decodering

foggyhill said:

EngDev said:

foggyhill said:

Basically, a lot of people here don't seem to have a clue. The reason all those speaker/receive companies are consolidating is because people are tired of their really crappy sound no matter how much you pay for them. Why? Because the speaker and receiver part alone is not the issue. It's putting them in a particular environment that's unsuited for them, and not being able to adapt to the music or listener location that's the issue.

Apple is offering an adaptive to room, music, etc, minimum setup speaker.

None of those bozos producing traditional speakers or sound systems have the processing chops to do anything about this; they're as doomed long term as the traditional watch makers.

This post is a lot of nonsense. Seriously, what are you talking about?

Maybe learn English or stop posting then.

The room acoustics and ambient sound, setup and placement is crucial to the sound you get..

The number of people who buy speakers/sound systems and then put them in their room and it sucks ass and they are not satisfied is beyond measure.

That's why the whole industry is slowly being decimated and consolidated; people prefer portable sounds to the actual sounds these systems produce.

The only place where those systems still make some sense is in home theater installations were the shear number of speakers overwhelms whatever deficiency there is and high fidelity is less important.

That you ding someone for not speaking English well and then make a grammatical mistake in your first sentence is hilarious. Honestly, better etiquette would do wonders for getting your points across.

Anyway, part of what you are saying is true: Yes, acoustics and speaker placement can make a big difference in the quality of sound reproduction.

But to blame that for why people are turning away from better audio components is completely off-base. The real reason is that many people look at the price of what they're buying and the functionality that comes with that purchase and go for cheap(er) and easy. The majority of people have decided that portable solutions using Bluetooth and/or music streaming services that play lossy (AAC, Ogg Vorbis, etc.) files are good enough. For them, the balance of quality and price is fine. To be honest, some of these wireless/portable systems can actually sound decent, even if they can't really compete with what you can get from a system built to produce high fidelity.

There is still a place in our modern lives for better quality systems in the living room or wherever people listen to music, some of which don't actually cost an arm and a leg (although most do, which is the real reason why the industry is suffering -- there aren't enough people willing to pay several hundred or thousands of dollars to get better sound). But for many, many people, that is a secondary consideration to convenience and cost. And that is real reason why the audio industry is suffering.

dysamoria said:

That new control center looks absolutely horrible. Total garbage. I thought it looked bad but it is even worse when seen in use.

• extra effort to get to the control center

• nothing looks like a control, requiring touch and gestural exploration and wild guesses (which tends to scare off new users, who won't use it for fear of doing something wrong).

• nothing looks distinctively different from anything else (compounding the current disease of flat design in the icons). Why do we have to spend so much more time switching context with Apple's current design? Nothing has distinctiveness, that's why.

• no color??

• Too much customization choice leads to bad visual design and no layout consistency between devices and users. Customization is not the end-all be-all of giving users a good system. Now when users customize their CC, they'll memorize their own layout (the few people who will customize this) and hit a road block when they use someone else's customized CC. This is one of the things Apple used to be very explicit about NOT doing, yet here they are adding this edge-case customization crap, causing a complete redesign to an otherwise feature-complete usable prior design, instead of refining the [still hard on the eyes] existing design... and instead of fixing the MANY bugs still in iOS since this flat GUI BS started with iOS 7 in 2013!!

Why are we devolving computer GUIs to be no more than thin lines, black & white boxes with black & white clip art...??? It's either too low contrast or too much contrast. No middle ground. We could go back to CMYK CGA graphics at this point. Hell, monochrome displays, even, instead of the expensive full-color high-ppi displays being wasted on this difficult to look at (and to intuit) minimalist garbage.

The flat GUI design fad is like a bastard offspring between ASCII graphics and 90s-era Corel Draw/MS Word bundled clip art.

This new control center looks like they put the programmers in the design jobs at Apple (I think even the print team responsible for iOS 7's ugly redesign would do better than this new junker). Too lazy to learn graphic design and UX, or too cheap/poor to pay for actual expertise to create an interface with actual imagery, depth, distinctiveness, and more than two colors. That expertise used to be AT Apple. It used to be BRED at Apple. Where is it now???

I stopped reading at "Total garbage." While everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, hyperbole -- especially unfounded hyperbole -- is the quickest way to discredit oneself.

Actually, I didn't stop at the second sentence since I actually wanted to see if the first assertions had any merit by being backed up with useful examples. Then I got to "extra effort to get to the control center." Huh? You just swipe up from the bottom like in previous iOS versions. The rest of the post didn't get any better.

Seriously, dude (male or female), just breathe. It's a freakin' interface with its strong points and weaknesses. 

Folks,

I get that conflating issues with the company's policies and the merit of it accepting Apple Pay can be objectionable, it's downright shocking and sad how many angry, ill-informed messages defending the company there are in this thread.

It's one thing for the president of the company to publicly state he believes in "traditional" marriage (the term is overly vague and rather random -- Which tradition? From which culture? At which point in the long history of humans creating and living in stable communities?). It's another thing for the company to donate large sums of money to groups that actively work to deny a group basic human and legal rights. To read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/01/chick-fil-a-anti-gay-controversy-employees-speak-out_n_1729968.html

If the president stated, and acted accordingly, that he did not personally believe in granting marriage equality but left it at that, then that would be one thing. But to actively give lots of money to discriminate against a group whose members have been and continue to be singled out for persecution just for living their lives peaceably isn't something anyone be jumping to defend.

Against same-sex marriage? Don't have one.

And remember: compassion and solidarity will get us a lot further in our collective journey than meanspiritedness and discrimination will.

king editor the grate said:

As a musician of sorts, it's humbling to discover people from around the world streaming "Golf Balls & Condoms." It's disheartening, however, to discover that enjoying or/and enduring it five times in a row generates a whopping .00001 cent for its creator.

That’s one of the reasons I continue to buy music I really like beyond the monthly subscription I have.

I also look for music I want to buy on Bandcamp, where the artists get a fairer share of revenues, before buying it through other services (I only buy CD-quality or better files)).

To me, it’s worth paying more when it comes
down to that.

sog35 said:

Still can't believe Apple pulled off the free 4k upgrade for 1080p movies.

Awesome.

Actually, I can’t believe Eddy Cue pulled it off... unless he didn’t.

gatorguy said:

Bing or DuckDuckGo pre-employment searches (or prior to dating or taking on business partners) would reveal just as much as Google Search would, right? So DDG or Bing or Google or Yahoo or any online search provider is a threat then? What would you suggest be done about what you've perceived as a threat?

You also said:
"Or the number of articles that describe the coercion the police use to strong-arm companies to hand over private information. Perhaps it is fair to say that Google, Facebook, et al. don't have evil intentions, but their business practices at the very minimum have the potential to do things that are dangerous for individuals."

In that regard Apple and Google are amazingly similar. They will both comply with legal requests for user data they have in their possession. Would you be implying then that Apple might also have business practices that are dangerous for individuals?  Again what would be your suggestion, refuse lawful requests (FWIW there's ample reports of Google challenging government requests to disclose user data on a case-by-case basis if they believe it's not a legally supported one and I'm sure Apple does too) Should schools, banks or security companies be able to search your background prior to employment, but not via an internet one? What about a single woman checking out a blind-dates background in advance? Should she have that right to know what she's buying into? How about police investigating why someone may have been attacked or worse murdered? Any clues in social posts? If those are valid reasons for searching a social site like Facebook how would you recommend restricting other searches that you would consider threatening to privacy, and what types of searches would those be? These are honest questions that might require some thought beyond "Google. Facebook. Evil. Internet. Bad" 

It's amazing to me how people go out of their way to oversimplify things to the point that we no are no longer talking about the same things.

The point I and others in this thread are trying to make is that we should be leery of the myriad ways technology is increasing the chances that our private lives could be turned against us should the right circumstances appear.

Go ahead and refuse to engage the points being made and spend your time instead cheering on the slow build-up of a technological web in which everyone gets snared. I will give you one point: Perhaps any online presence is reason to be circumspect. And perhaps not. But I don't think we're building in enough options to avoid the worst possible scenarios. And it's people like you that are so cavalier about these issues that will make sure that that continues.

Those who say that Google and Facebook aren't threats because either (1) targeted marketing only improves the quality of their lives or (2) the real threats are other companies that gather personal information on you are surprisingly (and dangerously) cavalier about where we seem to be headed as a global society (and using strawman arguments doesn't exactly make arguments any stronger). I cannot even count the number of articles I've read on companies using readily-available information within Facebook and Google searches to decide whether they're going to hire someone or not. Or the number of articles that describe the coercion the police use to strong-arm companies to hand over private information. Perhaps it is fair to say that Google, Facebook, et al. don't have evil intentions, but their business practices at the very minimum have the potential to do things that are dangerous for individuals.

Privacy concerns will always be at a crossroads with profit motives. Take Facebook as an example: As with any company, Apple included, you cannot use their services unless you agree to their terms of use. Those terms of use exist solely to give the company as much of a right to claim as its own intellectual property any information or photos you post. They also give the company absolute freedom to share your information with anyone and any organisation they please without you knowing about it for either commercial or law enforcement reasons. You don't get a say in it: you either accept the whole deal or you walk away. Facebook has a history of changing its terms of agreement without notifying anyone (people learn about such things, such as any uploaded photos becoming the intellectual property of the company, because someone raises a stink about it in the media and not because the company advised you). Then they change the terms again without seeking the knowledge and consent of its users (customers is the wrong term; it is more like revenue sources). And the information that is shared instanteously with other companies means that you, as a monetised source of revenue, can use a few key words and all of a sudden you are inundated with affiliated ads. That shows the company's only scrupule is to gather as much information as possible and profit from it. One can argue that that is not evil, and maybe it isn't until it is. (As an aside, I quit using Facebook several years ago after problems with the terms of service changing that I never agreed to and would have had I been given the chance.) But there are some potential issues that any functioning society should be discussing.

To those that say that people questioning where this is all leading to are being paranoid are themselves not being farsighted enough: With the right technology in place, which is in fact the state of things, it is not at all far-fetched to imagine a situation where data collection and sharing can lead to some very dangerous situations for individuals.

"49% of all iPhone owners are using a phone that's over two years old. That's just sad!"

Will we we hear that during the WWDC keynote next week?