If they're doing something sensible like combining an employee number (entered) plus a fingerprint or handprint/finger length measurement for authentication, this sounds like it could be resolved very easily - possibly with process changes, possibly just with documentation of what is/isn't collected and stored and for how long.
Datto makes some pretty nice stuff if you can get your customers to pay for it - hybrid onsite-offsite backup, with the ability to spin up a VM "in the cloud" with a VPN connection back to the in-office backup device so it looks like that server is actually still up and running in the office even if it's a bit slow.
I like that they're helping out in situations like this, though for most of what they can do you probably needed it up and running a week or two before the hurricane.
I've tried to track a few down with some success, but the only one I put much effort into was the one where I was getting the email confirmations and printable certificates for someone's continuing medical education courses to maintain their nursing credentials.
That one had a pretty uncommon name, and I ended up tracking down a phone number via an online publishing of their (small rural) church's member directory.
I can't help but wonder what's going to leach out of/off off all those roads that are starting to be made with recycled plastic and whether it'll be better or worse than what runs off of asphalt (also made from oil).
If you have something that needs a ton of electricity, you put it where the rates are low and likely to remain low. Based on May 2018 commercial rates I found, Texas has the third lowest commercial electric rates in the country, behind only Arkansas and Nevada. If Microsoft wants to get on the renewable energy bandwagon, Texas already has massive wind farms (probably 30,000 megawatts and close to 20% of the state's electrical production) and could also add solar in a lot of the state.
It's also a major enough business and residential player to be someplace where it makes sense to put a data center; Arkansas not so much.
My basic assumption for anything being OCR'd effectively free in the cloud through a software provider is that it's not safe. Could be sloppiness (as in this case), could be automated OCR+human verification.
While I actually do have a couple of Abbyy programs installed (FineScanner Pro and Business Card Reader Pro), I've never actually made serious use of them. On the other hand, I do use Microsoft's Office Lens program which provides much of the same capabilities - but provided under the Office 365 bundling and with a lot more resources devoted to security.
I used to have a couple more photo-to-scanned-document software packages as well, but I decided to dump anything like that from Russian companies some time back. Abbyy's presence is as much an oversight of "haven't cleaned in a while" as anything else.
The Pixel Qi screens were supposedly an attempt at something that could be similar to that, at least with some kind of a dual mode that would be readable in bright light in a monochrome(ish) display and usable as color as a normal display.
The company appears to be long gone, the domain has generic businessy content for feeding ads, and there's a link from Wikipedia to a small company in Georgia that may still do custom manufacture of those screens.
(rephrased slightly from my comment on the article)
A simple legislative solution to address some egregious property tax assessment appeals would be to mandate that when submitting a proposed valuation, the taxing body has the right to immediately purchase the property for some TBD multiplier of your submitted valuation. I suspect that multiplier should be in the 3-5x range.
Obviously there'd need to be reasonable allowances for time to move out, but the cost of moving should be covered by the multiplier.
If Apple wants to contend that a chunk of property is only worth $200, great! I'm sure the city can find $1000 to properly compensate them for that property and the cost of vacating it. Perhaps the city can find something more beneficial to do with that property that might provide more tax revenue.
In a market that's working without substantial surpluses, a small reduction in supply (as might be caused by a tariff going into effect) can have a highly magnified impact.
To take the extreme example, consider oxygen. On the surface, there's a substantial surplus. If you're deep underwater using scuba gear, a small reduction in supply may have a significant impact, one that you'd give huge amounts of money to alleviate if possible.
On a less silly note, imagine that you have one of many factories depending on receiving components coming from China, and that demand for those components has remained fairly predictable. Suddenly something happens to cause supply to shrink - a ship sinks, someone starts a trade war, a foreign competitor suddenly appears - and suddenly you and all of the other existing factories are in a bidding war for those components because otherwise you have to shut down. How much will each factory pay? They'll pay enough to keep their lines running, unless the cost goes so high that running the line doesn't make sense.
If you want to know more, the term is "Elasticity"
Are these new chips going to have all the same predictive execution and related issues? Did they have enough time to do any revamping? Or is this going to be the final generation that gets a big chunk of performance improvements crippled?
Attaching money is a little old-fashioned, but I suspect is still quite effective and a dime is about the only thing they could do.
Basically what they're paying for with that ("I can feel a coin through the envelope") dime is a bit more of your attention. If you open the envelope and glance at the materials inside rather than just throwing it in the trash unopened, the dime worked and was probably well worth it.
Amazon's biggest use to me these days is as a source for price-matching at local stores.
For expensive equipment I'm just as likely to order elsewhere (e.g. B&H or industry-specific sites), for cheap or commodity stuff it may already be cheaper locally or elsewhere online - and if it's not, there's a fair chance someplace local will price match to either Amazon or their own website if it has different pricing (e.g. Target, office supply places).
Basically if I need a thousand-dollar scanner or laptop I can be fairly sure what I'd get from Amazon won't be counterfeit, but I can also be pretty sure of getting competitive prices elsewhere. If I need a $10 (commodity something) then I have no faith in the authenticity of almost anything on Amazon.
Just tell people in-app on likely impacted devices "Your phone has power management that keeps VLC from playing in the background. Please ((go here)) and exempt it if you want to use background audio." Depending on how Android kills background processes it's probably also feasible to detect if this is happening and present that alert in that case - or I guess they can just continue blacklisting manufacturers as more and more of them do similar things to extend battery life. "VLC: The best background player you can have on your phone we haven't blacklisted yet."
Heck, is the power management they're talking about a Huawei thing or an Oreo thing?
On my phone (slightly older, so not yet on Oreo) I get a notification that "App X is consuming power in the background" and can kill it or ignore the warning. I can disable that power management on a per-app basis pretty easily - in settings I just type "power" in the search box and select the "Power-intensive apps" result. Within that, I have several options for how aggressive the phone will be on power saving, including a list of "Apps that will be closed after the screen is locked" and a separate list of "Power-intensive apps" that also shows why they're classified that way. Reasons I see seem to be limited to "High Location Frequency" and "Keep Awake" on my phone. Selecting any app gives me quite a bit more detail on its power use and control over whether to close it, etc.
What I like about my phone is that even though it's closing in on 2 years old I got the latest security patches for it just a few days ago and despite having shipped with Marshmallow (6) it got an OTA upgrade to Nougat (7) and is due for an upgrade to Oreo (8) likely within the next month (already released for some international models). I sure didn't get updates like that on my Samsung or HTC phones, nice as they might have been.
I've looked at the cord-cutting possibilities in the past, but what it really came down to was that for the same set of things that my wife watches now (including a lot of sports), I'd be paying close to the same amount (or more) for various subscriptions plus wasting time tracking down dodgy and unreliable live sports streams, all in the interest of saving what, $10-15 a month at most? Maybe? In a good month....
I can't provide an Amazon link for it today because when I try all I get is pictures of dogs telling me that something went wrong, but over the weekend I purchased https://www.meijer.com/product/home-improvement-auto/hardware/basic-hardware/adhesives/scotch-extreme-clear-4ft-rf6740/t1/t1-873/t2/t2-10042/t3/t3-588/t4/t4-1850/5114140318.uts
$13.99 at Meijer, and until Saturday was a BOGO50%off item - so 2 for $21. Amazon's best price for it was $14.99. I don't have links for another recent item, replacement shoelaces, but something that was about $2.50 in-store was listed for something like $7 on Amazon. Shipping would've been free, though! At least if I bought another $18-28 of items, I don't remember what the threshold is right now and Amazon's Dogs won't let me see it.
Even without the problem of counterfeit items being mixed in with their stock, tons of things sold on Amazon are much cheaper in local stores or even via web ordering from some of those retailers.
All I can really say to this is that clearly not everyone feels as you do. Firefox is my daily driver on Android, in part because I'm able to use little things like uBlock Origin and Dark Background And Light Text.
The click and hold for context menu has always worked just fine for me, and without any indications of how it's "AWFUL" (Too slow? Too sensitive? Too large a detection area? Too small a detection area?) it'd be hard for someone to fix it.
I do pop into Chrome for some things, particularly things that integrate with Google properties like Google Maps. I don't think I could stand to use it as my primary browser.
I could be wrong, but I don't think IE 10 is still a supported browser (in terms of security updates) on ANY platform.
Your choices for a currently-supported Microsoft browser are: IE11 on any platform it's supported on, Edge on Windows 10, and IE 9 on Windows Server 2008 (non-R2) SP2 which is the Vista generation of Windows Server and is supported for another year and a half.
Those few poor slobs on that 2008 non-R2 are the ones to feel sorry for - IE9 is the best from Microsoft, Chrome doesn't support it anymore, not sure about Firefox. Fortunately there shouldn't be many end-users on it, just a few services that nobody's gotten around to moving.
If there's no legal distribution of their content within Saudi Arabia, perhaps they should start making sure that most of the content of interest to Saudis also includes strong subversive and anti-government propaganda. After all, it's not like they're transmitting it to Saudi Arabia.
I'm pretty sure Pokemon Go had pretty huge initial adoption when it came out in the summer of 2016. Judging based on download numbers isn't all that useful, but it still had a pretty big uptake for at least a few weeks, tapering down after that.
For that matter, never having played it it sounds like Fortnite is similar to what you find on many Minecraft servers (Factions, Survival with PvP), but built into the game and as the default instead of something you need to be shown how to get to. Basically they looked at where Minecraft had business holes (no good model for subscription or transaction revenue back to Mojang/Microsoft) and built something to capture the ongoing revenue that in the MC world goes to third parties running servers.
I have one still around and may pop a SIM into it if I break my current phone. The combination of things that made it non-viable early on was a mix of "No Decent Apps" except the MS ones and no decent browsers to use mobile websites/webapps instead (Edge was too immature, other alternatives were few and also immature).
It's still getting the occasional insider update and software updates, and Edge is much more capable and mature now than it was a few years ago.
I don't use it all that often, but Spotify's ads are not all that obtrusive, obnoxious or frequent. It's not like they're popping in a 30 second ad after every second song.
Does anyone think that the company ownership matters if the Chinese government wants to compromise the software going into cell phones manufactured in China?
For the most part if you're looking at smartphones they're manufactured in one of three countries (four depending on how you feel about Taiwan). Many are in mainland China (Lenovo/Motorola, Huawei, TCL as Alcatel, ZTE), including ones that are outsourced to Foxconn (Apple, Nokia/HMD, probably others) or other fulfillment companies. Sony is probably in Japan. Samsung and LG most likely in South Korea. HTC and Asus are probably manufactured in Taiwan.
Notably absent in the manufacturing locations? Anyplace in the "West."
I just have bookmark folders grouped by roughly how often they update - daily, MWF, weekly/Sunday. In Firefox I just Ctrl-click on the bookmark folder and all bookmarks within it are opened in new tabs.
Can be a handy way to provide a big load to test a network connection as well, just by doing that Ctrl-click one level higher.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're doing something sensible like combining an employee number (entered) plus a fingerprint or handprint/finger length measurement for authentication, this sounds like it could be resolved very easily - possibly with process changes, possibly just with documentation of what is/isn't collected and stored and for how long.
Datto makes some pretty nice stuff if you can get your customers to pay for it - hybrid onsite-offsite backup, with the ability to spin up a VM "in the cloud" with a VPN connection back to the in-office backup device so it looks like that server is actually still up and running in the office even if it's a bit slow.
I like that they're helping out in situations like this, though for most of what they can do you probably needed it up and running a week or two before the hurricane.
I've tried to track a few down with some success, but the only one I put much effort into was the one where I was getting the email confirmations and printable certificates for someone's continuing medical education courses to maintain their nursing credentials.
That one had a pretty uncommon name, and I ended up tracking down a phone number via an online publishing of their (small rural) church's member directory.
I can't help but wonder what's going to leach out of/off off all those roads that are starting to be made with recycled plastic and whether it'll be better or worse than what runs off of asphalt (also made from oil).
If you have something that needs a ton of electricity, you put it where the rates are low and likely to remain low. Based on May 2018 commercial rates I found, Texas has the third lowest commercial electric rates in the country, behind only Arkansas and Nevada. If Microsoft wants to get on the renewable energy bandwagon, Texas already has massive wind farms (probably 30,000 megawatts and close to 20% of the state's electrical production) and could also add solar in a lot of the state.
It's also a major enough business and residential player to be someplace where it makes sense to put a data center; Arkansas not so much.
My basic assumption for anything being OCR'd effectively free in the cloud through a software provider is that it's not safe. Could be sloppiness (as in this case), could be automated OCR+human verification.
While I actually do have a couple of Abbyy programs installed (FineScanner Pro and Business Card Reader Pro), I've never actually made serious use of them. On the other hand, I do use Microsoft's Office Lens program which provides much of the same capabilities - but provided under the Office 365 bundling and with a lot more resources devoted to security.
I used to have a couple more photo-to-scanned-document software packages as well, but I decided to dump anything like that from Russian companies some time back. Abbyy's presence is as much an oversight of "haven't cleaned in a while" as anything else.
The Pixel Qi screens were supposedly an attempt at something that could be similar to that, at least with some kind of a dual mode that would be readable in bright light in a monochrome(ish) display and usable as color as a normal display.
The company appears to be long gone, the domain has generic businessy content for feeding ads, and there's a link from Wikipedia to a small company in Georgia that may still do custom manufacture of those screens.
(rephrased slightly from my comment on the article)
A simple legislative solution to address some egregious property tax assessment appeals would be to mandate that when submitting a proposed valuation, the taxing body has the right to immediately purchase the property for some TBD multiplier of your submitted valuation. I suspect that multiplier should be in the 3-5x range.
Obviously there'd need to be reasonable allowances for time to move out, but the cost of moving should be covered by the multiplier.
If Apple wants to contend that a chunk of property is only worth $200, great! I'm sure the city can find $1000 to properly compensate them for that property and the cost of vacating it. Perhaps the city can find something more beneficial to do with that property that might provide more tax revenue.
In a market that's working without substantial surpluses, a small reduction in supply (as might be caused by a tariff going into effect) can have a highly magnified impact.
To take the extreme example, consider oxygen. On the surface, there's a substantial surplus. If you're deep underwater using scuba gear, a small reduction in supply may have a significant impact, one that you'd give huge amounts of money to alleviate if possible.
On a less silly note, imagine that you have one of many factories depending on receiving components coming from China, and that demand for those components has remained fairly predictable. Suddenly something happens to cause supply to shrink - a ship sinks, someone starts a trade war, a foreign competitor suddenly appears - and suddenly you and all of the other existing factories are in a bidding war for those components because otherwise you have to shut down. How much will each factory pay? They'll pay enough to keep their lines running, unless the cost goes so high that running the line doesn't make sense.
If you want to know more, the term is "Elasticity"
Are these new chips going to have all the same predictive execution and related issues? Did they have enough time to do any revamping? Or is this going to be the final generation that gets a big chunk of performance improvements crippled?
Attaching money is a little old-fashioned, but I suspect is still quite effective and a dime is about the only thing they could do.
Basically what they're paying for with that ("I can feel a coin through the envelope") dime is a bit more of your attention. If you open the envelope and glance at the materials inside rather than just throwing it in the trash unopened, the dime worked and was probably well worth it.
Amazon's biggest use to me these days is as a source for price-matching at local stores.
For expensive equipment I'm just as likely to order elsewhere (e.g. B&H or industry-specific sites), for cheap or commodity stuff it may already be cheaper locally or elsewhere online - and if it's not, there's a fair chance someplace local will price match to either Amazon or their own website if it has different pricing (e.g. Target, office supply places).
Basically if I need a thousand-dollar scanner or laptop I can be fairly sure what I'd get from Amazon won't be counterfeit, but I can also be pretty sure of getting competitive prices elsewhere. If I need a $10 (commodity something) then I have no faith in the authenticity of almost anything on Amazon.
Just tell people in-app on likely impacted devices "Your phone has power management that keeps VLC from playing in the background. Please ((go here)) and exempt it if you want to use background audio." Depending on how Android kills background processes it's probably also feasible to detect if this is happening and present that alert in that case - or I guess they can just continue blacklisting manufacturers as more and more of them do similar things to extend battery life. "VLC: The best background player you can have on your phone we haven't blacklisted yet."
Heck, is the power management they're talking about a Huawei thing or an Oreo thing?
On my phone (slightly older, so not yet on Oreo) I get a notification that "App X is consuming power in the background" and can kill it or ignore the warning. I can disable that power management on a per-app basis pretty easily - in settings I just type "power" in the search box and select the "Power-intensive apps" result. Within that, I have several options for how aggressive the phone will be on power saving, including a list of "Apps that will be closed after the screen is locked" and a separate list of "Power-intensive apps" that also shows why they're classified that way. Reasons I see seem to be limited to "High Location Frequency" and "Keep Awake" on my phone. Selecting any app gives me quite a bit more detail on its power use and control over whether to close it, etc.
What I like about my phone is that even though it's closing in on 2 years old I got the latest security patches for it just a few days ago and despite having shipped with Marshmallow (6) it got an OTA upgrade to Nougat (7) and is due for an upgrade to Oreo (8) likely within the next month (already released for some international models). I sure didn't get updates like that on my Samsung or HTC phones, nice as they might have been.
I've looked at the cord-cutting possibilities in the past, but what it really came down to was that for the same set of things that my wife watches now (including a lot of sports), I'd be paying close to the same amount (or more) for various subscriptions plus wasting time tracking down dodgy and unreliable live sports streams, all in the interest of saving what, $10-15 a month at most? Maybe? In a good month....
I can't provide an Amazon link for it today because when I try all I get is pictures of dogs telling me that something went wrong, but over the weekend I purchased https://www.meijer.com/product/home-improvement-auto/hardware/basic-hardware/adhesives/scotch-extreme-clear-4ft-rf6740/t1/t1-873/t2/t2-10042/t3/t3-588/t4/t4-1850/5114140318.uts
$13.99 at Meijer, and until Saturday was a BOGO50%off item - so 2 for $21. Amazon's best price for it was $14.99. I don't have links for another recent item, replacement shoelaces, but something that was about $2.50 in-store was listed for something like $7 on Amazon. Shipping would've been free, though! At least if I bought another $18-28 of items, I don't remember what the threshold is right now and Amazon's Dogs won't let me see it.
Even without the problem of counterfeit items being mixed in with their stock, tons of things sold on Amazon are much cheaper in local stores or even via web ordering from some of those retailers.
All I can really say to this is that clearly not everyone feels as you do. Firefox is my daily driver on Android, in part because I'm able to use little things like uBlock Origin and Dark Background And Light Text.
The click and hold for context menu has always worked just fine for me, and without any indications of how it's "AWFUL" (Too slow? Too sensitive? Too large a detection area? Too small a detection area?) it'd be hard for someone to fix it.
I do pop into Chrome for some things, particularly things that integrate with Google properties like Google Maps. I don't think I could stand to use it as my primary browser.
"It's the obsolete overpriced piece of badly-engineered hardware that people have to buy if they want to develop apps for the iPad."
I could be wrong, but I don't think IE 10 is still a supported browser (in terms of security updates) on ANY platform.
Your choices for a currently-supported Microsoft browser are: IE11 on any platform it's supported on, Edge on Windows 10, and IE 9 on Windows Server 2008 (non-R2) SP2 which is the Vista generation of Windows Server and is supported for another year and a half.
Those few poor slobs on that 2008 non-R2 are the ones to feel sorry for - IE9 is the best from Microsoft, Chrome doesn't support it anymore, not sure about Firefox. Fortunately there shouldn't be many end-users on it, just a few services that nobody's gotten around to moving.
If there's no legal distribution of their content within Saudi Arabia, perhaps they should start making sure that most of the content of interest to Saudis also includes strong subversive and anti-government propaganda. After all, it's not like they're transmitting it to Saudi Arabia.
I'm pretty sure Pokemon Go had pretty huge initial adoption when it came out in the summer of 2016. Judging based on download numbers isn't all that useful, but it still had a pretty big uptake for at least a few weeks, tapering down after that.
For that matter, never having played it it sounds like Fortnite is similar to what you find on many Minecraft servers (Factions, Survival with PvP), but built into the game and as the default instead of something you need to be shown how to get to. Basically they looked at where Minecraft had business holes (no good model for subscription or transaction revenue back to Mojang/Microsoft) and built something to capture the ongoing revenue that in the MC world goes to third parties running servers.
I have one still around and may pop a SIM into it if I break my current phone. The combination of things that made it non-viable early on was a mix of "No Decent Apps" except the MS ones and no decent browsers to use mobile websites/webapps instead (Edge was too immature, other alternatives were few and also immature).
It's still getting the occasional insider update and software updates, and Edge is much more capable and mature now than it was a few years ago.
I don't use it all that often, but Spotify's ads are not all that obtrusive, obnoxious or frequent. It's not like they're popping in a 30 second ad after every second song.
Oh wait, that would be "almost all of them."
Does anyone think that the company ownership matters if the Chinese government wants to compromise the software going into cell phones manufactured in China?
For the most part if you're looking at smartphones they're manufactured in one of three countries (four depending on how you feel about Taiwan). Many are in mainland China (Lenovo/Motorola, Huawei, TCL as Alcatel, ZTE), including ones that are outsourced to Foxconn (Apple, Nokia/HMD, probably others) or other fulfillment companies. Sony is probably in Japan. Samsung and LG most likely in South Korea. HTC and Asus are probably manufactured in Taiwan.
Notably absent in the manufacturing locations? Anyplace in the "West."
I just have bookmark folders grouped by roughly how often they update - daily, MWF, weekly/Sunday. In Firefox I just Ctrl-click on the bookmark folder and all bookmarks within it are opened in new tabs.
Can be a handy way to provide a big load to test a network connection as well, just by doing that Ctrl-click one level higher.