It's almost like Nokia is the Commodore of the phone market. The Amiga took off in Europe but not so much in North America, where they kept pushing the Commodore 64-derived stuff. The Amiga had its fanboys here, but it never established a huge presence. Meanwhile, the Mac, which was technically inferior in nearly every way to the Amiga for quite a long time, took off. By the early 90s, I saw plenty of Macs, but only ever saw one Amiga in person. Its owner even showed off how it could emulate a Mac and run faster than a native Mac at the same clock rate would run. Technical superiority didn't matter, though.
Yes, it's not a perfect parallel, and Nokia's specific problems are certainly different than Commodore's. But lack of focus behind the cutting edge platform dogged them both.
I remember the joke at the time that if Commodore tried to sell sushi, they'd market it as "cold, dead fish." Kinda reminds me of how Nokia pushed Maemo.
He used the phrase "No real RAM, just cache." I work with embedded processors that split their memories between cache and RAM (many of the C6000-family DSP cores), and also work with processors that are all cache (most general purpose processors). The phrase "no real RAM, just cache" implies that there wouldn't be any directly mapped memory, only indirectly mapped memory (ie. "cache" by his definition).
How else would you interpret "no real RAM, just cache"?
The cache has to be backed by *something*. Either that, or you have to have some protocol wherein when you kick the last copy of something out of one cache, you arrange for it to get stored in another, in which case it isn't really a cache at that level so much as a set of dynamically assigned addresses system-wide.
Consider a smaller system first as an example. Suppose you had two CPUs, each only one level of cache, and each with 1MB. That's 2MB total system memory. Now suppose the first CPU reads through all 2MB twice, bringing all of it through its 1MB cache. It'd have to send the bits it wasn't using to the other CPU's cache while it wasn't stored in its own cache--ie. it's have to exchange data with the other cache as opposed to merely copying it as caches do today. The net effect is that you're just changing the current home for the data, since there's no system RAM outside of these "caches" that serves as the canonical home for the data.
It's not that such a system couldn't work, but it would probably be impractical for large memories and certain workloads. For example, suppose both processors are reading from the same large database, and the database is largely read-only. In this system, there's no opportunity for both CPUs to simultaneously have a copy of the data that they're both sharing. The data would have to ping back and forth
You could combine this with more ordinary caches. For example, add another 512K cache to each CPU between the CPU and the 1MB I described above. Now the CPUs could each have copies of read-only stuff and shared stuff, but the final home for the data would still migrate among the CPUs. It'd perform OK until you stopped fitting in the smaller cache. This is roughly what large NUMA machines do with page migration. The operating system has to manage that though to make it work well. Normal virtual memory translation mechanisms allow you to move a virtual page to different physical memories attached to other CPUs without the application knowing. It's like the cache idea you described, but managed by the OS.
The problem with huge hardware caches is the lookup penalty. For each cache block, you have to keep track of what address maps to the cache block. If you're distributing this through the system, then you need some sort of directory mechanism to find the cache block of interest. This isn't intractable mind you--it's a similar problem to finding a cell phone in the cell phone network, but it is expensive and complicated to get right in hardware. And unlike the cell phone network, it can't just send a call to voice mail when it can't find what it's looking for. That's why we push much of this to software and let the OS handle it at the page level. It can apply more sophisticated algorithms, and crucially, it can be patched when we find bugs.
That second picture was introduced by this explanation:
That theory was deemed unlikely, when the researchers found larger supercolonies dedicated their additional resources to building paths that essentially improved the robustness of the network.
They explain away the non-optimality with "they had extra resources to spare." That would argue in the direction of "optimize toward a Steiner tree until you get below some threshold relative to the total available resources," or something similar.
You see this sort of tradeoff all the time in heuristics: Optimization one aspect of resource use (in this case trail pheromones) gets traded off against the time/energy/effort to perform that optimization. In this particular case with the ants, I suspect the higher ant traffic means the pheromones are getting replenished "fast enough" along the suboptimal route that there's no impetus to explore for better routes. To pick a computer analogy, it's like a JIT only throwing its most expensive optimization heuristics at the hot spots of the program it translated, and retranslating the rest only if it runs for long enough.
Except one side is arguing with facts, figures and science, and the other one is making up wacky conspiracy theories and systematically distorting or outright ignoring the science.
I'll give you a hint: The one with the chalkboards making repeated Hitler references isn't the one arguing from a position of facts and figures.
Except that the fear mongers on the right rake in the big bucks. The ones on the left stay fairly niche. When did Air America pass any of the right wing talk radio outlets? Oh yeah, that's right, it folded. Meanwhile, Rush signs multiple-hundred-million dollar contracts. Who's the #1 cable news outlet, by a huge margin? Fox News, if you can call what they do "news".
All this directly supports the statement that it's harder to pull this tactic on liberals than on conservatives, which was the original contention. It probably has something to do with the fact that liberals are more open to new experiences and learning about other cultures, and so inherently find them less scary.
True enough. In fact, that applies to pretty much the whole market. The DSP architecture I work with (the TI C6000 family) has gone from RISC-like VLIW instruction set (the C62x/C67x) with basic load, store, multiply, add, shift type instructions to a much CISCier set of instructions, with complex multiply and round, dot product, vector adds and the like. But, we kept the fully-pipelined aspect and a fairly clean VLIW scheduling model, which were the important parts.
The main distinctions between ARM and x86 at this point come down to implementation styles and related tradeoffs, I think. The instruction set at this point is largely (if not completely) a footnote at least when considering the bulk of the underlying microarchitecture. I say "largely" based on the fact that x86 instruction decoding is quite baroque compared to most any current instruction set (due to all of the prefixes and other contributors to variable opcode size), and so to achieve throughput, you really do have to do a lot of wasted work there. And then there's the handful of microcoded instructions. But that's only the decode stages. x86 also could use more GPRs, although I see that Atom has picked up x86-64, which fixes this deficit.
Until recently, most ARM implementations I've looked at have fairly simple pipelines. So, they can spend most of their energy driving their actual datapath, and otherwise keep energy use to a minimum. Recent turns of the crank (Cortex A8 and A9) have gotten more aggressive, though, with A8 going to dual issue and A9 actually going out-of-order. Each step implies more energy to track dependences. A15 looks positively over-the-top compared to the rest of the ARM portfolio.
(For the record, I'll remain skeptical of their clock rate claims until I see devices ship. lkcl a few posts up said "can easily run at 2.5GHz", but this hasn't been demonstrated yet. That's still a marketing number on ARM's webpage. Clock rate doesn't scale like it used to as you go to smaller geometries, so don't buy the 2.5GHz number until you see a device shipping with those specs.)
Honestly, I don't see a good reason why an Atom-like x86 implementations couldn't perform in the same territory as ARM, both in terms of cycle count and energy usage. I suspect Intel engineers are just a little too hooked on trading energy for time, whereas ARM engineers have been caring about reducing energy per function for much, much longer.
That doesn't exactly sound like a barn burner, although your point about "absence of marketing" stands. Of course, if Nokia had marketed it heavily, it would be to their detriment, since the N900 is a total glitch-fest. PR1.3 fixes many long-standing issues, and yet there's still basic functionality that is either missing or broken.
The N900 might manage to come close to breaking even. If you look over the longer arc of Maemo's existence, though, I think you'll see a "strategic investment" that didn't really bolster the bottom line.
Don't get me wrong... For all its faults (and there are many), I still like my own N900. I love having a bash prompt. I also need to reinstall GCC, etc. since my PR1.3 upgrade. (Boy did that go badly until I reflashed...) But, when I put on my business hat, I can't see the business case for the N900 unless Maemo (and now MeeGo) could get to anywhere near the territory of "million in the first month" sort of quality and attractiveness.
I wouldn't be surprised if the iPad sold more in its two months (around 2 million) than I think Nokia sold in the entire 6 year history of the Maemo line. Even if it's "close" and you have to go to a larger time window (3 or 4 months) to show the disparity, it's just hard to put that in a positive light for Nokia. Nokia is still at least a year away from producing anything that could capture even a little attention from the market that's transfixed by iPad and Tab and all the existing product out there, not to mention actual phones.
That's pretty much the only thing keeping the N900 in my pocket at this point. The UI quirks, missing features and outright bugs are just annoying. Even the camera is a step down from the N82.
Speaking of UI quirks/misfeatures, is there a way to get to the end of a list of files other than using the "inertial scrolling" repeatedly? I've got waaaaaay too many pictures to be scrolling through ALL of them when attaching more than one to an email.
I guess one problem I see is that Nokia never really had the guts to put a ton of gusto behind Maemo. The N900 runs Maemo 5, and while it has some impressive features, it still messes up really basic stuff, even as of PR 1.3:
The accelerometer doesn't trigger the tilt worth a crap.
No per-contact ring tones.
The file-chooser (ie. when attaching photos or other files to emails and in a few other places) always comes up at the oldest file, not the youngest. You have to "gravity scroll" to the bottom, which gets increasingly painful as you add more stuff to the device.
You can't take a photo during a phone call (because the audio device is busy?!?).
If you have a Bluetooth headset, the "picture-taking" sound plays there, not over the speaker (useful for pervs?).
Sometimes, PulseAudio doesn't close the audio channel to your Bluetooth headset, running down both the phone and the headset's battery.
The email app, Modest, often comes up in a corrupted state when trying to email a photo you've just taken.
Modest drags the whole phone's performance to a crawl whenever it tries to do an update, and is generally slow as heck. It was apparently named ironically.
No support for sending/receiving MMSes.
Needs a reboot every few days, depending on what apps you ran. It's pretty inconsistent, although I've had it get bad enough I can't make or receive phone calls.
Doesn't support Bluetooth keyboards and mice.
And yet, since 2007 (well after Nokia started the tablet series in 2005), Apple has shipped 4 major versions of its iOS platform, all of them production worthy. Sure, the initial releases might've got light on the features (no MMS, no cut-and-paste, etc.), but they had something worthy of shipping. Why? Because they had both the weight and resources of the company behind it, as well as the focusing pressure of having to ship a viable product.
Nokia's Maemo research project feels like it never had the pressure to be truly real. They've been at it for 6 years, and it still has basic UI problems. The phone does some amazing stuff. I'm duly impressed. It needs some serious attention to the basic spit and polish though. Some of the N900's shortcomings have been addressed with 3rd party packages. Those help, but it's still rather clunky. (fMMS sucks compared to having MMS ability built right into the messenger, for example. And Faster Application Manager is a must for everyone.)
Nokia had a chance to get out in front of everyone years ago and totally squandered it. Symbian had a short term advantage in resource usage and battery management. By today's standards, though, the S60 UI sucks. They were content with a culture of incrementalism and got blindsided by radical changes. If Nokia had made a strategic decision in 2005 to transition their Symbian efforts to life support and put the company's full attention on addressing Maemo's resource-management shortcomings and then building a modern, kick ass UI on that so that they could transition from Symbian to Linux after a couple years, then they could have totally blunted the iPhone's popularity.
Even if they had waited until the iPhone's debut to adopt such a strategy, treating iPhone as a wake-up call, they still could have blunted the success of Android by offering a compelling alternative. Of course, Android does have the multivendor angle, so Nokia would have had to offer the base OS to multiple vendors (just as multiple vendors had/have Symbian phones) to head off Android.
Re:Low end identity is destroying Nokia
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Why Nokia Is Toast
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Agreed. While everyone knows Cadillac is GM, Cadillac isn't Chevy. And, like GM, I think Nokia would benefit from thinning the herd a bit so it can focus better.
- Nokia also announced it will ship its first MeeGo-related device in 2011, which will rely on the Qt ecosystem – and then will continue with MeeGo as an open source project for future disruption.
Uh... "for future disruption"? What does that mean?
And "will continue with MeeGo as an open source project".... Does that mean the community of folks who buy it have to provide their own updates, much like what has happened with the N900?
It depends on whether Amazon is selling goods from within the state of Texas. If Amazon or Generic Package Handling, Inc. have inventory in Texas that hasn't yet been sold, then Amazon is selling from within Texas. Amazon is liable to collect the sales tax (since they're the ones handling the customer's money), regardless of whether it's Amazon or Generic that "owns" the packages.
That's a good question. Where did you see that this facility was something other than a subsidiary of Amazon? The article made it sound like this was Amazon's distribution center, not a 3rd party fulfilment house on contract with Amazon.
The online retailer said Thursday that it would shutter its Irving distribution facility April 12 and cancel plans to hire as many as 1,000 additional workers rather than pay Texas what the state says is owed in uncollected sales tax.
Furthermore, the analogy to FedEx doesn't work. When Amazon ships via FedEx or UPS or whatever, they're shipping from somewhere to somewhere. The carrier is merely a conduit. I order a book, and voila: A package arrives here in Texas from Kentucky or wherever. FedEx didn't sell me the book. Amazon did, and they sent it from a distribution center.
If I had instead bought it from an Amazon affiliated seller, say, Bob's Books, and Bob's Books has stores here in Texas, Bob's Books would collect sales tax from me before sending me the book, even if they ended up sending it from a location in Kentucky.
If the distribution center is "Fred's Distribution Centers, LLC", and Fred is merely a conduit for a purchase after the purchase was made, picking up packages from Amazon's warehouses outside the state and then rerouting them to customers here (ie. no warehousing or logistics other than mere package routing), then they're indistinguishable from FedEx. But, if the distribution center is tightly integrated with Amazon's supply chain and order fulfilment process, such that they're carrying an inventory for Amazon to fulfill orders that have not yet been made, then they're not like FedEx at all. Either Fred or Amazon has to charge you sales tax, because they're selling goods from within Texas.
Failure to collect taxes doesn't absolve you from the liability of paying for them. I live in Texas, and I occasionally sell products to Texans. I collect sales tax for those purchases. But even if I didn't, I'd still owe just as much to the state based on the total amount I sold to Texans, pure and simple.
Just because Amazon did the wrong thing doesn't mean Texas is "asking for a handout."
Imagine if your employer didn't withhold federal income tax from your paycheck. Now it's tax time, and you owe all that tax plus penalties because you didn't pay your income tax throughout the year. Is the federal government "looking for a handout?" No. You have unpaid tax liability, plain and simple.
For as long as I can remember, and long before the Internet, if I ever ordered something via mail or phone, there was always something on there that said "XX residents, add Y% sales tax." The list would vary depending on where the company was, of course. But it was there. This isn't something new.
Amazon seems to be arguing that a fulfilment center does not constitute a "physical presence." (At least, I can't think of what other argument they might use.) It certainly isn't a store front. It's a warehouse. Amazon's "store front" is their website. Still, it's presence in the state of Texas, and it unfairly competes with other businesses in Texas that do charge sales tax.
I live maybe 20 minutes from this distribution center, so I would get direct benefit (fast, cheap shipping) from it. Not charging Texas sales tax is unfair competition for the other retailers near me.
Hmmm... the new Slashdot theme eats italics. Does it eat bold? It looks like it lets bold through. I had meant to emphasize "broadband" in this statement:
Of course, I haven't seen a good argument for what the economic benefits of widely deployed broadband might be.
Basically, the gist of my thought is that, yes, broadband is nice and shiny, but what great innovation are we enabling by bathing the vast plains of Wyoming and Nebraska and Montana with it? I can see the argument that more and more basic services are moving on line, but the baseline level of service you need to access these looks more like a 56kbps modem than broadband. Universal access could mean requiring certain sorts of websites to include a low bandwidth version, rather than building out higher bandwidth to everyone.
Broadband everywhere just makes it easier for ad networks to shovel more crap into each page.
Well, seeing as I work on the chips that go into the base stations, at least I and my coworkers benefit from this. And then there's all the people actually installing and maintaining the towers, etc. Not all of the money gets used like this.
Of course, I haven't seen a good argument for what the economic benefits of widely deployed broadband might be. Sure, everyone can now stream YouTube videos at higher definition. But in terms of basic economic benefit, even if you have fairly slow (by today's standards) Internet access, you still can access online retailers, news, government web sites, etc. You just don't get all the shiny baubles.
I surfed the web over a shared 14.4kbps dialup link once upon a time. It wasn't great, and would be unbearable with many of today's ad-laden websites. But, with AdBlock and FlashBlock, 56kbps modems are at least workable, if not great.
We don't go after this for the same reason we didn't productize tar sands in Alberta until recently, and for the same reason we haven't produced commercial quantities of oil from oil shale: If it costs too much to do, it's not worth doing. It becomes worth doing when the cost is less than the selling price.
Sure, some of the precious metals, etc. in these spacecraft are valuable. The cost of collecting it from space far, far outweighs the cost of just mining more here on earth. It simply isn't commercially viable to get it from space yet.
If space travel ever gets cheap, say 100+ years from now, maybe some space-faring Sanford and Son can make a living scrap collecting among the graveyard orbits. But until then, it's simply more economical to let derelict satellites drift safely out of the way of all the active birds.
You know, when I was a little kid, I used to buy into astrology too, since my mom and her family were really big into it. They came from a very superstitious background, believing in astrology, palm reading, numerology, tarot... yeah.
And when we went to the pizza place, there were always this machines (or sometimes a display case) were you could buy these little scrolls. Buy the one for your sign, and unroll it, and it'd have whatever the predictions were for your sign that month, along with charts and the whole shebang. My brother and I used to compare ours to each other. We got a kick out it. My dad would roll his eyes at the wasted dollar, but we were entertained.
And then I grew up. Now I pretty much read the Onion's horoscope for kicks, and that's about all the more seriously I take any of that superstitious bunk. You won't catch me saying anything about "how ornery Capricorns are" or what-have-you. You might catch me listening to this, though.
In all likelihood, the TCP connection you used to post that inane comment used John Nagle's algorithm. You sound like the one that needs a diaper change.
And don't forget molestationnursery... (Of course, they did eventually change their domain to molerivernusery. The old one goes to some NSFW domain yoinker.)
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It's almost like Nokia is the Commodore of the phone market. The Amiga took off in Europe but not so much in North America, where they kept pushing the Commodore 64-derived stuff. The Amiga had its fanboys here, but it never established a huge presence. Meanwhile, the Mac, which was technically inferior in nearly every way to the Amiga for quite a long time, took off. By the early 90s, I saw plenty of Macs, but only ever saw one Amiga in person. Its owner even showed off how it could emulate a Mac and run faster than a native Mac at the same clock rate would run. Technical superiority didn't matter, though.
Yes, it's not a perfect parallel, and Nokia's specific problems are certainly different than Commodore's. But lack of focus behind the cutting edge platform dogged them both.
I remember the joke at the time that if Commodore tried to sell sushi, they'd market it as "cold, dead fish." Kinda reminds me of how Nokia pushed Maemo.
He used the phrase "No real RAM, just cache." I work with embedded processors that split their memories between cache and RAM (many of the C6000-family DSP cores), and also work with processors that are all cache (most general purpose processors). The phrase "no real RAM, just cache" implies that there wouldn't be any directly mapped memory, only indirectly mapped memory (ie. "cache" by his definition).
How else would you interpret "no real RAM, just cache"?
The cache has to be backed by *something*. Either that, or you have to have some protocol wherein when you kick the last copy of something out of one cache, you arrange for it to get stored in another, in which case it isn't really a cache at that level so much as a set of dynamically assigned addresses system-wide.
Consider a smaller system first as an example. Suppose you had two CPUs, each only one level of cache, and each with 1MB. That's 2MB total system memory. Now suppose the first CPU reads through all 2MB twice, bringing all of it through its 1MB cache. It'd have to send the bits it wasn't using to the other CPU's cache while it wasn't stored in its own cache--ie. it's have to exchange data with the other cache as opposed to merely copying it as caches do today. The net effect is that you're just changing the current home for the data, since there's no system RAM outside of these "caches" that serves as the canonical home for the data .
It's not that such a system couldn't work, but it would probably be impractical for large memories and certain workloads. For example, suppose both processors are reading from the same large database, and the database is largely read-only. In this system, there's no opportunity for both CPUs to simultaneously have a copy of the data that they're both sharing. The data would have to ping back and forth
You could combine this with more ordinary caches. For example, add another 512K cache to each CPU between the CPU and the 1MB I described above. Now the CPUs could each have copies of read-only stuff and shared stuff, but the final home for the data would still migrate among the CPUs. It'd perform OK until you stopped fitting in the smaller cache. This is roughly what large NUMA machines do with page migration. The operating system has to manage that though to make it work well. Normal virtual memory translation mechanisms allow you to move a virtual page to different physical memories attached to other CPUs without the application knowing. It's like the cache idea you described, but managed by the OS.
The problem with huge hardware caches is the lookup penalty. For each cache block, you have to keep track of what address maps to the cache block. If you're distributing this through the system, then you need some sort of directory mechanism to find the cache block of interest. This isn't intractable mind you--it's a similar problem to finding a cell phone in the cell phone network, but it is expensive and complicated to get right in hardware. And unlike the cell phone network, it can't just send a call to voice mail when it can't find what it's looking for. That's why we push much of this to software and let the OS handle it at the page level. It can apply more sophisticated algorithms, and crucially, it can be patched when we find bugs.
That second picture was introduced by this explanation:
They explain away the non-optimality with "they had extra resources to spare." That would argue in the direction of "optimize toward a Steiner tree until you get below some threshold relative to the total available resources," or something similar.
You see this sort of tradeoff all the time in heuristics: Optimization one aspect of resource use (in this case trail pheromones) gets traded off against the time/energy/effort to perform that optimization. In this particular case with the ants, I suspect the higher ant traffic means the pheromones are getting replenished "fast enough" along the suboptimal route that there's no impetus to explore for better routes. To pick a computer analogy, it's like a JIT only throwing its most expensive optimization heuristics at the hot spots of the program it translated, and retranslating the rest only if it runs for long enough.
Except one side is arguing with facts, figures and science, and the other one is making up wacky conspiracy theories and systematically distorting or outright ignoring the science.
I'll give you a hint: The one with the chalkboards making repeated Hitler references isn't the one arguing from a position of facts and figures.
Except that the fear mongers on the right rake in the big bucks. The ones on the left stay fairly niche. When did Air America pass any of the right wing talk radio outlets? Oh yeah, that's right, it folded. Meanwhile, Rush signs multiple-hundred-million dollar contracts. Who's the #1 cable news outlet, by a huge margin? Fox News, if you can call what they do "news".
All this directly supports the statement that it's harder to pull this tactic on liberals than on conservatives, which was the original contention. It probably has something to do with the fact that liberals are more open to new experiences and learning about other cultures, and so inherently find them less scary.
True enough. In fact, that applies to pretty much the whole market. The DSP architecture I work with (the TI C6000 family) has gone from RISC-like VLIW instruction set (the C62x/C67x) with basic load, store, multiply, add, shift type instructions to a much CISCier set of instructions, with complex multiply and round, dot product, vector adds and the like. But, we kept the fully-pipelined aspect and a fairly clean VLIW scheduling model, which were the important parts.
The main distinctions between ARM and x86 at this point come down to implementation styles and related tradeoffs, I think. The instruction set at this point is largely (if not completely) a footnote at least when considering the bulk of the underlying microarchitecture. I say "largely" based on the fact that x86 instruction decoding is quite baroque compared to most any current instruction set (due to all of the prefixes and other contributors to variable opcode size), and so to achieve throughput, you really do have to do a lot of wasted work there. And then there's the handful of microcoded instructions. But that's only the decode stages. x86 also could use more GPRs, although I see that Atom has picked up x86-64, which fixes this deficit.
Until recently, most ARM implementations I've looked at have fairly simple pipelines. So, they can spend most of their energy driving their actual datapath, and otherwise keep energy use to a minimum. Recent turns of the crank (Cortex A8 and A9) have gotten more aggressive, though, with A8 going to dual issue and A9 actually going out-of-order. Each step implies more energy to track dependences. A15 looks positively over-the-top compared to the rest of the ARM portfolio.
(For the record, I'll remain skeptical of their clock rate claims until I see devices ship. lkcl a few posts up said "can easily run at 2.5GHz", but this hasn't been demonstrated yet. That's still a marketing number on ARM's webpage. Clock rate doesn't scale like it used to as you go to smaller geometries, so don't buy the 2.5GHz number until you see a device shipping with those specs.)
Honestly, I don't see a good reason why an Atom-like x86 implementations couldn't perform in the same territory as ARM, both in terms of cycle count and energy usage. I suspect Intel engineers are just a little too hooked on trading energy for time, whereas ARM engineers have been caring about reducing energy per function for much, much longer.
That doesn't exactly sound like a barn burner, although your point about "absence of marketing" stands. Of course, if Nokia had marketed it heavily, it would be to their detriment, since the N900 is a total glitch-fest. PR1.3 fixes many long-standing issues, and yet there's still basic functionality that is either missing or broken.
The N900 might manage to come close to breaking even. If you look over the longer arc of Maemo's existence, though, I think you'll see a "strategic investment" that didn't really bolster the bottom line.
Don't get me wrong... For all its faults (and there are many), I still like my own N900. I love having a bash prompt. I also need to reinstall GCC, etc. since my PR1.3 upgrade. (Boy did that go badly until I reflashed...) But, when I put on my business hat, I can't see the business case for the N900 unless Maemo (and now MeeGo) could get to anywhere near the territory of "million in the first month" sort of quality and attractiveness.
I wouldn't be surprised if the iPad sold more in its two months (around 2 million) than I think Nokia sold in the entire 6 year history of the Maemo line. Even if it's "close" and you have to go to a larger time window (3 or 4 months) to show the disparity, it's just hard to put that in a positive light for Nokia. Nokia is still at least a year away from producing anything that could capture even a little attention from the market that's transfixed by iPad and Tab and all the existing product out there, not to mention actual phones.
That's pretty much the only thing keeping the N900 in my pocket at this point. The UI quirks, missing features and outright bugs are just annoying. Even the camera is a step down from the N82.
Speaking of UI quirks/misfeatures, is there a way to get to the end of a list of files other than using the "inertial scrolling" repeatedly? I've got waaaaaay too many pictures to be scrolling through ALL of them when attaching more than one to an email.
Disclaimer: I'm an N900 owner.
I guess one problem I see is that Nokia never really had the guts to put a ton of gusto behind Maemo. The N900 runs Maemo 5, and while it has some impressive features, it still messes up really basic stuff, even as of PR 1.3:
And yet, since 2007 (well after Nokia started the tablet series in 2005), Apple has shipped 4 major versions of its iOS platform, all of them production worthy. Sure, the initial releases might've got light on the features (no MMS, no cut-and-paste, etc.), but they had something worthy of shipping. Why? Because they had both the weight and resources of the company behind it, as well as the focusing pressure of having to ship a viable product.
Nokia's Maemo research project feels like it never had the pressure to be truly real. They've been at it for 6 years, and it still has basic UI problems. The phone does some amazing stuff. I'm duly impressed. It needs some serious attention to the basic spit and polish though. Some of the N900's shortcomings have been addressed with 3rd party packages. Those help, but it's still rather clunky. (fMMS sucks compared to having MMS ability built right into the messenger, for example. And Faster Application Manager is a must for everyone.)
Nokia had a chance to get out in front of everyone years ago and totally squandered it. Symbian had a short term advantage in resource usage and battery management. By today's standards, though, the S60 UI sucks. They were content with a culture of incrementalism and got blindsided by radical changes. If Nokia had made a strategic decision in 2005 to transition their Symbian efforts to life support and put the company's full attention on addressing Maemo's resource-management shortcomings and then building a modern, kick ass UI on that so that they could transition from Symbian to Linux after a couple years, then they could have totally blunted the iPhone's popularity.
Even if they had waited until the iPhone's debut to adopt such a strategy, treating iPhone as a wake-up call, they still could have blunted the success of Android by offering a compelling alternative. Of course, Android does have the multivendor angle, so Nokia would have had to offer the base OS to multiple vendors (just as multiple vendors had/have Symbian phones) to head off Android.
Agreed. While everyone knows Cadillac is GM, Cadillac isn't Chevy. And, like GM, I think Nokia would benefit from thinning the herd a bit so it can focus better.
Uh... "for future disruption"? What does that mean?
And "will continue with MeeGo as an open source project".... Does that mean the community of folks who buy it have to provide their own updates, much like what has happened with the N900?
It depends on whether Amazon is selling goods from within the state of Texas. If Amazon or Generic Package Handling, Inc. have inventory in Texas that hasn't yet been sold, then Amazon is selling from within Texas. Amazon is liable to collect the sales tax (since they're the ones handling the customer's money), regardless of whether it's Amazon or Generic that "owns" the packages.
That's a good question. Where did you see that this facility was something other than a subsidiary of Amazon? The article made it sound like this was Amazon's distribution center, not a 3rd party fulfilment house on contract with Amazon.
Furthermore, the analogy to FedEx doesn't work. When Amazon ships via FedEx or UPS or whatever, they're shipping from somewhere to somewhere. The carrier is merely a conduit. I order a book, and voila: A package arrives here in Texas from Kentucky or wherever. FedEx didn't sell me the book. Amazon did, and they sent it from a distribution center.
If I had instead bought it from an Amazon affiliated seller, say, Bob's Books, and Bob's Books has stores here in Texas, Bob's Books would collect sales tax from me before sending me the book, even if they ended up sending it from a location in Kentucky.
If the distribution center is "Fred's Distribution Centers, LLC", and Fred is merely a conduit for a purchase after the purchase was made, picking up packages from Amazon's warehouses outside the state and then rerouting them to customers here (ie. no warehousing or logistics other than mere package routing), then they're indistinguishable from FedEx. But, if the distribution center is tightly integrated with Amazon's supply chain and order fulfilment process, such that they're carrying an inventory for Amazon to fulfill orders that have not yet been made, then they're not like FedEx at all. Either Fred or Amazon has to charge you sales tax, because they're selling goods from within Texas.
Failure to collect taxes doesn't absolve you from the liability of paying for them. I live in Texas, and I occasionally sell products to Texans. I collect sales tax for those purchases. But even if I didn't, I'd still owe just as much to the state based on the total amount I sold to Texans, pure and simple.
Just because Amazon did the wrong thing doesn't mean Texas is "asking for a handout."
Imagine if your employer didn't withhold federal income tax from your paycheck. Now it's tax time, and you owe all that tax plus penalties because you didn't pay your income tax throughout the year. Is the federal government "looking for a handout?" No. You have unpaid tax liability, plain and simple.
For as long as I can remember, and long before the Internet, if I ever ordered something via mail or phone, there was always something on there that said "XX residents, add Y% sales tax." The list would vary depending on where the company was, of course. But it was there. This isn't something new.
Amazon seems to be arguing that a fulfilment center does not constitute a "physical presence." (At least, I can't think of what other argument they might use.) It certainly isn't a store front. It's a warehouse. Amazon's "store front" is their website. Still, it's presence in the state of Texas, and it unfairly competes with other businesses in Texas that do charge sales tax.
I live maybe 20 minutes from this distribution center, so I would get direct benefit (fast, cheap shipping) from it. Not charging Texas sales tax is unfair competition for the other retailers near me.
Hmmm... the new Slashdot theme eats italics. Does it eat bold? It looks like it lets bold through. I had meant to emphasize "broadband" in this statement:
Basically, the gist of my thought is that, yes, broadband is nice and shiny, but what great innovation are we enabling by bathing the vast plains of Wyoming and Nebraska and Montana with it? I can see the argument that more and more basic services are moving on line, but the baseline level of service you need to access these looks more like a 56kbps modem than broadband. Universal access could mean requiring certain sorts of websites to include a low bandwidth version, rather than building out higher bandwidth to everyone.
Broadband everywhere just makes it easier for ad networks to shovel more crap into each page.
Well, seeing as I work on the chips that go into the base stations, at least I and my coworkers benefit from this. And then there's all the people actually installing and maintaining the towers, etc. Not all of the money gets used like this.
Of course, I haven't seen a good argument for what the economic benefits of widely deployed broadband might be. Sure, everyone can now stream YouTube videos at higher definition. But in terms of basic economic benefit, even if you have fairly slow (by today's standards) Internet access, you still can access online retailers, news, government web sites, etc. You just don't get all the shiny baubles.
I surfed the web over a shared 14.4kbps dialup link once upon a time. It wasn't great, and would be unbearable with many of today's ad-laden websites. But, with AdBlock and FlashBlock, 56kbps modems are at least workable, if not great.
We don't go after this for the same reason we didn't productize tar sands in Alberta until recently, and for the same reason we haven't produced commercial quantities of oil from oil shale: If it costs too much to do, it's not worth doing. It becomes worth doing when the cost is less than the selling price.
Sure, some of the precious metals, etc. in these spacecraft are valuable. The cost of collecting it from space far, far outweighs the cost of just mining more here on earth. It simply isn't commercially viable to get it from space yet.
If space travel ever gets cheap, say 100+ years from now, maybe some space-faring Sanford and Son can make a living scrap collecting among the graveyard orbits. But until then, it's simply more economical to let derelict satellites drift safely out of the way of all the active birds.
Probably not. At least, not for that. However, I would be surprised if it wasn't also a "career limiting move."
You know, when I was a little kid, I used to buy into astrology too, since my mom and her family were really big into it. They came from a very superstitious background, believing in astrology, palm reading, numerology, tarot... yeah.
And when we went to the pizza place, there were always this machines (or sometimes a display case) were you could buy these little scrolls. Buy the one for your sign, and unroll it, and it'd have whatever the predictions were for your sign that month, along with charts and the whole shebang. My brother and I used to compare ours to each other. We got a kick out it. My dad would roll his eyes at the wasted dollar, but we were entertained.
And then I grew up. Now I pretty much read the Onion's horoscope for kicks, and that's about all the more seriously I take any of that superstitious bunk. You won't catch me saying anything about "how ornery Capricorns are" or what-have-you. You might catch me listening to this, though.
Bing isn't contacting Google's servers. The Bing toolbar is watching IE users use Google and sending the information back to Microsoft.
That was my immediate response as well. (Insert a joke about bowing with NODELAY here.)
In all likelihood, the TCP connection you used to post that inane comment used John Nagle's algorithm. You sound like the one that needs a diaper change.
And don't forget molestationnursery... (Of course, they did eventually change their domain to molerivernusery. The old one goes to some NSFW domain yoinker.)