0
stringlengths 9
22.1k
|
|---|
I think you're giving Amazon way too much. I consider myself pretty typical of the average consumer and I buy some things on Amazon but not very often. I use Google multiple times everyday,Amazon maybe once a month at the most and even then I don't buy every time. Even I do buy its usually things I can't find in stores.
The last thing I bought on Amazon was microwave oven spray paint. Prior to that I bought a digitizer for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Before that I bought a screen for an HP laptop. All three of these Amazon purchases were driven by me knowing Amazon probably had the best price. Amazon marketing to me had nothing to do with it. And I'll never buy any of those 3 ever again.
Amazon can't target me for any future purchases based on my previous buys. I know there are some people who are extremely active Amazon shoppers but that's got to be a very tiny percentage of the population. |
My point was purely about the mast geography. The maximum cell size is down to head of poulation served, far more often than maximum range of masts. That is certainly the key point in urban environments, in rural ones things can be pretty spread out. Femto cells can be very handy in a rural situation too.
Masts, where needed are pretty much standardised designs. Coverage mapping is automated. You can attach the transmitters to existing buildings, or power pylons too. They are trivial compared to putting in fixed lines, they need power, and that's it. Maintenance is a wipe down with a cloth once in a while, or fix a board if somehing blows. I accept they might have been feats of engineering once - well the transmitters and original mapping development, but now they are entirely generic.
It's not nearly as complex as it used to be.
The one place where you may need to do clever work is in those dense urban areas to avoid interference between cells, which have to be placed so very close together to give the number of channels needed.
Moving on to the rest of your points though:
The published article is rubbish, I dare not call it a study.
I am no expert on the US / Canadian market, and can give you a little on the UK.
In the UK you pay more to call a mobile phone than a landline. I think most discount operators would charge aroung 16ppm to call a mobile and 1ppm for a landline call. However there are call bundles sold with mobiles, and with some landlines too, that give you inclusive minutes. You do not pay for an incomming call in the UK.
I am not an expert on the US, but I know you pay to send and receive. I am aware anecdotally that in Africa there are far more mobiles than landlines, largely because it is so much cheaper to install a mobile mast, uplinking via microwave or satelite link, than a cable based system.
Regarding the UK, it has superb coverage for mobiles, and rock solid reliability. A condition of getting a licence to operate in the UK is that you must cover a certain amount of the population, and network competition is fierce - you can easily switch and keep your number when you change networks. Phones sold here generally operate worldwide - quad band GSM is pretty much the norm.
Personally, for £15 per month I get 600 minutes outgoing (unlimited incomming), 600 sms (unlimited in), and unlimited data which I can tether to a laptop.
I can't really comment in detail on the US /canadian comparison but I can list the following:
Data speeds are listed as up to 6 Mbps down, and uplinks of 384 kbps (some networks have enhanced uplink features giving 0.5 or 1.0Mbps), that is likely to increase in speed. (Vodafone)
Roaming charges have been pretty steep, but the EU recently ruled to reduce
maximum roaming charges (within Europe), so the most we can be charged now is €0.39 per minute, text messages €0.11 (free for incomming). Data €0.80 per MegaByte uploaded or downloaded as of July 2010. (EU). Outside teh EU charges are much higher, but we can always get a local pay as you go sim and use it in an unlocked second hand phone, which you can get for about £10 off ebay, and use a discount carrier for teh international leg. :)
Hope that helps.
H |
Think if it like your TV, it has to be using some power to keep the receiver looking for that signal to turn "on". So in order to work your device, like your TV, is never truly off. It's in a low power standby state.
Now one of the problems with cellphones and power usage in standby is that they need to talk to with the tower to register what tower they're using, so the network can find the phone when it needs to send it a call. That means occasionally the phone needs to transmit, and depending on how far it is from the tower, that can require a fair amount of power.
Now, it's feasible that at some point it could gather enough energy from the environment it's in to maintain that standby state indefinitely, even including transmitting to the tower occasionally. In fact it should be possible with solar panels that are available now, as long as they're well positioned and there's sunlight available. |
This blog post is pretty lazy and completely misses every major point.
It's not that the technology doesn't yet exist for 1920x1200 and higher monitors. Those were actually more prevalent in 2000-2008.
DVI is a non-issue given that even the cheapest desktop pc's come with a discrete graphics card (which almost all can support dual-link DVI, or displayport or HDMI). Hell even most laptops can do the job if they have anything better than the ancient VGA connector.
The operating system is irrelevant and I don't understand why the author even brought it up. All 3 major OSes can handle scaling fonts with advanced anti-aliasing. Reading text usually isn't an issue anyway since the pixel pitch remains relatively constant as you increase both physical size and the number of pixels. There was a weird transition point going from 24in to 30in in some cases where you had very small pixel pitch 24in monitors then a jump to a larger than average pixel pitch on 30in monitors, but nobody could afford a 30in monitor back then anyway.
Why the fuck are you comparing phone and tablet resolutions to desktop monitors? You have to factor in the average viewing distance before making such asinine comparisons. You hold a phone much closer to your eyes than you would a monitor sitting on a desk while you read from a chair. You may as well compare TVs (50+in displays with a maximum of 1080p resolution). The reason they don't look like complete ass is because your TV is usually 10+ feet away from you.
Thunderbolt is great but irrelevant here, though I'm glad to see that it might one day be possible to connect all peripheral devices through a single cable (with daisy-chaining).
Apple has nothing to do with this. You sound like a rabid fanboy when every sentence mentions them, and you have no idea what you're talking about if you think they're the only company that does high-res displays. Dell, HP, NEC and many others have all been in the game for far longer than Apple, and it's obvious you didn't know that all these retailers buy their panels from the same small group of manufacturers. Apple is nowhere near the 'cutting edge' of display technology, even though their Cinema line targeted toward professionals does go back quite a while.
The reason there isn't a market for 23-30inch monitors with 1920x1200 or greater resolution anymore is because the market fragmented. As I alluded to earlier, there used to be a nice even distribution from 19 (typically 1280x1024) all the way up through 30in (2560x1600) monitors. There was a nice mix of panel technologies, too. TN panels (which dominate now) were cheap and had fast response times (at the time), which made them ideal for the 'gamer' market. Higher-end panel technologies like IPS and PVA had better image quality but were expensive and not as well suited to gaming, so they were relegated to the professional market (graphic designers, video editors, etc) for whom color accuracy was essential. In between you could find some cheaper IPS panels in the 24in and 27in range.
Unfortunately, the majority of the market focused on the cheap TN panels that the gamer community wanted. There are still a few high-quality displays made for the pros who can afford to shell out $500+ for the color accuracy of the other panel technologies, but it's a niche market now. The middleground has evaporated. With the push from the flat-panel HDTV market, the term "Full 1080p" became a marketing buzzword that took over. That is why you see the huge skew in the distribution towards the low-end 'value' segment. Manufacturers have almost completely abandoned 1920x1200 monitors as a result. The 27-30in monitors typically support higher bit-depth (10-12bits per color channel vs. 6-8), but you usually have to have either a very high-end consumer graphics card or a professional card like the Quadro and FirePro to take advantage of it. |
Yes, we've been through this on Reddit a few times but I'd be happy to reiterate. Macintosh computers are PCs unless they're Mac Servers or Mac Workstations in which case they're not PCs, they're servers or workstations respectively.
In Apple's advertising, a "PC" is defined as "a home computer running Windows OS". Everywhere else, a PC is defined as "a home computer that isn't running Mac OS, though that still could technically be called a PC except it isn't".
Hope that's cleared up things for you and prevented any future debacle :).
EDIT, just in case you weren't wondering about anything I said there; |
Yes, IBM called it "personal computer", and the instruction book for the TRS-80 called it a "personal computer". Nobody called it an "IBM personal computer" any more than they called it an "IBM 5150", unless you're writing a purchase order.
To disagree with me, you'd really want to be finding historical pictures talking about the Apple ][ PC, the TRS-80 PC, etc. I'm talking primarily in informal settings, rather than marketing brochures or technical specs.
I agree that the term probably best applies to a computer with an IBM compatible BIOS, but complaining that someone calling a computer a PC to distinguish it from an Apple computer is as absurd as someone complaining about calling it a TRS-80 to distinguish it from a PC or calling it an Android device to distinguish it from Linux. It makes no sense to even say "PC-Compatible" if PC really meant "personal computer." |
People, AMD conceded the race when they sold their fabs and rightly so.
They know they can't go head to head with Goliath whose R&D budget is more than they net in a year - it's suicide.
Selling their fabs gave them the cash to stay alive and [edit] instead of perpetually playing 'follow the leader' and repeating their success copying designs (K5 , K6 etc) , they struck off on their own and looking 5-10 years out , made a decision, more or less 'bet the farm on Fusion' and it's low power products and so far have been holding it together. it's looking good so long as they can hang onto their senior staff and keep sales up until it starts firing on all cylinders.
But in terms of street cred? Who's the fastest? They may have to be content with being #2 and giving people a value oriented choice that is competitive with the mass market.
The average end user surfing reddit and photoshopping the occasional pic don't know the difference between an i5 or a Phenom x4 and candidly the differences are mostly visible only in benchmarks.
CPU raw speed and throughput does not solely dictate performance. The best kept secret in the industry is this: The CPU sits around WAITING 99% of the time AS IT IS right now. Want to really perk up your system? Get an SSD - not a CPU that's 500 Mhz faster. 2.8 to 3.2 isn't going to load that WORD doc THAT much faster.
Gotta 100 meg Photoshop file. An SSD opens it in .25 sec and the 250 gig drive from 2005 takes 10 full seconds.
THAT you notice. [end edit]
I look at the feature set of the entire platform.
I had to buy a system last year and I went with AMD because they had native SATA 3 controllers and USB 3 on all their boards and even though there was no guarantee Bulldozer would drop into the cutting edge boards of the time -AMD has a long history of holding the line at the board level so you can upgrade your CPU and not have to swap the board out.
At the same time intel has a long history of making you buy a new board on every refresh and had already come out and said you would need a new board for Sandy Bridge.
In some areas you do take a hit on performance but even 20 and 30% is rarely seen or felt in real world usage.
On a very limited budget where even 20 bucks counts, the average end user is probably better served getting an AMD CPU and board and plowing the buck you save into a faster drive system , SSD and RAM and you actually get better OVERALL Performance you can FEEL. Just my 2 cents folks. (ducks)
On the other end of the spectrum, If you are editing 1080 video all day or running a CAD or 3D workstation and time = money , then spending a G for a Intel Extreme 6 Core 12 Thread chip with 12-15 megs cache can be treated for what it is.
A tax write off and business expense.
For the rest of us playing around on WoW? AMD has plenty of juice for you and they are being very smart right now going for the low power envelope with products optimized for phones and tablets.
I'll take 100 million chips at 5 bucks per chip just like a million chips at 500.
IMHO, I don't think there is a million chip market for those extreme processors. It's probably 100k worldwide and that's the complete product run. Just my .02 - it's a niche product.
Meanwhile, I guarantee you that you probably bought a couple dozen OTHER processors in the last 2 years.
Look around you. XBox. PS3. DS. Phone. Tablet. The box on your TV, hell THE TV. , your GPS - etc etc, Stereo AV receiver,
You get the idea. Did you even know Texas Instruments was still alive?
Their OMAP 'system on a chip' solutions are in most of the low - mid mainstream android tabs and phones.
Half of you probably have at least 1 TI chip running around the house or car. Ditto Toshiba. Samsung.
This year some of those chips will be AMD. You can add Intel and nVidia too. |
This was 15,000 signatures for something as obscure and specific as software patents. It's not like marijuana or taxes where there is a much public support against it as for it. Those who have an opinion on the subject are most likely middle-class citizens who work in the field and directly see the issues with the current implementation.
This is something for which I would have expected them to give a well reasoned response that supported why they believe software patents are vital, but instead they didn't even attempt a response.
Instead, they decided to try to promote their new 'first-to-file' reform , which anybody who thinks about it logically will see hurts innovation. First to file means you need to file before you work on a product, since someone else can come along half-way through your development and file a patent and you're screwed. First-to-invent means you can just start working on it, and if the idea pans out you can patent, if it doesn't you don't need to waste money on the legal system.
/endrant. |
Like some of the folks here have already said, SCOTUS has been aware of the dangers of GPS tracking for a while now and though they did allow warrantless tracking devices in US v. Knotts, the court later limited that decision in US v. Karo by saying that warrantless trackers that went into locations not open to visual surveillance (homes, for example) were an intrusion egregious enough to violate the 4th Amendment. Cellphones are such an enormous part of modern culture that tracking them into homes would probably be an intrusion into personal privacy that the Court wouldn't be willing to tolerate.
What's actually a more interesting issue, at least for me, comes down to what SCOTUS will do once they have to address the issue of police searching the contents of a smartphone during an arrest, as there is a "search incident to arrest" exception to warrants. There was a 2009 decision, US v. Murphy, where the 4th Circuit said that the preservation of evidence justified an officer warrantlessly searching the call logs and text messages of a suspect during an arrest. However, because smartphones today are so sophisticated that they are essentially portable computers (and computers certainly do require warrants for a search), the Court will eventually have to address how police officers are supposed to approach searches of smartphones. |
Did you fail English or something? I have said nothing whatsoever that could possibly be construed as having a meaning anywhere CLOSE to that of what you just wrote. |
This calculation assumes people do not effect other people using wireless service in the same area. It is important to note that wireless service uses bandwidth and each cell phone tries to communicate with the tower for that honeycomb area. With more people in an area you have to have more towers, and it becomes more complicated for tower placement. If you've ever been to a major athletic event, you might have experienced this, where 100,000 cellular devices in a given area try to out-power each others transmission to communicate successfully with the tower. The wireless bandwidth of the area is oversaturated, collisions and other concerns develop. With a more urban population, you have to be very careful with tower placement, bandwidth use in a given tower area, and pay for extremely costly tower-rights. Compared to a less urban society, where you can roughly plop down towers, with only medium fiber pipes running to them, and not have to worry about specific signal attenuation profiles for the area (less stuff in the way, less wireless collisions, etc).
Lastly why do you keep comparing France to U.S. as a whole, U.S. service is shitty even in the cities. It's a pricing cartel where the participants probably don't communicate directly with each other, but still end up with high prices. AT&T is giving T-Mobile over $4,000,000,000 and won't be hurt that bad, cell service is extremely profitable for large companies in the U.S. |
It wasn't "deregulation" that caused much of the problems, but rather right of way contracts and almost universal ban on above ground cable in most US neighborhoods. Actually, the many ways that the US government subsidizes suburbanization and the lateral expansion of neighborhoods contributes to the fact that most US neighborhoods are not dense enough to make competition upon multiple providers possible.
>Also, AT&T exists thanks to government contracts.
>Without regulation, the best possible scenario results when people live in dense cities with little regulation against above ground cable and no right of way contracts. Then you have a general level of competition. If you want your suburban lifestyle subsidized, then you have to admit it.
ADMIT YOU JUST WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO SUBSIDIZE YOUR LIFESTYLE WHARRGARBL!!
Jesus H. Jones.
There's always that one reactionary who sees the word "deregulation" and assumes HE'S singlehandedly paying for the whole country to show each other LOLcats because of ANY regulation at all. My heart truly breaks for you, but here's why that argument holds no water.
Never mind that 20 years after the Congressional antitrust actions that broke up Ma Bell, Congress itself passed a law that allowed the Baby Bells to rapidly re-merge into three companies (see chart above) with a stranglehold on service, landline OR cellular.
Fed Telecom Act of 1996:
That befrigged law was sponsored by Larry Pressler, a South Dakota Republican who lost his seat in the Senate BECAUSE he sponsored it, but who then quickly got a job in the Bush II administration, first on Candidate Bush's Information Technology Steering Committee, and then on the Bush Presidential Transition Team in 2001.
Larry Pressler:
After that, he served on all manner of corporate boards including Salomon Smith Barney, which got caught submitting false bids in an attempt to purchase more Treasury bonds than permitted by one buyer during the period between December 1990 and May 1991, and was fined $290 million for this infraction, the largest fine ever levied on an investment bank at the time. Then? It eventually rebranded as Citigroup. Clearly, no flies on THEM. Job security is a wonderful thing for a "Big Swinging Dick", after all, and Pressler's law certainly earned it for him.
You are right about one thing--I'd cream my jeans if the government subsidized my lifestyle half as much as it does the telecom companies. And I quote:
"Between 2008 and 2010, Verizon received $12.3 billion in tax subsidies from the federal government and had an effective tax rate of –2.9 percent.
"In the same period, AT&T received nearly $14.5 billion in federal tax breaks, second only to Wells Fargo, which received nearly $18 billion. It had an effective tax rate of 8 percent.
"Comcast received $2 billion in tax breaks and had an effective tax rate of 20.6 percent.
"The telecom industry as a whole paid an effective tax rate of 8.2 percent during the 2008–2010 period — far below the standard 35 percent corporate tax rate."
Info on telecom corps effective tax rates:
Nearly 30 billion in breaks? Sounds like a sweetheart deal to me. How'd YOU do?
Also, the overhead lines all over every place I've lived in the urban, rural, and suburban US beg to differ with at least one of your assertions, but I can't cite that so it must be LIES, DAMN LIES, correct? |
apple most definately does, and has, pulled peoples music from their ipod devices.
No. No they don't.
>i've witnessed this in person, and recently.
No. No you haven't.
> friend of mine asked if he could install itunes on my computer to check out some new music he was thinking of buying. as soon as itunes is running and he plugs in his ipod, all his songs were removed.
When you plug an iOS device into a computer with iTunes that has never seen that device before, it asks you a few basic setup questions. One of them is if you want to automatically sync or not. Obviously, your friend chose to automatically sync that iPod with iTunes on your computer... which had zero songs in it's library... hence why his iPod then had zero songs on it.
If he didn't want to automatically sync, he shouldn't have selected this option.
>both online and telephone customer support were rude as fuck.
OK...
>apparently, with apple, you do'nt buy a product, you buy a license to access a product, and his was revoked for using itunes on a different computer than the one he had at home.
And again, this is entirely wrong.
When you purchase music on iTunes, it's yours forever. You can download it from the iTunes store using your account, as many times as you desire. All your friend had to do, was go home and sync his iPod to his computer, and all of his music would be back on his iPod. If he didn't have it on his computer anymore, he can simply re-add it from wherever he got it (importing a CD, iTunes store, piracy, etc.) Then in the future, when he plugs it into a new computer, if he doesn't want it to automatically sync with that computer's library... then don't select to automatically sync.
Basically what this comes down to is a fundamental lack of understanding on how syncing works. If you have Song A and Song B on your iPod, and then you have Song A and Song C on your computer, and you set your iPod to sync to your computer... it is going to delete Song B, and then add Song C. That is what syncing means... making things the same. In iTunes you can check little boxes next to songs and those will be synced to your devices (or not). Or even simpler, you can select to manually manage music, then no syncing takes place and you have to manually drag/drop music into your iPod (which is what I prefer to do). |
I've been thinking about this myself.
Running an e-mail server, in particular, is really tough to do on a residential internet line. If you have a dynamic IP your netblock is probably on an email blacklist.
I'd have to pay an extra $100 to get a Static IP just to run my own e-mail server. |
Apple wanted Google to update the maps app on iOS to be on par w/ Android
Google wanted more money, integration of Latitude functionality (find friends locally), extra branding of Google
Apple said screw-u-guys we gonna make our own shiddy maps app |
I love it when people assume that the way they are doing things is the only way they can be done.
The entire point was that the entire service area was within a 2 mile radius. The build out was planned to be gradual, and we were taking full advantage of an unusually dense area to avoid a large part of the "last mile" expenses.
As for the uplink, our company was already contracted with the local backbone provider (level 3 specifically), and had a substantial run into the building already.
Increasing the size of that run (or getting a redundant link) would have been fairly trivial.
We were located within pissing distance of the largest hospital in the state, so we already had access to 3 different power grids from 2 different utility providers and several options for a backbone provider.
I'm tired of summarizing the business plan here, so I'm going to stop. |
I think it depends on what we define as high speed internet.
Since satellite broadband only gets a maximum of 10 Mbps, but realistically much lower speeds than that with large caps and high prices (think $130 a month for 25 GB, or 6 movies on netflix)
The problem is the low reliability, relatively low speeds and high cost associated with wireless. Eventually when the technology like LTE becomes widespread people will have access to high speeds, but the cost will be prohibitive for many Americans. |
Basically, as has been covered and discussed for months on reddit, this will never ever actually do a fucking thing. ISPs don't give a shit. Period. If they did, they'd already be bending over to groups like MGM who out source detection to other groups, who in turn bully the ISP who in turn are supposed to bully the user, but very rarely if ever do anything, but why should they? They'll just loose business. This is so passive aggressive it's astounding. Oh god! Don't make me watch an educational video! OH NO! |
There exists a thing called multiplexing and demultiplexing. Look it up. Plus, they're entirely different interfaces, the whole point of the processor is to convert between them. |
I could not imagine any ethical or moral reason as to why one should be allowed to kill other beings...
>>I personally prefer not to be bitten by mosquitoes. Is it immoral to kill them?
>Are you asking for permission to kill and eat Mosquitos?
I think that your goal is to be absurd, so I am not sure how much energy I should put into engaging you.
>So it's only bad if I eat them? Because before you said I shouldn't be allowed to kill "beings" because of a personal preference. A mosquito is a being.
First, I didn't say anything of the sort, nor anything resembling what you should or should not do. I am a different person entirely, or, at least I have a different username ;). But /u/hostergaard didn't say it either, just that there was no moral or ethical reason to do so. You went off on your own little thing about bugs. But since you did ...
Second, is killing mosquitos because they bother you a moral or ethical decision?
I don't think it usually is. I mean, it could be, and it perhaps should be, but is it for you?
You know a mosquito is barely comparable to a cow, or pig, or chicken, or fish. It is an insect, and an animal, and living, existing. But is it a "being?" We could have an entire separate argument about what "being" is.
A mosquito exists, we agree. It has a "purpose," you may agree. It has as much "right" to exist as you or I, I suppose. You may feel differently, but I would be interested to know why.
All of us can be snuffed out in an instant with no warning. So maybe we kill bugs, maybe we kill people, too. I think killing people is worse, but does that mean killing a bug isn't bad? It can be for good, but so can killing a person. It can make your life better, or your evening more pleasant ...I diverge into homicide.
Is killing a bug ever bad? What about beneficial insects, like ladybugs? Or rare or endangered bugs? What if that bug was worth a whole lot of money alive? Or someone's pet? Lots of people have tarantulas, and other insects.
I kill ants when they try and take over my kitchen counters. I don't say a prayer or break a sweat or fell morally troubled at all. But is it "good"? I am in no rush to classify it that way. It's good when they're gone, but that can be a different discussion.
I've gone on a bit, sorry. |
amen, bro. I'm a semi-cord cutter but tried to #SaveHappyEndings, the cool ensemble comedy from cancellation for the past few months. I was met with hostility and blunt rudeness from any/all attempts to get word from ABC, and they cancelled my SHOW. |
That's the part that's hilarious. ABC is also afraid of AERO, it is a service where basically a user can rent an antennae to stream shows to any internet capable device (Phone/iPad).
I can't install an antenna/don't really want to but for a few bucks a month I can pay this company to stream any over the air content via the internet. So I can watch live US TV in Japan if I wanted.
To stop this (according to the article) ABC is threatening to pull their shows from over the air broadcast. They want to only broadcast shows to cable subscribers. |
there are three problems here that ABC is failing to recognize. First of all ABC is trying to punish the customers even though the customers are rebelling against the cable company, there monopolistic powers and there ridiculous prices. Secondly, I understand that ABC is trying to lure the customers back by making the content only available through them but if the customer cared so much they wouldn't of left the cable company to begin with. Thirdly, I would think that those that have cut the cable either do not care about TV or are technologically savvy. so this move by ABC will only increase illegal downloads and the number of citizens with the knowledge and willingness to use them. Thus creating a larger problem for the cable companies and networks by decreasing the number of possible customers. |
Endanger"
The people that would continue to drive (and yes as long as there are working manually driven cars that are road worthy there will always be manually driven cars on the road...at least in the us...i can maybe see some european countries banning them), manually for pleasure (rather than due to money, depending how much this costs) are usually many times safer than those who dislike driving. Not to mention the with the reduced amount of people getting "real" licenses, the quality of real driver training could go up and the current joke of a "test" could be made into a real test, as well as the cost of getting a real license upped. It's pitiful/tragic/genocidal the government hasn't made the process of getting a license more stringent. Also drinking+driving and blowing a fair amount over the legal limit should be lost license for life, any multiples at all over and same. |
That last line sums up everything that I, and most people, think. It's the |
One could have anticipated the changes and moved from brick and mortar to an online retail system ala amazon.
Really the only reason I go to Best Buy is to actually see the device in person.
Didn't really take a wizard to see how great Amazon could become. Just took an investment. They probably didn't want to reinvest and be on the line of both their brick and mortar and website failed to draw equally and not enough capital to cover both. Unfortunately for a lot of these companies, their stockholders are too shortsighted to care and invest in it properly, and now it's too late for them. |
If you downloaded the torrent from a reputable tracker then there is a near zero chance of getting a virus. If the tracker webpage has a comment section then the virus would be exposed quickly and seeds would stop. If it has a trusted uploader system then it reduces the chances even further. And finally, if the torrent was uploaded by the content creator, like if VLC was seeded directly by VideoLAN, then there is no way for anyone to insert a virus into the torrent because of checksums and such.
Torrents are probably safer for downloading .exe files than regular websites. When you google a program you want to install and you find it on a site like download.com or cnet.com or whatever, you will usually get at the minimum a bunch of bloatware like toolbars and potentially virus's since there are no checks in place to ensure they are virus free. |
I agree that there are plenty of baby boomers that led the charge on the technology revolution, and know more than most of the techies of the younger generations. The problem is that they didn't grow up with it, so the majority don't instinctively think of using technology to automate stuff. I was in the same position as RebuildingTime in my last job, except my boss knew how to use excel to calculate the stuff, he just didn't even think of it. He wasn't spending hours a week, maybe just half an hour a week calculating stuff. When I put together an excel spreadsheet to calculate it for him, he told me he should have thought of that years ago, but it just never occurred to him because he had been doing it that way for so long. |
But you wouldn't give them more money then the cable companies are.
If HBO sold there shows directly to the customer they might make more money but it would be more variable. They would only make a lot of money on the good original shows.
On the other hand if they go through the cable providers they get a large guaranteed chunk of money on a ongoing basis. |
But you wouldn't give them more money then the cable companies are.
If HBO sold there shows directly to the customer they might make more money but it would be more variable. They would only make a lot of money on the good original shows.
On the other hand if they go through the cable providers they get a large guaranteed chunk of money on a ongoing basis. |
If HBO sold there shows directly to the customer they might make more money but it would be more variable. They would only make a lot of money on the good original shows.
On the other hand if they go through the cable providers they get a large guaranteed chunk of money on a ongoing basis. |
If HBO sold there shows directly to the customer they might make more money but it would be more variable. They would only make a lot of money on the good original shows.
On the other hand if they go through the cable providers they get a large guaranteed chunk of money on a ongoing basis. |
Wow, such a good internet samaritan! You two really are making life better for all of us.
Of course, if you take 30 seconds to think about why PayPal survives, it's actually very simple: they make it easy and relatively risk free for the people paying. There are, as I'm sure you're aware, far more people looking to buy things on the internet than sell things. As such, keeping the critical mass of buyers happy is more important than keeping the sellers happy. |
I'm going to tell you why people can't boycott paypal. It essentially has a monopoly within the United States, is used majorly for ebay and other big companies as well for virtual payments. Moneybookers is my prefered payment method however their marketing in the U.S. is virtually zero, you can't add money to moneybookers from your bank account, however you can receive from others and transfer to your bank account, not from. That within itself is a major problem. (Google wallet is the biggest fuck up because it has NO CUSTOMER SUPPORT) *I love google products but that was just a fuck up plain and simply. I have to say that this moneybookers problem is only within the United States, internationally it does great especially in the EU. I was hoping moneybookers would do great in the United States but they're not stepping up to the plate. |
I fucking hate when people do this. Every redditor knows how to google. When someone asks a question here they are looking for the collective knowledge of the people to give them an answer that google cannot. I could google alternatives to paypal and spend 30 minutes reading up on advantages and disadvantages, or I could just ask someone who has had experience on the matter who has already put time into it. |
I never used to understand the hate people had for paypal, before i had to deal with them myself.
My account which I had not used in a while was taken over. I had ~$5 on it, so it was more of a blow to my ego then my wallet. I never bothered reporting it, I figured $5 wasn't worth the hassle. Instead I changed the password, removed the new mail that was added and got on with my life. About a month later i get a mail. Your account has been locked for making illegal transactions.
At this point I'm not mad at them, I understood why they would lock my account. But then 6 months later i get a mail telling me me my account is unlocked. I login(which i couldn't do before that) and found my account was frozen. Which means you can't use it for anything.
I check the transaction history: nothing new. I figure it must have been that transaction. Since all my other transactions where old transactions to the same company, once a month paying for a MMO subscription. So i create a "unauthorized account activity" ticket for that one transaction, in hopes of get my account unfrozen. A few days later I get this response:
>Through careful research of your claim, PayPals Fraud Team has determined
the transaction(s) you submitted do not represent unauthorized account
activity because they are consistent with your accounts transaction
history.
Getting a unpersonal robot response claiming they did a "careful" investigation. When in my eyes they couldn't have, made my blood boil. I never really cared much about the $5. What I really wanted was to get my account back. After that mail, my trust in them was lost. I knew I wouldn't deposit any cash again. So I decided I was done with them.
4 years later I still haven't created a new account. And if paypal is the only payment option I still ask myself if I really want the product before buying. |
The list in the comment you replied to goes like this:
bad, okay, okay, good, good, good, bad, good, good, bad, good, good, bad, good, and finally okay, because people have differing opinions on W8.
If we count them, the score ends up like this:
4 bad
3 okay
8 good
There's over half that are good, and only 26.6% of Windows releases are bad. |
I honestly believe a lot of Redditors believe XP should be alive and supported 10-20 years from now.
I can speak only for myself, but yes, I stand firmly in that camp. The endless cycle of operating system obsolescence-for-obsolescence's sake is a Bad Thing in many different ways.
it is clearly driven by corporate greed: for all that the public claims to hate big corporations and ten-digit CEO salaries, most people complacently accept indignity after indignity from those same corporations, and reward the behavior by continuing to pump more money into the corporate coffers. It doesn't make practical sense to replace an entire computer in perfect working order just because some corporate entity has decreed that you shall. Do people like being sheep? I can only assume that they do .
The success of this business model has encouraged corporations to apply it in many other areas. I just bought a new "smart TV" (and yes, I feel like a hypocrite). It has direct wifi access to a huge panoply of content services--90% of which turn out to charge a fee. Even at "only" $5 or $10 a month apiece, who can afford to pay for more than a small fraction of them? On the other hand, most people clearly think nothing of paying several hundred dollars a month for cell phones, cable TV, etc. So maybe another couple hundred bucks a month for a couple dozen other services is no big deal for most. All I can say is, these people had better be spending only what's left over after they've contributed to their IRAs each month--becaise I don't want to hear them all "crying poor," thirty years from now when they "can't afford to retire.". Sorry, people--you spent it all on smart phones and tablets back in the 'teens.
By forcing the discarding of still-functional hardware, these practices accelerate the consumption of resources that are going to run out--we used to vaguely wave a hand and say "sooner or later," but now it's simply "soon." Reddit itself a few years ago linked an infographic showing how many years' worth of various resources were left in the earth (mines, etc.). It was shocking: there were less than ten years' worth of some things. Look it up. I feel sorry for those of you who have young children: lots of things we take for granted are going to disappear in their lifetimes. It won't be long 'til our descendants are "mining" metals by picking through our landfills for discarded razorblades, paperclips, and other such scraps. Some form of this is already a way of life in some third world countries, and eventually it will be everywhere.
a lot of crucial infrastructure is heavily dependent on equipment that Microsoft, et al, no longer support, but which also cannot be replaced because it uses--or controls--some sort of specialized peripheral hardware. I've seen $70,000 oscilloscopes based on Windows 2000. I've been scouted by companies whose entire business is dependent on some sort of industrial controller for which there haven't been drivers since Windows 98. I know of a hospital emergency room in which every treatment bay has a PC that still has a floppy drive; I don't know what version of Windows they're running, but I would be surprised if it's as new as XP. If nothing else, just how much less at-risk might be your very own healthcare if hospitals could still get support for their computers.
That's just what I can come up with off the top of my head; I could probably dig up more if I took time to really think about it.... |
It bit the driver/software compatibility/hardware requirement bullet for windows 7.
Installing laptop drivers in XP was a huge pain that, as computer shop employee, we had to fix a lot.
Windows 7 was so much more compatible and I very much liked that. And I suppose Vista had the same since it used the same method, downloading drivers via Windows Update.
But. Try this again in 2014 please. Try installing Windows 7 on a random, new laptop that came with Windows 8. The XP time is back guys, we can install everything from LAN to WiFi drivers again, and even then it won't recognize this completely ordinary geforce card.
Also, just for fun, prepare a USB stick with GNU/Linux on it. Any GNU/Linux system. Perhaps download Linux Mint, write it to a USB stick with Universal Usb Installer and do a live boot. It has drivers for LAN, WiFi, those "SMBus" devices that always go awry in Windows, and even mentions "hey I have this closed-source nvidia driver for you, do you want to install it?".
Going one step further, try connecting a mouse to Windows. A simple, off-the-shelf USB mouse. Windows will go and look for drivers and lo and behold, two minutes later you can use your mouse. From now on it'll recognize it, as long as you plug it into the same USB port (wtf?).
Try the same thing with that Linux Mint boot. It'll recognize the mouse instantly and you can't move your hands fast enough from the USB port to the mouse or it has already recognized it. |
I've aggressively purged work of Windows XP and Server 2003
Windows 7 was the cure. The computers that ran XP were failing left and right due to age and although we never got a virus due to me being an awesome and somewhat paranoid admin, I always feared its lack of security compared to NT6 platforms (Vista, 7, 8).
On the server, Fedora Linux was the cure for our Server 2003 ills. I now deal with a LOT less BS on the server side. It just works .
We had a small funeral for XP....the eulogy consisted of talking about how much better our new Core i5s were compared to our old Athlon 64s and how awesome 7 was. Good night and good riddance Windows XP! |
If you're going to count all the minor update OS's for apple you really need to count the SP updates for Windows. Apples to Apples. We can even leave off the minor service packs.
XP SP2
Vista SP1
8 SP1 .1
So to be fair I would say it is 7 to 10. I could also knock down some of the Apple revisions as being no more than "minor" service packs but I don't want to argue over petty differences and what makes it significant. |
God damn it Microsoft. You basically told wanna be hackers how to hack XP using security updates for newer OSes. Then press release the fact that this could happen, in an attempt to get money from people as they flocked to newer OSes. When they didn't just hand you cash in droves you then pretty much said "fuck 'em". |
Wrong again, please stop. I do say "Oh my God", because it is a common expression, I also say anything I want without projecting any ancient moral or societal constructs. I am a human. I used to hate all religions, but this was a result of a life I don't have the time nor intention to share with you. But I outgrew it, I don't hate anything anymore, because hate is dangerous. Hate hurts you just as much as the thing you hate.
I am a nihilist at the moment, I don't believe in any purpose. The only thing I believe in is that the world would be a better place without religions. Am I wrong? Maybe. But compare it to the religous dogmas and promises, the ancient morals and futile attempts at adjustment to a scientifically minded society. My belief sounds a lot more reasonable, doesn't it.
Well, let's wrap it up. I am a human being and I am a slave of my emotions. But I can observe them and decide whether to act on them. I admit that I sometimes feel superior to other people or frustrated with their stupidity and illogical thoughts, but I don't act on it. I don't profess it and take it out on them. I analyze on my thoughts and realize that we are all apes on a rock flying through space and there is no divine purpose. Anyone can do anything, I have stopped judging.
There is a giant void gaping in the middle of everyone. Some fill it with the divine, others with stimulants and I used to fill it with a video game addiction. But if you allow your mind to wander in the deepest corners of your consciousness, if you stare in the void of existentialism, you find that the nothingness stares back. |
I am one of those people who will keep buying digital cameras and DSLRs.
This is the key sentence. Once you will become one of those few people companies will stop producing affordable mid range equipment as it will not be profitable or affordable for them anymore. Basic economy - you can make cheaper shit the more people buy it because it follows economy of scale. You will still have high end market and it might even become more varied and affordable because mid range is slowly dying out. But mark my words - once you will be one of few it will be gone from market once supplier can't make a profit. Supply can not keep the same price if demand falls. And people will be more and more discouraged as their smartphones will at least partially fulfill their photography needs and better cameras will not make sense to them from economical point of view.
>Even with giant sensors, no smartphone can replace these things for me and I doubt ever will at at. At least not in the next 8-10 years. Who knows though. Maybe I'll be surprised.
SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER! You do not control the market in this case the majority that will be satisfied with "good enough" phone pics do.
"And this is where I would put my new low-mid range digital camera if they made any."
If you still will want low-mid range you will be forced to buy it with a phone attached. |
I think Blue Ocean is at work here.
Rather than say "objective camera quality is the primary value in the market for cameras", and thus extrapolating "a camera of inferior quality is not valuable in the market", a 'market based value' would be, 'what best allows purchasers of cameras to fulfill their desires'?
And here we go with 99% of camera purchasers: they want to take pictures of themselves and others.
Whatever fulfills that obligation for the best price at the highest convenience will earn their dollars.
This is why digital beat print (instant results & sharing), and why smartphones are now beating digital (convenience & continuity of services-sharing, storing, uploading, putting on a mug for an xmas gift).
The market for professional photography still exists-they are the 1% :-) But people vote with their dollars, and the market shift is evidence that objective camera quality is simply not a driver for the majority of consumers. |
Typical displays refresh what is on the screen at a set interval (most at 60 times per second). Graphics cards render frames in an animation as quickly as possible, and it varies (80 times one second, then a big explosion in game drops it to 30 the next). This constant mismatch results in tearing (the display was half way done showing one frame, the graphics card sends it the next one, so the display drops what its doing and draws the second half of the next one). This tech lets the monitor refresh itself at the same pace as the graphics card, so you don't get said tearing. |
Actually several municipalities in the US have done this . Chattanooga, TN was one of the first to offer gigabit speeds and now more municipalities are following suit. Local legislators from Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Ireland, Brazil, as well as from all over the US have come to Chattanooga to see how they did it. There are over 180 communities in the US with publicly owned fiber service to at least part of the metro area, and 40 communities with a publicly owned network that offers at least 1 Gb speeds.
In addition to municipalities starting their own gigabit networks, [public private partnerships]( are expanding. The one linked will be installing gigabit networks in 6 cities within the next couple years. It is a coalition of universities who decided private providers are not innovating fast enough. There are other public/private coalitions like this.
In addition to G^2 installing fiber on Chicago's south side, the city is pulling its own fiber as part of a sewer revitalization project to help offer lower cost of installing the fiber. So between both efforts, much of the city will have upgraded speeds. Other cities are pulling fiber as part of construction projects to help lower the cost of fiber installation as well. |
Let's see. I make a statement that says the US has laws preventing municipal broadband. You go off on a tangent about how the US did it first and we have it in few these places, something that I was not addressing in my original post at all. I mean shit if you're going to argue you should at least argue on topic at hand, you know about the fact that we have codified laws outlawing municipal broadband, not who did it first or are places fighting these laws.
Plus since we're taking about intellectual assumptions, your |
True.. For some reason though I imagined the elevator zipping off to space at mind blowing speeds (like 10km/s kinda speeds). With that kind of velocity the forces due to acceleration on the 'tether' wouldn't be irrelevant in my opinion. I suppose I should've said something more along the lines of "depends how fast you want to move a given mass"? |
Worked for Verizon customer service for 6 months, they have so much money but they don't care, the Call waiting queue at around 2PM there are ~600 callers waiting to be helped, this queue status is like that every day for around 4 hours, all other hours there are also people in queue but less than 200. I also saw so many fees, and increase in pricing that is just ridiculous. We were given training on HOW to read billing statements, that's just how stupid they make them, customer more likely are confused by their statement.
On the other hand when I worked for Apple (iOS Tech Support), there where no people waiting in queue, all Advisors were in the States, Apple calling queue closes at 9PM on weekdays, 8 PM Sat/Sun. At around 9AM the queue status is like 4-6 minutes between calls, at 2PM it goes to 6-15 minutes because that's when most advisors are available, after 6PM There are 500+ Advisors waiting for a call with times of 15-20 minutes between calls, where most of them are off at 8, some at 8:30, some at 9, and the "closers" at 9:30, since the queue closes at 9, from 9 to 9:30 we did nothing, the only calls you get at that time are from 3rd party companies that have the direct number, like Phone carriers and stuff.
The first month of a big update, like iOS 6 or 7, or a big release like iPhone 5 or iPad Mini, the max time a customer may have waited in like for an advisor may have been 20-30 minutes. This busy status was only for like 2 hours, but that doesn't mean they waited 20 minutes each, more like 5-10 minutes of peak busy time, and like 1-10 minute wait time the rest. From 10AM-12PM all other hours there was no wait in queue. ( All times are Pacific )
Apple for years have had top customer satisfaction on their customer service over the phone, which I think is because of how much attention to detail they have for the customers, the thing I loved the most about working there, no scripts, all they tell you is, "greet the customer, be courteous, be yourself, help them resolve the issue" (not "their" issue, but "the" issue). |
My wife just asked me why the Verizon bill went up again. I haven't had time to investigate it but we just recently got rid of a top box we don't use and turned off our premium channels, except HBO, to try to save some money. Of course we couldn't do this without changing our plan and since the speeds we had were 35/35 they only offer 15/5 or 50/25 now so I was forced to upgrade my speed. They wanted me to sign a two year contract to save $5 a month. That is $120 savings over 2 years, who the heck cares?
Also, it is funny they mention that battery in the box. My box in the garage started beeping I thought it was a smoke alarm. I finally figured out it was the battery needing to be changed. I looked it up and it is so you can have phone service when the power goes out. We don't have phone service with them so I dealt with the beeping. I think it went away now that I am writing about it. Its been a year. I'm not cheap but why spend the money fixing something I will never use.
Also pictures quality is shit. Pixelation is getting worse in the 6 years I've had Verizon now.
Edit: One more thing that is funny about the article I have also bought a second router and set it up as a bridge because the one they gave me can not reach the head of my bed. I would have to move to the foot and load my MDCU comic and then sit back and read on my iPad. |
That's what Intel said about the cpuid instruction when it came out "Oh, that software accessible unique per chip id query instruction will be user controlled, disable in bios if you want and a reboot will be necessary to enable it again".
Yeah about that... hackers (Chaos Computer Club) discovered you can reenable and disable to your heart's content on a running system. |
Here's a point of view to contrast with all the paranoid, anti-government types:
Both sides introduce stupid bills all the time which aim to solve one problem, but in a worst-case scenario could be used for some terrible, unintended purpose.
This isn't happening because every level of government is made up of Trotsky-esque totalitarian dictator wanna-be's; rather it's made of people who see a problem/whose constituents alert them to a problem (digital devices being the primary target of armed robbers in that area) and introduce a bill to fix that problem (if there's the ability to deactivate the device, and people take advantage of it, the robbers will soon find themselves with a pile of bricked devices they can't move for profit) without taking a moment to think about the possible, creative uses that paranoid shut-ins will come up with after reading half of an article with a misleading title.
Possibly, the people introducing the bill may be a little ignorant on the subject of technology as well, but I'm sure if they were to bring in an "industry insider", there'd be a whole other, darker narrative to this.
Elected officials are still people, and they make mistakes, don't fully understand issues, and can't imagine the ripple effect or envision the entire set of more villainous uses that such a bill may have.
Now, you asked why CA "[keeps doing] these kinds of things"? Probably because its an incredibly diverse, geographically large, and populous state with a huge variety of interests and industry, so you're going to see a huge variety of things that affect one area being blanket-applied across the state. Laws that affect Mexican immigrants, water limits, taxation, and such are applied across areas that are as diverse as small farming communities to rich and sprawling gated communities where the Silicon Valley elite are, suburban areas created by white flight and the inner-city areas inhabited primarily by minorities (and trustafarian hipsters gentrifying the areas back). This bill is being introduced by a senator representing the SF Bay Area, an incredibly population-rich area with above average wealth, high acceptance of technology, great income diversity, and pockets of high crime, and I can just imagine that quite often muggings are happening (I know that phones get stolen all the time), and this bill might serve as a deterrent to those criminals committing these crimes. So, back to your first question, CA introduces a huge variety of bills to solve a huge variety of issues; not all of them (in fact, very very few) pass; CA simply isn't the mono-culture that a state like Idaho, Montana, or <name your fly-over/bible belt state here> is.
As for your second question, how much more power...to the government and police, I'd suggest you read the article:
> The proposed bill, a copy of which was seen by IDG News Service, doesn't specify the kill-switch technology. Carriers or phone makers will be able to design their own system in software, hardware or a combination of both, but once activated it should prevent phone calls, Internet access and the ability to run apps.
> Users should have the option of deactivating it if they don't want the protection
So under the first draft of this bill the government isn't mandating a centrally located server that every phone in CA must register with that's stored in Nancy Pelosi's basement, but rather a system that is designed by and specific to each carrier. Furthermore, users can individually disable the feature if they don't want the option. On top of that:
> Apple introduced its iOS7 operating system with an activation lock feature. Samsung also responded to his call by installing the "Lojack for Mobile Devices" software on some of its phones
So two of the (if we're being honest, biggest) phone manufacturers on the market have already created these systems and have had them in place even before the bill has been proposed because if there's one thing Silicon Valley is good at, it's making sure that they're nimble enough to ensure that the government introduces as few bills as possible regulating them. |
Right. Some consumers may want this feature added to their devices, and that's great. But that change should come from a dialog between the manufacturers and an informed consumer base. The state of California should have nothing to say about this feature being mandatory because there is no genuine or serious public saftey threat associated with stolen cell phones. Unlike seatbelts or ingredient labels on food where people's lives could be saved by these features, the government/police would be adding control features to your gear without a demonstrable threat to public welfare. |
It's important to note that this comparison only measures the company's operational energy usage, not the impact of the products they produce.
Apple has made huge strides to be able to claim they only use renewable energy to produce their products, even though the products themselves may create a lot of e-waste.
Apple deserves the recognition for using more renewable energy than any other tech company in their industry, but calling them "the greenest" might be a stretch. It's my opinion that more things need to be taken into consideration than renewable energy use to accurately determine "how green" a company is, but Greenpeace didn't include e-waste in this comparison. |
The Internet is shitty on campus for reasons beyond TWC. I want you to go to a library computer and run a speedtest. Or even run a speed test on your computer with an ethernet cord. The library being the best case, you'll probably pull 800 mbps down (that is not a typo). Internet on campus isn't being destroyed by the TWC demons. In fact, we likely have the fastest Internet in the state. It has much more to do with an inability to combat network congestion and poor network logistics.
Think about this, when you get to class early in Whitehall you don't have a problem loading Yik Yak or anything else on your devices, do you? Yet right before class starts everything slows to a crawl. Teachers have trouble loading Web pages and start the ritual complaints about noncompliant technology. This is because even two current generation MIMO routers (the routers we have are from last year, they're okay but not the best of today either) struggle desperately to handle an estimated 200-300 smartphones simultaneously polling in to connect automatically along with the hundred other laptops and tablets in the room. This action alone can cripple the network, let alone everyone trying to check Facebook.
Now let's take a walk across campus with our phones. As we move, our phones switch from router to router automatically because all routers (outside of the ancient ukyresnet network) operate under the ukyedu SSID. This is convenient for the average laymen as they don't need to choose any wifi network on campus more than once, but we all like to check emails and that doesn't work when you're moving away from the router you're requesting packets from. Your phone will time out the request, reconnect to another router and try again. Even with fast network speeds this throws a wrench in performance. If you have a newer phone and never experience this your phone probably has a smart network switch feature.
Lastly, there's the subject of dorm networks. Simply put, the University didn't want to spend an extra $40,000 (iirc) a dorm on decent routers and switches, so they just got the normal ones in bulk from TWC and placed one in every room (this varies from dorm to dorm and is likely not exactly the case in the new dorm) for a lot of the dorms. This results in tons of channel overlap and interference. In addition, your devices can get just as confused about which router to stay connected to when the signal quality has a sudden drop from the aforementioned interference. |
Years ago some scientists strapped a monkey's arms to it's side and implanted a controller into the base of his brain for a robotic arm. They put an apple in front of it and it flailed around until realizing that it could control the robot arm. It eventually had no problem feeding itself with the arm, the brain just kinda figured it out.
There are programs where you wear a headset and focus on moving an on-screen box. Subjects can move it around the screen with just a little bit of practice, the hard part is making the box disappear since we don't naturally have that ability. The same principles could be used for programming extra arms to function. |
there is so much negativity towards him in this thread over this... I'm not sure I understand why.
Don't worry, reddit always shits on any new potential product, development, design, idea, etc. Don't take it too personally, most of the dissenters are too insecure to accomplish much in their own lives and need to pout and put others down to compensate. |
CPA, here.
Tesla is only 12-years-old. Some could still classify it as a start up, and negative cash flow is expected in a company's infancy. Makes sense given their investments in manufacturing/infrastructure. Between [2012 and 2013]( total assets more than doubled -- and revenues quadrupled. Once they start paying down some of their debt and reducing cash investments, cash flow will quickly turnaround. |
Tesla - and indeed cars like them, need to be the future. It is foolish to assume that we should sit on this dated technology that we know is negatively effecting our environment. No one is questioning that the industrial revolution wasn't amazing. It was an incredible time for technology, and we managed to do amazing things.
However, this type of technology is the next in-line to be revolutionised. 'Green' technology certainly isn't where it needs to be. It isn't as affordable as hydrocarbons, but it isn't going to get there unless we make investments in the advancement of the technology. I for one, think that it is incredible that this guy has taken it upon himself; to risk so much, with the goal of creating technology for the future. This is a guy that built a space program, a fully electric car and has ambitions to do so many other things that will make all of our lives better.
It's incredibly hard to argue that Elon does this only for his own benefit. The guy has put a great deal of his own money into these projects, and risks losing it all just so that the world can be a better place (as per Elon's standards.)
This is something Governments should be investing in - this is something we should all be investing in. Because we need to do something. The benefits far outweigh any kind of monetary reward that could be received if Tesla sold out on their objective and focused solely on profits. |
Togetherness, Veep, True Detective, Silicon Valley, John Oliver, Vice, and Hard Knocks are all top notch current shows.
From the back catalog, Deadwood, Rome, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Newsroom, Eastbound & Down, The Wire, Flight of the Conchords, and Da Ali G Show are all worth watching beginning to end. The Larry Sanders Show was just amazing and way ahead of its time, but I don't think it's included in HBO Go, and don't know about the possibility of it coming to Go or Now. |
That is true. Everyone seems to think that when Goolge announces that they're coming to a city, it just magically gets hooked up. I live in Kansas City, and it took them two years AFTER the announcement just to offer sign-ups in my area. It has now been over a year since the whole rally and "Yeah, our Fiberhood is getting it," and I received an e-mail last week saying that I should be hooked up by September. |
I switched from AT&T to my cities internet. AT&T was charging me prices for speeds that I never got. I was probably getting about half on a good day and when I called them about it they told me they couldn't give the speed they offered in my area. Not sure how that's legal... |
I've been 100% pleased with my FiOS for the last 4 years, even brought my account with me through a move. They even gave me free HBO after downgrading my TV package to basic (from deluxe). That was a year ago and I still watch HBO almost everyday. |
Skepticism is fine. In order to be a good skeptic you need to attack supporting evidence for an idea or point out a lack of evidence supporting an idea.
The person who he is responding to gave no details on why it was bad and made pretty bold claims of their own that now need to be supported, which they did not do. This is not the hallmark of a skeptic. It is the mark of either a troll or someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. Or maybe a really shitty skeptic I guess...
Maybe you think the internet can be run better but saying that net neutrality, the way the internet has been run up until now, will kill Netflix is getting up to the "pants on head" level of stupidity.
; |
I want to preface this by saying that I am a supporter of net neutrality.
However, I have a problem with the first conceit in this argument. He asserts that data is data, and implies that there is no difference between delivery of 1GB of text data, and 1GB of video data.
I can say with certainty after three years trying to keep a data server delivering video to clients in a continuous, unbroken, high quality stream, that is it much harder than sending a gig's worth of text, image, or any other data.
It isn't about the data itself, of course - it is about the customer's expectation of and use of the data when they receive it.
I will agree with the telcos that sending a 1GB text or image file to a user in a way that enables that user to view that information in a satisfactory manner is totally different from maintaining a continuous data stream to play back video at a satisfactory quality.
Should they charge more for streaming video? No. They shouldn't even know the difference. My data is my data and the telcos should keep their noses out of it.
Should they use the fund congress provided to improve network speeds and data handling? Yes.
Should they stop focusing on delivering the slowest possible network speeds at the highest possible cost, make improvements to customer service, and become companies that consumers want to use? Yes.
But I have to agree: because the receiving customer's expectation of data behavior is different for high quality video than it is for most other types of data, the delivery requirements and network behavior must also be different. |
This is the biggest thing that upsets me in this debate. All these "technical" redditors don't understand that streaming quality video without interruption is significantly different than text/image files. I'm not making excuses for ISPs but yeah, I can see where they're coming from. What they need to do is upgrade their infrastructure to handle it though. Changing world, changing demand, then need to supply a product that people want. This is where the FCC steps in and forces them to comply. |
Except utility status will regulate the shitty practices of the current players in the market. As far as new competitors and innovation are concerned, I have Google Fiber and can tell you that the infrastructure currently in place is so far beyond what normally connected users can even imagine. I'm not even worried about innovation in the near future and when that day does come, we will be able to sort it out. |
Well, the thing is, almost every cable company in the U.S. is already a monopoly in the cities it services. It dates back to the earliest days of cable TV when it was decided that cable TV was a "natural monopoly" like, say, the water company. Each local cable company (no matter if it served 200 cities overall or just one) paid to wire up the entire city, right to everyone's doorstep - an exceedingly expensive endeavor - and in return each city gave them an exclusive right to provide cable in that town. (You have to remember we're talking about the early 1970s in most cases here. Nobody ever expected cable companies would ever be offering more than 12-15 channels or so, much less Internet service.)
So here we are 40+ years later, but the underlying facts are still the same. The company paid to build and maintain the local cable infrastructure to every last house, and as such they still have those exclusivity agreements. It's only dumb luck that it turned out cable lines were also the best way to provide broadband internet service.
So the |
I suppose I draw a distinction between TV and Internet videos that you don't.
TV, to me, involves TV networks and TV production values and all of those corporate top-down assumptions. Those budgets require large-scale advertising, which demands every show appeal to a very broad audience.
Internet videos are most like public access TV, if they're like TV at all: Everyone can come, everyone can act or rant or just melt down, everyone can have 15 minutes of fame. Nobody really has control and nobody really has a budget. The shoestring budgets mean the creators are beholden to nobody and can target as few people as they want. |
rant
As OperaFanboy I always liked Firefox vs Opera flamewars. Then Chrome came out and I see all these firefox users starting to switch for one and only attribute - speed. Which as for Opera vs firefox flamewars has always been on Opera's side.
Anyway these firefox-->chrome users seems to me as, hmmm how to say it and not to offend them, hmmm lets go with: not so tech savvy.
You had firefox and you don't miss Ad block? Speed dial over which you have control and are not at whim of the browser? Mouse gestures? I just cant live without mouse gestures I end up doing them in total commander or in windows. Integrated email client? Bookmarks synchronization? And hundreds of small things... And remember I am opera user, firefox has ton of addons I don't really know of...
Compared to options, settings, preferences of Opera or firefox, chrome sucks big time. I give him speed, but over my opera 10.10 its just a little faster and all the things I would miss would make me 10x slower.
[btw here is little old test of speed, where opera actually won by small fraction](
Anyway I think Chrome will eventually get addons and stuff but then it wont be that fast and people that switched for it already, wont use them anyway. Smart people are not the target demographics of google chrome. Ah and now this privacy issue.... |
When will the gov't learn to stop messing with the internet? It's great how it is and would benefit from MINOR tweaking on the pricing of said service. seriously...this isn't a "level playing field" bill, it's the "we're calling it a dog and giving you flaming turd" bill. |
I glanced at the page. Yeah, he is complaining about how thumbnails images are set. But, it's an online social media application + video viewer. So I'm surprised at that complaint at all.
He is specifically complaining about the post to boxee-proxy.appspot.com which goes to thetvdb.com to get images. He mentions wanting to go back to XBMC to avoid this issue, but he is in for a surprise when he scrapes his library, XBMC is set to scrape directly to thetvdb.com. |
The answer to this (implied) question ("Why?!?") is that Korea was so far ahead of the curve WRT Internet banking that 128-bit SSL hadn't been implemented in browsers, so the government created an IE plug-in and mandated it for use in transactions. Remember back then? Netscape had lost, Mozilla was in nightlies, and Phoenix Firebird Firefox hadn't been started. It was pretty much an IE web. The government also set itself as IE-only.
Fun fact: The Korean web is quite insular. Few people use hotmail, yahoo, or gmail -- they use hanmail, naver, or other Korean mail systems. Google isn't popular. Naver and Daum are Yahoo!-like portals that have public transportation, maps, government forms, and everything else. They are also the big search engines. In fact, the number one search on Google Zeitgeist from Korea is normally "naver." The number two in "daum." That's right, Koreans apparently just accidentally get google and their first move is to go to Naver or Daum.
Not web-related, the ATM system is the same. Good luck trying to get money out of a Korean bank when you're not in Korea. Cirrus? Visa? MC? Amex? Pshaw! |
I couldn't get past page 2... can somebody kindly |
merika fuck yeah praise jeebus watch your mouth around my children that young lady's skirt is too short don't be a slut yes your brother could date at your age but not you because you're a girl and it's 'different' plymouth rock puritans jeebus jeebus jeebus jeebus fucking morons I wish they'd die.
Fuck. |
Oh god you guys are so hilarious circlejerking. Downvote me all you want but this is what I hate most about reddit; the overly-sensationalized articles being spewed everyday.
Listen, it's illegal for the government to spy on citizens, and it's especially illegal for the government to spy on you in your homes or private places. In public places, you have no privacy. Nada. It's always been like that
Who gives a shit if there's a drone in the air monitoring you walking around the streets? Do you really think the government is going to waste an already expensive and small team of people to spy on millions of people? Fuck no, because that's ridiculous. Why would the gov't care about you unless you were a criminal/threat?
Cameras exist on our streets monitoring our every moves. There are cameras that scan license plates as cars drive by placed in and around my university to check for criminals. I guarantee you there are cameras around sensitive buildings around our nation that utilize many technologies such as facial recognition. |
In java you have to say what your variable type is on both sides of the equal sign on both sides of the equal sign redundantly. Repeating things so many times for no other reason then to remind you of how the internal workings work can really be annoying just to remind you how the internal processes work when much less verbiage could imply all of the information necessary and save thousands of hours typing and line space. |
Yet they can protect works from piracy
They can try, but it is ultimately a losing battle. Look at the games industry legitimate customers can often get screwed by DRM and draconian anti piracy schemes. Whilst the pirates enjoy a completely hassle free experience.
> and they are probably going to ramp those efforts up more and more.
Actually trends seem to be going in the opposite direction and going DRM free in quite a few cases.
I think Gabe Newell said it best, piracy is a service issue. They need to offer better services and compete with piracy. They need to wake up and realize the world is no longer a segmented marketplace but a global market these days. More over they need to wake up and realize that a download does not equal a lost sale. There has been countless countless times i have downloaded something, be it a movie, game, ebook or music and then gone out of my way to buy it afterwards because i enjoyed it.
A few examples off the top of my head:
Movies:
Stop with the regional release dates. We in Australia for example do not get to see Wreck It Ralph in the cinemas until the end of this month, where as it has been out in the states for a while now. Another prime example is Wall-E Australia got it six months after the states did.
The quality of going to the cinemas has slipped dramatically not only is it incredibly expensive (Not to mention ridiculousness fees. Convenience fee to book and print my movie ticket at home? wtf!)
Forcing unskippable ads on purchased DVD/Blu-Ray that can go for 10+ minutes, that really makes me want to reconsider future purchases.
Region restrictions for online content, need i say anything? Because really what the hell.
TV Studios and networks: (Some of these apply more to the Australian networks, specifically the first three)
Stop moving shows around randomly and moving them to different slots with zero notice
Shows should start and finish at the advertised time! I am so sick of having the beginning and end of shows cut off because the previous show runs 10-20 minutes late.
The shows that do make it to the Australian networks can sometimes be delayed by up to a year before they are even shown down under.
Regional restrictions on online content. This is much much worse for tv shows, if we in Australia had services like Hulu i would pay for it in an instant. The problem is worse because a lot of the shows i actually like will never be broadcast by the Australian networks. I would happily pay to be able to watch some of these shows. Oh wait whats this only available to people living in the US? Well they have made it crystal clear they don't want my money so i have no other choice but to resort to acquiring it illegally.
All forms of media:
Regional pricing. It makes sense on paper to a degree i guess but in the real world all it does is piss people off and as a result they will either import from the grey market, pirate it or just not play it. No way in hell am i paying an extra 30-50% on top of the price because I live in Australia. This shouldn't even be an issue when buying online with zero shipping after all.
If i want to buy or watch something online legally the amount of hoops to jump through to find where it is on their own damn sites is ridiculous.
Those are just a few examples off the top of my head. If the studios, networks and publishers want to survive and have an impact on piracy they need to start competing with it by offering much improved services. Just look at the success of Steam and the Steam Sales as a prime example of it all.
At the end of the day piracy will never and can never be squashed entirely, by focusing on legal action and eroding our freedoms instead of looking at their own unwillingness to adapt to a changing world more and more people will be driven underground where nothing can be done at all. Some profit is better then none right? |
Indeed!
And if people want to celebrate the birth of Jesus, than good for them.
Also, if other people want to celebrate christmas as a time to sing along to Wham! songs, spending time with family, then that's great too.
Lastly, I reckon plenty of people combine the two. |
I think you might be slightly misleading here. Philosophical semantics is meaning. But semantics used in everyday conversation links more to interpretation of what's being said: ie meaning of a word, phrase, etc.
In this scenario, Christmas warriors are arguing over semantics, as many people say "happy holidays" intending to impart a degree of festive cheer and good will, yet they argue that is only achieved through the specific "Merry Christmas". As stated, its an argument of semantic interpretation, but not one of worth.
To many, the meaning of happy holidays is clear and straightforward. For these people who are getting upset, it's interpreted differently. It's why it's an argument that will never be resolved; we're arguing from different interpretations of the base assumption. |
Merry Christmas' wouldn't actually make a whole lot of sense in my country. 'Happy Holidays' does though.
We celebrate something called 'Jul' at the same time some other countries celebrate 'Christmas'. Jul is essentially just a month from the old Germanic time table, a month where people always celebrated the rising sun and whatnot. I guess Scandinavians never stopped celebrating Jul even though Christmas was planted right in the middle of it. But yeah, the main day of the Jul celebrations is the 24th of December (Jul-day), not the 25th of December (which is still a day off though, along with the 26th of December).
Christmas and Jul share many of the same customs though (you have Christmas trees, we have Jul trees etc.). Most of what you consider Christmas customs were most likely just adopted from other celebrations around this time of year though, and have little to do with Christianity per se. |
the objected doodle is from the 24th.
the 25th doodle is traditionally a "Merry Christmas" doodle, complaints about the 24th doodle being "Happy Holidays" has resulted in the "Merry Christmas" Doodle being canceled. |
If I'm understanding his comment correctly, the difference between then and now is simply that he is now older and wiser and less of an angsty teenager insecure about his religion. No one was ever shoving Christianity down his throat as a Jew, it just felt like that to him and he was wrong. |
Have the Wii and Kinect actually changed the way we interact with computers? No. Wiis and Kinects were shovelware that just sits in the closet. They're closer to the pet rock in terms of technological advances than they are to, say, rockets or jets.
The iPhone/iPad have changed things, I'll give you that. They finally made touch-screens usable. I even agree that bringing something to the mass market is just as important as the initial discovery. So on that count, props to Apple. Problem is, there are far fewer of these sorts of advances today than in past decades and generations.
I'm not choosing to ignore the spread of broadband and mobile communication. But those networks are like roads -- they can speed up the movement of good ideas. Problem is, there are too few good ideas to take advantage of that capacity. The same applies with the number of transistors on a given piece of silicon. The number keeps growing exponentially, but our imagination has stagnated on just what to do with those processors. Look at the processing power used for the moon landing. The network advances you're hyping are the proverbial bridges to nowhere. Sure, they're real and they function but no one's taking advantage of them (from a tech perspective.)
As a personal example, I'm on a quad-core i7 processor powered desktop PC at the moment. I'm not really doing anything differently than I did on my pentium 1 computer I had when I was in third grade. The input devises are the same, the OS interface is the same, etc. The only real change is the display technology, from CRT to LCD. That's a nice change, no doubt. Its much lighter and offers more viewing space than the old tech. But its not a fundamental change such as going from horses to cars or air ships to jet planes. |
I remember when I first moved here it was great but since, its all fallen apart.
Edit: So were playing the blame game now. Great.
I will say that NC used to be awesome, and still is, except for the government. As for what has been going on: /u/armstad and /u/flurben pretty much sum up what I have to say but I will elaborate. Easley and Purdue were great for this state and were making some great progress until Republicans got control of the Senate halfway through Purdue's term. For a weak comparison, it's like what the GOP did to Obama and now the GOP controls everything and is taking "everyone's" best interests to their 1950's-hearts.
From there, everything went down hill and now that the Republicans are back in control, it's like we are headed for the Marian trench of bullshit politics. I mean look at Wake County. Great school system turned to a pile of crap that even caught Steven Colbert's attention (home of NCSU with Duke and UNC Chapel Hill in the neighboring county). Not to mention that the smoking ban Purdue setup is being challenged by a [new bill]( this week. The bill wants to hand the right of declaring bans outdoors to the state and take it away from local governments.
Guess NC is not done going backwards yet. |
The reason I believe Tesla is keeping it in-house is so that the consumer has to pay a lower price on their cars, and thus are more likely to buy their cars. They would get payed the same, but customers wouldn't be as likely to buy it. If less customers buy their cars, they sell less to the dealers. |
i'm a south carolinian prisoner of war being held across the border in NC. When I moved here it was a state known for electing conservatives into national office, but centrist democrats would always win the state government. This was remarkably consistent, for something like 100 years.
I'm not particularly liberal, but these 'centrist democrats' running NC state government did a pretty good job. They were a big reason for NC's solid university system and subsequent tech industry.
Anyway, that was all true until recently... when the tea party made gains in North Carolina state politics. Now the state legislature is being run by anti-intellectual yokels. |
I think another main reason is, they are trying to create something new here and build a system around a product. There is a tipping point at which a larger charging network becomes economically feasible, so they need to get the product out there. Making it cheaper will help this. Granted what, 70-90k isn't exactly cheap, but it probably is going to a demographic that will fight for charging stations should some prickly little twat try to block zoning for one. |
You might as well give up. You are refuting blatant ignorance with less than a glowing smile and hand holding. Also, Libertarian think trains are pretty deeply engrained here. I feel the pain, but most people won't see the valid rebuttals because of the downvote system, so ignorance still wins. |
Historically yes, from company towns to slave plantations to the current sex/slavery trade we've seen that of there is the tiniest bit of profit to be made from systematic exploitation of anyone weaker than you that it will be done. The thing to remember is that government didn't drop from heaven and we aren't the first generation to realize its expensive to provide. The reason we have the governments that we do throughout the first world is from our various ancestors learning painful lessons on the effects of not having a system in place. |
It's been done before - emulated a rare few times in high budget video games, blasphemed in many a film, and requires a lot of "fooling" the listener; when you record an environment like this - even with the best microphones - you are limiting yourself to the perspective of the microphone recording from your vantage point. A human, in contrast, is listening to subtleties and echoes ("feeling" the bass of a crashing wave from your feet, for example) from many directional perspectives in the environment. From experience, recording with the "best microphones" in the world will limit you to either an accentuated treble or bass sound. In order to emulate a more realistic and natural experience, many different recordings - in some cases, even in different locations miles around the "perceived" vantage point - should be mixed and coordinated (if you are planning a 3D turnaround with sources affecting you from different distant points). |
There's a lot more to it, but in the simplest terms: Header compression and using one single connection to access multiple forms of data.
So, for example, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, images - anything hosted on that same page will be delivered on one connection, rather than the current model which uses multiple connections to access each file, resulting in some inefficiencies.
CSS, js and images will be embedded into the data sent to the browser on this single connection. |
I don't think most humans can notice the difference.
However, if you take a 16bit 44.1kHz sound sample and slow it down or speed it up slightly, then save it as 16bit 44.1kHz again, you will hear aliasing effects in that result.
If you take a 24bit 96kHz sound sample of the same sound, and do the same speedup/slowdown and resample down to 16bit 44.1kHz, the aliasing is no longer there. |
I can feel you on that. I've long since switched over to post-hardcore, skramz, emo, metal, shoegaze, math-rock, etc, where the focus isn't on the quality of the vocals but more so about how they're used. You still get tons of passionate, emotional performances, but no one's really hitting any insane notes like a more classically inclined singer would like what some of the guys from previous generations were capable of. I almost wonder if it's the fact that this sort of music was a thing before that people just aren't very inclined to make that sort of music anymore and have pursued other avenues? Funnily enough, Waxwing just reformed and will be putting out new music, and they are certainly far closer to the 90s style (they are a late 90s band) than all of the projects the band members did after that. Powerful vocals, singing along sort of stuff.
Anyways looking through my 2013 albums the only stuff that approaches rock I see are Bosnian Rainbows, King Khan & The Shrines, and Kvelertak (might be too metal for you but they know how to rock the fuck out). King Khan is the only one with that classic sort of voice (hell, it's basically Soul vocals.)
I've only seen them live but if you're into The Black Keys check out My Goodness from Seattle. |
Most of your post is simply FUD, and unjustified. You haven't in any way demonstrated that Chrome is a botnet, your claim that all input goes straight to GoogleHQ could pretty trivially be demonstrated false via Wireshark or other sniffing tools.
And your claim about passwords is similarly FUD. They're not stored in plaintext (find them on disk, and I'd believe you). They're shown to the user, which is a debatable practice, but if you don't believe the Chrome can get a hold of your decrypted password, how pray tell do you think it knows what your actual password is to log you in? That's sort of the point of a saved password, it has to have the text at some point. Google doesn't magically partner with everyone who has a login form. |
Not even close. Mori Seiki isn't going to deliver to Iran, which means that the machine would have to be moved from its original install location, at which point it locks up. I have been to their manufacturing plants, these machines are incredibly heavy and require extreme care in proper installation and calibration, which Mori Seiki does for you (since you're paying them upwards of half a million USD for their small machines with no frills, easily a million if you really spec it out). |
I hate to break it to you guys but Facebook isn't going anywhere, it's largely a reddit opinion that it is. I had mine deactivated for 2 years a recently brought it back. Although it is a bit annoying I deleted a bunch of "friends" who had the most annoying drama which caused me to deactivate in the first place. Although it may lose it's popularity or coolness amongst young users, I can say as someone who recently moved out of state that it really is the best way to stay in touch with actual friends and family. I still prefer twitter and don't really check it but it's a nice tool to have.
Zuckerburg even said in an interview not too long ago that Facebook isn't or won't be cool anymore, I believe he compared it to electricity or maybe the Internet..saying it's something with a lot of buzz and coolness when it came out but after a while it will just be something that is there and that people use. He's also connecting people in developing countries for the first with "dumb" phones that basically only have phone text and Facebook. Although that may be a ploy to get more users it can actually bring positive change. I realize it's not the most important thing in the world, as bill gates says eradicating the world or malaria or whatever disease he said is more important than bringing Internet to everyone.
Sorry for the rant but I think some of you are missing a perspective just because you have or have had negative experiences with it. |
A bit of advice, most of the people that you're friends with in your 20's aren't still your friends in your 40's. It's not a statement that your friends are bad or anything, it's just that most people, as they get older, have less and less time, and the old friend from college that you text and email with loses priority to the new friend who they actually see and do stuff with. There are exceptions, and you don't need facebook to keep up with them. |
The problem is that the chat program is vulnerable to any attacks on the HTTPS protocol, because that is how the javascript is delivered.
Since there are attacks based on the attacker breaking HTTPS between your site and the client, you cannot rely on your code & checksum being delivered to the client without being modified. These attacks are in addition to whatever attacks there are on your encrypted chat implementation. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.