Is that the one they recently moved from Moscow to Crimera? First article I found on the topic

If so that didn’t take long and is pretty embarrassing.

9.000 Euro für zwölf Tage exklusive der Flüge.

Das kann man in der Tat Hochpreissegment nennen, da würde ich auch einiges erwarten.

To be fair: from a financial perspective that sounds like the right call, even if the movie would have been interesting.

R rated horror movies just don’t bring in the amount of money to sustain high budgets like that. The exception being “It” (and the sequel), but that had more mainstream appeal and also only came out years later.

Although isn’t the break even number usually closer to double the budget?

I wonder if this method doesn’t overproportionally eliminates valuable workers, who can easily switch companies.

You are right, Apple also has some legit professional staff. And if the person using it gets paid a lot, then a one time hardware purchase becomes negligible.

Accurate fine motor control and even basic stuff like typing does seem not quite fleshed out, so that is indeed an issue. But I don’t think it’s a deal breaker that you can’t do long shifts with it, since you’d probably only use it for certain tasks.

Even more of a niche, but I could see it for something like architects. Both for work and to maybe even present to clients.

Performance and bettery is good, but they’re barely better than what Intel and AMD offer.

And both AMD and Intel have pretty exciting new architectures coming soon with zen5 and lunar lake.

Meanwhile, on Vive, you could stand up, walk around, and manipulate the world with two tracked remotes.

Issue is that if I remember correctly the vive was an outside-in concept that required base stations to be setup. So you lose the cable, but are still bound by location. And importantly also needs a pc aswell. So still far away from standalone.

I think the core issue is that every piece of new technology so far has helped us get lazier. People used to walk around an office, then they sat at a computer, now they carry their computer with them and do things from the couch.

Nobody wants to get up to do things if they can avoid it, and that’s the only real benefit VR/AR provides

But I think VR/AR could make us lazier:

For VR the promise is immersion. You get to experience a concert, sport event, unique experience or exotic place from your own living room. And for many of that it is just fine to sit on a couch and still have a benefit from the technology.

For AR i think it’s a bit more productivity focused. For example less need to train personel, if you can project every instruction into their field of view.

Ordinarily, Apple is good at throwing its weight (money) around to make things like this happen, but it seems like there weren’t many takers this go-round, so we just got an overpriced, beautiful and fascinating paperweight.

Yeah normally Apple is maybe the only company that has the scale and control over their ecosystem to force rapid adoption. But this was clearly not a consumer product aimed at capturing the masses, but more or less a dev kit sold to anyone willing to shell out the price.

The PS VR2 sounds nice, but feels like it is only aimed at the gaming market and even there sony only captures a fraction.

The Quest as a standalone device imo really would have the best shot at mass market adoption, but Facebook rightfully has an image problem. And despite spending so much on development doesn’t seem to create any content or incentivize others to do so.

Edit: actually kind of forgot “bigscreenVR”. I am somewhat surprised that the default is to cram all hardware into the headset making it much bulkier instead of a seperate piece on a belt, back, or maybe strap on your upper arm.

but it’s utterly useless.

That imo has been the issue with VR/AR for a while now. The Hardware as you said is pretty good by now and looking at something like the quest even afforable. What’s lacking is content and use cases.

Smartphones had an easier time being adopted, since it was just moving from a larger to a smaller screen. But VR/AR actually needs a new type of content to make use of it’s capabilities. And there you run into a chicken/egg problem, where no one is putting in the effort (and vr content is harder to produce) without a large user base.

Just games and some office stuff (that you can do just as well on a regular pc) aren’t cutting it. You’d need stuff like every major sport event being broadcast with unique content, e.g. formula one with the ability to put yourself into the driver seat of any car.

Sounds like what Apple is trying to do…

Yeah, although sadly Apple isn’t quite the good guy either. I feel like in a way instead of ads they use their walled garden approach to achieve a similar result.

They’ll make it really annoying or even impossible to use alternatives and mix things. This way they you are by design drawn to use their desired solutions.

Does make for a better user experience as long as you pay the price and play by their rules. And probably also better for privacy, because with the closed system approach they don’t need the data as much to target you.

But imo still problematic and Apple doesn’t want to just sell good Hardware, but also services.

Unfortunately I think without some kind of regulation that makes personal info a liability / hot potato, it will still be treated as an asset to be collected:(

Agreed, this is one of those problems where it is much easier to legislate from the top down, rather than trying to get each individual consumer to make fully conscious decisions.

Yeah, sadly from a economic perspective it is kind of obvious how a continuous source of revenue might be more appealing compared to a one time purchase. Especially with a product like TVs that usually have a pretty long lifetime before being replaced.

Although i would point out that (at least in our current society) privacy and an ad-free experience in many ways is treated as a luxury good. Persumably a TV with a better OS would be sold at a higher price, and confronted with this choice many consumers would likely choose the cheaper one.

Just to throw another option into the mix:

Maybe create a VPN connection with wireguard, then you can just transfer them however you’d do it in a local network? Tailscale would be an easy solution to achieve this.

For me in some ways it is even more telling how there seems to be no attempt towards a constructive solution with the West Bank. If anything they are making things worse with the illegal settlements.

That wouldn’t be an easy task either, but leagues easier compared to getting anything productive done in a hot conflict like what is currently happening in Gaza.

Also I don’t think we’ve really run out of suitable space to install new panels. If that ever happens it might be worthwhile to replace them, but as you said we can otherwise just run them alongside new installations until they break or maintenance costs surpass their profits

He could also take higher risks, since he knew that there was a security net to catch him. Much easier to make high risk/reward decisions, if the risk (e.g. going broke) isn’t actually real. He presumably also had an above average education and many other benefits. This is also why many rich people might end up building successful businesses. The average person might get one shot and either makes it or goes broke. The rich person can roll the dice multiple times (and might have learned something from the last try).

Also disregarding everything even, if he had succeded: That would still only have been a sample size of one. I doubt anyone is saying that you can’t under any circumstances pull yourself out of poverty, but on average the cards are just stacked against you in many ways.

Also i doubt that reselling second hand stuff is a viable business model for a larger group. Like sure in a large city a few people might be able to carve out a niche for themself, but the more people do it or the smaller the market, the less it works.

signatories of the Budapest memorandum are keeping their word to defend Ukraine’s sovereign

Is that actually something they promised in the Budapest memorandum?

My knowledge on the topic is very limited, but based on Wikipedia i was under the impression that signatories essentially only promised to not attack themself (which Russia clearly violated) and offer assistance only in the limited case where nuclear weapons are used (which isn’t the case). Also “assistance” can mean defense, but doesn’t necessarily, making it quite vague and the point about consultations when questions arise makes it even less binding.

Smartest thing they could do now is shut down their remaining software development. Ship the TVs with vanilla Google OS

I think there’s a difference between smartwatches and TVs in terms of being able to monetize the operating system. On the tiny screen of a watch you can’t really put any advertisement (at least not without destroying the usability completely) and most of the things you can analyse are happening on the smartphone.

A TV on the other hand gives you a huge surface in the living room of a families home and if you have control of the OS there are plenty of ways to monetize it (and companies willing to pay for it). You can preinstall certain streaming apps (and get payed for it), promote newly released movies and give links to rent them (either your own shop or again for commission), you can collect userdata and sell that to other companies, and much more.

For me personally it’s “Dredd”, but to be fair I am also a sci-fi fan in general.

I guess besides that “the raid”, “Kill Bill” and the first “John wick” probably have to be up there.

I mean i agree that more should be done and faster, but on the topic of prisoner conscription, i think this makes it harder for the west to act. Since there isn’t an obligation like Nato, which someone already mentioned, any aid has to gather popular support. And i can imagine how the downside mentioned above could negatively affect that.

Not really sure what to think about this one. On the one hand it does seem like a sensible implementation (unlike Russia’s), but is it worth it?

The amount of additional recruits seems to be very limited (2 now, up to 50 under review as of now) and comes with additional work. Can’t really see those numbers change anything in a meaningful way.

And on the other hand you give critics an easy target to attack. Now they get any easy way to downplay Russia’s use of prisoners (“see they are doing it too”), make Ukraine seem desperate (“they are running out of recruits and are scraping the barrel”), or any number of false stories.

In an ideal world that wouldn’t have an effect, but sadly it does.