I know of some towns in upstate NY that employ "crow hazing" techniques to harass and eventually drive away large flocks. Typically these groups tend to use nonlethal (and as non physically damaging as possible) methods like air rifles and lasers, and sometimes just bright lights.
My personal bias tells me that it won't effect much: I think a lot of current city dwellers live in cities not only for jobs, but also because they like the easy access to amenities, culture, and walkability.
There's also the fact that the throughput of autonomous vehicles compares very poorly with the throughput of a decent subway or light rail system (multiple orders of magnitude).
More objectively, I suspect there are a lot of people who are only living in cities today because of job availability. But I question how many of those folks want to transition from a 30 minute walk/public transit ride to a hour+ drive in a (semi?) autonomous vehicle. Even if you can read or work in your autonomous car -- which, in itself, is a dubious proposition for anybody who needs connectivity to their team or the internet due to the price of data plans -- it's still time spent away from home, family, loved ones, etc. I'm not sure how many jobs are truly flexible enough for you to let commute time replace at-desk time: even software jobs don't all allow that.
So for many people, autonomous vehicles would just mean more time spent commuting, away from their families. And for all of that, you end up driving (autonomously!) 20+ minute to do anything on the weekends or after work. It's not a deal I would make, but maybe other people are more OK with it.
Interesting thought. I've been very anti Spotify-as-a-label, but this is a really neat way of looking at it that I hadn't considered before. What if Spotify becomes a (small) label that's very artist-friendly? Then they can offer non-streaming distribution of their artists as a bargaining chip for existing labels.
My only issue here is that I'm not sure if existing labels will begrudge a new competitor on the block (and then try to kill Spotify). It doesn't seem to me like Spotify being a fellow label gives them much more that the existing labels would want, but maybe I'm just not thinking of it.
According to my memory and a little research [1], the record labels have some stock stake in Spotify. Personally I think this is Spotify's best bet: if the labels can derive stock gains from helping Spotify (plus licensing fees), they have skin in the game so they won't try to sabotage Spotify. I'm of the opinion that instead of trying to produce music (and fight the record labels), Spotify is better off getting into a complimentary position: make it easier for fans to find out about concert, purchase tickets at fair prices, and buy t-shirts. All stuff that Spotify can probably do better than the record labels, and which won't cut into label profits.
I don't understand the appeal of this model. Do you really want to have to subscribe to 5 different streaming music services, one per label, just to listen to all your favorite artists?
I'm admittedly not a particularly big music person but I'd have trouble seeing subscribing to multiple music streaming services unless one of them was for some obscure sub-genre I was really into. A lot of music seems to be ambient. If there's some artist I really need, I'll but a CD now and then.
Mind you, I don't like video being fragmented but that's a more deliberate choice a lot of the time for me. I'll subscribe to a few places based on available and original content--somewhat grudgingly to be sure--but I accept those are my options.
I know that rents in those places has plateaued, but there's so much demand that even a steady outstream of new parents might not make a dent in housing prices. NYC rents dipped recently for the first time in years, but as somebody who's currently shopping around for apartments in NYC, the changes aren't really substantial to the end renter.
It appears to me, based on looking last year and this year, that the L train shutdown is starting to distort rents in desirable neighborhoods outside of Wburg. People are fleeing Wburg in favor of places like LIC, Astoria, and Downtown Brooklyn before L service is suspended. Probably a great time to look in Wburg if you can commute via ferry or stay in the neighborhood though.
Edit: I should add that people aren't just leaving Wburg, anywhere along the L line is impacted. I suspect it's creating a rental price floor in other parts of the city, at all price points.
As someone whose current lease on the L doesn't end until this October/November, this scares me.
I've been wondering how many 100's of dollars average rent for a bedroom will rise (100, 200, 300?) in the other BK neighborhoods that young, childless, salaried people tend to live. I've found that one of the biggest benefits of NYC is the salary to rent ratio (compared to other major American cities) if you're OK with roommates and a 30-45 minute commute on the subway. I wonder how much the L shutdown changes the math.
> "A decision to go with ARM technology in computers might lend it credibility where it has failed to gain a foothold so far."
> "Apple is working on a new software platform, internally dubbed Marzipan, for release as early as this year that would allow users to run iPhone and iPad apps on Macs"
Two things here:
1) I'm OK with breaking the Intel near-monopoly on x86. I'm not OK with moving to a walled garden where Apple forces you to publish apps through their App Store with a paid dev account, etc. just for the privilege of users on their platform. ARM doesn't necessarily mean this, but it is a different CPU arch. When Apple transitioned to Intel/x86 from PowerPC, Intel processors were performant enough compared to PowerPC processors to provide a pleasant emulated PowerPC environment for applications build for PowerPC. I don't think that a switch to ARM would provide this benefit, and afaik Intel's mobile offerings aren't that far off from ARM efficiency. So what's the benefit? Just vertical integration, I guess? Escaping Intel's backdoors and high prices?
2) iOS apps on OS X. Why? Does anybody want this? The way I see it, web apps are perfectly adequate for the desktop environment when it comes to stuff like checking my bank account or browsing Hacker News. I don't want to deal with a desktop app to do any of the stuff I can currently do via a browser. Is there actually a use case?
3) Given the hellscape of bugs currently present in iOS/macOS, does anybody have faith that Apple is going to be able to navigate a rewrite of macOS on this scale? It sounds like the sort of thing that requires a lot of talent and a lot of focus. Apple has the capital for this, but not the environment, imo.
Seems to me like this could be the nail in the coffin for Macbooks that's been pending since the merger of the macOS/iOS teams and the introduction of the controversial TouchBar/USB-C Pro.
“2) iOS apps on OS X. Why? Does anybody want this? The way I see it, web apps are perfectly adequate for the desktop environment when it comes to stuff like checking my bank account or browsing Hacker News. I don't want to deal with a desktop app to do any of the stuff I can currently do via a browser. Is there actually a use case?”
Right now many new desktop apps are just badly ported web apps wrapped in electron. They are slow and eat a lot of memory as all of their UI is a being rendered in a glorified standalone chrome tab.
This is less about iOS apps on OSX and more about making it easier for the iOS developer ecosystem to build desktop apps.
Right now it’s web teams that are building desktop apps because for most companies it’s too expensive to hire a dedicated desktop team. Even big apps like slack/WhatsApp use electron.
Making it easier for iOS developers to build desktop applications with the APIs they currently use should hopefully lead to higher quality apps.
The best case scenario is that Apple has cooked up some sort of awesome translation layer between the Cocoa Touch APIs and Cocoa, letting iOS apps function almost like native macOS apps. Hopefully this will happen. But I won't let it go past hope.
I avoid installing apps for most sites, but I kind of remember in the early days, anyway, people were just sneaking a Web view in there for most of the functionality in many apps.
If you can build an iOS app, you can build a macOS app too.
Electron apps are not built by iOS developers, but by developers like myself who would rather hit 3 birds with one stone ;-)
And no, nothing would change, except the MacBook will get to be even more shitty. We'll remember fondly the MacBook Pro of year 2015 as the last model that didn't suck.
You're already scratching the surface: vertical integration, backdoors and high prices, power and battery life optimization, lesser effort for an app developer to publish to all platforms, develop-once-run-everywhere, ...
Looks like you're looking for one "The Reason" - but there doesn't need to be one. If a layperson like you or me is able to provide 5-10 reasons, then its likely there could be 100-1000 reasons internally, and all of them add up.
> 2) iOS apps on OS X. Why? Does anybody want this?
Of course yes. As an app developer and as a consumer - convergence and bringing my apps and data across all platforms is no longer an "optional" thing anymore, its mandatory even for a ToDo list app, or email, or IM and everything else. Web apps suck at power efficiency - see the situation with Slack/Electron/Chrome/others on desktop, especially when it comes to stuff like hardware bound work (video/audio, digital image and movie processing, hidpi wor and much more).
If you don't need all this, and all you need is just a chromebook with a browser, its fine, it has and will keep working. It also ties in to why you're confused "why this is required" in so many ways. You may not be the target audience here.
> 3) Given the hellscape of bugs currently present in iOS/macOS, does anybody have faith that Apple is going to be able to navigate a rewrite of macOS on this scale?
This one answers itself. If a fragmented platform doesn't work and has lots of bugs - then it makes all the more sense to invest all resources in one platform/arch to have better focus and lesser bugs to tackle. Everyone doing rewrites know that there will be short-term pains, but that has to be balanced with the larger picture - otherwise we'll just keep hating new releases but there will be no solutions other than "let's do only bug fixes for next 1-2 years" aka platform stagnation, and users still won't be happy :)
Good point on 1) -- basically, Intel has produced enough problems for a high enough cost that there's reason enough to try alternatives.
On 2)... I hate web apps. Probably much more than your average layperson. Electron is miserable in my experience -- laggy, high memory/CPU user, non-native feel, but I think a web app in a browser is OK. There are really two different use cases I see here.
a) Take TurboTax, for instance. I don't want to download a TurboTax app for my computer. I'd only use it once or twice a year. But it works well in a browser. It's complex enough that a web app is justified.
b) Spotify. It needs to interact with local files, and I usually have it up in the background. A web app doesn't work well for this. Unfortunately Electron doesn't work well for this either.
I think if this is executed well it could be amazing -- what if layouts scale beautifully onto a laptop screen, so I can use an iOS app instead of an Electron app for Spotify/Slack/etc? If this happened, the benefits could trickle down into iOS, making it a more useful platform. On the other hand, layouts might not scale well for larger screens, and iOS apps on macOS could end up neutered and even less useless than a current webapp. Hopefully the former case happens, but lately Apple makes me feel like the latter is more likely.
3) I'm not really convinced that this will reduce bugs. In my experience, combining two pieces of software into one just makes the resulting monolith harder to reason about because it doubles complexity at high levels and increases complexity exponentially at low levels. But maybe that says something about my development skills :)
If I read that correctly, I don't know where you're extrapolating that Apple is making this move to replace macOS with iOS / a walled-garden where nobody can create apps for Mac except by selling them through the App Store. If Apple wanted to do that, they would just sell iPads and stop selling MacBooks.
As for 2), I think that's a nice convenience - if you're a developer you wouldn't have to to worry about emulation.
> does anybody have faith that Apple is going to be able to navigate a rewrite of macOS on this scale
Is it really that crazy they would rewrite parts of their OS to target a new architecture? A large undertaking sure, but not that ridiculous... This is Apple, not some random startup lol.
Absolutely true-- Apple is, after all, one of the most valuable companies in the world. But I think recent issues in iOS and macOS hint that they might not be one of the most talented software companies in the world. If regular maintenance and feature updates are bringing their OSes to their knees, what will a massive spec change do?
Random, probably not true thought: large portions of their OS developers have been working on this rewrite, hence leading to the "increase" of bugs on macOS right now.
And it’s actually a pre that every iOS app works on multiple architectures. If Apple ever wants to change iOS to run on a different type of CPU it’ll be easy.
>So what's the benefit? Just vertical integration, I guess? Escaping Intel's backdoors and high prices?
Yes, and perhaps better power/performance ratio. Possible iOS binary compatibility as well.
It should be an easier transition than from PPC -> Intel, since at that time, most big apps used CodeWarrior and had to transition to XCode along with the architecture move.
iOS Apps on MacOS is a good reason for Apple to incorporate touch screens. Today, they say the trackpad is superior because you aren't raising your hands up to the screen. Touch optimized iOS apps would be a compelling reason to include this feature and motivation for many people to upgrade their MacBooks.
Also, the Microsoft Surface Book Pro has a detachable screen that is a stand alone tablet. What if Apple is designing for an iPad to be the main screen with a base that houses external GPU, battery, keyboard, etc. iPad production ramps up, iPad users can "upgrade" to a full laptop, laptop users are automatically in the iOS eco-system.
I believe it's a T series, though your point still stands. I think I'd personally far prefer a display under the trackpad (though I don't think it's necessary at all) to a TouchBar or a touchscreen laptop. But I think I'm very much in the minority.
My employer does a 3-month training program that covers our full development stack, which is rather specialized for our industry.
My first team didn't use any of those technologies. But the 30-some fellow students in the training program have become some of my closest friends and, in some cases, trusted teammates and mentors/mentees with various technologies.
Peers are an absolutely underrated part of the mentorship puzzle, and I'm glad your company takes strides to incorporate peer learning even at a small scale.
I can confirm Bloomberg does this, u/quackware is correct. I went through the program myself recently, and it's actually a very nice dive into a unique full stack -- and because you take the training with a large group of peers, it's a good way to network as the company/make friends in a new location, especially if you're fresh out of a grad or undergrad program.
I know there were some issues with the program in the past (for instance, at one point you had to maintain at least an 80% "grade" in the program or you'd be cut loose from the company) but Bloomberg has really invested in the program recently and it's much more trainee-friendly these days. Lots of emphasis on cooperation and teamwork, and even though there are some solo timed "assessments" they're about the right level of challenge, and the goal is understandable -- they're there so the trainers can get a feel for what lessons work and what lessons need fixing.
Anyway, it was invaluable to me. I can't imagine jumping straight into a dev role at a company fresh out of college.
A buddy of mine did a 3 month training program at BBG after undergrad, so I can confirm that they have a program of some sort, complete with an independent project. He also said that his class wasn't all on the same level when it came to experience, so the collaboration with others learning new technologies with x years in the industry was invaluable.
Not the parent, but the US-based Financial Services company I work for also does a 3 month training scheme for their new graduate hires. Better yet, they brought all of their graduates worldwide out to the same place - so we've now got a worldwide network of people who started at the same time as us and that we've spent months with together.
Alas, due to cost (airfare and accommodation for everyone for 3 months adds up to a lot!) they've now scaled it down to just within each region rather than globally - so all of the NA graduates will train together, all the EMEA ones etc. Not quite globe-spanning as before, but still 3 months long and with people from other locations, just not all locations.
It's pathetic to see a slight decrease in dark UX referred to as "new security settings". Oh, so they moved some stuff around in the settings menu? Call me back when they actually give you a link to delete your profile (seriously, there is none in the settings. There's only "deactivate" and "delete your profile after you die" -- even though both of those appear in a "delete" section.
"New Security Settings" implies that I'm given options I didn't have before. That does not seem to be the case here.
Maybe you're just not that sensitive to it? App load times aren't what keeps me from updating, it's stability -- iOS 11 is still ridden with bugs, which is ridiculous for a 6 month old OS used by millions of people worldwide. Of course, CPU throttling is another valid reason to hold off, or, if you use a phone with a smaller screen like my SE, you might not want to update to an OS that doesn't scale well for your screen size..
http://www.wwnytv.com/story/37317955/crow-hazing-in-watertow...