No. Automatic Downloads are turned Off by default.
No, it isn't. Apparently you're told to turn it on during setup (it's "recommended" or something) and so it doesn't default to either off or on, you're forced to decide. Which means that:
If it is setup otherwise on your devices, you turned it on.
Is technically true. But only technically.
Because there are definitely people out there who have automatic updates on and didn't know that their phones could even do that. They complained loudly enough that this article exists.
So either someone else turned it on for them, or they missed the part during setup where they could turn it off. Or more likely failed to understand what they were asked during setup and turned on a feature that they had no intention of ever using, since it's only useful in a very bizarre set of circumstances.
You can set a bit such that the phone will only download new purchases over wifi.
And how many users do you think knew that they needed to do this prior to the album being released?
The autodownload feature is only useful if you're completely within the Apple ecosystem and regularly buy songs from your iPad and want them to show up on your iPhone (or vice versa). If you either never download tracks off the music store or only download them on a single device (such as, say, someone who only owns the one iPhone), you'd never know that there even was an automatic download feature. (And if you're downloading them to your PC, you just sync to it and don't worry about downloading it a second time.)
If you aren't aware there is an automatic download feature, how are you supposed to know to either turn it off or set it to wifi only?
U2 showing up on the phone is likely the first time the majority of users even were made aware that there was an automatic download feature. Based on the articles and comments I've read, I know that there are people who only discovered this feature existed when U2 suddenly showed up on their iPhone. It may turn out to be a vocal minority, but this definitely was not something all iPhone users expected to happen.
a) false. You had to have your device set to allow automatic pushes.
Which is, of course, the default.
And, if I'm not mistaken, Apple defaults to downloading anything less than 100MB over cellular data. Which could be quite costly to people on more expensive data plans.
III) That's irrelevant to what happened. You putting this here tells me the only reason you are upset is because it's a group you don't like.
Well, yeah, it's U2. Their music is terrible. I'd be pretty pissed if I had U2 forced on me.
Wait, "anyone who has an Apple account?" Crap. That does include me.
From what I've been reading, it seems most likely that only some of these photos came from compromised iCloud accounts, and those accounts were probably not compromised due to an exploit of iCloud's service.
As I understand it (and I may be wrong), the accounts were accessed by abusing the "forgot my password" service. Resetting someone's Apple account password on them is notoriously easy, and it would make sense that's the way the hackers did it. I thought they didn't blame "weak passwords" so much as they blamed "weak security question answers" that the "hacker" guessed the answers to.
Then again, I may be misremembering or misreading the stories, I'm not sure if the actual details have been made public.
And the fact that it is the #1 camera and #1 camcorder in the world is proof positive that they have succeeded.
I call bullshit on that. The iPhone isn't even the #1 phone in the world.
And let me try and make my point clear: Fake-Steve-Jobs was standing in front of a slide showing a camcorder being destroyed, saying that they were made completely obsolete by the iPhone.
And that's entirely bullshit.
Until the iPhone has a user-replaceable battery and removable storage, it will never replace a real camera or a real camcorder. It simply can't.
And I'm guessing the last time you used it there were two zeros in the date?
The last time I used it was Saturday. The last time I tried to take video with my cellphone was... I actually can't remember. Probably because if I'm going to be taking video of something, I'll generally plan ahead to have the camcorder around.
There's absolutely no way the iPhone has enough storage space to make recording video viable without removable storage. Not unless you're only using it for things like Vine.
Based on the issues as you describe them, I can only assume they decided they'd use their new improved video camera and streamed the entire thing from a new iPhone 6.:P
I only saw one brief bit of the stream, and it was where Steve Jobs Wannabe (Tim Cook?) was explaining how no one used camcorders any more because the iPhone could take better video. Which leads to the obvious question: does the iPhone have a replaceable battery and removable storage yet?
Because I still have a camcorder hanging around and I use it when I want to take a video that lasts longer than a couple of minutes. The entire reason I have my camcorder is so that I can take two hour videos. Then, when the battery dies, I can swap it out with a new one. And if I manage to run out of storage space, I can swap out to a new SDXC card.
Can't do either of those with an iPhone, making it a toy at taking pictures and video. Which is, to be fair, frequently fine. But Faux-Steve-Jobs's idea that the iPhone can replace a camcorder is just hilarious without those two very simple features.
Well, you could actually read the dam court documents. If you put random junk into the CAPTCHA boxes sometimes you would get an error page back - over TOR - but which contained the true IP address of the server.
Where do you get this? Because the court documents in the article certainly don't say that. In fact, they seem to be saying that the IP packets themselves contained the IP:
Upon examining the individual packets of data being sent back from the website, we noticed that the headers of some of the packets reflected a certain IP address not associated with any known Tor node as the source of the packets.
That's not an error message, that's (apparently) an HTTP(S?) request being sent straight to the Tor servers. And the only way I can think of to screw up a CAPTCHA implementation to do that would be to have it construct a complete URL using the host IP instead of just using the configured host name, which would be insane.
Again: according to the FBI themselves, this wasn't "debugging data" or anything, it was packets that were for whatever reason completely outside of the Tor network.
I don't know why people seem to find it so hard to believe that the FBI would decide to target the highest-profile online illegal drug marketplace without prompting from "sinister forces"
Because we're aware of things like COINTELPRO or, for those of us in the Boston area, remember little things like Whitey Bulger? I don't trust the FBI because they've gone out of their way to prove they are not to be trusted.
The only way I can think of to accidentally do what the FBI is claiming is if he just grabbed an poorly written CAPTCHA program off the Internet and it constructed its own URLs back to the server using the server's IP address.
Why it would do that instead of using the configured server name or, even better, just use a relative URL would be anyone's guess. But it's the only plausible way for the FBI's explanation to make any sort of sense.
(Or, to put it another way, they're almost certainly lying.)
As for lag, there's no 'lag' between gamer and chat. The streamer can and will put on stream delays to prevent cheaters from attempting to use up to date information against them in-game (Stream cheating does happen alas). There is always a little bit of lag, but generally speaking it doesn't happen notably most of the time.
I just checked this by trying to stream something. You're wrong, there's an enforced 30-60 second delay between when you do something and when your viewers see it happen, and it's impossible to reduce this without becoming a Twitch partner. It's more than enough to make meaningful chat with viewers impossible.
I do want IRC integration with twitch chat, but oh well...
Did he also decide to produce the Hex output that is entirely useless and without merit?
If you read the blog entry, this is talking about Windows 3.1's BSOD. A screen I honestly did not know existed, although Windows 3.1 is so old that I'd have been a kid, so maybe it popped up all the time if you used computers daily back then. I have no idea.
Windows only picked up preemptive multitasking in NT and later 95, so Windows 3.1 was cooperatively multitasked. Apparently if the running program didn't respond to incoming messages quickly enough (presumably a check in an interrupt handler?) a blue screen would appear, and Steve Balmer wrote the text for that blue screen.
Windows 95 and NT don't use that blue screen since the blue screen that appears in 95 is for driver faults (basically) and one in NT is for kernel panics.
This deserves to be seen more, but when the Facebook app launched, it did have the option to switch to auto-play videos on wifi only. But you couldn't disable it on wifi.
The problem for me is that I have a mobile Internet hotspot which means that as far as Facebook cared, it was wifi which meant it could use all the data it wanted.
Thankfully there is now an option to turn off autoplaying videos on both the website and the apps (along with a wifi only option for the apps, but not the website). Of course Facebook should just default to autoplay off because it's a worthless feature that no one I know wants, but if they did that, no one would know that they added this new "feature." That no one wanted.
I never understand how people manage to keep that many tabs open because Firefox regularly corrupts its own session and refuses to restore the previously open tabs. Routinely.
So every couple of weeks I "get" to reset all my tabs back to nothing when Firefox corrupts its own session and refuses to restore the original settings.
And this is on every OS I've used Firefox: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X; it makes no difference, Firefox regularly refuses to restore tabs.
You don't need to take photos using an iDevice to have them end up in iCloud. All you need to do is use a Mac.
If you use a Mac to download pictures off your camera - including cell phones that aren't iPhones and therefore behave like standard cameras and don't require Apple-specific software - by default, your pictures will end up in iCloud. It's part of the "Photo Stream" thing to allow users to stream pictures to the Apple TV that clearly every Mac owner has.
The lag time is determined by the streamer, many choose to make it just a few seconds but some do choose longer times, which definitely does inhibit their ability to interact with their audience via chat.
Apparently (and I don't know that this is true as I don't use Twitch that often) you can't reduce it to a reasonable time any more. (Maybe it's changed?) All I know is that people I know who do stream games where they want to have audience participation (things like having the stream direct the choices they make in an RPG) have switched to using HitBox due to the amount of lag between when they do something and when the viewers see it.
For those not familiar with Twitch, every stream contains a "Now Playing: (Game)" thing with it, and you can select which game you're playing from a pre-defined list of games.
Bets on how long until that become a link straight to Amazon to buy said game, and how long until streamers become Amazon affiliates and start getting money for driving people to buy their games off Amazon?
Because that's the only angle I can see Amazon having here: trying to get gamers to grab games off Amazon. (And they do sell digital game downloads, so they do compete with things like Steam.)
Maybe Amazon can fix some of Twitch's more recent problems like the horrendous stream lag that makes it impossible for streamers to communicate with the stream chat since the stream now has something like 30 seconds of latency between streamer and audience. Then there's Twitch's new weird anti-piracy thing where they mute audio if they detect that the audio contains a copyrighted song (hint: for video games, that's always) and whatever other issues people are complaining about Twitch these days since I never bother to use it.
Worse, on BBC America, they actually edit out large portions of the show.
Remember that the original show is nearly an hour long without commercials. So for the US version, they edit it down to the standard 44 minutes so they can include 16 minutes of ads. Which means you're missing anywhere from 12-20 minutes of content depending on original. (Based on Netflix run times.)
They've started showing the initial airing of a new Top Gear in hour 20 minute blocks, but repeats are always the edited versions. There's some stuff that's simply never been shown on US TV because it was edited out for ads.
So, you have a few minutes of introduction, then a quick preview of whats coming up, then an ad break. Then after the ad break, they show you what you saw earlier, a quick little update, and then another flash forward to what you'll see coming up.
You left out the part where the flash forward is often misleading and designed to make the next part seem more interesting than it really is. So you start the show with an exciting preview, then a bit of content, then another exciting preview. Then ads. Then a recap, then the discovering that what looked interesting in the preview was entirely uninterested followed by another deceptive preview.
But MythBusters does it even more annoyingly: they'll combine Adam and Jamie doing Myth A with Tori, Grant, and Kari doing Myth B. So you end up getting those little recap, content, preview segments first for Myth A and then for Myth B, followed by a block of ads. It makes the entire thing completely disjointed and pads out what should be two mini-episodes into a single 45 minute episode.
I've kind of wanted to take a MythBusters episode as aired and edit it to remove the preview/recap stuff and merge Myth A and Myth B into a single block of content and see how much content I'm left with. Except I'm too lazy to bother pirating an episode to do that.
A lot of companies do. I have to have Java installed on my work computers - and not just because we end up writing a lot of Java code ourselves. The backup software IT uses requires 32-bit Java. (Not 64-bit, it will crash if you use 64-bit Java. Up until recently it would also crash if you used anything after Java 1.6, but since that's no longer supported, they finally fixed that.)
There are also a few internal sites that require Java applets, so that's fun to deal with too.
Exactly. It's extremely annoying having FB pick and choose what I see. I keep my news feed on "Most Recent" all the time. But every once in a while, without warning, they pull the ol' switcheroo and change it back to what they think are the "Top Stories". No FB, I actually know everyone in my friends list and I like to keep with with all of them, not just the few I communicate with most.
The article actually mentions this: that doesn't do what you think it does. All that does is sort the Top Stories feed in chronological order.
Users mostly rebelled against this because they peeked behind the curtain and realized that Facebook is indeed controlling the content we see. Naturally, Facebook placated the naive with a button that lets us view posts in chronological order. The illusion remains intact!
Every time I visit my facebook page, I have to click on the "most recent first" option instead of having facebook decide what items I want to see.
Just in case you weren't aware, all that does is sort the Top Stories chronologically. You're still only seeing the posts Facebook decides you want to see.
As far as I know, there is absolutely no way to prevent Facebook from filtering posts. If there is I'd love to know what it is, but Most Recent isn't it. (I think it used to be, but enough people knew about it, so Facebook had to take that away. We will read the ads Zuckerberg wants us to read, dammit.)
There is a chronological order option, but it's hidden in a drop-down by the news feed link in the list on the upper-left portion of the Facebook UI. It also tends to randomly switch back to "Top Stories" mode as well as showing a little link for "back to Top Stories" at the top of the feed.
As another AC mentioned but I think deserves reiterating: that option merely sorts the Top Stories in chronological order. It does not show you all posts from all your friends. If Facebook has decided you don't want to see a post, you will not be seeing it. If they've decided you want to see fifty copies of various people posting some annoying Facebook quiz result even though you've hit the little "don't show me this" option a thousand times, well, you will be seeing fifty copies of that Facebook quiz. (After all, stupid Facebook quiz makers are important (paying) Facebook partners, and your friends are just more losers to show important (paying) Facebook partner content to.)
The only difference is that in Most Recent, they'll be in chronological order and not ranked by Facebook's "how much did the content publisher pay us?" algorithm.
Do they have a team of people sitting around watching a Twitter feed, so that if anyone mentions Southwest they can pounce?
Actually, yes, they do.
I once tweeted to complain that of the four Southwest flights I took, a single one managed to get me to my destination on time. Every other flight was late in some way. My "favorite" of that group was the flight that landed 20 minutes ahead of schedule, only to be refused a gate at the airport and had to sit around on the taxiway somewhere for 40 minutes before being assigned a gate. (Apparently Southwest doesn't rent enough gates for all their flights at Seatac.) This counts as an "early" flight as far as their metrics are concerned, despite the fact that everyone was stuck on the plane until 20 minutes after it was scheduled to arrive.
Second place goes to the flight which landed at a Southwest hub that was stuck on the taxiway because there was no ground crew available to bring the plane to the gate and connect the jetway. Again: at a Southwest hub airport.
So, in any case, I tweeted this using Southwest (intentionally not using @SWA because I didn't really care at that point since by then I was done traveling) and got a response from a Southwest customer service agent.
The answer is yes: they do, in fact, search Twitter looking for people talking about Southwest and will reply to complaints.
Other businesses do this too. I've actually managed to get tech support issues resolved by whining about them on Twitter without even mentioning the a company handle. (For example, after complaining that I couldn't find drivers for Windows 8.1 for my Samsung laptop, a Samsung customer service agent replied telling me how to use their update tool to download working Windows 8 drivers.)
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No. Automatic Downloads are turned Off by default.
No, it isn't. Apparently you're told to turn it on during setup (it's "recommended" or something) and so it doesn't default to either off or on, you're forced to decide. Which means that:
If it is setup otherwise on your devices, you turned it on.
Is technically true. But only technically.
Because there are definitely people out there who have automatic updates on and didn't know that their phones could even do that. They complained loudly enough that this article exists.
So either someone else turned it on for them, or they missed the part during setup where they could turn it off. Or more likely failed to understand what they were asked during setup and turned on a feature that they had no intention of ever using, since it's only useful in a very bizarre set of circumstances.
You can set a bit such that the phone will only download new purchases over wifi.
And how many users do you think knew that they needed to do this prior to the album being released?
The autodownload feature is only useful if you're completely within the Apple ecosystem and regularly buy songs from your iPad and want them to show up on your iPhone (or vice versa). If you either never download tracks off the music store or only download them on a single device (such as, say, someone who only owns the one iPhone), you'd never know that there even was an automatic download feature. (And if you're downloading them to your PC, you just sync to it and don't worry about downloading it a second time.)
If you aren't aware there is an automatic download feature, how are you supposed to know to either turn it off or set it to wifi only?
U2 showing up on the phone is likely the first time the majority of users even were made aware that there was an automatic download feature. Based on the articles and comments I've read, I know that there are people who only discovered this feature existed when U2 suddenly showed up on their iPhone. It may turn out to be a vocal minority, but this definitely was not something all iPhone users expected to happen.
a) false. You had to have your device set to allow automatic pushes.
Which is, of course, the default.
And, if I'm not mistaken, Apple defaults to downloading anything less than 100MB over cellular data. Which could be quite costly to people on more expensive data plans.
III) That's irrelevant to what happened. You putting this here tells me the only reason you are upset is because it's a group you don't like.
Well, yeah, it's U2. Their music is terrible. I'd be pretty pissed if I had U2 forced on me.
Wait, "anyone who has an Apple account?" Crap. That does include me.
From what I've been reading, it seems most likely that only some of these photos came from compromised iCloud accounts, and those accounts were probably not compromised due to an exploit of iCloud's service.
As I understand it (and I may be wrong), the accounts were accessed by abusing the "forgot my password" service. Resetting someone's Apple account password on them is notoriously easy, and it would make sense that's the way the hackers did it. I thought they didn't blame "weak passwords" so much as they blamed "weak security question answers" that the "hacker" guessed the answers to.
Then again, I may be misremembering or misreading the stories, I'm not sure if the actual details have been made public.
And the fact that it is the #1 camera and #1 camcorder in the world is proof positive that they have succeeded.
I call bullshit on that. The iPhone isn't even the #1 phone in the world.
And let me try and make my point clear: Fake-Steve-Jobs was standing in front of a slide showing a camcorder being destroyed, saying that they were made completely obsolete by the iPhone.
And that's entirely bullshit.
Until the iPhone has a user-replaceable battery and removable storage, it will never replace a real camera or a real camcorder. It simply can't.
And I'm guessing the last time you used it there were two zeros in the date?
The last time I used it was Saturday. The last time I tried to take video with my cellphone was ... I actually can't remember. Probably because if I'm going to be taking video of something, I'll generally plan ahead to have the camcorder around.
There's absolutely no way the iPhone has enough storage space to make recording video viable without removable storage. Not unless you're only using it for things like Vine.
Based on the issues as you describe them, I can only assume they decided they'd use their new improved video camera and streamed the entire thing from a new iPhone 6. :P
I only saw one brief bit of the stream, and it was where Steve Jobs Wannabe (Tim Cook?) was explaining how no one used camcorders any more because the iPhone could take better video. Which leads to the obvious question: does the iPhone have a replaceable battery and removable storage yet?
Because I still have a camcorder hanging around and I use it when I want to take a video that lasts longer than a couple of minutes. The entire reason I have my camcorder is so that I can take two hour videos. Then, when the battery dies, I can swap it out with a new one. And if I manage to run out of storage space, I can swap out to a new SDXC card.
Can't do either of those with an iPhone, making it a toy at taking pictures and video. Which is, to be fair, frequently fine. But Faux-Steve-Jobs's idea that the iPhone can replace a camcorder is just hilarious without those two very simple features.
Technically they've had it since last year when they added the ability to do audio-only video calls.
Which is ... still 5+ years too late. But, hey, slightly earlier than you were thinking!
Well, you could actually read the dam court documents. If you put random junk into the CAPTCHA boxes sometimes you would get an error page back - over TOR - but which contained the true IP address of the server.
Where do you get this? Because the court documents in the article certainly don't say that. In fact, they seem to be saying that the IP packets themselves contained the IP:
Upon examining the individual packets of data being sent back from the website, we noticed that the headers of some of the packets reflected a certain IP address not associated with any known Tor node as the source of the packets.
That's not an error message, that's (apparently) an HTTP(S?) request being sent straight to the Tor servers. And the only way I can think of to screw up a CAPTCHA implementation to do that would be to have it construct a complete URL using the host IP instead of just using the configured host name, which would be insane.
Again: according to the FBI themselves, this wasn't "debugging data" or anything, it was packets that were for whatever reason completely outside of the Tor network.
I don't know why people seem to find it so hard to believe that the FBI would decide to target the highest-profile online illegal drug marketplace without prompting from "sinister forces"
Because we're aware of things like COINTELPRO or, for those of us in the Boston area, remember little things like Whitey Bulger? I don't trust the FBI because they've gone out of their way to prove they are not to be trusted.
The only way I can think of to accidentally do what the FBI is claiming is if he just grabbed an poorly written CAPTCHA program off the Internet and it constructed its own URLs back to the server using the server's IP address.
Why it would do that instead of using the configured server name or, even better, just use a relative URL would be anyone's guess. But it's the only plausible way for the FBI's explanation to make any sort of sense.
(Or, to put it another way, they're almost certainly lying.)
As for lag, there's no 'lag' between gamer and chat. The streamer can and will put on stream delays to prevent cheaters from attempting to use up to date information against them in-game (Stream cheating does happen alas). There is always a little bit of lag, but generally speaking it doesn't happen notably most of the time.
I just checked this by trying to stream something. You're wrong, there's an enforced 30-60 second delay between when you do something and when your viewers see it happen, and it's impossible to reduce this without becoming a Twitch partner. It's more than enough to make meaningful chat with viewers impossible.
I do want IRC integration with twitch chat, but oh well...
This already exists? Granted I haven't tried it recently.
Did he also decide to produce the Hex output that is entirely useless and without merit?
If you read the blog entry, this is talking about Windows 3.1's BSOD. A screen I honestly did not know existed, although Windows 3.1 is so old that I'd have been a kid, so maybe it popped up all the time if you used computers daily back then. I have no idea.
Windows only picked up preemptive multitasking in NT and later 95, so Windows 3.1 was cooperatively multitasked. Apparently if the running program didn't respond to incoming messages quickly enough (presumably a check in an interrupt handler?) a blue screen would appear, and Steve Balmer wrote the text for that blue screen.
Windows 95 and NT don't use that blue screen since the blue screen that appears in 95 is for driver faults (basically) and one in NT is for kernel panics.
This deserves to be seen more, but when the Facebook app launched, it did have the option to switch to auto-play videos on wifi only. But you couldn't disable it on wifi.
The problem for me is that I have a mobile Internet hotspot which means that as far as Facebook cared, it was wifi which meant it could use all the data it wanted.
Thankfully there is now an option to turn off autoplaying videos on both the website and the apps (along with a wifi only option for the apps, but not the website). Of course Facebook should just default to autoplay off because it's a worthless feature that no one I know wants, but if they did that, no one would know that they added this new "feature." That no one wanted.
I never understand how people manage to keep that many tabs open because Firefox regularly corrupts its own session and refuses to restore the previously open tabs. Routinely.
So every couple of weeks I "get" to reset all my tabs back to nothing when Firefox corrupts its own session and refuses to restore the original settings.
And this is on every OS I've used Firefox: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X; it makes no difference, Firefox regularly refuses to restore tabs.
You don't need to take photos using an iDevice to have them end up in iCloud. All you need to do is use a Mac.
If you use a Mac to download pictures off your camera - including cell phones that aren't iPhones and therefore behave like standard cameras and don't require Apple-specific software - by default, your pictures will end up in iCloud. It's part of the "Photo Stream" thing to allow users to stream pictures to the Apple TV that clearly every Mac owner has.
The lag time is determined by the streamer, many choose to make it just a few seconds but some do choose longer times, which definitely does inhibit their ability to interact with their audience via chat.
Apparently (and I don't know that this is true as I don't use Twitch that often) you can't reduce it to a reasonable time any more. (Maybe it's changed?) All I know is that people I know who do stream games where they want to have audience participation (things like having the stream direct the choices they make in an RPG) have switched to using HitBox due to the amount of lag between when they do something and when the viewers see it.
For those not familiar with Twitch, every stream contains a "Now Playing: (Game)" thing with it, and you can select which game you're playing from a pre-defined list of games.
Bets on how long until that become a link straight to Amazon to buy said game, and how long until streamers become Amazon affiliates and start getting money for driving people to buy their games off Amazon?
Because that's the only angle I can see Amazon having here: trying to get gamers to grab games off Amazon. (And they do sell digital game downloads, so they do compete with things like Steam.)
Maybe Amazon can fix some of Twitch's more recent problems like the horrendous stream lag that makes it impossible for streamers to communicate with the stream chat since the stream now has something like 30 seconds of latency between streamer and audience. Then there's Twitch's new weird anti-piracy thing where they mute audio if they detect that the audio contains a copyrighted song (hint: for video games, that's always) and whatever other issues people are complaining about Twitch these days since I never bother to use it.
Worse, on BBC America, they actually edit out large portions of the show.
Remember that the original show is nearly an hour long without commercials. So for the US version, they edit it down to the standard 44 minutes so they can include 16 minutes of ads. Which means you're missing anywhere from 12-20 minutes of content depending on original. (Based on Netflix run times.)
They've started showing the initial airing of a new Top Gear in hour 20 minute blocks, but repeats are always the edited versions. There's some stuff that's simply never been shown on US TV because it was edited out for ads.
So, you have a few minutes of introduction, then a quick preview of whats coming up, then an ad break. Then after the ad break, they show you what you saw earlier, a quick little update, and then another flash forward to what you'll see coming up.
You left out the part where the flash forward is often misleading and designed to make the next part seem more interesting than it really is. So you start the show with an exciting preview, then a bit of content, then another exciting preview. Then ads. Then a recap, then the discovering that what looked interesting in the preview was entirely uninterested followed by another deceptive preview.
But MythBusters does it even more annoyingly: they'll combine Adam and Jamie doing Myth A with Tori, Grant, and Kari doing Myth B. So you end up getting those little recap, content, preview segments first for Myth A and then for Myth B, followed by a block of ads. It makes the entire thing completely disjointed and pads out what should be two mini-episodes into a single 45 minute episode.
I've kind of wanted to take a MythBusters episode as aired and edit it to remove the preview/recap stuff and merge Myth A and Myth B into a single block of content and see how much content I'm left with. Except I'm too lazy to bother pirating an episode to do that.
A lot of companies do. I have to have Java installed on my work computers - and not just because we end up writing a lot of Java code ourselves. The backup software IT uses requires 32-bit Java. (Not 64-bit, it will crash if you use 64-bit Java. Up until recently it would also crash if you used anything after Java 1.6, but since that's no longer supported, they finally fixed that.)
There are also a few internal sites that require Java applets, so that's fun to deal with too.
Exactly. It's extremely annoying having FB pick and choose what I see. I keep my news feed on "Most Recent" all the time. But every once in a while, without warning, they pull the ol' switcheroo and change it back to what they think are the "Top Stories". No FB, I actually know everyone in my friends list and I like to keep with with all of them, not just the few I communicate with most.
The article actually mentions this: that doesn't do what you think it does. All that does is sort the Top Stories feed in chronological order.
Users mostly rebelled against this because they peeked behind the curtain and realized that Facebook is indeed controlling the content we see. Naturally, Facebook placated the naive with a button that lets us view posts in chronological order. The illusion remains intact!
It's still the filtered view.
Every time I visit my facebook page, I have to click on the "most recent first" option instead of having facebook decide what items I want to see.
Just in case you weren't aware, all that does is sort the Top Stories chronologically. You're still only seeing the posts Facebook decides you want to see.
As far as I know, there is absolutely no way to prevent Facebook from filtering posts. If there is I'd love to know what it is, but Most Recent isn't it. (I think it used to be, but enough people knew about it, so Facebook had to take that away. We will read the ads Zuckerberg wants us to read, dammit.)
There is a chronological order option, but it's hidden in a drop-down by the news feed link in the list on the upper-left portion of the Facebook UI. It also tends to randomly switch back to "Top Stories" mode as well as showing a little link for "back to Top Stories" at the top of the feed.
As another AC mentioned but I think deserves reiterating: that option merely sorts the Top Stories in chronological order. It does not show you all posts from all your friends. If Facebook has decided you don't want to see a post, you will not be seeing it. If they've decided you want to see fifty copies of various people posting some annoying Facebook quiz result even though you've hit the little "don't show me this" option a thousand times, well, you will be seeing fifty copies of that Facebook quiz. (After all, stupid Facebook quiz makers are important (paying) Facebook partners, and your friends are just more losers to show important (paying) Facebook partner content to.)
The only difference is that in Most Recent, they'll be in chronological order and not ranked by Facebook's "how much did the content publisher pay us?" algorithm.
Do they have a team of people sitting around watching a Twitter feed, so that if anyone mentions Southwest they can pounce?
Actually, yes, they do.
I once tweeted to complain that of the four Southwest flights I took, a single one managed to get me to my destination on time. Every other flight was late in some way. My "favorite" of that group was the flight that landed 20 minutes ahead of schedule, only to be refused a gate at the airport and had to sit around on the taxiway somewhere for 40 minutes before being assigned a gate. (Apparently Southwest doesn't rent enough gates for all their flights at Seatac.) This counts as an "early" flight as far as their metrics are concerned, despite the fact that everyone was stuck on the plane until 20 minutes after it was scheduled to arrive.
Second place goes to the flight which landed at a Southwest hub that was stuck on the taxiway because there was no ground crew available to bring the plane to the gate and connect the jetway. Again: at a Southwest hub airport.
So, in any case, I tweeted this using Southwest (intentionally not using @SWA because I didn't really care at that point since by then I was done traveling) and got a response from a Southwest customer service agent.
The answer is yes: they do, in fact, search Twitter looking for people talking about Southwest and will reply to complaints.
Other businesses do this too. I've actually managed to get tech support issues resolved by whining about them on Twitter without even mentioning the a company handle. (For example, after complaining that I couldn't find drivers for Windows 8.1 for my Samsung laptop, a Samsung customer service agent replied telling me how to use their update tool to download working Windows 8 drivers.)