DT gets the cash. T-Mobile get 4B in assets (spectrum, etc.) among which number lowered roaming charges in AT&T zones.
That might make T-Mobile more attractive to other possible purchasers. But it isn't all that great of a deal considering the holding pattern T-Mobile has been in ever since the merger was announced.
And SQL Server, and Visual Studio, and a bzillion different vertical apps put out by ISVs.
You hinted at that with "legacy applications" but the fact is that very little of the installed base of Windows applications counts as "legacy." Most are being actively developed.
Two claims that you seem to have missed in the GP.
(a) that the data flow that can entered on a tablet can be done on a PC in such a way that is more conducive to accuracy
(b) that "serious" work requires something other than an "underpowered" device like a tablet.
It was nice to see that the GP did admit that there were many applications for which a tablet is well suited. But there was certainly more than a little bit of condensention going on. Reminds me of a trouble ticket I raised back when I was doing software testing on Solaris in the 1990s. A job kept crashing in our UAT environment. Development sent the ticket back with the note "The job keeps crashing because the test server only has 2 gigs of RAM. Get a real server."
Motorola's semi-conductor unit (and all its chip factories) were spun off years ago into a company now called Freescale. What remained split in half. Google bought one of those halves, Motorola Mobility.
So Google is getting next to nothing with regards to silicon design, chip foundries, etc.
The current peg isn't to the US dollar but to a basket of currencies: baht, Canuckistani dollars, Euros, Oz dollars, pounds, rubles, Singaporean dollars, US dollars, won, and yen.
Consequently, comparissons to the exchange rate against the US dollar on its lonesome aren't very meaningful except inasmuch as the US dollar compares to the basket of currencies as a whole.
Moreover, although there is room for fluctuation in the present policy outside the exchange value of the basket of currencies, that fluctuation can only happen within a relatively narrow band.
Now, if you've done the math and can show that (a) the present black market rate is different than the official band around the basket of currencies; and (b) that most transactions between Chinese economic agents and non-Chinese economic agents happen at the black market rate, I'm all ears.
Which is why most analysts think that the RMB is undervalued, right?
Oh, wait, if it were really floating, it wouldn't be undervalued.
Seriously, think through your thought experiment. Imagine that RMB were still strictly pegged to the US dollar. If speculators around the world suddenly decided to dump USD and purchase RMB, there isn't a damn thing China could do to keep their currency down despite it being officially pegged to the US dollar.
Pegging a currency to another doesn't mean that its price on the market of currencies can't fluctuate unless one not only controls the official rate but also controls the market of currencies. So long as one can trade RMB to other speculators, there will be a difference between the official price set by a state and the price on markets outside of state control. But this is really neither here nor there.
The bottom line is that RMB do not float on the market the same way as many other currencies do. If it did, it wouldn't be a sticking point in virtually every set of economic negotiations between China and the US.
First, through most of the history of the People's Republic of China, their currency was pegged to the US dollar.
Second, while this practice ended in 2005 when the PRC both switched to pegging their currency to a basket of international currencies and allowing it to float within a narrow spectrum, it's not really fair to say that the RMB is a floating currency. Such a policy of managing the float of a currency is something entirely different from the way that most major western currencies completely float on international exchanges.
Sure, Amazon is thriving as the de facto marketplace that gets a cut of every sale.
But within that marketplace, independent stores of the sort that the big box bookstores were putting out of business now have a national marketplace that allows them to thrive where the big box bookstores have trouble keeping pace.
There is a borders within a half mile walk from my apartment. It's in a high densitiy urban setting along with a plethora of other shops, two movie theaters, numerous restauraunts, etc.
Everytime I'm out on a leisurely stroll, I go in and browse throught the Philosophy, Religion, Politics, History, and IT sections. They very rarely have anything I want to read. With the bankruptcy, I've been stopping in more often as they get new shipments from their warehouse. After four visits, they finally had one title I was willing to buy for the price they offered, a paperback reprint of William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Meanwhile, at Amazon, they have a metric truckload of independent affiliates offering rare and hard to find titles. I can find the out of print/Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy/ by Dvornik from one reseller or Dominic O'Meara's/Platonopolis/ by another. Amazon offers an interface that allows me to browse the titles of a multitude of independent bookstores that cater to my tastes. Borders never offered that.
So what we're actually seeing is the death of mass-market booksellers in preference to sellers that allow independent affiliates that specialize in various niches to prosper.
I think you're conflating the US Congress with the DC metropolitan area. Most people that live in DC are pretty normal and hold to the same sorts of laws of physics as most Americans.
FWIW, I live in Maryland, not DC. But where I live is close enough to DC to be considered part of the DC metro area.
Was that Microsoft having it right or Vadem having it right?
I used CE on tablets and phones circa 2005 and the user experience was pants. One could easily argue that this had more to do with the way that the respective manufacturers integrated CE onto their hardware than CE's design itself. But I think the over all failure of CE in the marketplace suggests otherwise.
But with the Nook Color, people figured out that e-Readers were also tablet computers. Not to mention the e-Reading capabilities of tablets and smartphones. I don't think my wife has picked up a hardback book since I pointed out that she could read anything the library offers in electronic format on her Android phone.
Their specialization is perhaps akin to the specialization early on in the PC industry. People in certain film/audio industries bought an Amiga while people who needed spreadsheets bought an IBM compatible PC. It's not that one can't do the job of the other but that some tasks are easier (or more enjoyable) on one over the other.
FWIW, I did all my term papers last academic year (20k+) on my iPad. Granted, I purchased a blue tooth keyboard. Which makes a good deal of sense if you want to do text entry.
My iPad is also great for lecture notes (when I'm giving lectures) and many other things.
And, as I mentioned in my previous comment, I see people with tablets all over town. Admittedly, this could be because a disproportionate number of people in my metropolitan area take public transport compared to many cities. But my coworkers that I see with tablets live on the north end of town and drive instead of taking the train or the bus.
As far as tablets go, there has yet to be a well designed third option. Once one hits, then we'll see how it plays out. Until then, that there are only two large players (Google and Apple) is really just a function of only two tablet software providers delivering a good enough product.
Of 15 people that work on my floor at my employer, 3 have iPads. On the bus to and from work, it's rare that there is not at least one person using an e-Reader or a tablet of some sort.
Just look at sales figures. Apple is selling iPads as fast as they can make them. At the Apple Store by my work, the days that new iPads come in, there is always a line out front before the store opens for the day.
That is, previous MS entries into the tablet realm have failed largely because tablet support was added to Windows as an after thought. MS tablet users had to use the Windows paradigm with support for a touch screen, stylus, handwriting recognition, etc. bolted on after the fact. This made for a crappy user experience. Palm and Apple both understood from the get go with their Palm Pilot and Newton lines that took the tablet paradigm as being central to the user interface. Android and iOS maintain that paradigm.
It's possible that MS might finally get it with Windows 8. Their future success or failure will depend on this far more so than any of the other factors that TFA bring up.
The rest of the article was mostly dreck that seems to assume that most tablet and PC users are power users.
I'm typing this comment on my iPad via a bluetooth keyboard.
I agree that the on screen keyboard is cumbersome. But as someone whose written 15,000 word term papers on an iPad, I have to say that its just as good as anything on the PC for text entry. In fact, I haven't been regularly using a PC at home since my laptop was stolen in spring of 2010.
My only complaint is that Apple's policy prevents TeX from being ported. If this isn't fixed, my next tablet will probably be a Android based one.
If I understand what they want to do, I think it's a failure. They make a big deal about metadata being context dependent and, as such, it should stored in the context in which it is meaningful rather than in a single place. But, if I understand what they do correctly, their service is basically a single place to store all their clients' metadata. You store all your metadata at fluidinfo and it does neat thing.
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I've been thinking about getting a Roku. But not supporting subtitles for streaming would be a deal breaker for me. Which generation Roku do you have?
Except T-Mobile doesn't get the cash.
DT gets the cash. T-Mobile get 4B in assets (spectrum, etc.) among which number lowered roaming charges in AT&T zones.
That might make T-Mobile more attractive to other possible purchasers. But it isn't all that great of a deal considering the holding pattern T-Mobile has been in ever since the merger was announced.
And SQL Server, and Visual Studio, and a bzillion different vertical apps put out by ISVs.
You hinted at that with "legacy applications" but the fact is that very little of the installed base of Windows applications counts as "legacy." Most are being actively developed.
Two claims that you seem to have missed in the GP.
(a) that the data flow that can entered on a tablet can be done on a PC in such a way that is more conducive to accuracy
(b) that "serious" work requires something other than an "underpowered" device like a tablet.
It was nice to see that the GP did admit that there were many applications for which a tablet is well suited. But there was certainly more than a little bit of condensention going on. Reminds me of a trouble ticket I raised back when I was doing software testing on Solaris in the 1990s. A job kept crashing in our UAT environment. Development sent the ticket back with the note "The job keeps crashing because the test server only has 2 gigs of RAM. Get a real server."
Motorola's semi-conductor unit (and all its chip factories) were spun off years ago into a company now called Freescale. What remained split in half. Google bought one of those halves, Motorola Mobility.
So Google is getting next to nothing with regards to silicon design, chip foundries, etc.
The current peg isn't to the US dollar but to a basket of currencies: baht, Canuckistani dollars, Euros, Oz dollars, pounds, rubles, Singaporean dollars, US dollars, won, and yen.
Consequently, comparissons to the exchange rate against the US dollar on its lonesome aren't very meaningful except inasmuch as the US dollar compares to the basket of currencies as a whole.
Moreover, although there is room for fluctuation in the present policy outside the exchange value of the basket of currencies, that fluctuation can only happen within a relatively narrow band.
Now, if you've done the math and can show that (a) the present black market rate is different than the official band around the basket of currencies; and (b) that most transactions between Chinese economic agents and non-Chinese economic agents happen at the black market rate, I'm all ears.
Which is why most analysts think that the RMB is undervalued, right?
Oh, wait, if it were really floating, it wouldn't be undervalued.
Seriously, think through your thought experiment. Imagine that RMB were still strictly pegged to the US dollar. If speculators around the world suddenly decided to dump USD and purchase RMB, there isn't a damn thing China could do to keep their currency down despite it being officially pegged to the US dollar.
Pegging a currency to another doesn't mean that its price on the market of currencies can't fluctuate unless one not only controls the official rate but also controls the market of currencies. So long as one can trade RMB to other speculators, there will be a difference between the official price set by a state and the price on markets outside of state control. But this is really neither here nor there.
The bottom line is that RMB do not float on the market the same way as many other currencies do. If it did, it wouldn't be a sticking point in virtually every set of economic negotiations between China and the US.
They would only be backordered if they were selling more iPads than they make.
Not at all.
That's like claiming that adding a mouse to an IBM compatible PC turns it into a Mac.
First, through most of the history of the People's Republic of China, their currency was pegged to the US dollar.
Second, while this practice ended in 2005 when the PRC both switched to pegging their currency to a basket of international currencies and allowing it to float within a narrow spectrum, it's not really fair to say that the RMB is a floating currency. Such a policy of managing the float of a currency is something entirely different from the way that most major western currencies completely float on international exchanges.
Just last night. Her flight came in at 1:20am.
Four or five people were dorking around on their iPads.
Kansas CIty, Detroit, St. Louis, Memphis, Buffalo, Cleveland, Baltimore and Oakland all have worse crime rates than DC.
And while I'm not about to try to defend Marion Barry, compare him to the likes of Rick Perry and DC looks pretty sane.
Sure, Amazon is thriving as the de facto marketplace that gets a cut of every sale.
But within that marketplace, independent stores of the sort that the big box bookstores were putting out of business now have a national marketplace that allows them to thrive where the big box bookstores have trouble keeping pace.
There is a borders within a half mile walk from my apartment. It's in a high densitiy urban setting along with a plethora of other shops, two movie theaters, numerous restauraunts, etc.
Everytime I'm out on a leisurely stroll, I go in and browse throught the Philosophy, Religion, Politics, History, and IT sections. They very rarely have anything I want to read. With the bankruptcy, I've been stopping in more often as they get new shipments from their warehouse. After four visits, they finally had one title I was willing to buy for the price they offered, a paperback reprint of William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Meanwhile, at Amazon, they have a metric truckload of independent affiliates offering rare and hard to find titles. I can find the out of print /Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy/ by Dvornik from one reseller or Dominic O'Meara's /Platonopolis/ by another. Amazon offers an interface that allows me to browse the titles of a multitude of independent bookstores that cater to my tastes. Borders never offered that.
So what we're actually seeing is the death of mass-market booksellers in preference to sellers that allow independent affiliates that specialize in various niches to prosper.
I'll take that over Borders anyday.
I think you're conflating the US Congress with the DC metropolitan area. Most people that live in DC are pretty normal and hold to the same sorts of laws of physics as most Americans.
FWIW, I live in Maryland, not DC. But where I live is close enough to DC to be considered part of the DC metro area.
Was that Microsoft having it right or Vadem having it right?
I used CE on tablets and phones circa 2005 and the user experience was pants. One could easily argue that this had more to do with the way that the respective manufacturers integrated CE onto their hardware than CE's design itself. But I think the over all failure of CE in the marketplace suggests otherwise.
But with the Nook Color, people figured out that e-Readers were also tablet computers. Not to mention the e-Reading capabilities of tablets and smartphones. I don't think my wife has picked up a hardback book since I pointed out that she could read anything the library offers in electronic format on her Android phone.
Their specialization is perhaps akin to the specialization early on in the PC industry. People in certain film/audio industries bought an Amiga while people who needed spreadsheets bought an IBM compatible PC. It's not that one can't do the job of the other but that some tasks are easier (or more enjoyable) on one over the other.
I live in the DC metropolitan area.
FWIW, I did all my term papers last academic year (20k+) on my iPad. Granted, I purchased a blue tooth keyboard. Which makes a good deal of sense if you want to do text entry.
My iPad is also great for lecture notes (when I'm giving lectures) and many other things.
And, as I mentioned in my previous comment, I see people with tablets all over town. Admittedly, this could be because a disproportionate number of people in my metropolitan area take public transport compared to many cities. But my coworkers that I see with tablets live on the north end of town and drive instead of taking the train or the bus.
As far as tablets go, there has yet to be a well designed third option. Once one hits, then we'll see how it plays out. Until then, that there are only two large players (Google and Apple) is really just a function of only two tablet software providers delivering a good enough product.
Of 15 people that work on my floor at my employer, 3 have iPads. On the bus to and from work, it's rare that there is not at least one person using an e-Reader or a tablet of some sort.
Just look at sales figures. Apple is selling iPads as fast as they can make them. At the Apple Store by my work, the days that new iPads come in, there is always a line out front before the store opens for the day.
That is, previous MS entries into the tablet realm have failed largely because tablet support was added to Windows as an after thought. MS tablet users had to use the Windows paradigm with support for a touch screen, stylus, handwriting recognition, etc. bolted on after the fact. This made for a crappy user experience. Palm and Apple both understood from the get go with their Palm Pilot and Newton lines that took the tablet paradigm as being central to the user interface. Android and iOS maintain that paradigm.
It's possible that MS might finally get it with Windows 8. Their future success or failure will depend on this far more so than any of the other factors that TFA bring up.
The rest of the article was mostly dreck that seems to assume that most tablet and PC users are power users.
Live oaks, blue oaks, and some other variations are evergreen.
I'm typing this comment on my iPad via a bluetooth keyboard.
I agree that the on screen keyboard is cumbersome. But as someone whose written 15,000 word term papers on an iPad, I have to say that its just as good as anything on the PC for text entry. In fact, I haven't been regularly using a PC at home since my laptop was stolen in spring of 2010.
My only complaint is that Apple's policy prevents TeX from being ported. If this isn't fixed, my next tablet will probably be a Android based one.
A thought experiment how their service might be used to automatically confirm or reject friendship requests: http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/fluidinfo/2011/06/01/personalized-filtering-of-friend-requests-in-social-networks/
If I understand what they want to do, I think it's a failure. They make a big deal about metadata being context dependent and, as such, it should stored in the context in which it is meaningful rather than in a single place. But, if I understand what they do correctly, their service is basically a single place to store all their clients' metadata. You store all your metadata at fluidinfo and it does neat thing.