I think it's logical that, given what an iPhone costs, they are slowly moving to model names that sound like they should be attached high end German cars.
I was going to post the same thing. I doubt any Canadian who has a cell phone will be surprised by this news. I might be a little surprised that there isn't some other country whose telecoms are squeezing their customers harder, but I think most of us would have assumed we were top five at least before this study came out.
I'm a third-party Illustrator developer and I can say that the move to a subscription model is a bit of a pain for us. We have a lot of users who won't budge from CS6 as a result. This really ties a support anchor around our neck.
That said, knowing a number of people at Adobe I can safely tell you that this wasn't purely a "let's lock people" decision. I'm sure they're happy with that as a by-product, but a big part of the of the reason they went this way was their biggest customers requested it.
You might ask: requested it? Sure. If you're a big company and you have, say, 100 seats of Illustrator, but you only upgrade every two years, you have a major problem. You need $100k to do your upgrade, but you only use it on alternating years. If you don't spend that $100k in one year, your accounting department won't give it to you the year after. Corporate account is *really* stupid that way. Apparently they got a lot of feedback from their corporate users that a subscription model would be ideal: they wouldn't have to worry about big jumps in upgrades (every other version) and it would smooth out their expenses.
Now, could you have worked out some way to let them do that while also letting someone own it? Maybe, but once you build the subscription model code, I imagine they decided supporting both methods was stupid. And again, as others have pointed out, they priced the subscription so if you were a regular upgrader, you're saving money. If you weren't, it will be pricier, but why should Adobe bend over backwards to make that person's life easier? If you skipped every other upgrade, it's a wash in terms of cost.
This is where if he had a reliable AI that could do the watching, it'd be faster *and* it wouldn't screw up the hapless people who currently have to watch it.
That said, I worry that watching snuff films and porn was why Skynet decided to nuke all the humans.
If the results are going to other people ("a range of stakeholders", which includes Congress) the information is there for Trump if he wants it. By having it delivered to him before he leaves office, that puts a timetable on it. Otherwise it's "Hey, go do this thing for me. Also, I'm out of here", which in my experience results in nothing happening.
I spent about two months trying to figure out how to tell the suggestion service on Android TV that I was not interested in his crap. I still don't know how he got into my rotation and I'm still not sure why he was finally removed. But it's good to know that CNN is going to inflict him on a whole generation; I feel like my pain should be shared.
I can see some interesting use cases for that TouchBar, but dear God, when that Photoshop lady was demonstrating using the mousepad & TouchBar at the same time, I cringed. I mimicked it on my keyboard in front of me and my wrists cried out in pain -- I can't imagine how it'd be if the keyboard was in my lap (i.e. on a laptop).
It's funny, my wife & I were talking about that the other day. Her cousin's kid can't do multiplication to save her life and neither of us could fathom why they dropped the multiplication table approach. Great, calculators are useful, but if you don't have one, you can't even *do* long-form multiplication if you don't have the Ten Times Table memorized. We agreed that whatever the hell the schools did, our kids are going to know their goddamn multiplication tables.
My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and over the last four years there's been a push to 'play based learning', presumably resulting from the same kind of research mentioned in the article.
By and large it seems fine, though it doesn't alleviate some of the problems they mention; specifically my wife still feels the pressure to move through the curriculum, but it's a little less clear how. Part of the 'learning through play' initiative also pushes heavily on 'self guided learning', and while all of this seems great, there's not a lot of guidance given on how to execute. I think most of us would agree that it's better if the student is interested & wants to learn the subject, but there's no real help about what to do if the student/isn't/ interested. Presumably the teacher just forces the kid to learn what has to be learned, but all the material provided leans heavily on instructing teachers not to do that.
At any rate, this is mostly just typical of governments adopting something and not thinking through how to implement fully. Still, the impression I get from my wife & her colleagues is that the ideas are good (play-based learning) but it'd have been nice if there was better instruction on how to follow through.
The Microsoft one is pretty close, so that didn't bother me. The Apple one did, because it was basically slapping me in the face with 101%. All I could think was "Sheesh, even in a gender split percentage, Apple just has to come out on top!";)
Fair enough, though every time this is mentioned on the news I can't help but wonder if this wasn't standard practice for the last few Secretaries of State. Do we actually *know* this is unusual? I mean, I know the Fox anchors have an orgasm every time they can talk about this, but I'd feel better knowing that this really was unusual. I honestly have no idea, and I'm suspicious only because it wouldn't be the first time political opponents made a mountain out of a mole hill.
They offer it for free to news and human right & election monitoring websites for free. I wouldn't be surprised if down the road, anyone else could buy the service. That's where they'd make money.
I would be bummed b the wireless charging removal except that its so terrible relative to the USB-C charging. The latter has quick charge: 4 hours of life in 10 minutes, and in general, is just way, way faster to charge. Wireless is nice, but it's always super sloooooooow.
Someday there'll be QuckCharge wireless, and I'll be chomping at the bit. But with USB-C (no more mangling of ports!) I really don't care about wireless anymore.
It's the GSL -- Guideline Support Library. It's header-only, nothing to link against, and it's being kept small to make it easy for it to be cleared for use.
A fair point. Plus, one has to consider that if harming AM was their primary aim here, releasing the data is bad, but releasing a subset of the data that demonstrates that kind of male-to-female ratio is perhaps far worse (for AM). If the ratio was 10:1, they're providing a fair service and just not having much luck attracting women; look at all those scumbags who are trying to cheat on their wives! If the ratio is 8000:1 though, look at all those scumbags running the site who are cheating people out of money! If you wanted to put a nail in their coffin, this is a great way to do it -- out the men, embarrass them, give them call to sue AM. Then doubly embarrass them as chumps; surely that'll push a few fence-sitters over the edge.
It does make me wonder. The only way we could verify this is if a bunch of women who had accounts looked themselves up, didn't find themselves, and then self-reported. So we may never know either way on this.
I think the 47% you're thinking of is sales last quarter or the North American breakdown. I remember seeing the 47% vs 46% cited, but only recently, and I remember it was not the overall figure. Worldwide, Android is sitting at something like 76.6% (it dropped 2% after the iPhone 6, and that translated into a 2% jump for Apple to 19.7%). The mobile profit numbers are inverted and wider though;)
Beyond that, I agree with the rest of your post. I think one of the points the article was trying to make though was that standing out is difficult. Even if you make a quality app, one that most people would be willing to pay a reasonable amount, it lost in the sea of crap. Which goes back in part to your point about the knock-offs -- they're getting as much prominence as you, and they're cheaper, so why wouldn't someone try that first?
It seems clear that everyone would benefit from a system that pushed quality to the top of the search list, but so far no one has figured out a way to make that happen reliably.
At least in the fourth article, the one posted. I read the first three and found them to be largely unconvincing. I think you can like the flat look or not, like Material Design (barely mentioned, but brought up a few times) or not, and that's cool. But one of the main thrusts of his argument in the first three articles was that the defense of these designs was riddled with 'artspeak', a nonsense language used to dissuade criticism. I don't dispute it; I like Material Design (Android user here) but having watched the Material Design sessions from I/O 2014, I definitely got annoyed at all the 'artspeak' going on from the lead guy at Google (Duarte I think his name is). What's funny is that what rubbed me the wrong way about him was how 'Apple-ish' he sounded, so go figure.
But back to the first three articles -- they seemed riddled with a different kind of 'artspeak'. Churlishing comparing the simplish people imagery from Google with Children's books and comparing Apple's design to the child who can paint like Pollock didn't feel particularly high-brow.
Still, the over-arching point that I felt was useful was that criticism is not well-received at Apple (or Google from the sounds of it). That's a point worth dwelling on, especially since Apple in particular has the reputation of having the 'zealots' come out in force whenever anyone says anything ill of Apple. It was quite interesting to hear in the fourth article that -- unless I misunderstood it? -- there's someone at Apple whose job is to rile up the crazies when they get wind of that kind of thing on the interwebz.
But ultimately, the discussion about the problems of the App Store is more interesting. The 'race to the bottom' is something anyone with half a brain can see, and anyone who's a developer looks at that and must feel some gnawing fear. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like we're all pushed to mobile (if you're not on mobile, you're out of touch!) and when I look at the market, it gives me the willies. I don't think the Google Play Store is doing any better in that regard either. Worse, I don't have the foggiest idea of how to correct the problem, not even one that would take Herculean effort from either company to employ.
If I'm reading the article correctly, the information that says that ads in the Facebook style are far more effective than Google's comes from...a study by Facebook. Gee, that seems totally unbiased and could in no way be slanted by them to help them convince potential advertisers to sign up. All of this seems very bizarre after reading -- for years -- about how the Facebook ad model is so deeply flawed.
I'll admit that I don't use any of those apps, so I can't say -- I would have assumed that they would open the default browsers of the system -- but maybe they do it in-app.
That said, I'd expect the big guys like Twitter or Facebook to upgrade to the newer component for that very reason -- someone gets hacked the user experience will fault Twitter or Facebook (and this case, with some good cause). Still, I hadn't thought of those cases, so maybe that does make this more dangerous than I thought!
Also a point that gets largely glossed over is that this only affects apps that use Webview as a widget -- browser apps like Chrome or Opera aren't affected because they've updated themselves to use Chromium (or something else). This may affect 60% of Android users, but what percentage of those are using the browser inside an app to visit random sketchy websites? I'm guessing the actual user base at risk is quite small.
The way this is reported it sounds like if you use Chrome on anything south of 4.4, you're IN GRAVE MORTAL DANGER OF TEH HACKZ.
I actually heard some good things about it. Not 'This is the End' good, but not far off. I think the problem is that it would entirely disrupt the narrative the poster or writer is trying to convey if The Interview is anything but awful tripe. I doubt it will be winning any Oscars, but I've heard nothing from people who've actually see that suggests that its worse than decent, and it might even be pretty good.
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I think it's logical that, given what an iPhone costs, they are slowly moving to model names that sound like they should be attached high end German cars.
I was going to post the same thing. I doubt any Canadian who has a cell phone will be surprised by this news. I might be a little surprised that there isn't some other country whose telecoms are squeezing their customers harder, but I think most of us would have assumed we were top five at least before this study came out.
I'm a third-party Illustrator developer and I can say that the move to a subscription model is a bit of a pain for us. We have a lot of users who won't budge from CS6 as a result. This really ties a support anchor around our neck.
That said, knowing a number of people at Adobe I can safely tell you that this wasn't purely a "let's lock people" decision. I'm sure they're happy with that as a by-product, but a big part of the of the reason they went this way was their biggest customers requested it.
You might ask: requested it? Sure. If you're a big company and you have, say, 100 seats of Illustrator, but you only upgrade every two years, you have a major problem. You need $100k to do your upgrade, but you only use it on alternating years. If you don't spend that $100k in one year, your accounting department won't give it to you the year after. Corporate account is *really* stupid that way. Apparently they got a lot of feedback from their corporate users that a subscription model would be ideal: they wouldn't have to worry about big jumps in upgrades (every other version) and it would smooth out their expenses.
Now, could you have worked out some way to let them do that while also letting someone own it? Maybe, but once you build the subscription model code, I imagine they decided supporting both methods was stupid. And again, as others have pointed out, they priced the subscription so if you were a regular upgrader, you're saving money. If you weren't, it will be pricier, but why should Adobe bend over backwards to make that person's life easier? If you skipped every other upgrade, it's a wash in terms of cost.
What the article fails to mention is that they also added a toggle to turn off autoplay.
So, yeah, the feature is stupid, but you can turn it off if it offends you.
Source: http://www.androidpolice.com/2...
This is where if he had a reliable AI that could do the watching, it'd be faster *and* it wouldn't screw up the hapless people who currently have to watch it.
That said, I worry that watching snuff films and porn was why Skynet decided to nuke all the humans.
If the results are going to other people ("a range of stakeholders", which includes Congress) the information is there for Trump if he wants it. By having it delivered to him before he leaves office, that puts a timetable on it. Otherwise it's "Hey, go do this thing for me. Also, I'm out of here", which in my experience results in nothing happening.
I spent about two months trying to figure out how to tell the suggestion service on Android TV that I was not interested in his crap. I still don't know how he got into my rotation and I'm still not sure why he was finally removed. But it's good to know that CNN is going to inflict him on a whole generation; I feel like my pain should be shared.
I can see some interesting use cases for that TouchBar, but dear God, when that Photoshop lady was demonstrating using the mousepad & TouchBar at the same time, I cringed. I mimicked it on my keyboard in front of me and my wrists cried out in pain -- I can't imagine how it'd be if the keyboard was in my lap (i.e. on a laptop).
It's funny, my wife & I were talking about that the other day. Her cousin's kid can't do multiplication to save her life and neither of us could fathom why they dropped the multiplication table approach. Great, calculators are useful, but if you don't have one, you can't even *do* long-form multiplication if you don't have the Ten Times Table memorized. We agreed that whatever the hell the schools did, our kids are going to know their goddamn multiplication tables.
My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and over the last four years there's been a push to 'play based learning', presumably resulting from the same kind of research mentioned in the article.
By and large it seems fine, though it doesn't alleviate some of the problems they mention; specifically my wife still feels the pressure to move through the curriculum, but it's a little less clear how. Part of the 'learning through play' initiative also pushes heavily on 'self guided learning', and while all of this seems great, there's not a lot of guidance given on how to execute. I think most of us would agree that it's better if the student is interested & wants to learn the subject, but there's no real help about what to do if the student /isn't/ interested. Presumably the teacher just forces the kid to learn what has to be learned, but all the material provided leans heavily on instructing teachers not to do that.
At any rate, this is mostly just typical of governments adopting something and not thinking through how to implement fully. Still, the impression I get from my wife & her colleagues is that the ideas are good (play-based learning) but it'd have been nice if there was better instruction on how to follow through.
You realize that was debunked, right?
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1...
I mean, it's great because it fits the assumed narrative, but there's actually no evidence to back up the claim.
That doesn't apply to this Revolv thing though; I have no idea what the hell they're thinking here at all.
The Microsoft one is pretty close, so that didn't bother me. The Apple one did, because it was basically slapping me in the face with 101%. All I could think was "Sheesh, even in a gender split percentage, Apple just has to come out on top!" ;)
This is exactly what I suspected. Thanks!
Fair enough, though every time this is mentioned on the news I can't help but wonder if this wasn't standard practice for the last few Secretaries of State. Do we actually *know* this is unusual? I mean, I know the Fox anchors have an orgasm every time they can talk about this, but I'd feel better knowing that this really was unusual. I honestly have no idea, and I'm suspicious only because it wouldn't be the first time political opponents made a mountain out of a mole hill.
They offer it for free to news and human right & election monitoring websites for free. I wouldn't be surprised if down the road, anyone else could buy the service. That's where they'd make money.
I would be bummed b the wireless charging removal except that its so terrible relative to the USB-C charging. The latter has quick charge: 4 hours of life in 10 minutes, and in general, is just way, way faster to charge. Wireless is nice, but it's always super sloooooooow.
Someday there'll be QuckCharge wireless, and I'll be chomping at the bit. But with USB-C (no more mangling of ports!) I really don't care about wireless anymore.
It's the GSL -- Guideline Support Library. It's header-only, nothing to link against, and it's being kept small to make it easy for it to be cleared for use.
A fair point. Plus, one has to consider that if harming AM was their primary aim here, releasing the data is bad, but releasing a subset of the data that demonstrates that kind of male-to-female ratio is perhaps far worse (for AM). If the ratio was 10:1, they're providing a fair service and just not having much luck attracting women; look at all those scumbags who are trying to cheat on their wives! If the ratio is 8000:1 though, look at all those scumbags running the site who are cheating people out of money! If you wanted to put a nail in their coffin, this is a great way to do it -- out the men, embarrass them, give them call to sue AM. Then doubly embarrass them as chumps; surely that'll push a few fence-sitters over the edge.
It does make me wonder. The only way we could verify this is if a bunch of women who had accounts looked themselves up, didn't find themselves, and then self-reported. So we may never know either way on this.
Milkshake would have been more fun, if only for the image of an Android filled with chocolatey goodness and a pair of straws for antennae.
I think the 47% you're thinking of is sales last quarter or the North American breakdown. I remember seeing the 47% vs 46% cited, but only recently, and I remember it was not the overall figure. Worldwide, Android is sitting at something like 76.6% (it dropped 2% after the iPhone 6, and that translated into a 2% jump for Apple to 19.7%). The mobile profit numbers are inverted and wider though ;)
Beyond that, I agree with the rest of your post. I think one of the points the article was trying to make though was that standing out is difficult. Even if you make a quality app, one that most people would be willing to pay a reasonable amount, it lost in the sea of crap. Which goes back in part to your point about the knock-offs -- they're getting as much prominence as you, and they're cheaper, so why wouldn't someone try that first?
It seems clear that everyone would benefit from a system that pushed quality to the top of the search list, but so far no one has figured out a way to make that happen reliably.
At least in the fourth article, the one posted. I read the first three and found them to be largely unconvincing. I think you can like the flat look or not, like Material Design (barely mentioned, but brought up a few times) or not, and that's cool. But one of the main thrusts of his argument in the first three articles was that the defense of these designs was riddled with 'artspeak', a nonsense language used to dissuade criticism. I don't dispute it; I like Material Design (Android user here) but having watched the Material Design sessions from I/O 2014, I definitely got annoyed at all the 'artspeak' going on from the lead guy at Google (Duarte I think his name is). What's funny is that what rubbed me the wrong way about him was how 'Apple-ish' he sounded, so go figure.
But back to the first three articles -- they seemed riddled with a different kind of 'artspeak'. Churlishing comparing the simplish people imagery from Google with Children's books and comparing Apple's design to the child who can paint like Pollock didn't feel particularly high-brow.
Still, the over-arching point that I felt was useful was that criticism is not well-received at Apple (or Google from the sounds of it). That's a point worth dwelling on, especially since Apple in particular has the reputation of having the 'zealots' come out in force whenever anyone says anything ill of Apple. It was quite interesting to hear in the fourth article that -- unless I misunderstood it? -- there's someone at Apple whose job is to rile up the crazies when they get wind of that kind of thing on the interwebz.
But ultimately, the discussion about the problems of the App Store is more interesting. The 'race to the bottom' is something anyone with half a brain can see, and anyone who's a developer looks at that and must feel some gnawing fear. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like we're all pushed to mobile (if you're not on mobile, you're out of touch!) and when I look at the market, it gives me the willies. I don't think the Google Play Store is doing any better in that regard either. Worse, I don't have the foggiest idea of how to correct the problem, not even one that would take Herculean effort from either company to employ.
If I'm reading the article correctly, the information that says that ads in the Facebook style are far more effective than Google's comes from...a study by Facebook. Gee, that seems totally unbiased and could in no way be slanted by them to help them convince potential advertisers to sign up. All of this seems very bizarre after reading -- for years -- about how the Facebook ad model is so deeply flawed.
I'll admit that I don't use any of those apps, so I can't say -- I would have assumed that they would open the default browsers of the system -- but maybe they do it in-app.
That said, I'd expect the big guys like Twitter or Facebook to upgrade to the newer component for that very reason -- someone gets hacked the user experience will fault Twitter or Facebook (and this case, with some good cause). Still, I hadn't thought of those cases, so maybe that does make this more dangerous than I thought!
Also a point that gets largely glossed over is that this only affects apps that use Webview as a widget -- browser apps like Chrome or Opera aren't affected because they've updated themselves to use Chromium (or something else). This may affect 60% of Android users, but what percentage of those are using the browser inside an app to visit random sketchy websites? I'm guessing the actual user base at risk is quite small.
The way this is reported it sounds like if you use Chrome on anything south of 4.4, you're IN GRAVE MORTAL DANGER OF TEH HACKZ.
I actually heard some good things about it. Not 'This is the End' good, but not far off. I think the problem is that it would entirely disrupt the narrative the poster or writer is trying to convey if The Interview is anything but awful tripe. I doubt it will be winning any Oscars, but I've heard nothing from people who've actually see that suggests that its worse than decent, and it might even be pretty good.