You're comparing the base model (GS9) with the premium models of the other two (Pixel 2 XL, iPhone X). A more accurate comparison would have been the GS9+, which starts at $840, or compare to the iPhone 8 and the Pixel 2 (non-XL).
It's no secret that Azure is their big money-maker now. The fact that all these technologies integrate better with Azure than with other cloud platforms shouldn't surprise anybody. Microsoft still exists to make money. But they're not throwing monkey wrenches into the products either. I'm currently working on a weekend project using ASP.Net core that I plan on running on Google as docker containers. I'm using Visual Studio to develop, writing my code in C#, and planning on deploying to GCP. Yes, there was a little pain in getting everything set up. What, you want Microsoft to give you a roadmap on how to set up your environment to run your product on a competitor's cloud platform? I don't expect that.
There's a HUGE difference in what they're doing now and what they did before. Before it was impossible, or expensive, to run a.Net project on any other platform besides Azure. Now, it's very do-able, and it's left Azure to compete on its merits, rather than because the tools just didn't work anywhere else. And I think Azure is pretty good, and is getting better all the time. But when it comes to cloud, I'm team GCP, and admittedly, it would take a much better value proposition to get me to switch. I do feel that their developer tools (C# as a language,.Net as a platform, and Visual Studio as an IDE) are the best around, and am thrilled that I get to use my favorite developer tools to deploy product to my favorite cloud platform, which happen to be owned by two different, competing companies. Not only that, but they also allow for plug-ins to Visual Studio that allow someone like Google to provide tools to make it easier to develop for their cloud platform.
One of my favorite podcasts is.Net Rocks, and they have ads on their show that talk about deploying.Net projects to GCP. It's a crazy world. As the GP said, if someone had proposed this 10 years ago, I imagine a mushroom cloud would have erupted out the top of Steve Ballmer's dome.
What you call spyware I call the price I gladly pay for free email, calendar, contact management, search, web browsing, drive space, photo organization, document creation/editing/management, (simple) web site hosting, a mobile device OS, maps, translation, music management, video hosting, messaging, social media (I know), note-taking, and data synchronization.
When encryption is criminal, only criminals will have encryption?
Screw the federal government. They had their chance when things were unencrypted. They took advantage and spied on people without warrants. Now he says that when warrants are issued, they need to be able to get into encrypted devices? Screw you. You should have played fair when you had the opportunity. Now nobody trusts you, and we'll do everything we can to keep you from our devices, because you've already proven that when given the opportunity, you'll hack into our devices without a warrant.
He wants an adult conversation? They should have acted like adults.
Yes, today, the Cell gets outclassed by most any GPU. GPU-based computing didn't get popular until just after the Cell came out, though. Back then, the architecture of the Cell was considered the future of computing. Even on the PS3, where you got access to 6 SPEs, times the quadruple-wide (128-bit) registers on the SPEs and the specialized, simplified instruction set that allowed you to do SIMD processing, you could execute floating point math at 24 times the throughput than using traditional computation.
Shortly after the Cell became a topic of interest in academia for its parallel processing capabilities, you saw GPUs coming out with 256 cores, and their instruction sets started allowing for the same sort of SIMD computation that the cell allowed, and the Cell was obsolete.
I was working on my Master's degree in CS at the time, doing some work on the Cell, and I wound up buying a PS3. I was in the market for a game console, and I had a young son at the time. I was trying to decide on whether to buy a Wii or get the PS3. Being able to do some schoolwork on the PS3 is what tipped the scale in favor of the PS3. The PS3 was the only consumer-available system you could get that had the Cell processor. However, I also used it as a game console. So removing OtherOS definitely harmed me. And because I wanted to play games on the PS3, I couldn't not update the system, as games and other features required you to update when there was one available. I readily admit OtherOS wasn't the ONLY reason I got the PS3, but without it, I definitely would have gotten a Wii.
Or at least disable. Some of these apps don't even let you disable them. I know that doesn't actually free up any space if you just disable, but uninstalling doesn't help so much either because these preinstalled apps are on the/system partition, and removing them doesn't give you any more space on your/data partition.
So small government = your dollars going to large corporations? Show me where Rand Paul is for corporate welfare of any kind. In fact, the first article I get back on a Google search of Rand Paul corporate welfare is where he's criticizing Republicans for not standing against corporate welfare. Reducing corporate welfare by definition is reducing government.
But if the app had the SMS group permission when you installed it, it had the ability to do that already. You haven't granted it any additional permission. If the developer only really wanted the ability to read SMS messages, it should have only asked for that in the first place.
I can definitely buy that app developers may get lazy and ask for more permissions than they need because it's more convenient. Let's say a group had 5 permissions, and an app needed 3 of those. The app developer may get lazy and just ask for the whole group instead of the 3 permissions the app really needed.
If a developer gets lazy and asks for more permission than the app needs, that developer should get raked over the coals in the app reviews, and maybe they'll fix their app.
The human component of asking for permissions (both on the developer's end and on the user's end) may be weakened, but the security model itself is no different with permission groups. As far as I can tell, they're not removing the ability to ask for individual permissions, they're just making it easier to ask for collections of permissions.
Someone tell me if I'm wrong here, but I just read the Google support page discussing the changes, and here's what I came away with.
Permission groups are new. If you grant permission for an app to have access to the features controlled by that permission group, then the app has access to all of them. Using the SMS example, if a developer requested the SMS group permission, the developer is asking you to allow the app to do all the things listed under that group. That would include reading SMS and sending SMS messages, among other things. If an app requested the SMS group, and you installed the app, even if the app previously only read SMS messages, it still had permission to send them. A future update may also send SMS messages, but you've already approved that action by installing and manually approving the previous version of the app. Where it gets dicey is if a new permission were added to a group. For example, if a delete SMS feature were added to the group, I don't think the Google page discusses whether that new permission would need to be approved.
An app developer can still ask for individual permissions, like reading SMS messages. If a future update wanted the ability to send SMS messages, they would still have to ask and the app would not be auto-updated. Or, if the app developer later decided he/she wants to add the SMS group permission request, that download would require manual approval.
I don't think there's anything nefarious going on here. You just need to be aware of what permissions you're granting an app. If you grant an app permission to send SMS messages (whether it's via an explicit request for that ability, or whether that ability is granted via a permissions group), don't get upset when it does send an SMS, even if that feature isn't baked in until a later update. As far as I can tell, no app is being granted permission to do something you haven't already given it permission to do. Except for internet access.
The internet access permission being demoted to a secondary permission, on the other hand, might be cause for worry.
I, like most of you, have a checking (and savings) account with a traditional bank. That bank has a web site. If that bank's web site gets hacked, my money is at risk. (Forget about FDIC for a second, because there's no reason a bitcoin exchange/online wallet site couldn't provide insurance.) My money could get transferred to another account, then withdrawn before I realize what happened. Why doesn't this happen as often as we hear about these bitcoin exchanges getting robbed? Is it because of regulations? I don't think so. As far as I know, there's no government regulation for "this bank's web site is safe because it implements these technologies we've decided they must implement." It's because the banks know that if their web site's reputation as a secure site becomes tarnished, they're going to lose a lot of customers.
My point is that there's no inherent security enhancement in big banks' web sites just because the banks are regulated and deal in government currency. The reason they're safe is because they've poured a lot of resources into making them safe, and the reason for that is so they don't lose customers. These bitcoin exchanges that are getting robbed obviously were not spending the amount of time and money necessary to ensure their safety. That's it. It has nothing to do with whether they deal with bitcoin or dollars.
In the app, you specify an SMB share. Any time you take a picture or video, the app will be notified. The next time you're on the same wifi network as your PC, the app will copy the new pictures/videos to the share. Optionally, you can have the app delete the pictures/videos off your phone after a user-defined amount of time after they've been synced, so that you don't run out of space on your phone (unless you set this time threshold longer than it takes to fill up your phone).
I'll see if I can address your freedom vs. rights remark. So you're suggesting that a poor, hungry man has more rights to my labor than I do, and that if I won't give a hungry man something to eat voluntarily, I should be forced to? Being forced to work for the benefit of another? Does that ring any bells? You may scoff at my comparing taxation to slavery, and it certainly differs with how slavery has been practiced in the history of humanity, because traditionally, slaves have been used to the benefit of the individuals that "owned" the slaves. However, the fact that you're forcing the taking the results of labor (even if it's not ALL of their labor) from one and handing it to another is the same result.
We don't disagree that humans have a moral obligation to help the less fortunate. That's because we share that value (I assume). However, I'll leave that moral decision up to everyone to make, and not make it for them. Again, libertarians get criticized for not wanting to help the needy. Certainly, there are plenty of those. But that's not even the point.
Re: your democracy comment below. As I often hear on a libertarian radio show I like to listen to, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. We also had Jim Crow laws in this country. Just because something has been approved by a majority, doesn't make it right.
This is why many people who call themselves libertarians would also not call themselves anarchists. Many people believe that it is legitimate for an authority to exist to protect people's rights and to protect them from the aggression of others.
Slashdot Mirror
They get to set the terms.
You're comparing the base model (GS9) with the premium models of the other two (Pixel 2 XL, iPhone X). A more accurate comparison would have been the GS9+, which starts at $840, or compare to the iPhone 8 and the Pixel 2 (non-XL).
Like washing down tide pods with an old pair of undies
It's no secret that Azure is their big money-maker now. The fact that all these technologies integrate better with Azure than with other cloud platforms shouldn't surprise anybody. Microsoft still exists to make money. But they're not throwing monkey wrenches into the products either. I'm currently working on a weekend project using ASP.Net core that I plan on running on Google as docker containers. I'm using Visual Studio to develop, writing my code in C#, and planning on deploying to GCP. Yes, there was a little pain in getting everything set up. What, you want Microsoft to give you a roadmap on how to set up your environment to run your product on a competitor's cloud platform? I don't expect that.
There's a HUGE difference in what they're doing now and what they did before. Before it was impossible, or expensive, to run a .Net project on any other platform besides Azure. Now, it's very do-able, and it's left Azure to compete on its merits, rather than because the tools just didn't work anywhere else. And I think Azure is pretty good, and is getting better all the time. But when it comes to cloud, I'm team GCP, and admittedly, it would take a much better value proposition to get me to switch. I do feel that their developer tools (C# as a language, .Net as a platform, and Visual Studio as an IDE) are the best around, and am thrilled that I get to use my favorite developer tools to deploy product to my favorite cloud platform, which happen to be owned by two different, competing companies. Not only that, but they also allow for plug-ins to Visual Studio that allow someone like Google to provide tools to make it easier to develop for their cloud platform.
One of my favorite podcasts is .Net Rocks, and they have ads on their show that talk about deploying .Net projects to GCP. It's a crazy world. As the GP said, if someone had proposed this 10 years ago, I imagine a mushroom cloud would have erupted out the top of Steve Ballmer's dome.
I'm guessing the hepatitis outbreak isn't helping our cause
Fire At Landfill Used To Dispose Of Faulty Samsung Batteries
What you call spyware I call the price I gladly pay for free email, calendar, contact management, search, web browsing, drive space, photo organization, document creation/editing/management, (simple) web site hosting, a mobile device OS, maps, translation, music management, video hosting, messaging, social media (I know), note-taking, and data synchronization.
When encryption is criminal, only criminals will have encryption?
Screw the federal government. They had their chance when things were unencrypted. They took advantage and spied on people without warrants. Now he says that when warrants are issued, they need to be able to get into encrypted devices? Screw you. You should have played fair when you had the opportunity. Now nobody trusts you, and we'll do everything we can to keep you from our devices, because you've already proven that when given the opportunity, you'll hack into our devices without a warrant.
He wants an adult conversation? They should have acted like adults.
The idea behind the prebate is not to provide the funds for a basic living, but to make the money spent on a basic living tax free.
Yes, today, the Cell gets outclassed by most any GPU. GPU-based computing didn't get popular until just after the Cell came out, though. Back then, the architecture of the Cell was considered the future of computing. Even on the PS3, where you got access to 6 SPEs, times the quadruple-wide (128-bit) registers on the SPEs and the specialized, simplified instruction set that allowed you to do SIMD processing, you could execute floating point math at 24 times the throughput than using traditional computation.
Shortly after the Cell became a topic of interest in academia for its parallel processing capabilities, you saw GPUs coming out with 256 cores, and their instruction sets started allowing for the same sort of SIMD computation that the cell allowed, and the Cell was obsolete.
I was working on my Master's degree in CS at the time, doing some work on the Cell, and I wound up buying a PS3. I was in the market for a game console, and I had a young son at the time. I was trying to decide on whether to buy a Wii or get the PS3. Being able to do some schoolwork on the PS3 is what tipped the scale in favor of the PS3. The PS3 was the only consumer-available system you could get that had the Cell processor. However, I also used it as a game console. So removing OtherOS definitely harmed me. And because I wanted to play games on the PS3, I couldn't not update the system, as games and other features required you to update when there was one available. I readily admit OtherOS wasn't the ONLY reason I got the PS3, but without it, I definitely would have gotten a Wii.
Or at least disable. Some of these apps don't even let you disable them. I know that doesn't actually free up any space if you just disable, but uninstalling doesn't help so much either because these preinstalled apps are on the /system partition, and removing them doesn't give you any more space on your /data partition.
Except Groupon won't throw you in jail if you decide not to participate.
So small government = your dollars going to large corporations? Show me where Rand Paul is for corporate welfare of any kind. In fact, the first article I get back on a Google search of Rand Paul corporate welfare is where he's criticizing Republicans for not standing against corporate welfare. Reducing corporate welfare by definition is reducing government.
But if the app had the SMS group permission when you installed it, it had the ability to do that already. You haven't granted it any additional permission. If the developer only really wanted the ability to read SMS messages, it should have only asked for that in the first place.
I can definitely buy that app developers may get lazy and ask for more permissions than they need because it's more convenient. Let's say a group had 5 permissions, and an app needed 3 of those. The app developer may get lazy and just ask for the whole group instead of the 3 permissions the app really needed.
If a developer gets lazy and asks for more permission than the app needs, that developer should get raked over the coals in the app reviews, and maybe they'll fix their app.
The human component of asking for permissions (both on the developer's end and on the user's end) may be weakened, but the security model itself is no different with permission groups. As far as I can tell, they're not removing the ability to ask for individual permissions, they're just making it easier to ask for collections of permissions.
Isn't there a little "new" icon next to the new permissions when you go to upgrade?
Someone tell me if I'm wrong here, but I just read the Google support page discussing the changes, and here's what I came away with.
Permission groups are new. If you grant permission for an app to have access to the features controlled by that permission group, then the app has access to all of them. Using the SMS example, if a developer requested the SMS group permission, the developer is asking you to allow the app to do all the things listed under that group. That would include reading SMS and sending SMS messages, among other things. If an app requested the SMS group, and you installed the app, even if the app previously only read SMS messages, it still had permission to send them. A future update may also send SMS messages, but you've already approved that action by installing and manually approving the previous version of the app. Where it gets dicey is if a new permission were added to a group. For example, if a delete SMS feature were added to the group, I don't think the Google page discusses whether that new permission would need to be approved.
An app developer can still ask for individual permissions, like reading SMS messages. If a future update wanted the ability to send SMS messages, they would still have to ask and the app would not be auto-updated. Or, if the app developer later decided he/she wants to add the SMS group permission request, that download would require manual approval.
I don't think there's anything nefarious going on here. You just need to be aware of what permissions you're granting an app. If you grant an app permission to send SMS messages (whether it's via an explicit request for that ability, or whether that ability is granted via a permissions group), don't get upset when it does send an SMS, even if that feature isn't baked in until a later update. As far as I can tell, no app is being granted permission to do something you haven't already given it permission to do. Except for internet access.
The internet access permission being demoted to a secondary permission, on the other hand, might be cause for worry.
Has Verizon verified that the update won't mess with their LTE network?
I, like most of you, have a checking (and savings) account with a traditional bank. That bank has a web site. If that bank's web site gets hacked, my money is at risk. (Forget about FDIC for a second, because there's no reason a bitcoin exchange/online wallet site couldn't provide insurance.) My money could get transferred to another account, then withdrawn before I realize what happened. Why doesn't this happen as often as we hear about these bitcoin exchanges getting robbed? Is it because of regulations? I don't think so. As far as I know, there's no government regulation for "this bank's web site is safe because it implements these technologies we've decided they must implement." It's because the banks know that if their web site's reputation as a secure site becomes tarnished, they're going to lose a lot of customers.
My point is that there's no inherent security enhancement in big banks' web sites just because the banks are regulated and deal in government currency. The reason they're safe is because they've poured a lot of resources into making them safe, and the reason for that is so they don't lose customers. These bitcoin exchanges that are getting robbed obviously were not spending the amount of time and money necessary to ensure their safety. That's it. It has nothing to do with whether they deal with bitcoin or dollars.
PhotoSync - https://play.google.com/store/...
In the app, you specify an SMB share. Any time you take a picture or video, the app will be notified. The next time you're on the same wifi network as your PC, the app will copy the new pictures/videos to the share. Optionally, you can have the app delete the pictures/videos off your phone after a user-defined amount of time after they've been synced, so that you don't run out of space on your phone (unless you set this time threshold longer than it takes to fill up your phone).
that a government supposedly "of the people, for the people, and by the people" has such an adversarial relationship with its people.
Look up fractional reserve banking and be as shocked as the rest of us when we first heard of it.
You do want to express yourself, don't you?
If they deny Koush's request for his app to be whitelisted when using the official, released SDK, THEN we can start getting upset.
Can emigrate where? The libertarian utopia of....
I'll see if I can address your freedom vs. rights remark. So you're suggesting that a poor, hungry man has more rights to my labor than I do, and that if I won't give a hungry man something to eat voluntarily, I should be forced to? Being forced to work for the benefit of another? Does that ring any bells? You may scoff at my comparing taxation to slavery, and it certainly differs with how slavery has been practiced in the history of humanity, because traditionally, slaves have been used to the benefit of the individuals that "owned" the slaves. However, the fact that you're forcing the taking the results of labor (even if it's not ALL of their labor) from one and handing it to another is the same result.
We don't disagree that humans have a moral obligation to help the less fortunate. That's because we share that value (I assume). However, I'll leave that moral decision up to everyone to make, and not make it for them. Again, libertarians get criticized for not wanting to help the needy. Certainly, there are plenty of those. But that's not even the point.
Re: your democracy comment below. As I often hear on a libertarian radio show I like to listen to, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. We also had Jim Crow laws in this country. Just because something has been approved by a majority, doesn't make it right.
This is why many people who call themselves libertarians would also not call themselves anarchists. Many people believe that it is legitimate for an authority to exist to protect people's rights and to protect them from the aggression of others.