I'm trying to use transit in SoCal right now and its dogshit. These stations have multiple floors of parking for cars but no bathroom!!!
Positive Train Control doesn't work right and is causing delays, the readerboards are accurate to within 10 minutes (but don't display info about trains when they are over 10min away).
Walking across the street to a store that had a bathroom almost got me killed by an SUV. In Seattle I can count on Sound Transit having restrooms at any station they've invested millions of dollars in.
We all have the urge to go, why should I be forced to cross a hostile road and pay multiple dollars just to not piss in public?
Whoever is running the transit agency down here is trying to drive away anyone who can choose not to ride.
I'm surprised that eMMC hasn't seen more of a price drop off like SSDs, mSD and other flash storage. The OrangePi PC+ does include 8GB of eMMC, but I think that was the largest they could get for a cheap price...
Flagships have been skyrocketing in price and are losing marketshare to the midrange segment, which almost always has removable storage, and often has a swappable battery.
Body shops would be able to bring in many more workers, and supress wages further.
The dearth of middle income jobs in the USA is in part caused by these body shops flooding the domestic market with questionable talent, driving down wages and living standards severely.
It does seem a bit out of proportion, News Corp bought a business that proceeded to sink.
I think Peertube and other Fediverse stacks like Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed & Lemmy will continue to bleed users from more traditional sites over the next few years. They've significantly lowered the barriers to running your own social site, creating a great variety of communities that otherwise would be much smaller or non-existent.
Yes, MySpace wasn't making any money if I recall and so had no real business plan. Sounds like the same like the guy complaining. They don't have real business plans to make money except an exit strategy to sell it to someone else. Their revenue was going to come from adsense? And he's complaining about google cutting him off. He should have been thinking how to make money, like his own adsense.
Six kids and two parents surviving on one regular income could buy a 3 bedroom house in the past. Not great living conditions for those 8 people, but housing did not used to be such an expensive proposition to buy or rent.
Oh I think you may be right. They might have been understating their GDP. I remember few yrs ago Bloomberg wrote a piece explaining why the Chinese bureaucrats have incentives to under-report.
"China’s national accounts are based on data collected by local governments. However, since
local governments are rewarded for meeting growth and investment targets, they have an
incentive to skew local statistics. China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) adjusts the
data provided by local governments to calculate GDP at the national level. The adjustments
made by the NBS average 5% of GDP since the mid-2000s. On the production side, the
discrepancy between local and aggregate GDP is entirely driven by the gap between local and
national estimates of industrial output. On the expenditure side, the gap is in investment.
Local statistics increasingly misrepresent the true numbers after 2008, but there was no
corresponding change in the adjustment made by the NBS. Using publicly available data, we
provide revised estimates of local and national GDP by re-estimating output of industrial,
construction, wholesale and retail firms using data on value-added taxes. We also use several
local economic indicators that are less likely to be manipulated by local governments to
estimate local and aggregate GDP. The estimates also suggest that the adjustments by the
NBS were insufficient after 2008. Relative to the official numbers, we estimate that GDP
growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower and the investment and savings rate in
2016 is 7 percentage points lower."
It hardly "had to be done", and in this process that you've claimed had to be done, many of the best and brightest have escaped the large adtech behemoth.
The organization is a husk of itself, unable to maintain services for more than a few dozen months, with a disinterest in improving anything that doesn't make PR headlines (eg: Google Fi RMAs, IPv6 support inside GCP, worsening search results, etc). Eventually this will cause Google to join AOL & Yahoo, though Android & Search should provide sizable staying power.
You may be right about the husk-ness. Sometimes companies can recover from this kind of cultural damage --- look at Microsoft's renaissance. But this kind of damage frequently causes talent flight and a death spiral.
I still think it had to be done. The activists wanted to turn the company into a tool for advancing a fringe political agenda, even if unprofitable
No leadership group can or should tolerate that kind of hijacking.
It'd have been better for this culture war not to have started at all. But once the activists started it, it became an existential imperative for Google to finish it --- which it did.
Not abusing workers and not turning Google into an extension of the DoD & Chinese Surveillance Infrastructure is a fringe political agenda? That seems fundamentally baked into Google's old motto, "Do no evil".
Microsoft's still playing their old games FYI, they have not shaken their prior reputation (esp. with their abhorent behaviour at Linuxfest Northwest 3 or 4 years ago), and they've essentially scuttled QA (hence certain Win10 updates deleting your files, among other recent bugs). There was a recent push to gut the MS Partner program's benefits, which had predictable results. IMO they are using Oracle's business model currently, albeit with a few thousand extra developers.
Apple has taken good stances on most privacy issues, but Apple Maps is poorly run.
The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS users could submit info about businesses and streets that lack data. Apple instead hires a ton of contractors in Austin (and now India) to manually trace roads and guess business hours based on anonymized GPS traces.
Apple lacks the scale of Google's army of unpaid Google Scouts (though they could easily fix this) and is wasting time on minutia rather than task their staff/contractors with sourcing & importing higher quality data regularly. One example would be importing county shapefiles, Apple could easily vault ahead of Google Maps if they diffed their map against each of the thousands of county maps in the USA, and they would be the only one regularly doing this (OSM does this occasionally, but not often).
They could also scrape business data from each state and use that to produce more accurate & detailed business listings than Google, among many other low hanging fruit.
This is not 100% true, if you go to an existing business listing and scroll to the bottom there's a "report an issue" option. Apple has fixed my reported issues within a few days in the past.
In another sense I'm not sure why it should matter to the end user how many interns Apple hires to do things behind the scenes. I'm imagining that Apple is well aware of these shortcomings. Not only that I wonder if operational information observations like this quickly become outdated. i.e. it's all manual and terrible until somebody gets around to automating it.
My son's school is in a kafka-ish situation with Google where their listing is wrong and cannot be changed. People cannot write reviews, and data doesn't get updated.
98/100 times, updates to Apple or Google mapping products are done in hours or days. The 2/100, forget it.
Apple Maps has a deep queue for reports about map inaccuracies, your minimum wait time is a few days 98 times out of 100. This is fixable, but it requires even more staffing than Apple already has working on Apple Maps (which is most of the people they employ in Austin and India).
>> Apple has fixed my reported issues within a few days in the past.
> These user reports take weeks to months to get triaged, making many rather useless.
My experience is closer to the "a few days" as well; they were faster than the one time I remember reporting something to Google Maps. YMMV and all that, but.
> The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS users could submit info about businesses and streets that lack data.
They weren't able to do this while they were still reliant on third-party data, because the contracts required them to submit those changes to the third-party providers first and then once they were accepted, get them in downstream updates. This is one of the main reasons they invested in building out their own data; they'll be able to accept user-sourced fixes much more quickly.
There’s an easy way for users to submit feedback/fixes to Apple maps, I used to do it all the time. The best (?) part is they’ll notify you on your device when the issue is fixed, typically in a day or two. Nowadays the only time I’ve submitted a fix is in a really small town no one goes to.
There’s an easy way for users to submit feedback/fixes to Apple maps
Which is? If I say "Hey Siri, how do I report an error with your navigation?" I get search results for how to report problems with Google Maps. And I definitely don't see any UI widgets that suggest that they're for reporting problems.
Click the information button "i" and then "Report an Issue".
There is no "i" button from the navigation screen and there's no "i" button from the search results either if you want to report entirely irrelevant results.
This is likely an intentional design decision, and it sounds like a common-sense safety feature.
Great feature for walking and public transit directions. They still have interactive bits for the driving directions — I can't imagine what sort of "common sense" simply hides the report a problem thing until you dig through a few levels of mediocre UI.
Positive Train Control doesn't work right and is causing delays, the readerboards are accurate to within 10 minutes (but don't display info about trains when they are over 10min away).
Walking across the street to a store that had a bathroom almost got me killed by an SUV. In Seattle I can count on Sound Transit having restrooms at any station they've invested millions of dollars in.
We all have the urge to go, why should I be forced to cross a hostile road and pay multiple dollars just to not piss in public?
Whoever is running the transit agency down here is trying to drive away anyone who can choose not to ride.