11 billion miles sounds like a long way when phrased like that. It doesn't sound so far when you write it as 16.4 light-hours, and remember that the nearest star is about 4.35 light years away. Or, to put it another way, it's travelled 0.043% of the distance from here to Alpha Centauri and is the furthest man-made object away from us. That really puts into perspective how much further (or, rather, faster) we have to go for interstellar space travel to be possible.
Audio cassettes over vinyl, MP3 over CD, VHS over Laserdisc... a long time ago. It's not that quality is not important, but in a lot of cases it reaches 'good enough' quite quickly. VHS quality is probably okay, DVD definitely is. HD is obviously better, but if you're watching something good then you'll rarely find yourself distracted by the poor video quality even if it's only at VHS levels. I'd certainly take being able to watch any film I wanted, when I wanted it, at DVD quality over having to wait a couple of days for a BluRay disk.
If you're charging for your software, the bandwidth cost is trivial. If it's open source, then there are places like GNA (not to be confused with GNAA), SourceForge, GitHub and so on that will give you free download space. There are also places like mirror.ac.uk that will mirror your download site for anything that's freely redistributable and you can just point people at their version.
Of course, sometimes you don't actually need the same level of competence. I spent some time this year supervising a couple of Chinese developers for a company that I do some work for. The project was fairly low priority and they couldn't afford to have it done at the rates I charge, but paying for a couple of days of my time doing code and design review and a couple of months of someone in China doing the real work. The end result was probably about as good as if I'd done it - maybe better, because a lot of it was tedious work and I'd have been bored - and a lot cheaper.
If they're part of the company, then they're not outsourced, they're just offshored. Often the two go together, but they are independent. You can move an office to a different country and you can move the work to another company in the same city. Or you can combine the two. This is usually when you get the worst results. There may be talented people in India, but if you're hiring them at one remove from a continent away then there's a very good chance that you won't be employing any of them.
The carriers are going to get your $50 to $120 a month
Are they? I bought my phone for about £50 and I'm on a pre-pay plan where I typically pay £2-3 each month. For £5/month I can get a light-use data package (enough for email and IM).
How much sense does that make? Whether you believe in evolution or intelligent design, makes no difference, that just doesn't figure
It does. Evolution tends towards locally optimal solutions for passing on genes. Individual survival is not an important trait. In fact it's a problem, because it means that the new generation competes with the older one, reducing the population turnover rate and slowing the process of evolution (which requires frequent mutations). If 80% of the populations survives long enough to produce offspring then that's great for evolution.
Intelligent design is different. Either your creator hates you or your creator is incompetent. Actually, it makes sense if you read genesis: God created animals after he creates cannabis...
Oh, and there's no reason why you couldn't have multiple brains. We do high availability clustering with computers now - just make sure that both receive the same inputs and they'll be in the same state.
That was my first thought to. Of course, it's a reimplementation of mercury delay lines in the same way that an ion drive is a reimplementation of a V2, so it probably does deserve some credit...
Chrome has something like 25% of the browser market, which means about 25% of the desktop computer market. I doubt even 25% of desktop computer users have a Smartphone of any kind, let alone an Android phone.
It's software, but it isn't a software product. It's only a software product if you can install it on your own hardware. If you're running it on their servers and don't have any access to the underlying system then it's a software service, not a software product.
They just seem more valuable alive than dead, to Google. Unlike some of the other competitors, even a sudden surge of unmitigated dominance, with the Gecko slaughtering all before it, would pretty much just require Google to switch from webkit to Gecko and feel absolutely no pain in the areas where it actually makes money
Not really. Differences between Gecko and WebKit, and particularly between V8 and the JS engine that FireFox uses, cost Google development effort on the server side. If they could ditch support for FireFox, they'd save money. If WebKit + V8 had 90% market share then most of Google's services would be a lot cheaper to develop.
You may not, but it only takes one person to leak information. As the adage says, information wants to be free: the natural state of something that is trivial to copy is widely dispersed. If you want something to remain confidential, restrict who has access to it. Or, to put it more simply, the best way to keep a secret is not to tell people...
But as tablets become able to do "real work", fewer people will demand PCs
Why? Given a laptop that can do what you want and a tablet, why do you assume that people would always pick the tablet? The tablet will have a smaller screen and be less comfortable for typing on. I'd expect a wall-mounted HDTV and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to be a better fit for most people's needs.
Transistor count means a lot to the future evolution of the product. If it's lower than the competitor, then that means that (on the same process technology) you can fit more onto a wafer and so they'll be cheaper. A low count means that you can easily fit extra cores on a die. The transistor count also implies the transistor count per core, so a lower number means that adding a couple of extra cores is less expensive that previously thought so it's likely to happen sooner. It may also mean that they're under the transistor budget and can add some extra execution units to the next version.
Sure, it doesn't tell you much about Bulldozer, but it does tell you a fair bit about Bulldozer II.
Oh, and 1.2 to 2 is an easy mistake to make. If the PR people are talking to the engineers on the phone it's easy to mishear 1.2 as 2.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do
Getting hazy, can't divide three by two
My answers I cannot see 'em
They're stuck in my Pentium
It would be sweet
My answers fleet
On a workable FPU.
Uh, email is decentralised. Anyone can set up a node in the network just by pointing an MX record at a machine. The problem in this case is too many people using the same node. You'll note that while UCB was having problems, email continued to work fine for everyone else unless they had unrelated problems.
It's not the Walled Gardens per se, it's the fact that apps for iPad typically cost anything from $1 to $5. Just contrast that w/ what a PC software title costs, and you have your answer
A lot of PC software is free. There is a lot of shareware that costs about $5 and even comes with a full-featured demo. The difference with the iPad model is that the cheap apps are presented to the user and there are very few expensive ones. There are equivalents of Paint.NET, but no equivalents of Photoshop.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nobel Peace Prize pays out pretty well; generally $1-3 million USD depending on market variations.
So, somewhere between 5 and 15% of the golden parachute that Carly Fiorina got for running HP into the ground (on top of her salary)?
That's true. Jokes are much more funny when you explain them.
A cloud is a large thing made entirely out of vapour.
11 billion miles sounds like a long way when phrased like that. It doesn't sound so far when you write it as 16.4 light-hours, and remember that the nearest star is about 4.35 light years away. Or, to put it another way, it's travelled 0.043% of the distance from here to Alpha Centauri and is the furthest man-made object away from us. That really puts into perspective how much further (or, rather, faster) we have to go for interstellar space travel to be possible.
I'm pretty sure that's how Godzilla was created...
Audio cassettes over vinyl, MP3 over CD, VHS over Laserdisc... a long time ago. It's not that quality is not important, but in a lot of cases it reaches 'good enough' quite quickly. VHS quality is probably okay, DVD definitely is. HD is obviously better, but if you're watching something good then you'll rarely find yourself distracted by the poor video quality even if it's only at VHS levels. I'd certainly take being able to watch any film I wanted, when I wanted it, at DVD quality over having to wait a couple of days for a BluRay disk.
404? I think that's the most appropriate suffix I've seen on your name so far...
If you're charging for your software, the bandwidth cost is trivial. If it's open source, then there are places like GNA (not to be confused with GNAA), SourceForge, GitHub and so on that will give you free download space. There are also places like mirror.ac.uk that will mirror your download site for anything that's freely redistributable and you can just point people at their version.
Of course, sometimes you don't actually need the same level of competence. I spent some time this year supervising a couple of Chinese developers for a company that I do some work for. The project was fairly low priority and they couldn't afford to have it done at the rates I charge, but paying for a couple of days of my time doing code and design review and a couple of months of someone in China doing the real work. The end result was probably about as good as if I'd done it - maybe better, because a lot of it was tedious work and I'd have been bored - and a lot cheaper.
If they're part of the company, then they're not outsourced, they're just offshored. Often the two go together, but they are independent. You can move an office to a different country and you can move the work to another company in the same city. Or you can combine the two. This is usually when you get the worst results. There may be talented people in India, but if you're hiring them at one remove from a continent away then there's a very good chance that you won't be employing any of them.
The carriers are going to get your $50 to $120 a month
Are they? I bought my phone for about £50 and I'm on a pre-pay plan where I typically pay £2-3 each month. For £5/month I can get a light-use data package (enough for email and IM).
How much sense does that make? Whether you believe in evolution or intelligent design, makes no difference, that just doesn't figure
It does. Evolution tends towards locally optimal solutions for passing on genes. Individual survival is not an important trait. In fact it's a problem, because it means that the new generation competes with the older one, reducing the population turnover rate and slowing the process of evolution (which requires frequent mutations). If 80% of the populations survives long enough to produce offspring then that's great for evolution.
Intelligent design is different. Either your creator hates you or your creator is incompetent. Actually, it makes sense if you read genesis: God created animals after he creates cannabis...
Oh, and there's no reason why you couldn't have multiple brains. We do high availability clustering with computers now - just make sure that both receive the same inputs and they'll be in the same state.
The French government said they recognized it was some activists and did nothing
So if I want to plant a bomb on a nuclear reactor I just have to dress like a hippy and hand out pamphlets on my way into the plant?
That was my first thought to. Of course, it's a reimplementation of mercury delay lines in the same way that an ion drive is a reimplementation of a V2, so it probably does deserve some credit...
Chrome has something like 25% of the browser market, which means about 25% of the desktop computer market. I doubt even 25% of desktop computer users have a Smartphone of any kind, let alone an Android phone.
It's software, but it isn't a software product. It's only a software product if you can install it on your own hardware. If you're running it on their servers and don't have any access to the underlying system then it's a software service, not a software product.
They just seem more valuable alive than dead, to Google. Unlike some of the other competitors, even a sudden surge of unmitigated dominance, with the Gecko slaughtering all before it, would pretty much just require Google to switch from webkit to Gecko and feel absolutely no pain in the areas where it actually makes money
Not really. Differences between Gecko and WebKit, and particularly between V8 and the JS engine that FireFox uses, cost Google development effort on the server side. If they could ditch support for FireFox, they'd save money. If WebKit + V8 had 90% market share then most of Google's services would be a lot cheaper to develop.
No software products, no. I can think of several Google services that people use more often than Chrome, but no software products.
You may not, but it only takes one person to leak information. As the adage says, information wants to be free: the natural state of something that is trivial to copy is widely dispersed. If you want something to remain confidential, restrict who has access to it. Or, to put it more simply, the best way to keep a secret is not to tell people...
But as tablets become able to do "real work", fewer people will demand PCs
Why? Given a laptop that can do what you want and a tablet, why do you assume that people would always pick the tablet? The tablet will have a smaller screen and be less comfortable for typing on. I'd expect a wall-mounted HDTV and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to be a better fit for most people's needs.
Transistor count means a lot to the future evolution of the product. If it's lower than the competitor, then that means that (on the same process technology) you can fit more onto a wafer and so they'll be cheaper. A low count means that you can easily fit extra cores on a die. The transistor count also implies the transistor count per core, so a lower number means that adding a couple of extra cores is less expensive that previously thought so it's likely to happen sooner. It may also mean that they're under the transistor budget and can add some extra execution units to the next version.
Sure, it doesn't tell you much about Bulldozer, but it does tell you a fair bit about Bulldozer II.
Oh, and 1.2 to 2 is an easy mistake to make. If the PR people are talking to the engineers on the phone it's easy to mishear 1.2 as 2.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do
Getting hazy, can't divide three by two
My answers I cannot see 'em
They're stuck in my Pentium
It would be sweet
My answers fleet
On a workable FPU.
(Credit to some anonymous TI employees)
Uh, email is decentralised. Anyone can set up a node in the network just by pointing an MX record at a machine. The problem in this case is too many people using the same node. You'll note that while UCB was having problems, email continued to work fine for everyone else unless they had unrelated problems.
It's not the Walled Gardens per se, it's the fact that apps for iPad typically cost anything from $1 to $5. Just contrast that w/ what a PC software title costs, and you have your answer
A lot of PC software is free. There is a lot of shareware that costs about $5 and even comes with a full-featured demo. The difference with the iPad model is that the cheap apps are presented to the user and there are very few expensive ones. There are equivalents of Paint.NET, but no equivalents of Photoshop.
Which is why things like CarrierIQ weren't found on the free and open Android platform
Correct. They were found on the proprietary locked-down Android platform.