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Comment Re:That is the PR dept talking, not the actual cop (Score 1) 497

by itTeach (#63422570) Attached to: Truck Thief Gunned Down by Owner After AirTag Gives Away Location
This is a great ideal, but difficult in practice. The problem is that it is difficult to get people to want to be police officers. There is stigma against the profession, the pay isn't great, and it is often thankless and dangerous. So how do we increase standards while still getting enough people to do the job?

Comment Re:Better odds than winning the lottery (Score 1) 67

Lets form a pool. $10 gets you a 1 KM2 area on the globe. Assuming that all the surface of the globe is subscribed, the lucky winner who picked the area that the asteroid hits gets $5.1 Billion. And of course, if the asteroid misses earth entirely, the house keeps all the money.

Submission + - Amazon Alexa Is a 'Colossal Failure,' On Pace To Lose $10 Billion This Year (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company's history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-commerce giant. That's according to a report from Business Insider, which details "the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon's larger hardware division." Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn't really make any money. The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash.

The BI report spoke with "a dozen current and former employees on the company's hardware team," who described "a division in crisis." Just about every plan to monetize Alexa has failed, with one former employee calling Alexa "a colossal failure of imagination," and "a wasted opportunity." This month's layoffs are the end result of years of trying to turn things around. Alexa was given a huge runway at the company, back when it was reportedly the "pet project" of former CEO Jeff Bezos. An all-hands crisis meeting took place in 2019 to try to turn the monetization problem around, but that was fruitless. By late 2019, Alexa saw a hiring freeze, and Bezos started to lose interest in the project around 2020. Of course, Amazon now has an entirely new CEO, Andy Jassy, who apparently isn't as interested in protecting Alexa. The report says that while Alexa's Echo line is among the "best-selling items on Amazon, most of the devices sold at cost." One internal document described the business model by saying, "We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices."

That plan never really materialized, though. It's not like Alexa plays ad breaks after you use it, so the hope was that people would buy things on Amazon via their voice. Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. The report says that by year four of the Alexa experiment, "Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Those questions aren't monetizable. Amazon also tried to partner with companies for Alexa skills, so a voice command could buy a Domino's pizza or call an Uber, and Amazon could get a kickback. The report says: "By 2020, the team stopped posting sales targets because of the lack of use." The team also tried to paint Alexa as a halo product with users who are more likely to spend at Amazon, even if they aren't shopping by voice, but studies of that theory found that the "financial contribution" of those users "often fell short of expectations."

In a public note to employees, Jassy said the company still has "conviction in pursuing" Alexa, but that's after making huge cuts to the Alexa team. One employee told Business Insider that currently, "There's no clear directive for devices" in the future, and that since the hardware isn't profitable, there's no clear incentive to keep iterating on popular products. That lack of direction led to the internally controversial $1,000 Astro robot, which is basically an Amazon Alexa on wheels. Business Insider's tracking now puts Alexa in third place in the US voice-assistant wars, with the Google Assistant at 81.5 million users, Apple's Siri at 77.6 million, and Alexa at 71.6 million.

Submission + - Automakers Are Locking the Aftermarket Out of ECUs (roadandtrack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Industry experts explain what increased cybersecurity means for tuning shops and customers.

As our vehicles start to integrate more complex systems such as Advanced Driver Assist Systems and over-the-air updates, automakers are growing weary of what potential bad actors could gain access to by way of hacking. Whether those hacks come in an attempt to retrieve personal customer data, or to take control of certain aspects of these integrated vehicles, automakers want to leave no part of that equation unchecked.

“I think there are very specific reasons why the OEMs are taking encryption more seriously,” HP Tuners director of marketing Eddie Xu told R&T. “There’s personal identifiable data on vehicles, there’s more considerations now than just engine control modules controlling the engine. It’s everything involved.”

In order to prevent this from becoming a potential safety or legal issue, companies like Ford have moved to heavily encrypt their vehicle’s software. Krenz specifically noted that the new FNV architecture can detect when someone attempts to modify any of the vehicle’s coding, and that it can respond by shutting down an individual vehicle system or the vehicle entirely if that's what is required. That sort of total lockout presents an interesting challenge for tuners who rely on access to things like engine and transmission control modules to create their products.

Comment Re:Mod the parent up. (Score 1) 488

by itTeach (#48516481) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Non-Coders, Why Aren't You Contributing To Open Source?
I was already on the edge with Firefox because of the insecurity of the plugin architecture, but when stupid power games forced the CEO out because of an unpopular political contribution, I bailed out entirely. I also changed the default browser on all the computers I manage for family / friends to Chrome.

Assuming that I am not the only one, exactly how did this benefit Mozilla corporation?

Comment Re:Consider the Statue of Brigham Young (Score 1) 174

by itTeach (#18322425) Attached to: SCO Says IBM Hurt Profits
"Hello, welcome to the bigotry department. May I help you?" "Ah, yes... directions. Now what type of bigotry are we talking about here? Linux? MacOS? Windows? ...or could it be OS2?" "None of those, you say. How about Open source, or could it be some form of proprietary flavor? MS Office? Open Office?" "No? Maybe Netware versus IP?" "Ah, I've got it, it must be hardware. You must be a PowerPC bigot." "What? Mormon? I'm sorry, this is Slashdot. We don's handle that kind of religion here."

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