Sure, Steam is free. But the whole point of Steam is that it's a store. Some products are free, but the vast majority of the products in the store require payment. If you're looking for good examples, you might want to try GIMP, or other free software tools. They are completely free, and don't even ask for your money. There's a small donate link on the top of their page, but you don't even see it unless you go looking for it.
I think more in depth analysis needs to be done. The numbers for gasoline powered vehicles is for all cars of any age. But most Teslas on the road are only a few years old. What do the numbers look like for gas powered cars in the same age range? What about when only compared to cars in teh same age range and price range? What portion of the car fires were set intentionally vs. which ones were the result of bad maintenance vs. which ones were the result of an accident vs which ones were just spontaneous? Just looking at overall percentages doesn't really tell the whole story. Maybe the Tesla is safer than other vehicles. Maybe they aren't. It's hard to tell without doing a huge in depth analysis about car fires, why they happen, when they happen, how they happen, and looking at these finer details.
Why would you want to spend $20 a month for 7 or 8 albums when you could spend $10 a month an get access to basically all the albums. I was on eMusic back when there was no subscription services, but I cancelled after a while because I realized that was usually just downloading random stuff to make sure I got my money's worth.
I know a lot of people are against subscription services, but personally I think they are great, but only because they got the price right. For less than the cost of a single album per month, I have access to a huge catalog of music that includes most of the stuff I would have bought anyway. Sure I don't "own" the music, but it also offers a lot of convenience. I can access that entire music library without having to go through any trouble with ripping my CD collection, having a server, or having a massive amount of storage on every device that I may want to listen to music on.
The problem is that great hardware is now a commodity. You used to have to pay a lot of money to get high quality equipment. It required a lot of R&D to create a good product so it required high markups. However, with the decades of innovation, we are now able to get very good products for a very small amount of money. There are still companies selling high end equipment, but the majority of people just generally can't tell the difference or just don't care about the difference.
The PlayStation points right to this problem. It's a commodity piece of hardware built off generic parts.You can pick one up right now for $400. Sure you could probably get a better experience from a PC, but you'll be hard pressed to even build a PC for that amount of money. Especially one that can play games at the level of the PS4.
"Good Enough" products are taking over the market. I got a $300 phone, almost a year back, and it does everything I need a phone to do. Why would I pay $1000 for a phone when the $300 phone isn't really all that different in day-to-day experience?
It was a lot easier to write code when you could fit the entire functionality of the computer into your head. Now there's so much going on under the hood that it's pretty much impossible to know what's really going on. When you only had 4k of memory, you could print out the entire contents of memory on a piece of paper and debug it by hand if you needed to. The code of decades ago may have been more stable, but the things we are writing today are much more complex. The amount of stuff that has to happen simply to respond to an HTTPS request is amazing.
It doesn't have to be IoT to have a short service live. I got a fridge about 18 months ago and it's already had the condenser fan go which costs $130 just for the part. I possibly could have replaced it with something generic, but trying to figure out which was going to be compatible was probably more trouble than it was worth. It used to be that a fridge would last 15 to 20 years before anything went wrong, but that time period has been going down for quite a while, and every manufacturer uses non-generic parts so something as simple as a fan motor will cost a lot more to replace than it really should.
I don't care if my music and video library is encrypted. You can keep all the important data on your phone or not use an SD card if that's important to you. But having a cheaply upgradeable storage option is a huge feature that I wouldn't want to go without.
If you're using Adobe Creative Suite then you are most likely making some money off of it. You can pay as little as $10 a month if you just want photoshop and lightroom (photography pack) which isn't a lot of money at all. The all apps package is $53 a month, but personally I don't see that as that bad for a professional level tool. That will easily pay for itself in time saved trying to use other tools that don't have the features you need. If you aren't generating income from your work, then open source/ free tools probably make more sense. However, it's a professional level tool, and isn't really that expensive compared to other professional level tools.
Seems like they are trying to give too much under a single service. They are trying to be Netflix, Spotify, a library, and a shipping service, all for a very similar price to what Netflix and Spotify charge for their sevices.
I would say that we never really moved people to higher skilled jobs, but just pushed them around to other low skilled jobs. I don't really see a farm hand as being any different in terms of higher skilled than somebody working as a cog in a manufacturing plant. But I do see a big difference between people who are working in factories or doing simple repetitive office tasks to making the jump to being computer programmers, chemical engineers, or whatever else actual high level jobs are left after automation takes over.
I picked up a small form factor refurbished desktop for $150 recent. It truly does play everything. I tried an Android TV box, and despite getting lots of views on Amazon, I found it to be a piece of junk. A lot of basic apps I downloaded from the App store wouldn't even run properly. For a little more than the Android box cost, I got a full windows PC that can not only play any media I throw at it, but can also act as a PLEX server as well as run a few basic games. It could probably run more games, but the form factor and power supply limit which graphics cards you would be able to use with the system.
There are a lot of issues with this. If you don't know why something works, it might work for completely the wrong reason. I heard about a group of researchers who tried to teach an AI to tell the different between wolves and dogs. It got very good, and they thought their AI had everything figured out. But, they late discovered that it wasn't even looking at the dog. It turned out that all the pictures they presented of wolves had snow in them. And so, instead of distinguishing wolf and not wolf, it was actually distinguishing between snow and not snow.
A lot of people paid a premium to buy a Mac in the first place because of the promise that they have a longer useful life than their Windows PC counterparts
I don't know where you got this idea. Apple has a long history of breaking compatibility with older software. This happened when they moved to OSX. They did provide some support for older software but that support eventually died out. Then again when they switched to X86 from PowerPC. Again they provided some support for the switchover, but eventually that died out as well. While not all older Windows software will work on newer machines, there is quite a good history of being able to run older software on new machines in the Windows. I have a PC from 2005 that still runs modern versions of Windows completely fine. You won't fine any Macs from 2005 that are still supported in any way.
They are about as close as you can get to having all the content. The only music that I've found they don't have is by a select few artists who specifically don't want to be on streaming platforms, and some movie soundtracks where they probably didn't license the music properly. They have a very good selection. It's a lot more comprehensive then what Netflix is offering.
$10 is less than the cost of a single album, for access to all the albums (for the most part). You might have a valid comparison with Netflix if they had a larger selection. The selection on Netflix is good for $10, but it's nowhere near as complete as what Spotify and other music streaming platforms have. I think that's the big difference. If Netflix had as much selection as Spotify, they would be demanding much higher subscription prices. Spotify has 30 million tracks while Netflix has around 6500 movies and 1600 TV shows.
Personally, I don't understand why somebody would go with them. Their prices are significantly more than what you would pay for a similar Windows computer with a major manufacturer (Dell, Lenovo, HP etc.) You might as well just buy a laptop off a major manufacturer and wipe the disk. I know that still means that Microsoft gets a chunk of money, and you may be against that, but the large price premium makes it a hard stance to take. The desktop makes even less sense as you can just build a desktop yourself and install your own OS.
If it's only 3 hours per month, then I would have to wonder why you would have a cleaner at all, especially with 4 people in your family. Even if the kids are to young to clean, that still means that you're paying almost $1500 a year for something that would amount to no more than about half an hour a week for each adult. Over 20 years with 6% interest and assuming your payments increase with inflation at 1%, if you invested all that money you would have $60,000. Over 40 years, assuming you needed a cleaner for your entire working life, you would have saved over $270,000. Or you could just use the money on something fun or whatever. Either way, it doesn't seem like you are getting much value for your money.
Swiss watches are a very small piece of the market. Japan took over once quartz watches become a thing. Most watches that are sold are probably made in Japan or China. The number of watches sold each year is around 1.2 billion. there's a lot more non-smart watches, which for the same year was only 36 million smart watches. This was for 2016, but I don't think things have changed that much in under 2 years.
Yeah, I recall thing being much worse when I was dealing with tractor fed dot matrix printers and early inkjets. I have a $50 laser printer from Walmart that is about 5 years old, and it very rarely gets paper jams. Usually only when the paper isn't in good condition or if you try to print double sided and run the same page through twice.
I think the take away from this is that it shows that AI isn't really seeing what we think it's seeing in most cases. Any human would say "there is no selfie stick" or "there is no traffic light", but for some reason the AI sees something where nothing exists, similar to how humans sometimes see a face where no face exists.
But wouldn't it make more sense for the cab driver to use a computer to find the best route? The computer can know much more about the current traffic conditions and provide a much better route. The cab driver has to be smart enough to know when the computer is making a really bad error, but for the most part, the computer will probably come up with a really good result. You might end up with cab drivers who are better at being drivers or who are more courteous to the public rather than picking only people who can memorize a map of the city.
It's like requiring that programmers do all their coding in assembly, because in a few edge cases they can get a better result, while ignoring all the errors they will make in the majority of cases.
Sure the AI has some flaws now, but it will eventually get better. Also, a lot of the problems are going to come from the quality of the picture. The lens usually distorts the image. I remember doing an AI project one and we had to account for the fish-eye effect of the lens. Also, our adjustments only worked for our camera and would have been broken for another camera.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe look into some bamboo cutlery.
Sure, Steam is free. But the whole point of Steam is that it's a store. Some products are free, but the vast majority of the products in the store require payment. If you're looking for good examples, you might want to try GIMP, or other free software tools. They are completely free, and don't even ask for your money. There's a small donate link on the top of their page, but you don't even see it unless you go looking for it.
I think more in depth analysis needs to be done. The numbers for gasoline powered vehicles is for all cars of any age. But most Teslas on the road are only a few years old. What do the numbers look like for gas powered cars in the same age range? What about when only compared to cars in teh same age range and price range? What portion of the car fires were set intentionally vs. which ones were the result of bad maintenance vs. which ones were the result of an accident vs which ones were just spontaneous? Just looking at overall percentages doesn't really tell the whole story. Maybe the Tesla is safer than other vehicles. Maybe they aren't. It's hard to tell without doing a huge in depth analysis about car fires, why they happen, when they happen, how they happen, and looking at these finer details.
Why would you want to spend $20 a month for 7 or 8 albums when you could spend $10 a month an get access to basically all the albums. I was on eMusic back when there was no subscription services, but I cancelled after a while because I realized that was usually just downloading random stuff to make sure I got my money's worth.
I know a lot of people are against subscription services, but personally I think they are great, but only because they got the price right. For less than the cost of a single album per month, I have access to a huge catalog of music that includes most of the stuff I would have bought anyway. Sure I don't "own" the music, but it also offers a lot of convenience. I can access that entire music library without having to go through any trouble with ripping my CD collection, having a server, or having a massive amount of storage on every device that I may want to listen to music on.
The problem is that great hardware is now a commodity. You used to have to pay a lot of money to get high quality equipment. It required a lot of R&D to create a good product so it required high markups. However, with the decades of innovation, we are now able to get very good products for a very small amount of money. There are still companies selling high end equipment, but the majority of people just generally can't tell the difference or just don't care about the difference.
The PlayStation points right to this problem. It's a commodity piece of hardware built off generic parts.You can pick one up right now for $400. Sure you could probably get a better experience from a PC, but you'll be hard pressed to even build a PC for that amount of money. Especially one that can play games at the level of the PS4.
"Good Enough" products are taking over the market. I got a $300 phone, almost a year back, and it does everything I need a phone to do. Why would I pay $1000 for a phone when the $300 phone isn't really all that different in day-to-day experience?
It was a lot easier to write code when you could fit the entire functionality of the computer into your head. Now there's so much going on under the hood that it's pretty much impossible to know what's really going on. When you only had 4k of memory, you could print out the entire contents of memory on a piece of paper and debug it by hand if you needed to. The code of decades ago may have been more stable, but the things we are writing today are much more complex. The amount of stuff that has to happen simply to respond to an HTTPS request is amazing.
It doesn't have to be IoT to have a short service live. I got a fridge about 18 months ago and it's already had the condenser fan go which costs $130 just for the part. I possibly could have replaced it with something generic, but trying to figure out which was going to be compatible was probably more trouble than it was worth. It used to be that a fridge would last 15 to 20 years before anything went wrong, but that time period has been going down for quite a while, and every manufacturer uses non-generic parts so something as simple as a fan motor will cost a lot more to replace than it really should.
I don't care if my music and video library is encrypted. You can keep all the important data on your phone or not use an SD card if that's important to you. But having a cheaply upgradeable storage option is a huge feature that I wouldn't want to go without.
If you're using Adobe Creative Suite then you are most likely making some money off of it. You can pay as little as $10 a month if you just want photoshop and lightroom (photography pack) which isn't a lot of money at all. The all apps package is $53 a month, but personally I don't see that as that bad for a professional level tool. That will easily pay for itself in time saved trying to use other tools that don't have the features you need. If you aren't generating income from your work, then open source/ free tools probably make more sense. However, it's a professional level tool, and isn't really that expensive compared to other professional level tools.
Netflix is Red, but they don't actually mention the word red anywhere in their branding.
Seems like they are trying to give too much under a single service. They are trying to be Netflix, Spotify, a library, and a shipping service, all for a very similar price to what Netflix and Spotify charge for their sevices.
I would say that we never really moved people to higher skilled jobs, but just pushed them around to other low skilled jobs. I don't really see a farm hand as being any different in terms of higher skilled than somebody working as a cog in a manufacturing plant. But I do see a big difference between people who are working in factories or doing simple repetitive office tasks to making the jump to being computer programmers, chemical engineers, or whatever else actual high level jobs are left after automation takes over.
I just want a dumb TV.
I picked up a small form factor refurbished desktop for $150 recent. It truly does play everything. I tried an Android TV box, and despite getting lots of views on Amazon, I found it to be a piece of junk. A lot of basic apps I downloaded from the App store wouldn't even run properly. For a little more than the Android box cost, I got a full windows PC that can not only play any media I throw at it, but can also act as a PLEX server as well as run a few basic games. It could probably run more games, but the form factor and power supply limit which graphics cards you would be able to use with the system.
There are a lot of issues with this. If you don't know why something works, it might work for completely the wrong reason. I heard about a group of researchers who tried to teach an AI to tell the different between wolves and dogs. It got very good, and they thought their AI had everything figured out. But, they late discovered that it wasn't even looking at the dog. It turned out that all the pictures they presented of wolves had snow in them. And so, instead of distinguishing wolf and not wolf, it was actually distinguishing between snow and not snow.
I don't know where you got this idea. Apple has a long history of breaking compatibility with older software. This happened when they moved to OSX. They did provide some support for older software but that support eventually died out. Then again when they switched to X86 from PowerPC. Again they provided some support for the switchover, but eventually that died out as well. While not all older Windows software will work on newer machines, there is quite a good history of being able to run older software on new machines in the Windows. I have a PC from 2005 that still runs modern versions of Windows completely fine. You won't fine any Macs from 2005 that are still supported in any way.
They are about as close as you can get to having all the content. The only music that I've found they don't have is by a select few artists who specifically don't want to be on streaming platforms, and some movie soundtracks where they probably didn't license the music properly. They have a very good selection. It's a lot more comprehensive then what Netflix is offering.
$10 is less than the cost of a single album, for access to all the albums (for the most part). You might have a valid comparison with Netflix if they had a larger selection. The selection on Netflix is good for $10, but it's nowhere near as complete as what Spotify and other music streaming platforms have. I think that's the big difference. If Netflix had as much selection as Spotify, they would be demanding much higher subscription prices. Spotify has 30 million tracks while Netflix has around 6500 movies and 1600 TV shows.
Personally, I don't understand why somebody would go with them. Their prices are significantly more than what you would pay for a similar Windows computer with a major manufacturer (Dell, Lenovo, HP etc.) You might as well just buy a laptop off a major manufacturer and wipe the disk. I know that still means that Microsoft gets a chunk of money, and you may be against that, but the large price premium makes it a hard stance to take. The desktop makes even less sense as you can just build a desktop yourself and install your own OS.
Even if you don't get motion sick, you're likely to get a few more busted units from the thing flying off their lap.
If it's only 3 hours per month, then I would have to wonder why you would have a cleaner at all, especially with 4 people in your family. Even if the kids are to young to clean, that still means that you're paying almost $1500 a year for something that would amount to no more than about half an hour a week for each adult. Over 20 years with 6% interest and assuming your payments increase with inflation at 1%, if you invested all that money you would have $60,000. Over 40 years, assuming you needed a cleaner for your entire working life, you would have saved over $270,000. Or you could just use the money on something fun or whatever. Either way, it doesn't seem like you are getting much value for your money.
Swiss watches are a very small piece of the market. Japan took over once quartz watches become a thing. Most watches that are sold are probably made in Japan or China. The number of watches sold each year is around 1.2 billion. there's a lot more non-smart watches, which for the same year was only 36 million smart watches. This was for 2016, but I don't think things have changed that much in under 2 years.
Yeah, I recall thing being much worse when I was dealing with tractor fed dot matrix printers and early inkjets. I have a $50 laser printer from Walmart that is about 5 years old, and it very rarely gets paper jams. Usually only when the paper isn't in good condition or if you try to print double sided and run the same page through twice.
I think the take away from this is that it shows that AI isn't really seeing what we think it's seeing in most cases. Any human would say "there is no selfie stick" or "there is no traffic light", but for some reason the AI sees something where nothing exists, similar to how humans sometimes see a face where no face exists.
Anecdote time/a>. There was an AI that was supposed to be learning to tell wolves from other dogs. They eventually thought the AI learned pretty well and thought it was doing a great job. On all their test photos, the AI was doing a great job in determining "wolf" or "domestic dog". However, they learned later that the AI was just actually seeing if there was show in the picture, as all the pictures of wolves contained snow, while the pictures of other dogs didn't contain snow.
But wouldn't it make more sense for the cab driver to use a computer to find the best route? The computer can know much more about the current traffic conditions and provide a much better route. The cab driver has to be smart enough to know when the computer is making a really bad error, but for the most part, the computer will probably come up with a really good result. You might end up with cab drivers who are better at being drivers or who are more courteous to the public rather than picking only people who can memorize a map of the city.
It's like requiring that programmers do all their coding in assembly, because in a few edge cases they can get a better result, while ignoring all the errors they will make in the majority of cases.
I say we name this AI, Denise.
Sure the AI has some flaws now, but it will eventually get better. Also, a lot of the problems are going to come from the quality of the picture. The lens usually distorts the image. I remember doing an AI project one and we had to account for the fish-eye effect of the lens. Also, our adjustments only worked for our camera and would have been broken for another camera.