It seems blockchain is the solution to all problems these days.
The root cause of this problem appears to be meta data doesn't always exist in the files sent to streaming services. How about trying to fix that problem first?
If they can't get this right, what are the odds they can do it in a distributed ledger?
It's probably not a problem for Netflix where most videos are viewed millions of times. But sites like youtube have a lot of videos that are almost never viewed. All of those still need encoding.
You are probably right that the total load will be less, but it might be a shift in where the load is. If uploads are suddenly slower because there is a long queue at the servers that encodes the videos during peak times, uploaders may not like that. And they will surely not give a crap that google saves money some where else.
But usually these fears are exaggerated so there is probably no need to worry yet.
I'm not sure time-shifting applies here. At least not for all cases.
Time shifting TV is a bit like you take something meant to be viewed once, record it and then watch it once later. Also "payment" means watching the commercials.
For spotify, the artists get payed for each recorded listen, so getting the listen-count right is kind of important. Also this would allow you to listen after you stop paying. And finally, there is almost certainly ToS stating you are not allowed to do it.
Maybe this still counts as time-shifting but it is at least not obvious that it is so.
I don't really understand this development model "theory". Are users "end users" or are users in-house testers?
If they are end users, how would they test the fix before it reaches production code?
If they are testers and they don't test the fix, who the hell closes the bug report?
Since you worry about errors getting introduced by merges, it sounds like you are also missing regression testing.
If you don't do regression testing, and don't verify fixes on the release branch, what the hell is your QA department doing?
I think the theory you are looking for is this:
1: Users report bug.
2: QA verifies the bug on the released code, and also that it exist in latest development code.
3: Developer fix bug.
4: QA verifies fix and close the bug report.
5: Code Freeze. QA does regression testing, and verifies all new fixes still work as intended.
6: Release!
There is no need for a single gatekeeper to do merges. Your developers need to be competent enough that they don't routinely break stuff when merging. If they are not capable of getting a merge right most of the time, you need new developers.
This could have been the greatest rickroll of all time.
Imagine millions of devices starting to play Rick Astley every time there is a BK commercial...
Sometimes this is a plus, but 9 times out of ten it is just annoying.
Focus
Speaking of focus. Occasionally the picture is slightly out of focus. Annoying as hell.
A massive speaker system
This is usually a positive, but sometimes they turn it up too loud. That does not make a pleasant experience at all, and this just doesn't happen at home.
Previews
How about starting the movie at the advertised time instead?
Disruption
Was this not covered by Focus? Not once have disruptions been a worse problem at home than at the theater...
9. 32 ounces of cola in the dark.
10. Bragging rights.
Who the hell are they trying to sell this to?
I still enjoy going to the movies, but those reasons just suck.
Take an afternoon off from work if you can, and go to the afternoon show. 500 seats and 27 people. That is how you get a good movie experience.
There is still the possibility that people who never drank, choose to not drink because their health was not that good to begin with.
14% of the participants were in the group that never drank. If a few percentage points of the participants had that reason for not drinking, it may have skewed the results a bit.
The only spheres that are now allowed are other shapes that have had the corners chipped away to now be spheres as they always felt that they were spheres on the inside.
Are you sure? I thought apple had a patent on that.
How the hell could I prove something like that? I have no access to netflix internal statistics.
But, if there was a coordinated review bombing, I assume they are clever enough to leave the show streaming in the background so it looks like they actually watched it.
The only indicator I see that could detect this is if it gets unusually many reviews quickly after launch. But since netflix don't disclose such numbers I guess we will never know.
But I guess it doesn't really matter. I just find it fishy that people who liked her previous stuff would all of a sudden think that the new show was a stinking pile of garbage.
She also draws big crowds, so some people clearly like her. But if you only read reddit you would never know this. Every single article that mentions her is completely bombarded with posts saying she is the worst comedian they have ever seen.
Not just "she sucks, so I don't pay attention to her", but really "she sucks and I hate her with a passion, so I will mention how bad she is at every possible opportunity" dislike.
Obviously it is impossible to know what is really going on, but it does not seem completely ridiculous that there was some coordinated review bombing.
Quite clearly a case of "review bombing" to me. It is not her best work, but if you like her other stuff, chances are you will like this one too.
Of course her style is vulgar and provocative, and this is not for everyone, but it in no way deserves 1 Star.
It really looks like most reviews came from people that knew beforehand they would never ever like it, but have an axe to grind.
Having these people reviewing the show clearly distorts the intent of the review system.
You can say everyone are entitled to give a review, but if everyone scored genres they don't like, almost everything would end up at 1 star.
Take sci-fi, I like it and on this site it is popular, but in the general population most people do not like it.
If all the people who dislike sci-fi decided to give all sci-fi movies 1 star because "fuck sci-fi and all those stupid nerds", every single sci-fi movie would end up at 1.05 stars or so on average. Clearly the reviews would be useless then.
I don't see how up/down votes would solve this problem though. Even if more people vote, the initial down-bomb would still leave it at 90% down votes.
Apparently it is "awkward to use it for anything else than browsing the Web"
But guess what 99% of the population want to use their portable device for...
Then add the fact that netbooks are also awkward for almost everything except browsing the web, because the screen and the keyboard are too small.
In addition, browsing the web is better with the screen in portrait mode, than in landscape mode, so the netbook is not even better at that.
I'm sure there are use cases for netbooks, and I loved my Asus netbook when I got it, but I think I have only used it a handful of times since I got myself a Nexus 7
How many of these people are also paying for legal streaming services?
Nobody is going to pay for one more streaming service, when you already have 2 legal streaming services, and you are really only interested in one show on that third service. Or worse, your favorite show is not available for streaming at all because it is licensed to a cable channel that don't offer streaming.
When that happens, I think most people feel torrent is a very reasonable alternative.
We can listen to almost any music on Spotify, Tidal, Itunes or Google Play. Why the hell do we need 5 different streaming services for seeing all TV shows?
If you want us to pay for your content, then make it easy for us to pay for it!
It would make sense to swap out entire buses rather than batteries. Bus drivers need a food break every 4-5 hours; rotating them back to the depot and putting them back on power would allow substantial recharging.
I'm not so sure about that. This only makes sense if you would have taken the bus back to the depot anyway. There is quite a lot of overhead in driving them back to the depot. The buses can only be taken out of traffic at the final stop, and those can be quite far from the depot sometimes.
Today the buses basically run non-stop. When I was driving it was basically in 4 shifts of 1.5-2.5 hrs, with breaks in between. The buses never stop for any longer period of time, you just replace the driver, when you pass by one of the traffic hubs.
The only time the bus stands still is after the final stop. There is usually some margin before the return trip.
Electrical buses are surely taking over soon, but probably not for this reason. Most likely charging will be done at the first/last stop, and maybe some top up at the intermediate stops. It does not necessarily need to be fully charged either. It is okay that the battery level gets lower during the day, as long as it lasts until it gets returned to the depot for scheduling reasons.
Your other arguments are absolutely right though.
But there was only a 1% drop in revenue. That means almost no readers were leaving.
NYT were barely braking even before, and they are barely breaking even now.
I am not arguing against socialized medicine. I think the "European way" is better.
But there is an argument in that an army is a public good, whereas health care is not* a public good.
If half the population pays for armed forces as protection from foreign invaders, the other half gets the benefit of not getting invaded without paying.
This is not the case with health care as you can easily not treat people that get sick if they don't have insurance.
Whether you are spending an appropriate amount on the military or not, is a different question...
* Vaccinations is a health care exception that actually is a public good. When others get vaccinated you benefit from a lower risk of infection
I suspect it's not primarily celebrities that want their age removed. Their age will be known anyway.
This is for nobodies and maybe C-list celebs that will no longer pass the first filter. "Damn, more than 200 applicants. Throw out anyone over 40!". When this happens it does not matter how much plastic surgery you have had to look younger.
I guess this is a bit like applying for tech jobs in some places. It does not matter that you have all the qualifications. Too old and your out before the process even started.
Also, hiring adults to play teens is a very specific case which has the advantage of avoiding child labor laws.
They say 450.000 people are driving for Uber, but the interesting number should be the number of customers riding with Uber.
Further more, I think we really need to know how many are riding around midnight, or other times when people are most likely to be driving drunk.
If all Uber drivers are working when almost nobody was driving drunk anyway it's very unlikely they affect the statistics very much.
It may also be that many people riding with Uber are people who used to be the designated driver, now thinking Uber is better than staying sober all night.
If this is the case we might have just as many drunk drivers now as before, because people who were assholes that just don't give a fuck before Uber came along are still assholes that don't give a fuck.
Isn't your second point the exact same thing we assume for the ideal free market? Rational actors with perfect information.
"It assumes perfect information on the part of the rational actor. While this is an oft-used simplification in economic models, it's a lousy reflection of reality. It's simply impossible for a rational actor to gather and correlate sufficient information to make it work."
I believe the specific means of communication is not important here, it's the act of not using what everyone else in the group are using.
If most of his friends are using Facebook to organize events, he is the oddball that is hard to contact because he only uses e-mail.
This is equivalent to you stop using e-mail, or answering phone calls and insisting that you can be contacted only by fax.
Sure, your friends can probably send you a fax if they really want to, and your 2-3 closest friends may even do so, but you better believe most of your extended group of friends won't bother with that, and you're gonna miss out on a lot of invitations.
It's most likely exactly like that for him. Some people still keep in touch and go out of their way to invite him to events. Everybody else won't bother.
This means, that for a large segment of the population, opting out of Facebook is a huge sacrifice socially.
When the options are "use facebook" or "miss out on almost everything", for many people there is only one realistic option.
It appears IMDB has the same problem all online, voluntary polls have. You do not get the opinion of the population at large, you only get the opinion of people who like to answer polls.
For IMDB this means their scores represent the score of people who like to rate movies.
From the article this appears to be men to a greater extent than women. There are most likely other biases as well. Maybe tech savvy people are more likely to do online ratings, and the scores are biased towards show that techies like?
You don't have to be a SJW to find this an interesting problem.
It's the same problem as can be seen in voting polls for presidential election, and all other election where people are trying to predict the result. You are trying to predict the general result based on the answers from people willing to answer the polls.
A second problem specific to movie ratings is that I may not be interested in the general opinion. For recommendations I want opinions that correlate with my own opinions. If you happen to like Sex And The City, you don't care that all the nerds vote Firefly to the top. You want shows that align with your interests.
But lets start with figuring out the real score for the general population...
Slashdot Mirror
It seems blockchain is the solution to all problems these days.
The root cause of this problem appears to be meta data doesn't always exist in the files sent to streaming services. How about trying to fix that problem first?
If they can't get this right, what are the odds they can do it in a distributed ledger?
It's probably not a problem for Netflix where most videos are viewed millions of times. But sites like youtube have a lot of videos that are almost never viewed. All of those still need encoding.
You are probably right that the total load will be less, but it might be a shift in where the load is. If uploads are suddenly slower because there is a long queue at the servers that encodes the videos during peak times, uploaders may not like that. And they will surely not give a crap that google saves money some where else.
But usually these fears are exaggerated so there is probably no need to worry yet.
I'm not sure time-shifting applies here. At least not for all cases.
Time shifting TV is a bit like you take something meant to be viewed once, record it and then watch it once later. Also "payment" means watching the commercials.
For spotify, the artists get payed for each recorded listen, so getting the listen-count right is kind of important. Also this would allow you to listen after you stop paying. And finally, there is almost certainly ToS stating you are not allowed to do it.
Maybe this still counts as time-shifting but it is at least not obvious that it is so.
And treating it as such is the only way to get decent competition among ISPs.
I don't really understand this development model "theory". Are users "end users" or are users in-house testers?
If they are end users, how would they test the fix before it reaches production code?
If they are testers and they don't test the fix, who the hell closes the bug report?
Since you worry about errors getting introduced by merges, it sounds like you are also missing regression testing.
If you don't do regression testing, and don't verify fixes on the release branch, what the hell is your QA department doing?
I think the theory you are looking for is this:
1: Users report bug.
2: QA verifies the bug on the released code, and also that it exist in latest development code.
3: Developer fix bug.
4: QA verifies fix and close the bug report.
5: Code Freeze. QA does regression testing, and verifies all new fixes still work as intended.
6: Release!
There is no need for a single gatekeeper to do merges. Your developers need to be competent enough that they don't routinely break stuff when merging. If they are not capable of getting a merge right most of the time, you need new developers.
This could have been the greatest rickroll of all time.
Imagine millions of devices starting to play Rick Astley every time there is a BK commercial...
People everywhere
Sometimes this is a plus, but 9 times out of ten it is just annoying.
Focus
Speaking of focus. Occasionally the picture is slightly out of focus. Annoying as hell.
A massive speaker system
This is usually a positive, but sometimes they turn it up too loud. That does not make a pleasant experience at all, and this just doesn't happen at home.
Previews
How about starting the movie at the advertised time instead?
Disruption
Was this not covered by Focus? Not once have disruptions been a worse problem at home than at the theater...
9. 32 ounces of cola in the dark. 10. Bragging rights.
Who the hell are they trying to sell this to?
I still enjoy going to the movies, but those reasons just suck.
Take an afternoon off from work if you can, and go to the afternoon show. 500 seats and 27 people. That is how you get a good movie experience.
There is still the possibility that people who never drank, choose to not drink because their health was not that good to begin with.
14% of the participants were in the group that never drank. If a few percentage points of the participants had that reason for not drinking, it may have skewed the results a bit.
The only spheres that are now allowed are other shapes that have had the corners chipped away to now be spheres as they always felt that they were spheres on the inside.
Are you sure? I thought apple had a patent on that.
How the hell could I prove something like that? I have no access to netflix internal statistics.
But, if there was a coordinated review bombing, I assume they are clever enough to leave the show streaming in the background so it looks like they actually watched it.
The only indicator I see that could detect this is if it gets unusually many reviews quickly after launch. But since netflix don't disclose such numbers I guess we will never know.
But I guess it doesn't really matter. I just find it fishy that people who liked her previous stuff would all of a sudden think that the new show was a stinking pile of garbage.
She also draws big crowds, so some people clearly like her. But if you only read reddit you would never know this. Every single article that mentions her is completely bombarded with posts saying she is the worst comedian they have ever seen.
Not just "she sucks, so I don't pay attention to her", but really "she sucks and I hate her with a passion, so I will mention how bad she is at every possible opportunity" dislike.
Obviously it is impossible to know what is really going on, but it does not seem completely ridiculous that there was some coordinated review bombing.
Quite clearly a case of "review bombing" to me. It is not her best work, but if you like her other stuff, chances are you will like this one too.
Of course her style is vulgar and provocative, and this is not for everyone, but it in no way deserves 1 Star.
It really looks like most reviews came from people that knew beforehand they would never ever like it, but have an axe to grind.
Having these people reviewing the show clearly distorts the intent of the review system.
You can say everyone are entitled to give a review, but if everyone scored genres they don't like, almost everything would end up at 1 star.
Take sci-fi, I like it and on this site it is popular, but in the general population most people do not like it.
If all the people who dislike sci-fi decided to give all sci-fi movies 1 star because "fuck sci-fi and all those stupid nerds", every single sci-fi movie would end up at 1.05 stars or so on average. Clearly the reviews would be useless then.
I don't see how up/down votes would solve this problem though. Even if more people vote, the initial down-bomb would still leave it at 90% down votes.
Apparently it is "awkward to use it for anything else than browsing the Web"
But guess what 99% of the population want to use their portable device for...
Then add the fact that netbooks are also awkward for almost everything except browsing the web, because the screen and the keyboard are too small.
In addition, browsing the web is better with the screen in portrait mode, than in landscape mode, so the netbook is not even better at that.
I'm sure there are use cases for netbooks, and I loved my Asus netbook when I got it, but I think I have only used it a handful of times since I got myself a Nexus 7
Please don't tell your CEO in Chief about this, or he will build a wall to keep the illegal CEOs out. Probably gonna make us pay for it too...
How many of these people are also paying for legal streaming services?
Nobody is going to pay for one more streaming service, when you already have 2 legal streaming services, and you are really only interested in one show on that third service. Or worse, your favorite show is not available for streaming at all because it is licensed to a cable channel that don't offer streaming.
When that happens, I think most people feel torrent is a very reasonable alternative.
We can listen to almost any music on Spotify, Tidal, Itunes or Google Play. Why the hell do we need 5 different streaming services for seeing all TV shows?
If you want us to pay for your content, then make it easy for us to pay for it!
I assume you consider Netflix a necessity then. US price $7.99 (plus tax I assume), Swedish price 79 SEK = 8.86 USD including tax.
It would make sense to swap out entire buses rather than batteries. Bus drivers need a food break every 4-5 hours; rotating them back to the depot and putting them back on power would allow substantial recharging.
I'm not so sure about that. This only makes sense if you would have taken the bus back to the depot anyway. There is quite a lot of overhead in driving them back to the depot. The buses can only be taken out of traffic at the final stop, and those can be quite far from the depot sometimes.
Today the buses basically run non-stop. When I was driving it was basically in 4 shifts of 1.5-2.5 hrs, with breaks in between. The buses never stop for any longer period of time, you just replace the driver, when you pass by one of the traffic hubs.
The only time the bus stands still is after the final stop. There is usually some margin before the return trip.
Electrical buses are surely taking over soon, but probably not for this reason. Most likely charging will be done at the first/last stop, and maybe some top up at the intermediate stops. It does not necessarily need to be fully charged either. It is okay that the battery level gets lower during the day, as long as it lasts until it gets returned to the depot for scheduling reasons.
Your other arguments are absolutely right though.
But I guess that seems completely normal, and would not generate any clicks...
the American kids are rioting or hiding in their safe spaces
Isn't this a bit contradictory?
But there was only a 1% drop in revenue. That means almost no readers were leaving.
NYT were barely braking even before, and they are barely breaking even now.
I am not arguing against socialized medicine. I think the "European way" is better.
But there is an argument in that an army is a public good, whereas health care is not* a public good.
If half the population pays for armed forces as protection from foreign invaders, the other half gets the benefit of not getting invaded without paying.
This is not the case with health care as you can easily not treat people that get sick if they don't have insurance.
Whether you are spending an appropriate amount on the military or not, is a different question...
* Vaccinations is a health care exception that actually is a public good. When others get vaccinated you benefit from a lower risk of infection
I suspect it's not primarily celebrities that want their age removed. Their age will be known anyway.
This is for nobodies and maybe C-list celebs that will no longer pass the first filter. "Damn, more than 200 applicants. Throw out anyone over 40!". When this happens it does not matter how much plastic surgery you have had to look younger.
I guess this is a bit like applying for tech jobs in some places. It does not matter that you have all the qualifications. Too old and your out before the process even started.
Also, hiring adults to play teens is a very specific case which has the advantage of avoiding child labor laws.
They say 450.000 people are driving for Uber, but the interesting number should be the number of customers riding with Uber.
Further more, I think we really need to know how many are riding around midnight, or other times when people are most likely to be driving drunk.
If all Uber drivers are working when almost nobody was driving drunk anyway it's very unlikely they affect the statistics very much.
It may also be that many people riding with Uber are people who used to be the designated driver, now thinking Uber is better than staying sober all night.
If this is the case we might have just as many drunk drivers now as before, because people who were assholes that just don't give a fuck before Uber came along are still assholes that don't give a fuck.
Isn't your second point the exact same thing we assume for the ideal free market? Rational actors with perfect information.
"It assumes perfect information on the part of the rational actor. While this is an oft-used simplification in economic models, it's a lousy reflection of reality. It's simply impossible for a rational actor to gather and correlate sufficient information to make it work."
I believe the specific means of communication is not important here, it's the act of not using what everyone else in the group are using.
If most of his friends are using Facebook to organize events, he is the oddball that is hard to contact because he only uses e-mail.
This is equivalent to you stop using e-mail, or answering phone calls and insisting that you can be contacted only by fax.
Sure, your friends can probably send you a fax if they really want to, and your 2-3 closest friends may even do so, but you better believe most of your extended group of friends won't bother with that, and you're gonna miss out on a lot of invitations.
It's most likely exactly like that for him. Some people still keep in touch and go out of their way to invite him to events. Everybody else won't bother.
This means, that for a large segment of the population, opting out of Facebook is a huge sacrifice socially.
When the options are "use facebook" or "miss out on almost everything", for many people there is only one realistic option.
It appears IMDB has the same problem all online, voluntary polls have. You do not get the opinion of the population at large, you only get the opinion of people who like to answer polls.
For IMDB this means their scores represent the score of people who like to rate movies.
From the article this appears to be men to a greater extent than women. There are most likely other biases as well. Maybe tech savvy people are more likely to do online ratings, and the scores are biased towards show that techies like?
You don't have to be a SJW to find this an interesting problem.
It's the same problem as can be seen in voting polls for presidential election, and all other election where people are trying to predict the result. You are trying to predict the general result based on the answers from people willing to answer the polls.
A second problem specific to movie ratings is that I may not be interested in the general opinion. For recommendations I want opinions that correlate with my own opinions. If you happen to like Sex And The City, you don't care that all the nerds vote Firefly to the top. You want shows that align with your interests.
But lets start with figuring out the real score for the general population...