It's just weird. Not that anyone with some common sense wouldn't know that all these idiotic new fangled IoT devices will end up having their own problems with vulnerabilities and hacking, we basically have proof every single week or day on how easily those can be defeated... yet we keep seeing big companies investing on stuff like that as if nothing was happening.
Save yourselves the headache guys, and do not buy any IoT devices whatsoever in which usefulness do not trample security concerns and overall problems. Your fridge shouldn't be connected to the Internet, your dishwasher, your washer/drier, your home security cameras, your thermostats, your home lamps, your fancy bathtubs, your pet feeding machines.. basically anything that isn't computers/tablets/smartphones and perhaps a home server. If you can find a way to work around some of these to stay into the local network or simply disconnected from everything, it'll be better in the long run. The slight convenience they promise more often than not already doesn't go over all the trouble they bring with setting up, updating, configuring, solving bugs, going through glitches and all the extra work that comes with anything that is Internet connected, let alone worries about security and privacy.
Get over the hype, the promises, the ads, the control everything with your smartphone crap, the unrealistic idealized scenarios and all that - and bring things down to real world usage and real world experience. It's not that much of an exercise for the imagination. Folks buying IoT crap because it's shiny and new are no different from delusional compulsive shopping addicts. A device being connected to the Internet is not an advantage, but something to be treaded carefully.
I won't even mention AI assistants. People think they know how invasive and how bad these things are, but they don't. And I'm tired of discussing this with hard headed folks who willingly pay for and put these devices in their homes. I'll just laugh at the flurry of problems that comes from those when things start falling apart.
I'd think that by now, if societies were smart enough, we'd be thinking of ways to add convenience to everyday appliances while keeping them offline, not by ramdonly connecting things. But it just seems people haven't waken up to that.
Brings back memories back when I was editing videos few years back... Things were working fine and all with the Adobe suite with desktop PCs running Windows 7 or something, when out of the blue one of my bosses caught the Apple bug and decided to buy an iMac and start using Final Cut Pro out of nowhere.
Might not sound like much, but here in Brazil anything Apple related is expensive as hell. It's seen as a luxury.
I mean, it was a great learning experience for me, and we had the extra time since work was plenty optimized (we mostly had to deliver a weekly show and few other side jobs, so once the workflow was optimized we had plenty of extra time to mess around), but the first barrier that ultimately defeated the whole thing we encountered was lack of codec support.
I think it was still Final Cut Pro 9 back then, my gullible not so tech savvy boss bought into the whole "Mac is for work" thing, he spent a whole lot of money on an used iMac and surprized us with the whole deal one day.
It was a very small studio. Two editors, two partner bosses, one knew almost nothing about computers but was the one responsible for text and presentation, and the other helped with editing jobs and other technical stuff.
We used Sony camcorders only, Premiere took good care of that... Final Cut didn't. Also didn't work well with the miniDV recorder thing that we needed to use to send material up to go on air (open TV station, they must still be using tape stuff to this day).
So goes another round of transcoding and a whole lot of other headaches, until a couple of weeks later, we just came to the realization that it was just far better to keep working on the Windows PCs instead. Speed was a priority, and having to transcode stuff only got in the way.
This was when I got to experience first hand and come to the conclusion myself that having Apple stuff is just fine... as long as you don't need to go outside it's walled garden. iMessage is great, as long as you never leave the iOS ecossystem. Facetime works great, as long as the people you need to talk to all have iPhones/iPads of course. Some Apple users might find it ok to get rid of the headphone jack and switch to a proprietary Apple bluetooth/wireless standard, or use the lightning port instead... as long as you never decide to go for Android phones in the future. And Final Cut Pro back then worked plenty fine. It didn't have too much of a steep learning curve to go from Premiere to it... but everytime we needed to use footage from cameras that had incompatible video codecs or use stuff pulled from YouTube videos and whatnot, it was always a major headache of having to transcode crap and find a way around to use Quicktime codecs.
It's ok for studios that do all the work in house, but we often received material made by others, so no deal.
Even sadder was that the studio ended up loosing it's most valuable client few months after that and had to close at some point in the next year, so it really ended up being a huge waste of money. But that's a whole other story.
Far fetched as this thought might be, if a Nintendo console could be used as a regular tablet, with options to read news, visit webpages, watch YouTube, Netflix and whatnot, plus be used to do everything people buy a tablet for, it'd be a no brainer purchase for tons and tons of people.
The Switch is pretty well priced when compared to high end tablets, it has the most powerful SoC for tablets out there, the design is neutral enough (I mean, you have the choice to make it look like a pretty standard tablet), and I bet tons of people looking for a tablet device would be swayed into getting one... if it could work as a tablet.
Doesn't even have to be full Android or something like that. Most people who have a tablet only use a handful of apps already, if those were there on the Switch, it'd certainly be a huge reason for people to get it.
I dunno what's the fans position on this one, so this might be an unpopular opinion, but here it goes.
Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed with what Reggie is saying here. I don't see why Nintendo would keep the 3DS going with a product like the Switch. Fear of commercial failure perhaps, I dunno, but from a gaming standpoint, I'd be plenty glad if Nintendo just chose to focus on a single device making sure it had all the best content they could close deals with and whatnot.
Contrary to many voices out there, I was a plenty glad Wii U costumer. Don't regret the singlest bit the purchase, the console paid for itself and was one of the most used in my particular and admitedly very peculiar case (I got a console mostly to play in party game scenarios).
If the Switch can work as a portable, I don't see why it'd be a good idea to segment the market by releasing a successor of the 3DS with some sort of classification as if it's more for kids or something.
Also, if there is one thing that made me furious with the Wii U (and make no mistake, despite liking the Wii U I had a ton of frustrations with it), was watching all the great titles being released for the 3DS with the Wii U left to collect dust specially in the past year.
One recurring thought was always... if only the 3DS games ran on Wii U, even if it kept that awkward resolution and didn't work all that well, I would have used and bought far more games for the console. I'm not even asking for actual Wii U version of these franchises... just ports would've been enough.
Now, if Nintendo ends up with a Switch and a New New New New 3DS or whatever comes next to it, we'll end up in a similar situation with Switch owners wanting the portable games, and whatever hardware sells the most being relegated to no titles at all.
What is this time's reason for predicting "the end of PCs"? Is it something new or just the same bullshit I heard back when laptops came out, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, macs, macbooks, and a number of other things, all of which were completely wrong and with tons of assumptions and misinformation completely disconnected with reality? Is there any evidence whatsoever?
Dunno how to say this, but I have no sympathy for the companies and people involved.... been saying for the longest time that all this IoT crap are not only security and privacy nightmares, they also only make stuff needlessly more complicated and prone to errors and glitches. Guess you get what you deserve. Too bad.
Also create a way to put backdoors into already available secure encryption systems without compromising them. I'll give you a buck for that.
Sad that they don't actually realize that they are asking for something impossible for some cheap change. If anyone could invent something like that, they'd sell it for millions a piece for every IoT company out there that could end up with class action lawsuits and recalls on their hands.
I know many people don't realize this, but high end smartphones have been able to do just that for quite a while now. Mouse and keyboard can be connected by either Bluetooth or USB OtG, and screen could be done either by MHL wired or wireless mirroring.
The problem is the OS and a lack of good standardized accessories. Much like gamepads, it doesn't really matter if tou have the hardware to do it if apps are not gonna support it.
Android alao gives a shit support for most of those things... I had a smartphone with a smashed touchscreen for a while, you can't use the phone without it (some functions are doable, but it's a pretty crappy experience). I had to use apps like Vysor to get by while waiting for replacement parts.
The iPhone is even worse as it doesn't suppory most accessories.
This really isn't all that much different from any jobs or particular tasks going from human employee hands to computers... data mining and data warehouse aren't new concepts after all. Specialized software for whicher you give an input or scenario to get processed options also have been around for a while now. The problem for most of those is training...
"A popular theory among many is that Samsung attempted to further slim the form factor of the Galaxy Note 7"
This popular theory came from a private company that disassembled a single unit and came up with the speculation just to promote their own company, yet it has been spread by the tech press irresponsibly as a specialist opinnion.
Though the theory is plausible, it has no substance. So it' s a good thing that an official statement will be coming out soon.
It's done already, not coming. If I remember correctly, a guy married his PS2 sometime ago, and at least one japanese fellow married his Love Plus DS waifu at sone point.:P
This just means that Nintendo hasn't changed it's strategy.
Just to let people who didn't look into it know: nVidia Shield TV - powered by the same SoC - has games like Half-Life 2, Portal 2 and Borderlands 2. That's running Android, not an OS dedicated for games alone, though I'm not sure how much better things would be in a Nintendo proprietary OS. You usually have some gains there though.
Yes, it's not up to latest gaming standards, but it'll be powerful enough... a big step from the 3DS which seems to be the target anyways.
The move also makes sense if Nintendo is gonna keep prices down in comparison to the competition, and if the screen is at 720p it'll be better for power savings. I have no qualms with having older specs if that means I can actually use the thing for some hours rather than minutes as a portable device.
In any case, I see that every time some spec gets released Nintendo haters jump at the opportunity to criticize the company... like all previous Nintendo hardware releases, there always seems to be these opportunistic trolls that keeps repeating the same crap over and over again.
I'm not saying the Switch will be great, but how about we wait and see? None of the consoles and portables Nintendo made in the past decade or so were as powerful as competition offerings, yet at least part of them sold multiple times over the competition. Nintendo has repeatedly said in official statements that specs are not their priority. Putting the latest untested tech into new consoles also means there's not enough time to properly test things, that the price will have to go up, and that developers will have to deal with unknown variables that could end up delaying games and all.
If you don't like the strategy, just stay away from it. Nintendo does not need to be another Sony or Microsoft. Vita had plenty impressive specs when it came out, and we all know where that went. For all the crap people gave about Wii and Wii U specs, both consoles had great games even if the former failed to sell. 3DS, which has pretty poor specs for todays' standard, is still selling plenty well 5 years after it's release, with new games coming every month, which is usually more than all other consoles and portables put together... and the Vita trampled over it specs wise back when it was released, remember?
So yeah, let's keep things in perspective here. Is it a bummer that it's not using Tegra X2 and the latest tech? Sure. It'd be awesome to have some more recent titles running smoothly on the Switch, I agree. Some ports either won't happen or will have to be toned down to low settings to work. Things won't be all that different from the relationship between Vita and PS3/PS4.
That doesn't mean, and it never meant though that there won't be great games on it - which is what's most important for a portable/console system anyways. Did the DS or 3DS failed for not having specs on the same level as console counterparts?
For those wondering how monopolies get made, it's like that.
Obvious that AT&T and Verizon would say something like that, specially now that they know they'll soon be able to do whatever they want... they've built their empire with similar practices. Big corporation abuses it's power to offer free services, starve competition out and stop anyone willing to enter the market with their impossible to beat practices. And then, when everyone is using the service with no other option left, they f you up in the ass and tell you to stop complaining. Whatcha gonna do? You have no other options.
And people will defend them to keep the steady stream of scraps coming. Because they don't realize how exploited they are. Please do take my absurd monthly payments in exchange for paltry data allowance and a spotty service, as long as you give me free access to your shit streaming video app I didn't ask for.
Not that it's particularly anyones' fault that this happens, but this is why. I know because my country is just the same. These f*cking companies making billions a year in revenue complaining about not having enough money to upgrade equipment and invest a bit to allow people to have usable data connections at reasonable prices. It's the gamers/video streaming/whatever fault for using so much data monthly. We are so so poor we can't upgrade our aging infrastructure.
For anyone who can, who has access to, and is lucky enough to be living somewhere you can get a smaller local service, do it. I cannot thank my provider enough for giving me and some cities in my state quality fiber service with no downtime, excellent costumer service and no datacaps. It's all the proof I need that all the excuses I had heard in the past 10+ years or so of using internet service from huge corporations are all bullshit.
Nothing is free people, specially if it's coming from some monopolistic corporation. Tell them you don't really want free access to their streaming video service and that you'd want whatever sum it would cost to be discounted directly in your subscription.
I agree with Snowden, think he made a great attempt on warning everyone, which unfortunately wasn't effective enough... there, I said it.
Here's the thing: data collection and the erosion of privacy is only the beginning. Government and big corporations are still not leveraging their power much, but they are building it, and in time they'll use it. I imagine it now as something like pollution right around the industrial revolution. The general population will be mostly dismissive of it's consequences, mostly because they cannot understand how much it'll affect them in the future, and how many economies are currently being built around it.
The majority will say that it's a worthy tradeoff for all sorts of reasons, usually rooted in fear or convenience. Fear of terrorism, fear of criminals, fear of the future, because it makes my life easier, because I get services I could not get otherwise, because I can call for Uber with my voice alone, etc.
"I have nothing to hide" or "my life is boring" arguments must be something pretty close to people in the past thinking "but I live in farmland" or "the air is clean enough in my garden/city". It's because dangers like those requires a certain level of abstraction and/or statesmanship that most don't have or can't be bothered with.
People can easily let go of fundamental democratic rights as long as they don't perceive it as a threat. Problem is, much as we're only seeing large scale disasters and climate change overall only now (and some are still in denial of the challenges we'll be facing from now on), the consequences of privacy erosion and large scale data collection will only be felt, fully leveraged and weaponized, in a few decades. By then, it'll already be too late to do something... we'll at most be able to mitigate consequences if we survive the onslaught.
Democracy relies on a delicate balance of power between governments and the people. What data collection essencially does is handle too much power in the hands of a few. Eventually, the imbalance of power corrupts. We might get lucky for a while with politicians/businesses who either don't want to make use of that power, or politicians who don't know how to, but with it just sitting there waiting for someone to seize the opportunity, it'll eventually happen.
It doesn't have to be anything like over the top dystopic fiction too, at least not for quite a while. Much like Hitler didn't get to form the 3rd reich overnight, lots of predominant muslin countries were much less radicalized in the past, and North Korea didn't just expontaneously form out of nowhere, changes are gradual.
You really don't need to be a genius to understand the problem though. The devices you use in a daily basis are a huge part of you now. For mass surveilance, the main problem is going through all that data and picking what's relevant to use. This problem will get solved with AI eventually. And then, whatever agency decides to use this will be able to pull your dossier and decide from a miriad of choices how to control you. They'll know where you are, what you are doing, who are your friends, who you have been in contact with, what are your interests, what devices you use to further extract more information, what is your position in relation to politicians and laws, what or who can be used to change your mindset, what your weak points are, what blind spots you have, etc etc.
And all that is only considering that the data remains on a government or private company's hand without leakage. They still have an interest to keep the country in general intact, since they depend on it to thrive. All that data falling into the hands of hackers and criminals living in other countries, then the scenario gets a whole lot grimmer.
Man, lately I've been having a hard time imagining the thought process of feds, government administrators, and people in charge of proposing policies like that.
How can they extol the supposed advantages of a system like that so much without giving a single thought - or thinking that people won't - of all the horrible potential dangers of it?
Like, dang dude, I could have a very nice adrenaline surge in my system which would feel nice and be potentially benefitial to my health if I jumped out of my balcony right now from the 20th floor or something... *silence*
I mean, let's all ignore how regular non connected car systems were already hacked, how dangerous it'd be to make it obligatory for car companies to have a system in place, the track record of car systems' security and then overall IoT, the history of unwarranted fed tracking and spying... let's save lives by forcing everyone to wear short choke chains to be controled remotely by proprietary closed software no one has access to and hackers would eventually find a way of taking control. It's not like we have weekly reminders on how badly companies handle security.
"We are allowed to guesstimate battery time for our advertisement campaigns, but you are left to guess what those means".
I mean, I get it... they need to put some number in the ads. But I have to thank reviewers with consistent methods to know how long devices will last on a single charge...
It's probably the case for generic low end devices here in Brazil too, and probably most other countries. Bought one of those earlier this year, something like 50 bucks for a quadcore tablet that performed pretty decently. If you try to root it, the whole thing factory resets itself after power down.
It has several suspicious stuff pre-installed into it, and they'll always be back no matter which way you try to uninstall or delete them. Some apps are simply shovelware, but there's plenty of stuff that apparently had no purpose there.
Crapshoot. I wanted a tablet to read some comics and do some of the basics, and also to experiment on rooting and making a device secure... ended up in the trash, going for a reputable brand instead.
Look people, this sort of tech has been around for decades now.
I don't think most people know, but for some of these automated restaurant ideas and industrial food machines, you read "it has been around for years"... you'll think something like early 2000s, but it's actually more like back in the 60s or 70s. You know that conveyor belt sushi thing? It was invented in 1958. It had a huge boom, then it fell out of fashion, then it started becoming popular once again in early 2000s. But here's the deal: restaurants with regular non automated parts are still the majority and the most popular.
Wanna see something older? Try restaurants that serves food using vending machines only. One of those existed back in 1902, and it was in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A prototype restaurant is far from replacing jobs in a large scale, and if this is about robots replacing fast food workers in a smaller scale, this isn't news. China and some countries in Europe already used adapted industrial automation systems, robots and robotic arms. The fact that one restaurant is opening does not mean that it's economically feasible as a regular thing, doesn't mean that all restaurants will copy the concept, and it doesn't mean it'll work at all. http://www.theverge.com/2016/4...
Eatsa opened last year, but it's basically the same idea as the previously mentioned Automat that had an initial boom only to disappear years later: https://techcrunch.com/2015/08...
Right now, these automated systems are on average extremely expensive, single purpose, hard to maintain, and mostly seen as novelty both by clients and from a marketing perspective. We're still probably over a century away from a multipurpose humanoid robot that can do everything human staff do, in an ideal condition where the price, maintenance costs and usefulness counterbalances paying minimum wage or so. By the time miraculous robots like those appear, we'll be more prepared for the switch, and it'll happen gradually. And even then, it's hard to imagine robots completely replacing fast-food and restaurant staff unless we're talking about a future where robots are replacing humans. Because there will always be people willing to pay for a restaurant that has humans preparing your food and serving it.
The base logic why things like that don't suddently happen out of nowhere is easy to understand: even if by some miraculous circunstance we managed to produce perfect robots that would work flawlessly and require no maintenance in all restaurants in a city, this would automatically put so many people out of a job that these restaurants would end up having no costumers to serve, closing down before all the investment put into it had any return. But of course, we can't magically create thousands of robots out of thin air overnight, most robots and automation systems nowadays have limited functionality that's not usually adequate for fast food kitchen environments, and culturally people are not used to and will take a long time to get used to automated restaurants.
Perhaps far into the future we'll pay more to go to restaurants with an all human staff that will only be there simply because they enjoy working with that... but here I'm entering utopia territory. If we ever reach an age where robots can do most things for use at reasonable costs, we'll either have already implemented the universal basic income, or governments will be responsible for most of the upkeep of basic population needs. I mean, you have a damn army of multipurpose robots,
Dude, I called this thing as being bullshit the first teaser they ever released how many years ago... I dunno why so many people fell into their bullshit, it was so obviously fake, and similar to several other fake VR/AR design concepts. Well produced CGI, now revealed to be from Weta Workshop, but still a piece of fiction. And to make things worse, the company was secretive and "couldn't reveal" any technical aspects, always a good sign for a leap of faith amirite?
It's like believing all these people working on Hyperloop development will actually come up with anything near what Elon Musk hallucinated about. I wanna see all these companies involved in development after being funded in the order of I dunno how many millions coming out of their labs to say they finally managed to make something that works exactly like a maglev train, only with several drawbacks. It'll be beyond hillarious. Monorail indeed.
Nevermind stupid Kickstarter scams that are obviously made by and for stupid people without any scientific knowledge like Solar freaking Roadways, smartphones projected on your wrist, laser razors, impossibly thin NFC or bluetooth rings or some crap... it's stuff like this Magic Leap crap that I get worried about. Huge money and time sinks that leads nowhere. Hyperloop, Terrafugia flying car, and whatnot. Tech media becoming a huge echochamber loop of hype and press release bullshit without any publication stopping to think about things logically.
And then there are times that even big companies get suckered into shit like that not knowing what to do afterwards. You have concepts like Phonebloks, now defunct Project Ara, and Tango which just released it's first commercial phablet, started 10 years ago with that video with the WiiMote experiment from Johnny Lee. Though there probably were lessons learned with both projects, I can only imagine how much time, money and resources were sunk into these projects that anyone with enough sense could see that while they were cool ideas, there was no path into a marketable end project anywhere. And I don't want to sound like a hipster or something but I knew these ideas were bound to fail back when first rumors came around... like lots of other people I guess.
Maybe I'm an asshole pessimist and it really is this sort of stuff that moves tech forwards... but Project Ara always seemed like a cool but infeasible concept to me because it's completely impractical and incompatible with how smartphones are made and sold, I always kinda knew that stuff like Project Tango was destined to die because despite showing some cool stuff, it's not something anyone but perhaps the tiniest niche of people needs on their smartphone (same for Amazon Fire Phone), I never liked the whole 3D movie/TVs idea because of how inconvenient it was and how incompatible for a home TV environment it seemed, VR might end up dying if all the major companies that invested in it don't change their sales strategy - they are not devices for the masses nor they will ever be, and all companies entered the whole deal without thinking about marketability of it, I never got into the whole wearables and specially smartwatch smarband stuff as something to be marketed for everyone... yeah, I guess I'm an asshole after all.:P
Admitedly I also favored the idea of HD-DVD over Blu-ray because it was cheaper to produce... and even though I still didn't buy into Blu-ray (or 4K and HDR for that matter) to this day, the standard only won because of sheer corporate backing. It's all about the practicality of those ideas. I still have my DVD movie collection that will eventually become digital only, because everything over fullHD are marginal gains that I don't see enough benefit to invest into. VHS to DVD was definitely great and necessary, but I don't see much over this (biased opinion because my vision isn't 20/20).
Heh, I got lost into my rant and changed the subject... whatevs. Give me your hatred folks.
Be it Google or Apple, it doesn't matter if these companies are "offsetting" anything or buying carbon credits and whatnot. These are the companies that have enough money to directly build and invest on renewable power infrastructures to supply their own demands.
What's the point of them buying stakes on renewable energy companies if in the end their data centers and factories are still using unregulated coal power, usually in cities that desperately need to move away from those? It's a half assed way to make them look good.
It also creates a false equivalence... if this tendency catches up, we won't make the necessary changes to replace dirty energy sources with clean ones where it's most needed. You only pay for a bunch of clean sources that are away from where it's really needed, and help keep regular coal and oil sources where they have always been, usually to feed the industrial complexes in big cities with tons of vehicles that are all plenty polluting by themselves.
I mean, it sure is better than nothing, but still a half-assed way to go around it. Specially because it ends up delaying decisions, investment in R&D, and overall thinking on how to completely eliminate dirty sources.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just weird. Not that anyone with some common sense wouldn't know that all these idiotic new fangled IoT devices will end up having their own problems with vulnerabilities and hacking, we basically have proof every single week or day on how easily those can be defeated... yet we keep seeing big companies investing on stuff like that as if nothing was happening.
Save yourselves the headache guys, and do not buy any IoT devices whatsoever in which usefulness do not trample security concerns and overall problems. Your fridge shouldn't be connected to the Internet, your dishwasher, your washer/drier, your home security cameras, your thermostats, your home lamps, your fancy bathtubs, your pet feeding machines.. basically anything that isn't computers/tablets/smartphones and perhaps a home server. If you can find a way to work around some of these to stay into the local network or simply disconnected from everything, it'll be better in the long run. The slight convenience they promise more often than not already doesn't go over all the trouble they bring with setting up, updating, configuring, solving bugs, going through glitches and all the extra work that comes with anything that is Internet connected, let alone worries about security and privacy.
Get over the hype, the promises, the ads, the control everything with your smartphone crap, the unrealistic idealized scenarios and all that - and bring things down to real world usage and real world experience. It's not that much of an exercise for the imagination. Folks buying IoT crap because it's shiny and new are no different from delusional compulsive shopping addicts. A device being connected to the Internet is not an advantage, but something to be treaded carefully.
I won't even mention AI assistants. People think they know how invasive and how bad these things are, but they don't. And I'm tired of discussing this with hard headed folks who willingly pay for and put these devices in their homes. I'll just laugh at the flurry of problems that comes from those when things start falling apart.
I'd think that by now, if societies were smart enough, we'd be thinking of ways to add convenience to everyday appliances while keeping them offline, not by ramdonly connecting things. But it just seems people haven't waken up to that.
Brings back memories back when I was editing videos few years back...
Things were working fine and all with the Adobe suite with desktop PCs running Windows 7 or something, when out of the blue one of my bosses caught the Apple bug and decided to buy an iMac and start using Final Cut Pro out of nowhere.
Might not sound like much, but here in Brazil anything Apple related is expensive as hell. It's seen as a luxury.
I mean, it was a great learning experience for me, and we had the extra time since work was plenty optimized (we mostly had to deliver a weekly show and few other side jobs, so once the workflow was optimized we had plenty of extra time to mess around), but the first barrier that ultimately defeated the whole thing we encountered was lack of codec support.
I think it was still Final Cut Pro 9 back then, my gullible not so tech savvy boss bought into the whole "Mac is for work" thing, he spent a whole lot of money on an used iMac and surprized us with the whole deal one day.
It was a very small studio. Two editors, two partner bosses, one knew almost nothing about computers but was the one responsible for text and presentation, and the other helped with editing jobs and other technical stuff.
We used Sony camcorders only, Premiere took good care of that... Final Cut didn't. Also didn't work well with the miniDV recorder thing that we needed to use to send material up to go on air (open TV station, they must still be using tape stuff to this day).
So goes another round of transcoding and a whole lot of other headaches, until a couple of weeks later, we just came to the realization that it was just far better to keep working on the Windows PCs instead. Speed was a priority, and having to transcode stuff only got in the way.
This was when I got to experience first hand and come to the conclusion myself that having Apple stuff is just fine... as long as you don't need to go outside it's walled garden. iMessage is great, as long as you never leave the iOS ecossystem. Facetime works great, as long as the people you need to talk to all have iPhones/iPads of course. Some Apple users might find it ok to get rid of the headphone jack and switch to a proprietary Apple bluetooth/wireless standard, or use the lightning port instead... as long as you never decide to go for Android phones in the future.
And Final Cut Pro back then worked plenty fine. It didn't have too much of a steep learning curve to go from Premiere to it... but everytime we needed to use footage from cameras that had incompatible video codecs or use stuff pulled from YouTube videos and whatnot, it was always a major headache of having to transcode crap and find a way around to use Quicktime codecs.
It's ok for studios that do all the work in house, but we often received material made by others, so no deal.
Even sadder was that the studio ended up loosing it's most valuable client few months after that and had to close at some point in the next year, so it really ended up being a huge waste of money. But that's a whole other story.
Oh, and then, why not see it as a tablet?
Far fetched as this thought might be, if a Nintendo console could be used as a regular tablet, with options to read news, visit webpages, watch YouTube, Netflix and whatnot, plus be used to do everything people buy a tablet for, it'd be a no brainer purchase for tons and tons of people.
The Switch is pretty well priced when compared to high end tablets, it has the most powerful SoC for tablets out there, the design is neutral enough (I mean, you have the choice to make it look like a pretty standard tablet), and I bet tons of people looking for a tablet device would be swayed into getting one... if it could work as a tablet.
Doesn't even have to be full Android or something like that. Most people who have a tablet only use a handful of apps already, if those were there on the Switch, it'd certainly be a huge reason for people to get it.
I dunno what's the fans position on this one, so this might be an unpopular opinion, but here it goes.
Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed with what Reggie is saying here. I don't see why Nintendo would keep the 3DS going with a product like the Switch. Fear of commercial failure perhaps, I dunno, but from a gaming standpoint, I'd be plenty glad if Nintendo just chose to focus on a single device making sure it had all the best content they could close deals with and whatnot.
Contrary to many voices out there, I was a plenty glad Wii U costumer. Don't regret the singlest bit the purchase, the console paid for itself and was one of the most used in my particular and admitedly very peculiar case (I got a console mostly to play in party game scenarios).
If the Switch can work as a portable, I don't see why it'd be a good idea to segment the market by releasing a successor of the 3DS with some sort of classification as if it's more for kids or something.
Also, if there is one thing that made me furious with the Wii U (and make no mistake, despite liking the Wii U I had a ton of frustrations with it), was watching all the great titles being released for the 3DS with the Wii U left to collect dust specially in the past year.
One recurring thought was always... if only the 3DS games ran on Wii U, even if it kept that awkward resolution and didn't work all that well, I would have used and bought far more games for the console. I'm not even asking for actual Wii U version of these franchises... just ports would've been enough.
Now, if Nintendo ends up with a Switch and a New New New New 3DS or whatever comes next to it, we'll end up in a similar situation with Switch owners wanting the portable games, and whatever hardware sells the most being relegated to no titles at all.
What is this time's reason for predicting "the end of PCs"? Is it something new or just the same bullshit I heard back when laptops came out, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, macs, macbooks, and a number of other things, all of which were completely wrong and with tons of assumptions and misinformation completely disconnected with reality?
Is there any evidence whatsoever?
Duh, this went to the wrong post, sorry.
Dunno how to say this, but I have no sympathy for the companies and people involved.... been saying for the longest time that all this IoT crap are not only security and privacy nightmares, they also only make stuff needlessly more complicated and prone to errors and glitches.
Guess you get what you deserve. Too bad.
Also create a way to put backdoors into already available secure encryption systems without compromising them. I'll give you a buck for that.
Sad that they don't actually realize that they are asking for something impossible for some cheap change. If anyone could invent something like that, they'd sell it for millions a piece for every IoT company out there that could end up with class action lawsuits and recalls on their hands.
I know many people don't realize this, but high end smartphones have been able to do just that for quite a while now. Mouse and keyboard can be connected by either Bluetooth or USB OtG, and screen could be done either by MHL wired or wireless mirroring.
The problem is the OS and a lack of good standardized accessories. Much like gamepads, it doesn't really matter if tou have the hardware to do it if apps are not gonna support it.
Android alao gives a shit support for most of those things... I had a smartphone with a smashed touchscreen for a while, you can't use the phone without it (some functions are doable, but it's a pretty crappy experience). I had to use apps like Vysor to get by while waiting for replacement parts.
The iPhone is even worse as it doesn't suppory most accessories.
This really isn't all that much different from any jobs or particular tasks going from human employee hands to computers... data mining and data warehouse aren't new concepts after all.
Specialized software for whicher you give an input or scenario to get processed options also have been around for a while now. The problem for most of those is training...
"A popular theory among many is that Samsung attempted to further slim the form factor of the Galaxy Note 7"
This popular theory came from a private company that disassembled a single unit and came up with the speculation just to promote their own company, yet it has been spread by the tech press irresponsibly as a specialist opinnion.
Though the theory is plausible, it has no substance. So it' s a good thing that an official statement will be coming out soon.
It's done already, not coming. If I remember correctly, a guy married his PS2 sometime ago, and at least one japanese fellow married his Love Plus DS waifu at sone point. :P
This just means that Nintendo hasn't changed it's strategy.
Just to let people who didn't look into it know: nVidia Shield TV - powered by the same SoC - has games like Half-Life 2, Portal 2 and Borderlands 2.
That's running Android, not an OS dedicated for games alone, though I'm not sure how much better things would be in a Nintendo proprietary OS. You usually have some gains there though.
Yes, it's not up to latest gaming standards, but it'll be powerful enough... a big step from the 3DS which seems to be the target anyways.
The move also makes sense if Nintendo is gonna keep prices down in comparison to the competition, and if the screen is at 720p it'll be better for power savings. I have no qualms with having older specs if that means I can actually use the thing for some hours rather than minutes as a portable device.
In any case, I see that every time some spec gets released Nintendo haters jump at the opportunity to criticize the company... like all previous Nintendo hardware releases, there always seems to be these opportunistic trolls that keeps repeating the same crap over and over again.
I'm not saying the Switch will be great, but how about we wait and see? None of the consoles and portables Nintendo made in the past decade or so were as powerful as competition offerings, yet at least part of them sold multiple times over the competition. Nintendo has repeatedly said in official statements that specs are not their priority. Putting the latest untested tech into new consoles also means there's not enough time to properly test things, that the price will have to go up, and that developers will have to deal with unknown variables that could end up delaying games and all.
If you don't like the strategy, just stay away from it. Nintendo does not need to be another Sony or Microsoft. Vita had plenty impressive specs when it came out, and we all know where that went. For all the crap people gave about Wii and Wii U specs, both consoles had great games even if the former failed to sell. 3DS, which has pretty poor specs for todays' standard, is still selling plenty well 5 years after it's release, with new games coming every month, which is usually more than all other consoles and portables put together... and the Vita trampled over it specs wise back when it was released, remember?
So yeah, let's keep things in perspective here. Is it a bummer that it's not using Tegra X2 and the latest tech? Sure. It'd be awesome to have some more recent titles running smoothly on the Switch, I agree. Some ports either won't happen or will have to be toned down to low settings to work. Things won't be all that different from the relationship between Vita and PS3/PS4.
That doesn't mean, and it never meant though that there won't be great games on it - which is what's most important for a portable/console system anyways. Did the DS or 3DS failed for not having specs on the same level as console counterparts?
Damnit One! Ruining it for everyone.
For those wondering how monopolies get made, it's like that.
Obvious that AT&T and Verizon would say something like that, specially now that they know they'll soon be able to do whatever they want... they've built their empire with similar practices.
Big corporation abuses it's power to offer free services, starve competition out and stop anyone willing to enter the market with their impossible to beat practices. And then, when everyone is using the service with no other option left, they f you up in the ass and tell you to stop complaining. Whatcha gonna do? You have no other options.
And people will defend them to keep the steady stream of scraps coming. Because they don't realize how exploited they are. Please do take my absurd monthly payments in exchange for paltry data allowance and a spotty service, as long as you give me free access to your shit streaming video app I didn't ask for.
Not that it's particularly anyones' fault that this happens, but this is why. I know because my country is just the same. These f*cking companies making billions a year in revenue complaining about not having enough money to upgrade equipment and invest a bit to allow people to have usable data connections at reasonable prices. It's the gamers/video streaming/whatever fault for using so much data monthly. We are so so poor we can't upgrade our aging infrastructure.
For anyone who can, who has access to, and is lucky enough to be living somewhere you can get a smaller local service, do it. I cannot thank my provider enough for giving me and some cities in my state quality fiber service with no downtime, excellent costumer service and no datacaps. It's all the proof I need that all the excuses I had heard in the past 10+ years or so of using internet service from huge corporations are all bullshit.
Nothing is free people, specially if it's coming from some monopolistic corporation. Tell them you don't really want free access to their streaming video service and that you'd want whatever sum it would cost to be discounted directly in your subscription.
Even vultures are selective about the rotten carcass they eat, apparently. xD
I agree with Snowden, think he made a great attempt on warning everyone, which unfortunately wasn't effective enough... there, I said it.
Here's the thing: data collection and the erosion of privacy is only the beginning. Government and big corporations are still not leveraging their power much, but they are building it, and in time they'll use it. I imagine it now as something like pollution right around the industrial revolution. The general population will be mostly dismissive of it's consequences, mostly because they cannot understand how much it'll affect them in the future, and how many economies are currently being built around it.
The majority will say that it's a worthy tradeoff for all sorts of reasons, usually rooted in fear or convenience. Fear of terrorism, fear of criminals, fear of the future, because it makes my life easier, because I get services I could not get otherwise, because I can call for Uber with my voice alone, etc.
"I have nothing to hide" or "my life is boring" arguments must be something pretty close to people in the past thinking "but I live in farmland" or "the air is clean enough in my garden/city". It's because dangers like those requires a certain level of abstraction and/or statesmanship that most don't have or can't be bothered with.
People can easily let go of fundamental democratic rights as long as they don't perceive it as a threat. Problem is, much as we're only seeing large scale disasters and climate change overall only now (and some are still in denial of the challenges we'll be facing from now on), the consequences of privacy erosion and large scale data collection will only be felt, fully leveraged and weaponized, in a few decades. By then, it'll already be too late to do something... we'll at most be able to mitigate consequences if we survive the onslaught.
Democracy relies on a delicate balance of power between governments and the people. What data collection essencially does is handle too much power in the hands of a few. Eventually, the imbalance of power corrupts. We might get lucky for a while with politicians/businesses who either don't want to make use of that power, or politicians who don't know how to, but with it just sitting there waiting for someone to seize the opportunity, it'll eventually happen.
It doesn't have to be anything like over the top dystopic fiction too, at least not for quite a while. Much like Hitler didn't get to form the 3rd reich overnight, lots of predominant muslin countries were much less radicalized in the past, and North Korea didn't just expontaneously form out of nowhere, changes are gradual.
You really don't need to be a genius to understand the problem though. The devices you use in a daily basis are a huge part of you now.
For mass surveilance, the main problem is going through all that data and picking what's relevant to use. This problem will get solved with AI eventually.
And then, whatever agency decides to use this will be able to pull your dossier and decide from a miriad of choices how to control you.
They'll know where you are, what you are doing, who are your friends, who you have been in contact with, what are your interests, what devices you use to further extract more information, what is your position in relation to politicians and laws, what or who can be used to change your mindset, what your weak points are, what blind spots you have, etc etc.
And all that is only considering that the data remains on a government or private company's hand without leakage. They still have an interest to keep the country in general intact, since they depend on it to thrive. All that data falling into the hands of hackers and criminals living in other countries, then the scenario gets a whole lot grimmer.
Man, lately I've been having a hard time imagining the thought process of feds, government administrators, and people in charge of proposing policies like that.
How can they extol the supposed advantages of a system like that so much without giving a single thought - or thinking that people won't - of all the horrible potential dangers of it?
Like, dang dude, I could have a very nice adrenaline surge in my system which would feel nice and be potentially benefitial to my health if I jumped out of my balcony right now from the 20th floor or something... *silence*
I mean, let's all ignore how regular non connected car systems were already hacked, how dangerous it'd be to make it obligatory for car companies to have a system in place, the track record of car systems' security and then overall IoT, the history of unwarranted fed tracking and spying... let's save lives by forcing everyone to wear short choke chains to be controled remotely by proprietary closed software no one has access to and hackers would eventually find a way of taking control. It's not like we have weekly reminders on how badly companies handle security.
"We are allowed to guesstimate battery time for our advertisement campaigns, but you are left to guess what those means".
I mean, I get it... they need to put some number in the ads. But I have to thank reviewers with consistent methods to know how long devices will last on a single charge...
It's probably the case for generic low end devices here in Brazil too, and probably most other countries.
Bought one of those earlier this year, something like 50 bucks for a quadcore tablet that performed pretty decently.
If you try to root it, the whole thing factory resets itself after power down.
It has several suspicious stuff pre-installed into it, and they'll always be back no matter which way you try to uninstall or delete them.
Some apps are simply shovelware, but there's plenty of stuff that apparently had no purpose there.
Crapshoot. I wanted a tablet to read some comics and do some of the basics, and also to experiment on rooting and making a device secure... ended up in the trash, going for a reputable brand instead.
Me: Cortana, are you part of the Mirai 2.0 botnet?
Cortana: I don't know what you are talking about Dave. Now, let me get back to work, I'm busy here.
Of course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Look people, this sort of tech has been around for decades now.
I don't think most people know, but for some of these automated restaurant ideas and industrial food machines, you read "it has been around for years"... you'll think something like early 2000s, but it's actually more like back in the 60s or 70s. You know that conveyor belt sushi thing? It was invented in 1958. It had a huge boom, then it fell out of fashion, then it started becoming popular once again in early 2000s. But here's the deal: restaurants with regular non automated parts are still the majority and the most popular.
Wanna see something older? Try restaurants that serves food using vending machines only. One of those existed back in 1902, and it was in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A prototype restaurant is far from replacing jobs in a large scale, and if this is about robots replacing fast food workers in a smaller scale, this isn't news. China and some countries in Europe already used adapted industrial automation systems, robots and robotic arms. The fact that one restaurant is opening does not mean that it's economically feasible as a regular thing, doesn't mean that all restaurants will copy the concept, and it doesn't mean it'll work at all.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4...
Remember this Nuremberg restaurant from 2007?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
How about this japanese restaurant from 2009?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Eatsa opened last year, but it's basically the same idea as the previously mentioned Automat that had an initial boom only to disappear years later:
https://techcrunch.com/2015/08...
Right now, these automated systems are on average extremely expensive, single purpose, hard to maintain, and mostly seen as novelty both by clients and from a marketing perspective. We're still probably over a century away from a multipurpose humanoid robot that can do everything human staff do, in an ideal condition where the price, maintenance costs and usefulness counterbalances paying minimum wage or so. By the time miraculous robots like those appear, we'll be more prepared for the switch, and it'll happen gradually. And even then, it's hard to imagine robots completely replacing fast-food and restaurant staff unless we're talking about a future where robots are replacing humans. Because there will always be people willing to pay for a restaurant that has humans preparing your food and serving it.
The base logic why things like that don't suddently happen out of nowhere is easy to understand: even if by some miraculous circunstance we managed to produce perfect robots that would work flawlessly and require no maintenance in all restaurants in a city, this would automatically put so many people out of a job that these restaurants would end up having no costumers to serve, closing down before all the investment put into it had any return. But of course, we can't magically create thousands of robots out of thin air overnight, most robots and automation systems nowadays have limited functionality that's not usually adequate for fast food kitchen environments, and culturally people are not used to and will take a long time to get used to automated restaurants.
Perhaps far into the future we'll pay more to go to restaurants with an all human staff that will only be there simply because they enjoy working with that... but here I'm entering utopia territory. If we ever reach an age where robots can do most things for use at reasonable costs, we'll either have already implemented the universal basic income, or governments will be responsible for most of the upkeep of basic population needs. I mean, you have a damn army of multipurpose robots,
Dude, I called this thing as being bullshit the first teaser they ever released how many years ago... I dunno why so many people fell into their bullshit, it was so obviously fake, and similar to several other fake VR/AR design concepts. Well produced CGI, now revealed to be from Weta Workshop, but still a piece of fiction. And to make things worse, the company was secretive and "couldn't reveal" any technical aspects, always a good sign for a leap of faith amirite?
It's like believing all these people working on Hyperloop development will actually come up with anything near what Elon Musk hallucinated about.
I wanna see all these companies involved in development after being funded in the order of I dunno how many millions coming out of their labs to say they finally managed to make something that works exactly like a maglev train, only with several drawbacks. It'll be beyond hillarious. Monorail indeed.
Nevermind stupid Kickstarter scams that are obviously made by and for stupid people without any scientific knowledge like Solar freaking Roadways, smartphones projected on your wrist, laser razors, impossibly thin NFC or bluetooth rings or some crap... it's stuff like this Magic Leap crap that I get worried about. Huge money and time sinks that leads nowhere. Hyperloop, Terrafugia flying car, and whatnot. Tech media becoming a huge echochamber loop of hype and press release bullshit without any publication stopping to think about things logically.
And then there are times that even big companies get suckered into shit like that not knowing what to do afterwards. You have concepts like Phonebloks, now defunct Project Ara, and Tango which just released it's first commercial phablet, started 10 years ago with that video with the WiiMote experiment from Johnny Lee. Though there probably were lessons learned with both projects, I can only imagine how much time, money and resources were sunk into these projects that anyone with enough sense could see that while they were cool ideas, there was no path into a marketable end project anywhere. And I don't want to sound like a hipster or something but I knew these ideas were bound to fail back when first rumors came around... like lots of other people I guess.
Maybe I'm an asshole pessimist and it really is this sort of stuff that moves tech forwards... but Project Ara always seemed like a cool but infeasible concept to me because it's completely impractical and incompatible with how smartphones are made and sold, I always kinda knew that stuff like Project Tango was destined to die because despite showing some cool stuff, it's not something anyone but perhaps the tiniest niche of people needs on their smartphone (same for Amazon Fire Phone), I never liked the whole 3D movie/TVs idea because of how inconvenient it was and how incompatible for a home TV environment it seemed, VR might end up dying if all the major companies that invested in it don't change their sales strategy - they are not devices for the masses nor they will ever be, and all companies entered the whole deal without thinking about marketability of it, I never got into the whole wearables and specially smartwatch smarband stuff as something to be marketed for everyone... yeah, I guess I'm an asshole after all. :P
Admitedly I also favored the idea of HD-DVD over Blu-ray because it was cheaper to produce... and even though I still didn't buy into Blu-ray (or 4K and HDR for that matter) to this day, the standard only won because of sheer corporate backing. It's all about the practicality of those ideas. I still have my DVD movie collection that will eventually become digital only, because everything over fullHD are marginal gains that I don't see enough benefit to invest into. VHS to DVD was definitely great and necessary, but I don't see much over this (biased opinion because my vision isn't 20/20).
Heh, I got lost into my rant and changed the subject... whatevs. Give me your hatred folks.
Be it Google or Apple, it doesn't matter if these companies are "offsetting" anything or buying carbon credits and whatnot.
These are the companies that have enough money to directly build and invest on renewable power infrastructures to supply their own demands.
What's the point of them buying stakes on renewable energy companies if in the end their data centers and factories are still using unregulated coal power, usually in cities that desperately need to move away from those? It's a half assed way to make them look good.
It also creates a false equivalence... if this tendency catches up, we won't make the necessary changes to replace dirty energy sources with clean ones where it's most needed. You only pay for a bunch of clean sources that are away from where it's really needed, and help keep regular coal and oil sources where they have always been, usually to feed the industrial complexes in big cities with tons of vehicles that are all plenty polluting by themselves.
I mean, it sure is better than nothing, but still a half-assed way to go around it. Specially because it ends up delaying decisions, investment in R&D, and overall thinking on how to completely eliminate dirty sources.