PC's are modular and not actively trying to tie your hands, that's the real difference. Sony doesn't want you using their box for anything that doesn't make them money, and if you try, they'll brick you.
Do you not understand that this is what many gamers want?
I've got a decently powerful PC that I can play games on, but typically I use it more for coding and web browsing. When I actually want to game, I more often than not use one of my consoles. I don't have to worry about compatibility, whether or not this game runs well on my PC or whether or not I need to upgrade, and I can just sit back and play it on my couch without having route an HDMI cable around the room or anything.
Yes, games on the PC can look a little better, but I'm long past worrying about graphics these days. I take advancements and they're nice but honestly PS3 graphics are "good enough" for me. I could live with that level of quality indefinitely and would be fine. And I'm fine with those consoles being used only for what Sony/MS intended them for. I don't have any use for them. Hell I don't even watch Netflix on them because it feels like a waste of power - I use a Roku instead.
Don't get me wrong the progress that has been made in this field is incredibly impressive, and I have no doubt that eventually we'll be there, but I've found it laughable when you have people with kids who are 8-9 years old stating that their kids won't have to learn how to drive.
Autonomous driving is a VERY complex problem, and while it may be 90% solved, that last 10% will likely take us decades to perfect. I wouldn't expect fully autonomous cars to be the norm for probably 40-50 more years.
Heck just look at the situation Boeing is in right now. Aviation is arguably a much easier task to automate, because there are fewer other vehicles around (and the ones that do typically have transponders announcing their location), and the environment is much more structured as to procedures, yet they've had multiple planes crash due to faulty sensors and autopilot related functions.
Electric cars - sure, they'll be the norm in 10-15 years. Autonomous though? It'll be a while.
Not all video entertainment costs money. Hell I watch more Youtube then anything these days; although I do pay for YouTube Premium, the option to watch free is there. Same with OTA broadcasts, Crackle, the Roku channel, or less legally, the Bittorrent option.
Granted, I'm not so poor that I have to worry about the cost of a few pay TV services (a Netflix subscription for a whole month costs about the same as going out to lunch), but still even behind the "I'm saving money." argument its still mostly about being trendy.
Very clever sir, very clever, but its cords all the way down.
DirectTV may get the signal from the source to the satellite wireless, but there's still a coax cable going from the dish to the receiver:).
In all seriousness though it seemed to originally be moreso applied to be people quitting cable and satellite after the digital OTA transition (since the number of channels typically went up and the quality of reception was then able to match digital satellite TV), and it just carried over to describe people getting rid of cable/satellite for other reasons. Sort of like how the save icon is still a picture of a floppy disk despite the fact that almost no one actually uses floppy disks anymore.
That isn't too bad - at least it indicates that the level seen today has been achieved using "all natural" methods. Earth (or rather, life) survived then - it will survive again.
Granted, I have no doubt this is man made, but I am not worrying myself about it because for the most part, it's not going to help. We'll continue dumping CO2 into the atmosphere because it's too convenient not to. We just cross our fingers and hope that the peak levels aren't irrecoverable and that at that point we will find alternative energy sources (since the fossil fuels will be depleted) and the planet slowly reclaims the CO2 back into the soil over time.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".
I don't buy into the "maybe we don't need livestreams" argument. The free and open exchange of information and ideas is paramount to a free society. Restricting that speech is a crime far greater than any terrorist could hope to achieve.
I was around 20 years ago - and on the internet then. I also remember that it was a much smaller and quieter place back then. The average person wasn't using the internet. That has changed dramatically.
Aside from the business model angle, this isn't trying to artificially maintain a business model that is dying, but rather trying to artificially kill a business . . . because it facilitates people being able to freely communicate with each other, which is something the government is afraid of.
Far enough back the masses were informed only by someone with deep pockets. Someone who could print a newspaper, or broadcast a radio station, and later a TV station. There was a filter on that information. More "underground" ideas were generally only spread around at your local pubs and through word of mouth. And to start even the internet was like that. Your average person had no clue what USENET was or how to use it.
Each TV broadcaster has a single stream to worry about. It's literally a "YOU HAD ONE JOB!" scenario. Do you have any idea how many livestreams are going on at any given time on Facebook, Twitch, and/or Youtube? It is not logistically possible, let alone financially, to review all those streams.
Gunshots don't imply extremist content. It could be someone reporting on a situation. It could be shooting a gun at a gun range for target practice. Or it could even be a loud car exhaust (see video below where some guys get descended upon by the local SWAT team who thought their car exhaust was a machine gun).
Being from the US it's tempting to make a "freedom of speech" argument, however since this is Australia I won't even go down that path. Looking at it from a purely logistical standpoint - how on Earth is a company supposed to suppress LIVESTREAMS of "extremist content". Even a human reviewer won't know what's going on until sometime specific happens.
The best they could ever hope for would be to just have a really good user reporting system but even with that you're not going to stop the first group of people from seeing it. All this will do is enforced is basically to make tech companies simply not allow livestreaming. And heck even outside of livestreaming for something like Youtube they can't possibly human review all uploaded content to know if it's against the rules.
To me, whether there's nefarious motive behind it or sincerely good intentions, this seems like a governmental push to get us back to the 1950's era of curated content only coming from official sources, rather than people actually sharing information among themselves.
Half the arguments these days tend to go something like:
Employee: "I'm taking Fridays off to protest global warming!" Boss: "How is that related to global warming?" Employee: "I can't believe you'd say something so racist!?!?!" Boss: "That had nothing to do with racism, and if you don't come in Friday you won't get paid." Employee: "How could you try to deny my existence!?"
I'm not going to deny that global warming exists, but to speak bluntly: it doesn't much matter if we dump X amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in 100 years or 8000 years. On a global/geologic timescale they are approximately equal. Regardless of how fast we do it, every single fossil fuel on this planet will be used up and burned. All we can really do is cross our fingers and hope that however much CO2 that happens to be isn't so much that it kills everyone.
If it's below that threshold, then we'll eventually create renewable energy sources out of necessity - essentially that will be our way of evolving through this change. If it's not, then whatever does survive will evolve to live in whatever new climate the planet settles into.
Yeah I wasn't happy about the S7 dying but it was out of warranty and I don't typically keep insurance on my phones (with the monthly costs plus it still costing $100 anyways for a replacement it's cheaper for me to just get another used phone in good condition if my phone breaks or is damaged).
Yep. Same thing happened with PC's. "Back in the day" you really needed to buy a computer every few years to stay up to date. These days most of the PC's in my home are close to 10 years old.
Smartphones - same. I bought a premium phone in 2016 (Galaxy S7) and was fine with it until it died on me. I replaced it with another 2016 vintage used phone (an LG V20) and am equally happy with it. Honestly I'll probably use this phone too until it actually stops working.
A smartphone is a great tool - but honestly there's only so much more to do with them. The cameras are already good. The GPS works well. It's fast enough to run all the apps I use (which is mostly web browsing, email, and social media). Software updates to make them more stable would be nice but as for the hardware - it's fine.
What baffles me is why they don't fix Notepad. I mean there are a TON of good other really basic text editors out there (Win32pad is my favorite for a direct replacement), but really all they'd need to do to make that program significantly more useful would be to make it handle Unix line-breaks correctly, and have some indicator (eg, a status bar) of cursor position within the file.
There are other things that would be nice, but those fixes would literally take any decent programmer less than an hour to implement. I'm half convinced they lost the source code to the Notepad back in the Win95 days . . .
Depends. I work in such a government office. Our property tax billing software is written in COBOL, was first written in the very early 1980's, and does generally work well.
HOWEVER - whew boy is that some weird code. Nothing is driven by configuration tables. Pretty much every behavior is hard coded into the program. Even for security permissions like who can access which screens, there's literally a user ID HARDCODED into the source.
And god help you if you need to something like widen a text field (all of which are notoriously small due to being defined back when disk space was much more expensive). You'll have to recompile dozens of programs that hit that file, and often times when it's absolutely necessary we have to cobble together fields to make a bigger one (ie, positions 1 through 30 of a field might be in the middle of a line, 30 through 40 towards the end, and then 40 through 50 in another field at the very end of each line.
Rather than being an example of how good the code is, I think it's more an example of the fact that even for bad (or even terrible) code, if you've had 30 years to debug it it'll still function fine. It's an unmanageable mess, but it does indeed do exactly what its supposed to.
I think part of the problem (at least for my generation growing up in the 80's and 90's) was there was a big push on this motivational stuff of "Don't let anybody tell you you can't make it.", along with inspirational photographs and stories of pop stars, pro-athletes, and billionaires.
While the motives were admirable and there is some element of truth there, the reality is that MOST people WON'T become those things. Even if they work hard for it. Most of those things are a combination of hard work (you can do that), genetics (you may or may not have lucked out there), and pure random luck (you have no control over that).
So sure, if you want to try to become those things have a shot, but there was always be a realistic, more mundane, and far more likely backup plan for what you're going to do with your life.
I personally grew up poor. My mom didn't work until I was about 10 years old. My dad dropped out of school in the 8th grade and worked construction. Until my mom went to work we lived in a run-down mobile home where I shared a room with my brother sleeping on a mattress laying on the floor. They didn't try to get me to be rich: they just insisted that I work hard in school, go to college, and get a regular job. That's what I did. I went to an in-state public school, got a STEM degree, graduated, and got a good but mundane job. I had my student loans paid off in 10 years and make around $80k per year. I'm not rich, but I'm doing pretty good, and focusing on realistic goals helped me get there.
I think within the least year or two it's become clear that Youtube as it once existed will not be able to survive. This is partially the fault of advertisers and partly the fault of Youtube itself.
I can understand demonetizing blatant racism, or terrorist training videos, etc, but it seems that just using profanity or DISCUSSING bad things (even for the sake of informing viewers) leads to demonetization now.
What made Youtube refreshing to me was that I don't have to put up with bullshit censorship like mainstream media had. Now Youtube is basically trying to enforce it on the new platform too.
I'm sure some people will survive off of Patreon pledges, and I support about a half-dozen creators there myself, but all in all I think we need a competing platform with a more reasonable approach towards the advertising.
This virtually never happens without one of them deciding to go just a little lower to get all the business. The only way to sustain this is for all of them to agree to not go below a certain price point, which is "collusion" and is indeed illegal.
That's completely wrong. Taxes have no bearing on Amazon's prices or most other companies. It's all about market share and what the market will bear.
Not exactly. The price only typically is set at "what the market will bear" for specialty items. For commodities, typically competition will drive the price of that commodity well below what the public is willing to pay because its a competitive market. While someone might be WILLING to pay $5.00 for a gallon of milk, if one store tries to sell it for $5 and another prices it at $4, people are naturally going to go to the lower price. Then the first store reduces their price to $3.75 to get the business back. Repeat until the prices are essentially be a bare minimum above their cost.
As such, if taxes go up, their costs go up, and the rock bottom price that they can charge must also go up - on commodities at least. Taxes won't have much impact on things like a Nintendo Switch or designer clothing, but on paper, razor blades, hand tools, etc, it certainly will.
I have a hard time categorizing Reddit as "social media". Don't get me wrong I like the site and probably use it more than any other social media site, but to me it's basically just a (barely) update UI for traditional forums what have existed since the birth of the net.
Slashdot Mirror
PC's are modular and not actively trying to tie your hands, that's the real difference. Sony doesn't want you using their box for anything that doesn't make them money, and if you try, they'll brick you.
Do you not understand that this is what many gamers want?
I've got a decently powerful PC that I can play games on, but typically I use it more for coding and web browsing. When I actually want to game, I more often than not use one of my consoles. I don't have to worry about compatibility, whether or not this game runs well on my PC or whether or not I need to upgrade, and I can just sit back and play it on my couch without having route an HDMI cable around the room or anything.
Yes, games on the PC can look a little better, but I'm long past worrying about graphics these days. I take advancements and they're nice but honestly PS3 graphics are "good enough" for me. I could live with that level of quality indefinitely and would be fine. And I'm fine with those consoles being used only for what Sony/MS intended them for. I don't have any use for them. Hell I don't even watch Netflix on them because it feels like a waste of power - I use a Roku instead.
I've pretty much expected this for a while.
Don't get me wrong the progress that has been made in this field is incredibly impressive, and I have no doubt that eventually we'll be there, but I've found it laughable when you have people with kids who are 8-9 years old stating that their kids won't have to learn how to drive.
Autonomous driving is a VERY complex problem, and while it may be 90% solved, that last 10% will likely take us decades to perfect. I wouldn't expect fully autonomous cars to be the norm for probably 40-50 more years.
Heck just look at the situation Boeing is in right now. Aviation is arguably a much easier task to automate, because there are fewer other vehicles around (and the ones that do typically have transponders announcing their location), and the environment is much more structured as to procedures, yet they've had multiple planes crash due to faulty sensors and autopilot related functions.
Electric cars - sure, they'll be the norm in 10-15 years. Autonomous though? It'll be a while.
Not all video entertainment costs money. Hell I watch more Youtube then anything these days; although I do pay for YouTube Premium, the option to watch free is there. Same with OTA broadcasts, Crackle, the Roku channel, or less legally, the Bittorrent option.
Granted, I'm not so poor that I have to worry about the cost of a few pay TV services (a Netflix subscription for a whole month costs about the same as going out to lunch), but still even behind the "I'm saving money." argument its still mostly about being trendy.
It's an old article but a good one:
https://www.theonion.com/area-...
Very clever sir, very clever, but its cords all the way down.
DirectTV may get the signal from the source to the satellite wireless, but there's still a coax cable going from the dish to the receiver :).
In all seriousness though it seemed to originally be moreso applied to be people quitting cable and satellite after the digital OTA transition (since the number of channels typically went up and the quality of reception was then able to match digital satellite TV), and it just carried over to describe people getting rid of cable/satellite for other reasons. Sort of like how the save icon is still a picture of a floppy disk despite the fact that almost no one actually uses floppy disks anymore.
That isn't too bad - at least it indicates that the level seen today has been achieved using "all natural" methods. Earth (or rather, life) survived then - it will survive again.
Granted, I have no doubt this is man made, but I am not worrying myself about it because for the most part, it's not going to help. We'll continue dumping CO2 into the atmosphere because it's too convenient not to. We just cross our fingers and hope that the peak levels aren't irrecoverable and that at that point we will find alternative energy sources (since the fossil fuels will be depleted) and the planet slowly reclaims the CO2 back into the soil over time.
I thought daylight savings was only a US thing. Hopefully we can abolish it soon too.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".
I don't buy into the "maybe we don't need livestreams" argument. The free and open exchange of information and ideas is paramount to a free society. Restricting that speech is a crime far greater than any terrorist could hope to achieve.
I was around 20 years ago - and on the internet then. I also remember that it was a much smaller and quieter place back then. The average person wasn't using the internet. That has changed dramatically.
Aside from the business model angle, this isn't trying to artificially maintain a business model that is dying, but rather trying to artificially kill a business . . . because it facilitates people being able to freely communicate with each other, which is something the government is afraid of.
Far enough back the masses were informed only by someone with deep pockets. Someone who could print a newspaper, or broadcast a radio station, and later a TV station. There was a filter on that information. More "underground" ideas were generally only spread around at your local pubs and through word of mouth. And to start even the internet was like that. Your average person had no clue what USENET was or how to use it.
Each TV broadcaster has a single stream to worry about. It's literally a "YOU HAD ONE JOB!" scenario. Do you have any idea how many livestreams are going on at any given time on Facebook, Twitch, and/or Youtube? It is not logistically possible, let alone financially, to review all those streams.
Gunshots don't imply extremist content. It could be someone reporting on a situation. It could be shooting a gun at a gun range for target practice. Or it could even be a loud car exhaust (see video below where some guys get descended upon by the local SWAT team who thought their car exhaust was a machine gun).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This doesn't make any sense to me.
Being from the US it's tempting to make a "freedom of speech" argument, however since this is Australia I won't even go down that path. Looking at it from a purely logistical standpoint - how on Earth is a company supposed to suppress LIVESTREAMS of "extremist content". Even a human reviewer won't know what's going on until sometime specific happens.
The best they could ever hope for would be to just have a really good user reporting system but even with that you're not going to stop the first group of people from seeing it. All this will do is enforced is basically to make tech companies simply not allow livestreaming. And heck even outside of livestreaming for something like Youtube they can't possibly human review all uploaded content to know if it's against the rules.
To me, whether there's nefarious motive behind it or sincerely good intentions, this seems like a governmental push to get us back to the 1950's era of curated content only coming from official sources, rather than people actually sharing information among themselves.
Half the arguments these days tend to go something like:
Employee: "I'm taking Fridays off to protest global warming!"
Boss: "How is that related to global warming?"
Employee: "I can't believe you'd say something so racist!?!?!"
Boss: "That had nothing to do with racism, and if you don't come in Friday you won't get paid."
Employee: "How could you try to deny my existence!?"
I'm not going to deny that global warming exists, but to speak bluntly: it doesn't much matter if we dump X amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in 100 years or 8000 years. On a global/geologic timescale they are approximately equal. Regardless of how fast we do it, every single fossil fuel on this planet will be used up and burned. All we can really do is cross our fingers and hope that however much CO2 that happens to be isn't so much that it kills everyone.
If it's below that threshold, then we'll eventually create renewable energy sources out of necessity - essentially that will be our way of evolving through this change. If it's not, then whatever does survive will evolve to live in whatever new climate the planet settles into.
Meh - my parents keep chickens and honestly - I can't tell one bit of difference between their local ones and grocery store ones.
Yeah I wasn't happy about the S7 dying but it was out of warranty and I don't typically keep insurance on my phones (with the monthly costs plus it still costing $100 anyways for a replacement it's cheaper for me to just get another used phone in good condition if my phone breaks or is damaged).
Yep. Same thing happened with PC's. "Back in the day" you really needed to buy a computer every few years to stay up to date. These days most of the PC's in my home are close to 10 years old.
Smartphones - same. I bought a premium phone in 2016 (Galaxy S7) and was fine with it until it died on me. I replaced it with another 2016 vintage used phone (an LG V20) and am equally happy with it. Honestly I'll probably use this phone too until it actually stops working.
A smartphone is a great tool - but honestly there's only so much more to do with them. The cameras are already good. The GPS works well. It's fast enough to run all the apps I use (which is mostly web browsing, email, and social media). Software updates to make them more stable would be nice but as for the hardware - it's fine.
What baffles me is why they don't fix Notepad. I mean there are a TON of good other really basic text editors out there (Win32pad is my favorite for a direct replacement), but really all they'd need to do to make that program significantly more useful would be to make it handle Unix line-breaks correctly, and have some indicator (eg, a status bar) of cursor position within the file.
There are other things that would be nice, but those fixes would literally take any decent programmer less than an hour to implement. I'm half convinced they lost the source code to the Notepad back in the Win95 days . . .
I think your sarcasm detector may need the battery changed.
Pantomime? This is more like a rollerblade.
Depends. I work in such a government office. Our property tax billing software is written in COBOL, was first written in the very early 1980's, and does generally work well.
HOWEVER - whew boy is that some weird code. Nothing is driven by configuration tables. Pretty much every behavior is hard coded into the program. Even for security permissions like who can access which screens, there's literally a user ID HARDCODED into the source.
And god help you if you need to something like widen a text field (all of which are notoriously small due to being defined back when disk space was much more expensive). You'll have to recompile dozens of programs that hit that file, and often times when it's absolutely necessary we have to cobble together fields to make a bigger one (ie, positions 1 through 30 of a field might be in the middle of a line, 30 through 40 towards the end, and then 40 through 50 in another field at the very end of each line.
Rather than being an example of how good the code is, I think it's more an example of the fact that even for bad (or even terrible) code, if you've had 30 years to debug it it'll still function fine. It's an unmanageable mess, but it does indeed do exactly what its supposed to.
To a large degree I agree with this.
I think part of the problem (at least for my generation growing up in the 80's and 90's) was there was a big push on this motivational stuff of "Don't let anybody tell you you can't make it.", along with inspirational photographs and stories of pop stars, pro-athletes, and billionaires.
While the motives were admirable and there is some element of truth there, the reality is that MOST people WON'T become those things. Even if they work hard for it. Most of those things are a combination of hard work (you can do that), genetics (you may or may not have lucked out there), and pure random luck (you have no control over that).
So sure, if you want to try to become those things have a shot, but there was always be a realistic, more mundane, and far more likely backup plan for what you're going to do with your life.
I personally grew up poor. My mom didn't work until I was about 10 years old. My dad dropped out of school in the 8th grade and worked construction. Until my mom went to work we lived in a run-down mobile home where I shared a room with my brother sleeping on a mattress laying on the floor. They didn't try to get me to be rich: they just insisted that I work hard in school, go to college, and get a regular job. That's what I did. I went to an in-state public school, got a STEM degree, graduated, and got a good but mundane job. I had my student loans paid off in 10 years and make around $80k per year. I'm not rich, but I'm doing pretty good, and focusing on realistic goals helped me get there.
I think within the least year or two it's become clear that Youtube as it once existed will not be able to survive. This is partially the fault of advertisers and partly the fault of Youtube itself.
I can understand demonetizing blatant racism, or terrorist training videos, etc, but it seems that just using profanity or DISCUSSING bad things (even for the sake of informing viewers) leads to demonetization now.
What made Youtube refreshing to me was that I don't have to put up with bullshit censorship like mainstream media had. Now Youtube is basically trying to enforce it on the new platform too.
I'm sure some people will survive off of Patreon pledges, and I support about a half-dozen creators there myself, but all in all I think we need a competing platform with a more reasonable approach towards the advertising.
This virtually never happens without one of them deciding to go just a little lower to get all the business. The only way to sustain this is for all of them to agree to not go below a certain price point, which is "collusion" and is indeed illegal.
That's completely wrong. Taxes have no bearing on Amazon's prices or most other companies. It's all about market share and what the market will bear.
Not exactly. The price only typically is set at "what the market will bear" for specialty items. For commodities, typically competition will drive the price of that commodity well below what the public is willing to pay because its a competitive market. While someone might be WILLING to pay $5.00 for a gallon of milk, if one store tries to sell it for $5 and another prices it at $4, people are naturally going to go to the lower price. Then the first store reduces their price to $3.75 to get the business back. Repeat until the prices are essentially be a bare minimum above their cost.
As such, if taxes go up, their costs go up, and the rock bottom price that they can charge must also go up - on commodities at least. Taxes won't have much impact on things like a Nintendo Switch or designer clothing, but on paper, razor blades, hand tools, etc, it certainly will.
I have a hard time categorizing Reddit as "social media". Don't get me wrong I like the site and probably use it more than any other social media site, but to me it's basically just a (barely) update UI for traditional forums what have existed since the birth of the net.
Yep. Every time I go there I seem to get sick. Every few months though I break down and give them another shot, then rinse/repeat.