Is that business appropriating the public commons if the mass transit is subsidized?
It sure sounds like it!
The problem with that logic is that it then makes mass transit pointless. If the only non-appropriating use of the train is for individuals to have social visits with other people (shopping = commercial, going to work = commercial, going to the movies = commercial....), then there almost certainly wouldn't be enough riders to justify a mass transit system in the first place. Furthermore, it means that even driving = appropriation of the roads, walking = appropriation of the sidewalks. Now, I'd wager the answer is, "well businesses should pay for the mass transit since it benefits them". To which, the answer is, "well duh - where do you think the subsidies come from?". They're already assisting in paying for it based on their property taxes and other taxes they pay.
what's the solution for people needing to park in order to remain employees or clients?
If they truly need to park, they can demonstrate that need by paying the market asking price for parking.
Which brings us to metered parking. Most commercially zoned areas with street parking in metro regions have metered parking, but it sounds like you're arguing that it still constitutes appropriation for those metered spots to be used by people going to work.
Similarly, if the business needs those employees, it can demonstrate that need by paying market rate salaries. If the business needs customers, it can demonstrate that need by offering market rate prices for its product or service.
If a business does precisely this, but mass transit and/or parking is still subsidized or paid for by the business' property taxes, it would still be appropriation based on what you've written.
The problem is that the sidewalk is an avenue where "no parking" is just implied.
Granted, but where do we disagree on whether customers parking on the street is an example of a business appropriating the public commons for profit?
Because the business still pays property taxes. If there is no place to park, the business is less competitive and can't afford the taxes. Consequently, only businesses which can avoid the use of cars can utilize that land. As a separate example, suppose a business is close enough to a train station or bus stop to make it possible for clients to not-park. Is that business appropriating the public commons if the mass transit is subsidized?
Let's flip the script just a bit - what's the solution for people needing to park in order to remain employees or clients? Every business is mandated to have a parking lot, even in densely-populated areas like NYC where the land simply doesn't exist otherwise? Businesses have to foot the bill for street-parked employees and clients? How does one keep track of that reliably without either endless bureaucracy or even-more-surveillance and tracking? Are sufficiently-high property taxes not enough to cover the cost and call it a day?
That number only works if it assumes all 11 million people would have bought a new $1,000 iPhone instead - $11 billion makes up for the earnings expectations nicely.
However, that only works at the most superficial of levels. There's a whole cottage industry of mall kiosks and small-time repair shops that specialize in replacing spent batteries and cracked screens. Apple managed to massively undercut them at $29 (which is why the numbers are so high). Let's say that half of those 11 million people would have done any of the following: -Gotten a $749 XR. 5.5 milion of those meets their projected earnings, but only barely. Make it a $599 iPhone 8, and now you're off by over a billion - not "oh f'k" money, but still enough to make investors plenty nervous. -Gotten an Android phone. -Had a third party change the battery. -Gotten a secondhand iPhone 7. -Stuck it out with their existing iPhone.
That also would have put them in a position where class action lawyers were tripping over themselves to get some iBucks. If that lawsuit was as large as the tenth largest payout in history - not impossible since it would likely include virtually every iPhone in the past decade - that's $3.2 billion just in the payout. That payout would make them miss their earnings by billions even if every battery replacement would have otherwise been a $1,000 XS.
The number indicates that even the slightest scrutiny prevents Apple from making their earnings numbers. In turn, this starts to indicate that Apple can't expect to make the fortunes off the Annual iPhone crowd they once did. IoT doesn't seem to be helping them; it's rare to find a description of a HomePod as a great-sounding also-ran and there's no indication that releasing the iRing or the iHue will push them into those markets. The Apple Car is vaporware, Apple being the new cable company could go either way (especially without a first party television to generate the hype for it), Tim doesn't seem to want to revisit the server room, and while I can't entirely dismiss a surprise-success like the iPod, Tim's had nearly a decade to do that and doesn't seem to have been able to figure out the next big thing just yet.
Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not an Apple hater, and I don't think they're going to die overnight. The iOS ecosystem is incredibly strong and will continue to be Apple's cash cow for quite some time to come. However, I think that investors are starting to get nervous. Maybe it'll be a good thing, and we'll see Apple revisit their creative design loyalists. Maybe Apple will shock everyone by finding a niche and owning it. Or maybe, Apple will finally prove to itself, to Microsoft, to Google, to Facebook, and ultimately to Wall Street, that Big Tech has settled in with Big Oil and Big Pharma as being boring, stable, and iterative.
In a sane world legal action would be taken to force Microsoft to make a fit for purpose successor to Windows 7, but Microsoft enjoys money too much and can bribe their way out of it.
I think the sane legal action would instead be a federal mandate that only a fit-for-purpose Win7 successor, with a perpetual licensing option, be the only legally allowed OS for any federal workstation projects. This would force MS to think real, real hard about whether they'll make more money with their telemetry than they would lose in government contracts. Now, the obvious loophole to this is for MS to make "Win10 fit-for-purpose: $100,000 MSRP for a perpetual license, Win10 FFP, $100/license for government entities"; they do this for not-for-profit sales already...but that's for the lawyers to resolve.
The reason why I'd have an issue with what you're suggesting is that I very much agree with the need for a version of Win10 that doesn't require a lengthy Powershell script, three separate privacy-granting utilities, and firewall rules at the router level in order to grant any vague sense of privacy and control. However, the chilling effects worry me. The San Bernadino iPhone case hinged on a decision that the government could not compel Apple to write a version of iOS they did not want to write, especially given the context. To compel Microsoft to write a version of Windows they don't want to write is to create the sort of precedent that would make the San Bernadino ruling much less resolute.
The government incentivizing that code be written by way of mandating it to bid for contracts, sure. Microsoft can opt-out of those tens of billions of dollars if they so choose, but I think even the most telemetry-happy members of Microsoft's decision makers would have trouble selling everyone else that their data mining and telemetry is going to earn them more money than they'll lose. If it's Microsoft's hill to die on, then let them die on that hill. Allowing the government to compel a company to write a program, however, is scary - and it doesn't stop being scary just because I happen to agree with the outcome. Sooner or later, I won't.
My rule has always been to set up Win10 machines without a network connection. If there is no internet connection, it will default back to creating a local account. Also, setting up Win10 with a network connection means that it will try and run some hour-long update before getting you to the desktop. Doing the OOBE offline means it will be forced to wait to attempt to update, so you can start doing other stuff while it runs that update in the background. Why that's not its default behavior, I have no idea, but that's how I've managed to remain sane.
Is that like when businesses allow their customers to park on the street?
*sigh* No.
Street parking isn't generally an issue in areas with lots of room. Street parking happens when it's illegal or impractical for a business to have a parking lot. In those areas, street parking is pretty clearly defined, with parking rules clearly defined on signs, and frequently with parking meters.
Pretty much anywhere you're going to street park, the general rules are that you're 1.) not blocking a driveway or fire hydrant, and 2.) have left enough room for other traffic to pass, and 3.) there aren't other regulations or notices disallowing parking. Not doing these things is a ticketable offense in most cases. The fact that businesses allow their employees and customers to street park is generally paid for by the property taxes of the business, and by the meters, and the lack of available parking is a disincentive for businesses to locate in those places, reducing that revenue accordingly. Back to your point, a business doesn't get to tell their customers and employees that it's okay to block traffic without those customers/employees getting impounded. That's the better analog to what this scooter company is doing.
The problem is that the sidewalk is an avenue where "no parking" is just implied. Yes, every so often, some inconsiderate person leaves their bike on a sidewalk, but that's usually a one-off nuisance case; one can deal with them and still reasonably assume that "don't park on the sidewalk" to be sufficiently obvious as to not need legislation/signage/enforcement. The issue is that now we have a company who is trying to argue that "it's not illegal to park a sidewalk-acceptable vehicle on the sidewalk" with sufficient frequency and are not self-policing their users, such that now they need to have the situation addressed more directly.
See, there is a level where even the masses start to say "do not want". Placebo as it may be, look around and you'll see plenty of people putting tape over their laptop webcams. Amazon's "we can give delivery men the ability to open your door, which is totally safe because of the camera that goes along with it" initiative is one I have yet to meet literally anybody who said "I want that". I think "multiple cameras in my car, uploading video in realtime" might have a niche in Uber vehicles or driverless cars (keeps drivers safe and passengers accountable), but I think even the Alexa-owning masses will say "too far".
More to the point, I don't see how this technology won't pit the advertisers against the insurance companies. The crux of the issue hinges on what is truly meant by "revenue opportunities". How will these systems generate revenue? Consumers won't pay for the video footage. Law enforcement agencies won't pay for access proactively, especially because it would simply ensure none of their actual-suspects use those cars. Image or video ads are a guaranteed way to distract the driver (insurance companies will never allow it). Audio ads won't be okay; if nothing else ClearChannel won't want the competition. City planners won't pay for it; they can get that sort of aggregate data from Google Maps or those statistical boxes.
My point is that there is a point where even John Q. Public is going to care. Alexa provides entertainment and utility, smartphones the same, but a whole system dedicated to post-sale monetization while providing no utility to customers that Android Auto or the Apple equivalent can't also provide? Yeah, I think that even those people are going to have an uphill battle.
A lot of what Trump does is done impulsively. His number one apologist, Scott Adams, says that in business you need to make decisions quickly because the quicker you act, the quicker you can fix it if you made a mistake. He gave out a big tax cut to the corporations when other changes he had made seemed to be making the economy stronger. That I blame on impulse - do everything now, not later.
I'm not a huge Trump fan personally, but I do at least respect this line of reasoning. Sadly, we have a government that can't agree that water is wet, and a population so heavily divided that they would remain blue/red even if their own side was the one claiming that it wasn't. In that environment, Hillary would have done no better. Neither would Sanders.
Now, Obama wasn't exactly a president that seemed to consider definitive, decisive action as something he wanted to do as a matter of course. He was an excellent orator, and very personable, but he gave the appearance of wanting everybody to be on the same page, and a general unwillingness to play hardball with those who didn't. I can appreciate that sort of desire for compromise and bipartisan agreement...but he was never going to get the red team to agree, even if he did everything they wanted to the point where the blue team was upset at him for turning into a DINO.
Trump isn't unaware of this. It's why he has a Twitter feed that is a massive red herring, letting the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC be appalled at the not-nice things he says, only to actually make it a point to make decisive actions with the media too busy reading tweets to report news. Now again, I don't think his policies align well with my political leanings, but I do think that looking at the methods in isolation, Trump at least gives the appearance of being a bit more successful.
For starters, even a $150 GPU can play most current titles at 1080p on 'high' settings.
You better take a look at the system requirements for some of the current AAA titles.
Far Cry 5's requirements list an a Radeon R9 270 or GTX 670. Newegg has RX570's and GTX1050Ti's for $150-$200. Running it on Ultra on a MBP for $0/month, I get. Even if they charge $20/month for the service, it's still a wash vs. getting a card in a desktop in under a year.
Unless one is buying AAA releases every month, it's likely that just buying games outright will be cheaper than this service.
OK, you misunderstand what the service does. You don't pay to get the games, you have to already own the games. They're yours. You just run them on nVidia's or Amazon's hardware in the cloud. Your Steam account fires up in the cloud and you can just play any game you own. Same with UPlay. Origin isn't part of this (I'm guessing they're going to end up offering their own service).
That makes it even less of a bargain. If it's only offsetting the cost of hardware, then I can't imagine there being a price point high enough for Amazon to make a profit while also being low enough to compare favorably to just getting a GPU or a Playstation.
he best I can figure is that it's good for kids who has a Chromebook, doesn't have a console, wants to play not-mobile games, and wants to play all of the AAA titles back to back, but also is willing to pay $30-$50 a month to do so.
Thing is, we have no idea what the price point is going to be yet. If it's $20/month, it would be cheaper than upgrading my PC every 2 years. We just have to wait and see.
I mean, yes, but the math isn't a no-brainer, either. If we're using a two-year amortization time, $20/month = $480 over that period, and for that price, you can get a PS4 Pro and a game or two. Admittedly rumors of the PS5 releasing in 2020 mean it's not the greatest example now, but since the release was in 2014, that's still 5 years of use. At the $399 release price and assuming 5 years of use, that's $6.67/month for a Playstation. The aforementioned R9 270 was released in November 2013 and cost $200. If you're going to assume a $1,000 CPU/RAM/GPU/SSD upgrade every two years then yeah, maybe, but that's almost deliberately stacking the deck to make your point; since the Far Cry 5 requirements are essentially "a $1,200 PC from 2014", the amortization on that through Dec 2018 ends up being $20/mo - the best-case-scenario pricing of Amazon's service...and you have a computer for other things as well.
Now, let's put some scrutiny on that $20/month number. Assume Amazon standardizes on the GTX1080. Newegg is still selling that for $519. But it's Amazon, and we'll assume MSI will do a custom run on them such that Amazon pays $399 a card. Assuming 2-year depreciation, that's $16.67/month *just* for the cards. Add in power, support, platform development, and bandwidth, and I sincerely doubt they'll be able to make $20/month the final cost of the service.
Also, it's not just going to be Chromebook users. I can play current AAA games that have not been released for OSX on an old Macbook Pro. Don't have to download the game, just fire it up. You can run Steam without having it installed on your computer. And everything runs on ultra.
I mean, that's awesome, but I guess it's still a puzzling black box about Amazon can stream games in realtime such that compression doesn't offset the rendering quality - after all, if there's more nuance on the textures, it's harder to compress.
More to my point, I guess I'm also having a rough time estimating the number of people using older Macbooks to game *and* who care about running those games in ultra such that using Parallels or Boot Camp isn't good enough to the point where they're
As a low-level peon I fall to understand how this happens. How do you get a contract signed at hiring that says "if I leave or am fired for misconduct you must give me a parachute of $500,000"?
In 2005, Google bought Android from Andy Rubin for 50 million dollars. Andy Rubin was at the helm of Android until December 2012 (basically, Android had already taken over the World by then).
In 2016, an Oracle lawyer leaked court documents that said that Google had made 22 billion dollars in profit from the Android operating system.
So you do the math.
I don't see much of an issue with this.
$50 Million is enough money to live very comfortably. If it's possible to get 1% interest on it, that's half a million dollars per year without earning another dollar otherwise. $50 million may not be Walton money, but it's still far more than the majority of programmers will earn over the course of a career. Sure, he would probably end up keeping only $30M after taxes and lawyers, but it's still "never work again" money.
Now, the argument here is that it's 0.002% of what Google's gross revenue from the platform is, so he should have gotten more. Well, I'm not much of a Google fan, but to give credit where it's due, Android's install base rivals Windows (exceeds it, depending on how you count), but in 2005, there was no guarantee of anything. 2005 was pre-iPhone, pre-Chrome, tablets were $2,000, ran XP Tablet PC Edition and shipped with a stylus, and the smartphone market was a three horse race between Microsoft, Palm, and Blackberry. If the outcome of the mobile race had Microsoft and Android in reverse, Rubin could have walked away with $50M, and he could have been the only one to turn a profit.
Even if the argument is that he should make a percentage of the gross revenue, that's both tough to define and also brings into the picture Google's part in the development. For good or for ill, a nontrivial part of what makes Google so popular is the Google ecosystem. Rubin didn't develop Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Youtube, Wallet, or Assistant. Rubin didn't integrate Activesync or make a one-stop-shop market for apps, books, movies, music, or work out the licensing or distribution deals. Yet, an Android phone without these things certainly wouldn't have been as much of a competitor to iOS. Android 9, and the Google ecosystem it integrates, bears very little resemblance to the Android Google bought. Yes, it's $22 billion, but that averages out to $2 billion per year, which goes pretty quick if you use it to pay all the developers who have continued development on the OS, its first party apps, the backend ecosystems that make it work, and the ad infrastructure from whence that revenue came.
You're wrong, and you clearly have never tried playing your games on a virtual system in the cloud.
The most popular games on GeForce Now are the FPS arena shooters that are so popular these days. People have been playing these games on virtual systems for over a year and having a great time.
Why are you so mad at the very idea of cloud gaming. I mean, you're just fuming about it.
Not the GP, but I think the issue is that it's just too tough to make the math work from an end user perspective.
The "get all the games" argument is tough to make. I tend to play one of maybe half a dozen games when I have time to play games. Steam sales and the Humble Bundles make it cheap to get last year's AAA games; even EA has figured that out - I just bought Titanfall 2 Kitchen Sink Edition for $8. Unless one is buying AAA releases every month, it's likely that just buying games outright will be cheaper than this service. Moreover, if a different commenter is correct, then it's only games that are owned anyway, so then the cost argument for the content flat out doesn't apply.
"But Voyager, the real value is in not having to get those expensive GPUs!" Uhm, okay...so let's mop the floor with this one. For starters, even a $150 GPU can play most current titles at 1080p on 'high' settings. Next, let's talk about "better GPUs on the back end". Those frames need to make it to the end user, who is probably on Wi-Fi, so the compression is going to offset any quality improvements from the better GPUs. Then, there would actually need to be higher end GPUs on the back end, which costs the provider money, and they need to be in machines that can also handle that image compression in realtime...and whether it's easier to get super-high-end GPUs and split them, or smaller GPUs and use them 1:1, is basically academic.
So, the content is the same, the image quality isn't going to be justified, the latency issues are simply a matter of physics, the cost of a year's subscription is unlikely to compare favorably to just buying a GPU...and what was the benefit again?
The best I can figure is that it's good for kids who has a Chromebook, doesn't have a console, wants to play not-mobile games, and wants to play all of the AAA titles back to back, but also is willing to pay $30-$50 a month to do so.
The only way it's going to take of is exclusive content. Sometimes it works (Origin), sometimes it doesn't (CBS All Access). Amazon, however, isn't well known for its game publishing acumen. They are, however, known for writing big enough checks to displace Oracle, so bigger money diplomacy may well do the job.
I think it is more to the fact, that AMD makes a set of chips which are a little better then Intel, then they ride that train until the chips are out of date, while Intel keeps their designs up to date
Like most things, I think there are a number of factors involved. I think the GP is half right, half incidentally-right. I think that while Intel is a household name that even nontechnical people know, AMD is...less so. Convincing people to buy a $700 AMD-based laptop vs. a $700 Intel-based laptop is going to be a very tough sell, even if they were identical in every other way. In the mid-2000s, when 3GHz Athlon64 processors were superior performance for similar prices, there was room for AMD to compete. However, for one reason or another, AMD stopped competing at the high end for OEM machines. Sure, system builders were always able to make a pretty good AMD build, and their support for ECC RAM on Vishera processors and similar gave them a bit of a niche in DIY cases, but for whatever reason, Dell/HP/Lenovo computers all seemed to only have AMD silicon in the sub-$300 range, which was going to be terrible, but now consumers tied AMD to "poor performance".
In the server room, there have been a number of software vendors saying "we only support Intel", and it's worth the money not to have the headache. AMD's Bulldozer debacle certainly didn't help matters. Even for those willing to roll the dice, they didn't offer anything radically different, either in performance or price, to make using them instead of Intel a worthwhile decision.
In the midst of all that, I'd argue that AMD managed to stay afloat as a result of their ATI acquisition; making the GPUs for a number of game consoles seemed to be a worthwhile focus that paid off; Intel didn't seem to really care about the graphics market. because they owned the CPU market.
AMD is definitely making a comeback in the consumer space, and their GPUs seem to remain neck-and-neck with nVidia, but the server room still seems to be a struggle for now, which is a shame because the added PCIe lanes and memory capacities would be great for some mid-range server uses.
Try not paying your state rent..er..property taxes and see how well that statement holds up.
I get your point, but it proves the GP's point as much as it proves yours.
Failure to pay property taxes, at least in my state, turns into a lien, which then turns into a foreclosure. That whole process involves a small mountain of paperwork and a number of lawyers, there are means of appeal, and so on - all of which are meticulously documented and whose procedures are well-defined.
A tax foreclosure is, basically, by definition, the state reclaiming ownership of the land; there's no easy way to use a house without land to put it on, but the fact that the house is part of the REpossession is basically an admission that the state didn't own it to begin with.
I paid once for my stack of CDs, and regardless of what contracts are signed or whether the CD goes out of print, my CD doesn't stop playing. My ripped MP3s don't stop playing. Even if the RIAA wants me to give back the CD, the law basically allows them to ask nicely, and that's about it. I may not *own* the music, I may not be allowed to redistribute the music as I see fit, but for every practical purpose, the fact that the media is owned means that there is a guarantee that there is nothing the "owners" can do to prevent me from listening to that CD at my leisure.
Here's a more clear-cut example:
I have a copy of Beauty and the Beast on DVD. I can watch that every day for the rest of my life if I want. Disney can put the DVD release back in the 'Disney Vault', they can sell the rights to Dreamworks, they can treat it like Song of the South...but my DVD copy ensures that I will never be prevented from watching the movie.
I have a subscription to Netflix. I can stream Beauty and the Beast until the deal between Netflix and Disney expires and Disney launches a separate streaming service, even if I continue to pay Netflix.
Note taking is one area where "mobile first" is a good idea. The best note taking device is the one you have with you. And most of the times, it is a mobile device.
And unfortunately, most note taking apps are terrible on mobile. In particular, the only app I know does hand drawing correctly is Squid/Papyrus, but it is the only thing it does well. Mobile phones take pictures, have a touchscreen you can draw on, but they are terrible for text input, and yet, most mobile note taking apps rely on the latter.
Still, "mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment" doesn't sound good. The problem is data entry, not the "view", the "cloud" or the "productivity environment".
I half agree with this, but I think you're missing the GP's point. I agree that making it easy to jot down notes and get the information out of one's brain and onto a more permanent form of storage is something mobile devices are good at, and I agree that the mobile versions of most note taking apps could stand to use a bit of improvement.
However, what I think was the original point, is that while mobile devices are great for taking notes due to their availability, desktops are great at helping to categorize that data based on their ability to show lots more data at once, and alter the display of that data to allow for greater amounts of categorization.. In the broadest of strokes, the most optimal system would be one where the mobile UI is optimized for data entry and the desktop UI is optimized for metadata entry (e.g. tags, categories, pages, links, consolidation, OCR, and so on).
The problem is that giving each platform a means to utilize its strengths is incredibly difficult to do; such a task would land the product in one of three categories:
1. The low-density, few-controls "mobile first" UI that wastes massive amounts of space on a 24" monitor and has so few controls as to lack the ability for users to customize. 2. A high-density, highly-customizable UI on a mobile device that's impossible to navigate or pick particular controls, or ending up with multiple sub-menus that make the mobile version unfriendly to use. 3. A schizophrenic UI that is optimized for both, but ends up being foreign to the end user when they switch between platforms, making it seem like almost two different products.
Good UI design is hard, and the unicorn, 'just right' UI, if it ever is properly conceived, is undoubtedly going to die on the table of the first committee meeting.
Cygwin is not a suitable replacement for WSL. Your talk about VMs shows that you don't understand the point in the first place
And your condescending description indicates that you miss *my* point. The thesis statement here is that LTSB is a bad option for the listed reasons. My point is that while WSL has its advantages, Cygwin and/or a separate Linux VM and/or Docker for Windows has been the way to perform the same tasks from a Windows workstation for over a decade now; a one-year-old method of doing certain Linux tasks without Cygwin or a VM is far from a compelling argument.
Slow updates ARE a problem when security is involved.
True, but any environment worth a damn has multiple layers of security, including antivirus, a decent firewall, UAC, some security-enhancing GPOs, and possibly some specialist software like Cryptoprevent. Getting security updates is important, but it's incredibly rare for a vulnerability to effectively exploit a system solely based on the absence of a security patch.
More to the point, my go-to example is one time when Windows 10 did an update on the laptop I used for controlling my intelligent lighting. That update got the machine stuck in a boot loop. I don't care what that laptop was vulnerable to prior to that update, and I don't care what new features are available after. 'preventing your computer from working properly' is a core description of the very malware the security updates are intended to prevent, and the updates caused more problems than the malware.
You can happily delay non security updates for 365 days in Windows 10 Pro. LTSB is stupid in this regard.
What's even better is not having monolithic patches.
No windows store is a problem on Windows 10 desktop.
...But why is it integrated into the OS to the point where it's not possible to be added on later? Valve seems to have figured out how to do that a decade ago.
It's a central license store for features not only for software.
Golden 'duh' award - those features are still software. Also, again, this is a solved problem except that the intent is unnecessary integration.
You mention OneNote as if you think you know what you're talking about.
I do.
Are you aware that OneNote UWP is nearly feature comparable
I mean, 'nearly' wasn't good enough for a Linux VM or Cygwin, but apparently it is now, because, reasons I guess...
and in many ways surpasses the Office version?
But OneNote was a part of Office when Billy Gates made the argument the first time? At least my arguments are consistent. Either way, I'm not saying it's useless now, but at the very least it's a royal PITA to use it without a Microsoft account, so even if it does everything else beautifully, the fact that it so heavily steers users to saving to Teh Cloud(tm) is a huge detriment.
Are you aware that depending on what Office 365 subscription you have OneNote activates a different set of features within the app and it requires the presence of the Store to do that?
...and yet, it was possible to have a single installation media with differing sets of active features, based on a product key, for over a decade? I know this because that's how Microsoft supplied Windows Vista. The need for the store is artificial, the inability to make the CtR installer download the required feature sets is also artificial, and even if all of that is somehow acceptable, we're still back to the fact that Valve solved di
There's Cygwin, there's Docker for Windows, there's Virtualbox and VMWare Workstation and Hyper-V...
slow as fuck Windows Update,
That's not a bug, that's a feature.
No Windows Store
Also a great feature.
which is a problem for Office 2019
I'm sure the CtR installer still works just fine, though odds are good that anyone with a licensed copy of LTSB will still have a volume license of Office, and anyone who gets it off The Pirate Bay similarly won't care.
as Sway
Who the hell has ever used Sway? I've never once met one person who used it. Even if it's a nice combination of Publisher, Wordpress, and Wix.com, the Youtube tutorial I watched didn't indicate any sort of export function; it's all browser based so it's barely a loss.
and OneNote
Ahhh, the incredibly powerful (if forever a sleeper) data organization and categorization tool that is a husk of its former self in Microsoft's pursuit of Evernote. It was a college student's best friend, but Microsoft could never understand that OneNote was a power user's tool, while Evernote focused on simplicity. While a 'simple mode' or 'OneNote Cloud' could have been a spinoff product, the UWP iteration of OneNote retains its name, and little else.
have moved to the Store only
Then it's not a part of Office anymore, is it? It's a spinoff product, likely from the same team, with similar branding...but it's not a part of Office if the Office installer doesn't include it.
and many other countless updates since 2015.
See, the problem is this false equivalence that newer is better. For a while, it was a safe bet. However, I'm hard pressed to come up with a feature added to Windows 10 that I have actually sought to implement, rather than disable. AFAIK, the LTSB still gets security updates, but is generally intended to be stable...which, at this point, is all a whole lot of Windows users really want.
Right. Because Mozilla has done such a great job not screwing up Firefox.
Firefox has made some missteps for sure (the plugin change, Pocket, and version number arms race all come to mind)...but they've kept things open source, they've improved their memory issues drastically, do the least amount of tracking, and with Edge, Safari, Chrome, and Opera all running on Webkit, they're basically the only browser between us and another browser monoculture.
Firefox may not be your preferred browser, and perhaps Facebook donating all their tech to Mozilla may not be the best idea (I'd opt for the EFF personally), but I don't think the notion that Mozilla is more screwed up than Chrome at this point is the safest ground upon which to stand.
The music executives needed to ditch DRM...If Apple hadn't gained such a dominant market position, we'd still have all kinds of small petty DRM kingdoms in music.
Look, as much as I agree that DRM needed to die (and still does), two points to bring up here:
1.) This was a subscription service. How does one enforce a subscription service without either internet connectivity or DRM? I agree that its demise for permanent downloads was long overdue, but in the context of a subscription service, what alternative is being suggested here?
2.) How is Spotify not DRM? You pay a set fee to access all their music, when you don't pay you lose access. If you use their offline mode, that lives as a blob of DRM'd data somewhere in a system(ish) folder; they're not dumping a bunch of MP3s on your drive and asking you nicely to delete them if you cancel your service.
So, as best as I can tell, the only way to rationalize the lack of software enforcing a time limit on audio playback in the context of a subscription service, is to principally disagree with the existence of subscription services for music at all.
all they had to do is to simply trade catalog for online presence.
The problem is that by the time Amazon rolled out, Sears had mostly traded catalog for brick and mortar.
No, Sears trade catalog for real estate. Most of their business has to do with land and building holdings, rather than selling goods...which is why they have existed for the past decade, long after their foot traffic had been lost to Wal-Mart and Amazon.
To the bigger topic, I don't know if Sears could have truly made the transition to the internet the way Amazon did. Bezos knew the key was "get big fast", and they did it by offering $20 books for $10, basically letting their early investors subsidize purchases, and expanding once it was practical to do so. This helped tremendously because they had to get people over the hump of using their credit cards online (remember when people were terrified of that?), and it's far easier to get logistics down with smaller items like books. Sears had lots of the logistics already in place, but they would have been expected to start with washing machines.
Sears wasn't going to offer a $100 Craftsman toolset for $70 if it was ordered online and shipped, people looking to get Sears products were unlikely to opt to use the internet to get those products just because it was the internet, and while people order everything from toilet paper to RAID controllers from Amazon *now*, Sears following the lead of a nascent internet bookstore that spent a decade selling everything at a loss would have been laughable in 1995, and justifiably so.
Yes, being overtaken by Amazon will be the final chapter in the story of Sears, but that's only obvious in the rearview mirror when the winner is known. It is both effective management and luck that Amazon is the new Sears, and not a nostalgic footnote like Pets.com or Myspace.
The ironic thing with this story is that 13 years ago, before Spotify and the like, HMV offered digital downloads...The downloads were clunky, required Windows Media Player and if you stopped paying the monthly subscription you lost access to the downloads entirely...The modern way of downloading music to keep (MP3s via Amazon, for example), is much better, as the music doesn't expire.
You're comparing apples to oranges here.
First off, let's set the stage here: We're dealing with a pre-smartphone, pre-streaming internet and device landscape. Spotify doesn't allow you to download songs and play them if you don't pay your Spotify bill, because it's a subscription*. So, how do you enforce a subscription on portable music players that were loaded via a USB cable? *That* is where the DRM comes into play.
Now, the reason this sort of subscription didn't take off is because, in that pre-smartphone, pre-LTE mobile internet, everyone had an iPod. iPods were not compatible with WMA files, DRM-laden or not. The players also needed to support the 'Janus' DRM that allowed subscription services like this one to exist at all, so even players that supported regular WMA didn't necessarily support *these* WMA files. Now, Creative and a few other companies made direct iPod competitors (look up the Zen Vision:M; it was one of my favorites) that would allow users to use this sort of a subscription, but now they need a brand new $200+ device to replace their perfectly-working iPod, and this new player wouldn't be compatible with their iTunes-purchased libraries - and even if it was all CD ripped / Limewire MP3s, playlists and ratings wouldn't transfer over, either.
Moreover, while Apple's vertical market meant that any issue would be handled by the same 800-number, getting your player from Creative, your subscription from HMV, your management software from MusicMatch, and your DRM system from Microsoft was a guaranteed way to land yourself in a Mexican Standoff trying to get someone to help.
To your point about the MP3 downloads, remember, the music industry was vehemently opposed to DRM-free downloads for the longest time; if it wasn't a DRM-laden m4p file or a DRM-laden WMA file, it was either ripped from one's own CDs or came from a P2P application. Amazon was an upstart who came late enough that the "DRM doesn't help" mantra was starting to sink in for the execs, but them saying 'f it' seemed to come when Apple made a deal where they would abandon DRM in exchange for being able to charge $1.29 for more popular tracks.
So, the reason you have WMA files that time bombed is the result of a number of people getting together to try and deliver a Spotify experience prior to the underlying technologies that make Spotify possible. Its klunkiness is a direct result of it being ahead of its time.
*yes, I know Spotify can be used exclusively in ad supported mode, but that would have been even more difficult to pull off in a pre-LTE world.
And even included an adapter to allow other, standard headphones to plug into the same port.
Now that's cynical/s
the "standard" requires an adapter? who is fooling who?
So when was the last time that you used a keyboard with a PS/2 connector? That was really cynical of PC manufacturers getting rid of PS/2 ports, forcing me to buy brand new USB keyboards. And don't get me started on those adapters that they forced on me when I had to use the AT style keyboard connectors with PS/2 ports.
*sigh*
1. It is still possible, in 2018, to buy desktops with PS/2 ports. Sure, it's a limited choice, but the port remains in existence. Now yes, I know the response to this one is "but you can still buy phones with headphone jacks", and you'd be correct...but the point is that while a port that was depreciated over a decade ago is still on the market, it is unclear whether the same will hold true in ten years for phones. Ten years ago, iPhones had 30-pin connectors and non-iPhones generally used mini-USB, but you can't find current-gen phones with these ports at any price.
2. The PS/2 ports were generally replaced with two USB ports; while you did have to get a new keyboard, even the first-gen motherboards without PS/2 had four or more USB ports; computers of the PS/2 era generally had only one or two USB ports, so the increase did not come at the expense of existing USB peripherals or a requirement of a hub. Apple didn't add a second general connectivity port (be it lightning or USB-C), so while a 6S could have both wired headphones and a charging cable, 7++ cannot.
3. PS/2 to USB adapters cost less than lightning to 1/8" adapters, and generally allow both mouse and keyboard to share a port, and require no drivers. Apple doesn't have a lightning-to-lightning-and-1/8" splitter for $10.
4. Bluetooth has awkwardness when it comes to multiple device combinations - my Plantronics headset can handle two devices concurrently, but not three, and my tablet can also handle two devices, but gets weird when I try connecting my Plantronics, my Bluetooth mouse, and my Pockethernet network tester. USB has this figured out already, and (albeit very differently) so did PS/2. Bluetooth isn't a panacea, but as it's quickly becoming the only connectivity option while charging, it's being treated as one.
So, even ignoring the sound quality and Yet Another Thing To Charge arguments, the PS/2 comparison falls flat.
I can (and do) give them permission to leave me sensitive info in a voicemail. And my voicemail is hosted by my telecom provider.
Just because they have your consent does not mean that they are actually-allowed to do it. If they have a policy that medical information is not left on voicemail, doesn't mean that the person on the other end is going to risk being in violation of that policy unless you have that consent as a part of your outgoing messge *and* they're recording their outgoing calls, and even then, super-regimented Mona who thrives on following every policy to the T is not going to make an exception for you when she makes the calls.
...but even if she was, this isn't about leaving a voicemail, it's about Google's AI assistant being fundamentally incompatible with HIPAA. Even if we believed that Assistant did not store any call data, the fact that the content of the call is being intercepted by a third party and processed by Google for transcription is near impossible to reconcile with HIPAA. Add to that the fact that there's no possible way Google isn't utilizing that data in some way, and it's guaranteed that Assistant and HIPAA can coexist.
So, for those of us keeping score, we've already tried giving alternatives to.com,.org, and.net, but they haven't picked up.
The problem, ultimately, is twofold. First, people don't associate anything other than the big three (and maybe.gov) with websites at all. So, people will likely do something like "okay, so i typed in slashdot.cc.com, and it's not loading..." - though, to be fair, it's been a while since I've come across a user who understands the difference between an address bar and a search bar, so Google would end up resolving it most of the time anyway.
More to the point, can you think of an established company or brand whose primary website is any of these other TLDs? Of the top 50 sites globally, only Twitch.tv doesn't end in.com,.org,.net, or a country's TLD. Even the porn industry couldn't make ".xxx" take off. If you're handing out business cards with something else, you're going to be seen as 'too small to get a.com', and spend lots of your time figuring out that people are e-mailing 'foobar.com' instead of 'foobar.vodka'; it saves everyone time to register 'foobarGA.com' or something else that ultimately ends in a recognizable TLD.
The issue is human nature, and the fact that custom TLDs don't translate to websites for most people...and there is neither a principle nor a profit motivation for using anything other than the TLDs that already do their job well.
Moffatt had his issues. He tended to lean pretty heavily on the Daleks / Cybermen / Weeping Angels a lot, and 'continuity' was almost laughable during his tenure, but he also knew how to do a story arc. The last three episodes of last season were easily the best of the season. I genuinely felt something when Bill said "I waited for you". I'd submit that the season-long arc in season 6 was probably the most well done of such arcs, and it was still possible to see the one-off episodes during the season without feeling like you walked in halfway through the story.
I don't think the issue the past two seasons had to do with the SJW content, though it certainly didn't help. The issue, I feel, had to do with three things. First, the pacing was terrible. The first act generally took way too long; it commonly felt like the episode was half over before they actually got started telling a story. Then, they raced through the climax, with the Doctor revealing something in that moment to solve the problem, which couldn't have been known otherwise, and then in 90 seconds the whole issue is resolved. After a while, there was no point in following the story, so we didn't get invested. Second, (admittedly more so last season), lots of those stories felt more like 'live action Scooby Doo' - land on a planet, meet someone who's scared of a thing, find the thing, find out the thing is really the nice one and is just misunderstood, realize the person who's scared of the thing is really the bad one, have the Doctor say "play nice, you two", and then leave. Finally, there were the villains. It's understandable that Daleks and Cybermen got old...but every week, a new villain, who's "just evil, okay?" with no motivation and no development, 'generic maniacal antagonist #493' stops being any better just because it can handle stairs. Why was the alien who was out to disrupt Rosa Parks getting on the fateful bus at all concerned about it? Why were those aliens who mourned everybody absent at Gallifrey? There was a golden opportunity to establish a recurring villain, but it was squandered on big spiders and a hungry thing.
So, I won't miss it in 2019...perhaps a year's sabbatical will involve the writers binge watching a few of the past seasons and taking some of the positive things from them.
Slashdot Mirror
It sure sounds like it!
The problem with that logic is that it then makes mass transit pointless. If the only non-appropriating use of the train is for individuals to have social visits with other people (shopping = commercial, going to work = commercial, going to the movies = commercial....), then there almost certainly wouldn't be enough riders to justify a mass transit system in the first place. Furthermore, it means that even driving = appropriation of the roads, walking = appropriation of the sidewalks. Now, I'd wager the answer is, "well businesses should pay for the mass transit since it benefits them". To which, the answer is, "well duh - where do you think the subsidies come from?". They're already assisting in paying for it based on their property taxes and other taxes they pay.
If they truly need to park, they can demonstrate that need by paying the market asking price for parking.
Which brings us to metered parking. Most commercially zoned areas with street parking in metro regions have metered parking, but it sounds like you're arguing that it still constitutes appropriation for those metered spots to be used by people going to work.
Similarly, if the business needs those employees, it can demonstrate that need by paying market rate salaries. If the business needs customers, it can demonstrate that need by offering market rate prices for its product or service.
If a business does precisely this, but mass transit and/or parking is still subsidized or paid for by the business' property taxes, it would still be appropriation based on what you've written.
Granted, but where do we disagree on whether customers parking on the street is an example of a business appropriating the public commons for profit?
Because the business still pays property taxes. If there is no place to park, the business is less competitive and can't afford the taxes. Consequently, only businesses which can avoid the use of cars can utilize that land. As a separate example, suppose a business is close enough to a train station or bus stop to make it possible for clients to not-park. Is that business appropriating the public commons if the mass transit is subsidized?
Let's flip the script just a bit - what's the solution for people needing to park in order to remain employees or clients? Every business is mandated to have a parking lot, even in densely-populated areas like NYC where the land simply doesn't exist otherwise? Businesses have to foot the bill for street-parked employees and clients? How does one keep track of that reliably without either endless bureaucracy or even-more-surveillance and tracking? Are sufficiently-high property taxes not enough to cover the cost and call it a day?
That number only works if it assumes all 11 million people would have bought a new $1,000 iPhone instead - $11 billion makes up for the earnings expectations nicely.
However, that only works at the most superficial of levels. There's a whole cottage industry of mall kiosks and small-time repair shops that specialize in replacing spent batteries and cracked screens. Apple managed to massively undercut them at $29 (which is why the numbers are so high). Let's say that half of those 11 million people would have done any of the following:
-Gotten a $749 XR. 5.5 milion of those meets their projected earnings, but only barely. Make it a $599 iPhone 8, and now you're off by over a billion - not "oh f'k" money, but still enough to make investors plenty nervous.
-Gotten an Android phone.
-Had a third party change the battery.
-Gotten a secondhand iPhone 7.
-Stuck it out with their existing iPhone.
That also would have put them in a position where class action lawyers were tripping over themselves to get some iBucks. If that lawsuit was as large as the tenth largest payout in history - not impossible since it would likely include virtually every iPhone in the past decade - that's $3.2 billion just in the payout. That payout would make them miss their earnings by billions even if every battery replacement would have otherwise been a $1,000 XS.
The number indicates that even the slightest scrutiny prevents Apple from making their earnings numbers. In turn, this starts to indicate that Apple can't expect to make the fortunes off the Annual iPhone crowd they once did. IoT doesn't seem to be helping them; it's rare to find a description of a HomePod as a great-sounding also-ran and there's no indication that releasing the iRing or the iHue will push them into those markets. The Apple Car is vaporware, Apple being the new cable company could go either way (especially without a first party television to generate the hype for it), Tim doesn't seem to want to revisit the server room, and while I can't entirely dismiss a surprise-success like the iPod, Tim's had nearly a decade to do that and doesn't seem to have been able to figure out the next big thing just yet.
Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not an Apple hater, and I don't think they're going to die overnight. The iOS ecosystem is incredibly strong and will continue to be Apple's cash cow for quite some time to come. However, I think that investors are starting to get nervous. Maybe it'll be a good thing, and we'll see Apple revisit their creative design loyalists. Maybe Apple will shock everyone by finding a niche and owning it. Or maybe, Apple will finally prove to itself, to Microsoft, to Google, to Facebook, and ultimately to Wall Street, that Big Tech has settled in with Big Oil and Big Pharma as being boring, stable, and iterative.
In a sane world legal action would be taken to force Microsoft to make a fit for purpose successor to Windows 7, but Microsoft enjoys money too much and can bribe their way out of it.
I think the sane legal action would instead be a federal mandate that only a fit-for-purpose Win7 successor, with a perpetual licensing option, be the only legally allowed OS for any federal workstation projects. This would force MS to think real, real hard about whether they'll make more money with their telemetry than they would lose in government contracts. Now, the obvious loophole to this is for MS to make "Win10 fit-for-purpose: $100,000 MSRP for a perpetual license, Win10 FFP, $100/license for government entities"; they do this for not-for-profit sales already...but that's for the lawyers to resolve.
The reason why I'd have an issue with what you're suggesting is that I very much agree with the need for a version of Win10 that doesn't require a lengthy Powershell script, three separate privacy-granting utilities, and firewall rules at the router level in order to grant any vague sense of privacy and control. However, the chilling effects worry me. The San Bernadino iPhone case hinged on a decision that the government could not compel Apple to write a version of iOS they did not want to write, especially given the context. To compel Microsoft to write a version of Windows they don't want to write is to create the sort of precedent that would make the San Bernadino ruling much less resolute.
The government incentivizing that code be written by way of mandating it to bid for contracts, sure. Microsoft can opt-out of those tens of billions of dollars if they so choose, but I think even the most telemetry-happy members of Microsoft's decision makers would have trouble selling everyone else that their data mining and telemetry is going to earn them more money than they'll lose. If it's Microsoft's hill to die on, then let them die on that hill. Allowing the government to compel a company to write a program, however, is scary - and it doesn't stop being scary just because I happen to agree with the outcome. Sooner or later, I won't.
My rule has always been to set up Win10 machines without a network connection. If there is no internet connection, it will default back to creating a local account. Also, setting up Win10 with a network connection means that it will try and run some hour-long update before getting you to the desktop. Doing the OOBE offline means it will be forced to wait to attempt to update, so you can start doing other stuff while it runs that update in the background. Why that's not its default behavior, I have no idea, but that's how I've managed to remain sane.
Is that like when businesses allow their customers to park on the street?
*sigh* No.
Street parking isn't generally an issue in areas with lots of room. Street parking happens when it's illegal or impractical for a business to have a parking lot. In those areas, street parking is pretty clearly defined, with parking rules clearly defined on signs, and frequently with parking meters.
Pretty much anywhere you're going to street park, the general rules are that you're 1.) not blocking a driveway or fire hydrant, and 2.) have left enough room for other traffic to pass, and 3.) there aren't other regulations or notices disallowing parking. Not doing these things is a ticketable offense in most cases. The fact that businesses allow their employees and customers to street park is generally paid for by the property taxes of the business, and by the meters, and the lack of available parking is a disincentive for businesses to locate in those places, reducing that revenue accordingly. Back to your point, a business doesn't get to tell their customers and employees that it's okay to block traffic without those customers/employees getting impounded. That's the better analog to what this scooter company is doing.
The problem is that the sidewalk is an avenue where "no parking" is just implied. Yes, every so often, some inconsiderate person leaves their bike on a sidewalk, but that's usually a one-off nuisance case; one can deal with them and still reasonably assume that "don't park on the sidewalk" to be sufficiently obvious as to not need legislation/signage/enforcement. The issue is that now we have a company who is trying to argue that "it's not illegal to park a sidewalk-acceptable vehicle on the sidewalk" with sufficient frequency and are not self-policing their users, such that now they need to have the situation addressed more directly.
Yes, you read correctly. I'm hopeful.
See, there is a level where even the masses start to say "do not want". Placebo as it may be, look around and you'll see plenty of people putting tape over their laptop webcams. Amazon's "we can give delivery men the ability to open your door, which is totally safe because of the camera that goes along with it" initiative is one I have yet to meet literally anybody who said "I want that". I think "multiple cameras in my car, uploading video in realtime" might have a niche in Uber vehicles or driverless cars (keeps drivers safe and passengers accountable), but I think even the Alexa-owning masses will say "too far".
More to the point, I don't see how this technology won't pit the advertisers against the insurance companies. The crux of the issue hinges on what is truly meant by "revenue opportunities". How will these systems generate revenue? Consumers won't pay for the video footage. Law enforcement agencies won't pay for access proactively, especially because it would simply ensure none of their actual-suspects use those cars. Image or video ads are a guaranteed way to distract the driver (insurance companies will never allow it). Audio ads won't be okay; if nothing else ClearChannel won't want the competition. City planners won't pay for it; they can get that sort of aggregate data from Google Maps or those statistical boxes.
My point is that there is a point where even John Q. Public is going to care. Alexa provides entertainment and utility, smartphones the same, but a whole system dedicated to post-sale monetization while providing no utility to customers that Android Auto or the Apple equivalent can't also provide? Yeah, I think that even those people are going to have an uphill battle.
A lot of what Trump does is done impulsively. His number one apologist, Scott Adams, says that in business you need to make decisions quickly because the quicker you act, the quicker you can fix it if you made a mistake. He gave out a big tax cut to the corporations when other changes he had made seemed to be making the economy stronger. That I blame on impulse - do everything now, not later.
I'm not a huge Trump fan personally, but I do at least respect this line of reasoning. Sadly, we have a government that can't agree that water is wet, and a population so heavily divided that they would remain blue/red even if their own side was the one claiming that it wasn't. In that environment, Hillary would have done no better. Neither would Sanders.
Now, Obama wasn't exactly a president that seemed to consider definitive, decisive action as something he wanted to do as a matter of course. He was an excellent orator, and very personable, but he gave the appearance of wanting everybody to be on the same page, and a general unwillingness to play hardball with those who didn't. I can appreciate that sort of desire for compromise and bipartisan agreement...but he was never going to get the red team to agree, even if he did everything they wanted to the point where the blue team was upset at him for turning into a DINO.
Trump isn't unaware of this. It's why he has a Twitter feed that is a massive red herring, letting the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC be appalled at the not-nice things he says, only to actually make it a point to make decisive actions with the media too busy reading tweets to report news. Now again, I don't think his policies align well with my political leanings, but I do think that looking at the methods in isolation, Trump at least gives the appearance of being a bit more successful.
You better take a look at the system requirements for some of the current AAA titles.
Far Cry 5's requirements list an a Radeon R9 270 or GTX 670. Newegg has RX570's and GTX1050Ti's for $150-$200. Running it on Ultra on a MBP for $0/month, I get. Even if they charge $20/month for the service, it's still a wash vs. getting a card in a desktop in under a year.
Unless one is buying AAA releases every month, it's likely that just buying games outright will be cheaper than this service.
OK, you misunderstand what the service does. You don't pay to get the games, you have to already own the games. They're yours. You just run them on nVidia's or Amazon's hardware in the cloud. Your Steam account fires up in the cloud and you can just play any game you own. Same with UPlay. Origin isn't part of this (I'm guessing they're going to end up offering their own service).
That makes it even less of a bargain. If it's only offsetting the cost of hardware, then I can't imagine there being a price point high enough for Amazon to make a profit while also being low enough to compare favorably to just getting a GPU or a Playstation.
he best I can figure is that it's good for kids who has a Chromebook, doesn't have a console, wants to play not-mobile games, and wants to play all of the AAA titles back to back, but also is willing to pay $30-$50 a month to do so.
Thing is, we have no idea what the price point is going to be yet. If it's $20/month, it would be cheaper than upgrading my PC every 2 years. We just have to wait and see.
I mean, yes, but the math isn't a no-brainer, either. If we're using a two-year amortization time, $20/month = $480 over that period, and for that price, you can get a PS4 Pro and a game or two. Admittedly rumors of the PS5 releasing in 2020 mean it's not the greatest example now, but since the release was in 2014, that's still 5 years of use. At the $399 release price and assuming 5 years of use, that's $6.67/month for a Playstation. The aforementioned R9 270 was released in November 2013 and cost $200. If you're going to assume a $1,000 CPU/RAM/GPU/SSD upgrade every two years then yeah, maybe, but that's almost deliberately stacking the deck to make your point; since the Far Cry 5 requirements are essentially "a $1,200 PC from 2014", the amortization on that through Dec 2018 ends up being $20/mo - the best-case-scenario pricing of Amazon's service...and you have a computer for other things as well.
Now, let's put some scrutiny on that $20/month number. Assume Amazon standardizes on the GTX1080. Newegg is still selling that for $519. But it's Amazon, and we'll assume MSI will do a custom run on them such that Amazon pays $399 a card. Assuming 2-year depreciation, that's $16.67/month *just* for the cards. Add in power, support, platform development, and bandwidth, and I sincerely doubt they'll be able to make $20/month the final cost of the service.
Also, it's not just going to be Chromebook users. I can play current AAA games that have not been released for OSX on an old Macbook Pro. Don't have to download the game, just fire it up. You can run Steam without having it installed on your computer. And everything runs on ultra.
I mean, that's awesome, but I guess it's still a puzzling black box about Amazon can stream games in realtime such that compression doesn't offset the rendering quality - after all, if there's more nuance on the textures, it's harder to compress.
More to my point, I guess I'm also having a rough time estimating the number of people using older Macbooks to game *and* who care about running those games in ultra such that using Parallels or Boot Camp isn't good enough to the point where they're
As a low-level peon I fall to understand how this happens. How do you get a contract signed at hiring that says "if I leave or am fired for misconduct you must give me a parachute of $500,000"?
In 2005, Google bought Android from Andy Rubin for 50 million dollars. Andy Rubin was at the helm of Android until December 2012 (basically, Android had already taken over the World by then).
In 2016, an Oracle lawyer leaked court documents that said that Google had made 22 billion dollars in profit from the Android operating system.
So you do the math.
I don't see much of an issue with this.
$50 Million is enough money to live very comfortably. If it's possible to get 1% interest on it, that's half a million dollars per year without earning another dollar otherwise. $50 million may not be Walton money, but it's still far more than the majority of programmers will earn over the course of a career. Sure, he would probably end up keeping only $30M after taxes and lawyers, but it's still "never work again" money.
Now, the argument here is that it's 0.002% of what Google's gross revenue from the platform is, so he should have gotten more. Well, I'm not much of a Google fan, but to give credit where it's due, Android's install base rivals Windows (exceeds it, depending on how you count), but in 2005, there was no guarantee of anything. 2005 was pre-iPhone, pre-Chrome, tablets were $2,000, ran XP Tablet PC Edition and shipped with a stylus, and the smartphone market was a three horse race between Microsoft, Palm, and Blackberry. If the outcome of the mobile race had Microsoft and Android in reverse, Rubin could have walked away with $50M, and he could have been the only one to turn a profit.
Even if the argument is that he should make a percentage of the gross revenue, that's both tough to define and also brings into the picture Google's part in the development. For good or for ill, a nontrivial part of what makes Google so popular is the Google ecosystem. Rubin didn't develop Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Youtube, Wallet, or Assistant. Rubin didn't integrate Activesync or make a one-stop-shop market for apps, books, movies, music, or work out the licensing or distribution deals. Yet, an Android phone without these things certainly wouldn't have been as much of a competitor to iOS. Android 9, and the Google ecosystem it integrates, bears very little resemblance to the Android Google bought. Yes, it's $22 billion, but that averages out to $2 billion per year, which goes pretty quick if you use it to pay all the developers who have continued development on the OS, its first party apps, the backend ecosystems that make it work, and the ad infrastructure from whence that revenue came.
Not the GP, but I think the issue is that it's just too tough to make the math work from an end user perspective.
The "get all the games" argument is tough to make. I tend to play one of maybe half a dozen games when I have time to play games. Steam sales and the Humble Bundles make it cheap to get last year's AAA games; even EA has figured that out - I just bought Titanfall 2 Kitchen Sink Edition for $8. Unless one is buying AAA releases every month, it's likely that just buying games outright will be cheaper than this service. Moreover, if a different commenter is correct, then it's only games that are owned anyway, so then the cost argument for the content flat out doesn't apply.
"But Voyager, the real value is in not having to get those expensive GPUs!"
Uhm, okay...so let's mop the floor with this one. For starters, even a $150 GPU can play most current titles at 1080p on 'high' settings. Next, let's talk about "better GPUs on the back end". Those frames need to make it to the end user, who is probably on Wi-Fi, so the compression is going to offset any quality improvements from the better GPUs. Then, there would actually need to be higher end GPUs on the back end, which costs the provider money, and they need to be in machines that can also handle that image compression in realtime...and whether it's easier to get super-high-end GPUs and split them, or smaller GPUs and use them 1:1, is basically academic.
So, the content is the same, the image quality isn't going to be justified, the latency issues are simply a matter of physics, the cost of a year's subscription is unlikely to compare favorably to just buying a GPU...and what was the benefit again?
The best I can figure is that it's good for kids who has a Chromebook, doesn't have a console, wants to play not-mobile games, and wants to play all of the AAA titles back to back, but also is willing to pay $30-$50 a month to do so.
The only way it's going to take of is exclusive content. Sometimes it works (Origin), sometimes it doesn't (CBS All Access). Amazon, however, isn't well known for its game publishing acumen. They are, however, known for writing big enough checks to displace Oracle, so bigger money diplomacy may well do the job.
I think it is more to the fact, that AMD makes a set of chips which are a little better then Intel, then they ride that train until the chips are out of date, while Intel keeps their designs up to date
Like most things, I think there are a number of factors involved. I think the GP is half right, half incidentally-right. I think that while Intel is a household name that even nontechnical people know, AMD is...less so. Convincing people to buy a $700 AMD-based laptop vs. a $700 Intel-based laptop is going to be a very tough sell, even if they were identical in every other way. In the mid-2000s, when 3GHz Athlon64 processors were superior performance for similar prices, there was room for AMD to compete. However, for one reason or another, AMD stopped competing at the high end for OEM machines. Sure, system builders were always able to make a pretty good AMD build, and their support for ECC RAM on Vishera processors and similar gave them a bit of a niche in DIY cases, but for whatever reason, Dell/HP/Lenovo computers all seemed to only have AMD silicon in the sub-$300 range, which was going to be terrible, but now consumers tied AMD to "poor performance".
In the server room, there have been a number of software vendors saying "we only support Intel", and it's worth the money not to have the headache. AMD's Bulldozer debacle certainly didn't help matters. Even for those willing to roll the dice, they didn't offer anything radically different, either in performance or price, to make using them instead of Intel a worthwhile decision.
In the midst of all that, I'd argue that AMD managed to stay afloat as a result of their ATI acquisition; making the GPUs for a number of game consoles seemed to be a worthwhile focus that paid off; Intel didn't seem to really care about the graphics market. because they owned the CPU market.
AMD is definitely making a comeback in the consumer space, and their GPUs seem to remain neck-and-neck with nVidia, but the server room still seems to be a struggle for now, which is a shame because the added PCIe lanes and memory capacities would be great for some mid-range server uses.
It's your house, not the State's.
Try not paying your state rent..er..property taxes and see how well that statement holds up.
I get your point, but it proves the GP's point as much as it proves yours.
Failure to pay property taxes, at least in my state, turns into a lien, which then turns into a foreclosure. That whole process involves a small mountain of paperwork and a number of lawyers, there are means of appeal, and so on - all of which are meticulously documented and whose procedures are well-defined.
A tax foreclosure is, basically, by definition, the state reclaiming ownership of the land; there's no easy way to use a house without land to put it on, but the fact that the house is part of the REpossession is basically an admission that the state didn't own it to begin with.
I paid once for my stack of CDs, and regardless of what contracts are signed or whether the CD goes out of print, my CD doesn't stop playing. My ripped MP3s don't stop playing. Even if the RIAA wants me to give back the CD, the law basically allows them to ask nicely, and that's about it. I may not *own* the music, I may not be allowed to redistribute the music as I see fit, but for every practical purpose, the fact that the media is owned means that there is a guarantee that there is nothing the "owners" can do to prevent me from listening to that CD at my leisure.
Here's a more clear-cut example:
I have a copy of Beauty and the Beast on DVD. I can watch that every day for the rest of my life if I want. Disney can put the DVD release back in the 'Disney Vault', they can sell the rights to Dreamworks, they can treat it like Song of the South...but my DVD copy ensures that I will never be prevented from watching the movie.
I have a subscription to Netflix. I can stream Beauty and the Beast until the deal between Netflix and Disney expires and Disney launches a separate streaming service, even if I continue to pay Netflix.
That is the difference.
Note taking is one area where "mobile first" is a good idea. The best note taking device is the one you have with you. And most of the times, it is a mobile device.
And unfortunately, most note taking apps are terrible on mobile. In particular, the only app I know does hand drawing correctly is Squid/Papyrus, but it is the only thing it does well. Mobile phones take pictures, have a touchscreen you can draw on, but they are terrible for text input, and yet, most mobile note taking apps rely on the latter.
Still, "mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment" doesn't sound good. The problem is data entry, not the "view", the "cloud" or the "productivity environment".
I half agree with this, but I think you're missing the GP's point. I agree that making it easy to jot down notes and get the information out of one's brain and onto a more permanent form of storage is something mobile devices are good at, and I agree that the mobile versions of most note taking apps could stand to use a bit of improvement.
However, what I think was the original point, is that while mobile devices are great for taking notes due to their availability, desktops are great at helping to categorize that data based on their ability to show lots more data at once, and alter the display of that data to allow for greater amounts of categorization.. In the broadest of strokes, the most optimal system would be one where the mobile UI is optimized for data entry and the desktop UI is optimized for metadata entry (e.g. tags, categories, pages, links, consolidation, OCR, and so on).
The problem is that giving each platform a means to utilize its strengths is incredibly difficult to do; such a task would land the product in one of three categories:
1. The low-density, few-controls "mobile first" UI that wastes massive amounts of space on a 24" monitor and has so few controls as to lack the ability for users to customize.
2. A high-density, highly-customizable UI on a mobile device that's impossible to navigate or pick particular controls, or ending up with multiple sub-menus that make the mobile version unfriendly to use.
3. A schizophrenic UI that is optimized for both, but ends up being foreign to the end user when they switch between platforms, making it seem like almost two different products.
Good UI design is hard, and the unicorn, 'just right' UI, if it ever is properly conceived, is undoubtedly going to die on the table of the first committee meeting.
Oh look you're trying to be clever.
Not clever, just realistic.
Good work ignoring the GP's requirements.
Yes, because they're dumb requirements.
But let me correct you on your sillyness
Go right ahead.
Cygwin is not a suitable replacement for WSL. Your talk about VMs shows that you don't understand the point in the first place
And your condescending description indicates that you miss *my* point. The thesis statement here is that LTSB is a bad option for the listed reasons. My point is that while WSL has its advantages, Cygwin and/or a separate Linux VM and/or Docker for Windows has been the way to perform the same tasks from a Windows workstation for over a decade now; a one-year-old method of doing certain Linux tasks without Cygwin or a VM is far from a compelling argument.
Slow updates ARE a problem when security is involved.
True, but any environment worth a damn has multiple layers of security, including antivirus, a decent firewall, UAC, some security-enhancing GPOs, and possibly some specialist software like Cryptoprevent. Getting security updates is important, but it's incredibly rare for a vulnerability to effectively exploit a system solely based on the absence of a security patch.
More to the point, my go-to example is one time when Windows 10 did an update on the laptop I used for controlling my intelligent lighting. That update got the machine stuck in a boot loop. I don't care what that laptop was vulnerable to prior to that update, and I don't care what new features are available after. 'preventing your computer from working properly' is a core description of the very malware the security updates are intended to prevent, and the updates caused more problems than the malware.
You can happily delay non security updates for 365 days in Windows 10 Pro. LTSB is stupid in this regard.
What's even better is not having monolithic patches.
No windows store is a problem on Windows 10 desktop.
...But why is it integrated into the OS to the point where it's not possible to be added on later? Valve seems to have figured out how to do that a decade ago.
It's a central license store for features not only for software.
Golden 'duh' award - those features are still software. Also, again, this is a solved problem except that the intent is unnecessary integration.
You mention OneNote as if you think you know what you're talking about.
I do.
Are you aware that OneNote UWP is nearly feature comparable
I mean, 'nearly' wasn't good enough for a Linux VM or Cygwin, but apparently it is now, because, reasons I guess...
and in many ways surpasses the Office version?
But OneNote was a part of Office when Billy Gates made the argument the first time? At least my arguments are consistent. Either way, I'm not saying it's useless now, but at the very least it's a royal PITA to use it without a Microsoft account, so even if it does everything else beautifully, the fact that it so heavily steers users to saving to Teh Cloud(tm) is a huge detriment.
Are you aware that depending on what Office 365 subscription you have OneNote activates a different set of features within the app and it requires the presence of the Store to do that?
...and yet, it was possible to have a single installation media with differing sets of active features, based on a product key, for over a decade? I know this because that's how Microsoft supplied Windows Vista. The need for the store is artificial, the inability to make the CtR installer download the required feature sets is also artificial, and even if all of that is somehow acceptable, we're still back to the fact that Valve solved di
And I swear that guy is going to have an aneurism with the rage fits he has from time to time.
Or...he's aware that those rage fits are a part of the entertainment value to his audience.
by Billly Gates ( 198444 )
Username checks out.
LTSB is not recommended. No Linux support,
There's Cygwin, there's Docker for Windows, there's Virtualbox and VMWare Workstation and Hyper-V...
slow as fuck Windows Update,
That's not a bug, that's a feature.
No Windows Store
Also a great feature.
which is a problem for Office 2019
I'm sure the CtR installer still works just fine, though odds are good that anyone with a licensed copy of LTSB will still have a volume license of Office, and anyone who gets it off The Pirate Bay similarly won't care.
as Sway
Who the hell has ever used Sway? I've never once met one person who used it. Even if it's a nice combination of Publisher, Wordpress, and Wix.com, the Youtube tutorial I watched didn't indicate any sort of export function; it's all browser based so it's barely a loss.
and OneNote
Ahhh, the incredibly powerful (if forever a sleeper) data organization and categorization tool that is a husk of its former self in Microsoft's pursuit of Evernote. It was a college student's best friend, but Microsoft could never understand that OneNote was a power user's tool, while Evernote focused on simplicity. While a 'simple mode' or 'OneNote Cloud' could have been a spinoff product, the UWP iteration of OneNote retains its name, and little else.
have moved to the Store only
Then it's not a part of Office anymore, is it? It's a spinoff product, likely from the same team, with similar branding...but it's not a part of Office if the Office installer doesn't include it.
and many other countless updates since 2015.
See, the problem is this false equivalence that newer is better. For a while, it was a safe bet. However, I'm hard pressed to come up with a feature added to Windows 10 that I have actually sought to implement, rather than disable. AFAIK, the LTSB still gets security updates, but is generally intended to be stable...which, at this point, is all a whole lot of Windows users really want.
Right. Because Mozilla has done such a great job not screwing up Firefox.
Firefox has made some missteps for sure (the plugin change, Pocket, and version number arms race all come to mind)...but they've kept things open source, they've improved their memory issues drastically, do the least amount of tracking, and with Edge, Safari, Chrome, and Opera all running on Webkit, they're basically the only browser between us and another browser monoculture.
Firefox may not be your preferred browser, and perhaps Facebook donating all their tech to Mozilla may not be the best idea (I'd opt for the EFF personally), but I don't think the notion that Mozilla is more screwed up than Chrome at this point is the safest ground upon which to stand.
The music executives needed to ditch DRM...If Apple hadn't gained such a dominant market position, we'd still have all kinds of small petty DRM kingdoms in music.
Look, as much as I agree that DRM needed to die (and still does), two points to bring up here:
1.) This was a subscription service. How does one enforce a subscription service without either internet connectivity or DRM? I agree that its demise for permanent downloads was long overdue, but in the context of a subscription service, what alternative is being suggested here?
2.) How is Spotify not DRM? You pay a set fee to access all their music, when you don't pay you lose access. If you use their offline mode, that lives as a blob of DRM'd data somewhere in a system(ish) folder; they're not dumping a bunch of MP3s on your drive and asking you nicely to delete them if you cancel your service.
So, as best as I can tell, the only way to rationalize the lack of software enforcing a time limit on audio playback in the context of a subscription service, is to principally disagree with the existence of subscription services for music at all.
The problem is that by the time Amazon rolled out, Sears had mostly traded catalog for brick and mortar.
No, Sears trade catalog for real estate. Most of their business has to do with land and building holdings, rather than selling goods...which is why they have existed for the past decade, long after their foot traffic had been lost to Wal-Mart and Amazon.
To the bigger topic, I don't know if Sears could have truly made the transition to the internet the way Amazon did. Bezos knew the key was "get big fast", and they did it by offering $20 books for $10, basically letting their early investors subsidize purchases, and expanding once it was practical to do so. This helped tremendously because they had to get people over the hump of using their credit cards online (remember when people were terrified of that?), and it's far easier to get logistics down with smaller items like books. Sears had lots of the logistics already in place, but they would have been expected to start with washing machines.
Sears wasn't going to offer a $100 Craftsman toolset for $70 if it was ordered online and shipped, people looking to get Sears products were unlikely to opt to use the internet to get those products just because it was the internet, and while people order everything from toilet paper to RAID controllers from Amazon *now*, Sears following the lead of a nascent internet bookstore that spent a decade selling everything at a loss would have been laughable in 1995, and justifiably so.
Yes, being overtaken by Amazon will be the final chapter in the story of Sears, but that's only obvious in the rearview mirror when the winner is known. It is both effective management and luck that Amazon is the new Sears, and not a nostalgic footnote like Pets.com or Myspace.
The ironic thing with this story is that 13 years ago, before Spotify and the like, HMV offered digital downloads...The downloads were clunky, required Windows Media Player and if you stopped paying the monthly subscription you lost access to the downloads entirely...The modern way of downloading music to keep (MP3s via Amazon, for example), is much better, as the music doesn't expire.
You're comparing apples to oranges here.
First off, let's set the stage here: We're dealing with a pre-smartphone, pre-streaming internet and device landscape. Spotify doesn't allow you to download songs and play them if you don't pay your Spotify bill, because it's a subscription*. So, how do you enforce a subscription on portable music players that were loaded via a USB cable? *That* is where the DRM comes into play.
Now, the reason this sort of subscription didn't take off is because, in that pre-smartphone, pre-LTE mobile internet, everyone had an iPod. iPods were not compatible with WMA files, DRM-laden or not. The players also needed to support the 'Janus' DRM that allowed subscription services like this one to exist at all, so even players that supported regular WMA didn't necessarily support *these* WMA files. Now, Creative and a few other companies made direct iPod competitors (look up the Zen Vision:M; it was one of my favorites) that would allow users to use this sort of a subscription, but now they need a brand new $200+ device to replace their perfectly-working iPod, and this new player wouldn't be compatible with their iTunes-purchased libraries - and even if it was all CD ripped / Limewire MP3s, playlists and ratings wouldn't transfer over, either.
Moreover, while Apple's vertical market meant that any issue would be handled by the same 800-number, getting your player from Creative, your subscription from HMV, your management software from MusicMatch, and your DRM system from Microsoft was a guaranteed way to land yourself in a Mexican Standoff trying to get someone to help.
To your point about the MP3 downloads, remember, the music industry was vehemently opposed to DRM-free downloads for the longest time; if it wasn't a DRM-laden m4p file or a DRM-laden WMA file, it was either ripped from one's own CDs or came from a P2P application. Amazon was an upstart who came late enough that the "DRM doesn't help" mantra was starting to sink in for the execs, but them saying 'f it' seemed to come when Apple made a deal where they would abandon DRM in exchange for being able to charge $1.29 for more popular tracks.
So, the reason you have WMA files that time bombed is the result of a number of people getting together to try and deliver a Spotify experience prior to the underlying technologies that make Spotify possible. Its klunkiness is a direct result of it being ahead of its time.
*yes, I know Spotify can be used exclusively in ad supported mode, but that would have been even more difficult to pull off in a pre-LTE world.
And even included an adapter to allow other, standard headphones to plug into the same port.
Now that's cynical /s
the "standard" requires an adapter? who is fooling who?
So when was the last time that you used a keyboard with a PS/2 connector? That was really cynical of PC manufacturers getting rid of PS/2 ports, forcing me to buy brand new USB keyboards. And don't get me started on those adapters that they forced on me when I had to use the AT style keyboard connectors with PS/2 ports.
*sigh*
1. It is still possible, in 2018, to buy desktops with PS/2 ports. Sure, it's a limited choice, but the port remains in existence. Now yes, I know the response to this one is "but you can still buy phones with headphone jacks", and you'd be correct...but the point is that while a port that was depreciated over a decade ago is still on the market, it is unclear whether the same will hold true in ten years for phones. Ten years ago, iPhones had 30-pin connectors and non-iPhones generally used mini-USB, but you can't find current-gen phones with these ports at any price.
2. The PS/2 ports were generally replaced with two USB ports; while you did have to get a new keyboard, even the first-gen motherboards without PS/2 had four or more USB ports; computers of the PS/2 era generally had only one or two USB ports, so the increase did not come at the expense of existing USB peripherals or a requirement of a hub. Apple didn't add a second general connectivity port (be it lightning or USB-C), so while a 6S could have both wired headphones and a charging cable, 7++ cannot.
3. PS/2 to USB adapters cost less than lightning to 1/8" adapters, and generally allow both mouse and keyboard to share a port, and require no drivers. Apple doesn't have a lightning-to-lightning-and-1/8" splitter for $10.
4. Bluetooth has awkwardness when it comes to multiple device combinations - my Plantronics headset can handle two devices concurrently, but not three, and my tablet can also handle two devices, but gets weird when I try connecting my Plantronics, my Bluetooth mouse, and my Pockethernet network tester. USB has this figured out already, and (albeit very differently) so did PS/2. Bluetooth isn't a panacea, but as it's quickly becoming the only connectivity option while charging, it's being treated as one.
So, even ignoring the sound quality and Yet Another Thing To Charge arguments, the PS/2 comparison falls flat.
I can (and do) give them permission to leave me sensitive info in a voicemail. And my voicemail is hosted by my telecom provider.
Just because they have your consent does not mean that they are actually-allowed to do it. If they have a policy that medical information is not left on voicemail, doesn't mean that the person on the other end is going to risk being in violation of that policy unless you have that consent as a part of your outgoing messge *and* they're recording their outgoing calls, and even then, super-regimented Mona who thrives on following every policy to the T is not going to make an exception for you when she makes the calls.
So, for those of us keeping score, we've already tried giving alternatives to .com, .org, and .net, but they haven't picked up.
The problem, ultimately, is twofold. First, people don't associate anything other than the big three (and maybe .gov) with websites at all. So, people will likely do something like "okay, so i typed in slashdot.cc.com, and it's not loading..." - though, to be fair, it's been a while since I've come across a user who understands the difference between an address bar and a search bar, so Google would end up resolving it most of the time anyway.
More to the point, can you think of an established company or brand whose primary website is any of these other TLDs? Of the top 50 sites globally, only Twitch.tv doesn't end in .com, .org, .net, or a country's TLD. Even the porn industry couldn't make ".xxx" take off. If you're handing out business cards with something else, you're going to be seen as 'too small to get a .com', and spend lots of your time figuring out that people are e-mailing 'foobar.com' instead of 'foobar.vodka'; it saves everyone time to register 'foobarGA.com' or something else that ultimately ends in a recognizable TLD.
The issue is human nature, and the fact that custom TLDs don't translate to websites for most people...and there is neither a principle nor a profit motivation for using anything other than the TLDs that already do their job well.
Moffatt had his issues. He tended to lean pretty heavily on the Daleks / Cybermen / Weeping Angels a lot, and 'continuity' was almost laughable during his tenure, but he also knew how to do a story arc. The last three episodes of last season were easily the best of the season. I genuinely felt something when Bill said "I waited for you". I'd submit that the season-long arc in season 6 was probably the most well done of such arcs, and it was still possible to see the one-off episodes during the season without feeling like you walked in halfway through the story.
I don't think the issue the past two seasons had to do with the SJW content, though it certainly didn't help. The issue, I feel, had to do with three things. First, the pacing was terrible. The first act generally took way too long; it commonly felt like the episode was half over before they actually got started telling a story. Then, they raced through the climax, with the Doctor revealing something in that moment to solve the problem, which couldn't have been known otherwise, and then in 90 seconds the whole issue is resolved. After a while, there was no point in following the story, so we didn't get invested.
Second, (admittedly more so last season), lots of those stories felt more like 'live action Scooby Doo' - land on a planet, meet someone who's scared of a thing, find the thing, find out the thing is really the nice one and is just misunderstood, realize the person who's scared of the thing is really the bad one, have the Doctor say "play nice, you two", and then leave.
Finally, there were the villains. It's understandable that Daleks and Cybermen got old...but every week, a new villain, who's "just evil, okay?" with no motivation and no development, 'generic maniacal antagonist #493' stops being any better just because it can handle stairs. Why was the alien who was out to disrupt Rosa Parks getting on the fateful bus at all concerned about it? Why were those aliens who mourned everybody absent at Gallifrey? There was a golden opportunity to establish a recurring villain, but it was squandered on big spiders and a hungry thing.
So, I won't miss it in 2019...perhaps a year's sabbatical will involve the writers binge watching a few of the past seasons and taking some of the positive things from them.