They don't sound terrible to me. Sure, they don't sound as good as a pair of over-the-hear studio headphones, but then again, if I'm in a position where I *want* to really enjoy my music to the fullest extent possible, I wouldn't be using some little bluetooth headphones anyway. I would be using a set of high quality studio headphones, if not actual regular speakers. When I am out and about, *who cares* if the sound isn't top quality? I challenge anyone to be able to pick out the subtle nuances of a song when you have traffic speeding past you 15 feet away. Or in a gym with 10 other people around you clanking weights or using exercise machines.
I have a set of Beats X earbud headphones, and they sound perfectly adequate for earbud headphones. More importantly, they sound *better* than every other in-hear bluetooth headphones I've ever owned, for two reasons: First, AAC support which is a massive quality difference from the standard SBC codec that's part of the bluetooth spec. Not that SBC was *that* bad mind you, but I may as well mention it. Second and infinitely more importantly: I have *zero* issues with connectivity. Up until the BeatX, *every* *single* bluetooth headset I purchased gave me significant connectivity problems. I couldn't even walk down a quiet suburban street unless I kept my phone in my hand or somehow in front of me, or I would be almost guaranteed to have at least one significant connection issue. Keeping my phone in a backpack or a purse was out of the question. I don't know if it's my location, or if I ate uranium as kid, or what. But my experience with all BT headphones have been universally awful. By comparison, the Beats X has given me virtually flawless connectivity. It's even allowed me to carry phone calls when me and my phone have been on opposite ends and floors of the house. I believe a large part of that is the fact that the W1 chip is the *only* mobile chip I'm aware of that uses Bluetooth Power Class 1 (up to 100mw), which is enough to punch through everything. Everything else is Class 2 (up to 10mw).
So, yeah, the Beats may not compare to a set of wired sannheisers, but they ARE superior to everything else on the market for the reasons that matter: Just f__king working when I want them to. I now completely ignore any bluetooth hardware below $175 because to me, that appears to be the cut off point between something that works and something that people claim works but actually doesn't.
I've found Airdrop to be notoriously unreliable. Sometimes it takes an absurdly long time to locate the recipient device.
Bluetooth has had OBEX transfer support for a very long time, but Apple never implemented it. I don't know if it was because Apple wanted something they could control, or if it was cause the feature was too unreliable because most other manufacturers botched the protocol as well, but either way, I find it annoying that I can't easily transfer something to someone else who isn't also using an Apple product.
That being said, it's a feature I use so rarely that it's not worth factoring into my purchase decisions compared to other things (like knowing I will get software updates for approx 5 years after I buy the product)
The only thing factually correct in that sentence is that Tim Cook does have a MBA degree and there is no evidence that constitutes a problem for Apple. Steve Jobs was not an engineer and did not have an engineering degree (or any other degree for that matter). Tim Cook IS an engineer and does have an engineering degree from Auburn University.
I have great difficulty believing that, considering that there has been virtually zero innovation since Jobs died. Unless you count "making products less useful and more expensive" as innovation. Seriously, only an abject idiot would leave out HDMI on a modern laptop, for example. And have you used the keyboard on the most recent MBPs? It's the single worst keyboard I have ever used in my life.
There is no evidence that Apple customers are walking away in any meaningful numbers.
Really? Then mind explaining why their laptop sales figures are tanking? I myself have been using Apple for over a decade. My "current" MBP is a 2011 because every version after that has been worse than the last. Nothing is upgradable on it anymore, and even the stuff that's built into it is crap. I already mentioned the god-awful keyboard. A whopping TWO USB-C ports, or 4 if you wanna splurge, and nothing else. Wanna connect to a meeting room TV? Nope. A projector? Nope. Someone wants to give you a file on a USB key? Nope.
It's like they took the top 10 use cases for a laptop in the business world, gave a good belly laugh and said, "Fuck'em all."
If you think that then I don't think you've actually dealt with Oracle. The experience of working with Apple is NOTHING like the experience of working with Oracle.
I didn't say they were Oracle. I said they were trying to be like Oracle. That takes time, but they're doing it. Have you bought a USB-C power supply from Apple? They don't even provide a USB-C cable in the box. You literally have to buy the cord separately. So you're now paying $125 for a power supply instead of $100.
And never mind the whole donglegate thing where you literally need to buy dongles if you wanna so much as scratch your nose.
Apple has taken nickle and diming people to amazing new heights, while *at the same time* jacking up their prices of their products across the board. You cannot possibly tell me that that is anything other than customer hostile.
It's literally a battle of what you hate less now. Everyone I know who is an apple user is only using apple products because they hate Microsoft's bullshit more than they hate Apple's bullshit. That's not a particularly good long term strategy. It means that should Microsoft ever mistakenly pull their head out of their ass and make a product that doesn't suck, Apple is going to be in serious trouble. Google is slowly gaining ground on both of them with their chromebooks, and that's going to accelerate as they get more useful and people realize they arn't dependent on the encumbents anymore.
The problem is that they replaced an engineer with a pointy haired boss with an MBA. Tim Cook knows how to do is squeeze people for more cash, exploiting their captive user base until people throw their hands up in the air and walk away.
It's ironic, Microsoft is trying so hard to be like Apple, but Apple is trying very hard to be like Oracle.
I'm curious if anyone has had any experience using the Oracle compatability pack on Postgres? It's supposed to let you drop an oracle schema into postgres and have it work unmodified, PL/SQL and all.
It may not be necessary, but just because they're development system that doesn't mean security should be ignored.
For one thing, you may run into problems in production if it applied security that you didn't check for in dev. For another thing, if your development efforts touch sensitive client data, then it *still* needs to be protected even if it's internal only. It's bad enough if your company is breached by an attack. It's even worse if your client data is threatened in the process.
Proper security needs to be baked into *everything*. Every layer of your infrastructure. Every component. There is no such thing as perfect security. *Everything* can be exploited. That's why you need a layered approach, because if you leave gaps, that's where the attacker will find and exploit.
Finally, maintaining a security mindset during development will make it significantly more likely that you will create a more secure product. So many people think that security is just some feature you can tick the checkbox on at some point during the development cycle, and those people are flat out wrong. That's why compromises are happening on a constant basis, and the problem is getting worse instead of better. And the easiest way to do that is to make sure you configure the dev environment for security right off the bat.
Because a) it doesn't provide a long term history of failures, and b) Microsoft can't be trusted to be honest about the scope of their failures (ie: "blah blah blah only a small subset of users are affected" when all of Europe is unavailable)
We're at the point now where using https is so easy, that there's very little reason to not use it. The biggest stumbling blocks had always been obtaining the certificate and vhost/IP limitations on certificates. But those are now taken care of with Lets Encrypt and recent changes to how certificates are handled.
Given the current technical and political climate, HTTPS should be the default for *everything*, barring very special circumstances.
There needs to be an alternate site that tells you when a site is actually up. Outlook.com seems to have so many outages that it seems easier to track when it's up rather than when it's down.
All true, although I wasn't really trying to go for an all encompassing comparison. I was just trying to illustrate my point, which was that total marketshare may not necessarily account for total mindshare. I'm betting that 50-75% of the people using android don't actually give two shits that they are using an android phone. They care that they were able to get a phone for for cheap, which is a market so alien to Apple that they will never be able to compete, so android wins by default. (The two sweetest words in the english language!)
OOC, ARE there any reports that indicate the amount of revenue collected from things like ads? I'm curious now.
When you configure siri on your iDoohickey, you actually have to go through a training process. After that, it (usually) only responds to your voice. That being said, I've occasionally had Siri activate by some odd ambient sound, but it's generally been pretty reliable.
I sure as hell wouldn't rely on that for any kind of genuine security though.
This assumes people are technically able to do that. The average mobile user wouldn't have the foggiest idea how to do that, and would probably still be afraid to do so even if you gave them detailed instructions.
And Android O doesn't mean jack to all the people who arn't getting upgrades.
The fact is, while a technical person can certainly do what you suggest, for the average person the Play Store is no different from the App Store, and so if your app isn't on that store, you've guaranteed to have poor market penetration.
Which sales numbers? For devices, or for apps? There's a big difference there. Despite the fact that android marketshare is almost a magnitude greater than Apple's, iOS app store revenue still wins.
If I were to guess, this is the first major action after a significant policy change. I am going to assume that this will be the first block of many.
As dubious as it is, I can also see how this is a perfectly reasonable action, as this is exactly what China has been doing for years. They overwhelmingly favour their local businesses and shit on foreign businesses. They consider it fair game to commit industrial espionage on foreign companies.
I think the primary reason why no one has tried harder to put a lid on things, is cause China already has the US over a barrel in many different ways and no one wanted to risk retaliation, cause that could end up being worse than the problem the US was defending against in the first place.
But this is my Arm Chair I Don't Actually Know Anything perspective, so....
I realize I'm wading into one big Anti-Apple circle jerk, but I just wanted to mention that I spend $175 on their overpriced BeatsX bluetooth headphones....
And they're the single best bluetooth headphones I've ever owned. The sound quality is great (well, as great as they can be for in-ear headphones, obviously), and most importantly, they have given me virtually flawless performance. I had given up completely on bluetooth headphones because every single one I bought gave me problems, notably constant connection drops. Every. Single. One. Even in residential areas where you would think ambient RF interference was low. They were all useless unless I kept my phone in a front coat pocket or otherwise somehow kept the phone within 2 ft unobstructed from the headsets.
I decided to take a chance with the BeatsX, cause I wanted to know if the W1 chip would make that much of a difference. And I have to say that the BeatsX headset doesn't give me any problems. I've had exactly one major connection failure, and that was when I was walking past an electrical room that puts out so much RF that I'm amazed surprised the florescent lights don't excite on their own.
I have no idea about the circumstances of this lawsuit, but I can honestly say that I am happier with my BeatsX headphones than I ever have been with any previous BT headset.
Also, make sure you use AudioQuest HDMI cables in your video gear. The cables are very high quality and will make your 0s rounder and smoother, and your 1s will be sharper and less jaggy.
The complaint contends that Apple's Beats Solo headphones cost $16.89 to make and retail for $199.95: a markup of more than 1000 percent.
If you think that is either unusual high or a problem specific to Apple, I have some very bad news to tell you.
Apple tends to get the news just cause, well, they're Apple. But *everybody* does this. ALL manufacturers. Hell, do you really think a large coke at McDonalds really costs as much as it does? The raw materials are literally a fraction of a cent.
It's not a CMS issue. It's a shit code issue. The more accessible you make software, or a programming language, the lower the barrier of entry is, and the more programmers get involved, no matter how crap their skills are. Wordpress is one of, if not the, single most popular blogging software available because it's so easy to set up and extend.
And as can be expected, it has a ridiculous number of half-assed poorly written plugins that by all rights should never have seen the light of day. If they did some kind of app store style curation of plugin quality, then their repository of plugins would probably drop by 90+%.
And wordpress is just one example of many. The market is now flooded with shockly poorly written applications, because the phrase of the day is "Getting everybody coding!" instead of "teach people to code *properly*".
Did you seriously compare the launch times for Office for Windows against Office for Mac? And not even the same application?
You DO understand that they are completely different code bases, yes? And that Office on Windows takes advantage of always-running libraries in Windows, similarly to what IE does, to artificially speed up their load times?
Furthermore, this is a problem I noticed consistently across several different machines, so no, it's not about my "shit being broken". The fact is, Office for Mac is a classic example of poorly coded bloatware. But no one cares cause shitty bloatware is better than nothing at all.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't sound terrible to me. Sure, they don't sound as good as a pair of over-the-hear studio headphones, but then again, if I'm in a position where I *want* to really enjoy my music to the fullest extent possible, I wouldn't be using some little bluetooth headphones anyway. I would be using a set of high quality studio headphones, if not actual regular speakers. When I am out and about, *who cares* if the sound isn't top quality? I challenge anyone to be able to pick out the subtle nuances of a song when you have traffic speeding past you 15 feet away. Or in a gym with 10 other people around you clanking weights or using exercise machines.
I have a set of Beats X earbud headphones, and they sound perfectly adequate for earbud headphones. More importantly, they sound *better* than every other in-hear bluetooth headphones I've ever owned, for two reasons:
First, AAC support which is a massive quality difference from the standard SBC codec that's part of the bluetooth spec. Not that SBC was *that* bad mind you, but I may as well mention it.
Second and infinitely more importantly: I have *zero* issues with connectivity. Up until the BeatX, *every* *single* bluetooth headset I purchased gave me significant connectivity problems. I couldn't even walk down a quiet suburban street unless I kept my phone in my hand or somehow in front of me, or I would be almost guaranteed to have at least one significant connection issue. Keeping my phone in a backpack or a purse was out of the question. I don't know if it's my location, or if I ate uranium as kid, or what. But my experience with all BT headphones have been universally awful. By comparison, the Beats X has given me virtually flawless connectivity. It's even allowed me to carry phone calls when me and my phone have been on opposite ends and floors of the house. I believe a large part of that is the fact that the W1 chip is the *only* mobile chip I'm aware of that uses Bluetooth Power Class 1 (up to 100mw), which is enough to punch through everything. Everything else is Class 2 (up to 10mw).
So, yeah, the Beats may not compare to a set of wired sannheisers, but they ARE superior to everything else on the market for the reasons that matter: Just f__king working when I want them to. I now completely ignore any bluetooth hardware below $175 because to me, that appears to be the cut off point between something that works and something that people claim works but actually doesn't.
What matters is that they make more profit for the drug manufacturers. Improving patient outcomes is just incidental.
adapts to answering their questions about long division and sex
I think I found the thing that has actually got people pissed off. Since when do politicians and lawmakers care about the average person's privacy?
I've found Airdrop to be notoriously unreliable. Sometimes it takes an absurdly long time to locate the recipient device.
Bluetooth has had OBEX transfer support for a very long time, but Apple never implemented it. I don't know if it was because Apple wanted something they could control, or if it was cause the feature was too unreliable because most other manufacturers botched the protocol as well, but either way, I find it annoying that I can't easily transfer something to someone else who isn't also using an Apple product.
That being said, it's a feature I use so rarely that it's not worth factoring into my purchase decisions compared to other things (like knowing I will get software updates for approx 5 years after I buy the product)
That sounds an awful lot like... like... REGULATION.
Why do you hate Amaerica?
They're referring to Tim Cook's financial advisor, Frank Consistency.
The only thing factually correct in that sentence is that Tim Cook does have a MBA degree and there is no evidence that constitutes a problem for Apple. Steve Jobs was not an engineer and did not have an engineering degree (or any other degree for that matter). Tim Cook IS an engineer and does have an engineering degree from Auburn University.
I have great difficulty believing that, considering that there has been virtually zero innovation since Jobs died. Unless you count "making products less useful and more expensive" as innovation. Seriously, only an abject idiot would leave out HDMI on a modern laptop, for example. And have you used the keyboard on the most recent MBPs? It's the single worst keyboard I have ever used in my life.
There is no evidence that Apple customers are walking away in any meaningful numbers.
Really? Then mind explaining why their laptop sales figures are tanking? I myself have been using Apple for over a decade. My "current" MBP is a 2011 because every version after that has been worse than the last. Nothing is upgradable on it anymore, and even the stuff that's built into it is crap. I already mentioned the god-awful keyboard. A whopping TWO USB-C ports, or 4 if you wanna splurge, and nothing else. Wanna connect to a meeting room TV? Nope. A projector? Nope. Someone wants to give you a file on a USB key? Nope.
It's like they took the top 10 use cases for a laptop in the business world, gave a good belly laugh and said, "Fuck'em all."
If you think that then I don't think you've actually dealt with Oracle. The experience of working with Apple is NOTHING like the experience of working with Oracle.
I didn't say they were Oracle. I said they were trying to be like Oracle. That takes time, but they're doing it. Have you bought a USB-C power supply from Apple? They don't even provide a USB-C cable in the box. You literally have to buy the cord separately. So you're now paying $125 for a power supply instead of $100.
And never mind the whole donglegate thing where you literally need to buy dongles if you wanna so much as scratch your nose.
Apple has taken nickle and diming people to amazing new heights, while *at the same time* jacking up their prices of their products across the board. You cannot possibly tell me that that is anything other than customer hostile.
It's literally a battle of what you hate less now. Everyone I know who is an apple user is only using apple products because they hate Microsoft's bullshit more than they hate Apple's bullshit. That's not a particularly good long term strategy. It means that should Microsoft ever mistakenly pull their head out of their ass and make a product that doesn't suck, Apple is going to be in serious trouble. Google is slowly gaining ground on both of them with their chromebooks, and that's going to accelerate as they get more useful and people realize they arn't dependent on the encumbents anymore.
The problem is that they replaced an engineer with a pointy haired boss with an MBA. Tim Cook knows how to do is squeeze people for more cash, exploiting their captive user base until people throw their hands up in the air and walk away.
It's ironic, Microsoft is trying so hard to be like Apple, but Apple is trying very hard to be like Oracle.
I'm curious if anyone has had any experience using the Oracle compatability pack on Postgres? It's supposed to let you drop an oracle schema into postgres and have it work unmodified, PL/SQL and all.
It may not be necessary, but just because they're development system that doesn't mean security should be ignored.
For one thing, you may run into problems in production if it applied security that you didn't check for in dev.
For another thing, if your development efforts touch sensitive client data, then it *still* needs to be protected even if it's internal only. It's bad enough if your company is breached by an attack. It's even worse if your client data is threatened in the process.
Proper security needs to be baked into *everything*. Every layer of your infrastructure. Every component. There is no such thing as perfect security. *Everything* can be exploited. That's why you need a layered approach, because if you leave gaps, that's where the attacker will find and exploit.
Finally, maintaining a security mindset during development will make it significantly more likely that you will create a more secure product. So many people think that security is just some feature you can tick the checkbox on at some point during the development cycle, and those people are flat out wrong. That's why compromises are happening on a constant basis, and the problem is getting worse instead of better. And the easiest way to do that is to make sure you configure the dev environment for security right off the bat.
Because a) it doesn't provide a long term history of failures, and b) Microsoft can't be trusted to be honest about the scope of their failures (ie: "blah blah blah only a small subset of users are affected" when all of Europe is unavailable)
We're at the point now where using https is so easy, that there's very little reason to not use it. The biggest stumbling blocks had always been obtaining the certificate and vhost/IP limitations on certificates. But those are now taken care of with Lets Encrypt and recent changes to how certificates are handled.
Given the current technical and political climate, HTTPS should be the default for *everything*, barring very special circumstances.
There needs to be an alternate site that tells you when a site is actually up. Outlook.com seems to have so many outages that it seems easier to track when it's up rather than when it's down.
http://downdetector.com/status...
All true, although I wasn't really trying to go for an all encompassing comparison. I was just trying to illustrate my point, which was that total marketshare may not necessarily account for total mindshare. I'm betting that 50-75% of the people using android don't actually give two shits that they are using an android phone. They care that they were able to get a phone for for cheap, which is a market so alien to Apple that they will never be able to compete, so android wins by default. (The two sweetest words in the english language!)
OOC, ARE there any reports that indicate the amount of revenue collected from things like ads? I'm curious now.
Really? Android will guide you through connecting to a 3rd party store? That's new. Course, I haven't touched 3rd party stores since v4 so... *shrug*.
When you configure siri on your iDoohickey, you actually have to go through a training process. After that, it (usually) only responds to your voice. That being said, I've occasionally had Siri activate by some odd ambient sound, but it's generally been pretty reliable.
I sure as hell wouldn't rely on that for any kind of genuine security though.
This assumes people are technically able to do that. The average mobile user wouldn't have the foggiest idea how to do that, and would probably still be afraid to do so even if you gave them detailed instructions.
And Android O doesn't mean jack to all the people who arn't getting upgrades.
The fact is, while a technical person can certainly do what you suggest, for the average person the Play Store is no different from the App Store, and so if your app isn't on that store, you've guaranteed to have poor market penetration.
Which sales numbers? For devices, or for apps? There's a big difference there. Despite the fact that android marketshare is almost a magnitude greater than Apple's, iOS app store revenue still wins.
http://www.androidauthority.co...
If I were to guess, this is the first major action after a significant policy change. I am going to assume that this will be the first block of many.
As dubious as it is, I can also see how this is a perfectly reasonable action, as this is exactly what China has been doing for years. They overwhelmingly favour their local businesses and shit on foreign businesses. They consider it fair game to commit industrial espionage on foreign companies.
I think the primary reason why no one has tried harder to put a lid on things, is cause China already has the US over a barrel in many different ways and no one wanted to risk retaliation, cause that could end up being worse than the problem the US was defending against in the first place.
But this is my Arm Chair I Don't Actually Know Anything perspective, so....
I realize I'm wading into one big Anti-Apple circle jerk, but I just wanted to mention that I spend $175 on their overpriced BeatsX bluetooth headphones....
And they're the single best bluetooth headphones I've ever owned. The sound quality is great (well, as great as they can be for in-ear headphones, obviously), and most importantly, they have given me virtually flawless performance. I had given up completely on bluetooth headphones because every single one I bought gave me problems, notably constant connection drops. Every. Single. One. Even in residential areas where you would think ambient RF interference was low. They were all useless unless I kept my phone in a front coat pocket or otherwise somehow kept the phone within 2 ft unobstructed from the headsets.
I decided to take a chance with the BeatsX, cause I wanted to know if the W1 chip would make that much of a difference. And I have to say that the BeatsX headset doesn't give me any problems. I've had exactly one major connection failure, and that was when I was walking past an electrical room that puts out so much RF that I'm amazed surprised the florescent lights don't excite on their own.
I have no idea about the circumstances of this lawsuit, but I can honestly say that I am happier with my BeatsX headphones than I ever have been with any previous BT headset.
Also, make sure you use AudioQuest HDMI cables in your video gear. The cables are very high quality and will make your 0s rounder and smoother, and your 1s will be sharper and less jaggy.
The complaint contends that Apple's Beats Solo headphones cost $16.89 to make and retail for $199.95: a markup of more than 1000 percent.
If you think that is either unusual high or a problem specific to Apple, I have some very bad news to tell you.
Apple tends to get the news just cause, well, they're Apple. But *everybody* does this. ALL manufacturers. Hell, do you really think a large coke at McDonalds really costs as much as it does? The raw materials are literally a fraction of a cent.
I routinely burn through the battery on my phone
Oh, a Samsung hey?
No no, he said that he burns through the battery on his phone, not that his phone burns the battery through him.
It's not a CMS issue. It's a shit code issue. The more accessible you make software, or a programming language, the lower the barrier of entry is, and the more programmers get involved, no matter how crap their skills are. Wordpress is one of, if not the, single most popular blogging software available because it's so easy to set up and extend.
And as can be expected, it has a ridiculous number of half-assed poorly written plugins that by all rights should never have seen the light of day. If they did some kind of app store style curation of plugin quality, then their repository of plugins would probably drop by 90+%.
And wordpress is just one example of many. The market is now flooded with shockly poorly written applications, because the phrase of the day is "Getting everybody coding!" instead of "teach people to code *properly*".
*facepalm*
Did you seriously compare the launch times for Office for Windows against Office for Mac? And not even the same application?
You DO understand that they are completely different code bases, yes? And that Office on Windows takes advantage of always-running libraries in Windows, similarly to what IE does, to artificially speed up their load times?
Furthermore, this is a problem I noticed consistently across several different machines, so no, it's not about my "shit being broken". The fact is, Office for Mac is a classic example of poorly coded bloatware. But no one cares cause shitty bloatware is better than nothing at all.