This thread is about Apple Maps, so yes, Apple has a maps search engine. It's limited to searching for POIs that exist on Apple Maps, but it's there.
Even so, there's nothing preventing Apple from gathering anything you search through using their browser anyway. Whether or not they actually do I can't really say: the privacy policy is vague on what exactly counts as "Apple services" where they absolutely do collect search queries.
It wasn't money at stake. It was user privacy. I'm glad Apple didn't "pay".
Huh? Apple collects the exact same user information Google does, the change is that they now keep it in-house instead of sharing it. If you value privacy, you won't be using either Google or Apple's products. (And if you value "getting to where you're going," you still won't be using Apple's maps.)
It's a report written by a lawyer. "More probably than not" is a legal term meaning "guilty in the civil sense, but not in the criminal sense." Essentially the lawyers writing the report are saying "yes, they're definitely guilty, but I'm not willing to say this meets the standards of criminal justice."
Not to mention Square Enix has a tradition of making the world's crappiest PC ports. Final Fantasy XIII launched on the PC supporting 1280x720 - and nothing else. Pressing Escape while the game was running instantly quit you out of the game without confirmation. The reason for this became obvious when they tried to add a confirmation dialog - the confirmation dialog wasn't done in-engine, meaning that pressing Escape appeared to lock up your game until you Alt-Tabbed to another app and could see the dialog box.
Square Enix can create some impressive graphics, and they can create games that run well on consoles, but their PC track-record is absolutely abysmal. (Keep in mind I'm only talking about games Square Enix themselves made for PC, not games other studios made that they published.) No matter how pretty their tech demos look, you can be sure that whatever they finally create will be unplayable on the PC.
Hell, where does that leave web developers who just want to test their website on a locally running copy?
Am I going to be forced to set up an HTTPS server just to test new features? Can you at the very least turn this off so you can test things locally without having to self-sign a certificate and then explicitly trust that certificate?
Basically this. jQuery is one of those things that's almost literally bloat: it adds nothing that your browser can't already do, it just wraps around it. You absolutely do not need to use it.
However it saves on development time. It's effectively a bunch of boilerplate code that you don't have to deal with. It's one of those things that if you were to decide not to use it, you're likely to end up rewriting a chunk of it by the time you're done anyway, so you might as well go ahead and use it from the get-go and save yourself some time.
(Which isn't to say you should always use it. I've written pages where the amount of dynamic code was small enough that using jQuery would make absolutely no sense. But the larger your project gets, the more sense it makes to use frameworks like jQuery.)
You mean it's there now. Going back through previous version of the XMLHttpRequest spec, it wasn't added until June 2007.
Who knows when it finally made it into enough browsers to be safe to use. By now no one uses it more out of momentum than anything else, but it wasn't a part of the spec originally, and people writing tutorials would use "4" because that would work even in browsers that hadn't been updated to use the latest spec.
Yeah, keep in mind Apple recently bought "Beats by Dre" which is a music streaming service (in addition to the headphones by the same name). Apple Radio (Apple's music streaming service) has been in the iPhone for a while. There's a very good reason Apple doesn't want their users to be able to listen to free radio on their iPhone.
Assuming you're aware that it requires an online server when you buy it.
I recently bought LEGO Batman 3 since I love the LEGO games and enjoyed the previous two Batman games in the series. None of them have ever had an online component. LEGO Batman 3 has no online multiplayer, it only has single player and split screen co-op.
Guess what? It requires an online connection to some server somewhere. This isn't mentioned in the Steam page anywhere. If you can't connect to the server, you can't play the game.
I hadn't thought to check if it required an Internet connection to play because why the fuck should it?!! (And if I had checked, I almost certainly wouldn't have found out about it because none of the reviews mention that fact.)
Hell, just look at the US version of Top Gear which is on a commercial channel (the History Channel because they ran out of WWII video to show and moved on to "reality" programming). The US version just does stunts. They don't do power laps, they don't do the star in a reasonably priced car, they don't do car reviews, they don't do any car news. (They actually did do the power lap times and the star in a reasonably priced car briefly during the first season, but they've since dropped those segments entirely.)
Part of the reason is surely due to time constraints: the US show only has 42 minutes to work with due to the 18 minutes of ads it has to fit the hour slot. But given that the closest to a car review they ever did was a blatant Tesla ad (ironically enough) and the show is almost always "brought to you by $CAR_COMPANY," it's fairly safe to say that the US version doesn't want to offend potential advertisers, and the show is horribly watered down due to it.
Are you talking about D Motor? I've never watched it because as an American I only speak American, dammit, but as I understand it it's a completely separate show done by a completely different company.
Which may be why it's OK.
Because their presenters know how to drive, as opposed to the American ones.
Honestly, that's not the problem with the US show. I mean, Captain Slow works.
No, the problem with the US show is that they removed the Power Laps, car reviews, "star in a reasonably priced car" and news segments, concentrating solely on the stunts. It just doesn't work because you get no sense of the personality of any of the presenters. You don't see them being "normal," you don't see any banter between them, you get no chemistry because they're always out driving cars and doing stupid things. It just doesn't work.
It also has the side-effect of making the "silent racing car driver" (apparently you can't call the Stig "tamed" in the US) a character that has absolutely no context when he shows up. Why is there suddenly a silent racing car driver driving a random car for them to race against? Oh, and now he's gone, never to show up for the remainder of the episode. Uh, OK, that was sure wacky!
Meanwhile, the BBC has a chance to reinvent Top Gear with younger presenters and a reinvigorated format (there are only so many new Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Aston Martins that can be driven around a track in a cloud of smoke every week and only so many routes for contrived road trips through war zones in ancient sports cars).
Have you ever watched any of the spin-off Top Gears, like Top Gear US or Top Gear Australia? They've already tried to "reinvent" the show, multiple times. It's yet to work.
The simple fact of the matter is that Jeremy Clarkson is the reason people watch Top Gear. Without Clarkson, there's no reason to watch.
And I agree, the BBC really has no choice, and the blame should be placed on Clarkson for being an idiot. But that doesn't change the fact that losing Clarkson will kill Top Gear. He made the show what it is.
It may not be Apple's fault (exactly), but it sure as hell is their problem. If more than 1 in 20 ApplePay transactions are fraudulent, what merchant in their right mind is going to accept it as a payment method? (Remember that fraud is paid by the merchants, not the banks.)
Even if it isn't Apple's fault, it sure is their problem to solve.
I would assume the repositories themselves could be moved. The thing is that they provide additional services beyond just hosting a git repository like issue tracking, wikis, and continuous integration support. Presumably that stuff can't be moved.
When the company I work for moved from Gitorious to GitLab we were able to migrate the git repositories with all their history relatively painlessly. GitLab had an automated process for doing it, but due to reasons apparently the Gitorious side would randomly flake out if you tried to use that. (It had to do with ulimits or something.) However you can still just clone a git repository and push branches from it to a new remote, which is the way I ended up transitioning most of the repositories.
The issue tracking and other features weren't an issue because we weren't using the built-in Gitorious/GitLab support in any case.
GitLab, not GitHub. GitHub is a different solution that provides pretty much the same software.
Strangely enough the company I work for recently (like six months ago) transitioned our internal git repositories from running on Gitorious to running on GitLab. From my experience GitLab is indeed the better product.
GitHub still seems to be better than both but I've never used that in a commercial setting.
It feels like this is worst in the Java (enterprise) community, but that could be my imagination. Sometimes I think those programmers need their 3rd party instantiation taken away from them....
I once had someone rip out a stream copy I'd written (int r; byte[] buf=new byte[1024]; while((r=in.read(buf)) >= 0) { out.write(buf,0,r); }) and replace it with a third-party library, because "we shouldn't reinvent the wheel."
Granted, I sort of agree, it's ridiculous that such a common thing isn't part of the standard Java library, but it isn't, and we didn't really need to add another 1MB of library dependencies just to do that...
Paying by smartphone is a solution in search of a problem.
You'd think that (hell, I'd have agreed), but people already pay by smart phone even without Google Wallet or Apple Pay. The obvious example is people paying by the Starbucks app, although there they get free drinks for paying that way so whatever. (However they could also pay by card, the app is just another method of getting free drinks.)
Another example is that you can apparently pay by smartphone in the cafeteria at the company I work at. I have no idea why you'd want to do this, but it's another "scan the barcode" thing, and people do it.
I have no idea why, but apparently some people find pulling out their phone and using that to be easier than using a card. Even when it takes longer because I'm not talking about NFC systems here, I'm talking about scanning a barcode on a phone.
Yeah, when my work MacBook was upgraded to Mavericks, they just flat-out reimaged the entire thing because they knew that the upgrade wouldn't work. For the forced Yosemite upgrade (really wish I could have skipped this one) they offered an actual upgrade, but it didn't matter, because I had to reimage anyway after Yosemite refused to boot for reasons I still don't understand.
Granted some of that may be due to the IT department's software, but I'll take missing features (it's not like the Samsung laptop was unusable with the Microsoft drivers) over flat-out won't boot like you get with the past two OS X upgrades.
Of course, that's just my work MacBook, and it's working (for the most part) now. Apparently other Yosemite upgraders lost wifi and DNS. I suppose I could have lost wifi too for all I know since I just leave it plugged in to the network.
Gladly. They linked me to the correct drivers for my laptop after the Windows 8.1 upgrade had trashed them. As I recall there were a bunch of drivers I needed to reinstall since Windows 8.1 had decided to revert to Microsoft stock drivers, and they told me to where to get them. (Which was necessary since by default Samsung uses a driver download program which at the time didn't know what to do with Windows 8.1 and therefore refused to download anything. So in essence they were solving a problem they themselves created.)
Basically I didn't even ask Samsung for help but got it anyway. Try doing that with Apple.
OMG!! Apple doesn't have a Twitter presence!.... Get a grip will you?!?
What, do you think the first thing I did for tech support was to whine about a problem on Twitter? I was trying to figure out a problem I had with Windows/my Samsung laptop and complained about it on Twitter, and because Microsoft/Samsung actually want their customers to be happy they reached out through it and helped me solve my problem.
With Apple, you search the web for your issue, find a ton of enthusiast sites where people are having the very same issue, and discover that there's no solution from Apple yet but they're sure there will be oh so soon now. (Originally posted: 2009.)
Apple does not deny the existence of problems with their products because they do not flip you a bird when you ask them for support
No, they just don't offer support. At all. So it's less that they flip you the bird and more that they just entirely ignore you. Except at the Apple Stores, I guess. Or did you mean I was supposed to shell out for Apple Care if I wanted their software to actually goddamned work?! (Another example: in OS X Yosemite, Apple flat-out broke DNS. Solution: copy over the DNS resolver from the previous version.)
Well, not their forums, obviously, but like the MacRumor forums or other enthusiast forums. Because like you said, Apple deletes comments rather than admitting issues.
If you want another example, I've complained about problems with Windows and my Samsung laptop on Twitter before. In both cases Microsoft and Samsung contacted me through Twitter and managed to solve my issues.
Issues with Apple products, on the other hand?
Forget it, they don't exist. They have no Twitter presence, their online tech support consists entirely of "find an Apple Store." Their online support is completely useless because their "knowledge base" doesn't include many incredibly common issues, even when you can find forums with threads that go back years and many, many pages of people with the same issue.
Apple's stance is "it just works" and if for any reason it doesn't work, fuck you, it just works, clearly you're holding it wrong. If something goes wrong in Windows you can probably fix it. It may not be easy, it may take some time, it may involve registry tweaking, but it can be fixed. If something goes wrong with Apple, well, you'd better go buy a new shiny because it won't be fixable! (If anyone wants specific examples, iCloud loves to randomly flake out and refuse to sync anything, and I've literally never seen AirDrop work.)
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This thread is about Apple Maps, so yes, Apple has a maps search engine. It's limited to searching for POIs that exist on Apple Maps, but it's there.
Even so, there's nothing preventing Apple from gathering anything you search through using their browser anyway. Whether or not they actually do I can't really say: the privacy policy is vague on what exactly counts as "Apple services" where they absolutely do collect search queries.
It wasn't money at stake. It was user privacy. I'm glad Apple didn't "pay".
Huh? Apple collects the exact same user information Google does, the change is that they now keep it in-house instead of sharing it. If you value privacy, you won't be using either Google or Apple's products. (And if you value "getting to where you're going," you still won't be using Apple's maps.)
Guess who pushed that rule through, though.
Did you guess "the New England Patriots quarterback who we now know was cheating using that rule?"
Because, guess what, you'd be right!
It's a report written by a lawyer. "More probably than not" is a legal term meaning "guilty in the civil sense, but not in the criminal sense." Essentially the lawyers writing the report are saying "yes, they're definitely guilty, but I'm not willing to say this meets the standards of criminal justice."
Meh, in this case, systemd might be an improvement.
Remember that several years ago Ubuntu switched away from SysV init to Upstart, which was effectively their own version of systemd.
So really the change is that they've gone from crappy in-house systemd to crappy actual systemd.
Which games are at the other end of that spectrum? I'd probably have to say MMOs.
Yeah, but this is Square Enix we're talking about. They don't let minor details like that prevent them from making the most detailed flower pots MMOs have ever seen.
Not to mention Square Enix has a tradition of making the world's crappiest PC ports. Final Fantasy XIII launched on the PC supporting 1280x720 - and nothing else. Pressing Escape while the game was running instantly quit you out of the game without confirmation. The reason for this became obvious when they tried to add a confirmation dialog - the confirmation dialog wasn't done in-engine, meaning that pressing Escape appeared to lock up your game until you Alt-Tabbed to another app and could see the dialog box.
Square Enix can create some impressive graphics, and they can create games that run well on consoles, but their PC track-record is absolutely abysmal. (Keep in mind I'm only talking about games Square Enix themselves made for PC, not games other studios made that they published.) No matter how pretty their tech demos look, you can be sure that whatever they finally create will be unplayable on the PC.
Hell, where does that leave web developers who just want to test their website on a locally running copy?
Am I going to be forced to set up an HTTPS server just to test new features? Can you at the very least turn this off so you can test things locally without having to self-sign a certificate and then explicitly trust that certificate?
This is a ludicrously stupid idea from Mozilla.
Well, sure, but here's a question for you:
What was the first version of Internet Explorer that included it?
Because the IE XMLHttpRequest documentation doesn't list it as a member. (I think that's the most recent documentation, but with MSDN, who even knows.)
And their example uses oReq.readyState == 4 /* complete */.
Then again, who knows when that page was last updated, and the standards they link to do include DONE. (And I checked: IE 11, at least, has it.)
Basically this. jQuery is one of those things that's almost literally bloat: it adds nothing that your browser can't already do, it just wraps around it. You absolutely do not need to use it.
However it saves on development time. It's effectively a bunch of boilerplate code that you don't have to deal with. It's one of those things that if you were to decide not to use it, you're likely to end up rewriting a chunk of it by the time you're done anyway, so you might as well go ahead and use it from the get-go and save yourself some time.
(Which isn't to say you should always use it. I've written pages where the amount of dynamic code was small enough that using jQuery would make absolutely no sense. But the larger your project gets, the more sense it makes to use frameworks like jQuery.)
You mean it's there now. Going back through previous version of the XMLHttpRequest spec, it wasn't added until June 2007.
Who knows when it finally made it into enough browsers to be safe to use. By now no one uses it more out of momentum than anything else, but it wasn't a part of the spec originally, and people writing tutorials would use "4" because that would work even in browsers that hadn't been updated to use the latest spec.
Yeah, keep in mind Apple recently bought "Beats by Dre" which is a music streaming service (in addition to the headphones by the same name). Apple Radio (Apple's music streaming service) has been in the iPhone for a while. There's a very good reason Apple doesn't want their users to be able to listen to free radio on their iPhone.
Assuming you're aware that it requires an online server when you buy it.
I recently bought LEGO Batman 3 since I love the LEGO games and enjoyed the previous two Batman games in the series. None of them have ever had an online component. LEGO Batman 3 has no online multiplayer, it only has single player and split screen co-op.
Guess what? It requires an online connection to some server somewhere. This isn't mentioned in the Steam page anywhere. If you can't connect to the server, you can't play the game.
I hadn't thought to check if it required an Internet connection to play because why the fuck should it?!! (And if I had checked, I almost certainly wouldn't have found out about it because none of the reviews mention that fact.)
Hell, just look at the US version of Top Gear which is on a commercial channel (the History Channel because they ran out of WWII video to show and moved on to "reality" programming). The US version just does stunts. They don't do power laps, they don't do the star in a reasonably priced car, they don't do car reviews, they don't do any car news. (They actually did do the power lap times and the star in a reasonably priced car briefly during the first season, but they've since dropped those segments entirely.)
Part of the reason is surely due to time constraints: the US show only has 42 minutes to work with due to the 18 minutes of ads it has to fit the hour slot. But given that the closest to a car review they ever did was a blatant Tesla ad (ironically enough) and the show is almost always "brought to you by $CAR_COMPANY," it's fairly safe to say that the US version doesn't want to offend potential advertisers, and the show is horribly watered down due to it.
Are you talking about D Motor? I've never watched it because as an American I only speak American, dammit, but as I understand it it's a completely separate show done by a completely different company.
Which may be why it's OK.
Because their presenters know how to drive, as opposed to the American ones.
Honestly, that's not the problem with the US show. I mean, Captain Slow works.
No, the problem with the US show is that they removed the Power Laps, car reviews, "star in a reasonably priced car" and news segments, concentrating solely on the stunts. It just doesn't work because you get no sense of the personality of any of the presenters. You don't see them being "normal," you don't see any banter between them, you get no chemistry because they're always out driving cars and doing stupid things. It just doesn't work.
It also has the side-effect of making the "silent racing car driver" (apparently you can't call the Stig "tamed" in the US) a character that has absolutely no context when he shows up. Why is there suddenly a silent racing car driver driving a random car for them to race against? Oh, and now he's gone, never to show up for the remainder of the episode. Uh, OK, that was sure wacky!
Meanwhile, the BBC has a chance to reinvent Top Gear with younger presenters and a reinvigorated format (there are only so many new Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Aston Martins that can be driven around a track in a cloud of smoke every week and only so many routes for contrived road trips through war zones in ancient sports cars).
Have you ever watched any of the spin-off Top Gears, like Top Gear US or Top Gear Australia? They've already tried to "reinvent" the show, multiple times. It's yet to work.
The simple fact of the matter is that Jeremy Clarkson is the reason people watch Top Gear. Without Clarkson, there's no reason to watch.
And I agree, the BBC really has no choice, and the blame should be placed on Clarkson for being an idiot. But that doesn't change the fact that losing Clarkson will kill Top Gear. He made the show what it is.
It may not be Apple's fault (exactly), but it sure as hell is their problem. If more than 1 in 20 ApplePay transactions are fraudulent, what merchant in their right mind is going to accept it as a payment method? (Remember that fraud is paid by the merchants, not the banks.)
Even if it isn't Apple's fault, it sure is their problem to solve.
I would assume the repositories themselves could be moved. The thing is that they provide additional services beyond just hosting a git repository like issue tracking, wikis, and continuous integration support. Presumably that stuff can't be moved.
When the company I work for moved from Gitorious to GitLab we were able to migrate the git repositories with all their history relatively painlessly. GitLab had an automated process for doing it, but due to reasons apparently the Gitorious side would randomly flake out if you tried to use that. (It had to do with ulimits or something.) However you can still just clone a git repository and push branches from it to a new remote, which is the way I ended up transitioning most of the repositories.
The issue tracking and other features weren't an issue because we weren't using the built-in Gitorious/GitLab support in any case.
GitLab, not GitHub. GitHub is a different solution that provides pretty much the same software.
Strangely enough the company I work for recently (like six months ago) transitioned our internal git repositories from running on Gitorious to running on GitLab. From my experience GitLab is indeed the better product.
GitHub still seems to be better than both but I've never used that in a commercial setting.
It feels like this is worst in the Java (enterprise) community, but that could be my imagination. Sometimes I think those programmers need their 3rd party instantiation taken away from them....
I once had someone rip out a stream copy I'd written (int r; byte[] buf=new byte[1024]; while((r=in.read(buf)) >= 0) { out.write(buf,0,r); }) and replace it with a third-party library, because "we shouldn't reinvent the wheel."
Granted, I sort of agree, it's ridiculous that such a common thing isn't part of the standard Java library, but it isn't, and we didn't really need to add another 1MB of library dependencies just to do that...
Paying by smartphone is a solution in search of a problem.
You'd think that (hell, I'd have agreed), but people already pay by smart phone even without Google Wallet or Apple Pay. The obvious example is people paying by the Starbucks app, although there they get free drinks for paying that way so whatever. (However they could also pay by card, the app is just another method of getting free drinks.)
Another example is that you can apparently pay by smartphone in the cafeteria at the company I work at. I have no idea why you'd want to do this, but it's another "scan the barcode" thing, and people do it.
I have no idea why, but apparently some people find pulling out their phone and using that to be easier than using a card. Even when it takes longer because I'm not talking about NFC systems here, I'm talking about scanning a barcode on a phone.
Yeah, when my work MacBook was upgraded to Mavericks, they just flat-out reimaged the entire thing because they knew that the upgrade wouldn't work. For the forced Yosemite upgrade (really wish I could have skipped this one) they offered an actual upgrade, but it didn't matter, because I had to reimage anyway after Yosemite refused to boot for reasons I still don't understand.
Granted some of that may be due to the IT department's software, but I'll take missing features (it's not like the Samsung laptop was unusable with the Microsoft drivers) over flat-out won't boot like you get with the past two OS X upgrades.
Of course, that's just my work MacBook, and it's working (for the most part) now. Apparently other Yosemite upgraders lost wifi and DNS. I suppose I could have lost wifi too for all I know since I just leave it plugged in to the network.
Gladly. They linked me to the correct drivers for my laptop after the Windows 8.1 upgrade had trashed them. As I recall there were a bunch of drivers I needed to reinstall since Windows 8.1 had decided to revert to Microsoft stock drivers, and they told me to where to get them. (Which was necessary since by default Samsung uses a driver download program which at the time didn't know what to do with Windows 8.1 and therefore refused to download anything. So in essence they were solving a problem they themselves created.)
Basically I didn't even ask Samsung for help but got it anyway. Try doing that with Apple.
OMG!! Apple doesn't have a Twitter presence! .... Get a grip will you?!?
What, do you think the first thing I did for tech support was to whine about a problem on Twitter? I was trying to figure out a problem I had with Windows/my Samsung laptop and complained about it on Twitter, and because Microsoft/Samsung actually want their customers to be happy they reached out through it and helped me solve my problem.
With Apple, you search the web for your issue, find a ton of enthusiast sites where people are having the very same issue, and discover that there's no solution from Apple yet but they're sure there will be oh so soon now. (Originally posted: 2009.)
Apple does not deny the existence of problems with their products because they do not flip you a bird when you ask them for support
No, they just don't offer support. At all. So it's less that they flip you the bird and more that they just entirely ignore you. Except at the Apple Stores, I guess. Or did you mean I was supposed to shell out for Apple Care if I wanted their software to actually goddamned work?! (Another example: in OS X Yosemite, Apple flat-out broke DNS. Solution: copy over the DNS resolver from the previous version.)
Well, not their forums, obviously, but like the MacRumor forums or other enthusiast forums. Because like you said, Apple deletes comments rather than admitting issues.
If you want another example, I've complained about problems with Windows and my Samsung laptop on Twitter before. In both cases Microsoft and Samsung contacted me through Twitter and managed to solve my issues.
Issues with Apple products, on the other hand?
Forget it, they don't exist. They have no Twitter presence, their online tech support consists entirely of "find an Apple Store." Their online support is completely useless because their "knowledge base" doesn't include many incredibly common issues, even when you can find forums with threads that go back years and many, many pages of people with the same issue.
Apple's stance is "it just works" and if for any reason it doesn't work, fuck you, it just works, clearly you're holding it wrong. If something goes wrong in Windows you can probably fix it. It may not be easy, it may take some time, it may involve registry tweaking, but it can be fixed. If something goes wrong with Apple, well, you'd better go buy a new shiny because it won't be fixable! (If anyone wants specific examples, iCloud loves to randomly flake out and refuse to sync anything, and I've literally never seen AirDrop work.)