The original Mac democratized computing in a way no one had yet achieved, and was actually priced aggressively, given its bill of materials. With continued innovation AND aggressive pricing, Apple could have blown the PC market wide open, dominated market-share, and been the ones being sued for anti-trust in the 90's instead of Microsoft. Unfortunately for them, Sculley had a different vision based on maximizing exclusivity (and thus per-unit profit) at the cost of market-share, if necessary. Unfortunately, unlike, say, BMW or Rolex, a computer company's fortunes are predicated on getting their product into as many hands as possible.
Saying the Apple Store only stocks 10 SKU's is an exaggeration, even granting that they'll use a single SKU to stand in for multiple, physically identical SKU's on their sales floor. For example, they'll have only 5 different MacBook's on display, but that's because there's only 5 Apple laptop form factors. In reality there are 15-20 SKU's for each "stock" configuration, all of which are stocked in-store. The same concept applies in one way or another to the entirety of their product line. Given the diversity of their product offerings, the Microsoft Store has to pack a much larger number of floor models (and presumably stock fewer variations of each) to adequately represent what is probably a comparable number of product SKU's.
It was actually nice when automakers rolled out RFID car keys about a decade ago, bringing two-factor authentication to the car's ignition. You needed a key with the right RFID, AND the correct mechanical cut to start the car. Two completely different systems had to be defeated to start the car, and it was difficult to do so without arousing suspicion. Now automakers are taking a step back in security, Not only is keyless ignition only single-factor authentication (relying on RFID exclusively), which makes it susceptible to remote attack, but it is also used to autonomously operate the door locks. A thief can steal a compromised car without any suspicious activity.
15 years ago, autobytel.com, a dot com startup that did Internet based sales of new cars, was undone by similar laws in many states which undermined their business model by forcing them to partner with local dealers. Tesla has already been sued by the Massachusetts Automobile Dealers' Association after they opened their first showroom in the Bay State. Turns out MA already had a similar law on the books. The suit was thrown out on the grounds that the dealers association had no standing. Tesla has never granted a sales or service franchise to anyone anywhere in the world, thus it is not possible for any existing dealer to have been subjected to "unfair" competition against them. I'm rooting for Tesla in this case. A victory by them would allow the other manufacturers to begin to unravel the convoluted dealer based sales model and replace it with a more customer friendly (and yes, profitable) direct sales model.
I totally agree. As an Apple fanboi I was severely underwhelmed by the iPad Mini, as well as the iPod Touch line. They're basically shrinky-dinked iPad 2's, which means they're qualitatively equal, if not superior to most $200 Android tablets on the market. Tim Cook doesn't have the brass balls Jobs had to tell shareholders "I've got this" and to suck it. Apple priced it to protect their margins and avoid cannibalizing iPhone and full-size iPad sales. Jobs might very well have priced the iPad Mini at $199 and iPod Touch at $149, which would have cut Android and Kindle Fire off at the knees. Even at $249 the case could be easily made that the price premium is worth it. But at $329 it's a "meh" purchase that leaves plenty of room for Android devices to thrive underneath it as mainstream buyers find themselves unable to justify the $130 Apple premium.
Interestingly, Google is currently selling an Acer Chromebook, using a dual-core Celeron chip and 320GB hard drive for $199 retail. It would appear the hardware would be Windows-capable if you wanted to bother. The first round of $200 netbooks flopped because they didn't change the paradigm. As Steve Jobs said in the iPad launch keynote "They're just cheap laptops". It didn't help that mainstream consumers had never heard of, and were wary of Linux. OEM's fixed this problem by adding Windows, which also required more memory, rust-based storage, a bigger battery to power it all and a larger casing to fit it all in. By the time this Windows tax was baked into the price of these second generation netbooks, the price was within spitting distance of a "real" notebook. Mainstream customers just ponied up the extra $50 to get a real laptop with a much bigger screen, decent keyboard and a DVD burner.
Case in point, my mom is now the proud owner of a Asus Vivobook. Her circa-2008 Dell Inspiron was, by her own account, still more than adequate to her needs. She only bought the new laptop because the hard drive in the old one died. She seriously contemplated just getting an iPad. The only thing that stopped her was my convincing her that using an iPad as your primary device is still a bridge too far...
Despite their efforts, Intel hasn't significantly extended past their position as the CPU supplier for Windows PC's. Which, in a world where potential customers are increasingly buying low cost, non-Windows ARM-based devices, is a problem. Intel must extend into this market or face a long slow slide to irrelevancy as the world migrates to mobile and ARM processors. It doesn't help that Windows system requirements haven't increased since Vista came out in 2007. Users have no reason to upgrade working PC's, or buy more than the bare minimum when circumstance forces a purchase.
Intel can fire sale Atom chips, but they can't achieve price parity with competing non-Windows ARM-based devices without ditching the Windows tax.
True, the 5ESS is what you'd call a "legacy product line" these days, and the DMS-100 is orphaned thanks to the demise of Nortel. Few, if any, new ones being deployed. But there are a lot of them still in service, and they cost a couple million a piece back in the day, in no small part because they were were built to last, with 40 year design lives and extensive redundancy.
On the one hand, I'm not a big fan of functionality being removed from a device, but given it's dependent on a server farm somewhere to run, it stands to reason they'd sunset it eventually. That said, nobody (myself included) used these services. The Wii takes forever to boot up (even from sleep), and I have to figure out where the kids hid the remote to drive it. Then the weather app is only updated every 8 hours, and is telling me the weather of the town two towns away because that's the closest one in their system. It was vaguely neat in 2008 when I got my Wii, but now my wife and I have iPhones and an iPad, which we've found to be slowly replacing all functionality formerly done by our Wii... Main thing we do with it these days is stream Netflix. On the other hand, a lot of people are using their Wii's to stream Netflix... http://techmedianow.blogspot.com/2011/07/25-of-us-netflix-users-using-wii-to.html
XP was the definitive windows OS because it merged the NT and consumer product lines. True, we geeks could get much the same benefits running Win2k, but XP brought true stability (such as we take for granted today) to mainstream PC's for the first time. It was the first version of Windows you could leave running for days without it getting borked up. It also pioneered (or at least mainstreamed) OS-level support for numerous technologies, such as Wifi, USB and disc burning, that had become ubiquitous since the Win9x product line was released.
Win7 continued all the benefits of WinXP, but with vastly improved security features and idiot-proofing. It was the first version of windows you could leave running for months and not have have it rot to unusability.
Win8 is Win7 shitshow when it's loaded on PC's that lack tablet and phone features like touch screens and accelerometers.
Public Transportation: A great way to get from someplace you don't live to someplace you don't work. It fails for this very important reason, and liberals never want to talk about...
Back in the world of analog media, the process of copying content involved cost. Be it paper and toner from photocopying a book, or cassettes to make mix tapes, physical media had to be purchased for each copy. The copying process was time consuming, and limited to a few generations before the end product was completely unusable. These limitations imbued bootlegs with a "scarcity", economically speaking, that allowed commercial sle to successfully continue in the face of bootleg copies.
This "scarcity" is the underpinning of the entire capitalist system. Goods and services require a non-zero amount of finite (scarce) resources to create, imbuing them with value that people pay in order to obtain them. Crucially, in an environment of scarcity, there is some non-zerovincremental cost to creating additional "copies" of an item. The capitalist scheme falls apart with digital data. All the cost is tied to the very first copy, because it can be reproduced infinitely for virtually zero incremental cost, with no loss of quality. DRM is a crude attempt to artificially create scarcity akin to what existed in the analog world...
Don't worry, T-Mobile and AT&T would love to be able to lock down the phones on their network the way Verizon and Sprint do. They can't, because GSM networks authenticate and provision phones entirely via their user-replaceable SIM's. The network must accept any phone with a valid SIM. Thus all mechanisms to lock the phone to a given carrier are necessarily localized to the phone itself. By comparison, CDMA's authentication and provisioning mechanism is integral to the phone. This has the net effect of allowing the carriers to use IMEI or MEID for authentication on the network side (whitelist), in addition to software lock functionality in the handset. Thus, Verizon and Sprint can disallow use of 3rd party equipment, such as unlocked iPhones, even though they include the necessary CDMA hardware. Things will get interesting as Voice over LTE rolls out. We're maybe a year or two away from a LTE-only smartphone, with no fallback CDMA functionality that Sprint/Verizon can rely on for authentication.
The above quoted dual clutch shift times include the computer autonomously rev matching all shifts in both automatic and manual shift mode using the E-throttle for smoothness of shift.
Lockup torque converter. Transmits torque directly, bypassing hydraulics when engaged, which is most of the time in a modern car, in the name of fuel economy.
Also slush boxes do have all those lovely gear selections below "D" such as "2", "1" or "L" which work nicely to provide engine braking on grades. The cruise control in my wife's Caravan routinely downshifts to maintain set speed on downgrades via engine braking.
Ford Fiesta, Focus.
VW Jetta, Golf, GTI, Beetle.
Hyundai Veloster.
Dodge Dart.
All have automated dual clutch manuals. In the case of Ford and Hyundai it is the only "automatic" offered on those models.
The Smart car has a single clutch automated manual as the only transmission.
Businesses have boat-loads of lagacy, proprietary software that will keep them tied to Winblows for the forseeable future. Consumers have no such hang-ups, and are starting to realize that iPad, Kindle Fire or the innumerable Android-based alternatives can meet their web surfing, Facebook, email, media consumption, gaming, etc. needs, at a lower cost and with much greater portability. We're a couple of software updates away from a tablet that is a true, viable replacement for a Windows PC. This is the future M$ is shitting themselves over, and that HP is trying to position themselves for.
The original Wii sold like hotcakes for a number of reasons. The WiiMote-based motion control was novel, and lent itself to casual games, opening a whole new market that, at that point, no one had really addressed. Nintendo, M$ and Sony all launched in time for Christmas 2006, but the Wii undercut XBox 360 and PS3 by HUNDREDS of dollars. $249 bought a complete system including save memory, a pack-in game, and even AA batteries for the Wii Remote. Buy ONE THING and Junior can rip it open Christmas morning and immediately start playing. They even managed (however accidentally) to engineer a Tickle-Me-Elmo style shortage. Nintendo doesn't have any of that this time around. There are no supply constraints to build buzz, and M$ and Sony aren't launching until next Christmas. When they launch, M$ (and possibly Sony, if they're smart) will match Nintendo's pricing. In the meantime, WiiU competes against lame-duck consoles that stubbornly refuse to be notably inferior to it, let alone more expensive than it...
I agree the Nintendo approach to DRM is pretty busted compared to, say, Apple's way with the iTunes store. Locking my purchases to a single piece of hardware is asinine, compared to the Apple iCloud, where everything I've ever bought can magically be on every device I own. My kids can find any game they might ever conceivably want on my iPad, but they have to brandish my iPad at me to get me to input my password to actually complete the transaction. The whole system is built around a knowledge of my personal info...
If nothing else, The Big N knows their demographic. They wanted a DLC system that was fully usable and purchasable by kids, but the Child Online Protection Act is pretty cut and dried. No personal info from kids under 13. You buy DLC on a Wii using "Wii Points" There is a mechanism for buying points on the console using a credit card, but it is also possible to obtain points from a "Wii Points Card" which can be bought, for cash, at places like 7-Eleven and CVS, then added to the console. No way to assure the person on the other end is over 13, so they play it safe...
I imagine the Australian MoD did weigh other options. Problem is there are none, really. The Russians in have gotten their shit together, and sell Su-30 and Su-35 Flankers to damn near anyone with the cash. They're also aggressively developing PAK-FA which is specifically designed to counter the F-22 Raptor. Rosoboronexport is aggressively marketing both planes to every shithole banana republic with the cash. If tou go to war against these 10 years fris not something you want to go toe to toe with in a 4th generation Western fighter like an F18 or a Eurofighter Typhoon. The PAK-FA even less so.
The real problem was that someone had the bright idea to replace the F-16, F/A-18, A-10 AND AV-8B Harrier with a single airframe, and do stealth at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
The original Mac democratized computing in a way no one had yet achieved, and was actually priced aggressively, given its bill of materials. With continued innovation AND aggressive pricing, Apple could have blown the PC market wide open, dominated market-share, and been the ones being sued for anti-trust in the 90's instead of Microsoft. Unfortunately for them, Sculley had a different vision based on maximizing exclusivity (and thus per-unit profit) at the cost of market-share, if necessary. Unfortunately, unlike, say, BMW or Rolex, a computer company's fortunes are predicated on getting their product into as many hands as possible.
Saying the Apple Store only stocks 10 SKU's is an exaggeration, even granting that they'll use a single SKU to stand in for multiple, physically identical SKU's on their sales floor. For example, they'll have only 5 different MacBook's on display, but that's because there's only 5 Apple laptop form factors. In reality there are 15-20 SKU's for each "stock" configuration, all of which are stocked in-store. The same concept applies in one way or another to the entirety of their product line. Given the diversity of their product offerings, the Microsoft Store has to pack a much larger number of floor models (and presumably stock fewer variations of each) to adequately represent what is probably a comparable number of product SKU's.
It was actually nice when automakers rolled out RFID car keys about a decade ago, bringing two-factor authentication to the car's ignition. You needed a key with the right RFID, AND the correct mechanical cut to start the car. Two completely different systems had to be defeated to start the car, and it was difficult to do so without arousing suspicion. Now automakers are taking a step back in security, Not only is keyless ignition only single-factor authentication (relying on RFID exclusively), which makes it susceptible to remote attack, but it is also used to autonomously operate the door locks. A thief can steal a compromised car without any suspicious activity.
15 years ago, autobytel.com, a dot com startup that did Internet based sales of new cars, was undone by similar laws in many states which undermined their business model by forcing them to partner with local dealers. Tesla has already been sued by the Massachusetts Automobile Dealers' Association after they opened their first showroom in the Bay State. Turns out MA already had a similar law on the books. The suit was thrown out on the grounds that the dealers association had no standing. Tesla has never granted a sales or service franchise to anyone anywhere in the world, thus it is not possible for any existing dealer to have been subjected to "unfair" competition against them. I'm rooting for Tesla in this case. A victory by them would allow the other manufacturers to begin to unravel the convoluted dealer based sales model and replace it with a more customer friendly (and yes, profitable) direct sales model.
I totally agree. As an Apple fanboi I was severely underwhelmed by the iPad Mini, as well as the iPod Touch line. They're basically shrinky-dinked iPad 2's, which means they're qualitatively equal, if not superior to most $200 Android tablets on the market. Tim Cook doesn't have the brass balls Jobs had to tell shareholders "I've got this" and to suck it. Apple priced it to protect their margins and avoid cannibalizing iPhone and full-size iPad sales. Jobs might very well have priced the iPad Mini at $199 and iPod Touch at $149, which would have cut Android and Kindle Fire off at the knees. Even at $249 the case could be easily made that the price premium is worth it. But at $329 it's a "meh" purchase that leaves plenty of room for Android devices to thrive underneath it as mainstream buyers find themselves unable to justify the $130 Apple premium.
Interestingly, Google is currently selling an Acer Chromebook, using a dual-core Celeron chip and 320GB hard drive for $199 retail. It would appear the hardware would be Windows-capable if you wanted to bother. The first round of $200 netbooks flopped because they didn't change the paradigm. As Steve Jobs said in the iPad launch keynote "They're just cheap laptops". It didn't help that mainstream consumers had never heard of, and were wary of Linux. OEM's fixed this problem by adding Windows, which also required more memory, rust-based storage, a bigger battery to power it all and a larger casing to fit it all in. By the time this Windows tax was baked into the price of these second generation netbooks, the price was within spitting distance of a "real" notebook. Mainstream customers just ponied up the extra $50 to get a real laptop with a much bigger screen, decent keyboard and a DVD burner.
Case in point, my mom is now the proud owner of a Asus Vivobook. Her circa-2008 Dell Inspiron was, by her own account, still more than adequate to her needs. She only bought the new laptop because the hard drive in the old one died. She seriously contemplated just getting an iPad. The only thing that stopped her was my convincing her that using an iPad as your primary device is still a bridge too far...
Intel can fire sale Atom chips, but they can't achieve price parity with competing non-Windows ARM-based devices without ditching the Windows tax.
True, the 5ESS is what you'd call a "legacy product line" these days, and the DMS-100 is orphaned thanks to the demise of Nortel. Few, if any, new ones being deployed. But there are a lot of them still in service, and they cost a couple million a piece back in the day, in no small part because they were were built to last, with 40 year design lives and extensive redundancy.
Ask Tesla about that. The Roadster was powered by 6853 laptop battery cells. The new model S uses a similar design with even more cells.
On the one hand, I'm not a big fan of functionality being removed from a device, but given it's dependent on a server farm somewhere to run, it stands to reason they'd sunset it eventually. That said, nobody (myself included) used these services. The Wii takes forever to boot up (even from sleep), and I have to figure out where the kids hid the remote to drive it. Then the weather app is only updated every 8 hours, and is telling me the weather of the town two towns away because that's the closest one in their system. It was vaguely neat in 2008 when I got my Wii, but now my wife and I have iPhones and an iPad, which we've found to be slowly replacing all functionality formerly done by our Wii... Main thing we do with it these days is stream Netflix. On the other hand, a lot of people are using their Wii's to stream Netflix... http://techmedianow.blogspot.com/2011/07/25-of-us-netflix-users-using-wii-to.html
XP was the definitive windows OS because it merged the NT and consumer product lines. True, we geeks could get much the same benefits running Win2k, but XP brought true stability (such as we take for granted today) to mainstream PC's for the first time. It was the first version of Windows you could leave running for days without it getting borked up. It also pioneered (or at least mainstreamed) OS-level support for numerous technologies, such as Wifi, USB and disc burning, that had become ubiquitous since the Win9x product line was released. Win7 continued all the benefits of WinXP, but with vastly improved security features and idiot-proofing. It was the first version of windows you could leave running for months and not have have it rot to unusability. Win8 is Win7 shitshow when it's loaded on PC's that lack tablet and phone features like touch screens and accelerometers.
Public Transportation: A great way to get from someplace you don't live to someplace you don't work. It fails for this very important reason, and liberals never want to talk about...
It's also worth noting that Tesla has publicly committed to paying off its ATVM loans 5 years ahead of time. Of course, the DOE is making them pay off the loans early, but that's another matter... http://www.teslamotors.com/no_NO/blog/early-repayment-tesla%E2%80%99s-atvm-loan http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/update-elon-musk
Back in the world of analog media, the process of copying content involved cost. Be it paper and toner from photocopying a book, or cassettes to make mix tapes, physical media had to be purchased for each copy. The copying process was time consuming, and limited to a few generations before the end product was completely unusable. These limitations imbued bootlegs with a "scarcity", economically speaking, that allowed commercial sle to successfully continue in the face of bootleg copies. This "scarcity" is the underpinning of the entire capitalist system. Goods and services require a non-zero amount of finite (scarce) resources to create, imbuing them with value that people pay in order to obtain them. Crucially, in an environment of scarcity, there is some non-zerovincremental cost to creating additional "copies" of an item. The capitalist scheme falls apart with digital data. All the cost is tied to the very first copy, because it can be reproduced infinitely for virtually zero incremental cost, with no loss of quality. DRM is a crude attempt to artificially create scarcity akin to what existed in the analog world...
Poor people getting trapped would require that they are actually working for a living, which, in the US, is more often than not, not the case...
Don't worry, T-Mobile and AT&T would love to be able to lock down the phones on their network the way Verizon and Sprint do. They can't, because GSM networks authenticate and provision phones entirely via their user-replaceable SIM's. The network must accept any phone with a valid SIM. Thus all mechanisms to lock the phone to a given carrier are necessarily localized to the phone itself. By comparison, CDMA's authentication and provisioning mechanism is integral to the phone. This has the net effect of allowing the carriers to use IMEI or MEID for authentication on the network side (whitelist), in addition to software lock functionality in the handset. Thus, Verizon and Sprint can disallow use of 3rd party equipment, such as unlocked iPhones, even though they include the necessary CDMA hardware. Things will get interesting as Voice over LTE rolls out. We're maybe a year or two away from a LTE-only smartphone, with no fallback CDMA functionality that Sprint/Verizon can rely on for authentication.
The above quoted dual clutch shift times include the computer autonomously rev matching all shifts in both automatic and manual shift mode using the E-throttle for smoothness of shift.
Lockup torque converter. Transmits torque directly, bypassing hydraulics when engaged, which is most of the time in a modern car, in the name of fuel economy. Also slush boxes do have all those lovely gear selections below "D" such as "2", "1" or "L" which work nicely to provide engine braking on grades. The cruise control in my wife's Caravan routinely downshifts to maintain set speed on downgrades via engine braking.
Ford Fiesta, Focus. VW Jetta, Golf, GTI, Beetle. Hyundai Veloster. Dodge Dart. All have automated dual clutch manuals. In the case of Ford and Hyundai it is the only "automatic" offered on those models. The Smart car has a single clutch automated manual as the only transmission.
Businesses have boat-loads of lagacy, proprietary software that will keep them tied to Winblows for the forseeable future. Consumers have no such hang-ups, and are starting to realize that iPad, Kindle Fire or the innumerable Android-based alternatives can meet their web surfing, Facebook, email, media consumption, gaming, etc. needs, at a lower cost and with much greater portability. We're a couple of software updates away from a tablet that is a true, viable replacement for a Windows PC. This is the future M$ is shitting themselves over, and that HP is trying to position themselves for.
The original Wii sold like hotcakes for a number of reasons. The WiiMote-based motion control was novel, and lent itself to casual games, opening a whole new market that, at that point, no one had really addressed. Nintendo, M$ and Sony all launched in time for Christmas 2006, but the Wii undercut XBox 360 and PS3 by HUNDREDS of dollars. $249 bought a complete system including save memory, a pack-in game, and even AA batteries for the Wii Remote. Buy ONE THING and Junior can rip it open Christmas morning and immediately start playing. They even managed (however accidentally) to engineer a Tickle-Me-Elmo style shortage. Nintendo doesn't have any of that this time around. There are no supply constraints to build buzz, and M$ and Sony aren't launching until next Christmas. When they launch, M$ (and possibly Sony, if they're smart) will match Nintendo's pricing. In the meantime, WiiU competes against lame-duck consoles that stubbornly refuse to be notably inferior to it, let alone more expensive than it...
I agree the Nintendo approach to DRM is pretty busted compared to, say, Apple's way with the iTunes store. Locking my purchases to a single piece of hardware is asinine, compared to the Apple iCloud, where everything I've ever bought can magically be on every device I own. My kids can find any game they might ever conceivably want on my iPad, but they have to brandish my iPad at me to get me to input my password to actually complete the transaction. The whole system is built around a knowledge of my personal info... If nothing else, The Big N knows their demographic. They wanted a DLC system that was fully usable and purchasable by kids, but the Child Online Protection Act is pretty cut and dried. No personal info from kids under 13. You buy DLC on a Wii using "Wii Points" There is a mechanism for buying points on the console using a credit card, but it is also possible to obtain points from a "Wii Points Card" which can be bought, for cash, at places like 7-Eleven and CVS, then added to the console. No way to assure the person on the other end is over 13, so they play it safe...
Yes but in the case of getting sidetracked at work, the activity you're being sidetracked into is much more likely to also be work related.
I imagine the Australian MoD did weigh other options. Problem is there are none, really. The Russians in have gotten their shit together, and sell Su-30 and Su-35 Flankers to damn near anyone with the cash. They're also aggressively developing PAK-FA which is specifically designed to counter the F-22 Raptor. Rosoboronexport is aggressively marketing both planes to every shithole banana republic with the cash. If tou go to war against these 10 years fris not something you want to go toe to toe with in a 4th generation Western fighter like an F18 or a Eurofighter Typhoon. The PAK-FA even less so. The real problem was that someone had the bright idea to replace the F-16, F/A-18, A-10 AND AV-8B Harrier with a single airframe, and do stealth at the same time.