Because the workers needed to make the Gig Economy (TM) haven't embraced it? And why would that be? Maybe it's because:
1. Gig workloads are inconsistent. One day or night you're busy, the next you might be sparsely working 2. Too many people started competing for those gigs, which leads to.... 3. The Gig payscale is awful and many people give it up after a while because they realize they'd make more at a boring steady job where they can reliably predict what their next paycheck will look like. 4. Hours are supposed to be flexible on whatever the worker wants to do, but in reality there are boom times and down times. If you're not working those, you're not paying your rent.
As an example of the above, we don't have Uber where I live but when I travel I use it a lot. It's great for the customer. But I also make a point of talking to the drivers about their experience with it as I'm quite curious about what they have to say. More than half the drivers I talk to say the profit for them keeps declining because of increasing operations costs and Uber's income share on the rides keeps shifting. Most of the full-time drivers say if they had known how the numbers would work out they would probably not have ditched their old day job to do Uber full time. Maybe one in 10 I talk to actually seem to enjoy it.
The gig economy is bullshit. It's just another fancy label for "you're going to be at will contractors and we're gonna pay you peanuts"
" It takes in data like your location, time, and the weather to create these soundscapes, and the result is not quite "musical" in the traditional sense"
After leaving Cambridge, he was poor for three years. During that time he had a number of different jobs, one of which was a road sweeper; at night on his own time, he worked on his computer.[1]
Richard then became a programmer at Gordon Way's WayForward Technologies. Gordon assigned him to write an accounting program for the Apple Macintosh. This became Anthem, which on top of its accouning functions could turn the spreadsheet numbers into music pieces.[1]
He wrote an article titled "Music and Fractal Landscapes", which was published in Fathom.[1]
> is like selling a car without airbags or charging extra for the brakes.
Well.. ya know... a few years back airbags were only on premium trim packages or models, and even today ABS is an option - as well as many of the lower end models of car are sold with drum brakes in the back as a cost savings measure, despite the proven shortcomings of drum brakes.
> as these days it's so easy to start and stop subscriptions.
It is, but it's also easy to forget when your subscription month end is, and as a result you'll miss cancelling in time. It's also a hassle. I have Netflix, and I get Prime Video through my Prime membership. I may entertain buying a couple of other services for a month here and there, but that's it, and when I do that I'll do it at a time when I can binge what I wanted and then drop it. I won't be subscribing to anything else on an ongoing basis. And I feel that my sentiment is somewhat common, so all these other streaming services that are getting ready to jump in, dreaming of massive ongoing recurring revenues will be quite disappointed, I think.
> Because this technology's real purpose is stronger drm
Care to explain how that is? There is no additional DRM above having the game in your library. In case you missed it, YOU are streaming from YOUR equipment to some of YOUR other equipment. Valve isn't locking anything else down harder, they're helping you play your stuff wherever instead of having to be sitting in front of your computer. Nothing to purchase, nothing to incrementally transact.
> But I bet you're one of the stupid masses who don't remember how steam was something nobody wanted in 2004
I remember that well. Steam sucked back then and brought little or no value. Over the last 15 years that's changed quite a bit. They learned from their mistakes and made the platform a value-add.
> trapping software inside the internet and drip feeding you encrypted files so you don't own anything.
And that is the tradeoff you accept with Steam yes. The countervailing benefit is I don't buy Steam games at full price, only on sale, and usually for 75-90% off. So I make the conscious choice that while I don't *really* own the game, it was also cheap enough I don't really care. If I was paying $80 a pop you're damn right I would want physical media.
>because the average game consumer is basically retarded.
Or maybe the average consumer doesn't care. YOU might not be all right with the terms of it, but others are. stoplikingwhatidontlike.jpg
> We need to keep pushing for this to be the norm.
Or, crazy thought: maybe we should be demanding instead that a lot of these "smart" service devices don't rely on cloud systems that will one day be retired and render all the devices useless.
Case in point, I just jumped into the smart light tech pool at home. I went with the Philips Hue system instead of any of the many many many competitors out there that are way cheaper. My starter kit with 4 RGB lights and a Zigbee bridge was $200 CDN, compared to 4 wifi RGB wifi lights from an Amazon Favorite for $35 CDN. But here's the thing: those Amazon lights call home to a cloud server for every single action, when you use the app you're not talking directly to your lights from your phone, you're instructing the cloud service to tell them what to do. My Hue lights by comparison communicate with the local bridge. This means if my internet goes down, I can still control the lights. If Philips abandons the Hue product altogether, my system will still work with all the hardware I have.
On the other hand, if the maker of those Amazon favorite lights I mentioned goes tits up and shuts off the cloud service, or decides to discontinue it, your bulbs are worthless. Same with those $25 smart plugs people are buying in droves.
> 3. You probably already have a phone, you do not want to carry an other device for a single purpose. (Hence why I never used my Palm Pilot III)
Depends how well that other device can do the single purpose. I carry a 3DS around on my commute by transit because most mobile games either have the depth of a shallow puddle, or they want you to use touchscreen "joysticks" and buttons which is a universally terrible experience. Having tactile controls is a huge advantage for the 3DS, hence I will carry it around. The Vita has a disadvantage here though as the 3DS is small enough to easily toss in a jacket pocket, but the Vita is heavier and significantly larger.
> Phones have a number of games some of good quality which are cheap or free to play or need to go to some ads.
This is largely subjective. If your idea of fun is a puzzle game or clash of whatever, then the phone works fine and more power to you. The Vita's library does tend toward games you'd be invested in longer play periods so for a portable device that is not ideal.
But... but... I was told specifically by the man in the television that the new Huawei smartphone has "advanced AI" to make it do all those things that will make my life 100x better, like taking slightly better pictures and wirelessly sharing power with someone else who has the exact same model phone...
You're not saying that companies LIE about what AI is, are you?
I agree. Especially the ones from Anonymous Cowards. I think 90% of the quality issues with/. comments would go away if AC posting was removed, at least for a while.
How-to videos are a relatively small subset of the total videos on the platform, and even they aren't immune from garbage comments. A quick serach for "how to repair" auto-suggested this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvtoikKG318
Now while the comments on this particular video aren't openly racist, calling for a group's extermination, or cancer, but they're still mostly useless. And the shit-posters on YouTube will start moving around to other videos once they can't comment on a certain category of video as their primary motivation is to shitpost.
> Now, my guess is that Netflix doesn't really care about college jkids using their parents account (again, get them hooked as customers and they'll get their own eventually). A bigger concern is likely young people who band together and share the cose of a single login, even though they don't live together. Saves a few bucks, but is very clearly not in line with the user agreement.
You are correct that use breaches the terms, but also correct that Netflix doesn't actually care. They know it's good for business to let people do what I do, because it is. Because let's be real, how many "households" really need the ability to stream to 4 screens simultaneously? But that's one of their most popular plans. Also, when the whole "people are sharing their Netflix account" first hit popular media as a talking point, what did Netflix do? Clamp down? No, they introduced profiles to make it so people who shared wouldn't have their lists and suggestions screwed up. They know, and they LIKE it. They just have to pretend not to like it because of the contracts they sign with the exterior content providers.
But they know it drives long term loyalty and profit, just like Adobe knows damn well that all those college age pirates of their strangely-easy-to-pirate tools will one day get jobs at companies and the only software they know how to use for graphic arts are Adobe products and well gee I guess the company who hired them needs to buy another set of licenses for those packages now don't they?
Or even if they don't they probably weren't going to pay for it anyway. My daughter lives in another city and is going to college there. If she didn't use my Netflix account, she wouldn't buy one herself as money's tight and she has other things to pay for.
Also, Netflix charges based on the number of concurrent screens using the service. More screens, more money. Half the reason I keep paying my current level is because of my aforementioned daughter's usage This isn't piracy. Would Netflix be happier if I cut her off and downgraded my service - and lowered my payment to them?
No, but they didn't shy away from the tech even after that. Macross Frontier has the tech re-purposed as exactly what the article describes from Boeing - little fighter wingmen to help out the main jet.
Easy is relative, and a lot of people aren't as up to the challenge of managing that as you may believe. I think 5% for Patreon providing a platform for some content and handling payments seamlessly on behalf of their users is reasonable. 30% is definitely not.
> How about if we just let everyone speak, and let the listeners decide for themselves who to believe?
We've tried that. Turns out, there are a lot of gullible or stupid people out there who are absolutely not equipped to winnow truth from bullshit. And when there's a firehose of bullshit being sprayed at them they can't even see the small waterpistol of truth. This is how you get everything from people embezzling 200K from their company to send to some nice Nigerian fellow who will make them rich in exchange for that help, all the way to people believing that the Earth is flat, Hillary would have started WWIII, and vaccines are poison. Plus, lizard people, secret bases under Denver airport, FEMA camps, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
If we let the status quo stay as it is, things will only get worse. While the old saw about censorship is true to a degree, it's hard to deny that deliberate lies are being weaponized by multiple actors and a good portion of society is starting to feel the effects.
> I guess the game of Handegg was pretty uninspiring then.
Pretty much yep. It was like the football equivalent of watching a 90s era NHL game against the New Jersey Devils playing their patented neutral zone trap bullshit.
Look at Foxconn's track record in other countries to see how this will all shake out in the end. They promise the world to get tax breaks and incentives and invariably scale back during the actual build and startup.
Right now there's a media firestorm and even Trump got dragged into it again so of course Foxconn can say they'll do the full factory to calm everything down, even though last week they were saying there's no profit to building LCD panels in the US. Talk. Is. Cheap. Let's wait and see what they actually end up doing. I bet it won't be anything close to what the talk promised. Just like in Brazil and Indonesia.
Don't forget CraveTV. If you subscribe to that, you're giving the bastards money. A shame, there's a few things on there I want to watch, but not enough to give Bell even a nickel.
Slashdot Mirror
> but you should never eat ground beef rare
Not traditionally cooked, no. But I do love a rare burger that I've cooked via sous vide for an hour. All of the taste, none of the bacteria.
Because the workers needed to make the Gig Economy (TM) haven't embraced it? And why would that be? Maybe it's because:
1. Gig workloads are inconsistent. One day or night you're busy, the next you might be sparsely working
2. Too many people started competing for those gigs, which leads to....
3. The Gig payscale is awful and many people give it up after a while because they realize they'd make more at a boring steady job where they can reliably predict what their next paycheck will look like.
4. Hours are supposed to be flexible on whatever the worker wants to do, but in reality there are boom times and down times. If you're not working those, you're not paying your rent.
As an example of the above, we don't have Uber where I live but when I travel I use it a lot. It's great for the customer. But I also make a point of talking to the drivers about their experience with it as I'm quite curious about what they have to say. More than half the drivers I talk to say the profit for them keeps declining because of increasing operations costs and Uber's income share on the rides keeps shifting. Most of the full-time drivers say if they had known how the numbers would work out they would probably not have ditched their old day job to do Uber full time. Maybe one in 10 I talk to actually seem to enjoy it.
The gig economy is bullshit. It's just another fancy label for "you're going to be at will contractors and we're gonna pay you peanuts"
" It takes in data like your location, time, and the weather to create these soundscapes, and the result is not quite "musical" in the traditional sense"
Douglas Adams has prior art circa 1987:
https://dirkgently.fandom.com/wiki/Richard_MacDuff_(Adams)
After leaving Cambridge, he was poor for three years. During that time he had a number of different jobs, one of which was a road sweeper; at night on his own time, he worked on his computer.[1]
Richard then became a programmer at Gordon Way's WayForward Technologies. Gordon assigned him to write an accounting program for the Apple Macintosh. This became Anthem, which on top of its accouning functions could turn the spreadsheet numbers into music pieces.[1]
He wrote an article titled "Music and Fractal Landscapes", which was published in Fathom.[1]
That blows. I have 3 credit cards, all of which have interest rates of 8% or lower. When did high teens to low 20s for interest rates become average?
> is like selling a car without airbags or charging extra for the brakes.
Well.. ya know... a few years back airbags were only on premium trim packages or models, and even today ABS is an option - as well as many of the lower end models of car are sold with drum brakes in the back as a cost savings measure, despite the proven shortcomings of drum brakes.
> as these days it's so easy to start and stop subscriptions.
It is, but it's also easy to forget when your subscription month end is, and as a result you'll miss cancelling in time. It's also a hassle. I have Netflix, and I get Prime Video through my Prime membership. I may entertain buying a couple of other services for a month here and there, but that's it, and when I do that I'll do it at a time when I can binge what I wanted and then drop it. I won't be subscribing to anything else on an ongoing basis. And I feel that my sentiment is somewhat common, so all these other streaming services that are getting ready to jump in, dreaming of massive ongoing recurring revenues will be quite disappointed, I think.
> Because this technology's real purpose is stronger drm
Care to explain how that is? There is no additional DRM above having the game in your library. In case you missed it, YOU are streaming from YOUR equipment to some of YOUR other equipment. Valve isn't locking anything else down harder, they're helping you play your stuff wherever instead of having to be sitting in front of your computer. Nothing to purchase, nothing to incrementally transact.
> But I bet you're one of the stupid masses who don't remember how steam was something nobody wanted in 2004
I remember that well. Steam sucked back then and brought little or no value. Over the last 15 years that's changed quite a bit. They learned from their mistakes and made the platform a value-add.
> trapping software inside the internet and drip feeding you encrypted files so you don't own anything.
And that is the tradeoff you accept with Steam yes. The countervailing benefit is I don't buy Steam games at full price, only on sale, and usually for 75-90% off. So I make the conscious choice that while I don't *really* own the game, it was also cheap enough I don't really care. If I was paying $80 a pop you're damn right I would want physical media.
>because the average game consumer is basically retarded.
Or maybe the average consumer doesn't care. YOU might not be all right with the terms of it, but others are. stoplikingwhatidontlike.jpg
> We need to keep pushing for this to be the norm.
Or, crazy thought: maybe we should be demanding instead that a lot of these "smart" service devices don't rely on cloud systems that will one day be retired and render all the devices useless.
Case in point, I just jumped into the smart light tech pool at home. I went with the Philips Hue system instead of any of the many many many competitors out there that are way cheaper. My starter kit with 4 RGB lights and a Zigbee bridge was $200 CDN, compared to 4 wifi RGB wifi lights from an Amazon Favorite for $35 CDN. But here's the thing: those Amazon lights call home to a cloud server for every single action, when you use the app you're not talking directly to your lights from your phone, you're instructing the cloud service to tell them what to do. My Hue lights by comparison communicate with the local bridge. This means if my internet goes down, I can still control the lights. If Philips abandons the Hue product altogether, my system will still work with all the hardware I have.
On the other hand, if the maker of those Amazon favorite lights I mentioned goes tits up and shuts off the cloud service, or decides to discontinue it, your bulbs are worthless. Same with those $25 smart plugs people are buying in droves.
> Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker
So you're saying you're NOT going to be first in line to get the fantastic new disc-less, digital only, always online Xbox One?
> 3. You probably already have a phone, you do not want to carry an other device for a single purpose. (Hence why I never used my Palm Pilot III)
Depends how well that other device can do the single purpose. I carry a 3DS around on my commute by transit because most mobile games either have the depth of a shallow puddle, or they want you to use touchscreen "joysticks" and buttons which is a universally terrible experience. Having tactile controls is a huge advantage for the 3DS, hence I will carry it around. The Vita has a disadvantage here though as the 3DS is small enough to easily toss in a jacket pocket, but the Vita is heavier and significantly larger.
> Phones have a number of games some of good quality which are cheap or free to play or need to go to some ads.
This is largely subjective. If your idea of fun is a puzzle game or clash of whatever, then the phone works fine and more power to you. The Vita's library does tend toward games you'd be invested in longer play periods so for a portable device that is not ideal.
Ah yes, weather and conditions are perfect in Cali 24/7/365...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp9Tg9Z-Hdg
But... but... I was told specifically by the man in the television that the new Huawei smartphone has "advanced AI" to make it do all those things that will make my life 100x better, like taking slightly better pictures and wirelessly sharing power with someone else who has the exact same model phone...
You're not saying that companies LIE about what AI is, are you?
I agree. Especially the ones from Anonymous Cowards. I think 90% of the quality issues with /. comments would go away if AC posting was removed, at least for a while.
> Why applaud censorship
Censorship? Where the hell is it written that it is your God given right to comment on videos?
How-to videos are a relatively small subset of the total videos on the platform, and even they aren't immune from garbage comments. A quick serach for "how to repair" auto-suggested this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvtoikKG318
Now while the comments on this particular video aren't openly racist, calling for a group's extermination, or cancer, but they're still mostly useless. And the shit-posters on YouTube will start moving around to other videos once they can't comment on a certain category of video as their primary motivation is to shitpost.
> Now, my guess is that Netflix doesn't really care about college jkids using their parents account (again, get them hooked as customers and they'll get their own eventually). A bigger concern is likely young people who band together and share the cose of a single login, even though they don't live together. Saves a few bucks, but is very clearly not in line with the user agreement.
You are correct that use breaches the terms, but also correct that Netflix doesn't actually care. They know it's good for business to let people do what I do, because it is. Because let's be real, how many "households" really need the ability to stream to 4 screens simultaneously? But that's one of their most popular plans. Also, when the whole "people are sharing their Netflix account" first hit popular media as a talking point, what did Netflix do? Clamp down? No, they introduced profiles to make it so people who shared wouldn't have their lists and suggestions screwed up. They know, and they LIKE it. They just have to pretend not to like it because of the contracts they sign with the exterior content providers.
But they know it drives long term loyalty and profit, just like Adobe knows damn well that all those college age pirates of their strangely-easy-to-pirate tools will one day get jobs at companies and the only software they know how to use for graphic arts are Adobe products and well gee I guess the company who hired them needs to buy another set of licenses for those packages now don't they?
Youtube comments are pretty much garbage, just ban them all and nothing of value will be lost.
Or even if they don't they probably weren't going to pay for it anyway. My daughter lives in another city and is going to college there. If she didn't use my Netflix account, she wouldn't buy one herself as money's tight and she has other things to pay for.
Also, Netflix charges based on the number of concurrent screens using the service. More screens, more money. Half the reason I keep paying my current level is because of my aforementioned daughter's usage This isn't piracy. Would Netflix be happier if I cut her off and downgraded my service - and lowered my payment to them?
No, but they didn't shy away from the tech even after that. Macross Frontier has the tech re-purposed as exactly what the article describes from Boeing - little fighter wingmen to help out the main jet.
http://mahq.net/mecha/macross/macrossf/aif-7s.htm
> It would be easy to establish direct payments
Easy is relative, and a lot of people aren't as up to the challenge of managing that as you may believe. I think 5% for Patreon providing a platform for some content and handling payments seamlessly on behalf of their users is reasonable. 30% is definitely not.
> How about if we just let everyone speak, and let the listeners decide for themselves who to believe?
We've tried that. Turns out, there are a lot of gullible or stupid people out there who are absolutely not equipped to winnow truth from bullshit. And when there's a firehose of bullshit being sprayed at them they can't even see the small waterpistol of truth. This is how you get everything from people embezzling 200K from their company to send to some nice Nigerian fellow who will make them rich in exchange for that help, all the way to people believing that the Earth is flat, Hillary would have started WWIII, and vaccines are poison. Plus, lizard people, secret bases under Denver airport, FEMA camps, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
If we let the status quo stay as it is, things will only get worse. While the old saw about censorship is true to a degree, it's hard to deny that deliberate lies are being weaponized by multiple actors and a good portion of society is starting to feel the effects.
> I guess the game of Handegg was pretty uninspiring then.
Pretty much yep. It was like the football equivalent of watching a 90s era NHL game against the New Jersey Devils playing their patented neutral zone trap bullshit.
Look at Foxconn's track record in other countries to see how this will all shake out in the end. They promise the world to get tax breaks and incentives and invariably scale back during the actual build and startup.
Right now there's a media firestorm and even Trump got dragged into it again so of course Foxconn can say they'll do the full factory to calm everything down, even though last week they were saying there's no profit to building LCD panels in the US. Talk. Is. Cheap. Let's wait and see what they actually end up doing. I bet it won't be anything close to what the talk promised. Just like in Brazil and Indonesia.
> In Canada, one refers to them as Bell Canada.
Yeah, no. Canadian here. We call them Bell. Or shit. Shit works too.
Don't forget CraveTV. If you subscribe to that, you're giving the bastards money. A shame, there's a few things on there I want to watch, but not enough to give Bell even a nickel.