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The article is nonsense. The "surprise" that users didn't opt to move to a phone with different software after having one with a hardware problem does presume that users are really stupid. I'm not saying many aren't, but not that stupid. The more reasonable expectation would be that they'd opt for another Android phone and not an Apple one.
The article mentions may opted for another Samsung phone, but fails to mention than in addition to offering refunds for the Note 7 they purchased, there were additional rebates if they purchased another Samsung phone as a replacement. ( http://venturebeat.com/2016/10... ) Samsung offered to pay people to stay with them and it seems to have worked.

Equating the decision to stick with the same OS and to take advantage of a $100 rebate as loyalty to a sports team ignores too many of the facts.

Given the NFL's track record with getting wireless headsets right, what makes you think that the problem is the Surface Pro itself and not just the underlying wireless service and/or the software that they are using?

Well, you're assuming that the majority of issues that the Belichick has had is with the connectivity. He himself has said that the connection is a problem; but that the reliability of the system is another.

"Sometimes something happens and it has to be fixed. And first of all, you have to find out what the problem is," he said. "It could be one of 15 different things."--Bill Belichick

Colin Kaepernick saying that the device often has to be rebooted and that he has many times had to knock it on it’s side to get the screen to unfreeze.

Remember that the Surface tablets the NFL uses are not stock ones you can get from BestBuy. They have customized software. Who wrote that software? Probably Microsoft. So when a glitch occurs, there's no one to turn to but MS.

In my opinion I also think MS designed their system to need constant wifi connection as a requirement which is, rather, a stupid design. Given that you have 100,000 fans in the stadium with all their devices interfering with the wifi signal alone, I don't think MS about that requirement really.

But hey Belichick is smart, so he must be a computer, wireless, and software expert and knows exactly where the problem lies... right...

Um, no. He knows they don't work well for him and his staff. They are very unreliable at times. Things are not easy to fix. That's all he needs to know.

The WebGL Oort Online benchmark from the article says Firefox performed better than Chrome.

I got the opposite result when trying that locally (On Linux). My Chromium scored 9830-9840 while my Firefox was all over the place, 6610-8440: it stalled really bad every second or so, I think it was GC hangs.

Once again, I fail to reproduce benchmarks locally. This is starting to become a recurring theme for me. I expect your results will differ in yet other ways: run the test and see.

On the other hand, for my Firefox destroys Chromium in Unity's benchmark (66210 to 44792). Its not like my Firefox is crap.

The WebGL Oort Online benchmark from the article says Firefox performed better than Chrome.

Oracle is campaigning for accountability? Sure, I love accountability.
How about:

- Improper accounting practices on your cloud service business: http://venturebeat.com/2016/06...
- Breach of contract: http://www.pcworld.com/article...
- Putting stockholders' investments at risk: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
- Fraudulent practices/overcharging the Deparment of Justice: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr...
- Patent infringement: http://www.infoworld.com/artic...
- Project cost overrun and breach of contract again: http://wtnnews.com/articles/85...

If Oracle had any hint of accountability it would've closed doors a long time ago. What they want is money.

It's something of a problem for them really. I remember early on, people I worked with in IT-related positions were always excited about new Google products coming out...Google Wave was one example I can think of. Not a month after it was available to the public, pretty much every manager I talked to was trying to figure out some way of using it...I think they had it in their heads that it was going to be something like Sharepoint, but without the licensing costs. That didn't quite go as well as expected.

Now it's evidently "Apache Wave," because of course it is. The Apache Foundation has turned into something of a retirement home for OSS projects that nobody really knows what to do with any more.

In either case, I found myself experiencing the same dilemma not long ago...I was trying to think on what I could set up for my parents for video conferencing for some of my relatives. I was leaning toward Google Hangouts because it's ad free, relatively clean and simple interface, plus most of them have GMail accounts already...what happened?

http://venturebeat.com/2016/08...

Completely unavailable as of September 12th. Not exactly much notice for terminating a product (granted they're terminating a feature, not the entire product). The real problem is that they could well give just as little notice for terminating _any_ of their products. I'm sure plenty of people still use Google as their primary search engine of course, but I'd have to think that DuckDuckGo and the likes have put a pretty big dent in their market share as well. About all they have going for them is Android and GMail, Google Drive perhaps, but for various reasons there's a lot of skepticism about storing data in "the cloud" these days, regardless of the company behind it...

Streaming really only works today because a majority of video watchers are not using streaming.

Where do you get that figure from? My understanding is that a huge percentage of people watching videos online are doing so via Netflix, Prime, Hulu, YouTube, etc. And with the exception of SOME Prime users (who can download for offline use), that's ALL, 100% streaming. Heck, we already know that Netflix has the single largest share of Internet bandwidth usage at 37%.

In the US we have a very large percentage of internet subscriber that can't download a two hour movie in two hours or less.

??? 4 megabits per second speed translates to roughly 1.8 gigabytes per hour, and it would seem that covers 80% of Americans. Seems like most Americans can download or stream 2 hour movies relatively easily.

It's just practical sense to download during off-peak hours and then watch whenever you want. Helps too if lots of people are downloading the same thing because then you can cache it on a local server, use multicast for a neighborhood, things like that.

Sure, unless you don't always know what you feel like watching ahead of time. Streaming services are popular because if I want to watch House of Cards tonight, but then actually change my mind tonight and want to watch Daredevil, well, no big deal. Offline playback capability is nice, but not the main feature for a lot of us.

Do you have more current data? Other current articles are just for the current time, don't show the data history but do confirm that iOS is losing market share. Macrumors confirms the numbers as well. So - where's data that says otherwise?

As far as not showing what's claimed, do a fit to the data presented. You'll find that iOS is on a slow downward slope, and Android is on an upward slope. That's what the data says. Absent any counter data presented...

"On Wednesday, the 12-year-old service quietly said it would cut off unlimited ratings access to companies that do not share their own evaluations of submitted samples" ref

By not sharing their own evaluations these companies are also facilitating the hackers, are they not. Does software evaluation firm AV-TEST contribute their own evaluations to VirusTotal?

Possibly, Venture beat would have been a better submission. http://venturebeat.com/2016/05... additionally the story follwing that is "Pornhub launches bug bounty program with rewards ranging from $50 to $25,000", which could be useful knowledge for some around here.

Sorry, but you're just wrong. A "taxi" or a "cab" in the general sense is any vehicle driven by someone else who you pay to take you places. How you book it, how you hail it, how you get in it, and what kind of music you play while travelling, are all linguistic gymnastics.

In addition, any such attempts to make up definitions will vary tremendously across the world. You can read about the official definitions for the UK here. You can read about the US here. A key observation is that the general trend in English is to refer to these kinds of vehicles as a "taxicab". As such, using "taxi" or "cab" would be a reasonable slang abbreviation.

So let's just stick to the facts.

Uber is running an illegal operation nearly everywhere. Do not conflate the problems with the possibly over-regulated taxicab industry by supporting an illegal operation, even moreso one that is extremely well funded and backed by assholes such as Goldman Sachs. I'll gladly shirk the law to fight for a movement that is decent and right, but I will not do so just to line their greedy pockets.

The phrase "sharing economy" is complete and utter bullshit. Uber is not some grassroots movement that should be allowed to side-step existing legislation because it brings about a greater good for the community. It is a well-planned and strategic attempt to break the established taxicab cartels. I don't think that's important enough to justify breaking the law over, but it seems that you do?

but somehow, I never pictured Lionshead getting shut down, even by our benevolent overlord Microsoft Studios. It was too iconic. It's a fixture. Hell, if it inherited just a tiny part of Peter Molyneux's ego, it should have been immortal.

I suppose the idea of Yet Another MMORPG getting shut down isn't a shocker, though. If you want to kill a good game idea dead, attempt to implement it as an MMO. And, to be completely sure, develop it at Microsoft Studios, the great elephant graveyard of gaming. It's the gaming equivalent of lifting off and nuking it from space.

Oh, yeah, original summary doesn't have a linky. Linky.

> Pocket isn't a Mozilla project.

But they have caused the UI to become worse.

Firefox for mobile has a feature called Reading List, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1123529.

It has been disabled/removed for desktop, presumably because of Pocket integration.

p.s. I have love Pocket (since it was called ReadItLater), love Intstapaper, and Readability, and have subscribed to them at one time or another. Sometimes I want to use Pocket, and sometimes I want to use Reading List. On mobile, I can.

The average age of someone who plays games is 31 years old. In fact, more gamers are over the age of 36 than between the ages of 18 to 35 or under the age of 18. They are also mostly men, but by a slimming margin. Men make up 52 percent. From 2012 to 2013, the number of women gamers over the age of 50 grew by 32 percent.

Source

Searches for a standard set of illegal materials - say known child porn images.

Some services already do that to try to uphold their terms of service: http://venturebeat.com/2012/08...

Yep. They have really fucked up with this.

I dont get it either, they were in a great position to refresh, and be the peoples os of choice and then did this shit. It is going to really hurt them, Im already considering mac os because of ms being jerks about this.

Yeah, I'm sure they are really hurt

Google's self driving cars have racked up over 1 million miles in the past few years. They're probably already capable of a coast-to-coast autonomous trip - in good weather.
What's uncertain is if they can cope with really poor driving conditions.
http://venturebeat.com/2015/06...

I see no indication the dock is not included in the $99 introductory offer, and the review I read on Venturebeat.com clearly indicates the dock is included...

You better read the Newegg.com reviews because you're totally and completely wrong. No dock included at $99. And the $39 dock is "out of stock". LOL http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Bo X.
10/26/2015 12:56:55 PM
Tech Level: Somewhat High
Ownership: less than 1 day
4 out of 5 eggsLooking forward to it
Pros: This is a smart phone size computer stick product. It has embodied battery that can support it for 4 hours. The best part is that you can use an iPad as its screen, think of using it on an iPad pro, the experience could be amazing. I have just ordered it, I will post more once I have it.

Cons: The machine itself does not provide any I/O ports, and what is really ridiculous is that the dock which provides I/O ports is out of stock. How am I supposed to use it without connecting to a display? Wirelessly? If they provide 4G Ram and 64Gb SSD, it will be fine if the price is higher. Obviously, they are not providing that option.

Did you find this review helpful? Yes No

Valentin S.
10/26/2015 11:39:00 AM
Tech Level: High
Ownership: less than 1 day
5 out of 5 eggsIs dock included?
Pros: Looks like an awesome pocketable Windows 10 PC with the latest Atom CPU, and well-designed and well-built
Has a fingerprint reader. No more passwords! (Note: this is based on pictures only, I have just ordered the device).

Cons: No I/O ports without the dock.
The only storage option is 32GB eMMC, would be nice to have a 64GB version.
Seems like it has vents. The CPU is only 2W - there should be no vents and definitely no fan, especially with an aluminum case.

Other Thoughts: Ordered one. The lack of detailed information bothers me, especially the fact that Newegg sells the dock separately and it is already out of stock! How am I supposed to connect everything if the dock is not included?
Will update the review when I get the device.

I see no indication the dock is not included in the $99 introductory offer, and the review I read on Venturebeat.com clearly indicates the dock is included...

They are so hilariously wrong so often you could build a successful career out of assuming they will be wrong about everything. A selection of their idiocies:

• Apple Should License the Mac to Dell
• Windows Phone to beat iPhone by 2015 (thanks to Nokia)
• Why does the IT industry continue to listen to Gartner?

Sorry. My last URL didn't get included. :(

http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/14/mobile-gaming-could-drive-entire-game-industry-to-100b-in-revenue-by-2017/

Microsoft's announcement coincidentally came a day after New York City announced an $81M public-private K-12 CS mandate, which prompted Microsoft's Smith to join fellow FWD.us PAC backers Ron Conway and Fred Wilson, as well other execs from Google, Facebook, and Goldman Sachs, to explain to the masses "Why Computer Science for All is Good for All" in An Open Letter from the Nation's Tech and Business Leaders. Making an argument worthy of a tantrum-throwing toddler, the execs exclaimed in a pull-quote, "We need talent, we need it now, and we simply cannot find enough."

I'll put hard data ahead of wishes and good feelings any day.

Then if you go beyond that extremely limited link you quoted you will find:

SunSpider: Edge wins!

Octane: Chrome wins!

Kraken: Chrome wins!

JetStream: Chrome wins!

Oort Online: Chrome wins!

Peacekeeper: Firefox wins!

WebXPRT: Chrome wins!

HTML5Test: Chrome wins!

  http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/13/benchmarking-beta-browsers-chrome-vs-firefox-vs-edge/

Shared autonomous vehicles will have their place. High traffic work areas easily and anything that demands public transport (sporting games, movies, schools, etc)... and will easily threaten to replace subways and buses--yes, replace them. The urban planners will have a lot of headaches considering they are pushing these mix-use living areas integrated into public transportation, not considering it's more expensive and time consuming [construction] to put living quarters with the subway and a bus station, etc...

Now trendy areas, i.e. date places and high 'look at me' places will demand person transport--cause automobiles are part of those "I have arrived" venues and events. There's also the hobby part (i.e. look at the horse and bicycle industries), but that's a fringe of what is being scaled.

But we'll just go on this see-saw of 'they solve everything' to 'it's crap hyped tech' for the next 5 yrs.

As much as us geeks think their gods and can develop the be all-end all solution, it's just never is the case in the real world. One things for sure--bet on autonomous cars, it's coming.

The grandparent was challenging the specific claim YOU made that SDC's get rear-ended because they stop too often.

The article you linked doesn't even mention any of the collisions the SDC's have been involved in, and certainly don't support the claim you made about them.

Try again.

Ok mr coward here are the actual citations, I was quick to post and put the wrong post above. Too many hipsters with common place movie knowledge and not actual engineerinrg knowledge so here you go I hope someone actually reads this that will appreciate facts.

The number of miles that google cars have driven so far including its safety record as stated by google directly : http://venturebeat.com/2015/06...

This equates to an accident every 90.9 thousand miles though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... the wiki clams 14 accidents that puts this at 71.4 thousand - all of which are meticulously planed courses - none have left turns into traffic - none of which are in heavy traffic at all - none of which are in adverse conditions such as snow or rain which the car can't even function at all and which of course makes for more difficult human driving. So it is pointless to try and compare that to bumper to bumper rush hour driving on freeways, hundreds to thousands of accidents during large snowstorms, bad winter driving in general, rush hour in general, etc. This makes it extremely difficult to compare to actual human driving statistics.

Note the wiki even states google as saying the car will often revert to extra cautious safety conditions and cannot handle many situations which wont even be addressed till 2020.

Google admits its cars rear ended suprisingly often : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...

Given that google has not made more than one accident detail public this is hurting their image in all likelyhood. Its a pretty safe assumption that a slow plodding car that often stops, say like you are supposed to text book style, but no one does, for pedestrians, will cause motorists to rear end you.

Amazon seems to be doing well?

Amazon writes off $170M on weak Fire Phone sales.

Shareholders and analysts have previously predicted that Amazonâ(TM)s attempt to produce its own Android-based smartphone has largely been a failure. While Amazon didnâ(TM)t specify the number of devices sold, independent research reports indicate that the company may have only sold 35,000 at the end of August, as VentureBeat previously reported.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/10...

And that's with an OS that is mostly compatible with Android.

Personally I think the doom and gloom over this write off is a bit excessive. Microsoft stated that they're going to go from having like 26 Lumia devices per year to 6. Apple is doing very well with 3. Over 20 Lumia devices is just too many. This consolidation is the right choice. They are killing off the feature phone candy bar phones and focusing exclusively on smart phones, they are focusing their energy into a much narrower and much smarter selection of phones. This will be good for Windows Phone. It will hopefully be like Google Nexus where you have a phone which is a role model for 3rd parties to emulate.

A big company in an unaligned industry buys a formerly popular hardware maker, now falling on hard times, and eventually sells or pretty much writes all the assets of the acquisition off. I'm having a strange sense of deja vu... almost like this has happened before several times.

Oh wait, it has happened before with Oracle and Sun. And again with HP and Palm. And again with Google and Motorola.

You would think people would notice a pattern here...

The pattern is its more profitable to claim sketchy tax write offs than pay taxes on massive real profits.

A big company in an unaligned industry buys a formerly popular hardware maker, now falling on hard times, and eventually sells or pretty much writes all the assets of the acquisition off. I'm having a strange sense of deja vu... almost like this has happened before several times.

Oh wait, it has happened before with Oracle and Sun. And again with HP and Palm. And again with Google and Motorola.

You would think people would notice a pattern here...

neighbors thinking they have the right to shoot things out of the sky.

Well, sadly, they don't have that right.

But, as long as the projectiles do not land on the neighbors' properties, it certainly ought to be legal:

Drone regulations are being written by lobbyists for drone manufacturers and other companies. You’re going to wake up one day, and there’s going to be a drone outside your bedroom window writing you a ticket for sodomy.

The above suggestion may seem frivolous, but it is scarier, than you might think — a major part of the argument to abolish laws outlawing particular sexual "deviations" was that in order to enforce them, police must invade the privacy of everyone.

Well, if a robotic "officer" can do the job on its own, that major pillar goes away and the law can come right back into your house. Whether it catches you sodomizing your (happily moaning and otherwise consenting) partner, or flushing your toilet more times than the governor thinks is good for the Collective is irrelevant. As long as no human officer is needed, no privacy invasion has occurred.

Now, today no computers yet exist, that can distinguish legal penetration from illegal. But that's no going to last long — red-light cameras are everybody's favorite already. Though my ticket from such a device claimed, that "an officer reviewed the recording" — and maybe he did, I don't know, because he never showed up in court — I am quite sure, police don't stare at the camera-feeds themselves all day. Some algorithm must already be in place to flag suspicious cases for a human's review.

These systems will become more sophisticated very soon — and suggestions will be made to trust them to issue summons automatically too. Fortunately, making an argument for shooting an invading robot is much easier than it is to advocate shooting policemen, however nosy...

Yeah, that's a total crock of shit.

Woz was a genius -- from using the 6502 to read floppies and do the decoding in software, to the whole design of the Apple such as getting 6-colors @ 280x192 with 8K that normally would take over 13K. Fuckerberg has done jack shit of inspiring people to get into hardware or software, aside from dropping out of college (Harvard.) He was extremely lucky Harvard's own social program didn't take off. Zuckerberg admits: If I wasn't the CEO of Facebook, I'd be at Microsoft

A wax figure of Dennis Ritchie, the co-inventor of C, you know who influenced thousands of programmers those who _built_ the systems that everyone uses today would make sense. Fuck Zuckerberg and him profiting off people's data.

"How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android."

How about extorting revenue from the hardware manufacturers under threat of litigation. And then leaning on them to install Office, OneDrive and Skype on the devices. So somebody is making money out of Microsoft Android ©.

if this article is to be believed.

Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s Windows chief: “We are upgrading all qualified PCs, genuine and non-genuine, to Windows 10. . .anywhere in the world. . .

but now

Terry Myerson, Microsoft's executive vice president of operating systems, has clarified the company's plans were not changing for non-genuine users . . .[but despite the earlier statement] our free offer to upgrade to Windows 10 will not apply to Non-Genuine Windows. . .

A little smelly. And just when I thought MS was working it's way back to cool.

From their marketing:

Unlimited storage, 25 MB of photo and video attachments, advanced spam filters, virus protection

I have no idea if that means 25MB per email or total for your mailbox. I'd hope it was the former. They support POP3 or IMAP.

Their current webmail client seems to be somewhat OK (if not cloned outright from Google and then had banner ads slapped in) - screenshot is over 2 years old:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/07...

I don't think it means they're leading edge in any way, but they're not lagging behind nearly as much as I thought they were.

No it won't business deals fail all of the time. Remember the Sprint/T-Mobile merger? It failed. Previously AT&T's attempt at buying T-Mobile also failed and Deutsche Telekom received a hefty premium for AT&T dropping the deal.

As per the original acquisition agreement, Deutsche Telekom will receive $3 billion in cash as well as access to $1 billion worth of AT&T-held wireless spectrum.

So there may or may not have been a penalty associated with this deal not going through, the article doesn't discuss this.

Can we get a FAQ please? Here are the common answers:

* Visually with Angry Birds characters: http://learn.code.org/hoc/1
* Scratch
* http://coderdojo.com/
* Minecraft mods
* http://www.learntomod.com./
* https://pragprog.com/book/ahmi...
* http://codecombat.com/
* http://boardgamegeek.com/board...
* http://boardgamegeek.com/board...
* http://www.gamebooks.org/show_...
* http://venturebeat.com/2014/06...
* http://meetedison.com/
* BASIC
* Vic-20 C64 Compute! magazine
* Raspberry Pi
* Arduino
* Logo

My kid loves this one: http://codecombat.com/

I got him started on it when he was 10, and he completed all of the free levels in two weeks with minimal help after I worked with him through the first few.

Lots of other great recommendations here: http://venturebeat.com/2014/06...

The board game one I've heard is good for younger kids, but once they have it down it's rather boring.

-Rick

Great thoughts on a potentially scary future.

Here the AirBnB CEO is selling this all as a way to turn the unemployed into "micro-entrepreneurs"

What is this? A city ordinance? Are we talking about a $500 fine? Could you actually face jail time for flying your drone? The stories I've looked at say yes. But also interesting, Chaotic Moons Studios have loudly protested the ban since the ban has grounded their drone- Drone Tyrone. http://venturebeat.com/2015/03... Apparently it can shoot silly string, spray paint and a 3 foot flame. Also, Bryce Bencivengo, Austin’s senior public information officer, has said some exceptions will be made for some drones, those that have made previous arrangements with SXSW. Wonder who you have to bribe?

Maybe that soohuld be telling you something.

Not really, I already know that Apple fanboys are willing to spend their disposable income on whatever Apple produces or buy it on credit or sell their organs.

It's particularly interesting since VMware seems, in many respects, friendly to open source. They distribute a bunch of open source in their products and extensively document this, they partner with open source projects like Docker and OpenStack, and they're on GitHub. The sticking point here seems to be that they have kernel-level code that they think isn't covered by the GPL and Hellwig and the Conservancy do.

If you've not seen that one before, FWIW it was quite influential:

http://www.metafilter.com/3766...
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
http://venturebeat.com/2009/07...

Yeah, at least with major league OSes like Windows we never have to worry about decade-old bugs. And Windows 8.0 was the model of usability.

(And without the advantages of being part of the Borg Collective.)
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01...
Pay particular attention to the chart showing -layoffs- across the IT sector!

Why not put the whole computer in the power source form factor? It' almost there already: http://venturebeat.com/2015/01...

This is veering offtopic, but, according to this article, thepiratebay.cr is not to be trusted, if I am understanding it correctly:

Various mirror sites of The Pirate Bay have sprung up since the site’s disappearance, but this one is different. Some alternatives simply provide a copy of The Pirate Bay with no new content (many proxy sites have been doing this for years). Others, like thepiratebay.cr, go further and even provide fake content as if it was new and even attempt to charge users.

Probably any torrent site is not to be easily trusted, but I could imagine hackers setting up a lookalike site in order to get people who should know better to download problematic stuff. Heck, maybe the CIA set it up.

Here's the trend from '90s to today. Courtesy @Vivek Wadhwa: http://venturebeat.com/2014/11...

In other news, Libre browesers like icecat, Iceweasel, and Abrowser offer search engines.like DuckDuckGo

There have been a DuckDuckGo search engine add ons for Firefox available for a long time, such as the DuckDuckGo and DuckDuckGo Plus addons. Mozilla also now ships a DuckDuckGo search engine option in Firefox by default.

Doubtful.

Then you've not been reading the news. This isn't even particularly new news.

You are the reason we can't have nice things like anonymity and common fucking sense.

Facebook is not a government entity. It is an entertainment site and its rules are about as authentic as your IQ.

Facebook's goal is to validate its user base because advertisers are learning that while Facebook brags about having over 1 billion members, some of those are bogus.

Facebook has no legal authority regarding whether name are real or not.

The site is free and the only recourse Facebook has is to block shit.

The sooner you learn that you are Facebook's bitch, the better.

Just piling on the bandwagon. You can absolutely use your phone as a hotspot. In fact, the FCC made them allow it. http://venturebeat.com/2012/07...