Not only do the retailers have to pay full price for the terminals, the new terminals do not all have the software drivers to handle chipcards (even now)!
But it is not just the cost of the terminals, but that the agreement for the old terminals was changed.
I'm with you: Sell new terminals at the option of the buyer, buyer should pay. But mandate new terminals, then the provider should pay!
If it turns out to work, and we don't know what is producing the thrust, do you really want the "q-rays" that it produces going through your house??;-)
Considering your UID, that's unlikely. Most if not all of the machines from the 80s and 90s were dumb. They'd walk across the floor if the load's unbalanced.
Wrong. Not every function in a machine requires a computer! 8-P
How about the community with all its great moders, designers, texturers, etc. work on its own game? Call it FreeSky or OpenSpace (maybe not), and implement every feature you wanted in the game from the start, instead of trying to force those down a game that's not designed for it.
I hear that Elite-dangerous is at least trying.
But the one I play is X-Rebirth and earlier X3-Terran conflict. Egosoft has been working on big space games for 25 years, and they have a lot of stuff working. But no multi-player.
Steam's refund policy was never intended to be a solution to fraud. Fraud is a different charge that can put people in jail. Just because nobody died, doesn't make it Ok.
So complain to the people that handle fraud cases, police, justice dept, or what is appropriate where you live.
Please show me this amazing code you have written that has zero bugs ever and runs flawlessly in scenarios you had no way of imagining when you wrote it.
If it works for what you need, then by definition it has no serious bugs. Risking useful operation by installing updates is not usually a good idea. Updating everything, all of the time, is something pushed by the corporate "control freaks".
The Caterpillar 797 400-ton mining truck (4000 hp) has an automatic transmission with 7 forward speeds and a torque converter.
That's a bit heavier than I was thinking of, but I have to say, that surprises me. Torque converters tend to slip under heavy loads. What am I missing?
Accurate control is much more important than raw power or efficiancy.
You are right. But technically "Assembler" is the human readable form in ASCII text, which gets "assembled" and "linked" into the binary image. So there is another step... 8-)
Researchers should store 3 word documents on their systems.
Seriously, using an empty install of Windows, in a VM, as a "Honey Pot" to catch malware is really lazy! Put something in there that would fool a casual human. Then maybe you can fool the -next- version of malware.;-)
It is calculated that the average personal computer will be hit by this about once a year. It's has been about the same since the 1960's. Cell size gets smaller, which reduces the chance, but number of cells gets greater, increasing the chance. The chips are about the same overall size, which is what makes the "target" area.
But operating systems such as Windows crash much more often than that, so nobody notices unless they have high-reliability equipment and track faults.
It's not an excuse or a fairy tale, it does happen. But not very often, so if your problem re-occurs it's something else.
It was initially thought that this was mainly due to alpha particles emitted by contaminants in chip packaging material, but research has shown that the majority of one-off soft errors in DRAM chips occur as a result of background radiation, chiefly neutrons from cosmic ray secondaries
Actually, there was a packaging material that caused this problem, back in the late '60s. They reaserched it and stopped using that, but were astonished to find it was still not completely cured. That's when the "Science-fiction" idea of cosmic ray impacts started to be believed.
(Strange how new people assume the "ancients" were wrong and ignorant, when they were usually smarter than the newbies.)
Microsoft might have popped up a window with a question, but that means nothing. And here is why:
Windows has a long-known bug, where if a new popup window opens it "steals" focus from whatever window you were working in. All of your typing is suddenly redirected to the popup window. This can happen before the popup is even visible, because the painting to the screen is a separate lowlevel thread in the OS.
So the user's keypresses go into the popup, and one of them is taken as the default button hotkey. Enter key will do it, in some windows Spacebar will do it. What do you want to bet that Microsoft set it to trigger on any key that was hit! 8-P
The popup question might have "eaten" a character, without the user even knowing that the popup had happend. They wonder what happened to the keypress, retype the word and continue totally unaware... Until later, when their computer is locked up (downloading) or gets "bricked". 8-{
If the bad "charger" provides 115 Vac to the phone, it will definitely blow the battery. And maybe the phone even if there is no battery in it! 8-P
And some designs have the charger regulator circuitry in the "charger" "plug", and if it's bad it can over charge the battery (but I don't know about this one)...
Patents are -not- to protect your ownership of an idea, or to help you make lots of money.
Patents are to encourage people to -disclose- ideas so that they may be recorded and not lost, as happened many times in history (and before). And it is part of the reason the U.S. (and now others) has advanced so far, so fast.
The normal way is to keep things a trade secret, which is great for the inventor but -not- so great for the nation or for humanity.
But a way to record prior art, that was never patented, would make things work much better! 8-)
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who buys the thinnest device they can find, and then leaves it in their back pocket when they sit down, deserves what they get! 8-P
Not only do the retailers have to pay full price for the terminals, the new terminals do not all have the software drivers to handle chipcards (even now)!
But it is not just the cost of the terminals, but that the agreement for the old terminals was changed.
I'm with you: Sell new terminals at the option of the buyer, buyer should pay. But mandate new terminals, then the provider should pay!
Better to test the "EM drive" in space.
If it turns out to work, and we don't know what is producing the thrust, do you really want the "q-rays" that it produces going through your house?? ;-)
Did I wander into a tangent here?
Yes, but you are right! 8-)
In other words:
"If Engineers built buildings the way Programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization!"
Considering your UID, that's unlikely. Most if not all of the machines from the 80s and 90s were dumb. They'd walk across the floor if the load's unbalanced.
Wrong. Not every function in a machine requires a computer! 8-P
How about the community with all its great moders, designers, texturers, etc. work on its own game? Call it FreeSky or OpenSpace (maybe not), and implement every feature you wanted in the game from the start, instead of trying to force those down a game that's not designed for it.
I hear that Elite-dangerous is at least trying.
But the one I play is X-Rebirth and earlier X3-Terran conflict. Egosoft has been working on big space games for 25 years, and they have a lot of stuff working. But no multi-player.
Steam's refund policy was never intended to be a solution to fraud. Fraud is a different charge that can put people in jail. Just because nobody died, doesn't make it Ok.
So complain to the people that handle fraud cases, police, justice dept, or what is appropriate where you live.
Wow.
Please show me this amazing code you have written that has zero bugs ever and runs flawlessly in scenarios you had no way of imagining when you wrote it.
If it works for what you need, then by definition it has no serious bugs.
Risking useful operation by installing updates is not usually a good idea.
Updating everything, all of the time, is something pushed by the corporate "control freaks".
True. And those big transmissions used in heavy stuff are not much like the automatic transmissions used in personal cars.
Automatics are getting better, but I still have a manual in my car! 8-)
So where is Clarion?
http://softvelocity.com/
Used all over the world, but only by people that know things... 8-)
The Caterpillar 797 400-ton mining truck (4000 hp) has an automatic transmission with 7 forward speeds and a torque converter.
That's a bit heavier than I was thinking of, but I have to say, that surprises me. Torque converters tend to slip under heavy loads. What am I missing?
Accurate control is much more important than raw power or efficiancy.
Assembly isn't hard, however it is tedious. You have a relatively small set of commands that do simple things. ...
See "Macro Assembler". Buy a library, call procedures from it, make the calls look like higher level language. Discover how "C" was started !!
Pascal New Version = Modula-2
If people can't explain what they want to other people, what sense does it make to expect a computer to understant it?? 8-)
You are right.
But technically "Assembler" is the human readable form in ASCII text, which gets "assembled" and "linked" into the binary image. So there is another step... 8-)
Researchers should store 3 word documents on their systems.
Seriously, using an empty install of Windows, in a VM, as a "Honey Pot" to catch malware is really lazy! Put something in there that would fool a casual human. ;-)
Then maybe you can fool the -next- version of malware.
It only takes a single "cosmic ray" particle to flip a bit in memory. The readings that are averages, are no good for this.
And all this has been known for about 50 years... ;-)
It shouldn't be a huge expense to build in some form of error correction to catch that sort of thing.
Otherwise known as ECC memory?
It is calculated that the average personal computer will be hit by this about once a year. It's has been about the same since the 1960's. Cell size gets smaller, which reduces the chance, but number of cells gets greater, increasing the chance. The chips are about the same overall size, which is what makes the "target" area.
But operating systems such as Windows crash much more often than that, so nobody notices unless they have high-reliability equipment and track faults.
It's not an excuse or a fairy tale, it does happen. But not very often, so if your problem re-occurs it's something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory#Problem_background
Actually, there was a packaging material that caused this problem, back in the late '60s. They reaserched it and stopped using that, but were astonished to find it was still not completely cured. That's when the "Science-fiction" idea of cosmic ray impacts started to be believed.
(Strange how new people assume the "ancients" were wrong and ignorant, when they were usually smarter than the newbies.)
Microsoft might have popped up a window with a question, but that means nothing. And here is why:
Windows has a long-known bug, where if a new popup window opens it "steals" focus from whatever window you were working in. All of your typing is suddenly redirected to the popup window. This can happen before the popup is even visible, because the painting to the screen is a separate lowlevel thread in the OS.
So the user's keypresses go into the popup, and one of them is taken as the default button hotkey. Enter key will do it, in some windows Spacebar will do it. What do you want to bet that Microsoft set it to trigger on any key that was hit! 8-P
The popup question might have "eaten" a character, without the user even knowing that the popup had happend. They wonder what happened to the keypress, retype the word and continue totally unaware... Until later, when their computer is locked up (downloading) or gets "bricked". 8-{
If the bad "charger" provides 115 Vac to the phone, it will definitely blow the battery. And maybe the phone even if there is no battery in it! 8-P
And some designs have the charger regulator circuitry in the "charger" "plug", and if it's bad it can over charge the battery (but I don't know about this one)...
Patents are -not- to protect your ownership of an idea, or to help you make lots of money.
Patents are to encourage people to -disclose- ideas so that they may be recorded and not lost, as happened many times in history (and before).
And it is part of the reason the U.S. (and now others) has advanced so far, so fast.
The normal way is to keep things a trade secret, which is great for the inventor but -not- so great for the nation or for humanity.
But a way to record prior art, that was never patented, would make things work much better! 8-)
If you think that tech is not solving problems, then maybe you have the wrong set of friends?
Maybe you should solve your own problems, instead of waiting for "superman" to show up... ;-)
Hey, that sounds like a goood idea! Wait a moment, while I post it so the -entire world- can see the new idea! 8-)