New numbers show 2020 was the first year that Chromebooks outsold Macs, posting impressive market share gains at the expense of Windows. Computers powered by Google’s Chrome OS have outsold Apple’
Just once, I want to see these graphs and sales figures omit corporate purchases from the data. I’m certain that Dell, HP, and Lenovo could provide numbers that show shipments to end users and, say, Best Buy and Target, vs bulk corporate orders. Then we’d see how people actually vote with their own personal dollars.
IDC, along with Gartner and others, have been doing this forever. The whole point of these articles is to cast aspersion on Apple’s influence in the computer market. As Microsoft-funded outfits (you can’t convince me otherwise), they’re never going to change.
Speaking of boosting the numbers with corporate purchases, the increase in Chromebook numbers in this graph is directly related to schools purchasing them for at-home use in remote “learning.” And they suuuuuck. Both of my sons have them, and they are just terrible, awful things to work with. You couldn’t pay me to believe that anyone would buy one for personal use. A person would buy a cheap iPad over a Chromebook, 100 times out of 100.
And don’t even get me started with the bat-crazy mish-mash of unrelated web sites my boys have to navigate to do “online” school. It’s a disaster. I mean, I know that the educational software world is way behind, but… dang. I really hope this area of the economy gets some serious investment, now that Covid has made everyone aware of just how bad it is.
After 25 years of seeing this lie about market share numbers, I wonder if it’s possible for me to run down someone inside the big 3 PC manufacturers who could provide a breakdown in their figures for personal vs. corporate or school use…
Rush Limbaugh, the monumentally influential media icon who transformed talk radio and politics in his decades behind the microphone, helping shape the modern-day Republican Party, died Wednesday at the age of 70 after a battle with lung cancer, his family announced.
I literally cannot imagine how the trash-fire-seen-from-space — aka Twitter — is raging today. Given that our information delivery systems are optimized for conflict, I suspect this news will infiltrate every web site on the internet, and consume a week of cable airtime.
As I was saying, some consumer-protection outfit in our government should literally shut Amazon’s “review” system down. It’s a complete fiasco. And the mere idea that Amazon is doing anything significant to combat the problem is a slap in the face, on top of the spit in the eye. You don’t even have to read an exposé to understand this. Ten minutes of reading reviews, and you can feel it in your bones.
I still use Amazon, for name-brand purchases of things that I would tend to put off buying for a couple weeks, until the next time I went to a store. With Prime, if you’re buying something well-established, and clearly delineated, it can be a nice convenience. But for anything requiring a decision, I avoid it.
If you’re going to put any faith in any reviews on the site, you have to filter by the 1-star ratings, and read them carefully. Unfortunately, competitors are also buying negative reviews of the competition’s products, so you can’t really trust them either. Trying to sort out the truth of online reviews is much more work than simply going to a store, and selecting an option on the shelf.
As I’ve also said before, Best Buy, Target, and other big-box retailers are doing the curation for us, and it turns out there’s a lot of value in this. I hope more people wake up to this fact. They’re simply not going to carry obvious junk that loses money for them through high rates of returns. Thus you have a reasonable expectation that anything you buy at retail is going to essentially “do what it says on the tin.” This is why I’ve gone back to doing most of my physical purchases from retailers, and avoiding the whole scammy thing.
Plus, you don’t have to play the game of Chinese roulette in whether or not the thing you finally select on the site is going to come over on a slow boat from the Far East, despite your “free” “2-day” shipping.
On the one hand, I find it difficult to believe that Amazon is the most successful realization of online commerce that our modern computer technologies can produce. On the other hand, you really can’t expect any different outcome, given the profit motives of all involved.
A comment from the Slashdot thread about this article sums it all up nicely:
Yup. And Amazon does not really want to fix the issue. They could if they wanted to, but they just won’t do anything about it, even when you report blatant violations and that’s from personal experience of a fake reviewer ring ganging up on me.
A while ago I bought some of the “top selling” binoculars from Amazon.co.uk because they looked shady and as I am quite familiar with scopes and binos I did some thorough and rather technical reviews. I was a top-500 reviewer at the time and the reviews appeared near the top. The result was that the sellers messaged me to warn me they are “reporting my account as of a malicious rival”, they left comments accusing me of being the owner of “rival store Agena Astro” (that was bizarre – that’s a large and very reputable US astro retailer to which I have no affiliation), and then my reviews started getting dozens of downvotes daily (it was possible then) until my reviews disappeared from the front page. Then, I got a message from someone with screenshots from a facebook group where the seller had users whom they paid and/or gave free products to, asking to downvote all my reviews. The guy told me he was in that group to get free products, but when he saw that message and looked up my profile he just could not do it and contacted me instead. I forwarded all the screenshots to Amazon, even though it should have been obvious that a group of users mass downvoting specific reviews is not something legitimate, and Amazon thanked me and did nothing. From a top-500 reviewer I fell well below top-1000, while the “best seller” garbage binoculars stayed on with glowing clueless or fake reviews visible. My profile did not recover even after the downvote feature was removed, the mass downvotes are permanent.
I have been a Prime member for over a decade and buy most online things from Amazon (not blindly, I do look around), but I miss the days when I could rely on Amazon reviews for purchases, or when the searches either returned good products or no products, not a sea of crap you have to navigate through…
Of course, then you have to wonder if he was telling the truth.
Control is a game that came free with Playstation Plus. I had heard relatively good things about it, but I know that PS+ games are the B- games that have run their course commercially, so I took this move with a grain of salt. Turns out that, like Red Dead Redemption 2, Control has a great game buried in there, underneath all the really terrible parts.
Control has a great X-Files-like vibe. Very atmospheric and moody. Very surreal and mysterious. It’s a great new intellectual property space. Or, at least, it will be, if Remedy ever makes another game based on the franchise. The story is great.
Control has an interesting gun play system. There’s no reloading, but there’s a pause while the gun reloads itself, so it’s all the same thing. Plus, the button that most games would use for reloading swaps between the 2 active weapon morphs in play, and muscle memory frequently leaves me hanging with the wrong weapon effect at the worst time.
That’s… about all the good I can say about it. I’m sure other people have done enough actual reviews, but I’ll give it a short run down:
The “control” points where you can start over if you die are far apart, and you have to walk a long way to get back to the point where you died.
The gun does NOT snap (by default), and the aim is unforgiving for a game like this.
There’s no crouching behind cover. Which is bizarre, because the enemies do it.
Optional missions come up at opportune moments, but you only get one shot at them. You have no idea what you’re facing, and if you die, and you simply lose out.
Finally, the map and the level design is horrendous, and there’s no pathing to help you navigate it.
I could chalk all the shooting mechanics up to taste, and put up with it for the story, but the last point just does the game in. I just tried the game again, and the ONLY way I can find to go forward to my objective is to go through an area that’s just too tough for me. I’ve failed to get through it twice, and there just didn’t seem to be a way to get it done. But I wandered around for 15 minutes, and concluded that this is, in fact, where I should be going, so I tried — and failed — for a third time, with literally no idea how I could deal with it.
I looked for a difficulty setting, and found that it has cheats. Well, that makes sense. So I activated them, and tried again. Despite aim snap, I was about to die for the 4th time, so I just went ahead and activated god mode. I got through the area, and found another control point, but there’s no where to go. Here’s what I see:
Control Ultimate Edition_20210214104514
And here’s what the map is showing me at that point:
Control Ultimate Edition_20210214104521
I don’t know where to go. I have an optional mission selected, and there’s no indication where that is. If I activate the “main” mission, the map indicator is in the ??? area to the northeast of my position. I cannot interpret what this is telling me, there’s no indication on how I can get where I need to go, and I can’t find any way through this section. I’m quite literally stuck, and I’m really tired of putting up with video games that force me to do a search and read some article to get past every other difficult part. At this point, I’m just going to delete the game, and hope that Sony gives Remedy access to the fact that this player quit playing the game at 18% completion, and uninstalled it, even though the game was free. That’s how big of a fail it is.
Tangentially, while trying to get the screenshots off the console, I found that it takes 4 non-obvious clicks to get to the media library, and there’s only one option for a service to upload the images with: Twitter. Really, Sony? Really? There must be a dozen prominent image sharing sites, and the only option is Twitter? Screw Twitter. Especially for sharing screenshots! And screw Sony for making that the only option. I had to resort to a USB stick. Ew.
Additionally, you can only share recorded video to YouTube or Twitter. You can only livestream to Twitch. Nothing about these options makes sense. Sony must expand these options with an update. I’m sure it’s all about the Benjamins. Sony was probably looking for kickbacks to include other services here, and no one donated, so they were forced to give us one option. Sony needs to suck it up, now that the console has launched, and move on. There’s no excuse for a lack of options for any of these ways of sharing. They need to make it like an iPhone, were you can connect your console to a service, and it becomes a “destination” to which you can share anything. (Well, I mean, they do, but they need to give us a lot more options.)
I’ve run an ad blocker in my browser since they became a thing. According to the blurb I see, from Business Insider, when I search on “first ad blocker,” that was AdBlock in 2002. And, by the way, this is what you get, if you click on that link in Google:
I don’t even bother any more. I just close the tab. I knew this would happen, so I clicked through to take the screenshot. I’ve learned to ignore links to BI. Google used to have this wonderful feature where you could exclude top-level domains from the results they gave you. I can at least partially understand why they don’t do that any more. Keeping an exclusion list for… literally everyone with internet access? They’re a victim of their own success.
I’ve been through the switchover to uBlock Origin, which I still use in Firefox. Macs got a whole new plugin system, and, yes, there’s still not many, so I’m wondering if this has really worked out the way Apple wanted. I’ve paid for 1Blocker on iOS and macOS, and I find it to be just fine. (I no longer use Chrome. I don’t even have it installed.)
For… 19 years now, I’ve told people about ad blockers, and just went ahead and installed them for people while I worked on their computers. No one seems to care. Ads are just “the internet” for most people. Which is why I find it surprising that places like “Business” “Intelligence” make themselves off-limits for people with ad blockers. Even after 20 years, there just can’t be that many of us. Maybe I don’t have a representative sample of internet users…
Since I know that trying to get all of my family to install ad blockers is a waste of time, I run a Pi-hole on my network. This takes care of a lot of it without anyone needing to do anything. I additionally forward my DNS lookups to OpenDNS, which keeps out most of the internet garbage.
I’m trying to do a speed test on my network. Neither speedtest.net nor speedtest.xfinity.com work. Speedtest.net seems to have a lot of errors related to ads. So I turned off all the ad blocking with the plugin. That didn’t fix it, so I deactivated the Pi-hole, and switched its forwarding to open DNS servers. That didn’t fix it either, but this is what I saw when I refreshed the speedtest.net page:
It still doesn’t work, but I get five — count ’em! — five banner ads, all for the same stupid thing. Maybe, if I just happened to be in the market for a $100,000 luxury diesel truck, one banner ad would have piqued my interest. But five? I’m surely going to click on one of those bad boys now! They really know how to market a product, don’t they? Whew-whee!
Anyway.
Speedtest.net’s site keeps trying to open web socket connections which are being blocked. I finally hooked my laptop up to the cable modem directly, and got the same behavior. I don’t know why it’s working like that now, what’s blocking it, or how to fix it. You can see dozens of lines about web sockets not working in the console log. Of course, Google doesn’t yield any usable answers. Once again, I’m apparently the only one on the entirety of the internet who is seeing a problem. I’m always surprised when this happens, and it happens a lot. Upon further reflection, Comcast must be blocking speedtest.net, despite claims to the contrary? I really don’t know.
Comcast’s speed test site showed that I was, in fact, getting a full gigabit, right at the modem, so I guess I can’t complain? I mean, do I really trust Comcast to tell me that they’re giving me what I’m paying for? I just wish I knew where it was all going once it gets past my router. My first test with everything connected normally only showed 500 mbps. So I started swapping ethernet cables, and got 750 or so. Then I put the cables back… and still got upwards of 800. When I first hooked this service up (and upgraded all the equipment to go with it), I could usually see 950+, so I don’t know. I’m forced to conclude that gigabit speeds are still finicky, and lossy, inside my house.
I’ve been continuing to play through Skyrim on my PS5, and enjoying the extra graphical power. Someone has released some mods that allow you widen the field of view, and crank up the FPS to 60 (or unlimited). Since I’m stuck at 1080p for now, naturally, it works great, and still never slows down, even with the environmental mods. I’ll be very eager to try it at 4K@120FPS some day, but, for now, it’s a very welcome addition.
Someone pointed out that Fallout 4 (which is based on the same engine) can’t be modded this way. It needs to actually be patched by Bethesda to allow for this sort of thing. Here’s hoping that they do this. 60 FPS really is quite an improvement. I played a couple of seconds of Fallout 4, and quickly decided that I won’t be doing any more of that until the mod happens.
As I keep saying on comment threads all over the internet: you cannot trust any review system. They’re all being gamed. They are worse than useless. They are actively hostile against users. Apple, Google… everyone should immediately take them all down and start over. Congress ought to ban Amazon’s system entirely. Right now. Forever. I’m not even joking. It’s that bad.
I guess I still give some credence to reviews on Steam, but only barely, and only because, when I read them, I’m reading about indie games, which don’t have the kind of money behind them to rent a room full of people in a 3rd-world country for a month to publish thousands of fake reviews.
As you can see, Facebook has to make decisions on a wide range of topics, from ethnic conflict to health information. Often, Facebook is forced to choose sides between deeply antagonistic groups—Democrats and Republicans, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, public health advocates and anti-vaxxers. One benefit of creating the Oversight Board is to give Facebook an external scapegoat for controversial decisions. Facebook likely referred its suspension of Donald Trump to the Oversight Board for exactly this reason.
This paints a picture of Facebook being very involved in picking what people can and cannot say about politics, and that’s a very disturbing picture to me. Before this article, I would have thought that they only stepped in on really egregious problems. I’m just not clear why Facebook should get involved in any of the censorings listed here. Let the software automatically block the boobs, and then let people say whatever they want about politics.
The boobs thing really shows why they’re always complaining about needing moderators, and they couldn’t possibly staff up to handle the load. Software has been able to effectively identify nudity for many years now. There’s only a problem because they want to allow some nudity. On a platform shared by, effectively, everyone with internet access, there really doesn’t need to be any. Lord knows there’s enough elsewhere. So I don’t think this isn’t something that they need to waste time and energy on.
The problem extrapolates. They don’t want people to quote Nazis, but they want people to be able to criticize Donald Trump, which oftentimes warrants parallels of speech. They won’t want people to post videos of animal cruelty, but they want PETA to be able to post their sensational, graphical protests, which look real. Facebook hires thousands of people in impoverished countries to filter out the gore and the porn, but none of that needs to happen if you just let it all go. The software can do that automatically. The problem is trying to find some happy mid-point, as if that needed to happen. And there are countless stories about how degrading and depressing the job of being one of Facebook’s moderators is, and I won’t rehash them here.
Things get real simple if you just pick one point of view. Instead, they’re playing the middle, and selecting what speech is “free,” what nudity is “tasteful,” and what gore is “fake.” So, yeah, if you’re going to employ people to censor things things, you’re going to need a lot of people. I have trouble finding sympathy.
Manzoor Ahmed Pashteen is a human rights activist in Pakistan, calling attention to unfair treatment of the Pashtun ethnic group, of which he is a member. In 2018, days after he led a rally in support of the Pashtun people in front of the Mochi Gate in Lahore, his Twitter account was suspended.
Decisions to be made by Twitter:
How do you distinguish human rights activists organizing protests from users trying to foment violence?
How do you weigh reports from governments against activists who criticize the governments making the reports?
How responsive should you be to users calling out suspensions they feel were unfair or mistaken?
We’re constantly being told that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the one, gold standard by which all speech on the internet is “allowed,” and how we can’t ever touch it. It says that companies cannot be held liable for the things that people post to their platforms. So why are Facebook and Twitter bothering to pick and choose what people can say at all? They are legally shielded from any problems. Just let people say whatever they way to say! If it turns out to be illegal, or slanderous, the people who posted those things can be sued by the affected parties. If people don’t like what’s being said, they be ignored and routed around.
I find the whole thing completely disingenuous. Either you have protection, and are for “free speech,” or you don’t, and need to police your platforms. Facebook and Twitter are acting like they need to kick people off their platforms to avoid being sued, but they are not at risk of that. They’re throwing people off their platforms because enough people make noise about them. It’s become a popularity contest, and mob rule. There’s nothing genuine, legally-binding, or ethical about it. That’s it. If some topic or person becomes untenable, they’re going to get the boot.
In the old days, the mob would boycott advertisers, like, say, the ones on Rush Limbaugh’s show. But you can’t do that on a platform like Facebook or Twitter, which use giant, shadowy advertising exchanges and closely-guarded algorithms to show ads to people, and everyone gets a different view, according to their profile. Even the advertisers have a hard time knowing how their ads are served or working! The people who would protest an advertiser would never know what is showing up most often on people’s pages whom they don’t like, and Facebook and Twitter sure isn’t going to tell them. That’s the secret sauce, baby. They can’t know who to go after.
So these platforms are proactively de-platforming people, but I can’t see why. They have legal protection. They can’t be blackmailed by boycotts of advertisers. What’s the mechanism here? What’s the feedback loop? I suspect the answer would make me even more cynical than I already am.
In the wrongful death suit, Alex Kearns’ parents accuse the company of targeting unsophisticated traders like their son.
Robinhood had no customer service phone number, but Alex emailed its support address three times late that night and the following morning. He asked for help understanding what had happened, and whether he could still offset the losses with another trade.
“Apps” and the black-box “algorithms” controlling them have their hands on most of the significant levers in our society now, and the companies that own them get to hide behind their “terms of service” which automatically absolves them of any legal culpability, and prevents them from being sued. And none of them have human beings to actually talk to when something catastrophic happens. (You know, like watching your wife’s Gmail account get hacked in real time, and having over 10 years of personal and financial email fall into some random douchebag’s hands.) Alex’s parents didn’t click through their ToS, though, and can’t be considered to have agreed to whatever “binding arbitration” clause they might have buried in them.
At the end of the day, though, there’s no way the courts will find Robinhood in any way responsible for Alex’s suicide. I mean, if they did, what would be next? Actually holding companies responsible for oil spills or chemical dumps, instead of fining them for what amounts to a rounding error of their revenues? Piercing the corporate veil, and jailing executives? Obviously, you can’t mess with the people paying for your election, so, ha ha, no.
Robinhood was not the only broker to limit sales of GameStop. Interactive Brokers on Wednesday said it had placed restrictions on sales of the stock. Charles Schwab said Thursday that its customers could still trade GameStop but noted that it limited certain kinds of transactions involving more risk.
I am gobsmacked about this whole story. Why did Charles Schwab “limit certain kinds of transactions involving more risk?” I mean, we all understand that what Robinhood is doing is simply unethical. They’re being manipulated behind the scenes by their big-bank investors. At first, Robinhood said they were just going to require enough in a margin account to cover loses. Fine; that’s fair. But Schwab? What trading platform has the balls to say “that trade is ‘too risky’ for us to allow you to make it?” The nerve.
This factors straight into all the posts I’ve been making about monopolistic platforms. All these giant new age apps, from Facebook and Twitter, down to trading apps like Robinhood and Charles Schwab, purport to be these egalitarian, equal-opportunity platforms, but, as we’ve seen over the past few weeks, they can simply choose to do whatever they want, exactly when people were relying on them to be open and available to them.
Don’t lecture me about how important Twitter was to the “Arab Spring.” First of all, that collapsed, and almost every one of those middle eastern countries in worse shape than before. Second of all, the minute the “other side” became troublesome here in the States, they got the boot. These platforms are not impartial. They’re king makers. And other platforms have watched Twitter and Facebook get away with picking winners and losers in the game of Free Speech, while hiding behind their terms of service, and they are naturally emboldened to do whatever they want too.
And don’t kid yourself, ever TOS you’ve clicked through is legalese for “we can do whatever we want with all of your stuff on our platform, and you have no legal recourse about it if you don’t like it.”
Don’t lecture me about how they’re not monopolies, either. First of all, once a platform like Twitter decides you’re done, everyone else colludes and follows suit. They are de facto monopolies, if not in fact. You have no credible alternatives. Second of all, they’re pulling the rug right out from under you precisely when you need it most. There’s no time to reorganize on another platform. By the time you do, the opportunity will be lost.
These past few weeks have really shown where we’re at as a society. We’re totally dependent on apps now, and they’re all under the control of the wealthy, not even government. This is deeply, deeply wrong.
