I know Prabhakar. He was my manager at Google Research and he tried to recruit me to Yahoo in 2005, but I went to Google instead. This article stinks of hatred and misunderstanding about how Google works. It's possible that Prabhakar bears some responsibility for the decline of search experience, but it sounds over the top to assign all blame to him as a manager.
To take something as useful as google search (was) and sacrifice it on Moloch’s altar for profits is profoundly bad. To the right person, such a level of callous indifference would inspire feelings of hatred.
foxnews.com is not paywalled, but mostly spews crap to the uneducated. By contrast, nytimes is paywalled. I'm sure that limits the effectiveness of legitimate news organizations.
My wife keeps a land line because of superior voice quality for calls to her family. I find it handy because I can give a number to businesses when they demand one. We never answer that phone (it has been silenced from ringing). AT&T has no broadband service in my area - they offer only DSL and I live in a fairly rich area of silicon valley. The problem is that my utilities were put underground when the house was built in the 70s, so it's too expensive to upgrade the utilities.
POTS would have had the same voice quality as a decent VOIP provider, as upstream from your home they were converting it to ulaw anyways. This would have been better than the early GSM codecs. But these days with VoLTE "HD Voice" uses a superior codec. Most chat apps will use a codec that's better than ulaw as well. So there's a lot of places to go that offer significantly better voice quality these days.
Yes. A long time ago had to give a landline number to school, to have a discussion with them 6 months later on why they expected us to ever pick it.
We only ever used that line for international phone calls, and after cancelling it it basically made no difference in our life, except the savings. We give our mobile numbers when asked for landline, bullshit numbers to spam companies, block the ones that still get a real number, and ask relatives to call us on any other reliable service (international call quality was garbage anyway)
Dumb question, but it's the same in France and Switzerland, and year the fiber optic coverage is quite good. They just use the existing conduit. Fiber creates no interference and usually they run alongside telephone cables
The issue is that a lot of countries didn't install their telephone cables in conduits, but put them directly into the dirt. Adding fiber to it requires digging up the entire run, which is of course quite expensive.
Facetime audio has super high quality. It's noticeable. If you use voip you can get "hd audio". If they turn it off... have her try that! Not trying to argue, just offering a solution.
One thing which is absolutely infuriating is the noise cancellation of iPhones.
For me, with multiple people, it frequently aggressively mutes the microphone in noisy environments such that they're speaking and it's entirely silent on my end. You can't turn this off, there's no setting. I can't speak to my parents if they're outside and it's windy or if they're in the car, or often if they're just on speakerphone inside. It's ridiculous.
I've been wanting to build a solar powered above-ground pump for a waterfall into my pool. The pump will not be submerged, so I'd like to use a well pump.
it's odd that you say that without having seen the competitor. This is evidence of belonging to a cult or being afraid of better things. Of course it's possible that the new one is shit, but I think I'll make my own mind up.
It's odd you go straight to a trope about a cult. If I'm happy with something I don't always have the time, energy, or interest to seek out something better.
It's completely unsurprising to expect the first generation of something like this, even if it was amazing, to have annoying flaws. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound amazing. Car companies have a long track record of disappointing infotainment systems and there's zero reason to expect anything better here. In fact, the problems in this article sound identical to the ones I had with Honda's most basic level infotainment system just a couple years ago. It would freeze and the only fix was turning off the car...a difficult solution on road trips. Asking the dealer about it, they said there was no update process for it--maybe a newer model year wouldn't have that issue?
>It would freeze and the only fix was turning off the car...a difficult solution on road trips.
Back in the days of manual transmissions, this wasn't so hard. I remember having to do this for some odd reason (don't remember) back in the 90s: just clutch in, turn off the ignition, restart the engine, clutch out.
On my most recent car which had an infotainment system, there was some kind of three-button combination you could press to reboot the system without restarting the car.
I was kind of expecting some magic button combination, too, but was told there wasn't one.
The car was actually a manual transmission and the thought did occur to me. My worry was something like steering lock or some other issue while trying that while driving down the road would cause a horrible accident.
It’s the same reason why people have car brand preferences in general. We don’t call someone preferring Volvo a cult member because they haven’t tried out several competitors. It’s just the way things are when you find something you know you enjoy. The power of knowing what you have is strong and isn’t necessarily about “politics”.
Also, let’s not pretend it’s not a little weird to have someone build a car in 2023 that doesn’t have CarPlay or Android Auto and isn’t firmly in the budget segment. It’s not only going to feel unusual, but market pressure for improvements on GM will be completely different if you use their custom system than something that is more standardized and used by orders of a magnitude more customers.
The “cult” thing might make sense if there were any history at all of GM, or really even any auto maker, making a better infotainment system than CarPlay. But it’s never happened.
Imagine GM were a home builder who suddenly said they will no longer sell any homes they build, only rent them out. You are free to sell your house with your 3% mortgage, and go back to renting, to see if you prefer it. But those who choose to continue owning are not in a “cult,” and they’d think you were making a pretty bad decision. And they’d almost certainly be right.
I'm guilty of calling Apple users cultists myself, but the idea that any car company, worst of all GM, could possibly make an in-house infotainment system that would be nearly as good as the very cheapest and worst Android or Apple phone is sheer lunacy. There is absolutely no evidence they can make anything decent, and a mountain of evidence that everything they've ever made has been utter trash.
I'm not part of a cult. I just have the foresight to realize it's cheaper to buy a new phone than it is a new car.
Knowing Google, they'll sunset this project within a few years and these GM EVs will lose support and fall behind on the features Google adds to their own hardware.
Sidenote: I would be more open to this approach if GM created a modular upgrade option for the infotainment system. Today's hardware will not run tomorrow's software the same as tomorrow's hardware.
For me, CarPlay/Android Auto was a must when we got a new EV this summer, as I see it as a backup in case the car's interface gets borked in an update, or abandoned.
I don't currently use it because I find the native interface superior, but I do want the option.
All car software is abaondonware after a period of time. This idea of constant software updates, risky as that is, only came about recently. And no manufacturer is going to update every year of every model forever.
If you aren’t leaving this exact same comment on all the Tesla shilling going on, you’re not genuine about your beliefs and I’ll write you off as a paid shill.
> They initially thought they would be providing search to companies for their intranet.
Really? Page and Brin were focused on public web pages and links from before Google existed, through their PhD research [1], so switching to intranet seems strange.
