gamble

GoPro 2 was rock-solid, but 3 and 4 had huge quality problems. Terrible customer service as well. I used to like GoPro, but since the GoPro 2 they've completely soured me. I don't know if the GoPro 5 is any better, but the Amazon reviews are terrible.

A company I was working for was acquired and the first thing the new management said in the initial meeting was that they had no interest in owning us. They were only acquiring the company because another office had government contracts they wanted. Also, our equity was worthless now. But don't worry, because no one is getting fired! (Instead everyone resigned within a few months)

TPM 2.0 is a crown jewel for the NSA. Windows 8 full-disk encryption is based on TPM, and Windows 8.1 certification requires a TPM 2.0 module. It already is or soon will be universal in PC hardware. The NSA was involved its creation, and resisted changes to the standard. At the same time the German government was claiming there were no backdoors in Windows or TPM, privately they had already concluded it was compromised.

Source: http://news.techworld.com/security/3465259/is-windows-8-a-tr...

You realize that these are exactly the same arguments that were brought up to argue against the details revealed in these documents, so perhaps appeals to authority and use of the words 'conspiracy theories' may be taken with a few more grains of salt. NSA backdoors have been alleged for decades now, and the response is always that they're a 'conspiracy theory'.

Even without naming the companies involved, it's very hard to imagine they are inserting backdoors in less-valued products while somehow missing the crown jewels of Windows and TPM.

Now we know why Congress thought it was a realistic risk - they were already doing it to China.

It may be widely believe in cryptography circles, but this release wipes away the plausible deniability that governments and American corporations have always depended on. Just last week, the German government was pooh-pooh'ing claims that Windows and TPM chips had backdoors inserted by the NSA.[1] These documents all but confirm it.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/german-government-refutes-windows-backd...

The streaming-music business reminds me of Netflix in its early days, before movie studios became worried that it was cannibalizing rental/VOD revenue for new releases. There are a certain group of fans who are willing to pay $10-20 per album for access to music the moment it's released. With Spotify, those fans are treated like any other stream even though they're willing to pay more. It's inefficient pricing, except from Spotify's perspective as they're able to use immediate access to new release music as a lure for subscribers. So really, you can look at Spotify as capturing that demand and converting it into free advertising for themselves. I don't see that as sustainable in the long run. Some artists are already holding back new releases from streaming services. Like Netflix, I think that in the future you will see few new releases from popular artists until they've been available through premium services long enough to capture demand from hardcore fans.

Spotify treats all songs as if they have equal value, but that's obviously not true from the listener's perspective. For any given person, there are going to be some songs that they're willing to pay a premium to hear, and some that they'll only listen to if it's free. Spotify is a good deal for the latter case, but not if it offers a discounted version of the former to people who could pay for it. Just because Spotify counts every stream as a single interchangeable unit of value doesn't mean that listeners value every stream equally.

Because radio is not a substitute for recorded music. The inability to choose what you're listening to was always the stick that compelled listeners to purchase a recording. If you have Spotify, there is no reason to ever purchase that music in a download store.

What? Bose has long been notoriously low-quality for the price. They were the Beats by Dr. Dre of the 1980s, not Apple.

I can't see many developers putting the time to offload calculations when they'd have to make the game work seamlessly with varying levels of latency or the servers becoming unavailable. Just look at how difficult it has been for games to utilize a handful of CPU cores. Microsoft's claims about the cloud remind me of ten years ago, when the .net label was being applied to everything they made and all software was somehow going to be delivered as web services. Plus I doubt MS is offering cloud server time to developers for free. Every service they provide to devs comes at a cost.

I'm sure the app will last about as long as Sparrow.

Because the technology industry depends on a lot of idealistic young workers putting in plenty of unpaid overtime, and no one ever motivated that commitment with a call to increase shareholder returns by 17%.

From what I can tell buying a physical disk gives you an activation key that you apply to your console. Any profile on your console can play that game. If you bring the disk to another console and use your profile, you can also play the game. If you try to use the game on another console and profile, you either have to buy another copy or transfer the license from your profile to theirs.

That's the biggest fail from the announcement. Microsoft mentioned a number of things that are guaranteed to provoke gamers, like used game fees and always-on DRM, then refused to clarify any of them. Some reporters present got flat refusals to answer questions while others were given different answers depending on who they talked to.

The whole design of the One seems mired in the past. No substantial changes to the developer relationship, no acknowledgement of the app market, a subscription service to go online, DRM and used game fees to protect the existing retail model, etc.

And in exchange... a cable box? Will people even have cable in five years?

It's like they set out to design the next Xbox without acknowledging that anything other than hardware has changed since 2005.

It was forced in Europe and Canada by shifting liability for fraud on swipe transactions to the merchant. Chips are very effective at preventing point-of-sale fraud. Mastercard and Visa had not tried to push it in the US, but they are getting more active now. As of this year, their processors are required to support chip transactions. By 2015 they will start shifting liability for certain transactions to the merchant if a chip card isn't used.

For some reason, Kijiji is dominant in most of Canada. Craigslist is almost never used here. I'm honestly glad, because I occasionally check Craigslist and it's never a rewarding experience. Without the network-effects monopoly, it's a truly awful site.

Hemlock Grove is also excellent. But the point isn't to make money on these shows. Netflix knows that once people sign up, they're unlikely to drop their subscription. At the moment, Netflix is known as a place to get older movies and last season's TV shows. They want to change that perception with some must-watch shows that entice people to sign up. Netflix itself is more than worth $8 per month even without original content, but they need people to sign up before they can see that.

They're stuck in a local optimum. These companies have to be structured in a certain way to succeed at low margin, high volume commodity hardware sales. It isn't easy to adapt that to higher-end products, and when they try the market is slow to recognize changes in a brand, which discourages them from trying.

From what I hear from a friend that worked in laptop development at Dell and HP, most of the actual design is done by the Chinese companies that will eventually manufacture the hardware. American hardware companies have stripped themselves down to the point where they basically just specify and test outsourced designs. It's a system designed to produce commodity hardware at low prices, not innovative products.

The significant difference is that taxes are assessed on an impartial basis - usually a percentage of current market value. The classic problem with landlords is that tenants have no incentive to increase productivity when the landlord captures all of the gains by increasing rent. Even today, businesses often end up in situations where the landlord sees that they're doing well and jacks up the rent in the belief that moving to another location will be too disruptive. My municipal government can demand property tax, but it doesn't hike it every time I get a raise at work.

I like your analogy. People have been talking about a "Facebook Phone" for years now, but Home actually makes a lot more sense than trying to compete directly by forking Android or building their own hardware. It feels like one of those ideas that seems so obvious after the fact that you wonder how you never thought of it.

That was a popular theory until 2008, when the industry was harshly disabused. I think it held so long as gaming was still expanding into the mainstream, but since the Wii/360/PS3 came out console gaming, at least, has been a saturated market.

I wouldn't be surprised if it affected the timing of his announcement - get all the bad news out at once and wipe the slate clean - bit it's been clear for some time that R. was in trouble if EA's financial situation didn't turn around soon. At this point it's pretty much guaranteed that the next step will be either a sale or severe cuts, likely planned out over the next couple of months so that they can be announced when their next earnings report is due. R. may just not have wanted to play the axe man.

For a PC game, it's pretty good. Not blowing the doors off, but multiple times what a typical multiplatform PC port would do.

I really doubt Simcity has anything to do with it. The real problem is that EA's stock took a big hit in '08, and has been stagnant since. Many of R's big initiatives, like the new-IP push, the studio acquisitions, and TOR have not paid dividends. Frankly, I'm surprised that he's lasted this long.

I'm pretty sure that 90% of the books published by O'Reilly and the like are written by consultants as self-promotion, with no expectation that they'll provide a return on their own. Presumably O'Reilly has adapted to take advantage of this fact.

I'm immediately skeptical of anything from Forbes these days. They have about as much publisher credibility as Tumblr.

I don't see what advantages Dell hopes to gain by going private. Dell has always been a one-trick pony: reduce the cost of PCs and servers by eliminating retail operations and manufacturing to-order or overseas. Everyone caught up to Dell a decade ago. Their problem today is that they provide nothing distinctive and occupy a stagnant market niche. Are they planning some sort of outrageously-expensive pivot to Apple-style consumer electronics or a Nokia-style desperation move to pin all their hopes on Microsoft's mobile platforms?