The Director's Cut (released in 1992) drops the narration and adds the dream sequence, but despite the name is not entirely approved by Ridley Scott.
The Final Cut (released in 2007) is the only version where Ridley Scott had full final cut approval. It re-masters the audio, fixes some of the effects (replacing faces on stunt doubles, removing wires, etc), and changes a few lines (most notably "I want more life, father" instead of "fucker"). The color is also re-graded.
Some people prefer the Director's Cut over the Final Cut, especially the color grading, although I saw the Final Cut in 35mm when it was released and it looked pretty spectacular. In any event the changes in the Final Cut are nowhere near as egregious as the Star Wars special editions or the AI remasters of James Cameron's films.
> the Star Wars special editions or the AI remasters of James Cameron's films
I really wonder why some creatives are so determined to sabotage their earlier works later in life. Do they actually believe that they are making them better and are so used to being told how great they are that they can too easily dismiss anyone telling them otherwise? Or are they perhaps (consciously or subconsciously) threatened by a standard that their current self can no longer match up to?
It's sad that with the way copyright and movie distribution work that these butchered version become the only version new audiences get to see.
> All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work
I grew up with this book - I have vivid memories still of the pages about a nuclear reactor - and I was pleasantly surprised to visit a bookshop recently and find it still in print, updated with new things like LIDAR, 3D Printers, MoCap, etc.
The author David Macaulay taught illustration at my college. His original series started with buildings like “Castle”. The way things work was a breakout hit.
This book is probably 90% of my understanding of how why so many transistors can add up to a CPU, and I didn't learn any programming for a good ten years after I pored through that book as a kid (for me it was "The new way things work", updated for the computer age).
> Usually, companies like Apple are largely to blame
Just as a point of fact, Micron and its peers have in the past operated an illegal cartel that engaged in a price fixing conspiracy to manipulate the cost of RAM.
> mega-buyers like Apple caused various issues, and the production equipment that was scaled back during that time is now leading to supply shortages in the upcycle [2]. Apple fans probably won't admit it, though.
That's Micron's problem. Nobody held a gun to their heads and made them accept the prices Apple was offering. Micron willingly took those deals.
It's true that memory companies formed a cartel in the early 2000s, and I'm not saying the memory companies did nothing wrong.
It's just that in the context of the current price surge, the biggest factor varies depending on how you look at it, but hardware manufacturing itself has problems with fixed-cost structures and demand monopolies. It's a problem of sunk costs. If fab utilization drops, losses pile up. In other words, a fab has to run 24/7.
So the problem is that if a fab stops running, astronomical losses begin, so it's natural to hesitate in investing in production facilities. And that hesitation is driven by fundamental issues of supply and demand. That's also why memory became expensive.
Ultimately, it seems you agree that the current prices were formed by these voluntarily created conditions, right?
>That's Micron's problem. Nobody held a gun to their heads and made them accept the prices Apple was offering. Micron willingly took those deals.
Then they risk losing Apple as a customer, with empty Fabs running which cost them most money. And pile of stock unable to be covered by any other player in the market.
The power is over at the buy side. The sell side have very little leverage. Hence they some times come together, and then they were called price fixing.
> Many such IDs are designed for local physical verification, like proof that the mobile phone owner is above certain age or has a valid driving license, they are not designed for remote verification.
This is incorrect, the Digital Credentials API[1] is designed so that identity information can be remotely verified in a cryptographically secure manner.
There is no reason Anthropic could not use the DC API for this in countries and states that support digital identity, I assume they simply aren't because they threw this together at the last minute and simply out-sourced it to Persona.
> they threw this together at the last minute and simply out-sourced it to Persona.
They could have vibe-coded their own verification system that uses DC APIs. It shouldn't take long, assuming that Anthropic still has access to Fable. /s
Google is competing with nvidia (TPU), AWS (GCP), Netflix (youtube), Tesla (waymo self driving), OpenAI (Gemini), Microsoft (Workspace), Apple (Android)....
> They scaled up the team briefly, which meant that lots of weird stuff was tried, but the roadmap was diluted.
Boz never cared for Portal, it wasn't his product. I was one of the original engineers on Portal. The VP running the research lap responsible for Portal was canned in a political coup, and her entire org moved under Boz, merging it with Oculus into the AR/VR team. There was some ham-fisted justification around why a smart home product should be part of AR/VR, but it never really made sense.
Portal had a bunch of other problems, including:
* Massively over-specced hardware, the SoC was the same SoC as the Quest, even though it had no reason to be. The BOM was something like $500. We were selling these units at a huge loss.
* Cambridge Analytica broke right in the middle of development, which completely tanked any remaining trust in the Facebook brand. Everyone knew the product was completely sunk at that point, but nobody wanted to come out and say it. At the last minute we had to stuff a plastic camera cover into the box as a result.
* Boz was convinced we could build a voice assistant for Portal and Quest that was better than Siri, but the Assistant team at FB was completely out of their depth. We ended up right before launch having to sign a deal with Amazon to ship Alexa on the product.
* So much politics. AR/VR had a virtually unlimited budget so there was a massive land grab to hire as many people as possible, with no consideration around what they'd actually work on. Even though Quest and Portal had the same SoCs, they had completely separate Android OS builds and engineering teams, because everyone was trying to build the biggest engineering teams they could. People were constantly leaking shit: I found out we were delaying the project because an executive leaked it to Bloomberg while the executive meeting was still happening.
> So much politics. AR/VR had a virtually unlimited budget so there was a massive land grab to hire as many people as possible, with no consideration around what they'd actually work on. Even though Quest and Portal had the same SoCs, they had completely separate Android OS builds and engineering teams, because everyone was trying to build the biggest engineering teams they could. People were constantly leaking shit: I found out we were delaying the project because an executive leaked it to Bloomberg while the executive meeting was still happening.
Hnnnnnn
yup, the empire building and land grabs. yup, I had forgotten about the early days before maui was actually universal and people needed different tools to flash different devices.
ar/vr, horizon, and boz ruined a bunch of great software products that people were actually using and enjoyed (i've seen the NPS) to shoehorn horizon worlds and ugly 3d avatars into that no one wanted.
We bought two portals for elderly relatives, predominantly for video calling, and I don't think there has been another product, then or since, that fitted that use case as well, especially with people who maybe aren't as familiar with smartphones.
So somewhat frustrating when it all started to wind down various bits of functionality disappeared a bit at a time, until finally you had something that would receive calls, but not be able to make them - and perhaps not even that any more.
(About the only downside I saw on it was the messenger vs whatsapp tussle caused a bit too much confusion).
But it was a solid bit of household tech for several years, so +1 for that!
I'd not seen that one, and it does look like it has some nice points - although needing its own special app is rather frustrating (vs leveraging apps that people are already using).
Seems not too disimilar from the echo show's video calling capabilities in that respect (i.e. only calls within the Amazon ecosystem).
i had a portal at home for work. great product for VC, i tried using one with my parents and my dad kept it in the trunk of his car outside because that's how negative the facebook brand equity was.
> It's common here in France for credit card operators to have fees in the 5-10% range (or 0.30€ per operation + 2% of the amount)
Interchange in the EU is capped at 0.4% for credit cards. Typical costs for processing are much lower than 5-10%.
For example, Adyen charges the 0.4% interchange + their fee of 0.6% and a flat 0.11€. On a 10€ transaction, that's 2.1%.
In most cases this is cheaper than handling cash. When you accept cash, you have to pay somebody to close and reconcile the drawer, take the cash to the bank (or have a security company do it for you), account for shrinkage / mistakes...it's a bit of a myth that cash is cheaper for businesses to handle, especially in places like the EU where card interchange rates are highly regulated.
Now of course, if your cash is not going the usual routes and isn't getting accounted for in the books...that equation can change.
Had a conversation with the landlord of my local pub a few years back, he said he'd go "Card Only" if it wasn't for the handful of patrons that refuse to use card, couple of which are the "Cash is King" Facebook types.
And he was paying his staff under the table in cash anyway! But would still rather just withdraw from the business account, rather than having to deal with handling of customer cash every day.
> Interchange in the EU is capped at 0.4% for credit cards
Still clients pay much more. To be fair, the prices i remember are from 15 years ago, and now there seems to be better offers for small businesses. For example, SumUp proposes 1.75% flat (no per-transaction fee). But yes, i'm quite sure that's not the kind of fees Carrefour or FNAC are paying.
Indeed, although today I got on a plane at LaGuardia and they made me check my carry on at the gate even though there was plenty of space in the overhead bins ( 60% capacity flight, about half of us had to do this) so YMMV.
No idea why they made us do that, but I had to grab my bag at the luggage claim.
> SpaceX already produces solar panels for the 10,000+ satellites it has in space
No they don't, they procure them from Taiwan Solar Energy Corp. They do not produce or manufacture their own cells, they're using off the shelf components.
The Director's Cut (released in 1992) drops the narration and adds the dream sequence, but despite the name is not entirely approved by Ridley Scott.
The Final Cut (released in 2007) is the only version where Ridley Scott had full final cut approval. It re-masters the audio, fixes some of the effects (replacing faces on stunt doubles, removing wires, etc), and changes a few lines (most notably "I want more life, father" instead of "fucker"). The color is also re-graded.
Some people prefer the Director's Cut over the Final Cut, especially the color grading, although I saw the Final Cut in 35mm when it was released and it looked pretty spectacular. In any event the changes in the Final Cut are nowhere near as egregious as the Star Wars special editions or the AI remasters of James Cameron's films.