So, two completely unrelated divisions making tablets. This is guaranteed to turn out well!
Why the hell is Apple the only large tech company that can get its shit together? A while back some pundit posted a bunch of speculation over who would have revolutionized mp3 players if Apple had not come along. Would it have been Microsoft or Sony or Creative? But the consensus of the responses was that none of the above would have stepped up and we would still be using crappy 2000's style mp3 players today and blackberries would still be the height of smartphones. Go e-mail!
Nothing was stopping any of those companies, or dozens of others, from making a better mp3 player before the iPod launched. Nothing stopped them from stepping up their game after it launched and the truth is that most of them still suck today, over a decade later. Apple's only secret sauce is that all their competitors are fundamentally incompetent.
Sony is famous for squabbling and hostile divisions. Each division tries to undercut every other division while developing competing ideas in parallel and not sharing any resources, while at the same time the media side of the company stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete.
Microsoft's long running managerial dysfunction has been getting a bunch of public airing lately. Their method of giving performance reviews on a scale, thus forcing out 20% of the good teams and encouraging the smart teams to keep on bad workers in order to pad their numbers. While the Office division stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete.
And now HP wants to do tablets again. Right after canceling their tablet plans. What do they do? Get a few dozen of their smartest people in a room and hash it out until they have a comprehensive plan that describes the tablet goals and provides for a cohesive set of feature to scale nicely from the consumer to the corporate, allowing them to cross-sell to their best advantage?
Hell No!
They set up two different teams. They are going to make two entirely different lines of tablets. They might not even use the same operating system, let alone a scaling feature set. Probably going to be completely incompatible. Already committed to one of HP's tablet lines and looking to upgrade or replace them? I'd bet cash money that it will be an easier experience to switch to iPads than switch to the other HP line.
This announcement right here is where the board should be fired and replaced and then the new board should fire and replace the entire C level.
I casually follow the open source/maker scenes and try and keep up to date with the general state of things. And without any other information I would have assumed these two logos represented either formally associated groups or even different projects branches of the same group.
I'd disagree. There are definitely some precursors that fed into steampunk culture, but it didn't pick up much momentum as a unified aesthetic until it moved into the costuming/cosplay/maker communities. And it would be hard to say most contemporary steampunk literature directly references "The Difference Engine". While it's a great story I feel it's more of an alternate history that happens to also be built out of many of the same era/characters that steampunk often utilizes rather than being a steampunk alternate history, if you appreciate the distinction.
Of course my whole line of thought is veering dangerously close to a 'no true Scotsman', so the entire distinction may only exist in my head.
The uplift books have some very amusing moments but are explicitly genocidal. It's a six book series that involves the death and destruction of a huge portion of the human race. And the protagonist space ship crew repeatedly solves problems by abandoning large chunks of the (ever shrinking) crew, never to be seen again.
I mean, great series, but I think you may need to recalibrate your definitions for emotional content.
I'm not sure David Brin is the best example. I mean, sure, not EVERYONE dies in his books. "Enough of us have survived that we have a good chance to rebuild" is often about as uplifting as his stuff gets.
Good reads, yes, but no exactly sunshine and rainbows.
If I was Acer, I'd be very quietly talking to Valve right now. Valve's recent Linux investments look like one of the first serious efforts to completely streamline the Linux hardware experience. If they can finally be the ones to kick the video/sound compatibility and performance problems, even to an Apple style 'this hardware approved' level it would make them an interesting partner for a hardware vendor. If Acer spends the next twelve months on a very heavy and quiet investment into something like OpenOffice and cleaning up/standardizing the Linux UI of their choice while Valve tackles hardware compatibility and driver issues a year from now they would be in a great place to launch a cheap performance all-in-one. Productivity suite built in with Steam front and center for games. Call it a nice middle ground between a console and a traditional PC. Perhaps even get Blizzard on board. Linux WoW installed right out of the box.
Or, instead of a clock, have a minimum hold time. If you need to buy some shares RIGHT NOW you are free to buy them as fast as the order can be processed. But they can not be sold again for a full minute. Or even an hour!
And if holding the shares for an entire minute is a problem, them I don't think 'investing' is a very good descriptor of your actions in the first place.
Market liquidity is extremely important. If you decide you want to trade your shares you want to be able to do so quickly and with a low trading fee.
It's obvious that this is extremely important... if your business model is based on many fast sales at low fees. But it's hard to see how millisecond transactions provide any benefit to the kind of shareholder that actually invests in businesses and expects to still be holding their shares weeks, months, or even years after having bought them. It's also hard to see what benefit the companies in question gain form having their share price bounce around by the millisecond instead of by the second or even the minute.
In short, I have yet to see anyone explain how extreme market liquidity of the kind pushed by the high frequency traders provides any significant benefit to anyone who is not also engaging in variations of high frequency trading. So, if you can, please explain how anyone not engaged in HFT would be negatively affected if all trades happened once a second, or even once a minute. And please have more of an answer than 'the HF traders would go away'. I am not trolling, I am genuinely curious what you think the general downsides would be.
I've found the literary branch of steampunk to be generally depressing, with very few bright spots. It's interesting because most expressions of the culture are very Jules Verne / Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp influenced, particularly on the costuming side where steampunk really started. But the literary side is almost entirely Dickens with zeppelins.
Is that $8 book a brand new best seller? No, it is not. It has been out for a few years. If you buy old games they also have a better cost/entertainment value. Buy a little older game on a Steam sale or used and the entertainment cost is pennies an hour.
Books are great value, but a new release book ($30) that takes 10 hours to read (for a slow reader) is $3 an hour of entertainment.
Really? Say game costs $60. Gets played for an average of 4 hours/night for two weeks. That's $1 an hour of entertainment. A damn sign better than just about any other media you can purchase. Sure, there are a handful of games out there that deserve hundreds of hours of play, but even the play-and-forget kind of games represent some of the best bang for the buck.
Joe Gamer is not buying "Final Ghost Warfare Ball 2011" for $50 instead of the new "2012" for $60. Joe Gamer is buying "2012" for $55 used two weeks after "2012" came out.
It's not the old games market that the game companies care about. Some kids spending $5-$10 on a few older titles? Whatever. A large number of customers willing to pay basically full retail price for new games having their money diverted? That they care about.
So far the quote "They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass security questions." is the only bit of information. It's hard to say what is covered under "clever social engineering" or "bypass" without more details. Did the hacker just do an incredible job of fast talking or is this a case where "clever social engineering" means they dug up security question answers that the author (and tech support) figured were un-discoverable?
Hey, Linux has had 15 years to get it's own shit together.
It's sort of like the Apple MP3 player thing. When the iPod launched it was far from the first MP3 player. But it was the first MP3 player that wasn't 100% crap to use. Completely took over the market and dominated everyone. But you know what? Five years later all the other MP3 players were still crap to use. Even after Apple showed how to do it right Creative and Sony and everyone else was still trudging along with crappy syncing utilities and even worse UI on the MP3 player itself.
Nothing was preventing them from making a good player and good software before or after Apple entered the market.
Same way, with or without Steam, nothing is preventing Linux and the distros from getting their shit together. Nothing is preventing them now. Nothing was preventing them five years ago. Steam comes out and turns a branch of Linux into RMS's worst nightmare? The rest of Linux will have no more or less opportunity to make a good package than if this whole Steam thing crashes and burns and never gets out of beta.
Who needs fast data rates? No need to send the entire stock exchange of information through this thing. If you can have the price information for two or three key stocks even a half second before everyone else I suspect you could make a killing. Pick a different stock every day, or a couple times a day. They say the throughput could be increased a couple levels right now with the right coding scheme? Give it five years and I bet they can get another order of magnitude out of that. 100 bits would be more than enough to send price change info for a couple of stocks.
There are almost certainly more people running FireFox on computers that have 32GB of ram than there are people running on 384MB. Two full orders of magnitude difference in RAM. For that matter, I suspect there are more computers out there with 32GB than there are (non-embedded) computers still in use at all with less than 512MB.
Your entire laptop has less memory than the smallest stick of RAM currently available at NewEgg, a 1GB stick of laptop memory for $9.99. It might be worth considering that your use case is so far on one side of the bell curve that it is ceased to be a valid target. To the point that it's no longer even meaningful to measure against.
Never happen. Nokia's market cap is hovering just under 10B. Dell's is 20B and HP's 35B. So for Dell to buy Nokia they would have to hand over HALF of their entire company to Nokia's current investors. HP is not in a much better ratio. Never, in a million years, could that happen.
Frankly, there are not many companies big enough to buy Nokia, particularly in the tech sector. Microsoft would be one. Google another and Apple would be about it. Apple would be buying them for the patents and the other two if they plan to go into first party manufacturing and design in a big way.
Assuming Nokia doesn't pull out of the death spiral the most likely outcome is that no one buys them outright. A big consortium of companies buys all the patents just to get them off the table and the rest of the company dies.
Did you read the 'limitation' Valve added? Should your dispute get to the point of arbitration, Valve agrees to refund the cost of the software. In exchange you don't get to file a class action lawsuit.
Now, in what scenario would you file a class action lawsuit over a game where the payout would be greater than the cost of the game?
That's because there are no more hardware limitations. Standard hardware is able to handle HD video or animation or anything else, let alone word processing. So of course all the current innovation is in the area of design. Hardware speed could double tomorrow and it would not make much noticeable difference.
Only (some) 10 year old computers that have since had upgrades. The oldest Intel processors that W8 will support had just come out and the earliest AMD processors were 2003. And it would be a damn rare thing to find a 2002 graphics card that meets W8 support requirements.
So, yes, if you bought the most expensive computer possible a decade ago and continued to upgrade its RAM and Video Card it would now run W8 at a minimal level.
If you bought anything but the very cheapest models OSX 10.8 is good back to 2007. Which considering that Apple only started switching to Intel in 2006 is pretty good.
The most destructive aspect has nothing to do with the 'old' games. The stuff that people pay $5-$15 for after it's been out for a couple years is a natural secondary market. It wold exist with or without GameStop and no one cares very much, one way or another, about these sales. The problem is with GameStop's approach ot new games.
Brand new game comes out for $50. Even for the biggest titles GamStop only brings a couple copies outside of pre-orders. This is deliberate. Game is bought on release day and played for a week. Then it is sold back to GameStop for $25. GameStop then sells it used for $45. They can do that because they deliberately underdstock titles. Often it is used or nothing. This will hapen a couple times the first month of release before the demand dies down. After that the sell back price drops to almost nothing. And the developer sees only the cut of the initial sale.
Yes, this is legal. It even saves a few dollars for the first couple customers. But it means that the developers only make money out of one in three PAYING customers. The people who are willing and able to pay full price on launch day. It is not an issue of people choosing old goods due to a stagnant industry. It's a problem of the new money being diverted before it can reward new development.
Except that's not how it's worked in practice. If you look at Steam all the old titles are still available and for cheap. Brand new and fully patched and cheaper than they sell for used at GameStop. When every player represents a sale and inventory space is unlimited there is a huge incentive for continued support and aggressive price drops.
Last week on the big Steam summer sale I picked up copies of Batman: Arkham Asylum for $4 and KoTOR (I lost my discs years ago and have been wanting another play-through) for $2. The system works. And works far better for every level from the developers to the consumers. The only people is does not serve better are parasitic rent seekers like GameStop.
The developers, indie or otherwise, will see a cut of GameStop's resale when hell is cold and frozen. If GameStop was the least bit inclined to make that sort of deal the publishers and developers would have never felt the need to cut them off at the knees in the first place. GameStop has a business model that is entirely legal and sometimes advantageous for some consumers. At the same time it is incredibly destructive and long-term death spiral for the industry and consumers as a whole. They have refused to play nice and so the nuclear option is getting deployed. Steam-style game sales on PC and console and the end of the resale market.
And you know what? It works out really well for developers and consumers. Look at Steam. When every player represents a sale and inventory space is unlimited there is incentive for long term support and lower prices. It works. You can buy titles, both AAA and super indie, on Steam for less than their used resale prices and the money actually goes to the developers both big and small.
No, but I think it's a self selecting group. The people with MBAs are, by definition, the kind of people that think an MBA is a really great thing to get.
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So, two completely unrelated divisions making tablets. This is guaranteed to turn out well!
Why the hell is Apple the only large tech company that can get its shit together? A while back some pundit posted a bunch of speculation over who would have revolutionized mp3 players if Apple had not come along. Would it have been Microsoft or Sony or Creative? But the consensus of the responses was that none of the above would have stepped up and we would still be using crappy 2000's style mp3 players today and blackberries would still be the height of smartphones. Go e-mail!
Nothing was stopping any of those companies, or dozens of others, from making a better mp3 player before the iPod launched. Nothing stopped them from stepping up their game after it launched and the truth is that most of them still suck today, over a decade later. Apple's only secret sauce is that all their competitors are fundamentally incompetent.
Sony is famous for squabbling and hostile divisions. Each division tries to undercut every other division while developing competing ideas in parallel and not sharing any resources, while at the same time the media side of the company stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete.
Microsoft's long running managerial dysfunction has been getting a bunch of public airing lately. Their method of giving performance reviews on a scale, thus forcing out 20% of the good teams and encouraging the smart teams to keep on bad workers in order to pad their numbers. While the Office division stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete.
And now HP wants to do tablets again. Right after canceling their tablet plans. What do they do? Get a few dozen of their smartest people in a room and hash it out until they have a comprehensive plan that describes the tablet goals and provides for a cohesive set of feature to scale nicely from the consumer to the corporate, allowing them to cross-sell to their best advantage?
Hell No!
They set up two different teams. They are going to make two entirely different lines of tablets. They might not even use the same operating system, let alone a scaling feature set. Probably going to be completely incompatible. Already committed to one of HP's tablet lines and looking to upgrade or replace them? I'd bet cash money that it will be an easier experience to switch to iPads than switch to the other HP line.
This announcement right here is where the board should be fired and replaced and then the new board should fire and replace the entire C level.
In this case I think it is more than egos.
I casually follow the open source/maker scenes and try and keep up to date with the general state of things. And without any other information I would have assumed these two logos represented either formally associated groups or even different projects branches of the same group.
I'd disagree. There are definitely some precursors that fed into steampunk culture, but it didn't pick up much momentum as a unified aesthetic until it moved into the costuming/cosplay/maker communities. And it would be hard to say most contemporary steampunk literature directly references "The Difference Engine". While it's a great story I feel it's more of an alternate history that happens to also be built out of many of the same era/characters that steampunk often utilizes rather than being a steampunk alternate history, if you appreciate the distinction.
Of course my whole line of thought is veering dangerously close to a 'no true Scotsman', so the entire distinction may only exist in my head.
The uplift books have some very amusing moments but are explicitly genocidal. It's a six book series that involves the death and destruction of a huge portion of the human race. And the protagonist space ship crew repeatedly solves problems by abandoning large chunks of the (ever shrinking) crew, never to be seen again.
I mean, great series, but I think you may need to recalibrate your definitions for emotional content.
I'm not sure David Brin is the best example. I mean, sure, not EVERYONE dies in his books. "Enough of us have survived that we have a good chance to rebuild" is often about as uplifting as his stuff gets.
Good reads, yes, but no exactly sunshine and rainbows.
If I was Acer, I'd be very quietly talking to Valve right now. Valve's recent Linux investments look like one of the first serious efforts to completely streamline the Linux hardware experience. If they can finally be the ones to kick the video/sound compatibility and performance problems, even to an Apple style 'this hardware approved' level it would make them an interesting partner for a hardware vendor. If Acer spends the next twelve months on a very heavy and quiet investment into something like OpenOffice and cleaning up/standardizing the Linux UI of their choice while Valve tackles hardware compatibility and driver issues a year from now they would be in a great place to launch a cheap performance all-in-one. Productivity suite built in with Steam front and center for games. Call it a nice middle ground between a console and a traditional PC. Perhaps even get Blizzard on board. Linux WoW installed right out of the box.
Or, instead of a clock, have a minimum hold time. If you need to buy some shares RIGHT NOW you are free to buy them as fast as the order can be processed. But they can not be sold again for a full minute. Or even an hour!
And if holding the shares for an entire minute is a problem, them I don't think 'investing' is a very good descriptor of your actions in the first place.
Market liquidity is extremely important. If you decide you want to trade your shares you want to be able to do so quickly and with a low trading fee.
It's obvious that this is extremely important... if your business model is based on many fast sales at low fees. But it's hard to see how millisecond transactions provide any benefit to the kind of shareholder that actually invests in businesses and expects to still be holding their shares weeks, months, or even years after having bought them. It's also hard to see what benefit the companies in question gain form having their share price bounce around by the millisecond instead of by the second or even the minute.
In short, I have yet to see anyone explain how extreme market liquidity of the kind pushed by the high frequency traders provides any significant benefit to anyone who is not also engaging in variations of high frequency trading. So, if you can, please explain how anyone not engaged in HFT would be negatively affected if all trades happened once a second, or even once a minute. And please have more of an answer than 'the HF traders would go away'. I am not trolling, I am genuinely curious what you think the general downsides would be.
And yet both comments are appropriately true.
I've found the literary branch of steampunk to be generally depressing, with very few bright spots. It's interesting because most expressions of the culture are very Jules Verne / Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp influenced, particularly on the costuming side where steampunk really started. But the literary side is almost entirely Dickens with zeppelins.
Is that $8 book a brand new best seller? No, it is not. It has been out for a few years. If you buy old games they also have a better cost/entertainment value. Buy a little older game on a Steam sale or used and the entertainment cost is pennies an hour.
Books are great value, but a new release book ($30) that takes 10 hours to read (for a slow reader) is $3 an hour of entertainment.
Really? Say game costs $60. Gets played for an average of 4 hours/night for two weeks. That's $1 an hour of entertainment. A damn sign better than just about any other media you can purchase. Sure, there are a handful of games out there that deserve hundreds of hours of play, but even the play-and-forget kind of games represent some of the best bang for the buck.
Joe Gamer is not buying "Final Ghost Warfare Ball 2011" for $50 instead of the new "2012" for $60. Joe Gamer is buying "2012" for $55 used two weeks after "2012" came out.
It's not the old games market that the game companies care about. Some kids spending $5-$10 on a few older titles? Whatever. A large number of customers willing to pay basically full retail price for new games having their money diverted? That they care about.
So far the quote "They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass security questions." is the only bit of information. It's hard to say what is covered under "clever social engineering" or "bypass" without more details. Did the hacker just do an incredible job of fast talking or is this a case where "clever social engineering" means they dug up security question answers that the author (and tech support) figured were un-discoverable?
Hey, Linux has had 15 years to get it's own shit together.
It's sort of like the Apple MP3 player thing. When the iPod launched it was far from the first MP3 player. But it was the first MP3 player that wasn't 100% crap to use. Completely took over the market and dominated everyone. But you know what? Five years later all the other MP3 players were still crap to use. Even after Apple showed how to do it right Creative and Sony and everyone else was still trudging along with crappy syncing utilities and even worse UI on the MP3 player itself.
Nothing was preventing them from making a good player and good software before or after Apple entered the market.
Same way, with or without Steam, nothing is preventing Linux and the distros from getting their shit together. Nothing is preventing them now. Nothing was preventing them five years ago. Steam comes out and turns a branch of Linux into RMS's worst nightmare? The rest of Linux will have no more or less opportunity to make a good package than if this whole Steam thing crashes and burns and never gets out of beta.
Who needs fast data rates? No need to send the entire stock exchange of information through this thing. If you can have the price information for two or three key stocks even a half second before everyone else I suspect you could make a killing. Pick a different stock every day, or a couple times a day. They say the throughput could be increased a couple levels right now with the right coding scheme? Give it five years and I bet they can get another order of magnitude out of that. 100 bits would be more than enough to send price change info for a couple of stocks.
There are almost certainly more people running FireFox on computers that have 32GB of ram than there are people running on 384MB. Two full orders of magnitude difference in RAM. For that matter, I suspect there are more computers out there with 32GB than there are (non-embedded) computers still in use at all with less than 512MB.
Your entire laptop has less memory than the smallest stick of RAM currently available at NewEgg, a 1GB stick of laptop memory for $9.99. It might be worth considering that your use case is so far on one side of the bell curve that it is ceased to be a valid target. To the point that it's no longer even meaningful to measure against.
Never happen. Nokia's market cap is hovering just under 10B. Dell's is 20B and HP's 35B. So for Dell to buy Nokia they would have to hand over HALF of their entire company to Nokia's current investors. HP is not in a much better ratio. Never, in a million years, could that happen.
Frankly, there are not many companies big enough to buy Nokia, particularly in the tech sector. Microsoft would be one. Google another and Apple would be about it. Apple would be buying them for the patents and the other two if they plan to go into first party manufacturing and design in a big way.
Assuming Nokia doesn't pull out of the death spiral the most likely outcome is that no one buys them outright. A big consortium of companies buys all the patents just to get them off the table and the rest of the company dies.
Did you read the 'limitation' Valve added? Should your dispute get to the point of arbitration, Valve agrees to refund the cost of the software. In exchange you don't get to file a class action lawsuit.
Now, in what scenario would you file a class action lawsuit over a game where the payout would be greater than the cost of the game?
That's because there are no more hardware limitations. Standard hardware is able to handle HD video or animation or anything else, let alone word processing. So of course all the current innovation is in the area of design. Hardware speed could double tomorrow and it would not make much noticeable difference.
Never? Windows 8 will run on a 10yr old computer.
Only (some) 10 year old computers that have since had upgrades. The oldest Intel processors that W8 will support had just come out and the earliest AMD processors were 2003. And it would be a damn rare thing to find a 2002 graphics card that meets W8 support requirements.
So, yes, if you bought the most expensive computer possible a decade ago and continued to upgrade its RAM and Video Card it would now run W8 at a minimal level.
If you bought anything but the very cheapest models OSX 10.8 is good back to 2007. Which considering that Apple only started switching to Intel in 2006 is pretty good.
The most destructive aspect has nothing to do with the 'old' games. The stuff that people pay $5-$15 for after it's been out for a couple years is a natural secondary market. It wold exist with or without GameStop and no one cares very much, one way or another, about these sales. The problem is with GameStop's approach ot new games.
Brand new game comes out for $50. Even for the biggest titles GamStop only brings a couple copies outside of pre-orders. This is deliberate. Game is bought on release day and played for a week. Then it is sold back to GameStop for $25. GameStop then sells it used for $45. They can do that because they deliberately underdstock titles. Often it is used or nothing. This will hapen a couple times the first month of release before the demand dies down. After that the sell back price drops to almost nothing. And the developer sees only the cut of the initial sale.
Yes, this is legal. It even saves a few dollars for the first couple customers. But it means that the developers only make money out of one in three PAYING customers. The people who are willing and able to pay full price on launch day. It is not an issue of people choosing old goods due to a stagnant industry. It's a problem of the new money being diverted before it can reward new development.
eBay items will evaporate as will the low prices.
Except that's not how it's worked in practice. If you look at Steam all the old titles are still available and for cheap. Brand new and fully patched and cheaper than they sell for used at GameStop. When every player represents a sale and inventory space is unlimited there is a huge incentive for continued support and aggressive price drops.
Last week on the big Steam summer sale I picked up copies of Batman: Arkham Asylum for $4 and KoTOR (I lost my discs years ago and have been wanting another play-through) for $2. The system works. And works far better for every level from the developers to the consumers. The only people is does not serve better are parasitic rent seekers like GameStop.
The developers, indie or otherwise, will see a cut of GameStop's resale when hell is cold and frozen. If GameStop was the least bit inclined to make that sort of deal the publishers and developers would have never felt the need to cut them off at the knees in the first place. GameStop has a business model that is entirely legal and sometimes advantageous for some consumers. At the same time it is incredibly destructive and long-term death spiral for the industry and consumers as a whole. They have refused to play nice and so the nuclear option is getting deployed. Steam-style game sales on PC and console and the end of the resale market.
And you know what? It works out really well for developers and consumers. Look at Steam. When every player represents a sale and inventory space is unlimited there is incentive for long term support and lower prices. It works. You can buy titles, both AAA and super indie, on Steam for less than their used resale prices and the money actually goes to the developers both big and small.
I'm not sure the degree alone is the problem.
No, but I think it's a self selecting group. The people with MBAs are, by definition, the kind of people that think an MBA is a really great thing to get.