produced. And there has been nothing worthwhile since then. I had to replace my Tab S 8.4 with a recent-model iPad Mini due to work (needed particular apps that were iOS only) and I hate it, it feels like it's years behind.
I think the market is being misread. Apple is falling, yet everyone is still following Apple's lead (and moving away from very positive differentiation) as though Apple were still king. There devices were awesome in the '00s. Now they're stale—and rather than step into the gap, Android makers and Android itself have been working very hard to copy the staleness.
Everyone who is going to get one now has a tablet for simple media consumption tasks, and most tablets out there are fast enough to do the job (my kids are still using their years-old original Galaxy Tabs—which show no signs of quitting—to browse the web and do homework). The same malaise that infected the PC market has hit tablets—the only real target segment is upgraders, and most users don't see a reason to upgrade.
What's missing from the tablet experience continues to be the ability to effortlessly create content and manage multiple applications and files well. Tablet makers are loathe to have users deal with "files" on their machines, I realize, but for most workers and creators, work is done in files. My suspicion is that one way to drive a round of upgrades is to produce a fast, light tablet with long battery life that makes real work easier to accomplish on a tablet. It can be done now, but it feels cumbersome. You do it because you have to—the tablet is light and has a long battery life, so it's what you brought with you—but you're aware of the trade-offs.
Give me back better task/window management and the ability to work with and think in locally stored files (i.e. any application supporting a particular file format can load it if you have it, without the weird mix of apps that only support one or another cloud storage service) and I'd upgrade in a moment, because a tablet would finally be a laptop replacement.
Surface comes close, only the UI still isn't good enough and the battery life isn't there, and it's too "heavy" in general terms (not just weight). Some UI innovation with a less involved architecture (i.e. iPad hardware, but with UI innovation to enable laptop-like work more easily) and a whole bunch of laptop owners will get one to replace their laptops with something that's just as good but with much longer battery life and much lower weight.
For mobile work I use an early 2011 17" with matte screen. It's now 1TB SSD + 1TB SSHD (removed the optical drive) and 16GB RAM, and I do end up paging rather often. I do marketing work for a dot-com and these days, and in the modern world that involves big data hosted on Amazon, extensive analytics, lots of R programs to cook the data, video production, lots of photoshop work, and many, many browser windows open at the same time.
I use gfxSwitcher to try to exercise some control over the graphics system and SMCFanControl to keep the fans running at 6k RPM because I know this machine's days are numbered due to the infamous AMD GPU mainboard heat issue (all of the 2011 MBPs with integrated AMD chips will eventually die due to a failure of the soldering on the GPU resulting from heat).
I was actually hoping it would die last year because Apple was replacing mainboards on these machines for free (official policy) until the end of February this year due to the problem—but they were just NOS mainboards, no actual fix for the long term issue, so while they might have extended the life, they didn't solve the problem definitively. None of these will be running in another 10 years, zero of them.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do when this machine goes up in smoke. Most of the features I care about are gone:
- More RAM? Nope. - Integrated ethernet port for gigabit? Nope. - Ability to install extra storage? Nope. - 17" display? Nope.
It looks like when this machine goes south, I'll be back to Wintel hardware (running Linux) for my portable computing.
You're looking at the stagnating iOS years on, rather than at what Apple did during Jobs' tenure.
I was a Palm user when the iPhone was released, and I thought I was totally satisfied with my Palm devices (which I'd been using for years) and that the premium for an iPhone was pointless. I poo-pooed the iPhone until the 3GS was released and I finally tried one. I was blown away. Full web browser, lots of useful apps that installed *over the network*, fast and complete WiFi support to enable this, large capacity to hold lots of songs and images, a camera capable of producing large images, the list went on and on. It was a HUGE step up from other things in the market at that point. Apple had taken half-measures scattered throughout the phone ecosystem and brought them all together as full "best of breed" measures in a single device. This is what the Jobs Apple excelled at.
NOW iOS is stale in comparison to Android (see my post above), and that's the problem with Apple and why they are rudderless without Jobs, but early on this was simply not the case—the iPhone was remarkable when it was introduced.
I'm a technology early adopter (not necessarily an Apple one) and this happened several times with Apple products under Jobs:
- MP3 players. I'd had several MP3 players prior to the introduction of the iPod, but the classic iPod blew them all out of the water. Far faster, large screen enabling actual navigation of your music library, capacity to hold thousands of songs (rather than just a couple dozen), played just about any MP3 file you could throw at it rather than requiring you to use their own encoder (or, in the case of Linux users like myself at the time, carefully curate and tweak command line for Lame to create files that the device's bandwidth could handle). The iPod was simply far more functional that other MP3 players at the time.
- iPad. I'd used other tablets for years: Vadem Clio, Hitachi eSlate, Fujitsu Stylistic, etc. They had compromised battery life, a resistive touchscreen, an OS that was difficult to work with, had dog-slow processors and little memory, could not run a full web browser (in the case of the CE devices), required desktop sync or a desktop environment, were heavy and difficult to hold for long periods of time and/or to carry around, etc. iPad was hand-holdable, had massive battery life, did not require desktop sync or that you run a desktop environment that suffered as a tablet, and was generally the device I'd been hoping for for all those years as I struggled to make previous tablets work. Again, the iPad was a tablet done *right*, rather than making me buy the "promise" but suffer through the compromises.
- OS X. I switched from Linux. Why? Because OS X gave me a *nix command line environment and infrastructure, robust stability, support for high-end hardware, *and* off-the-shelf retail purchases of software and devices without having to recompile code or worry about compatibility. It's still the only OS that does this.
Jobs had a talent for spotting technologies that were essentially at the "proof of concept" stage but were making headway in a few tiny niches, and were already being sold to (dissatisfied) consumers and riddled with compromises, and getting his team and company to engineer their way around and through those compromises to realize the technology in consumer-ready, appliance form. Other companies released Ford Model T cars (hand-crank start, too many levers to micromanage mechanical functionality, counterintuitive and dangerous gearbox, rotten ride for grandma) and Jobs could look at what was there, spot the potential, and then put his team to work on a car that could be started from the passenger compartment, manage the obvious parts of its own mechanical operation, that had a safer gearbox that matched the way that people think and expect machines to work, and that let grandma work on her knitting in the back seat without poking herself.
He was masterful at (1) identifying potential in new tech that was either failing in
I live in a GF area and love it. There are three tiers, 5 Mbps for $0 (yes, free broadband), 100 Mbps for $70, and 1 Gbps for $90. They have been absolutely bulletproof, the speeds are for real when tested, and the online system and the way that it integrates with their WiFi router is awesome.
I have had multiple providers over the years, including Comcast and Verizon, and Google Fiber's product and service are easily better than the others.
If Google can't make this work, there may be no hope for anything better for a long time to come. I just hope I don't lose it here!
enabling the user to do things they otherwise wouldn't know how to do or be able to do. Since Jobs left, they've steadily slid into the old game from the '90s and '00s that the tech majors (HP, Compaq, and so on) used to play—"innovation" becomes another word for "throw gadgety gimmicks at the wall and see what sticks," but without well-thought-out reasons why users might want the device, or an understanding of the ways in which UX friction impacts the device's usability.
Compared to the rest of the marketplace and competing products at the time, the original iPhone, the original iPod, the original Intel Power Macs, the original LaserWriter, the original Macbook Pro models, the original iPad, etc. were all towering improvements that enabled users far more than competing products did.
Now, the trend is the opposite.
On the consumer end, iOS phones and tablets feel arbitrarily constrained next to Android Current Mac OS machines are generally limited in serious software and upgradeability again relative to Windows machines On the pro end, Apple's application ecosystem is weak once again compared to pro-level Windows applications...and so on.
It used to be that you paid a premium for Apple products but got much more or at the very least something highly differentiated for your money (esp. in the cases of early iPods vs. other MP3 players, iPhone 1 vs. other smartphones, iPad vs. other contemporary tablets, etc.).
Now you pay a premium either for less or for something that is largely undifferentiated (and often negatively so in the minor differences that do exist).
It hasn't always been the case that you're simply paying double for brushed metal and a glowing Apple logo, but it certainly feels that way now. People still want to pay for quality (hey, the aluminum case and better QA are nice), but now they have to consider the tradeoff—I can pay a lot more and get a nice metal Apple device, or I can pay a lot less and get a phone that's more configurable and flexible.
That's my own feeling, anyway. I'd love to have the nice finish of an iOS device, but even if there was price parity I couldn't give up the flexibility of Android. I don't want to be tied down to Apple's visuals, Apple's icon positioning, Apple's version of KHTML, Apple's take on the (non-)filesystem and so on. I love Mac OS as well, or at least I have done since OS X, but the new Macbook Pros are limiting and I'm seriously considering getting a Windows laptop for my next purchase, just so that I can access hard drive, memory, and so on.
Apple has begun to fetishize itself, rather than fetishize overall UX.
Can this function like a normal tablet? Will I be able to remove the controller modules and carry it around and read email, use Chrome and Google Now and Microsoft Office apps and snap photos? Or is this a dedicated gaming machine that's just modular?
If the latter, I wouldn't buy it. If the former, I'd buy it to replace my current 8" tablet, as a tablet PLUS gaming experience. But I need a tablet, and I don't want to have to have TWO tablets just to get slightly better gameplay on one of them.
If it's a one tablet concept (would have to be Android, I assume, to have the ecosystem) then great. If it's just a game console with fancy industrial design? Pass. I have good enough gaming on my current tablet.
"[F]raud, cheating, plagiarism, etc." in *low-end* research, which we also have in spades in the U.S. and in the West more generally (it's really bad in a lot of the also-ran European countries). At the top end, Chinese research is every bit competitive with other players in serious global research, and they have more resources available to them, which they can apply to problems without nearly so much systemic overhead thanks to their particular governing system.
I don't use protectors of any kind, but I knew more than just a couple middle-America, middle-class folks who ALWAYS get the hardest, most solid-looking case they can find (irrespective of whether these actually help or which cases perform best). Why? Because their phone is one of their largest investments and a critical piece of everyday tech that they want to protect.
They appreciate the thinnest phone possible precisely because *after* they put it in an Otterbox it will still be manageable, whereas when they had an iPhone 4 or whatever, the Otterbox made it significantly thicker than an old Nokia candybar.
I think this is a bigger problem than is being recognized here. Most coders that I work with don't get to decide on ship dates. They may in a few cases have a claimed "veto power" if the code isn't ready, but they won't use it, because they'll be let go if they don't ship on time.
The management that I see is too often of the "Give me a demo. What are you talking about, that works fine! Ship it! Let's move the press date up by two months!" variety. Some of the better ones are of the "What's our risk exposure? Hmm... Versus the revenue model... Hmm... It's a close call, but I think the we have to go with the risk to hit our targets" variety. At least they *get* that there is risk.
But the fact is that management and investors don't care if software is buggy and insecure as long as those are "edge cases." They're fully onboard with the Fight Club model. "How many clients will get screwed vs. how much money will we make. Sounds like a good tradeoff."
I think most coders are capable of producing good code in a world in which good code is valued. The problem is that it isn't. Shipping products early and often are the values, and management tends to think that if we can ship code early, do write-offs for the bug and vulnerability cases, and then release the next version before having to patch the one that's about to be shipped, then the entire expense of refining and auditing code can just be eliminated.
At least that's been my experience—the idea is that it's a good way to reduce cost. Release a lot. Be "agile" (hate that word these days), which means: just keep releasing completely new code at an alarming pace. That way, you never have to create good code. You produce a pile of rapidly chucked out, 50% entirely new dogshit every three months with your programmers just barely managing to keep up, you release major versions as fast as you can. Consumers and clients don't get time to be exposed to major bugs and vulnerabilities, or to request that they be fixed, because you release fast enough that your answer can be "That product was released six months ago and is now EOL; no fixes are planned. We recommend that you upgrade to the new version." (The new version also happens to include another revenue item of some kind—upgrade fee, etc.—which is better for the bottom line than providing bug fixes for free.)
I think what we see in software is the same thing we see across the rest of the consumer landscape. Managers and investors have realized that disposable, non-repairable junk is better for the bottom line and for themselves, because it means that consumers have to keep paying over and over again, and often. All of the other employees (e.g. coders) are left to come along for the ride by the seat of their pants, or get fired and replaced by someone who will.
that the ordinary purpose for which the goods in question were sold do not include the installation of an alternative operating system, and they will have numbers to back that up.
Woman does malicious thing X. Woman regrets malicious thing X. Woman can't take it back. Woman kills self.
Welps, that about sums it up. Seems like the right outcome.
And for anyone screaming "misogyny," I realize that it is now considered sexist to allow women to experience the consequences of their very own behavior, but I think it's about time we started doing just that. After all, men have to do it. Let's have some equality.
No change in activity level throughout any of this. Office worker in a cube at a computer, come home to take care of kids. No specific exercise regime and no particular "high-energy" activities.
Sample size of one, and it may just be my biology, but over the last twenty years I have done this three times:
- Gain 50-70 lbs. over time, see skyrocketing blood pressure, and bad cholesterol, high fatigue, fuzzy thinking - Get tired of it and cut all sugar and starch (i.e. no breads, sweets, soft drinks) out of my diet - Lose 50-70 lbs. in the space of about 3 months, see blood pressure and cholesterol return to perfect, lose fatigue and fuzzy thinking problems
The first time I rationalized that it was more likely due to inadvertently reduced calorie count (after all, natural carbs are supposed to be good for you, and the foundation of your diet, while fats are supposed to be bad for you, and protein in moderation—that was the federal wisdom at the time). So I added sweet foods and starches back to my diet but kept to a lower calorie count. Within five years, I had put on tons of weight again.
The second time I sort of thought "worked once, probably will work again," so I cut out all sweeteners, natural or artificial, as well as all grains and grain flours. Three months down the line, I was skinny and healthy. "This time," I thought, "I'll adopt a lower calorie count when I return to a 'normal' diet." Well, another six or so years down the road, back up by 75+ pounds, even with calorie restriction and a conscious replacement of "refined" sugars with "natural" alternatives like honey and sticking to "whole grain, high fiber" starches and flours. I just plain got fat, even on the "natural" and "high fiber" stuff.
Third time cutting out sugars and starches just happened, started in about June of this year. Cut out all sweeteners and all grains. But consciously increased my caloric intake of protein and fat considerably as a kind of experiment. No limits. We're talking a full pound 70/30 beef patty sandwiched between two fried eggs for dinner territory. What many people at Whole Foods would call "heart-clogging food." Well... Dropped 75+ pounds in ~3 months. No calorie control at all, and not even thinking about moderating fat, protein, or salt intake. Same result, and again, blood pressure returned to excellent as did cholesterol, despite likely significantly higher cholesterol and salt intake. Energy levels are much higher. Alertness significantly improved.
Though some people worry about sustained ketosis as the result of diet, I have experienced no problems. This time, I'm not going back to a "normal diet." I feel like I have enough first-hand data for my own biology. I'm just gonna keep eating as much red meat, eggs, and butter as I want, along with low-sugar vegetables (esp. leafy greens like spinach and chard, etc.)
But sweet anything and grains are seriously off-limits.
I am still having trouble convincing relatives that this is a good idea, everyone is terribly worried about me. The fat will clog my arteries, the whole grains are good for me and I'll get colon cancer without them, etc. But I feel about 1,000% better without sugars and grains in my diet, and I can buy regular clothes as well.
1) Apps refuse to start on rooted/jailbroken phones. 2) There are about umpteen dozen payment systems that do not support each other. 3) Invariably retailers only support at most one or two (which your particular phone does not have). 4) Only a tiny fraction of retailers even support that one or two.
So the result is that you spend all the time setting it up on your device, and then walk around for months never seeing a place where you can use it. When you finally, finally do see a terminal that claims to support the network that your app uses, and you try to start it, you get a pop-up saying, "For security reasons you can not make payments from a rooted and/or jailbroken phone."
In short, people are willing to use it but the corporate world is fucking it up (again).
For years, companies wanted, but struggled, to generate revenue on the web. They couldn't. There was just too much friction for the average user in pulling out a credit card, typing in details, then remembering logins and logging in over and over again, not to mention tracking all of their subscriptions to various services.
Apps and in-app purchases are the "micropayments" that were talked about for so long. User provides billing information once, then is able to conveniently pay for content (whether the app or in-app purchases) with a tap or two. All payments and subscription information are centralized and run through a trusted (to the user) provider.
This is why companies have gone there. Because it's where they were finally able to generate sufficient user acquisitions to sustain an online purchase/subscription model, for the most part. Companies go where the money is, and it wasn't on the web.
beneath the "access denied" and watch a few of them try for 10 minutes straight to load it by clicking again and again, then leave it open and tap it once or twice a day for two weeks before giving up.
I know a couple people like this. You ask, "But what if the link is malware?" and they respond with "But what if it's something great?"
On a similar note, I once sent a bad link by accident to a person who was in college at the time. I then sent a follow up email saying, "Sorry, bad link. Try this one."
They then called me an hour later to say that they kept trying the first link I'd sent, but couldn't get it to load, and asked if there was anything I could do to help. I said, "But I thought I mentioned—that was a broken link, it doesn't work. I sent the right one!" And they responded with a variation on the above—"I know, but you never know, maybe I'd like it! I'd at least like to see it!"
I have a library of about 180k photos. You retain originals in case someone goes back to a contact sheet and wants a reprint or an enlargement a decade later or something. At a typical event I will shoot between 100 and 1,000 images. Sometimes, depending on conditions, I will shoot RAW.
My current gear is 24mp SLR and generated files are on the order of 12-15MB each for JPG images. I can easily lay down 12GB a shoot or 50GB in a week.
I keep an online 12TB RAID-1 library and then have 3 backup sets on LTO, rotated, with one set always offsite.
I know a person that does video editing and production as a sideline for corporate clients, mostly working on online ad videos and 30-second spots. They keep archives as well, because it's not uncommon for a client to come back several times over a period of several years to want minor tweaks to something that's already run (for versioning or feature changes, slightly different voice track, color edits, text overlay edits, etc.). They have even larger data needs.
Point being: even many individuals and small businesses *do* have legitimate, productive needs, and your condescending view is just a tad narrow.
Some people swear by optical media for archival and backup, but I've had trouble restoring data with different optical devices and media just 3-5 years after write, so I don't trust them.
Tape, on the other hand, is venerable and proven—so long as you stick to what the big boys use.
At the top end, DLT and LTO are both still very expensive, but as they age out, they end up on eBay relatively inexpensively. The mechanisms are very robust, repairs and replacements are readily available, media is in channels, compatibility is very good.
You can pick up a used-but-verified LTO-4 drive for $200 on eBay. SAS controller, $20-$40. Media ~$20/ea for 800GB/1600GB per cartridge. So you can get rolling at less than $300 for a complete backup and go from there.
If you want to run cheapskate, DLT-VS1 ("DLT-V4") drives often come up on eBay tested and working for $80-$100 for SATA, eliminating the need for a host adapter of any kind. The VS-160 tapes (160GB/320GB on a DLT-V4 drive) can pop up in boxes of 10 for $100-$120. So if you're patient, you can get rolling there for under $200 if you get lucky, though you'll wait around a long time and switch a lot of tapes to get your full backup done.
Just avoid helical scan tapes at all costs (AIT, DDS/DAT). The reliability is crap and the media quality is crap. Wine linear tape (DLT, LTO) is what you want if you're going to run data onto tape for backups. This opinion comes from two decades of experience.
We are talking about two different things here. Secure retention and secure deletion.
Clinton was very cavalier about secure retention. She was apparently very serious about secure deletion. And her argument is that the things retained with poor security were those of state, while those deleted with apparently deliberate security were personal.
One could easily thus infer that she wasn't particularly concerned about protecting the secrets of state, but was very concerned about ensuring that her own secrets never saw the light of day. Whether or not that's the case is another matter, but you're conflating a whole several things together here that are in fact conceptually separate—retention, deletion, national, personal.
The problem is the quasi-monopolies (i.e. industries with very few players but very high barriers to entry)—but in the other direction.
I'm a Google Fiber user, but in this area, the moment that Google Fiber announced, the two other providers both suddenly rolled out gigabit fiber plans at around $70/mo. after years of charging about that for 5-20 megabit plans. Their customers all switched to the new plans while waiting for Google Fiber to build out (took many months) and as a result didn't go through the hassle of switching to Google Fiber once it was available, since they already had an affordable gigabit plan with their current provider.
Basically, Google encountered the power of monopolies in exactly the classic sense. They found out that it was very difficult to enter an existing monopoly-served market because the large interests are able to instantly match whatever the new kid on the blog was offering.
It also demonstrates the power of competition—as soon as *someone* was offering $70/month gigabit fiber, all players in the area were. But sadly, it is the new kid on the block that suffered most by incurring the costs of trying to enter at a lower price point without realizing the expected benefits.
As an aside, I also imagine that were, hypothetically, to pull out of this area, those gigabit fiber plans from the others would suddenly and magically "disappear" again.
In the commercial world, there is a hierarchy whose basic job is to say "no" to everyone's pet idea. To refuse to adopt an initiative proposed by someone, and instead to allocate their resources, against their will, to the *single* direction that the team has been ordered to take. Good or bad. Because even if bad, a single bad direction properly executed by a sizable team with enough labor to complete it well is better than a thousand bad directions each executed by a single individual or a small handful of individuals who lack the resources to complete it, yet chuck it out there alongside all of the other 999 incomplete bad directions.
But the whole *point* of OSS *is exactly* that if you don't like what everyone else is doing, you can do your own thing. That is the basic philosophy. And that's why Linux UX never improves in the free and open space. Because there is nobody with the authority so say, "No, the product will *not* include that, and you *will* dedicate all of your labor to what it has been decided *will* be included."
So the bazaar happens. But the problem with the bazaar as opposed to the cathedral is that the bazaar is only a single story high. You can't build seriously tall stuff without an organized, managed collective of labor. Surge, you get lots of interesting stuff. But very little of it, if any of it, is epic. It's all the size that one single bazaar shopkeeper can build, to man their own little shop.
The Linux kernel avoided this problem because of the cult of personality (not meant in a bad way, but in the technical sense) surrounding Linus. People defer to him. He decides what's in and out, and he does a reasonable amount of labor allocation even if in an interesting, socially backhanded way that's not common. But it works—he is "in charge" enough in everyone's minds that there ends up being one kernel, with leadership.
Nobody similar has emerged in Linux userspace, and it would seem that Linus-like people are a rare enough phenomenon that it's unlikely that one will emerge at any point before the question is irrelevant. The pent-up demand just isn't there now for good Linux UX, like it was for a sound kernel and high-capability OS that didn't cost a fortune, as it was during the late '80s/early '90s boom. The social mechanics just aren't there to generate it.
The Linux desktop as a really sound piece of tech and UX engineering... will never happen. That era has passed, and the problems have been solved—by other platforms. And Android is a very good counterexample. There *was* enough emerging demand for a mobile operating system that wasn't iOS but that offered the same capabilities, and voila—Android. When there is enough demand, there is space for one shopkeeper at the bazaar to emerge as a champion for the needs of others, and to accumulate sufficient influence by acclamation that a cathedral structure can emerge organically.
The bazaar is merely an incubator of ideas. The cathedrals are the epic and actually useful accomplishments. It takes demand and allegiance-pledging at the bazaar from many attendees to lead in the end to a cathedral. This means that the bazaar has to be big, and that the shopkeeper in question has to have an idea that many, many are not just interested in, but willing to work toward—enough to sacrifice their own autonomy and submit to leadership. This just doesn't exist for desktop Linux any longer. It got close during the height of Windows dominance, but there was never quite enough demand to make it happen organically. And now the time has passed. The desktop Linux people are running little shops at the bazaar that don't get a lot of foot traffic, and nobody is seeking them out. They are the kings of very tiny, forgotten kingdoms without enough labor resources or wealth to even maintain their castles any longer—and as a result, there is nothing but infighting, strange hacks to maintain castles on the cheap, and lots of started-but-never-to-be-finished f
I had this exact conversation with family and friends in the '90s. The answer was always "nothing."
Q: What do you see? A: Nothing. Q: I mean, what's on the screen? A: Nothing. Q: There is nothing at all on the screen? A: No. Q: So the screen is entirely blank. No power? A: Pretty much. Q: Pretty much? Is there something on it or isn't there? A: There's nothing on it.
I go over... And sometimes there would be words ("Operating system not found" or similar), sometimes even a complete desktop but hard-locked or similarly hung.
Me: That's not nothing (pointing). Them: I don't see anything. Me: Don't you see words? and/or Don't you see windows? Them: Not any that mean anything. Me: If they didn't mean anything, I wouldn't have asked you about them. If you'd told me, I wouldn't have had to drive all this way. Them: What was I supposed to tell you? Me: I asked for the words on the screen. Next time, read me the words on the screen! Them: Okay. Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
it's late.
produced. And there has been nothing worthwhile since then. I had to replace my Tab S 8.4 with a recent-model iPad Mini due to work (needed particular apps that were iOS only) and I hate it, it feels like it's years behind.
I think the market is being misread. Apple is falling, yet everyone is still following Apple's lead (and moving away from very positive differentiation) as though Apple were still king. There devices were awesome in the '00s. Now they're stale—and rather than step into the gap, Android makers and Android itself have been working very hard to copy the staleness.
Everyone who is going to get one now has a tablet for simple media consumption tasks, and most tablets out there are fast enough to do the job (my kids are still using their years-old original Galaxy Tabs—which show no signs of quitting—to browse the web and do homework). The same malaise that infected the PC market has hit tablets—the only real target segment is upgraders, and most users don't see a reason to upgrade.
What's missing from the tablet experience continues to be the ability to effortlessly create content and manage multiple applications and files well. Tablet makers are loathe to have users deal with "files" on their machines, I realize, but for most workers and creators, work is done in files. My suspicion is that one way to drive a round of upgrades is to produce a fast, light tablet with long battery life that makes real work easier to accomplish on a tablet. It can be done now, but it feels cumbersome. You do it because you have to—the tablet is light and has a long battery life, so it's what you brought with you—but you're aware of the trade-offs.
Give me back better task/window management and the ability to work with and think in locally stored files (i.e. any application supporting a particular file format can load it if you have it, without the weird mix of apps that only support one or another cloud storage service) and I'd upgrade in a moment, because a tablet would finally be a laptop replacement.
Surface comes close, only the UI still isn't good enough and the battery life isn't there, and it's too "heavy" in general terms (not just weight). Some UI innovation with a less involved architecture (i.e. iPad hardware, but with UI innovation to enable laptop-like work more easily) and a whole bunch of laptop owners will get one to replace their laptops with something that's just as good but with much longer battery life and much lower weight.
For mobile work I use an early 2011 17" with matte screen. It's now 1TB SSD + 1TB SSHD (removed the optical drive) and 16GB RAM, and I do end up paging rather often. I do marketing work for a dot-com and these days, and in the modern world that involves big data hosted on Amazon, extensive analytics, lots of R programs to cook the data, video production, lots of photoshop work, and many, many browser windows open at the same time.
I use gfxSwitcher to try to exercise some control over the graphics system and SMCFanControl to keep the fans running at 6k RPM because I know this machine's days are numbered due to the infamous AMD GPU mainboard heat issue (all of the 2011 MBPs with integrated AMD chips will eventually die due to a failure of the soldering on the GPU resulting from heat).
I was actually hoping it would die last year because Apple was replacing mainboards on these machines for free (official policy) until the end of February this year due to the problem—but they were just NOS mainboards, no actual fix for the long term issue, so while they might have extended the life, they didn't solve the problem definitively. None of these will be running in another 10 years, zero of them.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do when this machine goes up in smoke. Most of the features I care about are gone:
- More RAM? Nope.
- Integrated ethernet port for gigabit? Nope.
- Ability to install extra storage? Nope.
- 17" display? Nope.
It looks like when this machine goes south, I'll be back to Wintel hardware (running Linux) for my portable computing.
You're looking at the stagnating iOS years on, rather than at what Apple did during Jobs' tenure.
I was a Palm user when the iPhone was released, and I thought I was totally satisfied with my Palm devices (which I'd been using for years) and that the premium for an iPhone was pointless. I poo-pooed the iPhone until the 3GS was released and I finally tried one. I was blown away. Full web browser, lots of useful apps that installed *over the network*, fast and complete WiFi support to enable this, large capacity to hold lots of songs and images, a camera capable of producing large images, the list went on and on. It was a HUGE step up from other things in the market at that point. Apple had taken half-measures scattered throughout the phone ecosystem and brought them all together as full "best of breed" measures in a single device. This is what the Jobs Apple excelled at.
NOW iOS is stale in comparison to Android (see my post above), and that's the problem with Apple and why they are rudderless without Jobs, but early on this was simply not the case—the iPhone was remarkable when it was introduced.
I'm a technology early adopter (not necessarily an Apple one) and this happened several times with Apple products under Jobs:
- MP3 players. I'd had several MP3 players prior to the introduction of the iPod, but the classic iPod blew them all out of the water. Far faster, large screen enabling actual navigation of your music library, capacity to hold thousands of songs (rather than just a couple dozen), played just about any MP3 file you could throw at it rather than requiring you to use their own encoder (or, in the case of Linux users like myself at the time, carefully curate and tweak command line for Lame to create files that the device's bandwidth could handle). The iPod was simply far more functional that other MP3 players at the time.
- iPad. I'd used other tablets for years: Vadem Clio, Hitachi eSlate, Fujitsu Stylistic, etc. They had compromised battery life, a resistive touchscreen, an OS that was difficult to work with, had dog-slow processors and little memory, could not run a full web browser (in the case of the CE devices), required desktop sync or a desktop environment, were heavy and difficult to hold for long periods of time and/or to carry around, etc. iPad was hand-holdable, had massive battery life, did not require desktop sync or that you run a desktop environment that suffered as a tablet, and was generally the device I'd been hoping for for all those years as I struggled to make previous tablets work. Again, the iPad was a tablet done *right*, rather than making me buy the "promise" but suffer through the compromises.
- OS X. I switched from Linux. Why? Because OS X gave me a *nix command line environment and infrastructure, robust stability, support for high-end hardware, *and* off-the-shelf retail purchases of software and devices without having to recompile code or worry about compatibility. It's still the only OS that does this.
Jobs had a talent for spotting technologies that were essentially at the "proof of concept" stage but were making headway in a few tiny niches, and were already being sold to (dissatisfied) consumers and riddled with compromises, and getting his team and company to engineer their way around and through those compromises to realize the technology in consumer-ready, appliance form. Other companies released Ford Model T cars (hand-crank start, too many levers to micromanage mechanical functionality, counterintuitive and dangerous gearbox, rotten ride for grandma) and Jobs could look at what was there, spot the potential, and then put his team to work on a car that could be started from the passenger compartment, manage the obvious parts of its own mechanical operation, that had a safer gearbox that matched the way that people think and expect machines to work, and that let grandma work on her knitting in the back seat without poking herself.
He was masterful at (1) identifying potential in new tech that was either failing in
I live in a GF area and love it. There are three tiers, 5 Mbps for $0 (yes, free broadband), 100 Mbps for $70, and 1 Gbps for $90. They have been absolutely bulletproof, the speeds are for real when tested, and the online system and the way that it integrates with their WiFi router is awesome.
I have had multiple providers over the years, including Comcast and Verizon, and Google Fiber's product and service are easily better than the others.
If Google can't make this work, there may be no hope for anything better for a long time to come. I just hope I don't lose it here!
enabling the user to do things they otherwise wouldn't know how to do or be able to do. Since Jobs left, they've steadily slid into the old game from the '90s and '00s that the tech majors (HP, Compaq, and so on) used to play—"innovation" becomes another word for "throw gadgety gimmicks at the wall and see what sticks," but without well-thought-out reasons why users might want the device, or an understanding of the ways in which UX friction impacts the device's usability.
Compared to the rest of the marketplace and competing products at the time, the original iPhone, the original iPod, the original Intel Power Macs, the original LaserWriter, the original Macbook Pro models, the original iPad, etc. were all towering improvements that enabled users far more than competing products did.
Now, the trend is the opposite.
On the consumer end, iOS phones and tablets feel arbitrarily constrained next to Android ...and so on.
Current Mac OS machines are generally limited in serious software and upgradeability again relative to Windows machines
On the pro end, Apple's application ecosystem is weak once again compared to pro-level Windows applications
It used to be that you paid a premium for Apple products but got much more or at the very least something highly differentiated for your money (esp. in the cases of early iPods vs. other MP3 players, iPhone 1 vs. other smartphones, iPad vs. other contemporary tablets, etc.).
Now you pay a premium either for less or for something that is largely undifferentiated (and often negatively so in the minor differences that do exist).
It hasn't always been the case that you're simply paying double for brushed metal and a glowing Apple logo, but it certainly feels that way now. People still want to pay for quality (hey, the aluminum case and better QA are nice), but now they have to consider the tradeoff—I can pay a lot more and get a nice metal Apple device, or I can pay a lot less and get a phone that's more configurable and flexible.
That's my own feeling, anyway. I'd love to have the nice finish of an iOS device, but even if there was price parity I couldn't give up the flexibility of Android. I don't want to be tied down to Apple's visuals, Apple's icon positioning, Apple's version of KHTML, Apple's take on the (non-)filesystem and so on. I love Mac OS as well, or at least I have done since OS X, but the new Macbook Pros are limiting and I'm seriously considering getting a Windows laptop for my next purchase, just so that I can access hard drive, memory, and so on.
Apple has begun to fetishize itself, rather than fetishize overall UX.
And the question wasn't addressed in the video.
Can this function like a normal tablet? Will I be able to remove the controller modules and carry it around and read email, use Chrome and Google Now and Microsoft Office apps and snap photos? Or is this a dedicated gaming machine that's just modular?
If the latter, I wouldn't buy it. If the former, I'd buy it to replace my current 8" tablet, as a tablet PLUS gaming experience. But I need a tablet, and I don't want to have to have TWO tablets just to get slightly better gameplay on one of them.
If it's a one tablet concept (would have to be Android, I assume, to have the ecosystem) then great. If it's just a game console with fancy industrial design? Pass. I have good enough gaming on my current tablet.
"[F]raud, cheating, plagiarism, etc." in *low-end* research, which we also have in spades in the U.S. and in the West more generally (it's really bad in a lot of the also-ran European countries). At the top end, Chinese research is every bit competitive with other players in serious global research, and they have more resources available to them, which they can apply to problems without nearly so much systemic overhead thanks to their particular governing system.
I don't use protectors of any kind, but I knew more than just a couple middle-America, middle-class folks who ALWAYS get the hardest, most solid-looking case they can find (irrespective of whether these actually help or which cases perform best). Why? Because their phone is one of their largest investments and a critical piece of everyday tech that they want to protect.
They appreciate the thinnest phone possible precisely because *after* they put it in an Otterbox it will still be manageable, whereas when they had an iPhone 4 or whatever, the Otterbox made it significantly thicker than an old Nokia candybar.
I think this is a bigger problem than is being recognized here. Most coders that I work with don't get to decide on ship dates. They may in a few cases have a claimed "veto power" if the code isn't ready, but they won't use it, because they'll be let go if they don't ship on time.
The management that I see is too often of the "Give me a demo. What are you talking about, that works fine! Ship it! Let's move the press date up by two months!" variety. Some of the better ones are of the "What's our risk exposure? Hmm... Versus the revenue model... Hmm... It's a close call, but I think the we have to go with the risk to hit our targets" variety. At least they *get* that there is risk.
But the fact is that management and investors don't care if software is buggy and insecure as long as those are "edge cases." They're fully onboard with the Fight Club model. "How many clients will get screwed vs. how much money will we make. Sounds like a good tradeoff."
I think most coders are capable of producing good code in a world in which good code is valued. The problem is that it isn't. Shipping products early and often are the values, and management tends to think that if we can ship code early, do write-offs for the bug and vulnerability cases, and then release the next version before having to patch the one that's about to be shipped, then the entire expense of refining and auditing code can just be eliminated.
At least that's been my experience—the idea is that it's a good way to reduce cost. Release a lot. Be "agile" (hate that word these days), which means: just keep releasing completely new code at an alarming pace. That way, you never have to create good code. You produce a pile of rapidly chucked out, 50% entirely new dogshit every three months with your programmers just barely managing to keep up, you release major versions as fast as you can. Consumers and clients don't get time to be exposed to major bugs and vulnerabilities, or to request that they be fixed, because you release fast enough that your answer can be "That product was released six months ago and is now EOL; no fixes are planned. We recommend that you upgrade to the new version." (The new version also happens to include another revenue item of some kind—upgrade fee, etc.—which is better for the bottom line than providing bug fixes for free.)
I think what we see in software is the same thing we see across the rest of the consumer landscape. Managers and investors have realized that disposable, non-repairable junk is better for the bottom line and for themselves, because it means that consumers have to keep paying over and over again, and often. All of the other employees (e.g. coders) are left to come along for the ride by the seat of their pants, or get fired and replaced by someone who will.
that the ordinary purpose for which the goods in question were sold do not include the installation of an alternative operating system, and they will have numbers to back that up.
Woman does malicious thing X.
Woman regrets malicious thing X.
Woman can't take it back.
Woman kills self.
Welps, that about sums it up. Seems like the right outcome.
And for anyone screaming "misogyny," I realize that it is now considered sexist to allow women to experience the consequences of their very own behavior, but I think it's about time we started doing just that. After all, men have to do it. Let's have some equality.
No change in activity level throughout any of this. Office worker in a cube at a computer, come home to take care of kids. No specific exercise regime and no particular "high-energy" activities.
Sample size of one, and it may just be my biology, but over the last twenty years I have done this three times:
- Gain 50-70 lbs. over time, see skyrocketing blood pressure, and bad cholesterol, high fatigue, fuzzy thinking
- Get tired of it and cut all sugar and starch (i.e. no breads, sweets, soft drinks) out of my diet
- Lose 50-70 lbs. in the space of about 3 months, see blood pressure and cholesterol return to perfect, lose fatigue and fuzzy thinking problems
The first time I rationalized that it was more likely due to inadvertently reduced calorie count (after all, natural carbs are supposed to be good for you, and the foundation of your diet, while fats are supposed to be bad for you, and protein in moderation—that was the federal wisdom at the time). So I added sweet foods and starches back to my diet but kept to a lower calorie count. Within five years, I had put on tons of weight again.
The second time I sort of thought "worked once, probably will work again," so I cut out all sweeteners, natural or artificial, as well as all grains and grain flours. Three months down the line, I was skinny and healthy. "This time," I thought, "I'll adopt a lower calorie count when I return to a 'normal' diet." Well, another six or so years down the road, back up by 75+ pounds, even with calorie restriction and a conscious replacement of "refined" sugars with "natural" alternatives like honey and sticking to "whole grain, high fiber" starches and flours. I just plain got fat, even on the "natural" and "high fiber" stuff.
Third time cutting out sugars and starches just happened, started in about June of this year. Cut out all sweeteners and all grains. But consciously increased my caloric intake of protein and fat considerably as a kind of experiment. No limits. We're talking a full pound 70/30 beef patty sandwiched between two fried eggs for dinner territory. What many people at Whole Foods would call "heart-clogging food." Well... Dropped 75+ pounds in ~3 months. No calorie control at all, and not even thinking about moderating fat, protein, or salt intake. Same result, and again, blood pressure returned to excellent as did cholesterol, despite likely significantly higher cholesterol and salt intake. Energy levels are much higher. Alertness significantly improved.
Though some people worry about sustained ketosis as the result of diet, I have experienced no problems. This time, I'm not going back to a "normal diet." I feel like I have enough first-hand data for my own biology. I'm just gonna keep eating as much red meat, eggs, and butter as I want, along with low-sugar vegetables (esp. leafy greens like spinach and chard, etc.)
But sweet anything and grains are seriously off-limits.
I am still having trouble convincing relatives that this is a good idea, everyone is terribly worried about me. The fat will clog my arteries, the whole grains are good for me and I'll get colon cancer without them, etc. But I feel about 1,000% better without sugars and grains in my diet, and I can buy regular clothes as well.
Totally would do this, but:
1) Apps refuse to start on rooted/jailbroken phones.
2) There are about umpteen dozen payment systems that do not support each other.
3) Invariably retailers only support at most one or two (which your particular phone does not have).
4) Only a tiny fraction of retailers even support that one or two.
So the result is that you spend all the time setting it up on your device, and then walk around for months never seeing a place where you can use it. When you finally, finally do see a terminal that claims to support the network that your app uses, and you try to start it, you get a pop-up saying, "For security reasons you can not make payments from a rooted and/or jailbroken phone."
In short, people are willing to use it but the corporate world is fucking it up (again).
For years, companies wanted, but struggled, to generate revenue on the web. They couldn't. There was just too much friction for the average user in pulling out a credit card, typing in details, then remembering logins and logging in over and over again, not to mention tracking all of their subscriptions to various services.
Apps and in-app purchases are the "micropayments" that were talked about for so long. User provides billing information once, then is able to conveniently pay for content (whether the app or in-app purchases) with a tap or two. All payments and subscription information are centralized and run through a trusted (to the user) provider.
This is why companies have gone there. Because it's where they were finally able to generate sufficient user acquisitions to sustain an online purchase/subscription model, for the most part. Companies go where the money is, and it wasn't on the web.
beneath the "access denied" and watch a few of them try for 10 minutes straight to load it by clicking again and again, then leave it open and tap it once or twice a day for two weeks before giving up.
I know a couple people like this. You ask, "But what if the link is malware?" and they respond with "But what if it's something great?"
On a similar note, I once sent a bad link by accident to a person who was in college at the time. I then sent a follow up email saying, "Sorry, bad link. Try this one."
They then called me an hour later to say that they kept trying the first link I'd sent, but couldn't get it to load, and asked if there was anything I could do to help. I said, "But I thought I mentioned—that was a broken link, it doesn't work. I sent the right one!" And they responded with a variation on the above—"I know, but you never know, maybe I'd like it! I'd at least like to see it!"
the late '90s in digital.
I have a library of about 180k photos. You retain originals in case someone goes back to a contact sheet and wants a reprint or an enlargement a decade later or something. At a typical event I will shoot between 100 and 1,000 images. Sometimes, depending on conditions, I will shoot RAW.
My current gear is 24mp SLR and generated files are on the order of 12-15MB each for JPG images. I can easily lay down 12GB a shoot or 50GB in a week.
I keep an online 12TB RAID-1 library and then have 3 backup sets on LTO, rotated, with one set always offsite.
I know a person that does video editing and production as a sideline for corporate clients, mostly working on online ad videos and 30-second spots. They keep archives as well, because it's not uncommon for a client to come back several times over a period of several years to want minor tweaks to something that's already run (for versioning or feature changes, slightly different voice track, color edits, text overlay edits, etc.). They have even larger data needs.
Point being: even many individuals and small businesses *do* have legitimate, productive needs, and your condescending view is just a tad narrow.
Some people swear by optical media for archival and backup, but I've had trouble restoring data with different optical devices and media just 3-5 years after write, so I don't trust them.
Tape, on the other hand, is venerable and proven—so long as you stick to what the big boys use.
At the top end, DLT and LTO are both still very expensive, but as they age out, they end up on eBay relatively inexpensively. The mechanisms are very robust, repairs and replacements are readily available, media is in channels, compatibility is very good.
You can pick up a used-but-verified LTO-4 drive for $200 on eBay. SAS controller, $20-$40. Media ~$20/ea for 800GB/1600GB per cartridge. So you can get rolling at less than $300 for a complete backup and go from there.
If you want to run cheapskate, DLT-VS1 ("DLT-V4") drives often come up on eBay tested and working for $80-$100 for SATA, eliminating the need for a host adapter of any kind. The VS-160 tapes (160GB/320GB on a DLT-V4 drive) can pop up in boxes of 10 for $100-$120. So if you're patient, you can get rolling there for under $200 if you get lucky, though you'll wait around a long time and switch a lot of tapes to get your full backup done.
Just avoid helical scan tapes at all costs (AIT, DDS/DAT). The reliability is crap and the media quality is crap. Wine linear tape (DLT, LTO) is what you want if you're going to run data onto tape for backups. This opinion comes from two decades of experience.
We are talking about two different things here. Secure retention and secure deletion.
Clinton was very cavalier about secure retention.
She was apparently very serious about secure deletion.
And her argument is that the things retained with poor security were those of state, while those deleted with apparently deliberate security were personal.
One could easily thus infer that she wasn't particularly concerned about protecting the secrets of state, but was very concerned about ensuring that her own secrets never saw the light of day. Whether or not that's the case is another matter, but you're conflating a whole several things together here that are in fact conceptually separate—retention, deletion, national, personal.
I believe that's what I said.
The problem is the quasi-monopolies (i.e. industries with very few players but very high barriers to entry)—but in the other direction.
I'm a Google Fiber user, but in this area, the moment that Google Fiber announced, the two other providers both suddenly rolled out gigabit fiber plans at around $70/mo. after years of charging about that for 5-20 megabit plans. Their customers all switched to the new plans while waiting for Google Fiber to build out (took many months) and as a result didn't go through the hassle of switching to Google Fiber once it was available, since they already had an affordable gigabit plan with their current provider.
Basically, Google encountered the power of monopolies in exactly the classic sense. They found out that it was very difficult to enter an existing monopoly-served market because the large interests are able to instantly match whatever the new kid on the blog was offering.
It also demonstrates the power of competition—as soon as *someone* was offering $70/month gigabit fiber, all players in the area were. But sadly, it is the new kid on the block that suffered most by incurring the costs of trying to enter at a lower price point without realizing the expected benefits.
As an aside, I also imagine that were, hypothetically, to pull out of this area, those gigabit fiber plans from the others would suddenly and magically "disappear" again.
to the kinds of development that UX needs.
In the commercial world, there is a hierarchy whose basic job is to say "no" to everyone's pet idea. To refuse to adopt an initiative proposed by someone, and instead to allocate their resources, against their will, to the *single* direction that the team has been ordered to take. Good or bad. Because even if bad, a single bad direction properly executed by a sizable team with enough labor to complete it well is better than a thousand bad directions each executed by a single individual or a small handful of individuals who lack the resources to complete it, yet chuck it out there alongside all of the other 999 incomplete bad directions.
But the whole *point* of OSS *is exactly* that if you don't like what everyone else is doing, you can do your own thing. That is the basic philosophy. And that's why Linux UX never improves in the free and open space. Because there is nobody with the authority so say, "No, the product will *not* include that, and you *will* dedicate all of your labor to what it has been decided *will* be included."
So the bazaar happens. But the problem with the bazaar as opposed to the cathedral is that the bazaar is only a single story high. You can't build seriously tall stuff without an organized, managed collective of labor. Surge, you get lots of interesting stuff. But very little of it, if any of it, is epic. It's all the size that one single bazaar shopkeeper can build, to man their own little shop.
The Linux kernel avoided this problem because of the cult of personality (not meant in a bad way, but in the technical sense) surrounding Linus. People defer to him. He decides what's in and out, and he does a reasonable amount of labor allocation even if in an interesting, socially backhanded way that's not common. But it works—he is "in charge" enough in everyone's minds that there ends up being one kernel, with leadership.
Nobody similar has emerged in Linux userspace, and it would seem that Linus-like people are a rare enough phenomenon that it's unlikely that one will emerge at any point before the question is irrelevant. The pent-up demand just isn't there now for good Linux UX, like it was for a sound kernel and high-capability OS that didn't cost a fortune, as it was during the late '80s/early '90s boom. The social mechanics just aren't there to generate it.
The Linux desktop as a really sound piece of tech and UX engineering... will never happen. That era has passed, and the problems have been solved—by other platforms. And Android is a very good counterexample. There *was* enough emerging demand for a mobile operating system that wasn't iOS but that offered the same capabilities, and voila—Android. When there is enough demand, there is space for one shopkeeper at the bazaar to emerge as a champion for the needs of others, and to accumulate sufficient influence by acclamation that a cathedral structure can emerge organically.
The bazaar is merely an incubator of ideas. The cathedrals are the epic and actually useful accomplishments. It takes demand and allegiance-pledging at the bazaar from many attendees to lead in the end to a cathedral. This means that the bazaar has to be big, and that the shopkeeper in question has to have an idea that many, many are not just interested in, but willing to work toward—enough to sacrifice their own autonomy and submit to leadership. This just doesn't exist for desktop Linux any longer. It got close during the height of Windows dominance, but there was never quite enough demand to make it happen organically. And now the time has passed. The desktop Linux people are running little shops at the bazaar that don't get a lot of foot traffic, and nobody is seeking them out. They are the kings of very tiny, forgotten kingdoms without enough labor resources or wealth to even maintain their castles any longer—and as a result, there is nothing but infighting, strange hacks to maintain castles on the cheap, and lots of started-but-never-to-be-finished f
I had this exact conversation with family and friends in the '90s. The answer was always "nothing."
Q: What do you see?
A: Nothing.
Q: I mean, what's on the screen?
A: Nothing.
Q: There is nothing at all on the screen?
A: No.
Q: So the screen is entirely blank. No power?
A: Pretty much.
Q: Pretty much? Is there something on it or isn't there?
A: There's nothing on it.
I go over... And sometimes there would be words ("Operating system not found" or similar), sometimes even a complete desktop but hard-locked or similarly hung.
Me: That's not nothing (pointing).
Them: I don't see anything.
Me: Don't you see words? and/or Don't you see windows?
Them: Not any that mean anything.
Me: If they didn't mean anything, I wouldn't have asked you about them. If you'd told me, I wouldn't have had to drive all this way.
Them: What was I supposed to tell you?
Me: I asked for the words on the screen. Next time, read me the words on the screen!
Them: Okay. Sorry.
Next time...
Q: What does the screen say?
A: Nothing...