I started collecting Laserdiscs a few years ago after having grown up with them as a kid in the 90s (we only rented them, because new laserdiscs were expensive!) - With the inflated cost of used Vinyl these days, it's been fun collecting Laserdiscs of my favorite movies for their artwork and form factor to display alongside my record collection at a fraction of the cost of Vinyl. Also it's a weird hobby that I find hilarious to tell people and see their reaction. Most people don't even know or remember what a laserdisc is/was. Anyone else love Seinfeld's Laserdisc joke on the last episode of Curb? Who says Laserdiscs aren't cool?
I dont remember many, if any mom&pop video stores carrying them. Was it Blockbuster?
And I had a friend with a small LD collection and Pioneer player who shit-canned the whole thing when he moved few years back. I told him why didn't he ask if anyone wanted them and his response was it was worthless junk...
There were a number of smaller rental shops in the Chicago area that carried them. Family Video comes to mind. I don't believe the Blockbusters by us ever had them.
I still have my laserdisc player, they are becoming a harder to find item for reasonable prices for sure.
Not long ago, maybe 5-6 years, a friend moved and in the process canned his small LD collection including a working Pioneer player. He said it wasn't worth keeping them and didn't think anyone would want them :-( I forget all the titles he had but they included GoldenEye and Terminator 2.
When I saw Foursquare transition from a B2C to a B2B focused company that is when I finally deleted the Swarm and Fourquare Apps. I still don't fully understand their decision to split Foursquare into 2 apps, but what I did/do understand is that there is alot of money to be made in location data. You just hope that the people in these businesses are ethical people.
We had a health scare that led us to accelerate our timeline (we had always planned to have kids). My wife and I had our first kid at 30, second at 33. The trend these days is definitely to wait till much later, but I can say that I look forward to having the kids fully grown and on their own when I am in my early 50's as opposed to my 60's.
That said as my Dad always said, there is no convenient time to have kids, which couldn't be more true.
Having kids is an amazing journey, but not for everyone. I totally respect people who choose not to have kids. With kids, at different times you will think it is the best and worst decision you've ever made. Lots of highs and lows. But ultimately it is very gratifying and helps you to better see the world beyond yourself.
Tripod pre-Lycos was an amazing learning space for me in the mid nineties. Domains and hosting were significantly more expensive than they are now (especially for a freshman in high school) and Tripod was an amazing lifeline. Little did I know that my time spent building fan sites for punk rock bands more than 20 years ago would end up having such a significant impact on my career even today.
That said, I'm ashamed of all the sites that I built with Image Maps and Frames and glorious tables!
It really is sad that the rise of the social media has meant that so many people will not have the opportunity to have this type of experience in learning front end development from the ground up.
I have a TiVo HD with a lifetime subscription as well and they are going to have to pry it from my cold dead hands. There is nothing better I've found out there for skipping commercials. That said TiVo really needs to evolve their business, I'd love to see them to shift to a cloud based DVR that works with FireTV, Chromecast etc.. I highly doubt I'll ever buy another TiVo DVR as they currently are. Every year we use it less as streaming becomes a better option.
Police Quest was huge for me. As a kid it was just risque and free form enough to capture my imagination. I always loved knocking over the motorcycles out in front of the biker bar. I re-bought the Police Quest series a few years back and this genre of games definitely didn't age very well, but still holds a place in my heart. Last time Sierra came up on HN, someone recommended the Sierra chapter in Steven Levy's "Hackers", definitely worth the read. All Sierra Games had a unique aesthetic and you could just tell that the people behind the games loved what they did for a living and had an amazing combination of tech and design skills.
Many areas are getting over-saturated with microbreweries and there eventually won't be enough demand to sustain them.
In retail, $10+ average price for a six pack, the even more offensive 4 pack of beer for the same price or more.
It's great to see this growth engine for jobs, and I personally love the amount of variety and innovation we are seeing in craft beer, I just wonder how long it will last until people are onto the next trend or until the industry gets so greedy that they kill the golden goose.
My first and last experience in Canada was when I saw a 30 rack of Natty Light for $60 USD (and a bunch of Canadians driving over the border to fill massive reservoir tanks with gas). Really left a bad taste! :P
Alcohol prices in Canada are sort of funny - the low end market is often massively inflated compared to the U.S., since the government (Ontario at least, I can't speak for the other provinces) sets minimum prices for alcohol - about $30 for a 24 pack of beer and about $10 for a bottle of wine.
As well, because (again, in Ontario) you have a single authority setting prices for all alcohol (beer and wine can in some cases be sold by private businesses, but the price is always controlled by the LCBO), prices are uniform across the province and you don't see the effect you see in the U.S. where rural areas have comparatively cheaper prices.
As a result, really cheap stuff is comparatively expensive but it levels out as the quality improves. I can get a 6 pack of Mill St, which is a higher quality but still mass produced beer (think maybe Goose Island) for $13 CAD / $10 USD, which isn't far off U.S. prices.
$60 for 30 Natty light is expensive though - remember that that's not a Canadian beer (I don't even think we can buy it in Ontario) - if you were buying Canadian or something like that you'd probably be closer to the $30 for 24 price.
I agree the movement is likely nearing saturation on total number of microbreweries. However, $10 +/- a few dollars, for a six pack, is not a problem. The mediocre old domestics cost $7 to $10 around most of the US. Paying more is perfectly fine for a superior tasting product. Product price scaling works that way in most consumer goods, it makes sense.
>The mediocre old domestics cost $7 to $10 around most of the US
No they don't, not even close. The beers you're referring to cost that for a _12_ pack. 6 packs are ~$5.50, and you can walk into a bar and get a draft old domestic for around $2.00. Wherever you're buying your e.g. Bud Light, it doesn't represent "most places".
Huh, we pay around 10-14 USD for a (single) nice beer here (Norway). Of course, the high taxes on alcohol makes it so that there is relatively little price difference between cheap and good beer, so this may actually be a good thing for the craft beer industry.
In Scotland a few of the micro-breweries are now experimenting with Gin and Whiskey. That could be the next stage as beer gets saturated. But there's also a long way to go with beer. Atm micro breweries are mostly making traditional flavorsome ales. There's a lot of room left for experimentation, particularly in the health aspect. If someone can make a tasty, full flavored, low cal beer they'd make a bomb.
What's nice with beer and gin is that there is short time from production start to market and getting paid. Other kinds of alcohol that needs storing for X years makes the startup barrier much larger.
Craft breweries are still small businesses and live and die by their business decisions. If you borrow millions to build a fancy new brewery/attraction, and then people don’t come, it doesn’t matter how good your beer is.
Publishers are buying traffic that is too good to be true from dubious networks and then it is being laundered through the programmatic ad tech machine at scale.
Brands looking to build awareness are buying access to this fraudulent traffic.
Advertising agencies, ad tech companies, and publishers more times than not are incentivized to look the other way and not investigate what is going on too closely as long as it is profitable.
Digital display advertising has long been considered a channel of questionable effectiveness. But the current state of programmatic advertising has made things much worse and will ultimately lead to Advertisers pulling billions of dollars out of this space unless there are significant improvements in getting more transparency into their advertising investments.
RSS was strategically killed by Google, Facebook, and Twitter and the rest of the web followed. RSS was basically the open source TiVo of content distribution.
Content not wrapped in ads, isn't good for business. Period.
The creativity unleashed by hackers with unfettered access to Twitter's RSS payload was legendary.
I loved RSS. I still do. I still use Shaun Inman's Fever RSS every day. It is really unfortunate that he has discontinued it, the guy is an artist at the highest level, but I get it.
RSS would be all but dead today if it wasn't for Wordpress's universal support of it. Major props to Matt Mullenweg and everything he stands for.
It should have become the backbone of the web and Dave Winer and Aaron Swartz more celebrated for it.
Instead it is just a footnote. A story of a time before everything digital was wrapped in glorious, money making ads and companies discovered charging for API calls as a business model.
I think the RSS decline is more of due to a simple supply/demand problem. (I hypothesize) RSS lost because most people who are on the internet aren't tech savvy enough to configure an RSS reader.
Because reading from an RSS source required you to have an RSS reader of sorts and there was some configuration required on the users' part - Install a client/setup an online tool, this was an extra (rather complicated) step as compared to say, simply going to Facebook and subscribing to a page you like with the click of a button.
Now, I'm not discounting the possibility it may have been killed strategically by the internet giants, because it's not in their interest, but I do believe Google Adsense (at that time) did allow you to publish ads into your RSS feeds somehow. So, maybe they killed it because of poor adoption rates and the configuration required to setup one?
Demand isn't some objective force! It is heavily affected by advertisement, culture and corporations strive for profit.
It could have taken another direction. We increasingly saw the embedding of the page Like button as we saw the decline of "Subscribe" button for RSS. So we moved from an open protocol and an ecosystem of "readers" to a propietary "protocol" and fenced-off news feeds.
I don't think the lack of incorporating ads in an RSS feed was a reason either. I think google just passively responded to the rise of blogs/rss with tools like Reader/feedburner/adsense-in-feeds, they didn't push for the greater vision that RSS implied.
I think open protocols need time, and we didn't get the time we needed before Facebook arrived...
> Because reading from an RSS source required you to have an RSS reader of sorts and there was some configuration required on the users' part
Up until a few years ago Safari supported RSS natively: there was a button you could click and a native RSS url would open in your browser that you could read and filter and everything.
Nowadays the alternative in Safari is "reader" mode, which removes all the website styling and leaves just the main content and also the notifications API, which allows you to subscribe to a site (if they support it) and get notified of new content without even opening your browser.
I didn't really use RSS and don't use the replacements either. I really like the idea of RSS and I think it's worth implementing for people who like it, but I never found it useful for myself.
Actually, when you open a RSS feed in Firefox, it shows a simple interface with the organized feed and propose you to subscribe to it, creating a "magic" bookmark in your bookmarks toolbar which lets you quickly access it and tweak it.
It could be because many feed readers just aren't that great. If you look at Twitter as a feed, the web interface is okay, but when it comes to reading threads etc, it becomes poor. Filtering, selecting, muting, interleaving, is the hard part. Grokking multiple streams and seeing the wood from the trees is tricky.
> Content not wrapped in ads, isn't good for business. Period.
RSS is actually a great, sustainable way for independent bloggers to deliver targeted ads to their readers. Daring Fireball comes to mind, but there are many other examples.
