What a blast from the past. I remember using Gopher extensively back in 1993 in the U.Md computer labs. It was like you could find anything at the push of a button. Then I used Mosaic, with the pretty pictures and type fonts, and knew that was the future immediately. Problem was, bandwidth was so limited back then you couldn't do a whole lot graphically (most folks were working with 1200 or 2400 baud modems). So Gopher was often still the best choice. I remember the Internet Yellow Pages someone else referred to. And it took a half hour to download a single porn shot off usenet! Ah, the memories.
The #1 mistake that Nintendo made with the GameCube was locking the system so hard that nobody was ever able to successfully run homebrew or backups on it. The competing systems allowed it, and that seemed to be the only reason the Xbox got any sales at all (not counting people who bought it just for Halo.)
Someone should mod this guy as funny. Hopefully that was a joke. Maybe 1 out of a 1000 game console owners give a damn about homebrew.
So only 6 million Revolutions by next march? That doesn't sound too good to me.
Assuming Wii launches in October, that's about a million a month, which is above the Xbox 360's pace (which in turn, is selling faster than PS2 at launch).
6 million would be over 25% of the total number of Gamecubes sold (about 21mil). It would be about 10% of the total number of NES's sold (around 60mil). It seems like a very reasonable target, especially for launch when production has not yet ramped up.
I was going to rip your post, but I realized that you are mostly right. It is an unfortunate trend that most people live above their means in the U.S. and don't save.
However, I'm not too sure that people are going to buy the PS3 as a status symbol. While anyone drools over a nice car, or nice clothes, or an expensive home, a game console sits somewhat hidden inside an entertainment center. Instead of "wow, you have a PS3?!!", the general reaction of the knowing gamer would be "why in the hell did you waste your money on that thing?!!"
There's no way you can propose that and call yourself a libertarian. When the time is right, gas prices will go up to $5/6 a gallon on their own, due to increased demand and decreased supply. We don't need government to interfere in that process and create a whole slew of other problems.
This stuff doesn't happen overnight, and there's no magic bullet solution. The tide is turning - hybrid cars are selling well and that's giving auto companies incentive to innovate solutions. In the long run, that's the only thing that's going to work.
Apple screwed the pooch on the iPod Hi-Fi. Sure, it looks all sleek and such, but it's priced WAY too high. $349 will get you a "home theater in a box" that will sound quite a bit better and give you a ton more flexibility, not to mention the ever-elusive AM/FM radio (not that people listen to it anyway). This thing is really no different from a $99 "boom box" type stereo with an AUX input, except that it charges your iPod, and costs $250 more.
It is priced too high. That said, compare the Altec im7 or Bose SoundDock to DLO's iBoom. You can hear the extra bucks in every note. Speakers are for playing music. You're judging it on auxiliary features.
It's my belief that if Apple TRULY wanted market share, they'd follow Microsoft's lead on the Xbox and sell it at a loss but then make it up in other ways.
Thank god they don't. This is a failing strategy for long term success. And that's something that makes Apple unique - I truly believe they care more about experience than market share.
This has been fun, but it's my last post as I need to do some work...
Doesn't matter how innovative it is if the innovation is kept out by barriers. The most you can hope for in this model is that the big corporation takes notice and incorporates the little guy's changes into it's products.
These barriers are more often governmental barriers, often motivated by lobbying money from the conglomerates. I could go into why lobbying should be totally abolished, but that's another topic.
It's taking issues that should be political and making them monetary. It's not about socialism, it's about when a corporate entity infringes upon my rights, the only recourse in which I can pursue them is monetary, making whether or not they want to trample on my rights a cost/benefit decision.
Sure you do - legal recourse. Government should make laws to protect the constitutional rights of individuals and other corporations. But back to the original topic, they should not try to socially engineer corporations to meet a policy initiative. The market should drive this.
Oh, and before you equate legal recourse to monetary resources... my reply to that would be, if the law wasn't so damn complicated, lawyers wouldn't make so much!
The problem with this type of thinking is that new and better products and services aren't the only way to make profit. You can profit off of wars, and off of disasters. Their concern isn't with the betterment of the national good, their concern is with the betterment of the profit and the two don't always agree with each other.
Products and services are the primary driver of profit by a long, long margin over anything else for the vast majority of companies. There are exceptions of course, but I believe most of these exceptions can be traced back to legal loopholes created by, you guessed it, the government. Patent and trademark holding companies are a prime example of this.
I am advocating for democratically executed control over the marketplace. This isn't socialist, it's democratic. There is a difference folks... I'm saying if you have a problem company, put it to a vote on whether or not to revoke their charter maybe. There's a hypothetical for you.
How about just enforcing the laws? Make only laws that protect people from harm by others, then enforce them.
The market works towards a monopoly that creates barriers of entry.
The market is cyclical, yes. It does tend to favor large corporations (which benefits you with convienence and lower prices) to a point - but there has historically been a tipping point where these conglomerates stagnate and smaller, innovative companies rise to provide new or better products or services, and even create entire new markets. The market provides incentive to do this - you have to beat the big boys, so you have to innovate.
Because when you vote with your dollar, your vote only counts as much as the contents of your wallet.
Yes, again, incentive. If everyone is guaranteed the same things, why would we ever work hard to advance ourselves in life? The failure of communism and the economoic stagnation of socialist countries should illustrate this point. Meanwhile, those embracing capitalism thrive (India, China to an increasing extent, South Korea)
Government funds a lot of research that would otherwise not happen because it is unprofitable.
The problem with government research is that too often it is politically motivated, which benefits nobody but the politician. Corporate research is generally intended to make profit - by providing new and better products and services.
Just because it's bureacratic and awful doesn't mean the free market is the answer, it means we need to make it a better government.
Obviously, arguing about political viewpoints is a no-win situation. You slant towards socialistic thinking, me towards liberatarian thinking. I appreciate your viewpoint, but I'll just close with this:
Name one socialist society in history that succeeded over a period of more than 100 years.
People did become conscious of their consumption. I don't know how you could argue otherwise. Anyone who noticed the price of gas was over $3 thought twice before making frivolous trips.
Yes, it's true that prices fluctuated wildly, with stations across the street from each other differing by as much as $.50! But unlike the 70's crisis, nobody went out of business and there wasn't long lines and a widespread panic. This is a successful conclusion to a crisis.
Yes, absolutely. Often times the best course of action for government is to stay out of issues because doing something will make it worse. Some of the great presidents understood this. In fact, our founding fathers wrote the consitution with this principal firmly in mind. Ever since FDR, the check on federal power has been obliterated.
This is not news. This was in Time a few years ago. Apparently there are several Pennsylvania and West Virginia coal mining companies that paid little to no taxes for 5 years by rigging up some tar spraying system over their coal cars.
This is another example of why you cannot rely on the government to "solve" these fuel problems. They end up making bad situations worse. Take the oil crisis of the mid 70's. The government tries to solve the problem by implementing price controls instead of letting market forces take hold and lowering demand. They end up running half the stations out of business for a time and creating huge lines at the ones that do manage to stay open. I'm not a Bush fan, but he should be praised for leaving things alone after Katrina. Gas prices worked themselves out because people became concious of their consumption. Demand fell, prices fell. The Market worked.
When will Samsung and Creative learn? It's NOT all about the hardware! There's no chicken-or-egg argument, you have to have both the chicken (the digital player) AND the egg (the software and content) to succeed in this market. There are a lot of fine players that are as good or better than the iPod, but none of the music services utilizing WMA can compete with iTunes.
The problem? This whole music subscription model. It doesn't work, because it puts the concerns of the industry ahead of the concerns of the customer. Ask 10 people, and at least 9 will say they'd prefer to own their music. This whole licensing model is based on business to business dealings - it's not going to fly with everyday consumers. Say you subscribe to Napster for a year, you spend about $100 bucks, and left with NOTHING! With iTunes, spend that same $100 bucks and have the music for a lifetime.
Until these WMA content providers wise up and adopt the pay-to-own model, it doesn't matter what kind of player Samsung makes. Give the customers what they want and you'll succeed, as Apple has.
Not only that, but they have component prices listed as if they were being sold with a profit margin. You can bet Sony isn't going to markup chips it sells to itself, and for third party chips, you can bet they're paying a lot less. Even the launch quantities of these boxes far surpass what normally qualifies as economies of scale.
Unless BD-ROM starts getting picked up by a lot of PC and Consumer Electronics OEMs, and soon, the price is going to be high for a while. The format isn't even locked down, and the "winner" of the HD-DVD/BD war *still* isn't clear cut!
I think Sony could be in a lot of trouble here. I believe they've overshot on system specs and overestimated the speed of cost drops. MS and Nintendo are looking good to grab a lot of market share back from Sony this generation.
Re:If you replace enough files...
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Good post, but I don't think Apple cares about people's ethics. They want to make money, and OSX in the wild helps their cause. Any exposure is good exposure. Try out OSX for free, but the catch is you have to live with stability problems, hardware incompatibility, no updates, etc. The solution? Go out and buy a Mac!
Oh, and don't weep for Apple. If you want to talk about ethics, let's talk about the Eminem ad and Intel ad being ripoffs of a Lugz and Postal Service video, respectively. Nobody's a saint... except for maybe daveshroeder.
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What a blast from the past. I remember using Gopher extensively back in 1993 in the U.Md computer labs. It was like you could find anything at the push of a button. Then I used Mosaic, with the pretty pictures and type fonts, and knew that was the future immediately. Problem was, bandwidth was so limited back then you couldn't do a whole lot graphically (most folks were working with 1200 or 2400 baud modems). So Gopher was often still the best choice. I remember the Internet Yellow Pages someone else referred to. And it took a half hour to download a single porn shot off usenet! Ah, the memories.
Someone should mod this guy as funny. Hopefully that was a joke. Maybe 1 out of a 1000 game console owners give a damn about homebrew.
Assuming Wii launches in October, that's about a million a month, which is above the Xbox 360's pace (which in turn, is selling faster than PS2 at launch).
6 million would be over 25% of the total number of Gamecubes sold (about 21mil). It would be about 10% of the total number of NES's sold (around 60mil). It seems like a very reasonable target, especially for launch when production has not yet ramped up.
"damn, I'm gonna have to come back in here once I find a mini mushroom..." Keep going back to World 1-4. No need to search.
I was going to rip your post, but I realized that you are mostly right. It is an unfortunate trend that most people live above their means in the U.S. and don't save.
However, I'm not too sure that people are going to buy the PS3 as a status symbol. While anyone drools over a nice car, or nice clothes, or an expensive home, a game console sits somewhat hidden inside an entertainment center. Instead of "wow, you have a PS3?!!", the general reaction of the knowing gamer would be "why in the hell did you waste your money on that thing?!!"
There's no way you can propose that and call yourself a libertarian. When the time is right, gas prices will go up to $5/6 a gallon on their own, due to increased demand and decreased supply. We don't need government to interfere in that process and create a whole slew of other problems. This stuff doesn't happen overnight, and there's no magic bullet solution. The tide is turning - hybrid cars are selling well and that's giving auto companies incentive to innovate solutions. In the long run, that's the only thing that's going to work.
Neither does anyone at Nintendo.
XP has eye candy? Where at?
This sounds suspiciously like this quote from 107 years ago:
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell, Director of US Patent Office, 1899.
In the past 7000 years of human existence, there has always been a next big thing. In the next 7000 years, it will still be true.
Apple screwed the pooch on the iPod Hi-Fi. Sure, it looks all sleek and such, but it's priced WAY too high. $349 will get you a "home theater in a box" that will sound quite a bit better and give you a ton more flexibility, not to mention the ever-elusive AM/FM radio (not that people listen to it anyway). This thing is really no different from a $99 "boom box" type stereo with an AUX input, except that it charges your iPod, and costs $250 more.
It is priced too high. That said, compare the Altec im7 or Bose SoundDock to DLO's iBoom. You can hear the extra bucks in every note. Speakers are for playing music. You're judging it on auxiliary features.
It's my belief that if Apple TRULY wanted market share, they'd follow Microsoft's lead on the Xbox and sell it at a loss but then make it up in other ways.
Thank god they don't. This is a failing strategy for long term success. And that's something that makes Apple unique - I truly believe they care more about experience than market share.
This has been fun, but it's my last post as I need to do some work...
Doesn't matter how innovative it is if the innovation is kept out by barriers. The most you can hope for in this model is that the big corporation takes notice and incorporates the little guy's changes into it's products.
These barriers are more often governmental barriers, often motivated by lobbying money from the conglomerates. I could go into why lobbying should be totally abolished, but that's another topic.
It's taking issues that should be political and making them monetary. It's not about socialism, it's about when a corporate entity infringes upon my rights, the only recourse in which I can pursue them is monetary, making whether or not they want to trample on my rights a cost/benefit decision.
Sure you do - legal recourse. Government should make laws to protect the constitutional rights of individuals and other corporations. But back to the original topic, they should not try to socially engineer corporations to meet a policy initiative. The market should drive this.
Oh, and before you equate legal recourse to monetary resources... my reply to that would be, if the law wasn't so damn complicated, lawyers wouldn't make so much!
The problem with this type of thinking is that new and better products and services aren't the only way to make profit. You can profit off of wars, and off of disasters. Their concern isn't with the betterment of the national good, their concern is with the betterment of the profit and the two don't always agree with each other.
Products and services are the primary driver of profit by a long, long margin over anything else for the vast majority of companies. There are exceptions of course, but I believe most of these exceptions can be traced back to legal loopholes created by, you guessed it, the government. Patent and trademark holding companies are a prime example of this.
I am advocating for democratically executed control over the marketplace. This isn't socialist, it's democratic. There is a difference folks... I'm saying if you have a problem company, put it to a vote on whether or not to revoke their charter maybe. There's a hypothetical for you.
How about just enforcing the laws? Make only laws that protect people from harm by others, then enforce them.
The market is cyclical, yes. It does tend to favor large corporations (which benefits you with convienence and lower prices) to a point - but there has historically been a tipping point where these conglomerates stagnate and smaller, innovative companies rise to provide new or better products or services, and even create entire new markets. The market provides incentive to do this - you have to beat the big boys, so you have to innovate.
Because when you vote with your dollar, your vote only counts as much as the contents of your wallet.
Yes, again, incentive. If everyone is guaranteed the same things, why would we ever work hard to advance ourselves in life? The failure of communism and the economoic stagnation of socialist countries should illustrate this point. Meanwhile, those embracing capitalism thrive (India, China to an increasing extent, South Korea)
Government funds a lot of research that would otherwise not happen because it is unprofitable.
The problem with government research is that too often it is politically motivated, which benefits nobody but the politician. Corporate research is generally intended to make profit - by providing new and better products and services.
Just because it's bureacratic and awful doesn't mean the free market is the answer, it means we need to make it a better government.
Obviously, arguing about political viewpoints is a no-win situation. You slant towards socialistic thinking, me towards liberatarian thinking. I appreciate your viewpoint, but I'll just close with this:
Name one socialist society in history that succeeded over a period of more than 100 years.
People did become conscious of their consumption. I don't know how you could argue otherwise. Anyone who noticed the price of gas was over $3 thought twice before making frivolous trips.
Yes, it's true that prices fluctuated wildly, with stations across the street from each other differing by as much as $.50! But unlike the 70's crisis, nobody went out of business and there wasn't long lines and a widespread panic. This is a successful conclusion to a crisis.
Yes, absolutely. Often times the best course of action for government is to stay out of issues because doing something will make it worse. Some of the great presidents understood this. In fact, our founding fathers wrote the consitution with this principal firmly in mind. Ever since FDR, the check on federal power has been obliterated.
This is not news. This was in Time a few years ago. Apparently there are several Pennsylvania and West Virginia coal mining companies that paid little to no taxes for 5 years by rigging up some tar spraying system over their coal cars.
This is another example of why you cannot rely on the government to "solve" these fuel problems. They end up making bad situations worse. Take the oil crisis of the mid 70's. The government tries to solve the problem by implementing price controls instead of letting market forces take hold and lowering demand. They end up running half the stations out of business for a time and creating huge lines at the ones that do manage to stay open. I'm not a Bush fan, but he should be praised for leaving things alone after Katrina. Gas prices worked themselves out because people became concious of their consumption. Demand fell, prices fell. The Market worked.
When will Samsung and Creative learn? It's NOT all about the hardware! There's no chicken-or-egg argument, you have to have both the chicken (the digital player) AND the egg (the software and content) to succeed in this market. There are a lot of fine players that are as good or better than the iPod, but none of the music services utilizing WMA can compete with iTunes.
The problem? This whole music subscription model. It doesn't work, because it puts the concerns of the industry ahead of the concerns of the customer. Ask 10 people, and at least 9 will say they'd prefer to own their music. This whole licensing model is based on business to business dealings - it's not going to fly with everyday consumers. Say you subscribe to Napster for a year, you spend about $100 bucks, and left with NOTHING! With iTunes, spend that same $100 bucks and have the music for a lifetime.
Until these WMA content providers wise up and adopt the pay-to-own model, it doesn't matter what kind of player Samsung makes. Give the customers what they want and you'll succeed, as Apple has.
Unless BD-ROM starts getting picked up by a lot of PC and Consumer Electronics OEMs, and soon, the price is going to be high for a while. The format isn't even locked down, and the "winner" of the HD-DVD/BD war *still* isn't clear cut!
I think Sony could be in a lot of trouble here. I believe they've overshot on system specs and overestimated the speed of cost drops. MS and Nintendo are looking good to grab a lot of market share back from Sony this generation.
Good post, but I don't think Apple cares about people's ethics. They want to make money, and OSX in the wild helps their cause. Any exposure is good exposure. Try out OSX for free, but the catch is you have to live with stability problems, hardware incompatibility, no updates, etc. The solution? Go out and buy a Mac! Oh, and don't weep for Apple. If you want to talk about ethics, let's talk about the Eminem ad and Intel ad being ripoffs of a Lugz and Postal Service video, respectively. Nobody's a saint... except for maybe daveshroeder.