Huh? I'm actually kind of a regular player of Overwatch, and all I've found is that after an initial feeling I was "underwhelmed", I started getting the hang of it and got sucked in.
The thing with Overwatch is, a lot of the game really hinges on you practicing and getting good at using each character's unique attributes, but always in the context of how they complement other players on your team (or work against the enemy character(s) you're up against in a given match).
You can get really far in the game just getting good at playing one particular character, BUT there are certain competitive maps where that character is far less than ideal, and times where he/she will just be ineffective because of the character choices the rest of your team made.
Even with all the hours I've put into playing Overwatch now, I'd say I really only "mastered" a few of the characters. Reinhardt is my "main" who I feel most comfortable playing. But every so often, I go up against a team that just has a playing-style that destroys him. You have to carefully chose a different character when that starts happening, to counter the situation.
And what I find even more interesting in Overwatch is the whole dynamic of playing with team-mates who have their OWN notions of how you should be playing your character. Some people will insist, for example, that my Reinhardt needs to concentrate on shielding one or two other characters from taking damage. (That's often a great strategy when someone is playing Bastion and in the gun turret mode, blasting away.) But I generally find him effective when I play with a really aggressive, "Charge in and go crazy, swinging the hammer at everyone!" method. Sure, he's gonna die a lot like that and someone playing a "healer" character will often get irate that "I can't heal you if you keep doing that!!" But I've often cleared a point of 4 or 5 people, just when doing that turned the tide of a match, too.
I guess I'm not sure how your point really relates to my original argument though?
It seems to me like it's not so relevant to the matter why a person decided to download a pirated piece of software, as long as the financial reality is that they can't afford to buy it?
Usability and capability of a piece of software clearly helps drive its desirability. But that's a universal truth. (Whether you're a company who can afford to buy anything they like, or a pre-teen who doesn't have $10 to her/her name -- you're probably going to gravitate towards the more user-friendly and capable program as the one you want to download, install, and learn to use.)
At least in the case of the computer bulletin board systems like the one I ran, it wasn't really much trouble at all to download a program. You had to have some disk space freed up for it and the time to wait for it to finish. But obtaining it was a matter of a few keystrokes. All sorts of programs got passed around on the BBS's and that was more a matter of some "cracking group" deciding to focus on cracking something they got ahold of at a particular time than anything else. (A BBS didn't typically cherry-pick what was offered. It took whatever someone was willing to share and upload to it. And that content tended to be anything the cracking groups just finished cracking and were trying to get distributed as widely as possible.)
Yep! I think this has generally been the case with most of the business Financial software packages out on the market, even though they're "boxed" software and not custom written.
With few exceptions, they seem to usually have their roots in MS-DOS or Unix -- but were converted into a Windows app for the sake of the GUI (and often sold to another company before that changeover took place).
Microsoft Great Plains ERP would be a great example. It's gone through at least 4 or 5 major revisions since Microsoft took it over and "Window-ized" it. And yet, it still feels like a huge kludge of SQL database tables and indexes it manipulates in often odd ways. Behaves oddly on a network, in the sense it still seems to pretty much require a low latency wired Ethernet connection between clients and the server. (Performance drops off a cliff if you connect over a VPN tunnel to the server from your client, no matter how fast a broadband connection you have.) Extremely oddball "DYNAMICS.SET" configuration file their client uses too, which seems to still require manual editing to add custom dictionaries or reports to be loaded at runtime. And if you add an entry to it in an order it doesn't like, it will often modify the file on its own - doing weird things like duplicating the line you added several times inside the file, before crashing with cascading error boxes you have to click through just to exit the software again.
Beneath the surface as a casual user, there's little about Great Plains that feels like anything but a huge "hack" to force it to work in the Windows environment.
You have your subjective opinion on the issue, and I don't know if any comprehensive study has ever been done that would give us answers to prove you right or wrong? But I can very definitely state that in my 30 years or so working with computers and I.T., I've seen MANY, MANY examples where people went on to drive commercial sales of software products, thanks to them having a way to get their hands on free, pirated copies of the programs first.
In your Gimp vs. Photoshop example? I know many people who try to get into photo editing and touch-up work who DO try "The Gimp" but don't find its UI look and feel to be very user-friendly or inviting. I know there was even a project at one time, at least for the Linux version of Gimp, that bolted a "Photoshop type UI" onto it as kind of a skin? I remember getting really excited that they'd finally done that for it, until I learned it was a dead project.
There are, arguably, a lot of other really good photo editors out there that cost much less than Photoshop. So sure, someone on a budget could buy Pixelmator or something like that instead. But once an application has established itself as a "leading" one for the tasks at hand, most people would rather invest their time and energy in learning and mastering it, vs. another product that you may not be able to get help on from anybody else you know if you get stuck.
Especially when you're still a kid or teenager, you have far more time than money. So it's a prime time of your life to spend a lot of hours of screen time in front of software to really learn it, but it's NOT a prime time at all to come up with many hundreds of dollars to PAY for it.
Even when it comes to video game titles though? Everyone I knew who got hooked on computers as a kid pirated many dozens of game titles. At the same time though? We were the main audience who had any interest in playing them in the first place. With our limited buying power, it was always a combination of spending as much as we could to buy a few games (especially the new releases that you wanted to play ASAP), and pirating a lot of the other stuff as the opportunities presented themselves.
I just can't see a valid reason to feel sorry for the industry selling the games? Even if they succeeded in applying some sort of 100% foolproof copy protection and forced every single owner of the game to have paid for it? They would wind up with, basically, no additional revenue over what they actually got. If a kid can only get 1 or 2 games each birthday a gifts, and another 1-2 each Christmas - and only earns enough money to buy 1-2 others over the rest of a year? That's a max of about 6 titles per year they're ever going to possibly buy. Successful piracy of a selection of the thousands of other choices competing for their dollars doesn't really change that. You'll profit from 6 sales per year off that kid, regardless.
I was *just* old enough to remember the tail end of people buying and listening to 8-tracks, so I gotta be honest here? I may not have a real good grasp of how the experience went for regular users.
I did, however. have one of those 2XL toy robot/quiz game machines that used special 8-tracks to run it, and could alternately play regular 8-track music tapes as a tape player. I remember getting my hands of a few good albums on 8-track at that time, like a couple early Police albums. And from my perspective, 8-track was a little better than cassettes where you had to flip them over to listen to the other side. (And probably as a side effect of how the 2XL robot worked, you could press the buttons on the front of it to skip to certain songs on the 8-track, which was kind of a cool, if unintentional feature.)
I think later on, I bought a cheap Radio Shack 8-track player that mounted under the dash of my Chevy Nova and I wired it in tandem with the factory AM radio. I didn't keep it long, but it seemed to work ok while it worked.
I mean, I'm one of the unfortunate people who ran a BBS back in the late 80's and early 90's who got raided by Federal agents over copyright violation accusations. (Ultimately, they just wound up sitting on all my equipment for over a year, keeping it in a storage locker someplace, until deciding to drop the case and return all of it to me. But as we all know with computer gear, a lot of it had already depreciated considerably by then -- so I was left with a lot of stuff I couldn't resell for much of anything.)
But way back THEN, we kept trying to tell everyone who would listen that software piracy was a big waste of time for anyone to chase after and try to prosecute. The SAME people guilty of pirating were the BEST CUSTOMERS or ADVOCATES for buying stuff made by the companies trying to squash it!
For example? One of the "big issues" they had with my BBS was that someone had uploaded a cracked copy of a version of AutoCAD to the "New Uploads" folder. While it's true that's a really expensive piece of software? It's also true that the users on my BBS were mostly kids who could never afford to buy AutoCAD, nor would they ever have a real cost justification to buy it, if they DID have the money. By them pirating it around though, it encouraged some of them to buy a book on how to use it, and they spent some time learning the application. That, in turn, means there's a whole self-taught generation of people who could grow up to work for companies who DO legitimately buy the software, the maintenance agreements, and all of the upgrades and add-ons for it. That's a big win for AutoDesk, whether they admit it or not! Those people aren't going to be happy if the company buys a competitor's CAD product. They want the one they're comfortable with!
When you challenge most software firms with this kind of logic, they typically turn around and give a lecture on there being a "right and a wrong way" to go about learning their products -- perhaps throwing in the fact that they sell "student versions" much cheaper for students. And you know? That's all true, technically. If you're purely a "letter of the law" and "show no mercy" type, I guess there's your answer? But I bet the "pirates" on BBS's like mine, back then, OFTEN got a career in I.T. or in using one or more of these business apps thanks to having a way to download it for free, on their own terms, to use on their own PC, on their own schedule. And it just wouldn't have ever happened if you expected them to opt to pursue it in college (when they're already cramming their brains full of other course content they need to get through to graduate).
Is there really a sizeable number of people out there who decide to go see a movie, or pass on it, simply based on Rotten Tomatoes taking what amounts to a poll before the film is even out, asking who is interested in it??
Maybe someone is rigging things with bots downvoting it. Maybe not.
What I *do* predict is that this movie won't do as well as some recent superhero films have done, simply because it lacks as broad an appeal. There was a pretty HUGE number of people familiar with superheroes like Superman, Batman or Spiderman, even if they never read a single comic book. By doing an above-average job with some of those movies, they managed to reel in a lot of people to learn more about OTHER superheroes they'd heard of in passing, at least, like Iron Man or Thor. But recently, Hollywood hasn't had a whole lot to offer people BESIDES superhero filcks! If you like these types of action, make-believe movies, you're pretty short on alternatives to go see. They got a lot of mileage out of Wonder Woman because females finally got represented, and Black Panther for the African American contingent. But we're down to films like Aquaman, that women (or gay men) attended primarily to oogle the star's body, and others that have just "sequel-ed out", like the X-Men franchise.
Now, obviously, a lot of Slashdot readers are in the category of more hard-core comic fans, so most of this doesn't apply here. If you're even an occasional comic shop visitor, you're going to have your own reasons to want to see pretty much any of these movies that come along. Plus, you probably care more about smaller plot twists that fly right over the heads of 80% of the paying audience.
But speaking for the theater "take" on the whole? Yeah, I can't see Capt. Marvel being way up there.
They might offer reasonably priced screen replacement, but the older vehicles are still going to be out the cost of a whole new computer assembly AND screen. (There's a known issue where the soldered-on flash storage on the older Teslas fails from too many read/write cycles after a while. And Tesla themselves pushed a lot of those flash chips close to the edge when they logged far too much data to them, until more recent firmware updates backed off on that.)
And I know all about the "Tesloop" Tesla S used for taxi service that logged 400,000+ miles. But the fact remains, that vehicle is probably an outlier that Tesla has been overly generous about doing warranty work on, because it makes for such good P.R. for them. (I can assure you, I run into folks on the Facebook Tesla forums every week who are struggling with failing battery packs that Tesla refuses to replace as warranty repairs.) If anything, service has gotten much WORSE with all the Model 3 sales going on. The service centers are over-booked and looking for any reason to turn someone away.
Honestly? It seems to me like there's a great business opportunity for shops who can take apart the Tesla battery packs and replace only the defective groups of cells in one that are failing. Most battery pack "failures" involve conditions where between 1 and 3 groups of individual cells are holding far less charge than the ones around them, creating an "unbalanced" battery pack. I imagine the biggest challenge is in getting the exact replacement cells needed?
When Apple did the huge transition over from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, it was near the height of Apple's success selling OS X based computers. Even then, there was a big fear it would hurt certain markets, like native OS X game development, as it would make an excuse to "just write a Windows only version and let the Mac users boot into Windows to play it". And that, in fact, DID happen. But by and large, Mac users accepted it as a "win" because Intel CPU development was so much further ahead and drove more competitive Macs with their Windows counterparts. Plus, it wasn't half bad being able to run Windows in virtual environments - where a bunch of processor instruction conversion between x86 and PPC didn't have to happen in the background to make it work.
This time around? It's far less clear.... Intel still cranks out great CPUs and nobody I know is complaining that their Mac is under-powered, CPU-wise. The big push seems to be Apple's continual insistence that "most people can just use an iPad and iPhone instead of a computer", and an interest in selling their own CPUs instead of giving all that money to Intel.
I think we're going to see a lot of "dumbing down" of OS X apps if they all start getting coded to run universally on iOS and OS X with ARM. If features in software don't translate well to a touch-screen UI, they'll rip them out instead of keeping "Mac only" versions with more capabilities.
It doesn't matter that the statistics show their batteries "hold up well". The reason you'll see serious depreciation is the realization that IF the battery fails on you, you're going to be out about $18,000 to buy a replacement, out of warranty.
Don't get me wrong... I'm a Tesla owner myself, right now. (Used 2014 Model S here.) I like the cars a lot. But the idea they'll run far longer than a comparable ICE vehicle without any major repair costs? That's just not realistic. I can get even a big block V8 engine completely rebuilt, and possibly even with some upgraded internals while I'm at it, for under HALF the cost of replacing a Tesla S battery pack. And as others pointed out -- you have the whole computer system/touch-screen assembly in the dash that's not very likely to hold up for over 10 years or so. (Most first generation Apple iPads are developing various screen issues like lines down the middle or dark spots, if they didn't just fail outright -- and that was regarded as a pretty good quality touchscreen. I don't see evidence a Model S or 3 screen is going to do much better? Many of them already have issues with yellow borders forming around the edges of the display, because the glue inside starts failing.)
IMHO, most debates like this have some truth on BOTH sides. I don't like the push to just stop vaccinating - but I'm also not fond of the way the medical community and others seem to be polarized, to try to utterly shut down what they're saying.
It's not logical or "good science" to assume that all the NEW vaccinations that are developed are just as safe as the "classic" ones with proven track records, like the polio vaccine.
I think it's worth noting that until 2000-2003 or so, they were still using mercury in the vaccines given to infants. I'm not sure that practice would have changed if there wasn't an outcry forming about potential safety issues with them? (And mercury is STILL found in many of the influenza shots today. Granted, they insist it's pretty safe, since it's ethylmercury, not methylmercury, which means it breaks down faster in the human body.)
But there are valid concerns about vaccines like Gardasil, too. Statistically, there ARE a certain number of deaths caused by receiving that immunization. The manufacturer counters that it's statistically about the same as the number of women who die from cervical cancer so it's therefore justified. Yet, that doesn't take into account any OTHER adverse effects the vaccine could cause, including cases it paralyzed a person. It's also uncertain the vaccine still provides protection for more than 15 years or so.
To be totally honest? I'm not sure a Tesla is a car anyone is going to keep trying to hang onto for the "long term"? By that, I mean we already know the average vehicle owner doesn't keep a car or truck more than about 6 years. The Tesla S had an unlimited mileage, 8 year warranty covering battery pack or drive motor failures, so even the very oldest 2012 models still have warranty on those items through next year.
But looking forward at things? I think you're going to see serious depreciation happen as soon as those 8 year warranties are up, and that, in turn will force prices down on the Model 3. Teslas have held their resale value pretty well because they didn't manufacture huge numbers of them to begin with, but also because all of them on the road have various states of warranty coverage - plus Tesla is still supporting them with things it *could* end at any time. (EG. All the Model S's purchased through 2016 had unlimited free supercharging bundled with them, which transfers with the car's resale. All of the Model 3's and S's have integrated cellular modems with LTE service paid for by Tesla for streaming music and the GPS maps.)
IMO, Tesla is marketing their vehicles more like high-end computer sales than the way traditional vehicle sales are done. How many people are going to keep a 10-15 year old computer running? Sure, a *few* will consider them collectible - but they're going to cannibalize other ones to keep their specimens going. That's how these cars will pan out too, if my guess is correct. Tesla WILL start making parts hard to obtain after a while, but by then - your car won't be worth a whole lot and you'll only be in a small minority of hard-core enthusiasts if you're even TRYING to keep it. The tech in it will be way outdated by then. You'll probably have far quicker charging, better "auto pilot" features and MUCH more if you invest in a newer model.
There are definitely some items on these cars that independent mechanics could service, but the demand doesn't seem to be there to make it worth the time of most to learn how to do it? Certainly, the Model S has long been plagued with door handles that stop auto-retracting/opening properly, and they can be obtained online easily enough. It's just kind of a bear to do the labor involved to swap the things. The "air suspension" is pretty much using Mercedes parts, as I understand it. So that, too, *could* be serviced by someone other than Tesla. It's just that currently, I bet 99.9% of shops would be afraid to touch it.
I dunno? My experience on the desktop is, you really DO want native apps vs "yet another app you use as a web page in your favorite browser". If nothing else, it's just advantageous from the standpoint of keeping things compartmentalized while utilizing the whole UI that's been built around manipulating individual apps.
As one example? Our office VoIP system used to use a control panel that ran in Java. It was cross-platform Mac and Windows compatible that way. Eventually, the company decided it was less development effort to just design a web browser based control panel. It has more functionality (nothing they couldn't have done in the old client if they wanted to -- but lot of things that probably were easy to add once they had the client running in a full size web browser window). Yet few of our employees like the thing. All we heard were complaints when they forced the transition, and many just stopped using their desk phones rather than deal with it.
The thing is, a small app that retains your login/password info and auto-starts at system boot is really user-friendly. It's "just there" when you sign in and your OS remember the window size and position for you, popping it up exactly where you like to have it. With the browser app, you're always required to load a more resource intensive full browser to use it, and you'll have to resize it at each launch if you want it to act like a toolbar on your desktop. If the browser its in is your default browser, it's immediately going to be hidden behind screens for other URLs you click on while working. And the overall "feel" is that it's something you should only have as a fall-back alternative to a full-blown client.
It seems to me like paper money will go away the day a government declares it so. In the U.S. right now, it would be entirely possible to issue some sort of government "cash card" to everyone, and dissolve the U.S. mints and all of their operational costs to offset the expense of issuing them.
All of this talk of paper money never going away because "the poor won't have bank accounts or credit cards" misses the point. All of the cash people walk around with had to be produced at considerable taxpayer expense and is maintained after that (damaged bank notes destroyed and replaced, etc.). It's not like it's unfathomable that the Federal government wouldn't just set up its own "no monthly fee, no credit check necessary" system where everyone gets a card.
Where that gets disturbing, to me, is that you're giving up the anonymous nature of cash transactions. You won't even be able to buy a stick of gum without it being logged in a computer system owned by the Fed. But practically speaking? I don't think those concerns will do much to stop things from progressing. Government already keeps tabs on any purchases you make of more significance, such as a home or car, and demands banks report your large cash deposits to them. 99% of the population will decide it just doesn't matter that government knows about all the little stuff you purchase.....
It seems to me like a LOT of people involved with or impacted by this Amazon HQ being in, vs. leaving New York are just running off emotions and assumptions?
To determine if this was a "good deal" for NY taxpayers, you have to look at many factors and crunch all the numbers. I'm confident the likes of Cortex didn't do so, but I question if DeBlasio did either?
I mean, you have to calculate impact of the extra traffic it generates.... the extra demand on public utilities like electric power, sewer and water. You obviously have to look at how much you gave Amazon in tax breaks and benefits, vs. how much they'll really benefit the public with new jobs. (How much will you collect in taxes from the people they hire?) And if the deal wasn't struck with a clause in it that required Amazon STAY there for a number of years -- you have to try to take an educated guess about the long-term future. Many times, companies take advantage of these deals to put a business in a state, only to pull back out as soon as the perks expire.
I don't know if the HQ was a good deal of Queens or it wasn't.... but the people making the decision should sure know, and I'm not confident any of them do?
Seriously, I'm a middle aged guy who still enjoys the occasional computer game. I'm primarily a Mac user, which means I'm locked out of running most of the good new titles on that platform. And I really don't play console games much. We have a PS4, but the kids pretty much take it over -- and that's fine with me. I don't really want my gaming on display in the living room on a 60" TV, or want to sit on the couch instead of a computer chair while playing one. And I never got used to the controllers vs a keyboard and mouse combo for a 3D shooter.
So I spent the money and invested in an ASUS ROG Zephyrus with the nVidia 1080 graphics card in it. Does everything I need for gaming, but that thing wasn't cheap! AND, frankly, it feels like it's all made of cheap, flimsy plastic. I tend to just leave it on a small desk in our bedroom, and use an external keyboard, mouse and display with it. So it's holding up ok. But I wouldn't trust it to last more than a couple of years if it was really being carried around all over the place.
But I feel like nVidia and ATI/AMD are both cranking out new GPUs at a quick enough pace so the value of these machines depreciates really rapidly. I doubt I could resell this Zephyrus for anywhere NEAR what I paid, and it's still a pretty new computer. Traditionally, that hasn't been as big an issue for people because if all you're swapping out is a video card in a desktop PC, you can time your upgrades right and probably get into a pattern of spending $500-60 for the latest card, followed by selling your last one to recoup $200-250. Even if you do that annually, you're spending around $250-350 per year to stay on top of things. With a laptop, there's a lot bigger loss involved.
I don't know how these gaming laptops are selling well to the primarily much younger audience? Our 16 year old sure can't afford to buy one himself, and that's a big "ask" for a Christmas or birthday gift.
It seems to me like the only reason people are still hanging onto using IE is all of these compatibility issues with Active-X controls, etc.
If Microsoft really thinks it's time to put IE to bed, they should develop a browser plug-in or extension that works with modern browsers, and extends the functionality that used to be IE specific.
It could even come with warnings that using it for general purpose browsing may be a security risk/unsafe, but it's simply a "shim" to enable on a case by case basis, on sites that used to require IE.
I don't understand why people would be resistant to this merger, really? Sprint is a dying company that's been up for grabs for a while now. Their cellular service has lousy coverage and they've resorted to heavily discounting iPhones to get people to take their garbage network.
In that light, we're not losing much of anything by having Sprint go away. T-Mobile has been growing, but is still the "underdog" compared to Verizon or AT&T. If they can make use of the Sprint network as something to supplement their own, and get the boost to the subscriber-base by acquiring Sprint customers -- it seems like it puts them on more even footing with the "big 2".
I don't see much chance of somebody coming along and wanting to buy Sprint just to continue operating it as a separate entity. The opportunity was there to do that for the last 7 years or so, and nobody seriously expressed interest.
I remember playing with custom ROMs like Cyanogen, years ago, with my Samsung Galaxy phone on Sprint's network. Even back then, it created a lot of headaches for me. Nothing insurmountable, ultimately, but it wreaked havoc with things like Sprint's "visual voicemail" on the phone until some special patch came out to fix it, and there were bugs for a while where the phone would stop ringing on incoming calls.
After that, I swore off the custom ROM hacks, because I needed my cellphone for work as well as for just personal calls and entertainment. It's not worth having some cool new features and custom UI if it means I miss a few important client calls or the phone gets unstable when I'm counting on it.
(I wound up pretty much moving myself to the iPhone as I got more invested in the whole Apple ecosystem, and except for the stupid high cost of the latest XS series phones, I haven't regretted that a bit. If Apple doesn't start offering more bang for the buck by the time I'm ready to upgrade phones again, I *might* switch back to an Android. All depends on what the landscape looks like then, I guess. I'm good for another couple of years, I think.)
But I did have to tinker with the low-cost Androids again, trying to find my teenager a phone to use on a budget. I'm really disappointed in those options. Went with a Motorola E4 as seemingly the best of a bad bunch of cheap ones. At least it has the fingerprint reader on it and more RAM than most. Unfortunately, I couldn't put it on her "SimpleMobile" plan like I wanted to (they use T-Mobile's network), as it was carrier locked to Verizon. People told me, when I bought it, that "That's no big deal! Just pay a few bucks for an unlock code off the Internet and you're good to go!" Well, I'm finding out now that nobody does unlock codes for these anymore. All you get are some shady foreign people who want you to give them TeamViewer access to your Windows PC with the phone attached to it, to unlock it for you for a price. I've paid 3 different people now and not one has actually tried to remote in and do the job. Starting to wonder if it's all just a big scam?
Look at AT&T U-Verse service. It was marketed as broadband that goes head-to-head with cable internet services or something like Verizon FiOS. Their marketing made a big deal about it using fiber, even. Yet it's *really* just a fancy way to squeeze about 18mbit/sec download speeds, maximum, out of copper wire intended for voice land line phone use. (Sure, they run fiber as far as the nearest phone box at the end of a neighborhood street. But all the gear in the box converts the fiber to a form of DSL service they can run over the copper from there to a customer's site.)
I'm not sure a lot of people realize (or want to realize) it, but Amazon was a proponent of the $15/hr. minimum wage laws from early on. That's simply because they know they're big enough and have enough money to handle that on their payroll, while many of their smaller competitors don't. They aren't trying to pay people more money because they're so generous and kind! They're trying to squeeze out their competition.
(And frankly? One of the reasons Amazon isn't hurt by having to pay that high a minimum wage is because it got such lucrative corporate welfare deals from New York and Virginia as they paid out BIG bucks to win the right to get HQ2 located there. (Virginia gave Amazon something like $20,000 for every single employee it was going to hire at that location.)
This idea of setting the lowest bar of what's legal to pay a person to do some work for you at $15/hr. is a bad one. There are a whole lot of jobs that companies only pay human beings to do as long as it's cheaper than automating them. $15/hr. is getting REALLY close to crossing that threshold, and is why you see so many places who pay their people better supplementing them with automated kiosks and checkout lanes. They're going to offset the increased labor expenses by hiring fewer people.
I had a very old email address with an swbell.net domain (the old Southwestern Bell telephone), from back when they were my dial-up 56K ISP in St. Louis, Missouri.
I had an opportunity to migrate it over when AT&T started handling DSL service, and later, U-Verse broadband service in the area. Since they partnered with Yahoo by that point, they had them do the mail hosting -- so the account stayed live with Yahoo even after I moved away from St. Louis and started using other services like Comcast.
To be honest, that address had started collecting so much spam, it wasn't a HUGE problem to just let it go and use other accounts after it was hacked. But my frustration is with the lack of ability to actually communicate with anyone at Yahoo to try to get the account back again. When I try to reset the password, it prompts me for my security questions. But both of them are ones I know I never set up. So of course, I can't answer them correctly. When I tried to Google for assistance, I found a number of different pages with conflicting info on how to deal with the problem. Some referred me to AT&T support pages, which have nothing to do with the issue -- beyond them migrating my swbell.net account to Yahoo while I was an AT&T customer, years and years ago. It looks like I *could* have proactively implemented 2 factor authentication for the account at some point.... but that's "water under the bridge" now.
It's obvious the company really just wants to automate things like their email accounts and wash their hands of any problems they can related to lost passwords, stolen accounts, etc.
Yep! Exactly. They tried to dump substandard quality panels on foreign markets like the USA, hoping they'd put the competition under. But ultimately, it didn't work and China is tired of paying so much to subsidize their manufacture, to keep selling them below their cost. A lot of the companies offering the "no money down solar loans/leases" were using the cheapest panels they could source from China, and people wound up with PV solar installations that degraded, only outputting 60% or so of their rated power production after only a few years of use.
That's one reason I insisted on buying my solar system outright, and paying more for SunPower branded equipment. It was all made in Canada instead of China, and produced at least 10% more power per square foot of panel than the average. That was important for me, because I only had a limited amount of roof space I could use for them. They also don't seem to have degraded much in performance so far. Maybe a few percent over when they were brand new, but hard to determine even that since the amount of sunlight isn't perfectly consistent from year to year.
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Huh? I'm actually kind of a regular player of Overwatch, and all I've found is that after an initial feeling I was "underwhelmed", I started getting the hang of it and got sucked in.
The thing with Overwatch is, a lot of the game really hinges on you practicing and getting good at using each character's unique attributes, but always in the context of how they complement other players on your team (or work against the enemy character(s) you're up against in a given match).
You can get really far in the game just getting good at playing one particular character, BUT there are certain competitive maps where that character is far less than ideal, and times where he/she will just be ineffective because of the character choices the rest of your team made.
Even with all the hours I've put into playing Overwatch now, I'd say I really only "mastered" a few of the characters. Reinhardt is my "main" who I feel most comfortable playing. But every so often, I go up against a team that just has a playing-style that destroys him. You have to carefully chose a different character when that starts happening, to counter the situation.
And what I find even more interesting in Overwatch is the whole dynamic of playing with team-mates who have their OWN notions of how you should be playing your character. Some people will insist, for example, that my Reinhardt needs to concentrate on shielding one or two other characters from taking damage. (That's often a great strategy when someone is playing Bastion and in the gun turret mode, blasting away.) But I generally find him effective when I play with a really aggressive, "Charge in and go crazy, swinging the hammer at everyone!" method. Sure, he's gonna die a lot like that and someone playing a "healer" character will often get irate that "I can't heal you if you keep doing that!!" But I've often cleared a point of 4 or 5 people, just when doing that turned the tide of a match, too.
I guess I'm not sure how your point really relates to my original argument though?
It seems to me like it's not so relevant to the matter why a person decided to download a pirated piece of software, as long as the financial reality is that they can't afford to buy it?
Usability and capability of a piece of software clearly helps drive its desirability. But that's a universal truth. (Whether you're a company who can afford to buy anything they like, or a pre-teen who doesn't have $10 to her/her name -- you're probably going to gravitate towards the more user-friendly and capable program as the one you want to download, install, and learn to use.)
At least in the case of the computer bulletin board systems like the one I ran, it wasn't really much trouble at all to download a program. You had to have some disk space freed up for it and the time to wait for it to finish. But obtaining it was a matter of a few keystrokes. All sorts of programs got passed around on the BBS's and that was more a matter of some "cracking group" deciding to focus on cracking something they got ahold of at a particular time than anything else. (A BBS didn't typically cherry-pick what was offered. It took whatever someone was willing to share and upload to it. And that content tended to be anything the cracking groups just finished cracking and were trying to get distributed as widely as possible.)
Yep! I think this has generally been the case with most of the business Financial software packages out on the market, even though they're "boxed" software and not custom written.
With few exceptions, they seem to usually have their roots in MS-DOS or Unix -- but were converted into a Windows app for the sake of the GUI (and often sold to another company before that changeover took place).
Microsoft Great Plains ERP would be a great example. It's gone through at least 4 or 5 major revisions since Microsoft took it over and "Window-ized" it. And yet, it still feels like a huge kludge of SQL database tables and indexes it manipulates in often odd ways. Behaves oddly on a network, in the sense it still seems to pretty much require a low latency wired Ethernet connection between clients and the server. (Performance drops off a cliff if you connect over a VPN tunnel to the server from your client, no matter how fast a broadband connection you have.) Extremely oddball "DYNAMICS.SET" configuration file their client uses too, which seems to still require manual editing to add custom dictionaries or reports to be loaded at runtime. And if you add an entry to it in an order it doesn't like, it will often modify the file on its own - doing weird things like duplicating the line you added several times inside the file, before crashing with cascading error boxes you have to click through just to exit the software again.
Beneath the surface as a casual user, there's little about Great Plains that feels like anything but a huge "hack" to force it to work in the Windows environment.
You have your subjective opinion on the issue, and I don't know if any comprehensive study has ever been done that would give us answers to prove you right or wrong? But I can very definitely state that in my 30 years or so working with computers and I.T., I've seen MANY, MANY examples where people went on to drive commercial sales of software products, thanks to them having a way to get their hands on free, pirated copies of the programs first.
In your Gimp vs. Photoshop example? I know many people who try to get into photo editing and touch-up work who DO try "The Gimp" but don't find its UI look and feel to be very user-friendly or inviting. I know there was even a project at one time, at least for the Linux version of Gimp, that bolted a "Photoshop type UI" onto it as kind of a skin? I remember getting really excited that they'd finally done that for it, until I learned it was a dead project.
There are, arguably, a lot of other really good photo editors out there that cost much less than Photoshop. So sure, someone on a budget could buy Pixelmator or something like that instead. But once an application has established itself as a "leading" one for the tasks at hand, most people would rather invest their time and energy in learning and mastering it, vs. another product that you may not be able to get help on from anybody else you know if you get stuck.
Especially when you're still a kid or teenager, you have far more time than money. So it's a prime time of your life to spend a lot of hours of screen time in front of software to really learn it, but it's NOT a prime time at all to come up with many hundreds of dollars to PAY for it.
Even when it comes to video game titles though? Everyone I knew who got hooked on computers as a kid pirated many dozens of game titles. At the same time though? We were the main audience who had any interest in playing them in the first place. With our limited buying power, it was always a combination of spending as much as we could to buy a few games (especially the new releases that you wanted to play ASAP), and pirating a lot of the other stuff as the opportunities presented themselves.
I just can't see a valid reason to feel sorry for the industry selling the games? Even if they succeeded in applying some sort of 100% foolproof copy protection and forced every single owner of the game to have paid for it? They would wind up with, basically, no additional revenue over what they actually got. If a kid can only get 1 or 2 games each birthday a gifts, and another 1-2 each Christmas - and only earns enough money to buy 1-2 others over the rest of a year? That's a max of about 6 titles per year they're ever going to possibly buy. Successful piracy of a selection of the thousands of other choices competing for their dollars doesn't really change that. You'll profit from 6 sales per year off that kid, regardless.
I was *just* old enough to remember the tail end of people buying and listening to 8-tracks, so I gotta be honest here? I may not have a real good grasp of how the experience went for regular users.
I did, however. have one of those 2XL toy robot/quiz game machines that used special 8-tracks to run it, and could alternately play regular 8-track music tapes as a tape player. I remember getting my hands of a few good albums on 8-track at that time, like a couple early Police albums. And from my perspective, 8-track was a little better than cassettes where you had to flip them over to listen to the other side. (And probably as a side effect of how the 2XL robot worked, you could press the buttons on the front of it to skip to certain songs on the 8-track, which was kind of a cool, if unintentional feature.)
I think later on, I bought a cheap Radio Shack 8-track player that mounted under the dash of my Chevy Nova and I wired it in tandem with the factory AM radio. I didn't keep it long, but it seemed to work ok while it worked.
I mean, I'm one of the unfortunate people who ran a BBS back in the late 80's and early 90's who got raided by Federal agents over copyright violation accusations. (Ultimately, they just wound up sitting on all my equipment for over a year, keeping it in a storage locker someplace, until deciding to drop the case and return all of it to me. But as we all know with computer gear, a lot of it had already depreciated considerably by then -- so I was left with a lot of stuff I couldn't resell for much of anything.)
But way back THEN, we kept trying to tell everyone who would listen that software piracy was a big waste of time for anyone to chase after and try to prosecute. The SAME people guilty of pirating were the BEST CUSTOMERS or ADVOCATES for buying stuff made by the companies trying to squash it!
For example? One of the "big issues" they had with my BBS was that someone had uploaded a cracked copy of a version of AutoCAD to the "New Uploads" folder. While it's true that's a really expensive piece of software? It's also true that the users on my BBS were mostly kids who could never afford to buy AutoCAD, nor would they ever have a real cost justification to buy it, if they DID have the money. By them pirating it around though, it encouraged some of them to buy a book on how to use it, and they spent some time learning the application. That, in turn, means there's a whole self-taught generation of people who could grow up to work for companies who DO legitimately buy the software, the maintenance agreements, and all of the upgrades and add-ons for it. That's a big win for AutoDesk, whether they admit it or not! Those people aren't going to be happy if the company buys a competitor's CAD product. They want the one they're comfortable with!
When you challenge most software firms with this kind of logic, they typically turn around and give a lecture on there being a "right and a wrong way" to go about learning their products -- perhaps throwing in the fact that they sell "student versions" much cheaper for students. And you know? That's all true, technically. If you're purely a "letter of the law" and "show no mercy" type, I guess there's your answer? But I bet the "pirates" on BBS's like mine, back then, OFTEN got a career in I.T. or in using one or more of these business apps thanks to having a way to download it for free, on their own terms, to use on their own PC, on their own schedule. And it just wouldn't have ever happened if you expected them to opt to pursue it in college (when they're already cramming their brains full of other course content they need to get through to graduate).
Is there really a sizeable number of people out there who decide to go see a movie, or pass on it, simply based on Rotten Tomatoes taking what amounts to a poll before the film is even out, asking who is interested in it??
Maybe someone is rigging things with bots downvoting it. Maybe not.
What I *do* predict is that this movie won't do as well as some recent superhero films have done, simply because it lacks as broad an appeal. There was a pretty HUGE number of people familiar with superheroes like Superman, Batman or Spiderman, even if they never read a single comic book. By doing an above-average job with some of those movies, they managed to reel in a lot of people to learn more about OTHER superheroes they'd heard of in passing, at least, like Iron Man or Thor. But recently, Hollywood hasn't had a whole lot to offer people BESIDES superhero filcks! If you like these types of action, make-believe movies, you're pretty short on alternatives to go see. They got a lot of mileage out of Wonder Woman because females finally got represented, and Black Panther for the African American contingent. But we're down to films like Aquaman, that women (or gay men) attended primarily to oogle the star's body, and others that have just "sequel-ed out", like the X-Men franchise.
Now, obviously, a lot of Slashdot readers are in the category of more hard-core comic fans, so most of this doesn't apply here. If you're even an occasional comic shop visitor, you're going to have your own reasons to want to see pretty much any of these movies that come along. Plus, you probably care more about smaller plot twists that fly right over the heads of 80% of the paying audience.
But speaking for the theater "take" on the whole? Yeah, I can't see Capt. Marvel being way up there.
They might offer reasonably priced screen replacement, but the older vehicles are still going to be out the cost of a whole new computer assembly AND screen. (There's a known issue where the soldered-on flash storage on the older Teslas fails from too many read/write cycles after a while. And Tesla themselves pushed a lot of those flash chips close to the edge when they logged far too much data to them, until more recent firmware updates backed off on that.)
And I know all about the "Tesloop" Tesla S used for taxi service that logged 400,000+ miles. But the fact remains, that vehicle is probably an outlier that Tesla has been overly generous about doing warranty work on, because it makes for such good P.R. for them. (I can assure you, I run into folks on the Facebook Tesla forums every week who are struggling with failing battery packs that Tesla refuses to replace as warranty repairs.) If anything, service has gotten much WORSE with all the Model 3 sales going on. The service centers are over-booked and looking for any reason to turn someone away.
Honestly? It seems to me like there's a great business opportunity for shops who can take apart the Tesla battery packs and replace only the defective groups of cells in one that are failing. Most battery pack "failures" involve conditions where between 1 and 3 groups of individual cells are holding far less charge than the ones around them, creating an "unbalanced" battery pack. I imagine the biggest challenge is in getting the exact replacement cells needed?
When Apple did the huge transition over from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, it was near the height of Apple's success selling OS X based computers. Even then, there was a big fear it would hurt certain markets, like native OS X game development, as it would make an excuse to "just write a Windows only version and let the Mac users boot into Windows to play it". And that, in fact, DID happen. But by and large, Mac users accepted it as a "win" because Intel CPU development was so much further ahead and drove more competitive Macs with their Windows counterparts. Plus, it wasn't half bad being able to run Windows in virtual environments - where a bunch of processor instruction conversion between x86 and PPC didn't have to happen in the background to make it work.
This time around? It's far less clear.... Intel still cranks out great CPUs and nobody I know is complaining that their Mac is under-powered, CPU-wise. The big push seems to be Apple's continual insistence that "most people can just use an iPad and iPhone instead of a computer", and an interest in selling their own CPUs instead of giving all that money to Intel.
I think we're going to see a lot of "dumbing down" of OS X apps if they all start getting coded to run universally on iOS and OS X with ARM. If features in software don't translate well to a touch-screen UI, they'll rip them out instead of keeping "Mac only" versions with more capabilities.
It doesn't matter that the statistics show their batteries "hold up well". The reason you'll see serious depreciation is the realization that IF the battery fails on you, you're going to be out about $18,000 to buy a replacement, out of warranty.
Don't get me wrong... I'm a Tesla owner myself, right now. (Used 2014 Model S here.) I like the cars a lot. But the idea they'll run far longer than a comparable ICE vehicle without any major repair costs? That's just not realistic. I can get even a big block V8 engine completely rebuilt, and possibly even with some upgraded internals while I'm at it, for under HALF the cost of replacing a Tesla S battery pack. And as others pointed out -- you have the whole computer system/touch-screen assembly in the dash that's not very likely to hold up for over 10 years or so. (Most first generation Apple iPads are developing various screen issues like lines down the middle or dark spots, if they didn't just fail outright -- and that was regarded as a pretty good quality touchscreen. I don't see evidence a Model S or 3 screen is going to do much better? Many of them already have issues with yellow borders forming around the edges of the display, because the glue inside starts failing.)
IMHO, most debates like this have some truth on BOTH sides. I don't like the push to just stop vaccinating - but I'm also not fond of the way the medical community and others seem to be polarized, to try to utterly shut down what they're saying.
It's not logical or "good science" to assume that all the NEW vaccinations that are developed are just as safe as the "classic" ones with proven track records, like the polio vaccine.
I think it's worth noting that until 2000-2003 or so, they were still using mercury in the vaccines given to infants. I'm not sure that practice would have changed if there wasn't an outcry forming about potential safety issues with them? (And mercury is STILL found in many of the influenza shots today. Granted, they insist it's pretty safe, since it's ethylmercury, not methylmercury, which means it breaks down faster in the human body.)
But there are valid concerns about vaccines like Gardasil, too. Statistically, there ARE a certain number of deaths caused by receiving that immunization. The manufacturer counters that it's statistically about the same as the number of women who die from cervical cancer so it's therefore justified. Yet, that doesn't take into account any OTHER adverse effects the vaccine could cause, including cases it paralyzed a person. It's also uncertain the vaccine still provides protection for more than 15 years or so.
To be totally honest? I'm not sure a Tesla is a car anyone is going to keep trying to hang onto for the "long term"? By that, I mean we already know the average vehicle owner doesn't keep a car or truck more than about 6 years. The Tesla S had an unlimited mileage, 8 year warranty covering battery pack or drive motor failures, so even the very oldest 2012 models still have warranty on those items through next year.
But looking forward at things? I think you're going to see serious depreciation happen as soon as those 8 year warranties are up, and that, in turn will force prices down on the Model 3. Teslas have held their resale value pretty well because they didn't manufacture huge numbers of them to begin with, but also because all of them on the road have various states of warranty coverage - plus Tesla is still supporting them with things it *could* end at any time. (EG. All the Model S's purchased through 2016 had unlimited free supercharging bundled with them, which transfers with the car's resale. All of the Model 3's and S's have integrated cellular modems with LTE service paid for by Tesla for streaming music and the GPS maps.)
IMO, Tesla is marketing their vehicles more like high-end computer sales than the way traditional vehicle sales are done. How many people are going to keep a 10-15 year old computer running? Sure, a *few* will consider them collectible - but they're going to cannibalize other ones to keep their specimens going. That's how these cars will pan out too, if my guess is correct. Tesla WILL start making parts hard to obtain after a while, but by then - your car won't be worth a whole lot and you'll only be in a small minority of hard-core enthusiasts if you're even TRYING to keep it. The tech in it will be way outdated by then. You'll probably have far quicker charging, better "auto pilot" features and MUCH more if you invest in a newer model.
There are definitely some items on these cars that independent mechanics could service, but the demand doesn't seem to be there to make it worth the time of most to learn how to do it? Certainly, the Model S has long been plagued with door handles that stop auto-retracting/opening properly, and they can be obtained online easily enough. It's just kind of a bear to do the labor involved to swap the things. The "air suspension" is pretty much using Mercedes parts, as I understand it. So that, too, *could* be serviced by someone other than Tesla. It's just that currently, I bet 99.9% of shops would be afraid to touch it.
Do you *really* think the people get represented on any of this when the Federal Reserve isn't even really a government agency in the first place?
I dunno? My experience on the desktop is, you really DO want native apps vs "yet another app you use as a web page in your favorite browser". If nothing else, it's just advantageous from the standpoint of keeping things compartmentalized while utilizing the whole UI that's been built around manipulating individual apps.
As one example? Our office VoIP system used to use a control panel that ran in Java. It was cross-platform Mac and Windows compatible that way. Eventually, the company decided it was less development effort to just design a web browser based control panel. It has more functionality (nothing they couldn't have done in the old client if they wanted to -- but lot of things that probably were easy to add once they had the client running in a full size web browser window). Yet few of our employees like the thing. All we heard were complaints when they forced the transition, and many just stopped using their desk phones rather than deal with it.
The thing is, a small app that retains your login/password info and auto-starts at system boot is really user-friendly. It's "just there" when you sign in and your OS remember the window size and position for you, popping it up exactly where you like to have it. With the browser app, you're always required to load a more resource intensive full browser to use it, and you'll have to resize it at each launch if you want it to act like a toolbar on your desktop. If the browser its in is your default browser, it's immediately going to be hidden behind screens for other URLs you click on while working. And the overall "feel" is that it's something you should only have as a fall-back alternative to a full-blown client.
It seems to me like paper money will go away the day a government declares it so. In the U.S. right now, it would be entirely possible to issue some sort of government "cash card" to everyone, and dissolve the U.S. mints and all of their operational costs to offset the expense of issuing them.
All of this talk of paper money never going away because "the poor won't have bank accounts or credit cards" misses the point. All of the cash people walk around with had to be produced at considerable taxpayer expense and is maintained after that (damaged bank notes destroyed and replaced, etc.). It's not like it's unfathomable that the Federal government wouldn't just set up its own "no monthly fee, no credit check necessary" system where everyone gets a card.
Where that gets disturbing, to me, is that you're giving up the anonymous nature of cash transactions. You won't even be able to buy a stick of gum without it being logged in a computer system owned by the Fed. But practically speaking? I don't think those concerns will do much to stop things from progressing. Government already keeps tabs on any purchases you make of more significance, such as a home or car, and demands banks report your large cash deposits to them. 99% of the population will decide it just doesn't matter that government knows about all the little stuff you purchase .....
It seems to me like a LOT of people involved with or impacted by this Amazon HQ being in, vs. leaving New York are just running off emotions and assumptions?
To determine if this was a "good deal" for NY taxpayers, you have to look at many factors and crunch all the numbers. I'm confident the likes of Cortex didn't do so, but I question if DeBlasio did either?
I mean, you have to calculate impact of the extra traffic it generates .... the extra demand on public utilities like electric power, sewer and water. You obviously have to look at how much you gave Amazon in tax breaks and benefits, vs. how much they'll really benefit the public with new jobs. (How much will you collect in taxes from the people they hire?) And if the deal wasn't struck with a clause in it that required Amazon STAY there for a number of years -- you have to try to take an educated guess about the long-term future. Many times, companies take advantage of these deals to put a business in a state, only to pull back out as soon as the perks expire.
I don't know if the HQ was a good deal of Queens or it wasn't .... but the people making the decision should sure know, and I'm not confident any of them do?
Seriously, I'm a middle aged guy who still enjoys the occasional computer game. I'm primarily a Mac user, which means I'm locked out of running most of the good new titles on that platform. And I really don't play console games much. We have a PS4, but the kids pretty much take it over -- and that's fine with me. I don't really want my gaming on display in the living room on a 60" TV, or want to sit on the couch instead of a computer chair while playing one. And I never got used to the controllers vs a keyboard and mouse combo for a 3D shooter.
So I spent the money and invested in an ASUS ROG Zephyrus with the nVidia 1080 graphics card in it. Does everything I need for gaming, but that thing wasn't cheap! AND, frankly, it feels like it's all made of cheap, flimsy plastic. I tend to just leave it on a small desk in our bedroom, and use an external keyboard, mouse and display with it. So it's holding up ok. But I wouldn't trust it to last more than a couple of years if it was really being carried around all over the place.
But I feel like nVidia and ATI/AMD are both cranking out new GPUs at a quick enough pace so the value of these machines depreciates really rapidly. I doubt I could resell this Zephyrus for anywhere NEAR what I paid, and it's still a pretty new computer. Traditionally, that hasn't been as big an issue for people because if all you're swapping out is a video card in a desktop PC, you can time your upgrades right and probably get into a pattern of spending $500-60 for the latest card, followed by selling your last one to recoup $200-250. Even if you do that annually, you're spending around $250-350 per year to stay on top of things. With a laptop, there's a lot bigger loss involved.
I don't know how these gaming laptops are selling well to the primarily much younger audience? Our 16 year old sure can't afford to buy one himself, and that's a big "ask" for a Christmas or birthday gift.
It seems to me like the only reason people are still hanging onto using IE is all of these compatibility issues with Active-X controls, etc.
If Microsoft really thinks it's time to put IE to bed, they should develop a browser plug-in or extension that works with modern browsers, and extends the functionality that used to be IE specific.
It could even come with warnings that using it for general purpose browsing may be a security risk/unsafe, but it's simply a "shim" to enable on a case by case basis, on sites that used to require IE.
I don't understand why people would be resistant to this merger, really? Sprint is a dying company that's been up for grabs for a while now. Their cellular service has lousy coverage and they've resorted to heavily discounting iPhones to get people to take their garbage network.
In that light, we're not losing much of anything by having Sprint go away. T-Mobile has been growing, but is still the "underdog" compared to Verizon or AT&T. If they can make use of the Sprint network as something to supplement their own, and get the boost to the subscriber-base by acquiring Sprint customers -- it seems like it puts them on more even footing with the "big 2".
I don't see much chance of somebody coming along and wanting to buy Sprint just to continue operating it as a separate entity. The opportunity was there to do that for the last 7 years or so, and nobody seriously expressed interest.
I remember playing with custom ROMs like Cyanogen, years ago, with my Samsung Galaxy phone on Sprint's network. Even back then, it created a lot of headaches for me. Nothing insurmountable, ultimately, but it wreaked havoc with things like Sprint's "visual voicemail" on the phone until some special patch came out to fix it, and there were bugs for a while where the phone would stop ringing on incoming calls.
After that, I swore off the custom ROM hacks, because I needed my cellphone for work as well as for just personal calls and entertainment. It's not worth having some cool new features and custom UI if it means I miss a few important client calls or the phone gets unstable when I'm counting on it.
(I wound up pretty much moving myself to the iPhone as I got more invested in the whole Apple ecosystem, and except for the stupid high cost of the latest XS series phones, I haven't regretted that a bit. If Apple doesn't start offering more bang for the buck by the time I'm ready to upgrade phones again, I *might* switch back to an Android. All depends on what the landscape looks like then, I guess. I'm good for another couple of years, I think.)
But I did have to tinker with the low-cost Androids again, trying to find my teenager a phone to use on a budget. I'm really disappointed in those options. Went with a Motorola E4 as seemingly the best of a bad bunch of cheap ones. At least it has the fingerprint reader on it and more RAM than most. Unfortunately, I couldn't put it on her "SimpleMobile" plan like I wanted to (they use T-Mobile's network), as it was carrier locked to Verizon. People told me, when I bought it, that "That's no big deal! Just pay a few bucks for an unlock code off the Internet and you're good to go!" Well, I'm finding out now that nobody does unlock codes for these anymore. All you get are some shady foreign people who want you to give them TeamViewer access to your Windows PC with the phone attached to it, to unlock it for you for a price. I've paid 3 different people now and not one has actually tried to remote in and do the job. Starting to wonder if it's all just a big scam?
Look at AT&T U-Verse service. It was marketed as broadband that goes head-to-head with cable internet services or something like Verizon FiOS. Their marketing made a big deal about it using fiber, even. Yet it's *really* just a fancy way to squeeze about 18mbit/sec download speeds, maximum, out of copper wire intended for voice land line phone use. (Sure, they run fiber as far as the nearest phone box at the end of a neighborhood street. But all the gear in the box converts the fiber to a form of DSL service they can run over the copper from there to a customer's site.)
It's quickly shaping up to be Amazon vs. WalMart .... with anyone much smaller than either one squeezed out.
I'm not sure a lot of people realize (or want to realize) it, but Amazon was a proponent of the $15/hr. minimum wage laws from early on. That's simply because they know they're big enough and have enough money to handle that on their payroll, while many of their smaller competitors don't. They aren't trying to pay people more money because they're so generous and kind! They're trying to squeeze out their competition.
(And frankly? One of the reasons Amazon isn't hurt by having to pay that high a minimum wage is because it got such lucrative corporate welfare deals from New York and Virginia as they paid out BIG bucks to win the right to get HQ2 located there. (Virginia gave Amazon something like $20,000 for every single employee it was going to hire at that location.)
This idea of setting the lowest bar of what's legal to pay a person to do some work for you at $15/hr. is a bad one. There are a whole lot of jobs that companies only pay human beings to do as long as it's cheaper than automating them. $15/hr. is getting REALLY close to crossing that threshold, and is why you see so many places who pay their people better supplementing them with automated kiosks and checkout lanes. They're going to offset the increased labor expenses by hiring fewer people.
I had a very old email address with an swbell.net domain (the old Southwestern Bell telephone), from back when they were my dial-up 56K ISP in St. Louis, Missouri.
I had an opportunity to migrate it over when AT&T started handling DSL service, and later, U-Verse broadband service in the area. Since they partnered with Yahoo by that point, they had them do the mail hosting -- so the account stayed live with Yahoo even after I moved away from St. Louis and started using other services like Comcast.
To be honest, that address had started collecting so much spam, it wasn't a HUGE problem to just let it go and use other accounts after it was hacked. But my frustration is with the lack of ability to actually communicate with anyone at Yahoo to try to get the account back again. When I try to reset the password, it prompts me for my security questions. But both of them are ones I know I never set up. So of course, I can't answer them correctly. When I tried to Google for assistance, I found a number of different pages with conflicting info on how to deal with the problem. Some referred me to AT&T support pages, which have nothing to do with the issue -- beyond them migrating my swbell.net account to Yahoo while I was an AT&T customer, years and years ago. It looks like I *could* have proactively implemented 2 factor authentication for the account at some point .... but that's "water under the bridge" now.
It's obvious the company really just wants to automate things like their email accounts and wash their hands of any problems they can related to lost passwords, stolen accounts, etc.
Yep! Exactly. They tried to dump substandard quality panels on foreign markets like the USA, hoping they'd put the competition under. But ultimately, it didn't work and China is tired of paying so much to subsidize their manufacture, to keep selling them below their cost. A lot of the companies offering the "no money down solar loans/leases" were using the cheapest panels they could source from China, and people wound up with PV solar installations that degraded, only outputting 60% or so of their rated power production after only a few years of use.
That's one reason I insisted on buying my solar system outright, and paying more for SunPower branded equipment. It was all made in Canada instead of China, and produced at least 10% more power per square foot of panel than the average. That was important for me, because I only had a limited amount of roof space I could use for them. They also don't seem to have degraded much in performance so far. Maybe a few percent over when they were brand new, but hard to determine even that since the amount of sunlight isn't perfectly consistent from year to year.