Actually, my thought is -- if Apple could put together 10 really good TV series, it's certainly "enough for a full scale subscription service" (contrary to the story summary)!
Think about it. Right now, you have people maintaining premium Showtime or HBO subscriptions just for ONE series they really want to watch. Everything else is really just "filler" that doesn't motivate them to keep the subscription. (Look how many subscriptions were only kept when new episodes of shows like The Sopranos were airing.)
Apple has plenty of money to be able to afford to license a lot of cheaper "miscellaneous content" that ensures their channel is constantly airing something. But a collection of original shows it could slowly release, interspersed with all of that? That would definitely keep people subscribing.
The heavy left-wing political slant most Hollywood stars and writers want to impart on films isn't helping sales either. But IMO, the lack of movies worth the price of admission to see is the biggest issue.
I actually enjoy going to the theater to see a movie sometimes. I'm not much of a sports person so I don't go to see games. A good movie is an excuse to get out of the house with the family and to buy bragging rights that we saw a newly released film long before it comes out on video. All the complaints about unruly crowds and teens using their phones through entire movies? I've encountered a bit of that, but it's more the exception than the rule - at least at the theaters I go to.
But the movie has to be worth seeing! With so many sequels and remakes, there's not a whole lot left! Anything in one of those categories is best rented and watched at home, IMO. Some of the remakes are mildly amusing or entertaining, but practically never rise to the level of justifying buying a group of adult movie tickets at over $11 each, plus popcorn or sodas or what-not at hugely inflated theater prices.
I think the superhero movies from Marvel and DC have done so well because there were so many good stories to tell there. We have many decades of comic books being printed that were all but ignored on the big screen until now. Even so? You've still got Hollywood trying to milk some of the best known ones (Spiderman, Batman and Superman) with regular re-releases of films about them, sometimes rehashing the same basic story different ways. It feels like the producers and directors are making these more for themselves than for the audience?
But sometimes you've just had enough of seeing yet another superhero movie, too. Then what? The Fast and the Furious movies started out as ideal summer action/fantasy films - but by this last one? It just went over the top on stretching your belief. "I'll just push this torpedo that's flying here and change its direction." Come on! A good car movie needs to have scenes that at least make some attempt at being plausible.
And some will disagree, but I feel like the "horror movie" genre was all played out by some time in the 1990's, if not earlier. 90% of them are pretty much formula material, aimed at an audience young enough to not have watched a lot of the older stuff first. Nobody else would find much of it worthwhile at all. And again, any of the true classics they came up with got rehashed with SO many sequels it became a farce. (Anyone up for another Chucky movie? Or hey, maybe we could redo the Exorcist one more time?)
Personally, I'm into sci-fi more than most genres, and Hollywood manages to do a decent job with that occasionally. But not often. And worse yet? When they promise a lot but get it all wrong, they alienate people who you managed to drag along who weren't really into sci-fi but resigned to give it a chance. How many times will they try again when future sci-fi movies come out?
I was just telling a friend of mine earlier today..... as much as we all loved "Office Space", I think I'm glad they didn't try to do a sequel. I mean, it's another obvious cash grab for Hollywood if they did. But it would probably be awful. I think you could do it right, at least for one more movie. But you'd need to tell a whole new story about a different company, with a whole new cast of interesting characters. And for comic relief, re-insert a couple of the originals. Maybe Lumbergh finds a new job as a middle manager at the new company, since crappy middle managers always seem to manage to keep getting re-hired at places in real life. I think instead, they'd screw it all up trying to tell some stupid story about how all the characters find themselves doing the same kind of work at a new place.
Our employees all have CrashPlan ProE software on their laptops so we can keep a constant backup of their desktop items, documents folder and so on. The last time I had a computer crash, it was while someone was traveling out of town to visit clients. I was able to overnight them a replacement laptop but they still needed to restore their personal data to it. The Internet access was so slow at their hotel and at the various coffee houses or restaurants in the area they attempted to use, they simply couldn't restore all of the data they needed before they needed access to it. (They had about 160GB of content including email archives.)
With all of the people using OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive, and other such services for cloud storage? This surely comes up much more often than just in the situations where someone uses CrashPlan as a backup solution.
A 10mb down/1mb up link is NOT going to allow easy and quick access to your data, especially if you're actually using the computer, doing other Internet-related activities on it, while you're trying to do this in the background. I would really want more than a 1mb upload speed link to feel comfortable about things like video conference calls, too. These govt. morons declaring what's "fast enough" for Americans are probably just web surfing and declaring that the pages seem to pull up at a satisfactory speed. Absolutely no regard for all of the other things people use a net connection for, or the fact that whole families share these links in many cases!
Tesla reminds me a lot of Apple..... Knew exactly how to generate a "buzz" around their products, while actually doing a pretty good job of doing R&D to make cool (but expensive) things people want to own.
Apple users are often accused of being religious zealots too.
The thing is though? The "big boys" of automotive have a big disadvantage. They're heavily invested in internal combustion engines, unlike Tesla. Almost all of them are still trying to manufacture traditional vehicles while simultaneously switching some of them to electric. They aren't always building cars from the ground up, designed to only be electric. They're shoe-horning batteries and motors into cars that were originally designed for gasoline engines (like the Kia Soul).
Chevy seems like they have a better chance than the others, but they've been building electric cars (at least sporadically) since the 90's with the EV-1. And even with 2 of them on sale right now -- sales are sluggish and people are unexcited by them. I have low confidence they can compete head-to-head with Tesla because they lack imagination.
I didn't get time to read his whole publication. But if you want to shut out all the subjective stuff about hurting someone's feelings or upsetting them over treatment they perceive as "unfair"? I think you *always* come back to one truth: The optimal way to hire people is based on who is most qualified for the job.
Workplace diversity is pretty much a code name for "guilt over the realization that our business wound up selecting an obvious majority of hires from the same ethnic background or sex".
I'm not saying Silicon Valley doesn't have some real issues with top-level execs mistreating or disrespecting women. But that's a different topic, unless the claim here is that Google execs look down on females and purposely refuse to hire them when they're clearly well qualified for the jobs they apply for?
In every aspect of life, I think men and women approach issues a bit differently. There's nothing wrong with that, but it DOES create realities, such as women tending to have less interest in climbing the rungs of a corporate ladder to get prestigious but high-stress, top-level jobs. I think some of this is changing as more people get comfortable living a life where they're in less traditional roles. (I know marriages where the guy does the laundry, washes the dishes, cleans the house, etc. and his wife earns the lion's share of the money to pay the bills. But this is still an exception to the rule and not what the majority of men or women would say they're happy doing.)
Personally? I'd rather work for a company where all of my co-workers are as competent and intelligent as possible, even if they're not very diverse. A diverse workplace, to me, should be something that just happens organically if it's meant to happen. Attempts to push for it or force it just lead to a less efficient business.
Since when does Elon Musk strike you as a crazy man who cares about profits above all else, and wants to sacrifice anything having to do with safety to better his bottom line?
The slow, careful roll-out of the self-driving mode in the Tesla should make it pretty clear that's not how this guy operates. He was working on all of that BEFORE government could get around to regulating it -- and he still managed to do a pretty responsible job of deploying the tech.
The thing all of the liberals seem to ignore, with the "Government needs to protect us all from our own foolishness!" mantra is that government itself is just made up of more people like the rest of us. Many of them with the most power and say-so are individuals who rose up the ranks inside government because they wanted only to better themselves at the expense of anyone else in their way. There's no reason to trust them with our safety any more than trusting anyone else with it!
What businesses have in their favor as motivation to do things safely is this: It's TERRIBLE for profits and the bottom line if you keep killing off your best customers.
Government agencies and regulators, by contrast, can often just say "Oops.... we screwed up. We take back our earlier promise that X was safe." They usually get to keep their jobs afterwards and families of those who died have little recourse.
Right now, I live out here in Maryland watching the whole project to add another line to the DC metro system. It's a huge undertaking that's costing taxpayers millions of dollars, just for a system that will cost users quite a bit just to ride on it afterwards as it loses money annually, as it always has. Entire blocks of successful businesses had to be shut down and moved to new locations for it, among other things. And ultimately, what do we get for it? A way to travel another 16.2 miles, total, if you happen to have a need to travel between a handful of designated stations in Prince George's County and Bethesda where it will terminate.
I can't help but think I'd be much MORE excited to see effort in digging tunnels and installing new infrastructure for something like the HyperLoop -- that promises to get people between much more distant points at far greater speed than was possible previously. The rail system in America feels woefully outdated, just like our land line copper wire phone system does today. What was once a great achievement has just stagnated since then.
Government doesn't make me feel safer at all, most of the time. Chipotle restaurant chains out here keep getting dozens of people sick and government hasn't done a damn thing to fix that yet. Meanwhile, they DO hurt small business owners like my neighbor who was trying to run his own BBQ business on weekends, serving food in front of microbreweries and at town events, etc. They pulled his permit because somebody called in to complain they saw him bringing in some food that was prepared off-site (back at his house in the kitchen), instead of preparing all of it right where he was selling it. I get why they have that rule, but practically-speaking? It was just needless harassment. The guy ran out of something and his wife was able to fix up some more for him back in the house, so he wouldn't disappoint customers who wanted it. If I trust his food enough to eat it at some event, I trust it just as much if he had to drive a mile or two back home to get it from there first.
As an Independent (yet a fiscal conservative who is repelled more by most Democratic tax plans than Republican ones), I'd question your assertion that "most Republicans" believe in the theory that rich people and corporations will start to "create jobs" only when they accumulate enough cash.
That's another way of talking about the "trickle down economics" which were out of the 1980's Reagan era, and were really just based on an untested economic theory at the time. Reagan's cabinet members succeeded in selling him on and supporting, so they could try it. It didn't work, primarily because they underestimated how many successful companies have little or no interest in more growth. (Even giants like Apple exhibit this tendency today. No matter how much money they make? They still cling to a business model that says it's perfectly acceptable to build computers that only cater to a relative niche in the marketplace. Apple doesn't even try to build Enterprise gear for server rooms anymore, leaving that whole sector to other companies. It doesn't even attempt to make its own mail server -- opting instead to build its Mail and Calendar clients around Microsoft's Exchange solution. Sometimes, adding too many new employees and expanding into too many areas just dilutes the formula that makes you successful. So profits aren't sensible to dump back into business expansion.)
I have no problem with Tesla's business model right now. I think Elon Musk is a very intelligent guy and a pretty decent leader, who really believes in the technologies he's trying to develop and market. That said though? He's definitely operating a company that greatly benefits from government loans, perks, subsidies and initiatives. In a more libertarian society, I'd like to see much less of that happening. But today, it is what it is. We voted for a bigger government than I personally like, and it's one that likes to take a lot of our tax dollars and spend them, directed at specific things it thinks are "best for all of us". So many subsidies have gone to fossil fuel based companies, it makes it really difficult to single out Tesla as the "bad guy" for receiving some now.
While yes, physical access to a device means it *can* be hacked, there are different degrees of concern you should have, depending on the device in question.
For example, physical access to my car in order to hack it? The car does have door locks on it as well as requiring a separate key to actually start it. Most people have a habit of doing some basic physical security with their car - such as putting it in a garage at night (which is also locked), or at least locking it up and taking the keys with them whenever they leave the vehicle. Most paid parking lots or garages are attended too, or at least have security cameras operating. That means the bar is raised a bit for hacking into it.
Same with physical access to servers.... Data centers with servers processing high value transactions are pretty heavily secured against unauthorized access. (I toured a data center out in Vegas recently and the place was full of armed guards with high powered rifles, as well as plenty of locked doors that only opened with the proper access cards, and surveillance equipment in place.) Even your average small business has a server room with at least a separate lock on the door to the room it's in.
An Amazon Echo compromise is of a bit more interest, because an Echo is likely to just be sitting on a shelf someplace, in plain view. People you invite over during a party or a housekeeper or service person you let inside would theoretically be able to apply this hack without you having a clue it was done.
When one of our corporate offices moved to a new location and got a ground-up remodeling as part of the deal, there were great opportunities to make a more functional space for everyone. Instead, the top level management for that location took charge of everything, designing a floor-plan the way THEY envisioned it. The "rank and file" employees barely got a chance to see it before it was approved and work begun on it.
The group of us in I.T. got a sneak peak at it, just before work started on it, and we collectively said, "Woah! Hold up! BAD ideas here!" The whole space was an open floor plan, except for a row of 6 "phone rooms" where you could shut the door to talk on a phone, placed on a small table, with a few chairs around it. That, and one short hall of offices with doors.
To be fair, it is a marketing oriented company, BUT a lot of the people working in this space are designers, or at least have jobs that require a lot of conference calls, video-conferences, and negotiating with clients over the phone. In other words, lots of need for quiet in the surrounding space so you can sound professional while communicating with people.
Our opinions held no weight though, and everything proceeded despite our complaints. So now? The office tends to be largely empty, because everyone decided they can get work done more effectively by just working from home whenever possible. The upper management folks who pushed for it? Well, they're rarely in the office anyway because they're constantly traveling. I guess they think it's fine when they finally come back for a few days though, since it's so quiet with so few people wanting to come in now?
I agree, 99% of the time, but one exception I've run across in 3 different houses I've lived in now was telephone wiring. With older homes, it's common to find a rat's nest of phone wires around a junction box in the garage or near the point of entry, as different residents required land land phones be installed in different places, or added additional lines.
Nobody ever wants to bother tracing old phone wires when installing anything new that needs them. Phone wire is really cheap and thin, so easy to run and to hide under baseboards and what-not.
If you're really motivated to clean up some excess wiring in a home, copper phone wire would be a great place to focus that effort. (Even if you don't think you'll ever do a traditional land line again, you may well do VoIP where the modem plugs into one of the RJ11 wall jacks to supply a dial-tone to phones in the rest of the house plugged into the other jacks. So having all of that functional and easy to trace is a plus.)
IMO, California has been screwed for years. The state attracts a whole bunch of people who are so in love with the weather conditions and beach that they don't look at the big picture realistically. It's WAY expensive living there, to the point where it doesn't make good economic sense to try, in many cases. But they stubbornly try to stick it out anyway, complaining that government should "make things better for them" while they suffer.
These tech companies deserve the fate of being miserable places to work because they can't hire enough lower paid service workers to fix their meals, clean their offices, and so on! They had 50 states to choose from where they could have set up a corporate presence and they arrogantly picked California because "the Valley is cool!".
I would just remind people that the old Gateway computer company was very successful for many years because the CEO had the common sense to put it far away from the coast, where salaries and taxes were far lower, cost of living was reasonable, and the demographic really appreciated the new job opportunities.
It's easy to blame vices for everything wrong in society. If only people weren't having so much irresponsible sex. If only people weren't so greedy.
But since the beginning of time, humans felt compelled to take actions based on their emotions -- so if these things do make society a worse place, it should be a pretty steady drag on how "awesome" it would be otherwise. None of this is new enough to explain any perceived recent problems.
I reject the claim that the OP made, too, that our need for an ever-expanding economy requires a constant increase in our population (and our failure to do that is causing our economic woes today). The need for economic growth is increasingly decoupled from the number of available laborers! Automation and robotics are displacing workers already in jobs like cashiers, bank tellers and even security guards. Self-driving vehicles will displace MANY more. But growth in these industries won't slow or stop because of that!
IMO, greed is a human emotion that isn't inherently good or bad. It depends on how you direct it. Is it bad to get angry? Depends on if the anger compels you to do something constructive or not, really. Same with greed.
I don't have lots of experience working with venture capitalists. But I do have a buddy who has run a successful VC firm for years, focusing on funding projects related to education.
I suspect in the "big picture" of any new business venture (of any type) asking for funding, or even in the tech sector, there could be a statistical reality that the projects with females in the group have been less likely to succeed. That could simply be because historically, females have tried to start new companies based on feelings/emotions; the sense that subjectively, "this new product idea is amazing because *I* love it and so does my circle of friends I shared it with". It could also be partially because they've caught on to the tactic of a group of guys trying to start a company adding a "token female" with a strategy of putting things under her name to get "female owned company" favors or tax breaks at a local level? They may realize that's not the ideal formula for long-term success.
Still, I would think the type of business being pitched has as much to do with it as anything. For example, a great product to aid in teaching young kids sounds like an area where a female-run company would be an asset. More women are doing the teaching to the really young kids than men are, so women are likely to be more in touch with a concept or product that appeals to them.
My wife has tried, time and again, to order household goods we use often with Amazon's Subscribe and Save service. The idea is nice.... Just have the system auto re-order what you need on a set schedule so you never run out of toilet paper or shampoo or deodorant or ??
The problem is, when we find a product on it we want at a price we like, the re-orders often stop after the first or MAYBE the second time we get a shipment. The reason? Amazon claims the item was discontinued. That or we purposely cancel the order after the price suddenly shoots way up from what we initially agreed to pay. And on those items they just discontinue? Again, the alternatives always seem to cost a lot more - to the point we do better just shopping locally.
This isn't that unexpected when they're paying the legal team to creates as many pages of documents as possible arguing their side (pro paid prioritization of traffic).
I mean, this is all about theoretical implementations. MAYBE there would be a reason for cars to do some communications over wireless Internet services alongside of the allocated frequencies dedicated for the task? 99.9% sure not, but it COULD happen.
I think you can create fictional scenarios all day long where someone COULD find it useful to pay extra money for prioritized data traffic. The real issue, though, is that the concept of broadband Internet is about paying X amount for a certain transfer speed; not paying different rates based on what you're trying to do over a given connection. You would never think it was logical to pay your electric power company different rates based on which devices used the electricity that was consumed. You wouldn't expect your water company to break out your water usage by how many gallons were used by your dishwasher, vs. your toilets vs your shower, and then offer you better water pressure for your shower if you paid a premium.
It's been forever since I looked at anything on MySpace... but as I recall? One of the last big pushes the site made to remain relevant was inviting entertainment-related businesses and individuals to use it as a one-stop place to find out schedules for stand-up comedy clubs, local musicians' tour dates and so forth.
That, too, may be obsolete today... but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of smaller clubs still have a presence there that somebody makes a marginal effort to update, just because they never put in the time or effort to change?
I mean, ever since computers became a commodity item, the operating systems they shipped with turned to trash. Even if you were happy with the (by current standards) clean and neat UI in Windows 7? Most PC manufacturers still loaded it up with garbage bloatware apps and utilities, killing the performance and taking your hours to uninstall. (Lenovo and HP often had items installed that refused to uninstall unless other pieces were removed first, so eliminating all of it was like playing a puzzle game.)
My workplace tried to migrate everyone from Win 7 to 10 and it's still a work in progress. It's incompatible with some software made by EMC that we still need for processing invoices for Finance (trying to use a new application instead, but it's still getting customized for our workflow and won't be ready for 6 more months). We acquired and merged with another firm that was still all on Win 7, so that, too, complicated the migration plan.
So far though? Lots of little things in 10 constantly frustrate. That garbage with having the classic Control Panel AND the new Settings menu is a big one. But also irritated with changes to the VPN options. (In the past, we had a custom VPN connection package built using Microsoft's CMAK wizard/tool. That no longer really works well in Win 10. You can still install the custom package, but you wind up with a confusing mess: You have one customized dialog box to connect the VPN and to manage multiple connection locations -- but the blue Windows 10 control panel/strip still opens up next and duplicates your connect or disconnect buttons.)
I'm also not liking the Windows Update services in 10. I can't really put my finger on it, but it seems like it can really mess things up in its effort to do things silently in the background? On my Surface Pro 4, for example? I went through a phase where every time I left it running, docked on my desk to a full size display, keyboard and mouse - I'd come back a day or two later and find a black screen with just a flickering mouse pointer I could move around. Clicking did nothing. Had to hard power off and back on to get back into Windows. It seemed to be a result of something Windows Updates was trying to do automatically, overnight - leaving the PC in a screwed up state.
I've done I.T. for everything from "running out of a large garage" type businesses to mid size companies with multiple offices.
I'd have to say the weirdest variety of job expectations were at the smallest places. When you're the only I.T. guy hired full-time at a small business, you're immediately viewed as one of the "smart guys" who surely knows how to do X, Y and Z that people want to do - regardless of if it has much of anything to do with computers.
The weirdest tasks of all had to be when I applied for a job in the local newspaper for a Macintosh tech for a small start-up business that wanted to refurbish older Macs and PCs to resell in daycare settings and secondarily to the public as "great first computers for small kids". I was unemployed at the time and needed to make the house and car payment, so wasn't being too selective. It turned out, the guy running this business came up with the idea because he already owned a number of daycare centers, as well as other rental property. He was a long time fan of Apple Macs, even though he wasn't that great at using them. (He was your typical older guy who attended those monthly users' group meetings held at the local library and knew just enough to be dangerous.) One of the interesting features of his house was this HUGE multi-bay garage built into the back side of a hill. He put about 6 rows of shelving units in part of it, where he collected up old, obsolete Macs that area schools, the local newspaper and others wanted to get rid of. He'd drive his van out to one of these places every so often with a trailer attached, and bring back 25 to 50 of the machines at a time.
The rest of this garage was stuffed full with other odds and ends that looked like a scene from one of those "American Pickers" episodes on TV. He had tool and die equipment (as he said he used to work in that field years back), a huge collection of paint cans of various colors (probably whatever was left when his rentals needed repainting), a lot of miscellaneous hardware like chains, bolts, hooks, and several vehicles including an older car with less than 500 miles on it, sitting under a cover.
Right away, this guy was maddening to work for. He insisted that I punch in and out on this old time clock he had sitting in the back on a desk. It was one of those green metal analog clocks where you had to line up the paper time card just right and press the big steel button on top to stamp your time on it. And as it was as ancient as most other junk in his garage, the clock often stopped -- so you had to make sure it was set right before punching your card. And the time it printed was barely legible either. I was supposed to be refurbishing these old Macs, putting collections of kids' games and learning programs on them, and tagging them with price sheets that told you exactly what the computer's configuration was. In reality, I'd get one or two finished only to find the hard drives were dying and they'd only boot correctly every other time. Then, I had to dig through a collection of used hard drives he kept around to try to find one that worked well enough so it would hold the information in a stable manner. Every so often, he'd come around trying to micro-manage my work and scold me about something or other I should be doing, in his opinion, in order to work faster.
At some point, he figured out I knew how to do things like update web sites, so he'd regularly pull me away from what I was doing to come up to his office in the main part of the house. There, he'd have me update his daycare center web site or upload photos and edit descriptions of his rental homes, or edit listings on his personal.Mac web page trying to sell some of those nuts, bolts and chains he had around.
In the winter months, he had this wood burning furnace contraption he built to heat the garage. So I had the task of tending the fire in it and adding logs to it regularly each day.
Eventually, he decided to try to sell a bunch of these computers at a computer show at an area
That's a pretty ridiculous statement though.... If Apple only gave users the features they asked for, they would have never been noticed as a company. Probably would have been out of business by now.
Apple's "magic" was designing new things people didn't even realize they wanted. They didn't always get it right, but they did pretty regularly, at least once Steve Jobs took the company back and got it back on track.
You call it "greed" when Apple wants to charge more than ever before for a new product. But in reality, it all depends on what people feel like they get for their dollar when they buy it. How many hundreds of billions of dollars Apple has earned really has nothing to do with the value a new product release does or doesn't have.
If the lines are longer than ever on release day for the next phone? That only proves Apple priced it correctly.
Increasingly, my cellphone has really become more of a pocket computer that I rely on constantly for both my work and personal communications. It often serves as the only camera or camcorder I'm carrying when I want to take photos or shoot video. It serves as my alarm clock each morning, and reminds me of appointments during the day. I often read the news on it while I'm out someplace. It might even be pressed into service as a flashlight or a ruler or bubble level in a pinch. I keep track of eBay auctions with it and track packages with it. I even get discounts at restaurants or earn points using their apps on it.
It's every bit as useful as my laptop that I happily spent 4 figures on.
The better question is what I'm going to get for my money if I buy it? I'm currently using an iPhone 7 Plus with 256GB of storage and it cost fairly close to $1,000. I have my whole music collection stored on it so it's accessible in my car or Jeep via Bluetooth at any time - justifying the extra cost for the extra storage. I'm pretty happy with the phone and it does most of what I need. So far, it sounds like the iPhone 8 will give me things like inductive charging, which is "nice to have" but not anything I'd spend a lot of money to get right now.
Truthfully? My cellular reception is one of my biggest hassles. All too often, I go inside some large building and find I don't have a good signal in part of it, or I travel someplace where my carrier has poor coverage (T-Mobile). It works well enough for what I pay each month for service. But if there was some way a new phone could promise a dramatically improved radio and antenna setup that would keep it locked in noticeably better on towers? I'd gladly pay to upgrade for that.
The fact is, there's no substitute for good, wired broadband connections. All of these attempts to provide service to unserved areas with wireless technologies are second-rate solutions that still leave rural customers at a disadvantage.
Pretty much anywhere in the U.S., I can set up a satellite broadband connection and have "high speed Internet" -- only it's subject to a lot of terms and conditions. High latency is a big show-stopper with it for many things, like online gaming or VoIP telephony. And then you have the high cost and bandwidth caps that come with it.
In many rural areas I've been in, you have at least one area ISP offering microwave type broadband, where you put one of their receiver antennas on your roof and get service that way. Again, it's better than only DSL as an option, but it's not great. It's costly and slower than speeds people are used to getting with cable modems.
In other places, you can hobble along with an LTE cellular hotspot and whatever limitations come with the cellular subscription you've got with it.
The point is -- none of this stuff is really very good. They're all wireless solutions that inherently have more issues than a piece of cable stuck in the ground or running along a pole to your property.
In modern times, everyone feels like technology enables them to have "better options" than they really have.
Instead of just walking up to a woman who strikes you as amazing, expressing that interest, and it potentially sparking a great relationship? Now you have to compete with all the "Hot or Not?" and Tindr type web sites that encourage you to just flip through hundreds of photos of people you might find physically attractive. You can potentially hook up with ANY of them with just the swipe of your finger.
That causes the "kid in a candy store" syndrome, where it feels like you have so many available choices, any one individual is rather disposable and will be judged against all of those others.
As someone who lives close to some of those former coal mining towns in WV, I'd have to say the core problem comes down to lack of education. The fact that coal mining went away certainly means the primary source of income for people disappeared. But the large percentage of people who still keep trying to do what they've always done, expecting a better/new result is disturbing. If you go out in public in those communities, you see a whole bunch of people who can't spell any words properly if they contain more than about 4 letters. Their math skills are just as rudimentary. Many lack even basic people skills, needed to negotiate things like confrontations with dissatisfied customers in a workplace. They're simply not mentally equipped to be employable in modern society.
You read stories about some of the exceptions to the rule who found success changing career paths from coal miner to software developer and so on. But that's not a realistic short-term plan for most of the people I've seen out there.
Businesses who need a specialized workforce would be wise to realize these places are opportunities in disguise. They need to invest the money in educating and training them as part of a job offer. (As just one example, I was talking to a guy who owns a plumbing company. Anyone working for him full-time can earn up to a 6 figure salary with little trouble, and he's willing to provide training. But he still can't get enough people willing to work for him, simply because most people don't want to do plumbing for a living. IMO, if you can live with mining coal, you can surely live with some sewage backups and bad smells?)
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Actually, my thought is -- if Apple could put together 10 really good TV series, it's certainly "enough for a full scale subscription service" (contrary to the story summary)!
Think about it. Right now, you have people maintaining premium Showtime or HBO subscriptions just for ONE series they really want to watch. Everything else is really just "filler" that doesn't motivate them to keep the subscription. (Look how many subscriptions were only kept when new episodes of shows like The Sopranos were airing.)
Apple has plenty of money to be able to afford to license a lot of cheaper "miscellaneous content" that ensures their channel is constantly airing something. But a collection of original shows it could slowly release, interspersed with all of that? That would definitely keep people subscribing.
The heavy left-wing political slant most Hollywood stars and writers want to impart on films isn't helping sales either. But IMO, the lack of movies worth the price of admission to see is the biggest issue.
I actually enjoy going to the theater to see a movie sometimes. I'm not much of a sports person so I don't go to see games. A good movie is an excuse to get out of the house with the family and to buy bragging rights that we saw a newly released film long before it comes out on video. All the complaints about unruly crowds and teens using their phones through entire movies? I've encountered a bit of that, but it's more the exception than the rule - at least at the theaters I go to.
But the movie has to be worth seeing! With so many sequels and remakes, there's not a whole lot left! Anything in one of those categories is best rented and watched at home, IMO. Some of the remakes are mildly amusing or entertaining, but practically never rise to the level of justifying buying a group of adult movie tickets at over $11 each, plus popcorn or sodas or what-not at hugely inflated theater prices.
I think the superhero movies from Marvel and DC have done so well because there were so many good stories to tell there. We have many decades of comic books being printed that were all but ignored on the big screen until now. Even so? You've still got Hollywood trying to milk some of the best known ones (Spiderman, Batman and Superman) with regular re-releases of films about them, sometimes rehashing the same basic story different ways. It feels like the producers and directors are making these more for themselves than for the audience?
But sometimes you've just had enough of seeing yet another superhero movie, too. Then what? The Fast and the Furious movies started out as ideal summer action/fantasy films - but by this last one? It just went over the top on stretching your belief. "I'll just push this torpedo that's flying here and change its direction." Come on! A good car movie needs to have scenes that at least make some attempt at being plausible.
And some will disagree, but I feel like the "horror movie" genre was all played out by some time in the 1990's, if not earlier. 90% of them are pretty much formula material, aimed at an audience young enough to not have watched a lot of the older stuff first. Nobody else would find much of it worthwhile at all. And again, any of the true classics they came up with got rehashed with SO many sequels it became a farce. (Anyone up for another Chucky movie? Or hey, maybe we could redo the Exorcist one more time?)
Personally, I'm into sci-fi more than most genres, and Hollywood manages to do a decent job with that occasionally. But not often. And worse yet? When they promise a lot but get it all wrong, they alienate people who you managed to drag along who weren't really into sci-fi but resigned to give it a chance. How many times will they try again when future sci-fi movies come out?
I was just telling a friend of mine earlier today ..... as much as we all loved "Office Space", I think I'm glad they didn't try to do a sequel. I mean, it's another obvious cash grab for Hollywood if they did. But it would probably be awful. I think you could do it right, at least for one more movie. But you'd need to tell a whole new story about a different company, with a whole new cast of interesting characters. And for comic relief, re-insert a couple of the originals. Maybe Lumbergh finds a new job as a middle manager at the new company, since crappy middle managers always seem to manage to keep getting re-hired at places in real life. I think instead, they'd screw it all up trying to tell some stupid story about how all the characters find themselves doing the same kind of work at a new place.
Our employees all have CrashPlan ProE software on their laptops so we can keep a constant backup of their desktop items, documents folder and so on. The last time I had a computer crash, it was while someone was traveling out of town to visit clients. I was able to overnight them a replacement laptop but they still needed to restore their personal data to it. The Internet access was so slow at their hotel and at the various coffee houses or restaurants in the area they attempted to use, they simply couldn't restore all of the data they needed before they needed access to it. (They had about 160GB of content including email archives.)
With all of the people using OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive, and other such services for cloud storage? This surely comes up much more often than just in the situations where someone uses CrashPlan as a backup solution.
A 10mb down/1mb up link is NOT going to allow easy and quick access to your data, especially if you're actually using the computer, doing other Internet-related activities on it, while you're trying to do this in the background. I would really want more than a 1mb upload speed link to feel comfortable about things like video conference calls, too. These govt. morons declaring what's "fast enough" for Americans are probably just web surfing and declaring that the pages seem to pull up at a satisfactory speed. Absolutely no regard for all of the other things people use a net connection for, or the fact that whole families share these links in many cases!
Tesla reminds me a lot of Apple..... Knew exactly how to generate a "buzz" around their products, while actually doing a pretty good job of doing R&D to make cool (but expensive) things people want to own.
Apple users are often accused of being religious zealots too.
The thing is though? The "big boys" of automotive have a big disadvantage. They're heavily invested in internal combustion engines, unlike Tesla. Almost all of them are still trying to manufacture traditional vehicles while simultaneously switching some of them to electric. They aren't always building cars from the ground up, designed to only be electric. They're shoe-horning batteries and motors into cars that were originally designed for gasoline engines (like the Kia Soul).
Chevy seems like they have a better chance than the others, but they've been building electric cars (at least sporadically) since the 90's with the EV-1. And even with 2 of them on sale right now -- sales are sluggish and people are unexcited by them. I have low confidence they can compete head-to-head with Tesla because they lack imagination.
I didn't get time to read his whole publication. But if you want to shut out all the subjective stuff about hurting someone's feelings or upsetting them over treatment they perceive as "unfair"? I think you *always* come back to one truth: The optimal way to hire people is based on who is most qualified for the job.
Workplace diversity is pretty much a code name for "guilt over the realization that our business wound up selecting an obvious majority of hires from the same ethnic background or sex".
I'm not saying Silicon Valley doesn't have some real issues with top-level execs mistreating or disrespecting women. But that's a different topic, unless the claim here is that Google execs look down on females and purposely refuse to hire them when they're clearly well qualified for the jobs they apply for?
In every aspect of life, I think men and women approach issues a bit differently. There's nothing wrong with that, but it DOES create realities, such as women tending to have less interest in climbing the rungs of a corporate ladder to get prestigious but high-stress, top-level jobs. I think some of this is changing as more people get comfortable living a life where they're in less traditional roles. (I know marriages where the guy does the laundry, washes the dishes, cleans the house, etc. and his wife earns the lion's share of the money to pay the bills. But this is still an exception to the rule and not what the majority of men or women would say they're happy doing.)
Personally? I'd rather work for a company where all of my co-workers are as competent and intelligent as possible, even if they're not very diverse. A diverse workplace, to me, should be something that just happens organically if it's meant to happen. Attempts to push for it or force it just lead to a less efficient business.
Since when does Elon Musk strike you as a crazy man who cares about profits above all else, and wants to sacrifice anything having to do with safety to better his bottom line?
The slow, careful roll-out of the self-driving mode in the Tesla should make it pretty clear that's not how this guy operates. He was working on all of that BEFORE government could get around to regulating it -- and he still managed to do a pretty responsible job of deploying the tech.
The thing all of the liberals seem to ignore, with the "Government needs to protect us all from our own foolishness!" mantra is that government itself is just made up of more people like the rest of us. Many of them with the most power and say-so are individuals who rose up the ranks inside government because they wanted only to better themselves at the expense of anyone else in their way. There's no reason to trust them with our safety any more than trusting anyone else with it!
What businesses have in their favor as motivation to do things safely is this: It's TERRIBLE for profits and the bottom line if you keep killing off your best customers.
Government agencies and regulators, by contrast, can often just say "Oops.... we screwed up. We take back our earlier promise that X was safe." They usually get to keep their jobs afterwards and families of those who died have little recourse.
Right now, I live out here in Maryland watching the whole project to add another line to the DC metro system. It's a huge undertaking that's costing taxpayers millions of dollars, just for a system that will cost users quite a bit just to ride on it afterwards as it loses money annually, as it always has. Entire blocks of successful businesses had to be shut down and moved to new locations for it, among other things. And ultimately, what do we get for it? A way to travel another 16.2 miles, total, if you happen to have a need to travel between a handful of designated stations in Prince George's County and Bethesda where it will terminate.
I can't help but think I'd be much MORE excited to see effort in digging tunnels and installing new infrastructure for something like the HyperLoop -- that promises to get people between much more distant points at far greater speed than was possible previously. The rail system in America feels woefully outdated, just like our land line copper wire phone system does today. What was once a great achievement has just stagnated since then.
Government doesn't make me feel safer at all, most of the time. Chipotle restaurant chains out here keep getting dozens of people sick and government hasn't done a damn thing to fix that yet. Meanwhile, they DO hurt small business owners like my neighbor who was trying to run his own BBQ business on weekends, serving food in front of microbreweries and at town events, etc. They pulled his permit because somebody called in to complain they saw him bringing in some food that was prepared off-site (back at his house in the kitchen), instead of preparing all of it right where he was selling it. I get why they have that rule, but practically-speaking? It was just needless harassment. The guy ran out of something and his wife was able to fix up some more for him back in the house, so he wouldn't disappoint customers who wanted it. If I trust his food enough to eat it at some event, I trust it just as much if he had to drive a mile or two back home to get it from there first.
As an Independent (yet a fiscal conservative who is repelled more by most Democratic tax plans than Republican ones), I'd question your assertion that "most Republicans" believe in the theory that rich people and corporations will start to "create jobs" only when they accumulate enough cash.
That's another way of talking about the "trickle down economics" which were out of the 1980's Reagan era, and were really just based on an untested economic theory at the time. Reagan's cabinet members succeeded in selling him on and supporting, so they could try it. It didn't work, primarily because they underestimated how many successful companies have little or no interest in more growth. (Even giants like Apple exhibit this tendency today. No matter how much money they make? They still cling to a business model that says it's perfectly acceptable to build computers that only cater to a relative niche in the marketplace. Apple doesn't even try to build Enterprise gear for server rooms anymore, leaving that whole sector to other companies. It doesn't even attempt to make its own mail server -- opting instead to build its Mail and Calendar clients around Microsoft's Exchange solution. Sometimes, adding too many new employees and expanding into too many areas just dilutes the formula that makes you successful. So profits aren't sensible to dump back into business expansion.)
I have no problem with Tesla's business model right now. I think Elon Musk is a very intelligent guy and a pretty decent leader, who really believes in the technologies he's trying to develop and market. That said though? He's definitely operating a company that greatly benefits from government loans, perks, subsidies and initiatives. In a more libertarian society, I'd like to see much less of that happening. But today, it is what it is. We voted for a bigger government than I personally like, and it's one that likes to take a lot of our tax dollars and spend them, directed at specific things it thinks are "best for all of us". So many subsidies have gone to fossil fuel based companies, it makes it really difficult to single out Tesla as the "bad guy" for receiving some now.
While yes, physical access to a device means it *can* be hacked, there are different degrees of concern you should have, depending on the device in question.
For example, physical access to my car in order to hack it? The car does have door locks on it as well as requiring a separate key to actually start it. Most people have a habit of doing some basic physical security with their car - such as putting it in a garage at night (which is also locked), or at least locking it up and taking the keys with them whenever they leave the vehicle. Most paid parking lots or garages are attended too, or at least have security cameras operating. That means the bar is raised a bit for hacking into it.
Same with physical access to servers.... Data centers with servers processing high value transactions are pretty heavily secured against unauthorized access. (I toured a data center out in Vegas recently and the place was full of armed guards with high powered rifles, as well as plenty of locked doors that only opened with the proper access cards, and surveillance equipment in place.) Even your average small business has a server room with at least a separate lock on the door to the room it's in.
An Amazon Echo compromise is of a bit more interest, because an Echo is likely to just be sitting on a shelf someplace, in plain view. People you invite over during a party or a housekeeper or service person you let inside would theoretically be able to apply this hack without you having a clue it was done.
When one of our corporate offices moved to a new location and got a ground-up remodeling as part of the deal, there were great opportunities to make a more functional space for everyone. Instead, the top level management for that location took charge of everything, designing a floor-plan the way THEY envisioned it. The "rank and file" employees barely got a chance to see it before it was approved and work begun on it.
The group of us in I.T. got a sneak peak at it, just before work started on it, and we collectively said, "Woah! Hold up! BAD ideas here!" The whole space was an open floor plan, except for a row of 6 "phone rooms" where you could shut the door to talk on a phone, placed on a small table, with a few chairs around it. That, and one short hall of offices with doors.
To be fair, it is a marketing oriented company, BUT a lot of the people working in this space are designers, or at least have jobs that require a lot of conference calls, video-conferences, and negotiating with clients over the phone. In other words, lots of need for quiet in the surrounding space so you can sound professional while communicating with people.
Our opinions held no weight though, and everything proceeded despite our complaints. So now? The office tends to be largely empty, because everyone decided they can get work done more effectively by just working from home whenever possible. The upper management folks who pushed for it? Well, they're rarely in the office anyway because they're constantly traveling. I guess they think it's fine when they finally come back for a few days though, since it's so quiet with so few people wanting to come in now?
I agree, 99% of the time, but one exception I've run across in 3 different houses I've lived in now was telephone wiring.
With older homes, it's common to find a rat's nest of phone wires around a junction box in the garage or near the point of entry, as different residents required land land phones be installed in different places, or added additional lines.
Nobody ever wants to bother tracing old phone wires when installing anything new that needs them. Phone wire is really cheap and thin, so easy to run and to hide under baseboards and what-not.
If you're really motivated to clean up some excess wiring in a home, copper phone wire would be a great place to focus that effort. (Even if you don't think you'll ever do a traditional land line again, you may well do VoIP where the modem plugs into one of the RJ11 wall jacks to supply a dial-tone to phones in the rest of the house plugged into the other jacks. So having all of that functional and easy to trace is a plus.)
IMO, California has been screwed for years. The state attracts a whole bunch of people who are so in love with the weather conditions and beach that they don't look at the big picture realistically. It's WAY expensive living there, to the point where it doesn't make good economic sense to try, in many cases. But they stubbornly try to stick it out anyway, complaining that government should "make things better for them" while they suffer.
These tech companies deserve the fate of being miserable places to work because they can't hire enough lower paid service workers to fix their meals, clean their offices, and so on! They had 50 states to choose from where they could have set up a corporate presence and they arrogantly picked California because "the Valley is cool!".
I would just remind people that the old Gateway computer company was very successful for many years because the CEO had the common sense to put it far away from the coast, where salaries and taxes were far lower, cost of living was reasonable, and the demographic really appreciated the new job opportunities.
It's easy to blame vices for everything wrong in society. If only people weren't having so much irresponsible sex. If only people weren't so greedy.
But since the beginning of time, humans felt compelled to take actions based on their emotions -- so if these things do make society a worse place, it should be a pretty steady drag on how "awesome" it would be otherwise. None of this is new enough to explain any perceived recent problems.
I reject the claim that the OP made, too, that our need for an ever-expanding economy requires a constant increase in our population (and our failure to do that is causing our economic woes today). The need for economic growth is increasingly decoupled from the number of available laborers! Automation and robotics are displacing workers already in jobs like cashiers, bank tellers and even security guards. Self-driving vehicles will displace MANY more. But growth in these industries won't slow or stop because of that!
IMO, greed is a human emotion that isn't inherently good or bad. It depends on how you direct it. Is it bad to get angry? Depends on if the anger compels you to do something constructive or not, really. Same with greed.
I don't have lots of experience working with venture capitalists. But I do have a buddy who has run a successful VC firm for years, focusing on funding projects related to education.
I suspect in the "big picture" of any new business venture (of any type) asking for funding, or even in the tech sector, there could be a statistical reality that the projects with females in the group have been less likely to succeed. That could simply be because historically, females have tried to start new companies based on feelings/emotions; the sense that subjectively, "this new product idea is amazing because *I* love it and so does my circle of friends I shared it with". It could also be partially because they've caught on to the tactic of a group of guys trying to start a company adding a "token female" with a strategy of putting things under her name to get "female owned company" favors or tax breaks at a local level? They may realize that's not the ideal formula for long-term success.
Still, I would think the type of business being pitched has as much to do with it as anything. For example, a great product to aid in teaching young kids sounds like an area where a female-run company would be an asset. More women are doing the teaching to the really young kids than men are, so women are likely to be more in touch with a concept or product that appeals to them.
My wife has tried, time and again, to order household goods we use often with Amazon's Subscribe and Save service. The idea is nice.... Just have the system auto re-order what you need on a set schedule so you never run out of toilet paper or shampoo or deodorant or ??
The problem is, when we find a product on it we want at a price we like, the re-orders often stop after the first or MAYBE the second time we get a shipment. The reason? Amazon claims the item was discontinued. That or we purposely cancel the order after the price suddenly shoots way up from what we initially agreed to pay. And on those items they just discontinue? Again, the alternatives always seem to cost a lot more - to the point we do better just shopping locally.
A whole lot of people took jobs at Apple under Steve Jobs ....
This isn't that unexpected when they're paying the legal team to creates as many pages of documents as possible arguing their side (pro paid prioritization of traffic).
I mean, this is all about theoretical implementations. MAYBE there would be a reason for cars to do some communications over wireless Internet services alongside of the allocated frequencies dedicated for the task? 99.9% sure not, but it COULD happen.
I think you can create fictional scenarios all day long where someone COULD find it useful to pay extra money for prioritized data traffic. The real issue, though, is that the concept of broadband Internet is about paying X amount for a certain transfer speed; not paying different rates based on what you're trying to do over a given connection. You would never think it was logical to pay your electric power company different rates based on which devices used the electricity that was consumed. You wouldn't expect your water company to break out your water usage by how many gallons were used by your dishwasher, vs. your toilets vs your shower, and then offer you better water pressure for your shower if you paid a premium.
I immediately interpreted PSP as Playstation Portable and wondered why AMD even held the source code for Sony's game system in the first place!
It's been forever since I looked at anything on MySpace... but as I recall? One of the last big pushes the site made to remain relevant was inviting entertainment-related businesses and individuals to use it as a one-stop place to find out schedules for stand-up comedy clubs, local musicians' tour dates and so forth.
That, too, may be obsolete today ... but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of smaller clubs still have a presence there that somebody makes a marginal effort to update, just because they never put in the time or effort to change?
I mean, ever since computers became a commodity item, the operating systems they shipped with turned to trash. Even if you were happy with the (by current standards) clean and neat UI in Windows 7? Most PC manufacturers still loaded it up with garbage bloatware apps and utilities, killing the performance and taking your hours to uninstall. (Lenovo and HP often had items installed that refused to uninstall unless other pieces were removed first, so eliminating all of it was like playing a puzzle game.)
My workplace tried to migrate everyone from Win 7 to 10 and it's still a work in progress. It's incompatible with some software made by EMC that we still need for processing invoices for Finance (trying to use a new application instead, but it's still getting customized for our workflow and won't be ready for 6 more months). We acquired and merged with another firm that was still all on Win 7, so that, too, complicated the migration plan.
So far though? Lots of little things in 10 constantly frustrate. That garbage with having the classic Control Panel AND the new Settings menu is a big one. But also irritated with changes to the VPN options. (In the past, we had a custom VPN connection package built using Microsoft's CMAK wizard/tool. That no longer really works well in Win 10. You can still install the custom package, but you wind up with a confusing mess: You have one customized dialog box to connect the VPN and to manage multiple connection locations -- but the blue Windows 10 control panel/strip still opens up next and duplicates your connect or disconnect buttons.)
I'm also not liking the Windows Update services in 10. I can't really put my finger on it, but it seems like it can really mess things up in its effort to do things silently in the background? On my Surface Pro 4, for example? I went through a phase where every time I left it running, docked on my desk to a full size display, keyboard and mouse - I'd come back a day or two later and find a black screen with just a flickering mouse pointer I could move around. Clicking did nothing. Had to hard power off and back on to get back into Windows. It seemed to be a result of something Windows Updates was trying to do automatically, overnight - leaving the PC in a screwed up state.
I've done I.T. for everything from "running out of a large garage" type businesses to mid size companies with multiple offices.
I'd have to say the weirdest variety of job expectations were at the smallest places. When you're the only I.T. guy hired full-time at a small business, you're immediately viewed as one of the "smart guys" who surely knows how to do X, Y and Z that people want to do - regardless of if it has much of anything to do with computers.
The weirdest tasks of all had to be when I applied for a job in the local newspaper for a Macintosh tech for a small start-up business that wanted to refurbish older Macs and PCs to resell in daycare settings and secondarily to the public as "great first computers for small kids". I was unemployed at the time and needed to make the house and car payment, so wasn't being too selective. It turned out, the guy running this business came up with the idea because he already owned a number of daycare centers, as well as other rental property. He was a long time fan of Apple Macs, even though he wasn't that great at using them. (He was your typical older guy who attended those monthly users' group meetings held at the local library and knew just enough to be dangerous.) One of the interesting features of his house was this HUGE multi-bay garage built into the back side of a hill. He put about 6 rows of shelving units in part of it, where he collected up old, obsolete Macs that area schools, the local newspaper and others wanted to get rid of. He'd drive his van out to one of these places every so often with a trailer attached, and bring back 25 to 50 of the machines at a time.
The rest of this garage was stuffed full with other odds and ends that looked like a scene from one of those "American Pickers" episodes on TV. He had tool and die equipment (as he said he used to work in that field years back), a huge collection of paint cans of various colors (probably whatever was left when his rentals needed repainting), a lot of miscellaneous hardware like chains, bolts, hooks, and several vehicles including an older car with less than 500 miles on it, sitting under a cover.
Right away, this guy was maddening to work for. He insisted that I punch in and out on this old time clock he had sitting in the back on a desk. It was one of those green metal analog clocks where you had to line up the paper time card just right and press the big steel button on top to stamp your time on it. And as it was as ancient as most other junk in his garage, the clock often stopped -- so you had to make sure it was set right before punching your card. And the time it printed was barely legible either. I was supposed to be refurbishing these old Macs, putting collections of kids' games and learning programs on them, and tagging them with price sheets that told you exactly what the computer's configuration was. In reality, I'd get one or two finished only to find the hard drives were dying and they'd only boot correctly every other time. Then, I had to dig through a collection of used hard drives he kept around to try to find one that worked well enough so it would hold the information in a stable manner. Every so often, he'd come around trying to micro-manage my work and scold me about something or other I should be doing, in his opinion, in order to work faster.
At some point, he figured out I knew how to do things like update web sites, so he'd regularly pull me away from what I was doing to come up to his office in the main part of the house. There, he'd have me update his daycare center web site or upload photos and edit descriptions of his rental homes, or edit listings on his personal .Mac web page trying to sell some of those nuts, bolts and chains he had around.
In the winter months, he had this wood burning furnace contraption he built to heat the garage. So I had the task of tending the fire in it and adding logs to it regularly each day.
Eventually, he decided to try to sell a bunch of these computers at a computer show at an area
That's a pretty ridiculous statement though.... If Apple only gave users the features they asked for, they would have never been noticed as a company. Probably would have been out of business by now.
Apple's "magic" was designing new things people didn't even realize they wanted. They didn't always get it right, but they did pretty regularly, at least once Steve Jobs took the company back and got it back on track.
You call it "greed" when Apple wants to charge more than ever before for a new product. But in reality, it all depends on what people feel like they get for their dollar when they buy it. How many hundreds of billions of dollars Apple has earned really has nothing to do with the value a new product release does or doesn't have.
If the lines are longer than ever on release day for the next phone? That only proves Apple priced it correctly.
Increasingly, my cellphone has really become more of a pocket computer that I rely on constantly for both my work and personal communications. It often serves as the only camera or camcorder I'm carrying when I want to take photos or shoot video. It serves as my alarm clock each morning, and reminds me of appointments during the day. I often read the news on it while I'm out someplace. It might even be pressed into service as a flashlight or a ruler or bubble level in a pinch. I keep track of eBay auctions with it and track packages with it. I even get discounts at restaurants or earn points using their apps on it.
It's every bit as useful as my laptop that I happily spent 4 figures on.
The better question is what I'm going to get for my money if I buy it? I'm currently using an iPhone 7 Plus with 256GB of storage and it cost fairly close to $1,000. I have my whole music collection stored on it so it's accessible in my car or Jeep via Bluetooth at any time - justifying the extra cost for the extra storage. I'm pretty happy with the phone and it does most of what I need. So far, it sounds like the iPhone 8 will give me things like inductive charging, which is "nice to have" but not anything I'd spend a lot of money to get right now.
Truthfully? My cellular reception is one of my biggest hassles. All too often, I go inside some large building and find I don't have a good signal in part of it, or I travel someplace where my carrier has poor coverage (T-Mobile). It works well enough for what I pay each month for service. But if there was some way a new phone could promise a dramatically improved radio and antenna setup that would keep it locked in noticeably better on towers? I'd gladly pay to upgrade for that.
The fact is, there's no substitute for good, wired broadband connections. All of these attempts to provide service to unserved areas with wireless technologies are second-rate solutions that still leave rural customers at a disadvantage.
Pretty much anywhere in the U.S., I can set up a satellite broadband connection and have "high speed Internet" -- only it's subject to a lot of terms and conditions. High latency is a big show-stopper with it for many things, like online gaming or VoIP telephony. And then you have the high cost and bandwidth caps that come with it.
In many rural areas I've been in, you have at least one area ISP offering microwave type broadband, where you put one of their receiver antennas on your roof and get service that way. Again, it's better than only DSL as an option, but it's not great. It's costly and slower than speeds people are used to getting with cable modems.
In other places, you can hobble along with an LTE cellular hotspot and whatever limitations come with the cellular subscription you've got with it.
The point is -- none of this stuff is really very good. They're all wireless solutions that inherently have more issues than a piece of cable stuck in the ground or running along a pole to your property.
In modern times, everyone feels like technology enables them to have "better options" than they really have.
Instead of just walking up to a woman who strikes you as amazing, expressing that interest, and it potentially sparking a great relationship? Now you have to compete with all the "Hot or Not?" and Tindr type web sites that encourage you to just flip through hundreds of photos of people you might find physically attractive. You can potentially hook up with ANY of them with just the swipe of your finger.
That causes the "kid in a candy store" syndrome, where it feels like you have so many available choices, any one individual is rather disposable and will be judged against all of those others.
As someone who lives close to some of those former coal mining towns in WV, I'd have to say the core problem comes down to lack of education. The fact that coal mining went away certainly means the primary source of income for people disappeared. But the large percentage of people who still keep trying to do what they've always done, expecting a better/new result is disturbing. If you go out in public in those communities, you see a whole bunch of people who can't spell any words properly if they contain more than about 4 letters. Their math skills are just as rudimentary. Many lack even basic people skills, needed to negotiate things like confrontations with dissatisfied customers in a workplace. They're simply not mentally equipped to be employable in modern society.
You read stories about some of the exceptions to the rule who found success changing career paths from coal miner to software developer and so on. But that's not a realistic short-term plan for most of the people I've seen out there.
Businesses who need a specialized workforce would be wise to realize these places are opportunities in disguise. They need to invest the money in educating and training them as part of a job offer. (As just one example, I was talking to a guy who owns a plumbing company. Anyone working for him full-time can earn up to a 6 figure salary with little trouble, and he's willing to provide training. But he still can't get enough people willing to work for him, simply because most people don't want to do plumbing for a living. IMO, if you can live with mining coal, you can surely live with some sewage backups and bad smells?)