391–400 of 418 posts
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ZeniMax competes against XBox Studios or whatever their internal video game studio is called.
Since when was Skyrim a competitor to Microsoft Flight Simulator or Age of Empires?
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Yes but... Siri is (to me) not there yet. Promising but not there. Siri is unaware of so many things. A simple command that would actually be useful (but fails totally): « Siri, remind me to buy milk the next time I go get groceries. » And even then... I should not have to mention the part about « groceries ». The request should be perfectly understood with a full stop after the word « milk » and a reminder should po…
heh. I'll just say that Alexa rarely misses an opportunity to "remind" me when I need to buy something.
I've used Alexa since it came out and they've added annoying random suggestions over the years that you were able to turn off in various settings menus.
But in the past year or Alexa has been upselling me stuff or randomly telling me about features I don't want to hear about when I'm just trying to turn on a light. And it seems like there's now actually no way to turn this stuff off.
Does anyone know if you can turn off Alexa upselling or is it going to just be a part of having a smart home forever?
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When I left Australia, which is now 14 years ago, so grain of salt: you paid 1% income tax for Medicare, unless you were above a certain income level, in which it became 1.5%. If you opted out of the system, you could purchase private insurance, and would not be subject to this tax. There was a floor, where below or near "minimum income" levels, you were also not required to pay this tax. > For instance, you can use…
(Australian here) Note that the 1% (or 1.5%) Medicare levy doesn't fully fund the health system here.
The system in Australia is:
* All Australian permanent residents (and some travellers) are able to access Medicare services. The services are funded by a combination of Federal and State governments.
* GPs/Surgeons/Specialists get set amounts from Medicare for different services delivered to patients. The amounts are set by the Federal health department and is the subject to ongoing arguments between the service providers and the government about the amount paid.
* For GP and out patient services, if the provider is willing to deliver the service at the set amount, then they "bulk bill" and the service is delivered "free at the point of delivery" to the paitent. If the provider charges more, then there is a "gap" that must be paid by the patient and cannot (by law and regulation) be covered by private insurance.
* For in-patient services, patients are either "private" or "public". Publicly funded hospitals accept patients of both types, private hospitals only accept "private" patients.
* Private patient services still receive the same reimbursement at a set value from the government. However, if the provider charges over that rate, private insurance is allowed to cover that "gap". Insurance companies can offer differing plans with different levels of cover for that "gap", as well as offering things like single patient wards, choice of physician/specialist etc.
* Public patients in a public hospital receive exactly the same services as private patients, but they: a) don't get to choose their doctor, b) are subject to waiting lists based on capacity, degree of urgency, etc.
* A public patient at a public hospital receives all services "free at the point of delivery". Private patients receive the same reimbursement, then their private insurance will reimburse according to their plan, then any remaining "gap" is payable by the patient.
* The "Medicare levy" is a theoretical additional tax that is added to a person's marginal tax, but it has never really covered the cost.
* As an incentive to get private insurance, the government subsidizes it at 30% and there are sticks and carrots (increased Medicare levy, age related reduction in subsidy if insurance is not continually held etc).
* Private insurance price increases are government regulated and require approval of the minister each year.
Subsidies for prescription medicines is a completely different system (the "PBS").
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And now you know why there will never ever ever be “free healthcare for all” in the US because this is how profitable sickness is. Plandemic.
>>“free healthcare for all” There never has been and will never be 'free healthcare for all' - its not free, it's only free for some people if some other people pay for it.
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And Ubuntu! Totally expecting that in the news at this point.
Really hope not, Ubuntu is like a beacon in the Linux world, no matter if you like it or not. Microsoft purchasing Ubuntu would mean the end of Linux desktop...
I'm referring to the various overtures between MS and Canonical lately, a lot of collaboration going on. https://pulse.microsoft.com/en/transform-en/na/fa2-canonical...
I don't think it would be the end of desktop Linux but it would mean a focus away from the core principles of Linux (which Canonical was not really that good at following anyway).
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I work in healthcare software and recently did a spike building a voice assistant for the EMR. We compared Google, AWS, Azure and Nuance's voice and intent recognition and Nuance blew all the others out of the water. When it comes to understanding medical terminology Nuance is way ahead of anything other providers have. Dragon has been around for 23 years and has been THE product for VR in the medical field for at le…
Wow, did not know EMR voice assistant was a thing. Can’t wait till our team works on something like this
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I remember people being flabbergasted by the price they paid for PA Semi. Dividing the price by the number of engineers seemed indeed ludicrous. And yet, here we are.
At the time, there were only 3 comments on HN I could find. One of them was certainly questioning the decision: [1] But wmf was right on the money [2]: "Maybe Apple thinks they can outdo the Cortex". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171511 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171879
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Siri is a train wreck. I have a $1200 phone where it takes more time to do “hey Siri FaceTime so-and-so” than to navigate. It just sits and spins.
My favourite: "Hey Siri, make a Facetime call to Bob Smith." "Which Bob Smith would you like to call? bobsmith@icloud.com or bobsmith@me.com? How at this point does Siri not have even the most basic of logic to know that it's literally the same person. That's Apple's OWN service.
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Apple has had some decent ones. P.A. Semi, notably. And for $278 million dollars, the ROI on that was ludicrous. But overall, yes. I can think of so many large-scale acquisitions that didn't go so swimmingly. - AOL/Time-Warner - Ford/its stable of luxury brands like Jaguar and Land Rover - Compaq/HP - Daimler/Chrysler It seems like these “big” mergers tend to now show the synergies people promise. Maybe it’s just too…
Tech M&A guy here. This is survivorship bias at its finest. How about Facebook's acquisition of Instagram? Google's acquisition of YouTube? Android? DoubleClick? Amazon's acquisition of Twitch? I could go on. For the record, yes there are VERY many acquisitions that go wrong, especially when you get to the $B+ value. The parent's characterization seems in line with the "no one ever got fired for using IBM" and that s…
These examples are not comparable to what the OP was saying, e.g AOL/Time-Warner, Compaq/HP are mergers of giants with lot of employees.