Private company hands out free healthy snacks to anyone who wants one, paying out of their own pocket, as a community service, and people find something to bitch about.
So that's 1,940,000,000 written out. The article mentions 14,000 of those were problematic and had to be shut down. That's 0.0007% of accounts.
Assuming 20 drops per mL, there are 90921 drops of water in a gallon of water. So one drop of water in a gallon is 0.02%. To even push it to the same order of magnitude would need 100 gallons of water. Would anyone consider one drop in 100 gallons of water "flooding"?
Not to say that I approve of revenge porn or extortion, but the amount of incidents reported in the article is nothing close to flooding, even if it's five or ten times worse than the reported numbers, and further illustrates the difficulty of trying to find this kind of abuse buried among all the legitimate traffic on the site, plus dealing with false positives or "approved" nudity mentioned in the aricle.
I don't care what operating system (or, for that matter, software or product) you are talking about, but at some point you just can't keep patching. You need to be able to re-architect and deprecate old functionality, and take things out of production. An operating system or software package is an engineered product, just as much as an automobile, airplane or coffee maker is. I can go buy a classic car without airbags, antilock brakes, pollution controls, crumple zones or even seatbelts if I go back far enough. I can register it and drive it on the road legally. If I get an an accident and have my head smashed against the unpadded dash, get skewered by a straight steering column, am left paralyzed by the lack of crumple zones, or am thrown from the vehicle in a rollover I really have no one to blame but myself. The vehicle manufacturer long ago retired any warranty to the vehicle. I would expect a new car that I buy to have all required modern safety features and expect that they would be fixed (recalled/patched) if there was an issue found. But I would not expect the vehicle maker to patch in whatever advancements happen in the next 5-10 years.
You could have always lost the booklet, or had it destroyed somehow. There's no guarantee a paper booklet would survive.
The bottom line is that the artists are likely getting better bang for the buck on social networks and the places like Wikipedia, Genius and so on are doing the other stuff for pretty much free. Even slapping together a PDF then distributing it takes time.
There's a similar parallel to special features on DVDs and BluRays. When the formats were introduced, you'd have some "making of" features, director commentary, etc. Now that those formats are mature those things aren't as common as they once were, being supplanted by things like Youtube where they can act as fan material and promotion material.
I haven't bought a CD in well over a decade, and I'd given up on the little booklets, too. Their death went rather unnoticed. If I want to look up something about an artist I like, I just Google them and get vastly more information than I'd ever have gotten in a booklet.
I guess it's just the latest progression of nostalgia to experience recording formats that had inherent limitations. Perhaps it's some way of suffering for one's art? I've lived through albums, cassettes, cds and now am thrilled that I'm quite literally living in the future. I recall saving up allowance/job money to be able to spend $20 on a CD, then finding out only two tracks were worth it. Nowadays we spend $15/month to feed the music desires of my whole family, and I can download whatever I want to listen to on a whim. If there's one good track on an album I throw it in a "favorites" playlist and throw the rest of the record out. There's so much back catalog available that I quite literally don't have time to listen to crap music because there's so much out there I just couldn't afford as a kid.
There was a widely available format for exchanging information that didn't require a login or membership. This format would require some sort of system for making sure the names didn't get mixed up, and you might need some means of searching it, too. But a band could use this format for promotion of their work, links to concert reviews, additional information about the inspirations for the tracks on their albums, links to interviews they gave and all that stuff. Rather than being just boring text and some photos put in a jewel case, it would be so much more since you could use text, images, videos and so on. A band could create single stop shopping for not only their own information, but provide information about how people could listen to their music, watch music videos and buy concert tickets. If they so wanted, they could allow people to optionally sign up for their fan club or connect fans to their accounts on social media. Plus, the band could... get this... add new information as the album was released!
Oh wait, that already exists... it's called a website.
I work for a private software company. We have a lot of customers. We don't use the customer's name without their consent, and this also generally implies that not only the executives sign off on the use, but also the legal department. This might also be part of a sales negotiation, where the publicity of landing a big well known name as a reference account can be worth something in terms of selling into other similar accounts. I know that we get permission for the use of other companies logos on our slides used in sales presentations before we put them up there. These are the exception rather than the rule.
There are companies that do not want the world to know they are a customer of ours under any circumstances, for myriad different reasons. There are others who are perfectly content to be used as a reference account, others prefer that details be obfuscated. Sounds like Harvard was OK with Microsoft providing broad outlines of what they did but didn't want it to be known that it was them.
I'm sure there are plenty of Azure customers who don't want it to be known that they are using Azure. This is probably the default for any Azure customer.
> use the classroom for experiments and demonstrations and so forth
When I was in school, no teacher or professor merely read from the book. The syllabus would contain what was going to be gone over in class, you were expected to read it before you showed up. Of course, not everyone did that, but the instructor would at least try by telling you and having it written down, as well as posting what problem sets were due and so on.
The lecture period would cover the high points of the text, but it was interactive in that the students could ask for clarification and have the professor work though things on the board. In certain classes there would be a demonstration of principles (if they applied), but not every class had the opportunity for this, such as writing classes. We also had lab sections when applicable for chemistry, physics, biology and so on, where we would learn by doing. I guess the lecture period was for reinforcement of the textbook plus an open forum for asking clarifying questions. Of course, if you were really still in the dark you could always go to office hours.
This was 30ish years ago... so by the definition of this article I didn't see a "traditional lecture" in the entire time I was being educated. My kids are still in grade school, but they have a very different school day than I ever did, and very much removed from what this guy is railing against.
Given the example of The Mechanical Universe, having a professor show up and play a video every week would make me angry. Why shell out thousands of dollars to have some PhD hit play on a video? Why not engage them at a human level that's been going on since the Greeks were having dialogs ages ago?
The evildoers will listen to the instructions of the flight crew and place their electronics in airplane mode so they can't communicate with anything. They would also never dream of bringing about communication devices that are not FAA certified and that might interfere with the airplane's electronic systems.
Honestly my nine year old could figure out ways some evildoer could make this work.
You can sign up with just an email. If you signed up with Facebook and just want to use an email, they will break the connection to Facebook and bring over anything for you.
For intense work: Office door is closed. IM turned off/existed. Calendar blocked off. Email turned off. Headphones on music I know helps. Phone on Do Not Disturb. I will use the pomodoro system. I also make every effort to stare intently at the screen and don't notice anyone who may be loitering in the hall, or recognize their presence.
For day to day: No flashing email alerts. I do a daily todo list. I block off time in the calendar for working on projects so people don't "drop by" or think I'm free.
of a similar thing. Less rich people who can afford lake houses and sit around sipping microbrews, more garage hacking, moments of sheer terror, exhilaration and proximity to death and/or loss of a limb. Better soundtrack than yoga studio lite.
My daugher's school uses iPads for pretty much every subject. Twentyish kids in each class, 1000 in the school building (2 grades). Each kid has an iPad and it's connected to wifi when the kids are in class. Town has a population of 35K. The iPads are on all the time and used all day for every lesson. Our high school has about 2000 kids with iPads. Plus desktop computers and laptops used by the staff. We are not a wealthy district, either. We aren't dirt poor but we are not even top ten in the state for things like house prices / median income -- we are pretty much right on the median for the state.
Even at the level you suggest of simultaneous access (560), AC/OP's suggestion of a 20 Mbps cable modem shared would fall over, too. Not to mention putting in the infrastucture to provide wifi to each classroom and salary for network/IT admin.
So even in my example, not everyone is accessing simultaneously (much like a business) but my point still stands -- a 20 Mbps line might have been sufficient for a business 10-15 years ago but those days are long past. A school isn't going to have *exactly* the same demands as a 2000 person business but it's not going to have what would be considered crappy household Internet, either. Plus paying the people to run it. I'd expect people on Slashdot to understand that supporting a network with 2000+ users (or more if you support a whole district) plus desktops, laptops and tablets is not something someone can take on in their spare time and using 20 Mbps internet.
- A "medium sized" high school may be 2000 students, 100ish staff. So that's 2100 people accessing a network. A 2100 person business isn't going to have one 20 mbps line. Heck, nowadays a 20 mbps line can be barely adequate for family use -- one HD youtube stream can consume 4.5 mbps alone. You are going to bring that to its knees if you have 2100 people sharing it. - Students access web sites like wikipedia, news sites and other curriculum related sites. These are by no means text based websites. Any professional site is going to be loading up a lot more than text. - Students taking programming or web design classes are largely using the same tools, sites, resources and references that professional programmers and web designers use. They aren't teaching BASIC and Logo on Commodores and Apple IIs with floppies or tape drive anymore. Kids are learning Java, Photoshop, etc and are looking up problems on Stack Overflow and such. - Plenty of curriculum-related apps are cloud-based. My daughter's school uses iPads and they are an essential part of the curriculum. She can access assignments, grades, calendars, etc all from her tablet (and as her parents, we can, too). I don't know how much those apps consume but even 20-30 kids in a classroom are going to be hitting a server somewhere. - OP also included "support". How much is your salary? How many users do you support? How much do switches, routers, wifi access points that will support 2100 users cost? How long do they last before they need an upgrade? It's not like they throw up a Linksys and call it a day. It's also not something you can expect a teacher or admin assistant to do, as there are security and privacy issues that need to be maintained, in addition to web filtering for appropriate sites, etc.
Since Waze allows me to select routes based on real time traffic data and also share my ETA and current position with my wife/friends, I am a horrible person since I'm "using" my smartphone while driving.
Since Waze added the "share drive" feature way back when, I don't receive calls asking "when will you be here" if I'm delayed by a traffic jam. Not only does the app automatically send notifications of ETA changes, it also lets recipients click a link to see exactly where I am. I use the hell out of that feature, sending links to friends and family when I'm on my way to meet them, it saves having a conversation about ETA while driving.
I recall driving without a phone, having to use a paper map, etc. I wonder how many people ran into things while trying to use a paper map and looking for road/street signs. I live in the Boston area where they rarely have a street sign for the street you are on, and where the color scheme of the street signs can change based on the town you happen to be in at the moment.
You are missing a quality engineering or quality assurance group -- a group that's independent of the developers and specializes in developing appropriate tests, test harnesses, test automation and also provides another set of eyes on features and bug fixes.
Our process:
Bug is reported or feature request is approved for developer to work on.
Development cycle: Developer implements feature / fixes it. Ideally based on design of fix/feature, QE develops test plan/tests. A lot of work can happen concurrently. Some people even write the tests first, then code second.
Code review code and fixes with other knowledgeable developers (and QE) Repeat this cycle till feature/fix and tests are ready.
Fix is submitted to integration system with appropriate tests.
QE (most definitely NOT the developer) verifies 1) software works 2) regression test actually ran. Ideally this is a completely separate QE from the one who did the submission, but this depends on resources.
Software enters customer release process (dev and qe largely forget about it and move onto something else)
Customer release process runs tests (or some representative subset of) against a consolidated build of "everything" to check for integration issues.
Vehicle sales have similar weirdness. There are some legal/regulatory terms of what constitutes a "light truck" versus a "car" and so on. Not to mention that the term "station wagon" became a death sentence for a vehicle. So you end up with a PT Cruiser being a truck for fuel efficiency standards but as a car for others. Subaru markets their Outback as a SUV, but it's really a wagon, or as they call it, a Crossover/SUV, and it's also a "truck", but never, ever a "wagon"... which calls up memories of giant domestic precursors of minivans that stylish people want to avoid.
Nowadays you have the laptops, convertible laptops, tablets designed to replace your laptop, tablets that are nearly laptops, etc. There's some really nice thinking going on out there in the laptop space. My wife went from a traditional laptop to a HP Spectre and is really enjoying the convertible aspect of the thing and the touch screen. Sure she doesn't use the touch screen much in laptop mode, but when she's watching videos she uses it all the time.
I live in a town with a municipal ISP. Our town has a municipal light and power, and it's a part of it.
Pluses: Price, speed, support are good. Certainly better than I experienced other other commercial ISPs. By extension, our power rates are also very low compared to the rates of other towns that use commercial power providers. They also provide VOIP phone for a decent price. Reliability has been decent. You can unbundle or bundle cable TV, phone and Internet as you like with no significant penalty. A lot of the employees live in town so they are quite literally your neighbors.
Minuses: We still don't have more than one provider in town. ISP support hours are not 24/7, they are "business hours" only. The electric side of the organization does respond quickly to outages.
Tesla is undoubtedly cool. Their cars seem to be holding up well, despite some hiccups and a weird amount of hate from the 'MURICA folks -- especially given that Tesla is
1) on track to be the most "domestic" of domestic automakers -- 90% when the gigafactory is fully working. 2) creating jobs in America 3) creating EVs that are sporty, fun to drive, etc.
I do see them as the future -- but they are a growing niche player. As an American I'm happy they are here and I'm happy to see what they are doing. It's good someone is out there pushing the envelope. Plus with Elon you get all the fun of Space X, solar, battery storage, tunnel boring and he's a fan of Iain Banks, so much so he names his recovery drones after Culture ships. Add powered armor and you can get to Tony Stark pretty quickly.
GM, though, is not dead yet. Not by far. I drive a Volt every day and it's probably the nicest small sedan I've owned. Decent power, very efficient and used models are very reasonably priced. Plus they have been really putting money and resources into EVs -- the Spark and Bolt are recent additions. Sure, it's not a pure EV, but also at the same time it's not as expensive as it would of been if it was and long distance travel is very possible in it. I know EV range is getting better and charging times are decreasing -- but for many Americans it's not anything approaching reality. I'm fortunate enough to be able to afford a house with a garage and have an employer that has on site EV charging. Therefore, I have easy charging at home and work and I do 85-90% of my driving on battery. For many people this isn't reality -- they park on the street or live in an apartment/condo complex with no access to charging infrastructure. Or they don't have the ability to spend the money to install a charging station at home, as it can approach $1K.
The other big money maker is trucks and SUVs. Tesla has the Model X, but honestly at its price point it only competes with top of the line Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac and Lexus SUVs. GM has a full range of SUVs and pickups -- and Chevy pumped out ~700K Silverado/GMC Sierra pickups in 2016, plus 215K Equinoxes, 200K Mailbus, and 171K Cruzes. That's well north of 1M vehicles delivered in the US alone. Tesla delivered 76K worldwide.
Of course, that's apples to oranges since Tesla competes in the luxury segment exclusively at this point. Not to mention that I can't recall people pledging $1000 to get in line for any GM vehicle launch. Maybe people put payments in advance on the next Corvette, but I've never heard of someone prepaying on the Cadillac that competes with the Model 3.
Lobbying amounts are in the millions (for example, $14M for Comcast). Revenues are in the billions ($80B for Comcast's 2016 yearly revenue), margin of 40%. So they are spending fractions of their revenue to drive legislation that they can in turn use to drive more profits.
Profits aren't inherently bad (I work for a private company, after all) but combining granted monopoly power with buying legislation to increase profits is just obscene.
I can already hear the evil villain laughs from the boardrooms of our monopolistic content masters, lighting cigars with $100 bills and slapping each other on the back with hearty gusto.
If I could take my business elsewhere, this wouldn't matter so much. In the designated local monopoly for ISPs that most Americans exist within, it's just pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
Private company hands out free healthy snacks to anyone who wants one, paying out of their own pocket, as a community service, and people find something to bitch about.
So that's 1,940,000,000 written out. The article mentions 14,000 of those were problematic and had to be shut down. That's 0.0007% of accounts.
Assuming 20 drops per mL, there are 90921 drops of water in a gallon of water. So one drop of water in a gallon is 0.02%. To even push it to the same order of magnitude would need 100 gallons of water. Would anyone consider one drop in 100 gallons of water "flooding"?
Not to say that I approve of revenge porn or extortion, but the amount of incidents reported in the article is nothing close to flooding, even if it's five or ten times worse than the reported numbers, and further illustrates the difficulty of trying to find this kind of abuse buried among all the legitimate traffic on the site, plus dealing with false positives or "approved" nudity mentioned in the aricle.
Source: https://zephoria.com/top-15-va...
I don't care what operating system (or, for that matter, software or product) you are talking about, but at some point you just can't keep patching. You need to be able to re-architect and deprecate old functionality, and take things out of production. An operating system or software package is an engineered product, just as much as an automobile, airplane or coffee maker is. I can go buy a classic car without airbags, antilock brakes, pollution controls, crumple zones or even seatbelts if I go back far enough. I can register it and drive it on the road legally. If I get an an accident and have my head smashed against the unpadded dash, get skewered by a straight steering column, am left paralyzed by the lack of crumple zones, or am thrown from the vehicle in a rollover I really have no one to blame but myself. The vehicle manufacturer long ago retired any warranty to the vehicle. I would expect a new car that I buy to have all required modern safety features and expect that they would be fixed (recalled/patched) if there was an issue found. But I would not expect the vehicle maker to patch in whatever advancements happen in the next 5-10 years.
You could have always lost the booklet, or had it destroyed somehow. There's no guarantee a paper booklet would survive.
The bottom line is that the artists are likely getting better bang for the buck on social networks and the places like Wikipedia, Genius and so on are doing the other stuff for pretty much free. Even slapping together a PDF then distributing it takes time.
There's a similar parallel to special features on DVDs and BluRays. When the formats were introduced, you'd have some "making of" features, director commentary, etc. Now that those formats are mature those things aren't as common as they once were, being supplanted by things like Youtube where they can act as fan material and promotion material.
I haven't bought a CD in well over a decade, and I'd given up on the little booklets, too. Their death went rather unnoticed. If I want to look up something about an artist I like, I just Google them and get vastly more information than I'd ever have gotten in a booklet.
I guess it's just the latest progression of nostalgia to experience recording formats that had inherent limitations. Perhaps it's some way of suffering for one's art? I've lived through albums, cassettes, cds and now am thrilled that I'm quite literally living in the future. I recall saving up allowance/job money to be able to spend $20 on a CD, then finding out only two tracks were worth it. Nowadays we spend $15/month to feed the music desires of my whole family, and I can download whatever I want to listen to on a whim. If there's one good track on an album I throw it in a "favorites" playlist and throw the rest of the record out. There's so much back catalog available that I quite literally don't have time to listen to crap music because there's so much out there I just couldn't afford as a kid.
There was a widely available format for exchanging information that didn't require a login or membership. This format would require some sort of system for making sure the names didn't get mixed up, and you might need some means of searching it, too. But a band could use this format for promotion of their work, links to concert reviews, additional information about the inspirations for the tracks on their albums, links to interviews they gave and all that stuff. Rather than being just boring text and some photos put in a jewel case, it would be so much more since you could use text, images, videos and so on. A band could create single stop shopping for not only their own information, but provide information about how people could listen to their music, watch music videos and buy concert tickets. If they so wanted, they could allow people to optionally sign up for their fan club or connect fans to their accounts on social media. Plus, the band could ... get this ... add new information as the album was released!
Oh wait, that already exists ... it's called a website.
I work for a private software company. We have a lot of customers. We don't use the customer's name without their consent, and this also generally implies that not only the executives sign off on the use, but also the legal department. This might also be part of a sales negotiation, where the publicity of landing a big well known name as a reference account can be worth something in terms of selling into other similar accounts. I know that we get permission for the use of other companies logos on our slides used in sales presentations before we put them up there. These are the exception rather than the rule.
There are companies that do not want the world to know they are a customer of ours under any circumstances, for myriad different reasons. There are others who are perfectly content to be used as a reference account, others prefer that details be obfuscated. Sounds like Harvard was OK with Microsoft providing broad outlines of what they did but didn't want it to be known that it was them.
I'm sure there are plenty of Azure customers who don't want it to be known that they are using Azure. This is probably the default for any Azure customer.
> use the classroom for experiments and demonstrations and so forth
When I was in school, no teacher or professor merely read from the book. The syllabus would contain what was going to be gone over in class, you were expected to read it before you showed up. Of course, not everyone did that, but the instructor would at least try by telling you and having it written down, as well as posting what problem sets were due and so on.
The lecture period would cover the high points of the text, but it was interactive in that the students could ask for clarification and have the professor work though things on the board. In certain classes there would be a demonstration of principles (if they applied), but not every class had the opportunity for this, such as writing classes. We also had lab sections when applicable for chemistry, physics, biology and so on, where we would learn by doing. I guess the lecture period was for reinforcement of the textbook plus an open forum for asking clarifying questions. Of course, if you were really still in the dark you could always go to office hours.
This was 30ish years ago ... so by the definition of this article I didn't see a "traditional lecture" in the entire time I was being educated. My kids are still in grade school, but they have a very different school day than I ever did, and very much removed from what this guy is railing against.
Given the example of The Mechanical Universe, having a professor show up and play a video every week would make me angry. Why shell out thousands of dollars to have some PhD hit play on a video? Why not engage them at a human level that's been going on since the Greeks were having dialogs ages ago?
The evildoers will listen to the instructions of the flight crew and place their electronics in airplane mode so they can't communicate with anything. They would also never dream of bringing about communication devices that are not FAA certified and that might interfere with the airplane's electronic systems.
Honestly my nine year old could figure out ways some evildoer could make this work.
You can sign up with just an email.
If you signed up with Facebook and just want to use an email, they will break the connection to Facebook and bring over anything for you.
https://support.spotify.com/us...
For intense work: Office door is closed. IM turned off/existed. Calendar blocked off. Email turned off. Headphones on music I know helps. Phone on Do Not Disturb. I will use the pomodoro system. I also make every effort to stare intently at the screen and don't notice anyone who may be loitering in the hall, or recognize their presence.
For day to day: No flashing email alerts. I do a daily todo list. I block off time in the calendar for working on projects so people don't "drop by" or think I'm free.
What about gamers who live in Europe, Australia, Asia, South America, Africa and have to contact US based servers? They also have latency.
Pray I don't alter it any further.
of a similar thing. Less rich people who can afford lake houses and sit around sipping microbrews, more garage hacking, moments of sheer terror, exhilaration and proximity to death and/or loss of a limb. Better soundtrack than yoga studio lite.
http://www.colinfurze.com/hove...
For the impatient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My daugher's school uses iPads for pretty much every subject. Twentyish kids in each class, 1000 in the school building (2 grades). Each kid has an iPad and it's connected to wifi when the kids are in class. Town has a population of 35K. The iPads are on all the time and used all day for every lesson. Our high school has about 2000 kids with iPads. Plus desktop computers and laptops used by the staff. We are not a wealthy district, either. We aren't dirt poor but we are not even top ten in the state for things like house prices / median income -- we are pretty much right on the median for the state.
Even at the level you suggest of simultaneous access (560), AC/OP's suggestion of a 20 Mbps cable modem shared would fall over, too. Not to mention putting in the infrastucture to provide wifi to each classroom and salary for network/IT admin.
So even in my example, not everyone is accessing simultaneously (much like a business) but my point still stands -- a 20 Mbps line might have been sufficient for a business 10-15 years ago but those days are long past. A school isn't going to have *exactly* the same demands as a 2000 person business but it's not going to have what would be considered crappy household Internet, either. Plus paying the people to run it. I'd expect people on Slashdot to understand that supporting a network with 2000+ users (or more if you support a whole district) plus desktops, laptops and tablets is not something someone can take on in their spare time and using 20 Mbps internet.
It may surprise you to know this, AC, but:
- A "medium sized" high school may be 2000 students, 100ish staff. So that's 2100 people accessing a network. A 2100 person business isn't going to have one 20 mbps line. Heck, nowadays a 20 mbps line can be barely adequate for family use -- one HD youtube stream can consume 4.5 mbps alone. You are going to bring that to its knees if you have 2100 people sharing it.
- Students access web sites like wikipedia, news sites and other curriculum related sites. These are by no means text based websites. Any professional site is going to be loading up a lot more than text.
- Students taking programming or web design classes are largely using the same tools, sites, resources and references that professional programmers and web designers use. They aren't teaching BASIC and Logo on Commodores and Apple IIs with floppies or tape drive anymore. Kids are learning Java, Photoshop, etc and are looking up problems on Stack Overflow and such.
- Plenty of curriculum-related apps are cloud-based. My daughter's school uses iPads and they are an essential part of the curriculum. She can access assignments, grades, calendars, etc all from her tablet (and as her parents, we can, too). I don't know how much those apps consume but even 20-30 kids in a classroom are going to be hitting a server somewhere.
- OP also included "support". How much is your salary? How many users do you support? How much do switches, routers, wifi access points that will support 2100 users cost? How long do they last before they need an upgrade? It's not like they throw up a Linksys and call it a day. It's also not something you can expect a teacher or admin assistant to do, as there are security and privacy issues that need to be maintained, in addition to web filtering for appropriate sites, etc.
Two gigantic corporations can do more than one thing at a time.
Since Waze allows me to select routes based on real time traffic data and also share my ETA and current position with my wife/friends, I am a horrible person since I'm "using" my smartphone while driving.
Since Waze added the "share drive" feature way back when, I don't receive calls asking "when will you be here" if I'm delayed by a traffic jam. Not only does the app automatically send notifications of ETA changes, it also lets recipients click a link to see exactly where I am. I use the hell out of that feature, sending links to friends and family when I'm on my way to meet them, it saves having a conversation about ETA while driving.
I recall driving without a phone, having to use a paper map, etc. I wonder how many people ran into things while trying to use a paper map and looking for road/street signs. I live in the Boston area where they rarely have a street sign for the street you are on, and where the color scheme of the street signs can change based on the town you happen to be in at the moment.
You are missing a quality engineering or quality assurance group -- a group that's independent of the developers and specializes in developing appropriate tests, test harnesses, test automation and also provides another set of eyes on features and bug fixes.
Our process:
Bug is reported or feature request is approved for developer to work on.
Development cycle:
Developer implements feature / fixes it. Ideally based on design of fix/feature, QE develops test plan/tests. A lot of work can happen concurrently. Some people even write the tests first, then code second.
Code review code and fixes with other knowledgeable developers (and QE)
Repeat this cycle till feature/fix and tests are ready.
Fix is submitted to integration system with appropriate tests.
QE (most definitely NOT the developer) verifies 1) software works 2) regression test actually ran. Ideally this is a completely separate QE from the one who did the submission, but this depends on resources.
Software enters customer release process (dev and qe largely forget about it and move onto something else)
Customer release process runs tests (or some representative subset of) against a consolidated build of "everything" to check for integration issues.
Vehicle sales have similar weirdness. There are some legal/regulatory terms of what constitutes a "light truck" versus a "car" and so on. Not to mention that the term "station wagon" became a death sentence for a vehicle. So you end up with a PT Cruiser being a truck for fuel efficiency standards but as a car for others. Subaru markets their Outback as a SUV, but it's really a wagon, or as they call it, a Crossover/SUV, and it's also a "truck", but never, ever a "wagon" ... which calls up memories of giant domestic precursors of minivans that stylish people want to avoid.
Nowadays you have the laptops, convertible laptops, tablets designed to replace your laptop, tablets that are nearly laptops, etc. There's some really nice thinking going on out there in the laptop space. My wife went from a traditional laptop to a HP Spectre and is really enjoying the convertible aspect of the thing and the touch screen. Sure she doesn't use the touch screen much in laptop mode, but when she's watching videos she uses it all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.subaru.com/vehicles...
http://www.thecarconnection.co...
I live in a town with a municipal ISP. Our town has a municipal light and power, and it's a part of it.
Pluses: Price, speed, support are good. Certainly better than I experienced other other commercial ISPs. By extension, our power rates are also very low compared to the rates of other towns that use commercial power providers. They also provide VOIP phone for a decent price. Reliability has been decent. You can unbundle or bundle cable TV, phone and Internet as you like with no significant penalty. A lot of the employees live in town so they are quite literally your neighbors.
Minuses: We still don't have more than one provider in town. ISP support hours are not 24/7, they are "business hours" only. The electric side of the organization does respond quickly to outages.
Tesla is undoubtedly cool. Their cars seem to be holding up well, despite some hiccups and a weird amount of hate from the 'MURICA folks -- especially given that Tesla is
1) on track to be the most "domestic" of domestic automakers -- 90% when the gigafactory is fully working.
2) creating jobs in America
3) creating EVs that are sporty, fun to drive, etc.
I do see them as the future -- but they are a growing niche player. As an American I'm happy they are here and I'm happy to see what they are doing. It's good someone is out there pushing the envelope. Plus with Elon you get all the fun of Space X, solar, battery storage, tunnel boring and he's a fan of Iain Banks, so much so he names his recovery drones after Culture ships. Add powered armor and you can get to Tony Stark pretty quickly.
GM, though, is not dead yet. Not by far. I drive a Volt every day and it's probably the nicest small sedan I've owned. Decent power, very efficient and used models are very reasonably priced. Plus they have been really putting money and resources into EVs -- the Spark and Bolt are recent additions. Sure, it's not a pure EV, but also at the same time it's not as expensive as it would of been if it was and long distance travel is very possible in it. I know EV range is getting better and charging times are decreasing -- but for many Americans it's not anything approaching reality. I'm fortunate enough to be able to afford a house with a garage and have an employer that has on site EV charging. Therefore, I have easy charging at home and work and I do 85-90% of my driving on battery. For many people this isn't reality -- they park on the street or live in an apartment/condo complex with no access to charging infrastructure. Or they don't have the ability to spend the money to install a charging station at home, as it can approach $1K.
The other big money maker is trucks and SUVs. Tesla has the Model X, but honestly at its price point it only competes with top of the line Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac and Lexus SUVs. GM has a full range of SUVs and pickups -- and Chevy pumped out ~700K Silverado/GMC Sierra pickups in 2016, plus 215K Equinoxes, 200K Mailbus, and 171K Cruzes. That's well north of 1M vehicles delivered in the US alone. Tesla delivered 76K worldwide.
Of course, that's apples to oranges since Tesla competes in the luxury segment exclusively at this point. Not to mention that I can't recall people pledging $1000 to get in line for any GM vehicle launch. Maybe people put payments in advance on the next Corvette, but I've never heard of someone prepaying on the Cadillac that competes with the Model 3.
Lobbying amounts are in the millions (for example, $14M for Comcast). Revenues are in the billions ($80B for Comcast's 2016 yearly revenue), margin of 40%. So they are spending fractions of their revenue to drive legislation that they can in turn use to drive more profits.
Profits aren't inherently bad (I work for a private company, after all) but combining granted monopoly power with buying legislation to increase profits is just obscene.
Sources:
Lobbying spend by Comcast: https://www.opensecrets.org/lo...
Comcast earnings and margin: http://www.cmcsa.com/earningde...
Honestly, Google it. It was well discussed / debated deconstructed prior to the regulations being put in place.
"voluntarily agree"
I can already hear the evil villain laughs from the boardrooms of our monopolistic content masters, lighting cigars with $100 bills and slapping each other on the back with hearty gusto.
If I could take my business elsewhere, this wouldn't matter so much. In the designated local monopoly for ISPs that most Americans exist within, it's just pathetic.