Amusing as it may be I thought of this as well, as I'm sure did the engineers. My guess is that if there is weight in the seat the chair will not move.
It's almost as if Snapchat is a direct reaction to the permanency of social media. Once schools/parents started teaching kids to be careful online, they moved to a service where it isn't as much of an issue.
How does anyone know for sure that all of that traffic (or at least the meta data related to the traffic) is not prepped for data mining on a per-user basis ?
There would be obvious commercial advantage in doing this, just for starters.
Data mining services like facebook gives you a solid picture of the interests and connections that the target person broadcasts publicaly. This is useful information, and it is exploited by any number of parties ... and people are (hopefully) aware of that.
Data mining snapchat gives a deeper picture of a person's interests and connections, as they are broadcast whilst that person believes that this information is entirely private.
Aggregating data from both sources (which would be almost trivial), would provide a very detailed view of the target. Much more than the sum of each dataset alone.
And it matters not whether the owners of Snapchat are completely and utterly above-board with everything .... there is the question of who owns and operates the network that all this info travels over.
Bottom line is that all of that "ephemeral" data that is going through snapchat is no more private than facebook, or youtube, or HAM radio, or telephone calls, or email, or SMS, or pretty much anything electronic.
There is no real privacy with this, but its easy to provide the illusion of privacy.
People get upset because Twitter and Facebook "mess with" their timelines, as if they were some fundamental natural component of the universe. The average person, even a young "digital native" has no concept of how their gadgets work, so while you might think "Oh, this pretty much has to be sitting on their server in a recoverable format" the average person thinks the picture lives only on their phone. They can't even get to the point of making an informed decision of whether or not the data they give up is worth the service received because they lack the models to understand what happens.
It's like wondering why someone who still thinks good and bad humors mediate health isn't worried about their cholesterol, there's literally not the machinery available to make that a concern. This is one of the biggest reasons that we should teach coding in schools. Even if you never write a line of code in anger, knowing vaguely what's going on at least gives you a chance to be a consenting participant in technologically mediated arrangements.
"How does anyone know for sure that all of that traffic (or at least the meta data related to the traffic) is not prepped for data mining on a per-user basis ?"
You can't, but that's not really the point. The point is that it's not permanent in a form that other users can access. Sure, maybe Snapchat stores every picture I ever sent. That sucks and should stop. But at least Grandma can't go back and look at some 2 year old picture I took with some buddies.
I know that because I know Evan, and he is obsessive about privacy. Of course it could all just be an act, but Occam's razor.
Truthfully, I don't really care if my Snapchat data is being mined. I'm not looking for absolute privacy. I'm not sending sensitive or private information. The ephemeral nature of the medium keeps me from worrying if a picture is unflattering or could be construed as in bad taste out of context.
It does suck the repairability is next to none but they have the best looking hardware out there. I have yet to see any other manufacture come close to what Apple can do hardware wise. A metal laptop enclosure is basically unheard of outside of Apple sadly. I would like to see someone step up.
I am typing on a $500 Asus flip that is all aluminum with a glass touchscreen. It is very nice, but I regret the OS (Windows 8.1,locked in place using the hosts file to avoid MS upgrades).
The issue I see is that the other side of the fence is not so sweet either. You cannot release a buggy OS that leads to my laptop bricking itself 3 times, and then jump right into another one with a hyper-aggresive update cycle, and expect me to follow along. Never. I risk losing massive amounts of work and significantly impacting my revenue at the same time.
I still have not decided if I will accept the sunk cost of Apple or a user experience downgrade to Linux, but hopefully I can put the decision off for a number of years like I did migrating away from Windows XP.
The entire modern tech ecosystem is rotten:
My drivers don't work. My OS doesn't work. The official development software for my target OS stinks. The official emulator to run it is dastardly. The api and functionality of the OS itself is pathetically broken, and less productive than battling bugs in php ten years ago. It all looks pretty from top to bottom if you squint, but the emperor definitely wears no clothes. 2016 is massively frustrating, and I long for the time when the basic premise of a computer being a tool that needs to function effectively was the norm.
I feel you. This is why I stick with Apple, however.
They may be declining, but they still have an overall "least frustrating" experience, especially when I have to help my family members with Windows 8 or 10, or need to Futz with my nephew's Linux setup.
My Dell M3800 has everything a MBP has, including the aluminum enclosure and Thunderbolt port, and more, such as 15.6 4K touchscreen and multiple USB ports. Oh, and it's also repairable.
Also, just for clarification, do you mean self-repairable? The review said it, like the MBP, has non-standard screw heads making repair difficult. Thoughts?
I don't know about self-repairable...yet. Mine's still under warranty, but that's almost up and I haven't had to use it.
I do use it plugged in most of the time, but I suspect that the review is spot on with the battery life. I maybe get a little more since I don't do much in the way of video, and I have my screen dimmed and my CPU in passive cooling mode.
I'm running an M3800 with Mint Linux 17.3. I can squeeze 2 hours out of the battery if I really need to; suspend/hibernate is currently completely broken, requiring that I cold boot the machine each time I open the lid; bluetooth has never worked properly, even after extracting the proprietary firmware from the Windows drivers.
And this is on a machine that shipped from Dell with Ubuntu 14.04 installed, so supposedly all the hardware is open-source friendly.
Actually, yes. Given my computer is always on display on a desk or table in my home, I consider it to be a piece of furniture. Therefore aesthetics are as much a consideration as they are for anything else I buy for for my home.
Just like people buy cars/homes/clothes/cellphones just because of how they look.
I'd argue they should look at the overall "package" when purchasing, but if looks are important to someone that's absolutely fine, and there is nothing wrong with valuing looks.
That case could do double duty as an axe in a pinch. It's incredibly solid. I really wished the hardware was more standard there is no way I'm going to be using OS/X.
Try installing ubuntu on a 7.1 macbook air and feel some pain. You're right though, nice enclosure. Of course I really should have known better but the places that I shopped at did not have anything at all that came close in stock.
I would say that some of the recent Dell, Microsoft, Asus and Razer designs are pretty nice, and there are plenty of metal laptop enclosures out there if you look.
I think there is a decline in the quality of Apple's software. However I think there is a correlation between the amount of users and complaints / bugs found. Now that Apple has a large and growing user base the seeming quality is also degrading. However I could be wrong, just my opinion.
Personally I haven't had as many issues as described in the article e.g. Preview has always worked fine for me.
However the biggest issue I do have is anything network related. Getting new messages in Mail is terribly slow, iTunes constantly gives me an error then loads the album or whatever just fine afterwards.
I am using a old mac mini, and I can't afford a new one... every time I update xcode, it get slower and more unstable, specially because the memory consumption jumps up, it is now in a point where it uses more memory than the mac mini has in first place (meaning it is constantly trashing with swap... crashes are common too, project corruption is also getting increasingly common).
I lucked out that my current client had a old non-updated iPod to allow me to use (you can't use new version iOS with old Xcode).
Apple does very aggressively update software to work best with the latest hardware. Sadly this does cause some negative effects for older generation users but without taking advantage of the newer stuff those users get screwed as well.
I'm running on a 2012 Mac Mini Core i7 with 16GB of ram with a spinning rust hard drive.
El Capitan has sped up the OS for me compared to the previous OS X release. Yosemite was so bad that I found myself avoiding using my Mac Mini instead using my rMBP with an SSD because the Mac Mini just felt so incredibly slow. With El Capitan they feel similar to me. Certain disk operations of course are slower, but overall the usability has increased under El Capitan versus Yosemite.
Based upon informal replies on Twitter when I posted about my upgrade experience, I wasn't the only one that noticed a distinct speedup compared to Yosemite on older hardware.
Mid-2012 MBP with 2.5 Ghz i5, 4GB ram here. I thought Mavericks sped it up, but Yosemite is unnoticeable. I couldn't tell you if it is faster or slower than when I bought it, to be honest. All the problems people mention in the thread, I'm somewhat surprised by. I guess I'm lucky enough to not have wifi issues, rely on iTunes, or Apple Music.
Until six months ago I did most of my day-to-day web browsing on a 2007 MBP with a 7200 RPM 160GB drive. I had to upgrade because the dying GPU was destabilizing the system, but with 4GB of RAM and competent ad-blocking, it was fine for the light use it was getting, and that did include Spotlight searches.
This is my experience. I have a late 2013 iMac with a spinner running El Capitan and it's one of the absolute worst OS experiences I've ever had and I've been using computers since the 80s.
That's the first thing that went through my mind when I read the complaint about Preview crashing. Then I got to thinking about how Preview can eat up a lot of memory in certain situations (maybe large complex documents rendered to retina framebuffers), so maybe it's a memory issue. Journalists may not be as likely as people like me to insist on ridiculous amounts of RAM.
There is a huge memory leak in Preview since El Capitan and the display of PDFs sometimes fails when you zoom in. I have no idea how many users are affected by this, but it seems strange that Apple hasn't fixed it yet. Perhaps it is just a tricky bug.
[edit] I think I found and fixed the issue. Thanks for mentioning it.
Yes, working on having a better landing page for sure. I just pushed a small update to clean it up a bit. Been trying to get some design help though.
I like the idea of a default entry. I may have to play around with that.