I saw a talk about WP8 and it could not sure about W8 though. Essentially the external media for the phone version of the OS can have the app data live in a isolated container on the SD or as a common pool of data that you could then use to have apps share amongst themselves. I guess maybe I'm just not much of a gamer but on a tablet I can't see me installing more than 2-3 hi-res games and then a half dozen of the small little ones + a bit of productivity apps. When I really want to game I'd rather use a console or a desktop. I'd be too paranoid with battery life to waste it playing games for any amount of time while travelling to get to where I'm going and have a brick to carry around and/or being that guy looking for an outlet to plug his gadgets into. 10GB would probably be fine given that I'd already have an office suite to start with. The extra 10 would be for a bit of media.
You'd likely have more than 20GB of apps on a tablet? What the heck are you installing (1000 Angry birds)? Things like Skype, Facebook, Twitter etc are all ~20MB or so sized apps. You already have office with this thing so the big productivity suite install is already included in the space you lost. As well supposedly iOS only takes 1GB on the iPad, so you're comparing 31 to 20GB of useable space. The surface for an extra $20 you can have 52GB of space: though you are a bit limited on the app/data breakdown of how you use it still $1 a GB vs the ~$3 a GB for internal storage for the 64GB model from Apple or MS seems a good deal.
The thought is also I think that not everyone has or wishes to own a TV (yeah I know probably going back a few years but probably coming back now that there are other ways of getting content). Why should the rich pay for television programs for the poor people that don't even own (or perhaps wish to own) a TV? This is a user funded model which regardless of susceptibility to being gamed is more fair. Similar to bus tickets, user fees for skating rinks etc. Those that use pay, those that don't use or aren't willing to pay what the service costs can do without. Distributive means like progressive taxation should only be used to provide necessities no one has a right to whatever entertainment that they chose.
How about if the camera sees something it doesn't like? Two people caught doing R acts watching a G rated film for example. "This movie has been paused to do the two in the back row who are groping each other. Please try again when less horny."
You nailed it. IT workers are generally highly into meritocracy. In my experience, nothing pisses of a group of us nerds more than stupid people making the decisions and having to interface with idiots (whether it be that user from hell story or the guy that dumps 100k files in a single folder).
You could add too that UAW is a failure too since it has made their industry operate on a propetual bailout/subsidy gravy train. I can't think of a union that has accomplished both good for their membership and an industry that isn't suffering.
It's even worst than that I think (I'm from Canada but I think we are similar to the US in this way) individuals can generate capital losses that they can use to offset future gains. So they get a lower tax rate "because they are taking a risk of a loss" but when the loss actually happens they get to write that off too. One or the other seems reasonable: normal income tax rate but you can carry losses forward and write things off so that you only pay taxes on what you earn net over long term OR lower interest rate and you eat any losses that should occur. It shouldn't be too hard (but it is) to convince people that there is such a thing as personal choice/owning the consequences of those choices. It is amazing how fund managers are brilliant and knew things before everyone else when things go good but when things go bad it becames: oh shit happened, how could I have predicted that Japan would have an earthquake, that New Orleans being on the coast and below sea level is a really dumb place for real estate, etc.
Another part of the problem is tax avoidance presumably leaves money in Bahamas, or Ireland or whatever. So say you think of Apple stock as a honest to God piece of a company. How good is it for you for them to say "buy our company we make lots of money, except we'll never bring it to the US because the tax would be too high". It is almost an Enron with borders used to make real profits disappear rather than profits disappearing because they weren't real in the first place.
Not surprising I guess but that means if you avoid flash and Java you are a long way to avoiding problems (outside of the normal AV and update activities). Both are really hard to avoid in the modern world though. I wonder when does Oracle start getting a bad rep for security out of this? Will customers start wondering about dropping $100k on a db server from the same company that got there phone hacked with a 3 month old bug?
Well to be fair for the the majority of/. readers we aren't in the cheap desktop market. For one reason or another we'll find a way to drop 2k+ on our laptops and desktops. We're devs, or gamers, or video processing nerds, or guys that measure their worth by their massive stash of pirated material and seed ratio etc. Either way we seem to all want some combination of SSD, big disk capacity, massive monitor, top of the line CPU, etc. Apple gear might not be great value but they don't target the low end of the market and we generally aren't there anyways.
I read somewhere (Job's biography?) that Forstall is a dick who could hold his own with Jobs in dickatude. Might have been more of a personality problem.
"development quickly turns into a game of code- and file-system navigation rather than programming and code editing"
You would rather have to code everything from scratch than spend a bit of time (with IDE assistance) finding what module does what you want? Good luck with that.
Is this guy calling for us to go back to the day when everything was dumped in the main function of a C program? Yes modularity is a pain but it is a bigger pain having to try to figure out how to do everything from scratch every time you start a new project. It is like an architect complaining about a house being made out of a whole lot of bricks rather than as a whole wall at a time. Sure you "could" do that but then you'd have the little problem of getting the wall to the job site and getting it vertical (similar to the size of the dll loaded in and difficulty of grasping in coding land).
7.50 a GB? Wow. So... is Blockbuster still popular up there than since your cap sucks so bad? I download about 500-1000 a month. My overage charges used to go away after 50 now raised to 100GB anyways so after $25 now $50 everything is free (so if you use enough to hit the throttle I just go crazy to reduce the per GB cost HD everything )). Also a 250GB base cap which you'd think would be enough but... I'm a nerd.
And all of those activities still cost money. As a business owner/manager those companies have to look at the cost of at least two options:
status quo: - very high legal expenses (not just maintaining an oligarchy but also each time they want to acquire or go into a new business line there is a huge push back making the process much more expensive) - high loses/collection activities - moderate investment required - high prices to customers an large market share
open market: - moderate legal expenses (I suspect you'd have an easier time acquiring 1 of 10 companies than 1 of 3), not as much fighting to maintain tight regulations limiting foreign investment etc. - moderate loses/collection (I worked in collections people stop paying what they find extra expenses to try to keep the lights on, so credit cards, cable etc get the shaft over car and house (as they should)) - large investment required to compete - low market share
Just because an expense is required to get the competitive market you want doesn't mean it isn't an expense. All expenses need to be considered of the options.
Rogers say has a 71% gross margin (I think they combine cable with internet in their operations). That is a lot which is likely what is going to have to be reported. However, there pre-tax net margin is only(still pretty good) 17% (http://finapps.forbes.com/finapps/jsp/finance/compinfo/Ratios.jsp?tkr=RCI). The thing is gross profit only includes the cost of goods sold where as your investors only ever see what is left over after you invest in further system upgrades, advertise (and these costs are huge don't kid yourself, there are ads every hour on every TV station for these giants plus a lot of promotion hoppers that are always on introductory rates), legal etc.
Operating expenses as a ratio of revenue would likely be much higher in a more competitive market: you'd have to pay to use someone else's system or roll out a system country wide but have less market share to pay for it. I don't think it would take much to make the industry level with normal companies after that, maybe $10 off your bill. Not saying we shouldn't still care but we are arguing over $10 not over a reduction to 1/2 or 1/3 as a 71% gross margin would imply.
Rogers didn't have competition in the cable space in east Canada and then Bell got into the business. For phones you have Fido, Virgin etc entering the market. ISPs: the little guys have always been around. They get screwed over since they have to lease bandwidth from one of the big players (usually Bell since it is DSL) but still it is there. They have nothing like the advertising (I think they are so local the revenue can't get them TV time) but you can get a fastish (5Mbps) connection for ~$30 with no limits in most places, some of them even explicitly state they don't traffic shape, the connection is symmetric etc.
Do what I do ignore the cap. When you reach it they only charge you the $5 for the first 50GB or something. If you get a better package you usually get a smaller fee for the overages too. I have 150/10 with Rogers and only get dinged 50c per GB over 250GB. I'd like that it was free but I'll pay $25 a month for unlimited porn.
Since Rogers, Telus and Bell have ~120k employees and also provide phone and cable services with those employees I'm willing to guess that the answer will round to zero millions. That is a lot of millions for a country as small as Canada:)
The markup is large but I suspect it is no where near that by the time you add in advertising (print, TV, cold/warm calls), collections activities, billing legal etc. The ISP business might very well be like Coke: 1% cost what is in the bottle and all the rest is branding and service around that. If investors really got to make 6000+% on there money the market would flood with people wanting those returns and the prices would drop.
realize that people have free speech but we also should stop apologizing so much. I don't give a shit if you are offended by what I say. Just because you believe something and I believe that that belief is complete bullshit doesn't mean I need to apologize each time I state my opinion. I'm not bound to the limits of your chosen superstitions.
Mac users do this all the time. I think Metro will be huge for all the Tweetards that just got to have an app for everything rather than a website. I suspect that the heavy "light" gamers (people that play Angry Birds but can't be bothered with something involved like Madden) and heavy social network users will jump all over this for $40. Things in the industry in general are moving from a major update every 3-5 years and free updates to a subscription model, every 3mths-2yrs you get a little bit of functionality in exchange for a little bit of money.
You have a point with the App's on Win 7 bit. They could have made SP2 be Metro. The store would generate at least some revenue from those unwilling or unable to afford a full OS + help build up an ecosystem rather than having to wait for people to do a hardware refresh. Might catch corporate customers better too: bundle up Metro + major functionality fixes in a service pack and voila corporate users are now into the App Store. They might still push back users that want to get apps on their computer but it would be a much smaller hurdle than having the IT department bless a whole new OS with all the corporate image.
You're still getting upgrades it is just assumed that Win 8 is close enough to Win 7 that those with Win 7 already have a working system and just need incremental updates. Those looking for a new computer are expected to go with a Win 8 machine since it is essentially Win 7 + an App Store. Service packs have their most value when people are expected to go years and years between major upgrades at their sites and so will be dusting off lots of new hardware a couple years into a release and needing to get everything current. If all this gets pushed down to the vendor and doesn't land on the invoice who cares? If you are using a corporate image again who cares?
They are charging something like $40 for a Xp, Vista,Win7 upgrade to Win 8 Pro. I think they are going the way of Apple, ~$30-40 upgrades every couple years. People are probably more likely to go "oh a little bit of eye candy, okay here's my $40" than a $200 complete generational shift every 5 years and having the whole "Will I still want to use this computer for a long enough timeframe to make it worth it?" kind of discussion. Cheaper than a dinner and movie for one yep why not. Heck I'd pay the $40 to be sure to not have any malware (that doesn't come in the "box";)), licensing issues in the future and save me the 20 min spent looking for a good rip and crack code.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw a talk about WP8 and it could not sure about W8 though. Essentially the external media for the phone version of the OS can have the app data live in a isolated container on the SD or as a common pool of data that you could then use to have apps share amongst themselves. I guess maybe I'm just not much of a gamer but on a tablet I can't see me installing more than 2-3 hi-res games and then a half dozen of the small little ones + a bit of productivity apps. When I really want to game I'd rather use a console or a desktop. I'd be too paranoid with battery life to waste it playing games for any amount of time while travelling to get to where I'm going and have a brick to carry around and/or being that guy looking for an outlet to plug his gadgets into. 10GB would probably be fine given that I'd already have an office suite to start with. The extra 10 would be for a bit of media.
You'd likely have more than 20GB of apps on a tablet? What the heck are you installing (1000 Angry birds)? Things like Skype, Facebook, Twitter etc are all ~20MB or so sized apps. You already have office with this thing so the big productivity suite install is already included in the space you lost. As well supposedly iOS only takes 1GB on the iPad, so you're comparing 31 to 20GB of useable space. The surface for an extra $20 you can have 52GB of space: though you are a bit limited on the app/data breakdown of how you use it still $1 a GB vs the ~$3 a GB for internal storage for the 64GB model from Apple or MS seems a good deal.
The thought is also I think that not everyone has or wishes to own a TV (yeah I know probably going back a few years but probably coming back now that there are other ways of getting content). Why should the rich pay for television programs for the poor people that don't even own (or perhaps wish to own) a TV? This is a user funded model which regardless of susceptibility to being gamed is more fair. Similar to bus tickets, user fees for skating rinks etc. Those that use pay, those that don't use or aren't willing to pay what the service costs can do without. Distributive means like progressive taxation should only be used to provide necessities no one has a right to whatever entertainment that they chose.
How about if the camera sees something it doesn't like? Two people caught doing R acts watching a G rated film for example. "This movie has been paused to do the two in the back row who are groping each other. Please try again when less horny."
You nailed it. IT workers are generally highly into meritocracy. In my experience, nothing pisses of a group of us nerds more than stupid people making the decisions and having to interface with idiots (whether it be that user from hell story or the guy that dumps 100k files in a single folder).
You could add too that UAW is a failure too since it has made their industry operate on a propetual bailout/subsidy gravy train. I can't think of a union that has accomplished both good for their membership and an industry that isn't suffering.
It's even worst than that I think (I'm from Canada but I think we are similar to the US in this way) individuals can generate capital losses that they can use to offset future gains. So they get a lower tax rate "because they are taking a risk of a loss" but when the loss actually happens they get to write that off too. One or the other seems reasonable: normal income tax rate but you can carry losses forward and write things off so that you only pay taxes on what you earn net over long term OR lower interest rate and you eat any losses that should occur. It shouldn't be too hard (but it is) to convince people that there is such a thing as personal choice/owning the consequences of those choices. It is amazing how fund managers are brilliant and knew things before everyone else when things go good but when things go bad it becames: oh shit happened, how could I have predicted that Japan would have an earthquake, that New Orleans being on the coast and below sea level is a really dumb place for real estate, etc.
Another part of the problem is tax avoidance presumably leaves money in Bahamas, or Ireland or whatever. So say you think of Apple stock as a honest to God piece of a company. How good is it for you for them to say "buy our company we make lots of money, except we'll never bring it to the US because the tax would be too high". It is almost an Enron with borders used to make real profits disappear rather than profits disappearing because they weren't real in the first place.
Oh snap, nerd burn ! ;)
http://slashdot.org/
Not surprising I guess but that means if you avoid flash and Java you are a long way to avoiding problems (outside of the normal AV and update activities). Both are really hard to avoid in the modern world though. I wonder when does Oracle start getting a bad rep for security out of this? Will customers start wondering about dropping $100k on a db server from the same company that got there phone hacked with a 3 month old bug?
Well to be fair for the the majority of /. readers we aren't in the cheap desktop market. For one reason or another we'll find a way to drop 2k+ on our laptops and desktops. We're devs, or gamers, or video processing nerds, or guys that measure their worth by their massive stash of pirated material and seed ratio etc. Either way we seem to all want some combination of SSD, big disk capacity, massive monitor, top of the line CPU, etc. Apple gear might not be great value but they don't target the low end of the market and we generally aren't there anyways.
I read somewhere (Job's biography?) that Forstall is a dick who could hold his own with Jobs in dickatude. Might have been more of a personality problem.
"development quickly turns into a game of code- and file-system navigation rather than programming and code editing"
You would rather have to code everything from scratch than spend a bit of time (with IDE assistance) finding what module does what you want? Good luck with that.
Is this guy calling for us to go back to the day when everything was dumped in the main function of a C program? Yes modularity is a pain but it is a bigger pain having to try to figure out how to do everything from scratch every time you start a new project. It is like an architect complaining about a house being made out of a whole lot of bricks rather than as a whole wall at a time. Sure you "could" do that but then you'd have the little problem of getting the wall to the job site and getting it vertical (similar to the size of the dll loaded in and difficulty of grasping in coding land).
7.50 a GB? Wow. So ... is Blockbuster still popular up there than since your cap sucks so bad? I download about 500-1000 a month. My overage charges used to go away after 50 now raised to 100GB anyways so after $25 now $50 everything is free (so if you use enough to hit the throttle I just go crazy to reduce the per GB cost HD everything )). Also a 250GB base cap which you'd think would be enough but ... I'm a nerd.
And all of those activities still cost money. As a business owner/manager those companies have to look at the cost of at least two options:
status quo:
- very high legal expenses (not just maintaining an oligarchy but also each time they want to acquire or go into a new business line there is a huge push back making the process much more expensive)
- high loses/collection activities
- moderate investment required
- high prices to customers an large market share
open market:
- moderate legal expenses (I suspect you'd have an easier time acquiring 1 of 10 companies than 1 of 3), not as much fighting to maintain tight regulations limiting foreign investment etc.
- moderate loses/collection (I worked in collections people stop paying what they find extra expenses to try to keep the lights on, so credit cards, cable etc get the shaft over car and house (as they should))
- large investment required to compete
- low market share
Just because an expense is required to get the competitive market you want doesn't mean it isn't an expense. All expenses need to be considered of the options.
Rogers say has a 71% gross margin (I think they combine cable with internet in their operations). That is a lot which is likely what is going to have to be reported. However, there pre-tax net margin is only(still pretty good) 17% (http://finapps.forbes.com/finapps/jsp/finance/compinfo/Ratios.jsp?tkr=RCI). The thing is gross profit only includes the cost of goods sold where as your investors only ever see what is left over after you invest in further system upgrades, advertise (and these costs are huge don't kid yourself, there are ads every hour on every TV station for these giants plus a lot of promotion hoppers that are always on introductory rates), legal etc.
Operating expenses as a ratio of revenue would likely be much higher in a more competitive market: you'd have to pay to use someone else's system or roll out a system country wide but have less market share to pay for it. I don't think it would take much to make the industry level with normal companies after that, maybe $10 off your bill. Not saying we shouldn't still care but we are arguing over $10 not over a reduction to 1/2 or 1/3 as a 71% gross margin would imply.
Rogers didn't have competition in the cable space in east Canada and then Bell got into the business. For phones you have Fido, Virgin etc entering the market. ISPs: the little guys have always been around. They get screwed over since they have to lease bandwidth from one of the big players (usually Bell since it is DSL) but still it is there. They have nothing like the advertising (I think they are so local the revenue can't get them TV time) but you can get a fastish (5Mbps) connection for ~$30 with no limits in most places, some of them even explicitly state they don't traffic shape, the connection is symmetric etc.
Do what I do ignore the cap. When you reach it they only charge you the $5 for the first 50GB or something. If you get a better package you usually get a smaller fee for the overages too. I have 150/10 with Rogers and only get dinged 50c per GB over 250GB. I'd like that it was free but I'll pay $25 a month for unlimited porn.
Since Rogers, Telus and Bell have ~120k employees and also provide phone and cable services with those employees I'm willing to guess that the answer will round to zero millions. That is a lot of millions for a country as small as Canada :)
The markup is large but I suspect it is no where near that by the time you add in advertising (print, TV, cold/warm calls), collections activities, billing legal etc. The ISP business might very well be like Coke: 1% cost what is in the bottle and all the rest is branding and service around that. If investors really got to make 6000+% on there money the market would flood with people wanting those returns and the prices would drop.
realize that people have free speech but we also should stop apologizing so much. I don't give a shit if you are offended by what I say. Just because you believe something and I believe that that belief is complete bullshit doesn't mean I need to apologize each time I state my opinion. I'm not bound to the limits of your chosen superstitions.
Mac users do this all the time. I think Metro will be huge for all the Tweetards that just got to have an app for everything rather than a website. I suspect that the heavy "light" gamers (people that play Angry Birds but can't be bothered with something involved like Madden) and heavy social network users will jump all over this for $40. Things in the industry in general are moving from a major update every 3-5 years and free updates to a subscription model, every 3mths-2yrs you get a little bit of functionality in exchange for a little bit of money.
You have a point with the App's on Win 7 bit. They could have made SP2 be Metro. The store would generate at least some revenue from those unwilling or unable to afford a full OS + help build up an ecosystem rather than having to wait for people to do a hardware refresh. Might catch corporate customers better too: bundle up Metro + major functionality fixes in a service pack and voila corporate users are now into the App Store. They might still push back users that want to get apps on their computer but it would be a much smaller hurdle than having the IT department bless a whole new OS with all the corporate image.
You're still getting upgrades it is just assumed that Win 8 is close enough to Win 7 that those with Win 7 already have a working system and just need incremental updates. Those looking for a new computer are expected to go with a Win 8 machine since it is essentially Win 7 + an App Store. Service packs have their most value when people are expected to go years and years between major upgrades at their sites and so will be dusting off lots of new hardware a couple years into a release and needing to get everything current. If all this gets pushed down to the vendor and doesn't land on the invoice who cares? If you are using a corporate image again who cares?
They are charging something like $40 for a Xp, Vista,Win7 upgrade to Win 8 Pro. I think they are going the way of Apple, ~$30-40 upgrades every couple years. People are probably more likely to go "oh a little bit of eye candy, okay here's my $40" than a $200 complete generational shift every 5 years and having the whole "Will I still want to use this computer for a long enough timeframe to make it worth it?" kind of discussion. Cheaper than a dinner and movie for one yep why not. Heck I'd pay the $40 to be sure to not have any malware (that doesn't come in the "box" ;)), licensing issues in the future and save me the 20 min spent looking for a good rip and crack code.