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Comment Re:Government Intervention (Score 1) 495

Not where I live (Romania).
If you look at the stats from Akamai and others, we rank 3rd in terms of speed, just after South Korea and Singapore.
Relatively big country with varied terrain (some big mountains, lots of hills).

No caps, no throttling, ISPs don't care if you seed torrents 24/7. 50 Mbps is the minimum you can get, for about $3/month, or you can get 1000 Mbps for $15/month! 1Gbps is not available everywhere but 100 Mbps is standard.
Rural areas may be more problematic but remote villages have bigger problems than lack of high-speed internet anyway.

How did we get here?
Up until 2003 the national telecom company had a monopoly on landlines. So all ISPs skipped DSL and invested in Ethernet and fiber. There were a lot of ISPs (now significantly less due to mergers) but real competition is keeping companies investing in infrastructure.

Comment I have similar (Score 1) 325

I have a custom-built Clevo 15.6", i7 4910MQ, 32 GB RAM, nVidia 780M, Samsung 512GB SSD.
I use it for 3d rendering, video editing and the like. It's small footprint, low noise and portability make up for the reduced performance compared to a desktop.

I have it for a year now and I never noticed overheating. I often let it work overnight.

So maybe it's just the way yours are built that doesn't the air flow normally.

Comment Re:"Just pay extra..." (Score 1) 473

I'm pretty sure you are not part of the Elite:Dangerous community. The game is almost complete, playable, now. I have my complaints with the game, but the developers never had the attitude you're describing, in fact that is the exact attitude of Chris Roberts and his Star Citizen: keep buying our ships and hangars.

The E:D devs did state that some features will come as an expansion (e.g. planetary landings) but that was stated up-front. They never asked for more money to deliver a new ship or something.

What I think is they are under huge pressure to release the game before Christmas and simply don't have the time to implement & test a proper offline mode. As a note for those not familiar, the game already has a "Solo" mode, where you're online but don't interact with other humans, just NPCs.

Comment Re:"Just pay extra..." (Score 1) 473

I agree that dropping offline support at the last moment wasn't wise, but how would a demo server have helped?

I backed both Star Citizen and E:D. My fear with Elite is the lack of variation and depth. Everything seems repetitive. If they can add more varied missions, interesting space sightings and inject some life into the universe, it'll be a fun game.

Comment Re:"Just pay extra..." (Score 2) 473

Of all the things you could complain about Elite:Dangerous, you complain about money? The extra 15 pounds is for those who preordered the game, if they want to get early access.

Compared to the Star Citizen money grab, what the Elite devs are doing is just great. There are people who spent over $10,000 (real money!) in Star Citizen to buy ships and a "business hangar". Money spent on a game that doesn't even exist yet (there is just a hangar and an in-game simulator and the controls are a pain).

Comment I think passwords were collected from elsewhere (Score 1) 203

I found one of my Gmail accounts in the list - the one I usually use when asked on forums and such. Using https://isleaked.com/results/e... I saw that the password leaked is not the actual gmail password, but the password I use when signing up on non-important sites, including Slashdot.

I'm quite sure the email+password was collected from another site, can't be sure which one.

Comment Must-have features (Score 3, Informative) 471

My watch is a Tissot PRC200 Automatic. Not a very expensive watch, but it would take some effort from a company to make me take it off my wrist.

To even consider a smart watch, it would need to have:
- a classy, attractive design (nothing convinced me so far, the LG G Watch R is the closest to something I'd use but still feels cheap; Apple watch looks too much like a gadget)
- a smaller size. I don't have a big wrist, my watch has 42mm diameter, anything larger looks bad on my wrist.
- much longer battery life. Current smart watches get 12-24 hours. I don't want a watch I must charge every night.

Get these right and then we can talk about software.

Comment Re:Are you fucking serious? Tell me you aren't! (Score 5, Informative) 198

I have worked for a health insurer in UK that treated ACID compliance as a bonus, not a requirement. At the time I left them, they had a whole "data correction team" - 12 people working full-time to do live SQL queries to fix database inconsistencies. I wish I made this up, but it's real. If this is considered acceptable practice, I don't want to work in this industry ever again.

Comment Re: Are you fucking serious? Tell me you aren't! (Score 4, Insightful) 198

Do you even know what ACID means?

Atomicity - either everything is committed or nothing is. I find it crucial to avoid inconsistent states.
Consistency - data is valid in all states.
Isolation - ensure that concurrent transactions work correctly.
Durability - no data is lost due to software crashes or power failures

How could these not be important for banking is beyond me.

Comment What's becoming of this site? (Score 4, Informative) 74

While I agree in principle that "cloud"-based services are overrated for reasons we are all aware, the issue with Creative Cloud was a minor one.
I use Adobe software every day and I noticed the error just because I tried make a change in the subscription plan.

The apps run locally and the license is checked every 90 days. Yes, some people could not activate their licenses or they couldn't download an application. This is a DRM issue, like Microsoft's or EA licensing servers being down. This could have happened regardless of Creative Cloud.

The only cloud services are their Typekit and Edgefont font distribution and Behance portfolios.

So let's make this clear: Creative Cloud is a fancy way of saying "rented software". Compared to the traditional model, it may cost more or less, depending on the upgrading habits (personally I used to always upgrade and use the newest version, other users upgrade to every other version)

Comment Re:In 3, 2, 1... (Score 2) 224

I haven't coded in Pascal since the good old DOS days, when I was about 17, but at the time was writing TSR apps, picture viewers (GIF, PCX, BMP, TIF), some graphic-mode UI, including mouse support, even some VGA graphic demos. I can't think of anything that I couldn't do in Pascal (and some ASM, I give you that). In fact, it's the reason I never got too heavily into C...

Comment Re:Seem Negligible (Score 1) 155

This is not for the benefit of the users but for webmasters.
If you have a site with any decent amount of traffic, you pay for bandwidth and you have a content delivery network. 10% smaller images translates into 10% savings.
Moreover, Google takes site speed into account when ranking sites.

Comment Re:Adobe Air (Score 3, Informative) 209

SWF was amazing for its time. Streaming vector animation with synced sound over modem speeds. Even today you need a hodge-podge of technologies - SVG, Javascript and a bunch of libraries to achieve what you could do 17 years ago! And I'm not even sure you can stream a svg animation+sound.

SWF has 2 shortcomings:
- it's proprietary
- it doesn't integrate seamlessly with its environment (browser).

For standalone apps, these are not big issues.

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