Yeah, let's just say I was hard pressed. I'm not a car guy (I have a Civic that runs so long as you put gas and oil in it every so often, which suits me just fine), but nothing else sprung to mind. I actually think the BBS v. TCP stack is pretty close, but the set of people who have actually used a BBS is pretty small at this point.
(old guy voice) Plus, they won't stay off my lawn. (/old guy voice)
On features, I'll listen to Myth v. TiVo arguments, but arguing TiVo v. the TimeWarner DVR on that front is pointless. I tried to come up for an analogy of how much better TiVo is, but I can't do it. Maybe a Yugo against a fuel-sipping Jag that never needs repairs. Seriously.
We just upgraded our lifetime series 1 TiVos to series 2s. We didn't care much, but wanted to get rid of the phone line and use our wireless network for TiVo upgrades. The dual tuners were nice, but frankly, there isn't that much we care about on TV anyway, and the number of shows lost to conflicts was extremely low.
The new software:
- shares between our DVRs (copies files over the wireless network, so I can watch my wife's stuff on my TiVo and vice versa). - has Yahoo and Live365 clients, so I can get traffic updates and stream net radio over my TV. - MUCH faster processing for updates with the new hardware - We've had ZERO slowdowns or reboots since installation, which wasn't the case with the DVR we had briefly. - folder based navigation (If I have five episodes of MythBusters, I get a folder labelled "Mythbusters (5)", rather than having to dig through the entire list - Personal Picture and video sharing - I could, if I had a mind to, download programs to a Windows box, and/or use that Windows box as a networked MP3 station for my TiVos. No Linux compatibility (dammit, uses some Win32.NET thing that doesn't go in Wine, IIRC).
I'm not about to argue that TiVo is in an enviable spot. Not being able to buy a new lifetime subscription is a BIG problem. TiVos are more expensive. A lot of people (including my parents) think the way the parent post does. From a marketing standpoint, TiVo is always going to be climbing uphill.
OTOH, do NOT try to tell me that TiVo and the TW DVR are comparable. Maybe the comparison is now vs. before everybody got a TCP stack on their PC. Hey, it worked just fine, too.
Granted, and please don't get me wrong, low functionality notebooks aren't going to play in the markets you're discussing.
OTOH, at least IMO, if the last five years have shown anything, it's that the demand for high performance desktop computing lies primarily in three sectors:
- people who actually need it (hard core developers, various and sundry applications) - gamers - people who use "computing power" as an analogue to, well, other things.
As the capabilities of ultra-low end boxes catch up with general requirements, it's going to get more difficult to sell the high end. Even two or three years ago, when sub-$200 boxes meant 90MHz and 128M, you'd have trouble running a GUI. That's no longer the case, and distros like DSL or window managers like xfce can run capably, if unspectacularly on the 566MHz/256M refurbs being sold for $49.
I think a LOT of the growth is going to be in quiet (read: fanless) solutions, as opposed to the upper end. The generic applications for most users aren't demanding the horsepower that the hardware is capable of. There may be a quantum shift in, say, office documents, or web applications, but I don't see it happening. At least not right now.
- kid's laptop. If it gets trashed, so what? - LTSP terminal. - heck, MY laptop. I wouldn't choose to do kernel compilations on any laptop in my price range to begin with, so as long as the OLPC has a browser, an email client, ssh, and WiFi, I'm pretty much done (although I wouldn't turn down an mp3 player). All I really want is that it be light, have a (preferably decent) keyboard, and legible in coffee shops for a couple of hours at a go. - if it has usb, low power consumption file server. See things like the kurobox, or the guys who are hacking the BuffaloTech stuff. You don't NEED tons of power to torrent or serve files. - disposable redundant server. Take ten of them, hook them to a load balancer and an NFS, and you've got a (functionally) infinite capacity web server for (basically) the cost of the load balancer and NFS, for which you can make a case anyway. I'm a little surprised somebody hasn't done this already with old Xboxes. In any event, that group that put together that Apple supercomputer proved that you can do things with multiply redundant hardware, and these would be perfect for low level apps. - Disposable emergency server. Say a hurricane is coming. It would be trivial to set up a databased refugee tracking system for 25 clients on one of these. GPL/BSD/whatever the software, and your app is completely portable for $100 in HW costs. - Heck, firewalls. Something like this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/90c6/ - I'm sure people smarter than I can append to this list in a big hurry.
Is it for everyone? No. Would I want to make it my primary computer? No. Would I make it a companion piece to my 4000x1280/1GHz C7/1GB workstation? You betcha.
I may have heard this wrong (and things may have changed since I heard it), but I seem to recall that there are two pricepoints for games in Japan. Something like $20 for "minor" games (Katamari, for instance), and the usual $60 or so for, say, MGS, FFXII or Pro Evolution.
Can we discuss this rationally? If we assume that Einstein was right, and faster than light speed travel is not possible, then isn't manned space flight pretty much impossible? My understanding is that Alpha Centauri is four light years away, making a round trip eight years, compounded by the fact that there's nothing there.
To meaningfully pursue manned space flight, how fast would we need to go to make Alpha Centauri functional? I'm not trying to cause trouble here, just uninformed and curious. I'm sure someone out there (especially in this community) has thought about this far more deeply than I.
check out damnsmalllinux. You can set a single usb memory stick to both boot off the stick or run (in emulation) in either Linux or Windows. You can customize it to run all sorts of packages. Running in emulation isn't speedy, but it gets the job done (eventually).
Knoppix is good at this, but I didn't have the same experience as the parent. Either I did something to munge apt, or, well, SOMEthing, but I couldn't get one to boot under 100MB or so. I didn't have a lot of patience with what I removed or included, but once, due to dependencies, it started to remove some really base packages, and I got fed up.
In my experience, if you really need to get small, just use DamnSmallLinux. Tack on the apt and actual gnu utils dsl packages, and you're in business, and there's an "install to HD" option already built in, IIRC. YMMV, obviously.
The fundamental question is: How does Playboy, in that instance, get paid for creating the content in the first place?
Given that they're not getting paid to produce those pictures, Playboy, by definition, must shut down at least their "picture producing" division. Now where's your content coming from?
I'm not arguing free speech. I'm not arguing copyright. I'm arguing finance. If content producers (be they game makers, pron producers, or musicians) are not financially compensated for their efforts, they will eventually stop producing content.
We can discuss whether that's good or bad, but I haven't seen anything on YouTube that makes me want to swear off film. Yet.
PS2 still has life in it. You can't look at Okami, GoW2, or RE4, and tell me there isn't plenty of room for gaming in this generation.
PS3 was obviously rushed to market. From my understanding, developers had about a week to get used to the SixAxis, and the first slate of games was shallow at best.
Nobody's passionate about HD-DVD v. BluRay, and cross-standard DVD players are already in the market.
Tacking on the BluRay drive achieves little, at least compared to including the CD player in the PS1 and DVD player in the PS2.
My understanding is that you need an HDTV to really get much out of the games, and HDTV penetration has been slow. We're probably past "early adopter," but not by much.
PS3 is overpriced, and the firstgen PS3 games aren't that much better looking than their Xbox 360 counterparts.
I'm not even going into the question of whether the games are "better" or "prettier." I mean, SOMEbody's going to take a fall for this.
Just for the record, PointCast was pull as well. I saw a speech by the guy at some Lotus conference back in the day, and ate with him. I was puzzling it out during his speech, so I just asked him whether it was a pull, and he said it was.
If you think about it, to actually push from PointCast to a client, you'd need a daemon on the client box, and some sort of UDP streamcasting. Pointless bandwidth (to clients that are turned off, for instance) would be gargantuan.
Isn't he the guy who ran the Trailblazers into the ground, lost their arena during bankruptcy, and is begging the city to subsidize them? Finally, he brings his management genius to the palmtop race.
I swear, if you say that management is like a college coaching staff, Microsoft would be Duke. The main guy (Coach K) is really good, but his high profile mentees are pretty awful (Synder at Missouri, Amaker at Michigan).
At some level, they're just outsourcing their R&D. Microsoft used this to great effect during the '90s. Need a DBMS? Buy Sybase, repackage it as MSSQLServer, and you're done. Need a web browser? Obtain Mosaic, and you're done. You can grow the product later, but at least you're playing. So, before the buyouts, let the market figure out who the bigger players are, and buy the biggest one still available. Everything else doesn't really matter. There are a couple of things in play here.
1) User base. There really isn't anything that can't be replicated by the big companies you mentioned. If you think about it, what's YouTube really got to offer? Terabytes of server space? Yawn. Media player technology? Relatively solved problem. Big horkin' bandwidth? Feh.
But, if, as one of the big companies, you develop a new media portal, you don't have the million-odd users that are already on YouTube, and there would be significant costs trying to get your homegrown app to that level. So, partly, they're buying the user base.
2) URL recognition. Same principle, only applied to the URL, instead of the user base.
I might just be showing my age here, but I'm reminded of a chess saying along the lines of "new lessons are old lessons remembered." I suspect there are significant analogues between "web 2" and "web 1," and Lord knows, the initial models were disproved with a vengeance. YouTube could be compared to broadcast.com, MySpace/social networking to GeoCities (although I'll admit that there is other, more viral, functionality in MySpace). I, at least, just don't get it.
It's worth noting that even at $1.65B, the YouTube buyout is chump change to Google, especially if it's a stock-only deal, which is my understanding. Google's made FAR more than that in stock appreciation, so getting a market leader in that space without actually spending money might make sense. I certainly couldn't justify it, but somebody sold the idea within Google, which is really the only thing that matters.
Innovation happens. What the mega-corporations do to catch up with the innovations is the question. In this business environment, I suspect you cannot tangle with the big guys and win. As a small company, the best you can hope for is a buyout.
"First of all, once you have gotten use to watching BluRay 1080p movies, anything less feels like an eyesore. You will probably be able to pickup a 1080p TV by the holidays this year for just under a grand."
You know what? I don't care. Do the marketers seriously think we're all going to rush out and buy yet another TV? I recognize that it looks a lot better, but not $1k worth, and certianly not even vaguely worth the replacement cost of my $40 DVD and 240GB hacked TiVo (six years old, still running strong). Forget it, not gonna happen. Until HD timeshifting is available, reliable, and cheap, I'm not even listening.
"Second, the Java layer, that Microsoft seems to hate so much, on BluRay discs is letting us do all sorts of very cool stuff far beyond the simple menu systems that current DVDs have."
Oh, good, because I didn't hate the menus for current DVDs nearly enough. Please, by all means, let the wanna be game programmers run loose on the menu system. Just be sure to call me when the movie starts.
TV and film, like radio before them, are reaching a point at which future technical improvements are borderline pointless. I, at least, don't hear much about DVD-Audio any more, because 90% of what 90% of the people want to do with their music can be handled capably by mp3. So, $2500 for a reasonable HD/HD-DVD/HD-Gaming system, or torrent it for nothing? Ethical/Legal/IDon'tWantToStartTHISArgumentAgain considerations aside, I'll bet more people pick the latter.
From another article (which, predictably, I can't find), it sounded as if there are some issues with the processor design that keeps this processor from being marketed in the US. It's not really my area, but does anyone have insight on this issue?
Other than that, I'm thinking we might be looking at the next Audrey or something. I'll never figure out why they don't put every piece of documentation on the web and open the box up to the hacker community. Seems straightforward to me, but I'm no marketer (thankfully).
We used NorthAmerican Van Lines to move from Mpls to Austin, and it was absolutely horrific. Like "Lost our stuff for two weeks, didn't know where to find it, destroyed a reasonably nice desk, and balked at paying us for ANOTHER two weeks" horrific.
In passing along our tale of woe, we've heard similar stories about most of the other major carriers, though. The overriding lesson being that if you use a company along those lines, you have to set it up through a company account. If it's just a single household move, you're subject to all sorts of abuse, as my understanding is that the carrier is different from both the company that packs your stuff and the company that unloads it. Good luck figuring out where the damage actually happened, so you're stuck taking the settlement, which is chump change compared to what you paid in the first place to avoid exactly the kind of hassle you're getting.
Unless your house is very big, or you're moving out of or into a walkup, don't use big carriers. Your mileage may vary, but for me, they're absolutely not worth it.
The 360 launch is hardly the success it might have been:
It's February, bordering on March. To the best of my knowledge, if I wasn't on a list at the launch, I STILL can't walk into someplace and buy one.
Launch titles have been tepid at best. Even a source that should mitigate fanboyism like Game Rankings has a 76% average rating for the 10th ranked game. That can't be good, although I have no historical comparisons.
Non-US sales have not been good.
Sony sees this, and might be thinking that they're in no hurry here:
The 360 might be slightly problematic in the US, but the launch is not setting the world on fire. Microsoft is unlikely to saturate the market without a severe price cut, which won't happen.
They're still probably ok in Japan, especially as the Revolution appears to be setting itself up as a secondary console. Third party support for the Revolution might not be good with that weird (but cool) controller.
Prices of the components are going to fall in the meantime, so they either come in WAY below sales price estimates, or lose a lot less money per console sold.
Where exactly is the pressure to launch quickly? The first 360 price cut will probably be for Xmas, but launch the PS3 in Japan in June, then US in October or so, and do it at $450 (better yet, $399), and they'll be fine, assuming the 360 goes to $350 snazzy, $250 core. If MS goes to $300/$200, it might get interesting, but historically, that's one DEEP cut on a year old console.
I'm just not seeing why the delay is such big news. I think it could easily work in Sony's favor.
1) The estimates aren't based solely upon the analysts' views. Frequently, the final estimate is based on a negotiation between the company and the analyst. It's not quite as explicit as that, but there are a lot of ways that the company can adjust the estimate (warnings probably being the most overt).
2) It's not necessarily clear that Sergey can sell those shares. Most of the time in an IPO, the founders (etc.) get N shares, but they can't legally sell them for a period of time after the IPO. That helps keep the founders (etc.) in line while the company gets used to being publicly traded. As such, his net worth on the N shares he has is N*(price of google stock), but it's illiquid.
Less formally, should that not be the case, and he dumps all his shares, what do you think happens to the company? A founder of the company has basically said that he has absolutely no faith in the ability of the company to make money moving forward. If that happens, a 12% dip is going to seem like a nice day.
The people who generally make real money in on IPO are the investment bankers and venture capitalists, not the founders.
... for low quantity sites (my old job would tend to buy one or two low end servers/yr before we moved to linux on commodity HW), Sun's salespeople can be a real pain to manage. Hopefully, it's just a "bad salesguy" situation, but I wouldn't blame them for focusing on higher end customers like this guy.
Fourth is pretty bad, and is where I stopped (according to Amazon, there are at least seven in the series). At one point in #4, IIRC, the main woman was mid-morph between human and horse (or something), and, well, let's just say that she had to plead with the main character to "service" her, lest she have to avail herself of a nearby stallion.
One quick (and somewhat enviable) spell later, our hero was able to accomodate her. I don't recall it being very explicit, but it's still probably not something I would advocate for a pre-teen.
I don't recall the name of the company either, but I'm pretty sure it went under. Primary problem was that (IIRC) they required that you sign up with their ISP for $N/month for a while, which basically worked out to the price you'd pay for the (relatively crappy) computer in the first place. You're basically just financing the computer cost into montlhly payments.
This was also back when computers were relatively expensive, so you could take the stance that someone who couldn't afford the $1k purchase price up front could afford the $40/month (or whatever it was). I imagine the introduction of the $300 mostly functional desktop killed that initiative.
Add that to the flight risk of the computer, and you've got pretty substantial problems with your business plan. I'd guess it would be extremely difficult to enforce somebody getting the PC, and dumping the linux distro of their choice on there, so you've got the net applicance problem in spades.
I assume, on the useability side, the ads would fade into the background pretty quickly. For instance, I can't remember the last time I noticed a banner ad. Besides, if you were using it as a compile box (cygwin + dcc or whatever), you could probably run it headless and not notice at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, let's just say I was hard pressed. I'm not a car guy (I have a Civic that runs so long as you put gas and oil in it every so often, which suits me just fine), but nothing else sprung to mind. I actually think the BBS v. TCP stack is pretty close, but the set of people who have actually used a BBS is pretty small at this point.
(old guy voice) Plus, they won't stay off my lawn. (/old guy voice)
On features, I'll listen to Myth v. TiVo arguments, but arguing TiVo v. the TimeWarner DVR on that front is pointless. I tried to come up for an analogy of how much better TiVo is, but I can't do it. Maybe a Yugo against a fuel-sipping Jag that never needs repairs. Seriously.
.NET thing that doesn't go in Wine, IIRC).
We just upgraded our lifetime series 1 TiVos to series 2s. We didn't care much, but wanted to get rid of the phone line and use our wireless network for TiVo upgrades. The dual tuners were nice, but frankly, there isn't that much we care about on TV anyway, and the number of shows lost to conflicts was extremely low.
The new software:
- shares between our DVRs (copies files over the wireless network, so I can watch my wife's stuff on my TiVo and vice versa).
- has Yahoo and Live365 clients, so I can get traffic updates and stream net radio over my TV.
- MUCH faster processing for updates with the new hardware
- We've had ZERO slowdowns or reboots since installation, which wasn't the case with the DVR we had briefly.
- folder based navigation (If I have five episodes of MythBusters, I get a folder labelled "Mythbusters (5)", rather than having to dig through the entire list
- Personal Picture and video sharing
- I could, if I had a mind to, download programs to a Windows box, and/or use that Windows box as a networked MP3 station for my TiVos. No Linux compatibility (dammit, uses some Win32
I'm not about to argue that TiVo is in an enviable spot. Not being able to buy a new lifetime subscription is a BIG problem. TiVos are more expensive. A lot of people (including my parents) think the way the parent post does. From a marketing standpoint, TiVo is always going to be climbing uphill.
OTOH, do NOT try to tell me that TiVo and the TW DVR are comparable. Maybe the comparison is now vs. before everybody got a TCP stack on their PC. Hey, it worked just fine, too.
Granted, and please don't get me wrong, low functionality notebooks aren't going to play in the markets you're discussing.
OTOH, at least IMO, if the last five years have shown anything, it's that the demand for high performance desktop computing lies primarily in three sectors:
- people who actually need it (hard core developers, various and sundry applications)
- gamers
- people who use "computing power" as an analogue to, well, other things.
As the capabilities of ultra-low end boxes catch up with general requirements, it's going to get more difficult to sell the high end. Even two or three years ago, when sub-$200 boxes meant 90MHz and 128M, you'd have trouble running a GUI. That's no longer the case, and distros like DSL or window managers like xfce can run capably, if unspectacularly on the 566MHz/256M refurbs being sold for $49.
I think a LOT of the growth is going to be in quiet (read: fanless) solutions, as opposed to the upper end. The generic applications for most users aren't demanding the horsepower that the hardware is capable of. There may be a quantum shift in, say, office documents, or web applications, but I don't see it happening. At least not right now.
Of course, I could be very, very wrong.
I can see tons of uses for such a thing:
/
- kid's laptop. If it gets trashed, so what?
- LTSP terminal.
- heck, MY laptop. I wouldn't choose to do kernel compilations on any laptop in my price range to begin with, so as long as the OLPC has a browser, an email client, ssh, and WiFi, I'm pretty much done (although I wouldn't turn down an mp3 player). All I really want is that it be light, have a (preferably decent) keyboard, and legible in coffee shops for a couple of hours at a go.
- if it has usb, low power consumption file server. See things like the kurobox, or the guys who are hacking the BuffaloTech stuff. You don't NEED tons of power to torrent or serve files.
- disposable redundant server. Take ten of them, hook them to a load balancer and an NFS, and you've got a (functionally) infinite capacity web server for (basically) the cost of the load balancer and NFS, for which you can make a case anyway. I'm a little surprised somebody hasn't done this already with old Xboxes. In any event, that group that put together that Apple supercomputer proved that you can do things with multiply redundant hardware, and these would be perfect for low level apps.
- Disposable emergency server. Say a hurricane is coming. It would be trivial to set up a databased refugee tracking system for 25 clients on one of these. GPL/BSD/whatever the software, and your app is completely portable for $100 in HW costs.
- Heck, firewalls. Something like this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/90c6
- I'm sure people smarter than I can append to this list in a big hurry.
Is it for everyone? No. Would I want to make it my primary computer? No. Would I make it a companion piece to my 4000x1280/1GHz C7/1GB workstation? You betcha.
I may have heard this wrong (and things may have changed since I heard it), but I seem to recall that there are two pricepoints for games in Japan. Something like $20 for "minor" games (Katamari, for instance), and the usual $60 or so for, say, MGS, FFXII or Pro Evolution.
Anybody know?
Can we discuss this rationally? If we assume that Einstein was right, and faster than light speed travel is not possible, then isn't manned space flight pretty much impossible? My understanding is that Alpha Centauri is four light years away, making a round trip eight years, compounded by the fact that there's nothing there.
To meaningfully pursue manned space flight, how fast would we need to go to make Alpha Centauri functional? I'm not trying to cause trouble here, just uninformed and curious. I'm sure someone out there (especially in this community) has thought about this far more deeply than I.
check out damnsmalllinux. You can set a single usb memory stick to both boot off the stick or run (in emulation) in either Linux or Windows. You can customize it to run all sorts of packages. Running in emulation isn't speedy, but it gets the job done (eventually).
It's pretty sweet.
Knoppix is good at this, but I didn't have the same experience as the parent. Either I did something to munge apt, or, well, SOMEthing, but I couldn't get one to boot under 100MB or so. I didn't have a lot of patience with what I removed or included, but once, due to dependencies, it started to remove some really base packages, and I got fed up.
In my experience, if you really need to get small, just use DamnSmallLinux. Tack on the apt and actual gnu utils dsl packages, and you're in business, and there's an "install to HD" option already built in, IIRC. YMMV, obviously.
The fundamental question is: How does Playboy, in that instance, get paid for creating the content in the first place?
Given that they're not getting paid to produce those pictures, Playboy, by definition, must shut down at least their "picture producing" division. Now where's your content coming from?
I'm not arguing free speech. I'm not arguing copyright. I'm arguing finance. If content producers (be they game makers, pron producers, or musicians) are not financially compensated for their efforts, they will eventually stop producing content.
We can discuss whether that's good or bad, but I haven't seen anything on YouTube that makes me want to swear off film. Yet.
Ratio of each group's developers that quit.
"I don't get it, Bob. Nobody wants to be in the group that does nothing but the Sims."
Point taken, and well put.
- PS2 still has life in it. You can't look at Okami, GoW2, or RE4, and tell me there isn't plenty of room for gaming in this generation.
- PS3 was obviously rushed to market. From my understanding, developers had about a week to get used to the SixAxis, and the first slate of games was shallow at best.
- Nobody's passionate about HD-DVD v. BluRay, and cross-standard DVD players are already in the market.
- Tacking on the BluRay drive achieves little, at least compared to including the CD player in the PS1 and DVD player in the PS2.
- My understanding is that you need an HDTV to really get much out of the games, and HDTV penetration has been slow. We're probably past "early adopter," but not by much.
- PS3 is overpriced, and the firstgen PS3 games aren't that much better looking than their Xbox 360 counterparts.
I'm not even going into the question of whether the games are "better" or "prettier." I mean, SOMEbody's going to take a fall for this.Just for the record, PointCast was pull as well. I saw a speech by the guy at some Lotus conference back in the day, and ate with him. I was puzzling it out during his speech, so I just asked him whether it was a pull, and he said it was.
If you think about it, to actually push from PointCast to a client, you'd need a daemon on the client box, and some sort of UDP streamcasting. Pointless bandwidth (to clients that are turned off, for instance) would be gargantuan.
Isn't he the guy who ran the Trailblazers into the ground, lost their arena during bankruptcy, and is begging the city to subsidize them? Finally, he brings his management genius to the palmtop race.
I swear, if you say that management is like a college coaching staff, Microsoft would be Duke. The main guy (Coach K) is really good, but his high profile mentees are pretty awful (Synder at Missouri, Amaker at Michigan).
At some level, they're just outsourcing their R&D. Microsoft used this to great effect during the '90s. Need a DBMS? Buy Sybase, repackage it as MSSQLServer, and you're done. Need a web browser? Obtain Mosaic, and you're done. You can grow the product later, but at least you're playing. So, before the buyouts, let the market figure out who the bigger players are, and buy the biggest one still available. Everything else doesn't really matter. There are a couple of things in play here.
1) User base.
There really isn't anything that can't be replicated by the big companies you mentioned. If you think about it, what's YouTube really got to offer? Terabytes of server space? Yawn. Media player technology? Relatively solved problem. Big horkin' bandwidth? Feh.
But, if, as one of the big companies, you develop a new media portal, you don't have the million-odd users that are already on YouTube, and there would be significant costs trying to get your homegrown app to that level. So, partly, they're buying the user base.
2) URL recognition.
Same principle, only applied to the URL, instead of the user base.
I might just be showing my age here, but I'm reminded of a chess saying along the lines of "new lessons are old lessons remembered." I suspect there are significant analogues between "web 2" and "web 1," and Lord knows, the initial models were disproved with a vengeance. YouTube could be compared to broadcast.com, MySpace/social networking to GeoCities (although I'll admit that there is other, more viral, functionality in MySpace). I, at least, just don't get it.
It's worth noting that even at $1.65B, the YouTube buyout is chump change to Google, especially if it's a stock-only deal, which is my understanding. Google's made FAR more than that in stock appreciation, so getting a market leader in that space without actually spending money might make sense. I certainly couldn't justify it, but somebody sold the idea within Google, which is really the only thing that matters.
Innovation happens. What the mega-corporations do to catch up with the innovations is the question. In this business environment, I suspect you cannot tangle with the big guys and win. As a small company, the best you can hope for is a buyout.
In a certain mindframe, it seems logical enough, but the content on that site is NOT linux reference material. Just trust me.
Smells like a troll to me, but quoth the parent:
"First of all, once you have gotten use to watching BluRay 1080p movies, anything less feels like an eyesore. You will probably be able to pickup a 1080p TV by the holidays this year for just under a grand."
You know what? I don't care. Do the marketers seriously think we're all going to rush out and buy yet another TV? I recognize that it looks a lot better, but not $1k worth, and certianly not even vaguely worth the replacement cost of my $40 DVD and 240GB hacked TiVo (six years old, still running strong). Forget it, not gonna happen. Until HD timeshifting is available, reliable, and cheap, I'm not even listening.
"Second, the Java layer, that Microsoft seems to hate so much, on BluRay discs is letting us do all sorts of very cool stuff far beyond the simple menu systems that current DVDs have."
Oh, good, because I didn't hate the menus for current DVDs nearly enough. Please, by all means, let the wanna be game programmers run loose on the menu system. Just be sure to call me when the movie starts.
TV and film, like radio before them, are reaching a point at which future technical improvements are borderline pointless. I, at least, don't hear much about DVD-Audio any more, because 90% of what 90% of the people want to do with their music can be handled capably by mp3. So, $2500 for a reasonable HD/HD-DVD/HD-Gaming system, or torrent it for nothing? Ethical/Legal/IDon'tWantToStartTHISArgumentAgain considerations aside, I'll bet more people pick the latter.
From another article (which, predictably, I can't find), it sounded as if there are some issues with the processor design that keeps this processor from being marketed in the US. It's not really my area, but does anyone have insight on this issue?
Other than that, I'm thinking we might be looking at the next Audrey or something. I'll never figure out why they don't put every piece of documentation on the web and open the box up to the hacker community. Seems straightforward to me, but I'm no marketer (thankfully).
We used NorthAmerican Van Lines to move from Mpls to Austin, and it was absolutely horrific. Like "Lost our stuff for two weeks, didn't know where to find it, destroyed a reasonably nice desk, and balked at paying us for ANOTHER two weeks" horrific.
In passing along our tale of woe, we've heard similar stories about most of the other major carriers, though. The overriding lesson being that if you use a company along those lines, you have to set it up through a company account. If it's just a single household move, you're subject to all sorts of abuse, as my understanding is that the carrier is different from both the company that packs your stuff and the company that unloads it. Good luck figuring out where the damage actually happened, so you're stuck taking the settlement, which is chump change compared to what you paid in the first place to avoid exactly the kind of hassle you're getting.
Unless your house is very big, or you're moving out of or into a walkup, don't use big carriers. Your mileage may vary, but for me, they're absolutely not worth it.
-Yelling like a playwright-
There's naught wrong with gala luncheons, lad!!!!!
-/Yelling-
Better in all caps (lameness filter).
Sony sees this, and might be thinking that they're in no hurry here:
Where exactly is the pressure to launch quickly? The first 360 price cut will probably be for Xmas, but launch the PS3 in Japan in June, then US in October or so, and do it at $450 (better yet, $399), and they'll be fine, assuming the 360 goes to $350 snazzy, $250 core. If MS goes to $300/$200, it might get interesting, but historically, that's one DEEP cut on a year old console.
I'm just not seeing why the delay is such big news. I think it could easily work in Sony's favor.
1) The estimates aren't based solely upon the analysts' views. Frequently, the final estimate is based on a negotiation between the company and the analyst. It's not quite as explicit as that, but there are a lot of ways that the company can adjust the estimate (warnings probably being the most overt).
2) It's not necessarily clear that Sergey can sell those shares. Most of the time in an IPO, the founders (etc.) get N shares, but they can't legally sell them for a period of time after the IPO. That helps keep the founders (etc.) in line while the company gets used to being publicly traded. As such, his net worth on the N shares he has is N*(price of google stock), but it's illiquid.
Less formally, should that not be the case, and he dumps all his shares, what do you think happens to the company? A founder of the company has basically said that he has absolutely no faith in the ability of the company to make money moving forward. If that happens, a 12% dip is going to seem like a nice day.
The people who generally make real money in on IPO are the investment bankers and venture capitalists, not the founders.
... for low quantity sites (my old job would tend to buy one or two low end servers/yr before we moved to linux on commodity HW), Sun's salespeople can be a real pain to manage. Hopefully, it's just a "bad salesguy" situation, but I wouldn't blame them for focusing on higher end customers like this guy.
Fourth is pretty bad, and is where I stopped (according to Amazon, there are at least seven in the series). At one point in #4, IIRC, the main woman was mid-morph between human and horse (or something), and, well, let's just say that she had to plead with the main character to "service" her, lest she have to avail herself of a nearby stallion.
One quick (and somewhat enviable) spell later, our hero was able to accomodate her. I don't recall it being very explicit, but it's still probably not something I would advocate for a pre-teen.
I don't recall the name of the company either, but I'm pretty sure it went under. Primary problem was that (IIRC) they required that you sign up with their ISP for $N/month for a while, which basically worked out to the price you'd pay for the (relatively crappy) computer in the first place. You're basically just financing the computer cost into montlhly payments.
This was also back when computers were relatively expensive, so you could take the stance that someone who couldn't afford the $1k purchase price up front could afford the $40/month (or whatever it was). I imagine the introduction of the $300 mostly functional desktop killed that initiative.
Add that to the flight risk of the computer, and you've got pretty substantial problems with your business plan. I'd guess it would be extremely difficult to enforce somebody getting the PC, and dumping the linux distro of their choice on there, so you've got the net applicance problem in spades.
I assume, on the useability side, the ads would fade into the background pretty quickly. For instance, I can't remember the last time I noticed a banner ad. Besides, if you were using it as a compile box (cygwin + dcc or whatever), you could probably run it headless and not notice at all.