CharmCityCrab

I wonder why they don’t just use as different brand for the less expensive computer hardware that they sell directly. The flagship stuff could still be "Microsoft Surface" branded and then the budget machines can be "Microsoft World" or whatever their marketing department can come up with. That’s on the hardware side.

I’ve also for a long time thought that every time Microsoft tries to do a wild variant on Windows, some that actually don’t contain program windows as part of the operating system, they might have a better chance at success if they didn’t call them Windows, so that people don’t experience confusion and can go in with an open mind.

For example, if you want a built for touch Windows 8 Metro style interface and don’t want to let machines run x86 programs, just the Microsoft Store PPA, that has a better chance of being accepted if it’s called "Microsoft Hypertouch" or something than calling it "Microsoft Windows", which brings with it certain expectations for look, feel, and compatibility, and which is a brand that Windows RT and such actually at least slightly damages.

While providing children with universal access to computers for educational purposes is important to their future, I don’t think we need to be giving them super-expensive machines. Teenagers being teenagers, they are going to shove these things into bookbags and toss the bookbags around, get all sorts of viruses, brick them doing random stuff, scratch them up, and so forth.

I don’t know a ton about the educational market as I was beyond that age before people started being given laptops to take home (We had computers in the schools, but they were desktops and you couldn’t take them home), but I would imagine that the number of repairs and replacements required are way higher than with typical adult consumer or business laptops. So, you get them cheap ones where that doesn’t matter as much, makes sense to me.

It’s also good stewardship of taxpayer money to get them the minimum thing that will let them get the job done (In this case, the job including making sure they are familiar with computers as well as the homework assignments themselves).

I also have to admit, and I am sure I am not the only one who had this reaction, that a bit of steam was coming out of my ears some years back when I read about a school giving their students MacBooks and that it was being paid for by the school district, not some sort of gift from Apple. I can’t afford a MacBook or a Windows/Linux laptop of a similar cost. I probably never will be able to. But they took government funds to give them to kids to throw around and break? I don’t think having a MacBook is any more advantageous to a student than having a Chromebook or low-end Windows laptop in terms of actually teaching them things they’ll use as part of the adult workforce. A MacBook is a luxury. Let their parents buy them those for Christmas (If they can afford to) or have the teens work a part-time or summer job to buy them if they feel they really want the best computers money can buy that badly. The schools should be providing the cheapest computers they can find that work.

I definitely see the value of getting students something they can use 24/7 whereever they have or can find wifi and how that helps even out some income-based educational discrepancies and prepares students for a world where computers are everywhere. I just think they should be low-end machines and, to the credit of many school districts, low-end machines are what they provide.

So, if the flavor of 5g that AT&T’s is labeling as "regular 5g" is about equivalent to 4G LTE, why not continue to broadcast 4g LTE at those frequencies? Does 4G LTE have a lot of drop-off at those frequencies as well that makes it inferior to 5g in the same spectrum, or does it hold up better on them? What about range from the tower? We know that 5g doesn’t reach as far as 4g in general, but I wonder specifically if 4g LTE reaches further than 5g would in certain spectrums intended to reach areas without a lot of tower density (i.e. fewer tours, people at the edge of the signal range).

It seems like, depending on the answers to those and other questions, it might actually make more sense to stick with some form of 4g LTE in certain areas to maintain and increase total coverage. After all, 4g can produce pretty solid speeds. There isn’t some sort of type of data or app that runs on smartphones that needs 5g by it’s very nature. Once 4g and 5g are the same speeds, who cares which one you’re getting? Wouldn’t the priority than go to whichever can reach more people at at more bars (i.e. a better DBS number, not creative carrier software editing of bars)?

I see a lot of T-Mobile commercials hyping more 5g in more places than Verizon. Every time I see one, it really jumps out at me that they only talk about 5g coverage and never just coverage in general. That makes me think you’re more likely to get a signal in more places with Verizon- it just might not be 5g. I’d rather take less 4g in exchange for a larger total coverage area of any signal from my carrier that my phone can use.

Obviously, the ideal would be to blanket ever square inch of the nation in 5g, but that’s never going to happen, so what interests me more than 5g built-out (Though I’m not saying that doesn’t matter, 5g is great when you can get a good signal with it), is getting a decent signal to more places and at minimum trying not to shrink your total coverage area just because as the number of "g"s goes up, the effective range of the towers and such is smaller and smaller. I wonder if there is a role for actually maintain 5g not only until a 5g transition completes, but even when everyone has 5g capable phones and perhaps even beyond into 6g, just to offer something to people who are indoors in their small rural not quite towns or whatever and whomever might be visiting people who live in places like that.

The idea that vaccines are 95% effective (Or whatever- varies by the brand of vaccine you get) is not inconsistent the idea that you can vaccinated and still get sick, because there’s obviously the other 5%. Still, you’ve improved your odds of staying healthy a ton by getting vaccinated.

The idea that vaccines reduce the severity of infection in many people who do are vaccinated and do get the vaccine isn’t inconsistent with some people who are vaccinated still being hospitalized and dying, because "many" still leaves a few for whom it doesn’t. Even so, you’re increasing your odds of your coronavirus infection only being mild instead of severe a ton by getting the vaccine (Which stacks with increasing your odds of not getting it in the first place).

The idea that vaccines reduce your odds of spreading coronavirus when vaccinated isn’t inconsistent with the possibility that you may spread it if you get it (and you’re less likely to get it and thus less likely to spread it from that angle) and that if you do get it and spread it, you’ll spread it for a shorter amount of time.

Some anti-vaxxers seem to think that unless something is 100% effective at providing an invincible shield against getting and spreading the virus, it’s not worth getting or mandating, and won’t on average improve people’s individual health or the overall public health. That’s not logical, though. It’s like saying you shouldn’t lock the door to your house or even close it because someone can still use a battering ram or kick it in to steal your stuff- I mean, yeah, they can, but they are less likely to do that if you have a locked door than if you leave your front door wide open with a big sign in the lawn that says "Free furniture and electronics. Come in and grab whatever you want.".

I think the old axiom "Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good" applies here. Something doesn’t have to be perfect to be a big help.

The actual threshold perfect health officials were originally willing to accept as providing enough value to approve and encourage the public to get was an effectiveness rate of 50% or above. That, say, Moderna came out to be 94.1% effective in clinical trials (With similar results for Pfizer) is thus actually way better than the experts thought it needed to be to be worthwhile. Johnson & Johnson was approved despite a way lower effectiveness rate than Moderna or Pfizer in it’s clinical trials (Though it was still significantly above 50% effective on preventing people from catching the virus, and actually was similarly effective to the other ones when measured in terms of "preventing hospitalizations and deaths due to coronavirus" or something similar [i.e. You were more likely to get it with that vaccine than the other two, but not much more likely to end up in the hospital or the mortuary.]).

These vaccines (especially Pfizer and Moderna) are very much worth getting IMO.

This dispute is about what NBC describes as 14+ channels. Subscribing to Peacock gets you back 1 of them (Your local NBC affiliate). Maybe a couple more, but if so, not their highest rated ones. A lot of the ones potentially about to go missing have key "niche" lynchpin type programs- a major cable news network with people’s favorite commentators, a big entetainnent network with a couple flagship wrestling shows (Which ironically set up the storylines that culminate in the Peacock-exclusive events- so if you replace that part with Peacock, you only get the conclusion of the story), national coverage of certain sports, almost all of certain local pro sports teams’ games in certain regions, a channel that airs science fiction, etc.. That’s a lot of "constituencies".

I’m not taking sides, but it’s kind of a big deal. I’m sure some people will switch to Hulu with Live TV or DirecTV Stream over it (Though I would imagine with streaming those customers are potentially always only a month away from coming back- switching takes minutes and the customer owns their own separately purchased equipment that works with everything.)- probably more to the former than the latter, which is more expensive.

One thing Comcast (Which is who YouTubeTV is negotiating with) might want to consider is how it will look to regulators and such if they can’t work this out. Does the owner of a monopoly cable company want to be sitting at a Congressional hearing being grilled by Senator Warren about how they pulled channels from one of their few partial competitors in the areas they operate (I say partial because many YTT subscribers probably use Comcast Internet to stream YTT over)? That is a real possibility, especially if what Google is saying is true- that YouTube TV is offering a price in line with what other carriers pay for these channels and NBC/Comcast wants more from them in particular.

Cable companies have these type of disputes also. It seems like it happens less often, but that’s because they are gouging their own customers so badly on price that they don"t need to, and in some cases are a vertically integrated monopoly or near-monopoly that literally owns many of the channels they negotiate with (i.e. Comcast and NBC networks).