fps

This is a video chat hardware device, not an assistant. Facebook has become the de-facto messaging platform for most of the people I know, and Facebook's Video chat is typically what I suggest when I want to do a video conference with a non-technical user. Google totally blew their commanding network and technical lead by the repeated gchat -> hangouts -> duo migrations. No one I know is typically logged into hangouts anymore, and I've never even had a single contact sign up for duo or allo. Facetime is a non-starter for the 80% of the population that uses something other than a Mac and an iOS device. Facebook works everywhere, has all my contacts, and is something people know and use.

The concession "stands" in theaters in my area (Boston) all sell hot food and alcohol[0,1] these days, because the traditional popcorn, 1/2 gallon of soda and raisinettes weren't selling to most people anymore. I think people are much less likely to sneak in a burger, truffle fries and 3 martinis.

0: https://www.amctheatres.com/food-and-drink/dine-in/full-serv... 1: https://www.showcasecinemas.com/dining

What part of "read and navigate news" and "printers for output and barcode scanners for input" isn't absolutely crystal clear? It fully and clearly explains what the system can do and how you interact with it. Do you not know what printers are? Barcode scanners? News?

I can also hear a CRT on anywhere in a house/office. One of the best things about the transition to flat screens is that the annoying high-pitched whine that accompanied CRTs has gone away. Now I only hear mode scanning/input skipping flat screens. At the same time, i do feel like I've lost a bit of a super power.

Verizon bought AOL in 2015 [0] and has recently started discontinuing their ISP provided @verizon.net email addresses and servers[1] in favor of @aol.com addresses.

0: https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-to-buy-aol-for-4-4-bill... 1: https://help.aol.com/products/aol-mail-verizon

citation? I belive that this local number spoofing is just a meme that's caught on within the junk calling industry. The people making these calls are already in violation of a pile of laws, but they don't care. Number spoofing was always something that was available to them, but not something they knew how to use effectively until recently. I highly doubt a change in the law changed their behavior that significantly.

Home assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) combined with zwave devices gives you an open source controller and a LAN only network of things. You can also to in to hundreds of existing devices/platforms. The platform is growing rapidly in capabilities and integrations.

I'd prefer they just let you run the hub/central service yourself, with an option to have them run it for a fee, yes.

I think we'll start to see regular consumers harmed by some of these start-ups destroying hardware when they go out of business, and perhaps people will stop buying them unless there's some protection. Then the "free" solutions will be looked at suspiciously and hopefully discounted by the tech press and retailers. Alternately, retailers might be held liable for refunding purchases of products that stop working before the legally mandated warranty date (such as in the EU) or by credit card companies in the US, so they'll stop selling any cloud required garbage.

I feel like selling a hardware device that depends on a cloud service you're bundling for free is intentionally bricking the devices. They are refusing to accept returns, and they're refusing to open the API or provide a firmware update that disconnects them from the cloud.

Most of these companies don't have any subscription fees. They just provide the "free" cloud service for as long as it takes to make a whole bunch of sales, then shut it down and suddenly all the devices stop working. if you're selling a $50 device that people have to wire into their home, with an expected lifetime in years or decades, it's pretty negligent to not provide for a sustainable service.

Home Assistant on a raspberry pi gives you an open source home hub with a mobile app. It has built-in dyndns functionality from a variety of providers, using an open standard. It supports on-board ssl via letsencrypt, and provides easy instructions for forwarding the relevant ports on your router. I think the router forwarding step can be fixed with upnp? Then you've got a home hub that works from anywhere and doesn't require a specialized cloud discovery service.

I'd love to see someone provide a pre-packaged zwave/zigbee talking home assistant appliance with support for snips.ai voice control. Unfortunately, hardware-wise it would probably cost $250 to build out of off the shelf components, but perhaps at scale it could be affordable? Google and Amazon are selling their closed, cloud chained voice assistants for practically below cost, though, so I don't know how such a product could really compete.

The "drop off lane" at my local elementary school is already a 30 minute traffic jam, and that's with parents in the cars hurrying the kids along and school staff directing traffic. You think a robot car is going to get a kid out of a seat with their backpack and lunch faster than a parent? The pick-up line is even worse, as the kids are individually dismissed after the driver has been authorized by the school staff. The current breed of self driving cars would flip out trying to navigate an elementary school parking lot with kids running all over the place and crossing at random spots. The idea of a robot car delivering my kids to school so I don't have to is appealing, however I can't imagine a worse application of the technology, given the reality of the situation.

Shared hosting (with PHP, mod_perl and SSI) was available from thousands of providers for between $5 and $25/month. SSL required a dedicated IP, because SNI wasn't a thing yet, and so if you wanted an SSL enabled site, you were looking at closer to $100/month. But that was for managed, shared hosting, typically with access to a database and automated backup. Good enough for most businesses small-ish web presences.

Rackspace offered dedicated servers for $150/month and up. Smaller providers would rent you a server in their datacenter for around $60/month. I used a company called sagonet in the early 2000s that is still in business and still offering a similar service for about $30/month: http://www.synergyisp.com/dedicated-servers/

Most larger companies at the time contracted with a colocation provider and purchased servers for between $1000 and $4000 each, and paid in the neighborhood of $1000/month for a rack, or $500/month for a half rack, including power and network.

This was monumentally cheaper than the AWS based stack we have these days, though - no company with any complexity to their website has a $40/month AWS bill. A company with a similar SAAS offering to what I ran in 2001 for $40K up front and $500/month is probably looking at a $5000/month AWS bill at today's rates.

the problem is that the four big consumer z-wave hubs all have the cloud entanglement issue. Wink, Smartthings, Amazon and Vera all sell you a piece of hardware that only works as long as they're providing their free cloud service. It's completely unsustainable in it's current model. Vera purports to be completely local, but as of UIv8, they've made all communications steer through their cloud proxy service to enable a seamless mobile UI at the expense of reliability, latency, security and sustainability.

I've been working on moving my Vera controlled zwave network to home-assistant.io and an aeon labs zwave USB gateway, but haven't made much progress because zwave devices all rely on inputting rhythmic patterns of button presses locally to reprogram them.

Some communities aren't profitable to serve with broadband. The first municipal broadband efforts I was aware of were created because no commercial ISPs wanted to compete in an area.

Broadband, like water and electricity, is a natural monopoly - there's only so much room on the poles, and there's significant economies of scale by having everyone in a neighborhood connected to the same infrastructure.

I hope that Municipal broadband becomes more available and more common. On average, the service provided by the municipalities is much better, and much cheaper than the commercial alternatives.

When I worked in a supermarket in the late 90's, we did have a pretty expansive back room filled with stuff that had been taken off trucks but not stocked on shelves. However, it was next to impossible for a front-end person to actually get to any of the products - they were stacked on pallets 3 to 5 rows high and about 5 rows deep with no clearance between them. Occasionally someone would ask me if something was in the back, but unless it was in the dairy fridge, or a case of it was actually sitting on a cart in the hallway, I'd tell them I couldn't find it.

I've never seen bluetooth audio devices that were capable of syncing video and audio in 10 years of using bluetooth audio devices. My most recent tao tronics BT headphones were great for podcasts and audio, but useless for watching video from my Moto X. Have also tested this with Anker portable speakers, Amazon Echo in BT mode, and Creative BT speakers. All are useless for video. I replaced them with a set of $9 Panasonic wired Earbuds that sound just fine and never run out of batteries.

As much as I appreciate https for sensitive information, I feel that for many things, it also functions as a way to lock down the standard protocols of the web and lock users in to proprietary software and services. No longer can you spy on the requests that that piece of closed source software is making while it phones home. No longer can you rescue and reuse IoT devices whose manufacturers have shut down their servers, or refuse to provide updates or promised functionality. Now all communications are inscrutable binary streams that can't be examined or improved, especially from devices that don't allow you to upload a replacement certificate authority.

I've always been upfront and honest about my current salary and expectations. It keeps me from getting lowballed on an offer, and reduces time wasted in talking to employers that can't meet my expected salary. The starting point is what I'm being paid now, plus a bit. Then we can negotiate additional salary, benefits and perks. My salary growth trajectory has been good over my career as a result.

we [1] do most of our AMI provisioning by booting a machine, checking out our ansible codebase and running `ansible-playbook -c local -i "localhost," ...` as part of cloud-init. Build progress is piped over SQS and a management process [2] waits for completion and triggers an AMI snapshot. It works well. I'm not sure if that's what you mean by "server-less", but in our use case there is no controller.

1. https://github.com/edx/configuration/ 2. https://github.com/edx/configuration/blob/master/util/vpc-to...

Intel and AMD both embed monitoring processors with unaudited binary OSes in their CPUs: https://boingboing.net/2016/06/15/intel-x86-processors-ship-... Intel calls their spy cpu "Management Engine", AMD calls it "Platform Security Processor." Both run code that sits between the OS you're running and the CPU, for the supposed purpose of remotely managing PCs in an organization.

Yeah, the intro to the article made it pretty clear that this writer doesn't know the first thing about mobile technology. I think, in his mind, "Siri" is the name for mobile text to speech.

I live in Massachusetts, and have 37 250 watt panels. Snow isn't an issue. The panels generate a little bit of resistive heat, which means snow typically doesn't stick. If it's snowing so heavy, and is so cold that the panels do get covered with snow, the snow melts and slides off within an hour or so.

In July my panels make 1300 kwh and in December and January they make 300 kwh, mostly because of the angle of the sun and the length of the time above the horizon. I also have significant southern tree cover, so my production is not optimal for my area.

> True, it's not "apt install" but it's pretty close

I feel like maybe you don't know what apt does, or how it's used, if you think that shell script is "pretty close."

I'm from southern NY, and where I grew up, you would refer to state highway 110 as "110" or "Route 110". Interstate 495 is "495" or "the L.I.E." Named roads like the Northern State Parkway or the Thruway get the definite article, but numbered roads either get the type of road mentioned, or nothing at all: "I 87" or just "87"

This is the same where I now live in New England, as well. "495", "128", "Route 3", "Route 1", "The Mass Pike"

The national average cost for gas is $2.67/gallon, Electricity $0.12/kwh. Based entirely on fuel costs, the Model S 85 costs $0.04/mile and the 20 mpg BMW M4 costs $0.13/mile. In order to save $200/month on fuel with the tesla, you'd have to drive 2200 miles a month. In the area I live, where gas is cheaper than average and electricity is almost twice as expensive, that number is 5000 miles/month.

MIT gave up half of 18/8 earlier this year, mostly to Amazon - https://www.networkworld.com/article/3191503/internet/mit-se...

They've internally started rolling out IPv4 NAT and IPv6

I've used it a few times but only because I know amazon's costs and shipping policies are consistent, and they give you enough information up front on the item page to make a fully informed purchase decision.

Other ecommerce sites frequently have so many additional/hidden charges that I would never want to click "buy" right from the item page. I abandon so many carts when I get to the checkout page because there's $20 in shipping charges on a $8 item, or they've tacked on a $5 handling fee, or they wait until the very end of the process to tell you that the item will ship in 8 weeks.

But it doesn't need to be shipped from the factory in China to the user. Sand can be locally sourced cheaply. Washing machine installers just need an additional material on their truck, in addition to the tools and plumbing supplies they already carry. 25kg of sand costs $0.50 from a landscaping yard.

I have the same setup, but I haven't yet been able to get the Yubikey Neo to work as a GPG key on android via NFC. It prompts for a PIN, but the PIN I use for GPG on linux isn't accepted. There's also no working windows client for this setup, so I find I have to manually copy a lot of 20 character complex passwords by hand these days.