Color for the Colorblind - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2014/05/09/color-for-the-colorblind.html

<comment><USER2> There's no information about how they work in OP's link, but the manufacturers site explains it(although I still found it a little difficult to grasp).

Basically, they cut out some parts of the spectrum where the cones in a colour blind eye overlap a lot.

"There are two types of red-green color blindness: deutans and protans. Deutans, which are 75% of cases, have a defect in the green cone cells. In this case, the defect causes the green cone cell to be spectrally shifted towards red. Green becomes more like yellow. Protans, which are 25% of cases, have a defect in the red cone cells. In this case, the defect causes the red cone cell to be spectrally shifted towards green. Red becomes darker and more like orange.

These spectral shifts degrade the quality of color information sent to the brain. Some colors like blue and yellow are not affected, but shades of green, orange, brown, red, pink and purple are muddled and washed out. If the color blindness is strong, it can be difficult to correctly name these colors, causing problems with jobs and many everyday tasks. People with red-green color blindness can usually see between 10,000 to 100,000 shades of color.

The EnChroma Cx uses a special extra-strength version of the Digital Color Boost™ coating. By removing the wavelengths of light where overlap is occurring between the red and green cone cells, the spectral shift can be reversed, amplifying the color signal sent to the brain. The result is that colors appear to be brighter and more pure. Thousands more shades can be seen. Colors can be recognized more quickly and with less confusion. For many, the effect is a profound emotional experience."

[http://enchroma.com/technology/how-it- works/](http://enchroma.com/technology/how-it-works/)

<comment> a-priori Colour vision is based on an opponent process [1]. There are three kinds of colour receptors called L, M and S (for Long, Medium and Short) and they are receptive to colours centred around the red, green, and blue parts of the visible light spectrum respectively.

Here is a good graph showing how sensitive each receptor is to different wavelengths of light:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cone-fundamentals-with- srg...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cone-fundamentals-with-srgb- spectrum.svg)

But we don't perceive colour directly from these receptors. Instead, our visual systems combine the output of these receptors to form three channels: black vs. white (L+M+S), red vs. green (L-M) and blue vs. yellow (S-(M+L)). This is why there is no such colour as a reddish-green or a bluish-yellow; our visual systems are not able to perceive these (except under exceptional laboratory conditions). As you can see in the graph, the L, M and S receptors aren't just receptive to pure red, green and blue but to a range of wavelengths centred near these colours, and they all overlap to some degree. But the L (green) and M (red) receptors overlap quite a bit.

In red-green colour blindness, either the L or M are shifted so they're even closer. This means that the red vs. green (L-M) channel is no longer able to distinguish between the two, so this channel is always close to zero and the person no longer sees either red or green just something muddy in between. Blue-yellow colour blindness is similar, but in this case it's the S channel that's shifted towards the L and M. In this case it overlaps with both and this means there's no longer any colours that activate the S without also activating L and M (and vice versa), making it impossible to distinguish blue from yellow.

For more information: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process)

These glasses work by notching out the parts of the spectrum where the receptors overlap the most. Assuming this works as described, they claim that this increases the relative difference between their outputs, making it easier for colour blind folks to distinguish the colours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm colorblind and I'm very interested in this.

A few years back I purchased for over 700 euros a pair of Chromagen glasses that promised to do the same.

[http://www.chromagen.us/](http://www.chromagen.us/)

With the Chromagen glasses you had to go to an specialist place and get your eyes tested with a variety of glasses to see which combination was the best for your type of colorblindness. Luckily for me both glasses were the same colors (pink, which even if I can't see it properly, I would prefer if they were another color).

Some interesting things since I had the glasses:

\- The first time I saw red trough the glasses was surreal: coca-cola, a tomato, carrots, etc. Was a very emotional moment because you realize how much info is missing in your sight.

\- As much as I got excited when wearing them I got depressed when taking them out. The world is excessively green to me which once I saw the world with red in it, a green world is incredibly boring.

\- While I tried to make them as fashionable as possible (had the glasses on an Oakley frame (hey it was 10 years ago) I don't think they look to good.

\- They were not really sunglasses per se, so I would wear them and still be bothered with the sun which this new ones seem to have figure out.

I will sure give this ones a try. They look good, seem to be fashionable enough and the price is accesible.

Just need to figure out the emotional aspect of it as is really something. I wonder is there's a correlation between mood with colors and colorblind people that can't see red being generally grumpier.

P.S: talk about resting on your laurels. Chromagen always had a marketing issue in my opinion and this is just surreal:

[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/decd967f-f4da-4ff3-b9fa...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/decd967f-f4da-4ff3-b9fa-698c9b9714f1/76ee08ce124a0f40493fe48f96518451)

They are displaying Google Ads in their site and I get a retargeting ad of EnChroma Glasses.

<comment><USER4> According to the site test I'm profiled as Strong Protan. No glasses are available to fully fix my colorblindness, since are only are available for medium protans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kind of interesting to get insight into how much of a handicap color blindness is via the revealed preference of whether you'd she'll out $X for them. A different article, David Pogue:

"The highlight came on Day 4 of my tests, when my kids discovered a rainbow arcing across the sky...

Then I put on the glasses. Unbelievable! ... I don't mind admitting, I felt a surge of emotion. It was like a peek into a world I knew existed, but had never been allowed to see...

So would I pay $600 for these glasses?

The truth is, I don't consider colorblindness much of a handicap..."

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/pogue/2013/08/15/glasses- tha...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/pogue/2013/08/15/glasses-that-solve- colorblindness-for-a-big-price-tag/)

<comment><USER6> To an extent that's true. But as a counterexample look at how certain communities of deaf people get... very strange about the condition and would even reject a free fix.

<comment><USER7> To be fair though a huge difference is that the deaf community is bound together by a common language. Language is hugely important in human social groups. A "free fix" for members of this community comes at the cost of the eventual annihilation of their shared language. This is why you typically don't see the same reaction from medical advancements in vision from the blind community, whose impairment has no effect whatsoever on their primary language (and just to be clear Braille is simply a character mapping to the readers native language while sign languages such as ASL are actually distinct languages).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a neat idea - a notch filter. The underlying biology is that colours that excite mostly just one type of cone cells are perceived as pure. In colourblind people the absorption spectra of the red and green cones overlap to a greater degree, so if you can cut out the overlap their vision more closely approaches that of a normal-sighted person - except for the part that is filtered out.

But with the recent Amazon flap, should this be patented? It's in essence a neat idea, and physics supply shops will sell you stock dichroic filters for USD 150 each, custom ones are more but not excessive - development cannot have been more than USD 100000 total. That's a programmer's salary and benefits.

Software patents are universally considered abusive because it is cheap to develop - much cheaper than an industrial process, the thing that patents were invented to cover. With this logic the producers shouldn't be allowed to take out a patent.

<comment><USER9> You couldn't patent a notch filter for obvious reasons.

On the other hand the coating isn't a notch filter, it's a series of bandpass/notch/dichroic/whatever filters which are optimised for colour blindness. If you look at the transmission graphs at least for the UV450 there's varying transmission over the entire visible range. So the patent would be for filters at X, Y and Z nm in a product designed for eyewear.

The problem with software patents is that they're extremely broad - e.g. things that are obvious and well documented in the literature like sorting. There are also obvious hardware patents like rounded corners.

A good example of a design patent is Blackberry's keyboard. They didn't patent keyboards, but they _were_ able to patent the little bumps that help you navigate.

As someone who works in hardware, sure in raw materials it cost <100k, but when you start charging for people's time, stuff gets a whole lot more expensive. Not everyone can live off ramen and sleep in the office. This probably took a few years to properly develop.

The patents (applied for) are below:

[http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Multi-band-color- visio...](http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Multi-band-color-vision- filters/WO2012119158.html)

[https://www.google.com/patents/WO2012119158A1?cl=en&dq=inass...](https://www.google.com/patents/WO2012119158A1?cl=en&dq=inassignee:%22ENCHROMA+INC.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=W2luU6fRAe-g7Ab8koHQDg&ved=0CEgQ6AEwAg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is advancements like this that give me hope for the humanity. This isn't the same level as Geordi La Forge's visor in Star Trek: TNG, but it _is_ in the same vein -- using technology to give senses to those born without them, and thus improve their quality of life. More and more it feels like we are beginning to live in the future speculated about in decades past.

</comment><comment><USER11> What would happen if someone who isn't colorblind wears these? Do the reds appear even stronger?

<comment><USER12> I wondered the same thing. I want to try on a pair, just to contrast my total lack of emotional response against the response of those who benefit from these glasses.

Also, I wonder if similar technology could be used to better visualize the presence of UV light, or maybe infrared (sans electricity), beyond the realm of typical human perception.

<comment><USER13> Just last week I was wondering if this was possible. I hadn't heard about these glasses until today, but I was thinking about the possibility of bringing UV into the visible spectrum.

Mostly this was based on something I had read about with respect to cataract surgery. Apparently the lenses block UV from reaching the retina, but with cataract surgery that isn't the case and patients have to wear glasses to prevent excess UV from damaging the eyes. Apparently Monet [1] had cataract surgery in 1923 and his paintings from that era suggest that he was seeing something in the UV spectrum.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have difficulty cooking meat by sight as a result of my color blindness. I wonder if these glasses would help.

<comment><USER15> I don't think they would work. The article says:

       They only work outdoors on a sunny day

I think the reason for that is found on the company's website where they claim

       10% visible transmission

So things are obviously very dark if these are worn indoors.

<comment><USER16> Things may be completely dark indoors, depending on the type of lighting.

For example, fluorescent lights emit three spectral spikes centered on where typical human eyes are most sensitive to red, green, and blue. They emit basically no light in other parts of the spectrum. So if the notches in these glasses' spectral filters don't line up with those spikes, they'll be totally opaque under fluorescent lighting.

On the flipside, instead of wearing glasses indoors, someone could probably make an LED lightbulb with LEDs whose output was centered on the same frequencies as the notches in these glasses. It should have a similar effect for the colourblind - same principle, just applied in a different way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a r/g color blind friend who has a pair of these.

He said: "They are amazingly totally worth the money and work very well. I have video of myself realizing that Starbucks is green and not brown for the first time. Mindfuck I thought brown like coffee."

</comment><comment><USER18> As a colorblind I find it a little bit offensive that it in the aricle says that "colorblind react significantly slower to red signals". Red is the topmost light, green is the bottom one. I just follow the light that is turned on, why would it make me significantly slower? Would a not colorblind driver drive if the uppermost light turns green and not red?

<comment><USER19> I believe it's fairly well established [1][2][3] that protanopia does make it harder to see red traffic lights, and increases reaction time. A couple studies I looked at indicated that using the position of the light as compensation is quite effective, but it doesn't seem questionable that it is, in fact, more difficult to do.

Color is remarkably useful for fast recognition of objects. Take this famous experiment [4] that showed the existence of synesthesia. People without synesthesia take _much_ longer to locate the 2s in the field of 5s. But people with synesthesia who perceive numbers to have color can find them trivially.

Anyway, as for this being offensive to you -- how is it any different than other facts like "short people have more difficulty reaching objects on high shelves" or "people born without a sense of smell cannot easily detect gas leaks?" These are simple facts, and there's nothing offensive about stating them.

[1] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1444-0938.2002....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1444-0938.2002.tb03045.x/pdf)

[2] [http://www.ltrc.lsu.edu/TRB_82/TRB2003-000250.pdf](http://www.ltrc.lsu.edu/TRB_82/TRB2003-000250.pdf)

[3] [http://eprints.qut.edu.au/29558/1/29558.pdf](http://eprints.qut.edu.au/29558/1/29558.pdf)

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Synaesthesiatest.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Synaesthesiatest.jpg)

<comment><USER13> The green on a stoplight isn't pure green for the same reason. It has a little blue mixed in to help those with red-green color blindness to be able to see the lights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems like a novelty toy.

Apparently, they won't help you pass the Ishihara Color vision test, [http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/glasses-that- solve...](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/glasses-that-solve- colorblindness-for-a-big-price-tag/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER21> Could the same effect be achieved in software for computer displays?

<comment><USER22> As far as I am aware, this is not possible. Computer displays work by sending light in a few wavelengths (but in different intensities), using the combinations of different frequencies to produce the same effects as single frequencies. This product seems to work by aggressively filtering out the parts of the spectrum that cause problems. This would not be possible with normal screens, because the light is of a (mostly) fixed wavelength. These glasses would be much better with objects (for example) illuminated by the sun.

<comment><USER23> Similarly, I think these would work much better with incandescent lighting vs flourescent or LED.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> what about people who already wear glass? I guess I will still need to get contacts to use them

<comment><USER25> They have a version called EnChroma Cx Receptor that is meant to fit over your glasses. I found out about these today thanks to this post and plan to order a pair.

[http://enchroma.com/shop/cx-receptor/?attribute_pa_frame- siz...](http://enchroma.com/shop/cx-receptor/?attribute_pa_frame- size=large&attribute_pa_frame-color=shblk)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your daily-driver headphone model? - <AUTHOR> At home, at work, on the go... what do you use as your all-arounder for music/games/whatever? Do you have it amp'd? Do you love it or does it leave something to be desired? Would you buy it again if it broke? <comment><USER2> Denon AH-D2000 for privacy/workplace, Sennheiser HD580 (upgraded to HD600 spec) for home use, NAD VISO HP50 for serious mobile use, and Westone W30 in- ear with triple flange for max portability.

At work, I amp using a Dragonfly Red outboard DAC, which frankly, I like less than my old NuForce Icon2. (I would've happily stayed with the Nuforce, but Apple cluelessly bricked older "dumb amps" like the Icon2 when they "upgraded" their audio code in MacOS Sierra. Morons.) The Dragonfly just doesn't seem to add anything beyond the system amp.

On my Mac, I drive the external DAC using the Vox app because it has a parametric equalizer. On my i[Phone|Pad], I playback using the Equ app, which also offers para EQ.

I love the Denons. They enhance bass a bit and don't export my music enough to annoy coworkers. The Senn HD-580s are great, but feel a bit "cool" compared to the warmer Denons (due to the open cushions). But their smoothness is effortless; I can listen to them all day long. The NADs cut out surrounding noise really well and offer surprisingly good fidelity for such lightweight cans. I like the Westones mostly for their portability; their sound quality just can't match any of my full-sized cans and IMHO depend too much on a good seal from the triple flanges.

I also own Grado SR325Es, but could never warm to them. Their bass is substantially weaker than my other phones, though mid-to-upper reproduction is exemplary.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bose QC35s. Day and night. Pretty much always wearing them. Active noise cancelling changed my life and is up there with the smart phone and Kindle as far as technology that most made my life better.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use Oppo PM-3's for just about everything right now; listening to music while working, gaming, travel, etc.

I got them because I wanted something that blocked external noise (I don't like the "pressure" feeling of active noise cancellation) and they came highly recommended from The Wire Cutter.

I consider them 'fine'. They're relatively comfortable for 2-3 hour stretches (after that, the lack of ventilation makes them start to get sweaty, even in cool rooms), they sound decent, and the build quality and carry-case are great.

On the minuses side, the clarity doesn't match my old Grado SR-80's, the noise blocking isn't as good as my Shure in-ear monitors, and the in-line mic is worse than what's on Apple's standard earbuds.

Bottom line, they're not worth the $400 price tag, but now that I have them, they're good enough that I'm not out looking for another pair.

I have to say, I'm not as impressed with them as The Wire Cutter review led me to believe I would be... and that has affected my opinion of The Wire Cutter. I probably could have bought a generic pair of closed-back headphones for $60 and been just as happy.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been through many listed here. Audio Technica ATX-M50, Sony MDR 7506, Sennheiser HD598, etc - all really great cans with their own strengths, but ultimately lacking in build quality and EQ curves that are too bumpy.

Over time, I came to prefer my audio to sound less fun and more "as is". Ie, without any spikes in the bass, mids, or trebles, from the manufacturer to colour the audio with some kind of wow factor.

Eventually, after a bunch of research and a $150-ish budget, I landed at the Beyer Dynamic DT250. They have the flattest EQ curve I know of, are super comfortable, and build quality is sturdy (Germans tend not to fuck around with the quality of the products products).

There's no excess wires that will get snagged around the can, and Beyer have their own unique cabling and connectors which are super-tough and chunky. Noise cancelling is average, but that's not an overly important feature for me.

If you want a bit more of a fun set with some more sub bass , check out the DT770. Supremely comfortable headphones and sound amazing.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have been quite rough with my headphones/earbuds over the years, so I've used and broken quite a few, and have a little insight. I'll split between desktop and on-the-go.

Desktop:

Favorite - Razer Barracuda (with matching soundcard), great sound, super comfortable. (wish they hadn't broken)

Runner up - Turtle Beach Ear Force PX21 (just cause it says ps3 don't mean you cant use it on PC!)

Current - Razer Kraken 7.1 Chroma (1st gen, 2nd gen is more sturdy metal) (windows software sucks, but I use GNU+Linux)

Others I've used - Logitech G35(wired and wireless versions), Creative Sound Blaster WoW Wireless, Seihnheiser.

On-the-go:

Favorite - Yurbuds Ironman Focus Behind the ear (lost them recently, so sad)

Current - Klipsch R6i

Others - Multiple cheap skullcandy, new model Apple.

All that said, on-the-go I don't trust bluetooth so I don't do wireless, but if you do your options expand quite a bit.

One more thing to keep in mind, if you really want the best, go to a hearing aid place and get your earmold taken so you can get the perfect fit rubber exterior for whatever model you choose. Personally, I really loved my Yurbuds Ironman Behind the ears because they stayed on the best while lifting/running/yardwork etc. Most of the time when I select, besides form factor, I mostly base selection on frequency range. Which is how I ended up with the Razer Kraken 7.1 Chroma's despite how disapointed I have been with Razor the last few years.

When I was in the military the best pair I ever had was the Bose sound reduction headphones.

<comment><USER7> Gaming headsets are pretty notoriously awful, my dude. When your current set breaks I'd really recommend picking up a pair of Sennheiser HD598s on sale along with a modmic. It shouldn't cost you any more than your current set up (HD598s go on sale for $100, modmic is like $30-40) and it'd absolutely blow any gaming headset out of the water.

Also, the HD598s are easily some of the most comfortable headphones I've ever used, and I have a weird Kevin Durant lookin head - I used to get headaches and pain behind my ears after like 6 hours of wearing my old ATH-M50s but with the HD598s I've gone 12 hours and still felt fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Audio-Technica ATH-M50x. Nothing beats the sheer value they give for that amount of money. Definitely the beat pair of cans i have ever owned.

<comment><USER9> Mine have become tatty very quickly — perhaps just because I wear them too much? But, tattiness aside, I find their sound exceptional and still think they're worth every penny.

<comment><USER10> I agree. I think they are both comfortable and sound good, but the leather (or faux-leather) starts to flake and fall apart quickly.

<comment><USER11> I've seen replacement leather pads for 20$ or 40$

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I own the ATH-M50X and also the Bose QC25, however -- I stick to the Audio Technica ATH-ANC23 or the TaoTronics TT‑EP01 (both noise cancelling earphones) for my daily driver for commute.

I think the biggest question for choosing a daily driver headphone is whether you want to use a headphone vs. in-ear earphone. For my daily commute, I prefer earphones because they are less bulky, they don't warm-up my ear during the summer time, and I can easily take it off and put it in my pocket. For headphones, taking them off and storing them in my bag is so bulky that it is so damn annoying.

For long trips like air plane rides or bus rides or for in the office usage, I prefer headphones.

For at-home only listening, I use Grade SR80e, this is an open headphone and it is not great for commuting but awesome for listening at home.

</comment><comment><USER13> At home - JVC HA-SZ2000 & AKG K701 (10 yrs old, still going strong, recently replaced the pads), Both driven through a MHDT DAC and a Magni 2 amp. I also have a tube amp that I rarely use these days. (Little Dot MK3, need to replace the tubes) I avoid in-ear headphones as I don't like the compromised sound quality.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sennheiser HD 650s at home, with an Asus Xonar Essence STX for the amp. I love them, pretty much exactly what I wanted since I can't imagine myself going more expensive than that unless I had far more expendable income.

</comment><comment><USER15> Daily Driver - Sennheiser HD518 / This open-backed pair is warm with some emphasis on the low end. The pads on the HD518 are very comfortable. I can use the headphones the whole day without fatigue.

Music Production - Audio Technica Ath-M35 / This closed-back pair is relatively flat. The pair puts more pressure on my ears so their not very comfortable for more than an hour or two.

On-the-Go - Panasonic Ergofit RP-HJE120 / This is an inexpensive V-shaped pair of IEMs that I typically throw in my pocket. Not the greatest when it comes to audio quality, but it does the job.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sennheiser 25-II. I love the clear and real sound these beasts have. Plus they are durable enough so I can just throw them in my backpack

</comment><comment><USER17> HD598, no amp. Just recently upgraded from my decade old pair of 595s, and the additional bass in the 598s is remarkable. Totally changes the sound stage, and not necessarily for better or worse.

Both models have a special place in my heart now.

Also, bravo on the "daily-driver" pun.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sennheiser HD598 without an amp for around the house. They are hands down worth every dollar.

</comment><comment><USER19> Usually I use JBL J88's for mostly everything, they are very comfortable and sound great. Personally I'd like a little more base to them but would recommend them for someone who isn't looking for much.

</comment><comment><USER20> Technics RP-DJ 1200. It's hooked up to an Asus U3 sound card, which is more basic as far as sound cards go but better than using the built-in Realtek chipset found in my motherboard.

</comment><comment><USER21> I use the Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO for heavy duty stuff like my Bach or other music with a large dynamic range. For my other music and mobile sessions I use Beyerdynamic DT 231 PRO.

</comment><comment><USER22> I had to google and scan images to find the pair, but I use Panasonic RP- HJE355 (in-ear). I bought a random pair in an airport but I still use them 2 years later every day.

</comment><comment><USER23> Sony MDR-7506

<comment><USER24> Same. These have perfect sound for me, are comfortable, and can be had for $60-70 bucks.

My only wish is that I could wear them around walking, but they have a long coiled cable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> AKG K712 at home for gaming and general computer audio. Great headphones for an flat, yet appealing sound. An audio engineer friend of mine bought the same set after sampling mine. I have a Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 driving those.

At work and on the go I'm using Shure SE215. Great isolation, clear sound and some of the best bass I've sampled from earphones.

I'd recommend both in a heartbeat and I think both of these represent good bang for their buck. Since I like my music (it's a hobby of mine) I wouldn't tolerate anything that I didn't think fell into the category of high quality.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sennheiser 280PRO. I had a pair that I accidentally destroyed by slamming the car door on the cord but love 'em so much had to get a new pair.

</comment><comment><USER27> Bose QC35. Best money I have spent on any audio equipment so far as it always puts me into that "hyperfocus" silent mode.

</comment><comment><USER28> Audio Technica ATH-M40x at home and AKG K92 with upgraded ear pads. For 95% of the time I am using K92, they are light, comfortable (with new earpads) and have surprisingly good sound quality. I've moved to them from full time ATH-M40x as they broke twice in 2 years on my head (cracks) and are in general to tight. The sound it self is great on AT but it's not worth lack of comfort that they offer.

</comment><comment><USER29> I thought wearing headphones while driving a vehicle was illegal, but I see it all the time now. What gives?

<comment><USER26> Depends on jurisdiction. In Illinois, you can only have one ear covered while driving. That said, I think OP means which headphones do you use daily rather than which headphones do you use while driving.

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 At work, some cheap Koss headphone supplied by the office.

At home, a Logitech G430 headset.

On the go, some in-ear bluetooth earphones from Aukey.

</comment><comment><USER30> Sennheiser Momentum over-ears for the office (closed back)

Sennheiser HD600 + Marantz PM65005 amp for home (open back)

</comment><comment><USER31> I've switched across the board to wireless for the most part. I use a number of different headsets based on location, so here are my choices for various settings.

Work:

Bose QC35 -- sound quality is somewhat compromised but the NC and comfort levels are second to none. Bose customer service is also excellent, particularly if you buy (and therefore can return/exchange) through a branded store.

Out and about:

Airpods, with foam covers. Without the covers, these were very convenient headphones that wouldn't stay in my ears for the life of me and so sounded thin and leaked noise. Then I added old-school thin foam earbud covers; Amazon sells some that are donut-style with a hole that exposes the light sensors, and they still fit in the charger. They don't compare to my audiophile headphones, but they sound "pretty good"\--about on the same level as my SoundMagic E10s, maybe a little better. More importantly, now I actually will use headphones for 20-30 minutes at a time on walks, whereas before it was too much of a hassle to carry a fat case around, wedge them in my ears, etc.

Home, in living room:

MDR-1ABTs. I don't actually like these as much as I should for what I paid for them. The pads are thin and hurt my ears. But they do connect to my Sony sound bar using their LDAC low-latency/high-def protocol, so I use them for late night viewing.

Console:

Playstation Gold or Platinums. I have both. The Golds are more reliable about connecting to the dongle. The Platinums fit over my PSVR headset. Neither sounds great for anything but games, but they integrate tightly into the OS.

PC/Mac:

SteelSeries Arctis 7. No blinkenlights, and they sound very good for pretty much everything. They're comparable to my wired Sennheiser PC360s (basically a 55x/59x with a mic) but even cheaper. That said, buy the add-on leatherette pads from Steelseries--they make a world of difference for isolation and sound quality. They shouldn't sell these without those pads TBH.

Audiophil(ish):

Keeping in mind I like "fun" headphones and not monitors, I oscillate between Plantronics Backbeat Pro (one of the best sounding BT headphones I've heard with a phenomenal range and hellaciously cheap, but fugly and with round pads that don't really fit anyone), V-Moda M100s (add the fat pads to these too for comfort and sound; they'll last forever--built like a tank), and Master and Dynamic MH40s. (by far the nicest pair aesthetically with real leather pads, and they sound great if you can get a good seal, but I'm not a huge fan of cables anymore).

Gadgets:

I do have a JDS labs O2 amp+DAC setup. I use it with the M&Ds and the M100s sometimes since those are the two cabled headphones still in rotation. However, Apple headphone outputs have historically been good enough to not really benefit _that_ much since all my headphones have lowish power requirements. Planars or some other "need a bunch of juice" headphones would be different.

<comment><USER32> How would you compare the Bose QC35 to the Plantronics? I know Marco Arment has fantastic things to say about the Backbeat Pro series, but I've never seen or heard those in real life, or even seen them mentioned in most reviews. I've tried the Bose a couple of times: the ANC is excellent, and I like the sound (but I'm not blown away by it).

<comment><USER31> The Plantronics' main issue is around comfort and to a lesser extent, leakage. The earcups are round, and don't have a ton of swivel to them. Because of that, A) they compress my eartips or sit on my lobe, take your pick, and B) they don't tightly seal against my cheekbones. They're also rather comically wide on one's head, and reminded me for all the world of a cyberman on Doctor Who. I will say that your colleagues can't possibly miss them as far as headphone rules goes, so there's that.

The pros do outweigh the cons, IMO.

They sound almost exactly the same wired as wireless, which is to say very good assuming you don't mind a slightly dark and scooped profile. I listen primarily to industrial, rock, metal and heavier forms of EDM (brostep, drum'n'bass, hardstyle, etc.) and they sound wonderful for that. There isn't much hiss at all, which can be a real problem for bluetooth headphones due to the internal amp. I was impressed with the noise floor.

The bluetooth stack itself is another pro--handles multipoint seamlessly, which is actually kind of rare, and the range (with an iPhone transmitting) was at least 50 feet line of sight, and well over 30 feet with walls. At home I could roam anywhere, at the office I could get pretty far away.

While your mileage may vary according to source, I also found the BBP's latency perfectly acceptable even for light game playing (though it's not ~0, hence the Arctis). I think Crypt of the Necrodancer's calibration measured it around 150ms, which isn't bad for not being connected via a low-latency codec. I had no problem at all using them for movies.

One other point for the BBPs is the controls. One earcup has a ginormous volume dial as its inset and the other buttons are very tactile. While the dial does tend to stiffen some over time if you don't use them often enough, it's hands down the easiest set of controls to fumble to in a hurry. Plus there's a "talk through" button that pipes in exterior sound so you can answer colleague questions (or hear flight announcements) without removing them.

And, of course, the OG Backbeat Pros are around $200 cheaper street than Bose QC35s. If you have bluetooth you don't need the Pro+ with the dongle, and the Pro 2s [don't have a ton of improvements IIRC]*

In comparison, Bose doesn't sound as good. It does sound just like Bose, so if you know that sound, there you go. I find it acceptable but not phenomenal, and there's a little mud in the mid-bass I don't hear with the BBPs that unfortunately doesn't play as well with metal. EDM and industrial both sound fine. Bose does have just as good a BT stack in terms of seamless pair and switching behavior, but nowhere near the range. Latency is fine on Bose but I haven't tried them gaming.

Places where Bose clearly excels include the followup service--say what you want about the audio tech, but Bose's customer service is absolutely fantastic whereas Plantronics is average; the comfort--Bose headphones feel much lighter (without having weighed them both or checking specs) and comform to my face and ears better; and especially in the noise cancelling. Plantronics' noise cancelling just isn't great, whereas only the Sony M1000x have come near Bose in NC and they have some quality concerns.

* Edit: looking at Pro 2s, they do address the aesthetic and comfort issues, with ovular cups and plusher-looking pads, and are supposedly lighter. The really convenient controls aren't there anymore. They might be worth a shot buying from somewhere you can return them to if you don't like the audition, though if you're looking for great NC I'd skip right on to the Bose.

<comment><USER32> This was extremely helpful -- thanks so much for that detailed comparison. I just ordered the Backbeat Pro 2's from Amazon. Although it would be nice to have the Bose ANC, that's less important to me than sound quality -- and $349 just feels like too much to spend on headphones. I'll let you know how the 2nd gen looks and feels.

<comment><USER31> Please do! I'm always looking for more reasons to feed my addiction.

Sony is reportedly updating the MDR1000Xs, btw. If they can fix the headband- cracking issue they currently have, they should be a good combination of sound quality and ANC (for about twice as much as the BBP2s, so you're not missing out on anything by buying now!)

<comment><USER32> Quick notes on the BBP2's after about a week:

* The sound quality is excellent. Wired or wireless, the sound is sharp and crystal clear. But it's not particularly flat; there's a lot of midrange that makes it sound a little muddy. I've set up a custom configuration for the iTunes equalizer that helps with the (rock) music I listen to: punchy bass, clear treble, but less mud in the middle.

* The noise cancelling isn't bad. It does a great job on public transit but it's not as all-encompassing indoors as the Bose QC35 seemed to be, from the little I've tried them.

* The BB2Ps aren't nearly as ugly as the product photos make them look. They're not particularly brown in real life, just dark.

* They're pretty comfortable although I find it fatiguing to wear them for more than a couple of hours. The new over-ear shape looks like it made a big difference on the comfort level.

* The Bluetooth signal tends to cut out quite a bit from my iMac at home, which is pretty disappointing. It works better from my MacBook Pro at work -- not sure if there's some interference at home or what.

Overall I do like them, but I don't know if I like them enough to justify the $200 I spent. I haven't decided yet whether to keep them long-term. If I don't keep these, I might switch to the Beats Solo3 without ANC, or just bite the bullet and go for the Bose QC35...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Audio Technica ATH-A900</comment>


30+ resources for modern IT Ops professionals - <AUTHOR> https://techbeacon.com/new-face-ops-resources-modern-ops-distributed-systems-engineers <comment><USER2> This makes me nervous to see how much content there is to know.

I work on the DevOps lite team ( App Support) pivoting between shepherding devs towards SRE - friendly practices, to re-re-re fixing the GPO/AD permissions on servers so the service accounts for prod apps work, to taking over all the new monitoring tools and other toys from the SRE team the moment the new toy feeling wears off and it's time to actually integrate it with the rest of the engineering org, to taking the emails from end users to troubleshoot and spelunk data out of whatever system so as not waste the devs time.

Sorry no huge point except maybe reading all the article content gives me a sense of intimidation or imposter syndrome. IT as a field needs some kind of meditation or chant to help us not get overwhelmed with the amount/breadth of work we get put on our place.

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the biggest problems in Ops is not a lack of tools, it's an overwhelming number of them. It's a huge effort just to even know what's out there, what they do, and then evaluating them to find one that fits your needs. A list of 30 doesn't help with this problem. A list of 5 would.</comment>


Docker is a dangerous gamble which we will regret (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.is/zkmaE <comment><USER2> If I use Docker, I get to put "Docker" on my resume for the next job; if I use bash scripts I don't. If I use React, I get to put "React" on my resume; if I use vanilla JS I don't. If I use Kubernetes, I get to put "Kubernetes" on my resume. If I use AWS, I get to put that on my resume, if I just spin up a Linux instance using Linode or etc, I don't Of course, I would have to convince my boss to let me do all of these. But, he also wants to be able to put on his resume that he managed developers who used these things, so that's an easy task. Many of these made perfect sense for the FAANG company they were developed for, but they are used at companies with 0.01% of the number of servers of those companies, and the basic reason is that both devs and managers want to pretend they are working at FAANG, so that someday they will work there.

Again, there are valid use cases for all of these, but there are also valid use cases for semi tractor trailers. It doesn't mean I should use one to get my groceries.

<comment><USER3> The problem is, as so often, the system.

If HR goes as low-level in hiring as "React Developer" then people have to play this game.

If HR would hire on something more substantial, it wouldn't matter if you did Linode or AWS, React or Angular, Docker or Bash scripts.

<comment><USER4> Hiring people is difficult, exhausting, time-consuming, and largely a crap shoot, since hiring consists of deducing a person's technical abilities with around 1-2 hours of interaction in a very limited scope.

If we could find a better way, we'd be using it. But, as it stands, recruiters and HR have only a few minutes per potential candidate to determine whether or not they meet the hiring manager's criteria. It's unreasonable to expect HR/recruiters to keep abreast of an ever expanding list of technologies and their analogs because that's not their core competency. Unless they are repeatedly told that GCP experience is worth like 70% of AWS experience (replace the values and technologies as you see fit), they aren't going to know that.

<comment><USER5> The solution seems pretty simple to me: get rid of the HR and recruiters, at least as having much power in deciding who to interview. That's the hiring manager's job. He knows what kind of person he's looking for, so let him make decisions. Why would you let some non-technical person decide who's qualified to be interviews? It makes no sense. At best, have the hiring manager give some very basic things to look for on resumes to the HR person, so they can screen out the people who are obvious wastes of time.

>If we could find a better way, we'd be using it.

It seems to me that the reason it's so bad is because, at many companies, HR people refuse to admit that they're incompetent at hiring technical people, and insist on inserting themselves into the process to a degree which is highly counterproductive. The only thing HR should be doing is helping hiring managers find the people they need, and otherwise staying out of the way. The bulk of the HR person's time should be on other tasks: personnel issues with existing employees, helping new employees get situated, maybe interpersonal issues, etc. The hiring manager can afford to spend an hour a day looking through resumes and giving good ones back to HR to recruit.

<comment><USER4> Maybe have experienced different approaches, but where I've worked, the hiring manager told HR what skillset they needed and HR would fire over resumes for the team to look at and decide who to bring in. Our team decided 100% who to hire and not.

So, basically what you're talking about already happens at every company I've been involved in hiring at. HR posts the job posting from the manager, forwards resumes that look good. The do perform the initial non-technical interview, but teams handle technical interviews as they see fit. HR is only involved to present the offer.

Because of that, I took the parent comment to say that HR should be better at resume fishing. Meaning, they should understand technological equivalencies better, like MySQL and Oracle are somewhat equivalent or related skills but Bash and Elasticsearch are not. This is what recruiters are _supposed_ to do; obviously most are bad at it, but his is largely because few SWE/SysAdmins/DevOps are going to pivot into recruitment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh geez, having a team of 24 engineers across multiple countries trying to maintain a common set of bash scripts that work for 12+ unique services sounds like a disaster.

Instead we have a single workflow for docker, whether it's going out to AWS or Kubernetes and all the services use an identical flow. Integration testing is a cinch since it's running actual, version matched postgres/redis/etc on the CI nodes which get spun up on demand and against the same docker image that'll get pushed out to production.

We haven't had a case of "Well it works on my machine why doesn't it work on yours!?" in a really long time since if it works in docker.. well it works in docker.

<comment><USER7> Exactly, docker standardizes something that was an otherwise nightmare to maintain across platforms and organizations. Next we need to standardize the orchestrator, my money is on kubernetes, but I wouldn't say it has won over everyone just yet.

<comment><USER8> The industry has standardized on Kubernetes for the orchestrator. If anything we are starting to see other container runtimes other than Docker as K8s added the CRI (Container Runtime Interface).

<comment><USER6> Well everyone at least wants to use Kubernetes. I'm not sure any organization really knows how to best use it yet, and nobody has a set of standards that have seen adoption.

Both the pro and the con of K8s is that it's exactly what you make of it and it's extremely flexible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author has the boldness of saying that anything that does not produce a single artifact (golang binary or fatjar) is a language that should not be used an that they were errors of the past and we should get rid of them (citing explicitly PHP, Ruby and Python).

Now, if we want to think that languages and whole ecosystems (libraries, bugs and edge cases fixed, developers and companies whose code base is written in such language) can be changed easily, then the author take on Docker is right. In such a world Docker doesn't add anything useful. But the real world is quite different and it's not going to change for the author, so Docker (or "containers") is still adding something valuable and it's not a "bet" to me, at all.

</comment><comment><USER10> The author's approach presupposes a devops "person" (side note: if you have a person in charge of ops, that person is an ops person, not a "devops" person, as devops is a process; either your org is on it or they aren't). If you want developers to launch to production with any degree of reliability, you're going to need either a lot of tooling support for your specific workflow, or you're going to use docker and a significant degree of creative blindness. The fat binary approach works great if you _can_ build a fat binary - python and node are nearly diametrically opposed to compiled binaries in general, much less ones that include a list of dependencies. The docker image _is_ the fat binary that our toolchain is set up to build and run.

<comment><USER11> You are assuming that developers have enough knowledge of Docker to deploy in production confidently. Why is it different for other ops skills? What "degree of reliability" does Docker adds over bash, for example?

<comment><USER10> It adds full environment reproducability. Essentially, "it works on my machine" \-- "then we'll ship your machine". Nothing about docker in particular is meaningful, if they shipped VM images this would be identical, but docker streamlines creation and management of the entire OS image. It eliminates all differences between the developer's laptop and the production server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I completely agree. My team has spent the last several years building software we then deploy with Docker and Kubernetes, and looking back I think that our software would have been _much_ better deployed as statically-linked binaries on simple Linux servers.

We're writing in Go, which means we already have the statically-linked binaries, which means we have a single file which needs to get deployed. What does Docker buy us? … a single file which gets deployed. We could get the same effect of Docker Hub by just scping versioned binaries.

Kubernetes is far worse, of course. It is an amazing ramshackle collection of disparate, ill-fitting parts which make everything 'easy' but nothing simple. It does buy us some useful things, but I don't think they are worth the cost.

A bunch of EC2 nodes running Debian, with a few dozen-line shell scripts to copy binaries around, would completely replace our usage of Docker and Kubernetes and drastically reduce the complexity of our system. We just don't need a lot of what Kubernetes does (no doubt others do), but we have to pay for it in complexity anyway.

I really do believe that in the future we will see a few companies be very successful by foregoing Docker + Kubernetes + Helm (yo dude, I heard your YAML was giving you problems so here's some more YAML to YAML your YAML into YAMLy submission!), and then a few years later we will all look back at this mess a little bit like people look at the Pet Rock craze.

<comment><USER13> Amazon (and other FAANGs) use OS packages and do not use Docker nor Kubernetes or anything with all that complexity.

This is a deliberate choice, at least in Amazon.

<comment><USER14> Maybe you know how it is at Amazon, but your statement is definitely not true for two other FAANGs. It's well known that Kubernetes is the open-source version of tools that already existed within Google, and Kubernetes itself is part of some public-facing products. I work at Facebook, and we most definitely do have our own equivalent of Kubernetes. It's awful in all of the same ways IMO. We _also_ build fat binaries (and I believe the same is true at Google) but that's orthogonal. So one point for your claim, two against. Maybe someone else can fill in the blanks for Apple and Netflix.

<comment><USER13> I'm familiar with different implementation in FAANGs. (I cannot disclose the names.) They are hardly as bloated and vulnerable as Docker+Kubernetes.

> It's awful in all of the same ways IMO.

> So one point for your claim, two against.

It's awful but at the same time it's a claim against... interesting.

<comment><USER14> That's not the least bit inconsistent. You claimed that FAANGs do not run anything with the complexity of Docker or Kubernetes. The best thing I can say about that claim is that your information is clearly outdated. Some might call it a lie. Facebook and Google, at least, _do_ use something with equivalent complexity, and the very thing that makes them awful is also the thing that refutes your claim. Don't claim to speak for all companies when you clearly don't know anything about more than one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have to agree a little bit.. One other thing that bothers me is when I don't WANT to run docker. Some packages/services actually make it tricky to achieve this. With some time being spent reversen engineering.

Docker is cool don't get me wrong, but it might be a bit over used sometimes. And I really don't think it needs to be this 1 way solution to everything.

<comment><USER16> The youngsters in my work keep sticking everything on docker to avoid packaging problems. I just makes running coed in a stepthrough debugger impossible so far (I know its possible but I haven't had the time to make it work yet).

One step forward two steps back.

<comment><USER17> Recently started working with other younger devs and I feel like every single application they write starts with a docker compose scaffolding.

Containers have uses but they're being treated like silver bullets and building new levels of unnecessary complexity in many cases.

<comment><USER18> I at least put my daemon dependencies (databases, mostly) in a docker-compose file from the beginning, to keep that cruft off my machine, to isolate projects, to avoid implicit dependencies on my own platform's package manager (adding one for the Docker registry, yes, but at least that's not specific to my environment), and to make the service dependency installation process super-easy and clean for others. I do this even if I'm running the project itself directly on my machine, outside of Docker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Docker _may_ be over-used, but, when managing hundreds of instances of machines, it's really useful to have deploys/redeploys/updates: \- Immutable (the instance is effectively frozen as an image) \- Has dependencies baked in (don't have to worry about whether the app was run on xenial/bionic,etc.) \- Identical (people are disincentivized to make ad-hoc modifications to instances)

<comment><USER20> > _when managing hundreds of instances of machines_

Well there's the rub. Most developers aren't going to manage hundreds of machines. My current company has thousands of customers, over a hundred employees, and makes tens of millions in profit. We've got two dozen servers (VMs) and obviously less than that in actual machines.

The scale at which you need hundreds of instances is probably when it does make sense to use something like Docker.

<comment><USER21> A lot of developers work in big companies.

My last company had 2400 OpenShift cpu cores assigned just to unused OpenShift projects. I'm sure the number of used OpenShift cores was in the tens of thousands.

For instance just a Kafka consumer that needs to sync a few billion records to cassandra and ElasticSearch by itself may use 50 cores.

<comment><USER18> Also, a lot of smaller (and mid-sized) companies end up with tons of instances and all kinds of complex server infrastructure because their code is mind- bogglingly inefficient and falls over without it. You either fix their mountain of broken shit or you throw "cloud" at it.

Relatedly, I've seen a lot of "we need to avoid & transition away from SQL database servers, they're slow and don't scale" in the wild when the problem is actually that the way SQL is being used is not simply not-advanced, but incompetent. Hundreds to thousands of queries per page load for no good reason, useless caching, little attention paid to indices, that kind of thing. Often Rails is involved. :-/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't trust people who like their software tools. I can trust some of the people who believe that their usecase justifies the cost of a tool, as long as they can also articulate it's limitations. If someone doesn't understand the environment and problem a tool solves well enough to rattle off a laundry list of good, bad and ugly design decisions, then their baseline analysis doesn't have any utility.

It's a subtle distinction, because once someone is primed that these are the two options, everyone thinks they're in the second category. You have to give someone enough rope and hope they offer up how much they "love" their toys.

I like this article because the container toolset ecosystem needs criticism to evolve. And we don't see enough of it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I notice that once you're invested, time and effort wise, in doing something one way, and it works, the general unwillingness to learn different or newer ways of doing the same things increases rapidly. Overcoming such prejudice requires understanding and accepting the incentives for further investing time and effort to accustom with newer technology.

Use-case driven technology fit is just one incentive. There are other incentives like resume enhancement, participation in communities where there is rapid development, FOMO / fear of being a dinosaur, the reputation of being known as someone well versed with the latest technologies, monetization via online courses/tutorials. These are just a few I could think of, I'm sure there are more.

In my relatively short career, I saw this playing out with NoSql databases, microservices architecture, SPA (AngularJS), NodeJS, responsive websites, blockchain and more recently, ReactJS, data-science (AI/ML) and containerization.

Each one of these, at some point or the other, have been used in cases where the problem space was completely solvable without using said technology but was introduced for some other incentive.

Say what you will but this rapid change is what makes and keeps this space moving, interesting, inspiring and well-paying.

</comment><comment><USER24> Docker lets you have a standard easy to run reproducible description of a system (service + all dependencies) as code for any service. It's a fat-binary for anything that is also the build env for that binary. Not all languages support native fat-binaries and even those that do you still need a way to reproducibly build that binary (CI doesn't count because local testing builds can't reproduce it).

</comment><comment><USER25> By expecting Docker users to know more than they do, the author thinks they're dumber than they are.

Docker users are mostly folks who specialize in other areas of programming, to whom Docker popularized affecting "fat binaries" out of PHP/Ruby/Python/node apps via chroot. Chroot was already well known to ops folks, but was arcane to most webapp devs.

We're not ops experts who have been confounded by marketing, we're ops amateurs for whom Docker cracked the nut of chroot legibility.

The author hates on Docker in comparison to other fat binary techniques; he ignores that pro-Docker advocates are comparing it to not using fat binaries at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would like to see more vetting in dockerhub and security in general, yes it's based on cgroups which are specifically security minded, but not all docker users are aware of this. A novice user pulling a random docker image, and running default as root is bound to cause some issues.

<comment><USER26> Docker itself is a good idea; a standard repository of other people's opaque binaries and an ecosystem discipline of "Just pull in whatever you need; who cares why it works or who maintains it?" probably less so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Docker (and docker-compose) is super useful for local development environments. Sure, there are problems with docker on windows and with non- root containers. But docker is way better then most of the other tools I used for this (vagrant and whatnot).

A main problem in my opinion is, that old images are no longer published (or removed from dockerhub). I doubt very much, that you can build docker images that are written now in 2030.

But I assume the same happens with Packer + Terraform. In both cases you need to make sure the image is saved and accessible at a place you control, because the build will stop working at some point in time. Also the nice thing about docker is, it runs local (developer machine) and in production. I am not sure how you archive that with AMIs.

Building fat binaries is only easy for some specific languages and tools. In docker, it is easy for everything. At the end docker gives you a standardized way to deploy (image, environment variables, network, volumes and off you go!).

Now about docker in production. I had lots of problems with that. But if you use docker for local and don't have a ops department, it is the natural way to go. You run your integration tests with the same image that later runs on prod, so you don't need to worry, what stack is running on in a different environment. As a developer with a fully automated CI chain, I can control the entire deployment from my IDE (Dockerfile, Jenkinsfile, ...). My college can review the entire deployment in the PR (code-changes and infrastructure changes). And also docker has for most external software a ready to use image. Those are big benefits for small dev teams in small companies.

Also cloud providers offer docker tooling like a private image repository and docker support in most CI tools. I mention all of this, because the tooling around a container solution is important. You may dislike docker, but it integrates in most cloud providers and has images for almost everything.

The argument about complexity is true. If something doesn't work and you have no idea about the parts under the docker layer then its game over. But this is a very general argument against complexity. Complexity in software makes everything easy until you need to go down an abstraction layer. Nobody forces you to run your MySQL or Elasticsearch in docker container. This is definitely an unnecessary (and potentially dangerous) layer of complexity.

But to run the 10 years old PHP 5 application that needs memcached version 0.1.5, docker is very very useful: you spend a week to put all that legacy stuff in an docker image, push the image and all the team members can run it locally. Even the designer that knows a bit of jquery can run "docker-compose up" on his windows machine.

</comment><comment><USER28> Docker is the fatbinary that he is talking about. It supports all-the- languages and runs just about everywhere.

The article ignores the fact that companies do not have the time, money, expertise, and desire to re-write their apps in a language that will compile down into a binary. There is a reason so many successful companies use PHP and Ruby. They work and make those businesses money. Taking a golang binary and building it into a tiny scratch docker image would be fantastic too.

In a previous job we ran hundreds of bare metal machines that were built up using puppet. It was amazing in the sense that it was somewhat standardized and could scale well. I still wish every service was using docker. We had php, ruby and golang services and getting all of those dependencies running was a pain. Not only did you have specific machine images to support each language, you had to support each service type too. If they were in docker containers we could have had one machine time and moved the docker images around.

</comment><comment><USER29> 5 years ago I dreamed that IT teams would be empowered to offer us developers a heroku-like experience. (Or JVM application server for those of you who remember those). But it seems like Kubernetes, the "new shiny", has distracted them from that goal, so now they're off in Kubernetes land reconfiguring and reconfiguring, never increasing the productivity or security of what they deliver to the rest of the company. Basically, Kubernetes has nerdsniped IT.

</comment><comment><USER30> His arguments seem week. I've used both docker and k8s for couple of years now. Sure there is a learning curve but because shit is consistent and sane we've been able to have better uptimes, and our pages went significantly down(self healing and auto-scaling properties of k8s are a god send).

Before we used to fab-ssh into the servers, manually ask some human at softlayer to provision new servers, bash script install things, and use native package managers like pip install. Fun fact. Pip is not deterministic. Until package-lock came, npm wasn't deterministic. Things that worked in dev and staging would end up borking prod and we'd be serving 500s. Other language package managers had similar issues.

I see docker as just a glorified package manager. Make a docker file, build an image, run the same image in prod/dev/stage for consistency.

That is a huge timesaver.

</comment><comment><USER31> The archive link is down and the original article is dead, so I can't read it...

The comments on the article are not kind, however [1][2].

1\. [https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/8j9yrn/docker_is_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/8j9yrn/docker_is_the_dangerous_gamble_which_we_will/)

2\. [https://www.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/8jk22u/docker_is_a_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/8jk22u/docker_is_a_dangerous_gamble_which_we_will_regret/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe you are using CloudFlare dns? It seems like 184.108.40.206 can't correctly resolve archive.is [1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317)

<comment><USER31> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This might be the most short sighted article I have ever read. One of humanity's greatest achievements was the creation of the intermodel shipping container([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container)). We literally would not live in the world of convenience we have today without it.

But imagine what the curmudgeon of the day had to say about this. "Why do I need to use this specific container? This container has all these problems... and on and on"

<comment><USER33> The shipping container was a solution to a problem.

Kubernetes? The jury's still out on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm on a project that only needs a single server, and storage. Yet we have k8s, docker, 3 other needless technologies with all their ancillary requirements,Microservices and about 5 more git repos than the entirety of Google needs. Development of simple features take 5-10x of what it should be. But then I understand the developers too: recruiters and team leads urged by their developers to "work on the latest tech or we'll leave" have to adopt and so ask for ppl with those skills.

</comment><comment><USER29> From what I've seen, Docker usually gets used when someone has a difficult-to- run app, usually due to many dependencies or a cryptic barely-documented jump- through-hoops-of-fire setup. So they dockerize it. Instead of trying to improve the app, they've essentially thrown up their hands in defeat and dockerized it. Which is a legitimate strategy in many cases, but too often it's the lazy way out.

</comment><comment><USER35> Oof, this didn't age well. Sounds like the OP didn't want to understand the benefits of Docker at scale in a large, heterogenous corporation and has stuck their head in the sand because their uses cases didn't need it.

<comment><USER36> I have a nagging feeling THIS comment won't age well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17062288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17062288)

</comment><comment><USER21> Plenty of companies:

a) do not want to give people/scripts access to the machine.

b) do not want to employ a bunch of people whose sole purpose is to manage these machines.

Being able to provision (for instance) an Openshift project in a click to deploy docker containers solves those problems.

Yes, those are not problems that a startup or a small business has, but these are problems that all large enterprises with sensitive data have.

Docker is a standard that anyone knows. Is it the best standard? Who knows, but it is a platform and a standard that has built an ecosystem. That fact alone will make it better than any product or custom-built deployment solution that has to be maintained by a team of engineers.

</comment><comment><USER38> We should all move to Krubnernetes

</comment><comment><USER39> don't gitlab/azure devops pipelines make docker irrelevant?

<comment><USER40> Aren't those orthogonal (i.e. have little to do with each other)? Why would Gitlab/Azure DevOps Pipelines (CI/CD tools) make Docker (a container engine) irrelevant?</comment></comment>


Kanban to organize toddlers mourning routine - <AUTHOR> http://ariadna.font.cat/2012/09/29/kids-kanban/ <comment><USER2> The title of the post in HN says "mo _u_ rning", but it should say "morning".</comment>


Lessons from the Haystack Affair - <AUTHOR> http://liberationtechnology.stanford.edu/events/lessons_from_the_haystack_affair/

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://liberationtechnology.stanford.edu/> has lots of good programs.</comment>


Show HN: FileRock, a Secure Dropbox Clone, goes Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://blog.filerock.com/2012/12/were-going-open-source/

<comment><USER2> i have a question about their authentication process as described at <http://blog.filerock.com/2012/06/filerock-security-overview/>

they say that they don't send the password over the net, but send instead the result from PBKDF2. but how does that make things more secure? couldn't someone simply snoop the PBKDF2 output and send that themselves? (if they could eavesdrop at all - my point is not that eavesdropping is possible, but that a transformed password is equivalent to the password itself).

i thought perhaps they provided a different random seed for PBKDF2, but then they would get a different answer each time and wouldn't be able to check it.

i get why PBKDF2 is better than just using a "simple" password. but i don't get why they make a point of saying your password is not transmitted. i mean, HTTP basic auth uses a hash, but that's considered just as insecure as the password for exactly this reason. and PBKDF2 is just a a glorified hash.

it just seems confused. claiming something is an advantage when it's not, as far as i can tell (although i suspect the confused party is me - it just reminded me so much of http basic auth...).

<comment><AUTHOR> the point is that in FileRock, several things depend on your password, and some of them must be kept confidential and never sent even to the FileRock servers.

You are right, from the only point of view of the authentication, using a password gives you the same level of security as using one of its derivations (given a deterministic generation of the derivations and a password with same length and randomness of its derivations).

The mechanism that actually protects your credentials from being sniffed and used to get the first level of access to your account, is the industry standard SSL/TLS.

But even if someone discovers which is the derivation that you use to authenticate with the FileRock servers, they won't be able to know your password. And that means that the other derivations of your password (for example, the one used to protect the encryption keys for your data) are not disclosed as well. Therefore, even the people managing the FileRock servers will not know them, and they will not be able to access your encrypted data.

I hope this will solve your doubts.

PS: I see now that evv and notimetorelax also replied and they are correct.

<comment><USER2> thanks; that makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You'd probably want to bump 1000 iterations of PBKDF2 to something like 100000 in the next version. Better: include cost parameter in key format, and calculate the number of iterations on-the-fly by estimating how many iterations it takes for a certain amount of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> good point. For different things we kept it quite simple, but soon we are certainly going towards these refinements and your suggestion sounds pretty good imho

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just in case the slashdot effect strikes, direct link to the source code on GitHub is: <https://github.com/filerock/FileRock-Client>

</comment><comment><USER4> I haven't looked, but assuming they do TLS like everyone else and they haven't provided perfect forward security, then sending the PBKDF2 hash over the wire is still a weakness.

Granted this is the same weakness that exists in most implementations of SSL where one sends their clear text password over a SSL channel.

<comment><AUTHOR> you might want to look at this ( <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5033540> ) comment on why the PBKDF2 is sent for the authentication rather than the password.

As far as concerns the usage of TLS, your guess is correct, right now we allow the usage of the most common cipher suites, with some of them not providing PFS.

However, the negotiation of cipher suite is just a matter of configuration, and we might take a closer look pretty soon on which ones we want to allow or not.

<comment><USER4> I saw that. I guess the problem is that for authentication I hope that the PBKDF2 hash is further hashed before sticking it in the DB to protect against DB compromises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Only client stuff, skip...

<comment><USER6> On the contrary.

As a user of a service the client is the only piece that I really care about wrt data security. If I can verify that the client isn't secretly uploading encryption keys to the server while claiming to encrypt my data, it's a massive win for transparency.

The server is a just an abstracted hard disk. Why would I care how it is implemented?

<comment><USER7> Because some people want to run their own DropBox clone, and titling the post "...goes Open Source" usually (correct me if I'm wrong) implies that the ENTIRE product goes open-source, not just half of it in order to prove that its security is "for real".

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies if the title of the post is not clear, I should have specified that it was only about the client. You are right, one of our main goals is to prove that our security is "for real". However, we also hope that our open source client might be useful to other projects, as well as for developers to fork it and implement themselves what is out of our scope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am currently using Dropbox with an EncFS folder on top, so your solution is interesting to me. One question:

Does (will) it sync as well as Dropbox?

Dropbox consumes almost no system resources, syncs right away with inotify, transmits files on the LAN and is generally very good at what it does. If your client is as good, I will switch to it for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question, difficult answer.

We are doing our best. So far, the performance and usage-of-resources are not the fields where we put the most of our effort. Additionally, there are two main issues to consider:

The first is about our security features: encryption and integrity check require some computation, hence our clients will have an higher load compared to Dropbox. Moreover, some of the magic performed by Dropbox to improve performance, cannot be combined with some of the security measures that we enforce.

The second is about the firepower of and age of the products you are comparing. Dropbox has a quite large and amazing team ( <https://www.dropbox.com/about> ) as well as few years of product development and testing on a large and impressively growing user base. The comparison with our team ( <http://blog.filerock.com/founders/> and <http://blog.filerock.com/dev-team/> ) and our time on this project so far, would be like throwing a cobble to the Ayers Rock and see who moves.

We are aware of the feature you mentioned: for instance, we already went for the filesystem monitoring using the API provided by the different platforms, but it turned out that they didn't behave as we expected on all platforms, in particular they made hard to get correct results needed by our integrity check technology. So we had to choose where to concentrate our effort and decided to put it on our distinctive features. So we switched to a simpler (and inefficient) approach that currently guarantees the correctness we need on each supported platform. As soon as possible, we plan to mix our current approach with the aforementioned usage of the different platform APIs to increase performance but still keeping our integrity check mechanism working properly.

Of course in the long term we aim to be as efficient as possible, and Dropbox is definitely the one to run after on this perspective. However, this will need time and resources. The good news is that having an open source client, anyone can contribute suggesting an improvement, or even implementing features that are not yet in our short-time roadmap (e.g., on-LAN files sync).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> SpiderOak (<https://spideroak.com>) is a zero-knowledge focused and secure backup service that you may want to take a look at.

<comment><USER10> SpiderOak looks great. The only issue is that, since the client is not Open Source (or is it?), you have to trust what it does and you cannot verify it in the code.

<comment><USER11> To my knowledge it is not. For this reason, I stopped using it, despite their otherwise very nice approach generally. I have been doing without cloud storage for my most important files (financial documents, etc.), so I'm pretty interested in Filerock, having found this thread.

I naively attempted to roll my own mash-up for this purpose (<https://github.com/clebio/duplicitySync>) and was not successful. The combination of local encryption, incremental backup, and _synchronization across multiple computers_ was the breaking point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not quite the same, but I've grown very fond of git-annex[1], which is also free software under the same license (GPL 3).

With git-annex, it's very simple to create your own self-hosted Dropbox. Unlike Dropbox, though, git-annex allows you to make your filesystem completely decentralized.

A rather rudimentary analogy: Dropbox:gitannex :: SVN:git.

[1] <http://git-annex.branchable.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> 1) Where is your pricing info?

2) Do you have mobile clients?

3) What makes this better than encfs on top of dropbox?

<comment><USER14> 1) We're still in private beta, we hope to publish commercial offers soon. You will get 3G free, and there will be different plans if you want more space. If you take part in the private beta, you will get a discount when our commercial offers go live.

2) Not yet, but we are planning to.

3) See this comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5036011></comment></comment>


Dear Apple, stop overcharging for extra iPad memory - <AUTHOR> http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31747_7-57542985-243/dear-apple-stop-overcharging-for-extra-ipad-memory/ <comment><USER3> It's called price discrimination (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination>).

Windows does it with their entire operating system/office line - <USER2> licenses are the cheapest because it's all they can afford (otherwise they just pirate - since value to them is so low), home the next (same reason), then the office, then corporations (they can afford a lot - and they derive a lot of value).

You charge what people can afford in terms of value to maximise your profit and increase your chances of continuing to supply said value (or not) into the future. Apple sells most of their tablets very competitively, but they know that there are plenty of people out there who get plenty more value, and are perfectly happy to pay up. So to extract these profits they create stacked price/entry levels to actively help those who can afford overpriced memory and perceive large amounts of derived value to happily pay up for it.

Value perceived/extracted and not the price of creation are what's important to consumers in non-commodity markets and the suppliers who supply them.

<comment><USER4> Yep, and Apple has traditionally capitalized on this big time. For example, on a Mac Pro: <http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD772LL/A>?

You pay about $150 per 4 GB of RAM, or $37.5 per GB. Current ram prices are about $4.5 per GB!

(See:

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007611+600078206&QksAutoSuggestion=&ShowDeactivatedMark=False&Configurator=&IsNodeId=1&Subcategory=147&description=&hisInDesc=&Ntk=&CFG=&SpeTabStoreType=&AdvancedSearch=1)

for example.)

<comment><USER5> At least with the Pro you can go to Crucial. If an SD card slot was available on the iPads the OP's complaint would go away, I'm guessing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always enjoy this whole "iSuppli estimates the cost at $X whereas Apple charges $X*3(ish)", like Apple should feel bad about saying "You want more space? Fine, pay $100".

You don't want to pay the extra? Don't. Get a 16Gb device, I have for both my iOS devices and I'm reasonably happy with it due to Dropbox/Box.net having a decent clients that allow me to expand my space concerns outwards.

The argument that they should charge less when people are willing to pay is ridiculous, they should charge what the market will pay, which in this case is $100 to move up the storage scale.

EDIT: Possibly this should be a separate comment. In the fashion world there's two well known UK clothing companies who occupy slightly overlapping markets, but with incredibly different price points. The material costs are roughly the same, stores in similar locations, staff wages the same and so on. Both have their products made in the same factory, by the same people. One charges about 2-3x for their products than the other, the other charges a 40-50% markup immediately. That's just how luxury goods economics end up working.

<comment><USER7> It's at least possible that they would make more money with lower prices (but it depends on where the volume is and where it would be).

<comment><USER6> It's very possible they would, but the brand has been built around premium, luxury products rather than smaller margins and it's doing well for them (see the cash pile that Smaug guards).

<comment><USER7> My point was more that they may be charging less than the market will pay. If lower margins on the better models result in a sufficient increase in upgrade participation, they capture more of the economic surplus.

It's likely that the $100 bumps are just fine, but I don't see that $50 bumps would do much to dilute their brand (especially given the total lack of visible differentiation between the models).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes - because whenever you buy hardware, optional upgrades are always available to purchase at cost-price /sarcasm

Although I guess it's not quite as bad with something like a notebook where at least you have the choice of buying your own upgrades and installing them yourself...

<comment><USER9> He acknowledged this:

"I can understand paying a nice premium over what you'd typically pay for flash memory, but it gets a little ridiculous when you're paying five times what you'd normally pay."

However Apple adds an awful lot onto the price for upgrades. When I bought my iMac a while ago, the only difference between the two 21.5" models was one had a 500MB HDD whereas the other had 1TB. The difference in price was somewhere in the region of £250. It will have cost Apple maybe £20-30 more for that extra price yet they charged around 1/4 of the original price for the upgrade.

In the end, I just got the 500MB iMac. It was a great machine and worth every penny, it's just a shame that they sting the customer on upgrades. When I bought a Lenovo laptop a year or so later, they too were pretty expensive to upgrade (battery, CPU, HDD), but nowhere near the premium that Apple adds.

<comment><USER10> It would've also had a discrete GPU which would add much more to the total cost than a bigger HDD.

<comment><USER9> Not that I'm aware of. I looked through the specs for quite some time and was unable to see a difference. I know there are differences between Macbooks of the same screen size, but couldn't spot any other hardware changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Truly a tragedy. When I get my 64GB iPad Mini, I'll be sure to install iViolin Nano and play Ashoken Farewell followed by the theme to Schindler's List.

It amuses me that the author was aware of his kvetching, but went ahead with the article anyway.

</comment><comment><USER12> I expect this isn't gouging so much as Apple just liking consumer-friendly price points and upgrades. By "consumer-friendly" I mean numbers like $499/599/699 (Wifi iPad) are "nice" numbers and $100 is a difference that gives choice without giving too much choice.

Apple isn't really in the habit of cutting prices (this has exceptions and I'm ignoring various FX price adjustments). They're more about giving you more for the same money. So at some point you'll probably see the same prices but for 32/64/128GB. I'm a little surprised this hasn't happened already. I expect we'll see it next year. 2014 at the absolute latest. Perhaps this would be too much of a constraint on flash chip supply though (IIRC Apple is already the largest consumer of flash memory so doubling their demand would be significant).

I, for one, will happily buy a 128GB iPad.

That all being said, I think there are now three serious missteps in the post- Jobs Apple:

1\. The Maps debacle;

2\. Elongating the iPhone 5 to create yet another resolution (the relative uniformity of the iOS line with only 2/4 (if you could retina) resolutions was a huge advantage for developers). I really don't see the point; and

3\. The Mini. Sure they'll sell millions of them but by that same argument Windows Vista was a success. IMHO 16:10/9 makes far more sense on the 7-8" form factor rather than the "fat" 4:3. Also, 7-8" tablets are moving to be 720p+ and this is below that at 1024x768. The price is also (IMHO) too high.

Google OTOH (disclaimer: I work for Google) I think has a lineup that is starting to make a lot more sense between the Nexus 4/7/10 at some pretty nice price points.

I guess that's a good comparison for this article because the Nexus 7 upgrade from 16 to 32GB is only $50.

EDIT: Two points:

1\. I'm not calling the iPad Mini a Vista-level failure. Seriously, please read what I actually wrote (the whole electric car was also a big example of people not reading what I wrote but I digress...). I simply said that selling a lot of something doesn't preclude it from being a misstep; and

2\. The whole idea of "excessive profit" with a luxury good is fundamentally flawed. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Ultimately it costs what it costs because the market bears it.

EDIT2: I understand very well why the mini is 1024x768. Perhaps I didn't explain my point very well. My point is that's not a very good resolution for a 7-8" tablet (IMHO of course). IMHO the 16:10 ratio works much better (YMMV) but they have their hands tied.

<comment><USER13> If they're really on about consumer-friendly numbers and reduced choices, then why not offer the biggest memory increase they can give with reasonable profit margins? They could offer to upgrade from 16GB to 64GB for $100, still making a decent profit while reducing the number of device options.

No, this is simply exploiting people for excessive profit.

<comment><USER14> What is "excessive profit" in the context of a luxury item? We're not talking about price gouging for disaster relief supplies here.

<comment><USER13> Who gets to decide what is a luxury item?

(I guess theoretically the tax office, ex: luxury car taxes...)

<comment><USER15> Whomever wishes to? If you already operate a desktop, a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet device could without too much trouble be considered a luxury and not a lifeline to modern society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "First, an admission: I preordered an iPad Mini. But I wasn't happy about the price I was paying."

The author kindly gives you permission to bail on the very first sentence. Lesser pundits would bury that much deeper.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Dear Apple, stop overcharging for extra iPad memory, or else I'll buy your product anyway ... _and then COMPLAIN about it!_ "

</comment><comment><USER18> He hits the nail on the head in the first paragraph. He bought anyway. Apple will continue to use unfair pricing because people are willing to buy it, even if they complain about it.

I'm frustrated by the fact the MacBook extra RAM/SSD is so expensive compared to manufacturing costs. But it's my only option, so I am going to have to pay it now aren't I?

<comment><USER19> > I'm frustrated by the fact the MacBook extra RAM/SSD is so expensive > compared to manufacturing costs.

That's quite variable actually, at least for the non-air non-retina ones the trend was generally that the prices (for RAM, not SSD) where fair-ish right at release (markup of 10 to 50%, roughly in line with other manufacturer-provided upgrades), but Apple doesn't float its prices so a year later with RAM prices having fallen by half or more (depending on the quantity) the prices were inane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if he understands that a long drawn out complaint about pricing where the author understands all of the component details, yet bought the product anyway and shows all signs of being willing to do so again... completely validates their pricing strategy.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is pure self-selecting pricing: it's neither new nor restricted to Apple.

The premise is simple: your market is divided into a very large spectrum of spending ability. So the most efficient way to charge each customer the best possible price is to simply let them select it themselves. For obvious reasons, you cannot sell the same product at each price, so some improvement is necessary at each upgrade. Quite often the upgrade is a token one, but sometimes people do need the extra features offered.

I see this all the time at restaurants, car dealerships, insurance companies and pretty much any other time someone is trying to sell me something.

</comment><comment><USER22> You can bend this any way you want. Here's one take: Apple is subsidizing the cost of the cheaper iPads and compensating by making the top of the line more expensive.

If you find that a ridiculous argument, consider that, every time they haven't been able to make them fast enough to meet demand, their prices were too low for the market.

I do not think either of these viewpoints is right. This is simply a matter of "price to what it is worth, not to what it costs"

</comment><comment><USER23> Can anyone point to a volume hardware OEM that doesn't charge considerably for storage capacity or RAM?

Off the cuff, let's go buy a laptop from Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc.

Lenovo's T430u is $730 with 4GB of memory and a 320GB hard disk. An additional 4GB of memory is $160, even though the consumer wholesale price of such DIMMs is $20. The cost to upgrade to a single 8GB DIMM is $450, even though the consumer wholesale price of such DIMMs is $40-50.

The cost to go from a 320GB 7200rpm hard disk to a 1TB 5400rpm hard disk is $170, even though the consumer wholesale price of such a disk is $110.

\-----

Every OEM does this for memory and storage, because to the end user, there is an _obvious, measurable benefit_. Twice the storage means they can store twice as many things. Twice the memory means they can do twice as many things at once. This is why Apple doesn't mention clock speeds for their custom ARM SoCs, but instead how many times faster it is -- 1.0GHz to 1.4GHz doesn't resonate with people as well as "twice as fast", especially when if you looked at just clock speed you might think it was only 40% faster.

</comment><comment><USER24> <economics>

I'm echoing the feelings of a lot of others in this comment thread. Moaning about price of something but buying it anyway is a pointless exercise. By buying the product you're sending a clear signal that they can continue to charge the same price.

Part of me also wants the title to include the word 'please'—since this is a request, not a demand.

And, indeed, there are many products sold by companies where the per-item margin is huge compared to the materials cost. Perfume, designer clothing, fancy cars…and software. But we buy perfume anyway because we have lots of money but no perfume, and would rather have some perfume and a little less (but still lots of) money.

I'm reminded of an economics joke I once heard. An economist and his friend are walking past a concert hall. The friend turns to the economist and says "you know, I always wanted to learn how to play an instrument," to which the economist responds "clearly not."

<comment><USER25> If a tech journalist buys the thing for professional reasons, the signal he sends is not the same as a consumer buying it. I do agree with your luxury/fashion goods comparison though. That's exactly the business that Apple is in.

<comment><USER26> He doesn't send any special signal: his money goes with the rest of the money from other buyers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Their pricing strategy is simple - make the maximum profit possible. Apple is a premium product and the upgrades are there to get more money out of the customer. The relationship with the value received is tenuous.

<comment><USER28> That has nothing to do with premium/non-premium. Thats called "good business". Even with a low-cost product you try to maximize profit, but in a different niche.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Apple can charge almost whatever they want for the memory as long as the competition is lagging behind on the software. It will probably be better in a couple of years. I'm buying a Nexus 7 instead for multiple reasons and the memory pricing is one of them. Main reason is that I already have an iPad 2 and want a smaller tablet but not the same one I already have.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the problem is the base memory is too low compared to the system spec. Apple is selling an arguably "high end" product and 16 gb is really pushing what is needed. They've upped speed and screen resolution but the memory levels has remained the same.

Unfortunately not upgradable or expandable after purchase.

</comment><comment><USER31> "You've found market price when buyers complain, but still pay."

IIRC, PG said that. We're on HN. Rings any bells?

</comment><comment><USER32> It wouldn't be Apple if they didn't overcharge.

</comment><comment><USER33> If it helps, think of it as a tax on the rich.

</comment><comment><USER26> Dear Apple, stop making profits.</comment>


Elon Musk plans to open source Tesla's self-driving software - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3061020/tesla-is-looking-at-releasing-the-software-for-tesla-as-open-source <comment><USER2> Misleading title.</comment>


My one question for Steve Jobs in 2000 - <AUTHOR> http://baligu.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-one-question-for-steve-jobs-in-2000.html

<comment><USER2> I like the friend's response. Almost always, the only wrong response to a "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" situation is to stall.

<comment><USER3> I was really expecting there to be a twist like the "friend" was actually Bill Gates. Imagining that, it made the "friend's" response even more humorous.

<comment><USER4> Given the tone of language, it's most likely Larry Ellison; Oracle's head honcho.

[http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Larry_Ellison_Discuss...](http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Larry_Ellison_Discusses_Steve_Jobs_In_Interview/)

"Q: Another person who has a certain mythology about him is your friend Steve Jobs. Everybody seems to believe they know the book on Jobs: heis brilliant but hard-driving, overly sensitive. Do you and he ever talk about that?

A: We almost decided to wear T-shirts: 'The Mercurial Steve Jobs' and 'The Arrogant Larry Ellison.'

Steve Jobs is my best friend, and I love him dearly, and heis one of the most remarkable people on this planet. You watch him create Apple, then in one of the worst human-resources mistakes in the history of Silicon Valley -- the only thing worse was when the French fired Napoleon -- they fire Steve Jobs and Apple almost completely disintegrates. Then he comes back and he saves a company that was on life support.

I never see this quoted about Steve, but they once asked Andy Grove who he most admired in the PC industry, and he said, "One guy: Steve Jobs. He invented the PC industry."

You know, we live in a very egalitarian world. We donit like heroes. And Steve is one of these heroic guys whose accomplishments are of such epic proportions, and it gnaws away at our egalitarian sense of the world."

<comment><AUTHOR> This was my guess exactly, actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The more posts like this I read, the more they sound like obituaries. The man might be sick, but he's not dead! He just stepped down from being CEO, that's all.

</comment><comment><USER6> I remember watching "Pirates of the Silicon Valley" some time ago. It was nice to see the battles between Gates and Jobs in the beginning of the PC era. That movie ended even before Apple's re-birth.

</comment><comment><USER7> 'Steve, look. I don't give a fuck about Apple. Just make up your mind'

I need friends like that. Glad to know indecision has good company.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is this on HN? Who the fuck cares about Apple?

</comment><comment><USER9> TLDR: Steve Jobs decided to go back to Apple after his friend told him he didn't give a fuck about Apple.

</comment><comment><USER10> _"Is Apple ever going to go after the enterprise market?" (Steve's response, a refreshing "If you're interested in that, you're probably at the wrong company.")_

You like our software enough to want to use it at work and/or want others to get to use it? Yeah, fuck that.

<comment><USER11> I thought that at first too, but I think it could be interpreted a couple other ways too.

What we've seen over the last 10 years or so is the increased consumerization of the enterprise. Essentially, large IT depts have been forced to accommodate iPhones and iPads, due to large numbers of people buying them then saying "I want to use this at work", rather than Apple having to accomodate "enterprise" needs (and thereby perpetuating often antiquated or just poor ways of doing things).

I'm generalizing here a bit, but that's another way I'd read it. It probably would have been difficult for people in the late 90s to foresee how much consumerization of IT we'd see 10-15 years in the future

<comment><USER10> _rather than Apple having to accomodate "enterprise" needs (and thereby perpetuating often antiquated or just poor ways of doing things)._

Thats kind of a plastering over of the reality though.

iOS plays nice with ActiveSync, right there thats Apple accommodating enterprise needs. I can hit up exchange to remote wipe any employee's iPhone right now.

Its not that IT departments are forced to accommodate _iPhone_ s, they're forced to accommodate yet another smartphone.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I did realize I was generalizing some. But... Apple's supported some of those protocols, but not out of the gate, and they've not built their initial products around some competitor's idea about a market (at least, not that I've seen). So... yes with the iPhone, they did accomodate "the enterprise", but didn't base the success of the iPhone on how well it was accepted by 'the enterprise'.</comment></comment></comment></comment>