Agreed, there should be more transparency on what data is collected, how long it's retained, what it's used for, and the ability to opt out of data collection. That's also the reasoning behind the "contact preference" field mentioned in the OP. This is probably where they are storing the opt-in preferences to stay in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act.
In terms of the "why are they storing such things?", though, this list of stuff isn't exactly earth shattering in terms of what a hotel would store about a customer. It's not like they had DNA, a retinal scan, and a urine sample on file.
Our many devices already understand how to play stuff from Amazon. If we want to shell out for this stuff I'd be willing to do it -- we like the MCU movies, and our kids like a lot of Disney stuff. I'd rather that it just work through an app our many devices already have and work fine with. It's kind of a model-view-controller approach to streaming video access -- just plug your content into one of the leaders in the space already, let them worry about the distribution and infrastructure, and get piles of money from licensing.
My Chevy Volt is doing 175 MPG for its lifetime average. My driving is averaging about 85-90% electric. My next vehicle will very likely be a full EV. My power comes from a power portfolio that is pretty clean already and is getting cleaner, plus I opt for paying more for green power on my bill to create demand for renewable sources versus fossil fuels.
I live in a climate where two wheeled vehicles don't do well several months out of the year due to snow and ice. Yes, I know there are ways for cyclists and motorcyclists to deal with snow, ice, freezing temperatures and all that -- but most people aren't going to deal with that.
Scooters and motorcycles powered by gasoline also sidestep a lot of emissions laws that cars don't, and can pollute quite a bit, even though they consume less fuel. Small engines can be emissions nightmares, especially two stroke engines.
The number of people who upgrade RAM in their machines is a rounding error and I'm pretty sure Apple has the data to prove it.
Of course it is... since it was soldered in place in the last "upgrade" it's 0 (insert meme of guy touching his temple, caption is "There is no demand for upgrades when we solder the stuff in place").
We had a large lab to support and were buying Mac Minis by the pallet. At that scale, spending a couple days swapping bulk RAM and drives to save the cost premium of paying Apple for the privilege was well worth it. It was kind of like shelling peas -- we sat around and pretty much chewed the fat while management was happy we were saving a pile of money.
I'm actually more fixed on the TB3 port being a thing. For a current project I'm working on with external GPUs it's so much easier to deal with the Mac Mini form factor than a laptop or iMac factor. If I could get nearly the same form factor as the Mini the rest of the job is shrugging my shoulders at management and telling them to take it up with Tim Cook when they ask why DIY RAM and disk isn't a thing.
Do you remember when you could buy a Mac Mini with non-soldered RAM, a quad core CPU, and a replaceable disk? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Update the thing already, or kill it. Please. Thunderbolt 3, decent, CPU, non-soldered on RAM/disk and I'm pleased as punch.
Your information is incorrect.
I drive a 2014 Volt. It still has the same range as I had at the start of ownership (6K miles) as today (50K miles). By your logic I would be replacing the battery pack. I'm not. Not even close. Chevrolet also provides a 8 year/80K mile warranty on the drivetrain -- including the battery. Would GM offer a warranty that would require two replacements of the battery on average?
There are at this point more than 70 EVs at my office from a range of manufacturers. I'm in touch with a lot of that community. No battery replacements.
There are longevity tests conducted by Idaho National Labs (a US DOE testing facility) that show the battery of an EV will last hundreds of thousands of miles.
A nice summary with backing data for the Volt is presented hereTesla owners have gathered real world data to show 10% degradation at 160K miles
There are many other such studies in this vein.
Batteries are also to some extent like hard drives. They are sold with extra capacity to allow for failure of cells over the vehicle lifetime. Hard drives and SSDs also have this same capacity with blocks/sectors the user cannot access but are remapped as others fail. So even if a battery drops 10% of its capacity, the range presented may not change. Or in the case of the Volt, a 10% change in capacity would present itself as the loss of a couple of miles of range.
It's remarkably similar to the FUD that traces electric power back to the generation source to criticize EVs, but then assumes gasoline magically appears in underground tanks below the gas pump. No mention of the cost of erecting extraction platforms, transporting crude around the globe, cracking it to make gas/diesel, then putting it in trucks to deliver to the tank. The FUD also assumes the dirtiest coal plant from the era of Charles Dickens is generating the power.
There are plenty of used full electric and plug-in cars on the market now. Plenty of used Volts and Leafs out there, at prices very comparable to other used small sedans. In a few years we will have used Bolts and Model 3s coming into the used market when people trade them in at the 3-5 year mark.
Battery prices continue to drop, but the more I hear the "OMG THE BATTERY IS SOOOOO EXPENSIVE", the more I'm convinced it's ignorance, FUD, or some combination of both. No one says "OMG REPLACING MY ENGINE OR TRANSMISSION WILL COST THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS", they expect the engine or transmission to last the useful lifetime of the car. The battery in an EV is designed to do the exact same thing. There was tons of this when the Prius came out, but the widespread failure of Prius batteries never materialized. Even better, there are now companies who will sell rebuilt / remanufactured batteries at lower cost. Some people even will replace failed battery modules.
EVs also beat the tar out of ICE in terms of operating cost and simplicity. There is "car stuff" that can go wrong -- you smack a curb in an EV and you are going to have to replace stuff. But you don't have an exhaust system, spark plugs, air intakes, emissions controls, multi-speed transmissions, etc. An EV's motor has one spinning part. The transmission is one gear. Brakes largely go unused because of regenerative braking. You don't have to change the oil, and so on and so forth. A friend of mine who has a Leaf had to replace tires and wiper blades, that's it.
I have a Volt I got used, it's fantastic. It's very likely that my next car will be a full on EV. The driving experience is so much better than any of the ICE cars I drove before it. It's only when the battery runs out of range and it switches to hybrid mode am I reminded of the ICE. Driving my wife's van just feels like a step backwards, I need to wait for torque to happen and it makes all this noise, unlike the no noise the Volt makes when in EV mode.
This problem could be solved with existing technology. Armed drones, water cannons, flamethrowers, electrified decks, tear gas nozzles could all be remotely controlled.
Or you could take a page from The Simpsons and stock each ship with knife-wielding monkeys who are only deployed in international waters.
Manufacturers/designers have put enormous time and effort into designing things so they don't require a manual to have basic functionality working quickly.
Consumer after consumer will appreciate well-designed things that are easy to use. They will pick consumer goods that are easier to use.
Tools like setup wizard or workflow will take you through the relevant steps to get up and running. Manufacturers will spend money/time/effort on a nice guided setup routine rather than commit those things to a manual. Even better, devices will have an option to "just start over" if someone wants to, or if they sell it, and by that time they have lost the manual or recycled it.
Up and coming generations like Millenials and Generation Z grew up with Google and Youtube being an extension of their brain (not to discount how much of my brain I've outsourced). By far, people of this generation will Google a question or search for a video on Youtube. A device manufacturer will spend money on SEO and producing videos/online help that are the first Google hit rather than printing a manual. With the far better voice control nowadays, even older generations that used to have problems with small fiddly buttons on a phone screen will just ask how to do something out loud and expect to be shown how to do it. In some cases, the voice/help assistants will even open the relevant settings page to make a change.
With regular updates being very common, a manual is often out of date as soon as it is printed. You can change the videos or online doc to reflect new UI elements, new features, new ways of doing things on an old device. You can't change a printed manual
My TiVos have been happily consuming OTA signals for 8 years, since I cut cable TV. They also do very well with streaming content. They also worked fine with cable when I had it, too. I've been very satisfied with TiVo since I got my first one in 2001, and continue to be satisfied with them. My devices are fully paid for, and I can service them when the hard drive dies. I've quite literally had to plug them in, follow the guided setup and then effectively forget about them until a hard drive dies. No muss, no fuss and anyone from a barely literate toddler to the toddler's grandparent can figure out how to use it.
Reading through to the original blog post, they are making pretty much the same announcement that many other ISVs make -- when the underlying OS is no longer maintained by the OS vendor, or is in the process of being depricated, they don't make new software on it. To quote the blog:
Microsoft discontinued mainstream support for Windows 8.1 in January 2018. Mainstream support for Windows 7 support ended in 2015. For more information on Windows support, visit the Windows lifecycle fact sheet.
Apple has announced macOS 10.14 (Mojave) for the fall of 2018 — and we will continue our policy of supporting the three most recent versions of MacOS.
From my career working at an ISV, these choices are perfectly reasonable, as attempting to support the old OS becomes something of a boat anchor on your ability to develop new features that rely on new features (or security constraints) in the more modern operating system. There's also the matter of dependencies -- if you are dependent upon other software, drivers, etc to make your product, if one of those vendors drops support for the OS, then all the features that depend on that in your product have to gracefully degrade, and have the code added to make it do so, which requires not only the writing of the code, but also documenting, testing and then explaining to customers. Any bug found and filed with the vendor is also very likely to be closed or fixed only in the currently supported operating systems, if it exists there at all. Only very rarely and after a lot of effort will an OS vendor fix something for an OS in the "extended support" (or whatever they call it) phase.
This isn't just an Adobe thing, or a Mac OSX thing or a Windows thing. It happens in Open Source all the time. Projects take advantage of new features that require a certain version of a library or other dependency and then "support is removed" for older versions of Linux. Do people complain about projects not supporting RHEL 5, which ended regular support in early 2017? Or RHEL 4, which ended entirely around the same time? Look at DistroWatch and see how various distros claim support for only certain versions of packages.
It's cheaper to do this kind of stuff in virtual than in meatspace. Get worried when Takeshi Kovacs gets called in. There will be some "fulfillment" going on.
We cut cable TV and switched to OTA+streaming because 1) the overall cost was lower, freeing up money for other things 2) streaming services are month-to-month, no lengthy contracts 3) we have two fully paid for TiVos that happily consume OTA and work as streaming devices 4) the hundreds of channels of content on cable tv are increasing filled with crappy, low budget reality content. If I want that, I can get it from YouTube 5) we have the good fortune to live in a town with a community not-for-profit ISP, so getting only Internet isn't a big problem.
I was surprised to find out how much content we were getting from OTA channels, and how little I missed the rest of the cable package. We did split a HBO Go subscription with a family member for a while, but then switched to HBO Now when we could, and we switch that on and off when GoT is showing. We also started using our local library for DVDs/Blu-Rays of recent movies. We end up going past our library about twice a day so it's never really out of the way, and can request movies via interlibrary loan, so it's not a time waster. We can also know if something we want to watch is available via the library website.
I had a similar question above from when I was looking to replace a very old and flaky Fire I used for only reading. I couldn't find anything compelling to make the extra money worth it, and chose the Paperwhite.
I was shopping for a replacement for my long in the tooth and increasingly flaky Fire. I pretty much only used it for reading library books I checked out online. When I compared the feature set of Paperwhite versus Voyage it was truly difficult to come up with anything that made the Voyage worth the extra money. Screen resolution was the same, both had backlights for night reading, both were about the same size, both were about the same weight. Battery life was pretty similar. The Voyage had a bit of an edge on the storage side, but since I only ever store a couple books on the thing it's not a big deal. Finding a refurbished Paperwhite for short money sealed the deal in favor of the Paperwhite.
My only complaint with the Paperwhite is that there isn't a way to access the Overdrive/Libby system from the device itself. Other than that I really enjoy having a device without the ability to browse the web in any meaningful way with very long battery life. Some might say "well, a book can do that", but if it's outside my library's hours, it's hard to go pick one up!
Cameras in phones have pretty much killed off the idea of a separate "point and shoot" camera for some time now, and yes, phone cameras can do some absolutely amazing stuff, especially combined with things like in-camera HDR, editing on the phone, instant cloud backup, and ability to share your photos pretty much instantly anywhere you have a data signal. That's pretty neat stuff, and as they say "the camera you use is the one that you have with you". So they are a great blending of two devices in one, and very useful.
That said, it's not all pixel count. A DLSR is going to give you full creative control, plus a full choice of optics optimized for whatever you might be doing, from macro work taking pictures of tiny subjects, to astrophotography, and everything in between. You can also do things with shutter speed, aperture, zoom, etc that you just can't get out of a phone.
I have both. The phone gets a lot of use because it's pretty darn good for what I use it for, and very convenient. The DLSR is hauled out for when the serious picture taking happens.
The EV parking slots at my company that are half filled by Chevy Volts would disagree with you. We also have Bolts, Leafs, Prius, Tesla, Focus, Golf, Hyundai and, yes, Tesla EVs/PHV vehicles. But the Volt by far is the favorite. I have one of the Volts and it's a fine car. GM is working on 20 EV or partial EV vehicles to be delivered in the next 5 years. Ford is working on a lot of EV projects, including the F150, delivery time is supposed to be 2020/2021.
Slashdot Mirror
We use rear door heat exchangers in our data centers, we have found that they work quite well vs. using air conditioning.
Agreed, there should be more transparency on what data is collected, how long it's retained, what it's used for, and the ability to opt out of data collection. That's also the reasoning behind the "contact preference" field mentioned in the OP. This is probably where they are storing the opt-in preferences to stay in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act.
In terms of the "why are they storing such things?", though, this list of stuff isn't exactly earth shattering in terms of what a hotel would store about a customer. It's not like they had DNA, a retinal scan, and a urine sample on file.
Could be a legal requirement for the area the hotel is located in. Some countries are creepier than others.
Our many devices already understand how to play stuff from Amazon. If we want to shell out for this stuff I'd be willing to do it -- we like the MCU movies, and our kids like a lot of Disney stuff. I'd rather that it just work through an app our many devices already have and work fine with. It's kind of a model-view-controller approach to streaming video access -- just plug your content into one of the leaders in the space already, let them worry about the distribution and infrastructure, and get piles of money from licensing.
My Chevy Volt is doing 175 MPG for its lifetime average. My driving is averaging about 85-90% electric. My next vehicle will very likely be a full EV. My power comes from a power portfolio that is pretty clean already and is getting cleaner, plus I opt for paying more for green power on my bill to create demand for renewable sources versus fossil fuels. I live in a climate where two wheeled vehicles don't do well several months out of the year due to snow and ice. Yes, I know there are ways for cyclists and motorcyclists to deal with snow, ice, freezing temperatures and all that -- but most people aren't going to deal with that. Scooters and motorcycles powered by gasoline also sidestep a lot of emissions laws that cars don't, and can pollute quite a bit, even though they consume less fuel. Small engines can be emissions nightmares, especially two stroke engines.
The number of people who upgrade RAM in their machines is a rounding error and I'm pretty sure Apple has the data to prove it.
Of course it is ... since it was soldered in place in the last "upgrade" it's 0 (insert meme of guy touching his temple, caption is "There is no demand for upgrades when we solder the stuff in place").
We had a large lab to support and were buying Mac Minis by the pallet. At that scale, spending a couple days swapping bulk RAM and drives to save the cost premium of paying Apple for the privilege was well worth it. It was kind of like shelling peas -- we sat around and pretty much chewed the fat while management was happy we were saving a pile of money.
I'm actually more fixed on the TB3 port being a thing. For a current project I'm working on with external GPUs it's so much easier to deal with the Mac Mini form factor than a laptop or iMac factor. If I could get nearly the same form factor as the Mini the rest of the job is shrugging my shoulders at management and telling them to take it up with Tim Cook when they ask why DIY RAM and disk isn't a thing.
Do you remember when you could buy a Mac Mini with non-soldered RAM, a quad core CPU, and a replaceable disk? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Update the thing already, or kill it. Please. Thunderbolt 3, decent, CPU, non-soldered on RAM/disk and I'm pleased as punch.
Your information is incorrect. I drive a 2014 Volt. It still has the same range as I had at the start of ownership (6K miles) as today (50K miles). By your logic I would be replacing the battery pack. I'm not. Not even close. Chevrolet also provides a 8 year/80K mile warranty on the drivetrain -- including the battery. Would GM offer a warranty that would require two replacements of the battery on average? There are at this point more than 70 EVs at my office from a range of manufacturers. I'm in touch with a lot of that community. No battery replacements. There are longevity tests conducted by Idaho National Labs (a US DOE testing facility) that show the battery of an EV will last hundreds of thousands of miles. A nice summary with backing data for the Volt is presented here Tesla owners have gathered real world data to show 10% degradation at 160K miles There are many other such studies in this vein. Batteries are also to some extent like hard drives. They are sold with extra capacity to allow for failure of cells over the vehicle lifetime. Hard drives and SSDs also have this same capacity with blocks/sectors the user cannot access but are remapped as others fail. So even if a battery drops 10% of its capacity, the range presented may not change. Or in the case of the Volt, a 10% change in capacity would present itself as the loss of a couple of miles of range.
It's remarkably similar to the FUD that traces electric power back to the generation source to criticize EVs, but then assumes gasoline magically appears in underground tanks below the gas pump. No mention of the cost of erecting extraction platforms, transporting crude around the globe, cracking it to make gas/diesel, then putting it in trucks to deliver to the tank. The FUD also assumes the dirtiest coal plant from the era of Charles Dickens is generating the power.
There are plenty of used full electric and plug-in cars on the market now. Plenty of used Volts and Leafs out there, at prices very comparable to other used small sedans. In a few years we will have used Bolts and Model 3s coming into the used market when people trade them in at the 3-5 year mark.
Battery prices continue to drop, but the more I hear the "OMG THE BATTERY IS SOOOOO EXPENSIVE", the more I'm convinced it's ignorance, FUD, or some combination of both. No one says "OMG REPLACING MY ENGINE OR TRANSMISSION WILL COST THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS", they expect the engine or transmission to last the useful lifetime of the car. The battery in an EV is designed to do the exact same thing. There was tons of this when the Prius came out, but the widespread failure of Prius batteries never materialized. Even better, there are now companies who will sell rebuilt / remanufactured batteries at lower cost. Some people even will replace failed battery modules.
EVs also beat the tar out of ICE in terms of operating cost and simplicity. There is "car stuff" that can go wrong -- you smack a curb in an EV and you are going to have to replace stuff. But you don't have an exhaust system, spark plugs, air intakes, emissions controls, multi-speed transmissions, etc. An EV's motor has one spinning part. The transmission is one gear. Brakes largely go unused because of regenerative braking. You don't have to change the oil, and so on and so forth. A friend of mine who has a Leaf had to replace tires and wiper blades, that's it.
I have a Volt I got used, it's fantastic. It's very likely that my next car will be a full on EV. The driving experience is so much better than any of the ICE cars I drove before it. It's only when the battery runs out of range and it switches to hybrid mode am I reminded of the ICE. Driving my wife's van just feels like a step backwards, I need to wait for torque to happen and it makes all this noise, unlike the no noise the Volt makes when in EV mode.
This problem could be solved with existing technology. Armed drones, water cannons, flamethrowers, electrified decks, tear gas nozzles could all be remotely controlled.
Or you could take a page from The Simpsons and stock each ship with knife-wielding monkeys who are only deployed in international waters.
No fucking way I spend money on that.
My TiVos have been happily consuming OTA signals for 8 years, since I cut cable TV. They also do very well with streaming content. They also worked fine with cable when I had it, too. I've been very satisfied with TiVo since I got my first one in 2001, and continue to be satisfied with them. My devices are fully paid for, and I can service them when the hard drive dies. I've quite literally had to plug them in, follow the guided setup and then effectively forget about them until a hard drive dies. No muss, no fuss and anyone from a barely literate toddler to the toddler's grandparent can figure out how to use it.
Reading through to the original blog post, they are making pretty much the same announcement that many other ISVs make -- when the underlying OS is no longer maintained by the OS vendor, or is in the process of being depricated, they don't make new software on it. To quote the blog:
Microsoft discontinued mainstream support for Windows 8.1 in January 2018. Mainstream support for Windows 7 support ended in 2015. For more information on Windows support, visit the Windows lifecycle fact sheet. Apple has announced macOS 10.14 (Mojave) for the fall of 2018 — and we will continue our policy of supporting the three most recent versions of MacOS.
From my career working at an ISV, these choices are perfectly reasonable, as attempting to support the old OS becomes something of a boat anchor on your ability to develop new features that rely on new features (or security constraints) in the more modern operating system. There's also the matter of dependencies -- if you are dependent upon other software, drivers, etc to make your product, if one of those vendors drops support for the OS, then all the features that depend on that in your product have to gracefully degrade, and have the code added to make it do so, which requires not only the writing of the code, but also documenting, testing and then explaining to customers. Any bug found and filed with the vendor is also very likely to be closed or fixed only in the currently supported operating systems, if it exists there at all. Only very rarely and after a lot of effort will an OS vendor fix something for an OS in the "extended support" (or whatever they call it) phase.
This isn't just an Adobe thing, or a Mac OSX thing or a Windows thing. It happens in Open Source all the time. Projects take advantage of new features that require a certain version of a library or other dependency and then "support is removed" for older versions of Linux. Do people complain about projects not supporting RHEL 5, which ended regular support in early 2017? Or RHEL 4, which ended entirely around the same time? Look at DistroWatch and see how various distros claim support for only certain versions of packages.
It's cheaper to do this kind of stuff in virtual than in meatspace. Get worried when Takeshi Kovacs gets called in. There will be some "fulfillment" going on.
We cut cable TV and switched to OTA+streaming because 1) the overall cost was lower, freeing up money for other things 2) streaming services are month-to-month, no lengthy contracts 3) we have two fully paid for TiVos that happily consume OTA and work as streaming devices 4) the hundreds of channels of content on cable tv are increasing filled with crappy, low budget reality content. If I want that, I can get it from YouTube 5) we have the good fortune to live in a town with a community not-for-profit ISP, so getting only Internet isn't a big problem.
I was surprised to find out how much content we were getting from OTA channels, and how little I missed the rest of the cable package. We did split a HBO Go subscription with a family member for a while, but then switched to HBO Now when we could, and we switch that on and off when GoT is showing. We also started using our local library for DVDs/Blu-Rays of recent movies. We end up going past our library about twice a day so it's never really out of the way, and can request movies via interlibrary loan, so it's not a time waster. We can also know if something we want to watch is available via the library website.
I had a similar question above from when I was looking to replace a very old and flaky Fire I used for only reading. I couldn't find anything compelling to make the extra money worth it, and chose the Paperwhite.
The link you provided only shows used models.
Note: This item is only available from third-party sellers (see all offers).
If you go to the Kindle frontpage on Amazon there are no Voyage models shown in the comparison table.
I was shopping for a replacement for my long in the tooth and increasingly flaky Fire. I pretty much only used it for reading library books I checked out online. When I compared the feature set of Paperwhite versus Voyage it was truly difficult to come up with anything that made the Voyage worth the extra money. Screen resolution was the same, both had backlights for night reading, both were about the same size, both were about the same weight. Battery life was pretty similar. The Voyage had a bit of an edge on the storage side, but since I only ever store a couple books on the thing it's not a big deal. Finding a refurbished Paperwhite for short money sealed the deal in favor of the Paperwhite.
My only complaint with the Paperwhite is that there isn't a way to access the Overdrive/Libby system from the device itself. Other than that I really enjoy having a device without the ability to browse the web in any meaningful way with very long battery life. Some might say "well, a book can do that", but if it's outside my library's hours, it's hard to go pick one up!
Cameras in phones have pretty much killed off the idea of a separate "point and shoot" camera for some time now, and yes, phone cameras can do some absolutely amazing stuff, especially combined with things like in-camera HDR, editing on the phone, instant cloud backup, and ability to share your photos pretty much instantly anywhere you have a data signal. That's pretty neat stuff, and as they say "the camera you use is the one that you have with you". So they are a great blending of two devices in one, and very useful.
That said, it's not all pixel count. A DLSR is going to give you full creative control, plus a full choice of optics optimized for whatever you might be doing, from macro work taking pictures of tiny subjects, to astrophotography, and everything in between. You can also do things with shutter speed, aperture, zoom, etc that you just can't get out of a phone.
I have both. The phone gets a lot of use because it's pretty darn good for what I use it for, and very convenient. The DLSR is hauled out for when the serious picture taking happens.
The EV parking slots at my company that are half filled by Chevy Volts would disagree with you. We also have Bolts, Leafs, Prius, Tesla, Focus, Golf, Hyundai and, yes, Tesla EVs/PHV vehicles. But the Volt by far is the favorite. I have one of the Volts and it's a fine car. GM is working on 20 EV or partial EV vehicles to be delivered in the next 5 years. Ford is working on a lot of EV projects, including the F150, delivery time is supposed to be 2020/2021.
I hope nobody tries to steal my dreams.
Goofus is cool