So shrink your market to a niche and monopolize that instead? The goal is still to crush all competitors and achieve monopoly position even if it's only a smaller market segment.
Depends on the endgame. Ideally, the company would love to become a monopoly. However, in the tech world, that's very difficult as new disruptive technologies come in all the time that upset your plans. E.g., Apple and the iPhone, which ended up screwing over every "old smartphone maker" (PalmOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, RIM), and paving the way for new (iOS, Android, Windows Phone,...). So in tech, achieving a monopoly is very difficult.
However, one thing you can do is try to achieve second best - like Apple. You care more for maximizing the profits (achieving 100% marketshare is hard - and the last few % can cost all profit just trying to get it).. So instead you skim off the "cream of the crop" and leave the rest to fight it out.
Like say, computers - Apple has absolutely no entrant in the netbook market, nor the low-cost (sub $500) market. However, by concentrating on the more expensive computers, they make more money - Dell has to sell 10 times as many PCs as Apple just to make the same profit.
Ditto iOS - the iPhone isn't the dominant smartphone platform anymore (it's Android), but Apple makes tons of money selling just a few phones for higher prices, while LG/Samsung/HTC/Nokia/RIM have to fight it out. Sure they have high end phones that directly compete with the iPhone, but they have a million more low end crap (featurephone and Android). I'm sure for every nicely profitable Galaxy S II phone Samsung sells, they sell 100 barely profitable Galaxy Slides and such. (Probably relying on customer confusion - I saw "Galaxy S II blah" on free with contract, and got excited, but then it was some small piece of crap that wasn't the flagship).
Apple's niche is to concentrate on people who have disposable income, and let everyone else fight in the race to the bottom to get marketshare. Tablets are popular and netbooks dying because netbooks were very low margin items compared to tablets. It was so bad netbooks started creeping up in prices, and now netbooks are relegated to just a couple of models now.
And yes, it also means Apple will cannibalise its own products in order to get a more profitable or desirable product out the door. (No doubt the iPad is hurting Apple's low end Mac sales).
In a free market, the ultimate objective of every company is monopoly and the untold wealth that position brings. It is a game that everyone must play, but none may be permitted to win.
Actually, plenty of companies are monopolies and are often blessed with that status. And even more so if you include virtual monopolies (where you don't have 100%, but you have enough that competitors are at a disadvantage purely because of interoperability - e.g., Windows and its API set, Office and its fileformat - you have compeitors, but they aren't completely compatible and thus everyone needs Office and therefore Windows).
The real protection is not protection from being a monopoly (if you're the first to invent some widget, how are compeitors going to come in before you sell it? Until they do, you're a monopoly), but the protection is required to avoid taking one monopoly and leveraging it to get monopoly somewhere else.
E.g., iTunes was a monopoly initially as it was the only place to buy mainstream music. There was a brief period of concern because of the iPod and iTunes Store monopoly (potential abuse), but that was mostly averted by "you can buy a CD, and play MP3s - you are not limited to buying music from us" (and eventually led to the removal of DRM so Amazon could sell for iPod).
You're not disappointed with the iPhone, you're disappointed with Smartphones, and quite frankly you've just disabled most of the things that makes it smart to begin with.
Here's a novel thought, rather than buying a shiny phone with a beefy CPU, hardware acceleration, a phone which could change the way you work forever, why not buy a feature phone if battery life is your most important goal?
I find it funny people are complaining that they only get 4 days between charges. What do people do, play Angry Birds in their sleep? The 4 or more hours you're asleep should charge most smartphones from dead to fully charged. All it takes is putting the phone on charge when you go to bed and it'll be fully charged when you wake up. Maybe a couple days or so is still decent if you forget to charge it overnight once in a while.
Though, for bad battery life, I have to admit the Galaxy Nexus I have seems to have battery issues. I can go from fully charged to dead in less than 24 hours. Though apparently it's firmware issues (the firmware is carrier specific still - though you can always restore official Google images) and an update can fix it.
I can't do it as it's not my phone, so I can't do anything that'll ruin the phone.
The SOPA issue was raised at the recent GOP debate, and all four candidates spoke against it.
Actually, the reason why is the major conservative think-tanks made it a major issue. They realized that all it would take would be a left-wing liberal hippie to go and claim copyright infringement and knock them off the 'net, which to them is quite dangerous.
So they made it a priority to oppose the bill and told all the GOP candidates that yes, it really does matter to them.
It's isn't just about piracy, it's about censorship, and you can bet there's going to be a LOT of people wanting ot misuse the power to censor people they don't like.
If you're lucky, the cloud provider may provide you with a one-time access to your account, but isn't it far safer to assume that if your cloud provider goes down, you've lost everything you put in? Not just data, either - if you've prepaid your account, you probably lost all that stored value as well.
Cloud storage providers especially. What happens if your hard drive dies? You lose the data. What happens if your backup tapes fail - you've lost the backup. What happens if your dropbox/skydrive/etc. disappear? You've lost your files.
All those XDA Developer links? Gone. hope the original authors are still around to upload them elsewhere or that someone downloaded it and can upload it.
Cloud providers make us lazy - we think "it'll always be around and I can grab it later". Turns out later can disappear - perhaps temporary (e.g., your or their internet connection dies), or permanently. But it's really just the same as storing files locally - there's a chance the storage may fail.
Tell me, how anyone was able to parse that document in 4 seconds, place the trade, and have it go through after hours.
You do realize that automated trading platforms do lexical analysis, right? They get a copy of all press releases and electronically decide if it's good or bad and do trades based on it. Even basic lexical analysis can tell you a statement of "loss" or "failed to meet expectations" is generally bad news (SELL!), while "higher than expected revenue" and "largest profit" is good news (BUY!).
In fact, it's possible all statements about earnings and such are couched in rather standard language to comply with regulations - trying to weasel word your way out of saying loss could be seen as trying to decieve the public.
What good is being an inventor when a patent is practically impossible for someone who isn't filthy rich to obtain and defend? The rich not only have priveleges you don't, they have rights you don't. Actually, this is one of the subthemes of the aformentioned book.
Which is why the whole "open source" movement is a great equalizer. If you got an innovation but no money, publish the heck out of it, which makes it ineligible for patenting. (Well, in the US you get a year, but most places the act of publishing or making it public before the patent is applied for makes it ineligible).
Don't let it sit in some untraversed corner of the web, but make it known as far and wide as possible. If it's particularly cool, you can get others working on it as well and as they adapt it, get them to publish everything.
That's the whole "maker" movement - it's really a more publicized version of the DIY thing that people were doing. Just some created cool blocks that increase the ease at which to do stuff (Arduino, for example, makes it possible to add in a simple microcontroller to your project, which is something most projects require these days).
Of course, the other bit is to get people to publish - companies will pay for innovations to lock it up and patent it, so the flip side is to have it published far and wide and collaborate and share (which is why it's building in strength - everyone's wanting to share).
The TL;DR version of all these articles is basically that Walmart demands suppliers hit a price point ("We'll pay you $x for each one"). Great if you can hit it, but if you can't, you have to do special "walmart production runs" which use lower quality materials in order to hit that price point - different accessory kits, cheaper lower end materials, maybe even a whole walmart-specific product line.
If you're not careful, this can easily lead to a tarnishing of your brand
Another tactic is the consolidation route - you get the shelf space, but walmart only pays you when someone buys it - so if it doesn't sell, it's up to you to either move it or retrieve the product.
It makes for a more interesting time shopping at walmart though. You can tell which items are high-margin because walmart offers some really good deals (e.g., toys 40-50% off regular). Which items are built to a price (e.g., tools) and which items warlmart has no pricing control over (e.g., electronics - games/dvds/etc - you'll find walmart's price is cheapest, but only by 16 cents or so).
And you can also tell what suppliers cut in order to meet the price - perhaps a smaller amount of consumables, or lower value per dollar (e.g., less pickles per jar). Or even note down part and model numbers and see which are "walmart specials".
Can't Apple reject your app if it has been written in or translated from anything but Objective-C?
It's not a rejection criterion anymore. Apps can be coded in any language (including Flash), with the exception that no external code may be downloaded. C++ was always accepted, but JavaScript, Flash, C# are all acceptable.
The general method is to stick all your core logic in a C++ module and then interface to that the UI code. Then cross platform porting involves rewriting the small UI core. Obj-C can call C++ objects trivially (native function call). For Android, it's done through JNI, but supported via the NDK. For Windows Phone, it's a bit more difficult since the core may need rewriting in C#.
iOS encourages MVC development, and doing it properly means it can be trivially ported.
Wait, it's okay to share your Netflix password...?
I can think of at least three reasons why that's a bad idea.
Well, if they're cohabitating with you, then maybe you do want to share the Netflix password because you want to watch a movie together. That is, unless you set your Netflix client to remember your password for you so your significant other could use Netflix without knowing the password.
And thank god for that. Forget the millions of drivers for whom GPS is a convenience; LightSquared would spell an end to the major advanced in aviation navigation systems and the accompanying time- and fuel-efficiency gains that have come with it. Check out Canadaian airline WestJet's use of so-called "RNAV" approaches into airports; their use of GPS in those systems saves them millions of dollars in fuel every year, plus gives them and their passengers the benefit of faster trips. No more bouncing around through the 3000 or so VHF Omnidirectional Radio beacons that dot North America.
Actually, you mean RNP (Required Navigation Performance) which are a set of approaches that are more efficient, but require that the plane have onboard a minimum set of equipment. And one of this is dual RAIM-locked GPS units.
A RAIM-locked GPS is a receiver that can see more than the 4 minimum GPS satellites - and all aviation GPSes have utilities that can take a location (destination) and time and calculate whether or not a RAIM lock is achievable (it depends heavily on the satellite configuration at that point in time).
Primary purpose of RAIM is to help the GPS decide if a satellite is "out of whack", which is essential if you need to figure out your position accurately.
RNAV is slightly different - it requires a flight management system that basically generates a GPS-like path by taking in multiple navigation sources like VORs and NDBs and calculating a virtual track based on your position relative to those navaids. So you're not flying navaid to navaid, you're flying a course through but using the navaids to cross-reference your position continually.
These days, a combination of RNAV, INS (Inertial navigation system) and GPS are used altogether to get very accurate positioning required for RNP. (RNP dictates the minimum performance your navigation equipment can have - you can always use better equipment to fly the RNP approaches more precisely).
You would be amazed to see the difference between the sky above a city or town and what it is like out in the country well away from lights but also from air pollution. When I go out of Silicon Valley, where you can see some stars, down to Pacheco Pass in the mountains southeast of the area, the difference is immense. You can see the Milky Way in all its glory, and then you realize what you see in the city is like having a gauze bandage around your head. Once the Illuminati kill off 99% of the population, those skies are going to be spectacular! Well worth it, I say.
Actually, you don't have to go into the sticks. You just need to go *up*.
One of the things I did during my private pilot training was night flights. Living in an area that's fairly heavily developed, once you get about 3000' AGL, the stars started coming out. And since the cockpit's quite dim, your eyes are in night vision mode.
It's actually quite nice, and a good way for those of us who just don't like camping without modern conveniences.
Most of the light pollution's at ground level, once you climbed your way above it, it doesn't interfere so much.
Why would we see it at all? TFA lists no practical advantage of using the material -- it was just an art project. With no advantage as a textile, it would only be useful as a luxury item anyway, and while I've no doubt that there's an eccentric millionaire or two about who might be interested in such a garment, it's no real loss for the rest of us that we're "stuck" with traditional materials.
Spider silk is one of the strongest materials around. With an equivalent diameter, it beats out steel, carbon fiber and other materials that are used in construction.
The only problem is that spider silk is extremely hard to come by - spiders don't produce much of it, and definitely not enough to be of practical use right now.
There's a ton of work in researching ways to get more production ready volumes of the stuff. Synthetic silk, genetically modified silkworms (used for making regular silk), etc.
It'll be too expensive for clothing, but as a cloth for composites, it's definitely got appeal.
Who are the folks buying high-end processors? Us! Ppl who know their OC business. This is no loss and all gain for Intel in a product category whose ability to differentiate is practically nil for the target savvy audience. Good on them for throwing us a worthwhile promotional bone.
The high-end processors have unlocked dividers. Sure you can overclock the cheaper chips but that involves running everything at the faster speed. In the old days, that included your PCI and AGP busses, and it could mean that spiffy new videocard forced your system to run slower because it couldn't handle the faster clock. Or memory, which was often also a limiting factor in clock speeds. Heck, you often had PC fun because the hard drive would get corrupted from the faster clock - so things worked, but a week later you're battling complete data loss, and everything works just fine otherwise (there's nothing wrong with the hard drive - it just couldn't talk SATA or IDE that fast).
Intel has marketed for a number of years the unlocked divider chips as "Extreme Edition" - you can set the divider any way you want and run the busses at a normal speed.
Otherwise you might have ot invest in faster RAM and looser timings and all that jazz. Still possible, but it's just easier getting wild overclocks with the unlocked processors than locked ones.
I have a similar story from the customer side. Bought my sister a nice all in one 5 disc CD stereo with cassette back in the days when such things were not cheap, because my aunt worked there I got a slight discount. Two weeks after Christmas it broke. The Radio and cassettes were fine but the CD's wouldn't play, figure it was within the month so back to the store for a replacement right?
Wrong, they made me send it for warranty repair.
What happened was Future Shop greatly increased their customer service sometime in the 2000's. Probably sometime after the dot-com bust.
Prior to that, it was just awful at customer service, then something happened and post crash their customer service actually increased (they were actually friendly and willing to exchange and such).
I don't know what happened, but they did go from being one of the worst places to shop to being actually decent. The purchase of Future Shop by Best Buy (Canada) actually happened a few years later.
As for buying computer parts - most of the stores remind me of the old Future Shop days. If you can get a return/exchange, you're lucky. Especially so if they only ding you 15% restocking. And forget it if you buy a product that someone returned fraudulently - they assume you did it and you're out the $500.
Interestingly, though, online shopping isn't that big with Canadians - sure it's growing, but the retail selection at Future Shop/Best Buy Canada is a lot better than down in the US. Probably because Amazon sucks in Canada (books, CDs, DVDs, and even less selection of electornics than Future Shop/Best Buy) so there's no real online megaretailer to buy stuff from. Plus prices don't tend to be wildly better than retail - once shipping and taxes are factored in.
Perhaps it's also why Future Shop/Best Buy Canada are doing much better than in the US.
This is precisely why packages should only be sold as refurbished and/or repaired items, not full-price "new" items. You never know why a device was really returned -- it should ALWAYS be opened to inspect the contents and verify that there are no missing parts or pieces.
I blame the stores for a bad process designed to maximize profits.
True, but then again, is it fair to the store that has to lose basically the profit off the sale because they have to market it as "open box"? Think about it - they have to sell it at a lower price because it could've been used, and if it's not low enough, everyone would just buy the brand-new-from-factory box over an open one.
In fact, it's this reason why stores have restocking fees. Effectively, the loss they make by doing it open box is taken from you, the customer (mark it down 10%, charge you 15% restocking fee, the 5% is kept as profit).
Sure, you can justify 15% as a "you should've done your research" fee, but then again, when your significant other buys you the wrong thing as a gift...
Finally - in Canada, most stores do this. Even Apple stores. I've purchased several products and returned them sealed and they accepted it. I never want to have to return anything to a US store, with all those restocking fees, even a computer parts store (been hit there as well).
But thanks to these bastards I'm no longer going to be able to enjoy these priviledges. (OTOH, maybe I can score a brand new item at discount because it had to be checked).
Also, these guys would have to be really good at shrinkwrapping. Apple products are shrinkwrapped quite unusually (but in traditional Apple fashion, very neatly). Most products are done by putting the product on the film, wrapping the film over the top, and sealing the three sides.
For Apple products, the shrinkwrap has the corners cut off (basically the shrinkwrap appears pre-cut for the item and the edges are sealed like a clamshell of shrinkwrap.). It's one thing I've seen of Apple products - they lack the traditional shrinkwrap "ears". It's really quite a nice bit of attention to detail that Apple is known for. Even if you're not a fan, inspect some shrinkwrapped Apple products (iPad, iPhone - iPods are plastic clamshells, and Macs are cardboard box with seal). It's really an impressive piece of work when it's gotta be mass produced.
Ideas are the most valuable commodity on the market today. Maintaining and increasing wealth is a simple matter of maintaining and increasing control over that which is valuable.
Actually, ideas are a dime a dozen. You probably come up with 10 in-between waking up and getting into work every day.
The real money's not in ideas, but in the expression of them. An idea for a book is worthless - the actual written story becomes valuable. An idea for a movie, a song, ditto - worthless until they are filmed or recorded. Ideas for inventions, ditto - "I wish someone would invent something that..." - worthless. Actually making it - that's valuable.
And that's what people want to control - an idea costs nothing and people come up with dozens daily individually. But taking that idea to completion takes work, and controlling that work is power.
CES is not open to the public (the CONSUMERS that buy their wares) so therefore, it is dead to me. I couldn't care less what happened at their industry frat party.
It's closed to the general public, but with a little effort, it's trivially easy to get in. Just say you're a buyer for scottbomb, Inc. and they'll let you right in. ("Buyer" typically means someone who procures the necessary supplies, but it can also mean, well, you the consumer).
In the end, it's really a "no children" kind of rule. Anyone can get in with a little effort. Anyone not interested in doing that effort, they don't want to target (they want interested people).
Of course, some exhibitors have an exclusive policy so you may not be able to see everything as they only let a very select group of people in (usually ones who have signed an NDA before) and are showing in private booths.
Re:Missing the point AND arrogant. Nice twofer.
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SOPA and PIPA So Far
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And Fark, Reddit, and Wired are for digital neophytes who aren't well informed about the topic? Because they all participated to some degree, and if it's only a 'nuisance' for a place with informed readers to participate in a protest then the readers of those websites are either much stupider than ours or their editors much dumber than ours...
It's not about informing. It's about awareness. Most of the public just doesn't know nor care what PIPA or SOPA is. And the general public is more likely to be reading Fark/Reddit/Wired than Slashdot.
The tech community lives in its own little island assuming everyone knows or cares for tech. They don't, and it's why Apple can package up a bunch of "old hat" technologies and still make it seem magical to the public (remember the old saying "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic").
Of all the protests though, Google and Wikipedia are probably the best places to have the largest impact because most of the (uninformed) public uses them.
And you have to frame things such that people care. ACTA for example - people just didn't care. So the wiser people re-framed it as "The law that could take away your iPod" and people started taking notice. Inaccurate? Possibly, but it had the necessary effect of bringing awareless to people who would otherwise skip it.
Dunno if I'd include NeXT in that list. It was bought out by a bigger richer company that wanted its technology and IP, and I'm posting using that technology right now.
Actually, I'm surprised Apple didn't make a move. RIM's got a few good patents in their portfolio. One of their biggest is the keyboard patent (yes, the thumb board is patented, which is why the thumbboard on blackberries just feels a LOT better than any other thumbboard around. Too bad that the stuff around the keyboard sucks, though).
Besides that, though, there are other nice patents RIM holds, mostly FRAND ones, but those are valuable in the sense that Apple can wave those around when other FRAND patent holders demand access to Apple's non-FRAND patents instead of direct cash licensing. (Yes, Apple's been trying to license those 3G patents, and the patent holders have refused to take the money, wanting Apple's patents instead)
You could not be farther from truth. The actual problem in all serious CGI production efforts (Final Fantasy, LoTR, Pixar movies etc.) is not the raw processing power, but the sheer amount of data processed. In 2001, the numbers were something like 1-15 hours per frame, with an average of 2-3 hours or so, and with 1-2 GB of scene data (RIB files per animation frame) and typically several GB of texture data.
These days it's even bigger. In 2007, in Transformers, rendering a single frame with one bot in it took hours. Rendering the whole gathering at the observatory took around 25 hours per frame. The total models only took around 2TB or so of data.
The 2011 final Transformer film though exceeded that data amount - I think it was aorund 200TB or so, and despite newer equipment, render times stayed the same - 8+ hours for a normal frame, days for a more complex one.
The only good part is it's a stupidly parallel problem since each cluster can render a frame independently of each other.
Not forgetting of course that apple didn't steal anything from Xerox.
Actually, Apple didn't steal it. Jobs licensed it from Xerox in exchange for Apple stock.
(Apple also improved on it because the Xerox Alto didn't have overlapping windows,and Woz came up with regions to handle updating overlapping windows. Woz subsequently got in a plane crash (in his Piper) and told Jobs (who visited him in the hospital) that he still knew how to do regions. Later, when Woz talked to Xerox, he found out that no, they didn't handle overlapping windows at all. So Woz got a patent on it)
Ethical including discriminating against startups and home-based family businesses? (source) How is a new video game development company supposed to become established in the video game industry in the first place? At least Microsoft has Xbox Live Indie Games, whose barrier to entry isn't any higher than, say, iOS development.
Newsflash - if you want to sell a game on Xbox360 or PS3, you have to agree to terms very similar to that! (Wii SDK is cheaper at $5000 or so, while PS3 and Xbox360 is over $10,000, each.). Console development ain't cheap.
As for "new game companies" - most are started by veterans in the industry - turnover is huge, and most only stay for a year or two before leaving for another company. So there's a lot of inbreeding.
The only thing Microsoft has is it's the only console manufacturer offering (limited) homebrew development (Xbox Live Indie Arcade). Sony used too, then got scared away (i.e., OtherOS). And yes, they're limited.
Newbies wanting to "break in" have to cut their teeth first. Primary way in the past is via the PC (where indie gaming is huge, and big game companies are slowly departing). Get out a good game and you'd be approached. Do it near the end of a cycle and you can be lavished with all sorts of incentives as maufacturers want to get a wide range of launch games in.
These days, you still have the very popular PC option. But you also have the iOS option (and Apple's policies are far more lenient than Sony, Microsoft OR Nintendo's - the approval process for the console is far more arbitrary, harsh and secretive (you rarely hear of rejected games)). Android's a possibility as well.
Which is why I wonder how they could possibly have gotten approval from the labels to do that. They have shut down similar services in the past that provided less service.
Apple's paying the labels for it. They paid a good chunk ($250M?) for the priviledge of setting up iTunes Match, and an unspecified sum every year in licensing fees. That's all it takes. The other lockers (Amazon, Googke, etc)? They're not paying a thing. Legal right or wrong, if you pay up, they leave you alone.
And while it could lead to music laundering, do remember that all the matched tracks "disappear" when you cancel iTunes match. What I mean is that you lose the right to download the higher quality matched music - the m4a files that are already on your hard drive will stay (iTunes won't delete them). So if you want to cancel, remember to download from iCloud before doing so.
An interesting thing - iTunes Match will PRESERVE metadata. It doesn't overwrite any metadata in matched files with that from the iTunes Store. So if the matched songs all have "RELEASED by MusicWaReZ!" in the id3 tags, the m4a's will also have that. (The upside is that your careful cataloging work won't be disturbed). Of course, this also leads to change instability where updating metadata may not get synced back to iCloud.
What I'd like to know is if "Complete my Album" works with iTunes match (I'm guessing it doesn't). That would allow those of us who bought CDs and ripped them to get at the "digital album bonus" by simply paying for the missing track or two and such.
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Depends on the endgame. Ideally, the company would love to become a monopoly. However, in the tech world, that's very difficult as new disruptive technologies come in all the time that upset your plans. E.g., Apple and the iPhone, which ended up screwing over every "old smartphone maker" (PalmOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, RIM), and paving the way for new (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, ...). So in tech, achieving a monopoly is very difficult.
However, one thing you can do is try to achieve second best - like Apple. You care more for maximizing the profits (achieving 100% marketshare is hard - and the last few % can cost all profit just trying to get it).. So instead you skim off the "cream of the crop" and leave the rest to fight it out.
Like say, computers - Apple has absolutely no entrant in the netbook market, nor the low-cost (sub $500) market. However, by concentrating on the more expensive computers, they make more money - Dell has to sell 10 times as many PCs as Apple just to make the same profit.
Ditto iOS - the iPhone isn't the dominant smartphone platform anymore (it's Android), but Apple makes tons of money selling just a few phones for higher prices, while LG/Samsung/HTC/Nokia/RIM have to fight it out. Sure they have high end phones that directly compete with the iPhone, but they have a million more low end crap (featurephone and Android). I'm sure for every nicely profitable Galaxy S II phone Samsung sells, they sell 100 barely profitable Galaxy Slides and such. (Probably relying on customer confusion - I saw "Galaxy S II blah" on free with contract, and got excited, but then it was some small piece of crap that wasn't the flagship).
Apple's niche is to concentrate on people who have disposable income, and let everyone else fight in the race to the bottom to get marketshare. Tablets are popular and netbooks dying because netbooks were very low margin items compared to tablets. It was so bad netbooks started creeping up in prices, and now netbooks are relegated to just a couple of models now.
And yes, it also means Apple will cannibalise its own products in order to get a more profitable or desirable product out the door. (No doubt the iPad is hurting Apple's low end Mac sales).
Actually, plenty of companies are monopolies and are often blessed with that status. And even more so if you include virtual monopolies (where you don't have 100%, but you have enough that competitors are at a disadvantage purely because of interoperability - e.g., Windows and its API set, Office and its fileformat - you have compeitors, but they aren't completely compatible and thus everyone needs Office and therefore Windows).
The real protection is not protection from being a monopoly (if you're the first to invent some widget, how are compeitors going to come in before you sell it? Until they do, you're a monopoly), but the protection is required to avoid taking one monopoly and leveraging it to get monopoly somewhere else.
E.g., iTunes was a monopoly initially as it was the only place to buy mainstream music. There was a brief period of concern because of the iPod and iTunes Store monopoly (potential abuse), but that was mostly averted by "you can buy a CD, and play MP3s - you are not limited to buying music from us" (and eventually led to the removal of DRM so Amazon could sell for iPod).
Yeah, I know GCC is just too damn proprietary with its fascist GPL, and definitely hard to work with, I mean you have to use the command line.
Too bad no one uses GCC at all.
(And yes, if you want, there's also LLVM, also open-source and "proprietary").
I find it funny people are complaining that they only get 4 days between charges. What do people do, play Angry Birds in their sleep? The 4 or more hours you're asleep should charge most smartphones from dead to fully charged. All it takes is putting the phone on charge when you go to bed and it'll be fully charged when you wake up. Maybe a couple days or so is still decent if you forget to charge it overnight once in a while.
Though, for bad battery life, I have to admit the Galaxy Nexus I have seems to have battery issues. I can go from fully charged to dead in less than 24 hours. Though apparently it's firmware issues (the firmware is carrier specific still - though you can always restore official Google images) and an update can fix it.
I can't do it as it's not my phone, so I can't do anything that'll ruin the phone.
Actually, the reason why is the major conservative think-tanks made it a major issue. They realized that all it would take would be a left-wing liberal hippie to go and claim copyright infringement and knock them off the 'net, which to them is quite dangerous.
So they made it a priority to oppose the bill and told all the GOP candidates that yes, it really does matter to them.
It's isn't just about piracy, it's about censorship, and you can bet there's going to be a LOT of people wanting ot misuse the power to censor people they don't like.
Source.
It goes away. Hope you had a backup.
If you're lucky, the cloud provider may provide you with a one-time access to your account, but isn't it far safer to assume that if your cloud provider goes down, you've lost everything you put in? Not just data, either - if you've prepaid your account, you probably lost all that stored value as well.
Cloud storage providers especially. What happens if your hard drive dies? You lose the data. What happens if your backup tapes fail - you've lost the backup. What happens if your dropbox/skydrive/etc. disappear? You've lost your files.
All those XDA Developer links? Gone. hope the original authors are still around to upload them elsewhere or that someone downloaded it and can upload it.
Cloud providers make us lazy - we think "it'll always be around and I can grab it later". Turns out later can disappear - perhaps temporary (e.g., your or their internet connection dies), or permanently. But it's really just the same as storing files locally - there's a chance the storage may fail.
You do realize that automated trading platforms do lexical analysis, right? They get a copy of all press releases and electronically decide if it's good or bad and do trades based on it. Even basic lexical analysis can tell you a statement of "loss" or "failed to meet expectations" is generally bad news (SELL!), while "higher than expected revenue" and "largest profit" is good news (BUY!).
In fact, it's possible all statements about earnings and such are couched in rather standard language to comply with regulations - trying to weasel word your way out of saying loss could be seen as trying to decieve the public.
Which is why the whole "open source" movement is a great equalizer. If you got an innovation but no money, publish the heck out of it, which makes it ineligible for patenting. (Well, in the US you get a year, but most places the act of publishing or making it public before the patent is applied for makes it ineligible).
Don't let it sit in some untraversed corner of the web, but make it known as far and wide as possible. If it's particularly cool, you can get others working on it as well and as they adapt it, get them to publish everything.
That's the whole "maker" movement - it's really a more publicized version of the DIY thing that people were doing. Just some created cool blocks that increase the ease at which to do stuff (Arduino, for example, makes it possible to add in a simple microcontroller to your project, which is something most projects require these days).
Of course, the other bit is to get people to publish - companies will pay for innovations to lock it up and patent it, so the flip side is to have it published far and wide and collaborate and share (which is why it's building in strength - everyone's wanting to share).
You missed nearly bankrupting Vlassic as well
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html
The TL;DR version of all these articles is basically that Walmart demands suppliers hit a price point ("We'll pay you $x for each one"). Great if you can hit it, but if you can't, you have to do special "walmart production runs" which use lower quality materials in order to hit that price point - different accessory kits, cheaper lower end materials, maybe even a whole walmart-specific product line.
If you're not careful, this can easily lead to a tarnishing of your brand
Another tactic is the consolidation route - you get the shelf space, but walmart only pays you when someone buys it - so if it doesn't sell, it's up to you to either move it or retrieve the product.
It makes for a more interesting time shopping at walmart though. You can tell which items are high-margin because walmart offers some really good deals (e.g., toys 40-50% off regular). Which items are built to a price (e.g., tools) and which items warlmart has no pricing control over (e.g., electronics - games/dvds/etc - you'll find walmart's price is cheapest, but only by 16 cents or so).
And you can also tell what suppliers cut in order to meet the price - perhaps a smaller amount of consumables, or lower value per dollar (e.g., less pickles per jar). Or even note down part and model numbers and see which are "walmart specials".
It's not a rejection criterion anymore. Apps can be coded in any language (including Flash), with the exception that no external code may be downloaded. C++ was always accepted, but JavaScript, Flash, C# are all acceptable.
The general method is to stick all your core logic in a C++ module and then interface to that the UI code. Then cross platform porting involves rewriting the small UI core. Obj-C can call C++ objects trivially (native function call). For Android, it's done through JNI, but supported via the NDK. For Windows Phone, it's a bit more difficult since the core may need rewriting in C#.
iOS encourages MVC development, and doing it properly means it can be trivially ported.
Well, if they're cohabitating with you, then maybe you do want to share the Netflix password because you want to watch a movie together. That is, unless you set your Netflix client to remember your password for you so your significant other could use Netflix without knowing the password.
Actually, you mean RNP (Required Navigation Performance) which are a set of approaches that are more efficient, but require that the plane have onboard a minimum set of equipment. And one of this is dual RAIM-locked GPS units.
A RAIM-locked GPS is a receiver that can see more than the 4 minimum GPS satellites - and all aviation GPSes have utilities that can take a location (destination) and time and calculate whether or not a RAIM lock is achievable (it depends heavily on the satellite configuration at that point in time).
Primary purpose of RAIM is to help the GPS decide if a satellite is "out of whack", which is essential if you need to figure out your position accurately.
RNAV is slightly different - it requires a flight management system that basically generates a GPS-like path by taking in multiple navigation sources like VORs and NDBs and calculating a virtual track based on your position relative to those navaids. So you're not flying navaid to navaid, you're flying a course through but using the navaids to cross-reference your position continually.
These days, a combination of RNAV, INS (Inertial navigation system) and GPS are used altogether to get very accurate positioning required for RNP. (RNP dictates the minimum performance your navigation equipment can have - you can always use better equipment to fly the RNP approaches more precisely).
Actually, you don't have to go into the sticks. You just need to go *up*.
One of the things I did during my private pilot training was night flights. Living in an area that's fairly heavily developed, once you get about 3000' AGL, the stars started coming out. And since the cockpit's quite dim, your eyes are in night vision mode.
It's actually quite nice, and a good way for those of us who just don't like camping without modern conveniences.
Most of the light pollution's at ground level, once you climbed your way above it, it doesn't interfere so much.
Spider silk is one of the strongest materials around. With an equivalent diameter, it beats out steel, carbon fiber and other materials that are used in construction.
The only problem is that spider silk is extremely hard to come by - spiders don't produce much of it, and definitely not enough to be of practical use right now.
There's a ton of work in researching ways to get more production ready volumes of the stuff. Synthetic silk, genetically modified silkworms (used for making regular silk), etc.
It'll be too expensive for clothing, but as a cloth for composites, it's definitely got appeal.
The high-end processors have unlocked dividers. Sure you can overclock the cheaper chips but that involves running everything at the faster speed. In the old days, that included your PCI and AGP busses, and it could mean that spiffy new videocard forced your system to run slower because it couldn't handle the faster clock. Or memory, which was often also a limiting factor in clock speeds. Heck, you often had PC fun because the hard drive would get corrupted from the faster clock - so things worked, but a week later you're battling complete data loss, and everything works just fine otherwise (there's nothing wrong with the hard drive - it just couldn't talk SATA or IDE that fast).
Intel has marketed for a number of years the unlocked divider chips as "Extreme Edition" - you can set the divider any way you want and run the busses at a normal speed.
Otherwise you might have ot invest in faster RAM and looser timings and all that jazz. Still possible, but it's just easier getting wild overclocks with the unlocked processors than locked ones.
What happened was Future Shop greatly increased their customer service sometime in the 2000's. Probably sometime after the dot-com bust.
Prior to that, it was just awful at customer service, then something happened and post crash their customer service actually increased (they were actually friendly and willing to exchange and such).
I don't know what happened, but they did go from being one of the worst places to shop to being actually decent. The purchase of Future Shop by Best Buy (Canada) actually happened a few years later.
As for buying computer parts - most of the stores remind me of the old Future Shop days. If you can get a return/exchange, you're lucky. Especially so if they only ding you 15% restocking. And forget it if you buy a product that someone returned fraudulently - they assume you did it and you're out the $500.
Interestingly, though, online shopping isn't that big with Canadians - sure it's growing, but the retail selection at Future Shop/Best Buy Canada is a lot better than down in the US. Probably because Amazon sucks in Canada (books, CDs, DVDs, and even less selection of electornics than Future Shop/Best Buy) so there's no real online megaretailer to buy stuff from. Plus prices don't tend to be wildly better than retail - once shipping and taxes are factored in.
Perhaps it's also why Future Shop/Best Buy Canada are doing much better than in the US.
True, but then again, is it fair to the store that has to lose basically the profit off the sale because they have to market it as "open box"? Think about it - they have to sell it at a lower price because it could've been used, and if it's not low enough, everyone would just buy the brand-new-from-factory box over an open one.
In fact, it's this reason why stores have restocking fees. Effectively, the loss they make by doing it open box is taken from you, the customer (mark it down 10%, charge you 15% restocking fee, the 5% is kept as profit).
Sure, you can justify 15% as a "you should've done your research" fee, but then again, when your significant other buys you the wrong thing as a gift...
Finally - in Canada, most stores do this. Even Apple stores. I've purchased several products and returned them sealed and they accepted it. I never want to have to return anything to a US store, with all those restocking fees, even a computer parts store (been hit there as well).
But thanks to these bastards I'm no longer going to be able to enjoy these priviledges. (OTOH, maybe I can score a brand new item at discount because it had to be checked).
Also, these guys would have to be really good at shrinkwrapping. Apple products are shrinkwrapped quite unusually (but in traditional Apple fashion, very neatly). Most products are done by putting the product on the film, wrapping the film over the top, and sealing the three sides.
For Apple products, the shrinkwrap has the corners cut off (basically the shrinkwrap appears pre-cut for the item and the edges are sealed like a clamshell of shrinkwrap.). It's one thing I've seen of Apple products - they lack the traditional shrinkwrap "ears". It's really quite a nice bit of attention to detail that Apple is known for. Even if you're not a fan, inspect some shrinkwrapped Apple products (iPad, iPhone - iPods are plastic clamshells, and Macs are cardboard box with seal). It's really an impressive piece of work when it's gotta be mass produced.
Actually, ideas are a dime a dozen. You probably come up with 10 in-between waking up and getting into work every day.
The real money's not in ideas, but in the expression of them. An idea for a book is worthless - the actual written story becomes valuable. An idea for a movie, a song, ditto - worthless until they are filmed or recorded. Ideas for inventions, ditto - "I wish someone would invent something that ..." - worthless. Actually making it - that's valuable.
And that's what people want to control - an idea costs nothing and people come up with dozens daily individually. But taking that idea to completion takes work, and controlling that work is power.
It's closed to the general public, but with a little effort, it's trivially easy to get in. Just say you're a buyer for scottbomb, Inc. and they'll let you right in. ("Buyer" typically means someone who procures the necessary supplies, but it can also mean, well, you the consumer).
In the end, it's really a "no children" kind of rule. Anyone can get in with a little effort. Anyone not interested in doing that effort, they don't want to target (they want interested people).
Of course, some exhibitors have an exclusive policy so you may not be able to see everything as they only let a very select group of people in (usually ones who have signed an NDA before) and are showing in private booths.
It's not about informing. It's about awareness. Most of the public just doesn't know nor care what PIPA or SOPA is. And the general public is more likely to be reading Fark/Reddit/Wired than Slashdot.
The tech community lives in its own little island assuming everyone knows or cares for tech. They don't, and it's why Apple can package up a bunch of "old hat" technologies and still make it seem magical to the public (remember the old saying "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic").
Of all the protests though, Google and Wikipedia are probably the best places to have the largest impact because most of the (uninformed) public uses them.
And you have to frame things such that people care. ACTA for example - people just didn't care. So the wiser people re-framed it as "The law that could take away your iPod" and people started taking notice. Inaccurate? Possibly, but it had the necessary effect of bringing awareless to people who would otherwise skip it.
Actually, I'm surprised Apple didn't make a move. RIM's got a few good patents in their portfolio. One of their biggest is the keyboard patent (yes, the thumb board is patented, which is why the thumbboard on blackberries just feels a LOT better than any other thumbboard around. Too bad that the stuff around the keyboard sucks, though).
Besides that, though, there are other nice patents RIM holds, mostly FRAND ones, but those are valuable in the sense that Apple can wave those around when other FRAND patent holders demand access to Apple's non-FRAND patents instead of direct cash licensing. (Yes, Apple's been trying to license those 3G patents, and the patent holders have refused to take the money, wanting Apple's patents instead)
These days it's even bigger. In 2007, in Transformers, rendering a single frame with one bot in it took hours. Rendering the whole gathering at the observatory took around 25 hours per frame. The total models only took around 2TB or so of data.
The 2011 final Transformer film though exceeded that data amount - I think it was aorund 200TB or so, and despite newer equipment, render times stayed the same - 8+ hours for a normal frame, days for a more complex one.
The only good part is it's a stupidly parallel problem since each cluster can render a frame independently of each other.
Actually, Apple didn't steal it. Jobs licensed it from Xerox in exchange for Apple stock.
(Apple also improved on it because the Xerox Alto didn't have overlapping windows ,and Woz came up with regions to handle updating overlapping windows. Woz subsequently got in a plane crash (in his Piper) and told Jobs (who visited him in the hospital) that he still knew how to do regions. Later, when Woz talked to Xerox, he found out that no, they didn't handle overlapping windows at all. So Woz got a patent on it)
Newsflash - if you want to sell a game on Xbox360 or PS3, you have to agree to terms very similar to that! (Wii SDK is cheaper at $5000 or so, while PS3 and Xbox360 is over $10,000, each.). Console development ain't cheap.
As for "new game companies" - most are started by veterans in the industry - turnover is huge, and most only stay for a year or two before leaving for another company. So there's a lot of inbreeding.
The only thing Microsoft has is it's the only console manufacturer offering (limited) homebrew development (Xbox Live Indie Arcade). Sony used too, then got scared away (i.e., OtherOS). And yes, they're limited.
Newbies wanting to "break in" have to cut their teeth first. Primary way in the past is via the PC (where indie gaming is huge, and big game companies are slowly departing). Get out a good game and you'd be approached. Do it near the end of a cycle and you can be lavished with all sorts of incentives as maufacturers want to get a wide range of launch games in.
These days, you still have the very popular PC option. But you also have the iOS option (and Apple's policies are far more lenient than Sony, Microsoft OR Nintendo's - the approval process for the console is far more arbitrary, harsh and secretive (you rarely hear of rejected games)). Android's a possibility as well.
Apple's paying the labels for it. They paid a good chunk ($250M?) for the priviledge of setting up iTunes Match, and an unspecified sum every year in licensing fees. That's all it takes. The other lockers (Amazon, Googke, etc)? They're not paying a thing. Legal right or wrong, if you pay up, they leave you alone.
And while it could lead to music laundering, do remember that all the matched tracks "disappear" when you cancel iTunes match. What I mean is that you lose the right to download the higher quality matched music - the m4a files that are already on your hard drive will stay (iTunes won't delete them). So if you want to cancel, remember to download from iCloud before doing so.
An interesting thing - iTunes Match will PRESERVE metadata. It doesn't overwrite any metadata in matched files with that from the iTunes Store. So if the matched songs all have "RELEASED by MusicWaReZ!" in the id3 tags, the m4a's will also have that. (The upside is that your careful cataloging work won't be disturbed). Of course, this also leads to change instability where updating metadata may not get synced back to iCloud.
What I'd like to know is if "Complete my Album" works with iTunes match (I'm guessing it doesn't). That would allow those of us who bought CDs and ripped them to get at the "digital album bonus" by simply paying for the missing track or two and such.