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11 years ago we had a 24k TV!!

https://www.cnet.com/news/what...

The linked article doesn't actually explain how to enable the new version. This CNET article does https://www.cnet.com/how-to/ho...

"Regular Gmail users
You can enable the new look and features by clicking on the Settings cog in the top-right corner, then selecting Try the new Gmail option."

Who are "they":: everyone learned, people who know how the internet works, and most techies..
http://fortune.com/2017/11/21/...
Here we are, exactly where everyone who understands the internet and online freedom knew we would be when net neutrality got repealed:
Facts:
- increased end user cost: instead of a regular $11 subscription, its now $14.
A "cable company" is "bundling" a specific website..
. Yahoo has been purchase by "Oath" and is sharing information with Verizon. opt out features don't work
https://www.cnet.com/news/yaho...

- Less choice : If you don't pay their pay-o-la, they will cripple (or in the cable cabal term, deprioritize ) your service. there is no longer a rule to stop them.

There absolutely no consumer benefit. As we all knew would happen. It's an estimated 8 billion dollar gimme to the cable cabal. more cost, less choice. If you want to say otherwise, give specific examples.

This seems like a poor excuse
https://www.cnet.com/news/dona...

You do realize that even from the very first release of Windows 10, you could configure it to prompt you to reboot instead of doing it automatically right?

No, I don't realize that because it's patently incorrect. First, the very first release of Windows 10 did not have this feature, as documented here. Second, the "feature", as described online, doesn't actually work, nor does the group policy method either.

You can nurse your various irrational reasons for disliking Microsoft, Windows, and whatever else all you want, no one here will really give two craps. Just don't crap all over threads with pointless posts that serve only to boost your own ego.

With the time you wasted trying to insult me you could have done a little research first and saved yourself some embarrassment.

"To me it's creepy when I look at something and all of a sudden it's chasing me all the way across the web" Cook said. "I don't like that."

https://snap.licdn.com/
https://analytics.slashdotmedi...
https://ssl.google-analytics.c...
https://ml314.com/
https://consent.trustarc.com/
https://a.fsdn.com/
https://ads.pro-market.net/
https://cdn.taboola.com/
https://rpxnow.com/
https://tag.crsspxl.com/
https://www.stack-sonar.com/
https://a.fsdn.com/
https://cdn-social.janrain.com...
https://d3tglifpd8whs6.cloudfr...

NN is not about banning the prioritizing one protocol over another.

That is certainly one of the things that NN is about. Comcast was formally found in violation of net neutrality rules in 2008 for throttling a particular protocol (bit torrent).

Also, I disagree with your and the parent's conclusion that prioritization would be good for gamers. When you start talking about giving one protocol a formal blessing over another, you're choking off future innovation. This is most of the point of net neutrality, after all: yes it allows for start-ups to compete with large companies on an equal playing field, but it also allows for new technologies to compete with (and replace) old ones. This is just as applicable to gaming innovations as it is to file sharing or music / video streaming or anything else. In fact, there are games which use bit torrent to distribute patches and such, and there are a lot that integrate video streaming now. (This specific gaming innovation is not a positive one, in my opinion, but you take the bad with the good.)

Facebook does sell themselves as a single sign on provider. Here's a photo of 2010 Zucks announcing the mobile version:

https://www.cnet.com/news/face...

How good a job do they do? Probably a pretty good one. Their profitability is directly tied to getting, having, and keeping loads of data. Probably better than the random companies who would otherwise roll their own. Do they keep track of where you've signed on using the service? Of course.

Aren't most USB-C docks with video output actually Thunderbolt docks in the first place and don't need any special software?

I don't have a USB-C-equipped Mac, so I only know so much about this; but...

I believe the answer is "No". There is a complicated relationship between USB-C and Thunderbolt 3, and I believe that you are correct in stating that a TRUE TB3 Dock would NOT require a Driver. But the USB-C Docks that are "Thunderbolt compatible" aren't REALLY TB3 at ALL, and actually use a different protocol out of the USB-C port, which I believe requires some interaction from the Peripheral-side of things to get the USB-C/TB3 controller in the computer to spit out the video datastream.

Sorry, that's more than all I really know about how all this works.

This might help:

https://thunderbolttechnology....

And this might confuse you further... ;-)

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/us...

I'm not sure what your wife's definition of "Barely" is; but I don't have ANY kind of experience that I would call "barely working".

The brokenness of multi-display support in the last two releases of macOS her her biggest issue. It's a battle to get her late 2015 5k iMac to wake her 2nd display after the machine sleeps, which has only been an (widely reported, mind you) issue since Sierra. It's not the Mac, either; nor is it the display. Every Mac we have with Sierra or newer (2 personal laptops, 1 business laptop and the iMac) exhibits this issue when this, or any other display is connected. These are Macs and displays which worked together just fine prior to Sierra.

Milti-display support isn't a niche feature; it's integral to the workflow of many a graphic designer -- drawing tablets with built-in displays are quite popular among that crowd -- and the vast majority of professional users who actually have a desk to work at. It's quite a major issue for them to seemingly be ignoring; it's the kind of thing you'd expect they'd have addressed in an early point release of Sierra, not something they'd let linger nearly half a year into the following release (and still not have fixed).

That's just one of many issues she's encountered in the past handful of years; to someone who remembers Macs "Just Working" since the mid 1980's, though, that's a world-breaking issue.

Spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about AV1 is a tactic HEVC patent pools have started to use. Velos Media says it's a nice codec you've got there, it'd be a shame if something happened to it.

https://www.cnet.com/news/how-...

OnePlus 5T

Huawei Mate 10

Xiaomi Mi A1 - costs around $200. Works with most cellular operators of the world.

We'll Tackle Bad Ads, Breach Alerts, Autoplay Video, Says Mozilla

I miss the days when these sorts of problems were dealt with by standards bodies. But ever since the W3C abanoned its XHTML 2 standard, it's been an escalating arms race between browser makers, creating new, poorly-conceived (and annoying) features, and working to undermine the features introduced by their competitors.

I thought such robots had been in use for years.

Like the one that went on sale in Japan in 2013 , possibly descended from the one in the labs in 2010

Or the Agrobot Strawberry Harvester in 2012. Their current Series E is advertised as doing all the stuff TFA says is hard and just being developed.

Original post by Puffin Fitness: https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/85p30j/deletefacebook_movement_gains_steam_after_50/dvz4y6o/

* * *

In 2009, Russian social-media mogul Yuri Milner invested $200 million into Facebook at a valuation of $10 billion dollars without voting rights or a seat on the board. To understand this investment, at the time the world was going through a global recession and Facebook's general valuation had dropped from the $15 billion from the year prior to $4-$6 billion in 2009.

https://www.cnet.com/news/facebooks-valuation-the-cheat-sheet/

One company did offer a valuation of $8 billion, but with a seat on the board, which Zuckerberg was strongly against. In other words, Yuri Milner invested in Facebook when they were strapped for cash and at an inflated price without voting rights or a seat on the board. That's an amazing deal for Zuckerberg!

Here's Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg hanging out for an interview: https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/mark-zuckerberg-and-yuri-milner-talk-about-facebooks-new-investment-video/

The deal was coordinated by Alisher B. Usmanov, a Russian oligarch that earned his fortune managing steel mill subsidiaries for Gazprom.

Usmanov spent six years in prison for fraud and embezzlement in the 80's.

In 2008, Usmanov fired a publisher and editor at one of Russia's most respected news paper after it published detailed accounts of Russian election fraud.

It is said, "His ties to the Kremlin and Facebook have stirred concerns that he might influence the companyâ(TM)s policies in subtle ways to appease governments in markets where Facebook is also an important tool of political dissent, such as Russia." This was in 2009.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/technology/a-russian-facebook-bet-pays-off-big.html

Usmanov is close friends with Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisher_Usmanov

Ivanka Trump and Wendi Deng are good friends with Abramovich's then wife, Dasha Zhoukova. Here they are watching a tennis match.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3784716/Ivanka-Trump-Karlie-Kloss-Wendi-Deng-Murdoch-watch-Open.html

The leak of the Paradise Papers revealed the money Yuri Milner used to invest into Facebook came from Gazprom, a US sanctioned Russian oil and gas company, at one point owning 9% of the company.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-the-paradise-papers-leak-facebook-yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia

Soon after, Zuckerberg and Milner became friends, meeting monthly:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-got-early-business-advice-194957335.html

And even spoke together in November 2015 at the 2016 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-the-paradise-papers-leak-facebook-yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia

In May 2012, Milner attended Zuckerberg's wedding. In 2014, Milner moved to California home he paid 100% above value on.

http://time.com/5011000/paradise-papers-tax-ha

TFA, and another poster, point out that this rule has been vacated (not just modified) so now there may be no legal restrictions on robocall devices.

Unless, of course, the current board passes a new regulation. [*crickets*]

TFA and the other poster clearly didn't read the opinion. The TCPA as a whole remains intact -- the only nuances that were rolled back were (1) the FCC's prior interpretation that smartphones constituted automated telephone dialing systems, and (2) the FCC's prior interpretation that companies using automatic dialers could be held liable for calling a phone number that used to be owned by someone who had given the company consent to call them, but then was (unbeknownst to the caller) transferred to someone else.

Meanwhile, as was all over the news at the time, the FCC actually issued MORE rules clamping down MORE on actual robocallers back in November. Crickets indeed.

This big story of the day is that AMD Ryzen chips have gaping security vulnerabilities that make these chips even less secure than the Intel ones, and easily hacked. You literally have noplace else to turn now. Even BSD will not protect you from this flaw. It's all over.

In real life they do cause accidents.

It all depends on what you focus on. The US uses rails where they make the most sense (for cargo) and planes where they make sense (people).

The US handed all passenger rail traffic off to a government outfit called Amtrak many years ago, and then spun that off into a supposedly commercial company that gets huge subsidies. Unfortunately, that scheme gave Amtrak certain monopoly legal control over all passenger rail service in the US and like any monopoly Amtrak got fat, dumb, and happy blocking all innovation and competition.

For cargo, however, the US maintained its older commercial competative arrangements. As a result, the natural tendency of market economics and money flowing to where it's most-efficiently used did its job and the result is that the US moves an absolutely astonishing amount of goods with an extremely reliable delivery schedule over its immense rail system with an amazing safety record and a relatively tiny workforce - and does it so well and reliably and efficiently that most people are not even aware it is happening. People who are interested and have some spare time to burn should educate themselves on the matter. Here's a couple of starting points: the Bailey Yard, the Bailey Yard 'hump' in action, the ever-increasing freight 'ton-miles' in the US system, and in case you think the Bailey yard is an isolated thing, consult wikipedia's List of rail yards and note how much of that list is within the US compared to so many countries whose rail systems are presumed superior simply because of a few fast passenger trains.

None of the positive things have something to do with a walled garden. At best the malware thing has to do with an app store.
Walled garden only helps if somehow having e.g. root access makes you unable to resist installing random crap from the internet, but then I would say a better impulse control would on your side would be a worthy thing to strive for instead.
Security and updates you can mostly get from select vendors on Android as well, though admittedly it is a big issue because most smartphone companies are a sad joke when it comes to software competence, and the little they have they decide to spend on useless crap.

"Random crap from the internet"?!? Boy, THAT's rich!!!

HOW many reports of Malware have their been regarding APPROVED Apps from the Google Play Store?!?

https://9to5google.com/2018/01...

https://www.cnet.com/news/goog...

http://www.zdnet.com/article/p...

http://fortune.com/2017/09/14/...

https://www.digitaltrends.com/...

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/...

https://www.wired.com/story/go...

Genuinely sorry if there are (likely are) dups in the above list. But you get the picture.

And if you say "Well, but Google REMOVED these Apps, proving the system works!" It begs the question, how many people downloaded and had their information stolen, etc. BEFORE an App was removed?!?

So replacing a 5 cent fuse on the PCB causes a security-issue?
Replacing a iPhone screen with a apple part causes a security-issue?
Having a re-pairing process with a fingerprint-reader from apple causes a security-issue?

Having some random repair-shop doing a hardware mode to install a hardware-keylogger etc it not really likley... It will cost them money, and it can be traced back to the person that did it.
The big problem is that the big brands don't want you to repair your own device but either replace or send it to them to fix at 10 times what it would cost with a local repair-shop...

If you have a look at the big brands out there..
Apple: Remember the recent issues where you could login as root without *any* password?
Lenovo: Remember the thing with Superfish where they installed a root-certificate on all their machines?
https://www.ghacks.net/2015/02...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

HP: Remember the laptops with preinstalled keyloggers.
https://www.cnet.com/news/keyl...

All the big brandnames all have big issues with security and they do not care about your security... They care about their bottom line and getting you buying a new version as soon as possible instead of keeping your old device.
https://www.cnet.com/news/unbo...

So replacing a 5 cent fuse on the PCB causes a security-issue?
Replacing a iPhone screen with a apple part causes a security-issue?
Having a re-pairing process with a fingerprint-reader from apple causes a security-issue?

Having some random repair-shop doing a hardware mode to install a hardware-keylogger etc it not really likley... It will cost them money, and it can be traced back to the person that did it.
The big problem is that the big brands don't want you to repair your own device but either replace or send it to them to fix at 10 times what it would cost with a local repair-shop...

If you have a look at the big brands out there..
Apple: Remember the recent issues where you could login as root without *any* password?
Lenovo: Remember the thing with Superfish where they installed a root-certificate on all their machines?
https://www.ghacks.net/2015/02...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

HP: Remember the laptops with preinstalled keyloggers.
https://www.cnet.com/news/keyl...

All the big brandnames all have big issues with security and they do not care about your security... They care about their bottom line and getting you buying a new version as soon as possible instead of keeping your old device.
https://www.cnet.com/news/unbo...

Microsoft have admitted they're not going to develop the platform further

https://www.cnet.com/news/wind...

Windows Phone was a major step back from Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile had quite an ecosystem of Win32 apps, a good custom Rom scene and manufacturers like HTC making devices like the HD2.

So you could buy an HD2, flash a custom Rom and find pretty much any software you wanted - e.g. iGO for navigation, Pleco's Chinese dictionary and so on. Once they announced that Windows Phone wouldn't run any of the old apps most of the ISVs decided to move to Android and/or iOS. And so did almost all the users. Windows Phone never really stood a chance. Still they kept it going for a fair bit of time. Windows Phone 7 was released in November 8, 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And it was only in October 2017 that they announced they were throwing in the towel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In October 2017, it was revealed that Microsoft had discontinued active development of Windows 10 Mobile due to its low market share and the lack of third-party development for the platform, and that the operating system will only receive patches and maintenance releases going forward.

It's a shame really. If they'd launched a Nokia Communicator type device with an Atom running desktop Windows in 2010 or so, they might have had a chance. Of course now Android and iOS are so dominant it's hard to see that MS could do anything that would dethrone them.

I think desktop Windows will survive but people that run it use heavy weight applications and need a powerful CPU. A netbook class device isn't really usable these days - I'd say you need an i5 and 13 inch screen minimum. Which means a Nokia Communicator type clamshell with an Atom is not really going to be much use.

The worst thing is that they fucked up the rather nice UI of Windows 7 trying to get people to write and use Metro apps in order to strengthen Windows Phone. Actually Windows Phone is dead and the clumsy tablet interface put people off Windows 8. I.e. merging mobile and desktop ended up weakening the desktop, not strengthening mobile, which died anyway.

Though admittedly Windows 10 isn't actually half bad. I think in the long run they'll kill of Metro/UWP/whatever the current name is. Win32/Win64 will survive though.

The real story is how most citizens are voluntarily carrying unique radio beacons 24x7 these days.

I've been thinking about switching back to a non-smartphone. A linux based phone was a cool idea if I could have root access to the device I own so that I could control what it does but the problem with smartphones is the things the dumbusers want in it and that they're too dumb to even want to understand why.

Apple Music is at 256 kbps. Airplay can do 16/44.1, basically redbook audio. No high res, though...

FLAC and Apple Lossless is probably as best as it's going to get. High res audio - while useful for mastering/mixing and other pro transformations - is utterly useless for end-user music listening gear.

Airplay can do Redbook audio if your SOURCE material is that bit rate (good luck getting that on to your phone, though). Apple Music is 256 kbps; you'd have to do your own rips to get to redbook (16/44.1), but you cannot do high resolution audio at all. Period. Nada. Apple doesn't care about high quality audio - just Beats and earpods and a mono speaker it claims can be full stereo (but which, in reality, it is not per lots of reviews, not to mention the laws of physics).

The butt hurt is strong with you!

You might be surprised; but I actually agree with you that, beyond their Pro apps (which are FINALLY getting better), Apple has had very disappointing support for multichannel, and high resolution, Audio. And even when the infrastructure support is there (which it actually has been for some time now), it just doesn't seem to get exposed in "common" Applications.

In fact, Apple does care about high-end audio; but they don't seem to want to mess with it outside the Pro arena.

And Actually, AirPlay itself can do more than Redbook audio: It can do at least 5.1:

https://www.5kplayer.com/airpl...

And also, my iPhone 6 can still record in the DAW App at up to 24/96; so that means an iOS framework has to support that for audio. But, I sure would like iTunes to allow 24/96 at least. But it would require a LOT of rewiring of a LOT of iTunes code to make that happen.

But it doesn't actually matter; because, like DAW, the VLC Mobile App is available for iTunes, and it supports, well, a LOT of audio formats, and reportedly does multichannel and high resolution audio.

And Apple most assuredly supports high resolution and multichannel audio, even in iOS!

https://developer.apple.com/au...

Qualcomm doesn't own big.LITTLE. The original implementation was by ARM. In fact Qualcomm stuck to having one Snapdragon core for both high performance and low power tasks until fairly late. E.g. the Galaxy S5 had two models. The Qualcomm Snapdragon one didn't do big.LITTLE/Heterogeneous Multi Processing.

https://www.cnet.com/news/the-...

For some Galaxy S5 models, Samsung will use the Exynos 5422, which also was announced at Mobile World Congress. The processor boasts eight ARM cores versus the four in the Snapdragon 801. Samsung has employed ARM technology that allows for four big cores that run at speeds up to 2.1GHz and four small cores for speeds up to 1.5GHz. When the phone requires heavy computing, all eight cores can run at the same time. The phone can also employ just one of the small cores for minor activities

And companies other than Qualcomm and ARM have patents on various implementations of big.LITTLE

https://patents.google.com/pat...

Also I'm sure Intel could do HMP. E.g. they could have a chip which has some Coffee Lake i5/i7 type 'big' cores and some Gemini Lake/Goldmont Plus Atom type 'little' ones. Sure there are patents but Intel have a patent portfolio of their own. They could just launch, and if they get sued agree on a cross licence.

NVidia sued Intel and got some cash but no x86 licence or the right to make chipsets for newer Intel CPUs.

https://www.anandtech.com/show...

And of course a hypothetical Intel chip with Coffee Lake/Gemini Lake might not work like big.LITTLE. On a big.LITTLE chip you can migrate threads from a big core to a little core quickly because they share the same registers. A Coffee Lake/Gemini Lake chip might not need to do that - you could have cores sharing an L3 cache but not much else and just relying on the OS to do the migration. And if you look at the Lenovo patent the patented thing is not 'having big and little cores on the same chip' but rather the way you decide whether a thread runs on the big or little core. Intel could invent their own scheme. Or just leave it to the OS.

Actually it's not a bad idea. The USP of Windows on ARM is 'better battery life'. Unfortunately that comes with Atom like performance. A Coffee Lake/Gemini Lake HMP design would offer the low power of an Atom when the system is idle but also the high power of a Coffee Lake when it is not. And you can have a whole bunch of Gemini Lake cores in the space taken up by a Coffee Lake one. So you might sacrifice 1-2 Coffee Lake and have 4-8 Gemini Lake in the same space.

If Intel can spend R&D on a package which has Coffee Lake and an AMD GPU on it which is basically just for Apple, I reckon they could spend R&D on a HMP chip to attack Qualcomm with.

Actually another option would be to dumb down the integrated graphics. I bet you could get away with just a frame buffer for most users who are just running a GUI and not doing an 3D. So gate all the 3D stuff with a Mosfet and make sure you can power it down.

Intel clearly cares about power consumption and battery life and Windows on ARM shows they've got some way to go to yet. HMP and more work on optimizing the power consumption of the integrated graphics solution in the lowest power/performance state is the way to go.

Airplay can do Redbook audio if your SOURCE material is that bit rate (good luck getting that on to your phone, though). Apple Music is 256 kbps; you'd have to do your own rips to get to redbook (16/44.1), but you cannot do high resolution audio at all. Period. Nada. Apple doesn't care about high quality audio - just Beats and earpods and a mono speaker it claims can be full stereo (but which, in reality, it is not per lots of reviews, not to mention the laws of physics).

The butt hurt is strong with you!

Apple Music is at 256 kbps. Airplay can do 16/44.1, basically redbook audio. No high res, though...

I appreciate your optimism for GPS, but there is a place in Oakland where Google maps will tell you to drive over the edge of an overpass. This is a funny clip but it's happened.

Over 1 million EVs sold worldwide in 2017, huge growth rate

In the US the total number of cars sold in 2017 was estimated to be 6.3 million Of those 105,963 were EV. So about 1.7%. It's progress to be sure. Globally, the number of cars sold in 2017 is estimated to be at 79 million. I think I saw estimates that claimed close to 2 million EV's sold in 2017, which is about 2.5% of all cars sold worldwide are EV's. While many countries are planning to phase out ICE powered cars, they are still going to be with us for a long time. Poorer countries are going to have a hard time with this transition. Countries with larger landmass will too. I'm sure we'll see it in the US eventually as well, but it's going to be a very long time before the last gas station closes down.

In the 4th quarter of 2007 Apple only sold a bit over 1 million iPhones. Clearly a loser product, just like EVs.

So what. The Zune sold 1 million units in the first 6 months.

With trillions of unpatched holes. Maybe one day they will invent Windows Update.

I bought a gift a year ago and it was even worse with tablets on physical stores or Amazon. The asymptotic Android 4.4 version apparently just dropped off the map, but it dragged results down for years. Most worrysome is that its old Dalvik runtime is dog slow at best, and infuriating under load. 5 makes things better, but I wouldn't bet on finding it for cheap.

A few hours ago tonight I coincidentally ran into https://www.cnet.com/topics/ta...
where Samsung tablet's video says "best one it's ever made". It's a serious 500 bucks which I find offensive after having purchased other Samsungs for $200 before. That is the golden price point for Android in my eyes. Despite the 500 bucks, the OS is declared to be 7.

The Google tablet isn't reported with a specific version, so a search led to finding 6.0 and 7 https://arstechnica.com/gadget... (we can assume auto-updates given that Google's name is involved but it's almost like 8.0 wasn't even a dream in the reviewer's mind.) More likely the builds just don't exist yet.

The Huawei tablet is only on 6. These are reviews that will hang around for the whole year, so it is worrysome that they don't even mention 8.0 even though it's been available on Browserstack's test suite for several months.

It's odd that the cheap $125 Chinese smartphone I bought around September, despite its serious storage planned obsolescence, came with 7.1 when so much premium stuff out there was still on 6 (and serious offerings already had version 8). It's a pain just number-wise, and features even within the same Android build are shamefully inconsistent across manufacturers... this causes many people to go see things as "iPhone versus non-iPhone" if they are ever disappointed.

Wireless #G networks are used extensively to access Internet and this would be a way for the Government to easily shut that down and/or restrict access to it. Several times Trump has called for an Internet "kill switch" or other measures. From Snopes (and other places):

On 7 December 2015, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addressed a crowd of supporters at the U.S.S. Yorktown in South Carolina. During that appearance, Trump invoked a vague approach to campaign issues as he proposed restricting access for some individuals to the internet:

"We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way Somebody will say, ‘Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people." -- Trump

Trump calls for internet to be cut off for terrorists
The Law That Could Allow Trump To Shut Down The US Internet

etc...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk...

http://volokh.com/2013/05/03/l...

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...

https://www.theguardian.com/la...

https://www.cnet.com/news/lond...

https://www.amren.com/news/201...

https://www.reuters.com/articl...

https://www.thenewamerican.com...

Yeap, totally didn't happen. ISPs never blocked or throttled anything.

If you want a smart speaker and are concerned about privacy and spying, Apple is the only way to go.

No. If you want a smart speaker and are concerned about privacy and spying then you realize the thing you want is directly in concert with the thing you're concerned about. If you're really concerned about privacy and spying then you don't buy a smart speaker, if you do then you're just demonstrating that you're really not that concerned about privacy and spying at all.

For Siri, voice recordings are saved for six months on Apple's voice recognition servers to understand a user better. After that, they're deleted automatically and another copy -- without any identifiers -- helps improve Siri for up to two years. With anonymized IDs, Apple's speakers have a much more compelling argument for not handing over data: They can't find it. In the game of hide and seek with your voice data, the advantage -- for now -- goes to Apple.

When Adobe stopped activating CS2 they actually offered a version for download without activation built in and included the serial number

Do we really need lossy compression for still images any longer?

Yes. Smaller images saves bandwidth for everyone. A company like 500px from the article wants the bandwidth savings. Netflix wants AV1 for video for the same reasons, which is why they and other content providers are members of AOMedia.

Heic is an image container.

You're thinkig of HEIF. HEIC is the file extension convention Apple adopted to indicate a HEIF file which contains HEVC encoded images.

With backing from every major tech company but Apple

No. Apple has joined the Alliance for Open Media. So Apple is an AV1 backer as well.

No the problem is compression or the loudness war:

https://www.cnet.com/news/comp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

When people say that music used to be better in the old days, that is actually true, it was better in the old days. Music in the old days had more dynamic range. Today it's just loud and flat.

But compression is nothing new. I was a DJ in the early 1980s and I was fascinated whenever a new REO Speedwagon album came out. The only thing they had going for them was they figured out how to use compression. It was eerie to realise that one could date one of their albums by watching how little the VU meter needles moved: The less they moved the more recent the album.

No the problem is compression or the loudness war:

https://www.cnet.com/news/comp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

When people say that music used to be better in the old days, that is actually true, it was better in the old days. Music in the old days had more dynamic range. Today it's just loud and flat.

I'd just like to point out that user interface design changes for no good reason other than change's sake resulted in the death of Chekov's actor, Anton Yelchin. While Snapchat's UI is unlikely to result in death, the point remains the same: once users buy into an interface and grow the skill set to use it well, you can't shake it up in any major way without causing serious problems and pissing off a lot of people. Microsoft made a major change in Office 2007 with the "ribbon" that user testing indicated was necessary and was successful in reducing hunting and whatnot, yet that stupid ass ribbon and the shuffling of formatting options to hidden places without decent discoverability is still an enormous pain in the ass for me to use even today. It used to be that I could right-click on text and get paragraph and character formatting boxes with everything but the kitchen sink in them organized into wonderfully neat hierarchical tabs. Now every time I want to do something that doesn't start with B/I/U I have to go on an Easter egg hunt.

Changing user interfaces willy-nilly kills well-known actors and pisses off millions of teenagers. Don't do it.

Here you go (1st link from 2012):
https://www.cnet.com/news/its-...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

For reference here are the Asus EEE 701 Specs(8.9" Wide x 6.3" Deep x 1.3" High)

Asus Mini Specs (~10" wide)
Asus Transformer Pad (~10" wide)
Chuwi Surfacebook Mini (~10" wide)
GPD Pocket
Or any Surface tablet with a bluetooth keyboard case (e.g. Naxa)

AT&T probably couldn't get favorable terms where they wouldn't be stuck with excess inventory of unsellable Huawei phones.

The poorly received Amazon Fire phone is probably still fresh in their minds. A $199 Fire phone that sold for $0.99 two months later.

Apple do have a reputation for selling overpriced stuff.

E.g. the replacement for to buy machine with the same Ram (16GB) and half the SSD size(512GB instead of 1024GB) of my 2012 Macbook Pro would cost $1,899.00. Even though the original machine was around $1100 and buying 16GB of Ram and a 1TB SSD from Crucial only cost about $400. So rather than paying $1100 up front to Apple and $400 to a third party when the machine gets a bit slow I need to pay $1900 up front and can't upgrade. That's a hefty price increase. And you can't upgrade the Ram because it's soldered and even the SSD which is socketed is proprietary and only available from Apple. Great.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy...

Still if you look at iPhones they do do a kids one, the SE

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy...

Oh wait, that's still $349 for the 32GB version

It used to be $399 for the 16GB version but people like CNet complained

https://www.cnet.com/news/ipho...

Now, to be clear, I can think of at least two types of people for whom a 16GB iPhone is a reasonable choice. There are the utilitarian non-shutterbugs: They're getting a smartphone because their flip phone finally bit the dust, and they like the convenience of browsing the Web, reading email and using a few key apps -- Facebook, Google Maps, Candy Crush, Pandora and the like. But they don't care about Instagram, and they don't expect to carry around a few zillion MP3 files.

The second group is anyone with limited or bad credit. If your carrier won't allow you to pay off the phone in 24 monthly installments of $17 to $21, then the 25 percent increase in price from the 16GB to the 64GB model could well be a bridge too far. It's 16GB -- or hello, Android. (And, if you're on such a tight budget, the $12 to $30 a year for a good iCloud backup plan may be out of reach as well.)

Actually kids would have been OK with 16GB. However Apple decided to offer only 32GB, admittedly at a lower price than 16GB used to be or 128GB.

And yea there is this
https://www.cnet.com/news/iphone-users-more-dishonest-says-study/
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/12/06/apple-drops-on-best-of-glassdoor/

You are doing a bang up just there squirt.

Wow, you even sold the Microsoft cheque for charity. Right on man, class act.