I suspect in the end, like Ethernet, Token Ring, DECnet, and other IEEE 802 network standards, one will win-out over the others. And like IEEE 802, it'll take close to 30 years for that one that becomes dominant to win-out, and it'll have some ridiculous limitations (like Ethernet's 100m physical limit and Ethernet's relatively small frame size) that plague its use for all time.
I never saw an ad for it that I can remember. I just looked up the device on various phone, gadget, and Android sites after it was announced that it had a pending price-cut to see if it'd be worthwhile, and even free it would be a downgrade compared to my almost four year old Galaxy SII as I'd lose most of the features that I use on a daily basis, and I suspect that since most early buyers of devices are interested in the devices enough to figure out how they work before buying them, and then mainstream buyers often make their decisions based on the experiences of the early buyers, it's just not gone anywhere.
Amazon has tried to create their own product lines with the Kindle and Fire branding, but unlike Sears' branding for Craftsman and Kenmore, the Kindle and Fire devices are less ends, and more means, at least in my eye, and when they hamstring the phone version by basically taking everything useful out of Android that made it popular (ie, Google's through-the-internet connectivity for 'cloud' stuff) they take away most of the means for which I would use the device.
I honestly don't care what brand of smartphone I have any more than I care what brand of business computer I have at work, in that the phones I buy run vanilla or close-to-vanilla Android, and the computers my work supplies for me generally run Windows, or I install Linux on them myself. The Fire Phone isn't really Android in that what I want to use Android for isn't there, and the experience would be just as foreign to me as using an iPhone or a Blackberry or a Windows phone.
Amazon over-valued their own brand. Amazon is a service more than a product, and attempting to be a product hasn't worked as well for them as they expected.
Amazon has been a fairly open marketplace, at least as far as what one can find, and who one can buy from (ie, third-party sellers), and the Fire Phone, by de-Googling Android and essentially making it impossible to use Google's Android-supporting applications, they made a device that ran contrary to their perceived openness. Amazon's appeal is that one isn't going to multiple stores to buy things, one just logs in and orders them and they show up. They're the new replacement for the Sears Roebuck catalog of old, with faster turnaround and a better indication of stock. They're stuck being the brand that has no brand because it has no reason to have products of its own as it's a service, not a product.
The only way I expect them to move stock is to fix it so one can use all of the normal stock Google-written and Google-interfacing applications, and to forget this whole Amazon-specific tie-in.
Wouldn't it simply be a matter of fixing or rewriting the software for the legs?
Worst case, if somehow the wiring for the legs is wrong, the astronauts should have some complex device, called a multimeter, to figure out how the legs ARE wired, if it comes down to that.
That's not the only place that Hydrogen can come from though. There have been ways to crack Hydrogen from water using non-electric solar tech. If the production of Hydrogen from byproducts of fossil-fuel refiining for other purposes means less waste or allows for use of a technology as a migrating tech, good.
The over/under for range for me is 150 miles. That number is based on the sheer size of my municipality and a round-trip to the furthest destination that I routinely visit, plus 50%. It's also about half of the range that a single tank of gasoline will allow cars to reach in city/mixed driving.
Exactly. I won't always have my SLR on me, because it's a boat-anchor when not taking pictures, but if I see something cool that I want a picture of, I always have my phone on me.
The laws of supply and demand do apply, but the more high-end a good becomes, the geometrically more expensive it becomes. Increase in quality happens, but is far offset by the cost to make that increase, to the point that there isn't a lot of legitimate reason to make that increase. Those that are fans or hobbyists aren't doing it for economic reasons though, so as long as someone is willing to pay $100,000 for a pair of speakers, someone is willing to try to push the envelope to make a pair of speakers that they can try to justify selling for $100,000.
So they can raise the price all they want, is as ludicrous as MSFT thinking they could just slap a high sticker price and open some stores and threaten Apple's sales. Sony as a brand just hasn't had the clout to sell in that market in a loooooong time as previous management traded all their reputation of being a high end quality brand from the 70s through 90s for selling the same Cheapo Chinese Crap at an inflated price. Their quality went to shit which gave them some short term gains (all anybody seems to are about anymore) and then their rep went to shit.
That's a good point. I'm using a Sony receiver for my home theater right now, mainly because I was on a budget and had to shop around certain constraints (types of inputs, conversion of video signal, etc) and the Sony receiver took a lot of setup effort to reduce the ambient white-noise that it produced when there was no audio being played. I also don't use the setup enough to justify a more expensive unit.
You're helping make my point. It's the speakers, much more than the digital signal processor, that affects the sound quality. Sure, there are better receivers/amplifiers/DSPs that do a better job, but the difference between a $200 receiver and a $2000 receiver is hard to hear with identical speakers, compared to the differences between a $100 set of speakers and a $1000 set of speakers with identical receivers, even when properly calibrated for the speakers.
A moderate, mid-market music player will do good enough of a job that it's very hard to justify a high-end music player when so many other factors (like the ambient environment) are not in the listener's control. I don't care how high-end the earbuds are, they're still earbuds, and will still produce sound hampered by the form-factor, even if the music player has a complex equalizer to help calibrate the signal to a given pair of earbuds.
Explain the, how DST works in relation to "noon" and "midnight". AM and PM are more like guidelines than actual code.
I think your use of DST was wrong, I think you meant timezones.
Timezones break local noon/midnight by offsetting the location to an approximate less than a half-hour away, but since timezones are calcuated based on the arbitrarily-picked Greenwich, UK, really the entire planet is running on Greenwich time, with a particular significant digit adjusted to reflect distance, to approximate the natural time of the area.
It's a lot simpler to sit down at a CAD workstation to do layout design than it is to manufacture that design.
Trouble is, at the rate we're going, the manufacturers won't need us for very much longer, especially if economies in other countries that don't respect IP become strong enough that those manufacturers can sell unlicenced production there, even if they can't sell it here. I'm thinking of that happy little picture of the world with a circle over portions of South and East Asia and the large islands in the Indian Ocean where half of the population of the planet lives.
We don't need to manufacture everything domestically, but we need to be capable of manufacturing everything domestically, even if we outsource a lot of it. Being capable is not simply a technical matter, it's also an economic one in that if it becomes too expensive to start up production if a foreign source is lost to us, then we effectively can't produce the thing anymore.
I think both were trumped by, "OMG! NASA just killed an entire shuttle crew with millions of children watching!"
WHY the children were watching suddenly became a lot less important than that they were watching. To this day we haven't recovered from the setbacks to the American space program caused by that exposion; the ISS was years behind schedule being constructed so years' of experiments haven't been carried out, nearly all other manned-projects never materialized until after we no longer had American-supplied man-rated access to Low Earth Orbit, and NASA's funding has been shaky for a long time.
That's why I'm willing to accept a physically-larger device, so that the battery life and durability can be vastly improved. The office I work out of has really terrible cell phone reception, I'm on Edge or 1G most of the time. Doesn't matter much for call availability, I have a landline phone for that, but it does mean that the phone spends a whole lot of battery trying to communicate with the tower network. If the recent rulings allowing for more cost-effective roaming between carriers means that my service improves, great, but in the mean time I'd like my phone to last 24 hours in this building before dropping to 10%; now eight and I'm about done.
My main desire for a 4/3 point-and-shoot is that those are getting smaller and have Android on some of them now, and if one's willing to accept a physically larger device, then finding room for a larger CCD and lens is probably easier too. I've handled a few of these point-and-shoots at the store, and I would be willing to carry some of them as phones if they had cell phone capabilities.
Congratulations! We invite you to sit-in on our strategizing session, we want to engage in the development of new market differentiation to leverage our corporate position to maximize ROI. Any insights or foreknowledge of the flowchart will enable us to better preplan for market forces and consumer-will to effectively drive our business model to achieve these results.
Bear in mind I'm talking specifically about portable devices for audiophiles that want them despite the environment in which they're attempting to use them being subpar.
I don't think the market is big enough to justify the development of the device. I very well may be incorrect, but the difference between a $300-cash dedicated music player or a $600-cash multifunction smarthphone that plays music well enough versus a $1200 device that just plays music is a pretty steep curve to ask while the former options, with high-end headphones, are already available.
Look at another market that Sony played in, the Laserdisc market. Was for high-end customers, also played music from compact disc perfectly well, and was meant to be integrated into a home theatre system with multispeaker surround sound where the owner could control the environment. It was unlikely to be dropped or damaged or otherwise lost and didn't require the user to do anything more than load the media to play the content. Despite the relative ease-of-use the Laserdisc was not a runaway success, and Sony only made a handful of players before effectively yielding the entire market to Pioneer. It was not a particularly profitable market even when the premium content at the time was vastly superior to the next step down, the video tape. Jumping to now, we can look at the differences- On-device content is competing with on-demand streamed content, modern devices like smartphones run loadable software so new things like codecs can be added, and the sound-reproduction end-device, the headphones, isn't an integrated part of the device but a user-selectable module. All that remains in-question is the quality of the audio reproduction in the DSP in the smartphone itself, but since the advent of computer-based sound at 44KHz, 16-bit with the sound cards of the mid-nineties, the differences between low-end sound and high-end sound have been very, very hard to differentiate.
Given that the cell phone is so ubiquitous, I find it very unlikely that even most audiophiles will want to carry a dedicated device in addition to their phone, and throwing a steep price on top of it isn't going to help matters.
I'm kind of wondering if the Saudis are attempting themselves to hurt Russia, or if they're playing-ball with the rest of the world in attempts to isolate Russia. They've stated, despite the low prices, that they do not intend to reduce production. If the Saudis are concerned that Russia is a threat to them then that would help explain the economics of producing something when it brings no more profit than a reduction in production would also bring. Or, they could see the upcoming electric-car and battery market as a longer-term threat to their profits, so continuing to produce oil, even less profitably than before, would mean more consumers of their product over the duration (in the form of inexpensive oil-powered vehicles as opposed to more expensive electric-powered cars).
When has the deposit-guarantee scheme shown to be useless vapor?
I've heard of numerous examples of over-leveraged, ready-to-fail banks that were taken over by the FDIC and merged into other banks to protect depositors' accounts. That's the typical operating format of the FDIC, force mergers and inject the minimal cash needed to make it function, usually over a long weekend so that the depositor sees little if any funds inaccessibility. I have never heard of an FDIC or NCUA-regulated bank closing and leaving regular account depositors high and dry since those entities were founded.
If you have counter-examples in the United States, then by all means, please share.
Admittedly it's been a few years since I had cable TV, but have they really fallen that far? Back when we got rid of cable, the History Channel was more like The WWII Channel.
If they price this thing in the ballpark of an iPod, I'll buy it.
I won't. We're at a tipping point, on the verge of a paradigm shift in personal devices. The smartphone has already replaced the functions of consumer-grade cell phones, personal digital assistants (calendar, e-mail, task list, alarm clock, contacts list), GPS receiver and mapper, and casual point-and-shoot camera. It's also marginally replaced music players, though the software for on-device libraries is seemingly mediocre at best. Introducing slightly better audio hardware into a smartphone and writing better software for both library management and for the audio codecs for less-lossy storage is the future, not adding yet another device.
If Sony wants to go into this arena, they need to make a phone that actually gets its OS updates in a timely fashion and fits the rest of the bill for what they're looking to do with the music playback. Hell, put two or three Micro-SD sockets and make some software that intelligently balances writes between the cards so that individual card is not the limiting factor on amount of music anymore.
I WOULD pay good money for an Android Smartphone that gets regular updates not carrier-dependent, has a decent 4/3 camera, has a good music player that actually does a good job of organizing and arranging playlists, and still maintains the other PDA and phone features that have been useful. I'm actually okay with a device that's closer to 5/8" thick too, if it actually did all this stuff and was fairly rugged.
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I suspect in the end, like Ethernet, Token Ring, DECnet, and other IEEE 802 network standards, one will win-out over the others. And like IEEE 802, it'll take close to 30 years for that one that becomes dominant to win-out, and it'll have some ridiculous limitations (like Ethernet's 100m physical limit and Ethernet's relatively small frame size) that plague its use for all time.
I never saw an ad for it that I can remember. I just looked up the device on various phone, gadget, and Android sites after it was announced that it had a pending price-cut to see if it'd be worthwhile, and even free it would be a downgrade compared to my almost four year old Galaxy SII as I'd lose most of the features that I use on a daily basis, and I suspect that since most early buyers of devices are interested in the devices enough to figure out how they work before buying them, and then mainstream buyers often make their decisions based on the experiences of the early buyers, it's just not gone anywhere.
None of us is as dumb as all of us?
Amazon has tried to create their own product lines with the Kindle and Fire branding, but unlike Sears' branding for Craftsman and Kenmore, the Kindle and Fire devices are less ends, and more means, at least in my eye, and when they hamstring the phone version by basically taking everything useful out of Android that made it popular (ie, Google's through-the-internet connectivity for 'cloud' stuff) they take away most of the means for which I would use the device.
I honestly don't care what brand of smartphone I have any more than I care what brand of business computer I have at work, in that the phones I buy run vanilla or close-to-vanilla Android, and the computers my work supplies for me generally run Windows, or I install Linux on them myself. The Fire Phone isn't really Android in that what I want to use Android for isn't there, and the experience would be just as foreign to me as using an iPhone or a Blackberry or a Windows phone.
Amazon over-valued their own brand. Amazon is a service more than a product, and attempting to be a product hasn't worked as well for them as they expected.
Amazon has been a fairly open marketplace, at least as far as what one can find, and who one can buy from (ie, third-party sellers), and the Fire Phone, by de-Googling Android and essentially making it impossible to use Google's Android-supporting applications, they made a device that ran contrary to their perceived openness. Amazon's appeal is that one isn't going to multiple stores to buy things, one just logs in and orders them and they show up. They're the new replacement for the Sears Roebuck catalog of old, with faster turnaround and a better indication of stock. They're stuck being the brand that has no brand because it has no reason to have products of its own as it's a service, not a product.
The only way I expect them to move stock is to fix it so one can use all of the normal stock Google-written and Google-interfacing applications, and to forget this whole Amazon-specific tie-in.
Wouldn't it simply be a matter of fixing or rewriting the software for the legs?
Worst case, if somehow the wiring for the legs is wrong, the astronauts should have some complex device, called a multimeter, to figure out how the legs ARE wired, if it comes down to that.
That's not the only place that Hydrogen can come from though. There have been ways to crack Hydrogen from water using non-electric solar tech. If the production of Hydrogen from byproducts of fossil-fuel refiining for other purposes means less waste or allows for use of a technology as a migrating tech, good.
The over/under for range for me is 150 miles. That number is based on the sheer size of my municipality and a round-trip to the furthest destination that I routinely visit, plus 50%. It's also about half of the range that a single tank of gasoline will allow cars to reach in city/mixed driving.
My driving test did not cover that, but my Cub Scout training as a young child sure did, at least as far as the flooded road/river part is concerned.
It looks like a minivan and the Trimaxion Drone Ship from Flight of the Navigator had a drunken night together...
Exactly. I won't always have my SLR on me, because it's a boat-anchor when not taking pictures, but if I see something cool that I want a picture of, I always have my phone on me.
The laws of supply and demand do apply, but the more high-end a good becomes, the geometrically more expensive it becomes. Increase in quality happens, but is far offset by the cost to make that increase, to the point that there isn't a lot of legitimate reason to make that increase. Those that are fans or hobbyists aren't doing it for economic reasons though, so as long as someone is willing to pay $100,000 for a pair of speakers, someone is willing to try to push the envelope to make a pair of speakers that they can try to justify selling for $100,000.
That's a good point. I'm using a Sony receiver for my home theater right now, mainly because I was on a budget and had to shop around certain constraints (types of inputs, conversion of video signal, etc) and the Sony receiver took a lot of setup effort to reduce the ambient white-noise that it produced when there was no audio being played. I also don't use the setup enough to justify a more expensive unit.
You're helping make my point. It's the speakers, much more than the digital signal processor, that affects the sound quality. Sure, there are better receivers/amplifiers/DSPs that do a better job, but the difference between a $200 receiver and a $2000 receiver is hard to hear with identical speakers, compared to the differences between a $100 set of speakers and a $1000 set of speakers with identical receivers, even when properly calibrated for the speakers.
A moderate, mid-market music player will do good enough of a job that it's very hard to justify a high-end music player when so many other factors (like the ambient environment) are not in the listener's control. I don't care how high-end the earbuds are, they're still earbuds, and will still produce sound hampered by the form-factor, even if the music player has a complex equalizer to help calibrate the signal to a given pair of earbuds.
I think your use of DST was wrong, I think you meant timezones.
Timezones break local noon/midnight by offsetting the location to an approximate less than a half-hour away, but since timezones are calcuated based on the arbitrarily-picked Greenwich, UK, really the entire planet is running on Greenwich time, with a particular significant digit adjusted to reflect distance, to approximate the natural time of the area.
It's a lot simpler to sit down at a CAD workstation to do layout design than it is to manufacture that design.
Trouble is, at the rate we're going, the manufacturers won't need us for very much longer, especially if economies in other countries that don't respect IP become strong enough that those manufacturers can sell unlicenced production there, even if they can't sell it here. I'm thinking of that happy little picture of the world with a circle over portions of South and East Asia and the large islands in the Indian Ocean where half of the population of the planet lives.
We don't need to manufacture everything domestically, but we need to be capable of manufacturing everything domestically, even if we outsource a lot of it. Being capable is not simply a technical matter, it's also an economic one in that if it becomes too expensive to start up production if a foreign source is lost to us, then we effectively can't produce the thing anymore.
I think both were trumped by, "OMG! NASA just killed an entire shuttle crew with millions of children watching!"
WHY the children were watching suddenly became a lot less important than that they were watching. To this day we haven't recovered from the setbacks to the American space program caused by that exposion; the ISS was years behind schedule being constructed so years' of experiments haven't been carried out, nearly all other manned-projects never materialized until after we no longer had American-supplied man-rated access to Low Earth Orbit, and NASA's funding has been shaky for a long time.
That's why I'm willing to accept a physically-larger device, so that the battery life and durability can be vastly improved. The office I work out of has really terrible cell phone reception, I'm on Edge or 1G most of the time. Doesn't matter much for call availability, I have a landline phone for that, but it does mean that the phone spends a whole lot of battery trying to communicate with the tower network. If the recent rulings allowing for more cost-effective roaming between carriers means that my service improves, great, but in the mean time I'd like my phone to last 24 hours in this building before dropping to 10%; now eight and I'm about done.
My main desire for a 4/3 point-and-shoot is that those are getting smaller and have Android on some of them now, and if one's willing to accept a physically larger device, then finding room for a larger CCD and lens is probably easier too. I've handled a few of these point-and-shoots at the store, and I would be willing to carry some of them as phones if they had cell phone capabilities.
Weren't there laws that actually made the use of equipment that could listen to analog cell phone communications illegal?
Congratulations! We invite you to sit-in on our strategizing session, we want to engage in the development of new market differentiation to leverage our corporate position to maximize ROI. Any insights or foreknowledge of the flowchart will enable us to better preplan for market forces and consumer-will to effectively drive our business model to achieve these results.
How large is the market for those people though?
Bear in mind I'm talking specifically about portable devices for audiophiles that want them despite the environment in which they're attempting to use them being subpar.
I don't think the market is big enough to justify the development of the device. I very well may be incorrect, but the difference between a $300-cash dedicated music player or a $600-cash multifunction smarthphone that plays music well enough versus a $1200 device that just plays music is a pretty steep curve to ask while the former options, with high-end headphones, are already available.
Look at another market that Sony played in, the Laserdisc market. Was for high-end customers, also played music from compact disc perfectly well, and was meant to be integrated into a home theatre system with multispeaker surround sound where the owner could control the environment. It was unlikely to be dropped or damaged or otherwise lost and didn't require the user to do anything more than load the media to play the content. Despite the relative ease-of-use the Laserdisc was not a runaway success, and Sony only made a handful of players before effectively yielding the entire market to Pioneer. It was not a particularly profitable market even when the premium content at the time was vastly superior to the next step down, the video tape. Jumping to now, we can look at the differences- On-device content is competing with on-demand streamed content, modern devices like smartphones run loadable software so new things like codecs can be added, and the sound-reproduction end-device, the headphones, isn't an integrated part of the device but a user-selectable module. All that remains in-question is the quality of the audio reproduction in the DSP in the smartphone itself, but since the advent of computer-based sound at 44KHz, 16-bit with the sound cards of the mid-nineties, the differences between low-end sound and high-end sound have been very, very hard to differentiate.
Given that the cell phone is so ubiquitous, I find it very unlikely that even most audiophiles will want to carry a dedicated device in addition to their phone, and throwing a steep price on top of it isn't going to help matters.
I'm kind of wondering if the Saudis are attempting themselves to hurt Russia, or if they're playing-ball with the rest of the world in attempts to isolate Russia. They've stated, despite the low prices, that they do not intend to reduce production. If the Saudis are concerned that Russia is a threat to them then that would help explain the economics of producing something when it brings no more profit than a reduction in production would also bring. Or, they could see the upcoming electric-car and battery market as a longer-term threat to their profits, so continuing to produce oil, even less profitably than before, would mean more consumers of their product over the duration (in the form of inexpensive oil-powered vehicles as opposed to more expensive electric-powered cars).
When has the deposit-guarantee scheme shown to be useless vapor?
I've heard of numerous examples of over-leveraged, ready-to-fail banks that were taken over by the FDIC and merged into other banks to protect depositors' accounts. That's the typical operating format of the FDIC, force mergers and inject the minimal cash needed to make it function, usually over a long weekend so that the depositor sees little if any funds inaccessibility. I have never heard of an FDIC or NCUA-regulated bank closing and leaving regular account depositors high and dry since those entities were founded.
If you have counter-examples in the United States, then by all means, please share.
Oak Island? WTF is that?
Admittedly it's been a few years since I had cable TV, but have they really fallen that far? Back when we got rid of cable, the History Channel was more like The WWII Channel.
I won't. We're at a tipping point, on the verge of a paradigm shift in personal devices. The smartphone has already replaced the functions of consumer-grade cell phones, personal digital assistants (calendar, e-mail, task list, alarm clock, contacts list), GPS receiver and mapper, and casual point-and-shoot camera. It's also marginally replaced music players, though the software for on-device libraries is seemingly mediocre at best. Introducing slightly better audio hardware into a smartphone and writing better software for both library management and for the audio codecs for less-lossy storage is the future, not adding yet another device.
If Sony wants to go into this arena, they need to make a phone that actually gets its OS updates in a timely fashion and fits the rest of the bill for what they're looking to do with the music playback. Hell, put two or three Micro-SD sockets and make some software that intelligently balances writes between the cards so that individual card is not the limiting factor on amount of music anymore.
I WOULD pay good money for an Android Smartphone that gets regular updates not carrier-dependent, has a decent 4/3 camera, has a good music player that actually does a good job of organizing and arranging playlists, and still maintains the other PDA and phone features that have been useful. I'm actually okay with a device that's closer to 5/8" thick too, if it actually did all this stuff and was fairly rugged.