Disqus - Latest Comments for tpurves

Re: Report to Congress on the Navy’s Constellation, FF(X) Frigate Programs

tpurves — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:46:19 -0000

Look on the bright side. We now live in such unprecedented times, that a weaker united states navy probably actually makes the world a safer place...

Re: Apple’s ‘Integrated Supply Chain And Robust Pricing Power’ Puts It In A Much Better Position Than Rivals To Experience Stabilized Shipments; 12.9-Inch MacBook To Bolster Growth In 2026

tpurves — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:13:41 -0000

I am worried about this too. I am now thinking that the dream machine for local AI, won't really be practical until M6 or M7 and 2027 or 2028 models. Moore's Law is so going the wrong direction right now on memory. What we really need is for 128GB+ to be an affordable baseline config (and a couple more gens of GPU/NPU iteration) but that aspirational day seems to be slipping further and further away...

Re: Apple’s AI Advantage On Its Mac Cluster Now Under Threat

tpurves — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 13:27:03 -0000

Good thing for Apple, that they're RAM upgrades have always been outrageously overpriced. Now Apple memory prices might just look 'normal'.

Re: The value of zero-priced software

tpurves — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 15:35:45 -0000

You could read it as powerful competitive move to undercut Microsoft's primary business model (which is still per-machine OS and office licenses). Microsoft's model makes less and less sense in a cloud, multidevice and integrated product world. This is Apple trying to kick MSFT further into obsolescence and compete in a way that MSFT can't.

You could read this a competitive response to Google, who already offer free OSes and web-based productivity suite (google drive) with a constant stream of free upgrades. It's only a matter of time before Google's office suite and chrome book OS is widely-enough considered 'good enough' to start triggering bottom-up disruption. So you could say Apple had no choice but to give up revenue and has been forced to compete on Google's terms.

Lastly, from an ecosystem perspective you could look at the advantages and operational savings related to having all (or almost all) your users using the latest version of your stack. MSFT and Google ecosystems both suffer from heavy fragmentation due to many people stuck on old versions of OS/products. Apple is moving to a model where they can rapidly move users to the latest and greatest versions. This reduces their own support costs, their developers' costs and increases the value of the ecosystem in the eyes of developers.

Re: Steve Ballmer and The Innovator's Curse

tpurves — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 13:58:04 -0000

There is also a well accepted theory that managers (or people) can be "situationaly" smart. That people can have different comparative advantages depending on the situation. I think that you refereed to this yourself with respect to managers vs leaders.

At this point microsoft (and many disrupted companies) has filled itself with people and processes who may have been smartest in one historic context (say the 90s). But the only problem is that the 90s have been over for a while, and the enormous assets that they built in that era are finally starting to erode to the forces of an entirely new environment.

But context change. And should it be surprising that the same organizations (or organisms) that were absolutely best evolved for one environment are the very same ones most imperiled when transplanted to another?

Cactus plants look like very smart creatures in the desert. But even if they are super desert-smart, for that very same reason, it doesn't mean we'd expect them to flourish if suddenly transplanted to the boreal forest.

Maybe Balmer is just a cactus.

And if the whole tribe has recently decamped from the desert to the forest, maybe we don't bring the cactus with us.

Re: The State Valley Money in 2013 – Liveblogging from START SF

tpurves — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 16:45:27 -0000

Post. Blog post.

what are we calling blog posts blogs now, we're not savages.

Re: Haswell Crystal Well has L4 cache for iGPU

tpurves — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:31:12 -0000

Sounds like the decline/slowness in PC sales has left Intel with more spare wafer area than they know what to do with.

Re: So long, break-even

tpurves — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:03:04 -0000

I am surprised how much revenue and growth iTunes is still seeing in music sales. All of that is up for disruption by the likes of Spotify and rdio. And I'm more surprised that those services aren't already taking a bigger bite out of iTunes sales.

As a long time rdio user, I can't imagine going back to the poorer experience and much higher prices of iTunes music ecosystem. All the young people I meet these days (in the US anyway) like me have switched wholesale from itunes to cloud-based music services.

Re: Tom’s Best of 2012 Indie Mix

tpurves — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:24:13 -0000

enjoy!

Re: Tom’s Best of 2012 Indie Mix

tpurves — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:24:04 -0000

doh I know. I should have added Stars. Funny enough that shot was taken at a Stars show (Diamond Rings were opening). Maybe it's just not the same with them any more. I did though have a funny nostalgic experience with the Stars and amazon.com the other day (they keep a *really* long history of your CD purchases it turns out. But that story could be worth a post on its own.

Re: AT&T talks about its disaster recovery strategy during Hurricane Sandy

tpurves — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:49:36 -0000

What a surprise. Only a company like AT&T could so easily say "Look there was a giant hurricane, and hardly any of our customers noticed any difference in our service!"

Re: I’ve just about had it with QR codes

tpurves — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 13:55:30 -0000

that's a great idea!

Re: John Cale's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

tpurves — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 01:00:15 -0000

Rufus Wainright's is the best. In general there are far too many covers but song itself is genius. Leave it to Cohen to think about love, biblical allegory and dirty sex all at the same time.

Re: A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 15 | GeekDad | Wired.com

tpurves — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 02:44:26 -0000

I believe that you could also be further east, that if you kept going through China the trains change gage again once it crosses in to North Korea.

Re: Circle overload and the trouble with Google+

tpurves — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:38:48 -0000

Thanks for the tip. Been thinking of doing something similar, just creating a big circle called "everybody".

I already just make all my G+ posts to "public". But that may be because I am stuck in trying to use the service like it's twitter.

Re: Teksavvy cable is faster than advertised

tpurves — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:23:53 -0000

The real answer it turns out is that a week or two after I bought the service, Teksavvy upped the speed cap to 15MB for all users. If you look at their site now that is what they are advertising. I didn't realize they had changed the offer when I wrote this post, but it's still pretty cool that they upgraded all their existing customers speeds by 50% for free.

Re: Dead media watch: the web is dead

tpurves — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:08:08 -0000

That's awesome, thanks for checking. I thought it was sometime in their first volume but I did remember that the first wired issues predated the graphical web. I seem to remember is was Wired, boingboing and Mondo2000 the early bibles of stylish geekery.

It's fun to go back and look at the old ads ... get blown away! by the speed of new 28.8 modems or 3x CDROM drives... etc.

Re: Strong versus weak connections

tpurves — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:47:44 -0000

Strong ties take a lot of work and investment and, by definition, you can't actively maintain a large number of them. Social networking can help cultivate and maintain the next best thing (weak ties). Social networking is a great way to find and be found by the best people to develop those strong ties with. Most people find their next career opportunities not through their strong ties but through the weak ones. It's the weak ties that have enough reach and that enable that first contact to be made.

If you don't have a wide weak tie network, your pool of who to form strong ties with could be pretty small. You may never find those right best strong ties you'll need to change the world.

Also, you don't always need to be changing the world. For example, at the moment, you could be not actually trying to change the world, you are just trying to buy a used toaster. In such a case, the trust proxy of an eBay reputation ranking may well be crude, but also "good enough" for the particular task at hand.

eBay built a multi-billion dollar business on a reputation system that was "good enough" to enable safe enough commerce (most of the time) between total strangers across the internet.

Re: Going Public with Capital Pool Companies

tpurves — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:21:54 -0000

Companies like RIM do just fine on the TSX. The problem is that few Canadian companies can get the mezzanine series B (or A these days) to get them to the scale where public trading makes any sense. Bear in mind that even NASDAQ has shrunk vastly in it's number of listed companies since the hey days of IPOs 10 years ago. We've seen a handful of IPOs, but it seems like you need to be very capital intensive global-scale company to make it worthwhile. How many Canadian companies make it to global scale? Without follow-on capital, even the best ones are getting bought out young and cheap.

Re: How location-based apps are dead in the water until someone fixes the extortionate rates of roaming charges

tpurves — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:14:50 -0000

Not as easy as you'd think. Many countries (Canada included) offer no pre-paid SIM cards or other prepaid options with data. Not much help if you are in country for a few days or a week but the shortest data plan you can buy is a one year contract.

Re: How bad design led to a lost decade

tpurves — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:38:33 -0000

heh, I think that you let of too lightly the other 49.99999% of the American voting population that day that did, in full knowledge, without error, deliberately cast their vote for bush. I think that's the real tragedy of the story, what the hell *they* were thinking we may never know. and they did it twice!

The design issue was a real one but it could have happened in any county. (if every county has a different system, what are the odds of at least some of them not screwing it up?)

From a mathematical/statistical perspective the election was a clear tie, well within any reasonably expectable margin for error in such a large process.

The real design problem was what the hell was wrong with the Democratic party's campaign. Against Bush, even in 2000, how did they fail to not sway *millions* more voters rather than only 500 befuddled Floridians?

but yes, the way the dice just happened to land in this case, two dumb design failures could possibly have saved the US and the world a lost decade. Though really the ramifications will be around a lot longer than that. (Remember that the whole debacle in Iraq and many other places can be traced back to arbitrary compromises and lines drawn on maps in 1919/1920...)

Re: The sky is falling

tpurves — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:55:35 -0000

This has a lot to do with the economy. Venture investing looks a less attractive as an asset class when even the "safe" bets in the large cap equity or debt markets are in turmoil. I think that the first half of this year the bulk of angel or institutional money was being kept far too busy just trying to hang on to their own pants rather than thinking of taking a flyer on high-risk new ventures or new venture funds.

Public funds might have stepped in to fill the gap like they did in other sectors. But again, it was easier to put money into things they could understand, like saving GM jobs millions of dollars a job, or moving ubisoft employees around the country at >350k a job.

If there is good news though, it is that even though a bunch of wealth has been destroyed, there's also a lot still on the sidelines, and it's been piling up there. Recent signs of a few deals, and M&As starting to flow here and there is encouraging (not to mention the performance of any index in the last few months).

Barring further calamities, it would be hard for the deal flow in the second half of this year not to be at least a lot better than the first.

And from the supply side, there's no excuse but to get out there and build truly awesome stuff despite the impossible. The truly awesome stuff has a tendency to find the smart money (or vice versa) eventually, whatever the economy.

Re: Plastic bag fees, inflation and lessons for bottled water

tpurves — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:43:43 -0000

Sometimes I lose track I myself. I think the landed cost of a plastic bottle from china or wherever they are manufactured is pretty low, certainly a good margin less than 30cents, one could cut out the middleman and cost the province a lot of money. If I was making a valid semi-serious point, it was about finding the right balance point between sufficient incentive and a market distortion or other unintended consequences of a price too high.

It's really remarkable how successful the 5cent bags were in Toronto. Just 5cents was enough to tip the balance at *every* merchant from the default being a bag to the default being you have to ask for one. Just look at organ donation rates, tipping from an opt-in to an opt-out default is sometimes all it takes for 70% swing in behaviour.

Water bottles are tricky though, they have value beyond the water, they are portable, reseal-able and trustable to be fresh/clean water.

and, as you suggest, why pick on the water bottles? coke is almost entirely water too only adulterated with a dollop of fairly unhealthy syrup and coloring.

If we're acting in the public as well as environmental interest, shouldn't we be taxing every plastic bottle beverage *except* pure water? wouldn't that be progress on both fronts?

Re: Plastic bag fees, inflation and lessons for bottled water

tpurves — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:11:10 -0000

Except at that rate people would be trucking container loads of plastic bottles to the province from all over north America...

Re: Clearing Something Up

tpurves — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:55:55 -0000

Except that passed links convert better than search generated links precisely *because* they aren't paid right?

So how do FB and Twitter integrate paid listings in a way that generates more value than the current (abysmal) CPM of social media ad rates?

How do you insert "pay" into passed links without corrupting the trust and value that people perceive in passed links? (which is why they click on them and convert)

Disqus - Latest Comments for tpurves

Re: Report to Congress on the Navy’s Constellation, FF(X) Frigate Programs

Re: Apple’s ‘Integrated Supply Chain And Robust Pricing Power’ Puts It In A Much Better Position Than Rivals To Experience Stabilized Shipments; 12.9-Inch MacBook To Bolster Growth In 2026

Re: Apple’s AI Advantage On Its Mac Cluster Now Under Threat

Re: The value of zero-priced software

Re: Steve Ballmer and The Innovator's Curse

Re: The State Valley Money in 2013 – Liveblogging from START SF

Re: Haswell Crystal Well has L4 cache for iGPU

Re: So long, break-even

Re: Tom’s Best of 2012 Indie Mix

Re: Tom’s Best of 2012 Indie Mix

Re: AT&T talks about its disaster recovery strategy during Hurricane Sandy

Re: I’ve just about had it with QR codes

Re: John Cale's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

Re: A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 15 | GeekDad | Wired.com

Re: Circle overload and the trouble with Google+

Re: Teksavvy cable is *faster* than advertised

Re: Dead media watch: the web is dead

Re: Strong versus weak connections

Re: Going Public with Capital Pool Companies

Re: How location-based apps are dead in the water until someone fixes the extortionate rates of roaming charges

Re: How bad design led to a lost decade

Re: The sky is falling

Re: Plastic bag fees, inflation and lessons for bottled water

Re: Plastic bag fees, inflation and lessons for bottled water

Re: Clearing Something Up

Re: Teksavvy cable is faster than advertised