Didn't Samsung get caught for their TVs always listening to everything around them, with no permission asked? LG was caught snooping on all files and filenames on the network, if my memory serves. Then there were a couple of others whose names I've already forgotten..Heck, pretty much every TV-manufacturer has gotten caught with their pants down by this point. A Roku is somewhat of a different beasts, because it needs Internet for streaming. I would hazard a guess that they track whatever you do on the Roku-box itself, but may not go to the same lengths as TV-manufacturers do, when it comes to overall spying in general.
Personally, I would rather give the TV a middle finger than any connectivity, whatsoever.
Of course it was done for PR-reasons, but still, it helped a large group of real people in real trouble, so it's hard to be terribly salty about it. I'd rather more companies used their marketing-budgets on stuff that actually benefits the common folk.
The banks over here in Finland offer something akin to what you were talking about: you click on "Pay", select which bank you're using and it takes you to a special landing-page of the bank, where you authorize the payment -- the merchant never receives your card-details, only the payment. The system is voluntary, so not all Finnish online-stores use it (yet?), but at least the system is in place and it works well enough, so it may just be a matter of time. With PayPal and this I don't really have any reason to ever enter my card-details anywhere (other than PayPal themselves, obviously)
This is why I use PayPal: the merchant never receives my card-details at all, only PayPal has them. The merchant only receives a token from PayPal that can be used for drawing the agreed-upon amount of money from your account via PayPal's API and unless the token is a subscription-token, it can't be used by the merchant to draw more money from your account at a later date. It's a million times safer than just giving your card-details to this and that website and hoping they're trustworthy -- which they most likely aren't!
It's more-or-less the challenge and the learning-process that I find so rewarding and that's what I use them for. Maybe one day I'll come up with some actually useful projects, but as of the moment, I just use them to fiddle with stuff and experiment on things -- software and hardware -- and put them away until I come up with the next thing I want to experiment on; I've always kind of found learning stuff more interesting than actually putting the knowledge to practical use, though, with electronics you kind of have to make *something* eventually, if you want to keep improving your skills. That said, I live in a very small rental apartment, so I do not have the landlord's permission to make a single hole in the walls or anything here, so I can't explore any home-automation stuff and I don't have the space to explore anything other than projects that fit on my desk -- I might come up with some actual practice projects, too, if only my living situation wasn't so limiting.
After a while, you will be able to make your own boards. YES! ** That the best part of it all! **
Myself I started with a simple Arduino UNO and a couple of years later, I'm about to launch my own IoT Arduino compatible platform, fully designed and implemented in the garage of our house: http://omzlo.com/
Being able to design one's own boards is exciting! I started with ESP8266 (a Chinese Nodemcu-clone) and since then I've been fiddling with a bunch of different MCUs and full-blown SoCs, I've tried to copycat and/or modify various kinds of sensor-modules I've found on eBay and stuff, and I've progressed enough that I was just designing my very first, ESP8266-based board with built-in LiPo-charger and some extras -- I know it ain't particularly impressive to anyone who already knows their shit, but I'm still a newbie when it comes to DIY-electronics and I still find it both fun and rewarding to realize that I can actually come up with simple boards of my own nowadays.
All I wish is that I had a better source for learning new stuff and improving my understanding than random Youtube-videos and articles I find on Google.
I've had the basic Shield TV for a good while now and personally I'm really happy with it. I only use it for media-playback, I am not interested in the slightest in Android-games, but for playback it's really hard to beat: Kodi works like a charm, the box supports audio-passthrough for a huge range of codecs for my surround-sound setup, HDMI CEC works like a peach, and unlike those cheap, Chinaman Android-boxes, the Netflix-app is the real Android TV-version instead of the mobile-one and supports 4K HDR and surround-sound, whereas those Chinaman-boxes lack the Widevine-license and can only play Netflix at 720p. Also, the whole UI of the box is useable without needing a mouse or mouse-emulation anywhere, and thus is comfortable to use from the couch or whatever.
Sure, the box was expensive when I bought it, but I haven't regretted it.
Yeah, I opened the link, found it to be a bunch of videos and just a mere couple of lines of text, and closed the tab. Videos are annoying enough even as-is, let alone videos recorded at some conference or such.
Meh. I like clean and uncluttered UIs that don't require much (if any) tweaking myself, but GNOME 3.x-series is just terrible in how clunky they've made it and how much useful stuff they've removed from it. Personally, Cinnamon is my current favourite, though it's terribly buggy and not well-supported at all under either Ubuntu or Debian. KDE is way too far into the "everything and the kitchen sink" - mentality, GNOME is way too far into the "back to the stone-ages," and I just find myself wishing Cinnamon got more love than it does now.
Then again, Linux on the desktop sucks in general, like e.g. I just found out that neither Chromium or Firefox, for example, still support H/W-accelerated playback of video -- this has been on the TODO-list for a decade already. Something like that affects battery-life on portable devices and can make all the difference between whether one can play higher-resolution Youtube-videos or not on a budget-laptop, for example.
Oh wow, that's SUCH important improvement that I can hardly contain my excitement! It's okay that the rest of the desktop-environment sucks ass as long as I get my emojis!
How much heat do the current processors produce compared to a coal power plant when build as compactly as electrically possible?
A miniscule fraction. As far as I am aware, there are plenty of different ways the water is heated up for district heating systems and the amounts of water being heated up, but we're generally talking about megawatt- or gigawatt-ranges -- you'd need tens to hundreds of thousands of these CPUs running to match the thermal output.
That's what I was thinking. It's not like they can just turn the machines off during summer-times, their whole cloud-computing platform would be basically rendered useless during summer if they did. They could turn the machines off during business-hours, but again, that'd bring the platform's uptime down drastically, and it wouldn't solve the heating-problem at all, as it takes a long time for big buildings to cool down.
I don't see how this would make much sense in an office-building, but I suppose it could be somewhat useful for storage-spaces, where it doesn't matter if it gets a little toasty during summers, but you don't want temperatures to drop below, say, +10C during winters.
Perhaps you should have done 5 minutes of Googling and you would have found the answers yourself.
If *you* had spent 5 minutes of Googling, you'd have known that those B006 and B007 refer to the installed ROM version, not H/W-revision. Also, it is available both for LTE and non-LTE-versions, as even this ( http://tabletmonkeys.com/andro... ) article here mentions with the quote Huawei now says that the update from Android 5.1 to Android 6.0 will begin its roll out at precisely 12:00 on November 7, with a 1.27GB update, for the Wi-Fi and 4G models of Huawei MediaPad M2 8.0 The LTE-versions are called M2-801L and M2-802L, which can easily be verified with a quick Google that they have, indeed, received the update a long time ago already.
Next time don't be so quick in being condescending when you're wrong.
It's not the only one. The one I have is the 16GB/2GB-model of the Mediapad M2 8.0 ( http://www.gsmarena.com/huawei... ) The hardware is the same on both the 16GB/2GB and 32GB/3GB-models, except for the amount of RAM and storage, and between the LTE and non-LTE models the only difference is that the latter has no LTE -- it's still the same SoC, and all these models have received the Marshmallow-update elsewhere in Europe, but not here.
Oh, I know about CM and LineageOS. I used CM first and then LineageOS on my previous phone for a long time, for example. Unfortunately, LineageOS ain't available for my tablet.
Nope, it's exact same hardware. Also, they said they have no plans of providing the update at all -- validation or no validation, they're not going to bother. Elsewhere in Europe they received the update at the beginning of the year, so Huawei's already had plenty of time to work on it, too.
I got a Huawei-tablet when it was new, since it had perfectly good specs for my needs and it wasn't outrageously expensive (1920x1200 IPS display, 2GB RAM, SD-card slot, stereo speakers, and it even has LTE-support) The hardware is still plenty good, but the tablet itself has only gotten ONE update in the couple of years that I've owned it now, and it's still stuck on Android Lollipop 5.1. The tablet has received an update to Android Marshmallow elsewhere in Europe, but when I asked their support for when the update arrives to the Nordic countries the support literally answered that they have absolutely no plans, whatsoever, to provide the update! They have all the software and everything already, they'd just need to bother doing the text-translations, but they rather leave people on an outdated Android-version and completely abandon the devices rather than spend some time and money on supplying a Nordic-version of the update!
I would not recommend anyone spend money on a company this shitty; you'll never know if they'll abandon your devices next!
I've been using Firefox on Android for a long time and I am very happy with it. I use Firefox on the desktop too, so I get tab-syncing and all that, plus I get adblock and a couple of other nice addons (I haven't used Chrome, but I don't think it supports addons on Android) and so on. Also, personally, I don't find it "too slow" to use, especially with an adblocker.
Pretty much. As soon as I noticed it was a video I just simply closed the tab in disgust. Videos are great and all for content where there is some visual content that'd be difficult to convey properly in textual form, but... talking heads ain't that.
I didn't say anything about the devices not being able to play the content, I was talking about *streaming* the content; I don't have to manually copy files to my phone before-hand, I can just pick and play whatever I like, whenever I like and stream it, and this is where transcoding a 20GB-file down is useful.
What the hell are you babbling about? SSL-certificates aren't tied to IP-addresses, they're tied to domain-names! Hell, you can have hundreds of HTTPS-sites served by a single Apache-server with a single IP-address, all with different SSL-certificates, by using SNI!
Plex does a lot of stuff that Kodi doesn't. One of the more-useful things that springs to mind is transcoding: I can stream stuff from my collection to my phone or tablet when on-the-go and I can either have Plex pre-transcode the files I know I'll be watching or it can transcode on-the-fly seamlessly. Kodi doesn't do anything like that at all, it's more of a standalone-player than a proper media-server.
Couples who live together share a lot of things: beds, bathrooms, food, toiletries. But one thing they might not expect to share? Skin bacteria.
Says who? Why wouldn't they expect that? Everyone knows you already share all sorts of bacteria and viruses and whatnot with whoever you live with, so you tend to get sick at the same time and you tend to be resistant to the same sicknesses and all that -- it's fucking common sense.
All the four USB-ports share bandwidth, so no. A single USB 2.0-port has a 480Mbps bandwidth, not counting for the losses of the USB-protocol and whatnot, and since all the ports share bandwidth it'd make no difference whether you used a single gigabit ethernet USB-adapter or 4. Also, don't forget that the 10/100 Ethernet-port on the RPi also shares bandwidth with those USB-ports!
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Samsung get caught for their TVs always listening to everything around them, with no permission asked? LG was caught snooping on all files and filenames on the network, if my memory serves. Then there were a couple of others whose names I've already forgotten..Heck, pretty much every TV-manufacturer has gotten caught with their pants down by this point. A Roku is somewhat of a different beasts, because it needs Internet for streaming. I would hazard a guess that they track whatever you do on the Roku-box itself, but may not go to the same lengths as TV-manufacturers do, when it comes to overall spying in general.
Personally, I would rather give the TV a middle finger than any connectivity, whatsoever.
Of course it was done for PR-reasons, but still, it helped a large group of real people in real trouble, so it's hard to be terribly salty about it. I'd rather more companies used their marketing-budgets on stuff that actually benefits the common folk.
The banks over here in Finland offer something akin to what you were talking about: you click on "Pay", select which bank you're using and it takes you to a special landing-page of the bank, where you authorize the payment -- the merchant never receives your card-details, only the payment. The system is voluntary, so not all Finnish online-stores use it (yet?), but at least the system is in place and it works well enough, so it may just be a matter of time. With PayPal and this I don't really have any reason to ever enter my card-details anywhere (other than PayPal themselves, obviously)
This is why I use PayPal: the merchant never receives my card-details at all, only PayPal has them. The merchant only receives a token from PayPal that can be used for drawing the agreed-upon amount of money from your account via PayPal's API and unless the token is a subscription-token, it can't be used by the merchant to draw more money from your account at a later date. It's a million times safer than just giving your card-details to this and that website and hoping they're trustworthy -- which they most likely aren't!
It's more-or-less the challenge and the learning-process that I find so rewarding and that's what I use them for. Maybe one day I'll come up with some actually useful projects, but as of the moment, I just use them to fiddle with stuff and experiment on things -- software and hardware -- and put them away until I come up with the next thing I want to experiment on; I've always kind of found learning stuff more interesting than actually putting the knowledge to practical use, though, with electronics you kind of have to make *something* eventually, if you want to keep improving your skills. That said, I live in a very small rental apartment, so I do not have the landlord's permission to make a single hole in the walls or anything here, so I can't explore any home-automation stuff and I don't have the space to explore anything other than projects that fit on my desk -- I might come up with some actual practice projects, too, if only my living situation wasn't so limiting.
After a while, you will be able to make your own boards. YES! ** That the best part of it all! **
Myself I started with a simple Arduino UNO and a couple of years later, I'm about to launch my own IoT Arduino compatible platform, fully designed and implemented in the garage of our house: http://omzlo.com/
Being able to design one's own boards is exciting! I started with ESP8266 (a Chinese Nodemcu-clone) and since then I've been fiddling with a bunch of different MCUs and full-blown SoCs, I've tried to copycat and/or modify various kinds of sensor-modules I've found on eBay and stuff, and I've progressed enough that I was just designing my very first, ESP8266-based board with built-in LiPo-charger and some extras -- I know it ain't particularly impressive to anyone who already knows their shit, but I'm still a newbie when it comes to DIY-electronics and I still find it both fun and rewarding to realize that I can actually come up with simple boards of my own nowadays.
All I wish is that I had a better source for learning new stuff and improving my understanding than random Youtube-videos and articles I find on Google.
Who cares? Even crumbs is better than nothing when it avoids going into patent-trolls' pockets!
I've had the basic Shield TV for a good while now and personally I'm really happy with it. I only use it for media-playback, I am not interested in the slightest in Android-games, but for playback it's really hard to beat: Kodi works like a charm, the box supports audio-passthrough for a huge range of codecs for my surround-sound setup, HDMI CEC works like a peach, and unlike those cheap, Chinaman Android-boxes, the Netflix-app is the real Android TV-version instead of the mobile-one and supports 4K HDR and surround-sound, whereas those Chinaman-boxes lack the Widevine-license and can only play Netflix at 720p. Also, the whole UI of the box is useable without needing a mouse or mouse-emulation anywhere, and thus is comfortable to use from the couch or whatever.
Sure, the box was expensive when I bought it, but I haven't regretted it.
Yeah, I opened the link, found it to be a bunch of videos and just a mere couple of lines of text, and closed the tab. Videos are annoying enough even as-is, let alone videos recorded at some conference or such.
Meh. I like clean and uncluttered UIs that don't require much (if any) tweaking myself, but GNOME 3.x-series is just terrible in how clunky they've made it and how much useful stuff they've removed from it. Personally, Cinnamon is my current favourite, though it's terribly buggy and not well-supported at all under either Ubuntu or Debian. KDE is way too far into the "everything and the kitchen sink" - mentality, GNOME is way too far into the "back to the stone-ages," and I just find myself wishing Cinnamon got more love than it does now.
Then again, Linux on the desktop sucks in general, like e.g. I just found out that neither Chromium or Firefox, for example, still support H/W-accelerated playback of video -- this has been on the TODO-list for a decade already. Something like that affects battery-life on portable devices and can make all the difference between whether one can play higher-resolution Youtube-videos or not on a budget-laptop, for example.
Oh wow, that's SUCH important improvement that I can hardly contain my excitement! It's okay that the rest of the desktop-environment sucks ass as long as I get my emojis!
How much heat do the current processors produce compared to a coal power plant when build as compactly as electrically possible?
A miniscule fraction. As far as I am aware, there are plenty of different ways the water is heated up for district heating systems and the amounts of water being heated up, but we're generally talking about megawatt- or gigawatt-ranges -- you'd need tens to hundreds of thousands of these CPUs running to match the thermal output.
That's what I was thinking. It's not like they can just turn the machines off during summer-times, their whole cloud-computing platform would be basically rendered useless during summer if they did. They could turn the machines off during business-hours, but again, that'd bring the platform's uptime down drastically, and it wouldn't solve the heating-problem at all, as it takes a long time for big buildings to cool down.
I don't see how this would make much sense in an office-building, but I suppose it could be somewhat useful for storage-spaces, where it doesn't matter if it gets a little toasty during summers, but you don't want temperatures to drop below, say, +10C during winters.
Perhaps you should have done 5 minutes of Googling and you would have found the answers yourself.
If *you* had spent 5 minutes of Googling, you'd have known that those B006 and B007 refer to the installed ROM version, not H/W-revision. Also, it is available both for LTE and non-LTE-versions, as even this ( http://tabletmonkeys.com/andro... ) article here mentions with the quote Huawei now says that the update from Android 5.1 to Android 6.0 will begin its roll out at precisely 12:00 on November 7, with a 1.27GB update, for the Wi-Fi and 4G models of Huawei MediaPad M2 8.0 The LTE-versions are called M2-801L and M2-802L, which can easily be verified with a quick Google that they have, indeed, received the update a long time ago already.
Next time don't be so quick in being condescending when you're wrong.
It's not the only one. The one I have is the 16GB/2GB-model of the Mediapad M2 8.0 ( http://www.gsmarena.com/huawei... ) The hardware is the same on both the 16GB/2GB and 32GB/3GB-models, except for the amount of RAM and storage, and between the LTE and non-LTE models the only difference is that the latter has no LTE -- it's still the same SoC, and all these models have received the Marshmallow-update elsewhere in Europe, but not here.
Oh, I know about CM and LineageOS. I used CM first and then LineageOS on my previous phone for a long time, for example. Unfortunately, LineageOS ain't available for my tablet.
Nope, it's exact same hardware. Also, they said they have no plans of providing the update at all -- validation or no validation, they're not going to bother. Elsewhere in Europe they received the update at the beginning of the year, so Huawei's already had plenty of time to work on it, too.
I got a Huawei-tablet when it was new, since it had perfectly good specs for my needs and it wasn't outrageously expensive (1920x1200 IPS display, 2GB RAM, SD-card slot, stereo speakers, and it even has LTE-support) The hardware is still plenty good, but the tablet itself has only gotten ONE update in the couple of years that I've owned it now, and it's still stuck on Android Lollipop 5.1. The tablet has received an update to Android Marshmallow elsewhere in Europe, but when I asked their support for when the update arrives to the Nordic countries the support literally answered that they have absolutely no plans, whatsoever, to provide the update! They have all the software and everything already, they'd just need to bother doing the text-translations, but they rather leave people on an outdated Android-version and completely abandon the devices rather than spend some time and money on supplying a Nordic-version of the update!
I would not recommend anyone spend money on a company this shitty; you'll never know if they'll abandon your devices next!
I've been using Firefox on Android for a long time and I am very happy with it. I use Firefox on the desktop too, so I get tab-syncing and all that, plus I get adblock and a couple of other nice addons (I haven't used Chrome, but I don't think it supports addons on Android) and so on. Also, personally, I don't find it "too slow" to use, especially with an adblocker.
Pretty much. As soon as I noticed it was a video I just simply closed the tab in disgust. Videos are great and all for content where there is some visual content that'd be difficult to convey properly in textual form, but... talking heads ain't that.
I didn't say anything about the devices not being able to play the content, I was talking about *streaming* the content; I don't have to manually copy files to my phone before-hand, I can just pick and play whatever I like, whenever I like and stream it, and this is where transcoding a 20GB-file down is useful.
What the hell are you babbling about? SSL-certificates aren't tied to IP-addresses, they're tied to domain-names! Hell, you can have hundreds of HTTPS-sites served by a single Apache-server with a single IP-address, all with different SSL-certificates, by using SNI!
Plex does a lot of stuff that Kodi doesn't. One of the more-useful things that springs to mind is transcoding: I can stream stuff from my collection to my phone or tablet when on-the-go and I can either have Plex pre-transcode the files I know I'll be watching or it can transcode on-the-fly seamlessly. Kodi doesn't do anything like that at all, it's more of a standalone-player than a proper media-server.
Couples who live together share a lot of things: beds, bathrooms, food, toiletries. But one thing they might not expect to share? Skin bacteria.
Says who? Why wouldn't they expect that? Everyone knows you already share all sorts of bacteria and viruses and whatnot with whoever you live with, so you tend to get sick at the same time and you tend to be resistant to the same sicknesses and all that -- it's fucking common sense.
All the four USB-ports share bandwidth, so no. A single USB 2.0-port has a 480Mbps bandwidth, not counting for the losses of the USB-protocol and whatnot, and since all the ports share bandwidth it'd make no difference whether you used a single gigabit ethernet USB-adapter or 4. Also, don't forget that the 10/100 Ethernet-port on the RPi also shares bandwidth with those USB-ports!