I've personally had 3 iPhone 4 & 4S's get the dreaded "wifi grayed out" issue where your wifi, bluetooth and gps stop working. It was so common that dozens of forum threads involved long discussions about it (you can still find them easily - and also on ebay devices with the problem) and even Apple had a page about it where they offered as a solution to "reset your network settings". Obviously this did nothing, as it was discovered the problem was the temperature sensor was malfunctioning and disabling the wireless module (which took down BT, GPS as well) and once your one year warranty was over you were out of luck with Apple. What's crazy is that the temperature sensor was not enabled with the shipping iOS of the iPhone 4 (possibly the iPhone 4S as well), but Apple enabled it from either iOS 5 or iOS 6 (I forget - but people not upgrading never had the problem), so they could disable it again if they wanted to. But they did not want to, my company purchased 3 iPhones for me because they were all failing the same way (after being used only in the office, sitting on a desk, occasionally debugging iOS apps), so it was good money for Apple. Apple won't fix a widespread problem even if it is just a firmware update for them, so don't count on a solution (other than offering you the newest iPhone perhaps with a "generous 10% discount" if you are "lucky").
This is not related to "non-brand" or discount brand phones with a generic Android slapped-on with some crap. Xiaomi is actually the Chinese high-end, and their OS called MIUI is actually a very well maintained project with a consistent UI (I'd say it borrows ideas from iOS and TouchWiz, in any case it is simple and familiar), continuous updates with the latest Android kernels and various useful extras. In fact, they build packages for hundreds of third party phones (including all the popular LG, Samsung, HTC, Moto etc) should you want to try it out: http://en.miui.com/download.ht... . Although for non Xiaomi phones not all features are available and also I have no idea if the experience will be as polished. Xiaomi originally pissed off the GPL people for not releasing their source (I guess not many Chinese companies do), but I think they eventually did publish it - in any case you can look it up if that is something you care about.
After replacing my Samsung Galaxy S4 (flagship device, cost when new 550 euro) with a Xiaomi Mi4 (flagship device, cost when new 200 euro), I have never looked back. I tried the switched because there were a couple of annoyances with the Samsung, plus I actual made money from the switch (yes, people were buying a second hand S4 for more than a new Mi4!). Not only you get the top specs, same as every other flagship, including high quality screen, good battery (the Mi4 lasts about 20-25% more than my S4), but you also get some unique stuff that only the Xiaomi has. For example, without even using a PC, you can go to the Xiaomi website, download the latest ROM image, save it and either upgrade or rename it, reboot in service mode and have it clean-install (useful when ordering from cheap retailers that make up for the lower price by installing spyware/adware crap). Oh, and when you do something bad and break your installation, it is dual boot with a clean basic image installed on an extra partition! Even better, Xiaomi continuously updates all their phones, you can be running Android 6.0.1 (official) whether you have the latest flagship (Mi 5), or the previous flagship (Mi 4) or the flagship before that (Mi 3 from 2013) or their cheapest device from 2 years ago (Redmi 1S) etc... And they have some other cool devices as well, but their phones have really done it for me, I'll be going with Xiaomi as long as they don't screw it up. Since you have to go through sometimes shady retailers sometimes currently, it will be great if they officially export to the US and other countries.
Defend? Is this some kind of subtle troll that pretends to misunderstand that this is a great thing for Nvidia? Great also for consumers, actually, as traditionally laptops get very weak graphics cards, but on this round they can get up to the high-end desktop equivalents. Of course they are expensive and their power profile will only fit on desktop replacement type laptops, but still it is nice to have the option. And I assume this means that AMD will also be able to fit their (less expensive) Polaris desktop chips in laptops, so should be something interesting for a lower price tier as well.
I am so relieved that all those colonization spaceships I've sent to Alpha Centauri, over many years of playing Civilization, will have somewhere to land!
This is a known issue and is being worked on by the actual Avast! support : https://forum.avast.com/index.... I don't know how the OP submitted the ticket, but it went to a "retention specialist" who probably thought he was trying to use it on Ubuntu (at least that's what I understand from the first email reply). And it is not just Avast!, see for example similar problems with Kaspersky: https://github.com/Microsoft/B... and more: https://github.com/Microsoft/B...
And let's not mention the fact that they couldn't get the timer to work (!!!), so they missed the ignition, the power source was knocked off so they missed the end, and also it is kind of shaky... So not that great of a test even as far as cameras go! Meanwhile two private companies are building rockets that can land themselves... But, yeah, who needs NASA as long as we have our drones and our F35s;)
All they are saying is that the F35 has very good stealth vs the US AA radar, which is a high frequency radar and that makes sense, since it was a big priority of the design. In fact, it was a priority over other aspects, so the F35 has many disadvantages. But yes, it has that advantage. Now, the problem is that Russia and China are building low frequency radars to which the F35 has no stealth capability. The difficulty is getting a good enough lock for weapons targeting - something that is thought to be hard with low frequency radars (i.e. you can see the F35 fine, but it exact location & vector are harder to get). If they succeed in making them good at targeting using low frequencies, then the F35 loses its main advantage and several disadvantages will start coming into play. Personally, I'd have thought the US would have already built radars that can "see" the F35, mainly to anticipate the others doing so, in order to prepare on facing them (perhaps tweaking the plane, or seeing the limits of low frequency radar technology, or developing strategies etc). But of course they wouldn't announce it, so this fluff piece would be published anyway.
Actually in this case this ship is still a record holder. It still holds the once very important "Blue Riband", which is the record for the fastest westbound (i.e. against the gulf stream) cross-atlantic passenger voyage. Only its eastbound records have been broken and even those not by regular passenger service. So this truly seems to be the fastest cross-atlantic passenger ship ever built (especially if you consider it held almost 2000 passengers) and it was retired quite early in its life, because cross-atlantic ship voyages were no longer required. So, considering that, I do find it a shame nobody ever found another use for it...
They've known for years and it is not uncommon for the Olympic city to host an event in another city (e.g. London held Sailing etc in Dorset), why did they HAVE to have these events in the dangerous Rio waters? I mean sure, a city that is on the coast, unlike others like the aforementioned London, COULD host water sports IF there are suitable waters. In this case there are no suitable waters, why couldn't they just move the event? It is not like they spent money for infrastructure for Sailing - in fact they didn't spend the promised money for sewage treatment, so they could just move the venue at any time.
Well, that post is before Xiaomi turned the default of the "data sharing to improve experience" to off (you could set it to off yourself before) and also use of free services like the Mi cloud do share your details with Xiaomi as you should expect. But, for example, Microsoft sends more data, even if you say "no" to everything according to reports. And Xiaomi releases the kernel source of their OS, which is something Microsoft and Apple don't do. So I sort of take it for granted that whatever phone I have someone will be tracking at least my IMEI, location etc. Since I am not a diplomat or something "sensitive" like that, I don't really care if the one tracking me is a US or Chinese company, corporations are equally not looking for my interests wherever they are based. In fact, historically, US companies have been shown to be very prone to sharing their data with the US government, so there is no way you can claim the Chinese ones are more dangerous because they have "stronger ties" with their government.
It is very strange that while Samsung phones that me and my wife used to have had were not updated much (especially the non-flagship devices), from the moment I tried the cheap Chinese Xiaomi I've been enjoying continuous updates to all devices, from flagship to budget (and this, along with other reasons, is why I am sticking with Xiaomi for the time being). E.g. your phone will be running Android 6.0.1 whether you have the latest flagship (Mi 5), or the previous flagship (Mi 4) or the flagship before that (Mi 3 from 2013) or their cheapest device from 2 years ago (Redmi 1S) etc. And all these cost 1/2 to 1/3 the price of the equivalent Samsung/LG etc. So, in this case buying "cheap Chinese" means you are the most protected from such issues. Yes, I know Xiaomi does not sell to most countries, I had to order it from a Chinese e-tailer who had an EU warehouse. And if you order from a Chinese e-tailer, whatever brand the phone it is almost guaranteed to be full of adware and spyware so your first move would be a clean install. Which is surprisingly easy on a Xiaomi, in fact you don't even have to use a PC - you can just go to the Xiaomi website to download the latest version, rename the file per the instructions, reboot in recovery mode and clean-install it! They even have dual boot - keeping a clean OS in case you screw up your regular installation. Sorry for the "ad", but I can't believe I have paid up to $600 in the past (or more if we include phones my company has provided me like the iPhone 6 Plus), when a $200-$250 phone has proved better IMHO in both hardware and software...
You can't just arbitrarily take the sum of all the models that a company has produced in a category and compare it to specific models in other fields. Try comparing the iPhone to 3M's all types of post-it notes, who has sold more units? If you want Apple to win that comparison by going "by value" you are worse off, since most car manufacturers trump you, even if you just go by "model" as this BS topic does and not the total of cars that a manufacturer has made. Oh, and, by the way, and "Corolla" is just a model line when we say "brand" we usually refer to "Toyota". If you want to get more serious, you can find products that sell more both in units and value. E.g. Coca Cola sells in a week, about as many bottles of Coke as Apple iPhones have been sold in history and it is just a matter of how many years back you have to go with Coke bottles to reach a greater overall value in Coke than iPhones... And it gets even worse than that. Even among phones, the iPhone is not that remarkable in *numbers*. The lowly Nokia 1110 sold 250 million units. This is far above any single iPhone model. In fact, some of its directy predecessors each sold more units than all or most iPhone models (e.g. the 1100 also about 250 million, the 3210 over 150 million, the 3310 130 million etc). Similar to the iPhones Nokia made phones that were very similar in looks and software and differed only in the model number, so if you can sum up all iPhones you can sum up a line of Nokia phones and come up with more than a billion. Why not just stay at the fact that the introduction of the iPhone was a paradigm shift that shaped the entire smartphone market and it continues to be one of the most popular platforms to this day? Why do you have to make up such BS headlines?
A journalist (of the WSJ no less) has no idea what is going on in their country? That's what was the most surprising to me. I mean, I knew about the 100-mile border rule and I am neither a journalist, nor a US citizen. I thought the US journalists are in on it with the government by not drawing attention to the slowly eroding US constitutional rights, but in this case it is not some conspiracy, the journalist is an idiot. Where idiot here is also used in the original meaning from the ancient greek (no unicode to list it here) which was referred to people who were not interested in the affairs of the State. If a journalist whose job is to know stuff exactly like this, is surprised to find something like that out, what hope do the people in the US realize that they have let them take away their rights one by one?
Currently in the UK I can buy regular pasteurized milk which can be homogenized or not and lasts about a week, or "filtered" but still regularly pasteurized milk (e.g. Cravendale) which lasts 2-3 weeks. What's the difference with this new process? I seems to still require the regular pasteurization and adds an extra heating to get the same effect as the "filtering". Note that I use quotes since I don't know what this filtering entails, so the question is whether this new process has any advantage over that filtering, or is the story just to advertise a new (I assume patented) way to achieve the same effect?
Say you receive $1,000,000 from selling drugs. You can't just go around spending it because you can't explain where you got it. In fact, in the US the police can outright confiscate money and you have to prove they came from legal sources. So, what do you do? You open a laundermat and you start spending your $1,000,000 on it in various ways that either require some "interesting" accounting, or paying undocumented salaries, buying equipment with cash etc. However, whatever income your laundermat makes is perfectly legitimate and you can spend without worrying. Laundering money costs of course. E.g. your laundermat business will appear in the books for example as having a $20k/week revenue, $10k/week expenses for $10k/week earnings, when in fact you are pumping in another $20k/week in undocumented "dirty money", effectively making 1 clean dollar for every 2 dirty ones and before the year is over you will have converted your "hot" million to a "clean" half a mil. You can also find someone who does this for you through their business, so you give them undocumented dirty money and they "pay" you for "services" with less, but "clean", money.
OK, I am the first to say VZW is the worst, but in this case people can't complain. They were stupid enough to sell "unlimited" data, so they would now be in the wrong if they made the "unlimited" have a limit (yes, they would love to do just that of course), but instead they are just deciding it makes no financial sense to them to keep these customers on. Similar to how you decide VZW makes no financial sense to you and you drop them, a company can do the same (following the terms of the contract), the aren't obliged to give you what you want, so in this case they are right to do that instead of finding a more sneaky way to limit or charge you. And 100GB is of course quite a lot of data, if you want that much data of your mobile connection, sorry, nobody will give it to you cheaply. In fact, it goes the other way around, they are giving you increasingly faster mobile connections (at least in cities, forget more rural areas), without making data cheaper. You simply have less time to run your connection at full speed, before you hit your data cap - in the most common max speed / included data combinations you can max out monthly caps in just a few minutes. No, it makes no sense, the only things that would actually help customers are signal coverage and some modest 3G in places where you currently have no signal or just GPRS/Edge, plus some reasonably priced data packages, and the only thing really advancing is max speed at a sweet-spot in the city...
What do you mean? We are talking here about the fastest in the quarter mile, which it does at 9.87 sec. The Tesla P85D does it in 10.9 sec, so this is faster than the Tesla in that respect (and others, e.g. 0-100kph is 3s vs Tesla's 3.2). Of course the Tesla is a production car and not some modified for drag racing awkward vehicle, which make its feats impressive, but it doesn't mean the summary is wrong.
I am a big ST fan and while TNG is still my favorite I even like the reboot movies (yes they are not "Trek" in the traditional sense, but the actors & dialogue are good entertainment). So I was quite happy to hear about a new series... Then they published the fan film guidelines and suddenly it all turned sour for me. Sure, I always knew Paramount/CBS are doing it for the money, but performing what is analogous to kicking their fans in the face? And I was never a big fan of fan-made films, but I always took it for granted that they added value to ST not take away from it... Nope, the way I feel right now I'll just re-watch my already paid-for TNG, TOS etc disks and hope someone else will make some decent non-ST sci-fi.
I'm not an graphics expert, but I'm gonna guess that's not nearly enough?
No, you certainly are not a graphics expert. I am not either, but at least I know that scenes are not composed and rendered for each pixel. So, when you go from 1080p to 720p which has 2.25 times less pixels, you never get 2.25 times more frame rate. It depends heavily on the game of course but at best you get something less than 2x, while at worse something like a 25% frame rate benefit. So you don't need 4x the performance for 4x pixels and 2.3x may be enough. More accurately, it will have to be enough, because developers will know that's what they have to fit.
If they want to solve it, they just need to issue a pardon. I mean, other people steal millions via various (much less "direct") means and just hide for a few years for the statute of limitations and they are free (rich) men. For this guy, who I'd say really "worked" for it, they started prosecution in absentia so that he can be caught at any time in the future. We don't care about the $200k he stole - in fact the cost of the investigation should have run up multiple times that - but the public wants to know if he made it! And whether it will be shot with IMAX cameras!
I have one, and since I am writing what looks to me right now to be the 8th post here, 12.5% of posters have a Xiaomi!
On the more serious side, I ordered mine (I live in the UK) from a Chinese seller who has a warehouse in the EU, and I know a few other people who ordered the same way (whether they are in UK, Greece, Netherlands etc). Specifically, I bought the Mi4 a year ago for a little over $200, i.e. less than half the cost of other flagship phones with comparable (or sometimes less) specs. Naturally, it came full of bloatware/spywhere, on a Xiaomi you can actually open a browser, download a clean image from the manufacturer website, restart and have it clean-install just like that, not even need of a PC. Oh, and it has dual-boot, keeping a "clean" OS version in case you run into trouble. Overall it blows away my previous Samsung (which still cost more than the Xiaomi last year, even second hand!!) in every aspect, including - believe it or not - manufacturer support, since you have immediate access to each (of the frequent) new version of the OS for what it seems like at least some years after release of a Xiaomi phone. It is an amazing value and I don't think I'll ever spend much more than $200 on a phone again... Caveat: Chinese resellers will install spyware (not only on Xiaomi), so clean install once you get a phone!
Slashdot Mirror
I've personally had 3 iPhone 4 & 4S's get the dreaded "wifi grayed out" issue where your wifi, bluetooth and gps stop working. It was so common that dozens of forum threads involved long discussions about it (you can still find them easily - and also on ebay devices with the problem) and even Apple had a page about it where they offered as a solution to "reset your network settings". Obviously this did nothing, as it was discovered the problem was the temperature sensor was malfunctioning and disabling the wireless module (which took down BT, GPS as well) and once your one year warranty was over you were out of luck with Apple. What's crazy is that the temperature sensor was not enabled with the shipping iOS of the iPhone 4 (possibly the iPhone 4S as well), but Apple enabled it from either iOS 5 or iOS 6 (I forget - but people not upgrading never had the problem), so they could disable it again if they wanted to. But they did not want to, my company purchased 3 iPhones for me because they were all failing the same way (after being used only in the office, sitting on a desk, occasionally debugging iOS apps), so it was good money for Apple.
Apple won't fix a widespread problem even if it is just a firmware update for them, so don't count on a solution (other than offering you the newest iPhone perhaps with a "generous 10% discount" if you are "lucky").
This is not related to "non-brand" or discount brand phones with a generic Android slapped-on with some crap. Xiaomi is actually the Chinese high-end, and their OS called MIUI is actually a very well maintained project with a consistent UI (I'd say it borrows ideas from iOS and TouchWiz, in any case it is simple and familiar), continuous updates with the latest Android kernels and various useful extras. In fact, they build packages for hundreds of third party phones (including all the popular LG, Samsung, HTC, Moto etc) should you want to try it out: http://en.miui.com/download.ht... . Although for non Xiaomi phones not all features are available and also I have no idea if the experience will be as polished.
Xiaomi originally pissed off the GPL people for not releasing their source (I guess not many Chinese companies do), but I think they eventually did publish it - in any case you can look it up if that is something you care about.
After replacing my Samsung Galaxy S4 (flagship device, cost when new 550 euro) with a Xiaomi Mi4 (flagship device, cost when new 200 euro), I have never looked back. I tried the switched because there were a couple of annoyances with the Samsung, plus I actual made money from the switch (yes, people were buying a second hand S4 for more than a new Mi4!). Not only you get the top specs, same as every other flagship, including high quality screen, good battery (the Mi4 lasts about 20-25% more than my S4), but you also get some unique stuff that only the Xiaomi has. For example, without even using a PC, you can go to the Xiaomi website, download the latest ROM image, save it and either upgrade or rename it, reboot in service mode and have it clean-install (useful when ordering from cheap retailers that make up for the lower price by installing spyware/adware crap). Oh, and when you do something bad and break your installation, it is dual boot with a clean basic image installed on an extra partition! Even better, Xiaomi continuously updates all their phones, you can be running Android 6.0.1 (official) whether you have the latest flagship (Mi 5), or the previous flagship (Mi 4) or the flagship before that (Mi 3 from 2013) or their cheapest device from 2 years ago (Redmi 1S) etc...
And they have some other cool devices as well, but their phones have really done it for me, I'll be going with Xiaomi as long as they don't screw it up. Since you have to go through sometimes shady retailers sometimes currently, it will be great if they officially export to the US and other countries.
Defend? Is this some kind of subtle troll that pretends to misunderstand that this is a great thing for Nvidia? Great also for consumers, actually, as traditionally laptops get very weak graphics cards, but on this round they can get up to the high-end desktop equivalents. Of course they are expensive and their power profile will only fit on desktop replacement type laptops, but still it is nice to have the option. And I assume this means that AMD will also be able to fit their (less expensive) Polaris desktop chips in laptops, so should be something interesting for a lower price tier as well.
I am so relieved that all those colonization spaceships I've sent to Alpha Centauri, over many years of playing Civilization, will have somewhere to land!
This is a known issue and is being worked on by the actual Avast! support : https://forum.avast.com/index....
I don't know how the OP submitted the ticket, but it went to a "retention specialist" who probably thought he was trying to use it on Ubuntu (at least that's what I understand from the first email reply). And it is not just Avast!, see for example similar problems with Kaspersky: https://github.com/Microsoft/B... and more: https://github.com/Microsoft/B...
And let's not mention the fact that they couldn't get the timer to work (!!!), so they missed the ignition, the power source was knocked off so they missed the end, and also it is kind of shaky... So not that great of a test even as far as cameras go! ;)
Meanwhile two private companies are building rockets that can land themselves...
But, yeah, who needs NASA as long as we have our drones and our F35s
In case you are wondering, here it is: https://cnet1.cbsistatic.com/i...
All they are saying is that the F35 has very good stealth vs the US AA radar, which is a high frequency radar and that makes sense, since it was a big priority of the design. In fact, it was a priority over other aspects, so the F35 has many disadvantages. But yes, it has that advantage.
Now, the problem is that Russia and China are building low frequency radars to which the F35 has no stealth capability. The difficulty is getting a good enough lock for weapons targeting - something that is thought to be hard with low frequency radars (i.e. you can see the F35 fine, but it exact location & vector are harder to get). If they succeed in making them good at targeting using low frequencies, then the F35 loses its main advantage and several disadvantages will start coming into play.
Personally, I'd have thought the US would have already built radars that can "see" the F35, mainly to anticipate the others doing so, in order to prepare on facing them (perhaps tweaking the plane, or seeing the limits of low frequency radar technology, or developing strategies etc). But of course they wouldn't announce it, so this fluff piece would be published anyway.
Actually in this case this ship is still a record holder. It still holds the once very important "Blue Riband", which is the record for the fastest westbound (i.e. against the gulf stream) cross-atlantic passenger voyage. Only its eastbound records have been broken and even those not by regular passenger service. So this truly seems to be the fastest cross-atlantic passenger ship ever built (especially if you consider it held almost 2000 passengers) and it was retired quite early in its life, because cross-atlantic ship voyages were no longer required.
So, considering that, I do find it a shame nobody ever found another use for it...
They've known for years and it is not uncommon for the Olympic city to host an event in another city (e.g. London held Sailing etc in Dorset), why did they HAVE to have these events in the dangerous Rio waters? I mean sure, a city that is on the coast, unlike others like the aforementioned London, COULD host water sports IF there are suitable waters. In this case there are no suitable waters, why couldn't they just move the event? It is not like they spent money for infrastructure for Sailing - in fact they didn't spend the promised money for sewage treatment, so they could just move the venue at any time.
Well, that post is before Xiaomi turned the default of the "data sharing to improve experience" to off (you could set it to off yourself before) and also use of free services like the Mi cloud do share your details with Xiaomi as you should expect. But, for example, Microsoft sends more data, even if you say "no" to everything according to reports. And Xiaomi releases the kernel source of their OS, which is something Microsoft and Apple don't do. So I sort of take it for granted that whatever phone I have someone will be tracking at least my IMEI, location etc. Since I am not a diplomat or something "sensitive" like that, I don't really care if the one tracking me is a US or Chinese company, corporations are equally not looking for my interests wherever they are based. In fact, historically, US companies have been shown to be very prone to sharing their data with the US government, so there is no way you can claim the Chinese ones are more dangerous because they have "stronger ties" with their government.
It is very strange that while Samsung phones that me and my wife used to have had were not updated much (especially the non-flagship devices), from the moment I tried the cheap Chinese Xiaomi I've been enjoying continuous updates to all devices, from flagship to budget (and this, along with other reasons, is why I am sticking with Xiaomi for the time being). E.g. your phone will be running Android 6.0.1 whether you have the latest flagship (Mi 5), or the previous flagship (Mi 4) or the flagship before that (Mi 3 from 2013) or their cheapest device from 2 years ago (Redmi 1S) etc. And all these cost 1/2 to 1/3 the price of the equivalent Samsung/LG etc.
So, in this case buying "cheap Chinese" means you are the most protected from such issues. Yes, I know Xiaomi does not sell to most countries, I had to order it from a Chinese e-tailer who had an EU warehouse. And if you order from a Chinese e-tailer, whatever brand the phone it is almost guaranteed to be full of adware and spyware so your first move would be a clean install. Which is surprisingly easy on a Xiaomi, in fact you don't even have to use a PC - you can just go to the Xiaomi website to download the latest version, rename the file per the instructions, reboot in recovery mode and clean-install it! They even have dual boot - keeping a clean OS in case you screw up your regular installation.
Sorry for the "ad", but I can't believe I have paid up to $600 in the past (or more if we include phones my company has provided me like the iPhone 6 Plus), when a $200-$250 phone has proved better IMHO in both hardware and software...
You can't just arbitrarily take the sum of all the models that a company has produced in a category and compare it to specific models in other fields. Try comparing the iPhone to 3M's all types of post-it notes, who has sold more units? If you want Apple to win that comparison by going "by value" you are worse off, since most car manufacturers trump you, even if you just go by "model" as this BS topic does and not the total of cars that a manufacturer has made. Oh, and, by the way, and "Corolla" is just a model line when we say "brand" we usually refer to "Toyota".
If you want to get more serious, you can find products that sell more both in units and value. E.g. Coca Cola sells in a week, about as many bottles of Coke as Apple iPhones have been sold in history and it is just a matter of how many years back you have to go with Coke bottles to reach a greater overall value in Coke than iPhones...
And it gets even worse than that. Even among phones, the iPhone is not that remarkable in *numbers*. The lowly Nokia 1110 sold 250 million units. This is far above any single iPhone model. In fact, some of its directy predecessors each sold more units than all or most iPhone models (e.g. the 1100 also about 250 million, the 3210 over 150 million, the 3310 130 million etc). Similar to the iPhones Nokia made phones that were very similar in looks and software and differed only in the model number, so if you can sum up all iPhones you can sum up a line of Nokia phones and come up with more than a billion.
Why not just stay at the fact that the introduction of the iPhone was a paradigm shift that shaped the entire smartphone market and it continues to be one of the most popular platforms to this day? Why do you have to make up such BS headlines?
A journalist (of the WSJ no less) has no idea what is going on in their country? That's what was the most surprising to me. I mean, I knew about the 100-mile border rule and I am neither a journalist, nor a US citizen. I thought the US journalists are in on it with the government by not drawing attention to the slowly eroding US constitutional rights, but in this case it is not some conspiracy, the journalist is an idiot. Where idiot here is also used in the original meaning from the ancient greek (no unicode to list it here) which was referred to people who were not interested in the affairs of the State.
If a journalist whose job is to know stuff exactly like this, is surprised to find something like that out, what hope do the people in the US realize that they have let them take away their rights one by one?
Currently in the UK I can buy regular pasteurized milk which can be homogenized or not and lasts about a week, or "filtered" but still regularly pasteurized milk (e.g. Cravendale) which lasts 2-3 weeks. What's the difference with this new process? I seems to still require the regular pasteurization and adds an extra heating to get the same effect as the "filtering". Note that I use quotes since I don't know what this filtering entails, so the question is whether this new process has any advantage over that filtering, or is the story just to advertise a new (I assume patented) way to achieve the same effect?
Say you receive $1,000,000 from selling drugs. You can't just go around spending it because you can't explain where you got it. In fact, in the US the police can outright confiscate money and you have to prove they came from legal sources. So, what do you do? You open a laundermat and you start spending your $1,000,000 on it in various ways that either require some "interesting" accounting, or paying undocumented salaries, buying equipment with cash etc. However, whatever income your laundermat makes is perfectly legitimate and you can spend without worrying.
Laundering money costs of course. E.g. your laundermat business will appear in the books for example as having a $20k/week revenue, $10k/week expenses for $10k/week earnings, when in fact you are pumping in another $20k/week in undocumented "dirty money", effectively making 1 clean dollar for every 2 dirty ones and before the year is over you will have converted your "hot" million to a "clean" half a mil.
You can also find someone who does this for you through their business, so you give them undocumented dirty money and they "pay" you for "services" with less, but "clean", money.
OK, I am the first to say VZW is the worst, but in this case people can't complain. They were stupid enough to sell "unlimited" data, so they would now be in the wrong if they made the "unlimited" have a limit (yes, they would love to do just that of course), but instead they are just deciding it makes no financial sense to them to keep these customers on. Similar to how you decide VZW makes no financial sense to you and you drop them, a company can do the same (following the terms of the contract), the aren't obliged to give you what you want, so in this case they are right to do that instead of finding a more sneaky way to limit or charge you.
And 100GB is of course quite a lot of data, if you want that much data of your mobile connection, sorry, nobody will give it to you cheaply.
In fact, it goes the other way around, they are giving you increasingly faster mobile connections (at least in cities, forget more rural areas), without making data cheaper. You simply have less time to run your connection at full speed, before you hit your data cap - in the most common max speed / included data combinations you can max out monthly caps in just a few minutes. No, it makes no sense, the only things that would actually help customers are signal coverage and some modest 3G in places where you currently have no signal or just GPRS/Edge, plus some reasonably priced data packages, and the only thing really advancing is max speed at a sweet-spot in the city...
What do you mean? We are talking here about the fastest in the quarter mile, which it does at 9.87 sec. The Tesla P85D does it in 10.9 sec, so this is faster than the Tesla in that respect (and others, e.g. 0-100kph is 3s vs Tesla's 3.2).
Of course the Tesla is a production car and not some modified for drag racing awkward vehicle, which make its feats impressive, but it doesn't mean the summary is wrong.
It lands by itself and they don't even call it Autopilot! In this case nobody would object, but they don't market it as such... Oh, well... ;)
I am a big ST fan and while TNG is still my favorite I even like the reboot movies (yes they are not "Trek" in the traditional sense, but the actors & dialogue are good entertainment). So I was quite happy to hear about a new series... Then they published the fan film guidelines and suddenly it all turned sour for me. Sure, I always knew Paramount/CBS are doing it for the money, but performing what is analogous to kicking their fans in the face? And I was never a big fan of fan-made films, but I always took it for granted that they added value to ST not take away from it...
Nope, the way I feel right now I'll just re-watch my already paid-for TNG, TOS etc disks and hope someone else will make some decent non-ST sci-fi.
I'm not an graphics expert, but I'm gonna guess that's not nearly enough?
No, you certainly are not a graphics expert. I am not either, but at least I know that scenes are not composed and rendered for each pixel. So, when you go from 1080p to 720p which has 2.25 times less pixels, you never get 2.25 times more frame rate. It depends heavily on the game of course but at best you get something less than 2x, while at worse something like a 25% frame rate benefit.
So you don't need 4x the performance for 4x pixels and 2.3x may be enough. More accurately, it will have to be enough, because developers will know that's what they have to fit.
You are right. I am sure he is entitled to a full refund.
If they want to solve it, they just need to issue a pardon. I mean, other people steal millions via various (much less "direct") means and just hide for a few years for the statute of limitations and they are free (rich) men. For this guy, who I'd say really "worked" for it, they started prosecution in absentia so that he can be caught at any time in the future.
We don't care about the $200k he stole - in fact the cost of the investigation should have run up multiple times that - but the public wants to know if he made it! And whether it will be shot with IMAX cameras!
I have one, and since I am writing what looks to me right now to be the 8th post here, 12.5% of posters have a Xiaomi!
On the more serious side, I ordered mine (I live in the UK) from a Chinese seller who has a warehouse in the EU, and I know a few other people who ordered the same way (whether they are in UK, Greece, Netherlands etc).
Specifically, I bought the Mi4 a year ago for a little over $200, i.e. less than half the cost of other flagship phones with comparable (or sometimes less) specs. Naturally, it came full of bloatware/spywhere, on a Xiaomi you can actually open a browser, download a clean image from the manufacturer website, restart and have it clean-install just like that, not even need of a PC. Oh, and it has dual-boot, keeping a "clean" OS version in case you run into trouble.
Overall it blows away my previous Samsung (which still cost more than the Xiaomi last year, even second hand!!) in every aspect, including - believe it or not - manufacturer support, since you have immediate access to each (of the frequent) new version of the OS for what it seems like at least some years after release of a Xiaomi phone. It is an amazing value and I don't think I'll ever spend much more than $200 on a phone again...
Caveat: Chinese resellers will install spyware (not only on Xiaomi), so clean install once you get a phone!