_broody

Yes, this is laugh-worthy. It's Apple's sneaky manner of building planned obsolescence into otherwise very competent devices. Just like my 4S, the brand spanking 6S+ will in a few years be choked by iOS updates's climbing RAM requirements. Not updating isn't an option either, as app updates demand the latest OS quickly afterward.

The iPad Pro is much more affected by this because it competes with Wintel devices. When you compare it to the Surface Pro, the later isn't considerably beefier except when it comes to RAM, which is enough on its own to give it double the life span...

That's definitely the best problem ever solved by GP, though given the unfathomably enormous computational resources poured into it, it's still hard to say it was any better than a brute force approach! ;)

I have to agree-MD isn't "off" by a whole lot but just enough to hinder the user experience. In particular, headers and topbars are oversized beyond what's reasonable, margins are excessive in content elements, and ironically this combination makes interfaces feel very boxed-in AND with poor data density on top of that...

Totally agree with you here. Brunch is fantastic for its minimal config requirements and super-fast performance. Oddly enough, in the JS world I've found it best to ignore all the hype around the latest and newest framework, and just go with something that has a small and loyal following and stick with it.

I mean, look at all the people who moved to working with Angular because it was "made by Google, so you could trust it to stick around". Now those people are using React, and soon they'll move to Angular 2. I've found that hyped technologies almost never have a fraction of the robustness and staying power that they claim to...

Upgrading is compulsory for many apps, such as Whatsapp.

> battery life that would probably outlast 3-4 iPhones.

And functional life as well. iOS 8 crippled A5 devices which had previously chugging along quite decently. Planned obsolescence sucks (in iDevices' case, it also affects present performance, i.e. Safari constantly having to reload tabs because the device has little RAM to spare). Unlike a smartphone, a simpler device won't be reduced to be unable to perform its more basic functionality decently a few years down the road...

That article doesn't actually counter what the OP says. In fact it ends by stating that SS is being more strained and giving diminishing returns as time passes by, which sounds disturbingly like a ponzi scheme. It's unsustainable by design even without free-riders, much less with min-maxers gaming the system to not put anything in.

Cyrus was the name of the traitor in The Matrix. Coincidence...

... Surely.

As a point of comparison, you can get a Lumia 520 for less. It's a really decent smartphone too from a good brand. It will be interesting to see if Mozilla can yield the combination of quality/value to succeed.

It's what I've observed as well. Plenty of low-income people get cheap chinese tablets, usually generic-brand entry-level models. No idea about the price but I don't think they're a hair above $100, possibly less than half that.

I agree. The hybrid touch paradigm is fantastic.

What Windows 8 did wrong was messing with the familiar old-school interface a bit too much, which made many non-tech-savvy users confused and miserable. My dad had a terrible time with Windows 8. But me? The Surface pro is easily among my favorite devices ever.

Yes, the app crashed. That was no doubt an app bug. The iPads also crashed. That's eyebrow-raising, and definitely an iPad glitch.

The airline will fix the bug and it won't happen again. But relying on a closed, unauditable platform to keep any sort of safety-critical data in these conditions seems absolutely unconvincing to me.

It's the later. Every other possible use of the technology is just speculation at this point.

It's very childish, which is sadly a recurring occurrence with Stallman at times.

All of the tech giants (Apple/Google/MS/Facebook/etc.) are as shady as the Amazon described here on a regular basis even when it's completely unnecessary, unfortunately. Amazon has drawn a lot of bad publicity to itself due to the poor treatment of its blue collar workforce (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641184 ), but I can't imagine the rest of the big players being any better... Only difference is that due to the nature of its operation, Amazon is forced to operate its sweatshops in U.S. soil.

Yes. The math in the article bothered me greatly. It seems that to the author, two fees will be "nearly the same" if they are within an order of magnitude of each other, which is ridiculous.

Not to mention the condescension dripping from every word. This piece is a good example of how not to write an 'informative' rebuttal.

For sure, defeating banks in the matter of customer interaction seems like low-hanging fruit. As the article says, they are too slow, too cumbersome, and I'll add that they are too unfun, and their sales departments are pushy and intrusive.

Do we even need monolithic financial entities in this day and age? Most transactions would be better handled by smaller, specialized and modern service companies. Banks are to financial startups what taxi driver unions are to Uber.

And the financial sector definitely deserves a shakedown, after they essentially plunged the rest of the world into a decade of misery with their securities fraud during the housing crisis, and went unpunished for it.

I think it's pretty clear the OP is being downvoted for resorting to character assassination (accusing Snowden of selling/giving intelligence secrets to Russia) without any proof of his claims.

It goes further than that. The KP partner that was accused of letting Pao out of company events was described by co-workers as having similar personality traits with her (being pushy and territorial, elbowing others out). He was promoted, she was fired. Sounds like the common pattern that the same sort of behavior will lead a man to be called an "alpha" or somesuch, and a woman, well, a bitch.

This. Facebook did really throw startup valuation out of whack starting with the Instagram acquisition and following up to Whatsapp. They appear to have no idea what they're doing with their money, they're in a rather vulnerable spot with their core business, and their demented frenzied spending seems to have infected everyone around them.

How can you take a OSX as an example of how it's done and lambast Gnome after the new Safari redesign throws OSX conventions through the window (much like iTunes and other OSX programs have done already, independently "reimagining" how the OSX title/control bar should work in a way that is not consistent at all).

The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to control window layout is just much better.

Agreed. And then deal with it the same way you do with tobacco and alcohol, with social campaigns to raise awareness of the issues of addiction. We have a working model here for legal drugs that are just as bad or worse.

> Snapchat had the right product with the right marketing that lead them to gaining a large user base with high engagement.

You can say this of any fad. The ice bucket challenge certainly engaged millions of people, but that doesn't mean it's a brand worth investing billions.

The problem is you're feeding the other candidates (and the audience) the illusion that they have a fighting chance against the insider. This deceit won't be taken kindly after they realize how they were beat out.

This is the equivalent of insider trading among government legislators. It's a very real problem, and there is no realistic solution since it is a systemic flaw of the startup/VC model.

It's quite possible startup culture can't continue working forever, and if this is a growing trend, that eventually too much encroachment by VCs will smother and scare away everyone who isn't an insider.

Indeed. Compromising cybersecurity as a means of defense is fighting with a gripless sword. It makes no sense that planting backdoors in all of your systems is somehow supposed to help security.

For one, there has been little appreciable gain from this practice, but it's also way too easy for an adversary to subvert a backdoor planted for purposes of peeping around, and use it to do very serious damage. The more entrenched surveillance via cyberespionage becomes, the more it expands the attack surface for a foreign actor to exploit it.

Second, there is no guarantee at all that the NSA is impervious to the same sort of infiltration methods. If they become compromised themselves by a foreign hacking entity, then that's it for everyone they're "surveying".

There's a number of professions where the crunch time is insane. There's a lot of differences between that and service work, though.

- Those people such as doctors, lawyers, programmers, etc. are paid an order of magnitude more for their time. Without counting the benefits which service workers don't get.

- They're not just working to earn a living wage. Their work propels career advancement.

- Their work is usually much more pleasant/interesting and they like it, which helps bear with crunch time.

Usually in a highly demanding, high-paying career you'll be able to advance relatively quickly and find yourself in a managing position which gives you a lot more slack. You'll also be able to retire rather soon. In light of all of this, the effort is more than worth it. But low-wage jobs... The only place service work leads you is to waste away.

What competition? Microsoft may be shunned by startups/hackers (that could change quickly if they keep turning the ship the way they've been), but in your average boring old cube farm they are absolutely ahead of other sellers in both product quality and revenue.

That's a moot point if there's another viable way to generate the same amount of power without trading lives in the process.

Slave labor also improved your life quite a bit, provided you were a slave owner. Thankfully we found an alternative.

One might argue that the SOLID principles applied in Symphony and inherited by Laravel are in fact anti-patterns which only serve to add massive cognitive overhead. They've wrecked countless Java projects over the years and are now going to do PHP the same favor.

There's even less reason for a scripting language with a GIL to be saddled with this level of complexity, than there is for Java.

You know, even though I think there are pretty decent Linux DEs today (I'll gladly take Gnome 3 over the OSX or Windows GUIs), you are completely right about the community having an awful attitude towards their designers. See all the hate thrown at Gnome 3, Unity and Pantheon... Those projects are the only ones keeping Linux from looking like it's 10-20 years behind its competitors in UI design.

The settlement offer is off by an order of magnitude or more from where it should be, that's what the OP means. The tech companies screwed their employees out of a lot more money than this, and this being a class-action lawsuit $100m means a pitiful amount of money being distributed among the plaintiffs.

Oh, and have you seen Apple's and Google's quartely revenue reports? This definitely is chump change to them.