So as a New Zealander, you should be well aware of how devastating an invasive species is to an ecosystem that has not evolved to keep it in check. Why else would your country embark on a massive invasive species eradication program:
We in North America are all too well acquainted with invasive species and the havoc they wreak on an ecosystem with few natural inhibitors, from asian pine beetles destroying swaths of forestry on the west coast to the zebra mussels monopolizing the Great Lakes.
Don't be so damn flippant. This can be a real problem.
Not in this case, the building was a great revenue source and everything else was ticking along OK. They used the influx of cash stupidly as they'd never had their hands on so much money and went on a massive buying spree, renovated the hell out of the offices (that they DIDN'T OWN any more...sigh) and bought a smaller company. It was like giving your kid an allowance of $10 a week all their life and then handing them $1000 in twentys and expecting them to be responsible with it.
Making matters even worse in retrospect, they sold the building right before Vancouver's massive insane real estate market started to take off. Like literally months before the 20+ year rocketship ride up.
The problem is that functionally a state usually only "takes back" foreign owned assets when things are going to shit. Like Venezuela. And if they exercise that before things go to shit, well, then everyone else stops investing in that country because the risk is too high and that country's economy is at a severe disadvantage compared to the rest of the world. So you are correct, but exercising that option is a double edged sword.
Semantics. The functions of the Wheat Board went with those assets to G3, the approval of the sale of which was interestingly enough, one of the last major regulatory items approved by the Harper government before they lost power. Wonder how Harper spun that one to his backers.
> trying to meet their quarterly expectations rather develop the company
Absolutely right. We've been seeing what happens to long standing tech institutions when the investors' quest for better quarterly numbers is king - R&D is sacrificed, entire parts of the company are sold off, and after the investors sell to take their profits and move elsewhere, the company is a sad shell of itself.
And it's not just tech companies, it's most public companies. One of the public companies I worked for in years past owned the building they were in and rented out the bottom 3 floors to other businesses for a decent chunk of revenue, but decided one quarter that selling the building would be a great way to prop up the numbers for the shareholders and get some capital. Needless to say they went into receivership and were sold piecemeal a few years later as it turns out that a one time cash infusion doesn't help a company's long term bottom line nearly as much as renting out 3 floors of a commercial/retail building in one of Canada's most expensive neighborhoods (Vancouver's Kitsilano area), but hey quick cash made the shareholders happy that quarter.
The Saudis have their mitts in a number of things you wouldn't expect, and which will give them reach for decades to come, for example, they own 50.1% of the Canadian Wheat Board:
The Canadian government should look strongly at foreign ownership of things like our Wheat Board as that's not in our nation's best interests from a food security standpoint.
But what you describe isn't an architecture problem, it's a content/IP one. The Nintendo Switch is using a Tegra architecture that is very similar to literally billions of Android devices but they're not having the same problems with competition - because of their content and IP libraries. People want to play Mario Odyssey and Fire Emblem, and Smash Bros and Mario Kart and the latest Zelda so they go get the Nintendo product. The PS4/Xbox war on the other hand comes down to both content and price as many games are available cross platform there so some consumers will shop on price alone.
Exactly. Most people who frequent/. tend to forget that setting up an emulator on an SBC like a Pine64 or a Raspberry Pi isn't something most people off the street even know is possible, let alone feel able to do. People are paying $60 for having all of that setup and packaging done by Nintendo in a convenient fashion, so all they need to do is plug and play. I set up a Pi with Retropie a while back and it was a fun little project, but it also took some time to do the first time especially with tweaking it, and if someone was paying me at my outside consulting rate it would definitely have been more than $100.
> Old arcade games are ludicrously hard too. They were deliberately so to make you put more money in. I've literally only ever completed one arcade game too, and that's because it cost a pittance by the time I played it and brother-and-I had about 50-continues worth of coins.
Arcade games where continues were allowed aren't really what I think of when someone says old games, as those came several years into the scene. And yes they were designed to extract as much money from you as possible. Gauntlet was the granddaddy of them all and was a very efficient wallet drainer.
The real old arcade games were ludicrously hard, and almost nobody "finished" them because they weren't designed around the idea of an ending at all. They just played the same sequence of maps or levels again and again, gradually ramping up the difficulty until the parameters peaked and then it was merely a test of endurance of the meatbag against the arcade machine. And the meatbag only "finished" the game if they lasted long enough to overflow some counter that the programmer(s) never expected someone to last long enough to do and the game crashed as a result.
>'We realised that UBI reduces governments ability to grow its control over peoples lives, grow is bureaucracy, and make small changes every electoral round therefore trumpeting how we have fixed everything this time. With this in mind we have dropped this like a hot potato, because its not best for US'
Oh, you're giving the Ford government too much credit for nuanced thinking. Doug Ford is a regressive, pure and simple. Anything that "gives money away" is bad in his eyes and will be seen as something to be cut. He's like a slightly more intelligent Trump and will probably do as much damage to Ontario before he's gone as Trump is doing down south to the US economy.
Yes, and somehow neither of those causes any significant heartburn during voting, but for some reason the US loses their minds at the mere thought of it. We also still use paper ballots and have our counts out nationally within a couple of hours after polls close. This isn't a hard thing to do, but for some reason the US makes it seem like it's a moonshot each time. Perhaps certain parties benefit from the current status quo enough that they don't want to risk change?
> Employee drives to restaurant and then drives back to work with alcohol in his system; traffic hazard
It's San Fran, business district. You'll walk. Or take a trendy Uber.
> Another item. Most employees want to get home after work as quickly as possible. Let's say you have a choice between
Ha. You do know most of the places that install free cafs are tech companies and startups right? The same kind of companies that would just install dorms and lock the door on you after you're hired if they thought they could get away with it? Nobody at those places is punching out at 5pm, so most of them actually wouldn't mind an excuse to leave the building for 60-90 minutes in the middle of their 10-14 hour day.
"To vote on election day: You must be registered to vote; if you aren't, you can register now, or register at your polling place, just before you vote."
Then again we also have a nonpartisan organization whose whole point of existence is running elections efficiently in a practical manner with integrity.
> Yes, all that poop on the streets, used syringes everywhere, crazy bums assaulting people at the BART station and living in the elevators, we'll deal with those later, we need to address the critical issues first.
All of that does take money. You know how to get more money? Making people buy lunch off campus instead of eating at the free office caf which generates revenue from additional restaurant licensing, liquor sales, and staff wages paying city taxes. Crazy idea right?
But no, you're correct, let's go back to that idea of yours of tackling the problems you mention without an additional nickel of resources. Surely just taking another poke at it will fix the problems this time!
That's a corruption problem in specific unions being used to scapegoat the whole concept. Many countries in Europe have huge rates of unionization and yet don't have the problems you allude to. 2/3s of Sweden's workers are unionized for example, and last I looked that was a pretty damn nice place to live and work... Germany has almost double the unionization rate of the US and does quite well.
Not sure, our desktops are locked down centrally by head office so nothing that looks like a mass storage device, like a phone, is allowed a full connection. If we plug in a phone or tablet all it does is charge and we get an angry popup. Nor sure the corporate USB paranoia would let a USB to Bluetooth adapter work either, haven't got one to try. So that's one of the reasons why I use an audio cable from the headphone jack to the line in.
I listen to music in my headset at the office since we also use softphones and IM for inter-team communication. External speakers would not be an option. And the desktops do not have bluetooth receivers, so again, not happening.
Perhaps you should try to envision use cases other than your own?
> i quantifiably listen to less music now that apple has done this.
I listen to just as much. Because, y'know I have an Android tablet with a headphone jack. Super handy for coming into the office loaded up with tunes and just plugging a line in cable into and hitting play. Can't do that with any non-headphone jack device.
> it sounds like a blend of self entitlement and blackmail.
Blackmail? "Sell me something I want to buy from you or I'll go get it elsewhere if you don't sell it"? Not really sure how that's blackmail...
And it absolutely is a service problem. We've seen it play out in the marketplace. Music piracy has nosedived in the age of paid streaming services - because people can get what they want at a reasonable price. Same thing for video with Netflix, Hulu, etc. The movies and TV shows that are still pirated are the ones that are hard or impossible to get in certain geographical areas because of studio licensing bs. Netflix's biggest "piracy" problem was paying customers using VPN services to try and watch things that they couldn't on a service they pay for because they happened to be sitting on the wrong chunk of Earth.
Same thing with Nintendo. Right now they have a hot hot hot console that would be PERFECT for portable retro gaming if they'd only put out an emulation package and sell games in the online store. There are people would would love to do so, and are fully willing to pay for the privilege. Nintendo should let them. But they won't, so considering the low barrier to entry to use an emulator and a couple minutes on Google to find roms, people will self serve instead.
We're talking about making clones of a Studebaker being legal, which they would be right up until the instant you installed Studebaker branding on them. So to keep the analogy I was saying while taking a copy of Legend of Zelda is not legal, you are perfectly within your rights to code your own game called Legend of Melda as long as you do all of the work yourself and don't do something like decompile the Zelda ROM to borrow code.
Customers are people who buy things. People who are downloading roms for free off a 3rd party site are by definition not engaging in a business-customer relationship with Nintendo, they are doing literally the opposite.
That said, I do think that like Gabe Newell of Valve famously said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem, not a pricing problem". The same holds true here. As long as Nintendo doesn't service the ability to easily get that experience on equipment people have or can easily buy (like the Switch or 3DS), people will go elsewhere for it. And they really need to sort that out.
Slashdot Mirror
AMD seems to have really shaken up Intel's complacent little world over the last 18 months with the Ryzen.
So as a New Zealander, you should be well aware of how devastating an invasive species is to an ecosystem that has not evolved to keep it in check. Why else would your country embark on a massive invasive species eradication program:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/07/new-zealand-invasives-islands-rats-kiwis-conservation/
We in North America are all too well acquainted with invasive species and the havoc they wreak on an ecosystem with few natural inhibitors, from asian pine beetles destroying swaths of forestry on the west coast to the zebra mussels monopolizing the Great Lakes.
Don't be so damn flippant. This can be a real problem.
Not in this case, the building was a great revenue source and everything else was ticking along OK. They used the influx of cash stupidly as they'd never had their hands on so much money and went on a massive buying spree, renovated the hell out of the offices (that they DIDN'T OWN any more...sigh) and bought a smaller company. It was like giving your kid an allowance of $10 a week all their life and then handing them $1000 in twentys and expecting them to be responsible with it.
Making matters even worse in retrospect, they sold the building right before Vancouver's massive insane real estate market started to take off. Like literally months before the 20+ year rocketship ride up.
Cooling towers don't cool the water enough. Need more cooling tower surface area, or a larger reservoir to dump the warmed water back into.
Perhaps you could enlighten us then? My relatives in rural Saskatchewan would appreciate the insight into where their grain goes...
The problem is that functionally a state usually only "takes back" foreign owned assets when things are going to shit. Like Venezuela. And if they exercise that before things go to shit, well, then everyone else stops investing in that country because the risk is too high and that country's economy is at a severe disadvantage compared to the rest of the world. So you are correct, but exercising that option is a double edged sword.
Semantics. The functions of the Wheat Board went with those assets to G3, the approval of the sale of which was interestingly enough, one of the last major regulatory items approved by the Harper government before they lost power. Wonder how Harper spun that one to his backers.
> trying to meet their quarterly expectations rather develop the company
Absolutely right. We've been seeing what happens to long standing tech institutions when the investors' quest for better quarterly numbers is king - R&D is sacrificed, entire parts of the company are sold off, and after the investors sell to take their profits and move elsewhere, the company is a sad shell of itself.
And it's not just tech companies, it's most public companies. One of the public companies I worked for in years past owned the building they were in and rented out the bottom 3 floors to other businesses for a decent chunk of revenue, but decided one quarter that selling the building would be a great way to prop up the numbers for the shareholders and get some capital. Needless to say they went into receivership and were sold piecemeal a few years later as it turns out that a one time cash infusion doesn't help a company's long term bottom line nearly as much as renting out 3 floors of a commercial/retail building in one of Canada's most expensive neighborhoods (Vancouver's Kitsilano area), but hey quick cash made the shareholders happy that quarter.
The Saudis have their mitts in a number of things you wouldn't expect, and which will give them reach for decades to come, for example, they own 50.1% of the Canadian Wheat Board:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/us-saudi-firms-to-buy-former-canadian-wheat-board/article23966156/
In light of the recent 9/11 style threat made against Canada by a Saudi State controlled twitter account:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/saudi-arabian-group-apologizes-for-posting-image-appearing-to-threaten-canada-with-9-11-style-attack-1.4775509
The Canadian government should look strongly at foreign ownership of things like our Wheat Board as that's not in our nation's best interests from a food security standpoint.
Tegra's heart is the ARM Cortex chip family, which has a significant chunk of the Android market (and Apple if you want to go there).
But what you describe isn't an architecture problem, it's a content/IP one. The Nintendo Switch is using a Tegra architecture that is very similar to literally billions of Android devices but they're not having the same problems with competition - because of their content and IP libraries. People want to play Mario Odyssey and Fire Emblem, and Smash Bros and Mario Kart and the latest Zelda so they go get the Nintendo product. The PS4/Xbox war on the other hand comes down to both content and price as many games are available cross platform there so some consumers will shop on price alone.
Exactly. Most people who frequent /. tend to forget that setting up an emulator on an SBC like a Pine64 or a Raspberry Pi isn't something most people off the street even know is possible, let alone feel able to do. People are paying $60 for having all of that setup and packaging done by Nintendo in a convenient fashion, so all they need to do is plug and play. I set up a Pi with Retropie a while back and it was a fun little project, but it also took some time to do the first time especially with tweaking it, and if someone was paying me at my outside consulting rate it would definitely have been more than $100.
> Old arcade games are ludicrously hard too. They were deliberately so to make you put more money in. I've literally only ever completed one arcade game too, and that's because it cost a pittance by the time I played it and brother-and-I had about 50-continues worth of coins.
Arcade games where continues were allowed aren't really what I think of when someone says old games, as those came several years into the scene. And yes they were designed to extract as much money from you as possible. Gauntlet was the granddaddy of them all and was a very efficient wallet drainer.
The real old arcade games were ludicrously hard, and almost nobody "finished" them because they weren't designed around the idea of an ending at all. They just played the same sequence of maps or levels again and again, gradually ramping up the difficulty until the parameters peaked and then it was merely a test of endurance of the meatbag against the arcade machine. And the meatbag only "finished" the game if they lasted long enough to overflow some counter that the programmer(s) never expected someone to last long enough to do and the game crashed as a result.
>'We realised that UBI reduces governments ability to grow its control over peoples lives, grow is bureaucracy, and make small changes every electoral round therefore trumpeting how we have fixed everything this time. With this in mind we have dropped this like a hot potato, because its not best for US'
Oh, you're giving the Ford government too much credit for nuanced thinking. Doug Ford is a regressive, pure and simple. Anything that "gives money away" is bad in his eyes and will be seen as something to be cut. He's like a slightly more intelligent Trump and will probably do as much damage to Ontario before he's gone as Trump is doing down south to the US economy.
Yes, and somehow neither of those causes any significant heartburn during voting, but for some reason the US loses their minds at the mere thought of it. We also still use paper ballots and have our counts out nationally within a couple of hours after polls close. This isn't a hard thing to do, but for some reason the US makes it seem like it's a moonshot each time. Perhaps certain parties benefit from the current status quo enough that they don't want to risk change?
> Employee drives to restaurant and then drives back to work with alcohol in his system; traffic hazard
It's San Fran, business district. You'll walk. Or take a trendy Uber.
> Another item. Most employees want to get home after work as quickly as possible. Let's say you have a choice between
Ha. You do know most of the places that install free cafs are tech companies and startups right? The same kind of companies that would just install dorms and lock the door on you after you're hired if they thought they could get away with it? Nobody at those places is punching out at 5pm, so most of them actually wouldn't mind an excuse to leave the building for 60-90 minutes in the middle of their 10-14 hour day.
> I'm with you on #1 and #3 but it's too time-consuming and expensive to verify same-day registrations
Why? In Canada we do it all the time and nobody has a problem with it:
http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?dir=vote&document=index&lang=e§ion=vot
"To vote on election day: You must be registered to vote; if you aren't, you can register now, or register at your polling place, just before you vote."
Then again we also have a nonpartisan organization whose whole point of existence is running elections efficiently in a practical manner with integrity.
> Yes, all that poop on the streets, used syringes everywhere, crazy bums assaulting people at the BART station and living in the elevators, we'll deal with those later, we need to address the critical issues first.
All of that does take money. You know how to get more money? Making people buy lunch off campus instead of eating at the free office caf which generates revenue from additional restaurant licensing, liquor sales, and staff wages paying city taxes. Crazy idea right?
But no, you're correct, let's go back to that idea of yours of tackling the problems you mention without an additional nickel of resources. Surely just taking another poke at it will fix the problems this time!
That's a corruption problem in specific unions being used to scapegoat the whole concept. Many countries in Europe have huge rates of unionization and yet don't have the problems you allude to. 2/3s of Sweden's workers are unionized for example, and last I looked that was a pretty damn nice place to live and work... Germany has almost double the unionization rate of the US and does quite well.
Not sure, our desktops are locked down centrally by head office so nothing that looks like a mass storage device, like a phone, is allowed a full connection. If we plug in a phone or tablet all it does is charge and we get an angry popup. Nor sure the corporate USB paranoia would let a USB to Bluetooth adapter work either, haven't got one to try. So that's one of the reasons why I use an audio cable from the headphone jack to the line in.
I listen to music in my headset at the office since we also use softphones and IM for inter-team communication. External speakers would not be an option. And the desktops do not have bluetooth receivers, so again, not happening.
Perhaps you should try to envision use cases other than your own?
> i quantifiably listen to less music now that apple has done this.
I listen to just as much. Because, y'know I have an Android tablet with a headphone jack. Super handy for coming into the office loaded up with tunes and just plugging a line in cable into and hitting play. Can't do that with any non-headphone jack device.
> it sounds like a blend of self entitlement and blackmail.
Blackmail? "Sell me something I want to buy from you or I'll go get it elsewhere if you don't sell it"? Not really sure how that's blackmail...
And it absolutely is a service problem. We've seen it play out in the marketplace. Music piracy has nosedived in the age of paid streaming services - because people can get what they want at a reasonable price. Same thing for video with Netflix, Hulu, etc. The movies and TV shows that are still pirated are the ones that are hard or impossible to get in certain geographical areas because of studio licensing bs. Netflix's biggest "piracy" problem was paying customers using VPN services to try and watch things that they couldn't on a service they pay for because they happened to be sitting on the wrong chunk of Earth.
Same thing with Nintendo. Right now they have a hot hot hot console that would be PERFECT for portable retro gaming if they'd only put out an emulation package and sell games in the online store. There are people would would love to do so, and are fully willing to pay for the privilege. Nintendo should let them. But they won't, so considering the low barrier to entry to use an emulator and a couple minutes on Google to find roms, people will self serve instead.
It's a service problem.
We're talking about making clones of a Studebaker being legal, which they would be right up until the instant you installed Studebaker branding on them. So to keep the analogy I was saying while taking a copy of Legend of Zelda is not legal, you are perfectly within your rights to code your own game called Legend of Melda as long as you do all of the work yourself and don't do something like decompile the Zelda ROM to borrow code.
> 2. Anger customers
Customers are people who buy things. People who are downloading roms for free off a 3rd party site are by definition not engaging in a business-customer relationship with Nintendo, they are doing literally the opposite.
That said, I do think that like Gabe Newell of Valve famously said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem, not a pricing problem". The same holds true here. As long as Nintendo doesn't service the ability to easily get that experience on equipment people have or can easily buy (like the Switch or 3DS), people will go elsewhere for it. And they really need to sort that out.