What I don't understand, is why they only make consumer-level stuff. They don't make anything, hardware or software-wise for businesses.
That's because it's much easier to tease a ridiculous profit margin out of consumers who buy hyped-up shiny shit. Business are a bit harder to fool, and tend to think a bit more about their spending decisions on technology.
How you are unable to put music on an iPod is beyond me... perhaps stop trying to use an 'explorer' to put pirated/unofficially downloaded files on it?
How hard can it be to click the check boxes in iTunes which playlists or albums you want to have on the iPod?
This is exactly the point OP is trying to make. You are only looking at things from the angle of someone embedded fully in the Apple ecosystem. --You are completely disregarding the viewpoint of people used to doing things a different way. For them, using Apple products *IS* difficult.
Just take a look at your own comments: using iTunes is easy only if 1) you plan on only ever downloading music from the iTunes store and 2) only use iTunes to manage your music without ever tinkering with how and where it is stored on your computer. Why do you assume that everyone does things that way or wants to do things that way? Or finds that natural?
Why do you assume any other music I want to put on the iPod is pirated or "unofficial"? There are other ways to get legal music downloads - you know there are other music stores apart from the iTunes one. Or maybe the band/artist gives it away for free? Maybe it's something that has become public domain? Maybe in the given legal jurisdiction, ripping CDs you have bought for personal use is legal? Etc.
Why do I necessarily want iTunes to completely manage my entire music library? Maybe I want to use other music players to play music on my computer?
That's the point: Apple is "easy" when you are "trapped" and fully encapsulated within their products. Try to go outside the prescribed way of doing things and it becomes a major pain in the ass. Now, I understand some people are OK with the prescribed way of doing things. Some people, on the other hand, are not. They find Apple products difficult to use.
I have never ever found an Apple product easy to use.
Same here. Give me a Mac, and I'm totally lost. Intuitive? I laugh when people say it's intuitive...it ain't intuitive for me.
Part of it stems from me always being in the PC ecosystem, so some things are just strange. They are not necessarily better or worse, just different. Like the different keyboard keys...what I am even supposed to call the ones with the weird arrows? "The Key formerly known as Page Up"? One mouse button? What? No right click? How does one use a computer without right-click? Dock for launching programs? Wtf give me a start-menu like thing. The way you install programs by dragging them into...just stop.
However, that's not the only thing. I hate how Apple tries to dumb things down. I've always felt, whenever I've booted up a Mac (I often had to do that at school, because, for some reason in the late 90s and early 2000s, teachers always liked/wanted Macs! And not just in the art classes either) that I'm being treated as an idiot. "You see, this computer thing, it's too complicated for you, so we turned into a fancy version of a fridge! Also, it smiles at you! Welcome!" - that how it's always felt for me. Also, why doesn't the iPhone have a separate menu away from the "desktop" where all the apps are (like in Android)? I don't want all of my apps on the "desktops". I hate when some Android phones use a custom UI that copies this. Why the obsession with so few physical buttons and controls? I hated the early iPods on which you were supposed to do everything with that one circular button - because I was already used to music players that had well defined, single-function (or at most dual-function) multiple buttons. I remember I was totally lost the first time I held an iPod in my hand. Rolling my finger around that circle did not feel any "easier" or "more intuitive" to me than repeatedly pushing (or just holding) a volume or forward buttons on an MP3 player - because I had done the same previously on CD players and walkmans.
My opinion is that Apple products are "easy" and "intuitive" to use only if Apple products are the only thing you've ever seriously used in your life. This makes it no different than Microsoft or open source products. If you learn the ecosystem, you feel at home in it. If you've never used a computer, is Apple "easier" to learn? I have no idea, and have no personal objective reference point, since I've been using computers since I was 4 years old and the first one was a 286 running DOS. For me, Apple has always been a foreign country.
Another thing: Apple is "easy" and "intuitive" only if you let Apple products do what they want and are cool with being forced doing stuff their way. Take iTunes: once I got an iPod as a prize. As I already had an MP3 player I was quite happy with, I gave the iPod to my girlfriend. To get music on it, she had to install iTunes. Then iTunes asks where all your music is on your PC...so she pointed iTunes to it, and later started horrifyingly yelling when she realized that iTunes had rearranged all the music folders the way it wanted...now, my girlfriend is no tech nerd for sure, but she is a music nerd. She likes her music organized the way she wants. She spends hours sorting it into folders and subfolders...and here comes iTunes, thinking it knows better. That's *exactly* what Tim Cook is saying in this article - Apple doesn't want to ever look at the actual directory structure where your music is stored, to actually touch the files. They want you to look at your music via iTunes ONLY and FOREVER. Oh, and not to mention the syncing "feature" where iTunes randomly deletes stuff (either from the iPod or the PC). The solution in this particular case was not to let iTunes ever touch the music directories, and just do drag and drop from Windows Explorer straight onto iTunes for transferring something to the iPod.
Whenever I use an Apple product, I feel like I am not in control - like the product is my master. Hence, I very rarely use Apple products.
...I will not drive. Or at least not own. I'll take public transit, a taxi or some "ride-sharing" (stupid name) service, walk, or cycle. In cases that I really need to drive, I'll rent or use a car-sharing service, which will rather limit the amount of data that can be collected from me in that context.
Note to car manufacturers: sell me a car that drives from point A to point B efficiently. Make a profit doing that. If you can't, then gtfo.
What's happened is some marketer did research comparing inline ads to some other type of (more annoying) ad, and found the more annoying type generated more click-throughs.
The whole "click-through" fixation is part of the problem. In the past, companies really had no direct and effective way to measure the effect of an ad. They could only do it indirectly - e.g. ad goes out, sales go up (but was it really due to the ad? no one can tell for sure).
When click-throughs arrived, the ad people came to *think* that they got an effective measure of ad effectiveness. So hence the fixation on click-throughs. They are easily measurable and objective (just a number), so they make a great metric to strive towards. Except that click-throughs don't really tell you the whole story, nor are click-through oriented ads the only way to do effective advertising. Companies take out non-online ads just to "create presence", to have them stuck in your mind. Maybe you're not shopping for a new car right now, but that doesn't mean that all those BMWs ads are pointless. When you DO get around to shopping for a new car, an effective BMW advertising campaign will have ingrained in your brain the idea that BMWs are great cars, and that you should consider buying one. Bonus points for the ad if that's the first car that comes to your mind.
Online ads should be treated the same way, I feel. An unobtrusive inline ad in an article will subconsciously ingrain some idea in your head - "Colgate = toothpaste" or "super laptop = Dell". It doesn't have to make you instantly buy (or think of buying) something, but it has to pop the brand up in your head the moment you want/need to buy something. That's maybe months or years down the road.
The ad-infested website has led to some horrible assumptions on the part of the Internet audience -- we now expect that everything should be free. It doesn't matter if it cost money for people to write the stories and for companies to host the content, some folks put up stuff for free, so 'free' is the default assumption for something that costs money.
It's not just that. Yes, the internet has increased the overall expectations for "free" content, that is true. However, the truth is that most of that content would never be read if it weren't offered for "free". Say I go to salon.com and the first thing I see is "if you want to read our articles, please subscribe for $X a month". Would I subscribe? Probably not. How many people hitting that page would subscribe? 1%? 0.5%? 0.01%? So yes, the content costs money to make. However,
most people don't care enough for the content to pay for it.
It's like when RIAA and MPAA make those inflated claims about lost revenue due to piracy: a lot of the music/video that people download they only listen to/watch because they can download it freely. If they had to pay, they would be a lot more selective of what they buy.
It's the choice of most websites to offer content for "free", and then to try and support themselves via ads or whatever. It's their choice to try and have millions of readers, and make a fraction of a cent on each via advertising, rather than have tens of thousands of readers who pay double or triple-digit dollar figures for a subscription. They figured it's easier to do the former than trying to convince people to take up a subscription in the latter model. If they screw up by offering too many ads for too little content, it's their problem. Not the readers'.
People use adblockers because they have no trust in websites to not abuse their computers, eg. by installation of malware through the served ads.
That's part of it for sure. However, it's not just that.
People (myself included) also use adblockers because they don't want a page they are reading plastered with annoying ads that jump at you every second. It's annoying. You know what I do when a website (usually some online publication, e.g. newspaper or magazine) tells me "you've got an ad blocker installed, please whitelist us to continue reading"? In 99% of the cases, I just leave that website. Most of the stuff I click just isn't THAT interesting to be worth being blasted by ads.
Which brings us to another point. These sites want to "make readers pay". The things is - readers don't want to pay for most of this content. They're happy to read it if it's free, but if it's not - they can live without it. Not wanting to pay includes not just not wanting to pay with their money - but also with their attention (ads blasting) and computing power (cryptocurrency mining). There's very little content out there that any particular reader is actually willing to pay for.
How will the poor websites fund themselves you ask? Well, it's their effin' problem that the advertising became way too aggressive and that the web became dominated at one point with websites which are 90% ads and 10% content. Not to mention all the malware and tracking and all of the other crap being "served" via the ads. Had the ads been less aggressive, ad blockers would not have proliferated. Even offline we are inundated with advertising, it goes way beyond just the businesses which fund themselves primarily via ads (e.g. free to air TV and in general media outlets), it looks like everyone is trying to make an extra buck by selling some space for an ad. Is it a wonder that people then massively say well screw you, I'm blocking this?
The only reason services like paypal exist are because bank transfers are typically stupidly overpriced, often far too slow and the banks tend to make them too convoluted to perform.
Yes, in North America (and maybe some other parts of the world, I don't know). In Europe, bank transfers are easy, and in fact, a lot of commerce is done this way...the merchant gives you the bank account number and you pay into it. Merchant doesn't have any of your data (except your name and address, which you fill in when you do the bank transfer - but you could fake that with pretty much no consequence).
Granted, it's not instant like a credit card, it usually takes a day or two for the money to show up on the merchant's account. So maybe not great for things you want access to instantly (like an online subscription), but OK for things that in any case require processing time (like something that you buy online that will anyway arrive 5, 7, 10, 30 days later).
International payments are also easy, thanks to IBANs (international bank account numbers) which contain all the necessary information in a single string of letters and digits (North American banks, for some reason, do not use the IBAN system).
Processing fees for domestic transfers are not very high (not bigger than the processing fees credit cards charge - except you don't see those, as they are rolled into the price). International fees could be quite a bit lower (however, your credit card also charges currency conversion fees...not always explicitly, but via the exchange rate).
At any rate, in Europe, the default way of paying lots of things (rent, utility bills, monthly insurance premiums, etc. etc.) is paying straight into the merchant's/service provider's account. Before the advent of online payments, everyone would get pre-filled payment slips in the mail (now in most places you can opt out of this, and go completely electronic) - payment slips use a standardised form btw - and you take these to any bank (or in many countries, also the post office) and pay at the counter. If that also happens to be your bank, they can deduct the money from your account. Everywhere you can pay with cash (and at most places nowadays, debit or credit card as well). The bank charges a fee for this transaction (usually around 1%, with a minumum and maximum fee cap, i.e. they won't actually charge 1% on a $1000 payment, but less, but neither on a $1 payment, but more). When you log into your internet banking, the interface usually presents itself in the shape of the standardized payment slip, so that you can just copy the information easily. Online merchants will, if you select bank transfer as the method of payment, often generate a payment slip for you in PDF, that you can either print (to pay in person at the bank) or just copy the information into your internet banking form.
Well, short of making them illegal, there'll always be a market for piston-engined/internal combustion-engined vehicles. They're so much fun to drive.
Think about "always" and "fun to drive" more carefully.
Yes, based on the current state of battery technology, and on what is projected to exist in the near future, we can say that for decades to come, there will exist at least a niche for internal combustion engine-powered vehicles. However projecting beyond the next, say, 20 years, we've no idea how far battery or some other EV storage technology might go. It might be that in 60 or 80 years, ICE-powered vehicles will exist just as old-timers, things you see out for a spin or at vintage car show just like you might see a car from the 1930s today.
"Fun to drive" is a subjective thing. For sure, there lots of people today who consider cars with prowling engines fun to drive. In 2-3 generations, it's possible that are no more such people (or that their number is very small).
Finally: internal combustion engines are in fact very complicated things to produce. They are vastly more complicated things to produce well. If the industry were to, at one point, shift wholesale to electric motors, manufacturing combustion engines probably wouldn't make economic sense anymore, except for some high-end luxury sports car manufacturers that have ridiculous margins anyway. However, even Ferrari depends a lot on the supply chains of the lowly FIAT, so if FIAT were to abandon combustion engines (and all the things that go along with them, with things as trivial as alternators and spark plugs), Ferrari's costs would go up (they'd probably have to hand-produce or pay a lot for custom low-volume industrial production of everything).
I can see a future where the roles of today (or better yet, of 20 years ago) are reversed: electric chargers everywhere, as (or more) common than gas stations today, while the few remaining owners of combustion vehicles have to have the fuel delivered to their homes (the equivalent of being only able to plug in your electric car at home), since there almost aren't any gas stations left.
but their living conditions and government has not changed much.
Uhm, what? If there is a country on Earth where people have experienced a DRASTIC improvement of their "living conditions" (I assume that by this you mostly mean the standard of living) over the past few decades, then it's China. Few places in the world have seen the improvement China has. This is the main reason why their government has not changed - people see their lives improving steadily, so they do not feel it is necessary to change.
Impress is so shockingly bad that they should be embarrassed to include it in the package.
I disagree.
When I make PowerPoint presentations, I really go animation-heavy. It's my thing. Recently I imported a bunch of PowerPoint presentations into Impress, edited them, made new slides, made new animations, saved in odp format and did the presentation in front of an audience of 50 people. Everything went fine.
Yes, the slides look a bit outdated when you are editing them inside Impress, but once you go into full-screen presentation mode, there is hardly any difference. I don't think anybody noticed.
On the other hand, PowerPoint has caused me some embarrassment in front of such audiences. I went to a conference once, and had a.pptx file prepared (due to the animations I use a lot to demonstrate sometimes highly complicated technical concepts and keep people following the story, using a PDF version won't cut it). The chair of the session was using a Mac, so he asked me to load the file on his computer to avoid having to disconnect it from the projector and spend time on connecting my computer. OK, I thought, he had MS Office on his Mac, with PowerPoint, everything should be fine, right?
Wrong. Half my slides were messed up. Some crucial parts. If I open a.pptx file made on Windows in the Mac version of Office (and vice versa), there should be NO difference in the presentation. Everything should look EXACTLY the same. Except that it doesn't. I'm not the only one with this issue.
Anyone who has attempted to use LibreOffice or GIMP for professional work will tell you the same thing: they are not suited for any kind of professional work. Adobe and the rest switched to this business model because they know users will have no choice.
I have used and currently use LibreOffice for professional work and it works just fine. To say that it is "not suited for any kind of professional work" is just plain false. As in not true. As in - a lie. There is lots of professional work LibreOffice is suited just fine for. For sure, there are things it cannot do, or cannot do well. It's not a perfect replacement for Microsoft Office. However, there is a lot of professional work you can do with it.
GIMP I can't comment on, I really haven't used that program much in any capacity (professional or otherwise).
Lubuntu it is. I find that this distro runs just fine od 10+ year old PCs (once-upon-a-time Windows laptops), no reason why it shouldn't run just fine on an old Macbook.
"Handy" is the simplest one, obviously the word hand is involved. It sounds english so we all use it, because english is hip. It means "mobile phone"... suddenly it makes no sense anymore, or does it?
To me, "handy" always sounded like some device for handicapped people. Dunno why.
Another denglish favourite of mine is the word "beamer" for "projector". I've never heard anyone from an English-speaking country use "beamer" (people from English-speaking countries might actually think a "beamer" is a BMW, not realizing that in German it should be "bimmer" - but then again, they also pronounce "Volkswagen" in English, not realizing it should be "folksvagen").
1. Pop music has become slower -- in tempo -- in recent years and also "sadder" and less "fun" to listen to.
seems to apply to hip-hop as well. To my ears, hip hop music has become less "funky", less dance-able, a lot slower, a lot less R&B/soul-like, more drawn out, with more "irregular" and slower beats. Note, I'm no music expert, I'm describing it as I hear it. I mean, compare the stuff say Drake puts out with hip hop of the 2000s and the 1990s. If I listen to some 2016/17 hip hop mix (the biggest hits, the mainstream stuff) it all sounds drawn out, slow, feeble, with lyrics which are more pathetic and pop-like compared to a mix of hip hop hits from say, the late 90s.
Google has relaunched its map service in China after an eight-year absence, signaling a new era of cooperation between the American internet giant and local partners in fields such as artificial intelligence, reports Nikkei.
I beg to disgree, and must posit as below: -
Google, like many other big [American] companies, blinked, period!
And why is this a surprise? They already fully co-operate with the NSA just fine back in the US, they'll feel right at home doing the same with the Chinese intelligence agencies.
Definitely it's time for some anti-trust action on both sides of the Atlantic.
Washington and Brussels, I'm looking at you. More so Brussels at the current moment, since if Ajit Pai is anything to go by, this administration isn't going to do anything about the issue.
If Microsoft had an anti-trust case brought against it for its business practices, surely Google deserves the same treatment. They are doing the same things, if not worse.
But I could never understand why *I* should pay *them* for it. It always seemed that it should be the other way around....
That's because the internet ad-driven revenue model has ruined everything. People are so used now to get a "free" service (e.g. Gmail, Youtube, whatever) in exchange for being subjected to a barrage of advertising (and giving up their personal data to the provider of the service) that this is now becoming commonplace in services and products you actually pay upfront for, in real currency. People are so used to ads everywhere that they just ignore it, and the distinction is lost on them. So I pay $100 for a Windows licence and get advertising on my login screen. I buy Google Home or Amazon Echo and then get ads inserted as "suggestions" (they don't even say they're ads anymore). Soon you'll be buying cars that'll have an LCD screen on each door flashing commercials streamed there by the manufacturer, and you won't have any say in the matter.
I think you might have missed the humour in the OP...just saying.
Here I was thinking I was paying $9.99 to Spotify a month in order to get my music legally...it's convenient and comparatively cheap. I thought the musicians were getting some money from this. Turns out I should just go back to downloading pirated stuff off of bittorrent and soulseek.
The first solution is to tax plastic packaging to make it significantly less attractive to use it for single-use applications. Once you artificially inflate that cost to reduce volume, you can likely burn a good part of it for energy, or subsidize recycling costs.
Right now we are artificially reducing costs by not including the externality of waste disposal (often just of the packaging itself) in the cost of the product. In some areas waste disposal costs are being added to products (engine oil, tires, auto batteries, electronics) already. If these costs are imposed based on the packaging used, more intelligent packaging choices are likely to be made.
Back in university many years ago, at a lecture we were told of a country (Ireland? Iceland? I can't remember anymore) that brought in a law which simply said that stores that sold products had to take back all of the packaging of said products. That is, you could buy something, open it on the spot and leave the packaging there, or open it at home and bring the package back. Apparently, very quickly packaging got a lot simpler, smaller and easier to dispose. Now I don't know if this story is true and where exactly it happened, but it sure does sound like a great idea.
Let's develop ways of digesting plastic back to simple hydrocarbons, so we can re-polymerize them into usable new plastics.
That would be really great, since there is certainly a lot of unrecycled plastic gunk (and will continue to be for the foreseeable future) to work with. However, long-term, this is curing the symptom rather than the disease. Also, it's been tried, sydbarrett74 below posted a link about thermal depolymerization (TDP). I don't know the current state of that technology.
I always thought that the disease will be cured by itself due to peak oil & gas, that it will just become uneconomical to dig up oil to make plastics out of it. Now that it looks like renewables might displace oil before peak oil actually hits, I'm not so sure. There might end up being a glut of oil that's cheap since it's not used for energy as much, and using it as a raw material might still make sense 50 years in the future, say. Which means more plastic crap.
The real solution is not recycling, but reduction in the use of so much plastic crap in the first place. Many things I buy have more packaging than product.
This. Exactly this.
People assume plastic is easily recyclable, because collecting e.g. plastic bottles for recycling is so ubiquitous. However, of the four "recyclables" we all think of when we think of our garbage (metal, paper, glass, plastic), plastic is the least recyclable. For example, the most common type of plastic bottles - PET bottles - hardly ever get recycled into new plastic bottles. They get turned into other, usually lower-grade products. So while we are reusing the PET material, we are not really "recycling" the PET bottles. We can truly recycle paper - make old paper into paper - as well as glass bottles - make new ones out of old ones - and aluminium cans - ditto. While we can make a glass bottle over and over again from the same pieces of glass, we cannot do this with plastic bottles - so most plastic bottles are made out of "virgin" plastic.
Furthermore, you can't just throw different types of plastics together, melt 'em, and get something usable (like you can with many metals), because such plastic mixtures are structurally weak (due to the phase separation of the different plastics). This means that proper sorting is key to recycling plastic. Furthermore, this means that some "exotic" plastic compounds made for a particular application (i.e. those not super-common like PET or PE) will end up in the landfill (or floating in the ocean) despite someone conscientiously throwing it initially in the recycling bin. Plastic has low value and plastics that are not produced in extremely high quantities are not lucrative for recycling.
We need to be aggressive about reducing the amount of plastic packaging used: we should go as far as banning it. A lot of plastic packaging is just simply unnecessary, a lot of other plastic packaging can be replaced with paper, metal, or glass packaging. In my book the worst offender is the transparent "product-shaped" type of packaging that allows you to see the product (but is actually totally useless, since you can't open it without destroying the package...so what's the point?). Most of those products can be placed inside a cardboard box. That can be opened and closed...the vendor can have one product on display (like is usually the case anyway), the rest can be in non-transparent cardboard boxes. This type of packaging needs to be banned everywhere, ASAP.
How about building recycling plants in your own country? Or is that too much to ask?
Sure they could build recycling plants...but from whom?
If you import a bunch of plastic crap from China (like the UK and almost any Western country does), that means you're not making the plastic crap yourself. That means that once that plastic crap becomes garbage, you have no one who will buy that garbage once it is recycled into a raw material. Hence you ship it to China, which can use it to make more plastic crap. To send back to you.
At the end of the day, doctors are service providers...they are vendors. Just as with buying a car, a house, or even a pizza, you have to consider your vendor and choose wisely. The fact that they have all taken the Hippocratic Oath does not guarantee quality, intelligence or skill. The good ones are doing the best they can now, and always trying to improve the definition of "best." The bad ones can be lazy, narrow-minded, or just plain greedy.
...and for the greedy types, we need a system that sets up the incentives properly. This is not a solved problem, government-run or funded systems also have this problem in various forms. In ones where doctors work for a fixed salary or have a fixed budget (NHS-type system) the lazy ones will just seek to do as little work as possible since there is no monetary benefit to them in serving 5 vs. 10 patients in a work day for example. In systems where the prices of health services are fixed and doctors charge the government for them (Canada-type system) but are otherwise independent, the greedy ones will do tons of unnecessary diagnostics (if you can't charge more than $100 for diagnostic A, let's do B, C, D, E, and F all at $100 each, even though only A is really required, at least on the first run).
I don't know what this incentive could be - incentivize somehow the health system overall to prioritize the health of individuals (not the treating of particular problems) thus putting prevention at #1...I don't know, this is difficult. We need some sort of regulation because the market for physicians is NOT the same as for pizza, cars, or houses - people are desperate when they have a life-threatening disease, the demand there is inelastic. It's not like pizza which you can choose not to eat and decide to have potatoes for dinner instead.
If you want to wait for years for procedures I could get done with in a week in the US.
What's the lead time for a knee replacement in the U.K.? 3 years or something, right?
Yeah you could get it done in a week - assuming you have insurance (or the cash to pay upfront). What about all the people who can't afford it? And for those who can afford it, how much does it cost them?
The "waiting time" red herring is invoked every time by Americans who have been brainwashed to think that socialized medicine means "death committees" (leading to such profound statements as "get your government hands off my Medicare" - a, uh, government program) or whatever. Yes, waiting times are a serious problem in poorly funded government-run health systems, mostly in poor countries (think, I don't know, Serbia?). In properly funded health systems in rich countries (Canada, UK, etc.) things that need to be done now will indeed be done now. If you're dying of a heart attack, there's no "wait time" for a bypass, it's done immediately (or as soon as medically possible). Similarly, if someone needs a knee replacement ASAP they will get it ASAP. If someone is waiting for it for 3 years, it means it's not urgent. Also, there is something called common sense - if your doctor thinks you will most likely need a knee replacement in 3 years (even if you don't need it that very moment) you'll be placed on a waiting list. Now think the other way - how many of those instant knee replacements in the US are totally or mostly unnecessary? How many of them are replacing knees in patients who can go on just fine for a couple of more years without it, while submitting them to unnecessary risks that accompany every type of surgery?
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What I don't understand, is why they only make consumer-level stuff. They don't make anything, hardware or software-wise for businesses.
That's because it's much easier to tease a ridiculous profit margin out of consumers who buy hyped-up shiny shit. Business are a bit harder to fool, and tend to think a bit more about their spending decisions on technology.
How you are unable to put music on an iPod is beyond me ... perhaps stop trying to use an 'explorer' to put pirated/unofficially downloaded files on it?
How hard can it be to click the check boxes in iTunes which playlists or albums you want to have on the iPod?
This is exactly the point OP is trying to make. You are only looking at things from the angle of someone embedded fully in the Apple ecosystem. --You are completely disregarding the viewpoint of people used to doing things a different way. For them, using Apple products *IS* difficult.
Just take a look at your own comments: using iTunes is easy only if 1) you plan on only ever downloading music from the iTunes store and 2) only use iTunes to manage your music without ever tinkering with how and where it is stored on your computer. Why do you assume that everyone does things that way or wants to do things that way? Or finds that natural?
Why do you assume any other music I want to put on the iPod is pirated or "unofficial"? There are other ways to get legal music downloads - you know there are other music stores apart from the iTunes one. Or maybe the band/artist gives it away for free? Maybe it's something that has become public domain? Maybe in the given legal jurisdiction, ripping CDs you have bought for personal use is legal? Etc.
Why do I necessarily want iTunes to completely manage my entire music library? Maybe I want to use other music players to play music on my computer?
That's the point: Apple is "easy" when you are "trapped" and fully encapsulated within their products. Try to go outside the prescribed way of doing things and it becomes a major pain in the ass. Now, I understand some people are OK with the prescribed way of doing things. Some people, on the other hand, are not. They find Apple products difficult to use.
I have never ever found an Apple product easy to use.
Same here. Give me a Mac, and I'm totally lost. Intuitive? I laugh when people say it's intuitive...it ain't intuitive for me.
Part of it stems from me always being in the PC ecosystem, so some things are just strange. They are not necessarily better or worse, just different. Like the different keyboard keys...what I am even supposed to call the ones with the weird arrows? "The Key formerly known as Page Up"? One mouse button? What? No right click? How does one use a computer without right-click? Dock for launching programs? Wtf give me a start-menu like thing. The way you install programs by dragging them into...just stop.
However, that's not the only thing. I hate how Apple tries to dumb things down. I've always felt, whenever I've booted up a Mac (I often had to do that at school, because, for some reason in the late 90s and early 2000s, teachers always liked/wanted Macs! And not just in the art classes either) that I'm being treated as an idiot. "You see, this computer thing, it's too complicated for you, so we turned into a fancy version of a fridge! Also, it smiles at you! Welcome!" - that how it's always felt for me. Also, why doesn't the iPhone have a separate menu away from the "desktop" where all the apps are (like in Android)? I don't want all of my apps on the "desktops". I hate when some Android phones use a custom UI that copies this. Why the obsession with so few physical buttons and controls? I hated the early iPods on which you were supposed to do everything with that one circular button - because I was already used to music players that had well defined, single-function (or at most dual-function) multiple buttons. I remember I was totally lost the first time I held an iPod in my hand. Rolling my finger around that circle did not feel any "easier" or "more intuitive" to me than repeatedly pushing (or just holding) a volume or forward buttons on an MP3 player - because I had done the same previously on CD players and walkmans.
My opinion is that Apple products are "easy" and "intuitive" to use only if Apple products are the only thing you've ever seriously used in your life. This makes it no different than Microsoft or open source products. If you learn the ecosystem, you feel at home in it. If you've never used a computer, is Apple "easier" to learn? I have no idea, and have no personal objective reference point, since I've been using computers since I was 4 years old and the first one was a 286 running DOS. For me, Apple has always been a foreign country.
Another thing: Apple is "easy" and "intuitive" only if you let Apple products do what they want and are cool with being forced doing stuff their way. Take iTunes: once I got an iPod as a prize. As I already had an MP3 player I was quite happy with, I gave the iPod to my girlfriend. To get music on it, she had to install iTunes. Then iTunes asks where all your music is on your PC...so she pointed iTunes to it, and later started horrifyingly yelling when she realized that iTunes had rearranged all the music folders the way it wanted...now, my girlfriend is no tech nerd for sure, but she is a music nerd. She likes her music organized the way she wants. She spends hours sorting it into folders and subfolders...and here comes iTunes, thinking it knows better. That's *exactly* what Tim Cook is saying in this article - Apple doesn't want to ever look at the actual directory structure where your music is stored, to actually touch the files. They want you to look at your music via iTunes ONLY and FOREVER. Oh, and not to mention the syncing "feature" where iTunes randomly deletes stuff (either from the iPod or the PC). The solution in this particular case was not to let iTunes ever touch the music directories, and just do drag and drop from Windows Explorer straight onto iTunes for transferring something to the iPod.
Whenever I use an Apple product, I feel like I am not in control - like the product is my master. Hence, I very rarely use Apple products.
...I will not drive. Or at least not own. I'll take public transit, a taxi or some "ride-sharing" (stupid name) service, walk, or cycle. In cases that I really need to drive, I'll rent or use a car-sharing service, which will rather limit the amount of data that can be collected from me in that context.
Note to car manufacturers: sell me a car that drives from point A to point B efficiently. Make a profit doing that. If you can't, then gtfo.
What's happened is some marketer did research comparing inline ads to some other type of (more annoying) ad, and found the more annoying type generated more click-throughs.
The whole "click-through" fixation is part of the problem. In the past, companies really had no direct and effective way to measure the effect of an ad. They could only do it indirectly - e.g. ad goes out, sales go up (but was it really due to the ad? no one can tell for sure).
When click-throughs arrived, the ad people came to *think* that they got an effective measure of ad effectiveness. So hence the fixation on click-throughs. They are easily measurable and objective (just a number), so they make a great metric to strive towards. Except that click-throughs don't really tell you the whole story, nor are click-through oriented ads the only way to do effective advertising. Companies take out non-online ads just to "create presence", to have them stuck in your mind. Maybe you're not shopping for a new car right now, but that doesn't mean that all those BMWs ads are pointless. When you DO get around to shopping for a new car, an effective BMW advertising campaign will have ingrained in your brain the idea that BMWs are great cars, and that you should consider buying one. Bonus points for the ad if that's the first car that comes to your mind.
Online ads should be treated the same way, I feel. An unobtrusive inline ad in an article will subconsciously ingrain some idea in your head - "Colgate = toothpaste" or "super laptop = Dell". It doesn't have to make you instantly buy (or think of buying) something, but it has to pop the brand up in your head the moment you want/need to buy something. That's maybe months or years down the road.
The ad-infested website has led to some horrible assumptions on the part of the Internet audience -- we now expect that everything should be free. It doesn't matter if it cost money for people to write the stories and for companies to host the content, some folks put up stuff for free, so 'free' is the default assumption for something that costs money.
It's not just that. Yes, the internet has increased the overall expectations for "free" content, that is true. However, the truth is that most of that content would never be read if it weren't offered for "free". Say I go to salon.com and the first thing I see is "if you want to read our articles, please subscribe for $X a month". Would I subscribe? Probably not. How many people hitting that page would subscribe? 1%? 0.5%? 0.01%? So yes, the content costs money to make. However, most people don't care enough for the content to pay for it.
It's like when RIAA and MPAA make those inflated claims about lost revenue due to piracy: a lot of the music/video that people download they only listen to/watch because they can download it freely. If they had to pay, they would be a lot more selective of what they buy.
It's the choice of most websites to offer content for "free", and then to try and support themselves via ads or whatever. It's their choice to try and have millions of readers, and make a fraction of a cent on each via advertising, rather than have tens of thousands of readers who pay double or triple-digit dollar figures for a subscription. They figured it's easier to do the former than trying to convince people to take up a subscription in the latter model. If they screw up by offering too many ads for too little content, it's their problem. Not the readers'.
People use adblockers because they have no trust in websites to not abuse their computers, eg. by installation of malware through the served ads.
That's part of it for sure. However, it's not just that.
People (myself included) also use adblockers because they don't want a page they are reading plastered with annoying ads that jump at you every second. It's annoying. You know what I do when a website (usually some online publication, e.g. newspaper or magazine) tells me "you've got an ad blocker installed, please whitelist us to continue reading"? In 99% of the cases, I just leave that website. Most of the stuff I click just isn't THAT interesting to be worth being blasted by ads.
Which brings us to another point. These sites want to "make readers pay". The things is - readers don't want to pay for most of this content. They're happy to read it if it's free, but if it's not - they can live without it. Not wanting to pay includes not just not wanting to pay with their money - but also with their attention (ads blasting) and computing power (cryptocurrency mining). There's very little content out there that any particular reader is actually willing to pay for.
How will the poor websites fund themselves you ask? Well, it's their effin' problem that the advertising became way too aggressive and that the web became dominated at one point with websites which are 90% ads and 10% content. Not to mention all the malware and tracking and all of the other crap being "served" via the ads. Had the ads been less aggressive, ad blockers would not have proliferated. Even offline we are inundated with advertising, it goes way beyond just the businesses which fund themselves primarily via ads (e.g. free to air TV and in general media outlets), it looks like everyone is trying to make an extra buck by selling some space for an ad. Is it a wonder that people then massively say well screw you, I'm blocking this?
The only reason services like paypal exist are because bank transfers are typically stupidly overpriced, often far too slow and the banks tend to make them too convoluted to perform.
Yes, in North America (and maybe some other parts of the world, I don't know). In Europe, bank transfers are easy, and in fact, a lot of commerce is done this way...the merchant gives you the bank account number and you pay into it. Merchant doesn't have any of your data (except your name and address, which you fill in when you do the bank transfer - but you could fake that with pretty much no consequence).
Granted, it's not instant like a credit card, it usually takes a day or two for the money to show up on the merchant's account. So maybe not great for things you want access to instantly (like an online subscription), but OK for things that in any case require processing time (like something that you buy online that will anyway arrive 5, 7, 10, 30 days later).
International payments are also easy, thanks to IBANs (international bank account numbers) which contain all the necessary information in a single string of letters and digits (North American banks, for some reason, do not use the IBAN system).
Processing fees for domestic transfers are not very high (not bigger than the processing fees credit cards charge - except you don't see those, as they are rolled into the price). International fees could be quite a bit lower (however, your credit card also charges currency conversion fees...not always explicitly, but via the exchange rate).
At any rate, in Europe, the default way of paying lots of things (rent, utility bills, monthly insurance premiums, etc. etc.) is paying straight into the merchant's/service provider's account. Before the advent of online payments, everyone would get pre-filled payment slips in the mail (now in most places you can opt out of this, and go completely electronic) - payment slips use a standardised form btw - and you take these to any bank (or in many countries, also the post office) and pay at the counter. If that also happens to be your bank, they can deduct the money from your account. Everywhere you can pay with cash (and at most places nowadays, debit or credit card as well). The bank charges a fee for this transaction (usually around 1%, with a minumum and maximum fee cap, i.e. they won't actually charge 1% on a $1000 payment, but less, but neither on a $1 payment, but more). When you log into your internet banking, the interface usually presents itself in the shape of the standardized payment slip, so that you can just copy the information easily. Online merchants will, if you select bank transfer as the method of payment, often generate a payment slip for you in PDF, that you can either print (to pay in person at the bank) or just copy the information into your internet banking form.
Well, short of making them illegal, there'll always be a market for piston-engined/internal combustion-engined vehicles. They're so much fun to drive.
Think about "always" and "fun to drive" more carefully.
Yes, based on the current state of battery technology, and on what is projected to exist in the near future, we can say that for decades to come, there will exist at least a niche for internal combustion engine-powered vehicles. However projecting beyond the next, say, 20 years, we've no idea how far battery or some other EV storage technology might go. It might be that in 60 or 80 years, ICE-powered vehicles will exist just as old-timers, things you see out for a spin or at vintage car show just like you might see a car from the 1930s today.
"Fun to drive" is a subjective thing. For sure, there lots of people today who consider cars with prowling engines fun to drive. In 2-3 generations, it's possible that are no more such people (or that their number is very small).
Finally: internal combustion engines are in fact very complicated things to produce. They are vastly more complicated things to produce well. If the industry were to, at one point, shift wholesale to electric motors, manufacturing combustion engines probably wouldn't make economic sense anymore, except for some high-end luxury sports car manufacturers that have ridiculous margins anyway. However, even Ferrari depends a lot on the supply chains of the lowly FIAT, so if FIAT were to abandon combustion engines (and all the things that go along with them, with things as trivial as alternators and spark plugs), Ferrari's costs would go up (they'd probably have to hand-produce or pay a lot for custom low-volume industrial production of everything).
I can see a future where the roles of today (or better yet, of 20 years ago) are reversed: electric chargers everywhere, as (or more) common than gas stations today, while the few remaining owners of combustion vehicles have to have the fuel delivered to their homes (the equivalent of being only able to plug in your electric car at home), since there almost aren't any gas stations left.
but their living conditions and government has not changed much.
Uhm, what? If there is a country on Earth where people have experienced a DRASTIC improvement of their "living conditions" (I assume that by this you mostly mean the standard of living) over the past few decades, then it's China. Few places in the world have seen the improvement China has. This is the main reason why their government has not changed - people see their lives improving steadily, so they do not feel it is necessary to change.
Impress is so shockingly bad that they should be embarrassed to include it in the package.
I disagree.
When I make PowerPoint presentations, I really go animation-heavy. It's my thing. Recently I imported a bunch of PowerPoint presentations into Impress, edited them, made new slides, made new animations, saved in odp format and did the presentation in front of an audience of 50 people. Everything went fine.
Yes, the slides look a bit outdated when you are editing them inside Impress, but once you go into full-screen presentation mode, there is hardly any difference. I don't think anybody noticed.
On the other hand, PowerPoint has caused me some embarrassment in front of such audiences. I went to a conference once, and had a .pptx file prepared (due to the animations I use a lot to demonstrate sometimes highly complicated technical concepts and keep people following the story, using a PDF version won't cut it). The chair of the session was using a Mac, so he asked me to load the file on his computer to avoid having to disconnect it from the projector and spend time on connecting my computer. OK, I thought, he had MS Office on his Mac, with PowerPoint, everything should be fine, right?
Wrong. Half my slides were messed up. Some crucial parts. If I open a .pptx file made on Windows in the Mac version of Office (and vice versa), there should be NO difference in the presentation. Everything should look EXACTLY the same. Except that it doesn't. I'm not the only one with this issue.
Anyone who has attempted to use LibreOffice or GIMP for professional work will tell you the same thing: they are not suited for any kind of professional work. Adobe and the rest switched to this business model because they know users will have no choice.
I have used and currently use LibreOffice for professional work and it works just fine. To say that it is "not suited for any kind of professional work" is just plain false. As in not true. As in - a lie. There is lots of professional work LibreOffice is suited just fine for. For sure, there are things it cannot do, or cannot do well. It's not a perfect replacement for Microsoft Office. However, there is a lot of professional work you can do with it.
GIMP I can't comment on, I really haven't used that program much in any capacity (professional or otherwise).
Lubuntu it is. I find that this distro runs just fine od 10+ year old PCs (once-upon-a-time Windows laptops), no reason why it shouldn't run just fine on an old Macbook.
"Handy" is the simplest one, obviously the word hand is involved. It sounds english so we all use it, because english is hip. It means "mobile phone" ... suddenly it makes no sense anymore, or does it?
To me, "handy" always sounded like some device for handicapped people. Dunno why.
Another denglish favourite of mine is the word "beamer" for "projector". I've never heard anyone from an English-speaking country use "beamer" (people from English-speaking countries might actually think a "beamer" is a BMW, not realizing that in German it should be "bimmer" - but then again, they also pronounce "Volkswagen" in English, not realizing it should be "folksvagen").
That be hip hop!
Word!
Except that I've noticed that this
1. Pop music has become slower -- in tempo -- in recent years and also "sadder" and less "fun" to listen to.
seems to apply to hip-hop as well. To my ears, hip hop music has become less "funky", less dance-able, a lot slower, a lot less R&B/soul-like, more drawn out, with more "irregular" and slower beats. Note, I'm no music expert, I'm describing it as I hear it. I mean, compare the stuff say Drake puts out with hip hop of the 2000s and the 1990s. If I listen to some 2016/17 hip hop mix (the biggest hits, the mainstream stuff) it all sounds drawn out, slow, feeble, with lyrics which are more pathetic and pop-like compared to a mix of hip hop hits from say, the late 90s.
Google has relaunched its map service in China after an eight-year absence, signaling a new era of cooperation between the American internet giant and local partners in fields such as artificial intelligence, reports Nikkei.
I beg to disgree, and must posit as below: -
Google, like many other big [American] companies, blinked, period!
And why is this a surprise? They already fully co-operate with the NSA just fine back in the US, they'll feel right at home doing the same with the Chinese intelligence agencies.
Definitely it's time for some anti-trust action on both sides of the Atlantic.
Washington and Brussels, I'm looking at you. More so Brussels at the current moment, since if Ajit Pai is anything to go by, this administration isn't going to do anything about the issue.
If Microsoft had an anti-trust case brought against it for its business practices, surely Google deserves the same treatment. They are doing the same things, if not worse.
But I could never understand why *I* should pay *them* for it. It always seemed that it should be the other way around....
That's because the internet ad-driven revenue model has ruined everything. People are so used now to get a "free" service (e.g. Gmail, Youtube, whatever) in exchange for being subjected to a barrage of advertising (and giving up their personal data to the provider of the service) that this is now becoming commonplace in services and products you actually pay upfront for, in real currency. People are so used to ads everywhere that they just ignore it, and the distinction is lost on them. So I pay $100 for a Windows licence and get advertising on my login screen. I buy Google Home or Amazon Echo and then get ads inserted as "suggestions" (they don't even say they're ads anymore). Soon you'll be buying cars that'll have an LCD screen on each door flashing commercials streamed there by the manufacturer, and you won't have any say in the matter.
I think you might have missed the humour in the OP...just saying.
Here I was thinking I was paying $9.99 to Spotify a month in order to get my music legally...it's convenient and comparatively cheap. I thought the musicians were getting some money from this. Turns out I should just go back to downloading pirated stuff off of bittorrent and soulseek.
The first solution is to tax plastic packaging to make it significantly less attractive to use it for single-use applications. Once you artificially inflate that cost to reduce volume, you can likely burn a good part of it for energy, or subsidize recycling costs.
Right now we are artificially reducing costs by not including the externality of waste disposal (often just of the packaging itself) in the cost of the product. In some areas waste disposal costs are being added to products (engine oil, tires, auto batteries, electronics) already. If these costs are imposed based on the packaging used, more intelligent packaging choices are likely to be made.
Back in university many years ago, at a lecture we were told of a country (Ireland? Iceland? I can't remember anymore) that brought in a law which simply said that stores that sold products had to take back all of the packaging of said products. That is, you could buy something, open it on the spot and leave the packaging there, or open it at home and bring the package back. Apparently, very quickly packaging got a lot simpler, smaller and easier to dispose. Now I don't know if this story is true and where exactly it happened, but it sure does sound like a great idea.
Let's develop ways of digesting plastic back to simple hydrocarbons, so we can re-polymerize them into usable new plastics.
That would be really great, since there is certainly a lot of unrecycled plastic gunk (and will continue to be for the foreseeable future) to work with. However, long-term, this is curing the symptom rather than the disease. Also, it's been tried, sydbarrett74 below posted a link about thermal depolymerization (TDP). I don't know the current state of that technology.
I always thought that the disease will be cured by itself due to peak oil & gas, that it will just become uneconomical to dig up oil to make plastics out of it. Now that it looks like renewables might displace oil before peak oil actually hits, I'm not so sure. There might end up being a glut of oil that's cheap since it's not used for energy as much, and using it as a raw material might still make sense 50 years in the future, say. Which means more plastic crap.
The real solution is not recycling, but reduction in the use of so much plastic crap in the first place. Many things I buy have more packaging than product.
This. Exactly this.
People assume plastic is easily recyclable, because collecting e.g. plastic bottles for recycling is so ubiquitous. However, of the four "recyclables" we all think of when we think of our garbage (metal, paper, glass, plastic), plastic is the least recyclable. For example, the most common type of plastic bottles - PET bottles - hardly ever get recycled into new plastic bottles. They get turned into other, usually lower-grade products. So while we are reusing the PET material, we are not really "recycling" the PET bottles. We can truly recycle paper - make old paper into paper - as well as glass bottles - make new ones out of old ones - and aluminium cans - ditto. While we can make a glass bottle over and over again from the same pieces of glass, we cannot do this with plastic bottles - so most plastic bottles are made out of "virgin" plastic.
Furthermore, you can't just throw different types of plastics together, melt 'em, and get something usable (like you can with many metals), because such plastic mixtures are structurally weak (due to the phase separation of the different plastics). This means that proper sorting is key to recycling plastic. Furthermore, this means that some "exotic" plastic compounds made for a particular application (i.e. those not super-common like PET or PE) will end up in the landfill (or floating in the ocean) despite someone conscientiously throwing it initially in the recycling bin. Plastic has low value and plastics that are not produced in extremely high quantities are not lucrative for recycling.
We need to be aggressive about reducing the amount of plastic packaging used: we should go as far as banning it. A lot of plastic packaging is just simply unnecessary, a lot of other plastic packaging can be replaced with paper, metal, or glass packaging. In my book the worst offender is the transparent "product-shaped" type of packaging that allows you to see the product (but is actually totally useless, since you can't open it without destroying the package...so what's the point?). Most of those products can be placed inside a cardboard box. That can be opened and closed...the vendor can have one product on display (like is usually the case anyway), the rest can be in non-transparent cardboard boxes. This type of packaging needs to be banned everywhere, ASAP.
How about building recycling plants in your own country? Or is that too much to ask?
Sure they could build recycling plants...but from whom?
If you import a bunch of plastic crap from China (like the UK and almost any Western country does), that means you're not making the plastic crap yourself. That means that once that plastic crap becomes garbage, you have no one who will buy that garbage once it is recycled into a raw material. Hence you ship it to China, which can use it to make more plastic crap. To send back to you.
At the end of the day, doctors are service providers...they are vendors. Just as with buying a car, a house, or even a pizza, you have to consider your vendor and choose wisely. The fact that they have all taken the Hippocratic Oath does not guarantee quality, intelligence or skill. The good ones are doing the best they can now, and always trying to improve the definition of "best." The bad ones can be lazy, narrow-minded, or just plain greedy.
...and for the greedy types, we need a system that sets up the incentives properly. This is not a solved problem, government-run or funded systems also have this problem in various forms. In ones where doctors work for a fixed salary or have a fixed budget (NHS-type system) the lazy ones will just seek to do as little work as possible since there is no monetary benefit to them in serving 5 vs. 10 patients in a work day for example. In systems where the prices of health services are fixed and doctors charge the government for them (Canada-type system) but are otherwise independent, the greedy ones will do tons of unnecessary diagnostics (if you can't charge more than $100 for diagnostic A, let's do B, C, D, E, and F all at $100 each, even though only A is really required, at least on the first run).
I don't know what this incentive could be - incentivize somehow the health system overall to prioritize the health of individuals (not the treating of particular problems) thus putting prevention at #1...I don't know, this is difficult. We need some sort of regulation because the market for physicians is NOT the same as for pizza, cars, or houses - people are desperate when they have a life-threatening disease, the demand there is inelastic. It's not like pizza which you can choose not to eat and decide to have potatoes for dinner instead.
If you want to wait for years for procedures I could get done with in a week in the US. What's the lead time for a knee replacement in the U.K.? 3 years or something, right?
Yeah you could get it done in a week - assuming you have insurance (or the cash to pay upfront). What about all the people who can't afford it? And for those who can afford it, how much does it cost them?
The "waiting time" red herring is invoked every time by Americans who have been brainwashed to think that socialized medicine means "death committees" (leading to such profound statements as "get your government hands off my Medicare" - a, uh, government program) or whatever. Yes, waiting times are a serious problem in poorly funded government-run health systems, mostly in poor countries (think, I don't know, Serbia?). In properly funded health systems in rich countries (Canada, UK, etc.) things that need to be done now will indeed be done now. If you're dying of a heart attack, there's no "wait time" for a bypass, it's done immediately (or as soon as medically possible). Similarly, if someone needs a knee replacement ASAP they will get it ASAP. If someone is waiting for it for 3 years, it means it's not urgent. Also, there is something called common sense - if your doctor thinks you will most likely need a knee replacement in 3 years (even if you don't need it that very moment) you'll be placed on a waiting list. Now think the other way - how many of those instant knee replacements in the US are totally or mostly unnecessary? How many of them are replacing knees in patients who can go on just fine for a couple of more years without it, while submitting them to unnecessary risks that accompany every type of surgery?