I think it's a bit early to call the S7 or Note 7 the most rock solid phones--when I talk about durability, I mean that over a 2-4 year period, and these've only been out a few months/weeks. You may yet be right, but I still think you might be jumping the gun a little.
In this case, form is function--part of the function of a mobile phone is to be portable. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have been more careful with it--supposedly the 6s is less bendable, which means they could design it to be strong AND skinny, if they want--but part of what I want in my phone is for it to be as invisible to me as possible when I'm not actually carrying it.
Whether or not that meets your goal for 'function' is another question. I can easily see other people wanting a phone that's considerably more robust. With the thinnest case I could find, I've had my 6 for two years, dropped it many times and not had any breakage problems. (I do have a faint blue streak in the middle of my screen which Apple tells me may be due to excessive pressure on that spot, but as its cosmetic and not a functional problem, they won't do anything about it.)
We don't all have the same functionality goals. It's part of your job as a consumer to decide if your idea of function lines up with the manufacturer's.
(It's worth noting that sometimes form is exactly the function--jewellery and other fashion items and ornaments are a good example of this. Do not denigrate people that carry phones for a reason that also has to do with fashion; for them, that's ALSO part of its function. It's not up to anyone else to decide if that's a worthwhile use or not. Even nerds carry things for 'fashion' reasons--sometimes we pick something that's objectively the ugliest, bulkiest, whateverest item to telegraph that we're the nerdiest kid on the block to all the other nerds. There's nothing wrong with that either.)
...And it goes through the lightning port. I bought a third party adaptor that fits in behind the standard stereo (in a 2006 VW!) and while I actually have to have two adaptors (iPhone 3G to iPhone 4--something changed in the 30-pin layout or something, and then a standard 30-pin to lightning adaptor on top of that) I can still control my phone from the steering wheel. The sound quality is, of course, very good.
When I borrowed my friend's car, I used my USB/Lightning cable to plug into her Sony deck. That worked fine, too. Charged the phone as well.
So I don't know what he's talking about when it comes to cars. There are a few ways around having to use the headphone jack or bluetooth.
The fourth amendment actually uses the word 'people' and not 'citizens'. In cases where the lawmakers or framers intended the rights to be extended only to 'citizens', they make that explicit (i.e., for voting).
So, no. Your assertion probably isn't true. But I'm not a lawyer--or even an American!--so my cursory search around the internet isn't worth much. Then again, it appears to be more than you've done...
I feel like there's a huge problem with projection in the anti-UBI crowd. If I had a basic income, I'd go back to school. I'd do things that were more risky. I'd read more, study more, create more.
My partner is doing her PhD right now. She can do it without worrying about money because *I* work. That's the power of getting money for nothing.
But honestly, if you want to live by the ocean and barely scrape by on a UBI, I'm not actually going to argue with that. We've only got this one life to live. If I had the power, I'd bequeath everyone the life of luxury and relaxation that they want.
Arguably, they're also using the school system right now to educate a future doctor that will take care of them, and an engineer to build the bridge they'll drive over, etc., etc. Educated people pay for themselves several times over, which is why we've had these school systems for so long. Defunding schools is the worst possible decision a country can make.
People buy cheap 'jewellery' watches all the time. I understand that a Rolex is a Veblen good perfectly well. But I also see people in my office wearing huge, ugly, largely inexpensive ($100-$300) watches all the time. They're just there to meet a certain aesthetic, regardless of the utility. Some of them are wickedly hard to tell the time on, even if the time it keeps is pretty good.
Fashion is an end of itself. That's why people can wear things that stand out and would normally be considered just awful, but under the context of a 'fashionable good', they become nice.
But maybe I mis-explained myself and should've talked more about fashion than jewellery. The Apple Watch is an ornament that conveys a certain meaning. It's also marginally useful at the same time. You can buy a $50 band for it to change up your wardrobe, or you can buy a Hermes strap to convey that you have enough money to spend on something as relatively trivial as a watch strap.
Oh lord, is slashdot really that full of old, out-of-touch people?
One of my good friends is someone I met from my swim team. We see each other in person at least twice a week. We even bought a scrabble board instead of playing on our phones because we thought that would be more fun.
You know why we're actually close, though? She went to Italy for the summer last year and we kept in touch through facebook. Through posts and through messenger.
I've got plenty of close friends, and ironically, a lot of them live a long way from me. I use every tool I have to stay in touch with them. A lot of the time that's facebook. Sometimes that's iMessage or Telegram or Twitter. Sometimes that's actually through handwritten letters on cotton paper with a calligraphy pen (yes, really--I'm a pen nerd). I don't care how I get to talk to them, I just want to see the pictures of their kids and know how their day is going.
Facebook reduces that friction for me. The ads I get on Facebook are often dumb, but they never take up the whole page, play sound without me asking or do weird things with the rendering (a la The Verge).
Don't condescend to me that my friends aren't friends just because I connect with a lot of them on Facebook during the week. I'm closer with a lot of people exactly because of Facebook.
Uh, a watch is jewellery. You can buy a $25000 wristwatch that does a mediocre job of telling time (that is, worse than a $20 Casio).
The Apple Watch aspires to be an ornament with some small number of useful features. Some notifications, reportedly very good heart rate tracking (at least in testsâ"real world usage always varies) and some fitness tracking.
With those criteria, I think the Apple Watch does better than MOST smart watches. At least they got the ornament part right.
On most benchmarks, the iPhone is faster. The iPhone SE, in fact, seems to be the top performer among iPhones, and it's the cheapest of the current generation.
Samsung's phones (and anything using the Qualcomm chips) tend to outperform the A-series chips when it comes to multi-threaded tasks, so you'll see physics simulations on high-end Android devices run better than iPhones. But honestly, that's not much of what most people do on their phones. On any real-world (ish) benchmark to do with browsing, IO or framerate, the iPhone is in the same ballpark or much faster.
Dollar-for-dollar, the iPhone is basically the best bet in town, even with 11-month-old silicon. Given that they're going to be announcing the next generation next month, this is only going to get better for Apple.
Look, there are lots of reasons to complain about both Apple and iPhones, and their SoCs have never been one of them. They produce power-efficient, highly integrated SoCs with great I/O throughput.
The flaw here is that minorities do often have a shared perspective and subculture, even if they're displaced by long distances and other trappings of the greater culture.
I don't have the experience of being a black man in America. But one in the north and one in the south do. They both know what it's like to be underrepresented in media, and to distrust police, and probably to be pulled over for no reason at all. Indeed, Chris Rock and Levar Burton have talked about those experiences too. Rich black men and poor black men have that common bond.
That very existence changes your perspective. And indeed, what you end up arguing for here, whether you realise it or not, is even MORE diversity. You want white people from all over the country and all over the world, as well as POC from all over the country and all over the world.
Colour-blindness ignores the struggles of various minorities--we KNOW they have a different experience walking through life. It's important that they're represented in business and tech and government, and sometimes we have to reach a little further to encourage them to get into the business and to get hired.
Apple would probably tell you that they're a company trying to build really good experiences into their products, and they want to be the best at that, they have to hire a really diverse staff. I heard one person that worked there say that when they interviewed him, they were interested with where he'd travelled and the non-tech things that he'd done in his life. They want people from all walks of life because that's where the new ideas come from--but you can't dismiss the inherent shifted perspective growing up as a minority in your own country will give you.
(Disclaimer: I'm a half-Asian born to immigrants on both sides of my family. I pass as white, but I know the immigrant/Asian experience pretty personally.)
I don't know why you think they should be able to survive on releasing the same games that exist on two other consoles already. Why would anyone buy a Nintendo system at all?
Nintendo's salvation lies in strong third party support, but they won't be the same games as are on the PS4 and XBox.
Game budgets for PS4 and XBone are enormous. The pipelines are huge, and hard to fill. When you've got that much horsepower, you need a lot more creative staff to make sure there's actually something worth rendering. If Nintendo produces a modestly equipped console that has decent graphics, it will be a much lower barrier to entry.
Moreover, after 12 (or 24? I think it's 12) hours of being locked, the timer resets, and you're forced to enter the passcode anyway. If the police have had your phone, and it's been locked longer than 12 hours, they're out of luck.
Tesla's autopilot is as much an autopilot at plane autopilot is. Plane autopilots require two human pilots in the cockpit, and they aren't allowed to just sit around and play Pokemon the whole time.
Autopilots don't mean you're allowed to stop paying attention, they just removed some of the drudgework of maintaining distance and emergency braking.
More people definitely doesn't mean a better product.
I've worked on projects where they turn the people-hose on near the end, and it 100% does not work. It tends to make things worse, in fact.
For testing purposes, what they'd have to do is hire people to...go out and use their phones like they're normal people in the world using their phones. Why not leverage the users that want early access to the software? They've done enough testing to make sure it's mostly stable and won't destroy your data, may as well release it on the world. It leads to better products faster. I'm not sure why anyone objects to that. Nobody's making us use the beta.
Apple itself DID know better. I mean, they had a whole service based around fingerprinting and metadata.
So you can't snarkily make a comment about how they're incompetent "at every level". (And they really, obviously aren't. They're making a lot of money at it--if they were as incompetent as you'd like to believe, they would've gone out of business long ago. It's not like there aren't other options.)
That said, it's not clear why they rolled out a meta-data match with Apple Music. That WAS obviously a bad decision, but it was also a deliberate decision. In my experience, Apple makes seemingly bad decisions often, but they're almost always deliberate. You may not agree with them, or they may be objectively bad, but there was someone that actually sat down and considered it (and eventually got it wrong, unfortunately). It may be that meta-data matches are faster or easier or it was something they were contractually obligated to try for DRM-ish reasons, which the industry always loves trying to impose. I honestly don't know.
Either way, I'm glad it's done with. I avoided adding my home library to Apple Music because I didn't want a zillion mismatched files. iTunes Match worked great for me for the years that I had it, so I'm sure this update will work fine.
Uh, the key word in each one of those points is about knowing and intentional damage of data. Apple didn't code something up with the express intention of destroying data. No matter what you think of Apple, they don't code in little bombs to ruin your day just for the hell of it. It was a bug. If we start looking at all bugs as intentional damage, we're going to have a lot fewer programmers willing to release software.
I only have one phone, and I install new OSes on it.
I used to install the developer previews, but I don't actually do any development (I was paying the $99 for the dev account because I really was going to write something and submit it...eventually) and frankly, those were too buggy even for me.
Now I do the public betas. I love the new features (I love patch notes day for OSes and games like WoW or Diablo 3) and they're stable enough that I'm not going insane. Battery life is markedly worse, and there are some times that mobile data will be flaky and get chewed up really quickly. I'm okay with those things.
I also get a chance to submit feedback on bugs that I've had issues with for a long time, not just new bugs.
These are betas, not alphas. I keep good backups, but I've never needed them.
There are too many use cases to accurately cover them all. App interactions with the system on top of new APIs--no company could afford to hire that many people to test all the possibilities.
The developer and public betas are a good compromise. They're opt in. I get a chance to use stuff first and play with it, which is something that I like (I'm the guy that always loved patch notes day in WoW or Diablo 3), and you get a less buggy OS. I think we can all win here.
How do you mean "switch". At my work we have a main dev language and a couple in-house languages that are used to generate code. I also use emacs as my main programming environment, so I write a little bit of elisp weekly, probably. Or do you mean how often do I abandon a language and move to a new one forever? In that case, not once in 15 years.
Use weak, shitty passwords for weak services. Who cares? Let them take your forum account. Use the same dumb easy to remember password in as many places as you can get away with so you can remember a strong password for each important service.
It's hard to remember a lot of passwords, and some things aren't worth protecting, honestly. It just takes up headspace to try. But make sure you've got something good when it counts and don't use it anywhere else.
I have more podcasts than I can listen to, and most of them are free. I pay a subscription for an ad-free version of the Savage Lovecast, but that version also comes with extra content. I listen to the ads of the other shows and for the most part, it's actually stuff I want. I also listen to a lot of shows from the CBC, so I've kind of already paid for those.
I can't believe they can give me greater value than what I'm getting. Shows in my schedule, more plentiful than I can actually handle, and all of them finding their own way to monetise. The current hands-off system is one of the best things Apple has ever done. The only people that don't like it are advertisers that don't want to be cut out of any advertising loops. (Meanwhile, the cost per conversion that podcast advertisers pay is insanely cheap.)
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a bit early to call the S7 or Note 7 the most rock solid phones--when I talk about durability, I mean that over a 2-4 year period, and these've only been out a few months/weeks. You may yet be right, but I still think you might be jumping the gun a little.
"When I'm not actually USING it" is what that should read. Sigh. :/
In this case, form is function--part of the function of a mobile phone is to be portable. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have been more careful with it--supposedly the 6s is less bendable, which means they could design it to be strong AND skinny, if they want--but part of what I want in my phone is for it to be as invisible to me as possible when I'm not actually carrying it.
Whether or not that meets your goal for 'function' is another question. I can easily see other people wanting a phone that's considerably more robust. With the thinnest case I could find, I've had my 6 for two years, dropped it many times and not had any breakage problems. (I do have a faint blue streak in the middle of my screen which Apple tells me may be due to excessive pressure on that spot, but as its cosmetic and not a functional problem, they won't do anything about it.)
We don't all have the same functionality goals. It's part of your job as a consumer to decide if your idea of function lines up with the manufacturer's.
(It's worth noting that sometimes form is exactly the function--jewellery and other fashion items and ornaments are a good example of this. Do not denigrate people that carry phones for a reason that also has to do with fashion; for them, that's ALSO part of its function. It's not up to anyone else to decide if that's a worthwhile use or not. Even nerds carry things for 'fashion' reasons--sometimes we pick something that's objectively the ugliest, bulkiest, whateverest item to telegraph that we're the nerdiest kid on the block to all the other nerds. There's nothing wrong with that either.)
...And it goes through the lightning port. I bought a third party adaptor that fits in behind the standard stereo (in a 2006 VW!) and while I actually have to have two adaptors (iPhone 3G to iPhone 4--something changed in the 30-pin layout or something, and then a standard 30-pin to lightning adaptor on top of that) I can still control my phone from the steering wheel. The sound quality is, of course, very good.
When I borrowed my friend's car, I used my USB/Lightning cable to plug into her Sony deck. That worked fine, too. Charged the phone as well.
So I don't know what he's talking about when it comes to cars. There are a few ways around having to use the headphone jack or bluetooth.
The fourth amendment actually uses the word 'people' and not 'citizens'. In cases where the lawmakers or framers intended the rights to be extended only to 'citizens', they make that explicit (i.e., for voting).
http://scholarship.law.georget...
So, no. Your assertion probably isn't true. But I'm not a lawyer--or even an American!--so my cursory search around the internet isn't worth much. Then again, it appears to be more than you've done...
I feel like there's a huge problem with projection in the anti-UBI crowd. If I had a basic income, I'd go back to school. I'd do things that were more risky. I'd read more, study more, create more.
My partner is doing her PhD right now. She can do it without worrying about money because *I* work. That's the power of getting money for nothing.
But honestly, if you want to live by the ocean and barely scrape by on a UBI, I'm not actually going to argue with that. We've only got this one life to live. If I had the power, I'd bequeath everyone the life of luxury and relaxation that they want.
Arguably, they're also using the school system right now to educate a future doctor that will take care of them, and an engineer to build the bridge they'll drive over, etc., etc. Educated people pay for themselves several times over, which is why we've had these school systems for so long. Defunding schools is the worst possible decision a country can make.
People buy cheap 'jewellery' watches all the time. I understand that a Rolex is a Veblen good perfectly well. But I also see people in my office wearing huge, ugly, largely inexpensive ($100-$300) watches all the time. They're just there to meet a certain aesthetic, regardless of the utility. Some of them are wickedly hard to tell the time on, even if the time it keeps is pretty good.
Fashion is an end of itself. That's why people can wear things that stand out and would normally be considered just awful, but under the context of a 'fashionable good', they become nice.
But maybe I mis-explained myself and should've talked more about fashion than jewellery. The Apple Watch is an ornament that conveys a certain meaning. It's also marginally useful at the same time. You can buy a $50 band for it to change up your wardrobe, or you can buy a Hermes strap to convey that you have enough money to spend on something as relatively trivial as a watch strap.
Oh lord, is slashdot really that full of old, out-of-touch people?
One of my good friends is someone I met from my swim team. We see each other in person at least twice a week. We even bought a scrabble board instead of playing on our phones because we thought that would be more fun.
You know why we're actually close, though? She went to Italy for the summer last year and we kept in touch through facebook. Through posts and through messenger.
I've got plenty of close friends, and ironically, a lot of them live a long way from me. I use every tool I have to stay in touch with them. A lot of the time that's facebook. Sometimes that's iMessage or Telegram or Twitter. Sometimes that's actually through handwritten letters on cotton paper with a calligraphy pen (yes, really--I'm a pen nerd). I don't care how I get to talk to them, I just want to see the pictures of their kids and know how their day is going.
Facebook reduces that friction for me. The ads I get on Facebook are often dumb, but they never take up the whole page, play sound without me asking or do weird things with the rendering (a la The Verge).
Don't condescend to me that my friends aren't friends just because I connect with a lot of them on Facebook during the week. I'm closer with a lot of people exactly because of Facebook.
Uh, a watch is jewellery. You can buy a $25000 wristwatch that does a mediocre job of telling time (that is, worse than a $20 Casio).
The Apple Watch aspires to be an ornament with some small number of useful features. Some notifications, reportedly very good heart rate tracking (at least in testsâ"real world usage always varies) and some fitness tracking.
With those criteria, I think the Apple Watch does better than MOST smart watches. At least they got the ornament part right.
...and life is a fucking nightmare o/~
(https://youtu.be/vzeOsEkzeA0
John Mulaney's stand up bit on Delta. It's worth it.)
Uh, no.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
On most benchmarks, the iPhone is faster. The iPhone SE, in fact, seems to be the top performer among iPhones, and it's the cheapest of the current generation.
Samsung's phones (and anything using the Qualcomm chips) tend to outperform the A-series chips when it comes to multi-threaded tasks, so you'll see physics simulations on high-end Android devices run better than iPhones. But honestly, that's not much of what most people do on their phones. On any real-world (ish) benchmark to do with browsing, IO or framerate, the iPhone is in the same ballpark or much faster.
Dollar-for-dollar, the iPhone is basically the best bet in town, even with 11-month-old silicon. Given that they're going to be announcing the next generation next month, this is only going to get better for Apple.
Look, there are lots of reasons to complain about both Apple and iPhones, and their SoCs have never been one of them. They produce power-efficient, highly integrated SoCs with great I/O throughput.
The flaw here is that minorities do often have a shared perspective and subculture, even if they're displaced by long distances and other trappings of the greater culture.
I don't have the experience of being a black man in America. But one in the north and one in the south do. They both know what it's like to be underrepresented in media, and to distrust police, and probably to be pulled over for no reason at all. Indeed, Chris Rock and Levar Burton have talked about those experiences too. Rich black men and poor black men have that common bond.
That very existence changes your perspective. And indeed, what you end up arguing for here, whether you realise it or not, is even MORE diversity. You want white people from all over the country and all over the world, as well as POC from all over the country and all over the world.
Colour-blindness ignores the struggles of various minorities--we KNOW they have a different experience walking through life. It's important that they're represented in business and tech and government, and sometimes we have to reach a little further to encourage them to get into the business and to get hired.
Apple would probably tell you that they're a company trying to build really good experiences into their products, and they want to be the best at that, they have to hire a really diverse staff. I heard one person that worked there say that when they interviewed him, they were interested with where he'd travelled and the non-tech things that he'd done in his life. They want people from all walks of life because that's where the new ideas come from--but you can't dismiss the inherent shifted perspective growing up as a minority in your own country will give you.
(Disclaimer: I'm a half-Asian born to immigrants on both sides of my family. I pass as white, but I know the immigrant/Asian experience pretty personally.)
I don't know why you think they should be able to survive on releasing the same games that exist on two other consoles already. Why would anyone buy a Nintendo system at all?
Nintendo's salvation lies in strong third party support, but they won't be the same games as are on the PS4 and XBox.
Game budgets for PS4 and XBone are enormous. The pipelines are huge, and hard to fill. When you've got that much horsepower, you need a lot more creative staff to make sure there's actually something worth rendering. If Nintendo produces a modestly equipped console that has decent graphics, it will be a much lower barrier to entry.
Moreover, after 12 (or 24? I think it's 12) hours of being locked, the timer resets, and you're forced to enter the passcode anyway. If the police have had your phone, and it's been locked longer than 12 hours, they're out of luck.
Tesla's autopilot is as much an autopilot at plane autopilot is. Plane autopilots require two human pilots in the cockpit, and they aren't allowed to just sit around and play Pokemon the whole time.
Autopilots don't mean you're allowed to stop paying attention, they just removed some of the drudgework of maintaining distance and emergency braking.
More people definitely doesn't mean a better product.
I've worked on projects where they turn the people-hose on near the end, and it 100% does not work. It tends to make things worse, in fact.
For testing purposes, what they'd have to do is hire people to...go out and use their phones like they're normal people in the world using their phones. Why not leverage the users that want early access to the software? They've done enough testing to make sure it's mostly stable and won't destroy your data, may as well release it on the world. It leads to better products faster. I'm not sure why anyone objects to that. Nobody's making us use the beta.
Apple itself DID know better. I mean, they had a whole service based around fingerprinting and metadata.
So you can't snarkily make a comment about how they're incompetent "at every level". (And they really, obviously aren't. They're making a lot of money at it--if they were as incompetent as you'd like to believe, they would've gone out of business long ago. It's not like there aren't other options.)
That said, it's not clear why they rolled out a meta-data match with Apple Music. That WAS obviously a bad decision, but it was also a deliberate decision. In my experience, Apple makes seemingly bad decisions often, but they're almost always deliberate. You may not agree with them, or they may be objectively bad, but there was someone that actually sat down and considered it (and eventually got it wrong, unfortunately). It may be that meta-data matches are faster or easier or it was something they were contractually obligated to try for DRM-ish reasons, which the industry always loves trying to impose. I honestly don't know.
Either way, I'm glad it's done with. I avoided adding my home library to Apple Music because I didn't want a zillion mismatched files. iTunes Match worked great for me for the years that I had it, so I'm sure this update will work fine.
:-(
Oh wait, except they didn't. http://www.cultofmac.com/41399...
Uh, the key word in each one of those points is about knowing and intentional damage of data. Apple didn't code something up with the express intention of destroying data. No matter what you think of Apple, they don't code in little bombs to ruin your day just for the hell of it. It was a bug. If we start looking at all bugs as intentional damage, we're going to have a lot fewer programmers willing to release software.
I only have one phone, and I install new OSes on it.
I used to install the developer previews, but I don't actually do any development (I was paying the $99 for the dev account because I really was going to write something and submit it...eventually) and frankly, those were too buggy even for me.
Now I do the public betas. I love the new features (I love patch notes day for OSes and games like WoW or Diablo 3) and they're stable enough that I'm not going insane. Battery life is markedly worse, and there are some times that mobile data will be flaky and get chewed up really quickly. I'm okay with those things.
I also get a chance to submit feedback on bugs that I've had issues with for a long time, not just new bugs.
These are betas, not alphas. I keep good backups, but I've never needed them.
There are too many use cases to accurately cover them all. App interactions with the system on top of new APIs--no company could afford to hire that many people to test all the possibilities.
The developer and public betas are a good compromise. They're opt in. I get a chance to use stuff first and play with it, which is something that I like (I'm the guy that always loved patch notes day in WoW or Diablo 3), and you get a less buggy OS. I think we can all win here.
How do you mean "switch". At my work we have a main dev language and a couple in-house languages that are used to generate code. I also use emacs as my main programming environment, so I write a little bit of elisp weekly, probably. Or do you mean how often do I abandon a language and move to a new one forever? In that case, not once in 15 years.
Ugh, no.
Use weak, shitty passwords for weak services. Who cares? Let them take your forum account. Use the same dumb easy to remember password in as many places as you can get away with so you can remember a strong password for each important service.
It's hard to remember a lot of passwords, and some things aren't worth protecting, honestly. It just takes up headspace to try. But make sure you've got something good when it counts and don't use it anywhere else.
I have more podcasts than I can listen to, and most of them are free. I pay a subscription for an ad-free version of the Savage Lovecast, but that version also comes with extra content. I listen to the ads of the other shows and for the most part, it's actually stuff I want. I also listen to a lot of shows from the CBC, so I've kind of already paid for those.
I can't believe they can give me greater value than what I'm getting. Shows in my schedule, more plentiful than I can actually handle, and all of them finding their own way to monetise. The current hands-off system is one of the best things Apple has ever done. The only people that don't like it are advertisers that don't want to be cut out of any advertising loops. (Meanwhile, the cost per conversion that podcast advertisers pay is insanely cheap.)