...one final option is that Reddit users don't respond to advertising when it's thrown at them.
This probably holds true for the likes of slashdot too - we're mostly techies, and a larger proportion of us have ad blockers than the general populous, and so probably less 'valuable' to the majority of advertisers. Like vast swathes of Reddit, we're a minority, a niche of society.
The truth is, both slashdot and Reddit are made by humans. We're all susceptible to advertising (if we see it). However, being niches, the mainstream advertisers aren't going to score well with us, and so it naturally falls to 'lesser' advertisers who pay less money. The truth is, they probably get a similar return on their spend than the big guys, but just see a lower response rate than you'd get on more 'main stream' sites.
Yep, we'll be getting rid of Windows Server 2012 any day now;-)
'years' is right - Microsoft is so 'built in' to so many places that changing from (say) 2012 to 2016 is hard work, and so it's easier for those shops to say "keep supporting 2012 for a bit longer please" (or same for old versions of office, or SQLserver or whatever else - so long as there are enough people using the old version, microsoft ends up having to support it). Microsoft doesn't want to have to do this because it's expensive and arguably slows the adoption of later versions.
They want the domination without the support burden than comes with it - and to do that, 'the cloud' is the perfect answer.
As for O365 - I've got to say, it's pretty terrible. The idea that you can do some stuff in the browser and some stuff with the desktop app is awful. Opening online invariably says "open in desktop to get all the features". The whole sharepointy-web-access thing is confusing and disjointed. Skype for Business is similarly awful, and getting meetings to work with people outside your organisation is problematic.
If Microsoft just spent the next 2 years fixing all the shit they've made, then O365 would be quite a good bet. They won't though, they'll keep 'innovating' new features no one wants and can't use, and all the old cruft will stay exactly where it is - killing users by a thousand pin pricks.
It is indeed a stupid company. He could have stored that password in a million secure ways that his successors could get access to.
I guess the point here is: how would you know a good exchange from a bad one?
You can spot a good 'bank' from a bad one because the good one is government regulated, has to pay insurance and so on, and can show you certificates and whatnot to prove it. A bad 'bank' is a guy in jogging bottoms with baseball bat in his coat, who will only meet you in quiet places.
A good exchange has a nice website, has a good privacy policy, legal terms and has an impressive looking list of clients. A bad exchange has a nice website, a good privacy policy, legal terms and has an impressive looking list of clients. How do you tell the difference?
I just bought a Doogee phone for about £45. It's to replace my old Galaxy S5 mini which we were using as a "sonos remote control" in the kitchen. Sonos are upgrading their app and whatever version of android the S5 runs is too old for it. So my upgrade prompt was bloody Sonos:-(
Anyway, the doogee runs Android 8.1, has a big bright screen, comes with a case and a screen protector and (so far) looks like a great replacement for the remote control. At this sort of price, it makes me slightly regret spending £10 buying a new battery for the samsung a few months back. My only slight gripe is that there's no 'desk dock' for it as the power socket is at the top.
For those looking for an actual phone, it's got dual sim, removable battery, headphone jack and most of the features you would want, but it is quite heavy. However, when we need another 'remote control' somewhere else in the house, I'll be buying another. Now the S5 is freed up, I'm on the prowl for a different OS to stick on it...
In fairness, Webalizer is pretty basic. When I last used it in anger, it still couldn't properly geo IP addresses and instead just used their reverse DNS to say all ".com" IPs were from the USA. That sort of thing is never going to get past any sort of 'SEO' or marketing function people.
However, GA can accept stats that you submit. I'm sure someone must have made a webalizer-style package that scrapes log files and send GA events. That way your marketing droids can still get whizzy graphs, but only from your server logs instead of cookies.
If that's still too 'big brother' for you, then you can run your own OpenWebAnalytics (http://www.openwebanalytics.com/) server and similarly send log information to it. You could start allowing cookies again, and then use your own endpoints to collect metrics rather than 3rd parties too. Which ever way you do it, you do get a slightly more modern looking solution this way.
I believe Splunk can do analytics quite respectably, as could an ELK stack, but I'd argue that they're a bit more of a big deal to operate and run, and don't really hit the mark for the marketing folks. YMMV.
Ultimately, GA is for the lazy. It's blocked by a measurable percentage of visitors these days, and (probably) gets some spam too, so it's accuracy isn't what it once was. When GA first came out, it was a more convenient and far superior version of Webalizer, but these days alternatives exist.
The thing is, Trump himself played the same trick on Scotland when he built his golf course. He wanted to build on environmentally sensitive land, so promised bajillions of pounds of investment, and would make "probably the best golf course in the world". A wind farm got put in the sea miles away from his new golf course, and he suddenly decided he didn't want to spend as much as he first said. There's still a golf course there, and all the environmental damage, but a lot less investment in Scotland than they wanted.
As mentioned above - the 'camera' most likely has a CPU + network + operating system on it, all in the same chip. Plus it was probably sold at an impossibly low price (subsidised, perhaps?) so it would sell in decent quantity, and a few of them might end up in 'interesting' places.
Article is mostly nonsense as far as I can tell too. Also, I do love how slashdot editors feel the need to tell us what repeaters are.
However, if quantum computing ever works, then your nice RSA or AES encrypted data stream is (so the thinking goes) highly vulnerable to quantum cracking, which (so goes the hype) is thousands if not millions of times faster then regular computing. Thus, in any post-Von-Neumann world, you're going to need a way to transmit data without it being snooped or cracked later. For that, only quantum transmission stands a chance of being secure.
Potentially quantum communication does also allow for the sender and receiver to know they're being snooped. Current optical communication can detect a 'bend attack', but it's tricky to get the measurements right without getting false positives. On long cable runs where you have repeaters, every repeater needs to do the same detection, and then somehow tell the sender or receiver that it's happening. All this pretty much makes it possible in theory, but hard in practice. Quantum properties mean the receiver is automatically notified of a snooper in ways that wouldn't be confused with a reduction in signal strength.
Taking the example of a transatlantic cable, you need a few repeaters over that length. Clearly, with quantum communication that's going to be tricky - every repeater would need to full receive the signal, then re-send it along the next bit of the cable. That's practically impossible at the moment because senders and receivers are absolute-zero, super complex machines. If these folks have found a way to repeat the signal without quantum-altering it along the way, then it means long range comms becomes possible. That's also something of a 'must have' if quantum computing ever becomes a real thing.
So yeah, quantum comms offers you nothing today that you can't get somewhere else. However, if the NSA or whomever gets a quantum computer, then all the worlds encryption is at risk, and for that, we need some sort of defence.
First up, the vloggers and whatnot don't get on regular media, so there's no need to worry about them there. They're a concern on youtube and whatnot because it's ostensibly their account, rather than (say) l'oreal or whomever. As a 'reasonable person', I would imagine that what they say on their own channel/account is their views. Of course, if they're being paid to have views, then fairly reasonably, they should say so.
Secondly, we generally have carefully marked adverts on TV and in print. That is, on TV, before the ads start there's a little title page, and then at the end of the ads the same. That tells you you're about to see ads. The 'informercial' type of ads (or the ones that look a bit like a TV show or whatever) typically have to say "advertisement" on the screen while they're playing too. Likewise in print, if a "reasonable person" could be fooled into thinking an ad was something more than that, then it too must say "advertisement" on it, sufficiently prominently to avoid any such confusion. The regular media is already pretty heavily regulated and managed. Anyone messing up there gets some pretty hefty issues to deal with afterwards, and as yet, we don't have "a problem" with product placement there.
How's any of that going to make any sort of clickbait?
If it had had some flame throwers and maybe some lasers, preferably some blockchain and maybe a raspberry pi or two in a 'supercomputer' cluster, then it could have made for some good headlines. As it is, "early test works out okay" is pretty boring.
...and why Amazon is playing a dangerous game. They're starting to put a few ads onto Prime Video, and they annoy the hell out of me (not least because they get in the way of the viewing, but most of all - because I've already paid for Prime). Worse still, they put ads on stuff that's on there and Netflix - they even show it in the search results. I'm now trying to avoid clicking the Amazon rendition of anything that has a Netflix alternative.
True. However, if DDG or anyone else gets an appreciable amount of the search market, they'll be asked to comply as well.
The Right to be Forgotten might sound like a stupid bit of legislation made by people who don't understand the Internet. It might be those things, but it's actually pretty limited in scope, and understands that it's not a complete solution. If you want to research this doctor, it doesn't stop you from doing so. However, if you are like 99% of people on the planet and just 'google' stuff because 'that's the internet', then you won't get misleading information about them by doing so. The intention isn't to fully censor the Internet - it's to stop 'casual' misleading taking place.
We can argue about intentions and actual results, streisand effects, collateral damage and the effectiveness of this legislation, but that's for another time/place.
The music industry is so old and 'legacy' that it still needs to think in terms of 'tracks sold'. They have a formula for counting streams and turning them into supposed tracks being sold (which they presumably then use to divide up the coppers down the back of the sofa to pay the artists). I believe it's something like 600 streams = one sale.
So... if you're a record company, then shorter streams mean more money - a person listening to a playlist will get through more tracks, and so will burn through the 600 streams quicker than if the tracks were longer.
If the record industry got it's head out of its collective buttocks and actually modernised, they might be able to cope with the idea of streams a bit better. We might see that happening by 2030 or so, I guess.
The cynic and oldfart in me suggests that shorter tracks are good when you don't have much to say. Pop is, and has always been vacuous, but had to compete with an undercurrent of intelligent, thought-provoking stuff which came out alongside it. These days all that has gone away, so we're just left with the froth, which has no need to compete with the 8 minute wonders of yester-year.
Just as an example, in the UK, none of the big supermarkets are allowed to have more than about a 30% share. It goes down to planning and commercials, so (say) Tesco can't own all of the big out-of-town supermarkets around a town (or even within a general region). They also can't buy up one of the other smaller supermarkets as that would tip them over the 30% commercially.
The idea is that we, the consumer get to make decisions. Without this sort of regulation, there'd be bits of the country where you can only really buy from Tesco and other bits where you can only buy from Sainsburys (unless you fancy making a 50 mile round trip. ). If such a situation existed, we adults wouldn't be able to make any choices because we weren't offered any (Citation: this actually happened in a few places, largely before we had big cars and loads of motorways, hence the regulation)
As a side note, the big super markets 'invented' small supermarkets (so called 'metro stores'). They sell as many of the same things as the big stores as they can fit in the floor space, charge a bit more for the privilege and aren't subject to the same planning and competition rules. Whilst it might be crazy to have a Sainsburys literally stuck to the side of a Tesco (citiation: just out the back of Waterloo station, London), it means we still get a choice - hence it's been left alone somewhat by the regulators.
I think the pinnacle of American cheese is the stuff you spray onto things from a can. I literally couldn't believe this was a thing until I was given a can to try. I'm told it serves a need because Americans can't be arsed to cut cheese into slices, and so 'demanded' a spray to do all that hard work for them. It really didn't taste anything like any cheese I've ever eaten (not even that rubbery gunk you mentioned).
If there's ever a way to completely bastardise a perfectly natural and (relatively) healthy product into something completely different (and probably infinitely more unhealthy), the American food industry will find it.
Years later, I was at a baseball game with a french guy. He bought some sort of nacho snack thing that came in a a sort of plastic prison plate (I suppose if you're watching baseball, you're in a sort of voluntary prison?). It had a little section of a weirdly luminous darkish yellow stuff. He asked me what it was - such was its complete difference from what he'd ever seen as 'cheese', he didn't believe me when I told him it was cheese. I don't think he ate any more of it than the first 'dunk'.
I (mostly) can't fault their build quality and specs on their hardware, but recently design decisions are dubious (eg. bixby button) and their software is, and has always been utterly terrible.
Citation: Bixby, Samsung Push Service, any of their 'hub' apps, actually, any apps pre-installed that weren't part of the base android system.
Personally, I use gitlab for such things, but I'd love to know how big github is now that the dust has settled on the MS deal. I mean, a load of people went to gitlab (and presumably bitbucket), but how many (genuinely active) repos are left on Github? It's still got to be comfortably the biggest, but I wonder how much it hurt them. Evidently enough that they need to do this...
Growing faster with fewer resources = good modification.
Maybe. Fast grown wood (like the faster growing pines) has its uses in our modern world, but is really a pretty crappy wood. Slow grown woods like oak obviously have far more uses. Even a slow grown pine has uses in more places and doesn't have the higher cost of the really slow growing trees.
My point here is that growing faster with fewer resources may make a plant that looks like the slower growing variety, but it may not be as useful as it appears.
Very few markets are really based on merit. They're skewed by artificial price manipulations, lobbying and laws and wonky business practices. The food market seems a particularly difficult one because of government approvals and tariffs, grants and subsidies, trade deals and whatnot. That means "the best" may not be what you can buy, even if you want to spend more to get it.
And in fact, I'd argue that Google have pretty much killed off the 'blogosphere'. I'm sure in many cases the owners just gave up on them and headed over to Facebook and Twitter, but in part that was probably because of falling traffic numbers. There's no point blogging if you're not getting the hits.
My very annecodtal experience suggests that Google seems to prefer "big" sites, and commercial sites over smaller, home-spun ones. You might have *the* most authoritative information about a particular niche topic on your little site, but Google will still prefer to show Amazon, Ebay and a bunch of other big sites ahead of yours - even though the search terms were a close match for content on your site (and you had no intention of buying something). There's very little way to have a few random pages on a site get anywhere in Google - you need to be on a big 'themed' site to get the hits.
You can of course ague this is all "pagerank" and whatnot. That's probably true, but maybe Pagerank has run its course, or maybe there's a way to 'rank' the Internet that's 'better' (for different values of $better, of course). Maybe Google massages the results to "provide greater user value", or maybe the blogs of old were just utter shit. I couldn't tell you for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
...one final option is that Reddit users don't respond to advertising when it's thrown at them.
This probably holds true for the likes of slashdot too - we're mostly techies, and a larger proportion of us have ad blockers than the general populous, and so probably less 'valuable' to the majority of advertisers. Like vast swathes of Reddit, we're a minority, a niche of society.
The truth is, both slashdot and Reddit are made by humans. We're all susceptible to advertising (if we see it). However, being niches, the mainstream advertisers aren't going to score well with us, and so it naturally falls to 'lesser' advertisers who pay less money. The truth is, they probably get a similar return on their spend than the big guys, but just see a lower response rate than you'd get on more 'main stream' sites.
Yep, we'll be getting rid of Windows Server 2012 any day now ;-)
'years' is right - Microsoft is so 'built in' to so many places that changing from (say) 2012 to 2016 is hard work, and so it's easier for those shops to say "keep supporting 2012 for a bit longer please" (or same for old versions of office, or SQLserver or whatever else - so long as there are enough people using the old version, microsoft ends up having to support it). Microsoft doesn't want to have to do this because it's expensive and arguably slows the adoption of later versions.
They want the domination without the support burden than comes with it - and to do that, 'the cloud' is the perfect answer.
As for O365 - I've got to say, it's pretty terrible. The idea that you can do some stuff in the browser and some stuff with the desktop app is awful. Opening online invariably says "open in desktop to get all the features". The whole sharepointy-web-access thing is confusing and disjointed. Skype for Business is similarly awful, and getting meetings to work with people outside your organisation is problematic.
If Microsoft just spent the next 2 years fixing all the shit they've made, then O365 would be quite a good bet. They won't though, they'll keep 'innovating' new features no one wants and can't use, and all the old cruft will stay exactly where it is - killing users by a thousand pin pricks.
I'm teaching an AI beer pong and spin the bottle. I expect to take over the world pretty soon.
It is indeed a stupid company. He could have stored that password in a million secure ways that his successors could get access to.
I guess the point here is: how would you know a good exchange from a bad one?
You can spot a good 'bank' from a bad one because the good one is government regulated, has to pay insurance and so on, and can show you certificates and whatnot to prove it. A bad 'bank' is a guy in jogging bottoms with baseball bat in his coat, who will only meet you in quiet places.
A good exchange has a nice website, has a good privacy policy, legal terms and has an impressive looking list of clients. A bad exchange has a nice website, a good privacy policy, legal terms and has an impressive looking list of clients. How do you tell the difference?
I just bought a Doogee phone for about £45. It's to replace my old Galaxy S5 mini which we were using as a "sonos remote control" in the kitchen. Sonos are upgrading their app and whatever version of android the S5 runs is too old for it. So my upgrade prompt was bloody Sonos :-(
Anyway, the doogee runs Android 8.1, has a big bright screen, comes with a case and a screen protector and (so far) looks like a great replacement for the remote control. At this sort of price, it makes me slightly regret spending £10 buying a new battery for the samsung a few months back. My only slight gripe is that there's no 'desk dock' for it as the power socket is at the top.
For those looking for an actual phone, it's got dual sim, removable battery, headphone jack and most of the features you would want, but it is quite heavy. However, when we need another 'remote control' somewhere else in the house, I'll be buying another. Now the S5 is freed up, I'm on the prowl for a different OS to stick on it...
In fairness, Webalizer is pretty basic. When I last used it in anger, it still couldn't properly geo IP addresses and instead just used their reverse DNS to say all ".com" IPs were from the USA. That sort of thing is never going to get past any sort of 'SEO' or marketing function people.
However, GA can accept stats that you submit. I'm sure someone must have made a webalizer-style package that scrapes log files and send GA events. That way your marketing droids can still get whizzy graphs, but only from your server logs instead of cookies.
If that's still too 'big brother' for you, then you can run your own OpenWebAnalytics (http://www.openwebanalytics.com/) server and similarly send log information to it. You could start allowing cookies again, and then use your own endpoints to collect metrics rather than 3rd parties too. Which ever way you do it, you do get a slightly more modern looking solution this way.
I believe Splunk can do analytics quite respectably, as could an ELK stack, but I'd argue that they're a bit more of a big deal to operate and run, and don't really hit the mark for the marketing folks. YMMV.
Ultimately, GA is for the lazy. It's blocked by a measurable percentage of visitors these days, and (probably) gets some spam too, so it's accuracy isn't what it once was. When GA first came out, it was a more convenient and far superior version of Webalizer, but these days alternatives exist.
The thing is, Trump himself played the same trick on Scotland when he built his golf course. He wanted to build on environmentally sensitive land, so promised bajillions of pounds of investment, and would make "probably the best golf course in the world". A wind farm got put in the sea miles away from his new golf course, and he suddenly decided he didn't want to spend as much as he first said. There's still a golf course there, and all the environmental damage, but a lot less investment in Scotland than they wanted.
Sound familiar?
As mentioned above - the 'camera' most likely has a CPU + network + operating system on it, all in the same chip. Plus it was probably sold at an impossibly low price (subsidised, perhaps?) so it would sell in decent quantity, and a few of them might end up in 'interesting' places.
Article is mostly nonsense as far as I can tell too. Also, I do love how slashdot editors feel the need to tell us what repeaters are.
However, if quantum computing ever works, then your nice RSA or AES encrypted data stream is (so the thinking goes) highly vulnerable to quantum cracking, which (so goes the hype) is thousands if not millions of times faster then regular computing. Thus, in any post-Von-Neumann world, you're going to need a way to transmit data without it being snooped or cracked later. For that, only quantum transmission stands a chance of being secure.
Potentially quantum communication does also allow for the sender and receiver to know they're being snooped. Current optical communication can detect a 'bend attack', but it's tricky to get the measurements right without getting false positives. On long cable runs where you have repeaters, every repeater needs to do the same detection, and then somehow tell the sender or receiver that it's happening. All this pretty much makes it possible in theory, but hard in practice. Quantum properties mean the receiver is automatically notified of a snooper in ways that wouldn't be confused with a reduction in signal strength.
Taking the example of a transatlantic cable, you need a few repeaters over that length. Clearly, with quantum communication that's going to be tricky - every repeater would need to full receive the signal, then re-send it along the next bit of the cable. That's practically impossible at the moment because senders and receivers are absolute-zero, super complex machines. If these folks have found a way to repeat the signal without quantum-altering it along the way, then it means long range comms becomes possible. That's also something of a 'must have' if quantum computing ever becomes a real thing.
So yeah, quantum comms offers you nothing today that you can't get somewhere else. However, if the NSA or whomever gets a quantum computer, then all the worlds encryption is at risk, and for that, we need some sort of defence.
First up, the vloggers and whatnot don't get on regular media, so there's no need to worry about them there. They're a concern on youtube and whatnot because it's ostensibly their account, rather than (say) l'oreal or whomever. As a 'reasonable person', I would imagine that what they say on their own channel/account is their views. Of course, if they're being paid to have views, then fairly reasonably, they should say so.
Secondly, we generally have carefully marked adverts on TV and in print. That is, on TV, before the ads start there's a little title page, and then at the end of the ads the same. That tells you you're about to see ads. The 'informercial' type of ads (or the ones that look a bit like a TV show or whatever) typically have to say "advertisement" on the screen while they're playing too. Likewise in print, if a "reasonable person" could be fooled into thinking an ad was something more than that, then it too must say "advertisement" on it, sufficiently prominently to avoid any such confusion. The regular media is already pretty heavily regulated and managed. Anyone messing up there gets some pretty hefty issues to deal with afterwards, and as yet, we don't have "a problem" with product placement there.
How's any of that going to make any sort of clickbait?
If it had had some flame throwers and maybe some lasers, preferably some blockchain and maybe a raspberry pi or two in a 'supercomputer' cluster, then it could have made for some good headlines. As it is, "early test works out okay" is pretty boring.
...and why Amazon is playing a dangerous game. They're starting to put a few ads onto Prime Video, and they annoy the hell out of me (not least because they get in the way of the viewing, but most of all - because I've already paid for Prime). Worse still, they put ads on stuff that's on there and Netflix - they even show it in the search results. I'm now trying to avoid clicking the Amazon rendition of anything that has a Netflix alternative.
Left or right hand drive?
^^ one thing even the European legislators are scared to 'harmonise' ;-)
True. However, if DDG or anyone else gets an appreciable amount of the search market, they'll be asked to comply as well.
The Right to be Forgotten might sound like a stupid bit of legislation made by people who don't understand the Internet. It might be those things, but it's actually pretty limited in scope, and understands that it's not a complete solution. If you want to research this doctor, it doesn't stop you from doing so. However, if you are like 99% of people on the planet and just 'google' stuff because 'that's the internet', then you won't get misleading information about them by doing so. The intention isn't to fully censor the Internet - it's to stop 'casual' misleading taking place.
We can argue about intentions and actual results, streisand effects, collateral damage and the effectiveness of this legislation, but that's for another time/place.
I was gonna say the same (although I haven't) - I had some fun with https://github.com/StreisandEf... a while back - it's very good :-)
As for TFA - the list of VPNs is here: https://www.top10vpn.com/free-... I can't say I'd heard of any of them.
Indeed.
The music industry is so old and 'legacy' that it still needs to think in terms of 'tracks sold'. They have a formula for counting streams and turning them into supposed tracks being sold (which they presumably then use to divide up the coppers down the back of the sofa to pay the artists). I believe it's something like 600 streams = one sale.
So... if you're a record company, then shorter streams mean more money - a person listening to a playlist will get through more tracks, and so will burn through the 600 streams quicker than if the tracks were longer.
If the record industry got it's head out of its collective buttocks and actually modernised, they might be able to cope with the idea of streams a bit better. We might see that happening by 2030 or so, I guess.
The cynic and oldfart in me suggests that shorter tracks are good when you don't have much to say. Pop is, and has always been vacuous, but had to compete with an undercurrent of intelligent, thought-provoking stuff which came out alongside it. These days all that has gone away, so we're just left with the froth, which has no need to compete with the 8 minute wonders of yester-year.
What does 'gooses' mean? Geese? Chooses? What?
Just as an example, in the UK, none of the big supermarkets are allowed to have more than about a 30% share. It goes down to planning and commercials, so (say) Tesco can't own all of the big out-of-town supermarkets around a town (or even within a general region). They also can't buy up one of the other smaller supermarkets as that would tip them over the 30% commercially.
The idea is that we, the consumer get to make decisions. Without this sort of regulation, there'd be bits of the country where you can only really buy from Tesco and other bits where you can only buy from Sainsburys (unless you fancy making a 50 mile round trip. ). If such a situation existed, we adults wouldn't be able to make any choices because we weren't offered any (Citation: this actually happened in a few places, largely before we had big cars and loads of motorways, hence the regulation)
As a side note, the big super markets 'invented' small supermarkets (so called 'metro stores'). They sell as many of the same things as the big stores as they can fit in the floor space, charge a bit more for the privilege and aren't subject to the same planning and competition rules. Whilst it might be crazy to have a Sainsburys literally stuck to the side of a Tesco (citiation: just out the back of Waterloo station, London), it means we still get a choice - hence it's been left alone somewhat by the regulators.
A keyboard overlay that alters the location of the letters?
Maybe a special lens that re-assembles the text on the screen so it's readable?
I miss the old days ;-)
I think the pinnacle of American cheese is the stuff you spray onto things from a can. I literally couldn't believe this was a thing until I was given a can to try. I'm told it serves a need because Americans can't be arsed to cut cheese into slices, and so 'demanded' a spray to do all that hard work for them. It really didn't taste anything like any cheese I've ever eaten (not even that rubbery gunk you mentioned).
If there's ever a way to completely bastardise a perfectly natural and (relatively) healthy product into something completely different (and probably infinitely more unhealthy), the American food industry will find it.
Years later, I was at a baseball game with a french guy. He bought some sort of nacho snack thing that came in a a sort of plastic prison plate (I suppose if you're watching baseball, you're in a sort of voluntary prison?). It had a little section of a weirdly luminous darkish yellow stuff. He asked me what it was - such was its complete difference from what he'd ever seen as 'cheese', he didn't believe me when I told him it was cheese. I don't think he ate any more of it than the first 'dunk'.
Repeat after me: Samsung can't do software.
I (mostly) can't fault their build quality and specs on their hardware, but recently design decisions are dubious (eg. bixby button) and their software is, and has always been utterly terrible.
Citation: Bixby, Samsung Push Service, any of their 'hub' apps, actually, any apps pre-installed that weren't part of the base android system.
Outsource it, baby - like everything else. Get the 6 Million Rupee Man: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programm...
Personally, I use gitlab for such things, but I'd love to know how big github is now that the dust has settled on the MS deal. I mean, a load of people went to gitlab (and presumably bitbucket), but how many (genuinely active) repos are left on Github? It's still got to be comfortably the biggest, but I wonder how much it hurt them. Evidently enough that they need to do this...
Growing faster with fewer resources = good modification.
Maybe. Fast grown wood (like the faster growing pines) has its uses in our modern world, but is really a pretty crappy wood. Slow grown woods like oak obviously have far more uses. Even a slow grown pine has uses in more places and doesn't have the higher cost of the really slow growing trees.
My point here is that growing faster with fewer resources may make a plant that looks like the slower growing variety, but it may not be as useful as it appears.
Very few markets are really based on merit. They're skewed by artificial price manipulations, lobbying and laws and wonky business practices. The food market seems a particularly difficult one because of government approvals and tariffs, grants and subsidies, trade deals and whatnot. That means "the best" may not be what you can buy, even if you want to spend more to get it.
And in fact, I'd argue that Google have pretty much killed off the 'blogosphere'. I'm sure in many cases the owners just gave up on them and headed over to Facebook and Twitter, but in part that was probably because of falling traffic numbers. There's no point blogging if you're not getting the hits.
My very annecodtal experience suggests that Google seems to prefer "big" sites, and commercial sites over smaller, home-spun ones. You might have *the* most authoritative information about a particular niche topic on your little site, but Google will still prefer to show Amazon, Ebay and a bunch of other big sites ahead of yours - even though the search terms were a close match for content on your site (and you had no intention of buying something). There's very little way to have a few random pages on a site get anywhere in Google - you need to be on a big 'themed' site to get the hits.
You can of course ague this is all "pagerank" and whatnot. That's probably true, but maybe Pagerank has run its course, or maybe there's a way to 'rank' the Internet that's 'better' (for different values of $better, of course). Maybe Google massages the results to "provide greater user value", or maybe the blogs of old were just utter shit. I couldn't tell you for sure.