Replacing the CPUs is likely something they can't do anytime soon, since I'd guess none of the next 2 years worth of CPUs will have a fix for this. Spectre can't be fixed in the general case, I believe.
Replacing is really the only viable option for performance-critical applications (which most users don't have), but Intel is never going to give them out. I can see after some massive lawsuits that they offer a 10% discount on a new CPU (for which you need a new motherboard). It's likely going to help their bottom line.
Not where I live. I just wish they'd make them more re-usable. Target ones are good for re-use, but the supermarket one aren't even good for groceries. The reusable bags are a source for food-borne illness.
How many disposable single-use containers made of oil sourced plastic are still produced and sold around the world?
Since there are strict requirements for food storage containers, re-using isn't very likely. Lunch meats often come in re-usable containers, which is cool, but they are all different and impossible to store more than a few efficiently.
This is such an horrible waste of resources.
Preventing theft is likely the major reason for large packaging. It's harder to stash a huge, sharp plastic package down your pants. As we get more things from places like Amazon, I'd hope companies will package products specifically for markets where theft isn't much of an issue. I've purchased some Amazon Basics stuff that comes plainly wrapped with thin cardboard. Works fine and I can easily recycle the cardboard.
Why can't I come to the supermarket with my containers to refill with whatever I need, like liquid soap?
Whole Foods does this for some items, but it's not very popular.
I buy my dish washing soap by 5 litters high concentration Teepol for €8.5 and have 13 refills at 50% water dilution for a 750 milliliters Paic bottle I bought 10 years ago for €2.5. An average consumer person would have bought and trashed 50 plastic bottles once empty by now. I went 10 years with only 2 × 5 litters soap containers. And I save money at that.
I buy large refills for liquid soap, but not much else is economical. It's cheaper for me to buy two small laundry detergents on sale than the huge one that's discounted the same amount as a single small one. In fact, I've noticed many large-volume items aren't really any cheaper per gram or liter than the smaller versions. That's marketing.
Kids buy fluff candy in strong transparent polyethylene boxes that go to trash. The plastic box weights more than the fluff it contains, and it is made of fossil oil.
To make it look nice and large enough to reduce theft. Those concerns will not change. If the government legislates this, stores will likely just not sell a lot of stuff because it becomes less attractive for an impulse buy or too much of it walks out the door.
It's much easier, cheaper and probably better for the environment to grind plastic and burn it. It can be done cleanly at scale. Plus, people who use plastic typically need electricity. Shipping it half-way around the world to pay people to manually sort icky garbage is not a long-term solution.
We burn plastic here in Eastern Pennsylvania because it's basically worthless, but I'm not sure why they don't just open it up to all types of plastic instead of just HDPE and PET.
There's no good way to recycle rechargeable batteries, small amount of copper and other metals, either.
I just had an Amazon order delivered in one of those stupid bubble wrap mailers. I hate them. I'd much rather have a recyclable box.
Anyway, as you. may expect, the item was crushed so I requested a replacement. It ALSO arrived in a bubble mailer, but at least it made it in good shape.
Bubble mailers aren't very useful for most items, I think. I've received Blu-rays that came in them that were basically a pile of plastic bits and pieces. They send you out another one, same packaging.
Ah UPS. I ordered two 34" monitors. One arrived when scheduled. The other one took 6 extra days. Even then they only delivered it when I called in to complain. They stated "it wouldn't fit on the truck." For 6 days?
My employer does the same for iced tea. We have a nifty commercial brewer that makes great tea, three gallons at a time. We get pre-measured loose-leaf tea for it that is high quality. Having a 20 oz cup right now.
This is part of the problem. Black Friday used to be "Black Friday". now it is Black 2-weeks-in-November.
If only it were two weeks. I've been getting Black Friday emails from the idiots at Best Buy and NewEgg since the beginning of October. That's likely why it has no meaning, when retailers use it to mean "sale". I'm tempted to have my email app dump anything containing "black friday" in the subject into the trash.
I have FiOS and I can see why they are losing customers. Their prices have been constantly increasing. We crossed $250/mo and I decided to drop equipment and go back to a contract. That's still $177/mo. Their pricing for equipment is aggravating. More so than Comcast. CableCards are $4/mo. That's outrageous. Their most basic cable box (no DVR, no guide) is $5/mo. I tried to drop some channels to save money, but was told my price wouldn't change with fewer channels unless I gave up almost all HD channels. Once I'm done with this contract, I'm leaning toward dropping the TV portion. Plus their DVRs are pathetic. My ReplayTV from the late 1990s remains better than anything they offer. Even so, I'll likely have to jump to Comcast since FiOS won't offer decent rates on internet only for existing customers.
I tend to agree. I think the advancements in materials science were huge factors, but much of that is related to chemistry anyway. Although math was critical to build structures that didn't fall down.
We've had something similar in Pennsylvania. While a number of trees are still green, others just gave up. Their leaves turned brown and many are still attached to the tree. Very atypical for us.
Seriously, this makes as much sense as Juicero. An expensive device to serve up a product you can get for less using old technology. I can't see this taking over anything, except a bunch of out-of-touch VC's money.
On the plus side, you can work for them and not really feel guilty when all you do is goof off at work, since no amount of effort is going to make this service successful.
I think they are doing that themselves. We were on vacation and were looking restaurants recently. The ratings on Yelp are almost totally useless anymore. Any one star review seems to be excluded (under "not recommended reviews"), and two restaurants (say a fast food burger joint and a high-end dinner place) will be rated the same. That's just useless.
Zagat was more useful, but since Google purchased them, they've languished. Perhaps after the legal agreement with Yelp is over this year, Google will put significant resources behind Zagat and wipe out Yelp once and for all.
I seem to recall reading about this as a kid back in the 60s in Popular Science. It was supposed to make shipping freight cheaper. But for some reason it never caught on. Is this round 2, fifty years later?
And I recall reading it in the 80s in Popular Science. I'm sure we'll be reading about it in another 20 years.
At least with cable TV you can DVR to skip commercials, or stream videos without commercials. I'd rather cancel my FB account that watch a single streaming commercial. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are so ad happy that I find I've largely lost the desire to visit them anymore.
I think they are just foaming at the mouth trying to increase their stock price that they'll try any dumb thing. Watching commercials are becoming an artifact of history for video. They are focusing on innovating the past instead of giving people something original.
I gave up on FM because of the incessant commercials 15 years ago. I tried again while on vacation, and it's definitely much worse. I don't know how anyone can manage to listen to the radio and not go insane. 25% of air time is commercials or inane talking. The music is overly compressed and every station plays the same songs. Over. And. Over.
Thankfully, one can get music without that crap easily.
TV isn't much better these days. If drug companies and law firms stopped advertising, most cable channels would go out of business.
To me, à la carte needs to be more fine-grained than just choosing channels. And more fine-grained than just choosing shows. I'd like all movies and individual TV episodes to be available for separate rental or purchase at a reasonable price. Google Play is getting there, but it looks like more stuff is being locked away in streaming bundles. It's bundling Mark 2.
I think that's different, but I'd prefer that. I'd gladly pay Netflix like $40/mo for such a service. But the video content providers aren't as sane as the music providers, it seems. With music, I like to listen to the same song again. Not so much with TV, yet most people would pay more than for a streaming music service. Yet everyone wants to do their own thing. Imagine if every music label offered its own streaming service.
Unless Disney throws a large team of programmers at it it'll be hard for them to match Netflix's ubiquity.
That's true. They are reducing the friction to be entertained, and all these other services are increasing it. We'll see what people want, but low friction choices almost always win.
1. Drop all non-original stuff and become the world's largest movie and serial provider, or 2. Start offering add-ons where you can drop in the Disney catalog, the CBS catalog, etc. (Like Amazon does, but much better.)
These idiot network executives see Netflix's revenue, and they figure they deserve half of that for their lame catalog. Netflix says no, so they pull their stuff and think "that will show them!" Hardly. They'll all be irrelevant in 10 years except Netflix, Amazon and HBO they way it's going.
Same with me. Two is it, and even that's pushing it.
I have Netflix, which I can watch anywhere at any time. However, discovering new shows is hard and they pretty much just have their original programming at this point. Everything else is total crap. With the Disney properties, they actually had other stuff to watch but I wasn't expecting it to stay around. Now they will effectively be a single channel or network, but with a budget larger than everyone else by several times. On the other hand, I like a lot of the Disney/Marvel stuff and buy much of it on Blu-ray. I'll likely keep doing so and just not watch some of the marginal stuff.
I also have Amazon Prime, but never watch it since it can't do so on my Apple TV and their user interface is pathetic and it aggravates me every single time. All the other also-rans are in the noise. I just don't care, but would have watched some programs if they were included in Netflix.
I tried CBS All Access when I wanted to catch up on a show, but it was amazingly lame. "All Access" to me means that I can watch anything, anytime. Nope. I could only watch Big Bang Theory's last few episodes. Not the entire current season. Canceled with extreme prejudice (which was difficult.) I want to watch the new Star Trek, but I'll never try their crap streaming service again. I guess that leaves torrenting or waiting until it comes out on Blu-ray.
I have a cable TV package, but there's too much garbage. I watch maybe 6 channels, 100% recorded on my TiVo. And what I watch there is getting less and less each year, whereas Netflix is growing. Commercials are getting far to frequent and annoying. I'd rather stare at the ceiling than watch live commercial TV.
I'm not sure I agree. Isn't "a la carte" what we wanted and were unable to get with the cable companies for many years? Well, now we have it.
Alas, this doesn't get us to real a al carte. People want to select the channels they want to watch, pay a single bill and use a single remote to flip through those channels and record the programs for later viewing (or view on demand.) None of these new services offer this. And if you want 15 channels at $10/mo, that's more than cable.
Most streaming services are terrible in terms of UI and streaming quality.
That sounds like one of those marketplace sellers from china. Read who is selling it. I wish they had an option to hide all marketplace items and sellers.
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Replacing the CPUs is likely something they can't do anytime soon, since I'd guess none of the next 2 years worth of CPUs will have a fix for this. Spectre can't be fixed in the general case, I believe.
Replacing is really the only viable option for performance-critical applications (which most users don't have), but Intel is never going to give them out. I can see after some massive lawsuits that they offer a 10% discount on a new CPU (for which you need a new motherboard). It's likely going to help their bottom line.
Yes, but they don't pick up. Driving 50 cents worth of copper across town is hardly a net benefit for the environment.
I think NIMBY is a big part of it, no one wants to live near a huge recycling center. But no one wants to work at one, either.
Maybe some enzyme can turn the plastic into some liquid that can be cleanly burned for electricity, heat or even in vehicles.
Plastic bags are already prohibited.
Not where I live. I just wish they'd make them more re-usable. Target ones are good for re-use, but the supermarket one aren't even good for groceries. The reusable bags are a source for food-borne illness.
How many disposable single-use containers made of oil sourced plastic are still produced and sold around the world?
Since there are strict requirements for food storage containers, re-using isn't very likely. Lunch meats often come in re-usable containers, which is cool, but they are all different and impossible to store more than a few efficiently.
This is such an horrible waste of resources.
Preventing theft is likely the major reason for large packaging. It's harder to stash a huge, sharp plastic package down your pants. As we get more things from places like Amazon, I'd hope companies will package products specifically for markets where theft isn't much of an issue. I've purchased some Amazon Basics stuff that comes plainly wrapped with thin cardboard. Works fine and I can easily recycle the cardboard.
Why can't I come to the supermarket with my containers to refill with whatever I need, like liquid soap?
Whole Foods does this for some items, but it's not very popular.
I buy my dish washing soap by 5 litters high concentration Teepol for €8.5 and have 13 refills at 50% water dilution for a 750 milliliters Paic bottle I bought 10 years ago for €2.5. An average consumer person would have bought and trashed 50 plastic bottles once empty by now. I went 10 years with only 2 × 5 litters soap containers. And I save money at that.
I buy large refills for liquid soap, but not much else is economical. It's cheaper for me to buy two small laundry detergents on sale than the huge one that's discounted the same amount as a single small one. In fact, I've noticed many large-volume items aren't really any cheaper per gram or liter than the smaller versions. That's marketing.
Kids buy fluff candy in strong transparent polyethylene boxes that go to trash. The plastic box weights more than the fluff it contains, and it is made of fossil oil.
To make it look nice and large enough to reduce theft. Those concerns will not change. If the government legislates this, stores will likely just not sell a lot of stuff because it becomes less attractive for an impulse buy or too much of it walks out the door.
All this should have been prohibited decades ago.
Sadly, we can't legislate reason.
It's much easier, cheaper and probably better for the environment to grind plastic and burn it. It can be done cleanly at scale. Plus, people who use plastic typically need electricity. Shipping it half-way around the world to pay people to manually sort icky garbage is not a long-term solution.
We burn plastic here in Eastern Pennsylvania because it's basically worthless, but I'm not sure why they don't just open it up to all types of plastic instead of just HDPE and PET.
There's no good way to recycle rechargeable batteries, small amount of copper and other metals, either.
I just had an Amazon order delivered in one of those stupid bubble wrap mailers. I hate them. I'd much rather have a recyclable box.
Anyway, as you. may expect, the item was crushed so I requested a replacement. It ALSO arrived in a bubble mailer, but at least it made it in good shape.
Bubble mailers aren't very useful for most items, I think. I've received Blu-rays that came in them that were basically a pile of plastic bits and pieces. They send you out another one, same packaging.
Ah UPS. I ordered two 34" monitors. One arrived when scheduled. The other one took 6 extra days. Even then they only delivered it when I called in to complain. They stated "it wouldn't fit on the truck." For 6 days?
I'm not sure that's the problem. I think Tim thinks these things are good ideas. I'd blame Ives more, he seems to be off the rails.
My employer does the same for iced tea. We have a nifty commercial brewer that makes great tea, three gallons at a time. We get pre-measured loose-leaf tea for it that is high quality. Having a 20 oz cup right now.
This is part of the problem. Black Friday used to be "Black Friday". now it is Black 2-weeks-in-November.
If only it were two weeks. I've been getting Black Friday emails from the idiots at Best Buy and NewEgg since the beginning of October. That's likely why it has no meaning, when retailers use it to mean "sale". I'm tempted to have my email app dump anything containing "black friday" in the subject into the trash.
I have FiOS and I can see why they are losing customers. Their prices have been constantly increasing. We crossed $250/mo and I decided to drop equipment and go back to a contract. That's still $177/mo. Their pricing for equipment is aggravating. More so than Comcast. CableCards are $4/mo. That's outrageous. Their most basic cable box (no DVR, no guide) is $5/mo. I tried to drop some channels to save money, but was told my price wouldn't change with fewer channels unless I gave up almost all HD channels. Once I'm done with this contract, I'm leaning toward dropping the TV portion. Plus their DVRs are pathetic. My ReplayTV from the late 1990s remains better than anything they offer. Even so, I'll likely have to jump to Comcast since FiOS won't offer decent rates on internet only for existing customers.
I tend to agree. I think the advancements in materials science were huge factors, but much of that is related to chemistry anyway. Although math was critical to build structures that didn't fall down.
We've had something similar in Pennsylvania. While a number of trees are still green, others just gave up. Their leaves turned brown and many are still attached to the tree. Very atypical for us.
Seriously, this makes as much sense as Juicero. An expensive device to serve up a product you can get for less using old technology. I can't see this taking over anything, except a bunch of out-of-touch VC's money.
On the plus side, you can work for them and not really feel guilty when all you do is goof off at work, since no amount of effort is going to make this service successful.
simple solution - can we just scrape Yelp?
I think they are doing that themselves. We were on vacation and were looking restaurants recently. The ratings on Yelp are almost totally useless anymore. Any one star review seems to be excluded (under "not recommended reviews"), and two restaurants (say a fast food burger joint and a high-end dinner place) will be rated the same. That's just useless.
Zagat was more useful, but since Google purchased them, they've languished. Perhaps after the legal agreement with Yelp is over this year, Google will put significant resources behind Zagat and wipe out Yelp once and for all.
I seem to recall reading about this as a kid back in the 60s in Popular Science. It was supposed to make shipping freight cheaper. But for some reason it never caught on. Is this round 2, fifty years later?
And I recall reading it in the 80s in Popular Science. I'm sure we'll be reading about it in another 20 years.
At least with cable TV you can DVR to skip commercials, or stream videos without commercials. I'd rather cancel my FB account that watch a single streaming commercial. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are so ad happy that I find I've largely lost the desire to visit them anymore.
I think they are just foaming at the mouth trying to increase their stock price that they'll try any dumb thing. Watching commercials are becoming an artifact of history for video. They are focusing on innovating the past instead of giving people something original.
I gave up on FM because of the incessant commercials 15 years ago. I tried again while on vacation, and it's definitely much worse. I don't know how anyone can manage to listen to the radio and not go insane. 25% of air time is commercials or inane talking. The music is overly compressed and every station plays the same songs. Over. And. Over.
Thankfully, one can get music without that crap easily.
TV isn't much better these days. If drug companies and law firms stopped advertising, most cable channels would go out of business.
To me, à la carte needs to be more fine-grained than just choosing channels. And more fine-grained than just choosing shows. I'd like all movies and individual TV episodes to be available for separate rental or purchase at a reasonable price. Google Play is getting there, but it looks like more stuff is being locked away in streaming bundles. It's bundling Mark 2.
I think that's different, but I'd prefer that. I'd gladly pay Netflix like $40/mo for such a service. But the video content providers aren't as sane as the music providers, it seems. With music, I like to listen to the same song again. Not so much with TV, yet most people would pay more than for a streaming music service. Yet everyone wants to do their own thing. Imagine if every music label offered its own streaming service.
Unless Disney throws a large team of programmers at it it'll be hard for them to match Netflix's ubiquity.
That's true. They are reducing the friction to be entertained, and all these other services are increasing it. We'll see what people want, but low friction choices almost always win.
I think Netflix basically has two options:
1. Drop all non-original stuff and become the world's largest movie and serial provider, or
2. Start offering add-ons where you can drop in the Disney catalog, the CBS catalog, etc. (Like Amazon does, but much better.)
These idiot network executives see Netflix's revenue, and they figure they deserve half of that for their lame catalog. Netflix says no, so they pull their stuff and think "that will show them!" Hardly. They'll all be irrelevant in 10 years except Netflix, Amazon and HBO they way it's going.
Same with me. Two is it, and even that's pushing it.
I have Netflix, which I can watch anywhere at any time. However, discovering new shows is hard and they pretty much just have their original programming at this point. Everything else is total crap. With the Disney properties, they actually had other stuff to watch but I wasn't expecting it to stay around. Now they will effectively be a single channel or network, but with a budget larger than everyone else by several times. On the other hand, I like a lot of the Disney/Marvel stuff and buy much of it on Blu-ray. I'll likely keep doing so and just not watch some of the marginal stuff.
I also have Amazon Prime, but never watch it since it can't do so on my Apple TV and their user interface is pathetic and it aggravates me every single time. All the other also-rans are in the noise. I just don't care, but would have watched some programs if they were included in Netflix.
I tried CBS All Access when I wanted to catch up on a show, but it was amazingly lame. "All Access" to me means that I can watch anything, anytime. Nope. I could only watch Big Bang Theory's last few episodes. Not the entire current season. Canceled with extreme prejudice (which was difficult.) I want to watch the new Star Trek, but I'll never try their crap streaming service again. I guess that leaves torrenting or waiting until it comes out on Blu-ray.
I have a cable TV package, but there's too much garbage. I watch maybe 6 channels, 100% recorded on my TiVo. And what I watch there is getting less and less each year, whereas Netflix is growing. Commercials are getting far to frequent and annoying. I'd rather stare at the ceiling than watch live commercial TV.
I'm not sure I agree. Isn't "a la carte" what we wanted and were unable to get with the cable companies for many years? Well, now we have it.
Alas, this doesn't get us to real a al carte. People want to select the channels they want to watch, pay a single bill and use a single remote to flip through those channels and record the programs for later viewing (or view on demand.) None of these new services offer this. And if you want 15 channels at $10/mo, that's more than cable.
Most streaming services are terrible in terms of UI and streaming quality.
That's what I was thinking. Must be a slow news day. While Foods needed a buyer more than Amazon needed to buy. Case closed.
That sounds like one of those marketplace sellers from china. Read who is selling it. I wish they had an option to hide all marketplace items and sellers.