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Comment Re:Many small solutions through a day (Score 5, Insightful) 174

Separate money from wallets? Bring smiles to Apple fanbois faces? Usher in a new wave of corporate privacy invasion?

Christ, this is so obnoxious. Look, just because you don't have a use for this watch, it doesn't mean NOBODY does. Your implication is that this watch is literally useless except for making people that buy Apple products feel good.

First of all, it actually has functions that people theoretically feel useful. There are certainly Android Wear and Pebble owners that have similar functionality that feel that those devices fill this need. So as long as the Apple Watch does at least as much as those watches do, there's utility to some people. Even if all it does for someone is tell the time, $300 is not even close to the high end of what watches cost.

But it's also jewellery. People wear that stuff for lots of reasons. Do you understand how insanely dumb it is to buy a mechanical watch except as jewellery? They're not terribly accurate timekeeping devices. But they look good, and there's a aesthetic value to knowing that what you're wearing is mechanical and hand crafted. It's over $5000 for a Rolex STEEL wrist band. But you're not here criticising the idea of all luxury watches in general, or even all Smartwatches, just the Apple Watch.

You finish by saying that it's about the lock-in, but that's a ridiculous complaint. You think someone buying the first-gen Apple watch is the kind of person that is normally so capricious about their tech decisions?

What you don't like is that Apple made it and that other people like it. Just say that out loud and move on. Or don't comment at all. I think we can all safely assume by now that when Apple makes something there are a bunch of people that don't like it, so let's all pretend that you've said your piece and not use up the space from now on, hmm?

Comment Re:Solution looking for a problem? (Score 1) 174

To me, every 'smartwatch' has to pass this test: would I wear it if all it did was display the time? Does it look and feel good enough? After that, the $300 is either easy or impossible to justify. I'd wear the Apple Watch. I'd wear one of the Withings Activite watches.

I will probably get one once I feel like the first-gen problems are worked out.

Comment Re:Solution looking for a problem? (Score 3, Insightful) 174

I don't think it can solve any problems for you--if you're overwhelmed by notifications, your watch will just be a new point of contact for your frustrations.

You need to consider what's actually worth being notified about. I have a personal email account and one that I use to sign up for forums and get shipping notifications sent to. Only my personal account displays notifications, and I have a few people on my email VIP list. I switched my other mail account to sound notifications only. That way I know something happened and I can check it when I care.

At first it really feels like I'm missing things, but it actually worked out really well. Start with the assumption that nothing is worth as much as your time, and turn off every notification. Then add them back in one by one if you think it saves you more time to know that information immediately rather than once every hour or so.

Comment Re:Pioneers get arrows in back (Score 1) 138

Joanna Stern of the Washington Post did a full EKG test with a bunch of fitness bands and a Polar heart rate strap. The fitness bands were all terrible, and the Polar Strap was pretty much spot on. Her testing of the Apple Watch seemed to indicate that it was within about 5 beats or so of her Polar-measured HR. It's by far the most accurate wrist-mounted HR monitor that she tested.

Comment Who gets fired? (Score 1) 334

The highest level person that explicitly signed off on the strike should be fired. That's not the president--he authorises programs like this with the intention that they're carried out properly. (Whether or not this is an action the USA should be taking is a matter for elections.) If something goes wrong, someone should be punished for their incompetence. It can't be the lowest level person, because they're not the one calling the shots--it has to be someone high in the chain of command. Only explicit accountability can keep this sort of thing from happening again, assuming that this program must continue at all.

(I'm all for banning this sort of thing, but let's be real. Of course, if we're being real, we probably won't hear about this ever again.)

Comment Or when the manager... (Score 1) 407

says Farah. "It is not hard to imagine a supervisor telling employees that this is the standard they should aspire to in their work, however they manage to do it (hint, hint)..." How 'bout what happens when its the supervisor using the enhancing drugs and decides that everyone else needs to be just as productive as he/she is? So the underlings have to use more of the enhancements to be productive enough to get noticed and promoted while those who choose not to tweak their brain chemistry will never be able to compete and will be seen as failures or inefficient managers of their time.

Submission + - Firefox marketshare plummets to 10% (computerworld.com)

Billly Gates writes: This is a story which is both sad, yet unsurprising. News like this just 5 or 6 years ago would send many of us in a panic as only Firefox was the savior from the stranglehold of IE 6 on the internet last decade. Many things have changed since then. Microsoft decided to start developing IE again to remain competitive. IE became secure and standards compliant starting with IE 9 which is still continuing to catch up with project Spartan for Windows 10 and no longer is proprietary.

New players have arrived derived from a new standard called webkit. Webkit and it's fork Blink created a new more modular rendering engine. Chrome, Safari, and mobile apps and browsers based on it rapidly have taken marketshare over the last few years. Chrome became a better browser with very fast java, threaded tabs, and tight memory management, and innovated many of the new HTML 5 and CSS 3 technologies leaving Firefox and IE in the dust.Firefox meanwhile has frustrated it's users over various issues and poor releases starting with Firefox 4.0 and continual breakage with add-ons every 6 weeks.

Netmatshare produces statistics independently from other companies which have Firefox marketshare listed at around 10%. but all seem to show the same trends. Are we heading into an era soon where webmasters will not support Firefox and put banners encouraging their users to download Chrome instead?

Comment Re: How about basic security? (Score 5, Informative) 390

IPSec is perfectly usable.

Telebit demonstrated transparent routing (ie: total invisibility of internal networks without loss of connectivity) in 1996.

IPv6 has a vastly simpler header, which means a vastly simpler stack. This means fewer defects, greater robustness and easier testing. It also means a much smaller stack, lower latency and fewer corner cases.

IPv6 is secure by design. IPv4 isn't secure and there is nothing you can design to make it so.

Comment Re: Waiting for the killer app ... (Score 3, Informative) 390

IPv6 would help both enormously. Lower latency on routing means faster responses.

IP Mobility means users can move between ISPs without posts breaking, losing responses to queries, losing hangout or other chat service connections, or having to continually re-authenticate.

Autoconfiguration means both can add servers just by switching the new machines on.

Because IPv4 has no native security, it's vulnerable to a much wider range of attacks and there's nothing the vendors can do about them.

Comment Re: DNS without DHCP (Score 4, Informative) 390

Anycast tells you what services are on what IP. There are other service discovery protocols, but anycast was designed specifically for IPv6 bootstrapping. It's very simple. Multicast out a request for who runs a service, the machine with the service unicasts back that it does.

Dynamic DNS lets you tell the DNS server who lives at what IP.

IPv6 used to have other features - being able to move from one network to another without dropping a connection (and sometimes without dropping a packet), for example. Extended headers were actually used to add features to the protocol on-the-fly. Packet fragmentation was eliminated by having per-connection MTUs. All routing was hierarchical, requiring routers to examine at most three bytes. Encryption was mandated, ad-hoc unless otherwise specified. Between the ISPs, the NAT-is-all-you-need lobbyists and the NSA, most of the neat stuff got ripped out.

IPv6 still does far, far more than just add addresses and simplify routing (reducing latency and reducing the memory requirements of routers), but it has been watered down repeatedly by people with an active interest in everyone else being able to do less than them.

I say roll back the protocol definition to where the neat stuff existed and let the security agencies stew.

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