Slashdot Mirror

"Your toilet will flush AFTER it authenticates with our servers to get our say so."

The future is coming:

https://www.techinasia.com/chi...

Apparently ripping off others work is 'innovation' these days. https://rendezvous.blogs.nytim... https://www.techinasia.com/chi... This is just another example.

Just because you don't use FB, it does not mean that no one has legitimated uses.

Here we go...

Most asians

That doesn't sound racist at all. Did you do a survey of most Asians? I'm interested in how you come to such conclusions?

e.g. use it as ersatz email and as messenger. It does not make sense to take that away for a month.

Couple of points:
Messenger is a separate product from FB
Most Asians I know (and I used to live there) use Wechat for messaging
Email is still quite popular in Asia, if your statement is true, who is using it?
That whole point is of going without is as a test to see how much value you give something. You can't get that from guessing.

> Skeuomorphic design is stupid and childish.

There is a name for myopic people who assumes their religion is "best" for everyone; their immature "my way is the only way" mentality is called a cult.

The *proper* solution is to give users a **choice** -- because good style is subjective.

Naturally, that begs the question, what is good? We'll get to that in a second.

Some people think this bookshelf is absolutely beautiful. Compare and contrast to the "modern" version which is bland and boring. All sense of charm, and uniqueness is flushed down the crapper -- Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft now all look the same. **Yawn**

I'm not the only one who hates the flat button look. All these modern designs look the same -- bland. Skeuomorphism matches what a real calculator looks like -- and you can pry my HP48SX from my cold, dead hands, thank-you very much.

Again, the best decision would be to match what users prefer. Some prefer the former, others prefer the latter. BOTH choices are OK. But designers love to pretend that they know better -- and shove their crap down my throat regardless if I like it or not.

Personally, I find antiskeuomorphism design to be dumb and gaudy -- as there no context for what is foreground and background. Congratulations, you've removed all signal and just made everything noise!. How is completely over-loading the user with noise helping them???

Maybe you prefer the gaudy, boxy design of Windows 1, er, Windows 8, but many people sure don't.

UI should be about empowering users -- NOT "let's make everything look bland, sterile, gaudy, lifeless and make me want to gouge my eyes out" because that's what modern UI has become. A clusterfuck of visual vomit.

IMO skeuomorphism is like spice

* Too much and you get indigestion.
* Too little and everything is "flat" and lacking.

I also disagree that "flat design" is skeuomorphic but that is a topic for another day.

--
Henry Poincare derived the e=mc^2 Mass-Energy equivalence 5 years earlier before Einstein. Einstein also abbreviated it as a linear equation instead of an infinite series.

FaceTime rarely works between China and the US, and both our phones were purchased in the US. I suspect deep packet inspection and forged packets forcing the app to disconnect the sessions.

https://www.techinasia.com/app...

Consider this a PSA both to travelers and local Chinese: if you’re in mainland China and want to buy an iOS gadget, don’t do it. Go to Hong Kong where you’ll get much better prices (thanks to no sales tax) and all the features you’d expect.

How many is "non trivial"? With things lik https://www.techinasia.com/chi... seems that jailbreaking is no longer as necessary as before.

This article says it's 3.6 billion passenger trips. Over a 40-day period, that's a little more believable, but I wonder what is counted as a "passenger trip". Let's say I live in NYC, and I want to travel to Lincoln, Nebraska for the holiday. So, subway ride to the airport, that's a passenger trip. Flight to hub in Chicago, another passenger trip. Flight from Chicago to Omaha, another passenger trip. Then whatever means I use to get from Omaha to Lincoln, another passenger trip. Coming home, I do the same thing all in reverse. That's eight passenger trips for one person for the holiday.

So, you take the 3.6 billion passenger trips, and divide it by 4 or 6 or 8 or whatever you think is the average passenger trip per person. Then divide that over a 40 day period, and account for the difference in population, and maybe you get something like a multiple of the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S.

I dunno, I'm just throwing it out there as a possibility.

Thank tho Snowden we now know that Cisco is even worse in that regard.

Do we? Really?

Elop is what killed nearly Nokia but it's not quite dead yet. Just last quarter they sold 53 million phones in China using the Sybian system that Elop tried to bury and halted all development on.

How do things like this which have nothing to do with reality get modded up to 5? Because it's what people wish was true?

In fact, "The whole China area bought 4.1 million Nokia phones in Q2 of this year, which was up slightly over the previous quarter, but down 48 percent year-on-year. "

That's ALL phones, not Symbian phones, which were only a tiny fraction of that.

Also from that source, or any number of other sources: "Nokia’s sales revenue for Greater China also fell by the greatest number anywhere in the world, plummeting 57%"

IMaking up what you WANT to be true doesn't actually make it true, but I guess it does get you modded up by others who also want to believe it.

http://www.techinasia.com/android-market-share-china-2012/ Is the graph easier. Apple simply is a none player in the largest smartphone [and gaming] market worldwide :)

Usual totalitarian bashing aside, this may actually be the real reason:

Back ground info: Spring Festival is coming (this year it's Feb. 10th), which calls for all people to go home to unite with their family. And this makes the train tickets very difficult to obtain and the beginning and ending the holidays. The railway ministry in China has build an online train-ticket buying/reserving system (12306.cn) a couple years back and it is now well known when new tickets would be available online, and they sell out within minutes.

A while ago some Chinese programmer wrote a (naive) browser plugin to automate the ticket reserving operation. A few factors contributed to this plugin causing a lot of extra strain on the already burdened 12306.cn site: it would poll the site repeatedly if the service was not available; as it relies on some Javascript hosted on GitHub and it tries to load that repeatedly as well; the plugin is packaged in some binary distribution of a couple Chinese re-branded browsers which brags about it's ability to "help you grab the ticket".

As a result, it brought down GitHub a couple weeks ago (when the grabbing of this years tickets begin), and the ticket sellout windows went from minutes to seconds.

The railway ministry is pissed and claim that this practice is "illegal" or "immoral" and should be banned. Blocking Github could just be the attempt at blocking that "ticket assistant" plugin: No Github, no plugin.

refernce: http://www.techinasia.com/china-railway-ministry-asks-kingsoft-shut-browser-addon/