Except for the fact that very few people that were not in the financial industry, or had someone in it advising them, even knew the market was going to take a horrible downturn in some areas. Yes, some of these houses were overpriced due to the collusion between banks and mortgages brokers, but some of them were not. Problem is they took advantage of the situation when a few people lost their homes because of a bad downturn in the economy. When they started hanging on to vacant homes and abusing the situation they drove homes that were bought at a fair price well below their real market value by manipulating the market. This is the same concept as when entities do the same in the stock market by finding ways to artificially lower a stock price, buying it in that short window, and waiting for that manipulation to go away and selling at a much higher price.
This had a much greater affect though because then no one could move for new jobs and they lost all of their equity they had built up and had no cushion if their industry took a downturn or something shitty happened. And throwing around the old, "they should have been better prepared," is pretty weak given they were preying on people with little to no knowledge of how this worked on a large economic scale and would have very little chance to even know how MUCH they needed to prepare. Hell, even people that had an idea of how dangerous their actions were could not prepare to the level they needed to without being a fucking millionaire. Wells Fargo is absolute garbage and honestly I wish they would get shut down for this shit. Companies like them are why we NEED regulations and oversight on them. People saying otherwise at this point are being intentionally malicious or absurdly idealistic about them being good stewards. Remember the old saying, power corrupts...
Well if that is the case maybe it is more warranted than I initially thought. As I said, I only have a passing familiarity with the issue and don't generally keep up with common trends with Apple hardware (I dislike most of their security practices and the walled garden ecosystem, so no point keeping up with it especially when I haven't written anything for any of their OSs since college).
The problem is it is really all blind conjecture. They had/have a problem, one that from the outside seems very easy to find and horribly obvious, but there are lots of reasons this could have been overlooked in a testing environment. Like I said, I don't want to necessarily make excuses for because they did screw up whether from incompetence, laziness, or just a honest mistake. It just really doesn't seem fair to make a blanket statement about it is my point.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that it is bad practice, but I disagree with the generalization that all or even most of these companies are doing that. The sheer complexity of tech now a days creates huge volumes of tests that essentially just continue to layer on top of each other. Rarely do the testing requirements for a new release decrease especially given how feature hunger almost all markets have become with the drive into insane fringe technologies (AI is cool and all, but it is in infancy for almost all real applications). Granted these technologies will eventually not be fringe anymore, but I digress. My main point with all this is that test cases rapidly increase, while quality and testing/release time are expected to stay exactly the same or even improve significantly.
This then creates the real problem that almost no one really looks at unless they are the ones trying to do the testing (or in my case, improve that testing time), and that is investment in better test tools, methodologies, and technology. This sometimes ends up viewed as strictly overhead expenditure creating a situation where what you said comes to fruition and they simply cut back on what they are going to test and how thoroughly. I think many larger companies are getting on board with this investment in improved testing efforts and strategies though, and sometimes things like a simple thermal throttling issue are going to fall through and piss people off.
Does this excuse them for it? No, in all honesty they probably did just cut back on how thoroughly they tested this hardware, but I don't think it is fair to say this in a general sense.
It's amazing how remorseful companies are when they get caught doing something silly:|
Here's a thought:
Fix it before you release it to the public and you won't have to apologize and tarnish your reputation.
...so basically, for any sufficiently complex venture involving human beings, never release it to the public.
Truth. It still confounds me that people don't understand the idea that these projects don't have unlimited time and budget to fix every issue imaginable before release. Speaking generally, not all companies and actors are inherently evil (though if left to their own devices many would trend that direction). If I spent the amount of time and/or resources that some people demand working on finding every single tiny issue (that a lot of times get blown out of proportion) then either the end result would be so ungodly cost prohibitive that no one would buy it or the resultant would be obsolete by the time it could be released.
I have a pretty strong dislike of Apple and admittedly only passing familiarity with this particular issue, but it is unfair to jump to that conclusion they didn't do any due diligence and just shoved the product out the door. This particular issue, there is a good chance that it was simple oversight or failure to perform proper QA procedure, making the chastising for this a bit more valid. It is also very possible that they genuinely did what they would normally and missed an issue. I'm not making an excuse for them, but without tangible evidence that they were being sloppy this is really an unfair assessment.
Yea I am going to have to agree with jaseuk here. Skype is not dying. The consumer market/perception is not really important to their strategy on a lot of products. Little guys pay with little checks and that is why the consumer market is absolutely brutal. For every Snapchat or WhatsApp (to borrow the examples) there is a littered landscape of dead applications or attempted copycats (*cough*Instagram*cough*). Meanwhile, MS realized a long time ago that businesses will pay big bucks for productivity software, and you don't even have to sign up that many before the product is in the black.
Then, because of the difficulty in shifting an entire company off of a particular technology it usually takes a monumental fuck-up or need before they get off of it (not to mention a real competitor). Some employees might hate it, but enough like it or the execs like it and it doesn't matter. Lync was perfectly fine in a lot of ways, and Skype for Business is basically re-branded Lync with some upgraded libraries from the acquisition. Originally, MS abused a lot of first-to-market features and tech (or at least they were the best of the first crop) and made TONS of money from it. Now? They can BUY the first to market/dominate market group if they don't capture it and as long as there is a clear path to business level monetization, it is worth it. Didn't work out with the phone division because they made a really bad strategic error and bought the company that was already on decline in that area. The one thing I am not sold on their strategy at the moment is the amount of money Nadella is paying for some of this stuff. I agree with other poster's that they are overpaying for GitHub, but that doesn't really feed into my post's main point.
Skype is plenty big in the business world. Especially with them bundling it into their O365 subscriptions and everyone looking at it as mild added value at the very least. Hell, even companies that use WebEx still have Skype often times. So the idea that Skype is dying is pretty poorly informed. MS business strategy is not to capture the consumer market so much, that is just a nice side-effect to them (hence the amount of stuff they are giving out free now to non-enterprise customers). Their strategy is to make money from businesses and be sure to keep enough of the consumer market engaged with their entire portfolio to make it more profitable for businesses to sign up with MS in general. Skype just so happens to be something they don't really care about in the consumer space it appears.
While absolutely non-profits can and are actively abused in different ways, they are generally orders of magnitude better than the abuse from most full corporations (as I type this from a Google Chrome window...). Mozilla has faults for sure, but they are not baked in quite like Google's faults. As they mentioned, Google is an ad company and always has been. Sure, they have created a bunch of cool stuff and back in the early days they were probably just the legit nerdy people wanting to build awesome things for people to use while using the ad dollars to fund their passion. Problem is somewhere along the lines that was lost (probably around that billion dollar net worth mark...) and they realized they could use these cool things they built to create a greater ad platform that made lots of money and that not just some companies would use, but all companies would use. This honestly became even more evident when they reorganized into Alphabet as the parent company and Google being made a sub-entity with an advertisement focus (notice how the browser, Gmail, Android, etc. were not split off into their own companies or non-profit foundations? Yea, there is a reason for that...).
I've been toying with the idea of getting off the Google teet at least a bit myself simply because they have become significantly less trust-worthy over the past 5 years, arguably decade. Problem I am running into is the alternatives are not too stellar and the migration process is PAINFUL. I migrated to Gmail from Yahoo since Yahoo made clear they hired a bunch of 10 year olds to manage their security and that was rough as hell. I would honestly like to switch to Proton Mail or a self hosted solution now, but I dread going through all of that again.
Then phone-wise, as much as I loathe Apple, I have to give them credit that they are actually taking privacy practices pretty seriously. Playing into the greater point though, guess why? Apple is a hardware business and has been since forever. They can afford to do it, because that was never their business model, unlike Google who was doing advertising from the start (which relies heavily on knowing your demographics). The problem is that no one else provides a flexible phone OS like Android and I really don't want to start installing custom ROMs...
Now browser might be something I could do reasonably without too much pain. We have real competition in the browser space (though all of them have their issues) and I genuinely feel like Mozilla is much better than Google at this point (note BETTER not necessarily good...).
DD-WRT is great. I tried TOMATO many moons ago and wasn't a fan back then. Absolutely agree on avoiding the stock Netgear/DLink firmware. Netgear has great hardware, but they don't utilize it worth a shit in their firmware packs. Linksys is a bit better, but at this point I probably won't run stock firmware on any router ever again. When I bought my newest one to upgrade my router I specifically checked the models and revisions for DD-WRT support before even consider it an option.
Did you read my post? Install DD-WRT and this is a non-issue. I am using the hardware from netgear not he firmware. I actually hate their stock firmware anyway and would recommend not buying the router if you don't plan to install custom firmware.
ityTheir stock firmware is absolute garbage, not arguments here. Loaded up with DD-WRT though I've never had an issue really. I ran an R6300 for 6 years and upgraded to the R7500 almost 2 years ago and both have been great. Benchmarks on speed have been excellent too, so I'm not sure where you're seeing the hit there? Not saying you're wrong, but mine has been great. I run the Kong flavor of DD-WRT which most anyone running netgear hardware has preferred for some time.
I may look into Ubiquity though out of curiosity, never hurts to have alternatives.
This AC is exactly right actually. If you don't want to deal with some god awful proprietary firmware or go commercial grade, pick up a Netgear router with good hardware and load DD-WRT on it. Been using it for years and it is the best decision I ever made for my home setup.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't say that is a typical thing. In my experience people don't do that for free, but I'm not as involved in open source groups and such so my view could be distorted a bit.
You're telling me that I have no understanding of this??? What is the DNS propagation time for dynamic DNS changes? What is the expected gap in coverage when your IP changes relative to your expected consumer audience? Do you actually run dynamic DNS or did you just google that to throw it in my face?
Apparently not because again, it takes 5 fucking second to look this up and read that it has a propagation time of less than a minute: https://dyn.com/dns/ Given that the update is initiated from the client side in practice it is actually less most of the time. I have used it, colleagues and friends have used it, it is not that damn complicated. Stop acting like an ass because you got called out. I've implemented networking interfaces and equipment for MULTIPLE Fortune 500 customers so just shut up before you make yourself look like a bigger fool.
Then why does hardly anyone take the time to actually do it?
Pretty sure I addressed the exact reasons why people are not doing it all the time in my first post. Not really sure what you're getting at here. You're also vastly overestimating the complexity of such an endeavor. I have worked with and on build teams of no more than about 3 engineers that implemented a much more complex solution and the deployment times were approaching less than a day before I left. After learning WiX now myself, the deployment could actually have been a single installer if the team had taken the time. Not to mention, once it is done and stable there is this thing called imaging that works really nicely to create exact copies...
You need to step out of your bubble for a minute and consider: What percentage of people on this planet (or your country of choice if you like) are even aware of what a Raspberry Pi is? I'd bet it's less than 5% Of the people who are aware, what percentage would be even remotely capable of attempting what OP proposes? Again, I'd argue maybe 5%. So when.25% of a given population is capable of doing what OP proposes, I find it offensive to pretend like it's common knowledge, say it's easily achieved, or act incredulous that nobody is doing it. I for one believe that the remaining 99.75% of the worlds population should be equally able to achieve a similar level of information independence.
I'm speaking from experience here: I've tried, and I'm totally incapable of creating an independent, cross-platform, interoperable and secure software product that large amounts of people wish to use. If only I had a team of hundreds, perhaps thousands of software developers who were willing to help me build this product, and to do so without pay or adequate recognition.
I never tried to say this is common knowledge or that the initial setup is super easy either. Hell I agreed with you that doing it as the OP suggests is impractical as hell and even mentioned the solutions were not optimal. Redeployment once created could be easy if people took the time and trusted the source of said deployment though, which was the second major point I was getting at.
First off you really shouldn't comment on something you have exactly zero understanding on when it comes to hosting. As spire3661 said, dynamic DNS services are a thing and have been around for some time. Takes about 5 seconds to google that and if someone runs anything like what the OP was suggesting, they will find that out very quickly.
Now, I will give you that it is highly impractical for everyone to run their own discussion boards, Jabber, etc. and it would totally defeat the purpose of half of it. A better option would be to have some type of distributed system where everyone handles their own data while being able to go out and aggregate other people's data for their viewing. Otherwise you have the problem of 8 people using the damn thing, or if one person hosts it everyone's data is still hosted by someone other than themselves and subject to the host's whims.
That stuff could be a one click install if someone took the time to actually do it. However, many people that have the understanding to do so either do not have the time, do not have the inclination, or would simply rather feel superior to everyone else and reply with "you figure it out." You also alluded to one of the other problems indirectly. Those big companies make money off of providing easy solutions for these services. We are all trained (especially in the U.S.) to feel our time is worth something. Our knowledge can make that time exponentially more valuable too. Doing the one-click install would take quite a bit of time and knowledge and it is hard to find someone to do that for free. Due to those reasons, this becomes the difficult cycle to break. Conceptually we can come up with a lot of things, but figuring out implementation is still so highly undervalued by many.
All that said, I agree in spirit with the OP that people should be more willing to take matters into their own hands, but in practice it is a whole different ball-game and I'd tend to agree with you more. I try to do whatever I can on my own, but time is by far my biggest constraint. This is why I pay someone to do my yard work, I pay someone to fix certain things when they break, and I pay someone for many of the goods that they produce. I could literally do all of those things myself (or at least learn to), but it is far simpler and more efficient if I just pay someone and continue producing the services/goods that I have much higher skill levels in (which happen to be technical for me, but this could apply to anyone). Which essentially boils down to the basic foundation of a currency based capitalist economy.
But again, that is a browser/client side solution. Nothing is to stop their plugins on the server side. If the backend of any website integrates with Facebook API, there is a very real possibility that it is doing all the requests on the server side which a user can NEVER control.
Now, is this useful? Absolutely it is, as not everyone is able to abuse server side requests. This is not going to solve everything though and it is naive to think it will.
Your first point is basically what they were banking on. Most of Congress lacks the technical expertise to verbally spar with him on most of these issues. He is employing the tactic every software engineer ever has when talking to non-tech executives. Plead ignorance to simple but damning questions and give overly complex answers to others such that management won't understand and doesn't want to look stupid. I really wish they would have pulled in some of his engineering leads that HAVE to be familiar with the product implementation so he couldn't plead ignorance so easily.
You second statement I think he was just abusing the double meaning. They aren't sharing data in the sense of a business deal where they get paid for the data, but they absolutely know they share a ton of information with developers and anyone plugging into the site to provide "enhancements" to their service.
The data stored in cookies is typically not meant to build a vast data profile about you (though some do, and many places will harvest that data improperly if given the chance). Not only that, cookies are stored on your machine, not on their servers. I can delete all of my cookies right now. I can opt not to even allow them to work on my computer. I cannot do the same with Facebook plugins that have invaded the internet.
Going to hazard a guess you don't understand when a web server makes those calls to Facebook "for you" the host file won't do jack shit to stop that....
You're joking right? You just listed like 5 fairly technical things for a user to do before they can "opt out" of Facebook tracking most of their internet habits. Do you seriously expect everyone to be doing that? Even people that semi embraced tech don't understand how 90% of that works and usually have to have a techie friend or family member inform them/do it for them. So now anyone with a modicum of tech expertise has to be a steward to create a viable opt out option? That doesn't even mention the thousand other things they can do to circumvent someone doing all that (1x1 pixel trick anyone?).
Server logs in the sense of someone explicitly going to the domain is one thing, and even to a lesser degree accessing the API explicitly such as clicking the stupid like button on some website. Problem is they are harvesting information on other sites simply because the page loaded the like button. Real damn lovely word play there to say they are only looking at their own servers logs, but they are filling them with massive amounts of harvested information that people don't even realize they can get to unless they are tech savvy. Not to mention there is no explicit opt out option. Short of knowing before you even open the page that there is Facebook integration (and these days basically EVERYTHING has social media integration) users have no idea they are essentially auto consenting to this crap. So now I have to opt out of the internet? Sounds reasonable...
This doesn't even address the issue of other people giving them data about you knowingly or unknowingly. Picture uploads where they use facial recognition to build profiles of everyone in the photo whether they are on the site or not. Other people posting information about someone else and them harvesting it into the profile. Other people making fucking profiles of someone else (this one happened to me, only reason I have a Facebook account now is to control my own profile and protect friends and family from a false 'me' contacting them on there). Now I also have to opt out of having my picture taken, going into any store that might have some type of recording device, or going anywhere near anything that can recognize my face? Maybe I'll just wear a mask! Or better yet move to a cabin in the damn woods and live like a mountain man...
Ian Malcolm put it quite well, they were so focused on could they do it (and how much money they could make from doing it) that none of them ever asked if they should do it or, adding on to it, the right way to do it.
This company and others like them have absolutely no incentive to self-regulate to any real degree. They might pay lip service for PR purposes or to create an illusion of them 'protecting your information.' Most people don't understand half of what they are doing though and don't listen to those of us that do. I am not for tons of government intervention and regulation necessarily, but there is no other solution in my opinion. The free market doesn't solve this problem, laws, binding agreements, and enforcement does.
This should be the day of reckoning for them. I don't have a ton of faith that it will be because of some inept asshats representing the country's interests in Congress currently (pretty sure I saw an article about how over half the committees interviewing Zuckerburg received significant campaign contributions from Facebook), but it damn sure should hit them hard. Maybe I'll be wrong and the Republicans are so desperate to hit liberal Silicon Valley they will take the beating stick to them, but even that will be for the wrong reasons and likely will be targeted on a partisan basis. Every company needs to have privacy regulation imposed on them badly in my opinion. Personally, I'd be all for a US version of the GDPR getting passed, but maybe that is just me.
This story is misleading on the date. The congressional review act allows them to repeal the rule within 60 LEGISLATIVE days of Congress receiving the rule (days the chambers are in session), not calendar. The rule can go into effect within 60 calendar days depending on certain criteria, but the review act should be duly noted.
While Uber is a garbage company and I've heard Airbnb isn't much better, their business idea is actually great just executed like a bunch of immoral greedy assholes.
The taxi monopoly was half horseshit anyway as really it is just entrenched people that used the political system to keep other players from ever even entering the space. Why should it cost 50 dollars to go a few blocks in LA? You want to talk about making a few people rich, go research the people that own most of the taxi medallions in the big cities, they are no better than the Uber execs. Really the only difference is they don't treat the drivers like complete shit, but they damn sure try to keep them from getting a real cut of their ridiculous large pie. I digress though. Benefits of Uber include, cheaper (probably a bit too cheap, but I wouldn't mind paying a little bit more to help the employees out) and easier to obtain rides, less cars on the road thanks to more efficient usage of the ones that are on it, and less issues due to a high number of cars on the road. Disruption of the taxi industry is a good thing, especially to society at large.
Airbnb is a little different as allowing people to let strangers stay in or around their home can be problematic simply because the vast majority of people are ill-informed of the baseline treatment required for those people or even the risks they are taking on. The number of people that don't even realize if someone gets hurt on your property you are liable illustrates that easily. A Libertarian would argue that is their choice, but we all know not everyone can be trusted and there are enough dumb people that would ruin it for everyone. Again though, allowing for more efficient usage of space and dwellings is not a bad thing. People pay less for short term lodging, homeowners can help utilize extra space for some monetary benefit, wider selection of locations when travelling, and not having to deal with ridiculously shitty or expensive hotel/motel monopolies in some of the more obscure locations. Again, disruption of the hotel/travel industry is a good thing to society at large.
Now as far as Waze, I am honestly tired of people complaining about it at all especially by saying, "sending cars through their 'quiet' neighborhood." Seriously, it is basically just using PUBLIC infrastructure more efficiently, getting cars off the road faster, reducing the number of dangerous traffic jams and incidents caused by them, and reducing pollution if the cars spend less time sitting on the road. If you want a quiet neighborhood that no one passes through either move to a dead end street or buy the fucking roads from the city and gate your community. You have no right to say people can't/shouldn't use those streets when public funding paid for them to be built and/or maintained. If you want to talk about the needs of the many outweighing the few, this is a prime example and driving is damn sure some low hanging fruit to improve safety and efficiency.
The delivery apps the jury is still out on in my mind, but tentatively I could probably argue that if they were run with some real ethics and morals they would again be an improvement for society. I won't get into them here though as I would have to get into a bunch of business analysis that I haven't even thought through fully.
Now, my main counter point to you is that if Uber and Airbnb actually took ethics and morals into real consideration, not only in the sense of trying to act like it because of the impending PR disaster that would and in some cases already has struck them, then their businesses would actually be great for the reasons I already mentioned and probably lots more. The entire idea of the technology being disruptive is more akin to shaking up existing systems/industries because the models could be improved or were terrible anyway. That is half of what engineers do all day is look for and implement process/model improvements. Sometimes those improvements do render other things obsolete though, and that is what mo
I'm confused myself. It has been about seven years since I graduated, but all engineering students at my university were required to take an ethics course then already (Pretty sure all ABET accredited degrees require some form of ethics). It covered both legal implications/liability and the actual moral side and importance of being responsible when doing any type of work in the field. We even discussed in depth the societal implications and impact several engineering disciplines can have on society (including Computer Science). Hell I remember at least a few times where the professor brought up the medical ethics saying precisely telling us that should always be kept in mind. My university may have been/still is one of the top CS programs for us normal people (top 50 ranking), but I would think places like MIT/Stanford/UT Austin would have had this a looooooooooooong time ago.
While I hate the current system allowing such easy manipulation of the voting patterns, unfortunately at large elections would not properly represent the state either. Each area geographically has different needs and hence why representatives are supposed to be from different areas. If it were purely at large then it would probably be common in some of the heavily lopsided states for over half the elected representatives to be from one area (likely the capitol or its surrounding area). This would then lead to elected officials representing the needs of people they have never been around nor even lived in the area. The situation has a term in the business world, 'Ivory Tower Meddling.'
Unfortunately as you said there is a bit of a natural skew due to democratic voters tending to clump together more densely. Perhaps a hybridization of the suggestion could be effective? Representative numbers are tied to the population at large now even though needs vary based on location. Perhaps if the areas with shared economic interests were determined to be the districts, etc. larger areas could have multiple representatives proportionate to their size without having to draw further sub-districts within them. Then those districts could vote based on preference as you suggest and the top X number of candidates are given the seats.
You can still skew the districts though, but it at least would be a bit harder. Our current system I feel is very broken regardless though. It invites corruption by the very nature of it. Politics is about getting into a position of power/influence/responsibility. When you allow those already in the majority to make the rules it is in their best interest to stack the deck unfairly to their advantage. And while some of them have integrity and may genuinely be trying to do things in an unbiased manner, again the very nature of it is going to attract dishonest self-serving people.
Maybe it would be better to have the major parties elect an equal number of participants to an independent commission? This would make it substantially harder for them to stack the deck too much. It is definitely better then having the body that is in power rewrite half of the rules that govern how they are elected every few years...
Yea I don't think that was ever even a valid argument. The guy was most definitely knowledgeable enough and had the expertise to make the analysis. The only argument was if he was violating P.E. laws by claiming the title without having the certification in the state. Clearly the answer is no he was not now, so by all accounts he comes out ahead here.
Even I, as a person that thought he probably did violate those laws originally, can't say anything negative about the guy concerning this whole debacle. The only even remote argument someone could make now is that it opens the door for people to use the term who really are not qualified. Problem with that though, either one, people don't give a shit what qualifications the person has anyway, or two, a little bit of research/questioning determines that person to be a fraud.
Really the end result is sensible limits have been clearly established for the governing body. I am in favor of the P.E. system, and even if I mistakenly thought they had the authority to levy the fine, I can't say that I agreed they should have in that instance.
Poor phrasing on my part, I really did mean to acknowledge he wasn't working in a commercial capacity at all so therefore the laws don't actually apply. I had previously been under the assumption that these types of laws applied to engineering work in general (whether commercially done or not) if done for anyone other than yourself, but clearly I was wrong about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for the fact that very few people that were not in the financial industry, or had someone in it advising them, even knew the market was going to take a horrible downturn in some areas. Yes, some of these houses were overpriced due to the collusion between banks and mortgages brokers, but some of them were not. Problem is they took advantage of the situation when a few people lost their homes because of a bad downturn in the economy. When they started hanging on to vacant homes and abusing the situation they drove homes that were bought at a fair price well below their real market value by manipulating the market. This is the same concept as when entities do the same in the stock market by finding ways to artificially lower a stock price, buying it in that short window, and waiting for that manipulation to go away and selling at a much higher price.
This had a much greater affect though because then no one could move for new jobs and they lost all of their equity they had built up and had no cushion if their industry took a downturn or something shitty happened. And throwing around the old, "they should have been better prepared," is pretty weak given they were preying on people with little to no knowledge of how this worked on a large economic scale and would have very little chance to even know how MUCH they needed to prepare. Hell, even people that had an idea of how dangerous their actions were could not prepare to the level they needed to without being a fucking millionaire. Wells Fargo is absolute garbage and honestly I wish they would get shut down for this shit. Companies like them are why we NEED regulations and oversight on them. People saying otherwise at this point are being intentionally malicious or absurdly idealistic about them being good stewards. Remember the old saying, power corrupts...
Well if that is the case maybe it is more warranted than I initially thought. As I said, I only have a passing familiarity with the issue and don't generally keep up with common trends with Apple hardware (I dislike most of their security practices and the walled garden ecosystem, so no point keeping up with it especially when I haven't written anything for any of their OSs since college).
The problem is it is really all blind conjecture. They had/have a problem, one that from the outside seems very easy to find and horribly obvious, but there are lots of reasons this could have been overlooked in a testing environment. Like I said, I don't want to necessarily make excuses for because they did screw up whether from incompetence, laziness, or just a honest mistake. It just really doesn't seem fair to make a blanket statement about it is my point.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that it is bad practice, but I disagree with the generalization that all or even most of these companies are doing that. The sheer complexity of tech now a days creates huge volumes of tests that essentially just continue to layer on top of each other. Rarely do the testing requirements for a new release decrease especially given how feature hunger almost all markets have become with the drive into insane fringe technologies (AI is cool and all, but it is in infancy for almost all real applications). Granted these technologies will eventually not be fringe anymore, but I digress. My main point with all this is that test cases rapidly increase, while quality and testing/release time are expected to stay exactly the same or even improve significantly.
This then creates the real problem that almost no one really looks at unless they are the ones trying to do the testing (or in my case, improve that testing time), and that is investment in better test tools, methodologies, and technology. This sometimes ends up viewed as strictly overhead expenditure creating a situation where what you said comes to fruition and they simply cut back on what they are going to test and how thoroughly. I think many larger companies are getting on board with this investment in improved testing efforts and strategies though, and sometimes things like a simple thermal throttling issue are going to fall through and piss people off.
Does this excuse them for it? No, in all honesty they probably did just cut back on how thoroughly they tested this hardware, but I don't think it is fair to say this in a general sense.
It's amazing how remorseful companies are when they get caught doing something silly :|
Here's a thought:
Fix it before you release it to the public and you won't have to apologize and tarnish your reputation.
...so basically, for any sufficiently complex venture involving human beings, never release it to the public.
Truth. It still confounds me that people don't understand the idea that these projects don't have unlimited time and budget to fix every issue imaginable before release. Speaking generally, not all companies and actors are inherently evil (though if left to their own devices many would trend that direction). If I spent the amount of time and/or resources that some people demand working on finding every single tiny issue (that a lot of times get blown out of proportion) then either the end result would be so ungodly cost prohibitive that no one would buy it or the resultant would be obsolete by the time it could be released.
I have a pretty strong dislike of Apple and admittedly only passing familiarity with this particular issue, but it is unfair to jump to that conclusion they didn't do any due diligence and just shoved the product out the door. This particular issue, there is a good chance that it was simple oversight or failure to perform proper QA procedure, making the chastising for this a bit more valid. It is also very possible that they genuinely did what they would normally and missed an issue. I'm not making an excuse for them, but without tangible evidence that they were being sloppy this is really an unfair assessment.
Yea I am going to have to agree with jaseuk here. Skype is not dying. The consumer market/perception is not really important to their strategy on a lot of products. Little guys pay with little checks and that is why the consumer market is absolutely brutal. For every Snapchat or WhatsApp (to borrow the examples) there is a littered landscape of dead applications or attempted copycats (*cough*Instagram*cough*). Meanwhile, MS realized a long time ago that businesses will pay big bucks for productivity software, and you don't even have to sign up that many before the product is in the black.
Then, because of the difficulty in shifting an entire company off of a particular technology it usually takes a monumental fuck-up or need before they get off of it (not to mention a real competitor). Some employees might hate it, but enough like it or the execs like it and it doesn't matter. Lync was perfectly fine in a lot of ways, and Skype for Business is basically re-branded Lync with some upgraded libraries from the acquisition. Originally, MS abused a lot of first-to-market features and tech (or at least they were the best of the first crop) and made TONS of money from it. Now? They can BUY the first to market/dominate market group if they don't capture it and as long as there is a clear path to business level monetization, it is worth it. Didn't work out with the phone division because they made a really bad strategic error and bought the company that was already on decline in that area. The one thing I am not sold on their strategy at the moment is the amount of money Nadella is paying for some of this stuff. I agree with other poster's that they are overpaying for GitHub, but that doesn't really feed into my post's main point.
Skype is plenty big in the business world. Especially with them bundling it into their O365 subscriptions and everyone looking at it as mild added value at the very least. Hell, even companies that use WebEx still have Skype often times. So the idea that Skype is dying is pretty poorly informed. MS business strategy is not to capture the consumer market so much, that is just a nice side-effect to them (hence the amount of stuff they are giving out free now to non-enterprise customers). Their strategy is to make money from businesses and be sure to keep enough of the consumer market engaged with their entire portfolio to make it more profitable for businesses to sign up with MS in general. Skype just so happens to be something they don't really care about in the consumer space it appears.
While absolutely non-profits can and are actively abused in different ways, they are generally orders of magnitude better than the abuse from most full corporations (as I type this from a Google Chrome window...). Mozilla has faults for sure, but they are not baked in quite like Google's faults. As they mentioned, Google is an ad company and always has been. Sure, they have created a bunch of cool stuff and back in the early days they were probably just the legit nerdy people wanting to build awesome things for people to use while using the ad dollars to fund their passion. Problem is somewhere along the lines that was lost (probably around that billion dollar net worth mark...) and they realized they could use these cool things they built to create a greater ad platform that made lots of money and that not just some companies would use, but all companies would use. This honestly became even more evident when they reorganized into Alphabet as the parent company and Google being made a sub-entity with an advertisement focus (notice how the browser, Gmail, Android, etc. were not split off into their own companies or non-profit foundations? Yea, there is a reason for that...).
I've been toying with the idea of getting off the Google teet at least a bit myself simply because they have become significantly less trust-worthy over the past 5 years, arguably decade. Problem I am running into is the alternatives are not too stellar and the migration process is PAINFUL. I migrated to Gmail from Yahoo since Yahoo made clear they hired a bunch of 10 year olds to manage their security and that was rough as hell. I would honestly like to switch to Proton Mail or a self hosted solution now, but I dread going through all of that again.
Then phone-wise, as much as I loathe Apple, I have to give them credit that they are actually taking privacy practices pretty seriously. Playing into the greater point though, guess why? Apple is a hardware business and has been since forever. They can afford to do it, because that was never their business model, unlike Google who was doing advertising from the start (which relies heavily on knowing your demographics). The problem is that no one else provides a flexible phone OS like Android and I really don't want to start installing custom ROMs...
Now browser might be something I could do reasonably without too much pain. We have real competition in the browser space (though all of them have their issues) and I genuinely feel like Mozilla is much better than Google at this point (note BETTER not necessarily good...).
DD-WRT is great. I tried TOMATO many moons ago and wasn't a fan back then. Absolutely agree on avoiding the stock Netgear/DLink firmware. Netgear has great hardware, but they don't utilize it worth a shit in their firmware packs. Linksys is a bit better, but at this point I probably won't run stock firmware on any router ever again. When I bought my newest one to upgrade my router I specifically checked the models and revisions for DD-WRT support before even consider it an option.
Did you read my post? Install DD-WRT and this is a non-issue. I am using the hardware from netgear not he firmware. I actually hate their stock firmware anyway and would recommend not buying the router if you don't plan to install custom firmware.
ityTheir stock firmware is absolute garbage, not arguments here. Loaded up with DD-WRT though I've never had an issue really. I ran an R6300 for 6 years and upgraded to the R7500 almost 2 years ago and both have been great. Benchmarks on speed have been excellent too, so I'm not sure where you're seeing the hit there? Not saying you're wrong, but mine has been great. I run the Kong flavor of DD-WRT which most anyone running netgear hardware has preferred for some time.
I may look into Ubiquity though out of curiosity, never hurts to have alternatives.
one to which you have the source code:
https://www.dd-wrt.com/site/in...
This AC is exactly right actually. If you don't want to deal with some god awful proprietary firmware or go commercial grade, pick up a Netgear router with good hardware and load DD-WRT on it. Been using it for years and it is the best decision I ever made for my home setup.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't say that is a typical thing. In my experience people don't do that for free, but I'm not as involved in open source groups and such so my view could be distorted a bit.
You're telling me that I have no understanding of this??? What is the DNS propagation time for dynamic DNS changes? What is the expected gap in coverage when your IP changes relative to your expected consumer audience? Do you actually run dynamic DNS or did you just google that to throw it in my face?
Apparently not because again, it takes 5 fucking second to look this up and read that it has a propagation time of less than a minute: https://dyn.com/dns/
Given that the update is initiated from the client side in practice it is actually less most of the time. I have used it, colleagues and friends have used it, it is not that damn complicated. Stop acting like an ass because you got called out. I've implemented networking interfaces and equipment for MULTIPLE Fortune 500 customers so just shut up before you make yourself look like a bigger fool.
Then why does hardly anyone take the time to actually do it?
Pretty sure I addressed the exact reasons why people are not doing it all the time in my first post. Not really sure what you're getting at here. You're also vastly overestimating the complexity of such an endeavor. I have worked with and on build teams of no more than about 3 engineers that implemented a much more complex solution and the deployment times were approaching less than a day before I left. After learning WiX now myself, the deployment could actually have been a single installer if the team had taken the time. Not to mention, once it is done and stable there is this thing called imaging that works really nicely to create exact copies...
You need to step out of your bubble for a minute and consider: What percentage of people on this planet (or your country of choice if you like) are even aware of what a Raspberry Pi is? I'd bet it's less than 5% Of the people who are aware, what percentage would be even remotely capable of attempting what OP proposes? Again, I'd argue maybe 5%. So when .25% of a given population is capable of doing what OP proposes, I find it offensive to pretend like it's common knowledge, say it's easily achieved, or act incredulous that nobody is doing it. I for one believe that the remaining 99.75% of the worlds population should be equally able to achieve a similar level of information independence.
I'm speaking from experience here: I've tried, and I'm totally incapable of creating an independent, cross-platform, interoperable and secure software product that large amounts of people wish to use. If only I had a team of hundreds, perhaps thousands of software developers who were willing to help me build this product, and to do so without pay or adequate recognition.
I never tried to say this is common knowledge or that the initial setup is super easy either. Hell I agreed with you that doing it as the OP suggests is impractical as hell and even mentioned the solutions were not optimal. Redeployment once created could be easy if people took the time and trusted the source of said deployment though, which was the second major point I was getting at.
First off you really shouldn't comment on something you have exactly zero understanding on when it comes to hosting. As spire3661 said, dynamic DNS services are a thing and have been around for some time. Takes about 5 seconds to google that and if someone runs anything like what the OP was suggesting, they will find that out very quickly.
Now, I will give you that it is highly impractical for everyone to run their own discussion boards, Jabber, etc. and it would totally defeat the purpose of half of it. A better option would be to have some type of distributed system where everyone handles their own data while being able to go out and aggregate other people's data for their viewing. Otherwise you have the problem of 8 people using the damn thing, or if one person hosts it everyone's data is still hosted by someone other than themselves and subject to the host's whims.
That stuff could be a one click install if someone took the time to actually do it. However, many people that have the understanding to do so either do not have the time, do not have the inclination, or would simply rather feel superior to everyone else and reply with "you figure it out." You also alluded to one of the other problems indirectly. Those big companies make money off of providing easy solutions for these services. We are all trained (especially in the U.S.) to feel our time is worth something. Our knowledge can make that time exponentially more valuable too. Doing the one-click install would take quite a bit of time and knowledge and it is hard to find someone to do that for free. Due to those reasons, this becomes the difficult cycle to break. Conceptually we can come up with a lot of things, but figuring out implementation is still so highly undervalued by many.
All that said, I agree in spirit with the OP that people should be more willing to take matters into their own hands, but in practice it is a whole different ball-game and I'd tend to agree with you more. I try to do whatever I can on my own, but time is by far my biggest constraint. This is why I pay someone to do my yard work, I pay someone to fix certain things when they break, and I pay someone for many of the goods that they produce. I could literally do all of those things myself (or at least learn to), but it is far simpler and more efficient if I just pay someone and continue producing the services/goods that I have much higher skill levels in (which happen to be technical for me, but this could apply to anyone). Which essentially boils down to the basic foundation of a currency based capitalist economy.
But again, that is a browser/client side solution. Nothing is to stop their plugins on the server side. If the backend of any website integrates with Facebook API, there is a very real possibility that it is doing all the requests on the server side which a user can NEVER control.
Now, is this useful? Absolutely it is, as not everyone is able to abuse server side requests. This is not going to solve everything though and it is naive to think it will.
Your first point is basically what they were banking on. Most of Congress lacks the technical expertise to verbally spar with him on most of these issues. He is employing the tactic every software engineer ever has when talking to non-tech executives. Plead ignorance to simple but damning questions and give overly complex answers to others such that management won't understand and doesn't want to look stupid. I really wish they would have pulled in some of his engineering leads that HAVE to be familiar with the product implementation so he couldn't plead ignorance so easily.
You second statement I think he was just abusing the double meaning. They aren't sharing data in the sense of a business deal where they get paid for the data, but they absolutely know they share a ton of information with developers and anyone plugging into the site to provide "enhancements" to their service.
The data stored in cookies is typically not meant to build a vast data profile about you (though some do, and many places will harvest that data improperly if given the chance). Not only that, cookies are stored on your machine, not on their servers. I can delete all of my cookies right now. I can opt not to even allow them to work on my computer. I cannot do the same with Facebook plugins that have invaded the internet.
Going to hazard a guess you don't understand when a web server makes those calls to Facebook "for you" the host file won't do jack shit to stop that....
You're joking right? You just listed like 5 fairly technical things for a user to do before they can "opt out" of Facebook tracking most of their internet habits. Do you seriously expect everyone to be doing that? Even people that semi embraced tech don't understand how 90% of that works and usually have to have a techie friend or family member inform them/do it for them. So now anyone with a modicum of tech expertise has to be a steward to create a viable opt out option? That doesn't even mention the thousand other things they can do to circumvent someone doing all that (1x1 pixel trick anyone?).
Server logs in the sense of someone explicitly going to the domain is one thing, and even to a lesser degree accessing the API explicitly such as clicking the stupid like button on some website. Problem is they are harvesting information on other sites simply because the page loaded the like button. Real damn lovely word play there to say they are only looking at their own servers logs, but they are filling them with massive amounts of harvested information that people don't even realize they can get to unless they are tech savvy. Not to mention there is no explicit opt out option. Short of knowing before you even open the page that there is Facebook integration (and these days basically EVERYTHING has social media integration) users have no idea they are essentially auto consenting to this crap. So now I have to opt out of the internet? Sounds reasonable...
This doesn't even address the issue of other people giving them data about you knowingly or unknowingly. Picture uploads where they use facial recognition to build profiles of everyone in the photo whether they are on the site or not. Other people posting information about someone else and them harvesting it into the profile. Other people making fucking profiles of someone else (this one happened to me, only reason I have a Facebook account now is to control my own profile and protect friends and family from a false 'me' contacting them on there). Now I also have to opt out of having my picture taken, going into any store that might have some type of recording device, or going anywhere near anything that can recognize my face? Maybe I'll just wear a mask! Or better yet move to a cabin in the damn woods and live like a mountain man...
Ian Malcolm put it quite well, they were so focused on could they do it (and how much money they could make from doing it) that none of them ever asked if they should do it or, adding on to it, the right way to do it.
This company and others like them have absolutely no incentive to self-regulate to any real degree. They might pay lip service for PR purposes or to create an illusion of them 'protecting your information.' Most people don't understand half of what they are doing though and don't listen to those of us that do. I am not for tons of government intervention and regulation necessarily, but there is no other solution in my opinion. The free market doesn't solve this problem, laws, binding agreements, and enforcement does.
This should be the day of reckoning for them. I don't have a ton of faith that it will be because of some inept asshats representing the country's interests in Congress currently (pretty sure I saw an article about how over half the committees interviewing Zuckerburg received significant campaign contributions from Facebook), but it damn sure should hit them hard. Maybe I'll be wrong and the Republicans are so desperate to hit liberal Silicon Valley they will take the beating stick to them, but even that will be for the wrong reasons and likely will be targeted on a partisan basis. Every company needs to have privacy regulation imposed on them badly in my opinion. Personally, I'd be all for a US version of the GDPR getting passed, but maybe that is just me.
This story is misleading on the date. The congressional review act allows them to repeal the rule within 60 LEGISLATIVE days of Congress receiving the rule (days the chambers are in session), not calendar. The rule can go into effect within 60 calendar days depending on certain criteria, but the review act should be duly noted.
While Uber is a garbage company and I've heard Airbnb isn't much better, their business idea is actually great just executed like a bunch of immoral greedy assholes.
The taxi monopoly was half horseshit anyway as really it is just entrenched people that used the political system to keep other players from ever even entering the space. Why should it cost 50 dollars to go a few blocks in LA? You want to talk about making a few people rich, go research the people that own most of the taxi medallions in the big cities, they are no better than the Uber execs. Really the only difference is they don't treat the drivers like complete shit, but they damn sure try to keep them from getting a real cut of their ridiculous large pie. I digress though. Benefits of Uber include, cheaper (probably a bit too cheap, but I wouldn't mind paying a little bit more to help the employees out) and easier to obtain rides, less cars on the road thanks to more efficient usage of the ones that are on it, and less issues due to a high number of cars on the road. Disruption of the taxi industry is a good thing, especially to society at large.
Airbnb is a little different as allowing people to let strangers stay in or around their home can be problematic simply because the vast majority of people are ill-informed of the baseline treatment required for those people or even the risks they are taking on. The number of people that don't even realize if someone gets hurt on your property you are liable illustrates that easily. A Libertarian would argue that is their choice, but we all know not everyone can be trusted and there are enough dumb people that would ruin it for everyone. Again though, allowing for more efficient usage of space and dwellings is not a bad thing. People pay less for short term lodging, homeowners can help utilize extra space for some monetary benefit, wider selection of locations when travelling, and not having to deal with ridiculously shitty or expensive hotel/motel monopolies in some of the more obscure locations. Again, disruption of the hotel/travel industry is a good thing to society at large.
Now as far as Waze, I am honestly tired of people complaining about it at all especially by saying, "sending cars through their 'quiet' neighborhood." Seriously, it is basically just using PUBLIC infrastructure more efficiently, getting cars off the road faster, reducing the number of dangerous traffic jams and incidents caused by them, and reducing pollution if the cars spend less time sitting on the road. If you want a quiet neighborhood that no one passes through either move to a dead end street or buy the fucking roads from the city and gate your community. You have no right to say people can't/shouldn't use those streets when public funding paid for them to be built and/or maintained. If you want to talk about the needs of the many outweighing the few, this is a prime example and driving is damn sure some low hanging fruit to improve safety and efficiency.
The delivery apps the jury is still out on in my mind, but tentatively I could probably argue that if they were run with some real ethics and morals they would again be an improvement for society. I won't get into them here though as I would have to get into a bunch of business analysis that I haven't even thought through fully.
Now, my main counter point to you is that if Uber and Airbnb actually took ethics and morals into real consideration, not only in the sense of trying to act like it because of the impending PR disaster that would and in some cases already has struck them, then their businesses would actually be great for the reasons I already mentioned and probably lots more. The entire idea of the technology being disruptive is more akin to shaking up existing systems/industries because the models could be improved or were terrible anyway. That is half of what engineers do all day is look for and implement process/model improvements. Sometimes those improvements do render other things obsolete though, and that is what mo
I'm confused myself. It has been about seven years since I graduated, but all engineering students at my university were required to take an ethics course then already (Pretty sure all ABET accredited degrees require some form of ethics). It covered both legal implications/liability and the actual moral side and importance of being responsible when doing any type of work in the field. We even discussed in depth the societal implications and impact several engineering disciplines can have on society (including Computer Science). Hell I remember at least a few times where the professor brought up the medical ethics saying precisely telling us that should always be kept in mind. My university may have been/still is one of the top CS programs for us normal people (top 50 ranking), but I would think places like MIT/Stanford/UT Austin would have had this a looooooooooooong time ago.
While I hate the current system allowing such easy manipulation of the voting patterns, unfortunately at large elections would not properly represent the state either. Each area geographically has different needs and hence why representatives are supposed to be from different areas. If it were purely at large then it would probably be common in some of the heavily lopsided states for over half the elected representatives to be from one area (likely the capitol or its surrounding area). This would then lead to elected officials representing the needs of people they have never been around nor even lived in the area. The situation has a term in the business world, 'Ivory Tower Meddling.'
Unfortunately as you said there is a bit of a natural skew due to democratic voters tending to clump together more densely. Perhaps a hybridization of the suggestion could be effective? Representative numbers are tied to the population at large now even though needs vary based on location. Perhaps if the areas with shared economic interests were determined to be the districts, etc. larger areas could have multiple representatives proportionate to their size without having to draw further sub-districts within them. Then those districts could vote based on preference as you suggest and the top X number of candidates are given the seats.
You can still skew the districts though, but it at least would be a bit harder. Our current system I feel is very broken regardless though. It invites corruption by the very nature of it. Politics is about getting into a position of power/influence/responsibility. When you allow those already in the majority to make the rules it is in their best interest to stack the deck unfairly to their advantage. And while some of them have integrity and may genuinely be trying to do things in an unbiased manner, again the very nature of it is going to attract dishonest self-serving people.
Maybe it would be better to have the major parties elect an equal number of participants to an independent commission? This would make it substantially harder for them to stack the deck too much. It is definitely better then having the body that is in power rewrite half of the rules that govern how they are elected every few years...
Yea I don't think that was ever even a valid argument. The guy was most definitely knowledgeable enough and had the expertise to make the analysis. The only argument was if he was violating P.E. laws by claiming the title without having the certification in the state. Clearly the answer is no he was not now, so by all accounts he comes out ahead here.
Even I, as a person that thought he probably did violate those laws originally, can't say anything negative about the guy concerning this whole debacle. The only even remote argument someone could make now is that it opens the door for people to use the term who really are not qualified. Problem with that though, either one, people don't give a shit what qualifications the person has anyway, or two, a little bit of research/questioning determines that person to be a fraud.
Really the end result is sensible limits have been clearly established for the governing body. I am in favor of the P.E. system, and even if I mistakenly thought they had the authority to levy the fine, I can't say that I agreed they should have in that instance.
Poor phrasing on my part, I really did mean to acknowledge he wasn't working in a commercial capacity at all so therefore the laws don't actually apply. I had previously been under the assumption that these types of laws applied to engineering work in general (whether commercially done or not) if done for anyone other than yourself, but clearly I was wrong about that.