Lacking the willingness to sell out what remains of freedom in the cellphone market and work with a carrier exclusively, I'd guess. I don't know, I don't deal with that end of telecom, nor represent any of those companies.
"Visual Voicemail" (like all voicemail) is done on the carrier's side. It has very little to do with the device. Your phone doesn't "store" your voicemail, you know that much right? You call into a server, it spits it out. If you add a bit more two-way communication you get a bit more control. But since there's no standard on that the way there is with a basic phone call and tone commands ("Press 7 to delete") you don't get that kind of control without carrier partnerships. Partnerships on a feature like this require exclusivity, and most phone manufacturers wouldn't want to limit themselves to one carrier. For Apple it's no big deal, before this they had no carriers.
The point is that it isn't new, not that sticking the EXACT same app on a cellphone isn't useful. Just that Apple claimed once again that they invented something that already existed.
Let's see...it has low call quality (GSM), a poorly functioning address book (no search), is locked to a single carrier, has a bad s/n ratio while in calls, requires you to SMS on a narrow, non-tactile keypad, won't let you send an SMS to more than one person, won't let you copy/paste sms text (or any text) to create a duplicate message, has no voice dial...
If anyone besides Apple had released a PHONE with these flaws it would be widely ridiculed. But the iPhone isn't just a phone, it's a convergence device. It does all the other things very well (internet browsing, picture/movie viewing, music player) and so people forgive it as a badly executed phone because it is a very good DEVICE.
So I stand by my statement: it is a lousy phone. If you want to explain why it lacks the features that most FREE phones have without any significant additions, then go right ahead (threaded SMS is not new). But if you look at the PHONE features and compare it with something like the Motorola Q, Samsung Blackjack, or any of the HTC WM6 devices...you'll see that it's missing just about every nice phone feature that sets those convergence devices apart from regular phones.
Well, unless they can manage to turn on a secret, hidden mic jack and processor with a software update this won't be a very big threat.
And VOIP on an iPod is not a replacement for a cellphone for the real world, non-/. users.
But I do bet that they released this one after since if they'd done it at the time of the iPhone they'd not have sold 1/10th as many iPhones. By most accounts isn't it a pretty lousy phone?
Did you even bother to RTFA? That's exactly what it's for.
Here's a more useful article summary, from someone who's hatred of Microsoft doesn't get in the way of appreciating a cool new technology: A user (read: anyone) defines a set of rating guidelines, and anyone else can subscribe to that rating system, and then selectively filter their content based on how it scores on said rating system. It can also IGNORE the "default" rating system imposed by the MPAA.
Despite this editor's Anti-MS vitriol, this is actually an incredibly useful tool. I don't really agree with much of what the MPAA decides is "decent" and what is "inappropriate" - I'd much rather have my children learn about normal sexual behavior between consenting adults than watching someone being disemboweled. This would give me the ability to not only generate my own rating system, but to actually subscribe to one that has the same ideals I have, rather than assuming that everyone has a pro-religion, pro-violence, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-independent-film stance.
If you're going to hate MS for anything, do it for something it isn't in fact a really good idea.
Note: If you don't understand how movies are currently rated, read up on it.
I'm sorry to punch holes in your math, but I have the distinct feeling that you going out of business had very little to do with the fluctuating density of fuel.
Since you listed your profit after describing how much you sold your goods for, I can guess you meant your gross income, not profit, was $300/wk. Now there are precious few places in the US (which I assume you ran you business in, otherwise it wouldn't be particularly relevant to the discussion) where you can operate a business on only $300/wk (of nearly any kind, let alone selling goods). Even assuming you had no labor cost (did all the work yourself) and your rent was minimal, fueling licenses and environmental regulatory compliance would easily run you upwards of $1000/mo, or nearly all of your GROSS INCOME, leaving you pennies a day to operate your business on. It is not terribly surprising that you went out of business, it doesn't sound like you had a particularly well-planned business.
Further, 10,000L/wk of gas comes out to about 2600 gallons, or ~120 customers a week. That's a pretty low number (less than 18/day!), and since your fixed costs (licenses, rent, etc) wouldn't care if you had 10 or 1000 customers, it sounds like your biggest problem was not being someplace (or run in such a way) that you could sell enough fuel to cover your costs.
Despite what all the little previews before your overpriced movie tell you, videotaping a movie (or downloading a bootleg, etc) IS NOT THEFT. IT IS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. This distinction often gets left out, because it benefits the **AA to be...forgotten.
Imagine you walked into a Kinkos with the latest NYT's Best Seller under your arm. Should they tackle you there? What if you put the first few pages into a copy machine? Should Kinko's call up a task force specially put in place to protect the 'creative' works of corporations?
Copyright Infringement laws traditionally kick in when the infringer has "profited materially" from the sale or distribution of copyrighted works. The act of making a copy doesn't constitute a material gain, so prior to NY's "special" laws, this would have been "Attempted Copyright Violation" - a crime so minuscule that it wouldn't be tried except by a massive organization with lawyers to spare.
By sponsoring legislation (more specifically, legislators) that would push through harsher punishments for something that can cost a company potential profits (note: this is not the same as a loss) the MPAA has successfully made it really easy to punish the wrong people. I promise you that this guy in NY was not going to be the one copy that makes it onto the internet. No, that'll happen when some organized crime group has one of their lackies either swipe the reel after the theater has closed for the night, or just snags a DVD from one of the many pre-releases that are distributed.
These new laws will be about as effective at stopping piracy as busting homeless crackheads is at stopping drug abuse. Sure, they can pat themselves on the back and remark what a great job they've done, but they're really just taking out the lowest hanging fruit. Good work, MPAA!
For a house? No, this probably isn't practical.
But suppose you sell it to law firms, CEOs, and Studios to coat their conference rooms. Despite the clear glass, no signals in or out. Seems a lot more practical, and a lot more likely.
I'm guessing the core audience (despite the article's narrow minded author) isn't really rich paranoid people.
As far as "plugging a hole" - as I recall most cellphone signals, WiFi, and the like operate within the 900-2400mHz range - IIRC the wave half-height is about the size of a few centimeters - making things like holes in the wall, seams between glass sheets, and even a door's crack unlikely places for waves to escape.
That's a mighty big "IF" - is it really 75% if you have to retrain your workforce, find all new support contacts, new suppliers and distributors, and be locked to a single hardware AND software vendor?
75% sounds like a marketing catchphrase.
Think about the people who's job it is to decide what hardware goes in a building to serve thousands of employees. They're not likely to change even if it is slightly less work to maintain - because it's THEIR job to maintain the existing systems. They'd be buying themselves out of work.
Fighting an entrenched competitor is not so easy as being marginally better / slightly different.
Eloquently stated, and clearly thoroughly researched.
USB/Firewire is a little different than DVD technology. With Firewire, you're paying to be part of a logo consortium. You guarantee that your product will work according to their standards and you pay them a bit of money. In exchange you get to put the "Firewire" logo on your stuff. Same goes for bluetooth, and for USB. But that's because no one company controls these. They're consortia and operate differently.
But how do you suppose they enforce that payment? It's very easy to see if someone's put your logo on their product. How do you know if they used your chips or someone else's? How do you sell them multi-million dollar encryption hardware if they could just go without it? You make it required to read the discs. You could produce a non-AACS compliant HD-DVD player. But it wouldn't play commercial movies.
The purpose is for Sony or Toshiba/NEC to control who can MAKE their standard's players, recorders, and authoring hardware. It's use as a copy-protection scheme is secondary.
Why spend millions on AACS when other DRM would work?
Two reasons: 1 - Because if it's an existing scheme, SOMEONE owns it and likely it isn't the people inventing the new standard, nor can they charge "new technology" prices on the encoding/decoding hardware. You can't really go to a mfg and tell them they have to buy the same chips they've been buying for 10 years and tell them they cost more now. No, these are new chips. See the new logo?
And 2 - Because you need to give the content creators a reason to prefer your technology, enough to get them to make the initial investment in it. "It's way harder to pirate this movie. It's HD-DVD! Encryption the likes of which has never been seen. So will you use it to stop those big scary pirates?"
Hell of a sales pitch to a dying, scared industry.
As inconvenient as it is, the real reason for DVD security like AACS isn't for the consumer. Sorry, you're not that important.
When people invest millions of dollars in developing a standard like HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, or whatever comes along next (UV-DVD?), they need assurances that they will get their money back. They don't make money off of the sale of DVDs, but rather off of DVD hardware. So companies that manufacture DVDs can't just build players, they have to buy little AACS chips directly and exclusively from the standard's creator, and pay them a fee.
They don't/really/ care if you break the encryption, because no DVD-player manufacturer could ever go out and use the cracks to avoid paying Sony / Toshiba/NEC. AACS has done its job, in that sense.
I'm glad AACS was cracked. I don't particularly like the idea that I have to rely on a physical copy of something I allegedly only own the rights to "watch" anyways.
Actually, if the phone has any kind of PC availably - USB cable, bluetooth push, whatever, you can copy it to the phone and run it just fine. I've never had a problem putting J2ME apps on Sprint phones, but I've only been selling their phones for three years.
Or, just pay the damned 3 cents and initiate a data call on the weekend. How do you put J2ME apps on your T-Mobile phones? Verizon?
Oh right....BREW.
Man, some people just want to complain for complaining's sake.
I think you're right in a lot of ways. I work for a software consulting company. We go in to big corporations and write custom apps to do internal process things - like workflow management. We write everything as an online app, and the entire office codes on Linux and OSX. Nevertheless, I'd say about 99% of the machines at our customer's places (especially for running things like shipping/inventory) are desktops that were cheap 5 years ago. But they run the one app they need to (and it happens to be a Windows app) and there's no need to replace them with even a $500 machine, no matter who makes it.
And while some exec might get a MacBookPro and just love it, the tech guy (who's made a living the last 10 years) will push back just as hard, even harder, because he doesn't know how to / is biased against supporting Macs. And who do you think they're going to listen to on a tech decision? The tech guy. Upper management makes bad suggestions on technology all the time. Tech guys rein them back in. That's their job. Otherwise the whole office would be "Grape";)
Or, you could shell out the $600 and get a machine that comes with Vista and enough RAM to run it, and spend the rest of the money you thought you'd allocate to an upgrade on that expensive panty-unbunching procedure.
Honestly, who thought getting the "best" (not "adequate" or even "pretty good") performance out of a new piece of software was only going to involve purchasing the software?
If you want to pre-cache 3.5GB of apps....then damnit buy 3.5GB of RAM. Don't whine that it doesn't do it magically. If you don't need to pre-cache 3.5GB of apps (which I suspect you don't, given that you currently run 0.5), then you won't need to buy it.
Sorry, but I think you've missed out on the last ten years of technology if that's your solution.
There's a convergence of TV and Computer, because the more people that content providers can squeeze out of the middle, the more money they can pocket. Plus they can charge more in the name of convenience.
Think about the XBOX360 rental program. You can get an HD-DVD download for 8 bucks. Now not every "joe" cna copy that disc, but it only takes ONE person in the world to buy the $600 graphics card that'll take the output from the xbox and put it in a file.
That's the difficulty. No matter how dedicated you are, you could always point a high-res camera at the screen and feed the audio into a multi-channel mixing board.
Or have some guy who makes $7/hr at the post-production company upload a working digital file online when it's 99% finished.
You can't cut piracy by making it a significant pain in the ass to watch a movie. You'll just cut down on your ACTUAL customers.
I haven't bought a DVD movie in several years, nor downloaded one in the meantime (except one legal HD-DVD rental through the xbox). The industry lost me as a customer once they started treating me like a criminal because I actually bought their goods.
"Any publicity is good publicity" - Some jerk from a no-name company.
When you really get down to it, this IS hurting Apple's image. They claim to be the hip, cool, company of the people, that's all about expressing yourself.
Unless, and god help you if you do, expressing yourself doesn't involve giving them money. I mean...suing people for posting a SCREENSHOT OF A SKIN THAT IS HOMAGE TO A PRODUCT YOU HAVEN'T RELEASED.
You can always spot an Apple fan. They don't see the difference between a person and a company. Bill Gates is not Steve Jobs. He doesn't have his finger in every company pie, doesn't claim responsibility for the inventions and creations of his employees, and DOESN'T RUN THE COMPANY. He is the Chairman of the Board of Directors, not the CEO. Bill Gates != Microsoft.
Back to the matter at hand: You pay for all kinds of things you don't have a choice over. You argument of $50 on a CD player is specious, and an outright fallacy. A $20 CD player with $50 in CDs means you're paying 2.5x the price of the object you're actually buying. A $50 charge on a $1000 computer is a little different. It'd be more like "Would you pay $2 for the paper that comes with your $50 printer?" To which the answer is yes. You ever bought a printer that came with some "sample paper" for you to try out? Would you really have PAID for the 20 pack of greeting cards? Of course not. But you paid as part of a bundle.
And if you think ditching the OS makes good business sense, think again. Imagine for a moment Dell DOES offer the option to not purchase XP on your machine. This added complexity to their construction process (which currently has 3 options: XP Home, Pro, or Media) means that you have to start putting empty hard drives into machines. Empty hard drives == no testing software, guided setup, or continuing support. No backup software sales. No add-on of Antivirus, Office suite, or any number of other products that they can just drop in. Numerous support calls of "I turned it on and it beeped three times and shut off. What does 'No valid system volume' mean?" A net loss.
Dell does not cater to the Linux community, any more than they do to the Apple community. You go to Dell to buy Hardware + Software, not just one. It isn't their business model.
If you want a Linux machine, go to Pogo or one of any number of other Linux sales houses. That's why they exist.
But don't whine that Dell isn't serving your needs. They're not the only one you can buy from.
You mention the company that works on a narrow margin, but at the same time you enrich the richtest man on earth by paying for a product you do not even want to use. This has got to end. Could you be any more needlessly melodramatic? You're a consumer, vote with your dollar. Spend your money elsewhere. Don't whine that a big company isn't serving your specific, niche needs.
I believe this comes from bad grammar, not a warning of apocalyptic molecular research.
Try "But if they're excellent candidates for being used in optical technologies such as optical switches and Internet connections, these new materials/will/ not be used before several years -- if ever."
Because the technology to produce them inexpensively and well does not yet exist.
The cost of a Windows license is negligible to a company Dell's size. However, a change in their process to let 1% of their customers pay $50 less is really a bad business decision. Sorry, you clever boy you (Winblows...hah!), but adding complexity to a system's configuration just so that you can lose money in the long run doesn't really make fiscal sense.
And referring back to the article: this is only a "refund" if your time is worthless. Personally, I'd rather work the 22 minutes it takes to earn that much than spend the hours on the phone wasting my own time to get a pittance back from a company that already works on some of the narrowest margins in the industry.
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Lacking the willingness to sell out what remains of freedom in the cellphone market and work with a carrier exclusively, I'd guess. I don't know, I don't deal with that end of telecom, nor represent any of those companies.
"Visual Voicemail" (like all voicemail) is done on the carrier's side. It has very little to do with the device. Your phone doesn't "store" your voicemail, you know that much right? You call into a server, it spits it out. If you add a bit more two-way communication you get a bit more control. But since there's no standard on that the way there is with a basic phone call and tone commands ("Press 7 to delete") you don't get that kind of control without carrier partnerships. Partnerships on a feature like this require exclusivity, and most phone manufacturers wouldn't want to limit themselves to one carrier. For Apple it's no big deal, before this they had no carriers.
The point is that it isn't new, not that sticking the EXACT same app on a cellphone isn't useful. Just that Apple claimed once again that they invented something that already existed.
You mean this visual voicemail? http://www.callwave.com/landing/widgets.asp Yes, so new. Never existed before. You win.
Hmm. A detailed and complete response.
Let's see...it has low call quality (GSM), a poorly functioning address book (no search), is locked to a single carrier, has a bad s/n ratio while in calls, requires you to SMS on a narrow, non-tactile keypad, won't let you send an SMS to more than one person, won't let you copy/paste sms text (or any text) to create a duplicate message, has no voice dial...
If anyone besides Apple had released a PHONE with these flaws it would be widely ridiculed. But the iPhone isn't just a phone, it's a convergence device. It does all the other things very well (internet browsing, picture/movie viewing, music player) and so people forgive it as a badly executed phone because it is a very good DEVICE.
So I stand by my statement: it is a lousy phone. If you want to explain why it lacks the features that most FREE phones have without any significant additions, then go right ahead (threaded SMS is not new). But if you look at the PHONE features and compare it with something like the Motorola Q, Samsung Blackjack, or any of the HTC WM6 devices...you'll see that it's missing just about every nice phone feature that sets those convergence devices apart from regular phones.
Well, unless they can manage to turn on a secret, hidden mic jack and processor with a software update this won't be a very big threat. And VOIP on an iPod is not a replacement for a cellphone for the real world, non-/. users. But I do bet that they released this one after since if they'd done it at the time of the iPhone they'd not have sold 1/10th as many iPhones. By most accounts isn't it a pretty lousy phone?
Did you even bother to RTFA? That's exactly what it's for.
Here's a more useful article summary, from someone who's hatred of Microsoft doesn't get in the way of appreciating a cool new technology:
A user (read: anyone) defines a set of rating guidelines, and anyone else can subscribe to that rating system, and then selectively filter their content based on how it scores on said rating system. It can also IGNORE the "default" rating system imposed by the MPAA.
Despite this editor's Anti-MS vitriol, this is actually an incredibly useful tool. I don't really agree with much of what the MPAA decides is "decent" and what is "inappropriate" - I'd much rather have my children learn about normal sexual behavior between consenting adults than watching someone being disemboweled. This would give me the ability to not only generate my own rating system, but to actually subscribe to one that has the same ideals I have, rather than assuming that everyone has a pro-religion, pro-violence, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-independent-film stance.
If you're going to hate MS for anything, do it for something it isn't in fact a really good idea.
Note: If you don't understand how movies are currently rated, read up on it.
I'm sorry to punch holes in your math, but I have the distinct feeling that you going out of business had very little to do with the fluctuating density of fuel.
Since you listed your profit after describing how much you sold your goods for, I can guess you meant your gross income, not profit, was $300/wk. Now there are precious few places in the US (which I assume you ran you business in, otherwise it wouldn't be particularly relevant to the discussion) where you can operate a business on only $300/wk (of nearly any kind, let alone selling goods). Even assuming you had no labor cost (did all the work yourself) and your rent was minimal, fueling licenses and environmental regulatory compliance would easily run you upwards of $1000/mo, or nearly all of your GROSS INCOME, leaving you pennies a day to operate your business on. It is not terribly surprising that you went out of business, it doesn't sound like you had a particularly well-planned business.
Further, 10,000L/wk of gas comes out to about 2600 gallons, or ~120 customers a week. That's a pretty low number (less than 18/day!), and since your fixed costs (licenses, rent, etc) wouldn't care if you had 10 or 1000 customers, it sounds like your biggest problem was not being someplace (or run in such a way) that you could sell enough fuel to cover your costs.
But I'm betting a lousy distributor didn't help.
Despite what all the little previews before your overpriced movie tell you, videotaping a movie (or downloading a bootleg, etc) IS NOT THEFT. IT IS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. This distinction often gets left out, because it benefits the **AA to be...forgotten.
Imagine you walked into a Kinkos with the latest NYT's Best Seller under your arm. Should they tackle you there? What if you put the first few pages into a copy machine? Should Kinko's call up a task force specially put in place to protect the 'creative' works of corporations?
Copyright Infringement laws traditionally kick in when the infringer has "profited materially" from the sale or distribution of copyrighted works. The act of making a copy doesn't constitute a material gain, so prior to NY's "special" laws, this would have been "Attempted Copyright Violation" - a crime so minuscule that it wouldn't be tried except by a massive organization with lawyers to spare.
By sponsoring legislation (more specifically, legislators) that would push through harsher punishments for something that can cost a company potential profits (note: this is not the same as a loss) the MPAA has successfully made it really easy to punish the wrong people. I promise you that this guy in NY was not going to be the one copy that makes it onto the internet. No, that'll happen when some organized crime group has one of their lackies either swipe the reel after the theater has closed for the night, or just snags a DVD from one of the many pre-releases that are distributed.
These new laws will be about as effective at stopping piracy as busting homeless crackheads is at stopping drug abuse. Sure, they can pat themselves on the back and remark what a great job they've done, but they're really just taking out the lowest hanging fruit. Good work, MPAA!
For a house? No, this probably isn't practical. But suppose you sell it to law firms, CEOs, and Studios to coat their conference rooms. Despite the clear glass, no signals in or out. Seems a lot more practical, and a lot more likely. I'm guessing the core audience (despite the article's narrow minded author) isn't really rich paranoid people. As far as "plugging a hole" - as I recall most cellphone signals, WiFi, and the like operate within the 900-2400mHz range - IIRC the wave half-height is about the size of a few centimeters - making things like holes in the wall, seams between glass sheets, and even a door's crack unlikely places for waves to escape.
I know everyone loves to bash Microsoft on /. - but lets be fair, this really shouldn't be tagged with the "Windows" tag.
Ever wonder why there's a "Linux" and an "Apple" section, but no "Microsoft" or even cleverly abbreviated "M$"?
There's your tinfoil conspiracy.
And tinfoil isn't made from tin. Stop calling it that.
That's a mighty big "IF" - is it really 75% if you have to retrain your workforce, find all new support contacts, new suppliers and distributors, and be locked to a single hardware AND software vendor?
75% sounds like a marketing catchphrase.
Think about the people who's job it is to decide what hardware goes in a building to serve thousands of employees. They're not likely to change even if it is slightly less work to maintain - because it's THEIR job to maintain the existing systems. They'd be buying themselves out of work.
Fighting an entrenched competitor is not so easy as being marginally better / slightly different.
Eloquently stated, and clearly thoroughly researched.
USB/Firewire is a little different than DVD technology. With Firewire, you're paying to be part of a logo consortium. You guarantee that your product will work according to their standards and you pay them a bit of money. In exchange you get to put the "Firewire" logo on your stuff. Same goes for bluetooth, and for USB. But that's because no one company controls these. They're consortia and operate differently.
But how do you suppose they enforce that payment? It's very easy to see if someone's put your logo on their product. How do you know if they used your chips or someone else's? How do you sell them multi-million dollar encryption hardware if they could just go without it? You make it required to read the discs. You could produce a non-AACS compliant HD-DVD player. But it wouldn't play commercial movies.
The purpose is for Sony or Toshiba/NEC to control who can MAKE their standard's players, recorders, and authoring hardware. It's use as a copy-protection scheme is secondary.
Why spend millions on AACS when other DRM would work?
Two reasons: 1 - Because if it's an existing scheme, SOMEONE owns it and likely it isn't the people inventing the new standard, nor can they charge "new technology" prices on the encoding/decoding hardware. You can't really go to a mfg and tell them they have to buy the same chips they've been buying for 10 years and tell them they cost more now. No, these are new chips. See the new logo?
And 2 - Because you need to give the content creators a reason to prefer your technology, enough to get them to make the initial investment in it. "It's way harder to pirate this movie. It's HD-DVD! Encryption the likes of which has never been seen. So will you use it to stop those big scary pirates?"
Hell of a sales pitch to a dying, scared industry.
As inconvenient as it is, the real reason for DVD security like AACS isn't for the consumer. Sorry, you're not that important.
/really/ care if you break the encryption, because no DVD-player manufacturer could ever go out and use the cracks to avoid paying Sony / Toshiba/NEC. AACS has done its job, in that sense.
When people invest millions of dollars in developing a standard like HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, or whatever comes along next (UV-DVD?), they need assurances that they will get their money back. They don't make money off of the sale of DVDs, but rather off of DVD hardware. So companies that manufacture DVDs can't just build players, they have to buy little AACS chips directly and exclusively from the standard's creator, and pay them a fee.
They don't
I'm glad AACS was cracked. I don't particularly like the idea that I have to rely on a physical copy of something I allegedly only own the rights to "watch" anyways.
Actually, if the phone has any kind of PC availably - USB cable, bluetooth push, whatever, you can copy it to the phone and run it just fine. I've never had a problem putting J2ME apps on Sprint phones, but I've only been selling their phones for three years.
Or, just pay the damned 3 cents and initiate a data call on the weekend. How do you put J2ME apps on your T-Mobile phones? Verizon?
Oh right....BREW.
Man, some people just want to complain for complaining's sake.
You still see ads on the internet?
I think you're right in a lot of ways. I work for a software consulting company. We go in to big corporations and write custom apps to do internal process things - like workflow management. We write everything as an online app, and the entire office codes on Linux and OSX. Nevertheless, I'd say about 99% of the machines at our customer's places (especially for running things like shipping/inventory) are desktops that were cheap 5 years ago. But they run the one app they need to (and it happens to be a Windows app) and there's no need to replace them with even a $500 machine, no matter who makes it.
;)
And while some exec might get a MacBookPro and just love it, the tech guy (who's made a living the last 10 years) will push back just as hard, even harder, because he doesn't know how to / is biased against supporting Macs. And who do you think they're going to listen to on a tech decision? The tech guy. Upper management makes bad suggestions on technology all the time. Tech guys rein them back in. That's their job. Otherwise the whole office would be "Grape"
Neither of them spend any time on "innovations" - they're in management.
Or, you could shell out the $600 and get a machine that comes with Vista and enough RAM to run it, and spend the rest of the money you thought you'd allocate to an upgrade on that expensive panty-unbunching procedure.
Honestly, who thought getting the "best" (not "adequate" or even "pretty good") performance out of a new piece of software was only going to involve purchasing the software?
If you want to pre-cache 3.5GB of apps....then damnit buy 3.5GB of RAM. Don't whine that it doesn't do it magically. If you don't need to pre-cache 3.5GB of apps (which I suspect you don't, given that you currently run 0.5), then you won't need to buy it.
I think you're forgetting what this all comes down to.
The ever-present:
iPOD ROKRZORZ and teh Zune sucks and is brown!!!
And equally:
WM5 is L33TLY bett0r than iPhone!!!
For whatever reason, this debate has recently spread into peripherals, with just as much fact as ever.
Sorry, but I think you've missed out on the last ten years of technology if that's your solution.
There's a convergence of TV and Computer, because the more people that content providers can squeeze out of the middle, the more money they can pocket. Plus they can charge more in the name of convenience.
Think about the XBOX360 rental program. You can get an HD-DVD download for 8 bucks. Now not every "joe" cna copy that disc, but it only takes ONE person in the world to buy the $600 graphics card that'll take the output from the xbox and put it in a file.
That's the difficulty. No matter how dedicated you are, you could always point a high-res camera at the screen and feed the audio into a multi-channel mixing board.
Or have some guy who makes $7/hr at the post-production company upload a working digital file online when it's 99% finished.
You can't cut piracy by making it a significant pain in the ass to watch a movie. You'll just cut down on your ACTUAL customers.
I haven't bought a DVD movie in several years, nor downloaded one in the meantime (except one legal HD-DVD rental through the xbox). The industry lost me as a customer once they started treating me like a criminal because I actually bought their goods.
"Any publicity is good publicity" - Some jerk from a no-name company.
When you really get down to it, this IS hurting Apple's image. They claim to be the hip, cool, company of the people, that's all about expressing yourself.
Unless, and god help you if you do, expressing yourself doesn't involve giving them money. I mean...suing people for posting a SCREENSHOT OF A SKIN THAT IS HOMAGE TO A PRODUCT YOU HAVEN'T RELEASED.
And they wonder why they'll never make it.
Back to the matter at hand: You pay for all kinds of things you don't have a choice over. You argument of $50 on a CD player is specious, and an outright fallacy. A $20 CD player with $50 in CDs means you're paying 2.5x the price of the object you're actually buying. A $50 charge on a $1000 computer is a little different. It'd be more like "Would you pay $2 for the paper that comes with your $50 printer?" To which the answer is yes. You ever bought a printer that came with some "sample paper" for you to try out? Would you really have PAID for the 20 pack of greeting cards? Of course not. But you paid as part of a bundle.
And if you think ditching the OS makes good business sense, think again. Imagine for a moment Dell DOES offer the option to not purchase XP on your machine. This added complexity to their construction process (which currently has 3 options: XP Home, Pro, or Media) means that you have to start putting empty hard drives into machines. Empty hard drives == no testing software, guided setup, or continuing support. No backup software sales. No add-on of Antivirus, Office suite, or any number of other products that they can just drop in. Numerous support calls of "I turned it on and it beeped three times and shut off. What does 'No valid system volume' mean?" A net loss.
Dell does not cater to the Linux community, any more than they do to the Apple community. You go to Dell to buy Hardware + Software, not just one. It isn't their business model.
If you want a Linux machine, go to Pogo or one of any number of other Linux sales houses. That's why they exist.
But don't whine that Dell isn't serving your needs. They're not the only one you can buy from. You mention the company that works on a narrow margin, but at the same time you enrich the richtest man on earth by paying for a product you do not even want to use. This has got to end. Could you be any more needlessly melodramatic? You're a consumer, vote with your dollar. Spend your money elsewhere. Don't whine that a big company isn't serving your specific, niche needs.
I believe this comes from bad grammar, not a warning of apocalyptic molecular research.
/will/ not be used before several years -- if ever."
Try "But if they're excellent candidates for being used in optical technologies such as optical switches and Internet connections, these new materials
Because the technology to produce them inexpensively and well does not yet exist.
The cost of a Windows license is negligible to a company Dell's size. However, a change in their process to let 1% of their customers pay $50 less is really a bad business decision. Sorry, you clever boy you (Winblows...hah!), but adding complexity to a system's configuration just so that you can lose money in the long run doesn't really make fiscal sense.
And referring back to the article: this is only a "refund" if your time is worthless. Personally, I'd rather work the 22 minutes it takes to earn that much than spend the hours on the phone wasting my own time to get a pittance back from a company that already works on some of the narrowest margins in the industry.