We now have light gray on white visual elements, because high contrast, easy to spot UI elements are so gauche.
We have mystery meat navigation elements (text doesn't show up until you mouse over), because even though designers 15 years ago figured out that was bad, a new generation apparently has to relearn the same lessons.
And it will be harder for them to learn it.
Designers in the 80's and 90's had to give people a reason to use their software, which meant it HAD to be easy to use, it HAD to make sense, and it HAD to convince the money men so business workflow needed to be the core selling point. UIs were still just as likely to be done by programmers as they were by artists who were only then making the migration to DTP software, but had made a career out of doing things by hand. Finally, the lack of broadband meant ship-then-patch was simply not an option so everything had to be done right the first time.
This generation ships software with UIs made by art majors. Everyone already has their data in $SOME_PROGRAM, meaning that moving to a competitor is commonly not an option. Seriously, when was the last time that a software UI change was so bad, users left it based on the UI? When was the last time a UI complaint managed to make its way up to the desk of someone with the ability to do something about it? With no repercussions for undesirable UIs, accolades for pretty art projects, and the realization that declaring a UI "basically finished" means UI designers declare themselves out of a job, there is zero disincentive to having UIs that make it abundantly clear that style matters more than substance.
United States V Paramount Pictures (1948) was case that decided the fate of movie studios owning their own theaters and holding exclusivity rights on which theaters would show their films.
The exclusivity clause would likely be the clincher. If Netflix is only distributing their content in their own theaters, then sure, it would probably hold. If, however, Netflix has attempted to distribute their films to AMC or Lowes and they simply don't want to gamble the theater space (especially if Netflix films are also available for streaming at the same time), then it's not 'exclusivity'.
The other argument that could be made is that, in 1948, there was no concept of watching movies at home, much less on demand streaming. People *had* to go to theaters to view content, and the complete vertical of production to theaters was troubling. Is the Paramount ruling still relevant in the age of on-demand streaming? I don't think the MPAA members are going to fight this one too much, especially since arguing that Netflix original content should be able to be shown in anyone's theaters makes a rather slippery slope for streaming service exclusivity - it's a short trip to consider streaming services a 'theater' in the context of "a place to experience viewing audiovisual entertainment" and rule that CBS cannot forbid Netflix from making Star Trek: Discovery available for streaming as a matter of course.
Finally, don't underestimate Hollywood Accounting. Netflix doesn't own theaters, Theaterflix, a wholly independent company does...who then proceeds to only incidentally screen films of Netflix original Content, as it is the only company from whom their customers enjoy seeing films. Netflix licenses distribution to Theaterflix, and makes the same offer to National Amusements. If Netflix allows NA to play the films just like Theaterflix, and for the same price as Theaterflix plays...then the question simply becomes whether Theaterflix can be compelled to show MPAA movies if they don't want to. If NA wants to play the films, everyone wins! If NA never makes the offer, then the fact that Theaterflix is the only one who wants to isn't Netflix's fault.
I have been reading this site for close to 20 years now. Based on GP's very similar user ID I suspect he has too. I agree with the GP. I too have noticed a substantial shift towards conservatism in Slashdot's discussions in about the last 2 years. My experience in the software industry during the same time frame is consistent with the GP's observation of disproportion.
It would be interesting to study this and see if there's been a shift or an influx in the population.
I think it's more nuanced than that. Over the past two decades, both the Democratic party and the Republican party have shifted more towards their respective extremes, with the Republican party defining itself heavily on wedge issues like guns and abortion, and the Democratic party defining itself heavily with identity politics and shaming the wealth gap. Both have moved far more towards authoritarianism, with the differences simply being on implementation.
Slashdot, in general, I've found to lean pretty heavily toward libertarianism and individual liberties, and away from heavily centralized power. With both D's and R's moving away from that direction, that lean becomes more pronounced. Moreover, with socialism inherently requiring a central authority for management, individual liberty starts looking closer to conservatism.
Finally, the demographics have always leaned heavily male, and presumably straight-ish white-ish as a simple majority. Slashdot has always had its group of non-men (and to all those who are here and reading this, sincerely, thank you), but it's always been a minority. Since the Democrats have in general been the party to host the extreme feminists and the social justice crowd, Slashdot has had a backlash against those camps, which is the logical consequence of the identity politics.
Put it all together, and while there might be some sort of a quantifiable shift in the aggregate demographics here, I submit that it appears far more apparent than it is due to the external motion which has taken place within the general population at the same time.
Oh, this chestnut again. Let's review what actually happened...
Apple ignored a Federal warrant requiring them to assist in accessing a phone used by a dead terrorist.
No, they didn't. They provided law enforcement with the data they had - iCloud data, keychain contents...whatever data they actually-had, they handed over. What the government wanted was for Apple to write a firmware update that would enable the FBI to brute force the passcode requirement and push it to the phone. The reason there was all kinds of fanfare was because the FBI was trying to compel Apple to write software that didn't exist, for the sake of reducing security that everybody, everywhere, ever, knew was not going to be used in just this one singular case.
They claimed it would cost them to much money and tie up too many resources.
Well, yes. Writing software takes time and money, from intelligent humans. Apple doesn't have a central database of passcodes camping out on a Macbook in Tim Cook's office in Cupertino that they were simply refusing to query.
They claimed their security was so good that even they might not be able to retrieve any data from the phone.
Well, if Apple wrote firmware that worked well enough on their test unit, but ended up failing on the phone of interest for whatever reason, would the FBI have been okay with that? Or would Apple have been liable for obstruction of justice? Only a fool would give any form of guarantee.
They used the entire episode to showcase their commitment to a users privacy.
The way this is written, it sounds like it's intended to be derogatory...but I really don't see a downside to such a commitment.
In other words they used their actions to sell more devices.
You have a dizzying intellect. People want phones that are secure. The FBI indicates they are having trouble unlocking the phone. The FBI brings the issue to the court of public opinion. Apple affirms that their devices are so secure, the FBI has to compel them to write software that doesn't exist in order to maybe-kinda-sorta get access to it. People trust Apple more, and buy more phones as a result due to their security. Welcome to how capitalism is supposed to work.
And a couple of days later they ended up getting a big kick in the nuts as a third party proved Apples vaunted security technology was complete bullshit.
Well, that's quite a leap there. Third parties have *always* managed to find a vulnerability in iOS. Take a look at the history of jailbreaking; time and time again iOS has fallen given enough poking and prodding. If an Israeli company managed to successfully exploit a vulnerability as a last ditch effort, that's far different than Apple using their software developers and their signing keys to write software they did not want to write, at the behest of their own government officials, who would have ended up using the incident to cement into case law the ability of the FBI to require work to be done by private companies in order to meet their own ends.
Now, if you want to take it one step further...how come the last thing we heard from the case was that the Israeli company unlocked the phone? If there was any useful data at all on that phone, you KNOW the FBI would have been shouting from the rooftops how they arrested a dozen more terrorists because of what was on the phone, and how Apple got in the way. Instead, we heard nothing thereafter. If Apple was full of it with respect to their security argument, then the FBI was ten times worse and they never owned up to being wrong.
First, like email, it needs to support federation.[...]Second, it needs data and identity portability.[...] Finally, it needs well-documented protocols.
Usenet. The system you're referring to is Usenet. It's federated, it has data and identity portability, and NNTP is a well documented protocol.
However, you'll note that the number of currently active Usenet participants is a rounding error compared to Facebook. There are a few problems that a social network meeting the three listed critera suffer from. First, the obvious one, is spam. E-mail battles with it with the use of reputation and blacklists, which are retained by Spamhaus and Google and Barracuda, and if you have companies in charge of blacklists, for all practical purposes we're all the way back to tools of censorship.
Next, someone needs to be willing to handle the data. Astraweb and Highwinds do it for peanuts, but it's still more than $0; whether users would be willing to pay even Astraweb prices for social media access is debatable. Moreover, some of the core tenets of social networking, including 'liking' or 'upvoting', need to be tracked by the centralized authority, lest we leave it up to the users to decide how many upvotes their post has...Finally, decentralized social networking means it's super difficult to allow or block individuals, and trying to make sure media posts like pictures and videos are replicated in relative realtime is not the easiest thing to make happen. Retroshare has these this to a limited extent, media sharing is closer to a download paradigm than an album paradigm, and a 'blocked' user can easily evade a block by spinning up a new profile.
On the topic of Retroshare, its super-decentralized nature means that it requires port forwarding to get any meaningful level of network effects. In addition, the forums are a complete dumpster fire of content many would deem offensive, like actually-anti-semitic rants, bomb creation instructions, graphic descriptions of non-consensual sexual acts...and no meaningful way to filter any of it.
You and I, we want freedom. Most people seem to prefer content they like, easily accessible. After all, when was the last time you had a personal, friendly discussion via e-mail? 99.999999% of e-mail now are either advertisements, account credentials, billing statements, or business correspondence.
Being able to use my Technics 1200s isn't the only factor. I have a pair of Shure M44-7 needles, as well as a pair of Ortofon Clubs, which have a tip of a particular size. If HD vinyl is fitting louder tracks at higher fidelity, and more of them, onto a 12" vinyl record, then the grooves *have* to be more narrow. Will I need new needles for these? If not, won't my wider needles just wear them out faster? If neither of these are true, is it because of a tougher material that is more resistant to wear at the expense of the stylus?
The information here is unclear regarding whether I'll need nothing but a record. However, the *real* question is whether there will be any music pressed on HD vinyl that will truly leverage the medium. Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" is great, but I doubt they will an end-to-end remaster from the original recordings, themselves in good enough shape, to warrant listening with the format. Modern stuff that's compressed to hell and generated in Ableton or Logic isn't going to sound any better. Perhaps new recordings of classical works might be the closest thing, but I'd argue that even these are going to have a very small audience; said audience is more likely to see a live performance by the local philharmonic.
I never understood the animosity to the Windows 8 start screen. What is the use case for the cramped start menu? You are doing one thing, you are looking to launch an application. Why constrain that function to a corner of the screen? One thing, full screen, maximum real estate given to do that one thing. I am not launching an app and also scanning my desktop for some other reason. I switched my Windows 10 back to full screen start.
The full-screen part isn't the source of the animosity. The source is basically everything else. What you call "cramped", I see as "information density". As a go-to example, let's use Magix Vegas, formerly Sony Vegas. Is the program icon under "Magix", "Sony", "Vegas", or "Movie Studio"? With the multi-column paradigm, I can fit 48 items per column, and 6 columns on a 1920x1080 screen. Whichever one of them it's under, it'll be readily apparent in short order. On that same 1920x1080 screen, the Windows 8 Start Screen shows 35 entries - less than a single column in the older paradigm. Given that Windows 8 was rarely run on a tablet, for 99% of people the reduction in information density wasn't a tradeoff for which they received a benefit. Additional annoyances involved the 'charms' menu for which a UI cue was never implemented, and an unintuitive pinning procedure. Now, the go-to answer is always "just type what you want!" There's no UI cue for that, either, it's been possible since Windows Vista, and if that's the primary way of launching programs, then congratulations, we're all the way back to a command line paradigm.
As for the Windows Metro UI apps, they are still in Windows 10. I have no problems with those either.
That's fine. There are plenty of reasons to not-like Metro UI apps, not the least of which because of how limited they are.
Cant resize it? Again, what is the use case.
The operating system is literally called "Windows". If MS wanted to use a different paradigm, fine, call it "Tiles" and see how well that works. You're stating that you don't understand the animosity, yet you require users to justify their preferences. "Because f'k you, that's why" is the only necessary reason as to why window resizing over tiling is preferred. I may well want to see just the status bar of a background process, which takes 3% of a screen rather than 25. Snapping is helpful, tiling is useful, but to assume every situation lends itself to not-windowing is shortsighted.
You can tile them on the screen. Dock them to the sides. Arrange them to see multiple apps at once. I don;t see the issue.
Few argue the problem. Most argue the requirement.
Unity uses over a quarter of the screen for the launcher, is someone bitching about that? Not as much, because it's "Linux" and we are used to it being schizophrenic in UI design. *SMH*
Well, first off, you just called using a quarter of the screen a schizophrenic UI design while arguing that full screen was acceptable earlier. Second, the Unity UI also spent the last few years receiving its share of criticism. Finally, Linux has options on that front; using Kubuntu or Xubuntu or Ubuntu Mate are all entirely viable and listed on the main Ubuntu download page, and tutorials for switching between them are incredibly easy to find and follow. Linux makes it far easier to change one's desktop environment than Windows, and while I would love nothing more than to be able to load up a Windows computer and end up in KDE or Cinnamon, the system just doesn't do that.
And yes, I own and use a Windows 10 phone as my primary communications device and it is better by design. I don't need your stinking 'droid apps:P
I'm with you here. I've got maybe three dozen apps on my phone, in total, over half of which are either rooting/backup tools, or apps that could be readily replaced with a website if the developers wanted to put the slightest effort into one.
The issue isn't an advertising model. Virtually everyone with a Facebook account understands that. The issue at hand is the incredibly pervasive data harvesting even for users who don't have accounts, lack of transparency to users, and then selling it to the highest bidder. If you do not understand that this is the problem at hand, then kindly take your billions and let someone else handle running your company - or at least your PR department.
The reason the streaming options are popular is because it's entirely possible for nontechnical people to call up their technical friend (and by "technical" I mean "can follow a Youtube tutorial"), hand them a Fire Stick, and add streaming plugins. These people aren't doing anything terribly different than what they do with Netflix or Hulu, just a different icon.
Moreover, the experience involves "having all the things in one place". No going to Netflix for this show (except that one episode where there's a license discrepancy over a song's usage so it's unavailable), then Hulu for that one, Crackle for the next, then CBS All Access for yet another one, HBO Go for still another...it doesn't matter what show someone wants to see, all the episodes are available, on demand.
Netflix mostly-had this situation under control, then everyone wanted their pound of flesh, which turned Netflix into half original content, and half "the refrigerator the night before grocery shopping". Even if the content producers wanted to charge a premium for their section of content, but still allow Netflix to handle the streaming, I think that model would make everyone happy..but alas, it does not.
Finally, I've always kinda wondered what's in it for the sites who serve the streaming files. At least torrent sites can say "community" and "advertising/donation revenue", but the sites that serve the streams can claim none of the above, have to pay the bandwidth and server bills, and have a bullseye painted on them from the *AA...so, all of the liability, none of the perks. I don't get it:/.
P.S. in case anyone was wondering, I don't own one of these devices, nor have I ever modded such a device for anyone.
Look, I'll be the first one to say that Windows Update in Win10 is basically indistinguishable from malware at this point. The forced updates are written with the assumption that the user wants them, that the software is an improvement over the old, and that the user's time is better spent waiting for the update to complete than whatever it is they would otherwise be doing with their computer.
All of these problems need to be solved. However, I will acknowledge the intermediate step being taken here. The amount of time an update takes to install is a major part of the problem here. If the monthly updates took five minutes and the semi-annual updates took 30, instead of the hours they currently take, I think it would go a long way to solving the other issues.
The massive question mark here is the hardware being used to make these claims. "a current-gen i7 with 32GB of RAM and a high end Intel SSD" taking half an hour? That's crap. "a six year old Celeron with a 5400RPM, 250GB laptop drive and 4GB of RAM" taking half an hour, on the other hand, is pretty impressive.
if DRM has taught us anything its that aggravating someone is the worst way to get them to participate in a market.
Well, to be fair, the argument against DRM had to do with the fact that it affects users who have already directly paid for the content. People streaming on Youtube haven't paid for the content, and thus must pay with some other means.
Youtube streaming is largely for convenience of getting to a single song easily; whether it would result in users paying for the tracks, paying for Spotify Premium or similar, or 'doing without' would accomplish the labels' goals...but the bigger concern I have is whether we'll see a renaissance in a Limewire-like service, which helps no one.
It did work for Netscape. While the company died, its technology lives on in our Firefox browsers.
I don't see that as a bad thing. Keep in mind all the niche iterations - Palemoon, Iceweasel, Seamonkey, and so on. None have critical mass, but all benefit from Netscape.
However for the most part it is like putting your trash on a freighter and sending it over to a third would country to see if any of those people wants your trash.
If the alternative is burning it or burying it, and we're dealing with industrial or consumer waste as opposed to food waste or other biohazards, then that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'd far rather some industrious third world people disassemble a curling iron to heat their water or whatever, rather than just assume it's all actual-junk and burn it. Getting back to the matter at hand, it's not like WebOS can do much worse with its code out in the open. Maybe no one will want to develop for it, but with iOS not being open source at all, and Android becoming progressively more and more closed, an OSS "third horse" is far from an undesirable thing to have.
Now there was a lot of love towards WebOS and many and was ahead of its time in a lot of features. However the question for today is it worth it, with the competitors over the past decade had improved their products, and what was ahead of its time, is now behind the times.
Well, yes, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, either. See, the past decade has showed us what has worked and what hasn't. Software features which weren't available then, can be readily added now. Those who wish to write those enhancements can do so with the awareness that these are standard features and know their code won't be ignored, and there is a template for the finalized product already. These are all good things.
WebOS is akin to BeOS, Amiga, Apple Lisa, Osborn, Sega Dreamcast... Good ideas, just implemented at a time where was too ambitious and people didn't need such features on particular hardware.
I'd argue that in WebOS's case, the issue was the hardware itself. A plastic phone with chiclet keys that was very prone to breaking in a number of different ways and was a Sprint exclusive...was far from a compelling offer. I always thought Apotheker seemed to have a good idea with using WebOS as a pre-boot environment to unify the company's phone/tablet/laptop offerings, but that never came to pass for some reason. In any case, the fact that it didn't take off 10 years ago is far from a compelling argument that it shouldn't find its way onto Github now.
You save your plays until 2024 unless you want to tip your hand and risk being scooped. It might make sense to throw your hat into the ring in 2020 and get your name out there, but you do NOT put your platform out there. It'll just have 4 extra years to be dismantled, attacked, made irrelevant, or copied.
That depends on your ultimate endgame. If the founders of Whole Foods were looking to get rich off people who were willing to buy all-natural, non-GMO snake oil, then yeah, the fact that most supermarkets increased their organic / non-GMO / lower-salt-and-sweetener options is a bad thing. If the founders were trying to help kick-start the improvement of the quality of groceries for everyone, then having a number of such products available everywhere is a positive change. Likewise, if a more popular DNC candidate scoops the platform for 2020, it's bad if Yang actually wants to be president, but good if he wants the UBI idea to gain traction regardless of who does it.
Tepples gives two reasons that are far better solved with actual-text than low-res images. If QZ's means of addressing the issues described by Tepples is both less effective and more complicated, then it's not a conspiracy to say that there's another 'problem' being 'solved' with image-based articles.
I think the GP's point was that the website is sending stories in image format. Both purposes you state are solved by using garden variety text; even the lowest resolution photo takes more data to transmit, and increases the time of the first meaningful paint, than just transmitting text. Since the site is intentionally using methods that are less effective at accomplishing either task you suggest, then it stands to reason that there are other reasons to be putting stories in an image format.
But seriously, you're undoing all the progress we've won
Netflix has the lowest streaming selection it's had in a very long time. CBS pulled lots of their stuff because All Access, Disney is pulling their stuff next year, HBO has always marched to their own drum; Amazon, Hulu, and Youtube Red have their own exclusives as well. Even if a particular individual were willing to subscribe to all of these services, or a preferred subset, it's impossible to do an aggregate search and play a piece of content from whoever owns it. Moreover, while Netflix has a client on basically-everything, even for users willing to switch apps to switch shows, the availability of the different 'apps' for many smart TVs and streaming modules hinges entirely on firmware updates that are unlikely to actually come.
Ultimately, paying per-publisher with an aggregating application that can access disparate paid sources is probably the best compromise that would work for both camps...but I'm not holding my breath for that sort of cooperation.
what about letting us have lan servers and our own hosted ones that can run the mods and maps we want to run?
There are still a handful of games which do this. The most recent release of Unreal Tournament does so, as does Civ VI. A great resource is this page: http://www.langamelist.com/ind...
Which lists out games exclusively by the ability to do LAN-based multiplayer.
This only comes into the conversation when it's RMS levels of repair. If it were only down to the secure enclave, baseband, and other similar SoC items, this wouldn't really be a problem.
I'd wager that the top five hardware items to repair on the iPhone are as follows:
Each of these are reasonably-modular things that a reasonably skilled individual could perform; Youtube tutorials abound for virtually all of these, and none of them interfere with the need for DRM. If these five repairs were possible to do with DIY kits or authorized repair facilities, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
A beta for one distro is news? Ubuntu has been falling in popularity according to many sources. This is a late release of only a beta. Why is this news?
I agree that a beta release is a bit much for a headline. However, Ubuntu news is still worth keeping apprised of. It's lower on the Distrowatch download stats, for sure, but Ubuntu has a sizeable ecosystem around it. Everything from half-decent forums to Youtube tutorials, to the fact that downstream distros like Crunchbang, Mythbuntu, Blackbox, and Gallium, are groups impacted by new Ubuntu releases.
The good/bad part about rolling release Linux distros is that releases aren't necessarily released as a result of groundbreaking new features being added. Moreover, while Ubuntu proper might be falling in popularity at a desktop level, if you add in Mint, the numbers hold up. Finally, it's pretty challenging to truly assess the popularity of a Linux distro; Debian runs lots of my infrastructure primarily due to it being the basis of the Turnkey Linux appliances but Debian isn't exactly getting credit for it.
If the SJWs want to make their own Star Wars series, let them. They did that with Mass Effect Andromeda. Look how that turned out, Mass Effect is now dead.
I'm actually on my second play-through of ME:A at the moment. I really just don't see anything particularly SJW about it. I see that as almost-surprising, given the shoe-in they had for showing some controversy regarding whether the Andromeda Initiative would count as colonialism. This really could have been done very well if there was a third race in Heleus besides the nearly-angelic Angara and the one-dimensional, conquest-driven Kett. It also was a near-perfect setup for there to have been an AGW angle to it - a planet where a vault was necessary because the Angarans had caused climate change through industrialization again would have been easy pickin's for such a topic.
I saw none of it. Really, I didn't. Both Scott and Sara have male and female love interests, but homosexual love interests have been a part of Mass Effect ever since Femshep caught a glimpse of Liara's sideboob.
No, the reason ME:A was a bust was because they did a whole lot of design-by-committee. Lots of open world quests that were simple time sinks which take away from the otherwise-fairly-short main quest, loyalty missions that were generally pointless, political issues on the Nexus that were used as plot devices rather than actually-explored the way they should have been, a story that thoroughly contradicts itself throughout the narrative, a combat system that's ultimately very good but an incredibly jarring difference for players who wrapped up ME3 the week prior, dialogue choices which seldom impact more than the NPC's next line of dialog, and characters that are either direct copy/pastes from ME1 (Drack), poor copy/pastes from ME1 (Vetra), or just outright abysmal (Liam). Ironically, the one thing they did reasonably well was give it a solid ending sequence.
No, ME:A has lots of issues with it, but though I keep hearing the "SJW BS" line, I'm open to examples because I was hard pressed to find many of them.
Rather than ditching Android you could always just use one of the many firewall options. AFWall+, for example, is open source and lets me deny network access on a per-application basis. It also lets me allow access only through a VPN, which accomplishes part of what you're talking about. It doesn't allow spoofing your location through location services, only through IP geolocation via VPN, but... you can always just turn off location services and use a more trusted program for maps if you need it. (Admittedly, I never use maps so this is something that I don't care about.)
The issue isn't the incompatibility of Xprivacy in a direct sense, but rather the framework behind it. Rooting is becoming progressively more difficult, and a firewall that can affect system apps is going to require root. Even when root is possible, Xposed is getting less and less universal. A firewall isn't really enough because there are apps like Whatsapp that I want to have access to the internet, but not to my location or contacts. The same goes for the web browser and Instagram, among others.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot:
We now have light gray on white visual elements, because high contrast, easy to spot UI elements are so gauche.
We have mystery meat navigation elements (text doesn't show up until you mouse over), because even though designers 15 years ago figured out that was bad, a new generation apparently has to relearn the same lessons.
And it will be harder for them to learn it.
Designers in the 80's and 90's had to give people a reason to use their software, which meant it HAD to be easy to use, it HAD to make sense, and it HAD to convince the money men so business workflow needed to be the core selling point. UIs were still just as likely to be done by programmers as they were by artists who were only then making the migration to DTP software, but had made a career out of doing things by hand. Finally, the lack of broadband meant ship-then-patch was simply not an option so everything had to be done right the first time.
This generation ships software with UIs made by art majors. Everyone already has their data in $SOME_PROGRAM, meaning that moving to a competitor is commonly not an option. Seriously, when was the last time that a software UI change was so bad, users left it based on the UI? When was the last time a UI complaint managed to make its way up to the desk of someone with the ability to do something about it? With no repercussions for undesirable UIs, accolades for pretty art projects, and the realization that declaring a UI "basically finished" means UI designers declare themselves out of a job, there is zero disincentive to having UIs that make it abundantly clear that style matters more than substance.
United States V Paramount Pictures (1948) was case that decided the fate of movie studios owning their own theaters and holding exclusivity rights on which theaters would show their films.
The exclusivity clause would likely be the clincher. If Netflix is only distributing their content in their own theaters, then sure, it would probably hold. If, however, Netflix has attempted to distribute their films to AMC or Lowes and they simply don't want to gamble the theater space (especially if Netflix films are also available for streaming at the same time), then it's not 'exclusivity'.
The other argument that could be made is that, in 1948, there was no concept of watching movies at home, much less on demand streaming. People *had* to go to theaters to view content, and the complete vertical of production to theaters was troubling. Is the Paramount ruling still relevant in the age of on-demand streaming? I don't think the MPAA members are going to fight this one too much, especially since arguing that Netflix original content should be able to be shown in anyone's theaters makes a rather slippery slope for streaming service exclusivity - it's a short trip to consider streaming services a 'theater' in the context of "a place to experience viewing audiovisual entertainment" and rule that CBS cannot forbid Netflix from making Star Trek: Discovery available for streaming as a matter of course.
Finally, don't underestimate Hollywood Accounting. Netflix doesn't own theaters, Theaterflix, a wholly independent company does...who then proceeds to only incidentally screen films of Netflix original Content, as it is the only company from whom their customers enjoy seeing films. Netflix licenses distribution to Theaterflix, and makes the same offer to National Amusements. If Netflix allows NA to play the films just like Theaterflix, and for the same price as Theaterflix plays...then the question simply becomes whether Theaterflix can be compelled to show MPAA movies if they don't want to. If NA wants to play the films, everyone wins! If NA never makes the offer, then the fact that Theaterflix is the only one who wants to isn't Netflix's fault.
I have been reading this site for close to 20 years now. Based on GP's very similar user ID I suspect he has too. I agree with the GP. I too have noticed a substantial shift towards conservatism in Slashdot's discussions in about the last 2 years. My experience in the software industry during the same time frame is consistent with the GP's observation of disproportion.
It would be interesting to study this and see if there's been a shift or an influx in the population.
I think it's more nuanced than that. Over the past two decades, both the Democratic party and the Republican party have shifted more towards their respective extremes, with the Republican party defining itself heavily on wedge issues like guns and abortion, and the Democratic party defining itself heavily with identity politics and shaming the wealth gap. Both have moved far more towards authoritarianism, with the differences simply being on implementation.
Slashdot, in general, I've found to lean pretty heavily toward libertarianism and individual liberties, and away from heavily centralized power. With both D's and R's moving away from that direction, that lean becomes more pronounced. Moreover, with socialism inherently requiring a central authority for management, individual liberty starts looking closer to conservatism.
Finally, the demographics have always leaned heavily male, and presumably straight-ish white-ish as a simple majority. Slashdot has always had its group of non-men (and to all those who are here and reading this, sincerely, thank you), but it's always been a minority. Since the Democrats have in general been the party to host the extreme feminists and the social justice crowd, Slashdot has had a backlash against those camps, which is the logical consequence of the identity politics.
Put it all together, and while there might be some sort of a quantifiable shift in the aggregate demographics here, I submit that it appears far more apparent than it is due to the external motion which has taken place within the general population at the same time.
Oh, this chestnut again. Let's review what actually happened...
Apple ignored a Federal warrant requiring them to assist in accessing a phone used by a dead terrorist.
No, they didn't. They provided law enforcement with the data they had - iCloud data, keychain contents...whatever data they actually-had, they handed over. What the government wanted was for Apple to write a firmware update that would enable the FBI to brute force the passcode requirement and push it to the phone. The reason there was all kinds of fanfare was because the FBI was trying to compel Apple to write software that didn't exist, for the sake of reducing security that everybody, everywhere, ever, knew was not going to be used in just this one singular case.
They claimed it would cost them to much money and tie up too many resources.
Well, yes. Writing software takes time and money, from intelligent humans. Apple doesn't have a central database of passcodes camping out on a Macbook in Tim Cook's office in Cupertino that they were simply refusing to query.
They claimed their security was so good that even they might not be able to retrieve any data from the phone.
Well, if Apple wrote firmware that worked well enough on their test unit, but ended up failing on the phone of interest for whatever reason, would the FBI have been okay with that? Or would Apple have been liable for obstruction of justice? Only a fool would give any form of guarantee.
They used the entire episode to showcase their commitment to a users privacy.
The way this is written, it sounds like it's intended to be derogatory...but I really don't see a downside to such a commitment.
In other words they used their actions to sell more devices.
You have a dizzying intellect. People want phones that are secure. The FBI indicates they are having trouble unlocking the phone. The FBI brings the issue to the court of public opinion. Apple affirms that their devices are so secure, the FBI has to compel them to write software that doesn't exist in order to maybe-kinda-sorta get access to it. People trust Apple more, and buy more phones as a result due to their security. Welcome to how capitalism is supposed to work.
And a couple of days later they ended up getting a big kick in the nuts as a third party proved Apples vaunted security technology was complete bullshit.
Well, that's quite a leap there. Third parties have *always* managed to find a vulnerability in iOS. Take a look at the history of jailbreaking; time and time again iOS has fallen given enough poking and prodding. If an Israeli company managed to successfully exploit a vulnerability as a last ditch effort, that's far different than Apple using their software developers and their signing keys to write software they did not want to write, at the behest of their own government officials, who would have ended up using the incident to cement into case law the ability of the FBI to require work to be done by private companies in order to meet their own ends.
Now, if you want to take it one step further...how come the last thing we heard from the case was that the Israeli company unlocked the phone? If there was any useful data at all on that phone, you KNOW the FBI would have been shouting from the rooftops how they arrested a dozen more terrorists because of what was on the phone, and how Apple got in the way. Instead, we heard nothing thereafter. If Apple was full of it with respect to their security argument, then the FBI was ten times worse and they never owned up to being wrong.
But hey, everyone has Graykey now, so you win.
Three more very important things:
First, like email, it needs to support federation.[...]Second, it needs data and identity portability.[...] Finally, it needs well-documented protocols.
Usenet. The system you're referring to is Usenet. It's federated, it has data and identity portability, and NNTP is a well documented protocol.
However, you'll note that the number of currently active Usenet participants is a rounding error compared to Facebook. There are a few problems that a social network meeting the three listed critera suffer from. First, the obvious one, is spam. E-mail battles with it with the use of reputation and blacklists, which are retained by Spamhaus and Google and Barracuda, and if you have companies in charge of blacklists, for all practical purposes we're all the way back to tools of censorship.
Next, someone needs to be willing to handle the data. Astraweb and Highwinds do it for peanuts, but it's still more than $0; whether users would be willing to pay even Astraweb prices for social media access is debatable. Moreover, some of the core tenets of social networking, including 'liking' or 'upvoting', need to be tracked by the centralized authority, lest we leave it up to the users to decide how many upvotes their post has...Finally, decentralized social networking means it's super difficult to allow or block individuals, and trying to make sure media posts like pictures and videos are replicated in relative realtime is not the easiest thing to make happen. Retroshare has these this to a limited extent, media sharing is closer to a download paradigm than an album paradigm, and a 'blocked' user can easily evade a block by spinning up a new profile.
On the topic of Retroshare, its super-decentralized nature means that it requires port forwarding to get any meaningful level of network effects. In addition, the forums are a complete dumpster fire of content many would deem offensive, like actually-anti-semitic rants, bomb creation instructions, graphic descriptions of non-consensual sexual acts...and no meaningful way to filter any of it.
You and I, we want freedom. Most people seem to prefer content they like, easily accessible. After all, when was the last time you had a personal, friendly discussion via e-mail? 99.999999% of e-mail now are either advertisements, account credentials, billing statements, or business correspondence.
Being able to use my Technics 1200s isn't the only factor. I have a pair of Shure M44-7 needles, as well as a pair of Ortofon Clubs, which have a tip of a particular size. If HD vinyl is fitting louder tracks at higher fidelity, and more of them, onto a 12" vinyl record, then the grooves *have* to be more narrow. Will I need new needles for these? If not, won't my wider needles just wear them out faster? If neither of these are true, is it because of a tougher material that is more resistant to wear at the expense of the stylus?
The information here is unclear regarding whether I'll need nothing but a record. However, the *real* question is whether there will be any music pressed on HD vinyl that will truly leverage the medium. Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" is great, but I doubt they will an end-to-end remaster from the original recordings, themselves in good enough shape, to warrant listening with the format. Modern stuff that's compressed to hell and generated in Ableton or Logic isn't going to sound any better. Perhaps new recordings of classical works might be the closest thing, but I'd argue that even these are going to have a very small audience; said audience is more likely to see a live performance by the local philharmonic.
I never understood the animosity to the Windows 8 start screen. What is the use case for the cramped start menu? You are doing one thing, you are looking to launch an application. Why constrain that function to a corner of the screen? One thing, full screen, maximum real estate given to do that one thing. I am not launching an app and also scanning my desktop for some other reason. I switched my Windows 10 back to full screen start.
The full-screen part isn't the source of the animosity. The source is basically everything else. What you call "cramped", I see as "information density". As a go-to example, let's use Magix Vegas, formerly Sony Vegas. Is the program icon under "Magix", "Sony", "Vegas", or "Movie Studio"? With the multi-column paradigm, I can fit 48 items per column, and 6 columns on a 1920x1080 screen. Whichever one of them it's under, it'll be readily apparent in short order. On that same 1920x1080 screen, the Windows 8 Start Screen shows 35 entries - less than a single column in the older paradigm. Given that Windows 8 was rarely run on a tablet, for 99% of people the reduction in information density wasn't a tradeoff for which they received a benefit. Additional annoyances involved the 'charms' menu for which a UI cue was never implemented, and an unintuitive pinning procedure. Now, the go-to answer is always "just type what you want!" There's no UI cue for that, either, it's been possible since Windows Vista, and if that's the primary way of launching programs, then congratulations, we're all the way back to a command line paradigm.
As for the Windows Metro UI apps, they are still in Windows 10. I have no problems with those either.
That's fine. There are plenty of reasons to not-like Metro UI apps, not the least of which because of how limited they are.
Cant resize it? Again, what is the use case.
The operating system is literally called "Windows". If MS wanted to use a different paradigm, fine, call it "Tiles" and see how well that works. You're stating that you don't understand the animosity, yet you require users to justify their preferences. "Because f'k you, that's why" is the only necessary reason as to why window resizing over tiling is preferred. I may well want to see just the status bar of a background process, which takes 3% of a screen rather than 25. Snapping is helpful, tiling is useful, but to assume every situation lends itself to not-windowing is shortsighted.
You can tile them on the screen. Dock them to the sides. Arrange them to see multiple apps at once. I don;t see the issue.
Few argue the problem. Most argue the requirement.
Unity uses over a quarter of the screen for the launcher, is someone bitching about that? Not as much, because it's "Linux" and we are used to it being schizophrenic in UI design. *SMH*
Well, first off, you just called using a quarter of the screen a schizophrenic UI design while arguing that full screen was acceptable earlier. Second, the Unity UI also spent the last few years receiving its share of criticism. Finally, Linux has options on that front; using Kubuntu or Xubuntu or Ubuntu Mate are all entirely viable and listed on the main Ubuntu download page, and tutorials for switching between them are incredibly easy to find and follow. Linux makes it far easier to change one's desktop environment than Windows, and while I would love nothing more than to be able to load up a Windows computer and end up in KDE or Cinnamon, the system just doesn't do that.
And yes, I own and use a Windows 10 phone as my primary communications device and it is better by design. I don't need your stinking 'droid apps :P
I'm with you here. I've got maybe three dozen apps on my phone, in total, over half of which are either rooting/backup tools, or apps that could be readily replaced with a website if the developers wanted to put the slightest effort into one.
I we just reported the 2 companies that didn't hand over our data.
Blockbuster and Funcoland.
The issue isn't an advertising model. Virtually everyone with a Facebook account understands that. The issue at hand is the incredibly pervasive data harvesting even for users who don't have accounts, lack of transparency to users, and then selling it to the highest bidder. If you do not understand that this is the problem at hand, then kindly take your billions and let someone else handle running your company - or at least your PR department.
Warm regards,
Voyager529
The reason the streaming options are popular is because it's entirely possible for nontechnical people to call up their technical friend (and by "technical" I mean "can follow a Youtube tutorial"), hand them a Fire Stick, and add streaming plugins. These people aren't doing anything terribly different than what they do with Netflix or Hulu, just a different icon.
Moreover, the experience involves "having all the things in one place". No going to Netflix for this show (except that one episode where there's a license discrepancy over a song's usage so it's unavailable), then Hulu for that one, Crackle for the next, then CBS All Access for yet another one, HBO Go for still another...it doesn't matter what show someone wants to see, all the episodes are available, on demand.
Netflix mostly-had this situation under control, then everyone wanted their pound of flesh, which turned Netflix into half original content, and half "the refrigerator the night before grocery shopping". Even if the content producers wanted to charge a premium for their section of content, but still allow Netflix to handle the streaming, I think that model would make everyone happy..but alas, it does not.
Finally, I've always kinda wondered what's in it for the sites who serve the streaming files. At least torrent sites can say "community" and "advertising/donation revenue", but the sites that serve the streams can claim none of the above, have to pay the bandwidth and server bills, and have a bullseye painted on them from the *AA...so, all of the liability, none of the perks. I don't get it :/.
P.S. in case anyone was wondering, I don't own one of these devices, nor have I ever modded such a device for anyone.
Look, I'll be the first one to say that Windows Update in Win10 is basically indistinguishable from malware at this point. The forced updates are written with the assumption that the user wants them, that the software is an improvement over the old, and that the user's time is better spent waiting for the update to complete than whatever it is they would otherwise be doing with their computer.
All of these problems need to be solved. However, I will acknowledge the intermediate step being taken here. The amount of time an update takes to install is a major part of the problem here. If the monthly updates took five minutes and the semi-annual updates took 30, instead of the hours they currently take, I think it would go a long way to solving the other issues.
The massive question mark here is the hardware being used to make these claims. "a current-gen i7 with 32GB of RAM and a high end Intel SSD" taking half an hour? That's crap. "a six year old Celeron with a 5400RPM, 250GB laptop drive and 4GB of RAM" taking half an hour, on the other hand, is pretty impressive.
if DRM has taught us anything its that aggravating someone is the worst way to get them to participate in a market.
Well, to be fair, the argument against DRM had to do with the fact that it affects users who have already directly paid for the content. People streaming on Youtube haven't paid for the content, and thus must pay with some other means.
Youtube streaming is largely for convenience of getting to a single song easily; whether it would result in users paying for the tracks, paying for Spotify Premium or similar, or 'doing without' would accomplish the labels' goals...but the bigger concern I have is whether we'll see a renaissance in a Limewire-like service, which helps no one.
It did work for Netscape. While the company died, its technology lives on in our Firefox browsers.
I don't see that as a bad thing. Keep in mind all the niche iterations - Palemoon, Iceweasel, Seamonkey, and so on. None have critical mass, but all benefit from Netscape.
However for the most part it is like putting your trash on a freighter and sending it over to a third would country to see if any of those people wants your trash.
If the alternative is burning it or burying it, and we're dealing with industrial or consumer waste as opposed to food waste or other biohazards, then that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'd far rather some industrious third world people disassemble a curling iron to heat their water or whatever, rather than just assume it's all actual-junk and burn it. Getting back to the matter at hand, it's not like WebOS can do much worse with its code out in the open. Maybe no one will want to develop for it, but with iOS not being open source at all, and Android becoming progressively more and more closed, an OSS "third horse" is far from an undesirable thing to have.
Now there was a lot of love towards WebOS and many and was ahead of its time in a lot of features. However the question for today is it worth it, with the competitors over the past decade had improved their products, and what was ahead of its time, is now behind the times.
Well, yes, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, either. See, the past decade has showed us what has worked and what hasn't. Software features which weren't available then, can be readily added now. Those who wish to write those enhancements can do so with the awareness that these are standard features and know their code won't be ignored, and there is a template for the finalized product already. These are all good things.
WebOS is akin to BeOS, Amiga, Apple Lisa, Osborn, Sega Dreamcast... Good ideas, just implemented at a time where was too ambitious and people didn't need such features on particular hardware.
I'd argue that in WebOS's case, the issue was the hardware itself. A plastic phone with chiclet keys that was very prone to breaking in a number of different ways and was a Sprint exclusive...was far from a compelling offer. I always thought Apotheker seemed to have a good idea with using WebOS as a pre-boot environment to unify the company's phone/tablet/laptop offerings, but that never came to pass for some reason. In any case, the fact that it didn't take off 10 years ago is far from a compelling argument that it shouldn't find its way onto Github now.
You save your plays until 2024 unless you want to tip your hand and risk being scooped. It might make sense to throw your hat into the ring in 2020 and get your name out there, but you do NOT put your platform out there. It'll just have 4 extra years to be dismantled, attacked, made irrelevant, or copied.
That depends on your ultimate endgame. If the founders of Whole Foods were looking to get rich off people who were willing to buy all-natural, non-GMO snake oil, then yeah, the fact that most supermarkets increased their organic / non-GMO / lower-salt-and-sweetener options is a bad thing. If the founders were trying to help kick-start the improvement of the quality of groceries for everyone, then having a number of such products available everywhere is a positive change. Likewise, if a more popular DNC candidate scoops the platform for 2020, it's bad if Yang actually wants to be president, but good if he wants the UBI idea to gain traction regardless of who does it.
Tepples gives two reasons that are far better solved with actual-text than low-res images. If QZ's means of addressing the issues described by Tepples is both less effective and more complicated, then it's not a conspiracy to say that there's another 'problem' being 'solved' with image-based articles.
WTF is wrong with Microsoft that I can attempt to open a PDF in MS Server 2014, and it STILL can't handle it natively?!?
Are they waiting to see if PDF will "take off"? Are they waiting to see if their "PDF-Killer" XPS will win-out (hint: It won't). Or what?!?
What morons.
Microsoft ships Win10 with a "print to PDF" option out of the box.
Also, they natively open PDFs in Edge, to the point of restoring the file association with every major upgrade.
So, you got exactly what you wanted, in the exact Microsoft way of handling such a situation. I hope you're happy.
I think the GP's point was that the website is sending stories in image format. Both purposes you state are solved by using garden variety text; even the lowest resolution photo takes more data to transmit, and increases the time of the first meaningful paint, than just transmitting text. Since the site is intentionally using methods that are less effective at accomplishing either task you suggest, then it stands to reason that there are other reasons to be putting stories in an image format.
But seriously, you're undoing all the progress we've won
Netflix has the lowest streaming selection it's had in a very long time. CBS pulled lots of their stuff because All Access, Disney is pulling their stuff next year, HBO has always marched to their own drum; Amazon, Hulu, and Youtube Red have their own exclusives as well. Even if a particular individual were willing to subscribe to all of these services, or a preferred subset, it's impossible to do an aggregate search and play a piece of content from whoever owns it. Moreover, while Netflix has a client on basically-everything, even for users willing to switch apps to switch shows, the availability of the different 'apps' for many smart TVs and streaming modules hinges entirely on firmware updates that are unlikely to actually come.
Ultimately, paying per-publisher with an aggregating application that can access disparate paid sources is probably the best compromise that would work for both camps...but I'm not holding my breath for that sort of cooperation.
what about letting us have lan servers and our own hosted ones that can run the mods and maps we want to run?
There are still a handful of games which do this. The most recent release of Unreal Tournament does so, as does Civ VI. A great resource is this page:
http://www.langamelist.com/ind...
Which lists out games exclusively by the ability to do LAN-based multiplayer.
Ah, the two companies I love the most getting together
Just wait until the collaboration between EA and Comcast, powered by Oracle!
This only comes into the conversation when it's RMS levels of repair. If it were only down to the secure enclave, baseband, and other similar SoC items, this wouldn't really be a problem.
I'd wager that the top five hardware items to repair on the iPhone are as follows:
1. Cracked screen.
2. EoL battery.
3. Lightning connector.
4. Home button.
5. silent switch / volume buttons / power button.
Each of these are reasonably-modular things that a reasonably skilled individual could perform; Youtube tutorials abound for virtually all of these, and none of them interfere with the need for DRM. If these five repairs were possible to do with DIY kits or authorized repair facilities, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Wow, seriously, no one can think of some possibilities here?
"Alexa, file a helpdesk ticket about the WiFi not working."
"Alexa, we need more coffee for the break room. Order some Kopi Luwak."
"Alexa, laugh maniacally whenever Steve says 'development'."
"Alexa, please translate the last several minutes of the VP of Marketing's presentation into actual English."
"Alexa, it's cold in here, turn up the thermostat." *next cubicle over* "Alexa, it's hot in here, turn down the thermostat."
A beta for one distro is news? Ubuntu has been falling in popularity according to many sources. This is a late release of only a beta. Why is this news?
I agree that a beta release is a bit much for a headline. However, Ubuntu news is still worth keeping apprised of. It's lower on the Distrowatch download stats, for sure, but Ubuntu has a sizeable ecosystem around it. Everything from half-decent forums to Youtube tutorials, to the fact that downstream distros like Crunchbang, Mythbuntu, Blackbox, and Gallium, are groups impacted by new Ubuntu releases.
The good/bad part about rolling release Linux distros is that releases aren't necessarily released as a result of groundbreaking new features being added. Moreover, while Ubuntu proper might be falling in popularity at a desktop level, if you add in Mint, the numbers hold up. Finally, it's pretty challenging to truly assess the popularity of a Linux distro; Debian runs lots of my infrastructure primarily due to it being the basis of the Turnkey Linux appliances but Debian isn't exactly getting credit for it.
If the SJWs want to make their own Star Wars series, let them. They did that with Mass Effect Andromeda. Look how that turned out, Mass Effect is now dead.
I'm actually on my second play-through of ME:A at the moment. I really just don't see anything particularly SJW about it. I see that as almost-surprising, given the shoe-in they had for showing some controversy regarding whether the Andromeda Initiative would count as colonialism. This really could have been done very well if there was a third race in Heleus besides the nearly-angelic Angara and the one-dimensional, conquest-driven Kett. It also was a near-perfect setup for there to have been an AGW angle to it - a planet where a vault was necessary because the Angarans had caused climate change through industrialization again would have been easy pickin's for such a topic.
I saw none of it. Really, I didn't. Both Scott and Sara have male and female love interests, but homosexual love interests have been a part of Mass Effect ever since Femshep caught a glimpse of Liara's sideboob.
No, the reason ME:A was a bust was because they did a whole lot of design-by-committee. Lots of open world quests that were simple time sinks which take away from the otherwise-fairly-short main quest, loyalty missions that were generally pointless, political issues on the Nexus that were used as plot devices rather than actually-explored the way they should have been, a story that thoroughly contradicts itself throughout the narrative, a combat system that's ultimately very good but an incredibly jarring difference for players who wrapped up ME3 the week prior, dialogue choices which seldom impact more than the NPC's next line of dialog, and characters that are either direct copy/pastes from ME1 (Drack), poor copy/pastes from ME1 (Vetra), or just outright abysmal (Liam). Ironically, the one thing they did reasonably well was give it a solid ending sequence.
No, ME:A has lots of issues with it, but though I keep hearing the "SJW BS" line, I'm open to examples because I was hard pressed to find many of them.
Rather than ditching Android you could always just use one of the many firewall options. AFWall+, for example, is open source and lets me deny network access on a per-application basis. It also lets me allow access only through a VPN, which accomplishes part of what you're talking about. It doesn't allow spoofing your location through location services, only through IP geolocation via VPN, but... you can always just turn off location services and use a more trusted program for maps if you need it. (Admittedly, I never use maps so this is something that I don't care about.)
The issue isn't the incompatibility of Xprivacy in a direct sense, but rather the framework behind it. Rooting is becoming progressively more difficult, and a firewall that can affect system apps is going to require root. Even when root is possible, Xposed is getting less and less universal. A firewall isn't really enough because there are apps like Whatsapp that I want to have access to the internet, but not to my location or contacts. The same goes for the web browser and Instagram, among others.