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I'm also excited about a non-x86 architecture on the desktop again. Monoculture is bad, and I find x86 to be especially ugly...
As for switching... I'm increasingly unhappy with Microsoft's complete disregard of user privacy. Apple isn't perfect with that either, but IMO much better at least. For my use cases, Win and Mac are the only credible options due to software availability. So to get away from Windows.. there's not much choice these days.
To give a different perspective: I find Apple's move to ARM the most exciting thing to happen in desktop computers in many years. I'm typing this from a PC running Win10. Current plan is: as soon as ARM desktop Macs become available (and assuming they don't screw it up in some weird way), I'd like to switch.
Nitpick: for the Amigas they used Motorola 68000 series CPUs.
Maybe it was a mistake for the software industry to give up on the nice big colorful cardboard box with software inside it. Bought at a physical retail store, with CD-ROMs in it an a thick printed manual. Certainly gave more or a feeling of actually having bought something, different from just clicking a "buy" button in an appstore.
To me, "telemetry" is a violation of boundaries. And I don't think it's necessary to provide legitimation scenarios for not wanting that.
For decades I have used personal computers and it was my machine and nobody constantly observed what I was doing with it. With "telemetry" I'm not sure about the relation anymore - do I own the machine or does the machine own me? It's a loss of control, I'm not able to make the decisions anymore about what happens and what doesn't.
So Sonos devices need "activation" via some server on the internet? Why? If I just want to stream audio within my own home, why is internet even necessary? And what happens when Sonos goes out of business and the servers are shut down?
I just don't understand why people keep buying such things...
Another disadvantage of AirPods (and most other wireless headphones): they're terrible for the environment. Builtin batteries which will wear out, glued shut so no way to replace the batteries, tied to a stack of radio/protocol/codecs which will be obsolete sooner or later.
They are throw-away products. Just look at all the original 1st gen AirPods which now see their batteries failing - each one by itself is small, but given the sales numbers it's huge mountains of electronics trash.
For the price of AirPods you can get a good pair of wired headphones which can last 20+ years. Replace tips or ear cushions as needed, on good headphones they are easily replaceable. No batteries or protocols or codecs to ever worry about.
> You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it.
Jeez... You may want to re-read my comment. I have written no such thing, and it is not my opinion at all.
Although efforts like internet archive are noble (and I find it occasionally useful), I'm not sure it's always so great that everything anyone does online will be permanently archived.
I know many people feel that everything should be available forever. But for me... it's pushing me away from doing much on the web. I liked it in the 90s when things were more ephemeral. When you could make mistakes and not have them easily found by anyone with a few clicks, forever.
I agree that "straight C" is not the best choice anymore... but C++ isn't great either. It inherits most of C's weaknesses and for libraries, it makes it very difficult to use the code from languages other than C++. By making a library in C++ you are basically limiting it to being used only in C++ projects. (Yes, wrapper generators for C++-to-whatever exist, but my experience with using e.g. Qt from other languages has always been pretty terrible).
Even in 2019, the C ABI is the one universally agreed-upon cross-language ABI for languages compiled to native code.
And they figured this all out without so-called "telemetry" in Win 3.1. Isn't that amazing. Almost as if today's "telemetry is absolutely necessary for improving UX" mantra isn't actually true...
iOS already has a separate feature "offline dictation" which works on-device. I don't understand why that isn't used for Siri.
Also about "recently"... back in the late 90s I had a desktop PC running Windows 98, I think it was a Pentium 166 MHz with 32 MB RAM. On it, I had a voice recognition program called "Dragon Naturally Speaking". It required a little training with my voice but after that, it worked remarkably well. And that was over 20 years ago on a PC with a - by today's standards - very primitive CPU. Decent voice recognition isn't new technology.
It's interesting how they talk about "doing as much on device as possible"... but Siri's voice recognition still works by sending the Siri request audio to an Apple server and doing the voice recognition there (only the trigger phrase "hey siri" is recognized on-device). Why isn't it all done on-device? I'm pretty sure even older iPhones have more than enough CPU-power for that.
> Cut out time-consuming distractions
Good idea. Time for me to close HN now.
Seriously... I spend (waste?) way too much time here.
Does Fedora come with support for playing back common media formats these days? Last time I tried, it didn't even play MP3s, just showing some dialog box about how it can't play that due to patents or something. To solve that IIRC it was needed to add some 3rd-party repository (which is always a bit worrying with having to trust them) to install the codec packages. Is that still the case with Fedora?
Same here. I see all this marketing hype about 5G but I just don't know what I would do with it. Maybe I could some day get gigabit internet on my smartphone then... but what for? Streaming 8K video on the go? I fail to see any use case, at least for me.
Cheap toys are generally worrying. Unrelated to Amazon specifically, but to get an idea, you can also take a look at this EU site listing some products which have been banned/recalled:
https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/consumers_safety/safety_produ...
Just scroll down a little and click on the weekly reports. The amount of kids toys being recalled every week for containing high amounts of harmful chemicals and other hazards is worrying.
Then how about Motorola, a US company in the same market segment, which also failed?
Oh wow, I remember playing Exile back then! Found it on some shareware CD-ROM in the 90s. Was a nice game... I should check out their newer games!
Yeah, you're right. I also wouldn't recommend to try just say "public domain" today for that reason.
What I miss from the Amiga days is the wide spread release of "public domain software". People would just write applications, tools, games and say "released as public domain" and that was it. Do what you want, have fun! These days it's all so much more complicated with licenses (even if it's FOSS licenses), everything full of text which only a lawyer can understand and no clear definition of what "derivative work" means. I miss those simpler times, before most software licenses were a complicated legal minefield.
> Well, it worked on Star Trek.
IIRC the official explanation from the makers of Star Trek is that the displays look like simple touch screens, but they are actually overlaid with structured force fields, so for the users it feels like a physical button press.
It was reworked to use so-called "modern web technologies".
Same experience here: my late-90s PC HD floppies are almost all unreadable. The early-90s DD floppies from my Amiga are almost all still readable without errors.
Maybe the article author is confusing data compression with dynamics compression [0]. The latter is a real problem with the terrible "loudness war" [1] going on for a long time, with many audio pieces (dynamics-)compressed to death. And in that regard, many albums are indeed better on vinyl: not because the format is better than modern digital formats... but because the vinyl version is often mastered separately, with much less dynamic compression than the digital versions. It's really sad that one has to buy the worse format to get the better mastering...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Sadly, offline dictation is a separate feature, it is not the speech-recognition used for Siri.
Quote directly from Apple:
"The recording of the user’s spoken words is sent to Apple’s voice recognition server. If the task involves dictation only, the recognized text is sent back to the device. "
Source:
Page 69 in https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....