I had a Charge HR for almost a month, got one for my wife too. I finally returned them this week. They're nice to wear and pleasant to use, but the battery lasts one day and the reported steps/calories/distance is basically science fiction.
I'm inclining towards this option, too. I didn't think it was likely because both watches (can you call them that?) had the same issues. This reminds me of my experience with Razer: out of 5 mice bought (4 abyssus, 1 orochi), two were faulty.
The reported distance is basically fiction, of course. It's not a GPS device. It's an estimate based on how many steps it thinks you took, and the average distance an average person goes in that number of steps.
As far as I can tell, steps/calories is roughly accurate (eg, not off by much more than, say, 10%) compared with other devices (my chest strap HRM+GPS device, stationary trainers, bicycle computer). Close enough for consumer use.
I echo the poor battery life. I forget what it's rated at, but I get barely 3 days. My old Nike Fuelband was rated at 7 days but I could push it over 2 weeks.
Steve Jobs took no pay at all for years. If he had played hardball with the board, he could've become the richest man in the world. Tim Cook is not doing it for the money either.
Tried some short gmail handles, can confirm. Creepy and stupid. Cloud-based datastores coming with your browser (aka what Chrome has* and probably its competitors too) have better performance, privacy, and UX; I can't think of any reason why I'd use something like this.
* - AFAIU if you set a sync passphrase you also get some (probably limited) form of "zero knowledge" client-side encryption; this makes me hopeful they implemented it properly i.e. "we literally can't access your shit" https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1181035?hl=en
I've used Spectacle for so long that I can't remember how it was to use OS X without it. The hotkeys are tied to my muscle memory, and don't clash with any of the stuff I care about (emacs, iTerm2, Chrome, etc).
Me too. It's awkward when I need to use someone else's Mac and it isn't there. I found some of the defaults did clash with iTerm, though. I use it mainly for toggling between full and half screens.
I initially wrote a stupid rant based on this [0] about how VW's ex-CEO doesn't speak English, but a quick Youtube search proved that was wrong [1]. Oops!
I'll just leave some quick facts that I dug up in the process:
* VW just had another scandal that made it to HN recently, regarding hiding security vulnerabilities [2]
* VW Group numbers for 2014: €204B of which €12.7B revenue, 583k employees [3]
* the board made some weird-ass declarations about the ex-CEO [4]
My confidence in VW is shaken to the point that I'll never buy another car from them again (I didn't like how they artificially segment the market by owning Audi/VW/Skoda/etc anyway), but how do other German manufacturers compare? [5]
"Geo models were manufactured by GM in joint ventures with three Japanese automakers. The Prizm was produced at the GM/Toyota joint-venture NUMMI assembly plant in Fremont, California, and the Metro and Tracker were produced at the GM/Suzuki joint-venture CAMI assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ontario. The exceptions, the Spectrum and Storm, were entirely manufactured by Isuzu in Japan. Geo Metro convertibles and early Geo Trackers were built by Suzuki in Japan."
Postscript: The NUMMI plant is now owned by Tesla.
Definitely not something unique to them, I just don't like that practice - also, you usually have the regular car brand and the upper-market version, e.g. Lexus/Toyota, not N degrees of "luxury" e.g. Audi/VW/Seat&Skoda. I like what BMW are doing, they have 3 branches based on different applications/philosophies.
On point #2, this was not only VW. That list even included Ferrari.
On point #4, this is pretty normal for any large company playing damage control. GM did the exact same song and dance in 2014.
I don't think I've lost any confidence in VW, but we may be looking at different types of cars. I like driving machines that may not be practical, but a hell of an experience to drive. The GTI's have done a great job of this, and I'll probably buy a new one soon. Currently a 2005 MKIV GTI 1.8t.
Given that VW tried to cheat emissions to improve performance and mileage, it's exactly something that a person like me actually wants (not the cheating the system, but the driver benefits).
> Given that VW tried to cheat emissions to improve performance and mileage, it's exactly something that a person like me actually wants (not the cheating the system, but the driver benefits).
No. They cheated to pass the exam on the cheap, instead of investing in the required R&D to create a motor that gives out the same amount of power while reducing emissions.
Given that they already had their engine for the EU, they didn't want to research a new one that conforms to the more drastic emissions of USA for Diesel. That's just a shitty workaround that was there for too long. That it has been in there since 2008 just shows how careless they were.
I'm wondering what the investigation in the chain of decision will unveil. You can't hide this for so long without some pretty intense omerta everywhere.
> No. They cheated to pass the exam on the cheap, instead of investing in the required R&D to create a motor that gives out the same amount of power while reducing emissions.
I'm not going to apologize for them but I can concoct how it happened... I think it all stems from the termination of the licensing deal on Daimler's BlueTec system/standard. Until 2007 VW used the BlueTec system but probably didn't want to continue paying license fees, track a moving target under a competitor's control, and support a competitor's branding alongside their own TDI branding. Continuing my guesswork, they expected their engineers could work out a replacement system but it proved harder than thought when tested in actual driving conditions. Speculating even more, someone noticed that under certain conditions the TDI engines performed up to the standard so they programmed the ECU to do that. But other performance metrics and reliability sucked. It was going to take time to work it out but the model year doesn't wait. Wild-assed guessing and getting into intent, someone down low in the hierarchy realized you could detect an emissions test (OBD2 port in use, wheel sensors differ, speed and rpm and timing, etc.) and trigger the clean mode. Unless someone stuck a sensor up the tailpipe while the vehicle was actually moving, no one would know and there would be enough time to work out the actual emissions problems. Except the vehicles were selling and maybe someone a little higher up decided not to fix it at all.
I wonder if we're going to see other car companies try to quietly issue software updates to existing vehicles to cover up their own emissions-test-defeating code.
I was going to mention the same thing wrt leap seconds: if a company at Google's scale could apply a "hacky" solution to this, then you don't really need a more "scalable" solution. The fact that it simplifies things massively for the developers can be a turn off for some people, though.
You've got it backwards: a company of Google's scale can do this because they're already providing and administering their own NTP servers. For a company of a smaller scale, that's an unnecessary cost.
That said, I'm intrigued at the idea of a public NTP server that does Google-style leap-second smearing. Does anyone know if one exists?
All the Network Time Protocol servers that I know of handle leap-seconds in one way or another. Some do leap-second smearing and I believe that newer versions of NTPD and OpenNTPD both support smearing. However, it appears (with only a cursory examination) that the Google time servers start smearing before the actual leap second is inserted and I've never seen that done anywhere else (or I missed it by reading too quickly).
Also note that big changes in the way time is handled (leap seconds, etc.) in the near future because of the upcoming meeting of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) at the World Radiocommunication Conference in November 2015.
The ITU has 4 methods for dealing with leap seconds, and method D is to change nothing. See the lack of consensus for any change in last week's presentations at
http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/wrc/2015/irwsp/2015/...
especially the "Input Document WRC-15-IRWSP-15/8" presentation by Zuzek.
