gamble

13 ms·

91.
by gamble 15y ago
Sounds a lot like the medical data startup I joined ten years ago. We were so, so painfully naive about the realities of medical software. Medical records are a trivial technical problem, but an almost insurmountable political and regulator
92.
by gamble 15y ago
The last time I did some reading into the limits of Moore's Law, about four years ago, the industry consensus was that ~12nm would be the practical limit for traditional CMOS scaling. It's interesting to see evidence that prediction does ap
93.
by gamble 15y ago
As they should. Print newspapers made their money by exploiting the high barrier to entry in the publishing industry to create local advertising monopolies. They compete in a much larger market for online advertising, and very few local pap
94.
by gamble 15y ago
High-DPI displays have a lower pixel aperture ratio than traditional displays, so the backlight needs to be brighter to give the same perceived brightness. Supposedly the new iPad retina display uses twice as many backlighting elements as t
95.
by gamble 15y ago
Probably the best evidence for your argument is the fact that he apparently negotiated a hand-shuffled shoe. I'm amazed anyone would agree to it, since it's pretty much a giant warning sign that the guy is planning to exploit poor shuffles.
96.
The Man Who Broke Atlantic City(theatlantic.com)
3 points by gamble 15y ago|1 comments
97.
by gamble 15y ago
DRM is what provides the barrier against switching between platforms. I have around 200 Kindle books. If I wanted to switch to another platform, I'd either have to carry two e-readers or lose access to a big chunk of my library. It also mak
98.
by gamble 15y ago
The underlying problem with the ebook market is the way publishers mandate the use of DRM. Under the old model, Amazon was free to sell ebooks under cost, with the goal of quickly establishing a Kindle monopoly and placing itself in a negot
99.
by gamble 15y ago
Except that it is now a conservative issue. There used to be bipartisan consensus among politicians and the public that global warming was a real phenomenon. Then Kyoto asked people to do something about it, and denial became an article o
100.
by gamble 15y ago
This is technically true, but it happens that clock speeds and MIPs have also increased at a geometric rate over long periods of time. It's a bit harder to characterize because processor architecture changes have a discontinuous effect, but
101.
by gamble 15y ago
The PC gaming market is almost entirely multiplayer games, console ports, republished older releases, flash games, and independent games sold through Steam. Almost no one is investing significant budgets in easily pirated, single-player PC
102.
by gamble 15y ago
Yes, absolutely. The fact that PC sales are normally very low (around a tenth) of console sales for the same title and games without multiplayer are pirated at a much higher rate than multiplayer games is common knowledge and entirely uncon
103.
by gamble 15y ago
Speaking from experience, piracy has a very strong influence on how much money video game companies are willing to spend on development. Piracy is the reason that PC gamers have to put up with games that are primarily designed for consoles,
104.
by gamble 15y ago
That's standard practice in education. It's very hard to sell new products in that market, and customers rarely switch products regardless of how badly they're treated. Acquisitions are the only way to grow quickly. Every large company serv
105.
by gamble 15y ago
If HBO wasn't hopelessly compromised by their dependence on cable networks, the smart move would be for them to use their proprietary content as the lure for a full-fledged competitor to Netflix streaming, similar to the way that Valve used
106.
by gamble 15y ago
I don't really see that BB is inevitably headed for bankruptcy. They've had some bad financial results lately and some embarrassing service problems, but they still have a near-monopoly on retail electronics. Their larger problem is a poor
107.
by gamble 15y ago
I used to work for a highly sales-focused software company (6-7 figure licenses, year-long sales cycles) with some very good salesmen. It was an eye-opening experience. The really good salesmen were no more ethical than a used-car salesman,
108.
by gamble 15y ago
I think it would have been hard to get around the fact that Kodak was based on selling consumables like film and paper that digital photography simply doesn't require. Even the point-and-shoot camera business is disappearing these days, or
109.
by gamble 15y ago
It's a good philosophy to start from, but you can't have a career in sales without eventually being forced to push products that no reasonable person would believe in. Perhaps I've been soured by the particular salespeople I've worked with,
110.
by gamble 15y ago
The fundamental reason companies use commissions is because it shifts risk from the company to the employee. Companies that depend on salespeople tend to scale up with the number of feet you have on the ground. If you pay salaries, every em
111.
by gamble 15y ago
Current 3D technology results in a dramatic loss of picture quality. In theory they're supposed to compensate for the brightness reduction by cranking up the projector, but I've yet to see a 3D film that wasn't dramatically murkier than the
112.
by gamble 15y ago
Online petitions exist to harvest email addresses so they can hit you up for donations and volunteering during the campaign. They're an easy way for campaign staff to build a mailing list of people politically engaged enough to be worth spa
113.
by gamble 15y ago
Apple's delays in PR announcements normally seem like they're the result of not wanting to say anything until they have something substantive to say. They're really not big on "we know it's a problem, hang tight..." announcements. In this c
114.
by gamble 15y ago
That Brainiac video was faked. They didn't get the violent reaction they were looking for from caesium, so they just rigged up a bomb in the bathtub. http://www.badscience.net/2006/07/brainiac-fake-experiments-...
115.
by gamble 15y ago
Judging by the deplorable quality of the editing and cover illustrations on many Kindle books, I question whether the traditional publishers are adding anything of value. Oftentimes it's obvious that the cover illustration was tossed togeth
116.
by gamble 15y ago
There are a lot of books that are only available through piracy. You can download 1 GB torrents containing more books than anyone will ever read in a year, and yet there are still major books like Dune that aren't available to Kindle users.
117.
by gamble 15y ago
The essence of EA's management style is that they're content to leave studios on their own, so long as the studio is consistently laying golden eggs. When that studio experiences a significant failure (when, not if) EA corporate has no qual
118.
by gamble 15y ago
I'm an EA spouse. The culture depends very strongly on the particular studio. It's mainly the old studios like Redwood Shores and Tiburon that have the really bad reputations, though they have gotten a bit better. I'd say it's partly the la
119.
by gamble 15y ago
They aren't intentionally being pricks; they just don't care. Caring costs too much. It's cheaper to have an unresponsive automated customer service system that lets a certain percentage of customers suffering from edge cases fall through t
120.
by gamble 15y ago
I was agog when I downloaded the LaTeX binary install for my new Mac a few years ago and discovered how massive it was. LaTeX is almost as big as the entire operating system disk! What on earth is in there?

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