Um... The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated!
- Amazon is now collecting taxes, which was one of their advantages over box stores. - Amazon is moving towards Sunday delivery using USPS, which is an advantage that box stores have had (i.e. open on Sundays) - Best Buy is now matching online prices, including Amazon, Frys, etc. - Best Buy returns can be completed the same day
The linked article about Best Buy in the original post mentions Costco, Target, and Walmart as direct competitors. However, it's been my experience that Best Buy, at least in my area, has had similar if not better pricing than all of these. I bought a new Plasma TV and A/V Receiver a year ago, I checked out Costco, Best Buy, Amazon, etc. and ended up buying from Best Buy, simply because they had the best price.
Granted, Best Buy has implemented a number of different strategies to maintain profitability and not all have succeeded. However, to say that the retail store is a dead business model is a tad short sighted. People still like to see, touch, experience stuff before buying. If the price is the same, whether you buy from a web store or a retail store, most people will happily buy directly from the retail store since they are already there.
In my opinion, grouping Best Buy in with Polaroid, Borders, and Blockbuster shows more about the poster's bias than reality.
In no way am I defending Best Buy. My point is simply that the physical retail model is not going to die any time soon. Streaming video is what killed Blockbuster because the product (i.e. movie) could be delivered instantly. In the future, we will have maker bots in our homes (equivalent to streaming). This is what will eventually kill retail stores.
Larry Ellison was famous for being a huge backer of thin client computing in the enterprise. Of course, it failed for a large number of reasons such as mobile computing, the need to be able to work on documents locally, user experience, etc. If the enterprise environment wasn't conducive to thin client computing (i.e. low latency, guaranteed bandwidth, etc.), why would anyone think that a thin client gaming environment that relies on the Internet would be a good idea?
The basic theme of the books is that when you have a government where almost everyone is 100% honorable at all times, and always refuses to compromise, the entire world is fucked. Off the top of my head I can think of two characters who died of being honorable, both of whom also managed to set back their personal causes greatly; and a third who merely managed to set back her timetable by several books. And I stopped reading so long ago I can't remember the title of the last book I read.
But back IRL the problem isn't that the Congressional leaders we've got are dishonest. The problem is half of them are actually being honest when they say "If we don't fire half the government, cut taxes on job-creators by 20 points, and end ObamaCare." The other half are being equally honest when they demand more government spending, higher taxes on the wealthy, and strongly support doubling down on ObamaCare.
This means that, for both sides, the only honest or honorable thing to do is fight to defeat the other side. Since our government is a complex dance between two Legislative houses with power, an independent Executive, and Judges who frequently heckle, this results in lots of arguing and very little happens except everyone thinks they're well-positioned for the next election.
This partisanship has been bred into the system as a direct result of Gerrymandering. A large number of the House of Representatives have districts that have been so corrupted that a large majority of constituents vote one way or another. This makes their seats safe. But it also gives the politicians who win these seats a skewed view of what US voters want from their government and leads to extremism. A conservative politician in a wildly conservative district has no reason to negotiate with democrats. If he did, he would lose his seat. However, if the district was relatively random, there would be enough moderates that if the politician negotiated for a good cause, he would pick up the votes he lost on the conservative side from the moderates.
This will only be fixed when re-districting is fixed by randomizing the districts instead of allowing politicians to decide the boundaries.
The problem isn't whether the car would of or would not have taken damage. The problem is that a fire is capable of spreading and causing serious other problems outside of the car. Suppose the damage happened but the fire didn't until the car was parked inside your garage that is connected to your home.
This is actually a really good point. With a gas car if you have a gas leak you can smell it. If you go to park your car in the garage and your gas tank is leaking you will smell it and move the car outside of the garage pretty quickly. However, a battery pack that is damaged could be slowly heating up and you would never know until it exploded or caught fire.
I don't know how Tesla implemented the battery packs in their cars. I would hope that they would have implemented smart batteries that would warn the driver, even if the car is off (i.e. flashing lights, horn, etc.) when the battery temperature goes over a certain value. Even so, I would be more willing to take the risk of moving a gas car than a battery operated car with a faulty battery.
While there are significant similarities between the two shifts, they are not completely parallel. For instance the actual playback mechanism for music remained unchanged even as the source shifted. You could unplug a CD deck and drop an mp3 player in and still use the rest of the stack, with primary advantages and disadvantages being linked to the rest of the equipment. With books we are talking about both a new medium AND new way of interacting with it (though there is the possibility of producing flashable 'paper' books), which puts it a little further apart.
I'm not sure that I follow your logic...
There definitely was a shift in how we interact with music when we shifted from CDs to MP3s. A single CD usually holds no more than 20 songs, at most. An MP3 player can hold thousands of songs. When we listened to CDs, we tended to listen to the CD as a whole and the songs in the order that the artist/producer created. With MP3s, we listen to the songs we like and dump the songs we don't like. Plus, most people like to shuffle their songs for a bit of variety. I could go on about other changes such as how we discover music, etc. But my point stands. MP3s and MP3 players changed the way we interact with music just as much as ebooks and ereaders changed the way we interact with books.
I still buy CDs then convert them because CDs are still of higher quality. I'll stop buying CDs when the music stores offer songs in a lossless format, such as FLAC. However, I no longer buy physical books. My Kindle is small enough to carry around, will last two weeks, and can store way more books than I can carry. I see book stores evolving into specialty shops, much like the stores that sell vinyl records.
I'm sure CyanogenMod is awesome, but the CyanogenMod homepage doesn't do a good enough job of explaining WTF it is, and why anyone would want it. I'm thorougly unimpressed by "it has themes" and "it has a DSP equalizer" and "it has quick settings". There are no obvious videos showing how it works, so please help me understand why anyone would use it.
Can anyone here please ELI5 (explain like I'm five) what it is and why someone would want to use it?
Dad: Tablets and phones are like computers. Every so often they need to be updated to fix glitches, to run faster, and to run longer. Normally these updates come from the people that made them. But, sometimes the people that make the tablets and phones stop building and giving us these updates. So, what the Cyanogenmod team does is gives us the updates for tablets and phones built by all kinds of different companies, even older ones. In other words, it allows you, Jimmy, to play the latest balloon game that requires KitKat.
Kid: Like the Chocolate bar?
Dad: Yes, like the chocolate bar.
Kid: My game needs a chocolate bar?
Dad: No Daddy does... Where did you hide your Halloween candy?
Kid: Daaaaad... Mom told me not to tell you... but my game needs a chocolate bar?
Dad: The latest update for your tablet is called KitKat because the Cyanogenmod guys like sweets...
Kid: I like sweets too... Can I play my balloon game now?
Speed limits on interstates are set to road conditions and what is safe for the average, or below average, driver driving an average car based on a formula from 20 or more years ago and includes a formula to reduce gas consumption. While driver skills haven't changed all that much, cars have become much safer due to technology. In addition, you can drive safely at higher speeds in a car with race car engineering due to the added down-force, braking, less weight, etc. There is also a big difference between driving fast and driving dangerously, though most people equate one with the other.
I'm willing to bet that the first image that most have in their mind when they read this is the guy weaving in and out of heavy traffic at high rates of speed and cutting everyone off. However, there is no way that he could achieve this speed with any amount of traffic on the road.
The article says that they left NY at 9:55pm on a Saturday night. My guess is that the majority of their driving in urban areas (i.e. NY, etc.) was late at night and into the early morning hours, a time when the Interstates are largely empty. He spent Sunday morning crossing Missouri, Oklahoma, New Mexico etc. Net exactly major transportation hubs. He had a co-driver to switch off when they got tired and he had a pilot car running in front of him keeping eyes on the road conditions, traffic, etc.
I'm not saying that I agree with what he did. It was illegal and relatively unsafe. But, in my opinion, it wasn't quite as reckless as people make it out to be. For my money, I prefer people who know how to drive and drive fast to people who drive drunk, while texting, while taking on the phone without a hands-free device, tailgate, switch lanes without looking or using a signal light, weave in and out of traffic, etc....
Texting is indeed normal... depending on the work place culture. Texting, when done quietly, is perfectly fine as long as it's intermittent.
If someone is constantly texting, that's a different matter. The meeting leader should ask the person if they have something urgent to attend to and, if so, go take care of it.
Taking a call during a meeting, however, is beyond rude. It takes 5 seconds to walk outside the meeting room and take the call. In the mean time, the group can talk about something that doesn't need your input.
While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do
....
but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
So with that last sentence you're saying it's superior to your iPhone....
I was thinking along the same lines until I noticed that his kids paid 150 Euro. It's my understanding that phones are sold without being subsidized in Europe, unlike the US. In the US a $150 phone after subsidies is really a $250 to $300 phone. So, it does sound like they bought a lower end Android phone. While it may have much of the same functions as an iPhone, it wouldn't be as smooth or as high resolution, etc.
Personally, I think that anyone who thinks that iDevices are superior to today's higher end Android devices are misinformed. However, with Android devices you do get what you pay for.
The problem here is the total impact is unknown. It's unknown if something in your field of vision is actually going to impact your driving. A HUD with e-mail on it might impair driving less than, say, checking your speedometer--I've almost caused a collision twice on the highway for taking one or two seconds to check my speed when it seemed fast (driver ahead of me took that time to brake, and I had to re-assess when I looked back up and didn't realize cruising at 65 was suddenly a bad thing).
If it takes that long to check your speed, you need to get a new car with Nav that will automatically warn you with voice prompts if you go over the speed limit. My new Jeep has this feature. It feels like I am being scolded by a nanny when it warns me, though...
Is an update really necessary? Isn't collusion already illegal? The only difference between this and some pistachio growers secretly meeting to fix prices is that the pistachios are people. OMG, I just realized something. People are pistachios, corporations are people, therefore... Corporations are pistachios.
Fix that for you... Now we can have pistachio cracking jokes...
However... With Dr. Who Smaller on the inside/Time traveling technology why would you need Digital Electronics? So you get yourself a mechanical differential engine, the size of room. Have it in a time bubble a few million years in the past, in a room bigger on the inside. You don't need to worry about all those details about digital computing. You have a simple calculator which is easy to fix and maintain. Start the processing a millions of years ago, when it is done it sends the message to your current time, So no wait.
The biggest advantages of Digital Technology is Speed and Size. If you master space and time, These advantages mean little to you.;
Computers are bigger on the inside than the outside and I can prove it... Ever try to print all of the data on your hard drive... (grin)
Wasn't he the guy Lister was always talking about in Red Dwarf, and that other guy from the Triple X movies Vin De Loo or whatever?
for those that don't know... Lister, in Red Dwarf, talked about Vindaloo curry, an Indian food dish popular in Goa. The guy in the triple-X movies was the actor Vin Diesel. They don't look anything alike... (grin)
Only? That sounds like proof of concept rather than a proof of overstatement.
It is only proof that America as a whole, of which NYC is a part of (contrary to popular opinion, who think it is America), has a shockingly low regard for bikers. Take for example, how the Dutch handle bicycling -- they have not just dedicated lanes, but dedicated traffic signals. Bikes are an integrated part of their public transportation system. In the United States, it's viewed as "something children do, or people who haven't grown up." In other words, you're viewed as immature and/or poor if you ride a bike, not environmentally conscious, fiscally prudent, or body smart.
NYC, Boston, etc. are old cities. Core city streets are narrow as they were originally built for horse and buggy and later adopted for cars. There are a lot of streets in these cities that simply cannot accommodate the space for proper bike lanes. Streets in newer cities, such as San Francisco, were built wider and have the necessary room. Both Boston and NYC, however, provide a slew of public transportation options including buses, subway, and rail. So, while not as conducive to cycling, both are great walking cities.
It's a little early to declare 4K a failure. TVs are just being released that support the new standard and, like any new feature, they are still expensive. As for content, movies are being filmed in 4K and Sony is remastering movies into 4K. Sony is also making deals with Comcast, etc., to air programming in 4K. Personally, I think that 4K has a very good chance at success. I do agree that the adoption rate will be along the lines of equipment replacement. However, this has more to do with the fact that HD is good enough. 4K just isn't the seismic change that going from a tube TV to flat panel was.
Customized UNIX kernels are being used today (mostly BSD) by a variety of vendors. These are heavily modified to support hardware (ASICS, etc.) based switching and routing. On top of that the OS needs to handle packet caching (for QoS), access lists and security features, encryption (VPN tunneling), etc. Most of which are handled in highly customized proprietary bits of hardware that can reliably handle a tonne of traffic flows. In my opinion, network hardware vendors will never hamstring their competitive edge by agreeing to standardized APIs and hardware calls.
I had a big retirement fund blowout bash planned for 2032. After all, you can't take it with you. Now I'll have to text everyone that's it's been cancelled....
Slashdot Mirror
Make sure that you have plenty of plasma cells to take on the Lost Soul of Caramack...
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have satellites with frickin' laser beams attached to their casings!
I wonder just how many tiny laser wielding box satellites it would take to make one awesome weapon....
Um... The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated!
- Amazon is now collecting taxes, which was one of their advantages over box stores.
- Amazon is moving towards Sunday delivery using USPS, which is an advantage that box stores have had (i.e. open on Sundays)
- Best Buy is now matching online prices, including Amazon, Frys, etc.
- Best Buy returns can be completed the same day
The linked article about Best Buy in the original post mentions Costco, Target, and Walmart as direct competitors. However, it's been my experience that Best Buy, at least in my area, has had similar if not better pricing than all of these. I bought a new Plasma TV and A/V Receiver a year ago, I checked out Costco, Best Buy, Amazon, etc. and ended up buying from Best Buy, simply because they had the best price.
Granted, Best Buy has implemented a number of different strategies to maintain profitability and not all have succeeded. However, to say that the retail store is a dead business model is a tad short sighted. People still like to see, touch, experience stuff before buying. If the price is the same, whether you buy from a web store or a retail store, most people will happily buy directly from the retail store since they are already there.
In my opinion, grouping Best Buy in with Polaroid, Borders, and Blockbuster shows more about the poster's bias than reality.
In no way am I defending Best Buy. My point is simply that the physical retail model is not going to die any time soon. Streaming video is what killed Blockbuster because the product (i.e. movie) could be delivered instantly. In the future, we will have maker bots in our homes (equivalent to streaming). This is what will eventually kill retail stores.
What does one use this for?
The same thing we do every night, Pinky - try to take over the world!
Larry Ellison was famous for being a huge backer of thin client computing in the enterprise. Of course, it failed for a large number of reasons such as mobile computing, the need to be able to work on documents locally, user experience, etc. If the enterprise environment wasn't conducive to thin client computing (i.e. low latency, guaranteed bandwidth, etc.), why would anyone think that a thin client gaming environment that relies on the Internet would be a good idea?
Have you read or watched Game of Thrones?
The basic theme of the books is that when you have a government where almost everyone is 100% honorable at all times, and always refuses to compromise, the entire world is fucked. Off the top of my head I can think of two characters who died of being honorable, both of whom also managed to set back their personal causes greatly; and a third who merely managed to set back her timetable by several books. And I stopped reading so long ago I can't remember the title of the last book I read.
But back IRL the problem isn't that the Congressional leaders we've got are dishonest. The problem is half of them are actually being honest when they say "If we don't fire half the government, cut taxes on job-creators by 20 points, and end ObamaCare." The other half are being equally honest when they demand more government spending, higher taxes on the wealthy, and strongly support doubling down on ObamaCare.
This means that, for both sides, the only honest or honorable thing to do is fight to defeat the other side. Since our government is a complex dance between two Legislative houses with power, an independent Executive, and Judges who frequently heckle, this results in lots of arguing and very little happens except everyone thinks they're well-positioned for the next election.
This partisanship has been bred into the system as a direct result of Gerrymandering. A large number of the House of Representatives have districts that have been so corrupted that a large majority of constituents vote one way or another. This makes their seats safe. But it also gives the politicians who win these seats a skewed view of what US voters want from their government and leads to extremism. A conservative politician in a wildly conservative district has no reason to negotiate with democrats. If he did, he would lose his seat. However, if the district was relatively random, there would be enough moderates that if the politician negotiated for a good cause, he would pick up the votes he lost on the conservative side from the moderates.
This will only be fixed when re-districting is fixed by randomizing the districts instead of allowing politicians to decide the boundaries.
The problem isn't whether the car would of or would not have taken damage. The problem is that a fire is capable of spreading and causing serious other problems outside of the car. Suppose the damage happened but the fire didn't until the car was parked inside your garage that is connected to your home.
This is actually a really good point. With a gas car if you have a gas leak you can smell it. If you go to park your car in the garage and your gas tank is leaking you will smell it and move the car outside of the garage pretty quickly. However, a battery pack that is damaged could be slowly heating up and you would never know until it exploded or caught fire.
I don't know how Tesla implemented the battery packs in their cars. I would hope that they would have implemented smart batteries that would warn the driver, even if the car is off (i.e. flashing lights, horn, etc.) when the battery temperature goes over a certain value. Even so, I would be more willing to take the risk of moving a gas car than a battery operated car with a faulty battery.
While there are significant similarities between the two shifts, they are not completely parallel. For instance the actual playback mechanism for music remained unchanged even as the source shifted. You could unplug a CD deck and drop an mp3 player in and still use the rest of the stack, with primary advantages and disadvantages being linked to the rest of the equipment. With books we are talking about both a new medium AND new way of interacting with it (though there is the possibility of producing flashable 'paper' books), which puts it a little further apart.
I'm not sure that I follow your logic...
There definitely was a shift in how we interact with music when we shifted from CDs to MP3s. A single CD usually holds no more than 20 songs, at most. An MP3 player can hold thousands of songs. When we listened to CDs, we tended to listen to the CD as a whole and the songs in the order that the artist/producer created. With MP3s, we listen to the songs we like and dump the songs we don't like. Plus, most people like to shuffle their songs for a bit of variety. I could go on about other changes such as how we discover music, etc. But my point stands. MP3s and MP3 players changed the way we interact with music just as much as ebooks and ereaders changed the way we interact with books.
I still buy CDs then convert them because CDs are still of higher quality. I'll stop buying CDs when the music stores offer songs in a lossless format, such as FLAC. However, I no longer buy physical books. My Kindle is small enough to carry around, will last two weeks, and can store way more books than I can carry. I see book stores evolving into specialty shops, much like the stores that sell vinyl records.
...are ready for prime time I hope to be retired, own a beach home, and be enjoying life running around on a sail boat....
I expect that it will take about 25 years before they have most of the bugs worked out and a significant adoption rate.
They could be filled with Red Bull...
I'm sure CyanogenMod is awesome, but the CyanogenMod homepage doesn't do a good enough job of explaining WTF it is, and why anyone would want it. I'm thorougly unimpressed by "it has themes" and "it has a DSP equalizer" and "it has quick settings". There are no obvious videos showing how it works, so please help me understand why anyone would use it.
Can anyone here please ELI5 (explain like I'm five) what it is and why someone would want to use it?
Dad: Tablets and phones are like computers. Every so often they need to be updated to fix glitches, to run faster, and to run longer. Normally these updates come from the people that made them. But, sometimes the people that make the tablets and phones stop building and giving us these updates. So, what the Cyanogenmod team does is gives us the updates for tablets and phones built by all kinds of different companies, even older ones. In other words, it allows you, Jimmy, to play the latest balloon game that requires KitKat.
Kid: Like the Chocolate bar?
Dad: Yes, like the chocolate bar.
Kid: My game needs a chocolate bar?
Dad: No Daddy does... Where did you hide your Halloween candy?
Kid: Daaaaad... Mom told me not to tell you... but my game needs a chocolate bar?
Dad: The latest update for your tablet is called KitKat because the Cyanogenmod guys like sweets...
Kid: I like sweets too... Can I play my balloon game now?
Speed limits on interstates are set to road conditions and what is safe for the average, or below average, driver driving an average car based on a formula from 20 or more years ago and includes a formula to reduce gas consumption. While driver skills haven't changed all that much, cars have become much safer due to technology. In addition, you can drive safely at higher speeds in a car with race car engineering due to the added down-force, braking, less weight, etc. There is also a big difference between driving fast and driving dangerously, though most people equate one with the other.
I'm willing to bet that the first image that most have in their mind when they read this is the guy weaving in and out of heavy traffic at high rates of speed and cutting everyone off. However, there is no way that he could achieve this speed with any amount of traffic on the road.
The article says that they left NY at 9:55pm on a Saturday night. My guess is that the majority of their driving in urban areas (i.e. NY, etc.) was late at night and into the early morning hours, a time when the Interstates are largely empty. He spent Sunday morning crossing Missouri, Oklahoma, New Mexico etc. Net exactly major transportation hubs. He had a co-driver to switch off when they got tired and he had a pilot car running in front of him keeping eyes on the road conditions, traffic, etc.
I'm not saying that I agree with what he did. It was illegal and relatively unsafe. But, in my opinion, it wasn't quite as reckless as people make it out to be. For my money, I prefer people who know how to drive and drive fast to people who drive drunk, while texting, while taking on the phone without a hands-free device, tailgate, switch lanes without looking or using a signal light, weave in and out of traffic, etc....
Texting is indeed normal... depending on the work place culture. Texting, when done quietly, is perfectly fine as long as it's intermittent.
If someone is constantly texting, that's a different matter. The meeting leader should ask the person if they have something urgent to attend to and, if so, go take care of it.
Taking a call during a meeting, however, is beyond rude. It takes 5 seconds to walk outside the meeting room and take the call. In the mean time, the group can talk about something that doesn't need your input.
....
While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do
....
but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
So with that last sentence you're saying it's superior to your iPhone....
I was thinking along the same lines until I noticed that his kids paid 150 Euro. It's my understanding that phones are sold without being subsidized in Europe, unlike the US. In the US a $150 phone after subsidies is really a $250 to $300 phone. So, it does sound like they bought a lower end Android phone. While it may have much of the same functions as an iPhone, it wouldn't be as smooth or as high resolution, etc.
Personally, I think that anyone who thinks that iDevices are superior to today's higher end Android devices are misinformed. However, with Android devices you do get what you pay for.
We have observed chimps exchanging food for sex. No civilization, farming, or even language necessary for prostitution.
We still exchange food for sex, isn't that what date night is?
The problem here is the total impact is unknown. It's unknown if something in your field of vision is actually going to impact your driving. A HUD with e-mail on it might impair driving less than, say, checking your speedometer--I've almost caused a collision twice on the highway for taking one or two seconds to check my speed when it seemed fast (driver ahead of me took that time to brake, and I had to re-assess when I looked back up and didn't realize cruising at 65 was suddenly a bad thing).
If it takes that long to check your speed, you need to get a new car with Nav that will automatically warn you with voice prompts if you go over the speed limit. My new Jeep has this feature. It feels like I am being scolded by a nanny when it warns me, though...
Is an update really necessary? Isn't collusion already illegal? The only difference between this and some pistachio growers secretly meeting to fix prices is that the pistachios are people. OMG, I just realized something. People are pistachios , corporations are people, therefore... Corporations are pistachios .
Fix that for you... Now we can have pistachio cracking jokes...
Corporations do it behind closed doors....
... than to be an adventurer who is the first to enter a black hole.
*Note: Yes, horrible Skyrim joke reference that is completely out of date... but someone had to say it... (grin)
However... With Dr. Who Smaller on the inside/Time traveling technology why would you need Digital Electronics?
So you get yourself a mechanical differential engine, the size of room. Have it in a time bubble a few million years in the past, in a room bigger on the inside. You don't need to worry about all those details about digital computing. You have a simple calculator which is easy to fix and maintain. Start the processing a millions of years ago, when it is done it sends the message to your current time, So no wait.
The biggest advantages of Digital Technology is Speed and Size. If you master space and time, These advantages mean little to you.;
Computers are bigger on the inside than the outside and I can prove it... Ever try to print all of the data on your hard drive... (grin)
Wasn't he the guy Lister was always talking about in Red Dwarf, and that other guy from the Triple X movies Vin De Loo or whatever?
for those that don't know... Lister, in Red Dwarf, talked about Vindaloo curry, an Indian food dish popular in Goa. The guy in the triple-X movies was the actor Vin Diesel. They don't look anything alike... (grin)
Yes. They give you a couple complex calculus problems and if you get them right, you're a robot.
Or you have 1000 monkeys working for you...
Only? That sounds like proof of concept rather than a proof of overstatement.
It is only proof that America as a whole, of which NYC is a part of (contrary to popular opinion, who think it is America), has a shockingly low regard for bikers. Take for example, how the Dutch handle bicycling -- they have not just dedicated lanes, but dedicated traffic signals. Bikes are an integrated part of their public transportation system. In the United States, it's viewed as "something children do, or people who haven't grown up." In other words, you're viewed as immature and/or poor if you ride a bike, not environmentally conscious, fiscally prudent, or body smart.
NYC, Boston, etc. are old cities. Core city streets are narrow as they were originally built for horse and buggy and later adopted for cars. There are a lot of streets in these cities that simply cannot accommodate the space for proper bike lanes. Streets in newer cities, such as San Francisco, were built wider and have the necessary room. Both Boston and NYC, however, provide a slew of public transportation options including buses, subway, and rail. So, while not as conducive to cycling, both are great walking cities.
It's a little early to declare 4K a failure. TVs are just being released that support the new standard and, like any new feature, they are still expensive. As for content, movies are being filmed in 4K and Sony is remastering movies into 4K. Sony is also making deals with Comcast, etc., to air programming in 4K. Personally, I think that 4K has a very good chance at success. I do agree that the adoption rate will be along the lines of equipment replacement. However, this has more to do with the fact that HD is good enough. 4K just isn't the seismic change that going from a tube TV to flat panel was.
Customized UNIX kernels are being used today (mostly BSD) by a variety of vendors. These are heavily modified to support hardware (ASICS, etc.) based switching and routing. On top of that the OS needs to handle packet caching (for QoS), access lists and security features, encryption (VPN tunneling), etc. Most of which are handled in highly customized proprietary bits of hardware that can reliably handle a tonne of traffic flows. In my opinion, network hardware vendors will never hamstring their competitive edge by agreeing to standardized APIs and hardware calls.
I had a big retirement fund blowout bash planned for 2032. After all, you can't take it with you. Now I'll have to text everyone that's it's been cancelled....