I'm also seeing a lot of 1016/1018 "Origin DNS errors" across a variety of web services. I saw this on my own company's website first around 21:40 UTC, although it's not bad enough to materially affect our traffic volume.
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).
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.
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.
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!)
* 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...
My muscle memory for "terraform apply" was too strong, so I just moved "terraform" out of my path altogether. Now I have a wrapper that invokes it safely (or a Makefile, depending on which project I'm working on).
It's actually cheaper than data transfer across AZs. Within a region, AWS charges 1 cent per GB in each direction. You pay a cent to send data from one instance and another cent to receive data on another instance. But between Virginia and Ohio, they charge 1 cent to send data (in either direction) but receiving data is free. In the end, it's actually cheaper to balance your servers across one AZ in Virginia and one AZ in Ohio, rather than 2 AZs in the same region.
But it's only a penny, right? How much could it matter? It actually matters a lot. At both my previous and current employers, a surprisingly large portion of our hill comes from data transfer across AZs. All the microservices, all the memcache hits, and all the database replication add up quickly.
My understanding is that the founding of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has no tax implications at all. The only way that tax would be avoided is if the foundation sells some Facebook stock and donates the proceeds to accredited non-profits in the same year. But the exact same deductions would apply if the Chan-Zuckerberg family donated directly.
That's opaque; of course it's the same as if he had donated directly.
I'm not accusing him of illegal tax evasion. I'm accusing him, and Facebook, of legally not paying taxes. That it's legal, though, is of little consolation. Remember that it was legal to send Rosa Parks to the back of the bus, at the time. The criticism is directly that its legality is a poor veil and its morality open to debate.
