Sounds like you're a wimp who wouldn't last five minutes in a pit.
Wimp huh? Ok Mr Internet Tough Guy. We will all pretend for you that a mosh pit is something other than a pathetic effort to compensate for a lack of sizeable genitalia by people with serious social issues.
If you think that somehow proves that you are actually tough you've told us everything we need to know about your lack of self confidence. Here's a hint. People that actually are tough don't need to brag about it or try to call other people wimps. When you actually are serious about proving you are a tough guy let me know and I'll introduce you to some people who really know what that means and can help you figure out just how tough you really are.
I don't go to concerts to hear the lyrics. I go to concerts to knock people over in the pit while the music is played.
Sounds like you need counseling rather than a concert. If you really need to go hit people I can suggest a few sports like boxing or MMA. You can even play music while you do it.
Or someone will upload the video to youtube or bittorent... where others will watch the show and guess what? Fewer ticket sales. If money was not an issue, most of these performers would not mind cameras. But they have to make a living... so no cameras, no piracy.
Nonsense argument. The Grateful Dead was a band that allowed recordings of their concerts and it didn't affect attendance one bit as far as anyone can tell. They cultivated a genuine relationship with their fans unlike too many of the overly entitled "artists" we see today. If a crappy cell phone recording of your concert makes people want to go less then you probably weren't selling anything worth attending in the first place. A good concert cannot remotely be replicated by a shaky video taken on an iPad. I think a lot of performers are trying to hide behind this stuff to cover their lack of actual ability and the poor value for money of their concerts.
I'm sick of people like you trying to film shows and blocking my view. Instead of me being able to enjoy a show, I have the experience stolen from me so while some narcissistic tool holds their iPad above their head to take shakycam footage with abysmal audio, and all I can see is their poorly exposed image on the iPad's screen.
Curious argument. You want to enjoy the performance on your terms while denying others the right to do the same. The idiot holding the smartphone could make exactly the same argument in reverse and it would be equally valid. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that trying to record a concert with an iPad is an idiotic thing to do and can definitely reduce the enjoyment for others. But if the folks producing the concert don't prohibit that behavior it's kind of hard to argue that they are ruining the experience because that IS what they want from the experience. The fact that you or I don't like what they are doing is kind of irrelevant.
I have no problem with the concert requesting *in advance* that people leave their recording devices at home. But if they don't prohibit it then they are effectively giving it the go ahead and those of us who don't like it become the self entitled douche-bags for complaining about what we knew in advance was likely to happen.
It's a LIVE performance. The entire point of the exercise is what's happening right in front of you at that very second. Whatever you're recording on your phone or iPad is a miserable substitute. Try actually paying attention to the show instead of fiddling with your widget.
Far be it from me to defend someone using a smartphone to make a shitty recording but to be honest that is the least of the annoyances at a lot of concerts. I find it far less annoying than the smelly drunks that seem to find their way to near my seat or the concerts that are played loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss or the concerts where performers lip sync or otherwise try to hide their lack of musical talent.
Artists that are exceptional live entertainers do not have to worry about this. No jerky phone recording can do the real thing justice.
Agreed but that describes relatively few performers in my experience. Particularly among the flavor of the day pop acts. Some well known bands are absolutely terrible in person. Some like Rod Stewart are inexplicably popular despite a profound lack of singing ability. The Beach Boys were renowned for using hired hands in the studio (others did too) and I can confirm with my own eyes and ears that they were not a great live band. Any performer that has to use auto-tune or lip-syncs is a waste of money.
I don't really understand the point of trying to record a whole or even substantial portion of a concert with a shitty smartphone camera. Especially given that it isn't likely to be watched by anyone ever again.
That's why? I don't go because the value for money almost always sucks. Once in a while a concert is an awesome experience but most of the time it's just an expensive, overly loud, poorly produced, sloppily performed, rehashing of music I've heard before and better in a recorded format. Sometimes you get the bonus of drunk or stoned concert goers and of course the numerous inconsiderate a-holes or thugs that too often seem to attend. Sure, live music CAN be awesome but it usually isn't. I really don't get the point of concert where i need ear plugs to avoid getting hearing damage.
Maybe all that is your bag and you dig it in spite of the problems. Cool by me. Have fun. Personally I find many/most concerts something to be avoided because the experience is decidedly unpleasant. I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions and I've been to a handful of excellent concerts myself. But most simply aren't worth even a fraction of the price of admission.
One or two mm extra thickness due to replaceable batteries won't scare off any consumer, so why not do it?
If you are asking the company doing it the answers include the following: 1) Customers demonstrably do not care if the battery is removable by their buying behavior. Other features are clearly more important. 2) Few customers ever removed the battery. Why put in a costly feature that almost nobody actually used? 3) Having a removable battery adds cost and customers demonstrably are not willing to pay extra for this feature given that few actually use it. 4) It eliminates third party batteries and the attendant quality problems from the party. (Yes ironic in the case of Samsung I know) It's hard enough to control quality when you control the supply chain. Much harder when you have to accommodate third party equipment, some of which is almost certain to be of dubious quality. 5) It adds weight and thickness in a device where every cubic millimeter matters.
To be clear there are good reasons and advantages to removable batteries but the calculus about them in the case of smartphones is pretty straightforward. It's a rarely used feature that few customers care much about that adds cost and complexity. The only surprising thing is that they weren't eliminated sooner by handset makers.
So it's dangerous, yet not easily replaceable. What does that say?
It says that you need to have good control over the production quality of the batteries used in the devices. Being able to replace the battery easily would not clearly solve the problem here. Even perfectly good Li-Ion batteries can be incinerated if the control electronics aren't designed properly or malfunction or if the battery is damaged somehow. Odds are that anyone with one of these phones that caught fire wasn't watching it slowly malfunction in such a manner that removing a battery would have been a viable solution.
Manufacturers care more about profit than customers getting injured in a fire.
Not if they wish to remain in business for any length of time. Companies care a lot about customers getting injured by their products when billions are on the line. Nobody is claiming that their motives are purely altruistic but I have no doubt that Samsung actually cares quite a lot about their product combusting in the hands of customers. Having a trusted product is very much in their interest both short and long term.
... will ultimately be passed to the consumer. No one seems to be talking about that. Samsung isn't just going to "lose" 5.3 billion dollars; they'll be marking up future hardware to finance it.
They aren't talking about it because it doesn't work that way. Samsung is in a competitive market for smartphones and cannot arbitrarily raise prices to make up for a previous loss. No one can, not even Apple. Think about it for just half a second. If they could have raised prices and still sold the same number of units they would have done that already. No, Samsung is going to eat this one. It's a big company and they can probably take the hit but losing that amount of money hurts even the biggest of companies.
Honestly Samsung is going to have to scramble to preserve their reputation. There are going to be a LOT of customers who won't be willing to take a chance on Samsung again after this debacle.
When VR gets good enough for on-the-fly 4k photorealistic resolution, and on-the-fly surround sound (forget taste/touch/smell for now), then we'll talk about who is late to the bus.;)
Late to the bus to do what? You are talking about a resolution and sound format not what anyone will do with it. Having higher resolution doesn't magically make use cases appear. Having marginally better sound doesn't make it suddenly useful when it wasn't before. There is no use case that 4K resolution will allow that you couldn't in principle do with 1080p resolution. It doesn't matter how polished VR displays are unless you have something useful you can do with it that people are willing to pay money to buy.
Geeks are fussing about getting a few more FPS and missing the big picture that none of that matters unless you have a real world problem you are solving with those extra FPS.
Human contact will go the way of the headphone jack.
You apparently haven't been hanging out with a lot of teenagers lately. Human contact largely disappeared with the emergence of the smartphone and social networking.
That said one only needs to look at our current election to see that human contact can be highly overrated in the hands of some people.
Apple is working on an AR project, because it's easier than VR...
AR easier than VR? Seriously you have that backwards for the really useful stuff. AR is a much more difficult challenge. I used to work with VR for a living a few years back. There are some tough problems to work out with it but we've been doing useful things with VR for some time now. Flight simulators are a version of VR. Games have been a thing in VR for well over a decade. I used to do industrial simulations for production planning and training. Cool stuff but way easier than the really cool AR stuff.
AR is a tougher nut to crack in a lot of ways. Unlike VR which has a made up world that you can control entirely, AR has to deal with the real world and the flood of data that brings. It also requires knowing not just where someone is looking but where they are and the ability to update data in relation to that in real time with useful context. That's a challenging thing to do for a lot of the really interesting problems.
This will be their mantra until they announce their own VR offering. And then they'll have the most "innovative and advanced VR goggles ever conceived".
They probably will if VR ever actually becomes a thing beyond the sort of folks who frequent slashdot. That seems unlikely any time soon. The problem with VR isn't that it isn't cool or even that it lacks utility. The problem with VR is that there are very limited use cases for it. Some simulations, a few games, maybe some virtual tourism, and marketing and *ahem*... adult entertainment. Useful stuff but all very niche and unlikely to be a big enough business to move the needle for a company the size of Apple. I'm sure Apple is keeping an eye on it but there is nothing to suggest that the business potential of VR is ever going to be enormous enough for Apple to get seriously involved.
I see Apple probably putting their muscle behind AR technologies because the market opportunity there is FAR bigger if they can figure out some useful products in that space.
My Mom use it without problem, you know: it's a matter of publicity
Could you mom build that system without your help? Did your mom set it up? Did you have to tell her about it? Was she able to use it without any guidance from you? Do you have to fix it whenever something breaks? Unless your mom is a lot more capable than most people, I seriously doubt she figured it out herself.
99.999% thinks that "there is no other way"..
And that's because for them they are right - there is no other way. Very, very, very few people are going to bother setting up a system like that even if they have to the technical chops to do it. Wouldn't matter if they knew it was possible or not - and most will not. Honestly even if you tell them point blank they will look at you like you are from Mars. They'll hear nothing but a bunch of meaningless (to them) technobabble and you can watch their eyes glaze over. The overwhelming majority wouldn't be able to figure it out on their own. That's why there is a market for stuff like Chromecast and AppleTV. Your solution is a solution by geeks for geeks and more or less useless to anyone else. I'm as geeky as anyone here on slashdot and I wouldn't go to the bother because the effort is just not worth the minimal reward to me.
... old notebook with HDMI plugged on TV, with kodi.tv on int (I use it with Debian Jessie and LXDE: any old computer cam play 1080p without problem there...)
Wow that fails the Mom test about as hard as possible. I'm sure it works beautifully for your needs but that doesn't work for 99.999% of people out there.
How are they going to compete with the 100's of convenience stores around each city and usually several with in a block of each other.
Presumably by offering something those stores cannot. I don't think they would be looking to open up a store identical to your local quickie-mart. There would be little point or profit in doing that.
No we most certainly do not have that technology today. Not on anything remotely resembling the scale you are talking about. We certainly have no experience doing large scale airborne construction starting solely with an airborne blimp. We haven't even tried this on Earth much less on another planet several light minutes away.
Large scale construction wouldn't be that far behind.
Really? How do you propose to get the materials there? How are you going to get them in place? How are you going to create enough buoyancy to actually float an honest to goodness city? How are you going to maintain the integrity of the flotation system? What is the flotation system going to consist of? Who is going to pay for the whole thing and what is the economic return?
Your link talks about a PRELIMINARY feasibility study at NASA that provides essentially zero specifics. It's basically a think tank mental exercise of a really far out there concept with no reasonable probability of implementation within the lifetime of anyone reading this.
The brick and mortar market is already at saturation.
And yet new ones open up all the time, many of which manage to turn a profit. Curious definition of saturation you have there.
Walmart is already starting to offer in-store pickup and drive up pickup.
So what? It doesn't follow that Amazon couldn't do some physical store fronts in a profitable manner just because Walmart has stores too. I don't think Amazon is dumb enough to try to model their business after Walmart. Furthermore Walmart isn't in a lot of places, particularly dense urban areas and Walmart's business model doesn't work well there. Amazon on the other hand has a business model much more compatible with dense urban locations so a small store might make some sense depending on exactly what they do with it.
Amazon would be better off investing in drone delivery as it has a much better chance of being profitable.
Two problems with that argument. 1) Nobody has proven that drone delivery is economically viable. 2) Innumerable brick and mortar stores continue to be profitable despite repeated predictions of their impending demise.
Oh and little stores that sell milk and stuff? Walmart already tried that with "walmart express" it didn't work.
Again, so what? Just because Walmart tried a model that didn't work doesn't mean there aren't small store models that can work.
Other than "it's there" and "Nobody else has gone" what's the point?
Lots of reasons. Scientific discover, technology development (particularly biotech and life support), financial gain (funding tech R&D has a huge and long term payback), preserving our species, spinoff technologies, learning how to explore away from Earth, national pride, colonizing, and quite a bit more. Certainly more than "because it's there".
However, I support the effort because it will advance technology and likely lead to gains in scientific knowledge should we actually get there (which I don't think is likely).
I think our likelihood of getting to Mars depends heavily on how low we can drive cost to orbit. If it gets cheap enough a manned mission to Mars will become almost inevitable because just getting off the Earth accounts for the lion's share of the cost and a pretty substantial percent of the risk as well. There are some significant engineering obstacles but there is no reason to believe these could not be overcome if the economics can be made to work.
Colonizing Venus with floating cities is a far more sexier venture.
How exactly do you propose to float something the size of a city on Venus. Furthermore how do you propose to get it there and how do you propose to build it? Bear in mind that you don't get to invoke magical levels of sci-fi technology just because the idea is cool. Seriously - what is your credible plan to make such a fantastical thing happen within the next 1000 years?
Really? You can tell the future? If you want to say you think no one is going to Mars in the time frame specified I probably would agree with you. I think pulling it off by the 2030s without a crash government program seems improbable given the technological, economic, and political realities of the day. If you are claiming no one will go to Mars ever I think that stands a very high probability of being a false statement.
There is simply no purpose to it.
Entirely false. There absolutely is a purpose to it. More than one in fact. You may not like or appreciate the reasons for trying to get to Mars but they are real and meaningful. Here's just a few of them. Scientific exploration, technology development, national pride, joy of exploration, curiosity, preserving our species, financial gain, biotechnology, and the list goes on and on and on. It's an expensive and difficult task and it will probably take decades if not centuries to actually pull off but to claim there is no purpose or value to it is just idiotic.
Apollo was the Mother Of All Demos, and it was a big stunt.
Yes it was. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth doing or that something like it won't be worth doing ever again. Furthermore the cost of getting to space has fallen substantially since then and we are a lot better at it now. Every indicator points towards cost to orbit continuing to fall. Once it gets cheap enough to get to space I would argue that a manned mission to Mars will become almost an inevitability. First for exploration and then for other purposes.
Pain is pain, and when you can mediate it people live a bit better with it. Unless of course you believe that 'pain' is a 'nonsense medical condition', but I can tell you the medical community doesn't think so based upon how many people are being medicated for it.
There are numerous and demonstrably effective treatments for pain which are perfectly legal. The use of pot "to treat pain" is a really nice way to pretend you have a condition when you don't since it isn't provable with current technology. I have seen no evidence that most if not all pot users would not be equally or better treated with other medicines if they genuinely are experiencing physical pain. Let's be frank. The number of people with medical marijuana cards hugely exceeds the number of people who reasonably could be likely to have genuine medical conditions requiring treatment with pot smoking even under the most generous of assumptions. It's a transparent white lie to get around the legal system. Nothing more.
People want to smoke pot because they like how it makes them feel. They are willing to bend some laws to facilitate this. Let's not pretend that most pot smokers are in any way, shape, or form using the drug to treat real medical conditions. I don't care if they do smoke pot so long as it doesn't harm anyone but don't pretend I'm dumb enough to believe such nonsensical arguments.
Out of interest, do you think drinking alcohol is a stupid thing to do?
Without putting too fine a point on it, as a general proposition yes I do think drinking alcohol is a stupid thing to do. Usually harmless but not rational or a smart thing to do. There are some pretty tragic downsides to drinking recreationally and the only meaningful up side is that it apparently makes people feel good. I don't really see much benefit in taking drugs that make you stupid, clumsy, and potentially a danger to others no matter how good they taste or how good they make you feel. If people could be trusted to drink only occasionally and in moderation and only when safe then it would be a harmless non-issue but that's not the reality we live in. Same thing with pot. If people wanted to smoke a joint now and then on their own time to blow off some steam nobody should care. Under those conditions it's dumb but relatively harmless. If someone wants to have a single glass of wine with dinner and doesn't have to drive anywhere who cares? Again dumb but harmless.
Clinton supporters have been telling me for a few days that any visible support for Trump makes you a supporter of sex abuse. From a persuasion standpoint, that actually makes sense. If people see it that way, that's the reality you have to deal with. I choose to not be part of that reality...
Trump has a LONG and well documented history of misogynistic and racist behavior. This is merely the latest in a long line of horrifying behavior by him with regard to women and minorities. The man has been blatantly campaigning by appealing to (mostly via lies) the most base tribal instincts of scared white males. I can understand if someone dislikes Hillary or if you like some third party candidate but to pretend that Trump's behavior is some kind of made up reality by the Clinton campaign is just idiotic.
To be fair, Gary Johnson is a pot head who didn't know what Allepo was. I call that relatable.
One person's relatable is another person's ignorant. I don't give a shit if the president is relatable. Honestly I haven't seen a good one that was. I care if they are competent and I care that their political views don't diverge too far from my own. They don't have to be nice but they can't be an asshole like Trump. If Gary Johnson doesn't have a clue about international affairs (which accounts for about 2/3 of the job of the president) then I don't really think he's cut out for the job.
They appreciate the thinnest phone possible precisely because *after* they put it in an Otterbox it will still be manageable, whereas when they had an iPhone 4 or whatever, the Otterbox made it significantly thicker than an old Nokia candybar.
Or a better solution could be for Apple (and other smartphone makers) to release a phone that didn't actually require a protective case in the first place. Design it so that it can take a beating. Yes this would be thicker and speaking solely for myself I would be fine with that. Nobody used to have a protective case on their Nokia because it didn't need one. There is no fundamental reason why smartphones have to be different in that regard.
Realistically as other have said....how much money could Samsung have saved if they had made the battery removable and just sent everyone a replacement battery?
You are presuming the battery is the actual root cause of the problem. Odds are very good that the source of the failure is somewhere else. In fact swapping the battery appears to be the first thing Samsung actually did and they still are having problems.
If that's not the issue, then obviously that's not going to solve the problem, but the quest for super thin phones is the cause of these issues.
It's not at all clear that that is true. Nobody currently knows what they actual cause of the problem is including apparently Samsung. It could be buggy control software. It could be improperly designed thermal management. It could be from physical damage. It could be any number of other possible failure modes, many of which have little or nothing to do with the thickness of the device.
Why make a phone this thin if you're just going to put it in an otterbox?
A fair question but not obviously related to the business at hand of figuring out why this particular model of phone is combusting with significant frequency. I tend to be in the camp that wants a thicker phone and better battery & more durability for the record. I like a light and thin phone but it's not the only important consideration to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you're a wimp who wouldn't last five minutes in a pit.
Wimp huh? Ok Mr Internet Tough Guy. We will all pretend for you that a mosh pit is something other than a pathetic effort to compensate for a lack of sizeable genitalia by people with serious social issues.
If you think that somehow proves that you are actually tough you've told us everything we need to know about your lack of self confidence. Here's a hint. People that actually are tough don't need to brag about it or try to call other people wimps. When you actually are serious about proving you are a tough guy let me know and I'll introduce you to some people who really know what that means and can help you figure out just how tough you really are.
I don't go to concerts to hear the lyrics. I go to concerts to knock people over in the pit while the music is played.
Sounds like you need counseling rather than a concert. If you really need to go hit people I can suggest a few sports like boxing or MMA. You can even play music while you do it.
Or someone will upload the video to youtube or bittorent... where others will watch the show and guess what? Fewer ticket sales. If money was not an issue, most of these performers would not mind cameras. But they have to make a living... so no cameras, no piracy.
Nonsense argument. The Grateful Dead was a band that allowed recordings of their concerts and it didn't affect attendance one bit as far as anyone can tell. They cultivated a genuine relationship with their fans unlike too many of the overly entitled "artists" we see today. If a crappy cell phone recording of your concert makes people want to go less then you probably weren't selling anything worth attending in the first place. A good concert cannot remotely be replicated by a shaky video taken on an iPad. I think a lot of performers are trying to hide behind this stuff to cover their lack of actual ability and the poor value for money of their concerts.
I'm sick of people like you trying to film shows and blocking my view. Instead of me being able to enjoy a show, I have the experience stolen from me so while some narcissistic tool holds their iPad above their head to take shakycam footage with abysmal audio, and all I can see is their poorly exposed image on the iPad's screen.
Curious argument. You want to enjoy the performance on your terms while denying others the right to do the same. The idiot holding the smartphone could make exactly the same argument in reverse and it would be equally valid. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that trying to record a concert with an iPad is an idiotic thing to do and can definitely reduce the enjoyment for others. But if the folks producing the concert don't prohibit that behavior it's kind of hard to argue that they are ruining the experience because that IS what they want from the experience. The fact that you or I don't like what they are doing is kind of irrelevant.
I have no problem with the concert requesting *in advance* that people leave their recording devices at home. But if they don't prohibit it then they are effectively giving it the go ahead and those of us who don't like it become the self entitled douche-bags for complaining about what we knew in advance was likely to happen.
It's a LIVE performance. The entire point of the exercise is what's happening right in front of you at that very second. Whatever you're recording on your phone or iPad is a miserable substitute. Try actually paying attention to the show instead of fiddling with your widget.
Far be it from me to defend someone using a smartphone to make a shitty recording but to be honest that is the least of the annoyances at a lot of concerts. I find it far less annoying than the smelly drunks that seem to find their way to near my seat or the concerts that are played loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss or the concerts where performers lip sync or otherwise try to hide their lack of musical talent.
Artists that are exceptional live entertainers do not have to worry about this. No jerky phone recording can do the real thing justice.
Agreed but that describes relatively few performers in my experience. Particularly among the flavor of the day pop acts. Some well known bands are absolutely terrible in person. Some like Rod Stewart are inexplicably popular despite a profound lack of singing ability. The Beach Boys were renowned for using hired hands in the studio (others did too) and I can confirm with my own eyes and ears that they were not a great live band. Any performer that has to use auto-tune or lip-syncs is a waste of money.
I don't really understand the point of trying to record a whole or even substantial portion of a concert with a shitty smartphone camera. Especially given that it isn't likely to be watched by anyone ever again.
That is why I do not go to concerts anymore.
That's why? I don't go because the value for money almost always sucks. Once in a while a concert is an awesome experience but most of the time it's just an expensive, overly loud, poorly produced, sloppily performed, rehashing of music I've heard before and better in a recorded format. Sometimes you get the bonus of drunk or stoned concert goers and of course the numerous inconsiderate a-holes or thugs that too often seem to attend. Sure, live music CAN be awesome but it usually isn't. I really don't get the point of concert where i need ear plugs to avoid getting hearing damage.
Maybe all that is your bag and you dig it in spite of the problems. Cool by me. Have fun. Personally I find many/most concerts something to be avoided because the experience is decidedly unpleasant. I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions and I've been to a handful of excellent concerts myself. But most simply aren't worth even a fraction of the price of admission.
One or two mm extra thickness due to replaceable batteries won't scare off any consumer, so why not do it?
If you are asking the company doing it the answers include the following:
1) Customers demonstrably do not care if the battery is removable by their buying behavior. Other features are clearly more important.
2) Few customers ever removed the battery. Why put in a costly feature that almost nobody actually used?
3) Having a removable battery adds cost and customers demonstrably are not willing to pay extra for this feature given that few actually use it.
4) It eliminates third party batteries and the attendant quality problems from the party. (Yes ironic in the case of Samsung I know) It's hard enough to control quality when you control the supply chain. Much harder when you have to accommodate third party equipment, some of which is almost certain to be of dubious quality.
5) It adds weight and thickness in a device where every cubic millimeter matters.
To be clear there are good reasons and advantages to removable batteries but the calculus about them in the case of smartphones is pretty straightforward. It's a rarely used feature that few customers care much about that adds cost and complexity. The only surprising thing is that they weren't eliminated sooner by handset makers.
So it's dangerous, yet not easily replaceable. What does that say?
It says that you need to have good control over the production quality of the batteries used in the devices. Being able to replace the battery easily would not clearly solve the problem here. Even perfectly good Li-Ion batteries can be incinerated if the control electronics aren't designed properly or malfunction or if the battery is damaged somehow. Odds are that anyone with one of these phones that caught fire wasn't watching it slowly malfunction in such a manner that removing a battery would have been a viable solution.
Manufacturers care more about profit than customers getting injured in a fire.
Not if they wish to remain in business for any length of time. Companies care a lot about customers getting injured by their products when billions are on the line. Nobody is claiming that their motives are purely altruistic but I have no doubt that Samsung actually cares quite a lot about their product combusting in the hands of customers. Having a trusted product is very much in their interest both short and long term.
... will ultimately be passed to the consumer. No one seems to be talking about that. Samsung isn't just going to "lose" 5.3 billion dollars; they'll be marking up future hardware to finance it.
They aren't talking about it because it doesn't work that way. Samsung is in a competitive market for smartphones and cannot arbitrarily raise prices to make up for a previous loss. No one can, not even Apple. Think about it for just half a second. If they could have raised prices and still sold the same number of units they would have done that already. No, Samsung is going to eat this one. It's a big company and they can probably take the hit but losing that amount of money hurts even the biggest of companies.
Honestly Samsung is going to have to scramble to preserve their reputation. There are going to be a LOT of customers who won't be willing to take a chance on Samsung again after this debacle.
When VR gets good enough for on-the-fly 4k photorealistic resolution, and on-the-fly surround sound (forget taste/touch/smell for now), then we'll talk about who is late to the bus. ;)
Late to the bus to do what? You are talking about a resolution and sound format not what anyone will do with it. Having higher resolution doesn't magically make use cases appear. Having marginally better sound doesn't make it suddenly useful when it wasn't before. There is no use case that 4K resolution will allow that you couldn't in principle do with 1080p resolution. It doesn't matter how polished VR displays are unless you have something useful you can do with it that people are willing to pay money to buy.
Geeks are fussing about getting a few more FPS and missing the big picture that none of that matters unless you have a real world problem you are solving with those extra FPS.
Human contact will go the way of the headphone jack.
You apparently haven't been hanging out with a lot of teenagers lately. Human contact largely disappeared with the emergence of the smartphone and social networking.
That said one only needs to look at our current election to see that human contact can be highly overrated in the hands of some people.
Apple is working on an AR project, because it's easier than VR...
AR easier than VR? Seriously you have that backwards for the really useful stuff. AR is a much more difficult challenge. I used to work with VR for a living a few years back. There are some tough problems to work out with it but we've been doing useful things with VR for some time now. Flight simulators are a version of VR. Games have been a thing in VR for well over a decade. I used to do industrial simulations for production planning and training. Cool stuff but way easier than the really cool AR stuff.
AR is a tougher nut to crack in a lot of ways. Unlike VR which has a made up world that you can control entirely, AR has to deal with the real world and the flood of data that brings. It also requires knowing not just where someone is looking but where they are and the ability to update data in relation to that in real time with useful context. That's a challenging thing to do for a lot of the really interesting problems.
This will be their mantra until they announce their own VR offering. And then they'll have the most "innovative and advanced VR goggles ever conceived".
They probably will if VR ever actually becomes a thing beyond the sort of folks who frequent slashdot. That seems unlikely any time soon. The problem with VR isn't that it isn't cool or even that it lacks utility. The problem with VR is that there are very limited use cases for it. Some simulations, a few games, maybe some virtual tourism, and marketing and *ahem*... adult entertainment. Useful stuff but all very niche and unlikely to be a big enough business to move the needle for a company the size of Apple. I'm sure Apple is keeping an eye on it but there is nothing to suggest that the business potential of VR is ever going to be enormous enough for Apple to get seriously involved.
I see Apple probably putting their muscle behind AR technologies because the market opportunity there is FAR bigger if they can figure out some useful products in that space.
My Mom use it without problem, you know: it's a matter of publicity
Could you mom build that system without your help? Did your mom set it up? Did you have to tell her about it? Was she able to use it without any guidance from you? Do you have to fix it whenever something breaks? Unless your mom is a lot more capable than most people, I seriously doubt she figured it out herself.
99.999% thinks that "there is no other way"..
And that's because for them they are right - there is no other way. Very, very, very few people are going to bother setting up a system like that even if they have to the technical chops to do it. Wouldn't matter if they knew it was possible or not - and most will not. Honestly even if you tell them point blank they will look at you like you are from Mars. They'll hear nothing but a bunch of meaningless (to them) technobabble and you can watch their eyes glaze over. The overwhelming majority wouldn't be able to figure it out on their own. That's why there is a market for stuff like Chromecast and AppleTV. Your solution is a solution by geeks for geeks and more or less useless to anyone else. I'm as geeky as anyone here on slashdot and I wouldn't go to the bother because the effort is just not worth the minimal reward to me.
... old notebook with HDMI plugged on TV, with kodi.tv on int (I use it with Debian Jessie and LXDE: any old computer cam play 1080p without problem there...)
Wow that fails the Mom test about as hard as possible. I'm sure it works beautifully for your needs but that doesn't work for 99.999% of people out there.
How are they going to compete with the 100's of convenience stores around each city and usually several with in a block of each other.
Presumably by offering something those stores cannot. I don't think they would be looking to open up a store identical to your local quickie-mart. There would be little point or profit in doing that.
We got the technology to launch a blimp on Venus.
No we most certainly do not have that technology today. Not on anything remotely resembling the scale you are talking about. We certainly have no experience doing large scale airborne construction starting solely with an airborne blimp. We haven't even tried this on Earth much less on another planet several light minutes away.
Large scale construction wouldn't be that far behind.
Really? How do you propose to get the materials there? How are you going to get them in place? How are you going to create enough buoyancy to actually float an honest to goodness city? How are you going to maintain the integrity of the flotation system? What is the flotation system going to consist of? Who is going to pay for the whole thing and what is the economic return?
Your link talks about a PRELIMINARY feasibility study at NASA that provides essentially zero specifics. It's basically a think tank mental exercise of a really far out there concept with no reasonable probability of implementation within the lifetime of anyone reading this.
The brick and mortar market is already at saturation.
And yet new ones open up all the time, many of which manage to turn a profit. Curious definition of saturation you have there.
Walmart is already starting to offer in-store pickup and drive up pickup.
So what? It doesn't follow that Amazon couldn't do some physical store fronts in a profitable manner just because Walmart has stores too. I don't think Amazon is dumb enough to try to model their business after Walmart. Furthermore Walmart isn't in a lot of places, particularly dense urban areas and Walmart's business model doesn't work well there. Amazon on the other hand has a business model much more compatible with dense urban locations so a small store might make some sense depending on exactly what they do with it.
Amazon would be better off investing in drone delivery as it has a much better chance of being profitable.
Two problems with that argument. 1) Nobody has proven that drone delivery is economically viable. 2) Innumerable brick and mortar stores continue to be profitable despite repeated predictions of their impending demise.
Oh and little stores that sell milk and stuff? Walmart already tried that with "walmart express" it didn't work.
Again, so what? Just because Walmart tried a model that didn't work doesn't mean there aren't small store models that can work.
Other than "it's there" and "Nobody else has gone" what's the point?
Lots of reasons. Scientific discover, technology development (particularly biotech and life support), financial gain (funding tech R&D has a huge and long term payback), preserving our species, spinoff technologies, learning how to explore away from Earth, national pride, colonizing, and quite a bit more. Certainly more than "because it's there".
However, I support the effort because it will advance technology and likely lead to gains in scientific knowledge should we actually get there (which I don't think is likely).
I think our likelihood of getting to Mars depends heavily on how low we can drive cost to orbit. If it gets cheap enough a manned mission to Mars will become almost inevitable because just getting off the Earth accounts for the lion's share of the cost and a pretty substantial percent of the risk as well. There are some significant engineering obstacles but there is no reason to believe these could not be overcome if the economics can be made to work.
Colonizing Venus with floating cities is a far more sexier venture.
How exactly do you propose to float something the size of a city on Venus. Furthermore how do you propose to get it there and how do you propose to build it? Bear in mind that you don't get to invoke magical levels of sci-fi technology just because the idea is cool. Seriously - what is your credible plan to make such a fantastical thing happen within the next 1000 years?
No one's going to Mars, coming back or not.
Really? You can tell the future? If you want to say you think no one is going to Mars in the time frame specified I probably would agree with you. I think pulling it off by the 2030s without a crash government program seems improbable given the technological, economic, and political realities of the day. If you are claiming no one will go to Mars ever I think that stands a very high probability of being a false statement.
There is simply no purpose to it.
Entirely false. There absolutely is a purpose to it. More than one in fact. You may not like or appreciate the reasons for trying to get to Mars but they are real and meaningful. Here's just a few of them. Scientific exploration, technology development, national pride, joy of exploration, curiosity, preserving our species, financial gain, biotechnology, and the list goes on and on and on. It's an expensive and difficult task and it will probably take decades if not centuries to actually pull off but to claim there is no purpose or value to it is just idiotic.
Apollo was the Mother Of All Demos, and it was a big stunt.
Yes it was. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth doing or that something like it won't be worth doing ever again. Furthermore the cost of getting to space has fallen substantially since then and we are a lot better at it now. Every indicator points towards cost to orbit continuing to fall. Once it gets cheap enough to get to space I would argue that a manned mission to Mars will become almost an inevitability. First for exploration and then for other purposes.
Pain is pain, and when you can mediate it people live a bit better with it. Unless of course you believe that 'pain' is a 'nonsense medical condition', but I can tell you the medical community doesn't think so based upon how many people are being medicated for it.
There are numerous and demonstrably effective treatments for pain which are perfectly legal. The use of pot "to treat pain" is a really nice way to pretend you have a condition when you don't since it isn't provable with current technology. I have seen no evidence that most if not all pot users would not be equally or better treated with other medicines if they genuinely are experiencing physical pain. Let's be frank. The number of people with medical marijuana cards hugely exceeds the number of people who reasonably could be likely to have genuine medical conditions requiring treatment with pot smoking even under the most generous of assumptions. It's a transparent white lie to get around the legal system. Nothing more.
People want to smoke pot because they like how it makes them feel. They are willing to bend some laws to facilitate this. Let's not pretend that most pot smokers are in any way, shape, or form using the drug to treat real medical conditions. I don't care if they do smoke pot so long as it doesn't harm anyone but don't pretend I'm dumb enough to believe such nonsensical arguments.
Out of interest, do you think drinking alcohol is a stupid thing to do?
Without putting too fine a point on it, as a general proposition yes I do think drinking alcohol is a stupid thing to do. Usually harmless but not rational or a smart thing to do. There are some pretty tragic downsides to drinking recreationally and the only meaningful up side is that it apparently makes people feel good. I don't really see much benefit in taking drugs that make you stupid, clumsy, and potentially a danger to others no matter how good they taste or how good they make you feel. If people could be trusted to drink only occasionally and in moderation and only when safe then it would be a harmless non-issue but that's not the reality we live in. Same thing with pot. If people wanted to smoke a joint now and then on their own time to blow off some steam nobody should care. Under those conditions it's dumb but relatively harmless. If someone wants to have a single glass of wine with dinner and doesn't have to drive anywhere who cares? Again dumb but harmless.
Clinton supporters have been telling me for a few days that any visible support for Trump makes you a supporter of sex abuse. From a persuasion standpoint, that actually makes sense. If people see it that way, that's the reality you have to deal with. I choose to not be part of that reality...
Trump has a LONG and well documented history of misogynistic and racist behavior. This is merely the latest in a long line of horrifying behavior by him with regard to women and minorities. The man has been blatantly campaigning by appealing to (mostly via lies) the most base tribal instincts of scared white males. I can understand if someone dislikes Hillary or if you like some third party candidate but to pretend that Trump's behavior is some kind of made up reality by the Clinton campaign is just idiotic.
To be fair, Gary Johnson is a pot head who didn't know what Allepo was. I call that relatable.
One person's relatable is another person's ignorant. I don't give a shit if the president is relatable. Honestly I haven't seen a good one that was. I care if they are competent and I care that their political views don't diverge too far from my own. They don't have to be nice but they can't be an asshole like Trump. If Gary Johnson doesn't have a clue about international affairs (which accounts for about 2/3 of the job of the president) then I don't really think he's cut out for the job.
They appreciate the thinnest phone possible precisely because *after* they put it in an Otterbox it will still be manageable, whereas when they had an iPhone 4 or whatever, the Otterbox made it significantly thicker than an old Nokia candybar.
Or a better solution could be for Apple (and other smartphone makers) to release a phone that didn't actually require a protective case in the first place. Design it so that it can take a beating. Yes this would be thicker and speaking solely for myself I would be fine with that. Nobody used to have a protective case on their Nokia because it didn't need one. There is no fundamental reason why smartphones have to be different in that regard.
Realistically as other have said....how much money could Samsung have saved if they had made the battery removable and just sent everyone a replacement battery?
You are presuming the battery is the actual root cause of the problem. Odds are very good that the source of the failure is somewhere else. In fact swapping the battery appears to be the first thing Samsung actually did and they still are having problems.
If that's not the issue, then obviously that's not going to solve the problem, but the quest for super thin phones is the cause of these issues.
It's not at all clear that that is true. Nobody currently knows what they actual cause of the problem is including apparently Samsung. It could be buggy control software. It could be improperly designed thermal management. It could be from physical damage. It could be any number of other possible failure modes, many of which have little or nothing to do with the thickness of the device.
Why make a phone this thin if you're just going to put it in an otterbox?
A fair question but not obviously related to the business at hand of figuring out why this particular model of phone is combusting with significant frequency. I tend to be in the camp that wants a thicker phone and better battery & more durability for the record. I like a light and thin phone but it's not the only important consideration to me.