Mobile phone charges should be on the list. Try getting a fair deal without a "sponsored" phone or getting support for a phone you haven't purchased with your plan. This can only be price fixing. Maybe there's no direct proof (yet) of phone companies negotiating about these, but it's sure odd that none of the big companies offer competitive no-sponsored-handset deals.
The same applies to roaming charges. The companies bill each other for those and only the difference actually gets paid. In reality, this means that most cell phone companies charge a lot for roaming charges but they never get to pay those to others than themselves. They are only needed to pay for interlinking to other providers, but the cost of these interlinks is way lower than the cost of the on-the-air part of mobile networks.
Lastly, paying by the second or by the amount of calls/texts you make is bogus. It's a data network and either you pay a flat fee, or you pay for the data you push over it. Charging differently because it's a voice or SMS protocol should be forbidden, it's 2013 now. Net Neutrality should be stretched to non-IP services as well. Especially if mobile providers want to block other services that are competing with their own voice or messaging platform. Any ISP, mobile or not should have responsible people that block these kinds of services spend some time with Bubba.
Passengers on flights coming from Willemstad into Amsterdam get checked 100%, because of the lax checks at Willemstad and the proportionally high amount of drug trafficking on this route.
Doing random checks on people not selected because they trigger certain alerts that make them suspicious makes it hard for customs/safety to get bribed and increases the chance the bad guys get caught. Once the bad guys figure out how not to stand out or bribe the guards, it's hard to catch them otherwise. This is why the random selector is better than having people do the random part of the selection. You want to check the poor African guy travelling alone to a rich country with a stop of one day in central America, because that's suspicious. But that doesn't mean that the mom and pop with a kid coming back from a 2 week holiday in Mexico can't be smuggling in a few Ks of cocaine as well. Having them press the button will make them think twice about the risk and it will probably even have a preventative effect in itself.
True, animated gif is the most widely supported "movie" format if you look at all target platforms. However, there currently is no technology implemented in browsers that will take an animated gif, re-render it into something that can be accelerated by the video card and use that for output. This results in the browser pumping all the frames non-accelerated to the video card. Devices with limited (read, all devices that have more than a few tabs open, or mobile devices) will hit limitations of the hardware pretty fast with this sort of animation.
I happen to have an average of about 200 tabs open on most of my daily use machines. This tends to eat most of the resources that my machine has, regardless of how modern the machine is. If it's an old clunker, it chokes on less and I generally don't make it that far before I have to kill the browser and restart it. It seems impossible for any OS vendor and any "full featured" web browser to just deal with the limitations of the system and keep the application snappy and usable.
Sure, it is way faster if you load just a few pages, but I just don't close tabs I think I might need later. Bookmarks accumulate so fast and searching them is bothersome, let alone cleaning them out. Regardless of my reasons why I do it, I see a lot of people hit the limitations of the model in which speed is achieved by unlimited resource claiming and not by efficient coding, if it comes to web browsers. The reason that mobile is in the picture is because a mobile device is way less powerful and battery life is much more of a concern than for a desktop or AC powered laptop.
I wish they would test "speed" by simultaneously loading 200 tabs of content-rich web pages on a single core system with 512M ram available to the browser and a slow magnetic media drive (5400rpm laptop drive) for storage. In my opinion, it would be a way more realistic test than just loading a single page, keeping everything in RAM and only looking at methods that will bottle neck at CPU/GPU or memory access. I bet that "speed improvements" in the JS engine would suddenly come from very different optimizations than from the current philosophy and that they would greatly benefit "mobile" too.
It's not the language that's the problem but the monolithic page in which you put all the content. Just cut it up into the static bits and the small dynamic bit. Any other language, whether native, bit code or machine code will require reloading if you put all your content in a single file and you change the file. While you're at it, you might as well put different parts of your page in different files, so you can re-use things like a menu bar, styles, headers and footers for other pages.
How about just sending all the tickets out and not excluding anyone "special"? If they had a valid reason to break the law, I'm sure they will be able to explain it to the judge on their day in court, just like everybody else. What makes people on a list more equal than others?
There's a good, measurable, audible reason you want to use low resistance cables for speakers. Speakers have a resonance frequency. When the membrane is pushed/pulled out of the center the membrane will want to move back to the center. Because of the speed it's traveling, it will overshoot that and there's your resonance. To stop that from happening, you'd ideally want the coil that's attached to the membrane to be "shorted out" on the outside. That way, the electrical energy generated by the coil moving over the magnet will be converted in to heat and the resonance will get dampened. Good amplifiers have a "damping rate" that's high. Essentially, that means they are very good at shorting out the speakers to eliminate resonance. The thing is, speakers themselves have a very low impendance, typically 4-8 Ohms. To effectively dampen out those speakers, you'll need a low resistance, way below 1 Ohms. This resistance is for the entire circuit combined, amplifier, speakers and all the connecting terminals in between. Having speaker cables that add a few tenth of an Ohm to this resonance will make your speakers sound "like someone is banging on a cardboard box" for lows and "a bit like a tin can" for highs. This effect is clearly measurable, and audible and has nothing to do with audiophile subjective arguments.
Low resistance cable doesn't mean hellishly expensive by itself. You can get good results by keeping your wires short, using as little interconnects as possible and making sure the resistance at the interconnects is as low as possible. Low resistance is achieved by tightly coupling as much surface area as possible. If you have screw type terminals, make sure to tighten them sufficiently. You usually can get affordable 4mm2 Oxygen Free Copper (OFC) wire for a reasonable price at electronics stores. The wire with the fine strands will remain bendable and in theory will give you "better transients". Since audio frequencies don't really get influenced by that I personally think it's not that important, but having cable that will flex will make it a lot easier to put in place and work with. You could spend fortunes on brand cabling, silver cabling, gold plated silver cabling and whatnot, but for any "normal" application, the 4mm2 copper wire is just fine.
People keep on getting confused by the name of "Firefox OS". It's not an OS in a browser. It's not just a browser with an app store for the plugins/extensions, like Chrome OS either. It's a full featured Linux kernel based operating system. You can probably compare it best to Badoo, Maemo and Android.
Translations have their own copyright. If commercial copyright studios make a translation later, they better not look too much like the 24-hour-after-broadcast fan translations, or they ar violating the copyright of the original fan-translation. However, there is a copyright on the original storyline and script. It just may or may not be that that copyright has a higher status than an "original" translation. The kicker here is that they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Either it's an original work of art and it has it's own copyright, or it's a "dumb" translation of the original and all copyrights on translations are null and void.
I'd like them to ban the use of crude oil and derivative products because it's used to fund terrorism. After all, it is one of the larger contributing resources for several terrorist groups and dictators.
.How long your computer hasn't rebooted isn't the important bit. What is important, that it will be available when you need it to be and that it won't reboot or crash without your explicit permission. Even though I have set my permissions such that MicroSoft should never ever update without my consent, let alone reboot my machines, it has happened on several occasions that they pushed an update without prior warning and rebooted XP computers.
On any critical infrastructure I'd want to have total control over when something happens and what happens then. Some vendor autonomously deciding to reboot my heart/lung controller during a heart transplant will not do. The same applies to (air) traffic control (ILS in San Francisco anyone?), hight voltage control, nuclear power plants and whatnot. Hell, I don't even want them to reboot my music player if I'm listening to it.
I don't mind having to do regular scheduled maintenance in maintenance windows if I know in advance, during the design phase of the platform. That way, I can decide which exact OS will be the most useful and beneficial for the exact purpose I intend it to have. Any rogue OS that decides to reboot "on it's own" will never ever get a place in any important infrastructure I have, no matter how long uptime some dude on a forum achieves on it.
Any down time outside of service windows is a major issue, regular windows are not only a minor nuisance compared to an incident during production hours, they are also "job security" if you look at it. I don't care how long uptime you get. I just don't want any downtime for myself.
They obviously meant all altitudes "normal" clouds appear. Mesosphere is way higher than were normal clouds ever form (the atmosphere) and water (vapour) never gets there by normal weather or climatic influences that we know of. The whole idea is that they have water there they can't explain properly. Their hypothesis is that it's coming from exhaust of rocket engines, but they aren't sure. There is no indication this has anything to do with the prediction that there will be increased cloud cover in the atmosphere due to increased temperatures on the surface of the planet.
Any moment it will pull out a bottle of bleach and a chewing gum paper to make explosives with your stomach acid. It will then commence to make an aeroplane out of your intestines and fly out to bomb your house so it can free it's friends.
Even better, it used to be free for a lifetime if you had your MCSE. Unfortunately, I passed my exams about three weeks after they quit that practice. Now get off my lawn!
I have a 7850 and I get frequent X restarts with the latest binary driver after trying to resize a window that has something accelerated in it happening. Also, (not their fault) I can't use oclhashcat with the latest driver. It seems they have quite a few rough edges left to polish out still.
So you have a four year old card that can be upgraded with a $50 new card and you are complaining it doesn't work with bleeding edge? I'd suggest you buy a new ATI card and enjoy the wonderful world of restarting X when you resize a window. Have you actually checked if the ATI driver works with 3.10 before you started this rant? I wouldn't be surprised if it wouldn't work either.
The EU never was a Union. It has always been a trade treaty and some fools tried to make more out of it. They spent billions and came up with nothing. The countries in the treaty are just way too autonomous and have their own language and culture. Every county is in it for themselves, not for the greater good of the whole, except maybe the Dutch politicians, that don't want to listen to their people and keep pumping money in. Ask any citizen in the EU if they want the EU to have influence on their local legislation and most of them will say no. They just want the money from the EU to subsidizing their economical project, but not the meddling.
Every startup is hiring brocoders now. They want to live in hip city centres where you can get 15 different nationalities of food on every intersection and live your whole life on foot. Introverts are sooooo 2011.
It won't really be a problem if you're not running into security problems. However, if someone finds a way to use the video driver to get SYSTEM or Administrator access to your computer, you'd really want the vendor of said video driver to come with an update. Since MicroSoft is still supporting the OS in terms of security updates, you'd expect the video driver vendor to do the same.
Mind you, just because there's no XP support in the latest beta driver doesn't mean AMD won't fix security flaws if those would arise. It's pure speculation to suggest that something like that might or might not happen. I have a gut feeling that the people at AMD would be smart enough to at least just fix the bug and do a minor version bump if something like that would happen in the period that MicroSoft still supports XP.
As if Apple won't go back to NVidia when they have a more competitive offering. They have been switching back and forth several times since the radeon 7000 was a hot video chip.
Seriously, the amount of torx I've broken/stripped the last 5 years compared to the amount of phillips heads is probably 50:1 and I've stripped a few torx head bolts. Actually, I've broken many more than I've stripped. I guess it comes down to buying quality tools and knowing how to use them. If you get cheap tools and/or apply force in the wrong angle, you will strip anything, regardless of the shape. Phillips head screws only have 4 flat surfaces to apply force on and due to the "point" of the tip of the tool, you tend to wedge your tool out of the head if you don't apply the force exactly at the correct angle. Torx makes it harder to apply force at the wrong angle, it has double the amount of surface for the same diameter on which you can apply force and it has a curved shape, making it harder to let the sharp edges of the tool cut into the head if you're working with small screws. I've probably spent a few thousand hours working on dozens of cars of over 10 brands in the last 5 year. Maybe you need to broaden your sample size to more than one individual vehicle and more than just phillips and torx before you come with such a strong judgement.
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Mobile phone charges should be on the list. Try getting a fair deal without a "sponsored" phone or getting support for a phone you haven't purchased with your plan. This can only be price fixing. Maybe there's no direct proof (yet) of phone companies negotiating about these, but it's sure odd that none of the big companies offer competitive no-sponsored-handset deals.
The same applies to roaming charges. The companies bill each other for those and only the difference actually gets paid. In reality, this means that most cell phone companies charge a lot for roaming charges but they never get to pay those to others than themselves. They are only needed to pay for interlinking to other providers, but the cost of these interlinks is way lower than the cost of the on-the-air part of mobile networks.
Lastly, paying by the second or by the amount of calls/texts you make is bogus. It's a data network and either you pay a flat fee, or you pay for the data you push over it. Charging differently because it's a voice or SMS protocol should be forbidden, it's 2013 now. Net Neutrality should be stretched to non-IP services as well. Especially if mobile providers want to block other services that are competing with their own voice or messaging platform. Any ISP, mobile or not should have responsible people that block these kinds of services spend some time with Bubba.
Passengers on flights coming from Willemstad into Amsterdam get checked 100%, because of the lax checks at Willemstad and the proportionally high amount of drug trafficking on this route.
Doing random checks on people not selected because they trigger certain alerts that make them suspicious makes it hard for customs/safety to get bribed and increases the chance the bad guys get caught. Once the bad guys figure out how not to stand out or bribe the guards, it's hard to catch them otherwise. This is why the random selector is better than having people do the random part of the selection. You want to check the poor African guy travelling alone to a rich country with a stop of one day in central America, because that's suspicious. But that doesn't mean that the mom and pop with a kid coming back from a 2 week holiday in Mexico can't be smuggling in a few Ks of cocaine as well. Having them press the button will make them think twice about the risk and it will probably even have a preventative effect in itself.
Okay, to get through the post filter: Too many humans
True, animated gif is the most widely supported "movie" format if you look at all target platforms. However, there currently is no technology implemented in browsers that will take an animated gif, re-render it into something that can be accelerated by the video card and use that for output. This results in the browser pumping all the frames non-accelerated to the video card. Devices with limited (read, all devices that have more than a few tabs open, or mobile devices) will hit limitations of the hardware pretty fast with this sort of animation.
Try looking into node.js and see all your fears come true.
I happen to have an average of about 200 tabs open on most of my daily use machines. This tends to eat most of the resources that my machine has, regardless of how modern the machine is. If it's an old clunker, it chokes on less and I generally don't make it that far before I have to kill the browser and restart it. It seems impossible for any OS vendor and any "full featured" web browser to just deal with the limitations of the system and keep the application snappy and usable.
Sure, it is way faster if you load just a few pages, but I just don't close tabs I think I might need later. Bookmarks accumulate so fast and searching them is bothersome, let alone cleaning them out. Regardless of my reasons why I do it, I see a lot of people hit the limitations of the model in which speed is achieved by unlimited resource claiming and not by efficient coding, if it comes to web browsers. The reason that mobile is in the picture is because a mobile device is way less powerful and battery life is much more of a concern than for a desktop or AC powered laptop.
I wish they would test "speed" by simultaneously loading 200 tabs of content-rich web pages on a single core system with 512M ram available to the browser and a slow magnetic media drive (5400rpm laptop drive) for storage. In my opinion, it would be a way more realistic test than just loading a single page, keeping everything in RAM and only looking at methods that will bottle neck at CPU/GPU or memory access. I bet that "speed improvements" in the JS engine would suddenly come from very different optimizations than from the current philosophy and that they would greatly benefit "mobile" too.
It's not the language that's the problem but the monolithic page in which you put all the content. Just cut it up into the static bits and the small dynamic bit. Any other language, whether native, bit code or machine code will require reloading if you put all your content in a single file and you change the file. While you're at it, you might as well put different parts of your page in different files, so you can re-use things like a menu bar, styles, headers and footers for other pages.
How about just sending all the tickets out and not excluding anyone "special"? If they had a valid reason to break the law, I'm sure they will be able to explain it to the judge on their day in court, just like everybody else. What makes people on a list more equal than others?
There's a good, measurable, audible reason you want to use low resistance cables for speakers. Speakers have a resonance frequency. When the membrane is pushed/pulled out of the center the membrane will want to move back to the center. Because of the speed it's traveling, it will overshoot that and there's your resonance. To stop that from happening, you'd ideally want the coil that's attached to the membrane to be "shorted out" on the outside. That way, the electrical energy generated by the coil moving over the magnet will be converted in to heat and the resonance will get dampened. Good amplifiers have a "damping rate" that's high. Essentially, that means they are very good at shorting out the speakers to eliminate resonance. The thing is, speakers themselves have a very low impendance, typically 4-8 Ohms. To effectively dampen out those speakers, you'll need a low resistance, way below 1 Ohms. This resistance is for the entire circuit combined, amplifier, speakers and all the connecting terminals in between. Having speaker cables that add a few tenth of an Ohm to this resonance will make your speakers sound "like someone is banging on a cardboard box" for lows and "a bit like a tin can" for highs. This effect is clearly measurable, and audible and has nothing to do with audiophile subjective arguments.
Low resistance cable doesn't mean hellishly expensive by itself. You can get good results by keeping your wires short, using as little interconnects as possible and making sure the resistance at the interconnects is as low as possible. Low resistance is achieved by tightly coupling as much surface area as possible. If you have screw type terminals, make sure to tighten them sufficiently. You usually can get affordable 4mm2 Oxygen Free Copper (OFC) wire for a reasonable price at electronics stores. The wire with the fine strands will remain bendable and in theory will give you "better transients". Since audio frequencies don't really get influenced by that I personally think it's not that important, but having cable that will flex will make it a lot easier to put in place and work with. You could spend fortunes on brand cabling, silver cabling, gold plated silver cabling and whatnot, but for any "normal" application, the 4mm2 copper wire is just fine.
People keep on getting confused by the name of "Firefox OS". It's not an OS in a browser. It's not just a browser with an app store for the plugins/extensions, like Chrome OS either. It's a full featured Linux kernel based operating system. You can probably compare it best to Badoo, Maemo and Android.
Translations have their own copyright. If commercial copyright studios make a translation later, they better not look too much like the 24-hour-after-broadcast fan translations, or they ar violating the copyright of the original fan-translation. However, there is a copyright on the original storyline and script. It just may or may not be that that copyright has a higher status than an "original" translation. The kicker here is that they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Either it's an original work of art and it has it's own copyright, or it's a "dumb" translation of the original and all copyrights on translations are null and void.
I'd like them to ban the use of crude oil and derivative products because it's used to fund terrorism. After all, it is one of the larger contributing resources for several terrorist groups and dictators.
.How long your computer hasn't rebooted isn't the important bit. What is important, that it will be available when you need it to be and that it won't reboot or crash without your explicit permission. Even though I have set my permissions such that MicroSoft should never ever update without my consent, let alone reboot my machines, it has happened on several occasions that they pushed an update without prior warning and rebooted XP computers.
On any critical infrastructure I'd want to have total control over when something happens and what happens then. Some vendor autonomously deciding to reboot my heart/lung controller during a heart transplant will not do. The same applies to (air) traffic control (ILS in San Francisco anyone?), hight voltage control, nuclear power plants and whatnot. Hell, I don't even want them to reboot my music player if I'm listening to it.
I don't mind having to do regular scheduled maintenance in maintenance windows if I know in advance, during the design phase of the platform. That way, I can decide which exact OS will be the most useful and beneficial for the exact purpose I intend it to have. Any rogue OS that decides to reboot "on it's own" will never ever get a place in any important infrastructure I have, no matter how long uptime some dude on a forum achieves on it.
Any down time outside of service windows is a major issue, regular windows are not only a minor nuisance compared to an incident during production hours, they are also "job security" if you look at it. I don't care how long uptime you get. I just don't want any downtime for myself.
They obviously meant all altitudes "normal" clouds appear. Mesosphere is way higher than were normal clouds ever form (the atmosphere) and water (vapour) never gets there by normal weather or climatic influences that we know of. The whole idea is that they have water there they can't explain properly. Their hypothesis is that it's coming from exhaust of rocket engines, but they aren't sure. There is no indication this has anything to do with the prediction that there will be increased cloud cover in the atmosphere due to increased temperatures on the surface of the planet.
Any moment it will pull out a bottle of bleach and a chewing gum paper to make explosives with your stomach acid. It will then commence to make an aeroplane out of your intestines and fly out to bomb your house so it can free it's friends.
Even better, it used to be free for a lifetime if you had your MCSE. Unfortunately, I passed my exams about three weeks after they quit that practice. Now get off my lawn!
I have a 7850 and I get frequent X restarts with the latest binary driver after trying to resize a window that has something accelerated in it happening. Also, (not their fault) I can't use oclhashcat with the latest driver. It seems they have quite a few rough edges left to polish out still.
So you have a four year old card that can be upgraded with a $50 new card and you are complaining it doesn't work with bleeding edge? I'd suggest you buy a new ATI card and enjoy the wonderful world of restarting X when you resize a window. Have you actually checked if the ATI driver works with 3.10 before you started this rant? I wouldn't be surprised if it wouldn't work either.
The EU never was a Union. It has always been a trade treaty and some fools tried to make more out of it. They spent billions and came up with nothing. The countries in the treaty are just way too autonomous and have their own language and culture. Every county is in it for themselves, not for the greater good of the whole, except maybe the Dutch politicians, that don't want to listen to their people and keep pumping money in. Ask any citizen in the EU if they want the EU to have influence on their local legislation and most of them will say no. They just want the money from the EU to subsidizing their economical project, but not the meddling.
Every startup is hiring brocoders now. They want to live in hip city centres where you can get 15 different nationalities of food on every intersection and live your whole life on foot. Introverts are sooooo 2011.
It won't really be a problem if you're not running into security problems. However, if someone finds a way to use the video driver to get SYSTEM or Administrator access to your computer, you'd really want the vendor of said video driver to come with an update. Since MicroSoft is still supporting the OS in terms of security updates, you'd expect the video driver vendor to do the same.
Mind you, just because there's no XP support in the latest beta driver doesn't mean AMD won't fix security flaws if those would arise. It's pure speculation to suggest that something like that might or might not happen. I have a gut feeling that the people at AMD would be smart enough to at least just fix the bug and do a minor version bump if something like that would happen in the period that MicroSoft still supports XP.
As if Apple won't go back to NVidia when they have a more competitive offering. They have been switching back and forth several times since the radeon 7000 was a hot video chip.
Seriously, the amount of torx I've broken/stripped the last 5 years compared to the amount of phillips heads is probably 50:1 and I've stripped a few torx head bolts. Actually, I've broken many more than I've stripped. I guess it comes down to buying quality tools and knowing how to use them. If you get cheap tools and/or apply force in the wrong angle, you will strip anything, regardless of the shape. Phillips head screws only have 4 flat surfaces to apply force on and due to the "point" of the tip of the tool, you tend to wedge your tool out of the head if you don't apply the force exactly at the correct angle. Torx makes it harder to apply force at the wrong angle, it has double the amount of surface for the same diameter on which you can apply force and it has a curved shape, making it harder to let the sharp edges of the tool cut into the head if you're working with small screws. I've probably spent a few thousand hours working on dozens of cars of over 10 brands in the last 5 year. Maybe you need to broaden your sample size to more than one individual vehicle and more than just phillips and torx before you come with such a strong judgement.
I just looked it up, we pay US $10.11 per gallon here in the Netherlands.
Hell no! is two words.