As the old saying goes, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. So, just think for a brief moment: who do you go to, to find out how to save the money? Thatâ(TM)s right: accountants. But what does IT tell you that they desperately need, whenever you go to them? Thatâ(TM)s right: more money. And so, since people generally tend to listen more intently to (and spend more money on) someone who is already telling them what they want to hear, and nobody really wants to hear from the guy who is always costing them money, it shouldnâ(TM)t be a mystery when corporate funds are increasingly diverted to accounting, and away from IT.
Facebook now says that [Cambridge Analytica] collected data about [87 million] users without their permission...
And Facebook is attempting to rewrite the script after the fact, by using very careful phrasing to imply that Cambridge Analytica is the real villain here... not Facebook.
<sarcasm>Because clearly Facebook is just as much a victim in this debacle as are all of their users... it's not as though they left this huge gaping hole in the security of their system, and the folks over at Cambridge just basically waltzed right in using only the most basic of social engineering tactics... no, nothing like that at all!</sarcasm>
Considering how frequently they just summarily reboot the Spiderman franchise, clearly the movie of which you speak will actually be identified as the fourth Spiderman 1... and it'll be a total Anime-styled CGI remake of the 2002 Tobey Maguire Spiderman, which means that it'll be an absolute hit everywhere except for the megalopolis of Japan -- where the locals will have finally outgrown such childish things in favor of the more refined and artistic animation styles of classic Simpsons episodes.
... To the contrary, I think it's important that we don't all get Stockholm syndrome, and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me."
The problem with this argument is that it represents a certain degree of hypocrisy; Zuckerberg is implying that services which take your money are only in it to get more of your money. But as the ads on Facebook become more pervasive, it's very clear that Facebook is likewise interested in the same progression... they're just getting there by a different path, that's all. Further, The Zuck is trying to throw out a red herring to sidestep the entire conversation about privacy, and about the collection, sale and leaks of user data, both public and private.
On the other hand, it's clearly in Cook's best interest to "kick 'em while they're down," as Apple has attempted more than once to make their own forays into social media, because they're highly interested in all of that juicy (and profitable) user data, as well... but they -- and likewise Google -- have been somewhat stymied by the competitive and highly entrenched offerings available from Facebook.
So really, who do we put more of our trust in? The mega-company which sells us cool toys at huge markups, and attempts to collect tons of data through those toys about our music/movie/television/gaming/reading/etc habits, in order to attempt to market more digital stuff to us that we'll probably like? Or the mega-company which attempts to connect us online to every single person, place, company or activity that we've ever had any contact with in our life, and which aggregates all of that into tons of data, in order to sell it en-mass to other mega-companies... so that they can attempt to market stuff to us that we'll probably like?
I'm not even kidding... that's actually a tough call.
You know, she might theoretically have been right about her being the inspiration for that one character... but it seems obvious that the reason she lost is because she got greedy, and pushed the comparison much, much too far. It was the absolute pinnacle of vanity for her to try to claim that basically all of the blond females likewise had to've been "stolen" from her.
Know your limits, people. Push things too far, and you're gonna fall right off the cliff... and ain't nobody gonna try to catch you, either.
... he is not permitted to send any messages that could interfere with the South American nation's relations with other countries....
Frankly, if this is really what he agreed to upon entry... than it was a surprisingly ignorant stipulation. Anyone who even has a passing familiarity with his work (which could be established with a simple google search and two minutes of research) would readily comprehend that the only way that they could possibly have prevented him from interfering with their relations with other countries would have been to not let him in the front door in the first place. It's as though they had no understanding of what "harboring a fugitive" actually means; you take this action, and the government bodies who want his ass in jail will be upset with you. That's not exactly a hard leap to make.
So, I glance at the/. feed, and I see one article about Android being more safe... and the very next article is about Google having just recently been fooled into serving up malicious ads -- and apparently not for the first time, either.
Uh huh. I'm sure you'll forgive me, Google, if I'm more than a wee bit skeptical of the veracity of your latest marketing materials...
I already have so many different shows queued up in Netflix, that I can't even keep up with them all... so I'm not so much interested in finding new shows/movies to watch, right now. There are, however, quite a few movies (not available on Netflix) which I wouldn't mind picking up, but I'm not so much interested in paying top dollar for them... so the only thing I'm really interested in tracking is sales on those movies. So towards that end, I happened upon an app called CheapCharts*, which tracks sales on iTunes. The default behavior drives you towards their list of all movies that are on sale... but it also gives you the option to shut off tracking of media types that you don't care about, which reduces the cruft a bit, and it gives you an option to create a "wishlist" of movies/shows/music that you're specifically hoping to buy, so that you know when they go on sale.
Since downloading CheapCharts months ago, I've only seen sales for four of the multitude of movies from my wishlist, so the sales I'm looking for aren't exactly frequent... but at least I'll have a chance at catching them, when they finally do go on sale.
* Addendum: The app is also available for Android -- and logically enough, the Android version also tracks media sales on Amazon -- though, it seems to me that Movies Anywhere makes the source of your purchases a bit of a moot point, at least where movies are concerned.
That argument is quite a leap beyond logic and reason. It sounds a little bit to me like if someone had tried to suggest that Apple was abandoning removable media when they started shipping the iMac with no internal floppy drive. Removing one largely unused and/or obsolete feature does not suggest that the entire product is going to be killed.
Mind you, as buggy as iTunes is, it seems likely that this particular leap really boils down to wishful thinking from Apple's biggest fans and/or biggest critics -- which are often one-and-the-same people, by the way -- but I'm afraid there are far too many things which still require iTunes, for it to be discontinued entirely, this early in the game.
It seems to me that there's an awful lot of misinformation here. Cookies have been given a bad name, because the moment they sprung into existence, they were misused and/or abused by advertisers and marketers. The reality is, cookies aren't going away at all... they're just being used more inline with their original intent, that's all. A cookie gives any standard web browser (including those on mobile devices) the feature of storing small chunks of identifying personal data ("login" data) for the user currently using that browser, in order to allow that user to personalize their experience on any given website. (If you're using a mobile app instead of a browser, than that app obviously doesn't need cookies; it can just use local memory natively to store your login credentials.) The abuse started when advertisers realized that they didn't need you to actively "login" to their service, in order to identify you and track you with cookies. Naturally, people don't like it when someone tracks them without first asking for permission... but that's not the cookies fault; they're just tools. A hammer is still intended to be used on nails, even when someone with no scruples uses it on your toes -- but nobody ever blames the hammer for that, and rightly so.
So in other words, "people based marketing" just means that the service you're actively logging into (such as Google, for example) has successfully established themselves as the primary marketer, and they've made arrangements to sell all of your activity to advertisers. Likewise, those advertisers no longer see much return-on-investment in doing the heavy lifting of attempting to gather all of that activity data themselves, in part because so many people have gone to great lengths to stop those advertisers from doing so. Which brings us back to simple the fact that: you're really the product that's being marketed, and the advertisers are the customers. (Which is just as it has always been, really.)
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
"... he's being charged for a 25 megabit per second download speed... and he's actually getting less than one tenth of that," said Andrew Wilkie,... "In other words, people are getting worse than dial-up speed..."
So, for those of us who still remember surfing the web over actual dial-up -- or even for those of you who can look up those speeds and do a little bit of really easy math -- the peak speed of a legacy POTS based dial-up modem connection was 56kbps. One-tenth of 25mbps would still be 2.5mbps, which is roughly on the order of 2500kbps. So unless that "less than one tenth" quote really meant less than one thousandth... those broadband users are probably still getting dramatically faster speeds than dial-up.
Mind you, the exaggerated performance figures routinely offered up by ISPs is indeed a yuuuuuge problem... but when Mr. Wilkie uses his own set of exaggerated numbers to illustrate the severity of the problem, all he's really doing is undermining his own credibility -- which, make no mistake, the ISPs will almost certainly recognize and point out, in their rebuttal.
Absolutely right -- jobs are in serious jeopardy, doggone-it! We all have to panic right friggin' now, before anyone brings up buggy whips!
(Ummmm.... so nobody heard me say that last part, right? Whew... that's a relief. I mean, my blatantly obvious attempt at irrational fear mongering would totally flop, if anyone brings that up.)
... and it's a total non-starter in this, otherwise all Apple, household, because it's simply too expensive to risk setting out in the open, in a house full of highly destructive children. Honestly, nothing at all about the HomePod seems to take into account typical multi-member households, and yet the keystone feature seems to want to shout, "Share my wonders with all your friends!"
Such a shame. But, ya know... perhaps next year's revision will be worth a look, eh?
If you plan on keeping your OS up-to-date, than I would highly recommend that you keep an eye out for -- nay, even seek out -- these warning messages. I had an experience with my iPhone, which I view as a bit of foreshadowing here:
I was participating in the iOS beta program, and I pretty much ignored the iOS 10 obsolescence warnings, even though I knew better. That meant that I was essentially blazing the trail, so there were no user stories online to enable me to learn from the mistakes of other people... so when I updated to iOS 11 and all of those apps ceased to function, I actually found myself in a bit of a pickle. It was over a single app: an older "Notes" type app, dating from well before Apple's own Notes app had incorporated several of the more useful features that it now has. So this old app had a bunch of old personal notes in it, which I wanted to recover... but there was no possibility that this app was ever going to be updated for iOS 11, because it had long since been removed entirely from Apple's App Store.
Now, I'm a geek with multiple spare devices lying around, so my own little pickle was resolved -- but not exactly easily, and any number of things could have gone wrong to prevent me from succeeding: Since it too me awhile to realize what I'd lost, I first had to hunt through Time Machine to find the last iOS 10 backup of my iPhone. I then copied that into the iTunes backup repository, grabbed an older iPhone which hadn't been updated to 11 yet, used iTunes to restore the old backup to that surrogate device, and then restored the app itself from the legacy iTunes app repository, where it was (fortunately) still lurking. (I also had to do a bit of research to see if that last step was still even possible, given that Apple had already disabled app management in iTunes awhile back; thankfully, you can still simply drag-and-drop existing app backups onto your iPhone within iTunes.) After some trial and error, I was finally able to get into the app and recover all of my old notes.
So ultimately, I sort'a got lucky, because I just happened to have all of the pieces in exactly the right place to enable such a recovery. (If my iOS backups had been in the cloud instead of on my Mac, or if I hadn't been using Time Machine, or if I hadn't had an old device at hand, or if that old device hadn't had the right version of iOS on it, or if... etc, etc, ad nauseam.) So keeping all of that in mind, I have very little confidence that such a scenario would play out with similar success upon updating my Mac... and there are probably far more legacy apps there than there were on my iPhone.
So, this time around, if Apple provides some type of compatibility list for all of the legacy apps on my Mac -- as they had done in iOS 10 -- then I'll be paying quite a bit more attention to what's on that list, so that I can salvage my old data before doing so becomes a practical impossibility.
Let's ignore the obvious correlation is not causation argument for a brief moment, and skip to the other major plot hole in this story: To whom are they comparing these reckless Hotmail.com users? What e-mail service represents a lower incidence of automotive accidents?
Reading below the fold in that article (which requires registration -- but not confirmation of that registration, so any fake e-mail address will do fine) seems to reveal that this was a simple a|b study, comparing Hotmail.com users to Gmail.com users, where Gmail was consistently quoted lower prices. But what about Yahoo.com? How about Microsoft.com? Are you less likely to get in an accident if you're employed by Microsoft, as opposed to just signing up for their incredibly commonly used free webmail service? And for that matter, why on earth is one common free webmail service supposedly a lower risk factor than the other?
Honestly, there's actually a lot wrong with this story -- not the least of which is the perplexing lack of detail in the reporting itself.
Cognitive bias is the single largest corrupting factor in any given study, and the hardest to genuinely remove from the study. The result is that researchers are essentially absolute egotists; the only reason that they're conducting their research in the first place is because they're already convinced that they're right, and they just want to prove it to the rest of the world. Likewise for any researcher who attempts to disprove another researchers conclusion... after all, why would the go to the trouble, if they weren't already convinced that they could successfully disprove the conclusion?
That said: if there is indeed any kind of correlation between the introduction of smartphones and tanking levels of happiness, I tend to wonder if perhaps the researchers were looking to the wrong core cause. For myself, I happen to know that my own happiness has taken a nosedive, since my wife learned how to use Find My iPhone to ensure that I'm not taking any unnecessary junk food detours or the like, before heading home from work...
What would happen if all the major commercial software developers forced this model on everyone simultaneously?
This seems like the wrong question, to me -- because we're already fast approaching that point. That said, the direct answer is still pretty clear: most people will simply buy dramatically less software for personal use, and leach off of their corporate use licenses instead. (It was already happening to a small degree with perpetual licenses... but that trend will quickly become the norm rather than the exception.)
What if the whole idea of being able to "purchase" a perpetual license for ANY commercial software went away completely, and it was subscription only from that point on?
That is the right question... and the answer, (quite unironically) is that new companies will sprout up and offer perpetual licenses, in an attempt to fill the void. Chances are they'll do pretty darn well too, since they'll be able to charge what would previously have seemed like absolutely ridiculous prices for their wares while still undercutting the subscription licenses.
So the question we have to ask ourselves is: what do you do when Big Brother turns out to be very real indeed... but repeatedly gets their facts wrong?
Because that's essentially what we're faced with, at this point.
... So if the company is raising the fee, you can bet that it discovered the current $10.99 was just not sustainable....
I honestly think the original authors reasoning here is rather a naive view of things, likely drawn directly from Amazon's press release where they attempted to justify the higher prices. It seems far more likely that the new $12.99 per month fee does exactly two things, and nothing more: 1) it only minimally impacts the number of users who will cancel their monthly Prime subscription, and 2) it positively impacts the number of customers who will upgrade their Prime subscription to the yearly model -- which cascades into improved long-term potential profits for Amazon, through increased customer spending over the course of the year. Honestly, it's one of the simplest economic formulae in the book: Increase the price until you've maximized profit potential.
And make no mistake: those monthly fees were indeed already a profit center. If you think otherwise, than you're probably drinking a bit too heavily from Amazon's Kool-Aid.
There's a component which I believe is missing from this story: Apple purchased PrimeSense back in 2013, which is the company which used to license the Kinect sensor array technology to Microsoft. Apple is now using the same patented tech in their FaceID system on the iPhone X.
Those are the facts; now on to the speculation: I would expect the licenses which previously covered the Kinect have since expired, and the two companies have been unable to negotiate mutually beneficial license terms, going forward. (Or to put it more bluntly: Apple probably just told Microsoft to kindly shove it.) Further, Microsoft no doubt knew this was coming well before now, so Microsoft has probably spent the past several years investigating whether or not it could forge a way ahead for the Kinect which does not rely upon the PrimeSense patents... and this new information seems to imply that they never found one.
Okay; so I'm going to have to question the plausibility of this one... not because I don't think that the media moguls and other statistics happy people out there aren't interested in collecting this data on us, but rather, because I'm skeptical of just how fruitful such a venture might be. Consider the scenario being described: The situation is, you're watching TV and playing a game on your phone at the same time. Of course, many of us probably do exactly that now and then -- but when that happens, how often are you doing it alone?
Personally, when I'm alone watching a movie or show, it's usually streaming to the iPad in my lap... with headphones plugged into it. So this method of consumer intel gathering from a game on my phone would fail entirely, in my scenario -- and I seriously doubt that I'm alone in indulging in this form of private viewing.
If you're not watching that movie or TV show alone, than there is a reasonable bet that you don't always get your say as to what everyone watches. Targeted ads in that scenario will be decidedly hit-or-miss. And (again, my own personal experience, but probably not all that unique) frequently in my case, I'm specifically playing a game on my phone because I didn't pick the show that's on... and I have no interest in that show at all. The targeted ads could fail rather spectacularly, in this scenario. (Da heck am I seeing stupid football ads in my game, for? Ain't I already sufferin' enough, listening to all these drunk idiots cheering around me??)
So sure; maybe someone is out there, trying to use this method to gather data on consumers... but I certainly wouldn't want to be them, personally. It sounds to me like a very frustrating way to try to make a living, with continually decreasing returns over the course of time.
Mind you, if we're talking about a "game" which in reality is attempting to always eavesdrop on you, even when the game itself is not loaded... well, the scenarios I've described would basically have to be immediately tossed by the wayside, because that's a whole separate level of creepy privacy invasion. "He hears you when you're jacking... he knows when you have nightmares... he knows the secrets that you spill when you're talking in your sleep... sooooo you better watch out..." (Shudder!)
Slashdot Mirror
As the old saying goes, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. So, just think for a brief moment: who do you go to, to find out how to save the money? Thatâ(TM)s right: accountants. But what does IT tell you that they desperately need, whenever you go to them? Thatâ(TM)s right: more money. And so, since people generally tend to listen more intently to (and spend more money on) someone who is already telling them what they want to hear, and nobody really wants to hear from the guy who is always costing them money, it shouldnâ(TM)t be a mystery when corporate funds are increasingly diverted to accounting, and away from IT.
Facebook now says that [Cambridge Analytica] collected data about [87 million] users without their permission...
And Facebook is attempting to rewrite the script after the fact, by using very careful phrasing to imply that Cambridge Analytica is the real villain here... not Facebook.
<sarcasm>Because clearly Facebook is just as much a victim in this debacle as are all of their users... it's not as though they left this huge gaping hole in the security of their system, and the folks over at Cambridge just basically waltzed right in using only the most basic of social engineering tactics... no, nothing like that at all!</sarcasm>
(Or, ya know... maybe it's exactly like that.)
Spiderman 8? Well, aren't you the idealist?
Considering how frequently they just summarily reboot the Spiderman franchise, clearly the movie of which you speak will actually be identified as the fourth Spiderman 1... and it'll be a total Anime-styled CGI remake of the 2002 Tobey Maguire Spiderman, which means that it'll be an absolute hit everywhere except for the megalopolis of Japan -- where the locals will have finally outgrown such childish things in favor of the more refined and artistic animation styles of classic Simpsons episodes.
... To the contrary, I think it's important that we don't all get Stockholm syndrome, and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me."
The problem with this argument is that it represents a certain degree of hypocrisy; Zuckerberg is implying that services which take your money are only in it to get more of your money. But as the ads on Facebook become more pervasive, it's very clear that Facebook is likewise interested in the same progression... they're just getting there by a different path, that's all. Further, The Zuck is trying to throw out a red herring to sidestep the entire conversation about privacy, and about the collection, sale and leaks of user data, both public and private.
On the other hand, it's clearly in Cook's best interest to "kick 'em while they're down," as Apple has attempted more than once to make their own forays into social media, because they're highly interested in all of that juicy (and profitable) user data, as well... but they -- and likewise Google -- have been somewhat stymied by the competitive and highly entrenched offerings available from Facebook.
So really, who do we put more of our trust in? The mega-company which sells us cool toys at huge markups, and attempts to collect tons of data through those toys about our music/movie/television/gaming/reading/etc habits, in order to attempt to market more digital stuff to us that we'll probably like? Or the mega-company which attempts to connect us online to every single person, place, company or activity that we've ever had any contact with in our life, and which aggregates all of that into tons of data, in order to sell it en-mass to other mega-companies... so that they can attempt to market stuff to us that we'll probably like?
I'm not even kidding... that's actually a tough call.
You know, she might theoretically have been right about her being the inspiration for that one character... but it seems obvious that the reason she lost is because she got greedy, and pushed the comparison much, much too far. It was the absolute pinnacle of vanity for her to try to claim that basically all of the blond females likewise had to've been "stolen" from her.
Know your limits, people. Push things too far, and you're gonna fall right off the cliff... and ain't nobody gonna try to catch you, either.
... he is not permitted to send any messages that could interfere with the South American nation's relations with other countries. ...
Frankly, if this is really what he agreed to upon entry... than it was a surprisingly ignorant stipulation. Anyone who even has a passing familiarity with his work (which could be established with a simple google search and two minutes of research) would readily comprehend that the only way that they could possibly have prevented him from interfering with their relations with other countries would have been to not let him in the front door in the first place. It's as though they had no understanding of what "harboring a fugitive" actually means; you take this action, and the government bodies who want his ass in jail will be upset with you. That's not exactly a hard leap to make.
So, I glance at the /. feed, and I see one article about Android being more safe... and the very next article is about Google having just recently been fooled into serving up malicious ads -- and apparently not for the first time, either.
Uh huh. I'm sure you'll forgive me, Google, if I'm more than a wee bit skeptical of the veracity of your latest marketing materials...
I already have so many different shows queued up in Netflix, that I can't even keep up with them all... so I'm not so much interested in finding new shows/movies to watch, right now. There are, however, quite a few movies (not available on Netflix) which I wouldn't mind picking up, but I'm not so much interested in paying top dollar for them... so the only thing I'm really interested in tracking is sales on those movies. So towards that end, I happened upon an app called CheapCharts*, which tracks sales on iTunes. The default behavior drives you towards their list of all movies that are on sale... but it also gives you the option to shut off tracking of media types that you don't care about, which reduces the cruft a bit, and it gives you an option to create a "wishlist" of movies/shows/music that you're specifically hoping to buy, so that you know when they go on sale.
Since downloading CheapCharts months ago, I've only seen sales for four of the multitude of movies from my wishlist, so the sales I'm looking for aren't exactly frequent... but at least I'll have a chance at catching them, when they finally do go on sale.
* Addendum: The app is also available for Android -- and logically enough, the Android version also tracks media sales on Amazon -- though, it seems to me that Movies Anywhere makes the source of your purchases a bit of a moot point, at least where movies are concerned.
That argument is quite a leap beyond logic and reason. It sounds a little bit to me like if someone had tried to suggest that Apple was abandoning removable media when they started shipping the iMac with no internal floppy drive. Removing one largely unused and/or obsolete feature does not suggest that the entire product is going to be killed.
Mind you, as buggy as iTunes is, it seems likely that this particular leap really boils down to wishful thinking from Apple's biggest fans and/or biggest critics -- which are often one-and-the-same people, by the way -- but I'm afraid there are far too many things which still require iTunes, for it to be discontinued entirely, this early in the game.
It seems to me that there's an awful lot of misinformation here. Cookies have been given a bad name, because the moment they sprung into existence, they were misused and/or abused by advertisers and marketers. The reality is, cookies aren't going away at all... they're just being used more inline with their original intent, that's all. A cookie gives any standard web browser (including those on mobile devices) the feature of storing small chunks of identifying personal data ("login" data) for the user currently using that browser, in order to allow that user to personalize their experience on any given website. (If you're using a mobile app instead of a browser, than that app obviously doesn't need cookies; it can just use local memory natively to store your login credentials.) The abuse started when advertisers realized that they didn't need you to actively "login" to their service, in order to identify you and track you with cookies. Naturally, people don't like it when someone tracks them without first asking for permission... but that's not the cookies fault; they're just tools. A hammer is still intended to be used on nails, even when someone with no scruples uses it on your toes -- but nobody ever blames the hammer for that, and rightly so.
So in other words, "people based marketing" just means that the service you're actively logging into (such as Google, for example) has successfully established themselves as the primary marketer, and they've made arrangements to sell all of your activity to advertisers. Likewise, those advertisers no longer see much return-on-investment in doing the heavy lifting of attempting to gather all of that activity data themselves, in part because so many people have gone to great lengths to stop those advertisers from doing so. Which brings us back to simple the fact that: you're really the product that's being marketed, and the advertisers are the customers. (Which is just as it has always been, really.)
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
So this quote presents a bit of an issue:
"... he's being charged for a 25 megabit per second download speed ... and he's actually getting less than one tenth of that," said Andrew Wilkie, ... "In other words, people are getting worse than dial-up speed ..."
So, for those of us who still remember surfing the web over actual dial-up -- or even for those of you who can look up those speeds and do a little bit of really easy math -- the peak speed of a legacy POTS based dial-up modem connection was 56kbps. One-tenth of 25mbps would still be 2.5mbps, which is roughly on the order of 2500kbps. So unless that "less than one tenth" quote really meant less than one thousandth... those broadband users are probably still getting dramatically faster speeds than dial-up.
Mind you, the exaggerated performance figures routinely offered up by ISPs is indeed a yuuuuuge problem... but when Mr. Wilkie uses his own set of exaggerated numbers to illustrate the severity of the problem, all he's really doing is undermining his own credibility -- which, make no mistake, the ISPs will almost certainly recognize and point out, in their rebuttal.
Absolutely right -- jobs are in serious jeopardy, doggone-it! We all have to panic right friggin' now, before anyone brings up buggy whips!
(Ummmm.... so nobody heard me say that last part, right? Whew... that's a relief. I mean, my blatantly obvious attempt at irrational fear mongering would totally flop, if anyone brings that up.)
... and it's a total non-starter in this, otherwise all Apple, household, because it's simply too expensive to risk setting out in the open, in a house full of highly destructive children. Honestly, nothing at all about the HomePod seems to take into account typical multi-member households, and yet the keystone feature seems to want to shout, "Share my wonders with all your friends!"
Such a shame. But, ya know... perhaps next year's revision will be worth a look, eh?
If you plan on keeping your OS up-to-date, than I would highly recommend that you keep an eye out for -- nay, even seek out -- these warning messages. I had an experience with my iPhone, which I view as a bit of foreshadowing here:
I was participating in the iOS beta program, and I pretty much ignored the iOS 10 obsolescence warnings, even though I knew better. That meant that I was essentially blazing the trail, so there were no user stories online to enable me to learn from the mistakes of other people... so when I updated to iOS 11 and all of those apps ceased to function, I actually found myself in a bit of a pickle. It was over a single app: an older "Notes" type app, dating from well before Apple's own Notes app had incorporated several of the more useful features that it now has. So this old app had a bunch of old personal notes in it, which I wanted to recover... but there was no possibility that this app was ever going to be updated for iOS 11, because it had long since been removed entirely from Apple's App Store.
Now, I'm a geek with multiple spare devices lying around, so my own little pickle was resolved -- but not exactly easily, and any number of things could have gone wrong to prevent me from succeeding: Since it too me awhile to realize what I'd lost, I first had to hunt through Time Machine to find the last iOS 10 backup of my iPhone. I then copied that into the iTunes backup repository, grabbed an older iPhone which hadn't been updated to 11 yet, used iTunes to restore the old backup to that surrogate device, and then restored the app itself from the legacy iTunes app repository, where it was (fortunately) still lurking. (I also had to do a bit of research to see if that last step was still even possible, given that Apple had already disabled app management in iTunes awhile back; thankfully, you can still simply drag-and-drop existing app backups onto your iPhone within iTunes.) After some trial and error, I was finally able to get into the app and recover all of my old notes.
So ultimately, I sort'a got lucky, because I just happened to have all of the pieces in exactly the right place to enable such a recovery. (If my iOS backups had been in the cloud instead of on my Mac, or if I hadn't been using Time Machine, or if I hadn't had an old device at hand, or if that old device hadn't had the right version of iOS on it, or if... etc, etc, ad nauseam.) So keeping all of that in mind, I have very little confidence that such a scenario would play out with similar success upon updating my Mac... and there are probably far more legacy apps there than there were on my iPhone.
So, this time around, if Apple provides some type of compatibility list for all of the legacy apps on my Mac -- as they had done in iOS 10 -- then I'll be paying quite a bit more attention to what's on that list, so that I can salvage my old data before doing so becomes a practical impossibility.
Let's ignore the obvious correlation is not causation argument for a brief moment, and skip to the other major plot hole in this story: To whom are they comparing these reckless Hotmail.com users? What e-mail service represents a lower incidence of automotive accidents?
Reading below the fold in that article (which requires registration -- but not confirmation of that registration, so any fake e-mail address will do fine) seems to reveal that this was a simple a|b study, comparing Hotmail.com users to Gmail.com users, where Gmail was consistently quoted lower prices. But what about Yahoo.com? How about Microsoft.com? Are you less likely to get in an accident if you're employed by Microsoft, as opposed to just signing up for their incredibly commonly used free webmail service? And for that matter, why on earth is one common free webmail service supposedly a lower risk factor than the other?
Honestly, there's actually a lot wrong with this story -- not the least of which is the perplexing lack of detail in the reporting itself.
Cognitive bias is the single largest corrupting factor in any given study, and the hardest to genuinely remove from the study. The result is that researchers are essentially absolute egotists; the only reason that they're conducting their research in the first place is because they're already convinced that they're right, and they just want to prove it to the rest of the world. Likewise for any researcher who attempts to disprove another researchers conclusion... after all, why would the go to the trouble, if they weren't already convinced that they could successfully disprove the conclusion?
That said: if there is indeed any kind of correlation between the introduction of smartphones and tanking levels of happiness, I tend to wonder if perhaps the researchers were looking to the wrong core cause. For myself, I happen to know that my own happiness has taken a nosedive, since my wife learned how to use Find My iPhone to ensure that I'm not taking any unnecessary junk food detours or the like, before heading home from work...
Ya know... I'm just sayin'...
What would happen if all the major commercial software developers forced this model on everyone simultaneously?
This seems like the wrong question, to me -- because we're already fast approaching that point. That said, the direct answer is still pretty clear: most people will simply buy dramatically less software for personal use, and leach off of their corporate use licenses instead. (It was already happening to a small degree with perpetual licenses... but that trend will quickly become the norm rather than the exception.)
What if the whole idea of being able to "purchase" a perpetual license for ANY commercial software went away completely, and it was subscription only from that point on?
That is the right question... and the answer, (quite unironically) is that new companies will sprout up and offer perpetual licenses, in an attempt to fill the void. Chances are they'll do pretty darn well too, since they'll be able to charge what would previously have seemed like absolutely ridiculous prices for their wares while still undercutting the subscription licenses.
a - "Wow... 23.6 hours per week; that's just unbelievable, ya know?"
b - "Yeah, no kidding. That should totally be per day."
a - "What?"
b - "What?"
So the question we have to ask ourselves is: what do you do when Big Brother turns out to be very real indeed... but repeatedly gets their facts wrong?
Because that's essentially what we're faced with, at this point.
... So if the company is raising the fee, you can bet that it discovered the current $10.99 was just not sustainable. ...
I honestly think the original authors reasoning here is rather a naive view of things, likely drawn directly from Amazon's press release where they attempted to justify the higher prices. It seems far more likely that the new $12.99 per month fee does exactly two things, and nothing more: 1) it only minimally impacts the number of users who will cancel their monthly Prime subscription, and 2) it positively impacts the number of customers who will upgrade their Prime subscription to the yearly model -- which cascades into improved long-term potential profits for Amazon, through increased customer spending over the course of the year. Honestly, it's one of the simplest economic formulae in the book: Increase the price until you've maximized profit potential.
And make no mistake: those monthly fees were indeed already a profit center. If you think otherwise, than you're probably drinking a bit too heavily from Amazon's Kool-Aid.
There's a component which I believe is missing from this story: Apple purchased PrimeSense back in 2013, which is the company which used to license the Kinect sensor array technology to Microsoft. Apple is now using the same patented tech in their FaceID system on the iPhone X.
Those are the facts; now on to the speculation: I would expect the licenses which previously covered the Kinect have since expired, and the two companies have been unable to negotiate mutually beneficial license terms, going forward. (Or to put it more bluntly: Apple probably just told Microsoft to kindly shove it.) Further, Microsoft no doubt knew this was coming well before now, so Microsoft has probably spent the past several years investigating whether or not it could forge a way ahead for the Kinect which does not rely upon the PrimeSense patents... and this new information seems to imply that they never found one.
But nothing you've said mitigates my commentary, about false positives corrupting the accuracy of the collected data.
Okay; so I'm going to have to question the plausibility of this one... not because I don't think that the media moguls and other statistics happy people out there aren't interested in collecting this data on us, but rather, because I'm skeptical of just how fruitful such a venture might be. Consider the scenario being described: The situation is, you're watching TV and playing a game on your phone at the same time. Of course, many of us probably do exactly that now and then -- but when that happens, how often are you doing it alone?
Personally, when I'm alone watching a movie or show, it's usually streaming to the iPad in my lap... with headphones plugged into it. So this method of consumer intel gathering from a game on my phone would fail entirely, in my scenario -- and I seriously doubt that I'm alone in indulging in this form of private viewing.
If you're not watching that movie or TV show alone, than there is a reasonable bet that you don't always get your say as to what everyone watches. Targeted ads in that scenario will be decidedly hit-or-miss. And (again, my own personal experience, but probably not all that unique) frequently in my case, I'm specifically playing a game on my phone because I didn't pick the show that's on... and I have no interest in that show at all. The targeted ads could fail rather spectacularly, in this scenario. (Da heck am I seeing stupid football ads in my game, for? Ain't I already sufferin' enough, listening to all these drunk idiots cheering around me??)
So sure; maybe someone is out there, trying to use this method to gather data on consumers... but I certainly wouldn't want to be them, personally. It sounds to me like a very frustrating way to try to make a living, with continually decreasing returns over the course of time.
Mind you, if we're talking about a "game" which in reality is attempting to always eavesdrop on you, even when the game itself is not loaded... well, the scenarios I've described would basically have to be immediately tossed by the wayside, because that's a whole separate level of creepy privacy invasion. "He hears you when you're jacking... he knows when you have nightmares... he knows the secrets that you spill when you're talking in your sleep... sooooo you better watch out..." (Shudder!)
... They, therefore, suggest to apply it to all filmmakers, instead of criminalizing those who don't identify themselves as documentarians. ...
Cue abrupt chorus of voices, all saying, "I'm a filmmaker! I'm a filmmaker!"
This sounds an awful lot like your stereotypical "correlation is not causation" finding to me.