AZ is great for generation, but homeowners would need a very large system to offset those ACs that run "24 hours a day". Because of the power demands, I don't think AZ can get away with having high electric rates without bankrupting its citizens. A quick Google search says that AZ customers in Phoenix pay around 9 cents per kWH.
In California, it's much easier to make the numbers work. We also have a lot of sun, but we pay up to 3 times what AZ does for power which makes the return on investment faster. We have less demands because the temperature is more moderate. We can fully offset our usage with a pretty reasonably sized system. I paid around $14,000 to save around $2000 per year. The system just about fully offsets our yearly power usage. I'd like to say I get the most satisfaction from being "green" but really - what's priceless is not paying out the nose to our crooked utility company.
It would be especially awesome if you could also pump the extra energy "into the grid" so to speak during the day. That can even make it profitable. I heard they have some program like that in Germany. Too lazy to google to verify.
That's exactly how it works here in the US! It's called "net metering". The power company doesn't have to do anything special to enable it. Even my 15 year old mechanical meter simply started spinning backwards when I turned the PV array on, though it's since been switched to a smart meter that tracks incoming and outgoing power separately.
My PV array often generates more than I can use. That goes into the grid (my neighbors end up using it). If at the end of the month, I've generated more KwH than I've used, my power company, Southern California Edison pays me 22c per kwh. SCE's Net metering customers typically get switched to annual billing. So, I get 1 electricity bill per year. California recently passed a law that the power company has to give you a check if you generate more power than you use in that year. Prior to that passing, you would "lose" any excess generation at the end of your 12 month billing cycle.
I've had my system for a couple years now. I "make" money in the spring and fall, and use up the credit in the summer and winter. It's a no-brainer if you live in an area with high electric rates.
The most obvious reason adoption was slow is that's not that easy to fill even a GBE pipe. Spinning disks typically don't do much over 100MB/sec anyway. Sustained writes in a disk speed test is one thing, real-world tests like copying a folder full of home photos and videos is another. Not only is 10GBE not needed for home use, the need for big bandwidth is actually lessening as streaming options improve. I was very excited to get my network up to gigabit in the early 2000's, when I used to copy DVD images down to the HTPC in order to play them. Trying to mount the image remotely would result in stuttering and buffering issues.
Today I can stream a 1080p 3D video across a 100mbps MoCA adapter without much thought. Media players and codecs have all been tuned to deal with internet-based video, so local traffic is a snap. Sadly this house doesn't have CAT5 going to the home theater like my last home so I'm stuck with MoCA, but I've found that it's not really limiting.
I'm all for 10GE becoming standard, just for those times when I want to transfer data from one laptop to another, but it's not something I've been waiting with baited breath for. It might have been more interesting if technologies like PXE network-booting had gone more mainstream.
You can get unlimited talk, text, and data through Straight Talk or similar for less than $50 a month. Bring your AT&T phone and just buy a new SIM card, if you like (usually around $15 or less). Or if you're not overly concerned with having the fanciest phones (which these days doesn't make nearly as much difference as it did 2-3 years ago), you can get a phone on Verizon's network and possibly have better coverage.
Yes, I think you're nuts.
You're forgetting the value of the subsidized upgrades. That's worth something, especially when you can sell the old ones on eBay. AT&T's coverage is significantly better than Verizon in my area.
StraightTalk would not be a good deal for me. I pay $120 per month for two unlimited-data iPhones and a basic no-frills emergency line for Mom. We get at least 1 new subsidized phone every year. I do have limited minutes (550 shared) and limited texts (200 per iPhone), but I have tons of rollover minutes that expire every month and with iMessage, reaching the 200 text limit is rare. As long as AT&T continues to let me upgrade and keep my rate plan, I'm sticking with them.
I don't trust MVNO's anyway. I'd probably try that route if I were a new customer, but the "tower owners" have them by the balls. I wouldn't expect the good deals to last very long.
If you're the "best programmer evar" but nobody wants to hire you, figure out a niche that interests you (be it graphics, TCP/IP programming, databases, web/javascript, java, test automation, whatever). Get involved in some open source projects and get some real world experience to supplement your degrees. Recruiters are looking to fill a specific position. If they need someone to work on a project, they will be looking for resumes that demonstrate aptitude in the technologies they need.
I got my very first programming job not because of the classes I took in college, but because I spent my spare time heavily modifying a BBS software written in 'C'. The firm that hired me needed someone to write a dial-in remote access module, and I had general coding skills combined with experience in the area that they needed me to have experience in. I learned far more working for that company than I ever did in school!
Did Tesla have to pay a penalty for early repayment? You know, like banks will do if you want to pay a mortgage off early. Or is it a different set of rules?
Most normal home mortgages do not have a pre-payment penalty.
Personally, I like the ban, since the idea of having people inches away from me, on each side, and behind and in front, all shouting away on a cell would drive me nuts. It's bad enough as it is now...
People can already use their cell phones in the plane, on the ground until the cabin doors closes. And, you're already legally allowed to use them when taxiing back to the gate after touchdown.
I'm not sure why so many people are trying to make this issue about something it's not. People wanting to be able to read a book on their kindle has nothing to do with annoying people yacking on a cell phone. If you leave the requirement to switch to "airplane mode", it will still stop cell phone chatter, but allow book reading. And anyone who uses the argument about it "only being fifteen minutes", clearly doesn't fly often enough to understand this issue.
Other then the new Super Mario Bros Game. I literally have no use for my Wii U at the moment. Once the new Nintendo franchise games start rolling out I would expect to see quite a rise in sales again.
Nail meet head. Zelda: TP was released alongside the Wii. The Wii U doesn't have a killer launch title. New SMB is good, but it's not a what I consider a "next gen" game. Wii U needs a new Zelda and maybe a new Metroid Prime game to get going.
Wind Waker HD is not a new Zelda game. In fact, it's Wind Waker is worst Zelda game I've ever played, and I don't think I could stomach playing it again unless I get confirmation that they've removed the busy-work "fluff" they added to cover for the fact that they didn't finish all of the dungeons they had planned. Rehashing wind waker suggests Nintendo isn't even close to ready with an A-list title, which is worrysome.
WordPerfect was great for DOS. The early Windows/WYSIWYG versions were not great. I remember going back to the DOS version for most things because the GUI was too clunky. It just didn't behave like a proper Windows application. By the time it worked well, it was too late. MS word had picked up marketshare for people wanting to use a Windows word processor.
I do remember finding it maddening when MS-Word would decide to do something unintended with styling, and I had no true "Reveal codes" function to fix it easily like I could in WordPerfect.
None of our "dumb" phones have survived as long as my iPhones. Previous phones I've had were pretty undesirable after a couple years of use. We ended up with broken buttons, sticky buttons, faulty ribbon cables/hinge switches, and scratched up screens.
My original iPhone is still in perfect working order save for the battery which doesn't last as long as it used to (but still works surprisingly well). I kept it in a case but no screen protector. The best thing about modern touch screen phones are the scratch resistant screens.
I have to disagree. WfW 3.11, Windows 95's predecessor, wasn't all that stable either. Running more than a couple heavy programs at the same time could result in graphics blacking out as "resources" became exhausted, and you had to reboot the GUI to get them back. Driver installation was a royal pain, and there was still a heavy reliance on the DOS underpinnings that caused issues. Himem, Netbeui, MSCDEX, setting IRQ and IO port jumpers on everything and entering setting switches in config.sys - ugh! If a driver failed to load properly, the common failure mode was to sit at the Windows logo and do nothing.
I thought Windows 95 was an amazing release. It gave us real device management, 32 bit, and the start menu/taskbar UI that people clearly still don't want to give up. I don't remember a single person crying that they wanted the Program Manager back. There were big performance improvements too. "DOS boxes" worked a LOT better - you didn't need to exit back to DOS mode to do things nearly as often. And it had built-in TCP/IP. Of course there were some stability problems while third parties got up to speed with the new driver architecture, but overall I remember it working VERY well, considering the massive amount of change that took place.
OSR2, 98, and 98SE all seemed like incremental improvements (largely to support hardware evolution - better USB support, FAT32 file system to handle larger hard disks, etc). ME was a half-baked release - It took away some things and didn't offer a lot in return. MS'es efforts were clearly in Windows 2000 at this point (as they should). XP seemed to be what all of their efforts were working towards - it brought the NT kernel into the mainstream with additional compatibility modes. They did such a good job with XP, it's as if MS didn't know where to go from here. XP's only achilles heel seemed to be with security.
Since then it seems like they're changing things for the sake of change. I'm not even all that impressed with Windows 7. Nothing wrong with it, but it feels more like a refined Vista to me, and Vista didn't seem like a terribly big step up from XP. The biggest reason to switch to Windows 7 (or Vista) is to get mainstream 64 bit support. And even that could have happened under XP had it not been EOL'ed, since there is a 64 bit version. Now we have windows 8, with is a step backwards aesthetically (subject to opinion, of course, but Aeroglass was added to Vista for a reason), as well as functionally, unless you have a touch screen where the new Metro interface has some value. They could have simply added a Metro "ecosystem" as an alternative shell, just as they did with Media Center. Instead they've decided to remove something as fundamental as the Start menu, and push everyone towards UI stylings that could have been rendered in the 80's with an EGA adapter. I'm just not feeling it.
That monopoly was removed back in the late '90s with the telecom act. I remember in 2000 when there were about 30 different DSL companies to choose from.
Now, there's 2. AT&T, and Comcast.
Those are the choices with no regulation.
And we're heading towards 1. AT&T and Verizon want to focus on more lucrative wireless customers. They've pretty much halted progress on FiOS and U-verse. Verizon is already making bundling deals with cable companies.
> Are you really so damn limited that you NEED some electronic device plugged into your ass 24x7?
Are you really so short-sighted that you can't understand why people are frustrated that they can't their gadgets for long periods of down-time, when there's absolutely no good reason not to? People keep throwing 10 minutes around, but it's much longer than that at busy airports.
Nobody's claiming that this issue compares to world hunger. First world problem, sure, but how is it any less newsworthy than the daily updates about Kate Middleton's pregnancy? If you don't care, why can't you just move along?
If people want talking on cell phones banned because yammering on phones is annoying, then ban that specific activity. You have my full support. That has nothing to do with wanting to read a book on my iPad or get some work done. It's time to do away with rules that make no sense.
Standard MP3s have unspecified, small gaps at the beginning and end (encoder delay and padding). Players cannot accurately determine where the audio is supposed to start and finish. LAME and Apple encoders can both add "proprietary" tags inform the player of the appropriate locations, which allow MP3s to play gapless by players that support the tag. Apple doesn't support LAME tags.
I've been making continuous-play dance mix CDs since the mid 90's. Back then Jeff Arnold's DAO (later became CDRWin) used to be one of the only authoring tools you could use to get continuous play CDs. Without it, standard Track-At-Once mode would always produce a 2 second gap.
There is a a fun thing you can do with the pregap area on a CD. You can make a "hidden" track by putting audio in Track 1's pregap. Virtually all players will skip past it when you first play the CD, but you can almost always hold the rewind button to access that area.
The Retina display macbook was delivered with an updated OSX which could take advantage of the added resolution, without making everything unusably small. Coordinating those things to offer a desktop OS with a USABLE high resolution screen is, in fact, something to commended.
I have a 30" cinema display. It looks great under Windows where I can adjust the DPI. However, when you do adjust the DPI, there are an assortment of compatibility problems. Even big ticket apps, like Adobe Photoshop/Dreamweaver don't work right. You'll have dialog boxes pop up with missing controls. There are some "compatibility options" which can fix it, but then you're left with blurry applications. Or you leave the DPI alone and deal with uncomfortably tiny text and icons.
AT&T doesn't care what phone you stick your sim in. I've been on a regular plan using pre-pay phones since at least 2007. Contract ended early 2008.
I just buy a el-cheapie flip. If I break it, who cares.
Put your SIM into an iPhone. You'll quickly find out that they care, they just don't care about your el cheapo phones.
Even before the iPhone, AT&T had this technology in place. You could insert your SIM into a different phone, log into AT&T's website, and see the model associated with your phone number automatically change.
When I call AT&T, the first thing they ask me is my PIN # or last 4 of my social to identify me. They should not accept a stolen phone report from anyone other than the account owner, and only block phones are registered under the account owner's control. If someone has stolen my identity to the extent that they can impersonate me to AT&T, they can do a lot of other damage as well.
They don't need to BRICK the phone - they can simply refuse to activate them while they're on the stolen list. Then if there's any falsified theft claims, it can be undone, but I suspect that would be pretty rare for the reason I noted above.
The purpose of such a blacklist is not to get the phone back, but rather, to make them less valuable to thieves who will try and sell them. I think it will help get some phones back to owners too. I knew a kid who boasted about how they "scored" a phone that someone else left behind. At the time I was surprised to learn that Verizon activated it, and despite how easily trackable all of this was, no effort would be made to return the phone to the owner. Had Verizon refused to activate it, this person would have turned it in. If it was well established that lost phones are useless, he probably would have either left it alone or turned it in where he found it.
I believe a more reasonable solution would be to reduce the amount returned to you by a percentage until Proven broken by a manufacturing error. Simply banning someone from returning something is bad solution and just adds insult to injury.
I don't find your solution reasonable. It's rare that I return anything, but sometimes I need to return items that are not damaged, but do not work as advertised or meet my expectations.
The convenience of being able to go back to the store is one of the best remaining reasons to shop in a brick and mortar store. If they're going to make returns inconvenient or treat me like a criminal, I might as well just order online.
Most people go to the dentist regularly. I can easily tell you that for the last 10 years, once a year, I've gotten my smaller x-ray panels. This month I got full panel. The precise dates probably don't have much bearing on the result.
I strongly suspect that the carrier lock feature is described in a functional specification somewhere that Apple and AT&T signed off on when AT&T agreed to subsidize iPhone purchases. Money for lawyers certainly helps win a lawsuit, but they won't win if they're blatantly violating agreements.
Tethering is a more interesting issue. Apple already went for the jugular with iMessage to bypass text plans, so why would bypassing tether plans be any different? There's even precedent in that almost every data enabled phone I've used going back as far as the Nokia 3650 or the Motorola V551 has had the ability to tether.
I feel charging to tether is wrong, particularly now that the carriers are selling data in blocks of GB per month. It shouldn't matter how I use my 3GB per month if I've paid for 3GB, I should be able to use it as I see fit.
I want higher DPI for PC monitors as well. But, DPI adjustment in the OS needs to work correctly. Microsoft keeps trying, but altering the DPI setting still results in too many broken applications. OSX doesn't even try, despite Apple having made it work on the iPhone.
I have two very nice high res displays that I have to run at non-native resolution because native res results in text that's too small for me to comfortably read. It sucks.
Lua is also used in the MiCasaVerde Vera home automation system. It's lightweight enough to run in router firmware, but powerful enough to allow users to script advanced home control logic, or even develop "drivers" for alarm panels or other serial devices it doesn't support out of the box.
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AZ is great for generation, but homeowners would need a very large system to offset those ACs that run "24 hours a day". Because of the power demands, I don't think AZ can get away with having high electric rates without bankrupting its citizens. A quick Google search says that AZ customers in Phoenix pay around 9 cents per kWH.
In California, it's much easier to make the numbers work. We also have a lot of sun, but we pay up to 3 times what AZ does for power which makes the return on investment faster. We have less demands because the temperature is more moderate. We can fully offset our usage with a pretty reasonably sized system. I paid around $14,000 to save around $2000 per year. The system just about fully offsets our yearly power usage. I'd like to say I get the most satisfaction from being "green" but really - what's priceless is not paying out the nose to our crooked utility company.
It would be especially awesome if you could also pump the extra energy "into the grid" so to speak during the day. That can even make it profitable. I heard they have some program like that in Germany. Too lazy to google to verify.
That's exactly how it works here in the US! It's called "net metering". The power company doesn't have to do anything special to enable it. Even my 15 year old mechanical meter simply started spinning backwards when I turned the PV array on, though it's since been switched to a smart meter that tracks incoming and outgoing power separately.
My PV array often generates more than I can use. That goes into the grid (my neighbors end up using it). If at the end of the month, I've generated more KwH than I've used, my power company, Southern California Edison pays me 22c per kwh. SCE's Net metering customers typically get switched to annual billing. So, I get 1 electricity bill per year. California recently passed a law that the power company has to give you a check if you generate more power than you use in that year. Prior to that passing, you would "lose" any excess generation at the end of your 12 month billing cycle.
I've had my system for a couple years now. I "make" money in the spring and fall, and use up the credit in the summer and winter. It's a no-brainer if you live in an area with high electric rates.
The most obvious reason adoption was slow is that's not that easy to fill even a GBE pipe. Spinning disks typically don't do much over 100MB/sec anyway. Sustained writes in a disk speed test is one thing, real-world tests like copying a folder full of home photos and videos is another. Not only is 10GBE not needed for home use, the need for big bandwidth is actually lessening as streaming options improve. I was very excited to get my network up to gigabit in the early 2000's, when I used to copy DVD images down to the HTPC in order to play them. Trying to mount the image remotely would result in stuttering and buffering issues.
Today I can stream a 1080p 3D video across a 100mbps MoCA adapter without much thought. Media players and codecs have all been tuned to deal with internet-based video, so local traffic is a snap. Sadly this house doesn't have CAT5 going to the home theater like my last home so I'm stuck with MoCA, but I've found that it's not really limiting.
I'm all for 10GE becoming standard, just for those times when I want to transfer data from one laptop to another, but it's not something I've been waiting with baited breath for. It might have been more interesting if technologies like PXE network-booting had gone more mainstream.
You can get unlimited talk, text, and data through Straight Talk or similar for less than $50 a month. Bring your AT&T phone and just buy a new SIM card, if you like (usually around $15 or less). Or if you're not overly concerned with having the fanciest phones (which these days doesn't make nearly as much difference as it did 2-3 years ago), you can get a phone on Verizon's network and possibly have better coverage.
Yes, I think you're nuts.
You're forgetting the value of the subsidized upgrades. That's worth something, especially when you can sell the old ones on eBay. AT&T's coverage is significantly better than Verizon in my area.
StraightTalk would not be a good deal for me. I pay $120 per month for two unlimited-data iPhones and a basic no-frills emergency line for Mom. We get at least 1 new subsidized phone every year. I do have limited minutes (550 shared) and limited texts (200 per iPhone), but I have tons of rollover minutes that expire every month and with iMessage, reaching the 200 text limit is rare. As long as AT&T continues to let me upgrade and keep my rate plan, I'm sticking with them.
I don't trust MVNO's anyway. I'd probably try that route if I were a new customer, but the "tower owners" have them by the balls. I wouldn't expect the good deals to last very long.
If you're the "best programmer evar" but nobody wants to hire you, figure out a niche that interests you (be it graphics, TCP/IP programming, databases, web/javascript, java, test automation, whatever). Get involved in some open source projects and get some real world experience to supplement your degrees. Recruiters are looking to fill a specific position. If they need someone to work on a project, they will be looking for resumes that demonstrate aptitude in the technologies they need.
I got my very first programming job not because of the classes I took in college, but because I spent my spare time heavily modifying a BBS software written in 'C'. The firm that hired me needed someone to write a dial-in remote access module, and I had general coding skills combined with experience in the area that they needed me to have experience in. I learned far more working for that company than I ever did in school!
Did Tesla have to pay a penalty for early repayment? You know, like banks will do if you want to pay a mortgage off early. Or is it a different set of rules?
Most normal home mortgages do not have a pre-payment penalty.
Personally, I like the ban, since the idea of having people inches away from me, on each side, and behind and in front, all shouting away on a cell would drive me nuts. It's bad enough as it is now...
People can already use their cell phones in the plane, on the ground until the cabin doors closes. And, you're already legally allowed to use them when taxiing back to the gate after touchdown.
I'm not sure why so many people are trying to make this issue about something it's not. People wanting to be able to read a book on their kindle has nothing to do with annoying people yacking on a cell phone. If you leave the requirement to switch to "airplane mode", it will still stop cell phone chatter, but allow book reading. And anyone who uses the argument about it "only being fifteen minutes", clearly doesn't fly often enough to understand this issue.
Other then the new Super Mario Bros Game. I literally have no use for my Wii U at the moment. Once the new Nintendo franchise games start rolling out I would expect to see quite a rise in sales again.
Nail meet head. Zelda: TP was released alongside the Wii. The Wii U doesn't have a killer launch title. New SMB is good, but it's not a what I consider a "next gen" game. Wii U needs a new Zelda and maybe a new Metroid Prime game to get going.
Wind Waker HD is not a new Zelda game. In fact, it's Wind Waker is worst Zelda game I've ever played, and I don't think I could stomach playing it again unless I get confirmation that they've removed the busy-work "fluff" they added to cover for the fact that they didn't finish all of the dungeons they had planned. Rehashing wind waker suggests Nintendo isn't even close to ready with an A-list title, which is worrysome.
WordPerfect was great for DOS. The early Windows/WYSIWYG versions were not great. I remember going back to the DOS version for most things because the GUI was too clunky. It just didn't behave like a proper Windows application. By the time it worked well, it was too late. MS word had picked up marketshare for people wanting to use a Windows word processor.
I do remember finding it maddening when MS-Word would decide to do something unintended with styling, and I had no true "Reveal codes" function to fix it easily like I could in WordPerfect.
Get used to it, been that way since Genesis.
Was the Master System really that much more repairable?
None of our "dumb" phones have survived as long as my iPhones. Previous phones I've had were pretty undesirable after a couple years of use. We ended up with broken buttons, sticky buttons, faulty ribbon cables/hinge switches, and scratched up screens.
My original iPhone is still in perfect working order save for the battery which doesn't last as long as it used to (but still works surprisingly well). I kept it in a case but no screen protector. The best thing about modern touch screen phones are the scratch resistant screens.
I have to disagree. WfW 3.11, Windows 95's predecessor, wasn't all that stable either. Running more than a couple heavy programs at the same time could result in graphics blacking out as "resources" became exhausted, and you had to reboot the GUI to get them back. Driver installation was a royal pain, and there was still a heavy reliance on the DOS underpinnings that caused issues. Himem, Netbeui, MSCDEX, setting IRQ and IO port jumpers on everything and entering setting switches in config.sys - ugh! If a driver failed to load properly, the common failure mode was to sit at the Windows logo and do nothing.
I thought Windows 95 was an amazing release. It gave us real device management, 32 bit, and the start menu/taskbar UI that people clearly still don't want to give up. I don't remember a single person crying that they wanted the Program Manager back. There were big performance improvements too. "DOS boxes" worked a LOT better - you didn't need to exit back to DOS mode to do things nearly as often. And it had built-in TCP/IP. Of course there were some stability problems while third parties got up to speed with the new driver architecture, but overall I remember it working VERY well, considering the massive amount of change that took place.
OSR2, 98, and 98SE all seemed like incremental improvements (largely to support hardware evolution - better USB support, FAT32 file system to handle larger hard disks, etc). ME was a half-baked release - It took away some things and didn't offer a lot in return. MS'es efforts were clearly in Windows 2000 at this point (as they should). XP seemed to be what all of their efforts were working towards - it brought the NT kernel into the mainstream with additional compatibility modes. They did such a good job with XP, it's as if MS didn't know where to go from here. XP's only achilles heel seemed to be with security.
Since then it seems like they're changing things for the sake of change. I'm not even all that impressed with Windows 7. Nothing wrong with it, but it feels more like a refined Vista to me, and Vista didn't seem like a terribly big step up from XP. The biggest reason to switch to Windows 7 (or Vista) is to get mainstream 64 bit support. And even that could have happened under XP had it not been EOL'ed, since there is a 64 bit version. Now we have windows 8, with is a step backwards aesthetically (subject to opinion, of course, but Aeroglass was added to Vista for a reason), as well as functionally, unless you have a touch screen where the new Metro interface has some value. They could have simply added a Metro "ecosystem" as an alternative shell, just as they did with Media Center. Instead they've decided to remove something as fundamental as the Start menu, and push everyone towards UI stylings that could have been rendered in the 80's with an EGA adapter. I'm just not feeling it.
That monopoly was removed back in the late '90s with the telecom act. I remember in 2000 when there were about 30 different DSL companies to choose from.
Now, there's 2. AT&T, and Comcast.
Those are the choices with no regulation.
And we're heading towards 1. AT&T and Verizon want to focus on more lucrative wireless customers. They've pretty much halted progress on FiOS and U-verse. Verizon is already making bundling deals with cable companies.
> Are you really so damn limited that you NEED some electronic device plugged into your ass 24x7?
Are you really so short-sighted that you can't understand why people are frustrated that they can't their gadgets for long periods of down-time, when there's absolutely no good reason not to? People keep throwing 10 minutes around, but it's much longer than that at busy airports.
Nobody's claiming that this issue compares to world hunger. First world problem, sure, but how is it any less newsworthy than the daily updates about Kate Middleton's pregnancy? If you don't care, why can't you just move along?
If people want talking on cell phones banned because yammering on phones is annoying, then ban that specific activity. You have my full support. That has nothing to do with wanting to read a book on my iPad or get some work done. It's time to do away with rules that make no sense.
Those of you claiming that it's "10 minutes without your iPad" have obviously have never flown out of a large, busy airport.
Standard MP3s have unspecified, small gaps at the beginning and end (encoder delay and padding). Players cannot accurately determine where the audio is supposed to start and finish. LAME and Apple encoders can both add "proprietary" tags inform the player of the appropriate locations, which allow MP3s to play gapless by players that support the tag. Apple doesn't support LAME tags.
I've been making continuous-play dance mix CDs since the mid 90's. Back then Jeff Arnold's DAO (later became CDRWin) used to be one of the only authoring tools you could use to get continuous play CDs. Without it, standard Track-At-Once mode would always produce a 2 second gap.
There is a a fun thing you can do with the pregap area on a CD. You can make a "hidden" track by putting audio in Track 1's pregap. Virtually all players will skip past it when you first play the CD, but you can almost always hold the rewind button to access that area.
You totally missed the point.
The Retina display macbook was delivered with an updated OSX which could take advantage of the added resolution, without making everything unusably small. Coordinating those things to offer a desktop OS with a USABLE high resolution screen is, in fact, something to commended.
I have a 30" cinema display. It looks great under Windows where I can adjust the DPI. However, when you do adjust the DPI, there are an assortment of compatibility problems. Even big ticket apps, like Adobe Photoshop/Dreamweaver don't work right. You'll have dialog boxes pop up with missing controls. There are some "compatibility options" which can fix it, but then you're left with blurry applications. Or you leave the DPI alone and deal with uncomfortably tiny text and icons.
AT&T doesn't care what phone you stick your sim in. I've been on a regular plan using pre-pay phones since at least 2007. Contract ended early 2008.
I just buy a el-cheapie flip. If I break it, who cares.
Put your SIM into an iPhone. You'll quickly find out that they care, they just don't care about your el cheapo phones.
Even before the iPhone, AT&T had this technology in place. You could insert your SIM into a different phone, log into AT&T's website, and see the model associated with your phone number automatically change.
When I call AT&T, the first thing they ask me is my PIN # or last 4 of my social to identify me. They should not accept a stolen phone report from
anyone other than the account owner, and only block phones are registered under the account owner's control. If someone has stolen my identity to the extent that they can impersonate me to AT&T, they can do a lot of other damage as well.
They don't need to BRICK the phone - they can simply refuse to activate them while they're on the stolen list. Then if there's any falsified theft claims, it can be undone, but I suspect that would be pretty rare for the reason I noted above.
The purpose of such a blacklist is not to get the phone back, but rather, to make them less valuable to thieves who will try and sell them. I think it will help get some phones back to owners too. I knew a kid who boasted about how they "scored" a phone that someone else left behind. At the time I was surprised to learn that Verizon activated it, and despite how easily trackable all of this was, no effort would be made to return the phone to the owner. Had Verizon refused to activate it, this person would have turned it in. If it was well established that lost phones are useless, he probably would have either left it alone or turned it in where he found it.
I believe a more reasonable solution would be to reduce the amount returned to you by a percentage until Proven broken by a manufacturing error. Simply banning someone from returning something is bad solution and just adds insult to injury.
I don't find your solution reasonable. It's rare that I return anything, but sometimes I need to return items that are not damaged, but do not work as advertised or meet my expectations.
The convenience of being able to go back to the store is one of the best remaining reasons to shop in a brick and mortar store. If they're going to make returns inconvenient or treat me like a criminal, I might as well just order online.
Most people go to the dentist regularly. I can easily tell you that for the last 10 years, once a year, I've gotten my smaller x-ray panels. This month I got full panel. The precise dates probably don't have much bearing on the result.
I strongly suspect that the carrier lock feature is described in a functional specification somewhere that Apple and AT&T signed off on when AT&T agreed to subsidize iPhone purchases. Money for lawyers certainly helps win a lawsuit, but they won't win if they're blatantly violating agreements.
Tethering is a more interesting issue. Apple already went for the jugular with iMessage to bypass text plans, so why would bypassing tether plans be any different? There's even precedent in that almost every data enabled phone I've used going back as far as the Nokia 3650 or the Motorola V551 has had the ability to tether.
I feel charging to tether is wrong, particularly now that the carriers are selling data in blocks of GB per month. It shouldn't matter how I use my 3GB per month if I've paid for 3GB, I should be able to use it as I see fit.
I want higher DPI for PC monitors as well. But, DPI adjustment in the OS needs to work correctly. Microsoft keeps trying, but altering the DPI setting still results in too many broken applications. OSX doesn't even try, despite Apple having made it work on the iPhone.
I have two very nice high res displays that I have to run at non-native resolution because native res results in text that's too small for me to comfortably read. It sucks.
Lua is also used in the MiCasaVerde Vera home automation system. It's lightweight enough to run in router firmware, but powerful enough to allow users to script advanced home control logic, or even develop "drivers" for alarm panels or other serial devices it doesn't support out of the box.