Computer geeks understand websites, and make money. Therefore the profitability of, say, Amazon, must be measured by its website.
Do you have any idea how complicated and far-reaching Amazon's shipping, warehousing, tracking, and packing infrastructure is?
Computer geeks understand software. Therefore the profitability of Apple must be measured by its software.
Do you have any idea how involved Apple is in the manufacturing process of its products? Any idea how involved it is in the sale of its products - training its own staff at its own brick-and-mortar stores?
I gotta wonder now, how is this any different from the automatic switching that every smartphone has done for the last decade?
If this is just about voice calls, how is this different from the automatic switching between WiFi and cellular that Verizon does when I'm actively making a call, or the automatic switching that an iPhone does when I'm making a "facetime" audio or video call? Why would Google mention this if it's de-rigueur? Is some other magic going on?
That depends on how you value your money versus your time. The rates don't change, true. But those rates are atrocious compared to local rates in almost all of those 175 countries. Convenient for occasional short-term international travel, but if you're going somewhere for more than a week, and really using your service, you're just letting Google vacuum up your money because you can't be bothered to, say, pick up a prepaid sim at an airport kiosk.
Answer me this: when it "switches seamlessly to wifi", does it stop counting against your Project Fi usage?
Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular use leased connectivity from ATT. There is no "transparent handoff". You're always on ATT. Transparent wifi handoff is not a unique feature BTW. I'm on Verizon and use it regularly.
Zuck's comment a few years ago that he could "buy the country of Greece" with his new stock profits was a bit glib too.
One day that self-important man is going to realize that he is not actually in charge any more. If he decides that the monster he's created needs trimming down, or breaking apart, or any number of other things that result in a decline in user base or profitability but also are good for things like democracy, culture, or mental health, he will be dumped out to pasture. Perhaps he already has been, and the most impactful thing he can do at this point is issue petulant orders to his fellow execs to use a different phone.
Seen this any number of times during my own tenure there. This guy was fired. He didn't leave voluntarily. Nevertheless it's clear he cares very deeply about the fate of the company he no longer works for, and is no longer welcome at. He wants the company to continue pushing towards the vision he had when he was hired there: Things "just work", surprising new must-have combinations of technology appearing every couple of years, and a clearly obsessive perfectionism behind every product design, and release, and support life cycle.
He believes he still fights for those values, and therefore the company higher-ups are corrupt idiots for firing him, and now since he knows he will never be coming back he is instead embarking on a personal crusade to draw attention to the corruption - the departure from the vision - he perceives at every level.
The company is crawling with people like him. Obsessively perfectionist live-to-work people who believe in the flattest, most democratic corporate structure possible, because that's the best way to gather and act on feedback. And they're not wrong. But they're also not perfect _people_. And chances are this guy was fired for something much more prosaic than a grand conspiracy of shareholders. He was probably fired for being an insufferable dick and annoying too many people for too long.
Take your massive paychecks and your massive stock holdings and go sit on the beach for a while doing nothing, and cool off, man, then go snag a job at almost literally any other tech company on Earth since you have Apple on your resume now. And quit your bitchin'.
I can only surmise that the reason the watch doesn't ask for voice confirmation before dialing is, they assume the wearer is unconscious. If the wearer wakes up later in the hospital and is enraged about criminal charges for a joint spotted on their table, they have their priorities out of whack.
Likewise if the wearer experiences some head injury or loss of blood pressure and is too delirious to notice and abort the countdown. Probably better off summoning medical personnel.
Of course there is plenty of room for improvement. There's no reason the watch couldn't make a unique beeping sound as it counts down to remind the wearer to disable it. There's no reason it couldn't alert emergency services AND text/email/call a list of contacts. There's no reason not to allow customizations like "slide to call" rather than "slide to cancel", at the wearer's own risk.
Well shit, man, you should have said you meant "random consumer grade camera" when you wrote "real camera", and "random jerk off the street" when you meant "photographer". That would have avoided a lot of angsty TL;DR writing!
Good digital cameras do not exist in a vacuum, and manufacturers have known this for a dozen years and have really compensated for it.
1. A good digital camera these days will pair with your smartphone, such that every time you snap a picture, one or more versions of it appear on the phone, potentially also triggering any number of secondary actions like watermarking, cropping, and uploading to multiple services. My favorite app for this purpose is "shuttersnitch".
2. In much the same way you can pair the camera with a tablet, such as an iPad, and get a very large screen indeed for previews, and use it from several feet away. The UI argument is a moot point, given the diversity of options, except:
3. "Ease of use" may not be what you think it is, if you're coming from the smartphone camera world. A purpose-built digital camera can go from OFF, to zoomed, precisely focused, and taking the picture, in less than a second. That includes zooming to the edge of, say, a 400mm lens: You just turn a large, easily accessible physical ring. See how long it takes to do the finger-spread or slider-drag equivalent on a smartphone -- even just to adjust the zoom slightly.
4. If you think a real camera only produces "marginally better" photos in most situations, try using a real camera with an f1.4 full-frame lens in a dimly lit room. Or try catching the action at a soccer game with even a reasonably priced 70-200mm lens like the Canon f/4.
The smartphone has one real thing going for it: Miniaturization. That is also its Achilles heel, because you simply cannot grab as much light on a smaller surface area. But as I pointed out earlier, the direct comparison doesn't even make sense. Almost ALL people who seriously use a good purpose-built camera ALSO own a smartphone, and have known how to integrate the two for years.
No. I have used both. The “long press” version is touchy and requires that I wait with my finger in place. The 3D touch version registers immediately. That savings in time and precision makes the feature worth it to me.
I use 3D touch multiple times every day when editing sentences in Messages and Mail. Pressing down on the keyboard and then moving the cursor within the text like the display is a giant mousing surface is way, way easier than trying to poke the cursor into the text by tapping it directly. I'm happy to see the feature stick around just for that use case.
I don't know if you've ever worked for a startup that crashed and burned and ruined everyone's mental health and finances and spawned multiple lawsuits and wasted gigantic amounts of seed money,
but CEOs of those invariably sleep on couches as well.
It's not proof of anything except the _inability_ to effectively delegate - whether for systemic reasons, or deleterious personal preference.
You have your head very throughly in the sand if you think Face ID is "straight-up evolution".
This is an extremely compact, extremely low-power time-of-flight sensor integrated into a handheld communications device. The implementation is both very ambitious and technically accomplished, not to mention several years ahead of any other company, and it has opened and shoved a metaphorical foot into a door that will be thrown wide over the next few years: AR and VR telepresence, to a degree of ease accuracy that it will thoroughly change the way much work is done across many white-collar industries.
Flipped burgers. Scooped ice cream. Shelved books. Stocked shelves. Then after several false starts I got a job writing software. Then I could afford many more things, and my health was better, and I had just as much time. THANK YOU AUTOMATION.
Programmers have been trying to obsolete themselves ever since programming was invented. Whaddaya know, they've caused the complete inverse effect. We re-learn 70% of our skillset every five years to keep up, and the bucks continue to roll in. This trend will continue. "What about all the dullards?" you cry, in mock concern. You utter misanthrope. The future is not a magical kingdom of locked doors to which you (software developers) alone hold the keys. Also, humans are cheap as hell, if you don't aspire to first-world standards. Catch-22: We need the machines, to create first-world standards.
Want less choice? Smash all the machines. After 90% of us simply die, the rest will be back to setting fires to flush out wild game, driving elephants off cliffs, drowning at sea, and scratching rows in dirt full of mold spores, spiders, and parasitic worms. Best jobs ever!
I know; for one thing there isn't a single CGI effect visible. Talk about cheap. Michael Bay, now there's a guy who makes expensive, quality films.
I mean, clearly this is just a stunt. It doesn't, for example, folow cinéma vérité custom by presenting the imagery as though it was shot by, or of, an ordinary person using their ordinary equipment. Which is totally unlike, say, Stephen Spielberg filming Schindler's List in "old" black and white specifically to invoke a documentary feel, except adding splashes of color for symbolic purposes, and subsequently winning an academy award for best director for his "cheap and nasty" decision...
I mean, what the fuck do actual lauded directors know about film? Us basement trolls have all the goods, and it's our techno aesthetic that makes or breaks any movie...
Personally, I find all those films before the 60's to be completely unwatchable crap. What moron thought it would be possible to tell a good story, or create tension, without COLOR?
From the look of the footage, Soderbergh has also ditched the expensive and cumbersome lighting kit for almost every scene. That also in turn cuts way down on the need for studio space. You can even run-and-gun your outdoor scenes without shutting everything down beforehand.
Also it helps that Soderbergh is a VERY experienced director and has probably broken out the entire movie into complete storyboards so he can farm most of the shooting out to assistants and they can go all at once, and he knows how to work with actors to get a properly threated performance even if they're shooting 8 different scenes from all over the movie back-to-back because they all take place in the same location, and he can quickly judge whether he's got what he wants so they don't need reshoots.
Google is not "engineer led". Sundar Pichai is a product manager and has been in charge for three years. Google's portfolio is stuffed full of "me too" products, building on the innovations of others, including every physical device they have ever made, and every iteration of Android in the last ten years. Their revenue stream is selling information to marketers. Everything else they do is in pursuit of that, or is a vanity project designed to position themselves in the market or maintain their hip mythos for recruiting purposes. Try working there for a few years. Engineers are not in charge there. Product and project managers call all the shots, and wield all the power, which they fight over like animals.
Tesla is not "engineer led", it's CEO is a physicist who's spent almost all his career trying to act as - and then acting as - a CEO. Tesla is a company differentiated by a luxury brand, not innovation. All the innovation in electric vehicles it uses has been borrowed from earlier innovators, before and during its lifetime. For comparison, consider BMW and Honda. Those are what a more engineer-led company looks like in the car space.
Amazon... now you have something. Jeff Bezos definitely respects the value of good engineering, and has been one himself. In fact, the real distinction I would make here is between Apple and Amazon: Both are full of great engineers and product managers but Apple seems to have siphoned off all the good designers.
Nothing more than what Cisco and IBM did. And after they realized that, they quit. If they can't offer something very distinctive, they're not interested. They used to make printers too and those weren't distinctive. And a whole bunch of other stuff that turned out just "meh" and then got the axe.
Mind you, they've swung that axe far, far fewer times than Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. have, where ten zillion things go into beta and then trail off into a wasteland of absent support and broken features and promises. So there's that.
Actually the FaceID data isn't even 30k dots x face scans.
Those raw measurements are immediately aggregated and shoved through a huge pile of logic (developed via machine-learning techniques) to get a series of completely different values that are then given to another huge pile of logic with some machine-learning based feedback systems to authenticate your current face plus a weird range of drift around it. It is utterly impossible to take those values and deconvolute them into a face.
Hackers may as well try to reconstruct an image of your face based on an audio recording of your fart.
Some people say Apple is successful only because of their fashionable marketing. You know what's fashionable marketing -- what never gets old? Loudly declaring that Apple is finally on the decline, or has been for years despite absolutely sky-high profits. And letting the ad impressions and the comments roll in, because hey, maybe THIS time, maybe we'll be right. And maybe THIS time congress will repeal Obamacare. And maybe THIS time, when we toss the poodle out the window, it'll fly.
Slashdot Mirror
Also the earth will eventually tumble into the sun! Or get eaten by it, depending on your point of view.
You heard it here first!
Computer geeks understand websites, and make money. Therefore the profitability of, say, Amazon, must be measured by its website.
Do you have any idea how complicated and far-reaching Amazon's shipping, warehousing, tracking, and packing infrastructure is?
Computer geeks understand software. Therefore the profitability of Apple must be measured by its software.
Do you have any idea how involved Apple is in the manufacturing process of its products? Any idea how involved it is in the sale of its products - training its own staff at its own brick-and-mortar stores?
Thank you, anonymous internet personage.
I gotta wonder now, how is this any different from the automatic switching that every smartphone has done for the last decade?
If this is just about voice calls, how is this different from the automatic switching between WiFi and cellular that Verizon does when I'm actively making a call, or the automatic switching that an iPhone does when I'm making a "facetime" audio or video call? Why would Google mention this if it's de-rigueur? Is some other magic going on?
That depends on how you value your money versus your time.
The rates don't change, true. But those rates are atrocious compared to local rates in almost all of those 175 countries.
Convenient for occasional short-term international travel, but if you're going somewhere for more than a week, and really using your service, you're just letting Google vacuum up your money because you can't be bothered to, say, pick up a prepaid sim at an airport kiosk.
Answer me this: when it "switches seamlessly to wifi", does it stop counting against your Project Fi usage?
Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular use leased connectivity from ATT. There is no "transparent handoff". You're always on ATT.
Transparent wifi handoff is not a unique feature BTW. I'm on Verizon and use it regularly.
Zuck's comment a few years ago that he could "buy the country of Greece" with his new stock profits was a bit glib too.
One day that self-important man is going to realize that he is not actually in charge any more. If he decides that the monster he's created needs trimming down, or breaking apart, or any number of other things that result in a decline in user base or profitability but also are good for things like democracy, culture, or mental health, he will be dumped out to pasture. Perhaps he already has been, and the most impactful thing he can do at this point is issue petulant orders to his fellow execs to use a different phone.
So, uh... Don't install the new OS.
Works for me on my Apple IIgs! Still a great word processor after 30 years -- I just keep booting it into PRODOS!
Seen this any number of times during my own tenure there. This guy was fired. He didn't leave voluntarily. Nevertheless it's clear he cares very deeply about the fate of the company he no longer works for, and is no longer welcome at. He wants the company to continue pushing towards the vision he had when he was hired there: Things "just work", surprising new must-have combinations of technology appearing every couple of years, and a clearly obsessive perfectionism behind every product design, and release, and support life cycle.
He believes he still fights for those values, and therefore the company higher-ups are corrupt idiots for firing him, and now since he knows he will never be coming back he is instead embarking on a personal crusade to draw attention to the corruption - the departure from the vision - he perceives at every level.
The company is crawling with people like him. Obsessively perfectionist live-to-work people who believe in the flattest, most democratic corporate structure possible, because that's the best way to gather and act on feedback. And they're not wrong. But they're also not perfect _people_. And chances are this guy was fired for something much more prosaic than a grand conspiracy of shareholders. He was probably fired for being an insufferable dick and annoying too many people for too long.
Take your massive paychecks and your massive stock holdings and go sit on the beach for a while doing nothing, and cool off, man, then go snag a job at almost literally any other tech company on Earth since you have Apple on your resume now. And quit your bitchin'.
These issues are not newly raised by the watch.
I can only surmise that the reason the watch doesn't ask for voice confirmation before dialing is, they assume the wearer is unconscious. If the wearer wakes up later in the hospital and is enraged about criminal charges for a joint spotted on their table, they have their priorities out of whack.
Likewise if the wearer experiences some head injury or loss of blood pressure and is too delirious to notice and abort the countdown. Probably better off summoning medical personnel.
Of course there is plenty of room for improvement. There's no reason the watch couldn't make a unique beeping sound as it counts down to remind the wearer to disable it. There's no reason it couldn't alert emergency services AND text/email/call a list of contacts. There's no reason not to allow customizations like "slide to call" rather than "slide to cancel", at the wearer's own risk.
*shrug*
If you can gripe needlessly into anonymous online dumpsters, so can I.
Well shit, man, you should have said you meant "random consumer grade camera" when you wrote "real camera", and "random jerk off the street" when you meant "photographer". That would have avoided a lot of angsty TL;DR writing!
Good digital cameras do not exist in a vacuum, and manufacturers have known this for a dozen years and have really compensated for it.
1. A good digital camera these days will pair with your smartphone, such that every time you snap a picture, one or more versions of it appear on the phone, potentially also triggering any number of secondary actions like watermarking, cropping, and uploading to multiple services. My favorite app for this purpose is "shuttersnitch".
2. In much the same way you can pair the camera with a tablet, such as an iPad, and get a very large screen indeed for previews, and use it from several feet away. The UI argument is a moot point, given the diversity of options, except:
3. "Ease of use" may not be what you think it is, if you're coming from the smartphone camera world. A purpose-built digital camera can go from OFF, to zoomed, precisely focused, and taking the picture, in less than a second. That includes zooming to the edge of, say, a 400mm lens: You just turn a large, easily accessible physical ring. See how long it takes to do the finger-spread or slider-drag equivalent on a smartphone -- even just to adjust the zoom slightly.
4. If you think a real camera only produces "marginally better" photos in most situations, try using a real camera with an f1.4 full-frame lens in a dimly lit room. Or try catching the action at a soccer game with even a reasonably priced 70-200mm lens like the Canon f/4.
The smartphone has one real thing going for it: Miniaturization. That is also its Achilles heel, because you simply cannot grab as much light on a smaller surface area. But as I pointed out earlier, the direct comparison doesn't even make sense. Almost ALL people who seriously use a good purpose-built camera ALSO own a smartphone, and have known how to integrate the two for years.
No. I have used both. The “long press” version is touchy and requires that I wait with my finger in place. The 3D touch version registers immediately. That savings in time and precision makes the feature worth it to me.
I use 3D touch multiple times every day when editing sentences in Messages and Mail. Pressing down on the keyboard and then moving the cursor within the text like the display is a giant mousing surface is way, way easier than trying to poke the cursor into the text by tapping it directly. I'm happy to see the feature stick around just for that use case.
I don't know if you've ever worked for a startup that crashed and burned and ruined everyone's mental health and finances and spawned multiple lawsuits and wasted gigantic amounts of seed money,
but CEOs of those invariably sleep on couches as well.
It's not proof of anything except the _inability_ to effectively delegate - whether for systemic reasons, or deleterious personal preference.
You have your head very throughly in the sand if you think Face ID is "straight-up evolution".
This is an extremely compact, extremely low-power time-of-flight sensor integrated into a handheld communications device. The implementation is both very ambitious and technically accomplished, not to mention several years ahead of any other company, and it has opened and shoved a metaphorical foot into a door that will be thrown wide over the next few years: AR and VR telepresence, to a degree of ease accuracy that it will thoroughly change the way much work is done across many white-collar industries.
Flipped burgers. Scooped ice cream. Shelved books. Stocked shelves. Then after several false starts I got a job writing software.
Then I could afford many more things, and my health was better, and I had just as much time. THANK YOU AUTOMATION.
Programmers have been trying to obsolete themselves ever since programming was invented. Whaddaya know, they've caused the complete inverse effect. We re-learn 70% of our skillset every five years to keep up, and the bucks continue to roll in. This trend will continue. "What about all the dullards?" you cry, in mock concern. You utter misanthrope. The future is not a magical kingdom of locked doors to which you (software developers) alone hold the keys. Also, humans are cheap as hell, if you don't aspire to first-world standards. Catch-22: We need the machines, to create first-world standards.
Want less choice? Smash all the machines. After 90% of us simply die, the rest will be back to setting fires to flush out wild game, driving elephants off cliffs, drowning at sea, and scratching rows in dirt full of mold spores, spiders, and parasitic worms. Best jobs ever!
I know; for one thing there isn't a single CGI effect visible. Talk about cheap. Michael Bay, now there's a guy who makes expensive, quality films.
I mean, clearly this is just a stunt. It doesn't, for example, folow cinéma vérité custom by presenting the imagery as though it was shot by, or of, an ordinary person using their ordinary equipment. Which is totally unlike, say, Stephen Spielberg filming Schindler's List in "old" black and white specifically to invoke a documentary feel, except adding splashes of color for symbolic purposes, and subsequently winning an academy award for best director for his "cheap and nasty" decision...
I mean, what the fuck do actual lauded directors know about film? Us basement trolls have all the goods, and it's our techno aesthetic that makes or breaks any movie...
Personally, I find all those films before the 60's to be completely unwatchable crap. What moron thought it would be possible to tell a good story, or create tension, without COLOR?
Cheap and nasty.
From the look of the footage, Soderbergh has also ditched the expensive and cumbersome lighting kit for almost every scene. That also in turn cuts way down on the need for studio space. You can even run-and-gun your outdoor scenes without shutting everything down beforehand.
Also it helps that Soderbergh is a VERY experienced director and has probably broken out the entire movie into complete storyboards so he can farm most of the shooting out to assistants and they can go all at once, and he knows how to work with actors to get a properly threated performance even if they're shooting 8 different scenes from all over the movie back-to-back because they all take place in the same location, and he can quickly judge whether he's got what he wants so they don't need reshoots.
Just guessing here.
Haaahaha "engineer led".
Google is not "engineer led". Sundar Pichai is a product manager and has been in charge for three years. Google's portfolio is stuffed full of "me too" products, building on the innovations of others, including every physical device they have ever made, and every iteration of Android in the last ten years. Their revenue stream is selling information to marketers. Everything else they do is in pursuit of that, or is a vanity project designed to position themselves in the market or maintain their hip mythos for recruiting purposes. Try working there for a few years. Engineers are not in charge there. Product and project managers call all the shots, and wield all the power, which they fight over like animals.
Tesla is not "engineer led", it's CEO is a physicist who's spent almost all his career trying to act as - and then acting as - a CEO. Tesla is a company differentiated by a luxury brand, not innovation. All the innovation in electric vehicles it uses has been borrowed from earlier innovators, before and during its lifetime. For comparison, consider BMW and Honda. Those are what a more engineer-led company looks like in the car space.
Amazon ... now you have something. Jeff Bezos definitely respects the value of good engineering, and has been one himself. In fact, the real distinction I would make here is between Apple and Amazon: Both are full of great engineers and product managers but Apple seems to have siphoned off all the good designers.
Nothing more than what Cisco and IBM did. And after they realized that, they quit. If they can't offer something very distinctive, they're not interested. They used to make printers too and those weren't distinctive. And a whole bunch of other stuff that turned out just "meh" and then got the axe.
Mind you, they've swung that axe far, far fewer times than Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. have, where ten zillion things go into beta and then trail off into a wasteland of absent support and broken features and promises. So there's that.
There is no private key in Apple's possession. Their system does not work that way.
Actually the FaceID data isn't even 30k dots x face scans.
Those raw measurements are immediately aggregated and shoved through a huge pile of logic (developed via machine-learning techniques) to get a series of completely different values that are then given to another huge pile of logic with some machine-learning based feedback systems to authenticate your current face plus a weird range of drift around it. It is utterly impossible to take those values and deconvolute them into a face.
Hackers may as well try to reconstruct an image of your face based on an audio recording of your fart.
Some people say Apple is successful only because of their fashionable marketing. You know what's fashionable marketing -- what never gets old? Loudly declaring that Apple is finally on the decline, or has been for years despite absolutely sky-high profits. And letting the ad impressions and the comments roll in, because hey, maybe THIS time, maybe we'll be right. And maybe THIS time congress will repeal Obamacare. And maybe THIS time, when we toss the poodle out the window, it'll fly.