aiscott

I am at a loss to understand how the "agency" model is anti-competitive or price-fixing.

I am hoping someone can just explain it rather than saying that it simply "is."

The agency model is what keeps the price of apps on the app store low. Developers (agents) can charge whatever they want, but clearly that doesn't equate to automatic sales at whatever price. It is in fact a very competitive market.

Nothing about the agency model, as I see it, in the example of the App Store has even a hint of being anti-competitive.

How is this different for books? I just don't see it. But I am open to explanations.

If anything is anti-competitive, it is selling at a loss so that nobody else can enter the market. That is what Amazon was doing.

Price fixing requires collusion between the producers to all sell at the same price point. It's certainly possible this is going on with the big publishers in Apple's store, but that doesn't require Apple's participation in the collusion. It doesn't exonerate Apple either, it's orthogonal.

In the wholesale model that traditional booksellers and Amazon use, it's still possible for publishers to price fix. It's possible for book sellers to price fix.

It seems to me that Agency vs Wholesale doesn't really have much to do with the concept for price fixing.

What am I missing?

and yet, accidents happen. Sometimes it is not wrong to use overlapping security measures.

[edit: unintentional use of slang]

My cynical side agrees with you. It seems like an absurd markup, between 16GB and 64GB.

I've looked briefly into stripping an app: the ipa format is just zip. There is a plist with hashes of the assets. Don't know if that plist itself is hashed, but I'm thinking probably.

I completely agree and I find it mystifying that you would be downvoted for that comment.

Thank you for noticing this. I'm beginning to think nobody else actually read the article.

I've never felt so productive in my life!

I'd like to see an implementation in OrgASM, but it's hard to type with just one hand.

Now I'm afraid of asking for a reference for anything. God forbid I'd like evidence so if I share a claim with others I have as solid foundation.

You are providing your own chilling effect by demanding others adhere to your personal standards.

It seems like you didn't actually read the article. Maybe you did, but she addressed the pure wordcount metric.

Her motivation for increasing her word count was the reduced number of days per week she could write on, trying to balance family life and professional life.

Her desire wasn't simply to have reached some arbitrary count, it was to increase her productivity so she could meet her deadlines while working fewer days.

I love homebrew, personally. In fact I wish it was available for linux. This is because we have a pretty restricted linux environment at work, and getting the admins to install anything is very difficult and lengthy.

I've gotten by with installing gentoo-prefix in a sub directory, but that is quite wasteful of space. A homebrew setup would be much nicer.

Amusing anecdote:

A few months back I was at the local Petsmart; getting out of my car I noticed a guy walking toward the store. I thought he looked familiar, so I looked back over my shoulder at him again... I didn't really recognize him but I thought he might have been somebody famous for some reason.

Anyway, when I got back to my car I saw that yellow mercedes, and when read the plate holder saying "Mr. Linux. King of Geeks." I figured out who it was, kind of neat.

At the time I don't think I realized he lived in Portland.

Could you please expand on what you mean by "Macs do not have the same power as a traditional unix"?

The Media are a group (or several large groups) and as such as subject to group-think like any other group. I believe a lot of conspiracy related accusations could be attributable to the natural tendency toward group-think.

Not my mother-in-law. She doesn't really understand what an OS is, but she understands a change in user interface.

She knows enough that an upgrade in operating system will change enough that she'll be confused all over again and be frustrated trying to learn how to use her own computer, something she paid thousands of dollars for.

I believe she is still on vista, and won't upgrade because she knows how to use vista, and that was painful enough.

She is, however, the most computer unsavvy person I've ever met that actually uses a computer.

I agree. Emacs type key bindings are prevalent in osx, sad to see vim missing. Although I was so happy to learn c-d was delete in cocoa boxes, especially since that is easier to type than fn-delete.

I mostly use emacs these days, but still use vim too. To keep my brain from scrambling, I changed emacs movement keys to match vim (ie c-h, c-j, c-k, c-m).

I was pretty excited about sublime text 2, and I use it on my Mac and windows box. But I can't use it on our work cluster due to it not supporting our version of rhel (5 I think)

I look forward to the day when we have super hi dpi laptops.

However, while the lower dpi of my macbook pro is noticeable, it is not tremendously so. If the screen were closer to my face it would be much more noticeable, but laptops usually have some distance to the viewer.

As well that Marco has been very upfront about the competition spurring him on.

I think Timothy Meaney needs to watch the Everything is a Remix series: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

It was an unintended consequence of Github's use of rails. So I think my characterization (Github's rails bug) is fair.

It's weird how this article treats Git and Github as synonymous.

Github's rails bug really had nothing to do with Git itself.

many sites, to my irritation, don't allow the + symbol in their email validation code.

I used to work in a integrated circuit debugging lab. We had a pulse laser that we would use to ablate the layer of glass on top of the metallization so we could probe the die.

While goofing around I discovered that I could vaporize the ink of dollar bills. The largest area per pulse was pretty small, 25 microns if I remember right. Maybe 100. So it wasn't very practical, but it worked.

I don't remember if I tried it with pen ink. It might work okay for ball-point as that mostly lays ink on top of the paper. You'd still have the impression in the paper from the pen though.

Ink that didn't soak in but lay on top of the paper would probably stand a good chance of working. Maybe gel ink?

Wait, why do you say that? Is there an assumption that startups don't have a workable business model?

This is a Stanford course. Coursera is merely the platform.

The first week's lectures are up, and are nicely broken up into < 20 minute pieces.

I agree, fairness over politeness. I would say honesty over politeness as well. That isn't to say you shouldn't be polite; just realize that sometimes your decisions are going to hurt people no matter how nicely you put it.

I have mixed feelings about this. Apple certainly brought competition to the market. Amazon was reputedly leveraging it's other profits to sell books at a loss in an attempt to corner the market. Seems pretty anti-competitive to me.

However Apple's "most favored nation" clause is something I find extremely distasteful. That seems to me to be a hinderance to the whole concept of free markets.

Yes, I see you are right. I guess it seems like I'm more likely to run afoul of the clause with Pinterest. Youtube is like "Funniest Home Videos," Pinterest has gallery like qualities.

Your examples after the link don't seem to have much to do with selling the works though. In Youtube's case, it's to allow them to advertise with overlays. Maybe that is where Pinterest is going as well.

I'm an amateur photographer, and I wasn't too concerned about this until I read that by Pinning something, their TOS says I am granting them rights to sell my work.

I don't like that very much.

  By making available any Member Content through the Site,
  Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs
  a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, 
  transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to 
  sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license,
  sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform,
  transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise 
  exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of
  the Site, Application or Services.

The rest just seems like standard CYA stuff.

This is true, but if you want to receive statutory damages for copyright infringement, you have to have registered your copyright.

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#register