I sit in the cube across from one of the purchasing guys. He gets on that phone 9 hours a day to negotiate the most trivial amounts of money on parts. And this at a company where we only sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 machines per year. He can pay for his cost to the company for the year by saving perhaps $150 per machine. If he worked at Apple, he'd only need to save something less than a penny to justify his position. Hiking a single part from approximately $28 to over $33 is going to give their purchasing guys a conniption fit.
Correct, Apple seems to be throwing money at Samsung's competitors anyway - clearly this is part of Samsung's calculus. I just wonder whether this will accelerate the rate of their competitor's growth.
The Galaxy S3 (their biggest seller) is selling slightly faster than Apple's biggest seller (the iPhone 4s), in terms of units. I don't know what the respective profit margins are. However, both companies have many other products, not the least of which are the tablets. Losing Apple as a customer would hurt, not just because Apple is their largest - it would also indicate that their competition has gotten good enough and large enough to play with the big boys. Any of their customers would then have the luxury of shopping around, not just Apple.
I suspect that Samsung knows what they are doing, but the stakes are quite high if they misjudge.
Probably Samsung's CEO thought "there's no way we can keep a long term relationship with these assholes so we should just milk them while we can
I think you are probably correct. I suspect this will lead to more competition for Samsung, though, since Apple will probably actively participate in making the other suppliers more capable. In other words, gouging Apple may bring the inevitable competition a little sooner. Samsung seems like a pretty well-run company, so I can't really armchair quarterback the company's decision.
Suing a key supplier with no other substitute products is not a good business move.
It's a good point, but gouging your customers is probably also not a good business move. Apple is not exactly cash-poor, and I expect Samsung to face a very capable competitor in the near future (TSMC?). So sure, in the short term Samsung will make a quick buck and sting their chief smartphone competitor. In the long term, they may see their manufacturing advantage disappear - along with an enormous customer.
Awwww, poor II... Are you serious? Or is it because you are at least laughing at the Holiday Special?
The only redeeming quality of I is when you finally get to see why Jedis are feared and respected. I also still keep a copy of "The Phantom Edit", which actually makes "I" pretty decent.
IV was corny*, had some iffy acting, and had weird editing - but was still groundbreaking and really set a new standard for scifi. V was a genuinely good movie.
VI? That was mostly a kids movie. Jar-Jar was just the new Ewoks.
* Death Star? Dark Side? Who the hell would name their crowning technical achievement and religion using such negatively charged words?
They look like they are going down to me. It's hard to directly compare, because the models change - but in general prices have been falling. I'm waiting for 3TB to fall below $100 to add capacity to my NAT.
I don't think you have any experience at all in the Chinese labor market. It is very difficult to retain labor. If an employee finds a job in another factory for an extra 25 cents a day, they just don't show up again. Turnover is terrible, even in highly skilled positions such as engineering. People don't wait around to be promoted - instead, they hop from job to job, earning small title and salary increases each time.
Yup, I'm apparently semi-retarded. Or maybe full-blown.
Since it was a new install, I was mostly moving things from Windows.old to various other folders - all on the same block device. I was also trashing things a lot and emptying the trash. I was just surprised by the new metric and assumed it showed up everywhere.
Yes, but sometimes the ends don't justify the means. Exposing everyone in America to universal scrutiny to catch one guy's boss is probably not worth the tradeoff, no matter how nasty the boss is.
Anyway, any effects the release of the cables had were probably not what he anticipated.
For me, hitting the Windows key and typing the program name works fine.
For some reason, it wasn't working initially and I was actually looking at reinstalling Launchy. I suspect I was either being impatient or it hadn't finished indexing, or when I was playing with settings I turned on some accessability feature. Or, I could just be an idiot. In any case, it's working almost the same way Windows 7 did now, at least for Apps.
n general, the experience has been more pleasant than anticipated for me
I think that's what got me wound up... I kind of blew off the bad reviews as hot air. Vista got universally panned, and it actually was not that bad. And Windows 7 is almost pleasant. So I was kind of startled to find that Windows 8 actually was worse than Windows 7, and in a way that was going to be painful to explain to my wife. I'm also still worked up about the crappy Ribbon interface of Office. Spent the better part of a year getting back to my level of competence and speed. And the worst part is that they completely redid the interface without standardizing, so things like tables in PowerPoint bear little resemblance to tables in Word. And whatever the merits of a ribbon in theory, Outlook's ribbon was assembled by a cargo cult somewhere in the far Pacific.
Anyway, I'm all for progress, but screwing up the desktop interface just so the 10 people who actually use a Microsoft touch interface can use the same exact code is a bad thing IMHO. Android and iOS shows that you can throw a new interface on top of existing kernels and libraries without putting your huge company out of business. You are right, it's nothing to lose sleep over, but I can't see my company adopting Windows 8 until Windows 7 becomes unavailable, either. I certainly will recommend that people avoid it.
I find dual-boot and seldom-used VMs to be difficult to maintain. When you finally fire them up after months of non-use, they need a ton of updates. I prefer to just have one of my machines running Windows. Once I tried to start a cron job that let Windows run once in a while so it could update and stuff, but I guess I did it wrong because it ended up corrupting it's drive image and wouldn't boot. I rolled it back, but lost confidence in the whole process.
Yes, I would say you nailed it. Windows has basically devolved to the same level of usability as Linux. It also reminds me of X applications run inside of the MacOS.
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I sit in the cube across from one of the purchasing guys. He gets on that phone 9 hours a day to negotiate the most trivial amounts of money on parts. And this at a company where we only sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 machines per year. He can pay for his cost to the company for the year by saving perhaps $150 per machine. If he worked at Apple, he'd only need to save something less than a penny to justify his position. Hiking a single part from approximately $28 to over $33 is going to give their purchasing guys a conniption fit.
Of course, this is a b2b transaction, so that principle doesn't really apply.
Yes, accountants don't have emotions :)
I think you are right :)
Correct, Apple seems to be throwing money at Samsung's competitors anyway - clearly this is part of Samsung's calculus. I just wonder whether this will accelerate the rate of their competitor's growth.
The Galaxy S3 (their biggest seller) is selling slightly faster than Apple's biggest seller (the iPhone 4s), in terms of units. I don't know what the respective profit margins are. However, both companies have many other products, not the least of which are the tablets. Losing Apple as a customer would hurt, not just because Apple is their largest - it would also indicate that their competition has gotten good enough and large enough to play with the big boys. Any of their customers would then have the luxury of shopping around, not just Apple.
I suspect that Samsung knows what they are doing, but the stakes are quite high if they misjudge.
I guess the Germans did have skulls...
Probably Samsung's CEO thought "there's no way we can keep a long term relationship with these assholes so we should just milk them while we can
I think you are probably correct. I suspect this will lead to more competition for Samsung, though, since Apple will probably actively participate in making the other suppliers more capable. In other words, gouging Apple may bring the inevitable competition a little sooner. Samsung seems like a pretty well-run company, so I can't really armchair quarterback the company's decision.
Isn't that just semantics? At the end of the day, if you have to pay more from one day to the next - that's a price increase.
Suing a key supplier with no other substitute products is not a good business move.
It's a good point, but gouging your customers is probably also not a good business move. Apple is not exactly cash-poor, and I expect Samsung to face a very capable competitor in the near future (TSMC?). So sure, in the short term Samsung will make a quick buck and sting their chief smartphone competitor. In the long term, they may see their manufacturing advantage disappear - along with an enormous customer.
Awwww, poor II... Are you serious? Or is it because you are at least laughing at the Holiday Special?
The only redeeming quality of I is when you finally get to see why Jedis are feared and respected. I also still keep a copy of "The Phantom Edit", which actually makes "I" pretty decent.
IV was corny*, had some iffy acting, and had weird editing - but was still groundbreaking and really set a new standard for scifi. V was a genuinely good movie.
VI? That was mostly a kids movie. Jar-Jar was just the new Ewoks.
* Death Star? Dark Side? Who the hell would name their crowning technical achievement and religion using such negatively charged words?
Fair enough - but using a different scripting environment still implies use of a "command line interface".
Actually... yeah - why should you need to dual-boot when Linux Desktop and Android both use the Linux kernel?
If he doesn't use PowerShell, he can't be much of an admin...
They look like they are going down to me. It's hard to directly compare, because the models change - but in general prices have been falling. I'm waiting for 3TB to fall below $100 to add capacity to my NAT.
Here's one model that is nearly back to where it started.
Here's an external in the same situation.
I wasn't making any social commentary, just pointing out that the parent was full of hot air.
I don't think you have any experience at all in the Chinese labor market. It is very difficult to retain labor. If an employee finds a job in another factory for an extra 25 cents a day, they just don't show up again. Turnover is terrible, even in highly skilled positions such as engineering. People don't wait around to be promoted - instead, they hop from job to job, earning small title and salary increases each time.
Oh, so you've been taking nationalism lessons from them! You are doing well, but still have a ways to go.
You need one of these:
Ohio-proof shopping cart
I'm not gonna lie... anything delivered is sweet. They actually have a grocery delivery service here in the suburbs now - I haven't tried it yet.
Yup, I'm apparently semi-retarded. Or maybe full-blown.
Since it was a new install, I was mostly moving things from Windows.old to various other folders - all on the same block device. I was also trashing things a lot and emptying the trash. I was just surprised by the new metric and assumed it showed up everywhere.
Yes, but sometimes the ends don't justify the means. Exposing everyone in America to universal scrutiny to catch one guy's boss is probably not worth the tradeoff, no matter how nasty the boss is.
Anyway, any effects the release of the cables had were probably not what he anticipated.
For me, hitting the Windows key and typing the program name works fine.
For some reason, it wasn't working initially and I was actually looking at reinstalling Launchy. I suspect I was either being impatient or it hadn't finished indexing, or when I was playing with settings I turned on some accessability feature. Or, I could just be an idiot. In any case, it's working almost the same way Windows 7 did now, at least for Apps.
n general, the experience has been more pleasant than anticipated for me
I think that's what got me wound up... I kind of blew off the bad reviews as hot air. Vista got universally panned, and it actually was not that bad. And Windows 7 is almost pleasant. So I was kind of startled to find that Windows 8 actually was worse than Windows 7, and in a way that was going to be painful to explain to my wife. I'm also still worked up about the crappy Ribbon interface of Office. Spent the better part of a year getting back to my level of competence and speed. And the worst part is that they completely redid the interface without standardizing, so things like tables in PowerPoint bear little resemblance to tables in Word. And whatever the merits of a ribbon in theory, Outlook's ribbon was assembled by a cargo cult somewhere in the far Pacific.
Anyway, I'm all for progress, but screwing up the desktop interface just so the 10 people who actually use a Microsoft touch interface can use the same exact code is a bad thing IMHO. Android and iOS shows that you can throw a new interface on top of existing kernels and libraries without putting your huge company out of business. You are right, it's nothing to lose sleep over, but I can't see my company adopting Windows 8 until Windows 7 becomes unavailable, either. I certainly will recommend that people avoid it.
I find dual-boot and seldom-used VMs to be difficult to maintain. When you finally fire them up after months of non-use, they need a ton of updates. I prefer to just have one of my machines running Windows. Once I tried to start a cron job that let Windows run once in a while so it could update and stuff, but I guess I did it wrong because it ended up corrupting it's drive image and wouldn't boot. I rolled it back, but lost confidence in the whole process.
You've basically just described Linux.
Yes, I would say you nailed it. Windows has basically devolved to the same level of usability as Linux. It also reminds me of X applications run inside of the MacOS.
I'll be damned, it is working now... maybe I was impatient because my computer is slow, but I spent a bunch of time looking for an alternative.