I think this is the wrong way to look at Vine's impact.
If you search Youtube for monthly Vine compilations (ie Oct 2016 Vines) these videos have millions of views - enough to make some of these Vine stars into minor celebrities (look up King Bach).
Vine pretty much started the short form video craze.
Twitter missed the opportunity to make it so people visited the Vine app to view these compilations, which would have maybe encouraged the creators to only make content for Vine.
They dropped the ball, and now the top creators all use their competitors.
I'm also a Prime addict, and have noticed vast improvements in the past year or so with Amazon Logistics (Bay Area).
Just like you mentioned, it was really bad at first. Packages would routinely arrive late, wrong address, etc. I live in a gated apartment complex and they would always leave the package with the leasing office instead of using the code I provided (UPS, FedEx, would always leave at my door).
Now it is indistinguishable from other carriers, in that all my packages arrive on time, at my door, without any problems.
The only thing I don't like is PrimeNow, which uses 'part time' carriers like Postmates, and they ALWAYS get confused by my apartment complex - so I stopped using it.
Wasn't even that long ago. In 2006, the CSU I was at still used your SSN for everything - including logging into the computers. This particular school has since changed this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the practice is still used elsewhere.
I have noticed an uptick as well (upto 3-4 calls a day). If it's not a number I recognize, I just silence the ringer and let it go to VM. And then block the number.
I play it a few times a week. Project Cars and DiRT are what I spend most of the time with. I'm also enjoying Chronos right now, which is more of a RPG.
Echoing what a few others have said, there are not a lot of great AAA titles for either the Vive or Rift. This will change over time.
Are you excited about VR, or are you looking somewhere just to make money? If you're into this, then yes, I would recommend you learn about developing for VR. No one I know has tried the Rift and just shrugged their shoulders and said "that's kinda cool'. Everyone, even my most techie friends, drop their jaws and lose their minds. That's exciting.
This is a brand new field with tons of potential. That being said, I don't think it will be a very lucrative market to indie devs for sometime.
IMHO, fully autonomous cars for the general public are at least 10+ years away.
What I'm excited about is how we will soon see more and more autonomous 'features' i.e. lane changing, smarter adaptive cruise control and parking lot mode.
That's what I thought at first too, but as I thought about it, I began to wonder.
They certainly have the chutzpah to try, and they have an ocean of money to spend overseas. A longshot bet on building another trillion dollar product might be preferable to paying corporate and personal income tax on dividends.
No, I totally agree with cgusto. Building a vehicle manufacturing base is a mammoth undertaking. Tesla's been at it for 12 years and is only now putting out 35,000 cars a year. It really doesn't make that much difference how much money you start off with; that was never Tesla's obstacle. Elon has said as much on more than one occasion, that they're spending money as fast as they can and the only real limit is the amount of work that can feasibly be done per unit time.
Apple may have almost $200 billion but where would they get the batteries, to focus on just one aspect of it? Tesla found there literally wasn't enough battery supply and decided to build the largest battery factory in the world from scratch to provide what they needed, and it's been in planning for years and won't be ready for a few years to come. And again, money isn't the blocking issue. It would be laughable to suggest that Apple could just conjure up a comparable factory out of nowhere....it would take them just as long.
And given their penchant for overseas labor, it would take even longer. Don't even get me started on that. It's like Elon has said: importing phones in bulk is one thing; importing cars or large heavy things is wholly another. They would really have to do it in the US, which could hardly be done in secrecy. Car manufacturing plants tend to be large and obvious.
My point: maybe they'll get into it, but it won't come out of nowhere and it will certainly take a LOT of time regardless of their bank account. Tesla will be many years ahead of them for the long-term foreseeable future.
Right, but the article's point is that they started working on cars. You are making the point that it would take them a long time to build it.. They have the cash and I don't see why they would be in any rush, if driverless cars are expected on the streets in 2020, or potentially 2023..
As a matter of fact, Apple's last quarterly profit was $18bn, while Tesla's valuation, is $25bn. They could buy a company like Tesla every two quarters..
Furthermore, maybe what they are trying to do is to create some in-house talent, in preparation for future purchases. Perhaps so that they can have their own employees join those of the acquired company..
Yes, it is scary when you realize how susceptible some of this infrastructure is.
Reminds me of an instance in 2009. I was working in Santa Cruz, CA. I was configuring some of our servers remotely, when suddenly I lost internet connection. The whole office was out. VoIP was down - no signal on my cell phone as well. I went to the front desk and tried the land line. No dial tone.
This was weird.
I saw a few people from other offices milling about the courtyard. I went outside. They were all experiencing the same thing. A few of us went to Starbucks. Couldn’t buy coffee because their registers were down.
At this point, people were starting to leave their offices in droves. Santa Cruz PD actually began to have a few officers walk around the area, since no one could make phone calls.
The only thing that worked was Verizon cell phones. These were being passed around so people could make calls (data did not work however).
All in all, this lasted about 6 hours.
This was caused by a single frustrated former ATT employee. He just went in and clipped some fiber lines and left.
I'm a little surprised Starbucks wouldn't just revert to cash mode? Who cares about exact prices when everyone involved knows that each items costs no more than a few cents. Just round to the nearest dollar, and any competent manager would reward such behaviour given the alternative.
At least this is my experience with pharmacy billing. If we couldn't put claims through due to network problems, we'd just estimate based on your previous claims and keep things humming along.
> I'm a little surprised Starbucks wouldn't just revert to cash mode?
The register - I speculate - is also tracking inventory. Ring up two cappuccinos and a pastry, corporate keeps track and knows what and when to re-order.
Getting the inventory out of whack might be worse than loosing trade during the outage.
There are tons of bat shit crazy ideas everywhere. Despite all the sensationalized stories, SF is a great area, filled with great people (for the most part).
But you will be paying nearly $2k/mo to rent a bedroom; that much is true :-p
If you search Youtube for monthly Vine compilations (ie Oct 2016 Vines) these videos have millions of views - enough to make some of these Vine stars into minor celebrities (look up King Bach).
Vine pretty much started the short form video craze.
Twitter missed the opportunity to make it so people visited the Vine app to view these compilations, which would have maybe encouraged the creators to only make content for Vine.
They dropped the ball, and now the top creators all use their competitors.