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What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe?

nytimes.com

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Re: What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe?

#121

Post by pferde »

ahakki wrote: post #103
baby wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change your ttl to 65 and you'll be fine

Could you expand on this? I have always wondered how carriers recognize tethering vs normal use.

The TTL (time-to-live) field of outgoing packets is one of the ways to detect when someone has another device behind the connected device (phone). The traffic from this device has an extra hop to go through, so TTL of every TCP packet will be decreased by one, compared to packets originating from the phone, when it reaches the ISP.

This, together with the fact that default TTL different OSes set for packets they send is well known, and virtually no user ever changes these defaults, means that if the ISP detects different packets with TTL for example 64 and 63 coming from you, you very likely have something tethered to your phone.

There are tools like https://github.com/p0f/p0f (it does much more, than just this, though) to make exploiting this technique easy. I remember we used p0f to detect unauthorized connection sharing in a certain university dorm network, and caught quite a few people.

Re: What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe?

#122

Post by retsibsi »

Jaruzel wrote: post #117
narrator wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, Starbucks encourages people to sit around for as long as they'd like to and is pretty much taking over the world. What does this corporate giant know that every stingy corner coffee shop owner is ignorant of?

A good share of Starbucks locations worldwide actually run at a loss. The mega-busy ones elsewhere make enough profit to cover the loss making stores. It's simple economics of scale. Obviously independent coffee shops can't do that, so if you want to sit in a coffee shop all day working on your laptop, try to pick a large chain, instead of an independent.

> A good share of Starbucks locations worldwide actually run at a loss. The mega-busy ones elsewhere make enough profit to cover the loss making stores. It's simple economics of scale.

I'm probably missing something obvious, but how does this work? What is the purpose of keeping the loss-making stores running?

Re: What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe?

#124

Post by kingkongjaffa »

taneq wrote: post #2

How common is it for people to do actual, regular, serious work at coffee shops and the like? I've tried a couple of times and I always feel like such a pretentious wanker when I pull out a laptop and start working on stuff, like I'm somehow broadcasting "oh look at me, I work remotely, aren't I special?"

Masters thesis write up. Especially the Literature review, was made more bearable by shitty caramel machiatto's in Starbucks.

If you don't need your workstation for heavy lifting.

If you're mainly reading research papers or writing little scripts, to apply the documentation to your use case or something, then coffee shops can be great.

Re: What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe?

#125

Post by chrisseaton »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #50
inDigiNeous wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says who? I would understand it if the cafe place would enforce rules like this. But they would also lose many current customers. Many people just come to a cafe and stare at their phone. Or read a book. How I see it this is a problem for the providers of the cafe service to solve, not the customers.

I've walked past cafes that have no seats available because they are full of people with laptops, they have lost my business because they don't enforce any rules.

I don’t get it. Those people shouldn’t sit at the tables... because you want to be sitting at the tables instead?

Re: What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe?

#126

Post by eeZah7Ux »

k_sh wrote: post #5
nharada wrote: post #3

So is this about sales or about the vibe of having a coffee place where people hang out and chat? I'd be happy to pay some money to work for longer than one drink at a cafe, but I don't really want to drink 5 coffees to work for a day.

See Workshop Cafe[0], $2/hr for fast wifi, order-by-text table service, suitable spaces for groups, and even some external monitors lying around (as of 2016...) [0]: http://www.workshopcafe.com

$2 per hour sound like a honest and fair price.

Re: What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe?

#127

Post by keithpeter »

badsectoracula wrote: post #92

This article feels is one of the very few cases where i read something online and totally feels weird to me due to where i am from. In Greece coffee shops are really mainly places to hang out and staying for hours on a single coffee is pretty much normal and expected. There is a huge "coffee culture" here. Me and my friends would go for a coffee at 6pm (or later 7pm, due to jobs) and often leave at 11pm or sometimes…

I'm guessing that rents are low for the coffee shops.

I also decry the loss of public spaces such as libraries (in my northern European city the main public library was rebuilt at fabulous cost and has less seating than the old one).

Re: What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe?

#128

Post by jclos »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #39
kenning wrote: post #12

If I bought a cup of coffee at your shop and sat down, only for you to tell me that laptops are "not allowed," I'd be very unhappy with your store. Anyway, this is why coworking spaces exist.

Your $3 coffee doesn't entitle you to sit there for an hour though. If I was running a cafe, I'd expect that you'd be leaving within 5 to 10 minutes of finishing your coffee. The very few times I've worked in a coffee shop, I've done that myself. It's not a coworking space.

While I tend to get mad at the cafe dwellers that spend 4 hours on a table sipping on the same latte, I disagree with you here. It's all about finding the middle ground. I have had to work in coffee shops before and if you hold yourself to a code of conduct (e.g. consume something regularly, don't take up too much space, pack up and move somewhere else when it gets busy and you see people looking for tables) you are literally costing nothing to the coffee shop, while making it appear more full.

The problem isn't laptops, it's people being assholes.

Re: What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe?

#129

Post by Jaruzel »

retsibsi wrote: post #122
Jaruzel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good share of Starbucks locations worldwide actually run at a loss. The mega-busy ones elsewhere make enough profit to cover the loss making stores. It's simple economics of scale. Obviously independent coffee shops can't do that, so if you want to sit in a coffee shop all day working on your laptop, try to pick a large chain, instead of an independent.

> A good share of Starbucks locations worldwide actually run at a loss. The mega-busy ones elsewhere make enough profit to cover the loss making stores. It's simple economics of scale. I'm probably missing something obvious, but how does this work? What is the purpose of keeping the loss-making stores running?

To create brand loyalty. If you regularly get coffee in a loss-making Starbucks, you are more likely to always get coffee from Starbucks where-ever you are.

Re: What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe?

#130

Post by EliRivers »

IIIIIIIIIIIIIII wrote: post #109
EliRivers wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you told me to leave after 5 to 10 minutes, I'd tell you to call the cops and make me. Presumably the owner would actually have asked your mother or whichever other adult is with you, though.

Why do you insult OP? If they had signs stating their policy clearly upfront I would accept it, but if not, in the cultures that I know the purpose of a coffee shop is exactly to sit there for quite a while. I'm in Germany and I used to live in the US for a decade. If I go to a real Italian coffee shop (i.e. the owner is an Italian), of which there are quite a few, I see people sitting and chatting for long times, an…

Why do you insult OP?

Laughably childish responses - "call the cops and make me" - indicate that the OP is childish. With childish people, reasoned discussion is less likely to carry the message that such behaviour is ridiculous than the public humiliation of having such childish behaviour highlighted. There will then be a small tantrum, probably involving turning it around and blaming me in some way (I expect I simply don't understand - that's the usual childish response, typically from teenagers) which shall be ignored.

Act like a child; get treated like a child. Nothing at all to do with the subject matter.

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