I don't think the issue is with diversity, but with presentation. Yes, TOS had "Plato's Stepchildren" and "Last Battlefield" and the one with the nuclear war fought within a computer...but how often was putting a Russian in charge of navigation and shields a point of contention? How many times was Sulu's Japanese heritage brought up (remember, we didn't like Japan much after WWII, and it was still very much in living memory)? Uhura being black during the civil rights movement is what everyone remembers, but how often did her gender come up in the context of her being a bridge officer and other than Plato's Stepchildren, did her race come up more than maybe once or twice? The answers to all of these questions are "It didn't", "It didn't", and "It didn't", and "I'll have to double check...but I'm pretty sure it didn't".
Roddenberry's most amazing statement throughout TOS was paradoxically the most subtle - these things were such non-issues that they weren't worthy of anyone's attention. Uhura wasn't perceived by the crew as "a black woman", she was "the communications officer, and a damn good one", and everyone from Kirk on down respected her as such. Same for Chekov and Sulu. The whole ship was egalitarian in that sense - skills and rank were respected, but nobody treated anyone else better or worse based on race or gender. As it should be.
I don't know the GP, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he would have an issue with a diverse cast in itself. The issue is when that becomes such a point of focus that it starts being the defining characteristic of the individual at the expense of anything that would give the character any real amount of depth. When a show starts doing that, the push for diversity starts seeping into the scripts. Even then, there's presentation to be had. The infamous interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura was controversial based on its existence, but the story itself didn't depend on the shock value of that scene. Roddenberry did this sort of thing well. Few today can say the same - characters intended to provide diversity tend to make that diversity a featured part of the story, rather than "the person doing the thing who happens to be a non-SWM".
Sometimes things do need to be pointed out directly, but most of the time, treating it like a non-issue is the best way to illustrate how normal something is in the future. Few directors can do this well.
The main issue with OpenStreetMap is that it is very labour intensive. It relies on humans to do far too much of the work.
If I might dovetail on this, there is a secondary issue caused by what you've specified: inconsistency. Relying on volunteers means you'll end up with some super dedicated people who will pour every waking moment into providing perfect data...and a bunch of people who couldn't care less, with data quality commonly reflecting both parties. Google has spent God-knows-how-much time and money making sure that every single street, no matter how obscure or infrequently traveled, is accurately documented.
Automation for OSM would help with this greatly; if the extent of participation was "use our GPS app, and opt into being a contributor, which will in turn give you the option to enable 'contributor mode', which will navigate you through indirect routes to help up acquire data"...there would probably be a bit more data of a relatively equal accuracy. Without it, you're right - Google wins.
Off-topic:
zebra crossings
It was comical the first time one of my British friends used this term. For those who might not know, the American word is "crosswalk", referring to the purpose, while the British term "zebra crossings" refers specifically to the paint pattern. My friend used the term, and I was like, "why the hell would you have a dedicated method for the street crossing of monochromatic quadrupeds?" It was kinda a you-had-to-be-there moment, but we had a good laugh.
So not only are they not required to update old phones, but they're allowed to lock the bootloaders so users can't even update them themselves.
This is textbook "forced obsolescence" but they'll continue to BS that it isn't.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. If Samsung isn't required to provide updates for at least three years after general availability, then the phones should be required to either ship with unlocked bootloaders, or provide an officially supported method of doing so. It would allow Samsung to avoid the requirement to formally support newer releases of Android, while also allowing modders to handle that for them. Everyone wins...but instead, the EU allows Samsung to have its cake and eat it, too.
Correlating whether or not one reads a EULA is not an effective metric.
Take an app which allows texting from a web browser. Both will need to have a clause like "we collect your text messages and contacts", because that's genuinely necessary for the service to be performed. However, if it's followed up with "we don't sell to third parties" isn't helpful - it still allows them to give the data away, or sell access to the data, or give the data to a shell company who then does the selling. Even if none of these happen, such a clause allows for the first party firm to do their own data mining and sell the results in aggregate. Then, if they do any of the above, and *those* companies get hacked, you can be certain that even if the app developer doesn't have an arbitration clause, it would be almost impossible to take legal action against the other company.
Location data is equally messy. The company with the most location data is Google itself, and unless you root, you're not stopping them from getting it with creepy accuracy even if the GPS is off. From there, apps requiring it are equally troubling. The EULA is a binary "use it or not". Most people would understandably let a navigation app use the GPS location in order to provide directions, but while Apple only allows apps to pull location data while an app is running, Android will happily let apps run a resident location scraper in the background without providing meaningful feedback to the end user.
Finally, the real metric of whether people are willing to do something about their privacy starts small - paid apps with no-data-mining guarantees, and free apps where users pay with privacy. See what wins....but nobody wants to do that.
Comparing Microsoft to Google is embarrassing. Google makes much of its revenue from ads, Microsoft is extremely well rounded tech company selling a OS, Azure, Xbox, Office Suite, Cloud services, and hardware. Now comparing Apple to Microsoft would be a much more equal comparison.
If you asked me which one would most likely still be around 100 years from now I'd have to say Alphabet. Microsoft's two biggest software items, Operating System and Office could easily be usurped at any time. Lack of reasonable alternative has been the only reason Windows has stayed on top. What are the alternatives- Apple or Linux? No surprise windows is on top. Google, or someone else could come along with a better OS any day- and Office is a product whose day appears to have come- losing market share.
MS also has Xbox, but video game market is very tricky- and with mobile devices becoming more powerful- you'd have to bet on Xbox being a minority player in a decade.
In comparison, Alphabet seems more diverse, Operating Systems, Search Engines, self-driving cars, ISP, and unlike MS, they terminate dying products and replace them with new successful ones when they reach end of life.
If only one of those two companies were alive 100 years from now; I'd bet on Alphabet.
I think this is a very tough assessment to make. If I had to bet on someone being around 100 years from now, it would be Amazon - "Sears, on the Internet" will likely continue to be a bedrock for them, and though their stock price will plummet if AWS dies tomorrow, as long as they can still sell books and clothes and toothpaste, they at least have a tangible business to fall back on if it came down to it.
As for your assessment of MS, I think it's a bit misleading. First, MS is making money using the Google method now; it's not like Candy Crush Soda Saga ends up automatically downloaded onto your computer and prominently suggested without MS getting a check to show for it. Moreover, their cash cow has always been small/med businesses. Sure, once you get big enough it's possible to hire enough folks to run everything on Linux, but a whole lot of software that makes businesses run is MS exclusive, many of which also require MS SQL Server. Between Active Directory and their database server, businesses will be stuck as long as their other software vendors require the stack. MS also has no shortage of government contracts, aka "guaranteed revenue". Sure, a number of the new hipster places run their businesses on iPad apps with an AWS backend now, but if Oracle and SAP can continue to exist and don't have consumer products at all, you can bet MS will always be able to keep their head above water for quite some time. 100 years might admittedly be optimistic, but I won't worry about MS going under until Larry Ellison is flying Southwest.
Apple is a poor comparison at this point in that they're basically this decade's Sony, replacing laptops for TVs. Attractive packaging on consumer electronics with a reputation for high quality at a high price. Sony ended up letting their media division's lawyers dictate requirements to the engineers, to the point where they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, a problem Apple doesn't have. What Apple does have, however, is a walled garden that is not easily portable to another vendor. Sure, empires come and empires go so 100 years of the App Store seems quite high, but with most of the consumer facing technology improvements being software-based now, it's almost impossible to predict exactly what Apple's downfall will be, or when.
DD-WRT is generally pretty solid and is available on a far greater number of routers.
Tomato is my personal favorite, not the least of which because it does ad blocking at the router level and is a bit better with VLANs than DD-WRT.
OpenWRT isn't my favorite, but it's gotten a lot better recently. I was particularly happy that it's available for some Cisco Meraki hardware. The least intuitive of the three IMO, but it does the job in lots of cases.
All of them have upstream updates from within the past three months, so no one is particularly slacking. availability on particular hardware is a case-by-case basis, so that's the bigger factor. In addition, my recollection is that none of the current consumer router vendors have been very good with open-sourcing the drivers for their AC chipsets. Odds are pretty good that you'll notice a performance dip in wireless if you're using onboard. You can resolve that by using separate access points (for which I'll recommend Ubiquiti, or even the latest crop of TP-Link APs have been surprisingly solid), but you will end up running into the same issues with aftermarket firmware on the APs unless you only care about running OSS at the router level.
What is the point of this? Does it really matter if the guy had a pound or 28 ounces or 16 ounces or 8 ounces? A dose of heroin is probably 10mg. The guy is a drug dealer either way.
You missed the setup.
The cop testified - as in, went on record saying, under oath, that there was half a pound of heroin in a cereal box. He said he knew it was half of a pound based on weighing it at the scene when the heroin was confiscated, and did not re-weigh it at the station. That scale weighed exclusively in metric measurements, so the police officer would have needed to be able to convert between measurements quickly in order to make that claim. The defense attorney then asks the police officer to do what he claimed he did at the scene of the crime. The officer, given a pencil and paper (unlikely to have been at his disposal during the arrest) then struggles to accurately perform the sort of arithmetic that is performed by third graders.
Whether the defendant was dealing or not, the plaintiff is a police officer who either decided to guess at how much heroin was confiscated rather than write down what the scale said, or lied under oath. Either way, the defense attorney managed to make it basically impossible for the standard of "proof beyond reasonable doubt" to be met, so the only reason the guy ended up doing any jail time was based on familial loyalty rather than having been proven guilty.
Of course, being those creeps, they may do exactly the best thing to prepare their children for living in the upcoming surveillance state and soon-to-follow full-blown fascism. The leakage of the accounts is obviously part of that pedagogic concept. Hence I conclude that this is an absolutely great app that anybody should inflict on their children as soon as possible! Of course, in any self-respecting fascism, children also do surveillance (and denunciation to the authorities) of their parents. A business opportunity for, aehm, "Parentsafe"?
To be fair here, there are a number of concepts to which a teenager's right to privacy comes in second place:
1. Unless it's a prepaid phone, the parent is paying the bill - and, in the majority of cases, probably paid for the phone, too. If it's the parent's phone and the parent's service, being able to monitor what's going on isn't all that unreasonable. If a teen has purchased their own phone and their own service with their own money, sure, that's a bit different...but a parent monitoring the phone and service they pay for doesn't seem unreasonable.
2. There can be situations where a parent can be held liable,or de facto liable, for a child's actions. It's not outright facism if the parent is potentially the one who will have to lawyer up.
3. Like everything else, there is room for responsible use and misuse. A parent may well require the software to be installed on the phone, but never look at it until there is, 'probable cause'. It's not an invasion of privacy to ensure a valid trail of evidence is secured, especially when, once again, the parent may well be called into the superintendent's office to have "a conversation".
4. Placing value on the fourth amendment is, like most other things, something that is both taught and learned. A whole generation has basically been brought up with the "nothing to hide" idea, from parents who aren't of the persuasion that privacy matters. A parent who is going to summarily go through a teen's phone because they feel like it isn't the sort of parent who will either teach or model a "do you have probable cause" argument at home.
5. Security cameras are *everywhere*. They cover every square inch of a school, school bus, Starbucks, library, amusement park, restaurant, and at least half the homes children live in. Gen-Z is already living in a world where it's impossible to avoid being surveilled. If the parents aren't doing it, Aunt Google and Uncle Facebook are.
It's the type of software that can be effectively used by responsible parents and abused by irresponsible ones, but responsible parents don't suddenly become irresponsible because of a cell phone app.
The issue with this assertion is that the Vaio line wasn't actually premium hardware.
I'll kinda beg to differ. Sony tried, arguably harder than anyone, to make the Media Center PC happen. HP made a handful at the time, but virtually every Vaio had a TV tuner and/or capture card in it. Their all-in-one PCs could easily be used (or mistaken for) TVs if mounted on the wall, and commonly had a remote and an HDMI in so you could plug a cable box into it. I remember a friend of mine had one of their laptops with a really nifty multipurpose slot that could fit either a subwoofer, a floppy drive, or a number pad into it, which was a really cool idea at the time - a time when a P4 with 512MB of RAM and a 120GB hard disk were pretty high end specs, which is what this machine had.
Vaio computers, however, had two very related problems. First, they had more bundled software than anyone else. Now, some of it was interesting like intro editions of Acid and Sound Forge, as well as Movieshaker and a stripped down version of Adobe Premiere and a number of other media production applications that actually were some of the better bundled titles being used at the time. They came, however, with MagicGate and a dozen other useless applications, which all had a startup stub or two. Sure, you'd have about the highest quantity of RAM that was shipping with a computer at the time, but 2/3 of it would be used up by the time the computer finished starting...and the number of startup wizards you'd have to answer or cancel could easily take half an hour. This wouldn't be nearly as bad if it weren't for their second problem: they put some of the slowest hard drives imaginable into them. 5400RPM drives were the norm, and even today only a handful ship with SSDs. Computer startups could easily take six minutes, and you'll never see one with a spun down hard disk. I would sit at one and ask myself if anyone at Sony ever had to actually use one on a day-to-day basis, because it sure didn't seem like it.
It was particularly sad because all of these issues were readily solvable.
There's still people out there that believe Trump is making himself look foolish as some sort of 4d chess instead of the much better explanation that he is genuinely ignorant? Sad!
My theory goes a bit more like this:
According to virtually every non-advertising minute of Fox News between 2009 and 2016, Obama could do no right. It didn't matter how a given situation was approached. Try to find common ground with Republicans? "Obama compromises his beliefs!" or "Obama plan retains worst parts of Democratic and Republican ideals!". Push it through when Democrats had majorities in both houses? "Obama is imposing tyrrany of the majority!" Ram it through with an executive order? "He's not going through Congress like he's supposed to!" Decide to say "screw it" until Congress stops acting like children? "Government Shutdown - and it's Obama's fault!" I certainly didn't agree with a number of his policies, but Fox never met a story they couldn't spin as a negative and then pin on Obama, and I always believed that was patently unfair.
Trump is no Steven Hawking, but I do think he was smart enough to realize that if he ran on the Republican ticket, CNN, MSNBC, Twitter, Tumblr, and most of Facebook would do the exact same thing to him. His options would be to either discuss actual legislation (and let the talking heads argue that), or say some outlandish things on Twitter and let those talking heads spend all day discussing Trump's Mean Tweets. Obama proved it's impossible to do anything right in the mind of a media circus that will take statements out of context and endlessly loop them. By going to the other extreme, Trump gives mass media their ratings fodder and he can deal with the issues on his own terms.
Now, I obviously have no evidence of this, but you don't have to be skilled at four dimensional chess to realize that "doing what Obama did" had its issues and decide to do the polar opposite with a clear level of success.
Here's the issue: Google does a lot of data slurping by default. Even if Google is as you say - super careful with how data is stored, one of the few companies who tell law enforcement "warrant or gtfo", and utilize it in ways that are above reproach...there is zero guarantee they will remain that way.
Imagine how much data Google has on you. Now, imagine Google was bought out by the worst possible person - Donald Trump, George Soros, 90's era Bill Gates, whoever it is for you...now think of all your Google-owned data in that person's hands. THAT is the problem. The database exists, and eventually, it will end up in the wrong hands. The only way to avoid that is to avoid populating the database.
The onus is not on ensuring everyone is not an idiot.
You're correct in that not everybody will be talented at everything. However, if the school is going to expect that teachers will be entering their grades into a website as well as communicate via e-mail, then "how to avoid being the victim of a phishing scam" needs to be a part of their baseline training.
The onus is on the people employing the idiots to empower them with knowledge.
So then are the employers on the hook for negligence in their duties to empower their employees with knowledge. This is a school. That is literally the point of the institution. In addition, "being able to detect phishing scams" is a skill that will keep the teachers safe in their own lives.
I'm willing to bet you this teacher has never so much as heard of the term "phishing" much less knows what to look out for.
Well, it's 2018. Phishing has been a thing for over a decade now. Schools train teachers to handle no shortage of situations, from irate parents to fire evacuations. If the school is going to place any value on their data's integrity, then there needs to be training for the teachers on the topic.
Punishing people for things they don't know is not a winning strategy.
And what about willful ignorance? I can't tell you how many times I've spoken to someone and their answer has been something to the effect of, "well, I'm not a computer person so, whatever that whole mumbo jumbo was is something I just don't understand". A first offense being a mandatory training course might well make sense to remove the "I didn't know" argument to some extent, but at some point there needs to be pressure to make deliberate avoidance an unacceptable stance.
If EA wants to disassociate loot boxes with gambling, they just have to do one of two things:
1. remove the financial outlay element. 2. remove the 'possibility of losing' element.
Now, it's EA, so we can summarily dismiss the first option. The second one, however, is relatively simple: ensure that any time a player purchases a loot box, at least one item in it is an upgraded model of an item the player already has. This way, there's a guarantee to the player that they are paying for an upgrade, while the inability to determine which item is upgraded still provides incentive to purchase additional loot crates. The EU regulators can simmer down since players are guaranteed upgrades when loot crates are purchased, and EA can continue to provide incentive for players to use the slot machine mechanic, making unreasonable amounts of money in the process.
My daughter's neighborhood had several cars broken into...They all polled their surveillance cameras and each found the same van casing their houses throughout the area.
The objection isn't to this sort of thing. Crimes had taken place in the neighborhood, and individuals worked together to submit useful evidence to the police to assist in convicting the criminal(s). This is excellent teamwork, and there is relatively little objection to this sort of scenario.
What's being suggested here, is that Ring is giving police direct access to citizen-owned cameras. Herein lies the problem: my neighbors paying for me to be surveiled, with no crime and no cause, to a police department that, in aggregate, has a bit of a reputation for being less-than-honorable and having limited accountability. That is only comparable to neighborhood watch pooling their DVR footage to provide relevant information to the police to assist in the apprehension of a specific criminal in that it involves digital camera footage and the police.
Does anyone assign children to write documents on a tablet? Chromebooks seem to be gaining popularity in lower education, while what I see in higher education is about a 30:30:30:10 mix. Macbooks:Chromebooks:Windows:Linux. Any of those things is closer in form factor to a laptop, not to a tablet or phone.
It would take much LONGER to write a paper on a tablet -- if I had a kid with that assignment, I'd show them how to type it on a real laptop, then copy the thing to whatever tablet their school was trying to force down people's gullets.
I completely concur. However, "technology in education" is like Communism - one of those great ideas whose real-world implementation never, ever looks anything like the brochure. If a school was sold on a one-iPad-per-pupil solution, you'd better believe that the point of the assignment is to justify the purchase of the iPad, rather than for an educative activity to have been performed. It obviously varies from school to school, and I begrudgingly share your preference for Chromebooks to tablets in this context for the very reasons you specify...but for every one parent like you, there's a classroom of students whose parents are anywhere from incapable to apathetic about the situation.
I can't believe I'm actually going to play devil's advocate on a post I actually agree with...
Microsoft doesn't "need" to know what you, I, or anyone else are working on.
This is true. However, browser-based productivity suites are very popular for lots of people. In addition, as much as you and I would be happier with some sort of a self-hosted compromise, like a partnership between OnlyOffice and Synology to make a browser based productivity appliance that's accessible from anywhere and stores data locally, the reality is that far too many people see Google Docs as $0 and no technical thingies required, so there's basically no market for it. For Microsoft to eschew providing an alternative to GDocs is counterproductive for everybody, especially since (sadly) there's a clear market for it.
It's not a big deal to re-open a document on a different device without giving your life's story to Microsoft (or any other Big Cloud company).
It's certainly possible to do this, but it's not nearly as simple. Nextcloud is great, but nobody is making an appliance for it that's seamless. iOS still does data shuffling through iTunes, and using a separate FTP client or similar is a pain, especially for the incredibly high number of people who don't really understand the concept of a file system. I agree, it's certainly possible for those who share our principles, but it's not "enter your e-mail address and a password and then leave everything else to us" simple. Remember: you have to think in terms of folks who think Snapchat is a useful piece of software.
This is just an excuse to loot your personal/corporate data under the excuse of a tiny bit more convenience.
Of course. It's not like MS is going to not-mine that data. However, the target demographic here isn't the Slashdot crowd.
Also, the functions of phones and "desktop" devices (not really desktops, could be laptops with a keyboard) are orthogonal.
Keep in mind that the original topic here is about making the phone's data more useful on a desktop. Manipulating phone contacts, writing longer text messages, and syncing photos are tasks that are still expedited by leveraging the desktop...which is sounds like is the task MS is looking to implement here. Now it sounds like MS is releasing an app that shares data with the OS directly rather than something like the now-defunct Jeyo Mobile Companion for Windows Mobile. To be fair though, Apple has been doing that for years between iOS and OSX, and Google has been largely-there if you consider Chrome and "The Google Ecosystem" an OS in context, so MS is just releasing an app to allow Windows 10 to do the same.
The first are for brief communications, (yes) talking, recording of data (e.g. fitness tracking), and media consumption. But they stink at content production, which "desktop" devices excel at. Try writing several pages on a phone or many tablets -- it amounts to torture.
100% agreed. However, there are two things missing from this assessment. First, it underestimates how much time children have to write their documents on a tablet when the assignment is "use your tablet to write your document", especially when they *only* have a tablet at their disposal. Second, consider the creation:consumption proportion for lots of people. You and I might be 50:50 or even higher, but for the crowd who's got a 20:80 split, investing in phones and tablets has been their more common technology purchase, with an aging XP/Vista/Early-Win7 desktop/$300-Celeron-Closeout machine being the PC that's "just kinda there" for the handful of times they need PC-specific stuff.
I love me my Origin laptop and agree that self-hosted browser-based applications are far more preferable to trusting Aunt Google or Uncle Tim or Cousin Nadella to handle my computing needs to my satisfaction. I also realize that we live in a society where "use a Raspberry Pi or t
Just sue Intel in small claims court. I'm expecting my cheque soon.
100% sincere question: how does that work? My understanding is that a small claims lawsuit only works if you can quantifiably prove damages. "I had to buy a new desktop/server" seems easy enough, but if you went against Intel and won, how did you prove that Spectre and Meltdown were the cause of your purchase to the point where the judge ruled in your favor?
I run Windows 10, and my method is that I format my computer annually, install all of the updates available up until that point, and then kill all the update processes with fire. A combination of file and folder permissions, deletion of executable and DLL files...whatever it takes to ensure my computer literally cannot run Windows Update.
Let's address some of the counterarguments with this system:
"but Voyager, aren't you missing out on the latest features?" No. See, Windows is still my OS because it does precisely one function: run my Windows applications. I'd love to move to Linux, but I've simply got too many industry specific applications to make that viable. The current release of Windows 10 does that. Microsoft has not released a single update which has improved the functionality of my computer. I don't need Paint3D, I don't need Cortana, I don't need any of the appy-apps from the MS store...I have literally never read a change log that has had even one single 'feature' that was advantageous to me.
"but Voyager, that's so insecure!!" This argument is based on a few assumptions. The one I'll dicsuss here is the definition of 'security'. Have we defined that yet? There may well be some sort of case made for security if the definition of 'security' is "the inability of a malicious hacker to access the contents of your computer, and/or somehow cause malicious code to run on your computer for their benefit". This is a stressed argument to make, because I keep UAC enabled, I make good use of the public/private network paradigm, I run ESET NOD32, I run browser add-ons like NoScript and Disconnect, and I haven't gotten a virus on my computer since 2007 (and even that was based on a USB Autorun in the XP era). How unsafe of a system are we really dealing with here. Wannacry? I mean, okay, but I disabled SMBv1 via a registry key shortly after that was documented. Spectre/Meltdown? I mean, that's a bit better of an argument, but for those exploits to work they would trigger a UAC prompt, and there's really not much that would require a Spectre exploit that couldn't just be transferred through conventional means on a workstation.
By contrast, I submit a different definition of 'security': "the assurance that the data on a computer is not transmitted to a third party without user consent, that executable processes are not executed without user consent, and that the computer itself shall not be rendered inoperable". Windows Update fails at all three of these qualifiers. We can argue the first one a bit since it's likely other subsystems performing the telemetry, but the other two? How many times have you seen an idle computer with a thrashing hard disk and 90% CPU usage, because Windows Update is doing whatever the hell it's doing, for over an hour, without quiescing to foreground applications? It happens a whole lot, and it gets in the way of the user. Moreover, every Windows user has had a startup or shutdown delayed significantly because of updating. If you haven't had a Windows Update get you to a point where you're restoring from a backup yet, you're fortunate - I've had that situation happen on more than one occasion. Even if the system isn't completely hosed, why is it Microsoft's right to remove Classic Shell or treat my Start Menu like advertising space or reset my PDF association? EULA all you want...but no. Even if you want to argue mandatory security updates, why can't driver updates be declined?
Windows Update, in many respects, acts more like malware than actual-malware.
"but Voyager! We've had these sorts of updates for years! They were just called 'Service Packs', and you happily installed those...so why is this such an issue now?"
Because Microsoft performed massive amounts of testing on those service packs, and they were pretty limited in scope (with XP SP2 being a notable exception). Additionally, if we go back a bit further to NT 4.0, king of the service packs with six of them released over the lifetime of the OS, there was no built-in Windows Update mechani
Full disclosure, I'm not the biggest Chrome fan, and not the biggest Google fan, either. However, I don't generally get caught up in browser wars; I don't generally tell Chrome users to use other browsers if they're happy with it and their sites load.
However, about a month ago, Chrome started acting really weird. Sites would time out, or take over a minute to load, on well-spec'd computers with no malware and wired network connections. After trying every tweak I could think of, I tried those same sites in Firefox and they loaded in the 2-3 seconds they were supposed to. Over the past month, that experience has repeated itself across users with nothing in common except Chrome, and "switching to Firefox" completely resolving their issues.
I'm sure the April update sucks; I'm hard pressed to point to a Win10 feature update that provided a useful feature that justified the update installation time. However, I'm hard pressed to not give Google at least some share of the blame when a number of users (some of which still using Windows 7) had issues with Chrome that were solved by switching to Firefox.
Well, just because Jesus taught that divorce/adultery was a sin (while saying nothing about abortion or gay marriage), that doesn't mean the bible belt fake christians in the US have to live by his teachings when they're so busy lying about his teachings.
Let's start with the divorce/adultery issue. You're absolutely right, that there isn't nearly as much disparity in divorce rates among Christians as their should be. Adultery would be a bit more complicated to pin down in this context, because Jesus' teachings indicate that lustful thoughts are akin to adultery. If Christians take that teaching into account when discussing their experiences with adultery, then that's going to skew the numbers a bit if the polls don't account for it. That said, we'll continue to agree that the numbers should show a much clearer story than they do.
On to the abortion topic: the abortion argument stems from the belief that a fetus is a person. If a fetus is a person, then abortion is the intentional killing of a person. Now, you might disagree with that view, but hopefully that core tenet makes at least some sense.
With respect to gay marriage, you're right, Jesus never spoke of homosexuality directly. However, you won't find a passage in the Bible that speaks about it positively. We'll agree in that this is one of those issues blown out of proportion as a whole since the Bible teaches that those who do not ascribe to its teachings should be able to live however they want. At the same time, there's a certain amount of concern about government being used to enforce moral acceptance.
That article you linked is spot on. Jesus taught to feed the hungry, cloth and shelter the poor, and heal the sick.
We're still in agreement here...sort of. The tricky part of this statement is that it implies that Christians should be in favor of government programs handling this task, while Jesus was actually putting the responsibility upon His followers directly. One can simultaneously be opposed to the government being in charge of these programs given known issues with wasteful spending and poor policies that end up ultimately being bad for both recipients and taxpayers, while also adhering to the individual mandate to help those who need it.
In a reply to another responder, you said:
Christians only have a higher rate of giving if you include money given to the church.... that isn't charity, that is them attempting to buy their way into heaven. Most churches, in fact, are dismal when it comes to using that money for causes other than paying for their own upkeep.
This is messy territory because it assumes that churches are bad charities, but non-churches are good ones. On the topic of churches, is so easy to point to examples of churches on both ends of the spectrum. I agree that there are no shortage of churches where the preachers promise that the offering plate will provide a financial return-on-investment, basically capitalizing on the greed of the giver. Similarly, I know there are no shortage of churches where a lot of the money goes into having a beautiful building...and that being the biggest share of right half of the balance sheet. I also know churches that are the largest non-governmental entity in their respective counties which handle giving food to thousands of hungry residents every week, providing showers and children's programs and helping them find jobs with no requirement on the part of the recipient. I know churches that have built multiple wells in Africa and help fund a home for mentally ill people in India, others who run drug rehabilitation centers, and still others who work primarily with single mothers who need diapers and formula and an emotional support system. All of these examples assume only "traceable giving", with no accounting for interpersonal giving, Kickstarter giving, direct food donations, and many more types of generosity which don't show up in a balanc
What do they do now, except suing Google for Java ownership? They missed Cloud completely. They missed mobile, but it is Ok for them. They missed big data.
What Oracle is about now?
You're right, Oracle isn't exactly an exciting or innovative company. That doesn't mean they aren't still making massive amounts of money.
Oracle has their own cloud offering, believe it or not. It's not dissimilar from AWS, but Oracle simply doesn't have much of a market. If you're up-and-coming, and don't have data in an Oracle DB already, you're not starting with one. You're also not starting with Oracle Cloud because "everbody uses Amazon", though you might be able to make a case for Azure or GCC if you're already in one of those ecosystems. If you've got data in an Oracle database already, you're not happy about it, and trusting a company whose installer requires a lawyer present with even more data an infrastructure reliance isn't exactly the easiest sell.
Oracle was also never going to make any real inroads in mobile. The closest they come to being a hardware company is whatever is left from acquiring Sun, and SPARC-based big iron isn't exactly a springboard for entering the smartphone world. Now, one can argue that 'Search and E-Mail' might not have been the most logical springboard either, but Solaris never hit the consumer market, and Oracle Linux is basically rebranded Red Hat, who isn't exactly taking mobile by storm either, by the by.
Big Data is something that I can't speak too strongly to, but from what I understand, they've implemented a number of things into more recent releases of Oracle DB that enable NoSQL-like functions. The thing is, though, that projects based on Big Data are recent enough that "not-Oracle" is all but assumed on the outset.
What Oracle *does* do, however, is what they've done well for a long time - play the government contract game. Bid for a project, which conveniently uses Oracle products, get in with the lowest bid, end up having the project grow to 150% of the bid, have the project end up with some terrible combination of scope creep and design-by-committee to the point where it doesn't work right but *technically* delivers, then charge to have their consultants work for double the contract length for 'maintenance and upgrades', while also charging for the software support licensing and contracts. Then, when the project is finally scrapped...the cycle repeats.
So long as Oracle is not banned from bidding on state and federal projects, and the government doesn't make an initiative to work to remove existing Oracle installations by 2025...Oracle can play that game until someone starts caring.
>As far as apps being moved to a paid model, look at something as stupid as Solitaire. Free in Windows 7, pay to remove ads in Windows 10
I knew someone was going to mention Solitare! So if you offer a free app in your OS, you are obligated till the end of time to enhance, update and include it free in all future versions of the OS? Especially something as irrelevant as a card game?
Well, that skips just a few interim possibilities there, doesn't it? Let's not forget that MS played all kinds of sketchy games with 'consent' when it came to updating lots of Windows 7 users to Windows 10; it wasn't exactly a truly conscious opt-in decision for many.
Possibility #1: leaving it in for users who upgraded from Windows 7/8. Possibility #2: copy/pasting the same Solitaire release from Windows 8 to Windows 10. No enhancements, no updates. just inclusion of already-completed code that costs them $0, with the new-and-improved Solitaire available in the store. Possibility #3: copy/paste the Win7 Solitaire release code,but have it give an ad for the new one in the Store when users close it out. Possibility #4: don't-delete the legacy code when windows users explicitly re-add it. https://www.reddit.com/r/Windo... Possibility #5: Make a base level version available as a one-time purchase and a premium version an annual fee.
I just came up with five options off the top of my head that don't involve MS having to write new code for free, forever.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the issue is with diversity, but with presentation. Yes, TOS had "Plato's Stepchildren" and "Last Battlefield" and the one with the nuclear war fought within a computer...but how often was putting a Russian in charge of navigation and shields a point of contention? How many times was Sulu's Japanese heritage brought up (remember, we didn't like Japan much after WWII, and it was still very much in living memory)? Uhura being black during the civil rights movement is what everyone remembers, but how often did her gender come up in the context of her being a bridge officer and other than Plato's Stepchildren, did her race come up more than maybe once or twice? The answers to all of these questions are "It didn't", "It didn't", and "It didn't", and "I'll have to double check...but I'm pretty sure it didn't".
Roddenberry's most amazing statement throughout TOS was paradoxically the most subtle - these things were such non-issues that they weren't worthy of anyone's attention. Uhura wasn't perceived by the crew as "a black woman", she was "the communications officer, and a damn good one", and everyone from Kirk on down respected her as such. Same for Chekov and Sulu. The whole ship was egalitarian in that sense - skills and rank were respected, but nobody treated anyone else better or worse based on race or gender. As it should be.
I don't know the GP, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he would have an issue with a diverse cast in itself. The issue is when that becomes such a point of focus that it starts being the defining characteristic of the individual at the expense of anything that would give the character any real amount of depth. When a show starts doing that, the push for diversity starts seeping into the scripts. Even then, there's presentation to be had. The infamous interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura was controversial based on its existence, but the story itself didn't depend on the shock value of that scene. Roddenberry did this sort of thing well. Few today can say the same - characters intended to provide diversity tend to make that diversity a featured part of the story, rather than "the person doing the thing who happens to be a non-SWM".
Sometimes things do need to be pointed out directly, but most of the time, treating it like a non-issue is the best way to illustrate how normal something is in the future. Few directors can do this well.
The main issue with OpenStreetMap is that it is very labour intensive. It relies on humans to do far too much of the work.
If I might dovetail on this, there is a secondary issue caused by what you've specified: inconsistency. Relying on volunteers means you'll end up with some super dedicated people who will pour every waking moment into providing perfect data...and a bunch of people who couldn't care less, with data quality commonly reflecting both parties. Google has spent God-knows-how-much time and money making sure that every single street, no matter how obscure or infrequently traveled, is accurately documented.
Automation for OSM would help with this greatly; if the extent of participation was "use our GPS app, and opt into being a contributor, which will in turn give you the option to enable 'contributor mode', which will navigate you through indirect routes to help up acquire data"...there would probably be a bit more data of a relatively equal accuracy. Without it, you're right - Google wins.
Off-topic:
zebra crossings
It was comical the first time one of my British friends used this term. For those who might not know, the American word is "crosswalk", referring to the purpose, while the British term "zebra crossings" refers specifically to the paint pattern. My friend used the term, and I was like, "why the hell would you have a dedicated method for the street crossing of monochromatic quadrupeds?" It was kinda a you-had-to-be-there moment, but we had a good laugh.
Can't Microsoft just let someone jump in that has a clue what he is talking about?
Just as the Official Microsoft Spokesperson . . . Cortana.
The answers:
Reply hazy, try again.
Ask again later.
Better not tell you now.
Cannot predict now.
Concentrate and ask again.
Obviously Cortana. It took the finest programmers in Redmond weeks to ensure she wouldn't give the most relevant 8-Ball answer:
Outlook not so good.
That jackass is so incompetent I wouldn't bet on anything of note happening in AI over this.
What do you think is running his Twitter account?
So not only are they not required to update old phones, but they're allowed to lock the bootloaders so users can't even update them themselves.
This is textbook "forced obsolescence" but they'll continue to BS that it isn't.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. If Samsung isn't required to provide updates for at least three years after general availability, then the phones should be required to either ship with unlocked bootloaders, or provide an officially supported method of doing so. It would allow Samsung to avoid the requirement to formally support newer releases of Android, while also allowing modders to handle that for them. Everyone wins...but instead, the EU allows Samsung to have its cake and eat it, too.
Correlating whether or not one reads a EULA is not an effective metric.
Take an app which allows texting from a web browser. Both will need to have a clause like "we collect your text messages and contacts", because that's genuinely necessary for the service to be performed. However, if it's followed up with "we don't sell to third parties" isn't helpful - it still allows them to give the data away, or sell access to the data, or give the data to a shell company who then does the selling. Even if none of these happen, such a clause allows for the first party firm to do their own data mining and sell the results in aggregate. Then, if they do any of the above, and *those* companies get hacked, you can be certain that even if the app developer doesn't have an arbitration clause, it would be almost impossible to take legal action against the other company.
Location data is equally messy. The company with the most location data is Google itself, and unless you root, you're not stopping them from getting it with creepy accuracy even if the GPS is off. From there, apps requiring it are equally troubling. The EULA is a binary "use it or not". Most people would understandably let a navigation app use the GPS location in order to provide directions, but while Apple only allows apps to pull location data while an app is running, Android will happily let apps run a resident location scraper in the background without providing meaningful feedback to the end user.
Finally, the real metric of whether people are willing to do something about their privacy starts small - paid apps with no-data-mining guarantees, and free apps where users pay with privacy. See what wins. ...but nobody wants to do that.
Comparing Microsoft to Google is embarrassing. Google makes much of its revenue from ads, Microsoft is extremely well rounded tech company selling a OS, Azure, Xbox, Office Suite, Cloud services, and hardware. Now comparing Apple to Microsoft would be a much more equal comparison.
If you asked me which one would most likely still be around 100 years from now I'd have to say Alphabet. Microsoft's two biggest software items, Operating System and Office could easily be usurped at any time. Lack of reasonable alternative has been the only reason Windows has stayed on top. What are the alternatives- Apple or Linux? No surprise windows is on top. Google, or someone else could come along with a better OS any day- and Office is a product whose day appears to have come- losing market share.
MS also has Xbox, but video game market is very tricky- and with mobile devices becoming more powerful- you'd have to bet on Xbox being a minority player in a decade.
In comparison, Alphabet seems more diverse, Operating Systems, Search Engines, self-driving cars, ISP, and unlike MS, they terminate dying products and replace them with new successful ones when they reach end of life.
If only one of those two companies were alive 100 years from now; I'd bet on Alphabet.
I think this is a very tough assessment to make. If I had to bet on someone being around 100 years from now, it would be Amazon - "Sears, on the Internet" will likely continue to be a bedrock for them, and though their stock price will plummet if AWS dies tomorrow, as long as they can still sell books and clothes and toothpaste, they at least have a tangible business to fall back on if it came down to it.
As for your assessment of MS, I think it's a bit misleading. First, MS is making money using the Google method now; it's not like Candy Crush Soda Saga ends up automatically downloaded onto your computer and prominently suggested without MS getting a check to show for it. Moreover, their cash cow has always been small/med businesses. Sure, once you get big enough it's possible to hire enough folks to run everything on Linux, but a whole lot of software that makes businesses run is MS exclusive, many of which also require MS SQL Server. Between Active Directory and their database server, businesses will be stuck as long as their other software vendors require the stack. MS also has no shortage of government contracts, aka "guaranteed revenue". Sure, a number of the new hipster places run their businesses on iPad apps with an AWS backend now, but if Oracle and SAP can continue to exist and don't have consumer products at all, you can bet MS will always be able to keep their head above water for quite some time. 100 years might admittedly be optimistic, but I won't worry about MS going under until Larry Ellison is flying Southwest.
Apple is a poor comparison at this point in that they're basically this decade's Sony, replacing laptops for TVs. Attractive packaging on consumer electronics with a reputation for high quality at a high price. Sony ended up letting their media division's lawyers dictate requirements to the engineers, to the point where they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, a problem Apple doesn't have. What Apple does have, however, is a walled garden that is not easily portable to another vendor. Sure, empires come and empires go so 100 years of the App Store seems quite high, but with most of the consumer facing technology improvements being software-based now, it's almost impossible to predict exactly what Apple's downfall will be, or when.
DD-WRT is generally pretty solid and is available on a far greater number of routers.
Tomato is my personal favorite, not the least of which because it does ad blocking at the router level and is a bit better with VLANs than DD-WRT.
OpenWRT isn't my favorite, but it's gotten a lot better recently. I was particularly happy that it's available for some Cisco Meraki hardware. The least intuitive of the three IMO, but it does the job in lots of cases.
All of them have upstream updates from within the past three months, so no one is particularly slacking. availability on particular hardware is a case-by-case basis, so that's the bigger factor. In addition, my recollection is that none of the current consumer router vendors have been very good with open-sourcing the drivers for their AC chipsets. Odds are pretty good that you'll notice a performance dip in wireless if you're using onboard. You can resolve that by using separate access points (for which I'll recommend Ubiquiti, or even the latest crop of TP-Link APs have been surprisingly solid), but you will end up running into the same issues with aftermarket firmware on the APs unless you only care about running OSS at the router level.
What is the point of this? Does it really matter if the guy had a pound or 28 ounces or 16 ounces or 8 ounces? A dose of heroin is probably 10mg. The guy is a drug dealer either way.
You missed the setup.
The cop testified - as in, went on record saying, under oath, that there was half a pound of heroin in a cereal box. He said he knew it was half of a pound based on weighing it at the scene when the heroin was confiscated, and did not re-weigh it at the station. That scale weighed exclusively in metric measurements, so the police officer would have needed to be able to convert between measurements quickly in order to make that claim. The defense attorney then asks the police officer to do what he claimed he did at the scene of the crime. The officer, given a pencil and paper (unlikely to have been at his disposal during the arrest) then struggles to accurately perform the sort of arithmetic that is performed by third graders.
Whether the defendant was dealing or not, the plaintiff is a police officer who either decided to guess at how much heroin was confiscated rather than write down what the scale said, or lied under oath. Either way, the defense attorney managed to make it basically impossible for the standard of "proof beyond reasonable doubt" to be met, so the only reason the guy ended up doing any jail time was based on familial loyalty rather than having been proven guilty.
Of course, being those creeps, they may do exactly the best thing to prepare their children for living in the upcoming surveillance state and soon-to-follow full-blown fascism. The leakage of the accounts is obviously part of that pedagogic concept. Hence I conclude that this is an absolutely great app that anybody should inflict on their children as soon as possible! Of course, in any self-respecting fascism, children also do surveillance (and denunciation to the authorities) of their parents. A business opportunity for, aehm, "Parentsafe"?
To be fair here, there are a number of concepts to which a teenager's right to privacy comes in second place:
1. Unless it's a prepaid phone, the parent is paying the bill - and, in the majority of cases, probably paid for the phone, too. If it's the parent's phone and the parent's service, being able to monitor what's going on isn't all that unreasonable. If a teen has purchased their own phone and their own service with their own money, sure, that's a bit different...but a parent monitoring the phone and service they pay for doesn't seem unreasonable.
2. There can be situations where a parent can be held liable,or de facto liable, for a child's actions. It's not outright facism if the parent is potentially the one who will have to lawyer up.
3. Like everything else, there is room for responsible use and misuse. A parent may well require the software to be installed on the phone, but never look at it until there is, 'probable cause'. It's not an invasion of privacy to ensure a valid trail of evidence is secured, especially when, once again, the parent may well be called into the superintendent's office to have "a conversation".
4. Placing value on the fourth amendment is, like most other things, something that is both taught and learned. A whole generation has basically been brought up with the "nothing to hide" idea, from parents who aren't of the persuasion that privacy matters. A parent who is going to summarily go through a teen's phone because they feel like it isn't the sort of parent who will either teach or model a "do you have probable cause" argument at home.
5. Security cameras are *everywhere*. They cover every square inch of a school, school bus, Starbucks, library, amusement park, restaurant, and at least half the homes children live in. Gen-Z is already living in a world where it's impossible to avoid being surveilled. If the parents aren't doing it, Aunt Google and Uncle Facebook are.
It's the type of software that can be effectively used by responsible parents and abused by irresponsible ones, but responsible parents don't suddenly become irresponsible because of a cell phone app.
The issue with this assertion is that the Vaio line wasn't actually premium hardware.
I'll kinda beg to differ. Sony tried, arguably harder than anyone, to make the Media Center PC happen. HP made a handful at the time, but virtually every Vaio had a TV tuner and/or capture card in it. Their all-in-one PCs could easily be used (or mistaken for) TVs if mounted on the wall, and commonly had a remote and an HDMI in so you could plug a cable box into it. I remember a friend of mine had one of their laptops with a really nifty multipurpose slot that could fit either a subwoofer, a floppy drive, or a number pad into it, which was a really cool idea at the time - a time when a P4 with 512MB of RAM and a 120GB hard disk were pretty high end specs, which is what this machine had.
Vaio computers, however, had two very related problems. First, they had more bundled software than anyone else. Now, some of it was interesting like intro editions of Acid and Sound Forge, as well as Movieshaker and a stripped down version of Adobe Premiere and a number of other media production applications that actually were some of the better bundled titles being used at the time. They came, however, with MagicGate and a dozen other useless applications, which all had a startup stub or two. Sure, you'd have about the highest quantity of RAM that was shipping with a computer at the time, but 2/3 of it would be used up by the time the computer finished starting...and the number of startup wizards you'd have to answer or cancel could easily take half an hour. This wouldn't be nearly as bad if it weren't for their second problem: they put some of the slowest hard drives imaginable into them. 5400RPM drives were the norm, and even today only a handful ship with SSDs. Computer startups could easily take six minutes, and you'll never see one with a spun down hard disk. I would sit at one and ask myself if anyone at Sony ever had to actually use one on a day-to-day basis, because it sure didn't seem like it.
It was particularly sad because all of these issues were readily solvable.
Netflix might be focusing on its streaming business, but the produce that made its name is still alive
I can't be the only person who had no idea that Netflix sold fresh fruits and vegetables.
There's still people out there that believe Trump is making himself look foolish as some sort of 4d chess instead of the much better explanation that he is genuinely ignorant? Sad!
My theory goes a bit more like this:
According to virtually every non-advertising minute of Fox News between 2009 and 2016, Obama could do no right. It didn't matter how a given situation was approached. Try to find common ground with Republicans? "Obama compromises his beliefs!" or "Obama plan retains worst parts of Democratic and Republican ideals!". Push it through when Democrats had majorities in both houses? "Obama is imposing tyrrany of the majority!" Ram it through with an executive order? "He's not going through Congress like he's supposed to!" Decide to say "screw it" until Congress stops acting like children? "Government Shutdown - and it's Obama's fault!" I certainly didn't agree with a number of his policies, but Fox never met a story they couldn't spin as a negative and then pin on Obama, and I always believed that was patently unfair.
Trump is no Steven Hawking, but I do think he was smart enough to realize that if he ran on the Republican ticket, CNN, MSNBC, Twitter, Tumblr, and most of Facebook would do the exact same thing to him. His options would be to either discuss actual legislation (and let the talking heads argue that), or say some outlandish things on Twitter and let those talking heads spend all day discussing Trump's Mean Tweets. Obama proved it's impossible to do anything right in the mind of a media circus that will take statements out of context and endlessly loop them. By going to the other extreme, Trump gives mass media their ratings fodder and he can deal with the issues on his own terms.
Now, I obviously have no evidence of this, but you don't have to be skilled at four dimensional chess to realize that "doing what Obama did" had its issues and decide to do the polar opposite with a clear level of success.
Here's the issue: Google does a lot of data slurping by default. Even if Google is as you say - super careful with how data is stored, one of the few companies who tell law enforcement "warrant or gtfo", and utilize it in ways that are above reproach...there is zero guarantee they will remain that way.
Imagine how much data Google has on you. Now, imagine Google was bought out by the worst possible person - Donald Trump, George Soros, 90's era Bill Gates, whoever it is for you...now think of all your Google-owned data in that person's hands. THAT is the problem. The database exists, and eventually, it will end up in the wrong hands. The only way to avoid that is to avoid populating the database.
The onus is not on ensuring everyone is not an idiot.
You're correct in that not everybody will be talented at everything. However, if the school is going to expect that teachers will be entering their grades into a website as well as communicate via e-mail, then "how to avoid being the victim of a phishing scam" needs to be a part of their baseline training.
The onus is on the people employing the idiots to empower them with knowledge.
So then are the employers on the hook for negligence in their duties to empower their employees with knowledge. This is a school. That is literally the point of the institution. In addition, "being able to detect phishing scams" is a skill that will keep the teachers safe in their own lives.
I'm willing to bet you this teacher has never so much as heard of the term "phishing" much less knows what to look out for.
Well, it's 2018. Phishing has been a thing for over a decade now. Schools train teachers to handle no shortage of situations, from irate parents to fire evacuations. If the school is going to place any value on their data's integrity, then there needs to be training for the teachers on the topic.
Punishing people for things they don't know is not a winning strategy.
And what about willful ignorance? I can't tell you how many times I've spoken to someone and their answer has been something to the effect of, "well, I'm not a computer person so, whatever that whole mumbo jumbo was is something I just don't understand". A first offense being a mandatory training course might well make sense to remove the "I didn't know" argument to some extent, but at some point there needs to be pressure to make deliberate avoidance an unacceptable stance.
If EA wants to disassociate loot boxes with gambling, they just have to do one of two things:
1. remove the financial outlay element.
2. remove the 'possibility of losing' element.
Now, it's EA, so we can summarily dismiss the first option. The second one, however, is relatively simple: ensure that any time a player purchases a loot box, at least one item in it is an upgraded model of an item the player already has. This way, there's a guarantee to the player that they are paying for an upgrade, while the inability to determine which item is upgraded still provides incentive to purchase additional loot crates. The EU regulators can simmer down since players are guaranteed upgrades when loot crates are purchased, and EA can continue to provide incentive for players to use the slot machine mechanic, making unreasonable amounts of money in the process.
You're welcome, EA.
My daughter's neighborhood had several cars broken into...They all polled their surveillance cameras and each found the same van casing their houses throughout the area.
The objection isn't to this sort of thing. Crimes had taken place in the neighborhood, and individuals worked together to submit useful evidence to the police to assist in convicting the criminal(s). This is excellent teamwork, and there is relatively little objection to this sort of scenario.
What's being suggested here, is that Ring is giving police direct access to citizen-owned cameras. Herein lies the problem: my neighbors paying for me to be surveiled, with no crime and no cause, to a police department that, in aggregate, has a bit of a reputation for being less-than-honorable and having limited accountability. That is only comparable to neighborhood watch pooling their DVR footage to provide relevant information to the police to assist in the apprehension of a specific criminal in that it involves digital camera footage and the police.
Does anyone assign children to write documents on a tablet? Chromebooks seem to be gaining popularity in lower education, while what I see in higher education is about a 30:30:30:10 mix. Macbooks:Chromebooks:Windows:Linux. Any of those things is closer in form factor to a laptop, not to a tablet or phone.
It would take much LONGER to write a paper on a tablet -- if I had a kid with that assignment, I'd show them how to type it on a real laptop, then copy the thing to whatever tablet their school was trying to force down people's gullets.
I completely concur. However, "technology in education" is like Communism - one of those great ideas whose real-world implementation never, ever looks anything like the brochure. If a school was sold on a one-iPad-per-pupil solution, you'd better believe that the point of the assignment is to justify the purchase of the iPad, rather than for an educative activity to have been performed. It obviously varies from school to school, and I begrudgingly share your preference for Chromebooks to tablets in this context for the very reasons you specify...but for every one parent like you, there's a classroom of students whose parents are anywhere from incapable to apathetic about the situation.
I can't believe I'm actually going to play devil's advocate on a post I actually agree with...
Microsoft doesn't "need" to know what you, I, or anyone else are working on.
This is true. However, browser-based productivity suites are very popular for lots of people. In addition, as much as you and I would be happier with some sort of a self-hosted compromise, like a partnership between OnlyOffice and Synology to make a browser based productivity appliance that's accessible from anywhere and stores data locally, the reality is that far too many people see Google Docs as $0 and no technical thingies required, so there's basically no market for it. For Microsoft to eschew providing an alternative to GDocs is counterproductive for everybody, especially since (sadly) there's a clear market for it.
It's not a big deal to re-open a document on a different device without giving your life's story to Microsoft (or any other Big Cloud company).
It's certainly possible to do this, but it's not nearly as simple. Nextcloud is great, but nobody is making an appliance for it that's seamless. iOS still does data shuffling through iTunes, and using a separate FTP client or similar is a pain, especially for the incredibly high number of people who don't really understand the concept of a file system. I agree, it's certainly possible for those who share our principles, but it's not "enter your e-mail address and a password and then leave everything else to us" simple. Remember: you have to think in terms of folks who think Snapchat is a useful piece of software.
This is just an excuse to loot your personal/corporate data under the excuse of a tiny bit more convenience.
Of course. It's not like MS is going to not-mine that data. However, the target demographic here isn't the Slashdot crowd.
Also, the functions of phones and "desktop" devices (not really desktops, could be laptops with a keyboard) are orthogonal.
Keep in mind that the original topic here is about making the phone's data more useful on a desktop. Manipulating phone contacts, writing longer text messages, and syncing photos are tasks that are still expedited by leveraging the desktop...which is sounds like is the task MS is looking to implement here. Now it sounds like MS is releasing an app that shares data with the OS directly rather than something like the now-defunct Jeyo Mobile Companion for Windows Mobile. To be fair though, Apple has been doing that for years between iOS and OSX, and Google has been largely-there if you consider Chrome and "The Google Ecosystem" an OS in context, so MS is just releasing an app to allow Windows 10 to do the same.
The first are for brief communications, (yes) talking, recording of data (e.g. fitness tracking), and media consumption. But they stink at content production, which "desktop" devices excel at. Try writing several pages on a phone or many tablets -- it amounts to torture.
100% agreed. However, there are two things missing from this assessment. First, it underestimates how much time children have to write their documents on a tablet when the assignment is "use your tablet to write your document", especially when they *only* have a tablet at their disposal. Second, consider the creation:consumption proportion for lots of people. You and I might be 50:50 or even higher, but for the crowd who's got a 20:80 split, investing in phones and tablets has been their more common technology purchase, with an aging XP/Vista/Early-Win7 desktop/$300-Celeron-Closeout machine being the PC that's "just kinda there" for the handful of times they need PC-specific stuff.
I love me my Origin laptop and agree that self-hosted browser-based applications are far more preferable to trusting Aunt Google or Uncle Tim or Cousin Nadella to handle my computing needs to my satisfaction. I also realize that we live in a society where "use a Raspberry Pi or t
Just sue Intel in small claims court. I'm expecting my cheque soon.
100% sincere question: how does that work? My understanding is that a small claims lawsuit only works if you can quantifiably prove damages. "I had to buy a new desktop/server" seems easy enough, but if you went against Intel and won, how did you prove that Spectre and Meltdown were the cause of your purchase to the point where the judge ruled in your favor?
I run Windows 10, and my method is that I format my computer annually, install all of the updates available up until that point, and then kill all the update processes with fire. A combination of file and folder permissions, deletion of executable and DLL files...whatever it takes to ensure my computer literally cannot run Windows Update.
Let's address some of the counterarguments with this system:
"but Voyager, aren't you missing out on the latest features?"
No. See, Windows is still my OS because it does precisely one function: run my Windows applications. I'd love to move to Linux, but I've simply got too many industry specific applications to make that viable. The current release of Windows 10 does that. Microsoft has not released a single update which has improved the functionality of my computer. I don't need Paint3D, I don't need Cortana, I don't need any of the appy-apps from the MS store...I have literally never read a change log that has had even one single 'feature' that was advantageous to me.
"but Voyager, that's so insecure!!"
This argument is based on a few assumptions. The one I'll dicsuss here is the definition of 'security'. Have we defined that yet? There may well be some sort of case made for security if the definition of 'security' is "the inability of a malicious hacker to access the contents of your computer, and/or somehow cause malicious code to run on your computer for their benefit". This is a stressed argument to make, because I keep UAC enabled, I make good use of the public/private network paradigm, I run ESET NOD32, I run browser add-ons like NoScript and Disconnect, and I haven't gotten a virus on my computer since 2007 (and even that was based on a USB Autorun in the XP era). How unsafe of a system are we really dealing with here. Wannacry? I mean, okay, but I disabled SMBv1 via a registry key shortly after that was documented. Spectre/Meltdown? I mean, that's a bit better of an argument, but for those exploits to work they would trigger a UAC prompt, and there's really not much that would require a Spectre exploit that couldn't just be transferred through conventional means on a workstation.
By contrast, I submit a different definition of 'security': "the assurance that the data on a computer is not transmitted to a third party without user consent, that executable processes are not executed without user consent, and that the computer itself shall not be rendered inoperable". Windows Update fails at all three of these qualifiers. We can argue the first one a bit since it's likely other subsystems performing the telemetry, but the other two? How many times have you seen an idle computer with a thrashing hard disk and 90% CPU usage, because Windows Update is doing whatever the hell it's doing, for over an hour, without quiescing to foreground applications? It happens a whole lot, and it gets in the way of the user. Moreover, every Windows user has had a startup or shutdown delayed significantly because of updating. If you haven't had a Windows Update get you to a point where you're restoring from a backup yet, you're fortunate - I've had that situation happen on more than one occasion. Even if the system isn't completely hosed, why is it Microsoft's right to remove Classic Shell or treat my Start Menu like advertising space or reset my PDF association? EULA all you want...but no. Even if you want to argue mandatory security updates, why can't driver updates be declined?
Windows Update, in many respects, acts more like malware than actual-malware.
"but Voyager! We've had these sorts of updates for years! They were just called 'Service Packs', and you happily installed those...so why is this such an issue now?"
Because Microsoft performed massive amounts of testing on those service packs, and they were pretty limited in scope (with XP SP2 being a notable exception). Additionally, if we go back a bit further to NT 4.0, king of the service packs with six of them released over the lifetime of the OS, there was no built-in Windows Update mechani
Full disclosure, I'm not the biggest Chrome fan, and not the biggest Google fan, either. However, I don't generally get caught up in browser wars; I don't generally tell Chrome users to use other browsers if they're happy with it and their sites load.
However, about a month ago, Chrome started acting really weird. Sites would time out, or take over a minute to load, on well-spec'd computers with no malware and wired network connections. After trying every tweak I could think of, I tried those same sites in Firefox and they loaded in the 2-3 seconds they were supposed to. Over the past month, that experience has repeated itself across users with nothing in common except Chrome, and "switching to Firefox" completely resolving their issues.
I'm sure the April update sucks; I'm hard pressed to point to a Win10 feature update that provided a useful feature that justified the update installation time. However, I'm hard pressed to not give Google at least some share of the blame when a number of users (some of which still using Windows 7) had issues with Chrome that were solved by switching to Firefox.
Christian, checking in...
Well, just because Jesus taught that divorce/adultery was a sin (while saying nothing about abortion or gay marriage), that doesn't mean the bible belt fake christians in the US have to live by his teachings when they're so busy lying about his teachings.
Let's start with the divorce/adultery issue. You're absolutely right, that there isn't nearly as much disparity in divorce rates among Christians as their should be. Adultery would be a bit more complicated to pin down in this context, because Jesus' teachings indicate that lustful thoughts are akin to adultery. If Christians take that teaching into account when discussing their experiences with adultery, then that's going to skew the numbers a bit if the polls don't account for it. That said, we'll continue to agree that the numbers should show a much clearer story than they do.
On to the abortion topic: the abortion argument stems from the belief that a fetus is a person. If a fetus is a person, then abortion is the intentional killing of a person. Now, you might disagree with that view, but hopefully that core tenet makes at least some sense.
With respect to gay marriage, you're right, Jesus never spoke of homosexuality directly. However, you won't find a passage in the Bible that speaks about it positively. We'll agree in that this is one of those issues blown out of proportion as a whole since the Bible teaches that those who do not ascribe to its teachings should be able to live however they want. At the same time, there's a certain amount of concern about government being used to enforce moral acceptance.
That article you linked is spot on. Jesus taught to feed the hungry, cloth and shelter the poor, and heal the sick.
We're still in agreement here...sort of. The tricky part of this statement is that it implies that Christians should be in favor of government programs handling this task, while Jesus was actually putting the responsibility upon His followers directly. One can simultaneously be opposed to the government being in charge of these programs given known issues with wasteful spending and poor policies that end up ultimately being bad for both recipients and taxpayers, while also adhering to the individual mandate to help those who need it.
In a reply to another responder, you said:
Christians only have a higher rate of giving if you include money given to the church.... that isn't charity, that is them attempting to buy their way into heaven. Most churches, in fact, are dismal when it comes to using that money for causes other than paying for their own upkeep.
This is messy territory because it assumes that churches are bad charities, but non-churches are good ones. On the topic of churches, is so easy to point to examples of churches on both ends of the spectrum. I agree that there are no shortage of churches where the preachers promise that the offering plate will provide a financial return-on-investment, basically capitalizing on the greed of the giver. Similarly, I know there are no shortage of churches where a lot of the money goes into having a beautiful building...and that being the biggest share of right half of the balance sheet. I also know churches that are the largest non-governmental entity in their respective counties which handle giving food to thousands of hungry residents every week, providing showers and children's programs and helping them find jobs with no requirement on the part of the recipient. I know churches that have built multiple wells in Africa and help fund a home for mentally ill people in India, others who run drug rehabilitation centers, and still others who work primarily with single mothers who need diapers and formula and an emotional support system. All of these examples assume only "traceable giving", with no accounting for interpersonal giving, Kickstarter giving, direct food donations, and many more types of generosity which don't show up in a balanc
What do they do now, except suing Google for Java ownership?
They missed Cloud completely.
They missed mobile, but it is Ok for them.
They missed big data.
What Oracle is about now?
You're right, Oracle isn't exactly an exciting or innovative company. That doesn't mean they aren't still making massive amounts of money.
Oracle has their own cloud offering, believe it or not. It's not dissimilar from AWS, but Oracle simply doesn't have much of a market. If you're up-and-coming, and don't have data in an Oracle DB already, you're not starting with one. You're also not starting with Oracle Cloud because "everbody uses Amazon", though you might be able to make a case for Azure or GCC if you're already in one of those ecosystems. If you've got data in an Oracle database already, you're not happy about it, and trusting a company whose installer requires a lawyer present with even more data an infrastructure reliance isn't exactly the easiest sell.
Oracle was also never going to make any real inroads in mobile. The closest they come to being a hardware company is whatever is left from acquiring Sun, and SPARC-based big iron isn't exactly a springboard for entering the smartphone world. Now, one can argue that 'Search and E-Mail' might not have been the most logical springboard either, but Solaris never hit the consumer market, and Oracle Linux is basically rebranded Red Hat, who isn't exactly taking mobile by storm either, by the by.
Big Data is something that I can't speak too strongly to, but from what I understand, they've implemented a number of things into more recent releases of Oracle DB that enable NoSQL-like functions. The thing is, though, that projects based on Big Data are recent enough that "not-Oracle" is all but assumed on the outset.
What Oracle *does* do, however, is what they've done well for a long time - play the government contract game. Bid for a project, which conveniently uses Oracle products, get in with the lowest bid, end up having the project grow to 150% of the bid, have the project end up with some terrible combination of scope creep and design-by-committee to the point where it doesn't work right but *technically* delivers, then charge to have their consultants work for double the contract length for 'maintenance and upgrades', while also charging for the software support licensing and contracts. Then, when the project is finally scrapped...the cycle repeats.
So long as Oracle is not banned from bidding on state and federal projects, and the government doesn't make an initiative to work to remove existing Oracle installations by 2025...Oracle can play that game until someone starts caring.
>As far as apps being moved to a paid model, look at something as stupid as Solitaire. Free in Windows 7, pay to remove ads in Windows 10
I knew someone was going to mention Solitare! So if you offer a free app in your OS, you are obligated till the end of time to enhance, update and include it free in all future versions of the OS? Especially something as irrelevant as a card game?
Well, that skips just a few interim possibilities there, doesn't it? Let's not forget that MS played all kinds of sketchy games with 'consent' when it came to updating lots of Windows 7 users to Windows 10; it wasn't exactly a truly conscious opt-in decision for many.
Possibility #1: leaving it in for users who upgraded from Windows 7/8.
Possibility #2: copy/pasting the same Solitaire release from Windows 8 to Windows 10. No enhancements, no updates. just inclusion of already-completed code that costs them $0, with the new-and-improved Solitaire available in the store.
Possibility #3: copy/paste the Win7 Solitaire release code,but have it give an ad for the new one in the Store when users close it out.
Possibility #4: don't-delete the legacy code when windows users explicitly re-add it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windo...
Possibility #5: Make a base level version available as a one-time purchase and a premium version an annual fee.
I just came up with five options off the top of my head that don't involve MS having to write new code for free, forever.