loire280

Actually, Nintendo dropped that strategy with the most recent console generation (Wii) and look to be doing the same thing with the 3DS (their new portable). Wii hardware was sold at a profit from day 1. They were the underdog compared to Sony and Microsoft, who can subsidize their console businesses with money from their more profitable core businesses.

http://www.infendo.com/nintendo-3ds-wont-be-sold-at-a-loss-s...

The tradeoff they made was using significantly cheaper, lower-performance hardware, skipping HD and leaning on the uniqueness of the motion control tech to move units. It proved to be brilliant, and while Sony and Microsoft's console business struggled for years, Nintendo's been raking in the profits.

Unfortunately, the Nooks have tried to compete on hardware features and don't have any disruptive technology equivalent to the motion controls. The Kindle is the simplest, cheapest ebook reader out there, so if their competitors want to do a loss-leader strategy, they'll need a bigger subsidy than Amazon.

If it's an app that is supposed to be useful, it may very likely be worth $15 to you. A game that you enjoy for a few hours has already beaten a movie rental in value. Most users have, on average, gotten more than their money's worth on their app purchases.

Why will a huge portion of people not upgrade from XP? It's been at long time since you could buy a computer with it preinstalled (unless you specifically ask for it). Hardware attrition, upgrade cycles, and hopefully the end of the global recession should clear out those machines.

Any computer that came with XP preinstalled that is still around 15 years later is going to be so slow that an outdated browser is going to be the least of its worries.

Perpetual public beta is a problem, but there's a huge difference between a public beta from a huge corporation and a small private beta from a startup. I think it's pretty easy to judge based on company size, service momentum, number of competitors, etc. if a service is likely to last.

Now that Flash is baked into Chrome, if you only use Chrome you never have to worry about Flash updates. Last time a new version was announced, I was surprised to find it had already been automatically updated for me.

My main problem with multitasking on iOS is that there isn't a good startup service implementation -- so for example if I restart my phone and don't open Google Voice at least once, I won't get push messages from it.

However, one of the reasons the platform performs well (esp. with battery life) is that the OS can kill a background process at will, and apps expect that and are usually designed to handle that gracefully. Hopefully there's more work coming to make this less of a trade off, especially as new phone versions have more resources.

For mass adoption, yes.

However, with the advent of cheap VPS hosting, most of the people willing to try a new language/framework before it hits Drupal/Django/Rails momentum are perfectly capable of deploying sites. Everybody has a VPS nowadays, right?

Having a Heroku-equivalent or being built into shared hosting doesn't happen until you're nearly to critical mass.

I suspect most people never noticed the addition of multitasking in iOS. Suddenly Pandora didn't stop playing when they checked a mail message and their apps reopened much faster, but they probably credited/blamed the app developers for that. I wonder what percentage of users don't even know about the double-click-home menu.

I think multitasking UIs on touch devices (where apps are usually 100% of the screen) are more confusing for users than just going back to the icon on the home screen. Users get that more than one thing is running at a time in a windowed environment -- you can see both of them at the same time if you position your windows properly. I'm not sure they bring that understanding along when they pick up a tablet.

Groupon has had pretty huge revenue growth and is currently bringing in some hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue.

Skepticism about the ability to maintain that growth rate, and the suspicion of many (especially here) that they're burning bridges with the companies they work with put a high valuation in doubt, but that's a matter of opinion at this point. Evidence that Groupon is having any trouble finding partners to offer coupons is so far anecdotal.

I never thought there'd be this much money in coupons, but so far it looks like it's a great business model. It wouldn't shock me if those valuations were true.

O'Reilly sells DRM-free ebooks through their store, so they're unaffected. You load the ebooks onto the iPad using the usual transfer methods for media.

It's one of the nice side-effects of selling DRM-free books: they don't need an app that has the DRM baked-in -- you can use iBooks or any third-party reader.

I think the grandparent was talking about home use.

Most of the time, anyone you see with a laptop in public is writing, coding, or some other type of "work" -- text-entry heavy activities that a device with a real keyboard will always be better for.

When I'm out, my phone is good enough for casual browsing, reading a few pages of my Kindle book while I'm waiting for something, or watching a YouTube video someone linked from Twitter. At home, picking up the tablet for a few minutes is much less hassle than going to my desk or opening up my laptop. Instead of buying a laptop for casual leisure computing, I imagine a lot of people opting for a tablet, with a cheap desktop relegated to the study for paying bills and catching up on work.

Just use a hosts file that redirects known ad sites to 127.0.0.1 if you're worried about ads. It blocks everything, though occasionally it breaks things or causes weird behavior (like silent, blank ad pages on the NPR player).

Yes, Photoshop knowledge is one of the major gaps in my toolset. I'm a little ashamed that I have to go to a designer for basic interface elements.

There's still plenty of TWO letter domains out there. I registered oc.tl with gandi.net a few weeks ago.

While better specs certainly never hurt, I've never heard any iPad users complain processing power or RAM. iOS does memory management seamlessly (if I didn't understand how it worked, I probably wouldn't even notice it) and the interface is notably responsive.

I'm sure the new version will have a spec bump. Whatever that ends up meaning (dual core, faster, more RAM), it will continue to be plenty.

Since Redis keeps the dataset in RAM, it offers performance in the same class as memcached -- though memcached is significantly faster. There's probably a way to run it without the persistence (or just decrease the snapshot frequency), though you could just set it up to clear the tables when the application restarts and not worry about it. If you're looking for a more "modern" replacement, it's a good choice.

That's an unfortunate side-effect of the Mac app store. It's too bad, because functional demos was one of the nice things about the Mac software ecosystem.

I hope demos are a feature they're working on.

If your goal is saving money, that's true.

However, much of Groupon's appeal is the incentive to try new restaurants or do new things. The sushi place around the corner may be good, but you're probably not going to remember your nth visit.

I think the revolutionary effect you are seeing can be better attributed to the fact that these populations have access to the Internet, especially through mobile phone. These people aren't leveraging the unique features of social media (the web of interpersonal relationships) so much as they are leveraging the ability to quickly get text, pictures, and video out of the country and onto servers hosted in countries sympathetic to the protestors. It just happens that Twitter and Facebook are currently the fastest ways to get something published and seen.

In July they announced that ebook sales had outpaced hardcover sales, so while sales probably haven't exceeded paperback + hardcover sales, it's certainly on pace to do so soon.

In the article they say that paperback sales are still growing. It almost looks like ebooks are increasing the overall demand for books and are cannibalizing print books less than expected -- though without the actual sales data we can't be sure. Of course, the brick-and-mortar book stores have been closing a lot of stores recently, which is another explanation for continuing increased paperback demand.

"Further, H.264 was a complete non-starter for Mozilla, and Firefox holds nearly 20% of the market. Using H.264 for HTML5 <video> would have guaranteed market segmentation and hurt the chances of a truly open future"

Except Internet Explorer will continue to be the highest-marketshare browser for the foreseeable future, and IE9 won't ship with VP8 (though you can install a codec for it, I doubt regular people will). It does ship with H.264.

Maybe Microsoft can be convinced to ship VP8/WebM in IE.

Then Sony's console business would go bankrupt?

But seriously, except for scientific computing, the PS3 was a terrible Linux system, especially for the price. Is this really about restoring functionality, or is it just punishment?

The marketing value of a supercomputer built from your company's product is surely worth the loss of subsidy. Each time one of them is built, it invariably results in a bunch of news stories. This helps reinforce the PS3's reputation as the most powerful modern console hardware.

They're probably enabling it in some cases -- the US military has built clusters with thousands of PS3s. I doubt they procured those through Best Buy.

Apple makes their money from hardware -- software sales are just icing on the cake. Sony, however, has to take piracy threats (since even well-intentioned cracking will lead to piracy) very seriously because they make all of their money from software sales.

Sony's ineffectual attempts to lock down the PSP (starting with the last-minute homebrew policy reversal) probably contributed to the firmware hacking community's fervor. However, after the rampant piracy on the PSP platform, I think Sony is going to take any firmware hacks very seriously. Gamers have proven to be perfectly willing to pirate games if given the opportunity.

I wonder if it means anything legally that (at least for the initial period of the console's life) Sony was selling the device for less than cost with the expectation that they would make up the difference with game sales.

I think there is some moral greyness to buying an essentially subsidized console with no intention to buy games -- though now that they probably make a profit on the hardware, that point is moot.

Credit cards are going to be the best form of payment for vendors for another decade.

Even if next year all smartphones have NFC built-in, it will take many more years before there are enough users with NFC to make it worth supporting for a small vendor. Besides, just having the capability doesn't mean a user has created an account -- and connecting to your cell phone bill doesn't count.

AT&T's reception problems seem to be mostly concentrated in a few large cities -- most notably NY and SV/San Fransisco.

I'm a longtime AT&T customer and recent iPhone owner. I've lived in Milwaukee and Phoenix, and their reception is on par with the other carriers in those cities. NY and SV are, in my opinion, the last places you'd want poor service (because it will be discussed nationwide), but I don't think that their reception is so terrible generally nationwide.

I agree that their customer service is pretty lackluster -- then again, I've heard plenty of Verizon customer service horror stories.

(Please chime if you're in another city and have unusual reception woes, my limited experience is not necessarily representative)

My 12 year old brother and all of his friends use Facebook already. Many of them use the mobile site on their iPod touches.

(incidentally, the iPod touch is a great way for Apple to build a userbase among the young)

I get a lot of emails from recruiters who obviously have no idea that Java and Javascript are different languages. I wonder if many of those postings should have said "Javascript" instead.

Anyone who says I'm a "strong candidate" for a big-corp Java job requiring 6+ years of Java experience after looking at my resume is very confused and won't be getting a call.