The ads don't distract you while you are reading. The reading screens are ad-free on the Kindle. The ads appear on the lock screen and in the Kindle store.
What Google is doing isn't exactly that. They're not reaching into the device and disabling it, they are shutting off the cloud services that support it. Unfortunately the net effect on the end user is exactly the same; the device is useless.
There aren't a lot of direct analogies yet for hardware, and most of them are from companies that have gone out of business. But there are plenty for software and for DRM-protected media. For example, the Microsoft Plays For Sure music files that no longer play because Microsoft shut down the server that provided the decryption keys. Music bought from Sony, MusicMatch, Yahoo, and Real Rhapsody suffered the same fate when their companies shut down their music services or the protected aspects of them. And there are games that can no longer be played (at least not without obtaining an unofficial patch) because the authorization servers are no longer available.
On the other hand, you probably will be able to walk into a Chevy dealership next year and buy a Bolt. It won't be as fast or as good looking as the Model 3, but it will get you from point A to point B without gasoline and offer a 200 mile range.
The people who are already happily driving the previous Tesla vehicles would dispute that. Whether Tesla will be able to successfully mass produce the Model 3 remains to be seen, but it is clear that an electric vehicle can meet the needs of some drivers.
That's exactly what Alexa is - a competitor for Siri, Cortana, and Google Now. Each has strengths and weaknesses. The best thing about Alexa is that developers can develop Alexa "skills" that let you use it (her?) for things like home automation, which are things that you cannot yet do with Siri or Cortana or Google Now's unnamed voice. Alexa has grown considerably more useful over time as both Amazon's own developers and third parties develop skills.
Alexa rules for playing music. You can play songs on Prime Music by voice command, and if you have a premium Spotify account you can do the same for any song on Spotify. On Fire TV you can search for video content by voice, though so far the results are limited to Amazon's own video and things on Hulu Plus (which you can now subscribe to through Amazon).
Alexa is not yet available on any phones, not even Amazon's own short-lived Fire Phone, so it has no ability to do phone-like things such as making phone calls. It had no calendar capabilities when released but later gained a link to Google Calendar - it's not there by default, you have to install it. It is weak at answering general-interest questions; Siri is still the champion at that, though Google Now is also respectable and is particularly good at travel-related questions and search.
Alexa is best known as the voice of the Amazon Echo, a voice controlled Bluetooth speaker and internet radio player, and its new siblings, the Tap and Dot. Alexa is also available on the Fire TV family of devices. Alexa for Raspberry Pi is an opening move in the direction of Alexa for non-Amazon devices; we can expect to see Amazon offer licensing deals in the future.
40K? You had a fancy model. The base version had 20K. I got to use one of those in high school for a few months in 1971. The following year we got an 1130 instead because IBM ran out of CEs who knew how to fix a 1620, and because by then they were cantankerous old beasts that broke frequently. IBM was in to fix the 1620 every couple of weeks; mostly it was the console typewriter or the card reader that failed.
The real question is why prisoners are getting charged for phone calls at all. The incremental cost of calls to anywhere in the US on any reasonable phone plan is now zero, so that should be the price that the prisoners pay. The entire system of charging for calls is a throwback to the days when using the telephone was expensive.
They may not be required to work. But they are in a situation that is coercive by its very nature and they are offered incentives that make it appealing to work. Aside the fact that they get money for incidentals, they also get to escape a very boring prison life situation and at least do SOMETHING. And refusing work doesn't look good when you come in front of the parole board.
AMOLED displays recently became less expensive than LCD displays: http://www.androidauthority.co... Given that, and especially given the fact that they are lighter and thinner (always priorities at Apple), a switch seems inevitable. One difference we are likely to see from the competition is that Apple's displays will be tuned for color accuracy rather than impact; they will probably look less vibrant than the displays on Samsung phones but will display colors more faithfully.
I don't buy iDevices either, because I do not want to own a computing device that gives veto power over what software I can run to somebody in Cupertino. Or any other place, for that matter. If I am asked for advice, I will tell people why I won't buy them and advise them not to. But I don't TELL other people not to buy iDevices, and respect the reasons why some people might choose them. There are even people I might advise to buy them, especially tech-unsavvy people who don't live around other techies and therefore might have a strong need to get help at the Genius Bar. (My parents would be good candidates were it not for the fact that they live 70 miles from the nearest Apple Store.)
Dimko's phrasing ("don't buy their products") sounds like a command not to buy them, rather than a statement of his own philosophy or a suggestion. But I don't know whether that was his intent. It's one of the hazards of written language; the intent probably would have been clear in spoken language.
It's newsworthy because it signals a possible change of direction of the Unity team toward more customization vs a standardized user experience. It never would have been difficult to let people move the launcher; it was a deliberate choice on the part of the developers to force it to always be in the same place.
Apple, Bing, and Microsoft are all sites that collect personal data. They ask you to log in, which means that you are either sending them a password or you already have a cookie. They are in the class of site that should be using HTTPS by default.
There are many sites that do not collect any personal data. Either they have no login at all, or they have a login procedure where you don't have to provide any significant amount of personal data to get a login credential, just a handle and a password. (That password requirement just serve as an anti-spam measure.) And any posts there are available for public reading without login. Furthermore, if they don't serve ads there is no risk of an injection attack from an ad network.
There is no compelling reason for a site like that to require HTTPS. Either you are sending no data at all or only data that is of little interest to anybody. The only way to get in trouble by accessing a site like that is if it serves you malware content, which can only happen if the site security has been compromised and somebody has replaced some of its content. Mandatory HTTPS won't save you in that case.
The RSS feed doesn't gather any PII (personally identifiable information). There is no compelling reason for it to use HTTPS. The same is true for all the read-only vanity sites out there that don't serve advertising or use passwords.
Phones may not be accurate timekeepers if they are not connected to a network. But if they are connected to a cellular network they update their time regularly so they should do just fine. Smartphones also get time updates over WiFi, so they will stay accurate even without a cell contract. On some smartphones you can put the phone into airplane mode (which turns off all the radios) but then manually turn on WiFi; the cellular radio stays off if you do that.
Tablets will also serve nicely, even those cheap $30 Android tablets that are underpowered for most uses. Microcenter currently has a less-awful one for $35 new (though the display viewing angles are evidently poor), or you could use a $50 Fire tablet from Amazon, or somebody's old 2012 Nexus 7... you get the idea.
Sending people to jail is part of the populist desire to make white collar criminals pay with time in prison. Typically poor criminals spend time behind bars, starting even before they are tried because they can't afford bail, and continuing after the trial because they can't afford good lawyers who can get them out of prison time. Meanwhile, white collar criminals get off with fines at worst (and often manage to buy their way out of the charges completely), and those are typically paid by their companies so the criminals themselves feel little pain. Lots of people want that to change, and specifically for white collar infractions to cost the criminals TIME (which is a scarce resource for them) rather than money (which they have plenty of and won't miss much).
This. The hotel charges for internet access in conference areas are insanely high. Professional conventions just pay it and build it into their fee structure, but it means that leisure conventions that have to keep their prices down are typically unable to pay and have to do without internet access. That causes problems for exhibitors who want to use the internet to present things.
Sheraton gives you free WiFi at most of their hotels if you have a membership in their frequent traveler program. Otherwise it's $10 per night. Westin has the same parent company so their policy is likely to be similar. My only recent Westin stay was at a convention that negotiated free WiFi for all guests, so I don't know.
The summary mentions a check that allows old school analog watches to be worn. But somebody will surely making a cheating watch that mimics one of those. It's much easier to just ban watch wearing completely.
I got my Fire tablet for $35 in the Black Friday weekend sale. I certainly get enough use out of it to justify the price. I regularly read Kindle books on it, view web sites and YouTube videos, and occasionally stream a movie or TV show. Streaming from Amazon Video, Netflix, and Google (see next paragraph) all work perfectly.
I sideloaded the Google Play store and services, and use Chrome as my browser rather than Silk. People who have commented on a poor experience with web browsing may be dealing with inadequacies of Silk rather than with the device itself.
I tried the Facebook app on the Fire and ended up uninstalling it. To be fair, Facebook has the same problem on all devices with only 1GB of RAM; it's simply too much of a memory pig to be comfortable with that amount of memory. I use the browser version for my occasional tablet-based Facebook needs; that works fine.
No, they have exactly the same IPC as Xeons from the same generation with fewer cores, assuming that you don't have enough threads to use the additional cores. They do have a slightly better IPC than Xeons from earlier generations, though the improvements have been small (5-10%) in recent iterations. I suppose it does add up if you jump a bunch of generations - say, comparing a Sandy Bridge core to a Skylake core.
Video editing is one of the primary use cases for the Mac Pro. Large scale multitrack audio editing (say, 32 tracks or more) has similar issues and is likely to require local storage. Writing off the needs of that large market is unrealistic.
The reboots won't happen if you are actually using the computer; Windows delays them until the system has been idle for a while. If you're walking away for long periods of time and not saving your work, you're getting what you deserve.
The 2015 MacBook is an ultraportable system taken to the max. It's not intended to be a high performance computer, but it's a well designed system for its intended purpose.
I agree with your comments on the other models. In particular, the new Mac Pro was a mistake. The form factor is sleek on your desktop... until you start to connect anything to it, which most people in the target market will do. Notably, the inability to add disk storage means that most people will have to connect an external Thunderbolt drive, and at that point you would have been better off with the old tower design. And the non-standard form factor means that you are cut off from all third party video upgrades, leading to the decision by Oculus not to support it. The only Mac system to meet the minimum specs for the Oculus Rift is an old-version Mac Pro with a third party GTX 970 (or better) or R9 290 (or better). That's too limited a market to justify development effort to support it under OS X, though it should work fine if you install Boot Camp and run Windows.
Yes, they are clocked lower. In the Xeon line, there is a clear tradeoff between number of cores and maximum clock speed; it exists to keep the total power consumption (and heat) within manageable limits. Here is a list of clock speed vs number of cores for the Broadwell-EP line of Xeon processors with dual processor support, the most recent ones that are available as a full line so far:
The 16 and 20 core models have lower clock speeds than the 18 and 22 core models, respectively, and are therefore omitted. The 2602 has a very high 165W TDP rating which is not supported by all motherboards and requires special attention to cooling; it is the fastest currently available x86 CPU in single-core benchmarks when tested at standard clock speed.
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The ads don't distract you while you are reading. The reading screens are ad-free on the Kindle. The ads appear on the lock screen and in the Kindle store.
I guess nobody has claimed cats in space yet. But if they had switched to pigs, Disney would still be after them for infringement on The Muppets.
What Google is doing isn't exactly that. They're not reaching into the device and disabling it, they are shutting off the cloud services that support it. Unfortunately the net effect on the end user is exactly the same; the device is useless.
There aren't a lot of direct analogies yet for hardware, and most of them are from companies that have gone out of business. But there are plenty for software and for DRM-protected media. For example, the Microsoft Plays For Sure music files that no longer play because Microsoft shut down the server that provided the decryption keys. Music bought from Sony, MusicMatch, Yahoo, and Real Rhapsody suffered the same fate when their companies shut down their music services or the protected aspects of them. And there are games that can no longer be played (at least not without obtaining an unofficial patch) because the authorization servers are no longer available.
On the other hand, you probably will be able to walk into a Chevy dealership next year and buy a Bolt. It won't be as fast or as good looking as the Model 3, but it will get you from point A to point B without gasoline and offer a 200 mile range.
The people who are already happily driving the previous Tesla vehicles would dispute that. Whether Tesla will be able to successfully mass produce the Model 3 remains to be seen, but it is clear that an electric vehicle can meet the needs of some drivers.
That's exactly what Alexa is - a competitor for Siri, Cortana, and Google Now. Each has strengths and weaknesses. The best thing about Alexa is that developers can develop Alexa "skills" that let you use it (her?) for things like home automation, which are things that you cannot yet do with Siri or Cortana or Google Now's unnamed voice. Alexa has grown considerably more useful over time as both Amazon's own developers and third parties develop skills.
Alexa rules for playing music. You can play songs on Prime Music by voice command, and if you have a premium Spotify account you can do the same for any song on Spotify. On Fire TV you can search for video content by voice, though so far the results are limited to Amazon's own video and things on Hulu Plus (which you can now subscribe to through Amazon).
Alexa is not yet available on any phones, not even Amazon's own short-lived Fire Phone, so it has no ability to do phone-like things such as making phone calls. It had no calendar capabilities when released but later gained a link to Google Calendar - it's not there by default, you have to install it. It is weak at answering general-interest questions; Siri is still the champion at that, though Google Now is also respectable and is particularly good at travel-related questions and search.
Alexa is best known as the voice of the Amazon Echo, a voice controlled Bluetooth speaker and internet radio player, and its new siblings, the Tap and Dot. Alexa is also available on the Fire TV family of devices. Alexa for Raspberry Pi is an opening move in the direction of Alexa for non-Amazon devices; we can expect to see Amazon offer licensing deals in the future.
40K? You had a fancy model. The base version had 20K. I got to use one of those in high school for a few months in 1971. The following year we got an 1130 instead because IBM ran out of CEs who knew how to fix a 1620, and because by then they were cantankerous old beasts that broke frequently. IBM was in to fix the 1620 every couple of weeks; mostly it was the console typewriter or the card reader that failed.
The real question is why prisoners are getting charged for phone calls at all. The incremental cost of calls to anywhere in the US on any reasonable phone plan is now zero, so that should be the price that the prisoners pay. The entire system of charging for calls is a throwback to the days when using the telephone was expensive.
They may not be required to work. But they are in a situation that is coercive by its very nature and they are offered incentives that make it appealing to work. Aside the fact that they get money for incidentals, they also get to escape a very boring prison life situation and at least do SOMETHING. And refusing work doesn't look good when you come in front of the parole board.
AMOLED displays recently became less expensive than LCD displays: http://www.androidauthority.co... Given that, and especially given the fact that they are lighter and thinner (always priorities at Apple), a switch seems inevitable. One difference we are likely to see from the competition is that Apple's displays will be tuned for color accuracy rather than impact; they will probably look less vibrant than the displays on Samsung phones but will display colors more faithfully.
I don't buy iDevices either, because I do not want to own a computing device that gives veto power over what software I can run to somebody in Cupertino. Or any other place, for that matter. If I am asked for advice, I will tell people why I won't buy them and advise them not to. But I don't TELL other people not to buy iDevices, and respect the reasons why some people might choose them. There are even people I might advise to buy them, especially tech-unsavvy people who don't live around other techies and therefore might have a strong need to get help at the Genius Bar. (My parents would be good candidates were it not for the fact that they live 70 miles from the nearest Apple Store.)
Dimko's phrasing ("don't buy their products") sounds like a command not to buy them, rather than a statement of his own philosophy or a suggestion. But I don't know whether that was his intent. It's one of the hazards of written language; the intent probably would have been clear in spoken language.
It's newsworthy because it signals a possible change of direction of the Unity team toward more customization vs a standardized user experience. It never would have been difficult to let people move the launcher; it was a deliberate choice on the part of the developers to force it to always be in the same place.
Apple, Bing, and Microsoft are all sites that collect personal data. They ask you to log in, which means that you are either sending them a password or you already have a cookie. They are in the class of site that should be using HTTPS by default.
There are many sites that do not collect any personal data. Either they have no login at all, or they have a login procedure where you don't have to provide any significant amount of personal data to get a login credential, just a handle and a password. (That password requirement just serve as an anti-spam measure.) And any posts there are available for public reading without login. Furthermore, if they don't serve ads there is no risk of an injection attack from an ad network.
There is no compelling reason for a site like that to require HTTPS. Either you are sending no data at all or only data that is of little interest to anybody. The only way to get in trouble by accessing a site like that is if it serves you malware content, which can only happen if the site security has been compromised and somebody has replaced some of its content. Mandatory HTTPS won't save you in that case.
The RSS feed doesn't gather any PII (personally identifiable information). There is no compelling reason for it to use HTTPS. The same is true for all the read-only vanity sites out there that don't serve advertising or use passwords.
Phones may not be accurate timekeepers if they are not connected to a network. But if they are connected to a cellular network they update their time regularly so they should do just fine. Smartphones also get time updates over WiFi, so they will stay accurate even without a cell contract. On some smartphones you can put the phone into airplane mode (which turns off all the radios) but then manually turn on WiFi; the cellular radio stays off if you do that.
Tablets will also serve nicely, even those cheap $30 Android tablets that are underpowered for most uses. Microcenter currently has a less-awful one for $35 new (though the display viewing angles are evidently poor), or you could use a $50 Fire tablet from Amazon, or somebody's old 2012 Nexus 7... you get the idea.
Sending people to jail is part of the populist desire to make white collar criminals pay with time in prison. Typically poor criminals spend time behind bars, starting even before they are tried because they can't afford bail, and continuing after the trial because they can't afford good lawyers who can get them out of prison time. Meanwhile, white collar criminals get off with fines at worst (and often manage to buy their way out of the charges completely), and those are typically paid by their companies so the criminals themselves feel little pain. Lots of people want that to change, and specifically for white collar infractions to cost the criminals TIME (which is a scarce resource for them) rather than money (which they have plenty of and won't miss much).
This. The hotel charges for internet access in conference areas are insanely high. Professional conventions just pay it and build it into their fee structure, but it means that leisure conventions that have to keep their prices down are typically unable to pay and have to do without internet access. That causes problems for exhibitors who want to use the internet to present things.
Sheraton gives you free WiFi at most of their hotels if you have a membership in their frequent traveler program. Otherwise it's $10 per night. Westin has the same parent company so their policy is likely to be similar. My only recent Westin stay was at a convention that negotiated free WiFi for all guests, so I don't know.
The summary mentions a check that allows old school analog watches to be worn. But somebody will surely making a cheating watch that mimics one of those. It's much easier to just ban watch wearing completely.
I got my Fire tablet for $35 in the Black Friday weekend sale. I certainly get enough use out of it to justify the price. I regularly read Kindle books on it, view web sites and YouTube videos, and occasionally stream a movie or TV show. Streaming from Amazon Video, Netflix, and Google (see next paragraph) all work perfectly.
I sideloaded the Google Play store and services, and use Chrome as my browser rather than Silk. People who have commented on a poor experience with web browsing may be dealing with inadequacies of Silk rather than with the device itself.
I tried the Facebook app on the Fire and ended up uninstalling it. To be fair, Facebook has the same problem on all devices with only 1GB of RAM; it's simply too much of a memory pig to be comfortable with that amount of memory. I use the browser version for my occasional tablet-based Facebook needs; that works fine.
No, they have exactly the same IPC as Xeons from the same generation with fewer cores, assuming that you don't have enough threads to use the additional cores. They do have a slightly better IPC than Xeons from earlier generations, though the improvements have been small (5-10%) in recent iterations. I suppose it does add up if you jump a bunch of generations - say, comparing a Sandy Bridge core to a Skylake core.
Video editing is one of the primary use cases for the Mac Pro. Large scale multitrack audio editing (say, 32 tracks or more) has similar issues and is likely to require local storage. Writing off the needs of that large market is unrealistic.
The reboots won't happen if you are actually using the computer; Windows delays them until the system has been idle for a while. If you're walking away for long periods of time and not saving your work, you're getting what you deserve.
The 2015 MacBook is an ultraportable system taken to the max. It's not intended to be a high performance computer, but it's a well designed system for its intended purpose.
I agree with your comments on the other models. In particular, the new Mac Pro was a mistake. The form factor is sleek on your desktop... until you start to connect anything to it, which most people in the target market will do. Notably, the inability to add disk storage means that most people will have to connect an external Thunderbolt drive, and at that point you would have been better off with the old tower design. And the non-standard form factor means that you are cut off from all third party video upgrades, leading to the decision by Oculus not to support it. The only Mac system to meet the minimum specs for the Oculus Rift is an old-version Mac Pro with a third party GTX 970 (or better) or R9 290 (or better). That's too limited a market to justify development effort to support it under OS X, though it should work fine if you install Boot Camp and run Windows.
Yes, they are clocked lower. In the Xeon line, there is a clear tradeoff between number of cores and maximum clock speed; it exists to keep the total power consumption (and heat) within manageable limits. Here is a list of clock speed vs number of cores for the Broadwell-EP line of Xeon processors with dual processor support, the most recent ones that are available as a full line so far:
E5-2602v4 4 5.1 GHz (!)
E5-2643v4 6 3.5 GHz
E5-2667v4 8 3.4 GHz
E5-2689v4 10 3.1 GHz
E5-2687Wv4 12 3.0 GHz
E5-2690v4 14 2.4 GHz
E5-2697v4 18 2.3 GHz
E5-2699v4 22 2.2 GHz
The 16 and 20 core models have lower clock speeds than the 18 and 22 core models, respectively, and are therefore omitted. The 2602 has a very high 165W TDP rating which is not supported by all motherboards and requires special attention to cooling; it is the fastest currently available x86 CPU in single-core benchmarks when tested at standard clock speed.