Furthermore, we could recognize that the function of the Internet is now much closer to city sewage
I don't think this is true. There are many different use cases for internet and I don't see why they should be treated the same. For instance, at work we essentially flood an internet link with data that we send to The Clouds (we use more than one cloud because it's easier than making a decision). For maybe $500/month the company could get dedicated links (such as DirectConnect) but since we can get by with the regular internet access at a flat rate, the bandwidth is maxed out 24x7, and fuck the idiots who try to Facebook from the office.
Case in point: today before punching out I started a job to upload multiple copies of Wikipedia (minus the talk pages) to our beloved Clouds so useless people can run spark code copy-pasted from stackOverflow and pretend to do data science. This corporate traffic is slowing down your pornhub streaming if you happen to live between our office and wherever the fuck our overpriced cloudbuntus are hosted.
Another example: as I type this, I'm streaming a Netflix documentary in full HD even though I'm not really watching, and I can hear the spotify playlist blasting music to an empty room down the hall. Meanwhile, I have machines crunching numbers for an open data project which will maybe help someone down the road as they do scientific research, and someone sitting 10 ft from me is writing an outraged yelp review about the sushi place because they forgot to send wasabi with the rest of their crap.
All those bytes are equal? One big sewer line for all, no matter what you dump in there or what kind of shit you're contributing to the steaming pile?
We need evil Russians, that's the only way we can keep the content of leaked DNC emails buried under a thick layer of mass hysteria. They're also very convenient as a distraction for people who still have their panties in a bunch because they lost their elections to a reality TV star.
Running all new wiring to every home, in every neighborhood, in every city, is a boondoggle of epic proportions. It's an enormous expense that no private business can justify.
They could justify it, if they could use it to provide a competitive advantage to other LOB, or at least rent it on their own terms to other providers like Netflix. But that would be beyond evil - even worse than not having a diversity hiring program - so instead we're all enjoying the excellent services provided by existing ISP and their crumbling networks.
Perhaps recent changes in the Commander in Chief have resulted in changes to how these fiber optic assets are being used and accounted for?
Or perhaps Google has no way to make money on this since citizens demand net neutrality as well as high speed and zero downtime, but instead of considering that you fall back on your default narrative, which is to blame Trump?
This is again a side effect of net neutrality. Heavy infrastructure costs + regulations on what the fuck you can do with that infrastructure = death sentence for ISP.
There's no reason for a company to keep pouring money in that kind of bottomless pit. It's not with the handful of dollars they're getting in subscriptions that they're going to pay for all that infrastructure. So Google is smart to pull out now, just like they're going to pull out from drones when they become heavily regulated.
I'm all for net neutrality on paper, but in real life it's just not going to work.
Let's all remember the little red hen.
Once upon a time there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered some grains of wheat. She called her neighbors and said ‘If we plant this wheat, we shall have bread to eat. Who will help me plant it?’
“Not I, “said the cow.
“Not I,” said the duck.
“Not I,” said the pig.
“Not I,” said the goose.
“Then I will,” said the little red hen. And she did. The wheat grew tall and ripened into golden grain. “Who will help me reap my wheat?” asked the little red hen.
“Not I,” said the duck.
“Out of my classification,” said the pig.
“I’d lose my seniority,” said the cow.
“I’d lose my unemployment compensation,” said the goose.
“Then I will,” said the little red hen, and she did.
At last the time came to bake the bread. “Who will help me bake bread?” asked the little red hen.
“That would be overtime for me,” said the cow.
“I’d lose my welfare benefits,” said the duck.
“I’m a dropout and never learned how,” said the pig.
“If I’m to be the only helper, that’s discrimination,” said the goose.
“Then I will,” said the little red hen.
She baked five loaves and held them up for the neighbors to see.
They all wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share. But the little red hen said, “No, I can eat the five loaves myself.”
“Excess profits,” cried the cow.
“Capitalist leech,” screamed the duck.
“I demand equal rights,” yelled the goose.
And the pig just grunted.
And they painted “unfair” picket signs and marched round and around the little red hen shouting obscenities.
When the government agent came, he said to the little red hen, “You must not be greedy.”
“But I earned the bread,” said the little red hen.
“Exactly,” said the agent. “That’s the wonderful free enterprise system. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as he wants. But under our modern government regulations productive workers must divide their products with the idle.”
And they lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who smiled and clucked, “I am grateful, I am grateful.” But her neighbors wondered why she never again baked any more bread.
If they send a robot, we will lose the opportunity to look at the driver name in the tracking app and get in stalker mode if it sounds even vaguely like a girl name.
When I saw your comment I remembered you as a low-added-value contributor that I usually ignore. Just to be sure I went to see your posting history, and yes, in the latest 14 posts you've accused people of being fascists or nazis 8 times, and basically called people stupid or morons over and over.
There's never an actual point in your comments, never a counter-argument, just shallow insults. It's like you're afraid to say anything of substance because it would allow people to disagree with you, so instead you just heckle from the peanuts gallery.
Free yourself from this fear, Plumpysnatch, and add even a tiny bit of content in your posts. The world is dying to drink at this well of wisdom hidden behind your smug, shallow replies.
For the record, Dell has basically invented mass customization. Their manufacturing agility has been copied by their Asian suppliers, and that's how today we get such a rich ecosystem of computer vendors.
And if you ever have to work in enterprise IT (which you clearly don't), Dell are as good as it gets; their inventory management system is terrific, allowing you to download updated drivers for all the components you've cherry-picked during the customization process even years later, thanks to their tag system that other vendors have tried to copy but failed. Dell also makes it immensely convenient for companies to keep a running bill instead of having to pay huge sums upfront, making it easier to align your payments with the depreciation period and with the EOL. When you buy high end equipment, they tell you exactly how many spare parts they keep and how far they are. They were the first major vendor to offer (and support) Linux on their servers. They're a great IT vendor.
So go play with your consumer-grade junk backed by disorganized, incompetent support, and feel free to keep being smug about it.
The MBP 2016 keyboard with "butterfly" scissor switches also have wider keys with smaller gaps between them - and smaller gaps also make many typists press two keys at once more often by mistake.
Key spacing, key gaps, curvature, travel to actuation -- all those measurements that classic keyboards have, they were not grabbed out of thin air. They were developed after many studies of actual typists back in the typewriter era.
I think you're missing the play here. Have you seen how kids text nowadays? They don't lift their fingers, it's all gesture and swiping. Apple is just paving the way to sell small iPhones and big iPhones, and call the big ones "Macbook".
Houston votes (D). It's half black and hispanic and a lot of the whites that live in the city are properly guilt ridden professional class, government and academic types that mindlessly support every tenet of the progressive world view.
No, you're just a hate filled liberal sperging out on the interwebs. Please don't stop; the more visible you people are the better.
Sounds like you've got your diatribe well expressed too. Let he who is without sin and all that...
It's not a diatribe. You'll see that one day if you free yourself from the Clinton doll you've got up your ass. ( <- that is a diatribe, see the difference?)
if you look at it, the Macbook is thinner, lighter, more powerful, has a better screen, and uses higher quality parts than the $300 Dell laptop
No they don't. Dell has a 7-day inventory turnover for parts, they're always on the forefront of components. On the other hand, Apple "refreshes" its Mac hardware every 5 years, if that. They probably already have the parts for the shiny, bleeding-edge new Mac you'll buy in 2023.
Ugly fonts, retarded window maximizing, and a title bar that's a liability on large screens. If you don't see those as massive idiocy in terms of UX, you're in denial.
That's absurd. First, did you read it before saying that it was a "disruptive" email, or are you just one of those phonies who repeat things they don't know shit about? People who repeat their shallow understanding of biased news reports remind me of that coward security guard in The Stand who runs away from the lab and carries the disease in the wild.
Second, the guy was fired because the document was made public, not because it was sent to everyone in the company. He was basically thrown under the bus by his employer for the purpose of appeasing the deranged twitter mobs, of which I suspect you are a member.
That was maybe true with the current Netflix. But if Disney, AMC and others pull their content to have their own streaming service, what's left on Netflix is a handful of good shows and an ocean of garbage. That's basically the same model as the cable company and their shitty bundles.
The math isn't that hard. Shipping + processing + repair costs = not worth it. They're not going to spend $50 trying to fix a $100 product that they would have to discount heavily if sold as refurbished. And it's not cheap to get rid of tons of broken electronic widgets.
No they're not. The disney situation is an eye-opener. Suppose you're already paying for netflix; now all the disney content goes away, so you have to not only pay another monthly fee to another company, but you also have to deal with a whole other platform. Are disney going to have good mobile apps, plus a web viewer, plus apps for smart TVs, plus console apps? Unlikely.
Then BBC will do the same, and AMC, and CBS, and pretty soon you've got 6 or 7 streaming services with narrow offerings, shaky infrastructure and buggy apps. And they'll all stuff their channel with thousands of hours of meaningless low-budget crap to complement their 3 good shows. That's how you end up with shows like Backyard Bounty or terrible subtitled korean dramas on Netflix.
We all know that cable companies shove unwanted junk down the throat of their customers with their packages and bundles, but having 9 different streaming services is not the answer.
Usually at all time I have a pair of email accounts: one from outlook.com or gmail, and one from some random provider like gmx or yandex. I setup a redirect from one to the other so I only have to monitor one. For online services I use the first one; with friends and such I use the 2nd account.
Outlook.com is fairly buggy; for instance password reset emails sent to @outlook.com often don't show up (not even in spam), although if automatic mail forwarding is enabled they mysteriously show up in the destination account. I have experienced that behavior with Netflix and other services. So I never use outlook.com as a main account, but I do use it as a buffer because they allow multiple (free) aliases per mailbox.
For files I switch between dropbox, box.com, google drive and onedrive. I use Fedora and some of those don't sync well on Linux so I have a Windows VM. For a while I was using a Windows server on AWS for that; it was starting/stopping on a schedule just to run a few hours every weekend and sync, it was very cheap. But now I stick with a local VM that has a volume shared with the host; it also acts as my print server (I have a shitty wifi winprinter for stuff like contracts or taxes).
Google is fairly convenient to move away from. There's a page (Google takeout) where you can get a zip of everything you want to keep. Others are not as nice so I typically setup Thundebird with pop3 (not imap) to download my mails before pulling the plug.
I use portable versions of browsers and mail clients so the identity is fairly self-contained. For various reasons I have a small group of social media puppets (all tied to a main buffer.com account) and each has its own portable browser so I'm fairly well organized for that. I use keepassx to keep track of various passwords and email addresses.
I used to factory-reset my phone when I switched identities but nowadays I mostly get my apps from F-Droid (and sometimes aptoide) so it's not really tied to Google, I can swap accounts easily.
Overall it's a painless process. When I'm ready to switch, I stop the forwarding between my two old accounts, but I setup forwarding between my old "friends & family" account to the new one so I can gently switch people over by replying from the new address. I used to have Facebook; back then I would close my account and open a new one, then refriend the handful of people I really wanted to hear from. But it's been a while since my last Facebook account.
I've never had big problems because I don't close the email accounts, I let them rot. I just delete all the emails once I have a backup. I'd say the biggest annoyance is when I sign up for a service with a Google account; some don't let you easily switch to another form of login. Typically I close that service and reopen under the new name.
In the past I had many services renewing automatically even if I had forgotten about them; stuff like cheap web hosting for an abandonned project, a virtual fax number on phaxio I no longer need, etc. Now since I sanitize my temporary identity before closing it I can spot those and cancel them.
For work stuff I do something different: I buy my own domain names (AWS; $9/year privacy included) and change my email addresses and/or domains on a regular basis, but I keep the same host (Office365, which unlike Google allows unlimited DNS aliases in the same $5/month account). Important stuff I backup on tarsnap, and less important stuff, git repos, etc. go on a pair of VPS found on lowendbox.com, which I change once or twice a year unless they shit themselves before.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, we could recognize that the function of the Internet is now much closer to city sewage
I don't think this is true. There are many different use cases for internet and I don't see why they should be treated the same. For instance, at work we essentially flood an internet link with data that we send to The Clouds (we use more than one cloud because it's easier than making a decision). For maybe $500/month the company could get dedicated links (such as DirectConnect) but since we can get by with the regular internet access at a flat rate, the bandwidth is maxed out 24x7, and fuck the idiots who try to Facebook from the office.
Case in point: today before punching out I started a job to upload multiple copies of Wikipedia (minus the talk pages) to our beloved Clouds so useless people can run spark code copy-pasted from stackOverflow and pretend to do data science. This corporate traffic is slowing down your pornhub streaming if you happen to live between our office and wherever the fuck our overpriced cloudbuntus are hosted.
Another example: as I type this, I'm streaming a Netflix documentary in full HD even though I'm not really watching, and I can hear the spotify playlist blasting music to an empty room down the hall. Meanwhile, I have machines crunching numbers for an open data project which will maybe help someone down the road as they do scientific research, and someone sitting 10 ft from me is writing an outraged yelp review about the sushi place because they forgot to send wasabi with the rest of their crap.
All those bytes are equal? One big sewer line for all, no matter what you dump in there or what kind of shit you're contributing to the steaming pile?
I hate the movie Blade Runner.
Then you just failed the test, replicant.
The name of the inventor on this patent is Steven T. "Trolan".
They're not even subtle about it!
We need evil Russians, that's the only way we can keep the content of leaked DNC emails buried under a thick layer of mass hysteria. They're also very convenient as a distraction for people who still have their panties in a bunch because they lost their elections to a reality TV star.
Running all new wiring to every home, in every neighborhood, in every city, is a boondoggle of epic proportions. It's an enormous expense that no private business can justify.
They could justify it, if they could use it to provide a competitive advantage to other LOB, or at least rent it on their own terms to other providers like Netflix. But that would be beyond evil - even worse than not having a diversity hiring program - so instead we're all enjoying the excellent services provided by existing ISP and their crumbling networks.
Perhaps recent changes in the Commander in Chief have resulted in changes to how these fiber optic assets are being used and accounted for?
Or perhaps Google has no way to make money on this since citizens demand net neutrality as well as high speed and zero downtime, but instead of considering that you fall back on your default narrative, which is to blame Trump?
This is again a side effect of net neutrality. Heavy infrastructure costs + regulations on what the fuck you can do with that infrastructure = death sentence for ISP.
There's no reason for a company to keep pouring money in that kind of bottomless pit. It's not with the handful of dollars they're getting in subscriptions that they're going to pay for all that infrastructure. So Google is smart to pull out now, just like they're going to pull out from drones when they become heavily regulated.
I'm all for net neutrality on paper, but in real life it's just not going to work.
Let's all remember the little red hen.
Once upon a time there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered some grains of wheat. She called her neighbors and said ‘If we plant this wheat, we shall have bread to eat. Who will help me plant it?’
“Not I, “said the cow.
“Not I,” said the duck.
“Not I,” said the pig.
“Not I,” said the goose.
“Then I will,” said the little red hen. And she did. The wheat grew tall and ripened into golden grain. “Who will help me reap my wheat?” asked the little red hen.
“Not I,” said the duck.
“Out of my classification,” said the pig.
“I’d lose my seniority,” said the cow.
“I’d lose my unemployment compensation,” said the goose.
“Then I will,” said the little red hen, and she did.
At last the time came to bake the bread. “Who will help me bake bread?” asked the little red hen.
“That would be overtime for me,” said the cow.
“I’d lose my welfare benefits,” said the duck.
“I’m a dropout and never learned how,” said the pig.
“If I’m to be the only helper, that’s discrimination,” said the goose.
“Then I will,” said the little red hen.
She baked five loaves and held them up for the neighbors to see.
They all wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share. But the little red hen said, “No, I can eat the five loaves myself.”
“Excess profits,” cried the cow.
“Capitalist leech,” screamed the duck.
“I demand equal rights,” yelled the goose.
And the pig just grunted.
And they painted “unfair” picket signs and marched round and around the little red hen shouting obscenities.
When the government agent came, he said to the little red hen, “You must not be greedy.”
“But I earned the bread,” said the little red hen.
“Exactly,” said the agent. “That’s the wonderful free enterprise system. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as he wants. But under our modern government regulations productive workers must divide their products with the idle.”
And they lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who smiled and clucked, “I am grateful, I am grateful.” But her neighbors wondered why she never again baked any more bread.
First, it's not just Google. It's most tech companies.
Second, Trumbo wasn't fired by the US government. He was fired by private companies who didn't want to look bad.
Same shit.
If they send a robot, we will lose the opportunity to look at the driver name in the tracking app and get in stalker mode if it sounds even vaguely like a girl name.
When I saw your comment I remembered you as a low-added-value contributor that I usually ignore. Just to be sure I went to see your posting history, and yes, in the latest 14 posts you've accused people of being fascists or nazis 8 times, and basically called people stupid or morons over and over.
There's never an actual point in your comments, never a counter-argument, just shallow insults. It's like you're afraid to say anything of substance because it would allow people to disagree with you, so instead you just heckle from the peanuts gallery.
Free yourself from this fear, Plumpysnatch, and add even a tiny bit of content in your posts. The world is dying to drink at this well of wisdom hidden behind your smug, shallow replies.
For the record, Dell has basically invented mass customization. Their manufacturing agility has been copied by their Asian suppliers, and that's how today we get such a rich ecosystem of computer vendors.
And if you ever have to work in enterprise IT (which you clearly don't), Dell are as good as it gets; their inventory management system is terrific, allowing you to download updated drivers for all the components you've cherry-picked during the customization process even years later, thanks to their tag system that other vendors have tried to copy but failed. Dell also makes it immensely convenient for companies to keep a running bill instead of having to pay huge sums upfront, making it easier to align your payments with the depreciation period and with the EOL. When you buy high end equipment, they tell you exactly how many spare parts they keep and how far they are. They were the first major vendor to offer (and support) Linux on their servers. They're a great IT vendor.
So go play with your consumer-grade junk backed by disorganized, incompetent support, and feel free to keep being smug about it.
Have you watched the movie Trumbo? Because that's exactly what's happening.
The MBP 2016 keyboard with "butterfly" scissor switches also have wider keys with smaller gaps between them - and smaller gaps also make many typists press two keys at once more often by mistake.
Key spacing, key gaps, curvature, travel to actuation -- all those measurements that classic keyboards have, they were not grabbed out of thin air. They were developed after many studies of actual typists back in the typewriter era.
I think you're missing the play here. Have you seen how kids text nowadays? They don't lift their fingers, it's all gesture and swiping. Apple is just paving the way to sell small iPhones and big iPhones, and call the big ones "Macbook".
Houston votes (D). It's half black and hispanic and a lot of the whites that live in the city are properly guilt ridden professional class, government and academic types that mindlessly support every tenet of the progressive world view.
No, you're just a hate filled liberal sperging out on the interwebs. Please don't stop; the more visible you people are the better.
Sounds like you've got your diatribe well expressed too. Let he who is without sin and all that...
It's not a diatribe. You'll see that one day if you free yourself from the Clinton doll you've got up your ass. ( <- that is a diatribe, see the difference?)
The Touch Bar, if engineered right, can be very useful.
Mysteriously, you didn't provide actual examples of those useful things it could do.
if you look at it, the Macbook is thinner, lighter, more powerful, has a better screen, and uses higher quality parts than the $300 Dell laptop
No they don't. Dell has a 7-day inventory turnover for parts, they're always on the forefront of components. On the other hand, Apple "refreshes" its Mac hardware every 5 years, if that. They probably already have the parts for the shiny, bleeding-edge new Mac you'll buy in 2023.
Ugly fonts, retarded window maximizing, and a title bar that's a liability on large screens. If you don't see those as massive idiocy in terms of UX, you're in denial.
No, instead they force you to store it on their poorly protected cloud so retards can get a copy of your naughty pics. Much better.
That's absurd. First, did you read it before saying that it was a "disruptive" email, or are you just one of those phonies who repeat things they don't know shit about? People who repeat their shallow understanding of biased news reports remind me of that coward security guard in The Stand who runs away from the lab and carries the disease in the wild.
Second, the guy was fired because the document was made public, not because it was sent to everyone in the company. He was basically thrown under the bus by his employer for the purpose of appeasing the deranged twitter mobs, of which I suspect you are a member.
That was maybe true with the current Netflix. But if Disney, AMC and others pull their content to have their own streaming service, what's left on Netflix is a handful of good shows and an ocean of garbage. That's basically the same model as the cable company and their shitty bundles.
Maybe, but at least I'm not European.
The math isn't that hard. Shipping + processing + repair costs = not worth it. They're not going to spend $50 trying to fix a $100 product that they would have to discount heavily if sold as refurbished. And it's not cheap to get rid of tons of broken electronic widgets.
Europe is basically bankrupt and Australia's GDP is 8 times smaller than Mexico's. You can keep your modern standards, for what they're worth.
It's 2017 and those are 90's arguments.
No they're not. The disney situation is an eye-opener. Suppose you're already paying for netflix; now all the disney content goes away, so you have to not only pay another monthly fee to another company, but you also have to deal with a whole other platform. Are disney going to have good mobile apps, plus a web viewer, plus apps for smart TVs, plus console apps? Unlikely.
Then BBC will do the same, and AMC, and CBS, and pretty soon you've got 6 or 7 streaming services with narrow offerings, shaky infrastructure and buggy apps. And they'll all stuff their channel with thousands of hours of meaningless low-budget crap to complement their 3 good shows. That's how you end up with shows like Backyard Bounty or terrible subtitled korean dramas on Netflix.
We all know that cable companies shove unwanted junk down the throat of their customers with their packages and bundles, but having 9 different streaming services is not the answer.
Usually at all time I have a pair of email accounts: one from outlook.com or gmail, and one from some random provider like gmx or yandex. I setup a redirect from one to the other so I only have to monitor one. For online services I use the first one; with friends and such I use the 2nd account.
Outlook.com is fairly buggy; for instance password reset emails sent to @outlook.com often don't show up (not even in spam), although if automatic mail forwarding is enabled they mysteriously show up in the destination account. I have experienced that behavior with Netflix and other services. So I never use outlook.com as a main account, but I do use it as a buffer because they allow multiple (free) aliases per mailbox.
For files I switch between dropbox, box.com, google drive and onedrive. I use Fedora and some of those don't sync well on Linux so I have a Windows VM. For a while I was using a Windows server on AWS for that; it was starting/stopping on a schedule just to run a few hours every weekend and sync, it was very cheap. But now I stick with a local VM that has a volume shared with the host; it also acts as my print server (I have a shitty wifi winprinter for stuff like contracts or taxes).
Google is fairly convenient to move away from. There's a page (Google takeout) where you can get a zip of everything you want to keep. Others are not as nice so I typically setup Thundebird with pop3 (not imap) to download my mails before pulling the plug.
I use portable versions of browsers and mail clients so the identity is fairly self-contained. For various reasons I have a small group of social media puppets (all tied to a main buffer.com account) and each has its own portable browser so I'm fairly well organized for that. I use keepassx to keep track of various passwords and email addresses.
I used to factory-reset my phone when I switched identities but nowadays I mostly get my apps from F-Droid (and sometimes aptoide) so it's not really tied to Google, I can swap accounts easily.
Overall it's a painless process. When I'm ready to switch, I stop the forwarding between my two old accounts, but I setup forwarding between my old "friends & family" account to the new one so I can gently switch people over by replying from the new address. I used to have Facebook; back then I would close my account and open a new one, then refriend the handful of people I really wanted to hear from. But it's been a while since my last Facebook account.
I've never had big problems because I don't close the email accounts, I let them rot. I just delete all the emails once I have a backup. I'd say the biggest annoyance is when I sign up for a service with a Google account; some don't let you easily switch to another form of login. Typically I close that service and reopen under the new name.
In the past I had many services renewing automatically even if I had forgotten about them; stuff like cheap web hosting for an abandonned project, a virtual fax number on phaxio I no longer need, etc. Now since I sanitize my temporary identity before closing it I can spot those and cancel them.
For work stuff I do something different: I buy my own domain names (AWS; $9/year privacy included) and change my email addresses and/or domains on a regular basis, but I keep the same host (Office365, which unlike Google allows unlimited DNS aliases in the same $5/month account). Important stuff I backup on tarsnap, and less important stuff, git repos, etc. go on a pair of VPS found on lowendbox.com, which I change once or twice a year unless they shit themselves before.