LOL. Yes, I'm sure that of all the ways our info leaks online, and of all the ways we can be tracked online, the one those agencies rely on is the Google subsystem that stores my bookmarks.
I used to work in the streaming video space, and if the streaming music space is anything like it is with streaming movies and TV shows, then the hurdles to this sort of thing aren't technical. It's all about contracts and rights negotiations - usually the streaming provider has to jump through all sorts of hoops to convince the rights holder to license them the content and that they (the provider) will keep it "safe".
In some cases, the rights holders have already bought in to the sales story of various DRM providers, such that their licensing terms require that you use a specific DRM. In other cases, there's a lot of CYA going on (similar to the old adage of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), so even if they don't dictate a specific DRM, it's hard to get them to go along with some new DRM scheme unless lots of others are already using it. So to introduce a new DRM scheme you have to get some outside security experts to audit it, get a few key rights holders and providers to buy into it, and then finally be in a position to get others to adopt it too. This takes a lot of time and money and the difficulty is compounded significantly by the fact that rights holders of high-value content will demand that some aspects of the DRM be implemented in hardware, so any new scheme has to either leverage that or work with hardware vendors to introduce new stuff, which takes even longer.
Also, this specific example (developer-specific DRM key) could work on a technical level, but even assuming you overcame the above issues, it doesn't really mitigate the risk to Spotify or the actual content owners. To them, the content is worth billions of dollars, so they'd look at it as giving Joe Random Developer a DRM key with the possibility of a sliver of more revenue vs the risk of lawsuits and lost contracts and probably say, "not a chance!".
It's true! And even if money were no issue, I still don't think I'd ever choose to live in Silicon Valley or someplace similar. I get that some people love living like that, but it's not for everyone.
Anytime a discussion comes up suggesting how awful the suburbs are (or similarly, about how much it must suck to live in a "flyover" state), I have this internal struggle of "wow that's totally at odds with my experience" vs "shhh... it's in your own best interest to let 'em keep thinking that".:)
Not really, that's just how it's depicted on TV. In many (most?) real world suburbs, there's all sorts of places to ride your bike as well as proximity to parks and the like.
I appreciate your comment, but partially disagree. And as noted, I'm not one of the morning people, and please don't forget that my original comment was wondering aloud about the effect of bedtimes on these things - something I was wondering because a common thread in so many of the discussions on this topic is to completely ignore that aspect of it. So mostly I'm coming from the perspective of "hold on, before we conclude that we need to move the schedule [as this study basically concluded], doesn't it make sense to look at this aspect too?"
And to be clear, I'm verrry much in favor of changing systems that need changing. But on the flipside, being part of a society includes, by definition, some amount of going along with societal conventions. So I see both sides - if a convention is flawed, let's change it... but it also feels like there is a lot of the mentality out there of "that doesn't work for me personally, so I expect the world to change, not me", which is just as bad if not worse.
But, for some reason, when it comes to education we find people turning all authoritarian, saying "suck it up buttercup", and accusing those who genuinely find early morning lectures a struggle of being snowflakes. While I have found educational psychology to be fascinating I must confess I find ex-students' (i.e. most of us adults') attitudes towards education equally interesting. What stories do they tell about our experiences when we were students.
The reason I take this position is precisely because of my experiences back when I was in school, as well as my experiences with my own kids now. I'm also in a role where I interact with a ton of teenagers, and my experiences with them in the present further reinforce that. It's all anecdotal of course, but it's not 3 or 4 data points either. In my experience there is this essentially universal correlation between overly groggy kids in the morning and staying up too late.
For many of them, the time they get up in the morning is *deduced* from the time they have to be somewhere the next day, and often the time they go to bed is further deduced from *that*. The net result is that moving the time they have to be somewhere doesn't provide any lasting benefit.
In addition to that, I've seen quite a few kids (and adults) who take it upon themselves to start going to bed earlier and within a few weeks they are doing just fine - any typically even better than they were.
So, yeah, I do tend to have a "suck it up, buttercup" attitude whenever I come across these stories. I do think that moving the schedule will provide no lasting benefit, and I do think that in nearly every case the problem is people not being very responsible for themselves, and I've seen over and over that this problem is easily solved in a much simpler way, so the expectation that everyone else shift to accommodate them rubs me the wrong way.
If a system is flawed, I'm on board with the idea of changing or abandoning it for something better. But I'll also resist upheaval if there are simpler solutions or if the reasoning for the change is flawed, and that seems to be the case here.
Well, this is your lucky day, because I myself am a night owl. I am not naturally a morning person. At all.
But in high school I read some article about the benefits of getting up early and decided that I wanted those benefits. So I changed. It took time and a lot of hard work, but I wanted the reward so I worked for it.
I've been there too, just like you, not able to fall asleep for hours. It's frustrating, but it is something that can be overcome - for me in involved learning falling asleep techniques, establishing a better evening routine, and adjusting my diet. For you it might be something different. But unless you are a member of a statistically tiny group of people, this is absolutely not something that you just have to live with.
An 8am class is not unreasonable for a university (especially since most of the rest of society is up and running by that time), and so rejecting the idea that we need to make classes later is not some sort of "holier-than-thou" attitude, but pushing back against solving a non-problem and further coddling kids who need to catch up in becoming responsible adults.
It'd be interesting to see what affect going to bed at a decent time has on things too.
In college, everybody I knew who had a morning class that they really struggled in were also the bozos who were up until 3am every night, and so their poor academic performance was really due to them having to learn how to set boundaries without leaning on mom and dad so much.
Those who had already learned how to be responsible for themselves would simply go to bed early enough to be awake and ready for their class. Just like, you know, you have to do after college.
I guess this is a good click-bait article, so good job in that sense Slashdot. I liked how neither the summary, nor the article itself, nor the other website that that first article was citing, could list off any examples either. Why? It's pretty simple but not overly politically correct to say it, but here goes: there aren't any.
There are not currently any female equivalents of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Bill Gates.
I have a hard time seeing that as a problem that we must somehow solve, and have a really hard time seeing that as some sort of "proof" of inherent unfairness. On the contrary: there are many, many, many men in tech and so the number that actually have widespread name recognition is, percentage-wise, a very small number. It's so small that the odds of being a famous tech person is more or less the same independent of gender. Or it could even be lower for men for that matter. Boo hoo!
What's really a shame is the whole mentality of "I spot a difference, so it goes without saying that it must be caused by racism/sexism/ageism/whateverism".
Agreed. Another thing I wonder about is if there are in fact effects, just not effects that the studies are trying to measure. For example, does extreme violence in video games and movies have any sort of impact on how people value life or desensitize people to those things in some ways? (and if so, what is the impact of that?)
And to your point, it may be that 99.999% of the population isn't affected in any significant way, but that remaining 0.001% is, and unfortunately that still translates into thousands of people in the U.S. alone who might be predisposed to some sort of extreme reaction to it all.
I'm in the same camp - not proposing some sort of policy change, but I do think there is more to study in this area.
It's relatively low tech, but I've tried just about everything over the years and I always come back to using a spreadsheet. I use a Google Sheet, but only because it's super convenient to have it "sync" to every computer and device I use, but there's no reason you can't just store an actual spreadsheet (ODT/XLS) file on a server. I have some misgivings about using Google for this, but the utter convenience of it trumps those concerns.
A huge consideration in any sort of task tool/has/ to be the "cost" of the most basic CRUD operations. If it takes 20 seconds to add a quick task or reminder to your todo list, or to mark something as done, etc., then you are almost certainly going to stop using it before too long because the tool will be too much in your way - you need as close to a frictionless experience as possible or it will feel burdensome.
A related issue is that any tool you use/has/ to very closely fit your organizational needs. If you have to adapt too much to the way the tool works or the way the author of the tool conceived its use, then again you will almost certainly stop using that tool before too long. This is especially important because your needs will almost certainly change over time. Sometimes I need to put subtasks into buckets and move tasks between them, other times I just need different areas to track tasks for unrelated projects. Sometimes I need prioritized lists, other times I just need to jot down lists of items whose order is unimportant.
I am always on the lookout for something better, but a spreadsheet comes closest to hitting the sweet spot of flexibility and power at a low cost. It is just free-form enough to make it trivial to add a quick, unofficial or temporary todo list (and columns make it easy to add multiple lists to the same page), while also supporting more structure via tabs, sorting, and text formatting.
Support for formulas is also surprisingly useful - for some lists I want to attach a time estimate or some other cost, and so it's nice to be able to include basic calculations like the total estimated time or the estimated completion time/date and have all of that update automatically. Or in the case of priorities like the OP mentioned, it's a trivial matter to constantly adjust priorities or add new ones and sort the tasks in whatever ways make sense.
My spreadsheet ends up being a combination of my todo lists for work, personal life, etc., my daily/weekly/monthly calendar, and also the thing for tracking goals and progress. Since those things are all sorta related anyway, it ends up being really nice to use a single tool to manage them all.
Obviously whether or not you find YoutubeTV interesting makes no difference to me one way or another; I replied to your comment only because you seemed to misunderstand what the service was. Anyway, have a great day!
I've got a hunch there are some channels that they get paid to place in the lineup. If so, letting you drop those would actually hurt their bottom line. Then there are channels that cost them so much that they simply must charge everyone for them or they would not be able to offer them to those that do want them, due to costs.
Yup, that's exactly how it works - some channel owners pay providers to carry the channels, while the "top-tier" channels are considered must-have and so it's the other way around: the providers pay for the right to carry the channels, and then more often than not there are groups of channels owned by the same company and the rights for them are negotiated as a group. For years, Disney + ESPN (especially ESPN) were considered must-have cable channels, so not only did providers pay for for the "privilege" of including ESPN, they paid a ton for it - easily 25% or more of the fees providers paid for their channel lineup went to ESPN.
ESPN's success is why there has been a proliferation of new cable sports channels, and it's a big part of why ESPN has been weakened so much. But the deals are so valuable and complicated that they end up being deals with a very long duration. For example, Comcast and Disney hammered out a deal in 2012 that remains in effect until 2022 (see https://mediadecoder.blogs.nyt...).
Incidentally, the long duration of these deals is also a major factor in why the TV industry has been moving so frustratingly slow for end users: people were wanting to e.g. watch TV on their computers or phones long before it was allowed because few of the business deals had provisions for anything online. It's not hard to imagine that in 2020, if ESPN is still alive, viewers will be frustrated by some inane restriction due to the fact that the content rights were negotiated way back in 2012.:)
A lot of times the/base/ price is about the same, but then they nickle and dime you for HD, DVRs, etc. And then on top of that often the low pricing is just introductory and then goes up after a year, and you're locked into a year or more contract. Also, cable companies always seem about a decade behind the times when it comes to user interfaces on their crappy set-top boxes.
I was on Dish then SlingTV (plus a few others to get the specific channels I wanted) and then switched to YoutubeTV once their Roku app finally came out. It's HD, unlimited DVR, allows up to 6 subaccounts (each with their own history and DVR library), and works on my phone, laptop, TVs, etc. and there is no long term contract.
To get the features and channels I wanted my Dish bill was north of $100/mo. With Sling + another provider or two I got it down to $65 (but it had weird restrictions and I still was down 1 or 2 channels I wanted and didn't have my local channels), and with YoutubeTV I'm at $35.
It might not be a good fit for everyone, and I've only been using it for a few weeks, but for me it's been fantastic.
I've worked for companies on both sides - both have their flaws, and both have their merits. If you can see only one side, then you are the one that has been duped, not me. Of *course* they are trying to solve a business problem too - I said as much in my post.
Are they trying to make as much money as they can? Of course they are - that's what businesses are created *to do*. They are not charity organizations, rather they are entities formed by people with ideas and initiative, who see opportunities as something to be harnessed rather than something to cry about.
If you think they are ripping people off, then rather than being part of the all-success-must-be-shamed fad, you could do what smart people do and see that as an opportunity. If there is an actual problem here, then why don't you do something about it, and also make boatloads of money along the way?
P.S. I think you hit 'Submit' too soon because posting changes in stock prices is, at best, half a thought. Either you submitted midway through trying to make a point, or you don't really understand how the stock market works.
That said, a difference in network speed does not imply evil intent, and that's part of the problem with the whole net neutrality thing.
Consider the side of a cellphone carrier. I know, I know, it's fun to say they're evil and all that, but just look at the technical problem they're trying to solve: you have some limited resources (your slice of the wireless spectrum, your capacity at your cell towers, your connections to the backbone) that you are trying to divide up among all of your customers wanting to use them. On top of that, you're competing against other companies who want to get your same customers, so you have to balance a nearly limitless demand for network capacity against the costs of building out and maintaining your network and how that translates into the price you set for your services. You have to balance the downsides of any wasted, idle capacity against the ability to handle huge spikes when there is a surge in demand. And on top of all this you are expected to provide value/profits to your owners.
Now, with that as the context, you are obviously constantly on the lookout for ways to optimize and improve. What if, as one specific example, you come across a technology that lets you dynamically re-encode some video chunks on the fly with little or no drop in perceived quality? Would you make use of that technology? Of course you would - it could be a huge win, not just for you and your shareholders, but it could legitimately be good for your users too (a higher number of concurrent users could be watching video without buffering).
This sort of thing happens all the time - carriers, ISPs, etc. are constantly looking for ways to optimize things because they are faced with this very real dilemma of competing objectives. And anyone in tech is familiar with optimizations and how important they can be. But the problem with apps like the one in TFA is that they cannot tell the full story (and yes, I did read the article, especially the part about them using their own servers to help know for sure that differences in speeds are happening).
With video content specifically, from the earliest days of the net we've known that users *strongly* prefer uninterrupted playback at lower quality versus super high quality that buffers constantly - this concept is fundamentally understood by everyone in the media space. Awesome HD w/o interruptions is the goal, but if you've got to choose one or the other, lowering quality is nearly always the better option.
And few things chew through a data plan like video, so when T-mobile says, "hey, any video you watch from these services will only be at TV quality, but it won't count towards your high speed data allotment" well, to me, that's a feature that makes me want to do business with them.
Are there some bad actors in all of this? Oh, for sure. But not every example of a difference in speeds is an indication of this. And even when you prove that throttling is going on, it's not necessarily a smoking gun showing ill intent. A lot of times it's just an example of people trying to find a practical solution to a complex technical problem - they're just trying to make it all work.
To each his own, I guess. What are some of the examples of those fundamental and profound problems? To me at least the downsides of e.g. vue are no worse than the downsides of react. Anyhoo... I used KO before vue and liked knockout quite a bit - but then in early 2016 the prj just sort of died - no commits for months on end, so I ditched it. I've heard it has sorta picked up steam again though.
This pretty much sums it up for me too - vue is nice because it's easy to just use some basic parts of it (e.g. two-way data binding) without having to fundamentally alter your application or way of thinking to fit some model. My first few projects with vue didn't use vue components or any server-side build process or anything like that because vue by itself did all I need.
And then when I did take the plunge and structure my app to make use of vue components, I still found it fairly straightforward to adopt and have been happy with the results.
(1) If a big chunk of the US doesn't even have 10Mbps broadband yet, do you think it'd be a good idea for the US to make that a priority in cases where a decision has to be made on what things to focus on? (versus making sure that, say, everybody with 25Mbps gets bumped to 50Mbps) Obviously the ideal is to make it good everywhere, but if push comes to shove, where should the focus be?
(2) In the US, part of the broadband reach problem is precisely due to government involvement (of the bad kind). That the government is setting speed goals of X vs Y is barely meaningful when the much larger problem is that broadband reach has been hampered by the government via garbage like this http://www.telecompetitor.com/... .
And there's a good chance that if the bad type of government involvement went away, a lot of the broadband reach problem would be taken care of automatically. See, for example, Singapore, when the government involvement was modest, fostered growth, but largely stayed out of the way. Singapore doesn't have all of the same challenges that a country like the US has, but it's telling that you can get a 2Gpbs for under 40 USD (https://www.singtelshop.com/shop/fibre-broadband/index.jsf).
Oh, absolutely - totally agree. Eventually we'll laugh at the thought of 100Mbps being decent, and so on: just like CPU, RAM, drive space, etc., it seems that usage of your net connection will continue to expand to capacity and then push for higher capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL. Yes, I'm sure that of all the ways our info leaks online, and of all the ways we can be tracked online, the one those agencies rely on is the Google subsystem that stores my bookmarks.
... and just use Google Chrome everywhere, and so bookmark syncing is built in (and works great).
I used to work in the streaming video space, and if the streaming music space is anything like it is with streaming movies and TV shows, then the hurdles to this sort of thing aren't technical. It's all about contracts and rights negotiations - usually the streaming provider has to jump through all sorts of hoops to convince the rights holder to license them the content and that they (the provider) will keep it "safe".
In some cases, the rights holders have already bought in to the sales story of various DRM providers, such that their licensing terms require that you use a specific DRM. In other cases, there's a lot of CYA going on (similar to the old adage of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), so even if they don't dictate a specific DRM, it's hard to get them to go along with some new DRM scheme unless lots of others are already using it. So to introduce a new DRM scheme you have to get some outside security experts to audit it, get a few key rights holders and providers to buy into it, and then finally be in a position to get others to adopt it too. This takes a lot of time and money and the difficulty is compounded significantly by the fact that rights holders of high-value content will demand that some aspects of the DRM be implemented in hardware, so any new scheme has to either leverage that or work with hardware vendors to introduce new stuff, which takes even longer.
Also, this specific example (developer-specific DRM key) could work on a technical level, but even assuming you overcame the above issues, it doesn't really mitigate the risk to Spotify or the actual content owners. To them, the content is worth billions of dollars, so they'd look at it as giving Joe Random Developer a DRM key with the possibility of a sliver of more revenue vs the risk of lawsuits and lost contracts and probably say, "not a chance!".
It's true! And even if money were no issue, I still don't think I'd ever choose to live in Silicon Valley or someplace similar. I get that some people love living like that, but it's not for everyone.
Anytime a discussion comes up suggesting how awful the suburbs are (or similarly, about how much it must suck to live in a "flyover" state), I have this internal struggle of "wow that's totally at odds with my experience" vs "shhh... it's in your own best interest to let 'em keep thinking that". :)
Not really, that's just how it's depicted on TV. In many (most?) real world suburbs, there's all sorts of places to ride your bike as well as proximity to parks and the like.
Haha, we played that exact same game but called it "smear the queer". I'm guessing that name wouldn't fly these days.
I appreciate your comment, but partially disagree. And as noted, I'm not one of the morning people, and please don't forget that my original comment was wondering aloud about the effect of bedtimes on these things - something I was wondering because a common thread in so many of the discussions on this topic is to completely ignore that aspect of it. So mostly I'm coming from the perspective of "hold on, before we conclude that we need to move the schedule [as this study basically concluded], doesn't it make sense to look at this aspect too?"
And to be clear, I'm verrry much in favor of changing systems that need changing. But on the flipside, being part of a society includes, by definition, some amount of going along with societal conventions. So I see both sides - if a convention is flawed, let's change it... but it also feels like there is a lot of the mentality out there of "that doesn't work for me personally, so I expect the world to change, not me", which is just as bad if not worse.
But, for some reason, when it comes to education we find people turning all authoritarian, saying "suck it up buttercup", and accusing those who genuinely find early morning lectures a struggle of being snowflakes. While I have found educational psychology to be fascinating I must confess I find ex-students' (i.e. most of us adults') attitudes towards education equally interesting. What stories do they tell about our experiences when we were students.
The reason I take this position is precisely because of my experiences back when I was in school, as well as my experiences with my own kids now. I'm also in a role where I interact with a ton of teenagers, and my experiences with them in the present further reinforce that. It's all anecdotal of course, but it's not 3 or 4 data points either. In my experience there is this essentially universal correlation between overly groggy kids in the morning and staying up too late.
For many of them, the time they get up in the morning is *deduced* from the time they have to be somewhere the next day, and often the time they go to bed is further deduced from *that*. The net result is that moving the time they have to be somewhere doesn't provide any lasting benefit.
In addition to that, I've seen quite a few kids (and adults) who take it upon themselves to start going to bed earlier and within a few weeks they are doing just fine - any typically even better than they were.
So, yeah, I do tend to have a "suck it up, buttercup" attitude whenever I come across these stories. I do think that moving the schedule will provide no lasting benefit, and I do think that in nearly every case the problem is people not being very responsible for themselves, and I've seen over and over that this problem is easily solved in a much simpler way, so the expectation that everyone else shift to accommodate them rubs me the wrong way.
If a system is flawed, I'm on board with the idea of changing or abandoning it for something better. But I'll also resist upheaval if there are simpler solutions or if the reasoning for the change is flawed, and that seems to be the case here.
Well, this is your lucky day, because I myself am a night owl. I am not naturally a morning person. At all.
But in high school I read some article about the benefits of getting up early and decided that I wanted those benefits. So I changed. It took time and a lot of hard work, but I wanted the reward so I worked for it.
I've been there too, just like you, not able to fall asleep for hours. It's frustrating, but it is something that can be overcome - for me in involved learning falling asleep techniques, establishing a better evening routine, and adjusting my diet. For you it might be something different. But unless you are a member of a statistically tiny group of people, this is absolutely not something that you just have to live with.
An 8am class is not unreasonable for a university (especially since most of the rest of society is up and running by that time), and so rejecting the idea that we need to make classes later is not some sort of "holier-than-thou" attitude, but pushing back against solving a non-problem and further coddling kids who need to catch up in becoming responsible adults.
It'd be interesting to see what affect going to bed at a decent time has on things too.
In college, everybody I knew who had a morning class that they really struggled in were also the bozos who were up until 3am every night, and so their poor academic performance was really due to them having to learn how to set boundaries without leaning on mom and dad so much.
Those who had already learned how to be responsible for themselves would simply go to bed early enough to be awake and ready for their class. Just like, you know, you have to do after college.
I guess this is a good click-bait article, so good job in that sense Slashdot. I liked how neither the summary, nor the article itself, nor the other website that that first article was citing, could list off any examples either. Why? It's pretty simple but not overly politically correct to say it, but here goes: there aren't any.
There are not currently any female equivalents of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Bill Gates.
I have a hard time seeing that as a problem that we must somehow solve, and have a really hard time seeing that as some sort of "proof" of inherent unfairness. On the contrary: there are many, many, many men in tech and so the number that actually have widespread name recognition is, percentage-wise, a very small number. It's so small that the odds of being a famous tech person is more or less the same independent of gender. Or it could even be lower for men for that matter. Boo hoo!
What's really a shame is the whole mentality of "I spot a difference, so it goes without saying that it must be caused by racism/sexism/ageism/whateverism".
Oh, this is rich: you're criticizing someone and simultaneously making the very same mistake that they are allegedly making.
Agreed. Another thing I wonder about is if there are in fact effects, just not effects that the studies are trying to measure. For example, does extreme violence in video games and movies have any sort of impact on how people value life or desensitize people to those things in some ways? (and if so, what is the impact of that?)
And to your point, it may be that 99.999% of the population isn't affected in any significant way, but that remaining 0.001% is, and unfortunately that still translates into thousands of people in the U.S. alone who might be predisposed to some sort of extreme reaction to it all.
I'm in the same camp - not proposing some sort of policy change, but I do think there is more to study in this area.
It's relatively low tech, but I've tried just about everything over the years and I always come back to using a spreadsheet. I use a Google Sheet, but only because it's super convenient to have it "sync" to every computer and device I use, but there's no reason you can't just store an actual spreadsheet (ODT/XLS) file on a server. I have some misgivings about using Google for this, but the utter convenience of it trumps those concerns.
A huge consideration in any sort of task tool /has/ to be the "cost" of the most basic CRUD operations. If it takes 20 seconds to add a quick task or reminder to your todo list, or to mark something as done, etc., then you are almost certainly going to stop using it before too long because the tool will be too much in your way - you need as close to a frictionless experience as possible or it will feel burdensome.
A related issue is that any tool you use /has/ to very closely fit your organizational needs. If you have to adapt too much to the way the tool works or the way the author of the tool conceived its use, then again you will almost certainly stop using that tool before too long. This is especially important because your needs will almost certainly change over time. Sometimes I need to put subtasks into buckets and move tasks between them, other times I just need different areas to track tasks for unrelated projects. Sometimes I need prioritized lists, other times I just need to jot down lists of items whose order is unimportant.
I am always on the lookout for something better, but a spreadsheet comes closest to hitting the sweet spot of flexibility and power at a low cost. It is just free-form enough to make it trivial to add a quick, unofficial or temporary todo list (and columns make it easy to add multiple lists to the same page), while also supporting more structure via tabs, sorting, and text formatting.
Support for formulas is also surprisingly useful - for some lists I want to attach a time estimate or some other cost, and so it's nice to be able to include basic calculations like the total estimated time or the estimated completion time/date and have all of that update automatically. Or in the case of priorities like the OP mentioned, it's a trivial matter to constantly adjust priorities or add new ones and sort the tasks in whatever ways make sense.
My spreadsheet ends up being a combination of my todo lists for work, personal life, etc., my daily/weekly/monthly calendar, and also the thing for tracking goals and progress. Since those things are all sorta related anyway, it ends up being really nice to use a single tool to manage them all.
Obviously whether or not you find YoutubeTV interesting makes no difference to me one way or another; I replied to your comment only because you seemed to misunderstand what the service was. Anyway, have a great day!
I've got a hunch there are some channels that they get paid to place in the lineup. If so, letting you drop those would actually hurt their bottom line. Then there are channels that cost them so much that they simply must charge everyone for them or they would not be able to offer them to those that do want them, due to costs.
Yup, that's exactly how it works - some channel owners pay providers to carry the channels, while the "top-tier" channels are considered must-have and so it's the other way around: the providers pay for the right to carry the channels, and then more often than not there are groups of channels owned by the same company and the rights for them are negotiated as a group. For years, Disney + ESPN (especially ESPN) were considered must-have cable channels, so not only did providers pay for for the "privilege" of including ESPN, they paid a ton for it - easily 25% or more of the fees providers paid for their channel lineup went to ESPN.
ESPN's success is why there has been a proliferation of new cable sports channels, and it's a big part of why ESPN has been weakened so much. But the deals are so valuable and complicated that they end up being deals with a very long duration. For example, Comcast and Disney hammered out a deal in 2012 that remains in effect until 2022 (see https://mediadecoder.blogs.nyt...).
Incidentally, the long duration of these deals is also a major factor in why the TV industry has been moving so frustratingly slow for end users: people were wanting to e.g. watch TV on their computers or phones long before it was allowed because few of the business deals had provisions for anything online. It's not hard to imagine that in 2020, if ESPN is still alive, viewers will be frustrated by some inane restriction due to the fact that the content rights were negotiated way back in 2012. :)
This isn't Youtube (like the website), it's a TV service (like Dish or DirecTV).
A lot of times the /base/ price is about the same, but then they nickle and dime you for HD, DVRs, etc. And then on top of that often the low pricing is just introductory and then goes up after a year, and you're locked into a year or more contract. Also, cable companies always seem about a decade behind the times when it comes to user interfaces on their crappy set-top boxes.
I was on Dish then SlingTV (plus a few others to get the specific channels I wanted) and then switched to YoutubeTV once their Roku app finally came out. It's HD, unlimited DVR, allows up to 6 subaccounts (each with their own history and DVR library), and works on my phone, laptop, TVs, etc. and there is no long term contract.
To get the features and channels I wanted my Dish bill was north of $100/mo. With Sling + another provider or two I got it down to $65 (but it had weird restrictions and I still was down 1 or 2 channels I wanted and didn't have my local channels), and with YoutubeTV I'm at $35.
It might not be a good fit for everyone, and I've only been using it for a few weeks, but for me it's been fantastic.
Whoosh!
What's the Mission?
I've worked for companies on both sides - both have their flaws, and both have their merits. If you can see only one side, then you are the one that has been duped, not me. Of *course* they are trying to solve a business problem too - I said as much in my post.
Are they trying to make as much money as they can? Of course they are - that's what businesses are created *to do*. They are not charity organizations, rather they are entities formed by people with ideas and initiative, who see opportunities as something to be harnessed rather than something to cry about.
If you think they are ripping people off, then rather than being part of the all-success-must-be-shamed fad, you could do what smart people do and see that as an opportunity. If there is an actual problem here, then why don't you do something about it, and also make boatloads of money along the way?
P.S. I think you hit 'Submit' too soon because posting changes in stock prices is, at best, half a thought. Either you submitted midway through trying to make a point, or you don't really understand how the stock market works.
Seems dumb for Apple to block the app.
That said, a difference in network speed does not imply evil intent, and that's part of the problem with the whole net neutrality thing.
Consider the side of a cellphone carrier. I know, I know, it's fun to say they're evil and all that, but just look at the technical problem they're trying to solve: you have some limited resources (your slice of the wireless spectrum, your capacity at your cell towers, your connections to the backbone) that you are trying to divide up among all of your customers wanting to use them. On top of that, you're competing against other companies who want to get your same customers, so you have to balance a nearly limitless demand for network capacity against the costs of building out and maintaining your network and how that translates into the price you set for your services. You have to balance the downsides of any wasted, idle capacity against the ability to handle huge spikes when there is a surge in demand. And on top of all this you are expected to provide value/profits to your owners.
Now, with that as the context, you are obviously constantly on the lookout for ways to optimize and improve. What if, as one specific example, you come across a technology that lets you dynamically re-encode some video chunks on the fly with little or no drop in perceived quality? Would you make use of that technology? Of course you would - it could be a huge win, not just for you and your shareholders, but it could legitimately be good for your users too (a higher number of concurrent users could be watching video without buffering).
This sort of thing happens all the time - carriers, ISPs, etc. are constantly looking for ways to optimize things because they are faced with this very real dilemma of competing objectives. And anyone in tech is familiar with optimizations and how important they can be. But the problem with apps like the one in TFA is that they cannot tell the full story (and yes, I did read the article, especially the part about them using their own servers to help know for sure that differences in speeds are happening).
With video content specifically, from the earliest days of the net we've known that users *strongly* prefer uninterrupted playback at lower quality versus super high quality that buffers constantly - this concept is fundamentally understood by everyone in the media space. Awesome HD w/o interruptions is the goal, but if you've got to choose one or the other, lowering quality is nearly always the better option.
And few things chew through a data plan like video, so when T-mobile says, "hey, any video you watch from these services will only be at TV quality, but it won't count towards your high speed data allotment" well, to me, that's a feature that makes me want to do business with them.
Are there some bad actors in all of this? Oh, for sure. But not every example of a difference in speeds is an indication of this. And even when you prove that throttling is going on, it's not necessarily a smoking gun showing ill intent. A lot of times it's just an example of people trying to find a practical solution to a complex technical problem - they're just trying to make it all work.
To each his own, I guess. What are some of the examples of those fundamental and profound problems? To me at least the downsides of e.g. vue are no worse than the downsides of react. Anyhoo... I used KO before vue and liked knockout quite a bit - but then in early 2016 the prj just sort of died - no commits for months on end, so I ditched it. I've heard it has sorta picked up steam again though.
This pretty much sums it up for me too - vue is nice because it's easy to just use some basic parts of it (e.g. two-way data binding) without having to fundamentally alter your application or way of thinking to fit some model. My first few projects with vue didn't use vue components or any server-side build process or anything like that because vue by itself did all I need.
And then when I did take the plunge and structure my app to make use of vue components, I still found it fairly straightforward to adopt and have been happy with the results.
Totally agree. But:
(1) If a big chunk of the US doesn't even have 10Mbps broadband yet, do you think it'd be a good idea for the US to make that a priority in cases where a decision has to be made on what things to focus on? (versus making sure that, say, everybody with 25Mbps gets bumped to 50Mbps) Obviously the ideal is to make it good everywhere, but if push comes to shove, where should the focus be?
(2) In the US, part of the broadband reach problem is precisely due to government involvement (of the bad kind). That the government is setting speed goals of X vs Y is barely meaningful when the much larger problem is that broadband reach has been hampered by the government via garbage like this http://www.telecompetitor.com/... .
And there's a good chance that if the bad type of government involvement went away, a lot of the broadband reach problem would be taken care of automatically. See, for example, Singapore, when the government involvement was modest, fostered growth, but largely stayed out of the way. Singapore doesn't have all of the same challenges that a country like the US has, but it's telling that you can get a 2Gpbs for under 40 USD (https://www.singtelshop.com/shop/fibre-broadband/index.jsf).
Oh, absolutely - totally agree. Eventually we'll laugh at the thought of 100Mbps being decent, and so on: just like CPU, RAM, drive space, etc., it seems that usage of your net connection will continue to expand to capacity and then push for higher capacity.