Rolandt

Being a portion of associations, it is not difficult to find a development of the writing services industry. The students have a tendency to hotel to those services. Graduates and even the undergraduates more than 25 are busy with families, their job and also, usually. The students and lacking experience do not have the control of speech for producing the content and hard times or entirely, respectively. The amount of papers is.

The university mission authors, usually, have a fantastic control of their language; they also devote their time to improving their abilities and attaining the papers. Regardless of that, students wish to find out more.

The system may be that the industry itself, plus it is not perfect. The schools accept an amount of entrants annually, and it is scarcely feasible to take struggles and the life of each person. There are individuals who want time or extra attention. Writing services’ growth can be a reaction to this pressure placed to the students of source, nationalities, different ages, and performance. The flaws are pointed out by this happening inside today’s world’s system.

The post The Importance of University Assignments appeared first on BookRiff.

The British Columbia Cycling Coalition is calling for Bold Action Now! Take a mere three minutes of your life to go there now and sign the petition. The process also gives you an easy way to quickly email several key people, with just a couple of clicks of your mouse. This will probably be the most important thing you do today!

The post A Billion for Bikes – Sign the Cycling for Everyone Petition for BC, Canada appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.

There’s an interesting Web Studies conference slated for next October in Paris.

Hypertext 18 (9-12 July, 2018) has a new track for Blue Sky Ideas.

“What am I going to write about?” That’s the content marketer’s constant challenge. In fact, the number of sources is endless. You just have to have the right mindset. Let’s remember what content marketing is. While there are any number of definitions out there, I think of it very simply: Content marketing is sharing something … Continued

The post Newsjacking and other fruitful sources of content marketing ideas appeared first on without bullshit.

The British  non-profit Sustrans has been examining governmental plans to increase walking and cycling and have figured out that if the plans are implemented within ten years, that 13,000 lives will be saved and nearly 9.31 billion pounds or 16 billion Canadian dollars still in coffers.

The CEO of Sustrans stated “The new findings reiterate that walking and cycling have a huge role to play in tackling the air quality crisis that causes tens of thousands of premature deaths every year. If we are to make a major modal shift, we need to provide a network of direct protected cycle routes on roads in addition to quieter routes across the UK.”

That’s an interesting thing to talk about protected bicycle routes, as air pollution in Great Britain causes 40,000 early deaths a year. The toxicity is mainly from diesel vehicles in the form of nitrogen dioxide. Many British towns and cities do not meet the WHO guidelines for mitigating air pollution, the most dangerous, PM2.5 coming from vehicle tires and brakes. “A report last month revealed that every area in London exceeds World Health Organisation limits for PM2.5.”

“Sustrans, in partnership with the environmental consultancy Eunomia, found that if targets to double journeys by bike and increase walking by “300 stages per person” in the England’s Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy were met, this would prevent more than 8,300 premature deaths from air pollution. This would result in £5.67bn in benefits over 10 years through the avoided costs associated with poor air quality, including NHS treatment in hospital for respiratory diseases.”  

Modal change from vehicles “to bikes, not diesel for electric” is the best way forward with even bigger savings if the wider impacts to health and well-being of physical activity were encouraged. This is the first time that Sustran’s data has been used with public health data to ascertain the impact of walking and cycling on a person’s exposure to air pollution.  “Our analysis suggests investment in cycling and walking has considerable potential to improve local air pollution. We believe this innovative model could be of considerable value in supporting local authorities and government as these bodies consider options to tackle the air pollution emergency at a local level.”

Fast for good, just right for watching video at home

As many of us prepare to be with families and close friends for the holidays, I’m excited to announce that Mozilla is bringing the speed of Firefox and the power of the web onto the TV with an established family of streaming media devices, just in time for the holidays.

As of this morning we have shipped Firefox for Fire TV, a browser for discovering and watching web video on the big screen TV for users to install on their Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV stick. The app is now available on 2nd generation or newer devices in the Amazon Appstore for free, aimed at U.S. customers, but available for anyone else that wants to try.

It’s a sign of the strength of Firefox Quantum that Amazon came to us looking for a partner who could bring more of the full web to its customers. The team came together to port, design and release a best-in-class application designed for the 10-foot, leanback experience and that makes watching videos as easy as clicking, searching or entering a URL. With this in-product application, we will be able to continue to drive our mission and reach existing and new users no matter what device they’re using.

“Our goal is to make it easy for customers to access the broadest range of content in the world,” said Marc Whitten, vice president, Amazon Fire TV and Appstore. “We’re excited to bring web browsing to customers on every Fire TV device in every country where we’re sold.”

Especially on this wave of a successful release of Firefox Quantum, extending our top-notch browser experience into so many livingrooms was an opportunity too large to pass. It also gave us new avenues to deepen our relationships with consumers and extend our mission to an even wider audience.

We believe passionately that you should have the ability to get to watch what you want or view the web how you want to. So, if you already have a Fire TV, consider using Firefox for Fire TV. (And if you haven’t finished your holiday shopping, you might want to add a Fire TV to your list.)

We hope you enjoy this last minute holiday gift from us, and expect more to come from Firefox for this and our other platforms, as we strive to bring our users the best the web can offer, keeping it open and accessible to all.

The post Firefox is Now on Amazon Fire TV – Happy Holiday Watching appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Benjamin Doxtdator, A Long View on Education, Dec 23, 2017

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I found this article via the most recent of Audrey Watters's posts summarizing 2017. It traces the origin of the claim that "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” It also attempts to debunk it. The claim appears to have its origin in a Bill Clinton speech in 1996. It shows up again in a 2006 speech by former Education Secretary Richard W. Riley. It was repeated by Ian Jukes and cited by Karl Fisch an d put into a video by Scott McLeod. It was also cited for a time by Cathy Davidson and by the World Economic Fourm and attributed to Jim Carroll and to the Innovation Council of Australia (both the report and the Council have disappeared) and to this 1999 report from the U.S. department of labour, which contains the assertion (illustrated) if not the precise number. But is it true? Doxtdator writes that "Andrew Old and more recently Michael Berman and the BBC have provided a solid de-bunking." But do they? Sure, the 65% figure is arbitrary, and depends a lot on how you count jobs. The BBC uses the 600 job titles in government labour surveys, but these are very broad categories, eg. "software professionals" and "IT user support technicians" and don't reflect change within categories.  As Catrhy Davidson says in the BBC interview, "I think all jobs are new jobs." 

[Link] [Comment]

Firefox users who are on Windows XP now have until August 28, 2018 to upgrade their machines. In the grand Internet tradition I will explore this by pretending someone is asking me questions.

Why?

The last Firefox release supporting Windows XP is Firefox ESR 52. Previously Firefox ESR 52 was set to end-of-life on or around May of 2018 after the next ESR, Firefox ESR 59, had been released and stabilized. Now, with an email to the Enterprise, Dev Platform, Firefox Dev, and Mobile Firefox Dev mailing lists, :Sylvestre has announced that the next ESR will be Firefox ESR 60, which extends the Firefox ESR 52 end-of-life to August 28, 2018.

No, not “Why did it change,” Why should anyone still care about Windows XP? Hasn’t it been out-of-service for a decade or something?

Not quite a decade, but the last release of Windows XP was over nine years ago, and even Microsoft’s extended support tapped out nearly four years ago.

But as to why we should care… well, Windows XP is still a large-ish portion of the Firefox user base. I don’t have public numbers in front of me, but you can see the effect the Windows XP Firefox population numbers had on the Firefox Hardware Report when we diverted them to ESR this past March. At that time they were nearly 8.5% of all Firefox users. That was more than all versions of Mac Firefox users.

Also, it’s possible that these users may be some of the most vulnerable of the Internet’s users. They deserve our thought.

Oh, okay, fine. If they matter so much, why aren’t we supporting them forever?

As you can see from the same Firefox Hardware Report, the number of Windows XP Firefox users was in steady decline. At some point our desire and capability to support this population of users can no longer match up with our desire to ship the best experience to the most users.

Given the slope of the decline in the weeks leading up to when we migrated Windows XP Firefox users to Firefox ESR, we ought to be getting pretty close to zero. We hate to remove support from any users, but there was a real cost to supporting Windows XP.

For instance, the time between the ESR branch being cut and the first Windows XP-breaking change was a mere six days. And it wasn’t on purpose, we were just fixing something somewhere in Gecko in a way that Windows XP didn’t like.

So who are we going to drop support for next?

I don’t know of any plans to drop support for any Operating Systems in the near future. I expect we’ll drop support for older compilers in our usual manner, but not OSs.

That pretty much sums it up.

If you have any questions about Firefox ESR 60, please check out the Firefox ESR FAQ.

:chutten

The tax bill headed to President Trump for signature lifts a ban on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But it might take years for drilling to begin, if it ever does.

The repeal of the individual mandate in the tax bill, despite President Trump’s claim, does not amount to a repeal of the entire health care law.

Mozilla Tech Policy Fellows continue to lead policy conversations around the world.

 

When Mozilla rolled out a new fellowship focused on tech policy this past June, the goal was to gather some of the world’s top policymakers in tech to continue advancing the important initiatives they were working on in government as fellows with Mozilla.

We rounded up 10 fellows from the U.S., Brazil, India, and Kenya as part of the initial cohort. Fellows are spending the year keeping the Internet open and free both by furthering the crucial work they had already been leading, and by finding new ways to add to forward-thinking policy efforts.

Fellows are urging policymakers to keep net neutrality in the United States and to adopt it in India, they’re promoting data privacy and security in East Africa and Brazil, and they’re encouraging increased access to high-quality broadband in vulnerable communities in rural, urban, and tribal areas everywhere. The fellows have all described their work in depth on Mozilla’s network blog:

— Alan Davidson is advancing policies and practices to support building the field of public interest technologists — the next generation of leaders with expertise in technology and public policy who we need to guide our society through coming challenges such as encryption, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, cybersecurity, and more.

— Amina Fazlullah is exploring policies that will help lower the cost of broadband access, support broad adoption, ensure that applications are developed with the most vulnerable users in mind, promoting a fair and open Internet, and identifying and highlighting the good work of digital inclusion organizations around the world.

— Camille Fischer worked on policies that support legal protections for privacy rights in the U.S. Camille completed her fellowship and recently joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a fellow working on free speech and government transparency.

— Caroline Holland is working to promote competition for a healthy Internet to make sure consumers have access to affordable and competitive high speed broadband and equal access to the lawful content they desire.

— Amba Kak is moving policies forward on net neutrality, zero rating and the open Internet in India, including supporting the country’s recent commitment to comprehensive net-neutrality protection.

— In East Africa, Linet Kwamboka is working to promote policies that support data protection and privacy as well as data literacy for the public.

— Terah Lyons explored the global role of stakeholders from public, private, civil society, and academic stakeholder communities on AI policy to address issues related to ethics, accountability, the future of work, and safety and control. Terah recently completed her fellowship and joined the Partnership on AI as its first Executive Director.

–From Brazil, Marília Monteiro is working to analyze tech policy issues from a consumer protection perspective to ensure that policy makers are balancing consumer interests with technology and innovation advances.

— Jason Schultz is exploring AI’s impact on open technologies including the need for new methods both to measure the negative impacts of AI closure and to adapt alternatives in meaningful technological, economic, and social ways.

— Gigi Sohn is continuing her nearly 30-year fight for fast, fair, and open networks, including working to keep net neutrality in the U.S.

The Tech Policy Fellows gathered at MozFest, Mozilla’s annual festival for the open Internet movement, in October. They led workshops, roundtables, and panels, and — of course — met Foxy.

Fellows are also contributing to the upcoming 2018 version of the Internet Health Report (you can get involved with that project, too!) and they are working closely with a dedicated Advisory Board, made up of seven top experts and supporters of a free and open Internet located in six different countries.

Mozilla will begin recruiting for a new cohort of fellows in 2018 — keep an eye out for our announcement and help us bring together even more amazing tech policy leaders to advance this crucial work.

The post Plugging in on Policy appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

My friend Emma has the answer for you with her 24 Hour London app (available on iOS and Android). The idea behind the app is to provide people with information about bars, restaurants and clubs that are open late at night with the added bonus of special offers of discounts and even free drinks at some of the establishments listed.

The app is in early stages but is gaining a following and Emma's on a mission to capitalise on that. Londoners, if you're ever out and about at night, then do download the app - it's free and I expect you'll find it useful.

As part of Emma's initial marketing push, she's using Thunderclap to help spread the word about 24 Hour London in January. Thunderclap simply posts a tweet or a status update on your feed at the time and day allotted and that's it. It doesn't ask you to connect your contacts or spam your friends by email. It costs you nothing save for a few moments of your time.

Your assistance will mean more downloads for her and more footfall for the venues she works with and maybe free drinks for you and your friends if you use the app. Plus, you'll probably find out about places near where you live or work that you never knew opened late at night. I'm also really interested to see how this campaign works. I've never tried Thunderclap. If there's any insight from the campaign, I'll share it here in due course.

Click on the link here or the image above, you too can add your voice to the campaign.

Day 21/25 Blogmas

While grading one last project for the semester, I ran across this gem:

    if checkInputParameters() == False:
       [...]

This code was not written by a beginning programmer, but a senior who likely will graduate in May. Sigh.

I inherited this course late in the semester, so it would be nice if I could absolve myself of responsibility for allowing a student to develop such a bad habit. But this isn't the first time I've seen this programming pattern. I've seen it in my courses and in other faculty's courses, in first-year courses and fourth-year courses. In fact, I was so certain that I blogged about the pattern before that I spent several minutes trolling the archive. Alas, I never found the entry.

Don't let anyone tell you that Twitter can't be helpful. Within minutes of tweeting my dismay, two colleagues suggested new strategies for dealing with this anti-pattern.

Sylvain Leroux invoked Star Trek:

James T. Kirk "Kobayashi Maru"-style solution: Hack CPython to properly parse that new syntax:

unless checkInputParameters(): ...

Maybe I'll turn this into a programming exercise for the next student in my compiler class who wanders down the path of temptation. Deep in my heart, though, I know that enterprising programmers will use the new type of statement to write this:

    unless checkInputParameters() == True:
       [...]

Agile Hulk suggested a fix:

    if (checkInputParameters() == False) == True:

This might actually be a productive pedagogical tack to follow: light-hearted and spot on, highlighting the anti-pattern's flaw by applying it to its own output. ("Anti-pattern eats its own dog food.") With any luck, some students will be enlightened, Zen-like. Others will furrow their brow and say "What?"

... and even if we look past the boolean crime in our featured code snippet, we really ought to take on that function name. 'Tis the season, though, and the semester is over. I'll save that rant for another time.

Few independent analyses project anywhere near the rosy forecasts offered by the president’s top economic advisers.

More than 40 per cent of the breadwinners for recent millionaire migrant households in Canada appear to have exited the country, although many left families behind there, according to new census data that illustrate the extent of a widespread phenomenon among rich Hong Kong and mainland Chinese immigrants. Overall, only 52.6 per cent of the 52,507 investor migrant households that moved to Canada between 1986 and the May 2016 census still had their original breadwinner, or “principal...

Worth following him on Twitter 

In Evergreen I’m using WKWebView instead of WebView, because it’s the new and improved WebKit view. NSHipster writes:

Boasting responsive 60fps scrolling, built-in gestures, streamlined communication between app and webpage, and the same JavaScript engine as Safari, WKWebView is one of the most significant announcements to come out of WWDC 2014.

Sounds great! I’m on board.

One of the best parts about it — easily enough to sell me — is that a crash in WKWebView won’t crash my app.

(Back when I was doing NetNewsWire, crashes in the old WebView — the predecessor to WKWebView — were the most common crash. But, to be fair, many if not most of those were actually Flash crashes.)

I’ve also heard, though I’m not sure how to verify, that WKWebView is better for accessibility, too. So it’s a win all around.

But it’s not a win all around

WebView — good ’ol trusty friend — has a bunch of things that WKWebView is missing.

The new web view has no built-in support for finding text, for instance. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this, since the ability to hit cmd-F and look for some text is a pretty fundamental thing, and I can’t skip it.

It also has no delegate method for when you mouse over a link. Seems like another fundamental thing, right? Any browser offers you a status bar or some way to see the URL of the link your mouse is over.

What I ended up doing there: my article renderer adds some JavaScript that adds event listeners. (See ArticleRenderer in the renderedHTML() method.) Then I added handlers in DetailViewController: see viewDidLoad and the WKScriptMessageHandler extension.

This worked fine: now my status bar shows the URL of the link your mouse is over. Cool.

Then the issue of scrolling came up

Evergreen’s design includes a key feature: you can go through all of your news just by hitting the space bar repeatedly.

If there’s more to scroll in the web view (the article), it scrolls. If not, then it goes to the next unread article.

This is a coffee-in-hand feature, which is critical for a news reader.

But WKWebView provides no access to its scroll view. (It does on iOS, yes, but not on Macs.)

The logic goes like this:

if canScrollDown()
    scrollDown()
else
    goToNextUnread()

There are two parts to this, and both (I thought) required access to the scroll view.

canScrollDown()

Well… JavaScript comes to the rescue again, just as with the mouseover-link handling. I can run a script in the app and get the results — and JavaScript can tell me the content height and the current amount of scrolling. (I already know the frame size, but I could have gotten that via JavaScript also.)

I did this an DetailViewController, in the fetchScrollInfo method.

(Unfortunately, this is asynchronous. I expect it to be super-fast, but I won’t know if this is a problem without a bunch of testing. Let’s set that issue aside.)

The fetchScrollInfo method creates a ScrollInfo struct (at the bottom of DetailViewController) that has canScrollDown and canScrollUp properties.

So that’s how I know if the web view can scroll. Part one of two solved.

scrollDown()

I tried making it scroll via JavaScript. It’s super-easy. But it’s not animated, and it needs to be. (In Safari, with a scrollable page, hit the space bar — notice how it animates.)

So I did some research and found some JavaScript utilities, some needing JQuery, for animated scrolling.

But do I really want to add that much JavaScript on every single article load? No way. And will their animation match the animation users expect? I strongly suspect it would be noticeably different.

(I write Mac apps. “Noticeably different” is the kiss of death.)

So I did some nerd-sniping, on Twitter and Slack, to see if anybody had a suggestion that would work.

People had ideas. Nothing worked.

Twist ending

So I’m frustrated, and I’m just about to switch back to my old friendly friend WebView, because I know it will do what I want.

The voice of another old friend — the guy who mentored me in my early days as a programmer — came into my head, as it often does in these situations.

“What is the real problem you’re trying to solve?” asks Dave Winer, in my head.

The real problem is not arbitrary animated scrolling. The real problem is that I want to do a page-down exactly the same way it would work if the WKWebView had focus and you hit the space bar. Exactly the same animation and scroll distance.

But not arbitrary scrolling: just a page-down.

So I think maybe I can spy on the event stream; maybe I can figure it out by seeing what happens when I click in the web view and hit the space bar. Maybe I can post an event that will do the job.

To do so I make an NSApplication subclass, which I do (in Swift, of course), and break on sendEvent.

But of course this doesn’t work. The app crashes immediately saying it can’t find the EvergreenApplication class. (Which is right there! Dude!)

Whatever.

Okay, maybe it’s back to WebView after all. Forget WKWebView.

Then I do a search in Xcode on pagedown, just out of a last gasp of trying — and, forgotten long ago by me, but look: there is a scrollPageDown method in NSResponder — and WKWebView is an NSView subclass which is an NSResponder subclass — so, could it be? maybe? it might work?

I tried it: sure enough! It works! With animation and everything. It’s perfect.

* * *

So, in the end, the action method is in MainWindowController — see scrollOrGoToNextUnread.

(It’s a little weird due to the async thing I mentioned earlier. But it does the job.)

And now — after three years of working on this app — I was finally able to go through all my news just by hitting the space bar. Big day for me.

mkalus shared this story from vintage everyday.

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With photos from the past you automatically think about black and white. Even in our own childhood, almost no color photograph was made. Nevertheless, the technique for making color photographs has been around for more than 100 years!

In 1907, the two French brothers August and Louis Lumière invented a technique with which real color photographs could be made, the Autochrome Lumière. It was a very ingenious process that used glass plates on which a layer of microscopically colored potato starch granules were applied.

The photographs that were taken with them were beautiful and had a dreamy painting-like atmosphere. And now it is possible for us to see the world of more than 100 years ago in the original colors.

These wonderful photographs from fiftymore that show how the Netherlands looked in color from the early 20th century.






See more »

mkalus shared this story from vintage everyday.

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The London Rock and Roll Show was a concert held at Wembley Stadium, London, on 5 August 1972. It is often said to have been the first ever concert held at the stadium, but in fact the band Yes had performed in the Stadium on 13 July 1969.

From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, many rock and roll performers from the 1950s experienced major career revivals due to a temporary upswing of interest in their form of music. The Revival was marked by a series of major concerts in the United States, and also spread to Europe where events such as the Wembley concert attracted thousands of fans who came out to see the performers behind the music.

The concert included performances by major stars including Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Bill Haley and His Comets. The concert ended with an extended performance by Chuck Berry, who at the time was enjoying major chart success in Britain and the US with his "My Ding-a-Ling".

5th August 1972: A group of teddy boys dancing at the London rock ‘n’ roll revival show in Wembley Arena.

Rock ‘n’ roll fans who attended the Rock ‘n’ Roll Festival at Wembley, North London. (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

Teddy boys gather at Wembley Stadium for The London Rock and Roll Show, 5th August 1972. (Photo by Michael Webb/Keystone/Getty Images)

A woman standing next to a teddy-boy sells leather belts at the Rock n’ Roll Festival, Wembley Stadium. (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

Hippies and rockers together at the rock ‘n’ roll Revival Show, held at Wembley Stadium, London. (Photo by Michael Webb/Getty Images)

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Apple isn't a hardware company. Nevertheless, hardware's importance to Apple continues to grow. Apple is now overseeing a supply chain and manufacturing apparatus responsible for producing more than 300M gadgets per year. As Silicon Valley increasingly bets on services and intelligent assistants, many are making a critical mistake in downplaying hardware. As Alan Kay, a tech industry pioneer, once said, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." Apple is betting that Kay's advice will remain relevant in the future. Apple is doubling down on hardware in order to become the most powerful software provider in the wearables era. 

Hardware Strategy

The vast majority of Apple's products are assembled by contract manufacturers in Asia. This wasn't always the case. In the 1990s, Apple owned its own factories. However, the company was imploding financially from a bloated product line and a costly manufacturing apparatus. Apple's supply chain and network of factories just weren't efficient. In March 1998, Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook as SVP of Operations to save Apple, literally. Cook's initial tasks included quickly drawing down excess Mac inventory in addition to laying the groundwork for Apple's outsourcing strategy. 

Cook began to rethink Apple's supply chain, going so far as to get suppliers to move closer to Apple's new assemblers. Apple soon discovered that manufacturers and assemblers in China were capable of meeting the company's high standards like no other. It was around this time that Apple began its long-standing partnership with Foxconn, the company's largest product assembler. Cook also instituted a just-in-time inventory production system which addressed excess inventory issues that nearly crippled Apple. 

While much attention has been placed on Apple's contract manufacturers, little is reported on the degree to which Apple works with its suppliers and assemblers. It is not uncommon for Apple designers to spend weeks, or even months, at factories in China. Apple does not design a product in California and just send final manufacturing instructions to its assemblers. The amount of collaboration that occurs between Apple and its various suppliers and manufacturers would surprise most outsiders. 

Even though Apple doesn't own factories, the company does own a significant amount of equipment and machines housed in third-party factories. As of the end of September, Apple held $54B of machinery, equipment and internal-use software on its balance sheet. A significant portion of this total is machinery used in the production of Apple's products.

Expanding the Bet on Hardware

Apple's bet on hardware continues to grow. In the past, controlling hardware still amounted to Apple being dependent on others to provide the core technology and components. Apple began to see the value in controlling its own destiny by owning the core technology powering its devices. 

In 2010, Apple unveiled the iPad. The device was powered by an A4 processor, the first Apple-designed chip. The A4 was made possible by Apple's P.A. Semi acquisition two years earlier. Jumping ahead seven years, Apple now has a range of processors:

• A Series: iPhone and iPad
• S Series: Apple Watch
• W Series: AirPods, Beats, and Apple Watch
• T Series: Mac

Back in September, Apple introduced the A11 Bionic chip in iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X. The chip includes the first Apple-designed GPU solution. There is now an increasing amount of evidence that Apple is moving into modem design and power management chips. Apple's end goal is to create a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that includes Apple Ax processors, GPUs, and LTE modem chips.

Apple's current hardware strategy is all about controlling the experience found with its products. In the past, differentiation came from simply doing both hardware and software. Differentiation is now found when there is tighter control over the core components powering products. 

Scale

It's easy to think of Apple as just an iPhone maker. More than 210M iPhones are sold per year, and no other Apple product comes close to surpassing iPhone in terms of unit sales. However, iPhone is only one piece of Apple's hardware story.

According to my estimates, Apple sold 322M gadgets in FY2017. This total includes unit sales from every major product category and accessory powered by Apple software (iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, AirPods, iPods, Apple Pencils, Beats headphones, and Apple TVs). After a down year in 2016, when Apple shipped 8% fewer devices than in 2015, the company returned to unit sales growth in 2017. In fact, Apple shipped 7% more devices in 2017 than in 2016. 

Exhibit 1: Apple Gadget Unit Sales

Apple gadget sales include: iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, AirPods, iPods, Beats headphones, Apple Pencils, and Apple TVs.

Additional accessories such as Apple Watch bands, iPhone and iPad cases and covers, and various charging cords and cables push the total number of Apple products sold in FY2017 well past 400M.

Along with demonstrating Apple's success at selling mass-market items, these sales numbers illustrate the ability of Apple's supply chain and manufacturing apparatus to produce hardware at scale. In fact, there aren't too many companies operating at Apple's hardware scale. While Samsung doesn't disclose smartphone sales, industry estimates peg the company at selling approximately 300M smartphones per year, which includes a wide range of models. Every other smartphone manufacturer is selling fewer smartphones than Apple is selling. Meanwhile, the world's largest PC makers and other consumer electronics companies don't have the sales required to come close to matching Apple in terms of hardware sales.

Wearables

Apple's hardware scale is about to undergo significant changes. The upcoming wearables era will prove to be a game changer for hardware sales. As there are a little under a billion users, it is not inconceivable for Apple to eventually ship a billion gadgets per year. While this may seem hard to believe considering Apple sold 322 million gadgets in FY2017, the wearables era will likely be defined in terms of ecosystems consisting of different wearable devices. An Apple product line including Apple Watch, AirPods, Beats, and Apple Glasses, combined with a user base of more than one billion people, will lead to massive demand for hardware.

We are already starting to see the beginning stages of wearables impact Apple's manufacturing apparatus. According to my estimates, Apple sold nearly 30M wearable devices in FY2017, up from 10M devices in FY2016. Nearly one out of ten gadgets Apple sells is a wearable. Looking ahead, it is possible we will see Apple sell 50M wearable devices in FY2018 as Apple Watch and AirPods are seeing remarkable momentum in the marketplace. Both Apple Watch and AirPods are products that contain the potential of one day selling in the hundreds of millions of units per year. Meanwhile, it is inevitable that Apple will one day sell a pair of augmented reality glasses. 

Exhibit 2: Apple Gadget Unit Sales by Product

Note: "Other" includes Apple Pencils, Apple TVs, and Beats headphones. Wearables include Apple Watches, AirPods, and select Beats headphones.

Hardware Prowess

In many ways, Apple's product event this past September at Steve Jobs Theater demonstrates the scope of Apple's hardware prowess. Apple unveiled a cellular Apple Watch and iPhone X, two products made possible only after years of intensive collaboration throughout Apple. The amount of collaboration required puts the company's extensive efforts with Apple Park, a campus designed to improve collaboration within Apple, into perspective.

Everything from the iPhone X's OLED display to the neural engine found inside the A11 Bionic chip come together to produce an experience that would be impossible to create by a company focused just on software or hardware. Similarly, the W2 and S2 chips found in Apple Watch Series 3, along with the ability to include cellular without jeopardizing device thickness or even battery life, is remarkable. After placing big bets on hardware for decades, Apple is now in a position where its hardware capabilities are opening doors for Apple software and services.

While Apple's hardware bets are already providing the company a competitive advantage over peers with smartphones, tablets, and wearables, the long-term implications of Apple's hardware strategy are still being underestimated. Apple is well-positioned to build the most formidable supply chain and manufacturing apparatus for wearables.  Apple now finds itself making bets in terms of controlling core components in products.  The company is also investigating new manufacturing techniques and processes that will give the company an advantage over peers in the wearables space.  This may be better measured in decades than in years. Apple has never seen a scenario like this play itself out before. This is unchartered territory.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook have been busy talking about a "post device" era in which the very idea of a device fades away. Instead powerful voice assistants and cloud services powered by artificial intelligence ultimately gain power at the expense of hardware. Apple is betting on a very different future. Apple sees a world in which hardware gains power in our lives. Apple is moving to the point at which it will have near complete control over every major component powering its device. Whether it is seen in new kinds of displays, smarter cameras, or custom silicon, hardware has a role to play in pushing more intelligent software and services. Instead of tomorrow's winners being those companies controlling powerful software and services, the winners will be companies shipping hardware that can melt away allowing the user to interact with software with as few barriers as possible. 

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Apple HomeKit is a user-friendly platform for anyone who owns an iOS device and is interested in a simple, reliable DIY smart-home system. With a couple of HomeKit-compatible devices and an iPhone or iPad, you can start from scratch and have an integrated system up and running in a few minutes. Control your HomeKit system via the Siri voice assistant built into Apple phones, tablets, computers, and watches, or from Apple’s HomePod smart speaker.

mkalus shared this story from NASA Image of the Day.

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This schlieren image shows an Air Force Test Pilot School T-38 in a transonic state, meaning the aircraft is transitioning from a subsonic speed to supersonic.

Whether you’re replacing an existing solid-state drive or upgrading from a traditional hard drive to get better performance, almost every SSD you can buy today is great. But some are still better than others. If you need to buy a SATA SSD right now, we think the 500 GB Crucial MX500 is the best option for most people. The MX500 isn’t the fastest SATA SSD you can get, but it comes close, and it has the best combination of price, performance, endurance, and capacity of any drive you can buy.

After an incredible response to our first issue of HackSpace magazine last month, we’re excited to announce today’s release of issue 2, complete with cheese making, digital braille, and…a crochet Cthulhu?

Your spaces

This issue, we visit Swansea Hackspace to learn how to crochet, we hear about the superb things that Birmingham’s fizzPOP maker space is doing, and we’re extremely impressed by the advances in braille reader technology that are coming out of Bristol Hackspace. People are amazing.

Your projects

We’ve also collected page upon page of projects for you to try your hand at. Fancy an introduction to laser cutting? A homemade sine wave stylophone? Or how about our first foray into Adafruit’s NeoPixels, adding blinkenlights to a pair of snowboarding goggles?

And (much) older technology gets a look in too, including a tutorial showing you how to make a knife in your own cheap and cheerful backyard forge.

As always, issue 2 of HackSpace magazine is available as a free PDF download, but we’ll also be publishing online versions of selected articles for easier browsing, so be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. And, of course, we want to hear your thoughts – contact us to let us know what you like and what else you’d like to see, or just to demand that we feature your project, interest or current curiosity in the next issue.

Get your copy

You can grab issue 2 of HackSpace magazine right now from WHSmith, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and independent newsagents. If you live in the US, check out your local Barnes & Noble, Fry’s, or Micro Center next week. We’re also shipping to stores in Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore, Belgium, and Brazil, so be sure to ask your local newsagent whether they’ll be getting HackSpace magazine.

Alternatively, you can get the new issue online from our store, or digitally via our Android or iOS apps. And don’t forget, as with all our publications, a free PDF of HackSpace magazine is available from release day.

That’s it from us for this year; see you in 2018 for a ton of new things to make and do!

The post HackSpace magazine 2: 3D printing and cheese making appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Drafting

In its continuing fight against fragmentation and security vulnerabilities, Google has announced three Google Play Store changes that it believes will help with both.

In a post to developers, Google’s Android team says it wants developers to target a recent API level for their apps — meaning the most recent set of routines, protocols and tools for building apps on Android.

The company is giving developers a head start on this change; by August 2018, it’ll be a mandatory requirement that new apps target API Level 26 (Android 8.0) or higher, and by November 2018 updates to existing apps will need to target the Android 8.0 level API or higher.

Google gives a few examples of why this is important, noting that, for instance, only apps with a target of API level 23 (Android 6.0) or higher gives the user full control over what private data – such as contacts or location – the app can access via runtime permissions. Recent releases also help prevent apps from overusing resources like battery and memory.

“We want to proactively reduce fragmentation in the app ecosystem and ensure apps are secure.”

“We want to proactively reduce fragmentation in the app ecosystem and ensure apps are secure and performant while providing developers with a long window and plenty of notice in order to plan ahead,” writes the Android team in its blog post.

Additionally, the Play Console — the place where developer manage all phases of app publishing — will require in August 2019 that developers make sure their apps can run without 32-bit support on 64-bit operating systems. For apps that use native libraries, 64-bit code usually offers better performance in comparison to 32-bit.

Google says over 40 percent of Android devices coming online have 64-bit support. All of those devices are still maintaining 32-bit compatibility, but it’s anticipating future Android devices that support 64-bit code only.

Lastly, in a move that requires no action from developers, Google says it’ll be adding “a small amount” of security metadata on top of each APK to verify that it was officially distributed by Google Play — essentially providing a digital badge of authenticity.

Source: Android Developers Blog

The post Google announces new changes designed to improve Google Play Store security appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Apple has confirmed to The Verge that it intentionally slows down older iPhones in an effort to conserve device battery health.

The tech giant released the following statement to The Verge regarding the recent controversy.

Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.

Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.

Reports emerged earlier this week via Reddit, indicating that Apple is intentionally slowing down older iPhones with depleting battery power, in an effort to conserve overall battery quality.

iPhone users have been reporting for years that they’re experiencing slowdowns with older devices following the release of iOS updates, leading to conspiracy theories surrounding Apple intentionally throttling devices in order to encourage consumer to purchase the latest version of the iPhone. A group of Reddit users even went so far as to uncover proof that Apple is throttling processor speeds as the iPhone’s battery deteriorates over time through a variety of tests.

So it’s true Apple intentionally slow down old iPhones. Proof: My iPhone 6 was bought 3years ago and recently got really slow. APP ‘CPU DasherX’ shows iPhone CPU is under clocked running at 600MHz. After a iPhone battery replacement. CPU speed resumed to factory setting 1400MHz. pic.twitter.com/pML3y0Jkp2

— Sam_Si (@sam_siruomu) December 20, 2017

Geekbench developer John Poole tracked the performance of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 over a specific period of time, coming to the conclusion that Apple’s iOS 10.2.1 and 11.2.0 are throttling the speed of both devices’ processors.

In the case of iOS 10.2.1, an update Apple released to solve shutdown issues with the iPhone 6 and 6s, the update slows down the phone’s CPU to prevent the device from shutting down.

Poole reported similar findings with iOS 11.2.0 when it comes to the iPhone 7. Other reports indicate that replacing an iPhone 6s’ or 7’s aging battery instantly brings performance back to normal.

“This fix will also cause users to think, ‘my phone is slow so I should replace it’ not, ‘my phone is slow so I should replace its battery,” says Geekbench’s John Poole, in a recent blog post.

While Apple’s thought process behind slowing down devices makes sense to an extent, the tech giant isn’t doing itself any favours by not being transparent about the fact that it’s intentionally throttling devices with the goal of prolonging battery life.

It would also be nice to see Apple be more clear regarding the benefits of replacing a device’s battery given how relatively inexpensive it is to do so.

Source: Reddit, Geekbench Via: The Verge

The post Apple confirms it slows down older iPhones to prolong battery health appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Bell has announced all of the new shows that will be streaming on its CraveTV service in January.

Here’s everything coming to the streaming platform in the first month of the new year:

January 1st

• Doctor Who: Season 10

January 2nd

• The Beaverton’s Year in Review: 2017, The Year That Sadly Was

January 3rd

• Cardinal: Season 2 premiere — 6pm PT/9pm ET

January 5th

• Broad City: Season 4
• Training Day: Season 1
• Underground: Season 2
• Unsportsmanlike Comedy with Rob Gronkowski — 7pm PT/10pm ET

January 7th

• The Chi: Series Premiere — 7pm PT/10pm ET

January 8th

• Star Trek Discovery: Season 1, Episode 10 — 5pm PT/8pm ET (with post-show After Trek beginning immediately afterward)

January 10th

• Cardinal: Season 2, Episode 2 — 6pm PT/9pm ET
• The Launch: Director’s Cut: Season 1, Episode 1 — 7pm PT/10 pm ET

January 12th

• Artie Lange: Stench of Failure
• Sam Smith: Live in London
• The Beaverton: Season 2, Episode 9
• The President Show: Season 1A

January 14th

• The Chi: Episode 2 — 7pm PT/10pm ET

January 15th

• Star Trek Discovery: Season 1, Episode 11 — 5pm PT/8pm ET (with post-show After Trek beginning immediately afterward)

January 17th

• Cardinal: Season 2, Episode 3 — 6pm PT/9pm ET
• The Launch: Director’s Cut: Season 1, Episode 2 — 7pm PT/10pm ET

January 19th

• Adam Devine’s House Party: Season 3
• Harry Styles Live in Manchester
• Reign: Season 4
• The Beaverton: Season 2, Episode 10

January 21st

• Counterpart Series Premiere — 5pm PT/8pm ET
• The Chi Episode 3 — 7pm PT/10pm ET

January 22nd

• Star Trek Discovery: Season 1, Episode 12 — 5pm PT/8pm ET (with post-show After Trek beginning immediately afterward)

January 24th

• Cardinal: Season 2, Episode 4 — 6pm PT/9pm ET
• The Launch: Director’s Cut Season 1, Episode 3 — 7pm PT/10pm ET

January 26th

• Beware the Slenderman
• Pete Davidson: SMD
• The Beaverton: Season 2, Episode 11
• W5: Season 52, Episode 12

January 28th

• Counterpart Season 1, Episode 2 — 5pm PT/8pm ET

January 29th

• Star Trek Discovery: Season 1, Episode 13 — 5pm PT/8pm ET (with post-show After Trek beginning immediately afterward)

January 31st

• Cardinal: Season 2, Episode 5 — 6pm PT/9pm ET
• The Launch: Director’s Cut: Season 1, Episode 4 — 7pm PT/10pm ET

Last chance programming

• Master Chef Celebrity Showdown 2016 (January 8th)
• Master Chef Celebrity Showdown 2017 (January 8th)

Coming Soon

• Girls
• The Young Pope
• Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars

In the meantime, check out what you can watch on CraveTV for the rest of December.

Image credit: IMDB

Source: Bell Media

The post Here’s everything that’s coming to CraveTV in January appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Netflix has revealed that the streaming video platform now supports high dynamic range (HDR) content on Windows 10 via Microsoft’s Edge browser and the Windows 10 Netflix app.

This means that Netflix content that supports HDR10, which primarily consists of the streaming platform’s original television shows and movies, can now be viewed with high dynamic range enabled, but only on compatible PCs.

In the PC world, it’s still early days when it comes to 4K and HDR10. This means that very few Windows 10 PCs and laptops actually feature HDR.

In a media release, Netflix said that Intel seventh-generation and higher CPUs provide the required processing power needed to play Netflix HDR10 encodes. The streaming company also mentioned that Intel and Nvidia have developed GPUs that utilize 10 bits-per-channel for RGB colour, increasing the colour space that can be displayed.

On Microsoft’s side of the equation, the company added Windows 10 support for this new technology in the operating system’s Fall Creators Update, released in October 2017.

While HDR is the future of high-end displays, the technology is still very confusing right now, especially in the high-end television space where HDR10 and Dolby Vision continue to battle it out in an effort to become the dominant format.

Source: Netflix 

The post Netflix now supports HDR with Windows 10 devices via Microsoft’s Edge browser appeared first on MobileSyrup.