It doesn't scare me at all. I won't be around to see it. What scares me is people who buy home-based voice-activated gadgets, not those who want to buy all their stuff (made by millions of different manufacturers around the glove) from one convenient place.
Amazon don't really MAKE products (they have a budget own-brand, but who doesn't? They have a couple of TV series that lose a LOT of money and aren't very popular, but everything else is bought). They sell other's products. As such they are just an interface. In the same way that 10 years ago everyone was worried about Facebook being the only website that could do its job, it's now dying off and the kids use other services entirely.
Remember when MySpace was "the place". Amazon will be like that. There are already Chinese sites that sell way more than Amazon even. I'm not worried about them taking over the world.
Jobs? They have single-handedly revitalised the UK Post Office. They employ four times more people than Apple. They NEED to start paying proper tax, same as everyone else, but apart from that, I couldn't say that they're problematic in my country. If anything, all those manufacturers are benefiting from not having to worry about distribution channels.
And, sorry, but if supermarkets are so evil, why does everyone use them? Why does EVERY town have several? All this "protect local businesses" stuff is only ever lip-service, nobody actually cares about it because they don't want to have to visit 20 different shops like their grandmothers did to get the shopping in. It might have worked back then, it doesn't work now.
I'll happily sacrifice quite a lot for a 24/7 supermarket that sells all kinds of stuff conveniently, and a 24/7 online store with same-day delivery that sells everything. Because the lost productivity of pissing about with anything is more expensive than anything else. I'll happily take supermarkets and Amazon any day, if it gets me several hours a week back, both professionally and personally.
It's about time we stopped spending so much time and money on the basics (buying food, purchasing products, etc.) and actually got shit done instead. Even if that's spending the time with your friends. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon, supermarkets, and appliances like microwaves and dishwashers have changed my life from "50% of free time spent on chores" to "1% of free time spent on chores".
They are only a monopoly if they are "the only supplier of a particular commodity".
That's not true. If anything, it's the opposite. They are one of many supplier of it, but the only one who supplies it AND does all the other competing products too.
It lets users buy what they want, when they want it, at a decent price.
Shocking that in this day and age, someone considers that a "scary" business plan.
My workplaces were spending tens of thousands a year on Amazon... ten years ago. And now there's Amazon for Business, they can centrally manage it.
Older people, not necessarily au fait with technology, are always shocked when I say "Have you tried looking on Amazon?" Everything from jars of sweets for a community event to hot tubs to laptops to videos to music to telephones to spare batteries for their old phone to garden houses to board games to new plastic drawers for their freezer to parts for their car to envelopes. They don't consider that one place can sell all that.
But, is it that shocking? I don't remember ever reading in books when I was younger where they discussed a future where "You'd still have to go to ten different shops to buy things". It was always "You can have all your shopping delivered, and parts for your car, and get it all from one place, and be charged automatically for your purchase straight out of your bank account without leaving the comfort of your own home!!!". We knew that that was what we wanted 50 years ago. Amazon delivered it (pun intended).
I think it's only a shock if you never sat and thought about it. To me, though it was surprising to find someone actually doing it, it was more a case of "about bloody time". I work for a school, the Amazon account has no less than 50 different names on it because it's used for every department - from hundreds of iPads down to a box of paperclips.
Rename Amazon to "Global MegaCorp" and you wouldn't notice the difference. We've been talking about it since we ever started imagining the future. And while users benefit, they will win. They can't just ramp up prices now they have the custom, even after everyone else goes. A competitor would still sweep in and remove them if they tried, and it would start in one niche and then grow like Amazon did (remember when they only did books?).
Personally, while it's beneficial to everyone, who cares? So long as they pay tax, I get the product I want cheaply, the seller sells enough to make profit and the middle-men make their money delivering, who cares? Little tiny local specialist shops are dying for a reason. Nobody cares, while they can get the same stuff more conveniently. They may pay lip-service to "supporting the local shops" but they just want the product, really. If they wanted the atmosphere, they'd pay for entry to the shop, not the product they sell.
You mean a GBP30 device that let's you bit-bang GPIO pins at up to 300Khz, run off battery and provide HDMI out and a Linux desktop is pointless for people tinkering with hardware?
I'm no defender of the RPi foundation (there are STILL performance and reliability problems with the USB and Ethernet buses because they are shared and under heavy load you can drop USB packets, they surfaced in the very first models and haven't been fixed and they tried to blame the SD-card, so I ended up sending my own off to a technician at Broadcom) but the devices are getting better all the time. Hell, for GBP30 you can slap RetroPi on them and build an arcade cabinet from the GPIO/USB that can run all kinds of stuff.
P.S. Nobody cares about h/w level programming. The BBC Micro:Bit is a flop. The RPi skips it and goes straight to Scratch on a Linux desktop. Teachers don't have the skills to do the simplest of things like that themselves, let alone teach them.
I speak as someone who works in IT in schools, spent all my youth doing just that, teaching myself Z80 assembly, removing the copy-protection on DOS games via disassembly x86, building circuits, etc.
I was one of the first to get an RPi, and didn't like it because it was "too easy", too powerful and too boring - but it's WAY over the heads of the average school child even with years of lessons. They'll turn it on, boot up Linux, click around, get bored, done. There's no way that even 1% of the RPi's that have been sold have ever had any amateur electronic hardware ever connected to them in a school. Schools will buy pre-made modules, or nothing at all. And if it hasn't got a lesson plan to go with it, forget it.
The RPi was sold on but NEVER got any focus as "educational kit for schools to teach electronics", they never even tried and they didn't even go to BETT (the biggest UK IT in schools exhibition), they have no interest in getting them there. It was my complaint about them from day one, that they NEVER did what they would need to do to get into schools. They just relied on "someone clever will do that bit for us", and it's never materialised. A good teacher could do it, but they could do it with anything and probably wouldn't choose an RPi (too many distractions readily available). There is NOTHING for teachers, and most teachers don't even know what they are, and even IT teachers wouldn't be able to image an SD card and boot them by themselves without a tutorial.
But as a hobbyist device, these things are fabulous, now. They could be a lot better, too. That's the point of them... a 1.4GHz battery-powered ARM kit that can bit-bang. Brilliant for me. Useless for teaching anyone anything about electronics or hardware that you couldn't just teach on a PC itself.
Honestly, nobody is going to officially teach the bits that you and I would like kids to learn, ever again, in any kind of serious depth. They just won't, because the teachers are two generations down from people who didn't understand it. Geeks don't go into teaching because the stuff they end up having to teach is SO DULL it's unbelievable.
Unless you show a kid it yourself, it's not going to happen with any level of Micro:Bit, Arduino,.NET Gadgeteer, RPi or anything else ever released. Honestly, it's just not.
It's a UFO. It's apparently flying (but that's not proven). It's apparently an object (but that's got a given either). And we don't know what it is.
And?
To be honest, it fits all the classic hallmarks of "UFO as aliens" sightings, from the scale, to the speed, to being just a blob. I'm really disappointed that people are still doing this stuff in 2018...
But I'm much more disappointed that Slashdot sees fit to make an article of it.
Surely just sliding the burgers into a double-sided wire-cage "envelope", then sticking them on the heat, lifting, rotating 180, putting on the heat again, then lifting, tilting, open a little "gate" at the end, and slide them out is not only quicker, easier, more consistent, more sensible and easier to make but it also reduces pretty much all the difficult jobs involved in it.
The excuse they used was that the robot can flip individual burgers when they get hot enough, but my brain just says "have even heating, for even times" rather than pissing about with computer vision, articulated hands, and still needing kitchen staff to arrange the meat in a certain way and work around it.
There have been automated burger machines for decades. It was always cheaper to just pay someone to do it, especially when it comes to cleaning, faults, maintenance, etc. The burger-flipping and consistent-cooking is the EASY part. They've taken that, over-complicated it to extremes, and not solved any of the original problems anyway (i.e. who cleans Flippy?).
And which you could do on any display device if you could be bothered to.
Sure it makes a nice meme image from a certain angle if you spent the time to photoshop it just right. Otherwise it looks like someone took a photo of the wall and then showed it on the TV.
And if it was REALLY convincing, even from an amateur taking the picture themselves, I'd be amazed. Most people have plain walls, surely, nowadays? You may as well just put a flat background of the right colour on it.
Same in the UK - they are going to have to advertise a guaranteed minimum as well as their headline figures.
We all know this was going to be abused from the second people started advertising "up to". They never really used to game it in the modem era, because it was 33.6K or 56K (or whatever) and your modem knew the difference.
Either we need to start charging based on the speed available (i.e. basically per gigabyte, which means most people on slow connections won't be able to consume enough to make money on) or we need to guarantee a figure (minimum or average, it doesn't matter, so long as you can get your money back if they can't reach it).
It's like saying that I'll give you "up to" 500g of sweets if you pay me a certain amount. And then only giving people one small jelly baby. It's fine to be approximate, it's fine to have variation, it's fine for there to be reasons for it, but it shouldn't be the norm.
I live in a major town inside Greater London. Highly developed area. Very dense development. Right in the middle of thousands of houses, roads, rail links, etc. And they will guarantee me "up to 5Mbps" on ADSL, "up to 15Mbps" on VDSL. That's just not worth me paying the standing charge for the line for, let alone the actual total cost.
I bought a 4G router instead and get a consistent 30Mbps from it. No guarantee, obviously, but I can change SIM card to another provider whenever I feel it's not meeting my needs, and I have no monthly ongoing tie-in.
But when 4G is at least 6 times better than what they'll promise on me on home broadband, there's something wrong.
3G was viable to use as a broadband replacement. 4G is more than adequate. When 5G becomes the norm, home broadband is going to take a massive hit, unless they buck their ideas up and start guaranteeing some service that we can't get elsewhere. And I guarantee that we see 5G in the rural areas before we see decent broadband speeds... purely because it then kills two birds with one stone - a single point covering hundreds of households for broadband and mobile phone coverage with no additional wiring required.
Telcos are going to drop home broadband eventually, and just start dealing in leased lines and 5G-antennas for nearby households.
160-180WPM last time I checked (which was 20 years ago, and I've not gotten slower).
Home-key typing slows you down but you do it because you were told to do it. My typing is rarely over the home keys at all, and my right hand wanders 2/3rds of the keyboard. Why? Because it's quicker. Little fingers are virtually unused, by the way. Row-migration of the entire hand at a time. Resting place, right hand diagonal from B to P, left hand almost home keys but also tilted, A to T.
Why? BECAUSE IT'S FASTER. And it's the way my hands have learned to type by 30+ years of almost 24/7 typing.
P.S. I can type blindfold no problem at all. I actually really annoy people because I can type while talking to someone in the doorway, literally typing an email on a subject that I'm not talking about, while not looking at either the screen or keyboard, and carrying out a separate conversation.
Try it. Seriously. The home row is a load of bollocks that you teach kids to get them started at best, but that they should abandon the second they have a natural rhythm and movement that's fast enough. Hint: Touchscreen typing doesn't take home-key typing well...
I have interactive whiteboards everywhere, and normal whiteboards everywhere, and I use neither. I use the projectors as display devices, but the whiteboard, by my desk, in my office, for my use, is blank. Except for maybe one day a year. And we use shared documents for anything like that. Scribbles, sure. I get that. Not necessary at all.
Diagram on paper? That's drawing. Entirely different. And for all the times I need it, I don't think years of education on how to hold a pencil are necessary. Pick up tablet, swipe a map, send to the person - they now have their own, permanent, non-degradable, shareable electronic copy. I draw on maps all the time. Printed maps. With coloured pens. To highlight areas and maybe draw a line. Again, not really worth the years of pencil-holding.
Napkin? Nope. Don't you do what I do? Get the number from the other person, ring them, bang you're now in each other's phone book synced to all their devices and backed up forever. Don't want to type the number? NFC. Bluetooth.
It's not that it's can't be USED. It's that it's not worth the YEARS AND YEARS of learning to hold a pen (which is less intuitive and more difficult a skill to acquire than pointing a finger at an electronic screen, as proven by the article and my experiences with young children doing just that). Use those years for something much more useful.
"Children adapt to best adjust to what they need to do."
Handwriting is dead. The writing is on the wall. (Sorry!)
These kids have 4 years of touchscreen and keyboard skills before they go to school now and we're teaching them to use pencils? Why? A lot of schools are issuing tablets to individual pupils from a young age and most certainly they still teach ICT skills.
We had to be taught how to write because it's not natural and "you'll need to be able to write when you grow up."
They need to be taught how to use a keyboard / touchscreen because it's not natural and "you'll need to be able to type when you grow up"
For myself, I literally have had NO NEED of handwriting beyond block capitals for the entirety of my adult life. Sure, I can do it. But I don't need it. And I have a degree and still didn't need it. In fact, I would argue that my degree is in one of the few areas where touchscreens and computers are useless for transcribing information - mathematics. I can out-formula anyone using LaTeX or equivalent by hand. But that's because I was made to use my hand, rather than a computer language with a GUI for laying out maths equations.
Rather than force these kids to hurt themselves (building up muscles like that is done by tearing and healing, tearing and healing enough that they strengthen the right areas - do you not remember wrist-pain when writing in school, because I do, yet I've never suffered from RSI even a tiny bit), to learn an outdated, obsolete and (to them) secondary skill, let them use the skills they ALREADY HAVE by the time they hit school, on a lot more relevant technology, which is much closer to what they'll require when they are older.
Fact is, I work in prep schools* - these kids are literally entering school able to type on QWERTY and do every swipe, sweep, drag, drop, tap and hold they will need until at least adulthood. And then we sit them in the ICT suite and try to teach them "home keys" (an outdated concept once you are able to type at any speed at all, like telling a rally driver to keep his hands on the ten-to-two position). And then we sit them in the English classes and force them to write with a stick for YEARS on end until they've learned to break their hands enough to hold the stick just right so that they don't have illegible scrawl but proper joined-up writing that they will NEVER NEED TO READ in their life (how much of what you read is printed or screen typefaces only? Almost everything).
No matter how much you disagree with abolishing handwriting, it's a stupid suggestion to forcibly train kids on an alternative older technology when they are so accustomed to the current technology that it comes natural to them anyway.
*Private education, age 3-13. The headmaster's 3-year-old son smashed their laptop screen because he assumed it was touchscreen like EVERYTHING ELSE he's used in his life and so kept applying pressure when it didn't respond to touch. I'm not even joking. And if the live-in son of the live-in headmaster of an exclusive expensive prep school (who still do "pen licences" for handwriting, etc. and teach Latin) is already that familiar with touchscreens, you can be sure that most people have that skill.
"Why the hell would they even bother to CGI that, you ask?"
I've not seen the clip but:
No actor to pay, just a CGI company already commissioned to work on the project. No cameraman. Get the shot exactly as you like, and do it years after shooting. No studio required. No casting agent. No wardrobe. No safety equipment or risk. No insurance required for stuntmen. Get the perfect shot and adjust as you go. No working hours. No rights.
No worker's unions for all those groups of unnecessary people. No royalties to them, either.
To be honest, I don't like the way movies are all about the CGI either. But they are also STUPENDOUSLY expensive, if you look at their budget figures. In some cases it would be cheaper to actually launch a shuttle and film scenes in space than it would be to make a studio set and film that way. But it's EVEN CHEAPER to just CGI everything in on footage shot on a backlot with a greenscreen. Even main actors (e.g. the "old" Terminator in Terminator:Genisys).
I think, while we still care about "it looking exciting" over "it being a good movie" we'll have an inexorable slide towards this kind of "virtual" studio.
Even great movies. The Shawshank Redemption. Two main actors. A disused prison. A library room. A sewer pipe full of chocolate sauce. A couple of outside scenes. No clever CGI or big stunts. Sort of thing you could film on the smallest of budgets. It cost $25m to make, in 1994. And that's chicken feed by modern movie standards.
This is why the independent studios are popular among people who like movies to have plot, storyline, acting, etc. No big budgets, no eye-candy. Sure, "dull" by comparison but that's like saying that the book of 1984 is dull compared to a movie version. It's almost a different media in that same way.
My ex- was European and hated anything that came out of the Hollywood... it was all the same dross with different explosions to her. I can see that point. Though I can turn my brain off and watch something mindless, I don't go to the cinema or watch most of the movies that everyone else does precisely because of that. I've got through any number of movies for about ten minutes and then just think "I'm bored".
Hollywood is bouyed up by CGI, big-name actors, famous franchises, lots of comedy in even the biggest of movies, and loud music which follows the action. It's like a fast-food meal. Maybe satisfying and quick and mindless, but after a while you do get a bit sick of it.
Video games are no different, though. This is why things like scandi-drama crime thrillers are now much bigger than they ever were... they are just actors acting in front of a camera with a decent plot.
It doesn't help that people expect them to do EVERYTHING - colour, fold, staple, multiple sizes, collation, bookleting, etc. all in the same job.
If we could remove them, about 10-25% of my job would disappear and I wouldn't be sad at all. To be honest, few things that we print out are actually necessary at all. It's people who can't work on the screen who propagate the problem.
I'm a mathematician. I'll give you handwriting/paper for mathematical formulae. For everything else, just put it on a document and share it with people. There's no need to print it out.
In my life I've owned precisely two printers. A Sharp JX-9200 and a Samsung ML-4500. The first was a "winprinter", mono laser with parallel port. I used it via a NetportExpress for over a decade and it needed precisely nothing to work for all that time. The Samsung was a "real" printer that didn't require all kinds of custom CUPS junk and was still parallel - it also worked off the Netport and required precisely two parts in its life - a HUGE bottle of generic toner (literally a powder in a big jug). And one drum. I think I bought a rubber paper roller for it once, too, but it was literally pence and I could have used anything of the right size that had grip as it was just floating on a metal rod... I could have just taped the existing one, but the old one literally wore flat from being a ridged wheel because it saw so much use.
Everything I've ever dealt with professionally before, during or since has been a huge heap of junk that requires so much attention, toner, ongoing maintenance, un-jamming and faffing that I can't be bothered with them. About the only printer I've used at work which I'd have considered was a HP Laserjet 4 (might be a 4V?) which came kinda close in terms of reliability.
I've never owned an inkjet in my life, those are just a complete waste and always have been.
I don't even own a printer now. I can't fathom why I'd really want to. The rare times I need to print something out, it's never urgent and I'll borrow someone else's (work, friends, the local newsagent). Hell, it's actually cheaper to pay for an online service that you email a PDF to and they print it, envelope it, put postage on it and post it for you in one hit. Let them deal with whatever huge automated monstrosity they have that does all that for them.
Hell, last time I flew, you could just scan the boarding pass direct from a phone. You don't even need to print out plane tickets any more.
Be suspicious of people who live by paper. It suggests they don't know how to use basic search-in-file tools, they want to swamp you in necessary data that's hard to analyse or modify, and that they can't read things on screen because they can't operate the computer sufficiently.
"Gauthier initially had her own couriers on staff, but, as delivery volumes grew, coordinating them became unmanageable"
Sounds like you overreached and grew so big you couldn't get the same profitability percentage anyway...
Try this... go back to your own couriers, and only accepting the same percentage of orders as you used to. Or hiring a fleet manager to sort out your in-house deliveries, saving you a huge percentage for a single wage.
But I guess you wouldn't do either of those as you know it has little to do with anything - business changes, either adapt or get shut out. And, to be honest, of all the business failures I've ever seen, you can see them for a long time lingering and building up on the balance sheet and being ignored.
If delivery costs too much... stop delivery. If the profitability is dropping, find another profit. If the food is good, to the point that you couldn't manage the deliveries, it should be easy.
Or, alternatively, take the profits you're getting and embrace the delivery culture. What's costing you most money? I would guess your premises. I've yet to see one but I see no problem with a food delivery business listed on those kinds of sites that has no physical restaurant presence you can visit. Literally operate as a food preparation and delivery company via those apps, with token presence wherever you need to prove catchment.
The Internet kills a lot of businesses, but almost always through providing a better service. You can't fight against that, only evolve and embrace it.
I could honestly and seriously live the rest of my live without having to visit a single shop, takeaway restaurant (maybe a proper sit-down restaurant for family meals etc.), supplier, provider, hell I could even book someone to cut to my house to cut my hair if I wanted. And the beauty is that such facilities provide me with MORE opportunity to get out and do other things much more classed as leisure (e.g. lounge in a nice restaurant) than before... it's optimisation of your life.
I have actually found it cheaper and much more convenient for me to pre-book a guy to drive to my workplace, change my car tyre with a model I choose online down to the exact specifications and brand, and bill me for that than it is to find a garage that's open after work hours, book it in, knock back all the upsell, take it there, wait while they do it, then drive home.
Time is money, now more than ever. And with food, especially, it's quicker and easier to take some buttons on the way home knowing by the time you get there your pre-paid food will arrive within minutes of you getting in (or even beat you there!). You can't compete against such things, but you could make an awful lot of money pre-empting and embracing them.
To be honest, I've enjoyed the vast, vast majority of my gaming life on systems that would be considered so laughably slow and obsolete now that people wouldn't take them off your hands for free.
It didn't once affect my enjoyment of the games, my enjoyment of replaying the games, or the nostalgia of going back to those same games 30 years later (whether on original hardware or via emulation).
If you think that anyone who plays games care about how many MHz or how many CUDA cores or how much texture RAM a certain device has, you're sadly in the minority. I gamed through the home computer rivalries, the 8-bit and 16-bit rivalries, PC vs console, online vs local LAN, etc. and not once did I ever care about having what was technically best, compared to what played the games I most enjoyed.
Nintendo are pretty much the only modern console company that get this. All their effort goes into the game design and new, fun twists, rather than what texture fill rate they can achieve.
Even in my "PC gamer" years on my twitch-shooters, I still didn't really care about those people who bought the top-line gear, overclocked everything, etc. just to get a few more FPS or a lower ping. It was the game that mattered.
Same as car-nuts. I'm sure your car does 0-60 in some unfathomably trivial fraction of a second faster than mine. But that's not why I bought the car. Don't put your use case onto me, or entire markets of billions of people who "just want to play a game with the kids".
If true, it may be possible to just get a "mod controller" box that just replaces one of the controllers for a one-off exploit.
I suppose it's possible that the nVidia chip involved has an exploit which is somehow possible to activate via a shared bus that happens to include the serial comms of the controllers. It would seem a bit silly, in design terms, but I suppose it's feasible.
To be honest, I never get why console manufacturers go to such lengths anyway. Go the Android route - if your phone is rooted, we can detect it and deny access to the store. If it's not, you can play ordinary games. If someone is prepared to switch back and forth between the two, let them, it means they are still paying for and playing normal games. If someone buys it just to hack it for homebrew, you aren't going to stop them but at least you get a hardware sale of YOUR hardware rather than "easier-to-hack rival".
Most people wouldn't use them, which is why people aren't buying them, which is why people don't make chips specifically for it.
That said, we could have had them in the 1980's. An LCD watch lasts for years on a tiny battery. Make that LCD screen a generic matrix like on almost every piece of electronic equipment manufactured at the time.
Now put a tiny radio in it that receives only and puts what's received on the screen. Now put a bunch of buttons on it that only actively transmit when pressed. Literally the tech is ancient. Apart from voice-recognition on the device, which the attached phone can do from your pocket anyway, you just needed a mic / transmit button and you could emulate that.
You could couple that to a smartphone-like device in the same way as AndroidWear etc. does, using tech from the 80's. Nobody ever bothered. Because... what's the point? You still need the smartphone.
Miniaturising the smartphone itself is dumb. You lose any function that relies on the screen being practical to see / type on. But sending the same content to a watch display and taking input? Easy. The fact nobody did it back then tells you why... it's not the tech that was in the way, it's the use-case.
I don't know about anyone else, but my first reaction to a tech is normally right, and normally the one I keep throughout my life. Smartphones were really cool at first, but underpowered and overpriced. When the power and price changed, I got on. Bluetooth headsets just made you look a twat and were only useful if you needed to use both hands (which presumably meant you should be concentrating and not on a phone call). I don't see as many people with them nowadays, they've died a death and people just use the phone like a phone. But Bluetooth was a fabulous idea, it just suffered from...battery life, cost, range, etc. all of which have been solved.
But my first reaction to smartwatches was along the lines of "Sure, you look like Bond... but what's the point?" and that's something that hasn't gone away. The use-case of a smartwatch is still just as obscure as ever and they lie firmly in the range of "fancy gadget". Hell, if anything they are just glorified fitness trackers and they were around in the 80's (there's a scene in the original Ghostbusters with a guy whose watch monitors his heart-rate and steps).
The coolness of the tech doesn't trump the necessity of a decent use case. We can miniaturise things to fit on the head of a pin, but unless we need a microwave oven that fits on the head of a pin, what's the point?
You streaming a 4Mbps stream over a 100Mbps local connection... sure.
You streaming a 1Mbps stream over a heavily congested 54Mbps wireless shared with a dozen people and interfered with by a dozen other networks? Er... nope. Things like RTSP etc. exist for a reason, and have done since the days of 56kbps audio/video streams.
SMB/NFS are all-or-nothing and work for video only because your system is capable of keeping up at all times. The second it CAN'T quite keep up for a moment, you'll lose audio and video whereas a proper streaming protocol won't - at worst it'll degrade (same reason for interlaced GIFs back in their day, and JPEG and MPEG and all codecs since have something similar that lets them recover a portion of data from a interrupted stream, and still maintain synchronicity by forfeiting select parts of the data).
If you want to stream over a local network without using a closed protocol - use VLC, which can act as both client and server and has any number of supported stream types (including RTSP) which work wonderfully. I once streamed a football match in HD to a hundred local PC's using a single central stream...
But SMB is just as obscure in this regard (hey, sure, we have compatible implementations but they are far from complete and every new Windows version adds new stuff in). And neither are designed with the use-case in mind which means, though it might "work", it's only doing so by brute-force and luck and when it starts to struggle, it can't compensate in the same way.
There's a reason that media boxes often support DLNA etc. as well as SMB/CIFS... because it's designed for the job.
Question - how many mass-market, buy-in-a-supermarket, easy-to-configure, easy-to-stream HDMI wireless devices do you know that use SMB rather than their own implementation? Because Amazon Fire, Google Chromecast, even things like Miracast, own the market. And most people WON'T EVER buy a cheap linux STB thing that does the same. Hell, they won't even understand what SMB is or why they'd want it. Because it would only work if they know how to share the folder, the PC / NAS name, a username and password, and where it's located on the drive structure. Compared to "click the cast button" on any wifi-connected smartphone, Chrome browser, etc. supported by Netflix, Google Play, BBC iPlayer, etc. and it doesn't even compare.
The enemy of open protocols is not cost, or implementation, or anything else. It's "does it just work with all the popular big-name services". Marketing. Everything from Skype, Whatsapp, Flash, Chromecast, etc. has a closed protocol but is mass-market. Nobody has ever heard of Ogg Vorbis, etc.in real-life. And people choose convenience and a brand name over hassle and a service they could have for free "if they just learned how" every time. Because learning costs more than most people are willing to pay, in time, effort and money.
If they're coded messages, it literally doesn't matter.
In fact, that's kind of the point of encrypted and coding - people can read your message AND STILL not understand what it says.
Sending as direct message would link the two parties conclusively. Putting a public message doesn't - literally anyone who viewed it could have been the intended recipient and there's no way to tell who it was.
Stupid headline/summary/article is stupid.
Any agency that wanted to get a message to an agent who can't reveal themselves would often find the best way to do so would be to publicly broadcast a coded message using a system that only that agent has the facility / knowledge / key to understand.
Everything from numbers stations, to messages in newspapers, to Twitter... it's the right way to do it without revealing the message, or the intended recipient.
Encrypt the message. Don't try to obfuscate/obscure the medium. Anything radio can be captured, anything visible can be photographed, anything written can be intercepted, anything electronic can be sniffed, anything audible canbe recorded. Pretty much the entire basis of things like TLS, SSH, etc. - who cares if the underlying medium is secure... form a secure channel over it using methods that EXPECT it to be actively monitored by an enemy (e.g. Diffie-Hellman, etc.).
For most online content, yes, it just tells the Chromecast what to play the the Chromecast pulls the stream on its own, independent (so you aren't killing your smartphone battery / data / whatever or tied to it being on to see your movie).
But desktop / tab / screen sharing, no, that's a media-transmission method of its own.
Sure, I imagine the protocol isn't as open as I'd like, but then same for all its rivals (AirServer / Amazon Fire / etc.).
That would require categorising every single video and every single channel.
And it would also mean that one channel would be fought over to advertise on, and everything else nobody would care or bid for. Big companies wouldn't waste their views on tiny groups of viewers, and would be annoyed that they can't all get fair shares of the big groups.
It would then quickly become a Ford / Barclays / McDonald's / whatever-channel of approved content anyway, as they'd basically buy up the channel and dictate the content directly, and YouTube would be able to do nothing.
It's better that you take generic adverts, on keywords, spread them over less popular videos, which removes the monopoly, uses up all their credits, they still get X viewers, and aren't forced to kowtow to their largest advertiser / highest bidder only.
P.S. A better solution would be... which of these three adverts would you rather watch for the next ten seconds, with three random choices. All kinds of metrics you could feed back, popular adverts cost more, a clear disconnect between "content" and "advert" (so they aren't directly sponsoring content they don't like their customers seeing them near) and no one advertiser could boycott you completely.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't scare me at all. I won't be around to see it. What scares me is people who buy home-based voice-activated gadgets, not those who want to buy all their stuff (made by millions of different manufacturers around the glove) from one convenient place.
Amazon don't really MAKE products (they have a budget own-brand, but who doesn't? They have a couple of TV series that lose a LOT of money and aren't very popular, but everything else is bought). They sell other's products. As such they are just an interface. In the same way that 10 years ago everyone was worried about Facebook being the only website that could do its job, it's now dying off and the kids use other services entirely.
Remember when MySpace was "the place". Amazon will be like that. There are already Chinese sites that sell way more than Amazon even. I'm not worried about them taking over the world.
Jobs? They have single-handedly revitalised the UK Post Office. They employ four times more people than Apple. They NEED to start paying proper tax, same as everyone else, but apart from that, I couldn't say that they're problematic in my country. If anything, all those manufacturers are benefiting from not having to worry about distribution channels.
And, sorry, but if supermarkets are so evil, why does everyone use them? Why does EVERY town have several? All this "protect local businesses" stuff is only ever lip-service, nobody actually cares about it because they don't want to have to visit 20 different shops like their grandmothers did to get the shopping in. It might have worked back then, it doesn't work now.
I'll happily sacrifice quite a lot for a 24/7 supermarket that sells all kinds of stuff conveniently, and a 24/7 online store with same-day delivery that sells everything. Because the lost productivity of pissing about with anything is more expensive than anything else. I'll happily take supermarkets and Amazon any day, if it gets me several hours a week back, both professionally and personally.
It's about time we stopped spending so much time and money on the basics (buying food, purchasing products, etc.) and actually got shit done instead. Even if that's spending the time with your friends. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon, supermarkets, and appliances like microwaves and dishwashers have changed my life from "50% of free time spent on chores" to "1% of free time spent on chores".
They are only a monopoly if they are "the only supplier of a particular commodity".
That's not true. If anything, it's the opposite. They are one of many supplier of it, but the only one who supplies it AND does all the other competing products too.
Reword it:
It lets users buy what they want, when they want it, at a decent price.
Shocking that in this day and age, someone considers that a "scary" business plan.
My workplaces were spending tens of thousands a year on Amazon... ten years ago. And now there's Amazon for Business, they can centrally manage it.
Older people, not necessarily au fait with technology, are always shocked when I say "Have you tried looking on Amazon?" Everything from jars of sweets for a community event to hot tubs to laptops to videos to music to telephones to spare batteries for their old phone to garden houses to board games to new plastic drawers for their freezer to parts for their car to envelopes. They don't consider that one place can sell all that.
But, is it that shocking? I don't remember ever reading in books when I was younger where they discussed a future where "You'd still have to go to ten different shops to buy things". It was always "You can have all your shopping delivered, and parts for your car, and get it all from one place, and be charged automatically for your purchase straight out of your bank account without leaving the comfort of your own home!!!". We knew that that was what we wanted 50 years ago. Amazon delivered it (pun intended).
I think it's only a shock if you never sat and thought about it. To me, though it was surprising to find someone actually doing it, it was more a case of "about bloody time". I work for a school, the Amazon account has no less than 50 different names on it because it's used for every department - from hundreds of iPads down to a box of paperclips.
Rename Amazon to "Global MegaCorp" and you wouldn't notice the difference. We've been talking about it since we ever started imagining the future. And while users benefit, they will win. They can't just ramp up prices now they have the custom, even after everyone else goes. A competitor would still sweep in and remove them if they tried, and it would start in one niche and then grow like Amazon did (remember when they only did books?).
Personally, while it's beneficial to everyone, who cares? So long as they pay tax, I get the product I want cheaply, the seller sells enough to make profit and the middle-men make their money delivering, who cares? Little tiny local specialist shops are dying for a reason. Nobody cares, while they can get the same stuff more conveniently. They may pay lip-service to "supporting the local shops" but they just want the product, really. If they wanted the atmosphere, they'd pay for entry to the shop, not the product they sell.
It's 1.4GHz.
And what 386 ever ran at 200MHz? Were you even around then? They ran at about one-tenth of that. Or over 50 times slower than a Raspberry Pi.
You mean a GBP30 device that let's you bit-bang GPIO pins at up to 300Khz, run off battery and provide HDMI out and a Linux desktop is pointless for people tinkering with hardware?
I'm no defender of the RPi foundation (there are STILL performance and reliability problems with the USB and Ethernet buses because they are shared and under heavy load you can drop USB packets, they surfaced in the very first models and haven't been fixed and they tried to blame the SD-card, so I ended up sending my own off to a technician at Broadcom) but the devices are getting better all the time. Hell, for GBP30 you can slap RetroPi on them and build an arcade cabinet from the GPIO/USB that can run all kinds of stuff.
P.S. Nobody cares about h/w level programming. The BBC Micro:Bit is a flop. The RPi skips it and goes straight to Scratch on a Linux desktop. Teachers don't have the skills to do the simplest of things like that themselves, let alone teach them.
I speak as someone who works in IT in schools, spent all my youth doing just that, teaching myself Z80 assembly, removing the copy-protection on DOS games via disassembly x86, building circuits, etc.
I was one of the first to get an RPi, and didn't like it because it was "too easy", too powerful and too boring - but it's WAY over the heads of the average school child even with years of lessons. They'll turn it on, boot up Linux, click around, get bored, done. There's no way that even 1% of the RPi's that have been sold have ever had any amateur electronic hardware ever connected to them in a school. Schools will buy pre-made modules, or nothing at all. And if it hasn't got a lesson plan to go with it, forget it.
The RPi was sold on but NEVER got any focus as "educational kit for schools to teach electronics", they never even tried and they didn't even go to BETT (the biggest UK IT in schools exhibition), they have no interest in getting them there. It was my complaint about them from day one, that they NEVER did what they would need to do to get into schools. They just relied on "someone clever will do that bit for us", and it's never materialised. A good teacher could do it, but they could do it with anything and probably wouldn't choose an RPi (too many distractions readily available). There is NOTHING for teachers, and most teachers don't even know what they are, and even IT teachers wouldn't be able to image an SD card and boot them by themselves without a tutorial.
But as a hobbyist device, these things are fabulous, now. They could be a lot better, too. That's the point of them... a 1.4GHz battery-powered ARM kit that can bit-bang. Brilliant for me. Useless for teaching anyone anything about electronics or hardware that you couldn't just teach on a PC itself.
Honestly, nobody is going to officially teach the bits that you and I would like kids to learn, ever again, in any kind of serious depth. They just won't, because the teachers are two generations down from people who didn't understand it. Geeks don't go into teaching because the stuff they end up having to teach is SO DULL it's unbelievable.
Unless you show a kid it yourself, it's not going to happen with any level of Micro:Bit, Arduino, .NET Gadgeteer, RPi or anything else ever released. Honestly, it's just not.
I absolutely agree 100%.
It's a UFO. It's apparently flying (but that's not proven). It's apparently an object (but that's got a given either). And we don't know what it is.
And?
To be honest, it fits all the classic hallmarks of "UFO as aliens" sightings, from the scale, to the speed, to being just a blob. I'm really disappointed that people are still doing this stuff in 2018...
But I'm much more disappointed that Slashdot sees fit to make an article of it.
Question - why does it need to be arm at all?
Surely just sliding the burgers into a double-sided wire-cage "envelope", then sticking them on the heat, lifting, rotating 180, putting on the heat again, then lifting, tilting, open a little "gate" at the end, and slide them out is not only quicker, easier, more consistent, more sensible and easier to make but it also reduces pretty much all the difficult jobs involved in it.
The excuse they used was that the robot can flip individual burgers when they get hot enough, but my brain just says "have even heating, for even times" rather than pissing about with computer vision, articulated hands, and still needing kitchen staff to arrange the meat in a certain way and work around it.
There have been automated burger machines for decades. It was always cheaper to just pay someone to do it, especially when it comes to cleaning, faults, maintenance, etc. The burger-flipping and consistent-cooking is the EASY part. They've taken that, over-complicated it to extremes, and not solved any of the original problems anyway (i.e. who cleans Flippy?).
And which you could do on any display device if you could be bothered to.
Sure it makes a nice meme image from a certain angle if you spent the time to photoshop it just right. Otherwise it looks like someone took a photo of the wall and then showed it on the TV.
And if it was REALLY convincing, even from an amateur taking the picture themselves, I'd be amazed. Most people have plain walls, surely, nowadays? You may as well just put a flat background of the right colour on it.
Er... Vivaldi has used Chrome as a base and been compiled with clang for a while now, I think:
Vivaldi 1.14.1077.55 (Stable channel) (32-bit)
Revision 46ff8f974f033190bbae67a70c7809ee15bc2353-
OS Windows
JavaScript V8 6.4.388.46
Flash (Disabled)
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.189 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/1.95.1077.55
Command Line "C:\Users\ldowling\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe" --always-authorize-plugins --enable-blink-features=ResizeObserver --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end https://vivaldi.com/newfeature...
Executable Path C:\Users\ldowling\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe
Profile Path C:\Users\ldowling\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\User Data\Default
Compiler clang
Same in the UK - they are going to have to advertise a guaranteed minimum as well as their headline figures.
We all know this was going to be abused from the second people started advertising "up to". They never really used to game it in the modem era, because it was 33.6K or 56K (or whatever) and your modem knew the difference.
Either we need to start charging based on the speed available (i.e. basically per gigabyte, which means most people on slow connections won't be able to consume enough to make money on) or we need to guarantee a figure (minimum or average, it doesn't matter, so long as you can get your money back if they can't reach it).
It's like saying that I'll give you "up to" 500g of sweets if you pay me a certain amount. And then only giving people one small jelly baby. It's fine to be approximate, it's fine to have variation, it's fine for there to be reasons for it, but it shouldn't be the norm.
I live in a major town inside Greater London. Highly developed area. Very dense development. Right in the middle of thousands of houses, roads, rail links, etc. And they will guarantee me "up to 5Mbps" on ADSL, "up to 15Mbps" on VDSL. That's just not worth me paying the standing charge for the line for, let alone the actual total cost.
I bought a 4G router instead and get a consistent 30Mbps from it. No guarantee, obviously, but I can change SIM card to another provider whenever I feel it's not meeting my needs, and I have no monthly ongoing tie-in.
But when 4G is at least 6 times better than what they'll promise on me on home broadband, there's something wrong.
3G was viable to use as a broadband replacement. 4G is more than adequate. When 5G becomes the norm, home broadband is going to take a massive hit, unless they buck their ideas up and start guaranteeing some service that we can't get elsewhere. And I guarantee that we see 5G in the rural areas before we see decent broadband speeds... purely because it then kills two birds with one stone - a single point covering hundreds of households for broadband and mobile phone coverage with no additional wiring required.
Telcos are going to drop home broadband eventually, and just start dealing in leased lines and 5G-antennas for nearby households.
160-180WPM last time I checked (which was 20 years ago, and I've not gotten slower).
Home-key typing slows you down but you do it because you were told to do it. My typing is rarely over the home keys at all, and my right hand wanders 2/3rds of the keyboard. Why? Because it's quicker. Little fingers are virtually unused, by the way. Row-migration of the entire hand at a time. Resting place, right hand diagonal from B to P, left hand almost home keys but also tilted, A to T.
Why? BECAUSE IT'S FASTER. And it's the way my hands have learned to type by 30+ years of almost 24/7 typing.
P.S. I can type blindfold no problem at all. I actually really annoy people because I can type while talking to someone in the doorway, literally typing an email on a subject that I'm not talking about, while not looking at either the screen or keyboard, and carrying out a separate conversation.
Try it. Seriously. The home row is a load of bollocks that you teach kids to get them started at best, but that they should abandon the second they have a natural rhythm and movement that's fast enough. Hint: Touchscreen typing doesn't take home-key typing well...
Nope.
I have interactive whiteboards everywhere, and normal whiteboards everywhere, and I use neither. I use the projectors as display devices, but the whiteboard, by my desk, in my office, for my use, is blank. Except for maybe one day a year. And we use shared documents for anything like that. Scribbles, sure. I get that. Not necessary at all.
Diagram on paper? That's drawing. Entirely different. And for all the times I need it, I don't think years of education on how to hold a pencil are necessary. Pick up tablet, swipe a map, send to the person - they now have their own, permanent, non-degradable, shareable electronic copy. I draw on maps all the time. Printed maps. With coloured pens. To highlight areas and maybe draw a line. Again, not really worth the years of pencil-holding.
Napkin? Nope. Don't you do what I do? Get the number from the other person, ring them, bang you're now in each other's phone book synced to all their devices and backed up forever. Don't want to type the number? NFC. Bluetooth.
It's not that it's can't be USED. It's that it's not worth the YEARS AND YEARS of learning to hold a pen (which is less intuitive and more difficult a skill to acquire than pointing a finger at an electronic screen, as proven by the article and my experiences with young children doing just that). Use those years for something much more useful.
"Children adapt to best adjust to what they need to do."
Handwriting is dead. The writing is on the wall. (Sorry!)
These kids have 4 years of touchscreen and keyboard skills before they go to school now and we're teaching them to use pencils? Why? A lot of schools are issuing tablets to individual pupils from a young age and most certainly they still teach ICT skills.
We had to be taught how to write because it's not natural and "you'll need to be able to write when you grow up."
They need to be taught how to use a keyboard / touchscreen because it's not natural and "you'll need to be able to type when you grow up"
For myself, I literally have had NO NEED of handwriting beyond block capitals for the entirety of my adult life. Sure, I can do it. But I don't need it. And I have a degree and still didn't need it. In fact, I would argue that my degree is in one of the few areas where touchscreens and computers are useless for transcribing information - mathematics. I can out-formula anyone using LaTeX or equivalent by hand. But that's because I was made to use my hand, rather than a computer language with a GUI for laying out maths equations.
Rather than force these kids to hurt themselves (building up muscles like that is done by tearing and healing, tearing and healing enough that they strengthen the right areas - do you not remember wrist-pain when writing in school, because I do, yet I've never suffered from RSI even a tiny bit), to learn an outdated, obsolete and (to them) secondary skill, let them use the skills they ALREADY HAVE by the time they hit school, on a lot more relevant technology, which is much closer to what they'll require when they are older.
Fact is, I work in prep schools* - these kids are literally entering school able to type on QWERTY and do every swipe, sweep, drag, drop, tap and hold they will need until at least adulthood. And then we sit them in the ICT suite and try to teach them "home keys" (an outdated concept once you are able to type at any speed at all, like telling a rally driver to keep his hands on the ten-to-two position). And then we sit them in the English classes and force them to write with a stick for YEARS on end until they've learned to break their hands enough to hold the stick just right so that they don't have illegible scrawl but proper joined-up writing that they will NEVER NEED TO READ in their life (how much of what you read is printed or screen typefaces only? Almost everything).
No matter how much you disagree with abolishing handwriting, it's a stupid suggestion to forcibly train kids on an alternative older technology when they are so accustomed to the current technology that it comes natural to them anyway.
*Private education, age 3-13. The headmaster's 3-year-old son smashed their laptop screen because he assumed it was touchscreen like EVERYTHING ELSE he's used in his life and so kept applying pressure when it didn't respond to touch. I'm not even joking. And if the live-in son of the live-in headmaster of an exclusive expensive prep school (who still do "pen licences" for handwriting, etc. and teach Latin) is already that familiar with touchscreens, you can be sure that most people have that skill.
"Why the hell would they even bother to CGI that, you ask?"
I've not seen the clip but:
No actor to pay, just a CGI company already commissioned to work on the project. No cameraman. Get the shot exactly as you like, and do it years after shooting. No studio required. No casting agent. No wardrobe. No safety equipment or risk. No insurance required for stuntmen. Get the perfect shot and adjust as you go. No working hours. No rights.
No worker's unions for all those groups of unnecessary people. No royalties to them, either.
To be honest, I don't like the way movies are all about the CGI either. But they are also STUPENDOUSLY expensive, if you look at their budget figures. In some cases it would be cheaper to actually launch a shuttle and film scenes in space than it would be to make a studio set and film that way. But it's EVEN CHEAPER to just CGI everything in on footage shot on a backlot with a greenscreen. Even main actors (e.g. the "old" Terminator in Terminator:Genisys).
I think, while we still care about "it looking exciting" over "it being a good movie" we'll have an inexorable slide towards this kind of "virtual" studio.
Even great movies. The Shawshank Redemption. Two main actors. A disused prison. A library room. A sewer pipe full of chocolate sauce. A couple of outside scenes. No clever CGI or big stunts. Sort of thing you could film on the smallest of budgets. It cost $25m to make, in 1994. And that's chicken feed by modern movie standards.
This is why the independent studios are popular among people who like movies to have plot, storyline, acting, etc. No big budgets, no eye-candy. Sure, "dull" by comparison but that's like saying that the book of 1984 is dull compared to a movie version. It's almost a different media in that same way.
My ex- was European and hated anything that came out of the Hollywood... it was all the same dross with different explosions to her. I can see that point. Though I can turn my brain off and watch something mindless, I don't go to the cinema or watch most of the movies that everyone else does precisely because of that. I've got through any number of movies for about ten minutes and then just think "I'm bored".
Hollywood is bouyed up by CGI, big-name actors, famous franchises, lots of comedy in even the biggest of movies, and loud music which follows the action. It's like a fast-food meal. Maybe satisfying and quick and mindless, but after a while you do get a bit sick of it.
Video games are no different, though. This is why things like scandi-drama crime thrillers are now much bigger than they ever were... they are just actors acting in front of a camera with a decent plot.
Pound signs haven't worked for me on this website for many years. I have a UK computer, UK keyboard, standard browser, nothing unusual.
Maybe they fixed it.
Let me have a look:
£
I hate printers, and photocopiers.
It doesn't help that people expect them to do EVERYTHING - colour, fold, staple, multiple sizes, collation, bookleting, etc. all in the same job.
If we could remove them, about 10-25% of my job would disappear and I wouldn't be sad at all. To be honest, few things that we print out are actually necessary at all. It's people who can't work on the screen who propagate the problem.
I'm a mathematician. I'll give you handwriting/paper for mathematical formulae. For everything else, just put it on a document and share it with people. There's no need to print it out.
In my life I've owned precisely two printers. A Sharp JX-9200 and a Samsung ML-4500. The first was a "winprinter", mono laser with parallel port. I used it via a NetportExpress for over a decade and it needed precisely nothing to work for all that time. The Samsung was a "real" printer that didn't require all kinds of custom CUPS junk and was still parallel - it also worked off the Netport and required precisely two parts in its life - a HUGE bottle of generic toner (literally a powder in a big jug). And one drum. I think I bought a rubber paper roller for it once, too, but it was literally pence and I could have used anything of the right size that had grip as it was just floating on a metal rod... I could have just taped the existing one, but the old one literally wore flat from being a ridged wheel because it saw so much use.
Everything I've ever dealt with professionally before, during or since has been a huge heap of junk that requires so much attention, toner, ongoing maintenance, un-jamming and faffing that I can't be bothered with them. About the only printer I've used at work which I'd have considered was a HP Laserjet 4 (might be a 4V?) which came kinda close in terms of reliability.
I've never owned an inkjet in my life, those are just a complete waste and always have been.
I don't even own a printer now. I can't fathom why I'd really want to. The rare times I need to print something out, it's never urgent and I'll borrow someone else's (work, friends, the local newsagent). Hell, it's actually cheaper to pay for an online service that you email a PDF to and they print it, envelope it, put postage on it and post it for you in one hit. Let them deal with whatever huge automated monstrosity they have that does all that for them.
Hell, last time I flew, you could just scan the boarding pass direct from a phone. You don't even need to print out plane tickets any more.
Be suspicious of people who live by paper. It suggests they don't know how to use basic search-in-file tools, they want to swamp you in necessary data that's hard to analyse or modify, and that they can't read things on screen because they can't operate the computer sufficiently.
"Gauthier initially had her own couriers on staff, but, as delivery volumes grew, coordinating them became unmanageable"
Sounds like you overreached and grew so big you couldn't get the same profitability percentage anyway...
Try this... go back to your own couriers, and only accepting the same percentage of orders as you used to. Or hiring a fleet manager to sort out your in-house deliveries, saving you a huge percentage for a single wage.
But I guess you wouldn't do either of those as you know it has little to do with anything - business changes, either adapt or get shut out. And, to be honest, of all the business failures I've ever seen, you can see them for a long time lingering and building up on the balance sheet and being ignored.
If delivery costs too much... stop delivery. If the profitability is dropping, find another profit. If the food is good, to the point that you couldn't manage the deliveries, it should be easy.
Or, alternatively, take the profits you're getting and embrace the delivery culture. What's costing you most money? I would guess your premises. I've yet to see one but I see no problem with a food delivery business listed on those kinds of sites that has no physical restaurant presence you can visit. Literally operate as a food preparation and delivery company via those apps, with token presence wherever you need to prove catchment.
The Internet kills a lot of businesses, but almost always through providing a better service. You can't fight against that, only evolve and embrace it.
I could honestly and seriously live the rest of my live without having to visit a single shop, takeaway restaurant (maybe a proper sit-down restaurant for family meals etc.), supplier, provider, hell I could even book someone to cut to my house to cut my hair if I wanted. And the beauty is that such facilities provide me with MORE opportunity to get out and do other things much more classed as leisure (e.g. lounge in a nice restaurant) than before... it's optimisation of your life.
I have actually found it cheaper and much more convenient for me to pre-book a guy to drive to my workplace, change my car tyre with a model I choose online down to the exact specifications and brand, and bill me for that than it is to find a garage that's open after work hours, book it in, knock back all the upsell, take it there, wait while they do it, then drive home.
Time is money, now more than ever. And with food, especially, it's quicker and easier to take some buttons on the way home knowing by the time you get there your pre-paid food will arrive within minutes of you getting in (or even beat you there!). You can't compete against such things, but you could make an awful lot of money pre-empting and embracing them.
To be honest, I've enjoyed the vast, vast majority of my gaming life on systems that would be considered so laughably slow and obsolete now that people wouldn't take them off your hands for free.
It didn't once affect my enjoyment of the games, my enjoyment of replaying the games, or the nostalgia of going back to those same games 30 years later (whether on original hardware or via emulation).
If you think that anyone who plays games care about how many MHz or how many CUDA cores or how much texture RAM a certain device has, you're sadly in the minority. I gamed through the home computer rivalries, the 8-bit and 16-bit rivalries, PC vs console, online vs local LAN, etc. and not once did I ever care about having what was technically best, compared to what played the games I most enjoyed.
Nintendo are pretty much the only modern console company that get this. All their effort goes into the game design and new, fun twists, rather than what texture fill rate they can achieve.
Even in my "PC gamer" years on my twitch-shooters, I still didn't really care about those people who bought the top-line gear, overclocked everything, etc. just to get a few more FPS or a lower ping. It was the game that mattered.
Same as car-nuts. I'm sure your car does 0-60 in some unfathomably trivial fraction of a second faster than mine. But that's not why I bought the car. Don't put your use case onto me, or entire markets of billions of people who "just want to play a game with the kids".
If true, it may be possible to just get a "mod controller" box that just replaces one of the controllers for a one-off exploit.
I suppose it's possible that the nVidia chip involved has an exploit which is somehow possible to activate via a shared bus that happens to include the serial comms of the controllers. It would seem a bit silly, in design terms, but I suppose it's feasible.
To be honest, I never get why console manufacturers go to such lengths anyway. Go the Android route - if your phone is rooted, we can detect it and deny access to the store. If it's not, you can play ordinary games. If someone is prepared to switch back and forth between the two, let them, it means they are still paying for and playing normal games. If someone buys it just to hack it for homebrew, you aren't going to stop them but at least you get a hardware sale of YOUR hardware rather than "easier-to-hack rival".
It's the other way around:
Most people wouldn't use them, which is why people aren't buying them, which is why people don't make chips specifically for it.
That said, we could have had them in the 1980's. An LCD watch lasts for years on a tiny battery. Make that LCD screen a generic matrix like on almost every piece of electronic equipment manufactured at the time.
Now put a tiny radio in it that receives only and puts what's received on the screen. Now put a bunch of buttons on it that only actively transmit when pressed. Literally the tech is ancient. Apart from voice-recognition on the device, which the attached phone can do from your pocket anyway, you just needed a mic / transmit button and you could emulate that.
You could couple that to a smartphone-like device in the same way as AndroidWear etc. does, using tech from the 80's. Nobody ever bothered. Because... what's the point? You still need the smartphone.
Miniaturising the smartphone itself is dumb. You lose any function that relies on the screen being practical to see / type on. But sending the same content to a watch display and taking input? Easy. The fact nobody did it back then tells you why... it's not the tech that was in the way, it's the use-case.
I don't know about anyone else, but my first reaction to a tech is normally right, and normally the one I keep throughout my life. Smartphones were really cool at first, but underpowered and overpriced. When the power and price changed, I got on. Bluetooth headsets just made you look a twat and were only useful if you needed to use both hands (which presumably meant you should be concentrating and not on a phone call). I don't see as many people with them nowadays, they've died a death and people just use the phone like a phone. But Bluetooth was a fabulous idea, it just suffered from...battery life, cost, range, etc. all of which have been solved.
But my first reaction to smartwatches was along the lines of "Sure, you look like Bond... but what's the point?" and that's something that hasn't gone away. The use-case of a smartwatch is still just as obscure as ever and they lie firmly in the range of "fancy gadget". Hell, if anything they are just glorified fitness trackers and they were around in the 80's (there's a scene in the original Ghostbusters with a guy whose watch monitors his heart-rate and steps).
The coolness of the tech doesn't trump the necessity of a decent use case. We can miniaturise things to fit on the head of a pin, but unless we need a microwave oven that fits on the head of a pin, what's the point?
Very much depends on the purpose.
You streaming a 4Mbps stream over a 100Mbps local connection... sure.
You streaming a 1Mbps stream over a heavily congested 54Mbps wireless shared with a dozen people and interfered with by a dozen other networks? Er... nope. Things like RTSP etc. exist for a reason, and have done since the days of 56kbps audio/video streams.
SMB/NFS are all-or-nothing and work for video only because your system is capable of keeping up at all times. The second it CAN'T quite keep up for a moment, you'll lose audio and video whereas a proper streaming protocol won't - at worst it'll degrade (same reason for interlaced GIFs back in their day, and JPEG and MPEG and all codecs since have something similar that lets them recover a portion of data from a interrupted stream, and still maintain synchronicity by forfeiting select parts of the data).
If you want to stream over a local network without using a closed protocol - use VLC, which can act as both client and server and has any number of supported stream types (including RTSP) which work wonderfully. I once streamed a football match in HD to a hundred local PC's using a single central stream...
But SMB is just as obscure in this regard (hey, sure, we have compatible implementations but they are far from complete and every new Windows version adds new stuff in). And neither are designed with the use-case in mind which means, though it might "work", it's only doing so by brute-force and luck and when it starts to struggle, it can't compensate in the same way.
There's a reason that media boxes often support DLNA etc. as well as SMB/CIFS... because it's designed for the job.
Question - how many mass-market, buy-in-a-supermarket, easy-to-configure, easy-to-stream HDMI wireless devices do you know that use SMB rather than their own implementation? Because Amazon Fire, Google Chromecast, even things like Miracast, own the market. And most people WON'T EVER buy a cheap linux STB thing that does the same. Hell, they won't even understand what SMB is or why they'd want it. Because it would only work if they know how to share the folder, the PC / NAS name, a username and password, and where it's located on the drive structure. Compared to "click the cast button" on any wifi-connected smartphone, Chrome browser, etc. supported by Netflix, Google Play, BBC iPlayer, etc. and it doesn't even compare.
The enemy of open protocols is not cost, or implementation, or anything else. It's "does it just work with all the popular big-name services". Marketing. Everything from Skype, Whatsapp, Flash, Chromecast, etc. has a closed protocol but is mass-market. Nobody has ever heard of Ogg Vorbis, etc.in real-life. And people choose convenience and a brand name over hassle and a service they could have for free "if they just learned how" every time. Because learning costs more than most people are willing to pay, in time, effort and money.
If they're coded messages, it literally doesn't matter.
In fact, that's kind of the point of encrypted and coding - people can read your message AND STILL not understand what it says.
Sending as direct message would link the two parties conclusively. Putting a public message doesn't - literally anyone who viewed it could have been the intended recipient and there's no way to tell who it was.
Stupid headline/summary/article is stupid.
Any agency that wanted to get a message to an agent who can't reveal themselves would often find the best way to do so would be to publicly broadcast a coded message using a system that only that agent has the facility / knowledge / key to understand.
Everything from numbers stations, to messages in newspapers, to Twitter... it's the right way to do it without revealing the message, or the intended recipient.
Encrypt the message. Don't try to obfuscate/obscure the medium. Anything radio can be captured, anything visible can be photographed, anything written can be intercepted, anything electronic can be sniffed, anything audible canbe recorded. Pretty much the entire basis of things like TLS, SSH, etc. - who cares if the underlying medium is secure... form a secure channel over it using methods that EXPECT it to be actively monitored by an enemy (e.g. Diffie-Hellman, etc.).
Caster.
For most online content, yes, it just tells the Chromecast what to play the the Chromecast pulls the stream on its own, independent (so you aren't killing your smartphone battery / data / whatever or tied to it being on to see your movie).
But desktop / tab / screen sharing, no, that's a media-transmission method of its own.
Sure, I imagine the protocol isn't as open as I'd like, but then same for all its rivals (AirServer / Amazon Fire / etc.).
That would require categorising every single video and every single channel.
And it would also mean that one channel would be fought over to advertise on, and everything else nobody would care or bid for. Big companies wouldn't waste their views on tiny groups of viewers, and would be annoyed that they can't all get fair shares of the big groups.
It would then quickly become a Ford / Barclays / McDonald's / whatever-channel of approved content anyway, as they'd basically buy up the channel and dictate the content directly, and YouTube would be able to do nothing.
It's better that you take generic adverts, on keywords, spread them over less popular videos, which removes the monopoly, uses up all their credits, they still get X viewers, and aren't forced to kowtow to their largest advertiser / highest bidder only.
P.S. A better solution would be... which of these three adverts would you rather watch for the next ten seconds, with three random choices. All kinds of metrics you could feed back, popular adverts cost more, a clear disconnect between "content" and "advert" (so they aren't directly sponsoring content they don't like their customers seeing them near) and no one advertiser could boycott you completely.