It really has nothing to do with international rights. Cost may be a factor, but it isn't the most important right now. They can license whatever the studios will sell them.
The studios aren't selling.
The reason is that they figure they've got the killer show that is enough to get them to install the service for just that studio's output. HBO and Starz are already exclusives (with HBO recently revoking Netflix's license with Sesame Street), Disney's working on theirs, CBS has forked off their own instead of signing on to Hulu with the other networks.
At $15/m, they figure they've got the one killer show that is enough to get that monthly subscription, and they're gambling they're right by taking their material off of Netflix.
In the end, "cutting the chord" is not going to save anybody any money, because instead of paying cable $99+ / month for shows and HBO, they're going to have to sign on to 7 services to get the same shows they want to watch, resulting in the same $99/month.
well, to get us to use the cloud for that, they would need to have their cloud-editing tools not suck.
They bought picnik and totally ran it into the dirt, where all that is left is a handful of astronomy-named one-shot filters that make me miss instagram, and i've never actually installed instagram for f's sake.
Otherwise, you can do more editing on your phone/tablet than you can on your desktop, and that is one gigantic bit of what-the-f round two. The idea that mobile should be *better* than desktop is an attitude I will simply never ever understand.
So the hardware and the O/S is a little limiting? Fine. It isn't the type of device you need.
On the other hand, all of the ridiculous levels of settings and personalizations and all that on a 5.1.1 or 6.0 Android box is too much for my parents to want to argue with.
There's something to be said for "works well enough". As developers we should not forget that, lest a simpler product line come along and put your complex fully-featured super-product out to dry, no matter what features the new upstart is missing.
I'm not saying Amazon's Fire will do that to Android, as the tablet market right now is still pretty large and has room for all (and of course, Fire could easily re-enable Android features they've suppressed at a moment's notice should the demand truly be there). But it is something to consider that not all products are the right fit for all audiences.
I have a Fire that I use for reading at night (Feedly, Pocket, and Facebook - all the links i've saved throughout the day - and kindle books if i'm still awake after all that). It works perfect for that purpose (I also use it as test platform for my apps since i'm targeting that easier-to-use market).
But I take a Samsung Tab 4 with me during the day, because that's the better one for when I want interactive stuff or games or things that require Google Play Services and all that.
Right tool for the right job and the right audience.
(That said, FireOS 5 did have a few really annoying bugs I've had to work around, but nevermind...:) )
Pretty much everybody and everything Google has acquired, they've pretty much killed off. They bought Picasa, and are finally killing it with a product that has FAR fewer features (and nothing to replace the capabilities of the desktop app at all).
They bought picnik a few years ago, made it the online editor for Picasa and google+ photos for a while, but then over time ditched ALL of it in favor of a handful of crappy instagram filters.
So all of the features, all of the tech, all of the MONEY in Picasa and Picnik is gone. Utterly gone. No legacy left. Google, once the most functional of photo online services out there, is now a second-hand copy of Apple's iCloud...just as everybody was basically complaining that Apple's online/mobile photo approach is damned annoying and nobody wants it and they're all out looking for something better.
At least Flickr has actually *added* functionality (as well as performance) in the last few years. I just hope whomever they get sold to will be able to keep it alive.
oh, it is easy: it is just like Apple's photos app. strictly chronological on date-taken (unless there's no exif data, in which case it is by date created or last update or, well, whatever, who cares). Plus albums. Unlike Picasa (but like Flickr) you can put a photo into multiple albums without it making copies of it.
And unlike the Android, the web version doesn't mix-n-match your online photos with the ones on your phone as if there was no difference between them.
Beyond that...it is one hell of a step backwards as far as features go.
It is on the slate to be removed. Existing copies still work, but 1) no updates (so an O/S or library change that breaks it is permanent), and 2) no promises that it will still be able to upload files after the transition.
Yes, very frustrating, as it is my primary post-processing tool.
You lost me when you mentioned financial records and health record. the health stuff is locked down by law, under HIPAA regulations. Google has no business in that space, especially not in a manner for pushing advertising recommendations to us. the last thing i want is to get *targeted* ads to me over my...not saying what my problem is. Get the drift?
Financial records are the same, though with less legal protection. The main inference they can get from that for advertisers is "are they rich"? Targeted ads based on the likelihood of whether or not i spend 50 or 500 for dinners on the road (or can afford to pay off my credit card or have extensive college debt)? (or more specifically, what is my company, or the government, willing to pay when i expense it). Is that really the future of Google you want to encourage?
It certainly isn't the future I want. while I agree that the idea of personal digital agents is inevitable, Google, which still makes most of its money on advertising and can improve its revenue by targeting, is the LAST company I want to have the ability to target me that closely. I won't hide that I have a kid, a dslr camera, a large music collection, and a hobby of visiting disney and national parks, but i still draw the line on my privacy somewhere.
indeed. and Google's solution to this (for their own apps) was Google Play itself, which provided the core APIs they could update and control so it didn't matter what OS you were running.
but not everybody else in the app developer space had access to those same APIs, so there we are.
If Samsung was willing to send upgrades to my not-even-2-year-old devices, I'd be upgraded by now.
Google doesn't have to sell the upgrade features to the end users. Google has to sell the upgrade to the OEMs (especially Samsung) to make them be willing to make the upgrade available for "old" devices (given that, today, 'old' means 9 months or less). Samsung and ASUS are more willing to let these older devices rot, under the expectation that they'll buy something new and get the upgrade then, so what is the point of back-porting it?
Google needs to better market the OS to the OEMs, not to Slashdot.
it is actually pretty well officially documented by google these days. making something "hard to accidentally trigger by someone who doesn't read documentation and who we think is too stupid to know what it will do" is not quite an easter egg...though close.:)
My new music player (SubFire - a player for Subsonic servers) has an easter egg in it, but only because i don't have time to give it the care it would need to actually make it a "useful" feature to anybody but me. Triple-clicking in the copyright footer will bring up a search box, and that can only happen on the Chrome version.
Basically, I needed a quick search to get to song titles, for my own purposes, but if I were to properly implement search, it would need to be very different...I know what it should be, and I don't have time to build that. So I now have one undocumented feature that does what I want the way I want for the purpose I need it for.
For that matter, it was in pre-messenger "Chat" for Facebook that many of us were hit by those "Hey, I'm stuck in London and my wallet was stolen, can you send me some cash?" scams from hacked accounts.
Making it easy to say yes to that kind of crap is just ridiculous.
Proponents of refactoring have never ever said otherwise (unless they themselves are confused on the matter). Code is only readable if it is either simple, or clearly follows design patterns, or is clearly commented and the comments are up to date with the current version of the code. Code is only easy to change when it is readable and when all external dependencies are well known. That last part is a key thing that metrics aren't necessarily able to capture.
A refactoring project, if not refactoring to the right design patterns to address what was wrong with the structure in the first place, is not going to improve it. One must know clearly why the current structure is making a bug-fix or a new feature difficult to implement.
And while some refactorings are 'good' in that they reduce a lot of copy-paste code, others are good because they add code, or add classes (an alternative increase in complexity). Different refactorings have different effects, and are used in different situations.
And as always, if you don't need to refactor, don't. A refactoring is to improve the design, not to rewrite for its own sake.
And there-in lies the great flaw of the whole idea of such a study: you can't measure the quality of a software design. Some things you just have to judge for yourself, based on experience and attention, and no arbitrary metrics number will ever differentiate between a good design and a rubbish heap.
the second you used the phrase "government overreach", you gave away that you are, in fact, a right-wing (or libertarian-right) jerk who has no interest in anything other than discrediting the government so you don't have to pay taxes and exist as a member of this society.
on top of that, being only a month or so old, it wasn't ready when the makers like Samsung needed to do their final packaging and testing for the Christmas season phones as all that had to happen in July through September to give the factories time to put the chip in and ship. How can I buy a 5.0 phone when the vast majority phones on the market now left the factory 3 months before 5.0 was released?
plus a 5g or 6g phone speaking 5.0 is going to be quite more expensive than the 2013 4g that as a simple matter of *hardware* is going to be fast enough for what most people throw at it, at least in the first few months. Why get a $250 (after contract) 5g phone with 5.0 on it when the 4g is only $99 and will run all the same apps just as well?
if it is that much better, samsung would already be pushing the updates to my more recent devices.
one problem was the timing of the release. they put it out just a month ago, but everybody bought their Christmas toys *2* months ago, and that meant they had to be in the factory *4* months ago. It wasn't out nearly in time to make the 2014 sales, so it has no chance of an upswing until this summer or next Christmas.
The only ones to reply so far are overly cynical, probably from having stayed up all night gaming or hacking code and likely are on their 6th cup of coffee.
seriously, have you ever tried to get a cert installed properly in J2EE? Node? PHP/Apache? Ever tried to get PGP working right on t-bird?
There is nothing about the process that is straightforward in any way (including the cert signing stuff). Thus, most websites will simply find it easier to not bother. Let those who can pay for experts pay for it, but until expertise becomes "push this button" easy, and still almost free, it isn't worth it for typical web traffic.
The article just talks about web-reading, and how more and more webpages are being responsive (for mobile reasons) in ways that actually now optimize sites for vertical orientation over horizontal.
However, from a coding and word processing* perspective, vertical layout is a bit better, too, as it allows you to see more of the text and the text's context, than horizontal mode does. Thus, most developers who pay attention to such things do use both, as the first 5point comment suggests above.
In fact, that was the actual vision of the PARC crew that invented GUI and WYSIWYG back in the 70s: the Xerox Alto workstation they created did have a vertical monitor, for this very reason: the idea was that if you were using a word processor to show you a page's layout, seeing the whole page on screen was the desired effect. They discovered it improved coding productivity once they were using the workstation to produce the software.
(that said, it is NOT better for spreadsheets or powerpoint, or database-editing tools, so there we are.)
That may be a fact, but we didn't need to know any of that. And neither do the birds.
That's the whole point of the harmonic series: our ears, in their ability to hear, can hear the overtones in a note because they are there *physically* in the sound. It is unavoidable.
"Dissonant" notes, such as a tritone or a minor 2nd, aren't dissonant because of some sine wave detail: that's just a matter of mathematical transposition and simplification. The notes are dissonant because their collective overtones within them are clashing all the way up the harmonic series as well. We hear ALL of those harmonic clashes, even if we're not conscious of it. The sine wave isn't why they are dissonant: the harmonics are.
Slashdot Mirror
It really has nothing to do with international rights. Cost may be a factor, but it isn't the most important right now. They can license whatever the studios will sell them.
The studios aren't selling.
The reason is that they figure they've got the killer show that is enough to get them to install the service for just that studio's output. HBO and Starz are already exclusives (with HBO recently revoking Netflix's license with Sesame Street), Disney's working on theirs, CBS has forked off their own instead of signing on to Hulu with the other networks.
At $15/m, they figure they've got the one killer show that is enough to get that monthly subscription, and they're gambling they're right by taking their material off of Netflix.
In the end, "cutting the chord" is not going to save anybody any money, because instead of paying cable $99+ / month for shows and HBO, they're going to have to sign on to 7 services to get the same shows they want to watch, resulting in the same $99/month.
well, to get us to use the cloud for that, they would need to have their cloud-editing tools not suck.
They bought picnik and totally ran it into the dirt, where all that is left is a handful of astronomy-named one-shot filters that make me miss instagram, and i've never actually installed instagram for f's sake.
Otherwise, you can do more editing on your phone/tablet than you can on your desktop, and that is one gigantic bit of what-the-f round two. The idea that mobile should be *better* than desktop is an attitude I will simply never ever understand.
So the hardware and the O/S is a little limiting? Fine. It isn't the type of device you need.
On the other hand, all of the ridiculous levels of settings and personalizations and all that on a 5.1.1 or 6.0 Android box is too much for my parents to want to argue with.
There's something to be said for "works well enough". As developers we should not forget that, lest a simpler product line come along and put your complex fully-featured super-product out to dry, no matter what features the new upstart is missing.
I'm not saying Amazon's Fire will do that to Android, as the tablet market right now is still pretty large and has room for all (and of course, Fire could easily re-enable Android features they've suppressed at a moment's notice should the demand truly be there). But it is something to consider that not all products are the right fit for all audiences.
I have a Fire that I use for reading at night (Feedly, Pocket, and Facebook - all the links i've saved throughout the day - and kindle books if i'm still awake after all that). It works perfect for that purpose (I also use it as test platform for my apps since i'm targeting that easier-to-use market).
But I take a Samsung Tab 4 with me during the day, because that's the better one for when I want interactive stuff or games or things that require Google Play Services and all that.
Right tool for the right job and the right audience.
(That said, FireOS 5 did have a few really annoying bugs I've had to work around, but nevermind... :) )
Pretty much everybody and everything Google has acquired, they've pretty much killed off. They bought Picasa, and are finally killing it with a product that has FAR fewer features (and nothing to replace the capabilities of the desktop app at all).
They bought picnik a few years ago, made it the online editor for Picasa and google+ photos for a while, but then over time ditched ALL of it in favor of a handful of crappy instagram filters.
So all of the features, all of the tech, all of the MONEY in Picasa and Picnik is gone. Utterly gone. No legacy left. Google, once the most functional of photo online services out there, is now a second-hand copy of Apple's iCloud...just as everybody was basically complaining that Apple's online/mobile photo approach is damned annoying and nobody wants it and they're all out looking for something better.
At least Flickr has actually *added* functionality (as well as performance) in the last few years. I just hope whomever they get sold to will be able to keep it alive.
oh, it is easy: it is just like Apple's photos app. strictly chronological on date-taken (unless there's no exif data, in which case it is by date created or last update or, well, whatever, who cares). Plus albums. Unlike Picasa (but like Flickr) you can put a photo into multiple albums without it making copies of it.
And unlike the Android, the web version doesn't mix-n-match your online photos with the ones on your phone as if there was no difference between them.
Beyond that...it is one hell of a step backwards as far as features go.
It is on the slate to be removed. Existing copies still work, but 1) no updates (so an O/S or library change that breaks it is permanent), and 2) no promises that it will still be able to upload files after the transition.
Yes, very frustrating, as it is my primary post-processing tool.
You lost me when you mentioned financial records and health record. the health stuff is locked down by law, under HIPAA regulations. Google has no business in that space, especially not in a manner for pushing advertising recommendations to us. the last thing i want is to get *targeted* ads to me over my...not saying what my problem is. Get the drift?
Financial records are the same, though with less legal protection. The main inference they can get from that for advertisers is "are they rich"? Targeted ads based on the likelihood of whether or not i spend 50 or 500 for dinners on the road (or can afford to pay off my credit card or have extensive college debt)? (or more specifically, what is my company, or the government, willing to pay when i expense it). Is that really the future of Google you want to encourage?
It certainly isn't the future I want. while I agree that the idea of personal digital agents is inevitable, Google, which still makes most of its money on advertising and can improve its revenue by targeting, is the LAST company I want to have the ability to target me that closely. I won't hide that I have a kid, a dslr camera, a large music collection, and a hobby of visiting disney and national parks, but i still draw the line on my privacy somewhere.
indeed. and Google's solution to this (for their own apps) was Google Play itself, which provided the core APIs they could update and control so it didn't matter what OS you were running.
but not everybody else in the app developer space had access to those same APIs, so there we are.
If Samsung was willing to send upgrades to my not-even-2-year-old devices, I'd be upgraded by now.
Google doesn't have to sell the upgrade features to the end users. Google has to sell the upgrade to the OEMs (especially Samsung) to make them be willing to make the upgrade available for "old" devices (given that, today, 'old' means 9 months or less). Samsung and ASUS are more willing to let these older devices rot, under the expectation that they'll buy something new and get the upgrade then, so what is the point of back-porting it?
Google needs to better market the OS to the OEMs, not to Slashdot.
The quantity of profanity spewed would run past most locality's obscenity standards.
it is actually pretty well officially documented by google these days. making something "hard to accidentally trigger by someone who doesn't read documentation and who we think is too stupid to know what it will do" is not quite an easter egg...though close. :)
My new music player (SubFire - a player for Subsonic servers) has an easter egg in it, but only because i don't have time to give it the care it would need to actually make it a "useful" feature to anybody but me. Triple-clicking in the copyright footer will bring up a search box, and that can only happen on the Chrome version.
Basically, I needed a quick search to get to song titles, for my own purposes, but if I were to properly implement search, it would need to be very different...I know what it should be, and I don't have time to build that. So I now have one undocumented feature that does what I want the way I want for the purpose I need it for.
For that matter, it was in pre-messenger "Chat" for Facebook that many of us were hit by those "Hey, I'm stuck in London and my wallet was stolen, can you send me some cash?" scams from hacked accounts.
Making it easy to say yes to that kind of crap is just ridiculous.
from my blog on this, just now:
Proponents of refactoring have never ever said otherwise (unless they themselves are confused on the matter). Code is only readable if it is either simple, or clearly follows design patterns, or is clearly commented and the comments are up to date with the current version of the code. Code is only easy to change when it is readable and when all external dependencies are well known. That last part is a key thing that metrics aren't necessarily able to capture.
A refactoring project, if not refactoring to the right design patterns to address what was wrong with the structure in the first place, is not going to improve it. One must know clearly why the current structure is making a bug-fix or a new feature difficult to implement.
And while some refactorings are 'good' in that they reduce a lot of copy-paste code, others are good because they add code, or add classes (an alternative increase in complexity). Different refactorings have different effects, and are used in different situations.
And as always, if you don't need to refactor, don't. A refactoring is to improve the design, not to rewrite for its own sake.
And there-in lies the great flaw of the whole idea of such a study: you can't measure the quality of a software design. Some things you just have to judge for yourself, based on experience and attention, and no arbitrary metrics number will ever differentiate between a good design and a rubbish heap.
Disclaimer: I hate software metrics.
they aren't real. they were never real. they never will be real.
if you're talking fiction and you want to talk about WWZ or Walking Dead, or whatever game it is you all are still playing, fine.
But stop posting crap like this where people make simulations about zombies and apocalypses as if this shit is real.
the second you used the phrase "government overreach", you gave away that you are, in fact, a right-wing (or libertarian-right) jerk who has no interest in anything other than discrediting the government so you don't have to pay taxes and exist as a member of this society.
to which I say, piss off.
go back to simcity version 1 or 2. homelessness wasn't a problem 22 years ago, right?
on top of that, being only a month or so old, it wasn't ready when the makers like Samsung needed to do their final packaging and testing for the Christmas season phones as all that had to happen in July through September to give the factories time to put the chip in and ship. How can I buy a 5.0 phone when the vast majority phones on the market now left the factory 3 months before 5.0 was released?
plus a 5g or 6g phone speaking 5.0 is going to be quite more expensive than the 2013 4g that as a simple matter of *hardware* is going to be fast enough for what most people throw at it, at least in the first few months. Why get a $250 (after contract) 5g phone with 5.0 on it when the 4g is only $99 and will run all the same apps just as well?
if it is that much better, samsung would already be pushing the updates to my more recent devices.
one problem was the timing of the release. they put it out just a month ago, but everybody bought their Christmas toys *2* months ago, and that meant they had to be in the factory *4* months ago. It wasn't out nearly in time to make the 2014 sales, so it has no chance of an upswing until this summer or next Christmas.
The only ones to reply so far are overly cynical, probably from having stayed up all night gaming or hacking code and likely are on their 6th cup of coffee.
seriously, have you ever tried to get a cert installed properly in J2EE? Node? PHP/Apache? Ever tried to get PGP working right on t-bird?
There is nothing about the process that is straightforward in any way (including the cert signing stuff). Thus, most websites will simply find it easier to not bother. Let those who can pay for experts pay for it, but until expertise becomes "push this button" easy, and still almost free, it isn't worth it for typical web traffic.
...is Dave Brubeck in all of this?
Dear Google, I asked for "Time Out", not whatever this crap is about.
The article just talks about web-reading, and how more and more webpages are being responsive (for mobile reasons) in ways that actually now optimize sites for vertical orientation over horizontal.
However, from a coding and word processing* perspective, vertical layout is a bit better, too, as it allows you to see more of the text and the text's context, than horizontal mode does. Thus, most developers who pay attention to such things do use both, as the first 5point comment suggests above.
In fact, that was the actual vision of the PARC crew that invented GUI and WYSIWYG back in the 70s: the Xerox Alto workstation they created did have a vertical monitor, for this very reason: the idea was that if you were using a word processor to show you a page's layout, seeing the whole page on screen was the desired effect. They discovered it improved coding productivity once they were using the workstation to produce the software.
(that said, it is NOT better for spreadsheets or powerpoint, or database-editing tools, so there we are.)
So glad I'm not the only one who thought that when I read the headline.
That may be a fact, but we didn't need to know any of that. And neither do the birds.
That's the whole point of the harmonic series: our ears, in their ability to hear, can hear the overtones in a note because they are there *physically* in the sound. It is unavoidable.
"Dissonant" notes, such as a tritone or a minor 2nd, aren't dissonant because of some sine wave detail: that's just a matter of mathematical transposition and simplification. The notes are dissonant because their collective overtones within them are clashing all the way up the harmonic series as well. We hear ALL of those harmonic clashes, even if we're not conscious of it. The sine wave isn't why they are dissonant: the harmonics are.