I've been trying to get rid of Google for years, but gmail and google maps (especially via Waze) are the most valuable things in Google's portfolio. Replacing Google search with Duck Duck Go was painless. But Google's map product is the best one on the market.
Alternatives:
Apple Maps -- not bad really, but the estimates are too conservative, and the routes aren't always optimal, and the traffic is often out of date HERE Maps -- formerly Nokia HERE, these offer offline navigation. Traffic is optional.I am not sure if it does voice or not.
Are there others? I don't know. I use Waze mostly for the police identification (not that I even drive fast anymore, but I think it's fun to screw the opportunists trying to make money off people who just want to get home).
I was on the $40/month DirecTV now with 105 channels. It went up to $65 a month which was too much for me. Why can't we do a cafeteria plan? Give me ABC, CBS, NBC, HGTV, ESPN, and that's it. I don't want anything else. I don't even need DVR capability, I just need my login to the tv provider to work to OAuth into the various channel apps so I can do their shows on demand.
If you make the private market illegal and let the government run everything, you are back to a monopoly with all the abuse an inefficiency that comes with it.
Have you not seen our healthcare system? It's a total shit show. I paid over $12k last year in insurance for my family, and this year the coverage is worse for more money, just like it is every year. Our system really couldn't be more horrible. People die all the time because they can't afford to get sick.
I would say Google is the only Monopoly in the list. Facebook is barely even useful and people are leaving it in droves (20 million last month I read). Google though is the only meaningful game in town for search. Nobody else has any marketshare.
I'm not arguing for Google to be broken up (I dont think it would accomplish anything) but they do have a monopoly on search.
He threatened the life of the director's wife. If I had the director's connections then this guy and everyone he ever met would just disappear off the face of the earth without a trace.
AdoptOpenJDK may be a better bet unless you want to update your JDK version every six months, or continue with an unpatched version. Oracle OpenJDK version 11 will only receive updates until version 12 is out. The commercial Oracle JDK version, being LTS, will receive them for a lot longer than that.
With all the security vulnerabilities we update a lot more often than twice a year as it is, but that's a valid point for people who aren't as plugged into that.
Java's been dead on the desktop forever. Oracle isn't doing it any favors either. But OpenJDK is alive and well, and Spring and spring cloud are very popular, performant, scalable tools that we use every day. Yes, we're dabbling in Node for purpose-built microservices more and more, but Java has always been and will continue to be a good choice for many server-side projects.
Not really. Even subscribing to 4 of the current players is STILL less than a cable bill.
Netflix $10.99 pe month
The thing is, many of us gave up the cable bill years ago. My current costs are: DirecTV NOW: $40 and Netflix $12. I also get Prime Video for free with my Prime subscription (doesn't factor into buying it at all, but we watch it). I'm really debating dropping DTVNow because I don't think we get $40/month value from it. I'm never going to pay $100+ a month for TV again. I can entertain myself with YouTube or video games, or social media, or just goofing around on reddit. I can't imagine I am the only one who feels that paying $1200+ a year for TV is not a good use of my money.
When I was a kid, Sears was a cool store that sold Craftsman tools (most of my tools still are), and had a candy counter that was the only place to get Swedish Fish and chocolate covered orange candy.
Now it will be "back in my day there was a store called Sears..."
Reading the comments, there are clearly a large group of people who loved their headphone jacks. I was never one of them. I always got the cords tangled, and I found the whole process of plugging and unplugging and managing the wad of cord in my pocket annoying. I'd bought some Bluetooth headphones long before the headphone jack left the iPhone line. I got some over-ear ones from Amazon for using in bed at night. I bought some Anker BT earbuds for the gym also. I liked them for the most part, but keeping them charged was annoying.
Recently though my wife bought me some AirPods. Honestly, they're what wireless headphones should be. The case charges them, they automatically pair and activate when you stick them in your ears, and they deactivate when you take them out. It even pauses the music/podcast when you remove them. I know it's cool to base Apple these days but this is a great product that shows you how it could be better than what came before.
I think the big issue is most people, like me, thought all Bluetooth headphones were basically the same thing. They aren't.
Plus we need a viable third OS. KaiOS looks promising, but it needs to be on flagship phones.
I don't care about notches or headphone jacks, at all. They're both fine. I don't want another ecosystem either, aside from competition moving my preferred platform forward through necessity.
The simple truth for me is that the iPhone XS isn't a big improvement over the X (I have both at my desk at work), and the Pixel 3 isn't a big improvement over the Pixel 2 (I have both at my desk at work).
The changes are so incremental now that it's hard to be excited about what the new one gets you. I plan on keeping my current phone for a few years in hope of something compelling. More incremental improvements just aren't going to keep me on an annual upgrade cycle.
actually it's not. StackOverflow stats already show it being quite popular. I've been using it for about 6 months now and it's really good. And no it's not a cheap rip-off because Flutter is NOT HTML5/JS but native apps. And Dart is really easy to use.
The interesting part here is the statement that flutter produces "native apps". I think that's true in the sense that the code is compiled rather than interpreted, but it's false in that none of the UI widgets are the "native" ones provided by Apple.
I've used Phonegap, Cordova, Corona, djinni, Xamarin, Appcelerator Titanium, Ionic, Sencha Touch, and React Native (and probably some others). All of them suffer in different degrees from the same thing. For most of them, they're using pseudo-native UI that looks like native until you use it, then you can tell it's painting widgets on a canvas or in a web view that just simulate the native ones. In a couple of cases (Xamarin, React Native), they do cross compile to native widgets, but you still end up creating bindings and bridges for every incremental release that adds something while you wait for the framework to catch up.
Honestly, if I were seriously going to develop a cross-platform app today (and I do), I'd either go all native, or else write the core business logic in C++ and create bindings to a native UI. We've seen this work in the market (Dropbox), as long as your development team can do C++ well enough.
Apple added Duck Duck Go as one of the built-in search engines. I've been using it for over a year instead of Google. It works well enough and they don't set any tracking cookies. I'd recommend everyone switch to that.
Honestly. every other smartphone on the market uses Google too. Apple is just always held to some high standard that is impossible to meet.
The battery in modern smartphones isn't soldered in. Not on iPhones, or Android or anything else. Glued maybe, but that's to save size and money, not to prevent people from being able to replace the battery. That's not at all iPhone specific though; every modern Android phone is in the same boat. Neither Samsung, Google, nor any others seem to offer user-replaceable batteries.
The market has spoken. People prefer thin light phones with bigger batteries over fat heavy ones with short battery lives that they can replace themselves.
Home of the nationalist, the white supremacist, the flat-earther, the fascist, the religious zealot, and the neo-nazi. These are some really awesome people and we all need to hear what they have to say....
The reason that iOS has an upgrade rate that's 10x that of Android is because Apple has conditioned its users to constantly upgrade their OS. My wife upgrades her iPhone without knowing or caring what's in the update. It's always something that makes her phone better in her mind. The only people who care about CVEs are security researchers and extreme geeks like me.
If you say "iOS 11.4.1 fixed CVE-2018-4293 which allowed cookies to persist unexpectedly in CFNetwork calls" to 99.99% of Apple's customers, the only word in that sentence that the might understand is cookies, and their take is "cookies are bad". Putting this in the patch notes doesn't mean anything to regular humans, and it shouldn't.
People should be able to trust that their device manufacturer will keep their phone safe. Apple is the only phone manufacturer (except maybe Google) that does this, and they're the only one people trust to do so.
On the other hand, knowingly having compromised servers like that would be a PR nightmare, so Apple and Amazon would also have an incentive to say 'everything is fine'. That is what makes stories like this so frustrating... unless the FBI chimes in, everyone is saying pretty much what you would expect to say regardless of if the story is accurate or not.
What the hell makes you think that just because we hate president Dumpsterfire that anyone likes the Democrats a ton better? They're all awful, which is how we got this orange orangutan in the first place.
I think most of us would be thrilled with a "Fire them all" button where we could start over with all new people. The corrupt bastards from my state are some of the worst. I vote against them every 2 years, and nothing ever comes of it.
When I was in high school, we were taught typing, and there was this assumption that everyone should learn MS Word and MS Excel. I never understood why these tools would be useful, and moreso didn't know why anyone would ever need training to use them anyway.
This seems like the same thing to me. People who don't know what coding is or accomplishes assume that because they keep hearing that coding is a critical path to the future that all kids will need it. They won't. There's a future where AI will handle the mundane task of translating human desire into code, but that future will be written by the programmers of today. The programmers of tomorrow likely won't be using the tools we use today, and very likely will need a different skillset.
My oldest son has gone to university dual majoring in math and physics. He knows enough python to run interesting calculations when he needs them, but it's not his primary focus or interest. I think a solid foundation in math and science will prepare him for whatever's next. I don't think that what's next is what was next 20 years ago though.
This seems pretty obvious. A Chromebook is woefully inadequate to do what I use my work computer for on a daily basis. It's the same reason I didn't replace my $3000 MBP with an iPad.
If I were to use my Mac purely for running Safari or Chrome in full screen mode, I suspect I'd see a lot less confusing stuff that way too.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been trying to get rid of Google for years, but gmail and google maps (especially via Waze) are the most valuable things in Google's portfolio. Replacing Google search with Duck Duck Go was painless. But Google's map product is the best one on the market.
Alternatives:
Apple Maps -- not bad really, but the estimates are too conservative, and the routes aren't always optimal, and the traffic is often out of date
HERE Maps -- formerly Nokia HERE, these offer offline navigation. Traffic is optional.I am not sure if it does voice or not.
Are there others? I don't know. I use Waze mostly for the police identification (not that I even drive fast anymore, but I think it's fun to screw the opportunists trying to make money off people who just want to get home).
I was on the $40/month DirecTV now with 105 channels. It went up to $65 a month which was too much for me. Why can't we do a cafeteria plan? Give me ABC, CBS, NBC, HGTV, ESPN, and that's it. I don't want anything else. I don't even need DVR capability, I just need my login to the tv provider to work to OAuth into the various channel apps so I can do their shows on demand.
If you make the private market illegal and let the government run everything, you are back to a monopoly with all the abuse an inefficiency that comes with it.
Have you not seen our healthcare system? It's a total shit show. I paid over $12k last year in insurance for my family, and this year the coverage is worse for more money, just like it is every year. Our system really couldn't be more horrible. People die all the time because they can't afford to get sick.
I wonder how much Trump's camp had to pay her to do something this stupid?
Pandering to the crazy fringe left will not win her an election.
Um, Trump won the election pandering to the crazy fringe. He's still doing it on a daily basis.
I would say Google is the only Monopoly in the list. Facebook is barely even useful and people are leaving it in droves (20 million last month I read). Google though is the only meaningful game in town for search. Nobody else has any marketshare.
I'm not arguing for Google to be broken up (I dont think it would accomplish anything) but they do have a monopoly on search.
He threatened the life of the director's wife. If I had the director's connections then this guy and everyone he ever met would just disappear off the face of the earth without a trace.
AdoptOpenJDK may be a better bet unless you want to update your JDK version every six months, or continue with an unpatched version. Oracle OpenJDK version 11 will only receive updates until version 12 is out. The commercial Oracle JDK version, being LTS, will receive them for a lot longer than that.
With all the security vulnerabilities we update a lot more often than twice a year as it is, but that's a valid point for people who aren't as plugged into that.
That seems to be the only "dead" part of Java, the idea that you can actually use it without Oracle screwing you over.
We've moved to OpenJDK for all production systems, and that sidesteps Oracle entirely.
Java's been dead on the desktop forever. Oracle isn't doing it any favors either. But OpenJDK is alive and well, and Spring and spring cloud are very popular, performant, scalable tools that we use every day. Yes, we're dabbling in Node for purpose-built microservices more and more, but Java has always been and will continue to be a good choice for many server-side projects.
Not really. Even subscribing to 4 of the current players is STILL less than a cable bill.
Netflix $10.99 pe month
The thing is, many of us gave up the cable bill years ago. My current costs are: DirecTV NOW: $40 and Netflix $12. I also get Prime Video for free with my Prime subscription (doesn't factor into buying it at all, but we watch it). I'm really debating dropping DTVNow because I don't think we get $40/month value from it. I'm never going to pay $100+ a month for TV again. I can entertain myself with YouTube or video games, or social media, or just goofing around on reddit. I can't imagine I am the only one who feels that paying $1200+ a year for TV is not a good use of my money.
When I was a kid, Sears was a cool store that sold Craftsman tools (most of my tools still are), and had a candy counter that was the only place to get Swedish Fish and chocolate covered orange candy.
Now it will be "back in my day there was a store called Sears..."
Reading the comments, there are clearly a large group of people who loved their headphone jacks. I was never one of them. I always got the cords tangled, and I found the whole process of plugging and unplugging and managing the wad of cord in my pocket annoying. I'd bought some Bluetooth headphones long before the headphone jack left the iPhone line. I got some over-ear ones from Amazon for using in bed at night. I bought some Anker BT earbuds for the gym also. I liked them for the most part, but keeping them charged was annoying.
Recently though my wife bought me some AirPods. Honestly, they're what wireless headphones should be. The case charges them, they automatically pair and activate when you stick them in your ears, and they deactivate when you take them out. It even pauses the music/podcast when you remove them. I know it's cool to base Apple these days but this is a great product that shows you how it could be better than what came before.
I think the big issue is most people, like me, thought all Bluetooth headphones were basically the same thing. They aren't.
Plus we need a viable third OS. KaiOS looks promising, but it needs to be on flagship phones.
I don't care about notches or headphone jacks, at all. They're both fine. I don't want another ecosystem either, aside from competition moving my preferred platform forward through necessity.
The simple truth for me is that the iPhone XS isn't a big improvement over the X (I have both at my desk at work), and the Pixel 3 isn't a big improvement over the Pixel 2 (I have both at my desk at work).
The changes are so incremental now that it's hard to be excited about what the new one gets you. I plan on keeping my current phone for a few years in hope of something compelling. More incremental improvements just aren't going to keep me on an annual upgrade cycle.
actually it's not. StackOverflow stats already show it being quite popular. I've been using it for about 6 months now and it's really good. And no it's not a cheap rip-off because Flutter is NOT HTML5/JS but native apps. And Dart is really easy to use.
The interesting part here is the statement that flutter produces "native apps". I think that's true in the sense that the code is compiled rather than interpreted, but it's false in that none of the UI widgets are the "native" ones provided by Apple.
I've used Phonegap, Cordova, Corona, djinni, Xamarin, Appcelerator Titanium, Ionic, Sencha Touch, and React Native (and probably some others). All of them suffer in different degrees from the same thing. For most of them, they're using pseudo-native UI that looks like native until you use it, then you can tell it's painting widgets on a canvas or in a web view that just simulate the native ones. In a couple of cases (Xamarin, React Native), they do cross compile to native widgets, but you still end up creating bindings and bridges for every incremental release that adds something while you wait for the framework to catch up.
Honestly, if I were seriously going to develop a cross-platform app today (and I do), I'd either go all native, or else write the core business logic in C++ and create bindings to a native UI. We've seen this work in the market (Dropbox), as long as your development team can do C++ well enough.
Anyone know how operating a cashless business is legal by refusing Legal Tender?
Isn't the entire point to have a common / ubiquitous currency that is available to ALL citizens?
Can I use cash to buy from Amazon?
Apple added Duck Duck Go as one of the built-in search engines. I've been using it for over a year instead of Google. It works well enough and they don't set any tracking cookies. I'd recommend everyone switch to that.
Honestly. every other smartphone on the market uses Google too. Apple is just always held to some high standard that is impossible to meet.
The battery in modern smartphones isn't soldered in. Not on iPhones, or Android or anything else. Glued maybe, but that's to save size and money, not to prevent people from being able to replace the battery. That's not at all iPhone specific though; every modern Android phone is in the same boat. Neither Samsung, Google, nor any others seem to offer user-replaceable batteries.
The market has spoken. People prefer thin light phones with bigger batteries over fat heavy ones with short battery lives that they can replace themselves.
a.k.a. liars and idiots.
Home of the nationalist, the white supremacist, the flat-earther, the fascist, the religious zealot, and the neo-nazi. These are some really awesome people and we all need to hear what they have to say....
However, White House officials believe tech workers are willing to "put politics aside."
Nope. No way in hell I'd do anything to support that evil bastard or anything in his agenda, whether it's good or bad.
The reason that iOS has an upgrade rate that's 10x that of Android is because Apple has conditioned its users to constantly upgrade their OS. My wife upgrades her iPhone without knowing or caring what's in the update. It's always something that makes her phone better in her mind. The only people who care about CVEs are security researchers and extreme geeks like me.
If you say "iOS 11.4.1 fixed CVE-2018-4293 which allowed cookies to persist unexpectedly in CFNetwork calls" to 99.99% of Apple's customers, the only word in that sentence that the might understand is cookies, and their take is "cookies are bad". Putting this in the patch notes doesn't mean anything to regular humans, and it shouldn't.
People should be able to trust that their device manufacturer will keep their phone safe. Apple is the only phone manufacturer (except maybe Google) that does this, and they're the only one people trust to do so.
On the other hand, knowingly having compromised servers like that would be a PR nightmare, so Apple and Amazon would also have an incentive to say 'everything is fine'. That is what makes stories like this so frustrating... unless the FBI chimes in, everyone is saying pretty much what you would expect to say regardless of if the story is accurate or not.
DHS already chimed in.
https://news.softpedia.com/new...
What the hell makes you think that just because we hate president Dumpsterfire that anyone likes the Democrats a ton better? They're all awful, which is how we got this orange orangutan in the first place.
I think most of us would be thrilled with a "Fire them all" button where we could start over with all new people. The corrupt bastards from my state are some of the worst. I vote against them every 2 years, and nothing ever comes of it.
I want in on that lawsuit. Fucking nazi
When I was in high school, we were taught typing, and there was this assumption that everyone should learn MS Word and MS Excel. I never understood why these tools would be useful, and moreso didn't know why anyone would ever need training to use them anyway.
This seems like the same thing to me. People who don't know what coding is or accomplishes assume that because they keep hearing that coding is a critical path to the future that all kids will need it. They won't. There's a future where AI will handle the mundane task of translating human desire into code, but that future will be written by the programmers of today. The programmers of tomorrow likely won't be using the tools we use today, and very likely will need a different skillset.
My oldest son has gone to university dual majoring in math and physics. He knows enough python to run interesting calculations when he needs them, but it's not his primary focus or interest. I think a solid foundation in math and science will prepare him for whatever's next. I don't think that what's next is what was next 20 years ago though.
If I were to use my Mac purely for running Safari or Chrome in full screen mode, I suspect I'd see a lot less confusing stuff that way too.