- Apple products cost more but you always had bragging rights...
2012 (Cook era)
- Apple products cost even more but you no longer have bragging rights... - Mac line is pricing itself out of existence... why can’t I get a 13” Mac laptop for under $1000 anymore? - iPad Mini no Retina?... even iPod Touch has Retina? - iOS 6 underwhelming... starting to feel dated... - iPhone 5 why didn’t you make the larger screen proportionally larger? - OSX App Store and Software Update interface is awful... Launchpad looks even worse...
That's even scarier then. Why should the police be allowed to cruise around a neighbourhood and peer into people's homes without a warrant? Whatever happened to privacy?
So if a house in your neighbourhood had a grow op and the police did an IR "flyby" they might find 6 other houses with elevated heat signatures. You would be OK with them raiding those houses as well - without a warrant or any other probable cause?
They guy the with indoor pool, the old folks with their thermostat cranked, the guy working in his garage all night, the house party full of people... there are hundreds of reasons why a house would have elevated heat signatures. You wouldn't mind having a SWAT team crashing down your door because they noticed the temperature of your house was hotter than your neighbours???? Really??
Why does my opinion make you uncertain about your future?
Last week NASA marketing team issued press releases and interviews drumming up excitement about the possibility of finding metal. Then it turns out to be trash. Then they announce under the trash there might be more metal particles.
Given the fact that the rover has a limited lifespan I am certain that they are wasting time and money analyzing anything close to the landing site.. creating uncertainty about anything they might find at that particular location. Getting the rover as far away as possible and then get us excited about the possibilities.
Gone are the days when companies invested in bettering their products and protecting their customers.
It's now cheaper to invest in lawyers and better contracts, at which point these companies can continue to provide sub-par products or customer service with no ill consequence.
PayPal.. I use them everyday with no complaints... heck I even like the product... but with this latest update it reads like they are preparing for armageddon... virtually every change leaves the customer worse off than before...
Ranting a bit... products are manufactured to fail... customer service is designed to exhaust you... contracts are designed to cheat you... yet we keep pouring money into this stuff...
Oh ya and if you lose your Wallet.dat you are sh*t out of luck. It's easy to forget to back it up constantly and hardware fails at the most inopportune times.
As a consumer In order for me to actually acquire a Bitcoin and then spend it I have to do the following:
1. Go to my Bank and transfer CAD to my local BitCoin Exchange - $3.00 fee 2. Covert the CAD balance transferred to the BitCoin Exchange into BTC (3% fee) 3. Send the BTC to my Wallet 4. Transfer money from by Wallet to the seller (there is a small fee applied to that.001 BTC or something like that) 5. The Seller then also incurs a fee if they are using BitPay or some other third-party to handle the transaction which is typical of a legitimate purchase 6. Furthermore if I don't want to lose my wallet I need to use a Hosted Wallet which costs me even more!! 7. Then when I want to cash out my remaining balance (which is always a strange amount) I have to pay even more fees through the Exchange (this is why there seems to be a lot of hoarding).
This whole process takes days and is not really worth the time and effort for small items.
Finally using the Default Bitcoin client (which they still recommend on the Bitcoin website) takes almost a DAY or more to download the Block Chain. You can't even begin to do any of that until you have the Block Chain download. There are other clients that don't need to do this but for the average newbie the Bitcoin website recommends Bitcoin-QT which requires a full download.
At this point it is a currency for people who can't use Credit Card or Interac or PayPal really. But the fees are just about the same when you look at the big picture and time-to-spend is really high.
Serve Beach is a dedicated server company. So presumably they did have their own server.
What's scary here is the article states it was a Server Beach automated script that detected the copyright infringement in a "cache file" that was not visible on the live website at all. And they shut down the server because of that.
"Unfortunately, in early October automated systems at ServerBeach spotted a copy of the disputed blog entry stored in the working memory of software Edublogs uses to make sure web pages are displayed quickly. The copy of the blog entry was in this memory store - only visible internally"
So Server Beach has an automated system that detected copyright infringement in a "cache" file and automatically shut down the server before checking to see if it was actually visible to the public (which according to the article it was not)?
Moral of the story... stop using Server Beach I guess.
This is scary for Server Beach customers because any copyrighted material could end up on disk (ie. if someone submits a form that writes to disk or into a database. Then the Server Beach script will nuke your site no questions asked!!!
A friend sent me an email a couple of years ago saying "Did you know that you have your phone number on FaceBook?". I said "Yes, I also have it in the phonebook".
Since the inspection and replacement is not covered by insurance or the auto shop I can only imagine that these counterfeit airbags will be on teh road for a long time.
Considering many / most people would go through insurance to get a new airbag installed as it's typically one part of a bigger job (ie. your front bumper assembly and other parts probably needed replacing at the same time) it's strange that Insurance would not cover the inspection.
You just paid a deductible just to get the work done and now you are being told that you need to pay to get it re-inspected and then you need to pay if the airbag is indeed a fake.
The burden shouldn't be on the consumer unless they knowingly purchased it and installed it themselves.
At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new sapphire lens camera last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make the camera better.
We launched an integrated camera initially with the first version of the iPhone. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with an even better camera including features such as a built-in flash and a sapphire lens. In order to do this, we had to create a new camera from the ground up.
There are already more than 5 million iPhones with the new camera, and more joining us every day. In just over a week, iPhone users with the new camera have already taken half a billion photos. The more our customers use the camera the more they will become accustomed to the new color balance. We greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from you.
While we can't really fix this, you can try alternatives by purchasing an additional camera from your local electronics store, Best Buy, Sony, Canon, Fuji, or use the front camera which doesn't have these issues.
Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.
There was no purple flare camera issue on the iPhone 4 / 4S... so why should a consumer have to think twice about this at all?
I agree that NEW features might have kinks and if you are buying the phone for the new features you should hold off... but the camera in the iPhone has been rock solid for the past few years. There should not be a "warming" period for existing functionality at this point.
Apple doesn't suck. All my gear is Apple and that's the reason why this is disappointing.
I did think of trying to cross reference population with the results because I am sure you are correct - it's the smaller towns in rural areas that have gotten the short end of the stick here. I also thought of using the Google Maps API to compare results but alas.. I've got better things to do really:-)
I think we can both agree they went backwards on this update. I'm from a small town so when it's no longer on the Map App (even though it was on the map App before) it's disappointing. You lock into a 3-year contract with the new phone and never expect that an App you use every day would suddenly become unusable.
- Port Perry Ontario pins you on an island about 5KM outside of town. - Bracebridge Ontario pins you in a forest about 10KM outside of town when you zoom in. - By my estimation 60% of towns in Ontario got relocated or completely wiped out.
How can you jump ship when: 1. Apple states all over their marketing that the new Maps App is a huge upgrade. Average consumers wouldn't think twice after all these years of upgrading iOS that suddenly the map app would suck it big time ? 2. You are locked into a contract for 2-3 years?
This is a great example of false advertising connected to a contract lock. Consumers get shafted any way you look at it.
Just because you haven't been there doesn't it shouldn't be there.
The whole reason this is an issue is because those small towns you have never been to are on all physical maps and on Google Maps. They are ALL ON the official Ministry of transportation Road Map: http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/traveller/map/
Furthermore people use Map Apps to find towns they haven't been to - not to find towns they have been to!!!
Ya, I agree. For Canada at least I don't think they got all of the data from Tom Tom. Because a regular Tom Tom GPS doesn't have these issues from what I have seen. So the question is where did Apple get the map data for Canada? Anyway you look at it if they can't get the fundamental locations correct then it will all snowball from there.
I agree the actual map data they have is really lacking.
However it's not hard to find good source data either. Almost 30% of my searches resulted int he location simply being "not found". These missing towns for example are on every map I have ever seen. It shouldn't be up to iPhone users to add towns onto a map - that is base location data that should be there from the start. Users can refine pin locations and add points of interests. But towns and cities should all be there as they have existed in real life since the 1800's or earlier.
You would think Apple would have audited the map data from their suppliers and realized that the maps themselves are sub-par.
At least 688 out of the 2000 towns are searched for on not even on the map... you get the same CLGeocoder Error Code 8 whether you manually search for it through Apple Maps (watch the iPhones consol because it logs those errors) or whether you do it using your own code in an App.
I agree they do not have good source data, however it's not hard to find good source data either. These missing towns for example are on every map I have ever seen.
In an effort to figure out how innacurate the data in my area is I did the following: - Fired up Xcode - Determined that Apple Maps uses the CLGeocoder Class by peeking at the iPhone's debug console in Xcode while doing live searches in Apple Maps - Scraped an official list of towns and cities in the province of Ontario from the provincial governments website. - Coded up something quick in Xcode to get the results of a couple thousand searches. Searches always included the province name to be more specific. - Ran a quick analysis of the results - not perfect but enough to get a perspective on the matter.
This is what I found: - 2028 cities and towns searched - 688 are not even on the map! Error Code 8 - 551 are clearly incorrect (wrong country, street names that are similar to town names etc.) - 389 were close but not good enough (for example turn-by-turn might send you off a bridge but you'll get rescued close to where you want to be) - Only about 400 results were actually correct.
Actual results data here and methodology here for those interested: http://www.mtonic.com/applemaps/ (It's not perfect but gives you an idea of how bad it really is in Ontario Canada anyways)
Slashdot Mirror
2001 to 2011 (Jobs era)
- Apple products cost more but you always had bragging rights ...
2012 (Cook era)
- Apple products cost even more but you no longer have bragging rights ... ... why can’t I get a 13” Mac laptop for under $1000 anymore? ... even iPod Touch has Retina? ... starting to feel dated ... ... Launchpad looks even worse ...
- Mac line is pricing itself out of existence
- iPad Mini no Retina?
- iOS 6 underwhelming
- iPhone 5 why didn’t you make the larger screen proportionally larger?
- OSX App Store and Software Update interface is awful
This unphysical non-Euclidean post brought to you by Hewlett Packard.
That's even scarier then. Why should the police be allowed to cruise around a neighbourhood and peer into people's homes without a warrant? Whatever happened to privacy?
So if a house in your neighbourhood had a grow op and the police did an IR "flyby" they might find 6 other houses with elevated heat signatures. You would be OK with them raiding those houses as well - without a warrant or any other probable cause?
They guy the with indoor pool, the old folks with their thermostat cranked, the guy working in his garage all night, the house party full of people ... there are hundreds of reasons why a house would have elevated heat signatures. You wouldn't mind having a SWAT team crashing down your door because they noticed the temperature of your house was hotter than your neighbours???? Really??
Why does my opinion make you uncertain about your future?
Last week NASA marketing team issued press releases and interviews drumming up excitement about the possibility of finding metal. Then it turns out to be trash. Then they announce under the trash there might be more metal particles.
Given the fact that the rover has a limited lifespan I am certain that they are wasting time and money analyzing anything close to the landing site .. creating uncertainty about anything they might find at that particular location. Getting the rover as far away as possible and then get us excited about the possibilities.
Nah .. billions of Tax dollars to analyze garbage and create uncertainty. Welcome to NASA.
Drive the rover as far away from the Mars Garbage Gyre as possible before sampling the soil.
Otherwise it's like taking a dump in your own back yard and gardening it in.
Gone are the days when companies invested in bettering their products and protecting their customers.
It's now cheaper to invest in lawyers and better contracts, at which point these companies can continue to provide sub-par products or customer service with no ill consequence.
PayPal .. I use them everyday with no complaints ... heck I even like the product ... but with this latest update it reads like they are preparing for armageddon ... virtually every change leaves the customer worse off than before ...
Ranting a bit ... products are manufactured to fail ... customer service is designed to exhaust you ... contracts are designed to cheat you ... yet we keep pouring money into this stuff ...
Oh ya and if you lose your Wallet.dat you are sh*t out of luck. It's easy to forget to back it up constantly and hardware fails at the most inopportune times.
Not really that easy.
As a consumer In order for me to actually acquire a Bitcoin and then spend it I have to do the following:
1. Go to my Bank and transfer CAD to my local BitCoin Exchange - $3.00 fee .001 BTC or something like that)
2. Covert the CAD balance transferred to the BitCoin Exchange into BTC (3% fee)
3. Send the BTC to my Wallet
4. Transfer money from by Wallet to the seller (there is a small fee applied to that
5. The Seller then also incurs a fee if they are using BitPay or some other third-party to handle the transaction which is typical of a legitimate purchase
6. Furthermore if I don't want to lose my wallet I need to use a Hosted Wallet which costs me even more!!
7. Then when I want to cash out my remaining balance (which is always a strange amount) I have to pay even more fees through the Exchange (this is why there seems to be a lot of hoarding).
This whole process takes days and is not really worth the time and effort for small items.
Finally using the Default Bitcoin client (which they still recommend on the Bitcoin website) takes almost a DAY or more to download the Block Chain. You can't even begin to do any of that until you have the Block Chain download. There are other clients that don't need to do this but for the average newbie the Bitcoin website recommends Bitcoin-QT which requires a full download.
At this point it is a currency for people who can't use Credit Card or Interac or PayPal really. But the fees are just about the same when you look at the big picture and time-to-spend is really high.
Serve Beach is a dedicated server company. So presumably they did have their own server.
What's scary here is the article states it was a Server Beach automated script that detected the copyright infringement in a "cache file" that was not visible on the live website at all. And they shut down the server because of that.
"Unfortunately, in early October automated systems at ServerBeach spotted a copy of the disputed blog entry stored in the working memory of software Edublogs uses to make sure web pages are displayed quickly. The copy of the blog entry was in this memory store - only visible internally"
So Server Beach has an automated system that detected copyright infringement in a "cache" file and automatically shut down the server before checking to see if it was actually visible to the public (which according to the article it was not)?
Moral of the story ... stop using Server Beach I guess.
This is scary for Server Beach customers because any copyrighted material could end up on disk (ie. if someone submits a form that writes to disk or into a database. Then the Server Beach script will nuke your site no questions asked!!!
A friend sent me an email a couple of years ago saying "Did you know that you have your phone number on FaceBook?". I said "Yes, I also have it in the phonebook".
Do you also have your photo in the phonebook?
Since the inspection and replacement is not covered by insurance or the auto shop I can only imagine that these counterfeit airbags will be on teh road for a long time.
Considering many / most people would go through insurance to get a new airbag installed as it's typically one part of a bigger job (ie. your front bumper assembly and other parts probably needed replacing at the same time) it's strange that Insurance would not cover the inspection.
You just paid a deductible just to get the work done and now you are being told that you need to pay to get it re-inspected and then you need to pay if the airbag is indeed a fake.
The burden shouldn't be on the consumer unless they knowingly purchased it and installed it themselves.
To our customers,
At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new sapphire lens camera last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make the camera better.
We launched an integrated camera initially with the first version of the iPhone. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with an even better camera including features such as a built-in flash and a sapphire lens. In order to do this, we had to create a new camera from the ground up.
There are already more than 5 million iPhones with the new camera, and more joining us every day. In just over a week, iPhone users with the new camera have already taken half a billion photos. The more our customers use the camera the more they will become accustomed to the new color balance. We greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from you.
While we can't really fix this, you can try alternatives by purchasing an additional camera from your local electronics store, Best Buy, Sony, Canon, Fuji, or use the front camera which doesn't have these issues.
Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.
Tim Cook
Apple’s CEO
There was no purple flare camera issue on the iPhone 4 / 4S ... so why should a consumer have to think twice about this at all?
I agree that NEW features might have kinks and if you are buying the phone for the new features you should hold off ... but the camera in the iPhone has been rock solid for the past few years. There should not be a "warming" period for existing functionality at this point.
How is it a challenge when this was a non-issue in the iPhone 4 / 4S ??
Apple shit the bed on quality control this time around. Everyday I read about more problems with my shiny new iPhone5 !!
Apple doesn't suck. All my gear is Apple and that's the reason why this is disappointing.
I did think of trying to cross reference population with the results because I am sure you are correct - it's the smaller towns in rural areas that have gotten the short end of the stick here. I also thought of using the Google Maps API to compare results but alas .. I've got better things to do really :-)
I think we can both agree they went backwards on this update. I'm from a small town so when it's no longer on the Map App (even though it was on the map App before) it's disappointing. You lock into a 3-year contract with the new phone and never expect that an App you use every day would suddenly become unusable.
- Port Perry Ontario pins you on an island about 5KM outside of town.
- Bracebridge Ontario pins you in a forest about 10KM outside of town when you zoom in.
- By my estimation 60% of towns in Ontario got relocated or completely wiped out.
How can you jump ship when:
1. Apple states all over their marketing that the new Maps App is a huge upgrade. Average consumers wouldn't think twice after all these years of upgrading iOS that suddenly the map app would suck it big time ?
2. You are locked into a contract for 2-3 years?
This is a great example of false advertising connected to a contract lock. Consumers get shafted any way you look at it.
Just because you haven't been there doesn't it shouldn't be there.
The whole reason this is an issue is because those small towns you have never been to are on all physical maps and on Google Maps. They are ALL ON the official Ministry of transportation Road Map: http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/traveller/map/
Furthermore people use Map Apps to find towns they haven't been to - not to find towns they have been to!!!
Ya, I agree. For Canada at least I don't think they got all of the data from Tom Tom. Because a regular Tom Tom GPS doesn't have these issues from what I have seen. So the question is where did Apple get the map data for Canada? Anyway you look at it if they can't get the fundamental locations correct then it will all snowball from there.
I agree the actual map data they have is really lacking.
However it's not hard to find good source data either. Almost 30% of my searches resulted int he location simply being "not found". These missing towns for example are on every map I have ever seen. It shouldn't be up to iPhone users to add towns onto a map - that is base location data that should be there from the start. Users can refine pin locations and add points of interests. But towns and cities should all be there as they have existed in real life since the 1800's or earlier.
You would think Apple would have audited the map data from their suppliers and realized that the maps themselves are sub-par.
At least 688 out of the 2000 towns are searched for on not even on the map ... you get the same CLGeocoder Error Code 8 whether you manually search for it through Apple Maps (watch the iPhones consol because it logs those errors) or whether you do it using your own code in an App.
I agree they do not have good source data, however it's not hard to find good source data either. These missing towns for example are on every map I have ever seen.
In an effort to figure out how innacurate the data in my area is I did the following:
- Fired up Xcode
- Determined that Apple Maps uses the CLGeocoder Class by peeking at the iPhone's debug console in Xcode while doing live searches in Apple Maps
- Scraped an official list of towns and cities in the province of Ontario from the provincial governments website.
- Coded up something quick in Xcode to get the results of a couple thousand searches. Searches always included the province name to be more specific.
- Ran a quick analysis of the results - not perfect but enough to get a perspective on the matter.
This is what I found:
- 2028 cities and towns searched
- 688 are not even on the map! Error Code 8
- 551 are clearly incorrect (wrong country, street names that are similar to town names etc.)
- 389 were close but not good enough (for example turn-by-turn might send you off a bridge but you'll get rescued close to where you want to be)
- Only about 400 results were actually correct.
Actual results data here and methodology here for those interested: http://www.mtonic.com/applemaps/
(It's not perfect but gives you an idea of how bad it really is in Ontario Canada anyways)
The post makes it sound like Hybrid is close to SSD ... it is not ...
Max. read speed (4K blocks)
SSD: 456MB/sec.
Standard: 122MB/sec.
Hybrid: 106MB/sec.
Max. write speed
SSD: 241MB/sec.
Standard: 119MB/sec.
Hybrid: 114MB/sec.
1.19GB file transfer
SSD: 15 sec.
Standard: 34 sec.
Hybrid: 29 sec.