Yeah, as a consumer file this one under "people still listen to FM radio?" Actually I did turn on my radio in the car on the weekend and listened to a local Vancouver station that I used to listen to ages ago for a while on a drive. I concluded that:
1. Every one of the on air personalities I used to listen to there are either dead or moved on to other things
2. They actually paid to have jingles (multiple!) produced telling you that they are in the process of getting you back to listening to music, instead of y'know, just playing the music.
3. They still play the same dreck from 20 years ago in frequent rotation along with the stuff the kids are listening to today.
4. My USB thumb drive is still the preferred choice to listen to, screw the radio.
You're seriously equating ads on a start menu to a dystopia: "Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization,[2] totalitarian governments, environmental disaster,[3] or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society."
Exaggeration much? I'm not saying what W10 is doing isn't a problem, but when you complain about people dismissing it, you don't honestly see that people might be doing so because others exaggerate the scope of the problem? Average computer user hears from AC "Windows 10 will eat your babies!" Sees Windows 10, notes babies are not eaten. Thinks "Ah, AC is full of shit, this isn't so bad".
1. Why blow 4 hours worth of gas when you could just tell the car to go home and call it back when you want it?
2. Who says people will even OWN self driving cars? Car cooperatives are exploding in popularity now, and that's where you have to live within a certain area to be able to use them. What do you think will happen when the car can be ordered to come to you? If you're a member of an SDC collective, just send it back into the pool after it drops you off, and request another when you're getting ready to leave.
My dad had one of these this morning. Contrary to the/. pitchfork crowd's popular opinion you can still say no and opt out completely. All it took him was about 2 seconds to say no to it.
Similar experience with me in the 90s and early 2000s. We worked 16 hour days in many cases, sometimes for weeks on end to ship and at one place I worked at they finally did an audit of our bugtracker after one release. It was discovered that the amount of mistakes on code worked on during those pushes went up dramatically, and especially tellingly - during the last 4 hours of those 14-16 hour days, frequently working all weekend as well for up to 2 months. As a result during the next release cycle, the "push" was started earlier but days were limited to 10 hours and we took weekends off again and our ship time on the release was actually faster.
Another after-release audit of the bugtracker showed that the number of introduced bugs was significantly lower than on the previous death march release and the conclusion was that the extra work hours were being burned up by mistakes to no benefit and much lower morale. Going forward, that company continued the 10 hour max rule and continues to do well.
I moved on to other things and places and sometimes there was the old work long cycle again, but I've decided that I will no longer work at places that institutionalize that kind of time commitment. I work in systems so I am on call 24/7, and if something breaks at 3am I get up and fix it because it's what I signed on for, but I am definitely not putting in crazy overtime as part of general employment.
"Fast food burger chain Wendy's Co. WEN, +0.24% reported on Wednesday a first-quarter profit that fell to $27.5 million, or 7 cents a share, from $46.3 million, or 12 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Excluding non-recurring items, adjusted earnings per share came in at 6 cents, beating the FactSet consensus of 5 cents. Revenue declined 11% to $466.2 million"
27.5M profit on 466M revenue is 5.9% profit. That's not really obscene at all. Compare and contrast with a company llike Apple's 21% margin.
Or maybe for the picky set you could start and run a "premium" carshare pool that keeps out the riffraff with high prices and your fleet is nothing but self driving Lexuses and Beermers. That way your clientele would be certain that their ass only touches a seat that has been sat in by their financial peers.
> eventually the wholesale banning of them (via legal/financial/liability regulations)
I hate to say it, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing long term. And I'm sure the 60,000 people who die in car accidents each year would agree if they could.
> I'll feel a lot more confident about self-driving cars when they're being promoted by people who DON'T live in mega-urban areas like New York and San Francisco and don't have an underlying hatred of car culture to begin with.
I love driving cars. That said I also can't wait for self driving cars because I can see how things can be a lot better with them. See my comment above about tens of thousands of people not dying for an example of one better thing. People with disabilities or those too infirm to have a drivers' license will suddenly gain mobility is another.
Maybe in the short term, but in the long term the fact that more and more cars will be self driving will reduce congestion because there won't be dumb meatbags making bad decisions and causing delays.
And that presumes you own the car. If you are part of a car collective then when the car drops you off at the mall it goes back into the "available" pool and someone else uses it.
> Pull up out front, get out, and have the car park itself
Why have the car park itself at the mall at all? Why not have it head home so someone else can use it while you shop? For that matter, I think car ownership itself will become much rarer, and membership in car collectives will be a much more common. Why spend $500 or more a month to have a car, plus insurance maintenance and gas, parking costs, etc, when a self driving car collective can give you a vehicle on demand right to your door that will take you to transit, shopping etc and cost a lot less?
> ever more exclusionary sketch show buoyed up by its ever more rabid and sycophantic fans
http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/11/media/top-gear-facts-jeremy-clarkson/ " Top Gear plays in 214 territories worldwide and has an estimated global audience of 350 million."
"exclusionary", 'sycophantic". Those words probably don't mean what you think they mean. vieweship of 5% of the world's population across hundreds of countries and cultures is hardly "exclusionary". But hey, keep telling yourself that.
It was "popular before Clarkson" like The Daily Show was popular before Jon Stewart.
"and this time with a wider audience"
Yeah... probably not. Here's the thing: Before CHM, Top Gear had a modest following. Then CH came in with Wilman and completely revamped the show. They brought on M not long after and the chemistry between the three turned it into literally the most watched "factual" program in the world. People around the world didn't watch it because it was a car show with an ensemble cast, they watched it because it was those three bumblers cocking about.
The BBC is desperate to recreate that lightning strike but is also shoving their PC agenda onto the program - hard. I will be frankly stunned if they manage to hold on to 50% of their domestic audience, let alone more than a fraction of the international one.
EVERY organization chooses what news they want to show you. Just go compare Foxnews.com, ABCnews.com and CNN.com at the same time on any given day to see what's making the front page and it's pretty easy to pick out each org's agenda.
This is nothing new or surprising to anyone who pays attention.
Hey numbnuts, ever work for a huge corporation with employees numbering in the tens of thousands? They're not buying and it's NOT because of the telemetry. It's because of the enormous efforts involved with enterprise-wide upgrades for little tangible benefit.
So websites are weapons now? That's a ridiculous analogy. Facebook is something you are free to use or not, and there is zero guarantee that any of the "information" on it has been fact checked in any way, shape or form, nor is there any guarantee any of it is not curated or biased. Hell if Fox News can go before a court and say openly that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media and that the First Amendment gives them the right to present stories from whatever angle they choose to - and they won that court case - then it's pretty clear Facebook can do the same.
They're a private enterprise, let them feel the wrath of their advertisers pulling ads.
Yeah, 99% of people don't know or care about that, so that's not the cause.
I'm thinking that a lot of the factors center more along the fact that newer processors aren't bringing a lot more to the table compared with even 5 year old processors. 10 years ago the difference between a 5 year old chip and a new chip in the same market segment was 8-12x the performance. These days that brand new i5 will only be 20-30% faster than that 5 year old one so there's no real pressure to upgrade. Speed isn't the driving factor in upgrades any longer for many, it's replacing broken/dead equipment which has slowed the cycle down.
Anecdotes aren't data, etc. etc. but for me - one of the guys who used to upgrade all the time, my life is now like this:
- my home PC has a 6 year old i5 in it, the only real upgrades in the last 6 years have been more RAM, a new video card a couple of years back and replacing the platter drive with an SSD. I have no intention of replacing the board or CPU unless one of them dies.
- I have a Nexus 7 tablet from 2013. The new tablets don't bring anything to the table at the same price point, so why upgrade?
- Work computers is 5 years old, and again it does everything I need. Work laptop is a 5 year old Thinkpad that I stuffed an SSD into and it also performs like a champ. No need to upgrade for now.
So a feature should be enabled for 100% of the users when 0.005% of them might avail themselves of it legally? From a liability and life saving perspective I think it would make more sense to either have limiters by default in cars that you need to pay a good chunk of change to have legally removed, or maybe there should be a separate class of vehicle that are not street legal that enthusiasts would purchase to only use on the track. Actually there already are several track only cars so we're part of the way there now.
Neither is Snapchat, unless of course you can show me their "107 mph in city traffic" award. There are several places people can take their phone and go 107mph legally though. Just like there are several places you can take your Focus and drive 121MPH legally. In fact I am sure there are more places you can take the phone than the car.
Linux is way better, but it's still not "there". Is your tech illiterate cousin or uncle going to install it on a machine they bought or use what's already on there and they "paid" for the OS already? Plus the guy in the article works for a design and photo firm which implies probable heavy use of Adobe products like InDesign, Photoshop, etc.
The simple fact is that it's not reasonable to expect the majority of people to go through the process of switching their PC or Mac over to an open source OS for a variety of reasons, any more than it's reasonable to expect the majority of smartphone users will jailbreak their iPhones or root and install Cyanogen or similar on their android handsets, even if it was a 5 click process.
> And exactly what is your proposal for fixing this problem?
It's a complicated problem, but I am sure people posting with a title like "No sympathy here" doesn't do jack shit to help fix it either.
> But intentionally deleting a user's data, or forcibly "upgrading" his OS, or spying on him, is nefarious, and these vendors are going to keep doing it as long as users let them get away with it. The only way to stop them is to stop using their products.
But again we're back to the whole "tech literacy" problem. The only way for the general public to stop using their products are to either dramatically increase their tech literacy, or stop using computers/tablets/smart phones altogether. So which one of those "hell freezes over" events do you think will happen first?
I don't think there is any one "right" answer but this is why things like class action lawsuits and legislation get brought up - because you have companies playing fast and loose with products targeted to an uneducated customer base and the customer is in many cases incapable of looking after their own interests properly.
If you're going to open that can of worms, I suggest we then start suing car manufacturers for not having 80 MPH limiters in place on all new North American sold vehicles. Because it does make you wonder what Ford was thinking selling a Focus that can go 121 MPH. Did nobody anticipate that jerks would drive at crazy speeds because of that?
Slashdot Mirror
I saw these in Vegas last year. Not at a trade show, in shops being used for serving beer, so obviously the cost isn't atrocious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KAbiQLkuQ0
And people have been doing smart mirrors for ages, and mirror display TVs. Not sure what the "new" hype is about.
Yeah, as a consumer file this one under "people still listen to FM radio?" Actually I did turn on my radio in the car on the weekend and listened to a local Vancouver station that I used to listen to ages ago for a while on a drive. I concluded that:
1. Every one of the on air personalities I used to listen to there are either dead or moved on to other things
2. They actually paid to have jingles (multiple!) produced telling you that they are in the process of getting you back to listening to music, instead of y'know, just playing the music.
3. They still play the same dreck from 20 years ago in frequent rotation along with the stuff the kids are listening to today.
4. My USB thumb drive is still the preferred choice to listen to, screw the radio.
Is it a case of TBTF or "screw with us and we'll show you what replaced the heart attack gun"?
http://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-heart-attack-gun/2555371072001
> Ads on my OS? Really? Dystopian future much?
You're seriously equating ads on a start menu to a dystopia: "Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization,[2] totalitarian governments, environmental disaster,[3] or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society."
Exaggeration much? I'm not saying what W10 is doing isn't a problem, but when you complain about people dismissing it, you don't honestly see that people might be doing so because others exaggerate the scope of the problem? Average computer user hears from AC "Windows 10 will eat your babies!" Sees Windows 10, notes babies are not eaten. Thinks "Ah, AC is full of shit, this isn't so bad".
Two things wrong with your scenario.
1. Why blow 4 hours worth of gas when you could just tell the car to go home and call it back when you want it?
2. Who says people will even OWN self driving cars? Car cooperatives are exploding in popularity now, and that's where you have to live within a certain area to be able to use them. What do you think will happen when the car can be ordered to come to you? If you're a member of an SDC collective, just send it back into the pool after it drops you off, and request another when you're getting ready to leave.
My dad had one of these this morning. Contrary to the /. pitchfork crowd's popular opinion you can still say no and opt out completely. All it took him was about 2 seconds to say no to it.
Similar experience with me in the 90s and early 2000s. We worked 16 hour days in many cases, sometimes for weeks on end to ship and at one place I worked at they finally did an audit of our bugtracker after one release. It was discovered that the amount of mistakes on code worked on during those pushes went up dramatically, and especially tellingly - during the last 4 hours of those 14-16 hour days, frequently working all weekend as well for up to 2 months. As a result during the next release cycle, the "push" was started earlier but days were limited to 10 hours and we took weekends off again and our ship time on the release was actually faster.
Another after-release audit of the bugtracker showed that the number of introduced bugs was significantly lower than on the previous death march release and the conclusion was that the extra work hours were being burned up by mistakes to no benefit and much lower morale. Going forward, that company continued the 10 hour max rule and continues to do well.
I moved on to other things and places and sometimes there was the old work long cycle again, but I've decided that I will no longer work at places that institutionalize that kind of time commitment. I work in systems so I am on call 24/7, and if something breaks at 3am I get up and fix it because it's what I signed on for, but I am definitely not putting in crazy overtime as part of general employment.
"obscene profits"
"Fast food burger chain Wendy's Co. WEN, +0.24% reported on Wednesday a first-quarter profit that fell to $27.5 million, or 7 cents a share, from $46.3 million, or 12 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Excluding non-recurring items, adjusted earnings per share came in at 6 cents, beating the FactSet consensus of 5 cents. Revenue declined 11% to $466.2 million"
27.5M profit on 466M revenue is 5.9% profit. That's not really obscene at all. Compare and contrast with a company llike Apple's 21% margin.
Then own your own self driving car. All good.
Or maybe for the picky set you could start and run a "premium" carshare pool that keeps out the riffraff with high prices and your fleet is nothing but self driving Lexuses and Beermers. That way your clientele would be certain that their ass only touches a seat that has been sat in by their financial peers.
> eventually the wholesale banning of them (via legal/financial/liability regulations)
I hate to say it, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing long term. And I'm sure the 60,000 people who die in car accidents each year would agree if they could.
> I'll feel a lot more confident about self-driving cars when they're being promoted by people who DON'T live in mega-urban areas like New York and San Francisco and don't have an underlying hatred of car culture to begin with.
I love driving cars. That said I also can't wait for self driving cars because I can see how things can be a lot better with them. See my comment above about tens of thousands of people not dying for an example of one better thing. People with disabilities or those too infirm to have a drivers' license will suddenly gain mobility is another.
> That's going to increase traffic congestion.
Maybe in the short term, but in the long term the fact that more and more cars will be self driving will reduce congestion because there won't be dumb meatbags making bad decisions and causing delays.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2012/09/02/how_bad_driving_habits_are_causing_gta_traffic_gridlock.html
And that presumes you own the car. If you are part of a car collective then when the car drops you off at the mall it goes back into the "available" pool and someone else uses it.
IMO you're still only seeing the edges of this.
> Pull up out front, get out, and have the car park itself
Why have the car park itself at the mall at all? Why not have it head home so someone else can use it while you shop? For that matter, I think car ownership itself will become much rarer, and membership in car collectives will be a much more common. Why spend $500 or more a month to have a car, plus insurance maintenance and gas, parking costs, etc, when a self driving car collective can give you a vehicle on demand right to your door that will take you to transit, shopping etc and cost a lot less?
> ever more exclusionary sketch show buoyed up by its ever more rabid and sycophantic fans
http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/11/media/top-gear-facts-jeremy-clarkson/
" Top Gear plays in 214 territories worldwide and has an estimated global audience of 350 million."
"exclusionary", 'sycophantic". Those words probably don't mean what you think they mean. vieweship of 5% of the world's population across hundreds of countries and cultures is hardly "exclusionary". But hey, keep telling yourself that.
It was "popular before Clarkson" like The Daily Show was popular before Jon Stewart.
"and this time with a wider audience"
Yeah... probably not. Here's the thing: Before CHM, Top Gear had a modest following. Then CH came in with Wilman and completely revamped the show. They brought on M not long after and the chemistry between the three turned it into literally the most watched "factual" program in the world. People around the world didn't watch it because it was a car show with an ensemble cast, they watched it because it was those three bumblers cocking about.
The BBC is desperate to recreate that lightning strike but is also shoving their PC agenda onto the program - hard. I will be frankly stunned if they manage to hold on to 50% of their domestic audience, let alone more than a fraction of the international one.
EVERY organization chooses what news they want to show you. Just go compare Foxnews.com, ABCnews.com and CNN.com at the same time on any given day to see what's making the front page and it's pretty easy to pick out each org's agenda.
This is nothing new or surprising to anyone who pays attention.
Hey numbnuts, ever work for a huge corporation with employees numbering in the tens of thousands? They're not buying and it's NOT because of the telemetry. It's because of the enormous efforts involved with enterprise-wide upgrades for little tangible benefit.
So websites are weapons now? That's a ridiculous analogy. Facebook is something you are free to use or not, and there is zero guarantee that any of the "information" on it has been fact checked in any way, shape or form, nor is there any guarantee any of it is not curated or biased. Hell if Fox News can go before a court and say openly that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media and that the First Amendment gives them the right to present stories from whatever angle they choose to - and they won that court case - then it's pretty clear Facebook can do the same.
They're a private enterprise, let them feel the wrath of their advertisers pulling ads.
> then that is misleading consumers
So, tell me how much does this Facebook thing cost to use? Oh, nothing? All right then! Damages of Zero Dollars it is!
Yeah, 99% of people don't know or care about that, so that's not the cause.
I'm thinking that a lot of the factors center more along the fact that newer processors aren't bringing a lot more to the table compared with even 5 year old processors. 10 years ago the difference between a 5 year old chip and a new chip in the same market segment was 8-12x the performance. These days that brand new i5 will only be 20-30% faster than that 5 year old one so there's no real pressure to upgrade. Speed isn't the driving factor in upgrades any longer for many, it's replacing broken/dead equipment which has slowed the cycle down.
Anecdotes aren't data, etc. etc. but for me - one of the guys who used to upgrade all the time, my life is now like this:
- my home PC has a 6 year old i5 in it, the only real upgrades in the last 6 years have been more RAM, a new video card a couple of years back and replacing the platter drive with an SSD. I have no intention of replacing the board or CPU unless one of them dies.
- I have a Nexus 7 tablet from 2013. The new tablets don't bring anything to the table at the same price point, so why upgrade?
- Work computers is 5 years old, and again it does everything I need. Work laptop is a 5 year old Thinkpad that I stuffed an SSD into and it also performs like a champ. No need to upgrade for now.
> Not at all. It appears as though Microsoft is supporting Windows 7 fully and patching bugs like they always do.
Yeah. "Fixing".
This was the same company that used to have an internal slogan of "the job's not done until Lotus won't run".
> Track Day
So a feature should be enabled for 100% of the users when 0.005% of them might avail themselves of it legally? From a liability and life saving perspective I think it would make more sense to either have limiters by default in cars that you need to pay a good chunk of change to have legally removed, or maybe there should be a separate class of vehicle that are not street legal that enthusiasts would purchase to only use on the track. Actually there already are several track only cars so we're part of the way there now.
Neither is Snapchat, unless of course you can show me their "107 mph in city traffic" award. There are several places people can take their phone and go 107mph legally though. Just like there are several places you can take your Focus and drive 121MPH legally. In fact I am sure there are more places you can take the phone than the car.
Linux is way better, but it's still not "there". Is your tech illiterate cousin or uncle going to install it on a machine they bought or use what's already on there and they "paid" for the OS already? Plus the guy in the article works for a design and photo firm which implies probable heavy use of Adobe products like InDesign, Photoshop, etc.
The simple fact is that it's not reasonable to expect the majority of people to go through the process of switching their PC or Mac over to an open source OS for a variety of reasons, any more than it's reasonable to expect the majority of smartphone users will jailbreak their iPhones or root and install Cyanogen or similar on their android handsets, even if it was a 5 click process.
> And exactly what is your proposal for fixing this problem?
It's a complicated problem, but I am sure people posting with a title like "No sympathy here" doesn't do jack shit to help fix it either.
> But intentionally deleting a user's data, or forcibly "upgrading" his OS, or spying on him, is nefarious, and these vendors are going to keep doing it as long as users let them get away with it. The only way to stop them is to stop using their products.
But again we're back to the whole "tech literacy" problem. The only way for the general public to stop using their products are to either dramatically increase their tech literacy, or stop using computers/tablets/smart phones altogether. So which one of those "hell freezes over" events do you think will happen first?
I don't think there is any one "right" answer but this is why things like class action lawsuits and legislation get brought up - because you have companies playing fast and loose with products targeted to an uneducated customer base and the customer is in many cases incapable of looking after their own interests properly.
If you're going to open that can of worms, I suggest we then start suing car manufacturers for not having 80 MPH limiters in place on all new North American sold vehicles. Because it does make you wonder what Ford was thinking selling a Focus that can go 121 MPH. Did nobody anticipate that jerks would drive at crazy speeds because of that?