Posts by famousringo 91 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2010
The author's point is that Win 8 is allowing tablet UI to influence desktop UI, just as iPad UI has influenced Lion's UI.
Calling it "copying" is a bit of a stretch, but it does mean that strategy and implementation are kinda sorta heading in the same direction for the big desktop OSes, I guess.
I tried Googling "iwata kamban". I get the office of Watase Kamban in Iwata City.
I Google "iwata disruption" and I get a speech Satoru Iwata gave at GDC 2006 where he explicitly cites disruption as Nintendo's strategy, months before Nintendo launches a textbook disruptive product.
I guess Andrew wasn't paying attention when the CEO of Nintendo outlined his plan to use 'disruption' to turn around Nintendo's fortunes in the video game console market in 2006.
You describe it as a distaste for jargon, but your views sound more like anti-intellectualism to me. These theories are not only discussed by actual business leaders, they have been successfully applied by them.
An Asay column I can get behind, and a valuable question.
The need to tie an 'app experience' between various devices and platforms is one way to get that kind of engagement. It's worked for services like Instapaper and it's certainly necessary if you have an existing desktop/web service that you want to extend to the mobile sphere.
But I don't think it's the only way to engage. You can also build apps which are uniquely useful when mobile. Red Laser and Word Lens come to mind as apps which are far more useful on a phone than they could possibly be on a conventional PC.
Ultimately, the simple answer is that a successful app needs to be either useful or entertaining. Those are the two things that people pay for. Tying different devices and services together is useful - after all, that's the point behind Google, Microsoft, and Apple building all these cloud services into these devices - but there are countless other ways to build that engagement.
Cutting out the cost of the retail chain is kinda the point of digital distribution. Record and video stores are also feeling the pain, and it's because they're going obsolete.
Just as increased capital investment has greatly reduced our need for farm and factory labour, digital information distribution is reducing our need for retail stockers and cashiers, among other jobs. All those farmers and factory workers found something else to do, I'm sure your clerks will as well. Sounds like their hardware, installation and support revenues are still okay.
Okay, so you've established that Apple makes a lot of money, and you've established that companies besides Microsoft make money off of Windows, while dismissing out of hand all money made off Apple products that doesn't go to Cupertino...
Got any reason why Apple should be more like Microsoft? You didn't make a case as to why Apple should for Apple's sake, or why they should for their customers' sake. You just put out some vague assertion that it's nice to share. Everything you needed to know, you learned in kindergarten, eh?
Asay seems to want to sort these companies into neat little boxes, then dismiss when a company successfully climbs out of the cage he's built.
Microsoft can't do consumer products... Oh, but they have the Xbox and that Kinect thing.
Apple doesn't do mass market products... Except for the iPod (and the iPad?).
Maybe the real world just doesn't fit into your tidy little boxes.
Well, Android revenues are zero, so that would be why it isn't here. Google makes money on ads and associated apps, but the OS itself is free as in beer.
As for iPhones, they mention iOS devices, but then they throw out this sentence:
"Gartner is only counting iMac and MacBooks and a thin amount of Mac OS X Server sales in this data."
So, no iPhones, iPads, Mac Pros, or Mac Minis? And since almost all Mac OS X and iOS "sales" are bundled with hardware, how would you figure what revenues those are worth? I would assume they count as zero, but I would be surprised if Apple sells more than a half billion dollars a year in 10.6 upgrades and server licenses.
Confusing article.
It's the speed per watt.
Wikipedia tells me that the most efficient C2D chews up 10W at 1.6 GHz clock. Google tells me that a dual-core A9 can offer a 1.6 GHz clock with a 2W power draw. Make that a quad-core A9 and you have something with roughly the same integer performance as a C2D and less than half the power requirement.
As long as the end result is snappy enough for the user, you can build a computer that's lighter, smaller, and runs longer. If you can keep that ARM cool without a fan, you can save even more space and power.
All of the other big PC market analysts are still calling these things "media tablets," but Canalys figured things out right away. These devices are being bought by people who don't need hard keyboards, optical drives, beefy CPUs, or tons of ports in their mobile computer — who don't need a laptop.
The other analysts will come around, eventually. If they don't, the PC market will look stagnant and boring as tablets snarf up all the growth.
Shares are worth what the market estimates a company is worth, divided by the number of shares. That estimation is based on assets, liabilities, profits, future growth, and other factors. Most tech stocks are worth about twenty times their earnings, plus their cash pile, modified by what the market thinks future earnings will look like.
Dividends are just one way for an investor to make money. The other is for the value of the stock to increase. Stock increases are generally considered better, because capital gains tend to pay fewer taxes than income. I'd get to keep more money if I sell a share at $1 more than I paid for it, rather than have that share pay me a $1 dividend.
So, at least in theory, a dollar is worth more sitting in Apple's bank than it is paid out in a dividend. But ideally, Apple would figure out a way to invest that dollar to create even more company growth.
...was frustration that every single damn thing we pay for seems to want to restructure itself as a subscription service so that customers only need to make one purchase decision instead of considering whether they actually need that new upgrade.
Then I realized that it makes perfect sense to replace a purchase with a lease for cloud computing, because one of the fundamental ideas behind the cloud is that you surrender ownership and control of your own data (and to be fair, there are payoffs for that surrender of control). If you're going to lease everything on the back end, why not lease the front end, too?
It was a serious weakness in the Dropbox app that you could easily get a file from your Dropbox account to any app on your iDevice, but good luck getting anything but a picture from your device to your Dropbox account. This service just became more than twice as useful.
I think I'd better buy myself a Dropbox subscription.
Is that code for, "So expensive to recover that nobody will bother tapping it until energy prices have doubled again"?
If so, at some point the rising costs of digging deeper and deeper into the planet (hello Horizon Deepwater!) will make alternative energy sources look more and more attractive.
It's nice to know that 3 hours is as low as it gets, even with all guns blazin', but there's been a lot of talk about the battery in this device. It would have been nice to see another test at minimum settings, to see how long a more conservative gamer could spam hadoukens.
This might be the first tablet which is actually competitive with the iPad. Decent specs, svelt form factor, good price, and an OS designed for tablets (though reviews suggest honeycomb could use a point release to smooth things out).
I do feel sorry for the chumps who bought the original Galaxy Tab. You know that thing will never see an update.
I can see how the headline is confusing, and the article doesn't go on to properly explain the multi-touch changes. We're talking about new multi-touch gestures and commands being written into the OS, not a new bullet point on a feature list.
Hope I cleared things up for you.
The technology was developed with optical connections in mind, then modified to work over copper. Presumably, the implementation Apple is going to reveal next week will be the copper variety. I understand that the advantage of copper is that it can carry power to a connected device, but I'm guessing copper won't have the same long-term speed potential as optical.
Surely if Zynga thought it could save $30 million dollars a month by offering their social games through some channel other than Facebook, they would do so immediately. That's a lot of money to pay if they aren't getting good value for it.
It's worth it. That's why these content creators/publishers accept the terms. If it wasn't worth it, they'd find some other way. But they don't have the aptitude for distribution, so they pay a commission to Facebook and Apple and Nintendo and Microsoft, because that's the price of making money. Paying your distributor is nothing new in the content business.
Why would Apple build a $1000 Apple TV when they can add what they want to the TV experience with a $100 box?
TVs are expensive commodity items with stiff competition and thin margins. I doubt the margins are especially large on the Apple TV 2, but the risk is lower, and it takes care of the important job: Add more value to the iTunes store and iDevices.
It means that molten sea ice won't become part of a vicious feedback loop that causes further climate change.
Now we just have to worry about all that land ice over Greenland and Antarctica that isn't forming an insulating layer over warm sea water. Oh, and whatever other factors were so powerful that they melted all that polar ice in the first place.
Aside from the late start, Microsoft's biggest problem is that all the dance partners are taken. All of Microsoft's OEM partners are falling over each other to get an Android-based iPad killer out to market. Android will be properly tablet-ready in matter of months, not years, and OEMs don't even have to pay a dime to license the OS (though they often pay to license other Google apps).
OEMs are Microsoft's real customers. If Windows Tablet Edition shows up in a couple years, its main competition will be Android, not iOS.
My first reaction to the headline:
If VoD is so DoA, why has Netflix's Canadian launch spawned a war between customers, ISPs, regulators, and top government ministers?
Personally, it's a dream come true for me. No ads. No adherence to an arbitrary and unpredictable schedule dictated by TV executive dweebs. And I can receive the signal on just about every internet-capable device in my house.
Pixelmator seems pretty happy to have grossed $1 million in 20 days on the Mac App Store. They've also taken the risk of going 'all-in' and offering their software exclusively through that channel:
http://www.pixelmator.com/weblog/2011/01/25/pixelmator-grosses-1-million-on-the-mac-app-store/
It's all thanks to people like you. All the Apple lovers and haters who diligently click every story with the word 'Apple' in it, then leave a comment of soaring praise or scathing criticism.
Not a calculated and cunning PR campaign, just clicks. Lots of clicks of people looking for Apple news to send them into spasms of rage or shivers of excitement. Clicks drive the internet, and Apple news, or even just Apple rumours, drive the clicks.
A sample size of 1,000 is big enough to draw solid conclusions from a population of almost any size.
The problem with this sample isn't size, it's bias. Every device surveyed is a registered member of Appsfire. It's like doing a political survey based on subscribers to The Economist and applying the results to a whole country.
Paris, because she probably also places too much value on the size of a sample rather than its quality
The premises are all wrong, from the notion that it's easier to type with two thumbs than ten fingers to the notion that Courier was ever anything more than a concept video.
The fact that all we have of the device is a few minutes of CG strongly suggests that there were some serious design problems. You really think MS would just shrug and say, "Sure, we have the perfect iPad killer, but I don't see why we should spend the money to develop it?"
"As yet it's unclear whether Apple will wall off this particular garden to the extent that it does with iOS apps."
Apple has made it pretty clear that the Mac App Store will not be the exclusive way to get software onto your Mac. They might make it into a lovely garden, keeping out the weeds and the riff-raff, but there will be no walls. Except perhaps in the minds of users who don't want to leave.
This seems like an interesting solution on the part of real tech companies to the problem of patent trolls. Everybody buys in, everybody gets a license to all the patents, nobody faces a lawsuit ten years down the line after they've made billions on a hit product.
And by 'everybody' I of course mean just those in the consortium. Everybody else gets a big, fat barrier to entry. Still, I'd rather see companies which make real products get a deep moat around their turf than see the money go to patent squatters who produce nothing but legal bills.
I can see the appeal of having only one data contract, but my iPad's battery is a whole lot beefier than my phone's. I don't think it would last too long with all radios blazing like that.
I guess it all comes down to your usage patterns and what you think is worth paying for.
All of Apple's other App Store restrictions I've been able to understand the position they're coming from (usually some mixture of this way is better for our customers and this way is better for our reputation), but this one is pretty baffling to me. What's next? No more book apps unless they contain multiple books?
Luckily, this one doesn't actually effect me because I get all the streaming radio I need from TuneIn Radio, so I don't need to make a big dramatic production of leaving the walled garden.
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