HN user
Wow. That's a new low standard for journalism. Whatever happened to keeping opinions and news separate?
I mean, it's Techdirt.com. Nowhere do they claim to be doing journalism, it's just a "tech blog".
This is how they describe themselves, and how other sources describe them too.
I am on the side of the author for this one. Especially when it comes to series that are complete, you can often find them for extremely discounted prices. For example Amazon is selling the complete "The Office" DVD set for about $30, and I'm sure you could find it for cheaper at something like a thrift store. That's about the same as 2.5 months of Peacock "Premium Plus" at $11.99.
I know different people consume media at different speeds, but it would take us much longer than 2.5 months to watch all that content. Therefore we could pay for 3 months of Peacock or pay Amazon for the box set. In our case, the math checks out in favor of buying the physical media.
Obviously the math changes depending on the user. Monthly subscriptions will always win out for people who are able to devote a significant amount of time to using the product (e.g. a movie every night).
Most I've used have a very small selection, maybe 30 total options, but a lot of those can be out of stock. If you have any sort of criteria (like I'm often looking for movies we could watch with our kids) there might only be one or two choices.
I'd compare it to showing up at a cinema and just hoping to find a show that looked interesting and happened to be starting soon.
Liquidity ≠ value.
There are plenty of highly liquid investments that are quite speculative, like gold, but you can at least make some reasonable assumptions and say "Would people still pay for a gold ring if it cost $1,000/oz? $10,000/oz? $100,000/oz? There's a natural feedback because of the underlying value of the object.
How do you do the same with Bitcoin? People point to factors of the technology as having some inherent value, but if things like divisibility or the distributed ledger were what give cryptocurrencies their value, then any crypto currency should be just as valuable as any other. There are other intangibles that help explain why Bitcoin out-values other coins, like the brand recognition, or the network effect, but there's no explanation for what those are worth. The problem with this is that bitcoin goes up _because_ bitcoin goes up, and bitcoin goes down _because_ bitcoin goes down. There are no other levers to move the price other than sentiment.
Agreed. I remember as a teenager when the first generation Macbook Airs came out, my friend realized you could reliably crash them (brand new, the demo models sitting out at the mac store) just by opening all the apps on the dock in quick succession. Took just a few seconds of clicking and the machine would crash and reboot.
And it's not like things have gotten any better, now I'm an adult with young children and if one of them gets their hands on my phone or laptop, they seem to be just as reliably be able to lock up, crash, freeze modern devices all the same. These kids are not physically damaging the phone in any way, they're just pushing buttons too quickly or in unexpected orders. That's the state of modern tech that we're in.
To be honest, I can understand why this hasn't been fixed. As mentioned in the article and throughout these comments, we've just come to expect to need to restart every now and again. In this case, people are likely to blame such a problem on the child, and a restart fixes the issue anyway. I just would've hoped for better by now in the lifecycle of these operating systems.
I have to imagine that these have been for sale throughout that time. I can see an argument that 8 years is a long time, but imagine if you purchased it last year, that's now a 2 year lifespan.
We're going down a bad road with obsolescence from "yeah, we only expect your water softener to last 8 years" to "your phone will stop receiving updates after 8 years" to "your device WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION after 8 years". Each step takes away a bit of agency for an individual to decide what obsolete means to them.
I, like many, had an Automatic Labs car adapter that simply stopped working when the company decided to no longer support them, and it still makes me mad every time I think about it.
I understand that a company can't be forced to operate a cloud service forever, I would love to see some requirements that if you're going to shut down a service that will make your hardware stop working that you must also provide software to your users to let them run their own servers or unlock their devices.