During the Keynotes when Steve Jobs would show off the computers they'd run their Photoshop or really large Excel file tests to show just powerful their chips were. If I remember right, all of those tests were highly selective. For most regular computing tasks, I felt like PC's were faster.
In marketing, if you're in second place it doesn't hurt many times to attack first place. In the consumers minds, you're putting yourself on similar footing to the first place contender and then getting to highlight specific differences that make whatever case you want.
It many not be elegant but Amazon's promotions and Samsung's recent phone ads do illustrate differences between the products. They may not be the most important differences to a lot of people but the burden is on Apple to show that, not on competitors to follow a vague sense of fairness.
You are absolutely correct. Apple has time and time again poked fun at, snubbed nose at, or just plain put down competitors devices that they considered "sucky". When it comes to advertising, there is no notion of fair. I say this as someone who only has Apple electronics in the house. And frankly, who didn't think the Mac & PC commercials weren't a little funny?
I don't particularly take offense at the Amazon ad. When it comes down to it, people will only care about the Kindle for the price. It's already shown to be slow and Amazon has some weird data collection/spying things that have popped up with Silk (although most people will not care about this). Apple will never beat anyone on price and they don't care about this.
If you care about how things are made, the quality of the OS, etc (the usual thing's Apple sells products on), then the extra $100+ for the market leader won't be an issue. Again, Apple knows this and they consistently state that they're not interested in the bottom of the barrel. And anyways, Apple can't win in the low price points, Android has that market wrapped up.
So, I think it's good that Amazon has this. They've taken a page outta Apple's play book. And if anything, all this pressure might force Apple to drop to $299. They've reduced prices before, but somehow, at this point in time with their dominance, I doubt they will. They have enough cash in the bank to allow the Mini to flop if it has to...
I also had similar results. On the searches where I chose something I knew about to search for, I always chose Google's results. On the one example where I chose a suggested example (Halloween Costumes) I chose Bing. My other searches were for a specific camera, the type of a battery used in an old film camera, a historic sail boat designer and a Rails method.
The two thoughts I had were: 1) Have the suggested examples been prescreened to favor Bing? 2) Do the Bing results favor a shallower explorations of topics while Google's favor more in depth ones?
Goldman Sachs statement isn't that surprising when you think about it from the perspective of countries and country size. Of the major oil producing countries, the only one larger than the U.S. is Russia (Canada's reserves are mostly natural gas). In addition to this midwest boom, the U.S. also has large reserves in Alaska and in Gulf Coast and it makes sense to deploy newer more expensive technologies to extract new oil reserves because the consumption is happening so close to the source and a stable political environment makes it worthwhile to make long term investments. Also, the difference is not as big as I first thought it was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produc....
On the pricing, I'm speculating a bit but I don't think the refineries issue is that major an issue for gas pricing. If you remember, during Hurricane Katrina, a number of refineries were shut down or damaged and prices did bump up a bit, but not dramatically so. I think the biggest factor is there's a lot more demand for oil on the world market. We typically hear about the growing number of cars in China and India as people's income rises and car costs drop but the same is happening all over the world. This week the BBC had a good article on the 180km traffic jams in Sao Paulo, Brazil. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19660765.
Oil is a global commodity and is fairly mobile so a demand increase in one part of the world raises prices everywhere. A sustained increase in demand all over the world raises prices a lot more.
I remember reading (source:?) that the US has had a (unofficial) policy since the 60s that they will import and buy oil internationally rather than rush to exploit internal oil reserves. The intention is to keep some in reserve for when the rest of the world runs out of oil.
How true it is, and how well US has kept to that I do not know, but it does speak of a degree of control and strategy one does not normally associate with governments.
Maybe but it means a coherent focused government policy applying for decades controlling sone of the most rapacious and powerful industry interests known.
If it's a smackdown between a n other us administration and the whole oil industry I would not bet on the politicians needeing reelection
If we're talking oil reserves, not production, then according to Wikipedia, Canada has the 3rd largest proven oil reserves in the world at 175,200,000,000 barrels. The U.S. is 13th with 20,682,000,000 barrels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oil...
I had forgotten about Canada's oil supplies. If I remember right, most of it's located in oil sands in Alberta. Extracting it and transporting it used to be more expensive than it was worth but they're doing more with chemical extraction techniques to pull out the oil. From what I've read, it left some pretty serious scars on the environment.
Also, looking back at the original article, I really wonder whether there's any production or efficiency benefit to what these 3rd party companies are doing to monitor levels. I kind of have the impression that they're feeding the real time demand of commodity markets and traders. Maybe there's something with pricing efficiency, but does that really make a difference outside of the commodity markets?
Before touch was a major major interface, Nik Software had developed an editing interface that was surprisingly good on touch devices. You essentially click a point on a photo and set the size of the area for edits to be applied to. The software will figure out regions in the photo similar to what you clicked on and then apply the edits. Creating SnapSeed on iOS really proved that the interface was perfectly suited to touch.
You can see the interface in action on their website. Load the following link (http://www.niksoftware.com/colorefexpro/usa/index.php?view=h...) and then click on "Working with control points". It's in an embedded flash player so I can't give a direct link.
Absolutely. I'm a non-programmer that had been working on picking up Rails a number of times without a good background in Ruby. Each time I'd run into one issue or another and not have enough knowledge to push past it.
I've put in a bit of time in Ruby and it's opened up Rails (and programming in general) for me more than I thought it would. The biggest advantage, besides just general programming, is reading other people's code and documentation. Recently, I've been exploring i18n (internationalization) in Rails. By going into time_ago_in_words helper, I was led to the distance_of_time_in_words helper and it's source code (https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/bd8a9701c27b4261e9d8dd84...). By understanding enough ruby, the Rails code became a wonderful source of documentation.
