4mpg?

Did you mean 8 litres / 100 km?

Most big data is videos, photo and audio which are played sequentially or in big enough chunks like one photo at the time that random access times and IOPS don't matter, a defragged hard drive is simply perfect for the task.

Err, no. Depends on what kind of video you're doing. In the video world it's easy to end up bottlenecked by disk I/O.

HD resolution ProRes files for instance will tax any hard drive, requiring over 40MB/s (330mbs) throughput:
https://documentation.apple.co...

I'm working with 4K sources, of which some are uncompressed. You need RAID or SSD.

I've lived in Canada, Australia and the UK. I prefer the system in Ontario where they are completely anti adding private in to the mix (although every company offering medical benefits for prescriptions seems to get ignored by voters). Private isn't the answer, and there's probably more to the story than that in Australia. Ridiculous rules like catchment areas (finally abolished this October) and limited opening hours, as well as lack of proactivity are the biggest failings in the NHS that I see. On the other hand there are some good things, like the cost of prescriptions and the fact that you don't need any additional coverage (e.g. private insurance in Australia to cover co-payments)

It seems to me that healthcare in Australia is much more effort to participate in. They have some sort of copayment system, and most people on a reasonable income have to take out private healthcare insurance to cover this. So not quite as universal the NHS, or even a lot of Europe and large parts of Canada for instance.

Maybe they find it horrible because the UI was designed by a two year old? Actually, that not fair, I haven't used it since 2006, but the horrible user experience was the driving force behind my disgust with it. In fact only early today I was using WireShark on OS X and remembering years of being annoyed by the terrible UI toolkit and total incompetence of the people who put the UI together. WireShark reminds me of the last time I used GIMP.

This isn't actually true. Although the EU is much more populous than the US, it's emissions per person are much lower. This results in the EU producing 10% of the global total of CO2 versus 15% by the US.

The dirty three (US, Canada and Australia) all produce more than 16 tonnes CO2 per person.

The EU about 6.8

China produces 7.2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...

Perhaps the US should demonstrate how big countries lead and actually do something meaningful about its emissions instead of hypocritically lecturing.

None of the figures above actually account for outsourcing manufacturing to China from the US and EU. In that light the Western country's CO2 production is much and China's lower.

If you're so inclined, I'd try a fresh install

The trouble with this is you lose all your call and messaging history. It's all or nothing with iOS device backups. I recently upgraded from a four year old iPhone 4 to a 5s. I thought a great opportunity to start clean: I installed only the apps I wanted and configured all my accounts, and was even satisfied with my photos from the old phone being an their own album instead of the camera roll. Loss of the message history in particular irritated me so much so quickly that I restored from backup in a few days. There are some apps out there that claim they can do this, but after a few wasted hours faffing around with one, I ended up with a messed up phone.

You must have serious amounts of spare if you think it's an acceptable solution to go looking around an online community for solutions like this. I don't have the time nor inclination to do this with every device in my household. Maybe once because it's interesting, but that's pushing it. It's a phone or table device FFS, I just want it to work and spend my time more usefully.

Furthermore, if the device was current at the time it was bought, it's irrelevant how long it was since the original release date. It's reasonable to expect a useful support period. What the grandparent post described is totally unacceptable.

Yeah, exactly. Have you seen how many hundreds of MB that WindowsUpdate tries to deliver once a month? OS X can be pretty chatty in the background too

That's not completely true. My previous employer gave our Shanghai employees stock, although they had to sell it immediately.

In some people's eyes. To other Ukrainians he was democratically elected and represented their views. Are you so sure that his pro-EU replacement was democratically elected? We only get part of the story here in the West, although I *hope* it's more honest/unbiased than the other side of the story.

Another way to look at it:

Reagan went from $1T to $3T = +200%
Bush Sr went from $3T to $6T = +100%
Clinton went from $6T to $5T = -17%
Bush Jr went from $5T to $11T = +120%
Obama went from $11T to $17T = +55%

Sadly the sane and smart people are being out-bred by the trash!

Microsoft's tiled thing is more like OS X's Launchpad. Both are shit and hard to use. Thankfully OS X only made Launchpad an optional extra if you want to use it.