Microsoft has its own games consoles. Apple, Google, and Amazon? Nope.
If you want to claim that a company "doesn't have its own game console", I would imagine that you would first have to define "game console" so that the discussion won't derail later. Can the iPad be connected to a TV? Can the Mac mini be connected to a TV? And if so, what specifically makes a tablet or a personal computer not a "game console"?
Hell for that matter, Amazon's Kindle Fire could be, scratch that, should be a game console. Amazon would do well to target/attack the iPod Touch market, just as the iPod Touch attacked the Gameboy/DS market. I'm still waiting, they finally fixed their "login to device == authorization to buy anything" problem on release, but if they create great games exclusive for Kindle Fire (or v2, v3, etc) then they'll be in a great position.
Ok, there's never going to be a hard drive big enough to suit everyone's needs - that's a given. But average joe consumer must have a limit of some kind - what is it?
Thing is, there are multiple "average joe users". Just from my knowledge I could state about 4-6 profiles which have different processing, portability, storage and interface needs. My dad is chugging along fine with his MB Air, but despite that sweet chassis, I need more local storage and more RAM.
To apocryphally quote a famous person, 64.0GB is enough for most people... and I'm sure both you and I are not "most people".
However considering the valuation at 100x trailing 12m earnings the valuation already assumes exponential earnings growth. Therefore as someone already put it... only way is down.
Considering AMZN's is trading at 179x earnings (and that after a quarter that didn't meet expectations - profit increased, but top-line tapered off) - you have to ask yourself - is Facebook more like Google or Amazon? Why Amazon is the permanent darling of Wall Street is not quite explained, but it has been stratospheric in terms of P/E for years.
Or you could could select "Windows 7 Basic" theme and get what pretty much amounts to the Windows 8 theme. It's what I use all the time on Windows 7. I just think it's alot nicer. It has the best bits of the classic interface with the new features of Aero.
You lose Aero Peek. That's one of the few features of Glass I actually care about it, the shiny gradient crap can get lost.
Aero Peek - Isn't this a more snazzy version of "Win-D" key combo? That's worked for years from XP onwards. My $1500+ quad-core i7 based work laptop still stalls and chugs working out the Aero graphics (it takes a second or more - same kind of functionality on my Mac is near-instantaneous). I now use the Win7 Basic theme - the "Win-tab" key combo that I randomly stumbled on in Aero was hugely frustrating, when all I wanted was the old Alt-Tab.
Indeed - I worked in a bookshop where we were constantly entering ISBN numbers, a 13 digit string. It's an absolute nightmare to do on the top row, but you can learn to very quickly touch-type on a keypad in minutes. For normal typing yes you've got a point, but for anything involving continual entry of numeric data a keypad is so much faster and accurate it's unbelievable.
That's not all - many games and other software are 10x better with a keypad. However, my solution is to get a very decent laptop, then attach a USB keypad for this support - I can position it on the left and do 10-key on my left hand quickly, and use the mouse at the same time to quickly enter numeric data.
. Basically, if Americans and Europeans really thought about who was getting killed and maimed and exploited in order to supply their cheap stuff
You think Chinese workers have it bad? The entire globalized supply chain for electronics is fraught with suffering and forced labor conditions that make the Foxconn workers look pampered [1]
Yes, some companies care about conditions of the workforce.
If they gave a fuck about the conditions of the workforce, they'd do their manufacturing in the US. Or some other 1st world country with laws that protect their workers.
--Jeremy
Why do you blame companies for taking f*cking tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas? The neo-liberal/conservative agenda for the past 40 years in Congress has been all about serving corporations.
At some point you realize the game is fixed and you play by the rules established. Apple isn't some paragon or iconoclast as much as their founder Steve Jobs is idealized as being: they play by the rules established and they play it well - look at their support for media content companies - they have saved that corrupt industry from complete collapse - if they did otherwise, they would have been shunned or even attacked.
The US citizen and employees (99%) need to seize the power and message and force their governmental representatives to repeal the horrendously anti-labor stance that prevents companies like Apple from bring manufacturing back home - by eliminating tax cuts for shipping jobs overseas in the first place and giving long-term tax incentives for companies that bring those jobs back and keep them here.
By being a defacto-required identity provider, they are a very important platform - look at Dropbox or Skype for examples on how important and ubiquitous these tools are.
Operating systems, internet file systems, chat/presence, search engines... they are all platforms. Sure you can compete with Facebook quite successfully, but if you don't intend to, why do it? If your business/startup can benefit (or even profit) from Facebook ID (and social graph), and by outsourcing what's not critical, you can get a leg up on *your* competitors and benefit your customers who likely don't doesn't care about Facebook's dominance (or might even be happier since they can "share seamlessly").
As a user, I've benefited from a dropbox-enabled tool - 1Password, to manage my passwords across all my devices - because Dropbox makes it simple. 1Password does not (yet) compete with Dropbox, so it's a win for them as well.
I wouldn't be so sure. Social networking is based almost entirely on Metcalf's law. The reason Facebook has value is that people use Facebook. But social networks are trend-based. And people hate Facebook. They only use it because their friends use it and vice versa; again, Metcalf's law.
You know the only difference between Facebook on the web today and Microsoft on the desktop in the 90s is that businesses (and sometimes the government) required Windows/Office and familiarity with it. Given adequate ubiquity, there's a large possibility [1] that this [2] could occur [3]... once it becomes de-facto standard, good luck getting rid of it.
Kickstarter will hit mainstream when there are numerous failed projects or several high-profile scams. The fact that most of these are weeded out by proper feedback and loop-inclusion will likely reduce the number and keep the entire crowd-funding mechanism feasible.
Also keep an eye out for high-profile competitors run by or funded by major companies as happened to Groupon (ie, Google Offers, LivingSocial, Amazon Deals, etc). When this happens, the likelyhood for the negative events increases - that can be associated with the mechanism can reflect poorly on the canonical brand as well.
Would be an incredible success. Part of the cost of medicare is that only disabled and seniors are allowed on it, leaving the profitable rest of the population to the private insurance market. If the risk pool were allowed to include the healthy and young, you would start to see serious improvements in medical outcomes and at a reasonable coverage rate.
All I hear is, "we're making money hand over fist, but it's not all perfect...". Meanwhile they paid a negative federal tax in 2011 [1] and are lobbying for even lower taxes and local subsidies.
The iPhone is their best selling device. The next iPhone will have LTE support (like the iPad today). Verizon just sounds like a whiny child who didn't get *everything* they wanted for Christmas.
In short, fuck them and their entitlement complaints.
The smaller number of different models increases the liquidity of the used market, which is good for stabilizing prices, and also has an effect on depreciation. You can actually sell almost any 24 month old apple laptop for half what you paid for it.
Actually, a 2008 unibody macbook 13" (current models have "pro" moniker) still sells for ~$500-$750 on ebay [1]. I have one I bought new at the time for $1300... that's about 40 month old machine, and with OSX lion upgrades, modern SSD and memory upgrade it's as usable as a new one.
In fact the first man-made radio signals haven't even reached it yet, assuming they were powerful enough to be detected. And those are travelling at the speed of light, not some miniscule fraction of it.
But they will. So we may need to send "seed ships" out into space, "manned" by software/AI and traveling for centuries/millenia. It is possible, just not in the standard "space opera" sense.
They're all playing the same game, and nobody wins in the end except for the big companies.
Don't forget the lawyers (especially when they assemble like voltron and form patent trolls) - lawyers are always going to win in such a poisonous litigious environment.
The problem with google filled with search results (and ads) for google's search, just specific to a major site (ebay, amazon, etc) isn't new [1]. It's not even particularly distressing.
The problem is more likely due to model proliferation - why are there dozens if not hundreds of models of Asus laptops? Why will you only find a particular model at some stores? The problem is one of retailers protecting themselves from channel conflict (i.e., trying to avoid this scenario: browse store - find item, scan barcode, buy on Amazon, lather, rinse repeat) and manufacturers protecting themselves from actually competing with each other in a commoditized space - when Windows is the standard, why try to be better than the other manufacturer - you simply cut your margins and people buy your hardware, or you don't (i.e., you maintain some quality) and other manufacturers eat your lunch.
I had this exact problem with this exact manufacturer (a year or so ago I wanted an AMD APU-based laptop with big screen for my dad). I ended up giving up as there was no way I could find the exact model that fit my requirements (E350, 15+" screen, non-sucky reviews). I ended up not buying anything, and a few months later my Dad got a new Macbook Air.
Considering Sarkozy got only 1% less of the vote than Hollande in the first round, it's far too early to call it. All the folks that voted for other candidates will pick 1 of the 2 in the next round, and considering the massive amount of votes that went to Le Pen...we might very well be seeing more of Sarkozy.
There are a lot bad signs for Sarkozy. For one, this is the first election in France's 5th republic where the sitting president didn't come out on top in the first-round popular vote [1]. Another is that Sarkozy has yielded his platform to the extreme right - this not only transfers power in the hands of Le Pen, but will piss off many of the non-extreme right wing voters. He has a very tough fight coming up, and I predict, barring any last-minute gimmicks/scandals, he'll lose it.
If features are "missing", the product doesn't even qualify as a beta test version. That means that it shouldn't leave the campus.
It really doesn't matter what kind of excuses you want to offer.
So now you're supposed to just blindly accept incomplete alpha level configuration tools from a company like Apple?
Great...
This product is not alpha-quality. It's a different interface. Apple has done this repeatedly - introduce a new codebase with simplified UI and the same moniker as a previous app (iMovie, Final Cut Pro) or even hardware (think: iBooks vs. iBook).
This new app has one feature (among others) that's not present in the older version - it's usable by my elderly parents - I can tell them to use their iPad or Mac to do simple fixes for common issues without complex screenshots or such. Considering I don't want to allow remote WAN admin for their airport, this is very very important.
I have faith that eventually most of those features will be restored or Apple will keep the more feature-laden complex airport utility available for download (you can use both to manage a given network - the new app doesn't overwrite things it doesn't have the UI for).
So, you want Smalltalk code browsers. This IDE concept is nothing new, Smalltalk had that kind of code browising from the start and the concept of a live image where every code change is done in a live vm. The only thing I see new here is some "modern" "HTMLy" UI
If a Kickstarter project and a new IDE is what it takes to get these ideas more commonly used, as a former smalltalker, I'm all game. The "live VM" idea of Smalltalk was probably way ahead of it's time - with JITs and a much higher baseline of compute power even in smartphones, it's now high-time we start seeing code as beyond text files or db blobs.
I'm still waiting for a non-smalltalk VM to feature the power of the walkback.
For example, I think murder is bad. If someone else thinks murder is fine, then they are being restricted from practicing their beliefs by laws.
If you think abortion is murder, I hope you either don't jack off (if you're a guy) or have a miscarriage (if you're woman). In both cases, you're killing potential humans.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has its own games consoles. Apple, Google, and Amazon? Nope.
If you want to claim that a company "doesn't have its own game console", I would imagine that you would first have to define "game console" so that the discussion won't derail later. Can the iPad be connected to a TV? Can the Mac mini be connected to a TV? And if so, what specifically makes a tablet or a personal computer not a "game console"?
Hell for that matter, Amazon's Kindle Fire could be, scratch that, should be a game console. Amazon would do well to target/attack the iPod Touch market, just as the iPod Touch attacked the Gameboy/DS market. I'm still waiting, they finally fixed their "login to device == authorization to buy anything" problem on release, but if they create great games exclusive for Kindle Fire (or v2, v3, etc) then they'll be in a great position.
Pintrest. Twitter. All the things media wants them to do and considers profitable territory for advertisement and corporate promotions.
Ok, there's never going to be a hard drive big enough to suit everyone's needs - that's a given. But average joe consumer must have a limit of some kind - what is it?
Thing is, there are multiple "average joe users". Just from my knowledge I could state about 4-6 profiles which have different processing, portability, storage and interface needs. My dad is chugging along fine with his MB Air, but despite that sweet chassis, I need more local storage and more RAM.
To apocryphally quote a famous person, 64.0GB is enough for most people... and I'm sure both you and I are not "most people".
However considering the valuation at 100x trailing 12m earnings the valuation already assumes exponential earnings growth. Therefore as someone already put it ... only way is down.
Considering AMZN's is trading at 179x earnings (and that after a quarter that didn't meet expectations - profit increased, but top-line tapered off) - you have to ask yourself - is Facebook more like Google or Amazon? Why Amazon is the permanent darling of Wall Street is not quite explained, but it has been stratospheric in terms of P/E for years.
Or you could could select "Windows 7 Basic" theme and get what pretty much amounts to the Windows 8 theme. It's what I use all the time on Windows 7. I just think it's alot nicer. It has the best bits of the classic interface with the new features of Aero.
You lose Aero Peek. That's one of the few features of Glass I actually care about it, the shiny gradient crap can get lost.
Aero Peek - Isn't this a more snazzy version of "Win-D" key combo? That's worked for years from XP onwards. My $1500+ quad-core i7 based work laptop still stalls and chugs working out the Aero graphics (it takes a second or more - same kind of functionality on my Mac is near-instantaneous). I now use the Win7 Basic theme - the "Win-tab" key combo that I randomly stumbled on in Aero was hugely frustrating, when all I wanted was the old Alt-Tab.
Indeed - I worked in a bookshop where we were constantly entering ISBN numbers, a 13 digit string. It's an absolute nightmare to do on the top row, but you can learn to very quickly touch-type on a keypad in minutes. For normal typing yes you've got a point, but for anything involving continual entry of numeric data a keypad is so much faster and accurate it's unbelievable.
That's not all - many games and other software are 10x better with a keypad. However, my solution is to get a very decent laptop, then attach a USB keypad for this support - I can position it on the left and do 10-key on my left hand quickly, and use the mouse at the same time to quickly enter numeric data.
You'll be hard pushed to find anything that's 16:10 these days, even desktop monitors.
Macbooks (aside from the 11" Air) have always been 16:10. Hopefully they stay that way - I despise 16:9 for work.
. Basically, if Americans and Europeans really thought about who was getting killed and maimed and exploited in order to supply their cheap stuff
You think Chinese workers have it bad? The entire globalized supply chain for electronics is fraught with suffering and forced labor conditions that make the Foxconn workers look pampered [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_minerals
Yes, some companies care about conditions of the workforce.
If they gave a fuck about the conditions of the workforce, they'd do their manufacturing in the US. Or some other 1st world country with laws that protect their workers.
--Jeremy
Why do you blame companies for taking f*cking tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas? The neo-liberal/conservative agenda for the past 40 years in Congress has been all about serving corporations.
At some point you realize the game is fixed and you play by the rules established. Apple isn't some paragon or iconoclast as much as their founder Steve Jobs is idealized as being: they play by the rules established and they play it well - look at their support for media content companies - they have saved that corrupt industry from complete collapse - if they did otherwise, they would have been shunned or even attacked.
The US citizen and employees (99%) need to seize the power and message and force their governmental representatives to repeal the horrendously anti-labor stance that prevents companies like Apple from bring manufacturing back home - by eliminating tax cuts for shipping jobs overseas in the first place and giving long-term tax incentives for companies that bring those jobs back and keep them here.
Facebook is not an operating system.
By being a defacto-required identity provider, they are a very important platform - look at Dropbox or Skype for examples on how important and ubiquitous these tools are.
Operating systems, internet file systems, chat/presence, search engines... they are all platforms. Sure you can compete with Facebook quite successfully, but if you don't intend to, why do it? If your business/startup can benefit (or even profit) from Facebook ID (and social graph), and by outsourcing what's not critical, you can get a leg up on *your* competitors and benefit your customers who likely don't doesn't care about Facebook's dominance (or might even be happier since they can "share seamlessly").
As a user, I've benefited from a dropbox-enabled tool - 1Password, to manage my passwords across all my devices - because Dropbox makes it simple. 1Password does not (yet) compete with Dropbox, so it's a win for them as well.
I wouldn't be so sure. Social networking is based almost entirely on Metcalf's law. The reason Facebook has value is that people use Facebook. But social networks are trend-based. And people hate Facebook. They only use it because their friends use it and vice versa; again, Metcalf's law.
You know the only difference between Facebook on the web today and Microsoft on the desktop in the 90s is that businesses (and sometimes the government) required Windows/Office and familiarity with it. Given adequate ubiquity, there's a large possibility [1] that this [2] could occur [3]... once it becomes de-facto standard, good luck getting rid of it.
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/240646/spotify_adds_facebook_requirement_angering_users.html
[2] http://www.slashgear.com/facebook-access-becoming-mandatory-part-of-job-college-applications-06217136/
[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20027837-501465.html
I flag and report them. Don't know if it will help. I click the flag in the lower right. If anyone knows a better way...
I never even knew this existed. Thanks.
Kickstarter will hit mainstream when there are numerous failed projects or several high-profile scams. The fact that most of these are weeded out by proper feedback and loop-inclusion will likely reduce the number and keep the entire crowd-funding mechanism feasible.
Also keep an eye out for high-profile competitors run by or funded by major companies as happened to Groupon (ie, Google Offers, LivingSocial, Amazon Deals, etc). When this happens, the likelyhood for the negative events increases - that can be associated with the mechanism can reflect poorly on the canonical brand as well.
Would be an incredible success. Part of the cost of medicare is that only disabled and seniors are allowed on it, leaving the profitable rest of the population to the private insurance market. If the risk pool were allowed to include the healthy and young, you would start to see serious improvements in medical outcomes and at a reasonable coverage rate.
[1] http://thehill.com/homenews/house/64029-medicare-for-everyone
All I hear is, "we're making money hand over fist, but it's not all perfect...". Meanwhile they paid a negative federal tax in 2011 [1] and are lobbying for even lower taxes and local subsidies.
The iPhone is their best selling device. The next iPhone will have LTE support (like the iPad today). Verizon just sounds like a whiny child who didn't get *everything* they wanted for Christmas.
In short, fuck them and their entitlement complaints.
More like feared...
The smaller number of different models increases the liquidity of the used market, which is good for stabilizing prices, and also has an effect on depreciation. You can actually sell almost any 24 month old apple laptop for half what you paid for it.
Actually, a 2008 unibody macbook 13" (current models have "pro" moniker) still sells for ~$500-$750 on ebay [1]. I have one I bought new at the time for $1300... that's about 40 month old machine, and with OSX lion upgrades, modern SSD and memory upgrade it's as usable as a new one.
[1] http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=macbook+13+unibody+2008&_sacat=0&_odkw=macbook+13+unibody+-pro
In fact the first man-made radio signals haven't even reached it yet, assuming they were powerful enough to be detected. And those are travelling at the speed of light, not some miniscule fraction of it.
But they will. So we may need to send "seed ships" out into space, "manned" by software/AI and traveling for centuries/millenia. It is possible, just not in the standard "space opera" sense.
They're all playing the same game, and nobody wins in the end except for the big companies.
Don't forget the lawyers (especially when they assemble like voltron and form patent trolls) - lawyers are always going to win in such a poisonous litigious environment.
... and, as I say every time I see someone bring it up, has probably the stupidest name for a search site, ever.
Did you not ever play duck duck goose in grade school? I think the name just rolls off the tongue.
Forgot to add my reference link in the previous comment:
[1] http://searchengineland.com/ebay-pulls-google-adwords-ads-to-protest-google-checkout-moves-11468
The problem with google filled with search results (and ads) for google's search, just specific to a major site (ebay, amazon, etc) isn't new [1]. It's not even particularly distressing.
The problem is more likely due to model proliferation - why are there dozens if not hundreds of models of Asus laptops? Why will you only find a particular model at some stores? The problem is one of retailers protecting themselves from channel conflict (i.e., trying to avoid this scenario: browse store - find item, scan barcode, buy on Amazon, lather, rinse repeat) and manufacturers protecting themselves from actually competing with each other in a commoditized space - when Windows is the standard, why try to be better than the other manufacturer - you simply cut your margins and people buy your hardware, or you don't (i.e., you maintain some quality) and other manufacturers eat your lunch.
I had this exact problem with this exact manufacturer (a year or so ago I wanted an AMD APU-based laptop with big screen for my dad). I ended up giving up as there was no way I could find the exact model that fit my requirements (E350, 15+" screen, non-sucky reviews). I ended up not buying anything, and a few months later my Dad got a new Macbook Air.
Considering Sarkozy got only 1% less of the vote than Hollande in the first round, it's far too early to call it. All the folks that voted for other candidates will pick 1 of the 2 in the next round, and considering the massive amount of votes that went to Le Pen...we might very well be seeing more of Sarkozy.
There are a lot bad signs for Sarkozy. For one, this is the first election in France's 5th republic where the sitting president didn't come out on top in the first-round popular vote [1]. Another is that Sarkozy has yielded his platform to the extreme right - this not only transfers power in the hands of Le Pen, but will piss off many of the non-extreme right wing voters. He has a very tough fight coming up, and I predict, barring any last-minute gimmicks/scandals, he'll lose it.
[1] http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/04/hollande-beats-sarkozy-in-french-first-round-voting/
If features are "missing", the product doesn't even qualify as a beta test version. That means that it shouldn't leave the campus.
It really doesn't matter what kind of excuses you want to offer.
So now you're supposed to just blindly accept incomplete alpha level configuration tools from a company like Apple?
Great...
This product is not alpha-quality. It's a different interface. Apple has done this repeatedly - introduce a new codebase with simplified UI and the same moniker as a previous app (iMovie, Final Cut Pro) or even hardware (think: iBooks vs. iBook).
This new app has one feature (among others) that's not present in the older version - it's usable by my elderly parents - I can tell them to use their iPad or Mac to do simple fixes for common issues without complex screenshots or such. Considering I don't want to allow remote WAN admin for their airport, this is very very important.
I have faith that eventually most of those features will be restored or Apple will keep the more feature-laden complex airport utility available for download (you can use both to manage a given network - the new app doesn't overwrite things it doesn't have the UI for).
So, you want Smalltalk code browsers. This IDE concept is nothing new, Smalltalk had that kind of code browising from the start and the concept of a live image where every code change is done in a live vm. The only thing I see new here is some "modern" "HTMLy" UI
If a Kickstarter project and a new IDE is what it takes to get these ideas more commonly used, as a former smalltalker, I'm all game. The "live VM" idea of Smalltalk was probably way ahead of it's time - with JITs and a much higher baseline of compute power even in smartphones, it's now high-time we start seeing code as beyond text files or db blobs.
I'm still waiting for a non-smalltalk VM to feature the power of the walkback.
For example, I think murder is bad. If someone else thinks murder is fine, then they are being restricted from practicing their beliefs by laws.
If you think abortion is murder, I hope you either don't jack off (if you're a guy) or have a miscarriage (if you're woman). In both cases, you're killing potential humans.