its not to everyone's taste but its not unequivocably bad.
I mean... I could have said "Bud Light Lime Mojito".
A gold coin in your pocket, or a record in a database, either way you have ownership of a thing of value.
That's true, but the gold coin's value (as a useful industrial metal) is intrinsic. Its value as a currency unit is extrinsic.
The record in the database only has extrinsic value, and no intrinsic value.
Your "ownership" of a thing isn't related to a things intrinsic value in any way. Ownership is an extrinsic value by definition, since it assigned externally from the thing and is not part of its nature.
The thing has the intrinsic value - a thing such as a factory.
A stock is not a factory though. It is, as you say, merely a 'record of ownership'.
Sure, the record of ownership isn't what has the value, but the thing owned. Naturally.
Right. The thing has intrinsic value, the stock does not. I get what you are arguing I think, but the level of abstraction or indirection makes it inappropriate to call it "intrinsic value" -- intrinsic value is defined as the value unto itself, without any external consideration that gives it value.
But without some concept of ownership, the concept of intrinsic value is a curiosity at best.
Aha. No. Intrinsic value is entirely unrelated to ownership; and doubly so when considering abstract "ownership" vs actual "possession".
So if you think gold has intrinsic value (I don't, really, but it's a good example)
Gold has intrinsic value in so far as it is a "useful industrial metal" - conductive, malleable, non-corrosive -- those are intrinsic properties or values of gold.
then the difference between a gold coin and a share of GLD is a minor one of logistics
You are effectively saying a chicken sandwich, and an IOU ("I-owe-you") for a chicken sandwich from someone reliable that you trust is the same thing.
You can eat a chicken sandwich and your hunger will be satisfied... you can't eat the IOU. The IOU itself doesn't have intrinsic nutritional value; you can collect on it for an actual chicken sandwich at some point, but an IOU is not a chicken sandwich. A share of GLD is an IOU.
The phrase "intrinsic value" applies to the thing, always, never to the "thing the thing can be exchanged for or is representative of"... because that's not "intrinsic value" anymore.
That's extrinsic value.
An IOU for a sandwich has extrinsic value -- the verbal debt implied by the IOU has no intrinsic value, but the customs and conventions surrounding IOUs give that verbal agreement extrinsic value -- we externally assign it the value of a chicken sandwich.
Likewise the share of GLD is nothing but an IOU, the legal constructs and government force behind the agreement gives that IOU a practical equivalence to a 10th oz. of gold less an administrative cost or whatever it is exactly, but that value equivalence is extrinsic.
We assign that value it to the share extrinsically, it is not intrinsic to the share.
Why? Is Bud light lime mojito really better from a glass?:p
-shudder-
But in all seriousness, I agree with you about the glass most of the time for most beer, but outside on a hot day I don't think there is anything wrong with a cold Corona or Stella from the bottle.
Slashdot Mirror
the average long term cost to all consumers who subscribe has to be at least equal to the costs of having the station exist, so the cost to each individual is lower the more people there are to distribute those overhead costs with. If the station can't cover its overhead in the long run then it will not exist.
This is correct, and yet misses the point.
The production costs of the station are not related to what consumers will pay for the station. The supply is essentially infinite once the channel is on the network the cost to the network is the same whether they have no subscribers or all of them. The demand is elastic, ranging from 0 to the number of households in the market.
The a la carte, price, as I said, will be the revenue maximizing price for the market, and it has no bearing on what the channel costs to produce.
Now your are right that if that isn't enough revenue for the channel, the channel goes away. But there is no escaping that. If they raise the price to try and keep producting the channel, they'll LOSE even more money -- because we started out with revenue maximizing price. Raising the price will cost subscribers faster then the revenue will increase. So the station is boned, (unless it can reduce its production costs, or reprogramm to attract a wider market).
I am confident the revenue maximizing price for a niche channel is going to be low. You'll grab 10s of thousands of people who will say "yeah whatever for $.25 cents" than you will get from the 20 die hards who will pay $2000/mo for the "gameshows from the 70s".
Whereas with ESPN, the revenue maximizing price might well be up around 10 or 20 or 30$ with the large majority of households buying in.
However, if a popular channel like ESPN tried to raise its price very high [...]
Fair enough. But even so the equilibrium price for ESPN will be far higher than 70s-gameshows.
The exception is foreign language/foreign market channels. These do tend to be very high a la carte, but the same revenue maximizing applies -- the demand there is both small AND relatively inelastic. Even though it has a small viewership, lowering the price of the greek channel won't substantially increase its market.
Honestly, I think both are crapping in the bed, and refuse to buy either. The exclusives are largely just uncreative re-hashes.
Meanwhile, IMO, the PC is going through a bit of a gaming golden age right now.
That is an overly simplistic analysis.
Reality is that the supply of ESPN and crappy channel are both unlimited once the channel is 'added' to the network, so the a la carte price is what the market will bear -- ie what is highest price they can charge for it where charging more will lose them more subscribers than the extra revenue will cover.
For a channel like ESPN, they can raise the price pretty high and lots of people will continue to pony up to keep getting it. For a channel like "gameshow reruns from the 70s"... not so much so it will be much much lower.
Yeah, because nobody's ever had a distro upgrade fail on them ever in the history of linux. Pinhead.
A lot of places are very wary of the GPL. Especially GPLv3.
And the wariness is unfounded ignorant FUD. That's my point. I don't disagree with you that many places are very wary, but its generally ridiculous.
Other licenses, like BSD, Apache, MIT, no problem - those tend to sail through the legal license audit easily. They even went out to say no new GPL code would be accepted - look for alternatives.
For code going into anything you are going to release as proprietary this makes perfect sense. The GPL stuff won't be usable, so there no point looking at it.
Oh, and by codebase, that includes the tools as well. Because some tools emit code, or otherwise touch code, and it's better to be safe than sorry.
Has anyone ever "been sorry"? Ever? I mean, is there really an actual example of someone using a GPL tool to work on their project that released GPL code, that wasn't completely obvious to anyone with a shred of common sense?
Because this argument has always seemed like FUD to me.
Me personally, I release code under the 3-clause BSD or GPLv2. I don't agree with the GPLv3
I respect that, but I don't agree with tivoization either or people doing an end run around the community intent by providing SaaS etc; so I think GPLv3 and AGPL have their place and are appropriate responses.
And I guess Crytek feels the same - they don't mind anyone using it, just not locking it up under the GPL.
Well, the MIT license is GPL compatible. So anyone can link it to GPL code and release it as GPL.
I've got nothing against BSD or MIT
The GPL is intended for developers who want to share their work, and have other people who benefited from it share their work back.
The MIT/BSD/Apache licenses are for developers who don't need or care about that reciprocity.
Nothing "wrong" with either.
Whilst it might not be for everyone, here I am sitting at my PC looking at my Computer Science books (purchased between 1995 and 1998)
I've referred to my calculus text several times over the years, along with my discrete and combinatorial mathematics stuff.
For CS specifically, I've got a big white Algorithms and data structures book, "A book on C", a couple on relational databases and relational calculus, and a book on design patterns, and a book on complexity theory I've referred to.
Sure I recently sent my "Event driven programming in Windows 95" and a book I had on Red Hat Linux (think it was for v3?) to the recyler but the majority of my actual text books I still consider valuable, especially the theoretical stuff.
A lot of AAA development houses (including the one I work for) have a no-GPL policy for game engine code (you can only use in tools and then you still have to be careful).
And this is a debugger. So what are you on about? Do you normally ship the debugger with your game?
have a no-GPL policy for game engine code
Well duh. If you don't want to release a GPL product, you don't want to incorporate GPL code in it since you don't have permission to release it under a proprietary license.
But that's true of all 3rd party code -- you need to vet and document that you have licensing for all of it, to redistribute it in the manner you wish to redistribute it. GPL is easy because its one license and the terms are simple (and if you want to release a proprietary license its trivial -- the answer is don't use it). But the proprietary libraries you might use with your code -- those are a lot more work to sort out; as each one has its own payment structure -- some want per unit royalties, others are sold in tiers, others are buy-once-and-forget, others are priced differently based on the size of your development team, or whether its commercial or non-commercial or research use, some are licensed to your company for all products you release while others are licensed per "product you release"... and on and on. Proprietary code is the labyrinth -- the GPL is dead simple.
(you can only use in tools and then you still have to be careful).
Careful how? Because if you use 7-zip or Notepad++ you'll somehow not be able to release your game? Do you worry obsessively about using Microsoft Excel or Visual Studio or Photoshop? Because you can't ship any of that with your game either.
I never said they couldn't be. I merely said that if playing Eve thrills you, its the abstract ideas doing it, because the actual game itself is tedious and boring, even in the middle of the biggest space battle in the history of the game.
Nothing wrong with getting wrapped up in the excitement and tension of the Eve metagame -- but its unfortunate that anyone has to suffer with playing Eve to enjoy it. And really, when I last played it, or other games where all the real excitement is in the metagame... Travian comes to mind for example. I discovered playing the game itself was a chore; and it was actually more fun to play entirely in the meta-game.
And in fact I'd expect that some of the most influential eve "players" don't actually play. They live completely on the meta game -- strategy, planning, negotiations. They leave the tedium of actually mining, shipping, manufacturing, fighting, and otherwise actually playing Eve to the "peons". ;)
As for the fantasy iPad Nintendo clone. Not going to happen. Why would they downgrade their offering to cater to the "Too cool for Nintendo" crowd?
They could rake in the cash though by supporting android games. Even if they didn't allow access to the play store, but just opened up their store to the same content and pricing, and made their indie dev process that friendly.
Then all those ipad games that are eating into their market would be 3ds games giving them a 30% cut. I think a lot of the best selling games for android would re-release in a nintendo store if it were easier for the devs.
Add in youtube support, messengers that send send / receive messages to other platforms, and the kids won't need or want a tablet.
AI War, Monaco, Limbo, Machinarium, Botanicula, Giana Sisters, Spelunky, Sword of the Stars: The Pit, Hotline Miami, Organ Trail, Defense Grid, Terraria
Really, it is the golden age of indie games.
Any battle where supercaps explode is a thrill. death2allsupercaps
See "explode" conjures images of force violent and sudden -- when it happens in agnonizing slo-motion time dilation with high latency and framerates in the single digits the "explosion"...like the participation itself are more abstract ideas than visceral.
People were willing to spend that money [in the Battle of B-R5RB] to get this thrill of participating in this battle.'"
Well the thrill of the "idea" of participating. The actual battle wasn't much to look at or be a part of.
Good, the hand held gaming console is dead...
Oh i dunno... there is still a niche for 6 to 12 year old kids before they merit getting a phone. Right now tablets are eating heavily into that niche... but the right device could still find a home.
A handheld gaming tablet from nintendo... ipad form factor + some physical controls + a cart slot ? I don't know N would need to allow it to load and play android games or soemthing though to really hit a home run... and that's not really in their corporate culture. But for them to hold off the tablets they need to let go of their iron fist over the store; and the high prices.
People will still drop $40 bucks for a new Pokemon title; and add the Play store to the 3DS XL and my kids wouldn't even care about ipads.
Ah, so your saying you just don't need your cell phone to be able to make calls, not that you don't ever need to make calls.
I guess that's fair.
The only scenarios i can think of where 'cellphone calls' are really necessary over 'regular phones':
driving - pretty easy to take or make a handsfree call. Virtually impossible to do the same via text. But arguably even handsfree calls should be eliminated.
emergencys - I'd hate have to try and text someone to get a locksmith or a towtruck or to report a robbery-in-progress, or what have you, and locating a landline in these cases isn't always viable. In theory, there's nothing preventing these sorts of things to be done via apps and texts etc... but its not quite here yet.
Well, yeah but that's only because with the VLA you're paying a lot extra for a lot less insane license key management compared to the retail version. They've made license key management for retail copies essentially impossible, it's that impractical and why people pay more per unit for a VLA.
This.
And that's I think why I find it SO offensive. I'm paying extra, like close to double, for the same damned thing simply to avoid 'license key management' grief.
But I'm buying in volume; its a VLA; and usually buying in volume gives you a price break, but in the case of Microsoft Office -- not so.
If I'm looking to buy 100 users of MS Office in a VLA for a small/medium office it should not cost twice as much as buying 100 boxes of MS Office Home and Business at BestBuy. Yes, I benefit from the VLA key and ease of license management, but I shouldn't be paying twice as much for that, if anything it should be CHEAPER, especially when I'm looking to hand you tens of thousands in licensing in one transaction.
She has an iPad, but wanted to write docs and track cases for her local hobby group (ghost-hunting).
Depending on how much writing she's doing - an ipad with a wireless keyboard would be sufficient.
Not that I'm disparaging your use of Linux -- I'm just making the point that most home users that can switch to linux can switch to a tablet instead (and for most of them its probably the smarter move -- nartually as your wife has linux expertise living in the house it works fine for you.
Basically though tablets are killing any chance for a home linux-desktop-in-the-home revolution... because a few years ago the idea was ... "If all you do is facebook, and gmail, and twitter, and youtube... hey you don't need windows you can get linux. And that's true... but if that's all you do you don't need a computer anymore either.
I already had a Windows 7 install disk (well, .iso - I ripped it years ago), so no cost there really. As for the rest, my use case is highly atypical (hence the "but it works well for me." bit.)
Windows 7 isos aren't the tricky part. Windows 7 licenses are. And unless you happened to own an otherwise unused FULL RETAIL license of Windows 7 your usage, strictly speaking, is in violation of the license agreement.
The OEM sticker on your (I'm taking a guess here) previous windows 7 laptop technically isn't transferable to a vm on your new Mac.
So your solution, to do it legit, requires a retail license purchase of windows 7, which is usually upwards of $250 for the pro version.
...err, not really. I mean, seriously - my missus looked at the same situation and decided that she really didn't need Windows for anything.
In my recent experience most "home" users who can make the switch to linux can probably switch to a tablet, and forego a computer entirely.
For my own new laptop, I found my own slightly costlier solution, but it works well for me. It has been working like a champ for almost year now, in spite of the abuse I regularly give it (which is, so far, longer than most laptops hold up under my not-so-tender mercies.) I keep Windows 7 around on a VMWare Fusion partition, but that's about it.
So your solution to the windows 7 vs windows 8 price dilemma was to buy a Mac with OSX, then bought VMWare Fusion, and then bought Windows 7 anyway?
Good job!
> Oh shut up.....
Truth hurts?
Not as much as the Stupid does.
I can live without the voice calls.
I routinely engage in 5 minute phone calls that would take hours to resolve via text messaging.
I like email and text as much as anyone, but the speed and efficiency of two-way information transfer over either is far lower than a voice call -- even if the voice call does force both parties to engage simultaneously in realtime.
I prefer to do as much as I can via email etc myself, because i prefer the written record, and the asynchronous nature -- but to suggest a voice call is unnecessary completely, ever, is ridiculous to me.
Yes, from win95 thru winxp it was standard practice anytime windows shat itself. In fact, it was standard practice for many to reinstall windows from scratch once are year just to head off it completely shitting itself.
But things have gotten better since then.
It really depends on the software. Windows itself, negligible.
Yeah, provided you are buying PCs with it installed OEM, and you time your migration to the hardware refresh cycle its not even something to think about.
Office, not much more.
See... I find Office VLAs stupidly expensive for what it is: Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Outlook; Software Assurance is bonkers on top of that, and I hate dealing with VARs instead of directly with MS (or just doing it via the bloody website) on top of that. And now Office 365... I HATE subscription access.
Stella, seriously?
What? I like Stella on a hot day. Its a light crisp lager that's readily available... I'm sure its not to everyone's taste but its not unequivocably bad.
I mean... I could have said "Bud Light Lime Mojito".
A gold coin in your pocket, or a record in a database, either way you have ownership of a thing of value.
That's true, but the gold coin's value (as a useful industrial metal) is intrinsic. Its value as a currency unit is extrinsic.
The record in the database only has extrinsic value, and no intrinsic value.
Your "ownership" of a thing isn't related to a things intrinsic value in any way. Ownership is an extrinsic value by definition, since it assigned externally from the thing and is not part of its nature.
The thing has the intrinsic value - a thing such as a factory.
A stock is not a factory though. It is, as you say, merely a 'record of ownership'.
Sure, the record of ownership isn't what has the value, but the thing owned. Naturally.
Right. The thing has intrinsic value, the stock does not. I get what you are arguing I think, but the level of abstraction or indirection makes it inappropriate to call it "intrinsic value" -- intrinsic value is defined as the value unto itself, without any external consideration that gives it value.
But without some concept of ownership, the concept of intrinsic value is a curiosity at best.
Aha. No. Intrinsic value is entirely unrelated to ownership; and doubly so when considering abstract "ownership" vs actual "possession".
So if you think gold has intrinsic value (I don't, really, but it's a good example)
Gold has intrinsic value in so far as it is a "useful industrial metal" - conductive, malleable, non-corrosive -- those are intrinsic properties or values of gold.
then the difference between a gold coin and a share of GLD is a minor one of logistics
You are effectively saying a chicken sandwich, and an IOU ("I-owe-you") for a chicken sandwich from someone reliable that you trust is the same thing.
You can eat a chicken sandwich and your hunger will be satisfied... you can't eat the IOU. The IOU itself doesn't have intrinsic nutritional value; you can collect on it for an actual chicken sandwich at some point, but an IOU is not a chicken sandwich. A share of GLD is an IOU.
The phrase "intrinsic value" applies to the thing, always, never to the "thing the thing can be exchanged for or is representative of"... because that's not "intrinsic value" anymore.
That's extrinsic value.
An IOU for a sandwich has extrinsic value -- the verbal debt implied by the IOU has no intrinsic value, but the customs and conventions surrounding IOUs give that verbal agreement extrinsic value -- we externally assign it the value of a chicken sandwich.
Likewise the share of GLD is nothing but an IOU, the legal constructs and government force behind the agreement gives that IOU a practical equivalence to a 10th oz. of gold less an administrative cost or whatever it is exactly, but that value equivalence is extrinsic.
We assign that value it to the share extrinsically, it is not intrinsic to the share.
Try pouring it into a glass, you chav.
Why? Is Bud light lime mojito really better from a glass? :p
-shudder-
But in all seriousness, I agree with you about the glass most of the time for most beer, but outside on a hot day I don't think there is anything wrong with a cold Corona or Stella from the bottle.