Between this and his publicly stated desires to shut down certain news organizations and an entire television network, how is it not obvious to every single person in these United States that the 'person' (using the word loosely here) we're dealing with should never have been elected POTUS in the first place? Seriously, it's like we're living in a perpetual nightmare.
The election was only last year; how quickly memories fade. For most people, it was a 'pick your poison' situation - by time we hit the general election, it was him or Hillary. I love how this British guy sums it up perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . Moreover, it seems that one of my predictions basically came to fruition, that the media isn't letting Trump get away with anything. He certainly helps them by making outrageous tweets all the time and thus providing them with no shortage of fodder for 'expert analysis', but the fact that all of this information comes to light, and does so quickly, means that we have a generally-more-informed electorate, which I don't think is a bad thing. Is it honestly reasonable to assume that Hillary would be under the same scrutiny?
Really, I think the solution is simple: remove a measure of power from the federal government, starting with the executive branch, then the role of the presidential candidate becomes far more muted, and the person who wins less important.
Use Plex with a Synology or QNAP unit; it's probably your best bet and you can RAID1 your drives to mitigate the possibility of data loss.
If your home internet goes down regularly, that's a different conversation. If that level of reliability is your concern, you can probably do what you need with a VPS or EC2 instance and host it in the cloud, though you'll be paying monthly for the privilege.
Personally, I'd definitely implore you to take it into your own hands. Amazon was far from the first company to attempt to do this, but if even Amazon can't make it run profitably, alternatives are likely to suffer the same fate as time progresses.
LOL, saving RAM in this day and age? The cold war is over man. Get yourself 32GB for Christmas and never look at your RAM consumption again.
My sarcasm meter reads 50/50, so if this was intended as sarcasm, I half-got it.
If it isn't, then I will state that I disagree. Even if machines have 32GB of RAM, it should be used for things other than 'to accommodate inefficient code'. Sure, we're not trying to make every byte count, but elsewhere on the thread someone posted some information regarding how the iOS Facebook app is at least twice as large as it needs to be primarily because of the redundant copies of libraries, which could be linked. The use of more RAM means longer load times because all the data going into RAM needs to come from somewhere, and assuming end users are running high end SSDs with gigabit internet is going to be false far more than it is going to be true.
Efficient code takes longer to write, but from an end user standpoint, there are no downsides to more efficient code.
Apparently you're not a T-Mobile customer, or you wouldn't be posting about "india based call centers."
Not entirely. T-Mobile farms out to India during low volume times (and presumably high volume times to handle overflow and limit hold times). 2:30AM on Thanksgiving, you're getting what is arguably the best call center in India - the handful of times I've been routed to them, they've been far and away the best experience I've had with offshore tech support; good English, friendly demeanor, genuinely listened to what I said, and they weren't completely beholden to scripts. Still, you're not getting Stephanie from Nebraska the same way you would at 6PM on any regular Thursday.
... a basis for decreeing Net Neutrality in the first place?
Networks have prioritized certain types of high-value traffic ever since someone figured out that their network was saturated with someone else's data, and that you could program a way to control that.
Because that was being done by end users. If I want to prioritize one sort of data over another, that's what I pay for. The issue is that when the ISP does it, I can't make those choices anymore.
NN isn't a "long standing expectation", but a relatively new idea.
It's not a new idea, it's only needed to be explicitly given a name because it was "just how stuff worked" beforehand. Bonus tip: with the admittedly notable exception of the AOL Time Warner merger, few ISPs were also content creators in the same way that NBC Comcast Universal are, so there was no incentive to deprioritize competitors.
If the basis for fighting the "abruptly reverse longstanding rules on which many have relied without a good reason", the reasons behind the "longstanding rules" need to be proven to be "good" first,
What is bad about all traffic being treated equally? How is it helpful to customers for ISPs to decide the speeds of different services?
then we can argue about these two-year-old rules being "longstanding".
As law, no. As "how stuff worked", yes. Ask a fish if it feels wet, then take it out of water and ask it again.
I just watched a bunch of Republicans c*rcle j*rking on YouTube about how they were now facing an unprecedented pool of unfilled positions in the judicial system that can now be filled with 'right thinking people' thanks to McConnell's obstructionist tactics during the Obama presidency.
Not to defend the clearly-partisan choices of the Trump administration, but Hillary explicitly promised "activist judges" - one of the few campaign promises I truly believe she intended to keep. It doesn't make Trump and friends right for doing it, but there was simply no way we were going to get nonpartisan judges out of the 2016 election.
Basically, the FCC wants to reclass ISPs from Title II utilities to Information Services and let the FTC and market dictacte what is and isn't acceptable behavior. It's not like the FCC doesn't believe in Neutrality, they just don't think they are the body that should enforce it through heavy handed regulation.
The issue at hand is that the ISPs want to have it both ways. If an ISP is going to be a regional monopoly, it needs tighter regulation. If an ISP is going to argue to decrease the regulatory requirements with which it must comply, it needs competitors.
For large areas in the country, neither apply.
If I want >10Mbit/sec, 100ms latency internet at my home, I've got one option: Altice (formerly Cablevision, branded as Optimum). FiOS is available two towns over, but Verizon will only offer me 2Mbit/sec DSL at my residence. Both companies have different stories on this topic...and I live in the NY Metro area; I am certain it's that much worse in more rural areas.
While Altice has been pretty good about keeping my speeds and bill about right, and my content flowing neutrally, "the market" isn't really something I can use as a punitive action if they opt to change this. Literally every other option I have for internet access does not fit the FCC guidelines for 'broadband'. If they behave badly, the 'market option' is to give up broadband. Technically possible, but that's like saying the solution to Ma Bell was for everyone to give up phone calls.
If the FCC is going to say "talk to someone else about requiring this", then they really should make it clear whose responsibility it is. The feedback page was rather clear that, if asked, most people explicitly prefer Net Neutrality. All the major ISPs involved in this dispute are interstate entities, meaning that this would still be a federal matter to regulate them. Conversely, most of those same ISPs have deals with local government for exclusivity regarding wire runs, meaning the free market solution has a roadblock at the town and/or county level in many cases.
We have thus ended up with a perfect storm of bureaucracy that penalizes both options.
Ultimately, there are no shortage of companies that face regulations that prevent them from making as much profit as they could be making. Truth in advertising laws prevent companies from lying to get business. The FDA, for all its faults, generally ensures my food is clearly labeled regarding its contents. Laws which regulate hospitals ensure they can't save money by reusing needles between patients. Laws regulating insurance companies make sure they can't just deny every single claim 'because reasons' and pocket all the money.
Maybe Title II isn't exactly the set of regulations ISPs should be regulated under...and I'm fine with that argument...but ISPs can't have de facto monopolies and also decide they aren't willing to be regulated more heavily than if they were one of five options for 96% of Americans.
Play Services makes most of the APIs available to older versions of Android. Most OEM customizations of Android include security-only patches. On a sidebar on this topic, while carrier-damaging hacks typically involve tower-side security measures and can be implemented that way, data-siphoning security issues that would actually harm consumers are considered 'core functionality' of the OS.
This "fragmentation" battle cry makes no sense, since monolithic install bases are relatively new and almost exclusive to iOS. Windows hasn't had it, Linux hasn't had it, and OSX only recently started doing it (and only on 'blessed' hardware models).
Despite this, software developers managed to write and support software for nearly three decades before the notion of "everyone running the same OS" was a meaningful notion. To this day, millions of desktops run the near-decade-old Windows 7, which happily keeps their hardware running and their applications starting.
So, I pose the question: why is fragmentation such a terrible thing? How do consumers lose out by not running Android Oreo? How is this such a terrible fate that it requires Google to adopt Apple's iron fist on the mobile market? Because personally, if I had my druthers, I'd be running Jelly Bean, or maybe Kitkat, on my phone.
Really, shouldn't the argument be that phones should be able to run a bit more like PCs, with more standardized OS installs that would allow consumers to choose which version to run, without needing to do all kinds of rooting and warranty-voiding operations in the process? I sincerely do not understand the reason why so many are of the persuasion that the ideal environment for computing devices is a monoculture.
There're a lot of people penned up, close together, and moving only very slowly waiting to be "screened". The "security" line would be a fine target for someone with a semi-automatic rifle or three. Or, just how much explosive and ball-bearings could a suicide bomber pack into a carryon suitcase he could set off in the midpoint of the line on the day before Thanksgiving?
Obviously, the next step is to declare the security line a 'gun free zone', to be immediately followed by erecting an additional security checkpoint before the security checkpoint so people won't be in danger when they go through security.
It's just that sites like Facebook and Reddit are the new town square.
No, they're not. Simple as that.
That's sort of the difficult question at hand. Do we, as a society, have a "Town Square" anymore? A location where everyone goes to participate in a marketplace of ideas? If it's not Facebook or Reddit, then where is that place? Freedom of speech to state the 'approved' set of ideas is almost as useless as freedom of speech limited to the middle of the desert in Nevada - technically accurate, but practically useless. The implication that Freedom of Speech was both the very first entry in the Bill of Rights, and that it was written under the auspices that it can only meaningfully be exercised in isolation, frankly doesn't make sense. Freedom of speech does imply meaningful access to an audience of some kind. Now yes, that audience must also have the readily-available freedom to not-listen and I don't think the Bill of Rights guaranteed a particular or captive audience, but an audience, at some level, there must be.
If Facebook and Reddit don't want to provide a true marketplace of ideas, that's kinda their right, but the question is "should it be?". These companies have plenty of regulations. Their buildings must have fire exits, they can't lie on their SCO filings, and they can't physically beat their employees until morale improves. Adding a requirement to not-stifle the first amendment would just be another requirement.
The alternative is the realization that we do need a town square, where nazis and antifa alike can make their views heard on equal footing. Usenet used to fill this job well, and I'd argue that it's still about the best system for this (or at least the best model for one), but it suffers from the dark side of the network effect. I'd also be in favor of some sort of government hosted public forum system, but even ignoring the funding and spam issues, it becomes a potential point-of-failure if it is ever manipulated by the government maliciously, and would lack accountability to do so.
So, if the government is not going to provide a digital town square, and private industry can't either, then someone is going to have to pay for it, either through donations or ads, which brings us, I guess, to the NPR model...but NPR is far from a 'marketplace of ideas' as I have yet to hear anything on my local NPR stations that vaguely resembled a conservative point of view - or, for that matter, something that wasn't political at some level, unless you count 'fundraiser season'.
The final option is that we have no town square - Freedom of Speech, but nowhere to meaningfully exercise it. I don't think that's something worth fighting for.
If you write to (say) the Catholic Herald newspaper, you can't seriously complain when they don't publish your "the Pope is a Paedophile and the Antichrist" cartoon. Similarly, they are under no obligation to accept adverts from condom manufacturers.
You don't have to read the Catholic Herald, and you don't have to visit Facebook or Reddit. It's not some Stalinist state controlled monopoly.
First off, the Catholic Herald does not have nearly the same userbase as Reddit. Second, the Catholic Herald is not understood to be a publication whose primary content is user-submitted. On the contrary, it is a topical periodical with editors and writers intended for a specific audience. Anyone reading it will assume it has gone through an editor who made choices as to what was deemed the most desirable content to distribute, a far cry from the community-driven aspects which are a primary feature of both Reddit and Facebook. Nobody would expect the Catholic Herald to publish an article called "the pope is a pedophile", and arguably/r/catholic probably wouldn't either as a function of the individual moderators on that subreddit....but are we ultimately arguing that there should be nowhere on Reddit that such an article *could* be posted? I'm not arguing for the front page, nor am I arguing for/r/sldkgfnw (the equivalent of the Nevada desert), but I am arguing that there does need to be a place for it.
Apple provides laptops that have four USB-C ports.
This is a fair point. Though the Airs famously have only one, and the lower end Pros only have two, the higher end models do indeed provide four ports. Thank you.
As to USB-A being such a sure standard... what happens when I plug my USB-3 drive into a device? It has a standard USB-A cable on one end, yes, and it will technically work - but on some devices it will only us USB-2.0 speeds, on others that support USB-3 it will be far faster. How is that not just as confusing for the non-technical user? It's the same device and cables and ports, but can work very differently across multiple devices...
Because their data still moves in exactly the same way, just slower. It doesn't work "differently", just at different speeds. Moreover, USB3 ports are blue, so it's clear that plugging that drive into ports that aren't blue, your drive will work at 2.0 speeds...but still work.
By contrast, let's take a USB-C to HDMI adapter. Yes, HDMI has its own myriad set of flavors, but there's at least a "lowest common denominator" mode that devices with HDMI on either end will get something to show on a screen if the port and cables physically fit. It may not be HDR or have an Ethernet run or support MHL, but you'll get something to show up. Laptops only with USB-C connectors are luck of the draw, because it depends on the adapter, port, and chipset all agreeing, which is far from a 'given' because the standard does not require it. Also, though the USB-C standard supports up to 100W of current, not every port does and not every cable does, so a device that might be able to receive power from one charger may not from another.
That's a far cry from "my external drive is only moving data at 45MB/sec instead of 85MB/sec", because that's not "technically work[ing]", that's "actually working".
1. He's absolutely right about it being a "collection of standards", where it's unclear whether a USB-C receptacle is power-only, high-power, power+data...etc. That inconsistency is hindrance to adoption, rather than flexibility. 2. There are tens of billions of items with USB-A connectors, for which even the 480mbits/sec of USB 2.0 is 'fast enough', and USB3 speeds are "definitely fast enough". Quite a number of these things are rather expensive. By contrast, there are very, very few devices that have a USB-C port for something other than charging. 3. Machines with USB-A ports tend to have a lot of them. Most standard-sized laptops have 3-5 of them, desktops have 6-10. I've yet to see a computer with USB-C provide more than two such ports. It does not help spur adoption when the number of ports available amount to "one to charge, one for the hub for all the other things". 4. Cables are expensive...except when they are inexpensive and they don't work, or outright combust.
But the really big reason I feel that USB-C hasn't gone much of anywhere is because no one really asked for it. The 12mbits/sec of USB 1.1 was quickly a bottleneck, and it was backwards compatible. The 480Mbits/sec of USB 2.0 was fast enough for plenty of things, but bulk data transfers and other tasks benefit from USB3...and both of them were backwards compatible at a physical level. USB-C is "maybe whatever you want it to be", doesn't have the same connectors, lacks real standardization beyond the connectors...and aside from the ability to flip it, from a customer's point of view it's supposed to be superior, how?
I'm sure it will increase its momentum and/or find a niche eventually, but the fact that it's going to require a painful and expensive transition period makes it the kind of thing that will take far longer than the iterations of USB that have been the standard for nearly two decades.
keyboards give tactile feedback. They give the ability to enter information quickly and accurately, and they do not require noise to be made (unless you have a Model M), and don't require a computer at the other end to guess what you mean. Whether the presumed successor is a gesture-based method (which the computer will get right...How often?) or the assumption is more comprehensive voice input, it requires a whole lot of computing power to turn these into reliable input and are generally inefficient.
Moreover, the piano has had the same 88-key layout for hundreds of years, and I've yet to hear anyone looking to change it.
Keyboards may not be the most exciting thing to ever exist, and I've used Siri to compose a short email on more than one occasion...but so long as there is data entry to be done that does not readily lend itself to being interpreted, keyboards will remain.
Some of you are missing the ramifications of this. Even though this is magnetic media it will drive down the cost of cloud storage. Right now it is cheap, but not that cheap. This could make is feasible for everyone to store all of their data in cloud for pennies a year....encrypted of course.
I don't think cost is the issue here. First, I don't think people are eschewing cloud storage for cost reasons alone; with BackBlaze being $0.005/gb/month and Amazon and Microsoft both under a nickel a gig even for their highest tier, few people are saying "too expensive". Most of the issues have more to do with either principle (i.e. not wanting their data on someone else's hard drive), bandwidth (10TBytes transferred over 10mbits/sec upload pipe...grab a snickers...), or latency (video editing in The Cloud...yeah, okay...).
For most people, cloud storage is cheap enough, but another poster is right in that more than 1TB (I'd argue 2TB) makes storage a solved problem for the overwhelming majority of people. Further, I'd argue that I doubt most cloud storage companies list "disk storage" as their primary expense, and I'd similarly argue that even if being able to quadruple storage capacities per 3.5" bay did save them a bunch of money, that they would be unlikely to pass that cost along to customers.
Just say no to Symantec, it can only make your system worse
Sadly, being "good" and "effective" are seldom requirements for 'checkbox compliance'. I went through this with a law firm recently that was trying to upgrade everything to meet the requirements the bank had in order to do business with them. The bank didn't explicitly say they required Symantec, but a whole lot of their workstation requirements were conveniently default (or basically-default) policies Symantec has. Being a fan of ESET due to it being actually-effective, I pitched it to the client. The client trusts my recommendations and was willing to pay more for ESET, but needed the bank to sign off on it. Again, the bank didn't *require* Symantec, they were just "more familiar with it" and "considered it the best option"...at which point, going with ESET would have likely caused more political issues. Half the machines in the office needed to have their RAM upgraded to run with any meaningful level of performance after installing Symantec on them, but it makes the banks happy, which was why they preferred it, and I really can't fault them.
After all, even for the banks, "secure systems" aren't nearly as important as "compliant systems".
What the heck are you doing that you're so terrified of governments hacking into your data and stealing it?
In other words, "If you have nothing to hide...". This 23-page PDF does an excellent job at succinctly describing issues regarding privacy: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf. It is most definitely worth the read as it does a great job discussing the "nothing to hide" argument.
The issue, at least for me, is the fact that the data has value. If it didn't, Google wouldn't be spending obscene amounts of time and money collecting, storing, and analyzing that data. If that data has value, then it should be treated like currency - not handed out to literally anyone, and exchanged for things I deem beneficial to me[1].
All of the data you're discussing about having amassed: If Google (or someone else) wrote software which gave you the identical logging and streaming capacity, but let you do it on your own hardware and software, do you think there would be a privacy issue with that? Of course not! The data is kept, but is kept by the person who generated it. Why doesn't something like this exist? It would cost money, sure, but how is it that all of this software can exist on a large scale for free, but scaling it down for an individual user costs money? Yes, that's the trade for the logging, most people understand that...but it's unreasonable to expect that everyone is comfortable with Google having all of that information. In a self-hosted paradigm, a person with "nothing to hide" could absolutely send that data to Google or post it on Facebook or burn it to a CD and give it to their local precinct, but that's their choice. Google (and Apple and MS and Facebook) has designed the data collection systems to do all of this logging with virtually no ability to opt-out. This is not a trustbuilding paradigm.
"What do YOU have to hide, voyager529?" I don't know. And that's the problem. I have no idea what sort of information Google has on me. As much as I wish it were "as little as possible", I know they have more than I want them to...but I don't know what. Yes, they have the dashboard in the account that gives you a few inklings of what data they possess, but we both know that they collect FAR more.
Bottom line: An opt-in system affords you everything you express you have wanted, and I am not for a second saying that such a service shouldn't exist for people like yourself. However, whether I have "nothing to hide" or not, I should still have control over who gets what data. Since no one wants to make a self-hosted system for people like me, the only other option is to forcibly opt-out. Maybe I don't get all the features you're talking about...and maybe, I'm perfectly fine with that.
[1] I'm not against charitable giving in this case; "helping others" does indeed constitute something "beneficial to me", but it's still up to me to decide how much money to give, and to what extent, and in what capacity.
To me, the bigger question about this is the fact that Groove Music is the name of the music playing application that is bundled with Windows 10, and that Microsoft resets the file associations to every time there's a feature update. They clearly couldn't get any traction. Samsung tried to get a music service off the ground with their "Milk" service, which got discontinued last year. Apple still keeps the money flowing with iTunes, but they couldn't get Ping to take off. HTC had their contract with Beats, and that gained only a smidge of traction before Apple bought the brand.
So, after everyone tried to launch an alternative to Pandora, Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, and technically Youtube...is it safe to say that the days of software taking off solely based on being bundled with hardware are over? I mean, I'm really hard pressed to come up with an application that "bundled its way to success" in the past decade, desktop or mobile.
Is it safe to say that the days of market dominance via bundle are over, and by extension we can stop having software installed with hardware by default (especially the uninstallable kind)? Because I'm really sick of having to drop to Powershell to remove all of the unnecessary Windows 10 apps, or root my phone to get rid of all the thoroughly unnecessary Samsung software.
I think you're right, this $200M is largely a feel-good measure, primarily for the sake of appearance. The problem is that we really can't get much more than that anymore. People who know STEM well *and* have a desire to teach are rare to begin with; those who are willing to teach below the college level and put up with the political headaches, endless grading, just-above-the-poverty-line wages, and general classroom drama are one in a million. Meanwhile, computers themselves are becoming evermore locked down devices making self-discovery almost impossible - and opening them up with the willingness to deal with the occasional malice or malware outbreak is guaranteed to be the one thing IT and superintendents agree on. It's always taken self-motivation to get into STEM fields and stay in them (frequently requiring one to overcome social pressures not to), but at least when things were 'more open' and 'more available', a payoff was more practical.
Throwing $200 million at the STEM education problem is going to leave us with a $200 million problem, and I'll even give Ivanka enough credit to believe that she's likely aware of this fact. At the same time, truly solving the problem is going to be long, bumpy, and expensive. Even if Donald Trump gave away every penny of his $3.5 billion net worth to this one particular problem, and did it so perfectly that it was able to put all of the right things into all of the right hands at all of the right schools in a way that brought zero pushback or any other sort of difficulty to the situation as to universally end up with a solution instead of Yet Another Problem, it would still take at least a decade for the effects start to be felt within the industry, and likely another decade to actually make a difference. That's an incredibly tough sell for even the most optimistic person with enough money and/or power to make that sort of change, when there's a chance that $200 million might have even a positive-even-if-superficial effect that is immediately visible.
The short version: People like us prefer our computers "do what we say". We will explicitly tell a computer to do a particular, non-default thing because we have some concept regarding how these things work.
The iPhone has a principally different paradigm: "do what I mean". The walled garden we see as keeping us in, generally keeps the baddies out for the general populous who has answered a "Windows technical support" call recently. The "do what I mean" crowd is perfectly content with a phone that lacks advanced features that they would never use. They're also okay with a device that works very similar to their old device, and seamlessly moves over their contacts and text messages and auto-downloads their apps and puts them in the same place. iPhones still do all of this incredibly well, and if it means they need an adapter for their headphones, it's a small price to pay.
Do I think the "wow" moments with the iPhone are behind us? Generally, yes. However, I think the appeal of $NEW_IPHONE is that the owner's current iPhone has a cracked screen and the battery requires three charges a day, and moving to the new model keeps things basically the same. This is what people are buying. And Apple still delivers this better than anyone else.
There are precisely zero people who use your product due to your business model. Your company has a decades-long history of costing customers huge amounts of money, either in licensing, legal fees, or both. Nobody looking to do a database migration is going to believe that the cost savings over AWS will last for any length of time; everybody, everywhere, ever sees right through the attempt to lock people in, yet again. Amazon, Microsoft, and OSS databases are your competition, and "We're not Oracle" is a selling point they will always possess. Even if by some miracle "Oracle is cheaper" was an argument anybody believed would remain true for any length of time, odds are good that most potential customers would be so wary of your business practices that paying more for Amazon is a better business decision.
The ability to continue increasing the cost for your current clients basically-indefinitely is the only reason your company is still in existence. Your decline will be slow, and will likely remain wealthy for the rest of your life, but when Oracle eventually goes under, your legacy will be such that there will be cheers and celebration for your demise.
Slashdot Mirror
Between this and his publicly stated desires to shut down certain news organizations and an entire television network, how is it not obvious to every single person in these United States that the 'person' (using the word loosely here) we're dealing with should never have been elected POTUS in the first place? Seriously, it's like we're living in a perpetual nightmare.
The election was only last year; how quickly memories fade. For most people, it was a 'pick your poison' situation - by time we hit the general election, it was him or Hillary. I love how this British guy sums it up perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . Moreover, it seems that one of my predictions basically came to fruition, that the media isn't letting Trump get away with anything. He certainly helps them by making outrageous tweets all the time and thus providing them with no shortage of fodder for 'expert analysis', but the fact that all of this information comes to light, and does so quickly, means that we have a generally-more-informed electorate, which I don't think is a bad thing. Is it honestly reasonable to assume that Hillary would be under the same scrutiny?
Really, I think the solution is simple: remove a measure of power from the federal government, starting with the executive branch, then the role of the presidential candidate becomes far more muted, and the person who wins less important.
Use Plex with a Synology or QNAP unit; it's probably your best bet and you can RAID1 your drives to mitigate the possibility of data loss.
If your home internet goes down regularly, that's a different conversation. If that level of reliability is your concern, you can probably do what you need with a VPS or EC2 instance and host it in the cloud, though you'll be paying monthly for the privilege.
Personally, I'd definitely implore you to take it into your own hands. Amazon was far from the first company to attempt to do this, but if even Amazon can't make it run profitably, alternatives are likely to suffer the same fate as time progresses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Ohh, the 90's...such a time for optimism.
http://rinkworks.com/stupid/
Also worth perusing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tales...
LOL, saving RAM in this day and age? The cold war is over man. Get yourself 32GB for Christmas and never look at your RAM consumption again.
My sarcasm meter reads 50/50, so if this was intended as sarcasm, I half-got it.
If it isn't, then I will state that I disagree. Even if machines have 32GB of RAM, it should be used for things other than 'to accommodate inefficient code'. Sure, we're not trying to make every byte count, but elsewhere on the thread someone posted some information regarding how the iOS Facebook app is at least twice as large as it needs to be primarily because of the redundant copies of libraries, which could be linked. The use of more RAM means longer load times because all the data going into RAM needs to come from somewhere, and assuming end users are running high end SSDs with gigabit internet is going to be false far more than it is going to be true.
Efficient code takes longer to write, but from an end user standpoint, there are no downsides to more efficient code.
Apparently you're not a T-Mobile customer, or you wouldn't be posting about "india based call centers."
Not entirely. T-Mobile farms out to India during low volume times (and presumably high volume times to handle overflow and limit hold times). 2:30AM on Thanksgiving, you're getting what is arguably the best call center in India - the handful of times I've been routed to them, they've been far and away the best experience I've had with offshore tech support; good English, friendly demeanor, genuinely listened to what I said, and they weren't completely beholden to scripts. Still, you're not getting Stephanie from Nebraska the same way you would at 6PM on any regular Thursday.
The very definition... of dirty money.
Sounds like there's a market for washing it...perhaps with a washing machine...
... a basis for decreeing Net Neutrality in the first place?
Networks have prioritized certain types of high-value traffic ever since someone figured out that their network was saturated with someone else's data, and that you could program a way to control that.
Because that was being done by end users. If I want to prioritize one sort of data over another, that's what I pay for. The issue is that when the ISP does it, I can't make those choices anymore.
NN isn't a "long standing expectation", but a relatively new idea.
It's not a new idea, it's only needed to be explicitly given a name because it was "just how stuff worked" beforehand. Bonus tip: with the admittedly notable exception of the AOL Time Warner merger, few ISPs were also content creators in the same way that NBC Comcast Universal are, so there was no incentive to deprioritize competitors.
If the basis for fighting the "abruptly reverse longstanding rules on which many have relied without a good reason", the reasons behind the "longstanding rules" need to be proven to be "good" first,
What is bad about all traffic being treated equally? How is it helpful to customers for ISPs to decide the speeds of different services?
then we can argue about these two-year-old rules being "longstanding".
As law, no. As "how stuff worked", yes. Ask a fish if it feels wet, then take it out of water and ask it again.
I just watched a bunch of Republicans c*rcle j*rking on YouTube about how they were now facing an unprecedented pool of unfilled positions in the judicial system that can now be filled with 'right thinking people' thanks to McConnell's obstructionist tactics during the Obama presidency.
Not to defend the clearly-partisan choices of the Trump administration, but Hillary explicitly promised "activist judges" - one of the few campaign promises I truly believe she intended to keep. It doesn't make Trump and friends right for doing it, but there was simply no way we were going to get nonpartisan judges out of the 2016 election.
Basically, the FCC wants to reclass ISPs from Title II utilities to Information Services and let the FTC and market dictacte what is and isn't acceptable behavior. It's not like the FCC doesn't believe in Neutrality, they just don't think they are the body that should enforce it through heavy handed regulation.
The issue at hand is that the ISPs want to have it both ways. If an ISP is going to be a regional monopoly, it needs tighter regulation. If an ISP is going to argue to decrease the regulatory requirements with which it must comply, it needs competitors.
For large areas in the country, neither apply.
If I want >10Mbit/sec, 100ms latency internet at my home, I've got one option: Altice (formerly Cablevision, branded as Optimum). FiOS is available two towns over, but Verizon will only offer me 2Mbit/sec DSL at my residence. Both companies have different stories on this topic...and I live in the NY Metro area; I am certain it's that much worse in more rural areas.
While Altice has been pretty good about keeping my speeds and bill about right, and my content flowing neutrally, "the market" isn't really something I can use as a punitive action if they opt to change this. Literally every other option I have for internet access does not fit the FCC guidelines for 'broadband'. If they behave badly, the 'market option' is to give up broadband. Technically possible, but that's like saying the solution to Ma Bell was for everyone to give up phone calls.
If the FCC is going to say "talk to someone else about requiring this", then they really should make it clear whose responsibility it is. The feedback page was rather clear that, if asked, most people explicitly prefer Net Neutrality. All the major ISPs involved in this dispute are interstate entities, meaning that this would still be a federal matter to regulate them. Conversely, most of those same ISPs have deals with local government for exclusivity regarding wire runs, meaning the free market solution has a roadblock at the town and/or county level in many cases.
We have thus ended up with a perfect storm of bureaucracy that penalizes both options.
Ultimately, there are no shortage of companies that face regulations that prevent them from making as much profit as they could be making. Truth in advertising laws prevent companies from lying to get business. The FDA, for all its faults, generally ensures my food is clearly labeled regarding its contents. Laws which regulate hospitals ensure they can't save money by reusing needles between patients. Laws regulating insurance companies make sure they can't just deny every single claim 'because reasons' and pocket all the money.
Maybe Title II isn't exactly the set of regulations ISPs should be regulated under...and I'm fine with that argument...but ISPs can't have de facto monopolies and also decide they aren't willing to be regulated more heavily than if they were one of five options for 96% of Americans.
On what basis?
Play Services makes most of the APIs available to older versions of Android. Most OEM customizations of Android include security-only patches. On a sidebar on this topic, while carrier-damaging hacks typically involve tower-side security measures and can be implemented that way, data-siphoning security issues that would actually harm consumers are considered 'core functionality' of the OS.
This "fragmentation" battle cry makes no sense, since monolithic install bases are relatively new and almost exclusive to iOS. Windows hasn't had it, Linux hasn't had it, and OSX only recently started doing it (and only on 'blessed' hardware models).
Despite this, software developers managed to write and support software for nearly three decades before the notion of "everyone running the same OS" was a meaningful notion. To this day, millions of desktops run the near-decade-old Windows 7, which happily keeps their hardware running and their applications starting.
So, I pose the question: why is fragmentation such a terrible thing? How do consumers lose out by not running Android Oreo? How is this such a terrible fate that it requires Google to adopt Apple's iron fist on the mobile market? Because personally, if I had my druthers, I'd be running Jelly Bean, or maybe Kitkat, on my phone.
Really, shouldn't the argument be that phones should be able to run a bit more like PCs, with more standardized OS installs that would allow consumers to choose which version to run, without needing to do all kinds of rooting and warranty-voiding operations in the process? I sincerely do not understand the reason why so many are of the persuasion that the ideal environment for computing devices is a monoculture.
There're a lot of people penned up, close together, and moving only very slowly waiting to be "screened". The "security" line would be a fine target for someone with a semi-automatic rifle or three. Or, just how much explosive and ball-bearings could a suicide bomber pack into a carryon suitcase he could set off in the midpoint of the line on the day before Thanksgiving?
Obviously, the next step is to declare the security line a 'gun free zone', to be immediately followed by erecting an additional security checkpoint before the security checkpoint so people won't be in danger when they go through security.
It's just that sites like Facebook and Reddit are the new town square.
No, they're not. Simple as that.
That's sort of the difficult question at hand. Do we, as a society, have a "Town Square" anymore? A location where everyone goes to participate in a marketplace of ideas? If it's not Facebook or Reddit, then where is that place? Freedom of speech to state the 'approved' set of ideas is almost as useless as freedom of speech limited to the middle of the desert in Nevada - technically accurate, but practically useless. The implication that Freedom of Speech was both the very first entry in the Bill of Rights, and that it was written under the auspices that it can only meaningfully be exercised in isolation, frankly doesn't make sense. Freedom of speech does imply meaningful access to an audience of some kind. Now yes, that audience must also have the readily-available freedom to not-listen and I don't think the Bill of Rights guaranteed a particular or captive audience, but an audience, at some level, there must be.
If Facebook and Reddit don't want to provide a true marketplace of ideas, that's kinda their right, but the question is "should it be?". These companies have plenty of regulations. Their buildings must have fire exits, they can't lie on their SCO filings, and they can't physically beat their employees until morale improves. Adding a requirement to not-stifle the first amendment would just be another requirement.
The alternative is the realization that we do need a town square, where nazis and antifa alike can make their views heard on equal footing. Usenet used to fill this job well, and I'd argue that it's still about the best system for this (or at least the best model for one), but it suffers from the dark side of the network effect. I'd also be in favor of some sort of government hosted public forum system, but even ignoring the funding and spam issues, it becomes a potential point-of-failure if it is ever manipulated by the government maliciously, and would lack accountability to do so.
So, if the government is not going to provide a digital town square, and private industry can't either, then someone is going to have to pay for it, either through donations or ads, which brings us, I guess, to the NPR model...but NPR is far from a 'marketplace of ideas' as I have yet to hear anything on my local NPR stations that vaguely resembled a conservative point of view - or, for that matter, something that wasn't political at some level, unless you count 'fundraiser season'.
The final option is that we have no town square - Freedom of Speech, but nowhere to meaningfully exercise it. I don't think that's something worth fighting for.
If you write to (say) the Catholic Herald newspaper, you can't seriously complain when they don't publish your "the Pope is a Paedophile and the Antichrist" cartoon. Similarly, they are under no obligation to accept adverts from condom manufacturers.
You don't have to read the Catholic Herald, and you don't have to visit Facebook or Reddit. It's not some Stalinist state controlled monopoly.
First off, the Catholic Herald does not have nearly the same userbase as Reddit. Second, the Catholic Herald is not understood to be a publication whose primary content is user-submitted. On the contrary, it is a topical periodical with editors and writers intended for a specific audience. Anyone reading it will assume it has gone through an editor who made choices as to what was deemed the most desirable content to distribute, a far cry from the community-driven aspects which are a primary feature of both Reddit and Facebook. Nobody would expect the Catholic Herald to publish an article called "the pope is a pedophile", and arguably /r/catholic probably wouldn't either as a function of the individual moderators on that subreddit....but are we ultimately arguing that there should be nowhere on Reddit that such an article *could* be posted? I'm not arguing for the front page, nor am I arguing for /r/sldkgfnw (the equivalent of the Nevada desert), but I am arguing that there does need to be a place for it.
Apple provides laptops that have four USB-C ports.
This is a fair point. Though the Airs famously have only one, and the lower end Pros only have two, the higher end models do indeed provide four ports. Thank you.
As to USB-A being such a sure standard... what happens when I plug my USB-3 drive into a device? It has a standard USB-A cable on one end, yes, and it will technically work - but on some devices it will only us USB-2.0 speeds, on others that support USB-3 it will be far faster. How is that not just as confusing for the non-technical user? It's the same device and cables and ports, but can work very differently across multiple devices...
Because their data still moves in exactly the same way, just slower. It doesn't work "differently", just at different speeds. Moreover, USB3 ports are blue, so it's clear that plugging that drive into ports that aren't blue, your drive will work at 2.0 speeds...but still work.
By contrast, let's take a USB-C to HDMI adapter. Yes, HDMI has its own myriad set of flavors, but there's at least a "lowest common denominator" mode that devices with HDMI on either end will get something to show on a screen if the port and cables physically fit. It may not be HDR or have an Ethernet run or support MHL, but you'll get something to show up. Laptops only with USB-C connectors are luck of the draw, because it depends on the adapter, port, and chipset all agreeing, which is far from a 'given' because the standard does not require it. Also, though the USB-C standard supports up to 100W of current, not every port does and not every cable does, so a device that might be able to receive power from one charger may not from another.
That's a far cry from "my external drive is only moving data at 45MB/sec instead of 85MB/sec", because that's not "technically work[ing]", that's "actually working".
1. He's absolutely right about it being a "collection of standards", where it's unclear whether a USB-C receptacle is power-only, high-power, power+data...etc. That inconsistency is hindrance to adoption, rather than flexibility.
2. There are tens of billions of items with USB-A connectors, for which even the 480mbits/sec of USB 2.0 is 'fast enough', and USB3 speeds are "definitely fast enough". Quite a number of these things are rather expensive. By contrast, there are very, very few devices that have a USB-C port for something other than charging.
3. Machines with USB-A ports tend to have a lot of them. Most standard-sized laptops have 3-5 of them, desktops have 6-10. I've yet to see a computer with USB-C provide more than two such ports. It does not help spur adoption when the number of ports available amount to "one to charge, one for the hub for all the other things".
4. Cables are expensive...except when they are inexpensive and they don't work, or outright combust.
But the really big reason I feel that USB-C hasn't gone much of anywhere is because no one really asked for it. The 12mbits/sec of USB 1.1 was quickly a bottleneck, and it was backwards compatible. The 480Mbits/sec of USB 2.0 was fast enough for plenty of things, but bulk data transfers and other tasks benefit from USB3...and both of them were backwards compatible at a physical level. USB-C is "maybe whatever you want it to be", doesn't have the same connectors, lacks real standardization beyond the connectors...and aside from the ability to flip it, from a customer's point of view it's supposed to be superior, how?
I'm sure it will increase its momentum and/or find a niche eventually, but the fact that it's going to require a painful and expensive transition period makes it the kind of thing that will take far longer than the iterations of USB that have been the standard for nearly two decades.
keyboards give tactile feedback. They give the ability to enter information quickly and accurately, and they do not require noise to be made (unless you have a Model M), and don't require a computer at the other end to guess what you mean. Whether the presumed successor is a gesture-based method (which the computer will get right...How often?) or the assumption is more comprehensive voice input, it requires a whole lot of computing power to turn these into reliable input and are generally inefficient.
Moreover, the piano has had the same 88-key layout for hundreds of years, and I've yet to hear anyone looking to change it.
Keyboards may not be the most exciting thing to ever exist, and I've used Siri to compose a short email on more than one occasion...but so long as there is data entry to be done that does not readily lend itself to being interpreted, keyboards will remain.
Some of you are missing the ramifications of this. Even though this is magnetic media it will drive down the cost of cloud storage. Right now it is cheap, but not that cheap. This could make is feasible for everyone to store all of their data in cloud for pennies a year....encrypted of course.
I don't think cost is the issue here. First, I don't think people are eschewing cloud storage for cost reasons alone; with BackBlaze being $0.005/gb/month and Amazon and Microsoft both under a nickel a gig even for their highest tier, few people are saying "too expensive". Most of the issues have more to do with either principle (i.e. not wanting their data on someone else's hard drive), bandwidth (10TBytes transferred over 10mbits/sec upload pipe...grab a snickers...), or latency (video editing in The Cloud...yeah, okay...).
For most people, cloud storage is cheap enough, but another poster is right in that more than 1TB (I'd argue 2TB) makes storage a solved problem for the overwhelming majority of people. Further, I'd argue that I doubt most cloud storage companies list "disk storage" as their primary expense, and I'd similarly argue that even if being able to quadruple storage capacities per 3.5" bay did save them a bunch of money, that they would be unlikely to pass that cost along to customers.
Just say no to Symantec, it can only make your system worse
Sadly, being "good" and "effective" are seldom requirements for 'checkbox compliance'. I went through this with a law firm recently that was trying to upgrade everything to meet the requirements the bank had in order to do business with them. The bank didn't explicitly say they required Symantec, but a whole lot of their workstation requirements were conveniently default (or basically-default) policies Symantec has. Being a fan of ESET due to it being actually-effective, I pitched it to the client. The client trusts my recommendations and was willing to pay more for ESET, but needed the bank to sign off on it. Again, the bank didn't *require* Symantec, they were just "more familiar with it" and "considered it the best option"...at which point, going with ESET would have likely caused more political issues. Half the machines in the office needed to have their RAM upgraded to run with any meaningful level of performance after installing Symantec on them, but it makes the banks happy, which was why they preferred it, and I really can't fault them.
After all, even for the banks, "secure systems" aren't nearly as important as "compliant systems".
What the heck are you doing that you're so terrified of governments hacking into your data and stealing it?
In other words, "If you have nothing to hide...". This 23-page PDF does an excellent job at succinctly describing issues regarding privacy: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf. It is most definitely worth the read as it does a great job discussing the "nothing to hide" argument.
The issue, at least for me, is the fact that the data has value. If it didn't, Google wouldn't be spending obscene amounts of time and money collecting, storing, and analyzing that data. If that data has value, then it should be treated like currency - not handed out to literally anyone, and exchanged for things I deem beneficial to me[1].
All of the data you're discussing about having amassed: If Google (or someone else) wrote software which gave you the identical logging and streaming capacity, but let you do it on your own hardware and software, do you think there would be a privacy issue with that? Of course not! The data is kept, but is kept by the person who generated it. Why doesn't something like this exist? It would cost money, sure, but how is it that all of this software can exist on a large scale for free, but scaling it down for an individual user costs money? Yes, that's the trade for the logging, most people understand that...but it's unreasonable to expect that everyone is comfortable with Google having all of that information. In a self-hosted paradigm, a person with "nothing to hide" could absolutely send that data to Google or post it on Facebook or burn it to a CD and give it to their local precinct, but that's their choice. Google (and Apple and MS and Facebook) has designed the data collection systems to do all of this logging with virtually no ability to opt-out. This is not a trustbuilding paradigm.
"What do YOU have to hide, voyager529?"
I don't know. And that's the problem. I have no idea what sort of information Google has on me. As much as I wish it were "as little as possible", I know they have more than I want them to...but I don't know what. Yes, they have the dashboard in the account that gives you a few inklings of what data they possess, but we both know that they collect FAR more.
Bottom line: An opt-in system affords you everything you express you have wanted, and I am not for a second saying that such a service shouldn't exist for people like yourself. However, whether I have "nothing to hide" or not, I should still have control over who gets what data. Since no one wants to make a self-hosted system for people like me, the only other option is to forcibly opt-out. Maybe I don't get all the features you're talking about...and maybe, I'm perfectly fine with that.
[1] I'm not against charitable giving in this case; "helping others" does indeed constitute something "beneficial to me", but it's still up to me to decide how much money to give, and to what extent, and in what capacity.
This IRS calling to check your identity we need your
Name
Address
SS number or tax ID number
Hello, IRS agent! It's on the internet now, so by all means, feel free to download it.
and, umm, how did those ships get where they are? Don't think some random dude parks those things :O
One hopes they included: LOOK OUT THE WINDOWS as part of the procedures also ! Don't want those pesky cargo ships sneaking up on you.
My interpretation of the summary is that this is precisely the problem.
To me, the bigger question about this is the fact that Groove Music is the name of the music playing application that is bundled with Windows 10, and that Microsoft resets the file associations to every time there's a feature update. They clearly couldn't get any traction. Samsung tried to get a music service off the ground with their "Milk" service, which got discontinued last year. Apple still keeps the money flowing with iTunes, but they couldn't get Ping to take off. HTC had their contract with Beats, and that gained only a smidge of traction before Apple bought the brand.
So, after everyone tried to launch an alternative to Pandora, Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, and technically Youtube...is it safe to say that the days of software taking off solely based on being bundled with hardware are over? I mean, I'm really hard pressed to come up with an application that "bundled its way to success" in the past decade, desktop or mobile.
Is it safe to say that the days of market dominance via bundle are over, and by extension we can stop having software installed with hardware by default (especially the uninstallable kind)? Because I'm really sick of having to drop to Powershell to remove all of the unnecessary Windows 10 apps, or root my phone to get rid of all the thoroughly unnecessary Samsung software.
I think you're right, this $200M is largely a feel-good measure, primarily for the sake of appearance. The problem is that we really can't get much more than that anymore. People who know STEM well *and* have a desire to teach are rare to begin with; those who are willing to teach below the college level and put up with the political headaches, endless grading, just-above-the-poverty-line wages, and general classroom drama are one in a million. Meanwhile, computers themselves are becoming evermore locked down devices making self-discovery almost impossible - and opening them up with the willingness to deal with the occasional malice or malware outbreak is guaranteed to be the one thing IT and superintendents agree on. It's always taken self-motivation to get into STEM fields and stay in them (frequently requiring one to overcome social pressures not to), but at least when things were 'more open' and 'more available', a payoff was more practical.
Throwing $200 million at the STEM education problem is going to leave us with a $200 million problem, and I'll even give Ivanka enough credit to believe that she's likely aware of this fact. At the same time, truly solving the problem is going to be long, bumpy, and expensive. Even if Donald Trump gave away every penny of his $3.5 billion net worth to this one particular problem, and did it so perfectly that it was able to put all of the right things into all of the right hands at all of the right schools in a way that brought zero pushback or any other sort of difficulty to the situation as to universally end up with a solution instead of Yet Another Problem, it would still take at least a decade for the effects start to be felt within the industry, and likely another decade to actually make a difference. That's an incredibly tough sell for even the most optimistic person with enough money and/or power to make that sort of change, when there's a chance that $200 million might have even a positive-even-if-superficial effect that is immediately visible.
The short version: People like us prefer our computers "do what we say". We will explicitly tell a computer to do a particular, non-default thing because we have some concept regarding how these things work.
The iPhone has a principally different paradigm: "do what I mean". The walled garden we see as keeping us in, generally keeps the baddies out for the general populous who has answered a "Windows technical support" call recently. The "do what I mean" crowd is perfectly content with a phone that lacks advanced features that they would never use. They're also okay with a device that works very similar to their old device, and seamlessly moves over their contacts and text messages and auto-downloads their apps and puts them in the same place. iPhones still do all of this incredibly well, and if it means they need an adapter for their headphones, it's a small price to pay.
Do I think the "wow" moments with the iPhone are behind us? Generally, yes. However, I think the appeal of $NEW_IPHONE is that the owner's current iPhone has a cracked screen and the battery requires three charges a day, and moving to the new model keeps things basically the same. This is what people are buying. And Apple still delivers this better than anyone else.
Dear Larry,
There are precisely zero people who use your product due to your business model. Your company has a decades-long history of costing customers huge amounts of money, either in licensing, legal fees, or both. Nobody looking to do a database migration is going to believe that the cost savings over AWS will last for any length of time; everybody, everywhere, ever sees right through the attempt to lock people in, yet again. Amazon, Microsoft, and OSS databases are your competition, and "We're not Oracle" is a selling point they will always possess. Even if by some miracle "Oracle is cheaper" was an argument anybody believed would remain true for any length of time, odds are good that most potential customers would be so wary of your business practices that paying more for Amazon is a better business decision.
The ability to continue increasing the cost for your current clients basically-indefinitely is the only reason your company is still in existence. Your decline will be slow, and will likely remain wealthy for the rest of your life, but when Oracle eventually goes under, your legacy will be such that there will be cheers and celebration for your demise.
Warm Regards,
Me