My understanding of this is that the ad networks historically didn't do much if any scrutiny and the business was largely built on near total automation which made it very easy for malware-based ads to filter through.
Have they changed this? I would guess that having people do this manually would not be remotely cost effective given the revenue per ad.
Are they? I mean, if the price today to run my workloads on Service A is $25 and on Service B $20, is there enough compatibility and flexibility to simply "vmotion" my workloads to whoever has the best deal that day? The same thing could apply to storage.
My basic understanding is "no" -- an Amazon VM instance isn't directly portable to Rackspace or some other service and the connectivity isn't necessarily fast enough to move the associated storage around that easily, either.
But will it get that way in the future to where you could just move your services around to whoever has the best deal, even if the timelines are weekly or monthly rather than daily?
I suppose there may be ways to do this now, but it might require a lot of intermediate layers that run directly on the respective compute platforms while the workloads are more platform independent.
Larry Ellison is just another borderline personality disorder businessman who doesn't give a fuck about anything besides making himself richer and self-aggrandizement.
He and Ballmer should go to some private island and never be seen again.
A flask for carrying liquor is curved because it is known as a "hip flask" designed to be carried in a back pocket or along the hip where the body has a natural curve so as to allow it to be carried with more comfort and discretion than might be achieved with a purely rectilinear container.
What's frustrating is how close they already are to being able to do this yet how little interest either side (handset or auto makers) seems to have in actually doing it.
The car would need a touch display, a network->video device that handled the display-side mirroring and wireless network connectivity.
The handset side would need display mirroring and remote touch capability. iPhone already has display mirroring but not remote touch capability.
It would be nice if the display mirroring would also adapt the screen for a different resolution/aspect ratio. I don't know how resolution independent the iPhone is, but it'd be nice if the mirrored image was reformatted for the aspect ratio & resolution of the dash display.
While this would be great for all the usual in-car app functionality, I see no reason why a dedicated window (or ideally, entire display) couldn't be devoted to car operations -- climate controls, etc -- with some physical buttons perhaps for some features.
...barring any newly released sex tapes, heroin possession charges or anything similar.
I'm not sure where de Blasio stands on this issue specifically but somehow I suspect that he's not really going to take a real entrepreneurial tack on it.
NYC has a major affordable housing problem and I'm sure there's affordable housing advocates that would argue that residential property should be residential or at least only usable for residential purposes, which makes some sense from a supply/demand perspective for residential housing and I'd wager that de Blasio is a big supporter of affordable housing initiatives.
Then there's the unions -- he's a democrat and I'm sure the hospitality unions back any initiative that's pro-hotel, and union support is something de Blasio wants.
And then there's the hotel industry generally which is probably not a lobbying entity which can be easily ignored, especially if they can get the unions on their side of an issue.
It makes even less sense on DVI->HDMI. AFAIK, DVI is less encumbered than HDMI, so you'd kind of expect it on an HDMI->DVI adapter. But moving from a less to more encumbered connection? That makes no sense.
As much as I dislike the DRM aspects of HDMI, it is a lot less annoying from a cabling perspective to be able to get HD video and digital audio on a single, relatively sturdy cable.
Before my gear was HDMI capable it was a major annoyance to cable everything together -- component video cables (3x RCA), digital audio cable (optical or RCA) and it was kind of a mess.
With HDMI, I run a lot fewer cables and it generally works, although device signalling doesn't work right much of the time -- turning on the TV causes it to randomly change the receiver input selection, not default back to the last input. And my Tivo Series 3 DVR has brain damaged DVI that causes it to not work through my Pioneer receiver.
Have we finally reached the stage where the security services are totally uncontrollable and have so much money and resources that they are no longer accountable or controllable?
This Slashdot story reminded me of an awful Christian Slater movie, "Kuffs" which used the San Francisco Patrol Special Police as its plot device. As it turns out, that organization is real (couldn't Google it in 1992 when the movie came out).
Your Hyper-V argument makes the perfect case for totally short-sighted cost savings.
Hyper-V may work "well enough" for a lot of single host implementations with very basic VMs, but once you get to shared storage and clustering environments (where virtualization really gets interesting), Hyper-V blows.
I work with a VAR who does both and we see lots of organizations implementing Hyper-V because its cheap and then we also help fix it when it blows up, like one client who had a fuckup with their Windows host SAN integration software that corrupted a volume and took out the whole cluster. At least 30 hours of after hours consulting time plus who knows how much lost productivity time for the network guy on site plus outage costs...
That's a ton of fucking money for upfront savings.
I've always thought this was a legacy of the airlines wanting to protect their airphone revenue.
When pocket-portable cellphones began to gain real traction with ordinary travelers, every airline seat had a $10/minute airphone in the back of the headrest.
I don't remember them being used that often (I think I saw or overheard maybe 1 call per flight, maximum, circa the late 1990s). I didn't travel enough pre-mid-1990s to know when airphones became ubiquitous on planes, but they were on everything I flew on from the mid-late 1990s onward.
I can't help but think that most of the airline rules are oriented around maximizing airline profits, and it's really easy to do this when you can scream "SAFETY!". The airlines probably overbet on their airphones since they seemed like a lot of hardware for the amount of use they got, but this didn't stop them from wanting to protect what money they did make on them, even if they were wrong about how useful an actual voice cell phone call would be from the air.
Meanwhile, the airphones are long gone and the airlines have probably turned the corner and figured that the money to be made is from USING devices all the time, not forcing people to use a service they don't or can't provide. I think the ban stuck around because the airlines were waiting to deliver some other service but the safety aspect of it has become no longer credible.
Instead of automated benchmarks of hardware, why not real world human benchmarking where a group of people is given a set of tasks to do on a given cell phone platform and see who can do them faster?
Automated technical benchmarks make sense when the workloads more or less approximate the benchmark -- video gaming, 3D modeling, disk throughput, etc.
But unless I'm living totally in the dark, most people aren't buying cell phones oriented towards single-task performance (eg, gaming). They get used for many tasks and the fact that I can run some obscure CPU task faster than some other model doesn't tell me if it makes it faster to open an app, etc.
What I hear economists say about technology relative to income is that it concentrates and magnifies existing economic power.
If you're a good stock trader, with advancements in technology, you become a better stock trader because you can manage more trades. And it's even simple technology changes that enable this -- running a GUI display instead of a character mode display, running 2+ monitors, even relatively simple software improvements.
And part of the reason why it concentrates power is technology is a capital intensive asset that requires capital to exploit. The more you invest, the better off you are -- if you are Goldman Sachs and have a lot of capital, you can do large-scale data mining, HFT.
I kind of wish I had a shotgun press because it would be fun to load some 3" magnum shells with #12 "rat shot" and see how it performs.
In pistol loads, #9 is pretty marginal (CCI snake shot loads,.44 mag size). I'd shoot a snake at 6 feet with it, but not much else. Out of the shotgun it works well on the skeet field but on super windy days I'll switch to #7-1/2 for better resistance to the wind.
Against those fucking wasps I think I'd prefer the range and mass of the #9 shot.
I avoided the dentist for about 5 years because each visit was more like a trip to a confessional, with lots of criticism and guilt about not flossing. I was brushing my teeth about twice a day and they said I absolutely HAD to floss. I would try flossing but it would be a 35 minute ordeal and there was just no way I was going to spend that much time every day doing that.
After a filling broke I knew I had to go to the dentist but rather than go back to the asshole I figured I'd look into sedation dentistry -- I was sure I had a bunch of work needed and didn't want to come back five times for long appointments.
I made an appointment and basically outlined my situation -- my teeth are a train wreck, I know I need a lot of work but I hate being badgered. I'm paying you to fix my teeth, not treat me like a criminal. And I'm just not going to floss, period. Don't ask, it won't happen. The dentist was very understanding and after two sedation sessions, 3 crowns, a root canal and several fillings I was back to normal.
Because my gums were in bad shape, he made me a set of trays -- basically molds of my teeth -- that he had me fill with a peroxide gel once a day for 5 minutes and put in my mouth. After 6 months of this my gums were healthy and as a side bonus, had bleached away a lot of the coffee and cigarette stains. The gel was a prescription thing, filled out of a pharmacy in North Dakota. The prescription lapsed on me and I didn't get it renewed and switched to using Crest Pro-Health (with CPC) dental rinse twice a day when I brushed (morning & night).
At my next appointment I didn't tell them I stopped using the trays and my gums were as healthy as ever. I've kept doing this and haven't had a cavity or any degradation of my gums since. I think a good dental rinse (with CPC or some other antibacterial) is really key to good oral health. Even after brushing and rinsing with water, I'm amazed at what gets dislodged when rinsing with a CPC mouthwash.
The idea of a flossing version has occurred to me as well. A similar kind of custom-molded set of trays with floss strands.
Put it in your mouth and bite a couple of times and you floss your entire mouth.
I'm not sure how you'd change the floss without a complex re-stringing process, but maybe it could be strung with some kind of strong filament that could be easily cleaned and sterilized without needing to be changed.
Was SR like eBay, where they just provided the marketplace, or was it an actual clearninghouse for physical goods? I always assumed it was just a marketplace and the goods moved between the actual buyers and sellers with SR taking a fee.
If it was just a marketplace, you would think it would be fairly simple to move it among zillions of global hosting sites and just run the whole thing by remote control, from anywhere.
How does "loading down a phone with apps" affect performance?
For most phones this just means filling flash storage with apps. Generally speaking you can't run apps simultaneously and even when you can/do background apps it sucks the battery badly. And on phones the screen is too small to make use of any kind of PC style multi window multitasking even if the platform supports it (AFAIK even Android doesn't really support this).
While I think you're right that it would be nice to compare phone performance, so much of it seems subjective relative to the actual user experience of GUI performance if not bound by the level of network connectivity.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need
on
How BlackBerry Blew It
·
· Score: 2
I'd say Microsoft stumbled even worse than Blackberry.
Microsoft owned ActiveSync, Exchange AND Windows Mobile. They should have been what Android has largely become. They controlled the email server, the protocol and a usable (if retarded by today's standards) operating system with a bunch of handset makers building handsets.
It would have been TRIVIAL for MS by iteslf to own the smartphone market with those three things.
Blackberry was undone by boring phones and their relentless greed for BES licenses. Had they made BES free to use and direct-connect they might have even withstood a shrewd Microsoft onslaught. Instead they lived and died by the need to run a 1990s cell data network for profit.
The novelty of a real-time criminal enterprise would quickly wear off for the viewing audience, turning it into something worse than the lowest budget fakeumentary indie horror movie.
It could just get boring and worst it would turn the audience against them, perhaps enough so that the authorities might be politically enabled to use the kinds of force against them now considered too extreme. Right now the public might consider the collateral damage of dead hostages unacceptable, it could get to the point where capturing and killing the hostages at any cost becomes politically acceptable.
The days-long drama of Westgate isn't a drama if 3 hours after the assault begins if the self-made media of the terrorists enables the authorities to merely bomb the building into rubble and kill anything that tries to escape.
Terrorists would then become victims of their own aims and end up subverting their goals to maintain media popularity.
I think by "good places to live" I think they really mean "desirable places to live in coastal areas" -- places with a low(er) flood risk in severe weather, more acceptable soils on which to build, etc.
Building technology and geotechnical engineering combined with demand and real estate inflation have made it possible technically and economically for new developments in areas people wouldn't have built before because the soil was too difficult to stabilize or the building techniques could not produce buildings durable to high-probability "ordinary" bad weather.
I'm not sure what a bias in favor of urban culture means after 50-odd years of suburbanization. It strikes me that a lot of people want the best of both worlds, which they translate into suburban living -- being away from a lot of the negatives of urban living (crime, bad schools, etc) yet close enough for jobs and the services of civilization (stores, cable tv, etc). At least in Minnesota it struck me that the trend over the last 10-15 years was to build ever further out, get yourself on as many acres as you could -- live the "rural" lifestyle with city amenities.
An older, agricultural rural lifestyle isn't in demand even by people who live in rural areas, although a somewhat romanticized version of it is popular among wooly headed hipsters (and always has been), and some sort of pull it off by feeding into the urban "locavore" dining trend and supplying city people with "artisinal" agricultural products. Of course the irony being that such a lifestyle probably wouldn't be terribly practical without urban elites to economically prop up said lifestyle by paying top dollar for restaurant meals where they eat free-range chicken and hand-made goat cheese. (FWIW, I think urban agriculture is great, and I'm actually totally in favor of backyard livestock, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding of this is that the ad networks historically didn't do much if any scrutiny and the business was largely built on near total automation which made it very easy for malware-based ads to filter through.
Have they changed this? I would guess that having people do this manually would not be remotely cost effective given the revenue per ad.
Mobile = growth, growth = money, money = marketing.
Are they? I mean, if the price today to run my workloads on Service A is $25 and on Service B $20, is there enough compatibility and flexibility to simply "vmotion" my workloads to whoever has the best deal that day? The same thing could apply to storage.
My basic understanding is "no" -- an Amazon VM instance isn't directly portable to Rackspace or some other service and the connectivity isn't necessarily fast enough to move the associated storage around that easily, either.
But will it get that way in the future to where you could just move your services around to whoever has the best deal, even if the timelines are weekly or monthly rather than daily?
I suppose there may be ways to do this now, but it might require a lot of intermediate layers that run directly on the respective compute platforms while the workloads are more platform independent.
Larry Ellison is just another borderline personality disorder businessman who doesn't give a fuck about anything besides making himself richer and self-aggrandizement.
He and Ballmer should go to some private island and never be seen again.
A flask for carrying liquor is curved because it is known as a "hip flask" designed to be carried in a back pocket or along the hip where the body has a natural curve so as to allow it to be carried with more comfort and discretion than might be achieved with a purely rectilinear container.
....to an in-dash touch display.
What's frustrating is how close they already are to being able to do this yet how little interest either side (handset or auto makers) seems to have in actually doing it.
The car would need a touch display, a network->video device that handled the display-side mirroring and wireless network connectivity.
The handset side would need display mirroring and remote touch capability. iPhone already has display mirroring but not remote touch capability.
It would be nice if the display mirroring would also adapt the screen for a different resolution/aspect ratio. I don't know how resolution independent the iPhone is, but it'd be nice if the mirrored image was reformatted for the aspect ratio & resolution of the dash display.
While this would be great for all the usual in-car app functionality, I see no reason why a dedicated window (or ideally, entire display) couldn't be devoted to car operations -- climate controls, etc -- with some physical buttons perhaps for some features.
Or have we reached a diminishing return point and/or a point where money is being spent elsewhere (consoles, mobile, tablets, etc)?
...barring any newly released sex tapes, heroin possession charges or anything similar.
I'm not sure where de Blasio stands on this issue specifically but somehow I suspect that he's not really going to take a real entrepreneurial tack on it.
NYC has a major affordable housing problem and I'm sure there's affordable housing advocates that would argue that residential property should be residential or at least only usable for residential purposes, which makes some sense from a supply/demand perspective for residential housing and I'd wager that de Blasio is a big supporter of affordable housing initiatives.
Then there's the unions -- he's a democrat and I'm sure the hospitality unions back any initiative that's pro-hotel, and union support is something de Blasio wants.
And then there's the hotel industry generally which is probably not a lobbying entity which can be easily ignored, especially if they can get the unions on their side of an issue.
It makes even less sense on DVI->HDMI. AFAIK, DVI is less encumbered than HDMI, so you'd kind of expect it on an HDMI->DVI adapter. But moving from a less to more encumbered connection? That makes no sense.
As much as I dislike the DRM aspects of HDMI, it is a lot less annoying from a cabling perspective to be able to get HD video and digital audio on a single, relatively sturdy cable.
Before my gear was HDMI capable it was a major annoyance to cable everything together -- component video cables (3x RCA), digital audio cable (optical or RCA) and it was kind of a mess.
With HDMI, I run a lot fewer cables and it generally works, although device signalling doesn't work right much of the time -- turning on the TV causes it to randomly change the receiver input selection, not default back to the last input. And my Tivo Series 3 DVR has brain damaged DVI that causes it to not work through my Pioneer receiver.
Have we finally reached the stage where the security services are totally uncontrollable and have so much money and resources that they are no longer accountable or controllable?
This Slashdot story reminded me of an awful Christian Slater movie, "Kuffs" which used the San Francisco Patrol Special Police as its plot device. As it turns out, that organization is real (couldn't Google it in 1992 when the movie came out).
This sounds a lot like what they want in Oakland.
Your Hyper-V argument makes the perfect case for totally short-sighted cost savings.
Hyper-V may work "well enough" for a lot of single host implementations with very basic VMs, but once you get to shared storage and clustering environments (where virtualization really gets interesting), Hyper-V blows.
I work with a VAR who does both and we see lots of organizations implementing Hyper-V because its cheap and then we also help fix it when it blows up, like one client who had a fuckup with their Windows host SAN integration software that corrupted a volume and took out the whole cluster. At least 30 hours of after hours consulting time plus who knows how much lost productivity time for the network guy on site plus outage costs...
That's a ton of fucking money for upfront savings.
I've always thought this was a legacy of the airlines wanting to protect their airphone revenue.
When pocket-portable cellphones began to gain real traction with ordinary travelers, every airline seat had a $10/minute airphone in the back of the headrest.
I don't remember them being used that often (I think I saw or overheard maybe 1 call per flight, maximum, circa the late 1990s). I didn't travel enough pre-mid-1990s to know when airphones became ubiquitous on planes, but they were on everything I flew on from the mid-late 1990s onward.
I can't help but think that most of the airline rules are oriented around maximizing airline profits, and it's really easy to do this when you can scream "SAFETY!". The airlines probably overbet on their airphones since they seemed like a lot of hardware for the amount of use they got, but this didn't stop them from wanting to protect what money they did make on them, even if they were wrong about how useful an actual voice cell phone call would be from the air.
Meanwhile, the airphones are long gone and the airlines have probably turned the corner and figured that the money to be made is from USING devices all the time, not forcing people to use a service they don't or can't provide. I think the ban stuck around because the airlines were waiting to deliver some other service but the safety aspect of it has become no longer credible.
Instead of automated benchmarks of hardware, why not real world human benchmarking where a group of people is given a set of tasks to do on a given cell phone platform and see who can do them faster?
Automated technical benchmarks make sense when the workloads more or less approximate the benchmark -- video gaming, 3D modeling, disk throughput, etc.
But unless I'm living totally in the dark, most people aren't buying cell phones oriented towards single-task performance (eg, gaming). They get used for many tasks and the fact that I can run some obscure CPU task faster than some other model doesn't tell me if it makes it faster to open an app, etc.
What I hear economists say about technology relative to income is that it concentrates and magnifies existing economic power.
If you're a good stock trader, with advancements in technology, you become a better stock trader because you can manage more trades. And it's even simple technology changes that enable this -- running a GUI display instead of a character mode display, running 2+ monitors, even relatively simple software improvements.
And part of the reason why it concentrates power is technology is a capital intensive asset that requires capital to exploit. The more you invest, the better off you are -- if you are Goldman Sachs and have a lot of capital, you can do large-scale data mining, HFT.
Gasoline works well and it makes for great fun watching the nest go up in flames.
I've used small quantities of kerosene (without burning it) to kill off ant hills in the driveway. About a 1/4 cup into the nest and they are done.
I kind of wish I had a shotgun press because it would be fun to load some 3" magnum shells with #12 "rat shot" and see how it performs.
In pistol loads, #9 is pretty marginal (CCI snake shot loads, .44 mag size). I'd shoot a snake at 6 feet with it, but not much else. Out of the shotgun it works well on the skeet field but on super windy days I'll switch to #7-1/2 for better resistance to the wind.
Against those fucking wasps I think I'd prefer the range and mass of the #9 shot.
Common shot used for actual birds would be too big (eg, #4).
I would actually consider using small sized shot used for clays, like #7.5 or even #9. You get very short range but a TON of pellets.
You could even consider developing a 3" magnum load with this shot for even larger shot strings.
I avoided the dentist for about 5 years because each visit was more like a trip to a confessional, with lots of criticism and guilt about not flossing. I was brushing my teeth about twice a day and they said I absolutely HAD to floss. I would try flossing but it would be a 35 minute ordeal and there was just no way I was going to spend that much time every day doing that.
After a filling broke I knew I had to go to the dentist but rather than go back to the asshole I figured I'd look into sedation dentistry -- I was sure I had a bunch of work needed and didn't want to come back five times for long appointments.
I made an appointment and basically outlined my situation -- my teeth are a train wreck, I know I need a lot of work but I hate being badgered. I'm paying you to fix my teeth, not treat me like a criminal. And I'm just not going to floss, period. Don't ask, it won't happen. The dentist was very understanding and after two sedation sessions, 3 crowns, a root canal and several fillings I was back to normal.
Because my gums were in bad shape, he made me a set of trays -- basically molds of my teeth -- that he had me fill with a peroxide gel once a day for 5 minutes and put in my mouth. After 6 months of this my gums were healthy and as a side bonus, had bleached away a lot of the coffee and cigarette stains. The gel was a prescription thing, filled out of a pharmacy in North Dakota. The prescription lapsed on me and I didn't get it renewed and switched to using Crest Pro-Health (with CPC) dental rinse twice a day when I brushed (morning & night).
At my next appointment I didn't tell them I stopped using the trays and my gums were as healthy as ever. I've kept doing this and haven't had a cavity or any degradation of my gums since. I think a good dental rinse (with CPC or some other antibacterial) is really key to good oral health. Even after brushing and rinsing with water, I'm amazed at what gets dislodged when rinsing with a CPC mouthwash.
The idea of a flossing version has occurred to me as well. A similar kind of custom-molded set of trays with floss strands.
Put it in your mouth and bite a couple of times and you floss your entire mouth.
I'm not sure how you'd change the floss without a complex re-stringing process, but maybe it could be strung with some kind of strong filament that could be easily cleaned and sterilized without needing to be changed.
Was SR like eBay, where they just provided the marketplace, or was it an actual clearninghouse for physical goods? I always assumed it was just a marketplace and the goods moved between the actual buyers and sellers with SR taking a fee.
If it was just a marketplace, you would think it would be fairly simple to move it among zillions of global hosting sites and just run the whole thing by remote control, from anywhere.
How does "loading down a phone with apps" affect performance?
For most phones this just means filling flash storage with apps. Generally speaking you can't run apps simultaneously and even when you can/do background apps it sucks the battery badly. And on phones the screen is too small to make use of any kind of PC style multi window multitasking even if the platform supports it (AFAIK even Android doesn't really support this).
While I think you're right that it would be nice to compare phone performance, so much of it seems subjective relative to the actual user experience of GUI performance if not bound by the level of network connectivity.
I'd say Microsoft stumbled even worse than Blackberry.
Microsoft owned ActiveSync, Exchange AND Windows Mobile. They should have been what Android has largely become. They controlled the email server, the protocol and a usable (if retarded by today's standards) operating system with a bunch of handset makers building handsets.
It would have been TRIVIAL for MS by iteslf to own the smartphone market with those three things.
Blackberry was undone by boring phones and their relentless greed for BES licenses. Had they made BES free to use and direct-connect they might have even withstood a shrewd Microsoft onslaught. Instead they lived and died by the need to run a 1990s cell data network for profit.
The novelty of a real-time criminal enterprise would quickly wear off for the viewing audience, turning it into something worse than the lowest budget fakeumentary indie horror movie.
It could just get boring and worst it would turn the audience against them, perhaps enough so that the authorities might be politically enabled to use the kinds of force against them now considered too extreme. Right now the public might consider the collateral damage of dead hostages unacceptable, it could get to the point where capturing and killing the hostages at any cost becomes politically acceptable.
The days-long drama of Westgate isn't a drama if 3 hours after the assault begins if the self-made media of the terrorists enables the authorities to merely bomb the building into rubble and kill anything that tries to escape.
Terrorists would then become victims of their own aims and end up subverting their goals to maintain media popularity.
I think by "good places to live" I think they really mean "desirable places to live in coastal areas" -- places with a low(er) flood risk in severe weather, more acceptable soils on which to build, etc.
Building technology and geotechnical engineering combined with demand and real estate inflation have made it possible technically and economically for new developments in areas people wouldn't have built before because the soil was too difficult to stabilize or the building techniques could not produce buildings durable to high-probability "ordinary" bad weather.
I'm not sure what a bias in favor of urban culture means after 50-odd years of suburbanization. It strikes me that a lot of people want the best of both worlds, which they translate into suburban living -- being away from a lot of the negatives of urban living (crime, bad schools, etc) yet close enough for jobs and the services of civilization (stores, cable tv, etc). At least in Minnesota it struck me that the trend over the last 10-15 years was to build ever further out, get yourself on as many acres as you could -- live the "rural" lifestyle with city amenities.
An older, agricultural rural lifestyle isn't in demand even by people who live in rural areas, although a somewhat romanticized version of it is popular among wooly headed hipsters (and always has been), and some sort of pull it off by feeding into the urban "locavore" dining trend and supplying city people with "artisinal" agricultural products. Of course the irony being that such a lifestyle probably wouldn't be terribly practical without urban elites to economically prop up said lifestyle by paying top dollar for restaurant meals where they eat free-range chicken and hand-made goat cheese. (FWIW, I think urban agriculture is great, and I'm actually totally in favor of backyard livestock, etc).