Although then every single tax jurisdiction - city, county, state, and federal - must have a different ad.
All they have to do is have some copy up front that says "As low as 19.99!*"
And then have some fine print at the bottom: "* Final price may vary depending on local tariffs" or whatever legalize the lawyers come up with. The ISP version of "prices and participation may vary".
Yes, but most people don't have the technical wherewithal to set it up.
IoT doesn't necessarily mean cloud. Plenty of IoT devices work without them.
I would say most IoT devices are cloud connected. You can't have an Internet of things if the thing is not on the internet.
Not all smart devices are IoT devices though. You have protocols like Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Matter that allow completely local control, but those devices aren't necessarily internet addressable without jumping through some hoops.
Here you go. Each button fires an event. How flexible it is depends on your hub. In HA you can make it run an arbitrary script that does whatever you want.
They make similar for Zigbee and Matter/Thread as well.
There's no reason this device needed the maker to continuously run a server for it.
That was a choice they made, for the sake of control.
That's the kind of design choice that was always bad and ought to go away.
I agree, but the reality is that most people don't want to go through the rigmarole of setting up some kind smart hub, figuring out if the potential device is compatible with their hub: Zigbee? Z-Wave? Matter (and what flavor? Thread or WIFI)? Pairing the device: Can I scan a QR code? Do I have to figure out an archaic set of button presses to put it in pairing mode? Is there a security code I have to put into the hub? Then you might have to debug a flaky connection: Do I need to buy a new Z-Wave, Thread repeater or WIFI access point, or should I just re-pair the device in long range rather than mesh mode?
I don't find that too daunting, but that is an impossible hill to climb for your average non-technical person. Compare that to installing your device and then just popping open the company's proprietary app to get it connected to the cloud.
When I moved into my new house, I bought a bunch of fairly bare-bones Honeywell switches that supported Z-Wave. All the smarts are on a server I control. Short of a physical defect I never have to worry about them going out of support.
It's really not too tough to run it in a VM. VMs get full plugin support. I went from knowing nothing about running VMs under Linux to standing up a KVM instance of HA in a couple hours of research. I used the virt-manager tool.
I've had very good experience with it, with the caveat that I only used Z-Wave and Matter. I don't bother trying to integrate most of the other stuff it discovers.
Here the command I used. The only thing that would differ between instances would be the --hostdev flag which was used to map the USB Z-Wave dongle from the host onto the VM.
virt-install --name haos --description "Home Assistant OS" --os-variant=generic \
--ram=4096 --vcpus=2 --disk
--controller type=scsi,model=virtio-scsi --import --graphics none --boot uefi \
--hostdev 001.004
Autism as used in the modern sense, is a relatively new diagnosis, coming into prominence only in the last 35 years or so. Previously a lot of people we now call mildly autistic would just be labeled as "weird" and singled out for extra discipline, bullied by their peers, and flagged for remedial education. Many of the "profoundly autistic"/low functioning kids would have been labeled "mentally retarded" and stuck in special education programs (that classroom near the boiler room with the window blacked out where you could always hear the teacher yelling or kids screaming) if not outright institutionalized.
In short, "everyone is autistic now" for the same reason "everyone is gay now". When you stop mislabeling, killing, and locking a group of people up, they become more visible.
Looks like they’re ending the subsidized console business. With the key word being subsidized.
Consoles have been sold at pretty near at or above the cost of goods for a while now. Some manufacturers, like Nintendo, actually make a profit on their hardware. Recent price hikes for hardware have more to do with US tariffs and the AI craze jacking the price of GPU silicon than anything else.
If it ends hardware sales, what will its games run on? Existing installs only? What sense does that make?
They've announced that they are going to publish everything pretty much day and date on all platforms, including Sony. XBox hardware will probably stick around for those who can't afford a gaming PC or don't want to deal with maintaining one or people who are already heavily bought into the XBox ecosystem and don't want to have to rebuy everything on Playstation.
I expect the next generation of XBox will be more streaming focused though. They already have their "everything is an XBox" marketing campaign that heavily pushes the ability to stream your XBox games to pretty much anything that can run their app and pair with a controller.
XBox is going to be primarily a software publisher with a vestigial retail hardware division and a massive cloud computing arm, basically.
A cabbie/rideshare driver gets paid far less than cops do, and is way more likely to be killed or injured on the job, and both spend much of their day driving around. Yet police office is held up as a dangerous job requiring bravery.
Trigger warnings are for people who have some deep emotional trauma or PTSD associated with the named topic. One would hope that 10% or less are that damaged. You put a trigger warning in front of a video that discusses or depicts sexual abuse for abuse survivors suffering from PTSD, not for the general population who finds it disturbing. Hopefully everyone finds it disturbing.
No such thing as a good landlord.
The said it was stopped at a DUI checkpoint. It's probably illegal to u-turn to avoid one of these, or else all the drunks would just dip on them.
So I guess it's fine when one of these things kills or injures someone? Nobody is responsible? The device, including the code, should require sign off by a licensed, bonded professional engineer who is on the hook for the consequences. If they can't find a PE willing to do so, then I guess that's a signal that it's not ready for public testing.
PL/I -- "the fatal disease" -- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5
