Go do some research into customer subsidies at major cell phone companies.
Find out how much these companies have to pay Nokia/SonyEricsson/etc for their phones that they give to you for $50. It's much more than $50.
Yes of course there are markups etc but the point is that when you "buy" a phone as part of a contract, the "price" is totally meaningless - it can be $0 if they are goosing you enoughh on your minutes, or it can be $500, both for the same phone.
it's true that marketers & engineers come up with new features to pack in, but they do this for only one reason - people buy them.
maybe people on/. can see through featuritis and say "no.. I don't need that" but 99% of people cannot - and buy whatever has the most features, biggest #'s on the box etc..
This is a pyschological problem, not a technical one
woah there... cell phones don't cost $50. They might cost *you* $50 if you're a good customer or a new customer but they're worth many times more than that and subsidized to get you on board.
In general, the prices offered by major wireless carriers are meaningless. If you want to know what a cell phone is worth, try buying a new, unlocked (use on any carrier, thus not subsidized) phone of recent vintage from an independant shop - you won't find much for $50
I don't have a huge amount of experience w/RSS but I'd like to point out that you can now include RSS feeds in your "My Yahoo" page, along with the plethora of news/weather/stock quotes/etc that you set up - it works for me.
The newest version of the Palm desktop has a number of new features, including new contact fields - these will not migrate to an older palm (i.e. less than OS 5) but they stay on your desktop until you upgrade.
I've been using the new desktop w/an older palm for a while and I'm pretty happy.
Sounds great, but have you considered that maybe those surviving speakers of really want to learn english, or want their kids to learn english, rather than live in poverty so phd's can study their ancient language?
Oh and animals don't share, they consume all the resources they can until disease or predators wipe them out, then they start over. Is that your preferred model for humanity?
re: Athens - while you're obviously more studied than I am on ancient history, I have one thought. I'm sure that all 60K (or 30K) of Athens was not all involved in creating math/science/lit/etc. In fact, I'm sure a fairly large portion of the population of Athens or it's surrounding area had to work to support the efforts of those that made those great contributions that you speak of. If the suburbs of Atlanta are really as devoid of thought as you suggest (a truly arrogant thought, if there ever was one) then I'm sure the labours of that suburb support the society in some way to allow us to keep Stephen Hawking alive, or operate probes on the surface of another planet, to name two examples.
IBM killed Warp because the only people who wanted it, and might have paid for it, live on/. and represent 0.0001% of the computing market.
Fuel efficient engines indeed have been made and can be made, but the fact is that the only people who care to ask what efficiency rating their soon to be purchased car gets are people who live on/. and represent 0.0001% of the car market.
I don't know a single non-nerdish/intellectual type that purchased their car based on fuel efficiency. Like it or not, non-nerdish types vastly outnumber nerdish types, so you make more money if you target unthinking "ohh... pretty car!!! me buy pretty car!!" types.
Don't like it? Neither do I but it's the only planet we've got, so I'm trying to make the best of it.
If you're a car company, and your budget allows you to hire an expert in efficiency for $100K/yr or a hire a designer for the same price, you will sell far far far more cars that are sexy fuel pigs than plain but economic cars.
If oil cost $80/barrel, you can believe more people would care about their car's mileage. However, when oil tops $30 for more than a few months, people call their congressmen and scream bloody murder.
You don't need to invent a conspiracy to explain the dearth of fuel efficient cars. It's just pyschology.
If you were concerned about wasting valuable spectrum, you'd draw and quarter the producers of today's televised tripe. Paris Hilton's reality TV is a waste of spectrum whether analog or digital.
Come on - this is TV for crying out loud - does anyone actually give two shits if they watch Friends in analog or digital? And if they do, why on earth is the government involved? I can understand a government taking a high profile role in healthcare, pensions, crime fighting, defense, etc., but TELEVISION?
If the logic goes that they are preventing a standards war, my question stands - who cares? Maybe if the TV industry wastes enough money on a standards war, TV would become expensive enough that more people will question their viewing habits.
Without any goverment intervention, TV will become digital one way or another, eventually, just by natural technological progression. Why are we wasting tax dollars trying to hurry it along? Is it that freakin' important?
I can understand tax dollars trying to hurry along progression of medical technologies, defense technologies, communication technologies, but TV?? Who cares?
Don't give me that line about educational TV like PBS/Discovery Channel/TLC - they're great I know, but really, do they get that much greater in digital? I didn't think so.
Sure they'll pay for it - but how many people, really now? How many people fly around the world often enough that the time spent matters *and* have enough money that paying 10x for super fast flight would be worth it?
I'd say very few. No more than ever flew on the Concorde.
As a previous poster said, I like big shiny fast machines, but these just don't make any sense unless they are only slightly more expensive than subsonic flight.
True, but you only get to do this once, so make it count.
Also, if you couldn't or wouldn't work to create what you needed, and decided to grab it from those who had it, what makes you think you can or will work to create what you need next, after your victims have already been fleeced?
So as long as you keep more than 1/2 a millilitre/second flowing over your square centimetre you won't be boiling. Of course to be safe you'd probably want a lot more than this.
I won't comment on your political agenda, just the more blatent lies.
Yes, Barwatch lobbied extensively for 4am closings. And why the hell not? We have some of the strictest liquor laws in the world - are you suggesting you don't think they're strict enough? When do you think bars should close? 7pm? Sounds like you're more concerned with the fact that bar owners expressed their opinion on the subject at all.
You may live near Vancouver, but you must not live in it. Yes, Barwatch, and every student association in the region, lobbied hard for more late night bus service. What you fail to point out is that as recently as 2 years ago, we had all night service. It was cut because our love affair with a certain elevated train system had bankrupted the transit system.
Finally, before suggesting Bradley Shende's technical ability wasn't up to snuff, maybe you should have contacted him? His opinion on recent developments in Barwatch would be great resource for your up coming paper. I have known and worked with Bradley Shende for many years and not only can he hold his own technically, his work with Barwatch has made Vancouver nightclubs safer for everyone.
Re:Performance doesn't come directly from 64 bits
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 1
Funny on this - I was in a Mac store the other day, drooling over the G5. I love the G5 design but I could never afford it, no matter how slick. Nevertheless, when the sales droid came over I let him give me the speil and I was astounded - he was explaining how 64 bits was better because you could load all your programs into memory and not use the hard drive anymore. I was totally blown away.
Sure, just one person might not be sufficient, but what if the entire IT department owned enough real stock to make an impact in the company's decisions?
There is a name for corporations that are run by their IT departments, and that name is "bankrupt".
Most techies don't know much about business, just like most managers don't know much about tech. Knowing how to run the corporate network doesn't mean squat when it comes to say, marketing your company's product, or negotiating with suppliers and customers, or god forbid, competing against other companies.
30 minute G latencies must be a E bitch for that T 3 way TCP D handshake, not to S mention the fact L that you for this / to work you C must also "transfer" A *yourself* from host to B host, along with any data. When you get L tired of riding the E rails, you know what to do.
GPS jamming does not turn smart bombs dumb, just less smart. JDAM kits have GPS and inertial guidance and in the event of a loss of GPS data the inertial system takes over. The Circular Error Probable (CEP) goes from 13 meteres to 30, but hardly a dumb bomb.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/jdam.ht m
>Despite the current situation, I don't think anyone could >realistically predict a long-term deterioration in the tech dustry. > >They didn't predict the current slump very well.
Lots of brave people pointed out that insanity that was going on in the late 90's, but if you were drinking the koolaid, you just didn't want to hear it. It's almost the definition of a bubble to be self-reinforcing, with everyone telling each other how much better it will get. A guy who comes along with a bucket of cold water will be soundly ignored, no matter how right he is.
Anyone who had been around for say, the nifty-fifty in the sixties would have known that a) tech was a bubble and b) it would end badly. Of course, no one can know when, but that it would end and with consequences for all, was never in question.
In every past investment bubble a few things stand out as constants. One is that the particular subject of the mania didn't return to pre-bubble normalcy for a long time. Not a few years, a few decades. The other is that it takes a long time for people to forget how burned they got and no new fads will take hold until a new generation of suckers is born. And finally, when that next bubble came along, it was never for the same product/commodity/investment as the last.
Think about it.
There was only *1* tulip mania, not two. Stocks didn't take a breather after 1929 and then keep on trucking. There was no "nifty-fifty part II" and so on..
There definately will never be a tech bubble again, but there will be other fads and manias that will cause people to pay ridiculous amounts of money for worthless stock. But it won't be for tech/internet.
The very fact that some people are sitting around bemoaning their fate and waiting for the next bubble is good evidence that the market has further to fall.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's try again.
Go do some research into customer subsidies at major cell phone companies.
Find out how much these companies have to pay Nokia/SonyEricsson/etc for their phones that they give to you for $50. It's much more than $50.
Yes of course there are markups etc but the point is that when you "buy" a phone as part of a contract, the "price" is totally meaningless - it can be $0 if they are goosing you enoughh on your minutes, or it can be $500, both for the same phone.
Actually you're not quite correct.
/. can see through featuritis and say "no.. I don't need that" but 99% of people cannot - and buy whatever has the most features, biggest #'s on the box etc..
it's true that marketers & engineers come up with new features to pack in, but they do this for only one reason - people buy them.
maybe people on
This is a pyschological problem, not a technical one
woah there... cell phones don't cost $50. They might cost *you* $50 if you're a good customer or a new customer but they're worth many times more than that and subsidized to get you on board.
In general, the prices offered by major wireless carriers are meaningless. If you want to know what a cell phone is worth, try buying a new, unlocked (use on any carrier, thus not subsidized) phone of recent vintage from an independant shop - you won't find much for $50
http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/promo_content?.module =ycontent
The newest version of the Palm desktop has a number of new features, including new contact fields - these will not migrate to an older palm (i.e. less than OS 5) but they stay on your desktop until you upgrade.
I've been using the new desktop w/an older palm for a while and I'm pretty happy.
I prefer this one:
http://shelf.dyndns.org/~stu/screen-desktop.jpg
http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/screen.html
Sounds great, but have you considered that maybe those surviving speakers of really want to learn english, or want their kids to learn english, rather than live in poverty so phd's can study their ancient language?
Oh and animals don't share, they consume all the resources they can until disease or predators wipe them out, then they start over. Is that your preferred model for humanity?
re: Athens - while you're obviously more studied than I am on ancient history, I have one thought. I'm sure that all 60K (or 30K) of Athens was not all involved in creating math/science/lit/etc. In fact, I'm sure a fairly large portion of the population of Athens or it's surrounding area had to work to support the efforts of those that made those great contributions that you speak of. If the suburbs of Atlanta are really as devoid of thought as you suggest (a truly arrogant thought, if there ever was one) then I'm sure the labours of that suburb support the society in some way to allow us to keep Stephen Hawking alive, or operate probes on the surface of another planet, to name two examples.
IBM killed Warp because the only people who wanted it, and might have paid for it, live on /. and represent 0.0001% of the computing market.
/. and represent 0.0001% of the car market.
Fuel efficient engines indeed have been made and can be made, but the fact is that the only people who care to ask what efficiency rating their soon to be purchased car gets are people who live on
I don't know a single non-nerdish/intellectual type that purchased their car based on fuel efficiency. Like it or not, non-nerdish types vastly outnumber nerdish types, so you make more money if you target unthinking "ohh... pretty car!!! me buy pretty car!!" types.
Don't like it? Neither do I but it's the only planet we've got, so I'm trying to make the best of it.
If you're a car company, and your budget allows you to hire an expert in efficiency for $100K/yr or a hire a designer for the same price, you will sell far far far more cars that are sexy fuel pigs than plain but economic cars.
If oil cost $80/barrel, you can believe more people would care about their car's mileage. However, when oil tops $30 for more than a few months, people call their congressmen and scream bloody murder.
You don't need to invent a conspiracy to explain the dearth of fuel efficient cars. It's just pyschology.
I thought part of the /. membership initiation was to type in at least 10 pages of Compute!'s Gazette ML code?
9 84 08-campaign.html
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/gazette/1
Evidently not...
This is close to what you want - perhaps it could be modified to rip instead of copy?
t m
http://www.summationtechnology.com/orbitmicro.h
If you were concerned about wasting valuable spectrum, you'd draw and quarter the producers of today's televised tripe. Paris Hilton's reality TV is a waste of spectrum whether analog or digital.
Come on - this is TV for crying out loud - does anyone actually give two shits if they watch Friends in analog or digital? And if they do, why on earth is the government involved? I can understand a government taking a high profile role in healthcare, pensions, crime fighting, defense, etc., but TELEVISION?
If the logic goes that they are preventing a standards war, my question stands - who cares? Maybe if the TV industry wastes enough money on a standards war, TV would become expensive enough that more people will question their viewing habits.
Without any goverment intervention, TV will become digital one way or another, eventually, just by natural technological progression. Why are we wasting tax dollars trying to hurry it along? Is it that freakin' important?
I can understand tax dollars trying to hurry along progression of medical technologies, defense technologies, communication technologies, but TV?? Who cares?
Don't give me that line about educational TV like PBS/Discovery Channel/TLC - they're great I know, but really, do they get that much greater in digital? I didn't think so.
Depends on whether or not your name is Micheal Jackson:
3 21 people.html
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/031126/afp/031126230
Sure they'll pay for it - but how many people, really now? How many people fly around the world often enough that the time spent matters *and* have enough money that paying 10x for super fast flight would be worth it?
I'd say very few. No more than ever flew on the Concorde.
As a previous poster said, I like big shiny fast machines, but these just don't make any sense unless they are only slightly more expensive than subsonic flight.
True, but you only get to do this once, so make it count.
Also, if you couldn't or wouldn't work to create what you needed, and decided to grab it from those who had it, what makes you think you can or will work to create what you need next, after your victims have already been fleeced?
OK, let's see here, first off, most stove top burners are closer to 2000 to 3000 Watts, not 1000.
s /c omparisonchart.html
i e= UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&me ta=
http://www.consumersearch.com/www/kitchen/range
But regardless, your analogy is much too much work, let's just figure out how much water you can boil each second with 1KW of power.
This page:
http://www.infinitepower.org/calc_watts.htm
Says you can evaporate 0.0001172 gallons each second. According to Google, this works out to:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=0.0001172+gallon&
Or about 0.44 mL
So as long as you keep more than 1/2 a millilitre/second flowing over your square centimetre you won't be boiling. Of course to be safe you'd probably want a lot more than this.
I won't comment on your political agenda, just the more blatent lies.
Yes, Barwatch lobbied extensively for 4am closings. And why the hell not? We have some of the strictest liquor laws in the world - are you suggesting you don't think they're strict enough? When do you think bars should close? 7pm? Sounds like you're more concerned with the fact that bar owners expressed their opinion on the subject at all.
You may live near Vancouver, but you must not live in it. Yes, Barwatch, and every student association in the region, lobbied hard for more late night bus service. What you fail to point out is that as recently as 2 years ago, we had all night service. It was cut because our love affair with a certain elevated train system had bankrupted the transit system.
Finally, before suggesting Bradley Shende's technical ability wasn't up to snuff, maybe you should have contacted him? His opinion on recent developments in Barwatch would be great resource for your up coming paper. I have known and worked with Bradley Shende for many years and not only can he hold his own technically, his work with Barwatch has made Vancouver nightclubs safer for everyone.
Funny on this - I was in a Mac store the other day, drooling over the G5. I love the G5 design but I could never afford it, no matter how slick. Nevertheless, when the sales droid came over I let him give me the speil and I was astounded - he was explaining how 64 bits was better because you could load all your programs into memory and not use the hard drive anymore. I was totally blown away.
Easy now... some of us grew up in those "wastelands" and consider themselves better for it...
:)
(Elsa YT 1972-1982
There is a name for corporations that are run by their IT departments, and that name is "bankrupt".
Most techies don't know much about business, just like most managers don't know much about tech. Knowing how to run the corporate network doesn't mean squat when it comes to say, marketing your company's product, or negotiating with suppliers and customers, or god forbid, competing against other companies.
30 minute G latencies must be a E bitch for that T 3 way TCP D handshake, not to S mention the fact L that you for this / to work you C must also "transfer" A *yourself* from host to B host, along with any data. When you get L tired of riding the E rails, you know what to do.
Parent will be modded down by the cabal. There is no cabal.
GPS jamming does not turn smart bombs dumb, just less smart. JDAM kits have GPS and inertial guidance and in the event of a loss of GPS data the inertial system takes over. The Circular Error Probable (CEP) goes from 13 meteres to 30, but hardly a dumb bomb.
t m
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/jdam.h
>Despite the current situation, I don't think anyone could >realistically predict a long-term deterioration in the tech dustry.
>
>They didn't predict the current slump very well.
Lots of brave people pointed out that insanity that was going on in the late 90's, but if you were drinking the koolaid, you just didn't want to hear it. It's almost the definition of a bubble to be self-reinforcing, with everyone telling each other how much better it will get. A guy who comes along with a bucket of cold water will be soundly ignored, no matter how right he is.
Anyone who had been around for say, the nifty-fifty in the sixties would have known that a) tech was a bubble and b) it would end badly. Of course, no one can know when, but that it would end and with consequences for all, was never in question.
Not.
In every past investment bubble a few things stand out as constants. One is that the particular subject of the mania didn't return to pre-bubble normalcy for a long time. Not a few years, a few decades. The other is that it takes a long time for people to forget how burned they got and no new fads will take hold until a new generation of suckers is born. And finally, when that next bubble came along, it was never for the same product/commodity/investment as the last.
Think about it.
There was only *1* tulip mania, not two.
Stocks didn't take a breather after 1929 and then keep on trucking.
There was no "nifty-fifty part II"
and so on..
There definately will never be a tech bubble again, but there will be other fads and manias that will cause people to pay ridiculous amounts of money for worthless stock. But it won't be for tech/internet.
The very fact that some people are sitting around bemoaning their fate and waiting for the next bubble is good evidence that the market has further to fall.