jcb@frisbee.Sun.COM (Jim Becker) (08/08/89)
jtreworgy@eagle.wesleyan.edu writes: ->In article <1505@ndmath.UUCP>, milo@ndmath.UUCP (Greg Corson) writes: ->> ->> Next week...why do vinal records cost $8 and CDs cost $15 when CD's cost less ->> to make? ->> ->> Greg Corson ->> {pur-ee,rutgers,uunet}!iuvax!ndmath!milo ->Vinyl records cost less to make than the packaging they come in. CD's cost ->between $3 and $6 to make. The process of making a CD is infinitely more ->complicated than that of making a record. Once a pressing mold has been made ->for a record, you just stamp out as many copies as you want. For the price of a ->platter of vinyl. This is the same situation in the CD world, as in many other manufacturing worlds. The bulk amount of money that is needed is to do the glass mastering of the disks and for the capital equipment and clean environment for the disks. Actually creating the disks and packaging them is around $1.25 per disk, from the last estimate that I've heard. ->James A. Treworgy "You should have seen me with the poker man, Re: Piracy and the Amiga and computer software in general. I was in the Amiga world at the beginning, and am no longer trying to do it. There is simply too much working against the developer for one to make a living writting Amiga software. After the initial effort there will be the `hit' impact of revenue for the first couple of months, then sales start to stall. There must be products that this is not true of but for most this is the case. Calculating the bucks that went into development and productization of your software doesn't add up to making back your investment for a lot of developers, although there are those that have done Ok for a time. People can say that there is little piracy, but from my experience this is not the case. The shareware stuff that I wrote was known to many, although there were only two people (whom I knew) that gave me the $15.00 that I was asking for the software. The product that I write, InfoMinder, was also known to quite a number of people, but there were less than a thousand sales of it. (I put about a thousand hours into writting and debugging it though). DPaint did really great when it came out though, because not only was it useful -- it was copy protected to boot. The program that people seemed to buy the most of, that I saw running all the time, was Marauder. It could copy copy-protected software, and went through lots of revisions (that had to be purchased). Once Marauder came out and broke DPaint there was a big dropoff in revenue from DPaint. I laugh at those that think that the great future of America is in their innovative software, as those Americans that need to support the innovation and creativity by purchasing it would rather complain that they need the source before they will buy a product, or simply steal the product. Those that want all software to be $10.00 have never tried to do this, and understand nothing about the economics of the marketplace. I would rather make paperclips than software at this point, if I wanted to make a profitable company. -Jim Becker jcb@sun.com
stephen@hpdml93.HP.COM (Stephen Holmstead) (08/15/89)
Dave Fetrow writes: > CD ROMs incorporate Error Correction Codes. A few mangled bits can be >reconstructed on the fly. If they didn't have ECC's they wouldn't have nearly >as many advantages over conventional media as they do. You make it sound like ECC is exclusive to CD ROM. As one who deals with 'conventional media' daily, I know that we make extensive use of ECC's. Most 'conventional media' has at least some form of ECC. This is often transparent so many user may not think that the drives are using ECC. I don't see ECC's as being an 'advantage' for CD ROM's. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Stephen Holmstead ...!hplabs!hpdmlge!stephen // Hewlett Packard Disk Memory Division \X/ Amiga Forever! "I remind you that humans are only a tiny minority in this galaxy." -- Spock, "The Apple," stardate 3715.6.