An important thing to remember about Internet Explorer is that on of the reasons why it rendered everything is because it was happy to take extremely garbage, malformed HTML and find a way to make it work. You could make a compliant site, but IE made it easy to be lazy. It was the web designers that didn't have to follow standards—IE would render standards compliant sites well too.
Don't get me wrong, IE was a blight and I'm glad that it's basically dead. The user experience was terrible and it made the web a worse place to be. But in some ways, it was the exact opposite of what we see here: a system so fault tolerant that it doesn't care what you're doing.
'Living language' just means it's not a 'dead language', which is to say, people still speak it. It will naturally shift and change on its own, but that doesn't mean we have to go out of our way to corrupt it or make it harder for other people to use.
There are some things they do and test really well! And on iOS they have the advantage of a lot of beta users. I really like my iPhone 7, for instance, and I'm surprised at how much of an upgrade it was from my 6.
But yeah, I think there's a real issue with real world testing, and it's going to come back and haunt Apple. (If it isn't doing so already; the replacement costs for those keyboards are enormous, and for the time being, all of them are being done under warranty. There's also losing the mantle of selling the most reliable products, which is one of the biggest reasons I buy Apple stuff.)
Supposedly it's a machine learning bug, which means if you're just testing how the keyboard works in sort of ideal conditions, it's not going to pop up. 50% adoption also means a LOT of people. Even a 1 in 500000 bug is going to crop up on a LOT of phones.
Here's the thing with Apple: I think they test everything as best as they can...but not in the real world.
The keyboard problems on their Pro laptops? That sounds like a lot of testing was done in Jony Ive's clean workroom. Same with the weird design problems with the AppleTV remote. Same with the TouchBar. All these things work great if you're not bringing something to a cafe and trying to get work done there, or sitting on a real couch with dogs and kids and trying to use the AppleTV remote in the dark while holding a drink.
Same with problems with the older phones. Nobody dogfoods this stuff. No employees (or not enough employees) are walking around with an iPhone 6 in their pockets trying to get on with their lives; the iPhone 6 is probably being tested in a lab with few apps installed and lots of empty space on the disk.
I love my Apple stuff, but sometimes it really feels like nobody tried to use it out in the street before shipping it.
Everything was a lot slower on my 6, yes. (I had to get a 7 over the weekend because my 6 was stolen.)
However, since I'm usually running the public beta, I made a complaint about the keyboard speed and got an email about it today, with the claim that they've made a fix that MIGHT help. So performance is something they're actively working on, it sounds like.
(I greatly suspect, like the weird issue with the 'I' key, that this was because of the 'machine learning' stuff they're trying to run in the background. The iPhone 6 simply doesn't have the horsepower for it.)
The iPhone 8, 8 plus and X currently make up about 4.79% of the iPhone market. The iPhone 7 that I got over the weekend still had iOS 10 on it. Since no new iPads have been released this fall, all of them will have iOS 10 on them at time of sale.
I don't meet many professors that are disgruntled about teaching, they're all run down by the wide array of administrative duties that they're compelled to participate in. My partner's supervisor turned down a position as the head of a research group several times until he politically couldn't do it any more, and at that point, he effectively disappeared from the lives of his students. He knew it would happen and he still tries his hardest, but at this point he's being paid to do work he never wanted, and neither of those things are research or teaching.
It's a completely different problem with AI/Machine Learning right now. ML people can work for private industry, have access to enough big iron to get their work done, do the things that interest them, and never have to do some BS administrative thing or organise a conference or write a grant proposal. Even when companies 'only' offer 20% time for your own research, that's still arguably more pure research time than you get at most CS departments. The only thing that you're not actively doing when you work for industry now is teaching, but even then, you'll have plenty of time to mentor junior programmers and researchers if that's your jam.
Actually, it's MUCH worse than that. Companies pay people much more to do RESEARCH than Universities do. My partner is finishing her PhD, and she's already talked to a few industry people. Her concern that she wouldn't be able to do the research that interests her, or that she wouldn't have the supercomputing resources that her research requires were completely assuaged. Companies want her to do her research, because even blue-sky AI research can and does have practical implications.
And because she's not doing a bunch of administrative bullshit or writing grant proposals, more of her actual work time will be spent doing research than she would ever be allowed at the University.
Universities don't just pay less, they heap a bunch of useless garbage work on their professors that has nothing to do with teaching or advancing the field. Why in the world would anyone want that kind of stress?
Either that 10% is the most important 10%, or it's not just 10%. Apple's chips murder every other chip on the market. It's not really even close.
No matter how you slice it, Apple's chip design is second-to-none, and trying to wave your hands in an attempt to diminish Apple's engineering prowess really isn't working.
Itâ(TM)s estimated that the screens cost something like $120-130 each. Given that, the cost to consumer ratio isnâ(TM)t entirely out of line with previous models. Samsung is the only one that can make this screen, so theyâ(TM)re milking it for what they can.
Sadly, I really AM old enough to have the 4-digit UID that I'm sporting.
In any case, the story about them compromising quality has been denied, and perhaps you could call that obvious or inevitable, but Apple rarely comments on stories at all.
I haven't seen any evidence that Apple uses anything other than the highest possible quality parts, going so far as to not source parts from a company that they've given millions of dollars to (LG) so they can get OLED panels from a major competitor (Samsung).
There are bound to be some edge cases, but it's incredibly hard to argue that Apple doesn't use the best components it can get its hands on (at scale), and that Samsung doesn't manufacture the best parts (at scale).
(And don't blame me for/. being so unable to cope with text from an iPhone. I mean, the thing has only been out for 10 goddamn years.)
Apple is not doing this the easily-exploitable image comparison way. Samsung tried that and it was terrible. They've got a projector that paints the face with 30,000 dots, then a height map is created and face analysis is done. That data is converted into a mathematical representation (that can't be reverse engineered, assuming you could even get to it) and compared with the mathematical representation that was already stored.
No pictures are taken or stored. You're not taking a selfie. That's also why this works at multiple angles, but isn't fooled by things like latex masks.
Yes, exactly, you can't have the feature on without a PIN being set. And I think setting a PIN turns on full-device encryption, though that may be on by default now, no matter what. (I'm not sure where they'd get the key from, or what good it would be without a PIN, but still.)
If the data were being sent to the cloud, you'd have to have an internet connection to use it, and you don't. You can turn wifi off or go into the forest or whatever and all these features still work. The TouchID (and presumably FaceID) systems are stand-alone, on-device only. They don't store pictures, they create a mathematical hash of the data, and then generate a new hash every time you're scanned. The hashes are then compared to see if they're alike, so there's nothing that's stored that can be turned back into personally identifiable data; the process is one-way.
It's all about friction. We KNOW that users are bad with passwords and all that jazz, and they feel like they should be better, but it's just one more thing they have to remember. It seems alien to a lot of us, but that's how it is. And that's why Apple made TouchID. The phones aren't unhackable, but they're close enough for most purposes, and they prevent casual intrusion if nothing else.
Well, and this was the problem in the first place. Apple's stats indicated most people weren't bothering to set a PIN, so the phones were unsecured entirely. TouchID made it possible to provide some modicum of security (as much as 4 digits is gonna get you anyway) while giving everyone enough convenience that they were happy to use it.
FaceID has the potential to be a much better implementation AND do some interesting things with face mapping and depth mapping besides that (see the minimum-viable-product that is the snapchat filters that more accurately map to one's face).
The reason Apple gave for introducing TouchID was that a vast majority of users weren't even bothering to put a PIN on their phone, so giving them an easy way to unlock the phone was better than nothing. There are definitely security concerns, but there's a BIGGER security concern when your phone isn't even locked to begin with.
FaceID is just a different extension of that. Neither of them is meant to be 100% secure, just somewhat MORE secure. For me, I went from having a 6-digit pin to a passcode somewhat over 15 characters because the overhead of only having to type it once in a while was more than offset by the convenience of TouchID. I simply wouldn't have a passcode that long if it weren't for biometric authentication.
If I really needed to keep my phone secure for some reason, I'd turn off TouchID/FaceID permanently.
It's apparently the dot projector that's at issue. It's a component that projects 30000 infrared dots onto your face...and it's so small it fits in one part of the notch on the iPhone X. That's bound a high-complexity component at that size.
Apple almost always has two sources for its components, and this is well known. They had three manufacturers trying to make the dot projector on the iPhone X, they have TMSC AND Samsung fabbing SoCs, etc. Apple rarely single-sources components because it drives prices up. The screen in the iPhone X is a rare exception, but as we've seen from the Pixel XL debacle, LG isn't really up to making high quality OLED screens on mobile yet.
This is all entirely public knowledge. If Apple can't get the prices and components they want out of a manufacturer, they'll dump them in a hot second for someone that says they can.
This is the exact opposite of how Apple, and to a certain extent, Samsung, operate. Apple famously pits manufacturers against each other. If the components arenâ(TM)t meeting spec, theyâ(TM)re sent back, at the manufacturerâ(TM)s cost. The whole reason why the iPhone X is reportedly supply constrained is because the dot projector is hard to make and Apple keeps sending them back.
Theyâ(TM)re not faultless, but in general, the components you get in an iPhone are the best ones that can be sourced from anyone.
Samsung has done some dumb things, even in recent memory, but itâ(TM)s hard to deny that theyâ(TM)re nearly always the SOURCE of the highest end parts. I have no love for them, but they make the best screens, have high quality chip fabs, etc. Iâ(TM)ll give Samsung a lot of grief for being a thieving garbage company with immoral leadership, but their high end parts are legitimately well made.
Only Apple has the scale to operate like they do, and only Samsung can build parts as well as they do, and the rest fight for scraps at the margins.
I think if Go playing programs were constrained to the world-view that humans have, somehow, maybe they wouldn't be able to outplay humans, but of course, they're not. They can look for solutions that we didn't even consider. Humans are really good at thinking we have all the answers, but we're obnoxiously bad at even understanding the SCOPE of the problem, let alone solving the problems themselves.
"The planet's other lifeforms reveal so many ways of being that we could never imagine them if they didn't already exist in reality. In this sense, other species don't only have the capacity to inspire our imaginations, they are a form of imagination. They are the genius of life arrayed against an always uncertain future, and to allow that brilliance to wane out of negligence is to passively embrace the death of our own minds." (JB Mackinnon, "The Once and Future World")
It's not new that we're bad at it, we've always been bad at it. But at the very least, we've been very narrowly successful in creating (and observing) things that can break past our own lack of vision.
So don't look at this as a scary time, this is just us finally building the tools so that we can hope to comprehend the universe around us. This is no scarier than the advent of the telescope or microscope.
Slashdot Mirror
An important thing to remember about Internet Explorer is that on of the reasons why it rendered everything is because it was happy to take extremely garbage, malformed HTML and find a way to make it work. You could make a compliant site, but IE made it easy to be lazy. It was the web designers that didn't have to follow standards—IE would render standards compliant sites well too.
Don't get me wrong, IE was a blight and I'm glad that it's basically dead. The user experience was terrible and it made the web a worse place to be. But in some ways, it was the exact opposite of what we see here: a system so fault tolerant that it doesn't care what you're doing.
'Living language' just means it's not a 'dead language', which is to say, people still speak it. It will naturally shift and change on its own, but that doesn't mean we have to go out of our way to corrupt it or make it harder for other people to use.
There are some things they do and test really well! And on iOS they have the advantage of a lot of beta users. I really like my iPhone 7, for instance, and I'm surprised at how much of an upgrade it was from my 6.
But yeah, I think there's a real issue with real world testing, and it's going to come back and haunt Apple. (If it isn't doing so already; the replacement costs for those keyboards are enormous, and for the time being, all of them are being done under warranty. There's also losing the mantle of selling the most reliable products, which is one of the biggest reasons I buy Apple stuff.)
Supposedly it's a machine learning bug, which means if you're just testing how the keyboard works in sort of ideal conditions, it's not going to pop up. 50% adoption also means a LOT of people. Even a 1 in 500000 bug is going to crop up on a LOT of phones.
Here's the thing with Apple: I think they test everything as best as they can...but not in the real world.
The keyboard problems on their Pro laptops? That sounds like a lot of testing was done in Jony Ive's clean workroom. Same with the weird design problems with the AppleTV remote. Same with the TouchBar. All these things work great if you're not bringing something to a cafe and trying to get work done there, or sitting on a real couch with dogs and kids and trying to use the AppleTV remote in the dark while holding a drink.
Same with problems with the older phones. Nobody dogfoods this stuff. No employees (or not enough employees) are walking around with an iPhone 6 in their pockets trying to get on with their lives; the iPhone 6 is probably being tested in a lab with few apps installed and lots of empty space on the disk.
I love my Apple stuff, but sometimes it really feels like nobody tried to use it out in the street before shipping it.
Everything was a lot slower on my 6, yes. (I had to get a 7 over the weekend because my 6 was stolen.)
However, since I'm usually running the public beta, I made a complaint about the keyboard speed and got an email about it today, with the claim that they've made a fix that MIGHT help. So performance is something they're actively working on, it sounds like.
(I greatly suspect, like the weird issue with the 'I' key, that this was because of the 'machine learning' stuff they're trying to run in the background. The iPhone 6 simply doesn't have the horsepower for it.)
The iPhone 8, 8 plus and X currently make up about 4.79% of the iPhone market. The iPhone 7 that I got over the weekend still had iOS 10 on it. Since no new iPads have been released this fall, all of them will have iOS 10 on them at time of sale.
http://info.localytics.com/blo...
I upgrade my OS because I want to upgrade my OS. The upgrade isn't forced, I have to give it permission to install.
What do you think the appropriate price for this phone is? And the correct amount of hype?
I don't meet many professors that are disgruntled about teaching, they're all run down by the wide array of administrative duties that they're compelled to participate in. My partner's supervisor turned down a position as the head of a research group several times until he politically couldn't do it any more, and at that point, he effectively disappeared from the lives of his students. He knew it would happen and he still tries his hardest, but at this point he's being paid to do work he never wanted, and neither of those things are research or teaching.
It's a completely different problem with AI/Machine Learning right now. ML people can work for private industry, have access to enough big iron to get their work done, do the things that interest them, and never have to do some BS administrative thing or organise a conference or write a grant proposal. Even when companies 'only' offer 20% time for your own research, that's still arguably more pure research time than you get at most CS departments. The only thing that you're not actively doing when you work for industry now is teaching, but even then, you'll have plenty of time to mentor junior programmers and researchers if that's your jam.
Actually, it's MUCH worse than that. Companies pay people much more to do RESEARCH than Universities do. My partner is finishing her PhD, and she's already talked to a few industry people. Her concern that she wouldn't be able to do the research that interests her, or that she wouldn't have the supercomputing resources that her research requires were completely assuaged. Companies want her to do her research, because even blue-sky AI research can and does have practical implications.
And because she's not doing a bunch of administrative bullshit or writing grant proposals, more of her actual work time will be spent doing research than she would ever be allowed at the University.
Universities don't just pay less, they heap a bunch of useless garbage work on their professors that has nothing to do with teaching or advancing the field. Why in the world would anyone want that kind of stress?
Either that 10% is the most important 10%, or it's not just 10%. Apple's chips murder every other chip on the market. It's not really even close.
No matter how you slice it, Apple's chip design is second-to-none, and trying to wave your hands in an attempt to diminish Apple's engineering prowess really isn't working.
Itâ(TM)s estimated that the screens cost something like $120-130 each. Given that, the cost to consumer ratio isnâ(TM)t entirely out of line with previous models. Samsung is the only one that can make this screen, so theyâ(TM)re milking it for what they can.
Sadly, I really AM old enough to have the 4-digit UID that I'm sporting.
In any case, the story about them compromising quality has been denied, and perhaps you could call that obvious or inevitable, but Apple rarely comments on stories at all.
I haven't seen any evidence that Apple uses anything other than the highest possible quality parts, going so far as to not source parts from a company that they've given millions of dollars to (LG) so they can get OLED panels from a major competitor (Samsung).
There are bound to be some edge cases, but it's incredibly hard to argue that Apple doesn't use the best components it can get its hands on (at scale), and that Samsung doesn't manufacture the best parts (at scale).
(And don't blame me for /. being so unable to cope with text from an iPhone. I mean, the thing has only been out for 10 goddamn years.)
Apple is not doing this the easily-exploitable image comparison way. Samsung tried that and it was terrible. They've got a projector that paints the face with 30,000 dots, then a height map is created and face analysis is done. That data is converted into a mathematical representation (that can't be reverse engineered, assuming you could even get to it) and compared with the mathematical representation that was already stored.
No pictures are taken or stored. You're not taking a selfie. That's also why this works at multiple angles, but isn't fooled by things like latex masks.
Yes, exactly, you can't have the feature on without a PIN being set. And I think setting a PIN turns on full-device encryption, though that may be on by default now, no matter what. (I'm not sure where they'd get the key from, or what good it would be without a PIN, but still.)
If the data were being sent to the cloud, you'd have to have an internet connection to use it, and you don't. You can turn wifi off or go into the forest or whatever and all these features still work. The TouchID (and presumably FaceID) systems are stand-alone, on-device only. They don't store pictures, they create a mathematical hash of the data, and then generate a new hash every time you're scanned. The hashes are then compared to see if they're alike, so there's nothing that's stored that can be turned back into personally identifiable data; the process is one-way.
It's all about friction. We KNOW that users are bad with passwords and all that jazz, and they feel like they should be better, but it's just one more thing they have to remember. It seems alien to a lot of us, but that's how it is. And that's why Apple made TouchID. The phones aren't unhackable, but they're close enough for most purposes, and they prevent casual intrusion if nothing else.
Well, and this was the problem in the first place. Apple's stats indicated most people weren't bothering to set a PIN, so the phones were unsecured entirely. TouchID made it possible to provide some modicum of security (as much as 4 digits is gonna get you anyway) while giving everyone enough convenience that they were happy to use it.
FaceID has the potential to be a much better implementation AND do some interesting things with face mapping and depth mapping besides that (see the minimum-viable-product that is the snapchat filters that more accurately map to one's face).
The reason Apple gave for introducing TouchID was that a vast majority of users weren't even bothering to put a PIN on their phone, so giving them an easy way to unlock the phone was better than nothing. There are definitely security concerns, but there's a BIGGER security concern when your phone isn't even locked to begin with.
FaceID is just a different extension of that. Neither of them is meant to be 100% secure, just somewhat MORE secure. For me, I went from having a 6-digit pin to a passcode somewhat over 15 characters because the overhead of only having to type it once in a while was more than offset by the convenience of TouchID. I simply wouldn't have a passcode that long if it weren't for biometric authentication.
If I really needed to keep my phone secure for some reason, I'd turn off TouchID/FaceID permanently.
It's apparently the dot projector that's at issue. It's a component that projects 30000 infrared dots onto your face...and it's so small it fits in one part of the notch on the iPhone X. That's bound a high-complexity component at that size.
That's a convincing rebuttal, commenter with no name or sources.
Apple almost always has two sources for its components, and this is well known. They had three manufacturers trying to make the dot projector on the iPhone X, they have TMSC AND Samsung fabbing SoCs, etc. Apple rarely single-sources components because it drives prices up. The screen in the iPhone X is a rare exception, but as we've seen from the Pixel XL debacle, LG isn't really up to making high quality OLED screens on mobile yet.
This is all entirely public knowledge. If Apple can't get the prices and components they want out of a manufacturer, they'll dump them in a hot second for someone that says they can.
This is the exact opposite of how Apple, and to a certain extent, Samsung, operate. Apple famously pits manufacturers against each other. If the components arenâ(TM)t meeting spec, theyâ(TM)re sent back, at the manufacturerâ(TM)s cost. The whole reason why the iPhone X is reportedly supply constrained is because the dot projector is hard to make and Apple keeps sending them back.
Theyâ(TM)re not faultless, but in general, the components you get in an iPhone are the best ones that can be sourced from anyone.
Samsung has done some dumb things, even in recent memory, but itâ(TM)s hard to deny that theyâ(TM)re nearly always the SOURCE of the highest end parts. I have no love for them, but they make the best screens, have high quality chip fabs, etc. Iâ(TM)ll give Samsung a lot of grief for being a thieving garbage company with immoral leadership, but their high end parts are legitimately well made.
Only Apple has the scale to operate like they do, and only Samsung can build parts as well as they do, and the rest fight for scraps at the margins.
I find it less scary than inevitable.
I think if Go playing programs were constrained to the world-view that humans have, somehow, maybe they wouldn't be able to outplay humans, but of course, they're not. They can look for solutions that we didn't even consider. Humans are really good at thinking we have all the answers, but we're obnoxiously bad at even understanding the SCOPE of the problem, let alone solving the problems themselves.
"The planet's other lifeforms reveal so many ways of being that we could never imagine them if they didn't already exist in reality. In this sense, other species don't only have the capacity to inspire our imaginations, they are a form of imagination. They are the genius of life arrayed against an always uncertain future, and to allow that brilliance to wane out of negligence is to passively embrace the death of our own minds." (JB Mackinnon, "The Once and Future World")
It's not new that we're bad at it, we've always been bad at it. But at the very least, we've been very narrowly successful in creating (and observing) things that can break past our own lack of vision.
So don't look at this as a scary time, this is just us finally building the tools so that we can hope to comprehend the universe around us. This is no scarier than the advent of the telescope or microscope.