I can't do a whole lot with my $1 bills in my wallet either. They're hard to write much on because so much of them is covered in print already. Takes too many of them to heat a room if you resort to burning them for warmth. At the end of the day, they're just another odd sized piece of fancy paper. Same for a $5, a $10, a $20 or even a $100 bill.

Yet, they're still valuable as currency because we collectively put faith in the *idea* they represent value for economic transactions.

For that matter, even gold isn't really very useful to most people who own it. Sure, you can melt it down and use it for things like fillings in teeth. But does your average person own a furnace capable of doing that, or even any interest in attempting it?

All that matters with these investments is the collective acceptance of them as symbols of value.

Ok.... gotcha. I never even heard of Thrasio before this, so it's all news to me as of today. :)

Ultimately though? Still pretty unimpressed, then. There are new "brick and mortar" startups out there trying to get businesses going every day, and it's more useful for society and our economy as a whole if someone throws some money at keeping what they're doing alive/thriving (even if they're buying them out to then run it themselves).

I mean, for example? I have a friend with an adult daughter who just partnered with someone who helped her navigate getting her own small business started, mostly selling on Amazon. She makes diaries and other notebooks/notepads with custom front decorative covers and themes. She does all the art and her friend helped handle the end of getting the artwork into print production. So officially, she's another "profitable Amazon vendor" now. Practically-speaking though? It's a good experience for her in doing online sales and in drawing art for commercial profit. It's not really anything that helps a small town keep its commercial district filled with businesses leasing the properties and maintaining them. IMO, it's not even anything really worth "buying out". She doesn't have some established "brand" you're getting rights to as part of owning it. (Kind of like your Gilbert's Bicycle Wheels, in that respect....)

Hmm..... yeah. The part of this that makes no sense to me is why, if you can successfully accomplish this (automation of purchases from sites like Alibaba to auto post to Amazon Marketplace if/when it makes good financial sense), you would worry about building some business model around offering this service to other vendors?

If it really works? Why aren't you just doing this yourself and profiting? (Obvious answer is that it's not REALLY so profitable or worth the effort and/or technical issues involved, so they'd rather try to profit off getting OTHER people to use it.)

I work for a transportation company where we have several thousand drivers carrying smartphones using AT&T in most cases, running a kiosked app we use for scanning packages as they're picked up or dropped off on routes. Our entire system was pretty much non-functional from late last night until sometime this afternoon. And I'd be surprised if ANY of those drivers were signing in to DownDetector and reporting anything.

Looks like coincidence now, but in my city, we lost Spectrum broadband during pretty much this same time-frame. (The rumors I'm hearing though say a truck hit a phone pole and severed some fiber, and people saw many Spectrum trucks in that area all morning/afternoon working on it.)

I also find it suspect that Verizon claims their network was "unaffected" because I've read a number of individual reports of people with Verizon phones having no service or ability to call out this morning. They weren't talking about being unable to complete calls to AT&T customers. Might well be some AT&T hand-off code they updated/changed and broke the whole thing, including competitor's cell towers that started mishandling their own customer's signal/service as a result of it?

I sure didn't care much for Apple's attempt to copy-cat the Echo Dots with their HomePod smart speakers. Too little, too late, and nobody I know was that excited to be able to ask Siri things from one, anyplace in their home. I guess it might have been ok if you paid for an Apple Music subscription already and wanted to be able to play songs on command, streaming from it? But especially having already bought a couple of Sonos products by then, it was underwhelming to me.

The Apple watch was perfectly ok, yet not real exciting. My ex-wife bought me the "series 0" on launch day as an anniversary gift, assuming I'd love it. And in reality? It wound up just being an item I hung onto a lot longer than I wanted to, just because I didn't want to upset her that I wasn't using it.

I kept having issues with Apple's bands breaking my skin out if I wore an Apple watch every day, and the leather third-party band I tried that worked better in that regard never really looked that good with it.

I upgraded my Apple watch every 3 generations after that, but my series 6 just tends to sit on my nightstand, on its charging stand. I rarely even wear it anymore. It's just another gadget I might wear on some specific occasion where I think it might come in handy (like a business trip with meetings where it's unwelcome to take your phone out of your pocket to look at it, even if you're just checking the time).

I think Apple failed pretty badly with the latest iMacs too. The iMac was clearly part of Jobs' vision of what the staple desktop Mac should be. Since the original Macintosh, it was always about that "all in one" design with the display built into the box. But now, you can't even buy one with a 27" screen anymore?! And this is when big monitors and even curved displays are everywhere. Why not a 27" or even 32" iMac with curved screen, as a redesign of something more like the old "lampshade" iMac G4? There's really nothing even stylish/eye-catching about today's iMac. IMO, they don't even look good in most of their color options.

... businesses spent billions with broadcasters to get their marketing onto the TV screen in your home?

Now, businesses spend billions to buy Smart TV manufacturers to get their marketing onto the TV screen in your home.

Ever since I bought my first Ring doorbell, I learned what a tangled mess it is to rely on the cloud for security cameras. Not only are you just buying into yet another need for a monthly subscription service, but you get into all the questions about privacy and a company's right to use the video from your camera for whatever THEY want to do with it.

If you think of traditional security cameras? All of the content was always stored locally on physical videotape. The only reason we have the cloud inserted in the middle of the process, today, is to ensure continued revenue streams for the companies selling the camera hardware.

Realistically, you can provide some sort of "base station" as part of these products and save the video to flash card storage or a HDD/SDD in said base station. (This ensures the whole system keeps working even if you have an Internet outage, like I had for about 24 hours over this last weekend with Spectrum cable, due to a fiber cut.) Done properly, it isn't really any more difficult for the end-user to set it up than configuring equipment to use the cloud (complete with a login/password you've got to set up and so on).

I've mentioned this sentiment in other Slashdot threads before. I was really into the Mac back around 2001. That's when I first took a job with a small business where the owner was a Mac guy, and was trying to start a business refurbishing older Macs to repurpose as "first computers for kids". (It helped that he already owned a chain of daycare centers, so he wanted to put rows of these machines in each one of them, all pre-loaded with kids' educational titles and games.)

At that time, my only Mac experience was a brief stint with a Performa tower I bought at OfficeMax (probably around 1997) to learn what Apple was doing/selling. Since that was probably Apple Computer's low point, what I got was really an inferior machine to the Windows PC I'd been used to using. I did get to learn my way around MacOS 8.6 at least, and I liked a few of the applications it ran. But I wound up reselling it in less than a year.

But I realized I *loved* what Steve Jobs had done to the company. Gutted the ENTIRE product line and started over, with OS X as the new operating system. Of course, these "vintage" Macs we were refurb-ing weren't that exciting by comparison. But we were basically turning them into kiosks anyway, with a menu launcher that only let kids run the choices we put on it. It was the newer OS X machines the owner had in the office and let me use that got me hooked.

I saved up and bought a G4 MDD (mirrored drive door) Mac which was the highest-end machine Apple really sold at that time, and was off and running with it. Soon, I resold that and got a G5 tower, when those launched. And I've been primarily a Mac user at home ever since. Apple has had their good products and bad over the years, since then. (They still can't make a decent mouse, to be honest. But who cares when there are plenty of third party alternatives and they don't cost a lot?)

So, fast-forward to recent years? Yeah, this whole "Post Steve Jobs" Mac era feels like the company has been re-imagined as a consumer electronics and media business that just happens to keep selling computers too. I keep telling myself I'm going to dump my Macs and go back to Windows and Linux (where applicable), and be done with them. (I dislike their "woke" political leanings too -- but that's always defined the brand/company since day 1, so not a reason to suddenly get upset with them about. I remember years back, even Rush Limbaugh was a Mac user and advocate. He used to say, "Hey, you have to spend your money on the company that makes the products you like, even if you don't like their politics." I think he was right about that.)

But the whole ecosystem they built is really pretty useful and hard to let go of, at least in my experience. I've got their watch and use CarPlay with custom stereos in 2 of my vehicles that were designed to use it. I have the iPhone as well, and rely on iCal for my calendar appointments/scheduling. I used to use HomeKit for my home automation too -- but that's an area where Apple really just didn't keep up with the competition. So now I have all of that using Alexa instead. Technically less secure, but I've never had hackers that interested in turning my lights on and off....

All of this "rambling" is to say, yeah - I've got a decent amount of Mac experience. And I can say the new product launches are largely "duds" vs what Apple used to hype up and release to great fanfare. The iPod really improved on something people were already wanting and trying to do; carry a lot of music around in their pocket on a device that could play it all back easily, and without eating tons of batteries doing it. The VR headset is an attempt to convince us we want/need something very few of us were clamoring for to begin with. And the people giving Apple the benefit of the doubt and paying this much for one are just your typical early adopters who don't want to be left out, in case it's the next big thing. Guess what? It's not.

Seems to me like that all makes sense. Is anyone *really* that worked out that they can't launch a web page from a home page icon on their iOS device anyway?
I know there are going to be special cases out there (like corporate issued phones that use some web app the employer built). But wow -- I haven't used a web app on my iPhone since the original iPhone was released and only allowed those to start with!

I'm sorry to see this go. I have fond memories of deploying the free version of ESXi for situations where there was just no budget for a commercial alternative, and the goal was simply consolidating 4 or 5 physical rack or tower servers into one machine to save on electricity, etc.

But I know time marches on, and there's not much use-case for NEW customers to pay for VMWare ESXi. So Broadcom has no real incentive to maintain support for the free edition. At this point, ESXi is mostly about existing customers who have critical infrastructure running on it and are in the, "If it ain't broke? Don't fix it!" mindset.

At the same time? There's a part of me that sort of hopes the whole thing crashes and burns, simply because I always felt like VMWare was run by greedy individuals trying to extract the maximum profit out of a product with less and less justification for the high price tag.

I mean, at a previous employer, we paid quite a bit to run ESXi on a single corporate server. But when we started looking at options for fail-over if that site lost power or its Internet connection or what-not? The cost to run a backup server on "hot standby" from a remote site was just more than we could really afford. For the sake of at least running a "proof of concept" setup and learning the ins and outs of it, I purchased a couple ESXi licenses someone had taken from decommissioned HP servers in a educational environment and was reselling online.

The "licensing police" quickly swooped in and smacked our hands for this terrible transgression and demanded crazy money to buy proper/legal licenses. (I guess they refuse to accept the idea that an originally purchased-at-full-price software license can ever be recycled if the hardware it used to run on dies.)

As you might predict? This didn't result in them making more money, as they hoped. It simply drove us away from the product completely. Can't afford means can't afford; not "We'll force you to afford it with threats."

Bottom line is, there's NO way these 26 people were impacted so negatively by any of this that they deserve some kind of financial compensation for their losses.

But as someone else pointed out in a reply here already? There's NOTHING stopping a person from visiting whatever search engine they like on any Apple or other devices out there! Just because a company like Google pays to be placed first in a list or as a "default selection", it doesn't prevent you from using an alternative any more than Dell making their support page the browser default URL prevents you from using the rest of the Internet!

I remember when Okta was pretty new.... They kept inviting me to free lunches or dinners where a sales rep would "teach" you all about the great things it was supposed to bring to your company.

Nobody I knew in I.T. had a very high opinion of it. Where I worked, we just implemented Azure SSO and called it a day. I feel like that's how it played out in a whole lot of other companies too?

I haven't even had a reason to look at their offerings any more closely in years so maybe I'm completely missing something. But what's the big draw for the software right now? I was told it was essentially a "Swiss army knife" of login credentials - so a single sign-in could work with a number of otherwise incompatible systems. I mean, ok, but how often is that really an issue a company will pay Okta's licensing costs to solve? As time goes on, I just see more and more web applications promising they work with the standards like Azure to get people signed into them.

You clearly don't have much of a handle on how a capitalist economic system really works, based on what you're questioning and your replies to my comments.

Yes, in any reasonably "free" market economy, any business worth a darn will be motivated to try to grow and increase its market share. That's the whole "competition" thing, in action. Mergers or buyouts are a legitimate way for one to attempt to accomplish that goal. It doesn't always work out well for them either. There's no "magic" that says all buyouts or all mergers automatically result in significant increases in customers staying with them, vs seeking out alternatives.

Often, a buyout results in the owners of the company that was just sold turning around and using those funds to start up a completely new business. There's (again), no set-in-stone rule that buyouts only result in the CEO getting super-wealthy and spending it all on hookers and blackjack.

We have anti-monopoly regulations in place to handle "edge cases", where for whatever reason, competition dwindles down to only 1 or 2 companies. I'm certainly not arguing we should remove all the "rails" that are put in place to keep things from going off the deep end. But yes, I *do* think free market Capitalism works better than any of the alternative economic systems anyone has proposed -- and works best if you leave it alone, subject to legislation that protects the "boundaries" like the forming of a single monopoly.

Lastly? I'd also suggest that ultimately, people make a lot of noise about wanting to support "small businesses" but they really don't want that nearly as much as they preach about it. They really, really LIKE the benefits that a giant corporation can bring them. You know, things like one-stop convenient online shopping for items that get delivered to your door as quickly as that same day or the next day? Or things like big "super stores" you can go into, in any of a number of big cities, knowing they all basically have the same inventory and in similar parts of the store. Not all, but many small businesses have hopes and dreams of striking a deal so their products start getting carried by these big corporations -- because for them, it would make all their effort trying to create and build up the business pay off at last.

I'm not real knowledgeable about how railroads are doing things. But when I used to live and work in the DC metro area, I used to take their MARC commuter train to the office. I recall the conductor carrying a walkie-talkie and having to report in something that seemed like status of the track every so many miles? Maybe I misunderstood and it had more to do with how close they were to another train on the tracks or something like that? But it seemed like I remember hearing this computer generated voice that would read off some information that they were listening to, and then they'd make a quick report on the walkie talkie about the mile marker they passed and if condition was green or yellow or what-not?

Not sure what you're trying to say here, honestly?

My entire point is simply that if you're buying new and spending the kind of money an EV costs, they're going to be a better value to drive over the typical period of time a new vehicle owner keeps their car. And the EV I drive currently? It's a Chevy Bolt EV Premier edition. Cost me about $24,000 -- so not some extravagant price.

The cheap vehicle I bought my daughter so she can get to work and back? Found a used 2013 Kia Soul in really clean, good condition that a towing company/garage had for sale out on their lot. Why was it for sale? Oh, the engine in it blew at around 100,000 miles and the owner wasn't going to spend what it cost to fix it at that point so let the tow truck company keep the thing for scrap value. They turned around and dropped a good engine in it from a Kia Rio that was in a wreck, with about 40,000 miles on it. I have to keep a close eye on it for oil loss though, because most of these Kia engines are dying prematurely these days thanks to burning oil and people not realizing how low they got until the oil light on the dash comes on, which is too late for them.

At least I didn't spend $65K or more for a new Ford Bronco back in 2022, when they were blowing engines at 150 miles on the odometer, thanks to a production defect. Or for that matter, any of the "EcoBoost" Ford Escapes they sold up through the last engine revision they did around 2021-22 -- since those all tend to blow head gaskets due to flawed design. Or I could get a good price on any of a number of Ford Focuses out there, except they're selling cheap on the used market because their automatic transmissions are so unreliable and prone to costly failure.

It's almost as if it's not just EVs that can have major/costly issues!

The price Kia wants for a new battery pack is just price-gouging on their part, though. There's really no other explanation for how a larger capacity battery pack in a Tesla would cost much less to replace than their quote for their own. We know that except for total outliers, EV batteries are lasting people at least 150,000 miles though. So that's long enough to buy a new one, own the thing for 6-7 years, driving at least as much as the national average, and to trade it in again without being responsible for a battery replacement.