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- nativeitLook for the USB hub that costs several times more than the rest, and that’s the correct one for your use case.
- I think they probably would, with maybe the exception of Apple TV. It’s probably not a coincidence that Apple TVs are the only hardware in this space that isn’t sold at a loss (or near loss), the rest are simply Trojan horses to park in the living room and maximize profit elsewhere by leveraging its privileged access to your eyeballs and/or ears (really no orifice is safe from these companies anymore, watch out for Smart Bidets).
- “House Project Managers”
- You inevitably catch LexisNexis shitting in your herb garden and leaving squirrel carcasses lying about…
- [ ] 231,846,239,211 “Messages related to wetland fauna migratory patterns and their impact on commodity spice markets, also Pepsi advertising”
- It runs a hashing algorithm locally, I believe, rather than transmitting the entire image. pHash or something similar would work.
- I’m not sure what relevance there is to other providers?
I work with a lot of small medical offices, and they do use consumer Smart TVs in some contexts. I typically limit their network access for other reasons, and displaying X-rays isn’t something I’ve personally facilitated, but it wouldn’t shock me to discover it’s being done in other clinics, and the popularity of cloud-based ePHR software has left a lot of smaller clinics with very limited internal I.T. services.
The destination isn’t relevant, if the image leaves the clinic at all without consent, that’s a HIPAA violation. Fortunately, I think it’s more likely that the images are sampled and/or hashed in a way that means the full image isn’t technically transmitted, but considering the consequences and costs of a data breach, I’d definitely be wary of it.
- This is called a “replacement excuse”. It’s a hallmark of nihilists and utilitarians, but I tend to prefer the more prosaic group noun, “jerks”.
- I’ve never understood why Firefox doesn’t just make an extension with first-party support, instead of bloating their browser with gimmicks that a large cohort of users don’t want, and that probably shouldn’t be included by default at this point anyway. Or, shit, they came up with “Focus” for a “privacy browser”, do that and leave Firefox alone. Better yet, implement any of the litany of fixes and features your users actually requested.
- The proportion of people you write off as “layabouts” is always conveniently ambiguous…of the number of unemployed/underemployed, how many are you suggesting are simply too lazy to work for a living?
- The Toshiba (!?) laptops that got sold to one of my clients at nearly $1100/ea are pathetic. Basically the same kit you can get for $600-700 at Best Buy. The equivalent MacBook would have been miles better, in terms of build quality and specs. Although, I’m using a ThinkPad E16v2 right now that I am quite pleased with that was $899 with 32GB/1TB. There are reports Apple is getting ready to launch a less expensive MacBook soon. I think the <$1000 options for laptops is about to get rather interesting.
I’m still disappointed to see the days of easy RAM/storage upgrades have largely gone. I was initially suspicious of the reasons offered for why soldering memory directly to the motherboard is necessary, but with a few years of academic engineering experience (I don’t use much of my EE education in my day job), it’s not illogical—as frequency increases, the circuit’s sensitivity to parasitic inductance and capacitance also increases, and connectors/interfaces are a big source of parasitic effects and general nonlinearity. That said, my desktop has traditional DIMM slots, and it’s technically running faster DDR5 than any of my other devices with soldered DDR4 modules.
I charitably assume the difference is laptop’s need for greater efficiencies, but either way it would be nice if the manufacturers hadn’t instantly taken advantage of this new “necessity” to jack up prices on memory and storage quite so aggressively. It’s probably also worth noting that Apple was first to really do this widely, as far as I’m aware, with the M1 chipset. Also worth noting the M1 was groundbreaking, and it’s seemingly magical memory management made it so an Apple M device with ~60% of the memory of its x86 equivalent can perform just as well (if not better). I have an 8GB M1 Mac Mini that’s still quite functional for routine work. 16GB still provides great performance.
But then, my AMD desktop that cost ~$1200 a year ago (with a capable GPU) is sporting 48GB because I could pay a reasonable price for DIMMs that I can plug-in myself. Similar specs on a mass-market machine probably would have run that price up to near $2000.
- Thanks for reposting this. I missed it last year, and as an EE with a misspent youth (I originally got a BA in media), I have frequently struggled with the calculus. One of the few regrets is that I didn’t learn advanced math back when my brain was primed for it. Learning calculus in mid-life is tough.
- They can’t afford Trump’s pardons. You don’t just give something like that away for free. Art of the deal.
- Also, honestly, the build. That “genuine concern” they ignored was that the build was critically flawed. I don’t think anyone here would have these takes if a small group of curious engineers tried their hand at a composite submersible, it was when they kept doing it after all the qualified engineers had said, “This is crazy, I’m out.”
The build was kind of dumb, and I’m hardly an engineer. It’s common sense. Carbon fiber composites are interesting because they’re strong relative to their weight. Remove either of those features and they become pointless.
Who cares if a submarine is heavy?
- There’s not much to break, honestly, and cable TV is still fairly popular outside of techy circles, but mostly it’s still the only option for broadband in a large portion of the US. I’ve been on Spectrum for several years, and it’s been largely trouble-free. I’m in a rural area of North Carolina, but near enough to Charlotte that they don’t have the entire region locked down. That said, Windstream/Kinetic is just now rolling out fiber in my area (should launch in the next few months), Spectrum has always been the only option for land-based broadband. I’ll switch to Kinetic for the symmetric upload speed, rather than any specific reliability problems we’ve experienced.
I’m sure these market conditions are common in most of the country, but without the moderating climate we have, so I imagine it’s much more susceptible to damage by freezing temperatures and natural disasters.
But the article is decrying the monopolies, and the bad incentives that they inevitably create, rather than attempting to highlight the poor state of telecommunications infrastructure.
- I’ve dealt with this at least twice on behalf of clients. In both cases, another provider entering the market was the only thing that made a difference. By that point, they’d already burned all the good will they had in the area, so maybe they would have fixed things with competition, but I wouldn’t know, my clients got on the waitlist to jump ship the absolute nanosecond they hear about it.
- I don’t think it was the author’s intent to shock us by the state of CATV infrastructure.
- How to scream, “I’m living a life of unalloyed privilege.”
- Most privacy-thumping browsers do this, to some degree, but it’s not a panacea. The article gets into it.