It's basically the reverse of the "browse in store, buy on Amazon for cheaper" experience.

I've been using Kubuntu 18.10 since January and have found it so much easier to get things done. I don't have to constantly reset privacy and telemetry settings to keep the OS's nose out of my life. It has a real shell, ssh, and terminal so I no longer have to muck about with cygwin, putty, and winscp. I can customize the UI to my liking, e.g. dark mode that's consistent across applications.

About the only thing that doesn't work is about 1/3rd of my Steam game library but it's a tiny sacrifice for the efficiency gained with a proper OS that respects your time and privacy.

One time I was driving up through NYC during a heavy downpour where visibility was only a few car-lengths ahead. Traffic had slowed to about 30 mph on the NJTP and most people thankfully had their hazard flashers on. Then Google Maps decides to distract me and pile on the anxiety with multiple "press no in the next 10 seconds or else!" re-routing prompts to save at most 5 minutes.

Just yesterday I got a pop-under to "confirm" that a speed trap was still in effect, which of course obscured some vital information on screen for a few minutes until it finally gave up.

Demanding that your user take their attention off the road to fumble with a touch screen just to stay on the route they're comfortable with is dangerous, and if I opt out once it should at the very least snooze those alerts.

Having to scroll down past ads, unrelated news, unrelated youtube videos, and ever more of these info boxes has pushed the actual content I'm looking for out to the second page. It's made it much easier to use ddg as default and use the !g flag only when absolutely necessary.

Tech should take a cue from the biomedical research community and adopt an institutional review board that can independently assess the ethical and privacy implications of the data they're collecting.

Apple could be a leader here and drag the rest of the industry forward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventricular_system

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14161/the-amd-x570-motherboar...

The investigative reporting from The Seattle Times[0] indicates that safety engineers were pressured to avoid delays to rush out a competitor to the A320. Furthermore, their safety analysis was based on flawed assumptions to meet an artificial constraint of not requiring pilot simulator training in order to appease the airlines they were selling to. Finally, the FAA is allowing industry to self-certify critical systems with lax oversight.

It is easy to get lost in the technical details of why a particular catastrophe happens. The common throughline is a broken culture where deviance is normalized and those who speak out are ignored. It's the same story with Chernobyl, Fukushima, the El Faro, the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain, Air France 447, and now the 737 Max.

[0] - https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the...

But yes, the difficulty in verifying a correct implementation of date and time calculation calls out for a standard test apparatus to "prove" correct results for a defined scope.

It is vastly cheaper to simply pay streamers to hype up your game on Twitch or youtube than it is to give an honest, sober demo live on an E3 stage. The audience at these press events has shifted from enthusiast reporters/critics to hyperventilating influencer personalities. It was so bad this year that they were obnoxiously screaming and interrupting the presenters every few seconds to the point where the people on stage were losing their train of thought.

The other aspect is that putting together a demo takes time out of development. Almost every game shown this year had a release date of either Fall 2019 or Spring 2020. That means they're either on crunch or ramping up for it and can't afford to set aside a few months to make a vertical slice for E3. This is partly due to the end of this console generation with new hardware coming next holiday season.

The longer term trend is that marketing has caught on to the irrelevance of E3. They can run their own Nintendo Direct style live stream whenever they want to speak to their audience and the press will disseminate that info to the wider community.

You're even seeing companies like EA experiment with dropping a new title with zero advance notice as they did with Apex Legends (their take on battle royale, from the Titanfall developers). They just had an influencer preview event the week before and dumped it to the public with pretty wild success.

I like that the title frames it as a language shootout to pull people in to see if their favorite language wins (and I'm partial to Python having rewritten tens of thousands of lines of Java into numpy). Still, it would be foolish for people to come away from this brilliant analysis by ignoring the more important conclusion.

"There are apps from Flipboard and Spotify as well as a unremovable version of Facebook. McAfee Anti-virus is baked into the operating system as "security," and the Samsung Gallery app wants to share my location with Foursquare. The storage management settings, which is just a simple file-cleanup app, is "Powered by Qihoo 360," a Chinese security company. A caller-ID feature built into the phone app is provided by a company called "Hiya."

Once you run through setup and connect to Wi-Fi, the phone spawns an undismissable "Secure Wi-Fi" notification, which, it turns out, is an ad for McAfee VPN subscription service. I tried blocking the notification—it's not blockable—but it turns out you can open the advertisement, carefully consider subscribing to McAfee VPN, say "No," and then it will go away. Cool."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/galaxy-s10-review-fo...

The purpose of communication is to inform the audience, and rather than clarify what happened, this statement obscures the truth to the public.

The test capsule exploded. It means both SpaceX and Boeing have had test failures in the launch abort system for their respective human launch capsules. It will set back the timeline for the US to regain the ability to launch humans into space without paying for seats on the Soyuz.

Instead of discussing the event and its implications, the longest thread is now dedicated to excessive pedantry and incorrecting each other over textbook definitions of the word "anomaly".

Relatively speaking, the CPU heatsink was massive compared to the GPU. I would assume the engineers designing it knew that the CPU was going to run very hot, especially when it launched on a 90nm architecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKtVpvzUF1Y

Most recently I was looking for a countertop hot plate/burner to replace one that finally broke (filament burned out after 15 years). Searching within the Appliances / Cooktops category, it is filled with random apparel like t-shirts and dresses for < $1. Try filtering by price to any interval and it's random kids' toys, arts and crafts supplies, tools, and sex toys. You're lucky to see one or two actual cooktops per page. Filter by 'Fuel Type: Electric' and there are only 5 actual results plus an impact socket even though there are hundreds of actual electric cooktops if you filter by brand name or surface material. It's insane.

Most of the sellers and brands have names that look like someone mashed their keyboard. At this point the only way to use the site is to already know the exact brand and model you want and search from google.