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1188 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2013
I've only been asked to do the speaking bit just the once, but at least I was expensively wined and dined in return. The thing that gets me is that, as a known 'techie', I am asked if I can just take a quick look at someone's laptop/tablet/phone/TV/satnav/microwave and even, on one occasion, a doorbell. Do I ever get an offer of some gardening or a couple of shirts ironed in exchange? To make matters worse, you find yourself being responsible for a lifetime warranty as soon as you do the slightest thing. Sort out someone's email problems on their phone and who's in trouble if the battery dies a week later?
Just say 'no'.
I wouldn't bet on it. End-of-battery is not end of life and I can see several people getting their batteries replaced by either themselves or a third party service (and count me amongst them). As for the rest, yes, many will get a new tablet resulting in an temporary extension of new sales, but how many of them will insist on a replaceable battery this time round?
I think it was substantially more than a simple port, beyond the first incarnations anyway. The Dartmouth MAT statements for matrix manipulation never made it to the MS interpreter and a few things that were useful for the microprocessors of the day such as the PEEK and POKE instructions came in.
Dartmouth BASIC on punch cards was great - you could actually shuffle your card deck before reading it in and it ran just fine thanks to the line numbers - eat your hearts out FORTRAN/COBOL/C coders!
Changing SSID is futile. That's not how these location systems work. After all, an SSID of "BTWiFi-with-FON" can only conclude you have been blown into a million pieces and scattered all over the UK. Very commonly found worldwide are manufacturer default SSIDs such as 'linksys', 'NETGEAR' and 'dlink'.
The vital element is the MAC address and this is not as easy to change. Spoofing a MAC address is supported on some bits of kit, tricky to do on others and near impossible on yet others. While a few reg readers have the capability, not enough people can use this to sabotage large access point databases.
...is cheating. It has only ever served to slow me down by predicting wildly off target words or autocompleting words that were complete before the extra bits got tacked on.
As far as the test phrase goes, took me damn near 18.4 seconds to read it never mind try to type it!
"...increasing the potential pool of investors..."
Really? I find it difficult to believe there can be many who yearn to be Apple shareholders but can only currently afford half a share. Rejoice, rejoice, you will soon be able to afford 3!
It just isn't as sound an investment due to the transaction costs being a higher proportion of the share value. Tiny shareholdings in large companies aren't too popular with the companies either as it costs the same to mail a dividend cheque or company report to a majority holder as it does to the guy with a single share.
Better yet, drop both patents and copyrights to 10 years. Still plenty of time to sell the same song several times over on remasters, collections, greatest hits, etc. Same for movies with cinema, DVD, Bluray, director's cuts and extended editions, TV rights, and so on and so forth.
While agreeing that conflation of Israel and Jews is generally undesirable, I don't believe there was any in this case. The word 'demographic' makes all the difference. The phrase is equivalent to: "Not exactly attractive to a group of people comprising approximately 3 Jewish persons for every non-Jewish person."
/Hyperpedant
Of those millions of 'must run' XP users, there will be hundreds of drop-outs on a daily basis as the hardware fails or a better solution turns up. The annual subscription goes up. The increased cost makes a few more users look for alternatives. It will soon enough come to an end anyway.
The only way to give it a really long run would be with a much bigger team actively developing. The users that drop out would be replaced by new users coming on board, hardware failing wouldn't be a problem as the system would now support the newer chipsets (USB3, etc.). If marketed from the outset on a subscription model with upgrades, patches and a commitment to respond to the collective wishes of the users, I can't see why it couldn't keep going for quite a while (except I can't see MS doing this).