That was one of the famous stories of Apple's Cupertino campus. An employee once left a note under the windshield wiper of Steve's car that said Park Different.
In an ideal capitalistic market, Verizon would then lose business from the higher pricing, their competition would get a leg-up. The alternative being that they do not pass this cost onto the consumer and remain at a competitive price-point.
In this bullshit version of real-world capitalism, Verizon increases the price and then the competition does as well, simply because they can get away with it. The alternative is that very few people can move carrier because of prohibitive consumer contracts, by the time many of these contracts have expired, consumers simply renew partially out of forgetfulness and partially due to convenience.
The prices asked by console makers for new generation consoles have always been prohibitive to sales, with the exception being the more dedicated players. Though in recent years a lot of the growth in the industry has been from the adoption by the casual gaming markets, which makes the proposition even riskier for console-markers.
Probably the biggest issue stopping newer generations of consoles is the cost, the tens of millions spent on R&D, the then millions more for marketing and manufacturing, historically Microsoft & Sony have also spend big buying exclusive rights for launch-title games. More recently, to launch a new console can cost a company like Microsoft roughly $250 million and often they'll sell those consoles at a loss for the first 6-18 months, which comes on top of that initial investment, an investment they're unlikely to see a return on for two years or more. This is a big part of the reason why there are so few console-makers, the investment needed is impossible for any electronics company to justify.
What we're likely to see more of are generations of consoles which will take bigger leaps in hardware performance, but console generations which'll often last a decade or more. It's been a business model that's made the Playstation 2 (and now the Playstation 3) very profitable investments.
Last time I checked, sales of the Kinect had blown the Playstation Move out of the water and re-invigorated sales in the Xbox 360. In most markets the Xbox 360 outsells the Playstation 3 and it's the first console by a western company to become a serious competitor in the Japanese market.
The Drobo's are a pretty big NAS player, I'm looking at ordering myself a Drobo + 10TB of storage myself, though I thought Drobo also supported RAID 0/1/5/6? Surely they could've done a piece comparing just those features alone.
For a company that's been convicted time & time again for anti-competitive behaviour and bullying it's competition, Samsung seems to get a lot of sympathy from/.'ers.
Taken individually, yes Apple's patent claims are ridiculous, the idea that Apple can patent a black square with rounded edges highlights how much of a joke the patent system currently is. Though if we take all of Apple's patent infringement claims together it does appear Apple have a case, fashion designers have won lawsuits in the past based on greater differentiation & less evidence.
I don't agree that Microsoft hasn't innovated in 20 years. The Xbox had quite a lot that the competition lacked at the time, the Windows Phone has a rather different approach to other handset OSs & the continued development of Windows 7 and Windows 8 is has been rather different to the one Microsoft (And other PC operating systems) have traditionally taken.
MS' biggest problem is the person at the top - Steve Ballmer. He has no vision whatsoever and at best is a chief operating officer.
In all the examples I've given above, are all projects Steve Ballmer has had very little input in. As a CEO, you couldn't pick someone who was more of an unimaginative, direction-less bureaucrat and it shows from everything Microsoft did from the late 1990's until recently. I don't know what's happened in the last four years but Microsoft have really gained some direction and begun to really innovate. The problem it seems is Microsoft is now working in the shadow of Apple in terms of the failed Zune and now the Windows Phone, that's not to say they're bad devices, but they're trying to innovate in areas where Apple dominates using a very different approach. To the point where it's given Microsoft a huge disadvantage if they want an innovative/different product to succeed.
Then again, these Microsoft stores appear to do nothing more than to follow Apple. There are advantages to how Apple handle retail, but the way in which MIcrosoft have done is appears to be nothing more than copying the competition.
I don't see Java as being a positive over a lower-level, compiled language like Objective-C (It is basically C after all). You can go onto the Apple developers site and download one of the twenty open-source projects that are currently being developed as a part of iOS. The other two examples though are legitimate positives ov Android.
Typical of the current Australian government, a politically sensitive policy that is redacted, classified or somehow protected as a trade secret. Rather than face legitimate scrutiny by the people paying for the project, the Australian government is currently more interested in public relations rather than developing sound policy.
I knew retailers were desperate to try and retain shoppers (A lot of Australians have started purchasing items like clothing and electronics overseas for half the price) but this isn't going to help bring anyone back into their stores.
Maybe if the whole supply chain wasn't about gouging consumers with large mark-ups at every point in supply maybe Australians wouldn't be shopping online nearly as much.
Here's an idea: I'll join the long long queue of Apple fans who are eagerly trying to update OSX and iOS at the same time.
I'll then go onto/. and complain about the update process being crap and slow while Apple's software update servers are still being crippled by demand. Of course I could just wait the few extra hours when there's less demand and have a far quicker and smoother iOS/OSX upgrade process, though that'd just be using common sense.
Unfortunately for everyone, however noble this movement is the combined power of politicians under the thumb of big-business will drown out any dissent this creates.
The only way I can see the greed ending is Americans electing a politician who isn't some spineless coward to bring in the legislative changes needed to stop the political influence businesses have, stop the influence businesses have on specific markets & start making them truly accountable for how much control they yield over the market.
If the GFC taught us one thing, it's that big business yields the most amount of influence on the economy and none of the accountability. It isn't a matter of big verses small government, it's a matter of regulation. Creating balance in the influence businesses can exert and the influence of the population & making businesses accountable for their actions. Nothing else, if governments could do only one thing, it would be to regulate the way businesses operate and how they can operate.
the USPTO would start rejecting vague software patents instead of granting them to every patent-troll that asks for one, the world would be a better place...
I've got 8TB worth of RAID-6 network-attached storage with mechanical drives. The advantage is there'a an industry built around recovering the data on failed mechanical drives, if your data is that valuable, or you have the money you can have a mechanical drive recovered far easier and cheaper than you could ever recover an SSD.
Compliment this with a cloud-based backup/storage solution for your most important documents, and you can't go wrong really.
SSDs are great for your general purpose laptop or desktop, but they will more readily fail as they age. An SSD failure is far more abrupt and recovery can be very costly and difficult.
Batteries are inherently a difficult component to innovate and develop. Putting aside limitations in chemistry and the costs involved, batteries are also subject to some of the toughest criteria before it'll even be considered viable for use in consumer products, operating temperatures, toxicity, size & weight, availability, longevity, stability & manufacturing scalability are some of the factors that need to be considered before new battery technology can be used.
Once a battery meets all of the criteria, history has shown companies are quick to adopt it into their products (Sometimes a little too quickly), plus companies are willing to invest quite a bit of money into R&D of battery technology. Probably the more notable advantage that companies are now starting to really work towards making components more power efficient and not just because being 'green' is a good marketing phrase.
At the end of the day though, battery technology is still woefully behind every other technology in a mobile/portable or even technology in a modern car.
Apple historically has been quick to adopt standards and just as quick in dropping their support.
Across all of their products Apple is really a mixed bag of supported proprietary & standards-compliant technology. It does strike a good balance between compatibility and pushing their own technology onto the market.
Slashdot Mirror
My father wants to start a new cloud storage company called blackhole.
At least they'd be honest about their business...
It's just our Facebook Immunity System making sure you're safe. Honest!
That was one of the famous stories of Apple's Cupertino campus. An employee once left a note under the windshield wiper of Steve's car that said Park Different.
In an ideal capitalistic market, Verizon would then lose business from the higher pricing, their competition would get a leg-up. The alternative being that they do not pass this cost onto the consumer and remain at a competitive price-point.
In this bullshit version of real-world capitalism, Verizon increases the price and then the competition does as well, simply because they can get away with it. The alternative is that very few people can move carrier because of prohibitive consumer contracts, by the time many of these contracts have expired, consumers simply renew partially out of forgetfulness and partially due to convenience.
The prices asked by console makers for new generation consoles have always been prohibitive to sales, with the exception being the more dedicated players. Though in recent years a lot of the growth in the industry has been from the adoption by the casual gaming markets, which makes the proposition even riskier for console-markers.
Probably the biggest issue stopping newer generations of consoles is the cost, the tens of millions spent on R&D, the then millions more for marketing and manufacturing, historically Microsoft & Sony have also spend big buying exclusive rights for launch-title games. More recently, to launch a new console can cost a company like Microsoft roughly $250 million and often they'll sell those consoles at a loss for the first 6-18 months, which comes on top of that initial investment, an investment they're unlikely to see a return on for two years or more. This is a big part of the reason why there are so few console-makers, the investment needed is impossible for any electronics company to justify.
What we're likely to see more of are generations of consoles which will take bigger leaps in hardware performance, but console generations which'll often last a decade or more. It's been a business model that's made the Playstation 2 (and now the Playstation 3) very profitable investments.
Last time I checked, sales of the Kinect had blown the Playstation Move out of the water and re-invigorated sales in the Xbox 360. In most markets the Xbox 360 outsells the Playstation 3 and it's the first console by a western company to become a serious competitor in the Japanese market.
When did we get the first look?
The Drobo's are a pretty big NAS player, I'm looking at ordering myself a Drobo + 10TB of storage myself, though I thought Drobo also supported RAID 0/1/5/6? Surely they could've done a piece comparing just those features alone.
Can we have a description that isn't plainly biased toward either Apple or Samsung with these patent lawsuit stories?
For a company that's been convicted time & time again for anti-competitive behaviour and bullying it's competition, Samsung seems to get a lot of sympathy from /.'ers.
Taken individually, yes Apple's patent claims are ridiculous, the idea that Apple can patent a black square with rounded edges highlights how much of a joke the patent system currently is. Though if we take all of Apple's patent infringement claims together it does appear Apple have a case, fashion designers have won lawsuits in the past based on greater differentiation & less evidence.
MS hasn't innovated in 20 years.
I don't agree that Microsoft hasn't innovated in 20 years. The Xbox had quite a lot that the competition lacked at the time, the Windows Phone has a rather different approach to other handset OSs & the continued development of Windows 7 and Windows 8 is has been rather different to the one Microsoft (And other PC operating systems) have traditionally taken.
MS' biggest problem is the person at the top - Steve Ballmer. He has no vision whatsoever and at best is a chief operating officer.
In all the examples I've given above, are all projects Steve Ballmer has had very little input in. As a CEO, you couldn't pick someone who was more of an unimaginative, direction-less bureaucrat and it shows from everything Microsoft did from the late 1990's until recently. I don't know what's happened in the last four years but Microsoft have really gained some direction and begun to really innovate.
The problem it seems is Microsoft is now working in the shadow of Apple in terms of the failed Zune and now the Windows Phone, that's not to say they're bad devices, but they're trying to innovate in areas where Apple dominates using a very different approach. To the point where it's given Microsoft a huge disadvantage if they want an innovative/different product to succeed.
Then again, these Microsoft stores appear to do nothing more than to follow Apple. There are advantages to how Apple handle retail, but the way in which MIcrosoft have done is appears to be nothing more than copying the competition.
I don't see Java as being a positive over a lower-level, compiled language like Objective-C (It is basically C after all). You can go onto the Apple developers site and download one of the twenty open-source projects that are currently being developed as a part of iOS. The other two examples though are legitimate positives ov Android.
Typical of the current Australian government, a politically sensitive policy that is redacted, classified or somehow protected as a trade secret. Rather than face legitimate scrutiny by the people paying for the project, the Australian government is currently more interested in public relations rather than developing sound policy.
I knew retailers were desperate to try and retain shoppers (A lot of Australians have started purchasing items like clothing and electronics overseas for half the price) but this isn't going to help bring anyone back into their stores.
Maybe if the whole supply chain wasn't about gouging consumers with large mark-ups at every point in supply maybe Australians wouldn't be shopping online nearly as much.
Here's an idea: I'll join the long long queue of Apple fans who are eagerly trying to update OSX and iOS at the same time.
/. and complain about the update process being crap and slow while Apple's software update servers are still being crippled by demand. Of course I could just wait the few extra hours when there's less demand and have a far quicker and smoother iOS/OSX upgrade process, though that'd just be using common sense.
I'll then go onto
Pfft push button are so 20th century.
It'd be on a touchscreen with a big red embossed touch-button saying fire.
Unfortunately for everyone, however noble this movement is the combined power of politicians under the thumb of big-business will drown out any dissent this creates.
The only way I can see the greed ending is Americans electing a politician who isn't some spineless coward to bring in the legislative changes needed to stop the political influence businesses have, stop the influence businesses have on specific markets & start making them truly accountable for how much control they yield over the market.
If the GFC taught us one thing, it's that big business yields the most amount of influence on the economy and none of the accountability. It isn't a matter of big verses small government, it's a matter of regulation. Creating balance in the influence businesses can exert and the influence of the population & making businesses accountable for their actions. Nothing else, if governments could do only one thing, it would be to regulate the way businesses operate and how they can operate.
Parasites can use Twitter now?
I suppose running a production AND distribution cartel is far more profitable.
the USPTO would start rejecting vague software patents instead of granting them to every patent-troll that asks for one, the world would be a better place...
-Keeps dreaming-
That's the sound of a million stoners, mourning the loss of the man who invented their favourite munchies.
We need to go deeper...
Seriously though, this looks like the work of someone who found the root login prompt and then proceeded to guess/bute-force the password.
I've got 8TB worth of RAID-6 network-attached storage with mechanical drives. The advantage is there'a an industry built around recovering the data on failed mechanical drives, if your data is that valuable, or you have the money you can have a mechanical drive recovered far easier and cheaper than you could ever recover an SSD. Compliment this with a cloud-based backup/storage solution for your most important documents, and you can't go wrong really. SSDs are great for your general purpose laptop or desktop, but they will more readily fail as they age. An SSD failure is far more abrupt and recovery can be very costly and difficult.
Batteries are inherently a difficult component to innovate and develop. Putting aside limitations in chemistry and the costs involved, batteries are also subject to some of the toughest criteria before it'll even be considered viable for use in consumer products, operating temperatures, toxicity, size & weight, availability, longevity, stability & manufacturing scalability are some of the factors that need to be considered before new battery technology can be used. Once a battery meets all of the criteria, history has shown companies are quick to adopt it into their products (Sometimes a little too quickly), plus companies are willing to invest quite a bit of money into R&D of battery technology. Probably the more notable advantage that companies are now starting to really work towards making components more power efficient and not just because being 'green' is a good marketing phrase. At the end of the day though, battery technology is still woefully behind every other technology in a mobile/portable or even technology in a modern car.
Apple historically has been quick to adopt standards and just as quick in dropping their support. Across all of their products Apple is really a mixed bag of supported proprietary & standards-compliant technology. It does strike a good balance between compatibility and pushing their own technology onto the market.