I think this is just the 80/20 split. Almost everybody goes home and sleeps almost every night. For the vast majority of cases, taking your watch off to charge it once every three days is no better than taking your watch off to charge it every night. And the tradeoff to get to three days is either a) a battery three times larger, b) a watch that is three times more power efficient, or c) lesser capability. A three day battery life isn't worth the sacrifices you'd have to make to get it.
I don't want to charge a watch every night!!
Why? What's so much better about taking your watch off every three nights instead of every night?
What exactly is the reason to have this as well, as opposed to pulling your phone out of your pocket?
I'm not inclined to wear a watch either, and I'm going to get one. My reasons are:
As you said, the alternative is pulling your phone out of your pocket. It's more convenient looking at your wrist, especially with the larger iPhone sizes. Ever had an extended iMessage group chat? It's a hassle looking at your phone every minute. Also, when you're going for a run, the difference between looking at your watch and looking at your phone is massive.
Apple Pay. It's convenient to just wave your wrist over a sensor to pay. It would be brilliant if this could replace Oyster cards for the London tube.
Health monitoring. Decent heart rate monitors are fairly expensive for what they are and are often a hassle to wear. If it's something I'm going to be paying for and wearing anyway, that's better than the standalone option.
Essentially, the company refuses to ban subreddits for being âoemorally badâ but will if they break any laws or any of the websiteâ(TM)s own rules.
Basically, they treat Reddit like DNS. Setting up a subreddit is like registering a domain name. What that domain name is used for is up to the owner. I'm sure if you asked registrars, they wouldn't feel obliged to be the moral police for people who use their services either.
That's not right at all. I've had that article pointed out to me before. The author is clueless.
iPhone sales are highly seasonal. A new iPhone gets released towards the end of the year, there's a big spike in sales, which tails off throughout the following year until the next iPhone is released, when the cycle starts again.
What articles like that do is point to the spike at the end of the year, when new iPhones are out and holiday sales are boosting the numbers as well, then point to the following three quarters which are naturally lower (including immediately before a new iPhone is released), and say that sales are "tapering off".
It makes no sense to do that. You aren't comparing like to like. You're comparing the most profitable time of year to the least profitable time of year. Of course sales are going to be lower if you look at it that way - it's true of any product that's seasonal. Would you assume that a suncream company is failing because you looked at their sales in winter and realised that they were selling a fraction of what they do in the summer?
The only sensible way to evaluate sales for seasonal products is to compare year-over-year sales. You compare this year's busy period to last year's busy period. You compare this year's quiet period to last year's quiet period. When you look at the iPhone sales like that - i.e. in the only way that makes sense - sales have never fallen. They have grown every year.
Why is some random naturalnews.com website I've never heard of and which is run by a single person more legitimate a source than Greenpeace?
More to the point, why haven't you read the sources I provided? Part of the point of the Greenpeace article I linked to is that Apple are making stronger pushes in this area and being more transparent. That article was published in 2014. Your article was published in 2011. So Greenpeace says that Apple are the leaders in the field and have strongly improved, and your article points out that they weren't always as good or open years ago. There's no contradiction there. All you are doing is showing that Apple have taken action and improved.
When somebody says 'the cloud', mentally replace it by 'somebody else's computer'.
Also, when somebody says "It's unclear how the images were obtained, but anonymous 4chan users said...", replace it with "It's unclear how the images were obtained."
Come on, since when are anonymous 4chan users a reliable source?
Again, like the other guy I responded to, you're setting up a no win situation. They don't support gay rights? They are unethical. They do support gay rights? It's just marketing.
Their CEO is widely believed to be gay and I'm sure a hell of a lot of their employees are gay as well. You're asking me to believe they aren't doing this out of principle at all? That's not the most plausible explanation here.
Enforcing worker rights in their contracts abroad.
Again, this is mainly a PR thing. People got upset (for the wrong reasons -- Apple's contract manufacturers may be bad employers by European or even American standards, but people in China appear to be happy to work for them) and Apple had to repair damage.
Nope, they actually started internal audits of their supply chain and generating public reports several years before all that happened. You can go and download them on their website and see for yourself.
Making their products environmentally friendly.
When will they be doing that?
They've been doing that for many years. Here's the info, specifically the products. Even Greenpeace are singing their praises, specifically, saying: Apple has put its money where its mouth is: Greenpeace's report, "Clicking Clean," found that the company's embrace of renewable energy is genuine, and is leading the technology sector.
Their entire product portfolio is based on planned obsolescence. They may be very proud of how much material they are saving by making critical parts as flimsy as possible, but in reality the reduced lifespan hurts the environment more than the minor savings help it.
This is just FUD. Apple hardware lasts a lot longer than the equivalent from their competitors. I've lost count of the number of laptops, PCs, and non-Apple smartphones I've seen people around me churn through while Apple users with the same needs just buy once or twice in the same time period.
Improving the privacy of their users
By storing all their personal data in a country that has effectively declared war on privacy? By secretly tracking their customers? Apple is doing the exact opposite of what you claim.
By forbidding abusive behaviour in the App Store. By removing application access to identifying information several times. By providing an alternative to third party analytics like Google Analytics that isn't driven by a market need to sell that data. By encrypting a whole bunch of things they aren't compelled to.
You're really setting up a no win situation here. If they don't perform positive ethical acts, then they are unethical. If they do, then it's just "brand management bullet points".
It's funny though, how we have two people here - one calling them unethical, and one pointing out ethical things that they have done - and you perceive this as "there's somebody here worshipping the brand". Not two people with different opinions. One person with a suspect opinion. That's an odd perception.
Also, if anybody is astroturfing, I'd lay my money on the anonymous coward and not the person with a Slashdot account that is several years old with excellent karma.
I hate apple (the corporation) because it seems their ethics are non-existent
Really? They seem to perform positive ethical acts quite regularly. Supporting gay rights. Enforcing worker rights in their contracts abroad. Making their products environmentally friendly. Improving the privacy of their users. Why do you think their ethics are non-existent?
Market share isn't the important factor though. iPhone sales have grown every year. Apple's profits have grown every year. They are the most profitable phone vendor by a long way. If that's failing, I'd love to fail as hard as Apple are.
Now on a mobile phone this would be a non-issue as the NFC could be configured to only respond under certain circumstances, e.g. entering a PIN number.
It's a safe bet that any new iPhones will have the fingerprint scanner built in that can be used for this purpose.
Given the nature of the mission and power source (multi-year if not multi-decade operation on another planet with no hope of human intervention if something should go wrong)
Curiosity was intended to last two years, it's been going for almost three. It wasn't intended to last this long, and it definitely wasn't intended to operate for decades.
iOS seems to have been last to join the flat look crowd.
It's not really accurate to say that iOS 7's design is flat. It actually has more depth than the earlier design, it's just that the individual items in each layer are flat.
So, for example, the Apple application's icons on the home screen are flat, but they are floating over a parallax background that gives the feeling of depth. The buttons in the control centre are flat, but the translucent background of the control centre gives the impression that it's sitting on top of the home screen.
Isn't there a short story about a songwriter who kills himself after losing a court case for plagiarism because there aren't any original melodies left?
And although many on Slashdot complain about the "Walled Garden", having an App store run by Apple itself provides some assurance to the customer that the App is legit and not some form of malware.
I don't think malware is particularly worrisome in the average user's mind. I think it's more about quality.
Speaking as an application developer, the vast majority of times I've had to say to clients "Apple won't allow that", it's been something that is self-serving and user-unfriendly if not downright abusive. Apple serve as a convenient foil for developers who care about users and stop developers who don't care from going too far.
As a developer, I know first hand how frustrating it is to have a great idea for something that Apple simply won't allow, but at the same time, I frequently see the benefit its policies bring to end users.
For instance, just the other day I saw a developer complain that a client wanted to force users to enter their personal information (e.g. age) before they could use the application, so that they could use it for marketing. Simple solution: Apple don't allow that. But Google does. How do you think policies like that are reflected in the average application quality?
Right now it's 8. It and 7 were wonderful improvements in CSS from IE 6
Not really. The only real difference between 6 and 7 from a CSS perspective was a few extra selectors and bug fixes. The real improvements came with version 8, which finally had full support for CSS 2.
Or which happens to be a valid image but has the same hash.
This is extremely unlikely. The whole point of hashes is that they collide as infrequently as possible.
So they got the warrant based on google reading his email?
He is a convicted child abuser who had a third party service provider independently notify the police that he was sending child pornography by email. Are you arguing that a judge shouldn't grant a search warrant under those circumstances?
Guess all the cops need for a warrant is for some throwaway email address to send a pic to your account.
Listen, if somebody tells you that you're saying dumb things because you didn't read the article, don't just say more dumb things without reading the article. The article clearly points out that Google detected it in an email he was sending, not receiving.
I've found it funny when I've made arguments about Google's ad scanning being something I didn't like, and people always came back with "but it's 100% automated and completely anonymous - no human ever looks at your mail".
I think that argument just got settled with this story - and I won.
No you didn't. If you had bothered to read the article, you would have seen that they detect things like this by using image hashing. It's an automatic process - unless you happen to be passing around images that are identical to known images of child pornography, at which point of course humans will get involved.
I really need to know more about whether this email triggered a thorough and careful investigation that led to the arrest of the person, or if the email WAS the trigger for his arrest.
Well, if you really need to know, then you could always read the article. It specifically states that he was arrested after police found other suspicious images on his computer (after obtaining a search warrant), and that he's a registered sex offender. Chances of this being a mistake are practically nil. All indications are that both Google and the police did their job properly, with judicial oversight.
Love how you just can take a single message, completely out of context, quote a bunch of text which is perfectly true, and claim it says anything about your use case.
It was a release announcement, it wasn't out of context, and it was entirely relevant.
Your bullshit is old, has been debunked multiple times over
How could you debunk the point I'm making when all I have to do is link to their own release announcement and point out what it says directly disagrees with you?
nothing but hot air from the camp of the other, abandoned desktop
Nope, I was using KDE from the 1.0 betas all the way to the 4.0 betas. I only switched to GNOME after the KDE 4 debacle, and I found that even worse and ended up moving off Linux altogether.
KDE 4.0 was pretty much the same way. The developers proclaimed quite loudly that it was not meant for everyday desktop use. A few Linux distributions took software that they were clearly told was not ready for end users and gave it to end users.
The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.
KDE 4.0 is the innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes.
The idea that KDE 4.0 wasn't intended for end-users and that the developers were clear about this was just an excuse they fell back on when it became apparent 4.0 was a miserable failure in the eyes of end-users.
The cause of the problem was a piss-poor attitude towards release management compounded with a complete inability to take responsibility for their choices. Yes, I'm aware of all the excuses, but they don't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Read that press release. Can you honestly say that's warning non-developers to stay away?
It's a release candidate, so it's meant for testing and preview purposes, like the developer preview of Android L.
If you label something as a release candidate, what you are saying is "we think this has been completely finished. Everybody check it out, and if we haven't screwed up, we'll rename it as the final version". Hence the name - it's a candidate for release. "Release candidate" is not another name for "preview" or "beta".
This is the kind of crap that gave KDE 4 such a bad reputation. Labelling things as done when they are still major works in progress. If you don't think it's finished, don't call it a release candidate. Don't label it as a new major version. If it's not finished, then it's neither of those things.
I could sit in an empty room for days without issue.
So could I. But if I was sat in an empty room with a button that gave me a shock, I'd definitely press it - not because I couldn't handle the boredom, but just to see what it's like. I'm not sure this study really measures what it intends to.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you describe yourself as one of Slashdot's customers?
I think this is just the 80/20 split. Almost everybody goes home and sleeps almost every night. For the vast majority of cases, taking your watch off to charge it once every three days is no better than taking your watch off to charge it every night. And the tradeoff to get to three days is either a) a battery three times larger, b) a watch that is three times more power efficient, or c) lesser capability. A three day battery life isn't worth the sacrifices you'd have to make to get it.
Why? What's so much better about taking your watch off every three nights instead of every night?
I'm not inclined to wear a watch either, and I'm going to get one. My reasons are:
Basically, they treat Reddit like DNS. Setting up a subreddit is like registering a domain name. What that domain name is used for is up to the owner. I'm sure if you asked registrars, they wouldn't feel obliged to be the moral police for people who use their services either.
That's not right at all. I've had that article pointed out to me before. The author is clueless.
iPhone sales are highly seasonal. A new iPhone gets released towards the end of the year, there's a big spike in sales, which tails off throughout the following year until the next iPhone is released, when the cycle starts again.
What articles like that do is point to the spike at the end of the year, when new iPhones are out and holiday sales are boosting the numbers as well, then point to the following three quarters which are naturally lower (including immediately before a new iPhone is released), and say that sales are "tapering off".
It makes no sense to do that. You aren't comparing like to like. You're comparing the most profitable time of year to the least profitable time of year. Of course sales are going to be lower if you look at it that way - it's true of any product that's seasonal. Would you assume that a suncream company is failing because you looked at their sales in winter and realised that they were selling a fraction of what they do in the summer?
The only sensible way to evaluate sales for seasonal products is to compare year-over-year sales. You compare this year's busy period to last year's busy period. You compare this year's quiet period to last year's quiet period. When you look at the iPhone sales like that - i.e. in the only way that makes sense - sales have never fallen. They have grown every year.
Why is some random naturalnews.com website I've never heard of and which is run by a single person more legitimate a source than Greenpeace?
More to the point, why haven't you read the sources I provided? Part of the point of the Greenpeace article I linked to is that Apple are making stronger pushes in this area and being more transparent. That article was published in 2014. Your article was published in 2011. So Greenpeace says that Apple are the leaders in the field and have strongly improved, and your article points out that they weren't always as good or open years ago. There's no contradiction there. All you are doing is showing that Apple have taken action and improved.
Also, when somebody says "It's unclear how the images were obtained, but anonymous 4chan users said...", replace it with "It's unclear how the images were obtained."
Come on, since when are anonymous 4chan users a reliable source?
They spent money commissioning a video celebrating gay pride.
They spent money on lawyers to petition the Californian government on Prop 8.
They donated $100K to the No to 8 campaign.
Their supplier responsibility reports have been auditing their suppliers for discrimination for years.
Again, like the other guy I responded to, you're setting up a no win situation. They don't support gay rights? They are unethical. They do support gay rights? It's just marketing.
Their CEO is widely believed to be gay and I'm sure a hell of a lot of their employees are gay as well. You're asking me to believe they aren't doing this out of principle at all? That's not the most plausible explanation here.
Nope, they actually started internal audits of their supply chain and generating public reports several years before all that happened. You can go and download them on their website and see for yourself.
They've been doing that for many years. Here's the info, specifically the products. Even Greenpeace are singing their praises, specifically, saying: Apple has put its money where its mouth is: Greenpeace's report, "Clicking Clean," found that the company's embrace of renewable energy is genuine, and is leading the technology sector.
This is just FUD. Apple hardware lasts a lot longer than the equivalent from their competitors. I've lost count of the number of laptops, PCs, and non-Apple smartphones I've seen people around me churn through while Apple users with the same needs just buy once or twice in the same time period.
By forbidding abusive behaviour in the App Store. By removing application access to identifying information several times. By providing an alternative to third party analytics like Google Analytics that isn't driven by a market need to sell that data. By encrypting a whole bunch of things they aren't compelled to.
You're really setting up a no win situation here. If they don't perform positive ethical acts, then they are unethical. If they do, then it's just "brand management bullet points".
It's funny though, how we have two people here - one calling them unethical, and one pointing out ethical things that they have done - and you perceive this as "there's somebody here worshipping the brand". Not two people with different opinions. One person with a suspect opinion. That's an odd perception.
Also, if anybody is astroturfing, I'd lay my money on the anonymous coward and not the person with a Slashdot account that is several years old with excellent karma.
Really? They seem to perform positive ethical acts quite regularly. Supporting gay rights. Enforcing worker rights in their contracts abroad. Making their products environmentally friendly. Improving the privacy of their users. Why do you think their ethics are non-existent?
Market share isn't the important factor though. iPhone sales have grown every year. Apple's profits have grown every year. They are the most profitable phone vendor by a long way. If that's failing, I'd love to fail as hard as Apple are.
It's a safe bet that any new iPhones will have the fingerprint scanner built in that can be used for this purpose.
That's just 4chan rumours at the moment. No point in taking them seriously unless there's confirmation.
Curiosity was intended to last two years, it's been going for almost three. It wasn't intended to last this long, and it definitely wasn't intended to operate for decades.
Yes, thanks for the reminder!
It's not really accurate to say that iOS 7's design is flat. It actually has more depth than the earlier design, it's just that the individual items in each layer are flat.
So, for example, the Apple application's icons on the home screen are flat, but they are floating over a parallax background that gives the feeling of depth. The buttons in the control centre are flat, but the translucent background of the control centre gives the impression that it's sitting on top of the home screen.
They even spell it out explicitly on their website when they talk about iOS 7's design:
Isn't there a short story about a songwriter who kills himself after losing a court case for plagiarism because there aren't any original melodies left?
I don't think malware is particularly worrisome in the average user's mind. I think it's more about quality.
Speaking as an application developer, the vast majority of times I've had to say to clients "Apple won't allow that", it's been something that is self-serving and user-unfriendly if not downright abusive. Apple serve as a convenient foil for developers who care about users and stop developers who don't care from going too far.
As a developer, I know first hand how frustrating it is to have a great idea for something that Apple simply won't allow, but at the same time, I frequently see the benefit its policies bring to end users.
For instance, just the other day I saw a developer complain that a client wanted to force users to enter their personal information (e.g. age) before they could use the application, so that they could use it for marketing. Simple solution: Apple don't allow that. But Google does. How do you think policies like that are reflected in the average application quality?
Not really. The only real difference between 6 and 7 from a CSS perspective was a few extra selectors and bug fixes. The real improvements came with version 8, which finally had full support for CSS 2.
This is extremely unlikely. The whole point of hashes is that they collide as infrequently as possible.
He is a convicted child abuser who had a third party service provider independently notify the police that he was sending child pornography by email. Are you arguing that a judge shouldn't grant a search warrant under those circumstances?
Listen, if somebody tells you that you're saying dumb things because you didn't read the article, don't just say more dumb things without reading the article. The article clearly points out that Google detected it in an email he was sending, not receiving.
No you didn't. If you had bothered to read the article, you would have seen that they detect things like this by using image hashing. It's an automatic process - unless you happen to be passing around images that are identical to known images of child pornography, at which point of course humans will get involved.
Well, if you really need to know, then you could always read the article. It specifically states that he was arrested after police found other suspicious images on his computer (after obtaining a search warrant), and that he's a registered sex offender. Chances of this being a mistake are practically nil. All indications are that both Google and the police did their job properly, with judicial oversight.
It was a release announcement, it wasn't out of context, and it was entirely relevant.
How could you debunk the point I'm making when all I have to do is link to their own release announcement and point out what it says directly disagrees with you?
Nope, I was using KDE from the 1.0 betas all the way to the 4.0 betas. I only switched to GNOME after the KDE 4 debacle, and I found that even worse and ended up moving off Linux altogether.
There wasn't a single hint of this in the official release announcement and they were pushing it like crazy to end-users. Quote:
The idea that KDE 4.0 wasn't intended for end-users and that the developers were clear about this was just an excuse they fell back on when it became apparent 4.0 was a miserable failure in the eyes of end-users.
The cause of the problem was a piss-poor attitude towards release management compounded with a complete inability to take responsibility for their choices. Yes, I'm aware of all the excuses, but they don't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Read that press release. Can you honestly say that's warning non-developers to stay away?
If you label something as a release candidate, what you are saying is "we think this has been completely finished. Everybody check it out, and if we haven't screwed up, we'll rename it as the final version". Hence the name - it's a candidate for release. "Release candidate" is not another name for "preview" or "beta".
This is the kind of crap that gave KDE 4 such a bad reputation. Labelling things as done when they are still major works in progress. If you don't think it's finished, don't call it a release candidate. Don't label it as a new major version. If it's not finished, then it's neither of those things.
So could I. But if I was sat in an empty room with a button that gave me a shock, I'd definitely press it - not because I couldn't handle the boredom, but just to see what it's like. I'm not sure this study really measures what it intends to.