The number of people using the kiosks is easily dwarfed by the number of people affected by their advertising purpose -- to work as bluetooth and wifi beacons to provide location data for anyone carrying a cellphone within their vicinity.
What the open web really needs to strong competition among web browsers. If you'd like to support the "open web", the best thing you can do is stop using Chrome.
Benchmarks for iPhones always talk about "real world performance", but rarely factor in that software can't run at full-speed on an iPhone for very long before thermal management kicks in and throttles the speeds down. This fact alone makes comparisons to laptop and desktop CPUs virtually worthless.
The problem with AirPower is that it's not a "simple charging mat". It was introduced as being able to charge multiple devices, with different power requirements, in any alignment on it. No one has done that. Apparently it's extremely difficult to build.
This isn't a problem related to thinness. This is a problem related to fast-charging an iPhone, while slow-charging a headphone case, side-by-side.
They're not going to stop fiddling, because the long-term goal is to eliminate URLs from the interface. They want you to do Google searches for websites instead of entering some "confusing" direct address. Hiding more parts of the URL is another gradual step towards making the address bar into a pure Google search bar. Average-Joe user will see no harm in this and probably even think it's a good idea.
I've been using a $20 QC 3.0 wireless charging stand from Amazon with my iPhone X, and it charges slower than the tiny USB adapter included with my phone, and it makes my phone fairly hot. (So hot my phone throttles the CPU down and on-screen animations become jerky.)
While it's definitely convenient, that's mostly because my phone stands upright while charging. Between slow-charing and a hot phone, it's not something I'd have been happy to pay a premium for. Plus, I've often wondered how the extra heat during charging could be affecting the long-term battery life...
Perhaps you also think that Google shouldn't display the top level domain as well? By this logic, the top level domain is also a "trivial" part of the URL. There is clearly no discernible difference between whitehouse.gov and whitehouse.com, right? There should be no problem, also, if Chrome shows just, "whitehouse" in the URL, because users will figure that out.
I actually think this is the end-game for Google. The URL bar will just show 'whitehouse', and it will represent the Google search term you should use to get to a website. They'll argue that since they vet the websites, searching will be the "safest way" to get to the whitehouse.gov.
All of their decisions around "making URLs easier", make sense if you consider they are really trying to replace URLs with search terms.
I think the reasoning behind the change goes like this:
A user visits a website via a link. They enjoy the website, so they look at the address bar and remember the website name. When they later type the website into they address bar, they will leave off the 'www', which will trigger a Google search instead of loading the website directly.
It seems like one obvious reason is that a lot of Fremium games contain paid in-game resources and their whole business model would be ruined by save game editing.
It seems pretty likely that non-Apple apps have such poor sales, that it's simply not that hard to climb the charts. The Mac App Store numbers look nothing like the iOS App Store numbers.
It's pretty ironic that a major "advantage" of the Mac App Store is app-sandboxing, but by requiring it, many good apps can't function properly (ie. Photoshop, Office and Coda variety apps), and so they shun the App Store and take the informed Mac audience with them. This leaves the less-informed Mac audience trusting that the App Store represents the sum of Mac apps, and downloading crippled apps that send their personal info off to China.
I like wireless headphones on my iPhone, but almost never used them with my Mac. Latency (lag) is a real problem for anything that requires audio to be synchronized with the screen. QuickTime solves this for video playback by slightly delaying the start of videos to sync with your headphones, but it only works for simple playback. Good luck trying to edit video when the audio never stays synced.
What are you talking about? Arsâ(TM) article is based on an article in The NY Times that uncovered the relevant documentation that Uberâ(TM)s cars are performing badly.
The driver might have been looking at or using a display console for the self-driving software. In the Google/Waymo testing videos, thereâ(TM)s usually been the equivelant of a laptop with car data either on someoneâ(TM)s lap or in the front dash.
Imagine you're having a conversation with someone who likes make the converstion go fast by finishing other people's sentences for them. When they're about to say something that's classified, they stop themselves before saying something they shouldn't. Researchers figured out that if you ask them what they were just thinking about, they will actually tell you.
Honest question: What is incorrect about this? Apple has admitted that they slow down phones with bad batteries (which would include the iPhone 6s that *shipped* with bad batteries.) When asked about a slow phone, Apple Store employees do suggest buying a new one.
The Unicode normalization issues have been fixed. At least according to a post in July by the same blog that you are citing:
https://eclecticlight.co/2017/...
"Can't believe how much people just believe everything they read and are so blind to all the rampant agendizing going on to day."
You use "agenda" like it's a dirty word. An agenda doesn't have to be inherently bad. Rooting out corporate evil seems like a fine agenda for the media to me.
Yeah, but I want you to have a car that does. People are great at over-estimating their abilities, especially in circumstances they've never personally encountered. And even if under normal circumstances you'd be fine, that day you didn't get any sleep because of a fight with your spouse, your reaction time isn't going to be what it needs to be. Although I'm sure you'd also have the self-restraint to not drive any day you were sluggish.
Regardless, I expect your insurance company is going to have some thoughts about you opting out of cars with auto-braking features.
My theory is that the headphones are ready, but Apple is worried that when people realize Bluetooth headphones are fundamentally unreliable, it will hurt iPhone 7 sales. Better to wait until further into the holiday shopping season and prevent any bad press or YouTube videos from impacting phone sales, then drop the headphones closer to the holidays so bad reviews haven't had time to sink into the public consciousness to hurt the gift-giving headphone sales.
It's not that I think these are going to be bad headphones, as much as Bluetooth headphones just don't work a lot of places and a lot of people are going to be disappointed.
Just tried weather on my watch (with WatchOS 3) and as I remembered: The delay is still there. My guess is that you probably live in a climate where the weather doesn't change every few hours so you don't see it.
My point is: The "main problem" is not that some people don't understand what it can do, it's that it just doesn't work for them. Glad it works for you.
I'd say the main problem with the watch is that people don't know what it does nor how it can streamline the use of their smartphones or integrate into their activities.
Maybe for some people, but not others and I honestly doubt it's the "main problem". I've owned an Apple Watch since the first week. I wore it for a few months before it ended up in the electronic gadget junk drawer.
It doesn't integrate well into my life. It gets my arm caught on things,it traps water against my wrist every time I wash my hands, it requires I recharge it daily, carry an extra charger when I travel, etc.
I can't trust that it's up to date without waiting for it. Take weather for example: If you check the weather, it takes several seconds to update the and will show you stale info until it does. So even if it's faster to get to the weather on your watch (although for me it's not), you still have to wait several seconds to see if it'll change its mind about what's the weather will be.
Fitness tracking doesn't work well. To save battery life the heart monitor only activates sporadically during a workout, but I exercise in intervals, so in any given workout it'll activate a couple times during a rest-period which throws off all the stats it's collecting. On top of that, the Activity app has reset all of my stats several times. (Once randomly, once when I upgraded my phone and once when I updated the Apple Watch OS.)
Overall the Apple Watch is really cumbersome, expensive way to shave a couple seconds off checking the time, and for me the other features really just don't work well enough.
As I posted (with supporting links) in another comment: The reason EA is giving for his departure is he's responsible for their performance being about $100 million short of what they expected. A successful game launch like Skyrim (at 3.3 million copies) earned $450 million dollars, so if SimCity sold 1.1 million at launch and this was immediately followed by Amazon pulling the game from sale and even once it was back, doing things like temporarily discounting the game to $46 bucks.. then sales are likely bad enough that they're losing more than $100 million from where they expected to be on this one game alone.
SimCity is a really bad game and I certainly hope that heads will roll for ramming an unfinished, needlessly server dependent game into the fans eager hands just to try and make some numbers for the quarter... but is Riccitiello really leaving directly as a result of it? Yeah, there's the timing of it, but the reason EA gives for the departure is they're going to be about $100 million lower on their guidance than they expected. Could they really be $100 million short this quarter from SimCity?
So what are the numbers... SimCity sold 1.1 million copies at launch. For comparison the super-popular Skyrim had a $450 million dollar launch at 3.3 million copies. From that perspective, it certainly looks like SimCity really did make that dent... And considering SimCity 4 is still selling 10 years later, the money they're missing out on over the next 5 to 10 years could be ridiculous.
Sometimes I don't mind microtransactions, but they have power to ruin otherwise perfectly good game, and that's my major problem with them.
It's frequently harder to get more people to buy your product, than it is to get people already buying it to spend more. So soap companies put a little less detergent in the bottle and whiskey makers water the whiskey down a little more.
Slashdot Mirror
The number of people using the kiosks is easily dwarfed by the number of people affected by their advertising purpose -- to work as bluetooth and wifi beacons to provide location data for anyone carrying a cellphone within their vicinity.
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/08/linknyc-free-wifi-kiosks/
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/07/30/1826229/google-wi-fi-kiosks-in-new-york-promise-no-privacy-can-collect-anything
What the open web really needs to strong competition among web browsers. If you'd like to support the "open web", the best thing you can do is stop using Chrome.
Benchmarks for iPhones always talk about "real world performance", but rarely factor in that software can't run at full-speed on an iPhone for very long before thermal management kicks in and throttles the speeds down. This fact alone makes comparisons to laptop and desktop CPUs virtually worthless.
The problem with AirPower is that it's not a "simple charging mat". It was introduced as being able to charge multiple devices, with different power requirements, in any alignment on it. No one has done that. Apparently it's extremely difficult to build.
This isn't a problem related to thinness. This is a problem related to fast-charging an iPhone, while slow-charging a headphone case, side-by-side.
They're not going to stop fiddling, because the long-term goal is to eliminate URLs from the interface. They want you to do Google searches for websites instead of entering some "confusing" direct address. Hiding more parts of the URL is another gradual step towards making the address bar into a pure Google search bar. Average-Joe user will see no harm in this and probably even think it's a good idea.
I've been using a $20 QC 3.0 wireless charging stand from Amazon with my iPhone X, and it charges slower than the tiny USB adapter included with my phone, and it makes my phone fairly hot. (So hot my phone throttles the CPU down and on-screen animations become jerky.)
While it's definitely convenient, that's mostly because my phone stands upright while charging. Between slow-charing and a hot phone, it's not something I'd have been happy to pay a premium for. Plus, I've often wondered how the extra heat during charging could be affecting the long-term battery life...
I actually think this is the end-game for Google. The URL bar will just show 'whitehouse', and it will represent the Google search term you should use to get to a website. They'll argue that since they vet the websites, searching will be the "safest way" to get to the whitehouse.gov.
All of their decisions around "making URLs easier", make sense if you consider they are really trying to replace URLs with search terms.
I think the reasoning behind the change goes like this: A user visits a website via a link. They enjoy the website, so they look at the address bar and remember the website name. When they later type the website into they address bar, they will leave off the 'www', which will trigger a Google search instead of loading the website directly.
It seems like one obvious reason is that a lot of Fremium games contain paid in-game resources and their whole business model would be ruined by save game editing.
It seems pretty likely that non-Apple apps have such poor sales, that it's simply not that hard to climb the charts. The Mac App Store numbers look nothing like the iOS App Store numbers.
It's pretty ironic that a major "advantage" of the Mac App Store is app-sandboxing, but by requiring it, many good apps can't function properly (ie. Photoshop, Office and Coda variety apps), and so they shun the App Store and take the informed Mac audience with them. This leaves the less-informed Mac audience trusting that the App Store represents the sum of Mac apps, and downloading crippled apps that send their personal info off to China.
I like wireless headphones on my iPhone, but almost never used them with my Mac. Latency (lag) is a real problem for anything that requires audio to be synchronized with the screen. QuickTime solves this for video playback by slightly delaying the start of videos to sync with your headphones, but it only works for simple playback. Good luck trying to edit video when the audio never stays synced.
What are you talking about? Arsâ(TM) article is based on an article in The NY Times that uncovered the relevant documentation that Uberâ(TM)s cars are performing badly.
The driver might have been looking at or using a display console for the self-driving software. In the Google/Waymo testing videos, thereâ(TM)s usually been the equivelant of a laptop with car data either on someoneâ(TM)s lap or in the front dash.
Imagine you're having a conversation with someone who likes make the converstion go fast by finishing other people's sentences for them. When they're about to say something that's classified, they stop themselves before saying something they shouldn't. Researchers figured out that if you ask them what they were just thinking about, they will actually tell you.
Honest question: What is incorrect about this? Apple has admitted that they slow down phones with bad batteries (which would include the iPhone 6s that *shipped* with bad batteries.) When asked about a slow phone, Apple Store employees do suggest buying a new one.
The Unicode normalization issues have been fixed. At least according to a post in July by the same blog that you are citing: https://eclecticlight.co/2017/...
"Can't believe how much people just believe everything they read and are so blind to all the rampant agendizing going on to day." You use "agenda" like it's a dirty word. An agenda doesn't have to be inherently bad. Rooting out corporate evil seems like a fine agenda for the media to me.
Yeah, but I want you to have a car that does. People are great at over-estimating their abilities, especially in circumstances they've never personally encountered. And even if under normal circumstances you'd be fine, that day you didn't get any sleep because of a fight with your spouse, your reaction time isn't going to be what it needs to be. Although I'm sure you'd also have the self-restraint to not drive any day you were sluggish. Regardless, I expect your insurance company is going to have some thoughts about you opting out of cars with auto-braking features.
My theory is that the headphones are ready, but Apple is worried that when people realize Bluetooth headphones are fundamentally unreliable, it will hurt iPhone 7 sales. Better to wait until further into the holiday shopping season and prevent any bad press or YouTube videos from impacting phone sales, then drop the headphones closer to the holidays so bad reviews haven't had time to sink into the public consciousness to hurt the gift-giving headphone sales.
It's not that I think these are going to be bad headphones, as much as Bluetooth headphones just don't work a lot of places and a lot of people are going to be disappointed.
Just tried weather on my watch (with WatchOS 3) and as I remembered: The delay is still there. My guess is that you probably live in a climate where the weather doesn't change every few hours so you don't see it.
My point is: The "main problem" is not that some people don't understand what it can do, it's that it just doesn't work for them. Glad it works for you.
Maybe for some people, but not others and I honestly doubt it's the "main problem". I've owned an Apple Watch since the first week. I wore it for a few months before it ended up in the electronic gadget junk drawer.
It doesn't integrate well into my life. It gets my arm caught on things,it traps water against my wrist every time I wash my hands, it requires I recharge it daily, carry an extra charger when I travel, etc.
I can't trust that it's up to date without waiting for it. Take weather for example: If you check the weather, it takes several seconds to update the and will show you stale info until it does. So even if it's faster to get to the weather on your watch (although for me it's not), you still have to wait several seconds to see if it'll change its mind about what's the weather will be.
Fitness tracking doesn't work well. To save battery life the heart monitor only activates sporadically during a workout, but I exercise in intervals, so in any given workout it'll activate a couple times during a rest-period which throws off all the stats it's collecting. On top of that, the Activity app has reset all of my stats several times. (Once randomly, once when I upgraded my phone and once when I updated the Apple Watch OS.)
Overall the Apple Watch is really cumbersome, expensive way to shave a couple seconds off checking the time, and for me the other features really just don't work well enough.
As I posted (with supporting links) in another comment: The reason EA is giving for his departure is he's responsible for their performance being about $100 million short of what they expected. A successful game launch like Skyrim (at 3.3 million copies) earned $450 million dollars, so if SimCity sold 1.1 million at launch and this was immediately followed by Amazon pulling the game from sale and even once it was back, doing things like temporarily discounting the game to $46 bucks.. then sales are likely bad enough that they're losing more than $100 million from where they expected to be on this one game alone.
SimCity is a really bad game and I certainly hope that heads will roll for ramming an unfinished, needlessly server dependent game into the fans eager hands just to try and make some numbers for the quarter... but is Riccitiello really leaving directly as a result of it? Yeah, there's the timing of it, but the reason EA gives for the departure is they're going to be about $100 million lower on their guidance than they expected. Could they really be $100 million short this quarter from SimCity?
So what are the numbers... SimCity sold 1.1 million copies at launch. For comparison the super-popular Skyrim had a $450 million dollar launch at 3.3 million copies. From that perspective, it certainly looks like SimCity really did make that dent... And considering SimCity 4 is still selling 10 years later, the money they're missing out on over the next 5 to 10 years could be ridiculous.
It's frequently harder to get more people to buy your product, than it is to get people already buying it to spend more. So soap companies put a little less detergent in the bottle and whiskey makers water the whiskey down a little more.