beardedscotsman's comments

Tesla isn’t the only company making great EVs EU is now full of other impressive machines and BYD is also being out impressive vehicles.

Tesla, well reputation is trash. Company success is questionable.

I’d rather by an EV from anyone right now than Tesla.

Just because it was encrypted doesn’t mean google can’t run some processing. For example encrypted zip files still can show the file names. These file names could be specific or malware or a collection of matching file names.

Sounds like you got some beef with them. What do they have in your mind that is incomplete?

Isn’t atmos not specifically multi channel as in traditional 5.1/ 7.1, but Atmos is positional sound that then generates the correct speaker positioning on the amplifier? For instance my home setup has support for 5.2.4 channels, two bass and 4 risen speakers. Additionally you can adapt the positioning of the rear speakers and the amp will adjust the audio to compensate.

So you could just export atmos to a 5.1 mix, but that is not a copy of atmos tracks.

I don’t understand your critique. Are you saying that European software developers don’t have a passion for shipping products?

Ok, we used a different term and associated attach rate as with console purchase. Either way, just take what I said as games sold with console purchase.

No, a 3 attach rate was huge, I said in a previous reply other consoles at the time were around 1.25. Over the lifetime older consoles needed around 5 games per console to break even and Xbox 360 hit that super fast compared to the competition.

This needs to be noted that it’s average as in 5 games per unit sold. So two consoles and 10 games sold to one person. The attach rate is a term related to games sold with the console at time of console purchase.

360 for sure was selling for a loss on cogs, that was rectified with the Xbox one that I believe was 400 cogs for 500 retail. It frustrated a ton of folk because 360 was 300 retail, but this was a clear change to make the console profitable without sales since they were worried people were buying it as a media device, hence the media focus of the Xbox one.

Just to be clear they managed to reduce the cogs with the Xbox 360 small and sold them at a profit without license sales.

Three was huge at the time. Before Xbox 360 the attach rate was estimated at 1.25 for previous consoles. Often due to low games at launch or including a game with the console. Xbox 360 broke this at the time with a huge launch portfolio and a whole set of HD games, it was really exciting and beating PS3 to launch was a big bonus. Shame the Xbox One had disastrous leadership that turned the console into a media device and forgot that people bought it for games primarily. This is a whole different conversation though.

To add to this, in Ireland the main retailer for toys was Smyth’s. They didn’t sell the original Xbox because they sold PlayStation and when Microsoft tried to get the Xbox 360 stocked by them, they initially refused saying when people want to buy a games console they come into the store and ask to buy a PlayStation or a games machine. Nobody was going in asking for Xbox. Microsoft had to do a massive deal with them to get shelf space and it was always in the corner away from the Sony and Nintendo stuff.

The consoles used to be sold at a loss, that was back a long time ago, Xbox 360, PS3 I believe were the last generation to be sold at a loss. The next gen Xbox at the time was sold for a 20% markup on cogs or there about at the time.

Games sold on the consoles have around a 15 usd flat royalty for big titles, not sure how that affected low cost games at the time. The 360 needed 5 games to brake even, but I believe they had an attach rate of around 3 at launch and that was unreal and unexpected at the time.

Depends on the car. For instance some BMWs will offer the hud now, but not all. And for the maps in the dials that’s only Apple Maps and no other nav software. So yeah it’s not perfect at all, but I’ll still take this over a cars standard navigation system

So entirely different experience for me. So 5 years ago I travel to California. Out of all the cars I picked a crappy GM car when there were better cars to pick from the rental lot, why, because I had my iPhone with navigation.

Every time I rented cars since I would always make sure it had apple CarPlay so I could drive any with a familiar experience.

Now today, my car has wireless CarPlay. My experience goes like this, I get in my car, turn it on, my head unit loads apple CarPlay instantly and I have Waze running which I like for speed camera notifications on new roads and my music and playlists instantly accessible.

It’s seamless, instant and I don’t touch my phone it stays in my pocket.

I would never consider a car with out either android auto or CarPlay. It’s mandatory for me and yes I miss out of heads up display of directions, but then I don’t have to pay an additional subscription to traffic info, or pay an update fee for new maps.

Isn’t the problem with this, that they work till they fail. You can run some software that can tell you how dead the drive is, but you can’t figure how likely it will die. Some drives I think have some stats you can access, but generally you can’t tell until it fails.

There used to be a great site before that was a data center publishing physical hdd stats, not looked for it for a long time, but I presume they would have ssd stats these days too.

I remember seeing the COGS for Xbox One and it was the same as retail prices. There was no profit from COGS and then you have shipping and associated costs to get the consoles out. So there is an inherent loss. it’s likely too that advertising comes under this cost per unit too.

Xbox games take 10 to 15 USD per title sold, so there is a big push for games to sell. Xbox 360 had the highest at the time games sold at console sale it was like 2.5 or 3.5 games per console sold and I think that is likely still a record.

Consoles take time to make a profit, but subscription models with multiplayer really help. Honestly I think this is how it should remain, at least with lowering the cost of entry to home consoles vs desktop computers.

That’s not entirely true. They gameafy some aspects for sure, but that’s just about accessibility. You can run it like a full sim and there are great videos of real Boeing pilots talking about it.

Even the old flight sim was so advanced MSFT had contracts with the French military for their mapping tech from the game specifically. This is back in the day now.

Twitter... have you ever tried to share a Sharepoint link. Those take up like 4+ lines in emails, it's a nightmare. Back in the day, Microsoft even used to have an internal url shortening service that people used to clean up Sharepoint links.

This needs more camera manufacturers adding CFExpress over SD cards. However, there are a large number of other devices such as audio recorders using SD, so this could be wishful thinking for now at least.

Well, you got the meetings with the or agencies, that’s going to cost a ton. Then there is licensing of music which is a known and respected artist. Likely a bunch of other additional costs to an ad agency to create the video and deliver to spec to the channel broadcasting the commercial. Lots of these aren’t huge, but when you get into live tv production, there are a ton of costs that seem insanely high, but it’s the business.

I was involved in part with the Windows 8 control panel refresh. What a nightmare it was working with that team.

There was just no care for actually improving user experience, everything was shoehorned into the modern ui mainly as a push for ARM windows devices which were so slow they just never took off. MS wanted to force an enclosed ecosystem like apple iOS, but just didn’t have the hardware to make it happen.

I remember one story asking why it was so difficult to manage switching to Bluetooth speakers for the surface which was still somewhat secret at MS at the time only to be told that they did follow up with my question and only 0.005% of users ever used Bluetooth speakers with windows and it wasn’t a priority. (Obviously the number is t right, but it was something utterly tiny)

France has a great system. You can’t rent a house unless the rent is under 1/3rd of your income. It’s not legally enforced, but is very difficult to rent for more of your pay check.

Unlike ireland where rents can be 60% of your take home pay.