I want small, unnoticeable solar cells that generate the same amount of energy. Just a few weeks ago there was a story about solar cells that were postage stamp sized and used some fancy technique to reflect incoming light to the outer rim of the cell to increase efficiency or something.
Now we are told that larger panels are better? Calgon, take me away!
Not only is there a lot of different platforms but also a lot of different hardware. CPUs, CPU speeds, RAM, storage capacity, screen resolutions/color depth, sound/music capabilities, controls/inputs, etc.
Conveniently, the word "platform" takes all of that (and more) into account.
Developing for the iPhone is easy. There is only one platform.
But Windows Mobile, Android, and Java are three completely different platforms. That's not to mention platforms based on Brew or Symbian, even. Developing for an individual phone is easy, but to reach the entire market, it's very difficult.
I suppose if you aren't interested in reaching many users, that developing for a single platform like the iPhone is a decent choice. However, if you want to remain viable both in terms of independence and also monetarily, you need to have a broad base of users, not just a small group of fanatics.
Unfortunately, because of the disparity among the various platforms, the difficulty is high to develop a broadly applicable application. So the answer is to target either the least common denominator (there is none in the current phone market) or to target a generic platform that is relatively widely installed.
Welcome to MIDP. Yes, you'll hate every minute of it, but at least it exists.
You can be the greatest programmer in the world, but until the realities of the market are well understood, you're going to be starving.
The fact of the matter is that very few independent programmers make it big. Those that do either got lucky or had a good understanding of business. It's easy to go off on your own and create what you want, but it's a completely different thing to garner interest in the product and sell it for a profit.
The reason why game developers "go rogue" is because they are inherently a seat-of-the-pants type personality who see personal pleasure and freedom as the highest attainable goals. While those are fine goals, without a solid business understanding, those goals area farther away from the independent game developer than if they stayed at a large employer.
People who have odd names (it seems especially prevalent in the Jewish community) are at a serious disadvantage in the culture that considers the name odd. This is the reason that the most famous Lipshitz ever changed his name to Ralph Lauren.
While the article says that the disease was halted in 300 trial patients, it's not quite clear that the effects of the disease can be reversed. So those in the early stages have perhaps gotten their lucky break, but many who have already progressed down the road to lunacy are still without reprieve.
I'm glad to see such progress being made, and more importantly that aluminum cans and deodorant have been vindicated. Seriously though, I'm turning Japanese isn't just a song anymore, it's a long gone daddy in the USA. Where some patients may get a chance to return to normal lives, it's still a bit sad that those who have lost loved ones to the waking death of Alzheimer's will only feel a bitterness that this trial was conducted so long after they bore the brunt of it.
Your dad is doing good work. We need more people like him.
The best argument against this kind of ridiculous assertion that somehow random information will somehow give rise to intelligence is provided in the old movie Short Circuit. The SAINT 5 robot spends all night reading the encyclopedia and when morning comes, it is suddenly an expert on everything. But its expertise is only in pure knowledge, not the rational use of that knowledge to create something beyond mere identification.
The only way for a robot to grow past its programming is to add the capability to do so. And simply having a system scan data and find correlations isn't going to be enough. There needs to be an action taken on the discovered correlations, and beyond that the actions need to be reprocessed back into the system in a feedback loop. And even further, it is necessary for the program to identify patterns and make intelligent decisions based on those patterns, but the intelligence necessary to make those decisions must come from external sources. I.e. the programmer.
It's a bit outlandish to think that just because a program is constantly watching and processing inputs that it is somehow sentient.
Tron. There is a whole family of Tron operating systems from tiny iTron embedded systems to full fledged server systems.
The problem is that it is cheaper to buy COTS Windows or Apple which has been localized, so Tron eventually got stuck in a very small (but wide) niche of embedded systems.
However, take a look at the Japanese cellphone market. They are making devices that are really cool and work great and yet are wholly unsuitable for the non-Japanese market. They are intuitive for the Japanese users who have become accustomed to a certain style of interface, but the interface is actually unintuitive for most non-Japanese users. And the opposite is also true. Non-Japanese phones (excluding new arrivals from Korea and Taiwan) do pretty poorly in Japan. Hence, Japanese phone makers cannot succeed outside of Japan making Japanese phones, and Western phone makers cannot succeed inside of Japan making Western phones.
So there is a lot of market-specific adaptation that has produced very different products within the same categories.
I will simply point out that it is usually cheaper to outsource a job than to try to do it in-house. The margins that the distributor makes is due to their unique position within the country, and not because of arbitrary mark up.
The benefit of buying the company is only to gain that X% margin. However, the drawbacks are numerous. First, it means that they need to either buy the company which costs a lot or they need to start a subsidiary which also costs a lot and entails quite a bit of legal work. Second, they lose negotiating leverage with the purchased company. They can't simply cut it loose and start again easily with another company. Third, they are taking on significant risk which only promises a minor ~10% increase in profits *from that market*.
So your option 2 doesn't make any sense from a business perspective unless we're talking very large markets which are stable and have a long track record of exceptional profit over the base product cost. There are no markets like that. Either the markets are small (many countries in Europe) or the margin is too low for the required investment (everywhere else).
So why doesn't MS simply take option 1 and squeeze the distributors? In a very broad sense, they do. However they are also bound by contract and are not able to arbitrarily raise prices at any time. At each renegotiation, you can bet that they are increasing their share of the pie. But looking beyond that, the price is never raised to the monopoly price on the distributor. Since they already realize the points which make option 2 a bad idea, they know they need local distributors and can't afford to squeeze them out completely. In fact, by keeping the margins high for the distributors, they ensure greater loyalty and increased sales effort. And if the distributor doesn't work out, there will be many other distributors-in-waiting ready to sign a lucrative contract with MS.
It's a whole ecosystem at work, and MS (and other companies, from soap makers to chip makers) needs to tend to the whole system to keep it healthy and keep their profits high. It isn't always about grabbing all you can for yourself. It's usually about creating successful partnerships and creating a business environment where everyone can make money.
Sorry. I didn't answer your question about why MS doesn't charge the moon as the base price of their product.
Even monopolies have a limit on how much they can charge before the returns start decreasing. They've found the price point that works for them in the US.
In the overseas market, they don't adjust their base price, set up monopolies in each country, and simple arithmetic takes over from there.
Suppose that the European distributor appointed a single sub-distributor for, say Western Europe, who appointed a single sub-distributor for France. Would they each be able to pump up prices? Of course not. After all, each distributor and sub has a monopoly.
And this is where you'd be wrong.
Yes, Microsoft is essentially unlimited in charging what it wants where it wants. However, dealing with the various laws in each country is troublesome and not worth the effort to work within, so they find distributors within each country to take care of local sales.
Each distributor is only responsible for generating income through sales and then returning the cost of software to MS (or they pay up front and sell later, but that's not typically how these contracts are laid out). So the distributors have a fixed cost (or sliding cost depending on sales volume, but let's forget that for a minute) that they need to charge just to pay MS back for the product. Add in a bit for shipping and handling. Some more for taxes. Now you're already talking a tangible increase in price over the base cost of the product.
We haven't even begun discussing the profit for the distributor. Add in another 10 or 20 percent on top of the already inflated price. Then, if you want to talk about sub-distributorships (typically disallowed, but hey, we're just talking here), each distributor is going to want another cut for themselves, so they tack on another few percent so they can feed their kids.
Suddenly, we're talking 50 to 100 percent markup over the base cost. That isn't due to unscrupulous business practices or anything of the sort. It is simply the fact of life that when you have a monopoly (as the sole distributorship provides), then there is no incentive to cut the costs for consumers by eating into the bottom line. OTOH, if there were competition between distributors, then those margins would be cut quite significantly and prices would mainly increase due to distribution costs and distributor profit would be in the single digit percentages.
For the most part, European countries are socialist, technologically retarded (look up the term in Wikipedia, if you're offended), and its citizens generally live hand to mouth. So I would definitely say that they would be semi-First World, even according to your definition.
Now, does that mean that the citizens enjoy a worse standard of living? Not necessarily. Though the incomes may just meet the expenditures, Europeans have much more free time because they do not take work as seriously as their American counterparts. It's a different focus of energy, and Europeans come out ahead on overall happiness (just as a fisherman who caught enough to eat his fill every day is typically happier than the workaholic investment banker who owns 3 houses but has no time to sleep).
Marx was right in that capitalism had its limits and would collapse. What he was wrong about was that it wouldn't come in violent uprising, but by the gradual advance of voices of the underclass and the effeminate upper class' unwillingness to say "no" to their demands.
In a sense, yes. Piracy has brought the price down to levels closer to the marginal value of the product.
Take oil as another example of something that is suddenly "overpriced". The minute the US announced that additional drilling within the country would be permitted, oil prices dropped the same day. It's not the actual production of oil that is driving the prices, but the perceived ability to drive the prices up (and subsequently the inability of consumers to fight back effectively). Once there is a perceived threat to the value of oil (additional reserves being tapped), the prices come down.
So yeah, piracy is one factor that keeps software prices at bay.
There are thousands of Windows distributors in the US. Though MS might be the final arbiter of who gets to distribute MS products, they rely on widespread distribution networks to provide the constant revenue stream they need to stay in business.
With foreign sole distributorships, the only stipulation is that the distributorships provide a certain level of sales and income back to MS (for example). So within the country, the sole distributor sells the product for at least cost, then adds in his cut, then pumps the price up because he has no competition to drive his prices down.
Since the sole distributor acts as a monopoly within the country, the retail outlets have to bear the cost that the distributor charges, and the customers have to bear the costs passed down from the retail outlets.
Yes, it's capitalism, and it's grounded in well understood economics. But it isn't "Supply and Demand at work" in a free market sense.
The reason is that the companies create artificial monopolies by creating sole distributorships in each country. On top of that, name/brand recognition goes a long way in semi-First World countries like those in Europe, so something like DreamWeaver is going to gather a lot more interest than XMLSpy (or what have you). So you have a market focused on one product, and only one supplier of that product. The math is pretty simple; consumers lose out to asymmetric market forces.
It's not just "because they can", but it's actually the market that has created those conditions. If Europeans would wake up to the alternatives (like China and India have), software prices would be much more reasonable.
If you have any reasonably recent version of Word, it actually has all the things you want, and it is easier to use and create publishable content than almost any other modern word/document processor for documents of the type that you seem to be interested in generating. It's not QuarkExpress or InDesign, but that type of publishing isn't what you seem to be talking about.
I suppose that referring to the product as "MS-Word" shows how far in the past you are since it hasn't been MS-Word for several years. Try the latest version and see how it suits you.
Like any tool, it takes a little while to get up to speed on all the useful features, but I think you'd be surprised at the progress has been made. Yes, you like all the power that a primitive typesetting program like LaTeX can give you, but to eschew new technology because it hides complexity behind a friendly interface is Luddism. Don't fall prey to the belief that simpler is better. As you have said yourself, you are finding dealing with the raw metal distracting and difficult. Let the program handle all that for you. Try Word again.
Bbbut but but... The quality of parts! Right? right? The premium parts make it more expensive, but cheaper in the grand scheme of things for what you get vs. what you pay.
Is Apple's combination HW/SW package a better deal than buying the HW and SW separately? Is the markup on Apple's product so much that the opposite is true?
We always hear about how underpriced the product is compared to Windows products, but how underpriced is it compared to a clone of itself?
And if the Apple clone HW is cheaper than comparable Windows HW, then why is the Windows HW so expensive? Have whiny Mac fanboys been lying to me all these years?
For a long time Microsoft didn't have a Boston engineering office, so many of the best and brightest from schools like BU, BC, and Harvard were passed over by MS recruiting. But now they have the chance to apply their brains to various research projects in MS. Naturally many would shy away from the company, as it is pretty much antithetical to the mindset of the typical Bostonian student.
But these kids are smart and will no doubt go to where the money is, i.e. Microsoft.
Anyway, the best first use of this new solar cell technology is in the solar racers that run every year. By using these as a proof of concept, they can then branch out into more lucrative MS Research programs. Can they create solar cars that absorb and retain more power using less surface area? Then we'll see how well these things work in real life.
Slashdot Mirror
I want small, unnoticeable solar cells that generate the same amount of energy. Just a few weeks ago there was a story about solar cells that were postage stamp sized and used some fancy technique to reflect incoming light to the outer rim of the cell to increase efficiency or something.
Now we are told that larger panels are better? Calgon, take me away!
Not only is there a lot of different platforms but also a lot of different hardware. CPUs, CPU speeds, RAM, storage capacity, screen resolutions/color depth, sound/music capabilities, controls/inputs, etc.
Conveniently, the word "platform" takes all of that (and more) into account.
Developing for the iPhone is easy. There is only one platform.
But Windows Mobile, Android, and Java are three completely different platforms. That's not to mention platforms based on Brew or Symbian, even. Developing for an individual phone is easy, but to reach the entire market, it's very difficult.
I suppose if you aren't interested in reaching many users, that developing for a single platform like the iPhone is a decent choice. However, if you want to remain viable both in terms of independence and also monetarily, you need to have a broad base of users, not just a small group of fanatics.
Unfortunately, because of the disparity among the various platforms, the difficulty is high to develop a broadly applicable application. So the answer is to target either the least common denominator (there is none in the current phone market) or to target a generic platform that is relatively widely installed.
Welcome to MIDP. Yes, you'll hate every minute of it, but at least it exists.
You can be the greatest programmer in the world, but until the realities of the market are well understood, you're going to be starving.
The fact of the matter is that very few independent programmers make it big. Those that do either got lucky or had a good understanding of business. It's easy to go off on your own and create what you want, but it's a completely different thing to garner interest in the product and sell it for a profit.
The reason why game developers "go rogue" is because they are inherently a seat-of-the-pants type personality who see personal pleasure and freedom as the highest attainable goals. While those are fine goals, without a solid business understanding, those goals area farther away from the independent game developer than if they stayed at a large employer.
People who have odd names (it seems especially prevalent in the Jewish community) are at a serious disadvantage in the culture that considers the name odd. This is the reason that the most famous Lipshitz ever changed his name to Ralph Lauren.
It's hard to think of a scarier disease than one where you slowly lose your mental faculties.
Ebola
While the article says that the disease was halted in 300 trial patients, it's not quite clear that the effects of the disease can be reversed. So those in the early stages have perhaps gotten their lucky break, but many who have already progressed down the road to lunacy are still without reprieve.
I'm glad to see such progress being made, and more importantly that aluminum cans and deodorant have been vindicated. Seriously though, I'm turning Japanese isn't just a song anymore, it's a long gone daddy in the USA. Where some patients may get a chance to return to normal lives, it's still a bit sad that those who have lost loved ones to the waking death of Alzheimer's will only feel a bitterness that this trial was conducted so long after they bore the brunt of it.
Your dad is doing good work. We need more people like him.
The best argument against this kind of ridiculous assertion that somehow random information will somehow give rise to intelligence is provided in the old movie Short Circuit. The SAINT 5 robot spends all night reading the encyclopedia and when morning comes, it is suddenly an expert on everything. But its expertise is only in pure knowledge, not the rational use of that knowledge to create something beyond mere identification.
The only way for a robot to grow past its programming is to add the capability to do so. And simply having a system scan data and find correlations isn't going to be enough. There needs to be an action taken on the discovered correlations, and beyond that the actions need to be reprocessed back into the system in a feedback loop. And even further, it is necessary for the program to identify patterns and make intelligent decisions based on those patterns, but the intelligence necessary to make those decisions must come from external sources. I.e. the programmer.
It's a bit outlandish to think that just because a program is constantly watching and processing inputs that it is somehow sentient.
Tron. There is a whole family of Tron operating systems from tiny iTron embedded systems to full fledged server systems.
The problem is that it is cheaper to buy COTS Windows or Apple which has been localized, so Tron eventually got stuck in a very small (but wide) niche of embedded systems.
However, take a look at the Japanese cellphone market. They are making devices that are really cool and work great and yet are wholly unsuitable for the non-Japanese market. They are intuitive for the Japanese users who have become accustomed to a certain style of interface, but the interface is actually unintuitive for most non-Japanese users. And the opposite is also true. Non-Japanese phones (excluding new arrivals from Korea and Taiwan) do pretty poorly in Japan. Hence, Japanese phone makers cannot succeed outside of Japan making Japanese phones, and Western phone makers cannot succeed inside of Japan making Western phones.
So there is a lot of market-specific adaptation that has produced very different products within the same categories.
Exactly. If you see the first branch of this thread, I outline exactly what you succinctly described.
But can you hammer a 6 inch spike through a board with your penis?
I will simply point out that it is usually cheaper to outsource a job than to try to do it in-house. The margins that the distributor makes is due to their unique position within the country, and not because of arbitrary mark up.
The benefit of buying the company is only to gain that X% margin.
However, the drawbacks are numerous. First, it means that they need to either buy the company which costs a lot or they need to start a subsidiary which also costs a lot and entails quite a bit of legal work. Second, they lose negotiating leverage with the purchased company. They can't simply cut it loose and start again easily with another company. Third, they are taking on significant risk which only promises a minor ~10% increase in profits *from that market*.
So your option 2 doesn't make any sense from a business perspective unless we're talking very large markets which are stable and have a long track record of exceptional profit over the base product cost. There are no markets like that. Either the markets are small (many countries in Europe) or the margin is too low for the required investment (everywhere else).
So why doesn't MS simply take option 1 and squeeze the distributors? In a very broad sense, they do. However they are also bound by contract and are not able to arbitrarily raise prices at any time. At each renegotiation, you can bet that they are increasing their share of the pie. But looking beyond that, the price is never raised to the monopoly price on the distributor. Since they already realize the points which make option 2 a bad idea, they know they need local distributors and can't afford to squeeze them out completely. In fact, by keeping the margins high for the distributors, they ensure greater loyalty and increased sales effort. And if the distributor doesn't work out, there will be many other distributors-in-waiting ready to sign a lucrative contract with MS.
It's a whole ecosystem at work, and MS (and other companies, from soap makers to chip makers) needs to tend to the whole system to keep it healthy and keep their profits high. It isn't always about grabbing all you can for yourself. It's usually about creating successful partnerships and creating a business environment where everyone can make money.
Sorry. I didn't answer your question about why MS doesn't charge the moon as the base price of their product.
Even monopolies have a limit on how much they can charge before the returns start decreasing. They've found the price point that works for them in the US.
In the overseas market, they don't adjust their base price, set up monopolies in each country, and simple arithmetic takes over from there.
Suppose that the European distributor appointed a single sub-distributor for, say Western Europe, who appointed a single sub-distributor for France. Would they each be able to pump up prices? Of course not. After all, each distributor and sub has a monopoly.
And this is where you'd be wrong.
Yes, Microsoft is essentially unlimited in charging what it wants where it wants. However, dealing with the various laws in each country is troublesome and not worth the effort to work within, so they find distributors within each country to take care of local sales.
Each distributor is only responsible for generating income through sales and then returning the cost of software to MS (or they pay up front and sell later, but that's not typically how these contracts are laid out). So the distributors have a fixed cost (or sliding cost depending on sales volume, but let's forget that for a minute) that they need to charge just to pay MS back for the product. Add in a bit for shipping and handling. Some more for taxes. Now you're already talking a tangible increase in price over the base cost of the product.
We haven't even begun discussing the profit for the distributor. Add in another 10 or 20 percent on top of the already inflated price. Then, if you want to talk about sub-distributorships (typically disallowed, but hey, we're just talking here), each distributor is going to want another cut for themselves, so they tack on another few percent so they can feed their kids.
Suddenly, we're talking 50 to 100 percent markup over the base cost. That isn't due to unscrupulous business practices or anything of the sort. It is simply the fact of life that when you have a monopoly (as the sole distributorship provides), then there is no incentive to cut the costs for consumers by eating into the bottom line. OTOH, if there were competition between distributors, then those margins would be cut quite significantly and prices would mainly increase due to distribution costs and distributor profit would be in the single digit percentages.
For the most part, European countries are socialist, technologically retarded (look up the term in Wikipedia, if you're offended), and its citizens generally live hand to mouth. So I would definitely say that they would be semi-First World, even according to your definition.
Now, does that mean that the citizens enjoy a worse standard of living? Not necessarily. Though the incomes may just meet the expenditures, Europeans have much more free time because they do not take work as seriously as their American counterparts. It's a different focus of energy, and Europeans come out ahead on overall happiness (just as a fisherman who caught enough to eat his fill every day is typically happier than the workaholic investment banker who owns 3 houses but has no time to sleep).
Marx was right in that capitalism had its limits and would collapse. What he was wrong about was that it wouldn't come in violent uprising, but by the gradual advance of voices of the underclass and the effeminate upper class' unwillingness to say "no" to their demands.
Yeah. A chick writing software. What a laugh!
What's next? A truly insightful comment on Slashdot?
I didn't want to hurt those zeros' feelings.
The "World"ness of a country has to do with its political affiliations, not the evolutionary progress of its citizens.
Not that I expect Slashbots to understand the distinction.
In a sense, yes. Piracy has brought the price down to levels closer to the marginal value of the product.
Take oil as another example of something that is suddenly "overpriced". The minute the US announced that additional drilling within the country would be permitted, oil prices dropped the same day. It's not the actual production of oil that is driving the prices, but the perceived ability to drive the prices up (and subsequently the inability of consumers to fight back effectively). Once there is a perceived threat to the value of oil (additional reserves being tapped), the prices come down.
So yeah, piracy is one factor that keeps software prices at bay.
That's simply not true.
There are thousands of Windows distributors in the US. Though MS might be the final arbiter of who gets to distribute MS products, they rely on widespread distribution networks to provide the constant revenue stream they need to stay in business.
With foreign sole distributorships, the only stipulation is that the distributorships provide a certain level of sales and income back to MS (for example). So within the country, the sole distributor sells the product for at least cost, then adds in his cut, then pumps the price up because he has no competition to drive his prices down.
Since the sole distributor acts as a monopoly within the country, the retail outlets have to bear the cost that the distributor charges, and the customers have to bear the costs passed down from the retail outlets.
Yes, it's capitalism, and it's grounded in well understood economics. But it isn't "Supply and Demand at work" in a free market sense.
The reason is that the companies create artificial monopolies by creating sole distributorships in each country. On top of that, name/brand recognition goes a long way in semi-First World countries like those in Europe, so something like DreamWeaver is going to gather a lot more interest than XMLSpy (or what have you). So you have a market focused on one product, and only one supplier of that product. The math is pretty simple; consumers lose out to asymmetric market forces.
It's not just "because they can", but it's actually the market that has created those conditions. If Europeans would wake up to the alternatives (like China and India have), software prices would be much more reasonable.
If you have any reasonably recent version of Word, it actually has all the things you want, and it is easier to use and create publishable content than almost any other modern word/document processor for documents of the type that you seem to be interested in generating. It's not QuarkExpress or InDesign, but that type of publishing isn't what you seem to be talking about.
I suppose that referring to the product as "MS-Word" shows how far in the past you are since it hasn't been MS-Word for several years. Try the latest version and see how it suits you.
Like any tool, it takes a little while to get up to speed on all the useful features, but I think you'd be surprised at the progress has been made. Yes, you like all the power that a primitive typesetting program like LaTeX can give you, but to eschew new technology because it hides complexity behind a friendly interface is Luddism. Don't fall prey to the belief that simpler is better. As you have said yourself, you are finding dealing with the raw metal distracting and difficult. Let the program handle all that for you. Try Word again.
Bbbut but but... The quality of parts! Right? right? The premium parts make it more expensive, but cheaper in the grand scheme of things for what you get vs. what you pay.
Or so the argument goes.
Which HW platform is cheaper?
Is Apple's combination HW/SW package a better deal than buying the HW and SW separately? Is the markup on Apple's product so much that the opposite is true?
We always hear about how underpriced the product is compared to Windows products, but how underpriced is it compared to a clone of itself?
And if the Apple clone HW is cheaper than comparable Windows HW, then why is the Windows HW so expensive? Have whiny Mac fanboys been lying to me all these years?
For a long time Microsoft didn't have a Boston engineering office, so many of the best and brightest from schools like BU, BC, and Harvard were passed over by MS recruiting. But now they have the chance to apply their brains to various research projects in MS. Naturally many would shy away from the company, as it is pretty much antithetical to the mindset of the typical Bostonian student.
But these kids are smart and will no doubt go to where the money is, i.e. Microsoft.
Anyway, the best first use of this new solar cell technology is in the solar racers that run every year. By using these as a proof of concept, they can then branch out into more lucrative MS Research programs. Can they create solar cars that absorb and retain more power using less surface area? Then we'll see how well these things work in real life.