
Re: I never thought I'd say this but...
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286 posts • joined 13 Nov 2015
The myth of vinyl sounding better than digital is bizarre.
That depends entirely on your budget, as any real audiophile can testify. I went to an audio demonstration back in the 90's for Rega turntables and heard both the vinyl and CD versions of Crowded House's Weather With You played back to back - the vinyl copy sounded much better. Mind you, the setup of amplifier, turntable, cartridge, speakers and speaker cable was approaching £5k.
Another demonstration I attended was comparing the improvement in sound quality with the corresponding upgrade in components and complexity of the setup - adding pre-amps, changing to bi-wired speakers, upgrading the cartridge etc. All told, when the total cost of the setup - and this is for a setup comprising essentially an amplifier and turntable, not a CD player - reached £23,500 I couldn't perceive any improvement in sound quality after that. But it did sound bloody good.
I do agree with your conclusion about homeopathics though.
and *at least* half the parking spaces at every motorway services needs to have a charger
Unless the manufacturers sort out a basic EV range of 500 miles and a 50%-75% recharge done in less than a couple of hours they'll also have to build some pretty fucking big hotels at those services for all the people having to stay overnight every day.
If I'm being forced to change from using IC to EV in my car then what replaces it must at least be as good as what it's replacing so it if can't even get from say, London to Edinburgh, 400-odd miles which the vast majority of IC cars can do on one tank of juice in one go then I personally do not consider it fit for purpose. Hopefully these issues will be addressed before we get to these cut-off dates, but I'm not holding my breath.
As per the title, how long will Samsung support these 'Smart' TV's with software and security updates? 1-year? 2-years? 5-years?
Also, how much telemetry is this 'gaming hub' sending back to Samsung and other partner companies? Do you have any option to opt-out of that?
These features add no value to me as they just add more complexity to an appliance which will render it obsolete sooner rather than later. I mean, they won't want you to be able to update the gaming hub app to the latest version in five years because they'll want you to upgrade to the latest and greatest, even it it still works fine.
For me personally, there is no compelling reason to consider buying one of these. YMMV though.
then in one year the registry key stops working and we force the new functionality.
Just like they did with Windows 7 when 10 came out. Release an update to remove the option inside Windows Update to review and choose which updates to install so you then have no choice but to accept all available updates. Then release another update to force GWX on your machine which then tries to force download Win10 ready for installation, your machines performance being crippled during download so you think you have a virus or malware. But removing GWX needed registry tweaks as well as removal of the relevant update, so it looked more like malware than an official MS update. And if you managed to avoid that shitshow, for the next year or so there were 2 to 3 times the number of 'updates' to Win7 then there ever had been before, but after each round of updates something else stopped working or the functionality was slightly different. It was almost as if MS were slowly, but deliberately breaking installations of Win7 to force people to move to the abortion which is Win10.
I really do feel sorry for the sysadmins who have to put up with the regular firefight to keep their Windows based systems up and running.
"...a savings protocol that at one point paid participants close to 20 percent interest on their investment."
Everything about that statement screams ponzi scheme to be avoided at all costs. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever stable or trustworthy about any cryptocurrency.
It is a shame, but you have to stand back and marvel at what the Boeing engineers achieved with the 747 some 50+ years ago. If you had said back in 1969 that these would still be flying in the year 2020 people would have scoffed at you.
The fact the I can stand in my back yard and watch Lufthansa, Cargolux and other carriers cargo 747's still flying is a testament to how well designed and built this aircraft was. Ok, they may be just the cargo versions, but that was what it was originally designed to do, and there is nothing which still comes close even now. The 747 was truly the Queen of the Skies.
I've said it before and will keep on saying it: Until there is a properly designed and inherently secure specific IoT protocol which had been properly tested, is fully certified and has been adopted by the entire industry as the default standard then I'm not interested in this shit.That way, at least you should be device agnostic and it shouldn't matter if a vendor goes bust as you should still be able to use anything you've bought from them.
What people need to remember in situations like this is that they are not just paying you for what you do, they are paying you for using your knowledge to work out what needs to be done to fix the issue.
I'd have taken the guys money and then told him to never contact me for help again in the future for being such a dick.
Windows 7 was the only version of Windows I ever willingly bought. Sadly though, the frequency of the updates got very tedious so that is when I also started playing around with Linux. When MS eventually started pushing updates to remove options from the update manager before putting out GWX to force feed you Win 10 that was the final straw and I ditched Windows completely.
Perhaps the reason people are stealing BMW's for parts is because their reliability these days - especially on certain models - is piss-poor and genuine parts are expensive, so it's cheaper and easier to get parts from one which has been broken up for spares.
In any case, unnecessarily restricting a persons options for repairing a car or phone they have paid for and own is highly offensive and should be illegal. If I own something, it's up to me how I get it repaired or serviced, irrespective of whether it's two years old or ten years old. If the manufacturers want you to use their repair services and genuine spare parts, they should ensure their pricing is reasonable rather than downright obscene.
They already do. Current reactors burn up at most 2% of the fuel leaving 98% as highly radoactive waste which needs reprocessing then disposal. This is the massive long term headache we have today.
Molten salt thorium reactors can be run on existing high level neucear waste and burn up over 98.5% of the fuel leaving very little high-level waste. With the existing stockpiles of waste we've created over the past 60 years it's estimated we can run the whole planet on molten salt reactors for over 25,000 years.
It's not that we don't know how, it's the lack of will to do it. Why build a nuclear plant for an operator which can use existing waste when there's more profit in locking in the operator of that plant to using fuel rods which only you as the manufacturer can supply? An easy 50-year profit cycle, and your grandkids can sort out the mess left behind.
I do hope they make a sensible choice with these reactors.
Intel did the 486DX4-100. I had an AMD 486DX40 which was really quick for the time.
The issue was getting the data bus on the motherboard to run stable at these higher clock speeds and a lot of vendors struggled with this. This is why motherboards with a lower clock speed and using a processor with a higher clock speed became popular.
I worked in a shop building PC's in the earliy 90's and we had someone come in asking for a 486DX50 machine. We built it, but ended up trying motherboards from 4 different vendors before we found one which worked reliably - not an issue in DOS6.x, but at the time critical for Windows 3.1 which would BSOD randomly. Also essential was a good VGA card from a well known vendor so you could get decent drivers.
Ahhh, the good old days.
Absolutely correct. It's irrelevant what 'improvements' are made in the OS, if the front-end UI is an unusable, unintuitive mess with all commonly used functionality that has been present for the past 20 years either hidden or removed completely, then it is not fit for purpose.
I also notice MS are saying this 'upgrade' is to enable better security. Well if they'd have built it sensibly in the first place instead of pushing out the dogs dinner they did in NT and building on top of that things would probably be a lot better now.
It seriously is no surprise that more home users are moving over to the various flavours of Linux as in most cases there's no major impediment and the hardware specs required don't really matter a jot.
I've been using a Mi Band 4 for just a year (only cost £25 from Amazon) and have found it great for my daily step count - It's about the only exercise I choose to do so it suits me perfectly. The Mi App on my phone has a lot of customisation so is good if you do a lot of different activities. Obviously the usage is going to be different per individual, but I normally only have to charge it every 4 weeks or so, which makes spending £100 upwards on a FitBit that needs charging every 3-4 days seem pretty excessive.
And yes, the strap broke two weeks ago but replacements are only a fiver for four off eBay!
Well for a liquid molten salt reactor the design is inherently stable so a complete failure of all the cooling systems will not result in a meltdown. Also, the fuel burn - the actual amount of fuel which used - for a molten salt reactor is in the region of 98%, compared to at most 3% for every water cooled plutonium fueled reactor ever built.
Added to that the fact the molten salt reactors can use just about any existing nuclear waste with minimal processing so you have a ready made fule source that can be almost completely used up and requires minimal reprocessing when done. Current estimates are that with the existing stockpiles of nuclear waste which will be highly radioactive for thousands of years would provide fuel for molten salt reactors for in excess of 25,000 years.
I'd suggest you do some research as there is plenty of verified information out there to confirm the significant benefits of molten salt reactors over anything else currently in use.
And this is why companies that do this without clearly explaining exactly why these changes are being made, how they will provide tangible benefits to the end user and making it optional should have punitive damages levelled against them.
Justifiy it, but make it optional with no penalties for opting out.
And until you have a specific IoT device protocol which is inherently secure, fully maintained and adopted as the industry standard, all these IoT devices are a complete pile of shit and not worth bothering with.
I just happened to be looking at some WiFi webcams over the weekend and they all seem to want you to download an app, register a new account with the vendor and then set up the camera via their servers. One even sent you a QR code you had to hold up to the camera to get it to register itself and connect. None that I could see had an app you could install on your phone and then connect to the camera locally over your own network and then configure it - you had to have an account and go via the vendors servers. That's a complete fail from my perspective.
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