Before a holiday flight (I think Germany to Switzerland), I was put aside behind X-ray screening for some extra checks and questions. The reason was, that I was carrying -among other things- a point'n'shoot digital camera and an extra battery (smallish 1500mAh) for my smartphone in my bag. The extra battery and the camera's image sensor happened to overlap in the first X-ray screening pass, triggering some false positive detection.
Buy Chinese. There are several models with 6Ah or larger battery (e.g. Oukitel K6000), which is twice the capacity of the Galaxy S6 battery. That's good enough for 10 hours display-on time. Quick charge is supported as well as the option to let this phone charge other devices.
Well, one can do that. At my workplace, we've replaced all traditional docking stations in conference rooms with new generic USB3 ones. Previosly, there were two kinds of docking stations for Dell and one for HP laptops. The USB3 "docking station" is connected with a single cable with a laptop, and provides 1080p HDMI output including sound to the big wall-mount monitor or projector, Ethernet and a few USB ports plus a connected mouse. Display output is fine when using USB3. On USB2, it is ok for most things except for full-screen video.
The top CPU model "i7" is the Core i7-6650U, only a dual-core with HT. In Cinebench R15, it has only 60% of the performance of a desktop i7-6670K (the first comparable benchmkar i've found). The RAM is dual-channel DDR3L-1600, with only 60% of the bandwidth of dual-channel DDR4-2666.
This article is a good start. There are two things were it could improve. 1) They measured the site's total data size, but not the load time. Load time was estimated = size/bandwidth, ignoring latency, parsing time and data dependencies. Actual load time should be (much?) higher. 2) Strangely, they did not account for http compression, so they cannot have measured actual traffic size. This implies they did only measure uncached loads. Most people visit a news sitte more than once, so cached loads would be more relevant. On a cached load, scripts, design elements and other stuff does not need to be reloaded, only the advertisiing. This makes the overhead for ads relatively much larger. On the German news site bild.de, a cached load is 17% content data and 83% advertising and tracking.
Just yesterday I measured data use of Germany's biggest gossip news site (bild.de) on my smartphone (Android 5.1 with stock browser), cached and uncached (browser cache cleared, browser restarted) with and without ad blocking (using AdFree host list). The phone was on Wifi / DSL. Here's the result: uncached load (first visit) with ads: 2.4MB data, 26s (!) until the display goes from white to some content uncached load (first visit) without ads: 1.7MB data, 11s until the display goes from white to some content cached load (second visit) with ads: 272KB data, 2s cached load (second visit) without ads: 45KB data, 2s
Your contract will be up in 2 years, and at 18 months, you will be offered a new phone with early renewal
That is soo yesterday. Today, I choose and change my contract as I like and buy the phone models I want at the time I want. There's no reason contract and phone(s) should be tied together.
My last contracts ran for 4 years (telephony only, no base fee), 3 years (telephony + 500MB data, 10€ base fee), and my current contract is 5€/month for 1GB LTE data, 50 minutes call time and SMS flat. I can switch contracts within 6 weeks if I find a better offer. Likewise, I bought an interesting Chinese phone model directly from China because it was not available here, and there's no way in hell providers would offer it.
I read the ICCT "clean diesel" study. The VW test car had on average during regular driving 25 times the NOx output it needs and had on the EPA test to pass. Most other models "only" had around 10 times the NOx value in regular driving vs on the test bench.
Surely, there are quite a few people enrolling, that aren't good enough. But they notice rather early, that it is not what they thought it would be (being good with computers is very different from informatics) or they realize they're just not good enough (*).
* There are mandatory tests each term. When you fail a test, you have to repeat it next term. When you fail a test the third time, you're not enrolled anymore and are not allowed to enter similar courses and any German college/university.
When I started university (informatics engineering), there were nearly 1100 clasmates starting with me that year. After one year, we were down to around 300, after two year there were 180 left. Around 160 finished within 6 years. I think this is quite extreme, and other courses have a better input/output ratio.
But in terms on money spent, it still is acceptable, because in the first two years, there's huge classes for all the basic stuff (math, basic informatics, mechanics etc) with one professor for all 300-1000 students. Most of the university personnel cost is spent afterwards in smaller specialized classes with one professor for 20-100 students.
With free universities, many more people are able to get better education. People that are talented, but could not afford paying thousands of dollars a year for education and wouldn't dare to loan that much money. When you give free education to those people, they tend to get better jobs. Companies can hire better employees, moving them ahead. Great people found new companies, creating more jobs. In the end, there are more taxes being paid by those people and companies, very likely paying off the actual cost of "free" universities.
There may also be a need to adjust the speed of one track. I recorded a few songs on a concert with video from a compact digicam and audio from my smartphone (because the camera only records audio at 16kHz). When lining up the start of a song, at the end it was asynchronous by a few seconds. Audio was iirc 0.7% faster or slower than video, and this was the same for all recordings. I resampled the audio using Audacity before merging it with some video editor.
In Hamburg, that's exactly what happens. I live next to a bar / party location. Some people come by those rental cars and leave by taxi or public transport. When there's mor than one rental car parked here, the next day someone comes and drives it away.
Doogee X5 on pre-sale for $62 (plus S&H): 5.0" 1280x720 pixels, MTK6580 1.3 GHz quad core, 1 GB RAM + 8 GB flash, Android 5.1 5MP main camera + 2MP front camera, GPS, BT4.0 quad-band 2G/3G GSM, tri-band WCDMA http://en.efox-shop.com/doogee...
MPIE/Stacy G7 for $66. Only on Android 4.4, but with 2GB RAM and LTE. 5.0 inch 960x540, MTK6582 1.3GHz Quad Core, 2GB RAM + 8GB flash, Android 4.4 8MP main camera + 2MP front camera, GPS, BT4.0 2G/3G/LTE GSM (all LTE bands for Europe) http://en.efox-shop.com/mpie-g...
zRAM's previous name was compcache, and that was available for Linux since 2008. https://code.google.com/p/comp... In 2014, zRAM just became a part of Linux kernel tree.
In the EU, 70% of all glas produced/sold ends up in recycling containers. In Germany and Austria it even is 90-95%. Although a huge amount of waste glass is avialable, recycling companies still PAY you for bringing large quantities of glass "waste" (10-20€/t for well-sorted clear glass). If it would be cheaper to make fresh glass instead of recycled glass, they wouldn't pay for it.
The real real devil is Danish "Faxe extra strong" beer. In Germany, most large supermarkets sell it. It has 10% alcohol and comes in 1 litre (34 oz) cans. Shouldn't drink two of them.
Well, that's quite expensive. Hamburg (Germany) has a similar system, but is cheaper. With one registration (5€ / 5.60USD, converted to credits) you can take up to two bikes (four after a phone call). The first 30 minutes of each bike rental are free, afterwards it is 4.80€ / 5USD per hour (billed per minute) or 12€ / 13.50USD per day (whatever is cheaper). There is no other cost like membership fees. Owners of public transport commutation tickets get 25% rebate. Rental stations are at near all tourist sites and at most central subway stations. You can easily bike from one interesting place to another, each time putting the bikes back and getting new ones when taking off. This works well for tourists, a family/group of four pays 5€ once and can ride all day long for their full stay.
Just do a performance test before accepting a new SD card.My Samsung TV can record on USB storage. When attaching a new stick for this, it does a quick acceptance test. It either says it's ok to use or it say the stick is too slow and I should get a faster one. Problem solved.
I've you're rich enough to buy Apple phones, you should be able to afford fast SD card. Especially when you've just saved 200 dollars for more internal flash. On the other hand, even average SD cards should be good enough to hold a big MP3 and photo collection. Software could be smart enough to store on fast internal flash first, and once it gets full, move stuff with low performance requirements or rarely accessed filles out to the SD card. Biggest obstacle is that Apple wouldn't earn the money from overpriced internal flash anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
In Germany, EC [Electronic Cash] debit cards are used heavily. Credit cards are used rarely.
Actually, in Germany you can travel anonymously on all trains and buses.
Before a holiday flight (I think Germany to Switzerland), I was put aside behind X-ray screening for some extra checks and questions. The reason was, that I was carrying -among other things- a point'n'shoot digital camera and an extra battery (smallish 1500mAh) for my smartphone in my bag. The extra battery and the camera's image sensor happened to overlap in the first X-ray screening pass, triggering some false positive detection.
Buy Chinese. There are several models with 6Ah or larger battery (e.g. Oukitel K6000), which is twice the capacity of the Galaxy S6 battery.
That's good enough for 10 hours display-on time. Quick charge is supported as well as the option to let this phone charge other devices.
Yeah, but when you want low-power, fast, tiny and cheap at the same time, there's not much offered with x86-64.
Well, one can do that. At my workplace, we've replaced all traditional docking stations in conference rooms with new generic USB3 ones. Previosly, there were two kinds of docking stations for Dell and one for HP laptops.
The USB3 "docking station" is connected with a single cable with a laptop, and provides 1080p HDMI output including sound to the big wall-mount monitor or projector, Ethernet and a few USB ports plus a connected mouse.
Display output is fine when using USB3. On USB2, it is ok for most things except for full-screen video.
b = 3 - (a == 5);
C++ converts bool to 1 (true) resp. 0 (false).
The top CPU model "i7" is the Core i7-6650U, only a dual-core with HT.
In Cinebench R15, it has only 60% of the performance of a desktop i7-6670K (the first comparable benchmkar i've found).
The RAM is dual-channel DDR3L-1600, with only 60% of the bandwidth of dual-channel DDR4-2666.
This article is a good start. There are two things were it could improve.
1) They measured the site's total data size, but not the load time. Load time was estimated = size/bandwidth, ignoring latency, parsing time and data dependencies. Actual load time should be (much?) higher.
2) Strangely, they did not account for http compression, so they cannot have measured actual traffic size. This implies they did only measure uncached loads. Most people visit a news sitte more than once, so cached loads would be more relevant. On a cached load, scripts, design elements and other stuff does not need to be reloaded, only the advertisiing. This makes the overhead for ads relatively much larger. On the German news site bild.de, a cached load is 17% content data and 83% advertising and tracking.
Just yesterday I measured data use of Germany's biggest gossip news site (bild.de) on my smartphone (Android 5.1 with stock browser), cached and uncached (browser cache cleared, browser restarted) with and without ad blocking (using AdFree host list). The phone was on Wifi / DSL.
Here's the result:
uncached load (first visit) with ads: 2.4MB data, 26s (!) until the display goes from white to some content
uncached load (first visit) without ads: 1.7MB data, 11s until the display goes from white to some content
cached load (second visit) with ads: 272KB data, 2s
cached load (second visit) without ads: 45KB data, 2s
Your contract will be up in 2 years, and at 18 months, you will be offered a new phone with early renewal
That is soo yesterday. Today, I choose and change my contract as I like and buy the phone models I want at the time I want. There's no reason contract and phone(s) should be tied together.
My last contracts ran for 4 years (telephony only, no base fee), 3 years (telephony + 500MB data, 10€ base fee), and my current contract is 5€/month for 1GB LTE data, 50 minutes call time and SMS flat. I can switch contracts within 6 weeks if I find a better offer. Likewise, I bought an interesting Chinese phone model directly from China because it was not available here, and there's no way in hell providers would offer it.
I read the ICCT "clean diesel" study. The VW test car had on average during regular driving 25 times the NOx output it needs and had on the EPA test to pass. Most other models "only" had around 10 times the NOx value in regular driving vs on the test bench.
Surely, there are quite a few people enrolling, that aren't good enough. But they notice rather early, that it is not what they thought it would be (being good with computers is very different from informatics) or they realize they're just not good enough (*).
* There are mandatory tests each term. When you fail a test, you have to repeat it next term. When you fail a test the third time, you're not enrolled anymore and are not allowed to enter similar courses and any German college/university.
When I started university (informatics engineering), there were nearly 1100 clasmates starting with me that year. After one year, we were down to around 300, after two year there were 180 left. Around 160 finished within 6 years. I think this is quite extreme, and other courses have a better input/output ratio.
But in terms on money spent, it still is acceptable, because in the first two years, there's huge classes for all the basic stuff (math, basic informatics, mechanics etc) with one professor for all 300-1000 students. Most of the university personnel cost is spent afterwards in smaller specialized classes with one professor for 20-100 students.
With free universities, many more people are able to get better education. People that are talented, but could not afford paying thousands of dollars a year for education and wouldn't dare to loan that much money.
When you give free education to those people, they tend to get better jobs. Companies can hire better employees, moving them ahead. Great people found new companies, creating more jobs. In the end, there are more taxes being paid by those people and companies, very likely paying off the actual cost of "free" universities.
There may also be a need to adjust the speed of one track. I recorded a few songs on a concert with video from a compact digicam and audio from my smartphone (because the camera only records audio at 16kHz). When lining up the start of a song, at the end it was asynchronous by a few seconds. Audio was iirc 0.7% faster or slower than video, and this was the same for all recordings. I resampled the audio using Audacity before merging it with some video editor.
In Hamburg, that's exactly what happens. I live next to a bar / party location. Some people come by those rental cars and leave by taxi or public transport. When there's mor than one rental car parked here, the next day someone comes and drives it away.
In Germany, there's no metric equivalent in use. You also use dpi, mostly because you read it everywhere.
update: pandawill sells the Doogee X5 for $60 with free worldwide shipping
Check out Chinese phones and shops, i.e. eFox.
Doogee X5 on pre-sale for $62 (plus S&H):
5.0" 1280x720 pixels, MTK6580 1.3 GHz quad core, 1 GB RAM + 8 GB flash, Android 5.1
5MP main camera + 2MP front camera, GPS, BT4.0
quad-band 2G/3G GSM, tri-band WCDMA
http://en.efox-shop.com/doogee...
MPIE/Stacy G7 for $66. Only on Android 4.4, but with 2GB RAM and LTE.
5.0 inch 960x540, MTK6582 1.3GHz Quad Core, 2GB RAM + 8GB flash, Android 4.4
8MP main camera + 2MP front camera, GPS, BT4.0
2G/3G/LTE GSM (all LTE bands for Europe)
http://en.efox-shop.com/mpie-g...
zRAM's previous name was compcache, and that was available for Linux since 2008.
https://code.google.com/p/comp...
In 2014, zRAM just became a part of Linux kernel tree.
In the EU, 70% of all glas produced/sold ends up in recycling containers. In Germany and Austria it even is 90-95%. Although a huge amount of waste glass is avialable, recycling companies still PAY you for bringing large quantities of glass "waste" (10-20€/t for well-sorted clear glass). If it would be cheaper to make fresh glass instead of recycled glass, they wouldn't pay for it.
The real real devil is Danish "Faxe extra strong" beer. In Germany, most large supermarkets sell it. It has 10% alcohol and comes in 1 litre (34 oz) cans. Shouldn't drink two of them.
Well, that's quite expensive. Hamburg (Germany) has a similar system, but is cheaper. With one registration (5€ / 5.60USD, converted to credits) you can take up to two bikes (four after a phone call).
The first 30 minutes of each bike rental are free, afterwards it is 4.80€ / 5USD per hour (billed per minute) or 12€ / 13.50USD per day (whatever is cheaper).
There is no other cost like membership fees. Owners of public transport commutation tickets get 25% rebate.
Rental stations are at near all tourist sites and at most central subway stations. You can easily bike from one interesting place to another, each time putting the bikes back and getting new ones when taking off.
This works well for tourists, a family/group of four pays 5€ once and can ride all day long for their full stay.
Just do a performance test before accepting a new SD card.My Samsung TV can record on USB storage. When attaching a new stick for this, it does a quick acceptance test. It either says it's ok to use or it say the stick is too slow and I should get a faster one. Problem solved.
I've you're rich enough to buy Apple phones, you should be able to afford fast SD card. Especially when you've just saved 200 dollars for more internal flash.
On the other hand, even average SD cards should be good enough to hold a big MP3 and photo collection.
Software could be smart enough to store on fast internal flash first, and once it gets full, move stuff with low performance requirements or rarely accessed filles out to the SD card. Biggest obstacle is that Apple wouldn't earn the money from overpriced internal flash anymore.