by this year's WWDC and the lack of any new hardware announcements, etc.
The WWDC is the WorldWide Developers Conference. They usually don't announce new hardware in the WWDC because the audience of the conference are developers, and they're announcing the new features in their operating systems because they're about to release new developer previews and SDKs, so that developers can start working on supporting the new OS. They then often announce a bunch of new hardware in October that will actually run the new OS.
Right, that's what I was going to bring up. Microsoft changed the popup to a banner, but I don't think that's really the problem. The problem is that they also have a nearly identical banner that pops up unnecessarily under different circumstances. So they spend a few years training people to just hit "Enable" whenever the banner pops up, meanwhile making that "Enable" button the only security against malicious macros.
It's a perfect example of "what not to do". You'd think Microsoft would have learned by now.
See, I kind of think of it in the opposite way. What I want most from consoles is just the fact that I don't have to wonder "will it run?" It would make sense to me if Sony released a new Playstation model every year with better capabilities, but maintaining compatibility. Sort of like what smartphone vendors do-- Apple releases a new iPhone every year, but I don't have to buy all new apps every time I get a new iPhone. With every new iPhone, I get something a little faster and with new features, but apps almost always work with an iPhone that's a few years old. I don't have to buy a new iPhone every year, but I can if I want to.
I agree with you up until the "nothing to see here" part. You're right in pointing out that this is a relatively normal thing to do given that Microsoft develops one of the most widely used hypervisors, but it's still noteworthy because Microsoft has spent decades refusing to do these kinds of "normal things".
I don't know about this particular setup, but I've thought for a while that as computing gets faster and smaller, it might make a lot of sense to have something like this.
The eventual/possible use case would be that for a lot of people, your phone could be your computer. Take it everywhere with you. When you want a full monitor/keyboard/mouse, you drop it into a dock and suddenly you have a fully functioning desktop computer. Or maybe you have a "dock" that's basically shaped like a laptop, but you snap your phone into it (through whatever mechanism) and you have a laptop.
So why would you want to do this? Well, you're already carrying a computer around with you all the time, so why just have that be your primary computer? Phone are getting to the point (or have gotten to the point) of having enough CPU, graphics processing power, and storage to serve as a primary computer for a lot of users. By doing everything on a single computer, you don't have to worry about syncing your documents, applications, and settings all over the place. Each person would have one computer.
The OS would need to be able to present a UI appropriate for the display size and input device present at the time, but iOS is already largely the same OS as MacOS. Google is working on unifying Android and ChromeOS. Apparently Ubuntu has made a version of their Linux distro for phones. Having these operating systems switch to an appropriate UI shouldn't be very hard.
And even if the phone device is a little underpowered, if you used Thunderbolt (or something like it) for the docking connection, you could basically have a dock that not only provided a connection to a larger screen, keyboard, and mouse, but the dock could also include a faster video card, or other devices that basically connect as though their internal devices.
My personal opinion is that application developers are generally misguided and developing stupid applications. I make a point to occasionally look around at what apps are available on different platforms, and with all the glut of apps, they're generally not aimed at solving problems that need to be solved. There's always another runner game, or someone trying to make the next Angry Birds. For some reason, there have been a lot of new mail clients for OSX/iOS recently. There are a bunch of task/todo list apps that don't offer distinct features. Every once in a while, you'll see a bunch of apps released that seem to be taking aim at a particularly successful app-- Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever.
So you take an existing app, rehash it with some gimmick, and hope to sell that for millions of dollars. Sometimes the existing app is actually useful (e.g. email), but often enough the app is silly and gimmicky to begin with (e.g. Flappy Bird). But in any case, the app doesn't add any value, and doesn't solve the problems with the existing app. And then a month later, some other developer has a newer more gimmicky app that also doesn't solve any problems with the original app. Or maybe it does solve some problems, but creates new ones.
Now, there's a very good argument against my complaints: Even though I'm saying these apps are silly and useless, they seem to be what people want. The reason there are so many Flappy Bird clones is because so many people are buying them. However, if the problem now is that people aren't buying the apps, then I have a new counter-argument to that: No, people aren't buying them.
It all just makes me sad because I work in IT, and I see problems every day that need to be solved. There's so much work that needs to be done, and all our money and development talent is going towards trying to make the next Snapchat.
Sure, a species evolved to an undersea environment faces challenges in getting to their surface and beyond...
I also wonder how long it would take for an undersea lifeform to think about the larger universe. There's a lot of historical reason to say that our scientific progress has been driven, in various ways, by the curiosity formed when looking up at the stars and other celestial bodies. You don't see those if you're under water. You might not even see those if you had a different kind of atmosphere.
Whenever the topic gets to alien life forms, everyone assumes that the aliens must be advanced compared to us and have mastered interstellar, maybe even intergalactic, travel.
There's an even more fundamental assumption that alien life forms are interested in building technology and speaking with aliens on other planets. Not only do I see no reason to assume that aliens *can* communicate with us or travel to meet us, I don't see any reason to think that they would *want to*. We can start by looking at some of the other intelligent animals on our planet: chimps, dolphins, and octopuses.
Although I'm sure some people would point out the distinction that these animals are not *as smart* as we are, but even taking that for granted, it's not clear that the distinction is really about brainpower. If you could genetically engineer an octopus to have greater brain-power, I'm not sure it would respond by seeking to communicate with other planets. An intelligent being that was, for some reason, unable to see the stars, might never develop theories about space. They might have a dramatically different understanding of life and the universe, which leads them away from the idea of exploring space.
Even within our own species, there are plenty of people who think that trying to communicate with aliens is stupid, that we should throw away our technology and live "closer to nature." I don't think it's unimaginable to think that a very intelligent alien race might generally take this point of view.
There's actually some validity to this method. As long as no potential hackers have access to your "yellow stickies", you should be safe.
Everyone always makes a big deal about the idea "you shouldn't write down your passwords". Really though, the problem is that if you write down your password, then even the most secure password is now only as safe as the medium you've written it on. If it's a notebook locked in a safe, that might be pretty good. If you're trying to protect that account from someone who has access to the same safe, then it's not so good. But it's about equally as good as the security of that safe.
It's a bit strange to me to ask the question, "Why do you want a smart-TV when you can just buy a Raspberry Pi?" Because then I'd need to figure out and set up a Raspberry Pi, obviously. It may be that it sounds to you like a fun project, but a lot of people don't want to go through that process. I don't want a media center computer, adding another device that I need to manage and update, I just want the simplest way to watch Netflix without worrying about yet another device.
Now I'm playing the devil's advocate a little here. I have a Smart TV because the TV model I wanted at the time I was shopping for TVs came with those features. I don't use it, because I use an Apple TV (if I weren't in Apple's ecosystem for other reasons, I'd probably have gone with a Roku box). If there were a TV with a built-in Apple TV, I might buy that as a matter of simplification and convenience, but if I kept two separate devices, it would probably be so that I could upgrade the "smart" components without upgrading the screen. Still, if it were an option to have a TV with the Apple TV components integrated, I might go for that, just to make things really simple.
All I want is to watch Netflix/Hulu. As long as it has that functionality, I want the simplest, easiest, most elegant, and most trouble-free method of doing that. I suspect that many people have a similar approach to the problem.
Also, many people have argued that effective terrorists don't try to do damage, but instead try to elicit a reaction. In the grand scheme of things, killing a handful of people doesn't do much damage to a civilization. However, if you can kill that same handful of people in a manner that's shocking and sensational enough, you might cause a large overreaction, and that overreaction by the civilization might do quite a lot of damage. It's kind of like a bee sting. By itself, a single bee sting won't kill you-- unless you're allergic, in which case your body's own overreaction will kill you.
So with minimal effort and money, a terrorist will kill a few people, and in response we'll panic, vote idiots into office, and spend billions/trillions of dollars on various forms of ineffective "security", and then declare ourselves to have won the exchange.
I'm not sure what your objection is about. It looks like this is a form of multi-factor authentication. The 2FA du jour is to either send an SMS or have an encryption key on your phone-- in both cases, the second factor is your phone. So you can't use that 2FA for signing into your phone.
See, on the one hand, what you're describing is exactly why I think FOSS is so important. Rather than getting held hostage in the upgrade treadmill, you could just pay a programmer to maintain your current codebase. Your business is stuck running on Windows XP? If it were open source, some programmers could make a business out of providing required patched and updates. Great.
On the other hand, as an IT person, I have violent hatred towards companies who run their business on a jenky old custom app that only runs on out-of-date systems. Yes, it's a big, expensive, complex, scary project to take your business-critical application that hasn't been touched since 1996 and make it run on modern infrastructure. That's why you never should have let it get to this point. If you have a business-critical custom-built application, you should have a plan for keeping it updated and running on modern infrastructure. You should not be waiting 20 years before you invest money into updating it. If it's too fragile to migrate to a new server running a new OS, then it's too fragile to be business-critical. If you can't run your business without that fragile and terrifying app, then you should not feel good about the way you're running your business.
I support this change. I've had multiple instances over the years where I'm filling out a complicated form, try to erase a couple characters by hitting the backspace key, and found myself going to previous pages and wiping out the work that I'd done. Honestly, I don't use the "Back" button enough to need a shortcut.
Now if only Macs would stop using the two-finger trackpad swipe gesture as a shortcut for back/forward buttons. I know you can turn it off (and I do on any Mac I sit down at), but the two-finger swipe is already used for scrolling, and it's a stupid move to have the same gesture do two different things in the same app.
...but then you run into the older workers who have to start over on a new career path.
I know what you mean, but older workers can still learn new things. They may have experience that's still relevant in other fields. People are living longer and a lot of people are working longer, so it's not insane to think that someone over 40 years old could start a new career. In fact, I suspect that part of the reason people often don't change careers later in life is less about their inability to do so, and more because it's just so daunting-- the idea of starting at the bottom, working alongside and competing with 23 year-olds. If we could provide better resources and pathways for changing careers, it might be more common.
The best solution I could think of would be an increased unemployment insurance tax... Workers over 50 would get some kind of long term unemployment compensation...
This gets more into my more general point, which is that we're already dealing with some problems with unemployment, underemployment, job training, and job placement. If more and more jobs and industries become obsolete due to technological advancement, those problems may well get much worse. We tend to act as though people who are unemployed deserve to be unemployed-- that they're lazy, stupid, or inherently worthless-- and that there's no reason to do anything to help them. However, in a world where there just aren't enough jobs to go around, we may have to look into some way of allowing those people a livable lifestyle (e.g. minimum guaranteed income).
Another possibility is that there could be too few unskilled/low-education jobs, while there's a shortage of workers with the required skills. Or just as likely, as technology advances, it may be that the skills needed in the workforce are changing quickly and people need to change jobs/careers even more frequently. I think we've started to see some of that already.
Now, if I had to guess, something much more stupid is also much more likely: we might just keep inventing work to do in order to fill the void. As goods and services are cheaper and more plentiful, people are willing to spend more money on more labor-intensive goods and services as a luxury. This is already happening. People with more money spend extra to get locally-crafted hand-made artisanal goods. There's also a lot of money flowing into what's basically busy-work, for example all the money flowing into startups to make fad-driven mobile apps.
This is a good point, but I also wonder if there will always be another industry for workers to go into. In your example, people left the farm to work in factories. More recently, factories became more automated, and now a lot of people work in the service industry. There's been talk about automating some of that (e.g. self-driving trucks, drones for deliveries, completely automated fast-food restaurants), so people with those jobs will have to look elsewhere. Maybe there will be a new industry for them to move into, and maybe another after that....
But after a while, couldn't you eventually run out of jobs that need doing? I'm sure there will always be some jobs that need to be done, but the number of jobs that can't be done better by automated equipment might shrink quite a bit in the next few decades, or the next could of centuries. Most likely, it will hit the jobs that are mostly automated already, which tend to be low-skill and low-education, so those are the groups that will generally be hit hardest and fastest. However, I'm sure there are some high-education high-paying jobs out there that an AI could take on, and some very skilled and highly educated people may also find themselves suddenly out of a job.
So I think there's still a question: As we make jobs obsolete through technology, what do we do with the people who lose their jobs? In the short-term, I think it would make sense to focus on have cheap/free job training to allow them to move to other jobs and other industries. In the longer-term, we may want to consider how to distribute resources in a world where there are far more people than there are jobs.
I agree with you, more or less. Essentially, I think there are a lot of areas where Apple could invest and make a big difference to dramatically improve their offerings. If I had my choice I'd start with making their existing products more appealing for business use:
1) Fix the problems with OSX. If you've had to support Macs, you've probably run into a couple problems that have been there for years, with no clear solution. Accessing file shares is slow and buggy. Their mail application tends to die when dealing with a lot of messages. Apple should just invest in fixing those things.
2) Make it easy to manage Macs in bulk. Right now there aren't a lot of good RMM options for Mac. JAMF is absolute shit. You can roll your own stuff with FOSS tools, but that takes quite a bit of knowledge. Apple has some Enterprise programs that are overly complex for small businesses. Whether they work to improve and integrate the FOSS tools, build their own cloud service, or work with existing RMM vendors, if Apple could make it dead-simple to deploy and manage Macs, it could help them dramatically in businesses.
3) Expand their business hardware. This is tough, because I understand that Apple had some good reasons to drop their Xserve line, but they could help their chances in business adoption if they were to expand their offerings to offer more of a full stack. Having a supported method of running OSX on server hardware is one direction, but I would take a different tack: Buy Meraki from Cisco to make a line of cloud-controlled network devices, including firewalls, NAS devices, and wireless access points. This even ties into #2 (better remote administration), since they could tie Meraki's MDM in with iCloud, and create a method of tracking devices, deploying software and settings, having remote control, etc. They could create a single-pane-of-glass to manage a whole network of Mac devices. Add in some directory services and SSO, and you've got a stew going.
I don't have an internal information, but when internal information has been leaked, the general answer has tended to be "it's complicated". It could be that they're planning a major redesign that will require retooling their factories, and they were more focused on that. It could be that the new chipsets don't have adequate support for some feature or port that Macs rely on. It could be that the new chips change the heat dissipation profile, requiring a redesign of the internal systems of the device. It could be that they swapped in the new chips and didn't see enough of a tangible improvement to justify screwing with their supply chain.
I think part of the issue is that Apple has really turned the computer into more of an appliance, which is something that people had talked about for many years. For a long time, computers were coming up with faster models every year and people saw value in constant upgrades. People wanted to compare the experience of buying computers with that of buying a TV or a washing machine. Washing machines companies might come out with new models, but there was usually not anything so groundbreaking that would lead you to trash your perfectly good washing machine in favor of a new one. A lot of people felt that computers should be the same way.
Meanwhile, the feature set of computers has stabilized, and often a computer from several years ago is sufficiently fast to do the things you'll do on a computer. The value of having a new machine is diminished. People are often buying computers more because their old one broke after the warranty ran out, or just because a new one is more cool, rather than actually needing new features that weren't available on previous models.
Although they haven't explicitly said it, I think Apple's marketing shows that they think we've reached the state of "appliance" computing. Apple comes out with new models periodically, but is far less focused on the specifics on gigahertz or chipsets. These are the "Skylake" Macbooks, they're the "Mid 2016" Macbooks that are essentially the same design as the previous version. It's basically that Apple doesn't want you to care what chipset is in your Mac any more than you'd care what chipset is in your TV.
Also ironic because Microsoft spent years squashing competition and innovation in the tech industry. Now the guy responsible complains that we don't have enough innovation.
All logic and semantics be damned; the law is clear.
The logic is pretty clear, too: It's not theft. Theft is when you take something away from another person. If I have a painting, and you take it away from me, that's theft. If I have a painting, and you look at it and derive pleasure from looking at it, that's not theft. It doesn't matter if I intended to sell you tickets, or use the painting in some commercial setting, looking at it still isn't theft. Taking a picture so you can look at it later is not theft. Even if I sell copies of that picture, I still haven't stolen the painting. If I paint a copy of the painting and sell that fake painting as the real thing, that's still technically not theft. Forgery, yes. Fraud? Sure. Theft? No.
Did you miss the part where I said, "If Microsoft wants to collect telemetry so badly, they could at least do stuff like this, which would actually help people"?
Great, so if you know what you're doing you can pour through some obscure file in a directory that we tell users never to look in. Why not provide something remotely helpful?
Like ok, maybe you can't do much analysis on the BSOD itself because the system has crashed, but then maybe it could launch an application by default, on the following boot, that would analyze the dump against known issues and provide some guess as to what went wrong. That's just off the top of my head, but I certainly feel like it would be helpful if the next time you booted after the BSOD, it could say, "This looks like the crash was caused by [whatever].sys, which seems to be related to your [whichever piece of hardware] driver. You may want to try updating that driver." Theoretically, MS could even collect this information across systems and say, "Lots of other people with the same version of the driver have experienced similar crashes, but the problem appears to be fixed in there new driver, which can be downloaded here:" and then link to it.
That level of analysis is possible, even if not incredibly easy. If Microsoft wants to collect telemetry so badly, they could at least do stuff like this, which would actually help people.
I'm really just speaking for myself here. I can only speculate that others might have had similar experiences to me, but I definitely don't know what people are doing on Facebook or why.
Essentially, I signed up for Facebook because it was a good way of keeping in touch with peers-- old college friends and current friends. Relatively close friends. I posted whatever I wanted, and didn't think much about it. Then I friended some people who weren't really friends, but more like acquaintances. It didn't change things much. Some of my cousins friended me, but only ones that were roughly my age, so that was fine. Then-- I remember this one event pretty clearly-- one of my aunts friended me. I was really torn. On the one hand, I did not want her to invade the my Facebook social circle. I would have to watch what I said to a much larger degree. Still, I wanted to keep in touch with her, and I couldn't think of a polite way to say "no", so I accepted her friend request.
After that, my parents friended me. Then coworkers. Then bosses-- and by that time, I was careful enough about what I posted that I just accepted without thinking too much about it. I was already careful not to post anything too controversial or inappropriate, so I wasn't too afraid of my boss seeing it. And I was kind of friendly with my boss, so... whatever.
Still, I posted things on Facebook. Nothing very personal. I posted photos that I would be ok with being public. I posted pretty inoffensive thoughts that I thought might be interesting or funny. But then something else started to happen. I don't know if it was because of a cultural shift or just that my network his some sort of critical mass of different viewpoints, but I couldn't post anything without someone getting butthurt. I'd post a comment about Net Neutrality, and one of my conservative uncles would start spamming me with comments about how Net Neutrality was a communist plot to destroy businesses. I'd post something about a video game, and I'd get responses relating to GamerGate. I'd mention that I'd gotten a new iPad and one person bring up the problems in Apple's Chinese factories, and another person would comment, "Apple is for fags. Android 4ever."
I'm exaggerating a little, but not that much. Even innocuous comments had random people coming out of the woodwork to make nasty comments. It wasn't just liberal people or conservative people, Democrats or Republicans, friends from the city or redneck friends. There wasn't really a common thread. Everyone had just gotten much more serious, much less unwilling to read comments in a way that gave you the benefit of the doubt, and much more hostile. Sometimes they were my friends, sometimes friends of friends, and sometimes people I didn't know at all (e.g. commenting on one of my friend's posts, someone I didn't know would yell at me for something or other). The whole thing became so unpleasant that I just stopped. I didn't see the value in posting.
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by this year's WWDC and the lack of any new hardware announcements, etc.
The WWDC is the WorldWide Developers Conference. They usually don't announce new hardware in the WWDC because the audience of the conference are developers, and they're announcing the new features in their operating systems because they're about to release new developer previews and SDKs, so that developers can start working on supporting the new OS. They then often announce a bunch of new hardware in October that will actually run the new OS.
Right, that's what I was going to bring up. Microsoft changed the popup to a banner, but I don't think that's really the problem. The problem is that they also have a nearly identical banner that pops up unnecessarily under different circumstances. So they spend a few years training people to just hit "Enable" whenever the banner pops up, meanwhile making that "Enable" button the only security against malicious macros.
It's a perfect example of "what not to do". You'd think Microsoft would have learned by now.
See, I kind of think of it in the opposite way. What I want most from consoles is just the fact that I don't have to wonder "will it run?" It would make sense to me if Sony released a new Playstation model every year with better capabilities, but maintaining compatibility. Sort of like what smartphone vendors do-- Apple releases a new iPhone every year, but I don't have to buy all new apps every time I get a new iPhone. With every new iPhone, I get something a little faster and with new features, but apps almost always work with an iPhone that's a few years old. I don't have to buy a new iPhone every year, but I can if I want to.
I agree with you up until the "nothing to see here" part. You're right in pointing out that this is a relatively normal thing to do given that Microsoft develops one of the most widely used hypervisors, but it's still noteworthy because Microsoft has spent decades refusing to do these kinds of "normal things".
I don't know about this particular setup, but I've thought for a while that as computing gets faster and smaller, it might make a lot of sense to have something like this.
The eventual/possible use case would be that for a lot of people, your phone could be your computer. Take it everywhere with you. When you want a full monitor/keyboard/mouse, you drop it into a dock and suddenly you have a fully functioning desktop computer. Or maybe you have a "dock" that's basically shaped like a laptop, but you snap your phone into it (through whatever mechanism) and you have a laptop.
So why would you want to do this? Well, you're already carrying a computer around with you all the time, so why just have that be your primary computer? Phone are getting to the point (or have gotten to the point) of having enough CPU, graphics processing power, and storage to serve as a primary computer for a lot of users. By doing everything on a single computer, you don't have to worry about syncing your documents, applications, and settings all over the place. Each person would have one computer.
The OS would need to be able to present a UI appropriate for the display size and input device present at the time, but iOS is already largely the same OS as MacOS. Google is working on unifying Android and ChromeOS. Apparently Ubuntu has made a version of their Linux distro for phones. Having these operating systems switch to an appropriate UI shouldn't be very hard.
And even if the phone device is a little underpowered, if you used Thunderbolt (or something like it) for the docking connection, you could basically have a dock that not only provided a connection to a larger screen, keyboard, and mouse, but the dock could also include a faster video card, or other devices that basically connect as though their internal devices.
My personal opinion is that application developers are generally misguided and developing stupid applications. I make a point to occasionally look around at what apps are available on different platforms, and with all the glut of apps, they're generally not aimed at solving problems that need to be solved. There's always another runner game, or someone trying to make the next Angry Birds. For some reason, there have been a lot of new mail clients for OSX/iOS recently. There are a bunch of task/todo list apps that don't offer distinct features. Every once in a while, you'll see a bunch of apps released that seem to be taking aim at a particularly successful app-- Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever.
So you take an existing app, rehash it with some gimmick, and hope to sell that for millions of dollars. Sometimes the existing app is actually useful (e.g. email), but often enough the app is silly and gimmicky to begin with (e.g. Flappy Bird). But in any case, the app doesn't add any value, and doesn't solve the problems with the existing app. And then a month later, some other developer has a newer more gimmicky app that also doesn't solve any problems with the original app. Or maybe it does solve some problems, but creates new ones.
Now, there's a very good argument against my complaints: Even though I'm saying these apps are silly and useless, they seem to be what people want. The reason there are so many Flappy Bird clones is because so many people are buying them. However, if the problem now is that people aren't buying the apps, then I have a new counter-argument to that: No, people aren't buying them.
It all just makes me sad because I work in IT, and I see problems every day that need to be solved. There's so much work that needs to be done, and all our money and development talent is going towards trying to make the next Snapchat.
Sure, a species evolved to an undersea environment faces challenges in getting to their surface and beyond...
I also wonder how long it would take for an undersea lifeform to think about the larger universe. There's a lot of historical reason to say that our scientific progress has been driven, in various ways, by the curiosity formed when looking up at the stars and other celestial bodies. You don't see those if you're under water. You might not even see those if you had a different kind of atmosphere.
Whenever the topic gets to alien life forms, everyone assumes that the aliens must be advanced compared to us and have mastered interstellar, maybe even intergalactic, travel.
There's an even more fundamental assumption that alien life forms are interested in building technology and speaking with aliens on other planets. Not only do I see no reason to assume that aliens *can* communicate with us or travel to meet us, I don't see any reason to think that they would *want to*. We can start by looking at some of the other intelligent animals on our planet: chimps, dolphins, and octopuses.
Although I'm sure some people would point out the distinction that these animals are not *as smart* as we are, but even taking that for granted, it's not clear that the distinction is really about brainpower. If you could genetically engineer an octopus to have greater brain-power, I'm not sure it would respond by seeking to communicate with other planets. An intelligent being that was, for some reason, unable to see the stars, might never develop theories about space. They might have a dramatically different understanding of life and the universe, which leads them away from the idea of exploring space.
Even within our own species, there are plenty of people who think that trying to communicate with aliens is stupid, that we should throw away our technology and live "closer to nature." I don't think it's unimaginable to think that a very intelligent alien race might generally take this point of view.
There's actually some validity to this method. As long as no potential hackers have access to your "yellow stickies", you should be safe.
Everyone always makes a big deal about the idea "you shouldn't write down your passwords". Really though, the problem is that if you write down your password, then even the most secure password is now only as safe as the medium you've written it on. If it's a notebook locked in a safe, that might be pretty good. If you're trying to protect that account from someone who has access to the same safe, then it's not so good. But it's about equally as good as the security of that safe.
It's a bit strange to me to ask the question, "Why do you want a smart-TV when you can just buy a Raspberry Pi?" Because then I'd need to figure out and set up a Raspberry Pi, obviously. It may be that it sounds to you like a fun project, but a lot of people don't want to go through that process. I don't want a media center computer, adding another device that I need to manage and update, I just want the simplest way to watch Netflix without worrying about yet another device.
Now I'm playing the devil's advocate a little here. I have a Smart TV because the TV model I wanted at the time I was shopping for TVs came with those features. I don't use it, because I use an Apple TV (if I weren't in Apple's ecosystem for other reasons, I'd probably have gone with a Roku box). If there were a TV with a built-in Apple TV, I might buy that as a matter of simplification and convenience, but if I kept two separate devices, it would probably be so that I could upgrade the "smart" components without upgrading the screen. Still, if it were an option to have a TV with the Apple TV components integrated, I might go for that, just to make things really simple.
All I want is to watch Netflix/Hulu. As long as it has that functionality, I want the simplest, easiest, most elegant, and most trouble-free method of doing that. I suspect that many people have a similar approach to the problem.
Also, many people have argued that effective terrorists don't try to do damage, but instead try to elicit a reaction. In the grand scheme of things, killing a handful of people doesn't do much damage to a civilization. However, if you can kill that same handful of people in a manner that's shocking and sensational enough, you might cause a large overreaction, and that overreaction by the civilization might do quite a lot of damage. It's kind of like a bee sting. By itself, a single bee sting won't kill you-- unless you're allergic, in which case your body's own overreaction will kill you.
So with minimal effort and money, a terrorist will kill a few people, and in response we'll panic, vote idiots into office, and spend billions/trillions of dollars on various forms of ineffective "security", and then declare ourselves to have won the exchange.
I'm not sure what your objection is about. It looks like this is a form of multi-factor authentication. The 2FA du jour is to either send an SMS or have an encryption key on your phone-- in both cases, the second factor is your phone. So you can't use that 2FA for signing into your phone.
So what's the solution that you'd like?
See, on the one hand, what you're describing is exactly why I think FOSS is so important. Rather than getting held hostage in the upgrade treadmill, you could just pay a programmer to maintain your current codebase. Your business is stuck running on Windows XP? If it were open source, some programmers could make a business out of providing required patched and updates. Great.
On the other hand, as an IT person, I have violent hatred towards companies who run their business on a jenky old custom app that only runs on out-of-date systems. Yes, it's a big, expensive, complex, scary project to take your business-critical application that hasn't been touched since 1996 and make it run on modern infrastructure. That's why you never should have let it get to this point. If you have a business-critical custom-built application, you should have a plan for keeping it updated and running on modern infrastructure. You should not be waiting 20 years before you invest money into updating it. If it's too fragile to migrate to a new server running a new OS, then it's too fragile to be business-critical. If you can't run your business without that fragile and terrifying app, then you should not feel good about the way you're running your business.
But won't it then turn into a scary computer virus?
I support this change. I've had multiple instances over the years where I'm filling out a complicated form, try to erase a couple characters by hitting the backspace key, and found myself going to previous pages and wiping out the work that I'd done. Honestly, I don't use the "Back" button enough to need a shortcut.
Now if only Macs would stop using the two-finger trackpad swipe gesture as a shortcut for back/forward buttons. I know you can turn it off (and I do on any Mac I sit down at), but the two-finger swipe is already used for scrolling, and it's a stupid move to have the same gesture do two different things in the same app.
...but then you run into the older workers who have to start over on a new career path.
I know what you mean, but older workers can still learn new things. They may have experience that's still relevant in other fields. People are living longer and a lot of people are working longer, so it's not insane to think that someone over 40 years old could start a new career. In fact, I suspect that part of the reason people often don't change careers later in life is less about their inability to do so, and more because it's just so daunting-- the idea of starting at the bottom, working alongside and competing with 23 year-olds. If we could provide better resources and pathways for changing careers, it might be more common.
The best solution I could think of would be an increased unemployment insurance tax... Workers over 50 would get some kind of long term unemployment compensation...
This gets more into my more general point, which is that we're already dealing with some problems with unemployment, underemployment, job training, and job placement. If more and more jobs and industries become obsolete due to technological advancement, those problems may well get much worse. We tend to act as though people who are unemployed deserve to be unemployed-- that they're lazy, stupid, or inherently worthless-- and that there's no reason to do anything to help them. However, in a world where there just aren't enough jobs to go around, we may have to look into some way of allowing those people a livable lifestyle (e.g. minimum guaranteed income).
Another possibility is that there could be too few unskilled/low-education jobs, while there's a shortage of workers with the required skills. Or just as likely, as technology advances, it may be that the skills needed in the workforce are changing quickly and people need to change jobs/careers even more frequently. I think we've started to see some of that already.
Now, if I had to guess, something much more stupid is also much more likely: we might just keep inventing work to do in order to fill the void. As goods and services are cheaper and more plentiful, people are willing to spend more money on more labor-intensive goods and services as a luxury. This is already happening. People with more money spend extra to get locally-crafted hand-made artisanal goods. There's also a lot of money flowing into what's basically busy-work, for example all the money flowing into startups to make fad-driven mobile apps.
This is a good point, but I also wonder if there will always be another industry for workers to go into. In your example, people left the farm to work in factories. More recently, factories became more automated, and now a lot of people work in the service industry. There's been talk about automating some of that (e.g. self-driving trucks, drones for deliveries, completely automated fast-food restaurants), so people with those jobs will have to look elsewhere. Maybe there will be a new industry for them to move into, and maybe another after that....
But after a while, couldn't you eventually run out of jobs that need doing? I'm sure there will always be some jobs that need to be done, but the number of jobs that can't be done better by automated equipment might shrink quite a bit in the next few decades, or the next could of centuries. Most likely, it will hit the jobs that are mostly automated already, which tend to be low-skill and low-education, so those are the groups that will generally be hit hardest and fastest. However, I'm sure there are some high-education high-paying jobs out there that an AI could take on, and some very skilled and highly educated people may also find themselves suddenly out of a job.
So I think there's still a question: As we make jobs obsolete through technology, what do we do with the people who lose their jobs? In the short-term, I think it would make sense to focus on have cheap/free job training to allow them to move to other jobs and other industries. In the longer-term, we may want to consider how to distribute resources in a world where there are far more people than there are jobs.
But it's all-metal. Isn't that why people like Apple laptops, because the casing is metal?
I agree with you, more or less. Essentially, I think there are a lot of areas where Apple could invest and make a big difference to dramatically improve their offerings. If I had my choice I'd start with making their existing products more appealing for business use:
1) Fix the problems with OSX. If you've had to support Macs, you've probably run into a couple problems that have been there for years, with no clear solution. Accessing file shares is slow and buggy. Their mail application tends to die when dealing with a lot of messages. Apple should just invest in fixing those things.
2) Make it easy to manage Macs in bulk. Right now there aren't a lot of good RMM options for Mac. JAMF is absolute shit. You can roll your own stuff with FOSS tools, but that takes quite a bit of knowledge. Apple has some Enterprise programs that are overly complex for small businesses. Whether they work to improve and integrate the FOSS tools, build their own cloud service, or work with existing RMM vendors, if Apple could make it dead-simple to deploy and manage Macs, it could help them dramatically in businesses.
3) Expand their business hardware. This is tough, because I understand that Apple had some good reasons to drop their Xserve line, but they could help their chances in business adoption if they were to expand their offerings to offer more of a full stack. Having a supported method of running OSX on server hardware is one direction, but I would take a different tack: Buy Meraki from Cisco to make a line of cloud-controlled network devices, including firewalls, NAS devices, and wireless access points. This even ties into #2 (better remote administration), since they could tie Meraki's MDM in with iCloud, and create a method of tracking devices, deploying software and settings, having remote control, etc. They could create a single-pane-of-glass to manage a whole network of Mac devices. Add in some directory services and SSO, and you've got a stew going.
I don't have an internal information, but when internal information has been leaked, the general answer has tended to be "it's complicated". It could be that they're planning a major redesign that will require retooling their factories, and they were more focused on that. It could be that the new chipsets don't have adequate support for some feature or port that Macs rely on. It could be that the new chips change the heat dissipation profile, requiring a redesign of the internal systems of the device. It could be that they swapped in the new chips and didn't see enough of a tangible improvement to justify screwing with their supply chain.
I think part of the issue is that Apple has really turned the computer into more of an appliance, which is something that people had talked about for many years. For a long time, computers were coming up with faster models every year and people saw value in constant upgrades. People wanted to compare the experience of buying computers with that of buying a TV or a washing machine. Washing machines companies might come out with new models, but there was usually not anything so groundbreaking that would lead you to trash your perfectly good washing machine in favor of a new one. A lot of people felt that computers should be the same way.
Meanwhile, the feature set of computers has stabilized, and often a computer from several years ago is sufficiently fast to do the things you'll do on a computer. The value of having a new machine is diminished. People are often buying computers more because their old one broke after the warranty ran out, or just because a new one is more cool, rather than actually needing new features that weren't available on previous models.
Although they haven't explicitly said it, I think Apple's marketing shows that they think we've reached the state of "appliance" computing. Apple comes out with new models periodically, but is far less focused on the specifics on gigahertz or chipsets. These are the "Skylake" Macbooks, they're the "Mid 2016" Macbooks that are essentially the same design as the previous version. It's basically that Apple doesn't want you to care what chipset is in your Mac any more than you'd care what chipset is in your TV.
Also ironic because Microsoft spent years squashing competition and innovation in the tech industry. Now the guy responsible complains that we don't have enough innovation.
All logic and semantics be damned; the law is clear.
The logic is pretty clear, too: It's not theft. Theft is when you take something away from another person. If I have a painting, and you take it away from me, that's theft. If I have a painting, and you look at it and derive pleasure from looking at it, that's not theft. It doesn't matter if I intended to sell you tickets, or use the painting in some commercial setting, looking at it still isn't theft. Taking a picture so you can look at it later is not theft. Even if I sell copies of that picture, I still haven't stolen the painting. If I paint a copy of the painting and sell that fake painting as the real thing, that's still technically not theft. Forgery, yes. Fraud? Sure. Theft? No.
Did you miss the part where I said, "If Microsoft wants to collect telemetry so badly, they could at least do stuff like this, which would actually help people"?
Great, so if you know what you're doing you can pour through some obscure file in a directory that we tell users never to look in. Why not provide something remotely helpful?
Like ok, maybe you can't do much analysis on the BSOD itself because the system has crashed, but then maybe it could launch an application by default, on the following boot, that would analyze the dump against known issues and provide some guess as to what went wrong. That's just off the top of my head, but I certainly feel like it would be helpful if the next time you booted after the BSOD, it could say, "This looks like the crash was caused by [whatever].sys, which seems to be related to your [whichever piece of hardware] driver. You may want to try updating that driver." Theoretically, MS could even collect this information across systems and say, "Lots of other people with the same version of the driver have experienced similar crashes, but the problem appears to be fixed in there new driver, which can be downloaded here:" and then link to it.
That level of analysis is possible, even if not incredibly easy. If Microsoft wants to collect telemetry so badly, they could at least do stuff like this, which would actually help people.
I agree.
I'm really just speaking for myself here. I can only speculate that others might have had similar experiences to me, but I definitely don't know what people are doing on Facebook or why.
Essentially, I signed up for Facebook because it was a good way of keeping in touch with peers-- old college friends and current friends. Relatively close friends. I posted whatever I wanted, and didn't think much about it. Then I friended some people who weren't really friends, but more like acquaintances. It didn't change things much. Some of my cousins friended me, but only ones that were roughly my age, so that was fine. Then-- I remember this one event pretty clearly-- one of my aunts friended me. I was really torn. On the one hand, I did not want her to invade the my Facebook social circle. I would have to watch what I said to a much larger degree. Still, I wanted to keep in touch with her, and I couldn't think of a polite way to say "no", so I accepted her friend request.
After that, my parents friended me. Then coworkers. Then bosses-- and by that time, I was careful enough about what I posted that I just accepted without thinking too much about it. I was already careful not to post anything too controversial or inappropriate, so I wasn't too afraid of my boss seeing it. And I was kind of friendly with my boss, so... whatever.
Still, I posted things on Facebook. Nothing very personal. I posted photos that I would be ok with being public. I posted pretty inoffensive thoughts that I thought might be interesting or funny. But then something else started to happen. I don't know if it was because of a cultural shift or just that my network his some sort of critical mass of different viewpoints, but I couldn't post anything without someone getting butthurt. I'd post a comment about Net Neutrality, and one of my conservative uncles would start spamming me with comments about how Net Neutrality was a communist plot to destroy businesses. I'd post something about a video game, and I'd get responses relating to GamerGate. I'd mention that I'd gotten a new iPad and one person bring up the problems in Apple's Chinese factories, and another person would comment, "Apple is for fags. Android 4ever."
I'm exaggerating a little, but not that much. Even innocuous comments had random people coming out of the woodwork to make nasty comments. It wasn't just liberal people or conservative people, Democrats or Republicans, friends from the city or redneck friends. There wasn't really a common thread. Everyone had just gotten much more serious, much less unwilling to read comments in a way that gave you the benefit of the doubt, and much more hostile. Sometimes they were my friends, sometimes friends of friends, and sometimes people I didn't know at all (e.g. commenting on one of my friend's posts, someone I didn't know would yell at me for something or other). The whole thing became so unpleasant that I just stopped. I didn't see the value in posting.