Aside from the apt "vending machine" comparison being made, I've also seen similar things at hotels I've stayed at, usually adjacent to the lobby where it can be monitored by hotel staff -- but the charging mechanism is via room key. Snacks, toiletries, drinks, etc. Prices are less than minibar and more similar to "convenient store". We also have a similar system for buying snacks at work -- you pick up the snack you want, take it to a kiosk and scan it. This gives a wider selection of stuff, which could be changed up as needed/desired, and the buying area is monitored with cameras. Probably wouldn't work in an "open to the public" setting without a lot better security, but for an office setting we get much better snack selection vs. vending machine. We also have vending machines around that work with Android/Apple Pay -- no app required. Of course, there are the fabled Japanese vending machines, which legend says sell just about anything you can imagine. Then there are the similar machines at airports... so yeah, a more crowded space for something that's already been invented many times, and one whose implementation details have already been worked out elsewhere by other firms who are doing essentially the same thing one way or another.
Why can't they just make it work like Windows XP did? It never asked me about permissions or for administrator access when I installed 500 toolbars, bonzi buddy and cool customized cursor packs and it was all just fine.
1. If a person is on food stamps, they pretty much should not have enough money to buy a smartphone with data plan to use EBT apps....? Food stamps are for the poor, and the TRULY poor people can't afford luxuries like smart phones....if they can afford those, they can afford to buy their own food.
We are on the nth generation of smartphones. You can get a used-yet-functional smartphone from a friend, colleague, family member or reseller for really short money -- think $20. Maybe even free -- think about if a sibling or cousin of yours fell on hard times and you could help by giving them an old phone you had gathering dust. Paired with a service like Ting or any of the other pay-as-you-go MVNO providers out there, your bill could be under $10 depending on how you use it. I'm an employed frugal guy and my Ting bill runs me $25/month. That's less expensive than a traditional land line.
People can be "poor" for many reasons. Women leave abusive relationships with nothing but the clothes on their backs and have nothing to their name. They often have kids to feed. People get sick and can't work. Factories shut down, leaving tons of people out of work. People get disabled. Not all "poor" people sit around sucking on the government cheese. Plenty of them want to find work, they just need a connection to be able to find work. In today's world that connection can be a smartphone.
How are people supposed to educate themselves and look for work without one of the most basic tools required to do that nowadays? A smartphone can be a gateway to all the major job search engines, umpteen learning resources (Khan academy, etc), and it also works as a phone for phone screens.
At a risk of saying "won't somebody think about the children", keep in mind that "poor" people can have kids. So they may have lost a well paying job and are trying to make ends meet on a minimum wage job that doesn't pay as well as a job that got outsourced/offshored. They had kids when they could feed them on the well-paying job. So they can still be working and still be poor. Maybe they got into a retraining program that will result in a better paying job, isn't that a better overall outcome -- support them for a little while so they can retrain but then later when they make more money they will contribute again?
Partially devil's advocate below. I'm playing the role of "dude who likes TVs and console games with limited time because of family"... or maybe "mass market guy". I'm not even going into the "retired people" or "people who can barely operate their smartphone" segments of the mass market. I'm doing this since the OP was specifically about "VR taking off". In my mind, that means it's a mainstream technology like a smartphone, TV, app, game or other thing you could reasonably expect the person next to you on a flight to know about.
Nothing I regularly watch/consume has a compelling VR port or option.
That's because it has to target VR in the first place to be truly compelling. There are games/videos where this is the case but you haven't heard of them because you haven't looked.
I see advertising for AAA game titles, movies releasing on DVD, movies in the theater, TV shows, upcoming sports events, when big name shows come back for a new season. I get this all passively while watching TV, watching youtube, listening to the radio or reading a magazine. Why don't I remember an advertisement for Monday Night Football being broadcast in VR? Why don't I see an ad for one of those Fathom events in VR? Why isn't Ticketmaster selling me access to concerts in VR? That's compelling content for the mass market. I don't go looking for it -- it finds me, or I look for it because there's some aspect of it that interests me -- a band a like, a team I like, a show I like. I don't go around looking for useful things to do with my TV or game console... I already know why it's useful.
There are multiple vendors, I don't know what's compatible with what, or what's exclusive to what.
It's actually pretty easy. Steam tells you which games are compatible with which platforms (usually it's both) and it's very easy to run Steam's VR software with a rift or vive.
What's Steam? What platforms? What's a rift? What's a vive? I could reasonably expect a realistic response from a PC gamer on the Steam question, of course, but from a console gamer's perspective Steam is something they have heard about for the PC, if they have PC gamer friends. And the console gamers outnumber the PC gamers by a lot.
Also, I'm the only one who can enjoy it. Will we need to have family movie night sharing the VR goggles?
What you see/hear is displayed on the TV as well for the benefit of others. It's like playing a game where only one person can use the controller at a time. It's still social.
I can only imagine this would end up with a lot of fighting and tears with both kids wanting to play simultaneously.
Lastly, price -- looks like a VR rig is something like $500.
Oculus just had a sale where everything you needed was included for $400 new. You can get used sets for even cheaper. This is console territory.
But the Oculus still needs to connect to something... looking at their site, eyeballing the "recommended" spec as about a $700 desktop PC. I'm sure I could build it for less, but again, this is mass market we are talking about... people that don't build PCs but buy them... and people have not been buying PCs. Honestly for $400 (or $1100), mass market people are going to view that as "too expensive".
If we wanted to have a family VR night I'd have to spend $2K on VR stuff, plus whatever they might need to plug into (console? PC?).
Now you're just blatantly lying due to what seems like an inherent objection to new technology. Maybe do some more research before knocking it?
As I said, I'm answering this from the point of mass market. I adopt new technologies all the time. Mass market adopts stuff when it's easy to use, easy to explain and largely works out of the box and is affordable. Especially for entertainment stuff. Hardcore PC gamers are not t
Shit happens and people are out of work all the time. It's nice when it's scheduled like a vacation, but you can also get some sort of infection, break a limb, require surgery, have a family member pass away, have to care for a sick kid or any other of the little curve balls life throws at you. Anyone in a corporate structure (including the CEO) should be able to be out of contact for a week without decision making breaking down. Managers under the CEO should be competent enough to keep their departments humming along for a week, and maybe some truly high level decisions get put off, or the CEO can explicitly appoint someone to make big decisions in their absence. There are plenty of companies and organizations that have done this kind of thing for decades, or in some cases, centuries (or millenia if you include the Catholic Church) at this point.
Nothing I regularly watch/consume has a compelling VR port or option. There are multiple vendors, I don't know what's compatible with what, or what's exclusive to what. Reminds me of VHS/Beta and HD-DVD/Blu Ray. There are wires and cables and drivers and bits and parts. Some days it's a hassle to find the remote control when the kids hid it somewhere, let alone digging up all the bits of a VR rig. Also, I'm the only one who can enjoy it. Will we need to have family movie night sharing the VR goggles? Lastly, price -- looks like a VR rig is something like $500. I can buy a fairly decent television we can all watch TV/movies on, or play games on. If we wanted to have a family VR night I'd have to spend $2K on VR stuff, plus whatever they might need to plug into (console? PC?). I'm not interested in buying four playstations, xboxes or PCs.
Box office receipts and retail numbers are tanking this year, because ordinary people have less disposable money
I still have disposable money, I just don't want to dispose of it on the pile of recycled offal that Hollywood pushed out this summer. I like going to the movies, it's been well-documented that this summer was a collection of absolute duds and scripts that should have been killed off at the concept phase.
Outside of the "usual suspect" metro areas, a lot of the country is still in a condition where home values are still recovering from the recession, so people are less inclined to move unless the company wanting to hire can make that problem go away. Right now if I had to sell my house I'd likely not only lose money versus what I paid for it, but then have to pay the realtor's commission on top of it, then have no great amount of equity to use as a down payment on another place, and then there's the cost of the move itself. Sure, I could rent, but with kids I want to get them into school and keep them in the same school. Also, if a job is in one of the metro areas that largely ignored the recession, it's an extra steep climb coming from an area that took the recession hard.
In the past when employers were looking to fill a position, they would often offer relocation assistance in some form -- signing bonus, paying for a realtor's fees, paying for a move, etc. I don't see those offers listed any more, they seem to want local-only unicorn candidates who will work for wages offered 10 years ago.
I'll echo the sentiment about Clearchannel killing the diversity that used to be available on FM radio. I moved to my current location 20 years ago. At that time there were locally owned stations that played many rock genres (hard/metal, alternative, contemporary, classic), some rap/R&B, top 40, country, talk, sports and two NPR stations - one that did news, the other was the classical/jazz station. Today, the NPR station still exists, and one of the independents, but quite literally everything else is programmed by Clearchannel. It's not only the radio programming that sucks now, but the stations used to be a big part of the live music scene, sponsoring festivals and promoting local bands, and otherwise contributing to the scene in some way. The DJs were local and knew the scene, did appearances at bars and many of were music geeks who really liked the genre they were in.
Fast forward to now, we have one NPR station that does news, the classical/jazz station is gone. The rock stations have been consolidated and homogenized, or converted to play "modern country", aka "country pop". The pop station has less diversity. There are now two sports talk stations that seem to be staffed by the world's most hateful idiot trolls that exist solely to fill the airwaves with useless drek. Local DJs only exist on some streaming stations, no longer on the air. I got a car with satellite radio and got hooked on that -- I like that the stations can be very genre specific and that there's a wide variety of styles to choose from. The DJs know their music and seem to like it. I also have a Spotify subscription and pile of podcasts to choose from. When I can choose between music that I like or talk I want to listen to, FM doesn't stand a chance, but on the other hand the vast number of streaming stations and services like Spotify make music discovery so much better now than when I was growing up -- even the best college stations from 20 years just don't hold a candle to what I have available to me now.
When the son of the deposed king of Nigeria emails you directly, asking for help, you help! His father ran the freaking country! As for the girlfriend, she has been running into one immigration hassle after another, so things keep getting delayed. She's also had to deal with her sick parents and a number of other personal issues. But the money I send is worth a lot more over there, so it goes a lot farther and we should have it all sorted out in a few months when we can get together. It seems crazy that this has been going on for a year already, but we are making do with photos, email, texts and Skype for now. But with all that money I'm making off the Nigerians, it's no big deal to cover these minimal expenses for the woman who is my soul mate, I'm sure!
Now in addition to needing to reset my PayPal passwords at paypalscam.serv3486.co, I've got emails that tell me to log into paypal.scamhaus.ru so my credit card won't stop working. What's next, PayPal mortgages so I can have my down payment routed to ppmortgageredirectmoneyscam.biz?
Whatever the cost, remember when the Keynote when they told us they had Mac OS X running on Intel CPUs since practically the beginning? You can be sure they also have macOS running on A11 (or whatever) in their labs right now.
And since power requirements and heat dissipation are much different in something the size of a MacBook air compared to something like an iPhone or iPad, you can be sure whatever numbers we've seen for the iPad Pro are lower than what we'd see in a A11-powered MacBook.
Perhaps they also have dual or even Quad-A11 in their prototypes. I don't know the cost of an A11 compared to a i5 but I'm thinking they can put multiple A11's inside a Mac before reaching the cost of a single i5.
There's a hardware cost, but there's also a non-trivial software cost -- to maintain two compiler versions, support two versions of applications, etc. If they just swapped AMD for Intel they don't need to leave x86 land. And if they bought AMD outright, they control the cost of chips, too.
I wonder which is cheaper: 1) Porting OSX to A-series CPUs, then supporting multiple processors for a while, and potentially lose customers/vendors or 2) Buying AMD outright. AMD's market cap is only 12.4 billion. Apple could pay for that out of cash. Apple probably has a decent number for what they paid to move to Intel, and what moving to Intel got them.
I am not part of an on-call rotation, nor support anything that's expected to be available outside business hours. Therefore, I have no reason or desire to be contacted by my employer outside of business hours. I can also not install work-related apps or connect my phone to work email/IM. That's worth the price I pay for the phone -- I can be in contact with friends/family and ignore work entirely when I'm not there.
What would you do if you had to pay out of pocket for a phone? What would you do if your employer stopped paying for your phone and wanted you to foot the bill but still be on call?
Apple's iPhone Upgrade Plan is a 0% loan that you have the option of terminating after a year. Even if you never plan on upgrading, using a 0% loan is financially better than using your own cash.
You are forgetting the "risk" part of the loan. It's still a loan, still debt. If you lose your source of income during that year long period you also lose the phone if you can't pay the loan, and likely get some black mark on your credit or have to pay some stupid fee if you can't pay. If you have the cash on hand and view it as "gone", then sure. Problem is, people don't do that. They ask what the minimum payment is and say "I can afford that". They don't think "I have $minimum_payment*12 in the bank, I'm not going to touch that". It also removes $minimum_payment from cash flow every month versus a one time payment. So if like many you live paycheck to paycheck, you have a $minimum_payment sized bump you need to deal with every month, alongside rent/mortgage, groceries, etc.
I used to give a shit about the latest and greatest and spent accordingly. Then I came to my senses and realized I could pay half price for top of the line phones a year old. So I buy my phone at half off, then run it for a few years till it gets twitchy, then upgrade to another used handset. I also gave up on contracts a long time ago, too, and have saved thousands as a result. My bill runs around $30/month and I have a fairly recent Android model. All phones now are pretty much a rectangle with rounded corners that goes in a case, so unless you are a phone geek they pretty much look exactly the same as the other. There also hasn't been a truly compelling differentiating feature in years. They all pack similar storage, you can get decent cameras on a lot of models, fingerprint readers, etc, etc.
I have the same philosophy for cars, I get them off lease and drive them into the ground, then repeat. I drive the miles I want to and enjoy not having a eternal payment. I also cut cable for similar reasons and generally try to avoid anything that has recurring payments, preferring to pay up front whenever possible.
Yes, that's my expectation. It seems that TV (and associated industries) manufacturers are hoping for another mass adoption along the likes of SD->HD, but they are going to be sorely disappointed with that. It's also been noted (and I'll repeat here) that the content is the thing. People still enjoy Shakespeare 400 years beyond his death because he wrote good stuff, that works on a stage as well as a screen. Hollywood keeps pushing out duds with occasional bright spots, and cable TV is pretty much all reality-driven drivel. Compelling entertainment is orthogonal to the resolution of the screen. There's still plenty of stuff from the black and white era or even standard def that's still worth watching, still relevant and still good entertainment. Of course there was probably plenty of drek in Shakespeare's time, too -- and Lord knows there was a lot of forgettable TV since it was invented.
When I was a kid, there was still some black and white content, and it wasn't uncommon to see a black and white TV set from time to time. Then things went to all color and standard definition. HD came out and there was a big WOW moment that created a compelling reason to switch over, helped by the broadcast changeover from analog to digital. Blu-Ray won the format war and it's only a little better than DVD, but it's not so much better that if I can only find a movie in DVD format I would skip it. From what I see, 4K is a little better than Blu-Ray but not the same as going from SD to HD. And a lot of the content I'm getting is streamed, anyway, so it can buffer and have compression artifacts. I guess if I was planning on getting some ginormous screen soon it might matter, but honestly the 42" size screens are "good enough" and we have better ways to spend money than to upgrade for only an incremental benefit.
The US economy is "worth" something like 18.6 trillion dollars, or 18,600 billion. 4.6 billion is 0.024 percent of the US GDP. So even if the foundation sold that all immediately, effectively nothing happens to US GDP. Average *daily* trading volume on markets like NYSE is in the hundreds of billions. Wikipedia says NYSE did $169B/day of trades in 2013. So selling 4.6B of stock in a day would be 2.7% of the daily volume of NYSE in 2013. A lot of times these foundations set up scheduled sales, to sell X number of shares on certain intervals as part of a diversement strategy.
We have three in the garage in my workplace, and are getting a fourth one next week when someone else takes delivery. For BEV/EVs in our employee garage we also have Teslas, Bolts, Volts, Leafs, Mercedes, VW Golf and Priuses. I know we have several people who have Model 3's on order. My employer provides free charging, which is a deal that's hard to turn down. FWIW I drive a Volt.
I don't miss floppies wearing out, usually at the most critical point, like when a big deadline came up. I do not recall the long grinding sound and the inevitable "Abort, Retry, Ignore" that followed. Dropbox has replaced a lot of the reasons I used a thumb drive or a floppy nowadays.
Didn't the Apple ][ boot from a ROM? I could be remembering wrong on that, I had a PC clone which I booted from floppy at home, and we used Commodore PETs at school, which might have booted from ROM but I can't remember. I do remember loading BASIC programs from cassette tape on the PET, though
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from the apt "vending machine" comparison being made, I've also seen similar things at hotels I've stayed at, usually adjacent to the lobby where it can be monitored by hotel staff -- but the charging mechanism is via room key. Snacks, toiletries, drinks, etc. Prices are less than minibar and more similar to "convenient store". We also have a similar system for buying snacks at work -- you pick up the snack you want, take it to a kiosk and scan it. This gives a wider selection of stuff, which could be changed up as needed/desired, and the buying area is monitored with cameras. Probably wouldn't work in an "open to the public" setting without a lot better security, but for an office setting we get much better snack selection vs. vending machine. We also have vending machines around that work with Android/Apple Pay -- no app required. Of course, there are the fabled Japanese vending machines, which legend says sell just about anything you can imagine. Then there are the similar machines at airports ... so yeah, a more crowded space for something that's already been invented many times, and one whose implementation details have already been worked out elsewhere by other firms who are doing essentially the same thing one way or another.
Why can't they just make it work like Windows XP did? It never asked me about permissions or for administrator access when I installed 500 toolbars, bonzi buddy and cool customized cursor packs and it was all just fine.
finishing up Joe Abercrombie's excellent "First Law" trilogy.
but ... SUPER RETINA DISPLAY. It's SUPER. So SUPER you will rush out and buy one. Hopefully.
1. If a person is on food stamps, they pretty much should not have enough money to buy a smartphone with data plan to use EBT apps....? Food stamps are for the poor, and the TRULY poor people can't afford luxuries like smart phones....if they can afford those, they can afford to buy their own food.
Partially devil's advocate below. I'm playing the role of "dude who likes TVs and console games with limited time because of family" ... or maybe "mass market guy". I'm not even going into the "retired people" or "people who can barely operate their smartphone" segments of the mass market. I'm doing this since the OP was specifically about "VR taking off". In my mind, that means it's a mainstream technology like a smartphone, TV, app, game or other thing you could reasonably expect the person next to you on a flight to know about.
Nothing I regularly watch/consume has a compelling VR port or option.
That's because it has to target VR in the first place to be truly compelling. There are games/videos where this is the case but you haven't heard of them because you haven't looked.
I see advertising for AAA game titles, movies releasing on DVD, movies in the theater, TV shows, upcoming sports events, when big name shows come back for a new season. I get this all passively while watching TV, watching youtube, listening to the radio or reading a magazine. Why don't I remember an advertisement for Monday Night Football being broadcast in VR? Why don't I see an ad for one of those Fathom events in VR? Why isn't Ticketmaster selling me access to concerts in VR? That's compelling content for the mass market. I don't go looking for it -- it finds me, or I look for it because there's some aspect of it that interests me -- a band a like, a team I like, a show I like. I don't go around looking for useful things to do with my TV or game console ... I already know why it's useful.
There are multiple vendors, I don't know what's compatible with what, or what's exclusive to what.
It's actually pretty easy. Steam tells you which games are compatible with which platforms (usually it's both) and it's very easy to run Steam's VR software with a rift or vive.
What's Steam? What platforms? What's a rift? What's a vive? I could reasonably expect a realistic response from a PC gamer on the Steam question, of course, but from a console gamer's perspective Steam is something they have heard about for the PC, if they have PC gamer friends. And the console gamers outnumber the PC gamers by a lot.
Also, I'm the only one who can enjoy it. Will we need to have family movie night sharing the VR goggles?
What you see/hear is displayed on the TV as well for the benefit of others. It's like playing a game where only one person can use the controller at a time. It's still social.
I can only imagine this would end up with a lot of fighting and tears with both kids wanting to play simultaneously.
Lastly, price -- looks like a VR rig is something like $500.
Oculus just had a sale where everything you needed was included for $400 new. You can get used sets for even cheaper. This is console territory.
But the Oculus still needs to connect to something ... looking at their site, eyeballing the "recommended" spec as about a $700 desktop PC. I'm sure I could build it for less, but again, this is mass market we are talking about ... people that don't build PCs but buy them ... and people have not been buying PCs. Honestly for $400 (or $1100), mass market people are going to view that as "too expensive".
If we wanted to have a family VR night I'd have to spend $2K on VR stuff, plus whatever they might need to plug into (console? PC?).
Now you're just blatantly lying due to what seems like an inherent objection to new technology. Maybe do some more research before knocking it?
As I said, I'm answering this from the point of mass market. I adopt new technologies all the time. Mass market adopts stuff when it's easy to use, easy to explain and largely works out of the box and is affordable. Especially for entertainment stuff. Hardcore PC gamers are not t
Shit happens and people are out of work all the time. It's nice when it's scheduled like a vacation, but you can also get some sort of infection, break a limb, require surgery, have a family member pass away, have to care for a sick kid or any other of the little curve balls life throws at you. Anyone in a corporate structure (including the CEO) should be able to be out of contact for a week without decision making breaking down. Managers under the CEO should be competent enough to keep their departments humming along for a week, and maybe some truly high level decisions get put off, or the CEO can explicitly appoint someone to make big decisions in their absence. There are plenty of companies and organizations that have done this kind of thing for decades, or in some cases, centuries (or millenia if you include the Catholic Church) at this point.
Nothing I regularly watch/consume has a compelling VR port or option. There are multiple vendors, I don't know what's compatible with what, or what's exclusive to what. Reminds me of VHS/Beta and HD-DVD/Blu Ray. There are wires and cables and drivers and bits and parts. Some days it's a hassle to find the remote control when the kids hid it somewhere, let alone digging up all the bits of a VR rig. Also, I'm the only one who can enjoy it. Will we need to have family movie night sharing the VR goggles? Lastly, price -- looks like a VR rig is something like $500. I can buy a fairly decent television we can all watch TV/movies on, or play games on. If we wanted to have a family VR night I'd have to spend $2K on VR stuff, plus whatever they might need to plug into (console? PC?). I'm not interested in buying four playstations, xboxes or PCs.
Box office receipts and retail numbers are tanking this year, because ordinary people have less disposable money
I still have disposable money, I just don't want to dispose of it on the pile of recycled offal that Hollywood pushed out this summer. I like going to the movies, it's been well-documented that this summer was a collection of absolute duds and scripts that should have been killed off at the concept phase.
When I was a kid, I had to wait 4-6 weeks for our Little Orphan Annie decoder rings, AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY. Drink your Ovaltine, er, Koolaid, kids!
Outside of the "usual suspect" metro areas, a lot of the country is still in a condition where home values are still recovering from the recession, so people are less inclined to move unless the company wanting to hire can make that problem go away. Right now if I had to sell my house I'd likely not only lose money versus what I paid for it, but then have to pay the realtor's commission on top of it, then have no great amount of equity to use as a down payment on another place, and then there's the cost of the move itself. Sure, I could rent, but with kids I want to get them into school and keep them in the same school. Also, if a job is in one of the metro areas that largely ignored the recession, it's an extra steep climb coming from an area that took the recession hard.
In the past when employers were looking to fill a position, they would often offer relocation assistance in some form -- signing bonus, paying for a realtor's fees, paying for a move, etc. I don't see those offers listed any more, they seem to want local-only unicorn candidates who will work for wages offered 10 years ago.
I'll echo the sentiment about Clearchannel killing the diversity that used to be available on FM radio. I moved to my current location 20 years ago. At that time there were locally owned stations that played many rock genres (hard/metal, alternative, contemporary, classic), some rap/R&B, top 40, country, talk, sports and two NPR stations - one that did news, the other was the classical/jazz station. Today, the NPR station still exists, and one of the independents, but quite literally everything else is programmed by Clearchannel. It's not only the radio programming that sucks now, but the stations used to be a big part of the live music scene, sponsoring festivals and promoting local bands, and otherwise contributing to the scene in some way. The DJs were local and knew the scene, did appearances at bars and many of were music geeks who really liked the genre they were in.
Fast forward to now, we have one NPR station that does news, the classical/jazz station is gone. The rock stations have been consolidated and homogenized, or converted to play "modern country", aka "country pop". The pop station has less diversity. There are now two sports talk stations that seem to be staffed by the world's most hateful idiot trolls that exist solely to fill the airwaves with useless drek. Local DJs only exist on some streaming stations, no longer on the air. I got a car with satellite radio and got hooked on that -- I like that the stations can be very genre specific and that there's a wide variety of styles to choose from. The DJs know their music and seem to like it. I also have a Spotify subscription and pile of podcasts to choose from. When I can choose between music that I like or talk I want to listen to, FM doesn't stand a chance, but on the other hand the vast number of streaming stations and services like Spotify make music discovery so much better now than when I was growing up -- even the best college stations from 20 years just don't hold a candle to what I have available to me now.
When the son of the deposed king of Nigeria emails you directly, asking for help, you help! His father ran the freaking country! As for the girlfriend, she has been running into one immigration hassle after another, so things keep getting delayed. She's also had to deal with her sick parents and a number of other personal issues. But the money I send is worth a lot more over there, so it goes a lot farther and we should have it all sorted out in a few months when we can get together. It seems crazy that this has been going on for a year already, but we are making do with photos, email, texts and Skype for now. But with all that money I'm making off the Nigerians, it's no big deal to cover these minimal expenses for the woman who is my soul mate, I'm sure!
Now in addition to needing to reset my PayPal passwords at paypalscam.serv3486.co, I've got emails that tell me to log into paypal.scamhaus.ru so my credit card won't stop working. What's next, PayPal mortgages so I can have my down payment routed to ppmortgageredirectmoneyscam.biz?
Whatever the cost, remember when the Keynote when they told us they had Mac OS X running on Intel CPUs since practically the beginning? You can be sure they also have macOS running on A11 (or whatever) in their labs right now.
And since power requirements and heat dissipation are much different in something the size of a MacBook air compared to something like an iPhone or iPad, you can be sure whatever numbers we've seen for the iPad Pro are lower than what we'd see in a A11-powered MacBook.
Perhaps they also have dual or even Quad-A11 in their prototypes. I don't know the cost of an A11 compared to a i5 but I'm thinking they can put multiple A11's inside a Mac before reaching the cost of a single i5.
There's a hardware cost, but there's also a non-trivial software cost -- to maintain two compiler versions, support two versions of applications, etc. If they just swapped AMD for Intel they don't need to leave x86 land. And if they bought AMD outright, they control the cost of chips, too.
I wonder which is cheaper: 1) Porting OSX to A-series CPUs, then supporting multiple processors for a while, and potentially lose customers/vendors or 2) Buying AMD outright. AMD's market cap is only 12.4 billion. Apple could pay for that out of cash. Apple probably has a decent number for what they paid to move to Intel, and what moving to Intel got them.
I am not part of an on-call rotation, nor support anything that's expected to be available outside business hours. Therefore, I have no reason or desire to be contacted by my employer outside of business hours. I can also not install work-related apps or connect my phone to work email/IM. That's worth the price I pay for the phone -- I can be in contact with friends/family and ignore work entirely when I'm not there.
What would you do if you had to pay out of pocket for a phone? What would you do if your employer stopped paying for your phone and wanted you to foot the bill but still be on call?
Apple's iPhone Upgrade Plan is a 0% loan that you have the option of terminating after a year. Even if you never plan on upgrading, using a 0% loan is financially better than using your own cash.
You are forgetting the "risk" part of the loan. It's still a loan, still debt. If you lose your source of income during that year long period you also lose the phone if you can't pay the loan, and likely get some black mark on your credit or have to pay some stupid fee if you can't pay. If you have the cash on hand and view it as "gone", then sure. Problem is, people don't do that. They ask what the minimum payment is and say "I can afford that". They don't think "I have $minimum_payment*12 in the bank, I'm not going to touch that". It also removes $minimum_payment from cash flow every month versus a one time payment. So if like many you live paycheck to paycheck, you have a $minimum_payment sized bump you need to deal with every month, alongside rent/mortgage, groceries, etc.
I used to give a shit about the latest and greatest and spent accordingly. Then I came to my senses and realized I could pay half price for top of the line phones a year old. So I buy my phone at half off, then run it for a few years till it gets twitchy, then upgrade to another used handset. I also gave up on contracts a long time ago, too, and have saved thousands as a result. My bill runs around $30/month and I have a fairly recent Android model. All phones now are pretty much a rectangle with rounded corners that goes in a case, so unless you are a phone geek they pretty much look exactly the same as the other. There also hasn't been a truly compelling differentiating feature in years. They all pack similar storage, you can get decent cameras on a lot of models, fingerprint readers, etc, etc.
I have the same philosophy for cars, I get them off lease and drive them into the ground, then repeat. I drive the miles I want to and enjoy not having a eternal payment. I also cut cable for similar reasons and generally try to avoid anything that has recurring payments, preferring to pay up front whenever possible.
Yes, that's my expectation. It seems that TV (and associated industries) manufacturers are hoping for another mass adoption along the likes of SD->HD, but they are going to be sorely disappointed with that. It's also been noted (and I'll repeat here) that the content is the thing. People still enjoy Shakespeare 400 years beyond his death because he wrote good stuff, that works on a stage as well as a screen. Hollywood keeps pushing out duds with occasional bright spots, and cable TV is pretty much all reality-driven drivel. Compelling entertainment is orthogonal to the resolution of the screen. There's still plenty of stuff from the black and white era or even standard def that's still worth watching, still relevant and still good entertainment. Of course there was probably plenty of drek in Shakespeare's time, too -- and Lord knows there was a lot of forgettable TV since it was invented.
When I was a kid, there was still some black and white content, and it wasn't uncommon to see a black and white TV set from time to time. Then things went to all color and standard definition. HD came out and there was a big WOW moment that created a compelling reason to switch over, helped by the broadcast changeover from analog to digital. Blu-Ray won the format war and it's only a little better than DVD, but it's not so much better that if I can only find a movie in DVD format I would skip it. From what I see, 4K is a little better than Blu-Ray but not the same as going from SD to HD. And a lot of the content I'm getting is streamed, anyway, so it can buffer and have compression artifacts. I guess if I was planning on getting some ginormous screen soon it might matter, but honestly the 42" size screens are "good enough" and we have better ways to spend money than to upgrade for only an incremental benefit.
The US economy is "worth" something like 18.6 trillion dollars, or 18,600 billion. 4.6 billion is 0.024 percent of the US GDP. So even if the foundation sold that all immediately, effectively nothing happens to US GDP. Average *daily* trading volume on markets like NYSE is in the hundreds of billions. Wikipedia says NYSE did $169B/day of trades in 2013. So selling 4.6B of stock in a day would be 2.7% of the daily volume of NYSE in 2013. A lot of times these foundations set up scheduled sales, to sell X number of shares on certain intervals as part of a diversement strategy.
They publish annual reports of where the money goes, and independent auditor reports. It's not like he's spending it on oil paintings of himself. https://www.gatesfoundation.or... https://www.gatesfoundation.or...
We have three in the garage in my workplace, and are getting a fourth one next week when someone else takes delivery. For BEV/EVs in our employee garage we also have Teslas, Bolts, Volts, Leafs, Mercedes, VW Golf and Priuses. I know we have several people who have Model 3's on order. My employer provides free charging, which is a deal that's hard to turn down. FWIW I drive a Volt.
I don't miss floppies wearing out, usually at the most critical point, like when a big deadline came up. I do not recall the long grinding sound and the inevitable "Abort, Retry, Ignore" that followed. Dropbox has replaced a lot of the reasons I used a thumb drive or a floppy nowadays.
Didn't the Apple ][ boot from a ROM? I could be remembering wrong on that, I had a PC clone which I booted from floppy at home, and we used Commodore PETs at school, which might have booted from ROM but I can't remember. I do remember loading BASIC programs from cassette tape on the PET, though