Posts by Ubermik

How the US attacked Huawei: Former CEO of DocuSign and Ariba turned diplomat Keith Krach tells his tale

Yeah the absolute LAST thing the US wants is someone spying on their citizens that isnt them or israel lol

Anyone still think the intel "vulnerabilities" are anything but a deliberate back door to spy on governments and individuals that ordinary people stumbled across?

I wouldnt be surprised if Huaweis REAL crime was actually making networking equipment that DIDNT have a back door built in, or that it was merely that they had the "audacity" to outsell Apple phones and were set to outsell US companies in the 5g arena, but most probably a bit from A and a bit from B

AMD scores 200,000 cores worth of secret silicon at new Australian supercomputer

Re: Poor old Intel.....

Which really just showed that they could ALREADY have been offering customers better CPUs for the same or less money but CHOSE to rip them off instead purely because they could....

You know, like they have bee doing with the 4 core cap on desktop CPUs for almost a decade, then the moment some competition comes along they "magically" discover how to have 6, 8 and then 10 cores on the exact same node

Go figure

Re: Poor old Intel.....

If the hype is true then the next iteration cores also beat intel on a per core performance too, so (assuming its true) intel would probably actually need 140 ish cores just to pull even this time around

Its like kicking a dog when its down because you just backed your car over it 5 times after dropping it onto concrete from an 8th floor balcony (bad doggy)

I am expecting intel enterprise execs to be found on the client list for a seedy dungeon catering for the excesses of masochists :)

Poor old Intel.....

AMD seems to be snapping up a huge share of the huge compute market over the last few years

Does intel even have silicon that comes close to the ROME CPUs yet? As the next gen is apparently more power efficient with around a 20% IPC gain and much lower latency

Intel could take half a decade to catch up and thats assuming they even can catch up if AMD keeps having such large leaps with each generation

If I recall, 1 64 core Rome CPU wipes the floor with a dual socket top silicon intel offering whilst also being about half the price and taking MUCH less power

In another couple of years the remaining intel customers are likely to look like people who were still clinging to their Atari STs in 2010 claiming they were still superior to anything the PC had to offer for gaming lol

"For those OCD sufferers who would freak out if their CPU didnt match the "intel inside" sticker on the case there are intel CPUs,,,, for everyone else there is AMD :)"

Video encoders using Huawei chips have backdoors and bad bugs – and Chinese giant says it's not to blame

Is there a list of manufacturers that use the suspect silicon BTW?

I install CCTV but to be honest have never really paid much attention to the actual silicon used plus much of it has heatsinks covering them anyway

The thing is, everyone makes such a huge fuss about it when "foreigners" do it, but who honestly thinks all of the Intel vulnerabilities were "discovered" rather than being put there deliberately for NSA, CIA etc to use to spy on US citizens and foreign powers?

Rather than claiming people "found" them I think its far more accurate to say they were EXPOSED, and intel moving chip manufacturing to Israel is on a par with asking a known child molester to watch your kids for a month while you are out of town lol

Wait a while and I will bet even ARM has them for MI6 to exploit

I can 'proceed without you', judge tells Julian Assange after courtroom outburst

The inversion of democracy

In any reasonable scenario someone exposing actual mass murder by an elected government committed based on outright lies SHOULD have been rewarded and heralded

But when the same criminals it exposes are the ONLY arbiters of "justice" you get this instead

Get the smell out of here! Gaming tournament bans players who raise a literal stink

I still think the BIGGEST stink so far is them booting out people for supporting Nepal and Taiwan's independence by a country mile in gaming tournaments which barely ANY tech publications have the plums to even talk about...…..

Why should the UK pensions watchdog be able to spy on your internet activities? Same reason as the Environment Agency and many more

Low hanging fruit

I think you can pretty much guarantee that rather than targeting corporate fraudsters terorrists and the like (who the politicians probably rub shoulders with anyway) they will use the powers to target ordinary people for trivial things just to make it look like they are doing SOMETHING and so they can ask for more money to carry on doing a mediocre at best job

If youre rich enough this wont affect you, but if youre not rich you should be VERY worried about it

Google productises its own not-a-VPN secure remote access tool

Google doing this?

Wouldnt that be like letting a child molester baby sit for you?

Remember that clinical trial, promoted by President Trump, of a possible COVID-19 cure? So, so, so many questions...

What utter fake news nonsense, you need to do MUCH better.....

The wife of the man who died from eating fish tank cleaner said EXACTLY who gave them the idea to eat it and it was NOT trump

He also didnt initiate the trials for the drug regime, it wasnt HIS paper, he merely pointed out that there was "something" that "might" work for covid, which absolutely ANYONE in power would have mentioned to try and avoid panic

The fact it didnt work out wasnt HIS fault, and its probably not going to be anything like the last drug treatment regime that is both tried AND fails miserably, thats kind of how science works, often you go through a 1000 failures before you get success

I am very disappointed with this DELIBERATELY misleading sack of utter journalistic gutter trash and lies, you should be ashamed of yourselves publishing this tripe

IBM's outgoing boss Rometty awarded $20m+ in 2019 for growing revenue 0.1%

Re: Adding insult to injury

I think cultural Marxism might be relevant if people suspect she wasnt the BEST choice, but she was the FEMALE choice, because "wammen" kind of thing

As cultural Marxism (amongst other things) dictates men and women are IDENTICAL, with NO differences at all and that everyone is just as good as everyone else (its ANOTHER way they have tried to sneak communism through the back door like socialism was) and its being taught like a religion in ALL major universities across the globe

So things will only get worse as more of these brainwashed snowflakes get into business and government

An ideology that claims ALL men are mysoginists and rape apologists, that the ONLY evil people on earth are first white MEN specifically closely followed by white women, and that between them those "white people" subjugate everyone else

Sounds insane? Seriously, check out places like Harvard and the race related courses they run, some of which are COMPULSORY in some universities in order to get ANY degree, even if its a technical discipline like physics or engineering

More companies are just ignoring the BEST employee for positions and are looking to the most NON MALE, NON white, non hetrosexual, non able bodied person they can to be able to tick as many "woke" boxes as possible, often regretting it when they see the work product, but then being too scared to do anything

Because a person who supports such an ideology would ONLY assume its their race, gender or disability that led to their replacement and that WHITE people were behind it, then sue

Ignoring the fact that those are ALSO why they even got a job that was above their level of expertise in the first place, ahh selective cognition at its finest :)

But still companies do it more and more because of social pressure

Yet despite it being so widespread and ALREADY affecting laws and policies people seem blissfully unaware or just too apathetic or scared of a backlash to even discuss it never mind oppose it

So much for diversity hires then I guess lol, maybe now they can shine again :)

This kind of tweaks my "gggrrrrr" bone tbh (its right next to the funny bone, but its just grumpy lol)

Politically we have social political ideologies dumbed down so much its laughable, of all the literally 1000s of choices and nuances its presented to the "peasants" who vote as merely a choice between COMMUNISM and wholly unregulated capitalism,, Niether is a workable ideology

One enslaves the workers under the government, the other just gradually creeps back inch by inch to the days of workhouses and feudal lords "owning" the peasants who live on their land

Time and time again we see companies either breaking even or improving slightly in often saturated markets where any real growth is nearly impossible without a disruptive technology nobody else has

Despite this we often see companies telling the 99% of its employees who ACTUALLY earn them the money with their work being told "its a lean year, we cant afford pay rises" right before giving their directors and top executives HUGE payrises and bumps in their perks

I personally think we need a law that dictates if ANYONE gets a payrise or a perk that EVERYONE should get the exact same raises AND perks based on annual salary/wages

So Instead of giving a director a 1 million pound bonus and nobody else ANYTHING that "bonus" fund would be EVENLY distributed between EVERYONE from the cleaners to the directors and CEOs. So some might get lets say £20 whilst the lowest might get 20 pence, but thats FAIR, which is the difference

Same with pay rises, either EVERYONE gets the same % of NOBODY gets anything

I've seen and even worked for companies who plead poverty to justify no pay rises, occasionally even pay CUTS during tight times where the top people got HUGE payrises and bonuses despite the revenue stagnating

A simple law would change this in one go, but when the rich and the corporations pretty much OWN every politician via donations and other means (token board memberships being another common method) its no wonder no such rule exists

Obviously I know its NOT as simple as just one "rule of law" a sentence long, but the actual concept itself isnt that complex, ANYONE gets an X% raise then EVERYONE gets that same % raise, and bonuses also treated the same because they ARE part of someones "earnings" however you dress it up

So bonuses and perks (or their monitary value) should ALSO be distributed the same way too

I think most people would be perfectly happy with this approach because its FAIR, admittedly the top 5-10% of earners probably wont unless some of them ARENT selfish sociopaths, but hey, isnt democracy supposed to be based on the MAJORITY?

When did our democracy change to being for the elites?

In the US that was clearly in 1913, but in the UK I kind of hope its not too late and something better than we have but NOT communism, Marxism or any other "ism" which seems to be being pushed for by ALARMING amounts of people nowadays (mostly ignorant university students), however those SAME students WILL potentially end up in power some day

In the E in HPE stands for Eroding revenues... Intel chip shortage, hardware supplies, coronavirus punish IT titan

They have only brought this on themselves

I "USED" to recommend HP to many of my enterprise customers until maybe 10 years ago when I discovered a rather troubling problem with the company

I had a customers server in for a rebuild and found a small incompatibility with one of the changes to the machine, no problem, a new bios will fix it.....or so I thought

This was when I found out that many HPE files including a bios were ONLY available to people who had a current care package active for that device which is just insane

Pretty much EVERY SINGLE OTHER COMPANY has theirs available for free to ANYONE, even with some extremely old legacy products that I doubt many people are still using, BUT, if you are theyre not only available, but are free and available to EVERYONE

When I asked my account manager WHY he gave me the most retarded and moronic exciuse imaginable

"Because a hacker could get, for example a bios file and alter it"

I was like DUH, but for that they would HAVE to actually have the product, if they bought it new they CAN download it and do that anyway, if not they can either open a carepack and THEN get it or find someone who DOES have one and ask them for a copy, so it stops NOTHING

What it DOES mean however, is a LOT of hardware that enthusiasts and users on a budget "might" have used keeping them out of landfills but now cant or wont because of the cost

They have also made quite a few machines with non standard PSU power cables and delivery, but dell has also done that. But you can get adapters from ebay and banggood etc to allow a normal PSU to be used instead, so thats not AS bad in my mind, but certainly doesnt help me to want to recommend a product

So since then I have not just stopped recommending HP products but have gone MILES out of my way to ensure EVERY SINGLE customer of mine knows to avoid HP products like the plague and have shared my views with several other people who work in IT and several have been doing the same for years

Now I am only self employed, so over the last decade or so its only cost HP around 200 servers at most and maybe 1000-1500 desktops and laptops which isnt really much for a company that size

But I also doubt very much I am the only person who took exception to hiding drivers and bios files behind a paywall for ANY equipment, but especially so for older or retired/redundant equipment especially as it tends to massively increase its likelihood of it ending up in a landfill instead of being reused or repurposed and saving the need to add another NEW machine to the market to make up for that

So as far as I am concerned it just serves them right, and if it means they go broke or pull out of the enterprise if the trend continues then perhaps it will be a warning to other manufacturers to show some fucking respect to their customers instead of just viewing them as walking wallets to be raped at every possible chance

So I for one will NOT miss HPE at all if this decline continues and if it did ever happen they folded or pulled out of the enterprise I would be sitting there with my popcorn smiling as I watch then sink beneath the waves of the technological ocean

Hey, you've earned it: Huawei chucks workers a £219m bonus for tackling US blacklist

The thing most people miss is that china isnt really "communist" as well as the fact that unregulated capitalism invariably tries to get as close to slavery and indentured workers as a legal system allows whilst lobbying incessantly to remove laws and restrictions that stop it getting even closer to slavery

Niether full blown communism or unregulated and unrestricted capitalism are good for a society, the "best" choice is NEVER one of the extremes for ANYTHING EVER, yet full blown communism or full blown capitalism are the ONLY two options people are led to believe exist, when the BEST choice is ALWAYS somewhere near the centre between the two extremes

I guess its good, they COULD have docked their pay for making products so good that they outsold the Iphone causing america to try and bankrupt them with their bullshit

Enjoy the holiday weekend, America? Well-rested? Good. Supermicro server boards can be remotely hijacked

Isnt this a bit like saying "if you leave the door to your safe open people who are allowed into your home and are THEN left alone in the room with your OPEN safe "might" take something from it, therefore you shouldn't buy a safe"....

What makes this even more silly, is how many people have pointed out that server admins might not even realise which servers have these boards in them without hitting network inventory data. Yet "someone" from, I guess CHINA "might" somehow magically arrive in a companies server cluster room and would then somehow magically know what the companies own techies dont and would somehow get physical access to the server to exploit the issue.....

TBH, this just seems like a less moral facet of the US trade war with china, you know, like the BS over the Huawei products JUST after they "coincidentally I am sure...." overtook APPLE in global phone sales with an even better model JUST about to launch.....

What tech companies SHOULD have taken from the Huawei fiasco is that NO company in ANY country is safe as long as it relies on US hardware, software or firmware

ARM needs to move completely out of the US so it can sell its chips where ever the heck it likes and other tech companies around the world need to work on having open source, openly traded equipment with no link to the US

Then the rest of the world can carry on advancing whilst the US clings desperately to its ever decreasing stranglehold on the worlds tech industry

Leave US tech companies ONLY selling in the US market and to its owners in Israel with everyone else selling EVERYWHERE else

Want a good Android smartphone without the $1,000+ price tag? Then buy Google's Pixel 3a

Re: Cloud Storage

No everyone wants "outstanding quality"

Thats why practically NOBODY has studio level audio and video equipment at home, because "normal" audio and video equipment is MORE than good enough

A wired headphone also doesn't go flat at inopportune moments, it doesn't cost way more than many want or need to pay for "good" quality, because "outstanding quality" becomes meaningless when sitting on a bus, walking down a crowded busy street, walking past road works and so on, also pretty worthless when youre only having a phonecall or my main use for headphones which is listening to audio books or connecting it to my car stereo or worksite radio ALSO via a 3.5mm to 3.5mm jack

Having the OPTION for USB-C audio is fine, but ASSUMING nobody needs nor wants the headphone/line out jack is just dumb narrow minded snobbery as it would cost practically NOTHING to have both so people can use whichever THEY prefer for each use case

The only two absolute deal breakers for me is the lack of an SD card socket and the lack of a headphone jack. My current phone is USB-C but ALSO has a headphone jack, go figure. Not to mention an SD card, so I happily paid an extra £225 for it over the google phone, although I also didn't have to buy a fully rugged case for the Google phone, so the gap was slightly less than that AND I got to sell my FLIR camera as the CAT has one built in, so I actually ended up effectively paying around £150 less to get the cat WITH headphone socket and WITH SD card socket that I would have ended up paying for the google without either because I would have needed to keep my FLIR camera AND pay for a rugged case whereas the S61 is fully rugged out of the box

Re: Cloud Storage

No its not, I have 64gb in my current phone plus 128gb SD card and have maybe 8gb spare

The lack of an SD card is just one of the ways they force you to change your phone even if you don't want to, same with non removable batteries that wear out long before the phone itself does

I would be happy with even 32gb on a phone as long as it had an SD card slot as you have to be retarded to pay for huge amounts of built in memory when an SD card costs a fraction of the price for several times the capacity

I was on the fence about this, but the SD card was the final straw to the compromises so I opted for the CAT S61 instead for the FLIR camera rather than buy another phone that I will feel is constantly restrictive with no benefits to compensate for them, the lack of an SD card on this narrowed it down to the CAT and a rugged Chinese no name that had dual sim, SD card and came with 2 6000mah batteries and which was still less than the google phone despite having a higher resolution screen, faster processor, more ram, more built in storage, and SD socket, dual sim, was waterproof, drop proof

Granted its a no name, but for less than £200 I could have bought two of them, and being rugged theres a good chance just one of them would have outlived the google phone anyway

But the CAT was the best of both worlds, brand name, SD card and rugged but £225 more than the google phone, but I just refuse to buy a phone that is deliberately crippled for no good reason other than to make them get replaced more often and there is NO GOOD REASON to omit an SD card slot on a phone

F***=off, Google tells its staff: Any mention of nookie now banned from internal files, URLs

This might make it "hard" to be able to get anywhere near Scunthorpe or Penistone in the UK

Or if youre undecided which you want you could visit Bicester or Gaydon to try and help you decide, however we don't seem to have anywhere called "normalstown", a sign off the modern Marxist times we live in I guess :)

Re: Im sure theres only one reason why a tourist would visit that town...

Then you could go down to Bicester and then bend right over to Gaydon, surely the next town along should be called normalsville?

Re: With that amount of censorship internally, just imagine how Google Search will end up.

White van man? How racist :)

Swedish ISP spanked for sexist 'distracted boyfriend' advert for developer jobs

Don't these people have anything better to do than cry about such irrelevant nonsense?

How empty and sad their lives must be

As one Microsoft Windows product hauls itself out of the grave, others tumble in

I thought that was unfair to suggest nobody uses the edge browser, pretty much EVERYONE uses it......to download a decent web browser on a clean install. So take that back you cad :)

To be perfectly honest re the edge browser, for me and a few other people I know its stupid unnecessary things that killed it

Not being able to select "open in new window" from favourites bar items for example and not being able to select "close current window" when you click the global window close gadget

And that's pretty much it for me to be totally honest, those two seemingly quite minor things annoy the heck out of me so much I wont use the browser

EU wants one phone plug to rule them all. But we've got a better idea.

They should just pick a standard for everything except apple and enforce that.

Who really cares about what is only 20% of the market any way? Let them do their own thing

Intel: Yeah, yeah, 10nm. It's on the todo list. Now, let's talk about AI...

Although the AMD chips look like they "could" give intel a run for their money to some extent it will depend on where larger IT hungry companies are on their upgrade cycles. Bringing out a new chip the year AFTER a large proportion of the market has upgraded isn't anywhere near as good as going to market BEFORE they do

So timing will play a part of the final analysis regardless of how the two match up against each other

The bottom line performance per socket isn't quite as important as many try to claim either, with most hardware being extremely cheap now barring ram you head into territory where intel would need one of their chips to be competitive price wise to 1.5 AMDs even 2 AMD equivalents or more in some cases.

Yet with some chip comparisons its AMD chips that outperform the intel opposition by that sort of margin despite also being significantly cheaper

But of course the energy use and cooling issues also feature, so I think there wont be a definitive "this is better" answer, it will depend on whether heat production, budget, rack space, energy consumption or just raw performance per U of rack space is the overriding factor in a companies decision making process

Then of course there will be the people who will want to change "just because" even if its "slightly" inferior and those who wont change "just because" even if the AMD offering is superior

So its about as predicable across many market sectors as what peoples favourite food or colour would be across an entire country

But I do hope AMD can carve out at least a reasonable market share partly just because its quite admirable how strongly they have come back and I do feel they deserve the rewards for that, but also because without intel having such a strong and uncontested dominance they could (and do) charge whatever the heck they wanted when they were the pimp for the only "ride" in town because outside of a board game a monopoly doesn't favour the customer

The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

I think this is a huge leap at best and a total propaganda piece at best

It will be a VERY long time before the durability and price of SSDs even comes close to that of a mechanical hard drive. With larger sizes you can replace your mechanical hard drive several times before it costs as much as just one SSD at the same capacity would have done and the reliability and endurance of the SSD means that chances are the combination of several HDDs for the same price as the one SSD would have given more of a workload when combined too

The register should archive this story (on an SSD if they wish) for QUITE a few years until 4 TB SSDs are WELL under £100 making them a decent choice for CCTV systems, home NAS boxes, PVRs and the main bulk of storage in computers

Whereas I suspect that for the cost of these 4TB SSDs you will be able to fill a 5 bay nas with 4TB mechanical hard drives and still have some change

Game over for Google: Fortnite snubs Play Store, keeps its 30%, sparks security fears

The fact that some idiots "might" install something other than the official APK and get a virus is a very weak justification for google using its position to take ridiculous cuts of the profits from people using its portal

30% is a joke, at most they should take something around 5% at the very highest so good job Epic for sticking it to the tax avoidance money gouging giant

Cheap NAND nasty: Flooding market with chips threatens prices

SSD and NVME prices are fine, its the DRAM prices that need to fall off of a VERY high cliff

Brit comms providers told: You must tell people when their cheap contract's about to end

Yeah I had this happen to me, I work 7 days a week most weeks and often away from home, earlier this year I had to check the bank for something and found my cable bill has doubled because my contract ran out but without a single letter or email about it meaning I had paid as much for 6 months with virgin as I should have, and would have wanted to pay for an entire year

And this despite being a virgin customer since they very first came to my area around 2 decades ago without interruption

So now I am with talk talk, and when they tried to offer me tasty deals to stay with them I told them to shove it as a matter of principle, they will NEVER get another penny out of me ever again

OnePlus 6: Perfect porridge? One has to make a smartphone that's juuuust right

Whilst there will always be "some" people who want the flagship models (like with video cards for PCs) the manufacturers seem to be totally out of touch with the majority of people who don't want to spend half a months salary on a phone when the one they have and probably the several older models they have stuffed in draws are more than "good enough" for what they do

MOST people just make and receive calls, send and receive texts, use some social media, run a few apps and maybe listen to some music or watch videos

A phone from 5 years ago can still do ALL of that with some processing power to spare

Factor in non removable batteries and the lack of headphone sockets or memory card slots on many new phones and the newer models don't even have the life expectancy of the older ones and therefore aren't as good of an investment in terms of price/years of use

Yes the manufacturers "want" people to spend upwards of $/£600 per year on a new phone for most people that is utterly ridiculous especially when more and more people are realising that the phone on offer for 6 or 700 dollars/pounds probably cost the manufacturer less than 50 to manufacture and will only last as long as the battery

Throw in bloatware and spyware from the phone manufacturer and the OS provider and you don't really have a very tempting product

All the fuss about cameras is irrelevant for most people too, any reasonable 4 mp camera was "good enough" for most people, many barely ever take photos apart from the odd snapshot now and then. So prices being hiked up on mainstream models for the quality of cameras and lenses only a small percentage need or really use enough to justify the cost also puts quite a few people off buying them as often the camera is pretty much the only main upgrade of note making it completely uninteresting for many people over several of the previous years models that can be bought for a fraction of the cost

So for me last year was the first year I opted out of the Samsung treadmill and bought an earlier years model for a fraction of its cost with a memory card slot, removable battery, perfectly adequate camera, screen, memory and processor saving myself enough to upgrade my PC motherboard and CPU in one of my PCs which I will get MUCH more value for money from

US websites block netizens in Europe: Why are they ghosting EU? It's not you, it's GDPR

It shows how irresponsible companies have been whilst trying to make a buck from selling every scrap (or scrape) of information about its customers to anyone willing to pay they have been up until now

Any company whose business practices mean that closing their doors is the best way they can comply well, can someone hand me the worlds smallest violin? Good riddance and don't let the door hit your big fat wallet on the way out

As for US news organisations same applies there too, for years they have restricted "news" based on geographical location no matter how trivial and irrelevant that might be and were doing it long before this legislation was on the horizon so again I couldn't really give the pretence of caring less whether or not I can watch their fake news and fantasy stories or not

Other than that this is one awesome way of getting rid of a huge chunk of the unwanted junk mail I get from sites I have never signed up to but whom contact me because a site I did sign up to sold my details to them without having to lift a finger but by merely ignoring their request for me to agree to have my privacy violated by them in the future

So once again, good riddance to them and the horse they rode in on

Obviously this wont stop the abhorrent behaviour with peoples data that goes on by large companies like facebook, google and the like or by government bodies. But its a start......

H-1B visa hopefuls, green card holders are feeling the wrath of 'America first' Trump

How is requiring that migrant workers are legal and that companies employing them should operate within the law "WRATH" exactly?

Amount of pixels needed to make VR less crap may set your PC on fire

Arent they overcomplicating this a bit?

From how it read you need a certain amount of pixels for the eye and brain to not struggle, but then they try to drive every pixel independently which is where the bottleneck comes from

Surely the solution would be to go "anadigilogue" a melding of analogue and digital

make the screen with the required pixel density, but then feed into it a lower resolution image and have silicon that "smears" the picture across the extra pixels in either a gradient or hard transition as required

This gives the eye the density it needs up close, but would allow the hardware to only feed in a monitors level of resolution which the hardware is already capable of doing

Munich council: To hell with Linux, we're going full Windows in 2020

Re: Hmmmmm

How would that have changed anything though?

They would have had to pay for the development (probably JUST for them), then purchase 30,000 licences for software they already own to begin with as well as potentially having similar issues with software moving forwards and having to do it over and over again where they "have" to use the same program as other councils and government bodies they have to exchange information with as the tail wagging the dog NEVER makes sense

Whereas just giving up their attempt to be an outsider and moving back to windows to avoid all of THAT extra expense and messing about solves the problem once and for all

So either way there is going to be a large cost, but going back to windows makes it a one off cost instead of a large one off cost now then other smaller ones moving forwards each time they "need" to use another or newer windows only program

Alternatively, they should have just bought some reclaimed windows 7 licences (30,000) of them and done the free upgrade when they had the chance

Much smarter AND cheaper

I cant see what so many people are getting so "huffy" about tbh

Yes it would be "nice" for Linux to be a real alternative to windows, but for the most part its not, ideology is "nice" when having a discussion or writing a novel, but the rest of the time reality is (or should be) king, and what "would" be nice is irrelevant, what can be done, what is practical and what makes sense aren't though

It would be "nice" to be able to fly unaided, but the sensible thing to do is to realise you can rather than jumping off of things over and over again and complaining when you merely plummet to the ground.

This is akin to a company deciding they didn't like the metric system, sticking with imperial measurements and threads and then complaining that every other company is incompatible with THEM

The reality is that despite decades of work Linux is "maybe" as user friendly as perhaps windows 98 for a non technical user as a desktop OS with the best distros and more like reverting to windows NT4 with the worst ones, and telling normal users they "should" expend hundreds of hours learning to become a Linux guru just to be able to update and maintain their Linux distro instead of using an almost self maintaining (most of the time) windows environment is just lunacy

Claiming that a council who has a duty of care to thousands, if not millions of people who are relying on their infrastructure working flawlessly and (where needed) being able to seamlessly exchange information with other government departments that they should stick with a restrictive environment which needs them to practically become software developers just to get basic functions to work makes lunacy seem almost sane by comparison

The problem here isn't Microsoft, the problem here isn't the council, the problem is Linux itself not being comparable to windows on a variety of levels combined with software developers not viewing Linux as a platform worthy of their applications being at parity with their windows offerings which lets face it is most probably due to the lack of demand which in turn is the fault of the Linux community itself for not making Linux a comparable choice to windows and THEN aggressively marketing it like Microsoft have

This whole topic gives me flashbacks to the Amiga dying. The OS was for the time excellent, far better than windows in many ways BUT, commodore decided to try and keep it as a niche market product with wallet gouging pricing for the bespoke hardware instead of porting it onto the much cheaper and far more X86 platform and just selling the OS

Before Linux can realistically compete with windows it needs to become as good as windows in terms of ease of use, automation, self maintenance and THEN with luck the shortfalls in software availability will, over time sort itself out IF Linux can be pushed effectively to end users

Until that happens Linux wont be a rounded choice for ANY decent enterprise which needs to have interoperability with other enterprises and no amount of trying to blame customers for wanting to purchase a fully rounded product rather than a fixer upper you have finish yourself will change a thing and Linux will remain a mainstream novelty that armchair anarchists and tech nerds use as an apathetic form of protest but which the mainstream totally ignores

If Linux distributors want companies and councils to use Linux instead of windows they HAVE to make it integrate fully WITH windows, run all the apps you CAN run on windows and without the end user having to create their own bespoke plug ins, patches and fixes just to get basic operations to work as that's not a good foundation for either a business nor a council to rely on

As for the cost issue, yes Microsoft shovel ware can be expensive, but its still setting the bar Linux doesn't reach yet.

think of it like a taste test, a nutrition bar that tastes worse and which needs you to add some of the basic ingredients AFTER you bought it will never compete with a finished product that tastes nice out of the box

It doesn't matter if the alternative is "slightly" more healthy, until its sold complete and tastes at least as good as competitor why would anyone choose to buy it?

And in this instance I notice people talking about the cost of buying the MS products but conveniently skipping around the cost in man hours, outtages and worst case potential law suits due to incompatibility with other organisations or software

Neither a council nor a business can afford to risk its core operations with an "almost" finished OS and patches, fixes and bodges they have to create themselves to get it to "almost" work as well as windows already does

But show them a product that does everything windows does right out of the box that is better, faster and cheaper and THEN people will consider using it, but give them a promising beta version and don't be surprised if they decide to stick with windows until the alternative is a finished product that is comparable in every way to windows

So, tell us again how tech giants are more important than US govt...

All this "Russian" nonsense is just a smoke screen, just the stories posted by the mainstream media itself could be viewed by many as being "fake", "misleading" and "a national security issue" in some indirect respects

It wasn't the Russians publishing outright lies about the polling data to try and "dupe" the American voters into putting a sociopath into the whitehouse it was the media

As for "free speech" that's laughable, if youre a tree hugging communist who buys into conspiracy theories like man made global warming you have free speech on sites like google, facebook and twitter but if youre any more "right wing" that ultra Marxist they want to censor or delete your posts or close down accounts

And hell, who really cares about Russia?

China is a much bigger threat and one of "Killarys" biggest financial "owners" wants to collapse the US dollar and make China the worlds financial powerhouse. The same candidate who is also partially bought and paid for by Islamic fundamentalist financiers and leaders yet not a murmur about that "influence" either. Killary, the candidate funded by a man who thinks only the rich should have a say in who gets to vote and that poor people shouldn't because they don't understand politics

Yet the MSM google and twitter were all openly pro Killary and shut down many accounts that were pro trump yet then try to play the "free speech" card lol

As stern as the wording might have been this just feels like another scam being enacted on the US population to pave the way for more censorship and a greater ability for companies like these to stamp out "free speech" that isn't the types of opinions they support so they can claim "the government made us do it"

Can the last person watching desktop video please turn out the light?

I live in the UK where we have a licence fee to pay for a bunch of substandard content, overpaid child molesting employees and which was used to fund a private BBC company that sells content around the world that licence fee payers aren't allowed to watch and which lines private investors pockets at UK taxpayers expense

So I stopped watching any form of transmitted TV about 15 years ago and haven't looked back, I watch streamed shows which means I can watch a show when it suits me without having to set a timer to record it and I can pause shows and watch them over several days if I am busy or leave them till a season ends and binge watch

Much more flexible, much more freedom and no reason to pay the "TV Tax" we have in the UK too

Awesome

Making us pay tax will DESTROY EUROPE, roars Apple's Tim Cook

These kind of back door deals go on all over the world and the deficit in tax they cause is then burdened onto the ordinary working class people instead whilst he companies profits fund lavish lifestyles for company executives and shareholders

But surprisingly or predictably "ordinary working class people" don't seem to get very annoyed about such things for a variety of reasons and as a result don't take to the streets to force a change in the status quo

We are often told that nothing can be done because such companies would just relocate and stop selling their products there, but the thing there is that people wouldn't magically just shrug and not want a tablet PC or mobile phone anymore if apple was removed from the market place or was penalised with huge import duties they would just buy something else instead and other companies would be clambering over each other to fill that void

Similarly if for example starbucks was forced to pay their fair share of tax and as a protest closed all their shops in a country the demand for overpriced mediocre coffee wouldn't just vanish, it would remain and other companies that DID want to abide by the essence of tax laws rather than hiding behind the details would fill that void too

So the problem isn't that governments hands are tied and theres nothing they can do, the problem is I suspect politicians lining their own pockets along the way and putting their own self interest and the interest of people who make cash donations to them personally or their political party above the best interests of the voters

So until that is changed nothing else is ever likely to improve

ZTE Axon 7: A surprise flagship contender

The reason for a removeable battery isnt so much for the ability to carry an extra one around already charged, but is because they can ONLY be a charged a certain amount of times before they fail, have a much lower capacity or the controller chip thinks its been charged a set amount and refuses to charge any more even though the batteries themselves might still be fine.

With other phones you just buy a new one, change it, throw the old one away and carry on using your phone for a few more years. With a built in battery you end up throwing away a perfectly useable phone and buying a new one for hundreds of pounds rather than the 10 pounds or less for a new battery.

As for the stereo seperation issue on small phones surely the answer would be obvious? Have the speakers firing out of each end of the phone (top and bottom technically). This instantly gives a wider soundstage but with the added advantage of not taking up any front real estate,

So somebody could make a phone with a screen totally covering the front but that still has bigger areas inside the phone to develop a richer base by having the sound chambers behind the screen

This could mean an almost borderless front, larger sound chambers for better base response and better stereo seperation, maybe even kicking the ends at a slight angle to give a forwards preference with viewed in landscape mode.

it would admittedly make the phone slighly chunkier but if done with a curved rather than a flat back you wouldnt really notice the extra space that much plus it would make the phone more natural to hold

So a phone could be made effectively thin and flat but with a sound chamber clipping over rear facing speakers which then directs the sound left and right (landscape mode) without adding any extra space on the front or any extra weight.The main body of the phone could still be made watertight too as it wouldnt matter if liquid got into the sound stage area. The phone could even have the option of being used without the sound enhancer if necessary with the addition of normal grilles over the two rear facing speakers for people who dont need the stereo seperation for films and TV or music but whom just want "sound"

This design has always seemed so obvious that I am amazed nobody has tried it yet

Heck the extra rear cover (sound expansion shield) would even act as extra protection for the phone as it would be easily removeable and replaceable and could even give the option of other rear shields too like larger batteries or other add ons, This could be accomplished with point contact pads rather than a plug socket arrangement to make it easier to avoid moisture ingress.

It would certainly improve the stereo seperation, should give better base response and could potentially be a flexible way to add various functions to the phone like POE ethernet port and charging, extended WIFI, high capacity battery maybe even a slightly reduced sound port but with an added mini subwoofer to accentuate the sound even more into a minimalist 2.1 output and other things I wouldnt even think of. Perhaps even the ability to purchase hobby skins for electronics enthusiasts to build their own projects into them like a hand held mobile phone arduino type option for bespoke applications such as researchers or field engineers.Heck it could go full techie with giving companies the ability to create CCTV monitor shields so you can plug in CCTV cameras up a ladder to set them up, multimeter clip on and even an oscilloscope add on shield,

Or more mainstream add ons like an SSD shield and for DIY laser measurement or plum line laser attachments and pipe, wire and power sub surface scanners, ethernet diagnostic scanners and a variety of other things for various trades like thermal camera shields or 3d filming shields etc etc. The list is only as short as a persons imagination and market demand

A phone like that could be the BBC micro of the 21st century with very little change from the normal format and a bit of imagination

This was an idea I had after seeing my first touch screen almost a decade ago and assuming this type of product would appear "soon", but I am STILL waiting lol DOH

Its also about time someone made a bluetooth to landline plug in dongle so a mobile phone can work as your house phone when in vicinity giving you all of your contact details available regardless of whether youre using the house phone or your mobile line to make or recieve a call, I have been waiting for THAT product since bluetooth headsets first appeared as it seemed like the obvious next step.......also still waiting for THAT product too lol

Sheesh!

Chinese demand end to canine carvery festival

Re: A dog isn't just for Christmas...

I think they already do grow human pig hybrids

But some odd reason they tend to end up with odd coloured hair like purple, blue or pink in colour but they have the habits and intellect of pigs but with the general appearance of pig shaped people

I think the scientific name for that sub species of people is "Homofeminist" :)

Anti-theft mobe KILL SWITCH edges closer to reality in California

This is kind of worthless nonsense and I am sure is designed purely to financially benefit "someone" whether its the manufacturers, the vendors or just insurance companies inventing new products to cover you for "bricking" of your phone by accident and other things

All that is really needed is a number that cant ever be removed or changed which is needed for ALL network interaction so that not only can a phone remain working but can then be used to track it to the new owner and maybe also then onto the thief

If that cant be done in a way that cant be circumvented then niether can this proposal as they are both at a similar level of complexity and technical security within a device

So it would suggest that the real reasoning behind a fatal solution rather than one that allows a device to still be used but then tracked is a financial rather than a practical one

Child sex abuse image peddlers dodge UK smut filters and demand Bitcoin payments

Child sex abuse image peddlers dodge UK banking and credit card charges

Kind of blatant but how many will even bother to look at this objectively once confronted with the gist of "child porn bad"

Obviously the use of "blah blah whatever we dont like is funding terrorism/drug trafficking/human slavery" has started to wear off it seems and now the primo number one excuse to be wheeled out to demonise whatever the goverment and their employers the ultra rich dont like or cant control

And by stressing that its a "foundation" so that people wont guess at it following government requests and directives is about as done to death as ham salad sandwiches

I am sure nobody promised the IWF more resources. government support or wider powers if they demonised bitcoin and linked it to paedophiles planting the seed of derision and opening the way for (a steady) path towards government control of or banishment of bitcoin

I suspect that next they will be linking it to that top secret sub internet thingy whos name I can never remember if they havent already once they feel that public opinion is sufficiently negative towards bitcoin and then

one day

eventually

we will be faced with such gems as

"A recent government study has found that its mostly terorists and anarchists that make use of democratic elections in western coutries"

"A recent "independant" study has found that how much a man drinks is directky proportionate to the likelyhood he is gay, similar links have also been found to the faster he drives the more likely he is to be gay and that extreme sports interests are usually a way of hiding subconcious homosexual urges"

I think the real story here is

"Government active seeks ways to eradicate bitcoin"

or......

"Child sex abuse image peddlers dodge UK banking and credit card charges"

If the pervs were using credit cards or normal money would that be a story? Would it even be worth mentioning as we could hardly ban credit cards or ban real money

Is the real problem here not that the crims are paedos but that they are exchanging money without banks and the owners of said banks getting their cut

After all we KNOW that banks are happy to fund terrorists, revolutionaries, the nazis (even jewish banks), criminals of all types and flavours, human slavers, drug traffickers, corrupt governments, governments actively perpetrating genocide etc etc

So I can understand that they must feel slighted by the idea that paedos dont ALSO want to bank with them and give them a cut of their earnings

Greenland glacier QUADRUPLES speed, swells seas

As somebody has brought nasa up lets also remember that three things nasa openly admit they are only just beginning to get a basic understanding of and are decades of research away from being able to grasp sufficiently their interaction with the rest of the ecosystem to outline and predict their effects are

Clouds, the solar cycles and outputs and the deepsea flows and currents

All of which are MAJOR climate drivers and all of which NASA a very pro AGW organisation (because its giving thema huge chunk of their funding) admits they have a very basic understanding of because of only recently (in data terms) had the ability to watch and monitor them in detail

So to put it into perspective niether the pro nor anti AGW crowd "knows" what is happening, NASA doesnt know what is happening, but everyone is wildly speculating and all with their own bias and justification much of which (on both sides) is driven by money

What we DO know however is that ice melts and raises water levels. We "could" be speeding this process up and most probably are to some extent, but how much impact we are having isnt known by EITHER side as it is a natural and somewhat sporadic and non linear process naturally

We also know that at least one other large glacier claimed to be melting because of AGW actually turned out to be melting because of natural erosion of the sea bet it was sitting on which should surely give at least some pause for breath

Although I can understand some of the frantic panic of the pro AGW side of the arguement they are also guilty of the things they accuse the anti AGW side of like selectively seeing what suits them as the main push behind the pro agw lobby is politically based rather than scientific but the politicians hold the academic purse strings which immediate sets a tone to academic stance irrespective of the actual facts on a topic

It "may" turn out that in 100 years by which time very little of a catastrophic nature will have happened btw we find out that AGW has noticeably sped up the natural pattern of global warming, or merely that we "might" have done that as natural spikes and troughs in such things can last centuries by themselves. Hell, we could find we are having a mini ice age in a hundred years too such is our current ability to model the climate

But we ARE already making improvements, we ARE already producing greener versions of our technologies, we ARE already being taxed to more than sufficient amounts IF governments didnt waste that money on expenses and flying themselves around the world every 5 minutes or funding puff piece biased research

We SHOULD tackle pollution and waste not because of doom and gloom nonsense but because it makes sense, And we are doing so.

What we shouldnt do though is to get caught up in (as yet) unproven and unproveable hysteria and as a knee jerk reaction throw the worlds better economies into decline by excessive and unjustified panic measures to raise more tax to keep feeding the ever growing self serving pro agw academic machine

We "could" have stopped world hunger, provided fresh water, healthcare and education for the entire planet for a lot less than we have already spent on not trying to counteract global warming, but PURELY on trying to prove its man made and still had billions left over according to WHO figures

Surely those are far more worthwhile uses for money? Surely dealing with a known and actual problem that we CAN fix right now is better than spending that money on academic navel gazing not into whether the planet is or has been till recently "warming" but purely into what if any percentage of that is man made?

So far the examination of possible AGW portions to any warming that might be occuring has killed quite literally millions of people and continues to do so by diverting money to something that really needs to wait for nasa to get a better understanding of the major climate drivers. Because right now they arent sure if a rise in temperature would cause more cloud cover which in turn would self regulate or not. They claim they need a decade or more of extra research

Meanwhile millions die on a monthly basis because of a lack of food, fresh water and healthcare.......

I am not saying we should completely ignore the possibility of AGW, but simply that we should maybe shift focus. Sort out pollution, greener energy sources, more sustainable living because they make sense and not have an almost religious style zealotry and paranoid draconian approach trying to enforce a regime when its own science is still incomplete

Because I wouldnt like to live in a world where in 50 years we find out that billions of people have been forced into or to remain in abject poverty and restrictive lives whilst the politicians, the rich and of course the academics wer e living the life of riley only to hear that mans contribution to warming wasnt as much as feared and that all that suffering was pre emptive which IS as much as the pro AGW lobby will disagree with it still a 50/50 chance

Boffins: Antarctic glacier in irreversible decline, will raise sea levels by 1cm

Isnt this the exact same ice shelf that despite being blamed on global warming for decades with little to no actual science to verify such has actually turned out to be melting because NATURAL erosion of the sea floor has now meant the shelf it sits on has eroded to below the level where the sea temperature is warmer

So now the warm water level is above the height of the shelf and melting the ice with no involvement at all by men, pollution, fossil fuels, CO2 or anything else except good old wear and tear

The problem with looking for proof of a belief system rather than actual science is that followers of whatever particular "religion" it is will pass out from over orgasmic flurries everytime they see anything that even closely seems to support what they want to find when theyre not ignoring all the things that dont prove it or actively disprove it

As for what "models" suggest, even nasa, one of the AGW crowds biggest protagonists openly admit that cloud cover, the deeper sea currents and even the effects of the suns output cycles are barely understood due to not having been studied or researched for very long

As these are three of the biggest climate and ecosystem drivers it doesnt really give ANY credence to any computer models which probably explains why to date they havent got anything at all correct

Its a bit like trying to predict the fuel economy of a car without knowing what type of fuel it uses, what sort of engine it has and not knowing what a car is but claiming you know its efficiency

But I guess when an organisation is set up to oppress the masses and keep them in financial servitude you cant let a simply thing like the lack of science, understanding or facts stop you from scaremongering eh?

Viva the IPCC, the PR arm of global taxation inc

Whodathunkit? Media barons slit own throats in flawed piracy crackdowns

The recording industries entire model is like something thought up whilst smoking crack and yet so many governments support it to already ridiculous levels

As an example picture someone who is unemployed, a student on a bursary or someone who is still at school in fact we can now include millions of families who with the current cost of living have literally ZERO disposable income after paying their basic bills and food

The recording industry claims that if any of those download lets say 10 films in a month they have "stolen" $50-100 from them based on what they WOULD have spent IF they had gone and watched them at the cinema, bought them on DVD/CD or if they had paid to stream them

But as none of those people would, at any point in that month have had $5 let alone $100 to spend on luxury items then they would still have spent zero on that media whether or not they could or couldn't download it meaning the recording industry is out of pocket to the exact figure of zero dollars

There SHOULD be some actual proof of actual loss when someone is being prosecuted instead of the recording industry just trying to blame someone else for their own demise due to their own inflexibility. overpricing and inability to realise what dinosaurs they are

It should also be noted that a LOT of people have a fixed budget they spend per month or week on games, music, films etc but because of how much overhyped drivel there is in all forms of media what many do now is to watch several films or play several games before deciding which ones to spend their hard earned and FIXED amount of money on as there is no returns policy when you spend $15-60 on a film or game and find out its total crap and NOTHING like the adverts and magazine reviews claimed

Another bogus aspect of this nonsense is TV programming where all people are doing in many cases with that is downloading a show they are already paying for via cable or satellite BUT where they want to watch it when THEY want to watch it and on their PC whilst doing other things rather than having to sit on the sofa to watch it and because its just easier that streaming services. Other times its a show that WILL be on a station they pay for, but is shown months earlier in another country which nowadays is completely ludicrous

So again they pay a fixed fee whether they watch those shows or not, the networks aren't being deprived of a penny of extra revenue despite claiming otherwise and we once again have quite bogus financial injury claims where none exists

I am not saying there is NO loss to the industry, but I do honestly believe that the majority of profits are due to their own mismanagement and inability to move with the times

Its wholly ridiculous for ANYONE to justify earning $50 million dollars for acting in a film, and that sort of wage is a large part of the cost of the making of programming and music that then reflects in the price

If no movie studio paid more than $2 million actors would have to choose between earning what is already a LOT of money or getting a job at starbucks. And I bet I know which they would choose.

This would not only mean the industry could MASSIVELY reduce the cost of films, music, TV subscriptions making far more people not only ABLE to afford them, but also likely to buy them in greater numbers BUT it would also mean theres more scope for profit and therefore investment in future content

Instead wage bills in all aspects of the industry spiral upwards like its a race and the consumer is then blamed for choosing to opt out of paying those increasing prices when the actual quality of content is declining noticeably as the price increases and it becomes like paying Faberge egg pricing for a standard poached egg that is highly likely to be undercooked anyway

IPCC: Yes, humans are definitely behind all this global warming we aren't having

China is an anomaly though as the state rather than individual families decide how many offspring are allowed so its a total straw man argument with no validity and no logical link to the topic of infant mortality and its relation to family size due to there being no freedom to breed

But in pretty much every other country the world over infant mortality which tends to be linked to both education and wealth does vary and on average the larger family sizes do tend to be in the poorest countries with the highest infant mortality rate, the worst health care, least education AND the least access to, or willingness to use contraceptives

Whereas in most weater countries birth rates are small and falling for everyone EXCEPT immigrants from poorer countries with little to no health care that have higher infant mortality rates

WOW, who would have thunked it

Theres a few other anomalies but theyre not in the west and are driven by long standing cultural influences that have remained to some extent even where wealth has increased, But in the west there is a clear link between family sizes, education, wealth and access to healthcare and contraception

The US however is looking like its about to have a baby boom due to it changing its education system and sexual health education back to something last seen in the middle ages but again that's a state driven effect and not a social one so its irrelevant

Re: RE: "All this global warming we aren't having"

That's weather not global warming

When the alarmists want it to they WILL use localised weather that is hotter than average to try and prove their point but for "global" warming to be proven you need the GLOBAL average to be increasing steadily in line with CO2 increases seeing as that is what is being blamed as the culprit as well as also matching the predictions of the models that claim to show how the global warming WILL occur

So it can be 3 times the "normal" temperature anywhere in the world and it proves nothing unless the average global temperature including that spike is also higher and fitting into a trend. Other wise its just an blip like all the other inconvenient blips the alarmists ignore like when GLOBAL temperatures have either stayed level or have decreased despite steady CO2 increases or where large increases in GLOBAL temperatures have occurred throughout history despite no increases or even dips in CO2 and god forbid they ever factor in times when CO2 has been at its lowest or highest and GLOBAL temperatures have been immense but life on earth has thrived rather than died as a result

So no offence but whether Australia was baking in the hottest winter ever or covered in snow all summer doesn't in a "global" sense have any relevance whatsoever although the pro AGW media will I'm sure claim otherwise and hope nobody bothers to actually think about the claim in any depth

Otherwise the US having some of the harshest winter weather it ever had in what are normally warm areas would have already disproved global warming wouldn't it. But obviously the alarmists only tend to advertise the stuff that supports their theory (as its not quite scientifically enough grounded to even be called a hypothesis just yet as they lack understanding of so much of our ecosystem at the moment)

The IPCC is really just a government lobbying group whose main aim is to get the easily led to believe that man made global warming is real with a religious zest and to en masse support new industries based around taxation that will further widen the gap between the 95% of the planet and the wealthy 5%

The scientific community itself (real scientists that is) admit they know barely nothing about the real long term cycles and influences of the sun and its variety of cycles and patterns on our ecosystem as well as only recently beginning to study the effects the sea has on the global temperature patterns and cycles which it also barely understands both of which are extremely fundamental parts of our climate and ecosystem and both of which not being understood completely removes ANY scientific value from any model used by anybody

Its a bit like somebody trying to model the fuel efficiency of a car without having any understanding of how the combustion engine works or any knowledge of drag and friction and those two areas are far from the only areas of our ecosystem that isn't just not "fully understood" by scientists, but which have only recently began to be studied by them

As for many of the claimed effects of global warming they are infact man made but not by global warming. Much of the frequently mentioned droughts and dry wells around the world are due to a variety of things like large companies pumping billions of gallons of ground water out to make soft drinks and bottled water leaving surrounding village wells dry

Much of the new desert land isn't caused by a drier atmosphere or warmer temperatures but is the result of many countries massive dam building projects which has the side effects of causing downstream deforestation, erosion of top soil and increased water run off into the sea resulting in shrinking water tables and aquifers. The resulting sandy banks where once greenery existed is then often blamed on global warming despite "actual scientists" knowing the real causes

The increased weather and flooding we are allegedly having is also overly stated. Some of the worst floods in Europe happened in the 1950s long before any man made effects on the ecosystem could possibly have occurred but theyre rarely mentioned nor compared to new Orleans as a modern comparison whose real causes lay in the lack of upkeep and maintenance of their flood defences as is a common state of affairs in much of the US as well as a lack of quick mobilisation or availability of flood resources after the fact

Bangladesh has been suffering a drought for decades along with flooding due to it being below sea level which is too often linked to global warming, Yet their flooding from the rainy season has been well documented for thousands of years and the increasing shortage of water is due to india building dams or diverting the rivers that fed into the country.

Bangladesh is likely to lose the river that provides around two thirds of its 160 million population with water and as a result food when India completes a dam and canal that routes the river around the outside of Bangladesh. THAT is a real ecological problem that most people will ignore in favour of screaming about the latest bit of flaky ill founded writings from the IPCC and other scaremongers

And something that has no real science to back it up will be religiously and blindly followed by millions the world over whilst other millions die due to lack of access to clean water and food because of REAL man made problems that are actually real and COULD actually be averted

Some perspective seems to be severely lacking in the world.

But when the people who own most of the money also own the media and whilst most people think the media doesn't lie that's not really surprising

Google Chromecast: Here's why it's the most important smart TV tech ever

@dalewking

I think youre actually missing the mediocrity of the device

Practically everything you mention there is software based

And theres already far superior hardware out there with FULL internet and android functionality for the same price that would merely need an ap to do anything this does that they currently don't

I also think youre over estimating the need in the market too as someone (virgin and sky) supplies the bulk of media content to homes and both already have rudimentary interactive TV which, were the need there would already have expanded I suspect

But as much as you downplay media streaming and playing video files it IS a very common requirement and where I think this product wins its badge in mediocrity is because it COULD very simply have included full blown full function android with access to the app store and everything else you get with android on the other TV sticks already available AND any new chromecast stuff that SOME people MIGHT want to use at some point somewhere in the future when someone MAYBE bothers to develop it

In the meantime though they would have a very useable very functional google branded stock android TV stick with something like 2G ram/8G rom, quad core processor and GPU, wifi and blue tooth an SD slot and the app store for lets say £75

Far far better product IMO and one far more people would buy