Hard to tell what that list means for the largest players in the software industry, since I can't find software in there anywhere.
Also, margins and profits are not the same thing. I believe what the poster meant was that the actual cost of producing the software (not including things like marketing and sales) is around 20% of the selling price. I don't know about most companies, but that is true for MS Windows and MS Office sales. MS's overall profits are much less than 80%, because they lose so much money on other things.

Like cattle. Then you could really be accounted for. No problemo.

It's the old issue of "polling" vs automatic "interrupts". In this case, the polling solution would appear to have less impact on personal privacy. Anything that could generate an "interrupt" when you moved away from your computer could just as well track you as you moved eleswhere. As I said, cattle tags.

I think I'd rather put up with the minor annoyance of having my systems periodically time out on me.

For one simple reason, micropayments as they are debated here will never work.

When the product is too cheap, then the time and effort buying the product is the true cost to the buyer.

In other words, after a certain point, it just has to be free, or it simply isn't worth it.

What's more, if the seller doesn't value their product enough to charge a non-micro amount for it, then what they are doing is failing to make a value proposition, which is the essence of a business transaction.

No one will pay pennies for something worth pennies.

Newspapers are already cheap, but they are not free. But they aren't micro-priced either. Whether it is buying a paper at the stand or subscribing months at a time, there is a valid value proposition there.

On-line media has yet to find that value proposition. Without that proposition, debating the technical details concerning how payments will be made is getting waaaaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of yourself.

GPS devices never "talk" to the GPS satellites. They "listen".

Any "talking" the device does is done via other avenues. In this case, it's cellular, and most likely the cellular module can't connect to the network if it's not activated (subscribed). If it's not connected, it can't send its location.

> I think this technology works best if it can be disabled sometimes.

This is the case for all technology, IMO. Feel free to make failsafes for dangerous tech hard to override, but make sure you *can* override if you need to. You never know when you'll need to reconfigure your graviton emitter arrays.

In my case, because I got run out of several other places when I asked if I could boot an Ubuntu live CD in order to check for compatibility, but the OfficeDepot guy said "sure, no problem".

And because I've twice gotten some really good answers to "what have you got in the back that was returned that you really don't want to deal with and will cut me a radical deal on?" question.

When I was in college the one professor who taught me the most, and especially the most that has helped my career, told me "publish, publish, publish!"

I didn't stay in academia, I've never had a peer-reviewed article in a major paper, but I've taken his advice to heart and it's served me well. I get my name out there as much as I can.

Back in the '90s, Ed Catmull, of Pixar fame, emailed me out of the blue on the basis of a discussion I participated in on comp.graphics.algorithms, and I went to work there for a while. That's my most dramatic episode of making a good contact online, but it's far from the only one.

I've had recruiters who actually knew what I was looking for contact me (rather than the usual annoyance of keyword matching on Dice), and they already knew what it would take to get me to move (One email started something like "I see you just bought a house in wine country, I can't imagine moving here is attractive, but the client told me to contact you anyway", which got my attention, because he cared enough to find out who I was. Even though "wine country" is a bit of a stretch... I suppose he was being nice).

I don't really like the social networking sites, and I rarely send invites because I feel like that's something of an imposition, but I gladly receive them because things that raise my visibility have, so far, been good for my career and my life.

Whoops. Meant to say that the ExpressPCB software works fine under Linux using WINE.

Sorry.