Only true for credit cards (not electronic debit cards). Only true if the charge was fraudulent (not your own carelessness). And the retailer gets the burden nowadays, not the card company. Also, you can pay several percent more just for using that method of payment.
P.S. Try contesting a charge when Chip & PIN transaction when your PIN was used. It's not as easy as you might think.
P.P.S. Google "Jeremy Clarkson sort code". Sort code and account number are enough to charge debits, and you WILL NOT necessarily get them refunded at all. Same "magic numbers", completely different liability, because it doesn't cost 2% or risk you running into chargeable credit in order to use.
I only got into it a couple of years ago. Bitcoin was actually MUCH more expensive back then - it was hitting over $1000 each at one point and then promptly dropped.
I put what's left of my disposal income / slush fund (from which I would normally buy a DVD or gadget) at the end of each month into it.
It's a pittance but. so far, it's increased or held steady until I've withdrawn it (or bought games with it directly). I don't expect that to continue but given my bank's attitude to saving rates, interest rates, withdrawal limits and generally dealing with my money like it's their "precious", I don't think I'm any worse off even if the price drops.
I don't have a savings account, even. I just don't have enough to bother opening one.
I don't know Australian law but even things like capital gains tax only take effect when you actually sell the asset. If you buy a house and it goes up in price, you don't get taxed the profit from it until you sell the house (or otherwise trade it).
And even if it was taxed, it's unlikely to be more than a pittance of the overall amount and only an idiot would try to dump the lot, rather than just cash our a bitcoin per week or whatever.
But more likely is that in all their poking, they found out that he was running a financial institution without proper licenses, or something like that. "Unrelated" to Bitcoin, but happened to be discovered while the article was written and reported to police diligently if/when he refused to give an exclusive? Nah, that's just me being cynical.
What fool is going to put their money into a bank and be issued with a number they can use to add or remove funds from this "fake" virtual account as if it was real cash?
Thank God Visa and Mastercard never took off and we still have to pay Amazon in coins and notes before their same-day-delivery.
Maybe not, but I've bought a shit-load of humble-bundles with them.
Put in a tiny amount of cash (think it was GBP20) years ago. I've since cashed out probably ten times that in actual monetary value for humble bundles (including the ones where you have to pay a minimum to get the higher-end products).
It's a viable payment system, it just hasn't gained mainstream traction yet. What would make it more viable is discovering that the creator was, say, some entrepreneur trying to make a digital currency rather than, say, the NSA/GCHQ trying to lure you into an "anonymous" payment system.
That said, I've never relied on, nor cared about, the anonymity side of things with my Bitcoin. It's a cinch to trace all my Bitcoin purchases back to the original seller and, from there, to a bank transaction between myself and them. I have nothing to hide in it, just a massive interest in cryptography and thus crypto-currencies as an aside.
That I put GBP20 into a toy project to see what happens, and got at least ten times that value out? It's obviously doing something right.
Considering that my bank want to charge me to hold my money, while fining me for every tiny infraction for a fraction of a millisecond deliberately introduced via their "X days to clear" bollocks in the modern age, while giving me an absolute pittance in interest, and locking up the branches so there's no staff in them and I can never get to them - by comparison Bitcoin is positively user-friendly and offers a great return.
And is my money guaranteed in my bank? Is it fuck. If nothing else, it's worth putting a small piece of disposable income into Bitcoin just to spread funds out. I can convert it back to real cash in a matter of seconds at the moment. That may or may not hold true in the future but as it's "just another" store of pocket-change money accessible to me, in an emergency it could come in handy.
Nobody's done that properly for Python 2.7 SSL libraries, for instances.
They just disabled certain functions which break a lot of, say, Python programs auto-updating from Github SSL sites. Fixes for several bits of software affected by this (e.g. Emscripten) just say "modify the source program, modify your python library to skip those bits, or put in massive function overrides for those functions to make it always enable a certain option".
Getting Emscripten to install/update/pull down new libraries when you first use them, on older LTS, is a bit of a nightmare. Given that emscripten is on the apt-get lists, you'd think they'd patch it so it works on them. They haven't.
We have no evidence at all that cows suffer damage by passive smoking. Nobody's ever done that experiment.
We can infer. We can guess. But we have no evidence at all.
So is "absence of that evidence" in itself evidence that cows actually don't suffer damage from passive smoking?
There's no evidence. So we have nothing, right?
Of course, it's easy to go and obtain evidence. But in the same way that you can't make an absolute positive from no evidence, you can't make an absolute negative either. The answer is literally indeterminate and unknown.
Now, for cows, that's not a big problem. But some things we can't collect evidence either way. At least not directly. But NOT being able to find the evidence we need, when we're not really looking, is not evidence that we're wrong.
You have to look to be wrong. No actual evidence means you haven't looked deeply enough to come to any conclusion. If you had looked deeply enough, it would be evidence - one way or another.
Basically it means "Don't jump to conclusions". Nobody has looked deep enough to find anything. And nobody has evidence enough that THE OPPOSITE is true either. Like in this case. Someone says they looked, but they can't have looked very deeply or correctly, and may not even be in looking in the right place at all. Thus we can't eliminate the theory either way, and so we have to keep both options open in the tree of possibilities that stem from that.
Be part of a verified educational institution that is given unlimited-storage Google Apps for Education (identical to Google Apps for Business - go look at the prices) for free.
The signup for my schools consisted of proving we were a registered school in the UK, and that our domain belonged to us, and some guy checked that our domain was the official school website.
Now I have an admin interface that lets me create unlimited accounts or unlimited size to assign to registered students, while tracking their every move myself (not that there's anything of interest there that we can't already get from web-filters, network shares, school databases etc.) and being able to poke into their accounts, and report on what files they are using and who they are sharing them with.
To be honest, if you have one of these accounts, the SCHOOL being the people who can see more of what you do is the concern, not Google. Which is exactly why you shouldn't be using them for non-school purposes anyway. Which is why my EULA states that, quite clearly, for both parents and students alike to be aware.
And, no, I've never, ever seen a single piece of advertising or even suspect a single piece of advertising is tracking via the Google Apps for Education functionality. They've got the best and most up-to-date data protection documents I've seen (which the UK law REQUIRES from them before we can use them, and which goes far beyond what the UK/EU require). By comparison, Apple barely bother to even publish one for iCloud, etc.
Big fuss about nothing.
If you have a school-issued Chromebook, or a Chromebook under Device Management for a school, the school (including the school IT guy) are capable of listening in to anything you do. That's infinitely more worrying than any trend you might trigger on Google Ads from what you searched for, if that's even happening at all.
Apple don't allow browsers to use their own rendering engines on iPad.
And there's a choice of old, unaccelerated WebView or new fancy QKView (or something like that), both of which use Safari-components to do the rendering.
Chrome on iPad is just Safari in a different skin. Opera on iPad is just a remote VNC into a real computer running Opera.
And there's not much that a pair of boltcutter's won't go through in seconds. Whether that's the lasp, the hasp, or some other part of the door.
A lock's purpose is not to stop it being opened EVER, it's to stop it being opened by a opportunist with equipment that he can find laying nearby. You can do super-cheap locks with nothing more than a small screwdriver as leverage.
Everything else is purely within the realm of whatever it is locking being weaker anyway.
Gives up to 52 weeks paid leave for one/either/both parents (shared among them), including in case of stillborn, including for adoption, legally allowing you to build up holiday, get rises and return to work while it goes on.
Sure, it won't necessarily be at full-pay-rates but this is the fucking bare, legal, statutory MINIMUM that you're required to give by even being an employer in the UK
So let's not shout about how great Facebook are for letting you spend more than a fucking month with your newborn child.
The US really need to get out more and look at what other countries consider normal and/or moral.
Firewire specs require arbitrary memory access via DMA, outside control of the driver or processor - It's a security nightmare.
It used different connectors over its life - it's not backwards compatible.
Outside of video, it basically never became popular for any other significant task. The networking side was short-lived and removed from Windows before Vista even came out. I've never seen other FireWire peripherals except storage and video.
Literally, FireWire never had a chance because it never tried to be cheap or ubiquitous. And USB can basically do anything that FireWire was originally intended for.
FireWire was dead nearly a decade ago. Give it up.
You still don't use USB for displays. And USB->HDMI peripherals are far from being the best gadgets - many of the cheap ones are basically unusable for anything more than a second screen of desktop icons.
Merge USB and HDMI and you have the ultimate connector.
The profit on an iPhone 5s is estimated to be over 90%, I believe.
It makes that list as one of the most returned products, but only because of insane margins.
As such, the monetary value alone is not useful or even indicative in judging whether something is "cheap and throwaway" tech, or a poorly-made expensive product that contributes to all kinds of waste.
Amazon basically haven't made profit, but their impact on the distribution chain, environmental considerations because they exist etc. is phenomenal.
- Projectors cast shadows when you walk in front of them. - They generally get duller or break more than a TV over time. - They are just as - if not more - expensive as a TV over time. - They get hot, and can be noisy, and sound often sucks compared to an equivalent TV (granted, some people have separate audio systems). - As you said, you can get 720p. I had that on a monitor back in the 1990's. In fact, I'm pretty sure I beat that quite handsomely. HD is a downgrade for anyone that was used to the first wave of 22" LCD monitors. 720p barely cuts it on a large projected screen (and I'm one of those people who doesn't see the need for HD even!). TV's are going into 4k as we speak, and that means huge res at huge size where you CAN utilise all that resolution. - You've got to go some to pull a 65" TV off the wall. Projectors can be pulled from even ceiling mounts and put under a coat (trust me, I've filled out the insurance forms for work).
I work in schools. We have DOZENS of projectors on site. Even in a massive industry like education, we're all moving to large-screen touch TV's for the above reasons. Even fancy short-throws mounted above the boards are no longer in vogue.
Projectors have a lot of problems that TV's don't have. The only advantage is (sort of) portability, but for any serious setup, you wouldn't be able to move it around anyway.
What with this, nVidia Shield (rubbish but still in the market) and Steamboxes being virtually all nVidia, I can't help but carry on doing what I've done for many years now.
ATI for 2D graphics on servers, if it's pre-integrated. Intel for 2D graphics for clients, if it's pre-integrated.
Everything else (i.e. the whole point of having a 3D graphics card) has to be nVidia.
The problem is that the "driver" nowadays isn't really a driver. The hardware still pushes the same shaders etc. to the card, over a standardised bus.
The problem is that the "driver" nowadays is a bunch of shortcuts and re-optimised shaders for particular operations, which are heavily dependent on how the games operate and basically "overrules" what the game wants the shaders to do, for the sake of per-game performance increases by sacrificing things that are sub-optimal on that particular card / game combination. Why else do you think that "new game X" suddenly needs a driver update to work when the game is using DirectX and the card is compliant with that level of DirectX?
In essence, this is tied quite tightly to DirectX. So the reason that the "drivers" often suck is that they are Windows-specific bodges to increase performance for individual games. That won't translate to even a Linux/OpenGL port of the same game on the same hardware, let alone for EVERY OpenGL game on EVERY Linux on ALL supported hardware.
And the investment is not in making a particular hardware faster, or pushing more texels over the standardised buses than before, but in optimising the hardware response for a particular game - which is labour-intensive and has to be redone for every game on every platform for each supported card.
In case you haven't noticed, an awful lot of households have not only broadband but multiple devices - PC in the lounge, several laptops across kids and parents, a handful of tablets, not to mention a smartphone each most likely. And not just in the richest households. The number of "Posted from device-name"'s I see on Facebook by people who claim to have no money is stupendous.
Add in Netflix, CCTV, phone services, streaming TV, etc. and it quickly adds up.
As time goes on, the bottleneck will be the wireless first - admittedly - but it won't be long before we'll have to get on-board with things like 5Gbps.
One of those stream you describe will wipe out most UK household's standard broadband today. That means dad can't get online because of kids streaming their movies. Multiply by the number of people in the house and you can easily use up even the top "home" broadband available by someone wanting to watch the football while someone else is watching their favourite movie (we max out somewhere around 152Mbps before you get into specialist packages for the UK).
How long would 1Gbps buy you? Not much. 5Gbps might buy you more.
But until there's a product you can actually buy, this is just a pre-Slashvertisement from a never-heard-of company.
"Unheard of start-up announces that next year they may have a highly-contended 'up to' 5 Gbps fibre* broadband service available for the price of pretty serious leased line now which would probably give you better service overall anyway"
The business one is £1500 a month. I can get quite a lot of leased line for that. And quite how many people could afford even the personal one, I'm not sure. I'm a geek and I couldn't.
I still have the earliest CD-R's from my university days, still perfectly readable. And that was the era of 2x read on CDROM and 1x write if you were lucky, no such thing as RW back then. And you bought the cheapest disks you could find because they cost a fortune, so I wasn't buying those gold-layered things, just the cheapest green-or-purple dye things from wherever had them in stock (pretty much pre-online ordering).
I have about 50-60 disks, each two copies because of the scare stories, and they all read identically and are intact. In fact one of them burned with a mastering error immediately and it was picked up by an immediate verify. I noticed that it was a single-byte change, noted it on a slip of paper that I stuck to the CD and - to this day - you can pull that disc out of it's sleeve, put it in a laptop, read the CD into an ISO, change that one byte back to what the piece of paper in there says, and the entire disk reads just fine (there are CRCs and integrity checks on the internal formats, e.g. original PKZIP etc. too in case you think I'm just not checking properly).
CD-R media has a long life, so long as you handle it nicely and store it in a room and not a damp basement.
To be honest, I have a 20Mb hard drive floating about somewhere. If it works on my IDE->SATA->USB convertors, I'd take a good guess that the MS DOS on there is still perfectly intact. All my other drives - spinning or not - that I have from after that era are just fine and I keep EVERY drive (I tend to buy a drive twice as big, copy the old drive over to the new, expand the partitions, then file the old drive, and repeat every time I run out of room). Some of them are still spinning and have been for years, some of them are in a box. I've never had problems with them.
USB sticks? No idea, I don't keep them long enough to worry about. SSD's, I doubt anyone has had them long enough to see them become unreadable just from age but I could be wrong (1Tb SSD drive in my laptop at the moment, copied from the previous 1Tb HDD which was a copy of my 500Gb Windows 7 drive, which was a copy of it's 128Gb Windows XP predecessor, etc. etc. etc.).
I don't know what you people do to your disks but I have a bunch of floppies from the 80's in work that still work just fine. I work in education and it's still not unusual for someone to pop up with a 3.5" thing with some software on it that "it's vital they get the kids onto immediately". Only those disks that have been abused can't be read back.
Whether you have the capability to run the resulting program on modern Windows at all... that's a bigger question entirely.
In some states of the US, it still is admissible, via roundabout methods.
But, as my favourite saying - in all CIVILISED countries, such bunkum isn't admissible in court.
It's nonsense. And they're using it to "detect terrorists". Which thus equates nonsense with what's supposed to be a serious, life-critical, global problem. That's how seriously they take it.
So either every sensible scientist in the civilised world is wrong and lie detectors are actually NOT a load of bunkum, or seeking out terrorists and spies isn't important enough to put REAL techniques, resources, effort and time into and it's all just a show.
Either you're an idiot or the rest of the world is. And the US can't admit that *IT* is being the idiot here.
You may as well be reading their fucking horoscope as performing polygraphs on these people. Scary thing is that people have gone to the chair - or worse - because of this bollocks.
Because that isn't the typical experience. For a start, the guy gets into driver parameters, testing kernels, and compiling from git. None of that is typical at all, hence why the Ubuntu etc. installation instructions say nothing about that. All a newbie user would know would be that some of his hardware isn't picked up in one particular distro. Maybe some older kernels work - who knows, did they test? What about the kernels in a STABLE version of a Linux distro that's aimed at first-time users? Did that work? I'm guessing you have no answer because you haven't tried.
(And, most importantly here, if that person was you, DID YOU REPORT THE BUGS? No? Thanks a lot for smearing bad news across the Internet without even giving people a chance to fix it).
However, it's like comparing my latest foray into IBM BladeCenter servers. On boot from a standard Windows 2012R2 install disk, they crash. That's it. BSOD and end of game. With a 10-minute BIOS boot, it doesn't matter how long you try, it still just crashes before it gets into Windows.
You have to create the support DVD from IBM-supplied drivers yourself. They don't supply one. This involves several HOURS of downloading, lots of disk space and knowing exactly what components you have in your blade server. Down to the difference between an HS23 (1506) blade and an HS23 (8883) blade, for example.
Then you have to burn that to a DVD (because it's too large for CD). Boot EVERY blade from that one by one, which runs off and updates 20-30 items of firmware on the blades and server and RAID card and AMM, and network card and all kinds of other internal hardware. It can take a day for a fully occupied BladeCenter. Then it lets you chain-boot into a Server 2012R2 install CD that you've got to slipstream the latest patches into.
Then AND ONLY THEN does it allow you to boot up into plain Windows without BSOD on bootup, so you can get on with actually installing the proper Windows drivers instead of the Microsoft-supplied ones, configuring the damn thing in terms of network, storage,etc.
Sounds like a horror story? It is. But it's got nothing to do with the Windows CD that Microsoft supply, in the same way that latest-laptop-model-with-Windows-support-only-not-yet-supported-on-Linux has nothing to do with some inherent flaw in Linux.
Typical experience with Linux is more generally "Okay. That seems to have worked. What do I do now?" (which is pretty much Linux use in a nutshell) while sitting at an unaccelerated login screen. I know, I've deployed Linux in schools, and we do it as part of some courses, and I've shown lots of people how to use it.
P.S. If I grab the latest laptop off the production line and slap plain Windows on it, likely I will have similar problems. How do I know? I do it all day long. Best ones are when the wireless or network just won't work, so it can't get to Windows Update to get the rest of the drivers for the machine. And sometimes even the Windows Update drivers just crash the thing or don't work at all. The newer the laptop, the bigger the problem you get.
Would you like me to describe the problem with a brand-new B5400 Lenovo laptop I had that consisted of ONLY joining open wireless networks and not encrypted ones, where only the left half of the touchpad worked properly, the network card didn't work, and the graphics were stuck in 1998 in terms of screen resolutions? Windows is JUST as bad in similar circumstances.
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Only true for credit cards (not electronic debit cards).
Only true if the charge was fraudulent (not your own carelessness).
And the retailer gets the burden nowadays, not the card company.
Also, you can pay several percent more just for using that method of payment.
P.S. Try contesting a charge when Chip & PIN transaction when your PIN was used. It's not as easy as you might think.
P.P.S. Google "Jeremy Clarkson sort code". Sort code and account number are enough to charge debits, and you WILL NOT necessarily get them refunded at all. Same "magic numbers", completely different liability, because it doesn't cost 2% or risk you running into chargeable credit in order to use.
Nope.
I only got into it a couple of years ago. Bitcoin was actually MUCH more expensive back then - it was hitting over $1000 each at one point and then promptly dropped.
I put what's left of my disposal income / slush fund (from which I would normally buy a DVD or gadget) at the end of each month into it.
It's a pittance but. so far, it's increased or held steady until I've withdrawn it (or bought games with it directly). I don't expect that to continue but given my bank's attitude to saving rates, interest rates, withdrawal limits and generally dealing with my money like it's their "precious", I don't think I'm any worse off even if the price drops.
I don't have a savings account, even. I just don't have enough to bother opening one.
Doubtful.
I don't know Australian law but even things like capital gains tax only take effect when you actually sell the asset. If you buy a house and it goes up in price, you don't get taxed the profit from it until you sell the house (or otherwise trade it).
And even if it was taxed, it's unlikely to be more than a pittance of the overall amount and only an idiot would try to dump the lot, rather than just cash our a bitcoin per week or whatever.
But more likely is that in all their poking, they found out that he was running a financial institution without proper licenses, or something like that. "Unrelated" to Bitcoin, but happened to be discovered while the article was written and reported to police diligently if/when he refused to give an exclusive? Nah, that's just me being cynical.
Yeah.
Like credit cards?
What fool is going to put their money into a bank and be issued with a number they can use to add or remove funds from this "fake" virtual account as if it was real cash?
Thank God Visa and Mastercard never took off and we still have to pay Amazon in coins and notes before their same-day-delivery.
Maybe not, but I've bought a shit-load of humble-bundles with them.
Put in a tiny amount of cash (think it was GBP20) years ago. I've since cashed out probably ten times that in actual monetary value for humble bundles (including the ones where you have to pay a minimum to get the higher-end products).
It's a viable payment system, it just hasn't gained mainstream traction yet. What would make it more viable is discovering that the creator was, say, some entrepreneur trying to make a digital currency rather than, say, the NSA/GCHQ trying to lure you into an "anonymous" payment system.
That said, I've never relied on, nor cared about, the anonymity side of things with my Bitcoin. It's a cinch to trace all my Bitcoin purchases back to the original seller and, from there, to a bank transaction between myself and them. I have nothing to hide in it, just a massive interest in cryptography and thus crypto-currencies as an aside.
That I put GBP20 into a toy project to see what happens, and got at least ten times that value out? It's obviously doing something right.
Considering that my bank want to charge me to hold my money, while fining me for every tiny infraction for a fraction of a millisecond deliberately introduced via their "X days to clear" bollocks in the modern age, while giving me an absolute pittance in interest, and locking up the branches so there's no staff in them and I can never get to them - by comparison Bitcoin is positively user-friendly and offers a great return.
And is my money guaranteed in my bank? Is it fuck. If nothing else, it's worth putting a small piece of disposable income into Bitcoin just to spread funds out. I can convert it back to real cash in a matter of seconds at the moment. That may or may not hold true in the future but as it's "just another" store of pocket-change money accessible to me, in an emergency it could come in handy.
Really? What's the temperature range of your mouth?
I doubt ANY material you've heard of expands enough over a typical tooth temperature range to really make it an issue.
Nobody's done that properly for Python 2.7 SSL libraries, for instances.
They just disabled certain functions which break a lot of, say, Python programs auto-updating from Github SSL sites. Fixes for several bits of software affected by this (e.g. Emscripten) just say "modify the source program, modify your python library to skip those bits, or put in massive function overrides for those functions to make it always enable a certain option".
Getting Emscripten to install/update/pull down new libraries when you first use them, on older LTS, is a bit of a nightmare. Given that emscripten is on the apt-get lists, you'd think they'd patch it so it works on them. They haven't.
We have no evidence at all that cows suffer damage by passive smoking. Nobody's ever done that experiment.
We can infer. We can guess. But we have no evidence at all.
So is "absence of that evidence" in itself evidence that cows actually don't suffer damage from passive smoking?
There's no evidence. So we have nothing, right?
Of course, it's easy to go and obtain evidence.
But in the same way that you can't make an absolute positive from no evidence, you can't make an absolute negative either. The answer is literally indeterminate and unknown.
Now, for cows, that's not a big problem. But some things we can't collect evidence either way. At least not directly. But NOT being able to find the evidence we need, when we're not really looking, is not evidence that we're wrong.
You have to look to be wrong. No actual evidence means you haven't looked deeply enough to come to any conclusion. If you had looked deeply enough, it would be evidence - one way or another.
Basically it means "Don't jump to conclusions". Nobody has looked deep enough to find anything. And nobody has evidence enough that THE OPPOSITE is true either. Like in this case. Someone says they looked, but they can't have looked very deeply or correctly, and may not even be in looking in the right place at all. Thus we can't eliminate the theory either way, and so we have to keep both options open in the tree of possibilities that stem from that.
Be part of a verified educational institution that is given unlimited-storage Google Apps for Education (identical to Google Apps for Business - go look at the prices) for free.
The signup for my schools consisted of proving we were a registered school in the UK, and that our domain belonged to us, and some guy checked that our domain was the official school website.
Now I have an admin interface that lets me create unlimited accounts or unlimited size to assign to registered students, while tracking their every move myself (not that there's anything of interest there that we can't already get from web-filters, network shares, school databases etc.) and being able to poke into their accounts, and report on what files they are using and who they are sharing them with.
To be honest, if you have one of these accounts, the SCHOOL being the people who can see more of what you do is the concern, not Google. Which is exactly why you shouldn't be using them for non-school purposes anyway. Which is why my EULA states that, quite clearly, for both parents and students alike to be aware.
And, no, I've never, ever seen a single piece of advertising or even suspect a single piece of advertising is tracking via the Google Apps for Education functionality. They've got the best and most up-to-date data protection documents I've seen (which the UK law REQUIRES from them before we can use them, and which goes far beyond what the UK/EU require). By comparison, Apple barely bother to even publish one for iCloud, etc.
Big fuss about nothing.
If you have a school-issued Chromebook, or a Chromebook under Device Management for a school, the school (including the school IT guy) are capable of listening in to anything you do. That's infinitely more worrying than any trend you might trigger on Google Ads from what you searched for, if that's even happening at all.
That's because Chrome on iPad isn't Chrome.
It's an old WebView.
Apple don't allow browsers to use their own rendering engines on iPad.
And there's a choice of old, unaccelerated WebView or new fancy QKView (or something like that), both of which use Safari-components to do the rendering.
Chrome on iPad is just Safari in a different skin.
Opera on iPad is just a remote VNC into a real computer running Opera.
A lock is only as strong as the weakest link.
And there's not much that a pair of boltcutter's won't go through in seconds. Whether that's the lasp, the hasp, or some other part of the door.
A lock's purpose is not to stop it being opened EVER, it's to stop it being opened by a opportunist with equipment that he can find laying nearby. You can do super-cheap locks with nothing more than a small screwdriver as leverage.
Everything else is purely within the realm of whatever it is locking being weaker anyway.
Welcome to the 21st-fucking-century.
UK Statutory Maternity / Paternity Pay:
https://www.gov.uk/paternity-p...
Gives up to 52 weeks paid leave for one/either/both parents (shared among them), including in case of stillborn, including for adoption, legally allowing you to build up holiday, get rises and return to work while it goes on.
Sure, it won't necessarily be at full-pay-rates but this is the fucking bare, legal, statutory MINIMUM that you're required to give by even being an employer in the UK
So let's not shout about how great Facebook are for letting you spend more than a fucking month with your newborn child.
The US really need to get out more and look at what other countries consider normal and/or moral.
Firewire specs require arbitrary memory access via DMA, outside control of the driver or processor - It's a security nightmare.
It used different connectors over its life - it's not backwards compatible.
Outside of video, it basically never became popular for any other significant task. The networking side was short-lived and removed from Windows before Vista even came out. I've never seen other FireWire peripherals except storage and video.
Literally, FireWire never had a chance because it never tried to be cheap or ubiquitous. And USB can basically do anything that FireWire was originally intended for.
FireWire was dead nearly a decade ago. Give it up.
Displays.
You still don't use USB for displays.
And USB->HDMI peripherals are far from being the best gadgets - many of the cheap ones are basically unusable for anything more than a second screen of desktop icons.
Merge USB and HDMI and you have the ultimate connector.
The Reg article is infinitely better, has history, facts, statistics, and links:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
The profit on an iPhone 5s is estimated to be over 90%, I believe.
It makes that list as one of the most returned products, but only because of insane margins.
As such, the monetary value alone is not useful or even indicative in judging whether something is "cheap and throwaway" tech, or a poorly-made expensive product that contributes to all kinds of waste.
Amazon basically haven't made profit, but their impact on the distribution chain, environmental considerations because they exist etc. is phenomenal.
- Projectors cast shadows when you walk in front of them.
- They generally get duller or break more than a TV over time.
- They are just as - if not more - expensive as a TV over time.
- They get hot, and can be noisy, and sound often sucks compared to an equivalent TV (granted, some people have separate audio systems).
- As you said, you can get 720p. I had that on a monitor back in the 1990's. In fact, I'm pretty sure I beat that quite handsomely. HD is a downgrade for anyone that was used to the first wave of 22" LCD monitors. 720p barely cuts it on a large projected screen (and I'm one of those people who doesn't see the need for HD even!). TV's are going into 4k as we speak, and that means huge res at huge size where you CAN utilise all that resolution.
- You've got to go some to pull a 65" TV off the wall. Projectors can be pulled from even ceiling mounts and put under a coat (trust me, I've filled out the insurance forms for work).
I work in schools. We have DOZENS of projectors on site. Even in a massive industry like education, we're all moving to large-screen touch TV's for the above reasons. Even fancy short-throws mounted above the boards are no longer in vogue.
Projectors have a lot of problems that TV's don't have. The only advantage is (sort of) portability, but for any serious setup, you wouldn't be able to move it around anyway.
What with this, nVidia Shield (rubbish but still in the market) and Steamboxes being virtually all nVidia, I can't help but carry on doing what I've done for many years now.
ATI for 2D graphics on servers, if it's pre-integrated.
Intel for 2D graphics for clients, if it's pre-integrated.
Everything else (i.e. the whole point of having a 3D graphics card) has to be nVidia.
The problem is that the "driver" nowadays isn't really a driver. The hardware still pushes the same shaders etc. to the card, over a standardised bus.
The problem is that the "driver" nowadays is a bunch of shortcuts and re-optimised shaders for particular operations, which are heavily dependent on how the games operate and basically "overrules" what the game wants the shaders to do, for the sake of per-game performance increases by sacrificing things that are sub-optimal on that particular card / game combination. Why else do you think that "new game X" suddenly needs a driver update to work when the game is using DirectX and the card is compliant with that level of DirectX?
In essence, this is tied quite tightly to DirectX. So the reason that the "drivers" often suck is that they are Windows-specific bodges to increase performance for individual games. That won't translate to even a Linux/OpenGL port of the same game on the same hardware, let alone for EVERY OpenGL game on EVERY Linux on ALL supported hardware.
And the investment is not in making a particular hardware faster, or pushing more texels over the standardised buses than before, but in optimising the hardware response for a particular game - which is labour-intensive and has to be redone for every game on every platform for each supported card.
Yep.
And LOTR was a three-volume book with each volume twice the size of The Hobbit.
That means that the Hobbit should be one sixth the length of the LOTR trilogy, not virtually the exact same length.
One of them.
In case you haven't noticed, an awful lot of households have not only broadband but multiple devices - PC in the lounge, several laptops across kids and parents, a handful of tablets, not to mention a smartphone each most likely. And not just in the richest households. The number of "Posted from device-name"'s I see on Facebook by people who claim to have no money is stupendous.
Add in Netflix, CCTV, phone services, streaming TV, etc. and it quickly adds up.
As time goes on, the bottleneck will be the wireless first - admittedly - but it won't be long before we'll have to get on-board with things like 5Gbps.
One of those stream you describe will wipe out most UK household's standard broadband today. That means dad can't get online because of kids streaming their movies. Multiply by the number of people in the house and you can easily use up even the top "home" broadband available by someone wanting to watch the football while someone else is watching their favourite movie (we max out somewhere around 152Mbps before you get into specialist packages for the UK).
How long would 1Gbps buy you? Not much. 5Gbps might buy you more.
But until there's a product you can actually buy, this is just a pre-Slashvertisement from a never-heard-of company.
Sounds more like:
"Unheard of start-up announces that next year they may have a highly-contended 'up to' 5 Gbps fibre* broadband service available for the price of pretty serious leased line now which would probably give you better service overall anyway"
The business one is £1500 a month. I can get quite a lot of leased line for that. And quite how many people could afford even the personal one, I'm not sure. I'm a geek and I couldn't.
*They are British, spell it the British way.
I still have the earliest CD-R's from my university days, still perfectly readable. And that was the era of 2x read on CDROM and 1x write if you were lucky, no such thing as RW back then. And you bought the cheapest disks you could find because they cost a fortune, so I wasn't buying those gold-layered things, just the cheapest green-or-purple dye things from wherever had them in stock (pretty much pre-online ordering).
I have about 50-60 disks, each two copies because of the scare stories, and they all read identically and are intact. In fact one of them burned with a mastering error immediately and it was picked up by an immediate verify. I noticed that it was a single-byte change, noted it on a slip of paper that I stuck to the CD and - to this day - you can pull that disc out of it's sleeve, put it in a laptop, read the CD into an ISO, change that one byte back to what the piece of paper in there says, and the entire disk reads just fine (there are CRCs and integrity checks on the internal formats, e.g. original PKZIP etc. too in case you think I'm just not checking properly).
CD-R media has a long life, so long as you handle it nicely and store it in a room and not a damp basement.
To be honest, I have a 20Mb hard drive floating about somewhere. If it works on my IDE->SATA->USB convertors, I'd take a good guess that the MS DOS on there is still perfectly intact. All my other drives - spinning or not - that I have from after that era are just fine and I keep EVERY drive (I tend to buy a drive twice as big, copy the old drive over to the new, expand the partitions, then file the old drive, and repeat every time I run out of room). Some of them are still spinning and have been for years, some of them are in a box. I've never had problems with them.
USB sticks? No idea, I don't keep them long enough to worry about. SSD's, I doubt anyone has had them long enough to see them become unreadable just from age but I could be wrong (1Tb SSD drive in my laptop at the moment, copied from the previous 1Tb HDD which was a copy of my 500Gb Windows 7 drive, which was a copy of it's 128Gb Windows XP predecessor, etc. etc. etc.).
I don't know what you people do to your disks but I have a bunch of floppies from the 80's in work that still work just fine. I work in education and it's still not unusual for someone to pop up with a 3.5" thing with some software on it that "it's vital they get the kids onto immediately". Only those disks that have been abused can't be read back.
Whether you have the capability to run the resulting program on modern Windows at all... that's a bigger question entirely.
In some states of the US, it still is admissible, via roundabout methods.
But, as my favourite saying - in all CIVILISED countries, such bunkum isn't admissible in court.
It's nonsense. And they're using it to "detect terrorists". Which thus equates nonsense with what's supposed to be a serious, life-critical, global problem. That's how seriously they take it.
So either every sensible scientist in the civilised world is wrong and lie detectors are actually NOT a load of bunkum, or seeking out terrorists and spies isn't important enough to put REAL techniques, resources, effort and time into and it's all just a show.
Either you're an idiot or the rest of the world is. And the US can't admit that *IT* is being the idiot here.
You may as well be reading their fucking horoscope as performing polygraphs on these people. Scary thing is that people have gone to the chair - or worse - because of this bollocks.
Because that isn't the typical experience. For a start, the guy gets into driver parameters, testing kernels, and compiling from git. None of that is typical at all, hence why the Ubuntu etc. installation instructions say nothing about that. All a newbie user would know would be that some of his hardware isn't picked up in one particular distro. Maybe some older kernels work - who knows, did they test? What about the kernels in a STABLE version of a Linux distro that's aimed at first-time users? Did that work? I'm guessing you have no answer because you haven't tried.
(And, most importantly here, if that person was you, DID YOU REPORT THE BUGS? No? Thanks a lot for smearing bad news across the Internet without even giving people a chance to fix it).
However, it's like comparing my latest foray into IBM BladeCenter servers. On boot from a standard Windows 2012R2 install disk, they crash. That's it. BSOD and end of game. With a 10-minute BIOS boot, it doesn't matter how long you try, it still just crashes before it gets into Windows.
You have to create the support DVD from IBM-supplied drivers yourself. They don't supply one. This involves several HOURS of downloading, lots of disk space and knowing exactly what components you have in your blade server. Down to the difference between an HS23 (1506) blade and an HS23 (8883) blade, for example.
Then you have to burn that to a DVD (because it's too large for CD). Boot EVERY blade from that one by one, which runs off and updates 20-30 items of firmware on the blades and server and RAID card and AMM, and network card and all kinds of other internal hardware. It can take a day for a fully occupied BladeCenter. Then it lets you chain-boot into a Server 2012R2 install CD that you've got to slipstream the latest patches into.
Then AND ONLY THEN does it allow you to boot up into plain Windows without BSOD on bootup, so you can get on with actually installing the proper Windows drivers instead of the Microsoft-supplied ones, configuring the damn thing in terms of network, storage,etc.
Sounds like a horror story? It is. But it's got nothing to do with the Windows CD that Microsoft supply, in the same way that latest-laptop-model-with-Windows-support-only-not-yet-supported-on-Linux has nothing to do with some inherent flaw in Linux.
Typical experience with Linux is more generally "Okay. That seems to have worked. What do I do now?" (which is pretty much Linux use in a nutshell) while sitting at an unaccelerated login screen. I know, I've deployed Linux in schools, and we do it as part of some courses, and I've shown lots of people how to use it.
P.S. If I grab the latest laptop off the production line and slap plain Windows on it, likely I will have similar problems. How do I know? I do it all day long. Best ones are when the wireless or network just won't work, so it can't get to Windows Update to get the rest of the drivers for the machine. And sometimes even the Windows Update drivers just crash the thing or don't work at all. The newer the laptop, the bigger the problem you get.
Would you like me to describe the problem with a brand-new B5400 Lenovo laptop I had that consisted of ONLY joining open wireless networks and not encrypted ones, where only the left half of the touchpad worked properly, the network card didn't work, and the graphics were stuck in 1998 in terms of screen resolutions? Windows is JUST as bad in similar circumstances.