...don't they know that Steve Jobs wants to control their lives?
Joking aside, I wonder how much that market share number changes when you look at the mobile market. I'd bet 95% of incoming students have cell phones of one type or another. I'd also bet that Windows-based mobile phones are probably near zero percent, with iPhone and Android sharing the lion's share of the market, but it'd be interesting to see what those numbers are for college students as compared to the outside world.
In the Chicago area, with the number of toll booths on the road, those devices might as well be GPS, as your passes through those booths are tracked with a time stamp, so anyone with access knows where you were and when. I've heard (but not validated) that you can actually get a speeding ticket mailed to you if you go from checkpoint A to checkpoint B faster than the speed limit, assuming there's no traffic at the far end to slow you down enough.
That's a good point. Most iPhone owners I know appreciate Android for its strengths, but the Android users out there are damned if they'll accept that even one person might possibly be just as happy with an iPhone.
Actually, with HTML5, they can indeed be apps. All application code and static data can be cached on the device, so anything which doesn't require data from the network can be run perfectly fine without web access.
It's HTML/Javascript/CSS, so it's not as fast as native apps, and it doesn't have hooks into all of the phone's features, but some pretty clever people are doing impressive stuff. Maybe not in this market, but it's out there.
It's just a matter of time. It's not like these devices don't get faster every year.
WebGL isn't yet in mobile safari; in fact, I think it's only in Chrome nightlies at the moment. But when it does come to mobile safari, you can bet HTML5Quake2 will be one of the first demos.
Well, if they've got an internal SLA for 24/7 uptime, that would require having at least four full-time people (4*40 = 160, and there's 168 hours in a week) *available*, if not directly interactive with the storage system. If they each make $90k, there goes your $360k/year. Cut those salaries in half and you get eight IT people full time, with a little bonus for the folks who work nights and weekends.
And that's just for one location. If this storage includes multiple datacenters, they would have to have more people on-hand.
Maybe this is just the way the original poster's company determines their IT staffing budget; if they've decided that there is a direct correlation between the amount of disk storage requirements and the number of IT people required to cover all IT needs, then it might make perfect sense. Buy yourself a gigabyte for $30/year and with it get all the free desktop and network support you can eat!
Reminds me of a study I read once where only something like 30% of people surveyed believed in UFOs, but 40% believed that the government was hiding information about UFOs. I remember thinking that the study should have been titled, "10% of people are idiots."
And beyond that, there is an element of truth to the argument that copyrights should have greater strength in the fight to defend the rights of content creators than those of megacorps which will at the drop of a hat, happily shit on both their paying customers and their contracted creative types.
Your post is already modded 5- insightful, so I will mod no more. But huzzah to you, genfail; that was a clear and succinct, non-inflammatory--even non-snarky--response to a question that might have met a much poorer fate at someone else's hands.
Right. It's really a tipping point question, isn't it? Hard drives will continue to get bigger and cheaper faster than SSDs, probably. But at some point, when SSDs are cheap enough and store enough for most people in a given niche, we'll see some fairly sudden shifts in purchasing patterns.
We can already see that in the high-end market. Most of the developers I know who have switched to SSDs say they'll never go back. Compile times, boot speed of virtual machines, SSDs have changed their lives.
It's all a matter of scale. If you're the market leader, and you can afford to ink those sorts of deals with the customers who drive 99% of the market for your niche, that's anticompetitive. If you're a scrappy start-up trying to break into the market, and your actions don't endanger the rest of the market, you get to play by different rules.
Competition is about helping ensure that the best products are available at the best price. Without these sorts of rules in place, you're effectively allowing the leader to maintain their position based on their cash hoard rather than, say, innovation. And that hurts the market.
Well, I respect him/her for putting it out there. The ACs who spewed their vitriol on this branch of the conversation, however, are far less savory beings.
I saw an 8 year old kid wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a sony walkman on it. I was thinking that kid might have never seen a cassette tape in real life, much less the device.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm close to some who do and have done work in similar arenas. Sometimes, you know what will fly and what won't, and while you are absolutely sure of the rightness of your case, you know that if it goes to trial, there are a million ways that your opponent, if they're any good, could bust the case down. Maybe simple technicalities, but if that means that your client who deserves some remuneration get's nothing, you don't want that to happen.
So you bluster and you bargain. You puff and you imply. And when it comes down to it, when you get an offer for a settlement, if it's better than what you think you'll get in court, you go to your client and try to convince them to settle.
I've heard stories of judges walking in on the first day of trial, having read the briefs, and saying, "why isn't this settled? why is this in my court room?" In some cases, judges will also suggest what they think a proper settlement is prior to the case being fought.
Oh, but why are there only financial damages instead of criminal ones? Well, that's all about corporate law, right? You can't put a company in jail. If you just seize all assets, you could be destroying the livelihoods of thousands, or tens of thousands of hard working, innocent people who did nothing wrong. So if it's possible, you try to pierce the corporate veil and go after individuals. But even then, if you don't think you can win such a case, you fall back on what you can do.
And in many cases, these settlements which replace criminal sentences do indeed bring some justice. People who were wronged get compensated. And sometimes it is enough to--at least temporarily--make a philosophical change in the company leadership. OK, maybe not that last thing, but some good does often come out of these settlements.
Well, sort of. Mom and pop probably typically don't vote, but sign off on proxy statements to their investment bankers who do the voting. Any major investment banker with enough proxies to make a difference probably knew what was going on and made a mint themselves, but mom and pop didn't know.
Even if they did vote, they did so based on lies and fabrications. GIGO, you know. The only thing you can blame them for is getting into the stock market in the first place. Once you're in, it's an elaborate game that's tilted significantly towards insiders who openly flaunt the law because the penalty is pennies on the dollar.
Well, Intel's actions may have been illegal. Discounts are one thing; hell, everyone loves volume pricing, right? But if the terms are exclusivity, and if they're doing it with all the major vendors, then it becomes a monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior.
And let's not forget the actual amount of the discount; if you discount stuff low enough so that nobody can compete, and it just so happens that you're selling products below production price, the case could be made that you're doing something called "dumping" which is itself an anti-competitive behavior.
So there could be more to this than disclosure issues. I don't know for certain, but just as it's illegal both to give and receive bribes, there's probably good reason to decry the behavior of those compliant in the monopolistic behavior.
I'm not saying I know all the details, by any stretch; all I'm saying is that the GP poster has as worthy a point as your own.
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...don't they know that Steve Jobs wants to control their lives?
Joking aside, I wonder how much that market share number changes when you look at the mobile market. I'd bet 95% of incoming students have cell phones of one type or another. I'd also bet that Windows-based mobile phones are probably near zero percent, with iPhone and Android sharing the lion's share of the market, but it'd be interesting to see what those numbers are for college students as compared to the outside world.
In the Chicago area, with the number of toll booths on the road, those devices might as well be GPS, as your passes through those booths are tracked with a time stamp, so anyone with access knows where you were and when. I've heard (but not validated) that you can actually get a speeding ticket mailed to you if you go from checkpoint A to checkpoint B faster than the speed limit, assuming there's no traffic at the far end to slow you down enough.
Man, there should be a SJobs version of the Godwin rule.
Huzzah for the Internet-age realist and/or snarker. Nice complement, back-handed or otherwise.
LOLwhut? Regardless of what you think of Javascript, it is indeed executable code.
That's a good point. Most iPhone owners I know appreciate Android for its strengths, but the Android users out there are damned if they'll accept that even one person might possibly be just as happy with an iPhone.
Actually, with HTML5, they can indeed be apps. All application code and static data can be cached on the device, so anything which doesn't require data from the network can be run perfectly fine without web access.
It's HTML/Javascript/CSS, so it's not as fast as native apps, and it doesn't have hooks into all of the phone's features, but some pretty clever people are doing impressive stuff. Maybe not in this market, but it's out there.
It's just a matter of time. It's not like these devices don't get faster every year.
WebGL isn't yet in mobile safari; in fact, I think it's only in Chrome nightlies at the moment. But when it does come to mobile safari, you can bet HTML5Quake2 will be one of the first demos.
Well, if they've got an internal SLA for 24/7 uptime, that would require having at least four full-time people (4*40 = 160, and there's 168 hours in a week) *available*, if not directly interactive with the storage system. If they each make $90k, there goes your $360k/year. Cut those salaries in half and you get eight IT people full time, with a little bonus for the folks who work nights and weekends.
And that's just for one location. If this storage includes multiple datacenters, they would have to have more people on-hand.
Maybe this is just the way the original poster's company determines their IT staffing budget; if they've decided that there is a direct correlation between the amount of disk storage requirements and the number of IT people required to cover all IT needs, then it might make perfect sense. Buy yourself a gigabyte for $30/year and with it get all the free desktop and network support you can eat!
Reminds me of a study I read once where only something like 30% of people surveyed believed in UFOs, but 40% believed that the government was hiding information about UFOs. I remember thinking that the study should have been titled, "10% of people are idiots."
And beyond that, there is an element of truth to the argument that copyrights should have greater strength in the fight to defend the rights of content creators than those of megacorps which will at the drop of a hat, happily shit on both their paying customers and their contracted creative types.
Information doesn't want to be free.
No, information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Your post is already modded 5- insightful, so I will mod no more. But huzzah to you, genfail; that was a clear and succinct, non-inflammatory--even non-snarky--response to a question that might have met a much poorer fate at someone else's hands.
Right. It's really a tipping point question, isn't it? Hard drives will continue to get bigger and cheaper faster than SSDs, probably. But at some point, when SSDs are cheap enough and store enough for most people in a given niche, we'll see some fairly sudden shifts in purchasing patterns.
We can already see that in the high-end market. Most of the developers I know who have switched to SSDs say they'll never go back. Compile times, boot speed of virtual machines, SSDs have changed their lives.
It's all a matter of scale. If you're the market leader, and you can afford to ink those sorts of deals with the customers who drive 99% of the market for your niche, that's anticompetitive. If you're a scrappy start-up trying to break into the market, and your actions don't endanger the rest of the market, you get to play by different rules.
Competition is about helping ensure that the best products are available at the best price. Without these sorts of rules in place, you're effectively allowing the leader to maintain their position based on their cash hoard rather than, say, innovation. And that hurts the market.
I'd use those variables in LISP if I had to. I always wanted to know the cdddddaddr of quuuuuux.
Personally, I thought 'i' stood for 'index', but 'I' guess it doesn't really matter...
Then I won't tell you!
Well, I respect him/her for putting it out there. The ACs who spewed their vitriol on this branch of the conversation, however, are far less savory beings.
;) Sorry... I'm very subtle in my commentary.
I saw an 8 year old kid wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a sony walkman on it. I was thinking that kid might have never seen a cassette tape in real life, much less the device.
I miss my old A500. Can't believe I gave it away.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm close to some who do and have done work in similar arenas. Sometimes, you know what will fly and what won't, and while you are absolutely sure of the rightness of your case, you know that if it goes to trial, there are a million ways that your opponent, if they're any good, could bust the case down. Maybe simple technicalities, but if that means that your client who deserves some remuneration get's nothing, you don't want that to happen.
So you bluster and you bargain. You puff and you imply. And when it comes down to it, when you get an offer for a settlement, if it's better than what you think you'll get in court, you go to your client and try to convince them to settle.
I've heard stories of judges walking in on the first day of trial, having read the briefs, and saying, "why isn't this settled? why is this in my court room?" In some cases, judges will also suggest what they think a proper settlement is prior to the case being fought.
Oh, but why are there only financial damages instead of criminal ones? Well, that's all about corporate law, right? You can't put a company in jail. If you just seize all assets, you could be destroying the livelihoods of thousands, or tens of thousands of hard working, innocent people who did nothing wrong. So if it's possible, you try to pierce the corporate veil and go after individuals. But even then, if you don't think you can win such a case, you fall back on what you can do.
And in many cases, these settlements which replace criminal sentences do indeed bring some justice. People who were wronged get compensated. And sometimes it is enough to--at least temporarily--make a philosophical change in the company leadership. OK, maybe not that last thing, but some good does often come out of these settlements.
Well, sort of. Mom and pop probably typically don't vote, but sign off on proxy statements to their investment bankers who do the voting. Any major investment banker with enough proxies to make a difference probably knew what was going on and made a mint themselves, but mom and pop didn't know.
Even if they did vote, they did so based on lies and fabrications. GIGO, you know. The only thing you can blame them for is getting into the stock market in the first place. Once you're in, it's an elaborate game that's tilted significantly towards insiders who openly flaunt the law because the penalty is pennies on the dollar.
Well, Intel's actions may have been illegal. Discounts are one thing; hell, everyone loves volume pricing, right? But if the terms are exclusivity, and if they're doing it with all the major vendors, then it becomes a monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior.
And let's not forget the actual amount of the discount; if you discount stuff low enough so that nobody can compete, and it just so happens that you're selling products below production price, the case could be made that you're doing something called "dumping" which is itself an anti-competitive behavior.
So there could be more to this than disclosure issues. I don't know for certain, but just as it's illegal both to give and receive bribes, there's probably good reason to decry the behavior of those compliant in the monopolistic behavior.
I'm not saying I know all the details, by any stretch; all I'm saying is that the GP poster has as worthy a point as your own.