gamble · HackerTrans

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

GoPro 2 was rock-solid, but 3 and 4 had huge quality problems. Terrible customer service as well. I used to like GoPro, but since the GoPro 2 they've completely soured me. I don't know if the GoPro 5 is any better, but the Amazon reviews are terrible.

gamble

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

A company I was working for was acquired and the first thing the new management said in the initial meeting was that they had no interest in owning us. They were only acquiring the company because another office had government contracts they wanted. Also, our equity was worthless now. But don't worry, because no one is getting fired! (Instead everyone resigned within a few months)

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

TPM 2.0 is a crown jewel for the NSA. Windows 8 full-disk encryption is based on TPM, and Windows 8.1 certification requires a TPM 2.0 module. It already is or soon will be universal in PC hardware. The NSA was involved its creation, and resisted changes to the standard. At the same time the German government was claiming there were no backdoors in Windows or TPM, privately they had already concluded it was compromised.

Source: http://news.techworld.com/security/3465259/is-windows-8-a-tr...

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

You realize that these are exactly the same arguments that were brought up to argue against the details revealed in these documents, so perhaps appeals to authority and use of the words 'conspiracy theories' may be taken with a few more grains of salt. NSA backdoors have been alleged for decades now, and the response is always that they're a 'conspiracy theory'.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Even without naming the companies involved, it's very hard to imagine they are inserting backdoors in less-valued products while somehow missing the crown jewels of Windows and TPM.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Now we know why Congress thought it was a realistic risk - they were already doing it to China.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

It may be widely believe in cryptography circles, but this release wipes away the plausible deniability that governments and American corporations have always depended on. Just last week, the German government was pooh-pooh'ing claims that Windows and TPM chips had backdoors inserted by the NSA.[1] These documents all but confirm it.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/german-government-refutes-windows-backd...

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

The streaming-music business reminds me of Netflix in its early days, before movie studios became worried that it was cannibalizing rental/VOD revenue for new releases. There are a certain group of fans who are willing to pay $10-20 per album for access to music the moment it's released. With Spotify, those fans are treated like any other stream even though they're willing to pay more. It's inefficient pricing, except from Spotify's perspective as they're able to use immediate access to new release music as a lure for subscribers. So really, you can look at Spotify as capturing that demand and converting it into free advertising for themselves. I don't see that as sustainable in the long run. Some artists are already holding back new releases from streaming services. Like Netflix, I think that in the future you will see few new releases from popular artists until they've been available through premium services long enough to capture demand from hardcore fans.

Spotify treats all songs as if they have equal value, but that's obviously not true from the listener's perspective. For any given person, there are going to be some songs that they're willing to pay a premium to hear, and some that they'll only listen to if it's free. Spotify is a good deal for the latter case, but not if it offers a discounted version of the former to people who could pay for it. Just because Spotify counts every stream as a single interchangeable unit of value doesn't mean that listeners value every stream equally.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Because radio is not a substitute for recorded music. The inability to choose what you're listening to was always the stick that compelled listeners to purchase a recording. If you have Spotify, there is no reason to ever purchase that music in a download store.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

What? Bose has long been notoriously low-quality for the price. They were the Beats by Dr. Dre of the 1980s, not Apple.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

I can't see many developers putting the time to offload calculations when they'd have to make the game work seamlessly with varying levels of latency or the servers becoming unavailable. Just look at how difficult it has been for games to utilize a handful of CPU cores. Microsoft's claims about the cloud remind me of ten years ago, when the .net label was being applied to everything they made and all software was somehow going to be delivered as web services. Plus I doubt MS is offering cloud server time to developers for free. Every service they provide to devs comes at a cost.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

I'm sure the app will last about as long as Sparrow.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Because the technology industry depends on a lot of idealistic young workers putting in plenty of unpaid overtime, and no one ever motivated that commitment with a call to increase shareholder returns by 17%.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

From what I can tell buying a physical disk gives you an activation key that you apply to your console. Any profile on your console can play that game. If you bring the disk to another console and use your profile, you can also play the game. If you try to use the game on another console and profile, you either have to buy another copy or transfer the license from your profile to theirs.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

That's the biggest fail from the announcement. Microsoft mentioned a number of things that are guaranteed to provoke gamers, like used game fees and always-on DRM, then refused to clarify any of them. Some reporters present got flat refusals to answer questions while others were given different answers depending on who they talked to.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

The whole design of the One seems mired in the past. No substantial changes to the developer relationship, no acknowledgement of the app market, a subscription service to go online, DRM and used game fees to protect the existing retail model, etc.

And in exchange... a cable box? Will people even have cable in five years?

It's like they set out to design the next Xbox without acknowledging that anything other than hardware has changed since 2005.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

It was forced in Europe and Canada by shifting liability for fraud on swipe transactions to the merchant. Chips are very effective at preventing point-of-sale fraud. Mastercard and Visa had not tried to push it in the US, but they are getting more active now. As of this year, their processors are required to support chip transactions. By 2015 they will start shifting liability for certain transactions to the merchant if a chip card isn't used.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

For some reason, Kijiji is dominant in most of Canada. Craigslist is almost never used here. I'm honestly glad, because I occasionally check Craigslist and it's never a rewarding experience. Without the network-effects monopoly, it's a truly awful site.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Hemlock Grove is also excellent. But the point isn't to make money on these shows. Netflix knows that once people sign up, they're unlikely to drop their subscription. At the moment, Netflix is known as a place to get older movies and last season's TV shows. They want to change that perception with some must-watch shows that entice people to sign up. Netflix itself is more than worth $8 per month even without original content, but they need people to sign up before they can see that.

gamble

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

They're stuck in a local optimum. These companies have to be structured in a certain way to succeed at low margin, high volume commodity hardware sales. It isn't easy to adapt that to higher-end products, and when they try the market is slow to recognize changes in a brand, which discourages them from trying.

comments