iPhone Data planes cost the same or less than every other smart phone plan AT&T offers, and AT&Ts smart phone data plans a fairly comparable to everyone elses.
This just another one of those things that sounds so terrible until you realize it is exactly the same for every other device in the class. Which carrier offers smart phones unlimited data access for the same price as using a "dumb" phone (for lack of a better word).
If you read the link to the information on the law (Another step beyond the article), you will see an exemption for items intended to be free. For some of the others, the law also specifically excludes Computer Software.
This law (Like all other sales tax laws). Requires the seller to have a substantial nexus within the state in order to compel them to collect and report sales. This does not make the consumer less liable for the tax they owe, but does not make collections problematic.
Reading the law will show you what it is. A poorly written law that is largely unenforceable which will be passed by legislators who will spend less dime reading and debating it than the average/. user has. The law is full of concessions to lobbyists. It includes online services, but not online travel services. Finally for those of you asking about newspapers:
19 Sec. 506. RCW 82.08.0253 and 1980 c 37 s 21 are each amended to 20 read as follows: 21 (1) The tax levied by RCW 82.08.020 ((shall)) does not apply to: 22 (a) The distribution and newsstand sale of printed newspapers; and 23 (b) The sale of newspapers transferred electronically, provided 24 that the electronic version of a printed newspaper: 25 (i) Shares content with the printed newspaper; and 26 (ii) Is prominently identified by the same name as the printed 27 newspaper or otherwise conspicuously indicates that it is a complement 28 to the printed newspaper. 29 (2) For purposes of this section, "printed newspaper" means a 30 publication issued regularly at stated intervals at least twice a month 31 and printed on newsprint in tabloid or broadsheet format folded loosely 32 together without stapling, glue, or any other binding of any kind, 33 including any supplement of a printed newspaper.
Unless Washington State is different, Sales tax is still on the amount an item is sold for and has nothing at all to do with the value of an item. Keep in mind we are not discussing income tax...Sales tax generally excludes people reselling items they already paid sales tax on as well.
Perhaps they will expect you to pay tax on the perceived value of the little chunks of encrypted data that can be assembled into a song, but only those chunks that were downloaded within the borders of Washington state.
Perhaps they will next Tax girls who receive Mix tapes (or cds or flash drives) from their boyfriends..
Good luck Washington State. We love you.
Demonstrated on this site time and again has been the fact that apple is not in way expensive for similar hardware. You are like the Microsoft commercials, yes if you need a cheaper laptop without all of the features the Apple offers, go ahead and buy it.
Show me a comparison where an Apple sells for more than $200 more than a PC without using the phrase "I don't really need X anyway". (This is almost impossible to do since no one else makes a 17" notebook that is less than an inch thick and has an 8 hour battery.
Comparisons are tough, something like the Dell M1730 which has SLI but on a lesser card, also weighs 5lbs more, is nearly twice as thick and supports 4GB less RAM. The RAM on the dell is inferior too, 667 DDR2 versus 1066 DDR3. Why did I choose Dell? They are the only major manufacture with something in the neighborhood that actually costs less than Apple's list price on the 17" Mac Book Pro.
If you want to get clsoer to the MBP form factor you can look at the Dell Studio 17. Still thicker and heavier with half the ram (and still DDR2 667), a slower CPU , and much less powerful GPU.
The point of all this is that the Apple provides a nice balance of form and function that a lot of people like. There is a demographic for people that want their portable computers portable......
The other interesting part of the equation will be the server side bandwidth required. A data center supporting just 200 gamers playing HD games at 5Mbps (their numbers, not mine) would need to be able to reliably push out ~1Gbps.
200 users would be paying about $10k a year. Even if each user brings in an additional $200 a year in revenue from their cut of game sales, we are still not covering the cost of the bandwidth. Add in server depreciation, power, cooling, staff, administrative overhead....
They can not multicast, the bandwidth required will scale directly with the number of users they have. Sad part is hey may have enough financial backing to get this off the ground which will just leave a bunch of users with games they can't play in a year or two.
Wow plays perfectly fine for more than one user on a regular dial-up connection. The only problem with dial-up will be latency for PVP not bandwidth. I suppose if you all went into Dalaran right before WG started you might overload your connection, but normal day to day use MMORPGs use very little bandwidth.
Of course this has nothing to do with the way MMORPGs work.
The article does say "streaming video", but I agree with your assessment, even with really good compression 5mbps would not be able to fully stream 1080p at an anything like a playable frame rate.
Hmm, how can you see where my head is while yours is so far embedded. I believe my response was totally appropriate to an AC who was being an ass and had clearly not even read the summary, let alone the actual article.
Your comment was just rudeness from a very small minded person.
The phantom was a considerably different project that was actually a lot more plausible. The Phantom still intended to render and play downloaded games locally.
this project is like.. Hey that Phantom worked so well, lets take it one step further...
Even the summary says the games are rendered by the servers.... The article will tell you they have a proprietary compression algorithm, which will send compressed video for 480p at 1.5mbps and 1080p at 5mbps, and nothing higher...
I will tell you this all works great inside their offices, and probably not anywhere else on this planet.
Except that is not what it says... It says the server will do the lifting to a thin client. The server is not just streaming binaries to be rendered on the client, the server is receiving input from and return video to be displayed on the client.
I think Amazon sells crowbars to remove your foot from your mouth.
I am still fascinated by all these Fascist Muslim Zionists running around. Children should stop trying to use words they do not understand. Even copying and pasting from a moron still makes you moron.
Perhpas the bios of this particular AC is infected with a Virus. He has tried to wipe his hard drive several times, but his PC keeps pouring out sensless hate speech.
On an unrelated note, I voted for Bush twice and the deregulating Republican Congress that caused this mess. I accept my responsibility and apologize. It is time you did the same. Trying to blame a mess you clearly helped cause on the people trying to fix it is dishonest and irresponsible.
This is how I ended up an OSX user. There is nothing that compares hardware wise (In spite of what the uninformed believe). I intended to install Windows and be done with it, I booted in to OSX just to check it out when I got the machine and now I cringe whenever I need to start Windows. Unix users that need a little more application support (ie Office (unfortunately)) should run from Windows.
And of course Apples actually cos $50-$100 more than similarly configured hardware in the same form factor in a Windows PC. I do enjoy when people point out that a machine with less L2 cache and weighing almost 9 lbs in its 1.5" case is "the same".
Worth the offtopic..So the chief aid to the guy your are trying to portray as a Muslim is a Zionist. I guess you have not fully thought through the meaning of your bigotry.
You could click on the link in his comment and then click on his name at his site. His involvement in this issue is fairly well documented here. There have even been one or two/. interviews of him.
Keep in mind that the author of the report, "Informa Telecoms & Media" has a vested interest in people believing the key to the mobile market is an open source platform (This was in fact the key finding of their report). Informa runs what they call "ONLY Mobile Specific Open Source Conference and Exhibition in the World".
Be cool if the journalists of the world still looked into the motivations of their sources. Informa needs to send IBT, Businessweek and the rest of them a check for advertising fees.
Until of course frustrated users returned their netbooks and forced all of them to begin offering Windows..I have been using Linux since before the first release of SLS, it still does not have the mainstream application support for mass market appeal.
I would be fascinated to see a link to the $1,499 machine with a Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processor and 6GB of ram. I would particularly interested if that machine was expandable to 2 of those CPUs and 32GB of ram.
Slashdot Mirror
iPhone Data planes cost the same or less than every other smart phone plan AT&T offers, and AT&Ts smart phone data plans a fairly comparable to everyone elses.
This just another one of those things that sounds so terrible until you realize it is exactly the same for every other device in the class. Which carrier offers smart phones unlimited data access for the same price as using a "dumb" phone (for lack of a better word).
If you read the link to the information on the law (Another step beyond the article), you will see an exemption for items intended to be free. For some of the others, the law also specifically excludes Computer Software.
This law (Like all other sales tax laws). Requires the seller to have a substantial nexus within the state in order to compel them to collect and report sales. This does not make the consumer less liable for the tax they owe, but does not make collections problematic.
Reading the law will show you what it is. A poorly written law that is largely unenforceable which will be passed by legislators who will spend less dime reading and debating it than the average /. user has. The law is full of concessions to lobbyists. It includes online services, but not online travel services. Finally for those of you asking about newspapers:
19 Sec. 506. RCW 82.08.0253 and 1980 c 37 s 21 are each amended to
20 read as follows:
21 (1) The tax levied by RCW 82.08.020 ((shall)) does not apply to:
22 (a) The distribution and newsstand sale of printed newspapers; and
23 (b) The sale of newspapers transferred electronically, provided
24 that the electronic version of a printed newspaper:
25 (i) Shares content with the printed newspaper; and
26 (ii) Is prominently identified by the same name as the printed
27 newspaper or otherwise conspicuously indicates that it is a complement
28 to the printed newspaper.
29 (2) For purposes of this section, "printed newspaper" means a
30 publication issued regularly at stated intervals at least twice a month
31 and printed on newsprint in tabloid or broadsheet format folded loosely
32 together without stapling, glue, or any other binding of any kind,
33 including any supplement of a printed newspaper.
It appears washington state does not tax them..
Unless Washington State is different, Sales tax is still on the amount an item is sold for and has nothing at all to do with the value of an item. Keep in mind we are not discussing income tax...Sales tax generally excludes people reselling items they already paid sales tax on as well.
Perhaps they will expect you to pay tax on the perceived value of the little chunks of encrypted data that can be assembled into a song, but only those chunks that were downloaded within the borders of Washington state. Perhaps they will next Tax girls who receive Mix tapes (or cds or flash drives) from their boyfriends.. Good luck Washington State. We love you.
Demonstrated on this site time and again has been the fact that apple is not in way expensive for similar hardware. You are like the Microsoft commercials, yes if you need a cheaper laptop without all of the features the Apple offers, go ahead and buy it.
Show me a comparison where an Apple sells for more than $200 more than a PC without using the phrase "I don't really need X anyway". (This is almost impossible to do since no one else makes a 17" notebook that is less than an inch thick and has an 8 hour battery.
Comparisons are tough, something like the Dell M1730 which has SLI but on a lesser card, also weighs 5lbs more, is nearly twice as thick and supports 4GB less RAM. The RAM on the dell is inferior too, 667 DDR2 versus 1066 DDR3. Why did I choose Dell? They are the only major manufacture with something in the neighborhood that actually costs less than Apple's list price on the 17" Mac Book Pro.
If you want to get clsoer to the MBP form factor you can look at the Dell Studio 17. Still thicker and heavier with half the ram (and still DDR2 667), a slower CPU , and much less powerful GPU.
The point of all this is that the Apple provides a nice balance of form and function that a lot of people like. There is a demographic for people that want their portable computers portable......
The other interesting part of the equation will be the server side bandwidth required. A data center supporting just 200 gamers playing HD games at 5Mbps (their numbers, not mine) would need to be able to reliably push out ~1Gbps.
200 users would be paying about $10k a year. Even if each user brings in an additional $200 a year in revenue from their cut of game sales, we are still not covering the cost of the bandwidth. Add in server depreciation, power, cooling, staff, administrative overhead....
They can not multicast, the bandwidth required will scale directly with the number of users they have. Sad part is hey may have enough financial backing to get this off the ground which will just leave a bunch of users with games they can't play in a year or two.
Man, I can't believe you listed TV as like the first thing you got rid of. Are you Canadian!?
Wow plays perfectly fine for more than one user on a regular dial-up connection. The only problem with dial-up will be latency for PVP not bandwidth. I suppose if you all went into Dalaran right before WG started you might overload your connection, but normal day to day use MMORPGs use very little bandwidth.
Of course this has nothing to do with the way MMORPGs work.
The article does say "streaming video", but I agree with your assessment, even with really good compression 5mbps would not be able to fully stream 1080p at an anything like a playable frame rate.
Hmm, how can you see where my head is while yours is so far embedded. I believe my response was totally appropriate to an AC who was being an ass and had clearly not even read the summary, let alone the actual article.
Your comment was just rudeness from a very small minded person.
The phantom was a considerably different project that was actually a lot more plausible. The Phantom still intended to render and play downloaded games locally.
this project is like.. Hey that Phantom worked so well, lets take it one step further...
Even the summary says the games are rendered by the servers.... The article will tell you they have a proprietary compression algorithm, which will send compressed video for 480p at 1.5mbps and 1080p at 5mbps, and nothing higher...
I will tell you this all works great inside their offices, and probably not anywhere else on this planet.
Except that is not what it says... It says the server will do the lifting to a thin client. The server is not just streaming binaries to be rendered on the client, the server is receiving input from and return video to be displayed on the client.
I think Amazon sells crowbars to remove your foot from your mouth.
I am still fascinated by all these Fascist Muslim Zionists running around. Children should stop trying to use words they do not understand. Even copying and pasting from a moron still makes you moron.
Perhpas the bios of this particular AC is infected with a Virus. He has tried to wipe his hard drive several times, but his PC keeps pouring out sensless hate speech.
On an unrelated note, I voted for Bush twice and the deregulating Republican Congress that caused this mess. I accept my responsibility and apologize. It is time you did the same. Trying to blame a mess you clearly helped cause on the people trying to fix it is dishonest and irresponsible.
This is how I ended up an OSX user. There is nothing that compares hardware wise (In spite of what the uninformed believe). I intended to install Windows and be done with it, I booted in to OSX just to check it out when I got the machine and now I cringe whenever I need to start Windows. Unix users that need a little more application support (ie Office (unfortunately)) should run from Windows.
And of course Apples actually cos $50-$100 more than similarly configured hardware in the same form factor in a Windows PC. I do enjoy when people point out that a machine with less L2 cache and weighing almost 9 lbs in its 1.5" case is "the same".
Worth the offtopic..So the chief aid to the guy your are trying to portray as a Muslim is a Zionist. I guess you have not fully thought through the meaning of your bigotry.
I was thinking Gateway, but the other choices are interesting.
Well I really meant it as a you have done a lot more work since then, certainly wasn't meant as a slight :)
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/13/1627205 There is the interview. It is getting a little old, but you may find it interesting. I see Ray already responded to you.
You could click on the link in his comment and then click on his name at his site. His involvement in this issue is fairly well documented here. There have even been one or two /. interviews of him.
Do you read /. much? lol..... I would have thought you were kidding if it was not for the odd emphasis...
Keep in mind that the author of the report, "Informa Telecoms & Media" has a vested interest in people believing the key to the mobile market is an open source platform (This was in fact the key finding of their report). Informa runs what they call "ONLY Mobile Specific Open Source Conference and Exhibition in the World".
Be cool if the journalists of the world still looked into the motivations of their sources. Informa needs to send IBT, Businessweek and the rest of them a check for advertising fees.
Until of course frustrated users returned their netbooks and forced all of them to begin offering Windows..I have been using Linux since before the first release of SLS, it still does not have the mainstream application support for mass market appeal.
I would be fascinated to see a link to the $1,499 machine with a Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processor and 6GB of ram. I would particularly interested if that machine was expandable to 2 of those CPUs and 32GB of ram.
Love them or hate them, Microsoft is a factual software giant...