Oh yea, all that stuff is a lot of fun, but hard to get other people interested in messing around with it, so sure you can ping routers all day but that's about it.
This is the problem with big corporations. Small firms and startups can offer a relatively large percentage of the payoff if successful. Google, while able to provide stock options out the wazoo, still can't offer the kind of equity in the company Sergey and Larry have. After all, even acquiring enough stock to offer a 1% payout on success would be next to impossible without either driving up the share price or diluting the pool with new shares to drive the price down. But if you're working for a startup with potential, hey here's 10% of nothing. If it works out, whoopee. If not, well you still have all that "FU money" from your previous employer.
I'm sure the same thing happened at Microsoft when they went public. I heard that people wore buttons that had the letters "FUIFV," which stood for "f*** you, I'm fully vested." I'm sure more than a few people decided to cut and run knowing their retirement, kids' education and possibly home were paid for. Just the right conditions for going out and starting your own company.
If you get nostalgic for the good old days, get your ham radio license. You'll be transported back to the past by trying to interface your fancy new $kilobuck radio with a modern PC, use software that can't address virtual com ports (meaning you'll have to hope your USB converter can fake being COM 1-4), actually attempt to communicate using only 45, 300, 1200 (but never 9600) baud, and deal with other users who won't let go of 20 year old computers running Windows XP because they're still pissed off they had to learn a new UI after that whole Windows 3.1 to 95 debacle.
Oh and when someone proposes actually doing something that might modernize the hobby, they get shot down in flames.
Yep. Remember dad was too cheap to pay the extra buck to GTE for touch tones. Waiting for the modem to pulse dial after my sister picked up the other extension and killed the connection was torture (as was the 300 baud throughput).
Verizon wants to do what AT&T tried to do in the 1990s, become a nationwide wireline provider. Didn't end so well for AT&T (real T, not former Bell South or whatever). Verizon is all about the northeast and mid-atlantic, where Comcast also has a big presence. But the rest of the country is covered by many different cable companies, and also a good bit of geography still has no cable at all. Hard to run national campaigns when most of the people watching aren't able to get your product.
I was all set to pull the trigger on one of these but then went with the Apple Watch on an impulse. Either one is probably more than your budget but I did like the looks of the thing. I own/used its little brother, the STB-1000 and found it functional enough to justify buying a smart watch. Yes, it needs a phone for reminders and such, but it will do much of what a true smart watch will do and still be a pretty good stand alone device. And you're probably going to have your phone with you anyway.
Bitcoin mining is helping people in Venezuela avoid the problems of hyperinflation, thanks to state subsided (although likely illegally used) electricity:
not enough customers bought into the tech to make it profitable in the timeline they wanted.
You missed that last part of my sentence, which is the critical part. Capex is all about time to payback the investment. If a stock buyback or acquiring a competitor has a faster payback or is preferred to the investor markets, infrastructure will take a back seat.
Sure, for many people there's no need for increased bandwidth. Until the next big thing hits and all of the sudden everyone needs more bandwidth. Dial up internet was fine for mostly text web pages and email. Then someone started producing graphics rich web sites with lots of advertising and people needed more bandwidth. Then people started sharing/downloading music, taking more bandwidth than available, so the ISPs had to catch up again. Then Netflix and Youtube. I'm not sure what the next big thing is, but you can bet it will take the ISPs by complete surprise.
Yet another bridge tech to keep from having to run fiber to the home. Cable companies are almost to the point where passive coax makes sense everywhere (Comcast will be deploying "fiber deep" tech in their network over the next 2-4 years). VZW again attempting to dump their copper pair network, this time for wireless. No idea what AT&T is up to with Uverse these days, but I think they're continuing to push RDSLAMs out closer to the customers. Any new build developments above a certain number of homes will be fiber to the home for every ISP thanks to joint open trenching, but all that legacy stuff is too expensive to dig up. The good news is that fiber continues to get cheaper.
Verizon was on the right track with FIOS, but unfortunately not enough customers bought into the tech to make it profitable in the timeline they wanted. This is the fundamental problem with very large national ISPs, they cannot scale out the last mile without sinking billions into the network, but because people don't necessarily understand what increased bandwidth means (and yes, lack of competition), there's little business at risk for doing nothing. So once again when the new bandwidth hog hits the network the ISPs are woefully unprepared.
Yea, there's a lot of very good research done in Washington. Look at some of the work generated by the CBO. Much of it is logical, reasonable and will never be implemented because logic and reason have no place in US politics.
So if you're happy sitting here by yourself typing away, go for it.
But that's the thing, the OP isn't sitting here "by themselves," they are with all of our thoughts, including yours. Just because someone isn't staring at your face at the same moment in time doesn't mean they aren't interacting with you. Humans have been interacting over distance and time for thousands of years. Now that communication and artificial memory has become cheap, there are a lot more of us who can afford to engage.
Actually CP/M ran just fine on the Altair 8800 and other S-100 bus computers, around 1975 or so (the first version of CP/M was released in 1974, but Wikipedia isn't clear as to what it ran on when). There were lots of different designs for personal computers, mostly built around the S-100 bus, and many of them were used by small businesses and hobbyist types even long after the first home computers hit the mass market.
But you're right, the Apple ][ was a new concept entirely. And by the time Atari, Commodore and the rest got into mass production the market changed. I think that the 3d printer world is in that same place as early PCs were in the late 1970s, still waiting for a great efficient design and mass market appeal. Unfortunately everyone thinks they're the next "the two Steves."
The advantage of big companies is that they gain economies of scale. But customer service doesn't scale very well. Every time customer service becomes a focus, the accounting department shuts down the budget. Call center personnel are low paid and poorly trained because their managers are low paid and poorly trained, having come up through the ranks of the underfunded call centers. This happens across the board. The engineers know that they could improve reliability (and customer satisfaction) by upgrading old equipment. But the accounting department/shareholders won't risk the dividend by releasing a lot of capital if the payback isn't within an arbitrary time period. So population dense areas get constant upgrades (because managers can easily justify the upgrade), while areas with longer payback get put on the back burner -or worse, the old stuff from the upgraded area gets shipped off to the more expensive operating areas.
Of course this all limits innovation in an industry. It only really works when there isn't sufficient competition, through controlling access to capital and/or regulation. By precisely controlling the upgrade cycle and product offers, you can define what constitutes customer service. It worked great for the old Ma Bell AT&T, and today it seems to work well for the cellular industry. The cable ISPs are slow to learn, but getting there. When the cable companies manage to rein in the marketing department we'll see customer service improve.
This morning I did a mass unfollowing on Twitter. Amazing the amount of vitriol that's been going through the past few months, from people who up until this year were mostly interesting to me for their ability to entertain. That and all that bitcoin crap that I never bothered to purge. Here's hoping my feed can get back to hobbies and tech news again.
Slashdot Mirror
Old white guys have all the money.
Oh yea, all that stuff is a lot of fun, but hard to get other people interested in messing around with it, so sure you can ping routers all day but that's about it.
This is the problem with big corporations. Small firms and startups can offer a relatively large percentage of the payoff if successful. Google, while able to provide stock options out the wazoo, still can't offer the kind of equity in the company Sergey and Larry have. After all, even acquiring enough stock to offer a 1% payout on success would be next to impossible without either driving up the share price or diluting the pool with new shares to drive the price down. But if you're working for a startup with potential, hey here's 10% of nothing. If it works out, whoopee. If not, well you still have all that "FU money" from your previous employer.
I'm sure the same thing happened at Microsoft when they went public. I heard that people wore buttons that had the letters "FUIFV," which stood for "f*** you, I'm fully vested." I'm sure more than a few people decided to cut and run knowing their retirement, kids' education and possibly home were paid for. Just the right conditions for going out and starting your own company.
If you get nostalgic for the good old days, get your ham radio license. You'll be transported back to the past by trying to interface your fancy new $kilobuck radio with a modern PC, use software that can't address virtual com ports (meaning you'll have to hope your USB converter can fake being COM 1-4), actually attempt to communicate using only 45, 300, 1200 (but never 9600) baud, and deal with other users who won't let go of 20 year old computers running Windows XP because they're still pissed off they had to learn a new UI after that whole Windows 3.1 to 95 debacle.
Oh and when someone proposes actually doing something that might modernize the hobby, they get shot down in flames.
Yep. Remember dad was too cheap to pay the extra buck to GTE for touch tones. Waiting for the modem to pulse dial after my sister picked up the other extension and killed the connection was torture (as was the 300 baud throughput).
You forgot "tab down," which caused a lot of confusion when training a coworker (and not specifying that) once. But only once...
Page 6 on the Atari 8 bits.
Verizon wants to do what AT&T tried to do in the 1990s, become a nationwide wireline provider. Didn't end so well for AT&T (real T, not former Bell South or whatever). Verizon is all about the northeast and mid-atlantic, where Comcast also has a big presence. But the rest of the country is covered by many different cable companies, and also a good bit of geography still has no cable at all. Hard to run national campaigns when most of the people watching aren't able to get your product.
http://edifice.casio.com/
I was all set to pull the trigger on one of these but then went with the Apple Watch on an impulse. Either one is probably more than your budget but I did like the looks of the thing. I own/used its little brother, the STB-1000 and found it functional enough to justify buying a smart watch. Yes, it needs a phone for reminders and such, but it will do much of what a true smart watch will do and still be a pretty good stand alone device. And you're probably going to have your phone with you anyway.
Of course you could go nuts and get an Oceanus...
Bitcoin mining is helping people in Venezuela avoid the problems of hyperinflation, thanks to state subsided (although likely illegally used) electricity:
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
not enough customers bought into the tech to make it profitable in the timeline they wanted.
You missed that last part of my sentence, which is the critical part. Capex is all about time to payback the investment. If a stock buyback or acquiring a competitor has a faster payback or is preferred to the investor markets, infrastructure will take a back seat.
Sure, for many people there's no need for increased bandwidth. Until the next big thing hits and all of the sudden everyone needs more bandwidth. Dial up internet was fine for mostly text web pages and email. Then someone started producing graphics rich web sites with lots of advertising and people needed more bandwidth. Then people started sharing/downloading music, taking more bandwidth than available, so the ISPs had to catch up again. Then Netflix and Youtube. I'm not sure what the next big thing is, but you can bet it will take the ISPs by complete surprise.
Yet another bridge tech to keep from having to run fiber to the home. Cable companies are almost to the point where passive coax makes sense everywhere (Comcast will be deploying "fiber deep" tech in their network over the next 2-4 years). VZW again attempting to dump their copper pair network, this time for wireless. No idea what AT&T is up to with Uverse these days, but I think they're continuing to push RDSLAMs out closer to the customers. Any new build developments above a certain number of homes will be fiber to the home for every ISP thanks to joint open trenching, but all that legacy stuff is too expensive to dig up. The good news is that fiber continues to get cheaper.
Verizon was on the right track with FIOS, but unfortunately not enough customers bought into the tech to make it profitable in the timeline they wanted. This is the fundamental problem with very large national ISPs, they cannot scale out the last mile without sinking billions into the network, but because people don't necessarily understand what increased bandwidth means (and yes, lack of competition), there's little business at risk for doing nothing. So once again when the new bandwidth hog hits the network the ISPs are woefully unprepared.
"But we followed all the guidelines as set forth by the FDA, so we're not liable."
-Every medical device manufacturer after they've been hacked.
"Krieger-san my cherry blossoms are wilting."
Yea, there's a lot of very good research done in Washington. Look at some of the work generated by the CBO. Much of it is logical, reasonable and will never be implemented because logic and reason have no place in US politics.
So if you're happy sitting here by yourself typing away, go for it.
But that's the thing, the OP isn't sitting here "by themselves," they are with all of our thoughts, including yours. Just because someone isn't staring at your face at the same moment in time doesn't mean they aren't interacting with you. Humans have been interacting over distance and time for thousands of years. Now that communication and artificial memory has become cheap, there are a lot more of us who can afford to engage.
No way will French workers put up with this nonsense. Look for strikes and sabotage.
Best way to beat Vegas is to day trade casino stocks.
Yep, you're right. Commodore had the PETs and CBM machines. Oh, but they were built after Commodore got a demo of an Apple 2 (happy?) prototype:
"In September 1976 Peddle got a demonstration of Jobs and Wozniak's Apple II prototype, when Jobs was offering to sell it to Commodore, but Commodore considered Jobs' offer too expensive.[3]"
There was a lot of work being done in parallel. That's what happens when new chips are introduced.
Actually CP/M ran just fine on the Altair 8800 and other S-100 bus computers, around 1975 or so (the first version of CP/M was released in 1974, but Wikipedia isn't clear as to what it ran on when). There were lots of different designs for personal computers, mostly built around the S-100 bus, and many of them were used by small businesses and hobbyist types even long after the first home computers hit the mass market.
But you're right, the Apple ][ was a new concept entirely. And by the time Atari, Commodore and the rest got into mass production the market changed. I think that the 3d printer world is in that same place as early PCs were in the late 1970s, still waiting for a great efficient design and mass market appeal. Unfortunately everyone thinks they're the next "the two Steves."
Office Depot has 3d printing at their stores.
http://news.officedepot.com/pr...
No big deal. From what we've seen so far, tomorrow he'll Tweet about how wonderful it is that Apple is making their phones in Asia instead of the US.
Too bad Steve Jobs isn't still around to take that phone call. The reality distortion fields would have caused a rip in space-time.
The advantage of big companies is that they gain economies of scale. But customer service doesn't scale very well. Every time customer service becomes a focus, the accounting department shuts down the budget. Call center personnel are low paid and poorly trained because their managers are low paid and poorly trained, having come up through the ranks of the underfunded call centers. This happens across the board. The engineers know that they could improve reliability (and customer satisfaction) by upgrading old equipment. But the accounting department/shareholders won't risk the dividend by releasing a lot of capital if the payback isn't within an arbitrary time period. So population dense areas get constant upgrades (because managers can easily justify the upgrade), while areas with longer payback get put on the back burner -or worse, the old stuff from the upgraded area gets shipped off to the more expensive operating areas.
Of course this all limits innovation in an industry. It only really works when there isn't sufficient competition, through controlling access to capital and/or regulation. By precisely controlling the upgrade cycle and product offers, you can define what constitutes customer service. It worked great for the old Ma Bell AT&T, and today it seems to work well for the cellular industry. The cable ISPs are slow to learn, but getting there. When the cable companies manage to rein in the marketing department we'll see customer service improve.
This morning I did a mass unfollowing on Twitter. Amazing the amount of vitriol that's been going through the past few months, from people who up until this year were mostly interesting to me for their ability to entertain. That and all that bitcoin crap that I never bothered to purge. Here's hoping my feed can get back to hobbies and tech news again.