Xbox division saw a 1.32 BILLION dollar profit for 2011. if that is a failure I'd like two please if you don't mind.
So, $1.3 billion back against $9 billion sunk costs, on a product with a limited lifetime. Let me see, that is negative how much? Versus 95% gross profit on Microsoft's core monopoly OS business? If that makes sense to you, then may I offer you an excellent opportunity to own a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge?
Neither MSFT or Sony is "riding high" this generation, they are both deep in multibillion dollar holes they are unlikely ever to get out of. MSFT more so than Sony, but MSFT had the money in the bank, Sony didn't.
You know, I don't want another overheating piece of underpowered garbage with a whining fan in my living room, from MSFT or Sony.
I'm always wary of people who say a language "sucks".
Well, if you don't know what I mean when I say "bash sucks" then you haven't written much bash. And by the way, it is in many cases the best tool for the job, but that does not mean it does not suck.
The Blender project has some pretty nice boolean operations written in Python, but they are history because of performance issues. And it would seem, they were not significantly less buggy than the buggy C code they attempted to replace.
You can write something in python for 1/8 - 1/2 the cost (cost is a function of time) and optimize a tiny section of code or you can write it in C++ and get nearly identical performance.
Let's just accept your magic numbers for the moment. If Python performance did not suck so badly, in many cases you could just drop that expensive and time consuming "optimize a tiny section" step and save even more money.
...you can put the Python monkeys to work on some parts, and put the C or C++ people to work on the performance-critical sections, and merge the two together.
Be careful not to gloss over how much work that "merge" might turn into, with concomittant maintainability and reliability issues. I generally do not favor the idea of adding a new layer of bugs to a complex system.
Because we don't want to spend our time thinking about pointers and how to iterate over things?
Whoops, you should have stopped with the "pointers". Because iterating over things in Python is very little different from C++.
Because functional programming is actually really nice?
Agreed, and C++11 supports it well.
Because in Python, you can download some data from the web, analyse it using a machine learning algorithm, plot the results, and install another package on the fly, combining 4 independent packages, and many ideas, in just 50 lines of code.
Sometimes. Sometimes not. It depends how well the libraries fit, just like C++.
The fucking language is designed to seamlessly use libraries written in C.
It's hardly seamless. The glue layer is horrible awkward and hopelessly inefficient. Often that gets buried behind a SWIG autogenerated interface that produces truly putrid code. Orders of magnitude more than you would get from writing it by hand, and the hand written interface already sucks.
most people don't realize these were the same arguements given back in the 80s for writing stuff in assembly instead of C.
And the argument failed because compilers were improved to the point that code quality became comparable to that of a naive assembly program. Python code quality has not improved into anything like the ballpark to overcome that argument. For many applications, Python is three or four orders of magnitude slower than C++. This is just embarrassing.
you can write the code in python several times in the same amount of time it takes to write it in C or C++.
Or C++? Maybe if you don't know C++, otherwise I would have to say that is a wild exaggeration or at best an over generalization. I find that Python development generally progresses somewhat faster than C++, but not enormously faster. And the quality of result is generally better with C++. Standalone executable, pretty compact, low memory footprint, very fast. For many "big" projects, developing in Python would just lower the quality of the result without saving enough development time to justify it.
How about trying this: Python has less of a learning curve than C++. More accessible to more programmers. You don't need a CS degree to program in Python.
Bash works for me a lot of the time too. But Bash sucks, and so does Python as a general purpose language. Python just goes out of its way to pigeonhole itself as a scripting language, for no discernable rational reason.
Guido's position, in hearly so many words, is: Python is not too slow if you write your code in some other language.
His exact words were "It is usually much more effective to take that one piece and replace that one function or module with a little bit of code you wrote in C or C++". But on the face of it, that is a glaring language deficiency. Python is too slow for compute intensive work. I have one word for Guido's attitude. Denial.
Obfviously, Python can never be a serious competitor to Java with Guido blocking progress. Java with its bloat and performance issues is indeed nothing to crow about, but it is a better all round language than Python.
The iPod scaled similarly, with huge gains. Once it saturated the market, it began to decrease, but by then, replacement products were already on a meteoric rise, specifically the iPhone and iPad.
Very insightful. And now it all plays out all over again, except this time the replacement products rising meteorically are Android phones and netpads. And the customer wins again!
See, Apple has never had to compete with a product - Linux - which tries its level best to be good for the customer, above all else. That's a new and terrifying threat for Apple. And rightly so.
AAPL is not the best short in the market, but I would not go long either, based on the cracks now appearing in its mainstay franchises. This is entirely appart from the fact that I do not make a habit of investing in unethical organizations.
Of course Apple worries about market share, because it worries about its prospects on a timeframe of more than just one quarter. What I said about Apple cutting its margins? It already happened. Quadrupling its screen resolution has a price: higher bill of materials cost.. Now hang on for a moment... some actual numbers are not going to kill you. Let's think about what the numbers actually mean. So Apple's bill of materials went up 6% expressed as a fraction of selling price. That translates to roughly $38 extra cost against Apple's gross margin of $319. That is 12% profit decrease. So Apple needs a 12% increase in volume just to stay flat. And with Apple's stratospheric stock price, breaking even is nowhere near good enough. See what I mean? This is already heading in the direction of Apple as a shrink stock, even faster than I expected.
Long-term, if that doesn't change, it will prove to be unsustainable
...this is the exact same rationale people have been using to predict Nintendo's death for over 10 years.
By no means the end of Apple, but the end of Apple as a good investment. To understand this using your own analogy, just look at Nintendo's five year performance:
I really do wish people around here would understand what [bleep] 'marketshare' actually means. Apple could sell 20% more iPads this year than last and still fall in marketshare.
See, it turns into a race between increasing absolute numbers and decreasing margin. That is where market share really counts, simple.
I have to ask: why is only Apple fanbots who profess not to care about market share? I am sure Apple does, as does everyone in business.
Well given that this whole article is just an advertisement, how about we consider a fact people really need to know? iPad market share fell by 7 percent last quarter. It would seem that in spite of a carefully crafted perception to the contrary, Apple's tablets are headed in the same direction as Apple's phones: absolute numbers shipped up, market share down. Apple's response will be to cut margins to slow the decline. This will not show up as a revenue slip for a while. So for now, Apple's share price will continue to tread air. But the writing is on the wall.
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Xbox division saw a 1.32 BILLION dollar profit for 2011. if that is a failure I'd like two please if you don't mind.
So, $1.3 billion back against $9 billion sunk costs, on a product with a limited lifetime. Let me see, that is negative how much? Versus 95% gross profit on Microsoft's core monopoly OS business? If that makes sense to you, then may I offer you an excellent opportunity to own a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge?
Neither MSFT or Sony is "riding high" this generation, they are both deep in multibillion dollar holes they are unlikely ever to get out of. MSFT more so than Sony, but MSFT had the money in the bank, Sony didn't.
You know, I don't want another overheating piece of underpowered garbage with a whining fan in my living room, from MSFT or Sony.
On consoles, Skyrim's interface is only "kinda borked" not "completely borked".
In this same time? My original PS3 is still kicking ass.
Mine isn't. After two returns and out $150, the third one has turned into a boat anchor too and I have given asking Sony to fix it.
I'm always wary of people who say a language "sucks".
Well, if you don't know what I mean when I say "bash sucks" then you haven't written much bash. And by the way, it is in many cases the best tool for the job, but that does not mean it does not suck.
Agreed. Bugs are caused by poor thinking, not by lack of type checking.
If you think that then maybe you should write all your code in assembly language. Just stay sharp!
I presume you meant:
return a > 0 ? (a + 1) : (a - 1);
The Blender project has some pretty nice boolean operations written in Python, but they are history because of performance issues. And it would seem, they were not significantly less buggy than the buggy C code they attempted to replace.
You can write something in python for 1/8 - 1/2 the cost (cost is a function of time) and optimize a tiny section of code or you can write it in C++ and get nearly identical performance.
Let's just accept your magic numbers for the moment. If Python performance did not suck so badly, in many cases you could just drop that expensive and time consuming "optimize a tiny section" step and save even more money.
...you can put the Python monkeys to work on some parts, and put the C or C++ people to work on the performance-critical sections, and merge the two together.
Be careful not to gloss over how much work that "merge" might turn into, with concomittant maintainability and reliability issues. I generally do not favor the idea of adding a new layer of bugs to a complex system.
Because we don't want to spend our time thinking about pointers and how to iterate over things?
Whoops, you should have stopped with the "pointers". Because iterating over things in Python is very little different from C++.
Because functional programming is actually really nice?
Agreed, and C++11 supports it well.
Because in Python, you can download some data from the web, analyse it using a machine learning algorithm, plot the results, and install another package on the fly, combining 4 independent packages, and many ideas, in just 50 lines of code.
Sometimes. Sometimes not. It depends how well the libraries fit, just like C++.
The fucking language is designed to seamlessly use libraries written in C.
It's hardly seamless. The glue layer is horrible awkward and hopelessly inefficient. Often that gets buried behind a SWIG autogenerated interface that produces truly putrid code. Orders of magnitude more than you would get from writing it by hand, and the hand written interface already sucks.
most people don't realize these were the same arguements given back in the 80s for writing stuff in assembly instead of C.
And the argument failed because compilers were improved to the point that code quality became comparable to that of a naive assembly program. Python code quality has not improved into anything like the ballpark to overcome that argument. For many applications, Python is three or four orders of magnitude slower than C++. This is just embarrassing.
you can write the code in python several times in the same amount of time it takes to write it in C or C++.
Or C++? Maybe if you don't know C++, otherwise I would have to say that is a wild exaggeration or at best an over generalization. I find that Python development generally progresses somewhat faster than C++, but not enormously faster. And the quality of result is generally better with C++. Standalone executable, pretty compact, low memory footprint, very fast. For many "big" projects, developing in Python would just lower the quality of the result without saving enough development time to justify it.
How about trying this: Python has less of a learning curve than C++. More accessible to more programmers. You don't need a CS degree to program in Python.
Bash works for me a lot of the time too. But Bash sucks, and so does Python as a general purpose language. Python just goes out of its way to pigeonhole itself as a scripting language, for no discernable rational reason.
Guido's position, in hearly so many words, is: Python is not too slow if you write your code in some other language.
His exact words were "It is usually much more effective to take that one piece and replace that one function or module with a little bit of code you wrote in C or C++". But on the face of it, that is a glaring language deficiency. Python is too slow for compute intensive work. I have one word for Guido's attitude. Denial.
Obfviously, Python can never be a serious competitor to Java with Guido blocking progress. Java with its bloat and performance issues is indeed nothing to crow about, but it is a better all round language than Python.
The iPod scaled similarly, with huge gains. Once it saturated the market, it began to decrease, but by then, replacement products were already on a meteoric rise, specifically the iPhone and iPad.
Very insightful. And now it all plays out all over again, except this time the replacement products rising meteorically are Android phones and netpads. And the customer wins again!
See, Apple has never had to compete with a product - Linux - which tries its level best to be good for the customer, above all else. That's a new and terrifying threat for Apple. And rightly so.
Apple has shown itself perfectly capable of retaining market share while keeping margins high.
Excuse me, but both Apple's market share and margins are currently slipping. Or have we now entered that proverbial reality distortion field?
AAPL is not the best short in the market, but I would not go long either, based on the cracks now appearing in its mainstay franchises. This is entirely appart from the fact that I do not make a habit of investing in unethical organizations.
Of course Apple worries about market share, because it worries about its prospects on a timeframe of more than just one quarter. What I said about Apple cutting its margins? It already happened. Quadrupling its screen resolution has a price: higher bill of materials cost.. Now hang on for a moment... some actual numbers are not going to kill you. Let's think about what the numbers actually mean. So Apple's bill of materials went up 6% expressed as a fraction of selling price. That translates to roughly $38 extra cost against Apple's gross margin of $319. That is 12% profit decrease. So Apple needs a 12% increase in volume just to stay flat. And with Apple's stratospheric stock price, breaking even is nowhere near good enough. See what I mean? This is already heading in the direction of Apple as a shrink stock, even faster than I expected.
Long-term, if that doesn't change, it will prove to be unsustainable
...this is the exact same rationale people have been using to predict Nintendo's death for over 10 years.
By no means the end of Apple, but the end of Apple as a good investment. To understand this using your own analogy, just look at Nintendo's five year performance:
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=NTOA.F+Interactive#symbol=ntoa.f;range=5y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;
I really do wish people around here would understand what [bleep] 'marketshare' actually means. Apple could sell 20% more iPads this year than last and still fall in marketshare.
See, it turns into a race between increasing absolute numbers and decreasing margin. That is where market share really counts, simple.
I have to ask: why is only Apple fanbots who profess not to care about market share? I am sure Apple does, as does everyone in business.
Well given that this whole article is just an advertisement, how about we consider a fact people really need to know?
iPad market share fell by 7 percent last quarter. It would seem that in spite of a carefully crafted perception to the contrary, Apple's tablets are headed in the same direction as Apple's phones: absolute numbers shipped up, market share down. Apple's response will be to cut margins to slow the decline. This will not show up as a revenue slip for a while. So for now, Apple's share price will continue to tread air. But the writing is on the wall.
If they plug into a motherboard. I understood the topic to be serving power to multiple enclosures.