You clearly have much lower utility rates than we do in the rural Western United States. For me, it was a matter of months. Our electricity when we lived in town was about $100-$150/month. Now that we've built a home in the country, we're completely off-grid (other than that pesky Internet fiber); we have about $3,000 invested into our solar array, battery bank, pure sine inverters, all wiring, and charge controllers. It provides enough electricity that we run a large refrigerator and a chest freezer, and we even use an electric water heater and range. We occasionally supplement with a small $200 gasoline generator when there are multiple cloudy days, but that's getting pretty rare, and probably costs less than $100/year.
My total payoff time for this system was about 24 months; 2 years. And since I have electric cooking and a wood stove for heat, I also save another $25-150/month (monthly average gas bill was about $45), and the cost for the wood stove & accessories was less than the cost of a gas or electric furnace. If we add that into the mix, it brings our payoff down to 18 months.
The fact that it will continue to print is a huge improvement over the other brands. In the other brands, if the 'replace now' message pops up, you are unable to print until you replace the part in question. The fact that they remind you is nothing compared with forcing your hand when you still have ink left.
I used to work in retail. The sales goals had both positive and negative reinforcement; [meager] commissions for selling extended warranties, and stiff reprimands for not meeting 'accessory sales' goals. One store in the district custom created their own signs for all of their furniture, marking the prices up by $20 or so, and selling everyone extended warranties with every piece sold, without ever asking the customer. I noticed this while visiting the store, and reported it to my manager. Guess who got in trouble (Hint: it wasn't them.)
Same where I am, but you can't record someone else's conversation; you have to be a party in the conversation to get the right to record it. As websites are concerned, that's already the case (after all, that's how most websites make their money), but when you use a desktop application, who is the second party? I would think that recording that would be similar to recording a person talking to himself, which is illegal without notification everywhere in the USA.
This sort of software should be no different from recorded phone calls. As long as the user is notified in a significant, reasonable way, this type of software should be allowed (i.e. just like most large business networks notify when you log in.) If the user is not notified that they are being recorded or monitored, it should be illegal under wiretap laws.
Skype won because it had clients for every OS under the Sun, then MS merged it with MSN Messenger, its largest competitor. Sure, it's a little buggy (although substantially less than Hangouts or Facebook Video Chat), but everyone has it.
The encryption issue is a non-starter for two reasons: First, there isn't a viable competitor that does adequately encrypt and open the source code so that you know it really did. Second, 90%+ of the userbase don't care.
Sorry Google, but you're not going to win the war with MS on this front; at least not with this.
I'm sorry, but this is straight-up nonsense. I've worked as many as 3 jobs at a time to make both ends meet in the middle, and no -- it's not a positive thing. At this point, I'm self- employed, and finally able to spend time with my family, which is actually what I want to be doing.
Just because you dress up your poverty as a plus (e.g. "Being unable to afford food has helped me lose 90 lbs!" or "I'm in the best shape of my life, because I walk 10 miles a day. How did I find the motivation to exercise this much? I got my car repo'd!"), does not mean that you should advise others to try it. I'm happy that I can afford food and a car. I'm also happy that I can do that with only 40-ish hours of work each week.
There was a customer who walked into my shop to get his iPhone 4s fixed a month or so ago. While he was waiting, we made small talk, and he bragged about his pickup truck. He told me that it has a 'chip' that makes it produce 900HP. He used to have a 1000HP chip, but his grandfather saw him spinning his tires, so he told him to take it out.
The truck was a rusty, 20-year-old Dodge, with a V8 that produces about 240HP from the factory.
Did I smile and nod, occasionally saying 'Wow'? Of course. Did I believe him? Not in the least.
This also reminds me of a story from one of the Gawker blogs, where a writer interviewed taxi drivers. The question she asked was: "Have you ever been propositioned by a passenger?" Most said "No", a couple said "Once", and one guy claimed that it happened every night, and that he had women falling all over him.
The part of this story that makes it a little unbelievable is the range of customers he claimed to have. 'Husbands and wives'; do they have a website where we can go and order some hacking? If not, how are these average citizens finding them? 'Governments'? I should expect that most interested governments would instead invest into their own cyber-military, rather than hiring a 2-bit scammer. This just doesn't smell right.
They've created enough artificial hype, that people are genuinely excited about it. At this point, people are talking about it without getting paid, because they want to.
What I don't understand is why people want to talk about it. I checked it out multiple times yesterday, and the only notable thing I saw was that the Amazon website was painfully slow. Absolutely nothing on sale looked like a good enough deal to entice me to impulse buy.
Something's not quite right here. I've been using this sort of product since 2010, when I purchased a set at Walmart for under $10. I know for a fact that it was earlier than May 2010, because I distinctly remember a conversation I had with a co-worker about them; I left that job in May 2010, and the co-worker passed away shortly thereafter.
While patent-infringing cheap merchandise may be a problem on Amazon, the particular item highlighted in this article seems to be a little misleading.
Microsoft has already announced that Windows 10 will continue to be a free upgrade for people with accessibility options turned on, even after the deadline for everyone else. As long as they don't rescind that, I'd personally wait until Win10 is fully compatible, rather than jumping the gun.
And, for reference, I'm someone who highly recommends the upgrade for standard users.
On older cars, the distributor cap would get damaged by submersion. Not a big deal, but it would definitely leave you stranded. Most modern cars do not float level, if at all, which leads to the classic nose-down 'duck pose' you see cars take in a flood. Aside from the beetle (which had different weight distribution due to the small rear engine), I'm not aware of any common production vehicle that will float level. Front wheel drives are simply too nose-heavy.
And Jeeps actually have terrible door seals. After all, serious off-roaders take the doors off; why bother making them water-tight?
As a 'serious offroader' myself, I can assure you it's not the exhaust you have to worry about. It's the air intake. Engines have plenty of power to force air out the exhaust while underwater. Sucking water into the engine, however, is something that ICE's really don't like.
I would say that rather than Win10, this is a complaint with Edge. I personally am pretty happy with Win10 (aside from it blocking installers for older software that I know to work), but Edge is horrible.
The thing is, this isn't new to 10. Explorer was just as flawed (in other ways), and also should be avoided on a Win7 computer. As a rule of thumb, use Firefox on all PCs.
This. Each Gawker blog is independently run, with (as I understand it) fairly little corporate oversight. The tone of the blog will depend entirely on the managing editor. Because of that, Jalopnik (and most of its sub-blogs, such as Black Flag, Lanesplitter, etc) has a very friendly and upbeat atmosphere, and are actively anti-clickbait. Jezebel, Deadspin, etc are more like tabloids; the managing editors think that controversy is what drives clicks, so that's what they focus on. Gizmodo is a fairly decent tech block now, but Sploid (one of Giz's sub-blogs) is utter trash written as if by a wide-eyed 8 year old, who thinks everything is 'magic' and 'mind blowing'. Not too long ago, Gizmodo used to have more articles about marijuana than technology; Why? Because the managing editor appeared to be a pot head*.
The Gawker network employs a lot of bad editors. Even the good blogs have some poor management (constantly firing good, talented writers without explanation), but that's the root problem.
*Purely speculative, based on the fact that the marijuana articles ended when they got a new managing editor. Perhaps the old editor wasn't pro marijuana, but he had a bad way of showing it, if so.
Thank you for pointing that out. This service offers exactly what I've been looking for; I have written an addon to VLC that automatically mutes offensive words based on subtitles, but that only works on DVDs, and Netflix has gotten expensive for how little we watch. Having an alternative that allows the same capability in a streaming service is fantastic.
I've found that asking for help in my endeavor seems to trigger some sort of extreme anger with a lot of people. I've even been told that it's 'criminal' for me to try to prevent myself from hearing things that I don't like. It's great to see that someone actually offers the service I'm looking for, now.
Care to say what "best practices" are in Windows 10?
The first thing that comes to mind is that it's nigh impossible to have a Window 10 account without a password. This is basic network security stuff, but a lot of Windows 7 home users still don't have passwords set.
Another is that it's a great deal of work to run without an anti-malware/virus/firewall/whatever. If you don't set one up, they do without asking. If you genuninely want to run without, it's a royal pain.
Another thing that I ran into this past week is that 'modern' apps don't work if UAC is completely disabled. Essentially, the computer annoys you into re-enabling UAC, because you can't use basic things like the calculator, or the new 'Mail' app they've forced on everyone.* UAC is of course a basic security feature, but lots of techs disable it, because some remote desktop applications (join.me, I think? I can't recall for sure) can't allow the remote tech to see the UAC prompts, which of course wreaks havok on their workflow.
I'm sure there are probably other examples as well, but those are the first that come to mind. I know it's also significantly harder to crack a user account password in Windows 10, if they're using an MS account instead of local.
*Mail has replaced Windows Live Mail. They're still allowing people to use Windows Live Mail, and you can install it in 10 just fine, but Exchange email servers and all the MS-hosted email services (outlook.com, hotmail, etc) will stop working with it soon. I'm sure I'll be switching some folks to Thunderbird soon.
Actually, I've been moderately impressed at the voice recognition quality; it's on par with Dragon. Then again, I have a very clear, well enunciated PNW accent; that may have something to do with it. Background noise also matters a lot; if your laptop has the mic anywhere near the fan, it won't work for anything.
The security improvements that I've personally encountered aren't actually changes to Windows, it's the fact that 'best practices' are enforced in Windows 10. Which, if you're administering military computers, you should have been doing anyway.
FWIW, Cortana is worthless anyway. Nothing works. 99% of the things you ask her just open Edge and search for whatever you said, word-for-word, even when it's something like "What will the weather be like tomorrow?"
All it does it save you from having to type the search query. The only other thing it will do consistently is launch applications ("Hey Cortana, Open Firefox.") Everything else is a Bing search. It never responds verbally.
So yeah, having her turned off really is no loss, especially if you want the ability to search the web without your co-workers being forced to listen to what you're looking for.
That actually makes a lot of sense. It definitely did not seem like those two games were really in the same genre. I can see how a fan of the series might feel sold out by that genre drift.
I gotta be honest, I don't get it. They both show lots of intense action with a theatrical setup, the COD game appears to be more like a competitor with Halo than with the Battlefield game, which appeared to be set in the early 20th century, but they both looked like engaging, well developed games. The COD gameplay actually looked more interesting to me, as it had space combat elements (something I enjoy), whereas Battlefield appeared to be more strictly FPS.
That having been said, I'm not a fan of either game. I've never played either one. My taste leans more towards character-driven stories than straight combat, which makes both of these look rather boring.
From the summary, it sounds like we're talking about boring old TV delivered via IP. Hardly a media revolution. Preferably, they'd let us choose shows we wish to subscribe to, and allow us to put 100% of our subscription money into those shows, rather than the old method of subsidizing all the stuff we don't care about with a huge monthly fee.
This is really not that exciting.
Slashdot Mirror
You clearly have much lower utility rates than we do in the rural Western United States. For me, it was a matter of months. Our electricity when we lived in town was about $100-$150/month. Now that we've built a home in the country, we're completely off-grid (other than that pesky Internet fiber); we have about $3,000 invested into our solar array, battery bank, pure sine inverters, all wiring, and charge controllers. It provides enough electricity that we run a large refrigerator and a chest freezer, and we even use an electric water heater and range. We occasionally supplement with a small $200 gasoline generator when there are multiple cloudy days, but that's getting pretty rare, and probably costs less than $100/year.
My total payoff time for this system was about 24 months; 2 years. And since I have electric cooking and a wood stove for heat, I also save another $25-150/month (monthly average gas bill was about $45), and the cost for the wood stove & accessories was less than the cost of a gas or electric furnace. If we add that into the mix, it brings our payoff down to 18 months.
The fact that it will continue to print is a huge improvement over the other brands. In the other brands, if the 'replace now' message pops up, you are unable to print until you replace the part in question. The fact that they remind you is nothing compared with forcing your hand when you still have ink left.
I used to work in retail. The sales goals had both positive and negative reinforcement; [meager] commissions for selling extended warranties, and stiff reprimands for not meeting 'accessory sales' goals. One store in the district custom created their own signs for all of their furniture, marking the prices up by $20 or so, and selling everyone extended warranties with every piece sold, without ever asking the customer. I noticed this while visiting the store, and reported it to my manager.
Guess who got in trouble (Hint: it wasn't them.)
Same where I am, but you can't record someone else's conversation; you have to be a party in the conversation to get the right to record it. As websites are concerned, that's already the case (after all, that's how most websites make their money), but when you use a desktop application, who is the second party? I would think that recording that would be similar to recording a person talking to himself, which is illegal without notification everywhere in the USA.
This sort of software should be no different from recorded phone calls. As long as the user is notified in a significant, reasonable way, this type of software should be allowed (i.e. just like most large business networks notify when you log in.) If the user is not notified that they are being recorded or monitored, it should be illegal under wiretap laws.
Skype won because it had clients for every OS under the Sun, then MS merged it with MSN Messenger, its largest competitor. Sure, it's a little buggy (although substantially less than Hangouts or Facebook Video Chat), but everyone has it.
The encryption issue is a non-starter for two reasons: First, there isn't a viable competitor that does adequately encrypt and open the source code so that you know it really did. Second, 90%+ of the userbase don't care.
Sorry Google, but you're not going to win the war with MS on this front; at least not with this.
I'm sorry, but this is straight-up nonsense. I've worked as many as 3 jobs at a time to make both ends meet in the middle, and no -- it's not a positive thing. At this point, I'm self- employed, and finally able to spend time with my family, which is actually what I want to be doing.
Just because you dress up your poverty as a plus (e.g. "Being unable to afford food has helped me lose 90 lbs!" or "I'm in the best shape of my life, because I walk 10 miles a day. How did I find the motivation to exercise this much? I got my car repo'd!"), does not mean that you should advise others to try it. I'm happy that I can afford food and a car. I'm also happy that I can do that with only 40-ish hours of work each week.
Wow, suddenly it all makes sense!
Seriously though, thanks for the laugh.
There was a customer who walked into my shop to get his iPhone 4s fixed a month or so ago. While he was waiting, we made small talk, and he bragged about his pickup truck. He told me that it has a 'chip' that makes it produce 900HP. He used to have a 1000HP chip, but his grandfather saw him spinning his tires, so he told him to take it out.
The truck was a rusty, 20-year-old Dodge, with a V8 that produces about 240HP from the factory.
Did I smile and nod, occasionally saying 'Wow'? Of course. Did I believe him? Not in the least.
This also reminds me of a story from one of the Gawker blogs, where a writer interviewed taxi drivers. The question she asked was: "Have you ever been propositioned by a passenger?" Most said "No", a couple said "Once", and one guy claimed that it happened every night, and that he had women falling all over him.
The part of this story that makes it a little unbelievable is the range of customers he claimed to have. 'Husbands and wives'; do they have a website where we can go and order some hacking? If not, how are these average citizens finding them? 'Governments'? I should expect that most interested governments would instead invest into their own cyber-military, rather than hiring a 2-bit scammer. This just doesn't smell right.
They've created enough artificial hype, that people are genuinely excited about it. At this point, people are talking about it without getting paid, because they want to.
What I don't understand is why people want to talk about it. I checked it out multiple times yesterday, and the only notable thing I saw was that the Amazon website was painfully slow. Absolutely nothing on sale looked like a good enough deal to entice me to impulse buy.
Something's not quite right here. I've been using this sort of product since 2010, when I purchased a set at Walmart for under $10. I know for a fact that it was earlier than May 2010, because I distinctly remember a conversation I had with a co-worker about them; I left that job in May 2010, and the co-worker passed away shortly thereafter.
While patent-infringing cheap merchandise may be a problem on Amazon, the particular item highlighted in this article seems to be a little misleading.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... would seem to say otherwise.
Above-average users all switched away from Windows ages ago, or have a reason why they didn't, so they don't need me telling them what to use ;-)
Microsoft has already announced that Windows 10 will continue to be a free upgrade for people with accessibility options turned on, even after the deadline for everyone else. As long as they don't rescind that, I'd personally wait until Win10 is fully compatible, rather than jumping the gun.
And, for reference, I'm someone who highly recommends the upgrade for standard users.
On older cars, the distributor cap would get damaged by submersion. Not a big deal, but it would definitely leave you stranded. Most modern cars do not float level, if at all, which leads to the classic nose-down 'duck pose' you see cars take in a flood. Aside from the beetle (which had different weight distribution due to the small rear engine), I'm not aware of any common production vehicle that will float level. Front wheel drives are simply too nose-heavy.
And Jeeps actually have terrible door seals. After all, serious off-roaders take the doors off; why bother making them water-tight?
As a 'serious offroader' myself, I can assure you it's not the exhaust you have to worry about. It's the air intake. Engines have plenty of power to force air out the exhaust while underwater. Sucking water into the engine, however, is something that ICE's really don't like.
I would say that rather than Win10, this is a complaint with Edge. I personally am pretty happy with Win10 (aside from it blocking installers for older software that I know to work), but Edge is horrible.
The thing is, this isn't new to 10. Explorer was just as flawed (in other ways), and also should be avoided on a Win7 computer. As a rule of thumb, use Firefox on all PCs.
This. Each Gawker blog is independently run, with (as I understand it) fairly little corporate oversight. The tone of the blog will depend entirely on the managing editor. Because of that, Jalopnik (and most of its sub-blogs, such as Black Flag, Lanesplitter, etc) has a very friendly and upbeat atmosphere, and are actively anti-clickbait. Jezebel, Deadspin, etc are more like tabloids; the managing editors think that controversy is what drives clicks, so that's what they focus on. Gizmodo is a fairly decent tech block now, but Sploid (one of Giz's sub-blogs) is utter trash written as if by a wide-eyed 8 year old, who thinks everything is 'magic' and 'mind blowing'. Not too long ago, Gizmodo used to have more articles about marijuana than technology; Why? Because the managing editor appeared to be a pot head*.
The Gawker network employs a lot of bad editors. Even the good blogs have some poor management (constantly firing good, talented writers without explanation), but that's the root problem.
*Purely speculative, based on the fact that the marijuana articles ended when they got a new managing editor. Perhaps the old editor wasn't pro marijuana, but he had a bad way of showing it, if so.
Thank you for pointing that out. This service offers exactly what I've been looking for; I have written an addon to VLC that automatically mutes offensive words based on subtitles, but that only works on DVDs, and Netflix has gotten expensive for how little we watch. Having an alternative that allows the same capability in a streaming service is fantastic.
I've found that asking for help in my endeavor seems to trigger some sort of extreme anger with a lot of people. I've even been told that it's 'criminal' for me to try to prevent myself from hearing things that I don't like. It's great to see that someone actually offers the service I'm looking for, now.
Care to say what "best practices" are in Windows 10?
The first thing that comes to mind is that it's nigh impossible to have a Window 10 account without a password. This is basic network security stuff, but a lot of Windows 7 home users still don't have passwords set.
Another is that it's a great deal of work to run without an anti-malware/virus/firewall/whatever. If you don't set one up, they do without asking. If you genuninely want to run without, it's a royal pain.
Another thing that I ran into this past week is that 'modern' apps don't work if UAC is completely disabled. Essentially, the computer annoys you into re-enabling UAC, because you can't use basic things like the calculator, or the new 'Mail' app they've forced on everyone.* UAC is of course a basic security feature, but lots of techs disable it, because some remote desktop applications (join.me, I think? I can't recall for sure) can't allow the remote tech to see the UAC prompts, which of course wreaks havok on their workflow.
I'm sure there are probably other examples as well, but those are the first that come to mind. I know it's also significantly harder to crack a user account password in Windows 10, if they're using an MS account instead of local.
*Mail has replaced Windows Live Mail. They're still allowing people to use Windows Live Mail, and you can install it in 10 just fine, but Exchange email servers and all the MS-hosted email services (outlook.com, hotmail, etc) will stop working with it soon. I'm sure I'll be switching some folks to Thunderbird soon.
Actually, I've been moderately impressed at the voice recognition quality; it's on par with Dragon. Then again, I have a very clear, well enunciated PNW accent; that may have something to do with it. Background noise also matters a lot; if your laptop has the mic anywhere near the fan, it won't work for anything.
The security improvements that I've personally encountered aren't actually changes to Windows, it's the fact that 'best practices' are enforced in Windows 10. Which, if you're administering military computers, you should have been doing anyway.
FWIW, Cortana is worthless anyway. Nothing works. 99% of the things you ask her just open Edge and search for whatever you said, word-for-word, even when it's something like "What will the weather be like tomorrow?"
All it does it save you from having to type the search query. The only other thing it will do consistently is launch applications ("Hey Cortana, Open Firefox.") Everything else is a Bing search. It never responds verbally.
So yeah, having her turned off really is no loss, especially if you want the ability to search the web without your co-workers being forced to listen to what you're looking for.
That actually makes a lot of sense. It definitely did not seem like those two games were really in the same genre. I can see how a fan of the series might feel sold out by that genre drift.
I gotta be honest, I don't get it. They both show lots of intense action with a theatrical setup, the COD game appears to be more like a competitor with Halo than with the Battlefield game, which appeared to be set in the early 20th century, but they both looked like engaging, well developed games. The COD gameplay actually looked more interesting to me, as it had space combat elements (something I enjoy), whereas Battlefield appeared to be more strictly FPS.
That having been said, I'm not a fan of either game. I've never played either one. My taste leans more towards character-driven stories than straight combat, which makes both of these look rather boring.
From the summary, it sounds like we're talking about boring old TV delivered via IP. Hardly a media revolution. Preferably, they'd let us choose shows we wish to subscribe to, and allow us to put 100% of our subscription money into those shows, rather than the old method of subsidizing all the stuff we don't care about with a huge monthly fee.
This is really not that exciting.