Posts by DropBear

I think you're right, but I also think the raison-d'etre of cloud-services-by-default (well, beyond whatever money can be made off snooping on the consumer) is not so much the difficulty of installing a local server package (come on, most people can perfectly well click "next-next-next" by now...) but the general lack of a dedicated computer powered on 24/7 (= server) in most homes - required for continuous recording / logging / alerts / etc.

Re: Consumer device?

Well, it's not entirely his fault - certain prominent players in the market (selling $2000-3000 machines) love to take every opportunity to spread the idea that the "average" price for a "proper" 3D printer is... drumroll... $2000-3000. Of course, those actually paying attention to the sector know perfectly well that's eminently bollocks, there's precisely zero reason to pay more than $500-800 for a printer that's essentially the exact same structure as the much more expensive ones, and if you shop around a bit, depending on your needs, that price can go still further down a lot more. For instance, here's a robust printer for $300 (for now), and another mini one for $99 (!)...

Re: The sucker birth rate

Frankly I'm astounded by how many people's biggest concern isn't price, compatibility, privacy implications or even whether they're interested in one at all - but how would they LOOK LIKE wearing it. The mind - it boggles.

Re: Ah, bollocks

OSVR?

Re: Stagnation...

- low cost of entry for consumers to dip a toe in the virtual waters (just pop your 5" smartphone into a $5 lens contraption)

...where the applications are pretty much limited to watching surround panoramas - I foresee it becoming about as popular as the same kind of long-existing 360-pano-viewers embedded on some websites ever were (some of them are even still around!). Remember when the Quicktime pano plugin was all the rage...? Yeah, me neither.

- more sophisticated, dedicated headsets inexpensive since they share components (screen, gyros, accelerometers) with smartphones

That would be nice - as it is, they cost an arm, two legs, half a dozen kidneys and some change. It could be argued their actual BOM cost is a tiny fraction of that (much like with smartphones), so their price will surely come way down (much as it happened in the smartphone market with Apple and Samsung). ...oh wait. Hmmm. Maybe the Chinese will save the day...?

- video content cheaper to make, due to cheaper multiple digital cameras and fancy post-processing.

Have you actually seen what one of those "360" multi-cameras aimed at enthusiats (not even pros) costs? Clue: almost a grand. Yup, aunt Jane will surely start shooting her holiday pics and videos with one of those one any day now...

-straightforward support from game-creation engines

Is that why only every single game studio who obviously promised VR support in their Kickstarter a few years ago is now wishing they haven't, going on about how even though the engine they use allegedly supports VR but actually making the game interface work half-decently in VR is much harder than they expected? Because that's all I hear whenever any of them mentions VR. It's always "yeah it's great _but_..."

- support from widely recognised consumer brands, such as Sony, Samsung, Steam, Intel, Qualcomm

...the best thing about standards being of course (as everybody knows) that there's so many of them. And a new one is born every time someone decides to jump on the bandwagon and try their hand at VR. Yup, I'm sure those supporting folks are working together in such a sublime harmony pushing all in a single direction, not at all the way ants "collaborate" by pushing the same thing from all sides simultaneously...

I'm not saying that mass market VR is a sure thing, but the landscape is very different to the mid 90s.

Is it really? Because I'm so not seeing it...

Re: Beginning of the end for Intel?

"AMD resurrected the zombie (x86_64) and the market forced Intel to keep providing it."

Hmmm... okay go ahead laugh, but... what if they'd switch to some more convenient architecture and let their new built-in FPGA emulate a legacy x86 when it can't be avoided and do something more useful when legacy software is not running...?

Re: Crack in the dam ....

Let me tell you this - I have no website of my own so I'm not versed in the ad revenue business; but I do frequent Patreon where some people turn these days for a stable revenue stream from their readers, and what I noticed is that those who offer to remove ads from their sites at a certain patronage level per month tend to do so at surprisingly large targets, usually reached with great difficulty or not at all. Which kinda implies that sites with a significant amount of traffic turn out to make a rather staggering amount of income from showing ads, especially compared to what they can make from the contributions offered by the truly minuscule percent of their readers who are actually willing to pay a modest contribution.

Sorry, did you mean the other way around and get confused? In my book, (ultimately) coding on bare metal doing things with actual effects in the real world is much more "programming" than a whole page of including high-level library after library stitching them into a "program"...

Re: Rattling Apples cage !!!!

Actually, it kinda was concluded that short of physically de-capping chip and applying some deep magic and industrial hardware (or using a zero-day exploit - which by its very nature eludes any meaningful assumptions other than one or more might potentially exist) there was _no way_ to get to the data, unless Apple replaced the OS with a custom backdoored one.

If it turned out all you need to do is say "Siri, open settings" on the 'emergency call' dialer screen, a bunch of folks would be rather miffed...