Forget Windows S, if they were to follow through and do this right, they could obliterate the entire retail Windows market. Of course, this is Google, so they won't follow through and they won't do it right. Seriously though, it's nice to see cheap solid state machines with proper keyboards that can run a good range of applications. Raspberry Pi? What's that?
The problem is, Google has decided on a 2-year/5-year style of support - 2 years of feature upgrades, 5 years of total support, then your chromebook is no longer supported. This means if you have one of the early Chromebooks, like the original Chromebook Pixel, you won't get this (even though it's more than capable of running those apps).
At least Microsoft supports their software for crazy long periods of time - Windows 7 just fell out of feature support, but will get security updates until 2021 or so.
Even without the internet, I see little purpose to delaying distribution. Maybe with DVDs because of varying regional prices and not wanting say, American buyers to purchase their DVDs from South Africa for $2 rather than the $25 they charge at home (though customs officials have been watching for that kind of thing for years now anyway.. for better or worse.)
But theater releases and TV broadcast? What's the point? Most companies from what I've seen want all the dollars right this second and to hell with the future. So why is this the one instance where they decide that absurdly long delays are useful? I just don't get it.
True. And in fact, movies and TV shows ARE distributed digitally these days (the reason movies in the past were delayed was because you only had so much film stock going around, and typically the film stock gets moved around).
The big problem is, and always will be, money. The only reason we have delays is because of distribution rights, and companies pay a LOT of money for exclusivity. A company like Netflix can easily send a movie or TV show worldwide on release, but unless Netflix matches every region dollar for dollar, the studios will take the higher paying distributors over the lower paying Netflix any day. And if those distributors lose exclusivity, they won't pay quite so much money for it - exclusivity means a lot more money than without, obviously
The only real way to break it is to either devalue the exclusivity deals tremendously, or step up to the plate and beat the distributors
Safeway has home deliveries. No one would call Safeway upscale.
They are upscale compared to other more bargain supermarkets like Walmart and other discount supermarkets.
Anyhow, they're going after the Amazon demographic - the millennials who have never stepped foot in a supermarket and shop almost exclusively at Amazon. Everyone else who shops at supermarkets know they practically all have pickup or delivery services nowadays and uses them on occasion.
Good on your workplace for buying you a top of the line PC.
When I used slack, it caused the browser to consume 30% of the CPU. The desktop client did the same (no surprise, since it's one of those Electron-based wrapped web apps), so the same way Visual Studio could take 30% blinking the cursor, so could Slack. I managed to get it down to a managable 10% or so by turning off every friggin' option that decorated text, replaced text with emojis, etc
Luckily when my involvement in that project was over, slack went into the recycle bin (they used it to collaborate). Still didn't see why a glorified chat client needed to take 5-10% of the CPU in the end, when my IRC client, connected to multiple networks consumed 0% regularly. And no, for security purposes, they did not have the IRC gateway enabled.
After the PS4 came out, and they made it more mandatory, they stopped giving away good high budget games.
They didn't make it mandatory. Only mandatory if you wanted to play online.
And they stopped giving good games because they didn't have to. They are "winning" the console war this generation, so why do anything different? PS4 outsels Xbones by 2:1, so why give away good stuff if people are going to buy your stuff regardless?
(It's why Microsoft is actually trying to compete - why they added backwards compatibility, fixing hardware mistakes, and giving in general good games for free.)
Sony's lying on their ass because they can - PS4's selling. Microsoft's adding features and trying to make their system better because they have to. It's the market at work - the runner up has to work harder.
Prisoners typically have access to only one service provider for telephone/videophone/email services. The providers are all profiteers. They can easily provide cheaper services, but their motivation is to pursue monopoly pricing.
Of course they can provide cheaper services. A local call in most areas is FREE. And long distance is a penny or less a minute (or even free) in plenty of areas.
Except in prison, where you can pay dollars per minute for a local call. Not even satellite phones cost that much! Hell, even cellphones at their most expensive 30 years ago were still cheaper than a prison phone call. Long distance could easily cost more than what NASA pays to call the ISS. Hell, I bet even a phone call to Mars would cost less than from prison. (And no, prisoners cannot pay for it - it's always collect).
Has the performance of Apple's chips outpaced Qualcomm's so much that Google will see any major improvement from making their own custom?
According to Geekbench benchmarks, yes - at least in single core because Apple doesn't make an 8-core chip. A single A10 used in the iPhone 7 Plus scores around 3300, while the latest Qualcomm scores... 1900. An Intel i7-6600 scores 4000. That puts Apple's chip somewhere around a i5 from 3-4 generations ago
Wasn't one of the big selling points of the 2nd-generation optical mice is that you didn't need a mouse pad anymore, you could use it on more or less any surface, even an uneven one? Now they want to sell you an expensive mouse pad? Seems backwards.
Yes, and since I went optical, I ditched the mousepad. The neoprene ones suck (and are great dirt magnets, eww), and there aren't ones that are better. I do use a mouse "pad" at home, but that's just a stone slab I got at Home Depot to keep from wearing down the finish on the table, as well as being infinitely easier to clean. Put four rubber feet on the slab and you've got a legacy mousepad that's easy to clean and doesn't wear.
Some people though swear by precision mousing surfaces like a Ratpadz, which presumably gives you a surface that's more responsive for those games where you move it an inch and you've done a 360.
People do indeed use refrigeration for PC cooling, but not in this way. They're referred to as Peltier coolers, and have been used by hardcore overclockers for many years.
No, Peltiers were just one step above water cooling. They actually made a cooler using the refridgeration process - it was built into a PC case and you built your PC in that,
I believe it was called the VapoChill, and a quick Google shows they actually updated the unit a few years ago. It's a complete refrigeration system for PCs (because Peltier coolers are cheap and easy, but very inefficient - the refrigeration system is much more efficient).
Of course, building a PC in a fridge (the little ones) was also common in the late 90s and early 00's. An old-timer site like the [H] from the past will have lots of news articles from people doing just that.
It's much easier to unplug than fiddle with the wireless receiver - which had a nasty habit of waking up my laptop from sleep whenever a button on the mouse was accidentally clicked while in my backpack.
I just switch my mouse to OFF when I do that. Heck, it lets me charge the mouse still in OFF, but buttons won't make up the computer.
Most wireless mice I've seen had an on/off switch on the bottom.
Why would anyone want their stove, clothes washer, or refrigerator connected to the internet? The lame excuses preferred simply boggle the mind with their stupidity (so you don't have to wait for your oven to warm up when you get home? Really? So you'll know when your clothes are finished washing? Want I know when the crappy washer stops banging around trying to throw itself apart?)
To you, they seem silly. To the busy mom or parents, they are a godsend.
Preheating an oven can easily be a 20+ minute affair (I timed it hungry for a pizza one day). Having the option of dropping by the supermarket, picking up a pizza and having the oven ready when you get home so you can shove it in there and do other things while it cooks is something a lot of people do. And when it's finished cooking, you're ready to serve. Sure you could've waited another 20 minutes, but then it's go home, turn on the oven, do stuff until it beeps 20 minutes later, then shove it in the oven, do more stuff and then take it out is an inconvenience and an interruption (i.e., having to stop what they're doing to put the food in the oven after it's finished preheating).
Sure, maybe you don't mind doing it - after all, what's an interruption to whatever you're doing? You only just got into the zone after all. And then there's the parents who have hungry kids who would appreciate not having to wait an extra 20 minutes for dinner.
Ditto laundry appliances. I can't hear the washer or dryer where I am (and they are LOUD). It would be nice to know how much time is left on them so I know roughly how much time I have to do something without having to be interrupted by laundry. Sure I can run up the stairs and check the display and run back down (and that's what I do now), but still, being able to see it on my phone and have it beep when it's done? I would appreciate that. Not enough to actually buy a whole new set of appliances with that feature, mind you, but something that makes the day just a tiny bit less irritating.
Of course, if you really wanted to improve things, design them into a laundromat so users could do something else with their time other than sit around waiting for the machine. Hell, design it with a locking door you can rent so you can bring all your laundry down and secure it and you'll probably be able to charge a premium.so people aren't wasting a couple of hours of their lives.
Of course, I just wish the timer on my washer and dryer was even remotely accurate - where "1" minute left really means 10. And when it can say 8 minutes left, and then turns into 23 a minute later... sort of like old school Windows file copy time estimates.
I know this might be regarded as antediluvian but I use gPodder and do not participate in the Apple iTunes walled garden. If I cannot get a RSS feed then I am not going to listen. In the same way that we regard open source software with respect I also think that "open podcasting" should be respected.
Except w.r.t. podcasts, iTunes was never closed or walled. It just happened to be a popular way of automatically downloading, syncing and managing podcasts. You really just point iTunes at an RSS feed and it it does it all.
The Podcasts app is similar - it recognizes iTunes information blobs to add an RSS feed to it,
None of that is going away - it's just that Apple is making available analytics to those who want it.
This came about because podcasters wanted Apple to give them something - the ability to make money or paid subscriptions, or even just analytics so they could get more than just something that can post MP3 files and such.
Video games were popular in 1982, like incredibly popular, as in a multi-billion dollar industry. The 2600 was still around, but showing its age. Mattel's Intellivision was starting to chip at its market share and ColecoVision came out that year. Computer gaming was taking off as well. Then 1983 happened. The video game industry went from $3+ billion (almost 8 billion adjusted for inflation) to $100 million industry over the next two years. Video gaming was declared a dead fad in the United States and virtually disappeared. The US may have given up, but Japan didn't - they released the NES into the US market in 1986 and it was raking in $5 billion by 1989 with a virtual monopoly on consoles (some late comers like Sega Genesis had some market share, but Nintendo dominated).
The video game crash of the early 80s was the result of crap being released and shovelled in front of the user. Retailers were buying up tons of video games because consumers were demanding it, and tons of developers were exploiting this, releasing half-done crap. Eventually the consumers got fed up with buying another crap game and stopped buying games altogether, leading to the crash where retailers were suddenly holding stock in tons of cartridges and no one was buying.
ET did not kill it - after all, the landfill contained ET, but it contained many other more popular Atari games as well. In fact, ET only made up a small part of the recovered cartridges - around 20% or so. The rest were all the more popular Atari mainstays, having been returned by retailers.
Nintendo would succeed with the NES for two reasons. First, they implemented an early DRM with the NES10 chip, which made sure that only games approved by Nintendo will make it onto the market. (Remember, a flood of crap was the cause of the crash, so by controlling who could make games, you could ensure only high quality games were released). Second, the NES was never sold as a video game system - no retailer was willing to take another chance on video games, so Nintendo sold the NES as an electronic toy.
This would be critical - because toy stores still are separated into girls and boys, and thus Nintendo could only market their system to one group, of which they chose boys. This may have been a primary influence to the male domination of computer science - prior to the crash, you had representations of the entire family from mom and dad to the daughter and son on everything. After the crash and Nintendo, ads featured primarily boys. Enough so that even regular people saw video games as something kids do despite it actually being a mostly adult hobby (most gamers are adults).
And we're seeing the crap come out again - Google Play, Apple App Store are filled with crap apps (even Apple's moderation still results in billions of crap being added). And Steam is having the same problem as well - lots of crap showing up everywhere - it seems everyone and their dog is creating a game with the canned textures and models that stuff like Unity come with and releasing it. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony have tightened their approval policies trying to keep the crap from flooding their markets.
Why Apple is keeping the current version rating, I'm not entirely sure, but it should be scrapped.
Because there are apps (Example - Audyssey Music Player) that went from a paid app to a free app. The difference is the paid app gave you all the headphone profiles for free. The free app charged you $1.99 for every profile now.
So while the paid version got 5 stars from users who loved it and paid the $5 or whatever for it, when it went free and started charging people, it was getting 1-star ratings. Because naturally the people who loved it and used the free profiles suddenly got pissed off at having to pay for it. Or that what was formerly free is now an in-app purchase
Is it fair for an app to be 5 starts and screw over the users? If global app ratings became standard, then what happens are crap devs will simply publish an app with everything free to get the massive 5 star reviews to get featured. Then they'll make it all in-app purchases so what was formerly free is now $$$. Sure it hurts their ratings, but if they can exploit this to get on the featured list of popular apps, I'm sure the additional revenue will make up for the losses.
And then there are just the bum versions - a 5 star app may have a bad release and everything breaks inside it, so it deserves a one-star until the developer fixes it (I know several devs who have made bum releases).
Of course, this doesn't fix the biggest issue I saw - I seen several apps pop up the "Rate this app!" dialog just before the freemium trial period ended. So the user was doing really well and getting lots of whatevers, asked to rate the app and gives it 5 stars as they're having fun. 5 minutes later, they're being inundated with "You need to pay for this feature" nags begging to buy stuff.
So naturally that app gets good reviews because by the time they're hit up with the money, the 5 stars are left and they're all happy and great that the app is fun etc. And of course, the app will never ask for another review, so the user likely doesn't know how to update their review.
The problem with legos now is you don't start with a blank sheet of paper. In terms of teaching creativity, getting people to not be afraid of the blank canvass is a critical step.
True, but a lot of times, people stop at the blank canvas. Opening a word processor and staring at the cursor on the sea of white and trying to type something creative is almost impossible (it's referred to as writer's block).
The real problem is creativity strikes randomly. The author who might be stalled at the blank screen on the word processor might suddenly get inspiration in the shower and have a completely fleshed out story while the water runs. Only to find that the moment the tap turns off, it all disappears.
Instead of sitting and staring at the sheet of paper, though, trying to conjure up a story, what we need to teach is to fidget. Yes, the same energy that goes into spinning the little toy round and round is a form of creative energy. But it's unstructured. It's not conducive to "write a blog article about X" or "build me a space ship". But for a writer, it means writing down lots of crap in a stream of consciousness session that probably makes zero sense, but there you go. Or you take a box of lego, stick two of them together, add another piece, and another piece, and then you have a random thing at the end. Perhaps it then appeals to some other side of you and you get the urge to smash it, or you realize it's the start of something and work on it.
The main problem though is we've bred out these things - instead of fidgeting or even the act of "being bored" we immediately seek out our phones and play a game as an outlet to our energies. A simple act of boredom, letting the mind wander, or taking a pen and drawing circles and squares, or otherwise unstructured creative (and play) time, and we've pretty much tried to eliminate it from all aspects of our lives. Because it's unstructured, and generally not useful, but it's far easier to have a kernel to start with from such endeavors than to actually try to start writing the next great novel starting from a blank page and trying to be productive immediately.
That's why Lego and other creative tools almost never start blank - because the people playing with them almost never can do anything else until you give them some structured thing and then they let their mind wander into unstructured thinking. (E.g., you assemble some parts, see it forms something that looks like a gun even though it isn't, and start making pew-pew noises at your friend and the whole thing devolves into a finger gun fight).
That is true, but how many web apps really have such highly variable demands that this works out in their favour?
Easy - e-commerce does. Every person consumes a certain percentage of server resources and you can handle the average load pretty easily.
But on special days like Black Friday (or Boxing Day or others), your server load and customer count can easily be 2-5x as much, or more. Just for a single day of shopping. And maybe if there's a big day of sales, it may peak at 2x or so. While a 2x peak might be able to be handled by existing resources (people may have to wait to check out), peaks of 5x or more are insanely difficult to architect for.
And it's not just the web front end that displays the webpage - companies suddenly realized when traffic spiked, their database load went up - it's not just 5x the front end web servers, now you need to beef up the database server as well to handle all those new requests. But then another part of their infrastructure failed - the payment side! People can buy and view products, but checking out is an exercise in frustration as the payment servers collapsed under the load. So they beef that up as well, but then their payment processor collapses!
Indeed. some retailers realized this and had to add slow down queues so their payment processors wouldn't get overwhelmed with the sudden strain. (And upgrading those servers is nigh-impossible because you can't easily spin up an AWS instance due to regulations and security). Heck, some retailers start pushing it off to Paypal and other processors to help with the load - either use our processor and wait, or use Paypal and check out instantly (even though we hate Paypal as much as you do, they can at least handle the load).
Well, depending on the size of the company, it could be possible. Maybe not if you're a 1000 person enterprise, but if you're a 10-100 person SME, it's definitely possible, especially a startup.
However, the lack of backups is more damning - it means the entire company is one mistake away from losing it all. I don't care if it's a new guy - it could be the rockstar developer making a typo and deleting the entire database. It could be anyone.
Even though I work for a company of less than 100 people, no one other than the IT guy has full permissions. Even me as the backup IT guy I don't have full permissions. I've been offered, and I always refuse it - if I don't see a need to have it, I don't want it. (It basically evolved down to what I should do - and the vast majority of what is needed involves users, so access to the domain controller isn't required (about the only thing I'd need it was for resetting locked out accounts, but it resets after 5 minutes anyways, so my response is "go for a coffee and it'll be fixed").
Even then, I'm pretty sure the only access he has to delete all the files is via the file server console - his user may have read only to everything, and read-write to what he needs, but not full read-write for obvious reasons.
But we have backups, too, and because it's all shared files, we have volume shadow copies enabled, so even if you do delete it all, there's a snapshot of it from a few hours back. How many asses this feature has saved, who knows? It's saved mine several times (not that I'd tell anyone:) ).
And that's why everyone believes the CTO should go - it's not hard to protect, and have backups and ensure they all work. If a newbie could delete the production database, so can anyone else. Perhaps the rockstar developer has an oops with a mouse and deletes it?
Accidents happen, and there is no excuse for not having basic, simple insurance policies (permissions, backups, etc) in place and operational. I say the shareholders should hold the management team to account for this - something so basic should not be possible.
Actually, what's worse is SSL-VPNs, because there are no standards for them. They are insanely simple and very popular because they can be used from behind practically any firewall that allows SSL through. (This is vitally essential since many corporate firewalls block everything except 80, 443 and 21, and if you consult and need to VPN to home base, you need a VPN that can go through the firewall)
The problem is all the SSL-VPN vendors are basically incompatible with each other - between Dell/SonicWall, OpenVPN (over SSL), Pulse, etc. And few offer Linux clients.
Such inventions which consist of a crazy amount of hard work, many sleepless nights, a lot of talent and ingenuity are the reason why I absolutely love science.
They say the defining moment of science is NOT "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."
That's true. My blood pressure goes up when I'm at my doctor's office, but is normal everywhere else. I use two different electronic blood pressure monitors and they are fairly accurate. The one the doctor uses is just one of those around-the-wrist types (same brand as my two - Omron) and it's no more accurate than my around-the-upper-arm ones.
My doctor thought the same as well - I kept measuring borderline with him and my pulse raced. So he set me up on a bed lying down with an automated machine that will take 10 or more measurements automatically, at random intervals. He then left the room as I lied there in bed. The machine waits a few minutes quietly and then does a measurement. It then waits a few more minutes and does another measurement. It records down all the measurements and my doctor said my pressure dropped back down after the first couple of measurements.
So, can anybody tell me why a 64-bit OS can't support 16-bit software? Is this some sort of laziness or artificial limitation imposed by Microsoft, or perhaps something caused by the 64-bit mode in the CPU itself?
AMD designed x64 mode to not support 16 bit or "real" mode.
The CPU still starts up in 8088 8 bit mode. The problem is that MS largely doesn't care about its legacy API. They don't reimplement them or improve them (when was the last time they improved or even touched the COM interfaces or old Win16 macros?), they just build more on top and when it breaks they say: just use the old version.
Nope, it's not legacy stuff. It's hardware. Once you enter 64-bit mode on x64, you cannot run real mode or 16 bit applications. VM software is required to emulate this in software, with the hope that what you're emulating will hoist itself into 32 or 64 bit mode so it can transfer the state from the software emulator to the hardware and run on hardware directly. If your application stays in real mode, you're running basically on emulated hardware. Of course, stuff like UEFI is natively 32-bits, so if it can, your VM software will prefer that over legacy.
This was by design by AMD. They wished x64 to get rid of all the legacy stuff. However, unlike Intel ia64 (Itanium), AMD wanted some backwards compatibility - there's a lot of 32-bit software out there so instead of running a 32 bit emulator, it can run on hardware.
The good news is the 16 bit era should soon be fully emulatable in software - stuff like DOSbox should be able to run Windows 3.1 in Enhanced mode fairly swiftly allowing for 16 bit apps to be fully retired.
I tried this like a year ago on my core i7, and it was rather slow. Not unusable, but there was a noticeable performance hit.
But this was a beefy i7 system, with GOBS of ram emulating ARM. Now, how well do you think that a bottom of the barrel ARM - which is what the majority of the users is gonna end up with - is going to fare emulating x86?
Not well, I'm guessing. This is mainly going to be a PR thing for Qualcomm and Microsoft.
That's because you're emulating an entire ARM system inside x86. That's a great way to emulate disparate hardware, but is really slow because you're virtualizing a lot of hardware as software.
The modern way to do it, especially if you know the operating systems are the same, is high level emulation. Here you don't emulate the hardware at all - you only emulate the application. When the application makes a system call (or Windows API call, in this case) the emulator catches it and redirects it to the right Windows API (This can be done by two ways - the emulator loading the x86 WIndows libraries (DLLs) and trapping the virtual processor in any call that jumps into the library space, or by having stub Windows libraries that make special emulator calls instead of implementing the library) running in native ARM space.
This is not a new technique - Apple did it twice - the first time for their 68k to PowerPC transition where 68k apps and operating system code would make calls to native PowerPC code through an emulator call.
More recently, Apple did it with Rosetta, the PowerPC emulator they had for x86. Granted, for CPU-heavy tasks, it was slow, but apps that made lots of operating system calls or called into various OS libraries weren't slowed down much since they spent a good chunk of time in native mode.
CPU intensive applications will be sluggish no doubt, but applications that are highly interactive and spend most time inside OS libraries will be very fast.
yeah apple just didn't bother yet with soldering the components yet since they don't have market data about demand so it's easier for now.. and you have to break the glue anyways, making it a no no for most users.
they might start doing that for cost cutting without telling anyone though once the new line is up to speed in production.
Well, the processor is easy. Intel doesn't sell BGA parts yet. Apple's only one customer of Intel and they're only able to buy what Intel can supply. Most likely what Intel can supply immediately in the quantities Apple wants at the price they want precludes BGA parts and soldering.
Apple did the math - Intel can custom produce the CPUs for Apple, but likely the demand is such that Intel doesn't really want to (everyone is waiting for Kaby Lake processors, so when Intel started providing them in quantity, Apple became like everyone else) so quoted Apple the "if you really want it, we can do it" price. Or they can take what Intel is making right now and supplying everyone, with the benefit that it's no longer a custom order and Apple can buy what they need, at the expense of making it socketed. Or in other words, it's cheaper socketed right now because Intel is providing them in quantities to everyone in that format.
Apparently living in a free society does have certain unfortunate and tragic costs; but that doesn't mean you should cash in your chips and go full frontal Stasi.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" is the phrase. Freedom isn't free (beer) but it requires vigilance to protect it against those who seek to take it away. Which include those people jealous of freedoms enjoyed by others and wish to take it away (your traditional terrorist), as well as those who seek to remove the freedoms in order to "protect" (government for example, wishing to take away human rights). And while it may seem they're two different groups of people, they're really after the same goal. And then there's those who wish to use the freedom granted them to take away other's freedoms (e.g., racists) who often cloak their activities as granted by freedom.
Although I applaud what he's trying to do, realistically, his company will be bought out and dismantled by one or the other. He and a few others will get big payouts and that'll be the end of it. If Samsung or Apple doesn't do it, maybe Microsoft will buy them out and ruin them.
In order for that happen, the phone has to be special. There's got to be something that consumers want in it that neither Apple or Samsung are providing, and I don't see what that could be.
To disrupt requires consumers to suddenly flock to your phone because they're not being provided with what they want from the others. And so far, the Essential offerings seem... meh.
Without it, no one would bother - just let them fail. Doesn't matter if you are a unicorn company or not. If people aren't buying your phones, you have nothing. And I haven't seen anything that would draw me to this phone.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, Google has decided on a 2-year/5-year style of support - 2 years of feature upgrades, 5 years of total support, then your chromebook is no longer supported. This means if you have one of the early Chromebooks, like the original Chromebook Pixel, you won't get this (even though it's more than capable of running those apps).
At least Microsoft supports their software for crazy long periods of time - Windows 7 just fell out of feature support, but will get security updates until 2021 or so.
True. And in fact, movies and TV shows ARE distributed digitally these days (the reason movies in the past were delayed was because you only had so much film stock going around, and typically the film stock gets moved around).
The big problem is, and always will be, money. The only reason we have delays is because of distribution rights, and companies pay a LOT of money for exclusivity. A company like Netflix can easily send a movie or TV show worldwide on release, but unless Netflix matches every region dollar for dollar, the studios will take the higher paying distributors over the lower paying Netflix any day. And if those distributors lose exclusivity, they won't pay quite so much money for it - exclusivity means a lot more money than without, obviously
The only real way to break it is to either devalue the exclusivity deals tremendously, or step up to the plate and beat the distributors
They are upscale compared to other more bargain supermarkets like Walmart and other discount supermarkets.
Anyhow, they're going after the Amazon demographic - the millennials who have never stepped foot in a supermarket and shop almost exclusively at Amazon. Everyone else who shops at supermarkets know they practically all have pickup or delivery services nowadays and uses them on occasion.
Good on your workplace for buying you a top of the line PC.
When I used slack, it caused the browser to consume 30% of the CPU. The desktop client did the same (no surprise, since it's one of those Electron-based wrapped web apps), so the same way Visual Studio could take 30% blinking the cursor, so could Slack. I managed to get it down to a managable 10% or so by turning off every friggin' option that decorated text, replaced text with emojis, etc
Luckily when my involvement in that project was over, slack went into the recycle bin (they used it to collaborate). Still didn't see why a glorified chat client needed to take 5-10% of the CPU in the end, when my IRC client, connected to multiple networks consumed 0% regularly. And no, for security purposes, they did not have the IRC gateway enabled.
They didn't make it mandatory. Only mandatory if you wanted to play online.
And they stopped giving good games because they didn't have to. They are "winning" the console war this generation, so why do anything different? PS4 outsels Xbones by 2:1, so why give away good stuff if people are going to buy your stuff regardless?
(It's why Microsoft is actually trying to compete - why they added backwards compatibility, fixing hardware mistakes, and giving in general good games for free.)
Sony's lying on their ass because they can - PS4's selling. Microsoft's adding features and trying to make their system better because they have to. It's the market at work - the runner up has to work harder.
Of course they can provide cheaper services. A local call in most areas is FREE. And long distance is a penny or less a minute (or even free) in plenty of areas.
Except in prison, where you can pay dollars per minute for a local call. Not even satellite phones cost that much! Hell, even cellphones at their most expensive 30 years ago were still cheaper than a prison phone call. Long distance could easily cost more than what NASA pays to call the ISS. Hell, I bet even a phone call to Mars would cost less than from prison. (And no, prisoners cannot pay for it - it's always collect).
According to Geekbench benchmarks, yes - at least in single core because Apple doesn't make an 8-core chip. A single A10 used in the iPhone 7 Plus scores around 3300, while the latest Qualcomm scores... 1900. An Intel i7-6600 scores 4000. That puts Apple's chip somewhere around a i5 from 3-4 generations ago
Multicore Qualcomm wins - 8 cores beats 2 cores any day.
Yes, and since I went optical, I ditched the mousepad. The neoprene ones suck (and are great dirt magnets, eww), and there aren't ones that are better. I do use a mouse "pad" at home, but that's just a stone slab I got at Home Depot to keep from wearing down the finish on the table, as well as being infinitely easier to clean. Put four rubber feet on the slab and you've got a legacy mousepad that's easy to clean and doesn't wear.
Some people though swear by precision mousing surfaces like a Ratpadz, which presumably gives you a surface that's more responsive for those games where you move it an inch and you've done a 360.
No, Peltiers were just one step above water cooling. They actually made a cooler using the refridgeration process - it was built into a PC case and you built your PC in that,
I believe it was called the VapoChill, and a quick Google shows they actually updated the unit a few years ago. It's a complete refrigeration system for PCs (because Peltier coolers are cheap and easy, but very inefficient - the refrigeration system is much more efficient).
Of course, building a PC in a fridge (the little ones) was also common in the late 90s and early 00's. An old-timer site like the [H] from the past will have lots of news articles from people doing just that.
I just switch my mouse to OFF when I do that. Heck, it lets me charge the mouse still in OFF, but buttons won't make up the computer.
Most wireless mice I've seen had an on/off switch on the bottom.
To you, they seem silly. To the busy mom or parents, they are a godsend.
Preheating an oven can easily be a 20+ minute affair (I timed it hungry for a pizza one day). Having the option of dropping by the supermarket, picking up a pizza and having the oven ready when you get home so you can shove it in there and do other things while it cooks is something a lot of people do. And when it's finished cooking, you're ready to serve. Sure you could've waited another 20 minutes, but then it's go home, turn on the oven, do stuff until it beeps 20 minutes later, then shove it in the oven, do more stuff and then take it out is an inconvenience and an interruption (i.e., having to stop what they're doing to put the food in the oven after it's finished preheating).
Sure, maybe you don't mind doing it - after all, what's an interruption to whatever you're doing? You only just got into the zone after all. And then there's the parents who have hungry kids who would appreciate not having to wait an extra 20 minutes for dinner.
Ditto laundry appliances. I can't hear the washer or dryer where I am (and they are LOUD). It would be nice to know how much time is left on them so I know roughly how much time I have to do something without having to be interrupted by laundry. Sure I can run up the stairs and check the display and run back down (and that's what I do now), but still, being able to see it on my phone and have it beep when it's done? I would appreciate that. Not enough to actually buy a whole new set of appliances with that feature, mind you, but something that makes the day just a tiny bit less irritating.
Of course, if you really wanted to improve things, design them into a laundromat so users could do something else with their time other than sit around waiting for the machine. Hell, design it with a locking door you can rent so you can bring all your laundry down and secure it and you'll probably be able to charge a premium.so people aren't wasting a couple of hours of their lives.
Of course, I just wish the timer on my washer and dryer was even remotely accurate - where "1" minute left really means 10. And when it can say 8 minutes left, and then turns into 23 a minute later... sort of like old school Windows file copy time estimates.
Except w.r.t. podcasts, iTunes was never closed or walled. It just happened to be a popular way of automatically downloading, syncing and managing podcasts. You really just point iTunes at an RSS feed and it it does it all.
The Podcasts app is similar - it recognizes iTunes information blobs to add an RSS feed to it,
None of that is going away - it's just that Apple is making available analytics to those who want it.
This came about because podcasters wanted Apple to give them something - the ability to make money or paid subscriptions, or even just analytics so they could get more than just something that can post MP3 files and such.
The video game crash of the early 80s was the result of crap being released and shovelled in front of the user. Retailers were buying up tons of video games because consumers were demanding it, and tons of developers were exploiting this, releasing half-done crap. Eventually the consumers got fed up with buying another crap game and stopped buying games altogether, leading to the crash where retailers were suddenly holding stock in tons of cartridges and no one was buying.
ET did not kill it - after all, the landfill contained ET, but it contained many other more popular Atari games as well. In fact, ET only made up a small part of the recovered cartridges - around 20% or so. The rest were all the more popular Atari mainstays, having been returned by retailers.
Nintendo would succeed with the NES for two reasons. First, they implemented an early DRM with the NES10 chip, which made sure that only games approved by Nintendo will make it onto the market. (Remember, a flood of crap was the cause of the crash, so by controlling who could make games, you could ensure only high quality games were released). Second, the NES was never sold as a video game system - no retailer was willing to take another chance on video games, so Nintendo sold the NES as an electronic toy.
This would be critical - because toy stores still are separated into girls and boys, and thus Nintendo could only market their system to one group, of which they chose boys. This may have been a primary influence to the male domination of computer science - prior to the crash, you had representations of the entire family from mom and dad to the daughter and son on everything. After the crash and Nintendo, ads featured primarily boys. Enough so that even regular people saw video games as something kids do despite it actually being a mostly adult hobby (most gamers are adults).
And we're seeing the crap come out again - Google Play, Apple App Store are filled with crap apps (even Apple's moderation still results in billions of crap being added). And Steam is having the same problem as well - lots of crap showing up everywhere - it seems everyone and their dog is creating a game with the canned textures and models that stuff like Unity come with and releasing it. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony have tightened their approval policies trying to keep the crap from flooding their markets.
Because there are apps (Example - Audyssey Music Player) that went from a paid app to a free app. The difference is the paid app gave you all the headphone profiles for free. The free app charged you $1.99 for every profile now.
So while the paid version got 5 stars from users who loved it and paid the $5 or whatever for it, when it went free and started charging people, it was getting 1-star ratings. Because naturally the people who loved it and used the free profiles suddenly got pissed off at having to pay for it. Or that what was formerly free is now an in-app purchase
Is it fair for an app to be 5 starts and screw over the users? If global app ratings became standard, then what happens are crap devs will simply publish an app with everything free to get the massive 5 star reviews to get featured. Then they'll make it all in-app purchases so what was formerly free is now $$$. Sure it hurts their ratings, but if they can exploit this to get on the featured list of popular apps, I'm sure the additional revenue will make up for the losses.
And then there are just the bum versions - a 5 star app may have a bad release and everything breaks inside it, so it deserves a one-star until the developer fixes it (I know several devs who have made bum releases).
Of course, this doesn't fix the biggest issue I saw - I seen several apps pop up the "Rate this app!" dialog just before the freemium trial period ended. So the user was doing really well and getting lots of whatevers, asked to rate the app and gives it 5 stars as they're having fun. 5 minutes later, they're being inundated with "You need to pay for this feature" nags begging to buy stuff.
So naturally that app gets good reviews because by the time they're hit up with the money, the 5 stars are left and they're all happy and great that the app is fun etc. And of course, the app will never ask for another review, so the user likely doesn't know how to update their review.
True, but a lot of times, people stop at the blank canvas. Opening a word processor and staring at the cursor on the sea of white and trying to type something creative is almost impossible (it's referred to as writer's block).
The real problem is creativity strikes randomly. The author who might be stalled at the blank screen on the word processor might suddenly get inspiration in the shower and have a completely fleshed out story while the water runs. Only to find that the moment the tap turns off, it all disappears.
Instead of sitting and staring at the sheet of paper, though, trying to conjure up a story, what we need to teach is to fidget. Yes, the same energy that goes into spinning the little toy round and round is a form of creative energy. But it's unstructured. It's not conducive to "write a blog article about X" or "build me a space ship". But for a writer, it means writing down lots of crap in a stream of consciousness session that probably makes zero sense, but there you go. Or you take a box of lego, stick two of them together, add another piece, and another piece, and then you have a random thing at the end. Perhaps it then appeals to some other side of you and you get the urge to smash it, or you realize it's the start of something and work on it.
The main problem though is we've bred out these things - instead of fidgeting or even the act of "being bored" we immediately seek out our phones and play a game as an outlet to our energies. A simple act of boredom, letting the mind wander, or taking a pen and drawing circles and squares, or otherwise unstructured creative (and play) time, and we've pretty much tried to eliminate it from all aspects of our lives. Because it's unstructured, and generally not useful, but it's far easier to have a kernel to start with from such endeavors than to actually try to start writing the next great novel starting from a blank page and trying to be productive immediately.
That's why Lego and other creative tools almost never start blank - because the people playing with them almost never can do anything else until you give them some structured thing and then they let their mind wander into unstructured thinking. (E.g., you assemble some parts, see it forms something that looks like a gun even though it isn't, and start making pew-pew noises at your friend and the whole thing devolves into a finger gun fight).
Easy - e-commerce does. Every person consumes a certain percentage of server resources and you can handle the average load pretty easily.
But on special days like Black Friday (or Boxing Day or others), your server load and customer count can easily be 2-5x as much, or more. Just for a single day of shopping. And maybe if there's a big day of sales, it may peak at 2x or so. While a 2x peak might be able to be handled by existing resources (people may have to wait to check out), peaks of 5x or more are insanely difficult to architect for.
And it's not just the web front end that displays the webpage - companies suddenly realized when traffic spiked, their database load went up - it's not just 5x the front end web servers, now you need to beef up the database server as well to handle all those new requests. But then another part of their infrastructure failed - the payment side! People can buy and view products, but checking out is an exercise in frustration as the payment servers collapsed under the load. So they beef that up as well, but then their payment processor collapses!
Indeed. some retailers realized this and had to add slow down queues so their payment processors wouldn't get overwhelmed with the sudden strain. (And upgrading those servers is nigh-impossible because you can't easily spin up an AWS instance due to regulations and security). Heck, some retailers start pushing it off to Paypal and other processors to help with the load - either use our processor and wait, or use Paypal and check out instantly (even though we hate Paypal as much as you do, they can at least handle the load).
Well, depending on the size of the company, it could be possible. Maybe not if you're a 1000 person enterprise, but if you're a 10-100 person SME, it's definitely possible, especially a startup.
However, the lack of backups is more damning - it means the entire company is one mistake away from losing it all. I don't care if it's a new guy - it could be the rockstar developer making a typo and deleting the entire database. It could be anyone.
Even though I work for a company of less than 100 people, no one other than the IT guy has full permissions. Even me as the backup IT guy I don't have full permissions. I've been offered, and I always refuse it - if I don't see a need to have it, I don't want it. (It basically evolved down to what I should do - and the vast majority of what is needed involves users, so access to the domain controller isn't required (about the only thing I'd need it was for resetting locked out accounts, but it resets after 5 minutes anyways, so my response is "go for a coffee and it'll be fixed").
Even then, I'm pretty sure the only access he has to delete all the files is via the file server console - his user may have read only to everything, and read-write to what he needs, but not full read-write for obvious reasons.
But we have backups, too, and because it's all shared files, we have volume shadow copies enabled, so even if you do delete it all, there's a snapshot of it from a few hours back. How many asses this feature has saved, who knows? It's saved mine several times (not that I'd tell anyone :) ).
And that's why everyone believes the CTO should go - it's not hard to protect, and have backups and ensure they all work. If a newbie could delete the production database, so can anyone else. Perhaps the rockstar developer has an oops with a mouse and deletes it?
Accidents happen, and there is no excuse for not having basic, simple insurance policies (permissions, backups, etc) in place and operational. I say the shareholders should hold the management team to account for this - something so basic should not be possible.
Actually, what's worse is SSL-VPNs, because there are no standards for them. They are insanely simple and very popular because they can be used from behind practically any firewall that allows SSL through. (This is vitally essential since many corporate firewalls block everything except 80, 443 and 21, and if you consult and need to VPN to home base, you need a VPN that can go through the firewall)
The problem is all the SSL-VPN vendors are basically incompatible with each other - between Dell/SonicWall, OpenVPN (over SSL), Pulse, etc. And few offer Linux clients.
They say the defining moment of science is NOT "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."
My doctor thought the same as well - I kept measuring borderline with him and my pulse raced. So he set me up on a bed lying down with an automated machine that will take 10 or more measurements automatically, at random intervals. He then left the room as I lied there in bed. The machine waits a few minutes quietly and then does a measurement. It then waits a few more minutes and does another measurement. It records down all the measurements and my doctor said my pressure dropped back down after the first couple of measurements.
Gives you time to calm down again.
AMD designed x64 mode to not support 16 bit or "real" mode.
Nope, it's not legacy stuff. It's hardware. Once you enter 64-bit mode on x64, you cannot run real mode or 16 bit applications. VM software is required to emulate this in software, with the hope that what you're emulating will hoist itself into 32 or 64 bit mode so it can transfer the state from the software emulator to the hardware and run on hardware directly. If your application stays in real mode, you're running basically on emulated hardware. Of course, stuff like UEFI is natively 32-bits, so if it can, your VM software will prefer that over legacy.
This was by design by AMD. They wished x64 to get rid of all the legacy stuff. However, unlike Intel ia64 (Itanium), AMD wanted some backwards compatibility - there's a lot of 32-bit software out there so instead of running a 32 bit emulator, it can run on hardware.
The good news is the 16 bit era should soon be fully emulatable in software - stuff like DOSbox should be able to run Windows 3.1 in Enhanced mode fairly swiftly allowing for 16 bit apps to be fully retired.
That's because you're emulating an entire ARM system inside x86. That's a great way to emulate disparate hardware, but is really slow because you're virtualizing a lot of hardware as software.
The modern way to do it, especially if you know the operating systems are the same, is high level emulation. Here you don't emulate the hardware at all - you only emulate the application. When the application makes a system call (or Windows API call, in this case) the emulator catches it and redirects it to the right Windows API (This can be done by two ways - the emulator loading the x86 WIndows libraries (DLLs) and trapping the virtual processor in any call that jumps into the library space, or by having stub Windows libraries that make special emulator calls instead of implementing the library) running in native ARM space.
This is not a new technique - Apple did it twice - the first time for their 68k to PowerPC transition where 68k apps and operating system code would make calls to native PowerPC code through an emulator call.
More recently, Apple did it with Rosetta, the PowerPC emulator they had for x86. Granted, for CPU-heavy tasks, it was slow, but apps that made lots of operating system calls or called into various OS libraries weren't slowed down much since they spent a good chunk of time in native mode.
CPU intensive applications will be sluggish no doubt, but applications that are highly interactive and spend most time inside OS libraries will be very fast.
Well, the processor is easy. Intel doesn't sell BGA parts yet. Apple's only one customer of Intel and they're only able to buy what Intel can supply. Most likely what Intel can supply immediately in the quantities Apple wants at the price they want precludes BGA parts and soldering.
Apple did the math - Intel can custom produce the CPUs for Apple, but likely the demand is such that Intel doesn't really want to (everyone is waiting for Kaby Lake processors, so when Intel started providing them in quantity, Apple became like everyone else) so quoted Apple the "if you really want it, we can do it" price. Or they can take what Intel is making right now and supplying everyone, with the benefit that it's no longer a custom order and Apple can buy what they need, at the expense of making it socketed. Or in other words, it's cheaper socketed right now because Intel is providing them in quantities to everyone in that format.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" is the phrase. Freedom isn't free (beer) but it requires vigilance to protect it against those who seek to take it away. Which include those people jealous of freedoms enjoyed by others and wish to take it away (your traditional terrorist), as well as those who seek to remove the freedoms in order to "protect" (government for example, wishing to take away human rights). And while it may seem they're two different groups of people, they're really after the same goal. And then there's those who wish to use the freedom granted them to take away other's freedoms (e.g., racists) who often cloak their activities as granted by freedom.
In order for that happen, the phone has to be special. There's got to be something that consumers want in it that neither Apple or Samsung are providing, and I don't see what that could be.
To disrupt requires consumers to suddenly flock to your phone because they're not being provided with what they want from the others. And so far, the Essential offerings seem... meh.
Without it, no one would bother - just let them fail. Doesn't matter if you are a unicorn company or not. If people aren't buying your phones, you have nothing. And I haven't seen anything that would draw me to this phone.