I think this is the best summary I've seen of the overall discussion. Or at least it seems to capture my sense of the reading (halfway so far, but I'm continuing). The main thing I'd add is that I'm still a bit concerned about how a laser printer will handle thicker paper, such as business card stock. (If I ever got a mod point, I'd mod you [Megane (eyeglasses in Japanese?)] up.
I read part of the discussion before leaving this morning, and stopped by an electronics store on my way home. They did have two low-end color laser printers around 200 bucks and black only for half that. I still think I want the pretty colors... I guess I also have some concern about low-end versus the other laser printers, but I tend to think most of that is speed, and I avoid printing in a hurry. (In a real hurry, emailing a PDF or other file is hard to beat.)
My joke along these lines was that there hasn't been a good printer since Benjamin Franklin died. Today's printers are spawn of Satan and only exist to mangle as much paper as you can feed them.
Having said that, there seems to be a strong consensus in the discussion in favor of a laser printer. I didn't mention that I definitely want color, and I should also have mentioned that I print on various kinds and sizes of paper, but the overall discussion has definitely convinced me to take a close look at the current color laser printer options.
Another consensus around inkjets jamming, but the HP printing insurance program was interesting
Kind of surprised there were so few reactions related to photo-printing places. Now I'm wondering why the Slashdot folk don't roll that way...
Also no mention (so far) of out-of-production models? When I used to sell computer stuff, I sure thought that was where the best values lay.
The library idea was another good lead to look into. I'm something of a connoisseur of libraries. Even wrote a blog comparing over 20 library systems with something like 200 branches... But I've never investigated whether they have printers with the copiers.
Out of time, but generalized thanks for all your thoughtful comments, and I'll read more when I get back...
I certainly agree with you that there are many distributions, and I think that is one of the best aspects of Linux. Monolithic thinking is anti-freedom. Check my sig.
However whenever a major distro looks bad, all of Linux catches some shade. I still blame the financial models, but been there, done that, no one's interested in such crazy ideas as alternative possibly even better financial models.
I don't want to file this story as disaster porn, but so far it hasn't been anything I could describe as helpful. Ditto the comments. Double ditto the link and the comments there.
Right now I have 17.10 running on a Lenovo and a Toshiba, and so far I haven't noticed any problems. Lack of evidence is no proof of the negative...
Seems like my easy "response" is to hope that the next updates from Ubuntu take care of the problem (for extremely low values of care?). Unless it's already too late, in which case...
Not like Linux needs to shoot its reputation in the foot.
Me? I still lament that Linux was unable to seize the golden opportunity of Windows 8. Most of my machines run Windows 10 these days, alas...
Too bad your late response is unlikely to receive any of the insightful mods it might deserve. I mostly agree with you, but I do want to clarify the large-OS thing.
You are responding in absolute terms, and you are correct on that basis, but Microsoft was thinking in relative terms. They deliberately crafted their OSes BEYOND the economically reasonable hardware available at the time they were creating them. They were counting on Moore's Law to make the hardware resources (as required by the newest version of Windows) widely available by the time they entered the market. As a competitive strategy when the OS market was more competitive, it worked pretty well because it allowed them to deliver the most functionality relative to competing OSes.
Not relevant now, and even less relevant in the smartphone market. As the author of the original question put it, the capabilities of the phones are already quite excessive. I also believe the power problem has kept an absolute lid on smartphones and effectively overcome Moore's Law, even though the chips continue to improve.
Good comment, though I think you deserve funny mods for your closing joke more than insightful for stating the obvious. To really show insight, you needed to say more about why Microsoft can't do small.
My theory is that the fundamental problem is that Microsoft had their head wrapped around the BIG OS model, and never recovered. Small is not their thing, but for phones smaller is just better and the ridiculously over-capable OS was a bad thought pattern.
However, in accord with my other comment, I would also argue that corporate cancerism tends to do that. We actually had other players in the smartphone market, with other choices to freely choose from. I think Nokia was an especially sad story, but there were others. The only way the two current cancers (Apple and the google) can avoid swallowing each other is if they can keep their predatory financial models separate--but it's obvious that they are converging.
Ultimately there will be one smartphone to rule them all. Our only choice will be the winner or nothing. Not a real choice. (However, we may not get that if they figure out how to bribe the politicians to require each person to have THE smartphone.)
In particular, I find your explicit description of your needs and implicit philosophy are highly simpatico. Alas, I think the answer is no, for religious reasons, as just proven by the tax "reform" legislation we [Americans] are in the process of receiving.
In a capitalist economy, there would be a number of competing options and we would have meaningful choice and freedom. The side effect of that competition might even drive meaningful improvements rather than the current insane defense of profit maximization. However, that should give you some hint as to what's wrong.
We don't have capitalism, which is even deader than communism. What we have now is corporate cancerism.
There is no gawd but Profit, and Apple is Profit's #1 prophet. Rounding out the top ten (according to Forbes for 2016) we have Gilead, the google, Exxon, and some huge gamblers. The gamblers are various kinds of too-big-to-fail financial institutions that gamble with OUR [the peasants'] money, pocketing the profits while relying on their captive governments to save them when they phuck up again. (Yeah, the Russians have it even worse.)
As it applies to your concrete question, you should count yourself lucky you still have too choices to "freely" pick from. One of these two cancers [Apple or the google] will ultimately swallow the other. My prediction is that Apple is more likely to make a fatal mistake, or perhaps just slump for a product or three and go down that way.
Or to reword it in long tweet form:
Trains on time? NO! Planes on time? NO! Make Rome great again? NO!
But #PresidentTweety got lots of "help" from #BolshevikRepublicans! So they gave themselves a YUGE raise paid from the national DEBT! There is no gawd but profit and Trump is NO prophet.
I confess me, too. That website has a lot of oldies, and many of them are goodies. However, we're getting off-topic, since I think "worst" was not supposed to be taken in that euphemistic sense.
[Khassaki] HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!! [Judge-Mental] try pressing the the Caps Lock key [Khassaki] O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!! [Judge-Mental] fuck me
Just joking. At this point I'm convinced nothing can help Slashdot and the dead accounts represent the most reasonable people. Why hang around to watch the system continue dying?
I really had high hopes for this topic. High activity and target rich for humor, but not a SINGLE visible comment moderated as funny. The first "insightful" comment was an AC comment that didn't even make sense (though it had been heavily moderated into visibility). When I opened the Parent to get the context, there was a bit more meat underneath, but it had been heavily moderated downward (presumably by the usual suspects AKA trolls).
If Slashdot didn't have so many #1 problems, then the broken moderation would be one of them.
Oh yeah. Where did the subject come from? From noticing that the hidden-by-moderation context was from a 4-digit ID AKA an oldtimer (unless it's just another dormant account that's been hacked by another you-know-who). As a lowly 6-digit ID, I've gotten to wondering where I would be if they started shuffling things around with the dormant accounts getting high user numbers and the people above them getting an option to slide down to the more "prestigious" low numbers... I suspect the number of active users of Slashdot these years is less than 10,000, so all of them could have 4-digit IDs if they wanted them.
Me? I'd prefer a prime ID number. Mathematical superstition?
Oh yeah. What about the story? Well, if we can't use any of the words the story is about, then we can't talk about that story anyway. All heil Herr #PresidentTweety! Zdravsvtvuyte, Comrade! (Why does Slashdot reject the Cyrillic form? Unicode violation?)
Thanks for the clarification of the source, though I'm not sure it changes the "deeper" part of my comment. I haven't seen the movie, but I rarely do. Now I'm wondering if I should look for a book version...
I'm not sure I understand you. I have my settings adjusted so that I almost never see anything from AC unless the comment is heavily moderated up. Based on their rare appearances (sometimes in Parent searches), I am convinced I am missing nothing of significance.
I think there is a better solution, though it would not be minor. I can describe it briefly, however. One description is to make karma more symmetric to moderation. An alternative description would be to make public reputation more symmetric with respect to private representation. Lots of detailed suggestions available upon polite request, or you can just rummage around among my old comments.
At this point I think Slashdot is basically what it is. Sort of sad to see it falling on such hard times and sort of frustrating to see the potential for improvements. However there is no evidence things will ever improve, which I mostly attribute to the broken financial models. The question is not "change" or "no change", but "smooth change" versus "disruptive change". There is also the dimension of getting better or worse. I would currently place Slashdot in the quadrant of gradual change for the worse. (Makes me realize I can tag three of the cells as "declining", "collapsing", and "improving", but I don't know how to label the 4th cell. Perhaps because it is so rare?)
Boy, you really hit the trolls' nerves with that one. Almost makes me wish I had the time and energy to cultivate the sock puppets with mod points to help you back into higher visibility.
If #4687763 is the real Steve Jackson, then this could be a rather deeper comment than it appears. Still not seeing the joke, but at least the "funny" mods don't appear to be from obvious trolls.
There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That's roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day.
I'm getting way more than my fair share, then. Because I receive upwards of 500-1000 spam emails every single day.
I wish I could thank you for taking care of part of my share, but I think I'm getting at least that many per day, too. It's getting hard to tell unless you actually look for the false positives. These days I only check my primary email address for them.
Much worse is the false negative problem that allows the spammers to confirm an email address using this same technique as long as they can get one of their spams to slip past the filters. Also annoying are the Facebook- and Google-linked spams, where the annoyance is compounded by how little such companies care about the abuse of their own "members" based on trust in the supposedly valuable "brands".
There is an existence proof for solutions. Haven't you noticed that pump-and-dump stock scams were actually fought successfully?
I think a possible solution to the problem you've described so well would be to share some of the information the inhuman corporations are already collecting about us. Consider a second icon next to your avatar. Your avatar would link as usual to your profile and what you want to say about yourself. The second icon would be a standardized representation of your public reputation, mostly based on the reactions of other people to your public activities.
Where is this "capitalism" thing you're talking about? Related to that dead "communism" thingamabob?
Seriously, what we have now is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and #PresidentTweety is NO prophet. According to Forbes, Apple is the #1 prophet of Gawd Profit.
Facebook is just one of the symptoms. Another is rampant bribery of the cheapest politicians to rig the rules in favor of bigger profits, with tax policies to make the rich richer while reducing our freedoms. Another symptom is disaster porn overwhelming real news. I even regard the division-and-conquest of the public school system as yet another symptom. Perhaps even the most dangerous one.
The joke is too subtle and recursive to deserve mod points.
Anyway, this problem doesn't apply on Slashdot. The moderation system is too broken. Or perhaps the other problems are just too overwhelming? There's also the factor that the "community" started out on the broken side, so to speak...
Too soon? Nothing moderated at all? Keyword searches also came up dry.
Anyway, my main experiences are with an Epson Pulsense and a Samsung Galaxy. Going back some years already. Also an Omron sleep tracker, but that leads into the blood pressure topics... Lesser experience with a FitBit and activity tracking apps (both for walking and bicycling) on various smartphones, currently a FreeTel and an ASUS. Various good features and limitations that could be discussed, but already running out of motivation to spend more time on today's Slashdot for that sort of thing...
I'll probably check back later but I'm not really anticipating much in the way of useful advice for what to buy next, which is my primary interest in the topic. My Epson is going on 5 years old now, and probably won't last much longer. Actually looked at a couple of the current offerings in a major electronic goods store today.
Short summary at a higher level: Glut of data, some of which is probably relevant to assessing my physical condition, but I can't interpret much of it and haven't found any doctor who was much interested, except for one sleep specialist.
Unauthorized or just plain censored? Or it might be specific censorship targeting me for my unacceptably negative attitude.
Anyway, the link requires me to log in with my Apple ID account (created several years ago when I bought that MacBook Pro), but then just says the "place or content is restricted". Based on my personal experiences with Apple, I think they are censoring it, though it appears that the preemptive censorship didn't work properly this time. In my prior experiences, they usually block me from posting when I've gotten about halfway through composing the description of the problem.
Went back to check your original comment. Rather than receive the positive moderation you might deserve, I see that you have received undeserved and meaningless negative moderation. I am certainly not defending either the quality of the moderation or the way it is implemented. However, I think it could be improved. VAST room for improvement. You mentioned karma, which should be part of such improvements. There's a natural symmetry there that is lost in the current approach.
Not sure about the longer second part of your reply. I could interpret it as agreement with examples, or that you are going in a different direction. I think that I definitely agree with you about the trade-offs, so perhaps I can address it with a pie-in-the-sky solution implemented via tax policy.
Let's start with the premise that Apple is doing a good job of serving the customers and deserves the profits. My more controversial premise is that Apple's customers would still benefit from more freedom in the form of additional choices. Perhaps it would sound less controversial if I reworded it in terms of the lack of a perfect solution for every person? Apple's best offering might be perfect for some people, but never for everyone--even if that assumption would maximize their profits.
So imagine that dominance in their market increased their tax rate. At some point it would make good sense to consider reproduction of the good ideas. Not a penalty for success, but rather an incentive to create more copies of the good ideas and let them evolve into the future. Divide Apple (or MS or Google) into competing companies with equal shares of the resources. Actually starting with the same profits, but divided among the daughter companies. If they want to maintain a standard platform, they could keep doing that, but the platform standards would have to be shared in public.
You might want to buy your next machine from a division that decided to put a higher priority on security. Based on my experience to date, I would be looking for the company that remembered physical security with a Kensington lock anchor on their machines. We might even get a hotkey screen lock on both options because of the competition.
If you can't understand what I wrote and actually want to, please feel free to ask for clarification.
If you can't understand what I wrote and don't want to, that's certainly your prerogative.
If you have nothing to say, why don't you just say nothing?
Let me check again. Yes, rereading your so-called reply and making suitable allowances for your poor writing, I can confirm that there is nothing there that has any relevance to anything I wrote. FYI.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is the best summary I've seen of the overall discussion. Or at least it seems to capture my sense of the reading (halfway so far, but I'm continuing). The main thing I'd add is that I'm still a bit concerned about how a laser printer will handle thicker paper, such as business card stock. (If I ever got a mod point, I'd mod you [Megane (eyeglasses in Japanese?)] up.
I read part of the discussion before leaving this morning, and stopped by an electronics store on my way home. They did have two low-end color laser printers around 200 bucks and black only for half that. I still think I want the pretty colors... I guess I also have some concern about low-end versus the other laser printers, but I tend to think most of that is speed, and I avoid printing in a hurry. (In a real hurry, emailing a PDF or other file is hard to beat.)
My joke along these lines was that there hasn't been a good printer since Benjamin Franklin died. Today's printers are spawn of Satan and only exist to mangle as much paper as you can feed them.
Having said that, there seems to be a strong consensus in the discussion in favor of a laser printer. I didn't mention that I definitely want color, and I should also have mentioned that I print on various kinds and sizes of paper, but the overall discussion has definitely convinced me to take a close look at the current color laser printer options.
Another consensus around inkjets jamming, but the HP printing insurance program was interesting
Kind of surprised there were so few reactions related to photo-printing places. Now I'm wondering why the Slashdot folk don't roll that way...
Also no mention (so far) of out-of-production models? When I used to sell computer stuff, I sure thought that was where the best values lay.
The library idea was another good lead to look into. I'm something of a connoisseur of libraries. Even wrote a blog comparing over 20 library systems with something like 200 branches... But I've never investigated whether they have printers with the copiers.
Out of time, but generalized thanks for all your thoughtful comments, and I'll read more when I get back...
I certainly agree with you that there are many distributions, and I think that is one of the best aspects of Linux. Monolithic thinking is anti-freedom. Check my sig.
However whenever a major distro looks bad, all of Linux catches some shade. I still blame the financial models, but been there, done that, no one's interested in such crazy ideas as alternative possibly even better financial models.
I don't want to file this story as disaster porn, but so far it hasn't been anything I could describe as helpful. Ditto the comments. Double ditto the link and the comments there.
Right now I have 17.10 running on a Lenovo and a Toshiba, and so far I haven't noticed any problems. Lack of evidence is no proof of the negative...
Seems like my easy "response" is to hope that the next updates from Ubuntu take care of the problem (for extremely low values of care?). Unless it's already too late, in which case...
Not like Linux needs to shoot its reputation in the foot.
Me? I still lament that Linux was unable to seize the golden opportunity of Windows 8. Most of my machines run Windows 10 these days, alas...
Too bad your late response is unlikely to receive any of the insightful mods it might deserve. I mostly agree with you, but I do want to clarify the large-OS thing.
You are responding in absolute terms, and you are correct on that basis, but Microsoft was thinking in relative terms. They deliberately crafted their OSes BEYOND the economically reasonable hardware available at the time they were creating them. They were counting on Moore's Law to make the hardware resources (as required by the newest version of Windows) widely available by the time they entered the market. As a competitive strategy when the OS market was more competitive, it worked pretty well because it allowed them to deliver the most functionality relative to competing OSes.
Not relevant now, and even less relevant in the smartphone market. As the author of the original question put it, the capabilities of the phones are already quite excessive. I also believe the power problem has kept an absolute lid on smartphones and effectively overcome Moore's Law, even though the chips continue to improve.
Good comment, though I think you deserve funny mods for your closing joke more than insightful for stating the obvious. To really show insight, you needed to say more about why Microsoft can't do small.
My theory is that the fundamental problem is that Microsoft had their head wrapped around the BIG OS model, and never recovered. Small is not their thing, but for phones smaller is just better and the ridiculously over-capable OS was a bad thought pattern.
However, in accord with my other comment, I would also argue that corporate cancerism tends to do that. We actually had other players in the smartphone market, with other choices to freely choose from. I think Nokia was an especially sad story, but there were others. The only way the two current cancers (Apple and the google) can avoid swallowing each other is if they can keep their predatory financial models separate--but it's obvious that they are converging.
Ultimately there will be one smartphone to rule them all. Our only choice will be the winner or nothing. Not a real choice. (However, we may not get that if they figure out how to bribe the politicians to require each person to have THE smartphone.)
In particular, I find your explicit description of your needs and implicit philosophy are highly simpatico. Alas, I think the answer is no, for religious reasons, as just proven by the tax "reform" legislation we [Americans] are in the process of receiving.
In a capitalist economy, there would be a number of competing options and we would have meaningful choice and freedom. The side effect of that competition might even drive meaningful improvements rather than the current insane defense of profit maximization. However, that should give you some hint as to what's wrong.
We don't have capitalism, which is even deader than communism. What we have now is corporate cancerism.
There is no gawd but Profit, and Apple is Profit's #1 prophet. Rounding out the top ten (according to Forbes for 2016) we have Gilead, the google, Exxon, and some huge gamblers. The gamblers are various kinds of too-big-to-fail financial institutions that gamble with OUR [the peasants'] money, pocketing the profits while relying on their captive governments to save them when they phuck up again. (Yeah, the Russians have it even worse.)
As it applies to your concrete question, you should count yourself lucky you still have too choices to "freely" pick from. One of these two cancers [Apple or the google] will ultimately swallow the other. My prediction is that Apple is more likely to make a fatal mistake, or perhaps just slump for a product or three and go down that way.
Or to reword it in long tweet form:
Trains on time? NO!
Planes on time? NO!
Make Rome great again? NO!
But #PresidentTweety got lots of "help" from #BolshevikRepublicans!
So they gave themselves a YUGE raise paid from the national DEBT!
There is no gawd but profit and Trump is NO prophet.
#TrumpStinks #PutinWins
Yo mama's bash.org is so old it uses angle brackets that Slashdot tries to treat as unknown HTML tags.
Let's see if a quote tag can help?
Nope. Obviously not, in hindsight.
I confess me, too. That website has a lot of oldies, and many of them are goodies. However, we're getting off-topic, since I think "worst" was not supposed to be taken in that euphemistic sense.
My favorite oldie is this one:
Yip yip yip yip yip.
*BANG*
NO TERRIER
Another one that got me was this ancient one:
[Khassaki] HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!
[Judge-Mental] try pressing the the Caps Lock key
[Khassaki] O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!
[Judge-Mental] fuck me
http://www.bash.org/?835030 is the source of the second one.
Just joking. At this point I'm convinced nothing can help Slashdot and the dead accounts represent the most reasonable people. Why hang around to watch the system continue dying?
I really had high hopes for this topic. High activity and target rich for humor, but not a SINGLE visible comment moderated as funny. The first "insightful" comment was an AC comment that didn't even make sense (though it had been heavily moderated into visibility). When I opened the Parent to get the context, there was a bit more meat underneath, but it had been heavily moderated downward (presumably by the usual suspects AKA trolls).
If Slashdot didn't have so many #1 problems, then the broken moderation would be one of them.
Oh yeah. Where did the subject come from? From noticing that the hidden-by-moderation context was from a 4-digit ID AKA an oldtimer (unless it's just another dormant account that's been hacked by another you-know-who). As a lowly 6-digit ID, I've gotten to wondering where I would be if they started shuffling things around with the dormant accounts getting high user numbers and the people above them getting an option to slide down to the more "prestigious" low numbers... I suspect the number of active users of Slashdot these years is less than 10,000, so all of them could have 4-digit IDs if they wanted them.
Me? I'd prefer a prime ID number. Mathematical superstition?
Oh yeah. What about the story? Well, if we can't use any of the words the story is about, then we can't talk about that story anyway. All heil Herr #PresidentTweety! Zdravsvtvuyte, Comrade! (Why does Slashdot reject the Cyrillic form? Unicode violation?)
Thanks for the clarification of the source, though I'm not sure it changes the "deeper" part of my comment. I haven't seen the movie, but I rarely do. Now I'm wondering if I should look for a book version...
I'm not sure I understand you. I have my settings adjusted so that I almost never see anything from AC unless the comment is heavily moderated up. Based on their rare appearances (sometimes in Parent searches), I am convinced I am missing nothing of significance.
I think there is a better solution, though it would not be minor. I can describe it briefly, however. One description is to make karma more symmetric to moderation. An alternative description would be to make public reputation more symmetric with respect to private representation. Lots of detailed suggestions available upon polite request, or you can just rummage around among my old comments.
At this point I think Slashdot is basically what it is. Sort of sad to see it falling on such hard times and sort of frustrating to see the potential for improvements. However there is no evidence things will ever improve, which I mostly attribute to the broken financial models. The question is not "change" or "no change", but "smooth change" versus "disruptive change". There is also the dimension of getting better or worse. I would currently place Slashdot in the quadrant of gradual change for the worse. (Makes me realize I can tag three of the cells as "declining", "collapsing", and "improving", but I don't know how to label the 4th cell. Perhaps because it is so rare?)
Boy, you really hit the trolls' nerves with that one. Almost makes me wish I had the time and energy to cultivate the sock puppets with mod points to help you back into higher visibility.
Under the new troll policies, it now appears the fake "funny" mods are a good way to find the comments they don't want people to see...
If #4687763 is the real Steve Jackson, then this could be a rather deeper comment than it appears. Still not seeing the joke, but at least the "funny" mods don't appear to be from obvious trolls.
Is there anything funny here? Or do some of the trolls (and their sock puppets) have mod points to burn?
There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That's roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day.
I'm getting way more than my fair share, then. Because I receive upwards of 500-1000 spam emails every single day.
I wish I could thank you for taking care of part of my share, but I think I'm getting at least that many per day, too. It's getting hard to tell unless you actually look for the false positives. These days I only check my primary email address for them.
Much worse is the false negative problem that allows the spammers to confirm an email address using this same technique as long as they can get one of their spams to slip past the filters. Also annoying are the Facebook- and Google-linked spams, where the annoyance is compounded by how little such companies care about the abuse of their own "members" based on trust in the supposedly valuable "brands".
There is an existence proof for solutions. Haven't you noticed that pump-and-dump stock scams were actually fought successfully?
I think we've had this discussion before?
I think a possible solution to the problem you've described so well would be to share some of the information the inhuman corporations are already collecting about us. Consider a second icon next to your avatar. Your avatar would link as usual to your profile and what you want to say about yourself. The second icon would be a standardized representation of your public reputation, mostly based on the reactions of other people to your public activities.
DAUPR, atAJG.
Where is this "capitalism" thing you're talking about? Related to that dead "communism" thingamabob?
Seriously, what we have now is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and #PresidentTweety is NO prophet. According to Forbes, Apple is the #1 prophet of Gawd Profit.
Facebook is just one of the symptoms. Another is rampant bribery of the cheapest politicians to rig the rules in favor of bigger profits, with tax policies to make the rich richer while reducing our freedoms. Another symptom is disaster porn overwhelming real news. I even regard the division-and-conquest of the public school system as yet another symptom. Perhaps even the most dangerous one.
The joke is too subtle and recursive to deserve mod points.
Anyway, this problem doesn't apply on Slashdot. The moderation system is too broken. Or perhaps the other problems are just too overwhelming? There's also the factor that the "community" started out on the broken side, so to speak...
Too soon? Nothing moderated at all? Keyword searches also came up dry.
Anyway, my main experiences are with an Epson Pulsense and a Samsung Galaxy. Going back some years already. Also an Omron sleep tracker, but that leads into the blood pressure topics... Lesser experience with a FitBit and activity tracking apps (both for walking and bicycling) on various smartphones, currently a FreeTel and an ASUS. Various good features and limitations that could be discussed, but already running out of motivation to spend more time on today's Slashdot for that sort of thing...
I'll probably check back later but I'm not really anticipating much in the way of useful advice for what to buy next, which is my primary interest in the topic. My Epson is going on 5 years old now, and probably won't last much longer. Actually looked at a couple of the current offerings in a major electronic goods store today.
Short summary at a higher level: Glut of data, some of which is probably relevant to assessing my physical condition, but I can't interpret much of it and haven't found any doctor who was much interested, except for one sleep specialist.
Unauthorized or just plain censored? Or it might be specific censorship targeting me for my unacceptably negative attitude.
Anyway, the link requires me to log in with my Apple ID account (created several years ago when I bought that MacBook Pro), but then just says the "place or content is restricted". Based on my personal experiences with Apple, I think they are censoring it, though it appears that the preemptive censorship didn't work properly this time. In my prior experiences, they usually block me from posting when I've gotten about halfway through composing the description of the problem.
Went back to check your original comment. Rather than receive the positive moderation you might deserve, I see that you have received undeserved and meaningless negative moderation. I am certainly not defending either the quality of the moderation or the way it is implemented. However, I think it could be improved. VAST room for improvement. You mentioned karma, which should be part of such improvements. There's a natural symmetry there that is lost in the current approach.
Not sure about the longer second part of your reply. I could interpret it as agreement with examples, or that you are going in a different direction. I think that I definitely agree with you about the trade-offs, so perhaps I can address it with a pie-in-the-sky solution implemented via tax policy.
Let's start with the premise that Apple is doing a good job of serving the customers and deserves the profits. My more controversial premise is that Apple's customers would still benefit from more freedom in the form of additional choices. Perhaps it would sound less controversial if I reworded it in terms of the lack of a perfect solution for every person? Apple's best offering might be perfect for some people, but never for everyone--even if that assumption would maximize their profits.
So imagine that dominance in their market increased their tax rate. At some point it would make good sense to consider reproduction of the good ideas. Not a penalty for success, but rather an incentive to create more copies of the good ideas and let them evolve into the future. Divide Apple (or MS or Google) into competing companies with equal shares of the resources. Actually starting with the same profits, but divided among the daughter companies. If they want to maintain a standard platform, they could keep doing that, but the platform standards would have to be shared in public.
You might want to buy your next machine from a division that decided to put a higher priority on security. Based on my experience to date, I would be looking for the company that remembered physical security with a Kensington lock anchor on their machines. We might even get a hotkey screen lock on both options because of the competition.
If you can't understand what I wrote and actually want to, please feel free to ask for clarification.
If you can't understand what I wrote and don't want to, that's certainly your prerogative.
If you have nothing to say, why don't you just say nothing?
Let me check again. Yes, rereading your so-called reply and making suitable allowances for your poor writing, I can confirm that there is nothing there that has any relevance to anything I wrote. FYI.