That's a completely different situation in two key respects:
The cellular carriers have a government-granted license to use limited spectrum, unlike Wi-Fi, which anyone can use freely to offer service.
The airport/airline does not charge money for the use of those flight information services, so they do not stand to profit from making that information available for free over their Wi-Fi network.
The airport/airline doesn't really have competitors charging money in that space, either, and the short-term impact of that free access is unlikely to have any meaningful impact on their competitors anyway.
In short, the two scenarios have about as much in common as giving away a free squirt gun with purchase of a toy car and giving away a free handgun in every box of Lucky Charms.
However, on some airlines, they do at least approach the line by offering pay-per-view movies via their Wi-Fi service for significantly less than the cost of Internet service for streaming movies via Netflix et al. That's potentially a lot more problematic. In that particular case, I can certainly understand why they would want to do so from the perspective of having limited bandwidth available and being able to stream locally instead of using that limited external bandwidth, but it is pretty clearly a grey area in terms of whether it is or is not acceptable.
With that said, having to pay more to watch your movies via Netflix during a three-hour flight is unlikely to affect competition in the same way that having to pay more to watch those movies via Netflix on your cellular phone on an ongoing basis. So that is at least marginally acceptable to me, albeit arguably anticompetitive. With that said, if they start zero-rating content from one outside provider and not from others (in exchange for a kickback or whatever), that would fall squarely on the other side of the line, because for frequent fliers, that "You could be watching for free if you were using Amazon Prime" banner would potentially color their perspective of those outside content providers.
By the time you are ready to replace that SE, there won't be a single decent smartphone, iOS or Android, that will have a 3.5 mm Jack. Not a single one. Sorry.
I would tend to bet almost the opposite—that not a single cell phone manufacturer except Samsung will follow Apple's lead by the time you're ready to replace that SE. Here's why:
Sales of iPhone 7 have lagged behind the iPhone 6s according to multiple reports.
Apple didn't even manage to pick up very many sales after the Note 7 train wreck. Those sales mostly went to other Android devices.
iOS continues to lose market share to Android at an alarming rate, because their sales are shrinking while the market grows.
Other manufacturers are continuing to release new product lines with headphone jacks.
In other words, all evidence strongly suggests that Apple's decision to remove the headphone jack was a mistake, and slumping customer sales are a reaction to what consumers perceive as the long, slow decline of a once-beloved product line. IMO, the only question that remains is whether Apple will double down on stupid or recognize and correct their error in their next design.
You don't upload the high-def data. You upload a downsampled copy over cellular in real time so that nobody can cover anything up. Then you use PK crypto with steganography to "prove" that the high-def data doesn't exist, and that the low-def data is out of reach.
It's the other way around. Encrypting the video data as you write it to disk would be an absolutely trivial change software-wise. You just add an appropriate set of crypto libraries and stick them in the file read/write path at whatever level you prefer. However, doing so would require a massive change to the hardware, because hardware-based encryption would be absolutely required to achieve the sorts of data rates needed for recording 4K/8K video.
Encryption also has other practical issues associated with it, making it unlikely that we'll see this, simply because the number of people willing to do all the extra work is likely to be small compared with the market for the products. If you use PK crypto, you could make it possible to record without allowing anyone to play it back, but that would make editing and in-camera review infeasible. If you use symmetric crypto, it is worthless unless the key is pre-shared, and even then, would be worthless unless you can delete it quickly when necessary.
In an ideal world, you would have multiple pairs of PK crypto keys, using the public key for encryption and the private key for decryption. Both halves of each pair would be stored on the device by default, and a copy of those keys would be stored safely back at their home base. You would then have a panic button that wipes the currently in-use private key and switches to the next key pair. That way, recent recordings can still be decrypted, but only after getting back home (or uploading the data back to their home base). And you would still be able to record and review new video using the next key pair even after hitting that panic button.
And in a truly ideal world, it would somehow use steganography on the file metadata to make it impossible to prove that the pre-existing data exists without uploading the entire disk image to somebody who has a copy of the master key.
The actual implementation of such a design is left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm pretty sure the functionality they just removed predates Mac OS X. So this isn't something that suddenly stopped working, nor was it some sort of emergency that required immediate action to "fix". But some manager had a knee-jerk reaction in response to some article, and they decided to remove functionality that is decades old.
Ten years ago, this would have gotten shot down in UI review. It is unclear whether they could have even made such a change in a major OS release, much less a minor bug-fix release, which are supposed to have zero user-facing functional changes except in situations where a feature's schedule slips, and even then, only to the minimum extent required to enable that feature.
No, this is not "exactly what Apple does and has been doing since the first days of the Macintosh". It might occasionally appear that way to folks who have no idea how Apple works internally, but that's a different matter.
So who wants to write the replacement widget that puts the time back? I mean it has to be what, a hundred lines of code, tops?
This is an absolutely idiotic response by Apple. It seriously diminishes the usability of the machine for people who currently use that indicator as a "My computer is using ten times as much battery power as it should be; what app has gone crazy?" notification.
I'm growing more and more concerned about Apple's leadership, and I say this as somebody who spent almost thirteen years working there. This is not normal Apple behavior. Something is very, very wrong in Cupertino.
There's less packaging in bulk display packs (boxes of 30 or whatever) because they aren't wrapped in groups of 6 or whatever, so the manufacturing cost is lower. And small boxes can be stacked more densely than flat packages because the boxes provide some degree of crush protection, so chances are the shipping costs are lower, too.
More to the point, if the per-unit price from the manufacturer were higher, most stores wouldn't buy the bulk display packs; they would buy the six-packs and rip them open (except in the relatively rare situation where the six-packs aren't labeled for individual sale) and make a higher profit per unit while charging the same price as everybody else who buys the display packs. Eventually, the manufacturers would realize that this was happening, and would reduce the price of their display packs. So it seems fairly safe to say that the stores pay less per unit when buying the display packs, or at a bare minimum, they don't pay appreciably more per unit.
It is true about higher theft risk and higher damage risk. And there is a small difference in the cost of the checker ringing up a single versus a bulk pack. I would expect those to be lost in the noise, though, and certainly not worthy of a large difference in price. They charge you a higher markup because they know most people don't want to buy six, and thus will pay more for the convenience, resulting in higher profit.
An item's price at the front is going to be the same as its price at the back. The UPC code is the same, and the store has no way of knowing if you picked it up in line or while shopping at the back of the store.
In practice, the candy bars in the back of the store are sold in packs of 6 or whatever, rather than individually, so the UPC code is different, and they're marked up considerably when sold individually even though the actual cost to the store is probably slightly less.
Depends on the company and the value of the gift. When I was at Apple, I think they just treated it as taxable income as long as it wasn't a high-value item, but when they gave us the original iPhone and the glass Apple blocks, IIRC, they paid the tax. YMMV.
You can't vote without a voter registration card or some other proof of who you are (e.g. an electric bill), and you can't vote unless you have at some point properly registered to vote, which you can't do without a SSN. So for illegals to vote, they would have to either commit outright identity theft to register fraudulently (which they screen for and actively remove when found) or steal somebody else's mail and vote in his/her name (which would likely be discovered when that other person went to vote).
In short, the absence of strong evidence supporting such a claim is, in this case, strong evidence of the absence of such fraud.
The only way they could have designed this to be more of a meme is if they made it an 'Internet of Things' device, and made it 'wirelessly charging'.
Wireless charging actually would have improved the design considerably. Use a coil of wire wrapped around the center shaft and jacket the whole thing in epoxy, then build a vertical tube that inductively charges all the smart umbrellas that people put into it (and tolerates dumb umbrellas).
I came here to post the same thing. It's about time Apple finally started behaving like a proper member of the academic community. On the other hand, I'd give it five... ten years tops before some leak causes them to clamp down and become paranoid again.
By that same standard, the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was designed to prevent precisely the same sorts of abuse that Net Neutrality laws prevent, is also an impediment to innovation and doing interesting things, if by interesting things, you mean using bundling to drive your competition out of the market and creating an oligopoly of content providers owned by the same folks who own the pipes (i.e. the exact opposite of what the Internet was intended to be).
No, no, courage is ripping out a feature that half your users use. Ripping out a feature that.0001% of your users use and is probably being actively exploited in the rare situations where it is used takes epic courage!
And statistics begs to point out that one special-snowflake outlier doesn't make the conclusion worthless.
It's not one outlier. They're analyzing the data wrong.
In my personal experience, I ran out of new movies to watch on Netflix after a few months, and began binge watching TV shows because there weren't enough movies on my list to be worth the hassle. I have watched approximately zero movies in the last year. This experience is echoed by everyone I've talked to.
So when they say that users watch about 1/3rd movies regardless of the depth of their catalog, what they really mean is that even though new users run out of movies to watch earlier, there are more new users coming in. As long as that is true, and as long as the old users don't cancel because they've run out of things to watch, they're good.
The bigger problem is that Netflix keeps dropping TV shows while I and members of my family are still watching them. I find it quite alarming how quickly I'm running out of things to watch, because the depth of their catalog (even in TV) is getting so shallow so quickly. At the current rate of decline, I'd give Netflix six months at most before I drop my subscription entirely and switch to one of the other providers temporarily until I run out of stuff to watch there. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Much like testing for certain medical diseases, sometimes you can only determine a cause by exclusion.
A phone that is turned off is consuming no power, so the failure cannot plausibly be caused by an excessive rate of discharge or by external heat (e.g. being too close to a hot GPU).
A phone that is not charging is adding no power to the pack, so the failure is probably not caused by an excessive rate of charge or by overcharging.
Multiple battery manufacturers use different battery chemistry and different designs, so the failure cannot plausibly be caused by dendrites or other similar failures. Also, the failures don't occur with those same batteries in other devices, which eliminates the batteries themselves as a likely cause.
When you eliminate the impossible, what remains are failures that can occur even with a battery that is neither charging nor discharging. The most likely causes, then, involve some form of physical damage.
LiPo packs change size during normal charging and discharging just a bit. That's why there are tolerances build into the design. With insufficient tolerances, bad things happen (TM), and even if the tolerances are sufficient to avoid self-puncturing at their maximum size, it is possible that flexing the case in just the right way while the pack is maximally swollen could still puncture the pack. So this is at least a plausible explanation, whereas most other theories aren't.
With that said, even if we assume that these folks are correct, it does not absolve other aspects of the design. Not all failures have only a single root cause. For example, IIRC, overcharging a LiPo pack can cause unusual levels of battery expansion from hydrogen buildup, which when combined with normal levels of flexing in a case that has insufficient tolerances, would result in the pack perforating and venting with flame.
The other companies gave no answer, which for any company that didn't have a history of inadvertently enabling genocide was IMO the right thing to do. Such political trolling really shouldn't even be dignified with a response, in general.
But you're right about IBM. Ethically speaking, they should have been the first to say no, given what happened the last time they helped with a database of everyone in a particular religious group. Then again, it is also possible that because IBM and its employees were not punished for their role in enabling the Holocaust, the bean counters that run the place would dutifully enable another one. Scary thought.
The G3 series had a ferrite choke a quarter inch from the plug, and that quarter inch of wire constantly broke, causing fires, so they recalled the entire lot of them and replaced them with the yo-yo power supply.
Slight correction. I'm not sure if they actually caused fires; they were recalled because they considered them to be a fire risk from overheating, which presumably was caused by shorting caused by the cable failures.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a completely different situation in two key respects:
In short, the two scenarios have about as much in common as giving away a free squirt gun with purchase of a toy car and giving away a free handgun in every box of Lucky Charms.
However, on some airlines, they do at least approach the line by offering pay-per-view movies via their Wi-Fi service for significantly less than the cost of Internet service for streaming movies via Netflix et al. That's potentially a lot more problematic. In that particular case, I can certainly understand why they would want to do so from the perspective of having limited bandwidth available and being able to stream locally instead of using that limited external bandwidth, but it is pretty clearly a grey area in terms of whether it is or is not acceptable.
With that said, having to pay more to watch your movies via Netflix during a three-hour flight is unlikely to affect competition in the same way that having to pay more to watch those movies via Netflix on your cellular phone on an ongoing basis. So that is at least marginally acceptable to me, albeit arguably anticompetitive. With that said, if they start zero-rating content from one outside provider and not from others (in exchange for a kickback or whatever), that would fall squarely on the other side of the line, because for frequent fliers, that "You could be watching for free if you were using Amazon Prime" banner would potentially color their perspective of those outside content providers.
Err.. signifcantly. Silly iPhone....
I think the GP meant that they took in $95M in revenue. The problem was that their expenses exceeded that revenue significabtly.
I would tend to bet almost the opposite—that not a single cell phone manufacturer except Samsung will follow Apple's lead by the time you're ready to replace that SE. Here's why:
In other words, all evidence strongly suggests that Apple's decision to remove the headphone jack was a mistake, and slumping customer sales are a reaction to what consumers perceive as the long, slow decline of a once-beloved product line. IMO, the only question that remains is whether Apple will double down on stupid or recognize and correct their error in their next design.
If the behavior is documented in the camera's manual, convincing them should be easy.
You don't upload the high-def data. You upload a downsampled copy over cellular in real time so that nobody can cover anything up. Then you use PK crypto with steganography to "prove" that the high-def data doesn't exist, and that the low-def data is out of reach.
Or stored on the camera and wiped with a panic button, cycling to the next key pair.
It's the other way around. Encrypting the video data as you write it to disk would be an absolutely trivial change software-wise. You just add an appropriate set of crypto libraries and stick them in the file read/write path at whatever level you prefer. However, doing so would require a massive change to the hardware, because hardware-based encryption would be absolutely required to achieve the sorts of data rates needed for recording 4K/8K video.
Encryption also has other practical issues associated with it, making it unlikely that we'll see this, simply because the number of people willing to do all the extra work is likely to be small compared with the market for the products. If you use PK crypto, you could make it possible to record without allowing anyone to play it back, but that would make editing and in-camera review infeasible. If you use symmetric crypto, it is worthless unless the key is pre-shared, and even then, would be worthless unless you can delete it quickly when necessary.
In an ideal world, you would have multiple pairs of PK crypto keys, using the public key for encryption and the private key for decryption. Both halves of each pair would be stored on the device by default, and a copy of those keys would be stored safely back at their home base. You would then have a panic button that wipes the currently in-use private key and switches to the next key pair. That way, recent recordings can still be decrypted, but only after getting back home (or uploading the data back to their home base). And you would still be able to record and review new video using the next key pair even after hitting that panic button.
And in a truly ideal world, it would somehow use steganography on the file metadata to make it impossible to prove that the pre-existing data exists without uploading the entire disk image to somebody who has a copy of the master key.
The actual implementation of such a design is left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm pretty sure the functionality they just removed predates Mac OS X. So this isn't something that suddenly stopped working, nor was it some sort of emergency that required immediate action to "fix". But some manager had a knee-jerk reaction in response to some article, and they decided to remove functionality that is decades old.
Ten years ago, this would have gotten shot down in UI review. It is unclear whether they could have even made such a change in a major OS release, much less a minor bug-fix release, which are supposed to have zero user-facing functional changes except in situations where a feature's schedule slips, and even then, only to the minimum extent required to enable that feature.
No, this is not "exactly what Apple does and has been doing since the first days of the Macintosh". It might occasionally appear that way to folks who have no idea how Apple works internally, but that's a different matter.
So who wants to write the replacement widget that puts the time back? I mean it has to be what, a hundred lines of code, tops?
This is an absolutely idiotic response by Apple. It seriously diminishes the usability of the machine for people who currently use that indicator as a "My computer is using ten times as much battery power as it should be; what app has gone crazy?" notification.
I'm growing more and more concerned about Apple's leadership, and I say this as somebody who spent almost thirteen years working there. This is not normal Apple behavior. Something is very, very wrong in Cupertino.
There's less packaging in bulk display packs (boxes of 30 or whatever) because they aren't wrapped in groups of 6 or whatever, so the manufacturing cost is lower. And small boxes can be stacked more densely than flat packages because the boxes provide some degree of crush protection, so chances are the shipping costs are lower, too.
More to the point, if the per-unit price from the manufacturer were higher, most stores wouldn't buy the bulk display packs; they would buy the six-packs and rip them open (except in the relatively rare situation where the six-packs aren't labeled for individual sale) and make a higher profit per unit while charging the same price as everybody else who buys the display packs. Eventually, the manufacturers would realize that this was happening, and would reduce the price of their display packs. So it seems fairly safe to say that the stores pay less per unit when buying the display packs, or at a bare minimum, they don't pay appreciably more per unit.
It is true about higher theft risk and higher damage risk. And there is a small difference in the cost of the checker ringing up a single versus a bulk pack. I would expect those to be lost in the noise, though, and certainly not worthy of a large difference in price. They charge you a higher markup because they know most people don't want to buy six, and thus will pay more for the convenience, resulting in higher profit.
In practice, the candy bars in the back of the store are sold in packs of 6 or whatever, rather than individually, so the UPC code is different, and they're marked up considerably when sold individually even though the actual cost to the store is probably slightly less.
Hoverboard fires, cell phone fires... I think I see a pattern.
Depends on the company and the value of the gift. When I was at Apple, I think they just treated it as taxable income as long as it wasn't a high-value item, but when they gave us the original iPhone and the glass Apple blocks, IIRC, they paid the tax. YMMV.
You can't vote without a voter registration card or some other proof of who you are (e.g. an electric bill), and you can't vote unless you have at some point properly registered to vote, which you can't do without a SSN. So for illegals to vote, they would have to either commit outright identity theft to register fraudulently (which they screen for and actively remove when found) or steal somebody else's mail and vote in his/her name (which would likely be discovered when that other person went to vote).
In short, the absence of strong evidence supporting such a claim is, in this case, strong evidence of the absence of such fraud.
Wireless charging actually would have improved the design considerably. Use a coil of wire wrapped around the center shaft and jacket the whole thing in epoxy, then build a vertical tube that inductively charges all the smart umbrellas that people put into it (and tolerates dumb umbrellas).
I came here to post the same thing. It's about time Apple finally started behaving like a proper member of the academic community. On the other hand, I'd give it five... ten years tops before some leak causes them to clamp down and become paranoid again.
By that same standard, the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was designed to prevent precisely the same sorts of abuse that Net Neutrality laws prevent, is also an impediment to innovation and doing interesting things, if by interesting things, you mean using bundling to drive your competition out of the market and creating an oligopoly of content providers owned by the same folks who own the pipes (i.e. the exact opposite of what the Internet was intended to be).
What kind of consumer are you? Don't you know you're supposed to be replacing phones once a week? :-D
Samsung tends to follow Apple's lead. It isn't as though that was unexpected....
Have courage; there will likely be copper-compatible options for some time to come. :-)
No, no, courage is ripping out a feature that half your users use. Ripping out a feature that .0001% of your users use and is probably being actively exploited in the rare situations where it is used takes epic courage!
It's not one outlier. They're analyzing the data wrong.
In my personal experience, I ran out of new movies to watch on Netflix after a few months, and began binge watching TV shows because there weren't enough movies on my list to be worth the hassle. I have watched approximately zero movies in the last year. This experience is echoed by everyone I've talked to.
So when they say that users watch about 1/3rd movies regardless of the depth of their catalog, what they really mean is that even though new users run out of movies to watch earlier, there are more new users coming in. As long as that is true, and as long as the old users don't cancel because they've run out of things to watch, they're good.
The bigger problem is that Netflix keeps dropping TV shows while I and members of my family are still watching them. I find it quite alarming how quickly I'm running out of things to watch, because the depth of their catalog (even in TV) is getting so shallow so quickly. At the current rate of decline, I'd give Netflix six months at most before I drop my subscription entirely and switch to one of the other providers temporarily until I run out of stuff to watch there. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Much like testing for certain medical diseases, sometimes you can only determine a cause by exclusion.
When you eliminate the impossible, what remains are failures that can occur even with a battery that is neither charging nor discharging. The most likely causes, then, involve some form of physical damage.
LiPo packs change size during normal charging and discharging just a bit. That's why there are tolerances build into the design. With insufficient tolerances, bad things happen (TM), and even if the tolerances are sufficient to avoid self-puncturing at their maximum size, it is possible that flexing the case in just the right way while the pack is maximally swollen could still puncture the pack. So this is at least a plausible explanation, whereas most other theories aren't.
With that said, even if we assume that these folks are correct, it does not absolve other aspects of the design. Not all failures have only a single root cause. For example, IIRC, overcharging a LiPo pack can cause unusual levels of battery expansion from hydrogen buildup, which when combined with normal levels of flexing in a case that has insufficient tolerances, would result in the pack perforating and venting with flame.
The other companies gave no answer, which for any company that didn't have a history of inadvertently enabling genocide was IMO the right thing to do. Such political trolling really shouldn't even be dignified with a response, in general.
But you're right about IBM. Ethically speaking, they should have been the first to say no, given what happened the last time they helped with a database of everyone in a particular religious group. Then again, it is also possible that because IBM and its employees were not punished for their role in enabling the Holocaust, the bean counters that run the place would dutifully enable another one. Scary thought.
Slight correction. I'm not sure if they actually caused fires; they were recalled because they considered them to be a fire risk from overheating, which presumably was caused by shorting caused by the cable failures.