The plan to pay for ETFs to switch from other carriers does not seem to make much financial sense. For a monthly plan of $50, it would take T-Mobile many years to break even on this initial cost and it is not clear if they will be guaranteed to retain the subscriber for that time. Unless they again charge the equivalent of an ETF on their contract, something seems off here.
Their current deal is $50 for an "unlimited" plan that switches to EDGE after 500MB and $60 for a similar plan with a 2 GB limit (or 3 GB, can't remember which).
But I am not sure this is the big problem in this space.
Current delivery time = 1 day for last mile + >1 day for warehouse -> local area
This method reduces the last mile delivery time down to 30 mins but it is not clear how the second part would be optimized down. At least, without losing the value proposition of Amazon - giant centralized warehouses instead of local retail outlets.
You bring up a good point, which is what I keep wondering too - where do they go? Dropbox already has sync APIs [0] across both iOS and Android (and presumably desktop), which must be their big bet to get to the central cloud store that you mention.
The part that is lacking is the metadata layer for pics/audio etc which allows apps to read others files, but that could be an easy layer on top of this API.
Julie Larson-Green brought the Ribbon interface to Office and then to other parts of Windows. Her ability to bring change to something as stable as the Office UI and the Windows Explorer UI was seen as a good thing.
I agree there is a problem with the lack of knowledge, but I wouldn't assume that it is all regarding "shadowy private companies". A number of public privacy scares like the concern of Gmail reading people's email seem to fall into the same category.
Again, there are good and bad players on all sides, but my point was simply that ignoring reality and making a complete swing to no monetization for content seems to assume all players on one side are bad. A more open standard that allows clear knowledge is probably a better direction for Microsoft to pursue.
While it is reasonable to assume a user's intent, it is also reasonable to assume a content publisher's intent to monetize their content. An advertising-funded web is the reality of today, unless Microsoft is proposing a radical change in this model.
The concept of Do Not Track, despite the emotional appeal of the name, essentially seems to be a compromise between privacy and advertising, keeping the advertising-based model intact while also allowing the extremely privacy focused (minority set of) individuals to have things their way.
Turning DNT on by default is a hardline approach and violates the spirit of this compromise. Instead, there needs to be more effort to constructively work with content providers, privacy advocates and advertisers to come up with a more explicit protocol that satisfies everyone's interests.
From what I have heard from people who work in pharma companies in India, the main reasons drugs are cheaper when manufactured in India are:
- not much R&D costs to design new drugs (however they do spend on designing the manufacturing process)
- cheap labor for manufacturing, including a good supply of chemical engineers.
- environmental regulations for chemical manufacturing are stricter in Western countries.
The article also quotes that this has changed in the last 7 years and adds more subtlety to the issue.
"But in 2005, India brought its law in line with World Trade Organization (WTO) rules recognising 20-year patents, pushing up the prices of newly launched drugs.
Cipla, India’s fourth largest pharmaceutical company by sales, has been pressing the government to allow widespread use of “compulsory licences”, which are permitted under WTO rules.
The licences allow companies to make existing life-saving drugs to sell in countries where they are otherwise priced out of reach."
While product design is important, availability of a strong manufacturing supply chain is also important. India's role in pharma is similar to what China provides for regular manufacturing.
It isn't their fault alone. Lots of software has backward-compatibility breaking changes all the time. Maybe if all platforms ensured all existing applications worked correctly with every update, maybe by extraordinarily thorough testing or something.
Just to counter the "brilliance" part of your statement, there was an issue with the proximity sensor in iPhone 4 that took a couple of months to fix :)
I think this bug matches part of the issues people have with capacitive buttons - those buttons are prone to be active when they shouldn't causing mishits.
Also, in your method, instead of guessing where 6 was to hit right after unlocking, you could also just use the backspace on the key pad. So to type in 1234, you could type in
random key backspace random key backspace 1 2 3 4
I suspect too that there just might have been a fast link between the google and speedtest datacenters, maybe because google earlier rented part of the other dc. A 3 ms ping looks like it must be from a bay area dc to SFO. They should really do an avg of times/bw to other speedtest nodes in US.
I doubt if the majority of them do, but you are totally right, there is very high cell phone penetration in India. Cell phones with some basic software could help them a lot.
I do not follow - isn't it all the more amazing that poorly paid, uneducated workers without proper salaries are able to achieve this?
I would measure their performance by inserting random 'canary tiffins' over a period and measuring their loss percentage. You could also track some individual carriers and get a similar measure to combine into the previous metric.