Somehow Android phone manufacturers have managed this for years (with even more sensors) with LARGER batteries, and maintaining water resistance all while not eliminating the headphone jack.
This is all about generating new earbud+headphone sales.
But.. I've had friends who have worked at Worst Buy, as has my brother, and they all have told me that they hold regular meetings (often all-hands-on at 5:00am or 6:00am o.O - they're as bad as Sprawl*Mart reputedly is) and although they're not on commission the departments do have sales quotas. Presumably details such as feedback from customers is shared at such meetings and is(??? or should be!) shared higher up the food chain when they identify that #itemIdenticalToAmazonItemExceptForSKU) sales numbers are down, and maybe they should consider matching the price?
The folks on the floor represent the face of the company - if they are not communicating feedback, complaints, etc. back to corporate they need to be fired (from a cannon, into the Sun) or the process needs to be fixed. Worst Buy has suffered in recent years and the refusal to match Amazon, Newegg, etc. may be part of the reason why. Their refusal to respond can result in their implosion.
I try to shop brick & mortar but am continually disappointed by the lack of selection, or brick & mortar stores' refusal to stock anything but the stripped-down or low-to-lower-midrange items in product lines. I bought my Ninja blender online because brick and mortars don't stock the SKU I wanted (since accessories are hard to find I wanted the most complete sku - oh and Ninja > Blendtec in quality btw, which surprised me), and I bought precision screwdrivers off Amazon because Sears doesn't offer any decent sets any more, nor do any of the other tool/hardware store chains, and I bought my Klipsch Reference-series speakers online from an authorised dealer through amazon because local stores (including mom & pop and Worst Buy's "Mangolia) don't stock anything higher end than the crappy Synergy line. I'm doing the same with Sennheiser headphones, since Worst Buy stocks only the bottom-end models. Same with the RoG Swift monitor - I bought my first through Amazon since Best Buy doesn't stock it (they'll happily "ship to store" but f*** that), and will be buying the second and third through Amazon as well. Same thing with printers- Worst Buy, Staples, etc. all happily shove the crappy inkjet and low-end laser printers, but a good workgroup printer is unobtainable through them. So, I ordered a Samsung workgroup printer ~5 years ago and had it shipped to my door.... no having to even borrow or rent a truck to get it home!
I want to shop brick & mortar... but their unwillingness to adapt is forcing me to do most of my shopping through their worst enemy.
Me, too. I have a CLX-6220FX and really like it. I have been thinking of upgrading to a faster and more capable model (although it could be argued that the one I already have is overkill for a home office) but Samsung has been letting their printer division languish lately, at least where workgroup printers are concerned. I don't care too much for HP since Carly's ruining everything that made HP great (make HP great again?;)) so I'll probably look at Xerox (I've previously had a 6180DN) or Ricoh.
What I like about my Samsung:
* scan to email, USB, network (SMB/CIFS or FTP - I wish it could do nfs) * Incoming fax forwarding to email * Easy to maintain
The reason I want to upgrade is that the menu is very clunky and entering email addresses for scans is a bit of a pain... and multi-page scans are better done on workgroup units which have hard drives.
That's a lot harder to get away with because the internal physical damage would be obvious. The damage resulting from ESD-scale voltages are generally not apparent during a visual inspection so the root cause is harder to trace as to repair the unit you would have to break up the circuit so you can test individual components with a multimeter, or simply chuck the whole PCB and replace it with a new one (and hope nothing else was fried).
The mention of the airliner issue brought something to mind: how long before airlines yank USB chargers from aircraft once some fuckwit decides it'll be a great joke to plug one of these into an arliner's USB charger? >_<
And, some of the airplanes we fly in today are made of cloth, like fuselages were back in ~1910-~1935.
However they aren't direct comparisons. The paper used in those fuselages back then were stiffened using a dope not entirely dissimilar to a thick shellac. Today we do the same, only we use epoxy-resins and layer the cloth.
That 3d printing wasn't up to task back in the '70s or even just ten years ago doesn't mean that laser-sintered 3D-printed metals today are not up to task.
Kind of like how emission controls choked performance out of cars from 1973 through 1987 or so, such that some of today's econoboxes are quicker and faster than real sportscars from the era where we hadn't learned to have good power AND clean exhaust. I wouldn't gut a cat in a new Z06 Corvette, but that's one of the first things I'd do in a C4 or L83 or L98-equipped C4 Corvette to get more power out of it (but more realistically I'd change out the engine for an LS9 or new LT4, or I'd put in high-flow/high-surface-area Random cats on a ported&extrude-honed, turbo/supercharged and tuned L98).
Ah yes, crippling the iPhone further with the removal of the highly standardised headphone jack, requiring a pricey and fragile, easy-to-lose, bulky adapter. They're seemingly trying to make the iPhone as useful as a pet rock, and similarly overpriced.
Why is Apple doing this, really? The reason isn't waterproofing (both Samsung and Sony meet at least IP68 ratings, and for some models, even Milspec 810G) without sacking the headphone jack. It isn't technology-related, since both Sony and Samsung fit far more features into less space - again, without sacking the headphone jack.
It's about having yet another expensive-yet-fragile-and-easy-to-lose mandatory accessory, or to create a sense vendor lock-in (because they'll be telling their gullible customers "by the way we make some premium headphones to match our pet rock") so they can sell more expensive yet inferior and terrible sounding headphones by Beats, which literally include weights to lend the illusion of high quality heavy magnets in the drivers. See:
I'm happy with my Samsung S7 Edge, thanks - the iPhone 4 was my last; after seeing the direction it was going with the 4s and 5 I made the switch back to Samsung phones (my phone prior to the iPhone 3GS was a Samsung) and am sticking with them.
But.. even simpler: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best, and in the case of headphone jacks, that's pretty much true; both the jacks and plugs are awful rugged. (now the PCB mounting is another matter, but that's just due to poor implementation in some cases, and not poor design)
...with inferior sound quality, having to charge additional devices (with more li-ion cells the airlines are starting to really hate and possible restrictions during ascent/descent), etc.
Do I REALLY need it? no. But... I am upgrading from my Gear S2 to a Gear S3 Frontier because of the integrated GPS so when I go inline skating, hiking, jogging, etc. I can leave my S7 Edge at home and no longer have to worry about smashing it when an asshole driver cuts me off causing me to have to ditch, or when climbing rocks, etc.
Why use GPS? Accountability; I track my workout activities and on days when I feel like "I've had enough" and see I've only gone four miles... nope, not quitting time yet, keep my ass moving!:)
BTW the Apple Watch sucks, but it's good to see they're starting to copy Samsung in the watch arena, too. Why stop at phones?:D
About six weeks ago I woke up to a fire started by a lithium-ion battery. It was pure luck I woke up because I had disconnected the smoke detector while seasoning cast iron cookware the evening before and hadn't yet reconnected it.
It was a cheap chinese LED camping lantern with an integrated USB charger. I had it charging and went to bed. I woke up and put the fire out, and put the hot melty charred items in the freshly-seasoned cast iron skillet and let it cool off. Once it was cool enough I started disassembling what was left of the 18650 cell - it turns out that it was the typical problem - it was a counterfeit -"remanufactured" battery where the protective circuit was removed, a like-sized metal disc with no circuitry was put in its place and it was re-wrapped with a new shrink label. So, if the integral charger was relying on a protected battery to cut off charging, and the battery had no actual protection circuit there was nothing to make it stop charging so it just kept heating up until it went into thermal runaway.
Too bad because it was otherwise an excellent camping lantern in terms of brightness and light spread but it was overall cheaply made. In fact when I received it I had to re-solder the leads to the LED strips because they were oringally connected with obviously too-cold solder, and the switch was misaligned with the case - and no there was no external damage to the packaging and there were no signs that it had been previously unpackaged.:-(
Just what we need - pizzas delivered under a nice cooling fan! Did Dominoes decide their pizzas didn't suck enough - that they had to lower the bar further in their race against Pizza Hut for bragging rights for the "worst pizza ever?"
Speakers will always be analog so the easy workaround would be to source "digital speakers" that utilise a single high quality full-range driver, snip the leads to the driver and hook up a LOC and record the analog level coming out of the LOC. There will always be an "analog hole" which can be used to bypass any and all DRM.
> How does this affect anyone at all? I don't know anyone who has or needs anywhere close to this amount if storage.
Whether you realize it or not, you probably use multi-petabyte storage arrays daily or have some running nearby without even realizing it. Walk into a large modern casino with thousands of cameras following your every move, there is probably a multi-petabyte SAN with video footage of you. Do you use Bank of America, Citicorp, etc? You're accessing data that are stored on SANs that are many petabytes in size. Do you have a VPS with a larger hosting company? Chances are it's on a half-petabyte or larger SAN.
This will be a huge breakthrough - for data centers they will pay for themselves in energy savings pretty quickly, and also will allow for installation of physically-smaller SANs, with buildouts only being needed as storage bandwidth is saturated.
Plus, Windows' install footprint could be approaching a terabyte in a decade. I'm joking but think it is plausible that this may actually come true. >_>
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Well on the Galaxy S4 you could wear gloves and still be able to use the phone. :)
Try sling.. I'm going to be trying it out as the end of my Comcrap "contract" comes up soon. If Sling is as good as they claim I'm cutting the cord. :D
Somehow Android phone manufacturers have managed this for years (with even more sensors) with LARGER batteries, and maintaining water resistance all while not eliminating the headphone jack.
This is all about generating new earbud+headphone sales.
Don't forget about the iPhone 4 fires, the iPhone 5c fires, iPhone 6 fires... and antennagate and bendgate :D
But.. I've had friends who have worked at Worst Buy, as has my brother, and they all have told me that they hold regular meetings (often all-hands-on at 5:00am or 6:00am o.O - they're as bad as Sprawl*Mart reputedly is) and although they're not on commission the departments do have sales quotas. Presumably details such as feedback from customers is shared at such meetings and is(??? or should be!) shared higher up the food chain when they identify that #itemIdenticalToAmazonItemExceptForSKU) sales numbers are down, and maybe they should consider matching the price?
The folks on the floor represent the face of the company - if they are not communicating feedback, complaints, etc. back to corporate they need to be fired (from a cannon, into the Sun) or the process needs to be fixed. Worst Buy has suffered in recent years and the refusal to match Amazon, Newegg, etc. may be part of the reason why. Their refusal to respond can result in their implosion.
I try to shop brick & mortar but am continually disappointed by the lack of selection, or brick & mortar stores' refusal to stock anything but the stripped-down or low-to-lower-midrange items in product lines. I bought my Ninja blender online because brick and mortars don't stock the SKU I wanted (since accessories are hard to find I wanted the most complete sku - oh and Ninja > Blendtec in quality btw, which surprised me), and I bought precision screwdrivers off Amazon because Sears doesn't offer any decent sets any more, nor do any of the other tool/hardware store chains, and I bought my Klipsch Reference-series speakers online from an authorised dealer through amazon because local stores (including mom & pop and Worst Buy's "Mangolia) don't stock anything higher end than the crappy Synergy line. I'm doing the same with Sennheiser headphones, since Worst Buy stocks only the bottom-end models. Same with the RoG Swift monitor - I bought my first through Amazon since Best Buy doesn't stock it (they'll happily "ship to store" but f*** that), and will be buying the second and third through Amazon as well. Same thing with printers- Worst Buy, Staples, etc. all happily shove the crappy inkjet and low-end laser printers, but a good workgroup printer is unobtainable through them. So, I ordered a Samsung workgroup printer ~5 years ago and had it shipped to my door.... no having to even borrow or rent a truck to get it home!
I want to shop brick & mortar... but their unwillingness to adapt is forcing me to do most of my shopping through their worst enemy.
Me, too. I have a CLX-6220FX and really like it. I have been thinking of upgrading to a faster and more capable model (although it could be argued that the one I already have is overkill for a home office) but Samsung has been letting their printer division languish lately, at least where workgroup printers are concerned. I don't care too much for HP since Carly's ruining everything that made HP great (make HP great again? ;)) so I'll probably look at Xerox (I've previously had a 6180DN) or Ricoh.
What I like about my Samsung:
* scan to email, USB, network (SMB/CIFS or FTP - I wish it could do nfs)
* Incoming fax forwarding to email
* Easy to maintain
The reason I want to upgrade is that the menu is very clunky and entering email addresses for scans is a bit of a pain... and multi-page scans are better done on workgroup units which have hard drives.
in which case you inform them "OK then I'll buy the same unit as model XYZ-65-99 from $vendor instead. Thank you for your time."
After they hear that enough times and units sold drops they will either listen or fold.
That's a lot harder to get away with because the internal physical damage would be obvious. The damage resulting from ESD-scale voltages are generally not apparent during a visual inspection so the root cause is harder to trace as to repair the unit you would have to break up the circuit so you can test individual components with a multimeter, or simply chuck the whole PCB and replace it with a new one (and hope nothing else was fried).
> the breaker will blow from the backfed voltage, but all the expensive devices attached will be smoked.
Breakers do not trip based on voltage, but on total power (meaning high current in this case) heating up a bar in the breaker.
If what you imagined would work, we would not need surge suppressors or lightning arrestors.
The mention of the airliner issue brought something to mind: how long before airlines yank USB chargers from aircraft once some fuckwit decides it'll be a great joke to plug one of these into an arliner's USB charger? >_<
Enjoy your high-latency low-bitrate limited-bandwidth bluetooth audio, and don't complain when the audio falls out of sync with video. :-p
And, some of the airplanes we fly in today are made of cloth, like fuselages were back in ~1910-~1935.
However they aren't direct comparisons. The paper used in those fuselages back then were stiffened using a dope not entirely dissimilar to a thick shellac. Today we do the same, only we use epoxy-resins and layer the cloth.
That 3d printing wasn't up to task back in the '70s or even just ten years ago doesn't mean that laser-sintered 3D-printed metals today are not up to task.
Kind of like how emission controls choked performance out of cars from 1973 through 1987 or so, such that some of today's econoboxes are quicker and faster than real sportscars from the era where we hadn't learned to have good power AND clean exhaust. I wouldn't gut a cat in a new Z06 Corvette, but that's one of the first things I'd do in a C4 or L83 or L98-equipped C4 Corvette to get more power out of it (but more realistically I'd change out the engine for an LS9 or new LT4, or I'd put in high-flow/high-surface-area Random cats on a ported&extrude-honed, turbo/supercharged and tuned L98).
Ah yes, crippling the iPhone further with the removal of the highly standardised headphone jack, requiring a pricey and fragile, easy-to-lose, bulky adapter. They're seemingly trying to make the iPhone as useful as a pet rock, and similarly overpriced.
Why is Apple doing this, really? The reason isn't waterproofing (both Samsung and Sony meet at least IP68 ratings, and for some models, even Milspec 810G) without sacking the headphone jack. It isn't technology-related, since both Sony and Samsung fit far more features into less space - again, without sacking the headphone jack.
It's about having yet another expensive-yet-fragile-and-easy-to-lose mandatory accessory, or to create a sense vendor lock-in (because they'll be telling their gullible customers "by the way we make some premium headphones to match our pet rock") so they can sell more expensive yet inferior and terrible sounding headphones by Beats, which literally include weights to lend the illusion of high quality heavy magnets in the drivers. See:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
http://bgr.com/2015/06/19/beat...
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
I'm happy with my Samsung S7 Edge, thanks - the iPhone 4 was my last; after seeing the direction it was going with the 4s and 5 I made the switch back to Samsung phones (my phone prior to the iPhone 3GS was a Samsung) and am sticking with them.
But.. even simpler: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best, and in the case of headphone jacks, that's pretty much true; both the jacks and plugs are awful rugged. (now the PCB mounting is another matter, but that's just due to poor implementation in some cases, and not poor design)
...with inferior sound quality, having to charge additional devices (with more li-ion cells the airlines are starting to really hate and possible restrictions during ascent/descent), etc.
I can't wait until we get a tacos truck on every corner. I hope Trump's paid shill is right on that one. :D
> Not me. I don't need it. Do you? Really?
Do I REALLY need it?
no.
But... I am upgrading from my Gear S2 to a Gear S3 Frontier because of the integrated GPS so when I go inline skating, hiking, jogging, etc. I can leave my S7 Edge at home and no longer have to worry about smashing it when an asshole driver cuts me off causing me to have to ditch, or when climbing rocks, etc.
Why use GPS? Accountability; I track my workout activities and on days when I feel like "I've had enough" and see I've only gone four miles... nope, not quitting time yet, keep my ass moving! :)
BTW the Apple Watch sucks, but it's good to see they're starting to copy Samsung in the watch arena, too. Why stop at phones? :D
About six weeks ago I woke up to a fire started by a lithium-ion battery. It was pure luck I woke up because I had disconnected the smoke detector while seasoning cast iron cookware the evening before and hadn't yet reconnected it.
It was a cheap chinese LED camping lantern with an integrated USB charger. I had it charging and went to bed. I woke up and put the fire out, and put the hot melty charred items in the freshly-seasoned cast iron skillet and let it cool off. Once it was cool enough I started disassembling what was left of the 18650 cell - it turns out that it was the typical problem - it was a counterfeit -"remanufactured" battery where the protective circuit was removed, a like-sized metal disc with no circuitry was put in its place and it was re-wrapped with a new shrink label. So, if the integral charger was relying on a protected battery to cut off charging, and the battery had no actual protection circuit there was nothing to make it stop charging so it just kept heating up until it went into thermal runaway.
Too bad because it was otherwise an excellent camping lantern in terms of brightness and light spread but it was overall cheaply made. In fact when I received it I had to re-solder the leads to the LED strips because they were oringally connected with obviously too-cold solder, and the switch was misaligned with the case - and no there was no external damage to the packaging and there were no signs that it had been previously unpackaged. :-(
> Are you a fucking moron?
I can read. Apparently you cannot. AC addressed your idiotic response already. Read the AC's response to your brain spasm.
Just what we need - pizzas delivered under a nice cooling fan! Did Dominoes decide their pizzas didn't suck enough - that they had to lower the bar further in their race against Pizza Hut for bragging rights for the "worst pizza ever?"
Your point?
Speakers will always be analog so the easy workaround would be to source "digital speakers" that utilise a single high quality full-range driver, snip the leads to the driver and hook up a LOC and record the analog level coming out of the LOC. There will always be an "analog hole" which can be used to bypass any and all DRM.
> How does this affect anyone at all? I don't know anyone who has or needs anywhere close to this amount if storage.
Whether you realize it or not, you probably use multi-petabyte storage arrays daily or have some running nearby without even realizing it.
Walk into a large modern casino with thousands of cameras following your every move, there is probably a multi-petabyte SAN with video footage of you.
Do you use Bank of America, Citicorp, etc? You're accessing data that are stored on SANs that are many petabytes in size.
Do you have a VPS with a larger hosting company? Chances are it's on a half-petabyte or larger SAN.
This will be a huge breakthrough - for data centers they will pay for themselves in energy savings pretty quickly, and also will allow for installation of physically-smaller SANs, with buildouts only being needed as storage bandwidth is saturated.
Plus, Windows' install footprint could be approaching a terabyte in a decade. I'm joking but think it is plausible that this may actually come true. >_>
Both remaining MSIE users will never notice the difference.
I'll say it.
You're an idiot, and a knee-jerk blowhard reactionist.
I'd even wager you think Trump would be a better president than Hillary, because that's how stupid you come across.