Anyone who doesn't want Microsoft's telemetry has already stopped updating Windows 7 (and 8.1) when Microsoft introduced the new update rollup system last October which made updates an all-or-nothing affair which meant you can no longer block the telemetry updates while still installing the security patches.
I don't have Flash installed. I noticed that on Linux where I never bothered with Adobe's crappy Flash plug-in, pretty much anything I that I wanted to do that you would think I would need Flash for has started to work without it over the past year or so thanks to HTML5. So I uninstalled it on Windows, and haven't looked back.
The only slightly tricky thing is that you also have to uninstall FlashBlock (as FlashBlock will fool websites into thinking you have Flash installed so they'll send you Flash stuff instead of HTML5), and you'll also want to install some kind of click-to-play for HTML5 content for all the stupid sites that still have auto-playing videos.
Not only that, but Microsoft never bothered to back-port the telemetry crap back to Vista, so at least for a few more months you can have version of Windows where you can install the updates without worrying as much about what data your OS is sending back to the mothership.
On the other hand, a lot of vendors have dropped their Vista support and list Windows 7 as the minimum version. But my guess is just like 2000 was to XP, most anything that will run on 7 will run just fine on Vista even if it's not officially supported.
Or he's remembering how Java GUI applications first were 20 years ago. Java is a bit heavy on a Pentium or a K6 with 32MB of ram. Also, back then the Java GUI toolkits all had their own look and feel so something created using Java stuck visually out no matter where you running it, besides being slow.
Nowadays, I would guess a lot of people are running GUI applications totally unaware they were created using Java.
Actually, the fact the earbuds won't be used as much is a good reason not to use hearing aid (zinc-air) batteries. Once the tab is removed and the hearing aid battery is exposed to air the chemistry starts and battery only has 2-3 weeks or so before it's toast no matter how little it is actually used. In that sense, hearing aid batteries really are meant to be used heavily (all day) because they won't actually last much longer if you don't use them that way.
With that said, I'll apply the KISS principle and stick with wired earbuds (cheap and no batteries) along with devices that still work with them.
The Superdelegates had enough votes to give the nomination to Bernie, which they should have done. That's the whole reason they exist, so that terrible candidates such as Clinton don't get the nomination and then lose the general election.
Not to mention Windows actually makes it really hard to name a file starting with a space, as it will helpfully remove the space if you try. And if you clever enough to actually do it, Windows Explorer behaves really weird in regards to the file, for example it won't let you rename it to not have a space in front, as it thinks the new file name is the same as the old file name so the rename operation fails.
What does it matter though if the content to the TV is in 60 Hz, or in some cases even 30 Hz? Sure, the panel might be able to refresh that fast, but either the panel is refreshing the same image 3 times for every time the image actually changes, or the TV is playing some processing games with the incoming signal to interpolate frames that don't actually exist. I'd prefer my display to just be a display myself.
The real tragedy for the Democrats is that it just didn't cost them the presidency. All those people who stayed home also didn't vote in the down-ticket races which is a big factor into why the Republicans still control Congress and why they also lost big at the state level. I don't think people yet realize just how big of a boat anchor Clinton really was and how much it set them back. The DNC really screwed themselves over this time.
Black Friday is the Friday after the American holiday of Thanksgiving, which is always on a Thursday. Because of this, many people also have Friday off of work(*) and used the day to do some shopping. Historically this made Black Friday one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Outside the US you don't have the holiday of Thanksgiving so unless you've got some other holiday taking its place you're not going to have the same situation that makes that particular Friday special.
Of course, the past 10-15 years or so, retailers in the US have been really trying to make Black Friday into a major event with the idea that if they can work people up into a frenzy they'll spend more money. I guess they're going to try to push that idea across the globe if they think it'll work.
SUV are so 90's and early 2000's. If you define a SUV as truck-based, body-on-frame, RWD or 4WD - there's actually not that many SUVs out there you can buy. "Crossovers" are all the rage now. Which are basically the station wagons of decades past, car-based but jacked up with big tires so they classify as light trucks under CAFE.
To be fair in this example, you're dealing with a monopoly (the phone company) back before ditching the landline was feasible or possible for most people. Demand was pretty much totally inelastic, so they just slapped the tax onto the bill and everyone had to suck it up and pay it.
But you're right, in most situations something like a tax will be paid for both the company and the consumer.
In the 80's, the USA Ford Escort was a 100% Ford product. This is not to be confused with other cars being sold around the world under the Escort brand, which while styled similarly to the USA Escort, were actually different cars. In 1990, they replaced the Ford Escort with a reskinned 323, which was a much better car.
At this point your options are getting pretty limited. As in, lower end models, and then you have to go to the lower trim lines. Even if you manage to find one without the navigation system, a lot of cars are still using touch interfaces for the radio/climate control.
That's the truth. It's one of the reasons the Federal Reserve targets a non-zero inflation rate. They want you spend your savings to help prop up the consumption-based economy, or failing that they want you to use it to gamble in and prop up the stock market. So if you are responsible they'll eat away at your savings with inflation. Of course, people still save anyway (well, some people), which is why they are pushing for negative interest rates and the elimination of cash to further eat away at people's savings.
At some point, it's all going to come crashing down. It's not a matter of if, but when.
I just saw this in the captiva screen they have in our office building elevators: more than half the US millenials who have bank accounts, have less than $1000 in their savings account, as in emergency funds.
A lot of the "millennials" are college kids. The youngest are still in high school. How much money do you think they have managed to save?
The amazing ones are the boomers who are at or quickly approaching retirement age, who have manage to save little to nothing their whole working lives.
The bank I use allows for overdraft protection where if I overdraft they can take it out of my savings account or charge it against a credit card (as long as the account is with them) automatically with no fee. So you could set up a savings account with some balance or credit card that you otherwise never use for that purpose.
However, the cynical side of me is saying that this is a feature they only offer to customers who keep a high enough balance that they would be unlikely to use it anyway.
The problem the gas pumps have is they authorize the card before they let you start pumping gas, but at that point they don't know how much the sale is going to end up being. So as long as the card is "good" (below the limit, even if only 1 cent) the credit card companies will authorize the card then allow the pump to charge anything against it.
They used to authorize the card for some arbitrary high amount like $75*, then charge the actual amount to the card after the gas was pumped, but this ended up pissing some people off as the $75 authorization would sometimes stick for a few days, so they stopped doing it.
* This was back when $75 would buy you a lot of gas.
And only a portion of the production cost is printing. It costs a lot to develop a service manual.
Which I'm sure is peanuts compared to the cost of developing the actual vehicle. And that's where I would roll the cost into because really, it's not like they are going to make their money by randomly creating service manuals for non-existent vehicles.
If it was up to me, I'd sell the service manuals at the cost of reproducing them. For a PDF that would be free. In 1992 you'd probably have to print it, so I could see it maybe costing a few tens of dollars.
The benchmarks actually agree. Take the higher end desktop "enthusiast" i7 CPU. If it was 2011, you would probably buy a 2600K. Today, five years and 4 generations later, you would probably buy a 6700K. If you look at the benchmarks the 6700K is maybe 30% faster. The main differences is the 6700K is a lot lower power at idle, and the built-in GPU is better if you care about that kind of thing (which if you're getting the 'K' variant chances are you're not).
15-20 years ago, a new processor would completely destroy a 5 year old processor (something like a Coppermine P3 vs. a Pentium MMX). That's no longer the case.
The reason they do that is because it's something most buyers don't pay attention to or even knows what it means and the difference it will make. PC makers have been skimping by putting slower but higher capacity hard drives in their machines for several decades now. Yes, we geeks know and it makes us cringe, but all most people see is that this one has 1TB and that other one has 256GB so the first one must be better...
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Not really, the Coppermine P3's are pretty efficient. A lot of them use less than 20W at full load until you start approaching the 1 GHz mark.
Anyone who doesn't want Microsoft's telemetry has already stopped updating Windows 7 (and 8.1) when Microsoft introduced the new update rollup system last October which made updates an all-or-nothing affair which meant you can no longer block the telemetry updates while still installing the security patches.
I don't have Flash installed. I noticed that on Linux where I never bothered with Adobe's crappy Flash plug-in, pretty much anything I that I wanted to do that you would think I would need Flash for has started to work without it over the past year or so thanks to HTML5. So I uninstalled it on Windows, and haven't looked back.
The only slightly tricky thing is that you also have to uninstall FlashBlock (as FlashBlock will fool websites into thinking you have Flash installed so they'll send you Flash stuff instead of HTML5), and you'll also want to install some kind of click-to-play for HTML5 content for all the stupid sites that still have auto-playing videos.
Not only that, but Microsoft never bothered to back-port the telemetry crap back to Vista, so at least for a few more months you can have version of Windows where you can install the updates without worrying as much about what data your OS is sending back to the mothership.
On the other hand, a lot of vendors have dropped their Vista support and list Windows 7 as the minimum version. But my guess is just like 2000 was to XP, most anything that will run on 7 will run just fine on Vista even if it's not officially supported.
Or he's remembering how Java GUI applications first were 20 years ago. Java is a bit heavy on a Pentium or a K6 with 32MB of ram. Also, back then the Java GUI toolkits all had their own look and feel so something created using Java stuck visually out no matter where you running it, besides being slow.
Nowadays, I would guess a lot of people are running GUI applications totally unaware they were created using Java.
Actually, the fact the earbuds won't be used as much is a good reason not to use hearing aid (zinc-air) batteries. Once the tab is removed and the hearing aid battery is exposed to air the chemistry starts and battery only has 2-3 weeks or so before it's toast no matter how little it is actually used. In that sense, hearing aid batteries really are meant to be used heavily (all day) because they won't actually last much longer if you don't use them that way.
With that said, I'll apply the KISS principle and stick with wired earbuds (cheap and no batteries) along with devices that still work with them.
The Superdelegates had enough votes to give the nomination to Bernie, which they should have done. That's the whole reason they exist, so that terrible candidates such as Clinton don't get the nomination and then lose the general election.
Not to mention Windows actually makes it really hard to name a file starting with a space, as it will helpfully remove the space if you try. And if you clever enough to actually do it, Windows Explorer behaves really weird in regards to the file, for example it won't let you rename it to not have a space in front, as it thinks the new file name is the same as the old file name so the rename operation fails.
What does it matter though if the content to the TV is in 60 Hz, or in some cases even 30 Hz? Sure, the panel might be able to refresh that fast, but either the panel is refreshing the same image 3 times for every time the image actually changes, or the TV is playing some processing games with the incoming signal to interpolate frames that don't actually exist. I'd prefer my display to just be a display myself.
The real tragedy for the Democrats is that it just didn't cost them the presidency. All those people who stayed home also didn't vote in the down-ticket races which is a big factor into why the Republicans still control Congress and why they also lost big at the state level. I don't think people yet realize just how big of a boat anchor Clinton really was and how much it set them back. The DNC really screwed themselves over this time.
Black Friday is the Friday after the American holiday of Thanksgiving, which is always on a Thursday. Because of this, many people also have Friday off of work(*) and used the day to do some shopping. Historically this made Black Friday one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Outside the US you don't have the holiday of Thanksgiving so unless you've got some other holiday taking its place you're not going to have the same situation that makes that particular Friday special.
Of course, the past 10-15 years or so, retailers in the US have been really trying to make Black Friday into a major event with the idea that if they can work people up into a frenzy they'll spend more money. I guess they're going to try to push that idea across the globe if they think it'll work.
(*) Unless you work in retail. Sorry.
It doesn't exist in nature not because it can't be created naturally, but because any naturally created plutonium has long since decayed away.
SUV are so 90's and early 2000's. If you define a SUV as truck-based, body-on-frame, RWD or 4WD - there's actually not that many SUVs out there you can buy. "Crossovers" are all the rage now. Which are basically the station wagons of decades past, car-based but jacked up with big tires so they classify as light trucks under CAFE.
A 32" 1080p TV is pretty close.
Maybe Zenburn? It's a low contrast mess and I don't use it, but it's found in many editors and the colors are rather subdued.
I'm more of a VIM dark blue fan, but if you don't like neon colors I doubt you would like it.
To be fair in this example, you're dealing with a monopoly (the phone company) back before ditching the landline was feasible or possible for most people. Demand was pretty much totally inelastic, so they just slapped the tax onto the bill and everyone had to suck it up and pay it.
But you're right, in most situations something like a tax will be paid for both the company and the consumer.
In the 80's, the USA Ford Escort was a 100% Ford product. This is not to be confused with other cars being sold around the world under the Escort brand, which while styled similarly to the USA Escort, were actually different cars. In 1990, they replaced the Ford Escort with a reskinned 323, which was a much better car.
At this point your options are getting pretty limited. As in, lower end models, and then you have to go to the lower trim lines. Even if you manage to find one without the navigation system, a lot of cars are still using touch interfaces for the radio/climate control.
That's the truth. It's one of the reasons the Federal Reserve targets a non-zero inflation rate. They want you spend your savings to help prop up the consumption-based economy, or failing that they want you to use it to gamble in and prop up the stock market. So if you are responsible they'll eat away at your savings with inflation. Of course, people still save anyway (well, some people), which is why they are pushing for negative interest rates and the elimination of cash to further eat away at people's savings.
At some point, it's all going to come crashing down. It's not a matter of if, but when.
A lot of the "millennials" are college kids. The youngest are still in high school. How much money do you think they have managed to save?
The amazing ones are the boomers who are at or quickly approaching retirement age, who have manage to save little to nothing their whole working lives.
The bank I use allows for overdraft protection where if I overdraft they can take it out of my savings account or charge it against a credit card (as long as the account is with them) automatically with no fee. So you could set up a savings account with some balance or credit card that you otherwise never use for that purpose.
However, the cynical side of me is saying that this is a feature they only offer to customers who keep a high enough balance that they would be unlikely to use it anyway.
The problem the gas pumps have is they authorize the card before they let you start pumping gas, but at that point they don't know how much the sale is going to end up being. So as long as the card is "good" (below the limit, even if only 1 cent) the credit card companies will authorize the card then allow the pump to charge anything against it.
They used to authorize the card for some arbitrary high amount like $75*, then charge the actual amount to the card after the gas was pumped, but this ended up pissing some people off as the $75 authorization would sometimes stick for a few days, so they stopped doing it.
* This was back when $75 would buy you a lot of gas.
Which I'm sure is peanuts compared to the cost of developing the actual vehicle. And that's where I would roll the cost into because really, it's not like they are going to make their money by randomly creating service manuals for non-existent vehicles.
If it was up to me, I'd sell the service manuals at the cost of reproducing them. For a PDF that would be free. In 1992 you'd probably have to print it, so I could see it maybe costing a few tens of dollars.
The benchmarks actually agree. Take the higher end desktop "enthusiast" i7 CPU. If it was 2011, you would probably buy a 2600K. Today, five years and 4 generations later, you would probably buy a 6700K. If you look at the benchmarks the 6700K is maybe 30% faster. The main differences is the 6700K is a lot lower power at idle, and the built-in GPU is better if you care about that kind of thing (which if you're getting the 'K' variant chances are you're not).
15-20 years ago, a new processor would completely destroy a 5 year old processor (something like a Coppermine P3 vs. a Pentium MMX). That's no longer the case.
The reason they do that is because it's something most buyers don't pay attention to or even knows what it means and the difference it will make. PC makers have been skimping by putting slower but higher capacity hard drives in their machines for several decades now. Yes, we geeks know and it makes us cringe, but all most people see is that this one has 1TB and that other one has 256GB so the first one must be better...