Actually, I favor the creation of patent firms with lower fees and larger volumes. The $10,000 it costs for a small entity to successfully prosecute a patent is quite expensive for most start-ups, especially when you may be filing for dozens of them.
Law firms, like the courtroom, are a few of the places desperately in need of a little programming attention. The problem, of course, is maintaining quality of work, while keeping the lawyers happy. If you're an associate, you're already doing too many hours, and if you're a partner (let alone a senior partner), you're probably past the point of doing volume work (you've paid your dues).
Indeed. It's something of an oddity these days that there are so many tech companies that, instead of growing larger, are instead being bought out. That is to say, the game now is to build a company that gets bought out in (say) 5 years, not one that will last 200 years.
You can't just mandate "small, independent, companies competing directly." They must develop because market forces allow them to, or you end up with a Solyndra.
What we 'need' here is a closer look at the market itself, to see what is interfering (if anything) with normal market operations. We need to verify that the market is actually functioning nominally. Chances are, if there is a lot of money, but very few players, something is going on. Perhaps the barrier to entry to the market has become obstructed. Perhaps the barrier to exit the market, in the event of failure, is too high. Perhaps some laws favor larger companies at the expense of smaller ones ("pay to play").
Whatever the case, an objective analysis, with no givens, is needed to understand what we do know, and what we don't know here.
Agreed. This product would have made more sense during the Vista years, but it's a few years later, and the pricing for SSDs are getting sweeter all the time.
No point paying a price premium for something so incapable. With a Desktop, you want a SSD with the OS on it, and multiple HDs. With a laptop, you want a SSD.
Depends how you design your factories, the best design, of course, being demand-limited, not resource limited.
Something about the thought of someone building a factory that can put out 1,000 widgets a month, but 1,001 being impossible, appeals to my humor gland.
Or he can have a refurbished 1 TB drive, and save mom and dad the re-install of the OS later. Or, since prices are actually nice enough, he can get an upgrade to a 128GB SSD.
They have a chance to give their competition a black-eye, without having to resort to any trickery (Fate / the Universe / Diety of choice has given them this one for free), and instead they're going to waste it. This is an excellent time to strong-arm the competition into licensing them some intellectual property gems they'd never get access to normally, or to displace every other HD manufacturer on the market for the next several months. Drop the price, and make it impossible for your competitors to raise enough capital to rebuild their factories. Play the marketing game, and get PC manufacturers to place a "Seagate Inside" sticker on their machines for the next several months in return for preferential pricing.
Instead, you're going to do the money soak for a year, then be punished when the other manufacturers get their sh*t together. You have a royal flush, and decide to trade it in for a pair. Not smart.
But seriously, what is this problem he's speaking of? I've been running a Corsair 128GB SSD for the past several months, haven't had a single problem related to it. Granted, it's not over 200 GBs, but I really want to hear about this problem, as my new SSD IS over 200 GBs.
A brief check on Google mentions a lot of problems with the Intel SSDs, from a while ago. And Wikipedia mentions that MLCs can undergo corruption in certain instances where the power suddenly switches off, but most drives are supposed to come with a super-capacitors to finish the read / write operation so that doesn't happen.
And of course, I have a UPS, which kind of negates the whole power issue anyway...
This isn't profit. It's a basic inability to do math. Like 2nd grade level math.
And while I am loathe to be dragged into this kind of conversation, I will attempt to put the beast to rest as follows: checks and balances were designed into our government to limit the dangers of concentrated power; they've failed.
UPS 2011 Holiday Schedule In the United States, UPS observes the following holidays:
Memorial Day - May 30, 2011* Independence Day - July 4, 2011* Labor Day - September 5, 2011* Thanksgiving Day - November 24, 2011* Day after Thanksgiving - November 25, 2011** Christmas (observed) - December 26, 2011* New Year's Day (observed) - January 2, 2012*
Me thinks it's a combination of a number of factors, resulting in a 'perfect storm.'
Western currencies aren't doing so hot compared to Eastern currencies. That hurts. China has cut back on exporting of rare-earths. That hurts. Gas prices have probably increased the demand for hybrid vehicles, which use Nd, a typical element also used by HD manufacturers. More competition for limited resources. That probably doesn't help. Floods have occurred in Thailand, knocking out 25% of the manufacturing capacity for HDs. That hurts. SSDs are slowly displacing HDs, so long-term investment in the HD market may not be worth the money. That hurts. Tariffs for imported electronics may or may not be increasing. Seagate merged with Maxtor, who may or may not have held over some executives who desperately needed to be fired, and whose thinking has probably infected Seagate. This is not unlike the Compaq / HP merger, where anyone with any intelligence could see the merger between a sick company (Compaq) and HP (a relatively healthy company) would result in HP getting sick. One need only think back to the retracted announcement the other day regarding HP getting out of the computer hardware business to see that "the inmates are running the asylum." And just for giggles -> technology companies aren't innovating anymore. Their inventions, as of late, do not compare in quality or impact, to those from several years ago. Marketing has ousted the techs from their own companies, and you can see the effect.They believe glitz is more important than quality (the customer is an idiot, and will buy whatever we place in front of them). Google doesn't care about its own search engine anymore, Microsoft doesn't care about its OS anymore, and IBM....that these HD manufacturers have the balls to sell us crap inventory, at wildly inflated prices...
Oh baby, I CAN tell the difference. Every time I sit down to fix someone's machine, it takes all of several moments to realize that the machine has a 'value' hard drive in it. I don't even need to crack the case to take a look at it. I just hit the power button, and wait more than a minute for the OS to get to a logon screen. In a machine with a dual-core processor and 4 GBs of ram.
If I have time to check the specs on your machine while the OS is booting, I can almost guarantee that it has a 'value' hard drive. And the sad part is, these people do not understand that upgrading to a faster video card or faster processor will not make the OS load faster (or in general, be more responsive).
Bullsh*t. The US is ridiculously more expensive for most industries, especially if you don't 'Rent-A-Senator' like most of the major companies do.
But, more importantly, if I am getting my rare-earths from China, and the hard drive case manufacturer is in Malaysia, and the hard drive controller manufacturer is in Vietnam, the platter manufacturer in India, and final assembly in Thailand, why do I want to spend good money shipping everything to the US and back? Do it on site, then ship it out, like any sane person.
My floor size is as the size of the last, largest hard drive I purchased.
Which means if they aren't selling 1.5 TB hard drives, I am not interested. What I am interested in is 2 TB or 3 TB hard drives -> 3 of them, to be exact, just for my home machine. 6 of them, if they are inexpensive enough.
But at today's prices and capacities, hell no. I have older drives (that I replaced with those 1.5 TB drives with) that are equal to what they want to sell me today. If I am feeling particularly desperate for a 500 GB hard drive, I'll walk over to my shelf, and retrieve an old 500 GB drive (rather than buying one off of Newegg, for crap prices).
Could it have increased the price? Probably. Could it have increased the price by this much? Unlikely.
Hard drives use, to the best of my knowledge, only a small amount of rare-earths (I believe the magnets are typically Neodymium). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet
Perhaps a better way of saying this is, the introduction and competition from hybrid vehicles (which use Nd) should have had a more profound impact on the market than a more limited supply from China; have hybrid vehicle prices tripled?
Slightly more than 4 TB here, with a brand new 240 GB SSD patiently waiting for me in the UPS sorting facility several miles from my home...which I will be breaking into later on tonight to get.
UPS takes one day off for Christmas, but two days for Thanksgiving (giving them a four day weekend). Now, I am all for lengthy vacations, but my current 128GB SSD is down to 6 GB of free space, and that's a fair chance that won't last the weekend...
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Actually, I favor the creation of patent firms with lower fees and larger volumes. The $10,000 it costs for a small entity to successfully prosecute a patent is quite expensive for most start-ups, especially when you may be filing for dozens of them.
Law firms, like the courtroom, are a few of the places desperately in need of a little programming attention. The problem, of course, is maintaining quality of work, while keeping the lawyers happy. If you're an associate, you're already doing too many hours, and if you're a partner (let alone a senior partner), you're probably past the point of doing volume work (you've paid your dues).
Perhaps. Too much spying and intellectual incest will result in far too similar solutions. Which is duplicated effort.
Indeed. It's something of an oddity these days that there are so many tech companies that, instead of growing larger, are instead being bought out. That is to say, the game now is to build a company that gets bought out in (say) 5 years, not one that will last 200 years.
You can't just mandate "small, independent, companies competing directly." They must develop because market forces allow them to, or you end up with a Solyndra.
What we 'need' here is a closer look at the market itself, to see what is interfering (if anything) with normal market operations. We need to verify that the market is actually functioning nominally. Chances are, if there is a lot of money, but very few players, something is going on. Perhaps the barrier to entry to the market has become obstructed. Perhaps the barrier to exit the market, in the event of failure, is too high. Perhaps some laws favor larger companies at the expense of smaller ones ("pay to play").
Whatever the case, an objective analysis, with no givens, is needed to understand what we do know, and what we don't know here.
Agreed. This product would have made more sense during the Vista years, but it's a few years later, and the pricing for SSDs are getting sweeter all the time.
No point paying a price premium for something so incapable. With a Desktop, you want a SSD with the OS on it, and multiple HDs. With a laptop, you want a SSD.
Most things placed near testes tend to decrease male fertility.
Briefs, jeans, angry women...
Depends how you design your factories, the best design, of course, being demand-limited, not resource limited.
Something about the thought of someone building a factory that can put out 1,000 widgets a month, but 1,001 being impossible, appeals to my humor gland.
Hmm. From what I read, several days ago, it's more like computer manufacturers were buying up the stock, not the tech enthusiasts.
Or he can have a refurbished 1 TB drive, and save mom and dad the re-install of the OS later. Or, since prices are actually nice enough, he can get an upgrade to a 128GB SSD.
Hmm, tempting, but fruitless.
They have a chance to give their competition a black-eye, without having to resort to any trickery (Fate / the Universe / Diety of choice has given them this one for free), and instead they're going to waste it. This is an excellent time to strong-arm the competition into licensing them some intellectual property gems they'd never get access to normally, or to displace every other HD manufacturer on the market for the next several months. Drop the price, and make it impossible for your competitors to raise enough capital to rebuild their factories. Play the marketing game, and get PC manufacturers to place a "Seagate Inside" sticker on their machines for the next several months in return for preferential pricing.
Instead, you're going to do the money soak for a year, then be punished when the other manufacturers get their sh*t together. You have a royal flush, and decide to trade it in for a pair. Not smart.
Lol.
But seriously, what is this problem he's speaking of? I've been running a Corsair 128GB SSD for the past several months, haven't had a single problem related to it. Granted, it's not over 200 GBs, but I really want to hear about this problem, as my new SSD IS over 200 GBs.
A brief check on Google mentions a lot of problems with the Intel SSDs, from a while ago. And Wikipedia mentions that MLCs can undergo corruption in certain instances where the power suddenly switches off, but most drives are supposed to come with a super-capacitors to finish the read / write operation so that doesn't happen.
And of course, I have a UPS, which kind of negates the whole power issue anyway...
*facepalms*
This isn't profit. It's a basic inability to do math. Like 2nd grade level math.
And while I am loathe to be dragged into this kind of conversation, I will attempt to put the beast to rest as follows: checks and balances were designed into our government to limit the dangers of concentrated power; they've failed.
Just out of curiosity, toxic water?
*UPS Holiday. UPS Express Critical® available.
**UPS Holiday. Delivery and pickup of air and international packages only.
http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/imp_exp/operation.html
UPS 2011 Holiday Schedule
In the United States, UPS observes the following holidays:
Memorial Day - May 30, 2011*
Independence Day - July 4, 2011*
Labor Day - September 5, 2011*
Thanksgiving Day - November 24, 2011*
Day after Thanksgiving - November 25, 2011**
Christmas (observed) - December 26, 2011*
New Year's Day (observed) - January 2, 2012*
Me thinks it's a combination of a number of factors, resulting in a 'perfect storm.'
Western currencies aren't doing so hot compared to Eastern currencies. That hurts.
China has cut back on exporting of rare-earths. That hurts.
Gas prices have probably increased the demand for hybrid vehicles, which use Nd, a typical element also used by HD manufacturers. More competition for limited resources. That probably doesn't help.
Floods have occurred in Thailand, knocking out 25% of the manufacturing capacity for HDs. That hurts.
SSDs are slowly displacing HDs, so long-term investment in the HD market may not be worth the money. That hurts.
Tariffs for imported electronics may or may not be increasing.
Seagate merged with Maxtor, who may or may not have held over some executives who desperately needed to be fired, and whose thinking has probably infected Seagate. This is not unlike the Compaq / HP merger, where anyone with any intelligence could see the merger between a sick company (Compaq) and HP (a relatively healthy company) would result in HP getting sick. One need only think back to the retracted announcement the other day regarding HP getting out of the computer hardware business to see that "the inmates are running the asylum."
And just for giggles -> technology companies aren't innovating anymore. Their inventions, as of late, do not compare in quality or impact, to those from several years ago. Marketing has ousted the techs from their own companies, and you can see the effect.They believe glitz is more important than quality (the customer is an idiot, and will buy whatever we place in front of them). Google doesn't care about its own search engine anymore, Microsoft doesn't care about its OS anymore, and IBM....that these HD manufacturers have the balls to sell us crap inventory, at wildly inflated prices...
The tech industry is sick.
Mmmmmmm. I'm thinking not even for the media server. If you want to run bit torrent on it, and be able to stream movies, 7200 RPMs barely cut it.
Oh baby, I CAN tell the difference. Every time I sit down to fix someone's machine, it takes all of several moments to realize that the machine has a 'value' hard drive in it. I don't even need to crack the case to take a look at it. I just hit the power button, and wait more than a minute for the OS to get to a logon screen. In a machine with a dual-core processor and 4 GBs of ram.
If I have time to check the specs on your machine while the OS is booting, I can almost guarantee that it has a 'value' hard drive. And the sad part is, these people do not understand that upgrading to a faster video card or faster processor will not make the OS load faster (or in general, be more responsive).
Bullsh*t. The US is ridiculously more expensive for most industries, especially if you don't 'Rent-A-Senator' like most of the major companies do.
But, more importantly, if I am getting my rare-earths from China, and the hard drive case manufacturer is in Malaysia, and the hard drive controller manufacturer is in Vietnam, the platter manufacturer in India, and final assembly in Thailand, why do I want to spend good money shipping everything to the US and back? Do it on site, then ship it out, like any sane person.
My floor size is as the size of the last, largest hard drive I purchased.
Which means if they aren't selling 1.5 TB hard drives, I am not interested. What I am interested in is 2 TB or 3 TB hard drives -> 3 of them, to be exact, just for my home machine. 6 of them, if they are inexpensive enough.
But at today's prices and capacities, hell no. I have older drives (that I replaced with those 1.5 TB drives with) that are equal to what they want to sell me today. If I am feeling particularly desperate for a 500 GB hard drive, I'll walk over to my shelf, and retrieve an old 500 GB drive (rather than buying one off of Newegg, for crap prices).
Who, in their right mind, builds a factory without excess capacity to trounce the competition in a moment of weakness?
That's just poor planning...
Just out of curiosity, I wonder how much it would cost to build a concrete sea-wall with a ramp around the factory.
Could it have increased the price? Probably.
Could it have increased the price by this much? Unlikely.
Hard drives use, to the best of my knowledge, only a small amount of rare-earths (I believe the magnets are typically Neodymium). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet
Perhaps a better way of saying this is, the introduction and competition from hybrid vehicles (which use Nd) should have had a more profound impact on the market than a more limited supply from China; have hybrid vehicle prices tripled?
Slightly more than 4 TB here, with a brand new 240 GB SSD patiently waiting for me in the UPS sorting facility several miles from my home...which I will be breaking into later on tonight to get.
UPS takes one day off for Christmas, but two days for Thanksgiving (giving them a four day weekend). Now, I am all for lengthy vacations, but my current 128GB SSD is down to 6 GB of free space, and that's a fair chance that won't last the weekend...
Hmm. Do you have a link to this problem?