When we migrated to the cloud, our actual costs were within 15% of the estimated costs.
But really, the easiest thing to do is just build a test environment and try it -- you only pay for the time you use.
When we migrated to AWS we knocked 70% off our colocation bill (we had more space at the coloc than we needed, but it's hard to move production hardware to a smaller space without downtime, plus we had significant savings in equipment leases and maintenance contract costs).
Our dev/test hardware was aging and becoming unreliable (and no longer matched production since we moved to AWS), so we moved that up to AWS as well, but even after that migration our total AWS bill less than half what we paid at the colocation center. We only run the dev/test hardware during business hours, or on-demand as needed -- we set up a simple web interface that lets developers spin up test instances as needed. AWS keeps dropping prices, so we're even as we've grown, our costs have remained relatively constant.
Yes. Alternatively there's SpiderOak if you want you files encrypted in the cloud. You could also set up you own personal cloud using OwnCloud if you have a webserver or a machine which is always-on which you can use as a webserver. it would do away with the space constraints and longevity of the service. You would only have to manage uptime and connectivity of the server.
You can rent an Amazon AWS micro instance for around $7/month (including a few GB of disk space -- additional space is $0.05/GB/month). Data transfer can kill you if you share a lot of data, inbound data to AWS is free, but outbound data is $0.12/GB so if you're send a 1GB file to 10 devices, that's $1.20 in bandwidth.
Seriously , why do so many people thinking transfering files is some new problem still looking for a solution? I can understand it for Windows users but Linux users really should know better.
Because FTP only supplies the transport layer - it's not going to automatically sync the 1000 files you dropped in the FTP directory and won't do the many-to-many replication that people use to share files among multiple desktops. Even rsync gets a little cumbersome for that without a central server that they all have access to, and if you're going to set up a server, you may as well set up something like OwnCloud.
No, they aren't. It entirely depends on each state. Many states have no inspections whatsoever, and I've never heard of any state where they make sure you maintain your car. The most stringent is probably California, and some other states, where they check emissions (in CA, I think they even check them at checkpoints as people drive by); that doesn't check maintenance at all, but a poorly-maintained car engine will eventually fail emissions tests. Of course, this doesn't mean the suspension or brakes have been maintained correctly; someone could change their oil regularly and pass smog tests with flying colors, but still have unsafe brakes or something wrong with their suspension.
Just because the state doesn't inspect your vehicle to ensure that it's safe doesn't mean that the owner is not responsible for doing so:
24002. (a) It is unlawful to operate any vehicle or combination of vehicles which is in an unsafe condition, or which is not safely loaded, and which presents an immediate safety hazard.
This is not plumber for dentist. It is dentist for dentist.
That is not an insignificant difference.
I don't see the difference. A dentist can't fill a cavity in his own teeth, so he either pays another dentist to do it (which is taxable income to that dentist), or he tells his dentist friend "Hey, if you fill my cavity, I'll do yours later", which is a taxable barter transaction. I don't see why the fact that they are in the same field makes any difference.
If I give you a pineapple and you return me a pineapple, that is called lending, not a sale.
And if I give you 20 tons of pineapples today, and you give me 20 tons of pineapples next week, that's called warehousing and entire businesses are dedicated to warehousing commodities and shipping them out again, sometimes to the same company that warehoused it in the first place.
Among other things it means that ZERO profit is made and government treats non-profit things very differently.
Whether the transaction earns profit or not, it's still a transaction.
So much for free market economics and competition. I hate it when government goes to lengths like these as competition is good all around.
As long as the new services operate under the same constraints as taxi companies, I see no reason why they should't be allowed to operate since, as you say, that's a free market at work. But they shouldn't get to skip over all of the costs of business that taxi companies absorb -- things like driver background checks, driver training (in some cities), insurance requirements, car maintenance requirements, etc.
Bartering occurs when you exchange goods or services without exchanging money. An example of bartering is a plumber exchanging plumbing services for the dental services of a dentist. You must include in gross income in the year of receipt the fair market value of goods or services received from bartering.
I don't see why Seattle couldn't also recognize that the a ride-share barter service is still a taxi service.
I'm surprised they didn't go with the typical million dollar settlement payable entirely in 75 cent coupons sent to every customer. I guess that only happens in class action lawsuits.
> A corporate firewall does little to ensure safety of a Windows installation. I've seen users behind a malware scanning firewall, running antivirus software on Win7 *still* manage to get infected by malware.
That is why you run multiple layers of protection; a UTM with antivirus/malware signature update subscriptions plus centrally-administered antivirus/antimalware software and policies covering use of USB devices.
Multiple layers is good. Running an unsupported and unpatched version of Windows is a huge gaping hole in your layers of security. Your UTM should automatically block WinXP machines from the network when they fail the NAC check - no network access for devices not up to date on patches, and by definition, WinXP systems are not up to date on patches after support ends.
If XP is behind a corporate firewall - no problem. Everyone should have a separate non-Windows firewall. It really is all very simple and never requires the running of ridiculous anti-virus products.
A corporate firewall does little to ensure safety of a Windows installation. I've seen users behind a malware scanning firewall, running antivirus software on Win7 *still* manage to get infected by malware.
If a remote exploite is found in WinXP, a single infected XP machine on a corporate network can hop around to other WinXP machines in that network.
It looks from the video that the password is simply the username concatenated with a global string, "123456".
That's not salt. That's not what the word means. A salt is data that is not part of the password but is combined with the password when hashed. The client side never sees salt.
So all these discussions of salt are not at all relevant.
This is fundamentally a case of hard-coded credentials, which is more stupid than a non-random salt. (Also, really, transmitting credentials over HTTP?)
I was wondering about that too -- from the description it didn't sound like a salt, I thought the summary was inaccurate (nearly unheard of on Slashdot!), but TFA said the same thing.
Sounds like someone knew enough about cryptography to be dangerous and though that any random (or not) string added to the plaintext password is a salt.
Except all of these business related regulations and taxes and inflation produce the exact opposite results.
Nonsense. They're producing exactly the results people want.
So if you wanted to have fewer cars on the roads
People don't want fewer cars on the roads. People want fewer taxis on the roads, so they can keep driving their cars
Depends where you live -- if I'm heading downtown, i really don't want to drive... if I drive, I need to park my car (which is expensive), and it means that I have to stay around where my car is - if I want to park near the theater then hop a bus to meet some friends at a restaurant across town, I've got to go back to where my car was to get back home. It's much easier to hop on a bus to the theater, go to dinner, then call a cab for the ride home since I don't feel like waiting 20 minutes for a bus at 11pm.
It's when anybody can afford a cab ride and cabs are extremely accessible (easy to order, so there is no shortage) you'll reduce number of cars on the roads
More communist nonsense. Cars are people's private property. They're gonna drive them on roads (that their taxes paid for) as they please. It's also their taxes that pay government, and like hell they're going to pay taxes to fund your collectivist delusions of an efficient transit system that would drive them off the road.
No, free people got exactly what they wanted out of their tax dollars: a system that keeps taxi and transit at a minimum and maximize individual liberty to drive their cars
Again, it depends on where you live - where I live, people outnumber road capacity so much that driving is usually not very pleasant, I'm happy to take transit and/or taxis since it's usually faster and more convenient than driving.
I know someone who just tried to buy a Tesla. What they told him it would cost, what he would get, and so on sounded like a reasonable deal. He did the test drive and loved it and was all excited about getting it. Then the REAL numbers came up.
So he went to a Tesla showroom where someone gave him some lowball numbers to get him to do a test ride, then when it came time to actually do the sale, the numbers were higher? How is this different than buying from a dealer?
NO DEALERSHIP does a bait and switch even half as bad as Tesla does. They added $30K to the price and over doubled the monthly payment. The down payment also went from $2K to $35K.
This part of the story doesn't really make sense -- I don't really see how adding $30K to the price *and* requiring an additional $33K downpayment requirement could have doubled the monthly payment he was expecting. Unless his credit warranted such a high interest rate that the monthly payment was higher than expected. Which may be what happened since they also upped the downpayment from the standard 10% advertised on their website to 30% - 50%.
I know someone that bought a Tesla a few months back and he said he paid the same price they list on their website. He didn't need to finance it, but I'd imagine that most shoppers for a $70 - $100K car don't need dealer financing.
If they had dealerships and one did this to you, at least you could go to another one to buy the car. With their model you either take their bait and switch or don't get their car. I think their business model is pure fail if they are doing the same to everyone else.
Well, the difference is that the car's list price would be set higher so the dealer could "give" you $30K off the list price of the car so you think you're getting a good deal, then the finance guy in the back room will make you think that the 72 month financing at 20% interest is a fantastic deal but you have to buy today because when his boss comes in Monday he'll cancel the deal since the dealership is losing money on the sale.
Chip-and-Pin doesn't provide magstripe data to Target. Target can't build its demographic data. That's going to hurt sales.
If that's the case, they'll just have to do it the old fashioned way -- with affinity cards "Swipe your TargetPoints card and save $$$!".
It's not necessarily the case that chip-and-pin removes the ability for merchants to do customer tracking -- just because the card number is encrypted and protected doesn't mean that no unique identifying information is sent in the clear to let a merchant recognize a returning customer.
Banks hold some of the responsibility too -- why are they still issuing cards with 1970's era magstripe technology that is so easily intercepted and stolen? They claim that the merchants don't want to pay to install new credit card readers, yet only the banks have the power to force it on them (through fee penalties for those still use magstripes, or an outright mandate requiring new scanners). Even merchants that *want* to use safer technology can't do anything to make the banks issue the new cards.
Gonna be a long while till robots will be able to do all the shitty things nomadic, entry-level employees do.
It will be a while before robots can do all of those jobs, but many of them will soon be automated. If you go into a McDonald's, half the employees are taking orders, and the other half are fulfilling them. The people taking the orders could easily be replaced: Just turn the touchscreens around so that customers can enter their own orders, and then swipe a card to pay. Grocery stores have already done this, and so have banks. Fast food is next.
I don't understand why they haven't done so already -- I assume it's because they don't think their customers are ready for touch-screen ordering. Starbucks could do it too -- with their pushbutton espresso machines, they don't really need a human barista for most drinks.
I can tell you why... I witnessed it firsthand. My mall food court had this system in the early 1990's. People would place orders via the touchscreen and then the food would be prepared. I saw the place get trolled (someone ordered 10 large fries at once and walked away). Obviously, this was before credit card swipes were allowed for payment so it was a cash business, and payment was collected when the food was presented.
Yeah, that system didn't last long.
But if they collect payment at the time of order, that problem goes away.
Now the likely issue would be trolls ordering bizarre combinations and then claiming there was a mistake/demanding a refund.
Seems like if their receipt says "Hamburger with extra strawberries", they'd have a hard time saying that they didn't order that - and really the cost of fast food is so low that throwing away a bad order every once in a while isn't a huge expense.
As for self-checkout, most places I saw experiment with those in the past two years (grocery stores and Costco) has ripped them out and gone back to using human cashiers. The reasons? Fraud/theft
I can see why it wouldn't work well at Costco - lots of incentive to swap barcodes to get a 55" TV for the price of a $5.99 lawnchair, and they can't easily do a weight check like grocery store self-checkouts.
But it seems to work well in grocery stores - to the point that if there is more than one person in line in the staffed line, I'll go to the self-checkout because it's faster - the checkout clerk may be faster at scanning than I am, but I inevitably get stuck behind someone that didn't realize that they'd have to present payment for their purchase and wait until after the cashier tells them the total to get out their wallet and fish around for a credit card.... or worse, a check.
I've even gotten pretty good at remembering or looking up produce codes
and speed (trained cashiers are faster, who would have thought?).
I don't think any store exec ever thought that customers would be faster at self checkout than human clerks (especially when the scanners purposely slow you down to verify that you've put each item into the bagging area), but when they can put in 4 or 6 self-checkout lines per human operator, even if the checkout process itself is slower, you can still get out of the store faster.
Walmart and big box home improvement stores are the outliers still offering self-checkout in my area.
Home improvement stores seem like the worst place for self-checkout -- at my store they don't have hand scanners at self-checkout, so you need to maneuver everything over the little scanner window, even large pieces of lumber, unless the attendant isn't already busy, sees you struggling, and comes over with the wireless scanner.
Of course, if products were tagged with RFID chips, then self-checkout could work effortlessly, like in the old IBM commercial:
Gonna be a long while till robots will be able to do all the shitty things nomadic, entry-level employees do.
It will be a while before robots can do all of those jobs, but many of them will soon be automated. If you go into a McDonald's, half the employees are taking orders, and the other half are fulfilling them. The people taking the orders could easily be replaced: Just turn the touchscreens around so that customers can enter their own orders, and then swipe a card to pay. Grocery stores have already done this, and so have banks. Fast food is next.
I don't understand why they haven't done so already -- I assume it's because they don't think their customers are ready for touch-screen ordering. Starbucks could do it too -- with their pushbutton espresso machines, they don't really need a human barista for most drinks.
Well if you ignore the fact that the project didn't save money-spent overall, then yes, its about costs.
What you are forgetting to take into account is that you get significantly more production, at a higher rate of accuracy with machines. In some cases (not all), the accuracy and production increase is simply unfeasible with a human workforce.
Its like asking how many postmen would it take to deliver all the world's email. There simply wouldn't be enough resources to do the job, regardless of cost.
I don't think you understand "cost" - if the increase in production and better accuracy didn't make the program cost effective, then they'd dump the smart forklifts and bring back the humans. Few businesses can afford to turn the core part of their business into a speculative testbed for technology that costs more to operate than the human workers it replaced. The project may very well have cost more than the human workers it replaced, but that expense was made up by the factors you just mentioned.
Moving the pedals farther apart and with more vertical separation may make it harder to quickly switch from the accelerator to the brake pedal, causing more accidents than the few prevented by the people with size 13 feet wearing large boots. Plus, with a large vertical separating, the big footed guy might find his foot trapped under the brake pedal when trying to quickly shift over.
I think it's going to take a little more research than one man's anecdote to determine if it's a problem.
Netflix should charge back whatever fees they pay to Comcast back to their customers that view content via Comcast. This lets the customer see the true cost of their ISP.
Why should users of Google and other ISPs that don't charge fees to Netflix subsidize Comcast subscribers?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe dog semen, but cat semen? That stuff is nearly undrinkable, much worse than Pepsi or Mountain Dew.
Holy mother of god! You were modded informative. Just. Wow.
ROFLMAO
Yeah, I was a little horrified to see that!
Amazon has a detailed AWS cost estimator:
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws...
When we migrated to the cloud, our actual costs were within 15% of the estimated costs.
But really, the easiest thing to do is just build a test environment and try it -- you only pay for the time you use.
When we migrated to AWS we knocked 70% off our colocation bill (we had more space at the coloc than we needed, but it's hard to move production hardware to a smaller space without downtime, plus we had significant savings in equipment leases and maintenance contract costs).
Our dev/test hardware was aging and becoming unreliable (and no longer matched production since we moved to AWS), so we moved that up to AWS as well, but even after that migration our total AWS bill less than half what we paid at the colocation center. We only run the dev/test hardware during business hours, or on-demand as needed -- we set up a simple web interface that lets developers spin up test instances as needed. AWS keeps dropping prices, so we're even as we've grown, our costs have remained relatively constant.
Why would anyone drink Pepsi or Mountain Dew? Drinking cat piss or dog semen would be a better way to spend your time.
Well, maybe dog semen, but cat semen? That stuff is nearly undrinkable, much worse than Pepsi or Mountain Dew.
ok, but what does it mean?
You don't have Google where you live?
Try this link:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=downing+t...
Yes. Alternatively there's SpiderOak if you want you files encrypted in the cloud.
You could also set up you own personal cloud using OwnCloud if you have a webserver or a machine which is always-on which you can use as a webserver. it would do away with the space constraints and longevity of the service. You would only have to manage uptime and connectivity of the server.
You can rent an Amazon AWS micro instance for around $7/month (including a few GB of disk space -- additional space is $0.05/GB/month). Data transfer can kill you if you share a lot of data, inbound data to AWS is free, but outbound data is $0.12/GB so if you're send a 1GB file to 10 devices, that's $1.20 in bandwidth.
Seriously , why do so many people thinking transfering files is some new problem still looking for a solution? I can understand it for Windows users but Linux users really should know better.
Because FTP only supplies the transport layer - it's not going to automatically sync the 1000 files you dropped in the FTP directory and won't do the many-to-many replication that people use to share files among multiple desktops. Even rsync gets a little cumbersome for that without a central server that they all have access to, and if you're going to set up a server, you may as well set up something like OwnCloud.
No, they aren't. It entirely depends on each state. Many states have no inspections whatsoever, and I've never heard of any state where they make sure you maintain your car. The most stringent is probably California, and some other states, where they check emissions (in CA, I think they even check them at checkpoints as people drive by); that doesn't check maintenance at all, but a poorly-maintained car engine will eventually fail emissions tests. Of course, this doesn't mean the suspension or brakes have been maintained correctly; someone could change their oil regularly and pass smog tests with flying colors, but still have unsafe brakes or something wrong with their suspension.
Just because the state doesn't inspect your vehicle to ensure that it's safe doesn't mean that the owner is not responsible for doing so:
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vc...
V C Section 24002 Vehicle Not Equipped or Unsafe
Vehicle Not Equipped or Unsafe
24002. (a) It is unlawful to operate any vehicle or combination of vehicles which is in an unsafe condition, or which is not safely loaded, and which presents an immediate safety hazard.
This is not plumber for dentist. It is dentist for dentist.
That is not an insignificant difference.
I don't see the difference. A dentist can't fill a cavity in his own teeth, so he either pays another dentist to do it (which is taxable income to that dentist), or he tells his dentist friend "Hey, if you fill my cavity, I'll do yours later", which is a taxable barter transaction. I don't see why the fact that they are in the same field makes any difference.
If I give you a pineapple and you return me a pineapple, that is called lending, not a sale.
And if I give you 20 tons of pineapples today, and you give me 20 tons of pineapples next week, that's called warehousing and entire businesses are dedicated to warehousing commodities and shipping them out again, sometimes to the same company that warehoused it in the first place.
Among other things it means that ZERO profit is made and government treats non-profit things very differently.
Whether the transaction earns profit or not, it's still a transaction.
So much for free market economics and competition. I hate it when government goes to lengths like these as competition is good all around.
As long as the new services operate under the same constraints as taxi companies, I see no reason why they should't be allowed to operate since, as you say, that's a free market at work. But they shouldn't get to skip over all of the costs of business that taxi companies absorb -- things like driver background checks, driver training (in some cities), insurance requirements, car maintenance requirements, etc.
Why does the author think that the government doesn't (or even can't) recognize that a barter transaction is still a transaction?
The IRS says that barter transactions are taxable:
http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/t...
Bartering occurs when you exchange goods or services without exchanging money. An example of bartering is a plumber exchanging plumbing services for the dental services of a dentist. You must include in gross income in the year of receipt the fair market value of goods or services received from bartering.
I don't see why Seattle couldn't also recognize that the a ride-share barter service is still a taxi service.
I'm surprised they didn't go with the typical million dollar settlement payable entirely in 75 cent coupons sent to every customer. I guess that only happens in class action lawsuits.
What happened to the 3D printing revolution?
It's more of an evolution than a revolution. Give it time. But it still won't be the right tool for every job.
> A corporate firewall does little to ensure safety of a Windows installation. I've seen users behind a malware scanning firewall, running antivirus software on Win7 *still* manage to get infected by malware.
That is why you run multiple layers of protection; a UTM with antivirus/malware signature update subscriptions plus centrally-administered antivirus/antimalware software and policies covering use of USB devices.
Multiple layers is good. Running an unsupported and unpatched version of Windows is a huge gaping hole in your layers of security. Your UTM should automatically block WinXP machines from the network when they fail the NAC check - no network access for devices not up to date on patches, and by definition, WinXP systems are not up to date on patches after support ends.
If XP is behind a corporate firewall - no problem.
Everyone should have a separate non-Windows firewall.
It really is all very simple and never requires the running of ridiculous anti-virus products.
A corporate firewall does little to ensure safety of a Windows installation. I've seen users behind a malware scanning firewall, running antivirus software on Win7 *still* manage to get infected by malware.
If a remote exploite is found in WinXP, a single infected XP machine on a corporate network can hop around to other WinXP machines in that network.
It looks from the video that the password is simply the username concatenated with a global string, "123456".
That's not salt. That's not what the word means. A salt is data that is not part of the password but is combined with the password when hashed. The client side never sees salt.
So all these discussions of salt are not at all relevant.
This is fundamentally a case of hard-coded credentials, which is more stupid than a non-random salt. (Also, really, transmitting credentials over HTTP?)
I was wondering about that too -- from the description it didn't sound like a salt, I thought the summary was inaccurate (nearly unheard of on Slashdot!), but TFA said the same thing.
Sounds like someone knew enough about cryptography to be dangerous and though that any random (or not) string added to the plaintext password is a salt.
Except all of these business related regulations and taxes and inflation produce the exact opposite results.
Nonsense. They're producing exactly the results people want.
So if you wanted to have fewer cars on the roads
People don't want fewer cars on the roads. People want fewer taxis on the roads, so they can keep driving their cars
Depends where you live -- if I'm heading downtown, i really don't want to drive... if I drive, I need to park my car (which is expensive), and it means that I have to stay around where my car is - if I want to park near the theater then hop a bus to meet some friends at a restaurant across town, I've got to go back to where my car was to get back home. It's much easier to hop on a bus to the theater, go to dinner, then call a cab for the ride home since I don't feel like waiting 20 minutes for a bus at 11pm.
It's when anybody can afford a cab ride and cabs are extremely accessible (easy to order, so there is no shortage) you'll reduce number of cars on the roads
More communist nonsense. Cars are people's private property. They're gonna drive them on roads (that their taxes paid for) as they please. It's also their taxes that pay government, and like hell they're going to pay taxes to fund your collectivist delusions of an efficient transit system that would drive them off the road.
No, free people got exactly what they wanted out of their tax dollars: a system that keeps taxi and transit at a minimum and maximize individual liberty to drive their cars
Again, it depends on where you live - where I live, people outnumber road capacity so much that driving is usually not very pleasant, I'm happy to take transit and/or taxis since it's usually faster and more convenient than driving.
I know someone who just tried to buy a Tesla. What they told him it would cost, what he would get, and so on sounded like a reasonable deal. He did the test drive and loved it and was all excited about getting it. Then the REAL numbers came up.
So he went to a Tesla showroom where someone gave him some lowball numbers to get him to do a test ride, then when it came time to actually do the sale, the numbers were higher? How is this different than buying from a dealer?
NO DEALERSHIP does a bait and switch even half as bad as Tesla does. They added $30K to the price and over doubled the monthly payment. The down payment also went from $2K to $35K.
This part of the story doesn't really make sense -- I don't really see how adding $30K to the price *and* requiring an additional $33K downpayment requirement could have doubled the monthly payment he was expecting. Unless his credit warranted such a high interest rate that the monthly payment was higher than expected. Which may be what happened since they also upped the downpayment from the standard 10% advertised on their website to 30% - 50%.
I know someone that bought a Tesla a few months back and he said he paid the same price they list on their website. He didn't need to finance it, but I'd imagine that most shoppers for a $70 - $100K car don't need dealer financing.
If they had dealerships and one did this to you, at least you could go to another one to buy the car. With their model you either take their bait and switch or don't get their car. I think their business model is pure fail if they are doing the same to everyone else.
Well, the difference is that the car's list price would be set higher so the dealer could "give" you $30K off the list price of the car so you think you're getting a good deal, then the finance guy in the back room will make you think that the 72 month financing at 20% interest is a fantastic deal but you have to buy today because when his boss comes in Monday he'll cancel the deal since the dealership is losing money on the sale.
Target doesn't want to ditch the magstripe. They do incredible amounts of data mining based off of data on the magstripe.
See: How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.
Chip-and-Pin doesn't provide magstripe data to Target. Target can't build its demographic data. That's going to hurt sales.
If that's the case, they'll just have to do it the old fashioned way -- with affinity cards "Swipe your TargetPoints card and save $$$!".
It's not necessarily the case that chip-and-pin removes the ability for merchants to do customer tracking -- just because the card number is encrypted and protected doesn't mean that no unique identifying information is sent in the clear to let a merchant recognize a returning customer.
Banks hold some of the responsibility too -- why are they still issuing cards with 1970's era magstripe technology that is so easily intercepted and stolen? They claim that the merchants don't want to pay to install new credit card readers, yet only the banks have the power to force it on them (through fee penalties for those still use magstripes, or an outright mandate requiring new scanners). Even merchants that *want* to use safer technology can't do anything to make the banks issue the new cards.
Gonna be a long while till robots will be able to do all the shitty things nomadic, entry-level employees do.
It will be a while before robots can do all of those jobs, but many of them will soon be automated. If you go into a McDonald's, half the employees are taking orders, and the other half are fulfilling them. The people taking the orders could easily be replaced: Just turn the touchscreens around so that customers can enter their own orders, and then swipe a card to pay. Grocery stores have already done this, and so have banks. Fast food is next.
I don't understand why they haven't done so already -- I assume it's because they don't think their customers are ready for touch-screen ordering. Starbucks could do it too -- with their pushbutton espresso machines, they don't really need a human barista for most drinks.
I can tell you why... I witnessed it firsthand. My mall food court had this system in the early 1990's. People would place orders via the touchscreen and then the food would be prepared. I saw the place get trolled (someone ordered 10 large fries at once and walked away). Obviously, this was before credit card swipes were allowed for payment so it was a cash business, and payment was collected when the food was presented.
Yeah, that system didn't last long.
But if they collect payment at the time of order, that problem goes away.
Now the likely issue would be trolls ordering bizarre combinations and then claiming there was a mistake/demanding a refund.
Seems like if their receipt says "Hamburger with extra strawberries", they'd have a hard time saying that they didn't order that - and really the cost of fast food is so low that throwing away a bad order every once in a while isn't a huge expense.
As for self-checkout, most places I saw experiment with those in the past two years (grocery stores and Costco) has ripped them out and gone back to using human cashiers. The reasons? Fraud/theft
I can see why it wouldn't work well at Costco - lots of incentive to swap barcodes to get a 55" TV for the price of a $5.99 lawnchair, and they can't easily do a weight check like grocery store self-checkouts.
But it seems to work well in grocery stores - to the point that if there is more than one person in line in the staffed line, I'll go to the self-checkout because it's faster - the checkout clerk may be faster at scanning than I am, but I inevitably get stuck behind someone that didn't realize that they'd have to present payment for their purchase and wait until after the cashier tells them the total to get out their wallet and fish around for a credit card.... or worse, a check.
I've even gotten pretty good at remembering or looking up produce codes
and speed (trained cashiers are faster, who would have thought?).
I don't think any store exec ever thought that customers would be faster at self checkout than human clerks (especially when the scanners purposely slow you down to verify that you've put each item into the bagging area), but when they can put in 4 or 6 self-checkout lines per human operator, even if the checkout process itself is slower, you can still get out of the store faster.
Walmart and big box home improvement stores are the outliers still offering self-checkout in my area.
Home improvement stores seem like the worst place for self-checkout -- at my store they don't have hand scanners at self-checkout, so you need to maneuver everything over the little scanner window, even large pieces of lumber, unless the attendant isn't already busy, sees you struggling, and comes over with the wireless scanner.
Of course, if products were tagged with RFID chips, then self-checkout could work effortlessly, like in the old IBM commercial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Gonna be a long while till robots will be able to do all the shitty things nomadic, entry-level employees do.
It will be a while before robots can do all of those jobs, but many of them will soon be automated. If you go into a McDonald's, half the employees are taking orders, and the other half are fulfilling them. The people taking the orders could easily be replaced: Just turn the touchscreens around so that customers can enter their own orders, and then swipe a card to pay. Grocery stores have already done this, and so have banks. Fast food is next.
I don't understand why they haven't done so already -- I assume it's because they don't think their customers are ready for touch-screen ordering. Starbucks could do it too -- with their pushbutton espresso machines, they don't really need a human barista for most drinks.
Well if you ignore the fact that the project didn't save money-spent overall, then yes, its about costs.
What you are forgetting to take into account is that you get significantly more production, at a higher rate of accuracy with machines. In some cases (not all), the accuracy and production increase is simply unfeasible with a human workforce.
Its like asking how many postmen would it take to deliver all the world's email. There simply wouldn't be enough resources to do the job, regardless of cost.
I don't think you understand "cost" - if the increase in production and better accuracy didn't make the program cost effective, then they'd dump the smart forklifts and bring back the humans. Few businesses can afford to turn the core part of their business into a speculative testbed for technology that costs more to operate than the human workers it replaced. The project may very well have cost more than the human workers it replaced, but that expense was made up by the factors you just mentioned.
Moving the pedals farther apart and with more vertical separation may make it harder to quickly switch from the accelerator to the brake pedal, causing more accidents than the few prevented by the people with size 13 feet wearing large boots. Plus, with a large vertical separating, the big footed guy might find his foot trapped under the brake pedal when trying to quickly shift over.
I think it's going to take a little more research than one man's anecdote to determine if it's a problem.
As a Netflix customer who doesn't have to use AT&T, I strongly agree with your proposition.
If these fees stick, you can count on AT&T jumping on board too.
Netflix should charge back whatever fees they pay to Comcast back to their customers that view content via Comcast. This lets the customer see the true cost of their ISP.
Why should users of Google and other ISPs that don't charge fees to Netflix subsidize Comcast subscribers?