This is a cool concept, but the triangle idea is more effort than it's worth IMO. Having to have a way to communicate between the two triangles plus having separate batteries for both, not to mention the weirdness of losing one of them, makes the product needlessly more complex. Having one device with two headphone outputs is much easier to build IMO.
But then you both need to be in the same spot to use it. I like the idea of being able to sit on opposite sides of a room, or go for a run while using the device.
I'm willing to drop the triangle shape. I'm not that attached to it. However, we need to have two different devices that can be one. Don't worry about loosing them. I've figured that out. We are going to put 2 separate beacons in it. Netizens is the creator of the first beacons working in mesh network (take a look http://eonbeacon.com/), which is good for navigation as well. We are going to have an excellent tracking service within a Velo app, better than Tile.
> Going from the airport to Coney Island takes an hour and a half by subway (according to Google), rather than half an hour by car. Now what happens if you have what to do in Queens, Far Rockaway, or NJ?
Unless if it's during commuting hours, in which case they're pretty much equal I'd say.
It's ridiculous on the face of it, but at what point do you need to have a CLA signed? 10 bytes? Having an arbitrary cutoff for what needs a CLA or doesn't, I think, is probably even worse than having a CLA.
We can accept small changes (roughly, fewer than 15 lines) without
an assignment. This is a cumulative limit (e.g. three separate 5 line
patches) over all your contributions.
That byte is not copyrightable, it's as simple as that.
It follows the rules on what is copyrightable.
So mechanical changes (for example reformatting text), that involve no creativity are not copyrightable and IMO would not need a CLA even if they were very extensive.
On the other hand a single line with complicated and creative code would.
Like all things human it's subjective, there is no bright line but courts have definitely dealt with this issue (often in the context of plagiarism of musical passages).
> I imagine if you open the Spotify app and it said that it's a subscription service and you must have a Spotify account to login and listen to music, and nothing else, the vast majority of people would figure out to check their website to sign up.
I'm not so optimistic. I'd presume a nontrivial number of people would be confused and leave a 1-star review. I can't imagine how many people are confused about how the Kindle iOS experience works.
That's possible too. I guess you'd have to weigh the loss of the 30% to Apple (now 15% if they keep the scription over a year) to the lost 100% from the people who don't sign up at all.
I remember hearing somewhere that some apps have fantastic subscription conversion inside the app because payment to so convenient compared to doing it outside. I don't know if that was a dating app, or Netflix, or what. But Apple's payment system is so simple and frictionless that user seem to be very willing to spend money.
I'm cancelling my Comodo certs today. It's scary that this is the largest CA in the world.
Sibling comments have brought up some good points about the baseless claims in this post. The CEO also quotes this Let's Encrypt blog post on "Why 90 Days":
> "Ninety days is nothing new on the Web. According to Firefox Telemetry, 29% of TLS transactions use ninety-day certificates. That’s more than any other lifetime"
> so whose certs are these? Of course Comodo's!!! So they are admitting they are copying our innovation of 90 day free ssl certs!
So is the CEO saying that 29% of TLS transactions on the web are on sites which use Comodo's 90-day free trial SSL certificates, probably used on sites with the least traffic on the web? That at any one time, 29% of TLS traffic is over an unrenewable 90-day trial cert? Huh, seems implausible for some reason!
----
The post right above is also misinformed as well:
> From a legal standpoint (ISRG) should have trademarked this when they started using it publicly in November of 2014. There negligence to have done so is why this debate is happening. Then they want to cry foul because of their failure to follow the simplest of product protections. Registering your trademarks. The one who is in possession of the registered trademark is the owner, and that is the law.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but "from a legal standpoint," there has to be evidence of use in commerce before a trademark can be registered, and it's crystal clear that Comodo did not use "Let's Encrypt" in commerce, and it's also crystal clear that ISRG did.
Even more, you gain a trademark simply by using a mark in, well, trade (commerce). It isn't required to register a trademark in order to have the trademark, or to be able to protect it. Yes, your case is stronger if it's registered, but registration is not required.
Federal registration is not required to establish rights in a trademark. Common law rights arise from actual use of a mark and may allow the common law user to successfully challenge a registration or application.
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but "from a legal standpoint," there has to be evidence of use in commerce before a trademark can be registered, and it's crystal clear that Comodo did not use "Let's Encrypt" in commerce, and it's also crystal clear that ISRG did.
Yes, and then after the mark is approved you have to provide evidence of use, which can be nothing more than a screenshot of a webpage (plus a $250 filing fee). Filing evidence of use can be delayed up to 5 times I believe, meaning you have plenty of time to file. If you fail to file, you will lose your mark though.
That's pretty good in the twisted world of email newsletters. I've seen quotes of 2 weeks to unsubscribe before, as if they already printed and stamped a physical mailer weeks ago...
I unsubscribed from the highly annoying BestBuy marketing emails and got a notice I'd be removed in 10 days. I looked into CAN-SPAM, and that's the maximum allowance of time to comply with a removal request. Never going to shop at a BestBuy again.
Four opinions, going off of this article and partly in response to Gruber's[0]:
1. There was a functional reason that CDs and floppies went out of style: low capacity and the Internet. What’s the functional reason to get rid of analog headphones? It’s not quality – analog headphones have excellent sound quality, and 99% of people won’t be able to tell the difference with ‘digital’ sound, right?
2. So what happens if I want to charge my phone (e.g. from an external battery) and listen to headphones at the same time? Do I have to use some sort of ... dongle? That’s going to get silly.
3. Wireless headphones are ideal, but the price-to-performance ratio still sucks. Maybe if in the future we all have excellent wireless headphones, it might be a good idea to remove the headphone jack and provide a legacy wired output through the Lightning port, but we're not there yet.
4. Why do this in an era of declining iPhone sales growth?
Admittedly, analog headphone jacks will go away at some point, but I hope it's not before we have an elegant solution to these problems – like wireless headphones, perhaps.
> What’s the functional reason to get rid of analog headphones? It’s not quality – analog headphones have excellent sound quality, and 99% of people won’t be able to tell the difference with ‘digital’ sound, right?
You have it backward - analog headphones are superior, generally speaking.
"Digital headphones" simply move the D/A converter, amplifier, and transducer into the headphone package.
In almost all cases, the higher-quality D/A converter and amplifier will be ones not crammed into your headphones; and the higher-quality transducers are not the ones packaged with a cheap DAC and low-power amplifier into your earbuds. The same holds true for speakers (exception being high-quality powered loudspeakers, still, keep the DACs out of the speakers).
I think it makes more sense to put the D/A and amp in the headphones. If you want a particular quality level of sound, you need a particular quality level D/A, amp, and transducer. If these are all in the headphones then you choose your quality level by choosing your headphones. If you use your headphones with more than one device you get your chosen quality level on all of those devices.
With the D/A and amp in the device then your quality level can vary from device to device depending on the D/A and amp quality of those devices. If you want higher quality you not only need to get high quality headphones, you also have to get high quality devices.
Since device makers are going to tend to put their best D/As and amps on their higher end devices those who want higher audio quality will have to be higher end devices even if they don't need most of the features those higher end devices offer.
With the D/A and amp in the headphones they can buy phones and tablets and such that just do what they need and no more, which should save them some money (money which can go toward one set of headphones with a top notch D/A and amp).
> If you use your headphones with more than one device you get your chosen quality level on all of those devices.
What if you buy speakers? Now you need a different DAC for them. If you have a good DAC in source device you have no problem to begin with.
Having said that I'll retract my previous statement in the instance that the system is able to stream lossless digital audio to the headphones. In that case putting the DAC in the headphones could be used to actually deliver high quality wireless audio.
Past that, wired will "always" sound better than wireless with lossy compression (ie bluetooth).
Past that, the best DACs and headphone amps will be component. The worst ones are likely to be powered by whatever tiny battery powers the wireless headphones.
I'm just pointing out, this isn't about quality - if you want quality, you'll be using wired headphones. Lossless wireless is a nice idea that would justify DACs and amps in the cans, it just probably won't improve sound quality, just cost and troubles.
A decade or so ago Roland tried to convince the pro audio world that it needed "digital speakers." It was a dumb idea then, it's still a dumb idea, and that's what I hear when I hear "digital headphones."
"So what happens if I want to charge my phone (e.g. from an external battery) and listen to headphones at the same time? Do I have to use some sort of ... dongle? That’s going to get silly."
What happens if you want to charge your new 12" macbook and you also need to use your cellular dongle ? They've shown total contempt for even this common, necessary use-case - why would they not show the same contempt for your use-case ?
"Admittedly, analog headphone jacks will go away at some point"
There is no reason to assume that. Only a childish contempt for "old things" and a desire to fix things that aren't broken would lead to that outcome.
I have a strong distaste for what C.S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery;" the idea that something is worthless simply because it isn't new.
Age is meaningless when evaluating technology and its function. It could be 1000 years old or 10; what matters if fulfills the requirements of the relevant use-case in an acceptable manner.
and yet we've got nailgun "nowadays" (though they're already ancient at this point too). people that actually need to drive in silly amounts of nails no longer use traditional hammers.
Wireless headphones are another battery to charge, maintain, replace... Not ideal, imo not even an improvement. My phone is on my person when I use headphones with it, so untethering isn't really a plus. The only advantage I can think of is keeping a phone in a pocket or bag while listening to music, which doesn't seem worth it all.
Wireless headphones with a dead battery should[1] work when plugged into the phone. So if you don't want to worry about the battery, just keep it connected to the phone. Sort of the best of both worlds.
should: I don't know if they actually do, I've never used usb-c or lightning headphones. But they should.
> You might be responding to the Gruber in your head rather than the one who wrote that post.
You're probably right – there's likely more mutually shared opinions between my thoughts and Gruber's article than I think, though I'm only partly responding to his post.
> (He also kind of addressed some of your other points in the article as well, but perhaps not to your satisfaction or as directly as you'd like.)
Yes, exactly. I think a big thing that got me was his response to the dongle question: "External floppy drives sucked too." That's it. Not quite the level of detail I was looking for.
Great points, and mostly agree.
1. as far as I know, the jack takes up quite a bit of volume, it's a long and empty space, that could be used for battery, heatsink etc. It's a minor save, but smartphones are some of the most volume-dependent devices, and marginal benefits can be high. i.e. most users may swing around say 4 hours of screen on-time, and get frustrated with 3.8h of capacity. Small increases can push them over the contentness-edge. I'm very much reaching here, it's not a very compelling argument imo, but there's some benefit there nonetheless.
2. So apparently I'm the edge case who never charges while listening, it's just not a thing for me. I charge once, at night, and it's fine. (Galaxy S7). In a car I'm happy with my phone's speakers or a wireless setup, and in newer cars especially a usb-audio or bluetooth audio setup shouldn't be a problem. (ignoring obvious transition issues). And especially here, in a private, safe, storage area like a car is, I'm okay (obviously not thrilled) to buy and one-time mount a $25 dongle. Not the end of the world for me. Same with my fixed office space, and that's about all big usecases I can think of.
3. Completely agree, however it must be noted that stuff like this pushes wireless audio quality forward. There's suddenly a forced market demand when the port drops, which opens up industry incentives to push wireless price/performance ratio improvements which I feel are around the corner (and partially announced already). And tech wise a lot more is possible than the quality we've had in the past years. And price wise, a LOT more should be possible than the past few years of price points. Also I'm expecting Apple (let's not forget, a producer of custom earbuds for years, and buyer of Beats) to drop decent wireless tech, too. I want good wireless audio tech regardless of whether I'm forced to use it lacking a port or not. (!) Again, obvious transition issues but it's alright.
4. Rumours are hey're looking to reinvent their base model with oled screens, no home button, edge to edge screen, delayed to 2017. i.e. a move away from a phone that has ports and buttons, towards a device that's completely digital, mostly screen and almost fully wireless. And I think that makes a lot of sense, stylistically too, if rumours are true and they can pull it off. That can reinvigorate sales, because let's be fair, the iPhone 6 was 'good enough', kind of like the Nexus 5 (still a lovely phone I'd happily use) was for the mid-section, the 6 was at the top-end of the market. I've got lots of friends with a 6 who just don't care for iterations. Something radical is needed to get them to buy, and dropping this port long-term as part of the 10y iPhone anniversary update is part of that narrative. Lots of speculation here of course, just thinking out loud to try and discuss your questions.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Some things that came to mind:
> 1. as far as I know, the jack takes up quite a bit of volume, it's a long and empty space, that could be used for battery, heatsink etc.
This is a good idea in theory, but in this particular case, what is being said now is that the phone will be thinner by 1mm. I'm very, very much for more battery – even with a Plus I don't have enough – but Apple tends not to handle these tradeoffs with an eye toward functional improvements. What I worry about is being able to shave off a millimeter off the thickness of the phone, but then having to carry around an adapter or two that will easily outweigh the space savings. As you say, in stationary situations like car/office, it's not a big deal, but in those situations, neither is the thickness of the phone or battery life, really.
> 3. ... There's suddenly a forced market demand when the port drops, which opens up industry incentives to push wireless price/performance ratio improvements which I feel are around the corner (and partially announced already).
Unfortunately I can only speculate as to what will happen. The plausible explanation is that the market will be able to generate excellent alternatives that become the gold standard, but as my sibling commenter says, this has been said of Bluetooth for a long time. I'm not confident that Bluetooth will be able to catch up soon enough, given its history and how far it lags behind today in sound quality, cost, and reliability. With that said, this will certainly be a big shock that may cause the desired shift, or Apple might have new wireless audio technology up their sleeves (though I shudder at the thought of another closed A/V standard) – and the 90% of people who don't care too much for audio quality will probably be unaffected on this dimension.
> There's suddenly a forced market demand when the port drops, which opens up industry incentives to push wireless price/performance ratio improvements which I feel are around the corner (and partially announced already).
Bluetooth will be great next year!
(People have been saying this about Bluetooth since 1999.)
