NetworkWorld, and a few other IDG publications are still in ink. Many are free to qualified subscribers that don't mind acres of checkboxes on qualification forms.
Not yet they don't, but I think Canonical is pushing Unity towards tablets and other touchythings.
Slim that puppy down, slam it onto a CyanogennyModdyROM, give it some deathskull tats and a few piercings, and hey-- more gnarly waykewl phone mods, man. Screw these grannyglasses doods with their black turtleneck geeky 501 crap!
Now your going to suggest finding all of the Mercian Primes under 10^1000 or something. Just what we needed, more goddamn Mercian Primes. They're all over the place.
Like it or not, Pakistan is a "nuclear power". I believe it's dangerous for them (and for India, for that matter). But it's a big ego and power cusp in a world where respect often came at the tip of a sword, etc.
I don't think that Iran and Pakistan share ideologies. Iran's volatility is vastly higher than Pakistan's, and given Pakistan's fragmented loyalties, I express this with great trepidation and fear. Yet Pakistan is a given, Iran, not yet. Whoever pulls the trigger first, will be the first one to evaporate into a post-holocaust crater. This is another price paid. Suggestions that the US should do this are of the most paramount folly, and are lip flatulences of the smelliest sort.
A controlling minority in Iran is doing really stupid things. That justifies bombing them back into the Stone Age? I think the Stux virus is a stroke of genius. Whether Conficker was the delivery vehicle, or a USB drive, I don't care. It did the job peacefully of screwing up Iran's fueling program. What's to say it can't be done again? Why spend all of the weaponry when it can be done inside, without the loss of life, without a huge cost?
The Persian people still have a chance of overthrowing their repression.
If you use nukes, you open up a Pandora's Box that you probably won't be able to close. You'll give every terrorist idiot a reason to become martyrs using equal or uglier tactics.
The regime in Iran, if they were to use nuclear weapons, would probably point them towards Israel. It would be the last thing they ever did. Instead, they want to play politics, and taste the power that comes by being India, Pakistan, etc. It's all about their sense of power, and respect, and ego.
Tim Cook has learned much from Steve Ballmer, on how to make money from cell phone makers and OEMs. iOS isn't going to run on any of them, so they make no direct enemies. Microsoft 'taxed' a few of their OEMs, but OEMs are used to being picked off by patent trolls.
Bad move, Apple. You lose friends a handful at a time. Then there are no more handfuls.
It gives us something to think about, this beautiful sky of ours. It's also a potential cop-out to problems like over population, interpersonal relationships, poverty, and conservation of resources.
I'm as curious as the next person. Seems that if there are signals, we're missing them, or are otherwise actively shielded from them. Or we're just not smart enough to understand them. Long after I'm dead, perhaps they'll find out.
Yup. Billions of years of random pairings, energy strikes, and we get microphages, yeasties, the fungis, bacterium, little odd segments of stuff.
One of then strikes, and then easily dominates with no competition. It moshes around for a few thousand millennium, and we get you.
In the meantime, we get lots of variants, including plenty that didn't work, or were otherwise unsuitable for the environment. Perhaps they were tasty, or not symbiotic enough.
All the math you want all started at some juncture with success. Success dominates, doesn't it? Then look out, it's the long road to humanity. If you want to add in your magic-thinking, or you have "faith", insert it at some place in the timeline. I don't care, but it is your magic-thinking or faith, not mine. People deny lots of stuff all the time. You won't be the first one.
There's more. The "uniquers" are clueless. Is the magnetic field because of our unique liquid core?
No. We have a lot of iron and rotate. Duh.
Moons! Look at the moons! Statistically most of the other rocks going around the sun have 'em, too.
And so forth. Statistically, we're in a zone that allowed the chemicals to make whoopee and produce life, leading to us. People believe they're special, but they evolved something that they narcissitically believe is "intelligence". Do they treat their little planet with care? I don't think so. And they kill each other with glee, and deny the world around them, waiting for magical-thinking to become real.
Thanks... one sits on the shelf (long story). I suggest your creative recycling efforts can be re-used again. I'm amused that my original post was trampled down, then floats back up again.
For some books, time to market is important. Getting the first three months @ 100% of that market is taking the cream from the top, and helps Amazon as a goto-place for new fresh titles. There's a lot of money in that space.
I don't see, however, how this means (as the post indicates) that Amazon is getting out of the rest of the eBook business; that inference doesn't make sense. And as an author, I'll put my books through ALL channels at eBook publishing point, especially the lucrative alternate channels. There is no need to make Amazon exclusively rich. They're going to have a hard time pulling the entire program off, IMHO.
If you walk into a "drugstore" and look at the cosmetics aisles, presuming you're a male, you'll be absolutely mystified because the value proposition of cosmetics is total mystery to men.
Women, however, can give you chapter and verse and a "war story". There is a herd, it moves, and it then assigns somewhat arbitrary but often predictable values to what it's doing. The size of the herd then determines characteristics necessary to market to it, what vendors will do, and how efficiently they'll carry out the mission.
There will be competitors after the "beachhead" phase as everyone struggles for marketshare. Noise will create inefficiencies all through the process, and bargains will be had by those that guessed incorrectly all through the food chain and lifecycle of the greenfield where the herd moved.
Ultimately, it's not artificial, although there are lots of variables, as you cite. The ruse is frustrating, but your contention of "artificial" is a point of perspective, whether you're buyer, seller, or stockholder.
You can argue the viewpoint of any or all three. When I'm the buyer, I have the same set of values; I'm essentially a sole prop, so also the stockholder. I know my worth. Me + $2.43 gets you a grande Americano at Starbucks. Shrug.
I have the HTC TPs, several Treos, all to be given to a friend of mine for target practice (will recycle the batteries). She promises YouTube links when she's done. I can't wait.
The Droid just works, altho Verizon had re-written the kernel 2x now to kill rootkits. Too bad about that. GSM in my neighborhood is just awful, but I have a G1 with a SIM for the times when the Verizon tower goes south. Barring that, I stand on the roof with flags.
I didn't say that I thought the fanboi rationale was valid. I said that there's a correlation between price and value.
Symbolism, marketing, and various grey-scale shades of magic notwithstanding, value is in the eye of both the beholder, and the beholder's need. A 19" spare tire does nothing for me unless I have a vehicle that uses one, and then a replacement is valued X. I'll pay X++ for a replacement if I'm in a vehicle with a flat 19" tire, no spare, on a cold wet night with a bunch of screaming kids in the back.
Value is a transient proposition for the very largest part. Today's fad is tomorrow's junk until it might have antique value. Computers generally don't have antique value because their value of tools has the shelf life of hamburger on a hot windowsill. Both of them had value when you bought them, whatever you paid for them. In a year, both of them are bad meat.
I have two dead (screen) HTC Touch Pros. I'm looking at them as I write this. Both were eBay purchases, out of warranty and worked when they arrived. Both died and now lay there, bricked, to remind me that I won't buy HTC again. But this is my experience, and yours obviously varies. Now I use a Droid something, and it's worked well. It's in warranty.....
Sure. There are some items that are lopsided and of really high value. That's what value is all about: perceived currency for item bought.
There are all sorts of things that are on dailysteals, woot, slickdeals, and two dozen more sites. These are items that are sold below their manufacturing cost. There are loss leaders, discounted in the hopes you'll buy something with more margin to make up for it.
The HP TouchPad is a nice example of primal stupidity, with an outstanding hardware platform. It's beautiful. But you need to trash the WebOS on it and put something different on it to make it worthwhile.
Behind the product is a vendor, who may or may not have support (and incumbent costs) to make a product sell well, especially to clueless civilians. They pay more for that because it's of value to them. Several sites have done a COGS analysis on the iPad models to see how much money *exactly* Apple is making on them. It's not cheap. Apple's margin is comparatively thin. But it's positive, and they have their supply chain enslaved and at capacity so the actual price is probably a bit less than the exact book price quoted.
People do indeed buy a lot of vendor reputation and that's meaningful to them. If you're an electronics geek, you know actual versus marketing hype and can make value judgments that suit *you* because you're a self-maintaining person capable of circumventing the non-hard costs of a product.
But junk is junk, and especially in electronics. When I buy mobos from various vendors, some of these guys do a genuinely lousy job. On a good day, you can get a nice workstation with the drivers you need to do the job. On a bad day, you're SOL and there is not a thing you can do except pray.
Firesale prices are marketing, not product mistakes. When things go below cost, it hurts. Yes, buyers benefit, but there's a floor and ceiling price they'll pay. It's capitalism at work.
It's often a reality. Yes, there are good and decent values out there, but by and large, price and value have a proportionate correlation. High margins can be dishonorable, or they could be part of intelligent capital endeavor.
I don't like to pay retail. I like a deal. But the Chinese tablets I've ordered and tried are no deal. They break, and the companies selling them don't back up their "deals", and they don't support the product, and the products don't hold up. That may change, and I expect it will. I'm TRYING to find a sweet spot, but to label me a fanboi is one of your larger mistakes of the month so far.
And I'll stand by the correlation I made. Good shoppers get good deals.
Resistive or capacitive, the ones I've tried are junk. You get what you pay for. They're not cheap to make and getting support from Chinese-based organizations has been frustratingly difficult for me. Others may have had different experiences, but there's a different expectation set by mainstream vendors, that while being occasionally ugly, isn't the total lack of support that I've seen from direct Chinese sources.
Don't expect iPad or Xoom quality at a low price point.
I use cloud, but there's network latency, even when the delivery chain is optimized. With full-bore 802.11n, rendering jobs and compiles still take time. Stopping a job to fix an oops-problem is easier on a local basis, too.
There are cool docks out there; Moto has one for the Xoom, and there are lots of others. A couple of iPads, a joy stick, something rendering up at AWS, might work very well. But we're dreaming here.... and it'll be real soon enough.
Slashdot Mirror
NetworkWorld, and a few other IDG publications are still in ink. Many are free to qualified subscribers that don't mind acres of checkboxes on qualification forms.
Nah, it's an Iranian space capsule with a test payload.
Not yet they don't, but I think Canonical is pushing Unity towards tablets and other touchythings.
Slim that puppy down, slam it onto a CyanogennyModdyROM, give it some deathskull tats and a few piercings, and hey-- more gnarly waykewl phone mods, man. Screw these grannyglasses doods with their black turtleneck geeky 501 crap!
Never underestimate the whimsy of youth.
Now your going to suggest finding all of the Mercian Primes under 10^1000 or something. Just what we needed, more goddamn Mercian Primes. They're all over the place.
Like it or not, Pakistan is a "nuclear power". I believe it's dangerous for them (and for India, for that matter). But it's a big ego and power cusp in a world where respect often came at the tip of a sword, etc.
I don't think that Iran and Pakistan share ideologies. Iran's volatility is vastly higher than Pakistan's, and given Pakistan's fragmented loyalties, I express this with great trepidation and fear. Yet Pakistan is a given, Iran, not yet. Whoever pulls the trigger first, will be the first one to evaporate into a post-holocaust crater. This is another price paid. Suggestions that the US should do this are of the most paramount folly, and are lip flatulences of the smelliest sort.
A controlling minority in Iran is doing really stupid things. That justifies bombing them back into the Stone Age? I think the Stux virus is a stroke of genius. Whether Conficker was the delivery vehicle, or a USB drive, I don't care. It did the job peacefully of screwing up Iran's fueling program. What's to say it can't be done again? Why spend all of the weaponry when it can be done inside, without the loss of life, without a huge cost?
The Persian people still have a chance of overthrowing their repression.
If you use nukes, you open up a Pandora's Box that you probably won't be able to close. You'll give every terrorist idiot a reason to become martyrs using equal or uglier tactics.
The regime in Iran, if they were to use nuclear weapons, would probably point them towards Israel. It would be the last thing they ever did. Instead, they want to play politics, and taste the power that comes by being India, Pakistan, etc. It's all about their sense of power, and respect, and ego.
Yes.
Tim Cook has learned much from Steve Ballmer, on how to make money from cell phone makers and OEMs. iOS isn't going to run on any of them, so they make no direct enemies. Microsoft 'taxed' a few of their OEMs, but OEMs are used to being picked off by patent trolls.
Bad move, Apple. You lose friends a handful at a time. Then there are no more handfuls.
It gives us something to think about, this beautiful sky of ours. It's also a potential cop-out to problems like over population, interpersonal relationships, poverty, and conservation of resources.
I'm as curious as the next person. Seems that if there are signals, we're missing them, or are otherwise actively shielded from them. Or we're just not smart enough to understand them. Long after I'm dead, perhaps they'll find out.
Yup. Billions of years of random pairings, energy strikes, and we get microphages, yeasties, the fungis, bacterium, little odd segments of stuff.
One of then strikes, and then easily dominates with no competition. It moshes around for a few thousand millennium, and we get you.
In the meantime, we get lots of variants, including plenty that didn't work, or were otherwise unsuitable for the environment. Perhaps they were tasty, or not symbiotic enough.
All the math you want all started at some juncture with success. Success dominates, doesn't it? Then look out, it's the long road to humanity. If you want to add in your magic-thinking, or you have "faith", insert it at some place in the timeline. I don't care, but it is your magic-thinking or faith, not mine. People deny lots of stuff all the time. You won't be the first one.
There's more. The "uniquers" are clueless. Is the magnetic field because of our unique liquid core?
No. We have a lot of iron and rotate. Duh.
Moons! Look at the moons! Statistically most of the other rocks going around the sun have 'em, too.
And so forth. Statistically, we're in a zone that allowed the chemicals to make whoopee and produce life, leading to us. People believe they're special, but they evolved something that they narcissitically believe is "intelligence". Do they treat their little planet with care? I don't think so. And they kill each other with glee, and deny the world around them, waiting for magical-thinking to become real.
Thanks... one sits on the shelf (long story). I suggest your creative recycling efforts can be re-used again. I'm amused that my original post was trampled down, then floats back up again.
Good for you; a great re-use of technology.
For some books, time to market is important. Getting the first three months @ 100% of that market is taking the cream from the top, and helps Amazon as a goto-place for new fresh titles. There's a lot of money in that space.
I don't see, however, how this means (as the post indicates) that Amazon is getting out of the rest of the eBook business; that inference doesn't make sense. And as an author, I'll put my books through ALL channels at eBook publishing point, especially the lucrative alternate channels. There is no need to make Amazon exclusively rich. They're going to have a hard time pulling the entire program off, IMHO.
Your solar panels will be green, and smell vaguely like broccoli, with little graphene wires. You may have to water them.
If you walk into a "drugstore" and look at the cosmetics aisles, presuming you're a male, you'll be absolutely mystified because the value proposition of cosmetics is total mystery to men.
Women, however, can give you chapter and verse and a "war story". There is a herd, it moves, and it then assigns somewhat arbitrary but often predictable values to what it's doing. The size of the herd then determines characteristics necessary to market to it, what vendors will do, and how efficiently they'll carry out the mission.
There will be competitors after the "beachhead" phase as everyone struggles for marketshare. Noise will create inefficiencies all through the process, and bargains will be had by those that guessed incorrectly all through the food chain and lifecycle of the greenfield where the herd moved.
Then, the herd will move on. Rinse, repeat.
Ultimately, it's not artificial, although there are lots of variables, as you cite. The ruse is frustrating, but your contention of "artificial" is a point of perspective, whether you're buyer, seller, or stockholder.
You can argue the viewpoint of any or all three. When I'm the buyer, I have the same set of values; I'm essentially a sole prop, so also the stockholder. I know my worth. Me + $2.43 gets you a grande Americano at Starbucks. Shrug.
Way bummer.
I have the HTC TPs, several Treos, all to be given to a friend of mine for target practice (will recycle the batteries). She promises YouTube links when she's done. I can't wait.
The Droid just works, altho Verizon had re-written the kernel 2x now to kill rootkits. Too bad about that. GSM in my neighborhood is just awful, but I have a G1 with a SIM for the times when the Verizon tower goes south. Barring that, I stand on the roof with flags.
I didn't say that I thought the fanboi rationale was valid. I said that there's a correlation between price and value.
Symbolism, marketing, and various grey-scale shades of magic notwithstanding, value is in the eye of both the beholder, and the beholder's need. A 19" spare tire does nothing for me unless I have a vehicle that uses one, and then a replacement is valued X. I'll pay X++ for a replacement if I'm in a vehicle with a flat 19" tire, no spare, on a cold wet night with a bunch of screaming kids in the back.
Value is a transient proposition for the very largest part. Today's fad is tomorrow's junk until it might have antique value. Computers generally don't have antique value because their value of tools has the shelf life of hamburger on a hot windowsill. Both of them had value when you bought them, whatever you paid for them. In a year, both of them are bad meat.
I have two dead (screen) HTC Touch Pros. I'm looking at them as I write this. Both were eBay purchases, out of warranty and worked when they arrived. Both died and now lay there, bricked, to remind me that I won't buy HTC again. But this is my experience, and yours obviously varies. Now I use a Droid something, and it's worked well. It's in warranty.....
Sure. There are some items that are lopsided and of really high value. That's what value is all about: perceived currency for item bought.
There are all sorts of things that are on dailysteals, woot, slickdeals, and two dozen more sites. These are items that are sold below their manufacturing cost. There are loss leaders, discounted in the hopes you'll buy something with more margin to make up for it.
The HP TouchPad is a nice example of primal stupidity, with an outstanding hardware platform. It's beautiful. But you need to trash the WebOS on it and put something different on it to make it worthwhile.
Behind the product is a vendor, who may or may not have support (and incumbent costs) to make a product sell well, especially to clueless civilians. They pay more for that because it's of value to them. Several sites have done a COGS analysis on the iPad models to see how much money *exactly* Apple is making on them. It's not cheap. Apple's margin is comparatively thin. But it's positive, and they have their supply chain enslaved and at capacity so the actual price is probably a bit less than the exact book price quoted.
People do indeed buy a lot of vendor reputation and that's meaningful to them. If you're an electronics geek, you know actual versus marketing hype and can make value judgments that suit *you* because you're a self-maintaining person capable of circumventing the non-hard costs of a product.
But junk is junk, and especially in electronics. When I buy mobos from various vendors, some of these guys do a genuinely lousy job. On a good day, you can get a nice workstation with the drivers you need to do the job. On a bad day, you're SOL and there is not a thing you can do except pray.
Firesale prices are marketing, not product mistakes. When things go below cost, it hurts. Yes, buyers benefit, but there's a floor and ceiling price they'll pay. It's capitalism at work.
It's often a reality. Yes, there are good and decent values out there, but by and large, price and value have a proportionate correlation. High margins can be dishonorable, or they could be part of intelligent capital endeavor.
I don't like to pay retail. I like a deal. But the Chinese tablets I've ordered and tried are no deal. They break, and the companies selling them don't back up their "deals", and they don't support the product, and the products don't hold up. That may change, and I expect it will. I'm TRYING to find a sweet spot, but to label me a fanboi is one of your larger mistakes of the month so far.
And I'll stand by the correlation I made. Good shoppers get good deals.
Resistive or capacitive, the ones I've tried are junk. You get what you pay for. They're not cheap to make and getting support from Chinese-based organizations has been frustratingly difficult for me. Others may have had different experiences, but there's a different expectation set by mainstream vendors, that while being occasionally ugly, isn't the total lack of support that I've seen from direct Chinese sources.
Don't expect iPad or Xoom quality at a low price point.
Yup. The MBA can get expensive. And although a pancake engine Porsche can be cool, they're getting out of date.
I saw a Porsche 914, running if admittedly ugly on CL for under $1200. A MBA, admittedly beautiful and over-configured, for $1700. Ipso facto.
I use cloud, but there's network latency, even when the delivery chain is optimized. With full-bore 802.11n, rendering jobs and compiles still take time. Stopping a job to fix an oops-problem is easier on a local basis, too.
There are cool docks out there; Moto has one for the Xoom, and there are lots of others. A couple of iPads, a joy stick, something rendering up at AWS, might work very well. But we're dreaming here.... and it'll be real soon enough.