I'm pretty sure that the sneakers were given to the program by Nike, or at least at a VERY steep discount from Retail. They are Promotional Items for Nike.
Probably less so when they explode and cause knee injuries to players.
Um, so how does that relate to the current topic? I'm genuinely curious -- what does Windows Phone use for a back button? I haven't touched a windows os on a phone since Windows Mobile 6, and that one tried to have a start button and walking menus on a phone. Horrible experience.
But as bad as that was, it wasn't the reason I got rid of the phone. The last straw (of many) was when the audio driver would die, sometimes silently, and sometimes helpfully with a little popup "the audio driver has caused a problem and will now close. OK." And the phone would not ring until it was rebooted. Being on-call with a phone that randomly stops ringing on incoming calls is not a good thing. I never considered Windows for a phone again.
At least for now, do both. Allow the new gesture but keep the button. Let us get used to the gesture and explore how individual manufacturers will screw it up. If the gesture becomes popular, then and only then remove the back button.
...in other words, not at all like new gui features are usually introduced. ("Yeah, we changed it. Live with it.")
A lot of studies (environmental impact, economics, engineering, earthquake, etc), a bunch of lawsuits, and building a short length of very nice (but ultimately useless) above-grade high speed rail between two small cities, neither of which wanted it.
So, it sounds like business was really good, for some people.
Disingenuous it may be, but to ignore it is to commit a fatal error of understanding how users interact with software. If anything this should be a clear indication to the likes of Firefox and Opera that in this day and age it is no longer sufficient to produce good software. You have to be in control of the default user experience.
There might be some truth to that. On the other hand, users have been trained for decades by Microsoft to automatically install an alternate browser on the platform they use frequently. I have absolutely nothing to base this on except gut, but I suspect that this phenomenon carries over to phones and tablets as well. [1]
However, you do bring up a good point, and Firefox and Opera need to continue to behave like the underdogs they are, and promote their products aggressively. A really good argument might be, if you ever move to Motorola, or HTC or some other platform, Opera will move with you, whereas the Samsung browser won't.
[1]. Except in Apple world, of course, where the installed base wouldn't think of using alternatives to what came with the device. Because. Apple.
> I find that, despite making great hardware, all of the Samsung apps blow chunks!
Yes. It's fortunate that Samsung has very helpfully put all their apps in their own "Samsung" folder, so you can avoid running one of them by accident.
Installing a browser by default on a popular platform, and then claiming it's the most installed browser, is a tad disingenuous. It's like Microsoft claiming that IE was the most installed browser on PCs, even if a great number of people only ever used it to download Firefox or Chrome.
I have a Note 9 that came with Samsung's browser, which almost certainly counts as an install, even though I use the Adblock browser exclusively.
So really, it's all market-speak. Nothing to see here.
If you want the host to not know content is being blocked, the browser needs to download all blocked content, in which case you're giving up one of the main performance advantages of content blocking.
Ok good point and there are a lot of cases where not downloading content you don't want to see is important -- over wifi or if you're in an area that's still confined to DSL.
But I have 100/100 over fiber to the house and I'd at least like to have the *option* to trick the host, even if it means downloading ads that I never see. I'll never notice it.
...is content blocking that doesn't inform the host that content is being blocked. So I stop getting those "hey, we see you're using an ad blocker. And we're not going to let you read the article until you whitelist us" popups in the middle of the screen.
We've gotten to the point where phones are too thin. Dilbert poked fun at this, something like "Our phone product is so thin and slippery that a significant number are broken when the customer drops them while unpacking. But the customers blame themselves. And we've won several design awards".
I've just ordered a phone, first time in several years. The frame on my current phone is physically coming apart, and resources like GPS no longer work. It's time...
I researched the phone I chose, and interestingly enough, the current model is slightly thicker and heavier than the previous model. The stated reasons were (a) increased robustness, (b) water resistance, and (c) the thicker phone was easier to hold. Just goes to show, sometimes it's more important to find out what customers actually need, rather than trying to achieve some impossible ideal for bragging rights.
> as well as a generation of iPhones that wasn't a big enough improvement over the previous year models.
How could they be? Product features tend to follow a logarithmic curve that asymptotically approaches some steady value. At least in the perception of the consumer. So, for instance, in the early PC days people were likely to dump their current machine when a new architecture came out because it really was substantially faster. Now, Intel or AMD comes out with a faster proc and only a few people care.
OS has the same issue. Both Apple and M$ have struggled to differentiate their new OS from the previous version, sometimes going backwards in features, or making the interface clunkier, apparently because being different is better than being better. Neither company seems to understand that at some point osx, ios, Windows are good enough, and they should be concentrating on bug fixes and security fixes and just leave the GUI alone for awhile. (WinCE and Windows Mobile were never good enough, and I don't see how they could be fixed. It was just a poor concept.)
Inevitably, at some point, the iphone approaches Good Enough. There comes a point where making it thinner doesn't add value, it just increases the likelihood of damage and makes the device harder to hold. The rank and file are eventually coming to realize that having the "latest and greatest" isn't worth the money, and that a battery that will no longer take a charge is a poor reason to replace the entire phone. And this is entirely normal. Cell phones as a device have asymptotically approached the point where only minor bug and security fixes are necessary, until such time that the entire concept changes.
Wildly overcharging on storage, at a time when solid state storage has never been cheaper, isn't helping.
So it's not just that iphones weren't a big enough improvement, it's that making substantial improvements is becoming more and more difficult.
I just ordered a phone (my Note 3 is literally coming apart, being held together by scotch tape, and the GPS no longer works) and the new phone (not an iphone) has a quarter TERABYTE of internal storage. In a PHONE. For a total unlocked cost substantially less than $1k. That's equivalent to what's available in my laptop. I don't have a use case for that much storage, but that's what was available. Resources have expanded beyond what regular users can conveniently use.
That would make sense, but I wonder if the Russian law allows for copies existing in other countries at all. It depends on what the intent of the law was. If privacy, then, I'd think no, rsyncs will not be allowed. But if it's so Russia can more easily mine their citizens data, then they may not care if there are copies or where they are.
At first I was going to say, of course they meant personal data from Russian citizens, not all personal data.
But then, I thought, maybe I'd better check...
But yeah, TFM says that Russia is requiring servers containing personal data from Russian citizens be hosted in Russia. Not, like, all personal data in existence.
And...enh... gotta say, that's not an unreasonable request. I know that were it my personal data, I'd feel more comfortable were it physically hosted in my country.
Slashdot Mirror
The heating system doesn't pair with the app, and it's freezing in here.
I believe this has actually happened.
I'm pretty sure that the sneakers were given to the program by Nike, or at least at a VERY steep discount from Retail. They are Promotional Items for Nike.
Probably less so when they explode and cause knee injuries to players.
The right shoe is using MySQL, the left shoe is using Oracle.
You gotta make sure your Oracle license fees are paid, before you go for a run. Also, it is REALLY difficult to get that left shoe off.
And when you try to install Maria on the right shoe, it wants to install Oracle instead.
My left shoe won't even reboot...
I've been waiting all my life to say that.
Um, so how does that relate to the current topic? I'm genuinely curious -- what does Windows Phone use for a back button? I haven't touched a windows os on a phone since Windows Mobile 6, and that one tried to have a start button and walking menus on a phone. Horrible experience.
But as bad as that was, it wasn't the reason I got rid of the phone. The last straw (of many) was when the audio driver would die, sometimes silently, and sometimes helpfully with a little popup "the audio driver has caused a problem and will now close. OK." And the phone would not ring until it was rebooted. Being on-call with a phone that randomly stops ringing on incoming calls is not a good thing. I never considered Windows for a phone again.
At least for now, do both. Allow the new gesture but keep the button. Let us get used to the gesture and explore how individual manufacturers will screw it up. If the gesture becomes popular, then and only then remove the back button.
WHY??
A lot of studies (environmental impact, economics, engineering, earthquake, etc), a bunch of lawsuits, and building a short length of very nice (but ultimately useless) above-grade high speed rail between two small cities, neither of which wanted it.
So, it sounds like business was really good, for some people.
Or, they do backups, but keep all the copies online? For an app connected to the raw internet? And someone thought this was a good idea?
So, um, where did the money go?
Disingenuous it may be, but to ignore it is to commit a fatal error of understanding how users interact with software. If anything this should be a clear indication to the likes of Firefox and Opera that in this day and age it is no longer sufficient to produce good software. You have to be in control of the default user experience.
There might be some truth to that. On the other hand, users have been trained for decades by Microsoft to automatically install an alternate browser on the platform they use frequently. I have absolutely nothing to base this on except gut, but I suspect that this phenomenon carries over to phones and tablets as well. [1]
However, you do bring up a good point, and Firefox and Opera need to continue to behave like the underdogs they are, and promote their products aggressively. A really good argument might be, if you ever move to Motorola, or HTC or some other platform, Opera will move with you, whereas the Samsung browser won't.
[1]. Except in Apple world, of course, where the installed base wouldn't think of using alternatives to what came with the device. Because. Apple.
> I find that, despite making great hardware, all of the Samsung apps blow chunks!
Yes. It's fortunate that Samsung has very helpfully put all their apps in their own "Samsung" folder, so you can avoid running one of them by accident.
Installing a browser by default on a popular platform, and then claiming it's the most installed browser, is a tad disingenuous. It's like Microsoft claiming that IE was the most installed browser on PCs, even if a great number of people only ever used it to download Firefox or Chrome.
I have a Note 9 that came with Samsung's browser, which almost certainly counts as an install, even though I use the Adblock browser exclusively.
So really, it's all market-speak. Nothing to see here.
I've had fiber to the house for years. Nothing has me nostalgic for dial-up.
The site needed to play a wav file with a modem moose call before it loaded.
That doesn't mean they didn't exist at the time, just that they loaded verrrrrry slowwwwwly.
If you want the host to not know content is being blocked, the browser needs to download all blocked content, in which case you're giving up one of the main performance advantages of content blocking.
Ok good point and there are a lot of cases where not downloading content you don't want to see is important -- over wifi or if you're in an area that's still confined to DSL.
But I have 100/100 over fiber to the house and I'd at least like to have the *option* to trick the host, even if it means downloading ads that I never see. I'll never notice it.
> After the BBC alerted Spotify to the trend, all of these artists disappeared from its platform entirely.
Did you expect anything else?
We've gotten to the point where phones are too thin. Dilbert poked fun at this, something like "Our phone product is so thin and slippery that a significant number are broken when the customer drops them while unpacking. But the customers blame themselves. And we've won several design awards".
I've just ordered a phone, first time in several years. The frame on my current phone is physically coming apart, and resources like GPS no longer work. It's time...
I researched the phone I chose, and interestingly enough, the current model is slightly thicker and heavier than the previous model. The stated reasons were (a) increased robustness, (b) water resistance, and (c) the thicker phone was easier to hold. Just goes to show, sometimes it's more important to find out what customers actually need, rather than trying to achieve some impossible ideal for bragging rights.
> as well as a generation of iPhones that wasn't a big enough improvement over the previous year models.
How could they be? Product features tend to follow a logarithmic curve that asymptotically approaches some steady value. At least in the perception of the consumer. So, for instance, in the early PC days people were likely to dump their current machine when a new architecture came out because it really was substantially faster. Now, Intel or AMD comes out with a faster proc and only a few people care.
OS has the same issue. Both Apple and M$ have struggled to differentiate their new OS from the previous version, sometimes going backwards in features, or making the interface clunkier, apparently because being different is better than being better. Neither company seems to understand that at some point osx, ios, Windows are good enough, and they should be concentrating on bug fixes and security fixes and just leave the GUI alone for awhile. (WinCE and Windows Mobile were never good enough, and I don't see how they could be fixed. It was just a poor concept.)
Inevitably, at some point, the iphone approaches Good Enough. There comes a point where making it thinner doesn't add value, it just increases the likelihood of damage and makes the device harder to hold. The rank and file are eventually coming to realize that having the "latest and greatest" isn't worth the money, and that a battery that will no longer take a charge is a poor reason to replace the entire phone. And this is entirely normal. Cell phones as a device have asymptotically approached the point where only minor bug and security fixes are necessary, until such time that the entire concept changes.
Wildly overcharging on storage, at a time when solid state storage has never been cheaper, isn't helping.
So it's not just that iphones weren't a big enough improvement, it's that making substantial improvements is becoming more and more difficult.
I just ordered a phone (my Note 3 is literally coming apart, being held together by scotch tape, and the GPS no longer works) and the new phone (not an iphone) has a quarter TERABYTE of internal storage. In a PHONE. For a total unlocked cost substantially less than $1k. That's equivalent to what's available in my laptop. I don't have a use case for that much storage, but that's what was available. Resources have expanded beyond what regular users can conveniently use.
That would make sense, but I wonder if the Russian law allows for copies existing in other countries at all. It depends on what the intent of the law was. If privacy, then, I'd think no, rsyncs will not be allowed. But if it's so Russia can more easily mine their citizens data, then they may not care if there are copies or where they are.
At first I was going to say, of course they meant personal data from Russian citizens, not all personal data.
But then, I thought, maybe I'd better check...
But yeah, TFM says that Russia is requiring servers containing personal data from Russian citizens be hosted in Russia. Not, like, all personal data in existence.
And ...enh... gotta say, that's not an unreasonable request. I know that were it my personal data, I'd feel more comfortable were it physically hosted in my country.
Am I off base here?