As well as dubious wireless adapters Dell also shipped a USB GigE adapter for some XPS15 models that doesn't work for more than a few hours before the adapter crashes and needs to be power cycled by removing and reinserting it. I had a customer with one XPS15 that contained both the terrible wireless and terrible external wired network adapter.
The story gets better though, Dell shipped a demo model of a new XPS15 recently and we discovered the improved USB3.0 GigE adapter that it ships with is now stable, so got them to swap the older ones out but customers shouldn't really be testing hardware that is unable to perform its basic function reliably.
Not enough is being said about this, there are still no really energy efficient receivers and on a per-station basis DAB is also a lot more expensive to transmit. DAB only becomes energy efficient at the transmitter end because it's always transmitting a multiplex of many stations.
A few years ago I bought a battery-powered DAB radio so I can listen to Radio 4 in the bath. It will zip through a set of high capacity AA NiMH cells in around 2-3 weeks, the old FM radio used such a small amount of power that Alkaline cells made more sense and would consume around two sets per year.
Pressure sensitivity on a musical keyboard is known as "aftertouch" and is generally implemented in a "monophonic" way, the effect of pressure on any key is applied to all the currently depressed keys. The CS-80 implements aftertouch on a per-key basis, rather than common to all the keys. This allows it to be more naturally expressive. There have been a few MIDI keyboards that implemented CS-80 style aftertouch, but it's extremely rare and many of the implementations have been less than brilliant (but Ensoniq deserves recognition for even trying to do it on some very reasonably priced equipment).
Quite pretty but I can't figure out why anyone would invent their own non-ISO date format and then have to write a parser for it. Is it really so hard to start with the year?
Those steps might make you feel better but buy you very little in terms of privacy. Your telecoms provider will still know roughly where you are at all times, they have to, it's how their switches know which towers to route your traffic to and from.
Unless you tunnel all your data traffic they'll also get copies of that and may sell pseudo-anonymous website usage statistics to one of the web metrics businesses. In some countries they also intercept and modify web content that you might view.
And what can you do about the baseband radio processor and its code? Nothing. Assuming you have a tunnel in operation, the phone could still be collecting and quietly sharing metadata and you'd never know.
Well you're right that it's not a silver bullet, but it does have some benefit. At least I know no software running within or on top of the OS is reading/stealing my info.
"Well sure, my OS might have a rootkit, but I've replaced Internet Explorer with Chrome, so my online banking should be secure!"
The baseband has its own processor and, to my understanding, pretty much complete hardware control of the phone.
I don't deny that that the benefit is non-zero, but I think saying "it's not a silver bullet" is still overselling it. I think it would be more accurate to describe it as "It's all I can do, and it's better than nothing."
Technology still didn't replace the policing part. The NSA may be recording everything we say, but you won't be taken during the night and disapeared to some cell because of it.
It's definitely above the part 15 limits of 150 μV/m at 3m
I don't know the current drive capabilities of the Broadcom SoC, but let's assume it can perfectly drive a dipole antenna presenting around 72 ohms. The supply is 3.3V, I think. 3.3^2/72 = 0.15125W. In reality I doubt it's anywhere close to that, let's assume 50mW instead (it could be lower, I just don't know). According to a legit-looking field strength calculator I found online this works out to just over 0.5V/m at 3m! That sounds a bit high. Various factors would conspire to making even this much field strength unlikely, but it'd still exceed the FCC limits easily.
The Pi's output is also a reasonably decent square wave, as pointed out elsewhere. So there are some harmonics that are, themselves, above the part 15 limits.
In other words, don't do this, unless you have a spectrum analyzer, attenuator (don't forget to block DC). Actually, someone needs to do this with the right equipment just to find out how well it really performs.
The MH370 777 was fitted with ADS-B, which is how the various internet based tracking services managed to track it. Unfortunately, it was so far away from the nearest receiver site that the line-of-sight needed for microwave transmissions wasn't possible below 30,000 feet. If the plane made an emergency descent, it would've vanished from tracking very quickly though perhaps not as quickly as it did vanish.
AF477 sent ACARS messages over its satellite communication link, as I recall, these are not sent as frequently as ADS-B messages but would be enough to locate the aircraft very approximately. The problem with any technical solution is it may not continue to function for the whole flight, which is why ELTs exist, but they're not indestructible or guaranteed to be in a position to transmit after a crash. There is only so much you can do with electrons, when you're facing the prospect of a large metal object falling 35,000 feet into salt water.
It's worth pointing out that you can't renew existing pro accounts manually, only accounts that are set up with recurring transactions will renew automatically. For some reason this doesn't include my account, as far as I can tell. I'm a little annoyed about this.
As I understand it, accounts that were originally a gift, like mine, don't get the recurring transaction treatment. This makes sense, but only up to a point, that point being where the owner of the account renews it with a different credit card and it becomes truly "theirs".
I am not sure that flickr gave this scenario due consideration, there must be a lot of people who received pro as a gift but have since paid to renew it will be unable to benefit from the reduced "grandfathered" price of $25.
These PCs and laptops are the very same machines that "apps" users are deciding they just don't need any more. Full desktop applications for Windows aren't going to go away, but as I see it they're not going to be ported to "So modern we can't agree a sensible consumer-facing name for it" rapidly, either.
I agree that it's a good place to be selling right now, as the competition is sparse and largely terrible. There are a lot of holes waiting to be filled. I don't think it's going to grow the way you seem to be predicting.
The story gets better though, Dell shipped a demo model of a new XPS15 recently and we discovered the improved USB3.0 GigE adapter that it ships with is now stable, so got them to swap the older ones out but customers shouldn't really be testing hardware that is unable to perform its basic function reliably.