la_barba

>I keep seeing absolutely massive fines of American tech companies in Europe, fines marked up to account for Google’s global revenues.

Maybe EU companies don't dodge taxes as much as US companies? Maybe there is a larger concentration of wealth in US corporate entities? Lots of sane reasons, no need to rush to wild conspiracy theories...

>To be clear I think France has every right to do this and Google can decide to close up shop there if they want, nobody is forcing Google to operate in an unfriendly environment.

Well, nobody is forcing Google to dodge taxes either...

>If you impose a 50bn fine then every other company out there will start having second thoughts about entering the EU market.

Yes, don't enter the EU market if you want to dodge taxes. More countries should be enforcing this..

Ironically, all this voice input stuff is making the regular people bend over backwards so that the computer understands what they want. The one extreme is programmers who completely bend over backwards to tell the computer exactly what to do with each byte.

>This is based on an assumption that making the device serviceable is actually going to help with this.

We are choosing between repairing phones versus tossing them in the garbage. I can see which one is better for the planet, given that phones are purchased in the millions..

>Apple actually takes the old phones and is fairly good at recycling and/or refurbishing them. If you're going to toss your phone with that being the case, I somehow doubt you'd repair them either.

The "you" here is reputable repair shops. I don't have the skills to repair my phone, nor do I want to. There are forums littered with people taking their phone to the Apple store and being told that they need to buy a new one, when all they had to do was replace a capacitor that costs 5 cents, or given the standard lie about water damage, or being told to replace the entire motherboard for a component failure, etc, etc.

Okay, you can say that Apples policy on repair is such and such due to the cost of labor involved, and that would have been fine if the consumer had another option to go to. But Apple fights tooth and nail to restrict legitimate repair businesses from purchasing spare parts from suppliers, and providing repairs that Apple refuses to, which makes it worse.

>I can imagine a phone that's also a horse and a vacuum cleaner, but it's not imagination that helps. Extra demands restrict options.

That's ridiculous. i'm talking about a reasonable design compromise. In any case, I'll believe your statement when talented phone designers apply their creativity to this problem, and fail to make a sleek and repairable phone. Due to the commercial aspect, most phone makers are unfortunately focused on getting you to buy a new phone every 2 years, and so the focus is not on making it repairable.

Agreed, I think there should be an option for paying for long term service/support. The 5years thing is purely due to lack of funding.

The more you look at the e-waste that is being generated and dumped (often in developing countries, or.. out of sight of most westerners) the more you realize that increasing repairability/re-use/longetivity of devices is important for the planet. Can you imagine dumping your laptop in the garbage if one of the keys stopped working? Or if your CPU fan clogged up with dust? That's essentially whats happening with iphones, because Apple refuses to give customers the option to take their phones to reputable repair shops by prohibiting suppliers to sell to repair-shops, or in some cases using DRM to prevent repair.

>How many of those phones will need repairs? How much more resources have to be spent, and what other trade-offs have to be made, to enable that repairability?

Judging by the large amount of phone repair shops in existence, we already have the answer.

>(One of the trade-offs being less economy-of-scale because not as many people are willing to buy a bulky yet expensive phone.)

Why do you assume that the phone has to be bulky? That's simply a lack of imagination on the part of designers..

I know you meant it as a general statement, but I think it depends on the kind of noise, and obviously the type of signal. Its trivial for a computer to look past 'fixed pattern noise' to find the data in an audio-visual signal. For certain noisy signals, a compute device could amplify/scale the data (and then perform noise removal) to retrieve the signal, etc, etc..

Most of the time I vary the speed of the book as I read it. I think thats quite common (?) The last book I read had over a thousand pages, and some chapters which were not really interesting could just be skimmed without a huge loss of plot/story/detail.

Also, I can see how if you have multiple hobbies/kids/etc you'd want to speed up your reading because you have limited time.

Why the weird extremes? Did the Iphone 8 or X or a android flagship from 2017 stop being nice? Is that your standard for an "IKEA particle plank"?

>A preinstalled app is the reason to switch the platforms?

No. What they actually said :-

>Every damn Android phone I've bought lately has Facebook preinstalled, theres other things, but I'm done with it all.

Apparently if you market share increases you are no longer allowed to make "just works" products.

From what I understand the restaurant listed themselves on Google's platform with contact information, and a link to their own ordering website, or a way to call for a meal pickup. Google inserted an indirection where the orders get placed via a third-party thus bypassing the restaurant without informing the restaurant.

If the restaurant gets a lead via a delivery-app, they they pay a fee to the delivery app. Here they would have gotten an organic "free" lead, that was then converted into a paid lead because Google inserted a delivery-app between the user and the restaurant. And Google probably earns some coin along with the delivery app.

Seems like Google wants to put a toll booth to monetize the action behind every search result. If I search for a toy and then buy a toy from a website, then Google wants money because they provided a "lead".

I really don't mean this as a knock on the work you do.. but what is the actual complexity of the operations you're describing? From what little I understand of it, all HFT operations are designed to be as simple as possible. Like.. I've read that the decision to the order engine could be as simple as a comparison between two numbers (some kind of arbitrage model), and the price adjustment could be just a simple addition/alpha adjustment. Basically, the offline/non-realtime stuff in HFT is way more complicated than the live/real-time stuff.

Well.. I'm totally OK with the efficiency in online-advertising being low. My point was that after a certain point, there is no way to get a better ad-to-viewer match without violating privacy. Google was never on the right side of privacy, and given the business they're in, they never will be.

What other ways exist to run a successful ad campaign?

Yes, we can do contextual targeting, but after that, what are the ways to improve upon the outcomes (from an advertisers standpoint) without violating privacy?

Yes, thats what I was thinking too. For Google, being in the ad business itself necessitates that Google's trajectory will be on shaky ground w.r.t privacy.

When switching from onboard -> dedicated, the resources (textures, shaders, etc) to migrate will be quite small. There is no question of migrating resources from dedicated -> onboard as that is never going to happen, unless .. again the resources are tiny. The context switch performance hit will depend on the other components on the board, but for a high end CPU/RAM/SSD combo, it wont be much. It will be equal to re-loading the all the browser tabs (for e.g. after a browser crashes).

Is there any way to improve the matching of ads to the viewer without violating their privacy?

I guess I was thinking of this from a heterogeneous architecture standpoint (e.g. big.LITTLE) . You have differently-capable compute resources, and you need to pick the one thats best suited for the work-load. Rather than the app talking directly to the hardware, I suppose the OS should let the app pick its work-load type, similar to letting it choose a process scheduling priority.

Does anyone know the technical reason that the OS can't handle that itself?

Actual headline:

Whole Foods CEO: Highly-processed food not good for health.

That is ridiculous. Nobody said that. Sorry, this conversation is no longer productive for either of us. I prefer to have more rights, and not less, for the consumer. You can make up your own mind. Good bye and have a nice day.

Err.. even on my PC with a TPM chip that has biometric data, I can replace the RAM, GPU, CPU or any other component without a problem. People need to think critically with a technical mind, instead of simply accepting Apples fairytales.

But all that aside, people are free to repurchase a new phone or get the entire motherboard replaced when a $0.50 component fails on their phone. I and many others prefer to repair it and save money. And not to mention .. reduce the e-waste burden on our planet as a bonus.

>It’s a phone where you might save $20. It’s not like it’s the right to vote....

You can thank them the next time you get your car fixed without buying a new car.

>And when Apple doesn’t approve a repair shop there will be another uproar about Apple “gatekeeping” repair shops....

We don't want them to approve anything. The iPhone isn't some magical unicorn. Its a box that contains components purchased from suppliers around the world. Apple forces the suppliers to not provide parts to repair shops. They use DRM in random components that have nothing to do with security so that repair shops doing basic repair have to beg Apple to "activate" the new components.

I think apart from the scale, they view labor as a risk, rather than an asset. The ironic part to me is they're hiring "genius" level talent to create these dummy level algorithms.

Being in the vaccine industry.. we take that term to mean reduced stress, back to normal life, and dollar signs.. :P

The 'article', if we are to be charitable here, is simply a press release. There is no substance to it, and we'll have to wait to see what parts they actually provide.

>And how do you “choose” a reputable shop without knowing where the parts come from?

You do it either based on brand, word-of-mouth, recommendations, online reviews, or a number of other ways people have been using to find reputable service centers for decades. People who came before us fought hard and we have established a precedent for repair in many many industries so that companies like Apple are not able to rip us off by denying right to repair, and denying legitimate repair shops the ability to purchase legitimate parts.

Given that argument, Microsoft, Apple and other OS makers will pretty soon ship you operating systems without admin privileges, because those sneaky hackerZ might install backdoors...

Luckily, you can pay other people to do that. Apple prevents a customer from getting their own device repaired at a reputable repair shop of their choice.