I just tend to ignore people and channels of information that prove irrelevant or uninteresting.
In fact I end up "archiving" most of this information and only focus on discussion relating to important things or people at work.
Then again, in an poorly run organization where authority isn't clearly delineated or understood, people can often have too many "important people" (TPS reports anyone?). If that kind of situation isn't kept in check (either by the worker or the organization), it will lead to burnout and turnover.
MS pretty much did very little consumer computing.
They did tons of ads, had spots on many channels, people confused IE for "the Internet" and assumed all computers ran Windows. Bill Gates was idolized by many.
Remember a brand is a promise and an identity, and according to the article, they're fading with consumers.
One can only pin this fade with their lack of movement in OS and Office and complete lack of traction in recently emerging markets (online, mobile). I'd say they've done well in gaming, but that seems to be their sole bright spot.
Though they're dominant in sales, a weak brand will wreak havoc on employee morale and margins in all markets where they aren't leaders (ie everything but desktop OS + office)
The area they're [Microsoft] failing nearly completely in is Japan... who are very Xenophobic.
Japan loves em some games and mobiles and tech. Guess what, the top selling phone in Sept was the iPhone 4 (and it has been previously numerous times).
Is that xenophobia, or does Microsoft just care to not understand Japan?
Yes, very interesting and realistically just a way for the big telcos to not have to upgrade the wire and instead upgrade the modem and equip at the CO. Take a look at the graphic here.
Looks like today's announcement is the extension of existing work last year, but using 4 copper wires (ie, 2 phone lines).
What's interesting is noone mentions latency, and whether this actually will increase responsiveness or just throughput.
The disadvantage is that the employees most likely to volunteer for redundancy are often those the employer would least wish to lose, namely the good performers who are able to find a new job easily.
I was working at a company recently acquired by Oracle in 2005 (name left as exercise for reader), and my coworker pretty much told his manager he wanted the severance. This guy was pretty good and self-directed, but he was not an Oracle type (more of an independent consultant), and Oracle won by cutting him loose, and the guy got enough cash to start his consultancy... with which he's doing well.
Moral: Sometimes the folks who want to leave won't necessarily be doing well for your company, even though they're stellar and very hireable (note: I left after a year as the merged company wasn't a fit for me either).
My friends and family who are unsure about what tech to buy, ask me. If I am confident in my knowledge of the product (ie, Cameras, Laptops, etc)... I issue clear recommendations. For the past 5-7 years I've been recommending Mac laptops. If Apple locks down OSX (I strongly doubt it), then I will stop recommending them. I know for a fact that folks I know factor my recommendations strongly.
I'm pretty sure there are a lot of "evangelists" like me out there, and if Apple shuns us, they will lose sales.
However many SSDs have garbage collection. In particular, drives with the SandForce controller do garbage collection and work fine in Macs (not to mention they're pretty good for price to performance based on benchmarks from AnandTech).
The chicken-little fear of OSX becoming "closed" ignores the reality: Macs have barely 10% marketshare, Cross-platform development is common and well understood these days, and if power users (who act as system evangelists) start abandoning OSX, Apple stands to lose LOTS of money.
The moment it becomes even difficult to do my daily job on a Mac is the day I go to Linux permanently... it's quite easy and usable today, but the Mac is more usable and affords me (with VMWare) the best OS for development for now.
It's a great password manager. Aside from dropbox, it's one of the first things I install on a new machine that will be used by me or a close relative.
On the broader note, though, almost all of these have equivalents or better on the iPhone platform.
If you want a more level playing field and you live in California, vote Yes for Proposition 24, which will make it more difficult for companies like Google (and esp. oil companies) to avoid their fair share of taxes.
Before you anti-tax folks get your panties in a bunch, please keep in mind this proposition would close exactly the kind of tax loophole that only benefits corporate behemoths at the expense of small business and consumers.
It competes with the Viao-Z and other CULV high-margin lightweight laptops.
Netbooks, from my direct experience, have major issues with hardware quality (trackpad false clicks, keyboard crammed, screen too small, you name it). An Atom chipset does not compare to C2D+320M in capability.
Even when running the nice Ubuntu Unity, the hardware quality really does the OS no favors. I don't see the use of having to plug in a mouse to avoid the false-click-fest. Let's just assume that Win7 (No) Starter is not a option.
Exactly. Democracy in this country was bought and sold a long time ago, along with most of our other rights. But considering how little anybody gives a shit, it's no less than we deserve.
Maybe you're putting the cart before the horse? Perhaps most folks don't give a shit precisely because the system has been so obviously and thoroughly corrupted and has resisted change repeated and sometimes violently?
NiMH prefers what NiCd hates: a partial charge/discharge. I am told the NiMH batteries in a Toyota Prius are charged only to 55% of capacity, and allowed to run down only to 45% before charging begins. The car carries 10x as much battery capacity as it actually uses, supposedly to maximize battery life. I don't know for sure if it works that way, but that's what I heard.
To get maximum life out of the Prius battery pack, the car's computer brain does not allow the battery to fully charge or discharge. Toyota says that for the best service life, the Prius battery likes to be kept at about a 60 percent charge. In normal operation, the system usually lets the charge level vary only 10-15 percentage points. Therefore, the battery is rarely more than 75 percent charged, or less than 45 percent charged.
If you're familiar with the Prius, you know there's a battery-charge indicator on the instrument panel. Toyota says this isn't the charge level per se, but rather a state-of-charge window. The top of the window represents about a 75 percent charge, the bottom about 45 percent charge.
The take-away should be: if you buy a modern device, it should have on-board power management to take care of this. For example the new Macbooks with non-replaceable batteries do similar battery management to maintain life.
And the people I've talked to with iPhones older than version 4 are having real troubled with the latest version of iOS on their iPhone 3* phones - majorly slow is what I've heard.
I own a 3GS. My sister owns a 3GS, and several of my friends own a 3G. No problems, everything is fine (3G on iOS 4.0 was a problem if you didn't wipe and reinstall/restore, I hear, but that's been resolved).
Also as long as we're talking anecodotally, I just talked to a coworker with an original Droid (which he loved and had configured perfectly). In the OTA upgrade to Android 2.2, his Droid just halted halfway through and even the Verizon store couldn't restore it back to good. He was SOL, having no backups. They did give him a replacement (refurbished) Droid, and he was able to get his personal data back on it, but all his config and App data(Android users do this more than iOS users) was lost.
All I could relate to him was that, he wouldn't be so up the creek in iOS land because there is no concept of an OTA update (when your iOS device is being firmware updated, you're plugged in)... meaning disruption of power while updating. Furthermore, all iOS devices (through iTunes) have a backup, and it's default process.
I don't know about you, but I haven't seen SSDs battle tested enough for me to truly trust the things yet. With mechanical drives I've yet to have one "just die" as I ALWAYS got warnings something was going via drive noise, heat, random small errors, etc. And now SMART just makes that even easier to spot.
Google found differently in their massive hard drive survey... sometimes drives would just up and die with no SMART warnings. Also the most common SSD failure-case is lack of writes, at least you can retrieve data off the drive as opposed to a completely opaque device if the platter is frozen.
someone removed the 3G unit from their iPad and replaced it with the insides of an.. wait, you guessed it, a MiFi.
A one-off hardhack does not make a shipping product. To prevent against "Son of Antennagate" they'll have to do rigorous testing to make this sale-able. Not to mention cooperation from VZ.
Plus, why not just have VZ network be a feature for iPad v2?
"Until quite recently, spider silk had the highest tensile strength of any substance known to man, and the name Silksteel pays homage to the arachnid for good reason."
Commissioner Pravin Lal
"U.N. Scientific Survey"
Some of the best (sometimes prophetic) fictional quotes ever.
I know someone (who used to work at TiVo) who said that something like 50% of TiVo's issue backlog (this was 2008) was dealing with CableCard issues (on models that supported it).
Maybe their curve has flattened out now, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that "support for CableCard" "works reasonably well on Comcast (or other cable company)". Is probably designed to prevent the next TiVo from popping up and embarrassing the cable behemoths.
How exactly would they prevent a user from literally running an EXE someone randomly mails them?
I predict now that the iOS AppStore model will become the new PC norm, much to our dismay. The ability to run random binaries without a curator overseeing will be gone for most folks in about 5 years. There will of course, be jailbreaking, open builds (pro OS) and such, but instead of virus-scanning taking the bulk of your computer's idle processor, it will be iTunes/Steam or the equivalent ensuring that your Apps are licensed, compliant and behaving.
RMS was a visionary, and it will be proven out in about 5 years or so (before 2020 for sure).
No matter what your personal feelings are about their products, they've clearly tapped into something that's getting large numbers of people to fork over their hard-earned money.
With a economic conditions that are best described as a depression being held at bay by devaluation of the currency, Apple still sets records. I wonder when they'll be worth more than Exxon.
For most app development, I would be comfortable applying Pareto's Principle. I don't have any data, and unless I'm mistaken about how fractured the Android OS implementations are, then I imagine that 10% of my effort would work on 80% of the market.
While I would agree with the idea, you do realize that sometimes it's not that clear whether it works or not. 80/20 (probably more like 97/3 or something really stable) rule applies for *each feature*, resulting in a really mixed bag of some things working weirdly or not at all on some handsets, and *other features* not working properly on other handsets.
Also consider this argument against the Pareto principle for software features:
...The point I am trying to make is that the other 80% of the features we may not need regularly varies between users.
So while in principle I agree with you (I try to apply Pareto's principle regularly towards feature/bug discussions with my customers), often the "undesireable 20%" rears it's head and we have to go back and revisit a fix/enhancement to broaden it.
Finally, examine the Kano Model to find "killer features" that will help you market your product - some features working solidly across versions/hardware will be far more important than the vast bulk of features your App provides.
Ah right, and transport by sea will never take off because of sea sickness. Likewise for air travel and the horseless carriage due to altitude sickness and motion sickness.
You're comparing sea travel with 3D TV? Get real. Sea travel took off because of war, trade and colonization efforts. What does 3D TV do for me? I'll put it to you this way: I don't think 3D TV is going to be a Civilization "tech" anytime soon, but sailing/flight/horses sure are.
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I just tend to ignore people and channels of information that prove irrelevant or uninteresting.
In fact I end up "archiving" most of this information and only focus on discussion relating to important things or people at work.
Then again, in an poorly run organization where authority isn't clearly delineated or understood, people can often have too many "important people" (TPS reports anyone?). If that kind of situation isn't kept in check (either by the worker or the organization), it will lead to burnout and turnover.
MS pretty much did very little consumer computing.
They did tons of ads, had spots on many channels, people confused IE for "the Internet" and assumed all computers ran Windows. Bill Gates was idolized by many.
Remember a brand is a promise and an identity, and according to the article, they're fading with consumers.
One can only pin this fade with their lack of movement in OS and Office and complete lack of traction in recently emerging markets (online, mobile). I'd say they've done well in gaming, but that seems to be their sole bright spot.
Though they're dominant in sales, a weak brand will wreak havoc on employee morale and margins in all markets where they aren't leaders (ie everything but desktop OS + office)
The area they're [Microsoft] failing nearly completely in is Japan... who are very Xenophobic.
Japan loves em some games and mobiles and tech. Guess what, the top selling phone in Sept was the iPhone 4 (and it has been previously numerous times).
Is that xenophobia, or does Microsoft just care to not understand Japan?
https://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/dslphantommodeexplained.jpg
Yes, very interesting and realistically just a way for the big telcos to not have to upgrade the wire and instead upgrade the modem and equip at the CO. Take a look at the graphic here.
Looks like today's announcement is the extension of existing work last year, but using 4 copper wires (ie, 2 phone lines).
What's interesting is noone mentions latency, and whether this actually will increase responsiveness or just throughput.
So Broken Arrow means missing nuke.
Apparently Dull Sword is the term for a non-functioning nuclear warhead.
The disadvantage is that the employees most likely to volunteer for redundancy are often those the employer would least wish to lose, namely the good performers who are able to find a new job easily.
I was working at a company recently acquired by Oracle in 2005 (name left as exercise for reader), and my coworker pretty much told his manager he wanted the severance. This guy was pretty good and self-directed, but he was not an Oracle type (more of an independent consultant), and Oracle won by cutting him loose, and the guy got enough cash to start his consultancy... with which he's doing well.
Moral: Sometimes the folks who want to leave won't necessarily be doing well for your company, even though they're stellar and very hireable (note: I left after a year as the merged company wasn't a fit for me either).
My friends and family who are unsure about what tech to buy, ask me. If I am confident in my knowledge of the product (ie, Cameras, Laptops, etc)... I issue clear recommendations. For the past 5-7 years I've been recommending Mac laptops. If Apple locks down OSX (I strongly doubt it), then I will stop recommending them. I know for a fact that folks I know factor my recommendations strongly.
I'm pretty sure there are a lot of "evangelists" like me out there, and if Apple shuns us, they will lose sales.
Au contraire, Apple has over 20% of all PC sales now
Retail does not include most Business PC purchases... so I stand uncorrected.
Here is my keynote liveblog reference:
However many SSDs have garbage collection. In particular, drives with the SandForce controller do garbage collection and work fine in Macs (not to mention they're pretty good for price to performance based on benchmarks from AnandTech).
The chicken-little fear of OSX becoming "closed" ignores the reality: Macs have barely 10% marketshare, Cross-platform development is common and well understood these days, and if power users (who act as system evangelists) start abandoning OSX, Apple stands to lose LOTS of money.
The moment it becomes even difficult to do my daily job on a Mac is the day I go to Linux permanently... it's quite easy and usable today, but the Mac is more usable and affords me (with VMWare) the best OS for development for now.
It's a great password manager. Aside from dropbox, it's one of the first things I install on a new machine that will be used by me or a close relative.
On the broader note, though, almost all of these have equivalents or better on the iPhone platform.
If you want a more level playing field and you live in California, vote Yes for Proposition 24, which will make it more difficult for companies like Google (and esp. oil companies) to avoid their fair share of taxes.
Before you anti-tax folks get your panties in a bunch, please keep in mind this proposition would close exactly the kind of tax loophole that only benefits corporate behemoths at the expense of small business and consumers.
It competes with the Viao-Z and other CULV high-margin lightweight laptops.
Netbooks, from my direct experience, have major issues with hardware quality (trackpad false clicks, keyboard crammed, screen too small, you name it). An Atom chipset does not compare to C2D+320M in capability.
Even when running the nice Ubuntu Unity, the hardware quality really does the OS no favors. I don't see the use of having to plug in a mouse to avoid the false-click-fest. Let's just assume that Win7 (No) Starter is not a option.
You pay for what you get, apprently.
Maybe you're putting the cart before the horse? Perhaps most folks don't give a shit precisely because the system has been so obviously and thoroughly corrupted and has resisted change repeated and sometimes violently?
Close, it's about a 45-75% range:
The take-away should be: if you buy a modern device, it should have on-board power management to take care of this. For example the new Macbooks with non-replaceable batteries do similar battery management to maintain life.
I own a 3GS. My sister owns a 3GS, and several of my friends own a 3G. No problems, everything is fine (3G on iOS 4.0 was a problem if you didn't wipe and reinstall/restore, I hear, but that's been resolved).
Also as long as we're talking anecodotally, I just talked to a coworker with an original Droid (which he loved and had configured perfectly). In the OTA upgrade to Android 2.2, his Droid just halted halfway through and even the Verizon store couldn't restore it back to good. He was SOL, having no backups. They did give him a replacement (refurbished) Droid, and he was able to get his personal data back on it, but all his config and App data(Android users do this more than iOS users) was lost.
All I could relate to him was that, he wouldn't be so up the creek in iOS land because there is no concept of an OTA update (when your iOS device is being firmware updated, you're plugged in)... meaning disruption of power while updating. Furthermore, all iOS devices (through iTunes) have a backup, and it's default process.
Google found differently in their massive hard drive survey... sometimes drives would just up and die with no SMART warnings. Also the most common SSD failure-case is lack of writes, at least you can retrieve data off the drive as opposed to a completely opaque device if the platter is frozen.
A one-off hardhack does not make a shipping product. To prevent against "Son of Antennagate" they'll have to do rigorous testing to make this sale-able. Not to mention cooperation from VZ.
Plus, why not just have VZ network be a feature for iPad v2?
Some of the best (sometimes prophetic) fictional quotes ever.
I know someone (who used to work at TiVo) who said that something like 50% of TiVo's issue backlog (this was 2008) was dealing with CableCard issues (on models that supported it).
Maybe their curve has flattened out now, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that "support for CableCard" "works reasonably well on Comcast (or other cable company)". Is probably designed to prevent the next TiVo from popping up and embarrassing the cable behemoths.
I predict now that the iOS AppStore model will become the new PC norm, much to our dismay. The ability to run random binaries without a curator overseeing will be gone for most folks in about 5 years. There will of course, be jailbreaking, open builds (pro OS) and such, but instead of virus-scanning taking the bulk of your computer's idle processor, it will be iTunes/Steam or the equivalent ensuring that your Apps are licensed, compliant and behaving.
RMS was a visionary, and it will be proven out in about 5 years or so (before 2020 for sure).
With a economic conditions that are best described as a depression being held at bay by devaluation of the currency, Apple still sets records. I wonder when they'll be worth more than Exxon.
While I would agree with the idea, you do realize that sometimes it's not that clear whether it works or not. 80/20 (probably more like 97/3 or something really stable) rule applies for *each feature*, resulting in a really mixed bag of some things working weirdly or not at all on some handsets, and *other features* not working properly on other handsets.
Also consider this argument against the Pareto principle for software features:
So while in principle I agree with you (I try to apply Pareto's principle regularly towards feature/bug discussions with my customers), often the "undesireable 20%" rears it's head and we have to go back and revisit a fix/enhancement to broaden it.
Finally, examine the Kano Model to find "killer features" that will help you market your product - some features working solidly across versions/hardware will be far more important than the vast bulk of features your App provides.
You're comparing sea travel with 3D TV? Get real. Sea travel took off because of war, trade and colonization efforts. What does 3D TV do for me? I'll put it to you this way: I don't think 3D TV is going to be a Civilization "tech" anytime soon, but sailing/flight/horses sure are.