I dunno about that. Seems like that could devolve into shouting matches or physical fights (or even shootings) pretty quick. Too much interactivity might incite riots. I think there's a time and place for things.
Not that I'm advocating for riots or shootings, but events where companies basically enable users to incite shouting matches and (figuratively) drag incompetent devs and management through the mud is exactly what the industry needs.
Nobody cares about backwards compatibility, competent UIs, optimizing for resource frugality, useful status indicators, or a dozen other software paradigms that have fallen to the wayside in the past decade. Amongst the reasons for this is the fact that there is basically no accountability to customers anymore, and no concern of user revolt. If there was, Quickbooks would be half its size, twice its speed, and thrice its stability. Windows 10 simply wouldn't exist in its present form. Oracle...
While I'm not outright advocating for violence and I realize that such a paradigm is likely to end up with a mob mentality on both sides, I think instilling a little fear into some managers and project developers would do wonders to improve the software industry.
You'll be delighted to know that in the years since xprivacy came out, iOS now lets you set a "only use location services while using the app" for each app. Applications have to be able to function with this restriction.
That does a solid job in this one particular instance, I agree. Once Xprivacy stops being viable on Android, I may be stuck going to iOS explicitly for this reason; Android allows apps to refuse to run if the app is told it doesn't have location or contact data or whatever.
The thing Xprivacy does better than iOS is give that sort of control to system apps. Additionally, Xprivacy allows me to deny network/internet access to apps, even on a per-domain basis (I can allow appdomain.com traffic, but deny graph.facebook.com, for example). iOS does not provide this function; everyone can talk to anyone. Finally, Xprivacy allows users to intentionally falsify location data to particular apps. I can use Google Maps the way its intended, but simultaneously tell Moviepass that I'm at the movie theater...and remain there for eleven days straight before returning to the north pole instantly...that sort of thing.
XPrivacy has not been updated in years, and the Git repo is archived by the owner. I wish there were a fork of this that was actively maintained. It used to be a must have because it would allow apps that had to slurp up info all the info they could ever want... fresh from/dev/urandom or/dev/zero.
Agreed, but my experience thus far has been that Xprivacy is "good enough"; vi isn't exactly receiving weekly updates, either.
As far an an actively maintained option, Protect My Privacy is a good option, but I'm not really a fan because of its "hieroglyphics interface" - unlabeled icons and unclear statuses, rather than the words "allow" and "deny", etc. I thought apps were denied access to things, but then weren't because I set them wrong and wasn't clear on it. Xprivacy might be unmaintained, but the UI is far more functional.
Who knows why but the value of streaming music isn't considered as valuable as a service which allows download and ownership.
A dead tree copy of 1984 sits on my bookshelf. If there is a dispute with a publisher, they can kindly request it back if they want, but it is illegal for them to come into my house to repossess it, even if they leave my purchase price in exchange.
A copy of 1984 was purchased by thousands of people on an Amazon Kindle. There was a dispute with a publisher. Amazon deleted the book from all of those Kindles.
If I buy a season of a TV show on DVD, I can continue to watch it even if Best Buy stops selling that season.
If I stream a season of TV from Netflix, and Netflix removes the series from the catalog on the next contractual go-round, I am unable to continue watching that season.
Now, some pedant is going to reply with saying, "you don't own anything but the physical medium and a license to consume the content!" This is true. In practice though, retaining the physical medium of distribution has been the most effective way of ensuring continued access to content. That is why it is more valuable than trusting a streaming service to not-remove that content.
XPrivacy user here...and by 'user', I mean 'multi-time donor' and 'will not buy a phone unless I know it can run Xprivacy'.
Xprivacy is excellent, but users must be aware of what they're getting into. If you use it just to deny location data from downloaded apps, you're probably fine. If you decide to set it so apps are unconditionally denied calendar and contact data, again, you're probably fine. However, Xprivacy can get you into trouble. It's the first thing I install, primarily because I use it to deny system apps access to various forms of data as well. I also have it set to prompt for other sorts of data, especially internet - Swype doesn't get internet access at all, for example. If you set it to prompt you, it will give you a number of UAC-style prompts when you first start the app. If you apply Xprivacy to system apps, you *will* spend ten minutes after your next reboot allowing and denying permissions to things, and doing so without being careful can get you stuck in a boot loop...ask me how I know this.
It takes time and dedication to make Xprivacy stabilize, but it's also pretty impressive how well it also acts as a de facto alert system. It's amazing how much Facebook Messenger hates it, especially when I deny it access to my contacts...which is why I use a combination of the mobile website and Frost instead. Similarly, it's almost scary going through the log of denied things, to see exactly how many times my location was requested from things which clearly didn't need it.
All in all, Xprivacy is why I'm still on Android - it's the only mobile OS with a tool like it. It does, however, require dedication and a willingness to put up with a less-smooth phone experience, but that's the cost of liberty.
If I could add anything to it, it's that Hillary engaged heavily in identity politics and bet the farm on that. That might not have been so bad if it was a matter of saying "less-privileged people need a voice", but it commonly morphed into, "if we deem that you have privilege, we demand your silence". That's not the sort of thing which helps in a general election.
Exactly, thus my comment. The game companies don't care why you bought a Mac, just that people with Macs buy their games. I have no idea what the Venn diagram looks like for "people who buy Macs" and "people who will buy Vulkan-enabled games", but clearly someone thinks it's a good business move. Mac owners in general are more willing to buy software, so there's that.
I think the bigger draw is not OSX compatibility per-say; OSX compatibility is all but a happy accident. Right now, desktop gaming is largely the realm of DirectX. You've got a few early adopters and a few more OpenGL-based games, but a whole lot is tied to a proprietary MS technology. This is helpful if you're designing a AAA game intended to be compiled for the Xbox as well, but with all the stuff Microsoft is doing with Windows 10, there's some genuine FUD going on. There is a very-rational concern that Microsoft is going to start getting heavy handed with DirectX. Now, EA is probably fine, but if you're not EA, betting on DirectX is a concerning proposition.
By contrast, Vulkan is a far easier development platform than OpenGL ever was, and cross-compiling for OSX and Linux is far simpler than is possible with DirectX. From what I understand, some simpler games would be possible to target mobile platforms with not-that-much additional coding. If Vulkan can live up to this possibility, it means that if Microsoft makes DirectX 14 a UWP-only affair, developers aren't stuck playing ball with Microsoft's app store to sell their games, and while garden variety Win32 is widely used for gaming, the valiant efforts of both Ballmer and Nadella to make the Windows Store a viable place to get apps has not been terribly successful. Even if DirectX remains dominant but Vulkan gets even 20% market share, it may be enough to dissuade MS from pulling those sorts of shenanigans to prevent everyone from jumping ship and losing the gaming market on Windows.
As time goes on new technology advances making such trade offs lessen and should be brought back, so you get regain some advantage that had been lost.
Well yes...but when enough is lost, pining for the 'good old days' goes beyond nostalgia and becomes the hope for a renaissance.
Nostalgia looks back and forgets lots of DRM systems that were used in the earlier days. One can avoid doing that while also looking for some sort of sensible compromise that reduces casual copying while also not requiring the draconian levels that are present today.
Nostalgia looks back and exclusively remembers good discussions on Usenet. One can look back and remember the spam and trolling problems while also appreciating its near-perfect hybrid of centralized and decentralized paradigms and the fact that the technological inability to have any sort of filtering or algorithmic capacities at the server level left it up to users to decide what they did or did not want to see, in contrast to Facebook constantly having issues on this front.
Nostalgia looks back and remembers that dial-up ISPs had far more competition than broadband providers do in most of the country. It's possible to appreciate that while also not-appreciating 28.8k internet speeds.
We solved plenty of problems, but exchanged them for others. Whether it is a beneficial exchange is an exercise for the reader.
Never understood why DVDs and Blu-Rays come bundled with download codes.
The content is literally on the disc you purchased why bother to enter a code or download it from the Internet (I assume with strings attached) when you can just copy content of disc and play it on anything you want?
1. As others have pointed out, I would argue that the number of devices used to watch movies which do not have an optical drive exceed the number of devices which do. Download codes solve that problem for those use cases. 2. The MPAA long ago made it clear that they desired a world where DVD ripping wasn't a common practice, despite the fact that CD ripping was commonplace. "Just copy the content of the disc" is something that the MPAA has technological measures, copyright law, and case law on their side. AnyDVD may well be in a place that is difficult to prosecute, rest assured that the only reason this is the case is because it remains a niche. 3. The MPAA also learned that convenience wins over liberty. Vudu, Ultraviolet, and the iTunes codes are "take picture of code with phone, download/stream movie". For most people, this experience is "good enough", such that "cross compatible MP4/MKV files" aren't an advantage to most of those people, especially when encoding takes hours on their not-i7 processors and the purchase of a USB optical drive is likely needed. 4. Download codes give the MPAA a far greater amount of control. Passing files around is impossible (and if it's attempted it's trivial to figure out the source), sharing through Plex libraries is impossible, and in the case of the services where streaming is used, they get viewing statistics and user profiles on top of it.
And those would be the reasons I can think of off the top of my head.
Wouldn't it be easier to write a replacement dick-pic sharing app than go to all this trouble of creating a poll?
tl;dr: no.
Snapchat usage instructions: 1. install app. 2. create account, or just choose the 'sign in with facebook' option and grant permissions. 3. add other users by scanning their QR code, or let it scrape your contacts and auto-add. 4. exchange images of genitals. 5. create petition when a bad UI somehow manages to get even worse by going to a website expressly created for the purpose.
OpenSnap usage instructions: 1. install app. There may be options here, including ones that retain images even when they're not supposed to. 2. find someone with an authentication server and create an account there. If you can't find one...
a. spin up LAMP stack. You've got dedicated hardware for this, right? If not, you're cool with dropping $50 on a VPS, right?
b. install OpenSnap Server, configure port forwards, purchase domain so you can get an SSL cert, buy certificate or configure certbot, enable authentication, configure firewall, implement ways to prevent spammers from creating a bunch of accounts, make sure it is seamless, then make sure you can keep a solid at-least 99% uptime......
3. federate with other OpenSnap Server operators to facilitate communication between server hosts. Also, you'll have to figure out which servers are possible to federate to, and which ones are safe.
4. convince a bunch of other people to install OpenSnap.
5. exchange images of genitals....and all of that assumes that OpenSnap is already programmed by competent programmers such that the only thing to do is sysadmin the app.
Now, you could go the other way and create NotSnapChat, with the same core functions, but the reality is that Instagram, WhatsApp, and Viber already support expiring messages and have infrastructure and millions of users, so it'll be a bit of an uphill battle.
That...is a rather tall expectation of the sorts of folks who use SnapChat enough to call the old layout 'easy to use'.
I thought most everyone switched to qbitorrent years ago when they started showing ads and other strange things. My main tracker doesn't even allow Utorrent anymore. I'm guessing q isn't affected by this?
Or Transmission or Deluge or Vuze or Tixati or rTorrent/rutorrent...really basically anything is better, but uTorrent got in right when Azureus started trying to add bloat to reinvent itself and Transmission was still not available on Windows, and then once all the tutorials used it began to morph into the abomination it is now.
Even so, version 2.2.1 is the 'completed' version that is sufficiently used that it's the google autocomplete for "utorrent", and according to another poster here, it isn't vulnerable to this attack.
Swype started out pretty early - its original release was for Windows Mobile 6.5. Their original business model was to charge OEMs to add it to the stock firmware as an option; prior to Google and Samsung shipping with swipe-based keyboards, handsets shipped with them or didn't; it wasn't available in the Android Market and only later was released as a public beta. Nuance later bought them out and added Dragon Dictation and such.
That being said, their use of telemetry is well-known - it made me super happy to have Xprivacy so the keyboard was never able to access the internet, and to be fair, they did seem to add trending words as they became progressively more popular (and suggested them less as popularity waned). Few doubt they have amassed a pretty impressive word-to-usage database, as well as word pairs - I was pleasantly surprised that they suggest "Effect" after the word "Mass". That data is certainly useful as a starting point for a number of linguistic AI algorithms.
To use this data as a starting point for AI? Seems reasonable. To assume that a startup in 2008 planned it all out to create an AI ("but first we need data"), or that Nuance bought it for reasons other than "because they wanted to have a mobile presence", is giving them far too much credit.
Not that this is overly practical or ultimately secure. But the problem is that the *original* can now easily be altered by too many evil monkeys (not that this is a surprise).
One counter measure that offers some–if not even nearly perfect–protection would be to go back to analog/analogue. Sure, photographic film has always been retouched and altered for ill reasons (seems all totalitarian regimes are experts in that – hey, Russia...). But altering movie film is fairly painful, especially on smaller formats (lots of really small pictures like Super 8). And at least right now it would have to be done by hand.
I see where you're going with this, and I like the idea in theory. However, the problem is that the requirement would need to be an end-to-end analog signal. There can be no digital conversion at any point in the chain in order for this solution to be practical...and at this point, that's basically impossible.
Even if it's film + telecine + analog broadcast, good luck finding an all-analog video room in a broadcast studio in 2018 since TV signals have to be digital now. If it's shown on Youtube (or Facebook or any other internet-based video distribution medium), it's digital and the game is over because there's no guarantee of whether it was converted to digital immediately before broadcast, or immediately after filming and found its way through Final Cut Pro on the way to the broadcast studio. Moreover, anyone still having such a setup would be someone like CBS or some other broadcaster who still hasn't upgraded for some reason, and is thus going to have a lot of difficulty getting traction. Real news filmed in analog needs to preserve that end-to-end chain of trust for this to be a solution, but an altered video requires no such constraints. A few thousand people will see your video at best, while a fake video posted on Youtube and trending on Twitter will be seen by tens of millions overnight.
Finally, there's the purely philosophical issue. Someone willing to go end to end analog is going to need to carry lots of unwieldy equipment around and will be very conspicuous. Someone holding an iPhone is not. Carrying that gear is a planned and prepped event. Carrying an iPhone is not. A willingness to show the original film to someone to verify its authenticity is only going to work until the 'wrong' person asks and confiscates the film using bigger gun diplomacy. Real-time cloud backup is not an option.
Ultimately, I think the theory works at a high level, and thank you for continuing to use analog film...but really, in practice, using analog as a de facto chain of trust is virtually impossible to do, and even if it is done, its audience is orders of magnitude smaller than the fake news it seeks to combat.
Software can be cross-platform if that's one of the goals of the developer.
VLC is the best video player out there -- and it works for Linux/Windows/MacOS. So is Libre Office and Microsoft has even managed develop a cross-platform code editor -- and each one is in an entirely different programming language (C++/Java/Javascript respectively).
Will there be a day when developers mostly write cross-platform software? One can hope.
These aren't the greatest examples.
VLC is the sort of app that "if it works, great, if not, there's the forum/wiki/IRC, if it doesn't work, go use one of a dozen other media playback applications", and have that be a practical answer. LibreOffice also doesn't really have to care. Visual Studio is on the other end of the spectrum and is the product of Microsoft wanting to keep Visual Studio the go-to choice of developers who prefer Linux and are perfectly happy using Eclipse instead.
Writing cross-platform applications means testing and supporting multiple OSes. Linux is particularly difficult because of how many individual components are iterated slightly differently - if it's all CLI then yeah, make a shell script to pull all the dependencies, but it's not nearly that simple for GUI stuff...and there are a thousand cottage industries who rely on Windows software to file taxes, take MRIs, control sign making equipment, and handle plenty of other things whereby supporting Windows is tough enough, and supporting Linux is the chicken-and-egg problem that no one dependent on their software uses Linux because they are dependent on their software.
Also, Quickbooks. Intuit has been screwing people over so long there is zero incentive to change for them.
LOL you're a fucking moron, 10 years ago the world didn't run on social media, now news travel fast, very fast.
AMD is killing Intel in performance and prices, that's what the customers see, not what AMD fucking released 10 years ago.
You think like a moron, stop thinking with Intel's dick in your mouth.
Normally I would just ignore the AC who can't spell my name right...
We agree that AMD's mainline CPUs are at least equivalent, if not superior, to Intel's offerings. The issue isn't that AMD had very low end processors a decade ago, but that AMD's low end processors have been the most readily accessible to customers for the past decade. The brief time when AMD beat Intel to 64-bit desktop CPUs with the Athlon64 line was the last time, to my recollection, that midrange machines sporting both Intel and AMD shared shelf space side by side in most computer retailers. Since about the Core 2 Duo/Quad era, it's been rare to see a midrange or high end laptop or desktop with an AMD processor; it's the sub-$400 machine space where AMD has been hanging out for a very long time.
Now yes, people like you and I know better. My last two NAS builds, along with my homebrew cable box, are all FX-6300 based (as are three others I built for friends and clients). My original post indicates that I've got a pair of Opteron-based Poweredge servers functioning as routers. I've personally bought more AMD processors than Intel processors, because they deliver solid performance at a good price (and are a good fit for FreeNAS because they support ECC RAM at 1/3 the price of a Xeon).
Go to Bestbuy.com and filter laptops by Ryzen5 and Ryzen7 processors. In my region there were precisely two options available. There were three laptops listed with Xeon processors. Over a hundred each for i3's and i5's. 3/4 of the other AMD laptops were in the under-$500 range, with three under $300. Now, you can argue that I'm a moron for using Bestbuy.com as my baseline because everyone shops at Amazon, but I don't have that kind of time and there are still plenty of people unlikely to buy a laptop sight unseen.
This leaves us with the custom build market for the more powerful CPUs to reside, but in my experience, that's still a bit of a crapshoot. It's dumb to recommend AMD wholesale when someone going to Costco is likely to get one of the lower end CPUs in the box, rather than the nicer processors you and I both know they make. There are still some people who are willing to have their machines custom built, but it's a relatively small market that is far less likely to get the sort of social media traction that would be able to stem a decade's worth of inertia.
Even if this ends up being AMD's time to shine and they're able to muscle their way past all of this, Intel can either reduce prices provisionally or can pull some 90's Microsoft back door deals to ensure more prominent advertising and similar, bringing it all back to status quo.
I'm not an Intel shill, but I've watched far BP and Bank of America and Equifax pay virtually no consequences for their poor actions. I do not put it past Intel to do anything different.
Wow. You are a good corporatist there. You never mentioned the affected end users, just Intel and a few other mega corporations. Good job.
Affected end users aren't fabbing their own processors. Affected end users are in a position to decide how much they care, and whether they will buy not-Intel for their next computer. Affected end users may choose AMD, but are unlikely to do so in an impactful manner. Affected end users may have the option to purchase from Samsung if Samsung decides to enter the market. Affected end users will likely end up paying more for Intel, as Intel is likely to simply increase costs to affected end users in order to cover the payout of the lawsuits.
Perhaps I'm assuming more intelligence than is warranted, but I just assumed the UX designers went for "parent proof", and succeeded. Kids use Snapchat specifically because their parents don't.
It's a possibility, but I think Snapchat is inherently more parent-proof because of its anti-retention functions. Trading naughty pics and pejorative comments is far easier if you can keep your phone away from the 'rents for 24 hours; can't get in trouble for what they can't find, and even if they do find it, it limits the fallout vs. a since-forever Whatsapp thread. Additionally, I'd assume that the majority of parents aren't going to want to spend time on a social network that requires constant checking in order to not-miss stuff; parents also have a bit more affinity for looking back on older stuff than teens do and are thus more likely to utilize Whatsapp or Instagram.
While the UI helps, for certain, I would argue that learning a UI is not the only barrier to entry for parents, and those who cared enough would learn the UI.
I mean, thinking this all through, it seems to be a frivolous exercise without some massive shift.
Intel grossed over $60 billion in FY 2016. Even if each of these lawsuits requires Intel to pay $1 billion, and all of them are won, it's less than six months of revenue for them - not fun, but not the corporate equivalent of $150,000 in individual medical debt, either. Intel has enough in the bank to ride the storm, and simply bump up CPU prices by another 15% until the costs are paid...and then leave the prices there.
In a perfect world, this would give AMD the golden opportunity to pick up the slack. The Ryzen line of processors has been met with a whole lot of favorable press; they could easily take over the i3/i5/i7 desktop/laptop markets from a performance perspective. However, AMD has spent the last decade scraping the bottom of the barrel with their A10 processors and similar, low performance CPUs that are almost synonymous with the sub-$400 laptop market, and the hatred that people associate with Windows machines. Even if the shelves at Best Buy became 50/50 between AMD and Intel (as opposed to right now, when there are more Xeon-based laptops available than Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 combined), it's going to take consumers quite a while to realize that AMD makes high end processors, too. Intel sales take a dip, sure, but I don't see AMD managing to truly eat at Intel's market in a way that leaves a lasting impact.
The server room is still Intel's. Dell, HP, and Lenovo have dabbled in a few AMD-based machines (I've got a pair of Opteron-based R415's running as routers myself), but will AMD having misstepped with the Bulldozer architecture and certain server applications being all "we only support Intel", I don't see AMD making massive inroads there either. This is compounded by the likelihood that Dell ordering 0.8X Xeon processors from last year and making up the slack with newer Opterons is going to inevitably involve a higher per-processor price, making their servers more expensive, meaning that if Lenovo keeps their orders up, they will be cost favorable, leaving Dell less able to compete on price unless sysadmins really do start ordering AMD-based servers for their racks.
Now, the one player that really could make a dent would be Samsung - there's not a laptop component they don't make except the processor at this point, so retooling their Exynos chip fabs to make an x86 processor that can compete with an i3 and deliver an end-to-end, single-manufacturer laptop or desktop is in the cards for them, certainly more so than any other manufacturer. If they can pitch one running Android and avoid a Windows license, even better. Even so, it's risky for Samsung, and although they can eat a pretty big loss, trying to capitalize on Intel while they are down and hoping that consumers end up buying a laptop sporting a CPU from relative newcomer is not the kind of gamble that risk-averse execs are likely to go full force on.
In summary, Intel CPU processors will rise, AMD may well be capable of meeting demand but OEMs, retailers, sysadmins, and consumers are going to be a bit skittish about giving AMD a shot when Intel is a known quantity, and while Samsung could probably kick 'em while they're down, it's highly debatable that they will do so. In the end, Intel is likely to just raise prices and the world continues as normal.
people always hate change right? even if it's positive... well not this time. the update actually isn't intuitive.
Well, I mean, to be fair, Snapchat's UI was never intuitive. There were no UI indicators as to whether to tap or swipe or hold, there are virtually no context menus, no 'back' buttons, and very little consistency for tasks in various swipe directions.
The UX designers went for 'trendy minimalism' rather than allowing users with existing understanding of UI paradigms to leverage them. It's easily the worst UI I've worked with, and I configure Sonicwalls for a living.
I completely agree with you - the web as we know it wouldn't exist if HTTP, SMTP, and TCP/IP were some vertical thing that only one company could produce.
The problem is twofold: First off, protocols don't make anyone money. I sincerely doubt the teams who wrote SIP or SSH are millionaires, even though their protocols make the world go round. Even the altruistic folks willing to write such a protocol need to pay the bills.
Second, making an open protocol and then trying to make money off a first party implementation is basically opening the door to competing with one's self. If Snapchat was a protocol, Google and Facebook would integrate the protocol into their respective mobile apps tomorrow. If not that, then someone would write a 'good enough', ad-free OpenSnap and put an APK on Github next week. You don't have to be one of the sharks on Shark Tank to see making an open protocol to a first party app implementation as a problem. Adobe can do that with PDF because they're Adobe, MS can do that with Exchange* because SMTP traffic is one of a dozen protocols it uses.
We see this in Jabber - an open protocol that's pretty solid and well-maintained, enabling real-time text, voice, and video communication, complete with decentralization and anonymity options...and yet its userbase pales in comparison to Whatsapp, Kik, or Viber. I know that Z-Wave is a home automation protocol of some kind, but it's the Philips Hue lights that are prominently displayed on the endcaps of Home Depot and Microcenter. It is just the reality of our modern society that vertical integration is how money is made in the tech world. Pydio and Nextcloud exist, but everyone and their dog has an account with Dropbox and Google Drive.
Protocols are necessary, but they are the result of altruism, not efficacy.
*I am not suggesting MS invented the SMTP protocol, but they are using an open one.
They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...
Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?
I'm torn on this topic because auto-play video ads, floating ads, ads with undesired audio, and ads on overlays have made using websites an absolute chore without ad blocking software. uBlock and friends, however, seem to go too far in the other direction and prevent any ads from being displayed, which is not what I want, either. In theory, Google has the balance right, and I think that having such capabilities built into the dominant web browser is going to instill corrective behavior in the same way that integrated pop-up blockers have brought that ad format to extinction.
However, Google is not the company that should be doing this. They are an ad company. This is the definition of 'conflict of interest'. Google also has an overwhelming market share of online advertising. Facebook admittedly rules the roost on their own platform, but it's not entirely apples to apples since they keep their ads in-house, and even though they're the most popular website on the internet, their decline has begun.
Beyond Google, you end up with small percentages in other areas where AdSense doesn't do the trick - the MSN, Yahoo, and AOL homepages (still seen by millions), the sketchy ad networks like Trafficstars and Taboola that serve up ads to torrent sites and porn sites, and places like DDG who run their own ads on principle for whatever they can get.
Ad networks should never have let things get this far in the first place, and shame on whoever thought it was preferential to do this rather than keep ads a 'necessary evil', as if the pop-up blocker battle of the 90's is forgotten history. I'd throw 'government oversight' into the ring as a solution, but if you're left-of-center, Trump and Ajit aren't going to make any decisions you like, and if you're right-of-center, it's more government oversight in general, which isn't desirable, either. Even if somehow there was a sudden outbreak of common sense from Washington, we start dealing with the same "physical jurisdictions don't apply to the internet" problem. Even a perfectly written and enforced federal law is thwarted by an office move and shifting the VMs to Ireland or Sweden.
To directly answer your question, no, there's no law preventing what you state. However, you're not a multibillion dollar company whose primary income is based on ad revenue with a browser commanding over half the browser market share...in which case, the rules are just a bit different. There's nothing stopping you from writing an operating system and shipping a web browser on it, but you're not Microsoft, you're not telling OEMs they can't ship computers with Chrome on it, and this isn't 1997...so context is involved here.
But really, aren't "algorithms" what are used by humans anyway? Input data, apply logic and other constraints, eliminate some options, rinse and repeat until a 'best course of action' is shown? Or, is Watson "AI" and thus totally different? Or, is this a matter of deep learning, with blockchain technology being integrated next quarter?
I know buzzword bingo is nothing new, but it really, really feels like nobody remembers anything anymore.
(cue all the trolls who jump in and claim that rooting is no longer necessary and serves no purpose. Don't bother, you're wrong.)
Thank you!
"Why do you need to root?" "Because f'k you, that's why." Even if it's for the pure reason of retaining ownership of the device, out of pure principle rooting needs to remain a mainstay.
Still, there are reasons to root. Arguably the biggest one is that apps that shouldn't be set as 'system', and thus are unremovable, are. Shipping with them, fine, I get it. Preventing their removal is unacceptable and shame on both Google and the OEMs for allowing this practice. In many cases, the XDA community will release a ROM based on a more recent version of Android than the OEM will release, extending the life of the hardware. Also, Xprivacy/PMP. In one case, my mom's tablet kept updating in a way that prevents the Play Store from working...so I had to root it to block the update so it would continue to work.
I don't understand the idea of people saying, "I don't need a rooted phone, so I will argue that no one else does". I never argue that everyone should have root access on their phones, but I do argue that they should be able to have it if they so choose. Those who argue the inverse forget history.
It's sad that a company keeping software roughly the same for 5 years is considered "news". Microsoft and other real software companies often support their products for a decade or more, believe it or not.
Well, I think the more newsworthy part is that Google has a piece of software which continues to function for users of relatively ancient devices and operating systems. Since the company is notorious for depreciating products at a whim, it's surprising that anything but their search engine has that amount of backwards compatibility available to it.
Moreover, MS is in a bit of a different position with respect to supporting software for a decade - it's typically locally installed. I've got Windows 98 install CDs that will still happily install and run on hardware capable of handling it - it's not dependent on the mothership for anything. By contrast, the locally installed component of Google Maps is basically responsible for figuring out which map data is needed from Google, getting that map data, and then showing it with a blue dot on the screen. If Google made changes to the back end, the installed copy would load, and proceed to go nowhere, or throw an error message, or something.
Essentially, it's not surprising that the old mobile apps still start, it's that Google has been mindful to make sure that improvements to the back end are still usable by the last.1% of people still using very old hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno about that. Seems like that could devolve into shouting matches or physical fights (or even shootings) pretty quick. Too much interactivity might incite riots. I think there's a time and place for things.
Not that I'm advocating for riots or shootings, but events where companies basically enable users to incite shouting matches and (figuratively) drag incompetent devs and management through the mud is exactly what the industry needs.
Nobody cares about backwards compatibility, competent UIs, optimizing for resource frugality, useful status indicators, or a dozen other software paradigms that have fallen to the wayside in the past decade. Amongst the reasons for this is the fact that there is basically no accountability to customers anymore, and no concern of user revolt. If there was, Quickbooks would be half its size, twice its speed, and thrice its stability. Windows 10 simply wouldn't exist in its present form. Oracle...
While I'm not outright advocating for violence and I realize that such a paradigm is likely to end up with a mob mentality on both sides, I think instilling a little fear into some managers and project developers would do wonders to improve the software industry.
You'll be delighted to know that in the years since xprivacy came out, iOS now lets you set a "only use location services while using the app" for each app. Applications have to be able to function with this restriction.
That does a solid job in this one particular instance, I agree. Once Xprivacy stops being viable on Android, I may be stuck going to iOS explicitly for this reason; Android allows apps to refuse to run if the app is told it doesn't have location or contact data or whatever.
The thing Xprivacy does better than iOS is give that sort of control to system apps. Additionally, Xprivacy allows me to deny network/internet access to apps, even on a per-domain basis (I can allow appdomain.com traffic, but deny graph.facebook.com, for example). iOS does not provide this function; everyone can talk to anyone. Finally, Xprivacy allows users to intentionally falsify location data to particular apps. I can use Google Maps the way its intended, but simultaneously tell Moviepass that I'm at the movie theater...and remain there for eleven days straight before returning to the north pole instantly...that sort of thing.
XPrivacy has not been updated in years, and the Git repo is archived by the owner. I wish there were a fork of this that was actively maintained. It used to be a must have because it would allow apps that had to slurp up info all the info they could ever want... fresh from /dev/urandom or /dev/zero.
Agreed, but my experience thus far has been that Xprivacy is "good enough"; vi isn't exactly receiving weekly updates, either.
As far an an actively maintained option, Protect My Privacy is a good option, but I'm not really a fan because of its "hieroglyphics interface" - unlabeled icons and unclear statuses, rather than the words "allow" and "deny", etc. I thought apps were denied access to things, but then weren't because I set them wrong and wasn't clear on it. Xprivacy might be unmaintained, but the UI is far more functional.
Who knows why but the value of streaming music isn't considered as valuable as a service which allows download and ownership.
A dead tree copy of 1984 sits on my bookshelf. If there is a dispute with a publisher, they can kindly request it back if they want, but it is illegal for them to come into my house to repossess it, even if they leave my purchase price in exchange.
A copy of 1984 was purchased by thousands of people on an Amazon Kindle. There was a dispute with a publisher. Amazon deleted the book from all of those Kindles.
If I buy a season of a TV show on DVD, I can continue to watch it even if Best Buy stops selling that season.
If I stream a season of TV from Netflix, and Netflix removes the series from the catalog on the next contractual go-round, I am unable to continue watching that season.
Now, some pedant is going to reply with saying, "you don't own anything but the physical medium and a license to consume the content!" This is true. In practice though, retaining the physical medium of distribution has been the most effective way of ensuring continued access to content. That is why it is more valuable than trusting a streaming service to not-remove that content.
XPrivacy user here...and by 'user', I mean 'multi-time donor' and 'will not buy a phone unless I know it can run Xprivacy'.
Xprivacy is excellent, but users must be aware of what they're getting into. If you use it just to deny location data from downloaded apps, you're probably fine. If you decide to set it so apps are unconditionally denied calendar and contact data, again, you're probably fine. However, Xprivacy can get you into trouble. It's the first thing I install, primarily because I use it to deny system apps access to various forms of data as well. I also have it set to prompt for other sorts of data, especially internet - Swype doesn't get internet access at all, for example. If you set it to prompt you, it will give you a number of UAC-style prompts when you first start the app. If you apply Xprivacy to system apps, you *will* spend ten minutes after your next reboot allowing and denying permissions to things, and doing so without being careful can get you stuck in a boot loop...ask me how I know this.
It takes time and dedication to make Xprivacy stabilize, but it's also pretty impressive how well it also acts as a de facto alert system. It's amazing how much Facebook Messenger hates it, especially when I deny it access to my contacts...which is why I use a combination of the mobile website and Frost instead. Similarly, it's almost scary going through the log of denied things, to see exactly how many times my location was requested from things which clearly didn't need it.
All in all, Xprivacy is why I'm still on Android - it's the only mobile OS with a tool like it. It does, however, require dedication and a willingness to put up with a less-smooth phone experience, but that's the cost of liberty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He sums it up perfectly.
If I could add anything to it, it's that Hillary engaged heavily in identity politics and bet the farm on that. That might not have been so bad if it was a matter of saying "less-privileged people need a voice", but it commonly morphed into, "if we deem that you have privilege, we demand your silence". That's not the sort of thing which helps in a general election.
Exactly, thus my comment. The game companies don't care why you bought a Mac, just that people with Macs buy their games. I have no idea what the Venn diagram looks like for "people who buy Macs" and "people who will buy Vulkan-enabled games", but clearly someone thinks it's a good business move. Mac owners in general are more willing to buy software, so there's that.
I think the bigger draw is not OSX compatibility per-say; OSX compatibility is all but a happy accident. Right now, desktop gaming is largely the realm of DirectX. You've got a few early adopters and a few more OpenGL-based games, but a whole lot is tied to a proprietary MS technology. This is helpful if you're designing a AAA game intended to be compiled for the Xbox as well, but with all the stuff Microsoft is doing with Windows 10, there's some genuine FUD going on. There is a very-rational concern that Microsoft is going to start getting heavy handed with DirectX. Now, EA is probably fine, but if you're not EA, betting on DirectX is a concerning proposition.
By contrast, Vulkan is a far easier development platform than OpenGL ever was, and cross-compiling for OSX and Linux is far simpler than is possible with DirectX. From what I understand, some simpler games would be possible to target mobile platforms with not-that-much additional coding. If Vulkan can live up to this possibility, it means that if Microsoft makes DirectX 14 a UWP-only affair, developers aren't stuck playing ball with Microsoft's app store to sell their games, and while garden variety Win32 is widely used for gaming, the valiant efforts of both Ballmer and Nadella to make the Windows Store a viable place to get apps has not been terribly successful. Even if DirectX remains dominant but Vulkan gets even 20% market share, it may be enough to dissuade MS from pulling those sorts of shenanigans to prevent everyone from jumping ship and losing the gaming market on Windows.
As time goes on new technology advances making such trade offs lessen and should be brought back, so you get regain some advantage that had been lost.
Well yes...but when enough is lost, pining for the 'good old days' goes beyond nostalgia and becomes the hope for a renaissance.
Nostalgia looks back and forgets lots of DRM systems that were used in the earlier days. One can avoid doing that while also looking for some sort of sensible compromise that reduces casual copying while also not requiring the draconian levels that are present today.
Nostalgia looks back and exclusively remembers good discussions on Usenet. One can look back and remember the spam and trolling problems while also appreciating its near-perfect hybrid of centralized and decentralized paradigms and the fact that the technological inability to have any sort of filtering or algorithmic capacities at the server level left it up to users to decide what they did or did not want to see, in contrast to Facebook constantly having issues on this front.
Nostalgia looks back and remembers that dial-up ISPs had far more competition than broadband providers do in most of the country. It's possible to appreciate that while also not-appreciating 28.8k internet speeds.
We solved plenty of problems, but exchanged them for others. Whether it is a beneficial exchange is an exercise for the reader.
Load pdf in Adobe. Convert to or save as doc. If your version of Adobe doesn't have that bust out the credit card and upgrade it.
If you're planing to use it to commit fraud to the tune of several million dollars you may as well pirate the software.
So, you're suggesting that he should have risked the ire of the IRS *and* the BSA? I mean, one or the other you might be able to fend off, but both?!
Never understood why DVDs and Blu-Rays come bundled with download codes.
The content is literally on the disc you purchased why bother to enter a code or download it from the Internet (I assume with strings attached) when you can just copy content of disc and play it on anything you want?
1. As others have pointed out, I would argue that the number of devices used to watch movies which do not have an optical drive exceed the number of devices which do. Download codes solve that problem for those use cases.
2. The MPAA long ago made it clear that they desired a world where DVD ripping wasn't a common practice, despite the fact that CD ripping was commonplace. "Just copy the content of the disc" is something that the MPAA has technological measures, copyright law, and case law on their side. AnyDVD may well be in a place that is difficult to prosecute, rest assured that the only reason this is the case is because it remains a niche.
3. The MPAA also learned that convenience wins over liberty. Vudu, Ultraviolet, and the iTunes codes are "take picture of code with phone, download/stream movie". For most people, this experience is "good enough", such that "cross compatible MP4/MKV files" aren't an advantage to most of those people, especially when encoding takes hours on their not-i7 processors and the purchase of a USB optical drive is likely needed.
4. Download codes give the MPAA a far greater amount of control. Passing files around is impossible (and if it's attempted it's trivial to figure out the source), sharing through Plex libraries is impossible, and in the case of the services where streaming is used, they get viewing statistics and user profiles on top of it.
And those would be the reasons I can think of off the top of my head.
Wouldn't it be easier to write a replacement dick-pic sharing app than go to all this trouble of creating a poll?
tl;dr: no.
Snapchat usage instructions:
1. install app.
2. create account, or just choose the 'sign in with facebook' option and grant permissions.
3. add other users by scanning their QR code, or let it scrape your contacts and auto-add.
4. exchange images of genitals.
5. create petition when a bad UI somehow manages to get even worse by going to a website expressly created for the purpose.
OpenSnap usage instructions: ...and all of that assumes that OpenSnap is already programmed by competent programmers such that the only thing to do is sysadmin the app.
1. install app. There may be options here, including ones that retain images even when they're not supposed to.
2. find someone with an authentication server and create an account there. If you can't find one...
a. spin up LAMP stack. You've got dedicated hardware for this, right? If not, you're cool with dropping $50 on a VPS, right?
b. install OpenSnap Server, configure port forwards, purchase domain so you can get an SSL cert, buy certificate or configure certbot, enable authentication, configure firewall, implement ways to prevent spammers from creating a bunch of accounts, make sure it is seamless, then make sure you can keep a solid at-least 99% uptime......
3. federate with other OpenSnap Server operators to facilitate communication between server hosts. Also, you'll have to figure out which servers are possible to federate to, and which ones are safe.
4. convince a bunch of other people to install OpenSnap.
5. exchange images of genitals.
Now, you could go the other way and create NotSnapChat, with the same core functions, but the reality is that Instagram, WhatsApp, and Viber already support expiring messages and have infrastructure and millions of users, so it'll be a bit of an uphill battle.
That...is a rather tall expectation of the sorts of folks who use SnapChat enough to call the old layout 'easy to use'.
I thought most everyone switched to qbitorrent years ago when they started showing ads and other strange things. My main tracker doesn't even allow Utorrent anymore. I'm guessing q isn't affected by this?
Or Transmission or Deluge or Vuze or Tixati or rTorrent/rutorrent...really basically anything is better, but uTorrent got in right when Azureus started trying to add bloat to reinvent itself and Transmission was still not available on Windows, and then once all the tutorials used it began to morph into the abomination it is now.
Even so, version 2.2.1 is the 'completed' version that is sufficiently used that it's the google autocomplete for "utorrent", and according to another poster here, it isn't vulnerable to this attack.
Don't give them that much foresight.
Swype started out pretty early - its original release was for Windows Mobile 6.5. Their original business model was to charge OEMs to add it to the stock firmware as an option; prior to Google and Samsung shipping with swipe-based keyboards, handsets shipped with them or didn't; it wasn't available in the Android Market and only later was released as a public beta. Nuance later bought them out and added Dragon Dictation and such.
That being said, their use of telemetry is well-known - it made me super happy to have Xprivacy so the keyboard was never able to access the internet, and to be fair, they did seem to add trending words as they became progressively more popular (and suggested them less as popularity waned). Few doubt they have amassed a pretty impressive word-to-usage database, as well as word pairs - I was pleasantly surprised that they suggest "Effect" after the word "Mass". That data is certainly useful as a starting point for a number of linguistic AI algorithms.
To use this data as a starting point for AI? Seems reasonable. To assume that a startup in 2008 planned it all out to create an AI ("but first we need data"), or that Nuance bought it for reasons other than "because they wanted to have a mobile presence", is giving them far too much credit.
Not that this is overly practical or ultimately secure. But the problem is that the *original* can now easily be altered by too many evil monkeys (not that this is a surprise).
One counter measure that offers some–if not even nearly perfect–protection would be to go back to analog/analogue. Sure, photographic film has always been retouched and altered for ill reasons (seems all totalitarian regimes are experts in that – hey, Russia ...). But altering movie film is fairly painful, especially on smaller formats (lots of really small pictures like Super 8). And at least right now it would have to be done by hand.
I see where you're going with this, and I like the idea in theory. However, the problem is that the requirement would need to be an end-to-end analog signal. There can be no digital conversion at any point in the chain in order for this solution to be practical...and at this point, that's basically impossible.
Even if it's film + telecine + analog broadcast, good luck finding an all-analog video room in a broadcast studio in 2018 since TV signals have to be digital now. If it's shown on Youtube (or Facebook or any other internet-based video distribution medium), it's digital and the game is over because there's no guarantee of whether it was converted to digital immediately before broadcast, or immediately after filming and found its way through Final Cut Pro on the way to the broadcast studio. Moreover, anyone still having such a setup would be someone like CBS or some other broadcaster who still hasn't upgraded for some reason, and is thus going to have a lot of difficulty getting traction. Real news filmed in analog needs to preserve that end-to-end chain of trust for this to be a solution, but an altered video requires no such constraints. A few thousand people will see your video at best, while a fake video posted on Youtube and trending on Twitter will be seen by tens of millions overnight.
Finally, there's the purely philosophical issue. Someone willing to go end to end analog is going to need to carry lots of unwieldy equipment around and will be very conspicuous. Someone holding an iPhone is not. Carrying that gear is a planned and prepped event. Carrying an iPhone is not. A willingness to show the original film to someone to verify its authenticity is only going to work until the 'wrong' person asks and confiscates the film using bigger gun diplomacy. Real-time cloud backup is not an option.
Ultimately, I think the theory works at a high level, and thank you for continuing to use analog film...but really, in practice, using analog as a de facto chain of trust is virtually impossible to do, and even if it is done, its audience is orders of magnitude smaller than the fake news it seeks to combat.
Software can be cross-platform if that's one of the goals of the developer.
VLC is the best video player out there -- and it works for Linux/Windows/MacOS. So is Libre Office and Microsoft has even managed develop a cross-platform code editor -- and each one is in an entirely different programming language (C++/Java/Javascript respectively).
Will there be a day when developers mostly write cross-platform software? One can hope.
These aren't the greatest examples.
VLC is the sort of app that "if it works, great, if not, there's the forum/wiki/IRC, if it doesn't work, go use one of a dozen other media playback applications", and have that be a practical answer. LibreOffice also doesn't really have to care. Visual Studio is on the other end of the spectrum and is the product of Microsoft wanting to keep Visual Studio the go-to choice of developers who prefer Linux and are perfectly happy using Eclipse instead.
Writing cross-platform applications means testing and supporting multiple OSes. Linux is particularly difficult because of how many individual components are iterated slightly differently - if it's all CLI then yeah, make a shell script to pull all the dependencies, but it's not nearly that simple for GUI stuff...and there are a thousand cottage industries who rely on Windows software to file taxes, take MRIs, control sign making equipment, and handle plenty of other things whereby supporting Windows is tough enough, and supporting Linux is the chicken-and-egg problem that no one dependent on their software uses Linux because they are dependent on their software.
Also, Quickbooks. Intuit has been screwing people over so long there is zero incentive to change for them.
LOL you're a fucking moron, 10 years ago the world didn't run on social media, now news travel fast, very fast.
AMD is killing Intel in performance and prices, that's what the customers see, not what AMD fucking released 10 years ago.
You think like a moron, stop thinking with Intel's dick in your mouth.
Normally I would just ignore the AC who can't spell my name right...
We agree that AMD's mainline CPUs are at least equivalent, if not superior, to Intel's offerings. The issue isn't that AMD had very low end processors a decade ago, but that AMD's low end processors have been the most readily accessible to customers for the past decade. The brief time when AMD beat Intel to 64-bit desktop CPUs with the Athlon64 line was the last time, to my recollection, that midrange machines sporting both Intel and AMD shared shelf space side by side in most computer retailers. Since about the Core 2 Duo/Quad era, it's been rare to see a midrange or high end laptop or desktop with an AMD processor; it's the sub-$400 machine space where AMD has been hanging out for a very long time.
Now yes, people like you and I know better. My last two NAS builds, along with my homebrew cable box, are all FX-6300 based (as are three others I built for friends and clients). My original post indicates that I've got a pair of Opteron-based Poweredge servers functioning as routers. I've personally bought more AMD processors than Intel processors, because they deliver solid performance at a good price (and are a good fit for FreeNAS because they support ECC RAM at 1/3 the price of a Xeon).
Go to Bestbuy.com and filter laptops by Ryzen5 and Ryzen7 processors. In my region there were precisely two options available. There were three laptops listed with Xeon processors. Over a hundred each for i3's and i5's. 3/4 of the other AMD laptops were in the under-$500 range, with three under $300. Now, you can argue that I'm a moron for using Bestbuy.com as my baseline because everyone shops at Amazon, but I don't have that kind of time and there are still plenty of people unlikely to buy a laptop sight unseen.
This leaves us with the custom build market for the more powerful CPUs to reside, but in my experience, that's still a bit of a crapshoot. It's dumb to recommend AMD wholesale when someone going to Costco is likely to get one of the lower end CPUs in the box, rather than the nicer processors you and I both know they make. There are still some people who are willing to have their machines custom built, but it's a relatively small market that is far less likely to get the sort of social media traction that would be able to stem a decade's worth of inertia.
Even if this ends up being AMD's time to shine and they're able to muscle their way past all of this, Intel can either reduce prices provisionally or can pull some 90's Microsoft back door deals to ensure more prominent advertising and similar, bringing it all back to status quo.
I'm not an Intel shill, but I've watched far BP and Bank of America and Equifax pay virtually no consequences for their poor actions. I do not put it past Intel to do anything different.
Wow. You are a good corporatist there. You never mentioned the affected end users, just Intel and a few other mega corporations. Good job.
Affected end users aren't fabbing their own processors. Affected end users are in a position to decide how much they care, and whether they will buy not-Intel for their next computer. Affected end users may choose AMD, but are unlikely to do so in an impactful manner. Affected end users may have the option to purchase from Samsung if Samsung decides to enter the market. Affected end users will likely end up paying more for Intel, as Intel is likely to simply increase costs to affected end users in order to cover the payout of the lawsuits.
Is that rephrasing more to your liking?
Perhaps I'm assuming more intelligence than is warranted, but I just assumed the UX designers went for "parent proof", and succeeded. Kids use Snapchat specifically because their parents don't.
It's a possibility, but I think Snapchat is inherently more parent-proof because of its anti-retention functions. Trading naughty pics and pejorative comments is far easier if you can keep your phone away from the 'rents for 24 hours; can't get in trouble for what they can't find, and even if they do find it, it limits the fallout vs. a since-forever Whatsapp thread. Additionally, I'd assume that the majority of parents aren't going to want to spend time on a social network that requires constant checking in order to not-miss stuff; parents also have a bit more affinity for looking back on older stuff than teens do and are thus more likely to utilize Whatsapp or Instagram.
While the UI helps, for certain, I would argue that learning a UI is not the only barrier to entry for parents, and those who cared enough would learn the UI.
I mean, thinking this all through, it seems to be a frivolous exercise without some massive shift.
Intel grossed over $60 billion in FY 2016. Even if each of these lawsuits requires Intel to pay $1 billion, and all of them are won, it's less than six months of revenue for them - not fun, but not the corporate equivalent of $150,000 in individual medical debt, either. Intel has enough in the bank to ride the storm, and simply bump up CPU prices by another 15% until the costs are paid...and then leave the prices there.
In a perfect world, this would give AMD the golden opportunity to pick up the slack. The Ryzen line of processors has been met with a whole lot of favorable press; they could easily take over the i3/i5/i7 desktop/laptop markets from a performance perspective. However, AMD has spent the last decade scraping the bottom of the barrel with their A10 processors and similar, low performance CPUs that are almost synonymous with the sub-$400 laptop market, and the hatred that people associate with Windows machines. Even if the shelves at Best Buy became 50/50 between AMD and Intel (as opposed to right now, when there are more Xeon-based laptops available than Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 combined), it's going to take consumers quite a while to realize that AMD makes high end processors, too. Intel sales take a dip, sure, but I don't see AMD managing to truly eat at Intel's market in a way that leaves a lasting impact.
The server room is still Intel's. Dell, HP, and Lenovo have dabbled in a few AMD-based machines (I've got a pair of Opteron-based R415's running as routers myself), but will AMD having misstepped with the Bulldozer architecture and certain server applications being all "we only support Intel", I don't see AMD making massive inroads there either. This is compounded by the likelihood that Dell ordering 0.8X Xeon processors from last year and making up the slack with newer Opterons is going to inevitably involve a higher per-processor price, making their servers more expensive, meaning that if Lenovo keeps their orders up, they will be cost favorable, leaving Dell less able to compete on price unless sysadmins really do start ordering AMD-based servers for their racks.
Now, the one player that really could make a dent would be Samsung - there's not a laptop component they don't make except the processor at this point, so retooling their Exynos chip fabs to make an x86 processor that can compete with an i3 and deliver an end-to-end, single-manufacturer laptop or desktop is in the cards for them, certainly more so than any other manufacturer. If they can pitch one running Android and avoid a Windows license, even better. Even so, it's risky for Samsung, and although they can eat a pretty big loss, trying to capitalize on Intel while they are down and hoping that consumers end up buying a laptop sporting a CPU from relative newcomer is not the kind of gamble that risk-averse execs are likely to go full force on.
In summary, Intel CPU processors will rise, AMD may well be capable of meeting demand but OEMs, retailers, sysadmins, and consumers are going to be a bit skittish about giving AMD a shot when Intel is a known quantity, and while Samsung could probably kick 'em while they're down, it's highly debatable that they will do so. In the end, Intel is likely to just raise prices and the world continues as normal.
people always hate change right? even if it's positive... well not this time. the update actually isn't intuitive.
Well, I mean, to be fair, Snapchat's UI was never intuitive. There were no UI indicators as to whether to tap or swipe or hold, there are virtually no context menus, no 'back' buttons, and very little consistency for tasks in various swipe directions.
The UX designers went for 'trendy minimalism' rather than allowing users with existing understanding of UI paradigms to leverage them. It's easily the worst UI I've worked with, and I configure Sonicwalls for a living.
I completely agree with you - the web as we know it wouldn't exist if HTTP, SMTP, and TCP/IP were some vertical thing that only one company could produce.
The problem is twofold: First off, protocols don't make anyone money. I sincerely doubt the teams who wrote SIP or SSH are millionaires, even though their protocols make the world go round. Even the altruistic folks willing to write such a protocol need to pay the bills.
Second, making an open protocol and then trying to make money off a first party implementation is basically opening the door to competing with one's self. If Snapchat was a protocol, Google and Facebook would integrate the protocol into their respective mobile apps tomorrow. If not that, then someone would write a 'good enough', ad-free OpenSnap and put an APK on Github next week. You don't have to be one of the sharks on Shark Tank to see making an open protocol to a first party app implementation as a problem. Adobe can do that with PDF because they're Adobe, MS can do that with Exchange* because SMTP traffic is one of a dozen protocols it uses.
We see this in Jabber - an open protocol that's pretty solid and well-maintained, enabling real-time text, voice, and video communication, complete with decentralization and anonymity options...and yet its userbase pales in comparison to Whatsapp, Kik, or Viber. I know that Z-Wave is a home automation protocol of some kind, but it's the Philips Hue lights that are prominently displayed on the endcaps of Home Depot and Microcenter. It is just the reality of our modern society that vertical integration is how money is made in the tech world. Pydio and Nextcloud exist, but everyone and their dog has an account with Dropbox and Google Drive.
Protocols are necessary, but they are the result of altruism, not efficacy.
*I am not suggesting MS invented the SMTP protocol, but they are using an open one.
They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...
Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?
I'm torn on this topic because auto-play video ads, floating ads, ads with undesired audio, and ads on overlays have made using websites an absolute chore without ad blocking software. uBlock and friends, however, seem to go too far in the other direction and prevent any ads from being displayed, which is not what I want, either. In theory, Google has the balance right, and I think that having such capabilities built into the dominant web browser is going to instill corrective behavior in the same way that integrated pop-up blockers have brought that ad format to extinction.
However, Google is not the company that should be doing this. They are an ad company. This is the definition of 'conflict of interest'. Google also has an overwhelming market share of online advertising. Facebook admittedly rules the roost on their own platform, but it's not entirely apples to apples since they keep their ads in-house, and even though they're the most popular website on the internet, their decline has begun.
Beyond Google, you end up with small percentages in other areas where AdSense doesn't do the trick - the MSN, Yahoo, and AOL homepages (still seen by millions), the sketchy ad networks like Trafficstars and Taboola that serve up ads to torrent sites and porn sites, and places like DDG who run their own ads on principle for whatever they can get.
Ad networks should never have let things get this far in the first place, and shame on whoever thought it was preferential to do this rather than keep ads a 'necessary evil', as if the pop-up blocker battle of the 90's is forgotten history. I'd throw 'government oversight' into the ring as a solution, but if you're left-of-center, Trump and Ajit aren't going to make any decisions you like, and if you're right-of-center, it's more government oversight in general, which isn't desirable, either. Even if somehow there was a sudden outbreak of common sense from Washington, we start dealing with the same "physical jurisdictions don't apply to the internet" problem. Even a perfectly written and enforced federal law is thwarted by an office move and shifting the VMs to Ireland or Sweden.
To directly answer your question, no, there's no law preventing what you state. However, you're not a multibillion dollar company whose primary income is based on ad revenue with a browser commanding over half the browser market share...in which case, the rules are just a bit different. There's nothing stopping you from writing an operating system and shipping a web browser on it, but you're not Microsoft, you're not telling OEMs they can't ship computers with Chrome on it, and this isn't 1997...so context is involved here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And that video was from 2013.
But really, aren't "algorithms" what are used by humans anyway? Input data, apply logic and other constraints, eliminate some options, rinse and repeat until a 'best course of action' is shown? Or, is Watson "AI" and thus totally different? Or, is this a matter of deep learning, with blockchain technology being integrated next quarter?
I know buzzword bingo is nothing new, but it really, really feels like nobody remembers anything anymore.
(cue all the trolls who jump in and claim that rooting is no longer necessary and serves no purpose. Don't bother, you're wrong.)
Thank you!
"Why do you need to root?" "Because f'k you, that's why." Even if it's for the pure reason of retaining ownership of the device, out of pure principle rooting needs to remain a mainstay.
Still, there are reasons to root. Arguably the biggest one is that apps that shouldn't be set as 'system', and thus are unremovable, are. Shipping with them, fine, I get it. Preventing their removal is unacceptable and shame on both Google and the OEMs for allowing this practice. In many cases, the XDA community will release a ROM based on a more recent version of Android than the OEM will release, extending the life of the hardware. Also, Xprivacy/PMP. In one case, my mom's tablet kept updating in a way that prevents the Play Store from working...so I had to root it to block the update so it would continue to work.
I don't understand the idea of people saying, "I don't need a rooted phone, so I will argue that no one else does". I never argue that everyone should have root access on their phones, but I do argue that they should be able to have it if they so choose. Those who argue the inverse forget history.
It's sad that a company keeping software roughly the same for 5 years is considered "news". Microsoft and other real software companies often support their products for a decade or more, believe it or not.
Well, I think the more newsworthy part is that Google has a piece of software which continues to function for users of relatively ancient devices and operating systems. Since the company is notorious for depreciating products at a whim, it's surprising that anything but their search engine has that amount of backwards compatibility available to it.
Moreover, MS is in a bit of a different position with respect to supporting software for a decade - it's typically locally installed. I've got Windows 98 install CDs that will still happily install and run on hardware capable of handling it - it's not dependent on the mothership for anything. By contrast, the locally installed component of Google Maps is basically responsible for figuring out which map data is needed from Google, getting that map data, and then showing it with a blue dot on the screen. If Google made changes to the back end, the installed copy would load, and proceed to go nowhere, or throw an error message, or something.
Essentially, it's not surprising that the old mobile apps still start, it's that Google has been mindful to make sure that improvements to the back end are still usable by the last .1% of people still using very old hardware.