If 90% of table salt people are using all the time has microplastics in it, then it clearly has no negative health effects, or else with such a massive experimental group, we'd have seen negative results already.:)
No, all that proves is that whatever effects there might be are not acutely toxic. It's quite possible there may be long term effects or mild effects or effects that only impact a portion of the population or perhaps no impact at all. We just don't know at this point. It's not unusual at all for mild chemical pollution (which this is) to have health implications that are not noticed for some time. Right now we have essentially no clue if these things will actually be harmful but we would be foolish not to take the possibility seriously. Becoming aware of the presence of a potential problem is the first step in dealing with it. We are just recently becoming aware there may be a serious issue and that further research is warranted.
Are there any health implications of micro plastics in salt? That was suspiciously left out of the article for some reason.
What's suspicious about it? The answer is they have no fucking clue what the health implications (if any) are. Neither does anyone else at this point. Why would they make claims about health implications when there is a good approximation of zero data regarding the effect of microplastic on health? We know it isn't acutely toxic but beyond that a lot of research is going to have to be done to figure out if/how/why it is a problem and even more research to figure out what to do about it if it actually is a health risk.
Of course it is... since it was soldered in place in the last "upgrade" it's 0
Don't be ridiculous. Most Windows desktops and laptops have user upgradable memory and the VAST majority of people and companies never touch it. They don't even open the case to look. This is not some sort of new revelation. People rarely upgraded memory on Macintoshes when they could do it and Apple provided the opportunity for literally decades. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Apple looked at the data and said "we can make more money by eliminating something almost none of our users are bothering with anyway".
People act like Apple somehow should be forced to cater to their niche need which baffles me. Apple is going to do what is best for Apple. If you care about something that only a single digit percentage of users will ever care about (like upgrading your RAM) don't be surprised when Apple or any other company decides the added cost and lost revenue isn't worth the trouble.
We had a large lab to support and were buying Mac Minis by the pallet.
That just makes you the exception that proves the rule. The primary customers for Macs are decidedly NOT "large labs" or companies. They are end users purchasing them on their own dime and the vast majority of them never crack open the case. People like you and me are the rare exception and Apple knows it. They can make more money by reducing cost and overcharging for the OEM installed memory so they do that because it makes financial sense for them to do it. They know they aren't going to lose customers over it so why wouldn't they? I'm not saying I like it or approve but I get it.
I think it's more that building in the RAM means you have to buy your RAM upgrades from Apple.
Sure that's part of it - Apple can bring in extra revenue that way. But don't underestimate the cost savings from not having to add the hardware to interface with the memory modules. They also don't have to design a user serviceable product which saves money too. They don't have to source the more complicated modular parts, they can have simpler assembly procedures, they reduce warranty costs by not having to deal with third party parts and ham handed users, etc. They realize these savings on EVERY device, not just the ones they sell to the smaller group of people who might consider upgrading the RAM.
Financially it's a win in pretty much every way for Apple so whining at them about it will accomplish nothing. Like I said, if you want Apple to give a shit about user serviceable parts then you need to make a financial case where it's in Apple's interest to provide them. I think that is going to be a hard thing to accomplish.
Do you remember when you could buy a Mac Mini with non-soldered RAM, a quad core CPU, and a replaceable disk?
If you want non-soldered RAM and user replaceable disks you need to show Apple a business case where it makes sense for them. The number of people who upgrade RAM in their machines is a rounding error and I'm pretty sure Apple has the data to prove it. If the number of your customers who take advantage of a feature is a good approximation of zero then why incur the added cost (design, manufacturing, purchasing) of the more complicated device? If it is more profitable for them to just deal with it as a warranty issue then they will do that. I think the lost business they incur from this decision is almost zero (unfortunately) so it really shouldn't be surprising especially in light of Apple's preference for a closed ecosystem.
Don't get me wrong, I have a Mac Mini and swapped the RAM on it a while back so I'd definitely prefer that option. But I get why Apple does what they do and I'm not really sure how to make a business case for modular RAM that would bring in enough profit to Apple for them to give a shit.
I expect that it would be more effective and provide a higher degree of accuracy to use a purpose built/modified ship to simply traverse the waters following satellite guided paths would be less expensive and simpler.
More accurate maybe but almost certainly more expensive unless they are doing something rather daft.
Not to mention that most ships are following trade routes.So your results would be highly limited.
Probably not as limited as you think and it makes a lot of sense to start where most of the ships are traveling anyway.
Actually, it isn't. That's the point I was trying to make when I mentioned video editing. A LOT of creative tools make use of the keyboard.
You are thinking that the only practical way to do things is the way we do them currently and are having trouble thinking beyond the mouse/keyboard interface. Function and meta keys are useful but reliance on them in far too many cases is a simple case of the proverbial "if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem becomes a nail". They make use of the keyboard because they have a keyboard to make use of, not because it is necessarily the best way to do a given task. Keyboards are great tools but one of the smart decisions Apple (and others) made a while back was to de-emphasize them with tablets because it forced software developers to actually think about their interface instead of absent mindedly relying on a keyboard like they always have and thinking of tablets as a type of laptop. Same thing with a stylus - developers historically wanted to be lazy and treat it like a mouse which is rarely a good interface decision.
Thinking of a tablet as a type of laptop (or as a supersized smartphone) is precisely the reason the software for them sucks and their sales have stagnated. Yes you can find tasks for which a tablet isn't the best tool for the job. The problem is that we don't have the software for SOME tasks where they should be the best tool for the job - note taking IMO being paramount among them.
Wi-Fi is only really viable in the presence of an infrastructure network, because in both IBSS and peer-to-peer modes, you're limited to 802.11g speeds.
So what? 802.11g is plenty fast for lots of tasks and the faster versions of wifi are not hard to find when needed. The wireless network in our company runs that speed and we very successfully run ERP, accounting, and engineering software over it. Our physical ethernet network is still mostly 10/100 and that is FINE. Plus you aren't considering LTE which is plenty fast for lots of uses when you aren't near wifi or only have slow wifi available.
Try importing a few dozen 4 GB video files over 802.11g.
How many people do you think actually do this routinely? If you are doing that sort of work, yeah a tablet probably isn't your tool of choice. But VERY few people as a percent of the general population spend much time working with multiple GB files and heavy duty video editing. Certainly nobody I work with. You are thinking of this technology from a very narrow collection of use cases that don't apply to most of the population. If you want to pick tasks for which a tablet isn't an ideal tool it isn't hard but that's not a very useful discussion. A laptop isn't a great tool for making phone calls even though technically it can do it. Horses for courses and all that. Don't make the mistake of thinking that because a tablet isn't the right tool for some jobs that it is the wrong tool for all jobs.
There's a reason I use my laptop for everything and never bothered to upgrade my tablet hardware, which is now sitting unused. Even right now, I cannot do even 1% of the things I do on my laptop while using a tablet — not because the software isn't there, but because the hardware couldn't support the software even if it existed.
I think that argument is bogus. In any case it shows you are missing my point. Current tablets are plenty powerful enough to do lots of useful work and plenty of people do it every day and I'm pretty sure a lot of what you do could be done just fine with a tablet. My wife is a doctor and her office staff does all their data capture for patient charts on tablets with some software that was developed specifically with their capabilities in mind - works great. I wrote software to enable work instructions and tooling data to be available on tablets in our manufacturing plant - a laptop would actually be kind of clumsy for that purp
The lack of a physical keyboard makes many types of content creation much less efficient (typing, video editing, etc.).
Which is irrelevant if the content you are creating isn't related to typing. Like I said they should be targeted at replacing paper note pads which would primarily involve fingers + stylus. Laptops already do a more than adequate job of dealing with tasks that require a keyboard for most applications. Yes you can add one to a tablet if needed but trying to make a tablet into a laptop is mostly a fools errand.
The problem with tablets is NOT the hardware. The problem is the (sucky) software which fails to take full advantage of what they can do.
I/O is limited (a single Lightning port for charging and USB-2.0-speed I/O). This will go away when Apple adopts USB-C ports on their iDevices.
This is a good approximation of a non-issue. You seem to be forgetting about WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc. There are innumerable tasks that aren't particular I/O intensive that tablets can handle just fine. It's not like one needs gigabit ethernet to write notes or take pictures etc. I agree that Apple should move to USB-C but I/O speed isn't the primary reason for that.
Tablets have insufficient RAM to work with large projects without constant paging (which would significantly reduce hardware life expectancy unless very carefully managed).
A) "Large" is an ambiguous term and tablets have more than enough memory to do a huge variety of useful tasks right now. B) It is a trivial proposition to add more memory to these devices provided one is willing to add physical size to them.
To make a tablet work well for content creation, you would need to give it a laptop-sized battery, which means a laptop-sized tablet.
Not even remotely true unless you are doing work that should be done on a laptop anyway. And there is no inherent reason tablets have to be smaller than laptops anyway for all use cases. Thinking of tablets as weak laptops or supersized smartphones is precisely the problem. They need to be their own special category or there is no point to them.
I had an iPad for three years and never really used it, because I don't see the niche for it. I already have my large phone in my pocket and it can do pretty much anything an iPad can do, without carrying an extra device.
There is a niche for them but it's something of a missed opportunity to date. For example a 10" iPad with a stylus could in principle be the most awesome device for note taking ever. Every student and many professionals could use one and it solves a lot of problems with paper and laptops. Problem is that nobody has written decent software to solve this problem. Believe me, I've looked and nearly all of it sucks. I could easily see tablet's basically being a replacement for the venerable pad of paper in a lot of circumstances with the right software. Personally I think the primary target market for tablets should be any place you would use a pen and pad of paper.
I think a lot of it stems from the fact that they originally marketed these things as content consumption devices and the idea stuck. They continue to propagate this foolish notion even to this day. They get treated as supersized smartphones rather than a separate category with unique capabilities. That bigger screen is a HUGE missed opportunity because it's just too easy for developers to write software for smartphones that caters to the least common denominator and doesn't take full advantage of what a tablet could do that a smartphone cannot.
No one edits on the iPad. That is the point. The very idea is dumb.
There is no technical reason people cannot edit on an iPad aside from the fact that to date the software for doing that task has sucked to date. Make some better software and problem solved. Nobody is arguing it is the best tool for every job but at the end of the day it's just a computer, barely different from the PCs we've been using. I already do minor edits of photos and video on my iPhone and iPad. I see no reason why anyone could not do more extensive editing with the right software. I could easily see photographers or graphics artists having a use for a portable version of Photoshop, particularly for content that will be viewed mostly on similar devices.
The notion that tablets are only for consumption and not content creation is a ridiculous artificial constraint invented for marketing the early versions of these devices which were more limited in capabilities. Current iPads are more powerful than the laptop I had just a few years ago which was more than adequate for editing photos using... wait for it....... Photoshop. No reason at all they could not be used effectively to create or edit some types of content.
This is just a marketing attempt to try to stem flagging iPad sales.
Or it's attempt by Adobe to reach their product into a new market. Do you have any actual evidence to the contrary or are you just being snarky?
The reason iPad and other tablet sales are stagnant is because software developers (including Apple) have been (stupidly) treating them as either a supersized smartphone or a handicapped laptop when in reality it is neither of those things. Having a 10 inch screen and possibly a stylus should result in software that can do more than is practical on a smartphone. It would be trivial to amp up the operating performance of a tablet if one is willing to add a bit of bulk. And yet almost nobody writes software to take full advantage of what it can do. They just make one application that can run more or less the same on a phone or a tablet and call it a day. It's an opportunity missed.
Apple probably paid Adobe money to port some version over.
Assuming that is true, so what? If it provides a valuable tool for some people then how is that a bad thing? Apple would be stupid to not explore whether this is a viable market segment for them. Not like they don't have the money to give it a try.
One man's garbage is another man's vital lifeblood. You have no idea what's vital, and not, to others.
Go ahead and show me a single credible example of someone who actually needs RSS built into core Firefox. Not wants or prefers but actually needs to the point that there is no practical alternative. Dazzle me.
The entire point of having a tight core functionality and using add-ons for features not universally needed is precisely because people's specific needs differ. It's just another version of the unix philosophy of having small tight code that does one thing well and communicates with others. If you prefer having RSS because it works better for your work flow but 99%+ of other people don't give a shit then it is idiotic to include it in the core package since it isn't required.
One problem with extensions is that they are quite literally a no-man's-land, in terms of security.
Completely separate issue. And frankly having a feature that almost no one cares about is a security problem too because it increases the attack surface and needlessly adds to the complexity of the code base.
My noggin runs differently. I'm super interested in what I don't understand. Besides, I'm afraid of rocks 8^)
Umm, they didn't know it was a rock back then. Not for certain anyway. And an eclipse isn't a rock - it's an entire world traveling at terrifying speed going in front of and blocking the light on our world from a giant ball of gas undergoing nuclear fusion millions of kilometers away through the void of space. Good luck explaining what is actually happening to someone a thousand years ago without sounding like a lunatic. I appreciate your scientific fervor and world view but not everyone thinks like that and we are fortunate to live in an era where such information is readily available.
That's terribly sad, don't you think?
I just think of them as one of the lucky 10000. Bear in mind that not everyone is smart or mentally stable or well informed or cares. A lot of people are paranoid or just scared. A lot of people believe in imaginary beings because a book told them they were real. I'd say cut them some slack and try to educate those who can be educated.
I always wondered why ancients feared eclipses so much.
Because they didn't happen often in their experience, they had no way to predict them, and they are pretty freaky. People tend to fear what they don't understand which you should know unless you've been living under a rock. There hasn't been a totality that passed over where I live in my lifetime and even the partials weren't generally notable. If you were living in an age where you didn't have access to libraries and internet and didn't get to travel much, chances are reasonable you'd kind of freak out too. Look how many people freaked out about the SpaceX launch this past week on the west coast and it wasn't hard to find out what was going on.
I had the good fortune to see the 2017 eclipse in Wyoming and it was AWESOME but I do get how it could really scare the crap out of someone who didn't know it could or would happen.
And chances are you've never used a braille terminal in your whole life. Doesn't mean someone else doesn't desperately need it.
Nobody "desperately needs" RSS feeds in core Firefox. There are plenty of RSS readers available for those who need one and it will still be available via extensions which is probably where it always should have been.
Honest question from one of the 0.01%: How do you people parse news across the web?
I go to a handful of sites which provide most of the information I'm looking for. Some are general news sites, others are more topical or special interest. I also follow a fair number of webcomics.
Does everybody only read aggregators?
No but they are a source I use. RSS I really find constraining to be honest and for the more specific interests of mine I find it essentially useless.
Do you visit all of your sources websites individually? How is that not driving people insane? I just don't understand.
It's a handful of sites so it's genuinely not a big deal. Plus RSS isn't really making things easier for me and I find the RSS readers to be more than a little clumsy for my workflow. It doesn't organize it better or provide me more information or even reduce the number of things I click on. Plus it isn't supported by some key sources I follow. If it works for you then you be you but I don't really see much of a value proposition in it for me personally.
There is data and research on this but it's complicated and depends on the population you are talking about.
I'd be very surprised if you took a group of same-age individuals- say one hundred 25yo men and 100 25yo women- if more than 10 women were stronger than the weakest 10 men- if we're looking at pure strength.
You would be surprised then. It's more complicated than your intuition is telling you though I understand why you would think that. It depends on exactly what you are measuring and which population. There are important differences between realized population strength versus realized genetic potential strength. It also depends on whether the men and women have been physically training. Men are on average considerably stronger in the upper body but the difference are notably smaller in the lower body. There are some women that are stronger than most men at any given activity. There are no women that are stronger than all men obviously but the overlap is sometimes surprising. For example there are women who can squat over 200kg which I assure you is FAR more than most men of any size can do. The point is that women in general can reach peak strength that is closer to men than many realize.
I coach wrestling and have for over three decades and I coach both men and women. Wrestling obviously has a big strength component to it. Women definitely have a strength disadvantage but it's a smaller gap than most people imagine it to be for equivalent amounts of training. A typical untrained man will often have a bigger advantage over an untrained woman than a trained man will have over a trained woman. This of course varies by size and obviously men on average are larger. But women of similar size can often compete successfully. I've coached high school girls who were good enough to qualify for the state tournament competing against boys in wrestling which puts them in the top 10% and if they were really as weak as you imagine them to be they couldn't possible compete to that high a level. The best Olympic level women's wrestlers can't compete with the guys but they can beat a shocking percentage of the general population of equivalent age men - probably more than 50% in my direct experience. The gap between men's and women's world records in most sports has been shrinking steadily for decades. While nobody should expect women to overtake men, the peak performance potential seems to be not a vast chasm provided equivalent training. I think a lot of the perception of differences comes from the fact that women for a variety of reasons tend to participate less in sports and strength based activities so fewer of them realize their potential.
It is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. What it does tell us is that it is not a popular thing. Increasing a tiny number by 50% is not actually very impressive compared to growing a big number by a smaller percentage. For Apple computer to grow by just 10% next year they will have to generate more business than the entire revenue of eBay over the same period. That is FAR more impressive than DDG growing 50% from close to zero.
I dunno about you, but I much prefer to use less "popular" things in life.
I don't give a shit if something is popular or not. I care if it does what I want/need and provides good value. The only reason I consider something's popularity is to evaluate whether that popularity or lack thereof will cause me problems. For example if a product is unpopular chances are that service and support for it are going to be hard to find in the future. Similarly I sometimes avoid something popular because of excessive crowds or because the popularity of it will cause my needs to be dismissed as unimportant.
I prefer the National Hockey League to the NFL, and DDG to Google, both on it's privacy model, as well as knowing that huge amounts of money drive corruption.
If you prefer the NHL to the NFL because hockey is your particular brand of vodka then that's fine, although calling the NHL unpopular is objectively kind of ridiculous. If you prefer it solely because it is less popular it means you are a hipster. You be you and use what works for you but I am not impressed by anyone who chooses something just because it is popular or explicitly because it is not.
Some nice momentum for privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo which has just announced it's hit 30 million daily searches a year after reaching 20 million -- a year-on-year increase of 50%.
To provide perspective Google does 1.2 trillion searches per day. Good progress but pretty much a rounding error compared to the big boys.
The company told us this financing would be used to respond to an expanding opportunity for pro-privacy business models, including by tuning its search engine for more local markets and expanding its marketing channels to "have more of a global focus."
Having trouble parsing this sentence. It's so vague as to be effectively meaningless.
I've seen what DuckDuckGo's business model is supposed to be and I'm rather dubious how much it can scale because advertisers and retailers don't generally give a shit about your privacy and in fact your privacy is somewhat at odds with their incentives. Furthermore Google and Bing and the others get all the network effects so advertisers and retailers aren't generally going to flock to a small search engine that isn't going to give them as much data or reach as many potential customers. If DuckDuckGo is really doing what they say they are trying to do I wish them well but it's not going to be an easy battle.
I disagree most people eat ground beef patties without any idea how it got from cow to their burger bun.
People have a pretty darn good idea how ground beef is made or more accurately and more importantly they think they know. I know what you are getting at and some of the industrial scale food processing involves chemicals and procedures many would not recognize and would likely find off putting. But I can go down to my local butcher, buy the ingredients (beef plus some fat) and grind my own beef patties if I want to and so can you so we think we know what we are getting at least in principle. The basic process of what is going on is something most people can wrap their head around just fine even if they aren't paying attention to the details. Synthetic meat grown in a proverbial vat however is something quite different and it will be like trying to convince them to eat cockroaches to get them to consume it regardless of the objective merits (nutrition, taste, cost) of the product.
The hard part really is very likely to turn out to be the marketing of the stuff presuming we figure out the technical details. For a start calling it "synthetic meat" is a perfect example of how not to convince people to eat this stuff. There is an old joke that if you let an engineer market sushi they would have labeled it "cold raw fish" which is accurate but not exactly enticing. Think more along the lines of the Chilean Seabass which is a trade name invented by a fish wholesaler because its proper name, which is Patagonian toothfish, doesn't exactly sound appetizing.
"Asking"...I hope this isn't a veiled "requires forcing" reply.
I don't think you could force it either. Cripes, look at the fit people throw if you just tax some soft drinks a little extra. Asking people to voluntarily exchange a steak for kale will be ignored. Trying to force them to make such an exchange on an ongoing basis will be met with revolution.
Real meat makes sense, because the muscle cells get fed real cow's blood, with immense complexity of nutrients that we cannot duplicate.
Well, to be fair we cannot duplicate it now but that isn't evidence that we never could do so. It's entirely conceivable we could even come up with something that is an improvement in both nutrition and taste. Unlikely I'll grant but possible. Just because we lack the technology currently doesn't mean we always will.
In any case I think it's a moot issue because of the ick factor. Butchering meat is gross but we've got a few thousand years of getting used to it and millions of years of evolution as well. Synthetic mystery meat is not something people are going to accept overnight even if all the evidence says it's great - which isn't likely to happen.
I'd appreciate a search engine that gives me exactly what I search for.
No you wouldn't. You want something that will return the information you are seeking. That is often not going to be what you actually searched for. Furthermore that isn't a valid justification for a search engine returning the sorts of "horrifying" results Bing is evidently prone to in places where they should not reasonably be expected.
I can filter things myself and get better at searching and get what I'm looking for that way.
Even if true that doesn't mean that is the best way to do it and it also doesn't mean other people want to search that way. I sure as hell value a search engine that isn't rock dumb and that can help me get to the information I'm seeking. If I want to seek out some bogus conspiracy theories or racists propaganda there probably should be some extra steps involved in getting to that.
I dunno, worked okay with junk food taxes in some places.
Name one place where taxes resulted in a massive decrease in junk food consumption.
But really the better solution is synthetic meat. Lower environmental impact, fewer antibiotics and other additives, and eventually should be a lot cheaper.
Note that Better Tasting is not among the items you listed. Until better tasting is #1 on the list it's a waste of money, brains, and time even if you manage to convince people that the ick factor doesn't matter.
Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system's impact on the environment.
Asking people to voluntarily change their diet away from things they find tasty is doomed to failure. McDonald's isn't a multi-billion dollar company because people like eating broccoli. Any politician that suggests regulation of what foods people can buy is going to be out of a job rather quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
If 90% of table salt people are using all the time has microplastics in it, then it clearly has no negative health effects, or else with such a massive experimental group, we'd have seen negative results already. :)
No, all that proves is that whatever effects there might be are not acutely toxic. It's quite possible there may be long term effects or mild effects or effects that only impact a portion of the population or perhaps no impact at all. We just don't know at this point. It's not unusual at all for mild chemical pollution (which this is) to have health implications that are not noticed for some time. Right now we have essentially no clue if these things will actually be harmful but we would be foolish not to take the possibility seriously. Becoming aware of the presence of a potential problem is the first step in dealing with it. We are just recently becoming aware there may be a serious issue and that further research is warranted.
How long until someone tries to introduce the term "essential dietary microplastics"?
Looking at the time of your post I'd say Friday October 19, 2018 @ 12:36AM is when it will happen.
Are there any health implications of micro plastics in salt? That was suspiciously left out of the article for some reason.
What's suspicious about it? The answer is they have no fucking clue what the health implications (if any) are. Neither does anyone else at this point. Why would they make claims about health implications when there is a good approximation of zero data regarding the effect of microplastic on health? We know it isn't acutely toxic but beyond that a lot of research is going to have to be done to figure out if/how/why it is a problem and even more research to figure out what to do about it if it actually is a health risk.
Of course it is ... since it was soldered in place in the last "upgrade" it's 0
Don't be ridiculous. Most Windows desktops and laptops have user upgradable memory and the VAST majority of people and companies never touch it. They don't even open the case to look. This is not some sort of new revelation. People rarely upgraded memory on Macintoshes when they could do it and Apple provided the opportunity for literally decades. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Apple looked at the data and said "we can make more money by eliminating something almost none of our users are bothering with anyway".
People act like Apple somehow should be forced to cater to their niche need which baffles me. Apple is going to do what is best for Apple. If you care about something that only a single digit percentage of users will ever care about (like upgrading your RAM) don't be surprised when Apple or any other company decides the added cost and lost revenue isn't worth the trouble.
We had a large lab to support and were buying Mac Minis by the pallet.
That just makes you the exception that proves the rule. The primary customers for Macs are decidedly NOT "large labs" or companies. They are end users purchasing them on their own dime and the vast majority of them never crack open the case. People like you and me are the rare exception and Apple knows it. They can make more money by reducing cost and overcharging for the OEM installed memory so they do that because it makes financial sense for them to do it. They know they aren't going to lose customers over it so why wouldn't they? I'm not saying I like it or approve but I get it.
I think it's more that building in the RAM means you have to buy your RAM upgrades from Apple.
Sure that's part of it - Apple can bring in extra revenue that way. But don't underestimate the cost savings from not having to add the hardware to interface with the memory modules. They also don't have to design a user serviceable product which saves money too. They don't have to source the more complicated modular parts, they can have simpler assembly procedures, they reduce warranty costs by not having to deal with third party parts and ham handed users, etc. They realize these savings on EVERY device, not just the ones they sell to the smaller group of people who might consider upgrading the RAM.
Financially it's a win in pretty much every way for Apple so whining at them about it will accomplish nothing. Like I said, if you want Apple to give a shit about user serviceable parts then you need to make a financial case where it's in Apple's interest to provide them. I think that is going to be a hard thing to accomplish.
Do you remember when you could buy a Mac Mini with non-soldered RAM, a quad core CPU, and a replaceable disk?
If you want non-soldered RAM and user replaceable disks you need to show Apple a business case where it makes sense for them. The number of people who upgrade RAM in their machines is a rounding error and I'm pretty sure Apple has the data to prove it. If the number of your customers who take advantage of a feature is a good approximation of zero then why incur the added cost (design, manufacturing, purchasing) of the more complicated device? If it is more profitable for them to just deal with it as a warranty issue then they will do that. I think the lost business they incur from this decision is almost zero (unfortunately) so it really shouldn't be surprising especially in light of Apple's preference for a closed ecosystem.
Don't get me wrong, I have a Mac Mini and swapped the RAM on it a while back so I'd definitely prefer that option. But I get why Apple does what they do and I'm not really sure how to make a business case for modular RAM that would bring in enough profit to Apple for them to give a shit.
I expect that it would be more effective and provide a higher degree of accuracy to use a purpose built/modified ship to simply traverse the waters following satellite guided paths would be less expensive and simpler.
More accurate maybe but almost certainly more expensive unless they are doing something rather daft.
Not to mention that most ships are following trade routes.So your results would be highly limited.
Probably not as limited as you think and it makes a lot of sense to start where most of the ships are traveling anyway.
Actually, it isn't. That's the point I was trying to make when I mentioned video editing. A LOT of creative tools make use of the keyboard.
You are thinking that the only practical way to do things is the way we do them currently and are having trouble thinking beyond the mouse/keyboard interface. Function and meta keys are useful but reliance on them in far too many cases is a simple case of the proverbial "if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem becomes a nail". They make use of the keyboard because they have a keyboard to make use of, not because it is necessarily the best way to do a given task. Keyboards are great tools but one of the smart decisions Apple (and others) made a while back was to de-emphasize them with tablets because it forced software developers to actually think about their interface instead of absent mindedly relying on a keyboard like they always have and thinking of tablets as a type of laptop. Same thing with a stylus - developers historically wanted to be lazy and treat it like a mouse which is rarely a good interface decision.
Thinking of a tablet as a type of laptop (or as a supersized smartphone) is precisely the reason the software for them sucks and their sales have stagnated. Yes you can find tasks for which a tablet isn't the best tool for the job. The problem is that we don't have the software for SOME tasks where they should be the best tool for the job - note taking IMO being paramount among them.
Wi-Fi is only really viable in the presence of an infrastructure network, because in both IBSS and peer-to-peer modes, you're limited to 802.11g speeds.
So what? 802.11g is plenty fast for lots of tasks and the faster versions of wifi are not hard to find when needed. The wireless network in our company runs that speed and we very successfully run ERP, accounting, and engineering software over it. Our physical ethernet network is still mostly 10/100 and that is FINE. Plus you aren't considering LTE which is plenty fast for lots of uses when you aren't near wifi or only have slow wifi available.
Try importing a few dozen 4 GB video files over 802.11g.
How many people do you think actually do this routinely? If you are doing that sort of work, yeah a tablet probably isn't your tool of choice. But VERY few people as a percent of the general population spend much time working with multiple GB files and heavy duty video editing. Certainly nobody I work with. You are thinking of this technology from a very narrow collection of use cases that don't apply to most of the population. If you want to pick tasks for which a tablet isn't an ideal tool it isn't hard but that's not a very useful discussion. A laptop isn't a great tool for making phone calls even though technically it can do it. Horses for courses and all that. Don't make the mistake of thinking that because a tablet isn't the right tool for some jobs that it is the wrong tool for all jobs.
There's a reason I use my laptop for everything and never bothered to upgrade my tablet hardware, which is now sitting unused. Even right now, I cannot do even 1% of the things I do on my laptop while using a tablet — not because the software isn't there, but because the hardware couldn't support the software even if it existed.
I think that argument is bogus. In any case it shows you are missing my point. Current tablets are plenty powerful enough to do lots of useful work and plenty of people do it every day and I'm pretty sure a lot of what you do could be done just fine with a tablet. My wife is a doctor and her office staff does all their data capture for patient charts on tablets with some software that was developed specifically with their capabilities in mind - works great. I wrote software to enable work instructions and tooling data to be available on tablets in our manufacturing plant - a laptop would actually be kind of clumsy for that purp
The lack of a physical keyboard makes many types of content creation much less efficient (typing, video editing, etc.).
Which is irrelevant if the content you are creating isn't related to typing. Like I said they should be targeted at replacing paper note pads which would primarily involve fingers + stylus. Laptops already do a more than adequate job of dealing with tasks that require a keyboard for most applications. Yes you can add one to a tablet if needed but trying to make a tablet into a laptop is mostly a fools errand.
The problem with tablets is NOT the hardware. The problem is the (sucky) software which fails to take full advantage of what they can do.
I/O is limited (a single Lightning port for charging and USB-2.0-speed I/O). This will go away when Apple adopts USB-C ports on their iDevices.
This is a good approximation of a non-issue. You seem to be forgetting about WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc. There are innumerable tasks that aren't particular I/O intensive that tablets can handle just fine. It's not like one needs gigabit ethernet to write notes or take pictures etc. I agree that Apple should move to USB-C but I/O speed isn't the primary reason for that.
Tablets have insufficient RAM to work with large projects without constant paging (which would significantly reduce hardware life expectancy unless very carefully managed).
A) "Large" is an ambiguous term and tablets have more than enough memory to do a huge variety of useful tasks right now. B) It is a trivial proposition to add more memory to these devices provided one is willing to add physical size to them.
To make a tablet work well for content creation, you would need to give it a laptop-sized battery, which means a laptop-sized tablet.
Not even remotely true unless you are doing work that should be done on a laptop anyway. And there is no inherent reason tablets have to be smaller than laptops anyway for all use cases. Thinking of tablets as weak laptops or supersized smartphones is precisely the problem. They need to be their own special category or there is no point to them.
I had an iPad for three years and never really used it, because I don't see the niche for it. I already have my large phone in my pocket and it can do pretty much anything an iPad can do, without carrying an extra device.
There is a niche for them but it's something of a missed opportunity to date. For example a 10" iPad with a stylus could in principle be the most awesome device for note taking ever. Every student and many professionals could use one and it solves a lot of problems with paper and laptops. Problem is that nobody has written decent software to solve this problem. Believe me, I've looked and nearly all of it sucks. I could easily see tablet's basically being a replacement for the venerable pad of paper in a lot of circumstances with the right software. Personally I think the primary target market for tablets should be any place you would use a pen and pad of paper.
I think a lot of it stems from the fact that they originally marketed these things as content consumption devices and the idea stuck. They continue to propagate this foolish notion even to this day. They get treated as supersized smartphones rather than a separate category with unique capabilities. That bigger screen is a HUGE missed opportunity because it's just too easy for developers to write software for smartphones that caters to the least common denominator and doesn't take full advantage of what a tablet could do that a smartphone cannot.
No one edits on the iPad. That is the point. The very idea is dumb.
There is no technical reason people cannot edit on an iPad aside from the fact that to date the software for doing that task has sucked to date. Make some better software and problem solved. Nobody is arguing it is the best tool for every job but at the end of the day it's just a computer, barely different from the PCs we've been using. I already do minor edits of photos and video on my iPhone and iPad. I see no reason why anyone could not do more extensive editing with the right software. I could easily see photographers or graphics artists having a use for a portable version of Photoshop, particularly for content that will be viewed mostly on similar devices.
The notion that tablets are only for consumption and not content creation is a ridiculous artificial constraint invented for marketing the early versions of these devices which were more limited in capabilities. Current iPads are more powerful than the laptop I had just a few years ago which was more than adequate for editing photos using... wait for it....... Photoshop. No reason at all they could not be used effectively to create or edit some types of content.
This is just a marketing attempt to try to stem flagging iPad sales.
Or it's attempt by Adobe to reach their product into a new market. Do you have any actual evidence to the contrary or are you just being snarky?
The reason iPad and other tablet sales are stagnant is because software developers (including Apple) have been (stupidly) treating them as either a supersized smartphone or a handicapped laptop when in reality it is neither of those things. Having a 10 inch screen and possibly a stylus should result in software that can do more than is practical on a smartphone. It would be trivial to amp up the operating performance of a tablet if one is willing to add a bit of bulk. And yet almost nobody writes software to take full advantage of what it can do. They just make one application that can run more or less the same on a phone or a tablet and call it a day. It's an opportunity missed.
Apple probably paid Adobe money to port some version over.
Assuming that is true, so what? If it provides a valuable tool for some people then how is that a bad thing? Apple would be stupid to not explore whether this is a viable market segment for them. Not like they don't have the money to give it a try.
One man's garbage is another man's vital lifeblood. You have no idea what's vital, and not, to others.
Go ahead and show me a single credible example of someone who actually needs RSS built into core Firefox. Not wants or prefers but actually needs to the point that there is no practical alternative. Dazzle me.
The entire point of having a tight core functionality and using add-ons for features not universally needed is precisely because people's specific needs differ. It's just another version of the unix philosophy of having small tight code that does one thing well and communicates with others. If you prefer having RSS because it works better for your work flow but 99%+ of other people don't give a shit then it is idiotic to include it in the core package since it isn't required.
One problem with extensions is that they are quite literally a no-man's-land, in terms of security.
Completely separate issue. And frankly having a feature that almost no one cares about is a security problem too because it increases the attack surface and needlessly adds to the complexity of the code base.
My noggin runs differently. I'm super interested in what I don't understand. Besides, I'm afraid of rocks 8^)
Umm, they didn't know it was a rock back then. Not for certain anyway. And an eclipse isn't a rock - it's an entire world traveling at terrifying speed going in front of and blocking the light on our world from a giant ball of gas undergoing nuclear fusion millions of kilometers away through the void of space. Good luck explaining what is actually happening to someone a thousand years ago without sounding like a lunatic. I appreciate your scientific fervor and world view but not everyone thinks like that and we are fortunate to live in an era where such information is readily available.
That's terribly sad, don't you think?
I just think of them as one of the lucky 10000. Bear in mind that not everyone is smart or mentally stable or well informed or cares. A lot of people are paranoid or just scared. A lot of people believe in imaginary beings because a book told them they were real. I'd say cut them some slack and try to educate those who can be educated.
I always wondered why ancients feared eclipses so much.
Because they didn't happen often in their experience, they had no way to predict them, and they are pretty freaky. People tend to fear what they don't understand which you should know unless you've been living under a rock. There hasn't been a totality that passed over where I live in my lifetime and even the partials weren't generally notable. If you were living in an age where you didn't have access to libraries and internet and didn't get to travel much, chances are reasonable you'd kind of freak out too. Look how many people freaked out about the SpaceX launch this past week on the west coast and it wasn't hard to find out what was going on.
I had the good fortune to see the 2017 eclipse in Wyoming and it was AWESOME but I do get how it could really scare the crap out of someone who didn't know it could or would happen.
And chances are you've never used a braille terminal in your whole life. Doesn't mean someone else doesn't desperately need it.
Nobody "desperately needs" RSS feeds in core Firefox. There are plenty of RSS readers available for those who need one and it will still be available via extensions which is probably where it always should have been.
Honest question from one of the 0.01%: How do you people parse news across the web?
I go to a handful of sites which provide most of the information I'm looking for. Some are general news sites, others are more topical or special interest. I also follow a fair number of webcomics.
Does everybody only read aggregators?
No but they are a source I use. RSS I really find constraining to be honest and for the more specific interests of mine I find it essentially useless.
Do you visit all of your sources websites individually? How is that not driving people insane? I just don't understand.
It's a handful of sites so it's genuinely not a big deal. Plus RSS isn't really making things easier for me and I find the RSS readers to be more than a little clumsy for my workflow. It doesn't organize it better or provide me more information or even reduce the number of things I click on. Plus it isn't supported by some key sources I follow. If it works for you then you be you but I don't really see much of a value proposition in it for me personally.
What do you call significant overlap?
There is data and research on this but it's complicated and depends on the population you are talking about.
I'd be very surprised if you took a group of same-age individuals- say one hundred 25yo men and 100 25yo women- if more than 10 women were stronger than the weakest 10 men- if we're looking at pure strength.
You would be surprised then. It's more complicated than your intuition is telling you though I understand why you would think that. It depends on exactly what you are measuring and which population. There are important differences between realized population strength versus realized genetic potential strength. It also depends on whether the men and women have been physically training. Men are on average considerably stronger in the upper body but the difference are notably smaller in the lower body. There are some women that are stronger than most men at any given activity. There are no women that are stronger than all men obviously but the overlap is sometimes surprising. For example there are women who can squat over 200kg which I assure you is FAR more than most men of any size can do. The point is that women in general can reach peak strength that is closer to men than many realize.
I coach wrestling and have for over three decades and I coach both men and women. Wrestling obviously has a big strength component to it. Women definitely have a strength disadvantage but it's a smaller gap than most people imagine it to be for equivalent amounts of training. A typical untrained man will often have a bigger advantage over an untrained woman than a trained man will have over a trained woman. This of course varies by size and obviously men on average are larger. But women of similar size can often compete successfully. I've coached high school girls who were good enough to qualify for the state tournament competing against boys in wrestling which puts them in the top 10% and if they were really as weak as you imagine them to be they couldn't possible compete to that high a level. The best Olympic level women's wrestlers can't compete with the guys but they can beat a shocking percentage of the general population of equivalent age men - probably more than 50% in my direct experience. The gap between men's and women's world records in most sports has been shrinking steadily for decades. While nobody should expect women to overtake men, the peak performance potential seems to be not a vast chasm provided equivalent training. I think a lot of the perception of differences comes from the fact that women for a variety of reasons tend to participate less in sports and strength based activities so fewer of them realize their potential.
This is a good thing.
It is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. What it does tell us is that it is not a popular thing. Increasing a tiny number by 50% is not actually very impressive compared to growing a big number by a smaller percentage. For Apple computer to grow by just 10% next year they will have to generate more business than the entire revenue of eBay over the same period. That is FAR more impressive than DDG growing 50% from close to zero.
I dunno about you, but I much prefer to use less "popular" things in life.
I don't give a shit if something is popular or not. I care if it does what I want/need and provides good value. The only reason I consider something's popularity is to evaluate whether that popularity or lack thereof will cause me problems. For example if a product is unpopular chances are that service and support for it are going to be hard to find in the future. Similarly I sometimes avoid something popular because of excessive crowds or because the popularity of it will cause my needs to be dismissed as unimportant.
I prefer the National Hockey League to the NFL, and DDG to Google, both on it's privacy model, as well as knowing that huge amounts of money drive corruption.
If you prefer the NHL to the NFL because hockey is your particular brand of vodka then that's fine, although calling the NHL unpopular is objectively kind of ridiculous. If you prefer it solely because it is less popular it means you are a hipster. You be you and use what works for you but I am not impressed by anyone who chooses something just because it is popular or explicitly because it is not.
Some nice momentum for privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo which has just announced it's hit 30 million daily searches a year after reaching 20 million -- a year-on-year increase of 50%.
To provide perspective Google does 1.2 trillion searches per day. Good progress but pretty much a rounding error compared to the big boys.
The company told us this financing would be used to respond to an expanding opportunity for pro-privacy business models, including by tuning its search engine for more local markets and expanding its marketing channels to "have more of a global focus."
Having trouble parsing this sentence. It's so vague as to be effectively meaningless.
I've seen what DuckDuckGo's business model is supposed to be and I'm rather dubious how much it can scale because advertisers and retailers don't generally give a shit about your privacy and in fact your privacy is somewhat at odds with their incentives. Furthermore Google and Bing and the others get all the network effects so advertisers and retailers aren't generally going to flock to a small search engine that isn't going to give them as much data or reach as many potential customers. If DuckDuckGo is really doing what they say they are trying to do I wish them well but it's not going to be an easy battle.
I disagree most people eat ground beef patties without any idea how it got from cow to their burger bun.
People have a pretty darn good idea how ground beef is made or more accurately and more importantly they think they know. I know what you are getting at and some of the industrial scale food processing involves chemicals and procedures many would not recognize and would likely find off putting. But I can go down to my local butcher, buy the ingredients (beef plus some fat) and grind my own beef patties if I want to and so can you so we think we know what we are getting at least in principle. The basic process of what is going on is something most people can wrap their head around just fine even if they aren't paying attention to the details. Synthetic meat grown in a proverbial vat however is something quite different and it will be like trying to convince them to eat cockroaches to get them to consume it regardless of the objective merits (nutrition, taste, cost) of the product.
The hard part really is very likely to turn out to be the marketing of the stuff presuming we figure out the technical details. For a start calling it "synthetic meat" is a perfect example of how not to convince people to eat this stuff. There is an old joke that if you let an engineer market sushi they would have labeled it "cold raw fish" which is accurate but not exactly enticing. Think more along the lines of the Chilean Seabass which is a trade name invented by a fish wholesaler because its proper name, which is Patagonian toothfish, doesn't exactly sound appetizing.
"Asking"...I hope this isn't a veiled "requires forcing" reply.
I don't think you could force it either. Cripes, look at the fit people throw if you just tax some soft drinks a little extra. Asking people to voluntarily exchange a steak for kale will be ignored. Trying to force them to make such an exchange on an ongoing basis will be met with revolution.
Real meat makes sense, because the muscle cells get fed real cow's blood, with immense complexity of nutrients that we cannot duplicate.
Well, to be fair we cannot duplicate it now but that isn't evidence that we never could do so. It's entirely conceivable we could even come up with something that is an improvement in both nutrition and taste. Unlikely I'll grant but possible. Just because we lack the technology currently doesn't mean we always will.
In any case I think it's a moot issue because of the ick factor. Butchering meat is gross but we've got a few thousand years of getting used to it and millions of years of evolution as well. Synthetic mystery meat is not something people are going to accept overnight even if all the evidence says it's great - which isn't likely to happen.
I'd appreciate a search engine that gives me exactly what I search for.
No you wouldn't. You want something that will return the information you are seeking. That is often not going to be what you actually searched for. Furthermore that isn't a valid justification for a search engine returning the sorts of "horrifying" results Bing is evidently prone to in places where they should not reasonably be expected.
I can filter things myself and get better at searching and get what I'm looking for that way.
Even if true that doesn't mean that is the best way to do it and it also doesn't mean other people want to search that way. I sure as hell value a search engine that isn't rock dumb and that can help me get to the information I'm seeking. If I want to seek out some bogus conspiracy theories or racists propaganda there probably should be some extra steps involved in getting to that.
I dunno, worked okay with junk food taxes in some places.
Name one place where taxes resulted in a massive decrease in junk food consumption.
But really the better solution is synthetic meat. Lower environmental impact, fewer antibiotics and other additives, and eventually should be a lot cheaper.
Note that Better Tasting is not among the items you listed. Until better tasting is #1 on the list it's a waste of money, brains, and time even if you manage to convince people that the ick factor doesn't matter.
Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system's impact on the environment.
Asking people to voluntarily change their diet away from things they find tasty is doomed to failure. McDonald's isn't a multi-billion dollar company because people like eating broccoli. Any politician that suggests regulation of what foods people can buy is going to be out of a job rather quickly.