at least I'm not a yuppie assuming everyone who doesn't like abusive ways of making money is a weed-using commie. I didn't even come here to defend GPL usage. I came here pointing out this lawyer's argument is totally invalid. She's trying to make sense of nonsense with charismatic speeches like this is the republican presidential race
businesses now must accelerate their move to the cloud where everything can be controlled (...). Consumers can expect to find decreasing options to own anything for themselves, decreasing options to control their data, decreasing options to protect their privacy.
No! No! And no!
On the cloud, not everything can be controlled. Especially not related with fair use vs commercial use! Are you telling me the fact I am using a cloud service during work hours on a work IP is gonna grant a SaaS provider that I am using the service for commercial reasons? Can't I edit a private document in Word or check my free Outlook email on my work PCs now, even if my work is on a BYOD policy? WTF! This is bollocks right there.
And it continues being bollocks when you tell me I don't own a service I actually purchased for the web! When people buy an online game, and online text/presentation/spreadsheet editor (e.g. Office 365), there is a license that states very well that ownership lasts as long as the service can be provided by the provider, and/or has a fixed, unquestionable time frame such as a 1 year license! Despite this being time-limited ownership, IT IS OWNERSHIP! Stop arguing that people have to be bound to a physical object (a CD/DVD) that has to work to full extent OFFLINE for it to be called ownserhip! Even Oracle knows that and it uses SaaS for most of its core business, and it's not even a recent practice - they been doing this for the last 2 decades! (even when they didn't use cloud services, you pretty much had to have Oracle support for maintaining anything on production every N-months or so!). Want me to blow your mind? Time-shares are ownership. From wikipedia: "A timeshare (sometimes called vacation ownership) is a property with a particular form of ownership or use rights." BAM!
Finally, stop arguing about data control and user privacy like you invented the thing! You're a lawyer lady, you know there's no such thing as privacy in a country with the Patriot Act and the Snowden leaks. You just used widespread, catch-all internet and policy issues to justify a circumvention of your (clients') flawed GPL licencing, and by flawed I mean that Oracle made it to protect a solid royalty revenue, and then it simply didn't! Don't call out civilization's evolutionary problems to fix THAT mess! Tell your client to learn from their mistakes. Or simply to drop the patent-troll scheme like most commercial companies like to do now: buy a FOSS company in order to nullify competition by making it non-FOSS. Because unlike that "loss of privacy induced by cloud/SaaS gold rush induced by dual-licensing issues", that is an ACTUAL PROBLEM!
Once again I come here to defend my Fitbit Charge HR: I'm trying to lose weight, and it works great for keeping a gross measure of calorie burn vs intake. Its "imprecise" HRM is a lot better than a step counter at counting calories spent, even on average - even if the instantaneous heart rate is 10-20 BPM off from the actual one, you're likely still in the zone it uses to calculate calories. And it isn't off that long from my own experience. I have simultaneously used twice or "thrice" a Charge HR, Mi Band Pulse and chest HRM on workout sessions, and despite both imaging-based devices rarely being on the same as the chest one, they correct themselves to "close enough" status after seconds, and you don't change zones in seconds. The Fitbit is much better than the Mi Band as it clearly scans with a much higher frequency (I can see just from the leds lighting more often on exercise mode on both). At the end of the day, apps that use the chest monitor will basically provide the same calorie output as both the Charge and the Mi Band. I believe all this ruckus from over-expectationers is because they couldn't distinguish the type of product they were buying - people in the cities, more likely to purchase such devices are also more prone to use gyms and practice amateur sports, thus require better accuracy found in a chest HRM. But in part, this was also Fitbit's mistake: selling the product as such and targeting a market too focused on unimportant markers such as second-accurate BPMs.
Something I forgot to mention: I believe the main problem is Xiaomi is mainly present on markets with very bad information gathering methodologies. They are mostly popular in China, India and southern asian neighbors, Russia and east-europe. From some connections I got, they also have an arm and leg in south america, as south america is all in for the drop-shipping "scams" from people who abuse the low prices in china retailers like gearbest and set up "virtual shops" that just mediate transactions at a cost, and Xiaomi is a very popular brand as it's the most reliable Chinese phone maker today imho.
With that said, I believe the information provided might be accurate in whatever scope it was provided. I just believe that scope is probably not fit for Fortune's affirmations or even the source they quote, and this is why the information was retracted. I just wouldn't publish bull out of my editorial hat if I had very solid facts that information is inconsistently true.
First of all, I never mentioned I only trusted Chinese sources. The article itself cites chinese sources, but faiIs to provide links as they state themselves the links were removed. How fun it would be if we could all go and start outing news in the ways of "a very official source said this but then they retracted it so it must be true". We don't even know the whys of this retraction, who knows, maybe they were even wrong!
I do agree about misleading information coming from China, but they didn't start out on misinformation campaigns, the US did way back in the 1920's. Hell, even European news agency space is tainted by corporate and polittical influence. Full disclaimer: I am european. The problem is this is coming from a source clearly american and clearly bound to american economy (it's in the name after all...), and what is usually a decent, fact-based publication is now basing its articles on hearsay from Xiaomi. This is bull. I'll wait eargerly for public data, which they will have to make available for investors in a proper way, not this half-assed "leak" Fortune is bragging about.
As someone deeply invested in researching and using Xiaomi devices, and having felt their quality over the years, I believe this news to be utter bull. Sources are all american. Xiaomi did a lot in 2015, its doing a lot in 2016, and that affects revenue. If someone told me they made less profit, I would be totally OK with that because they launch products like rabbits, but whoever believes Xiaomi isn't growing in revenue must be dumb or attempting to influence the market with speculation. Xiaomi has it all: it as a very decent brand, a great product line up, amazing pricing AND availability, even despite not making its devices available internationally (sites like gearbest take care of that high cost for them, and we, the final consumer use them indiscriminately). It is flat out impossible this brand made less revenue than in 2014 - they launched the Mi4, but the OnePlus killed its market for most of 2014. The S6 came right after. If they managed to make 135% revenue with the low season of 2014, considering those 2 very successful devices came right before or during prime season, I highly doubt the very uneventful 2015 (for most other brands) could have killed them. I mean, they released about 6 of the most interesting devices for the low-mid range: Redmi 2 and 3, Redmi Note 2 and 3, the Mi4 cheap variants 4s and 4c (this one being one of my favourite devices ever on the market as it matches a N5x for half price at launch, and still gives it a run for the money despite de N5X price cut). And this is just the mobile side of the thing. I am sure they are making gazillions with the old and new Mi bands, and I don't even have to mention the weird products they launch in the market, from water purifiers, passing through wifi routers, smart TVs, smart TV boxes, to audiophile-graded headphones like the Piston 3 or the hybrids (seriously, they're praised in places like head-fi forums, it has to mean something). I don't believe they are even making less profit, let alone less revenue. Prove me wrong, I dare you internet
But you did like Win(dows)amp right? I'm just gonna take the opportunity to say I didn't even bother with skins, the default one was the best, and I know there were good ones but why fix something that's not broken. You can't compare apps, they're different ecosystems. Man, even the unix folder structure was an anti-pattern for Winamp's usage pattern.
In any case, Winamp was the shyte because:
1. Timing: it was like the first (or first 2-3) mp3 players back in the day, certainly the first to be actually usable day to day
2. Features: the controls, the equalizer, the visualizations, the fast playlist load times no matter the size (I remember having 10's of thousands of contemporary, music, classical, OSTs on shuffle and it simply didn't hog, and all I had to do was drag and drop that big ass MUSIC folder in there. Instant joy. It didn't hog skipping, pausing, resuming songs. It had the very first REAL gapless playback which was essential for all them house/electronica compilations and/or concept albums that just needed it for the experience. The equalizer presets were just on point for most tastes and even customizing it was easy and provided UI and sound feedback necessary for noticing what you were doing (it did lag a bit, but it still is hard processing signal in real time, and it managed well)
3. that radio. Man that radio. Shoutcast still has no comparison despite falling into oblivion, and it laid the foundation for all things streaming. It might not have been the first, once again, but was THE go to radio app
But most of all, the fact we still talk about Winamp is the reason why it is, or was, so great - it was that application that didn't come bundled with your OS, but would be one of the 10 first to install and the only one you would keep magazine shareware CDs around for (even more than notepads, total commanders and zip/rar suites). It was the only app you didn't care for super updated versions because any single one would magically click to your usage. Even in the odd instances when they might have failed. E.g. when they decided to set the media library and/or the video/visualization window shown by default, cluttering your common experience, they had an easy way to remove it - a simple X on each individual window. No deep menus to go through for most important stuff. EVEN THOUGH IT WAS NOT CLUTTERED AT ALL!
Yeap, you got all the point I initially made and then some. And the answer to your question is..: "Yes, you're supposed to buy new stuff that isn't compatible with anything so you have to buy new anythings again, if not for the fact that it saves us hardware minor costs (placing them on you) and you improve the economy going which keeps technology like this flowing". By economy they meant their pockets full, and by technology flowing they meant standardization by nonsense. They just want you to eat their crap basically, at a premium, and with that gourmet feeling all over. You know, like Apple does.
So I guess it's not Intel, but Intel pushers that want this. But there are a lot of cost/space advantages for reusing a port and dropping a DAC. Headphones will be more expensive though as the DAC will have to be on their side.
I want to see their faces when they clash with the music production and entertainment industry, and the now vogue audiophile (...and pseudo-audiophile) community. They may well attempt to do so in the consumer world, but premium audio is all the rage these days and people won't want to downplay their expensive, high-res audio streaming services due to hardware companies wanting to save on ports, space, and that cumbersome DAC that occupies as much board as a 3g module. And yeah, I know the source is digital and the conversion process is lossy. But you go tell that to them vinyl lovers
Go electric. Seriously. Stop whining about government overreach on stuff that can actually save the planet instead of, say, making you feel bad for paying 100k taxes on a 300k salary. At least this one you know for sure exists for a scientific reason, as there is no other explanation on why a government would limit emissions.
in Japan they got this bad habit of spewing it all out when the shit first hits the fan. It's some sort of "first-fail atonement", deeply instilled in their culture, which in my humble opinion, is better practice than elsewhere. When you do the "bad thing", odds to get caught are around the sub-10% as you take measures to hide it, but by the time you get caught, odds are you're gonna get caught so they sky-rocket to 99%+ for all other instances of the event that can be analyzed. So why really trust in that meager, uncontrollable 1% that will keep sinking you when you can just apologize for all past, present and future instances of the event? Better just to spit it all out since the milk has already been spilled than have that corrosive loss of confidence haunt you forever. It's actually the best damage control you can do. Nothing like what Volkswagen is doing to be honest - VW won't admit the problem likely exists in other models before 2009. They are also just "patching" really awfully the problem, with a patch that suits emission policy, but that surreptitiously harms the consumer by reducing original power/economy spec, which made the consumer buy the product. It's like they are swiping all the dirt under the rug with the worst possible mop they had lying around, and that rug is already bulgy with previous dirt they hope will stay covered.
As someone said already, it is with great regret that real offenders get away with doing something that is universally unethical at the highest order (if you take into account some religions are pretty unethical...). Yet the fact they have to resort to such "techniques" is the pinnacle of hypocrisy - they are, ultimately, helping these offenders TWO-FOLD. They are running the site creating conditions to prosecute for one, and now there's evidence exclusion... I don't fancy a state using easy-to-through-out-of-court measures that will pretty much question the next case against the individuals. They will play it safe afterwards - they know they're watched now - and that's bad for us all as they won't get caught so easily. They are pretty much making a case to DEFEND sexual offenders with these techniques and that really hits my nerves.
With that said, I will transpose this to something much less important, yet more broad: online piracy. There are currently tens, maybe hundreds of websites run by the MPAA, the RIAA, and their henchmen, who will eventually use collected data for the sake of their business. They are obviously supplying, tampering with but also gathering the torrenting habits of all unsuspecting users. Two actual examplea comes to mind: PopcornTime's original domain, which was part of a deal struck between the prosecuted operators and effectively found to be owned by the MPAA; and of course a lot of torrent trackers and usenet aggregators also "seized" with such types of deals. So the question is: will the same principle the judge used apply here? I mean, this won't probably even go to court, and that's an issue - harbored by the DMCA et al, the MPAA/RIAA/henchmen can just directly affect the offender by notifying him or his ISP, who has to comply. And they don't even need a court order to "run" the illegal service, as they can defend themselves the same way the original operators could, with the added fact they won't sue themselves over it!
I know it was a big rant, and ultimately pointless as I just state facts. But it does make one guy think of the nuances around the orthodox American habit of MAKING CONDITIONS TO PROSECUTE, as opposed to, you know, finding evidence of wrongdoing, and then prosecuting. John Woo's Minority Report also comes to mind...
You actually made me think of the worst possible insult you can get from management: "I have lost confidence in your work" (or "the team's work capacity"). When you know a manager's work is to manage expectations and balance work on the team, you know your below acceptable levels when someone high up tells you they can't trust in your work. This is also when you know you won't have much leverage asking for that raise or benefits, pretty much forcing you to switch companies or even career to avoid stagnation.
... or "too much POJO usage in detriment of basic patterns". To me, as an OOP developer (Java mostly), this is so much more hurting than any single word/expression criticism. If there's something I don't like is someone to tell me I code like somebody who knows the language basics, has the intellect to get things done, but doesn't know the ways to make it standardized. At the same time it is also something I will look for in a quality developer, so in practice I'm only really offended by others saying stuff like that because I see it as an actual flaw. So there's that.
I disagree. There isn't a single feature of my Charge HR I haven't come to appreciate because it wouldn't be matched by features and usability with smartphone interaction. I can't say the same for an iWatch - every feature the Charge HR does'nt match the iWatch, I would rather do on the smartphone or even a PC. And that's the potential value of a wrist wearable, and indirectly the iWatch problem. When you take the toll of "wearing" something, you have to extract the pros of its usability versus the con of actually wearing it, charging it, and buying it. That's one of the reasons Google Glass failed, and it's one of the reasons augmented/VR will take time gaining traction (as I do see a lot of the potential value I'm talking about in things like Occulus or Microsoft Hololens).
I share some thoughts on why the Charge HR makes so much sense to me as opposed to an iWatch on another comment.
I'm the proud owner of a 4-6day bettery-lasting Charge HR, with daily 1 to 1:30h activities/training sessions (which monitors HR every 3), with the whole 9 yards activated: sleep monitor ON; Heart Rate ON (as opposed to auto); call notifications On (with encryption); all day sync; always connected. I even have a daily silent alarms which I let ring to full most times. Every option is super battery optimized even with their warnings, and if any of these does affect performance, they're probably "all day sync" and "always connected" options, which I found to have no effect on user experience at all, so I will randomly shut them off with no real impact. For instance, all day sync's only benefit is to get immediate feedback when switching on the app, with the most updated info without sync (sync itself would last like 10 seconds without it), and "always connected" will give me a call notification 3 seconds sooner than it would provide turned off, which is a non-issue as I can always call back anyway. But even with them all On I will profit 1 day tops of battery, and that's why I digress on having them Off.
Back on topic: So, even though I can't really compare this to an iWatch's full feature set, it does compare on the "things I really need from a smart wrist wearable", with the added benefit of that unmatched Fitbit app (and web app). And man do I like having the peace of mind of a device that rarely dies on me, either on normal usage or while cycling. Add the fact that I wouldn't cry a whole lot if I lost it or got mugged because it costs 1/3 of the price of a full-fledged smartwatch.
Granted, spec-by-spec there is better stuff out there, but nothing really comes close to the usability, experience and "price-per-satisfaction" of owning a Charge HR. Except maybe a Mi Band 1S. If you really want to save big, don't mind the lack of a screen, or spending 1 dollar on a market app that does what the official one doesn't (Mi Band Tools), you can go a long way with the new Xiaomi tracker, which I happen to own and really see some benefits over that "screen gimmick" type smart bracelets like my Fitbit. The screen is only a pro until you notice you can enable vibrations for heart rate zones, and you only have to charge the Mi Band every 25-30 days or so... As compared to the 4-6 days of the Charge HR, or DAILY with [insert any iOS/Android/Tizen smartwatch here]. Maybe a Pebble with HR would also fit my needs, but I can't comment on ownership of that one.
Because a new console generation will already be out in 1.5 years, and Sony will probably have its iteration ready in 2-3 years. As Microsoft is evolving, I believe in 4 years Win 7 will still have at least 30% user-base on Windows platforms, and I know pretty much for sure I will still be on it. I'm not living in the past, I do everything I want and I can pretty much do most of what people on 10 do with 7, except remote play on PS4 apparently. Sony should spend R&D on 7 because every product is on obsolescence track but Win7 will still be here strong in 4 years. It is not going to drop off the map, it's just gonna be painted out of it a bit more than it should because of business decisions.
Don't know about you, but my Windows machine is still on 7. I play games, I value performance, compatibility, stability, and my damn privacy. Supposedly it still is supported as I use it on an Ivy Bridge CPU (as it now depends on CPU architecture... yeah). Unfortunately, I'm sure Sony will argue it's all about Miracast not existing per say in 7, to which I say: "F*CK YOU", I have a Widi or whatever you call it now-compatible GPU, which is exactly the same fkin thing as Miracast. I'm gonna go ahead and call bull on both MS and Sony wanting to drive the consumer base to worse products, which have "THAT hardware degradation upgrade" or "THAT version-restricted upgrade which costs us 1 line of code to retro-support but it's your problem" written all over. And I'm not one for such conspiracy theories - I like innovation, and I now it takes a toll on hardware, but it sure as FCK isn't by using 10 over 8, 8.1 or 7, and to a lesser degree it also isn't going from Ivy Bridge to Skylake, as we all know Moore's Law is breaking harshly. Even Intel is admitting it in a way, and they make business from forcing people to upgrade. Current CPU benefits over 4 year-ago machines is close to none in most consumer-centric scopes, especially when compared to secondary memory advancements (read: SSD reliability & performance). And the only things I don't see working on 7 are things Microsoft has 0 technological basis not to launch them on 7. Or even 8.x for that matter.
To me its pretty clear: this feature is just bells and whistles for the casual guy who was on the fence for a PS4 because he mostly spent time on the PC while the missus was watching E on the big screen. Or the husband, let's not be sexist.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm assuming this was directed at the "parse failure" comment right?
at least I'm not a yuppie assuming everyone who doesn't like abusive ways of making money is a weed-using commie. I didn't even come here to defend GPL usage. I came here pointing out this lawyer's argument is totally invalid. She's trying to make sense of nonsense with charismatic speeches like this is the republican presidential race
businesses now must accelerate their move to the cloud where everything can be controlled (...). Consumers can expect to find decreasing options to own anything for themselves, decreasing options to control their data, decreasing options to protect their privacy.
No! No! And no!
On the cloud, not everything can be controlled. Especially not related with fair use vs commercial use! Are you telling me the fact I am using a cloud service during work hours on a work IP is gonna grant a SaaS provider that I am using the service for commercial reasons? Can't I edit a private document in Word or check my free Outlook email on my work PCs now, even if my work is on a BYOD policy? WTF! This is bollocks right there.
And it continues being bollocks when you tell me I don't own a service I actually purchased for the web! When people buy an online game, and online text/presentation/spreadsheet editor (e.g. Office 365), there is a license that states very well that ownership lasts as long as the service can be provided by the provider, and/or has a fixed, unquestionable time frame such as a 1 year license! Despite this being time-limited ownership, IT IS OWNERSHIP! Stop arguing that people have to be bound to a physical object (a CD/DVD) that has to work to full extent OFFLINE for it to be called ownserhip! Even Oracle knows that and it uses SaaS for most of its core business, and it's not even a recent practice - they been doing this for the last 2 decades! (even when they didn't use cloud services, you pretty much had to have Oracle support for maintaining anything on production every N-months or so!). Want me to blow your mind? Time-shares are ownership. From wikipedia: "A timeshare (sometimes called vacation ownership) is a property with a particular form of ownership or use rights." BAM!
Finally, stop arguing about data control and user privacy like you invented the thing! You're a lawyer lady, you know there's no such thing as privacy in a country with the Patriot Act and the Snowden leaks. You just used widespread, catch-all internet and policy issues to justify a circumvention of your (clients') flawed GPL licencing, and by flawed I mean that Oracle made it to protect a solid royalty revenue, and then it simply didn't! Don't call out civilization's evolutionary problems to fix THAT mess! Tell your client to learn from their mistakes. Or simply to drop the patent-troll scheme like most commercial companies like to do now: buy a FOSS company in order to nullify competition by making it non-FOSS. Because unlike that "loss of privacy induced by cloud/SaaS gold rush induced by dual-licensing issues", that is an ACTUAL PROBLEM!
Once again I come here to defend my Fitbit Charge HR: I'm trying to lose weight, and it works great for keeping a gross measure of calorie burn vs intake. Its "imprecise" HRM is a lot better than a step counter at counting calories spent, even on average - even if the instantaneous heart rate is 10-20 BPM off from the actual one, you're likely still in the zone it uses to calculate calories. And it isn't off that long from my own experience. I have simultaneously used twice or "thrice" a Charge HR, Mi Band Pulse and chest HRM on workout sessions, and despite both imaging-based devices rarely being on the same as the chest one, they correct themselves to "close enough" status after seconds, and you don't change zones in seconds. The Fitbit is much better than the Mi Band as it clearly scans with a much higher frequency (I can see just from the leds lighting more often on exercise mode on both). At the end of the day, apps that use the chest monitor will basically provide the same calorie output as both the Charge and the Mi Band. I believe all this ruckus from over-expectationers is because they couldn't distinguish the type of product they were buying - people in the cities, more likely to purchase such devices are also more prone to use gyms and practice amateur sports, thus require better accuracy found in a chest HRM. But in part, this was also Fitbit's mistake: selling the product as such and targeting a market too focused on unimportant markers such as second-accurate BPMs.
Something I forgot to mention: I believe the main problem is Xiaomi is mainly present on markets with very bad information gathering methodologies. They are mostly popular in China, India and southern asian neighbors, Russia and east-europe. From some connections I got, they also have an arm and leg in south america, as south america is all in for the drop-shipping "scams" from people who abuse the low prices in china retailers like gearbest and set up "virtual shops" that just mediate transactions at a cost, and Xiaomi is a very popular brand as it's the most reliable Chinese phone maker today imho.
With that said, I believe the information provided might be accurate in whatever scope it was provided. I just believe that scope is probably not fit for Fortune's affirmations or even the source they quote, and this is why the information was retracted. I just wouldn't publish bull out of my editorial hat if I had very solid facts that information is inconsistently true.
First of all, I never mentioned I only trusted Chinese sources. The article itself cites chinese sources, but faiIs to provide links as they state themselves the links were removed. How fun it would be if we could all go and start outing news in the ways of "a very official source said this but then they retracted it so it must be true". We don't even know the whys of this retraction, who knows, maybe they were even wrong! I do agree about misleading information coming from China, but they didn't start out on misinformation campaigns, the US did way back in the 1920's. Hell, even European news agency space is tainted by corporate and polittical influence. Full disclaimer: I am european. The problem is this is coming from a source clearly american and clearly bound to american economy (it's in the name after all...), and what is usually a decent, fact-based publication is now basing its articles on hearsay from Xiaomi. This is bull. I'll wait eargerly for public data, which they will have to make available for investors in a proper way, not this half-assed "leak" Fortune is bragging about.
As someone deeply invested in researching and using Xiaomi devices, and having felt their quality over the years, I believe this news to be utter bull. Sources are all american. Xiaomi did a lot in 2015, its doing a lot in 2016, and that affects revenue. If someone told me they made less profit, I would be totally OK with that because they launch products like rabbits, but whoever believes Xiaomi isn't growing in revenue must be dumb or attempting to influence the market with speculation. Xiaomi has it all: it as a very decent brand, a great product line up, amazing pricing AND availability, even despite not making its devices available internationally (sites like gearbest take care of that high cost for them, and we, the final consumer use them indiscriminately). It is flat out impossible this brand made less revenue than in 2014 - they launched the Mi4, but the OnePlus killed its market for most of 2014. The S6 came right after. If they managed to make 135% revenue with the low season of 2014, considering those 2 very successful devices came right before or during prime season, I highly doubt the very uneventful 2015 (for most other brands) could have killed them. I mean, they released about 6 of the most interesting devices for the low-mid range: Redmi 2 and 3, Redmi Note 2 and 3, the Mi4 cheap variants 4s and 4c (this one being one of my favourite devices ever on the market as it matches a N5x for half price at launch, and still gives it a run for the money despite de N5X price cut). And this is just the mobile side of the thing. I am sure they are making gazillions with the old and new Mi bands, and I don't even have to mention the weird products they launch in the market, from water purifiers, passing through wifi routers, smart TVs, smart TV boxes, to audiophile-graded headphones like the Piston 3 or the hybrids (seriously, they're praised in places like head-fi forums, it has to mean something). I don't believe they are even making less profit, let alone less revenue. Prove me wrong, I dare you internet
Subject says it all. Somebody didn't think the least bit about the implications of generally sharing private passwords.
But you did like Win(dows)amp right? I'm just gonna take the opportunity to say I didn't even bother with skins, the default one was the best, and I know there were good ones but why fix something that's not broken. You can't compare apps, they're different ecosystems. Man, even the unix folder structure was an anti-pattern for Winamp's usage pattern.
In any case, Winamp was the shyte because:
1. Timing: it was like the first (or first 2-3) mp3 players back in the day, certainly the first to be actually usable day to day
2. Features: the controls, the equalizer, the visualizations, the fast playlist load times no matter the size (I remember having 10's of thousands of contemporary, music, classical, OSTs on shuffle and it simply didn't hog, and all I had to do was drag and drop that big ass MUSIC folder in there. Instant joy. It didn't hog skipping, pausing, resuming songs. It had the very first REAL gapless playback which was essential for all them house/electronica compilations and/or concept albums that just needed it for the experience. The equalizer presets were just on point for most tastes and even customizing it was easy and provided UI and sound feedback necessary for noticing what you were doing (it did lag a bit, but it still is hard processing signal in real time, and it managed well)
3. that radio. Man that radio. Shoutcast still has no comparison despite falling into oblivion, and it laid the foundation for all things streaming. It might not have been the first, once again, but was THE go to radio app
But most of all, the fact we still talk about Winamp is the reason why it is, or was, so great - it was that application that didn't come bundled with your OS, but would be one of the 10 first to install and the only one you would keep magazine shareware CDs around for (even more than notepads, total commanders and zip/rar suites). It was the only app you didn't care for super updated versions because any single one would magically click to your usage. Even in the odd instances when they might have failed. E.g. when they decided to set the media library and/or the video/visualization window shown by default, cluttering your common experience, they had an easy way to remove it - a simple X on each individual window. No deep menus to go through for most important stuff. EVEN THOUGH IT WAS NOT CLUTTERED AT ALL!
+1 for Winamp. I sense a media player war coming in this comment section. Foobar lover flaming in 3..2...
seriously, it's been some time I laughed so hard from a headline. A perfect fitting for "itz funny cuz itz tru"
Yeap, you got all the point I initially made and then some. And the answer to your question is..: "Yes, you're supposed to buy new stuff that isn't compatible with anything so you have to buy new anythings again, if not for the fact that it saves us hardware minor costs (placing them on you) and you improve the economy going which keeps technology like this flowing". By economy they meant their pockets full, and by technology flowing they meant standardization by nonsense. They just want you to eat their crap basically, at a premium, and with that gourmet feeling all over. You know, like Apple does.
I had a feeling I shouldn't have dropped the audiophile bomb... Talk about stiring up a hornet's nest. Time to move to the next topic. :P
So I guess it's not Intel, but Intel pushers that want this. But there are a lot of cost/space advantages for reusing a port and dropping a DAC. Headphones will be more expensive though as the DAC will have to be on their side.
I want to see their faces when they clash with the music production and entertainment industry, and the now vogue audiophile (...and pseudo-audiophile) community. They may well attempt to do so in the consumer world, but premium audio is all the rage these days and people won't want to downplay their expensive, high-res audio streaming services due to hardware companies wanting to save on ports, space, and that cumbersome DAC that occupies as much board as a 3g module. And yeah, I know the source is digital and the conversion process is lossy. But you go tell that to them vinyl lovers
I'm excited to see what adblock will do with them.
Dear fossil-fuel car makers,
Go electric. Seriously. Stop whining about government overreach on stuff that can actually save the planet instead of, say, making you feel bad for paying 100k taxes on a 300k salary. At least this one you know for sure exists for a scientific reason, as there is no other explanation on why a government would limit emissions.
Some guy ending with Musk.
in Japan they got this bad habit of spewing it all out when the shit first hits the fan. It's some sort of "first-fail atonement", deeply instilled in their culture, which in my humble opinion, is better practice than elsewhere. When you do the "bad thing", odds to get caught are around the sub-10% as you take measures to hide it, but by the time you get caught, odds are you're gonna get caught so they sky-rocket to 99%+ for all other instances of the event that can be analyzed. So why really trust in that meager, uncontrollable 1% that will keep sinking you when you can just apologize for all past, present and future instances of the event? Better just to spit it all out since the milk has already been spilled than have that corrosive loss of confidence haunt you forever. It's actually the best damage control you can do. Nothing like what Volkswagen is doing to be honest - VW won't admit the problem likely exists in other models before 2009. They are also just "patching" really awfully the problem, with a patch that suits emission policy, but that surreptitiously harms the consumer by reducing original power/economy spec, which made the consumer buy the product. It's like they are swiping all the dirt under the rug with the worst possible mop they had lying around, and that rug is already bulgy with previous dirt they hope will stay covered.
As someone said already, it is with great regret that real offenders get away with doing something that is universally unethical at the highest order (if you take into account some religions are pretty unethical...). Yet the fact they have to resort to such "techniques" is the pinnacle of hypocrisy - they are, ultimately, helping these offenders TWO-FOLD. They are running the site creating conditions to prosecute for one, and now there's evidence exclusion... I don't fancy a state using easy-to-through-out-of-court measures that will pretty much question the next case against the individuals. They will play it safe afterwards - they know they're watched now - and that's bad for us all as they won't get caught so easily. They are pretty much making a case to DEFEND sexual offenders with these techniques and that really hits my nerves.
With that said, I will transpose this to something much less important, yet more broad: online piracy. There are currently tens, maybe hundreds of websites run by the MPAA, the RIAA, and their henchmen, who will eventually use collected data for the sake of their business. They are obviously supplying, tampering with but also gathering the torrenting habits of all unsuspecting users. Two actual examplea comes to mind: PopcornTime's original domain, which was part of a deal struck between the prosecuted operators and effectively found to be owned by the MPAA; and of course a lot of torrent trackers and usenet aggregators also "seized" with such types of deals. So the question is: will the same principle the judge used apply here? I mean, this won't probably even go to court, and that's an issue - harbored by the DMCA et al, the MPAA/RIAA/henchmen can just directly affect the offender by notifying him or his ISP, who has to comply. And they don't even need a court order to "run" the illegal service, as they can defend themselves the same way the original operators could, with the added fact they won't sue themselves over it!
I know it was a big rant, and ultimately pointless as I just state facts. But it does make one guy think of the nuances around the orthodox American habit of MAKING CONDITIONS TO PROSECUTE, as opposed to, you know, finding evidence of wrongdoing, and then prosecuting. John Woo's Minority Report also comes to mind...
You actually made me think of the worst possible insult you can get from management: "I have lost confidence in your work" (or "the team's work capacity"). When you know a manager's work is to manage expectations and balance work on the team, you know your below acceptable levels when someone high up tells you they can't trust in your work. This is also when you know you won't have much leverage asking for that raise or benefits, pretty much forcing you to switch companies or even career to avoid stagnation.
... or "too much POJO usage in detriment of basic patterns". To me, as an OOP developer (Java mostly), this is so much more hurting than any single word/expression criticism. If there's something I don't like is someone to tell me I code like somebody who knows the language basics, has the intellect to get things done, but doesn't know the ways to make it standardized. At the same time it is also something I will look for in a quality developer, so in practice I'm only really offended by others saying stuff like that because I see it as an actual flaw. So there's that.
I disagree. There isn't a single feature of my Charge HR I haven't come to appreciate because it wouldn't be matched by features and usability with smartphone interaction. I can't say the same for an iWatch - every feature the Charge HR does'nt match the iWatch, I would rather do on the smartphone or even a PC. And that's the potential value of a wrist wearable, and indirectly the iWatch problem. When you take the toll of "wearing" something, you have to extract the pros of its usability versus the con of actually wearing it, charging it, and buying it. That's one of the reasons Google Glass failed, and it's one of the reasons augmented/VR will take time gaining traction (as I do see a lot of the potential value I'm talking about in things like Occulus or Microsoft Hololens).
I share some thoughts on why the Charge HR makes so much sense to me as opposed to an iWatch on another comment.
I'm the proud owner of a 4-6day bettery-lasting Charge HR, with daily 1 to 1:30h activities/training sessions (which monitors HR every 3), with the whole 9 yards activated: sleep monitor ON; Heart Rate ON (as opposed to auto); call notifications On (with encryption); all day sync; always connected. I even have a daily silent alarms which I let ring to full most times. Every option is super battery optimized even with their warnings, and if any of these does affect performance, they're probably "all day sync" and "always connected" options, which I found to have no effect on user experience at all, so I will randomly shut them off with no real impact. For instance, all day sync's only benefit is to get immediate feedback when switching on the app, with the most updated info without sync (sync itself would last like 10 seconds without it), and "always connected" will give me a call notification 3 seconds sooner than it would provide turned off, which is a non-issue as I can always call back anyway. But even with them all On I will profit 1 day tops of battery, and that's why I digress on having them Off.
Back on topic: So, even though I can't really compare this to an iWatch's full feature set, it does compare on the "things I really need from a smart wrist wearable", with the added benefit of that unmatched Fitbit app (and web app). And man do I like having the peace of mind of a device that rarely dies on me, either on normal usage or while cycling. Add the fact that I wouldn't cry a whole lot if I lost it or got mugged because it costs 1/3 of the price of a full-fledged smartwatch.
Granted, spec-by-spec there is better stuff out there, but nothing really comes close to the usability, experience and "price-per-satisfaction" of owning a Charge HR. Except maybe a Mi Band 1S. If you really want to save big, don't mind the lack of a screen, or spending 1 dollar on a market app that does what the official one doesn't (Mi Band Tools), you can go a long way with the new Xiaomi tracker, which I happen to own and really see some benefits over that "screen gimmick" type smart bracelets like my Fitbit. The screen is only a pro until you notice you can enable vibrations for heart rate zones, and you only have to charge the Mi Band every 25-30 days or so... As compared to the 4-6 days of the Charge HR, or DAILY with [insert any iOS/Android/Tizen smartwatch here]. Maybe a Pebble with HR would also fit my needs, but I can't comment on ownership of that one.
Because a new console generation will already be out in 1.5 years, and Sony will probably have its iteration ready in 2-3 years. As Microsoft is evolving, I believe in 4 years Win 7 will still have at least 30% user-base on Windows platforms, and I know pretty much for sure I will still be on it. I'm not living in the past, I do everything I want and I can pretty much do most of what people on 10 do with 7, except remote play on PS4 apparently. Sony should spend R&D on 7 because every product is on obsolescence track but Win7 will still be here strong in 4 years. It is not going to drop off the map, it's just gonna be painted out of it a bit more than it should because of business decisions.
Don't know about you, but my Windows machine is still on 7. I play games, I value performance, compatibility, stability, and my damn privacy. Supposedly it still is supported as I use it on an Ivy Bridge CPU (as it now depends on CPU architecture... yeah). Unfortunately, I'm sure Sony will argue it's all about Miracast not existing per say in 7, to which I say: "F*CK YOU", I have a Widi or whatever you call it now-compatible GPU, which is exactly the same fkin thing as Miracast. I'm gonna go ahead and call bull on both MS and Sony wanting to drive the consumer base to worse products, which have "THAT hardware degradation upgrade" or "THAT version-restricted upgrade which costs us 1 line of code to retro-support but it's your problem" written all over. And I'm not one for such conspiracy theories - I like innovation, and I now it takes a toll on hardware, but it sure as FCK isn't by using 10 over 8, 8.1 or 7, and to a lesser degree it also isn't going from Ivy Bridge to Skylake, as we all know Moore's Law is breaking harshly. Even Intel is admitting it in a way, and they make business from forcing people to upgrade. Current CPU benefits over 4 year-ago machines is close to none in most consumer-centric scopes, especially when compared to secondary memory advancements (read: SSD reliability & performance). And the only things I don't see working on 7 are things Microsoft has 0 technological basis not to launch them on 7. Or even 8.x for that matter. To me its pretty clear: this feature is just bells and whistles for the casual guy who was on the fence for a PS4 because he mostly spent time on the PC while the missus was watching E on the big screen. Or the husband, let's not be sexist.