I think you might be selling Shomi and Cineplex Online a bit short. Both seem to be fine services -- what is really holding them back is a near total lack of device support, making it more difficult to integrate them into the living room (or in the case of Shomi,needing to be a Shaw or Rogers customer).

I recently cancelled my 90 day free Shomi trial. It's more geared towards TV binge watching it seems -- while it has movies, its selection is sparse, and in some cases duplicates what Netflix already provides. I'm not much into TV shows, however my wife may have watched it if it had actually been available on any of our smart entertainment devices. They technically support cable boxes from Shaw and Rogers, but that doesn't include much in the way of browsing; you have to use another device to find what you want to watch, flag it, and then find it on your cable box's "On Demand" section as a saved item. Perhaps even more stupid, the service just started three months ago, and the only other non-PC and non-phone/tablet device they support is the Xbox 360. Way to aim for last generation there, guys!

I've never even used Cineplex's offering, even though it looks like a pretty decent service overall. Again -- the device support just isn't there for set-top devices, although it seems to be better than Shomi. They also support the Xbox 360, the Roku 3, and some LG and Samsung smart TVs.

Then there is the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Nearly their entire collection is available to watch online (http://www.nfb.ca) -- over 2500 films. I was surprised to learn that they do have some device support (Roku, LG Smart TV, Samsung Smart TV, Panasonic, Google TV, Opera TV, Philips). No Playstation (or Sony TV/BluRay player) or Apple TV support, unfortunately.

The CBC would seem to be ripe for this sort of streaming service. Their iOS app already has a full compliment of all of their shows and original programming available to watch free on-demand, as does their website. They also have streams of all of their radio stations, again for free. I'm rather surprised that nobody has done the footwork to get their content on their devices (beyond PCs and iOS/Android mobile devices).

So I'd argue that the content is there -- it's the device support that sucks. It's all over the place. You might get two or three services with a Roku, but for others you'd need an Xbox 360. Apple Canada should be pursuing more of these sorts of connections. It's bad enough we don't get many of the US service like Hulu here, but it feels nearly criminal that we also don't even get was access to the existing Canadian services either. The services are there -- it's the lack of widespread device support that is hurting them.

Yaz

On the other hand, maybe that's a bad idea, as I may then have to sleep forever...

This is why, even though I do own a bunch of other Apple gear, I don't own an Apple TV. The Apple TV "channel" selection here in Canada is pretty pathetic. And while we do have a variety of online streaming services at our disposal (Netflix, Shomi, Cineplex Store, NFB, and probably a few more), none of them are available on the Apple TV, other than Netflix (indeed, many of them aren't available on ANY devices outside PCs (Windows/OS X, and sometimes Linux), or phones/tables (running iOS or Android)).

Honestly, the only thing the Apple TV potentially has going for it is Airplay support, which would allow me to use my iPad to stream stuff to the Apple TV, or to use as a secondary wireless display for my MacBook Pro. It's cheap enough I might buy one someday just for AirPlay, but otherwise the online services are sufficiently pathetic outside the US that it makes it hard to really get excited about.

Apple needs to spend more time in international markets like Canada in getting more content. Or they should just open up the device to 3rd party developers ala iOS, and permit "channel apps". All of the big networks in Canada already have iOS apps for streaming and watching shows online; porting these to the Apple TV should be trivial, and would open up a huge world of possibilities. I already have the HDMI interface cable for my iPad so my wife and I can watch content we may have missed, and so my wife can watch TV from her home country -- being able to do something like this directly on the Apple TV would be greatly welcomed (that, or have more such apps available on the PS4, which is already part of our entertaining system).

Yaz

Which only reenforces my point that Apple came along, and won the market by introducing a device that didn't suffer from these issues. And a huge part of that was the end-to-end software integration that all the other device manufacturers ignored.

Sure, you could pop open some piece of software and tell it to rip tracks from your CD player, resulting in a whole bunch of files name TRACK_XXX.MP3, but then you had to manually do the work of naming them, organizing them into an album, and getting them into your MP3 player (as your mp3 player-of-choice's sync software of the day typically didn't include its own CD ripping software). It was a chore. iTunes did away with all of this; it had a built-in CD ripper, it used CDDB (now Gracenote) to automatically tag track data, it uses a database to automatically categorize and organize music along multiple vectors.

Sure, the parts were there for other MP3 players, but getting them all integrated together was a chore, and not one likely to be undertaken by your average everyman. The iPod integrated all of these things together, making ripping your CD and putting it onto your iPod as easy as insert CD, press button, plug-in iPod, wait. It took the chore out of it, along with the need to get together all of the disparate pieces of software you'd need to do the task, as it was with other MP3 players. That is why the iPod won.

Yaz

Perhaps even more importantly, Apple made it dirt simple for the everyman to actually get their music onto their device.

I had an early MP3 player. It was from before USB was popular, and used a parallel port interface. Getting music onto it required the following procedure:

1. - Unplug the printer (after ensuring no print jobs were going)
2. - Plug in the custom parallel cable
3. - Run the custom software
4. - Hope that the custom software would actually work from the time you started it, to the time the transfer completed. The software for my MP3 player was notoriously bad, and updates were virtually non-existent.
5. - Find music you don't want on the device anymore and delete it
6. - Navigate around the file interface to find all the MP3s you wanted added to the device
7. - Transfer the files, and hope the software didn't crash during the transfer.
8. - It was completely up to you to organize your music on your hard drive. The device had no display, didn't work with any form of metadata like ID3 tags.

Contrast this with the original iPod, where iTunes took care of organizing all your music on your hard drive for you, made metadata handling easy, and allowed you to simply plug-in your iPod, wait for the "Do not unplug" icon on its display to go away, and unplug and walk away.

I had the opportunity back-in-the-day to experiment with a lot of MP3 players, and for almost every single one, it's bigger failing was in the software to get music onto the device. These devices were primarily pushed out by small consumer electronics companies that knew very little about software development; the software was often painfully craptastic. Some of the better ones did simply identify themselves as USB Mass Storage devices, but you still had to manually catalog and organize all your music (a task admittedly some people seem to enjoy; myself this is a perfect sort of task for the computer to do for me while I focus on more important tasks), and then sit and drag-and-drop music to the device.

It was the overall iPod experience that really made it excel. Apple took the time and care to make everything right end-to-end. The majority of the other devices just pushed out hardware, and paid very little attention to decent software integration to make the process seamless to the (particularly non-technical) end user.

Not to mention the fact that virtually no other MP3 player had an integrated store to make it even easier to put music on your devices -- I remember the days of ripping CDs, or scouring FTP sites known to host MP3s. Apple made both CD ripping and downloading (for a fee) pretty simple, whereas for most other MP3s, getting the music in the first place was your problem, and not one their software would tackle.

Yaz

Murderers rationalize their crimes in exactly the same way.

Yaz

For those who aren't aware of what was said, in the case of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's comments, I don't think Godwin is being appropriately applied.

Mr. Trudeau didn't compare the government to that of the Nazis. He didn't compare it to Hitler. He didn't claim that a government policy was as bad as the Holocaust.

What he did say is that current anti-Muslim government policies are akin to the Canadian policy just after World War II of "none is too many" when it came to Jewish immigrants to Canada, which the Government of Canada has since admitted was wrong.

In essence, it compared a current policy to a previous policy that the Government had admitted was wrong. I don't see why everyone is so upset, other than that the government would like to try to make this into a Godwin-like comparison in order to score cheap political points. For the record, according to the interview (for anyone who doesn't RTFA), Mr. Godwin agrees with this analysis.

Minister Blaney, however, seems in my mind to have skirted the line much more closely, specifically bringing up the Holocaust as an example to try to prop up support for an unpopular bill. His specific statement, that the Holocaust didn't begin with the gas chambers, but with words is correct -- however I have to agree with MP Randall Garrison (FWIW, he represents my riding, although admittedly I didn't vote for him in the last election) who said that this was "over-inflated rhetoric".

So in essence we have one instance worthy of invoking Godwin against, and another that had nothing directly to do with the Holocaust, but instead a Canadian policy that happened around the same time, and affected the same people, which mirrors in some respects what the current Government is attempting to do with a different population, for which Godwin shouldn't apply (but which is being brought out in some corners in an attempt to score political hay).

Yaz

Well, then you'd simply be wrong.

You see, there isn't one "Placebo Effect". The effect is different for different ailments.

An example: you have a patient who is suffering from a migraine. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they say they feel somewhat better. That may be the "placebo effect".

A second patient comes in who has had a heart attack. They aren't breathing, and there is no pulse. You give them a placebo. In 10 minutes, they're dead.

When constructing studies with placebos, you typically have to compare like with like. There isn't a universal Placebo Constant you just throw into your paper to compare against-- you have to compare outcomes between a population of patients with condition X taking the substance being tested, to the outcomes of a population of patients, also with condition X, who are taking placebos. The placebos may or may not have any effect -- that makes no difference. What is important is that the substance you're testing will ideally do better than placebos do, otherwise you might as well just use the cheaper placebos for the condition at hand, and head back to the drawing board.

(This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of how such studies are run and constructed -- it is provided for illustrative purposes only)

Yaz

And that's why they compare things like this to placebos, and not poisons.

The purpose of such testing to see if the medicine in question is actually having an active, biological effect against disease. Placebos don't have any sort of active biological effect on people; they have a more passive, mental effect. If your effect is statistically indistinguishable from a placebo, than all you really have is a different type of placebo. If you do statistically better than a placebo, then we infer that there is an active biological effect of the substance in question. If you somehow do statistically worse than a placebo, then you have some serious issues with the compound you're studying.

In effect, what this research has found is that homeopathic preparations have no active biological effect, and that they are, in fact, just overly-processed, overly-expensive placebos. For things that can be healed psychosomatically (or which will heal in the normal course of time, and just makes the patient feel less anxiety over something being done about their condition), they're just a very expensive version of a sugar pill. They still, however, have no effect on AIDS or brain tumours or TB.

Placebos are often used as the control because we expect medicine to be better than a placebo. And as this study has shown, homeopathy isn't better than a plain-jane placebo.

Now if homeopathic practitioners were honest about this, it probably wouldn't be an issue. But they claim they can cure everything from ingrown toenails to cancer -- and that's a serious issue.

Yaz

Actually, that may depend. I haven't looked at the WatchKit APIs yet to see what internal time representation they're using, but it may be susceptible to the Year 2038 Problem

Of course, what everyone seems to be ignoring is that the case is (as are some of the pins in the straps) 18k gold. According to Apple, the large Apple Edition watch has a case that weighs 69g. Now that's probably not all gold (the back is ceramic, the front is glass, the internals are electronic), however at the very least there is roughly $1000 USD of gold in there.

So while it's possible it won't retain its original price, it will probably never become worthless -- at the very least, there is some 30g or so of 18k gold there.

Yaz

Sure they are -- they're just really early on the euphemism treadmill

Can you recall a time when someone didn't use one of these terms as a put-down? I sure can't.

Yaz

Well, it's not my media -- I'm Canadian, and have never lived in the US. I visit from time to time, and have had some business related trips here and there, but it's not my country.

Still, if you want a more impartial view of things that are happening in the US, you can do worse than talking to a Canadian. Canadians are the great American watchers. It's somewhat hard to avoid -- we share a continent, they have 10 times our population, and we get most of their television channels. Their politics and business often affects us quite intimately, so we have a collective habit of paying a lot of attention to what they're doing down there. To paraphrase one of our greatest Prime Ministers, we're a mouse in bed with an elephant. It's certainly good policy to keep an eye on the elephant, in case it decides to roll over.

I've never been to Sweden, so I can't really say much about your experiences there.

What I can say is that anytime an American has decided they need more freedom, they come to Canada. There are a lot of examples over the last few hundred years: the United Empire Loyalists (basically, people loyal to England during the American Revolution), black slaves via the Underground Railroad, Vietnam draft dodgers, Iraq veterans who did't want to be redeployed yet again -- the list is long and varied.

This debate has also occurred within the US, in conjunction with illegal immigrants from Mexico, particularly in places like Arizona, which tried to pass laws permitting law enforcement to target people like this. IIRC, the measure failed in the end due to the fact they were targeting people who "looked Mexican", even if they were long-time American citizens. So that's hardly unique to Sweden.

There is a big difference between the propaganda and how Hollywood would like everyone to see the US, and reality here too, unfortunately.

It's hard to be free when you can't afford health care, and a member of your family gets ill. It's hard to be free when the state you live in has a history of serious racial segregation. It's hard to be free when you're homosexual and your employer is 100% legally entitled to fire you from your job, or your landlord to evict you because of your sexual orientation. And the US has the largest incarcerated population of any country in the world (more than 2.2 million Americans are in jail, giving it the second highest per capita incarceration rate in the world). There are a lot of people in the US for whom "land of the free" has never lived up to the hype.

You'd probably find that Sweden would be a whole lot richer if it had 330 million people living there.

A very large part of the US's wealth really comes down to the number of people. That's not to put down the fact that they have developed a very advanced nation, of course -- it still takes a lot of work to get to the Western worlds level of development, and to maintain a high level of productivity. However, Sweden is also an advanced nation, and if it had the population of the US, you'd probably find that Sweden would be a whole lot richer as well.

I don't mean to put down the US. But there is a difference between the nationalistic/super-patriotic way they see themselves, and reality. I invite you to travel there and see the reality for yourself. There are amazing people and places there, but there is also a lot of unnecessary social ills. How you are treated there will depends a lot on where you are, what colour your skin is, what religion you follow, immigration status, and what your sexual orientation is. Different people will have wildly different experiences, because there is still a huge amount of prejudice there. People in those groups hardly feel all that "free". As the great American President JFK once said, "...this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free."

Yaz

You seriously need to take off those rose-tinted glasses.

Or maybe just read a US news website once in a while. The US is a country where a) justice is applied very unequally, depending on your race (ref: the recent analysis of Ferguson, Missouri); b) where there are all sorts of political battles raging right now over the number of illegal immigrants living in the US (estimated in 2008 as 12 million people; more than the entire population of Sweden! The basis is often about how the President isn't doing enough to "protect the border"), and has the highest murder rate of any of the western, industrialized nations (by quite a bit -- you're nearly 7 times more likely to be murdered in the US than in Sweden, for example).

There are a lot of things to laud the United States over -- but the ones you specifically picked aren't them. Unless you were going for sarcasm, in which case "whoosh!" to me.

Yaz

I'm not convinced you know your history of devices at the time all that well.

WinCE/Windows Mobile/etc. didn't start to succeed against Palm because of great improvements in Windows for devices; it started to take over because of overt stagnation in PalmOS-based devices.

Palm become successful with the PalmPilot and PalmPilot Pro, in part because it was simple, quick, and worked. It avoided many of the complexities of the PC ecosystem, such as the notion of everything being in a "file" (PalmOS used an in-memory record-based storage model instead), so that people could work with the kinds of PDA data they wanted to work with in a more natural manner.

Unfortunately, Palm saw great success, and pretty much decided to keep on doing what they were doing, without really pushing any significant boundaries. They dragged their feet on implementing a colour display. They dragged their feet adding any form of wireless communication (before the Tungsten era, they only communications you could get were either via the serial interface, or via a modem over the serial interface). Palm OS 6.0 (Cobalt) was in development for a good part of a decade, and in the end never shipped on any device. The business itself went from being a stand-alone business to being bought out by US Robotics, which was then bought out by 3Com two years later. The founders didn't like the direction 3Com was taking the company, bailed, and formed Handspring. Meanwhile, only two years later, 3Com spun Palm off into it's own, separate company again. Two years after that, Palm broke itself into palmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software)...in another two years, palmOne bought out some of PalmSources IP, and the rest of PalmSource was sold to ACCESS. palmOne became Palm again, merged with Handspring, developed webOS -- and a few short years later was bought out by HP.

Now I didn't have a very large peek behind the scenes -- I was out on the sidelines writing the jSyncManager, once in a while hearing from a manager at Palm, but even from the outside it was easy to see that the serious game of Hot Potato being played with/by Palm led to some serious issues with innovation. There really wasn't any. Developments were iterative and slow. Where they were once ahead of the curve, by the year 2000 they were already falling behind. It took them ages just to integrate their system with a phone! The device and platform was nearly stagnant by the time webOS was released, and while innovative, in the end it was too little, too late -- especially when compared to what Apple showed the world with iOS.

The point being, Windows on mobile devices didn't rise in prominence because they suddenly were seen as extremely good devices. They had a UI with lots of small items that needed a stylus to manipulate, their browser was substandard, and the devices needed frequent rebooting. Battery life wasn't great, and when compared to Palm with it's simplified interface, were a PITA to use for normal PDA uses. Sure, they were great for the Windows geek who wanted to show how they had an underpowered Windows PC in their pocket, and became somewhat the standard for use in embedded systems like barcode scanners, but for virtually everyone else, they were nearly useless. However, they did suck much less than Palm did by that time. PalmOS pretty much hadn't changed in 10 years. It took ages for them to add simple things like colour and wireless networking (and even when they did, that was a feature relegated to only one or two models). The core of the OS was pretty close to stagnant -- they used pretty much the same non-threaded kernel from the original Pilot 1000 all the way up to PalmOS 4. Windows for mobile devices only looked good in comparison to how badly Palm continually fumbled around instead of innovating.

Looking back, considering that Windows on mobile devices (in its various incarnations) was only better in that it sucked less than Palm did, it shouldn't come as any surprise that Apple came in and ate everyones lunches overnight. Microsoft than, as now, took the wrong approach, and Palm just sat around and frittered away their lead until they didn't matter anymore (not entirely their fault -- all the resets and restarts and changes in direction from being bought and sold every 2 - 3 years for 15 years was as much to blame as anything). Microsoft only had the distinction of being the best of the worst -- which is still better than Palm's giving away the market entirely.

In summation, Windows Mobile 5 didn't knock "Palm down several notches". Palm was already actively falling down a notch-filled pit of doom. Sure, this helped Windows Mobile for a short while, but I'm not so sure that "sucking less than Palm" is really all that much to brag about. In the end, the market certainly didn't find it all that exciting.

Yaz

Because it violates the standard definition of "refactoring".

Refactoring is about changing the structure of the code, and not the algorithms used within the code. The goal is typically to reduce coupling, increase cohesion, and (frequently) to improve testability.

Replacing an algorithm with a better algorithm isn't "refactoring", it's "rewriting".

Taking your giant brute-force method and breaking it into smaller parts in a cohesive unit (source file, class, package, etc.) with lowered coupling (perhaps by genericizing previously tightly-coupled bits), in such a way that the individual units have a smaller testing surface -- but is otherwise the same algorithm -- then you've refactored the code, by definition.

Yaz