The Mac Mini is a legacy product for Apple, much like the iPod Classic was. They aren't going to be putting much money into upgrades, but they will continue selling them so long as people buy them and the parts to make them don't get discontinued. (The demise of the iPod Classic finally happened when 1.8" hard drives went out of production; Apple was the only significant customer that was still using them.) Apple might even consider going to a new motherboard for an upgrade if they can go to the SAME new motherboard for all the models, rather than needing multiple versions for different parts of the product line.
The Mac Pro is a different beast that has a different reason for existing. Apple probably isn't making any money on the Pro; doing all that custom engineering and manufacturing for a low volume product pretty much guarantees that. But it's a product that needs to exist to keep high end creative professionals in the fold; if no such product existed those people would start to defect to Windows or Linux. Having those people in the Mac ecosystem helps Apple sell their higher volume iMac and Macbook lines.
The Macbook Air is a key part of Apple's product line. It will certainly get an upgrade unless Apple decides to shift to ARM.
Likely but not certain. It would be consistent with their previous upgrades to those lines. There have been rumors that Apple is considering a shift to ARM for their Mac line; if they go that way they won't be buying future Intel processors.
One reason you can't get that in the US: EDGE networks are being turned off in some places, a trend that will continue with time. HSDPA is the minimum point of entry to GSM-network data now.
You have to stream a lot of music to get in trouble with data caps unless you have a plan with a really low limit measured in MB rather than GB. (Exception: the new Tidal high quality streaming service that streams lossless music.) Some people have unlimited data plans. Postpaid T-Mobile customers get free streaming from the major services; that data doesn't count against your cap.
The sound quality of music on YouTube is highly variable. Early uploads had terrible sound because YouTube was using a poor codec, and they didn't preserve the original uploads back then so those videos will not sound any better now. Anything where the highest available resolution is 240p or 144p is likely to be in that category.
Current videos have the audio encoded in AAC at reasonable bit rates, so the sound quality is comparable to other streaming options if the uploader provided good audio. (That means not quite as good as music downloads, which in turn are not quite as good as CDs.) Officially posted music videos are usually fine; user uploads may or may not be.
Apple designs its own mobile processors but they are manufactured by TSMC. They do the industrial design of all their systems even though most of them are built for them by other companies. The new Mac Pro is the notable exception; Apple actually builds those.
Apple has had success at making money on hardware because they target the premium end of the market, where there is actually some profit margin available. Companies like HP and Dell are struggling because the bulk of their business is in commodity rather than premium systems. Competition with companies like Acer and ASUS has sucked most of the profit potential out of those products.
HP and Dell do have bright spots. HP makes money selling ink and toner. Dell has been successful with monitors; there are people who are willing to pay a small premium for a better display and Dell has done well at targeting them. Those niches are likely a big part of what is keeping those companies afloat.
Microsoft's software is in a decent place right now. Windows 8 has UI problems, but most can be fixed with third party software. Windows 10 seems to be on the right track to be what Windows 8 should have been. Office has its own problems and it's rather big and bloated, but it is mostly reliable; people would have abandoned it in droves if that were not true. Microsoft's developer software continue to be solid and their cloud offerings are following suit.
Their biggest problem in the past year has been with software updates. They have pushed out multiple updates to Windows that have broken significant numbers of systems. They need to get that problem cleared up ASAP.
Canada has content laws for broadcasters, requiring that a percentage of what they broadcast be connected in some way or another to Canada. Written there, performed there, done by Canadian performers, and being about Canada all figure into the formula. (Ironically, that means that the Great White North sketches on SCTV were a grand slam of CanCon even as they mocked it.) The justification is in part that broadcast spectrum is a finite resource. Cable channels are not regulated as tightly, and satellite radio has an overall requirement for the entire package of channels offered rather than content requirements for each channel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
French language preservation isn't about preventing the adoption of new words - words for concepts that the language previously had no words for - from being borrowed from other languages. It is about keeping words that are already in use from being displaced by words from other languages. Usages like le weekend and le drugstore are frowned upon by many people there, though they are also frequently encountered.
At one time there was something to the superiority of tubes. Early solid state designs really did sound terrible, because of things like crossover distortion (that has nothing to do with the crossover in your speakers, it has to do with bad things that happen when signals cross the zero point in an amplifier) that those designers did not understand. Transistor amplifiers (even now) also sound worse than tubes if they are pushed past their limits; solid state designs in that situation distort in ways that are uglier to our ears than tubes do.
But... there isn't much excuse for pushing a solid state amplifier past its limits. Getting a given amount of power output with transistors is much easier than it is with tubes, so there is no reason not to design your sound system with ample reserve capacity.
There is one market where the desire for tube amplifiers makes sense - electric guitar amps. The characteristic distortions of tubes are a part of what we recognize as the distinctive sound of the instrument. When people are trying to fill an arena with guitar sounds, it's not uncommon to feed the guitar into a tube amp, put a microphone in front of that amp, and then feed that signal into the big sound system that fills the arena - a quality condenser mic and solid state amplifiers faithfully reproduce the distortions that the small tube amplifier contributed to the guitar sound.
Slight digression: blues harp (harmonica) is nearly always amplified with one of two vintage models of microphone: the Shure 520 "Green Bullet" or the Astatic JT-30. (A version of the Shure is still being made, though some harp players prefer the earlier versions.) The microphone feeds into a tube amplifier that is usually being pushed hard; for large spaces that amp would then be mic'ed and reamplified just like the electric guitar. Both the sound of the microphone (which is far from neutral) and the amp are part of the sound that we associate with blues harp.
Similarly, digital recording pushed past its limits and into digital clipping sounds horrible. But again there is no reason to let that happen; 24 bit recording has lots of dynamic range so you don't have to push the top limit. (No commercially available DAC achieves the theoretical limit of 144dB, but more than 120dB is available.) It's easy to normalize the recording when you master it for CD so you take advantage of all 16 bits of that medium.
If you want to hear something even better than CD, try some high resolution downloads. You will need a sound card that can handle 24 bit samples and preferably at least 96KHz sample rate to take full advantage, but even many integrated sound interfaces can do that now. http://www.hdtracks.com/ is a good place to start.
You have two more days to get the free high resolution holiday sampler from Linn: http://www.linn.co.uk/christma... Get it even if you're allergic to holiday music; most of the songs in the sampler have nothing to do with any December holiday.
Hobbit 2 came out in December 2013. But you might have waited until January to see it. One of the good things about digital is that there is no penalty to waiting until later in the run to see a movie, unlike film where you will get to watch a badly worn print.
Incumbent big businesses are most vulnerable during paradigm shifts. The problem with trying to compete against Amazon is that they already ARE the paradigm shift, so your new online service would be taking them on more directly.
I don't think Amazon has gone public with this info, but I suspect they have a threshold of somewhere in the 10-20% range for novels. That is, if you haven't read at least that much of the book it doesn't count. Reference books, if they offer any, would have to be counted differently since you don't normally read the entirety of those.
The author might be making as much money on that $3 ebook as they do on a $25 hardcover. If you self publish through Amazon you get about $2 for each $3 ebook; they widely tout their 70% royalty but there some additional fees that take that down a bit. Of course, the author isn't getting any of the services that the hardcover publisher might provide such as editing and promotion.
If you have the skill set to take your MBP apart and remove the logic board this might be worth a try. If it fails you are no worse off than before, since you were going to have to replace the logic board anyway.
For anybody thinking of trying this at home: it's important to note that it is only the logic board that is going in the oven. Putting the case or the LCD in the oven would be very very bad. And that is pretty much how the logic board got soldered in the first place. They have a fancier oven with digital temperature control, but the principle is still that you heat the board up just past the melting point of solder, keep it there for a short time while the solder flows, and then cool it down.
Mine looks pretty silly on the rare occasion when I hold it up to my head to talk. But I rarely do that, because I don't often talk on the telephone. For me it's a portable data device first and foremost. I might talk on it a couple of times a week, and it's not worth owning a second device (and a second data contract!) for that.
Doctors and lawyers are both challenging for an IT person to work with, especially a contractor.
With doctors, the problem is that they treat their time as priceless and your time as worthless, just as they often do with patients. They think nothing of keeping you waiting for an hour, but heaven help you if you ever make them wait for a minute.
Doing the work for lawyers is OK until it's time to get paid. Then they challenge everything on your bill.
Sony Xperia Z Ultra. Samsung Galaxy Mega. (The Galaxy Mega 2 downsized from 6.3" to an even 6".) Both are over 6 inches. Neither is a brand new model but both are still available. There are also a couple of Chinese models that are over 6". Most of the action seems to be in the 5.5-6" area; lots of phones in that size class coming out.
By current standards, the Nexus 7 is rather porky for a 7" tablet. Look at something like the Xperia Tablet Z3 for a look at where the tech can go now - that's an 8" tablet that is super-thin and weighs a mere 9.5 ounces. (The Nexus 7 is thicker and an ounce heavier despite its smaller screen.) But right now it's too expensive to sell in mass quantities; the tablets that are selling right now are either iPads, or under-$100 budget models.
The limited-capability driverless cars that Google is currently testing mostly won't be for individuals to buy. They will be an alternative to urban taxi service. Eventually we will also have driverless capability in more capable cars as an option; you will either be able to drive the car yourself or turn over control to the AI, as you wish.
Unclear. The sites that they are using to rent and sell the movie usually stream it. It is possible to download Google Play movies to a device, though since those downloads are still DRM-protected and tied to the app they aren't quite downloads in the usual sense, just like the offline option on Spotify. YouTube has no download option. Sony's own site was supposed to be streaming-only, but they apparently forgot to disable the "download video" option at first.
Pre-cooling the interior by turning on the AC while the car is still plugged in also helps with summer range. Many electric cars even let you turn on the heat or AC by remote control, so you don't have to go out to the car to do it.
Warning about all sites that don't use TLS is excessive. Many web sites gather no information (they may not even issue cookies) and there is no reason for the warning on those sites. Warning about the lack of TLS on pages that include input forms might be a reasonable compromise; not all of those actually gather any sensitive information (online entertainment quizzes, for example, unless they ask for your email address or the like) but there is no way for the browser to know that.
The tube amp still COULD sound better. (I say could, not does, that's a matter of taste.) An important difference in the situations is that the final power amp is the only large signal amplifier in the listening chain. There are important differences between small and large signal amplification; for starters, small signal amplifiers are almost always run in class A, whereas except for a few designs for fanatic audiophiles, large signal amplifiers run in some other class. (For a long time that was a push-pull design in class AB; now we also see classes G and H as well as the digital class D.
Large signal amplifiers usually add much more coloration to sound than small signal amplifiers do; we can build nearly perfect small signal amps but the large signal ones are another matter. That means that differences in the sound of the final amplification stage can overwhelm many of the effects of earlier stages - not to mention that variations in loudspeakers can overwhelm both.
Tube and transistor large signal amplifiers certainly do sound different. Tubes have a lower slew rate; that tends to soften transients, for better or for worse. Tubes have lower inherent levels of harmonic distortion, so tube amplifiers tend to need less negative feedback. Most tube designs include output transformers, which have their own effect on sound. Capacitors are imperfect devices that some audiophiles believe have an effect on sound; the high voltage caps used in a tube amplifier could sound different from the low voltage ones used in transistor designs. Tube amplifiers usually have a higher output impedance; the impedance of speakers typically varies with frequency, and that means that they will interact differently with tube amps.
Another important distinction is that the sonic damage of amplifiers is all pretty much the same KIND of thing, it's just a matter of degree. The damage done by digital conversion, to whatever extent it exists, is damage of a fundamentally DIFFERENT kind. Some digital damage is easily observed, like the effects of low bit rate MP3 encoding, and no further processing of the music will undo what the MP3 encoding did. (In a different realm, the effects of JPEG encoding on pictures and MPEG encoding on movies is easily seen with the right source materials, and again remains even after additional image processing.) The effects of PCM encoding at sufficiently high bit rates is certainly more subtle if it exists at all. Badly done PCM encoding is another matter; nearly everybody agrees that some early CDs sound terrible.
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The Mac Mini is a legacy product for Apple, much like the iPod Classic was. They aren't going to be putting much money into upgrades, but they will continue selling them so long as people buy them and the parts to make them don't get discontinued. (The demise of the iPod Classic finally happened when 1.8" hard drives went out of production; Apple was the only significant customer that was still using them.) Apple might even consider going to a new motherboard for an upgrade if they can go to the SAME new motherboard for all the models, rather than needing multiple versions for different parts of the product line.
The Mac Pro is a different beast that has a different reason for existing. Apple probably isn't making any money on the Pro; doing all that custom engineering and manufacturing for a low volume product pretty much guarantees that. But it's a product that needs to exist to keep high end creative professionals in the fold; if no such product existed those people would start to defect to Windows or Linux. Having those people in the Mac ecosystem helps Apple sell their higher volume iMac and Macbook lines.
The Macbook Air is a key part of Apple's product line. It will certainly get an upgrade unless Apple decides to shift to ARM.
Likely but not certain. It would be consistent with their previous upgrades to those lines. There have been rumors that Apple is considering a shift to ARM for their Mac line; if they go that way they won't be buying future Intel processors.
One reason you can't get that in the US: EDGE networks are being turned off in some places, a trend that will continue with time. HSDPA is the minimum point of entry to GSM-network data now.
You have to stream a lot of music to get in trouble with data caps unless you have a plan with a really low limit measured in MB rather than GB. (Exception: the new Tidal high quality streaming service that streams lossless music.) Some people have unlimited data plans. Postpaid T-Mobile customers get free streaming from the major services; that data doesn't count against your cap.
The sound quality of music on YouTube is highly variable. Early uploads had terrible sound because YouTube was using a poor codec, and they didn't preserve the original uploads back then so those videos will not sound any better now. Anything where the highest available resolution is 240p or 144p is likely to be in that category.
Current videos have the audio encoded in AAC at reasonable bit rates, so the sound quality is comparable to other streaming options if the uploader provided good audio. (That means not quite as good as music downloads, which in turn are not quite as good as CDs.) Officially posted music videos are usually fine; user uploads may or may not be.
Apple designs its own mobile processors but they are manufactured by TSMC. They do the industrial design of all their systems even though most of them are built for them by other companies. The new Mac Pro is the notable exception; Apple actually builds those.
Apple has had success at making money on hardware because they target the premium end of the market, where there is actually some profit margin available. Companies like HP and Dell are struggling because the bulk of their business is in commodity rather than premium systems. Competition with companies like Acer and ASUS has sucked most of the profit potential out of those products.
HP and Dell do have bright spots. HP makes money selling ink and toner. Dell has been successful with monitors; there are people who are willing to pay a small premium for a better display and Dell has done well at targeting them. Those niches are likely a big part of what is keeping those companies afloat.
Microsoft's software is in a decent place right now. Windows 8 has UI problems, but most can be fixed with third party software. Windows 10 seems to be on the right track to be what Windows 8 should have been. Office has its own problems and it's rather big and bloated, but it is mostly reliable; people would have abandoned it in droves if that were not true. Microsoft's developer software continue to be solid and their cloud offerings are following suit.
Their biggest problem in the past year has been with software updates. They have pushed out multiple updates to Windows that have broken significant numbers of systems. They need to get that problem cleared up ASAP.
Canada has content laws for broadcasters, requiring that a percentage of what they broadcast be connected in some way or another to Canada. Written there, performed there, done by Canadian performers, and being about Canada all figure into the formula. (Ironically, that means that the Great White North sketches on SCTV were a grand slam of CanCon even as they mocked it.) The justification is in part that broadcast spectrum is a finite resource. Cable channels are not regulated as tightly, and satellite radio has an overall requirement for the entire package of channels offered rather than content requirements for each channel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
French language preservation isn't about preventing the adoption of new words - words for concepts that the language previously had no words for - from being borrowed from other languages. It is about keeping words that are already in use from being displaced by words from other languages. Usages like le weekend and le drugstore are frowned upon by many people there, though they are also frequently encountered.
At one time there was something to the superiority of tubes. Early solid state designs really did sound terrible, because of things like crossover distortion (that has nothing to do with the crossover in your speakers, it has to do with bad things that happen when signals cross the zero point in an amplifier) that those designers did not understand. Transistor amplifiers (even now) also sound worse than tubes if they are pushed past their limits; solid state designs in that situation distort in ways that are uglier to our ears than tubes do.
But... there isn't much excuse for pushing a solid state amplifier past its limits. Getting a given amount of power output with transistors is much easier than it is with tubes, so there is no reason not to design your sound system with ample reserve capacity.
There is one market where the desire for tube amplifiers makes sense - electric guitar amps. The characteristic distortions of tubes are a part of what we recognize as the distinctive sound of the instrument. When people are trying to fill an arena with guitar sounds, it's not uncommon to feed the guitar into a tube amp, put a microphone in front of that amp, and then feed that signal into the big sound system that fills the arena - a quality condenser mic and solid state amplifiers faithfully reproduce the distortions that the small tube amplifier contributed to the guitar sound.
Slight digression: blues harp (harmonica) is nearly always amplified with one of two vintage models of microphone: the Shure 520 "Green Bullet" or the Astatic JT-30. (A version of the Shure is still being made, though some harp players prefer the earlier versions.) The microphone feeds into a tube amplifier that is usually being pushed hard; for large spaces that amp would then be mic'ed and reamplified just like the electric guitar. Both the sound of the microphone (which is far from neutral) and the amp are part of the sound that we associate with blues harp.
Similarly, digital recording pushed past its limits and into digital clipping sounds horrible. But again there is no reason to let that happen; 24 bit recording has lots of dynamic range so you don't have to push the top limit. (No commercially available DAC achieves the theoretical limit of 144dB, but more than 120dB is available.) It's easy to normalize the recording when you master it for CD so you take advantage of all 16 bits of that medium.
If you want to hear something even better than CD, try some high resolution downloads. You will need a sound card that can handle 24 bit samples and preferably at least 96KHz sample rate to take full advantage, but even many integrated sound interfaces can do that now. http://www.hdtracks.com/ is a good place to start.
You have two more days to get the free high resolution holiday sampler from Linn: http://www.linn.co.uk/christma... Get it even if you're allergic to holiday music; most of the songs in the sampler have nothing to do with any December holiday.
Hobbit 2 came out in December 2013. But you might have waited until January to see it. One of the good things about digital is that there is no penalty to waiting until later in the run to see a movie, unlike film where you will get to watch a badly worn print.
Incumbent big businesses are most vulnerable during paradigm shifts. The problem with trying to compete against Amazon is that they already ARE the paradigm shift, so your new online service would be taking them on more directly.
Half? You are wildly optimistic. The typical author doesn't even see $1 from that paperback sale.
I don't think Amazon has gone public with this info, but I suspect they have a threshold of somewhere in the 10-20% range for novels. That is, if you haven't read at least that much of the book it doesn't count. Reference books, if they offer any, would have to be counted differently since you don't normally read the entirety of those.
The author might be making as much money on that $3 ebook as they do on a $25 hardcover. If you self publish through Amazon you get about $2 for each $3 ebook; they widely tout their 70% royalty but there some additional fees that take that down a bit. Of course, the author isn't getting any of the services that the hardcover publisher might provide such as editing and promotion.
If you have the skill set to take your MBP apart and remove the logic board this might be worth a try. If it fails you are no worse off than before, since you were going to have to replace the logic board anyway.
For anybody thinking of trying this at home: it's important to note that it is only the logic board that is going in the oven. Putting the case or the LCD in the oven would be very very bad. And that is pretty much how the logic board got soldered in the first place. They have a fancier oven with digital temperature control, but the principle is still that you heat the board up just past the melting point of solder, keep it there for a short time while the solder flows, and then cool it down.
Mine looks pretty silly on the rare occasion when I hold it up to my head to talk. But I rarely do that, because I don't often talk on the telephone. For me it's a portable data device first and foremost. I might talk on it a couple of times a week, and it's not worth owning a second device (and a second data contract!) for that.
Doctors and lawyers are both challenging for an IT person to work with, especially a contractor.
With doctors, the problem is that they treat their time as priceless and your time as worthless, just as they often do with patients. They think nothing of keeping you waiting for an hour, but heaven help you if you ever make them wait for a minute.
Doing the work for lawyers is OK until it's time to get paid. Then they challenge everything on your bill.
Sony Xperia Z Ultra. Samsung Galaxy Mega. (The Galaxy Mega 2 downsized from 6.3" to an even 6".) Both are over 6 inches. Neither is a brand new model but both are still available. There are also a couple of Chinese models that are over 6". Most of the action seems to be in the 5.5-6" area; lots of phones in that size class coming out.
By current standards, the Nexus 7 is rather porky for a 7" tablet. Look at something like the Xperia Tablet Z3 for a look at where the tech can go now - that's an 8" tablet that is super-thin and weighs a mere 9.5 ounces. (The Nexus 7 is thicker and an ounce heavier despite its smaller screen.) But right now it's too expensive to sell in mass quantities; the tablets that are selling right now are either iPads, or under-$100 budget models.
The limited-capability driverless cars that Google is currently testing mostly won't be for individuals to buy. They will be an alternative to urban taxi service. Eventually we will also have driverless capability in more capable cars as an option; you will either be able to drive the car yourself or turn over control to the AI, as you wish.
Unclear. The sites that they are using to rent and sell the movie usually stream it. It is possible to download Google Play movies to a device, though since those downloads are still DRM-protected and tied to the app they aren't quite downloads in the usual sense, just like the offline option on Spotify. YouTube has no download option. Sony's own site was supposed to be streaming-only, but they apparently forgot to disable the "download video" option at first.
Pre-cooling the interior by turning on the AC while the car is still plugged in also helps with summer range. Many electric cars even let you turn on the heat or AC by remote control, so you don't have to go out to the car to do it.
Warning about all sites that don't use TLS is excessive. Many web sites gather no information (they may not even issue cookies) and there is no reason for the warning on those sites. Warning about the lack of TLS on pages that include input forms might be a reasonable compromise; not all of those actually gather any sensitive information (online entertainment quizzes, for example, unless they ask for your email address or the like) but there is no way for the browser to know that.
The tube amp still COULD sound better. (I say could, not does, that's a matter of taste.) An important difference in the situations is that the final power amp is the only large signal amplifier in the listening chain. There are important differences between small and large signal amplification; for starters, small signal amplifiers are almost always run in class A, whereas except for a few designs for fanatic audiophiles, large signal amplifiers run in some other class. (For a long time that was a push-pull design in class AB; now we also see classes G and H as well as the digital class D.
Large signal amplifiers usually add much more coloration to sound than small signal amplifiers do; we can build nearly perfect small signal amps but the large signal ones are another matter. That means that differences in the sound of the final amplification stage can overwhelm many of the effects of earlier stages - not to mention that variations in loudspeakers can overwhelm both.
Tube and transistor large signal amplifiers certainly do sound different. Tubes have a lower slew rate; that tends to soften transients, for better or for worse. Tubes have lower inherent levels of harmonic distortion, so tube amplifiers tend to need less negative feedback. Most tube designs include output transformers, which have their own effect on sound. Capacitors are imperfect devices that some audiophiles believe have an effect on sound; the high voltage caps used in a tube amplifier could sound different from the low voltage ones used in transistor designs. Tube amplifiers usually have a higher output impedance; the impedance of speakers typically varies with frequency, and that means that they will interact differently with tube amps.
Another important distinction is that the sonic damage of amplifiers is all pretty much the same KIND of thing, it's just a matter of degree. The damage done by digital conversion, to whatever extent it exists, is damage of a fundamentally DIFFERENT kind. Some digital damage is easily observed, like the effects of low bit rate MP3 encoding, and no further processing of the music will undo what the MP3 encoding did. (In a different realm, the effects of JPEG encoding on pictures and MPEG encoding on movies is easily seen with the right source materials, and again remains even after additional image processing.) The effects of PCM encoding at sufficiently high bit rates is certainly more subtle if it exists at all. Badly done PCM encoding is another matter; nearly everybody agrees that some early CDs sound terrible.