beyondcompute

Society cuts off its own ways of monitoring corporations' behavior.

Be nice to everyone (at least to people who do not commit the wrong apparently) :)

Violence is terrible, terrible thing. But when a society starts to prosecute people for thoughtcrime, it is even more chilling.

I'd switch to Apple the month it assures me it doesn't store all that data about myself.

Nice material. When I was watching it, I wondered where were those expert opinions during the campaign itself? I mean that's how all our Western elections seem to work. We have highly staged advertisement-like TV shows with catchups being thrown upon viewers. And after we elect someone, experts start to analyze what just happened.

That's not how the system is supposed to work. Candidates should present their programs half a year before elections and then the social discussion and expert analysis should kick in and go on until the voting.

A solution? The good ol' government regulation. If companies 'cannot' achieve acceptable standards of customer support service, those standards should be imposed on them. This game where ordinary customers are so often the victims must be put to an end.

"Belongings of people who are leaving their apartments are not private, Court Rules.

A judge in Rhode Island rules that people should have no expectation of owning their belongings while they are outside of apartments, because no person on the street 'is immune from robbery'."

After half a year on Android I want to move back to iOS. Good luck with switching :) Also whatever the camera specs, I still have impression that iPhone makes better pictures. On my Sony Z7 "normal" pictures are almost unusable (poor dynamic range) and I don't really use 23Mp (files are slow to handle, etc.). So I shoot in 8Mp and HDR which doesn't obliterate half the image into highlights but gives me crazy unnatural, "alien" colors (especially on a cloudy day).

iOS mail can't search? Well there's no usable mail or calendar or weather app on Android whatsoever. Book readers are a joke, too.

Apple may be wrong much of the time but it at least tries to focus on essentials. Google seems to always build geeky three-storey-configurable apps which most people don't probably need.

Also the file system. Why in 2016 I have to tell the machine where to save a file? (Other app cannot see it anyway after I download it. I have to open a "File manager" to locate the file and open it with the respective viewer. I can imagine, reading this makes an iOS user smile.)

Good luck with other "ecosystems" out there :)

Ħħ - Maltese

Are there similar statements by any of Russian oligarchs?

The nature of unbounded capitalism in one sentence.

Can I install packages/modules for my scripts (e.g. using npm)?

I am using a 2011 laptop. I am not poor. I understand Apple is being sad (it's a business) that I don't buy new hardware (I feel there's no more return over the investment). I also agree that tablets are closer to the present (not the "future", ha-ha) of computing but I am software developer and I will gladly switch to iPad pro only when I have an access to terminal, all the usual unix tools, homebrew and the ability to compile/run the usual web-dev software: servers, database systems, programming languages (and to easily connect my mechanical keyboard). Apple is not mocking the poor. Calm down, let's get back to work.

It'a good they didn't do some other consumer-facing product this time. Algorithms and infrastructure are their strong points.

Thanks for the post. I think, we need more of these. I too have been feeling that the companies in a sense "aren't even trying" to show some care and respect for a customer. We agree to pay money for "hardware", they accustomed to "assemble together" some electronic components. There's no inspiration, no consideration, no ambition to provide experience that lasts (despite that hardware is fast-to-become-obsolete, the brand image and the impression you leave can be relevant for a much longer time). For me personally the only decent machine out there is MacBook Air. It does not make false promises about performance (like other laptops do, only to fail miserably later). My ideal machine would be lightweight plastic with mechanic keyboard. Performance is not really critical. Something like Surface pro with 14 inch display and mechanical keyboard (touch-screen is not necessary; good, macbook-like touchpad is) would do.

Why not fix all the bugs that are there before lunching new products/features?

Wow! Awesome story! And unfortunately yet another human-oriented tool which got dumped by the IT crowd in favor of obscurantist arcane machine-oriented engineerism-ridden hacks that break most of the possible principles of design and HCI and that are fantastically performant (i.e. have mind-boggling throughput) but often quite slow (i.e. take 300ms to react to key press and start for long seconds).

Can it make calls?

Poor website. It delivers no information, it does not convey the vision (because there is no, probably) it does not create a product impression. What are "Advanced photo and video features", for example? Why Google is so brilliant in terms of engineering and so miserable in terms of design?

Well maybe. I actually had some more problems with it since unboxing (didn't mention them because they seem random while the described ones somehow already make an impression of being systematic). Gonna check the machine with the service center.

Spectacular! Could you add synchronous replication though? And coalescing queries (so that entire system processes queries in batches, say 300 times per second)?

Year of Reason

Articles like that are needed to give Apple its wake-up call.

Nice article. Thanks for sharing!

Oh, those seething bureaucracies with faceless collectives and blurred responsibilities...

Also that's sort of interesting to see how a company which is supposed to take over the world is unable to deliver even the ordinary products. I hope, this will prove in the long run that to be successful you need to have a good product or service.

That's partially my point. Unfortunately, it seems to me that with modern tools, libraries, OSes (Yak Shaving is actually one consequence of those) it's extremely costly to actually finish something of genuine robustness and quality. As I was telling to my friend once, at university we made database-centric applications using Delphi in under an hour and how much does the simple (couple screens, HTTP request, couple buttons wiring them) iOS application cost now? About a $1000? And do you feel that people mostly building not what they want or what would enrich the community but what their tools allow them? Why after release of golang everyone started to develop data-storages with it? Does world need 100 more database systems (while few of currently existing properly support ACID)? Why people not building next-generation GUI tools with go? Because it does not easily allow it (it would be too cumbersome/costly).

Because programming gives us very easy means of getting something on the screen (just write a line of text and computer will execute it; magic!) but makes it very hard to accomplish anything (due to extreme indirection AKA „Yak Shaving“ and archaic computer-centered text-based „tools“). Also because we generally lack culture of Developing things (i.e. understanding that production and polishing of things takes 95% of effort which takes enormous amounts of perseverance, focus and discipline).

Agree about bugginess of Software. It seems that Apple shifted focus from overall flawlessness and coherence of UX to craftsmanship and advanced technological processes in hardware. And since we started to see all those weird "Connect phone to iTunes to receive push notifications" popups, etc. If we will have products, whose surface was polished by zirconium particles but that are always buggy and unreliable, it will be not the Apple we all loved. Not "advanced features" but "lack of annoyances and irritation" is what made Apple what it is now, in my opinion.

Yet another testimonial that something is wrong with Git UX :)