PALO ALTO (CBS SF) – Authorities are trying to determine if a Tesla driver who was arrested for alleged DUI in Palo Alto early Friday morning had used the vehicle’s “Autopilot” feature to help him get to his destination.
The California Highway Patrol attempted a traffic stop on southbound Highway 101, south of Highway 92 around 3:30 a.m. After the driver refused to yield, they apparently found him asleep behind the wheel.
When the CHP had units in place minutes later, one patrol car got in front of the Tesla to slow down the vehicle. Officers said the driver then woke up after the car had slowed below 30 miles per hour.
He was taken into custody at a gas station in Palo Alto after allegedly failing a field sobriety test.
Folks, I’m mystified about this story. With the brains of Elon Musk navigating this vehicle, what did the car do that caused the California Highway Patrol to take an interest in it? While its creator may be subject to puffing on the illicit weed, I think silicon based lifeforms are immune to the effects of California’s largest cash crop.
Think about it. The vehicle is the one failing to yield for law enforcement not the sole passenger of the car. The man in the car engaged all the safety systems that money can buy in a modern vehicle and still it wasn’t enough.
Once the CHP communicated with the Tesla, it slowed as instructed. A musk apologist might even say it performed as expected. Clearly the flaw demonstrated by the vehicle is a reflection of its creator. Musk is a documented scofflaw (just ask the SEC, DEA, & FBI) so it would follow that his creation likewise reflects its maker; in temperament anyways.
Again the passenger is cited for the actions of the driver, clearly I have a problem blaming the victim and not the perpetrator. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles recognizes the rights of self-driving vehicles, why doesn’t the State Police (CHP)? This is clearly speciesism.
The other issue of note is where this traffic stop took place, Palo Alto, California. Yeah, the heart of Silicon Valley. Clearly this shows a bias for Google’s self-driving car. Again, this is discriminatory and selective use of the law.
Lastly, look at the humiliation that the Tesla was subjected to. The CHP forced the vehicle to stop in a gas station. Yes, the state-of-the-art pinnacle of electric vehicles was subjected to treatment that is clearly below its superior class.
Where is John Edwards or Johnny Cochran when we need a trial attorney? This is clearly cutting edge legal territory begging for its day in court.
The Tech Industry is very cozy with the Chinese government and not just because iPhones are cheaper to make there. Tech companies willingly participate in Chinese government censorship and suppression of their citizens. Tech companies know that most laptops, cell phones, televisions, and other electronic devices that they sell all over the world regularly report user data back to their masters in China but have no problem with this as long as the get their financial cut.
Governments in the United States are tinkering with the idea of mileage taxes which have rightly raised the specter of government tracking your every movement—which my cell phone and health band already do.
Now this from China.
SHANGHAI (AP) — When Shan Junhua bought his white Tesla Model X, he knew it was a fast, beautiful car. What he didn’t know is that Tesla constantly sends information about the precise location of his car to the Chinese government.
Tesla is not alone. China has called upon all electric vehicle manufacturers in China to make the same kind of reports — potentially adding to the rich kit of surveillance tools available to the Chinese government as President Xi Jinping steps up the use of technology to track Chinese citizens.
More than 200 manufacturers, including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and U.S.-listed electric vehicle start-up NIO, transmit position information and dozens of other data points to government-backed monitoring centers, The Associated Press has found. Generally, it happens without car owners’ knowledge.
And critics say the information collected in China is beyond what is needed to meet the country’s stated goals. It could be used not only to undermine foreign carmakers’ competitive position, but also for surveillance — particularly in China, where there are few protections on personal privacy. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has unleashed a war on dissent, marshalling big data and artificial intelligence to create a more perfect kind of policing, capable of predicting and eliminating perceived threats to the stability of the ruling Communist Party.
Oh, remember all those self-driving cars the utopian folks here in California want to unleash on the public? The article addresses that too:
There is also concern about the precedent these rules set for sharing data from next-generation connected cars, which may soon transmit even more personal information.
Many vehicles in the U.S., Europe and Japan transmit position information back to automakers, who feed it to car-tracking apps, maps that pinpoint nearby amenities and emergency services providers. But the data stops there. Government or law enforcement agencies would generally only be able to access personal vehicle data in the context of a specific criminal investigation and in the U.S. would typically need a court order, lawyers said.
Automakers initially resisted sharing information with the Shanghai monitoring center; then the government made transmitting data a prerequisite for getting incentives.
“The automakers consider the data a precious resource,” said a government consultant who helped evaluate the policy and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues. “They gave you dozens of reasons why they can’t give you the data. They give you dozens of excuses. Then we offer the incentives. Then they want to give us the data because it’s part of their profit.”
There was concern that data pulled from electric vehicles might reveal proprietary information about, for example, how hybrids switch between gas and battery power, and eventually set automakers up for commercial competition with a Chinese government entity. As cars become more connected, carmakers are looking to tap new revenue streams built on data — a market McKinsey estimated could be worth $750 billion by 2030.
The Chinese government’s ability to grab data as it flows from cars gives its academics and policymakers an edge over competing nations. China tends to view technology development as a key competitive resource. Though global automakers have received billions in incentives and subsidies from U.S., European and Japanese governments, they are contributing data to the Chinese government that ultimately serves Beijing’s strategic interests.
Global automakers stressed that they share data to comply with Chinese regulations. Nearly all have announced plans to aggressively expand their electric vehicle offerings in China, the world’s largest car market.
“There are real-time monitoring systems in China where we have to deliver car data to a government system,” Volkswagen Group China chief executive Jochem Heizmann said in an interview. He acknowledged that he could not guarantee the data would not be used for government surveillance, but stressed that Volkswagen keeps personal data, like the driver’s identity, secure within its own systems.
“It includes the location of the car, yes, but not who is sitting in it,” he said, adding that cars won’t reveal any more information than smart phones already do. “There is not a principle difference between sitting in a car and being in a shopping mall and having a smart phone with you.”
Jose Munoz, the head of Nissan’s China operations, said he was unaware of the monitoring system until the AP told him, but he stressed that the automaker operated according to the law. Asked by the AP about the potential for human rights abuses and commercial conflicts posed by the data sharing, Munoz smiled and shrugged.
If you read the American media, you’d think the real threat to our nation comes from Russia. Really?
In the 1980’s, Japan was famous for saying, “Business is war”. Almost 40 years later, China has raised the concept to an art form—with the support of likeminded people in America—and the stakes are not just commerce but the freedom of the world. We have never seen a global totalitarian regime rule the planet but China is positioning itself to be the first.
Those that see this as a possibility are considered nutjobs by the Liberal Elites. Donald Trump is concerned that America’s dependence on China is a problem but most folks don’t care as long as YouTube and Facebook are working on their cell phones.
Nobody would seriously argue that Tim Cook is anything other than a caretaker of the company. The brand that Steve Jobs built, is running out of steam. Jobs was good at looking at other people’s ideas and making refinements. Jobs then would market stuff as if Apple was the inventor of the gizmo. They have been successful in selling their products at double or triple what competitor products are sold for.
Until the bail-out by Microsoft many years ago, Apple was on the brink of collapse. Microsoft needed to prop-up Apple to defend themselves against accusations that they had a monopoly on PC operating systems. Following the cash infusion from Microsoft, Apple began marketing the iPod. Other folks sold MP3 players for a fraction of the cost but Apple created an exclusive ecosystem in conjunction with the introduction of the Apple Music Store.
This change from relying on revenue from Apple computers to other more profitable products, helped to diversify the company. The introduction of the iPhone was a game changer for Apple. Now, a decade after its introduction, the bloom is falling off the iPhone.
The smartphone market is mature, saturated, or whatever term you wish to use. Sales are declining and the phone industry is lacking innovation. Many companies are working with new technology and other form-factors but Apple, as usual, is lagging behind the competition. Five years after its introduction, Apple may finally be deploying USB-C connectors of their next generation of phones. They still don’t allow SD cards and are behind in a number of other ways in comparison to Android devices.
Android manufacturers are investing heavily in foldable smartphone screens, 5G technology, and platform independent technology but Apple’s name is not associated with any of these things which are already available for Android phones. These are among the product features that will be displayed by most phone manufacturers in the first quarter of 2019 if they haven’t already.
Strangely, Apple’s name is not associated with any patents or innovation in these areas. Apple says they would like to have a 5G phone in two years but again they appear to be lagging behind everyone else in these areas. Heck, Microsoft’s Andromeda device has a better paper trail than anything Apple may be tinkering with.
In conjunction with their earnings report a week ago, Apple declared that they will stop publishing any sales numbers on their iPhones.
Investors sold off Apple stock on Friday after the company gave weaker-than-expected holiday sales guidance and said it would no longer disclose unit sales of iPhones and other products.
Apple (AAPL) fell 6.6% to 207.48 on the stock market today. It was the steepest single-day drop for Apple stock in nearly three years.
Late Thursday, Apple reported fiscal fourth-quarter results that topped analyst estimates. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company earned $2.91 a share on sales of $62.9 billion in the quarter ended Sept. 29. Analysts expected it to earn $2.78 a share on sales of $61.57 billion. On a year-over-year basis, earnings per share rose 41% while sales climbed 20%.
But Apple predicted sales of $91 billion in the December quarter. That is short of Wall Street’s estimate of $92.91 billion.
But the news gets worse as you continue reading this article:
On a conference call with analysts, the consumer electronics giant announced it would stop providing unit sales figures for iPhones, iPads and Mac computers starting with its current fiscal first quarter.
Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said hardware unit sales figures are no longer a good measure of the health of Apple’s business. This is largely because of the growth of Apple’s services business, he said.
The change in reporting is likely to fuel speculation that Apple’s iPhone unit sales will decline in the current fiscal year.
It is “typically not a good sign” when a company reduces its financial disclosures, BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk said in a report.
“Not reporting unit data effectively eliminates any discussion about rising and record ASPs (average selling prices),” Piecyk said. “This was a positive point for investors, but perhaps a risk to Apple, as press reports about squeezing more money out of its loyal customer base is not a good look for the company.”
Jefferies analyst Timothy O’Shea said the change is “fueling fears the company has something to hide.”
Market research firm Strategy Analytics is out with new data showing a year-over-year decline of 360 million units, the equivalent to an 8 percent dip, in the third quarter, with Strategy Analytics director Linda Sui going so far as to declare the smartphone market “effectively in a recession.”
“The smartphone industry is struggling to come to terms with heavily diminished carrier subsidies, longer replacement rates, inventory buildup in several regions, and a lack of exciting hardware design innovation,” she said.
Samsung, no surprise, is still the king of the global smartphone hill. It’s got a 20 percent market share and shipped a little more than 72 million units during the third quarter — but that was 13 percent less than the third quarter of 2017. Huawei, meanwhile, is continuing to nip at Samsung’s heels, shipping almost 52 million smartphones during the quarter (a 32 percent gain). It only has a 14 percent global market share, in part because its phones have little to no presence in North America.
Apple, meanwhile, rounds out the top three, having shipped almost 47 million units during the quarter. That was basically flat with where Apple was a year ago and gives the Cupertino-based company a 13 percent global market share.
Apple hiding their sales figures is not a good sign, especially for a company flirting with a valuation of one trillion dollars. They’ve been living off of goodwill for a while but maybe this is a signal that Tim Cook should be looking for a golden parachute and a graceful exit.
I don’t write too often about the Navy even though I spent six years of my life wearing the uniform but this story is so ridiculous that I can’t let it pass without comment. It concerns the contracting and construction of the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford. What you learn from reading the story is that the newest carrier in the fleet can’t launch aircraft, can’t safely land them, and can’t equip them with weapons; other than that, it’s a fine vessel.
The $13 billion Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, the U.S. Navy’s costliest warship, was delivered last year without elevators needed to lift bombs from below deck magazines for loading on fighter jets.
Previously undisclosed problems with the 11 elevators for the ship built by Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. add to long-standing reliability and technical problems with two other core systems — the electromagnetic system to launch planes and the arresting gear to catch them when they land.
The Advanced Weapons Elevators, which are moved by magnets rather than cables, were supposed to be installed by the vessel’s original delivery date in May 2017. Instead, final installation was delayed by problems including four instances of unsafe “uncommanded movements” since 2015, according to the Navy.
While progress was being made on the carrier’s other flawed systems, the elevator is “our Achilles heel,” Navy Secretary Richard Spencer told reporters in August without providing details.
Technology Risk
The elevator system is “just another example of the Navy pushing technology risk into design and construction — without fully demonstrating it,” said Shelby Oakley, a director with the U.S. Government Accountability Office who monitors Navy shipbuilding.
In the above we learn two more facts, this ship design was the responsibility of Presidents not named Trump since construction takes years to accomplish and second and more importantly, the ship relies on untested technology. Sorry folks but that is not how the military; especially, the Navy did things in my era.
The Navy is in the unique position of traveling wherever they are needed without a traditional supply chain which for them can be stretched or even nonexistent for long periods of time. This forces them to be self-reliant and needing to improvise because parts could be thousands of miles away. Traditionally, they have used lower and more proven tech.
I was in the Naval Nuclear Power Program and the control systems that we used on the reactors were purposely not based on solid-state electronics. If you can believe it, there were zero transistors on any reactor protection systems! Hyman Rickover, who started the Navy’s nuclear powered ship program, did not believe in implementing this technology. I think it was both a supply chain issue and one to prevent propulsion from being crippled by EMP. Instead we used magamps. Magamps are something that was so old-school in the 1980’s that my friend with an electrical engineering degree had never even hear of them in any of his classes.
The only propulsion supply issue that we ever experienced was getting a replacement fuse for the reactor protection ABT (Automatic Bus Transfer). Reactor protection systems had two independent supplies of electrical power available and this switch was able to go from one to the other fast enough not to scram the reactor. The fuse for this switch blew during a routine test. It took ten days to get a replacement. The fuse was about eight inches long and over 3/8th of an inch in diameter; it’s not your typical off the shelf part from Ace Hardware.
Using unproven designs for the catapult system and weapons elevators is not something they should be deploying for all four Ford class carriers currently authorized for construction. As a result, the Navy owns a warship cruise ship ready to go anywhere in the world that can’t conduct war and has a capacity of 10,000 passengers. On many levels, the Ford sounds like the Democrat military model to me.
This is another in a long series of failures by the Navy in recent years. They can’t build ships that work and can’t drive ‘em once they set sail.
Before getting into this article just a quick reminder that Wham-O makes Frisbees and Waymo does other stuff related to hubcaps. Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet, the umbrella corporation that operates Google. Earlier this week they issued a press release which I shall quote in part:
We’re excited to announce that the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has just granted Waymo the first permit in the state to begin driverless testing on public roads.
This permit is the result of new DMV regulations that took effect in April, which allow companies to apply for fully driverless testing within carefully defined limits, and is the product of nearly ten years of testing in California by Waymo’s team. It’s the first time that California has allowed tests on public roads of fully driverless cars ― that is, without a test driver sitting in the driver’s seat.
Waymo’s permit includes day and night testing on city streets, rural roads and highways with posted speed limits of up to 65 miles per hour. Our vehicles can safely handle fog and light rain, and testing in those conditions is included in our permit. We will gradually begin driverless testing on city streets in a limited territory and, over time, expand the area that we drive in as we gain confidence and experience to expand.
So if you operate, Uber, Lyft, or Yellow Cab, they’re coming for your job. Uber was just getting ready to go public, darn. They probably will anyway, but…
Folks, I know that I scoffed recently that this would happen and I still do but let’s talk about why.
In a word, my issue is infrastructure. The system that Google seems to be employing is dependent on outside connectivity.
With fully self-driving technology, the car is designed to do all the work of driving and the person in the vehicle is never expected to take control of the vehicle at any time. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) calls this a fully automated vehicle. This is the type of technology we are working on.
Cars driving without a driver is their goal. I submit to you that no vehicle can be equipped with the amount of technology needed to do everything that they are attempting. This is part of the reason they need to test in populated areas; this is not just a proof of concept by performing in traffic but a control and connectivity issue. They need to control the operating environment and have rock solid internet connectivity.
If you look under the hood, you will find that these vehicles operate just like your computer at work using a client-server model. The car has the sensors which send data to the server, the server processes the data and then controls the car. Thus like Elon Musk’s Tesla, they are geographically limited to certain areas of operation.
Thus the vehicle is “automated” but not “autonomous”. It does not carry everything necessary to operate in traffic. You can’t go to the local AAA, pick-up a map, scan it into the car, and then tell it to drive to Grandma’s house in Montana.
Once 5G cellular data is deployed, you will see the Google car significantly expand its driving area on the above map but like electric vehicles, it is a limited technology.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is losing popularity with teenagers. This is ironic since it was founded as a way for teens to keep in touch. Instead, Facebook has become the place to go for older people to see who had a baby or when the next class reunion will take place and stuff like that. Facebook is not bleeding users as quickly as Myspace did many years ago but the trend is not good.
Facebook will see a decline among teenagers in the U.S. this year, says market research firm eMarketer.
EMarketer predicts 14.5 million people ages 12 to 17 will use Facebook in 2017, a decline of 3.4% from the previous year, as they migrate to Snap’s Snapchat and Facebook’s Instagram.
Monthly Facebook usage among those under 12 and ages 18 to 24 will grow more slowly than previously forecast, too, according to eMarketer.
The forecast suggests young people are turning away from the world’s most populous social network, which reached 2 billion users this year.
It’s a grown-up problem for Facebook which needs young users to develop the habit of checking Facebook so it can show them ads well into adulthood.
EMarketer forecasting analyst Oscar Orozco says teens and tweens, seem less engaged on Facebook, logging in less frequently and spending less time there.
For years there have been warnings that Facebook was losing its cool with young people.
As if losing your cool with teens was not enough, there is this from U.K.’s Metro
Facebook ‘could collapse’ if it keeps being dogged by scandals over misinformation and election hacking, says the author of a 2010 book on the company. David Kirkpatrick says advertisers could start to shun the platform if the scandals don’t stop – after a year of seemingly endless controversy over misinformation, privacy and ‘fake news’.
Kirkpatrick said that if Facebook stops being a virtual watercooler for friendly conversation, but a lair for trolls and misinformation – advertisers might find the service too dangerous to showcase washing tablets and shoes.
Research earlier this summer suggested that young people are deserting Facebook.
Just 51% of teens are on Facebook, suggesting young people are turning away from a social network which was once a pivotal part of adolescent life.
There has been a huge decline in teenage Facebook users over the past three years as youngsters ditch the social network in favour of platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, a new study reveals.
That’s according to the Pew Research Center, which reports that the number of teenage Facebook users (aged 13-17) had plummeted from 71% in 2015 to 51% in 2018.
Censorship of conservatives is an issue that also is causing folks to look for friendlier alternatives to Facebook’s social platform. The evil algorithm gets the blame but really Facebook is intolerant of people that stray from liberal orthodoxy. They fail to realize that Silicon Valley’s values are not those of America’s Heartland.
The disconnect between the real value of companies like Facebook and their sky high stock prices is concerning. This “tech bubble” will eventually correct itself but whether that is the result of bleeding users or advertisers or something else remains to be seen.
• They have one way to do things, their way.
• They make the bulk of their money from other socialists.
• They copy other people’s inventions and try to claim them as their own.
• They never admit fault ; therefore, their groupies think their products are superior.
The most famous example was Apple’s Safari browser fiasco a few years ago. They touted it as the most secure Internet browser available and the same day it was released it was hacked six different ways by six different folks that all were able to take full control of the computers via different exploits.
Today we learn that the top paid antivirus app in the Apple store is spyware. This app sells for $5 and is the fifth most popular paid app in their store. It has been spying on people since 2015 and sending their personal data to an unknown server in—you guessed it—China. The good news is maybe we have finally found all the files from Hillary’s server.
In his blog post, Wardle noted, “The fact that application has been surreptitiously exfiltrating users’ browsing history, possibly for years, is, to put it mildly, rather f#@&‘d up!”
Security researcher Privacy 1st tweeted that they initially contacted Apple about the Adware Doctor issue on Aug. 12.
Adware Doctor, which costs $5, was the top paid app in the “Utilities” category, and the fifth top paid app overall, before it was removed Friday.
#5 paid app in Apple Store
Please note that as usual, Apple only took action after this story became public even though they have known about this for almost a month. Again, this is typical behavior from Apple.
Security researcher Privacy 1st tweeted that they initially contacted Apple about the Adware Doctor issue on Aug. 12.
“What is sad is that it was reported by me on 12th of August and Apple didn’t even care… Attached are email screenshots”
Adware Doctor also turns out to have pushed the boundaries for years. Reed says that Malwarebytes originally started tracking it in 2015, when it was called Adware Medic, which was also the name of a legitimate scanner Reed had developed. Malwarebytes notified Apple and the company removed the app, but Reed says it resurfaced in the App Store within days as Adware Doctor.
Malwarebytes continued to track the app over the years and found it suspect, because the app’s functionality was limited—its protections are based on generic, open-source offerings rather than effective, tailored tools. But the new findings from Privacy 1st indicate that the app may have recently added expanded suspicious functionality through an update. “It’s been scammy for awhile, but that was new behavior that we hadn’t observed before,” Reed says.
Adware Doctor also rides on a common strategy of posing as a security product to seem more trustworthy and gain the deeper system permissions that come with being a scanning tool.
Earlier this year, my Lumia 950 LX began having a series of unexplained issues related to phone calls and messages. I began having to reboot my phone not because of any obvious error but because I would become aware that I was not getting text messages from my family. Upon restarting, my phone would suddenly receive three or four days’ worth of text messages in a matter of seconds. After dealing with this irritation for a while, my phone began missing calls. The phone would not ring or show a missed call. When someone dialed my number, it would ring four times and send the caller to voicemail.
Let me tell you, when mama bear calls and you don’t answer the phone then mama ain’t happy. I tried it myself with the wife’s phone. I literally set her phone next to mine and called myself. Her phone rang four times and then went to the voicemail. No ring or missed call ever appeared on my phone. However, using my phone I could dial and get right thru to her.
I tried the wife’s old phone, Lumia 950, and experienced that same problems. I went to the cell carrier and bought a new sim card. This too failed to resolve the problem.
Neither my wife nor son had problems calling each other on their Android phones. I had my son try to call me and his call failed. I then took the wife’s phone and put my sim chip in her phone and had my son dial me. His call rang with no problem. Thus the sim chip was not the problem.
I did some Internet research and while not conclusive this is my best guess as to what was happening. The problem seemed to be relate to cell phone carrier frequency and signal changes. When I dialed the wife’s phone, my phone would hunt thru a series of available frequencies until it found one and then it would dial. However, the reason the wife couldn’t call me is because the carrier’s preferred frequency was not available in my coverage area. The cell network would try to reach me on a frequency that my phone couldn’t receive or in a way that my phone didn’t recognize and then it would time-out and send the call to voicemail. This behavior was intermittent and seemed to depend on which combination of cell towers that each of our phones was using.
Whether the phone hardware or Window Mobile Operating System is partially to blame was something that I couldn’t determine. My conclusion was that the cell provider did some change earlier this year that wasn’t compatible because they assumes nobody was still using Windows phones. Visual Voicemail was broken on Windows phones about three years ago and the carrier was moving on without supporting the feature on Microsoft’s platform.
I researched a bunch of different phones. I wanted a large screen, good camera, fast CPU, and reliable Bluetooth. Amazingly enough, per user reviews, most phones failed in one of these areas. Either the screen resolution or framerate were crappy, camera was poor, or Bluetooth connection was subject to failure or intermittent. In other words, manufactures took shortcuts in hardware or had poor designs that didn’t work in the real world.
Another feature that I wanted was the ability to store apps on the SD card. While the Android operating system supports this feature, many phone manufactures disable this feature. For example, my son is using my old ASUS phone. ASUS treats the SD card as an external drive and will only allow photos and music to be stored on the SD card. My son’s 32 GB phone is full of apps and he has to delete existing apps to install new ones. He likes games and many are over 2 GB each. Can you say Pokémon Go? The phone will not allow him to move apps to the SD card. As a result, he has a 64 GB SD card sitting virtually empty in his phone. This is stupid.
My wife has a phone by Sony. The Sony Bluetooth is terrible. If her phone goes on internet, the Bluetooth will disconnect. If the Bluetooth connects to her car it will disconnect from her Samsung health band. The phone cannot support more than one radio connection at a time. She can only have internet or one Bluetooth device connected. The phone will not multitask or support multiple simultaneous radio connections. Her phone also will randomly uninstall apps every time she restarts the phone, which she must try to identify and reinstall. We did a factory reset of phone and found the SD card was identified as bad but the reset did nothing to resolve the Bluetooth issues. I love the traditional six inch format of her phone but the internals are crumby.
After much research I decided to get a Samsung Galaxy S8+. It checked most of the boxes that I wanted except screen size. I don’t like their “candy bar” screen format, I would like a bigger size. The phone is long but narrow. I would prefer a wider screen but they just aren’t available on high-end phones.
I went into my neighborhood Best Buy and looked at the phones. They had a Samsung Galaxy S9+ with a price tag of $719. That isn’t much different than the S8+ was on the Internet. I thought to myself, what a bargain, maybe I will get the S9+ instead. I waited in line and when my turn came, asked for the Galaxy S9+ from the lady in the phone area. She rung it up and asked for $906 and change. Then I knew I’d been played. They had purposely put the wrong price in front of the phone just to dupe folks like me. I’m holding the S9+ in my hot little hand and they are now asking for more money. I went ahead and bought it at the higher price. After the transaction, I went back to the in store display and checked. The Galaxy S9 has no price in front of it but the Galaxy S9+ had the Galaxy S9 price tag on it.
Illustration showing Galaxy S9+ shape being more like candy bar
Best Buy does have a two week return policy for the phone and I ended-up putting that to good use as I will now explain.
After I got home from buying the phone at Best Buy, I went onto Amazon to order a case for my phone. In my experience, Best Buy marks up phone accessories like crazy and I wanted to pay less, especially after breaking my budget like I did. As a Prime member, I knew I could get two day delivery on the case. I would have to survive only Sunday and one day at work in order to save some money. Well, amazingly enough, even with a tracking number, Amazon lost the order.
After five days of waiting, I went on the internet to see if Best Buy had a case similar to the one that Amazon lost. Best Buy actually had a similar case for five dollars more than the one I had previously ordered and not received. While on their website, I checked on the phone price just to see if what I paid was the correct price. Well guess what? Best Buy was selling the phone for the same price that I had paid but they were offering the phone with a wireless charger and 128 GB SD card.
The next day, Saturday, I went on Amazon and cancelled my missing order and got my money refunded. Oh, the Amazon service rep was Kuldeep. Thinking that I was probably dealing with an ESL (English as a Second Language) person, I used full sentences and was very polite in the chat session.
I then went to Best Buy with my receipt and asked for a charger and SD card. Best Buy did not have a charger or SD card in stock but they ordered them for me. The sales lady also helped me set-up and use the Samsung Pay app. I even got a $5 credit for using Samsung Pay for buying the case. The charger and SD card arrived three days later. I felt better for at least getting something extra for having paid cash for the phone a week earlier.
I love the Galaxy S9+. It is a great phone. I did have to hunt around for a few things.
On Windows Phone, my favorite app was Earthquake Watch. I was hoping that the developer had made an Android app. I tried to find out but unfortunately, all the contact info for the programmer and his website are stale. Most of the earthquake apps in the Google Play Store are crappy. After several days of researching, the closest that I could find to Earthquake Watch in the Google Store was My Earthquake Alerts. After using the app for about a month, Google game me a credit for $2 for no apparent reason. I used it to upgrade to the Pro version which is identical except ad free.
My other issue was getting my address book to download into my car so I could make hands-free calls. I was able to connect my Google and Outlook accounts to my contacts but they would not download to my car. Connecting my Outlook account to the built-in Calendar app in the phone seemed to solve this issue.
My only remaining and unresolved issue is will Cortana read my text messages to me while I’m driving? Windows phones have had this ability in them for at least the last five years but Android…? If so, I can send text replies via voice commands. TBD.
Back when digital music downloads were in their infancy, many consumer choices were available. In 2001, Apple began their iTunes music while big music companies like Sony had their own services. Amazon decided to wade into this market as well. One reason was that Amazon got into the market is because Apple—in their typical snob appeal fashion—charged more for music from iTunes than other companies and furthermore, they required that it could only be played back on Apple devices. Amazon felt they could charge less and still be profitable in this market space.
Music Encryption
You may not remember this but back in the day, all music downloads sold by Apple were encrypted and only their software could unlock the encryption to allow playback. The only workaround for this was to make a music CD using iTunes and then using third party software rip the songs back to your computer. Once that was done, you could play your music on any device that you owned.
Rootkits
Both Apple and Sony had malicious defects in their software.
In 2005, Sony snuck rootkits into their music software and 22 million CDs that they produced. Rootkits operate at a level below the operating system and could be used to monitor your computer usage and download other software onto your computer without the operation system or antivirus programs being aware of its existence. This software reported user data to Sony without user consent or awareness. Sony produced these rootkits for many years before being outed by the Tech community. However, many of the CDs with preinstalled rootkits are still in circulation today. Link: Sony BGM copy protection rootkit scandal
SONY BMG can take two lessons from its recent wayward attempt to fend off digital piracy: One, in a world of technology-astute bloggers, it’s not easy to get away with secretly infecting your customers’ computers with potentially malicious code. And two, as many a politician has learned, explaining your own screw-up badly is often worse than the screw-up itself.
FYI: most Google Android devices are built with rootkit features that regularly report your phone info including address book and text messages to third parties including foreign governments which by the way does not include Russia. (We have previously documented these issues on our blog.)
Apple was aware of an iTunes a security vulnerability in 2008 but didn’t fix it until bad publicity forced their hand in 2011. Link: Wikipedia iTunes
Apple also has pushed out rootkits in their music software but since Apple calls it a feature of their program, people somehow don’t get bother by it.
Ironically, this news comes on the heels of the recent Sony BMG DRM fiasco, a part of which included an undisclosed “phone home” feature of its own. Is the Apple MiniStore a rootkit DRM? Not from what we can tell, but it is part of a dangerous trend EFF has been witnessing in the digital music space market. When the music players on our computers start monitoring our listening habits, we’ve crossed a major privacy line. After all, my Sony stereo and my Panasonic boombox don’t shouldersurf my listening habits when I turn them on, so where does Apple get off suddenly doing it on my computer?
Amazon Introduces Encryption Free Music
In 2008, along came Amazon and offered essentially the same songs as iTunes for less money and without the digital rights management (DRM) encryption. Eventually, Apple began to relax the DRM requirement and by the time smartphones were a thing (2009), the encryption of mp3 files was eliminated. (Please note that Amazon gets no credit from the Apple folks for breaking the Steve Jobs monopoly on digit music.)
As a result of their overpriced music and lack of trustworthiness, I never use iTunes for anything and am reluctant to install it on any computing devices that I own. Only when some other Liberal company or educational institution grants monopoly status to the iTunes store will I consider using it. Even if Rush Limbaugh or Hugh Hewitt or some other conservative media guy offered their shows for free as a podcast only on iTunes I would still not install it. Yeah, I really hate Apple that much.
Anyway, as time went on, Apple decided to offer a music matching service. The way it was supposed to work was that if you had an LP and recorded the music onto your computer and then uploaded it to Apple, if Apple had a digital version in their library, they would replace your LP ripped version with a clean digital copy—usually at a higher quality that your recording.
Amazon, as Apple’s chief competitor in the music download market, implemented a similar offering. Both companies offered the ability to upload files and get the music match option. With an annual subscription, Amazon offered you the ability to upload up to 250,000 of your own songs; plus any music that you bought from Amazon did not count against the 250K limit. Thus the offer was not a dedicated amount of space on their servers but number of tracks. All this for $24.95 per year. Oh, and just to get you to try it, Amazon would let you upload up to 250 songs for free.
Ten years Later
In December 2017, Amazon eliminated the free 250 song upload offer. This month, the other shoe dropped on their digital music business model. It was announced that the paid subscription for warehousing 250,000 songs is going away.
Amazon Music software warning message
Interestingly, I have yet to see a single article on the tech blogs and news sites that I frequent that even mentions this move by Amazon. I guess maybe not that many folks utilize this feature. I guess the pirated music offered by Spotify is all the rage these days.
Overall, I’ve been happy with Amazon but I do have a few gripes. Amazon has neglected the music software that they produce. For most of its existence, album art that was wrong could not be corrected and sometimes after they rolled-out updates, the album art would be changed.
The music match offer that Amazon made was never well thought out from a consumer’s point of view. Amazon software has never had the ability to give me a visual or other indication of when a music match was successful. This idea of the music match was to give you a copy of the song free of pops and scratches so prevalent in ripping LP tracks to a computer. The underlying assumption was that if you owned the LP copy, you had a license to entitle you to have a digital copy also—for your own personal use. Once matched, in theory you could then download a “clean” copy of the mp3 file.
Amazon website notice of pending doom
Amazon will let me keep what I have purchased from them but everything else is facing the digital chopping block. It is clear that rather I check the “Keep my songs” box in their webpage or not, my personal stuff will eventually go away. If they want, I suspect they could offer to sell hard drive space on Amazon Drive that could link to their media player but I think they are big enough not to bother with a bunch of us pesky customers anymore when they get so much money for hosting corporate data. At least when Microsoft got out of the music service business, their software will still play music warehoused on OneDrive.
I also like Amazon Music because it is not blocked by the draconian firewall where I work so I can stream anything from my vast library of music. I’m sad that this option will soon go the way of Toys R Us.
Lest you thought Toys R Us was the only business with bad news featured on our blog this week, things are not going well for another company whose name you know; namely, Intel. In the PC space, Intel has only one competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). However, in recent years they have faced pressure from the smartphone/portable devices segment of consumer devices.
Previously, we have documented the Windows on ARM initiative which is finally appearing in the consumer space. While Microsoft has yet to get all the bugs worked out of the process, you can now buy devices free of Intel chips that run a full version of Windows 10. The cell phone CPU chips are not quite up to the processing power of Intel’s but these devices can last up to a week on a full charge and unlike Intel’s they can maintain a connection to cellular data and resume from sleep in less than a blink of an eye.
In addition, this year you are seeing a new feature implemented by tech companies across devices that allows you to continue a document or game from one device to another. Here are some things you can or will shortly be able to do:
• Playing a game on your phone, you will be able to pause it, resume it on your tablet device and pause it and resume playing it on your desktop device.
• Working on a document, you can cut or copy to the clipboard on your PC and the paste it into you phone’s text message or tablet’s email.
Device platforms are moving to an always connected to the Internet model. This will allow for seamless operating of many tasks that you do daily.
Also companies like Microsoft are enabling personal devices to be integrated with Enterprise networks so you can use the same phone or tablet to do both your work stuff and your own stuff. If your company’s IT staff is worth a darn then folks on the go don’t need to carry two phones, one for work and one for them.
This week it was announced that Microsoft is not the only company trying to get free of the decades old Intel monopoly, Apple announced that they are abandoning Intel all together and will run all their devices including desktop PCs with cell phone CPUs.
Apple has delivered a shock to Intel’s share price with news of a new project to move their Mac business to ARM-based processors of their own design by 2020.
According to Bloomberg, Project Kalamata would have all Apple’s devices, from iPhones to Macs, running on the low power processors, and would rely on Marzipan, a platform which lets iOS apps run on the Mac desktop.
The move would emulate that of Microsoft, who has already launched their Windows 10 on ARM initiative with two 3rd party laptops already in the market, and who has been working for many years on their UWP platform, which unifies mobile and desktop applications.
ARM Diagram
Two days later, Intel got another blow from Microsoft when they announced that the new version of their virtual reality device—HoloLens—will be using ARM chips and not those made by Intel.
Competition for the Microsoft Hololens is finally close to reaching the market, with the Magic Leap’s headset expected to reach virtual shelves later this year.
This seems to have prompted the company to finally get around to releasing version 2 of the headset, according to a leak via the WC.
According to their sources, the headset will use Microsoft’s Always-Connected PC platform, with an ARM processor with LTE modem, have longer battery life and greater autonomy, and would also have an increased field of view.
Folks we are approaching the world of Ready Player One—at least in some respects—and Intel has no part of it. They are becoming a legacy company that has totally missed the boat on computing! Let that sink in, the biggest computer processor manufacturing company in the world has no part in the future of their own industry.
First generation Microsoft HoloLens
Please understand that Intel has spent billions of dollars trying to get into the mobile space but failed at every turn. They actually make Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell look like geniuses and that is really hard to accomplish. While I’m reluctant to say so, Aaron Park’s favorite phrase of “epic failure” is actually appropriate in this case.
Intel quit trying to get into the mobile device CPU business two years ago and look where they are now.
Late on Friday night, Intel snuck out the news that it’s bailing on the smartphone market. Despite being the world’s best known processor maker, Intel was only a bit player in the mobile space dominated by Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung, and it finally chose to cut its losses and cancel its next planned chip, Broxton. This followed downbeat quarterly earnings, 12,000 job cuts, and a major restructuring at a company that’s had a very busy April. Intel is still one of the giants of the global tech industry, but it’s no longer as healthy and sprightly as it used to be.
The bane of Intel’s existence for the past decade or so has been the transition to mobile computing. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Having secured a commanding lead as the premier provider of desktop PC processors, Intel had a clear-eyed strategy for extending its dominance into the mobile realm.
This has cost Intel dearly, with the company lavishing billions on developing suitable processors and modems to put into its various mobile undertakings. The multibillion-dollar mobile costs have spiraled in recent years — a loss of $3.1 billion in 2013 was followed by a loss of $4.3 billion in 2014 — which eventually forced Intel to combine its mobile and PC earnings reports in order to disguise its unproductive spending.
The tragedy of Intel’s mobile failure is that the company foresaw all the threats to its business and acted to preempt them. It just didn’t do so very well. That being said, Intel’s the victim of its bad decision making almost as much as its poor execution.
While Intel appears to be continuing to dominate the desktop and laptop market with their processors, their mobile efforts haven’t been as successful, with the landscape being mostly dominated by the likes of Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Samsung. So much so that there is now speculation that Intel could be looking to exit the mobile business.
Atom has been one of the biggest duds in the history of semiconductors as Intel spent billions designing and producing the chip, then billions more paying hardware makers to use them before failing to get any traction at all and eventually burying the whole project last year inside of its shrinking but still highly profitable PC unit.
Since these articles appeared two years ago, Intel still has not produced a single chip that can connect to either Wi-Fi or the Internet. In contrast, ARM devices in a single chip can do computing, video, cellular modem, Wi-Fi connectivity, and other functions and just as you would expect, each generation of ARM chips is better and faster than the last. Moore’s law anyone??
