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The people making those comments are basing them on a perception that doesnt reflect reality.
Windows Vista was a kernel rewrite to fix what XP had become, and in the process made old drivers incompatible. All the hardware manufacturers had to rewrite driver stacks. Vista was Win7 beta, and they used their userbase as product testers to make win7 better.
Windows 8 is a gui rewrite ontop of win7. The change is nothing like XP to Vista, or Vista to 7. Its a new interface tied to dotnet, with the intent of making apps function independent of which ms os they run on.
There is no comparison from XP to Vista. Not 98se to ME, not 2k to XP. Not ME to XP. The transition was from a monolithic ball to a modular inside. It took time, and testing, and extensive rewrites. And what resulted (7) was great. |
Dude, this isn't really an argument when I have the same opinion as you. Please read my comments again and you'll see that I'm clearly calling my city officials and people in charge of each individual department stupid and cheap and that is why they haven't bothered to upgrade their computers. I'm clearly saying this is all on them and it is not Microsoft's fault whatsoever.
Yes they have a budget and books but sadly, most of their resources are going to renovate an already perfect inner harbor. They are also pumping millions to keep a struggling Hilton hotel afloat. This is not my opinion but they are actual facts that are reported on our local news.
Our last mayor was impeached after being caught using charity money and gift cards for her own use. She gave a ton of gift cards to her boyfriend. The new mayor is just as crooked.
And to answer your question about city vehicles, to some extent: yes. While firetrucks and ems vehicles are new other city vehicles are really old. Let me elaborate-
Our city police have a few brand new Chevy Caprices but the rest of the cars are old Ford Crown Victorias, old Chevy Impalas, and much older Chevy Blazers. Not Trail Blazers I mean the smaller shittier ones you can pick up for just $2k. The cars are all beat up, many cars are littered with duct tape. You see one racing towards an emergency and the cars just sputter and backfire. It's not uncommon to see a cop car on a summer day with it's hood open and steam coming out of the radiator while the officer waits for a tow truck.
As far as other city cars go, city employees can often be found driving white Chevy Cavaliers that are also beat up. There are few newer cars which are white Ford Fiestas but keep in mind there are very few.
City buses are no better. There are a few new hybrid diesel buses but they all drive in the inner harbor where tourists go. The rest are old buses from the late 90's early 2000's. That's the thing, they use new vehicles to drive around in the inner harbor to look good for the tourists but use the shit cars for the rest of the city where they hope tourists won't go.
So yes, government is supposed to operate a certain way, they have to follow protocol. They are supposed to allocate funds for specific resources and they must stay honest to their citizens. But I'm surprised you actually think they do that. When have you ever heard of an honest government? |
If there's complex information that the customer needs to keep, words are essential. I work in engineering consultation and we generate and transmit visual data at a rate that would be inhumane to ask anyone to write up and put into 'reports.' It is good practice to speak to the results we see on screen and not read everything, but a ppt or pdf file is often more than the centerpiece of a presentation. It is often a medium of communication. In my business, it's where the data and the conclusions, the deliverables that the customer paid for are stored. We have the luxury of forgoing long-winded reports because we have wonderful pictures, but sometimes carefully worded sentences are required. Carefully is itallicized, because you need to communicate a nuanced conclusion; one whose implications may not survive the paraphrasing of a note taker or a nervous presenter. Believe me, I hate bad powerpoints more than 98% of people, because as a manager, my job is to edit/approve my employee's powerpoints. However, I think there is a lot of value to be lost if people think they can go back to the good ol' Dale Carnegie days or try follow simplistic rules like "pictures only" or no two line bullet points ala Edward Tuft. |
terrible article. author is essentially trying to fear monger- and was probably paid off by insurance companies to pen this piece of garbage (as no insurance will be needed once autonomonus vehicles cover the streets).
things to consider:
Computers process data faster than humans can.
if that were to happen in a human driven vehicle- the driver wouldnt have time to register the child in the street, much less question the moral implications.
for this situation to ever arise, the child would have to fall into the street at the exact point where the vehicle could not decelerate in time
Essentially the car would need to be driving over 60MPH with less than 2.5 seconds from time of detection to time of impact and less than 50 feet to the child for this question to ever arise; and in the event that it did arise- a human couldnt avoid hitting the child- their reactions wouldnt be fast enough. |
Apple will make this a trend rather than a standard. If this feature works well then consumers will simply demand the same for their platform. Android users will say "why the fuck can't I pay like that Apple user?" and then someone will launch a similar system for android.
Since NFC is a standard, all decent payment terminals can be software-upgraded to use Apple Pay, Android-Pay or any other future NFC payment system. There will be multiple systems just like there are multiple credit cards today.
This is absolutely wonderful for the consumer because it allows competition. If Apple Pay is the best, smoothest, most reliable experience then people will flock to Apple. If another provider does it better then people will flock there.
One thing is for sure: banks and credit card companies suck and have terrible customer service and user experience. My bank can't even get off it's fucking ass and issue me with a wireless card. Fuck that, my bank can't even transfer money instantly - why should I wait even 1 hour for money to reach someone on the other side of the world when I can send them real-time video of my dick from the middle of a fucking field. |
Owned a gas station for 10 years.
Dealt with every credit card company and their policies.
I'm the source.
As I stated in another reply, the signature on the back is considered "ID" as long as it matches the one you sign. If the card is not signed, the retailer then has every right and obligation to check ID or he/she will be at fault in the case of a chargeback. The retailer has the right to refuse the purchase if signatures do not match. Should they not ask for ID and accept any signature, the CC company is within their rights (and often will) to refuse the settlement in the case of a chargeback.
Almost any gas station running a normal volume will get 8-10 chargebacks a month. If you have not checked ID during the transaction, it's very easy for the CC company to refuse settlement. They simply claim the signature doesn't match and you get to eat the cost.
Apple pay helps streamline the process. For gas, you have your ID in file in the form of a biometric signature. It wont take long for this to be tested again in the courts and become standard. As an owner, I would have loved to have more people use this technology as it reduces the time I waste faxing (CC companies generally make chargebacks as much of a time waster as possible to deny the claim and force the retailer to eat the cost). It also streamlines the ability for Visa and Mastercard when it comes to verifying CC holder's activity. **EDIT: Try to keep in mind that during a chargeback, the CC company wants a copy of the physical ticket. That means any retailer wanting to avoid a chargeback will need to keep ALL credit card receipts for a month. My CC volume was in the tens of thousands daily. I usually had a stack of CC slips two inches thick a day. In the case of a chargeback, I needed to sort through those by hand to find the ticket, make a copy, and fax to Visa or Mastercard. While nost chargebacks are fraud, asking for ID is easier than doing that paperwork and can be shifted to the front end rather than the back office. Even reducing the number from 10 to 5 makes a big difference in efficiency. |
Apple likes to test features in their products and make sure they work properly, rather than just throwing shiny stuff to people. When they release Touch ID, it was for Apple's use only, but when the next version of iOS dropped, they introduced an API so that any dev could use Touch ID in their apps. The same thing will happen here. This time next year, any app will be able to use the built in NFC tech. The people who are making noise about this are smug android/windows phone users who brag about their NFC access...even though most of the don't use it for anything anyway.
Edit: Realized this wasn't quite as simple as it could be. |
I only know about the DMCA on a very superficial level, but I think that DMCA violations are typically a civil tort and not criminal. Notice how I said typically ; the DMCA does explicitly criminalize copyright violation under certain conditions, but the average recepient of a takedown notice is not being charged with a crime.
With that in mind, presumption of innocence isn't relevant from a legal perspective. A person suing you for copyright infringement doesn't need to prove that you are responsible beyond a reasonable doubt. They simply need to convince a judge or jury. The bar, as it were, is much lower.
Of course, this is a purely legal argument. On purely ethical grounds, your point remains generally valid. I'm posting this in the hopes that it'll avoid the usual confusion.
Now a counter-argument would be that there's a valid reason for this lower standard of proof. The governing principle is that since civil tort deals with actual damages, there is (in theory) pressure not to engage in frivolous lawsuits. Indeed, a takedown notice that is negligently filed might have serious, concrete consequences for an individual or a business, which in turn would open the door to a counter-suit.
With that in mind, I think the problem isn't so much with that particular aspect of the DMCA itself, but with the fact that counter-suits are essentially impossible to file because tech-savvy lawyers are scarce, and therefore expensive. Just to be clear, there are plenty of things wrong with the DMCA, but this particular aspect does not strike me as being one of them.
Of course this is all the opinion of a layperson, so a bit of fact-checking (and perhaps gentle correction) is in order. |
Unnecessary is an opinion. Comcast being broken up would absolutely without a doubt benefit the state of broadband in the United States. This is uncontestable. Whether a better solution is available is open to debate.
"Government owned regional monopolies" have done just fine in the communities that create them. Trying to frame them in the scariest terms possible doesn't change the fact that they tend to be lower-cost higher-performance services than their corporate equivalents. I'm not scared, and you shouldn't be either.
Taxpayer financed subsidies to private corporations are not a new concept, the entire corporate tax system could be viewed as such. Comcast has already received billions of dollars in taxpayer money that was ostensibly to improve broadband, and pocketed almost all of it with no progress to show for it. How is giving Google money to improve broadband by a factor of 10 at lower cost worse somehow?
Eliminating regional monopolies will work, provided that new competitors emerge to try to take on Comcast, TWC, and Charter. Historically this has not happened since the barriers to entry are so large. In order for this idea to work, your dreaded #3 (taxpayer financed subsidies to private corporations) would probably be needed to spur growth in that industry. |
I was going to buy it digitally. Then the news about the song Sony pirated and used in the movie came out. If they don't bother to follow the rules they keep lobbying to put in place, why should I? |
Well in theory its not. If it was perfect, it would cut down on pirating without being an inconvenience to the consumer. But that's not how it is in implementation. So far DRMs sometimes require the consuper to jump through many hoops to get to the content they paid for. Like GTA 4 for instance required you to log into like 3 different accounts to access the game you paid for.
Sometimes it also makes it reeeeaaaally difficult to transfer your game to a new computer without errors or it saying that the serial for the game is already used.
It also limits the control the consumer has over the products they paid for. |
What is bad about it is that the studio knows you and millions like you did this, and because you can't follow the law they will continue forward with DRM and harder-to-steal models, which means those of us that do follow the law won't be able to watch movies on the internet on the first day of release: because the model is too open to piracy. |
I am a statistic. I have my own personal reason why i pirated the movie myself instead of paying to watch it online or go to the cinema to watch it.
First off my internet sucks right about now so instead of being patient and waiting a week or two to get faster internet i spent 8 hours downloading the movie to watch at home. If i tried to "stream" the movie it would of taken the same amount of time to watch as it did to download.
If a cinema was showing the movie i would of most definitely paid to go see it. But with no parents around the area (100 miles in any direction) and the lack of baby sitters around unless you're willing to pay £20 an hour from the Ofsted website (Prices exaggerated) the actual price of a movie for me would be either 8 hours of horrendous buffering destroying the movie for me or the £6+ 3 hours @ £20 = £66 this is not including any drinks or snacks at the cinema.
To be fair the movie was pretty good and i will most likely buy it on DVD later on to add to my collection but for now Sony can add me to some sort of black list or statistic for pirating the movie. As at the end of the day i have talked about the movie with friends and family and i know of 3 people that i have suggested the movie to, to go and watch it (Paying for it) so my £6 they lost out on infact gained them £18 from people that would of not watched it in the first place. |
I can tell you beyond any possible doubt that you are wrong.
I can also, apparently, tell you that you are not very good at your job if you can't tell an HD video from a non-HD video. |
Close. The RF aspect of Wifi (the carrier) is a shared medium, equivalent to wired hubs of the old days. Meaning that if two or more devices speak at the same time, the data will collide. Think of it this way. Say you have a bunch of people using two way radios, such as walkie-talkies. There is a base station that you need to communicate with if you want to send some information to other parts of the world (this is the “carrier”... equivalent to the wireless access point). Now, you have agreed upon a way to communicate with the other people on your chosen frequency so that you can send information as efficiently and as quickly as possible (the “protocol”... 802.11b/g, for example). This all works fine as long as everyone plays by the rules. This is analogous to the hotel's wireless network.
Along comes another group of people who set up another base station and some other walkie-talkies on the same frequency as you (or close enough to you that the signal bleeds over and you can hear it). This group of people have a similar agreed upon “protocol” that they use to communicate that works for them but they are speaking in a different language. This is analogous to a personal hot spot that someone sets up in a hotel room. Because they are on the same frequency as you, they are using the same carrier that you are and you can hear them and they can hear you. But, they have a smaller “cell” and they are closer to their base station. Their base station also happens to be a lot closer to you than you are to your base station, so every time they transmit, it drowns out your transmissions and transmissions from your base station to you, essentially breaking your ability to communicate.
This is what most mifi users don't understand. It is impossible for dissimilar networks to coexist in the 2.4Ghz spectrum. Heck, it's even a major challenge to get a densely deployed network to work well in that spectrum even with no outside interference due to the limited number of channels. It is impossible to avoid co-channel interference in a well designed, professionally installed, dense wifi deployment. And then, one mifi in the middle of it totally screws it up. The 5Ghz spectrum is much more forgiving because there are 3 or more times the number of channels to use. However, most hospitality wifi networks don't use this spectrum because it doesn't penetrate solid objects nearly as well as the lower 2.4Ghz frequency. So, this would force the hotels to deploy an even denser deployment so they can cover everywhere well which costs more.
Now, I'm not saying I totally agree with what the hotel industry wants to do because of one major reason... they are charging extra for access to their guest networks. If they were saying, “we are giving you free wifi access so please don't bring your personal devices in a screw up our network”, then I would be ok with that. But, I think that there is more of a lean towards “hey, you are bringing in your own device and not paying for the access that we are providing... oh, and you're screwing up access for other people around you”... and that, I don't agree with. |
802.11w adds protected management frames to the protocol. Linux and Free BSD have added the functionality to their kernel and some drivers, whereas the implementation in windows and osx is still problematic. |
Obamacare is fundamentally a cluster, honestly. 15%? I'd take that in a heartbeat right now. My costs went up 125% and I honestly have no idea how we're going to square things away. Can anyone but the 1% absorb a $10,000 cut in income? I doubt it.
The problem is that Obama didn't stamp his authority on the process. He had a super-majority, his coattails were longer than the Amazon and he could have said "you WILL pass MY bill with these things in it else I'll make you regret it come the midterms (bitches!)"
He should have been out front and pushing what he wanted rather than saying "just sign the bill, I don't care what's in it". He had a landslide to go along with his first 100 days in office.
Instead, the committee was "persuaded" by private health insurers to do away with the "public option" and to MANDATE that everyone should have PRIVATE health insurance. Unbelievable. What incentive is there for private health insurance to lower their costs if they have a captive market of 330m people and no public alternative. None.
Even better, the ACA guarantees private health insurers profits for 3 years after the bill was passed. Yep, public money is going to ensure these companies can continue to make billions in "incidental" profits.
The big problem is that Obamacare is a guaranteed death spiral: those who are subsidized don't care how much premiums cost because the government will fund the subsidies. The health insurers can keep bumping up the costs by 15-20% / year and make insane amounts of money and pass the burden onto the government. The government, of course, doesn't care, because it's taxpayers' money that funds everything (or taxpayers' debt).
Who gets hit the hardest? The middle-class, naturally, upon whose discretionary spending depends the entire US economy, will bear the greatest tax burden and will find that they can't afford to pay for their health care (example: me) and will have to choose between taking on increasing amounts of debt and having health care or paying the fine and hoping they don't get sick.
It is, at best, an incredibly stupid bill that will guarantee economic stagnation. The top x% and the bottom x% of the population will maintain their spending patterns regardless - it's the middle-class who are the ones who have to buy the vehicles, the white goods, the houses for the economy to function.
Job losses = more people who are eligible for Obamacare subsidies = greater cost to the government = higher taxes = less discretionary spending = worsening economy = job losses and so on.
Don't get me wrong - what the Republicans are suggesting (the status quo) is not a solution. Whether they like it or not, there's no repealing Obamacare. They will have to tweak it if they can as they appear completely bereft of anything which might resemble a solution. I honestly think nothing would be better than this crap, but that's no way to govern.
By the way, I'm probably the only person in the US who thinks private healthcare should be replaced by public healthcare (can confirm: was born in the UK and the NHS is awesome - Sarah Palin (surprisingly) is way off the reservation about that).
I don't understand how providing health care isn't one of the most important obligations for a government and why it's a commodity here - after all, what good is national security if everyone's sick? |
If any Hollywood people see this, please just stop. Money is not equal to success...I'd actually pay to see your movies if you'd just shut the fuck up about how actors with millions of dollars are being ripped off because Joe Smith downloaded Avatar. Those actors are just fine, and are being immature assholes if they claim they're losing their financial security due to piracy. They haven't yet, and they most likely never will. Forcing regular, generally middle-class working people to pay money to see a movie that really won't end up being "the best movie of the summer", all for the sake of retaining absurdly high paychecks, is just pushing more and more people to piracy.
I'm sure you all know how deeply popular media affects society's perception of reality...imagine all the non-Hollywood productions that could be based off an existing movie that would be better than the original, if only you'd let people use your movie content for their own purposes. The only thing you're trying to protect with these stupid laws is content, not the creation of new ideas. If you cared about the creation of new ideas - as you claim - then you wouldn't release countless shit movies all following the same basic storyline that all blend into one another. Those aren't different ideas, its just different content...a female lead vs a male lead, a Ferrari instead of a Bentley...aesthetic bullshit that really doesn't make a movie "good".
Come out with original movies or shut the fuck up about piracy. Even if you can buy some kind of loophole for the net neutrality regulations, pirates will find a way around it. They always have, and always will. |
For a second I thought "Wait, who's the Mafiaa? Is it the regular Mafia, but spelled wrong? But why is it capitalized." And then I realized that people have a stupid and irritating habit of giving dumb names to things they don't like. i.e. NObama, McSame, MAFIAA, and other retardery. |
Facebook user information was 'never' private. Trolling employers, creditors, crazy ex-lovers, reporters, and of course the government...
It's surprisingly easy to access one's personal information.
The more public Facebook becomes, users will inevitably become more and more aware and modify their behavior accordingly. |
Well, transportation is expensive, and it is a fundamental need, and public transport often suffers from the last mile problem.
$3500 is a lot when you think of it as just another nifty gizmo. It might not be a lot if you think of it as a gizmo that lets you buy a house 2 miles further (and $30K cheaper) from the train station. |
did you read the part where they're paying for hotel fares, cab fares etc or was it |
You know what's funny? Even though MS does so much philanthropy, people still love Apple infinitely more. |
Microsoft doesn't make up these numbers - they have focus groups and research that comes up with these numbers. The mere fact that you have a blog and are on reddit proves that you're not an average Windows user. These changes were not done to make YOU more efficient. They were done to make the rest of the folks more efficient. Your efficiency has been eclipsed once you decided the best use of your time is to write blogs about things you don't understand.
(and mine was when I started commenting on your blog posts, etc etc) |
Microsoft UI team is a firm believer in function over form. That has actually hurt them recently as major competitors appear more trendy and cool because they go for form over function."
I assume you are referring to Apple. And with that assumption I LOL at your statement. Like Steve Jobs said: "Design is not above how it looks, it is about how it works". |
No it just seems like that. The main issue was integrated graphics not being advanced enough and not running Aero. The slower CPU's from Amd didn't help nor did Intel's Celeron line.
The requirements are the same for both Vista and 7. The issue was people upgrading their 5 year old XP machine expecting the same performance.
Driver issues didn't help, especially the lack of x64 support. Most people don't do clean installs, they also don't know how to remove useless programs from running on boot, cleaning the registry from sloppy uninstallers, etc.
So you take XP running for 5 years probably already running slow from all the buildup and you upgrade to Vista because you're lazy and don't want to reinstall programs. Yea I would say you would have a few problems. Clean installs are always better and worth it.
At the time when I did read about people having issues it was driver issues or old hardware.
Win7 had the advantage of drivers and newer hardware in more hands. Plus more software was rewritten right to handle UAC and WDDM and the new audio stack became mature.
So was Vista that bad? No I used it when it came out and didn't have a problem with it. I was running it on my rig built in 09 and before that on my core 2 duo laptop. I now run Win7 also without issues. |
Seems a biter hyperbolic, no? Very little functionality is lost in the upgrade (possible none, but I'm not "super" enough to be so confident), it is just that the form changes while functionality is added; for a super-user who may have everything down to muscle memory, this causes more re-learning than every other group. But the function is still there, and often there in a way that to most is much more intuitive. But regardless, few people are actually super-users anyway, even among those that would give themselves that label. |
Aesthetics and functionality are two separate categories. Generally speaking, I don't give a fuck about aesthetics, I just want something that works. If it looks pretty, too, that's an added bonus.
However, this UI is about more than that. This is meant to expose features to users who didn't know they were there. It's meant to help them to become better users of the software. It's meant to boost productivity across the board. Which is why I would argue that the ribbon interface is one of the best things to come out of Microsoft in recent years, and I would love to see such interfaces implemented by other companies. |
all you people with your fast internet speeds can suck it. 1.5mb with 5gb/month limit. Former Alltel customer that supposedly has a grandfathered contract that Verizon has to honor. They throttle the shit out of me when I exceed 5gb within 1 month. Sure they don't charge me for going over the limit like a normal Verizon contract would, but I can't even stream a 2min youtube clip any time its so slow. By the way, I'm referring to 3G wireless, my only option for $60/month.
(my signal is better than average, not a factor) |
Are you using the default Netgear wireless router they give you that has 1 antenna and charge $5 a month for letting you borrow it? Because that router is the biggest piece of shit ever created. It's a wireless router and cable modem built all-in-on device that can't do either of those things well. Bring it back to them, tell them you want just the cable modem (it's free, plus you no longer pay $5 to borrow their shitty wireless router) and go buy a router yourself. You'll save money, and you'll have an actual good piece of hardware.
I also live in LA and used to have TWC (my roommate and I got their fastest internet option and nothing else). For a week we used the default wireless router they loan to you and was terrible. It dropped connections all the time, was slow as fuck, and needed to be reset every few hours. I exchanged it for just the cable modem, got a TRENDnet wireless N router for $40, and have not had a single issue since (just about any router is better than the shitty Netgear one they give you). Connections were always solid, downloads (p2p or otherwise) was always fast, and I never once had to reset the router. TWC is actually one of the better ISPs out there. |
I'm usually a late adopter and I use G+ because it's fucking awesome. |
Nothing would benefit the technology space more than eliminating technology patents wholesale.
Right now it is impossible to create anything non-trivial without running afoul of someone's absurdly broadly worded patent. The whole thing would be hilarious if people's companies weren't being destroyed by lawyers.
Most patent violations are not willful, where you're deliberately copying someone else's technology, for which there is already strict copyright protection. They're accidental.
Many have no doubt violated patents for "embedded hypermedia links" by having a video player on their web page. For having a shopping cart on a mobile device. For having a preview audio clip that's tied to a purchase. There are patents for these very things, and they're all bullshit .
A patent was supposed to represent a specific implementation of a specific technology. The system comes from an era where the adoption rate of new technology was measured in decades.
Now a six month old phone is considered obsolete, a three year old platform considered antiquated. There are patents from the 1990s that are still valid and are still causing trouble, especially in the encoded video space where it's impossible to innovate without getting in trouble.
How is [shit like this]( helping anyone? |
I have 2 google tv's. A sony google tv which I bought at launch and a revue i bought for the office for a 3rd of the price. Here's the thing: the update took forever to come and it's not stable. Admittedly it has shortcomings. Shortcomings which can be fixed with adequate third party support such as a decent browser like dolphin (not compatable without rooting, why root such a device) it's still better than apple tv though, the browser is good, it needs an email client, but it does what it's supposed to do: even though I feel it's dated, it could have been designed in 2003. So... long story short. Don't write off google tv too quickly, if they give the platform out for free, like they did android to mobile platforms: it could be on your cheap $100 LCD onboard. noone would complain.
That being said. I has to be noted. The system in it's current setup is too flash dependent, buggy and poorly supported. I'd say "google will fix this" but i've had my sony for what feels like forever. It's clear they just aren't putting the money into it like apple is.
LONG STORY SHORT. |
Is it mildly or highly probable that this wasn't done by anonymous and was inserted by legal authorities or it's just bad propaganda for Anonymous?
In other words is there room to question this as in not believing everything you read in the news? |
This. Please stop comparing CISPA to SOPA, all they have in common is that it aims to change things on the internet, and their acronyms end in PA. CISPA is about your private information, SOPA was about blocking anything they didn't like.
While I agree, the consequences of CISPA may be worse than those of SOPA, had it passed, there is not a lot of evidence of that. You should care about CISPA because it deregulates your personal information and allows the government to gather it at their own digression. |
I'm a Congressional Intern in Washington, D.C. and I can say that alls it takes is 5-10 calls in a House office for the Member to be notified. From what I have gathered, that number is closer to 50-100 in a Senate office. We are required to take detailed notes of ALL constituent calls and mailings and in my office, our member "responds to every call/mail." Also, remember that we're unpaid interns who do shitty grunt work. We understand you're frustrated, but if you take it out on us, there's a better chance we might make a mistake when we take down your information ;) |
CISPA is worse in the sense that it tells us, as Americans, that if we fight tooth and nail against one bill and have it shot down then congress will be faced with passing a new, similar bill under a different name shortly thereafter. Because SOPA was "old news", the new bill is like "Old News part 2" and more likely to slip beneath the radar. Now we have CISPA (Old News Part 4.5: The Return of Shit Nobody Cares About). Proponents of SOPA are banking on a lack of interest and activism from we the people since we already won the first few battles against this bullshit legislation. They know we don't want it, but they know if they try enough times to pass it, it will. AMURIKUH! |
They can use it to take away the power of peoples to fight governments by organizing and deseminating information through it. Because they know what you're saying, so they can find you, and because they know all about you, stop you, without so much as a warrant. Worst possible case I think, but plausible. I'd love to see mythbusters tackle it. I can see it now, "Adam: Ok, the law has been passed now for 18 hours, and so far it has been used inappropriately by law enforcement, the FBI, private citizens with access to the government's equipment, and several hackers, the Chinese government, and I'm seeeing.....six hundred fifty thousand times per hour and rising accelerating, or its rate of speed increase is increasing." You know, bunting it in for the kids watching. |
You seem to be one of the gullible types that still believes the government is inherently good... a blind sheep that actually believes in big brother,,,
This legislation will give the government the legal backing it needs to do whatever the fuck it wants, they already have laws to classify anyone a terrorist and hold them without due process (NDAA) -- CISPA will give agencies the ability to monitor any and all mediums of communications and companies will obviously open up their networks to be complacent with national legislation--
sure you think there is the "without warrant" clause but then again you have to remember that these bills is written to support our government, a corrupted entity that can't police itself.... and I'm surely it's full of legal loopholes that vaguely binding the gov. |
I'm against it. The blackout was annoying as hell. I know it was for a good cause, but I (personally) think it hardly did anything. Yeah, SOPA didn't get passed, but that's correlation, and there's no way anyone can be sure that the blackout actually caused (even in part) the bill to fail.
Yeah, yeah, I know, what's the big deal with not being able to go on reddit for a day? Don't I have other things to do? Yeah, I do, but I just want to hop on reddit and take a quick break. No, it's not going to kill me to not be able to for a day, but I think it's pointless. And really, I'll just go to other websites. It's a minor inconvenience, nothing more. It doesn't make people think more about CISPA, especially because redditors already see so much about it. |
Another part of it that I'm surprised most people don't realize is that, like reddit and imgur, a lot of users would rather look at and post pictures instead of making actual posts. Instagram was also a particularly interesting threat to Facebook. There are a ton of mostly younger people who post their status using apps like tweegram. I see a growing number of people checking their instagram 10 times for every 1 time they check Facebook. Instagram is the imgur, the |
25-35.
This is a very foolish way to value something, first look at their valuation. Currently at their anticipated IPO they are looking at $95 billion, if they had only 95 stocks to sell and that same valuation each stock would cost $1 billion dollars. Now as many people are doing, look at their revenue, they don't have any where near that amount of money flow through their company. They do have a good advertising portion to their company, they also have user information. Now if the profits from the advertising plus the value of the user info (as well as all the things they own; i.e. data centers, buildings,...) justifies the valuation then a stock at the $25- 35 price makes sense (IPO is just initial offering, the markets will correct the price if it is too high or low). However if in ten years those numbers are not greater then or equal to the valuation then there are far better investments to be made. |
Why I'm not investing in Facebook, is the same reason I didn't invest in apple earlier this year.
This sort of hype is synthesized by the shareholders themselves. Its a ploy to cash in their shares before the value of the stock starts deprecating. Facebook is no longer a new and innovative frontier for social networking. Yes its a large and functioning company. But it's no longer up-and coming. So it looses the hype(translates to value) that comes with being new, unexplored, and under exploited.
The stock WILL start depreciating in value shortly after it hits the market.Just like the Apple stock did early this year. |
Bull shit! For every person in North America bidding on a job there is 20 people in third world countries that will do it for half the cost. Sure their programming sucks and they speak very little English, but no one wants to waft through the shit pool to find the good stuff (???). |
Read Million Dollar Consulting and learn to price your work according to the value you provide. Learn to figure out what problems people have and provide simple solutions to them. Find good clients who pay well. Ad agency overflow and medium sized businesses are my favorites (tiny companies have no $/nickel and dime you, huge companies are mazes that take forever to pay). Get a few (regional or national) big names in your portfolio, even if they're tiny gigs you're still "That guy that worked for Nike". Work with awesome designers as clients mostly look at how a project looks. Never work for a for-profit company for free. Forget oDesk etc as they're full of people looking for a bargain and getting what they pay for. Be really nice to everyone you meet and don't burn bridges, you never know when that nerdy-seeming guy at the meetup will refer a $20k consulting project to you because you had a good conversation about brewing mead once.
Go out and try to buy a mattress. Seriously. It's confusing as fuck and the salesmen bombard you with utterly meaningless jargon like you're an idiot for not wanting the 1000 coil superflex over the downy soft supercomfort. At the end of the day you'll have quotes ranging from $300 to $3000 and still have no idea which mattress is any good. This is Exactly how 99% of people feel when trying to hire a developer. Be the guy who can build trust and establish expertise without dumping jargon on people and you'll get a lot of referrals and goodwill.
Start going to local meetups, establishing a reputation as someone who does excellent work, delivers on time and is nice to work with and the work will start rolling in like a god damn tsunami as the demand for a half-decent programmer who can actually deliver useful things that work is through the roof.
A decent freelance programmer is worth $75-100/hr in the US and there are plenty of clients out there who will pay this. If you live in the middle of nowhere, find companies in big cities and work remotely. There's always plenty of clients who will not consider you worth that much and will try to get you to work for slave wages, but you don't need them. Practice saying "I charge $100 per hour" into the mirror without laughing, it took me a while to be able to do this. Also practice saying "that'll need a change order" with confidence as clients always change their mind or want to add stuff in.
I earned over $175k last year and am on track to beat that this year. I'm not even that good at programming - there's a million people out there who blow me out of the water, but I am good at helping business people figure out their problems and and then solving them. In 99% of cases, the actual programming bit is quite simple. I actively avoid overcomplicated projects as they always turn into a clusterfuck, especially when they're being commissioned by someone who doesn't know what they're doing (and if they're building something crazy complicated before it ever sees a real user, they don't know what they're doing).
There's also the funded startup game, where there's a ton of money floating about, but the VCs are counting on 99 out of 100 of those companies failing and 1 being the billion-dollar winner that pays for all the failures. They have the luxury of scale, you don't, even though you are an investor too (investing your time). Consulting is a far better way to make a good income quickly.
There's also bootstrapping a product - this grows nicely out of consulting though, when you start to see that you're fixing the same problem over and over. Charge $30 a month to solve some niche problem (accounting for freelancers, reminders for property managers, invoicing for gyms etc), get 500 customers and you'll bank $15k/month in passive income.
Once you have a track record of self-employment with a good portfolio then you can easily jump into a corporate gig if you prefer stability - corporations love developers who have communication skills and understand the full lifecycle of the project.
There are so. many. ways. to be raking in money via software right now, and there will continue to be so for a number of years as everything moves online and software eats the world.
Let me know if you have any specific questions, I'd love to help struggling developers earn what they're worth as it's bad for everyone if good devs are undercharging :) |
I don't have anything against Groupon but the fact remains that there is absolutely nothing the service can do to rise above its competitors.
As for Facebook, any corporation that harms its users (think user concerns over their data being sold) will ultimately fail when a white knight alternative comes riding in. Google had the opportunity with Google+ but ultimately botched its launch by making it invite-only and not including Facebook-familiar features (i.e. post box on people's walls). Additionally, Facebook has created a clusterfuck of the news feed: its whole initial appeal was how simple it was. Now, constant changes aside, there is an information overload everywhere you look. They're putting sponsored stories from Yahoo on my news feed (a company I don't like to receive my news from). I barely use Facebook at all now.
Zynga is just terrible. They rip off of other games, always have a shitty UI, and take every opportunity to spam the app with ads. The only game of theirs I still play is Words with Friends, and the UI is so counterintuitive and unsightly that I fear they may fall the way of Myspace (poor, counterintuitive design perpetuated by the company's insistance on hiring friends and unqualified designers). Even in that game, Zynga started pushing microtransactions by adding an annoying word rater button that I always hit by mistake. Sorry, I don't want to pay real money to tell me how good my word is. |
Exactly and RIM was a good company up until about 4 years ago. Their stock price was $148 a share.
Further the average executive pay is $7 million which both of them are extremely close to.
It's not like they came in from another company, ran RIMM to shit, then left 3 years later with a $60 million severance package. |
In some ways he was exactly right.
It took Android until the Galaxy Nexus (ICS) with its dual core CPU to match the graphical smoothness of the original iPhone!
Android OS was designed like a normal desktop OS, where thread priority is not given to the UI. This of course makes most sense to engineers - you want the computer to compute not move pretty pictures around!
iOS was based on another desktop OS, Apple's OSX. However Apple engineers gave priority to a UI rendering thread above all others.
If you think I just made this up, read this
EDIT: turns out I was wrong. Android threading is not to blame. In order to provide secure screen access to apps, Android uses multiple windows, but for a long time they went without hardware capable of making this work smoothly. Also Android's "Activity" approach adds overhead when switching views. Not to mention things running in the background can kill performance. |
Your incredulity indicates to me that you don't know a lot about Android updates, so forgive me if I'm explaining something you already know. Unlike iOS, Android's major updates haven't been coupled with a full change of the version number. The versions have been Cupcake (1.5.x), Donut (1.6.x), Eclair (2.0.x/2.1.x), Froyo (2.2.x), Gingerbread (2.3.x), Honeycomb (3.0.x), and Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0.x). With the exception of Honeycomb, which was for tablets only, these could all be run on phones.
With that understanding, yes, I would say that Google is offering "close to [Apple's level] of support." Like the first two generations of the iPhone, the first generation of the Nexus line has been officially supported through three major versions of the Android OS (Eclair, Froyo, and Gingerbread). The announcement that iOS would be released for the 3GS was so unexpected, that it's been called a "blessing" by some, meaning it's not been Apple's standard, but an outlier. |
Two points I have to make.
First, this is what Android has done to this subset of smartphone users. Since Android phones are so different from one another, running different versions of the OS, and all layered with some awful manufacturer UI like HTC Sense, they expect Apple to give them the same. Like Android devices, they want an entirely new phone with an entirely new look and feel and a gimmicky feature to go with it every other week. Mobile projector? 3D? Fax? Throw 'er in, and package it as a new phone.
iPhones aren't disposable like Samsung or HTC phones. I like the fact that there's consistency with the OS I use. I don't need a UI overhaul every 5 years. I like the fact that the moment I bought my phone, the company that made it didn't just release 14 other phones running yet another bastard version of the OS.
Second, no other company is expected to deliver as much as Apple – which is a good thing. I haven't read an article like this about HTC or LG or Samsung. I've never cared to tune into a live blog of updates Samsung is making to one of it's Galaxy phones. Apple is held to a different standard because their products are better and they're better known than the big Android companies for innovation – I said it, let the persecution begin. I won't even throw in that obligatory statement of "And I still use Android all the time, don't get me wrong" because I don't. I had an Android phone and I ditched it for an iPhone because the UI is atrocious, the memory management is poor, and the phone prioritized dazzling me with animations of the weather of a locale I was currently in over speed and access to what I needed most.
I always believed that companies that continuously replace their products at a breakneck pace do so because they didn't get it right in the first place, or that they aren't confident enough in thinking that users will always want that one thing they made. Look at how many different models of turntables the competitors of Technics (Panasonic) had to put out against the SL-1200 which stood mostly unchanged for 30+ years. Sure, iPhones get updated and iOS improves, but it's done deliberately and steadily, because all the time and effort they put into it initially paid off. |
Um, I'm not sure I'd call him a true hero — or any sort of hero, for that matter.
By all accounts, it sounds like he's not getting a fair shake from the authorities or the MPAA. That's really shitty, and the people need to be aware when authorities and powerful interests opt for expediency and underhanded tactics.
That being said, nothing I've seen or read leads me to believe that he wasn't involved in illegal activity. That's really shitty too.
I mean, when it comes to the IP debate, I'll stick up for him, but I think that characters like Dotcom do an awful lot to undermine the credibility of online openness and freedom champions. |
Completely omits the part where he was illegally recording stuff and replaces it with some crap about "video buffering" that got stuck in memory capturing just the exact images he needed.
No, he explained it pretty clearly. The camera is always active, even if it isn't recording a video or picture. The video feed is buffered in memory because memory is faster to access than disk space when you're trying to manipulate the video data.
In normal operation the buffer would constantly being overwritten, as you would expect from a buffer. However, if the device is damaged then it stops recording video. Not recording video means not over writing the buffer. Since it isn't overwritten, it will contain the last x minutes of video. If the damage caused the software to crash it is very likely that this buffer would be included in the crash dump, as it would be invaluable for troubleshooting problems with the augmented reality programs. |
Patents are full of the most idiotic speculation. Sony has a patent on [using ultrasound to manipulate your brain]( through your skull with the intent of giving you sensations. No explanation or theory how this would work exist, no prototypes exist, and Sony hasn't performed any research in this direction. Yet, the idea is patented. Just in case. Even if this isn't going anywhere, they can slap somebody doing something vaguely similar with a lawsuit and damages. |
It should, what Metro PCS suffers from is Bad backhaul & tech problems. They chose CDMA EV-DO, but didn't have proper backhaul which makes it slow. This is also why their LTE is on the slow side. Someone put it like "it's like running a Wireless-N Wifi router on dial up" to show why backhaul is important. Metro PCS has limited spectrum by itself, also. With the Merger, CDMA EV-DO will be bumped for HSPA+ which T-Mobile knows how to implement well. T-Mobile has proper back haul & most important MetroPCS' Spectrum will allow T-Mobile to Implement LTE that rivals At&t, Verizon, and surpasses Sprint with the extra spectrum. |
I love the S3 for its screen and raw capabilities. It's a pretty sexy looking device too.
My employer recently adopted Android devices into or corporate phone contract. Previously we were an all-iPhone shop (3G, 3GS, 4, 4S). Prior to shifting to iPhones, we were using Samsung Blackjacks and similar, so the jump to iPhone was a monumental one.
The S3 basically hits all of the right bullet points for those that consider themselves "Power Users" and need more than the "Walled Garden" platform that Apple provides.
We have a handful of HTC X1s and some S3s distributed.
Many folks are still using their "legacy" iPhones.
I'm in a rare position of being able to be very objective about my mobile devices without any true bias, because I'm not beholden to any of them, nor did I shell out any personal money for them. So, they are just devices that are judged based upon their merits.
The S3 is a performance powerhouse for sure. It's apparent when playing high quality video, or running some of the better native apps (I love my Yahoo! fantasy football app, especially on that amazing screen). One of the heavier apps we use is Ekahau Heat Mapper, which provides wi-fi coverage maps and statistics for a predetermined area. We also run this app on some Galaxy Tabs (10.1) which is more suited to the task due to the extra screen size and battery life.
The S3 is not without flaw, however, and the flaws it has are pretty annoyng IMO.
All of the S3s we have are battery killers .
We've diagnosed the issue and found that just probing for cellular connectivity is draining some devices by as much as 18% by mid day. We use our mobile devices heavily, and often to perform wi-fi analysis, and this is absolutely obliterating the S3 batteries.
The keyboard .
As many who are used to the forgiving iOS keyboard, the S3s is not. You can jab at Apple's autocorrect (there's even a website- [damnyouautocorrect.com]( but the S3s keyboard does not feel responsive, nor does autocorrect provide good correction nearly as well as iOS. It also lacks a nice "feel" and by that I mean, the animations and the timing of the perceived key taps don't make it feel as if you are interacting with pseudo buttons. It still feels a bit... clunky?
The email app.
Many of the S3 users are unhappy with the email client as well. I can't really comment on this as I don't haev my email setup on the S3, but virtually all of the converts prefer the updated email app on iOS6.
Then there's clutter.
There are about 9 icons in the upper task bar at all times. It's a chore just to decipher them all, which undermines the usefulness of that space. The Settings menu is also not very intuitive. There just seems to be a lack of cohesiveness across the OS in regards to aesthetics, and how you interact with the options (sometimes radio buttons are used, other times check boxes, and sometimes it's just a list in which you select an item). While this doesn't kill the user experience, it gives it a somewhat inconsistent feel.
Lastly is the build quality.
The plastic body just doesn't hold up. It also doesn't feel as solid/compact/dense as the iPhone 5 or 4S. The thickness is great (it's very thin, which helps offset some of the awkwardness of holding a phone with such a large screen). However, it does feel less sturdy in hand, and the plastic has proven to be easily cracked. We have already had a few busted battery covers, and a cracked screen since acquiring them, whereas we've only had one iPhone 4S break (rear glass) all year. |
I first wanted an iPhone, 6 years ago. But they were too expensive, out of my price range and only for Att. I was on sprint. My brother had just received his Samsung galaxy epic and the thing blew my mind away. Yea I've seen and iPhone and had an iPod touch so I knew what was there. But the android OS is what got me. And the fact that the phone looked way better then the iPhone even if it was thicker and had a slide our keyboard. That's when I wanted a smartphone like his. I was on low budget. Just starting out as a freshman at college. So I got my first android powered smartphone. The thing sucked but that's what I get for paying for such a low end phone just to get a smartphone with the android OS. And that's where people get Android wrong. They think just because they want to be cheap and get a cheap phone that runs android, that it will works circles around an iPhone. So this built a bad rep for android and it sucks because it is a great OS with so many features and I think everyone should at least have a flagship device with the latest android OS or at least android 4.0. I finally moved my way up in knowledge of phones and their hardware as well as features. Got an HTC inspire 4g from att. For the money and specs. You couldn't compete with that. Now I own a gs3 and not an iPhone because it was learning about what I needed in a phone. Not about having the phone because everyone and their grandmother has one. Majority of people are biased, closed-minded and just down right unintelligent. |
Absolutely high end VFX are not the only creative professionals, but they are probably the "most intense" users of hardware and software in the sense that whatever you can pack into a box or a package will be most likely pushed to it's limits in terms of performance and output and there is trickle down (same for audio and 2d photo editing etc)
As for Shake, I was using it on films back in 2007 and it was as dead as a doornail in terms of it having a future by early 2008. Sure places were still using it but only while they were transitioning to Nuke. By 2009 it was truly dead and buried and none of my comper mates had touched it for at least 6mths, more like a year.
As for Final Cut Pro being poised to take over Avid, what can I say, I never saw that in my years of film/TV post production. It was around maybe, but only poised to take over in the sense that linux is supposedly always poised to take over from Windows. Again, maybe for smaller movies/some TV/documentary stuff, but definitely not for the big guns (and I acknowledge that they aren't the only ones :). Same way After Effects can be used for film VFX, but why the hell would you put yourself through that?
Don't get me wrong. Personally I agree with Apple's strategy as it fits in with their consumer focus. Catering to the pro end of town is costly. They demand incredible stability and performance and complain a lot/demand a lot of support, even with how much they pay that support and licences.
I too prefer to work with Macs for the reasons you mentioned. I have Bootcamp setup for Windows 7, primarily for Steam games and when I have to have something down in Win, and I have a mega gaming/compositing Win rig, but I prefer the Mac. Agreed about the worklow as well on Mac. |
This enforcement is utter bull-shit. My own university regularly offers free or inexpensive non-degree courses to anyone, regardless of what state they're from. Oh, did I mention that some of these are online courses for continuing education students? I.E. anyone with an internet connection and half a brain can find them and take them from out-of-state. The only possible reason to block Coursera would be that their courses are -completely- free and are thus -not- subject to taxation. |
As a Electrical and Computer engineer at a Minnesota State school, I can completely confidently say that without online resources such as Udacity, AcademicEarth, Coursea, and KhanAcademy all my 2000+ level courses would be next to impossible. While this law doesn't include Udacity and KhanAcademy (they don't nessicarily offer degrees from schools), I look at all these sites to do well in the classes I pay 10,000+ a year for. The professors all explain things differently and gets points across better than some of my professors at times. |
This is only possible because of a regulation happy, over-sized government on all levels. Every time you add a regulation, you are implicitly giving someone or a group of people the authority to enforce it. Who cares who these people are? Mainly those who are regulated. So while initially effective, all these offices eventually fall to the continuous pressure of companies whose ROI on lobbying is massive. |
That's outrageous! |
iPad 4th gen and an iPad mini.
I believe that the iPad 4th gen has been announced too soon. This will deter many individuals that just bought an iPad 3rd gen from upgrading when the 5th gen gets announced.
To those who were waiting to get an iPad. The 3rd gen will likely be discounted and found cheaper used. Considering that the 3rd gen is only 6 months old, it will function just fine. The cost benefit of buying a 3rd gen iPad is likely worth it. |
Having spent most of yesterday installing Windows 8, the software itself is OK, but the installation is a nightmare:
My older PC was running XP (this one is Win7), and I figured it was time to upgrade before XP support runs out. The motherboard supports 8 GB, so I wanted the 64 bit version of Win 8 because memory is cheap, and the 2GB I have in it is kinda wimpy these days.
Since the existing XP is 32 bit, the $40 upgrade to Win8 Pro automatically downloads a 32 bit version. The only way to get a 64 bit version was to first do a clean install of Win 7 x64 from my existing Win 7 license, then immediately upgrade to Win 8, before Microsoft detected I was using the same serial number on two computers. The only way to get a copy of the Win8 64 bit installer was to download it on this PC, which is running a 64 bit OS.
Nowhere in the upgrade process does Microsoft explain about 32 vs 64 bit. I had to find out the hard way by first doing the naive direct XP to Win8 upgrade, finding out I had a 32 bit version, then researching on the Net to find out how to get the version I really wanted. |
Worst advice? You must not have read the TorrentFreak article:
>1. We absolutely do not maintain any VPN logs of any kind. We utilize shared IP addresses rather than dynamic or static IPs, so it is not possible to match a user to an external IP. These are some of the many solutions we have implemented to enable the strongest levels of anonymity amongst VPN services.
>
>2. Our company currently operates out of the United States with gigabit gateways in the US, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Romania. We chose the US, since it is one of the few countries without a mandatory data retention law. We will not share any information with third parties without a valid court order. With that said, it is impossible to match a user to any activity on our system since we utilize shared IPs and maintain absolutely no logs .
I have bolded the key points. Basically PIA needs to say that they will release data under a court order, but if they have no data to give up then they will comply with the court order and provide the no data that they have.
Do your research before making ignorant claims. |
I appreciate your long lecture about the formats, but really it was unnecessary as my comment was specifically about discs containing LPCM tracks, [which certainly are not mandatory and ~8% of blurays contain.](
[again, while the spec lists them as "mandatory", a disk only has to support one of the options.](
Its 2013, even entry level <$200 receivers can decode DTS-HD/TrueHD, why waste space on the disk with LPCM track when lossless DTS-HD/TrueHD will do the same job? The discs that do contain LPCM tracks simply do so either because they wanted a different mix (presumably from a different master) than those obtained from DTS/TrueHD or simply because there was extra room on the disk.
Your entire previous post was pertaining to how 4k will be impossible because its not feasible to stream uncompressed video/audio(see your comment about 20TB).
My reply was simply that few disks uses uncompressed video/audio for those exact reasons, and the same would obviously apply to streaming. Of course in your reply, you suddenly change to saying streaming 15gb is unfeasible. Why? The technology already is common place and cheap.
BTW here is streaming 4K video. Available today. |
You have a point there, and regrettably there's no way around that reality. You paying for their cable package gives them part of the revenue they need to pay for content, and I acknowledge that in that fact, I am in a small way indebted to you.
You and the current HBO subscribers allow shows like GoT to be paid for. I can pay for the DVDs to support the GoT crew, but in doing so I am not helping HBO pay for their programming.
This is exactly what gets me so frustrated. If HBOGo were available without cable package, I would be able to support HBO programming without the cable connection I don't want, the shows I don't like, or the current high price of a cable package. |
Hate to break it to you but Microsoft is more business based than you think. They make the the most widely used and accepted operating system(s) the world over. Take Microsoft out of the picture and IBM along with a very larger percentage of the worlds servers run on Microsoft technology. Not to mention there other software such as Office that is even the standard on Apple machines (granted there are other options for that). |
Since Reddit have a raging boner for Scandinavia, I will let you in on a secret. We are such a small place so what happens here you don't really hear about out in the rest of the world, this make Scandinavia a good testing sandbox for business ideas. For awhile now have had access to HBO Nordic a streaming service on par with Netflix. |
Agreed. I know this may sound like not a big deal but as a person that uses his phone for nearly everything. I was really pissed to find out my 64GB iPhone only has 57.30GB on it. Why does iOS need to take up 6.7GB of space?! At least on android, all that extra space the OS is taking up is because of actual features. On iOS, all that space is being used up to do things like make the Applications zoom in when opening or making the volume slider simulate shininess when the device is moved. |
Simply because you don't have a problem does not mean there is no problem.
You could argue that a particular device is not suited for whatever task an individual uses it for, but don't presume everyone uses the device in the same way (or, indeed if a way is wrong in your opinion) |
UK here as well. I get realistic speeds of 200-225down/20-22up and pay £30/$45 a month for the service. Always flawless as well. Saying that, it has only been the last 2/3 years that I have been getting what I consider to be value for money instead of constantly having to call up the ISP because something is broken or its running too slow to use. I love the future and mourn for our American brothers. Mainly because I will probably end up moving there soon for work and face the same shit. COME ON GOOGLE FIBRE |
I know this will get buried, but I don't even care. I just needed to share.
I just moved from Houston a few months ago to the Austin area. While I lived in Houston, I had ATT DSL because that's all that was offered in the area. I got 6 Mbps which was fine. I could browse the net and game a bit as it was just me and my SO.
Find out where I'm moving to in Austin offers Uverse and higher speeds. I get excited and set up Uverse. Move here and it was the most awful internet I've ever had. I grew up in the country and my parents' dial up was better than this shit. I had it for a week before I was fed up and called ATT. They then told me I could GET UP TO 6 Mbps. I was getting like 3. I explained to them I was quite pleased with their DSL in Houston and asked why I couldn't just switch back to DSL. They told me it wasn't offered in my area. It was Uverse ONLY and to top it off, when I tried to get a TV package added to my existing Uverse plan, they told me they couldn't offer me TV service at this time.
I called Time Warner. They offered me 30 Mbps WITH cable TV. I called them within my 30 days of being here in Austin AND before I got my first ATT bill. They came out and installed the next day. I cancelled my service with ATT and they told me because I cancelled within the 30 days, there would be no charges.
May rolls around, I get a $300 bill from ATT. I call them. I had to go through 8 different people because NO ONE would even listen to me or help me with the bill issue. The lady that finally took the time to discuss it with me told me she would have the issue resolved.
June, I get my final bill from Houston for the DSL. It was $55 and I paid it with a money order. Yesterday, I get a "FINAL NOTICE" demanding the $55 for the DSL even though I MAILED IT. Then ATT Uverse calls me about the service I cancelled here in Austin demanding $150!
They are the absolute worst. I am extremely disappointed with ATT and I will never recommend them again. |
From New Orleans, LA myself and my only options as far as internet is concerned are Cox and AT&T's U-Verse.
Considering how long i've been a customer of AT&T I get a permanent discount to their internet service so I pay $55 per month for the 24mbps connection. More than I feel I should be paying but the best option available to me.
Now take Cox Cable's internet service, $68 a month for a 25mbps connection, and then cut it by 2/3 of it's actual speed because you share bandwith and the majority of people in the New Orleans area have Cox and I would have to pay $68 every month for a 8.5mbps connection.
Point being, there are far worse ISPs than AT&T. Also AT&T does not strictly enforce their data cap. I've far exceeded their data cap for U-Verse for 2 years and haven't been charged for it once. More than likely due to the fact that I also have U-Verse TV which within itself transmits an excessive amount of data... |
Just to point out, it won't really. The disparity will be huge when considered in terms of GBs or TBs, but we'll be working with EBs, so it won't.
I mean, technically it will asymptotically trend towards zero, but when every single atom in the universe is included in the size, we'll have a 50% disparity between the SI prefix and the computing preference. For reference, 1GB - 93%, 1TB - 91%, 1PB - 89%, 1EB - 87%. The thing is, as size goes up, the difference matters less. A few kilobytes means nothing on a drive that is terabytes big, and as such, a few gigabytes means nothing on a drive a few exabytes big. etc etc. |
If they voted 3rd party they have a leg to stand on
Meh, not really. I mean think about it: the incompetence of the third parties dwarf that of the Republicans and Democrats. They should be building grassroots followings by running strong state and local candidates. Instead, they push all of their resources at presidential campaigns that they mathematically cannot win and they remain wallowing in irrelevance.
Don't think the third parties are somehow more benevolent than the Dems and Repubs. The third parties say good shit, but so do the Ds and Rs - the third parties just don't have to back it up because they never win. The Ds and Rs are better at playing the game. We need election reform. |
Replying to a comment that was deleted, asking why Total didn't add up. They're adding up all the costs, and then subtracting the $7500 for the credit.
I think there are some issues with the page however.
They don't add opportunity costs in that specifically, although they do reference the added cost of borrowing money in the left pane.
There is also some uncertainty regarding fuel cost. As many states have talked about taxing EVs due to lost gas tax revenue. It would be safe to assume that many will do just that at some point.
They also do not count cost for replacing the battery. Which would add ~$6250 to the cost over 5 years, assuming you prepay for the battery replacement option. With the battery being replaced on year 8.
The 85kwhr car is shown having the same fuel cost as the 60kwhr car. But their mileage is different, so it should be higher.
The fuel cost listed for the Model S also seem rather low. I didn't see where they listed what that was measured with. But some rough calculations...
Using combined mileage for LA:
MDX - 23mpg
Model S 60kwhr - 95MPGe (32kWh/100 mi)
$4.115 $/Gal (July 2013)
$0.203 $/kWh
Reverse engineering the 17k listed for the MDX's fuel consumption:
$17,757.00 / 4.115 $/Gal = 4315 Gallons
4315 G * 23Mi/G = 99245 Mi
Tesla:
99245Mi 32kWh / 100 Mi = 31758kWh
31758kWh $0.203 $/kWh = $6446.95
So the fuel costs appear to be underestimating by ~$4000.00. Or they're using some level of super charger/lower cost night time charge in their numbers. Apologies if I just missed where they talked about that. |
I know this is not a neutral source, but they are using reputable sources to promote their point: |
So getting your power from coal is somehow superior to getting it from gasoline? You are trading one pollutant for another, and the actual amount has never actually been calculated (at least by an unbiased source). It's all fine and dandy to think you are saving the world by driving an electric car (and I think they are the future), but pretending that the environmental impact is so great that you are "saving the planet" is just bumper sticker stuff.
Renewable energy accounted for only 15% of energy production last year, while over 70% was produced by coal and natural gas. We continue to focus on wind as the ultimate renewable, but the fact is that it is unreliable, and there are environmental impacts that are being ignored because of the political circle jerk around it.
This isn't even getting into the incredibly short lifespan of the batteries. What do we do with all of them when they have to be replaced? What's the environmental impact of that? How much of that material can be recycled and at what cost?
I know that many people don't want to think about these things and want to just feel good driving their electric car, but that seems completely insincere to me. I applaud the technological innovation, and think this is a legitimate post to r/technology, and I think electric motors are the way of the future for many reasons (none of them environmental), but there is still a long way to go, and dozens of questions that need to be answered. |
In the long run doesn't it benefit the city driver more?
Every day I work, I have to fill my tank. The average commuter fills up once every other week. We each spend $40 at the pump, but I go to the pump 10 times as often as he does.
If we could both switch to EVs, he'd save ~$25 every two weeks; I'd save $25 every work day.
Every month, my savings would more than cover a car payment. His probably wouldn't cover his phone bill.
>The City driver usually has terrible mileage and if I'm driving less daily won't the car (on average) last longer?
Basically irrelevant. You'll trade in your car in 7-10 years with 80K to 120K on the odometer. (Because depreciation means that maintenance costs on your car will exceed its market value around that time, and you'll opt for new hotness over old and busted). I'll scrap mine in 4-6 years with 250-350K on the odometer. And when I say "scrap", I mean "scrap" - I'll drive it until the dealer comes up with some excuse to no longer honor my lifetime warranty, and then I'll drive it into the ground.
You'll get more on the calendar; I get more on the road. |
battery replacement] (
Here is a link to a mental exercise in average cost between gas and tesla. This exercise factors in average "fuel" consumption and battery pack replacement and assumes an 8 year replacement (end of warranty) on battery packs and does not take average motor maintenance on gas engines. |
First, let me say that I applaud your desire to leave the earth better than you found it. I'm an outdoorsman, and I really do love the great outdoors. My problem isn't with you, it's with the modern environmental movement. Because it is a complete scam. It's the Xzibit of scams, it's a scam within a scam, within a scam. From the "Carbon Credit" scam, to the recycling scam, and to Green Mountain Energy.
How do I know what I'm about to write? Well, I used to work for one of the biggest power companies in Texas, I was on writing boards that drafted the rules in which power companies comply with certain ERCOT needs, and I was also one of the members of the writing committees for NERC. I know what I'm talking about.
>My power company gets 100% of its energy from wind. Green Mountain Energy in Texas
Your move.
Well chess master, here it is. You have been duped. There is one power grid in Texas, and you get your electricity from the same source as every other Texan. Period, end of story. Unless you have a windmill in your backyard hard wired to your house, you are not getting "100% of (your) energy from wind". ERCOT is the controlling entity for power in Texas, and they are the one responsible for "balancing the grid" they actually have a tie in to every electric plant in the state, and have the ability to fine tune to output (within a narrow window) in order to balance the grid.
You have three entities involved in power. You have the power producers (Florida Power & Light, and Luminant are the two biggest in Texas), these are the plants, whether they be coal/lignite, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, or wind. You have the power Transmission company, Oncor.
Then you have the electricity sellers. Way too many of them to name here, but a few of them you might know; TXU, Gexa, Reliant, and Green Mountain. That's really all they are. They buy the power from ERCOT, and then sell it to you. They buy the same power that I get from another vendor, and then sell it to you. LYING to you and telling you that it is "Pollution Free" and "100% Wind". Bullshit, you are buying the same exact electricity from the same exact sources as me!
[The fine print on their contract actually says](
>ERCOT Texas State Average Fuel Mix
>State Average (2012)
>Coal and lignite 34.6%
>Natural gas 44.6%
>Nuclear 10.4%
>Renewable energy 9.5%
>Other <1.0%
>Total 100%
They pass it off as somehow more noble by saying that "You will not have electricity from a specific generation facility delivered directly to your service address, but your purchase ensures that renewable energy equal to 100% of your paid electricity usage is produced using renewable resources on an annual basis." This is just as another scam like [Carbon Credits](
The saddest thing is that these idiots are hiding the problems with wind power. It's unreliable. We had big monitors on the floor I worked on that showed, in real time, the power production of all the plants. It was always a joke in the summer when the wind would get up to the "average" levels that are quoted. That 9.5% renewable ERCOT advertises is a average across the whole year. I will admit that in Fall and Spring wind does a decent job of creating electricity. However during the summer when demand is at it's peak, wind is at it's lowest. It will never be a viable alternative to Coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear.
Solar has more promise because when it is at it's most effective is when the most demand also exists, unfortunately it's useless at night, and it's more damaging to the wildlife than wind is (and wind is horrible for birds). |
You know, about 6-7 years ago I interviewed to get a job at a call center. I lived in a fairly small town, 90,000 or so, and jobs were scarce. They were offering slightly higher than minimum wage, like $8.50 an hour or something.
But these questions kept coming, like "you know that during these calls you will be required to try to upsell services, or in other cases, you will receive calls from customers seeking to cancel their subscriptions or services, and you will be required to try and talk them out of doing so.. etc etc"
The interview was just crushing. I felt like I was being interviewed by Satan. I started to falter off and at a point I was just like "you know, I don't think this is gonna work out." |
Okay, I think you're exaggerating here (sorry if I missed the sarcasm). The point is that Google Play Store (as any other software repository) tends to operate on a good faith. Yes, they should be paranoid, but in general most developers don't make malicious apps. And here's the key: Malicious. An app which doesn't steal your accounts and simply does NOTHING isn't malicious. EDIT: Perhaps we should call it nihilicious ?
What happened here is an exploit of the Play Store. Normally users don't view the source code, so they have no way to know whether it works or not. It would be obvious in case of a game, "it doesn't work", but how can you prove an antivirus was designed NOT to work in the first place?
Perhaps Google should have a policy for code review of antivirus software in the future. But this is the first case we see of a paid antivirus placebo app that was advertised as actually working. |
I personally like Apple's approach. It is true that Android is more "open", but in reality most people don't need or want that. Even the guys in my office don't really write apps for themselves(some of us have side projects to make extra cash though). The average person has never even thought of writing their own app. They may say something like "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was an app that does X?!" Where "X" is either impossible(IE Finds your lost keys) or already done(remind you to get eggs next time you go to the store). But they have never thought about downloading an IDE and actually attempting to make such a thing a reality. There are people who write their own apps/scripts, but they are far outside the norm.
Apple's process can be a pain, sometimes the rejection reasons are vague or seem to be applied a bit arbitrary. In all honesty though, it isn't that hard if you've read the HIG(Human Interface Guidelines, a rulebook Apple puts out about how to design an app) and aren't intentionally being malicious. Apple really does want as many apps as possible to get through, it is a great selling point for them. They also realize that a bunch of crappy apps isn't a good selling point, so they curate.
Google has an impossible task now. They need to protect people from being scammed while at the same time not limiting what can run on the platform. This cannot be done effectively. It would require human review of every line of code submitted.
Think of the Snowden releases. We know about huge security and privacy issues now, they are in the eye of the public more than ever. . . Yet there is very little outcry. Why? Because security and privacy are hard, you have to work at them. I don't want to have to work at my phone, I just want to text and play a few games. I can't be bothered to worry if this app really works or not, it is coming from a place I trust so it must be ok. |
and absence of competition.
You do realize that's because of the state, right? The state created those monopolistic sectors to begin with. And now you're getting angry that people took advantage of it? I realize those money hungry bastards are in the wrong, but none of this would be happening if it weren't for the fact that the state has the power to dictate markets in the first place. |
r/technology is so predictable.
To the everyday, non-audiophile, both Bose and Beats make great products.
Bose's noise-canceling headphones are outstanding and set a new standard for noise-canceling technology. There may be better options out there, but that doesn't matter to the thousands of satisfied customers of their QC line; just read the online reviews.
Beats has found a niche market (with disposable income) that love their headphones. Sure, there are significantly better and cheaper headphones for listening to Eric Clapton Unplugged. But again, that doesn't matter to the college kid who likes how his black/red Beats match his black/red Jordans. He just wants to listen to Kendrick Lamar — which sounds great on Beats headphones. |
Yes, pretty much exactly that.
I guess that might be true, but you wouldn't be able to use any of the copyrighted software you already have. Say you have an iPhone. There is a TON of stuff that would need to be replaced if you set the restriction that you can't modify software. Even the BootROM, which is often referred to as hardware since it can't be updated, still would require a modification of its copyrighted software to load a different OS. You could probably keep the screen, the battery, and case around the phone, maybe the camera, and a few other sensors, and replace the entire logic board and have it run linux legally. There is no legal way to have any device run modified iOS. If you use a BootROM exploit to load linux instead of iOS, that is still breaking your lease of the BootROM software. If you modify the kernel, or iOS, you are breaking the lease. |
Lol, your argument is analogous to having a car that the manufacturer says you shouldn't drive on the freeway because the tires are shit. However they install locking lugnuts to prevent you from changing the tire. Jailbreaking lets you change the tires. |
If you could have stretched your assertion into multiple paragraphs, this could have been a |
There hasn't been a radio shack in Canada since 2005. Circuit city bought it and renamed it to the source, then they sold it to bell. |
There are areas of the USA much larger than your Nordic country with as many guns & hunters per capita, and likewise few homicides.
The USA is the size of Western Europe but suffers from tremendous localized poverty and crime . Most of the violence occurs in specific neighborhoods. Most Europeans I've brought over to the states expect to find it dangerous and are surprised / disappointed to find that the streets are as safe as anywhere in Europe with no guns in sight. Because we don't go to the dangerous neighborhoods. I've lived in gun-toting Texas my whole life (almost 50 years). I've never witnessed gun violence. I've witnessed a knifing as well as a police beating, but no gun violence. I'm not an exception. |
HEADLINE IS WRONG!!! It seemed absurd when I saw it on /r/bitcoin so I went and asked /r/law about this, [here]( The top comments there were:
>>activities originating from, or directed by persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States
>Foreign hackers--Snowden's activities occurred while he was inside the US, so doesn't seem like a likely target Wikileaks is more likely
and
>>While I like Bitcoin as a concept (and tool for cheap, fast international fund transfers), never trust the idiots at /r/bitcoin to get anything right. It looks like it's just an expansion of the criteria for who can be put on the OFAC list. Snowden isn't on it, and likely never would be unless he formally renounced his US Citizenship in compliance with US DOS regulations.
>Edit: Just searched it, he's not on their SDN list, which is what this order is referencing: |
The thing is ICANN really doesn't do a whole lot beyond administering the top-level domains, and getting people to agree on / implement a new administration system is basically impossible.
>And they can be pressured by world governments to act in favour of spying and censorship.
The good news is they can do squat to spy on or censor anyone. They can make waves that people are using the .sucks gTLD in what they consider an inappropriate manner but unless they actually revoke the entire gTLD from the company they issued it to it's all a load of hot air. They have precisely zero control over domain names. |
Very awesome step towards bionic augmentation indeed, however it seems to only be a camera within the prosthetic eye with a wireless transmitter. What will really make me excited is hooking such devices up via neural implants to the visual cortex, which has already been done once or twice for blind people. With it directly hooked up to the brain and with the assistance of a small computer one could write software to impose HUD elements on the signal to the brain for environmental data. Theoretically one could open up a web browser and display this directly to the user, or take over vision completely for remote viewing Ghost in the Shell style. |
The image doesn't support your argument, it talks about people going through and making videos where they read the shit in the video.
I meant for my tone to be rude because of your stupidity. You asked for someone to create something on blogspot.... go do it yourself?
Your point about the automated cables-to-video conversion, where was it mentioned? It sure as shit doesn't say anything about that in the post, you just asked for a slide show to be made. |
So? Do you remember DARPA and ARPANET? How about the projects and research at MIT that were funded by the DoD? Does that mean that the internet is bad and MIT is just a gov't front?
I don't know if you read that entire NetworkWorld article, but Tor is not run by any gov't whatsoever.
From Tor's own website: "It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications."; after that the Electronic Frontier Foundation supported it. Now it's run by a nonprofit organization.
Tor is still heavily endorsed by the EFF, which is about as far away from the US govt as possible. It's also free software, so the source code is publicly available. I suggest you read for a more detailed description of Tor. |
Well it's nuclear powered so it will out live some of us, so there's that. I doubt the solar panel would do so well on mars without human intervention. The rovers had to be positioned in such away that sunlight was consistently provided to the solar cells. Plus unless positioned correctly they could have gotten so cold that they would've stopped working. Plus not to mention the dust. Dust coated the solar panels of previous rovers. They only got cleared becuase of a wind storm that wooshed away all the dust. |
Its not like he was teaching us anything either. He kept attacking people by giving them bad sounding names, but there was no reasoning behind any of his points. |
is this the mortgage case where they have voice recordings of laptop owner telling husband that incriminating evidence is on laptop? |
I would jump at the chance if I had the opportunity to have a solid-state storage device implanted in my brain to supplement my own, flaky, biological memories. I would literally trade my left testicle for a device which could record everything my eyes picked up, giving me the ability to recall the things I've seen or read in complete and accurate detail.
The ability to augment my mind with reliable, digital storage would make me a super-human, able to quickly absorb books of reference material and recall it as fast as a Google search. However, if that device were subject to a search warrant as evidence, it would be a basic violation of my 5th amendment right.
So where does that right end? If the device is outside my skull, does that give the police the right to chisel it off and demand a password? If it's a wireless device that I carry in my pocket, do they have the right to take away my memories and turn them over to the boys in the lab?
Consider spousal privilege. Having a private channel for communications with ones spouse is valuable, beneficial to society and therefore protected under the Constitution. How much more valuable is it to advance the race with super-memories?
But what are the limits? When does a storage device stop being augmented memory and start being just another piece of evidence? The spousal privilege has already given us the standard: If I have a reasonable expectation of privacy, shared with no one else, then it's part of me, and it's protected under the 5th amendment. |
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