Re: Sorry, is it just me ?
Author Matthew JC Powell
Matt JCP..
Can you squint at pronunciation?
815 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2010
is having to pay TSMC to make their GPUs, isn't a great sign.
Nor their just released and homegrown generation of x86, being almost indistinguishable from their last.
Still, got to be worth a punt on their currently collapsed share price - they're on the ropes and if this doesn't help bump them out of their decades-long-complacency, nothing will.
Can't help but feel that the type of people available for a 9 month secondment, might skew towards those from groups wanting to extract money from government.
Even putting aside the cynicism, experts in a field make money from the field - if there's not a conflict, then maybe not the right expert.
Seems a little odd that "employing people with domain expertise and separating from those without" wasn't considered.. seeing as it's how most jobs work.
You don't even have to use an alternative market place - nothing stopping you sticking your APK on your website (or even email it to your users).
They might have to click through a couple of warnings - but absolutely no reason you'd have to pay anybody else to distribute your Android app.
Similar to PC where you might choose to give Valve a heft % for them to host it on Steam and enable you to use their services - but entirely optional.
"Buffett and Co. don't typically turn over stocks in a hurry, preferring shares with long term growth and revenue prospects."
"Unfortunately the stock jumped a third to a price we consider to be an over-valued, so with regret we have no option but to offload this over-priced stock for a gargantuan immediate profit"
Which are pretty much "We're going to use our money, to buy our own shares, solely to support the price"
Or "The quarter isn't looking good, so instead of investing to earn more money and raise the price by adding value - we'll just hand you our investment pot and worry about next quarter later"
Downfall: The Case Against Boeing - (on Netflix) is excellent for showing how this works out.
Bit like how it use to be buying stuff from amazon.
Your order would have a charge for the item you bought and another line charge for the price going to the shipping company to get it to you.
Similar to how your eyeball pays google a fraction of a cent for the search service and then your phone/internet bill pays a similarly small fraction for getting those results to you.
Amazon could beat down the courier prices to the bare minimum as there was competition between them - but in the end worked out it was cheaper to cut them all out for most deliveries and do it themselves.
Telcos hate being called dumb-pipes, but there's absolutely nobody other than themselves who wants to them to anything more.
Whole racks of CDs moved into that satisfyingly small (and annoyingly scratchable) little brick you could easily drop into your pocket and later drop into a little dock nestling on-top of a speaker. Latter was also maybe the 'death of the hifi in most homes'
iTunes (especially on my PC) was never perfect - but a quantum leap ahead of previous music management software.
Also allowed podcasts and audiobooks to really take off and sit alongside music.
Continuing my defence of the slighted, the Zune wasn't bad, but just that bit clunkier and late. Did do some interesting things around music subscriptions and sharing, whilst Apple was still wanting to just sell you CDs, but digitally.'
"I think I can speak for everyone that we're weary of product launches that not everyone can participate in,"
I'd be apoplectic - not just that it's a launch of something you can't buy and sell, but it's an announcement that you customers are best going elsewhere, through no fault of your own.
Providing ifixits guides with google's parts - gives a pretty damn good mechanism to let you repair your phone.
My guess is that repairing phones has never been a profit centre (even for apple with their battery swaps) - the fight within the coporations has been between planned obsolescence and buying the latest version.
Pendulum has been swinging back against this for numerous reasons - there's the right to repair lobby, there's the decreasing levels of progress between the yearly updates - and maybe more importantly the shift from making money from the hardware to the services that can be sold over it.
I like the idea that amazon has to deal with a unionized workforce.
Mainly as I like and want to use amazon, but I don't want that to be part of a system that legally has to grind down workers to legally appease their shareholders.
Where I think the tech-bros are missing a trick, is harnessing their customers as part of the justification.
Email me and give me a button to press, that lets me say I'm prepared to pay say 2% more to cover better benefits for their workers that fill the box and deliver it to my door.
Maybe IBM stands out as they had the history of being the "job for life, benevolent employer, in IT"
The name carries a lot of baggage with it - they were never really a dot.com darling, nor a bonus-shitting FANG today. But neither were they considered an off-shore-centred, body-shop.
They held the position of being the sensible, small-c conservative, back-bone of IT - makers of both mainframes and the thinkpad you wanted in your bag.
A partner that would outlive you the customer - a safe pair of hands.
My feeling is that all these stories about "IBM being dicks" are really just shorthand for "the old industry being dicks"
They're doing it for selfish reasons - but they perform a useful service 'outing' and 'punishing' illegal behaviour/fraud.
Of course it would be better if this was all handled by the regulators/governments, but knowing they're out there with their giant pockets, sniffing for blood in their water - well it's not going to make anybody behave worse, and that benefits us all.
Maybe what got overlooked isn't so much the game though - as is endlessly mentioned it's quite simple and could be knocked out by any competent dev and isn't even that original.
My thoughts:
1) It's the absolute antithesis of any recent game. No ads, you can only play it once a day, still no ads and not an f'in "best value gem pack" to buy.
Each day you have fun for a few minutes - and hope to see you again tomorrow.
2) The UI is slick. It gives me pleasure just interacting with it. The keyboard that auto-marks your burnt letters, even the feeling of commitment pressing enter gives (despite a lesser designer thinking it would be pointless as you've entered 5 letters, so "let's remove that extra click" - that click extra click makes it better)
3) Everybody gets the same word each day. I'm not sure if we have the oft-desired 'water-cooler comments' we used to back in the day. With everything being optimized and customized on every refresh, it gives you the opportunity to say "Don't you think that word today was a complete bastard?"
4) The game is for everybody - can't think of many games I'd happily point my grandmother to (Unless Raid:Shadow Legends had promised me a gem-pack and a 50% cooldown boost, if she spent $50 on Ork powder)
5) The ability to share your results/show-off, without spoiling the game or making you feel like a shill. This is the thing that I suspect drew most people in.
Not some cookie-loaded URL - you can literally just paste it into anything. People are intrigued, they click and happily go through my previous points and become 'one of us'
Really glad to see it's paid off for him and glad to see it's found a home that seems like a good fit.
My real point, if I had one, was that whilst Wordle was small and simple - it shows that's all you need if you're prepared to polish it until it shines.
I'm sure it was noticed that AMD's recent renaissance neatly aligns with the rise of their "technical CEO" in Lisa Su - I hope Gelsinger can do similar for Intel.
Being vertically integrated, Intel has a riskier path ahead - but with that risk comes the potential to reap greater rewards.
There seem to be some promising noises about their return to the discrete GPU market - currently an over-priced duopoly constrained by TSMC.
If they can nail that (or get close enough) and then crank out the wafers 'at cost' - they'll be untouchable as they can pick their retail price by just adjusting some internal budgeting to their desire to destroy their competition.
Maybe 5 years of crushing - before they decide to reappoint a bean-counter and the cycle will continue.
Historically we're had leading-edge manufacturing making goods to a higher and higher quality.
Then in parallel we the movement of production going off-shore, allowing us all to buy the high-end for less.
Last few years have shown us that the two progressions above have left holes on our manufacturing.
Whereas previously a skilled person with a machine lathe could have made your required legacy widget for a handsome markup, there are now holes. You could offer $50 for that $5 chip your car needs - but nobody can make it for you - they're now making $500 parts and don't feel the urge to answer your RFP.
The motor manfacurers (as an example) have now learnt that battering down suppliers on price doesn't work for high-investment parts, like it maybe previously did injection molding the plastic on a wing-mirror.
My guess is that this is a "one time" lesson - long term availability will be baked into contracts going foward - or like Tesla they'll design a product with replaceable components.
I had a cheap infrared thermometer that's got black rubber over-molding over yellow (looks like a DeWalt tool) - randomly picked it up a week ago and rubber stuck to my hand (consistency of a thick caramel). Didn't slowly deteriorate - was fine for years and now I can pull bits off it with my fingers.
Much older real DeWalt stuff like my drill - still absolutely fine.
No idea what the difference in the chemistry is - but there is one.
As an opposing/devil's advocate - you must remember the hell of a customer asking you which very expensive machine to buy based on some vague "transactions" and then a vague "number per second with some order of magnitude high/low random numbers".
Now you can ignore all that - customer can burn as much money as they like to get the performance that they want and you still have the option of re-writing the odd asinine query - but now you get to produce some gargantuan opex saving for your 30 minutes of work.
*small voice* - I'm quite enjoying it.
I've bought everything from VietNam onwards, although 1 and V only got a small amount of play.
I like the modern-ish periods and BF4 is still filling servers to this day.
I feel a lot of the criticisms out there are unfair. Hiking across a map is part of the game (and punishment for letting your squad die). I don't need a bazillion weapons and mods.
Now easier to get useful addons (no week of trying to snipe with ironsights to get a useful scope, while being picked of by those already with it etc).
Being able to swap from a set of gun mods in game is a great improvement.
Portal has the scope to be incredible.
Some stuff I'm ambivalent about, like the new class/specialists.
I like the flexibility - but it's now harder to at a glace work out what the people around you can do.
The special skills is fun (but clearly a mechanism to screw more money out of us later)
Some stuff I hate, but can be fixed. Big gap for me is the lack of tighter/smaller maps (and low number of maps in general in the main game), end of match stats.
The bugs - last patch managed to prevent you from looking left and right.. (until you deleted your local config, which forced you to sit through videos and intro-bot-mission again).
Some stuff I hate they're not going to fix (the f'in 'specialists' posing and catch-phrasing between rounds) - actually the general menu system is an unintuitive mess.
If you want to give it a go, signing up for a month of EA Play gives you 10 hours - which is enough to decide if it's for you.
*not* for the technology itself - but for the increasingly insane and ever more obviously ridiculous edge cases, such as this.
So.
You can plug your VR headet (you probably don't have) into this device (rather than the high-end PC you have if you did have a headset), and it can use the near non-existent, blocked by a leaf, mm5G to connect you to the *acutally* non-exsistent edge-GPU compute, to allow you to stream a VR experience that doesn't exist.
As a though experiment, imagine how much you'd pay per month/minute for the above - the number you're thinking of, isn't enough to make it nearly happen.
I'm old enough to remember the excitement of 3G video calls - which cost some ridiculouus price per minute and even once we'd both bought 'high-end phones' barely worked and were flakey-a-f cross-network.
But at least with 3G, there was a real sunny-day scenario demo that was 'real'
*nobody* wants their mobile operator to be anything over than a big dumb pipe, that gets faster and cheaper.
Also handy way to inflate the price of something obscure.
List it on a few different sites for an outrageous sum (maybe even fake a sale to yourself)- then offer it to sale to a third party at half the price. They then check what it's going for and think they're going to be able to sell it for a profit.
if you miss your revenue prediction you get a massive kicking, whilst if you exceed it you get a pat on the back and ability to award each other another bonus.
So everybody low-balls their forecasts, so the analysts ignore them. Instead they come up with a figure that they think you should be making and it's on this the market prices your shares.
Or looking at it another way, unless you miss your projections as often as you exceed them - your projections aren't accurate and are pointless.
Indeed.
If say the director is taken out for a golfing trip each year by Informatica, then he might even subconsciously want to ensure a relationship is maintained with them. Might not be handing them work, but maybe just asking whether they made the shortlist or were considered for RFPs
All brands want to have that full set of white-goods for your kitchen, but a whole lot of them just outsource to different manufacturers - this one'll do my microwave, this one by dishwasher, this one my fridge - and they're all branded to look the same.
And once you've opted out of manufacture, then managing spare parts is an over-head. Oh, and then the next year you might switch to a different manufacturer - front panel looks the same, but all the innards are now based an entirely different OEM pattern.
One plus side of this all though, is that a load of the spare parts are now interchangable and widely enough used for OEMs to provide pattern parts. Thing I'd find most useful is simply if all parts had a unique ID number on them - so when I'm squinting at the picture of a dishwasher pump that "works with Bosch and looks the same" - I know it's a drop in replacement to the broken one next to me.
I think manufacturers are finally understanding that making products made to last or be repaired is a good marketing point.
Currently looking to replace a fridge, so looking at Miele (as previous white-goods from have been faultless) - and was just looking at https://frame.work/ for my next laptop (although might follow them for a bit, before taking the plunge).
£1.99 a month for 50 pages (and I think you can roll 100 over between months) - and easily covers my occasional printing needs.
I know I could print pages cheaper using 3rd-party carts and a less draconian manufacturer - but it nicely shifts annoyances with one colour running out before the others, blocked nozzles etc onto HP.
I pay £24 a year - and I have one less thing to worry about.
From casual research, LED panels are now available which have a way lower power consumption than the traditional sodium grow-lamps.
Now I don't for one moment think criminals have 'gone green' (well not in that way) - but excessive, even if 'free', electricity consumption generates a lot of heat. A lot of heat needs to be disposed of - and lights up the building to IR cameras and requires venting which puts out that distinctive smell.
Also, whilst definitely not condoning theft of power - I'm always a little dubious of the legality of getting a search warrant for one suspicion and bagging the criminals for another crime entirely. I'd have thought in this case the difference between the observed heat radiation and paid for power would have been enough.