jeffythequick

seanismorris said:

I wonder what Epic is thinking...
I get they are frustrated with the 30% “Apple Tax” but their actions make no sense.

70% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Regarding nausea - 
I was in a room with a bunch of "higher ups" watching a demo of someone wearing an AR headset with what he was seeing on projector screens.  Up to about a minute in, everyone was enthusiastic about what the tech was doing: installing parts.  Then, I started looking at them... one by one they started looking away, until all of them were intentionally shadowing their faces from the screen.  One or two left the room and din't come back in until they were made aware that the projector was now showing a PowerPoint.

I asked about that, and everyone was getting nauseous, mainly because the micro-movements of our heads are well accounted for by our brains and the AR headset, but to those watching, it looked like he was on the water, but they were on land, so the movement didn't match what they were seeing.

They technician had no issues, nor did most of the people when they tried the headset on.

There is a phenomenon where the users do get seasick, claustrophobic, or have other issues when wearing AR/VR headsets, and one thing I believe can help solve this is not having cameras display on the screen, but have clear screens that project the images needed, and let the user see reality with no delay.

I do fly FPV drones, and it's a lot of fun to do that, and every 8-9 minutes I have to take the goggles off and maybe that's the eye-rest I need.

So, the argument is, "You must feed user information to us without restriction."

Hey FB, why not make your own phone?  All the cool kids are doing it.

Only journalists can save journalism.

When one turns on the 5 major news outlets (CBS/NBC/ABC/CNN/Fox) and sees the hard news (not the opinion people like Scarborough/Hannity, etc) people saying the exact same phrases (it's been going on for a long time...the word "gravitas" was foisted upon us in 1988 by the big 4 (first 4 from the previous list) repeating it over and over... and it was said in one of the major party's talking points) over and over, and presenting one side of the story without presenting a valid point from the other side.  Other "sins" are:

• Presenting something inherently incorrect and when the incorrect information is revealed (let's say 10 seconds later on the same video that was replayed ad nauseum) that the exact opposite situation happened.  When it is revealed that the contradicting information is revealed, the story is quickly dropped with exactly one apology.
• Taking the worst of one side and presenting it as the standard of that side.
• Minimizing the amount of peaceful demonstrators, and concentrating on those that were not peaceful.
• Minimizing those that incite violence in a crowd, and blaming those on another side as the instigators.
• Not questioning why authorities made calls to have police forces stand down when two sides (one side disarmed when they had to attend an event, the violent side waiting for them when they exited an arena, forced to walk through that agitated crowd) are forced.
• Asking one side (relatively) softball questions and the other side ad hominem questions, or better yet, making journalists submit their questions and then selecting journalists that ask questions that the elected official wants to answer. 
• Selective editing to make one side look bad (i.e. having 2 hours of interview material and using the worst 4 minutes), and the other look good.
• Asking relatives of an elected official to comment on personal conversations between them and the elected official.

This isn't new in America.  Having government or another entity (editors) filter the news for me is where my red flag goes up.  Biases will be invoked, and here's the thing... Journalists, if you report all the facts and some disagree with your biases, then you're a real journalist.  If all of the facts agree with your biases, check your sources.

According to cybersecurity website vx-underground, at least 14 members of the group have been arrested at 25 locations.

Just curious... how do 14 people get arrested at 25 locations?  Did they get moved during the arrest process?

jellybelly said:

When you show bar charts and point out quarters, it would be nice if you could label the chart better in a graphic program after the chart source exports the chart. 

I did it on my iPad in Vectornator, using it for the first time. Amazing features and amazingly useless search in the help/ support area.  I could have knocked this out in InDesign in 15 minutes or less, which I’ve used since 2003.  And I’d have had the time to do a nicer job. 

I hope you can improve on this and do something like this so we can find all the 2nd quarters for the comparisons. Maybe highlighting the 2nd quarters with shaded rectangles (in multiply mode to make ‘see-through’) would work better. Labeling and dividing the years with vertical rules helps too.

Thanks in advance for considering this. 

I don't have a nice chart like you did, @jellybelly , but can the Gross Margin be a line graph superimposed over the Revenue bars?  I've used those quite a bit where I work, and they really help tell the story.  The offset bars kind of look like things are going up/down.  Just a further improvement on what @jellybelly suggested.  I do like the year markers!

Microsoft Voice Command had this back in 2004.

Contacts on your Windows Phone that you wanted to call, simply hold the button and say, "call Mike Jones on mobile"
Voice command would instantly respond with "Call Mike Jones on mobile?"
I respond, "Yes"
and the call would go through.

The whole idea of having my voice be telegraphed to some computer for processing 20 (it was November 2003 when Voice Command was released) years later is a bit ludicrous, especially when the Windows Phones at the time were still 5 years behind the first iPhone.

Voice recognition isn't new, by any stroke of the imagination.

The phone I had was pretty tricked out.  I had the HTC TyTN, with 64MB of RAM and I did put Voice Command on my 128MB SD card.

daven said:

Well, as a stockholder, I’m a happy boy.

I too have barely survived the last 4,832.43 cries of “Apple is doomed,” since 2010.

zimmie said:

The wild part is eliminating Section 230 would ultimately just consolidate power into the hands of already-rich media companies. All the conclusions you can reach via Section 230 can also be reached via the First Amendment, but it will take vastly more money and time to get there. Small sites like this one would have to shut down anything which accepts arbitrary input from users, while sites like Facebook could keep operating while they spend years and millions of dollars on the court case. Then after all that, Facebook would win (after all, they're not a government, so they have freedom of speech, and choosing what you want to publish and what you want to remove is speech), and the smaller sites would have been crushed, so Facebook wins again!

It is a conundrum, and I can see both sides of the case.  A few things that could have happened, but didn't:
President Trump could have just started using Parler rather than Twitter.  It would probably crush Parler's servers, but getting 73M users on their platform would probably help their bottom line.  It's nice that Parler doesn't care what you put on there, and puts the onus of finding the truth on the reader, rather than an algorithm.
MeWe can take off, and make Facebook the MySpace of the 2010's.
People that don't like the "Big Guys in Social Media" can make their own platform, and make it better than the existing ones, and people will generally start going to them, then there's a tipping point, and then the masses will join.  (Again with the MySpace thing).

Jack Dorsey, Zuckerberg, et al don't have to care about Section 230.  They weren't around 10 years ago, and they can go away, and if there's something better, people won't care.  Their platform is made of nothing except the imagination of those that contribute to it.