MS buys Nokia and now Nokia is "hinting" at tablet computers. Are we falling for the same tricks that MS has played out over the last 20 years?
Get Steve Ballmer up there using one at a public event, and cap it off with "one more thing - they are on sale today" and then this becomes a product announcement worth talking about.
At this point Nokia has traded everything it has in order to buy a ticket on the MS tugboat. My personal feeling is that Nokia was purchased for their patents and in order to sink the company.
Another use case is that you have some massive web site like Facebook which creates and destroys a lot of little server processes which handle a few KB to a MB of data or so in each instance, then die. Today those processes are running on Intel machines and they are almost totally IO bound (network drives and all that) so it would be easy peasy to slip in a bunch of ARM processors into the same role, and save massively on the power bill.
Remember the early days of Linux? Silly people trying to run a wanna-be Unix on their little piddly home computers using the ridiculous Intel architecture. What a bunch of tards. Those little pissant boxes didn't even have SCSI*, and certainly didn't sport the massive RAM expansion that a real computer like a VAX could boast.
Of course, the naysayers from back then are all retired now, and those piddly X86 machines run practically all the servers on the planet, and that OS has turned into a multi-billion dollar operation.
The other point I'd make is that in this day, developers emphatically do NOT sit there hand optimizing all their code. This is the job of the compiler suite and it has been since probably the late 80s.
If you have an in-house developer team making an in-house product which they control the source of, they can probably have it running on your new ARM box in a few hours.
With the amount of data processing that truly huge operations do, and figuring that an Intel solution costs you at least 10x as much just for the electricity bill, trust me - vendors and in-house developers both will be either learning all they can about ARM or looking for a job in a different field. Intel is in serious trouble and this is the first real crack in the wall that shows through to the other side.
* - recalling a debate I had in 1995 with a senior IT guy at an unnamed corporation, explaining why Linux and X86 would never win. He always gravitated back to the SCSI in his arguments.
Of course, calling multi-core computing a fetish is ridiculous and ignores the fact that, barring some amazing new physics, processors can only get so fast. Scalability is not about having one 10 GHz CPU that costs $100,000,000 but having 12 3 GHz CPUs for a thousand bucks.
And outside the datacenter, the idea of screaming CPUs just seems retarded in this day and age when even a 10 year old processor can handle a typical workload from today's typical user without even straining.
The low hanging fruit is probably 95% of the server market. Most servers sit around all day doling out a few files and maybe handling email. This could all have been done on a PDP-11 with plenty of juice left over.
Whatever fantasy land you are living in sounds very hot and noisy. Take a look at how many machines in a typical corporate datacenter are running under any significant load sometime - it's usually only a few, if any.
Are they though, really? I don't think they really will make such a bold move.
They certainly are interested in talking about making this move, because Intel chips are way too hungry for tablet use. My feeling is that they are just announcing vaporware again, and Windows 8 will be just like Windows 7 with a different skin and more driver and compatibility issues.
What Microsoft says it's doing, and what it shows off as mockups and teasers, usually has little to do with what they eventually ship. I don't want to call you a sucker for buying into their vaporware bullshit schemes for what must be the 20th time for you (assuming you are older than 15) but there it sits, anyway.
They didn't "kill" it because it was never really alive. There was no business plan behind the Courier, there was a plastic box with two screens showing a demo.
It wasn't a real product at all. It was a rabbit in a hat, something to flourish in front of the world right as the iPad train was bearing down. Nobody looked at the rabbit, they were too busy boarding the train.
You know the same thing was said about SEGA back in the old days. Now they're pimping out very worn-out cartoon characters on everybody else's hardware and nobody cares.
The problem with Blackberry is that it's not enough any more to just have a black chunky plastic stick that you can use for voice communication and text messaging. Sure, the peons at Accenture may still be using Blackberries, but their bosses are all on the iPhone because it is just plain *better* at almost everything.
The only remaining grace that RIM has is that it's easy to lock a phone down for the peons in the coal mines. Apple has been showing some effort toward taking this last pearl from RIMs formerly bursting treasure chest, and I don't doubt that it will happen sooner or later.
It's pretty clear by your comment that you've never used an iPad. You probably haven't ever even seen a person USE the iPad. The only time you see anything relating to someone else's content is when you open the App Store or iBooks.
Sure, they aren't going to make it hard to buy stuff from the Apple store on an iPad, but to suggest somehow that this is the only function of the device, that all UI interactions lead the way of purchasing somebody else's content, is just to again make yourself out as a fool.
What the hell? The iPad works great for editing documents, spreadsheets, making graphs and charts with Omnigraffle, SSHing into a server box, it can edit digital video unlike every other tablet out there, and it has become in the space of only a year and a half, the hottest piece of electronic music hardware the world has ever seen. I know a few electronic musicians who use iPads to control all their synthesizers and their computer music systems and they wouldn't trade it for anything.
About the only thing it lacks is a touchscreen for image editing, and once it has that it will likely become the goto device for most digital artists, because it's not much more expensive than a good quality digitizing tablet.
Whoever started this "iPad can't do content" meme is not only a liar, but is probably a shill too. Don't do their work for them - it makes you a fool on several levels.
For one, the Courier didn't leak. It was shown off on purpose.
Secondly, it never existed in the first place. It was a mockup that was shown off, not a functioning device meant for consumers. Think, pre-prototype. It's doubtful that MS had the engineering knowhow and industry connections to make it at a price that was comparable to the iPad.
Microsoft's sole reason for showing off the Courier was to attempt to take thunder away from a competing product that had beat them to market. This is just another in a long string of thunder-takers that MS has shown off in the past, in their attempts to get people to hold off buying *cool widget* and they rarely intend to actually compete by bringing any of their little *cool widget clones* to actual market.
This trick is getting so old (remember they were doing this after Windows 95 came out, up to today) that it is surprising that anybody falls for it any more. Certainly the bought and paid for IT "press" isn't going around reminding us about the many lies of MS, but that's no excuse for us all to have such a short memory.
I've never seen a Fire. I don't even know what it is. But to suggest that it will replace the iPod is to ignore the massload of games that exist for that platform.
In case you missed it these past few years, kids aren't really playing Nintendo or Sony handhelds any more. They have an iPod Touch instead, the new Gameboy for the internet age.
Well, the Apple method only works for a few people. Only freaks would check the "Let iTunes manage my music" because then it'd end up in neat little folders categorized by artists and album, in an easy to use manner.
Most folks I know have their music thrown into a gigantic tarball from which they extract single files as they need them. It's much easier and better this way.
We have NOAA, the NWS, NASA, and the FAA all doing weather forecasting and forecast dispersal. That right there is an example of the waste and fraud perpetrated on the public by an overly large federal government.
It is probably your state government that pays for the majority of their education right now.
But ask yourself this - if their needs are so expensive and difficult to fulfill appropriately, is it moral of you to force others to pay for their education? Or should you or your wife or other partner or friends step up and devote the difference in effort needed to educate them properly?
It's not so much as they're stupid and don't care, it's more like the publishing industry is stupid and people don't care if it gets thrown under a bus.
I hope you realize what an advance is. It comes out of the author's future earnings on the book. If the book flops the advance has to be paid back, often with interest!
No, advances don't cost the publishing industry a dime.
Which BSD community? They don't really give a shit, ultimately. Maybe you're talking about Theo in which case I am not surprised, because he will always find something to bellyache over.
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MS buys Nokia and now Nokia is "hinting" at tablet computers. Are we falling for the same tricks that MS has played out over the last 20 years?
Get Steve Ballmer up there using one at a public event, and cap it off with "one more thing - they are on sale today" and then this becomes a product announcement worth talking about.
At this point Nokia has traded everything it has in order to buy a ticket on the MS tugboat. My personal feeling is that Nokia was purchased for their patents and in order to sink the company.
Another use case is that you have some massive web site like Facebook which creates and destroys a lot of little server processes which handle a few KB to a MB of data or so in each instance, then die. Today those processes are running on Intel machines and they are almost totally IO bound (network drives and all that) so it would be easy peasy to slip in a bunch of ARM processors into the same role, and save massively on the power bill.
Remember the early days of Linux? Silly people trying to run a wanna-be Unix on their little piddly home computers using the ridiculous Intel architecture. What a bunch of tards. Those little pissant boxes didn't even have SCSI*, and certainly didn't sport the massive RAM expansion that a real computer like a VAX could boast.
Of course, the naysayers from back then are all retired now, and those piddly X86 machines run practically all the servers on the planet, and that OS has turned into a multi-billion dollar operation.
The other point I'd make is that in this day, developers emphatically do NOT sit there hand optimizing all their code. This is the job of the compiler suite and it has been since probably the late 80s.
If you have an in-house developer team making an in-house product which they control the source of, they can probably have it running on your new ARM box in a few hours.
With the amount of data processing that truly huge operations do, and figuring that an Intel solution costs you at least 10x as much just for the electricity bill, trust me - vendors and in-house developers both will be either learning all they can about ARM or looking for a job in a different field. Intel is in serious trouble and this is the first real crack in the wall that shows through to the other side.
* - recalling a debate I had in 1995 with a senior IT guy at an unnamed corporation, explaining why Linux and X86 would never win. He always gravitated back to the SCSI in his arguments.
Of course, calling multi-core computing a fetish is ridiculous and ignores the fact that, barring some amazing new physics, processors can only get so fast. Scalability is not about having one 10 GHz CPU that costs $100,000,000 but having 12 3 GHz CPUs for a thousand bucks.
And outside the datacenter, the idea of screaming CPUs just seems retarded in this day and age when even a 10 year old processor can handle a typical workload from today's typical user without even straining.
The low hanging fruit is probably 95% of the server market. Most servers sit around all day doling out a few files and maybe handling email. This could all have been done on a PDP-11 with plenty of juice left over.
Whatever fantasy land you are living in sounds very hot and noisy. Take a look at how many machines in a typical corporate datacenter are running under any significant load sometime - it's usually only a few, if any.
Are they though, really? I don't think they really will make such a bold move.
They certainly are interested in talking about making this move, because Intel chips are way too hungry for tablet use. My feeling is that they are just announcing vaporware again, and Windows 8 will be just like Windows 7 with a different skin and more driver and compatibility issues.
What Microsoft says it's doing, and what it shows off as mockups and teasers, usually has little to do with what they eventually ship. I don't want to call you a sucker for buying into their vaporware bullshit schemes for what must be the 20th time for you (assuming you are older than 15) but there it sits, anyway.
They didn't "kill" it because it was never really alive. There was no business plan behind the Courier, there was a plastic box with two screens showing a demo.
It wasn't a real product at all. It was a rabbit in a hat, something to flourish in front of the world right as the iPad train was bearing down. Nobody looked at the rabbit, they were too busy boarding the train.
You know the same thing was said about SEGA back in the old days. Now they're pimping out very worn-out cartoon characters on everybody else's hardware and nobody cares.
The problem with Blackberry is that it's not enough any more to just have a black chunky plastic stick that you can use for voice communication and text messaging. Sure, the peons at Accenture may still be using Blackberries, but their bosses are all on the iPhone because it is just plain *better* at almost everything.
The only remaining grace that RIM has is that it's easy to lock a phone down for the peons in the coal mines. Apple has been showing some effort toward taking this last pearl from RIMs formerly bursting treasure chest, and I don't doubt that it will happen sooner or later.
It's pretty clear by your comment that you've never used an iPad. You probably haven't ever even seen a person USE the iPad. The only time you see anything relating to someone else's content is when you open the App Store or iBooks.
Sure, they aren't going to make it hard to buy stuff from the Apple store on an iPad, but to suggest somehow that this is the only function of the device, that all UI interactions lead the way of purchasing somebody else's content, is just to again make yourself out as a fool.
What the hell? The iPad works great for editing documents, spreadsheets, making graphs and charts with Omnigraffle, SSHing into a server box, it can edit digital video unlike every other tablet out there, and it has become in the space of only a year and a half, the hottest piece of electronic music hardware the world has ever seen. I know a few electronic musicians who use iPads to control all their synthesizers and their computer music systems and they wouldn't trade it for anything.
About the only thing it lacks is a touchscreen for image editing, and once it has that it will likely become the goto device for most digital artists, because it's not much more expensive than a good quality digitizing tablet.
Whoever started this "iPad can't do content" meme is not only a liar, but is probably a shill too. Don't do their work for them - it makes you a fool on several levels.
Ah, OK, it's an Android thing. Looks like Amazon has an app store, but I wonder how many apps are in the store?
Looks like there's 20 apps for the Fire up already.
For one, the Courier didn't leak. It was shown off on purpose.
Secondly, it never existed in the first place. It was a mockup that was shown off, not a functioning device meant for consumers. Think, pre-prototype. It's doubtful that MS had the engineering knowhow and industry connections to make it at a price that was comparable to the iPad.
Microsoft's sole reason for showing off the Courier was to attempt to take thunder away from a competing product that had beat them to market. This is just another in a long string of thunder-takers that MS has shown off in the past, in their attempts to get people to hold off buying *cool widget* and they rarely intend to actually compete by bringing any of their little *cool widget clones* to actual market.
This trick is getting so old (remember they were doing this after Windows 95 came out, up to today) that it is surprising that anybody falls for it any more. Certainly the bought and paid for IT "press" isn't going around reminding us about the many lies of MS, but that's no excuse for us all to have such a short memory.
I've never seen a Fire. I don't even know what it is. But to suggest that it will replace the iPod is to ignore the massload of games that exist for that platform.
In case you missed it these past few years, kids aren't really playing Nintendo or Sony handhelds any more. They have an iPod Touch instead, the new Gameboy for the internet age.
Well, the Apple method only works for a few people. Only freaks would check the "Let iTunes manage my music" because then it'd end up in neat little folders categorized by artists and album, in an easy to use manner.
Most folks I know have their music thrown into a gigantic tarball from which they extract single files as they need them. It's much easier and better this way.
Sounds like you could improve the page. Wikipedia doesn't improve by mere osmosis - people have to contribute.
That's bullshit. You can compile almost anything yld on Linux, run any X11 WM you wish, etc etc.
Good thing you posted AC because you are a laying sack of shit.
This is just the source to the GPL portions of Android. It's not "the source code to Android."
We have NOAA, the NWS, NASA, and the FAA all doing weather forecasting and forecast dispersal. That right there is an example of the waste and fraud perpetrated on the public by an overly large federal government.
It is probably your state government that pays for the majority of their education right now.
But ask yourself this - if their needs are so expensive and difficult to fulfill appropriately, is it moral of you to force others to pay for their education? Or should you or your wife or other partner or friends step up and devote the difference in effort needed to educate them properly?
Actually there is now a hardened QNX.
You know what an advance is, right? They take the money out of your future earnings on the book, and if it flops they take it out of your ASS!
Yes, you have to pay back an advance if your book is not profitable enough.
It's not so much as they're stupid and don't care, it's more like the publishing industry is stupid and people don't care if it gets thrown under a bus.
Actually block paragraphs have been part of the MLA style since I was in college in the 90s.
I hope you realize what an advance is. It comes out of the author's future earnings on the book. If the book flops the advance has to be paid back, often with interest!
No, advances don't cost the publishing industry a dime.
Which BSD community? They don't really give a shit, ultimately. Maybe you're talking about Theo in which case I am not surprised, because he will always find something to bellyache over.