dbendixen

king editor the grate said:

Buh, I'm not familiar with the way such things are engineered, but is it possible the bit rate is high because few people are using the service? And, thus, it will drop when it becomes more popular?

No, there’s no link to the number of users and the quality offered. Unless Apple doesn’t want to fork over the money to the CDN providers when they have millions of subs.

The way streaming services work is they generate a piece of encoded content and then segment it into 4-8 sec chunks (sometimes vice versa). These are organized with playlists or manifests that tell the player what segment to play in what order. All these files are pushed out to content delivery networks which are composed of hundreds or thousands of servers for high availability and scalability. And, generally, they can scale on demand. 

Way too big. If I wanted a brick on my wrist it’d be cheaper to get one from the side of the road. 

I had a catastrophic disk failure a couple years ago and long story short, I didn’t have an iTunes backup. Needless to say, I lost everything, but was able to restore all my music from the cloud. It worked like a charm and while I can’t verify that 100% of my songs were restored, I did a spit check and found that even obscure, unnamed tracks had been restored. 

bshank said:

Which conspiracy is a it? Planned obsolescence? Or slowing down old phones to help them last longer? Both conspiracy theories cannot both be true at the same time.

Indeed. It's troubling to see greedy individuals and scum sucking attorneys going after companies like this. It's nothing more than a get rich quick scheme. What's more troubling here is that the French government may get behind this. At any rate, they'll have a hard time proving this in court, unless there's a French conspiracy to convict Apple... 

Apple should make the old/bad battery slow downs an optional setting and see how people like that. They also will need to include disclaimers in future OS versions along the lines of "improved user interfaces with enhanced user experience inevitably lead to increased memory and processor needs that may manifest as slight decreases in performance, particularly on outdated hardware." Or they'll just stop issuing updates to old hardware. Then they'll get sued for that. You can't win with greedy, selfish people.

bloggerblog said:

I call this as total BS, and if not I bet he ID'd the mask and unlocked with real face.

Does it really matter? FaceID is still better than anything else on the market today. Samsung's first try at this was foiled with a simple photograph of the person's face. What this video doesn't show is how many attempts they made before they got it right. In practice, this just isn't going to be possible--either they'll lock the phone out permanently and force an erase or have to try so many iterations it just won't be feasible. Also, how likely is this to work without a good, multi-angle set of photographs of the person and/or physical access to the person, in which case the person has probably been kidnapped and has more to worry about than his phone being unlocked. Either way, it shouldn't cause too much alarm as anyone who knows anything about security will tell you that all bets are off if the bad guy has physical access to the hardware (macOS single user mode, anyone?).