Posts by P. Lee

Re: Invention

Samsung suing apple seems to be retaliatory.

Apple aren't playing nice and the other kids are shunning them.

ah, but you wouldn't want to mess up the earnings per employee ratio by bringing the function in-house, would you?

Nobody gets bonuses for that!

Helloooo!

Add radius authentication to the feature set and always use that for testing.

It ain't rocket science!

(go-go silver!)

Re: If anything

True. I'm still using more core2duo for gaming and its fine.

However, to make things work well you really need hot-swap and an easy interface. Something like PCMCIA for graphics cards - multiplexed thunderbolt maybe? It might be enough if you only have to drive an HDTV. You don't want average joe messing around touching static-sensitive bits.

You also need... rom/cd based software installation (PXE over http?) for when the disk dies.

I hope Valve is paying attention... :)

> I remember thinking that NDS was doing this four years ago

Novell, another sadly badly steered company.

You can't charge for authentication what the client is paying for the whole OS. That won't work in a mass market.

Re: slightly higher than they think OEMs" Indeed, that is precisely what they have done in fact.

> Android already have the crappy low-end of the market sewn up and Apple have proven that it's about margin not bulk sales.

Nope, both ends of the market have shown that you need to give people what they want. Some want "shiny," "feels nice in your hand", and "safe as IBM" feeling. Some want a particular text input mechanism, some want a status symbol.

Nobody really wants something they associate with their work pc, viruses (or anti-virus software) and having to call the IT helpdesk.

MS even got the branding wrong.

Re: re: *Any* venture calling itself "Egnyte"

Which is ugly to say and therefore doomed to be known as egg-nogg.

> Shock! Has someone realised that you don't need a £400 tablet to teach kids to read and write.

But you can teach them about common sense and corporate greed.

Re: Companies don't benefit

> Companies don't benefit from anything. Only the stake holders (shareholders and employees) benefit.

By ditching corp tax, you add incentive to move shareholders (personal and corporate) to tax havens as they immediately gain corptax% extra income.

You're then down to trying to track how people re-import the money into the economy. They might just be sucking it all out and planning on living it up in Monaco or retiring to a beach somewhere. No tax taken at source, no tax payable later on. Or they might just be using a credit card, sipping small amounts of cash as they want it.

Now you've gone from a big lump sum (if slightly disadvantageous) payment from an easily identifiable source to tracking the lifestyles of individuals.

If you really want to people to do well, you need to clamp down on the mortgage market. Restrict the amount people can borrow. Mortgages work like taxes on income. Take out the house-price competition between purchasers - that will hurt a lot for existing owners, but in the long run, property prices will drop, people will have more cash and you can raise government taxes without taking food out of their mouths. A lower cost of living makes industry more competitive to do as workers need less cash to live and you can actually make things that people want rather than relying on financial and "IP" jiggery-pokery because that's the only thing that will fund your high-cost economy. Currently, 50%+ of income goes into inflatable house prices which benefits the banks (higher, longer borrowing). Its an unnecessary cost. Paying twice as much for a house doesn't double its benefit.

When will people learn that borrowing is bad? It is piling up future costs and eventually that bird comes home to roost. "It doesn't matter as long as we can service the debt," is an irresponsible attitude that pushes people far closer to the edge than they should go. House-price competition is a different animal to tomato-price competition and its evil to generalise to a theory and suggest its all the same.

Re: Meaningful comparison metrics anyone ?

and reliability+uptime over everything else.

Re: You PAY, oh yes you do!

Android's free, but no-one wants an OS, they want apps.

Specifically, they want gmail and google maps/navigation on their phone.

MS' problem is that they are trying to ape apple and google. If they gave away their phone OS for nothing and provided a few good apps, then that would be fine. However, they'll try to commercialise search and advertising. They will spy on their customers and try to take a slice of the revenue for app sales.

In the process, they might lose the war, not winning the phone/tablet battle and allowing unix onto the phone, tablet and then desktop. Then their office suite and datacentre products will be in jeopardy.

If I were google, I'd put out a private cloud email system for corporates only. If they can break MS' lock on Exchange (where they aren't making much headway anyway) then far more corporates would consider a *nix desktop which would break MS' corporate grip, Office revenue would tail off and Bing would lose its funding.

Re: Downloads cost more

ps. also, "to protect retailers" is a great excuse to keep the prices high...

Re: Odd system

Which is why we have country-level tlds. It means patagonia can have patagonia.ar and the shop can have patagonia.com and everyone is happy.

This has basically flattened the whole DNS into the root domain to get more cash for icann rather than the registrars.

Dumb plan, badly executed.

Re: He did however pretend to be other than who he was

Or perhaps an even closer analogy would be a company that has put your stuff in self-storage locker and not bothered putting locks on the doors. Someone comes along, opens a couple of doors and photographs some people's stuff and posts the pics on a noticeboard.

He hasn't removed anything so that it isn't there, merely put people's stuff on display. Not very nice, but probably not criminal.

But point taken, real-world analogies don't map well to information.

Re: If this is true

Piracy schmiracy. PC games cost less than console games which is unlikely to be the case if the cost of business was higher due to piracy.

The main issue is people modifying game code (auto-aim bots etc) which spoils the fun for other players in online games.

This is less of an issue for the casual gaming wii where multiplayer is often local.

Re: Interesting approaches to monopoly

> End result: You can only run Apple software on Apple hardware, and you can only run MS software on MS-approved hardware.

Not quite. You can only run MS-approved software on any (non-Apple) hardware.

I find it difficult to believe that MS will get away with this.

I sense a "bios" setting for "MS-ONLY" which provide defaults to UEFI.

Re: x86 on mobile platforms...

And here lies Intel's second problem.

Using ARM and IOS forced Apple's and Android devs to start from scratch and build appropriate apps. x86 on mobile makes it too tempting to drop existing desktop apps in a mobile app store, where they destroy battery life.

Re: Like PCs?

I think the comparison is with the advantage they had with the original Mackintosh over the original IBM PC.

They had an obviously superior product but the desire for high-margins allowed MS Windows to eat the marketplace to the point where they almost disappeared completely.

They have done ok with the emac/imac/mac laptops, but that's a relatively small part of the company now.

OSX is still a better UI than W7, but W7 is cheaper (or pirated) and as other companies fail in the ultrabook market, they'll bring ultrabook "pretty" to standard laptops which is going to hurt Apple's laptop division. Likewise, android is eating IOS share with both "pretty" and features. Android is also significant enough that doing IOS-only apps is not an option.

High-margin Samsung phones and tariff-subsidies have hidden the phone margins which protected iphone market-share but Nexus 4 and its descendents are going to spoil that party.

If Valve can get their linux stuff off the ground, I could easily see that area squeezing things with casual gamers. Not to mention that valve already have a voip solution.

Ha, for irony, I run debian on Apple's abandoned G5 platform. Mythtv is the killer app, but I get universal network boot if I want it, http caching as well as file-server services.

Plus I'm really annoyed with withdrawn support. I used to have ebook applications on a 2nd gen ipod touch, but now the app store only supports later IOS versions, so after a reset, I've lost capabilities. Not good enough.

Re: Free speech? Freedom of religion?

Not even close and I think you know it.

Re: Long overdue?

What other CPU's are there?

ARM is a success numerically but its profits are rounding errors for intel.

Intel's issue with ARM similar (though not as advanced) as MS' issue with linux on the tablet/phone. Its a strategic problem of an alternative ecosystem being built, not a problem of immediate sales loss.

Apart from that, Intel is doing very nicely with x86/64.

Re: Someone needs a better accountant

That would make sense, except that the issue is that the UK company is not making any profit - it is all sucked out under various guises to the foreign parent corp.

They need to stop bogus royalty payments and "management" fees.