So by your reasoning, if a car manufacturer accidentally made a bug which caused the engine to cheat on diesel emissions tests, it's actually the EPA's fault for not designing their test to more accurately mimic how people use their cars in real life?
Not even remotely. I'm saying that if there was a bug where putting the transmission into test mode caused emissions to go out of spec, but almost no one except for technicians would ever go into that mode, then it's a lot different from the case where the average owner should expect their emissions to be out of spec.
Your no-spin version is somewhat correct, except that it misses the key fact that CR reported those bad numbers and told people not to buy the laptop because of them. If Ford says a Focus should get 30MPG and testing shows it really gets 25MPG, then that's probably a legitimate result explainable by different testing scenarios. But if Consumer Reports puts their Focus into a test mode that regular owners will never use, and it gets somewhere between 13.5MPG and 58.5MPG, then something's probably gone wrong. Given that it's Ford and not Joe's Crawfish and Car Factory, it doesn't seem unreasonable for CR to doublecheck their results before publishing a "don't buy a Ford Focus because it only gets 13.5MPG!" recommendation.
(Note: those numbers are to scale. Apple says the 13" MBP should get 10 hours of web usage. CR said it varies from 4.5 to 19.5 hours. I multiplied those by 3MPG/hour to show the proportions.)
But many developers probably use Safari Developer Mode to work on their projects, and this will help them.
Yes, but those developers don't get their recommendations from Consumer Reports. That magazine's audience would never have encountered that bug.
Obligatory car analogy: say they're testing a Ford Focus. They disable its antilock brakes so that a professional driver can get its best-case dry pavement stopping distance. Along the way, the find an OBD-II bug that causes the brakes to take twice as long to stop the car. They report the bad results instead of the normal, expected values. Yes, their test was correct! It found a bug that needs to be fixed. However, the only people who would ever see that bug are the exact ones who'd notice something was wrong and be able to troubleshoot it. You and I aren't ever going to disable our antilock brakes, even if a test engineer might.
I think that's kind of what happened here. Again, yes, they legit found a bug. My problem with it is that they reported the buggy results instead of the actual ones that a normal non-developer would see. A developer would notice their battery draining in a fourth the expected time and that it only happened when they were debugging in Safari, so they probably wouldn't even be significantly affected by the bug.
But they disabled cache by putting it in developer mode. Which turns out has its own bugs that Apple said they've now fixed, but that's kind of beside the point: they weren't running Safari in a configuration that an end user would ever have found themselves in. I'm in dev mode right now so I can test some stuff on my laptop. You very well might be too. But my non-techie wife will never run in dev mode, so she'd never see the behavior that Consumer Reports experienced.
and Streamed Content I'd argue is a much bigger % of people's traffic (volume wise (hits wise probably less so... but that is the nature of the beast))
That seems very unlikely for the usage profile of being on batteries. Sure, we all stream when we're at our desks, but I don't know how that translates to out-and-about traffic patterns. Restaurant Wi-Fi is often so spotty that you wouldn't try to listen to live streams. I doubt many people are consuming lots of video content from their cell phone tethers.
iPods aren't even in the top 10 of anti-consumer MP3 players.
Disclaimer: my first iPod was a gen 4 Touch and I'd been using Sansa devices flashed with Rockbox before it. I never owned a classic scrollwheel iPod. I sure wanted one, though, because it was far nicer than anything else at the time.
just goes to show the best product doesnt always win
Just goes to show your metric for "best" isn't aligned with the rest of the market's. iPods were the best portable MP3 players: we all took a vote with our wallets and it won. They might not have had highest values for individual specifications, but the total package was better than the competition. The same was true for iPhones. Some competitors were faster, or had higher resolution cameras, or had more storage, but none packaged everything in such a way that millions of people saw it and immediately wanted to throw cash at it.
iPhones and iPods were much better than anything that came before them. You can disagree by touting specific numbers, but almost no one outside Slashdot and similar forums cares about specs. Everyone else just wants to use the stuff they bought. Apple came to market with the first devices that concentrated on usability rather than specs and made an absolutely killing. You can't say Apple's stuff wasn't the best without naming something better, and in these cases there was no better to name.
On the other hand: Whoever released the DNC/Podesta emails did us all a huge favor.
I wish that they'd done us the same favor for the RNC. It's easy to say the DNC is awful (and they clearly are), but we have no basis for comparison for how awful they are in relative terms. That would have been an interesting comparison.
Johnson is only a conservative candidate in the economic sense. He's very liberal in the personal liberty sense. It's not reasonable to add his votes in with Trump when polls showed that he took a lot of would-be Hillary supports in practice.
Headline: most populous state in the country has an opinion on who should lead it.
Clinton also won New York by 1.5 million votes. You could try to make a story of "without New York, Clinton would have only won by 1.4 million votes!", but that would also be dumb and misleading. In fact, if you skip all states where Clinton won, then Trump would have lead by 8.4 million votes! Of course, the opposite would have Clinton winning by 11.2 million, so you might want to keep that inconvenient fact in your pocket.
America preferred Clinton. "America, except for..." doesn't matter for shit because it wasn't "America, except for..." who votes on these things.
I can do lots of stuff myself. I can hunt for my food, or plant it. I can build furniture. I could make papyrus if I had to. And I don't do any of that because there are other things I'd rather be doing with my time. Networking was fun for the first 15 years or so, and I still enjoy it but it's no longer on the short list of my favorite hobbies. It's been demoted to something I have to get done so I can get started with my more favorite stuff.
Yeah, I like eero. I read up on it, I bought it, and I'm glad I did. There are alternatives from Google and Netgear that I also considered and I probably would have also liked quite a bit, but I can't give you a firsthand account of them because I don't have one. Why don't you give them a shot and report back?
Why? Because these have the potential to be infinitely better. I'm not going to detail my geek cred, but suffice it to say for these purposes that I usually build my own Linux-based routers. I'm not allergic to solder or compiling kernels. But I bought a 3-unit eero system over Thanksgiving and it's been a godsend.
These networks aren't so much hubs as layer 2 switches. Know how your phone jumps from one station to another as you move through the house? How it's automatic and quick, but sometimes totally breaks the connect and makes Netflix stutter or VOIP calls drop? eero at least totally ends that. Connections are rock solid even as they bounce from one router to another. And they do bounce. If my kid and I are sitting on the couch using our phones, and both of us start streaming videos, eero is smart enough to push one of us off onto a different router so we're not interfering with each other's connection.
I would not willingly go back to a handbuilt network now. I've only had a mesh network for a month and a half, but it's so much better than anything I'd pieced together myself that I'm retiring from the practice. Laugh if you want to or dismiss it as "I could do that myself for a fourth the price!", but keep an open mind. I think this is the way of the future.
Eventually, their turn will come around in terms of fashion, and eventually, people who use their phones for work will discover Windows Phone.
That's cute, but in the real world, no. I know it's fun to slag off on others' choices as unserious, but those of us with Androids and iPhones are using them to get real work done. We're not sitting around playing Pokemon Go all the time. I mean, we can because it's available and sometimes we do, but we also use them extensively for mail, Slack, project planning, calendaring, SSH, and all the other work-related stuff you're doing on your beloved phone. I promise you that you're not the only person using their phone to Do Important Things.
You looked at the available options and picked Windows Phone. Cool. We looked at the available options - just like you did - and chose something different. I too bought the phone that I genuinely like.
From an operational POV, I would hate going from an "everything is immutable; we only support insert and delete operations" to "mutate all the things and damn the caches!". It's an entirely different architecture. I can totally imagine the backend and ops teams saying sure, we can do this, as long as you understand it means we're launching a brand new platform.
Dude, adjust your tinfoil. I dislike smart TVs for several reasons - they're known to spy on owners, their UIs suck, their apps suck, and their app stores suck - but I like other modern conveniences. I applaud your backup strategy that you mention for no apparent reason, but I like having friends over and letting them use my Wi-Fi without jumping through insane hoops.
It's easy to be secure: just unplug the thing and be done with it. It's more satisfying to be secure and functional.
Our previous TV outlasted several consoles and settop boxes. I don't see any benefit at all in having to use the TV vendor's app store - which they don't have huge experience maintaining - over a separate unit's. Google and Apple know how to deliver up-to-date apps. Smart TVs will probably never have the per-model volume to keep up.
Seriously? I couldn't even connect to Amazon Prime Video because the app was so out of date (not that the situation is better with Apple TV specifically because Amazon is being a butthead). Netflix took for. eh. ver. to load and the streaming quality was lower. Our Apple TV can decode 1080p in realtime but I'm not convinced the Vizio's chipset is capable of it.
I want my display to be a dumb panel. Nothing good has ever come from combining two unrelated items into one package. Buy a printer/scanner/fax? Now you can't scan if you're out of toner. Good tools do one thing and do it well.
We bought a nice Vizio with a good display. I played with the builtin apps long enough to verify that they were ancient junk that would never not suck. About that time it came out that Vizio was monitoring your content for advertising purposes
so that completely ended the experiment. Fun fact, though: there's no way in the Vizio UI to disable a wireless network! I could give it an unroutable static IP, but didn't trust their code not to say "that's not working - let's try DHCP instead!" I ended up setting up my Wi-Fi router's guest network with a weird, random SSID and associating the TV with it. Then I removed the guest network, so the TV is now trying to find an SSID that will never again exist. I don't think it's smart enough to figure its way out of that one.
BTW, we use Apple TV instead of the weird built-in apps. It was either that or Chromecast, but Google sells you TV boxes cheaply so they can monitor your habits. Apple sells you devices at full price and then doesn't monitor them. I went with the less creepy option.
I want my display to be a dumb panel. Nothing good has ever come from combining two unrelated items into one package. Buy a printer/scanner/fax? Now you can't scan if you're out of toner. Good tools do one thing and do it well.
We bought a nice Vizio with a good display. I played with the builtin apps long enough to verify that they were ancient junk that would never not suck. About that time it came out that Vizio was monitoring your content for advertising purposes so that completely ended the experiment. Fun fact, though: there's no way in the Vizio UI to disable a wireless network! I could give it an unroutable static IP, but didn't trust their code not to say "that's not working - let's try DHCP instead!" I ended up setting up my Wi-Fi router's guest network with a weird, random SSID and associating the TV with it. Then I removed the guest network, so the TV is now trying to find an SSID that will never again exist. I don't think it's smart enough to figure its way out of that one.
BTW, we use Apple TV instead of the weird built-in apps. It was either that or Chromecast, but Google sells you TV boxes cheaply so they can monitor your habits. Apple sells you devices at full price and then doesn't monitor them. I went with the less creepy option.
Slashdot Mirror
So by your reasoning, if a car manufacturer accidentally made a bug which caused the engine to cheat on diesel emissions tests, it's actually the EPA's fault for not designing their test to more accurately mimic how people use their cars in real life?
Not even remotely. I'm saying that if there was a bug where putting the transmission into test mode caused emissions to go out of spec, but almost no one except for technicians would ever go into that mode, then it's a lot different from the case where the average owner should expect their emissions to be out of spec.
Your no-spin version is somewhat correct, except that it misses the key fact that CR reported those bad numbers and told people not to buy the laptop because of them. If Ford says a Focus should get 30MPG and testing shows it really gets 25MPG, then that's probably a legitimate result explainable by different testing scenarios. But if Consumer Reports puts their Focus into a test mode that regular owners will never use, and it gets somewhere between 13.5MPG and 58.5MPG, then something's probably gone wrong. Given that it's Ford and not Joe's Crawfish and Car Factory, it doesn't seem unreasonable for CR to doublecheck their results before publishing a "don't buy a Ford Focus because it only gets 13.5MPG!" recommendation.
(Note: those numbers are to scale. Apple says the 13" MBP should get 10 hours of web usage. CR said it varies from 4.5 to 19.5 hours. I multiplied those by 3MPG/hour to show the proportions.)
No, it's actually a Bug. The article describes a problem with the "Disable Caches" setting such that:
But many developers probably use Safari Developer Mode to work on their projects, and this will help them.
Yes, but those developers don't get their recommendations from Consumer Reports. That magazine's audience would never have encountered that bug.
Obligatory car analogy: say they're testing a Ford Focus. They disable its antilock brakes so that a professional driver can get its best-case dry pavement stopping distance. Along the way, the find an OBD-II bug that causes the brakes to take twice as long to stop the car. They report the bad results instead of the normal, expected values. Yes, their test was correct! It found a bug that needs to be fixed. However, the only people who would ever see that bug are the exact ones who'd notice something was wrong and be able to troubleshoot it. You and I aren't ever going to disable our antilock brakes, even if a test engineer might.
I think that's kind of what happened here. Again, yes, they legit found a bug. My problem with it is that they reported the buggy results instead of the actual ones that a normal non-developer would see. A developer would notice their battery draining in a fourth the expected time and that it only happened when they were debugging in Safari, so they probably wouldn't even be significantly affected by the bug.
But they disabled cache by putting it in developer mode. Which turns out has its own bugs that Apple said they've now fixed, but that's kind of beside the point: they weren't running Safari in a configuration that an end user would ever have found themselves in. I'm in dev mode right now so I can test some stuff on my laptop. You very well might be too. But my non-techie wife will never run in dev mode, so she'd never see the behavior that Consumer Reports experienced.
and Streamed Content I'd argue is a much bigger % of people's traffic (volume wise (hits wise probably less so... but that is the nature of the beast))
That seems very unlikely for the usage profile of being on batteries. Sure, we all stream when we're at our desks, but I don't know how that translates to out-and-about traffic patterns. Restaurant Wi-Fi is often so spotty that you wouldn't try to listen to live streams. I doubt many people are consuming lots of video content from their cell phone tethers.
This (and iTunes) is enough for declaring it the worst MP3 player of all times.
LOL *cough* PlaysForSure *cough*
iPods aren't even in the top 10 of anti-consumer MP3 players.
Disclaimer: my first iPod was a gen 4 Touch and I'd been using Sansa devices flashed with Rockbox before it. I never owned a classic scrollwheel iPod. I sure wanted one, though, because it was far nicer than anything else at the time.
just goes to show the best product doesnt always win
Just goes to show your metric for "best" isn't aligned with the rest of the market's. iPods were the best portable MP3 players: we all took a vote with our wallets and it won. They might not have had highest values for individual specifications, but the total package was better than the competition. The same was true for iPhones. Some competitors were faster, or had higher resolution cameras, or had more storage, but none packaged everything in such a way that millions of people saw it and immediately wanted to throw cash at it.
iPhones and iPods were much better than anything that came before them. You can disagree by touting specific numbers, but almost no one outside Slashdot and similar forums cares about specs. Everyone else just wants to use the stuff they bought. Apple came to market with the first devices that concentrated on usability rather than specs and made an absolutely killing. You can't say Apple's stuff wasn't the best without naming something better, and in these cases there was no better to name.
On the other hand: Whoever released the DNC/Podesta emails did us all a huge favor.
I wish that they'd done us the same favor for the RNC. It's easy to say the DNC is awful (and they clearly are), but we have no basis for comparison for how awful they are in relative terms. That would have been an interesting comparison.
Johnson is only a conservative candidate in the economic sense. He's very liberal in the personal liberty sense. It's not reasonable to add his votes in with Trump when polls showed that he took a lot of would-be Hillary supports in practice.
Headline: most populous state in the country has an opinion on who should lead it.
Clinton also won New York by 1.5 million votes. You could try to make a story of "without New York, Clinton would have only won by 1.4 million votes!", but that would also be dumb and misleading. In fact, if you skip all states where Clinton won, then Trump would have lead by 8.4 million votes! Of course, the opposite would have Clinton winning by 11.2 million, so you might want to keep that inconvenient fact in your pocket.
America preferred Clinton. "America, except for..." doesn't matter for shit because it wasn't "America, except for..." who votes on these things.
I can do lots of stuff myself. I can hunt for my food, or plant it. I can build furniture. I could make papyrus if I had to. And I don't do any of that because there are other things I'd rather be doing with my time. Networking was fun for the first 15 years or so, and I still enjoy it but it's no longer on the short list of my favorite hobbies. It's been demoted to something I have to get done so I can get started with my more favorite stuff.
Yeah, I like eero. I read up on it, I bought it, and I'm glad I did. There are alternatives from Google and Netgear that I also considered and I probably would have also liked quite a bit, but I can't give you a firsthand account of them because I don't have one. Why don't you give them a shot and report back?
Why? Because these have the potential to be infinitely better. I'm not going to detail my geek cred, but suffice it to say for these purposes that I usually build my own Linux-based routers. I'm not allergic to solder or compiling kernels. But I bought a 3-unit eero system over Thanksgiving and it's been a godsend.
These networks aren't so much hubs as layer 2 switches. Know how your phone jumps from one station to another as you move through the house? How it's automatic and quick, but sometimes totally breaks the connect and makes Netflix stutter or VOIP calls drop? eero at least totally ends that. Connections are rock solid even as they bounce from one router to another. And they do bounce. If my kid and I are sitting on the couch using our phones, and both of us start streaming videos, eero is smart enough to push one of us off onto a different router so we're not interfering with each other's connection.
I would not willingly go back to a handbuilt network now. I've only had a mesh network for a month and a half, but it's so much better than anything I'd pieced together myself that I'm retiring from the practice. Laugh if you want to or dismiss it as "I could do that myself for a fourth the price!", but keep an open mind. I think this is the way of the future.
I'm not finding the RJ45 on my phone.
That is the worst example of the broken window fallacy that I've ever heard.
Eventually, their turn will come around in terms of fashion, and eventually, people who use their phones for work will discover Windows Phone.
That's cute, but in the real world, no. I know it's fun to slag off on others' choices as unserious, but those of us with Androids and iPhones are using them to get real work done. We're not sitting around playing Pokemon Go all the time. I mean, we can because it's available and sometimes we do, but we also use them extensively for mail, Slack, project planning, calendaring, SSH, and all the other work-related stuff you're doing on your beloved phone. I promise you that you're not the only person using their phone to Do Important Things.
You looked at the available options and picked Windows Phone. Cool. We looked at the available options - just like you did - and chose something different. I too bought the phone that I genuinely like.
The problem was that they never sold any Lumia phone through their store (or any others). This just makes it official.
Turns out.
From an operational POV, I would hate going from an "everything is immutable; we only support insert and delete operations" to "mutate all the things and damn the caches!". It's an entirely different architecture. I can totally imagine the backend and ops teams saying sure, we can do this, as long as you understand it means we're launching a brand new platform.
Dude, adjust your tinfoil. I dislike smart TVs for several reasons - they're known to spy on owners, their UIs suck, their apps suck, and their app stores suck - but I like other modern conveniences. I applaud your backup strategy that you mention for no apparent reason, but I like having friends over and letting them use my Wi-Fi without jumping through insane hoops.
It's easy to be secure: just unplug the thing and be done with it. It's more satisfying to be secure and functional.
Our previous TV outlasted several consoles and settop boxes. I don't see any benefit at all in having to use the TV vendor's app store - which they don't have huge experience maintaining - over a separate unit's. Google and Apple know how to deliver up-to-date apps. Smart TVs will probably never have the per-model volume to keep up.
Seriously? I couldn't even connect to Amazon Prime Video because the app was so out of date (not that the situation is better with Apple TV specifically because Amazon is being a butthead). Netflix took for. eh. ver. to load and the streaming quality was lower. Our Apple TV can decode 1080p in realtime but I'm not convinced the Vizio's chipset is capable of it.
Really? That sounds a lot harder and I have to remember to copy the config over every time I touch the firewall.
I want my display to be a dumb panel. Nothing good has ever come from combining two unrelated items into one package. Buy a printer/scanner/fax? Now you can't scan if you're out of toner. Good tools do one thing and do it well.
We bought a nice Vizio with a good display. I played with the builtin apps long enough to verify that they were ancient junk that would never not suck. About that time it came out that Vizio was monitoring your content for advertising purposes
so that completely ended the experiment. Fun fact, though: there's no way in the Vizio UI to disable a wireless network! I could give it an unroutable static IP, but didn't trust their code not to say "that's not working - let's try DHCP instead!" I ended up setting up my Wi-Fi router's guest network with a weird, random SSID and associating the TV with it. Then I removed the guest network, so the TV is now trying to find an SSID that will never again exist. I don't think it's smart enough to figure its way out of that one.
BTW, we use Apple TV instead of the weird built-in apps. It was either that or Chromecast, but Google sells you TV boxes cheaply so they can monitor your habits. Apple sells you devices at full price and then doesn't monitor them. I went with the less creepy option.
Wrong tab, sigh.
I want my display to be a dumb panel. Nothing good has ever come from combining two unrelated items into one package. Buy a printer/scanner/fax? Now you can't scan if you're out of toner. Good tools do one thing and do it well.
We bought a nice Vizio with a good display. I played with the builtin apps long enough to verify that they were ancient junk that would never not suck. About that time it came out that Vizio was monitoring your content for advertising purposes so that completely ended the experiment. Fun fact, though: there's no way in the Vizio UI to disable a wireless network! I could give it an unroutable static IP, but didn't trust their code not to say "that's not working - let's try DHCP instead!" I ended up setting up my Wi-Fi router's guest network with a weird, random SSID and associating the TV with it. Then I removed the guest network, so the TV is now trying to find an SSID that will never again exist. I don't think it's smart enough to figure its way out of that one.
BTW, we use Apple TV instead of the weird built-in apps. It was either that or Chromecast, but Google sells you TV boxes cheaply so they can monitor your habits. Apple sells you devices at full price and then doesn't monitor them. I went with the less creepy option.