751–760 of 844 posts
As much as I dislike Amazon, I am continually surprised at how hands off their streaming creations seem to be. Expanse is probably biggest anti-corporate rant on TV I saw in a while. If they continue to treat their streaming arms as another business and not PR, it is a great move.
I don't think the Washington Post has gotten any softer on big tech since Bezos bought it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such a cowardly view. > or are you just shifting the balance of power from US companies to Chinese companies? That's not going to happen. The biggest Chinese companies only exist because of stolen technology. This is a well documented fact. Tencent for example has this business model: 1) Identify trending games from competitors outside of China 2) Clone those games and release them internationally 3) Petition…
This is such a cowardly view. > If anything, breaking up these monopolies will lead to more innovation Yes, let’s violate a company’s right to exist and conduct business just because we don’t like ads, or have preferences for how the run things. If you’re so concerned that they are not doing the right thing, then you go out and do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Government regulation would be one solution. Another would be less government regulation, specifically making piracy legal.
Less government regulation doesn’t mean violating contract law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apparently, it's some kind of alias "feature" they added to Windows at some point. What legitimate reason is there for that It's a loophole so they don't have to ship Windows with a version of Python and then have to support it for how long that version of Windows will be supported. So instead the user gets it from the store (and it's upgraded via the store). Same thing they did for years "Add or Remove features" w…
Why Python though? If a user knows what Python is, they probably know enough about technology to install it themselves. Are there any Windows 10 features that require Python?
Yes and no, it's frequently used as an intro language. I could see advanced users being annoyed by this but I'm not certain they are the target demographic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. No it isn't. It's a workaround. This is an 8 billion dollar deal, there would have to be an impossible amount of piracy for it to count as "competition." This is precisely the reason why government regulation here is correct, as consumers, we don't have a lever long enough to have any real impact on the core problem. And we're just one side of the deal. These types of…
The solution is to break up big tech. Amazon shouldn't be ten companies in one. Google shouldn't be able to set web and mobile standards, then reap ad monies by forcing everyone to accept their anticompetitive changes. Apple shouldn't be the sole guardian of iPlatform. You can't have a protection racket on 50% of all commerce (phones >> gaming consoles) and enforce what gets put on the device. These companies don't h…
Compared to Amazon, Google, & Apple, Microsoft's is incredibly litigious when it comes to licensing their products. It can seem baffling that most other tech company grants access to what you are licensed to use but Microsoft, perhaps deliberately, makes their licensing confusing and imprecise. Since not everything that requires a license is enforced via software, you can pretty easily be breaking their licensing rules.
Additionally, Microsoft products are deeply entrenched business best practices and auditor requirements:
Use Windows? Pay for it. Need centralized antivirus for your organization? Pay for it. Need to enforce MFA for Windows accounts? Pay extra for it. Use Linux? Aren't you glad that Windows Defender supports it? And yea pay more for it.
Meanwhile Office 365 is a mess compared to AWS. Maybe Azure is better but it's still obvious that Microsoft uses its dominance in the OS space to pander more products to service its own OS which means they have no incentive to actually make Windows easy to manage.
Microsoft buying up the good will of developers is just an extra twist of the knife.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or we could fall back to watching movies made from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, that’s what I have been doing for more than half a year now and it has been wonderful for my mental well-being (they really knew how to make comedies back then, even after the Hayes code).
Any recommendations?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I truly cannot relate. All one needs is a VPN, a torrent client, a browser and an internet connection. Most tv's nowadays are smart enough to either connect to a simple Windows share or at least be able to play movie files. My SO and I watch a new movie almost every single night with a very simple setup and rarely encounter problems. It reads to me like you've over engineered movie night and are now complaining about…
Three comments so far that highlight the exact point the parent was making, a true lack of empathy. VPN alone is enough complexity for most... it's hard to find one that doesn't have comments calling it potentially insecure, questioning the owner, nevermind keeping tabs on if it sells to another owner.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish we had the data on this but I suspect a customer only selects a one or two video platforms and _MAYBE_ juggles a third when a hot show like GoT shows up, which is rare. There is a limited number of attention hours, it doesn't make sense to be on 10 platforms. Regardless, the end game of these streaming services is probably going to be consolidation or partners, if it makes since because the market is too dilut…
It's probably more than one or two. Amazon Prime Video and Netflix are two right there. But, you're right, The reality is that most people don't feel like they have to see a particular show. In any case, for the time being, it's pretty easy to dip in and out. I guess I have four at the moment (though two of them are free for various reasons). Depending upon how you allocate the cost of Amazon Prime though, I'm saving…
I pay for Hulu because I'll pay just about anything to never see a commercial. When I do have time to watch something, I don't want to see commercials. If that means paying a bit extra to have another service, so be it.
The meaninglessness of $8.45b relative to amazon's scale is mind boggling. It represents 0.5% of their market cap, 20% of their cash-on-hand, nevermind their borrowing capacity @ near 0%. If a problem is worth the Jeff/Andy's personal attention, it's worth spending $8bn on. I'm a broken record but, current equity prices and financial climate generally makes massive consolidation very likely. Antitrust, or fear of is…
> they have no way to put cash they have to work Apple could have built the most incredible semiconductor mega-hub in the world with the money it spent on dividends and buybacks in the past decade. In-house R&D is still a thing. Capital expenditure is still a thing. Pay raises for rank-and-file staff are still a thing. Please don't suggest that acquisitions, buybacks, and dividends are the only ways for Apple and Goo…
Meanwhile, besides search, most of their big successes were acquisitions: adwords, youtube, android, docs... all acquisitions at core. All extremely cheap, in retrospect.
Tesla joining the elite "tech company" ranks has made for some good juxtaposition. They are a "textbook" company, because the textbook more or less assumes that firm = manufacturing. The way they were financed (pre-insanity equity markets), the way they consume capital, etc. Apple, Alphabet, FB, etc aren't like this.
^if