Yeah, except Jobs was referring to the fact that Google was now competing with them in the mobile handset market, which is somehow an evil thing to do.
All whilst his own company was still using child labour in Asia to product iPhones and iPods and half his products still had planned obsolescence by having batteries that can't easily be replaced which inevitably increases the amount of toxic waste from these products when they have to be disposed of by Joe Average. Then of course there's the monopolistic practice of pushing DRM as hard as possible so as to ensure that a lot of content bought from iTunes wont work unless people replace their failed Apple products with more Apple products or must face losing their entire library of content if they go to a competitor.
Really, the fact Jobs calls greater competition an evil thing, whilst continuing to run a business guilty of things like the above says far more about Jobs and Apple than it does about Google.
It's also ironic, when the conclusion was reached via a quote (and used completely out of context I might add) from Steve Jobs. I mean, it's not like Apple ever "borrowed" from the open source community without giving back is it?
I suspect Conroy would be a candidate to go on holiday with Peter Mandelson from the UK, they seem to have a similar ideology.
Ideally, they'd fly to a nice remote island together somewhere, and crash.
Seriously though, how do these people even get into positions of power? They're hated by the majority of the population- not just those interested in technology because people like this are blatantly corrupt to the core, and people hate nothing more than corrupt politicians. Yet despite this, time and time again they keep rearing their ugly heads, like a more powerful Jack Thompson that can't be disbarred.
Size still wouldn't be a factor in consumer choice though anyway, as all most people would care about is that a 1080p movie fits on a single disc, which in both cases it would.
People don't care about DRM per-se, but they care when problems arise, as they have with BD+ DRM, reports of things not working would've pushed things away from Bluray, if there had still been an alternative when the problems arose. I'm not sure where you live, but in Europe region coding is certainly a big deal amongst the general population, but the travelling population of anywhere across the world will also care- I can't count the amount of times I've wanted to bring back a movie or game from trips to North America as presents for example but not been able to because of region coding. Similarly here in Europe we still often have to wait 6months+ after the US has received movie releases to get them, so most people just resort to piracy instead when they can't simply import them or buy region 1 discs locally.
I don't disagree that it's good that Zend gets money as I too am a big fan of the Zend framework- in fact, I think it's the best PHP framework there is, the rest seem to be bloated, or crappy in some other way.
But I do still take issue with Zend studio, it's just so lacking in features that I reall am amazed they charge for it. Effectively, there's making money, then there's completely and utterly taking the piss. I feel Zend Studio is certainly in the realms of taking the piss. That said, I guess as you say if people want to pay it, then let them pay it, I suppose it's not as if there isn't a demo available, so people certainly know what they're letting themselves in for at least.
Yeah I was only joking, I agree Ubuntu is just as easy to install and use as Windows now. Sometimes you still get issues with certain hardware that can be a pain to fix, but Linux as a desktop OS is getting there for sure.
Hehe, I didn't notice that line for some reason when I made my reply, but to be fair he didn't use the term professionally so he's probably right- most PHP developers are far from professional after all;)
Developing large scale web applications where you need more than just a bunch of php files and need a decent folder structure ala most MVC frameworks becomes a pain without a proper IDE as you note.
Yeah, they also gave Zend 9/10 for tools and 10/10 for Value when it's basically just Eclipse PDT with a toolbar button for the command line tool that comes free with the Zend framework and costs $399 per year for the privilege.
Well, I suppose it can do more if you pay an extra $1195 per year for Zend server. Did I mention that Zend server is basically little more than just a pre-configured Apache setup?
Perhaps I've been spoilt by Visual Studio which actually costs much less and gives you far more, or the fact that 99.99% of Zend Studio's functionality is just inherited from Eclipse which is free, but the idea of giving Zend Studio 10/10 for value is er, baffling to say the least- at least their 9/10 for tools can be somewhat justified by the fact most of them are just inherited from the free tools Eclipse provides.
I suppose at least they still gave positive reviews of the other IDEs, but the idea that Zend Studio is somehow better than them, well, I'm not really sure there's a word for how simply not true that is.
So er yeah, still, most the article is probably one of the finest loads of bollocks I've ever seen which is quite impressive, sseing as I've often made the mistake of reading The Register which is basically like a bollocks farm.
Because consumers aren't always given an equal choice.
Look at the HD wars, Bluray won, not because it was the better format for the consumer per-se, but because it gained a large lead by being included in the PS3, and ultimately because the studios all decided to back it as it had stronger DRM.
HD-DVD kit was cheaper, region free, and had less troublesome DRM as well as dual DVD/HD-DVD discs actually on the market, I suspect all things being equal these factors alone would've made it the consumer choice otherwise.
I don't really know the VHS war well enough, in fact, I can't even really remember what was going on when x86 and Windows really started to gain traction, but I suspect it wasn't simply down to consumer choice. As such, I don't think users select the worst choice, I think they're just somewhat forced into it- good luck getting HD-DVD now for example, the format is gone before HD media has still even really gone mainstream hence the "majority of users" don't even get a choice, many probably wont even realise there ever was a choice.
I understand that, but what specifically about it allows for permanent battery damage? Can commands to discharge and so forth really be issued to the battery in a manner so as to permanently damage and decrease the life of it in a short space of time? Is there no protection at hardware level against it also for example?
If there is no hardware protection then does that not also leave the door open for intentionally malicious software such as viruses and trojans to kill batteries?
I guess my question would've been better phrased as "if it is possible, then why is it possible for software to kill a battery?".
I'm not sure that's Windows 7 in that particular case as I had the same problem with my old Inspiron 6000 and the battery was useless after less than a year. I only ever ran Windows XP on it, I think it's simply that Dell sold a load of shit batteries.
I used to do IT support in schools some years back too, we supported 147 schools and they all ordered a bunch of Dell D500s and D505s so had to support over a thousand of the things in total, the battery life on these wasn't exactly spectacular either, again, with many being largely useless on battery after only a year or so.
I've not experienced this on my ASUS Eee PC 1008, whilst I've never had the advertised 10.5hrs battery life out of it, because I've never used it only in the lower power modes, I've always been able to get at least 8hrs out of it between recharges. I've been running Windows 7 Ultimate on it since it was released to MSDN subscribers (i.e. prior to consumer release).
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but clearly it doesn't effect every laptop and must occur under a specific set of circumstances or against a certain set of hardware.
Out of interest though, does anyone know enough about modern batteries to be able to tell why a piece of software should be able to cause permanent damage to a battery in the first place?
So they've taken a language that encourages sloppy programming, and translated it into one that demands perfection.
Is it me or does that not sound like the most backwards step in advancement of web security and stability in history? It would explain at least why Facebook has for the last few weeks been noticably slower, and more noticably unstable as random things just fail to work, such as nagivating to certain pages, and clicking go offline on the chat bar only to be told it can't do that.
"Sad times if you live under an oppressive regime, like China, States, or UK. Or a corrupt Eastern European country. There are plenty of quite easy going countries out there still."
Like which? Most of Europe is no better than the UK, the exceptions are Scandianavian nations, but even they're beginning to falter, as are non-European nations like New Zealand and Australia and to a lesser extent Canada.
I do not believe there is a single country in the "West" now that is more liberal, and less oppresive than it was 10 to 20 years ago.
In the UK that's the case with most retailers really. It's why I bought my XBox 360 in PC World rather than online, because despite having the RROD 4 times, I was able to get it swapped each time in store, same day, no questions asked. It's certainly not an advantage specific to Apple over here, but pretty standard customer service in most shops on the high street. Similarly extended warranties and such are pointless in the UK because for this sort of thing specifically you have a legal right for a product to last a reasonable amount of time too, and even 5 years is well within that expectation for something like a TV or laptop. Perhaps one of the best examples of service in this respect I had was from Staples, I had a nice leather office chair in my office room in my house, but the pump to raise and lower it broke after 3.5 years, I went to Staples to get a new chair and mentioned it in passing when talking to a member of staff there when asking about different chairs and he said to just go fetch the old one and they'd replace it which they did. I still have the replacement chair now.
The issue for me is really that I bought my Dell online, and they didn't sell in the high street at the time, so the only point of contact was their phone number, or e-mail which went to the same call centre and generally resulted in even less helpful responses. There is quite a push over here to get online stores EU-wide right now to follow the rules better too though which is a good thing.
"While everyone getting any book at lets say $1 or having access to all the entertainment in the world for free, that's not how our society works currently."
But isn't that just it? We've now got this great method for reproducing material without the costs we had before, wouldn't it be better if we actually took that opportunity to improve society rather than do what MacMillan is doing in taking the opportunity to reap greater profits for less work than ever before? The latter half of your argument ignores the fact that as price is lowered, audience size increases.
The real issue here is the same as that with the RIAA- they could maintain profits, and move to the digital era, but as with the RIAA, they've decided to use the digital era to try and greatly increase profits by increasing the price, whilst the amount of work they need to do is lowered, in the case of the RIAA, they also try and use DRM to force people to re-buy the content each time they get a new device. Really, what it comes down to is not maintaining current profits, but greed- they want more from the consumer, and the consumer doesn't want to pay more, quite understandably, when they know less work is involved in a product, they want it for less, but that doesn't mean less profit for the companies involved, it just means they have to concentrate on increasing their audience to grow, rather than milking their existing audience for ever more money.
That's one US F18 and one British Tornado in a single war alone, vs. how many missile threats protected against? I'm not sure if it had any friendly fire hits in earlier wars.
I'm intrigued to know if there's better potential in kinetic weapons like this:
I'm intrigued to know how effective countermeasures would actually be against a mach 8 dumb but accurate projectile? As I understand it the fastest missile in the world is a Russian ICBM at around 10,800mph, which still leaves this mach 8 projectile (~6000mph) a little on the slow side, but would it be enough to take out such an incoming threat still?
Of course, then there's laser tech, but these rail guns seem to be a bit further ahead in the technology game than they are in terms of production level feasibility.
Benchmarks results are meaningless unless they're done on a massive sample set in perfect circumstances, because they're so easy to fix and even unintentionally mislead. Assume for example that version 2 of a piece of software has new features over version 1 that slow it down a bit, but then version 2 has optimizations using a technology, say SIMD3 for example which speed it back up, on a system that supports SIMD3 the optimizations may make up for the slowdown of additional features, but on a version without SIMD3 the new version is going to suffer the slow down of the new features, without the speed up of the old.
For what it's worth, my older Athlon XP 3200 Windows XP system had 3.0 on and when I upped that to 3.6 it did seem a bit faster, but only marginally so I agree it's not something common on all systems.
That doesn't escape the fact that it certainly has serious issues though- that 1.8gb RAM usage for example is just insane. I remember back with version 2 there were many complaints about memory leak issues with Firefox which I never really ran into and in fact perhaps naively defended those slagging it off for the issues, but now they seem to be back with a vengeance for me with 3.6 and I'm sat on the other side of the fence able to see what it's like.
It could be as you say Windows 7 related, but again, it's not really excusable when other browsers just work on it still and even then, Firefox 3.5 was markedly slower than 3.0 and 3.0 markedly slower on 2 even when I ran Vista also so the issues must stem back at least that far.
Most customer service centres seem to be manned by people that would fail the Turing test.
Last time I called Dell about a laptop that was completely dead, no power lights, no fans, they asked me what the error message on screen was and it took a few minutes to explain to them something as simple as the fact that I couldn't get an error message on screen because the laptop was dead.
It was probably one of the most epic examples of human idiocy I have ever encountered. The worst part is that I understand these people are given little flow charts, or on screen wizards, so he must've managed to click past the first box that checked whether the system even turned on or not and then been incapable of handling the idea that my response didn't fit his next question.
I don't even know why places like Dell even have customer services anymore really, they outsource because it's cheap, but the centres they outsource to are cheap because they're incompetent. They might as well drop the customer service lark altogether and save themselves even more, if I phoned Dell and got told by an automated message that customer service didn't exist anymore, it wouldn't have been any less helpful than the guy above that I did actually get through to.
Because then when people like you buy it they'll say "Hey, this is obviously priced too low" and up future books to $19.99 and so on. That's a 25% price increase, the previous being a 50% price increase, they'll figure as long as they don't lose 25% or 50% in this case of buyers then it's worth it. The problem is, through the population in general less people have access to the text, which depending on the books, is bad to society. If it means less students being able to afford the books they need for example, it's a bad thing.
It seems silly to encourage them. I can afford the price hike too, but from a common sense and moral standpoint I wont. It even effects me personally even then- sure it's not too big a price jump, but what about over time also? If I stick to my guns, I can buy 3 eBooks for the price it costs you for two, I can buy 9 eBooks for the amount you pay for 6 and so on.
Having better access to books is nearly always a good thing personally, and for society in general. Artificial price hikes don't help that goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except Jobs was referring to the fact that Google was now competing with them in the mobile handset market, which is somehow an evil thing to do.
All whilst his own company was still using child labour in Asia to product iPhones and iPods and half his products still had planned obsolescence by having batteries that can't easily be replaced which inevitably increases the amount of toxic waste from these products when they have to be disposed of by Joe Average. Then of course there's the monopolistic practice of pushing DRM as hard as possible so as to ensure that a lot of content bought from iTunes wont work unless people replace their failed Apple products with more Apple products or must face losing their entire library of content if they go to a competitor.
Really, the fact Jobs calls greater competition an evil thing, whilst continuing to run a business guilty of things like the above says far more about Jobs and Apple than it does about Google.
"Sad, just sad."
It's also ironic, when the conclusion was reached via a quote (and used completely out of context I might add) from Steve Jobs. I mean, it's not like Apple ever "borrowed" from the open source community without giving back is it?
I suspect Conroy would be a candidate to go on holiday with Peter Mandelson from the UK, they seem to have a similar ideology.
Ideally, they'd fly to a nice remote island together somewhere, and crash.
Seriously though, how do these people even get into positions of power? They're hated by the majority of the population- not just those interested in technology because people like this are blatantly corrupt to the core, and people hate nothing more than corrupt politicians. Yet despite this, time and time again they keep rearing their ugly heads, like a more powerful Jack Thompson that can't be disbarred.
Size still wouldn't be a factor in consumer choice though anyway, as all most people would care about is that a 1080p movie fits on a single disc, which in both cases it would.
People don't care about DRM per-se, but they care when problems arise, as they have with BD+ DRM, reports of things not working would've pushed things away from Bluray, if there had still been an alternative when the problems arose. I'm not sure where you live, but in Europe region coding is certainly a big deal amongst the general population, but the travelling population of anywhere across the world will also care- I can't count the amount of times I've wanted to bring back a movie or game from trips to North America as presents for example but not been able to because of region coding. Similarly here in Europe we still often have to wait 6months+ after the US has received movie releases to get them, so most people just resort to piracy instead when they can't simply import them or buy region 1 discs locally.
Yeah, that's why I said possibly. It'd be nice to have a clarification either way.
I don't disagree that it's good that Zend gets money as I too am a big fan of the Zend framework- in fact, I think it's the best PHP framework there is, the rest seem to be bloated, or crappy in some other way.
But I do still take issue with Zend studio, it's just so lacking in features that I reall am amazed they charge for it. Effectively, there's making money, then there's completely and utterly taking the piss. I feel Zend Studio is certainly in the realms of taking the piss. That said, I guess as you say if people want to pay it, then let them pay it, I suppose it's not as if there isn't a demo available, so people certainly know what they're letting themselves in for at least.
Yeah I was only joking, I agree Ubuntu is just as easy to install and use as Windows now. Sometimes you still get issues with certain hardware that can be a pain to fix, but Linux as a desktop OS is getting there for sure.
Hehe, I didn't notice that line for some reason when I made my reply, but to be fair he didn't use the term professionally so he's probably right- most PHP developers are far from professional after all ;)
Developing large scale web applications where you need more than just a bunch of php files and need a decent folder structure ala most MVC frameworks becomes a pain without a proper IDE as you note.
People who don't want to recompile their kernel, and edit their x config with a command just to get their video card to work mostly.
Yeah, they also gave Zend 9/10 for tools and 10/10 for Value when it's basically just Eclipse PDT with a toolbar button for the command line tool that comes free with the Zend framework and costs $399 per year for the privilege.
Well, I suppose it can do more if you pay an extra $1195 per year for Zend server. Did I mention that Zend server is basically little more than just a pre-configured Apache setup?
Perhaps I've been spoilt by Visual Studio which actually costs much less and gives you far more, or the fact that 99.99% of Zend Studio's functionality is just inherited from Eclipse which is free, but the idea of giving Zend Studio 10/10 for value is er, baffling to say the least- at least their 9/10 for tools can be somewhat justified by the fact most of them are just inherited from the free tools Eclipse provides.
I suppose at least they still gave positive reviews of the other IDEs, but the idea that Zend Studio is somehow better than them, well, I'm not really sure there's a word for how simply not true that is.
So er yeah, still, most the article is probably one of the finest loads of bollocks I've ever seen which is quite impressive, sseing as I've often made the mistake of reading The Register which is basically like a bollocks farm.
Because consumers aren't always given an equal choice.
Look at the HD wars, Bluray won, not because it was the better format for the consumer per-se, but because it gained a large lead by being included in the PS3, and ultimately because the studios all decided to back it as it had stronger DRM.
HD-DVD kit was cheaper, region free, and had less troublesome DRM as well as dual DVD/HD-DVD discs actually on the market, I suspect all things being equal these factors alone would've made it the consumer choice otherwise.
I don't really know the VHS war well enough, in fact, I can't even really remember what was going on when x86 and Windows really started to gain traction, but I suspect it wasn't simply down to consumer choice. As such, I don't think users select the worst choice, I think they're just somewhat forced into it- good luck getting HD-DVD now for example, the format is gone before HD media has still even really gone mainstream hence the "majority of users" don't even get a choice, many probably wont even realise there ever was a choice.
Yes, I'm intrigued to know too as it implies that Slashdot possibly handed over his details in response to a complaint from the MPAA.
I understand that, but what specifically about it allows for permanent battery damage? Can commands to discharge and so forth really be issued to the battery in a manner so as to permanently damage and decrease the life of it in a short space of time? Is there no protection at hardware level against it also for example?
If there is no hardware protection then does that not also leave the door open for intentionally malicious software such as viruses and trojans to kill batteries?
I guess my question would've been better phrased as "if it is possible, then why is it possible for software to kill a battery?".
I'm not sure that's Windows 7 in that particular case as I had the same problem with my old Inspiron 6000 and the battery was useless after less than a year. I only ever ran Windows XP on it, I think it's simply that Dell sold a load of shit batteries.
I used to do IT support in schools some years back too, we supported 147 schools and they all ordered a bunch of Dell D500s and D505s so had to support over a thousand of the things in total, the battery life on these wasn't exactly spectacular either, again, with many being largely useless on battery after only a year or so.
I doubt it, they've not found enough space children caught up in intergalactic warfare to exploit yet.
I've not experienced this on my ASUS Eee PC 1008, whilst I've never had the advertised 10.5hrs battery life out of it, because I've never used it only in the lower power modes, I've always been able to get at least 8hrs out of it between recharges. I've been running Windows 7 Ultimate on it since it was released to MSDN subscribers (i.e. prior to consumer release).
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but clearly it doesn't effect every laptop and must occur under a specific set of circumstances or against a certain set of hardware.
Out of interest though, does anyone know enough about modern batteries to be able to tell why a piece of software should be able to cause permanent damage to a battery in the first place?
So they've taken a language that encourages sloppy programming, and translated it into one that demands perfection.
Is it me or does that not sound like the most backwards step in advancement of web security and stability in history? It would explain at least why Facebook has for the last few weeks been noticably slower, and more noticably unstable as random things just fail to work, such as nagivating to certain pages, and clicking go offline on the chat bar only to be told it can't do that.
"Sad times if you live under an oppressive regime, like China, States, or UK. Or a corrupt Eastern European country. There are plenty of quite easy going countries out there still."
Like which? Most of Europe is no better than the UK, the exceptions are Scandianavian nations, but even they're beginning to falter, as are non-European nations like New Zealand and Australia and to a lesser extent Canada.
I do not believe there is a single country in the "West" now that is more liberal, and less oppresive than it was 10 to 20 years ago.
In the UK that's the case with most retailers really. It's why I bought my XBox 360 in PC World rather than online, because despite having the RROD 4 times, I was able to get it swapped each time in store, same day, no questions asked. It's certainly not an advantage specific to Apple over here, but pretty standard customer service in most shops on the high street. Similarly extended warranties and such are pointless in the UK because for this sort of thing specifically you have a legal right for a product to last a reasonable amount of time too, and even 5 years is well within that expectation for something like a TV or laptop. Perhaps one of the best examples of service in this respect I had was from Staples, I had a nice leather office chair in my office room in my house, but the pump to raise and lower it broke after 3.5 years, I went to Staples to get a new chair and mentioned it in passing when talking to a member of staff there when asking about different chairs and he said to just go fetch the old one and they'd replace it which they did. I still have the replacement chair now.
The issue for me is really that I bought my Dell online, and they didn't sell in the high street at the time, so the only point of contact was their phone number, or e-mail which went to the same call centre and generally resulted in even less helpful responses. There is quite a push over here to get online stores EU-wide right now to follow the rules better too though which is a good thing.
"Next time you call support take a video, it might be the next "verizon math fail" with 30,000+ hits. All that bad press over $71. "
Well that's just it, I don't intend there to be a next time ;)
"While everyone getting any book at lets say $1 or having access to all the entertainment in the world for free, that's not how our society works currently."
But isn't that just it? We've now got this great method for reproducing material without the costs we had before, wouldn't it be better if we actually took that opportunity to improve society rather than do what MacMillan is doing in taking the opportunity to reap greater profits for less work than ever before? The latter half of your argument ignores the fact that as price is lowered, audience size increases.
The real issue here is the same as that with the RIAA- they could maintain profits, and move to the digital era, but as with the RIAA, they've decided to use the digital era to try and greatly increase profits by increasing the price, whilst the amount of work they need to do is lowered, in the case of the RIAA, they also try and use DRM to force people to re-buy the content each time they get a new device. Really, what it comes down to is not maintaining current profits, but greed- they want more from the consumer, and the consumer doesn't want to pay more, quite understandably, when they know less work is involved in a product, they want it for less, but that doesn't mean less profit for the companies involved, it just means they have to concentrate on increasing their audience to grow, rather than milking their existing audience for ever more money.
I wouldn't be suprised if Patriot has shot down more friendly units than enemy missiles. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_fire#2003_invasion_of_Iraq
That's one US F18 and one British Tornado in a single war alone, vs. how many missile threats protected against? I'm not sure if it had any friendly fire hits in earlier wars.
I'm intrigued to know if there's better potential in kinetic weapons like this:
http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,160195,00.html
I'm intrigued to know how effective countermeasures would actually be against a mach 8 dumb but accurate projectile? As I understand it the fastest missile in the world is a Russian ICBM at around 10,800mph, which still leaves this mach 8 projectile (~6000mph) a little on the slow side, but would it be enough to take out such an incoming threat still?
Of course, then there's laser tech, but these rail guns seem to be a bit further ahead in the technology game than they are in terms of production level feasibility.
Benchmarks results are meaningless unless they're done on a massive sample set in perfect circumstances, because they're so easy to fix and even unintentionally mislead. Assume for example that version 2 of a piece of software has new features over version 1 that slow it down a bit, but then version 2 has optimizations using a technology, say SIMD3 for example which speed it back up, on a system that supports SIMD3 the optimizations may make up for the slowdown of additional features, but on a version without SIMD3 the new version is going to suffer the slow down of the new features, without the speed up of the old.
For what it's worth, my older Athlon XP 3200 Windows XP system had 3.0 on and when I upped that to 3.6 it did seem a bit faster, but only marginally so I agree it's not something common on all systems.
That doesn't escape the fact that it certainly has serious issues though- that 1.8gb RAM usage for example is just insane. I remember back with version 2 there were many complaints about memory leak issues with Firefox which I never really ran into and in fact perhaps naively defended those slagging it off for the issues, but now they seem to be back with a vengeance for me with 3.6 and I'm sat on the other side of the fence able to see what it's like.
It could be as you say Windows 7 related, but again, it's not really excusable when other browsers just work on it still and even then, Firefox 3.5 was markedly slower than 3.0 and 3.0 markedly slower on 2 even when I ran Vista also so the issues must stem back at least that far.
Most customer service centres seem to be manned by people that would fail the Turing test.
Last time I called Dell about a laptop that was completely dead, no power lights, no fans, they asked me what the error message on screen was and it took a few minutes to explain to them something as simple as the fact that I couldn't get an error message on screen because the laptop was dead.
It was probably one of the most epic examples of human idiocy I have ever encountered. The worst part is that I understand these people are given little flow charts, or on screen wizards, so he must've managed to click past the first box that checked whether the system even turned on or not and then been incapable of handling the idea that my response didn't fit his next question.
I don't even know why places like Dell even have customer services anymore really, they outsource because it's cheap, but the centres they outsource to are cheap because they're incompetent. They might as well drop the customer service lark altogether and save themselves even more, if I phoned Dell and got told by an automated message that customer service didn't exist anymore, it wouldn't have been any less helpful than the guy above that I did actually get through to.
Because then when people like you buy it they'll say "Hey, this is obviously priced too low" and up future books to $19.99 and so on. That's a 25% price increase, the previous being a 50% price increase, they'll figure as long as they don't lose 25% or 50% in this case of buyers then it's worth it. The problem is, through the population in general less people have access to the text, which depending on the books, is bad to society. If it means less students being able to afford the books they need for example, it's a bad thing.
It seems silly to encourage them. I can afford the price hike too, but from a common sense and moral standpoint I wont. It even effects me personally even then- sure it's not too big a price jump, but what about over time also? If I stick to my guns, I can buy 3 eBooks for the price it costs you for two, I can buy 9 eBooks for the amount you pay for 6 and so on.
Having better access to books is nearly always a good thing personally, and for society in general. Artificial price hikes don't help that goal.