gamble

GoPro 2 was rock-solid, but 3 and 4 had huge quality problems. Terrible customer service as well. I used to like GoPro, but since the GoPro 2 they've completely soured me. I don't know if the GoPro 5 is any better, but the Amazon reviews are terrible.

A company I was working for was acquired and the first thing the new management said in the initial meeting was that they had no interest in owning us. They were only acquiring the company because another office had government contracts they wanted. Also, our equity was worthless now. But don't worry, because no one is getting fired! (Instead everyone resigned within a few months)

You realize that these are exactly the same arguments that were brought up to argue against the details revealed in these documents, so perhaps appeals to authority and use of the words 'conspiracy theories' may be taken with a few more grains of salt. NSA backdoors have been alleged for decades now, and the response is always that they're a 'conspiracy theory'.

Even without naming the companies involved, it's very hard to imagine they are inserting backdoors in less-valued products while somehow missing the crown jewels of Windows and TPM.

Now we know why Congress thought it was a realistic risk - they were already doing it to China.

The streaming-music business reminds me of Netflix in its early days, before movie studios became worried that it was cannibalizing rental/VOD revenue for new releases. There are a certain group of fans who are willing to pay $10-20 per album for access to music the moment it's released. With Spotify, those fans are treated like any other stream even though they're willing to pay more. It's inefficient pricing, except from Spotify's perspective as they're able to use immediate access to new release music as a lure for subscribers. So really, you can look at Spotify as capturing that demand and converting it into free advertising for themselves. I don't see that as sustainable in the long run. Some artists are already holding back new releases from streaming services. Like Netflix, I think that in the future you will see few new releases from popular artists until they've been available through premium services long enough to capture demand from hardcore fans.

Spotify treats all songs as if they have equal value, but that's obviously not true from the listener's perspective. For any given person, there are going to be some songs that they're willing to pay a premium to hear, and some that they'll only listen to if it's free. Spotify is a good deal for the latter case, but not if it offers a discounted version of the former to people who could pay for it. Just because Spotify counts every stream as a single interchangeable unit of value doesn't mean that listeners value every stream equally.

Because radio is not a substitute for recorded music. The inability to choose what you're listening to was always the stick that compelled listeners to purchase a recording. If you have Spotify, there is no reason to ever purchase that music in a download store.

What? Bose has long been notoriously low-quality for the price. They were the Beats by Dr. Dre of the 1980s, not Apple.

I can't see many developers putting the time to offload calculations when they'd have to make the game work seamlessly with varying levels of latency or the servers becoming unavailable. Just look at how difficult it has been for games to utilize a handful of CPU cores. Microsoft's claims about the cloud remind me of ten years ago, when the .net label was being applied to everything they made and all software was somehow going to be delivered as web services. Plus I doubt MS is offering cloud server time to developers for free. Every service they provide to devs comes at a cost.

I'm sure the app will last about as long as Sparrow.

Because the technology industry depends on a lot of idealistic young workers putting in plenty of unpaid overtime, and no one ever motivated that commitment with a call to increase shareholder returns by 17%.

From what I can tell buying a physical disk gives you an activation key that you apply to your console. Any profile on your console can play that game. If you bring the disk to another console and use your profile, you can also play the game. If you try to use the game on another console and profile, you either have to buy another copy or transfer the license from your profile to theirs.

That's the biggest fail from the announcement. Microsoft mentioned a number of things that are guaranteed to provoke gamers, like used game fees and always-on DRM, then refused to clarify any of them. Some reporters present got flat refusals to answer questions while others were given different answers depending on who they talked to.