We can be pretty sure that Google isn't charging everyone else 2.25%. Google only holds a couple of significant 802.11 patents while organizations like CSIRO hold a larger number of more important patents. If 2.25% was the base rate for just Google's share, you'd be losing 10%+ of your revenue just to 802.11 patent holders.
This is just Google taking the screws to Microsoft to make a point. They've already tried this once before with H.264 (another tech that they hold only a few patents), going after Microsoft for 2.25% of Windows and Xbox revenue.
Sure, technically that's a requirement. But any programming flagged Copy Never can't be sent over it, and as for everything else, what are you going to feed it to? There isn't any readily available software that can take advantage of that feature, so it goes unused even by geeks.
It's pretty much all of the above. On the Intel side of things, making their own controllers just wasn't panning out. There are rumors that they had some problems with what was supposed to follow their existing in-house controller, but there's also a lot of evidence that the benefits of building their own controller wasn't worth the cost. The controller itself is very low margin, and Intel is looking for high-margin areas.
Meanwhile SandForce has some extremely desirable technology. Data de-dupe and compression not only improve drive performance right now, but they're going to be critical in future drives as NAND cells shrink in size and the number of P/E cycles drops accordingly. Intel likely could have developed this in-house, but why do so? They can just buy the controller from SandForce at a sweet price, roll their own firmware (that's where all the real work happens anyhow), and sell the resulting SSD as they please.
It's the difference between being able to pirate games and being able to execute arbitrary code. The 360 is relatively easy to fake out into believing that it's reading from pressed discs as opposed to burnt copies, but it's still validating the code on those discs. Hackers still have no real ability to execute arbitrary code on a wide range of consoles, excluding a few consoles with specific hardware/firmware revisions that have suitable flaws.
Thank you for the through explanation, Marcan. The PS3 news sites are a bit... hyperactive in their reporting, so until now I have never really understood the significance of the the 3.60+ boot order or where the latest keys fit into all of this.
"Trying" is probably an overstatement in this case. Intel has a well-devised plan to get there, but it's a plan that involves them taking one step at a time. First they needed the Atom CPU design, then they needed to get it integrated into a true SoC, then they need to integrate their own GPU, etc.
Silvermont is where Intel makes their architectural leap over ARMv7 (Cortex) with the new Atom architecture coupled with Intel's own, higher performance GPUs. Then in 2014 Intel does Airmont, where Atom gets promoted to first-class status in Intel's fabs, jumping to new process nodes at the same time as Core. If all goes to plan, at this point Intel will be roughly a node ahead of the competition with an architecture as good as or better than any planned ARMv7 designs. This is the tick-tock strategy in full swing, the same strategy that is currently bludgeoning AMD to death.
So Intel may be the challenger here, but never underestimate them. Their fabs are unrivaled and they can afford to hire some of the best architects on Earth. If Intel does their homework and doesn't screw up, they're a very dangerous foe. The only place Intel can't (or won't) go is into low-margin products, and as bad as competition from Intel would be, the ARM partners don't want to sacrifice their margins too much just to scare off Intel. It would be a Pyrrhic victory.
I can't speak for other industries, but for the semiconductor industry gross margin is measured as revenue from a chip minus the immediate production costs. For AMD this would be how much they paid GloFo for the chip (or rather averaged across the wafer), plus the costs of testing, assembly/packaging, boxing, and shipping. It does not include advertising, R&D, taxes, etc. And as I stated earlier, R&D is a massive expense. All of those engineers designing the next chip are a huge cost that have to be paid.
You can take a look at AMD's finances first-hand and see how this plays out; AMD has never made a profit with gross margins below 44% or so. Intel would be an even better example: 13.5B in revenue, 3B in net income, and a gross margin of 63.3%. That would put Intel's profit margin at 22% versus their gross margin of 63.3%. Where did all the money go? R&D and fab upgrades. Gross margin only covers your immediate expenses in the semiconductor industry.
Before calling it greed, it would be useful to get the story from the other side.
Taxi officials say that Uber's service may not be legal since city rules do not allow for prearranged rides in yellow taxis. They also forbid cabbies from using electronic devices while driving and prohibit any unjustified refusal of fares. (Under Uber's policy, once a driver accepts a ride through the app, no other passenger can be picked up.)
Councilman James Vacca, the chairman of the City Council's transportation committee, said that the spread of taxi apps had the potential to create a "two-tiered taxi system" in the city: one for people "with fancy smartphones" who are asked to pay a premium, and one for everybody else.
"As a councilman from the Bronx," he said, "a disparity like that does concern me."
The NYC TLC and the city councilors have significant concerns about this effectively siphoning off high paying customers, leaving few cabs for the lower classes. I'm not sure that's rational, but I also wouldn't call it greed.
Any tips for those of us looking to instigate culture change and promote healthy work-life balance?
Yes, get another profession. There aren't enough astronomy jobs to go around, so if you can't keep up with the rest of the pack then as far as labs, schools, and other employers are concerned you're in the wrong field. 9-5 jobs can only exist in fields where labor has the upper hand, and in the case of academia where there's enough funding to afford adequate staffing. Neither of these apply to astronomy - especially the part about funding - which is why the 80 hour week is common as it's the only way to get enough work done.
Despite the rambling, the TFA made it's only salient point with the following:
there's less need to clog up existing lanes with orange cones and repair crews.
Compared to repairing existing roads, new road construction is the cheaper option, even with the costs of additional steps such as planning and grading. Repairs are incredibly expensive and inconvenient for exactly the above reason; it's much harder, much more dangerous, and much slower work to repair a surface in active use, and in the meantime some fraction of that infrastructure is put out of use. When you do need to make significant repairs, what you end up with is Carmageddon, which users can't put up with for long periods of time.
Simply put, many of these major roads are too important and too busy to take out of commission for any period of time for repairs. Your best option quite often comes down to building a parallel track, at which point the original track becomes free for repairs (or more historically, decommissioning).
To be fair, it's not that they don't like consumers, it's that consumers don't (and won't) pay enough. You can't offer real support when most of the machines you sell are $500 craptops. Apple's prices approach business hardware prices, which gives them the kind of margins necessary to offer such good support.
It seems you cannot even BUY that kind of warranty from most PC makers.
You can, but such service is primarily reserved for business customers. Pick up a business machine and pay enough, and they'll even send someone out to come fix it. It'll just cost you out the nose.
Otherwise for consumer/prosumer level gear, Apple is hard to beat. Especially since no one else has a repair shop network that can make the Apple Store.
When a torrent completes and switches to seeding, the incoming connection count and amount of bandwidth drop instantly and significantly. This is due to their "sandvine" software being installed at their border routers.
I appreciate your post, but you're either misinformed or woefully out of date. Comcast dropped Sandvine years ago.
Furthermore the article doesn't at all get into the realities of developing an Android tablet, which for AMD would be a significant hurdle that almost certainly shaped their plan to stick to Windows for now.
While Android itself is cross-platform, the ecosystem as a whole is built around ARM processors. As a result getting Android up and running is a fairly easy endeavour - though still easier for ARM since it more closely matches the Google reference platform - but getting the rest of the ecosystem in place is much harder.
One only has to take a look at Intel's smartphone ambitions to see what is required; approximately 25% of the apps on the Market are statically compiled for ARM, which required that Intel dedicate resources towards building an ARM/x86 binary translator and staff to test and approve applications using it. AMD would have to do much of the same thing for themselves, which significantly raises the barrier to entry for them.
Microsoft certainly isn't handing any money to AMD. AMD is not a Windows 8 tablet launch partner. They got cut out completely, which is why all of the major upcoming Windows 8 tablets are Atom (or Core) despite the fact that AMD's Brazos platform is considerably faster than Atom.
AMD and their ODM partners are free to work on Windows 8 tablets on their own time (and their own dime), but unlike Intel they aren't getting any help or promotion from Microsoft. Which is a shame since AMD really needs the business.
For better or worse this reminds me of the "free" PC era.
For you youngins that weren't around at the time, in the late 90s at the tail-end of the dot-com boom, companies would offer PCs for free in exchange for the ability to track your usage of the PC, track your buying habits, and to run ads. This happened to come late enough in the dot-com boom that "free" PCs were only around for a short period of time before the PC suppliers (and really, the crazy dot-coms that funded them) vanished in a puff of red smoke.
Anyhow, even though no one is getting a free device this time around the similarities are very strong. Amazon gets to track your usage and buying habits (via Silk), and they get to run ads. In fact the only thing that seems different is that instead of being exploited for free, people are expected to pay to be exploited this time around. Financially this is an improvement - this stupid concept may get off the ground for once - but I'm not sure this is any better for consumers than it was the first time around.
Where does Amazon get off doing this? They're not the publisher. The device is paid for. The books are paid for.
The device and the books are being sold at a loss; or to put this another way, you're not the one paying for them. Amazon has discovered that consumers don't care what the catches are - in this case ads and the formation of an Amazon monopoly respectively - so long as things are cheap. In fact it will probably be the most successful Kindle yet.
I concur. With the digital distribution of written works, so long as you have a decent selection of distributors (particularly ones that accept self-publication) then the barrier to entry to the market is almost nil. A cartel on the publishing side means that major publishers can try charging $100 for Harry Potter if they'd like, but that's really all they can do since they can't compel other publishers/authors to stick to their high prices.
On the other hand a cartel or monopoly on the distribution side creates a chokepoint that rivals the world of physical print today. Getting your book listed would put you at the mercy of at most a couple of powerful distributors. Since all of this is virtual they'll probably list your work, but they get to dictate the prices and the share of the proceeds.
Ultimately with eBooks distributors become the new publishers, and publishers become a new type of middle-man. This means it's the distributors you need to be worried about, as the publishers are no longer capable of making themselves the chokepoint.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in this case online-only play is not a binary feature. Diablo III is programmed like an MMO; all of the game logic is server-side. You can't just patch around that kind of functionality, Blizzard would have to rewrite large chunks of the game logic to make it suitable for use in clients.
Unfortunately this isn't all that surprising. With the market failure of WiMAX in the US, Sprint has been put in a very bad position overall. At this point it's everything the company can do just to stay relevant, particularly when the big two (VZ and AT&T) are ahead of you in both coverage and LTE deployment and "little" T-Mobile has a lock on the cities by offering good prices combined with fast speeds (3G DC-HSPA+).
Meanwhile Sprint's network is still almost entirely composed of a last generation CDMA network, unless you're fortunate enough to be in Atlanta where their first LTE deployment is. Even then the performance sucks thanks to the fact that they are deploying their LTE network on such a high frequency.
Because of these reasons, expect to see Sprint do more "crazy" things like MVNO LTE. They're not going to win in a price war, a speed war, or a coverage war; they're going to have to keep throwing things at the wall until they find something that reverses their fortunes, if such a thing can be found in time.
If that's proven to be the case, then the US Government is going to have a boondoggle on their hands. Borax is so widely used as hand soap in schools that practically everyone born in the last 50 years has been exposed to copious amounts of it.
Samsung also confirmed it was ready and willing to sue Apple if an LTE iPhone ever hits the market
Either I'm missing something, or that doesn't make a lick of sense. LTE is all FRAND (just like 3G) isn't it? So what are they going to sue over exactly?
See guys, was that so hard? Now next time you should focus on getting the patch out before it gets exploited in the wild, since you've been sitting on this exploit for the last 4 months.
Slashdot Mirror
We can be pretty sure that Google isn't charging everyone else 2.25%. Google only holds a couple of significant 802.11 patents while organizations like CSIRO hold a larger number of more important patents. If 2.25% was the base rate for just Google's share, you'd be losing 10%+ of your revenue just to 802.11 patent holders.
This is just Google taking the screws to Microsoft to make a point. They've already tried this once before with H.264 (another tech that they hold only a few patents), going after Microsoft for 2.25% of Windows and Xbox revenue.
Sure, technically that's a requirement. But any programming flagged Copy Never can't be sent over it, and as for everything else, what are you going to feed it to? There isn't any readily available software that can take advantage of that feature, so it goes unused even by geeks.
If they don't already, they will when the courts start looking at who to throw in jail for contempt of court.
It's pretty much all of the above. On the Intel side of things, making their own controllers just wasn't panning out. There are rumors that they had some problems with what was supposed to follow their existing in-house controller, but there's also a lot of evidence that the benefits of building their own controller wasn't worth the cost. The controller itself is very low margin, and Intel is looking for high-margin areas.
Meanwhile SandForce has some extremely desirable technology. Data de-dupe and compression not only improve drive performance right now, but they're going to be critical in future drives as NAND cells shrink in size and the number of P/E cycles drops accordingly. Intel likely could have developed this in-house, but why do so? They can just buy the controller from SandForce at a sweet price, roll their own firmware (that's where all the real work happens anyhow), and sell the resulting SSD as they please.
It's the difference between being able to pirate games and being able to execute arbitrary code. The 360 is relatively easy to fake out into believing that it's reading from pressed discs as opposed to burnt copies, but it's still validating the code on those discs. Hackers still have no real ability to execute arbitrary code on a wide range of consoles, excluding a few consoles with specific hardware/firmware revisions that have suitable flaws.
Thank you for the through explanation, Marcan. The PS3 news sites are a bit... hyperactive in their reporting, so until now I have never really understood the significance of the the 3.60+ boot order or where the latest keys fit into all of this.
"Trying" is probably an overstatement in this case. Intel has a well-devised plan to get there, but it's a plan that involves them taking one step at a time. First they needed the Atom CPU design, then they needed to get it integrated into a true SoC, then they need to integrate their own GPU, etc.
Intel Atom roadmap
Silvermont is where Intel makes their architectural leap over ARMv7 (Cortex) with the new Atom architecture coupled with Intel's own, higher performance GPUs. Then in 2014 Intel does Airmont, where Atom gets promoted to first-class status in Intel's fabs, jumping to new process nodes at the same time as Core. If all goes to plan, at this point Intel will be roughly a node ahead of the competition with an architecture as good as or better than any planned ARMv7 designs. This is the tick-tock strategy in full swing, the same strategy that is currently bludgeoning AMD to death.
So Intel may be the challenger here, but never underestimate them. Their fabs are unrivaled and they can afford to hire some of the best architects on Earth. If Intel does their homework and doesn't screw up, they're a very dangerous foe. The only place Intel can't (or won't) go is into low-margin products, and as bad as competition from Intel would be, the ARM partners don't want to sacrifice their margins too much just to scare off Intel. It would be a Pyrrhic victory.
I can't speak for other industries, but for the semiconductor industry gross margin is measured as revenue from a chip minus the immediate production costs. For AMD this would be how much they paid GloFo for the chip (or rather averaged across the wafer), plus the costs of testing, assembly/packaging, boxing, and shipping. It does not include advertising, R&D, taxes, etc. And as I stated earlier, R&D is a massive expense. All of those engineers designing the next chip are a huge cost that have to be paid.
You can take a look at AMD's finances first-hand and see how this plays out; AMD has never made a profit with gross margins below 44% or so. Intel would be an even better example: 13.5B in revenue, 3B in net income, and a gross margin of 63.3%. That would put Intel's profit margin at 22% versus their gross margin of 63.3%. Where did all the money go? R&D and fab upgrades. Gross margin only covers your immediate expenses in the semiconductor industry.
In the tech world that is abysmal. R&D costs are so high that you'd almost certainly take a loss in the end.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/nyregion/as-ubers-taxi-hailing-app-comes-to-new-york-its-legality-is-questioned.html?_r=0
The NYC TLC and the city councilors have significant concerns about this effectively siphoning off high paying customers, leaving few cabs for the lower classes. I'm not sure that's rational, but I also wouldn't call it greed.
Yes, get another profession. There aren't enough astronomy jobs to go around, so if you can't keep up with the rest of the pack then as far as labs, schools, and other employers are concerned you're in the wrong field. 9-5 jobs can only exist in fields where labor has the upper hand, and in the case of academia where there's enough funding to afford adequate staffing. Neither of these apply to astronomy - especially the part about funding - which is why the 80 hour week is common as it's the only way to get enough work done.
Despite the rambling, the TFA made it's only salient point with the following:
Compared to repairing existing roads, new road construction is the cheaper option, even with the costs of additional steps such as planning and grading. Repairs are incredibly expensive and inconvenient for exactly the above reason; it's much harder, much more dangerous, and much slower work to repair a surface in active use, and in the meantime some fraction of that infrastructure is put out of use. When you do need to make significant repairs, what you end up with is Carmageddon, which users can't put up with for long periods of time.
Simply put, many of these major roads are too important and too busy to take out of commission for any period of time for repairs. Your best option quite often comes down to building a parallel track, at which point the original track becomes free for repairs (or more historically, decommissioning).
To be fair, it's not that they don't like consumers, it's that consumers don't (and won't) pay enough. You can't offer real support when most of the machines you sell are $500 craptops. Apple's prices approach business hardware prices, which gives them the kind of margins necessary to offer such good support.
You can, but such service is primarily reserved for business customers. Pick up a business machine and pay enough, and they'll even send someone out to come fix it. It'll just cost you out the nose.
Otherwise for consumer/prosumer level gear, Apple is hard to beat. Especially since no one else has a repair shop network that can make the Apple Store.
I appreciate your post, but you're either misinformed or woefully out of date. Comcast dropped Sandvine years ago.
Furthermore the article doesn't at all get into the realities of developing an Android tablet, which for AMD would be a significant hurdle that almost certainly shaped their plan to stick to Windows for now.
While Android itself is cross-platform, the ecosystem as a whole is built around ARM processors. As a result getting Android up and running is a fairly easy endeavour - though still easier for ARM since it more closely matches the Google reference platform - but getting the rest of the ecosystem in place is much harder.
One only has to take a look at Intel's smartphone ambitions to see what is required; approximately 25% of the apps on the Market are statically compiled for ARM, which required that Intel dedicate resources towards building an ARM/x86 binary translator and staff to test and approve applications using it. AMD would have to do much of the same thing for themselves, which significantly raises the barrier to entry for them.
Microsoft certainly isn't handing any money to AMD. AMD is not a Windows 8 tablet launch partner. They got cut out completely, which is why all of the major upcoming Windows 8 tablets are Atom (or Core) despite the fact that AMD's Brazos platform is considerably faster than Atom.
AMD and their ODM partners are free to work on Windows 8 tablets on their own time (and their own dime), but unlike Intel they aren't getting any help or promotion from Microsoft. Which is a shame since AMD really needs the business.
For better or worse this reminds me of the "free" PC era.
For you youngins that weren't around at the time, in the late 90s at the tail-end of the dot-com boom, companies would offer PCs for free in exchange for the ability to track your usage of the PC, track your buying habits, and to run ads. This happened to come late enough in the dot-com boom that "free" PCs were only around for a short period of time before the PC suppliers (and really, the crazy dot-coms that funded them) vanished in a puff of red smoke.
Anyhow, even though no one is getting a free device this time around the similarities are very strong. Amazon gets to track your usage and buying habits (via Silk), and they get to run ads. In fact the only thing that seems different is that instead of being exploited for free, people are expected to pay to be exploited this time around. Financially this is an improvement - this stupid concept may get off the ground for once - but I'm not sure this is any better for consumers than it was the first time around.
The device and the books are being sold at a loss; or to put this another way, you're not the one paying for them. Amazon has discovered that consumers don't care what the catches are - in this case ads and the formation of an Amazon monopoly respectively - so long as things are cheap. In fact it will probably be the most successful Kindle yet.
I concur. With the digital distribution of written works, so long as you have a decent selection of distributors (particularly ones that accept self-publication) then the barrier to entry to the market is almost nil. A cartel on the publishing side means that major publishers can try charging $100 for Harry Potter if they'd like, but that's really all they can do since they can't compel other publishers/authors to stick to their high prices.
On the other hand a cartel or monopoly on the distribution side creates a chokepoint that rivals the world of physical print today. Getting your book listed would put you at the mercy of at most a couple of powerful distributors. Since all of this is virtual they'll probably list your work, but they get to dictate the prices and the share of the proceeds.
Ultimately with eBooks distributors become the new publishers, and publishers become a new type of middle-man. This means it's the distributors you need to be worried about, as the publishers are no longer capable of making themselves the chokepoint.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in this case online-only play is not a binary feature. Diablo III is programmed like an MMO; all of the game logic is server-side. You can't just patch around that kind of functionality, Blizzard would have to rewrite large chunks of the game logic to make it suitable for use in clients.
Unfortunately this isn't all that surprising. With the market failure of WiMAX in the US, Sprint has been put in a very bad position overall. At this point it's everything the company can do just to stay relevant, particularly when the big two (VZ and AT&T) are ahead of you in both coverage and LTE deployment and "little" T-Mobile has a lock on the cities by offering good prices combined with fast speeds (3G DC-HSPA+).
Meanwhile Sprint's network is still almost entirely composed of a last generation CDMA network, unless you're fortunate enough to be in Atlanta where their first LTE deployment is. Even then the performance sucks thanks to the fact that they are deploying their LTE network on such a high frequency.
Because of these reasons, expect to see Sprint do more "crazy" things like MVNO LTE. They're not going to win in a price war, a speed war, or a coverage war; they're going to have to keep throwing things at the wall until they find something that reverses their fortunes, if such a thing can be found in time.
If that's proven to be the case, then the US Government is going to have a boondoggle on their hands. Borax is so widely used as hand soap in schools that practically everyone born in the last 50 years has been exposed to copious amounts of it.
Either I'm missing something, or that doesn't make a lick of sense. LTE is all FRAND (just like 3G) isn't it? So what are they going to sue over exactly?
See guys, was that so hard? Now next time you should focus on getting the patch out before it gets exploited in the wild, since you've been sitting on this exploit for the last 4 months.