"The company is sharpening Google Play store recommendations with AI..."
Yeah, because you really need powerful AI to have an intern do a search for 'Plants vs Zombies' once a week and make sure there's not five pages of scam apps and guides followed by the real app on Page 6.
Who the fuck ever thought this was a good idea in the first fucking place?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?! 99% of all web sites give exactly ZERO fucks about my screen dimensions, bandwidth availability, bandwidth costs, CPU, memory, storage usage, what else I'm using my computer for, or how much free time I have. What fucking IDIOT thought ANYONE ANYWHERE would ever lift a fucking FINGER to save me an ounce of battery life? "Oh, hey, I was going to do a few rounds of SETI@HOME in this iframe here, but since your browser indicates you have under 20% battery left, I'll just skip that."
Now, if my OS wants to tell my browser "Hey, battery is low, don't autoplay media or loop GIFs", that's totally fine, but I can't think of one single reason to ever tell a remote server about that.
Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
And near the end...
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc)
Things have changed since then, but 386 was a requirement since literally day one.
The hardware is neat, though of course the price is high. The dial, however, looks like a solution in search of a problem. I don't think it does anything you couldn't do with a gesture -- say, three fingers on the screen in a triangle, and then move them in the same way that you'd turn a dial. Like in Minority Report.
Yes, because Apple would have simply gone up forever if Steve Jobs were still around. No other company has ever done that in history, but you can bet it would have happened here.
Personally, I like Jason Snell's take:
There's a lot of angst about Apple's growth, and that makes sense from certain financial perspectives. If you're an investor, you care. If you're someone who is more concerned with the general health and well being of Apple, well: In a year where it received financial scrutiny the likes of which it hadn't seen since the earliest days of the second Steve Jobs era, Apple had its second-best year ever, threw off nearly $46 billion in profit, and now sits on a $237.6 billion cash pile. Yeah... as bad years go, it was pretty okay.
Just in case regular cubes aren't bad enough, a new high-level manager joined my company a couple years ago and decided to go with short-walled cubes so everyone can SEE each other and REALLY collaborate. Luckily that plague has not yet descended upon my location, and it looks like it won't. If it did, I'd just work from home 100% of the time. (Luckily my company is pretty good about that.) Besides the noise, I don't want to feel like everyone is staring at me all day long. Did I mention no one else on my team is in my city? (Or state, for that matter.) There's no collaboration to be had, in my case.
Noise sucks. Usually I work from home in the mornings when I (and all my neighbors at work) have calls, then I go in after lunch because my office is close and I don't want to be in the house every day, all day.
Different people like different things. Unfortunately, it seems that the people who rise to management are more often than not outgoing, and think fratboy bullpens are awesome.
Plus there's the little matter of physics. What do you have if there are 90 noisy people and 10 quiet people? A noisy environment. What do you have if there are 10 noisy people and 90 quiet people? A noisy environment.
Like the old joke: If you have a barrel of sewage and you add a cup of wine, you still have a barrel of sewage. If you have a barrel of wine and you add a cup of sewage, you now have a barrel of sewage.
Customer -> Uber -> Driver -> Tesla -> Self-driving Software -> local, state, national laws about self-driving cars -> local, state, national laws about ride sharing -> Insurance companies... figuring out who to sue and who pays in case of an accident would be like legal Inception.
Nice backhanded compliment: "There are many reasons a person might support Trump that do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia, or accepting sexual assault."
The age-old question: if you claim to be inclusive, do you have to include people who exclude others?
Similar to "what happens to 'alternative' when it becomes mainstream?"
I've long held onto a naïve dream that we might achieve SOME level of security by teaching users how to read domain names, enabling status bars (note: FUCK ALL CURRENT BROWSER MAKERS that turn them off by default) so users can look at URLs before clicking on them, and NOT blindly trusting that little green padlock (oh look! I'm securely connected to totally-legit-bank.ru) but for that to happen, domain names MUST be human-parseable. I don't expect everyone to become a cybersecurity expert, but if you can learn and follow a basic rules of traffic safety, you can learn follow a few basic rules of online safety.* Oh well. Now I guess I can spend my time dreaming of riding ponies and winning the lottery.
No sense mentioning how much harder it will make it for everyone who writes make-this-FQDN-a-link code. Lots of systems will make google.com clickable but I doubt anyone BUT google will do the same for blog.google. Or we can just render EVERYTHING with a dot as a link.:-/
* Please spare me the obvious jokes about OMG EVERYONE IS TEH WORST DRIVERS!!!!!11
I think a major issue is that it's easy and common to have contacts in your phone with addresses. People send you contacts that are fully populated with info, you can search in Maps and 'create new contact' from a result and it includes the address, etc. And you have it with you all the time so you can easily update it at your convenience. As opposed to a GPS built into a car, where you have to sit there in the car and punch the info in on the screen. You can only update it when you're sitting in the car and doing nothing else. And the UI to choose an existing location usually isn't that great.
On top of that, many (most?) car GPSs don't have Internet connections to show live traffic info, which is almost as important as knowing where you're going in the first place. In fact, more often than not, I use my phone to check traffic on the way to a known destination, which means the traffic info is MORE important than the actual directions 90% of the time. On top of worrying about out-of-date info and potentially expensive updates, it's pretty obvious why people prefer their phones.
I only ever use a standalone GPS when I'm going on a long trip (over an hour) to a new place and when traffic isn't a concern -- i.e., there's nothing else to do but stay on the highway and make my exit. THEN it's worth the time it takes to punch in the address because I get a screen that can stay on without tying up my phone. And even then I'll have the address ready in my phone, too, so I can check traffic as I get closer.
So it's not entirely that car GPS systems are totally bad -- they're just way worse (in practical terms) than phones.
Luckily, not all companies choose Option B. (Or at least, not all at once.) This is the #1 reason I moved from AT&T to T-Mobile 3 years ago. On AT&T, if I went over, they charged a TON for the next small clump of data. I think my plan was $30/mo for X GB, and if I went over, it was about $15 or $20 for two-tenths of X GB more -- something ridiculous like that. And it wasn't optional -- if you went over, you paid.
On T-M, besides giving me more data for less money in the first place AND including tethering for free (which was also $15-20/mo on AT&T), they have no overage charges. If you go over your allotment, you get throttled to 2G speeds for the rest of the month. (Not sure if that is still how they work for new accounts, but I still have the deal that I signed up for.)
AND they were one of the first companies to make it easy to buy phones outright and not subsidize them, so if you can stand to use a phone for more than 2 years, you save money. AND they aren't jerks when you ask to unlock your phone. Etc etc etc.
Other than the fact that actual phone calls get dropped a lot more (like, weekly or more, versus almost never on AT&T), I've been totally happy with T-M and I've saved a lot of money with them over AT&T in the last 3 years.
Plenty of people are nuts and you don't know them. You know about the famous nuts BECAUSE THEY'RE FAMOUS. There are literally thousands of famous actors, musicians, and athletes, and it only takes a few visible nuts to make it seem like there are a WHOLE LOT of nuts.
... if people start doing something they didn't used to do, sometimes they don't want to keep doing it? Amazing! Armed with this knowledge, I can finally shave off these mutton chops I grew in the 70s, and give up my paper route.
What kind of linguistic game are you trying to play? Yes, it existed before the iPhone, but the day the iPhone was released, BlackBerry became an alternative. And it was especially an "alternative" once the iPhone started outselling it. Which, considering BlackBerry had an 8 year headstart, happened pretty quickly. http://www.businessinsider.com...
"Alternative" simply means "If I want to buy an iPhone, is there something else available I can buy instead?"
Slashdot Mirror
"The company is sharpening Google Play store recommendations with AI..."
Yeah, because you really need powerful AI to have an intern do a search for 'Plants vs Zombies' once a week and make sure there's not five pages of scam apps and guides followed by the real app on Page 6.
Don't hold your breath. They had a patent in 2002 for changing the colors of a device's case that we still haven't seen used.
> These are your choices in 2016.
That, and Trump and Hillary.
FUCK. The Mayans were 4 years off.
Who the fuck ever thought this was a good idea in the first fucking place?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?! 99% of all web sites give exactly ZERO fucks about my screen dimensions, bandwidth availability, bandwidth costs, CPU, memory, storage usage, what else I'm using my computer for, or how much free time I have. What fucking IDIOT thought ANYONE ANYWHERE would ever lift a fucking FINGER to save me an ounce of battery life? "Oh, hey, I was going to do a few rounds of SETI@HOME in this iframe here, but since your browser indicates you have under 20% battery left, I'll just skip that."
Now, if my OS wants to tell my browser "Hey, battery is low, don't autoplay media or loop GIFs", that's totally fine, but I can't think of one single reason to ever tell a remote server about that.
Came here to say this. FROM THE FIRST FREAKING SENTENCE OF ORIGINAL FREAKING ANNOUNCEMENT...
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
And near the end...
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc)
Things have changed since then, but 386 was a requirement since literally day one.
Make it one millimeter thicker. Fucking a.
Now ask me how I think iPhone battery life could be improved...
> I'm just waiting for someone to invent non-pixelated
> screen which just uses continuous orthogonal
> functions to paint the screen.
Once the pixel density exceeds the eye's ability to discern them as individual objects, what's the point of using another system?
The hardware is neat, though of course the price is high. The dial, however, looks like a solution in search of a problem. I don't think it does anything you couldn't do with a gesture -- say, three fingers on the screen in a triangle, and then move them in the same way that you'd turn a dial. Like in Minority Report.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
Yes, because Apple would have simply gone up forever if Steve Jobs were still around. No other company has ever done that in history, but you can bet it would have happened here.
Personally, I like Jason Snell's take:
There's a lot of angst about Apple's growth, and that makes sense from certain financial perspectives. If you're an investor, you care. If you're someone who is more concerned with the general health and well being of Apple, well: In a year where it received financial scrutiny the likes of which it hadn't seen since the earliest days of the second Steve Jobs era, Apple had its second-best year ever, threw off nearly $46 billion in profit, and now sits on a $237.6 billion cash pile. Yeah... as bad years go, it was pretty okay.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/10/apples-fiscal-4th-quarter-in-5-charts/
Just in case regular cubes aren't bad enough, a new high-level manager joined my company a couple years ago and decided to go with short-walled cubes so everyone can SEE each other and REALLY collaborate. Luckily that plague has not yet descended upon my location, and it looks like it won't. If it did, I'd just work from home 100% of the time. (Luckily my company is pretty good about that.) Besides the noise, I don't want to feel like everyone is staring at me all day long. Did I mention no one else on my team is in my city? (Or state, for that matter.) There's no collaboration to be had, in my case.
Noise sucks. Usually I work from home in the mornings when I (and all my neighbors at work) have calls, then I go in after lunch because my office is close and I don't want to be in the house every day, all day.
Different people like different things. Unfortunately, it seems that the people who rise to management are more often than not outgoing, and think fratboy bullpens are awesome.
Plus there's the little matter of physics. What do you have if there are 90 noisy people and 10 quiet people? A noisy environment. What do you have if there are 10 noisy people and 90 quiet people? A noisy environment.
Like the old joke: If you have a barrel of sewage and you add a cup of wine, you still have a barrel of sewage. If you have a barrel of wine and you add a cup of sewage, you now have a barrel of sewage.
A leak like this would have never happened if Steve Jobs were still alive!
I mean, except for the one time he was on the cover of Time magazine with the new iMac G4 the day before it launched. But other than that... never!
What in the world do those 3700 people do?
Certainly not anything that generates any profit.
Citation needed.
Oh wait, here it is:
https://twitter.com/dcurtis/st...
Profit per employee, 2015:
Apple: $464k
Facebook: $290k
Google: $250k
Microsoft: $102k
Yahoo: $54k
Twitter: -$129k
Customer -> Uber -> Driver -> Tesla -> Self-driving Software -> local, state, national laws about self-driving cars -> local, state, national laws about ride sharing -> Insurance companies... figuring out who to sue and who pays in case of an accident would be like legal Inception.
This is what you get when kids raised on Transformers reach adulthood and become product managers.
"Hello again" can only mean one thing -- they're bringing back the SCSI port!!!!!11 Or maybe the floppy drive. Either way -- STOKED. :D :D :D
Nice backhanded compliment: "There are many reasons a person might support Trump that do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia, or accepting sexual assault."
The age-old question: if you claim to be inclusive, do you have to include people who exclude others?
Similar to "what happens to 'alternative' when it becomes mainstream?"
I've long held onto a naïve dream that we might achieve SOME level of security by teaching users how to read domain names, enabling status bars (note: FUCK ALL CURRENT BROWSER MAKERS that turn them off by default) so users can look at URLs before clicking on them, and NOT blindly trusting that little green padlock (oh look! I'm securely connected to totally-legit-bank.ru) but for that to happen, domain names MUST be human-parseable. I don't expect everyone to become a cybersecurity expert, but if you can learn and follow a basic rules of traffic safety, you can learn follow a few basic rules of online safety.* Oh well. Now I guess I can spend my time dreaming of riding ponies and winning the lottery.
No sense mentioning how much harder it will make it for everyone who writes make-this-FQDN-a-link code. Lots of systems will make google.com clickable but I doubt anyone BUT google will do the same for blog.google. Or we can just render EVERYTHING with a dot as a link. :-/
* Please spare me the obvious jokes about OMG EVERYONE IS TEH WORST DRIVERS!!!!!11
> Oh yeah -- the courts are not supposed to interpret
> intent either; they're supposed to make judgements
> according to the way laws are written.
Have you ever in your life seen a design spec that covered all possible use cases?
According to some snail mail I got today, "Donald Trump will defeat ISIS once and for all."
I think a major issue is that it's easy and common to have contacts in your phone with addresses. People send you contacts that are fully populated with info, you can search in Maps and 'create new contact' from a result and it includes the address, etc. And you have it with you all the time so you can easily update it at your convenience. As opposed to a GPS built into a car, where you have to sit there in the car and punch the info in on the screen. You can only update it when you're sitting in the car and doing nothing else. And the UI to choose an existing location usually isn't that great.
On top of that, many (most?) car GPSs don't have Internet connections to show live traffic info, which is almost as important as knowing where you're going in the first place. In fact, more often than not, I use my phone to check traffic on the way to a known destination, which means the traffic info is MORE important than the actual directions 90% of the time. On top of worrying about out-of-date info and potentially expensive updates, it's pretty obvious why people prefer their phones.
I only ever use a standalone GPS when I'm going on a long trip (over an hour) to a new place and when traffic isn't a concern -- i.e., there's nothing else to do but stay on the highway and make my exit. THEN it's worth the time it takes to punch in the address because I get a screen that can stay on without tying up my phone. And even then I'll have the address ready in my phone, too, so I can check traffic as I get closer.
So it's not entirely that car GPS systems are totally bad -- they're just way worse (in practical terms) than phones.
Luckily, not all companies choose Option B. (Or at least, not all at once.) This is the #1 reason I moved from AT&T to T-Mobile 3 years ago. On AT&T, if I went over, they charged a TON for the next small clump of data. I think my plan was $30/mo for X GB, and if I went over, it was about $15 or $20 for two-tenths of X GB more -- something ridiculous like that. And it wasn't optional -- if you went over, you paid.
On T-M, besides giving me more data for less money in the first place AND including tethering for free (which was also $15-20/mo on AT&T), they have no overage charges. If you go over your allotment, you get throttled to 2G speeds for the rest of the month. (Not sure if that is still how they work for new accounts, but I still have the deal that I signed up for.)
AND they were one of the first companies to make it easy to buy phones outright and not subsidize them, so if you can stand to use a phone for more than 2 years, you save money. AND they aren't jerks when you ask to unlock your phone. Etc etc etc.
Other than the fact that actual phone calls get dropped a lot more (like, weekly or more, versus almost never on AT&T), I've been totally happy with T-M and I've saved a lot of money with them over AT&T in the last 3 years.
Plenty of people are nuts and you don't know them. You know about the famous nuts BECAUSE THEY'RE FAMOUS. There are literally thousands of famous actors, musicians, and athletes, and it only takes a few visible nuts to make it seem like there are a WHOLE LOT of nuts.
... if people start doing something they didn't used to do, sometimes they don't want to keep doing it? Amazing! Armed with this knowledge, I can finally shave off these mutton chops I grew in the 70s, and give up my paper route.
What kind of linguistic game are you trying to play? Yes, it existed before the iPhone, but the day the iPhone was released, BlackBerry became an alternative. And it was especially an "alternative" once the iPhone started outselling it. Which, considering BlackBerry had an 8 year headstart, happened pretty quickly. http://www.businessinsider.com...
"Alternative" simply means "If I want to buy an iPhone, is there something else available I can buy instead?"
"For some period of time that work would be done by Mozillaâ(TM)s Connected Devices team."
COME ON, SLASHDOT!
And now, a joke:
Q: What's the difference between me and Slashdot?
A: In the last 20 years, I've learned how to deal with common special characters.