Running your own web-server has gotten easier and cheaper. A RaspberryPI 3 would easily handle the traffic for most people's personal sites. And high speed connections are much less costly than they used to be for the speed you get.
Replacing Facebook with yet another central repository like GeoCities used to be is not a step forward, or backward, it's just the same thing.
Facebook beat MySpace because of Glitter GIFs and other ungodly customizations that were so popular. Going to someone's page was unbearable. That's why Facebook banned GIFs for so long on their site and they highly control the layout to something simple and elegant instead of allowing garish monstrosities.
If you want to make a go of being a "somebody" on the internet, then yes, you should build your own brand, host your own content and stop running ads that point to a megacorp's platform.
Even streaming videos is trivial these days. I have the public domain "His Girl Friday" streaming on my own server as a proof of concept.
The closer you get to the ISP the closer you get to the first amendment being enforced. Freedom of the Press doesn't give you a right to another man's printing press. Roll your own. Then you can print what you want and no one can shut you down without a court order that shows your "speech" isn't protected by the first amendment.
What this was was yet another stab at the consistently failing Family Entertainment Center. Chuck E Cheese, Showbiz Pizza, Discovery Zone, GameWorks, etc, etc.
This isn't any argument about the merits of VR.
It's notoriously difficult to run an FEC as it requires a substantial investment and does not lend itself well to franchising. People just generally don't care to spend hundreds of dollars to get their family into a place for a few hours that isn't substantial. While Disneyland seems expensive, it's 16 hours of entertainment which works out to $10-20 per hour per person which isn't unreasonable compared to other family entertainment options.
Disney tried the small model FEC and failed as well. You just can't really do it on a small scale. You have to go big out of the gate.
The companies that would be more likely to succeed are the ones that have substantial IP to capitalize on and can keep the place afloat long enough to realize the full profit potential. You just can't half-butt it and that requires substantial cash flow.
The VOID seems to be doing pretty well over at Downtown Disney. It's a Star Wars themed social experience in VR in a prime location. It wouldn't surprise me if Disney eventually found a way to incorporate it directly into an experience in the Star Wars area of the park opening next summer.
In short, there are too many variables to say anything about VR in particular. The tech is vastly improving, opportunities do exist, but you have to get all the factors in place.
The problem is that YouTube wants to be the arbitrator of truth rather than let the community handle it. Add a link to videos that simply says "upload a response" and when someone uploads a video, that video is linked to under the original video and the video being responded to is linked on the response page. The community can then vote on the original and response so that garbage responses are voted down and good responses have a chance to be voted up.
YouTube wants to rule by tyranny rather than by encouraging dialog.
People are confusing high frame rates with the issue which is simply motion blur.
Decades ago, motion blur was added to video games to make them more realistic. Now we have studios filming motion in a way that reduces it to unnatural levels.
High frame rates are fine as long as motion blur is preserved. When every frame of motion is a crisp image it looks completely unnatural.
Fast Food Kiosks are increasing business which increases the need for more employees to make food and serve customers.
The McDonald's outside of Disneyland has a couple rows of kiosks and business is booming. No more standing in long lines to order and there are plenty of people making food to keep things moving along.
Automation has generally increased the need for labor, not decreased it. McDonald's now has table service.
The cotton gin actually increased the demand for slave labor. When you automate one part of a process, there is necessarily more demand for the non-automated parts.
just makes life harder for those who are working. That money for unproductive people comes from the productive people in the form of lower pay and fewer employees.
Social Security pays out less than you paid in until you reach around age 81. The average person lives until 78.
The only financial safety net you need is competence. Competent people who are laid off find work elsewhere.
We currently have move openings than people looking for work.
If you want to retire comfortably, you need to make the most of your productive years. Not hope for a last minute bail out.
New York state collects 76 billion in revenue every year.
The few million they're tossing Amazon to encourage development will be paid back far more with income taxes and all the other taxes the customers, employees, etc will be paying for the foreseeable future.
Crooked politicians always blame a penny for collapsed bridges while they squander dollars. The citizens should be smarter than to let them get away with such nonsense.
If he doesn't actually own the space he's in then with Amazon setting up shop, the lease payments are going to go up substantially to capture some of that sweet rich people money. He's going to have to decide whether his business can support the higher rent. If he decides he can't take the risk, the person who owns the building will find plenty of businesses that are willing to take the risk.
This is where autonomous cars will help. When you can get work done as part of your commute it becomes less of a hassle. This is why rich people have drivers, so they can be conducting business and the driver has no incentive to get worked up about traffic as it's their job and they get paid no matter what traffic is doing.
While is may be practical for some people to pick up a cheap rental near work to live and work in during the week, it's not a practical solution for people who have families. And it requires that the time you save can be put towards real actual additional paid work to make it financially worth it.
Public transit exacerbates the problem by extending the time wasted commuting while providing no ability to get work done even though someone else is driving.
The problem of the commute can be solved two ways: make it shorter or make it more productive.
Business class Waymo with Wifi and enough room to comfortably sit with a laptop. That would be useful. Unless you tend to get motion sickness.
Telsa is working on making the commute shorter. Which is probably the most practical solution for most people. The question is whether it will either be affordable or take enough richer people off the road to make the freeways not terrible for the rest.
If you want to learn the latest buzzwords, go to a trade school.
If you want to learn how things used to be done so you can some idea of where to begin learning how modern things build on the "old" stuff, then you go to college. There is very little "old" technology that doesn't continue to drive new technology. Syntax might change but concepts don't. You'd be surprised how old the math is for doing 3D graphics. The issue was that technology wasn't fast enough, not that the concepts weren't fully understood and implemented to some degree.
If you don't see the relevance of "old" concepts in new technology then you're not college material. You're the type of person who just wants to be told what to do and follow directions.
If you're "overqualified" for a degree in Computer Science, then you best option is to choose a different degree program like Math which is generic enough to get past most HR filters in tech companies.
Whoo. Am I supposed to get excited that I can produce cases that look just like theirs? Because that's definitely not cheap to do small run manufacturing of large parts like that.
Even if the motherboard were open source, there is nothing that makes creating your own a practical exercise.
And for that you pay an insane premium.
Computers are largely build to standards which are readily available if you care to find them. Those standards allow you to design and build your own cases and not have to worry about parts fitting properly.
There's a reason that serious open hardware stick to low power micro controllers which require far fewer components and those components are far cheaper to produce than a full featured PC. It's actually feasible to design and build your own Arduino clone. Even the RaspberryPi is really out of reach to clone if you don't have rich people money to get started.
There is no point open sourcing things that are cost prohibitive for the average person to duplicate. And it's a good way to just go broke if someone does decide to do what you did better and cheaper. Which is not hard to do if your design is worth anything and your prices are ridiculous as we have here.
The issue is bundling. They want you to buy more and more services so of course the bill goes up.
I have only internet service with the local cable provider. It's $90 a month for static IP and 25Mbit or so both ways. Years ago I was paying $70 a month for 256K both ways. Toss in Netflix and HBO NOW and it's over 100 a month for internet and TV.
The only reason people still pay for cable TV is sports. If you don't care about sports, it's not hard to get your bills down. The only necessary service is an internet connection. Everything else is a luxury.
It's not surprising they're starting with novelty books. We're not encouraging reading books that thought leaders read and write. Just another way to get the latest rendition of the manic pixie archetype.
The only issue with eReaders is that you're essentially renting the books. If ownership were protected then they would be more compelling.
Owning physical books is more of a thing for show. And with young people having less and less space, it makes sense they'd want smaller books so they can show off the same collection but retain more space for other things.
The real issue is quantity over quality. Read better books and give them to charity or resell them on Amazon when you're done. Or use a library. Then space isn't an issue.
We've had key fobs for decades. Databases have been able to hold more than 8 characters for a password for decades. Any system that hashes the user's password doesn't actually care how long the password is since it's hashed down to a fixed length anyway.
The problem is not making use of key fobs to allow per account passwords to be stored so you don't have to share passwords between accounts and those passwords should be a long string of random characters that never need to be typed in.
With key fobs, the account provider could issue the password when you register instead of having the user pick one. Put in your email address, give access to the fob, the provider can write a single password to their account file on your fob, done.
I use a 43" 4K TV which cost all of $300 because it can be run by any half decent graphics card and doesn't require multiple outs on the graphics card. It's equivalent to 4 1080p monitors.
When it comes to screens, it's more about pixels than size. An 8K monitor that's less than 30" is wasting a lot of pixels unless you have insanely go eyesight and like squinting.
VR will have you moving your head all over the place which is going to kill your neck in no time.
HONG KONG — The U.S. Postal Service has initiated a new service with Hongkong Post that is structured to foster growth in e-commerce. The new ePacket service expands the array of options offered to e-commerce merchants in Hong Kong seeking to reach consumer markets in the United States. The ePacket shipping solution features tracking and Delivery Confirmation in the Postal Service network for lightweight goods and merchandise ordered by consumers in the United States from merchants in Hong Kong.
---
This agreement is not likely to change. The Post Office makes a lot of money on this deal because people tend to buy a lot of stuff in bulk and then ship pieces of it domestically. Or they buy lots of parts, build something and then sell that domestically. Amazon.com is filled with people reselling stuff from AliExpress
If the price were to go up substantially it would hurt the USPS.
Net neutrality will lead to more stringent data caps.
You didn't pay for bandwidth from your ISP. You paid for access to a shared resource that gets "up to" a certain speed to your modem depending on what everyone else is doing.
If the ISPs are not allowed intelligently throttle traffic so everyone gets a good experience, you're going to suddenly find yourself with the bandwidth limit they can guarantee 24/7/365 which will be a small fraction of what you get now and will result in Netflix buffering or being completely unsustainable.
ISPs oversell bandwidth because they don't care to waste their resources like so many malls do with virtually empty parking lots except around Christmas.
Besides the hundreds of billions of lines of code that would need to be translated, COBOL does fixed point math exceptionally well which is why banks used it in the first place.
If developers are serious about replacing COBOL, they need to focus on fixed point math and then figure out how to make a compelling financial case for using it. Change for the sake of change is not a reason to spend the money to change a language.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting how many people continue to pretend that the Republicans hold the Senate when it takes 60 votes to get a budget passed.
Democrats are holding up the process.
Republicans have been ready to go.
Mexico would have paid for the wall long ago if the Democrats hadn't blocked the efforts.
And the result is a unique creation.
Most things that are patented or copyrighted are a combination of inspiration and uniqueness.
So no, that won't do anything to change the argument of his lawsuit.
Running your own web-server has gotten easier and cheaper. A RaspberryPI 3 would easily handle the traffic for most people's personal sites. And high speed connections are much less costly than they used to be for the speed you get.
Replacing Facebook with yet another central repository like GeoCities used to be is not a step forward, or backward, it's just the same thing.
Facebook beat MySpace because of Glitter GIFs and other ungodly customizations that were so popular. Going to someone's page was unbearable. That's why Facebook banned GIFs for so long on their site and they highly control the layout to something simple and elegant instead of allowing garish monstrosities.
If you want to make a go of being a "somebody" on the internet, then yes, you should build your own brand, host your own content and stop running ads that point to a megacorp's platform.
Even streaming videos is trivial these days. I have the public domain "His Girl Friday" streaming on my own server as a proof of concept.
The closer you get to the ISP the closer you get to the first amendment being enforced. Freedom of the Press doesn't give you a right to another man's printing press. Roll your own. Then you can print what you want and no one can shut you down without a court order that shows your "speech" isn't protected by the first amendment.
My tax burden is greatly reduced thanks to the tax cuts.
Less taxes is equivalent to a pay raise.
What this was was yet another stab at the consistently failing Family Entertainment Center. Chuck E Cheese, Showbiz Pizza, Discovery Zone, GameWorks, etc, etc.
This isn't any argument about the merits of VR.
It's notoriously difficult to run an FEC as it requires a substantial investment and does not lend itself well to franchising. People just generally don't care to spend hundreds of dollars to get their family into a place for a few hours that isn't substantial. While Disneyland seems expensive, it's 16 hours of entertainment which works out to $10-20 per hour per person which isn't unreasonable compared to other family entertainment options.
Disney tried the small model FEC and failed as well. You just can't really do it on a small scale. You have to go big out of the gate.
The companies that would be more likely to succeed are the ones that have substantial IP to capitalize on and can keep the place afloat long enough to realize the full profit potential. You just can't half-butt it and that requires substantial cash flow.
The VOID seems to be doing pretty well over at Downtown Disney. It's a Star Wars themed social experience in VR in a prime location. It wouldn't surprise me if Disney eventually found a way to incorporate it directly into an experience in the Star Wars area of the park opening next summer.
In short, there are too many variables to say anything about VR in particular. The tech is vastly improving, opportunities do exist, but you have to get all the factors in place.
The problem is that YouTube wants to be the arbitrator of truth rather than let the community handle it. Add a link to videos that simply says "upload a response" and when someone uploads a video, that video is linked to under the original video and the video being responded to is linked on the response page. The community can then vote on the original and response so that garbage responses are voted down and good responses have a chance to be voted up.
YouTube wants to rule by tyranny rather than by encouraging dialog.
People are confusing high frame rates with the issue which is simply motion blur.
Decades ago, motion blur was added to video games to make them more realistic. Now we have studios filming motion in a way that reduces it to unnatural levels.
High frame rates are fine as long as motion blur is preserved. When every frame of motion is a crisp image it looks completely unnatural.
Fast Food Kiosks are increasing business which increases the need for more employees to make food and serve customers.
The McDonald's outside of Disneyland has a couple rows of kiosks and business is booming. No more standing in long lines to order and there are plenty of people making food to keep things moving along.
Automation has generally increased the need for labor, not decreased it. McDonald's now has table service.
The cotton gin actually increased the demand for slave labor. When you automate one part of a process, there is necessarily more demand for the non-automated parts.
Nonsense.
just makes life harder for those who are working. That money for unproductive people comes from the productive people in the form of lower pay and fewer employees.
Social Security pays out less than you paid in until you reach around age 81. The average person lives until 78.
The only financial safety net you need is competence. Competent people who are laid off find work elsewhere.
We currently have move openings than people looking for work.
If you want to retire comfortably, you need to make the most of your productive years. Not hope for a last minute bail out.
The problem is not the bots, the problem is people who pay the increased prices.
Ticketmaster has been a problem forever and suddenly the government wants to worry about toys.
It's up to companies to put up better technological barriers to scalping. Ticketmaster is in bed with the scalpers so that will never happen.
But customers can refuse to buy just released products at jacked up prices.
New York state collects 76 billion in revenue every year.
The few million they're tossing Amazon to encourage development will be paid back far more with income taxes and all the other taxes the customers, employees, etc will be paying for the foreseeable future.
Crooked politicians always blame a penny for collapsed bridges while they squander dollars. The citizens should be smarter than to let them get away with such nonsense.
If he doesn't actually own the space he's in then with Amazon setting up shop, the lease payments are going to go up substantially to capture some of that sweet rich people money. He's going to have to decide whether his business can support the higher rent. If he decides he can't take the risk, the person who owns the building will find plenty of businesses that are willing to take the risk.
This is where autonomous cars will help. When you can get work done as part of your commute it becomes less of a hassle. This is why rich people have drivers, so they can be conducting business and the driver has no incentive to get worked up about traffic as it's their job and they get paid no matter what traffic is doing.
While is may be practical for some people to pick up a cheap rental near work to live and work in during the week, it's not a practical solution for people who have families. And it requires that the time you save can be put towards real actual additional paid work to make it financially worth it.
Public transit exacerbates the problem by extending the time wasted commuting while providing no ability to get work done even though someone else is driving.
The problem of the commute can be solved two ways: make it shorter or make it more productive.
Business class Waymo with Wifi and enough room to comfortably sit with a laptop. That would be useful. Unless you tend to get motion sickness.
Telsa is working on making the commute shorter. Which is probably the most practical solution for most people. The question is whether it will either be affordable or take enough richer people off the road to make the freeways not terrible for the rest.
The point of college is to learn how to learn.
If you want to learn the latest buzzwords, go to a trade school.
If you want to learn how things used to be done so you can some idea of where to begin learning how modern things build on the "old" stuff, then you go to college. There is very little "old" technology that doesn't continue to drive new technology. Syntax might change but concepts don't. You'd be surprised how old the math is for doing 3D graphics. The issue was that technology wasn't fast enough, not that the concepts weren't fully understood and implemented to some degree.
If you don't see the relevance of "old" concepts in new technology then you're not college material. You're the type of person who just wants to be told what to do and follow directions.
If you're "overqualified" for a degree in Computer Science, then you best option is to choose a different degree program like Math which is generic enough to get past most HR filters in tech companies.
The issue is not it being open source. The issue is pretending that it's a selling point or has any relevance to what they are selling.
It's like slapping an "open source" license on a "hello world" program. Nobody cares.
A hipster and their money are soon parted.
The design.
Whoo. Am I supposed to get excited that I can produce cases that look just like theirs? Because that's definitely not cheap to do small run manufacturing of large parts like that.
Even if the motherboard were open source, there is nothing that makes creating your own a practical exercise.
And for that you pay an insane premium.
Computers are largely build to standards which are readily available if you care to find them. Those standards allow you to design and build your own cases and not have to worry about parts fitting properly.
There's a reason that serious open hardware stick to low power micro controllers which require far fewer components and those components are far cheaper to produce than a full featured PC. It's actually feasible to design and build your own Arduino clone. Even the RaspberryPi is really out of reach to clone if you don't have rich people money to get started.
There is no point open sourcing things that are cost prohibitive for the average person to duplicate. And it's a good way to just go broke if someone does decide to do what you did better and cheaper. Which is not hard to do if your design is worth anything and your prices are ridiculous as we have here.
The issue is bundling. They want you to buy more and more services so of course the bill goes up.
I have only internet service with the local cable provider. It's $90 a month for static IP and 25Mbit or so both ways. Years ago I was paying $70 a month for 256K both ways. Toss in Netflix and HBO NOW and it's over 100 a month for internet and TV.
The only reason people still pay for cable TV is sports. If you don't care about sports, it's not hard to get your bills down. The only necessary service is an internet connection. Everything else is a luxury.
It's not surprising they're starting with novelty books. We're not encouraging reading books that thought leaders read and write. Just another way to get the latest rendition of the manic pixie archetype.
The only issue with eReaders is that you're essentially renting the books. If ownership were protected then they would be more compelling.
Owning physical books is more of a thing for show. And with young people having less and less space, it makes sense they'd want smaller books so they can show off the same collection but retain more space for other things.
The real issue is quantity over quality. Read better books and give them to charity or resell them on Amazon when you're done. Or use a library. Then space isn't an issue.
We've had key fobs for decades. Databases have been able to hold more than 8 characters for a password for decades. Any system that hashes the user's password doesn't actually care how long the password is since it's hashed down to a fixed length anyway.
The problem is not making use of key fobs to allow per account passwords to be stored so you don't have to share passwords between accounts and those passwords should be a long string of random characters that never need to be typed in.
With key fobs, the account provider could issue the password when you register instead of having the user pick one. Put in your email address, give access to the fob, the provider can write a single password to their account file on your fob, done.
I use a 43" 4K TV which cost all of $300 because it can be run by any half decent graphics card and doesn't require multiple outs on the graphics card. It's equivalent to 4 1080p monitors.
When it comes to screens, it's more about pixels than size. An 8K monitor that's less than 30" is wasting a lot of pixels unless you have insanely go eyesight and like squinting.
VR will have you moving your head all over the place which is going to kill your neck in no time.
A Union would simply interfere with the ability to make gainful additional employment when you're not the type of person obsessed with TV and sports.
If you're the type of person that needs "protection" to not be fired, you're probably the type of person that needs to be fired.
Unions make sense in highly physically demanding jobs where cutting corners could literally get you killed.
They don't make sense in desk jobs. If you don't like your job, get better at it and find another one.
https://about.usps.com/news/na...
HONG KONG — The U.S. Postal Service has initiated a new service with Hongkong Post that is structured to foster growth in e-commerce. The new ePacket service expands the array of options offered to e-commerce merchants in Hong Kong seeking to reach consumer markets in the United States. The ePacket shipping solution features tracking and Delivery Confirmation in the Postal Service network for lightweight goods and merchandise ordered by consumers in the United States from merchants in Hong Kong.
---
This agreement is not likely to change. The Post Office makes a lot of money on this deal because people tend to buy a lot of stuff in bulk and then ship pieces of it domestically. Or they buy lots of parts, build something and then sell that domestically. Amazon.com is filled with people reselling stuff from AliExpress
If the price were to go up substantially it would hurt the USPS.
Net neutrality will lead to more stringent data caps.
You didn't pay for bandwidth from your ISP. You paid for access to a shared resource that gets "up to" a certain speed to your modem depending on what everyone else is doing.
If the ISPs are not allowed intelligently throttle traffic so everyone gets a good experience, you're going to suddenly find yourself with the bandwidth limit they can guarantee 24/7/365 which will be a small fraction of what you get now and will result in Netflix buffering or being completely unsustainable.
ISPs oversell bandwidth because they don't care to waste their resources like so many malls do with virtually empty parking lots except around Christmas.
Besides the hundreds of billions of lines of code that would need to be translated, COBOL does fixed point math exceptionally well which is why banks used it in the first place.
If developers are serious about replacing COBOL, they need to focus on fixed point math and then figure out how to make a compelling financial case for using it. Change for the sake of change is not a reason to spend the money to change a language.
https://medium.com/@bellmar/is...