Almost every ancient Pub in England now has mindless music, usually with yodelling foreign women lamenting their love-life incomprehensibly. Staff will sometimes turn it down, but are not authorised to turn it off because the management has paid for the mandatory licence. Props to 'Weatherspoons', which has a mind of its own and no music.
Not sure which Pubs you're going to but most of them I've gone to in Berkshire don't have music playing. Especially the owner/operator pubs. Weatherspoons are at least cheap, apart from them I rarely go to a chain pub (Greene King/Chef and Brewer). Brewdog has to be the exception, but Brewdog itself is exceptional.
Supermarkets on the other hand... In late November ASDA started to play Christmas music and I pretty much walked out until mid January. Wen't to Morrison's almost exclusively as they weren't playing Christmas music. I really pity retail staff around Christmas.
why the hell is there a need to continuously blast music in a coffee shop, to begin with?
Because Market Research TM says that it promotes the spending of money.
Then Legal says that we have to pay to play music.
Sales comes up with the brilliant idea of getting a discount on the license fees by playing the latest crap from popular culture.
Management says that this has to be on repeat.
Its reasons like that why I refuse to go to chain coffee shops if I can at all avoid it. Costa Coffee, should have called it Costa BleedinFortune.
There's a small coffee shop near where I live, owned and operated by the same bloke. Sometimes there's music playing but never at a level where you cant have a conversation. I suppose it helps that we're both fans of classic and soft rock but you rarely hear the same song twice, I'm absolutely certain he's not playing the same thing day in and day out on repeat.
Point in short, stop going to chains, go to independents or learn to make your own coffee (do that and you'll never be able to stomach Starbuck's dishwater again).
That's an interesting take, PC gamers happen to use Microsoft's OS but their gaming platforms (Microsoft Store, Xbox on PC) have effectively a 0% market share.
The problem MS has isn't that they have 0% of the sales, its that they're losing their 100% of the platform. Steam has released on Linux, a lot of PC games are being released as cross platform. It's only a matter of time before being a gamer no longer means having to run Windows 100%. That scares them more than Steam dominating PC game sales.
The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.
The 90's called, they want their excuses back.
That hasn't been an advantage for consoles in a long time. Drivers, engines and interfaces have improved to the point where PC games are hardware agnostic. Doesn't matter if you have an AMD or Intel, Nvidia or ATI. ASUS or MSI.
OTOH, Console hardware being uniform is a huge problem because if one console has a major design fault, they all have them and it's not like that's a rare thing (RROD, YLOD). It also is outdated by the time of it's release. The Xbox One uses a Radeon 7000 series chipset, that was released in 2012 and superceded by the R8000 in 2013, we're currently up to GCN 5th gen of Radeon GPU's whilst the Xbox is still using the GCN 1st gen arch. It's hardware uniformity has become more of a curse.
Obviously you haven't seen (or don't care about) recent the body cam video of a traffic stop in Vallejo California where the driver turned to "get his license" and got off two rounds before the another officer shot him.
At that point aren't you really saying your society has a problem with guns, not with armed police. Maybe you should fix that.
Is that really the norm these days? I had one run-in with a US cop but that was ages ago: he pulled me over for running a 4 way stop (red blinking traffic light, I didn't even know what the hell that meant, and assumed it was the same as blinking yellow). It was the middle of the night on a quiet street, but the cop didn't seem overly concerned for his safety. No guns, no shouting, just a polite chat (and he let me off with a warning).
Pretty much what I'd expect of a normal cop. But then again I suppose the same could happen over here. Our cops generally do not pull out their guns unless there is an immediate and clear threat, but if the call comes down about armed suspects fleeing the scene and an ANPR matches the plate, you better believe that they will take similar precautions i.e. take cover and order the driver out of the car at gunpoint.
UK resident here... Most of our cops don't even carry guns, our society is that safe. If PC Bobby (erm. PC is Police Constable, bobby is a slang term for them) wants to take you down, he has to get in nice and close with his truncheon.
Armed police operate where they're needed, places like Westminster, airports, et al. The copper on the A332 isn't likely to have a firearm, he also isn't likely to pull you over unless you're doing something stupid.
There's a reason why in the perfect Europe joke the police are British (and in the imperfect Europe joke, the chefs are British... food here is not good).
Old people tend to ignor it as they don't usually fully appreciate what it is.
Or maybe we see it for exactly what it is, which explains our lack of interest.
No, you dont.
I know plenty of old people who have adapted, embraced modern technology and ideas... OTOH there are always those who just don't want to change, rejecting new ideas and technologies. The latter group are the ones left behind, fortunately the former are more numerous.
By and large I see social media as a relatively uninteresting, shallow, and not very well done.
RIKKI RIKKI RIKKI RIKKI.... Ugh.. I can still remember that bollocks from 20 fucking years ago.
What you have described is popular culture. It's always been shallow, uninteresting and never very well done (or even medium rare). Seriously, go and watch some Rikki Lake from the 90's and tell me that was better, more interesting, less shallow.
The difference is now I can choose not to be subjected to it, the tables have turned on broadcasters who used to decide what we could and couldn't watch.
We might someday evolve the correct biological hardware to live in harmony with portable supercomputers that satisfy our every need and connect us to infinite amounts of stimulation. But for most of us, it hasn't happened yet...
For others of us, it happened a long time ago. I grew up computing, I met my first girlfriend in a BBS chat way way back in 1993 or so, and the internets are my happy place. Maybe that's the difference?
[S]ometime last year, I crossed the invisible line into problem territory. My symptoms were all the typical ones: I found myself incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies or having long uninterrupted conversations.
I find I can still do all of those things happily, but the people around me can't manage any of them. And I'm plugged in more or less constantly.
Social media made me angry and anxious, and even the digital spaces I once found soothing (group texts, podcasts, YouTube k-holes) weren't helping...
You're using them wrong. Stop watching stuff that pisses you off.
This, a thousand times this.
Not in the history of public media have we ever had so much control over what we do and do not see.
It's not like the bad old days where you could accidentally be exposed to things because they were broadcast, in the 90's you didn't have any control if Rikki Lake or Peirs Morgan came onto your television set. That decision was made by someone else and if it pissed you off you couldn't change it. Because TV pissed me off so much I stopped watching it. With the internet, content comes to you, you decide what you watch, you customise your feeds. Everything is within your power, right up to and including using local mods and extensions to customise the code that you display(I.E. an adblock, blocking ads).
So please let me correct the headline:
NYT reporter seeks to get his name recognised by failing to understand technology and printing absolute bollocks.
Kevin Roose, your brain is even more broken because you have refused to learn.
Apple's market share literally doubled after switching to Intel and allowing Windows to dual boot. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to get people to switch to Mac was their need to use Windows (and before that MS-DOS) software. Once you could dual boot MacOS or Windows you no longer had to choose PC or Mac, you could have one computer that could run either software family.
Regarding emulation, it worked but was not practical. It barely works today where it does *not* have to emulate the CPU architecture. A switch to ARM would impose a huge burden on emulators and seriously and negatively impact performance.
While Microsoft might offer Windows on ARM you would have a lot of PC software that will not be recompiled for ARM. So dual booting ARM MacOS or ARM Windows gets you back to the bad old days of having the choose PC (ie x86) or something-not-PC. Good news for Dell, HP, etc... bad news for Apple.
Apple's computers are an abbreviation. Their money comes from locking people into the Apple ecosystem. Right now, with computers that can run Windows and act like general purpose operating systems (despite how limiting Mac OS is, you can still run unsigned code on it). No, this cannot stand in the world of Apple. They have a new way forward, a better way where your Apple computer connects to your Apple phone and to your Apple tablet all of which can only install Apple approved apps from an Apple only store whilst listening on Apple approved headphones to Apple approved music all of which Apple collects 30% from.
Apple doesn't care if Peter Programmer buys an Apple computer, you mean nothing to them. They want to force Helen Homemaker and Steve Salesman onto a 100% Apple platform with no escape.
We saw this coming years ago (well I did, and if I saw it I'm sure I'm not the only one). Apple are ruthless at simplifying, reducing options, funnelling you into their way of doing things. They're not going to turn these things into giant IOS devices because they have to, but because they want to. It also won't happen overnight, but it will happen.
Isn't this one of the signs of the coming Armageddon?
This is Queensland, they're already two sandwiches and a Maroon loss away from a situation called "Mad Max".
Seriously though, I don't think this is going to be part of your actual number plate number, just an extra graphic. We've been able to have certain graphics for years already, things like this ancient plate with a map of Queensland on it. This is just adding new options.
Probably quite a lot of them do, with the screen units being integrated and similar units used across airlines.
I really doubt they are being used though, or else you would see porn based on captures from them.
This, the new seat back entertainment units are just COTS Android tablets with a custom ROM designed to run one app that connects to the back end. I've seen pretty much the same units in everyone from Virgin Australia to Singapore to Air France to Avianca.
This means they'll have most, if not all of the hardware usually included in an Android tablet. Maybe the addition of an Ethernet port.
I'm also willing to bet that the cameras were an intentional inclusion with the idea that you could have gesture based controls. As this was a brainfart from some marketing retard they didn't quite get that gesture controls would work fucking horribly in a moving aircraft.
Besides, what would American or any other airline be doing with videos of their customers picking their noses?
If they're so obsessed about "protecting the children", then just hide and disable comments across the entire site on the Youtube Kids interface. Then it's just up to the parents to ensure that Youtube is locked in the Kids mode on their devices.
You're assuming this is about "the children" when it's actually about Alphabet reducing the number of things they could be potentially sued for.
... if only I believed that Facebook are actually doing what they say...
I dumped the Facebook app on Android ages ago because it just became too slow to use. It was a revelation that I could use my phone's browser complete with adblock and the page loaded much faster with no lost functionality.
I'm going to say it. The app age is over, most apps are just single use browsers that connect to web back ends and browsers are now well and truly good enough that we don't need limited functionality, single use browsers for each website we visit.
I've been able to use the full website of my banks for ages on my Android devices. In fact I've left a bank because they kept trying to redirect me to a mobile site with limited functionality. Given the types of shonky crap companies have been trying on with "apps", I'm using fewer and fewer.
You mean like GPRS really bringing the success for WAP, like Edge satisfying all our bandwidth needs, like UMTS bringing blazingly fast data plus ultra high quality voice connections to everyone, and like 4G "LTE" bringing a "Long Term Evolution"?
Sorry, but there is no reason to believe in the next of those hypes. There is no obstacle to connect LTE towers with "extra big tubes", if that is what carriers wanted. What they really want is people spending more money on data transfers, while limiting their investments as much as possible.
The problem isn't the backbone, its congestion. With a mobile connection you've only got so much bandwidth to play with. Usually bandwidth is about 50-80 MHz for Frequency Division Duplexing to be shared amongst every single device connected to that cell. This means that you're going to be queuing a lot when you get a lot of devices. It doesn't matter how fast LTE is (and lets face it, even at 50mbps, its pretty fast) it's going to feel slow because you're in a queue waiting for bandwidth.
This is why I connect to the Wifi at work, I rarely get near my monthly data cap even if I didn't but on the LTE signal I'd be queuing up with 500 other people for the same 80 MHz of bandwidth compared to the couple of dozen connecting to the same wireless AP.
The chip sets are shipping, phones are being engineered and built, carriers are buying spectrum space, vendors are starting to ship the equipment and the marketing blitz is already on.
It doesn't matter if you are ready or not, it's going to happen unless there is some huge unforeseen world/national event that makes it financially impossible. It's happening, like it or not.
That isn't the question.
Sure it's being shipped, but will it be bought. The problem you've got is that 5G offers no advantages over 4G LTE and that hasn't even finished rolling out yet. 4G is already fast enough that data caps can't keep up with it. Besides all the speed in the world will not help you in the middle of London or New York where towers are horribly congested (even in Basingstoke town centre it's terrible).
Yet again, YouTube demonstrates the sort of behavior that could never be tolerated if it weren't for having Alphabet as their sugar daddy. Say what you will about the general desire a lot of folks have to use antitrust laws to bust up Silicon Valley's darlings, but YouTube is one incredibly good argument for wielding it against Alphabet. Why? A few reasons:
1. They continue to operate at a loss.
2. Alphabet continues to tolerate their amateurish ways of dealing with ToS that pisses off folks at every turn--including gaming their premium content producers. 3. Their content regulation is a total amateur hour shit show that a for-profit company accountable to shareholders could never put up with.
Erm no. The problems with their copyright and content filtering systems is that they are automated. They're automated to save money, as you said, YT is operating at a loss.
Such systems should not be automated, rather have a charge per accusation (but I know, good luck with that).
If they had been bought by Microsoft to join with Bing,
Odd you should mention that... give the quality of other Bing products can you imagine the shit show that BingTube would be.
YT under Google/Alphabet may not be perfect, but its not bad and really the best system yet devised for public video hosting... And that is the real reason they don't have any competition, no-one has come up with anything better.
/sarcasm Apparently 40+ errors are "minor factual errors". LUL.
Sir, I would like to protest the second so-called "error" on that page. A swiss army knife is an ideal tool for any PC builder, you've got a Philips head, flat head, blade, scissors, pliers and corkscrew in the same handy package.
The US government is just looking out for US corporations, trying to secure a bigger piece of the estimated 3.5 trillion dollars that 5G will generate by spreading FUD about their biggest competition.
Meanwhile the British and Germans are saving billions on not having backup infrastructure.. If we lose any data we'll just ask the Chinese government for it.
Scummy company that uses the piracy spectre to get companies to insert ads into paid for programs are revealed to be even scummier by faking ad clicks.
Thank's for that Detective Obvious, I never would have thought.
And the fact that they've been accused by Oracle, one of the scummiest of the scummy companies is just a delicious irony.
This is fine, but I hope they somehow retain long-hold-on-back-button = force quit (enabled in developer options). I love this feature.
They'll keep it. This is just the Google Hype/Hate cycle warming up.
1. Google announces that they're developing a new feature in $product.
2. The "tech" media ignore the actual press release and use Buzzfeedian headlines like "OMG WAFFLEBOTTOM GOOGLE WILL TAEK ALL YOUR THINGS".
3. The Twiterarti start twatling "Holy TESTICLEBALLS I am Angry at Google doing a thing I'm not even sure what they're doing but I"M AGRNY. Even though I"M a shameless APPLE FANBOY (bless his Steveness) IM selling ALL MY ANDROID THINGS I DONT HAVE".
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 ad nauseam.
5. New feature is either released side by side or quietly dropped if it doesn't work.
They might be working on gesture based things but they're usually never work as well as intended and Google are smart enough to realise this.
They should invent Netflix-Man and not pay a licensing fee. Genius!
It's not quite so simple. Writers are cheap and plentiful... Writers with talent are expensive and rare.
Working from pre-written material is much cheaper and faster, especially when part of the audience is already familiar with the universe meaning the concept has already been tested and is likely to be popular. The 1990's had a whole load of 1 season original concept SciFi shows like Gerry Anderson's Space Precinct. Space Precinct was a safe bet, Gerry Anderson was well known for good SciFi, SciFi was popular, police procedurals were going gangbusters so it was one of the highest budgeted sci-fi shows of the mid 90's and still flopped for a variety of reasons (it is worth watching for the kitsch factor and was on Amazon Prime last time I looked). So producers, including Netflix have become cautious, they'd rather tested material than take the risk on 19 flops because the 20th might make it.
The odd thing is, they hate dealing with talented authors because they resist the studio tampering with their work. There's a metric crapload of good books written to be adapted for TV/Film that sit there untouched.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost every ancient Pub in England now has mindless music, usually with yodelling foreign women lamenting their love-life incomprehensibly. Staff will sometimes turn it down, but are not authorised to turn it off because the management has paid for the mandatory licence. Props to 'Weatherspoons', which has a mind of its own and no music.
Not sure which Pubs you're going to but most of them I've gone to in Berkshire don't have music playing. Especially the owner/operator pubs. Weatherspoons are at least cheap, apart from them I rarely go to a chain pub (Greene King/Chef and Brewer). Brewdog has to be the exception, but Brewdog itself is exceptional.
Supermarkets on the other hand... In late November ASDA started to play Christmas music and I pretty much walked out until mid January. Wen't to Morrison's almost exclusively as they weren't playing Christmas music. I really pity retail staff around Christmas.
why the hell is there a need to continuously blast music in a coffee shop, to begin with?
Because Market Research TM says that it promotes the spending of money.
Then Legal says that we have to pay to play music.
Sales comes up with the brilliant idea of getting a discount on the license fees by playing the latest crap from popular culture.
Management says that this has to be on repeat.
Its reasons like that why I refuse to go to chain coffee shops if I can at all avoid it. Costa Coffee, should have called it Costa BleedinFortune.
There's a small coffee shop near where I live, owned and operated by the same bloke. Sometimes there's music playing but never at a level where you cant have a conversation. I suppose it helps that we're both fans of classic and soft rock but you rarely hear the same song twice, I'm absolutely certain he's not playing the same thing day in and day out on repeat.
Point in short, stop going to chains, go to independents or learn to make your own coffee (do that and you'll never be able to stomach Starbuck's dishwater again).
That's an interesting take, PC gamers happen to use Microsoft's OS but their gaming platforms (Microsoft Store, Xbox on PC) have effectively a 0% market share.
The problem MS has isn't that they have 0% of the sales, its that they're losing their 100% of the platform. Steam has released on Linux, a lot of PC games are being released as cross platform. It's only a matter of time before being a gamer no longer means having to run Windows 100%. That scares them more than Steam dominating PC game sales.
The Console has one major advantage over the PC. Uniform Balanced Hardware.
The 90's called, they want their excuses back.
That hasn't been an advantage for consoles in a long time. Drivers, engines and interfaces have improved to the point where PC games are hardware agnostic. Doesn't matter if you have an AMD or Intel, Nvidia or ATI. ASUS or MSI.
OTOH, Console hardware being uniform is a huge problem because if one console has a major design fault, they all have them and it's not like that's a rare thing (RROD, YLOD). It also is outdated by the time of it's release. The Xbox One uses a Radeon 7000 series chipset, that was released in 2012 and superceded by the R8000 in 2013, we're currently up to GCN 5th gen of Radeon GPU's whilst the Xbox is still using the GCN 1st gen arch. It's hardware uniformity has become more of a curse.
Obviously you haven't seen (or don't care about) recent the body cam video of a traffic stop in Vallejo California where the driver turned to "get his license" and got off two rounds before the another officer shot him.
At that point aren't you really saying your society has a problem with guns, not with armed police. Maybe you should fix that.
Is that really the norm these days? I had one run-in with a US cop but that was ages ago: he pulled me over for running a 4 way stop (red blinking traffic light, I didn't even know what the hell that meant, and assumed it was the same as blinking yellow). It was the middle of the night on a quiet street, but the cop didn't seem overly concerned for his safety. No guns, no shouting, just a polite chat (and he let me off with a warning).
Pretty much what I'd expect of a normal cop. But then again I suppose the same could happen over here. Our cops generally do not pull out their guns unless there is an immediate and clear threat, but if the call comes down about armed suspects fleeing the scene and an ANPR matches the plate, you better believe that they will take similar precautions i.e. take cover and order the driver out of the car at gunpoint.
UK resident here... Most of our cops don't even carry guns, our society is that safe. If PC Bobby (erm. PC is Police Constable, bobby is a slang term for them) wants to take you down, he has to get in nice and close with his truncheon.
Armed police operate where they're needed, places like Westminster, airports, et al. The copper on the A332 isn't likely to have a firearm, he also isn't likely to pull you over unless you're doing something stupid.
There's a reason why in the perfect Europe joke the police are British (and in the imperfect Europe joke, the chefs are British... food here is not good).
Old people tend to ignor it as they don't usually fully appreciate what it is.
Or maybe we see it for exactly what it is, which explains our lack of interest.
No, you dont.
I know plenty of old people who have adapted, embraced modern technology and ideas... OTOH there are always those who just don't want to change, rejecting new ideas and technologies. The latter group are the ones left behind, fortunately the former are more numerous.
By and large I see social media as a relatively uninteresting, shallow, and not very well done.
RIKKI RIKKI RIKKI RIKKI.... Ugh.. I can still remember that bollocks from 20 fucking years ago.
What you have described is popular culture. It's always been shallow, uninteresting and never very well done (or even medium rare). Seriously, go and watch some Rikki Lake from the 90's and tell me that was better, more interesting, less shallow.
The difference is now I can choose not to be subjected to it, the tables have turned on broadcasters who used to decide what we could and couldn't watch.
For others of us, it happened a long time ago. I grew up computing, I met my first girlfriend in a BBS chat way way back in 1993 or so, and the internets are my happy place. Maybe that's the difference?
I find I can still do all of those things happily, but the people around me can't manage any of them. And I'm plugged in more or less constantly.
You're using them wrong. Stop watching stuff that pisses you off.
This, a thousand times this.
Not in the history of public media have we ever had so much control over what we do and do not see.
It's not like the bad old days where you could accidentally be exposed to things because they were broadcast, in the 90's you didn't have any control if Rikki Lake or Peirs Morgan came onto your television set. That decision was made by someone else and if it pissed you off you couldn't change it. Because TV pissed me off so much I stopped watching it. With the internet, content comes to you, you decide what you watch, you customise your feeds. Everything is within your power, right up to and including using local mods and extensions to customise the code that you display(I.E. an adblock, blocking ads).
So please let me correct the headline:
NYT reporter seeks to get his name recognised by failing to understand technology and printing absolute bollocks.
Kevin Roose, your brain is even more broken because you have refused to learn.
So this means no more boot camp as well?
Sure, but who wants that
Apple's market share literally doubled after switching to Intel and allowing Windows to dual boot. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to get people to switch to Mac was their need to use Windows (and before that MS-DOS) software. Once you could dual boot MacOS or Windows you no longer had to choose PC or Mac, you could have one computer that could run either software family.
... bad news for Apple.
Regarding emulation, it worked but was not practical. It barely works today where it does *not* have to emulate the CPU architecture. A switch to ARM would impose a huge burden on emulators and seriously and negatively impact performance.
While Microsoft might offer Windows on ARM you would have a lot of PC software that will not be recompiled for ARM. So dual booting ARM MacOS or ARM Windows gets you back to the bad old days of having the choose PC (ie x86) or something-not-PC. Good news for Dell, HP, etc
Apple's computers are an abbreviation. Their money comes from locking people into the Apple ecosystem. Right now, with computers that can run Windows and act like general purpose operating systems (despite how limiting Mac OS is, you can still run unsigned code on it). No, this cannot stand in the world of Apple. They have a new way forward, a better way where your Apple computer connects to your Apple phone and to your Apple tablet all of which can only install Apple approved apps from an Apple only store whilst listening on Apple approved headphones to Apple approved music all of which Apple collects 30% from.
Apple doesn't care if Peter Programmer buys an Apple computer, you mean nothing to them. They want to force Helen Homemaker and Steve Salesman onto a 100% Apple platform with no escape. We saw this coming years ago (well I did, and if I saw it I'm sure I'm not the only one). Apple are ruthless at simplifying, reducing options, funnelling you into their way of doing things. They're not going to turn these things into giant IOS devices because they have to, but because they want to. It also won't happen overnight, but it will happen.
Isn't this one of the signs of the coming Armageddon?
This is Queensland, they're already two sandwiches and a Maroon loss away from a situation called "Mad Max".
Seriously though, I don't think this is going to be part of your actual number plate number, just an extra graphic. We've been able to have certain graphics for years already, things like this ancient plate with a map of Queensland on it. This is just adding new options.
Probably quite a lot of them do, with the screen units being integrated and similar units used across airlines.
I really doubt they are being used though, or else you would see porn based on captures from them.
This, the new seat back entertainment units are just COTS Android tablets with a custom ROM designed to run one app that connects to the back end. I've seen pretty much the same units in everyone from Virgin Australia to Singapore to Air France to Avianca.
This means they'll have most, if not all of the hardware usually included in an Android tablet. Maybe the addition of an Ethernet port.
I'm also willing to bet that the cameras were an intentional inclusion with the idea that you could have gesture based controls. As this was a brainfart from some marketing retard they didn't quite get that gesture controls would work fucking horribly in a moving aircraft.
Besides, what would American or any other airline be doing with videos of their customers picking their noses?
If they're so obsessed about "protecting the children", then just hide and disable comments across the entire site on the Youtube Kids interface. Then it's just up to the parents to ensure that Youtube is locked in the Kids mode on their devices.
You're assuming this is about "the children" when it's actually about Alphabet reducing the number of things they could be potentially sued for.
If he means money made of paper, then he's probably right, but wrong otherwise.
This. Most new bank notes series issued today are made from polymer.
Even US notes aren't and I'm pretty sure, were never made from paper. They're made from linen, hence they were once called "rag money".
... if only I believed that Facebook are actually doing what they say...
I dumped the Facebook app on Android ages ago because it just became too slow to use. It was a revelation that I could use my phone's browser complete with adblock and the page loaded much faster with no lost functionality.
I'm going to say it. The app age is over, most apps are just single use browsers that connect to web back ends and browsers are now well and truly good enough that we don't need limited functionality, single use browsers for each website we visit.
I've been able to use the full website of my banks for ages on my Android devices. In fact I've left a bank because they kept trying to redirect me to a mobile site with limited functionality. Given the types of shonky crap companies have been trying on with "apps", I'm using fewer and fewer.
You mean like GPRS really bringing the success for WAP, like Edge satisfying all our bandwidth needs, like UMTS bringing blazingly fast data plus ultra high quality voice connections to everyone, and like 4G "LTE" bringing a "Long Term Evolution"?
Sorry, but there is no reason to believe in the next of those hypes. There is no obstacle to connect LTE towers with "extra big tubes", if that is what carriers wanted. What they really want is people spending more money on data transfers, while limiting their investments as much as possible.
The problem isn't the backbone, its congestion. With a mobile connection you've only got so much bandwidth to play with. Usually bandwidth is about 50-80 MHz for Frequency Division Duplexing to be shared amongst every single device connected to that cell. This means that you're going to be queuing a lot when you get a lot of devices. It doesn't matter how fast LTE is (and lets face it, even at 50mbps, its pretty fast) it's going to feel slow because you're in a queue waiting for bandwidth.
This is why I connect to the Wifi at work, I rarely get near my monthly data cap even if I didn't but on the LTE signal I'd be queuing up with 500 other people for the same 80 MHz of bandwidth compared to the couple of dozen connecting to the same wireless AP.
The chip sets are shipping, phones are being engineered and built, carriers are buying spectrum space, vendors are starting to ship the equipment and the marketing blitz is already on.
It doesn't matter if you are ready or not, it's going to happen unless there is some huge unforeseen world/national event that makes it financially impossible. It's happening, like it or not.
That isn't the question.
Sure it's being shipped, but will it be bought. The problem you've got is that 5G offers no advantages over 4G LTE and that hasn't even finished rolling out yet. 4G is already fast enough that data caps can't keep up with it. Besides all the speed in the world will not help you in the middle of London or New York where towers are horribly congested (even in Basingstoke town centre it's terrible).
Yet again, YouTube demonstrates the sort of behavior that could never be tolerated if it weren't for having Alphabet as their sugar daddy. Say what you will about the general desire a lot of folks have to use antitrust laws to bust up Silicon Valley's darlings, but YouTube is one incredibly good argument for wielding it against Alphabet. Why? A few reasons:
1. They continue to operate at a loss.
2. Alphabet continues to tolerate their amateurish ways of dealing with ToS that pisses off folks at every turn--including gaming their premium content producers.
3. Their content regulation is a total amateur hour shit show that a for-profit company accountable to shareholders could never put up with.
Erm no. The problems with their copyright and content filtering systems is that they are automated. They're automated to save money, as you said, YT is operating at a loss. Such systems should not be automated, rather have a charge per accusation (but I know, good luck with that).
If they had been bought by Microsoft to join with Bing,
Odd you should mention that... give the quality of other Bing products can you imagine the shit show that BingTube would be. YT under Google/Alphabet may not be perfect, but its not bad and really the best system yet devised for public video hosting... And that is the real reason they don't have any competition, no-one has come up with anything better.
Sir, I would like to protest the second so-called "error" on that page. A swiss army knife is an ideal tool for any PC builder, you've got a Philips head, flat head, blade, scissors, pliers and corkscrew in the same handy package.
I predict their game streaming service will be full of ads.
And the rest of us predict that it'll be a massive failure like every other streaming games service.
The US government is just looking out for US corporations, trying to secure a bigger piece of the estimated 3.5 trillion dollars that 5G will generate by spreading FUD about their biggest competition.
Meanwhile the British and Germans are saving billions on not having backup infrastructure.. If we lose any data we'll just ask the Chinese government for it.
Espionage based backup is insanely cheap.
Scummy company that uses the piracy spectre to get companies to insert ads into paid for programs are revealed to be even scummier by faking ad clicks.
Thank's for that Detective Obvious, I never would have thought.
And the fact that they've been accused by Oracle, one of the scummiest of the scummy companies is just a delicious irony.
This is fine, but I hope they somehow retain long-hold-on-back-button = force quit (enabled in developer options). I love this feature.
They'll keep it. This is just the Google Hype/Hate cycle warming up.
1. Google announces that they're developing a new feature in $product.
2. The "tech" media ignore the actual press release and use Buzzfeedian headlines like "OMG WAFFLEBOTTOM GOOGLE WILL TAEK ALL YOUR THINGS".
3. The Twiterarti start twatling "Holy TESTICLEBALLS I am Angry at Google doing a thing I'm not even sure what they're doing but I"M AGRNY. Even though I"M a shameless APPLE FANBOY (bless his Steveness) IM selling ALL MY ANDROID THINGS I DONT HAVE".
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 ad nauseam.
5. New feature is either released side by side or quietly dropped if it doesn't work.
They might be working on gesture based things but they're usually never work as well as intended and Google are smart enough to realise this.
I agree it's a direction to take, but the name.. Space Force. I feel like I'm starting to live in a Mel Brooks film.
Perhaps Republican Space Rangers would be better?
I can hardly believe I watched it until the end.
The Punisher in Daredevil wasn't very good to begin with, it inspired me not to watch the series.
They should invent Netflix-Man and not pay a licensing fee. Genius!
It's not quite so simple. Writers are cheap and plentiful... Writers with talent are expensive and rare.
Working from pre-written material is much cheaper and faster, especially when part of the audience is already familiar with the universe meaning the concept has already been tested and is likely to be popular. The 1990's had a whole load of 1 season original concept SciFi shows like Gerry Anderson's Space Precinct. Space Precinct was a safe bet, Gerry Anderson was well known for good SciFi, SciFi was popular, police procedurals were going gangbusters so it was one of the highest budgeted sci-fi shows of the mid 90's and still flopped for a variety of reasons (it is worth watching for the kitsch factor and was on Amazon Prime last time I looked). So producers, including Netflix have become cautious, they'd rather tested material than take the risk on 19 flops because the 20th might make it.
The odd thing is, they hate dealing with talented authors because they resist the studio tampering with their work. There's a metric crapload of good books written to be adapted for TV/Film that sit there untouched.