I'm sure you're very pleased with yourself, but if I'm reading this report right you got ripped off by about 50% on your hardware, and any music or videos you happened to pay actual money for.
AOL is a good comparison. They had their own little corner with its own content, which AOL built and maintained, and when you paid for AOL you paid for that safe - but restricted - little selection. You might think that's a dumb idea and prefer to go elsewhere, but that's the basic idea.
Of course this makes a games console rather like a PC that could only access AOL, which is a nightmare vision that never came to pass in this universe.
Has MS made a decision regarding the Xbox where they haven't backtracked to "whatever Sony is doing"? It seems like Mark Cerny has more control over the Xbox One's capabilites than Ballmer does.
Ford doesn't take responsibility for the quality of the highways and what happens on them, although that would let them sell more trucks. (The Turnpike, now with 99% less accidents and Smoothdrive(TM)!) Microsoft does take responsiblity for the quality of Xbox games and what happens on the Live service, using that as a selling point.
Yes, exactly. You wouldn't use a lathe to cut two-by-fours and you wouldn't use a handsaw to make a bannister. You're going to need both to make a house.
If you take 10% from each exchange the value will never reach zero (Zeno's paradox). Regardless, a Ponzi scheme extracts no value from the original capital. There's no arbitrage. It's a zero-sum game. That's what distinguishes it from markets, which are supposed to be about finding areas where someone has under- or over-valued something relative to its actual value, and extracting that difference.
They haven't been able to keep up with demand for the One because their component suppliers looked at their past performance gave them a low priority, so they literally couldn't make them.
That's a bit like arguing that a computer's a terrible content creation tool because it's no good as a woodworking lathe or sewing machine. No, a tablet's no good for doing multi-track video editing. (Most single-display computers aren't any good at it either.) However it's a remarkable tool for gathering, organising and triaging information. (Papers, the science literature tool, is its killer app in my environment.) It's the swiss army knife of desk references. It's an x-windows client I can pass around at a scientific meeting. It's the world's least annoying way to deal with email.
You'd be surprised. I could touch-type with my thumbs within a month, and I'm not exactly an avid texter. I imagine hunt-and-peck people might have a problem with the lack of feedback though.
For $229 you can buy a computer the size of a small book that connects wirelessly to the internet. If you can't find interesting things to do with something like that I worry for your imagination. I'd already dreamt up a dozen uses for something like that when I was a teenager and it was a ridiculous space-age fantasy.
Maybe people don't talk about them because they stopped being novelties and started being an unremarkable part of the computing landscale? I don't talk about how amazing computer mice are any more, but that doesn't mean that they're a novelty that's destined for the bin.
Is that where we are now? Every new tech product goes from profitable business to lost cause in five years because Google wants more eyeballs to serve ads to?
Apple doesn't have a choice: cheap Android and Windows Phone devices are becoming highly competitive on price, both with less demanding, mainstream users and more technically proficient, hack-seeking buyers. So those sales are going away. The only question is whether they're going to go to rivals, or to Apple's own cheaper product. It's just another part of the product cycle; I recall that Apple made more money on the iPod Mini/Nano than they ever did on the classic iPod, although it was exactly the same kind of self-cannibalising move.
In my (admittedly pessimistic) scenario they don't have to prove anything, though, they just have to make the case run long enough that a settlement becomes preferable. Surprise witnesses, requests for extra time, copious and un-necessary filings... if they can find a judge who's willing to put up with it, they can spin the case out long enough to "win" a settlement rather than a decision against them.
Here's what'll happen: MediaNet will find a way to press the case on and on beyond the plaintiff's resources, and will then settle for a bit more than the $20/month the plaintiff would've been getting, with a confidentiality agreement.
'Cause that's how law works when it's corporations versus individuals. Equal, but not egalitarian.
Not sure you have a good grasp of what a Ponzi scheme involves. In a Ponzi scheme there's no making money off other people's money. There's no making money off anything. It's like trying to build a hill in a sandbox. You drag the sand in to the middle, which makes the middle go up, but the edges go down to form a moat. So you drag sand in from further away. The moat gets deeper, and the hill gets higher. The total amount of sand stays the same; all that happens is that it is redistributed. So long as you keep dragging sand around, people think the hill will get bigger forever, because the moat's never in the same place very long.
Except when you run out of sand and have no way to fill in the moat.
In the simplest case it is a fraction of the issuing body's products, be that labour, goods, raw materials, whatever in the case of a country. I work in the mine and exchange my gold for dollars; I go to the baker and exchange my dollars for his bread. I could've exchanged gold for bread with essentially the same outcome.
Neither Slashdot, the article, nor the SEC are saying that it is a bitcoin problem; it's your standard scheme exploiting irrationality around a commodity, that happens in this case to be bitcoins.
That's my point. The scheme's operators only had to sit on the coins and pay out their actual nominal value to come out in line with even their most optimistic predictions. If they'd posited a 5% rate of return they could've even made a very tidy profit too.
I wouldn't be surprised if Android 5.0 took some measures to decouple important system functions like this from the user experience layer in such a way that Google could roll out important, low level updates while leaving the overall experience in the hands of the carriers.
Of course then Google would be responsible for making sure the update is compatible with every available Android device, rather than the carriers and manufacturers.
According to the post the actual value of bitcoins has climbed at about 1% per day, so surely it's more remarkable that the scheme failed to meet those expectations?
They were giving them away because they had already killed the product. From the moment the "fire sale" started they had zero intent on even manufacturing new units, much less supporting the platform.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure you're very pleased with yourself, but if I'm reading this report right you got ripped off by about 50% on your hardware, and any music or videos you happened to pay actual money for.
That's not because vanadium is rare but because silicon is absurdly abundant; there's more vanadium than chlorine, lithium, cobalt, copper...
I really doubt scarcity is an issue here.
AOL is a good comparison. They had their own little corner with its own content, which AOL built and maintained, and when you paid for AOL you paid for that safe - but restricted - little selection. You might think that's a dumb idea and prefer to go elsewhere, but that's the basic idea.
Of course this makes a games console rather like a PC that could only access AOL, which is a nightmare vision that never came to pass in this universe.
More like "Sony did it, so should we."
Has MS made a decision regarding the Xbox where they haven't backtracked to "whatever Sony is doing"? It seems like Mark Cerny has more control over the Xbox One's capabilites than Ballmer does.
Ford doesn't take responsibility for the quality of the highways and what happens on them, although that would let them sell more trucks. (The Turnpike, now with 99% less accidents and Smoothdrive(TM)!) Microsoft does take responsiblity for the quality of Xbox games and what happens on the Live service, using that as a selling point.
Yes, exactly. You wouldn't use a lathe to cut two-by-fours and you wouldn't use a handsaw to make a bannister. You're going to need both to make a house.
If you take 10% from each exchange the value will never reach zero (Zeno's paradox). Regardless, a Ponzi scheme extracts no value from the original capital. There's no arbitrage. It's a zero-sum game. That's what distinguishes it from markets, which are supposed to be about finding areas where someone has under- or over-valued something relative to its actual value, and extracting that difference.
They haven't been able to keep up with demand for the One because their component suppliers looked at their past performance gave them a low priority, so they literally couldn't make them.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4122798/htc-one-delayed-because-of-component-shortage
That's a bit like arguing that a computer's a terrible content creation tool because it's no good as a woodworking lathe or sewing machine. No, a tablet's no good for doing multi-track video editing. (Most single-display computers aren't any good at it either.) However it's a remarkable tool for gathering, organising and triaging information. (Papers, the science literature tool, is its killer app in my environment.) It's the swiss army knife of desk references. It's an x-windows client I can pass around at a scientific meeting. It's the world's least annoying way to deal with email.
You'd be surprised. I could touch-type with my thumbs within a month, and I'm not exactly an avid texter. I imagine hunt-and-peck people might have a problem with the lack of feedback though.
For $229 you can buy a computer the size of a small book that connects wirelessly to the internet. If you can't find interesting things to do with something like that I worry for your imagination. I'd already dreamt up a dozen uses for something like that when I was a teenager and it was a ridiculous space-age fantasy.
What do you think most people use computers for? There's a reason computer use exploded around the time the web went mainstream.
Maybe people don't talk about them because they stopped being novelties and started being an unremarkable part of the computing landscale? I don't talk about how amazing computer mice are any more, but that doesn't mean that they're a novelty that's destined for the bin.
Is that where we are now? Every new tech product goes from profitable business to lost cause in five years because Google wants more eyeballs to serve ads to?
Apple doesn't have a choice: cheap Android and Windows Phone devices are becoming highly competitive on price, both with less demanding, mainstream users and more technically proficient, hack-seeking buyers. So those sales are going away. The only question is whether they're going to go to rivals, or to Apple's own cheaper product. It's just another part of the product cycle; I recall that Apple made more money on the iPod Mini/Nano than they ever did on the classic iPod, although it was exactly the same kind of self-cannibalising move.
In my (admittedly pessimistic) scenario they don't have to prove anything, though, they just have to make the case run long enough that a settlement becomes preferable. Surprise witnesses, requests for extra time, copious and un-necessary filings... if they can find a judge who's willing to put up with it, they can spin the case out long enough to "win" a settlement rather than a decision against them.
Here's what'll happen: MediaNet will find a way to press the case on and on beyond the plaintiff's resources, and will then settle for a bit more than the $20/month the plaintiff would've been getting, with a confidentiality agreement.
'Cause that's how law works when it's corporations versus individuals. Equal, but not egalitarian.
Err, so I should say that a negative is an unpaid debt. You take the bread, but you don't leave any gold.
Not sure you have a good grasp of what a Ponzi scheme involves. In a Ponzi scheme there's no making money off other people's money. There's no making money off anything. It's like trying to build a hill in a sandbox. You drag the sand in to the middle, which makes the middle go up, but the edges go down to form a moat. So you drag sand in from further away. The moat gets deeper, and the hill gets higher. The total amount of sand stays the same; all that happens is that it is redistributed. So long as you keep dragging sand around, people think the hill will get bigger forever, because the moat's never in the same place very long.
Except when you run out of sand and have no way to fill in the moat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
In the simplest case it is a fraction of the issuing body's products, be that labour, goods, raw materials, whatever in the case of a country. I work in the mine and exchange my gold for dollars; I go to the baker and exchange my dollars for his bread. I could've exchanged gold for bread with essentially the same outcome.
Neither Slashdot, the article, nor the SEC are saying that it is a bitcoin problem; it's your standard scheme exploiting irrationality around a commodity, that happens in this case to be bitcoins.
That's my point. The scheme's operators only had to sit on the coins and pay out their actual nominal value to come out in line with even their most optimistic predictions. If they'd posited a 5% rate of return they could've even made a very tidy profit too.
I wouldn't be surprised if Android 5.0 took some measures to decouple important system functions like this from the user experience layer in such a way that Google could roll out important, low level updates while leaving the overall experience in the hands of the carriers.
Of course then Google would be responsible for making sure the update is compatible with every available Android device, rather than the carriers and manufacturers.
According to the post the actual value of bitcoins has climbed at about 1% per day, so surely it's more remarkable that the scheme failed to meet those expectations?
They were giving them away because they had already killed the product. From the moment the "fire sale" started they had zero intent on even manufacturing new units, much less supporting the platform.