Please? This drip and dribble of single techs to extend the smartphone is maddening. Just unify the blessed things and give everyone a medical tricorder already!
There may be some edge cases for the uninformed but almost everything taken out of Chrome has an impact on the bottom line for Alphabet.
Stripped out options for not automatically running javascript, html5 video, and made it more difficult to monitor locally stored data. I'm waiting for them to get rid of extensions so we can't have our ad & tracker blockers running.
The baggage scanners use some sort of high powered x-ray back-scatter that can detect explosives.
Sometimes...the rate of false positives is above what should be acceptable in this sort of situation but since the TSA is a jobs program they're letting that slide by.
The Hollywood business is currently driven by metrics that put incredible emphasis on the immediate payout over the long-term health of franchises and eventual returns that used to come with home video sales. Part of this has been driven by the digitization of movies and music and part of it is the marketing of instant gratification.
Much of this has to do with Wall Street's insistence for quarterly returns since this is where movie studios have to go to if they want the cash to make them. It's also why you've seen movie budgets both explode and shrink at the same time. The banks want their money at a return rate which would make most mobsters blush. If you're not going to produce a hit that will, at minimum, return triple its costs then you'll not get financed. On the other hand if you can keep the costs down in the single digit millions, then plain curiosity during opening weekend will likely see profit.
The stuff in the middle doesn't return fast enough for anyone to care about getting it made. Forty million for a movie these days? Forget it. Hollywood can't make the guarantees it can with a budget of two-hundred million. You want the movie to grow an audience through word of mouth? Forget it. Hollywood doesn't have the patience for that to happen. It needs the numbers to come up in the black inside of the next twelve weeks, not in the next two years.
Still don't know what a "Ghost rider" is or why the CIA leaks link is relevant, but that's how they're skirting regulators.
Okay. That's starting to make some sense. I missed the bit you pointed out. Given what you found + ghost rider it sounds like the app was putting fake people into cars and directing the driver elsewhere.
Now, how they knew when a sting was happening or when an assault was being planned are different questions that should also be answered. Because if they have some nifty prognostication software I'd like to look. Otherwise, they were outright spying on people, somehow.
I went to the fine article and I still can't tell what is being argued over. What's a ghost driver? What does Greyball do, exactly and how does it thwart oversight? None of that is clear anywhere! I'm used to figuring things out given context but the context is so dense or missing I can't tell what is going on or why.
BTW: The second link is not germane to the conversation. It's bringing up the CIA leak from earlier this week, not the Uber article.
Seriously, unless you're part of a big corp with big corp lawyers and money behind you why develop for Apple? You have to buy your way into their walled garden, give up a significant portion of sales to them, and be put through an obscured process to get approval to be published in a store. Which, if you're lucky enough to hit on something that's both novel and popular, is going to fill up with a bunch of clones within days of the first hint of success.
If you're not doing it for the fun of being repeatedly punched in the face, what are you doing it for?
Not only that but it gives our society a chance to ask some good questions. Such as, "Does work really matter?" and "Why must a person earn a living?". When for all practical purposes our base necessities are taken care of automatically, why should anyone labor?
I think that question is something a lot of the very wealthy, and mostly those who are newly wealthy, are afraid of asking. If not more than a little jealous of.
I'm certain this scratches a certain itch for some of their customers but the only reason any console is allowed in my house is because of the stupid exclusive games anymore. And you know, I'm not all that upset at it. Used to be, but it's too much energy to be angry at that stuff. I'd rather be putting that energy into having fun playing the games.
So, you know, hope someone has fun with this. It's not the best deal but it's better than nothing.
Oh goody. Maybe it's time for Uncle Dinosaur to show Mom & Dad just how much surveillance is going on and how much is bleeding through to other channels.
I'm not certain if your questions are rhetorical or not but I feel as though you should already know the answer to all of it is simply money.
That's the why of anything got built the way it did wrt browsers and so forth. I mean there is a colorful history and complex humans behind it all, but a lot of the motivation comes back to money and what it moves in our society.
And if you think advertisers actually left things up to chance before, you would be mistaken. Magazines were invented to get into niches to advertise. Hobbyists have had to deal with that for years. Their feelings of ownership of eyeballs comes with the disgusting amounts of money spent on getting copy in front of those same eyes. It's an actual industry after all.
I just don't know how many occupations there are that the normal job state is being in one place the entire day. Sounds horrifying.
Those that are quite horrifying. I'm thinking call center jobs or any such service level position. Ones where you are not measured by how well you resolve the customer's issue but how many calls you get through and how quickly you do it.
These are jobs which devalue and degrade you fast if you don't buy into their antisocial focus. There are reasons these jobs have been packaged up and forced into contracted companies. It changes their nature. Your job is no longer to assist the people calling, as they aren't your customers. Your customer is the company paying you to get through as many calls as possible. That's messed up.
Yes, but what kind of efficiency? You're making a ton of assumptions that being at a desk, in a meeting room, or elsewhere leads to work being done, which leads eventually to profit. Work rarely is so attached to anything of the like that attempting to measure an individual's output for anything other than CO2 production is a waste of time, money, and thought.
Work, as we all know it, has been as industrialized as it possibly can be. And not everything that could be put into some sort of process needs it. Part of work is knowing where things can lead, it's following your instincts since you're supposed to be familiar with what you're doing.
And then there's the whole being valued by what work you do. That whole thing where your personal worth and wealth is directly tied to how "good" you're viewed as. Wealth as a virtue signaling! How sickening is that? How messed up as a society to you have to become to think that way?
People forget things all the time. At some point you are going to forget where or what the key is for your encrypted email, so what to do? Recovery of that key is going to be necessary. Which leads to an entire host of other problems, many of which are security related.
So yeah, until memory becomes infallible we're stuck with encrypted emails having a certain amount of pain that comes along with them.
Along those lines, I think it may be time to return to the grotesque, detailed art that came from Zap Comixs, R. Crumb, and the other underground creators. Those are going to be the people closest to the metal (so to speak) in what the crowds are feeling. Hopefully the shocking expressions will be enough to get people unsettled enough to keep up the protests and calling their congress critters.
Because trade isn't solely about making the rich richer.
It's also about creating ties at the human level. The level where people matter and count. See? Immigration is the best way to safeguard a nation against attack. Who wants to attack their own? Those nations that restrict their immigration don't have that protection, they don't have the reasons to not do stupid things and wage war against their neighbors.
By having this program, we get some pretty smart people to come here and start families. We get them used to the idea of how nice we have it and either they find a way to stick around or they take those ideas back home with them. If they stick around? That's beautiful. It helps us. Them becoming a citizen or green card holder only makes all that better. And if they return? Where do you think ideas for the student protest at Tiananmen square came from? Or the urge for the Arab spring? It came from having a taste from a work or student visa.
War sucks. War is bad. We want to avoid war, any war, at just about any cost.
And so does under-employment. I know because I've been there. So does seeing someone you know doing better because of seeming random chance.
But war sucks more. Cutting off routes for immigration starts us down that road as a nation. Fewer people will come here. Fewer people will have a reason to avoid thinking poorly of us. Which are just further steps down that road towards war.
Immigration pays for itself many times over. Not just economically but in very real, very social ways.
That's what he wants. It's what he needs to feel important and the more you give into it, the more he's going to keep doing these stupid, stupid things.
This isn't about getting more Americans employed. It's about punishing people who wouldn't kowtow to him and his corrupt cronies. It's about hurting those he thinks need to be hurt.
He doesn't understand the world or how it works. He couldn't care less about you or I or how well we are employed. Neither can anyone else in his administration. Don't fool yourself into thinking that is a good thing. It's not. It's only going to hurt us more and more each day it goes on. It's going to hurt the prestige of the nation. It's going to hurt the economic prospects going forward. It's going to affect each and everyone of us in subtle and not so subtle ways. It already has.
Hate to break it to you but they don't go from the masters to vinyl. They send the mix to be pressed. That's the way it's worked since multi-channel stereo became the norm.
AFAIK, you can't get the unmixed masters even if you wanted to.
It's supposed to demoralize the front-line people. It's supposed to make them hate every second with the customers. This isn't a big revelation. It's applied psychology being used for anti-social ends.
The ends which state that time is money.
For every second you're not selling, you're costing someone money. For every second you're not adding value to that sale, you're costing someone money. For every second you're spending getting to know that other human, you're wasting someone else's money. That's how retail works now. How's it's been working for the past 15 years or so when those got first introduced. It was never about getting someone to better themselves. It was always about manipulation.
I'm going to sound like an old man but there was a time when all Chrome was aiming for was to be fast and lean. And it was able to be that. Something changed and now Google wants to use it for more than that. Which is when these sorts of things always go to shit. We saw it with IE, which was always shit but it got even more shit to everyone's surprise. Firefox keeps going through cycles of shittiness. Ug.
It wasn't a engineering problem that was at fault, it was an aesthetic one. Trying to make things too thin and too fragile all in the name of keeping up with Apple. Samsung over-engineered the housing where any imperfection in the battery used could cause trouble. And imperfections did cause trouble. Imperfections, if reports are to be believed, that should have been well tolerated.
So maybe it's time to back off the thinness race and, you know, work on creating a unique look and feel.
Slashdot Mirror
Please? This drip and dribble of single techs to extend the smartphone is maddening. Just unify the blessed things and give everyone a medical tricorder already!
There may be some edge cases for the uninformed but almost everything taken out of Chrome has an impact on the bottom line for Alphabet.
Stripped out options for not automatically running javascript, html5 video, and made it more difficult to monitor locally stored data. I'm waiting for them to get rid of extensions so we can't have our ad & tracker blockers running.
The baggage scanners use some sort of high powered x-ray back-scatter that can detect explosives.
Sometimes...the rate of false positives is above what should be acceptable in this sort of situation but since the TSA is a jobs program they're letting that slide by.
The Hollywood business is currently driven by metrics that put incredible emphasis on the immediate payout over the long-term health of franchises and eventual returns that used to come with home video sales. Part of this has been driven by the digitization of movies and music and part of it is the marketing of instant gratification.
Much of this has to do with Wall Street's insistence for quarterly returns since this is where movie studios have to go to if they want the cash to make them. It's also why you've seen movie budgets both explode and shrink at the same time. The banks want their money at a return rate which would make most mobsters blush. If you're not going to produce a hit that will, at minimum, return triple its costs then you'll not get financed. On the other hand if you can keep the costs down in the single digit millions, then plain curiosity during opening weekend will likely see profit.
The stuff in the middle doesn't return fast enough for anyone to care about getting it made. Forty million for a movie these days? Forget it. Hollywood can't make the guarantees it can with a budget of two-hundred million. You want the movie to grow an audience through word of mouth? Forget it. Hollywood doesn't have the patience for that to happen. It needs the numbers to come up in the black inside of the next twelve weeks, not in the next two years.
Still don't know what a "Ghost rider" is or why the CIA leaks link is relevant, but that's how they're skirting regulators.
Okay. That's starting to make some sense. I missed the bit you pointed out. Given what you found + ghost rider it sounds like the app was putting fake people into cars and directing the driver elsewhere.
Now, how they knew when a sting was happening or when an assault was being planned are different questions that should also be answered. Because if they have some nifty prognostication software I'd like to look. Otherwise, they were outright spying on people, somehow.
I went to the fine article and I still can't tell what is being argued over. What's a ghost driver? What does Greyball do, exactly and how does it thwart oversight? None of that is clear anywhere! I'm used to figuring things out given context but the context is so dense or missing I can't tell what is going on or why.
BTW: The second link is not germane to the conversation. It's bringing up the CIA leak from earlier this week, not the Uber article.
Seriously, unless you're part of a big corp with big corp lawyers and money behind you why develop for Apple? You have to buy your way into their walled garden, give up a significant portion of sales to them, and be put through an obscured process to get approval to be published in a store. Which, if you're lucky enough to hit on something that's both novel and popular, is going to fill up with a bunch of clones within days of the first hint of success.
If you're not doing it for the fun of being repeatedly punched in the face, what are you doing it for?
Not only that but it gives our society a chance to ask some good questions. Such as, "Does work really matter?" and "Why must a person earn a living?". When for all practical purposes our base necessities are taken care of automatically, why should anyone labor?
I think that question is something a lot of the very wealthy, and mostly those who are newly wealthy, are afraid of asking. If not more than a little jealous of.
I'm certain this scratches a certain itch for some of their customers but the only reason any console is allowed in my house is because of the stupid exclusive games anymore. And you know, I'm not all that upset at it. Used to be, but it's too much energy to be angry at that stuff. I'd rather be putting that energy into having fun playing the games.
So, you know, hope someone has fun with this. It's not the best deal but it's better than nothing.
Never going to happen.
Too many people want to get to that information. For various reasons. Some commercial, some investigative, some malignant.
Oh goody. Maybe it's time for Uncle Dinosaur to show Mom & Dad just how much surveillance is going on and how much is bleeding through to other channels.
I'm not certain if your questions are rhetorical or not but I feel as though you should already know the answer to all of it is simply money.
That's the why of anything got built the way it did wrt browsers and so forth. I mean there is a colorful history and complex humans behind it all, but a lot of the motivation comes back to money and what it moves in our society.
And if you think advertisers actually left things up to chance before, you would be mistaken. Magazines were invented to get into niches to advertise. Hobbyists have had to deal with that for years. Their feelings of ownership of eyeballs comes with the disgusting amounts of money spent on getting copy in front of those same eyes. It's an actual industry after all.
I just don't know how many occupations there are that the normal job state is being in one place the entire day. Sounds horrifying.
Those that are quite horrifying. I'm thinking call center jobs or any such service level position. Ones where you are not measured by how well you resolve the customer's issue but how many calls you get through and how quickly you do it.
These are jobs which devalue and degrade you fast if you don't buy into their antisocial focus. There are reasons these jobs have been packaged up and forced into contracted companies. It changes their nature. Your job is no longer to assist the people calling, as they aren't your customers. Your customer is the company paying you to get through as many calls as possible. That's messed up.
Proponents claim the goal is efficiency
Yes, but what kind of efficiency? You're making a ton of assumptions that being at a desk, in a meeting room, or elsewhere leads to work being done, which leads eventually to profit. Work rarely is so attached to anything of the like that attempting to measure an individual's output for anything other than CO2 production is a waste of time, money, and thought.
Work, as we all know it, has been as industrialized as it possibly can be. And not everything that could be put into some sort of process needs it. Part of work is knowing where things can lead, it's following your instincts since you're supposed to be familiar with what you're doing.
And then there's the whole being valued by what work you do. That whole thing where your personal worth and wealth is directly tied to how "good" you're viewed as. Wealth as a virtue signaling! How sickening is that? How messed up as a society to you have to become to think that way?
Fight this sort of bullshit. Fight it hard.
People forget things all the time. At some point you are going to forget where or what the key is for your encrypted email, so what to do? Recovery of that key is going to be necessary. Which leads to an entire host of other problems, many of which are security related.
So yeah, until memory becomes infallible we're stuck with encrypted emails having a certain amount of pain that comes along with them.
When the going gets weird, the weird turns pro.
Along those lines, I think it may be time to return to the grotesque, detailed art that came from Zap Comixs, R. Crumb, and the other underground creators. Those are going to be the people closest to the metal (so to speak) in what the crowds are feeling. Hopefully the shocking expressions will be enough to get people unsettled enough to keep up the protests and calling their congress critters.
It does make a difference.
Because trade isn't solely about making the rich richer.
It's also about creating ties at the human level. The level where people matter and count. See? Immigration is the best way to safeguard a nation against attack. Who wants to attack their own? Those nations that restrict their immigration don't have that protection, they don't have the reasons to not do stupid things and wage war against their neighbors.
By having this program, we get some pretty smart people to come here and start families. We get them used to the idea of how nice we have it and either they find a way to stick around or they take those ideas back home with them. If they stick around? That's beautiful. It helps us. Them becoming a citizen or green card holder only makes all that better. And if they return? Where do you think ideas for the student protest at Tiananmen square came from? Or the urge for the Arab spring? It came from having a taste from a work or student visa.
War sucks. War is bad. We want to avoid war, any war, at just about any cost.
And so does under-employment. I know because I've been there. So does seeing someone you know doing better because of seeming random chance.
But war sucks more. Cutting off routes for immigration starts us down that road as a nation. Fewer people will come here. Fewer people will have a reason to avoid thinking poorly of us. Which are just further steps down that road towards war.
Immigration pays for itself many times over. Not just economically but in very real, very social ways.
That's what he wants. It's what he needs to feel important and the more you give into it, the more he's going to keep doing these stupid, stupid things.
This isn't about getting more Americans employed. It's about punishing people who wouldn't kowtow to him and his corrupt cronies. It's about hurting those he thinks need to be hurt.
He doesn't understand the world or how it works. He couldn't care less about you or I or how well we are employed. Neither can anyone else in his administration. Don't fool yourself into thinking that is a good thing. It's not. It's only going to hurt us more and more each day it goes on. It's going to hurt the prestige of the nation. It's going to hurt the economic prospects going forward. It's going to affect each and everyone of us in subtle and not so subtle ways. It already has.
Now I have to wonder when the Greatest Nation on Earth is going to do the same.
Oh. I forgot myself for a moment. It's profit over people. All the people, all the time.
Hate to break it to you but they don't go from the masters to vinyl. They send the mix to be pressed. That's the way it's worked since multi-channel stereo became the norm.
AFAIK, you can't get the unmixed masters even if you wanted to.
It's supposed to demoralize the front-line people. It's supposed to make them hate every second with the customers. This isn't a big revelation. It's applied psychology being used for anti-social ends.
The ends which state that time is money.
For every second you're not selling, you're costing someone money. For every second you're not adding value to that sale, you're costing someone money. For every second you're spending getting to know that other human, you're wasting someone else's money. That's how retail works now. How's it's been working for the past 15 years or so when those got first introduced. It was never about getting someone to better themselves. It was always about manipulation.
to have a mainstream browser just be a browser?
I'm going to sound like an old man but there was a time when all Chrome was aiming for was to be fast and lean. And it was able to be that. Something changed and now Google wants to use it for more than that. Which is when these sorts of things always go to shit. We saw it with IE, which was always shit but it got even more shit to everyone's surprise. Firefox keeps going through cycles of shittiness. Ug.
alone in their "brave" design and not had to deal with this particular mess which keeps coming back to bug them.
But what do I know? I'm not an exec trying to make their quarterly projections.
it was supposed to be slotted into was too small.
It wasn't a engineering problem that was at fault, it was an aesthetic one. Trying to make things too thin and too fragile all in the name of keeping up with Apple. Samsung over-engineered the housing where any imperfection in the battery used could cause trouble. And imperfections did cause trouble. Imperfections, if reports are to be believed, that should have been well tolerated.
So maybe it's time to back off the thinness race and, you know, work on creating a unique look and feel.
there's nothing else to talk about. /THREAD