Well, David Foot is obviously wrong. That’s ridiculous. LOL - That would throw off everything!
In response to the commentary about Google Stadia, I think that the target audience that Google is going for here is the casual gamer, as you mentioned. PC gamers won’t ‘convert’, dedicated console gamers won’t ‘convert’, but there is an even larger audience that is neither of those, and that is what Google is going for.
Case in point, remember when Nintendo was tanking about 14 years ago and they needed a new product. Nintendo doesn’t just try to copy the rest and compete, they try to do their own thing. They have been doing this for years. They shifted the market and came out with the Wii, the sales were amazing and people that never played games were playing and buying the Wii because of their innovative motion controls. Then Microsoft and Sony copied their solution. Fast forward to a few years ago, NIntendo needed another miracle, out comes the Switch. It was a smash hit. It sold with Casual gamers that loved gaming on the TV and gaming on the road. Nintendo made a way to not compromise their games, even on a mobile platform.
Now we have Stadia, Google realizes there is a huge market for this casual gamers, but was never able to take AAA games with them as Nintendo does with the Switch. Now they are able to compete directly with the Switch, the PC, Xbox, and Sony, all while using their own hardware. All they need now is a $4.99/month subscription to quality ‘controller friendly’ games and/or group party games you can play on the TV or on the road and this will be a killer system.
But only time will tell if they will make it work. So far, I am impressed. They just need to start rolling out some more casual games to get the interest moving.
Listened to the episode as I drove to work Monday morning… I lost count of how many times OK Boomer triggered my device and popped up the “listening” prompt in Android Auto in my Subaru…
¯_(ツ)_/¯
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this will really show which gen u r…
I think any time that StarLink is brought up, we should keep in mind that Musk is not the only one who wants to launch thousands of satellites for internet. Bezos also has his plans. And if they’re successful, I can’t imagine China wouldn’t want to have their own thousands of internet satellites just because they’re China and they can’t be a world leader–as they see themselves–without being present wherever America is.
Also, a question: Would satellite internet be affected by wildfire smoke or thunderstorms?
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It’s interesting to look at the right to repair on cars. Leo mentioned (and I’m paraphrasing here) that it would be horrible to imagine not being able to change components in a car to repair it. The truth is, that’s exactly how it is for modern cars. I own a 2014 Volkswagen, and they have parts that the agent calls “intelligent parts”, these are parts that cannot be replaced with even original parts from another vehicle, but instead must be ordered from the factory and are “paired” with the car.
I think we should strive to make our electronics as repairable as reasonably possible to be responsible beings on this planet and therefore minimising waste.
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I think that makes you an X-boomer 
Hey that would be a pretty good gamer/ forum handle or podcast name.
That is awesome. I had a Zune and loved it - It’s ashamed that they didn’t catch on and died. The song sharing was ahead of its time. I actually got into an argument with a sales person in a major big box store one day not long after I bought mine. I overheard the sales person who was helping a customer shopping MP3 players tell them that they didn’t want it because all your music disappeared on the Zune after you bought it (of course that was only true of shared songs because you were really borrowing them). I jumped into the conversation and corrected the sales person - I got some ugly looks for sure.
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I will say that 1 thing I did not like about Zune… And, I do not know if it was because of the player or the Microsoft software…
I never shared, and I had music I purchased or ripped myself occassionally get deleted from my hard drive. I never shared music with anyone.
It would sometimes rename songs and sometimes delete some songs. That was annoying. Occassionally I would lose an entire CD.
But, I liked the size of the device, and I liked the interface.
I certainly agree that devices should be as reparable as possible, but I think the enthusiast/hobbyist segment overstates the amount by which the ability to repair is going to keep devices out of landfills and slow demand for new raw materials. And there are certainly pressures on this beyond a simple ideology of no user repair and planned obsolescence. Part of it is the structure of a consumer economy and the nature of these devices, mobile in particular, that urges an artificial replacement cycle.
Now, if Tim Apple decides tomorrow to direct iPhone engineers to build “the last iPhone you’ll own” with fully modular components that can be traded out and repaired, I’m sure they could build something where the screen, camera, mainboard, battery, etc. could all be swapped out (with relative ease) in an attractive package. But I don’t think they’re going to be interested going there until we hit a peak performance and peak featureset in phones, absent any other outside pressure.
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further to conversation about CCTV and London there is a fantastic BBC drama about how the security services use the network for monitoring and manipulation !
The Capture