I'm not sure it's praiseworthy to have had an idea first, but completely failed to deliver anything off that idea before someone else (and a game billing itself as a "spiritual successor" to your original hit, no less) gets there first and gets rich. That tells me he's a man with great ideas, and an inability to follow through.
Not a great selling point for someone on Kickstarter.
Plenty do, plenty don't. I'd avoid any that don't have one like the plague myself. But then that's the great thing about Android- choice. There are devices of all shapes, sizes and feature sets out there to play with.
Windows Phone is still way behind BlackBerry in market share, which is saying something. If you want to back an "I'm not dead yet" tech giant, you might as well back RIM as much as you'd back MS. I wouldn't put smart money on either of them myself though.
The problem is, this is a story because it's nude photos and that's very amusing, but it could have been anything.
I use my phone for, for example, internet banking, internet shopping, I have server passwords saved on there, all sorts of things that I wouldn't want to fall into the wrong hands. My phone is encrypted and PIN locked. In the normal course of things, data on it is (within reason) as safe as data on any of my devices. If it got stolen, I'd be reasonably happy that my data is safe.
If I need to send my phone back to be warranty repaired, I'd need to do so on the assumption that the good folks at Virgin Media and/or Sony Ericsson aren't going to rob me blind. If my credit card got ripped off by the Virgin Media staffers because I wasn't able to wipe it from my bricked device before sending it off, would that be my fault? Would I have "deserved it"? By the same token, the people at Virgin Media have all sorts of personal and private data on me on their customer database that I've given them as part of signing up for their service- I'm trusting them not to abuse any of that too.
Being non-paranoid does not mean that someone deserves to be ripped off by anyone with access to their data. And just because the private data we're talking about are embarrassing pictures rather than private bank information doesn't make it suddenly OK.
I suspect they were thinking "we need to get our website back up or we'll lose business, and $400 is cheaper than the $6000 that Rackspace are asking for". They know they did wrong- hence why they're asking us here for better ways to deal with it next time. But unfortunately, it's a "you can't start from here" situation- if your site is down and you're under sustained attack and you don't already have something in place to deal with it, you don't really have many options.
So do you have a suggestion as to what they could have done differently / can do differently next time, or are you just here to make easy quips?
Since when are judges supposed to care about numbers of jobs? They're law-interpreting machines, not economic strategists. That's for the politicians to worry about.
Thank you for posting this; I get tired of posting the same thing in every Surface-related thread. With Kin and Zune, MS have proved that they're quite capable of making own-brand hardware that no-one wants to buy. Yes the Xbox sold well, and so does the mice and keyboards, but they've hardly got great form in the hardware market so far.
In all seriousness, I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple buy out another search engine company. Yahoo! for example, although a smaller no-name company would do if all they're after is the technology and infrastructure rather than the brand.
It would be one more way of cutting ties with the hated Google, and would enable them to have a fully own-branded service. If Steve were still in charge, I'd have called it almost a dead cert.
Google Maps already has gotten better. Apple aren't competing with the Google Maps of 7 years ago, they're competing with the Google Maps of today.
If a company had released a car that was competitive with the Ford Model T in 1908, they would have made a killing. Releasing a car that was competitive with the Model T in 2012 won't get you anywhere.
The trick in investing is to know which companies are going to defy gravity and go against "common knowledge", and which are going to go exactly as everyone thought.
Buying Apple stock at $50 and selling it at $500 would have made you a very rich man. But it's easy to know that's what you should have done with hind sight. Did you know it at the time? Did you know with any certainty that Apple was going to go through the roof, while Palm or RIM were for the can?
If Apple stock climbs now from $500 to $800, people would say "ah, you should have known Apple would keep going up!". But if they plummet from $500 to $200, people would say "ah, those suckers who bought stock at such a massively overinflated price!". Short of a crystal ball, you can't really do anything but guess.
Space X came along and "commercialised" technology that the government had already paid to research and develop over many decades. They're doing (more cheaply) what the government perfected decades ago.
Fusion is still at the "government pays to do the basic research" phase. No private company is going to ride in and fix this one for us.
What's sad about that chart is that their lowest wish- the "moderate" level" is only $2 billion or so. That's the same amount of money as it costs to build a single B-2 bomber. It's also the same amount of money (thanks Google) as the US has given to Egypt every year since the 70's to support Mubarak and his predecessors.
Relatively speaking, and for a potentially multi-national effort, that's pocket change.
I'm happy to try running my gaming back catalogue in Linux under WINE, but I'd probably baulk at paying £25 for a game that might never work. That's why I keep a Win7 install on my gaming machine.
I wouldn't consider abandoning my Windows install unless publishers were willing to *support* the game on Linux; i.e. I'm either guaranteed it will run, or guaranteed my money back. This Steam move is exciting as it promises just that very thing.
1) The overwhelming majority of people don't buy games in the first month after they're released. 2) Steam doesn't have a huge release delay that I've noticed. 3) If they did have a huge title delay, it'd only be because publishers insist on it to drive up boxed sales. The Windows store (and all the rest) would suffer from the exact same problem.
That would only be a valid comparison if your typewriter was one of the largest and most lucrative gaming platforms, and your calculator was better than it. There are no games for your typewriter, so that doesn't make sense.
Windows is a huge, lucrative gaming platform. If Linux is "better" than it in any major ways, that's a big thing.
If you can't figure Linux out, you are probably not a Windows power user.
I've never been trained in using Linux, and I would probably not consider myself a Windows "power user" (insofar as I define it as someone who knows more than how to navigate menus and a little bit of CLI stuff). Yet when I installed Linux for the first time a few years ago (Ubuntu, probably around 2006), I picked it up no problem. Since then, I've experienced a hand full of the usual Linux gripes around hardware and drivers, but it's basically been no more painful than my life running Windows (which I still do- this is posted from a Win7 machine).
I mean, what the hell is stopping you? Assuming you don't have a huge problem with hardware compatibility (which can always ruin your day, but then it did with Vista too), what else is different? The file system structure is arranged differently, but it's not that confusing, and especially not if you intend to make liberal use of search instead of finding everything by hand (I always use the Win7 search facility these days- I can't remember the last time I descended into the file tree to search for something by hand). Installing programmes is easier than in Windows (just go to the Software Centre, use apt-get, or download the package from a website and double click it). If you use the CLI then you'll need to learn a new set of commands, but all you really need to know is "man" and "man -k", and the rest is at your finger tips- surely not that hard for a "power user"?
Maybe you need to use programmes that are only available in Windows (games are the main reason I keep Win7 boxes around at the moment), or you've bought hardware that won't play nice with Linux. They're both valid reasons not to switch. But general usability? Get real.
I went to a shop on Saturday to have a play (a UK PC World), and saw much the same thing. The Windows 8 section had one middle aged woman in it, where a salesman was vainly trying to explain to her why she should buy a Windows 8 PC over one of the "reduced to clear" Windows 7 PCs in the next aisle. His approach seemed to mostly be "it's safer, more secure, will last you longer, will run all the shiniest new widgets", rather than anything about the new UI. Meanwhile, the Apple section was as crowded as ever with people playing with Macs and iPads, and the Android Tablet section had a fair few lurkers.
I had a play with Windows 8 on an all-in-one PC, as I was keen to see how it felt with a touch screen. I'm still baffled. Couldn't figure out how to tile windows for Metro apps (except to put two alongside each other with a bizarre 80:20 screen split), couldn't grab windows from the bottom left corner (to get at "minimized" windows) with any sort of consistency, couldn't figure out when windows were retrievable versus when I had to re-access the programme from the Start/Metro screen again. Still just plain don't get it.
Consider this: Supposed you had to pay all of your health-care expenses up to (say) 5% of your annual income, and 10% of subsequent expenses up to 10% of your annual income. What would the effect be?
The effect would be that poor people, for whom 10% of their income is the difference between paying rent AND buying groceries that month, will ration their medication and make themselves ill. The ghettoes will get sicker, differences in life expectancy widen, and the economy gets dragged down. Rich people will continue to buy any medical treatment they like, and the middle classes will continue to follow doctors orders (but will have less money).
In theory, insurers should be lobbying, negotiating and bargaining for lower medical costs to save themselves money. In countries with universal healthcare (e.g., UK with the NHS), the national providers take care of this. The UK has vastly lower medical costs for the same medical treatment compared to the US, and that's because the NHS drives a hard bargain. Patients don't pay a penny.
Teenagers are the group with the largest disposable income (better earnings than a child, no outgoings like an adult), and are the group least likely to need a hearing aid. Old aged pensioners are the group most likely to need hearing aids, and are also the group with some of the highest relative poverty rates.
Might even be easier to just make the actual gear owned by a non-profit and let the profit seeking enterprises act only as MVNOs.
That's how the UK railways works these days. The track and infrastructure is owned by government-owned Network Rail, and private companies just operate the trains.
And I use "works" in the loosest possible sense. It's a flipping train-wreck.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure it's praiseworthy to have had an idea first, but completely failed to deliver anything off that idea before someone else (and a game billing itself as a "spiritual successor" to your original hit, no less) gets there first and gets rich. That tells me he's a man with great ideas, and an inability to follow through.
Not a great selling point for someone on Kickstarter.
Plenty do, plenty don't. I'd avoid any that don't have one like the plague myself. But then that's the great thing about Android- choice. There are devices of all shapes, sizes and feature sets out there to play with.
Windows Phone is still way behind BlackBerry in market share, which is saying something. If you want to back an "I'm not dead yet" tech giant, you might as well back RIM as much as you'd back MS. I wouldn't put smart money on either of them myself though.
What is wrong with you people today?
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Expectable
The problem is, this is a story because it's nude photos and that's very amusing, but it could have been anything.
I use my phone for, for example, internet banking, internet shopping, I have server passwords saved on there, all sorts of things that I wouldn't want to fall into the wrong hands. My phone is encrypted and PIN locked. In the normal course of things, data on it is (within reason) as safe as data on any of my devices. If it got stolen, I'd be reasonably happy that my data is safe.
If I need to send my phone back to be warranty repaired, I'd need to do so on the assumption that the good folks at Virgin Media and/or Sony Ericsson aren't going to rob me blind. If my credit card got ripped off by the Virgin Media staffers because I wasn't able to wipe it from my bricked device before sending it off, would that be my fault? Would I have "deserved it"? By the same token, the people at Virgin Media have all sorts of personal and private data on me on their customer database that I've given them as part of signing up for their service- I'm trusting them not to abuse any of that too.
Being non-paranoid does not mean that someone deserves to be ripped off by anyone with access to their data. And just because the private data we're talking about are embarrassing pictures rather than private bank information doesn't make it suddenly OK.
I suspect they were thinking "we need to get our website back up or we'll lose business, and $400 is cheaper than the $6000 that Rackspace are asking for". They know they did wrong- hence why they're asking us here for better ways to deal with it next time. But unfortunately, it's a "you can't start from here" situation- if your site is down and you're under sustained attack and you don't already have something in place to deal with it, you don't really have many options.
So do you have a suggestion as to what they could have done differently / can do differently next time, or are you just here to make easy quips?
Since when are judges supposed to care about numbers of jobs? They're law-interpreting machines, not economic strategists. That's for the politicians to worry about.
Thank you for posting this; I get tired of posting the same thing in every Surface-related thread. With Kin and Zune, MS have proved that they're quite capable of making own-brand hardware that no-one wants to buy. Yes the Xbox sold well, and so does the mice and keyboards, but they've hardly got great form in the hardware market so far.
Even the cheapest Lumias are £160. You can get an Android smartphone for half that.
Will it be crap? You betcha. But it's a big step up from the feature phones going at the same price, in terms of apps.
In all seriousness, I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple buy out another search engine company. Yahoo! for example, although a smaller no-name company would do if all they're after is the technology and infrastructure rather than the brand.
It would be one more way of cutting ties with the hated Google, and would enable them to have a fully own-branded service. If Steve were still in charge, I'd have called it almost a dead cert.
Build stuff people want to buy, make a profit, have your product axed in favour of an untested competitor by a self destructive CEO?
Google Maps already has gotten better. Apple aren't competing with the Google Maps of 7 years ago, they're competing with the Google Maps of today.
If a company had released a car that was competitive with the Ford Model T in 1908, they would have made a killing. Releasing a car that was competitive with the Model T in 2012 won't get you anywhere.
The trick in investing is to know which companies are going to defy gravity and go against "common knowledge", and which are going to go exactly as everyone thought.
Buying Apple stock at $50 and selling it at $500 would have made you a very rich man. But it's easy to know that's what you should have done with hind sight. Did you know it at the time? Did you know with any certainty that Apple was going to go through the roof, while Palm or RIM were for the can?
If Apple stock climbs now from $500 to $800, people would say "ah, you should have known Apple would keep going up!". But if they plummet from $500 to $200, people would say "ah, those suckers who bought stock at such a massively overinflated price!". Short of a crystal ball, you can't really do anything but guess.
Space X came along and "commercialised" technology that the government had already paid to research and develop over many decades. They're doing (more cheaply) what the government perfected decades ago.
Fusion is still at the "government pays to do the basic research" phase. No private company is going to ride in and fix this one for us.
What's sad about that chart is that their lowest wish- the "moderate" level" is only $2 billion or so. That's the same amount of money as it costs to build a single B-2 bomber. It's also the same amount of money (thanks Google) as the US has given to Egypt every year since the 70's to support Mubarak and his predecessors.
Relatively speaking, and for a potentially multi-national effort, that's pocket change.
I'm happy to try running my gaming back catalogue in Linux under WINE, but I'd probably baulk at paying £25 for a game that might never work. That's why I keep a Win7 install on my gaming machine.
I wouldn't consider abandoning my Windows install unless publishers were willing to *support* the game on Linux; i.e. I'm either guaranteed it will run, or guaranteed my money back. This Steam move is exciting as it promises just that very thing.
1) The overwhelming majority of people don't buy games in the first month after they're released.
2) Steam doesn't have a huge release delay that I've noticed.
3) If they did have a huge title delay, it'd only be because publishers insist on it to drive up boxed sales. The Windows store (and all the rest) would suffer from the exact same problem.
That would only be a valid comparison if your typewriter was one of the largest and most lucrative gaming platforms, and your calculator was better than it. There are no games for your typewriter, so that doesn't make sense.
Windows is a huge, lucrative gaming platform. If Linux is "better" than it in any major ways, that's a big thing.
If you can't figure Linux out, you are probably not a Windows power user.
I've never been trained in using Linux, and I would probably not consider myself a Windows "power user" (insofar as I define it as someone who knows more than how to navigate menus and a little bit of CLI stuff). Yet when I installed Linux for the first time a few years ago (Ubuntu, probably around 2006), I picked it up no problem. Since then, I've experienced a hand full of the usual Linux gripes around hardware and drivers, but it's basically been no more painful than my life running Windows (which I still do- this is posted from a Win7 machine).
I mean, what the hell is stopping you? Assuming you don't have a huge problem with hardware compatibility (which can always ruin your day, but then it did with Vista too), what else is different? The file system structure is arranged differently, but it's not that confusing, and especially not if you intend to make liberal use of search instead of finding everything by hand (I always use the Win7 search facility these days- I can't remember the last time I descended into the file tree to search for something by hand). Installing programmes is easier than in Windows (just go to the Software Centre, use apt-get, or download the package from a website and double click it). If you use the CLI then you'll need to learn a new set of commands, but all you really need to know is "man" and "man -k", and the rest is at your finger tips- surely not that hard for a "power user"?
Maybe you need to use programmes that are only available in Windows (games are the main reason I keep Win7 boxes around at the moment), or you've bought hardware that won't play nice with Linux. They're both valid reasons not to switch. But general usability? Get real.
I went to a shop on Saturday to have a play (a UK PC World), and saw much the same thing. The Windows 8 section had one middle aged woman in it, where a salesman was vainly trying to explain to her why she should buy a Windows 8 PC over one of the "reduced to clear" Windows 7 PCs in the next aisle. His approach seemed to mostly be "it's safer, more secure, will last you longer, will run all the shiniest new widgets", rather than anything about the new UI. Meanwhile, the Apple section was as crowded as ever with people playing with Macs and iPads, and the Android Tablet section had a fair few lurkers.
I had a play with Windows 8 on an all-in-one PC, as I was keen to see how it felt with a touch screen. I'm still baffled. Couldn't figure out how to tile windows for Metro apps (except to put two alongside each other with a bizarre 80:20 screen split), couldn't grab windows from the bottom left corner (to get at "minimized" windows) with any sort of consistency, couldn't figure out when windows were retrievable versus when I had to re-access the programme from the Start/Metro screen again. Still just plain don't get it.
Death of the gaming PC is already covered this year too, with the "tablets are killing PCs" articles.
Consider this: Supposed you had to pay all of your health-care expenses up to (say) 5% of your annual income, and 10% of subsequent expenses up to 10% of your annual income. What would the effect be?
The effect would be that poor people, for whom 10% of their income is the difference between paying rent AND buying groceries that month, will ration their medication and make themselves ill. The ghettoes will get sicker, differences in life expectancy widen, and the economy gets dragged down. Rich people will continue to buy any medical treatment they like, and the middle classes will continue to follow doctors orders (but will have less money).
In theory, insurers should be lobbying, negotiating and bargaining for lower medical costs to save themselves money. In countries with universal healthcare (e.g., UK with the NHS), the national providers take care of this. The UK has vastly lower medical costs for the same medical treatment compared to the US, and that's because the NHS drives a hard bargain. Patients don't pay a penny.
Teenagers are the group with the largest disposable income (better earnings than a child, no outgoings like an adult), and are the group least likely to need a hearing aid. Old aged pensioners are the group most likely to need hearing aids, and are also the group with some of the highest relative poverty rates.
Might even be easier to just make the actual gear owned by a non-profit and let the profit seeking enterprises act only as MVNOs.
That's how the UK railways works these days. The track and infrastructure is owned by government-owned Network Rail, and private companies just operate the trains.
And I use "works" in the loosest possible sense. It's a flipping train-wreck.
Pun partially intended.
So if Samsung bring out a tablet with a better resolution display than an iPad, they can say it has a Retina Display?
No, because that's an Apple trademark. No matter how good the screen is on a Samsung/Sony/HTC/whatever device is, it can't be called a Retina Display.
That makes it a useless marketing term.