Sorry this was me, I didn't realize I wasn't logged in:

The round LG is about $50 cheaper and it looks like a nice $100 watch. Which is problematic since it costs $300.

I think when it comes to pricing these wearable things out, Apple has the right idea in that the functionality is there but it's redundant to the value proposition. The value of the watch is its value as jewlery. That it is useful is nice but even a cheap smart watch is still going to cost over $200, and for that if better get something that looks as good as a $200 chronograph.

1) Sometimes I need a timecode stopwatch, and it's distracting to use the phone in screenings.

2) I do like the idea of discreet notifications.

3) I usually wear a Fossil on dates and when I meet clients but, typically for a man's watch, it's very blocky and it doesn't really work under a sport jacket or french cuffs, which I like to wear. Something like an Apple Watch has a cleaner look, but it's still a smartwatch so it projects sophistication. It's really the only piece of jewelry a man can pull off in professional situations, except for maybe cufflinks and a wedding band.

Understand, this thing is being sold primarily as jewelry. It's a kewl smartwatch too, but the smartwatch features are necessary, not sufficient.

Let's punish people who are good at something! Diversity!

All it really does is shift the external negotiation, between company and employee, to an internal negotiation, with HR and upper management on one side (who want people cheap), and the staff and project managers (who want the best people).

Ability to negotiate, or rather, communicate your needs in a persuasive way, is sortof a core competence, everybody who wants to be successful and progress in their career either needs to have it or at least needs to have confidence in the process.

And StartCom has been handing out S/MIME certificates without charge.

I probably wouldn't be interested in a CA that gave me my cert, I'd rather have one that signed one I generated :)

The "letter-number-symbol" verifiers are the bane of my existence.

I have a really simply rule: "You may choose whatever password you wish. If your password is compromised, you will be denied further access to this system. If your job requires access to this system, you will be terminated."

Maybe that's too severe, but if the user needs a little color-coded bar-graph to tell them how good their password is, that would suggest that (1) they don't understand what a password is actually protecting or is for, and (2) the incentives aren't correctly aligned. Personally I think employees should be assigned passwords to company servers. If they have trouble remembering it print it on a key fob or something, it'd be better than them doing what they obviously are going to do: "$username.2015". If a company's password policy is know, a reasonably clever script kiddy can generate a list of 10 probable passwords per account that would probably crack a few percent of them.

And of course the execs are the worst offenders, because their incentives are completely misaligned. It transpired after the Sony hack that the co-chariman of the motion picture group, Michael Lynton, used "sonyml3" as his email password.

Those meters are stupid.

How do they actually work? Do they do any kind of entropy calculation, or check the data against known rainbow tables? Or do they just apply rules?

I bet you're .login just launches Midnight Commander too. Bah you people!

Don't get too cute, sugar is a perfectly cromulent part of your diet; a very small part, but a part.

Sugar doesn't rot your teeth. Sugar stimulates the growth of mouth flora, many of these critters exude waste substances that lower your mouth's pH, your teeth erode in an acidic environment, particularly if you don't have fluorine ions in your enamel.

This is definitely an issue, Apple's supply chain model is much more efficient than Samsungs. Like most west asian conglomerates it maintains a bloated, 20th century heavy industrial infrastructure.

Why doesn't Samsung run its factories and supply chain like Apple? Because they're a byzantine Korean chaebol that doesn't know half the time if it's making a cellphone, a car or an oil tanker, and measures its success by how many little paternalistic fiefdoms it can sustain.

I don't think Sammy has anything to gain by cutting prices to get marketshare. It's good to sell more units but they don't benefit in the slightest by having a marginally higher percentage of the pie. From a platform perspective and drawing developers and mindshare, the Android share is the important number, and that's mostly out of Samsung's control, eating HTCs business is a wash and even at the prices they charge their flagship phones are still basically the same price as iPhones for the same specs and generation.

If you're Samsung you have to ask, I'm cutting my prices under the prevailing market price point, so I'm going to lose X million dollars in prospective revenues in order to get more marketshare. So exactly what is an additional 5% of smartphone marketshare worth? It's not worth much of anything. it'd be worth a lot if you were selling that 5% of phones at a good profit, but you already sacrificed that.

The whole point of marketshare is that share should give you leverage, like you get more bargaining power with sales channels, or you make it more profitable to sell complementary goods (like apps); you have Network Effects that draw in more consumers because of the perception that they need to have a Samsung phone over and above any other. But if Android is a commodity, and the phones are a commodity, market share is useless; it can be an indicator of your health in a competitive market but it does not itself reify into something you can use to your advantage. It's an indicator, not a cause.

Yeah that's why I said I thought the articles sounded like BS. I could see it maybe being part of some kind of watch or tie-in strategy, maybe "we'll take your phone if you want to get an Apple-watch" or something like that.

Also they might just be offering it just for the recycling value, it's not clear they're going to offer over and above the market value of the phone (i.e. "buy marketshare"), they might just be trying to front-run Gazelle's business. There are people in the article speculating that they may be paying a premium for old Android phones but nobody knows what their business model for the service is actually going to be (assuming it's not BS in the first instance).

Yeah I don't think market share is a goal. I think they just want to make money. What good is market share if you have to sell at or below cost to get it, and the share doesn't actually give you a competitive advantage?

Apple is trying everything except the one thing that would actually work - stop price gouging their customers.

It seems to me like everything they do works great. This story kinda sounds like BS, very un-Apple, they've never cared about market share, except in the depths of the Gil Amelio/Mac Clone days, and anyways their actual unit share of sales in the US and other developed markets is increasing.

Everybody just wants mobile to play out like the PC/Mac wars, and for network effects to award the whole pie to the dominant player, but it's just not working out that way. Network effects don't count for much anymore, "ecosystems" aren't as closed as they were, even the Apple one, and the most important applications, the drivers of growth in the IT space, of our era are cross-platform, usually web-centered. Android has a majority of the mobile installed base, but it's a worthless hill to hold. Things have reverted to a mean and traditional branding and product positioning are more important now, you buy from a company you had a good experience with, not the company that's logo-compliant with your box at work.

Apple had the most profitable quarter ever recently and is the most profitable company in the world. How do you do that without heavy markup?

Right, but why don't Samsung or HTC have such a high margin on their phones? Do they sell at a lower price because they want to be nice to you? Or because the people who set the prices at Samsung and HTC only want to charge you a "fair" price?

Their phones are just less desirable. Supply and demand.

Taxi companies have to settle for Paul Schrader...

I'm not in a big hurry, and I want to see what DTS comes out with before I invest in an object-oriented sound system.

Seriously, don't bother, all the features and TV shows doing objects mixing now are mixing in Atmos, and the DTS-Barco system is a vaporware "open spec" that's DOA.

You don't have to do a ceiling installation for home atmos, I've heard good things about top-firing speakers.