Ironic that RIM is losing-out to the likes of Apple, by making the same mistake Apple did back in the dark days of the '90s, when it seemed like there was a new Performa out every week.
Exactly this. When Jobs came back to Apple, he drew a box on a whiteboard and drew a cross through it. Four quadrants: Pro/Consumer on top and Desktop/Portable along the side. Instead of all these crappy Performas and 4400s and what-not, Apple relaunched with four computer products, grand total. Those were iMac/Power Mac G3 and iBook/PowerBook.
Why can't RIM do this? It could probably get away with two models: BlackBerry (which has a nicer camera, movie player, and integrates nicely with Facebook) and BlackBerry Pro (which has slightly nicer build quality and some kind of easy VPN capability, or something). Model numbers disappear -- they just upgrade the hardware every year or two. It would go a long way to address the problem of sitting on too much inventory.
Then launch it with a decent TV ad campaign. "Imagine a phone... blah blah blah... introducing the new BlackBerry, from Research in Motion." And then, when customers go to the store, they just tell the clerk "I want that new BlackBerry." Clerk hands him a box that says "BlackBerry" on it. Simple.
HP should buy them? Why, to put them out of their misery? As you point out, that 2 billion "investment" in Palm was more like a bullet to the head. HP might be good at pushing cheap laptops into the consumer channel, but it has shown no real talent for products in years.
HP has this bad problem of not being able to decide whether it wants to be Apple or IBM. The problem is, it's neither and never has been.
I don't hate RIM. But I do think RIM is dying. The disease is reversible, I think, but nobody over there seems to be seriously looking for a cure. TFS says RIM stock is down 75 percent from last year alone. Imagine a patient who has lost 75 percent of his body weight but keeps insisting, "I'm not sick!"
My own experience: My last three phones before my current one were BlackBerrys. But I started looking around and comparing prices and it seemed to me that other phones could provide at least most of the functionality that my BlackBerry gave me, plus more besides. I also wasn't impressed with the hardware of the current crop of BlackBerry devices. It seemed like RIM's focus had drifted from its core business market and it was trying to sell camera phones to college students. They didn't seem like they were targeting me anymore, and other manufacturers were. So I switched to Android.
I'd be more than happy to switch back to BlackBerry if they'd show me a really great phone, though. Do they have something like that in the works? I don't see it. The market doesn't seem to see it, either.
You know who you remind me of? Me, when I was a Mac OS admin in the late 90s. Back then, everybody thought Mac users were a cult. We were all convinced our platform was the best, but everybody else kept focusing on how Gil Amelio had fucked up a once-great company. We Mac fans were right, but so was everybody else. It took Steve Jobs' return to get Apple back on track. Unfortunately, I don't think RIM has a Steve Jobs.
"Organizational efficiency" certainly sounds like job cuts. But hopefully it means RIM might take a look at its manufacturing efficiency, as well.
At Apple, Steve Jobs always invested heavily in modern, automated assembly lines for its products, because he realized that the problem of too much inventory is particularly risky for computer makers. If you think about it, technology products have relatively short shelf lives. You can't sit on a pile of inventory and sell it for the next few years, like you could if you were making hammers or dinner plates. By next year, your inventory of shiny gadgets might effectively be junk. So the key is to develop a manufacturing process -- and equally important, supply partnerships -- that allow you to manufacture products at an incredibly fast rate, so that you can respond to market demand rapidly. If the market wants tons of units, ramp up production. When it cools off, stop making more. Then you don't have to sit on so much inventory.
If RIM is sitting on $1 billion in inventory, it certainly sounds like it grossly overestimated the demand for some of its products at launch. But it also suggests that it either isn't paying close enough attention to the market numbers, or is unable to react quickly enough to them. Working on either one might save it some money.
Of course, this would all be solved if MS just put out a general C# DRM library instead of some weird Windows-only one. I guess I've just never been desperate enough to try to reverse engineer it.
Generally speaking, effective DRM is more difficult to engineer than you make it sound. The systems that have been effective have been tied deep into the OS level (say, the Windows video drivers), so porting them to another platform would be difficult. I'm not saying you can't crack Windows DRM schemes -- people obviously have -- but cracking them isn't the same thing as porting them.
I recall that Sun Microsystems was working on some kind of open source DRM platform that sounded pretty promising, I think it fizzled out before Sun was acquired by Oracle, though. I don't think the customers were lining up, and the open source community has an innate distaste for DRM.
The parent is part of Slashdot's new marketing deal with Microsoft. The pattern goes: 1. New user account is created and immediately gets first post on a story, posting pro-Microsoft propaganda. 2. Some registered user with an actual posting history points this out, but they are immediately chastised by ACs claiming that the user account number that was used to create the first post doesn't matter. Rinse. Repeat. You can go back and find evidence of it in story after story. The only conclusion is that/. is getting money for these posts. Keep modding them all down.
Stranger to me is why you would support the idea of a newspaper that trades news for advertising. You don't strike me as the type of guy who actually reads a newspaper.
Well... it gets complicated, but a newspaper that is 100 percent ads is not a newspaper, it's a catalog.
The only control the law really has over that (because this is, after all, a free country with freedom of speech), is over postal rates. Newspapers and other media enjoy special rates for mass postage, provided they maintain a certain ratio of advertising to editorial pages. If they exceed the ratio, they can lose the favored shipping rates, which can incur significant costs.
If you don't ship your publication through the mail, though, or you don't care what you pay for postage, you can put whatever you want in it.
I dunno. I know it's not popular around here to like anything that smells like "social," but I find I like using Facebook far more than I ever liked using MySpace. Even if you assume they're both serving the same market with all of the exact same features (which isn't really true), one piece of software is not identical to everything else in its category. It may be that Facebook succeeds simply because it's better.
I think it depends. If you're talking about the old-model, "throw one onto every porch" daily newspaper, then perhaps advertising is the only way it can survive (if it can at all). But I'm pretty sure The Economist, for example, makes a decent chunk of its money from subscriptions.
Companies especially local businesses are DESPERATE for relevant advertising options. Absolutely desperate. Radio, newspapers, park benches... anything.
True to an extent, but if you have a cute local restaurant you're not going to want to put an ad for it right next to a write-up of a recent child murder. Around here, that kind of advertising goes into the weekly papers, along with the live music listings and the coupons for discount spa treatments. None of that stuff is underwriting the actual news reporting.
What's wrong with Warren Buffett? He's made a lot of money for himself, true, but he's made a lot of money for other people besides. And as for his own wealth, he's in the process of donating it all to charity, to the tune of billions going toward important causes that governments are too broke or shortsighted to fund. He was instrumental in convincing Bill Gates to do the same. If you're going to demonize some successful, wealthy American, I can think of a lot of better targets.
Don't be dense. A noob who gets first post with his first comment ever? For the express purpose of slamming Google over some random bullshit that nobody cares about (as much as I like my Chromebook, it's true, nobody cares and it's probably not going anywhere)? This is becoming a pattern on Slashdot. I don't know if it's with the explicit complicity of the Slashdot editors or what, but it's blatantly obvious what's going on.
Wow I cannot believe the reaction you are getting here. It seems to me that some people have a strong emotional stake in believing that "depression" as a category is completely unrelated to ordinary emotional, psychological and social states.
It is. If you think it's not, you have not experienced it, simple as that. "Feeling blue" is not depression. Based on your attitude, I can say with confidence that real depression is unlike anything you have ever felt.
Jesus Christ, can the pro-Microsoft shilling get any more blatant?
Here is yet another brand-new poster with a userid in the two millions, getting first post, with only one comment to his record, and he chooses to slam... holy fucking shit, ChromeOS?
Really? Of all the things Google is doing that you could choose to knock them for, fucking ChromeOS is destroying freedom and ending the world?
Seriously, holy sweet Jesus, this is just pathetic.
And FWIW, I have a Chromebook and I actually really dig it. No, it's not really great for everything, but as skeptical as I was at first, I ended up using it a lot more than I expected to.
Note that I do not believe you need to be experiencing depression to follow this plan, and I wish you godspeed, sir! I recommend something to wash down those Cheetos, though.
I hope that your point is that not all depressed people can be lumped into one category.
People who have experienced episodes of major depression might resent your assertion that they got that way because they were "lonely" or "bored" -- or even "sad."
Makes sense to me that depressed people would do more file sharing. File sharing is a means to an end, not an activity in and of itself. It follows that a depressed person might say, "Fuck it, I'm just going to stay home and watch every episode of Game of Thrones and eat Cheetos until I fall asleep."
Answering my own question: It's just speculation, but based on the memory problems they cite in TFS, maybe the device manufacturer has opted to starve it for video memory. Thus, no 1080p, even though the chip's capable of it.
The manufacturer's site definitely says the chip can do 1080p and H.264. That doesn't mean this particular device can do greater than 720p, but I don't see any reason to hobble it. Anyone?
Specifically (judging by the photo) it uses a WonderMedia Prizm WM8750 SoC (system on a chip). That bundles the VIA 800Mhz ARM 11 core with some other stuff (click the link to see).
Next up: Boot to Emacs. We've always known that Emacs is a great OS with a piss-poor text editor. We need these capabilities baked into hardware. Behold... the EmacsBook Pro!
Slashdot Mirror
Ironic that RIM is losing-out to the likes of Apple, by making the same mistake Apple did back in the dark days of the '90s, when it seemed like there was a new Performa out every week.
Exactly this. When Jobs came back to Apple, he drew a box on a whiteboard and drew a cross through it. Four quadrants: Pro/Consumer on top and Desktop/Portable along the side. Instead of all these crappy Performas and 4400s and what-not, Apple relaunched with four computer products, grand total. Those were iMac/Power Mac G3 and iBook/PowerBook.
Why can't RIM do this? It could probably get away with two models: BlackBerry (which has a nicer camera, movie player, and integrates nicely with Facebook) and BlackBerry Pro (which has slightly nicer build quality and some kind of easy VPN capability, or something). Model numbers disappear -- they just upgrade the hardware every year or two. It would go a long way to address the problem of sitting on too much inventory.
Then launch it with a decent TV ad campaign. "Imagine a phone... blah blah blah ... introducing the new BlackBerry, from Research in Motion." And then, when customers go to the store, they just tell the clerk "I want that new BlackBerry." Clerk hands him a box that says "BlackBerry" on it. Simple.
Never happen.
HP should buy them? Why, to put them out of their misery? As you point out, that 2 billion "investment" in Palm was more like a bullet to the head. HP might be good at pushing cheap laptops into the consumer channel, but it has shown no real talent for products in years.
HP has this bad problem of not being able to decide whether it wants to be Apple or IBM. The problem is, it's neither and never has been.
I don't hate RIM. But I do think RIM is dying. The disease is reversible, I think, but nobody over there seems to be seriously looking for a cure. TFS says RIM stock is down 75 percent from last year alone. Imagine a patient who has lost 75 percent of his body weight but keeps insisting, "I'm not sick!"
My own experience: My last three phones before my current one were BlackBerrys. But I started looking around and comparing prices and it seemed to me that other phones could provide at least most of the functionality that my BlackBerry gave me, plus more besides. I also wasn't impressed with the hardware of the current crop of BlackBerry devices. It seemed like RIM's focus had drifted from its core business market and it was trying to sell camera phones to college students. They didn't seem like they were targeting me anymore, and other manufacturers were. So I switched to Android.
I'd be more than happy to switch back to BlackBerry if they'd show me a really great phone, though. Do they have something like that in the works? I don't see it. The market doesn't seem to see it, either.
You know who you remind me of? Me, when I was a Mac OS admin in the late 90s. Back then, everybody thought Mac users were a cult. We were all convinced our platform was the best, but everybody else kept focusing on how Gil Amelio had fucked up a once-great company. We Mac fans were right, but so was everybody else. It took Steve Jobs' return to get Apple back on track. Unfortunately, I don't think RIM has a Steve Jobs.
"Organizational efficiency" certainly sounds like job cuts. But hopefully it means RIM might take a look at its manufacturing efficiency, as well.
At Apple, Steve Jobs always invested heavily in modern, automated assembly lines for its products, because he realized that the problem of too much inventory is particularly risky for computer makers. If you think about it, technology products have relatively short shelf lives. You can't sit on a pile of inventory and sell it for the next few years, like you could if you were making hammers or dinner plates. By next year, your inventory of shiny gadgets might effectively be junk. So the key is to develop a manufacturing process -- and equally important, supply partnerships -- that allow you to manufacture products at an incredibly fast rate, so that you can respond to market demand rapidly. If the market wants tons of units, ramp up production. When it cools off, stop making more. Then you don't have to sit on so much inventory.
If RIM is sitting on $1 billion in inventory, it certainly sounds like it grossly overestimated the demand for some of its products at launch. But it also suggests that it either isn't paying close enough attention to the market numbers, or is unable to react quickly enough to them. Working on either one might save it some money.
Of course, this would all be solved if MS just put out a general C# DRM library instead of some weird Windows-only one. I guess I've just never been desperate enough to try to reverse engineer it.
Generally speaking, effective DRM is more difficult to engineer than you make it sound. The systems that have been effective have been tied deep into the OS level (say, the Windows video drivers), so porting them to another platform would be difficult. I'm not saying you can't crack Windows DRM schemes -- people obviously have -- but cracking them isn't the same thing as porting them.
I recall that Sun Microsystems was working on some kind of open source DRM platform that sounded pretty promising, I think it fizzled out before Sun was acquired by Oracle, though. I don't think the customers were lining up, and the open source community has an innate distaste for DRM.
The parent is part of Slashdot's new marketing deal with Microsoft. The pattern goes: 1. New user account is created and immediately gets first post on a story, posting pro-Microsoft propaganda. 2. Some registered user with an actual posting history points this out, but they are immediately chastised by ACs claiming that the user account number that was used to create the first post doesn't matter. Rinse. Repeat. You can go back and find evidence of it in story after story. The only conclusion is that /. is getting money for these posts. Keep modding them all down.
Stranger to me is why you would support the idea of a newspaper that trades news for advertising. You don't strike me as the type of guy who actually reads a newspaper.
People who subscribe to the New York Times, and a lot of others besides.
Well... it gets complicated, but a newspaper that is 100 percent ads is not a newspaper, it's a catalog.
The only control the law really has over that (because this is, after all, a free country with freedom of speech), is over postal rates. Newspapers and other media enjoy special rates for mass postage, provided they maintain a certain ratio of advertising to editorial pages. If they exceed the ratio, they can lose the favored shipping rates, which can incur significant costs.
If you don't ship your publication through the mail, though, or you don't care what you pay for postage, you can put whatever you want in it.
I dunno. I know it's not popular around here to like anything that smells like "social," but I find I like using Facebook far more than I ever liked using MySpace. Even if you assume they're both serving the same market with all of the exact same features (which isn't really true), one piece of software is not identical to everything else in its category. It may be that Facebook succeeds simply because it's better.
Maybe this means you have to increase the ratio of ads to news? So what...
Believe it or not, there are laws about that, at least if you plan to sell your product through the U.S. Post.
I think it depends. If you're talking about the old-model, "throw one onto every porch" daily newspaper, then perhaps advertising is the only way it can survive (if it can at all). But I'm pretty sure The Economist, for example, makes a decent chunk of its money from subscriptions.
Companies especially local businesses are DESPERATE for relevant advertising options. Absolutely desperate. Radio, newspapers, park benches... anything.
True to an extent, but if you have a cute local restaurant you're not going to want to put an ad for it right next to a write-up of a recent child murder. Around here, that kind of advertising goes into the weekly papers, along with the live music listings and the coupons for discount spa treatments. None of that stuff is underwriting the actual news reporting.
What's wrong with Warren Buffett? He's made a lot of money for himself, true, but he's made a lot of money for other people besides. And as for his own wealth, he's in the process of donating it all to charity, to the tune of billions going toward important causes that governments are too broke or shortsighted to fund. He was instrumental in convincing Bill Gates to do the same. If you're going to demonize some successful, wealthy American, I can think of a lot of better targets.
"I hate it... every time I come home, my roommate is always playing one of those first-person shooter games."
"You mean like Duke Nukem?"
"No, the other kind."
Don't be dense. A noob who gets first post with his first comment ever? For the express purpose of slamming Google over some random bullshit that nobody cares about (as much as I like my Chromebook, it's true, nobody cares and it's probably not going anywhere)? This is becoming a pattern on Slashdot. I don't know if it's with the explicit complicity of the Slashdot editors or what, but it's blatantly obvious what's going on.
Wow I cannot believe the reaction you are getting here. It seems to me that some people have a strong emotional stake in believing that "depression" as a category is completely unrelated to ordinary emotional, psychological and social states.
It is. If you think it's not, you have not experienced it, simple as that. "Feeling blue" is not depression. Based on your attitude, I can say with confidence that real depression is unlike anything you have ever felt.
Jesus Christ, can the pro-Microsoft shilling get any more blatant?
Here is yet another brand-new poster with a userid in the two millions, getting first post, with only one comment to his record, and he chooses to slam ... holy fucking shit, ChromeOS?
Really? Of all the things Google is doing that you could choose to knock them for, fucking ChromeOS is destroying freedom and ending the world?
Seriously, holy sweet Jesus, this is just pathetic.
And FWIW, I have a Chromebook and I actually really dig it. No, it's not really great for everything, but as skeptical as I was at first, I ended up using it a lot more than I expected to.
Note that I do not believe you need to be experiencing depression to follow this plan, and I wish you godspeed, sir! I recommend something to wash down those Cheetos, though.
I hope that your point is that not all depressed people can be lumped into one category.
People who have experienced episodes of major depression might resent your assertion that they got that way because they were "lonely" or "bored" -- or even "sad."
Makes sense to me that depressed people would do more file sharing. File sharing is a means to an end, not an activity in and of itself. It follows that a depressed person might say, "Fuck it, I'm just going to stay home and watch every episode of Game of Thrones and eat Cheetos until I fall asleep."
Answering my own question: It's just speculation, but based on the memory problems they cite in TFS, maybe the device manufacturer has opted to starve it for video memory. Thus, no 1080p, even though the chip's capable of it.
The manufacturer's site definitely says the chip can do 1080p and H.264. That doesn't mean this particular device can do greater than 720p, but I don't see any reason to hobble it. Anyone?
The summary says it's an ARM-based device.
Specifically (judging by the photo) it uses a WonderMedia Prizm WM8750 SoC (system on a chip). That bundles the VIA 800Mhz ARM 11 core with some other stuff (click the link to see).
Next up: Boot to Emacs. We've always known that Emacs is a great OS with a piss-poor text editor. We need these capabilities baked into hardware. Behold... the EmacsBook Pro!