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Comment Re:This was a UX design issue not a touchscreen is (Score 1) 168

Clearly this implementation left a lot to be desired, as military contractors tend to be not very good at their jobs, and are more concerned about their cost-plus profits.

Most military contracts are fixed price nowadays. The contractors still want to make a profit though so they're more likely to cut expenses like usability testing.

Comment Re:Good grief (Score 1) 168

Why on earth would touch screens even be up for consideration? Do military engineers not understand haptic feedback?

Human factors engineers aren't in the most glamorous engineering profession. If corners are going to be cut, that's one position that likely won't be filled, or if filled will be by people with little or no domain experience such as new grads or those who have only worked with graphical UIs.

Comment Re:PaaS (Score 1) 356

I "subscribe" to PaaS, Piracy as a Service. It provides a higher quality product, at a much lower cost.

-No subscription fees
-No renewal fees
-No tracking
-No automatic billing
-No DRM [ Digital Restrictions Management

This is what SaaS is competing against. Guess which one gets my money.

I'm guessing neither!

Comment Depends on cost. (Score 1) 356

I like the [i]idea[/i] of software as a service. I like to be able to access my software and data from anywhere and I like automatic updates that include the latest features. But 99 times out of 100 it is just too expensive compared to the buy once model. The break-even point for me is 3 years. If 3 years of service costs less than or equal to the pay once price, it's probably worth it, with the logic being that if I like it I'll probably want to upgrade in 3 years anyway and if I don't like it I can stop paying anywhere in the 3 year window and save money.

Comment All hype (Score 1) 219

You can get an entire internet connection cheaper than that. It sounds like a scam to get investor money. It has the classic scam buzzwords like "exclusivity", "long waiting lists" and "support of influential venture capitalists and bigwigs" who will happen to make a lot of money if they can get other investors to join in.

Businesses

Millions of Business Listings On Google Maps Are Fake -- and Google Profits (wsj.com) 47

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Google's ubiquitous internet platform shapes what's real and what isn't for more than two billion monthly users. Yet Google Maps is overrun with millions of false business addresses and fake names, according to advertisers, search experts and current and former Google employees. The ruse lures the unsuspecting to what appear to be Google-suggested local businesses, a costly and dangerous deception. Once considered a sleepy, low-margin business by the company and known mostly for giving travel directions, Google Maps in recent months has packed more ads onto its search queries. It is central to Google parent Alphabet's hope to recharge a cresting digital-advertising operation.

Often, Google Maps yields mirages, visible in local business searches of U.S. cities, including Mountain View, Calif., Google's hometown. Of a dozen addresses for personal-injury attorneys on Google Maps during a recent search, only one office was real. A Viennese patisserie was among the businesses at addresses purported to house lawyers. The fakes vanished after inquiries to Google from The Wall Street Journal. The false listings benefit businesses seeking more customer calls by sprinkling made-up branches in various corners of a city. In other cases, as Ms. Carter discovered, calls to listed phone numbers connect to unscrupulous competitors, a misdirection forbidden by Google rules but sporadically policed by the company. Hundreds of thousands of false listings sprout on Google Maps each month, according to experts. Google says it catches many others before they appear.
According to the report, Google Maps is estimated to carry "roughly 11 million falsely listed businesses on any given day," and a majority of the listings "aren't located at their pushpins."

Google didn't provide its own figure, but they did say that false map listings are a small percentage of the total. A 2017 academic study that the company paid for found that 0.5% of local searches examined on the service had yielded fake results. But that's likely because "Google provided limited data and diluted the study with listings for restaurants, hotels and other businesses that rarely post false locations," the report says.

Comment Re:Downgrade? (Score 2) 201

From the FAQ:

What will happen to WSL 1? Will it be abandoned?

We currently have no plans to deprecate WSL 1. You can run WSL 1 and WSL 2 distros side by side, and can upgrade and downgrade any distro at any time. Adding WSL 2 as a new architecture presents a better platform for the WSL team to deliver features that make WSL an amazing way to run a Linux environment in Windows.

Comment What is Stadia? (Score 1) 125

From the previous article:

Stadia is not a dedicated console or set-top box. The platform will be accessible over the internet on a variety of platforms: browsers, computers, TVs, and mobile devices. In an onstage demonstration of Stadia, Google showed someone playing a game on a Chromebook, then playing it on a phone, then immediately playing it on PC, picking up where the game left off in real time.

Stadia can stream games in 60 fps, with HDR and 4K resolution, said Google's Majd Bakar. In the future, Bakar said, Stadia will achieve resolutions up to 8K and frame rates up to 120 fps. Google showed AAA games like Ubisoft's Assassinâ(TM)s Creed Odyssey and id Software Doom Eternal running on Stadia.

So it basically sounds like you'll be able to play games from any device using powerful cloud hardware on the back end.

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