To audio pros, the single most important feature in a pro laptop is knowing that when the logic board s**ts itself, you can take the thing in for repair, and you'll get back a machine that still has all your software on it. Without that, you get to experience the joy of spending several weeks on the phone with a hundred different software vendors trying to convince them to give you another device activation because your old machine no longer exists and you can't deactivate the existing installation.
The other design screw-ups in the new "Pro" were obnoxious, but survivable. This one, however, represents a level of epic fail that is simply beyond acceptable. When you've had a long string of GPU-related logic board failures like Apple has experienced lately, soldering the non-volatile storage to the main logic board is just too incompetent for words.
This is a show-stopper. This is not a pro machine. It is a disposable toy.
But with a Bluetooth headset, that balloons to potentially a couple of entire seconds, during which the app probably thinks that it is receiving audio, but is actually getting silence. Plus the whole Bluetooth device rediscovery/handshake likely incurs a nonzero power penalty.
This. There's a reason you're supposed to shut down the audio processing chain completely and tear down the hardware when not in use. Any time you have the audio hardware active, you're using a nontrivial amount of power.
That's not to say that it should necessarily tear it down instantly. If powering up the hardware incurs a significant delay, then it probably makes sense to keep it hot if the app thinks that it is likely to need to capture audio again within a few seconds. But after a reasonable timeout (no more than 30 seconds), it really should be shutting the hardware down. Anything else is battery abuse (not to mention a serious privacy concern).
The problem is that mail clients don't know whether the "all@" mailing list email expands to five users or five million. As far as it is concerned, you're sending it to one address.
The correct solution is server-side, not client-side. Specify a policy that any mailing list with more than... say thirty people must have an authorized senders list, and must reject emails from anyone not on that list. That way, when someone responds to the "all@" list without a "Resent-From" header from someone on the authorized senders list, it will get dropped.
The problem is most people outside the aviation industry assume autopilot does pretty much everything, when in reality it just maintains speed and altitude along a preprogrammed route.
Depends on the autopilot. Category III and later autopilots can automatically land in autoland-compliant airports. And that functionality isn't particularly uncommon these days. And ACAS-capable planes will at least attempt to avoid a mid-air collision as well, but this hardware is relatively rare, I think.
What makes autopilot on the ground so different is how much higher the risk of travel path incursion is, whether temporarily (by other vehicles, pedestrians, or potholes) or permanently (by curbs, center barriers, etc.).
I suspect the design of cars will still be done by well trained engineers in the US, but the whole product will be assembled elsewhere to avoid extra retaliatory tariffs in the rest of the world.
At least for cars that are sold outside the United States. The most likely effect of protectionist policies is a bifurcation of manufacturing, where products for sale in the U.S. are made here and products for sale outside the U.S. are made elsewhere. The net effect on American jobs is likely to be a wash, but the effect on the cost of goods will likely be significant, with hyperinflation like we've never seen before.
I'm not sure the problem is adjusting your thinking (or not). It's that people tend to seek out and consume information that confirms their already strongly held opinions. Newspapers pander to their readers, for example. I don't even think this is a problem. It's just how people are.
Not all people. When someone challenges my thinking, I go straight to Google and search for studies on the subject to see if they're right. If they are, I adjust my thinking. When they aren't, I don't. But the thing is, I rarely change my opinions, because as a rule, I won't state an opinion unless I'm at least moderately informed on the issue to begin with. I don't get those views from random news sources with their tendencies towards extreme bias unless there's no other option. I go to original sources, or at worst, to a fairly politically neutral source like Snopes or Wikipedia.
There's a real problem with the word "truth" in your comment too. Given that most public policy is simply arbitrating competing interests and even scientific "truth" is far from it (I give experimental physics a pass here because it's highly competitive and has a 5 sigma standard - and they use error bars!), what will this "fact checking" actually entail? It can't search information that isn't in the public domain can it. Who decides what gets published and what doesn't?
As soon as you make that concession, politics becomes a useless popularity contest, and the world is screwed. You really have to distinguish between verifiable facts and predictions. It's a verifiable fact that something happened after something else happened. It's a prediction that the same thing will happen if the first thing happens again. The biggest problem in this election, IMO, is that our leaders (on both sides of the aisle) act as though the facts don't actually matter, and their predictions should be based on nothing more than gut feelings. That's scary.
Who decides what gets published and what doesn't?
The person doing the publishing. The point of having a "BozoMeter" on those sorts of stories when they appear (for example) in a Facebook feed is not to stifle the speech, but rather to serve as a strong hint to the people reading the story that they should do a little bit of research before knee-jerk reposting it. It would also help with all the fake/stale Amber Alerts, the "Facebook is going to start charging" stories, the "Facebook does not have my permission to..." posts, etc. Without that, by the time somebody recognizes it as complete crap, the story has been reposted dozens of times. Getting the "This is probably bogus" message to the reader early would diminish the spread of complete falsehood.
She's to the right of Trump in pretty much every way. She was the most conservative candidate that the Democrats have run in a very long time.
Trump, by contrast, was the "I'm going to make something random up and say it and see how the public reacts" candidate. He has no position on basically any issues. He has no semblance of self control. He is the political equivalent of a random number generator.
Really ? So you think he's not going to try and force Muslims to register on a special database and carry special ID ? He promissed to do that many times. You think being okay with a president who wants laws like that does not make you complicit in the atrocity such a law would represent ?
I'm not too worried about that. After all, that's the sort of thing that the courts can fix (for the most part).
I'm far more worried about a guy who asked why we shouldn't use nuclear weapons getting his hands on the nuclear football. I pray that our military leaders will have the courage to refuse any illegal orders that would put our entire world in jeopardy, because I don't trust Trump not to give those sorts of orders. If he does, and if they follow them, there's no going back. The world ends. Everyone dies.
But not the power, since ICANN is now completely outside the jurisdiction of the US government
If that had been the only good thing happened under Obama, it would still be enough to cement him in history as one of the most prescient PsOTUS in our history for allowing it to happen.
You don't see the value in outsourcing all your thinking to corporations like Google, Apple, etc.?
I don't see value in outsourcing my thinking, because I actually think and adjust my reasoning when presented with solid evidence that contradicts my point of view. However, I definitely see value in outsourcing the thinking for the sorts of people who repost these things, because on the whole, they don't adjust their reasoning when presented with contradictory facts, and they mostly just waste the time of people who actually want to know the truth by filling the Internet with crapfloods of misinformation and disinformation.
Also touch authentication keys (e.g. YubiKey). As a result, this new design is likely to be a non-starter at many companies, at least in the short term.
It depends on how the developer interprets the question. If the question is interpreted as "where is it most costly to fix a bug", then your answer is clearly correct. If the question is interpreted a "where do we waste the most time and energy fixing bugs, it should (hopefully) be the opposite, i.e. you're going to see more bugs in development, so the total cost of fixing those bugs is much higher than the total cost of fixing bugs in production even though the per-bug cost is lower. This difference in interpretation likely explains the bathtub curve.
Apple has always been slightly ahead of the game, in part because their products sometimes have a long life between refreshes. The assumption is normally that the old ports will go away quickly.
Unfortunately, USB is a little different, mainly because of the prevalence of thumb drives, for which an adapter is somewhat impractical because it is as big as the device you're plugging in, because people carry them in their pockets, because recent thumb drives last for years before you replace them, and because you don't always plug them into your computer (which greatly raises the risk of the thumb drive's owner not owning an adapter, much less having it with him/her).
The new MacBook Pro added some very consumer-centric features while removing lots of pro-centric features under the theory that wireless will somehow replace those features. I don't think Apple has really taken the time to understand just how slow wireless is in practice. In the absence of an 802.11ac infrastructure base station, the maximum speed two devices can communicate with each other is 802.11g speeds, or about 54 Mb/s. A 5D Mark IV RAW file can be ~60 MB. So it takes ~9 seconds to transfer a single photo. UHS-I can potentially read at ~100 megabytes per second, so it takes 0.6 seconds to transfer a photo. Transferring a batch of photos (say 500 photos for a day of light shooting) takes an hour and 15 minutes over Wi-Fi (long enough to run your camera battery down completely). Transferring the same photos via SD takes five minutes and doesn't run down your battery at all. And it is much easier to shove an SD card into the side of your machine than to keep your camera tethered by USB and using it to transfer photos and takes up less space in your bag than a separate flash card reader or a USB cable.
And then there's HDMI. Apple has always removed ports designed for computer video when newer ports come out, under the assumption that old monitors will get replaced with newer monitors with the new ports. The problem comes when TV is factored in. HDMI is a shared standard used by television sets, Blu-Ray players, etc. None of that gear will benefit from newer standards, and worse, has a much longer service life (decades) than computer monitors. Hotel room TVs will likely have HDMI ports in twenty years. So basically by removing the port, Apple is saying that they don't think most users need to connect their computer to anything except in their homes. Worse, most users who are impacted by this won't even know that they're going to be impacted. If connecting their computer to a TV is something you do every day, you'll have the adapter. Most people who are affected, however, are folks who suddenly decide to stay in the hotel and watch something on Netflix. Those folks won't even own the adapter, much less have it with them. And when they realize that they have to drive three hours to an Apple store to get a special adapter, it will sour their perception of Apple's product line.
These sorts of decisions aren't the sorts of bad decisions that kill a product line in the short term. They don't impact product sales for that model. They're the sorts of bad decisions that insidiously diminish users' expectations, leading them to question future product purchases. Unfortunately, the MBAs won't be able to connect cause and effect, which means they'll keep making the same sorts of mistakes.
But you do point out a very important use case that simply isn't addressed by USB-C. There frequently is a need to have small devices that can permanently stay attached without any risk of damage.
That use case can't be solved by USB-C. It would require the devices themselves conforming to a form factor, rather than just the connector. It isn't really feasible to design a camera to accommodate arbitrarily sized USB flash sticks internally.
Which is why anyone serious was already using an external SD reader and realized why they would not really use an internal one that much anyway.... you might use it for a year then something faster would come around and who wants to wait for images to transfer?
Never underestimate the power of convenience. The slot in your laptop is there as long as you have your laptop with you. An external reader is something you have to dig out of your bag. I'm typically doing other things while Lightroom imports photos anyway, so the difference between a minute and two minutes is mostly irrelevant.
Thus, even though I own a UHS-II reader, I only bother to get it out if I need to import contents off of a CF card (because it does both) or when I need to bulk import an unusually large number of images from multiple cards.
Every single port is USB-C with Thunderbolt 3 support, so basically they are operating a way faster "hub" than that already internally.
Not really, no. Inside the computer are multiple USB hubs—one that provides service for the keyboard, trackpad, and SD slot, and (at least) one that provides service for the ports on the side. The SD card slot was tied in with the keyboard and trackpad, which are almost certainly not using USB 3 communication.
Actually, the better answer is that they weren't willing to update the SD card reader to something modern. Newer UHS-II SD card readers are much faster than the ancient UHS-I reader that they included, and somebody probably calculated that upgrading to UHS-II would require replacing their USB-2 hub with a USB-3 hub in addition to upgrading the SD card reader, and they decided that it wasn't worth it.
As someone who uses the SD card slot on a regular basis, I disagree with them, and this is definitely making me question Apple's commitment to photography professionals, particularly given what they did to Aperture.
Except that most pro photographers have cameras that use Compact Flash or a newer protocol. SD is really for consumer stuff. Still very useful and that. Pros have had to use external readers forever.
Actually, Canon has been transitioning their DSLR product line to SD for several years, starting with the 6D (2012). Their newer offerings have an SD card slot to make it easier to get data into your laptop.
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Don't buy. "Pro", my ass.
To audio pros, the single most important feature in a pro laptop is knowing that when the logic board s**ts itself, you can take the thing in for repair, and you'll get back a machine that still has all your software on it. Without that, you get to experience the joy of spending several weeks on the phone with a hundred different software vendors trying to convince them to give you another device activation because your old machine no longer exists and you can't deactivate the existing installation.
The other design screw-ups in the new "Pro" were obnoxious, but survivable. This one, however, represents a level of epic fail that is simply beyond acceptable. When you've had a long string of GPU-related logic board failures like Apple has experienced lately, soldering the non-volatile storage to the main logic board is just too incompetent for words.
This is a show-stopper. This is not a pro machine. It is a disposable toy.
But with a Bluetooth headset, that balloons to potentially a couple of entire seconds, during which the app probably thinks that it is receiving audio, but is actually getting silence. Plus the whole Bluetooth device rediscovery/handshake likely incurs a nonzero power penalty.
This. There's a reason you're supposed to shut down the audio processing chain completely and tear down the hardware when not in use. Any time you have the audio hardware active, you're using a nontrivial amount of power.
That's not to say that it should necessarily tear it down instantly. If powering up the hardware incurs a significant delay, then it probably makes sense to keep it hot if the app thinks that it is likely to need to capture audio again within a few seconds. But after a reasonable timeout (no more than 30 seconds), it really should be shutting the hardware down. Anything else is battery abuse (not to mention a serious privacy concern).
The problem is that mail clients don't know whether the "all@" mailing list email expands to five users or five million. As far as it is concerned, you're sending it to one address.
The correct solution is server-side, not client-side. Specify a policy that any mailing list with more than... say thirty people must have an authorized senders list, and must reject emails from anyone not on that list. That way, when someone responds to the "all@" list without a "Resent-From" header from someone on the authorized senders list, it will get dropped.
Depends on the autopilot. Category III and later autopilots can automatically land in autoland-compliant airports. And that functionality isn't particularly uncommon these days. And ACAS-capable planes will at least attempt to avoid a mid-air collision as well, but this hardware is relatively rare, I think.
What makes autopilot on the ground so different is how much higher the risk of travel path incursion is, whether temporarily (by other vehicles, pedestrians, or potholes) or permanently (by curbs, center barriers, etc.).
It's like aiming a car at the library of Congress and hitting only books by Ayn Rand.
At least for cars that are sold outside the United States. The most likely effect of protectionist policies is a bifurcation of manufacturing, where products for sale in the U.S. are made here and products for sale outside the U.S. are made elsewhere. The net effect on American jobs is likely to be a wash, but the effect on the cost of goods will likely be significant, with hyperinflation like we've never seen before.
Not all people. When someone challenges my thinking, I go straight to Google and search for studies on the subject to see if they're right. If they are, I adjust my thinking. When they aren't, I don't. But the thing is, I rarely change my opinions, because as a rule, I won't state an opinion unless I'm at least moderately informed on the issue to begin with. I don't get those views from random news sources with their tendencies towards extreme bias unless there's no other option. I go to original sources, or at worst, to a fairly politically neutral source like Snopes or Wikipedia.
As soon as you make that concession, politics becomes a useless popularity contest, and the world is screwed. You really have to distinguish between verifiable facts and predictions. It's a verifiable fact that something happened after something else happened. It's a prediction that the same thing will happen if the first thing happens again. The biggest problem in this election, IMO, is that our leaders (on both sides of the aisle) act as though the facts don't actually matter, and their predictions should be based on nothing more than gut feelings. That's scary.
The person doing the publishing. The point of having a "BozoMeter" on those sorts of stories when they appear (for example) in a Facebook feed is not to stifle the speech, but rather to serve as a strong hint to the people reading the story that they should do a little bit of research before knee-jerk reposting it. It would also help with all the fake/stale Amber Alerts, the "Facebook is going to start charging" stories, the "Facebook does not have my permission to..." posts, etc. Without that, by the time somebody recognizes it as complete crap, the story has been reposted dozens of times. Getting the "This is probably bogus" message to the reader early would diminish the spread of complete falsehood.
She's to the right of Trump in pretty much every way. She was the most conservative candidate that the Democrats have run in a very long time.
Trump, by contrast, was the "I'm going to make something random up and say it and see how the public reacts" candidate. He has no position on basically any issues. He has no semblance of self control. He is the political equivalent of a random number generator.
I'm not too worried about that. After all, that's the sort of thing that the courts can fix (for the most part).
I'm far more worried about a guy who asked why we shouldn't use nuclear weapons getting his hands on the nuclear football. I pray that our military leaders will have the courage to refuse any illegal orders that would put our entire world in jeopardy, because I don't trust Trump not to give those sorts of orders. If he does, and if they follow them, there's no going back. The world ends. Everyone dies.
If that had been the only good thing happened under Obama, it would still be enough to cement him in history as one of the most prescient PsOTUS in our history for allowing it to happen.
I don't see value in outsourcing my thinking, because I actually think and adjust my reasoning when presented with solid evidence that contradicts my point of view. However, I definitely see value in outsourcing the thinking for the sorts of people who repost these things, because on the whole, they don't adjust their reasoning when presented with contradictory facts, and they mostly just waste the time of people who actually want to know the truth by filling the Internet with crapfloods of misinformation and disinformation.
And that's still dirt cheap compared with the Bay Area, almost to the same degree that large cities in India are cheap relative to Chicago....
Which electable candidates were those? I don't remember seeing any.
Crash. Wham. I forgot how good that movie was. Too bad they didn't make any sequels.
Ingres.
Also touch authentication keys (e.g. YubiKey). As a result, this new design is likely to be a non-starter at many companies, at least in the short term.
It depends on how the developer interprets the question. If the question is interpreted as "where is it most costly to fix a bug", then your answer is clearly correct. If the question is interpreted a "where do we waste the most time and energy fixing bugs, it should (hopefully) be the opposite, i.e. you're going to see more bugs in development, so the total cost of fixing those bugs is much higher than the total cost of fixing bugs in production even though the per-bug cost is lower. This difference in interpretation likely explains the bathtub curve.
Apple has always been slightly ahead of the game, in part because their products sometimes have a long life between refreshes. The assumption is normally that the old ports will go away quickly.
Unfortunately, USB is a little different, mainly because of the prevalence of thumb drives, for which an adapter is somewhat impractical because it is as big as the device you're plugging in, because people carry them in their pockets, because recent thumb drives last for years before you replace them, and because you don't always plug them into your computer (which greatly raises the risk of the thumb drive's owner not owning an adapter, much less having it with him/her).
The new MacBook Pro added some very consumer-centric features while removing lots of pro-centric features under the theory that wireless will somehow replace those features. I don't think Apple has really taken the time to understand just how slow wireless is in practice. In the absence of an 802.11ac infrastructure base station, the maximum speed two devices can communicate with each other is 802.11g speeds, or about 54 Mb/s. A 5D Mark IV RAW file can be ~60 MB. So it takes ~9 seconds to transfer a single photo. UHS-I can potentially read at ~100 megabytes per second, so it takes 0.6 seconds to transfer a photo. Transferring a batch of photos (say 500 photos for a day of light shooting) takes an hour and 15 minutes over Wi-Fi (long enough to run your camera battery down completely). Transferring the same photos via SD takes five minutes and doesn't run down your battery at all. And it is much easier to shove an SD card into the side of your machine than to keep your camera tethered by USB and using it to transfer photos and takes up less space in your bag than a separate flash card reader or a USB cable.
And then there's HDMI. Apple has always removed ports designed for computer video when newer ports come out, under the assumption that old monitors will get replaced with newer monitors with the new ports. The problem comes when TV is factored in. HDMI is a shared standard used by television sets, Blu-Ray players, etc. None of that gear will benefit from newer standards, and worse, has a much longer service life (decades) than computer monitors. Hotel room TVs will likely have HDMI ports in twenty years. So basically by removing the port, Apple is saying that they don't think most users need to connect their computer to anything except in their homes. Worse, most users who are impacted by this won't even know that they're going to be impacted. If connecting their computer to a TV is something you do every day, you'll have the adapter. Most people who are affected, however, are folks who suddenly decide to stay in the hotel and watch something on Netflix. Those folks won't even own the adapter, much less have it with them. And when they realize that they have to drive three hours to an Apple store to get a special adapter, it will sour their perception of Apple's product line.
These sorts of decisions aren't the sorts of bad decisions that kill a product line in the short term. They don't impact product sales for that model. They're the sorts of bad decisions that insidiously diminish users' expectations, leading them to question future product purchases. Unfortunately, the MBAs won't be able to connect cause and effect, which means they'll keep making the same sorts of mistakes.
That use case can't be solved by USB-C. It would require the devices themselves conforming to a form factor, rather than just the connector. It isn't really feasible to design a camera to accommodate arbitrarily sized USB flash sticks internally.
Never underestimate the power of convenience. The slot in your laptop is there as long as you have your laptop with you. An external reader is something you have to dig out of your bag. I'm typically doing other things while Lightroom imports photos anyway, so the difference between a minute and two minutes is mostly irrelevant.
Thus, even though I own a UHS-II reader, I only bother to get it out if I need to import contents off of a CF card (because it does both) or when I need to bulk import an unusually large number of images from multiple cards.
Not really, no. Inside the computer are multiple USB hubs—one that provides service for the keyboard, trackpad, and SD slot, and (at least) one that provides service for the ports on the side. The SD card slot was tied in with the keyboard and trackpad, which are almost certainly not using USB 3 communication.
??? They don't exist. Did you mean USB-C to SD?
The 6D has only an SD slot. The 5D Mark IV put in an SD slot in place of one of the CF slots. I would call that transitioning towards SD.
Actually, the better answer is that they weren't willing to update the SD card reader to something modern. Newer UHS-II SD card readers are much faster than the ancient UHS-I reader that they included, and somebody probably calculated that upgrading to UHS-II would require replacing their USB-2 hub with a USB-3 hub in addition to upgrading the SD card reader, and they decided that it wasn't worth it.
As someone who uses the SD card slot on a regular basis, I disagree with them, and this is definitely making me question Apple's commitment to photography professionals, particularly given what they did to Aperture.
Actually, Canon has been transitioning their DSLR product line to SD for several years, starting with the 6D (2012). Their newer offerings have an SD card slot to make it easier to get data into your laptop.