Pretty hard to watch them with their logins too. The Comcast stream for game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals was completely borked yesterday with a weird mixed-content warning in the dev console, and I'm fairly certain it wasn't just my account affected.
The text fields on the sign-up form [0] are unlabeled, the submit button ("Register") doesn't visually show keyboard focus, and almost nothing has sufficient color contrast; that doesn't bode well for the actual player's accessibility. Also, the <form> element has a completely unnecessary role="form" ARIA attribute which suggests accessibility has crossed someone's mind but also that it's likely errors of consequence have been or will be made.
It's been a couple years and I don't recall if he was associated with NPR, WBEZ or both, but a meetup I sometimes go to had someone from "there" speaking about accessibility and giving the impression that it was actually a pretty serious matter for them.
I've been frustrated with many free podcast apps so I paid for Pocket Casts and I've been happy since. I think it's a smart move by NPR et al. What they want is the usage data like where they pause, where they skip, etc. These data were traditionally not available to podcast publishers because podcast is really just an mp3 file uploaded to some server.
NPR has the NPR One app but I guess not enough people are using it. They've been open about what data they're collecting and I honestly don't mind NPR knowing about my podcast listening habits.
I don't want them to have individual data, but I'm fine with them having anonymized statistics. Knowing what people are doing with things you make is such a valuable tool for making it better.
People with these statistics will be making things better for themselves and for advertisers. This may often coincide with making things better for users, but the type of data you're talking about is mostly useful for making it harder to skip ads.
I like my free, RSS-shared MP3 files as much as the next listener, but these things aren't free to produce, just like PocketCasts isn't free to make. Podcasters sell ads, and advertisers rightly want something in return. If ads are easy to skip, they have no assurance that they're getting anything for their money, so the money dries up, and the podcast goes under. There is always going to be a game of back and forth between ads and avoiding them, and this is just the next move, if it even happens.
I prefer the direction it's going in now where most podcasts I listen to have an option to subscribe to pay the podcaster more directly. This does not require turning my player into spyware yet it keeps the podcasts going.
I agree in theory but what else can be made better about podcasts? Is it worth the trade off for everyone's data? These are questions I believe were asked and answered with NPR One. Also, anonymized data is still data and that derived information can be very powerful.
The only caveat to this is their insight into advertisements. Lets say a podcast runs ads during its first 5 minutes, they can now tell exactly how many people are listening or skipping those ads and may be incentivized to start putting ads in the middle of podcasts, or implement some sort of non skip-able interruption.
Exactly my thoughts. I'm currently using a different podcast app that has a neat "fast forward 30 seconds" feature that I only ever use to skip ads.
It's annoying enough having to get my phone out of my pocked to press the fast forward button. If the ads were unskippable, I'd switch apps immediately.
Or they can make the ads less annoying. For the most part NPR podcasts are pretty good for having "not worth skipping" ads that are a few seconds long.
I also love Pocket Casts, particularly with the "skip pauses" feature. Often podcasts are full of short pauses... to date, I have saved 9 hours of time with the feature enabled!
AntennaPod looks nice, but I do use the Web version of Pocket Casts a lot. It wouldn't be too hard to switch back to gPodder and Rhythmbox, but I love that state syncs between the Android app and web player. It will be hard to let Pocket Casts go (if it does become a spy).
I'd really love to use AntennaPod but they're missing the key smart playlist feature I love from BeyondPod. I don't even have to open the app most days and I can easily switch to a different set of podcasts when my wife is in the car. Does AntennaPod have anything similar that I'm missing?
I don't like using fingerprints because my fingerprint is literally left on the reader. Anybody with a scotch tape can get a copy of my fingerprint left on the reader or the screen. That's like writing down your password on a post-it on your monitor. Anybody dedicated enough can then make a fake finger that can log in.
Not that I'm worried about someone pulling this spy operation on me but if my laptop is lost or stolen, I won't have the peace of mind.
I think what killed AIM, MSN, etc. was SMS. You had to meet your friends in person at school or be home in front of a computer to talk to your friends. With SMS you can talk to them anytime, anywhere. Then smartphones came out and apps like WhatsApp, FB Messenger and LINE took over.
The United States got SMS a lot later in the piece than other countries, didn't they? From my experience the opposite of what you said appeared to be true - what started to kill SMS here was services like MSN messenger and eventually facebook etc afterwards
Not only that, but SMS was extremely expensive in the US. If you didn't have a text plan, they cost $0.20-$0.30 a message, and unlimited plans were in the neighborhood of $30 a month. Texting didn't really take off in the US until the prices started coming down, and that didn't start happening until Google and Apple launched their own messaging apps.
MSN was helped by the integration into the most used email at the time, hotmail. It was still pretty good, you could play mind sweeper on it with your friends, most of my international friends used it. they had a pretty good market penetration in China too.
Then MSFT was like, OK we bought skype. EVERYONE WILL USE SKYPE.
For me what killed MSN Messenger was Microsoft. I would have not had a need to ever use FB Messenger were it not for the merge of Skype and Messenger. Both Skype and Messenger were good back then by themselves, but the result of the merge wasn't so convincing for me. I literally only use Skype to talk with my parents - noone else even uses it anymore...
I think MSN for me died when I finished middle school. Everybody kinda lost contact (going to different schools / apprenticeships) and we stopped writing.
Then new people I met (online and offline) were all using Skype. This was just right before Smartphones came out.
Then offline people slowly started joining Whatsapp or Facebook groups.
Online people stayed on Skype until Telegram took over a few years ago.
If your company is only paying Slack $6.67 a month, you've either negotiated for an amazing discount or I really hope your chatbots are fun to talk to.
But I agree with your assessment: the purpose of the 100x is almost certainly to make it less offensive to receive an SLA credit. The only thing worse than having downtime is getting a credit that doesn't even round up to a dollar.
7 cents per employee per month isn't exactly a generous discount either. Even if your chat is down for half the work day (4 hours), you're looking at $3.55.
I mean, it's better than nothing, but let's not pretend it's compensation for lost productivity either.
My thoughts are this: even at 100x, the service credit is probably not that significant to the recipient. But the amount at 100x is significant to Slack. As the recipient, I don’t think too much about the money I receive back, but I know those credits in aggregate are quite painful to Slack (and a lot more painful than they could have otherwise justified) so I know they are taking the issue seriously and will work hard to prevent future outages, which is worth a lot more to me than the service credit.
And if you have 100,000 employees on slack, that compensation will be $7,000. For a company of that size this is not really noticeable. Refunds don't really matter, I guess most clients would be happier if that money was invested in increasing future reliability.
The number of companies for whom Chat SAAS is a major expense is probably pretty small. I think the refund is more important for how it impacts Slack than how it impacts its customers. As long as the refund is substantial enough to significantly impact Slack's bottom line, then I'm more inclined to believe that they are going to make a serious effort to avoid paying it in the future. That said, I'm not sure that refunding at this level represents a sufficient incentive.
7$ for 5 minutes of downtime in a month? That seems good to me. 1 hour would be a better example I guess, 84$ for an hour of downtime, that seems to be low for the amount of work that "may" have been lost, but then, that's weird to depend on a chat software that much.
I don't see what's weird about that -- before companies relied on chat, they relied on email -- in my company email can go down and people hardly notice, but a Slack outage is immediately met with cries of "Hey, are you having trouble with Slack!?".
Before companies relied on email, they relied on phones. My company doesn't even provide desk phones for most staff, only Sales and other staff that need to make a lot of calls have them.
So what's so weird about companies relying on Slack?
They were down for 53 minutes by their reckon and 115 minutes if the OG tweet times are right. Rough split the difference and say 65 minutes downtime, the refund would be ~ $62.50 for a 20 person team bill per month at current rates. That is not too shabby for being out of service for 1 hour during North American primetime. If they were out for 4 hrs 30 mins, it would have been a full refund for the month for everyone!
It is worth noting the SLA only applies to the Plus and Enterprise levels, so it would $12.50 / user. Still only 12.5 cents per 0.01% downtime per user. Doesn't really change your point though.
This might be a good scenario for Apple. Apple doesn't have to build a backdoor, which is good for PR, and the Feds got what they want to they'll stop bothering Apple. Which is the position Android/Google was in all along.
So the tinfoil hat theory here is that Apple itself leaks the cracking tech to Cellobrite to ease the fed pressure, and keep reputation intact? Sorry, I don't buy it.
That's not really the strongest interpretation of GP's statement. It wasn't implying that nobody would ever share source code for any reason, but that the company would deliberately decide to share source code in order to obtain fly-by-night compliance with government requests while maintaining its public image.
That happens all the time too, and I'm sure Apple is no exception. Want to score that big NSA storage contract? Pony up your HDD firmware... for "security assurances." Suddenly, NSA has exploits for all 7 major HDD manufacturers.
One thought I had was that species evolved to maximize the survival of the species, not the individual organism. Once an organism is too old to reproduce or contribute to the survival of the species, it's probably better to die than becoming a burden to the rest of the members of your species. It sounds cold hearted and brutal but that's just how nature works. Maybe it is possible for an individual organism to reproduce and live forever someday but that would be very hard to achieve and we're probably stuck in a local maxima.
That doesn't really answer the question, though, of why animals get too old to reproduce. Surely it would be evolutionarily advantageous for an animal to be able to reproduce for its entire life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V06LLTNxc4