"When they play with the iPad and experience the magic of using it... I have a hard time believing they're going to go for a netbook"
I dunno, I can think of a few reasons -- no memory slot, lack of a forward facing camera, no flash support, no memory slot, no gesture for mouse-over interfaces, and last but not least, no memory slot.
But mostly, cost. Cook shows a profound, almost deliberate misunderstanding of the netbook market, where affordability is at least as important as portability. Apple doesn't compete well in the cheap commodity market. It's alien to their business model. They create exquisitely designed, top shelf products at premium prices, which is anathema to the netbook market.
One could say, it's cheap for a mac. That's true. And I wonder if the ipad will dig into the macbook market. That would be an interesting irony. But it's still expensive for a netbook, especially when comparing price to capacity, as Apple still appears to believe that 16 Gbytes of non-replaceable storage should cost $100.
Of course the ipad will be a success. As usual, Apple fanbois will line up for it, just like they line up for every shiny new Apple product. That doesn't make it a replacement for the netbook.
If one includes the ipad in the total netbook market, (which I would not -- it fails on price and a few other things, is essentially a bigger ipod touch, not a netbook replacement) the total size of the market increases, but I think you'll find that the demand for conventional netbooks will grow at about the same rate.
Cook's comment is very revealing in another sense -- Apple's true product is magic and fairy dust in a very attractive package, and there is definitely a market for that. More power to them. And maybe, when other companies start making similar devices without the ipad's limitations and at the netbook price point, we might eventually see a reduction in the traditional netbook market, as netbook manufacturers find that a less complicated form factor with fewer moving parts can be made for less money, and more users realize they don't always have to have a keyboard with them.
A more original plot than Avatar
on
Axe Cop Trailer
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· Score: 1
Hmm. No worse than most of what I've seen on the big screen lately. Maybe Hollywood should hire him. Or at least, call him once in awhile and get his opinion on scripts.
I can't speak for the insurance companies, but the issue at the company I work for is that their supplier didn't stock the older phone anymore. So say you had an original iphone and it, um, accidentially went through the washing machine, the company had no choice but to replace it with the most recent phone. Because the company doesn't stock phones, and their supplier doesn't either. Everything is "just in time", and that means the supply chain empties quickly of older models. Good news for those who just can't live without a phone with a built-in compass.
Well, where it's different is the culture of standing in line outside the Apple shop to snap up the latest incremental upgrade. It's not something you see with Windows Mobile phones. (With, admittedly, good reason.) Someone awhile back pointed out that this cycle of fanboi-driven regular forklift upgrades to acquire minor improvements has to be bad for the environment. The counter-argument was that the old units generally got sold on ebay or otherwise "trickeled down" to less financially advantaged users. I'd tend to think not, if people are breaking them in order to get a new unit.
At my work, which allows the jesus phone as a company phone, there was a spike of accidental breakage when 3G came out. Not big, but significant.
Ok, so Comcast has soiled their old trademark beyond redemption. Rebranding will at best buy them a little while, mostly with new customers. It only helps if you have a plan in place to fix the issues, which in this case are (1) customer service, (2) high prices, and (3) customer service. How much do you want to bet that instead, all the effort will go into marketing? They seem to have a basic inability to understand that crappy service is the issue.
> There's a chance this is still running WinCE but the layers on top of that have been chucked out and replaced.
I would be very disappointed were this so, but you're right, that could have been what they did, and it would qualify in some circles as "new from the ground up". (Depending on one's definition of "ground".)
> Given that WP says the Zune is also running WinCE, I think there's a good chance this is what's going on here. I, personally, wouldn't be surprised if code was copied across from the Zune!
Sigh. So we still have the problem of software bloat, complexity, poor performance, and having to reboot the thing every so often, all of which are underlying code issues not gui issues. Although the gui needed help too, (C'mon, a START button on a PHONE??) and it looks like they did that part at least.
None of this makes me want to chuck my blackberry, even though I'm irritated at it at the moment.
Sales have very little relation to actual usefulness. Apple has carefully cultivated a fanboi base that will insure that the iPad is successful. And good on them -- they deserve to make money as much as anyone else. But sales aren't a direct sign of usefulness -- else Winders wouldn't rule the world.
If Microsoft really did throw out everything and start from scratch, cool. They really needed to start over, (Windows Mobile was a mess) and assuming they didn't replicate the same mistakes, this could be a good thing.
What prevents me from stating this more positively are phrases scattered through TFA and TFA referenced by TFA. (Emphasis mine in the following.)
"Microsoft has done what would have been unthinkable for the company just a few years ago: started from scratch. At least, that's how things look (and feel) with Windows Phone 7 Series."
"You haven't used an interface like this before (well, okay, if you've used a Zune HD then you've kind of used an interface like this)."
"The phone operating system does away with pretty much every scrap [...]"
This could be either journalistic caution (which would be laudable) or prevarication. (IE, the article may report "It sure looks from my 30 seconds with the mock-up at some trade show that Microsoft rewrote the entire OS from the ground up", which gets reported as "Microsoft rewrote the entire OS from the ground up".) When I read this, considering Microsoft's past history of building on top of elderly code whenever possible, I'm thinking this could be anything from a complete rewrite, (least likely) to a general sprucing-up, (more likely) to a new GUI on top of the Windows Mobile 6 base code (most likely). I'm not saying this is the case -- I'd love to be wrong -- I'm saying one can't tell from the articles.
Oooh. Consider. A man-in-the-middle attack has the potential to cripple millions of PCs. I wonder how long it'll take for crackers to think of that.
Intuitively, making the process fail for good licenses is probably easier than making the process succeed for pirated licenses. Especially since (bonus!) previous success is no guarantee against current failure. Thanks, Microsoft, for creating another DOS vector.
Star Wars is tainted by more than the memory of Jarjar. There's three loud, busy, but ultimately empty prequels, terrible acting by people who should know better, idiotic plot developments, a painfully pedestrian, bizarrely animated series, and years and years of disrespect towards the fans from whom he got his wealth.
Never again. I don't care if the new series ignored everything made after Empire Strikes Back and was produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Martin Scorsese. (Which it won't be; it'll be ham-fisted ol' George at the helm, as expected, and he'll make a mess of it, as expected.) Let's all face it -- George Lucas is never going to repeat the success of 1977. It's time to move on. And even if by some bizarre set of circumstances he did, who cares? I'm so through with Star Wars that I was reluctant to spend two minutes to write this. Never again. That ship has sailed. Life is too short for bad TV.
I'm not exactly saying that. I am getting powerful bored with remakes. You're right, it's just a story. There are lots of stories that have never seen film, and we seem to be doing the same ten or twelve stories over and over. That's not what I call entertainment.
But you're absolutely right, it's their money, to do with as they please. And my money is (at least for now) mine to do with as I please. I'm probably going to skip Dune. I already seen it twice, and although both versions left a lot to be desired, I don't feel like I need to sit through yet another movie where I already know the story by heart.
Speaking of discworld, you realize that there are already two live action films in the can -- The Colour of Magic/The Light Fantastic (2008) (both novels combined into one 191 minute movie) and Hogfather (2006, 185 minutes). Both are worth seeing. Vadim Jean (director/adaptation) really "gets it".
Reportedly, Going Postal is in post production, and The Wee Free Men is in planning stage. So there are new and interesting things happening. I just hate to see another $100M blown on yet another remake when they could do some novel -- any novel! -- that hasn't yet been beaten to death.
I do have a dog in this fight -- There are several versions of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers available, and they all stinketh mightely. But as much as I love the novel, I wouldn't want to see another ST remake. That ship has sailed.
Ok, so Lynch's Dune took huge, I say I say, HUGE liberties with the source material. (There is a legend that Herbert endorsed Lynch's version as true to the source material, which to me means either Herbert had the novel ghosted and never read the drafts, or he was on crack.) And the version on siffie or whatever they're calling themselves these days was deadly dull.
Does that necessarily mean we need yet another version of Dune? Couldn't the producers pick a novel that hadn't been done yet and mess with, er, make that instead?
> Think about. You can accuse O'Reilly, Hannity, Matthews, etc of many things, but you can't accuse them of being idiots. They know EXACTLY what they are saying.
Was Constellation, specifically the Ares booster series, ever going to be practical? Let's assume for a moment that the nay-sayers are right, and Ares would be a huge hole to dump money into that wouldn't yield a usable launch vehicle in a reasonable time frame. If so, canceling the program provides a needed wake-up call for NASA, opens the door for consideration of lower-cost alternatives, and perhaps even gives a boost to the commercial spacecraft industry. In the short term, it helps (if only by a tiny amount) stem the money hemorrhage.
I know it's hard to take, but the question I have to ask is -- do we want to get back to the moon at any cost? Or should we take this opportunity to step back and see if there's a more practical way?
> How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful?
Well, because not every computer user is a computer geek. Some think of computers as an appliance to get a particular job done, and don't want to know what goes on inside any more than they want to know how their television works.
I'm not a particular fan of Apple, but this should be self-evident, at least to non-geeks. Apple sells appliances (at a substantial markup) to get creative stuff done, just as one buys an easel to paint or a Maytag to wash clothes. If the creative stuff you want to do is to build a washing machine from scratch or gut one and upgrade it, then you're probably not going to appreciate this.
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Yeah. Often, if you have a lot of apps installed.
"When they play with the iPad and experience the magic of using it ... I have a hard time believing they're going to go for a netbook"
I dunno, I can think of a few reasons -- no memory slot, lack of a forward facing camera, no flash support, no memory slot, no gesture for mouse-over interfaces, and last but not least, no memory slot.
But mostly, cost. Cook shows a profound, almost deliberate misunderstanding of the netbook market, where affordability is at least as important as portability. Apple doesn't compete well in the cheap commodity market. It's alien to their business model. They create exquisitely designed, top shelf products at premium prices, which is anathema to the netbook market.
One could say, it's cheap for a mac. That's true. And I wonder if the ipad will dig into the macbook market. That would be an interesting irony. But it's still expensive for a netbook, especially when comparing price to capacity, as Apple still appears to believe that 16 Gbytes of non-replaceable storage should cost $100.
Of course the ipad will be a success. As usual, Apple fanbois will line up for it, just like they line up for every shiny new Apple product. That doesn't make it a replacement for the netbook.
If one includes the ipad in the total netbook market, (which I would not -- it fails on price and a few other things, is essentially a bigger ipod touch, not a netbook replacement) the total size of the market increases, but I think you'll find that the demand for conventional netbooks will grow at about the same rate.
Cook's comment is very revealing in another sense -- Apple's true product is magic and fairy dust in a very attractive package, and there is definitely a market for that. More power to them. And maybe, when other companies start making similar devices without the ipad's limitations and at the netbook price point, we might eventually see a reduction in the traditional netbook market, as netbook manufacturers find that a less complicated form factor with fewer moving parts can be made for less money, and more users realize they don't always have to have a keyboard with them.
Hmm. No worse than most of what I've seen on the big screen lately. Maybe Hollywood should hire him. Or at least, call him once in awhile and get his opinion on scripts.
I can't speak for the insurance companies, but the issue at the company I work for is that their supplier didn't stock the older phone anymore. So say you had an original iphone and it, um, accidentially went through the washing machine, the company had no choice but to replace it with the most recent phone. Because the company doesn't stock phones, and their supplier doesn't either. Everything is "just in time", and that means the supply chain empties quickly of older models. Good news for those who just can't live without a phone with a built-in compass.
Not to contradict you, but I have to wonder... where is all the money coming from?
> Do they lie when selling the warranties?
The two go together to the extent that the statement becomes redundant.
Well, where it's different is the culture of standing in line outside the Apple shop to snap up the latest incremental upgrade. It's not something you see with Windows Mobile phones. (With, admittedly, good reason.) Someone awhile back pointed out that this cycle of fanboi-driven regular forklift upgrades to acquire minor improvements has to be bad for the environment. The counter-argument was that the old units generally got sold on ebay or otherwise "trickeled down" to less financially advantaged users. I'd tend to think not, if people are breaking them in order to get a new unit.
At my work, which allows the jesus phone as a company phone, there was a spike of accidental breakage when 3G came out. Not big, but significant.
Ok, so Comcast has soiled their old trademark beyond redemption. Rebranding will at best buy them a little while, mostly with new customers. It only helps if you have a plan in place to fix the issues, which in this case are (1) customer service, (2) high prices, and (3) customer service. How much do you want to bet that instead, all the effort will go into marketing? They seem to have a basic inability to understand that crappy service is the issue.
This story gets tagged "republicans"? Washington State is Democrat controlled.
> There's a chance this is still running WinCE but the layers on top of that have been chucked out and replaced.
I would be very disappointed were this so, but you're right, that could have been what they did, and it would qualify in some circles as "new from the ground up". (Depending on one's definition of "ground".)
> Given that WP says the Zune is also running WinCE, I think there's a good chance this is what's going on here. I, personally, wouldn't be surprised if code was copied across from the Zune!
Sigh. So we still have the problem of software bloat, complexity, poor performance, and having to reboot the thing every so often, all of which are underlying code issues not gui issues. Although the gui needed help too, (C'mon, a START button on a PHONE??) and it looks like they did that part at least.
None of this makes me want to chuck my blackberry, even though I'm irritated at it at the moment.
Sales have very little relation to actual usefulness. Apple has carefully cultivated a fanboi base that will insure that the iPad is successful. And good on them -- they deserve to make money as much as anyone else. But sales aren't a direct sign of usefulness -- else Winders wouldn't rule the world.
If Microsoft really did throw out everything and start from scratch, cool. They really needed to start over, (Windows Mobile was a mess) and assuming they didn't replicate the same mistakes, this could be a good thing.
What prevents me from stating this more positively are phrases scattered through TFA and TFA referenced by TFA. (Emphasis mine in the following.)
"Microsoft has done what would have been unthinkable for the company just a few years ago: started from scratch. At least, that's how things look (and feel) with Windows Phone 7 Series."
"You haven't used an interface like this before (well, okay, if you've used a Zune HD then you've kind of used an interface like this)."
"The phone operating system does away with pretty much every scrap [...]"
This could be either journalistic caution (which would be laudable) or prevarication. (IE, the article may report "It sure looks from my 30 seconds with the mock-up at some trade show that Microsoft rewrote the entire OS from the ground up", which gets reported as "Microsoft rewrote the entire OS from the ground up".) When I read this, considering Microsoft's past history of building on top of elderly code whenever possible, I'm thinking this could be anything from a complete rewrite, (least likely) to a general sprucing-up, (more likely) to a new GUI on top of the Windows Mobile 6 base code (most likely). I'm not saying this is the case -- I'd love to be wrong -- I'm saying one can't tell from the articles.
Oooh. Consider. A man-in-the-middle attack has the potential to cripple millions of PCs. I wonder how long it'll take for crackers to think of that.
Intuitively, making the process fail for good licenses is probably easier than making the process succeed for pirated licenses. Especially since (bonus!) previous success is no guarantee against current failure. Thanks, Microsoft, for creating another DOS vector.
Star Wars is tainted by more than the memory of Jarjar. There's three loud, busy, but ultimately empty prequels, terrible acting by people who should know better, idiotic plot developments, a painfully pedestrian, bizarrely animated series, and years and years of disrespect towards the fans from whom he got his wealth.
Never again. I don't care if the new series ignored everything made after Empire Strikes Back and was produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Martin Scorsese. (Which it won't be; it'll be ham-fisted ol' George at the helm, as expected, and he'll make a mess of it, as expected.) Let's all face it -- George Lucas is never going to repeat the success of 1977. It's time to move on. And even if by some bizarre set of circumstances he did, who cares? I'm so through with Star Wars that I was reluctant to spend two minutes to write this. Never again. That ship has sailed. Life is too short for bad TV.
Yes. Of course, we'll then have to contend with the Zoofnin terrorists.
Could this be why media player still doesn't let me control subtitles and alternate audio tracks, when free players have for ages?
I'm not exactly saying that. I am getting powerful bored with remakes. You're right, it's just a story. There are lots of stories that have never seen film, and we seem to be doing the same ten or twelve stories over and over. That's not what I call entertainment.
But you're absolutely right, it's their money, to do with as they please. And my money is (at least for now) mine to do with as I please. I'm probably going to skip Dune. I already seen it twice, and although both versions left a lot to be desired, I don't feel like I need to sit through yet another movie where I already know the story by heart.
Speaking of discworld, you realize that there are already two live action films in the can -- The Colour of Magic/The Light Fantastic (2008) (both novels combined into one 191 minute movie) and Hogfather (2006, 185 minutes). Both are worth seeing. Vadim Jean (director/adaptation) really "gets it".
Reportedly, Going Postal is in post production, and The Wee Free Men is in planning stage. So there are new and interesting things happening. I just hate to see another $100M blown on yet another remake when they could do some novel -- any novel! -- that hasn't yet been beaten to death.
I do have a dog in this fight -- There are several versions of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers available, and they all stinketh mightely. But as much as I love the novel, I wouldn't want to see another ST remake. That ship has sailed.
Ok, so Lynch's Dune took huge, I say I say, HUGE liberties with the source material. (There is a legend that Herbert endorsed Lynch's version as true to the source material, which to me means either Herbert had the novel ghosted and never read the drafts, or he was on crack.) And the version on siffie or whatever they're calling themselves these days was deadly dull.
Does that necessarily mean we need yet another version of Dune? Couldn't the producers pick a novel that hadn't been done yet and mess with, er, make that instead?
> Think about. You can accuse O'Reilly, Hannity, Matthews, etc of many things, but you can't accuse them of being idiots. They know EXACTLY what they are saying.
Was Constellation, specifically the Ares booster series, ever going to be practical? Let's assume for a moment that the nay-sayers are right, and Ares would be a huge hole to dump money into that wouldn't yield a usable launch vehicle in a reasonable time frame. If so, canceling the program provides a needed wake-up call for NASA, opens the door for consideration of lower-cost alternatives, and perhaps even gives a boost to the commercial spacecraft industry. In the short term, it helps (if only by a tiny amount) stem the money hemorrhage.
I know it's hard to take, but the question I have to ask is -- do we want to get back to the moon at any cost? Or should we take this opportunity to step back and see if there's a more practical way?
> How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful?
Well, because not every computer user is a computer geek. Some think of computers as an appliance to get a particular job done, and don't want to know what goes on inside any more than they want to know how their television works.
I'm not a particular fan of Apple, but this should be self-evident, at least to non-geeks. Apple sells appliances (at a substantial markup) to get creative stuff done, just as one buys an easel to paint or a Maytag to wash clothes. If the creative stuff you want to do is to build a washing machine from scratch or gut one and upgrade it, then you're probably not going to appreciate this.