Why would you want a Microsoft skin around the Safari browser widget rather than an Apple or Google or Firefox skin? What will Edge give you that the others dont when they are all using the same browser engine?
Here in Australia it must be different then. All the major supermarket chains still sell cigarettes, as do many petrol stations and convenience stores. Some newsagents and other smaller businesses still sell cigarettes as well.
As for tobacconists in Oz, a lot of the ones I see are more shops selling all sorts of crap (e.g. sports/car racing merchandise, bar/alcohol related merchandise, heck I even saw one such store selling a Hookah Pipe in the shape of a Kalashnikov) that also happen to sell cigarettes on the side.
They probably survive more because of the other crap they sell than because of the money they make on cigarettes.
If anything, its likely to be the smaller businesses that exit tobacco retailing whilst the big chains like Coles and Woolworths remain in the business. Newsagents as well as any independent (or independently franchised) petrol stations and convenience stores that dont make enough money from tobacco sales to cover the increasing costs will be the first to stop selling I suspect.
I dont smoke and I am not involved in the business but I do notice what is happening and what sorts of businesses are still selling the products and what sorts are not...
My predictions for business that may well be dead in the not-to-distant-future (if they aren't already): Video rental stores (I am surprised the ones that still exist have been able to hang on for so long given the rise of both rental kiosks and digital content purchase/rental/streaming/etc)
Landline phones (more and more people will replace home phones completly with mobile like I have or they will get some sort of VoIP service running over cable or fibre or whatever other tech rather than actual proper old-school copper wire phones)
Tobacconists (as less people smoke, taxes on tobacco increase and more and more general retailers like supermarkets and petrol stations are selling cigarettes, less and less people will have a reason to go to a specialty tobacconist for their tobacco products. Laws regulating how retailers can display and sell tobacco products dont help matters either)
Paid FTP software (with free alternatives like FileZilla being as good as the paid alternatives if not better, why would anyone bother to pay for FTP software anymore?)
Classified advertising in newspapers (why would anyone bother with newspapers when buying cars, buying property, looking for a job or buying general crap when things like Gumtree, realestate.com.au, Seek, CarSales and others in other countries are so much better)
Printed TV guides and listings (with digital TV even free-to-air channels give you up-to-date on-screen program guides so you can see what's on and when plus if you do need to look it up without looking on your TV, the Internet has you covered for that)
Printed phone books (I am surprised these aren't completly dead yet)
Toy stores (with the recent bankruptcy of Toys R Us and consumers increasingly buying toys from online or from big box department stores that have lower prices than the toy retailers, could the death of the toy store be far away?)
It doesn't help matters in the US when there is a specific law (the Tax Reform Act of 1986 section 1706) that made it difficult for independent contractors in IT working as an individual to continue to work as an independent contractor in many cases.
Maybe he should hook up with Bruce Simpson (another Kiwi who got busted by the NZ government at the behest of the USA because he was making a "DIY Cruise Missile" using off-the-shelf parts) and send a few in the direction of the head offices of the film studios who are really behind all this...
What it ultimately comes down to is that the NZ government needs Hollywood to keep making films in NZ (it provides local jobs and economic benefit and stuff which is good for NZ) and so they need to listen when Hollywood (through their puppets in the US government) ask them to take action against a "filthy pirate" that is "costing Hollywood a lot of money in lost revenue".
One type of vehicle I could see being popular in electric form would be a car-type pickup similar to the old Chevrolet El Camino or the Australian-market Holden Ute. I suspect there are quite a few people who would buy a small sized pickup truck that is easier to drive/park/etc than current larger sized pickups. Especially if they don't need a massive truck and don't need to drive really long distances in their truck.
A number of the pieces I had in my previous apartment where moved multiple times over their life and didn't fail.
And when I moved out, a lot of it was sold/given to friends and family and it made it to their place without failures. (I had a large IKEA Expedit shelving unit that moved house at least 3-4 times and is still going strong at the house of a family member last I saw it)
My current apartment is full of IKEA products (wardrobe, computer desk, kitchen table, coffee table & TV unit). All bought in early 2014 and none has failed on me and its all still in good condition.
The apartment I had before this one (where I got rid of my furniture rather than move it cross country at great expense) was full of IKEA furniture as well and that stuff never failed me in all the years I owned it (I did replace the top of a computer desk but that was only because I needed a larger one)
In terns of how much use I get out of IKEA furniture vs what I paid for it, IKEA has represented good value to me.
You would have to ask the power companies that have replaced coal generation with gas generation why they have switched from coal to gas and why it cant compete.
Its entirely possible that building new gas generators (and burning cheap gas) is cheaper overall than refurbishing coal plants that may be several decades old and need big sums spent on upgrade and then continuing to burn coal in those plants.
Even if you made solar power illegal, it would do absolutely nothing to get the coal miners jobs back. The major reason coal has been killed in the USA is because fracking and other unconventional forms of extraction have made generating power using natural gas more attractive than using coal.
I set my email client to plain text. 99% of emails I get are in plain text or are not worth reading (e.g. SPAM and junk). For the 1% of emails I get that aren't in plain text, are actually important and dont have a "go here to read this" link I turn on HTML, read the email, do what I need to with it and then turn HTML off again. (about the only time I have needed to do that recently is for vouchers from a fast food chain I visit regularly)
Bugatti holds various records for the fastest cars on the road. I cant wait to see how bonkers fast the Bugatti EV (whatever they come up with) ends up being.
The real problem with TV is that the good shows get axed before they get any chance to find an audience yet we get season after season of reality TV garbage like Survivor.
Does anyone know if Apple has published (or plans to publish) documentation/code so other operating systems (Linux for example) can support APFS partitions? Or is this another example of Apple creating something proprietary and not sharing?
Even the mighty Donald Trump couldn't get a plan for genuinely high speed internet build in America, not as long as the lobbyists for Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and other dinosaur ISPs are so powerful.
If they are worried about the guy skipping the country (to the point they are insisting he avoid airports) why don't they just ask him to surrender his passport so he cant leave the country. (it happens all the time when people are released on bail or otherwise let out of jail, they are forced to surrender their passport and not to leave the country)
The thing I like about the Logitech (and didn't like about the previous Microsoft I had or other keyboards I tried that were in my budget) is that the top row of keys (escape, f1-f12, print screen, scroll lock, pause) are the same size as the rest of the keys. The Cherry models you mention don't have the full size top row which makes them less attractive to me (I use the f-keys all the time)
My wired Logitech K120 USB keyboard is great and if I needed a new keyboard I would buy another one no question. (its better than the Microsoft keyboard I was replacing and better than any of the other keyboard options I saw when I was shopping for a keyboard)
The demand just isn't there for non-smart TVs with the large size high-end OLED/4K/whatever panels from the fancy smart TVs. Even if there was enough demand to make building such a thing (as opposed to a monitor or special-purpose display) viable, if they sold it at a price that was too close to the price of the "smart" version, it wouldn't sell and if they sold it at a price that was too low it would cannibalize sales of the "smart" version.
Not to mention that you couldn't get rid of the TV tuners (and the hardware to support that like Dolby AC3 and MPEG decoders and such) because the law in America mandates that all TVs sold in the US require an ATSC compatible tuner (I wonder if you could get away with including the mandated tuner in a box that is separate from the main TV electronics but is still in the box with the TV and functions with the same remote and etc?)
Oh and for those who need US frequencies, there are 4 different modem variants currently listed as options for the Neo900, one of which supports CDMA2000 for those unlucky enough to live in an area where Verizon is your only option.
If you want a hardware keyboard on a phone that at least has the goal of being as open as possible, you want a Neo900 http://neo900.org/ It will be able to be used with NO closed blobs on the main ARM CPU for WiFi OR cellular modem. It will also be possible to use it with no closed blobs for the GPU if you dont need 3D acceleration.
And there are hardware level security features built into the design. The cellular modem firmware has no access to the main ARM CPU, main RAM, the main filesystem, the microphone, the speakers, the Bluetooth chip or the WiFi chip so its not possible for backdoors (government or otherwise) in the cellular modem firmware to turn the Neo900 into a covert listening device or other covert device.
There are physical hardware switches to let you turn off all the different wireless devices (cellular, WiFi, bluetooth, GPS) so its physically impossible for the firmware on those things to transmit if you turn them off.
I have no association with the Neo900 project other than as someone who wishes he could afford one to replace his already-excellent Nokia N900:)
Just pointing out that there are other "make a phone as secure as possible" phones out there and there is a way to get one that has a hardware keyboard.
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Why would you want a Microsoft skin around the Safari browser widget rather than an Apple or Google or Firefox skin?
What will Edge give you that the others dont when they are all using the same browser engine?
Here in Australia it must be different then. All the major supermarket chains still sell cigarettes, as do many petrol stations and convenience stores. Some newsagents and other smaller businesses still sell cigarettes as well.
As for tobacconists in Oz, a lot of the ones I see are more shops selling all sorts of crap (e.g. sports/car racing merchandise, bar/alcohol related merchandise, heck I even saw one such store selling a Hookah Pipe in the shape of a Kalashnikov) that also happen to sell cigarettes on the side.
They probably survive more because of the other crap they sell than because of the money they make on cigarettes.
If anything, its likely to be the smaller businesses that exit tobacco retailing whilst the big chains like Coles and Woolworths remain in the business. Newsagents as well as any independent (or independently franchised) petrol stations and convenience stores that dont make enough money from tobacco sales to cover the increasing costs will be the first to stop selling I suspect.
I dont smoke and I am not involved in the business but I do notice what is happening and what sorts of businesses are still selling the products and what sorts are not...
My predictions for business that may well be dead in the not-to-distant-future (if they aren't already):
Video rental stores (I am surprised the ones that still exist have been able to hang on for so long given the rise of both rental kiosks and digital content purchase/rental/streaming/etc)
Landline phones (more and more people will replace home phones completly with mobile like I have or they will get some sort of VoIP service running over cable or fibre or whatever other tech rather than actual proper old-school copper wire phones)
Tobacconists (as less people smoke, taxes on tobacco increase and more and more general retailers like supermarkets and petrol stations are selling cigarettes, less and less people will have a reason to go to a specialty tobacconist for their tobacco products. Laws regulating how retailers can display and sell tobacco products dont help matters either)
Paid FTP software (with free alternatives like FileZilla being as good as the paid alternatives if not better, why would anyone bother to pay for FTP software anymore?)
Classified advertising in newspapers (why would anyone bother with newspapers when buying cars, buying property, looking for a job or buying general crap when things like Gumtree, realestate.com.au, Seek, CarSales and others in other countries are so much better)
Printed TV guides and listings (with digital TV even free-to-air channels give you up-to-date on-screen program guides so you can see what's on and when plus if you do need to look it up without looking on your TV, the Internet has you covered for that)
Printed phone books (I am surprised these aren't completly dead yet)
Toy stores (with the recent bankruptcy of Toys R Us and consumers increasingly buying toys from online or from big box department stores that have lower prices than the toy retailers, could the death of the toy store be far away?)
It doesn't help matters in the US when there is a specific law (the Tax Reform Act of 1986 section 1706) that made it difficult for independent contractors in IT working as an individual to continue to work as an independent contractor in many cases.
Maybe he should hook up with Bruce Simpson (another Kiwi who got busted by the NZ government at the behest of the USA because he was making a "DIY Cruise Missile" using off-the-shelf parts) and send a few in the direction of the head offices of the film studios who are really behind all this...
What it ultimately comes down to is that the NZ government needs Hollywood to keep making films in NZ (it provides local jobs and economic benefit and stuff which is good for NZ) and so they need to listen when Hollywood (through their puppets in the US government) ask them to take action against a "filthy pirate" that is "costing Hollywood a lot of money in lost revenue".
One type of vehicle I could see being popular in electric form would be a car-type pickup similar to the old Chevrolet El Camino or the Australian-market Holden Ute. I suspect there are quite a few people who would buy a small sized pickup truck that is easier to drive/park/etc than current larger sized pickups. Especially if they don't need a massive truck and don't need to drive really long distances in their truck.
A number of the pieces I had in my previous apartment where moved multiple times over their life and didn't fail.
And when I moved out, a lot of it was sold/given to friends and family and it made it to their place without failures. (I had a large IKEA Expedit shelving unit that moved house at least 3-4 times and is still going strong at the house of a family member last I saw it)
My current apartment is full of IKEA products (wardrobe, computer desk, kitchen table, coffee table & TV unit). All bought in early 2014 and none has failed on me and its all still in good condition.
The apartment I had before this one (where I got rid of my furniture rather than move it cross country at great expense) was full of IKEA furniture as well and that stuff never failed me in all the years I owned it (I did replace the top of a computer desk but that was only because I needed a larger one)
In terns of how much use I get out of IKEA furniture vs what I paid for it, IKEA has represented good value to me.
You would have to ask the power companies that have replaced coal generation with gas generation why they have switched from coal to gas and why it cant compete.
Its entirely possible that building new gas generators (and burning cheap gas) is cheaper overall than refurbishing coal plants that may be several decades old and need big sums spent on upgrade and then continuing to burn coal in those plants.
Even if you made solar power illegal, it would do absolutely nothing to get the coal miners jobs back. The major reason coal has been killed in the USA is because fracking and other unconventional forms of extraction have made generating power using natural gas more attractive than using coal.
I set my email client to plain text. 99% of emails I get are in plain text or are not worth reading (e.g. SPAM and junk). For the 1% of emails I get that aren't in plain text, are actually important and dont have a "go here to read this" link I turn on HTML, read the email, do what I need to with it and then turn HTML off again. (about the only time I have needed to do that recently is for vouchers from a fast food chain I visit regularly)
Bugatti holds various records for the fastest cars on the road. I cant wait to see how bonkers fast the Bugatti EV (whatever they come up with) ends up being.
This is one Chrome feature I wish Firefox (and browsers that use the same codebase) WOULD copy.
The real problem with TV is that the good shows get axed before they get any chance to find an audience yet we get season after season of reality TV garbage like Survivor.
Does anyone know if Apple has published (or plans to publish) documentation/code so other operating systems (Linux for example) can support APFS partitions?
Or is this another example of Apple creating something proprietary and not sharing?
Even the mighty Donald Trump couldn't get a plan for genuinely high speed internet build in America, not as long as the lobbyists for Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and other dinosaur ISPs are so powerful.
If they are worried about the guy skipping the country (to the point they are insisting he avoid airports) why don't they just ask him to surrender his passport so he cant leave the country. (it happens all the time when people are released on bail or otherwise let out of jail, they are forced to surrender their passport and not to leave the country)
The thing I like about the Logitech (and didn't like about the previous Microsoft I had or other keyboards I tried that were in my budget) is that the top row of keys (escape, f1-f12, print screen, scroll lock, pause) are the same size as the rest of the keys. The Cherry models you mention don't have the full size top row which makes them less attractive to me (I use the f-keys all the time)
My wired Logitech K120 USB keyboard is great and if I needed a new keyboard I would buy another one no question. (its better than the Microsoft keyboard I was replacing and better than any of the other keyboard options I saw when I was shopping for a keyboard)
The demand just isn't there for non-smart TVs with the large size high-end OLED/4K/whatever panels from the fancy smart TVs.
Even if there was enough demand to make building such a thing (as opposed to a monitor or special-purpose display) viable, if they sold it at a price that was too close to the price of the "smart" version, it wouldn't sell and if they sold it at a price that was too low it would cannibalize sales of the "smart" version.
Not to mention that you couldn't get rid of the TV tuners (and the hardware to support that like Dolby AC3 and MPEG decoders and such) because the law in America mandates that all TVs sold in the US require an ATSC compatible tuner (I wonder if you could get away with including the mandated tuner in a box that is separate from the main TV electronics but is still in the box with the TV and functions with the same remote and etc?)
Didn't Intel try to trademark "486" and get blocked from doing so?
Oh and for those who need US frequencies, there are 4 different modem variants currently listed as options for the Neo900, one of which supports CDMA2000 for those unlucky enough to live in an area where Verizon is your only option.
If you want a hardware keyboard on a phone that at least has the goal of being as open as possible, you want a Neo900
http://neo900.org/
It will be able to be used with NO closed blobs on the main ARM CPU for WiFi OR cellular modem. It will also be possible to use it with no closed blobs for the GPU if you dont need 3D acceleration.
And there are hardware level security features built into the design. The cellular modem firmware has no access to the main ARM CPU, main RAM, the main filesystem, the microphone, the speakers, the Bluetooth chip or the WiFi chip so its not possible for backdoors (government or otherwise) in the cellular modem firmware to turn the Neo900 into a covert listening device or other covert device.
There are physical hardware switches to let you turn off all the different wireless devices (cellular, WiFi, bluetooth, GPS) so its physically impossible for the firmware on those things to transmit if you turn them off.
I have no association with the Neo900 project other than as someone who wishes he could afford one to replace his already-excellent Nokia N900 :)
Just pointing out that there are other "make a phone as secure as possible" phones out there and there is a way to get one that has a hardware keyboard.
So glad I own a 32" Samsung dumb TV with no smarts whatsoever.