There's no update, and even if there were it'll come when the providers push it out. With a phone, you just have to accept that if the thing is vulnerable, it is vulnerable. You can't really do anything as a user. Anything you can do is shit you should already be doing like installing apps only from trusted sourced and running a malware scanner.
The Olympics is rarely a net gain for the country hosting it. Despite lots of tourism and lucrative media contracts, the cost is so high that usually they are coming out behind on the deal. Now that's ok for a country with a lot of money, who doesn't mind spending some on this kind of thing and maybe has a plan for the facilities after the games. However for a country like Brasil it is basically just a loss.
If "invented" means what he did with his original thing which was "stuffed some over the counter parts in a box". I "invented" lots of shit like that as a kid. Turns out tearing apart electronics is not only fun, but pretty easy....
However it is also not inventing and nothing this kid has done is worthy of news or praise.
Unless the ambulance takes a really long time to get to your house (and in most cities they are distributed around town, usually in fire stations, they don't come from the hospital) you get treatment faster. Why? Because they can treat you. Ambulances are little mobile treatment rooms. They have an EMT and Paramedic who have a not insignificant amount of training, a radio back to doctors, and a ton of equipment. No, they are not as well equipped as a hospital, but they have a lot of shit, including most of what you'd want to keep someone stable until they reach the hospital. Also they can usually get there faster than you can since they have the whole lights n' sirens thing. That isn't magic, but it helps them move through traffic a lot faster than normal.
Let's say you live 30 minutes away from the hospital, presuming normal traffic. If you leave your house right away, and everything goes well (like you don't pass out) then you get there in 30 minutes and presuming they properly triage you you get full care then. However if you call an ambulance you may have to wait, but let's say one is at a fire station only 15 minutes away, particularly since they can move faster. So in that case you get treatment starting in 15 minutes, not full care, but people there to help, and you get full care in 40, because they get to the hospital in 25 minutes rather than 30.
It will vary based on where you live, of course, but it is information you can find out if you are interested. Usually, you'll be getting care a lot faster with an ambulance and it won't take that much longer to get to the hospital.
Also it can help with making sure you get care right away if you need it. The Paramedic will be doing triage on you, seeing how bad you are. If you are in a bad way and need immediate care, they will let the hospital know and they'll be ready. You'll be admitted straight away and seen to. However if you walk in, that sometimes doesn't happen. Hospitals assume, usually correctly, that if you are well enough to be able to get yourself to them, walk in and sit down, you are well enough to wait until there is time. Now hopefully they'll notice if you are in need of immediate care, but maybe not.
Come in on an ambulance though, and it is probably taken care of. If you are not seriously injured, no problem, you'll come in and wait if necessary, just as if you walked in. If you are in need of immediate care though, they'll make sure to have it ready if they can.
Medical care in the US yes, that is private. So you pay for ambulances. Fire, no that varies by region. There is no federal firefighting setup, for a lot of reasons. So it is a state and local thing. Generally, firefighters are paid for by county or city taxes. In the vast majority of places, this is the case. If you are actually in the city limits, it is essentially always the case.
The issue is unincorporated areas. They don't have city government services because, well, they aren't incorporated in a city. There is depends on how the state, or usually the county, handles it. Sometimes it is taken care of at that level. Taxes paid to the county are used to with fund rural fire departments, or get paid in to city departments to have service out there.
However some places decide they want to be cheap to have less taxes. In that case, ya you have to pay some other way. Usually it is directly paying the local FD, often run by a nearby city (or the county) but it could be paying a completely private agency. You could even contract out your own, if you really wanted.
Don't like it? Well then you may need to move somewhere with higher taxes. Sorry, that's the tradeoff. You wanted to live somewhere with a really low property tax, and probably low property cost, you get to pay direct for some of the things that tax would cover. Where I live it is mostly funded by city sales tax, and also some aid from the state, but there is a line for it on my property tax bill as well.
I don't have a ton of sympathy for people that want to live in a cheap, unincorperated area and then cry when they have to pay for things that are city services in a city like water, sewer, fire, and so on. Either move, or start a vote to incorporate. You can join (or form) a city, you know. It comes with paying more taxes though.
I dunno, when I was in the UK I didn't notice the chip units being any faster. Now of course I was using a US card, but it seemed to be the same speed. A bit slower than mag strip, but not very much.
Also with regards to pin/signature I've yet to see a card and retail terminal that doesn't support both. It is just up to the bank to decide which it likes best and it asks for that. So if you come from Canadaland and use your card, it'll ask you for a PIN, and the American behind you will get a signature. However that American signature card works just fine on the PIN only automated terminals in the UK so long as you've set up a PIN on it. Heck you can see both as an American in Target if you like. Target has upgraded to chip readers now. If you have one of their store credit cards, they'll issue you a chip ONLY card, no mag stripe. It will use a PIN, not a signature. However take out your Visa and stick it in the same machine, and it'll use signature. It is up to what the bank requests as default.
You can argue about if it is a good idea to use signature, but it is absolutely no problem from an implementation standpoint. The terminals do both. When I was in the UK this month, everything happily took my US card and just spit out a signature form, excepting automated kiosks (for the subway and shit) which happily used the PIN I'd set. This was all handled on the design of the system years ago.
With regards to speed I will say that it is a tiny bit slower, even with good equipment, and this is something that the hardware makers are aware of and are working on but it is seriously trivial. On a quality, hardwired, terminal you get a swipe through in maybe 1-3 seconds, a chip seems to take maybe 5-10. Oh no, a few extra seconds, what ever will I do! It isn't like you are waiting for a minute or something. The things that take a long time with chip are usually ones that take a long time (just less of a long time) with swipe, namely wireless ones that have to establish a connection like vending machines.
Valve quit crying because they got bored with SteamOS. A major problem with Valve's "flat" model of no bosses and no structure is that they only work on something if they find it interesting. Once they get bored, it languishes. Half Life 3 is a great example. There was clearly more story to tell, they left it unfinished, and there is clearly market demand for a sequel to the point it would be virtually assured to make money. So why hasn't it happened? Because they aren't interested in it right now. It's not a business or creative decision, it is that people are playing with other shit.
Valve is now fascinated with VR and eSports so that is where most of their energy is going. They are the shiny new toys they like, until they change their mind and chase something else. So SteamOS is in the same general boat as Steam itself in that they work on it a bit and maintain it, but there isn't a lot going on because there are few people interested in it.
Also I think they thought that SteamOS and Steam Machines would be like Steam itself: minimal effort on their part and people would just flock to them and use them in droves. Instead the market has responded with a resounding "meh". They'd need to put in a lot more effort to have a chance of making it happen and they don't want to do that.
Maybe it'll end up being true, but so far there is zero evidence. The only thing so far they've done that would in any way limit Steam is that their universal applications (what used to be called Metro) are Windows Store only. So you can't sell those on Steam. Ok, except nobody but MS makes those because nobody gives a shit. The "universal" part doesn't matter, MS's phones and tablets are in their final dying moments so there's no need to make something that runs both on real Windows and Windows RT/Phone.
At this point Win32/64 programs run better and have less limitations, and also have the advantage of running on all versions of Windows not just 10, so that is what people keep making. MS themselves are releasing their games using their new UWP format, of course, but nobody else seems to give a shit.
So it is a meaningless limitation for now. Programs using an API nobody uses won't work with Steam. Who cares? Other than that, nothing has changed or been limited. Steam runs great on Windows 10.
Will something change in the future? We'll have to wait and see. There's no evidence now though, because it hasn't happened. This is a doomsday prediction, and like most doomsday predictions it is based on what the predictor feels to be true, not actual evidence.
For one, they haven't done anything yet. This is Tim Sweeny doomsaying. Now maybe his predictions will be accurate but they are false right now. Presently, Steam works excellent in Windows 10. You download it, install it, and it just works as it does on any other platform. They have done nothing to stop it from working.
You can't scream about "abuse" when nothing has happened. That is like claiming someone robbed you when they didn't actually take anything from you or even say anything to you they just "look sketchy, like they might rob you."
Second, all the monopoly stuff has gone out the windows with Apple around now. You can't argue MS is a monopoly in the desktop arena with Apple selling tons of their products. Macbooks are trendy as hell and all kinds of people buy them. Having a major, viable, competitor defacto makes someone not a monopoly. Same deal in servers to an even larger extent as Linux is huge in the server market. And in phones? Shit MS is hardly a player.
They aren't in a monopoly position anymore, so anti-monopoly arguments don't work.
Gotcha. I still get people who ask about it occasionally (I work in computer support for a living) so I'm used to giving the spiel. Since Slashdot was one place it got repeated a lot my sarcasm detector was turned off:D.
Bluetooth can work fine if you don't use something a lot, but headphones are the kind of thing you may wish to use for extended periods. I've never seen a BT device that isn't massive that has any staying power. Like I have a Plantronics Voyager Legend. This is a new, high end, and fairly large ear piece. It curves over your ear and has a unit that sits behind with electronics and a sizable battery in it. For all that, it is lucky to get maybe 6 hours of talk time fully charged (which will only get worse as the battery ages). Less if you use the high quality audio mode.
That's not great, and that is for a bigass part. You take something small, like the Earin phones one of our students has, and it is a bit over an hour if you are lucky. On the other hand my little Shure earbuds will work as long as the device feeding them will. Despite the cord, they are actually no larger to carry than the Plantronics earpeice as well. Oh, and they work with my computer, my phone, my receiver, and so on with no fiddling, just plug and go.
I don't hate BT audio devices, but earbuds have good reasons to exist.
Ya unless Apple makes really shitty connectors on their products, I'm failing to see how this isn't a case of user error (or someone making shit up). I can't think of the last time I've seen a 3.5mm TRS plug fail. I make a lot of use of them between my personal devices for listening to music and connecting computers to capture/presentation setups at work. I really honestly can't remember when I last experienced one fail on me. I'm not saying it never happens, but it is rare enough that it isn't even a problem I consider. They are quite reliable, in no small part because they are dead fucking simple.
You see it all the time with fanboys of a given brand. When that brand does something stupid or something they don't like, they have to rationalize it away how it isn't just not bad, but is actually a GOOD thing. That way, they can continue to be a fan and needn't reevaluate their position, which is important since being a fan of a brand often means having your ego tied up in the success of that brand.
You see it a lot with Apple fans since Apple is known for changing things on a whim with no warning or input.
Doesn't even have to be changes either, fans will do it when something is just disappointing. I saw a funny one with one of our former students who was a total Apple fanboy. The iPad 2 was coming out and he'd really hyped himself up for it. I told him that some of the things he was hyped for (like a high DPI display) weren't going to happen, tech just wasn't there yet. So it launched and was underwhelming to him at least. It was just a bit of an update to the old one. Now I don't see an issue with that, makes sense to refresh your products with the latest tech, even if the refresh is just minor. Just means that they are more for new customers than people upgrading. However he was very let down.
But then, over the course of about 5-10 minutes, he managed to find all kinds of rather stretched reasons as to why it was better and he had to have one, and then placed an order. It went from "I am disappointed," to "I must have this ASAP," in the course of just a few minutes. Nothing changed, no new information, he just rationalized the decision he'd already held: That he wanted a new toy from the brand he was a fan of.
It isn't like all phones are doing this. In fact, usually if some companies start doing something stupid and not giving people what they want, someone else will make and advertise products with those features.
For example I'm not a fan of the "no removable battery, no SD card" trend. Lots of phones have gone that way in the name of thin... however LG apparently figures there's a market for people who want those features and the LG G5 has them. So guess what phone I've ordered?
It really isn't that difficult a problem, unless you are a fanboy who is overly dedicated to a given product. If you don't mind a feature going away, ok no problem, buy the new unit and be happy. If you do mind, go and buy another product that has what you want.
However what I can't respect and get annoyed with are fanboys who will cry about something like this, and then go and buy the product anyways, acting like this had no choice in the matter and they "had" to upgrade. They are the problem.
Basically what happened is one "security researcher" who wasn't that good at the "research" part of his job upgraded a system to Vista and had audio issues. He then wrote a blog piece about how Vista sucked and theorized that it was DRM causing issues. This got echo-chambered over the Internet tons and because "Vista's DRM won't let you have good audio."
It amused me since, when I read it, I had Cakewalk Sonar loaded in the background and was working with pro audio at the time, in Vista, no issues at all.
What had really happened is his system had a old, low end, integrated soundcard. The manufacturer provided poor quality Vista drivers that didn't work well in full duplex (recording and playing back) mode. So if you were using the mic and output, sound quality was degraded. This was a function of the sound chip and its drivers, not Vista. It was, and is, fully capable of doing 24-bit 192kHz or greater multi-channel audio in and out, as are subsequent versions of Windows.
The DRM that showed up in Vista related to audio is "protected audio path" and is only relevant to shit like Blu-ray playback. The media industry won't give out licenses to AACS and BD-J unless the whole setup it DRM'd including the drivers. So Vista added this capability (and subsequent Windows versions keep it). A program can say "I am playing DRM'd content, you need to protect this" and the driver will then make sure that screenshots/recording can't happen, that it only plays on HDCP enabled outputs and shit like that. However normally all that is turned off and it affects nothing if you don't use it. While it is silly, it was either implement it, or Windows would never be able to (legally) play Blu-rays.
Because consoles don't usually render at it. Most games on current consoles render at 1600x900 or 1280x720, usually at 30fps and are then scaled to whatever screen you have. So setting a target of 1080p60 for a PC to be like a console is not accurate for most games. They have a few that are like that, but not many.
It isn't necessarily zero sum, since what they will own is a Mac laptop. While you can play some basic games on that, you'd need a second system to do any real gaming.
The logical argument of "Well just get a PC and use it for games and writing," is lost on them. I mean how could you NOT have a trendy Mac laptop? It is just unthinkable!
That is unlimited data at 2G speeds (around 100kbps usually), 2GB of data at 4G speeds. I love T-Mobile and have been a customer for quite some time but it isn't unlimited data in the sense many people would expect. On their base $50 plan you get as high a speed as the network can support for the first 2GB of data, then they throttle it down to a slower speed.
If you want unlimited (barring abuse, if you go too nuts they still might throttle) high speed data that is another $45/month.
Their base plan is the best plan going though. Really these days I think many people will find 2GB more than sufficient since WiFi is everywhere.
Undersea cables are interesting beasts. When you look at them they are MASSIVE and so you figure there are a lot of pairs. Nope. 4-8 usually. All the rest is shielding and power. The big limiting factor size and cost wise is the amplifiers. You have to have a bunch of optical amplifiers in-line with the cable, and those have to be powered from the shore. Obviously each channel needs its own amplification so in the case of 6 pairs that's 12 amps. You then need a set of 12 amps periodically along the cable.Every few hundred km or so.
Hence, undersea cables are small in count when laid. Very different form land. If you hook up a building, fuck it you probably lay 144 fibers minimum because that's a small sized bundle. However for those long-haul undersea connection, it is just a few fibers per massive line.
If you are doing IT for an enterprise, get stats like this to go to management and show them why you need storage with snapshots and backups to alternate storage. Ya it costs to get a good setup, and it takes some IT time to administer, but all it takes is one of these and it has paid for itself.
We got hit with cryptolocker back in the day, the Dean opened it and it proceeded to go and encrypt the entire administration share he had access to. However we didn't pay shit, I went in to the management console, rolled back to an earlier snapshot, and we were good. Minimal disruption. Even had it somehow been able to blast the snapshots (users don't have write access to them so I can't see a way) we could have pulled data from tape that was at most a couple days old.
There's other reasons to do this too, of course, but this is a big one that is very visible these days, and so worth it.
Dunno if you've ever played with overclocking but the relation between speed increases past a chip['s normal limits and heat increases are not linear. So if you don't need/want the extra power, it is not a good idea to run your card harder than needed, particularly since those fans can get noisy when they spin up.
Support and stability are another reason. If a company rates a chip to a given level, they'll support/replace it there. Past that, maybe there's problems, maybe there's failures.
There can be a difference between what you normally design for and what something can actually do. Like my processor is spec'd to 140 watts TDP. What that means is Intel certifies that at standard operating frequency and voltage it will never dissipate more than that amount of heat, so if my thermal solution can handle that, I'm good. However the chip itself can survive more power, if there's a good enough solution. I can push it past that limit, if I want. If I do though, it is on me with regards to cooling and stability. If the chip messes up, they won't replace it.
What kind of money do you think those review sites make per review? It is going to be a real problem staying in business if every review is predicated on being able to purchase one (or more) of a piece of high end hardware that can cost in the real of $700 in this particular case. It might be a nice idea to think they'd do it out of the goodness of their hearts and just spend their own money to help people but that isn't how things work. They need to get paid and they all have to cope with the rise of adblockers dropping revenue. So ya, review samples are pretty important.
Also in some cases samples are sent prior to public launch, so reviewers have to to get their review ready for when the public can purchase the hardware, so they don't need to sit around waiting for a review or go in blind. These things take time to do right, getting them hardware early is the only way to make that happen.
If you have a solution where people can still get the hardware early enough time to meet release day reviews and can do it cheaply enough to be able to pay their people to work on reviews for a living, I'd love to hear it. However the reality is I don't think there's a way.
It was a valid lawsuit. I could see hating on someone if they were funding a long, drug out, suit with lots of delay tactics over nothing to try and force a settlement or bankrupt the other side. However the Hogan suit went to trial, and Hogan won in short order.
I don't see anything bad with someone funding a legitimate suit.
Advancements in car safety are great. When you look at the stats on car deaths despite number of miles drive per year going up, death rate just keeps dropping. It isn't because people are better drivers, but because we've managed to build in so many safety features in to cars. I love it.
I'd never heard of that 911 feature until your post. Something like that is wonderful because it means even if you are completely incapacitated EMS is summoned quickly.
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There's no update, and even if there were it'll come when the providers push it out. With a phone, you just have to accept that if the thing is vulnerable, it is vulnerable. You can't really do anything as a user. Anything you can do is shit you should already be doing like installing apps only from trusted sourced and running a malware scanner.
The Olympics is rarely a net gain for the country hosting it. Despite lots of tourism and lucrative media contracts, the cost is so high that usually they are coming out behind on the deal. Now that's ok for a country with a lot of money, who doesn't mind spending some on this kind of thing and maybe has a plan for the facilities after the games. However for a country like Brasil it is basically just a loss.
If "invented" means what he did with his original thing which was "stuffed some over the counter parts in a box". I "invented" lots of shit like that as a kid. Turns out tearing apart electronics is not only fun, but pretty easy. ...
However it is also not inventing and nothing this kid has done is worthy of news or praise.
Unless the ambulance takes a really long time to get to your house (and in most cities they are distributed around town, usually in fire stations, they don't come from the hospital) you get treatment faster. Why? Because they can treat you. Ambulances are little mobile treatment rooms. They have an EMT and Paramedic who have a not insignificant amount of training, a radio back to doctors, and a ton of equipment. No, they are not as well equipped as a hospital, but they have a lot of shit, including most of what you'd want to keep someone stable until they reach the hospital. Also they can usually get there faster than you can since they have the whole lights n' sirens thing. That isn't magic, but it helps them move through traffic a lot faster than normal.
Let's say you live 30 minutes away from the hospital, presuming normal traffic. If you leave your house right away, and everything goes well (like you don't pass out) then you get there in 30 minutes and presuming they properly triage you you get full care then. However if you call an ambulance you may have to wait, but let's say one is at a fire station only 15 minutes away, particularly since they can move faster. So in that case you get treatment starting in 15 minutes, not full care, but people there to help, and you get full care in 40, because they get to the hospital in 25 minutes rather than 30.
It will vary based on where you live, of course, but it is information you can find out if you are interested. Usually, you'll be getting care a lot faster with an ambulance and it won't take that much longer to get to the hospital.
Also it can help with making sure you get care right away if you need it. The Paramedic will be doing triage on you, seeing how bad you are. If you are in a bad way and need immediate care, they will let the hospital know and they'll be ready. You'll be admitted straight away and seen to. However if you walk in, that sometimes doesn't happen. Hospitals assume, usually correctly, that if you are well enough to be able to get yourself to them, walk in and sit down, you are well enough to wait until there is time. Now hopefully they'll notice if you are in need of immediate care, but maybe not.
Come in on an ambulance though, and it is probably taken care of. If you are not seriously injured, no problem, you'll come in and wait if necessary, just as if you walked in. If you are in need of immediate care though, they'll make sure to have it ready if they can.
Medical care in the US yes, that is private. So you pay for ambulances. Fire, no that varies by region. There is no federal firefighting setup, for a lot of reasons. So it is a state and local thing. Generally, firefighters are paid for by county or city taxes. In the vast majority of places, this is the case. If you are actually in the city limits, it is essentially always the case.
The issue is unincorporated areas. They don't have city government services because, well, they aren't incorporated in a city. There is depends on how the state, or usually the county, handles it. Sometimes it is taken care of at that level. Taxes paid to the county are used to with fund rural fire departments, or get paid in to city departments to have service out there.
However some places decide they want to be cheap to have less taxes. In that case, ya you have to pay some other way. Usually it is directly paying the local FD, often run by a nearby city (or the county) but it could be paying a completely private agency. You could even contract out your own, if you really wanted.
Don't like it? Well then you may need to move somewhere with higher taxes. Sorry, that's the tradeoff. You wanted to live somewhere with a really low property tax, and probably low property cost, you get to pay direct for some of the things that tax would cover. Where I live it is mostly funded by city sales tax, and also some aid from the state, but there is a line for it on my property tax bill as well.
I don't have a ton of sympathy for people that want to live in a cheap, unincorperated area and then cry when they have to pay for things that are city services in a city like water, sewer, fire, and so on. Either move, or start a vote to incorporate. You can join (or form) a city, you know. It comes with paying more taxes though.
I dunno, when I was in the UK I didn't notice the chip units being any faster. Now of course I was using a US card, but it seemed to be the same speed. A bit slower than mag strip, but not very much.
Also with regards to pin/signature I've yet to see a card and retail terminal that doesn't support both. It is just up to the bank to decide which it likes best and it asks for that. So if you come from Canadaland and use your card, it'll ask you for a PIN, and the American behind you will get a signature. However that American signature card works just fine on the PIN only automated terminals in the UK so long as you've set up a PIN on it. Heck you can see both as an American in Target if you like. Target has upgraded to chip readers now. If you have one of their store credit cards, they'll issue you a chip ONLY card, no mag stripe. It will use a PIN, not a signature. However take out your Visa and stick it in the same machine, and it'll use signature. It is up to what the bank requests as default.
You can argue about if it is a good idea to use signature, but it is absolutely no problem from an implementation standpoint. The terminals do both. When I was in the UK this month, everything happily took my US card and just spit out a signature form, excepting automated kiosks (for the subway and shit) which happily used the PIN I'd set. This was all handled on the design of the system years ago.
With regards to speed I will say that it is a tiny bit slower, even with good equipment, and this is something that the hardware makers are aware of and are working on but it is seriously trivial. On a quality, hardwired, terminal you get a swipe through in maybe 1-3 seconds, a chip seems to take maybe 5-10. Oh no, a few extra seconds, what ever will I do! It isn't like you are waiting for a minute or something. The things that take a long time with chip are usually ones that take a long time (just less of a long time) with swipe, namely wireless ones that have to establish a connection like vending machines.
Valve quit crying because they got bored with SteamOS. A major problem with Valve's "flat" model of no bosses and no structure is that they only work on something if they find it interesting. Once they get bored, it languishes. Half Life 3 is a great example. There was clearly more story to tell, they left it unfinished, and there is clearly market demand for a sequel to the point it would be virtually assured to make money. So why hasn't it happened? Because they aren't interested in it right now. It's not a business or creative decision, it is that people are playing with other shit.
Valve is now fascinated with VR and eSports so that is where most of their energy is going. They are the shiny new toys they like, until they change their mind and chase something else. So SteamOS is in the same general boat as Steam itself in that they work on it a bit and maintain it, but there isn't a lot going on because there are few people interested in it.
Also I think they thought that SteamOS and Steam Machines would be like Steam itself: minimal effort on their part and people would just flock to them and use them in droves. Instead the market has responded with a resounding "meh". They'd need to put in a lot more effort to have a chance of making it happen and they don't want to do that.
Maybe it'll end up being true, but so far there is zero evidence. The only thing so far they've done that would in any way limit Steam is that their universal applications (what used to be called Metro) are Windows Store only. So you can't sell those on Steam. Ok, except nobody but MS makes those because nobody gives a shit. The "universal" part doesn't matter, MS's phones and tablets are in their final dying moments so there's no need to make something that runs both on real Windows and Windows RT/Phone.
At this point Win32/64 programs run better and have less limitations, and also have the advantage of running on all versions of Windows not just 10, so that is what people keep making. MS themselves are releasing their games using their new UWP format, of course, but nobody else seems to give a shit.
So it is a meaningless limitation for now. Programs using an API nobody uses won't work with Steam. Who cares? Other than that, nothing has changed or been limited. Steam runs great on Windows 10.
Will something change in the future? We'll have to wait and see. There's no evidence now though, because it hasn't happened. This is a doomsday prediction, and like most doomsday predictions it is based on what the predictor feels to be true, not actual evidence.
For one, they haven't done anything yet. This is Tim Sweeny doomsaying. Now maybe his predictions will be accurate but they are false right now. Presently, Steam works excellent in Windows 10. You download it, install it, and it just works as it does on any other platform. They have done nothing to stop it from working.
You can't scream about "abuse" when nothing has happened. That is like claiming someone robbed you when they didn't actually take anything from you or even say anything to you they just "look sketchy, like they might rob you."
Second, all the monopoly stuff has gone out the windows with Apple around now. You can't argue MS is a monopoly in the desktop arena with Apple selling tons of their products. Macbooks are trendy as hell and all kinds of people buy them. Having a major, viable, competitor defacto makes someone not a monopoly. Same deal in servers to an even larger extent as Linux is huge in the server market. And in phones? Shit MS is hardly a player.
They aren't in a monopoly position anymore, so anti-monopoly arguments don't work.
Gotcha. I still get people who ask about it occasionally (I work in computer support for a living) so I'm used to giving the spiel. Since Slashdot was one place it got repeated a lot my sarcasm detector was turned off :D.
Bluetooth can work fine if you don't use something a lot, but headphones are the kind of thing you may wish to use for extended periods. I've never seen a BT device that isn't massive that has any staying power. Like I have a Plantronics Voyager Legend. This is a new, high end, and fairly large ear piece. It curves over your ear and has a unit that sits behind with electronics and a sizable battery in it. For all that, it is lucky to get maybe 6 hours of talk time fully charged (which will only get worse as the battery ages). Less if you use the high quality audio mode.
That's not great, and that is for a bigass part. You take something small, like the Earin phones one of our students has, and it is a bit over an hour if you are lucky. On the other hand my little Shure earbuds will work as long as the device feeding them will. Despite the cord, they are actually no larger to carry than the Plantronics earpeice as well. Oh, and they work with my computer, my phone, my receiver, and so on with no fiddling, just plug and go.
I don't hate BT audio devices, but earbuds have good reasons to exist.
Ya unless Apple makes really shitty connectors on their products, I'm failing to see how this isn't a case of user error (or someone making shit up). I can't think of the last time I've seen a 3.5mm TRS plug fail. I make a lot of use of them between my personal devices for listening to music and connecting computers to capture/presentation setups at work. I really honestly can't remember when I last experienced one fail on me. I'm not saying it never happens, but it is rare enough that it isn't even a problem I consider. They are quite reliable, in no small part because they are dead fucking simple.
You see it all the time with fanboys of a given brand. When that brand does something stupid or something they don't like, they have to rationalize it away how it isn't just not bad, but is actually a GOOD thing. That way, they can continue to be a fan and needn't reevaluate their position, which is important since being a fan of a brand often means having your ego tied up in the success of that brand.
You see it a lot with Apple fans since Apple is known for changing things on a whim with no warning or input.
Doesn't even have to be changes either, fans will do it when something is just disappointing. I saw a funny one with one of our former students who was a total Apple fanboy. The iPad 2 was coming out and he'd really hyped himself up for it. I told him that some of the things he was hyped for (like a high DPI display) weren't going to happen, tech just wasn't there yet. So it launched and was underwhelming to him at least. It was just a bit of an update to the old one. Now I don't see an issue with that, makes sense to refresh your products with the latest tech, even if the refresh is just minor. Just means that they are more for new customers than people upgrading. However he was very let down.
But then, over the course of about 5-10 minutes, he managed to find all kinds of rather stretched reasons as to why it was better and he had to have one, and then placed an order. It went from "I am disappointed," to "I must have this ASAP," in the course of just a few minutes. Nothing changed, no new information, he just rationalized the decision he'd already held: That he wanted a new toy from the brand he was a fan of.
It isn't like all phones are doing this. In fact, usually if some companies start doing something stupid and not giving people what they want, someone else will make and advertise products with those features.
For example I'm not a fan of the "no removable battery, no SD card" trend. Lots of phones have gone that way in the name of thin... however LG apparently figures there's a market for people who want those features and the LG G5 has them. So guess what phone I've ordered?
It really isn't that difficult a problem, unless you are a fanboy who is overly dedicated to a given product. If you don't mind a feature going away, ok no problem, buy the new unit and be happy. If you do mind, go and buy another product that has what you want.
However what I can't respect and get annoyed with are fanboys who will cry about something like this, and then go and buy the product anyways, acting like this had no choice in the matter and they "had" to upgrade. They are the problem.
Basically what happened is one "security researcher" who wasn't that good at the "research" part of his job upgraded a system to Vista and had audio issues. He then wrote a blog piece about how Vista sucked and theorized that it was DRM causing issues. This got echo-chambered over the Internet tons and because "Vista's DRM won't let you have good audio."
It amused me since, when I read it, I had Cakewalk Sonar loaded in the background and was working with pro audio at the time, in Vista, no issues at all.
What had really happened is his system had a old, low end, integrated soundcard. The manufacturer provided poor quality Vista drivers that didn't work well in full duplex (recording and playing back) mode. So if you were using the mic and output, sound quality was degraded. This was a function of the sound chip and its drivers, not Vista. It was, and is, fully capable of doing 24-bit 192kHz or greater multi-channel audio in and out, as are subsequent versions of Windows.
The DRM that showed up in Vista related to audio is "protected audio path" and is only relevant to shit like Blu-ray playback. The media industry won't give out licenses to AACS and BD-J unless the whole setup it DRM'd including the drivers. So Vista added this capability (and subsequent Windows versions keep it). A program can say "I am playing DRM'd content, you need to protect this" and the driver will then make sure that screenshots/recording can't happen, that it only plays on HDCP enabled outputs and shit like that. However normally all that is turned off and it affects nothing if you don't use it. While it is silly, it was either implement it, or Windows would never be able to (legally) play Blu-rays.
Because consoles don't usually render at it. Most games on current consoles render at 1600x900 or 1280x720, usually at 30fps and are then scaled to whatever screen you have. So setting a target of 1080p60 for a PC to be like a console is not accurate for most games. They have a few that are like that, but not many.
It isn't necessarily zero sum, since what they will own is a Mac laptop. While you can play some basic games on that, you'd need a second system to do any real gaming.
The logical argument of "Well just get a PC and use it for games and writing," is lost on them. I mean how could you NOT have a trendy Mac laptop? It is just unthinkable!
That is unlimited data at 2G speeds (around 100kbps usually), 2GB of data at 4G speeds. I love T-Mobile and have been a customer for quite some time but it isn't unlimited data in the sense many people would expect. On their base $50 plan you get as high a speed as the network can support for the first 2GB of data, then they throttle it down to a slower speed.
If you want unlimited (barring abuse, if you go too nuts they still might throttle) high speed data that is another $45/month.
Their base plan is the best plan going though. Really these days I think many people will find 2GB more than sufficient since WiFi is everywhere.
Undersea cables are interesting beasts. When you look at them they are MASSIVE and so you figure there are a lot of pairs. Nope. 4-8 usually. All the rest is shielding and power. The big limiting factor size and cost wise is the amplifiers. You have to have a bunch of optical amplifiers in-line with the cable, and those have to be powered from the shore. Obviously each channel needs its own amplification so in the case of 6 pairs that's 12 amps. You then need a set of 12 amps periodically along the cable.Every few hundred km or so.
Hence, undersea cables are small in count when laid. Very different form land. If you hook up a building, fuck it you probably lay 144 fibers minimum because that's a small sized bundle. However for those long-haul undersea connection, it is just a few fibers per massive line.
If you are doing IT for an enterprise, get stats like this to go to management and show them why you need storage with snapshots and backups to alternate storage. Ya it costs to get a good setup, and it takes some IT time to administer, but all it takes is one of these and it has paid for itself.
We got hit with cryptolocker back in the day, the Dean opened it and it proceeded to go and encrypt the entire administration share he had access to. However we didn't pay shit, I went in to the management console, rolled back to an earlier snapshot, and we were good. Minimal disruption. Even had it somehow been able to blast the snapshots (users don't have write access to them so I can't see a way) we could have pulled data from tape that was at most a couple days old.
There's other reasons to do this too, of course, but this is a big one that is very visible these days, and so worth it.
Dunno if you've ever played with overclocking but the relation between speed increases past a chip['s normal limits and heat increases are not linear. So if you don't need/want the extra power, it is not a good idea to run your card harder than needed, particularly since those fans can get noisy when they spin up.
Support and stability are another reason. If a company rates a chip to a given level, they'll support/replace it there. Past that, maybe there's problems, maybe there's failures.
There can be a difference between what you normally design for and what something can actually do. Like my processor is spec'd to 140 watts TDP. What that means is Intel certifies that at standard operating frequency and voltage it will never dissipate more than that amount of heat, so if my thermal solution can handle that, I'm good. However the chip itself can survive more power, if there's a good enough solution. I can push it past that limit, if I want. If I do though, it is on me with regards to cooling and stability. If the chip messes up, they won't replace it.
What kind of money do you think those review sites make per review? It is going to be a real problem staying in business if every review is predicated on being able to purchase one (or more) of a piece of high end hardware that can cost in the real of $700 in this particular case. It might be a nice idea to think they'd do it out of the goodness of their hearts and just spend their own money to help people but that isn't how things work. They need to get paid and they all have to cope with the rise of adblockers dropping revenue. So ya, review samples are pretty important.
Also in some cases samples are sent prior to public launch, so reviewers have to to get their review ready for when the public can purchase the hardware, so they don't need to sit around waiting for a review or go in blind. These things take time to do right, getting them hardware early is the only way to make that happen.
If you have a solution where people can still get the hardware early enough time to meet release day reviews and can do it cheaply enough to be able to pay their people to work on reviews for a living, I'd love to hear it. However the reality is I don't think there's a way.
It was a valid lawsuit. I could see hating on someone if they were funding a long, drug out, suit with lots of delay tactics over nothing to try and force a settlement or bankrupt the other side. However the Hogan suit went to trial, and Hogan won in short order.
I don't see anything bad with someone funding a legitimate suit.
Advancements in car safety are great. When you look at the stats on car deaths despite number of miles drive per year going up, death rate just keeps dropping. It isn't because people are better drivers, but because we've managed to build in so many safety features in to cars. I love it.
I'd never heard of that 911 feature until your post. Something like that is wonderful because it means even if you are completely incapacitated EMS is summoned quickly.