They've reached the point where they're just making "courageous" changes which benefit their own assembly & engineering
I believe you meant to say "shareholders" there... elimination of the headphone jack meant add on sales of dongles, AirPods, Beats, etc with each new phone that didn't have a headphone jack. Why have the newest thing when for "just" another $159 you can have these very obvious "I GOT THE NEW THING" headphones? So in effect, Apple sells the $650-750 (or more) iPhone 7, plus then adds on $159 to that sale with the AirPods. Sure some people will just use the dongle and old headphones, but there will be a non-zero attach rate for the other stuff, driven by lack of headphone jack.
FWIW I see bigger stagnation as you discuss in the tablet/notebook space. In the phone space there are fuck ups all over the place, the most recent being exploding phones from Samsung. Convertibles on the Windows side are getting to the point where the line can be extremely blurred between a laptop with an occasionally detached keyboard and a tablet with a add-on typing cover. Apple should be owning this market, with clear leadership in the tablet space -- but instead they are giving half-answers like the touchbar. Plenty of PC notebook designers are doing a fair job of aping aluminum bodies, rugged design and so on. My wife bought a HP Spectre that seems well made, is convertible and stylish. Most of the time she's using it as a PC, but then she "tents" it to watch video, or uses it as a tablet for web browsing. Multiple USB-C ports, one USB-A and accessories that work well with it for driving an external monitor and so on. Why doesn't Apple have a product like this? Are there warring fiefdoms between iPad Land, Mac Book Land and Mac Book Pro Land?
If they want to make something exclusive, they have done it before and priced it accordingly. See the Apple Watches that had list prices of $10-17K. Who knows how well they actually sold, but Apple doesn't have a hard time putting a large price tag on something exclusive. I'm also intentionally omitting the diamond studded phone cases and so on sold by high end designers. Evidently there's a market for this stuff, and you have to imagine the margins on a 10K iPhone are going to be huge when it (likely) repurposes most of the guts the run of the mill models.
Google Fiber is very limited and is currently on hold for any future expansion. Google Fiber operates in six cities now -- Kansas City, Austin, Provo, Salt Lake City, Charlotte, Atlanta and Raleigh-Durham, which includes some big cities but also some cities which can broadly be considered "mid-sized". I'm totally with you on the removal of cable monopolies, though. I live in a big metro area and luckily I have a municipal ISP that's really quite good, but if they were awful I'd have zero choices to take my business elsewhere. It's the same for other towns around here, they choose Comcast, Charter or Verizon and that's what you get. Where my parents live they can choose between a few providers and they get better service/lower prices (although, to some extent, it's picking the best of the worst. Cable companies just generally suck). I'd really like to see more municipalities be able to set up their own services in addition to getting rid of monopoly restraints so the market could offer up a variety of services from things like a cheap wifi only plan to gigabit fiber. You don't have to go far to see that companies and consumers will benefit -- look at the breakup of Ma Bell or the deregulation of long distance. It benefits both the consumer with lower prices and spurs innovation/profit for the business side.
I stepped off the upgrade bandwagon a while ago. Just like with cars, the used market offers fantastic value given the steep depreciation of electronics. Plus you get a year or so for other people to find the exploding batteries, dodgy touch sensors, update bugs, bending problems, wireless headphones to actually be shipped, etc. I guess there's always the "oooh factor", but honestly that goes away about a week after launch and no one gives a damn anymore, you just have another bar-shaped phone with a logo on it.
This actually makes a fair amount of sense for what we do, for a few use cases:
For cloud to on-prem: You have something that has started small on Azure but has now grown to the point that your Azure bill is so large that it makes sense to just put it on a local server. You can migrate it to a local server and not have to change any code over. This is assuming that running Azure in-house is significantly less expensive than running it on Azure itself.
You have a pile of data that you don't want to move to Azure for $reasons. $reasons might be "data is too big to move", "data should never leave company network", etc. But you could develop using Azure locally and then if it becomes feasible in the future, you move the application and data with no code changes
Developing Azure applications, then deploying them to paying customers. If you have on-prem servers and a pile of software development infrastructure (IDEs, regression tests, debugging tools, version control, etc) keeping that stuff local can offer better performance for your dev staff, but then when you put it on Azure you ship the application but you don't need the "extras" behind it
Gets foot in the door at customers who are not ready to move to cloud, but whose developers want to use cloud stuff. Or it allows developers to develop for Azure in parallel with security audits and design for Azure, and move when the company is ready. This removes a significant barrier to entry for a lot of organizations that aren't willing to move to Azure just yet, and might be spending a lot of time on security questions -- those projects can now roll in parallel with those discussions, and even if you never go to the cloud you haven't lost anything.
I grew up in the waning days of vinyl, the rise and fall of the cassette, and then the eventual move to CDs. I used to save my pennies to get something in one of those forms, or at least buy cassettes for dubbing or recording off the radio. A new recording was at least $15, maybe $20. That was a lot back then, so I'd spend a lot of time going through used record stores. We now spend $15/month on Spotify family, so basically $4/person for access to a catalog so deep it even surpasses my young teen dreams. The best part is that it Just Works... I find something I want to listen to, I can stream it or save it local to my device, and no ads, DJ's talking over the songs, and as much as I want, plus everyone has their own playlists so I can listen to what I want but I don't have to try to share with tween music or what my wife likes.
Glad to see AMD recovering and delivering a chip that offers decent performance and value. We bought a lot of AMD back in the days when you could warm your lunch up on the Intel chips. But extrapolating the vanishingly small "enthusiast" market from benchmark data into a double digit market share change seems to be more than a little but of a stretch. Intel still holds a lot of the cards with the bulk of PCs being sold. It's good to have glimmers of real competition again, though -- in any given market, having choice of vendor is a good thing for consumers.
2A says "a well regulated militia" as part of its text, which has been interpreted by courts to include training. It doesn't just say "right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", the two statements are coupled together. The 24th says "The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election... shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax. So the "poll tax or other tax" is the bit that says "no poll tax" and then becomes broader to include "other ideas you may dream up, e.g. "you must provide a copy of your tax return" or "you have to have paid property taxes". Civics "tests" common under Jim Crow were pretty much impossible to pass, so those have largely been thrown out since they were proven discriminatory. An example is here. The test is designed to disenfranchise. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcr.... If you smashed up 2A and 24A, you might end up with the interpretation that would give you free, unregistered purchase and carry of firearms, e.g. "The right of citizens of the United States to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed, denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax", where the "other tax" could apply to courses,
FID cards, competency, possession of a criminal record and other restrictions on purchase and ownership of firearms
FWIW I have zero problems with gun ownership, I learned firearms safety and operations at an NRA class a long while ago and have used a firearm in both a recreational and sporting capacity.
This is the tough part of implementing such laws. People will say things like "just use your driver's license". Not everyone has a driver's license, and they cost money. "Just make driver's licenses free". State doesn't want to spend the money, and also a barrier to entry is set up: you have to be able to get to the DMV. States have been closing DMVs to save money... and if $party wants to make it hard for $other_party to sign up voters, they close DMVs where $other_party has more voters. Not to mention that DMVs don't always have fantastic hours for people that work, and you'd potentially need to take time off from work (lose wages) to go get your ID card. Other initiatives, such as a national ID card, have been suggested for decades but inevitably get killed by 1) state's rights 2) privacy concerns 3) "It's a first step towards Armageddon / tool of the devil / Mark Of The Beast" (google "national ID revelations" if you don't believe me) 4) loss of state revenues from driver's license fees. The current solution of showing up and stating your name and address is simple, cheap, cost effective and able to be implemented with voter roll printouts. Various studies and audits have shown that it's actually quite effective and voter fraud is astonishingly small. Smaller than people seem to believe, and when people want to spend public money on any of this, everybody cries poor.
The big problem with Voter ID is that many proposals violate the 24th Amendment against poll taxes. A voter ID would need to be free of any financial charge and also free of other logistical barriers, e.g. "you can only get them at the DMV next to the statehouse on odd Tuesdays between the hours of 10 and 11 AM, and you need to provide an in-state birth certificate, social security card, blood sample, passport, pass a citizenship test and submit to a DNA swab".
As it works out, only two of the hours would have any impact on my life so it's probably not worth the time/hassle. If I wanted full control I could always just pony up the bucks for my own EVSE. The one they are offering for free is not my first choice, but there's approximately 500 reasons why it's a better choice.
Our school system has 1) a school board for which people must run and be elected 2) a PTO, comprised of volunteers who work with the district or individual school 3) an education foundation, which raises money and converts that into useful things for the schools. Also, there are state boards which oversee the district's adherence to state standards and so on. Also, the town funds the schools so you can say your piece in Town Meeting or show up for a School Committee meeting to air your beef. So in my town if you want some level of input into the school, there already many places you can turn up and say it. Plenty of people want to gripe, nobody wants to actually spend the time to implement anything and see it through. Our teachers can be hired with a bachelor's but must get a master's within a certain period of time, and some go on to PhDs. This is not an unusual setup for a town in Massachusetts. FWIW I have degrees in two science fields and have zero idea what it takes to run a classroom, school district or put together a comprehensive educational curriculum, deal with special needs kids, impoverished kids, kids who don't speak English, etc. Just like I wouldn't expect my kid's teacher and principal to tell me how to develop software, I can't expect to show up and tell them how to do their job, either, just because I might have hard science degrees. I also don't tell my accountant how to do her job, my mechanic how to fix my car, the plumber how to install pipes.
My power company is giving away Level 2 chargers. The trick is that they are wifi controlled so they can drop them to Level 1 chargers during certain hours. Given that Volt can charge completely on Level 1 overnight, this is a no-brainer for me. I agree on the pickup, too. They are by far the vehicle the American public votes for most as their favorite, and an electric motor with full torque available at 0 RPM could be very useful for towing things, among many other positives.
Someone googled him, found out about the curl connection, googled curl and found out "curl | sudo" is a security risk. NO SECURITY RISKS ENTER ON MY WATCH.
(yes, this is sarcasm)
For ages, studies of "multitasking" have shown that there is a "context switching" cost that is non-trivial for the human brain to try and do two things at once, even simple tasks, such as "write numbers 1 through 26 and write the alphabet out". People who do numbers then alphabet (1..26 then A-Z) complete before people who try to interleave the tasks (1... A, 2... B). Work organization schemes like Getting Things Done encourage turning off notifiers for new email, or batching email responses, or turning off IM clients in order to get through tasks. Then, of course, there's the whole example of getting into the "flow zone", which is important for working on complex problems -- try debugging code with a bored and hungry toddler in the same room. It's also painfully obvious when you try to have a conversation with someone who keeps looking at their phone that they aren't "all present".
So to sum up, unsurprising results. Having a distraction generating machine close at hand is going to end up with more interruptions and less ability to concentrate on anything worth concentrating on, e.g. http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-...
I'd really like to see Slashdot readers try to defend their hypocrisy...... My post will quickly be censored to -1 to avoid addressing this hypocrisy, but it absolutely needs to pointed out. I predict that Slashdot readers will be too cowardly to address my observation.
A lecture on hypocrisy and cowardice delivered by Anonymous Coward. See: recursion.
Things I need from a car radio: FM/AM tuner. Maybe a satellite radio tuner. Interface to my phone. Bluetooth is generally OK, Android Auto or Apple CarPlay are nice to haves. Providing a nice place to mount a phone dock with convenient power/USB would be fantastic.
Things I don't need that my phone does better: GPS using the app of my choice, locked in "apps" for music/podcast services I don't use.
Please try to stop reinventing the wheel and ending up with some half-assed result. Even the old people have smartphones now. The people who don't are listening to AM talk radio and using paper maps and don't care about your fiddly buttons. People use their phones rather than in-vehicle crap that's out of date when the car is delivered. Get over it. Make that work nicely. That's a hard enough problem.
You should have moved onto the third, then. Its conclusion is as follows:
Yoga is not just a harmless physical exercise, it opens the door to demonic control. On which side do you ultimately want to stand? The devil’s or Christ’s? The consequences are more serious than you might realise.
I'd say in terms of "trolling" this is pretty weak "trolling". There are references out there to Christians who have varying degrees of problems with it. It's certainly not made up and there is certainly evidence from many sources that some Christians have problems with it. Many don't, of course. But it sure isn't "trolling", which is defined as "make a deliberately offensive or provocative online post with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them"...
I got a call about an opening in a government agency doing a job not far off from what I do in the private sector. However, I'd need to move to DC (not necessarily a deal breaker), but there's a hiring freeze on, budget cuts, government shutdowns and let's just say the people being appointed to run some parts of the government aren't exactly shining examples of competence to run their agencies. I work at a well run company with a decent salary and benefits. Why am I going to leave that to step into chaos, incompetence and possibly having my job eliminated by budget cuts, or skipping paychecks because of political bullshit? DC isn't a cheap area to live in and the traffic is horrible, but it still has a lot of other upside going for it in terms of what I like to do in a metro area.
You need to look harder. Here are a few examples I got from "Christian yoga evil" and "christian no yoga school" in Google. There are plenty more examples. Of course, there is the "you can google an answer for anything", but this is certainly not the first time I've heard of Christianity having trouble with yoga. And of course, there are Christians who completely disagree and practice yoga regularly, as well as become certified and lead classes at their churches, with the consent of the church leadership. Definitely not trolling. References:
Slashdot Mirror
They've reached the point where they're just making "courageous" changes which benefit their own assembly & engineering
I believe you meant to say "shareholders" there ... elimination of the headphone jack meant add on sales of dongles, AirPods, Beats, etc with each new phone that didn't have a headphone jack. Why have the newest thing when for "just" another $159 you can have these very obvious "I GOT THE NEW THING" headphones? So in effect, Apple sells the $650-750 (or more) iPhone 7, plus then adds on $159 to that sale with the AirPods. Sure some people will just use the dongle and old headphones, but there will be a non-zero attach rate for the other stuff, driven by lack of headphone jack.
FWIW I see bigger stagnation as you discuss in the tablet/notebook space. In the phone space there are fuck ups all over the place, the most recent being exploding phones from Samsung. Convertibles on the Windows side are getting to the point where the line can be extremely blurred between a laptop with an occasionally detached keyboard and a tablet with a add-on typing cover. Apple should be owning this market, with clear leadership in the tablet space -- but instead they are giving half-answers like the touchbar. Plenty of PC notebook designers are doing a fair job of aping aluminum bodies, rugged design and so on. My wife bought a HP Spectre that seems well made, is convertible and stylish. Most of the time she's using it as a PC, but then she "tents" it to watch video, or uses it as a tablet for web browsing. Multiple USB-C ports, one USB-A and accessories that work well with it for driving an external monitor and so on. Why doesn't Apple have a product like this? Are there warring fiefdoms between iPad Land, Mac Book Land and Mac Book Pro Land?
If they want to make something exclusive, they have done it before and priced it accordingly. See the Apple Watches that had list prices of $10-17K. Who knows how well they actually sold, but Apple doesn't have a hard time putting a large price tag on something exclusive. I'm also intentionally omitting the diamond studded phone cases and so on sold by high end designers. Evidently there's a market for this stuff, and you have to imagine the margins on a 10K iPhone are going to be huge when it (likely) repurposes most of the guts the run of the mill models.
Utterly false. At worst it's 4 years out of a 30 year lifetime. At best it's a year. http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99o...
Google Fiber is very limited and is currently on hold for any future expansion. Google Fiber operates in six cities now -- Kansas City, Austin, Provo, Salt Lake City, Charlotte, Atlanta and Raleigh-Durham, which includes some big cities but also some cities which can broadly be considered "mid-sized". I'm totally with you on the removal of cable monopolies, though. I live in a big metro area and luckily I have a municipal ISP that's really quite good, but if they were awful I'd have zero choices to take my business elsewhere. It's the same for other towns around here, they choose Comcast, Charter or Verizon and that's what you get. Where my parents live they can choose between a few providers and they get better service/lower prices (although, to some extent, it's picking the best of the worst. Cable companies just generally suck). I'd really like to see more municipalities be able to set up their own services in addition to getting rid of monopoly restraints so the market could offer up a variety of services from things like a cheap wifi only plan to gigabit fiber. You don't have to go far to see that companies and consumers will benefit -- look at the breakup of Ma Bell or the deregulation of long distance. It benefits both the consumer with lower prices and spurs innovation/profit for the business side.
I stepped off the upgrade bandwagon a while ago. Just like with cars, the used market offers fantastic value given the steep depreciation of electronics. Plus you get a year or so for other people to find the exploding batteries, dodgy touch sensors, update bugs, bending problems, wireless headphones to actually be shipped, etc. I guess there's always the "oooh factor", but honestly that goes away about a week after launch and no one gives a damn anymore, you just have another bar-shaped phone with a logo on it.
I grew up in the waning days of vinyl, the rise and fall of the cassette, and then the eventual move to CDs. I used to save my pennies to get something in one of those forms, or at least buy cassettes for dubbing or recording off the radio. A new recording was at least $15, maybe $20. That was a lot back then, so I'd spend a lot of time going through used record stores. We now spend $15/month on Spotify family, so basically $4/person for access to a catalog so deep it even surpasses my young teen dreams. The best part is that it Just Works ... I find something I want to listen to, I can stream it or save it local to my device, and no ads, DJ's talking over the songs, and as much as I want, plus everyone has their own playlists so I can listen to what I want but I don't have to try to share with tween music or what my wife likes.
Glad to see AMD recovering and delivering a chip that offers decent performance and value. We bought a lot of AMD back in the days when you could warm your lunch up on the Intel chips. But extrapolating the vanishingly small "enthusiast" market from benchmark data into a double digit market share change seems to be more than a little but of a stretch. Intel still holds a lot of the cards with the bulk of PCs being sold. It's good to have glimmers of real competition again, though -- in any given market, having choice of vendor is a good thing for consumers.
People will stop playing when crossing the streams bricks their phone. Samsung phone owners will stop playing when it sets their phone on fire.
Or you could just submit a request to have it removed. https://support.pokemongo.nian...
FWIW I have zero problems with gun ownership, I learned firearms safety and operations at an NRA class a long while ago and have used a firearm in both a recreational and sporting capacity.
Yes, it is. But some of it isn't and has been declared unconstitutional (e.g. citizenship test)
This is the tough part of implementing such laws. People will say things like "just use your driver's license". Not everyone has a driver's license, and they cost money. "Just make driver's licenses free". State doesn't want to spend the money, and also a barrier to entry is set up: you have to be able to get to the DMV. States have been closing DMVs to save money ... and if $party wants to make it hard for $other_party to sign up voters, they close DMVs where $other_party has more voters. Not to mention that DMVs don't always have fantastic hours for people that work, and you'd potentially need to take time off from work (lose wages) to go get your ID card. Other initiatives, such as a national ID card, have been suggested for decades but inevitably get killed by 1) state's rights 2) privacy concerns 3) "It's a first step towards Armageddon / tool of the devil / Mark Of The Beast" (google "national ID revelations" if you don't believe me) 4) loss of state revenues from driver's license fees. The current solution of showing up and stating your name and address is simple, cheap, cost effective and able to be implemented with voter roll printouts. Various studies and audits have shown that it's actually quite effective and voter fraud is astonishingly small. Smaller than people seem to believe, and when people want to spend public money on any of this, everybody cries poor.
The big problem with Voter ID is that many proposals violate the 24th Amendment against poll taxes. A voter ID would need to be free of any financial charge and also free of other logistical barriers, e.g. "you can only get them at the DMV next to the statehouse on odd Tuesdays between the hours of 10 and 11 AM, and you need to provide an in-state birth certificate, social security card, blood sample, passport, pass a citizenship test and submit to a DNA swab".
As it works out, only two of the hours would have any impact on my life so it's probably not worth the time/hassle. If I wanted full control I could always just pony up the bucks for my own EVSE. The one they are offering for free is not my first choice, but there's approximately 500 reasons why it's a better choice.
Our school system has 1) a school board for which people must run and be elected 2) a PTO, comprised of volunteers who work with the district or individual school 3) an education foundation, which raises money and converts that into useful things for the schools. Also, there are state boards which oversee the district's adherence to state standards and so on. Also, the town funds the schools so you can say your piece in Town Meeting or show up for a School Committee meeting to air your beef. So in my town if you want some level of input into the school, there already many places you can turn up and say it. Plenty of people want to gripe, nobody wants to actually spend the time to implement anything and see it through. Our teachers can be hired with a bachelor's but must get a master's within a certain period of time, and some go on to PhDs. This is not an unusual setup for a town in Massachusetts. FWIW I have degrees in two science fields and have zero idea what it takes to run a classroom, school district or put together a comprehensive educational curriculum, deal with special needs kids, impoverished kids, kids who don't speak English, etc. Just like I wouldn't expect my kid's teacher and principal to tell me how to develop software, I can't expect to show up and tell them how to do their job, either, just because I might have hard science degrees. I also don't tell my accountant how to do her job, my mechanic how to fix my car, the plumber how to install pipes.
My power company is giving away Level 2 chargers. The trick is that they are wifi controlled so they can drop them to Level 1 chargers during certain hours. Given that Volt can charge completely on Level 1 overnight, this is a no-brainer for me. I agree on the pickup, too. They are by far the vehicle the American public votes for most as their favorite, and an electric motor with full torque available at 0 RPM could be very useful for towing things, among many other positives.
Someone googled him, found out about the curl connection, googled curl and found out "curl | sudo" is a security risk. NO SECURITY RISKS ENTER ON MY WATCH. (yes, this is sarcasm)
So to sum up, unsurprising results. Having a distraction generating machine close at hand is going to end up with more interruptions and less ability to concentrate on anything worth concentrating on, e.g. http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-...
I'd really like to see Slashdot readers try to defend their hypocrisy ... ... My post will quickly be censored to -1 to avoid addressing this hypocrisy, but it absolutely needs to pointed out. I predict that Slashdot readers will be too cowardly to address my observation.
A lecture on hypocrisy and cowardice delivered by Anonymous Coward. See: recursion.
Things I need from a car radio: FM/AM tuner. Maybe a satellite radio tuner. Interface to my phone. Bluetooth is generally OK, Android Auto or Apple CarPlay are nice to haves. Providing a nice place to mount a phone dock with convenient power/USB would be fantastic.
Things I don't need that my phone does better: GPS using the app of my choice, locked in "apps" for music/podcast services I don't use.
Please try to stop reinventing the wheel and ending up with some half-assed result. Even the old people have smartphones now. The people who don't are listening to AM talk radio and using paper maps and don't care about your fiddly buttons. People use their phones rather than in-vehicle crap that's out of date when the car is delivered. Get over it. Make that work nicely. That's a hard enough problem.
Yoga is not just a harmless physical exercise, it opens the door to demonic control. On which side do you ultimately want to stand? The devil’s or Christ’s? The consequences are more serious than you might realise.
I'd say in terms of "trolling" this is pretty weak "trolling". There are references out there to Christians who have varying degrees of problems with it. It's certainly not made up and there is certainly evidence from many sources that some Christians have problems with it. Many don't, of course. But it sure isn't "trolling", which is defined as "make a deliberately offensive or provocative online post with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them" ...
So ... Top men, Dr. Jones. Top. Men. ... ?
I got a call about an opening in a government agency doing a job not far off from what I do in the private sector. However, I'd need to move to DC (not necessarily a deal breaker), but there's a hiring freeze on, budget cuts, government shutdowns and let's just say the people being appointed to run some parts of the government aren't exactly shining examples of competence to run their agencies. I work at a well run company with a decent salary and benefits. Why am I going to leave that to step into chaos, incompetence and possibly having my job eliminated by budget cuts, or skipping paychecks because of political bullshit? DC isn't a cheap area to live in and the traffic is horrible, but it still has a lot of other upside going for it in terms of what I like to do in a metro area.