I'd guess that "gray nondescript blurs" is inaccurate. It sounds more like prosopagnosia is when someone's "coprocessor" that quickly maps faces to memories of people doesn't work so well. It doesn't mean they can't see the face or the features on it, or even try and pattern-match normally as you would an apple or an orange.
I wouldn't be surprised if this eventually gets filed as an autism spectrum disorder. To me this sounds like just another "people skill" that normal thinkers take for granted that some might lack.
I know mine's not very good. I almost never say hi to people by name because it takes me longer than it should to identify, and be sure I'm right about, who I'm speaking to. Meanwhile I've had people that I barely know, and not seen in decades recognize me. I don't have distinctive features at all. Obviously I'm missing something they have.
OK, but you can install the 32 bit version of Windows 10, and still load the GWBASIC.EXE compiled in 1986 on a current operating system.
Microsoft did away with 16 bit compatibility layer in the 64 bit OS, but as others have pointed out, VMs and things like DosBox make it not a big loss.
Mac users seem more accustomed to having old software getting obsoleted into oblivion. I don't even know how I'd go about running some PPC-era app now if it wasn't open-sourced or modernized. They had Rosetta on early Intel OSX builds. It only lasted from 10.4 through 10.6, I think about 3 years.
BMW cars with CarPlay capability still retains BMW's existing smartphone interface. If you don't subscribe to CarPlay you can still use bluetooth integration or connect the phone via USB and get playlists, album art, siri with the steering wheel, etc.
I'm guessing it will play out a bit like the TiVo on DirecTV situation. By the time they had worked out the TiVo HD DVR solution, the "native" DVR was feature-rich enough few could justify the cost premium. And that's not saying that TiVo wasn't better, it just wasn't better enough to justify a premium fee. I suspect BMW customers will see the same thing here. What is CarPlay really buying that they can't do with the normal BMW interface?
I still think it's a shitty move too, though. I really loathe subscription models.
How about we demand a 10% refund on our chips? I wonder how that would fly. I think replacement would be a better offer though.
I don't think a 10% refund covers it. Depending on how cutting edge your processor was when you bought it, you may have paid a pretty steep premium to get an extra 10% performance vs lower speed processors. If you look through the chart, small performance differences can have huge costs associated with them.
Yep this. It's just never gone to/from anywhere that I wanted to go efficiently enough to bother. I find the free tram from Luxor/Excalibur/Mandalay Bay tram far more useful. If it could get me from say Wynn/Encore/Venetian to City Center/Aria I'd probably use it a lot.
The general consensus around where I live is that people must go to Amazon for the selection instead of the price, because Amazon is usually more expensive. Most people around here go to brick and mortars for this reason. Once they can't find it at a brick and mortar, then they'll try something like Amazon.
Amazon is convenient, especially when coupled with fast, free Prime shipping. I'll often pay a small amount more for something marked "Amazon Prime" because I know I'll receive it within a day or two. I know it's not going to end up UPS ground from somewhere across the country that gets here a week later. It's also comfortable because I know they have a good, hassle free return policy. Key being a small amount, it doesn't take long for me to verify that I'm not over-paying for something by a significant amount.
Getting gouged at brick and mortar stores for things like USB or HDMI cables is a lot of what drove me to using Amazon as my primary store in the first place.
The X has a larger, presumably better (OLED) screen in a smaller package. The screen is a pretty important part of your smartphone experience. Not something I'd write off as a "fashion statement".
A friend of mine has the Samsung Note8. Having a screen like that really is something to be excited about.
Apple is far from the only "Mp3 media player company" that required some sort of music manager to update the library. It used to drive me nuts too, because I just wanted to drag and drop my MP3s and go.
But, judging from all of the cars that I've driven that support USB memory sticks or SD card media, I grudgingly must admit they were probably right in requiring that a database be kept up to date by an update tool rather than by the player itself. I've yet to see even a modern car "flat file" MP3 player that doesn't suck in some way or another, be it poor playlist management, folder file limits, slow startup times as it scans for changes, slow searching, missing support of gapless audio, etc.
Then, when people ask how to get their large library to work well, the answer is almost always to connect an iPod to the USB port. As clunky and quirky as iTunes is, it has had years and years of experience dealing with the storage of a digital music library. There's usually a way to do almost anything you can think of, even changing the EQ of specific songs. It has a script interface that you can use for automation. I use it to pull in a long audio source and break it up into gapless chunks, and add to a playlist with a specific order that I can skip through.
The "all in one" tool they refer to is very much like a jailbreaking tool. It lets you pick from a list of popular hacks, and makes it easy to install.
One of the more interesting hacks available is enabling Android Auto support. Mazda is using a system called OpenCar.
These "exploits" that get you access are really simple ones. Mazda obviously didn't consider them to be of big concern, they've been around for quite a while. Then of course the security zealots come in and ruin all the fun.:)
Will be more interesting to see if the Mazda dealers try to force this update on you. I imagine people will want to update anyway, there are still some really glaring bugs in their infotainment system (maps crashing, spurious restarting of USB playlists, etc).
> In other words: use virtualization without the user knowing or caring that virtualization is even being used.
Yes, but read the use cases people are citing carefully. The typical reason people legitimately cling to 16 bit software is often due to some legacy software that has an unusual dependency on direct communication with hardware. The VM abstraction will likely break things the same way emulation does.
Yes you do need a system wide change. And when you make that change, Windows will put a "Test mode" watermark on your desktop. No, the unsigned driver will not work when you turn it back on.
Sudo isn't an apt comparison as it's not an access rights issue. I think MS considers it a security feature, that they really don't want defeated. It's somewhat understandable as vendors commonly provided unsigned 32 bit drivers, and users would just ignore the big red warning pop ups,
> because you can always buy newer devices to run the same software, all app data is migrated.
If iOS 11 stops running 32 bit apps, then no, you can't. To use a silly example, I had an old game called 3-Tuple that was pulled from the App Store after someone claimed it was IP infringement. This app has moved along fine from device to device. Once iOS 11 hits - the app is defunct, never to be run again, at least until someone makes a 32 bit IOS emulator.
> You can if you jailbreak it which you absolutely can for any 32-bit IOS device.
Not really. I have lots of old iOS devices, many of which I really wish I hadn't loaded the "latest" iOS versions. I use them as iPods. I would swear that some of the "last" available iOS versions have "planned obsolescence" memory leaks/performance problems baked into them. Since I didn't keep the SHSH blobs I'm out of luck loading a more desirable iOS version. The whole shsh blob thing might be an outdated notion too now, I stopped jailbreaking a long time ago.
>You give this grad sweeping statement of this being the only time specific binaries have been left to age. But there are very probably other niche platforms for which no simulators exist. Even for iOS some simulators do exist... so I'm not even sure that is correct.
Quite true. Just because there is no emulator now, doesn't mean there won't be. They're adding new emulators for obscure hardware to MAME/MESS all the time. But I suppose some of the point is - with the relatively high degree of security around iOS, if the hacking community isn't archiving off the apps in an unencrypted format somewhere, they are in fact very likely to be lost forever. The good news is that we probably don't care about the vast majority of it.:)
The original Core Duo MacBook runs Windows 10 x86 (32-bit) quite nicely (for an 11 year old machine), assuming you've put in the maximum 2GB of Ram and a decently fast HDD . It was Core Duo not Core2Duo though, so no 64 bit, not that you need it in 2GB anyway. I have one still "in service" at my mom's house when she needs to print something out or if I need to Remote Desktop into my home PC real quick.
Windows or linux is the best path forward for old Macs. Once Apple obsoletes the machine for new OS updates, it quickly becomes a boat anchor in their ecosystem. For example, newer versions of iTunes won't load on old OSes, which means you then can't use that machine to sync a newer iPhone. Or even be able to run recent versions of Chrome. But load Windows 7-10 on the same machine, and then the latest Windows version of iTunes can be installed, no problem, and it the machine will be able to live out its real useful lifespan.
It was particularly annoying when Apple stopped supporting my old first gen Mac Pro. With an upgraded video card, that machine still performed about on par with the current Mac mini (of course, with more power consumption), but the only way to use modern Mac OSes was through an EFI hack.
> I think it's safe to ask...does anyone really still use a Safari on the desktop?
I do as my default, mainly because of iCloud Keychain and having my passwords synced across my iDevices. If something isn't working I pull up Chrome. I haven't found a good solution to export iCloud Keychain into google's sync.
The only real complaint I have with Safari is that its authentication mechanism sometimes gets stuck, particularly with Hotmail.
> Painstakingly archiving every detail of life really makes for a shitty life.
That's exactly what I think whenever I go to a concert, and see people trying to record the performance. Like they're ever going to watch that shaky, horrible video with shitty audio. Meanwhile they're missing the live performance they paid so dearly to go see.
I've worked from home almost my entire 24 year career (about 20 years at home, 4 years doing in-office work). But, every WFH position I've had, including my current one, came out of a previous at-office work relationship, where I'd already established the trust with my superiors that I know what I'm doing, and can be productive without supervision.
If a company is just "blindly" hiring, they're going to pick someone who will work in-office every time, unless you have an extremely specialized skill set that's tough to find.
I got a set as a gift, and I think they're atrociously bad.
They don't stay in my ears unless I sit perfectly still. I don't even have that problem with the wired EarPods. And, I really hate the lack of media/volume controls. Surely they could have come up with some sort of "gesture" to change the volume and skip tracks. Telling Siri to change the volume is NOT a good solution.
Yep. Apple is much worse in this respect. My 2006 Mac Pro had processing power and memory that is still on par, or better than, the current Mac mini once you upgrade the video card. But Apple stopped supporting new OS versions on it, which quickly renders the whole Apple ecosystem defunct. You can't update iTunes, so then you can't sync a new iPhone, for example. And finding compatible browsers starts to be an issue too, as new software for OSX tends to just not run on older OSes. I had to resort to end-user hacks to load the modern OS on it, but when I did, it worked very nicely.
The irony is that the most straightforward solution to the iTunes problem is to install Windows on it. Even Windows 10 is perfectly fine with the older hardware, and happily runs the newest version of iTunes.
Caller id is simple and just works. And when it fails, it just says unknown number and you have to pick up the call to find out who it is or let it go to voice mail. Home automation is a rube-goldberg machine that is a lot of fun if you like building and maintaining rube goldberg machines -- but its not practical and it frequently fails in pretty spectacular ways.
I've had a Z-wave HA system going for around 8 years. It is like caller ID - if the controller fails, I revert to using the wall switches. Z-wave can be a bit finicky to set up initially but the only real failure modes I've had are dead switches, which I've had actually more of with my bath fan timers that are not part of the HA system. I've had zero problems with door locks. They're great not because I can "unlock it with my phone", but because it makes managing the entry codes easy (example: give a temporary code to a contractor), and because they can alert you when someone punches in a code.
I will say having lighting control is on the overrated side. I find that's mostly only valuable when switches aren't convenient to reach. The one I use most often is the back patio light, because I generally don't notice I've left it on until I'm upstairs and about ready to go to bed, and the dog has finally settled down, etc.
HA made my in-ground hot tub experience a whole lot better. There's a filter pump, a heater, and light, and a water filler valve. The controls for all of these things were in separate and very hard to reach places, and the old mechanical timer used to "conflict" with the heater when I wanted to heat it during its normal filter schedule. Now they're all lined up on one page on my smartphone. And now that I've connected my system to HomeKit via HomeBridge, I can even ask Siri to turn the light on hands free if I'm in the tub and it gets dark out.
I haven't seen a "spectacular" HA failure since the old X10 days, when noise in your power line might trigger every HA-connected light switch to turn on.:)
I beg to differ: it IS bad. Because when you read a+b, you have NO idea what may be happening
I beg to differ with you!
If you see the function add(a, b), you have NO idea what may be happening. And this applies to ALL the functions. In C++ a+b simply means operator+ IOW it's a function with a funny syntax just like any other.
Not true. In C, if I see "a+b", I generally know that I'm getting the time-tested and well understood behavior of the compiler adding two numbers together. If I see "add(a,b)", I know that something more complex may be happening, and that if I need to know more, I should go look up the source or documentation for the add(x, y) function.
I understand the potential readability benefit of operator overloading, but I've never liked the cost of making known compiler behavior ambiguous.
> Apple watch was a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist. > Now, if the device was truly stand alone, that's one thing, but needing to pair it up with an iPhone makes it far less interesting.
Its primary benefit is reducing the amount of times you need to pull your phone out of your pocket. If you don't care about the phone integration there are a lot of regular watches that do "being a watch" better. I never wore a regular watch, though. I have no need for it.
I bought my Apple Watch primarily because I'm at the gym doing fitness classes a lot. My phone is usually away from me in my gym bag. I would sometimes be unreachable for 1-2 hours at a time. The watch solves that problem for me nicely.
Old fashioned dimmers required a dimmer switch. Making a dimmer switch that could use some sort of powerline comms to send 3 integers (RGB) from switch to bulb to control hue and brightness would be utterly trivial. No new cabling required, just install a new dimmer switch and the bulb and you're done.
Have you ever used X10 / Insteon? PLC sounds good until you try to use it. Half the house is on different phases so you have trouble getting everything on the network. Then you also get issues with power strips consuming the signals, things generating interference, etc.
I'm really not a big fan of wireless either, but in practice Z-wave works a lot better.
The AirPods are a product similar to the PowerBeats bluetooth earbuds, which are not cheap either. They have little to do with the removal of the 3.5mm jack. "Regular" earpods with a lightning connector are included. A 3.5mm to lightning adapter is also included.
I'm hoping this "W1" chip has better sound quality and lower audio latency than Bluetooth audio. You cannot play games with the PowerBeats earbuds, and the standard bluetooth audio codecs have atrocious quality.
Facebook has a complex enough UI that making a more efficient app for it makes sense. There are a ton of apps that are barely more than a skinned browser that loads a mobile website. Those are the ones that I wish would die off.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess that "gray nondescript blurs" is inaccurate. It sounds more like prosopagnosia is when someone's "coprocessor" that quickly maps faces to memories of people doesn't work so well. It doesn't mean they can't see the face or the features on it, or even try and pattern-match normally as you would an apple or an orange.
I wouldn't be surprised if this eventually gets filed as an autism spectrum disorder. To me this sounds like just another "people skill" that normal thinkers take for granted that some might lack.
I know mine's not very good. I almost never say hi to people by name because it takes me longer than it should to identify, and be sure I'm right about, who I'm speaking to. Meanwhile I've had people that I barely know, and not seen in decades recognize me. I don't have distinctive features at all. Obviously I'm missing something they have.
Much more difficult with binary 68k machine code.
OK, but you can install the 32 bit version of Windows 10, and still load the GWBASIC.EXE compiled in 1986 on a current operating system.
Microsoft did away with 16 bit compatibility layer in the 64 bit OS, but as others have pointed out, VMs and things like DosBox make it not a big loss.
Mac users seem more accustomed to having old software getting obsoleted into oblivion. I don't even know how I'd go about running some PPC-era app now if it wasn't open-sourced or modernized. They had Rosetta on early Intel OSX builds. It only lasted from 10.4 through 10.6, I think about 3 years.
BMW cars with CarPlay capability still retains BMW's existing smartphone interface. If you don't subscribe to CarPlay you can still use bluetooth integration or connect the phone via USB and get playlists, album art, siri with the steering wheel, etc.
I'm guessing it will play out a bit like the TiVo on DirecTV situation. By the time they had worked out the TiVo HD DVR solution, the "native" DVR was feature-rich enough few could justify the cost premium. And that's not saying that TiVo wasn't better, it just wasn't better enough to justify a premium fee. I suspect BMW customers will see the same thing here. What is CarPlay really buying that they can't do with the normal BMW interface?
I still think it's a shitty move too, though. I really loathe subscription models.
How about we demand a 10% refund on our chips? I wonder how that would fly. I think replacement would be a better offer though.
I don't think a 10% refund covers it. Depending on how cutting edge your processor was when you bought it, you may have paid a pretty steep premium to get an extra 10% performance vs lower speed processors. If you look through the chart, small performance differences can have huge costs associated with them.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/h...
Yep this. It's just never gone to/from anywhere that I wanted to go efficiently enough to bother. I find the free tram from Luxor/Excalibur/Mandalay Bay tram far more useful. If it could get me from say Wynn/Encore/Venetian to City Center/Aria I'd probably use it a lot.
The general consensus around where I live is that people must go to Amazon for the selection instead of the price, because Amazon is usually more expensive. Most people around here go to brick and mortars for this reason. Once they can't find it at a brick and mortar, then they'll try something like Amazon.
Amazon is convenient, especially when coupled with fast, free Prime shipping. I'll often pay a small amount more for something marked "Amazon Prime" because I know I'll receive it within a day or two. I know it's not going to end up UPS ground from somewhere across the country that gets here a week later. It's also comfortable because I know they have a good, hassle free return policy. Key being a small amount, it doesn't take long for me to verify that I'm not over-paying for something by a significant amount.
Getting gouged at brick and mortar stores for things like USB or HDMI cables is a lot of what drove me to using Amazon as my primary store in the first place.
The X has a larger, presumably better (OLED) screen in a smaller package. The screen is a pretty important part of your smartphone experience. Not something I'd write off as a "fashion statement".
A friend of mine has the Samsung Note8. Having a screen like that really is something to be excited about.
Apple is far from the only "Mp3 media player company" that required some sort of music manager to update the library. It used to drive me nuts too, because I just wanted to drag and drop my MP3s and go.
But, judging from all of the cars that I've driven that support USB memory sticks or SD card media, I grudgingly must admit they were probably right in requiring that a database be kept up to date by an update tool rather than by the player itself. I've yet to see even a modern car "flat file" MP3 player that doesn't suck in some way or another, be it poor playlist management, folder file limits, slow startup times as it scans for changes, slow searching, missing support of gapless audio, etc.
Then, when people ask how to get their large library to work well, the answer is almost always to connect an iPod to the USB port. As clunky and quirky as iTunes is, it has had years and years of experience dealing with the storage of a digital music library. There's usually a way to do almost anything you can think of, even changing the EQ of specific songs. It has a script interface that you can use for automation. I use it to pull in a long audio source and break it up into gapless chunks, and add to a playlist with a specific order that I can skip through.
The "all in one" tool they refer to is very much like a jailbreaking tool. It lets you pick from a list of popular hacks, and makes it easy to install.
One of the more interesting hacks available is enabling Android Auto support. Mazda is using a system called OpenCar.
These "exploits" that get you access are really simple ones. Mazda obviously didn't consider them to be of big concern, they've been around for quite a while. Then of course the security zealots come in and ruin all the fun. :)
Will be more interesting to see if the Mazda dealers try to force this update on you. I imagine people will want to update anyway, there are still some really glaring bugs in their infotainment system (maps crashing, spurious restarting of USB playlists, etc).
> In other words: use virtualization without the user knowing or caring that virtualization is even being used.
Yes, but read the use cases people are citing carefully. The typical reason people legitimately cling to 16 bit software is often due to some legacy software that has an unusual dependency on direct communication with hardware. The VM abstraction will likely break things the same way emulation does.
Yes you do need a system wide change. And when you make that change, Windows will put a "Test mode" watermark on your desktop. No, the unsigned driver will not work when you turn it back on.
Sudo isn't an apt comparison as it's not an access rights issue. I think MS considers it a security feature, that they really don't want defeated. It's somewhat understandable as vendors commonly provided unsigned 32 bit drivers, and users would just ignore the big red warning pop ups,
> because you can always buy newer devices to run the same software, all app data is migrated.
If iOS 11 stops running 32 bit apps, then no, you can't. To use a silly example, I had an old game called 3-Tuple that was pulled from the App Store after someone claimed it was IP infringement. This app has moved along fine from device to device. Once iOS 11 hits - the app is defunct, never to be run again, at least until someone makes a 32 bit IOS emulator.
> You can if you jailbreak it which you absolutely can for any 32-bit IOS device.
Not really. I have lots of old iOS devices, many of which I really wish I hadn't loaded the "latest" iOS versions. I use them as iPods. I would swear that some of the "last" available iOS versions have "planned obsolescence" memory leaks/performance problems baked into them. Since I didn't keep the SHSH blobs I'm out of luck loading a more desirable iOS version. The whole shsh blob thing might be an outdated notion too now, I stopped jailbreaking a long time ago.
>You give this grad sweeping statement of this being the only time specific binaries have been left to age. But there are very probably other niche platforms for which no simulators exist. Even for iOS some simulators do exist... so I'm not even sure that is correct.
Quite true. Just because there is no emulator now, doesn't mean there won't be. They're adding new emulators for obscure hardware to MAME/MESS all the time. But I suppose some of the point is - with the relatively high degree of security around iOS, if the hacking community isn't archiving off the apps in an unencrypted format somewhere, they are in fact very likely to be lost forever. The good news is that we probably don't care about the vast majority of it. :)
The original Core Duo MacBook runs Windows 10 x86 (32-bit) quite nicely (for an 11 year old machine), assuming you've put in the maximum 2GB of Ram and a decently fast HDD . It was Core Duo not Core2Duo though, so no 64 bit, not that you need it in 2GB anyway. I have one still "in service" at my mom's house when she needs to print something out or if I need to Remote Desktop into my home PC real quick.
Windows or linux is the best path forward for old Macs. Once Apple obsoletes the machine for new OS updates, it quickly becomes a boat anchor in their ecosystem. For example, newer versions of iTunes won't load on old OSes, which means you then can't use that machine to sync a newer iPhone. Or even be able to run recent versions of Chrome. But load Windows 7-10 on the same machine, and then the latest Windows version of iTunes can be installed, no problem, and it the machine will be able to live out its real useful lifespan.
It was particularly annoying when Apple stopped supporting my old first gen Mac Pro. With an upgraded video card, that machine still performed about on par with the current Mac mini (of course, with more power consumption), but the only way to use modern Mac OSes was through an EFI hack.
> I think it's safe to ask...does anyone really still use a Safari on the desktop?
I do as my default, mainly because of iCloud Keychain and having my passwords synced across my iDevices. If something isn't working I pull up Chrome. I haven't found a good solution to export iCloud Keychain into google's sync.
The only real complaint I have with Safari is that its authentication mechanism sometimes gets stuck, particularly with Hotmail.
> Painstakingly archiving every detail of life really makes for a shitty life.
That's exactly what I think whenever I go to a concert, and see people trying to record the performance. Like they're ever going to watch that shaky, horrible video with shitty audio. Meanwhile they're missing the live performance they paid so dearly to go see.
I've worked from home almost my entire 24 year career (about 20 years at home, 4 years doing in-office work). But, every WFH position I've had, including my current one, came out of a previous at-office work relationship, where I'd already established the trust with my superiors that I know what I'm doing, and can be productive without supervision.
If a company is just "blindly" hiring, they're going to pick someone who will work in-office every time, unless you have an extremely specialized skill set that's tough to find.
I got a set as a gift, and I think they're atrociously bad.
They don't stay in my ears unless I sit perfectly still. I don't even have that problem with the wired EarPods. And, I really hate the lack of media/volume controls. Surely they could have come up with some sort of "gesture" to change the volume and skip tracks. Telling Siri to change the volume is NOT a good solution.
Yep. Apple is much worse in this respect. My 2006 Mac Pro had processing power and memory that is still on par, or better than, the current Mac mini once you upgrade the video card. But Apple stopped supporting new OS versions on it, which quickly renders the whole Apple ecosystem defunct. You can't update iTunes, so then you can't sync a new iPhone, for example. And finding compatible browsers starts to be an issue too, as new software for OSX tends to just not run on older OSes. I had to resort to end-user hacks to load the modern OS on it, but when I did, it worked very nicely.
The irony is that the most straightforward solution to the iTunes problem is to install Windows on it. Even Windows 10 is perfectly fine with the older hardware, and happily runs the newest version of iTunes.
Caller id is simple and just works. And when it fails, it just says unknown number and you have to pick up the call to find out who it is or let it go to voice mail. Home automation is a rube-goldberg machine that is a lot of fun if you like building and maintaining rube goldberg machines -- but its not practical and it frequently fails in pretty spectacular ways.
I've had a Z-wave HA system going for around 8 years. It is like caller ID - if the controller fails, I revert to using the wall switches. Z-wave can be a bit finicky to set up initially but the only real failure modes I've had are dead switches, which I've had actually more of with my bath fan timers that are not part of the HA system. I've had zero problems with door locks. They're great not because I can "unlock it with my phone", but because it makes managing the entry codes easy (example: give a temporary code to a contractor), and because they can alert you when someone punches in a code.
I will say having lighting control is on the overrated side. I find that's mostly only valuable when switches aren't convenient to reach. The one I use most often is the back patio light, because I generally don't notice I've left it on until I'm upstairs and about ready to go to bed, and the dog has finally settled down, etc.
HA made my in-ground hot tub experience a whole lot better. There's a filter pump, a heater, and light, and a water filler valve. The controls for all of these things were in separate and very hard to reach places, and the old mechanical timer used to "conflict" with the heater when I wanted to heat it during its normal filter schedule. Now they're all lined up on one page on my smartphone. And now that I've connected my system to HomeKit via HomeBridge, I can even ask Siri to turn the light on hands free if I'm in the tub and it gets dark out.
I haven't seen a "spectacular" HA failure since the old X10 days, when noise in your power line might trigger every HA-connected light switch to turn on. :)
I beg to differ: it IS bad. Because when you read a+b, you have NO idea what may be happening
I beg to differ with you!
If you see the function add(a, b), you have NO idea what may be happening. And this applies to ALL the functions. In C++ a+b simply means operator+ IOW it's a function with a funny syntax just like any other.
Not true. In C, if I see "a+b", I generally know that I'm getting the time-tested and well understood behavior of the compiler adding two numbers together. If I see "add(a,b)", I know that something more complex may be happening, and that if I need to know more, I should go look up the source or documentation for the add(x, y) function.
I understand the potential readability benefit of operator overloading, but I've never liked the cost of making known compiler behavior ambiguous.
> Apple watch was a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist.
> Now, if the device was truly stand alone, that's one thing, but needing to pair it up with an iPhone makes it far less interesting.
Its primary benefit is reducing the amount of times you need to pull your phone out of your pocket. If you don't care about the phone integration there are a lot of regular watches that do "being a watch" better. I never wore a regular watch, though. I have no need for it.
I bought my Apple Watch primarily because I'm at the gym doing fitness classes a lot. My phone is usually away from me in my gym bag. I would sometimes be unreachable for 1-2 hours at a time. The watch solves that problem for me nicely.
Old fashioned dimmers required a dimmer switch. Making a dimmer switch that could use some sort of powerline comms to send 3 integers (RGB) from switch to bulb to control hue and brightness would be utterly trivial. No new cabling required, just install a new dimmer switch and the bulb and you're done.
Have you ever used X10 / Insteon? PLC sounds good until you try to use it. Half the house is on different phases so you have trouble getting everything on the network. Then you also get issues with power strips consuming the signals, things generating interference, etc.
I'm really not a big fan of wireless either, but in practice Z-wave works a lot better.
The AirPods are a product similar to the PowerBeats bluetooth earbuds, which are not cheap either. They have little to do with the removal of the 3.5mm jack. "Regular" earpods with a lightning connector are included. A 3.5mm to lightning adapter is also included.
I'm hoping this "W1" chip has better sound quality and lower audio latency than Bluetooth audio. You cannot play games with the PowerBeats earbuds, and the standard bluetooth audio codecs have atrocious quality.
> And from what I have read, the Beats products are going to be much less expensive than the flagship AirPods.
The new PowerBeats3 are MORE than the AirPods at $199.
Facebook has a complex enough UI that making a more efficient app for it makes sense. There are a ton of apps that are barely more than a skinned browser that loads a mobile website. Those are the ones that I wish would die off.