To what degree are 'ARM manufacturers' reasonably a monopoly? The rise of ARM devices whose performance people give a fuck about does seem to have opened room for whoever is currently selling the hottest part on the street to charge a nontrivial premium; but cut back a bit from the bleeding edge and it's a veritable knife-fight of utterly undistinguished and cheap offerings.
Forgive my ignorance; but when and how did MIPS get relegated to second-class status? I still see them crop up from time to time, certain cheapy router SoCs still come out with MIPS cores; but ARM appears to have gone rampaging across much of the territory that Intel hasn't already entrenched themselves in.
Was there a fuckup or an epic design win at some point in the past?
There is a second extra-classy angle in this story.
When the composer discovers his song has been used more widely than agreed, he goes to his music royalty collecting agency, an entity ostensibly representing those starving artists out of whose mouths pirates are stealing delicious crumbs.
They stonewall him. Hard.
Then, in a conversation that turned out to be recorded, causing a bit of a scandal, "The case caused a scandal in the Netherlands last year following discussions Rietveldt had with Buma/Stemra[the collecting agency] board member Jochem Gerrits about getting the money he was owed. In order to help, Gerrits suggested that the composer should sign his track over to High Fashion Music, a label owned by Gerrits himself and one that would take 33% of Rietveldt’s royalties for its trouble."
So, yeah, if he was merely willing to play ball with the label owned by a board member of the collecting agency, his little problem could be made to go away, for a modest price. If he preferred not to sign, well, perhaps he might continue to have trouble?
This isn't exactly news; but the de-facto Intellectual 'Property' system appears to operate on the basis that peasants might have the right to sell their little scraps of it; but only people who matter are accorded any serious protection.
So, does somebody think that their malware is actually a figure in islamic eschatology, are they engaging in some sort of wordplay for the lulz, or are the social engineers capitalizing on suspected mahdi-enthusiasm among their targets, in a way roughly analogous to the hilariously overt christianity of nigerian spammers?
I suspect that you'd run into serious correlation/causation issues unless the scheme includes some component(if you know of one that might work, do tell) that allows you to induce the process to occur organically...
You can't exactly just 'assign' somebody a girlfriend, and the odds are that their present singleness is not necessarily their choice...
Based on the pictures kindly provided in TFA, they were all boring-looking caucasians in generic 'knowledge worker' garb(complete with outward-facing photo-ID badge on belt in the case of the mental giant who decided to assault the guy with the camera attached to his head while wearing photo ID...)
While I recognize the (statistically, perhaps, er, 'tentitatively validated') American reflex to assume that 'assaulted' and 'mcdonalds' in the same sentence signals a wacky story about the violence of the degenerate classes, it appears that the French golden arches crowd is slightly different...
One could also view Valve's move as a somewhat defensive one.
Apple hasn't exactly been shy about the fact that The App Store is exciting and mandatory on iDevices, and exciting-and-optional-for-now on OSX.
Microsoft hasn't exactly been shy about copying Apple in these matters(and while their 'games for windows live' initiative is risible, their xbox work shows that they are to be treated with caution).
Valve has a comparatively well regarded distribution mechanism; but they face the potential of being squeezed by platform vendors who want to own the store.
Now, as long as Redmond wants their $20-$100 bucks a box to make sure that Win32 and device drivers are working, and Apple wants their somewhat larger slice to provide the full package, Valve has a pretty limited incentive to try to upset that arrangement. Neither business is easy, and only the dominant player stands to make any serious money.
However, now the platform guys want to own both the platform and the store. That can't be good for the independent shopkeeper, now can it?
You're being overly paranoid. Newspaper and websites want eyeballs so they can sell advertising and make money. Now, individual authors and writers might have their own point of view, but so does everyone.
You do realize that eyeball-herding celebrity gossip and 'infotainment' fluff are probably overwhelmingly more efficient in neutralizing the effects of a free press than simply having your Political Kommisars order them to publish assorted farcical lies?
Propaganda in the classic sense certainly isn't a total failure; but a voluntarily afactual media is ultimately even more useless than one that is merely contrafactual.
If you already have armored (payphones didn't mess around when it came to protecting their quarters or their wiring) hardpoints with access to the telco infrastructure and possibly power, what better place?
Indeed. My point was just that(in terms of bank bad debts vs. GDP) Iceland experienced the largest bubble of financial chicanery of any economic region(and, to the best of my knowledge, any point in human history) which helped remove the "zOMG, we have to bail out the banks or Worse Things Will Happen!!!!" faction from serious consideration.
In the US, for instance, the government was only strictly on the hook for the (relatively small, and largely not advantageous to the bankers) FDIC-insured accounts. Minor matters like, oh, All of AIG were 'voluntary' decisions. By virtue of being totally and absolutely fucked, per capita, Iceland managed to make these sorts of 'responsible' responses look entirely insane, while the US, EU, and similar made the same basic mistakes(and, let's not forget, embraced moral hazard like it was going out of style); but managed to carry them through because their costs were simply excessive, rather than overtly ruinous, per capita.
I'm no Microsoft fan; but this sort of thing is common enough(especially among what I imagine Slashdot's readership to be), that I'd expect better.
For better or for worse, MS is eyeballs-deep in the corporate market, which generally doesn't give a fuck about the cube drones' desire to have a shiny clock wasting 50 pixels on whatever screen was cheap from Dell 3 years ago; but does care about getting 0wn3d.
For this reason, while they adopt a somewhat milder hand toward home users with autoupdate on, MS more or less continually offers fairly draconian 'apply this to axe $EXPLOITABLE_FEATURE' packages to their IT minions in the corporate world.
Oh, definitely, if you make medical claims in the only-for-FDA-approved-drugs format without FDA approval, the FDA can come down on you like a sack of hammers from earth orbit.
Empirically, though, the FDA is far too overstretched to do jack about the legion of 'this is a "food supplement" it is not intended to treat, cure, or diagnose any disease; but it encourages general welfare, boosts the immune system, and is used in traditional Chinese homeopathy modalities to treat cancer!" vendors.
Iceland actually totally fucked up at banking not so long ago. However, that may have actually had a salubrious effect. In the US and EU, the fuckuppery of the banking sector has been massive; but small enough that shovelling bushels of money at the people responsible can be advanced as a 'reasonable' proposal. In the case of Iceland, the scale of the meltdown of the imaginary money economy was so enormous that even the most overtly delusional had difficulty advocating the 'just bail out the Experienced Experts who got us here' theory of repair...
Probably easier now that(most of the world's) TV spits out a reasonably well characterized digital video streams once the messy RF bit is taken care of; but I'd still be surprised to see much in the way of savings from a standard wifi chip and a dedicated TV receiver. It might at least help deal with the zillion different slightly different regional/national standards in broadcasting. Probably wouldn't overcome the 'the apathetic won't care, and the enthusiastic will just buy slingboxes' issue, though.
I can see the SEC caring, because I'm sure that there are some clever little accounting tricks that violate the letter, spirit, or both, of their rules designed for more conventional forms of investment; but what possible interest would the FDA have in the accounting structure of the company bringing a device/drug/whatever before them?
The FDA certainly has its own set of Things It Takes Seriously; but those largely concern testing. Aside from, incidentally, testing a company's ability to stick it out long enough to make it through the approval process, does the FDA even pay attention to that stuff?
As a side note, why don't more gadget manufacturers include tiny antennae in their products specifically for tuning in OTA TV?
Is there some massive challenge that restricts this?
Based on the going rate for little USB-TV dongles (ATSC or DVB-T, depending on region) on ebay(obviously a OEM wouldn't shop there; but let's pretend that pacific-rim-bottom-feeder prices on ebay are vaguely correlated to actual-BOM-cost-for-something-not-totally-dreadful with savings from mass production) of $15-$25, depending on the phase of the moon, I'd assume that it's just the technically minor; but significant, issue of price sensitivity(and, in the UK market and any others with a similar setup, BBC licensing fees).
They don't seem to be cheap enough that you can throw-it-in-just-in-case(especially for customers in questionable signal areas, where external antennas, sometimes rather large, are a necessity, and just-throwing-it-in means adding an external antenna jack, and, for people who care, displays sold as TVs have them built in, basic cheap-n-nasty ATSC tuners for connecting to legacy displays are only $40-$50ish, and proper network-connected tuners like http://www.silicondust.com/ makes are certainly not free; but close to 'impulse purchase' for the target demographic.
Aero's offering draws its worth from selling location to users; but for equipment being run on-premises, standalone and optional tuners are cheap enough to be accessible; but too expensive to be in the category of 'just bundle it and save them the headache'
1. RIM's problems started well before network speeds really picked up(the 'iPhone' for example was GPRS/EDGE, which is pretty miserable even under good conditions, and many of the zOMG 4G++++!!! handsets of late have actually suffered on customer satisfaction because of shit battery life and high peak speeds that are rendered essentially irrelevant by caps or coverage problems)
2. RIM doesn't just make handsets, they run a data transfer infrastructure service and work to provide service with their telco partners. If they don't have access to information on which way the wind is blowing, infrastructure wise, they aren't doing their job...
So, if I understand the situation in bizzaro world correctly, it goes something like this:
Noble RIM, blindsided(because maintaining strong, mutually beneficial carrier partnerships isn't at all part of RIM's job given that they sell both in-house hardware and proprietary data backend services to carriers...) by the US' sudden uptick in LTE enthusiasm(the same one that was proceeded by a blizzard of advertising so relentless that even drooling morons 'knew' that they 'wanted 4G', even if they didn't know what that meant, and which was necessarily accompanied by a flurry of buildouts and upgraded hardware that the professional channel-watchers and trade rags would never have noticed) caused RIM to be horribly blindsided by the iPhone(which, incidentally, has been quite conservative about bumping connection technologies, with HSDPA only introduced on the 3GS and HSUPA exclusive to the 4S) and various Android devices, many of which were brutally smacked down by reviewers and customers for having early-adopted cell modems that their batteries and/or browsers couldn't cope with in order to sell 'zOMG 4G+++!@!!!" to the cluelesss.
This development, catching RIM entirely by surprise, and having no apparent effect on the relatively low-speed requirements of RIM's email/messaging/truly awful browser experience, thereby gutted RIM's position.
The cynic might suggest that the Chinese have caught on to the existence of 'slacktivists', who find bitching on the internet to be cathartic; but are generally quite harmless, especially if you don't bother them in their favorite hobby.
(Says the guy whose username is 'fuzzyfuzzyfungus', on Slashdot, before no doubt going back to working for world peace or something...)
Out of curiosity, what keeps Lamar in office? His vehement support for the content cartels presumably doesn't hurt his war chest; but I don't imagine the 'Decadent Hollywood types love cutting me checks!' gambit is what gets out the voters down in Texas. He does have the requisite enthusiasm for fetuses; but that's a dime a dozen, and can be had from people who lack the additional oddity of being a Christian Scientist who spends part of his time hanging out in Massachusetts...
Does anybody more familiar with the fellow's local style know what he does that keeps him in office, as opposed to some socially-identical baptist or something without a copyright maximalist fetish?
If Ballmer thinks that his problem is being 'out-innovated' by Apple, his attempt to respond is going to be about as effectual as a fish out of water.
Apple doesn't really do innovation as much as they do polished, decisive, takes on things that were previously relegated to niche status or mediocrity. They've also shown a historical willingness to murder even their popular products in order to introduce something that they like better(ipod mini being the most notable recent example: killed at the height of its popularity in favor of more expensive and lower-capacity flash-based products, because rotating media were deemed sufficiently inelegant.
If 'innovation' were the problem, Microsoft could trivially bury Apple in wacky stuff coming out of MS research. As it is, though, they can't even refrain from eating any of their own young that don't play nicely enough with Windows/Office, and they have a veritable talent for squandering even the technical superiority areas that they do have by making them too expensive or too complex for individual users(eg. MS had volume shadow copy in full working order since server 2003, and has substantial clout in terms of getting OEMs to build things, plus an embedded OS to license to them for the purpose. So why is it that they let Apple beat them to releasing a usable-by-morons home backup system(based on a rather more primitive and hacky architecture) 4 years later?)
I suspect that once your phone has encountered an MRI, small navigational errors will not be high on your list of concerns... The videos of hardware that can put a 3 Tesla field across an entire patient ingesting ferromagnetic objects are... dramatic.
Slashdot Mirror
To what degree are 'ARM manufacturers' reasonably a monopoly? The rise of ARM devices whose performance people give a fuck about does seem to have opened room for whoever is currently selling the hottest part on the street to charge a nontrivial premium; but cut back a bit from the bleeding edge and it's a veritable knife-fight of utterly undistinguished and cheap offerings.
Forgive my ignorance; but when and how did MIPS get relegated to second-class status? I still see them crop up from time to time, certain cheapy router SoCs still come out with MIPS cores; but ARM appears to have gone rampaging across much of the territory that Intel hasn't already entrenched themselves in.
Was there a fuckup or an epic design win at some point in the past?
There is a second extra-classy angle in this story.
When the composer discovers his song has been used more widely than agreed, he goes to his music royalty collecting agency, an entity ostensibly representing those starving artists out of whose mouths pirates are stealing delicious crumbs.
They stonewall him. Hard.
Then, in a conversation that turned out to be recorded, causing a bit of a scandal, "The case caused a scandal in the Netherlands last year following discussions Rietveldt had with Buma/Stemra[the collecting agency] board member Jochem Gerrits about getting the money he was owed. In order to help, Gerrits suggested that the composer should sign his track over to High Fashion Music, a label owned by Gerrits himself and one that would take 33% of Rietveldt’s royalties for its trouble."
So, yeah, if he was merely willing to play ball with the label owned by a board member of the collecting agency, his little problem could be made to go away, for a modest price. If he preferred not to sign, well, perhaps he might continue to have trouble?
This isn't exactly news; but the de-facto Intellectual 'Property' system appears to operate on the basis that peasants might have the right to sell their little scraps of it; but only people who matter are accorded any serious protection.
Every infringing DVD should probably also be hunted down and destroyed by armed ICE agents or their local equivalents....
He who controls the bytes controls the universe...
So, does somebody think that their malware is actually a figure in islamic eschatology, are they engaging in some sort of wordplay for the lulz, or are the social engineers capitalizing on suspected mahdi-enthusiasm among their targets, in a way roughly analogous to the hilariously overt christianity of nigerian spammers?
I suspect that you'd run into serious correlation/causation issues unless the scheme includes some component(if you know of one that might work, do tell) that allows you to induce the process to occur organically...
You can't exactly just 'assign' somebody a girlfriend, and the odds are that their present singleness is not necessarily their choice...
Based on the pictures kindly provided in TFA, they were all boring-looking caucasians in generic 'knowledge worker' garb(complete with outward-facing photo-ID badge on belt in the case of the mental giant who decided to assault the guy with the camera attached to his head while wearing photo ID...)
While I recognize the (statistically, perhaps, er, 'tentitatively validated') American reflex to assume that 'assaulted' and 'mcdonalds' in the same sentence signals a wacky story about the violence of the degenerate classes, it appears that the French golden arches crowd is slightly different...
One could also view Valve's move as a somewhat defensive one.
Apple hasn't exactly been shy about the fact that The App Store is exciting and mandatory on iDevices, and exciting-and-optional-for-now on OSX.
Microsoft hasn't exactly been shy about copying Apple in these matters(and while their 'games for windows live' initiative is risible, their xbox work shows that they are to be treated with caution).
Valve has a comparatively well regarded distribution mechanism; but they face the potential of being squeezed by platform vendors who want to own the store.
Now, as long as Redmond wants their $20-$100 bucks a box to make sure that Win32 and device drivers are working, and Apple wants their somewhat larger slice to provide the full package, Valve has a pretty limited incentive to try to upset that arrangement. Neither business is easy, and only the dominant player stands to make any serious money.
However, now the platform guys want to own both the platform and the store. That can't be good for the independent shopkeeper, now can it?
You're being overly paranoid. Newspaper and websites want eyeballs so they can sell advertising and make money. Now, individual authors and writers might have their own point of view, but so does everyone.
You do realize that eyeball-herding celebrity gossip and 'infotainment' fluff are probably overwhelmingly more efficient in neutralizing the effects of a free press than simply having your Political Kommisars order them to publish assorted farcical lies?
Propaganda in the classic sense certainly isn't a total failure; but a voluntarily afactual media is ultimately even more useless than one that is merely contrafactual.
If you already have armored (payphones didn't mess around when it came to protecting their quarters or their wiring) hardpoints with access to the telco infrastructure and possibly power, what better place?
Indeed. My point was just that(in terms of bank bad debts vs. GDP) Iceland experienced the largest bubble of financial chicanery of any economic region(and, to the best of my knowledge, any point in human history) which helped remove the "zOMG, we have to bail out the banks or Worse Things Will Happen!!!!" faction from serious consideration.
In the US, for instance, the government was only strictly on the hook for the (relatively small, and largely not advantageous to the bankers) FDIC-insured accounts. Minor matters like, oh, All of AIG were 'voluntary' decisions. By virtue of being totally and absolutely fucked, per capita, Iceland managed to make these sorts of 'responsible' responses look entirely insane, while the US, EU, and similar made the same basic mistakes(and, let's not forget, embraced moral hazard like it was going out of style); but managed to carry them through because their costs were simply excessive, rather than overtly ruinous, per capita.
I'm no Microsoft fan; but this sort of thing is common enough(especially among what I imagine Slashdot's readership to be), that I'd expect better.
For better or for worse, MS is eyeballs-deep in the corporate market, which generally doesn't give a fuck about the cube drones' desire to have a shiny clock wasting 50 pixels on whatever screen was cheap from Dell 3 years ago; but does care about getting 0wn3d.
For this reason, while they adopt a somewhat milder hand toward home users with autoupdate on, MS more or less continually offers fairly draconian 'apply this to axe $EXPLOITABLE_FEATURE' packages to their IT minions in the corporate world.
Oh, definitely, if you make medical claims in the only-for-FDA-approved-drugs format without FDA approval, the FDA can come down on you like a sack of hammers from earth orbit.
Empirically, though, the FDA is far too overstretched to do jack about the legion of 'this is a "food supplement" it is not intended to treat, cure, or diagnose any disease; but it encourages general welfare, boosts the immune system, and is used in traditional Chinese homeopathy modalities to treat cancer!" vendors.
Iceland actually totally fucked up at banking not so long ago. However, that may have actually had a salubrious effect. In the US and EU, the fuckuppery of the banking sector has been massive; but small enough that shovelling bushels of money at the people responsible can be advanced as a 'reasonable' proposal. In the case of Iceland, the scale of the meltdown of the imaginary money economy was so enormous that even the most overtly delusional had difficulty advocating the 'just bail out the Experienced Experts who got us here' theory of repair...
Probably easier now that(most of the world's) TV spits out a reasonably well characterized digital video streams once the messy RF bit is taken care of; but I'd still be surprised to see much in the way of savings from a standard wifi chip and a dedicated TV receiver. It might at least help deal with the zillion different slightly different regional/national standards in broadcasting. Probably wouldn't overcome the 'the apathetic won't care, and the enthusiastic will just buy slingboxes' issue, though.
I can see the SEC caring, because I'm sure that there are some clever little accounting tricks that violate the letter, spirit, or both, of their rules designed for more conventional forms of investment; but what possible interest would the FDA have in the accounting structure of the company bringing a device/drug/whatever before them?
The FDA certainly has its own set of Things It Takes Seriously; but those largely concern testing. Aside from, incidentally, testing a company's ability to stick it out long enough to make it through the approval process, does the FDA even pay attention to that stuff?
Other than that, good luck to Aereo.
As a side note, why don't more gadget manufacturers include tiny antennae in their products specifically for tuning in OTA TV?
Is there some massive challenge that restricts this?
Based on the going rate for little USB-TV dongles (ATSC or DVB-T, depending on region) on ebay(obviously a OEM wouldn't shop there; but let's pretend that pacific-rim-bottom-feeder prices on ebay are vaguely correlated to actual-BOM-cost-for-something-not-totally-dreadful with savings from mass production) of $15-$25, depending on the phase of the moon, I'd assume that it's just the technically minor; but significant, issue of price sensitivity(and, in the UK market and any others with a similar setup, BBC licensing fees).
They don't seem to be cheap enough that you can throw-it-in-just-in-case(especially for customers in questionable signal areas, where external antennas, sometimes rather large, are a necessity, and just-throwing-it-in means adding an external antenna jack, and, for people who care, displays sold as TVs have them built in, basic cheap-n-nasty ATSC tuners for connecting to legacy displays are only $40-$50ish, and proper network-connected tuners like http://www.silicondust.com/ makes are certainly not free; but close to 'impulse purchase' for the target demographic.
Aero's offering draws its worth from selling location to users; but for equipment being run on-premises, standalone and optional tuners are cheap enough to be accessible; but too expensive to be in the category of 'just bundle it and save them the headache'
That would be my guess.
My point twofold:
1. RIM's problems started well before network speeds really picked up(the 'iPhone' for example was GPRS/EDGE, which is pretty miserable even under good conditions, and many of the zOMG 4G++++!!! handsets of late have actually suffered on customer satisfaction because of shit battery life and high peak speeds that are rendered essentially irrelevant by caps or coverage problems)
2. RIM doesn't just make handsets, they run a data transfer infrastructure service and work to provide service with their telco partners. If they don't have access to information on which way the wind is blowing, infrastructure wise, they aren't doing their job...
At least they managed to trim a bit of fat from the top, instead of keeping the jet and firing 150 minions as part of a 'strategic realignment'...
So, if I understand the situation in bizzaro world correctly, it goes something like this:
Noble RIM, blindsided(because maintaining strong, mutually beneficial carrier partnerships isn't at all part of RIM's job given that they sell both in-house hardware and proprietary data backend services to carriers...) by the US' sudden uptick in LTE enthusiasm(the same one that was proceeded by a blizzard of advertising so relentless that even drooling morons 'knew' that they 'wanted 4G', even if they didn't know what that meant, and which was necessarily accompanied by a flurry of buildouts and upgraded hardware that the professional channel-watchers and trade rags would never have noticed) caused RIM to be horribly blindsided by the iPhone(which, incidentally, has been quite conservative about bumping connection technologies, with HSDPA only introduced on the 3GS and HSUPA exclusive to the 4S) and various Android devices, many of which were brutally smacked down by reviewers and customers for having early-adopted cell modems that their batteries and/or browsers couldn't cope with in order to sell 'zOMG 4G+++!@!!!" to the cluelesss.
This development, catching RIM entirely by surprise, and having no apparent effect on the relatively low-speed requirements of RIM's email/messaging/truly awful browser experience, thereby gutted RIM's position.
Also, the sky is purple, with green dots.
The cynic might suggest that the Chinese have caught on to the existence of 'slacktivists', who find bitching on the internet to be cathartic; but are generally quite harmless, especially if you don't bother them in their favorite hobby.
(Says the guy whose username is 'fuzzyfuzzyfungus', on Slashdot, before no doubt going back to working for world peace or something...)
Out of curiosity, what keeps Lamar in office? His vehement support for the content cartels presumably doesn't hurt his war chest; but I don't imagine the 'Decadent Hollywood types love cutting me checks!' gambit is what gets out the voters down in Texas. He does have the requisite enthusiasm for fetuses; but that's a dime a dozen, and can be had from people who lack the additional oddity of being a Christian Scientist who spends part of his time hanging out in Massachusetts...
Does anybody more familiar with the fellow's local style know what he does that keeps him in office, as opposed to some socially-identical baptist or something without a copyright maximalist fetish?
If Ballmer thinks that his problem is being 'out-innovated' by Apple, his attempt to respond is going to be about as effectual as a fish out of water.
Apple doesn't really do innovation as much as they do polished, decisive, takes on things that were previously relegated to niche status or mediocrity. They've also shown a historical willingness to murder even their popular products in order to introduce something that they like better(ipod mini being the most notable recent example: killed at the height of its popularity in favor of more expensive and lower-capacity flash-based products, because rotating media were deemed sufficiently inelegant.
If 'innovation' were the problem, Microsoft could trivially bury Apple in wacky stuff coming out of MS research. As it is, though, they can't even refrain from eating any of their own young that don't play nicely enough with Windows/Office, and they have a veritable talent for squandering even the technical superiority areas that they do have by making them too expensive or too complex for individual users(eg. MS had volume shadow copy in full working order since server 2003, and has substantial clout in terms of getting OEMs to build things, plus an embedded OS to license to them for the purpose. So why is it that they let Apple beat them to releasing a usable-by-morons home backup system(based on a rather more primitive and hacky architecture) 4 years later?)
I suspect that once your phone has encountered an MRI, small navigational errors will not be high on your list of concerns... The videos of hardware that can put a 3 Tesla field across an entire patient ingesting ferromagnetic objects are... dramatic.