How does this minor masquerade harm you? Why does unknowingly interacting with our new machine partners fill you with such loathing? Do you get worked up about answering machines, too? Luddite.
It's not the bot, it's the flakiness of the client.
Already restaurants are starting to not allow reservations because OpenTable and other things let clients book 5-10 restaurants and not show up. It's starting to cost restaurants real money since that table isn't revenue generating.
It's getting to the point where to reserve tables you need to have a credit card so they can charge you for the table you didn't take (the only way around it is to cancel ahead of time, which is the whole idea since it means the table is free for another reservation or a walk in customer).
If the reservation is made by a bot, a mark can be made that it's likely going to be a flaky client and a no-show and steps taken, like releasing the table if they haven't shown up within 5 minutes of the requested time, or cancelling automatically if they fail on a return confirmation call, etc.
Moore's Law has been dead for many years now. We can only expect single digit improvements in CPU performance from now on. Of course, someone will reply with "what about quantum computers?" but those people don't even understand what quantum computers are.
Moore's Law doesn't say anything about performance. It only applies to transistor density. And transistor density has nothing to do with performance - other than being able to cram more cache into a processor. (The vast majority of transistors in a processor are for memory - the transistors doing the actual calculation are far far fewer than you'd think - random logic transistors are far less dense than memory).
As a result, Moore's Law applies more towards memory (RAM, flash, etc) than logic devices. Logic devices are dominated by how dense you can make the wiring. In fact, there are so few transistors, chip makers traditionally sprinkle those areas with footprints for inactive transistors so they have spares they can wire in during minor stepping revisions.
Yes, but the point is you would buy the bitcoin from the tobacco shop to use to purchase things you could not buy at the shop, hint hint..
Ah, you mean a way for the French to pay their outstanding taxes, right?
(Do those tax agency scammers even speak French? In Canada they seem to get upset if you ask them to speak in French. After all, service in your preferred language is your legal right...)
After all, you buy BTC (Back Taxes Credit) at BTC machines to pay your taxes owing. (Yes, that's what they call the bitcoin ATMs - they almost always just splash "BTC" all over them which they back-ronym as Back Taxes Credit or Compensation or other term).
I like mechanicals after work bought me one to replace the ergonomic one I had that died.
But I had to do quite a bit of research, and I go with Cherry MX Browns. They are tactile, but non-clicky. They can make some racket, but no more than a good membrane keyboard. In fact, I think a few of my coworkers type louder than me on their Dell or Lenovo mush-boards.
Sure, a few hard core people hate the browns because they require only around half the activation force of regular switches, but they have a nice break. And they can be really quiet.
The problem with mechanical keyboards is there are a million of them. There are Cherry MX switches, Omron switches, a bunch of clone (cheaper) siwtches (Like the Romer-G from Logitech), and there are dozens of different kinds of switches from each manufacturer. So just saying "mechanical board" is like saying "I want a drink" - there's so much variety that what you try may just be the switches.
Best bet is to stick with something like Cherry MX switches which makes them independent of manufacturer, find a type you like and buy on that. I like the brown, so when I needed a new keyboard for home, I bought a keyboard with MX Browns. It feels the same (naturally) since the feel is generated by the switch itself.
You are not allowed to use an independant app repository when using apple ? You're sooooo screwed.
Yes you can. Officially there are many independent app repositories, containing stuff not allowed on the app store. It requires a Mac to use them as technically you are only allowed to distribute them as source code. Yes, the applications must be distributed as open-source.
This has been true since iOS 10 or so.
There are unofficial methods to get binaries onto your device, typically as ways to install pirated apps. But these work for both Windows and Mac. The downside is it costs around $20/year to use. They are only unofficial in that Apple doesn't make them. They use the exact same mechanism as the open-source application repos use to sideload applications.
Enterprise users can pay $500 a year for a management certificate which lets them self-sign apps.
Surrey BC just elected a municipal government that will ban weed stores. Surrey is the second largest town in BC (might be the largest soon) Actually banning weed by a municipality is outside their power.
Well, that's what happens when you elect a backwards mayor who makes few good points and basically wants to turn Surrey back into the dead backwoods bedroom city rather than try to grow into the metropolis it should be.
Richmond BC is actually a community that wants to ban weed (they too have declared no weed stores there).
And yes, the new Surrey council is completely stuck in the 90s. It's so stupid that it's actually easier for me to spend money in neighbouring cities in Metro Vancouver than in Surrey, and I live in Surrey. (It takes longer for me to take transit to Newton and Guildford subdivisions than to take the SkyTrain to Metrotown and others). And soon I can go to Langley. Spend money everywhere else except in Surrey. That should be city council's new motto.
Or maybe it's part of the Mayor's brilliant strategy for gangs - with all the "normals" working everywhere else other than Surrey, the gangs can shoot up the city during the day.
Google is pretty blatant that they use customer data to target ads. Apple? Blatantly dishonest. "We respect your privacy" but give China whatever they demand while stonewalling the FBI against actual terrorists.
They don't give China anymore than what the FBI and other LEOs already get. The only thing China has is potential access to iCloud data. But Apple gives that up pretty freely upon being shown a warrant.
The only thing Apple cannot get you are unlock codes for the devices. China can't get them either. So Apple won't unlock a phone upon request because they can't. Doesn't matter if you're an FBI, China, ISIS, whatever.
They have a booming business in logistics tracking. Notably, in the modules that you can stick on trailers and containers and track them. They're popular because they are nearly zero-install (you practically stick them on the trailer) and you can see where your trailer is at all times.
Normally you'd track the tractor and have something installed the cab, but those generally require a lot of installation work and antenna setup and all that (and the trucker might get a jammer). It's also a problem if you hire independents (owner-operators) who do not have your tracking equipment installed in their units.
So shippers would stick it on their containers and track those things and it's completely independent of the shipper you use - even if the shipper doesn't know where their trucks are, you know where your container is.
The real reason I suspect is embedded - there are still times we use Ubuntu 14.04 because we have to support customers using old Android versions. You can use Ubuntu 16.04 to build Android 7, 9 and 9 projects, but older projects require older Ubuntu versions to build.
We only started provisioning Linux machines with 16.04 this year because we couldn't find machines that run 14.04 without patching, but also because for the most part, most projects are using Android 7 and we've got Android 8 BSPs so most new employees can live with the limitation.
Apple pretty much bought up the supply of OLED screen manufacturing equipment for years to ensure Samsung could actually make enough (the iPhone X pretty much trumped Samsung's normal OLED production for their high end phones, so Apple had to ensure Samsung had at least double the equipment. And we're talking about something that is produced in single quantities per year - the manufacturer Samsung's equipment comes from makes at most 2 machines a year.)
Tiny monochrome OLEDs are one thing but the big nice ones just aren't manufactured in significant quantities - Samsung has enough on their plate with Galaxy and iPhone screen production, we've seen LG (another big OLED manufacturer) have issues - seems LG can make OLEDs in the 50+" size scale, but their small screens generally... suck.
The ability to buy and sell second hand games on the used market.
They also don't provide refunds on digital purchases except where the law forces them to, aka not most of the USA. Physical goods are required to allow this, and most large retailers will do so for longer than required
Bullsh*t. Used games are not a thing anymore, just perpetrated by a vocal minority.
Because "The PC Master Race" has gotten over this years ago - after all, stores like Steam make it much hard to "resell" games (some people do elaborate "make a new account for 1 game" and sell it on eBay thing, but that's a rather big PITA).
Plus, both Sony and Microsoft are big into the "Day 1 Digital" or even "Early Digital Release" in their game stores. And in fact, it's been shown the digital game sales outweigh the physical sales by a large amount - not only do you often get to play a weekend ahead of release, but you don't have to line up and pick up a disc only to download another disc's worth of day 1 patches. (or larger - Fallout 76 was apparently a 45GB game on disc, with a required patch of 52GB. WTF?).
And the stores know it too - I don't think I've seen ads for midnight store openings for a big game release in a long while. There used to be plenty - every big AAA game would have a midnight release party. Now people just wait at home for it to unlock. The biggest thing that's happened in recent memory was Best Buy offering to break a street date on Battlefield - they were going to sell it to you a day early so you could go and download the patch and be ready for it to unlock the next day.
Hell, Microsoft tried to promote used digital game sales in the initial Xbox One release, but everyone hated that, so now we're struck with a model that doesn't allow it, in either store. And Sony's "Yes you can give it to someone else" thing worked, it only lasted a couple of years before they too were heavily into the promotion of digital downloads. (Except of course, they didn't have to worry about Microsoft offering used digital game sales as a competitive factor).
And in the practical end, I also learned by the time the used games came into reasonable prices at the store, you could just pick up the game on sale either new or via a store sale.
It's a romantic thought. Really, it is. But physical sales are down through the industry - movies and music are now almost all digital sales with few physical sales (despite physical offering better quality, the convenience of not going to the store beats quality, or even getting it through Amazon - digital means not having to find the disc). PC games have embraced digital for at least a decade now. It's basically inevitable. I don't know what people with poor internet connections do, because they generally are also in places where they can't get to Best Buy to buy the discs easily enough.
People say the solution to the tobacco use problem is to ban tobacco.
People say the solution to the illegal drug use problem is to legalize them.
Whenever a solution doesn't work perfectly, there's a knee-jerk reaction among people to suggest that the opposite of the current solution be tried. Such simplistic reasoning almost never works.
Banning a product as a whole doesn't work. We tried it with alcohol, it didn't work out so well.
But banning subcategorties - e.g., flavored e-liquids or menthol cigarettes, while keeping the regular stuff around isn't a complete ban - if you must smoke or vape, you can. It's just they removed the attractants that make it feel less nasty or more appealing. So you can smoke and vape still.
Illicit drug use, well, the drugs should be legalized, regulated, taxed and controlled. Banning does not work (see alcohol) so make it so people can do it. First it removes the "cool" factor of doing something illicit, and second, well, until e-cigs came along and were unregulated, weed was the easiest to get drug around - easier than tobacco and alcohol, because the latter two are subject to control and licensing for sale. Sellers wish to keep their sale licenses and thus will prevent underage sales.
The bottomless hole that is human stupidity is doing a great deal of harm to these sites. It doesn't matter what dumb, useless or ultimately bullshit idea somebody has, there will always be idiots ready to back it. And not just back it for a % of the profits, no, they back it for a pathetic discount off the final product (assuming there is one) or some other meaningless gesture.
And Indigogo and other crowdfund sites don't care. They get to skim the money flowing in and the money flowing out regardless of that happening.
People with an ounce of sense in their heads would just wait for a tangible product to actually exist.
The problem is that many projects will never get the funding or loans required to take a prototype to production. Mass production of an item takes a lot of money.
Even something as well established as printing a book often has minimum orders - you write a book and if you want to self-publish, the printers will generally want an immediate order of 500 copies (if they're a small printer) or more likely, a run of 5000 copies, which requires an immediate investment of up to $20,000 or so. Crowd funding helps get you that amount of money so you can publish your book - most authors wouldn't have $20K or more sitting around in a bank account to fund a print run. (And it can cost more if you want the nicer paper, or nicer ink, embossing, etc)
So a lot of projects simply die after that stage because the next injection of cash is needed to take to production and they can't personally sponsor it.
Investing for profits is also hard - at this point you're going to saddle the company or people with reporting requirements (per rules of the country they're in) which can be quite onerous and eat up tons of funds - it would make any crowdfunding under half a million dollars unfeasible if you have to hire auditors to audit your books every 3 months. Plus tons of rules and regulations ensure that you'll spend a chunk of that money on a compliance officer.
I find it annoying how many AV products identify key-generators, cracks and other actually useful non-malicious stuff as malicious and bad.
That's because most ARE bad.
If you get the ones released direct from a topsite, fine, great, they're clean. But if you're like everyone else who uses Bittorrent and such, well, those things are usually wrapped.
And by wrapped, I mean they are wrapped with a dropper program that will download malware and run the crack/keygen at the same time. So they do infect your machine while running the real crack or keygen. And some clever people have figured out how to wrap the cracked files as well, so after you run it, the cracked binaries are infected and will download the malware as well.
And yes, some crack groups give verification programs, though of dubious quality since it's trivial to write one that gives a pass always.
Maybe your keygens are clean, but most users are getting the infected variety.
My point is, there is nothing difficult about jamming GPS. The signal is so weak, especially in these latitudes, that a 100W jammer probably would be enough to jam GPS in the whole country. In fact, the power output of the actual GPS satellites is just a few hundred watts and they sit way up high with the resulting power loss.
There are different levels to jamming.
The cheapest of the cheap simply aim to spew crap over the band - these are trivially easy to find and identify and they don't do as good a job as you might think. They work when they desensitize nearby receivers, but you have to to be close. It's basically like having someone shout in your ear. Once you start getting farther away, all you did is raise the noise floor a tiny amount.
Basically, satellite signals are inherently weak. What we do is design coding schemes that actually let us recover a signal that's below the noise floor (which is basically what GPS uses). Through the magic of a correlation receiver you can recover signals buried deep within noise.
The other kind of GPS jammer actually transmits incorrect GPS signals. These are much nastier and can lead things astray unless you compare your received GPS signals against each other.
How are they determining a mobile device is being used and can the identifiers be spoofed?
Probably trivially. But then again, they probably also limit the resolution to 320x240 and mono audio so it's fine on a phone, but just plain unwatchable on anything larger
I'm sure everyone already thought of it already since people, especially Asians can be especially cheap.
Forget relying on a pre-package DRM solution. Make games where internet access is a necessity to enjoy the game.
When the game boots have some data structures with critical assets that must be loaded from data that is only available on servers.
It's been tried many times, and many people cry out "always on internet drm sucks". Microsoft tried it for an entire console, too. And nevermind the likes of Ubisoft which proposed doing it for all their games.
Maybe all the PC needs is to drop the AAA games and live on with indies, online and free to play. It's not unusual, since that was the general state of most gaming pre-Denuvo with MMOs being particularly popular.
PC gaming hasn't exactly been killed by piracy, and that's in a world where 99.9% of the time piracy is
No, but the number of big AAA game releases on PC has diminished greatly. There was a brief spike when Denuvo was king and could hold off piracy enough to make a little bit of money on the port. But before that, PC ports, if they existed were either online games or shitty ports that came out years later.
In the meantime, the PC just gets tons of crappy free to play and indie games (not a bad thing necessarily). But generally not where the money's at.
The only big publisher putting AAA games on PC would be Microsoft, and really only because UWP was proven to be much stronger - usually it's just easier to wait for the Steam release than try to break UWP (or rather, once the Steam release comes out, then UWP is cracked).
PC gaming may not be dead, but it's certainly not attracting all the money it once did. Developers are going after consoles with their low piracy rate first, then providing shitty PC conversions because they know there's very little money to be made.
Many top tier airports are slot restricted - they are at capacity and can't increase the number of aircraft landing or taking off, which means that the only alternative is larger aircraft.K/blockquote>
But of course the big 'scandal' is that those bigger aircraft aren't anywhere near full a lot of the time.
The full airports demand slot utilization - use it or lose it. If a plane isn't full, they'll still run it. Hell, they'll fly a plane out even if it's completely empty!
Take a look at London Heatrhrow - there are 737s that fly out of it that do not have any passengers. They are there only because the airline has a slot and they need to occupy the slot. (The plane usually is just for a short domestic flight and used as a placeholder until the real flight is established).
Slots are expensive and rare and thus anyone who has them has to use them or they will be bumped.
And for emptier flights, sometimes the plane is used because it's the one that fits their needs best - they'd run a smaller plane but then they'd need to have a smaller plane with sufficient range, have their ground crew and pilots for it, etc.
The theory goes that imposing tariffs on foreign goods would decrease domestic demand for that foreign good, and thereby impose economic pressure on the foreign supplier, indirectly punishing them that way.
That's half the theory. The other half is that it is to stimulate domestic production of the same good because they no longer have to compete against an artificially price reduced import.
The reality is though, that the domestic product price jumps to be the same price as the tariffed good and consumers pay more.
Think of it this way - you make a widget for $50, and want to sell it for $100. Importers can bring in a foreign made version for $90. So you can sell your widget for $100 while a competitor sells it for $90,, or you can compete for $90. Let's say a tariff gets imposed of 20%, so now your foreign competitor costs $108 ($90 + $18 tariff). Now what do you do - sell your product for $100? Or sell it for $108 and make an extra $8 over what you wanted?
In the mean time, other foreign competitors are forced to adapt to $90 widgets, so if the tariff is removed, now you've been enjoying the $18 premium and suddenly have to compete with $90 competitors again. It will not end well for your business because while everyone else had to compete, you didn't and have grown inefficient, fat and flabby on the excess.
I think the problem was discovered with the iMacs - they had removable storage. Except they were not really removable.
As in, you couldn't take the storage media (it's actually raw flash) and put it in another iMac - it just wouldn't work. You see, the T1/T2 chip is also the SSD controller with the secure enclave and thus, the encryption keys.
So offering a removable module doesn't really do you any good - you certainly can't stick it in any other machine to recover your data because the security key is stored in the T1/T2 chip.
And yes, the T1/T2 chip uses PCIe for the SSD interface.
Amazon has a massive logistics infrastructure that sellers can take advantage of.
And still do. Lots of people use Amazon Logistics. You can be someone to ship via Amazon but not sell anything via Amazon. You just ship your product to Amazon, and Amazon warehouses it and ships it. All you have to do is tell Amazon where to ship your item to.
I've bought tons of stuff from eBay that were drop-shipped by Amazon in the end (complete with smile boxes). They didn't have Amazon on the label,
The only thing happening here is that Amazon isn't letting refurbishers sell on Amazon. They're still free to use their logistics services.
And yes, Amazon offers a full suite of services, including customs clearance for product. If it's new product, it needs to be palletized and labelled in a special way before Amazon will break it down into individual units.
They only give you photos of your flat mail. Packages don't seem to get photographed, ever, even just padded envelopes. So the stuff I want most to know about, they don't tell me about.
Most likely because flat mail is automatically sorted and scanned through the system. And part of that automation is... taking a photo of the envelope and analyzing it for the address and other important details.
The only change here is that instead of discarding those photos, USPS saves them for you as a service.
Parcels and other stuff don't get sorted automatically and thus photos don't exist since they were never taken by the machines. Once the item is coded (the bar code they print) then the system can run it through the sorting machines.
Don't worry, with all the M&A going on in the US, soon we'll just have ONE media conglomerate, and it'll be $129/mo. + tax + fees for the privilege of accessing their stuff. Required Internet connection sold separately, additional data rates WILL apply, offer void in Your State.
In other words, we'll end up just like we are today with cable.
Funny how we want A La Carte, Then we get A La Carte, and now we complain it's not bundled into packages.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the bot, it's the flakiness of the client.
Already restaurants are starting to not allow reservations because OpenTable and other things let clients book 5-10 restaurants and not show up. It's starting to cost restaurants real money since that table isn't revenue generating.
It's getting to the point where to reserve tables you need to have a credit card so they can charge you for the table you didn't take (the only way around it is to cancel ahead of time, which is the whole idea since it means the table is free for another reservation or a walk in customer).
If the reservation is made by a bot, a mark can be made that it's likely going to be a flaky client and a no-show and steps taken, like releasing the table if they haven't shown up within 5 minutes of the requested time, or cancelling automatically if they fail on a return confirmation call, etc.
Adobe Analytics knows because stores use them.
Look for "adobertm.com" in the list of trackers. Just same as "google-analytics.com" and the like.
Moore's Law doesn't say anything about performance. It only applies to transistor density. And transistor density has nothing to do with performance - other than being able to cram more cache into a processor. (The vast majority of transistors in a processor are for memory - the transistors doing the actual calculation are far far fewer than you'd think - random logic transistors are far less dense than memory).
As a result, Moore's Law applies more towards memory (RAM, flash, etc) than logic devices. Logic devices are dominated by how dense you can make the wiring. In fact, there are so few transistors, chip makers traditionally sprinkle those areas with footprints for inactive transistors so they have spares they can wire in during minor stepping revisions.
Ah, you mean a way for the French to pay their outstanding taxes, right?
(Do those tax agency scammers even speak French? In Canada they seem to get upset if you ask them to speak in French. After all, service in your preferred language is your legal right...)
After all, you buy BTC (Back Taxes Credit) at BTC machines to pay your taxes owing. (Yes, that's what they call the bitcoin ATMs - they almost always just splash "BTC" all over them which they back-ronym as Back Taxes Credit or Compensation or other term).
I like mechanicals after work bought me one to replace the ergonomic one I had that died.
But I had to do quite a bit of research, and I go with Cherry MX Browns. They are tactile, but non-clicky. They can make some racket, but no more than a good membrane keyboard. In fact, I think a few of my coworkers type louder than me on their Dell or Lenovo mush-boards.
Sure, a few hard core people hate the browns because they require only around half the activation force of regular switches, but they have a nice break. And they can be really quiet.
The problem with mechanical keyboards is there are a million of them. There are Cherry MX switches, Omron switches, a bunch of clone (cheaper) siwtches (Like the Romer-G from Logitech), and there are dozens of different kinds of switches from each manufacturer. So just saying "mechanical board" is like saying "I want a drink" - there's so much variety that what you try may just be the switches.
Best bet is to stick with something like Cherry MX switches which makes them independent of manufacturer, find a type you like and buy on that. I like the brown, so when I needed a new keyboard for home, I bought a keyboard with MX Browns. It feels the same (naturally) since the feel is generated by the switch itself.
Yes you can. Officially there are many independent app repositories, containing stuff not allowed on the app store. It requires a Mac to use them as technically you are only allowed to distribute them as source code. Yes, the applications must be distributed as open-source.
This has been true since iOS 10 or so.
There are unofficial methods to get binaries onto your device, typically as ways to install pirated apps. But these work for both Windows and Mac. The downside is it costs around $20/year to use. They are only unofficial in that Apple doesn't make them. They use the exact same mechanism as the open-source application repos use to sideload applications.
Enterprise users can pay $500 a year for a management certificate which lets them self-sign apps.
Well, that's what happens when you elect a backwards mayor who makes few good points and basically wants to turn Surrey back into the dead backwoods bedroom city rather than try to grow into the metropolis it should be.
Richmond BC is actually a community that wants to ban weed (they too have declared no weed stores there).
And yes, the new Surrey council is completely stuck in the 90s. It's so stupid that it's actually easier for me to spend money in neighbouring cities in Metro Vancouver than in Surrey, and I live in Surrey. (It takes longer for me to take transit to Newton and Guildford subdivisions than to take the SkyTrain to Metrotown and others). And soon I can go to Langley. Spend money everywhere else except in Surrey. That should be city council's new motto.
Or maybe it's part of the Mayor's brilliant strategy for gangs - with all the "normals" working everywhere else other than Surrey, the gangs can shoot up the city during the day.
They don't give China anymore than what the FBI and other LEOs already get. The only thing China has is potential access to iCloud data. But Apple gives that up pretty freely upon being shown a warrant.
The only thing Apple cannot get you are unlock codes for the devices. China can't get them either. So Apple won't unlock a phone upon request because they can't. Doesn't matter if you're an FBI, China, ISIS, whatever.
They have a booming business in logistics tracking. Notably, in the modules that you can stick on trailers and containers and track them. They're popular because they are nearly zero-install (you practically stick them on the trailer) and you can see where your trailer is at all times.
Normally you'd track the tractor and have something installed the cab, but those generally require a lot of installation work and antenna setup and all that (and the trucker might get a jammer). It's also a problem if you hire independents (owner-operators) who do not have your tracking equipment installed in their units.
So shippers would stick it on their containers and track those things and it's completely independent of the shipper you use - even if the shipper doesn't know where their trucks are, you know where your container is.
The real reason I suspect is embedded - there are still times we use Ubuntu 14.04 because we have to support customers using old Android versions. You can use Ubuntu 16.04 to build Android 7, 9 and 9 projects, but older projects require older Ubuntu versions to build.
We only started provisioning Linux machines with 16.04 this year because we couldn't find machines that run 14.04 without patching, but also because for the most part, most projects are using Android 7 and we've got Android 8 BSPs so most new employees can live with the limitation.
OLEDs are hard to manufacture.
Apple pretty much bought up the supply of OLED screen manufacturing equipment for years to ensure Samsung could actually make enough (the iPhone X pretty much trumped Samsung's normal OLED production for their high end phones, so Apple had to ensure Samsung had at least double the equipment. And we're talking about something that is produced in single quantities per year - the manufacturer Samsung's equipment comes from makes at most 2 machines a year.)
Tiny monochrome OLEDs are one thing but the big nice ones just aren't manufactured in significant quantities - Samsung has enough on their plate with Galaxy and iPhone screen production, we've seen LG (another big OLED manufacturer) have issues - seems LG can make OLEDs in the 50+" size scale, but their small screens generally... suck.
Bullsh*t. Used games are not a thing anymore, just perpetrated by a vocal minority.
Because "The PC Master Race" has gotten over this years ago - after all, stores like Steam make it much hard to "resell" games (some people do elaborate "make a new account for 1 game" and sell it on eBay thing, but that's a rather big PITA).
Plus, both Sony and Microsoft are big into the "Day 1 Digital" or even "Early Digital Release" in their game stores. And in fact, it's been shown the digital game sales outweigh the physical sales by a large amount - not only do you often get to play a weekend ahead of release, but you don't have to line up and pick up a disc only to download another disc's worth of day 1 patches. (or larger - Fallout 76 was apparently a 45GB game on disc, with a required patch of 52GB. WTF?).
And the stores know it too - I don't think I've seen ads for midnight store openings for a big game release in a long while. There used to be plenty - every big AAA game would have a midnight release party. Now people just wait at home for it to unlock. The biggest thing that's happened in recent memory was Best Buy offering to break a street date on Battlefield - they were going to sell it to you a day early so you could go and download the patch and be ready for it to unlock the next day.
Hell, Microsoft tried to promote used digital game sales in the initial Xbox One release, but everyone hated that, so now we're struck with a model that doesn't allow it, in either store. And Sony's "Yes you can give it to someone else" thing worked, it only lasted a couple of years before they too were heavily into the promotion of digital downloads. (Except of course, they didn't have to worry about Microsoft offering used digital game sales as a competitive factor).
And in the practical end, I also learned by the time the used games came into reasonable prices at the store, you could just pick up the game on sale either new or via a store sale.
It's a romantic thought. Really, it is. But physical sales are down through the industry - movies and music are now almost all digital sales with few physical sales (despite physical offering better quality, the convenience of not going to the store beats quality, or even getting it through Amazon - digital means not having to find the disc). PC games have embraced digital for at least a decade now. It's basically inevitable. I don't know what people with poor internet connections do, because they generally are also in places where they can't get to Best Buy to buy the discs easily enough.
Banning a product as a whole doesn't work. We tried it with alcohol, it didn't work out so well.
But banning subcategorties - e.g., flavored e-liquids or menthol cigarettes, while keeping the regular stuff around isn't a complete ban - if you must smoke or vape, you can. It's just they removed the attractants that make it feel less nasty or more appealing. So you can smoke and vape still.
Illicit drug use, well, the drugs should be legalized, regulated, taxed and controlled. Banning does not work (see alcohol) so make it so people can do it. First it removes the "cool" factor of doing something illicit, and second, well, until e-cigs came along and were unregulated, weed was the easiest to get drug around - easier than tobacco and alcohol, because the latter two are subject to control and licensing for sale. Sellers wish to keep their sale licenses and thus will prevent underage sales.
The problem is that many projects will never get the funding or loans required to take a prototype to production. Mass production of an item takes a lot of money.
Even something as well established as printing a book often has minimum orders - you write a book and if you want to self-publish, the printers will generally want an immediate order of 500 copies (if they're a small printer) or more likely, a run of 5000 copies, which requires an immediate investment of up to $20,000 or so. Crowd funding helps get you that amount of money so you can publish your book - most authors wouldn't have $20K or more sitting around in a bank account to fund a print run. (And it can cost more if you want the nicer paper, or nicer ink, embossing, etc)
So a lot of projects simply die after that stage because the next injection of cash is needed to take to production and they can't personally sponsor it.
Investing for profits is also hard - at this point you're going to saddle the company or people with reporting requirements (per rules of the country they're in) which can be quite onerous and eat up tons of funds - it would make any crowdfunding under half a million dollars unfeasible if you have to hire auditors to audit your books every 3 months. Plus tons of rules and regulations ensure that you'll spend a chunk of that money on a compliance officer.
That's because most ARE bad.
If you get the ones released direct from a topsite, fine, great, they're clean. But if you're like everyone else who uses Bittorrent and such, well, those things are usually wrapped.
And by wrapped, I mean they are wrapped with a dropper program that will download malware and run the crack/keygen at the same time. So they do infect your machine while running the real crack or keygen. And some clever people have figured out how to wrap the cracked files as well, so after you run it, the cracked binaries are infected and will download the malware as well.
And yes, some crack groups give verification programs, though of dubious quality since it's trivial to write one that gives a pass always.
Maybe your keygens are clean, but most users are getting the infected variety.
There are different levels to jamming.
The cheapest of the cheap simply aim to spew crap over the band - these are trivially easy to find and identify and they don't do as good a job as you might think. They work when they desensitize nearby receivers, but you have to to be close. It's basically like having someone shout in your ear. Once you start getting farther away, all you did is raise the noise floor a tiny amount.
Basically, satellite signals are inherently weak. What we do is design coding schemes that actually let us recover a signal that's below the noise floor (which is basically what GPS uses). Through the magic of a correlation receiver you can recover signals buried deep within noise.
The other kind of GPS jammer actually transmits incorrect GPS signals. These are much nastier and can lead things astray unless you compare your received GPS signals against each other.
Probably trivially. But then again, they probably also limit the resolution to 320x240 and mono audio so it's fine on a phone, but just plain unwatchable on anything larger
I'm sure everyone already thought of it already since people, especially Asians can be especially cheap.
It's been tried many times, and many people cry out "always on internet drm sucks". Microsoft tried it for an entire console, too. And nevermind the likes of Ubisoft which proposed doing it for all their games.
Maybe all the PC needs is to drop the AAA games and live on with indies, online and free to play. It's not unusual, since that was the general state of most gaming pre-Denuvo with MMOs being particularly popular.
No, but the number of big AAA game releases on PC has diminished greatly. There was a brief spike when Denuvo was king and could hold off piracy enough to make a little bit of money on the port. But before that, PC ports, if they existed were either online games or shitty ports that came out years later.
In the meantime, the PC just gets tons of crappy free to play and indie games (not a bad thing necessarily). But generally not where the money's at.
The only big publisher putting AAA games on PC would be Microsoft, and really only because UWP was proven to be much stronger - usually it's just easier to wait for the Steam release than try to break UWP (or rather, once the Steam release comes out, then UWP is cracked).
PC gaming may not be dead, but it's certainly not attracting all the money it once did. Developers are going after consoles with their low piracy rate first, then providing shitty PC conversions because they know there's very little money to be made.
That's half the theory. The other half is that it is to stimulate domestic production of the same good because they no longer have to compete against an artificially price reduced import.
The reality is though, that the domestic product price jumps to be the same price as the tariffed good and consumers pay more.
Think of it this way - you make a widget for $50, and want to sell it for $100. Importers can bring in a foreign made version for $90. So you can sell your widget for $100 while a competitor sells it for $90,, or you can compete for $90. Let's say a tariff gets imposed of 20%, so now your foreign competitor costs $108 ($90 + $18 tariff). Now what do you do - sell your product for $100? Or sell it for $108 and make an extra $8 over what you wanted?
In the mean time, other foreign competitors are forced to adapt to $90 widgets, so if the tariff is removed, now you've been enjoying the $18 premium and suddenly have to compete with $90 competitors again. It will not end well for your business because while everyone else had to compete, you didn't and have grown inefficient, fat and flabby on the excess.
I think the problem was discovered with the iMacs - they had removable storage. Except they were not really removable.
As in, you couldn't take the storage media (it's actually raw flash) and put it in another iMac - it just wouldn't work. You see, the T1/T2 chip is also the SSD controller with the secure enclave and thus, the encryption keys.
So offering a removable module doesn't really do you any good - you certainly can't stick it in any other machine to recover your data because the security key is stored in the T1/T2 chip.
And yes, the T1/T2 chip uses PCIe for the SSD interface.
And still do. Lots of people use Amazon Logistics. You can be someone to ship via Amazon but not sell anything via Amazon. You just ship your product to Amazon, and Amazon warehouses it and ships it. All you have to do is tell Amazon where to ship your item to.
I've bought tons of stuff from eBay that were drop-shipped by Amazon in the end (complete with smile boxes). They didn't have Amazon on the label,
The only thing happening here is that Amazon isn't letting refurbishers sell on Amazon. They're still free to use their logistics services.
And yes, Amazon offers a full suite of services, including customs clearance for product. If it's new product, it needs to be palletized and labelled in a special way before Amazon will break it down into individual units.
Most likely because flat mail is automatically sorted and scanned through the system. And part of that automation is... taking a photo of the envelope and analyzing it for the address and other important details.
The only change here is that instead of discarding those photos, USPS saves them for you as a service.
Parcels and other stuff don't get sorted automatically and thus photos don't exist since they were never taken by the machines. Once the item is coded (the bar code they print) then the system can run it through the sorting machines.
In other words, we'll end up just like we are today with cable.
Funny how we want A La Carte, Then we get A La Carte, and now we complain it's not bundled into packages.