WWDC to Be Moved Online
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
You’re green bubble in Messages - out of style.
You’re not using FaceTime for remote call - get out of here...
tl;dr - yes, a compelling video chat software must run well on all employee devices for real success
A wonderful collaborative experience could just be a USP for the platform. FWIW, the now obsoleted iChat was way ahead of the curve compared to the current iteration of FaceTime in group settings, anyway.
Petition: Keep your promise to make FaceTime open source https://www.change.org/p/apple-inc-keep-your-promise-to-make...
Legal battle may be to blame for Apple breaking Steve Jobs’ FaceTime promise https://macdailynews.com/2018/06/07/legal-battle-may-be-to-b...
I think the restriction for a lot of these bigger conferences (WWDC, Google's big Android conference) is how many people the physical space can hold. The tickets always either sell out really fast, or they have to hold a raffle for them. So they're definitely aware that there are lots of people who want to attend but are unable.
This is what a lot of people thought and it is actually the other way round, and as Steve Jobs put it himself [1], Apple is a software company, you just have to buy its hardware to use it.
This is a bit like Swift - it's really only attractive to those in the Apple ecosystem and doesn't acknowledge the world outside of it.
It's too bad, too, Hangouts used to be a nice platform.
There was a period a few months (over a year?) ago where Hangouts Meet would reject Firefox and tell you to use Chrome, but certainly not anymore.
It’s definitely failed for me during the current school year (2019-20). Usually the audio fails to come through, or one side of the call gets booted off as soon as the other side joins.
It worked great on Mac in late 2017 and early 2018.
If you're on Catalina, be sure to grant the appropriate permissions to FF. You should only have to do this once -- the first time -- but this could explain why audio's not working for you.
On iPadOS the Hangouts app has, without a single exception, always failed to join the call. Tapping the link to open it in Safari just causes Hangouts to tell me I need to use the app. Manually pasting the link into Safari sometimes works and sometimes shows the same "please use our app" message.
On macOS the camera is black in Safari and provides no image (even though permissions are granted). It shows the little camera icon in the address bar, but the camera LED stays off and I'm not getting a picture. This seems to be a Safari issue in general though, because I just tried a bunch of sites and neither of them worked (but did in FF). So Firefox it is
The folks they hire to check people in, guard the door, move furniture around, hang signs, etc.
Those folks probably don't have much to fall back on.
Working in the service industry already sucks -- it's a lot worse when there is no one to service.
Lay-offs seem inevitable and you are right most people have no safety net.
Plus lack of sick leave...
Now Andrew Yangs universal basic income would be useful.
More useful than UBI are low interest loans provided by the SBA. If anyone here is being impacted by the downturn there's info here:
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15639-trump-covid-19-sba-l...
Congress also really needs to pass legislation for government secured loans for small businesses in particular sectors immediately, then expand it out as needed.
I guess if we're hoping this crisis only lasts a couple of weeks, loans should bridge the gap. And options are never a bad thing!
Does the small business take a loan (at 3.75%) to continue paying payroll, despite not having any income or any work for the employees to do? Or are all the laid-off hospitality/entertainment industry workers going to go get a loan to start their own businesses (not hospitality-related, obviously)?
What am I missing?
Not only that, looking at post crisis, all the Wages Gain that happened ( or not, with respect to inflation ) are going to reset, at a time where All developed countries have the highest inequalities and lowest working class will be struggling ever more.
And I have repeatedly pointing out, no UBI, Negative Income Tax will have any impact or changes without fixing first and foremost the most important issues; Housing.
Expand social insurance.
Not pay people to waste their time doing fake makework
And Apple dumping money into commercial enterprises around their convention site is a little bit like them investing money in a manufacturer to upgrade their equipment. Either we succeed together or not at all.
In this particular case, my cluster of hotels in the Bay Area have seen our revenues drop by roughly 50-60% in the first week of March and it's only going to get worse. I've seen the numbers for Seattle, and it looks like the Bay Area is about 3-4 days behind on the revenue drop.
I also own several restaurants in San Francisco and on average, revenue is down by 70-80% this past week. Along with many large restaurants in San Francisco, we're planning on closing permanently (or perhaps offering only one service per day) for the next two to four weeks.
Even though my top line revenue is falling through the floor, my expenses are largely unchanged. In the SF market, labor is my most significant cost and with our restaurants, rent is close behind. Without people to service, my direction has been to prepare for the future -- deep cleaning rooms, scrubbing kitchens spotless, constantly patrolling public spaces with cleaning solution and wiping everything down, and performing as many renovation/repairs as possible.
The worst part about all of this is that at some point, with no revenue, I won't be able to afford to keep paying my employees even if they're busy cleaning. I'll furlough them, but I know that this may cause some (many) of them to not be able to pay for housing, food, or transport in the near future. I'm currently working on contingency plans to make sure that my employees are properly taken care of, but it's been rough.
If it were up to me, we’d be figuring out how to temporarily suspend rent, loan payments, and taxes to people who are quarantined/isolated/hospitalized/furloughed due to the crisis, and temporarily block evictions. We’d be expanding public food assistance and just directly paying affected workers. We’d be figuring out how to deliver food and medication (and test kits) safely to those in need. We’d be figuring out how to scale out childcare for any child whose caretakers all get sick.
We’d be closing all restaurants to the public but organizing restaurant workers to (while taking strong hygiene precautions) make prepared deliverable meals. We’d be organizing taxi drivers to work as delivery workers. We’d be maybe organizing empty hotels to e.g. host medical workers who need to be quarantined away from their own families for a while, or potentially even turning some into temporary hospitals.
We’d be retooling existing factories to produce necessary equipment like face masks, antiseptics, mechanical ventilators, ...
This is one of the richest societies in the history of the world. A pandemic is an economic challenge but we can afford to keep everyone going through a few months of acute crisis, if we make it a policy priority.
This. Under society-wide crisis, it's madness that the economic impact is supposed to just stop at landlords, moneylenders, etc. There are instances where individual organizations are trying to do the right thing, but the only humane thing to do is spread the impact (and recovery measures) across everyone.
Who is advocating this position that you think is "madness"? This is an evolving situation that individuals, local, state, and national officials are figuring out as we go along. There is no consensus on any of this and the response needs to be (and actually is) distributed not centralized, IMHO.
Never mind the fact that the huge difficulty with this situation is that the ultimate impact is unknown at this point. How many people will need to be hospitalized? What treatment plans will be discovered? What is the impact of putting the economy on life-support for weeks? Will social distancing be enough to stop the spread?
If this were happening in the 1980s, I think that we would have kept our calm better. I was a child then, and my grandparents were in their 50s/60s and had seen the Great Depression and World War II. My parents' generation (the boomers) were full of well-trained doctors and nurses. There was a general level of competence and a willingness to give of oneself then that I believe was higher than today, even though we have more access to information now.
What I'm saying is that we need central solutions. Scientists and medical experts should be directing this. Like they used to, before several decades of being undermined by political and religious dogma.
Note. I'm pretty much poking fun at the idea of things being centralized and driven top down. Not at the notion of "experts"
They used central solutions. Scientists and other experts directed the economy. Without the signalling mechanism of price, demand and supply got way out of whack. The economy collapsed.
1. That they buy out the entire hotel and do not expect my staff to work. Essentially, I'd be turning the hotel into an apartment. I will not otherwise increase the risk of exposure for my employees or my guests.
2. That I am compensated fairly for the rooms. The government per diem rates for rooms ranges between roughly $200-300 per night in the Bay Area. I don't even want those rate to be honest -- there are likely better uses for that money. But I'd need enough to make sure that I could cover the cost of payroll, utilities, etc. This would roughly be in the range of $100 per room per night.
3. That I am allowed to keep at least one property myself. We have long-term guests and contracted business that are still staying with us now. I'd consolidate all of these guests into one property so that they could still receive the services they paid for. I have an obligation to try to provide service to them.
4. That the hotel is returned to me in the same condition as they received it in.
I feel like if these four items are satisfied, I'd gladly sign any contract. As far as I'm aware, this would be a win-win-win. The state would be able to secure cheap accommodations that are fully furnished and ready to go. Patients that need a place to stay are afforded a comfortable place of residence in quarantine. I would be able to protect my staff by sending them home and continue to pay them.
Edit: Also, I'm aware that they could just "commandeer" my hotels, but I hope that doesn't happen. That would make things far tougher than they are now.
DTSJ already has SJSU, but it wouldn't surprise me if having regular, large conventions helps quite a bit.
> Apple also announced it will commit $1 million to local San Jose organizations to offset associated revenue loss as a result of WWDC 2020’s new online format.
The shows I’ve worked the overall topline budget for a 2 day single-company show at San Jose Convention Center (SJCC) that uses all of SJCC usually $30-40 million. Moscone South in SF is $35-50.
That’s just direct cost for food, Union, fabrication, etc... doesn't include venue rental (client usually pays that direct) & doesn’t count the extra that flow to the hotels, Uber/taxis that the guests generate.
The messaging is still sickly over-positive. There is not a single mention of the cancellation of the physical WWDC. It's merely alluded to.
This is weak sauce. I don't really understand the motive. Would the stock market be more upset if this message spelled out things clearly?
The motive for the positive tone is probably to build faith that the new event format will still be exciting and as valuable for developers.
But when I think of announcements of products and things I always think of now Nintendo went to Nintendo Direct... some of this stuff really is just fine being recorded and streamed only.
I was hoping it would be moved to later in the year, not moved online.
Everyone knows the underlying reason, but it's less fearful and more 'we got this, relax.'
If the decision is reversed to call off the Olympics (I hope not), then 2020 is completely cancelled.
And a part of it would have been about “volunteers” (like school/university kids/sponsor company employees requested by their board to participate due to lack of actual volunteers) working in the heat of the summer for a for profit organisation getting super preferential tax and financing treatment.
We have global events every year centered about the athletes, I wont be crying any tears for the IOC and officials not getting their payback.
Do you mean many Japanese?
I know very few people irl that are positive about the impact, and the polls where mostly negative as well (except those done by the IOC itself, who got up to 70% support at some point, go figure)
Anectodtaly that’s the usual reaction I see about the event: https://twitter.com/audiophilefreak/status/12386270677274583...
But to be fair though the rest are not all streaming their own event on their own platform.
For those who had to squint and think for a second, Microsoft owns Mixer (formerly known as Beam) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixer_(service)
Microsoft also has Microsoft Stream which I understand is more for Microsoft 365/Office 365 customers
> Microsoft Stream is a corporate video-sharing service which was released on June 20, 2017 that will gradually replace the existing Office 365 Video.
Microsoft Stream is basically login-required corporate YouTube, and as you surmised wouldn't really fit this model.
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/
I think some convention runners might find some ideas by looking back at how Blizzcon has worked over the last half dozen years, where it has been a hybrid between a physical and virtual conference, where if you are lucky you can get admittance to the conference, and everyone else has streaming video of all of the events for a much lower price.
There are also satellite conferences which, while not quite as useful for the COVID-19 situation, does allow a degree of camaraderie without carting yourself clear across the country (or having carted yourself, relying on getting a pass that may not come your way).
Just don’t watch Apple events if they make you unhappy.
Having a conference at all is newsworthy at this point. And they've had a few weeks or a month to come up with a completely new strategy for something they usually have a year to figure out?
Have you ever been involved in planning or running an annual event? It doesn't sound like you have. That people make it look easy is a testament to their skills, not the magnitude of the logistical problem.
You used a lot of words to say, "I hate Apple and this schadenfreude is not living up to my expectations."
> cupertinology.com
> Make offer
Oh well.