Dial-up, like broadband, is a term that encompasses various speeds. Just like you wouldn't get away with claiming your 9.6K ISP was "blazingly fast" when everybody else had long since upgraded to 14.4K, you shouldn't get away with using "broadband" as a term unless "broad" really is an applicable adjective. It has been a number of years since 4Mbps qualified.
As far as I can recall, Netflix's HD (not 4K) tops out at about 6Mbps. It could be as simple as Netflix deciding that your connection can't handle the higher quality stream and falling back to 2.5Mbps (or your provider throttling Netflix, for that matter). Which is fine for a tablet, but would likely be fairly noticeable on a decently sized TV.
I can but repeat myself. Just because it's an Internet connection that isn't totally useless, does not make it qualify to be described as "broadband" in my mind. For a provider to claim they offer broadband, they should offer 10Mbps as a minimum. If they don't, they're just offering "Internet". This is, of course, entirely my opinion, since there's no firm definition of the term broadband.
"I bring my Chromecast and stream a Blu-ray image from my media center at home"
And technically, that's not legal.
To which technicality in Norwegian law are you referring? Because I'd be willing to bet a fair bit of cash on you being dead wrong. I can even make a copy, as long as the person I'm giving it to is a friend or family member.
I max out my 75Mbps on a daily basis. I could, of course, live with a bit less, but significantly less and I'd need to find other solutions to some usage areas. For example, I upload full hard drive images to online storage as backups. It takes a good while already at 75Mbps. If I visit someone to watch a movie, I don't bring a selection of Blu-ray discs, I bring my Chromecast and stream a Blu-ray image from my media center at home. That's typically 30-40Mbps. I tried to upgrade my subscription, but it turns out I'll need to wait until my provider upgrades the local switch to gigabit.
I'm not saying my usage is representative of the average home user. But I would still say that 10Mbps is the absolute minimum to qualify as "broadband" today. Broadband didn't use to mean "an Internet connection", but rather "really fast Internet connection". At 10Mbps you can barely stream HD at reasonable quality, something I would say should be considered a normal use case today.
Yeah, I have the same issue. It takes me a while to get into it every time. I also struggle for the first few episodes of season 5. But with a few episodes under my belt, it's like a snowball gaining momentum.
Where I live, three months is the norm. The law stipulates from one to three months, depending on how many years you've been working at the same place, but I have yet to work anywhere that operates with anything but three months notice after the six month trial period.
To be honest, if my password is a 30 character one that takes me several minutes to pull up on my computer's password safe and type in using a phone's keyboard, it doesn't take very often for that password to be dumbed down to something more convenient.
The problem is that password is not protecting the phone, but the account, accessible from anywhere. Dumbing down the password is a bad solution. I'd be equally happy with a middle ground, like a PIN code to purchase as opposed to the full password. Which, incidentally, is exactly how people would avoid someone picking up their phone and "prank buying" in the first place (current security drama with regards to the lock screen notwithstanding).
Having said that, my Android phone has not asked me for my password since I bought it, and I am not bankrupt yet, nor can I remember seeing articles about people having issues.
I said *I* don't want. I'm not trying to impose my choice upon others. I'd much prefer Apple added a configurable option to cater both for people that hand their gear to kids, or people they don't know, or habitually misplace hundreds of dollars worth of kit, as well as for people like me that do not.
As I said, it has gotten better. But it's not that long since it asked for a password simply to update an already installed application.
And, no, I don't want it to ask me for my password when I buy something on a device I have previously authenticated on. Tell me the price and ask for confirmation, yes, but ask me for password, no.
Indeed, the last time I can remember having to enter my Google password for my Android phone, was when I bought it. And that's why it's a randomly generated password of some length (and two-factor protected). My AppleID is.... not.
Apple could have solved this in so many ways that are more convenient. Like, god forbid, letting the user decide between several options. That way I could get one I would be happy with (a confirmation dialog to avoid accidental clicks), and parents could get one they are happy with (password required when doing something that costs money). Apple really does not like multiple choices though, so it is what it is.
If I didn't have to type my password all the freakin' time, I might generate an actually secure one. Granted, iOS has gotten somewhat better with the latest updates- at least it doesn't ask me for every app update anymore. But, still...
In the largest company I've worked for, the written rule was to explain and comment (using a specific syntax), never delete. The unwritten/save-our-sanity rule was to delete if the comments began affecting the readability of the code.
When working on code with hundreds of other developers, code that's commented out and explained/linked to a case id, can save a _lot_ of time. Say a piece of code solved an issue, but in turn created a performance issue. This did not become apparent until the code went live. The developer tasked with figuring it out isolates the affected flow and "... oh... someone added that credit check here a few weeks ago, I'll check that out first." That saves a lot of time compared to identifying dozens of involved files, then only diffing the specific methods involved in the particular flow.
They're going after the Usenet providers as well, via automated DMCA takedown requests. The providers have no choice but to comply (and to keep up, also automating the process), which means content is effectively gone within hours of being uploaded.
The irony when it comes to TV shows/movies is the same as it used to be with the music industry: the stuff being downloaded is largely not available to buy online legally. I wish they would put their efforts into making this content available for purchase instead of wasting their time trying to stem the flood of copyright infringement.
In defense of the diagnosis: when the inability to process social cues impairs your ability to function in society, it is a disability. One can argue that society has its head up its collective arses for being so rigid there's virtually one right way, and one only, to respond to any given social situation. But those are the rules we have to live by for the foreseeable future.
That would depend on where you live. Where I live and work, my employer isn't even allowed to check my email without a good reason. The same applies to all "personal areas". The hard drive in the computer the company has provided for you, is considered such an area. The assumption here is that there will always be _some_ personal use of a computer an employee sits at all day and often brings home or on trips with them. And a person has a right to privacy that the employer cannot invade without cause.
On the topic at hand, no place I have ever worked would dream of just handing a computer on to the next one in line without first reinstalling. So the employee wiping it before turning it in would be just fine. Last few jobs I've had, I've Truecrypted my computer (at the start of my employment) and handed it over in that state without any issues.
I said "here's what I think". I didn't say I had researched the agreements and could offer a contractual way to accomplish it. I believe a clause to enforce updates for a certain period (12 or 18 months, was it?) has already been added. I don't feel it's inconceivable that the manufacturers might also open their phones up at end-of-life. Come to think of it, doesn't HTC already offer a way to unlock their _new_ phones? Last I heard it was supposed to launch in the Aug/Sep time frame.
Enforce a policy where handset manufacturers are required to offer a convenient way to optionally install vanilla Android. Problem solved, as far as I'm concerned. When "primary" support is ended, I get the option of buying a newer device to get the manufacturer added bells and whistles, or going with vanilla Android until the hardware just can't handle it.
I'm Norwegian. 80% of the posts I see are in Norwegian. Yet I prefer to run Facebook in English. Unless I can configure this thing, 80% of the posts I see will have a needless translate button cluttering things up. Not the end of the world, but sure to annoy.
As others have mentioned, there's a difference between multiplayer and singleplayer. To anyone only interested in single player (or willing to have separate single and multiplayer characters), this is simply draconian DRM at its finest. And, as with the history of DRM before it, it will be cracked and the only ones suffering will be the legitimate customers when they wish to play somewhere that has no internet connectivity.
Torchlight 2 just became a lot more interesting. I loved D1, skipped D2, was looking forward to D3. But this constant connection requirement for single player just needs to go away. I'll never buy a game with that sort of DRM. Luckily, there are literally tens of thousands of games to choose from that do not require an always-on internet connection whenever I want to play.
Blizzard will still sell truckloads, of course. Plenty of people don't care.
There's principle, and then there's reality. In principle, I agree with you. But in reality, I can see how apps might either not be possible to implement in html5, or it might not be time efficient to go that route compared to creating a native app. Remember, we're not necessarily talking about just the equivalent of displaying a web page here. It could be a tad more fancy, like optical recognition of which painting you are looking at, with interactive bits overlaid in augmented reality fashion (painting was probably a bad example, but you get the idea).
"Will be possible soon", TFA says. How is any of this not possible now? Local wi-fi can happily direct you to an internal web page for app download. Wifi/BT signal strength can determine position within the given building/area.
The entire article reads like something a visionary might have said a few decades ago. Saying it today, just shows you don't actually have anything interesting to talk about.
I don't really see a problem. The word has several meanings. Robbing ships, copyright infringement, trademark infringement (counterfeit apparel). It pretty much boils down to 1) Robbing ships and 2) Everything else.
What I'm getting at is that there isn't really a lot of room for confusion when used in context. Nobody's going to think you boarded a ship if you "bought a pair of pirate Nike shoes", or "pirated Angry Birds". A lot of people won't even think of the pirates of old (the salty kind) if you mention piracy. They have no other frame of reference than copyright infringement for the word.
If I'm wrong, and a large percentage of people in the "western world" actually do associate "piracy" in the context of applications/media with "killing people" rather than "not respecting intellectual property rights", I'd agree with you. But that does not seem to me to be the case.
I have much bigger issues with cracker/hacker. Those words used to mean distinct things. That they have blended into sharing the original meaning of "cracker" is a royal pain, since no new word has really taken the place of "hacker". So today you have to explain how a hacker is not a cracker whenever you use it in a sentence. Now *that* is a royal pain. Pirate? Not so much. People know what I mean when I use that word.
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Dial-up, like broadband, is a term that encompasses various speeds. Just like you wouldn't get away with claiming your 9.6K ISP was "blazingly fast" when everybody else had long since upgraded to 14.4K, you shouldn't get away with using "broadband" as a term unless "broad" really is an applicable adjective. It has been a number of years since 4Mbps qualified.
As far as I can recall, Netflix's HD (not 4K) tops out at about 6Mbps. It could be as simple as Netflix deciding that your connection can't handle the higher quality stream and falling back to 2.5Mbps (or your provider throttling Netflix, for that matter). Which is fine for a tablet, but would likely be fairly noticeable on a decently sized TV.
I can but repeat myself. Just because it's an Internet connection that isn't totally useless, does not make it qualify to be described as "broadband" in my mind. For a provider to claim they offer broadband, they should offer 10Mbps as a minimum. If they don't, they're just offering "Internet". This is, of course, entirely my opinion, since there's no firm definition of the term broadband.
"I bring my Chromecast and stream a Blu-ray image from my media center at home"
And technically, that's not legal.
To which technicality in Norwegian law are you referring? Because I'd be willing to bet a fair bit of cash on you being dead wrong. I can even make a copy, as long as the person I'm giving it to is a friend or family member.
I max out my 75Mbps on a daily basis. I could, of course, live with a bit less, but significantly less and I'd need to find other solutions to some usage areas. For example, I upload full hard drive images to online storage as backups. It takes a good while already at 75Mbps. If I visit someone to watch a movie, I don't bring a selection of Blu-ray discs, I bring my Chromecast and stream a Blu-ray image from my media center at home. That's typically 30-40Mbps. I tried to upgrade my subscription, but it turns out I'll need to wait until my provider upgrades the local switch to gigabit.
I'm not saying my usage is representative of the average home user. But I would still say that 10Mbps is the absolute minimum to qualify as "broadband" today. Broadband didn't use to mean "an Internet connection", but rather "really fast Internet connection". At 10Mbps you can barely stream HD at reasonable quality, something I would say should be considered a normal use case today.
Yeah, I have the same issue. It takes me a while to get into it every time. I also struggle for the first few episodes of season 5. But with a few episodes under my belt, it's like a snowball gaining momentum.
I'm sorry, as much as I loved Babylon 5, it simply doesn't stand the test of time when you watch it in your 30s rather than as a teenager.
I watched it for the first time in my 30s and still found it absolutely brilliant. Just sayin'.
Where I live, three months is the norm. The law stipulates from one to three months, depending on how many years you've been working at the same place, but I have yet to work anywhere that operates with anything but three months notice after the six month trial period.
To be honest, if my password is a 30 character one that takes me several minutes to pull up on my computer's password safe and type in using a phone's keyboard, it doesn't take very often for that password to be dumbed down to something more convenient.
The problem is that password is not protecting the phone, but the account, accessible from anywhere. Dumbing down the password is a bad solution. I'd be equally happy with a middle ground, like a PIN code to purchase as opposed to the full password. Which, incidentally, is exactly how people would avoid someone picking up their phone and "prank buying" in the first place (current security drama with regards to the lock screen notwithstanding).
Having said that, my Android phone has not asked me for my password since I bought it, and I am not bankrupt yet, nor can I remember seeing articles about people having issues.
I said *I* don't want. I'm not trying to impose my choice upon others. I'd much prefer Apple added a configurable option to cater both for people that hand their gear to kids, or people they don't know, or habitually misplace hundreds of dollars worth of kit, as well as for people like me that do not.
As I said, it has gotten better. But it's not that long since it asked for a password simply to update an already installed application.
And, no, I don't want it to ask me for my password when I buy something on a device I have previously authenticated on. Tell me the price and ask for confirmation, yes, but ask me for password, no.
Indeed, the last time I can remember having to enter my Google password for my Android phone, was when I bought it. And that's why it's a randomly generated password of some length (and two-factor protected). My AppleID is.... not.
Apple could have solved this in so many ways that are more convenient. Like, god forbid, letting the user decide between several options. That way I could get one I would be happy with (a confirmation dialog to avoid accidental clicks), and parents could get one they are happy with (password required when doing something that costs money). Apple really does not like multiple choices though, so it is what it is.
If I didn't have to type my password all the freakin' time, I might generate an actually secure one. Granted, iOS has gotten somewhat better with the latest updates- at least it doesn't ask me for every app update anymore. But, still...
In the largest company I've worked for, the written rule was to explain and comment (using a specific syntax), never delete. The unwritten/save-our-sanity rule was to delete if the comments began affecting the readability of the code.
When working on code with hundreds of other developers, code that's commented out and explained/linked to a case id, can save a _lot_ of time. Say a piece of code solved an issue, but in turn created a performance issue. This did not become apparent until the code went live. The developer tasked with figuring it out isolates the affected flow and "... oh... someone added that credit check here a few weeks ago, I'll check that out first." That saves a lot of time compared to identifying dozens of involved files, then only diffing the specific methods involved in the particular flow.
They're going after the Usenet providers as well, via automated DMCA takedown requests. The providers have no choice but to comply (and to keep up, also automating the process), which means content is effectively gone within hours of being uploaded.
The irony when it comes to TV shows/movies is the same as it used to be with the music industry: the stuff being downloaded is largely not available to buy online legally. I wish they would put their efforts into making this content available for purchase instead of wasting their time trying to stem the flood of copyright infringement.
In defense of the diagnosis: when the inability to process social cues impairs your ability to function in society, it is a disability. One can argue that society has its head up its collective arses for being so rigid there's virtually one right way, and one only, to respond to any given social situation. But those are the rules we have to live by for the foreseeable future.
That would depend on where you live. Where I live and work, my employer isn't even allowed to check my email without a good reason. The same applies to all "personal areas". The hard drive in the computer the company has provided for you, is considered such an area. The assumption here is that there will always be _some_ personal use of a computer an employee sits at all day and often brings home or on trips with them. And a person has a right to privacy that the employer cannot invade without cause.
On the topic at hand, no place I have ever worked would dream of just handing a computer on to the next one in line without first reinstalling. So the employee wiping it before turning it in would be just fine. Last few jobs I've had, I've Truecrypted my computer (at the start of my employment) and handed it over in that state without any issues.
I said "here's what I think". I didn't say I had researched the agreements and could offer a contractual way to accomplish it. I believe a clause to enforce updates for a certain period (12 or 18 months, was it?) has already been added. I don't feel it's inconceivable that the manufacturers might also open their phones up at end-of-life. Come to think of it, doesn't HTC already offer a way to unlock their _new_ phones? Last I heard it was supposed to launch in the Aug/Sep time frame.
Enforce a policy where handset manufacturers are required to offer a convenient way to optionally install vanilla Android. Problem solved, as far as I'm concerned. When "primary" support is ended, I get the option of buying a newer device to get the manufacturer added bells and whistles, or going with vanilla Android until the hardware just can't handle it.
What did you think I meant with "configurable", if not exactly that?
I'm Norwegian. 80% of the posts I see are in Norwegian. Yet I prefer to run Facebook in English. Unless I can configure this thing, 80% of the posts I see will have a needless translate button cluttering things up. Not the end of the world, but sure to annoy.
As others have mentioned, there's a difference between multiplayer and singleplayer. To anyone only interested in single player (or willing to have separate single and multiplayer characters), this is simply draconian DRM at its finest. And, as with the history of DRM before it, it will be cracked and the only ones suffering will be the legitimate customers when they wish to play somewhere that has no internet connectivity.
Torchlight 2 just became a lot more interesting. I loved D1, skipped D2, was looking forward to D3. But this constant connection requirement for single player just needs to go away. I'll never buy a game with that sort of DRM. Luckily, there are literally tens of thousands of games to choose from that do not require an always-on internet connection whenever I want to play.
Blizzard will still sell truckloads, of course. Plenty of people don't care.
There's principle, and then there's reality. In principle, I agree with you. But in reality, I can see how apps might either not be possible to implement in html5, or it might not be time efficient to go that route compared to creating a native app. Remember, we're not necessarily talking about just the equivalent of displaying a web page here. It could be a tad more fancy, like optical recognition of which painting you are looking at, with interactive bits overlaid in augmented reality fashion (painting was probably a bad example, but you get the idea).
"Will be possible soon", TFA says. How is any of this not possible now? Local wi-fi can happily direct you to an internal web page for app download. Wifi/BT signal strength can determine position within the given building/area.
The entire article reads like something a visionary might have said a few decades ago. Saying it today, just shows you don't actually have anything interesting to talk about.
I don't really see a problem. The word has several meanings. Robbing ships, copyright infringement, trademark infringement (counterfeit apparel). It pretty much boils down to 1) Robbing ships and 2) Everything else.
What I'm getting at is that there isn't really a lot of room for confusion when used in context. Nobody's going to think you boarded a ship if you "bought a pair of pirate Nike shoes", or "pirated Angry Birds". A lot of people won't even think of the pirates of old (the salty kind) if you mention piracy. They have no other frame of reference than copyright infringement for the word.
If I'm wrong, and a large percentage of people in the "western world" actually do associate "piracy" in the context of applications/media with "killing people" rather than "not respecting intellectual property rights", I'd agree with you. But that does not seem to me to be the case.
I have much bigger issues with cracker/hacker. Those words used to mean distinct things. That they have blended into sharing the original meaning of "cracker" is a royal pain, since no new word has really taken the place of "hacker". So today you have to explain how a hacker is not a cracker whenever you use it in a sentence. Now *that* is a royal pain. Pirate? Not so much. People know what I mean when I use that word.