Blah blah blah. Yes, chargers are expensive, but there's no need to get into the "pennies to make" argument, because you simply haven't given anything to substantiate that argument.
I've worked in manufacturing, and for a while was in charge of plastics. Consumer-grade plastics are *really expensive* to mould, and that rubbery stuff that cables are made from? Even more so. So yeah, a charger might not be a bargain at $30 a pop, but it cost a lot more than "a few pennies" to make.
Trains are the new luxury Greyhounds, up here in Canada anyway. Okay, so no scantily-clad stewardesses or free booze, but you do get *massive* seats, tons of legroom, no real luggage limits, and on-board WiFi. It doesn't get much better than that.
Oh, and the air is at sea-pressure level, as opposed to 8000 feet like standard passenger craft.
I used to travel from Toronto to Ottawa by train. Easily the most pleasant moving vehicle I have ever been in.
But they *do*. It's called first class! I know people who *do* pamper themselves when flying to their vacations, and it's a wonderful way to fly - but it's not for everyone, or indeed even a large portion of the traveling public.
I think you're suggesting that the cost of first class be lowered - and perhaps it can, I'm certainly not privy to the finances of major airlines. I would like to point out, though, that most people I know only consider spending good money on *the vacation*, and not the means of getting there. I don't know about you guys in the US, but up here in Canada we have "vacation airlines" that service only popular vacation routes, and completely redefine "cattle class" (in the bad way). Consumers are clearly more about cheap than comfort, and unfortunately the airlines are giving them precisely what they want.
Not only that, we have advanced in ways invisible to the public. The type of engineering that took hundreds of engineers with slide rules months of work and calculations is now possible with a single engineer sitting at a workstation. The kinds of tests and analyses we can perform without even manufacturing a single physical prototype is immense and incredible.
Engineering, in general, is now cheaper to perform than ever. This has opened the door for smaller players to be competitive with the Big Boys, and this can only be a good thing. We are now able to go through so many more design iterations and optimizations than we ever have before.
Thank you. We will get science-fiction-like leaps in technology when the general public demands it. The 747 came about because we *needed* to move *a lot* of people around at once over very long distances. This has not changed. COnsumers have shown time and time again that they will not pay the extreme premium to get from Beijing to New York 3 hours sooner.
For curiosity's sake, which airlines in the US are known for these amenities? I was in the US last summer and flew with AA and NWA, both of which seemed... really run down.
How about the result of consumers winning out? I think people forget just how expensive air travel used to be - no wonder you were treated like a king. Free food, free drinks (some airlines even had free alcohol)...
The fact of the matter is that airline travel is a *lot* cheaper and more accessible to the average person than it used to be. This is a good thing. It also necessitates us changing our expectation from "floating sky-palace" to "flying Greyhound bus", which is a more appropriate modern analogy.
If you want the service of yonder years, you can still get it. In fact, you can still get it at approximately the same prices *you used to pay*.
I for one welcome the democratization of long-distance travel.
Viola, low power, moderate bitrate and range wireless data storage device for $5. Development costs furnished by the Indian tax payers.
What does string instruments have to do with anything? The word you're looking for is "voila":P
As for why it's expensive, batteries cost a lot, as do wireless certification and licenses (802.11x or Bluetooth). The SD and microcontroller are the least of their cost concerns.
And don't bother with the GIMP until it has a UI that works. Same goes for Blender, although Blender at least starts making sense after a *really steep* learning curve.
That's the thing I cannot stand about the FOSS community - its insistence that its products are "just as good" when they can't even accomplish the most basic in usability tasks. I admire the ideals of FOSS, but I simply cannot stand by and champion free choices like the GIMP as a "replacement" for Photoshop when it is so woefully inferior in usability.
If you want something to happen, try reporting the situation to the Beijing branch manager, and CC a higher-up of appropriate stature at the home office.
Speaking as a Chinese, and having much dealings with my kind, I can say that Chinese people will shit a brick when it comes to potentially pissing off a higher-up in the States.
and it would be nice if a $300 PC could keep up with a $300 (HD/BD)DVD player.
Your HD/BD player doesn't come with a screen, keyboard, battery, and all the trimmings... this isn't even a fair comparison. At this stage expecting a netbook-level device to handle HD movies is simply ridiculous.
And that's precisely my point: all the effort speeding up games is easily re-purposed for playing HD movies, and this is in fact *why* NVidia will succeed where Intel fails. Intel has always made poor-performing integrated solutions on the expectation that only gamers need performance. The reality now is that *everyone* needs a little of that gaming performance.
Except that the performance for Intel's integrated graphics is still junk. NVidia's 9400M chipset at least offers decent performance, and IMHO is poised to take a lot of market share from products that are currently Intel's.
AMD? AMD is a has-been. They bought ATI how long ago? They've been promising a CPU-GPU hybrid for years now, and it's always "just around the corner". As far as I'm concerned I'll believe it when I see it, because AMD doesn't look like they're capable of delivering on that promise.
The days of non-accelerated graphics are over. As we've seen with OS X and now Vista, the requirement for graphics horsepower is no longer limited to the few gamers out there, but we're seeing the OS demand some of that power for itself as wel. The 9400M IMHO offers the right amount of performance, whereas the Intel's X3100 and the previous GMA950's (which a lot of platforms are still using) are simply too slow to get the job done.
That being said, I don't get why TFA complains about the inability to play HD movies on $300 netbook. Seriously, it's a *netbook*. It was *specifically invented* to be a low-performance but cheap and highly mobile laptop. If you want to play HD movies and run Photoshop or whatever, get a real laptop!
One major limitation is user base. How many phones out there actually have videoconferencing capability? It's pointless implementing a feature that very few people out there use.
The difference between voice calling and SMS vs. video calling is that the previous two were well-established and universally used before Apple came onto the scene. They didn't face a chicken and egg situation.
My local carrier (Rogers Wireless) introduced video calling almost 2 years ago. I remember seeing the marketing blitz for it. Nobody I know uses the feature - the phones that have them are too expensive, so even the few high-end smartphone owners have nobody to talk to. Until this situation changes video calling cannot even begin to compare to voice calls and SMS.
It's not really a bandwidth or even much of a technical problem. In the same way as my example about music phones, the problem was never technical.
The problem is usability and experience. You need to make video calling a compelling feature that's readily accessible, and ubiquitous enough to be a worthwhile addition to your product. It's a chicken and egg situation - video calling will not be compelling, nor get the attention of users, until a large number of people have video-call-capable phones. But people will also not purchase these phones until there is a significant user base.
There is a reason why Apple hasn't done anything with regards to iPhone-to-iPhone features, because despite how well they're selling they're still a tiny minority of all phones out there. They will not make the same mistake as the Zune - to build up features that rely on a broad install base to be compelling, without having the prerequisite user base.
"Good enough" is not really in Apple's vocabulary, though. I've seen many MP3 phones before the iPhone, and all of them were "good enough". You could drag files onto the memory cards, the music playing app would pick them up. You could play, pause, next, shuffle... all the basic features.
But I hated all of them. They were "good enough", but not "good". When I got my hands on the iPhone I felt that it was finally media integration into a phone, done right.
I don't think Apple is going to release video-calling until they have a compelling way to work around the limitations of existing implementations.
Less creepy? No. But still, you have to wonder why people get press about this. Apple patents a *lot* of things that never get implemented. Remember the big ol' patent hubbub over the bunch of UI elements they patented (touch-sensitive edges) from a couple years back? Those have yet to materialize.
Just because they patented it doesn't mean it's coming. Companies patent things all the time that they never end up releasing.
Don't excuse Bethesda for their technical incompetence. There are plenty of open-world games out there that are relatively bug-free (GTA4 comes to mind). I liked Fallout 3 the gameplay, but I hated Fallout 3 the code. Bethesda is by now infamous for shipping some of the shoddiest code in the industry with the best gameplay. Sad.
A lot of these bugs don't smell like lack of QA. They smell like really, really bad design. Rockstar did a game that's just as complex, if not moreso, than Fallout 3, and they've done it almost entirely bug-free.
I don't regret buying the game, but at the same time I'm wary about buying another Bethesda product. When simple crash bugs that the majority of your players run into appear in the gold product YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
It's called price differentiation. In economics profits are maximized by charging each person the maximum they are willing to pay for your product (assuming that price is above the cost of production). So if Joe in Thailand can only afford $20, sell it to him for that much. If he's in the US, charge him $150.
This usually works out well because products are inherently difficult to move from one price zone to another. In cases where they are not (see: DVDs) difficult enough, we have things like region codes and other trade restrictions so that arbitrage can't happen (i.e. moving goods from a cheaper price zone to a more expensive one).
With software licenses this is not really preventable... If MS releases one (legal) version at a super-low price somewhere in the world, you can bet your ass that everyone will simply buy from that area and bring it elsewhere. After all, it's a fricking serial number/registration key right?
They do... Microsoft, at the very least, pays their H-1Bs the same salary as American workers. In fact, they're one of the few companies who, on average, do NOT abuse the H-1B program. Seriously, find another boogeyman to go after - a good candidate would be the large Indian outsourcing firms who *do* bring in H-1Bs on the cheap.
Google, MS, Amazon, etc, all bring H-1Bs in on high salaries that at least match that of the equivalent American. Go after someone else.
The irony is that MS is one of the few companies that *doesn't* use H-1Bs to get cheap labor. Look at the list of top H-1B recipient companies, and you will find that the top two are Indian outsourcing consultant firms, whose sole job is to bring in cheap contract work.
And then compare with the "reputable" ones lower down the list (including MS), who from personal experience actually pay their foreign imports at the same salary as their similarly experienced American peers.
Punishing MS for this while giving the "consultancies" a free pass is not only hypocritical, but also downright dangerous. Here you are screaming for justice when the target of your anger is really one of the few players who has (on average) done nothing wrong.
I would like to make a point that will be unpopular:
- The H-1B visa has outgrown its original stated intent. In an era where Russia is quickly recovering from the collapse of the USSR, and China threatens to economically eclipse the US, it is more important than ever for the US to "steal" the world's talent by offering the one big thing that nobody else has: safety and quality of life. By bringing in real talent (as opposed to cheap labor) and keeping them out of the hands of less-friendly foreign powers the US can actually hope to secure their lead on the rest of the world. It is also for this reason that the US should stop relying on the false crutch of the H-1B and establish a skilled immigration program (i.e. immigration-based, not job-based)... like the rest of the industrialized world.
Oh, and the shortage is far from false. No offense to present company, but I've been in and out of the recruiting system for a number of major American companies, and never once have I seen a bias against local American labor (hell, they cost less, visas cost a lot)... and the most vocal people against the shortage tend to be those who got snubbed and never could've made the cut to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck. Even completely open specifications like CSS don't have uniform implementations across the board.
Blah blah blah. Yes, chargers are expensive, but there's no need to get into the "pennies to make" argument, because you simply haven't given anything to substantiate that argument.
I've worked in manufacturing, and for a while was in charge of plastics. Consumer-grade plastics are *really expensive* to mould, and that rubbery stuff that cables are made from? Even more so. So yeah, a charger might not be a bargain at $30 a pop, but it cost a lot more than "a few pennies" to make.
Trains are the new luxury Greyhounds, up here in Canada anyway. Okay, so no scantily-clad stewardesses or free booze, but you do get *massive* seats, tons of legroom, no real luggage limits, and on-board WiFi. It doesn't get much better than that.
Oh, and the air is at sea-pressure level, as opposed to 8000 feet like standard passenger craft.
I used to travel from Toronto to Ottawa by train. Easily the most pleasant moving vehicle I have ever been in.
But they *do*. It's called first class! I know people who *do* pamper themselves when flying to their vacations, and it's a wonderful way to fly - but it's not for everyone, or indeed even a large portion of the traveling public.
I think you're suggesting that the cost of first class be lowered - and perhaps it can, I'm certainly not privy to the finances of major airlines. I would like to point out, though, that most people I know only consider spending good money on *the vacation*, and not the means of getting there. I don't know about you guys in the US, but up here in Canada we have "vacation airlines" that service only popular vacation routes, and completely redefine "cattle class" (in the bad way). Consumers are clearly more about cheap than comfort, and unfortunately the airlines are giving them precisely what they want.
Not only that, we have advanced in ways invisible to the public. The type of engineering that took hundreds of engineers with slide rules months of work and calculations is now possible with a single engineer sitting at a workstation. The kinds of tests and analyses we can perform without even manufacturing a single physical prototype is immense and incredible.
Engineering, in general, is now cheaper to perform than ever. This has opened the door for smaller players to be competitive with the Big Boys, and this can only be a good thing. We are now able to go through so many more design iterations and optimizations than we ever have before.
Thank you. We will get science-fiction-like leaps in technology when the general public demands it. The 747 came about because we *needed* to move *a lot* of people around at once over very long distances. This has not changed. COnsumers have shown time and time again that they will not pay the extreme premium to get from Beijing to New York 3 hours sooner.
For curiosity's sake, which airlines in the US are known for these amenities? I was in the US last summer and flew with AA and NWA, both of which seemed... really run down.
And back in the "good old days" you *had* to pay first-class level money just to get on *any* plane.
How about the result of consumers winning out? I think people forget just how expensive air travel used to be - no wonder you were treated like a king. Free food, free drinks (some airlines even had free alcohol)...
The fact of the matter is that airline travel is a *lot* cheaper and more accessible to the average person than it used to be. This is a good thing. It also necessitates us changing our expectation from "floating sky-palace" to "flying Greyhound bus", which is a more appropriate modern analogy.
If you want the service of yonder years, you can still get it. In fact, you can still get it at approximately the same prices *you used to pay*.
I for one welcome the democratization of long-distance travel.
I stand corrected :) And will stop derailing the thread...
What are you on? That link only proves my point... he's looking for the interjection, not the musical instrument.
I've studied French, I do not believe "voila" has an accent grave on top of the A.
As for the cost... well then... that *is* pretty expensive for an SD card with an RF chip...
Viola, low power, moderate bitrate and range wireless data storage device for $5. Development costs furnished by the Indian tax payers.
What does string instruments have to do with anything? The word you're looking for is "voila" :P
As for why it's expensive, batteries cost a lot, as do wireless certification and licenses (802.11x or Bluetooth). The SD and microcontroller are the least of their cost concerns.
And don't bother with the GIMP until it has a UI that works. Same goes for Blender, although Blender at least starts making sense after a *really steep* learning curve.
That's the thing I cannot stand about the FOSS community - its insistence that its products are "just as good" when they can't even accomplish the most basic in usability tasks. I admire the ideals of FOSS, but I simply cannot stand by and champion free choices like the GIMP as a "replacement" for Photoshop when it is so woefully inferior in usability.
If you want something to happen, try reporting the situation to the Beijing branch manager, and CC a higher-up of appropriate stature at the home office.
Speaking as a Chinese, and having much dealings with my kind, I can say that Chinese people will shit a brick when it comes to potentially pissing off a higher-up in the States.
and it would be nice if a $300 PC could keep up with a $300 (HD/BD)DVD player.
Your HD/BD player doesn't come with a screen, keyboard, battery, and all the trimmings... this isn't even a fair comparison. At this stage expecting a netbook-level device to handle HD movies is simply ridiculous.
And that's precisely my point: all the effort speeding up games is easily re-purposed for playing HD movies, and this is in fact *why* NVidia will succeed where Intel fails. Intel has always made poor-performing integrated solutions on the expectation that only gamers need performance. The reality now is that *everyone* needs a little of that gaming performance.
Except that the performance for Intel's integrated graphics is still junk. NVidia's 9400M chipset at least offers decent performance, and IMHO is poised to take a lot of market share from products that are currently Intel's.
AMD? AMD is a has-been. They bought ATI how long ago? They've been promising a CPU-GPU hybrid for years now, and it's always "just around the corner". As far as I'm concerned I'll believe it when I see it, because AMD doesn't look like they're capable of delivering on that promise.
The days of non-accelerated graphics are over. As we've seen with OS X and now Vista, the requirement for graphics horsepower is no longer limited to the few gamers out there, but we're seeing the OS demand some of that power for itself as wel. The 9400M IMHO offers the right amount of performance, whereas the Intel's X3100 and the previous GMA950's (which a lot of platforms are still using) are simply too slow to get the job done.
That being said, I don't get why TFA complains about the inability to play HD movies on $300 netbook. Seriously, it's a *netbook*. It was *specifically invented* to be a low-performance but cheap and highly mobile laptop. If you want to play HD movies and run Photoshop or whatever, get a real laptop!
One major limitation is user base. How many phones out there actually have videoconferencing capability? It's pointless implementing a feature that very few people out there use.
The difference between voice calling and SMS vs. video calling is that the previous two were well-established and universally used before Apple came onto the scene. They didn't face a chicken and egg situation.
My local carrier (Rogers Wireless) introduced video calling almost 2 years ago. I remember seeing the marketing blitz for it. Nobody I know uses the feature - the phones that have them are too expensive, so even the few high-end smartphone owners have nobody to talk to. Until this situation changes video calling cannot even begin to compare to voice calls and SMS.
It's not really a bandwidth or even much of a technical problem. In the same way as my example about music phones, the problem was never technical.
The problem is usability and experience. You need to make video calling a compelling feature that's readily accessible, and ubiquitous enough to be a worthwhile addition to your product. It's a chicken and egg situation - video calling will not be compelling, nor get the attention of users, until a large number of people have video-call-capable phones. But people will also not purchase these phones until there is a significant user base.
There is a reason why Apple hasn't done anything with regards to iPhone-to-iPhone features, because despite how well they're selling they're still a tiny minority of all phones out there. They will not make the same mistake as the Zune - to build up features that rely on a broad install base to be compelling, without having the prerequisite user base.
"Good enough" is not really in Apple's vocabulary, though. I've seen many MP3 phones before the iPhone, and all of them were "good enough". You could drag files onto the memory cards, the music playing app would pick them up. You could play, pause, next, shuffle... all the basic features.
But I hated all of them. They were "good enough", but not "good". When I got my hands on the iPhone I felt that it was finally media integration into a phone, done right.
I don't think Apple is going to release video-calling until they have a compelling way to work around the limitations of existing implementations.
Less creepy? No. But still, you have to wonder why people get press about this. Apple patents a *lot* of things that never get implemented. Remember the big ol' patent hubbub over the bunch of UI elements they patented (touch-sensitive edges) from a couple years back? Those have yet to materialize.
Just because they patented it doesn't mean it's coming. Companies patent things all the time that they never end up releasing.
Don't excuse Bethesda for their technical incompetence. There are plenty of open-world games out there that are relatively bug-free (GTA4 comes to mind). I liked Fallout 3 the gameplay, but I hated Fallout 3 the code. Bethesda is by now infamous for shipping some of the shoddiest code in the industry with the best gameplay. Sad.
A lot of these bugs don't smell like lack of QA. They smell like really, really bad design. Rockstar did a game that's just as complex, if not moreso, than Fallout 3, and they've done it almost entirely bug-free.
I don't regret buying the game, but at the same time I'm wary about buying another Bethesda product. When simple crash bugs that the majority of your players run into appear in the gold product YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
It's called price differentiation. In economics profits are maximized by charging each person the maximum they are willing to pay for your product (assuming that price is above the cost of production). So if Joe in Thailand can only afford $20, sell it to him for that much. If he's in the US, charge him $150.
This usually works out well because products are inherently difficult to move from one price zone to another. In cases where they are not (see: DVDs) difficult enough, we have things like region codes and other trade restrictions so that arbitrage can't happen (i.e. moving goods from a cheaper price zone to a more expensive one).
With software licenses this is not really preventable... If MS releases one (legal) version at a super-low price somewhere in the world, you can bet your ass that everyone will simply buy from that area and bring it elsewhere. After all, it's a fricking serial number/registration key right?
They do... Microsoft, at the very least, pays their H-1Bs the same salary as American workers. In fact, they're one of the few companies who, on average, do NOT abuse the H-1B program. Seriously, find another boogeyman to go after - a good candidate would be the large Indian outsourcing firms who *do* bring in H-1Bs on the cheap.
Google, MS, Amazon, etc, all bring H-1Bs in on high salaries that at least match that of the equivalent American. Go after someone else.
The irony is that MS is one of the few companies that *doesn't* use H-1Bs to get cheap labor. Look at the list of top H-1B recipient companies, and you will find that the top two are Indian outsourcing consultant firms, whose sole job is to bring in cheap contract work.
And then compare with the "reputable" ones lower down the list (including MS), who from personal experience actually pay their foreign imports at the same salary as their similarly experienced American peers.
Punishing MS for this while giving the "consultancies" a free pass is not only hypocritical, but also downright dangerous. Here you are screaming for justice when the target of your anger is really one of the few players who has (on average) done nothing wrong.
I would like to make a point that will be unpopular:
- The H-1B visa has outgrown its original stated intent. In an era where Russia is quickly recovering from the collapse of the USSR, and China threatens to economically eclipse the US, it is more important than ever for the US to "steal" the world's talent by offering the one big thing that nobody else has: safety and quality of life. By bringing in real talent (as opposed to cheap labor) and keeping them out of the hands of less-friendly foreign powers the US can actually hope to secure their lead on the rest of the world. It is also for this reason that the US should stop relying on the false crutch of the H-1B and establish a skilled immigration program (i.e. immigration-based, not job-based)... like the rest of the industrialized world.
Oh, and the shortage is far from false. No offense to present company, but I've been in and out of the recruiting system for a number of major American companies, and never once have I seen a bias against local American labor (hell, they cost less, visas cost a lot)... and the most vocal people against the shortage tend to be those who got snubbed and never could've made the cut to begin with.