The companies in question should just pass on the fees to their users. Want to use your Chase account with a third-party payment provider? That's a $15 service fee. When Chase starts bleeding customers, they'll rethink their strategy.
Crazy pricing scheme Is it $3125 for seven? Why not just use two $20 accounts to get six per month for $40?
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, but presumably the second plan offers more than just 40% more videos per day.
It should be obvious that changing a 0 to a 1 (whether or not one swaps other digits) is not cutting a zero off the price. The normal price is not $3490.99, either.
Yeah, the snark is high in this thread.
But in all seriousness, $3,499 really is an order of magnitude too expensive to compete against Quest at $499. If they had game availability that could compete with Quest, they might be able to get away with more like $750, but not $3.5k, or even $2k, realistically. It's just way too overpriced for something that in practice is only usable for gaming.
$3,490.99 to $4,391.99
Cutting a zero off the price, yeah, but faster, no.
So, something like $3,490.99 to $3491.00?
No, that's adding a zero.
The wealthy aren't the problem with inflation. Giving money to them (or not taxing it away from them, same thing) isn't inflationary, they'll more or less invest the money to increase their wealth. Rich people always want more money.
Ah, but for the most part, that money just sits there. Investing money in stocks has only limited impact on anything, in practice, which is why it doesn't impact inflation much. The money doesn't ever get spent on anything that meaningfully contributes to strengthening the economy.
Cutting checks to people on the street, that's inflationary because they spend the money on goods.
It is, but not proportionately. The increase in funds availability does increase demand, which increases scarcity, but the price people spend on goods and services doesn't increase to absorb all of the extra money going in — just some of it. That's why if you compare San Jose, CA to Jackson, TN, the median salary differs by more than a factor of 2.8, while the overall cost of living differs by only a factor of 1.9 (and if you ignore the housing costs that are largely caused by San Jose being landlocked, by only a factor of 1.5).
Improving people's standard of living has little to do with giving them money. You need more goods, which then become relatively cheaper within the existing money supply because of the lack of scarcity. That means producing said goods, whether we're talking about consumer stuff or housing.
While true, absent government intervention in how people run their companies, you can't prevent scarcity. Scarcity allows companies to charge higher prices for the same amount of labor, so except when you're talking about true commodities, companies have a perverse incentive to keep supply down as much as possible, so long as they stay below the point where the profit margins become too high relative to the barriers to entry into the market and another competitor is encouraged to enter the market and compete with them.
Because the people working on that product want to stay employed. Unless Apple cancels the product and lays all those people off it will continue to be developed.
I suspect that Apple's hardware design teams are rather fluid in terms of what projects they work on. Certainly nothing fundamentally prevents Apple from shifting them to work on the next-next iPhone design, or designing eyeglasses with a HUD, or designing some other new consumer device that someone comes up with. There's really no need for an updated version of the Vision Pro hardware right now, IMO, unless doing so would reduce the price by a factor of 4 to make it able to compete with Oculus. They'd be *way* better off having those people work on other projects until the technology reaches a point where there is a pressing need to do a hardware revision.
I never heard anyone complain the original vision pro was "slow", so why are they adding a faster chip?
I can't imagine. Spending more money on Vision Pro hardware right now seems like throwing good money after bad. For most users, Vision Pro is a fun toy, and an expensive one at that. Toys don't get upgraded very often even if they work well and are frequently used. Unfortunately for Apple, surveys show that users aren't using them very much at all, and there's no reason to believe that CPU speed has anything to do with the lack of use, which means you should expect nearly zero upgrades unless Apple takes a cue from the PC playbook and makes them connector-compatible with the existing design so that users can bring them into an Apple retail store and get a $500 main board swap. And even then, upgrades would be a hard sell.
Similarly, users who don't own one are not going to be persuaded to buy one because the new version is faster. Cutting a zero off the price, yeah, but faster, no.
What Apple should do is focus on making the software and user interface not suck. Once they get it to that point and sales start to pick up, *then* start thinking about a new version with a faster CPU. For starters, what we want to see is:
Get those three things, and the platform will be an immediate success. As long as doing any meaningful work with the device requires being tethered to a physical keyboard, which completely defeats the purpose of using a headset, and as long as a significant number of apps that you might want to run cannot be used at all without being tethered to a Mac, any marketing claims of it being a "spatial computer" are rather comically aspirational, to the point of being an outright lie.
Alternatively, Apple could try to make Vision Pro compete with Oculus by throwing money at the gaming industry in one form or another, but that will still have a pretty limited market, and would require Apple acknowledging that it's really just a high-end gaming headset, so I wouldn't hold my breath. Oh, and you'd probably need controllers to make that work well, so that would be a pretty big pivot.
And of course, Apple could also pivot by acknowledging that Vision Pro was the wrong approach for augmented reality and take a cue from Android XR instead of Oculus, by building an iOS-compatible eyewear fashion accessory that provides a HUD rather than a full active blending of reality with computer-generated content, and supports a more modest feature set, such as real-time text translation, reminding you of people's names and recent conversations, highlighting foods it thinks you might like on restaurant menus, providing access to email and text messages without whipping out your phone, letting you watch movies while out for a walk, etc.
None of these things involve taking Vision Pro and giving it a faster CPU, though. That's just pouring money down the drain. The only rational reason to do that would be if they're going to run into contractual costs related to continuing to build the M2 chip in small quantities and if the R&D costs for doing the board rev are less than the projected annual cost of continuing to make (or stockpile) the old chips. This seems unlikely to me, but I'm willing to acknowledge that it is a possibility.
This is videogame development. You almost never have a "main" where all your games are made from - a game is a self-contained app.
Typically development starts by cloning a copy of the game engine to where you will do your development. This will go into a new tree because after the game is released, other than updates, it will never be used again. Even though you have say, Call of Duty 1 and Call of Duty 2, they are about as same as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
Yeah, but the summary says "The Microsoft Store and Game Pass versions contained an unpatched security flaw that had been fixed in other versions of the game." Not other games based on the same engine. Other versions of the same game. I assume that they have one product manager that oversees Call of Duty: WWII, and that this person should be aware of what's happening on every platform.
So it's likely it was discovered and fixed for one game, but that fix was not propagated to other trees because well, they're pretty much all independent and to do so would require manually applying the patch.
This is why real software companies have "one version" policies, where you aren't allowed to check in a single project into source control in more than one place. Copies of the engine should be checked out from a shared repository, and changes should get pushed back to that shared repository. And there should be build bots that throw a fit if it doesn't build on every platform, forcing you to stop what you're doing and fix it.
What you're describing barely qualifies as software engineering. It reminds me of how some hardware vendors handle firmware updates. It guarantees that their systems are in a perpetual state of being barely working.
Oh, and game developers are had pressed to churn out stuff. There almost is no time to simply go and apply random patches for security issues found in other games. It might have been on someone's to-do list but completely forgotten about because they're busy churning out code for the product.
If that's true, then their products should be banned from every platform ASAP, and not just their old titles. Part of the software release cycle is maintenance, and if you aren't doing maintenance — particularly for security updates — then users should not trust your software as far as they can throw it. I have zero respect for companies that play games like that. Real software development doesn't end when the first build ships. It ends when you declare it EOL. And until that date, if you aren't providing security updates, then your company is a threat to the entire computing world.
After seeing this, I won't touch Activision software with a ten-meter pole for at least the next decade, and nobody else in their right minds should, either.
Everywhere I've ever worked, when you release an update to one channel, you release to all channels. This sort of process should be scripted and automatic, to the maximum extent possible. More to the point, there should have been someone responsible for making sure that critical updates have been successfully pushed out to every channel before they declare the update release process closed. There literally should have been someone checking on this on a daily basis for that entire time.
So unless this security bug was just fixed on those other platforms within the last single-digit days, what we have here is a serious process problem, and if it can happen on one game, it can happen on any Activision game. What is Activision doing to fix its processes to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again?
That is definitely not what the word 'volunteer' means and it is used many times. Nor do I see anywhere in the summary about people being paid. I'm scared to click on the article these days.
These are salaried workers. They are, by definition, getting paid, and paid the same amount whether they work extra hours in the warehouse or not.
There are some narrow/one-way streets in a few parts of the grid, mainly in the older parts of town toward the Delaware side, and a couple of oddities with active trolley tracks, but mostly it's a rationally laid out place where they took care to make surface transportation as painless as possible.
Suburbs are mostly a grid too.
Philadelphia is Northeast cities on easy mode.
Boston roads on the other hand...third world at best.
Boston on July 4: "You can't get there from here." When they shut down Storrow Dr., all those one-way streets become the tenth circle of hell.
And it's a meta-analysis paper, according to the description, and they described the correlation as somewhat questionable. I automatically assume that meta-analysis papers are going to be weak.
Nature MedicineArticle https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591... studies adjusted their effect size measure for age and sex. All studies except one adjusted for smoking. Other common adjustment variables included energy intake (n=13)28,30–35,37,38,40–42, alcohol consumption (n=12)27–30,32,33,36–38,40–42 and BMI (n=14) 27–30,32–36,38–42.
So not all of the original studies adjusted for income.
These study-level covariates included length of follow-up period (10years and >10years), precision of the exposure and outcome definitions, study design (that is, RCT or prospective cohort study), reported measure of association (RRs or ORs), outcome measures (incidence or mortality), number of exposure measurements (single or repeat), method by which outcomes were ascertained (administrative records, self-reports, biomarkers or physician diagnosis) and level of adjustment for relevant confounders (for example, age, sex, smok-ing, education, income, calorie intake, BMI, physical activity, alcohol intake, saturated fat intake and other dietary factors). We adjusted for these covariates in our meta-regression if they significantly biased our estimated RR function.
So basically, it sounds like nowhere near all studies adjusted for income, and they think they took that into account, but because this is a meta-analysis, there's a certain degree of garbage-in-garbage-out involved. The only way to really be sure is to exclude studies that don't adjust for everything you care about.
Also, because this is a meta-analysis, the papers you exclude are also kind of important.
Reports Excluded:
Duplicates n=5
Not study design of interest n=39
Not outcome of interest n=45
Not outcome of interest n=54
Not measure of interest n=2
I'm not sure why "not outcome of interest" excluded both 45 and 54 papers, but that sort of discrepancy raises some red flags, particularly when there are only 16 included studies.
But the real red flag for me is the confidence interval. If I'm understanding this correctly, without compensating for heterogeneity, the effect on colorectal cancer and heart disease are statistically indistinguishable from zero. This intuitively feels like the sort of study where after a few more studies, you'll see regression to the mean.
And type 2 diabetes tends to be strongly correlated with obesity, and there's no mention of the original studies having adjusted for that. If obese people are more likely to eat processed meat because of it being a quick way to get the calories that they need, then it is also possible that the correlation with type 2 diabetes is entirely spurious.
I'm not seeing a whole lot of actual evidence to go from "we combined a bunch of studies with weak-to-zero correlation and got weak-to-zero correlation" to "eating processed meat likely causes an increase in these conditions".
The more you breathe, the more the risk of age-related illnesses increases.
There is, of course, no other factor other than eating the hot dog that can explain diabetes, and not, say, a poverty-based lifestyle.
It's the hot dog.
Most people who aren't at or near the poverty line don't eat a hot dog daily. That's what people eat who can't cook and can't afford take-out food. So yeah, chances are, this correlation would go away if you adjust for other risk factors like poverty.
But I'm not willing to spend $33 just to confirm that. Nothing is more useless than medical journal articles that are locked behind a paywall.
You mean the vaccine that got pushed into the school children required list when the CDC's own data said it was over 5x as likely to kill children as the disease? Yeah, he's an idiot for not completely trusting them without doing any research himself.
Citation needed.
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