Comment by iconara

If they keep predicting that, eventually they’ll be right!

(It’s hard to harvest more power from a star than a Dyson sphere is capable of)

Those 2 charts are amazing! At least the Itanium people adjusted their curves downward over time, looks like the IEA just carried on regardless!

> At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no one could afford to move anything except by ox cart.

Just for some rough math here - I’m currently paying around $1.20/L for gas, and crude oil cost is roughly half of that, so if crude went up by 6x, I’d be looking at $5/L for gas. Gas is currently about 20% of my per-km cost of driving, so that price increase at the pump would increase my per-km cost by about 60%.

FWIW that’s roughly the same per-km cost increase that people have voluntarily taken on over the past decade in North America by buying more expensive cars.

(Though this does apply to personal transportation only, the math on e.g. transport trucks is different)

I think Bob Colwell's account is the clearest short synopsis.

https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf

'And I finally put my hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said, wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did 30 lines of code”. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let’s move on".'

I had heard that it wasn't suppression as much as just not making it a thing at all, and that AMD used the opportunity to extend x86 to 64-bit, and Intel was essentially forced to follow suit to avoid losing more of the market. It also explains why the shorthand "amd64" is used; Intel didn't actually design x86_64 itself.

I worked as a Sales Consultant for AT&T wireless during this period. They really did do a great job training the employees. We attended day long trainings and we were each given windows phones as our work phones. I loved my Samsung and Nokia Windows phones and was quite knowledgeable. The issue was that we were commissioned-based employees. What do you think sales people pushed: the iPhone with an entire wall of accessories or the Windows phone with two cases? Employees needed to have their commission structure altered to benefit significantly more from each windows phone sale if this was ever to succeed. This is why iPhone competitors failed initially, the sales people took the path of least resistance and more money, just like most would.

While I agree that Windows phone was actually quite nice, I wish they didn't have to kill Meego to make it by planting a mole CEO at Nokia.

If you think Windows phone was great you should have seen the Nokia N9. Still one of the best phones I ever owned.

Glad to hear this sentiment, even all these years later. We got there finally, we really did. But oh my, was it a journey. The effort (and investment ms put in) moving mobile computing/devices forward during that time is (IMO) an under song but major part of the work required to get to the modern day cell phone/embedded device.

(I worked at ms starting during ppc/tpc era through wm)

This made some memories pop. I was on the camera and photo app team. I was not an integral part at all. I think most of my code never made it into the app because being part of that org was a shocking experience. I came from building web apps in an org that got shut down to writing mobile apps that used the Windows build system. My psyche was not prepared.

But I remember I worked with 2 of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with - guy named Mike and guy named Adam. To this day I miss working with them.

The only Windows Phone people I know either worked for Microsoft, or were Microsoft superfans. (And the one friend who liked to just be a contrarian - this time he was right, but he's usually wrong)

They shot themselves in the foot right out the gate by trying to copy Apple's $99 annual fee for developers to publish their apps. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for Windows Phone quickly disappeared when they added that requirement. When they finally figured out it wasn't going to be a new revenue stream, they reduced it for a while instead of eliminating it. When they finally realized just how badly they had messed up and removed all the fees, most developers had already moved on and never gave Windows Phone another look.

It reminds me of the failure of Windows Home Server. It was removed from MSDN because the product manager said developers needed to buy a copy of it if they wanted to develop extensions and products for Home Server. Very few bothered. However many dozen licenses the policy lead to being purchased was dwarfed by the failure of the product to gain market share. Obviously that wasn't only due to alienating developers but it certainly was part of it.

Up until 2011 I was still using one of those Samsung phones with the slide out keyboard, maybe an Intensity II or something. My first smartphone was a Windows phone, an HTC Titan. I really liked the phone and the OS - I thought it was very well done. The only problem: the app store was complete shit. There were barely any apps and the ones that were there were trash barely discernible from malware.

After about a year I bought a Nexus 4 instead.

That was Windows Mobile, which was the end of the line of the old Windows embedded line vs Windows Phone, the brand new OS made for modern (at the time) smartphones.

WP7 was the first of the new OS

I’d say for English too. I don’t know about non-standard keyboards, but WP swiping was better than both the stock iOS keyboard and gboard.

You don't have to be snarky. If you actually have something to say, just say it so people can understand what you're even talking about.

The luxury watch was released in April 2015. The cheaper stainless steel model wasn't released until the fall event a few months later.

But I was talking about branding and marketing; sorry if that wasn't clear. At release the Hermes and "Edition" models were the story. The Apple Watch was the next fashion accessory. You couldn't even buy it at an Apple Store -- you could get fitted, but had to order it shipped to store. But the Hermes store next door had the expensive models in stock.

It wasn't until 2016 that Apple partnered with Nike and changed their branding for the watch to be about health and fitness.

That comports with my memory. I have no idea what Apple's internal sales projections were. But there was a ton of nerd and tech press criticism to the effect that young people didn't wear watches any longer so obviously this was a stupid idea for a product.

Even if I'm not really sold for day-to-day wear because of the limited battery life, I do have one.

Entry level watches are available from China for €40, with everything but Maps. Huawei/Honor Magicwatch 2 e.g.

I got a Treo in 2006 mostly because I had a badly broken foot and needed an alternative to carrying a computer on some trips. Didn't get an iPhone until a 3GS or thereabouts in around 2010.

When I was a little kid I "jailbroke" my palm pre, and had all kinds of cool tweaks and apps loaded. I wish I could remember the name of this funny little MS-paint style RPG... WebOS was a great OS, shame what happened to it.

That seems like a reversal of cause and effect.

Indie developers were (and to an extent still are) pretty important on computers. People made (still make) a living selling software for double-digit dollars direct to the customer, and many of them were very well known.

The App Store model provoked a race to the bottom because everything was centralized, there were rules about how your app could be purchased, and pricing went all the way down to a dollar. The old model of try-before-you-buy didn't work. People wouldn't spend $20 sight-unseen, especially when surrounded by apps with a 99 cent price tag. It's not so much that people don't care about indie developers as that indie developers had a very hard time making it in a space that didn't allow indie-friendly approaches to selling software.

No surprise that such a thing ended up in a situation where high-quality software doesn't sell, and most of the revenue comes from effectively gambling.

We say all of this on top of a mountain of open source software. This isn't about market love of "indie developers." It's the basic software economy we've known and understood for decades now.

It was 30% commission for the time frame we are discussing and an investment in hardware tools and desktop software on top of all that. It used it's own proprietary system which required additional effort to adapt to and increased your workload if you wanted to release on multiple platforms.

So users don't get to use their own device unless a corporation can smell money in creating that software for them? What a valueless proposition given everything we know about the realities of open source.

You've fallen into the same trap. This is a computer. There's nothing magic about it. The lens you view this through is artificially constrained and bizarrely removed from common experience.

I think you're genuinely forgetting how starved people were for phone applications when these devices first came on the market.

Developers were absolutely willing to make the investment. Billions of devices were about to come online.

> We always knew that the software side of hp provides barely 10% of the revenue while the rest is printers.

Specifically, the rest is ink used in those printers. They pretty much give away the printers

Yeah all the fit and finish stuff was what I meant by build quality. Besides the stuff you mentioned, the back of the Touchpad was made of plastic and I was able to flex it by pushing on it, so it definitely didn't feel as premium as the iPad 2. Agreed that WebOS was fantastic from a software standpoint, the UI was years ahead of where iOS/Android were back then. Sadly, developer support dried up after a few years so my Touchpad spent the rest of its life flashed to Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

Apotheker is basically everything wrong with the EU non-startup tech scene today. Not him personally per se, but you see a lot of characters like him on a much more regular basis in EU companies than you will find in US companies.

These kinds of folks only seem to fail upwards in the EU, whereas in the US, they would have been laughed out.

This is well after the fact though, and it does sound like in this circumstance he was treated unfairly. I don’t begrudge him some annoyance/complaining now.

... and it is their job to actually find somebody to represent the agreed-on goals and make damn sure that the leadership will listen them. If you're as a manager / team leader whatnot alone in your skillset and trained nobody to represent you and your vision, you did a bad job of management.

Exactly! It is your responsibility, like it or not. That’s what the money’s for!