Completely missed the point, clearly didn't read the article
I remember back in the day when we had decent trolls who would actually read the article and then incisively cut down posts made here. Had you done so yourself, you'd have been aware that the article said...
However, it’s worth noting that with Apple’s new iPhone releases just around the corner, the iPhone maker is almost certain to get back on top in September.
...which is exactly what the OP was talking about.
Frankly, I'm disappointed. As you just demonstrated, the quality of the trolls on Slashdot has diminished significantly in recent years. We deserve better than you. But, to answer your question, the fact that you're all we've got could indeed be taken as evidence of the slow death of Slashdot.
You're not thinking very creatively, since I was able to think of a variety of attacks that could use this without having physical access to the interior of your home.
For instance, they could have just dropped a small device into your pocket that every few minutes emits an inaudible command to open the garage door. You, yourself would be the vector through which the attacker could attack your always-on devices in your home. In fact, it could even be something you're aware of, like a thumb drive you were given that secretly has a tiny speaker built in or that is setup to autorun a sound file with the commands when plugged into a computer.
Alternatively, a person who is known to you but who you don't realize is malicious could use this to gain physical access. Maybe you're okay taking a FaceTime call from them, but then they transmit the inaudible signal over the call, which your iDevice faithfully reproduces, resulting in Alexa, Siri, or whatever else opening your garage door. Or maybe someone standing outside at your smart doorbell uses it when you ask what they want via the app, resulting in your phone or tablet reproducing the sounds within earshot of a device that will respond to them.
A third possibility is that they could use your always-on phone to engage in an attack against your home even while you're not at home. For instance, an attacker passing you in the street could activate the commands on a device in your hand or pocket via "OK Google" or "Hey Siri" to open your garage door for a crony of theirs. For that matter, anyone who can get within listening distance of your phone can use this attack on it, all without ever having access to the devices within your home.
I agree that it is NOT a good thing for consumers if we allow local monopolies to work out exclusivity agreements with other services or products, but T-Mobile is hardly a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination, local or otherwise. In about 99% of the places they are, so too are Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.
I'd be right there with you if this was Comcast or Cox or Suddenlink doing similarly, simply because of the way that they've all managed to carve out regional monopolies in which they're largely uncontested, but the wireless market is a fairly competitive one without either local or regional monopolies. As such, I don't see a problem with one of the wireless carriers finding new ways to add value to their services, so long as they don't do so by prioritizing Netflix's traffic over that of its competitors.
What sidebar? Between content blockers, custom CSS, and userscripts, I've removed, added, and moved elements on a variety of sites that I visit on a daily basis, including Slashdot. My browser is formatting it in the manner that I find most readable on my device, in seemingly the exact sort of way that you described as how things are supposed to work.
I'll grant that my mobile devices don't play along as nicely, but at least on the desktop I don't see ads, "featured" content, or links to (un)related stories when I peruse Slashdot. Instead, I get to read it how I want on my device.
I'll grant as well that I'm not a typical user, but it's unrealistic to expect a browser to be able to reliably render text in a meaningful way in the absence of any stylistic guidance, given that we frequently use semantic information in order to provide secondary text alongside a primary text. But if all you want is a best stab at browsers making that happen anyway, at least some browsers already support a mode for easier reading (e.g. Reading List in Safari), suggesting that this isn't so much of an issue with the underlying languages, so much as it is a problem with the browser vendors and their unwillingness to implement a feature you want.
I would completely disagree. I enjoy binge watching far more than having it doled out in a prescribed dose on a weekly basis. But that's neither here nor there, since the summary would suggest that they weren't testing "enjoyability" in the first place.
Rather, the researchers were testing retention, which is a wholly separate issue. Whether someone can remember an episode a week or two later is only weakly correlated to their enjoyment of it. My wife and I discovered The West Wing on Netflix maybe two weeks back. We're already most of the way through season 2 (despite Hurricane Harvey and a cross-country trip interfering with our binging), but the plot details for any given episode in season 1 have already faded quite a bit.
Does that mean I didn't enjoy them? That I would have enjoyed them more if they were doled out over a longer period of time? Hardly. While it's not much of an issue in a primetime show like The West Wing, niche shows that are more subtle in their storytelling are far more enjoyable when binge watched, because, as the researchers noted, you're more capable of recalling details that you saw more recently, enabling you to pick up on or even simply recognize the cues and references far more capably.
Plus, binge watching allows you to stay in the moment far better. For instance, I remember trying to keep up with a season of 24 in realtime by binge watching the entire season on a Saturday, and it was easily the most enjoyable way I watched any season of that show. When I watched episodes on a more sporadic basis it really pulled me out of the moment and made the show feel far less intense. It was, simply put, far less enjoyable. Even just watching 3-4 episodes at a time was better than one at a time, since it allowed the show to develop a cadence and rhythm.
You'll hear people who are engrossed in a good book talk about physically experiencing the chills or blasts of heat described in the book's setting. I've never experienced that personally, but my dad told me about the one time he had that happen to him: when he was first learning to speed read. It kept him so in the moment that he experienced the book in a way that was completely unlike how he had ever experienced one prior, making an otherwise fairly mediocre novel far more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been.
Binge watching is a similar sort of experience for most people, which, again, has very little to do with retention.
This is a non-story. iOS has supported switching between background apps via cards for several years already, and supported it via a slightly different interface prior to that. I think it's been around since iOS 4 in some form or fashion.
The only thing that's different now is that they once again tweaked the UI slightly and made it so that it appears via a different gesture than before (right now, you can either double-tap the Home button or four-finger pinch to bring up the app switcher, depending on how your settings are configured and which iOS device you're on).
Exactly what I came here to say. When you're the underdog, you embrace, and when it comes to these areas, Microsoft is increasingly becoming—or already is—the underdog. Meanwhile, they've already demonstrated hostility towards Valve via the Windows App Store being mandatory in Windows 10 S, effectively locking Steam out, and Valve has clearly been aware of that sort of threat, which is why they tried to make Steam OS a thing. Microsoft has also already demonstrated an unwillingness to embrace crossplay in the previous generation when their console was on top, and there's no reason to think that they won't conveniently drop it the moment their position would be improved by doing so.
It's fine to allow your products to interoperate with Microsoft's, but know who you're getting into bed with before you do so.
Regarding the measuring tape, don't you ever hang pictures? Move furniture around a room? Want to calculate how much paint you'll need for your walls or how many tiles you'll need for your floor? My tape measures (yes, plural) are out in my garage, so they're rarely on hand when I want them for some quick work. This sort of thing would let me do small jobs (e.g. centering my media console under my TV) easily without having to go grab an extra tool.
Even better, if it can take a snapshot of the space as it's measuring, I could then immediately head out to Home Depot, Lowe's, or wherever else without having to waste time transcribing those measurements onto a notepad. Instead, I could just pull them up on my phone. Even better, I wouldn't have to deal with the situation where I forgot to transcribe an important nook or cranny that I didn't think would matter, since I'd have them all in that snapshot of the space on my phone. Oh, and if I decide I want to replace all of my lightbulbs in the room while I'm out at the store? I'd already have a snapshot with each of them visible, so I wouldn't need to remember how many to grab.
Hell, my wife already spent dozens of hours in the Sherwin Williams paint app, testing out colors in our dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and master bathroom to see what they'd each look like in a variety of colors so that we could narrow down our selections before heading out to pick up swatches and samples. If she could do draw the boundaries for surfaces like the tape measuring app did, then view the space three-dimensionally with more accurate lighting reflected in the virtual image (since lighting significantly impacts the appearance of the final color, and ARKit takes lighting into account when rendering objects in the real world), she'd do so in a heartbeat. That'd be a killer app for her.
Yeah, because lots of restaurants will hire coders to create interactive menus. It's really, really cheap to do and you'll get ROI super-fast!
No,
Few restaurants currently pay for fully custom, one-off apps. This won't change that in the least, yet you'll still see features like this one roll out. "How can this be?", I hear you ask.
The reason they'll be able to utilize this feature is because what they're currently doing is paying other companies for POS systems or white labeled apps that they customize with their branding. In much the same way that Squarespace and Wix provide affordable, white labeled sites to thousands of companies, there are developers doing the same thing in this space. And just as the sites guide companies through the steps necessary for customizing things (e.g. adding images, changing text, etc.), the POS systems and white label apps do the same. They'll simply add AR functionality as a feature that's available to the restaurants interested in it. Restaurants that want it will be guided through the steps to take the scans, likely using their phones to do so in much the same way that they take pictures of menu items already. Simple as that, and, just as they currently do, the developers will keep the cost affordable by selling the same feature to thousands of restaurants.
Popular doesn't necessarily mean profitable. It certainly can, but the popular apps you're talking about are outliers, not the norm.
In contrast, my company routinely makes apps for engineering clients who are willing to shell out seven figures for something that meets their needs. The app may only ever be distributed privately, used by a few dozen people, and never make us a dime on an app sale to any given individual, but it'll make those few dozen employees so productive that it'll give their company the competitive edge they need to make the app well worth the purchase price to that company.
Then back on our end, even as a mid-sized shop with just a few dozen employees, we can put out a half dozen apps like that year after year without being subject to the changing whims of consumers, playing the App Store lottery, or having to work on things that frankly don't interest us. We get to tackle tough problems that we enjoy working on, deal with (mostly) sane clients who work in adjacent fields of industry, and have guarantees in place that if we meet milestones we'll be paid specific amounts.
We're hardly alone. There are tens of thousands of other businesses profitably and quietly doing B2B work that never appears publicly in the App Store or Play Store, simply because there's loads of money in B2B, tremendous demand, and a lot more stability than you'll ever find in the consumer market.
So, yes, enterprise is definitely a target for this sort of tech. I could probably think of a half-dozen applications for AR in the apps we're building for our clients right now, since we're already doing a lot of related work in terms of image recognition, mapping virtual objects into the real world, and autonomous navigation, all of which could be enhanced with stuff like ARKit.
Yup, AR stands for augmented reality, and it's shaping up to be interesting. In the few months since ARKit was announced by Apple, developers have been putting out some really fascinating demos, some practical, some simply experimental. ARKit is due for its official release later this year with iOS 11, so these demos are giving us a notion of what sort of uses we may end up seeing for augmented reality in the real world.
And these are just some of the early demos. There are demos for doing 3D sculpting, putting characters from existing video games in the real world, watching dance performances in your living room, and playing versions of everything from Pacman to Minecraft to a zombie game in the space around you. I originally thought this was all merely a gimmick, but now I'm starting to think that this technology will render a lot of single-use items we have in the real world obsolete, in much the same way that smartphones turned GPS devices, cell phones, and MP3 players into simple apps on our pocket computers.
There's a distinction here that you may have missed: the xkcd crooks never had anonymity, whereas the hypothetical Google Translate user does.
The crooks gave up their anonymity the moment they registered for a license plate using their real identity. Having tied their real identity to their pseudonym, they pierced the veil of anonymity, meaning that, they weren't counting on anonymity to protect their identity. Rather, they were counting on the illegibility of their pseudonym to somehow make it unrecognizable, preventing its relationship to their real identity from being looked up. As you pointed out, those sorts of schemes rarely pan out.
But in the case of the Google Translate user, they still have their anonymity. They never pierced the veil, so, unlike the crooks, they're still counting on the veil to protect them. In fact, this hypothetical person could make the pseudonym as distinct, recognizable, and identifiable as they please, so long as none of those traits in any way tie back to their real identity. In many cases, those traits may actually help to strengthen the veil by putting more distance between the pseudonym and the real identity.
Where things may sour is if those steps end up also being a means for piercing the veil. For instance, the police may be able to subpoena Google Translate's records to procure information on the users asking to translate specific phrases. In that sort of situation, being the lone person translating things in that way can indeed get you into trouble, as you suggested.
Even so, the notion to speak in a distinct form of gibberish isn't a bad one, provided you go about doing so in a way that doesn't open you up otherwise.
No worries, and yup, I think we're on the same page. I agree that the reviews in your example, when taken by themselves, are insufficient for making any sort of reasonable determination one way or the other, so any choice would amount to making an uneducated guess. Which isn't to say that we can't make educated guesses, but to do so we would need to incorporate additional information, which goes beyond the scope of what you were trying to address in your original post.
Also, let me just say: your English is incredible. I wish I could work in other languages as well as you write English. Despite having studied three foreign languages (Spanish, Latin, and Japanese) over the course of my schooling, I sadly didn't make a point of keeping up with any of those skills. Now that it's been 10 years since I was last in a language course, I've essentially lost any ability to converse outside of English, which is a shame.
Determinations aren't separate from assumptions: they're based on assumptions. Moreover, depending on your assumptions, your determinations may be uncertain or wrong.
But let's take a step back for a sec, since I want to get on the same page about something else you said. I think that the distinction you just tried to make is between choosing with certainty ("DETERMINE") and choosing despite uncertainty ("ASSUME"). You're saying you were talking about determining a sure thing, whereas I was talking about making an educated guess. Am I understanding you correctly?
If so, then I think I see how things may have become confused for us. Back in your first post, I interpreted "you can NOT determine which product is more likely to be bad" (emphasis mine) as you claiming that it's impossible to make a probabilistic analysis regarding which is more likely to be the worse product. As such, I pointed out a correction to your assumptions that would allow us to take advantage of additional data (i.e. past experiences) in order to make exactly that sort of probabilistic determination.
Does it provide us with certainty? Absolutely not, and if certainty is what you were talking about, then we're on the same page: you can't determine this stuff with certainty. But if we're talking about which is more likely, then I believe that we already have more than enough data to make those sorts of determinations.
As for that "fairly certain" phrasing, it was intended as an implicit acknowledgement that I was indeed talking about a probabilistic analysis with error bars on either side, but from which we could draw some fairly accurate results, thanks to the large sampling size of reviews we had for Product B that afford us a reasonable degree of certainty. Again, not absolute certainty, but enough that we could make a determination regarding which is more likely to be the worse product.
I readily acknowledge that I'm talking about a means to make an educated guess, so if you intended to talk in terms of absolutes, then what I said in no way addresses your point, and I apologize for the miscommunication. But if you intended to talk about probabilities, I believe that my suggestions provide a means to determine which is more likely to be the worse product.
Say you have product A and product B, each with a score of 3 stars out of 5. Product A has 6 reviews, 3 of which are 1-star and the other 3 are 5-star - the average is obviously 3. Product B has 600 reviews, 3 of which are 1-star, 594 reviews are 3-star and the other 3 are 5-star - the average is obviously 3, again.
Based on that information alone, you can NOT determine which product is more likely to be bad.
Sure you can, since both you and the researchers have—I believe, wrongly—assumed that good products are just as likely as bad products, which is fine in theory, but doesn't hold up in the real world any better than a physicist's example that starts with "consider a perfect sphere in a frictionless vacuum". In the real world, bad products outnumber good products by a wide margin, and we're well-served in relying on past experience to shape our future decisions.
With 600 reviews establishing a 3-star rating, we can be fairly certain that what we're getting with Product B is a 3-star product. With 6 wildly varying reviews for Product A, however, we can't pull any useful information from the reviews. That said, we know from past experience that any given product is more likely to be bad than good. As such, given the dearth of information to the contrary, we'd be well-served in assuming that Product A is likely to be a bad product, suggesting then that Product B is the better choice.
Further, consider that good products tend to attract numerous reviews as they succeed and that, statistically speaking, it's unlikely you'll be among the first 6 (i.e. the first 1%) to review a product that will eventually go on to attract 600 reviews. In contrast, bad products tend to fade into obscurity before ever attracting many reviews. As such, for any given product with just 6 reviews, it's more likely that it's a bad product on its way to obscurity than a good product on its way to 600 reviews. Again, this would point towards B being the better choice.
even the most generous reading of these statistics stills leaves you with Tasers being more than six times deadlier than the company has ever admitted.
Wouldn't that be the least generous reading of the statistic? The most generous reading would be that tasers actually had no causal relationship to any of the deaths.
Moreover, even if it is a factor of six greater, it really doesn't matter too much. I couldn't find discharge statistics for the US, but I did find them for England and Wales, which together accounted for nearly 2000 taser discharges in 2015 alone. Tasers are in use by police in over 12,000 jurisdictions in the US, so a sixfold increase is likely to be a single-digit percentage difference (or less) when taken in the context of the sheer number of discharges that likely occur in the US each year.
Mind you, I think some police are abusing tasers by treating them as non-lethal weapons, rather than as the less lethal weapons that they actually are. Even so, sixfold increases don't mean much unless you provide context, and the context here suggests it's a drop in the bucket either way.
Hundreds of pull down menus is NEVER a good design. A hundred knobs and sliders is far better than that sort of insanity
Exactly right. And that's what I was trying to get at. Until a better paradigm existed for managing the necessary complexity, going with what they had was by far the better choice. They couldn't experiment with new paradigms when their target audience was entrenched in another way of doing things and had no incentive to change. But when there are potentially a lot of new, unaddressed customers in the market and the technology has radically shifted, there's an opportunity to experiment in an effort to find something new that can disrupt the old way of doing things, and that's what we're finally starting to see.
Honestly, a better headline would have been "Software Is Eating *", given that software is eating anything and everything.
In some cases that's a good thing, such as dedicated phones and music players going away as we've replaced them with apps on our pocket computing devices. In other cases that's a bad thing, such as with smart TVs that abuse their newfound ability to gather personal information before becoming obsolete far short of the product's intended lifespan.
People used to joke about putting software in toasters and refrigerators, but that's today's reality.
I'd rather have a whitelist, but this seems like exactly the sort of thing that should just be treated like any other sort of permission (e.g. location data, notifications, etc.). Just give it the standard Always Allow/Ask/Always Deny toggle in Chrome's settings and call it a day. I'll get my whitelist, you'll get your blacklist, and everyone (that matters) will be happier.
Exactly. Up until recently, the vast, VAST majority of people using audio software were professionals who got their start by working with real knobs and real buttons on real mixing boards. Each of those controls was on that mixing board to serve its very specific, important purpose, and any audio software intending to replicate that functionality would need to provide some way for controlling the functionality provided by each of those knobs. Unfortunately, filling the screen with hundreds of pull-down menus or text boxes would have confused the hell out of their target audience, so it made sense for the time that the software's interactions reflected the real world's interactions. It may have been less convenient, but it was far more understandable.
In the last few years, however, we've seen a gradual democratization of the field as fully digital boards have replaced analog and hybrid boards, prices have dropped, and the pace of app development has skyrocketed. In a very short span of time, audio production has become the domain of the everyman, rather than being relegated to people who had access to or could afford professional equipment.
In response to this shift, we have seen a number of apps eschew skeuomorphic designs and instead go about fundamentally rethinking the nature of how we interact with audio (e.g. Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack may not be intended as a replacement for a mixing board, but it does do a lot of interesting things with audio). Many of them don't align especially well with the functionality provided by any particular audio device that currently exists. Instead, they'll combine subsets of functionality from a variety of devices in new and interesting ways that open up new approaches for interacting with audio. We're seeing a lot of design experimentation as developers try out new paradigms for interacting with audio, but, as you'd expect, most of these efforts are being aimed at newcomers who don't have established workflows, don't have the high requirements of professionals, and don't have rigid expectations about how their audio software should behave.
I'd expect that within the next few years we'll see a convergence on certain patterns for how we interact with audio when we aren't constrained by having to use knobs, buttons, and faders, and that we'll eventually see the professional caliber apps adopt those conventions as they become more mainstream. In the meantime, however, we're still in a state of transition.
There seems to be this common misconception among the general population that Bitcoin is anonymous in the same way that cash is. What people don't realize is that it's pseudonymous, not anonymous, and that if you allow the veil to be lifted for even one transaction, legal or otherwise, then every transaction you make, legal or otherwise, can be traced back to you. Oh, and everyone's entire history of transactions is publicly accessible too, so if your pseudonym is pierced, anyone and everyone can see who you've done business with.
At least with credit cards that data is only in the hands of the credit card processors and the people willing to pay them for that info. It's not a good situation by any means, but I'll take it over Bitcoin.
Because all of those other areas have at least a pretense of interstate activity. With product sales, however, too many of them are done entirely intrastate, particularly once you start getting to the places like California, Florida, and Texas that can grow their own food and have fairly self-sufficient markets. There's no way to establish a pretense of intrastate activity with those sorts of things.
I once met someone (a then-fiancé of an acquaintance), let's call him Joe, who got himself into a situation about a decade back. From what I gathered, some guy at a bar, let's call him Bob, was giving Joe's buddy a hard time. One thing led to another, and pretty soon they were taking things outside. By the time it was done, Bob had received a pretty significant beating, though he thankfully didn't suffer any permanent damage. Even so, the beating went beyond what I would imagine is typical of a bar fight (having never seen one in person, I'm ill-equipped to say), given that they kept kicking him after they had him on the ground.
Anyway, fast forward a few days and the police arrive to arrest Joe, but rather than it being a mere assault charge, he found out he was being charged with a hate crime. Bob, as it turned out, was a homosexual, and even though the two of them had never met before that night, Bob claimed that Joe shouted homophobic slurs as he kicked Bob, so Joe must have attacked Bob because of his orientation. It was a he-said/he-said scenario with Joe having no prior record and there being no evidence that Joe harbored homophobic tendencies (or was even aware of Bob's orientation), but the judge was openly lesbian and an LGBT rights activist, who instead of recusing herself, instead chose to throw the book at Joe, tossing him in jail without parole for the maximum sentence permitted for a violent hate crime.
Don't get me wrong: Joe absolutely deserved a criminal assault charge. And frankly, I didn't know Joe well enough to rule out the possibility that he really was a homophobe and that everything Bob said was true (in fact, I knew him so little that I can't even remember his name at this point). Even so, tacking "hate crime" onto the sentence increased the time Joe spent in jail by several years, and while I don't know that it happened here, the notion that someone like Bob can make a false claim without evidence in order to trump up an otherwise fairly typical charge has continued to haunt me to this day.
As you said, the only rational course is to prosecute the underlying crime.
By "pain", you mean "illegal under the terms of the Constitution". I quite agree that something approximating a federal sales tax would greatly simplify matters, but such a thing isn't possible without both amending the Constitution and substantially changing the relationship between the federal and state governments.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely missed the point, clearly didn't read the article
I remember back in the day when we had decent trolls who would actually read the article and then incisively cut down posts made here. Had you done so yourself, you'd have been aware that the article said...
However, it’s worth noting that with Apple’s new iPhone releases just around the corner, the iPhone maker is almost certain to get back on top in September.
...which is exactly what the OP was talking about.
Frankly, I'm disappointed. As you just demonstrated, the quality of the trolls on Slashdot has diminished significantly in recent years. We deserve better than you. But, to answer your question, the fact that you're all we've got could indeed be taken as evidence of the slow death of Slashdot.
You're not thinking very creatively, since I was able to think of a variety of attacks that could use this without having physical access to the interior of your home.
For instance, they could have just dropped a small device into your pocket that every few minutes emits an inaudible command to open the garage door. You, yourself would be the vector through which the attacker could attack your always-on devices in your home. In fact, it could even be something you're aware of, like a thumb drive you were given that secretly has a tiny speaker built in or that is setup to autorun a sound file with the commands when plugged into a computer.
Alternatively, a person who is known to you but who you don't realize is malicious could use this to gain physical access. Maybe you're okay taking a FaceTime call from them, but then they transmit the inaudible signal over the call, which your iDevice faithfully reproduces, resulting in Alexa, Siri, or whatever else opening your garage door. Or maybe someone standing outside at your smart doorbell uses it when you ask what they want via the app, resulting in your phone or tablet reproducing the sounds within earshot of a device that will respond to them.
A third possibility is that they could use your always-on phone to engage in an attack against your home even while you're not at home. For instance, an attacker passing you in the street could activate the commands on a device in your hand or pocket via "OK Google" or "Hey Siri" to open your garage door for a crony of theirs. For that matter, anyone who can get within listening distance of your phone can use this attack on it, all without ever having access to the devices within your home.
I agree that it is NOT a good thing for consumers if we allow local monopolies to work out exclusivity agreements with other services or products, but T-Mobile is hardly a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination, local or otherwise. In about 99% of the places they are, so too are Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.
I'd be right there with you if this was Comcast or Cox or Suddenlink doing similarly, simply because of the way that they've all managed to carve out regional monopolies in which they're largely uncontested, but the wireless market is a fairly competitive one without either local or regional monopolies. As such, I don't see a problem with one of the wireless carriers finding new ways to add value to their services, so long as they don't do so by prioritizing Netflix's traffic over that of its competitors.
What sidebar? Between content blockers, custom CSS, and userscripts, I've removed, added, and moved elements on a variety of sites that I visit on a daily basis, including Slashdot. My browser is formatting it in the manner that I find most readable on my device, in seemingly the exact sort of way that you described as how things are supposed to work.
I'll grant that my mobile devices don't play along as nicely, but at least on the desktop I don't see ads, "featured" content, or links to (un)related stories when I peruse Slashdot. Instead, I get to read it how I want on my device.
I'll grant as well that I'm not a typical user, but it's unrealistic to expect a browser to be able to reliably render text in a meaningful way in the absence of any stylistic guidance, given that we frequently use semantic information in order to provide secondary text alongside a primary text. But if all you want is a best stab at browsers making that happen anyway, at least some browsers already support a mode for easier reading (e.g. Reading List in Safari), suggesting that this isn't so much of an issue with the underlying languages, so much as it is a problem with the browser vendors and their unwillingness to implement a feature you want.
I would completely disagree. I enjoy binge watching far more than having it doled out in a prescribed dose on a weekly basis. But that's neither here nor there, since the summary would suggest that they weren't testing "enjoyability" in the first place.
Rather, the researchers were testing retention, which is a wholly separate issue. Whether someone can remember an episode a week or two later is only weakly correlated to their enjoyment of it. My wife and I discovered The West Wing on Netflix maybe two weeks back. We're already most of the way through season 2 (despite Hurricane Harvey and a cross-country trip interfering with our binging), but the plot details for any given episode in season 1 have already faded quite a bit.
Does that mean I didn't enjoy them? That I would have enjoyed them more if they were doled out over a longer period of time? Hardly. While it's not much of an issue in a primetime show like The West Wing, niche shows that are more subtle in their storytelling are far more enjoyable when binge watched, because, as the researchers noted, you're more capable of recalling details that you saw more recently, enabling you to pick up on or even simply recognize the cues and references far more capably.
Plus, binge watching allows you to stay in the moment far better. For instance, I remember trying to keep up with a season of 24 in realtime by binge watching the entire season on a Saturday, and it was easily the most enjoyable way I watched any season of that show. When I watched episodes on a more sporadic basis it really pulled me out of the moment and made the show feel far less intense. It was, simply put, far less enjoyable. Even just watching 3-4 episodes at a time was better than one at a time, since it allowed the show to develop a cadence and rhythm.
You'll hear people who are engrossed in a good book talk about physically experiencing the chills or blasts of heat described in the book's setting. I've never experienced that personally, but my dad told me about the one time he had that happen to him: when he was first learning to speed read. It kept him so in the moment that he experienced the book in a way that was completely unlike how he had ever experienced one prior, making an otherwise fairly mediocre novel far more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been.
Binge watching is a similar sort of experience for most people, which, again, has very little to do with retention.
This is a non-story. iOS has supported switching between background apps via cards for several years already, and supported it via a slightly different interface prior to that. I think it's been around since iOS 4 in some form or fashion.
The only thing that's different now is that they once again tweaked the UI slightly and made it so that it appears via a different gesture than before (right now, you can either double-tap the Home button or four-finger pinch to bring up the app switcher, depending on how your settings are configured and which iOS device you're on).
Exactly what I came here to say. When you're the underdog, you embrace, and when it comes to these areas, Microsoft is increasingly becoming—or already is—the underdog. Meanwhile, they've already demonstrated hostility towards Valve via the Windows App Store being mandatory in Windows 10 S, effectively locking Steam out, and Valve has clearly been aware of that sort of threat, which is why they tried to make Steam OS a thing. Microsoft has also already demonstrated an unwillingness to embrace crossplay in the previous generation when their console was on top, and there's no reason to think that they won't conveniently drop it the moment their position would be improved by doing so.
It's fine to allow your products to interoperate with Microsoft's, but know who you're getting into bed with before you do so.
Regarding the measuring tape, don't you ever hang pictures? Move furniture around a room? Want to calculate how much paint you'll need for your walls or how many tiles you'll need for your floor? My tape measures (yes, plural) are out in my garage, so they're rarely on hand when I want them for some quick work. This sort of thing would let me do small jobs (e.g. centering my media console under my TV) easily without having to go grab an extra tool.
Even better, if it can take a snapshot of the space as it's measuring, I could then immediately head out to Home Depot, Lowe's, or wherever else without having to waste time transcribing those measurements onto a notepad. Instead, I could just pull them up on my phone. Even better, I wouldn't have to deal with the situation where I forgot to transcribe an important nook or cranny that I didn't think would matter, since I'd have them all in that snapshot of the space on my phone. Oh, and if I decide I want to replace all of my lightbulbs in the room while I'm out at the store? I'd already have a snapshot with each of them visible, so I wouldn't need to remember how many to grab.
Hell, my wife already spent dozens of hours in the Sherwin Williams paint app, testing out colors in our dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and master bathroom to see what they'd each look like in a variety of colors so that we could narrow down our selections before heading out to pick up swatches and samples. If she could do draw the boundaries for surfaces like the tape measuring app did, then view the space three-dimensionally with more accurate lighting reflected in the virtual image (since lighting significantly impacts the appearance of the final color, and ARKit takes lighting into account when rendering objects in the real world), she'd do so in a heartbeat. That'd be a killer app for her.
Yeah, because lots of restaurants will hire coders to create interactive menus. It's really, really cheap to do and you'll get ROI super-fast!
No,
Few restaurants currently pay for fully custom, one-off apps. This won't change that in the least, yet you'll still see features like this one roll out. "How can this be?", I hear you ask.
The reason they'll be able to utilize this feature is because what they're currently doing is paying other companies for POS systems or white labeled apps that they customize with their branding. In much the same way that Squarespace and Wix provide affordable, white labeled sites to thousands of companies, there are developers doing the same thing in this space. And just as the sites guide companies through the steps necessary for customizing things (e.g. adding images, changing text, etc.), the POS systems and white label apps do the same. They'll simply add AR functionality as a feature that's available to the restaurants interested in it. Restaurants that want it will be guided through the steps to take the scans, likely using their phones to do so in much the same way that they take pictures of menu items already. Simple as that, and, just as they currently do, the developers will keep the cost affordable by selling the same feature to thousands of restaurants.
Popular doesn't necessarily mean profitable. It certainly can, but the popular apps you're talking about are outliers, not the norm.
In contrast, my company routinely makes apps for engineering clients who are willing to shell out seven figures for something that meets their needs. The app may only ever be distributed privately, used by a few dozen people, and never make us a dime on an app sale to any given individual, but it'll make those few dozen employees so productive that it'll give their company the competitive edge they need to make the app well worth the purchase price to that company.
Then back on our end, even as a mid-sized shop with just a few dozen employees, we can put out a half dozen apps like that year after year without being subject to the changing whims of consumers, playing the App Store lottery, or having to work on things that frankly don't interest us. We get to tackle tough problems that we enjoy working on, deal with (mostly) sane clients who work in adjacent fields of industry, and have guarantees in place that if we meet milestones we'll be paid specific amounts.
We're hardly alone. There are tens of thousands of other businesses profitably and quietly doing B2B work that never appears publicly in the App Store or Play Store, simply because there's loads of money in B2B, tremendous demand, and a lot more stability than you'll ever find in the consumer market.
So, yes, enterprise is definitely a target for this sort of tech. I could probably think of a half-dozen applications for AR in the apps we're building for our clients right now, since we're already doing a lot of related work in terms of image recognition, mapping virtual objects into the real world, and autonomous navigation, all of which could be enhanced with stuff like ARKit.
Oops, I meant to link to this measuring tape video, since I think it actually shows off the technology even better.
A few other videos I forgot to link before:
- Finding friends in a crowd using waypoints
- Trying out makeup live on yourself
- More portals to other worlds
- Laying out furniture (I believe IKEA has said they plan to use ARKit to allow people to virtually place IKEA's furniture in their homes so they can get a sense for how it'd look and feel)
Yup, AR stands for augmented reality, and it's shaping up to be interesting. In the few months since ARKit was announced by Apple, developers have been putting out some really fascinating demos, some practical, some simply experimental. ARKit is due for its official release later this year with iOS 11, so these demos are giving us a notion of what sort of uses we may end up seeing for augmented reality in the real world.
For instance:
- Measuring real world objects without a tape measure
- Drawing without a pen
- Perusing menu options at a restaurant
- Becoming part of a music video
- Bringing fictional worlds to life
And these are just some of the early demos. There are demos for doing 3D sculpting, putting characters from existing video games in the real world, watching dance performances in your living room, and playing versions of everything from Pacman to Minecraft to a zombie game in the space around you. I originally thought this was all merely a gimmick, but now I'm starting to think that this technology will render a lot of single-use items we have in the real world obsolete, in much the same way that smartphones turned GPS devices, cell phones, and MP3 players into simple apps on our pocket computers.
Which I seem to recall specifically raising as a concern when I said...
the police may be able to subpoena Google Translate's records to procure information on the users asking to translate specific phrases
There's a distinction here that you may have missed: the xkcd crooks never had anonymity, whereas the hypothetical Google Translate user does.
The crooks gave up their anonymity the moment they registered for a license plate using their real identity. Having tied their real identity to their pseudonym, they pierced the veil of anonymity, meaning that, they weren't counting on anonymity to protect their identity. Rather, they were counting on the illegibility of their pseudonym to somehow make it unrecognizable, preventing its relationship to their real identity from being looked up. As you pointed out, those sorts of schemes rarely pan out.
But in the case of the Google Translate user, they still have their anonymity. They never pierced the veil, so, unlike the crooks, they're still counting on the veil to protect them. In fact, this hypothetical person could make the pseudonym as distinct, recognizable, and identifiable as they please, so long as none of those traits in any way tie back to their real identity. In many cases, those traits may actually help to strengthen the veil by putting more distance between the pseudonym and the real identity.
Where things may sour is if those steps end up also being a means for piercing the veil. For instance, the police may be able to subpoena Google Translate's records to procure information on the users asking to translate specific phrases. In that sort of situation, being the lone person translating things in that way can indeed get you into trouble, as you suggested.
Even so, the notion to speak in a distinct form of gibberish isn't a bad one, provided you go about doing so in a way that doesn't open you up otherwise.
No worries, and yup, I think we're on the same page. I agree that the reviews in your example, when taken by themselves, are insufficient for making any sort of reasonable determination one way or the other, so any choice would amount to making an uneducated guess. Which isn't to say that we can't make educated guesses, but to do so we would need to incorporate additional information, which goes beyond the scope of what you were trying to address in your original post.
Also, let me just say: your English is incredible. I wish I could work in other languages as well as you write English. Despite having studied three foreign languages (Spanish, Latin, and Japanese) over the course of my schooling, I sadly didn't make a point of keeping up with any of those skills. Now that it's been 10 years since I was last in a language course, I've essentially lost any ability to converse outside of English, which is a shame.
Determinations aren't separate from assumptions: they're based on assumptions. Moreover, depending on your assumptions, your determinations may be uncertain or wrong.
But let's take a step back for a sec, since I want to get on the same page about something else you said. I think that the distinction you just tried to make is between choosing with certainty ("DETERMINE") and choosing despite uncertainty ("ASSUME"). You're saying you were talking about determining a sure thing, whereas I was talking about making an educated guess. Am I understanding you correctly?
If so, then I think I see how things may have become confused for us. Back in your first post, I interpreted "you can NOT determine which product is more likely to be bad" (emphasis mine) as you claiming that it's impossible to make a probabilistic analysis regarding which is more likely to be the worse product. As such, I pointed out a correction to your assumptions that would allow us to take advantage of additional data (i.e. past experiences) in order to make exactly that sort of probabilistic determination.
Does it provide us with certainty? Absolutely not, and if certainty is what you were talking about, then we're on the same page: you can't determine this stuff with certainty. But if we're talking about which is more likely, then I believe that we already have more than enough data to make those sorts of determinations.
As for that "fairly certain" phrasing, it was intended as an implicit acknowledgement that I was indeed talking about a probabilistic analysis with error bars on either side, but from which we could draw some fairly accurate results, thanks to the large sampling size of reviews we had for Product B that afford us a reasonable degree of certainty. Again, not absolute certainty, but enough that we could make a determination regarding which is more likely to be the worse product.
I readily acknowledge that I'm talking about a means to make an educated guess, so if you intended to talk in terms of absolutes, then what I said in no way addresses your point, and I apologize for the miscommunication. But if you intended to talk about probabilities, I believe that my suggestions provide a means to determine which is more likely to be the worse product.
Say you have product A and product B, each with a score of 3 stars out of 5.
Product A has 6 reviews, 3 of which are 1-star and the other 3 are 5-star - the average is obviously 3.
Product B has 600 reviews, 3 of which are 1-star, 594 reviews are 3-star and the other 3 are 5-star - the average is obviously 3, again.
Based on that information alone, you can NOT determine which product is more likely to be bad.
Sure you can, since both you and the researchers have—I believe, wrongly—assumed that good products are just as likely as bad products, which is fine in theory, but doesn't hold up in the real world any better than a physicist's example that starts with "consider a perfect sphere in a frictionless vacuum". In the real world, bad products outnumber good products by a wide margin, and we're well-served in relying on past experience to shape our future decisions.
With 600 reviews establishing a 3-star rating, we can be fairly certain that what we're getting with Product B is a 3-star product. With 6 wildly varying reviews for Product A, however, we can't pull any useful information from the reviews. That said, we know from past experience that any given product is more likely to be bad than good. As such, given the dearth of information to the contrary, we'd be well-served in assuming that Product A is likely to be a bad product, suggesting then that Product B is the better choice.
Further, consider that good products tend to attract numerous reviews as they succeed and that, statistically speaking, it's unlikely you'll be among the first 6 (i.e. the first 1%) to review a product that will eventually go on to attract 600 reviews. In contrast, bad products tend to fade into obscurity before ever attracting many reviews. As such, for any given product with just 6 reviews, it's more likely that it's a bad product on its way to obscurity than a good product on its way to 600 reviews. Again, this would point towards B being the better choice.
even the most generous reading of these statistics stills leaves you with Tasers being more than six times deadlier than the company has ever admitted.
Wouldn't that be the least generous reading of the statistic? The most generous reading would be that tasers actually had no causal relationship to any of the deaths.
Moreover, even if it is a factor of six greater, it really doesn't matter too much. I couldn't find discharge statistics for the US, but I did find them for England and Wales, which together accounted for nearly 2000 taser discharges in 2015 alone. Tasers are in use by police in over 12,000 jurisdictions in the US, so a sixfold increase is likely to be a single-digit percentage difference (or less) when taken in the context of the sheer number of discharges that likely occur in the US each year.
Mind you, I think some police are abusing tasers by treating them as non-lethal weapons, rather than as the less lethal weapons that they actually are. Even so, sixfold increases don't mean much unless you provide context, and the context here suggests it's a drop in the bucket either way.
Hundreds of pull down menus is NEVER a good design. A hundred knobs and sliders is far better than that sort of insanity
Exactly right. And that's what I was trying to get at. Until a better paradigm existed for managing the necessary complexity, going with what they had was by far the better choice. They couldn't experiment with new paradigms when their target audience was entrenched in another way of doing things and had no incentive to change. But when there are potentially a lot of new, unaddressed customers in the market and the technology has radically shifted, there's an opportunity to experiment in an effort to find something new that can disrupt the old way of doing things, and that's what we're finally starting to see.
Honestly, a better headline would have been "Software Is Eating *", given that software is eating anything and everything.
In some cases that's a good thing, such as dedicated phones and music players going away as we've replaced them with apps on our pocket computing devices. In other cases that's a bad thing, such as with smart TVs that abuse their newfound ability to gather personal information before becoming obsolete far short of the product's intended lifespan.
People used to joke about putting software in toasters and refrigerators, but that's today's reality.
I'd rather have a whitelist, but this seems like exactly the sort of thing that should just be treated like any other sort of permission (e.g. location data, notifications, etc.). Just give it the standard Always Allow/Ask/Always Deny toggle in Chrome's settings and call it a day. I'll get my whitelist, you'll get your blacklist, and everyone (that matters) will be happier.
Exactly. Up until recently, the vast, VAST majority of people using audio software were professionals who got their start by working with real knobs and real buttons on real mixing boards. Each of those controls was on that mixing board to serve its very specific, important purpose, and any audio software intending to replicate that functionality would need to provide some way for controlling the functionality provided by each of those knobs. Unfortunately, filling the screen with hundreds of pull-down menus or text boxes would have confused the hell out of their target audience, so it made sense for the time that the software's interactions reflected the real world's interactions. It may have been less convenient, but it was far more understandable.
In the last few years, however, we've seen a gradual democratization of the field as fully digital boards have replaced analog and hybrid boards, prices have dropped, and the pace of app development has skyrocketed. In a very short span of time, audio production has become the domain of the everyman, rather than being relegated to people who had access to or could afford professional equipment.
In response to this shift, we have seen a number of apps eschew skeuomorphic designs and instead go about fundamentally rethinking the nature of how we interact with audio (e.g. Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack may not be intended as a replacement for a mixing board, but it does do a lot of interesting things with audio). Many of them don't align especially well with the functionality provided by any particular audio device that currently exists. Instead, they'll combine subsets of functionality from a variety of devices in new and interesting ways that open up new approaches for interacting with audio. We're seeing a lot of design experimentation as developers try out new paradigms for interacting with audio, but, as you'd expect, most of these efforts are being aimed at newcomers who don't have established workflows, don't have the high requirements of professionals, and don't have rigid expectations about how their audio software should behave.
I'd expect that within the next few years we'll see a convergence on certain patterns for how we interact with audio when we aren't constrained by having to use knobs, buttons, and faders, and that we'll eventually see the professional caliber apps adopt those conventions as they become more mainstream. In the meantime, however, we're still in a state of transition.
There seems to be this common misconception among the general population that Bitcoin is anonymous in the same way that cash is. What people don't realize is that it's pseudonymous, not anonymous, and that if you allow the veil to be lifted for even one transaction, legal or otherwise, then every transaction you make, legal or otherwise, can be traced back to you. Oh, and everyone's entire history of transactions is publicly accessible too, so if your pseudonym is pierced, anyone and everyone can see who you've done business with.
At least with credit cards that data is only in the hands of the credit card processors and the people willing to pay them for that info. It's not a good situation by any means, but I'll take it over Bitcoin.
Because all of those other areas have at least a pretense of interstate activity. With product sales, however, too many of them are done entirely intrastate, particularly once you start getting to the places like California, Florida, and Texas that can grow their own food and have fairly self-sufficient markets. There's no way to establish a pretense of intrastate activity with those sorts of things.
I once met someone (a then-fiancé of an acquaintance), let's call him Joe, who got himself into a situation about a decade back. From what I gathered, some guy at a bar, let's call him Bob, was giving Joe's buddy a hard time. One thing led to another, and pretty soon they were taking things outside. By the time it was done, Bob had received a pretty significant beating, though he thankfully didn't suffer any permanent damage. Even so, the beating went beyond what I would imagine is typical of a bar fight (having never seen one in person, I'm ill-equipped to say), given that they kept kicking him after they had him on the ground.
Anyway, fast forward a few days and the police arrive to arrest Joe, but rather than it being a mere assault charge, he found out he was being charged with a hate crime. Bob, as it turned out, was a homosexual, and even though the two of them had never met before that night, Bob claimed that Joe shouted homophobic slurs as he kicked Bob, so Joe must have attacked Bob because of his orientation. It was a he-said/he-said scenario with Joe having no prior record and there being no evidence that Joe harbored homophobic tendencies (or was even aware of Bob's orientation), but the judge was openly lesbian and an LGBT rights activist, who instead of recusing herself, instead chose to throw the book at Joe, tossing him in jail without parole for the maximum sentence permitted for a violent hate crime.
Don't get me wrong: Joe absolutely deserved a criminal assault charge. And frankly, I didn't know Joe well enough to rule out the possibility that he really was a homophobe and that everything Bob said was true (in fact, I knew him so little that I can't even remember his name at this point). Even so, tacking "hate crime" onto the sentence increased the time Joe spent in jail by several years, and while I don't know that it happened here, the notion that someone like Bob can make a false claim without evidence in order to trump up an otherwise fairly typical charge has continued to haunt me to this day.
As you said, the only rational course is to prosecute the underlying crime.
By "pain", you mean "illegal under the terms of the Constitution". I quite agree that something approximating a federal sales tax would greatly simplify matters, but such a thing isn't possible without both amending the Constitution and substantially changing the relationship between the federal and state governments.