" However, Apple really isn't in the phone business as much as they are in the content delivery business. They'll still put out great iPhones; but they'll be aimed at tying people tighter into the whole eco-system. That is an area that gives them an advantage over their competitors because they don't offer the same end to end experience (yet). The iPhone, iPad, AppleTV and Mac will all be ways to deliver content i this customers that allow happen to text, make phone calls and run programs."
Apple makes much more money in profits and revenues from hardware---and iPhone hardware to be specific---than anything else. Content revenues are relatively insignificant and will stay insignificant.
Remember that Apple's revenue is about the same as Chevron's and twice IBM's and JPMorgan (biggest mega-bank!), three times ConocoPhillips, and 5 times Goldman Sachs.
It's ***enormous***, only exceeded by Exxon, Walmart and Saudi Aramco.
There's no remote way that content revenue (maybe 1% of that) could possibly substitute to run Apple's business. Apple trying to make money on content instead of hardware leads to a Blackberry death-spiral outcome.
Content network and ecosystem is there to promote the attractiveness of the hardware.
"However, once it loses mobile, as it is surely poised to do, it will no longer be making lots of money... at least, not by current standards."
Everybody else but Samsung is not making any money. What does it mean to "lose"? Has google made money net on android yet? (I doubt it).
"Companies like Apple and Blackberry need to learn that no matter how dominantly they control a market, they are only a few quarterly cycles away from completely losing their market position."
Does it apply to Samsung too?
Blackberry's loss---as in massive economic collapse and mass firing----is much worse than 'no longer making as much money'. It was did in by two technologically/economically superior competing platforms which came out of unexpected places. (Nobody expected the iPhone to be anywhere near of a step change and nobody expected google to spend lots of money without profit to make a free OS).
"They haven't made it impossible, but they've made some very large barriers to entry. Amazon can afford to maintain replacements for all of the Google applications, and even its own app store. Few other companies can."
Samsung has the money, and the motivation. Undoubtedly Google's moves are attempting to thwart Samsung. Samsung doesn't yet have the ability to operate as a serious software company. They can buy talent and partner with talent, but that doesn't yet give them deep institutional understanding and capability. Why are they so hot on programming their own skins and additional apps onto their phones? What does it give the user (not that much). What does it give the company (plenty, they have developed an experience base to build up for the long-term plan). If they succeed at that (and they have a good chance as they've been exceptional at everything else), Android will be a minority platform once again.
There will be Samdroid as the dominant software target and Google will complain about "forking" and haranguing people to use only "pure, authentic Android."
The ex-Sun people on the Java ME team will laugh bitterly into their unemployment checks.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.[1]"
Note 'particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized'.
People were familiar with this trick a long time ago.
Monitoring international money transfers is like massacring people?
Isn't monitoring just that what you expect to be doing to find criminals and enemy activities? All the governments are cracking down on their own banks over potential money laundering violations for the same reasons and monitoring the systems, intentionally.
| It's a good thing for Linux, because maybe more people will write apps for Linux, outside of the steam walled garden. It will expose more people to Linux then before. This is a long term thing.
How well did that work with Android? How much carryover from Android to generic Linux?
Obamacare exchanges promote direct, immediate competitive substitutability, at least in insurance plans. In states which didn't try to sabotage the law, the premiums come in somewhat lower than originally projected.
A number of insurers are not participating because the properties of the insurance pool are not known---with time they will be and the number of competitors will increase.
"he said he was puzzled why the red tape covers a few grams of gunpowder, which is pretty much harmless, and not a few tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene, which is not harmless."
Because empirically, gunpowder has been used by people to commit harm to others intentionally in various criminal ways.
A few tons of LOX and kerosene is looking to have Darwin taking care of the problem.
If people start making and using LOX + kerosene weapons sucessfully, then they'll be regulated.
There is history and experience behind law. Logical consistency is not a primary design consideration.
"Where are any documents about Chinese or Russian intelligence activities?"
Snowden wasn't interested in having polonium-flavored green tea.
He knows that the US Government will make his life miserable, but he will still have it. The idea that "He's so famous once he goes public, he can't be assassinated" only works with some governments. Trotsky was extremely famous, and look what happened.
| Snowden also insisted he was able to protect the documents from China’s spy services because he was familiar with that country's intelligence capabilities through his work as an NSA contractor.
Correction. He was familiar with what the NSA had believed to be Chinese intelligence capabilities. That's not the same thing.
BTW, of course the Russians and Chinese are engaging in at least as much and as intrusive espionage, at most limited only by budget.
"It was a subtle thing to most Germans who were fighting for patriotism. At the end of the war, US soldiers marched German citizens through concentration camps because they thought the US was lying about the mass killing of Jews."
Was it that subtle? After the hysterical anti-Jew propaganda for 10 years, and the fact that *ALL the Jews who used to live there* were gone? Everywhere?
There are lots of things which C++ can do better than Fortran. Graphs, guis, operating systems,drivers, template metaprogramming, compiler message heiroglyphics, segmentation faults, memory leaks, & heisenbugs.
Numerical computation isn't part of that.
Part of my paycheck is doing numerical computing with C++. I find the Eigen library and C++ 11 makes things better. F2003 would still be better yet.
And assuming the acquisition, configuration, installation and parallelization of the servers has zero cost in time.
The supervisor of two researchers finds that one gets the job done with very fast code in Fortran 95 in a reasonable time, the other gets a demo up real quick but it is far too slow to be used for practical data reduction, and wants to buy 50 servers to spawn it out with some new package (which he hasn't used yet and is bleeding edge freeware).
"Well, if sequestration is repealed you can write a justification in the grant renewal in 9 months, and if it gets approved (funding rates are under 7% these days at NSF) we might have money for 2 in 18 months. You could rent some on Amazon on your own money, I guess but we have to check with legal about data security requirements."
Fortran 95 or 2003 is better than C++ for numerical computation, if you don't need to do complex I/O or interact with data base libraries with C interfaces (and without Fortran interfaces).
"And I find it laughable and sad that the Teapartiers are mostly old white people and if they REALLY wanted what they think they wanted"
The TeaPartiers know just that. Most aren't really against government spending, just spending on the Wrong Kind Of People. There's plenty of right wing conservatives (old white farmers) in Kansas and Texas getting agricultural subsidies.
"There is nothing special about health insurance."
Other than
a) If you don't buy some of the underlying product you might well be dead b) you don't have a choice when to buy much of the product c) the cost is so extreme that one health event can bankrupt you d) there is almost no competitive substitutability e) the health insurance itself gets you access to only extremely high health care prices instead of unbelievably gouging health care prices
it's just like every other consumer purchase, i.e. it's entirely and completely different.
"How good insurance *could* be if politicians of both parties (at the state level) would let go of it."
Let's see how good.
"If you could get your insurance from a nation-wide market and via vendors like amazon and ebay, who actually know what they are doing and "get" customer service, the entire insurance discussion would be different."
What does amazon know about insurance? Nothing. What would amazon analytics do about insurance if they put their minds to it without any of this government regulation business?
It would make things extraordinarily awful for you and very profitable for them. There's extremely good reasons for the regulation.
Health insurance is entirely different from property and casualty insurance. An accident or fire is a point event in time on the timescale of insurance, they can't do anything in the middle of the event. Suppose, contrary to fact, insurance companies had very inexpensive drones with infrared cameras flying over all their covered areas and monitored for fires. If they saw one and geolocated it, if you were the policyholder you and your mortgage company gets a tweet that the policy is canceled as of YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS, just a few seconds before the fire truck rolls up. How well would that work? It would be amazingly profitable and extremely scummy. Oh yeah, you still owe the mortgage on the burnt down house, and gee the bank is upset that the value of their collateral was destroyed. That equivalent happens in health insurance.
Insurance companies are extremely motivated to be obtuse and make it difficult to pay out claims with arbitrary difficulties. Amazon wants to do everything to get you your package efficiently. How would it be if Amazon Insurance was motivated to be the opposite on claims? (as all insurance companies are). Look how some banks already were intentionally deceptive about acknowledging loan modification documentation, and this despite massive Federal regulatory intrusion. How would it be WITHOUT that regulation?
Now, in health insurance, your life can depend on it, literally.
What Republicans are pushing for is "buying insurance across state lines" which sounds nice, until you realize what that means: regulatory arbitrage. In an instant the only place from which insurance will be written will happen to be the one state which has the least regulation and investigative capacity. Why is North Louisiana's insurance commissioner going to be motivated to investigate the tremendous abuses against California policyholders? When the little state capital has a very large Hike-Co Insurance headquarters, and they've paid for the football stadium and all the local politicians?
Slashdot Mirror
" However, Apple really isn't in the phone business as much as they are in the content delivery business. They'll still put out great iPhones; but they'll be aimed at tying people tighter into the whole eco-system. That is an area that gives them an advantage over their competitors because they don't offer the same end to end experience (yet). The iPhone, iPad, AppleTV and Mac will all be ways to deliver content i this customers that allow happen to text, make phone calls and run programs."
Apple makes much more money in profits and revenues from hardware---and iPhone hardware to be specific---than anything else.
Content revenues are relatively insignificant and will stay insignificant.
Remember that Apple's revenue is about the same as Chevron's and twice IBM's and JPMorgan (biggest mega-bank!), three times ConocoPhillips, and 5 times Goldman Sachs.
It's ***enormous***, only exceeded by Exxon, Walmart and Saudi Aramco.
There's no remote way that content revenue (maybe 1% of that) could possibly substitute to run Apple's business. Apple trying to make money on content instead of hardware leads to a Blackberry death-spiral outcome.
Content network and ecosystem is there to promote the attractiveness of the hardware.
"However, once it loses mobile, as it is surely poised to do, it will no longer be making lots of money... at least, not by current standards."
Everybody else but Samsung is not making any money. What does it mean to "lose"? Has google made money net on android yet? (I doubt it).
"Companies like Apple and Blackberry need to learn that no matter how dominantly they control a market, they are only a few quarterly cycles away from completely losing their market position."
Does it apply to Samsung too?
Blackberry's loss---as in massive economic collapse and mass firing----is much worse than 'no longer making as much money'. It was did in by two technologically/economically superior competing platforms which came out of unexpected places. (Nobody expected the iPhone to be anywhere near of a step change and nobody expected google to spend lots of money without profit to make a free OS).
"They haven't made it impossible, but they've made some very large barriers to entry. Amazon can afford to maintain replacements for all of the Google applications, and even its own app store. Few other companies can."
Samsung has the money, and the motivation. Undoubtedly Google's moves are attempting to thwart Samsung. Samsung doesn't yet have the ability to operate as a serious software company. They can buy talent and partner with talent, but that doesn't yet give them deep institutional understanding and capability. Why are they so hot on programming their own skins and additional apps onto their phones? What does it give the user (not that much). What does it give the company (plenty, they have developed an experience base to build up for the long-term plan). If they succeed at that (and they have a good chance as they've been exceptional at everything else), Android will be a minority platform once again.
There will be Samdroid as the dominant software target and Google will complain about "forking" and haranguing people to use only "pure, authentic Android."
The ex-Sun people on the Java ME team will laugh bitterly into their unemployment checks.
Compile times are better in LLVM. Run times are generally a little bit worse in LLVM.
The commercial Intel compilers (C++/Fortran) offer the highest execution performance on Intel hardware.
Sometimes the invisible hand flips you a quite visible finger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
there is no reason an ogilopoly has to achieve the maximization of global utility
There's also a few aimless fantasizing billionaire dilletantes, but government funding pushes 99% of basic science progress forward.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.[1]"
Note 'particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized'.
People were familiar with this trick a long time ago.
Monitoring international money transfers is like massacring people?
Isn't monitoring just that what you expect to be doing to find criminals and enemy activities? All the governments are cracking down on their own banks over potential money laundering violations for the same reasons and monitoring the systems, intentionally.
| It's a good thing for Linux, because maybe more people will write apps for Linux, outside of the steam walled garden. It will expose more people to Linux then before. This is a long term thing.
How well did that work with Android? How much carryover from Android to generic Linux?
Elon Musk calls up some billionaire pals and they start a company called Tesla of Texas. Tesla of Texas runs a minimal profit margin operation.
No free pass.
Obamacare exchanges promote direct, immediate competitive substitutability, at least in insurance plans. In states which didn't try to sabotage the law, the premiums come in somewhat lower than originally projected.
A number of insurers are not participating because the properties of the insurance pool are not known---with time they will be and the number of competitors will increase.
Constitutional. It takes 51 senators to pass a law. Notice that one can't gerrymander states.
"he said he was puzzled why the red tape covers a few grams of gunpowder, which is pretty much harmless, and not a few tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene, which is not harmless."
Because empirically, gunpowder has been used by people to commit harm to others intentionally in various criminal ways.
A few tons of LOX and kerosene is looking to have Darwin taking care of the problem.
If people start making and using LOX + kerosene weapons sucessfully, then they'll be regulated.
There is history and experience behind law. Logical consistency is not a primary design consideration.
"Do you really think Brazil or Mexico is running operations hacking President Obama's email account?"
No, because of capability.
"Do you think Germany is?"
Yes, because of capability.
I heard this directly from a significant security researcher & company founder: it's not illegal for Russians to hack non-Russian banks.
"Where are any documents about Chinese or Russian intelligence activities?"
Snowden wasn't interested in having polonium-flavored green tea.
He knows that the US Government will make his life miserable, but he will still have it. The idea that "He's so famous once he goes public, he can't be assassinated" only works with some governments. Trotsky was extremely famous, and look what happened.
| Snowden also insisted he was able to protect the documents from China’s spy services because he was familiar with that country's intelligence capabilities through his work as an NSA contractor.
Correction. He was familiar with what the NSA had believed to be Chinese intelligence capabilities. That's not the same thing.
BTW, of course the Russians and Chinese are engaging in at least as much and as intrusive espionage, at most limited only by budget.
"It was a subtle thing to most Germans who were fighting for patriotism. At the end of the war, US soldiers marched German citizens through concentration camps because they thought the US was lying about the mass killing of Jews."
Was it that subtle? After the hysterical anti-Jew propaganda for 10 years, and the fact that *ALL the Jews who used to live there* were gone? Everywhere?
There are lots of things which C++ can do better than Fortran. Graphs, guis, operating systems,drivers, template metaprogramming, compiler message heiroglyphics, segmentation faults, memory leaks, & heisenbugs.
Numerical computation isn't part of that.
Part of my paycheck is doing numerical computing with C++. I find the Eigen library and C++ 11 makes things better. F2003 would still be better yet.
And assuming the acquisition, configuration, installation and parallelization of the servers has zero cost in time.
The supervisor of two researchers finds that one gets the job done with very fast code in Fortran 95 in a reasonable time, the other gets a demo up real quick but it is far too slow to be used for practical data reduction, and wants to buy 50 servers to spawn it out with some new package (which he hasn't used yet and is bleeding edge freeware).
"Well, if sequestration is repealed you can write a justification in the grant renewal in 9 months, and if it gets approved (funding rates are under 7% these days at NSF) we might have money for 2 in 18 months. You could rent some on Amazon on your own money, I guess but we have to check with legal about data security requirements."
Personally, I want to get my research done now.
Fortran 95 or 2003 is better than C++ for numerical computation, if you don't need to do complex I/O or interact with data base libraries with C interfaces (and without Fortran interfaces).
Things have moved on. Fortran 95+ is almost as easy as Matlab, definitely easier than C++ and faster than both.
And for heavily numerical algorithms it is better designed, beyond just the speed.
"And I find it laughable and sad that the Teapartiers are mostly old white people and if they REALLY wanted what they think they wanted"
The TeaPartiers know just that. Most aren't really against government spending, just spending on the Wrong Kind Of People. There's plenty of right wing conservatives (old white farmers) in Kansas and Texas getting agricultural subsidies.
"There is nothing special about health insurance."
Other than
a) If you don't buy some of the underlying product you might well be dead
b) you don't have a choice when to buy much of the product
c) the cost is so extreme that one health event can bankrupt you
d) there is almost no competitive substitutability
e) the health insurance itself gets you access to only extremely high health care prices instead of unbelievably gouging health care prices
it's just like every other consumer purchase, i.e. it's entirely and completely different.
"How good insurance *could* be if politicians of both parties (at the state level) would let go of it."
Let's see how good.
"If you could get your insurance from a nation-wide market and via vendors like amazon and ebay, who actually know what they are doing and "get" customer service, the entire insurance discussion would be different."
What does amazon know about insurance? Nothing. What would amazon analytics do about insurance if they put their minds to it without any of this government regulation business?
It would make things extraordinarily awful for you and very profitable for them. There's extremely good reasons for the regulation.
Health insurance is entirely different from property and casualty insurance. An accident or fire is a point event in time on the timescale of insurance, they can't do anything in the middle of the event. Suppose, contrary to fact, insurance companies had very inexpensive drones with infrared cameras flying over all their covered areas and monitored for fires. If they saw one and geolocated it, if you were the policyholder you and your mortgage company gets a tweet that the policy is canceled as of YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS, just a few seconds before the fire truck rolls up. How well would that work? It would be amazingly profitable and extremely scummy. Oh yeah, you still owe the mortgage on the burnt down house, and gee the bank is upset that the value of their collateral was destroyed. That equivalent happens in health insurance.
Insurance companies are extremely motivated to be obtuse and make it difficult to pay out claims with arbitrary difficulties. Amazon wants to do everything to get you your package efficiently. How would it be if Amazon Insurance was motivated to be the opposite on claims? (as all insurance companies are). Look how some banks already were intentionally deceptive about acknowledging loan modification documentation, and this despite massive Federal regulatory intrusion. How would it be WITHOUT that regulation?
Now, in health insurance, your life can depend on it, literally.
What Republicans are pushing for is "buying insurance across state lines" which sounds nice, until you realize what that means: regulatory arbitrage. In an instant the only place from which insurance will be written will happen to be the one state which has the least regulation and investigative capacity. Why is North Louisiana's insurance commissioner going to be motivated to investigate the tremendous abuses against California policyholders? When the little state capital has a very large Hike-Co Insurance headquarters, and they've paid for the football stadium and all the local politicians?