Looks like we have a Bell guy here
Someone is downvoting posts that are not favourable to the telcos. I understand if mine was downvoted, but why downvote posts like ma1010's or Mad Chaz's, which are dealing with facts?
64 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2013
Up until about 5 years ago I had a good opinion about Seagate, and pretty good about WD. But after what these companies did to us after the flood I sworn to only buy SSDs, and that's what I did, and the rusting spindles manufacturers can go wherever they want and not come back.
Actually I used to know Seagate quite well in the '90s, they were innovating and agile, but somehow in the last 10 years they grew too big and it seemed like only the latest quarter results matter, so again, good to know you HDD manufacturers. Pity about the job losses though, which never affect the real culprits.
Ex TP-Link customer here as well. I had one of their better models for a couple of years and lately I had to reboot every evening, the connections were so slow.
Now I got a much cheaper and more featured Mikrotik hAP lite ac and I am flying. Configuring it is a pain, and I thought I had more than basic networking knowledge, but ultimately I got it working as I wanted it to. Not recommended for everyone, but if you can use Mikrotiks, they have the best value.
But I stopped buying HDDs 5 years ago, and started buying SSDs at the same time. My first SSD, a 32 GB OCZ, is still working fine as the swap drive (!) on my home PC, which gets 3 - 4 hours of use per day.
Then I bought a bunch of 128 and 256 SSDs for my home laptop, work laptop, wife laptop, media player (the wife's old laptop :) )
Then twp 512 GB SSDs as main drives in my home PC. No SSD failure. I said good bye to the HDD industry that was happy to overcharge me when they failed to build factories on land that doesn't get flooded once a year, and I sweared in my beard I will never give them one more dollar.
Even for work, we switched from 1 TB HDDs to 256 GB SSDs and no failure, on machines that are on 24/7. Happy camper here with SSDs.
For more than a year now I am using a Huawei Mate 2. I like it's big screen (6.1 in), even if it's 720p only, and most of all the big battery - I charge it every 3 days in normal use, where before each phone I had (I changed them yearly) would barely last one day.
Now I am looking for a replacement, but it's not easy to find. While many phones now have big 6 in screens, none I could find have a big 3 day battery, support an SD card, and preferably cost less than $400. I may have to live a bit more with the Mate 2. The Mate 8 may be a replacement, depending on how long the battery will last in real world tests and the no contract cost.
Everyone I know, lately myself included (even if I know it's a bit stupid), stopped typing the domain in the browser bar and just use Google or whatever is the default search engine to find the desired site.
E.g. let's say I am looking for The Reg and I don't have it bookmarked. I just type 'the register' or even 'the reg' in the address bar and Google shows theregister.co.uk as the first result, which is what I want.
It's not even a dot com, which proves that the TLD is kinda irrelevant.
So is it worthy to pay that much for dot blog?
Since I am not going to pick a hosting company (Go Daddy is not an ISP AFAIK) based on a TV ad, they might as well show nicely clad young ladies.
I would rather look at them then at rows upon rows of racks of servers.
Not that I live in the States or I am interested in the Superbowl anyway. Just saying.
Sick with Google's data grab, in November of last year I decided to ditch my Nexus 4 for a Z30. Brand new for $300 CAD, unlocked and no contract, why not?
It was on 10.2, I know I could have downloaded a build of 10.3, but I did not bother.
I was of two minds about the hub - my personal email together with company email in the same place sometimes seemed like a good idea, sometimes not. Email handling overall was great.
My main complaint about it is the speed. Very slow to load apps. Once loaded, they are generally responsive. Also, boot is very slow, in good Blackberry tradition.
I don't use my phone to watch videos or listen to music. All I want from it is email, web browsing and navigation. While the former two are fine, the later was subpar. Besides the fact that the Maps app was very slow to load, it was slow to use - an exception to the rule. Traffic display also was definitely not as good as in Google Maps.
I know why - not so many people use BB Maps compared with GMaps. I know also that I could get GMaps on the Z30, but that comes with the whole Google services, so it would defeat the purpose of going away from Google. And I am sure it would have been slow, as well.
The Z30 feels well made, and the gestures in BB 10 are a nice way of controlling the device.
The battery was lasting me two days sometimes, one day and a half for sure. I was still charging overnight if I was at less than 60% at the end of the day, because I hate running out of juice.
I am traveling relatively frequent, and I hated the long loading times when switching between SIM cards.
The sound quality was good, but I did not find the reception out of ordinary, at least compared to the Nexus 4. I know all about that, my fellow Wind customers know why.
At the beginning of January I decided to sell the Z30 at a loss (at the end of December it could be bought new for $250 CAD) and i got a Huawei Mate 2.
Back to Android, and an older version of that. But what a difference in experience. While far from being a top of the line device, the Mate 2 is very fast, at boot and at loading apps. The battery is good for 3 days at least, 4 days if the weekend is included. Reception again, seems about the same as with the Z30, a bit lower than the Nexus 4. The massive 6.1" screen of the Mate 2 makes all the text visible to my tired eyes.
I think I will stick with this phone for a while. I would be willing to try the Passport, but I refuse to pay more than $400 for a phone. When it gets to that level, I will decide.
I did not buy an HDD in 3 years, i still have 2 TB drives since before the Thailand flood. But I bought 1 SSD per year since (32, 128, 256, 512 GB), at an average price higher than a HDD.
It would be interesting to know when the SSD business will be on par with the HDD one.
Not for me, if I cannot pay by credit card then it defeats the purpose of carrying one. I don't like carrying a lot of cash, and pre-paid debit/credit cards have huge fees.
While Home Depot's security blunder is inexcusable, at least they did something right: they gave all customers (me included) one year of free credit monitoring, which is handy. At the end of the year, I will change my card.
<<The cost of providing and maintaining a copper phone line does not change because you are not using it for voice does not lower the cost of provisioning and maintaining the line. Therefore, a data only line must cost at least as much as a voice+data line.>>
Something strikes me as illogical. In your own words, the cost of provisioning the line is the same, so what does it matter if the user does voice or voice + data, or data only? It should cost the same.
I would say actually it should cost less for data only than data and voice because there's no need to maintain a customer record on the voice side of the business.
I think what you want to say is that voice subsidizes data by sharing a part of the line cost. In that case, a fair pricing structure would show copper maintenance as a line item, and voice and data as add-ons, as they are. Fair pricing structure telecom company is an oxymoron though.
They will last maybe 5 years, then all files will be corrupted.That is a problem with organic media. Pressed DVDs are a lot better, but it seems that the aluminum inside corrodes as well.
HDDs are not much better, hysteresis will kill the differences between 0s and 1s, but much slower. All my backups moved from DVDs to HDDs.
I am not sure about SSDs, maybe someone can illuminate me on that. Not that I can afford to backup on SSDs yet.
Not a good analogy.
A better one would be: I am paying company X to deliver me a product from the warehouse of company Y.
Now X, instead of only charging me, wants to charge Y as well.
And when I pay for shipping, I don't care that X has to pay for toll roads, gas and trucks. That is their business.
Traffic is traffic is traffic - why is it different for the ISP piping Netflix to the customer than any other traffic?
As far as I remember, the price for GB was 2-3 cents at the interchange, so all those 2 - 3 TB of data that Netflix is pushing to the servers at the ISP is $40 - 90 dollars a day. I am not sure how much power they would draw, but let's put some made up numbers, let's say 20 servers at 200 W each, which should be 4 kW/h, about 50 cents/hour, or 12 dollars a day.
So for 100 bucks a day, an ISP can host Netflix? Is $3000 a massive amount for even a small ISP with a few thousand customers? I don't know, I am asking.
I cannot tell you what BB does better than iPhone, but I can talk about what it does better than Android: email.
Five years ago I had a Blackberry and email was great. Then I wanted to see what it all about the new touchscreen phones and got an Android, a TMobile G2, then I replaced it with an HTC Amaze 4G, and now I am on a Nexus 4.
None of the Android phones had a good email client out of the box, the major issue being search. I bought the Enhanced Email app, which gives me email, but it's far from perfect and only can store a few weeks of emails before becoming too slow/unstable.
My next phone is going to be the Blackberry Z30. I use my phone for 3 things (besides talking), in this order:
- browsing
- navigation
Z30 has all of them.
I will tell you why I think I believe selling below cost is a good thing for me, the consumer.
It is because I believe no one can control books retail in such a way to have an absolute monopoly, long or short term. Amazon is number 1 for many years now, does it look like a monopoly to you? Like are they the only place where you can buy your latest Harry Potter fix?
Capitalism works if the government does not mess with it. If Amazon increases prices too high, there will be someone to undercut them, so that they will have to keep their prices in line. Worst case, I can live without buying new books, if they will be so expensive so I cannot afford them. There are billions out there already, and I can buy them two for a dollar at garage sales, or for the price of a coffee at a used books store, never mind Kijiji or eBay.
But I suspect you are also against any type of sales and specifically against loss leaders in other fields as well?
I did not buy any bridges in many years and I do not intend to start anytime soon, but I am curious, what bridge in particular do you want to sell and what is your pitch?
My bad, should be Northern California.
15 judges does not seem a lot. With the amount of lawsuits that America is known for, I would expect that they would need a lot more. And with some trials lasting many months, like the Samsung - Apple one, again the number seems very low.
I know that a judge works on multiple cases in the same time, but still, I would expect them to take the time to investigate besides what exhibits are shown in court.
My ignorance of the finer points in the American judicial system is visible, and still logic tells me there should be more judges for such a populous area.
I knew of course it's the same Lucy Koh.
If you think voice is a problem on your 175 Mbps line, I don't know what to say...
I replaced POTS with VoIP 6 years ago (over a 3 Mbps line) and I never had any issues with voice. Because I set my router up so that voice gets higher QoS then everything else. You should do the same and ask your ISP to be the dumb pipe that it should be, not ask them to prioritize traffic, which ultimately will end up as fast lanes.
I don't really know if I should downvote or upvote you...
I agree with everything but the last paragraph. Why would the ENTIRE IT be sacrificed? I am sure it is always budgetary constraints that keeps IT from deploying top of the line security.
Are we examining chess here as a mean of measuring intelligence? It's obviously not, because many very intelligent people are crappy chess players.
And people saying that chess players are using brute force are correct - they are thinking closer to how a machine operates by trying all possibilities. Not a sign of intelligence, in my opinion.
Or maybe they need to place an order for 100K pieces and hope that by delaying more people will pre-order and they can fill the order?
I mean, that's the best case scenario for any manufacturer, why make them and stock them, and pay the supplier, and then hope to sell them? Best is to sell them before even starting the manufacture. No cash blocked, no fear of product not selling.
But the first generation Sync system in my 2010 Stang GT is not that much in my way. It worked pretty much with all smartphones I had since. It is not the most intuitive, but it's workable.
It's definitely not as good as Android in interpreting voice commands, but I wasn't expecting it to be. I am content with operating Sync by buttons only.
Based on how the 2015 Mustang looks, I would get a 5.0 even if it had MS-DOS on it. Actually, I would rather like it that way...
Yes, any "computing device" can run Photoshop if it has HTML 5 support.
In the same sense that any car can carry 10 tons of sand from A to B, but most sane people would prefer to have a tool more suited for that, called a truck/lorry.
You are correct sir. I hate the 4 way stops. A lot of them can be easily replaced with roundabouts - my home town in Europe has switched almost all intersections from traffic lights to roundabouts, and now a trip across town takes 10 minutes instead of 25.
Here in Ontario Canada it's also stop all way fest. I know though of a couple of roundabouts, and some people are still stopping in front of them, driving me nuts (no pun intended).
I agree with you on designing systems with zeros as placeholders. It is nuts. However, when one is forced upon you, there is little choice. But again, this does not excuse Excel guessing that my "00032653453" is a number.
Any programmer worthy of their title should know that it's a string. It seems to me that Excel is looking at the string of characters to import, finds that there's no letter in it, but only digits, and says "it's a number". Wrong.
If they had to make it so that it parses the string at import time, they should have left all fields as text and let the user decide either in the wizard or after import what the data type is.
Same for long integers being shown in exponential format. Very annoying. Excel should either import it as a string, or leave it as a number (if it fits in the 4 bytes data type or whatever Excel is using internally), but show it to me how it is in the original file, do not assume it's an exponential number.
You see, someone has to start using a different file system on portable media. If not Google, that has their OS on millions of devices, then who? It will get traction, if not overnight. If they would have started 3 years ago, everyone would have used it by now. But if they don't start, you have to assume that they are Ok with Android hardware manufacturers paying the Microsoft toll.
What's the big deal anyway in pushing another file system on a MicroSD card? You use it natively on Android, and for reading/writing it on Windows and Mac, you would install a small application.