59100593
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
Tesla has already put over 25,000 cars on the road with more to come and, presumably, most will still be running well past the 8-year battery warranty. What would happen if it is time to replace the battery pack on an old Model S or X and the cost is $25K? Simple, it would destroy the resale value of said cars, which would negatively affect the lease value of new Tesla automobiles. That’s a big part of the real reason why Tesla is building its own battery factory. They not only need to ensure enough supply for new cars, but they have to dramatically bring down the price of the replacement batteries low enough so owners of otherwise perfectly running old Teslas don’t just junk them. The Tesla Roadster was not a mass produced vehicle, so the cost of replacing its battery is $40K. The economies of scale of a gigafactory alone will drop battery costs dramatically. Heavy research could drop it further over the next decade or so. The good news is that if they do it right Tesla will have the replacement battery business to itself — without a gigafactory of their own non-OEM battery suppliers won’t be able to compete — which will bring more profits rather than headaches.
52587861
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
On July 1 Amazon started to charge sales tax to NJ residents, which is 7% in the state. But something was not right when I attempted to buy a book for my daughter. Just as I was about to finalize the order I noticed the charges were way off. The book cost $8.09. The tax I was to be levied was $0.85. That's a 10.5% tax rate! Why am I being charged 10.5%? It turns out that Amazon is also charging me tax on the $3.99 cost of shipping and handling. That's a problem, because New Jersey does not tax shipping and handling as I confirmed on the state's web site. I then checked a purchase I made from Amazon on October 7th of this year. Guess what? I was taxed on the $13.50 shipping and handling charge for that order. Now it is very possible — probable most likely — that this is nothing more than a coding error on Amazon's site. But it's a whopper! Just consider the hundreds-of-millions of dollars in sales Amazon makes in New Jersey each year. These extra dimes add up very quickly. Has Amazon been overcharging NJ residents’ sales tax since July? If so, why haven’t they picked it up by now?
46928137
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
Apple traditionally has big product announcements in the early spring, so around February both the mainstream press and the tech blogs began to circulate their favorite rumors (the iWatch, iTV). They also announced the date of the next Apple event, which this year was in March — except it didn’t happen. “Reliable sources” then confirmed it would be in April, then May and then — nothing. In withdrawal and with a notoriously secretive Apple offering no relief the tech journalists started to get cranky. The end result is a rash of petulant stories that insist Apple is desperate for new products, in trouble (with $150 BILLION dollars in the bank I should be in such trouble) and in decline. The only ones desperate seem to be editors addicted to traffic-generating Apple announcements. Good news is on the horizon, though, as the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference starts June 10th.
34254709
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
This morning we learned that Google fired the first volley against YouTube conversion sites by blocking YouTube-MP3.org's servers from accessing its service and sending a letter threatening legal action. It looks like the fast growing Clip.dj also got the letter based on the note posted on the site: "We're sorry to announce this, but Clip.dj has shut its service down for good".
13075430
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units. This number supported, through advertising, three national television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS (a fourth, Dumont, folded in 1956) and numerous local independent stations. Now here are another set of numbers. As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild. That makes a proprietary amalgam greater than what the TV networks had in 1959 and one that easily serves as a foundation for a pending broadcast network that will be delivered not through tall radio towers, but through small wireless hubs and the Internet. Call it the Apple Broadcast Network. iAd is how Apple plans to pay for it.
9152822
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
This past week Guadalajara, Mexico hosted the 7th secret meeting of ACTA proponents who continue to ignore demands worldwide to open the debate to the public. Piecing together official and leaked documents from various global sources, Michael Geist has coalesced it all into a five part ACTA Guide that offers structured insight into what these talks might foist upon the populace at large. "Questions about ACTA typically follow a familiar pattern — what is it (Part One of the ACTA Guide listing the timeline of talks), do you have evidence (Part Two), why is this secret (Part Three), followed by what would ACTA do to my country's laws (Part Four)? Countering the momentum behind ACTA will require many to speak out" (Part Five).
4070515
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
Steve Jobs vowed weeks ago that when iTunes shifted to a tiered price structure in April older tracks priced at $0.69 would outnumber the contemporary hits that are rising to $1.29. Today, several weeks later, iTunes made the transition. While the $1.29 tracks are immediately visible, locating cheaper tracks are proving to be an exercise in futility. With the exception of 48 songs that Apple has placed on the iTunes main page, $0.69 downloads are proving to b a scarce commodity. MP3 Newswire tried to methodically drill down to unearth more of them only to find: 1) A download like Heart's thirty-four year-old song Barracuda went up to $1.29, not down. 2) Obscure 90s Brit pop and 50's Rockabilly artists — artists most likely to benefit from a price drop — remained at $0.99. 3) Collected tracks from a cross-section of 1920s, 30s, and 40s artists all remained at $0.99. Finally, MP3 Newswire called up tracks in the public domain from an artists named Ada Jones who first recorded in 1893 on Edison cylinder technology. The price on all the century-old tracks remained at $0.99 (Since they are in the public domain the same tracks are available for free on the Archive.org). Wonder where the price savings on deeper catalog cuts went? The problem may reflect the fact that the labels themselves decide which price tier they want to pursue for a given artist and they are mostly ignoring the lower tier. Meanwhile, Amazon's UK site has decided to counter promote their service by dropping prices on select tracks to 29 pence ($0.42).
3500917
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
On the old Perry Mason TV shows it was a common site to see someone burst into the crowded courtroom at a dire moment and confess aloud that they, not the defendant, killed so-and-so. In reality courts do not allow evidence to enter trial without a chance for the opposing council to view it and for a judge to rule on their admissibility. Yet, in the fifth day of the Pirate Bay trial lawyers for the prosecution again tried to sneak in surprise evidence while questioning defendants. The judge put his foot down this time telling lawyers for the state "If you have documents which you eventually plan to use, you need to hand them over now." The prosecution continues to struggle in court. In one humorous moment prosecutor Håkan Roswall tried to show how "hip" he was with technology when he questioned defendant Peter Sunde. "When did you meet [Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?" asked the Prosecutor. "We do not use the expression IRL," said Peter, "We use AFK." "IRL?" questioned the judge. "In Real Life," the Prosecutor explained to the judge. "We do not use that expression," Peter noted. "Everything is in real life. We use AFK — Away From Keyboard." "Well," said Roswall. "It seems I am a little bit out of date." The defendants are not out of the woods yet. Lawyer and technology writer Richard Koman wonders aloud if the Pirate Bay's I-dunno defense is all that much better.
3473621
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
Yesterday was a big day for the Pirate Bay when half of the charges against them were dropped leaving only the lesser charges of assisting making copyrighted material available in place. TorrentFreak is following the English twitter feed of the trial in the wee hours of the night, documenting more missteps by the prosecution. "The Pirate Bay trial is moving forward rapidly and again the day in court has ended early. On the third day the prosecution presented the amended charges. The defendants all called for acquittal while Carl Lundström's lawyer scored points with the already legendary 'King Kong' defense".
1155093
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
Former MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson offers up this commentary on The Register that basically says that any attempts to build a sanctioned digital music site today is doomed from the outset. "The internet companies I talk to don't mind giving some direct benefit to music companies. What torpedoes that possibility is the big financial requests from labels for "past infringement", plus a hefty fee for future usage. Any company agreeing to these demands is signing their own financial death sentence. The root cause is not the labels — chances are if you were running a label you would make the same demands, since the law permits it. The lack of clarity in the law is the real culprit — and it's the huge potential penalties that create an incentive for the big record labels' law firms to file lawsuits. Without clear laws and rulings from the court about what is permissible, every action touching a copyrighted work is a possible infringement, with a large financial windfall if the copyright owner can persuade a Judge to agree". Bottom line, today's global copyright laws give all the competitive advantages to the outlaws. Of course, if the labels were a bit less aggressive with the huge upfront payments and debilitating restrictions (caustic DRM,etc.) maybe all these "legal" companies would not be going out of business.
627692
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
Frequently, we get wind of big announcements that are either backed up by a dubiously small data set or not backed up at all. Big Champagne, PC Pitstop and Digital Music News joined forces to analyze 1,661,688 PCs to track 152 unique P2P clients quarterly from September 2006 to September 2007. Topping the list by a healthy margin is LimeWire. "In September of 2007 LimeWire was found on 17.8% of all the PCs polled that month (also referred to as the attachment rate). With regards to market share — counting only those users with at least one P2P application on their systems — LimeWire held a 36.4% share, meaning one out of three P2P users has LimeWire on their system. These numbers are up slightly from September 2006 when LimeWire held a market share of 34.1%". Meanwhile, uTorrent has made huge gains during this period soaring into second place and posing a genuine challenge to LimeWire. The article includes a chart that tracks the top thirteen applications over each of the four quarters, so you get to see whose fortunes are rising (uTorrent) and whose are falling (Azureus). Six of the thirteen are BitTorrent clients. The methodology at the end of the article also makes an interesting read.
562048
submission
Hodejo1 writes:
The early adopter premium is the difference between the cost of buying the latest greatest techno-toy today and the cost of buying an equal or better unit a couple of years later for much less. That Blu-ray unit you buy today for $300 will cost $80 two years from now. The premium is the $220 you pay to get the starter Blu-ray unit now as opposed to waiting. The same applied for HD-DVD until the axe finally fell and this is where it gets interesting. MP3 Newswire has been tracking post-mortem HD-DVD sales on eBay and surprisingly found that there are many takers. And why are people flocking to buy this decade's Betamax? Simple, they did the math. The demise of HD-DVD format creates "an option where the consumer can get his high-def player NOW without paying the $220 early adopter premium. That savings pays for the player and more". New sealed boxes of the Toshiba HD-A3, which shipped last fall for $300, are now drawing on average about $75 on eBay, where plummeting HD-DVD movie prices are averaging between $6 and $10. "Take a consumer with a 42" plasma set who needs to replace a broken standard definition DVD player. He can a) replace it with another standard definition DVD for about $60. b) He can buy a Blu-Ray player for between $300-$1000. c) He can buy an HD-DVD unit for under $80 and then buy ten $10 or sixteen $6 HD-DVD videos for a total of $180". What really drives this is Blu-ray's skimpy catalog, which will take a couple of years to pump up. Rather than blow the $220 on the early adopter premium just to have access to a limited number of movies the post mortem HD-DVD buyers can enjoy cheap Hi-Def players, cheap Hi-Def videos, and pay less. These users can shift to Blu-ray when players are less expensive and the catalog is robust. Actually, the early adopter premium is more like $320. With the win, Blu-ray manufacturers have raised prices.
