Google actually takes these guys on. I wrangled one of them into giving me a mailing address to pay by check and reported it to Google they were prompt in responding,got me in touch with their legal department and took as much info as I could give them. I saw on the news 2 months later that they filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against that exact company so it's clear they're always building cases against these guys.
Today you can write a top app for Windows UWP, Android and iOS in short order. You can even maintain an app on all 3. But these are really truly "Apps". And the dev effort is "Only" a couple million for most. They're glorified websites by and large. Apple is happily sitting on the premium customers and losing market share but enjoying app parity or even superiority. The question becomes though what do you write for when you want to write the next Autocad or $3,000 program? I think companies will stop seeing iOS as a given when faced with substantially higher dev costs for multi-platform development vs quick and easy apps. I expect sometime soon as apps are expected to do more for there to be a second round of winnowing to one dominant OS again.
The question is can Google move Android/Chrome to the desktop fast enough to capitalize on their phone dominance. Apple isn't showing any interest in OSX anymore. Linux has to wait for someone to win and then copy.
Essentially you have Google and Microsoft in a duel where the first to finish assembling the gun in front of them wins. It looks like nothing is happening but as soon as one of them gets an OS and app library that solves both desktop and mobile the race will be over in a near instant.
Major innovation started and stopped with the shift to capacitive touch/multi-touch touch screens and the availability of 2G Edge data. People scoff at Windows Mobile 5 using a stylus, but anyone who has tried to use a resistive touch screen with their finger knows why styluses were necessary. Apple got there first but their first-mover success is rapidly evaporating and they've lost all advantage they once had on hardware quality and design both in mobile and the desktop market.
So the question becomes who gets Photoshop first? Windows Mobile as a Universal Application or Google as an android app for the Chromebook?
That's not at all true. Look at the release of No Man's Sky this week. Some people had VC++ 2010 installed, some didn't. Some people were on the latest drivers, some weren't.
Then you get into the unpredictable performance issues. We have a farm of 20 machines and about 5 different hardware configurations. The render time is pretty different across XGhz * YMemory * Zarchitecture. Some frames render really fast thanks to fast memory, some render really fast because high GHZ. It's a total crapshoot on how long a simulation on the CPU will take. So sure your GPU is a well understood quantity but there is a lot of slop in predicting precisely how many fragments a box can break into without taking longer than X ms to process on the CPU.
These are all surmountable problems. Obviously because the PC gaming industry exists. But generally speaking the criticism that consoles are better tuned for performance is true due to their smaller target size. But it's false that 3 consoles is equivalent to the 10 billion PCs all unique out in the world with different drivers, different libraries installed, different hard drives, different network cards etc..
He didn't say they wouldn't make a faster box. Just that they don't see themselves releasing "generations". Instead of there being a clean break every 6 years you're going to pick your price point and get all of the latest games at that quality.
2016 : Xbox One: 1080p HDR gaming. 2017 : Xbox One Scorpio: 4k HDR gaming and VR. Xbox 2019 : 4k HDR gaming and VR w/ raytracing. Xbox 2021: Lightfield Raytraced UHDR 4k gaming. Xbox Ones no longer play AAA titles. But will play indie games and DOTA 4. Xbox 2022: Lightfield Raytraced UHDR 8k gaming. Xbox Scorpios no longer support AAA titles.
They will stick to 6 years of depreciation where 6 year old systems just can't handle it I imagine, but the transition will be easy and you can jump in to "modern" hardware at any given point in time.
Take that away and what exactly would differentiate Scorpio from a gaming PC?
There is a big difference between 2 hardware platforms (One and Scorpio) supported at a time vs the 2,000,000,000 hardware combinations on Windows. You might even say it's a 1,000,000,000 times different.
- Let's say we all stuck to the last 3 generations of GPU alone with a Low/Mid/High GPU selection per generation. Ok that's 6 GPUs from AMD and NVidia that's 18 GPUs total. But we also need the 2GB vs 4GB RAM in each of those... - Let's say there are "only" 7 CPUs from Intel: M, i3 low, i3 mid, i5 mid, i5 high, i7 high and i7 enthusiast. - Let's say AMD narrows their portfolio to 3 CPUs. - Let's say that there are 5 motherboard chipsets worth paying attention to and 3 RAM speeds. - Let's say everybody is on the last 4 versions of Windows: 7, 8, 8.1 and 10.
36 GPUs * 10 CPUs * 5 Motherboards * 3 RAM speeds * 4 Windows versions = 76,000 combinations... vs 2.5 combinations (Xbox One/S, Scorpio). And we radically narrowed the supported specs to only target the most common probably 25% of PCs.
Also does your PC have an HDMI in, almost certainly not? All of the XBoxes do. Are you on the latest Windows Patches? The Xbox is.
Yeah, I know people who got a truck because they really needed to be able to pull a trailer once a year... maybe. So they burn $500 in gas per year to avoid paying $100 for a truck rental for a long weekend.
The point of every board isn't to ever do work. It's just to head up the meetings and organize the allocation of funds to achieve the agenda.
You might want one technician but management is management. Management is just about allocating your resources to do get shit done.
Obviously nobody on the board is actually going to get their hands dirty. And boards don't do very much. They will probably meet once a quarter... by phone for an hour. Agree that the consulting firm that they hired is spending the money wisely and then go back to their real jobs.
Holy cow...did nobody at Google see what happens with similar utilities? Or did they just assume the old rules didn't apply to them since it was "on the Internet"? I thought the 1999 "we'll make it up in volume" rules were already thrown out. I highly doubt Economics 101 courses at Stanford leave out the discussion of natural monopolies.
Google is not interested in ISP business. What Google is interested in is forcing ISPs to react to their plans but hopefully on a larger scale.
It's actually worked really well in my area. Google was looking at Fiber. The city announced a big push to invest in fiber. The ISPs all fought tooth and nail to stop it. And then suddenly started rolling out gigabit to the home as a defensive action. The municipal fiber fell through. Google picked another city. But Centurylink is going door to door selling gigabit to the home.
Interestingly enough... we have one overloaded UPS so when we RDPed into it the UPS sounded its alarm. It would be really slow but you could definitely hear the UPS alarm over the 20 servers. Just increase the power draw on 10 servers you don't mind shortening the life of to overload a UPS. I bet people don't think to secure their UPS and leave it on "Default" to sound an audio alarm. One more attack vector.
That being said the best advice I ever read was that there are two kinds of attackers "Mossad and Not-Mossad" "If it's mossad, you're screwed no matter what they'll find a way in." All security is really to stop Not-Mossad. That's true of physical security, digital security, information security whatever... if Mossad wants you dead you'll die. If the CIA wants into your database they'll get in. All you can really hope to stop is a guy in Bulgaria acting alone.
Reservation system could be implemented in chapter 10 of your first programming book. It seems trivial thing?
It's actually really really complex.
It's not just a "reservation system" where you lock out a ticketed space for X seconds until someone completes a transaction. You really have to view it as "The Company" when you're talking about airlines. Let's say a pilot has been in the air too long due to a delayed departure in New York. He hits his max flight time for the next 24 hours but he was scheduled to fly from his destination to another leg. So now you need to replace the pilot. Which pilot? Well there is a plane coming into the airport around the same time as the NY flight. But is that pilot rated to fly that same aircraft? Ok he is, great. But because 30 of the 300 passengers are going to miss their connections now because of the delayed arrival they need to be moved to different flights. But those flights are maxed out. So you have to bump some passengers on a scheduled flight and move them to a later flight as well. Because the plane is getting in late it's also going to depart late. So you also need to either arrange all of the passengers at the next destination to be on different flights and set of a chain reaction or you need to pull in a different plane at the 2nd destination to short circuit the chain reaction. But where can you get a plane from for the cheapest? And how much will it cost to put people up in a hotel vs flying an extra crew in on overtime?
This is all simple enough to calculate with like 1-2 planes. But when you have 1,000 aircraft and all of the seat assignments effectively being interdependent along with business interests (profit/loss of changes), customer service interests such as ticket class... and you have to stay up to date instantaneously with dozens of terminals all trying to do the same thing manually in addition to the automatic callbacks for unexpected events... it's big engineering effort to not create some sort of automatic-trading style feedback loop that accidentally sets off a chain reaction that cancels every flight in the country.
Every change has a cost. No human can orchestrate thousands of interdependent variables with millions of passengers manually. You have to have a central director system which instantaneously handles all of the callbacks and dependencies for a change throughout the entire graph.
It's actually very cool when you stop and think about how well it does at keeping everything relatively straight.
The problem is that if all of your competitors are willing to go bankrupt every 15 years its' really hard to not go bankrupt before they do. It doesn't do you any good if they'll be going bankrupt in 8 years if you go bankrupt next year because you're 10% more expensive.
We see that in my industry all the time. Lots of people undercutting sustainable rates. They inevitably go bankrupt but if you don't match prices you'll go bankrupt waiting for them to go first. And since they're offering products at under cost they can also appeal to investors with fat grosses and rapid growth.
Imagine for instance you were trying to take on Amazon. Amazon hasn't really ever made money. But they can point to their rapid growth for long term investors. If you're an airline you probably won't see growth and it's hard to say "look we're losing a lot of money now but in 8 years when our competitors hit a hard time we'll make some money then until someone else comes along and promises to do what we do but cheaper and never go out of business." You see that with Jetblue and Virgin America. Jump into the industry with lots of investment. Offer a product at razor thin margins and capture a ton of market. But their business plan isn't tested to survive a big recession. So it's a gamble. They'll either do great or it'll reveal they were built on sand.
When your competitors are playing with fire it means they capture all of the revenue when times are good leaving you nothing to save for the "bad times" and then you only prosper when the market is crappy anyway and they can write off their debt in bankruptcy. It's a lose lose.
Facebook ads are just regular Facebook posts from non-friends. If there were exploits people wouldn't bother paying for an ad they would just spread them through regular posts.
1) It limited you to like 6 photos. Which is way too few. 2) Browsing meant subjecting yourself to a cacophony of 8 songs simultaneously. 3) The Wall which consolidated all your friends onto one page. 4) The network effect of people leaving due to mostly reasons number one and two. "Hey I posted photos from this weekend on Facebook!" And just the allure of exclusivity and "maturity" of being college not high school centric.
Working backwards, there is no other better network to flea to. The ads are nowhere near as irritating as 10 techno songs playing on top of each other. And there is no huge missing feature or limitation that can be easily solved by an upstart.
And it should be pointed out that while you can discern detail at a specific resolution any imaging sensor with discreet sensors will alias. So offering more samples than the imaging system can resolve will reducing imaging artifacts. That's why a 6k RED camera makes for a better 1080p image. Fine detail can theoretically be captured by a 1080p sensor but it will look inferior to a 6k sensor that supersamples. If your eye can resolve a 2k phone display, that means you have to perfectly align the phones grid of pixels with your retina's light sensing cells. Move 1/10000th of a mm and then you will start getting aliasing artifacts between your retina and the discreen grid of the screen. You won't detect it as "Pixels" but your brain will realize it's looking at something not quite perfect even if it can't resolve the actual detail.
no one wants that are almost identical except you'll need to re-purchase 99% of your stuff.
If you have a 1080p: $199 XBox One Original
If you have a 4k HDR TV want to watch movies in 4k but don't mind playing games in 1080p: $299 Xbox One S.
If you want to play games in 4k or VR: $499 Xbox One Scorpio
There is no "repurchasing 99% of your stuff". All of your controllers work. All of your games work. All of your saved games should be in the cloud. All of your movies and music is still there. If you are an enthusiast and want a slightly higher end experience for more money they are giving you the option of turning up the Antialiasing, texture resolution and graphics detail. Most people already complain "The graphics are good enough!" Those people can buy an Xbox One Original. For people who like to turn up their graphics settings... there are more expensive options.
How much support do you honestly believe 3 consoles is? It's little more than a separate graphics card driver that's probably written by AMD. Microsoft sells hundreds of variations of the Surface because some people want an Atom, some people want an intel i3, some people want an intel i5 other an i7. Some want LTE. Some want 4GB of RAM. Some want 8GB of RAM. By comparison offering 3 GPU/CPU options is practically nothing. Especially since the XBox is just running Windows 10 now. So the ethernet driver is probably just a Realtek windows 10 driver. The GPU driver is a slightly modified Radeon Win10 driver. The USB controllers are probably realtek windows 10 USB drivers. The IR blaster/receiver is probably through the USB bus. The audio is probably a Realtek Windows 10 audio driver. The capture card is probably the same chipset in all 3 so one driver for all 3. The BluRay drive is just a regular SATA bluray drive.
From a game developer perspective you just create a Low, Medium and High graphics preset in your engine settings for AA, Shadows, Model LOD, texture LOD and resolution.
Nothing has been "shortened". The console lifespawn is just as long as before. Some customers have just been given the option to have more whizbang graphics and watch videos in 4k for more money if they so choose. If anything Microsoft's commitment to forwards compatibility means it'll be like a PC where all of your hardware and software lasts indefinitely. You should probably assume your Xbox One games will run on Xbox Two.
HDR might real-time tonemapping with a LUT so it's possible it's not compatible. Also I don't believe the Original Xbox One shipped with an HEVC hardware decoder for 4k streaming.
Xbox One Scorpio, Xbox One, Xbox One S and PC PlayAnywhere games will all be compatible. The latter Xboxes will also play a good number of Xbox 360 games. All games on the Xbox One line are also streamable to a PC.
All of the hardware is compatible as well and the new controllers even add native Bluetooth so that you don't need an Xbox Wireless Receiver dongle to play on your PC with an Xbox One controller.
The only difference is that Xbox One Scorpio will let you play in 4k or VR. And Xbox One S adds 4k Bluray and streaming as well as HDR for games.
If you'd like to offer a deeper explanation of your take of the transaction, I'm all ears.
Tesla will soon be the world's largest lithium ion battery manufacturer, and with the size of batteries each Tesla will need... perhaps the largest customer if they meet sales goals. If solar city starts leasing a lot of residential solar panels with batteries built into the unit they'll probably be the 2nd largest customer for batteries after Tesla.
People think there are a lot of lithium ion batteries out in the world... and there are. But each Tesla 85KWh battery is equivalent to ~1,500 laptop batteries.
The two most battery intensive industries are energy storage and transportation. You have to start thinking of Tesla as a "Battery Company" not an "Automotive company". And as a "battery company" it makes perfect sense to buy up one of the largest "battery charger companies". Renewable energy doesn't work on its own. You need some form of storage to make renewable power work. We're not very heavily invested in solar power so the power companies are just taking it on the chin to supply regulated constant power. If Solar City wants to grow, they have to be able to eliminate the need for baseline generators (fossil fuel and nuclear) otherwise the legacy power generators will rightfully complain that they can't affordably maintain energy security.
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Google actually takes these guys on. I wrangled one of them into giving me a mailing address to pay by check and reported it to Google they were prompt in responding,got me in touch with their legal department and took as much info as I could give them. I saw on the news 2 months later that they filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against that exact company so it's clear they're always building cases against these guys.
The problem is Apple is overly complacent.
Today you can write a top app for Windows UWP, Android and iOS in short order. You can even maintain an app on all 3. But these are really truly "Apps". And the dev effort is "Only" a couple million for most. They're glorified websites by and large. Apple is happily sitting on the premium customers and losing market share but enjoying app parity or even superiority. The question becomes though what do you write for when you want to write the next Autocad or $3,000 program? I think companies will stop seeing iOS as a given when faced with substantially higher dev costs for multi-platform development vs quick and easy apps. I expect sometime soon as apps are expected to do more for there to be a second round of winnowing to one dominant OS again.
Taking 5 seconds to look at the kickstarter:
There is an antenna port on the top left.
It has a micro-SD slot on the $9 version.
The question is can Google move Android/Chrome to the desktop fast enough to capitalize on their phone dominance. Apple isn't showing any interest in OSX anymore. Linux has to wait for someone to win and then copy.
Essentially you have Google and Microsoft in a duel where the first to finish assembling the gun in front of them wins. It looks like nothing is happening but as soon as one of them gets an OS and app library that solves both desktop and mobile the race will be over in a near instant.
Major innovation started and stopped with the shift to capacitive touch/multi-touch touch screens and the availability of 2G Edge data. People scoff at Windows Mobile 5 using a stylus, but anyone who has tried to use a resistive touch screen with their finger knows why styluses were necessary. Apple got there first but their first-mover success is rapidly evaporating and they've lost all advantage they once had on hardware quality and design both in mobile and the desktop market.
So the question becomes who gets Photoshop first? Windows Mobile as a Universal Application or Google as an android app for the Chromebook?
That's not at all true. Look at the release of No Man's Sky this week. Some people had VC++ 2010 installed, some didn't. Some people were on the latest drivers, some weren't.
Then you get into the unpredictable performance issues. We have a farm of 20 machines and about 5 different hardware configurations. The render time is pretty different across XGhz * YMemory * Zarchitecture. Some frames render really fast thanks to fast memory, some render really fast because high GHZ. It's a total crapshoot on how long a simulation on the CPU will take. So sure your GPU is a well understood quantity but there is a lot of slop in predicting precisely how many fragments a box can break into without taking longer than X ms to process on the CPU.
These are all surmountable problems. Obviously because the PC gaming industry exists. But generally speaking the criticism that consoles are better tuned for performance is true due to their smaller target size. But it's false that 3 consoles is equivalent to the 10 billion PCs all unique out in the world with different drivers, different libraries installed, different hard drives, different network cards etc..
No one needs more than Project Scorpio.
He didn't say they wouldn't make a faster box. Just that they don't see themselves releasing "generations". Instead of there being a clean break every 6 years you're going to pick your price point and get all of the latest games at that quality.
2016 : Xbox One: 1080p HDR gaming.
2017 : Xbox One Scorpio: 4k HDR gaming and VR.
Xbox 2019 : 4k HDR gaming and VR w/ raytracing.
Xbox 2021: Lightfield Raytraced UHDR 4k gaming. Xbox Ones no longer play AAA titles. But will play indie games and DOTA 4.
Xbox 2022: Lightfield Raytraced UHDR 8k gaming. Xbox Scorpios no longer support AAA titles.
They will stick to 6 years of depreciation where 6 year old systems just can't handle it I imagine, but the transition will be easy and you can jump in to "modern" hardware at any given point in time.
Take that away and what exactly would differentiate Scorpio from a gaming PC?
There is a big difference between 2 hardware platforms (One and Scorpio) supported at a time vs the 2,000,000,000 hardware combinations on Windows. You might even say it's a 1,000,000,000 times different.
- Let's say we all stuck to the last 3 generations of GPU alone with a Low/Mid/High GPU selection per generation. Ok that's 6 GPUs from AMD and NVidia that's 18 GPUs total. But we also need the 2GB vs 4GB RAM in each of those...
- Let's say there are "only" 7 CPUs from Intel: M, i3 low, i3 mid, i5 mid, i5 high, i7 high and i7 enthusiast.
- Let's say AMD narrows their portfolio to 3 CPUs.
- Let's say that there are 5 motherboard chipsets worth paying attention to and 3 RAM speeds.
- Let's say everybody is on the last 4 versions of Windows: 7, 8, 8.1 and 10.
36 GPUs * 10 CPUs * 5 Motherboards * 3 RAM speeds * 4 Windows versions = 76,000 combinations... vs 2.5 combinations (Xbox One/S, Scorpio). And we radically narrowed the supported specs to only target the most common probably 25% of PCs.
Also does your PC have an HDMI in, almost certainly not? All of the XBoxes do. Are you on the latest Windows Patches? The Xbox is.
Yeah, I know people who got a truck because they really needed to be able to pull a trailer once a year... maybe. So they burn $500 in gas per year to avoid paying $100 for a truck rental for a long weekend.
The point of every board isn't to ever do work. It's just to head up the meetings and organize the allocation of funds to achieve the agenda.
You might want one technician but management is management. Management is just about allocating your resources to do get shit done.
Obviously nobody on the board is actually going to get their hands dirty. And boards don't do very much. They will probably meet once a quarter... by phone for an hour. Agree that the consulting firm that they hired is spending the money wisely and then go back to their real jobs.
Holy cow...did nobody at Google see what happens with similar utilities? Or did they just assume the old rules didn't apply to them since it was "on the Internet"? I thought the 1999 "we'll make it up in volume" rules were already thrown out. I highly doubt Economics 101 courses at Stanford leave out the discussion of natural monopolies.
Google is not interested in ISP business. What Google is interested in is forcing ISPs to react to their plans but hopefully on a larger scale.
It's actually worked really well in my area. Google was looking at Fiber. The city announced a big push to invest in fiber. The ISPs all fought tooth and nail to stop it. And then suddenly started rolling out gigabit to the home as a defensive action. The municipal fiber fell through. Google picked another city. But Centurylink is going door to door selling gigabit to the home.
Interestingly enough... we have one overloaded UPS so when we RDPed into it the UPS sounded its alarm. It would be really slow but you could definitely hear the UPS alarm over the 20 servers. Just increase the power draw on 10 servers you don't mind shortening the life of to overload a UPS. I bet people don't think to secure their UPS and leave it on "Default" to sound an audio alarm. One more attack vector.
That being said the best advice I ever read was that there are two kinds of attackers "Mossad and Not-Mossad" "If it's mossad, you're screwed no matter what they'll find a way in." All security is really to stop Not-Mossad. That's true of physical security, digital security, information security whatever... if Mossad wants you dead you'll die. If the CIA wants into your database they'll get in. All you can really hope to stop is a guy in Bulgaria acting alone.
Reservation system could be implemented in chapter 10 of your first programming book. It seems trivial thing?
It's actually really really complex.
It's not just a "reservation system" where you lock out a ticketed space for X seconds until someone completes a transaction. You really have to view it as "The Company" when you're talking about airlines. Let's say a pilot has been in the air too long due to a delayed departure in New York. He hits his max flight time for the next 24 hours but he was scheduled to fly from his destination to another leg. So now you need to replace the pilot. Which pilot? Well there is a plane coming into the airport around the same time as the NY flight. But is that pilot rated to fly that same aircraft? Ok he is, great. But because 30 of the 300 passengers are going to miss their connections now because of the delayed arrival they need to be moved to different flights. But those flights are maxed out. So you have to bump some passengers on a scheduled flight and move them to a later flight as well. Because the plane is getting in late it's also going to depart late. So you also need to either arrange all of the passengers at the next destination to be on different flights and set of a chain reaction or you need to pull in a different plane at the 2nd destination to short circuit the chain reaction. But where can you get a plane from for the cheapest? And how much will it cost to put people up in a hotel vs flying an extra crew in on overtime?
This is all simple enough to calculate with like 1-2 planes. But when you have 1,000 aircraft and all of the seat assignments effectively being interdependent along with business interests (profit/loss of changes), customer service interests such as ticket class... and you have to stay up to date instantaneously with dozens of terminals all trying to do the same thing manually in addition to the automatic callbacks for unexpected events... it's big engineering effort to not create some sort of automatic-trading style feedback loop that accidentally sets off a chain reaction that cancels every flight in the country.
Every change has a cost. No human can orchestrate thousands of interdependent variables with millions of passengers manually. You have to have a central director system which instantaneously handles all of the callbacks and dependencies for a change throughout the entire graph.
It's actually very cool when you stop and think about how well it does at keeping everything relatively straight.
The problem is that if all of your competitors are willing to go bankrupt every 15 years its' really hard to not go bankrupt before they do. It doesn't do you any good if they'll be going bankrupt in 8 years if you go bankrupt next year because you're 10% more expensive.
We see that in my industry all the time. Lots of people undercutting sustainable rates. They inevitably go bankrupt but if you don't match prices you'll go bankrupt waiting for them to go first. And since they're offering products at under cost they can also appeal to investors with fat grosses and rapid growth.
Imagine for instance you were trying to take on Amazon. Amazon hasn't really ever made money. But they can point to their rapid growth for long term investors. If you're an airline you probably won't see growth and it's hard to say "look we're losing a lot of money now but in 8 years when our competitors hit a hard time we'll make some money then until someone else comes along and promises to do what we do but cheaper and never go out of business." You see that with Jetblue and Virgin America. Jump into the industry with lots of investment. Offer a product at razor thin margins and capture a ton of market. But their business plan isn't tested to survive a big recession. So it's a gamble. They'll either do great or it'll reveal they were built on sand.
When your competitors are playing with fire it means they capture all of the revenue when times are good leaving you nothing to save for the "bad times" and then you only prosper when the market is crappy anyway and they can write off their debt in bankruptcy. It's a lose lose.
Wow, so many Russian troll farm posters around these parts with silly conspiracy theories. Putin must really really hate Hillary Clinton.
Facebook ads are just regular Facebook posts from non-friends. If there were exploits people wouldn't bother paying for an ad they would just spread them through regular posts.
Myspace failed for 4 reasons:
1) It limited you to like 6 photos. Which is way too few.
2) Browsing meant subjecting yourself to a cacophony of 8 songs simultaneously.
3) The Wall which consolidated all your friends onto one page.
4) The network effect of people leaving due to mostly reasons number one and two. "Hey I posted photos from this weekend on Facebook!" And just the allure of exclusivity and "maturity" of being college not high school centric.
Working backwards, there is no other better network to flea to. The ads are nowhere near as irritating as 10 techno songs playing on top of each other. And there is no huge missing feature or limitation that can be easily solved by an upstart.
So the best way to fix a non problem is to make it a problem?
And it should be pointed out that while you can discern detail at a specific resolution any imaging sensor with discreet sensors will alias. So offering more samples than the imaging system can resolve will reducing imaging artifacts. That's why a 6k RED camera makes for a better 1080p image. Fine detail can theoretically be captured by a 1080p sensor but it will look inferior to a 6k sensor that supersamples. If your eye can resolve a 2k phone display, that means you have to perfectly align the phones grid of pixels with your retina's light sensing cells. Move 1/10000th of a mm and then you will start getting aliasing artifacts between your retina and the discreen grid of the screen. You won't detect it as "Pixels" but your brain will realize it's looking at something not quite perfect even if it can't resolve the actual detail.
Researchers discover that for $100 they can dig a hole, cover it with a thin layer of asphault and potentially kill a driver.
In other news, researchers also discover that $3 hedge clippers can cut a brake line endangering drivers.
Researchers discover that $10 high powered flash light carefully timed at a blind corner can confuse a human driver's imaging sensors.
no one wants that are almost identical except you'll need to re-purchase 99% of your stuff.
If you have a 1080p:
$199 XBox One Original
If you have a 4k HDR TV want to watch movies in 4k but don't mind playing games in 1080p:
$299 Xbox One S.
If you want to play games in 4k or VR:
$499 Xbox One Scorpio
There is no "repurchasing 99% of your stuff". All of your controllers work. All of your games work. All of your saved games should be in the cloud. All of your movies and music is still there. If you are an enthusiast and want a slightly higher end experience for more money they are giving you the option of turning up the Antialiasing, texture resolution and graphics detail. Most people already complain "The graphics are good enough!" Those people can buy an Xbox One Original. For people who like to turn up their graphics settings... there are more expensive options.
How much support do you honestly believe 3 consoles is? It's little more than a separate graphics card driver that's probably written by AMD. Microsoft sells hundreds of variations of the Surface because some people want an Atom, some people want an intel i3, some people want an intel i5 other an i7. Some want LTE. Some want 4GB of RAM. Some want 8GB of RAM. By comparison offering 3 GPU/CPU options is practically nothing. Especially since the XBox is just running Windows 10 now. So the ethernet driver is probably just a Realtek windows 10 driver. The GPU driver is a slightly modified Radeon Win10 driver. The USB controllers are probably realtek windows 10 USB drivers. The IR blaster/receiver is probably through the USB bus. The audio is probably a Realtek Windows 10 audio driver. The capture card is probably the same chipset in all 3 so one driver for all 3. The BluRay drive is just a regular SATA bluray drive.
From a game developer perspective you just create a Low, Medium and High graphics preset in your engine settings for AA, Shadows, Model LOD, texture LOD and resolution.
Nothing has been "shortened". The console lifespawn is just as long as before. Some customers have just been given the option to have more whizbang graphics and watch videos in 4k for more money if they so choose. If anything Microsoft's commitment to forwards compatibility means it'll be like a PC where all of your hardware and software lasts indefinitely. You should probably assume your Xbox One games will run on Xbox Two.
HDR might real-time tonemapping with a LUT so it's possible it's not compatible. Also I don't believe the Original Xbox One shipped with an HEVC hardware decoder for 4k streaming.
Xbox One Scorpio, Xbox One, Xbox One S and PC PlayAnywhere games will all be compatible. The latter Xboxes will also play a good number of Xbox 360 games. All games on the Xbox One line are also streamable to a PC.
All of the hardware is compatible as well and the new controllers even add native Bluetooth so that you don't need an Xbox Wireless Receiver dongle to play on your PC with an Xbox One controller.
The only difference is that Xbox One Scorpio will let you play in 4k or VR. And Xbox One S adds 4k Bluray and streaming as well as HDR for games.
Bank has a responsibility to do due diligence.
Was there a point in listing a $120 cable bill as a liability for a man allegedly worth millions?
He is not-so-allegedly worth nothing if he is filing for bankruptcy.
If you'd like to offer a deeper explanation of your take of the transaction, I'm all ears.
Tesla will soon be the world's largest lithium ion battery manufacturer, and with the size of batteries each Tesla will need... perhaps the largest customer if they meet sales goals. If solar city starts leasing a lot of residential solar panels with batteries built into the unit they'll probably be the 2nd largest customer for batteries after Tesla.
People think there are a lot of lithium ion batteries out in the world... and there are. But each Tesla 85KWh battery is equivalent to ~1,500 laptop batteries.
The two most battery intensive industries are energy storage and transportation. You have to start thinking of Tesla as a "Battery Company" not an "Automotive company". And as a "battery company" it makes perfect sense to buy up one of the largest "battery charger companies". Renewable energy doesn't work on its own. You need some form of storage to make renewable power work. We're not very heavily invested in solar power so the power companies are just taking it on the chin to supply regulated constant power. If Solar City wants to grow, they have to be able to eliminate the need for baseline generators (fossil fuel and nuclear) otherwise the legacy power generators will rightfully complain that they can't affordably maintain energy security.