I am really looking forward to the lawsuits deciding whether a post-op or pre-op transgender person (is transgender the right term to use? I honestly don't know) is one gender or the other as it comes to sitting on the board for some company.
I have a mental image of a board of directors drawing straws to decide who goes into surgery.
Like, Oooh, really? Make a batch of popcorn Martha, while I put up some lawn chairs.
Groundskeepers who are constantly at war with burrowing creatures will probably be less than concerned about this. Except, of course, for picking up the body parts afterwards. Oooh, I wonder if you could build that feature into the robot lawn mower? And have it dump the organic pieces somewhere?
Now I'm an Android user not an iPhone user (currently, I used to use an iPhone) but come on, Samsung released a phone that quite literally exploded and caused owners' cars and houses to catch fire and people are still buying the successor to that phone. Not sure what leads to perpetuate the moronic view that all people who buy a particular brand/type of phone think the same.
In fairness, we didn't keep buying the model that exploded. (Actually, I just kept my older model, which I still have, but the point still stands.)
You also should mention the first Samsung galaxy, which had defective GPS. As a family we switched to Motorola for years.
What's interesting to me is that even after the problems came out about this particular rather expensive iphone, it was still a hot seller. Clearly there was something else going on besides the mere ability to send and receive calls. Maybe because it takes such good pictures? (But then, why not buy a camera?)
I know you're not talking to me, but the issues to me are twofold:
(a) The company I work for, and come to think of it the previous company and the one before that, have/had standardized on the iphone for a company phone. So I get issued one whether it's actually useful or not. Because it's pretty and slippery and thin and the execs liked that. This is the largest issue.
I'm not an exec, it's not important to me how many aesthetic awards my phone has won, and "keeping up appearances" means nothing to me. What's vital to me is that my phone make and receive calls reliably when I'm chasing a severity one incident. (For this reason, the iphone I'm required to have sits mostly unused in a second holster, and my team knows to call me on my old beat-up Note 3 instead.)
So I follow these threads to see what I'll potentially have to deal with, and yes, occasionally venting, which is arguably not terribly mature but is cathartic.
(b) (Admittedly to a much lesser extent,) I have to drive by an AT&T store to get to the beginning of the drive-thru line for the most convenient Starbucks on the way to work. Every time Apple craps out some new handheld device, there's a big crowd of people standing in the cold PNW drizzle waiting for the store to open. They block traffic, and flat out refuse to get out of the way for oncoming cars, rather than take a chance of losing their place. It's damned irritating. Have some SELF RESPECT, people. It's JUST A PHONE.
All that said, there are worse things than having an iphone. My Windows phone, long ago, would pop up a message "(some driver) has stopped working and will now close" with an OK button. Thereafter, the phone WOULD NOT RING until it was rebooted. An iphone was arguably better than that. I guess everything is relative.
The message has been receive and a patch will be sent soon enough. Older models will have their performance decrease so the newer model won't feel so sluggish anymore.
Will the patch also misreport the bars so we think signal strength has improved?
I can confirm this has been my experience with one. Also that I was overcharged for minimal improvements and still pissed there's no headphone jack from the company "brave" enough to screw their customers repeatedly. And lack of fingerprint reader is seriously annoying.
Got 2 iPhone X'es in my household and they get the worst WiFi reception out of all devices in the house (Apple banned any apps that will actually show you channels and signal strength, but you can still monitor from the AP side). An iPhone 6 and and iPhone 5S work great where iPhone X loses 5GHz and switches to 2.4GHz as backup. Grabbed an iPhone X and Galaxy S9+ and started walking away from the home, Galaxy got twice as far (by a couple hundred feet) before not being able to stay connected. Sounds like iPhone XS is continuing with the decline. Maybe a ploy to sell Apple's WiFi AP products?
*Do* the devices work any better with Apple WiFi access points? That would be a little diabolical, but would at least be a solution.
Seriously, unless you are a gamer, why use Windows? A Linux install will get you access to Chrome or Firefox just like Windows will. Go buy a Mac if you want. Just stop using Microsoft products and they'll take notice.
The only thing I still need Windows for is Adobe Creative Cloud. Which doesn't quite work under Wine. The moment there exists a native port to Linux, I'll leave M$ and Apple behind and never look back.
Why not a mac? Because I don't want to be locked into the hardware. I can build a high performance Linux or even Windows box for a fraction of the cost of a mac, and it's equipped with what I need, not with what Apple thinks I should have.
As consumers, we can drive the market by confining our purchases to less bloat or no bloat. But how do we do that? If not IOS or Android, then what? I'm already running Mint on my laptop at home -- but I still need to run that bloated monstrosity called Windows for the single horribly bloated application that doesn't work correctly under Wine.
A few years ago I got a freebie Android tablet with a big purchase that was obsolete basically out of the box. Yes, it supported SD cards, but you couldn't put apps on the card. Just installing the Facebook app on top of the preinstalled bloat was enough to get "out of memory" errors. It's now sitting in a drawer.
There was that time I thought I'd update to IE6 on Windows 98SE, and the system got unbootable or unusable. I then never updated Windows ever again (till I got pwned in 2009)
If you only had to reinstall Windows from scratch the one time, especially in the late nineties, count yourself very lucky.
Content creators have gotten the message that the broadcast networks apparently haven't figured out yet, and have abandoned ship for on-demand services. We've seen this coming for a very long time.
Can't speak to the Chrome situation, but to me it doesn't matter if Edge was the greatest and fastest and most feature-rich browser that walked the earth. And yes, I regularly get nagged to use Edge instead, or speak to Cortana, neither of which I am ever inclined to do.
For me Microsoft forever ruined any chance of me ever trying a M$ built browser by how hard they promoted IE through the years, and (more importantly) how crappy it was. The only real usage of which was for websites that didn't work with any other browser. (Or noobs who didn't know other browsers existed, and thought IE was "the internet".)
Actions have consequences. Microsoft's actions have insured that I don't use any product of theirs unless there is no practical alternative. That's just the way it is. And there's no solution, except perhaps rebrand themselves and try to build up a new loyal following. (re: comcast/xfinity) And I'm not likely to fall for that either.
Side note to Adobe: Dammit guys, PORT TO LINUX. You're the only reason I still own a Windows box. Adobe alternatives are looking better and better.
I *have* to keep IE around for those thankfully fewer and fewer websites that won't work any other way, but I'll be damned if I step on another Microsoft browser merry-go-round. Fool me once, etc.
That reminds me of a time... Years ago, I was hired on the side to fix a small business website. The previous designer had used Frontpage. The website rendered (mostly) correctly in IE but was a mess in any other browser. Most of my work was expunging all the Frontpage crap and replacing it with browser-agnostic code.
That bunch never seems to learn. It wouldn't surprise me if Windows also pushes back when you try to make Firefox, Chrome, Opera, et al, the default browser.
You mean, again. There was a well known issue in the '90's where Microsoft would ask you during an update if you wanted to to switch your default browser from Netscape to IE, and no matter what button you pressed, it'd do it anyway. From memory, when this was exposed it was put down to a coding error and the responsible coder was "fired".
I don't think we're in that much of disagreement. If the child is in front of the class having nothing to say to a bunch of other children with no interest, the teacher has failed.
I think what we're illustrating here is that any technique can be done horribly wrong. And I absolutely agree that's the case. I don't have a feeling for how common it is for teachers to botch setting up public speaking assignments, but I have a pretty low opinion of public schools, so I'm willing to stipulate that it's a lot of the time.
That said, I'm willing to modify my position from "it's important and needs to be taught" to "it's important and needs to be taught CORRECTLY".
Example: My daughter has an anxiety disorder. Her 4th grade class required a presentation. Now, we could have gone with the Hawley-Smoot act, or the louisiana purchase, and have her read something deadly dull from cards, and it would have ended really badly. Instead, I asked her, what do you really want to talk about? She said, sugar gliders.
So we built her presentation around the sugar glider. She did the research, I bought the supplies, she did the artwork, we made a presentation, then I asked her to just talk free form just to me about sugar gliders and I transcribed what she said and put it in coherent order. Then we practiced it, first in front of me, then in front of me and her mom, and then a couple of her friends. She got really good at it.
I still have that presentation she made to the class on tape. It was fantastic, for a 4th grader. The keys were, she was comfortable about the topic, she was familiar with the visual aids, she had practiced the presentation, was enthusiastic about the topic (this is very important) and knew enough to answer questions afterwards.
This by no means "fixed" her anxiety disorder. To this day (she's 24) she struggles with leading an adult life, and has been in and out of therapy. But making a presentation to a group of people is no longer a problem for her. She did a fantastic capstone presentation graduating from High School with props and a slide show. The principal from her school came to watch it. Not bad for someone who barfs at the thought of keeping an appointment.
Now that I think about it, having at least one parent who's completely engaged probably doesn't hurt either.
I don't know what school is like now, but when I was in high school, some level of physical proficiency was required. I remember this vividly, as I could not in my sophomore year do one (1) pull-up. Five were required.
One could argue that careers for which public speaking is a component generally pay much more than careers for which blow jobs are a component.
Seriously, geeks become engineers and programmers and architects, and to get into the upper echelons in any of those fields requires the ability to point at what you created and speak intelligently about it, to a crowd. And I guarantee, if you can't do it, someone less capable than you will do it for you, and they'll tend to get credit for your work.
Because it's a marketable skill. Much more so than juggling. [1] Every introvert who learns to manage their anxiety and speak in front of crowds is another introvert that, just perhaps, won't live in the shadow of a much less capable person who can. Speaking as a geek with no social skills who has given his share of presentations.
[1] What is it with geeks and juggling, anyway? An unreasonably high number of the geeks in my experience had juggling as a hobby.
Slashdot Mirror
I am really looking forward to the lawsuits deciding whether a post-op or pre-op transgender person (is transgender the right term to use? I honestly don't know) is one gender or the other as it comes to sitting on the board for some company.
I have a mental image of a board of directors drawing straws to decide who goes into surgery.
Like, Oooh, really? Make a batch of popcorn Martha, while I put up some lawn chairs.
Groundskeepers who are constantly at war with burrowing creatures will probably be less than concerned about this. Except, of course, for picking up the body parts afterwards. Oooh, I wonder if you could build that feature into the robot lawn mower? And have it dump the organic pieces somewhere?
Now I'm an Android user not an iPhone user (currently, I used to use an iPhone) but come on, Samsung released a phone that quite literally exploded and caused owners' cars and houses to catch fire and people are still buying the successor to that phone. Not sure what leads to perpetuate the moronic view that all people who buy a particular brand/type of phone think the same.
In fairness, we didn't keep buying the model that exploded. (Actually, I just kept my older model, which I still have, but the point still stands.)
You also should mention the first Samsung galaxy, which had defective GPS. As a family we switched to Motorola for years.
What's interesting to me is that even after the problems came out about this particular rather expensive iphone, it was still a hot seller. Clearly there was something else going on besides the mere ability to send and receive calls. Maybe because it takes such good pictures? (But then, why not buy a camera?)
I know you're not talking to me, but the issues to me are twofold:
(a) The company I work for, and come to think of it the previous company and the one before that, have/had standardized on the iphone for a company phone. So I get issued one whether it's actually useful or not. Because it's pretty and slippery and thin and the execs liked that. This is the largest issue.
I'm not an exec, it's not important to me how many aesthetic awards my phone has won, and "keeping up appearances" means nothing to me. What's vital to me is that my phone make and receive calls reliably when I'm chasing a severity one incident. (For this reason, the iphone I'm required to have sits mostly unused in a second holster, and my team knows to call me on my old beat-up Note 3 instead.)
So I follow these threads to see what I'll potentially have to deal with, and yes, occasionally venting, which is arguably not terribly mature but is cathartic.
(b) (Admittedly to a much lesser extent,) I have to drive by an AT&T store to get to the beginning of the drive-thru line for the most convenient Starbucks on the way to work. Every time Apple craps out some new handheld device, there's a big crowd of people standing in the cold PNW drizzle waiting for the store to open. They block traffic, and flat out refuse to get out of the way for oncoming cars, rather than take a chance of losing their place. It's damned irritating. Have some SELF RESPECT, people. It's JUST A PHONE.
All that said, there are worse things than having an iphone. My Windows phone, long ago, would pop up a message "(some driver) has stopped working and will now close" with an OK button. Thereafter, the phone WOULD NOT RING until it was rebooted. An iphone was arguably better than that. I guess everything is relative.
The message has been receive and a patch will be sent soon enough.
Older models will have their performance decrease so the newer model won't feel so sluggish anymore.
Will the patch also misreport the bars so we think signal strength has improved?
I can confirm this has been my experience with one. Also that I was overcharged for minimal improvements and still pissed there's no headphone jack from the company "brave" enough to screw their customers repeatedly. And lack of fingerprint reader is seriously annoying.
So why did you buy one?
Because it's Apple. Silly person.
Got 2 iPhone X'es in my household and they get the worst WiFi reception out of all devices in the house (Apple banned any apps that will actually show you channels and signal strength, but you can still monitor from the AP side). An iPhone 6 and and iPhone 5S work great where iPhone X loses 5GHz and switches to 2.4GHz as backup. Grabbed an iPhone X and Galaxy S9+ and started walking away from the home, Galaxy got twice as far (by a couple hundred feet) before not being able to stay connected. Sounds like iPhone XS is continuing with the decline. Maybe a ploy to sell Apple's WiFi AP products?
*Do* the devices work any better with Apple WiFi access points? That would be a little diabolical, but would at least be a solution.
apple makes low quality ; high profit devices.
People are just figuring this out?
Pretty though.
Are they really? Or do we think they're pretty because that's what we're told? Just askin'.
Welcome to the dark side. We have cookies. (And phones that can make a call.)
(Cr)apple deserves this for trying to sell a $5.00 phone for $1000 to $1200!!!!
It's all about mindshare. I don't begrudge Apple selling mediocre phones at boutique prices. I applaud them for being successful at it.
Even with these caveats, still a good suggestion.
Seriously, unless you are a gamer, why use Windows? A Linux install will get you access to Chrome or Firefox just like Windows will. Go buy a Mac if you want. Just stop using Microsoft products and they'll take notice.
The only thing I still need Windows for is Adobe Creative Cloud. Which doesn't quite work under Wine. The moment there exists a native port to Linux, I'll leave M$ and Apple behind and never look back.
Why not a mac? Because I don't want to be locked into the hardware. I can build a high performance Linux or even Windows box for a fraction of the cost of a mac, and it's equipped with what I need, not with what Apple thinks I should have.
A pox on both their houses.
> This is not a good user experience, Microsoft.
Well, not for *us*. It's great for Microsoft.
"You're Holding it WRONG!" comments in 3, 2, 1
Right, but in their defense, Apple kinda deserves it.
There's probably some truth to that. And it's a sad commentary on the industry.
So... what do we do about it?
As consumers, we can drive the market by confining our purchases to less bloat or no bloat. But how do we do that? If not IOS or Android, then what? I'm already running Mint on my laptop at home -- but I still need to run that bloated monstrosity called Windows for the single horribly bloated application that doesn't work correctly under Wine.
A few years ago I got a freebie Android tablet with a big purchase that was obsolete basically out of the box. Yes, it supported SD cards, but you couldn't put apps on the card. Just installing the Facebook app on top of the preinstalled bloat was enough to get "out of memory" errors. It's now sitting in a drawer.
There was that time I thought I'd update to IE6 on Windows 98SE, and the system got unbootable or unusable. I then never updated Windows ever again (till I got pwned in 2009)
If you only had to reinstall Windows from scratch the one time, especially in the late nineties, count yourself very lucky.
What, you mean, from 70 to like, 68? What *will* I do with all that extra time?
Content creators have gotten the message that the broadcast networks apparently haven't figured out yet, and have abandoned ship for on-demand services. We've seen this coming for a very long time.
I don't believe this. I actually agree with the California legislature. I feel like I should turn in my man card or something.
Caveat; I'm neither an Edge nor a Chrome user.
Can't speak to the Chrome situation, but to me it doesn't matter if Edge was the greatest and fastest and most feature-rich browser that walked the earth. And yes, I regularly get nagged to use Edge instead, or speak to Cortana, neither of which I am ever inclined to do.
For me Microsoft forever ruined any chance of me ever trying a M$ built browser by how hard they promoted IE through the years, and (more importantly) how crappy it was. The only real usage of which was for websites that didn't work with any other browser. (Or noobs who didn't know other browsers existed, and thought IE was "the internet".)
Actions have consequences. Microsoft's actions have insured that I don't use any product of theirs unless there is no practical alternative. That's just the way it is. And there's no solution, except perhaps rebrand themselves and try to build up a new loyal following. (re: comcast/xfinity) And I'm not likely to fall for that either.
Side note to Adobe: Dammit guys, PORT TO LINUX. You're the only reason I still own a Windows box. Adobe alternatives are looking better and better.
I *have* to keep IE around for those thankfully fewer and fewer websites that won't work any other way, but I'll be damned if I step on another Microsoft browser merry-go-round. Fool me once, etc.
That reminds me of a time... Years ago, I was hired on the side to fix a small business website. The previous designer had used Frontpage. The website rendered (mostly) correctly in IE but was a mess in any other browser. Most of my work was expunging all the Frontpage crap and replacing it with browser-agnostic code.
... back in the '90s, doesn't it?
That bunch never seems to learn. It wouldn't surprise me if Windows also pushes back when you try to make Firefox, Chrome, Opera, et al, the default browser.
You mean, again. There was a well known issue in the '90's where Microsoft would ask you during an update if you wanted to to switch your default browser from Netscape to IE, and no matter what button you pressed, it'd do it anyway. From memory, when this was exposed it was put down to a coding error and the responsible coder was "fired".
I don't think we're in that much of disagreement. If the child is in front of the class having nothing to say to a bunch of other children with no interest, the teacher has failed.
I think what we're illustrating here is that any technique can be done horribly wrong. And I absolutely agree that's the case. I don't have a feeling for how common it is for teachers to botch setting up public speaking assignments, but I have a pretty low opinion of public schools, so I'm willing to stipulate that it's a lot of the time.
That said, I'm willing to modify my position from "it's important and needs to be taught" to "it's important and needs to be taught CORRECTLY".
Example: My daughter has an anxiety disorder. Her 4th grade class required a presentation. Now, we could have gone with the Hawley-Smoot act, or the louisiana purchase, and have her read something deadly dull from cards, and it would have ended really badly. Instead, I asked her, what do you really want to talk about? She said, sugar gliders.
So we built her presentation around the sugar glider. She did the research, I bought the supplies, she did the artwork, we made a presentation, then I asked her to just talk free form just to me about sugar gliders and I transcribed what she said and put it in coherent order. Then we practiced it, first in front of me, then in front of me and her mom, and then a couple of her friends. She got really good at it.
I still have that presentation she made to the class on tape. It was fantastic, for a 4th grader. The keys were, she was comfortable about the topic, she was familiar with the visual aids, she had practiced the presentation, was enthusiastic about the topic (this is very important) and knew enough to answer questions afterwards.
This by no means "fixed" her anxiety disorder. To this day (she's 24) she struggles with leading an adult life, and has been in and out of therapy. But making a presentation to a group of people is no longer a problem for her. She did a fantastic capstone presentation graduating from High School with props and a slide show. The principal from her school came to watch it. Not bad for someone who barfs at the thought of keeping an appointment.
Now that I think about it, having at least one parent who's completely engaged probably doesn't hurt either.
I don't know what school is like now, but when I was in high school, some level of physical proficiency was required. I remember this vividly, as I could not in my sophomore year do one (1) pull-up. Five were required.
One could argue that careers for which public speaking is a component generally pay much more than careers for which blow jobs are a component.
Seriously, geeks become engineers and programmers and architects, and to get into the upper echelons in any of those fields requires the ability to point at what you created and speak intelligently about it, to a crowd. And I guarantee, if you can't do it, someone less capable than you will do it for you, and they'll tend to get credit for your work.
Because it's a marketable skill. Much more so than juggling. [1] Every introvert who learns to manage their anxiety and speak in front of crowds is another introvert that, just perhaps, won't live in the shadow of a much less capable person who can. Speaking as a geek with no social skills who has given his share of presentations.
[1] What is it with geeks and juggling, anyway? An unreasonably high number of the geeks in my experience had juggling as a hobby.