All options are full of crap. Tons of crap. Sure there are a couple semi-recent movies, but that is about it. Most of it is not worth watching, which is exactly why they can buy tons of hours of stuff for dirt cheap. Very frustrating is that there is no good indexing service I have found to tell which of our 3 subscriptions might have it. WTF? Want to go back and watch a good show again after giving up finding anything new in despair? Too bad, it disappeared.
+1. You can't get the desktop hardware you actually want, and the Apple tax on the outdated mid to low end stuff you have to settle for is just insulting.
+1. The best and brightest would have to be completely foolish to go into manufacturing in the USA today. Similarly since most remaining manufacturing left behind is of niche nature, don't expect that the supply chain will all be here waiting for your order to show up.
Apple in particular is a VERY demanding customer, and will pull shit like expecting tens of thousands of sample chips built to their oddball specification, for free, just to be considered for an eventual slot in their designs. Their vendors have to go WAAAAY out on a limb by pre-purchasing materials and equipment on the hope that they win. Fail to compete? Bankruptcy. Fail to win? Bankruptcy.
One of the more obvious ones was the sapphire manufacturer that tooled up to be a phone glass supplier, and was driven out of business when they only got a fraction of the expected business. Many more cases of critically wounded companies abound without the same headlines.
So I have no sympathy for Apple in particular when they don't have manufacturers lining up to produce some artisinal screw on demand.
+1. I grabbed it on-sale, and kind of want my money back. The whole nickel and diming for the "Deluxe" version, or early access pisses me off. The weird roll-out schedule annoyed me into waiting till it went on-sale. It sucks to then be the guy with a pea shooter while everyone else is a month or two ahead on unlocks. Grinding through the ranks to unlock stuff has gotten to be tiresome and rather boring.
I want to hop into a game and have fun, not suffer through paying my figurative dues that much (or literally paying to avoid doing so).
So BF5 feels like a movie with beautiful set and a shitty script. The game play is barely distinguishable from BF1, which I barely played and regret buying. It bogs down hard on my GTX 970 unless I really ratchet down the effects to mostly Low settings, which is also frustrating. Upgrading to something substantially better is a $300+ proposition, so folks like me who only get a few hours a week to play games anymore have a pretty hard time justifying that kind of Nvidia tax.
The contrast is the shit-show that is Android. It is a wild west scene of outdated OS versions, sporadic and unreliable security updates, non-removable bloatware, apparently rampant Chinese spyware, etc. Even otherwise good brands turn around and do this crap on their entry level and mid-range phones with just a few notable exceptions.
I have an Android phone, and I am amazed at the rampant pitfalls one has to navigate to pick a good phone at a low price. The safe ways to avoid this seem to be to get a flagship phone from the likes of Samsung or Google, or to get an Apple phone. I did not begrudge my rather non-technically minded wife when her iPhone 5s wore out and she wanted an 8. I've had to do ZERO to help her out. $800 was very cheap for marital bliss, and the phone will likely keep her going for a good 3+ years.
The peanut gallery will tell you to just root your android phone and load Lineage OS, or similar. For 99% of the buying public that is useless advice.
All good points. To make matters worse, corporate culture is very homogenized. Within an industry there is less an less to differentiate one company from the next. Most mid-tier companies offer very, very similar salaries (they benchmark against each other based on job titles, rather than pay based on employee value), very similar benefits, very similar vacation, and so forth. Beige boxes were the fashion, now everyone has moved to cheaper and crappier open office BS.
Basically jobs are a meal ticket and nothing more. You move when the jobs disappear and you have no options. Fewer and fewer companies offer decent moving packages as well. My current shop offers none as a policy, they expect you to be local or move your self for example.
Given that loyalty is a bridge burned from both ends I understand why work has become so transactional, but the result is that people want a job near where they live, rather than wanting to live where their job is.
So what matters is the life expectancy at ~62 relative to the growth/decline of the population of ~15-45 years olds who will be funding their next ~20 years. Geezers dying from our awful healthcare system will help SSA, young folks giving up and committing suicide or OD'ing will not.
A colleague from Germany was visiting our office recently. He was quite perplexed as to why on a lunch walk we all were discussing the stock market. Basically everyone has to be both investor and worker here. Over there there is a reasonable pension system and people focus on their jobs.
It is also clear from various lunch walks with well educated co-workers that steady investing is beyond the grasp of many otherwise smart and rational people. Some want to have "my guy" handle their stuff (cue Berny Madoff flashbacks), others have been on the sidelines waiting for prices to be "right" while insisting they are not timing the market (they are). It is saddening that this is where we expect most folks to draw their retirement from.
So while I don't suggest there should not be a system with zero responsibility, the current system is akin tossing baby seals into a shark tank and wishing them the best. I would like to see an expansion of social security to help fill the gap that has widened into a chasm between what people need and what they have to retire at a reasonable age.
The upgrades from the defaulta 128GB flash drive to 512GB is $500, while you can just to buy one outright for well under $200. Similar story for RAM. Overpriced hobbled base model with price gouging for upgrades. Same old Apple.
They have been a hard driving "success" at any cost type of shop for a while. The result is that they have a lot of staff who are sleep deprived and frayed at the edges. There is hug pressure to appear perfect from the outside, which also results in the drive to hit deadlines no matter what. In that environment people make mistakes, and some of those mistakes slip through the cracks.
in general these overly complex OS's are damn hard to fully QA. M$ just had to have a do-over on a release that deleted folks files
Linux desktop users just, oh wait, there are almost none of those.
The hardware as shipped was faulty. The fix/patch was to throttle, which was not disclosed to the customers.. Apple should have tested the phone with a simulation of a degraded battery and fixed the issue before shipping, perhaps with slower initial performance or with a better voltage regulator design that would handle a bigger battery droop with a degraded battery at full load.
Perhaps the fix should have been a motherboard replacement.
The point being made is that while philosophically it is great that something is repairable, it seems unjustified. Only a handful of gray beards even want a Tandy 2000, and zero of them actually use it for "real work".
Let's take an original iPhone for a second, how many people today would be daily users on an iPhone 1 today if Apple put a bin of them out front in original condition for free, contingent on actual daily usage? By current standards the network speed is awful, then screen is crude and small, and it is horrendously thick. The number of takers would be vanishingly small. So right now the extra valuable of them being repairable is arguably ZERO.
Until the innovation slows down so that the mean time to obsolescence is not dwarfed by mean time to failure, arguing for repairability will continue to be a noble, yet foolish endeavor.
However, to leave them as shambling zombie products is just a cruel farce. There are plenty of NUC PC's out there that get regular updates, and they are basically the same as the mini except for being inadequately "minimalist". The "Pro" should have been a simple tower like every other real workstation box out there. Instead they tried to make it look like a shiny jet engine, which is even more non-standard than Dell's Alienware triangular BS. Basically I am saying that there are many vendors out there that do this on the PC side, often with multiple variants (often too many), updated regularly, and it is no big deal for them.
Even in the mid-range offering Apple chooses mobile grade stuff for desktop applications, needlessly hamstringing performance to be able to fit into their all-in-one fashion driven form factor. How about sell both a good mid-range tower AND all-in-on's and let the buyer decide?
Only Apple can have such a huge workforce, yet be unable to knock out basic updates to what amount to bog standard PC's wrapped up in designer cases. What the heck are all those people doing in the Spaceship, or are they all concussed from running into glass walls?
+1. Most screens are polarized the same way to mostly get along with polarized sunglasses, but there is still a good 10-15% of screens that are in portrait orientation. Higher end smartphones clearly have had effort into making them work with polarized glasses. most iphones have funny tints to the colors as you rotate them, but are always readable. My mid-range Moto X4 however disappears when in portrait mode, which sucks for taking pictures on a sunny day (when will manufacturers just put in a square sensor and let me choose the format before or after taking a picture?!?!).
You are an idiot. You must think your annual refund is "free money" too? Higher taxes get withheld from large checks such as one that includes a bonus, as each one calculated as if all checks were of that size. However you are taxed on your overall income for the year, so any over-payment or underpayment comes back to you come tax time.
Automate the rubbish, and ask for specific work you actually find interesting to fill out your day. I don't mind putting in an honest 8 hours, but I do mind spending it on repetitive make work, and polishing documents up that will never be read by anyone ever again.
So women are kept out of the sciences for hundreds of years, and that makes it OK to point to the lopsided male contributions as proof of some twisted ideas about who owns physics?
Apple began to staff up on mixed signal and RF ASIC designers with a list of job titles that looked like they were going after making a modem about 4-5 years ago, so yeah, they likely are ready to do their own by now. They already make their own CPU/GPU chips that leap frogged what Qualcomm offered in their SOC lineup.
Several years back I worked at a cellular amplifier supplier to a fruit themed cell phone maker (one with onerous secrecy BS in the contracts). On three ways calls with Qualcomm it was quite clear that even 5+ years ago there was a "frenemy" relationship with lots of frustration all around. Qualcomm's specifications for their envelope tracking technology was a real shit-show, and eventually when Qualcomm's 800 lb Gorilla tactics made it impossible for any of the suppliers to succeed the fruit themed company dropped it for 2 years in a semi-vindictive fashion. It was quite clear that Apple only tolerated Qualcomm so long as they had no viable alternative. When Intel got business it was clear they were willing to take a hit on performance just to have a second source.
In the end, it is hard to root for one 800 lb Gorilla over another when they are wrestling in the mud.
Slashdot Mirror
+1. The low attention span Google has makes me dismissive of just about anything they release no matter how good it sounds or operates.
All options are full of crap. Tons of crap. Sure there are a couple semi-recent movies, but that is about it. Most of it is not worth watching, which is exactly why they can buy tons of hours of stuff for dirt cheap.
Very frustrating is that there is no good indexing service I have found to tell which of our 3 subscriptions might have it. WTF?
Want to go back and watch a good show again after giving up finding anything new in despair? Too bad, it disappeared.
+1. You can't get the desktop hardware you actually want, and the Apple tax on the outdated mid to low end stuff you have to settle for is just insulting.
If only we had some law that guaranteed equal protection under the law. Might be nice to add that to the constitution or some such...
+1.
The best and brightest would have to be completely foolish to go into manufacturing in the USA today. Similarly since most remaining manufacturing left behind is of niche nature, don't expect that the supply chain will all be here waiting for your order to show up.
Apple in particular is a VERY demanding customer, and will pull shit like expecting tens of thousands of sample chips built to their oddball specification, for free, just to be considered for an eventual slot in their designs. Their vendors have to go WAAAAY out on a limb by pre-purchasing materials and equipment on the hope that they win. Fail to compete? Bankruptcy. Fail to win? Bankruptcy.
One of the more obvious ones was the sapphire manufacturer that tooled up to be a phone glass supplier, and was driven out of business when they only got a fraction of the expected business. Many more cases of critically wounded companies abound without the same headlines.
So I have no sympathy for Apple in particular when they don't have manufacturers lining up to produce some artisinal screw on demand.
+1. I grabbed it on-sale, and kind of want my money back. The whole nickel and diming for the "Deluxe" version, or early access pisses me off. The weird roll-out schedule annoyed me into waiting till it went on-sale. It sucks to then be the guy with a pea shooter while everyone else is a month or two ahead on unlocks. Grinding through the ranks to unlock stuff has gotten to be tiresome and rather boring.
I want to hop into a game and have fun, not suffer through paying my figurative dues that much (or literally paying to avoid doing so).
So BF5 feels like a movie with beautiful set and a shitty script. The game play is barely distinguishable from BF1, which I barely played and regret buying. It bogs down hard on my GTX 970 unless I really ratchet down the effects to mostly Low settings, which is also frustrating. Upgrading to something substantially better is a $300+ proposition, so folks like me who only get a few hours a week to play games anymore have a pretty hard time justifying that kind of Nvidia tax.
The contrast is the shit-show that is Android. It is a wild west scene of outdated OS versions, sporadic and unreliable security updates, non-removable bloatware, apparently rampant Chinese spyware, etc. Even otherwise good brands turn around and do this crap on their entry level and mid-range phones with just a few notable exceptions.
I have an Android phone, and I am amazed at the rampant pitfalls one has to navigate to pick a good phone at a low price. The safe ways to avoid this seem to be to get a flagship phone from the likes of Samsung or Google, or to get an Apple phone. I did not begrudge my rather non-technically minded wife when her iPhone 5s wore out and she wanted an 8. I've had to do ZERO to help her out. $800 was very cheap for marital bliss, and the phone will likely keep her going for a good 3+ years.
The peanut gallery will tell you to just root your android phone and load Lineage OS, or similar. For 99% of the buying public that is useless advice.
All good points. To make matters worse, corporate culture is very homogenized. Within an industry there is less an less to differentiate one company from the next. Most mid-tier companies offer very, very similar salaries (they benchmark against each other based on job titles, rather than pay based on employee value), very similar benefits, very similar vacation, and so forth. Beige boxes were the fashion, now everyone has moved to cheaper and crappier open office BS.
Basically jobs are a meal ticket and nothing more. You move when the jobs disappear and you have no options. Fewer and fewer companies offer decent moving packages as well. My current shop offers none as a policy, they expect you to be local or move your self for example.
Given that loyalty is a bridge burned from both ends I understand why work has become so transactional, but the result is that people want a job near where they live, rather than wanting to live where their job is.
Why 12%? Why not even less? Still seems like an arbitrary and painful tax between the buyer and the seller.
So what matters is the life expectancy at ~62 relative to the growth/decline of the population of ~15-45 years olds who will be funding their next ~20 years. Geezers dying from our awful healthcare system will help SSA, young folks giving up and committing suicide or OD'ing will not.
A colleague from Germany was visiting our office recently. He was quite perplexed as to why on a lunch walk we all were discussing the stock market. Basically everyone has to be both investor and worker here. Over there there is a reasonable pension system and people focus on their jobs.
It is also clear from various lunch walks with well educated co-workers that steady investing is beyond the grasp of many otherwise smart and rational people. Some want to have "my guy" handle their stuff (cue Berny Madoff flashbacks), others have been on the sidelines waiting for prices to be "right" while insisting they are not timing the market (they are). It is saddening that this is where we expect most folks to draw their retirement from.
So while I don't suggest there should not be a system with zero responsibility, the current system is akin tossing baby seals into a shark tank and wishing them the best. I would like to see an expansion of social security to help fill the gap that has widened into a chasm between what people need and what they have to retire at a reasonable age.
Just a few more dozen forks and it will be there, right?
The upgrades from the defaulta 128GB flash drive to 512GB is $500, while you can just to buy one outright for well under $200. Similar story for RAM. Overpriced hobbled base model with price gouging for upgrades. Same old Apple.
They have been a hard driving "success" at any cost type of shop for a while. The result is that they have a lot of staff who are sleep deprived and frayed at the edges. There is hug pressure to appear perfect from the outside, which also results in the drive to hit deadlines no matter what. In that environment people make mistakes, and some of those mistakes slip through the cracks.
in general these overly complex OS's are damn hard to fully QA. M$ just had to have a do-over on a release that deleted folks files
Linux desktop users just, oh wait, there are almost none of those.
The hardware as shipped was faulty. The fix/patch was to throttle, which was not disclosed to the customers.. Apple should have tested the phone with a simulation of a degraded battery and fixed the issue before shipping, perhaps with slower initial performance or with a better voltage regulator design that would handle a bigger battery droop with a degraded battery at full load.
Perhaps the fix should have been a motherboard replacement.
At least let us downgrade back if we get upgraders remorse. I agree with that bit fully.
The point being made is that while philosophically it is great that something is repairable, it seems unjustified. Only a handful of gray beards even want a Tandy 2000, and zero of them actually use it for "real work".
Let's take an original iPhone for a second, how many people today would be daily users on an iPhone 1 today if Apple put a bin of them out front in original condition for free, contingent on actual daily usage? By current standards the network speed is awful, then screen is crude and small, and it is horrendously thick. The number of takers would be vanishingly small. So right now the extra valuable of them being repairable is arguably ZERO.
Until the innovation slows down so that the mean time to obsolescence is not dwarfed by mean time to failure, arguing for repairability will continue to be a noble, yet foolish endeavor.
If they are not profitable, kill them with fire.
However, to leave them as shambling zombie products is just a cruel farce. There are plenty of NUC PC's out there that get regular updates, and they are basically the same as the mini except for being inadequately "minimalist". The "Pro" should have been a simple tower like every other real workstation box out there. Instead they tried to make it look like a shiny jet engine, which is even more non-standard than Dell's Alienware triangular BS. Basically I am saying that there are many vendors out there that do this on the PC side, often with multiple variants (often too many), updated regularly, and it is no big deal for them.
Even in the mid-range offering Apple chooses mobile grade stuff for desktop applications, needlessly hamstringing performance to be able to fit into their all-in-one fashion driven form factor. How about sell both a good mid-range tower AND all-in-on's and let the buyer decide?
Only Apple can have such a huge workforce, yet be unable to knock out basic updates to what amount to bog standard PC's wrapped up in designer cases. What the heck are all those people doing in the Spaceship, or are they all concussed from running into glass walls?
+1. Most screens are polarized the same way to mostly get along with polarized sunglasses, but there is still a good 10-15% of screens that are in portrait orientation. Higher end smartphones clearly have had effort into making them work with polarized glasses. most iphones have funny tints to the colors as you rotate them, but are always readable. My mid-range Moto X4 however disappears when in portrait mode, which sucks for taking pictures on a sunny day (when will manufacturers just put in a square sensor and let me choose the format before or after taking a picture?!?!).
Don’t forget snapping each other with their their rainbow suspenders.
You are an idiot. You must think your annual refund is "free money" too? Higher taxes get withheld from large checks such as one that includes a bonus, as each one calculated as if all checks were of that size. However you are taxed on your overall income for the year, so any over-payment or underpayment comes back to you come tax time.
Automate the rubbish, and ask for specific work you actually find interesting to fill out your day. I don't mind putting in an honest 8 hours, but I do mind spending it on repetitive make work, and polishing documents up that will never be read by anyone ever again.
So women are kept out of the sciences for hundreds of years, and that makes it OK to point to the lopsided male contributions as proof of some twisted ideas about who owns physics?
Apple began to staff up on mixed signal and RF ASIC designers with a list of job titles that looked like they were going after making a modem about 4-5 years ago, so yeah, they likely are ready to do their own by now. They already make their own CPU/GPU chips that leap frogged what Qualcomm offered in their SOC lineup.
Several years back I worked at a cellular amplifier supplier to a fruit themed cell phone maker (one with onerous secrecy BS in the contracts). On three ways calls with Qualcomm it was quite clear that even 5+ years ago there was a "frenemy" relationship with lots of frustration all around. Qualcomm's specifications for their envelope tracking technology was a real shit-show, and eventually when Qualcomm's 800 lb Gorilla tactics made it impossible for any of the suppliers to succeed the fruit themed company dropped it for 2 years in a semi-vindictive fashion. It was quite clear that Apple only tolerated Qualcomm so long as they had no viable alternative. When Intel got business it was clear they were willing to take a hit on performance just to have a second source.
In the end, it is hard to root for one 800 lb Gorilla over another when they are wrestling in the mud.