Purely objectively, Apple has the most closed combination of hardware, software and ecosystem of any mobile platform, and it always has had, and the trend is clearly further in that direction including with the battery issue we're discussing here. I'm not "dragging Apple into this". They dragged themselves into it by making themselves by some way the best example of my point.
Whereas for example the 3rd generation iPad I have on the desk next to me gets noticeably worse battery life today than it had when new. It could just be that the newer version of iOS now running on it is bad at power management, but given the steady degradation over time rather than a sharp drop after updating the software, decaying battery performance seems a far more plausible explanation.
YMMV, but even if it does, physics is still physics.
Indeed, but as far as I know none of the big name smartphones have that sort of option at the moment (though I'd be happy to discover I've overlooked one that does). If anything, the big brands all seem to be pushing as hard as possible in the other direction, with as close as they can get to no external connectivity except wirelessly via their own preferred services/networks/whatever. They're pretty much stuck with having a power cable, but if routine wireless charging becomes viable I expect your phone will be a completely sealed unit in hardware, software and ecosystem as fast as the likes of Apple can get it there.
Ah, sorry, apparently I'd jumped context and missed the unusual use of "prioritised" to mean "deprioritised" in this particular subthread. Scratch my previous comment, then.
Personally, I'd find it attractive just for having a removable (and therefore also replaceable) battery, which is something a lot of the recent generation of smartphones don't have. Batteries for mobile devices degrade over time.
There may be potential privacy/security advantages to this sort of modular system as well, which for some people could be significant. For example, my company normally won't surrender an electronic device that could have had sensitive data stored on it. If such a device breaks and can't be repaired without losing custody of it, it's securely destroyed and replaced. This more often affects things like hard drives, and therefore creates a bias towards business-grade suppliers who understand the restriction and won't expect a dead drive to be returned. However, a mobile device where say a broken screen or failed battery could be replaced without having to give up the whole phone complete with potential access credentials to a company VPN or sensitive customer data could also be more attractive for the same reason.
It looks like they're using almost vanilla Android. Wouldn't you just upgrade if that was a concern? Given the issue of big name brands not offering timely upgrades for their software, it's hard to imagine a phone like this being significantly worse over its useful lifetime.
Why does something have to give rather than everything having to give.
Because some applications are more sensitive to latency than others. Something happening in real time, such as gaming, a VOIP call, or streaming a video, will be more disrupted by frequent minor delays than a bulk data transfer like backing up 100G of data from office servers to an off-site location overnight.
When the roads become congested, the authorities do not restrict the number of vehicles allowed onto the road or only allow cars and prohibit trucks.
Maybe your roads work differently, but over here in the UK, we do this all the time.
Many popular areas have dedicated lanes to prioritise various forms of transport considered a high priority in congested periods: buses, taxis, cycles, and so on.
We have a variety of systems for prioritising emergency vehicles, from the obvious lights and sirens, through exempting them from various laws that would cause delays, to providing special equipment at junctions so the lights turn green ahead of the emergency vehicle to allow blocking traffic to clear quicker.
We have congestion charging and road tolls in some areas, which is partly added to moderate demand at busy times (though there's a fair argument that it's also quite a cash cow for the authority operating the affected roads, which is why this type of measure is more controversial).
As you mentioned yourself, sometimes trucks are also restricted. There are some places they aren't allowed to go or aren't allowed to stop for loading/unloading at certain times. On our high speed roads, some areas also specifically prohibit overtaking by HGVs at busy times to avoid bottlenecking smaller, faster vehicles excessively.
So it's actually not true at all that all the traffic on the roads is slowed at busy times. In fact, the roads here make an excellent example of both the advantages and, sometimes, the problems with a "traffic shaping" system.
Apply priority to 95% of clients and priority doesn't mean anything anymore
Actually it does, but probably not in a good way: it means the other 5% of clients are losing out, perhaps heavily.
Avoiding this scenario -- keeping in mind that a huge proportion of all Internet traffic is generated by a relatively small number of businesses today, and all the little guys between them might only make up 5% of total traffic -- is a large part of why Net Neutrality matters.
That's what most of the internet used to be. There's still some of it left, but the percentage isn't high.
Fortunately, we don't need a high signal to noise ratio, we just need a useful absolute level of signal.:-)
I too have run various sites over the years just for some combination of personal satisfaction and maybe helping or entertaining others with common interests. It's kind of a shame that ISPs don't seem to routinely supply your own web space as part of the deal any more, so you have to go looking for some separate hosting. That means a lot of stuff gets dumped on sites like Facebook or Medium or Pinterest. The alternative is to pay real money to a hosting service, which as you say isn't a lot for most people, but it's still real money.
Personally I'd quite like it if the search engines could prioritise sites that just provide good quality content without ads, so good enthusiast/community sites could enjoy the profile they deserve, but somehow I don't see Google ever doing that...
It's certainly true that good, responsible advertising can be beneficial all round. After all, if someone invents the best product/service since sliced bread for some niche market, how is anyone in that market who would be interested in having that product/service supposed to find out about it without some form of advertising?
As you say, the trouble is that on-line ads are often so... well, evil. And the trouble with hoping to change that is that the evilness makes them much, much more cost-effective. It seems likely there is a more healthy balance to be found somewhere in the middle, but I don't know whether it will be possible to achieve it in practice because the potentially evil qualities of on-line ads tend to be all-or-nothing propositions.
The thing is, it isn't the customers driving the bad habits in advertising. Those who buy advertising want it to be effective, but aren't really too well clued in as to how this happens.
This is due, at least in part, to the opaque systems operated by big advertising platforms like Google and Facebook.
I run some small businesses. We don't have huge ad budgets, so we've experimented with a lot of different platforms to see what works well. What follows is some of our experience, but of course it's anecdotal and you should imagine a huge "your results may vary" wrapped around this whole post.
In many cases, we start with a very low budget (maybe $100 for an on-line ad network) just to test the waters, because even that level has proven to be enough to identify cost-effective channels. We've found there's not much point trying to figure out in advance what you're really going to get from the auction-based systems anyway, you just have to try one and see if it's competitive with what you get from the others for the same money. They dress things up and show you a million knobs you can turn, but ultimately all you care about is how much money you put in and how much money you got out as a result. If you get one that looks plausible, then you can invest some more money in further campaigns and refining how you use it to improve the results.
We tried Google. Among the top referral sources from an already disappointing level of traffic were blatant spam sites with small print about Viagra, fake qualifications, and so on. We get some conversions from general Google search traffic, but I'm not sure we got a single conversion from the paid ad campaign with them. I suppose this is hardly surprising if that's the kind of site where the ads were showing.
We've never gone back. Sure, the ad industry consultants can probably tell us "how to do better", but if Google's system is that easy to game why would we even try? I can spend the same amount on some other channels that already do better, and I can spend any extra time and money to improve the performance on improving other channels that already do better too. As an obvious example, on Facebook an ad campaign with the same budget pays for itself within just a few weeks on average for us, and our numbers tend to improve over time.
Maybe Google's problem isn't the hostile advertisers. Maybe it's that our experience isn't unusual and they simply aren't offering a good service.
This is like if I offer to watch my neighbor's house and then rent the house to my friends to throw a party in.
Except that as far as I know there is no law explicitly making it a criminal offence to do what you described, while the Data Protection Act does exactly that in the case we're discussing. Sadly, it's only punishable by a fine though, and the upper limit on what the Commissioner can seek is quite modest by commercial standards. The relevant law is not enforceable through powers of arrest and punishable by jail time.
I don't think corporations should be allowed to own copyrights at all. They should be assigned to human beings and corporations should license them.
I don't know if I'd go that far. If nothing else, many works are created as a result of the work of many individuals co-ordinating as part of or on behalf of an organisation, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The overheads of not allowing any collective ownership of rights in creative works, and thus having to negotiate individually with everyone involved having an ability to unilaterally roadblock/veto new deals, would surely be prohibitive. Ultimately the idea is to incentivise creators to share their work and so promote distribution and enjoyment all round, and the easier it is to reach mutually beneficial deals the better that is going to work.
Now, if you were to adapt that argument a little to say that anyone other than the original creator of a work could hold only a temporary licence -- for example, if distributors such as record labels and book publishers could only hold the rights to a song or book for a couple of years without renewing -- then we might be getting somewhere, because those organisations would suddenly have to actually produce good returns for their sources in a competitive environment or risk losing their margin on a good work when the next deal went to someone else.
In terms of the collective ownership, I also wouldn't be averse to some sort of scheme where the rights were administered centrally, like some sort of trust, but all of the original contributors retained acknowledgement and a share of any future benefits or royalties. Just have everyone's contract include both an assignment of their rights to the collective trust and a clear statement of any agreed terms (e.g., this contributor will receive x% of any future royalties or other financial benefits, or this contribution is made on the basis that the work as a whole will be available under some open licence).
They do? Perhaps you meant literal rock stars rather than the colloquial "good programmers" meaning? Because the programmers I see going to the US are mostly doing it because average programmer salaries in the Bay Area are probably at least 2-3x what most of the developed world pays, because you even consider the start-up scene and potential for never-work-again money if your employer has a successful exit.
You don't really need statistics to see how this works in the UK, just the basic tax rules.
If you had a salary and additionally received stock worth a similar amount of money as a "bonus", one way or another you would immediately have a tax liability on the stock that would eat a substantial chunk of your total income for no immediate benefit. You would either have to sell much of the stock immediately to cover the tax liability or use much of your basic salary to pay for it (after the salary was already taxed, probably much of it at the higher rate in this sort of situation).
In contrast, if you have options, they are firstly not going to incur an immediate tax liability and secondly only going to incur a liability on the gain if you later exercise the options and then sell the stock at a higher price. In other words, you only incur the tax liability at the point when you actually have real money to pay for it. In addition, there have often been favourable tax regimes for employee stock options to incentivise this sort of arrangement, for example having the tax liability taper off over time, making it even more cost-effective.
This doesn't just make sense for start-ups or pre-IPO businesses where employees couldn't just sell the stock immediately anyway. It makes sense for almost any business that wants to reward its employees and expects it value to be higher in the future than it is today.
If you're in the UK, I'd like to introduce you to IR35, and a hostile HMRC and Treasury.
In a nutshell, IR35 are the rules that say if you're incorporating purely as a tax avoidance measure and otherwise working like an employee, you're required to declare this and pay tax and NI as if you were an employee anyway.
Added to that, the last budget was almost incredibly hostile to small businesses, which was very surprising from a Conservative government. Most importantly, from next year, most dividends are effectively going to be double-taxed at a much higher rate than before. That means operating a small business through something like a limited company that pays out most of the money through dividends will work out almost as expensive as operating as self-employed and paying the corresponding NI if you're at lower levels of income. If I've done the math correctly, it will actually be much more expensive at higher levels of income, because the NI contributions have upper limits whereas there is effectively no equivalent cap on the extra 7.5% or so of tax on dividend income.
I can see why the government might want to do this out of frustration with IR35's apparent ineffectiveness, because obviously some people were just doing it to dodge tax. Unfortunately it's a huge blow to anyone who really is running a small business as a genuinely independent operation, whether it's a well paid IT consultancy or a small family with a corner shop. It also appears to be a huge barrier to starting a "proper" business through a company that could then do things like taking on other employees or working for larger clients. I don't really understand how anyone thinks this is a good thing for the economy, but maybe that's why I don't get to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.
There's actually a very simple reason the tax auditors can't trivially do that: sometimes, businesses really do spend a lot of money buying rights or services or other assets from abroad. It is very hard to define objective criteria for when this is being done legitimately in the normal course of business and when it is being done artificially as a tax avoidance scheme.
This is particularly true when the assets in question are intellectual property like trademark or patent rights. Often in such cases there will be a reasonable argument that the revenues are only generated at the level they are because of the work previously done in another country to develop the assets and so transferring significant compensation is justified.
If two completely independent businesses were dealing in this way, they'd most likely be transferring significant compensation from one to the other, and essentially the same accounting rules apply to big multinationals with national subsidiaries.
That looks like a reasonable summary of what is actually happening. Given the reported revenues, number of staff, and staff compensation, it's plausible that there really wouldn't be much left as profit.
The thing I'm most surprised about here is that their UK revenues (not profits, revenues) are reported as a little over £100M, which based on their most recent published results seems to be only around 1% of their total global annual revenues.
What (non-employee) shareholders would think of a company at Facebook's scale making effectively zero profit from an entire national operation is a different question entirely, of course. If they were in the same position everywhere in the world or maintained that position for very long then you'd expect some serious questions be asked.
The standard is not whether something worked a year or two ago, but whether it followed the recommended best practices in effect at that time.
The important thing is always whether something works properly. Everything else -- formal standards, compatibility work, portability work -- is just a means to that end.
If you write a site using standards on the verge of being declared obsolete, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Which is an easy argument to make until someone points out that in these cases the people declaring something "obsolete" are frequently biased and, in particular, advocating a new and inferior replacement.
Dependence on NPAPI plugins hasn't been best practice for a long time now, much longer than one year
And yet viable alternatives to the things we've been doing successfully with various plug-ins for literally a decade or more have barely been around that long, and in many cases are still obviously and objectively worse in significant respects today.
Flash is the only plugin with any widespread support left, and it's been on its way out for a while.
Not in corporate use. Not even close.
Sites which depend on such plugins already fail on mobile browsers, which are becoming more and more popular and haven't even supported Flash for several years, much less other plugins.
And the corporates mostly don't care, because they have real work to do and provide their staff with real computers to do it. No-one is preparing their quarterly accounts presentation on an iPhone.
Plugins, on the other hand, have always been a compatibility nightmare—non-standardized, proprietary, and non-portable.
And yet Java applets were recognised as early at the <applet> tag somewhere back in the 90s, while Flash has been one of the most successfully standardised parts of web history in terms of both portability and longevity. I suspect only HTTP, HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 have been more successful in those respects.
If you like standards and cross-browser compatibility, you should be backing this change.
I like things that work. To be fair, I also like the new "standard" and "cross-browser compatible" features, but for a very different reason: they are still so badly implemented so often, and broken so often by browser updates, that I make an awful lot of money fixing things that rely on them.
fewer one-off, closed-source, browser- and OS-specific binary plugins
Because ECE for multimedia playback and graphics drivers to accelerate WebGL are so much better?
IE itself is deprecated
It really isn't, in any practical sense. Realistically, Microsoft are going to continue supporting it until at least 2020 because of the Win7 support, and because dropped it would cost them the support of the business community that makes up the lion's share of revenues.
For perspective, that is more than 30 six-weekly update cycles of various other major browsers where businesses don't have to worry unduly about something they rely on being arbitrarily broken.
...it isn't unreasonable for ancient, unmaintained web sites using obsolete plugins to require a contemporary web browser.
Where by ancient you mean written more than a year ago, by unmaintained you mean without dedicated resources available to rewrite the entire thing every few months, and by obsolete you mean no longer working in browsers with rapid updates but still working just fine in trusty, stable IE?
The idea that something that worked just a year or two ago should no longer work on today's browsers is unreasonable. Much of the reason the web has been successful is that it has been standardised and future-proof. There were widely respected and mostly reasonable standards. There were multiple browser implementations that would let you view anything developed using those standards. Content on the web has been widely and permanently accessible for as long as its host cared to provide it and anyone else cared to visit the host's site. Sacrificing all of this just to make life easier for browser makers who prefer to write fire-and-forget software with no longevity is not progress.
I make browser-based user interfaces for a living, and I can say without hesitation that a lot of these new technologies aren't ready for prime time yet (though that's not going to stop Google, Apple and Mozilla treating them as if they are).
SVG and Canvas performance is highly variable. There are sometimes serious rendering glitches in some of the browsers as well, even looking at quite simple cases. Plus issues with events not propagating properly, which variation of animations we're supporting this week, etc.
MathML is only supported usefully in Firefox and Safari.
HTML5 audio/video is just a gigantic mess, not only in the lack of any portable format for each that works just about everywhere, but also in terms of browser controls, cache behaviour, even basic stuff like triggering corresponding JS events at the right time or showing the right poster image for a video. Plus of course there's the whole ECE mess, which is corrupting the open web with DRM, creating whole new attack vectors, or just another kind of plug-in that now needs to be developed and then ported across platforms instead of the old ones, depending on who you'd like to hate it the most right now.
WebGL is interesting but support is generally still patchy. It's also worth noting that like any of the other hardware-accelerated features here, it's going to create more attack surface, which is why the argument that browser features are somehow more likely to be secure than the equivalent plug-in features they're replacing is just silly.
As a final comment, a lot of those sites using plug-ins that you call "legacy" were doing things the only way they could just a few years ago. Even if they all worked properly today, those technologies I mentioned above have only been viable alternatives very recently. It's not realistic to expect everyone who has been developing tools built with plug-ins and sunk large amounts of time and money into developing them to just do a Big Rewrite into HTML5-friendly technologies to suit the browser makers. Given that most of those browser makers have made it abundantly clear that they don't really care about providing meaningful long term support for anything any more, I suspect before long they are going to start reaping what they have sown as they find people who build web apps increasingly sceptical about relying on unproven features. Ironically, they could even be strengthening the native software and mobile app markets in the long run.
I think IE will continue to do so indefinitely, because Google and Mozilla just gifted a significant advantage to Microsoft for a significant number of their business customers.
It's not even as if Java is a huge security problem today. It's effectively been click-to-play by default in all major browsers for a long time, and the plug-in itself then has a bunch more security safeguards before it will trust remote code to do just about anything.
As I seem to have to point out every time this subject gets raised, this is a horrible move in terms of preserving useful content on the web. A lot of things that have been done with plug-ins like Java or Silverlight are small and in-house, like the math lecturer's interactive visualisation of something in their course, or the applet some guy in sales wrote a few years ago for the intranet so the group managers could see a quick overview of how everything is going and copy the data straight into their Excel spreadsheet. Of course they have also been used for a lot of GUIs for networked devices, where things like drawing interactive charts wasn't possible using native web technologies until relatively recently.
Many of these useful tools won't have dedicated maintainers and they aren't magically going to get rewritten to use the new blessed technologies. Closing them off in Firefox as well just means anyone who actually relies on them is now left on IE forever. Again.
You're talking about reading the ODBII data. That's a very different application to an information display that most drivers will be using routinely. So if nothing else, there's probably a good chance that many of those downloads were professionals who work on cars. Most of the rest were presumably enthusiasts who enjoy tweaking, and if you reckon you've personally saved $5-10K just on diagnostics with Torque then clearly you're not a typical driver.
But lets see if you can compromise it without taking off a panel, disconnecting a wire, or otherwise having privileged access to it.
Does your definition of privileged access include being within radio range? Being within radio range when the legitimate owner activates a remote feature? Gaining access to the manufacturer's facilities, either to extract sensitive information or to initiate contact with vehicles through the manufacturer's own remote access tools?
(If you're wondering if these questions aren't random and this line of questioning is a trap... Yes. Yes, it is.)
As for "infotainment" systems you can't have a bad system without a good/better one to compare it to.
I hope we could all agree that, for example, a system that allows a potentially dangerous compromise of the vehicle's control systems is bad even if all cars have the same defect.
Also, the standards of presentation of these systems are awful. There is nothing good/better for comparison only if you exclude pretty much the entire field of user interface design in modern technology outside of cars.
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Purely objectively, Apple has the most closed combination of hardware, software and ecosystem of any mobile platform, and it always has had, and the trend is clearly further in that direction including with the battery issue we're discussing here. I'm not "dragging Apple into this". They dragged themselves into it by making themselves by some way the best example of my point.
Whereas for example the 3rd generation iPad I have on the desk next to me gets noticeably worse battery life today than it had when new. It could just be that the newer version of iOS now running on it is bad at power management, but given the steady degradation over time rather than a sharp drop after updating the software, decaying battery performance seems a far more plausible explanation.
YMMV, but even if it does, physics is still physics.
Indeed, but as far as I know none of the big name smartphones have that sort of option at the moment (though I'd be happy to discover I've overlooked one that does). If anything, the big brands all seem to be pushing as hard as possible in the other direction, with as close as they can get to no external connectivity except wirelessly via their own preferred services/networks/whatever. They're pretty much stuck with having a power cable, but if routine wireless charging becomes viable I expect your phone will be a completely sealed unit in hardware, software and ecosystem as fast as the likes of Apple can get it there.
Ah, sorry, apparently I'd jumped context and missed the unusual use of "prioritised" to mean "deprioritised" in this particular subthread. Scratch my previous comment, then.
Personally, I'd find it attractive just for having a removable (and therefore also replaceable) battery, which is something a lot of the recent generation of smartphones don't have. Batteries for mobile devices degrade over time.
There may be potential privacy/security advantages to this sort of modular system as well, which for some people could be significant. For example, my company normally won't surrender an electronic device that could have had sensitive data stored on it. If such a device breaks and can't be repaired without losing custody of it, it's securely destroyed and replaced. This more often affects things like hard drives, and therefore creates a bias towards business-grade suppliers who understand the restriction and won't expect a dead drive to be returned. However, a mobile device where say a broken screen or failed battery could be replaced without having to give up the whole phone complete with potential access credentials to a company VPN or sensitive customer data could also be more attractive for the same reason.
It looks like they're using almost vanilla Android. Wouldn't you just upgrade if that was a concern? Given the issue of big name brands not offering timely upgrades for their software, it's hard to imagine a phone like this being significantly worse over its useful lifetime.
Why does something have to give rather than everything having to give.
Because some applications are more sensitive to latency than others. Something happening in real time, such as gaming, a VOIP call, or streaming a video, will be more disrupted by frequent minor delays than a bulk data transfer like backing up 100G of data from office servers to an off-site location overnight.
When the roads become congested, the authorities do not restrict the number of vehicles allowed onto the road or only allow cars and prohibit trucks.
Maybe your roads work differently, but over here in the UK, we do this all the time.
Many popular areas have dedicated lanes to prioritise various forms of transport considered a high priority in congested periods: buses, taxis, cycles, and so on.
We have a variety of systems for prioritising emergency vehicles, from the obvious lights and sirens, through exempting them from various laws that would cause delays, to providing special equipment at junctions so the lights turn green ahead of the emergency vehicle to allow blocking traffic to clear quicker.
We have congestion charging and road tolls in some areas, which is partly added to moderate demand at busy times (though there's a fair argument that it's also quite a cash cow for the authority operating the affected roads, which is why this type of measure is more controversial).
As you mentioned yourself, sometimes trucks are also restricted. There are some places they aren't allowed to go or aren't allowed to stop for loading/unloading at certain times. On our high speed roads, some areas also specifically prohibit overtaking by HGVs at busy times to avoid bottlenecking smaller, faster vehicles excessively.
So it's actually not true at all that all the traffic on the roads is slowed at busy times. In fact, the roads here make an excellent example of both the advantages and, sometimes, the problems with a "traffic shaping" system.
Apply priority to 95% of clients and priority doesn't mean anything anymore
Actually it does, but probably not in a good way: it means the other 5% of clients are losing out, perhaps heavily.
Avoiding this scenario -- keeping in mind that a huge proportion of all Internet traffic is generated by a relatively small number of businesses today, and all the little guys between them might only make up 5% of total traffic -- is a large part of why Net Neutrality matters.
That's what most of the internet used to be. There's still some of it left, but the percentage isn't high.
Fortunately, we don't need a high signal to noise ratio, we just need a useful absolute level of signal. :-)
I too have run various sites over the years just for some combination of personal satisfaction and maybe helping or entertaining others with common interests. It's kind of a shame that ISPs don't seem to routinely supply your own web space as part of the deal any more, so you have to go looking for some separate hosting. That means a lot of stuff gets dumped on sites like Facebook or Medium or Pinterest. The alternative is to pay real money to a hosting service, which as you say isn't a lot for most people, but it's still real money.
Personally I'd quite like it if the search engines could prioritise sites that just provide good quality content without ads, so good enthusiast/community sites could enjoy the profile they deserve, but somehow I don't see Google ever doing that...
It's certainly true that good, responsible advertising can be beneficial all round. After all, if someone invents the best product/service since sliced bread for some niche market, how is anyone in that market who would be interested in having that product/service supposed to find out about it without some form of advertising?
As you say, the trouble is that on-line ads are often so... well, evil. And the trouble with hoping to change that is that the evilness makes them much, much more cost-effective. It seems likely there is a more healthy balance to be found somewhere in the middle, but I don't know whether it will be possible to achieve it in practice because the potentially evil qualities of on-line ads tend to be all-or-nothing propositions.
The thing is, it isn't the customers driving the bad habits in advertising. Those who buy advertising want it to be effective, but aren't really too well clued in as to how this happens.
This is due, at least in part, to the opaque systems operated by big advertising platforms like Google and Facebook.
I run some small businesses. We don't have huge ad budgets, so we've experimented with a lot of different platforms to see what works well. What follows is some of our experience, but of course it's anecdotal and you should imagine a huge "your results may vary" wrapped around this whole post.
In many cases, we start with a very low budget (maybe $100 for an on-line ad network) just to test the waters, because even that level has proven to be enough to identify cost-effective channels. We've found there's not much point trying to figure out in advance what you're really going to get from the auction-based systems anyway, you just have to try one and see if it's competitive with what you get from the others for the same money. They dress things up and show you a million knobs you can turn, but ultimately all you care about is how much money you put in and how much money you got out as a result. If you get one that looks plausible, then you can invest some more money in further campaigns and refining how you use it to improve the results.
We tried Google. Among the top referral sources from an already disappointing level of traffic were blatant spam sites with small print about Viagra, fake qualifications, and so on. We get some conversions from general Google search traffic, but I'm not sure we got a single conversion from the paid ad campaign with them. I suppose this is hardly surprising if that's the kind of site where the ads were showing.
We've never gone back. Sure, the ad industry consultants can probably tell us "how to do better", but if Google's system is that easy to game why would we even try? I can spend the same amount on some other channels that already do better, and I can spend any extra time and money to improve the performance on improving other channels that already do better too. As an obvious example, on Facebook an ad campaign with the same budget pays for itself within just a few weeks on average for us, and our numbers tend to improve over time.
Maybe Google's problem isn't the hostile advertisers. Maybe it's that our experience isn't unusual and they simply aren't offering a good service.
This is like if I offer to watch my neighbor's house and then rent the house to my friends to throw a party in.
Except that as far as I know there is no law explicitly making it a criminal offence to do what you described, while the Data Protection Act does exactly that in the case we're discussing. Sadly, it's only punishable by a fine though, and the upper limit on what the Commissioner can seek is quite modest by commercial standards. The relevant law is not enforceable through powers of arrest and punishable by jail time.
I don't think corporations should be allowed to own copyrights at all. They should be assigned to human beings and corporations should license them.
I don't know if I'd go that far. If nothing else, many works are created as a result of the work of many individuals co-ordinating as part of or on behalf of an organisation, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The overheads of not allowing any collective ownership of rights in creative works, and thus having to negotiate individually with everyone involved having an ability to unilaterally roadblock/veto new deals, would surely be prohibitive. Ultimately the idea is to incentivise creators to share their work and so promote distribution and enjoyment all round, and the easier it is to reach mutually beneficial deals the better that is going to work.
Now, if you were to adapt that argument a little to say that anyone other than the original creator of a work could hold only a temporary licence -- for example, if distributors such as record labels and book publishers could only hold the rights to a song or book for a couple of years without renewing -- then we might be getting somewhere, because those organisations would suddenly have to actually produce good returns for their sources in a competitive environment or risk losing their margin on a good work when the next deal went to someone else.
In terms of the collective ownership, I also wouldn't be averse to some sort of scheme where the rights were administered centrally, like some sort of trust, but all of the original contributors retained acknowledgement and a share of any future benefits or royalties. Just have everyone's contract include both an assignment of their rights to the collective trust and a clear statement of any agreed terms (e.g., this contributor will receive x% of any future royalties or other financial benefits, or this contribution is made on the basis that the work as a whole will be available under some open licence).
They do? Perhaps you meant literal rock stars rather than the colloquial "good programmers" meaning? Because the programmers I see going to the US are mostly doing it because average programmer salaries in the Bay Area are probably at least 2-3x what most of the developed world pays, because you even consider the start-up scene and potential for never-work-again money if your employer has a successful exit.
You don't really need statistics to see how this works in the UK, just the basic tax rules.
If you had a salary and additionally received stock worth a similar amount of money as a "bonus", one way or another you would immediately have a tax liability on the stock that would eat a substantial chunk of your total income for no immediate benefit. You would either have to sell much of the stock immediately to cover the tax liability or use much of your basic salary to pay for it (after the salary was already taxed, probably much of it at the higher rate in this sort of situation).
In contrast, if you have options, they are firstly not going to incur an immediate tax liability and secondly only going to incur a liability on the gain if you later exercise the options and then sell the stock at a higher price. In other words, you only incur the tax liability at the point when you actually have real money to pay for it. In addition, there have often been favourable tax regimes for employee stock options to incentivise this sort of arrangement, for example having the tax liability taper off over time, making it even more cost-effective.
This doesn't just make sense for start-ups or pre-IPO businesses where employees couldn't just sell the stock immediately anyway. It makes sense for almost any business that wants to reward its employees and expects it value to be higher in the future than it is today.
If you're in the UK, I'd like to introduce you to IR35, and a hostile HMRC and Treasury.
In a nutshell, IR35 are the rules that say if you're incorporating purely as a tax avoidance measure and otherwise working like an employee, you're required to declare this and pay tax and NI as if you were an employee anyway.
Added to that, the last budget was almost incredibly hostile to small businesses, which was very surprising from a Conservative government. Most importantly, from next year, most dividends are effectively going to be double-taxed at a much higher rate than before. That means operating a small business through something like a limited company that pays out most of the money through dividends will work out almost as expensive as operating as self-employed and paying the corresponding NI if you're at lower levels of income. If I've done the math correctly, it will actually be much more expensive at higher levels of income, because the NI contributions have upper limits whereas there is effectively no equivalent cap on the extra 7.5% or so of tax on dividend income.
I can see why the government might want to do this out of frustration with IR35's apparent ineffectiveness, because obviously some people were just doing it to dodge tax. Unfortunately it's a huge blow to anyone who really is running a small business as a genuinely independent operation, whether it's a well paid IT consultancy or a small family with a corner shop. It also appears to be a huge barrier to starting a "proper" business through a company that could then do things like taking on other employees or working for larger clients. I don't really understand how anyone thinks this is a good thing for the economy, but maybe that's why I don't get to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.
There's actually a very simple reason the tax auditors can't trivially do that: sometimes, businesses really do spend a lot of money buying rights or services or other assets from abroad. It is very hard to define objective criteria for when this is being done legitimately in the normal course of business and when it is being done artificially as a tax avoidance scheme.
This is particularly true when the assets in question are intellectual property like trademark or patent rights. Often in such cases there will be a reasonable argument that the revenues are only generated at the level they are because of the work previously done in another country to develop the assets and so transferring significant compensation is justified.
If two completely independent businesses were dealing in this way, they'd most likely be transferring significant compensation from one to the other, and essentially the same accounting rules apply to big multinationals with national subsidiaries.
That looks like a reasonable summary of what is actually happening. Given the reported revenues, number of staff, and staff compensation, it's plausible that there really wouldn't be much left as profit.
The thing I'm most surprised about here is that their UK revenues (not profits, revenues) are reported as a little over £100M, which based on their most recent published results seems to be only around 1% of their total global annual revenues.
What (non-employee) shareholders would think of a company at Facebook's scale making effectively zero profit from an entire national operation is a different question entirely, of course. If they were in the same position everywhere in the world or maintained that position for very long then you'd expect some serious questions be asked.
The standard is not whether something worked a year or two ago, but whether it followed the recommended best practices in effect at that time.
The important thing is always whether something works properly. Everything else -- formal standards, compatibility work, portability work -- is just a means to that end.
If you write a site using standards on the verge of being declared obsolete, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Which is an easy argument to make until someone points out that in these cases the people declaring something "obsolete" are frequently biased and, in particular, advocating a new and inferior replacement.
Dependence on NPAPI plugins hasn't been best practice for a long time now, much longer than one year
And yet viable alternatives to the things we've been doing successfully with various plug-ins for literally a decade or more have barely been around that long, and in many cases are still obviously and objectively worse in significant respects today.
Flash is the only plugin with any widespread support left, and it's been on its way out for a while.
Not in corporate use. Not even close.
Sites which depend on such plugins already fail on mobile browsers, which are becoming more and more popular and haven't even supported Flash for several years, much less other plugins.
And the corporates mostly don't care, because they have real work to do and provide their staff with real computers to do it. No-one is preparing their quarterly accounts presentation on an iPhone.
Plugins, on the other hand, have always been a compatibility nightmare—non-standardized, proprietary, and non-portable.
And yet Java applets were recognised as early at the <applet> tag somewhere back in the 90s, while Flash has been one of the most successfully standardised parts of web history in terms of both portability and longevity. I suspect only HTTP, HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 have been more successful in those respects.
If you like standards and cross-browser compatibility, you should be backing this change.
I like things that work. To be fair, I also like the new "standard" and "cross-browser compatible" features, but for a very different reason: they are still so badly implemented so often, and broken so often by browser updates, that I make an awful lot of money fixing things that rely on them.
fewer one-off, closed-source, browser- and OS-specific binary plugins
Because ECE for multimedia playback and graphics drivers to accelerate WebGL are so much better?
IE itself is deprecated
It really isn't, in any practical sense. Realistically, Microsoft are going to continue supporting it until at least 2020 because of the Win7 support, and because dropped it would cost them the support of the business community that makes up the lion's share of revenues.
For perspective, that is more than 30 six-weekly update cycles of various other major browsers where businesses don't have to worry unduly about something they rely on being arbitrarily broken.
...it isn't unreasonable for ancient, unmaintained web sites using obsolete plugins to require a contemporary web browser.
Where by ancient you mean written more than a year ago, by unmaintained you mean without dedicated resources available to rewrite the entire thing every few months, and by obsolete you mean no longer working in browsers with rapid updates but still working just fine in trusty, stable IE?
The idea that something that worked just a year or two ago should no longer work on today's browsers is unreasonable. Much of the reason the web has been successful is that it has been standardised and future-proof. There were widely respected and mostly reasonable standards. There were multiple browser implementations that would let you view anything developed using those standards. Content on the web has been widely and permanently accessible for as long as its host cared to provide it and anyone else cared to visit the host's site. Sacrificing all of this just to make life easier for browser makers who prefer to write fire-and-forget software with no longevity is not progress.
I make browser-based user interfaces for a living, and I can say without hesitation that a lot of these new technologies aren't ready for prime time yet (though that's not going to stop Google, Apple and Mozilla treating them as if they are).
SVG and Canvas performance is highly variable. There are sometimes serious rendering glitches in some of the browsers as well, even looking at quite simple cases. Plus issues with events not propagating properly, which variation of animations we're supporting this week, etc.
MathML is only supported usefully in Firefox and Safari.
HTML5 audio/video is just a gigantic mess, not only in the lack of any portable format for each that works just about everywhere, but also in terms of browser controls, cache behaviour, even basic stuff like triggering corresponding JS events at the right time or showing the right poster image for a video. Plus of course there's the whole ECE mess, which is corrupting the open web with DRM, creating whole new attack vectors, or just another kind of plug-in that now needs to be developed and then ported across platforms instead of the old ones, depending on who you'd like to hate it the most right now.
WebGL is interesting but support is generally still patchy. It's also worth noting that like any of the other hardware-accelerated features here, it's going to create more attack surface, which is why the argument that browser features are somehow more likely to be secure than the equivalent plug-in features they're replacing is just silly.
As a final comment, a lot of those sites using plug-ins that you call "legacy" were doing things the only way they could just a few years ago. Even if they all worked properly today, those technologies I mentioned above have only been viable alternatives very recently. It's not realistic to expect everyone who has been developing tools built with plug-ins and sunk large amounts of time and money into developing them to just do a Big Rewrite into HTML5-friendly technologies to suit the browser makers. Given that most of those browser makers have made it abundantly clear that they don't really care about providing meaningful long term support for anything any more, I suspect before long they are going to start reaping what they have sown as they find people who build web apps increasingly sceptical about relying on unproven features. Ironically, they could even be strengthening the native software and mobile app markets in the long run.
Edge doesn't support Java applets at all.
I think IE will continue to do so indefinitely, because Google and Mozilla just gifted a significant advantage to Microsoft for a significant number of their business customers.
It's not even as if Java is a huge security problem today. It's effectively been click-to-play by default in all major browsers for a long time, and the plug-in itself then has a bunch more security safeguards before it will trust remote code to do just about anything.
As I seem to have to point out every time this subject gets raised, this is a horrible move in terms of preserving useful content on the web. A lot of things that have been done with plug-ins like Java or Silverlight are small and in-house, like the math lecturer's interactive visualisation of something in their course, or the applet some guy in sales wrote a few years ago for the intranet so the group managers could see a quick overview of how everything is going and copy the data straight into their Excel spreadsheet. Of course they have also been used for a lot of GUIs for networked devices, where things like drawing interactive charts wasn't possible using native web technologies until relatively recently.
Many of these useful tools won't have dedicated maintainers and they aren't magically going to get rewritten to use the new blessed technologies. Closing them off in Firefox as well just means anyone who actually relies on them is now left on IE forever. Again.
You're talking about reading the ODBII data. That's a very different application to an information display that most drivers will be using routinely. So if nothing else, there's probably a good chance that many of those downloads were professionals who work on cars. Most of the rest were presumably enthusiasts who enjoy tweaking, and if you reckon you've personally saved $5-10K just on diagnostics with Torque then clearly you're not a typical driver.
But lets see if you can compromise it without taking off a panel, disconnecting a wire, or otherwise having privileged access to it.
Does your definition of privileged access include being within radio range? Being within radio range when the legitimate owner activates a remote feature? Gaining access to the manufacturer's facilities, either to extract sensitive information or to initiate contact with vehicles through the manufacturer's own remote access tools?
(If you're wondering if these questions aren't random and this line of questioning is a trap... Yes. Yes, it is.)
As for "infotainment" systems you can't have a bad system without a good/better one to compare it to.
I hope we could all agree that, for example, a system that allows a potentially dangerous compromise of the vehicle's control systems is bad even if all cars have the same defect.
Also, the standards of presentation of these systems are awful. There is nothing good/better for comparison only if you exclude pretty much the entire field of user interface design in modern technology outside of cars.