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Comment Re:WHO vs Public Health Officials (Score 2) 274

+1 for the parent on this point.

The videos of people crammed inside The D, largely without masks, in Vegas didn't look good.
I'm sure you'll see Covid cases as a result of the protests, but at least you're seeing attempts at wearing masks.

For those who dispute that it's worsening on a global scale, take a look at the global daily new case chart:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.worldometers.info%2F...

Now maybe some of that increase is simply due to increased testing. Still, though, that's a lot of new cases.

June, so far, is not showing a decline from May. I'm curious how they're getting the Brazil numbers now that Brazil is supposedly not publishing data anymore.

I'm still not sure how much underreporting has been going on in Russia.

If you think it's getting better in the US, that's true for a lot of states. For Florida and Texas, it's not so much, at least for the daily new case rates, which in June are higher than in May.

Comment i'm going to skip it (Score 2) 15

I go almost every year to CES just for fun, but I'll be skipping in 2021. I could totally see there being far fewer attendees next year, which would be nice. It's just gotten so insanely crowded over the last decade. However, I bet there will be so many rules and restrictions that that it'll still be a pain to attend.

All that being said, I saw just a video clip of The D casino in Vegas reopening today and it was packed. It didn't look like most people were wearing masks. That's just not going to work out well.

Comment probably a good thing for Qt (Score 5, Interesting) 125

Over the last few years, whenever I looked at a changelog for a new release of Qt, I noticed quite a bit of of work was being done to support Symbian or Meego. When I went to their annual conference a couple of years ago, some of the stuff they were showing off (namely, basic UI control widgets for QML) seemed to be focused on Symbian or Meego first and maybe other platforms later. Meanwhile, I noticed that some releases of Qt (especially around 4.6.2) had some surprisingly bad bugs that I wouldn't have expected in the past. I wasn't alone. A friend of mine at Nokia doing Mac development with Qt admitted as much. The whole thing made me think that far more resources was going into getting Qt support for Nokia's platforms at the expense of Qt's traditional desktop platforms. That's an uncomfortable feeIing to have when you're a software firm and you're paying Nokia (and now Digia) for commercial support for the toolkit. I'm hoping that what's going on now will refocus Qt development.

Comment collusion? (Score 1) 268

I haven't been keeping up on this subject the last couple of months, but I was under the impression that the operations at the drive manufacturing plants were going to return to normal sooner rather than later. I would think that would cause prices to drop, even with the consolidation of the vendors. Otherwise, I'd suspect price-fixing.

Comment Not Worth It (Score 1) 403

I have worked at two major tech companies where they've tried this. At my last company, the COO used to be a senior exec at an outsourcing firm. Regardless, the results in both cases were the same: a waste of time and money.

If you're going to pay an outsourcing firm peanuts, you're going to get engineers who lack the necessary skills. You and your managers will spend an inordinate amount of time hand-holding these contractors. If you don't, you'll get really poorly written code. It may work, but it'll be completely unmaintainable spaghetti.

That's assuming you'll get a finished product. The turnover rate for outsourced engineers is ridiculously high. The moment these guys hear about some other firm that pays another dollar an hour, they'll jump ship. Every 6 to 12 months, you'll be training new people to replace the old ones.

There's also the question of logistics. It's hard to communicate with people who live on the opposite side of the world. It's bad enough that things get lost in translation, but when two groups get together for a conference call when one of the parties should be in bed, that's just not productive.

Comment Re:Just like slashdot (Score 1) 369

Your logic is seriously flawed, just as is your reaction to my previous post. Just because you claim Comcast's prices are "more or less" the same in different regions doesn't make the pricing "competitive." Competitive pricing suggests that there's competition that gives you a basis for comparison. There is next to no such thing in most broadband markets when communities grant official monopolies. You also should consider backing-up your claim about the Comcast pricing with some facts. I can just as easily claim that Comcast's pricing in one region is 15% more than in another region.

Comment Re:Just like slashdot (Score 2, Insightful) 369

"They price their offerings to be competetive."

You're kidding, right? Comcast has no competition where I live, and neither do many providers around the country. There's no incentive to be competitive. Why do you think ISPs have gone so far as to sue whenever a city or town even whispers the words "municipal wifi"?

Comment Re:Just like slashdot (Score 1) 369

"and of the 1% who "need" more bandwidth, 99% of them probably aren't using it for legitimate downloads. "

That stat may have been true a few years ago, but I strongly suspect, if it hasn't changed already, it'll be different over the next few years. Video streaming services are becoming very popular, and it's gotten to the point where many Netflix users prefer the Watch Instantly option over receiving DVDs in the mail. The bitrate for HD Netflix content on the Roku box is 3.5 Mbit/sec. Let's suppose that some people keep increasing their usage of streaming services to the point where it replaces their usage of broadcast TV. Hell, why not? Netflix and Apple TV are cheaper than standard or premium cable. Let's then consider the statistic from http://www.digitalhome.ca/content/view/3134/283/ that the average person spends about 142 hours in front of a TV per month. That means downloading over 218 GB in one month just from watching TV through a streaming service.

Comment Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score 5, Insightful) 104

Last month, I had a broken Verizon phone and a year left on my contract. I really wanted an Android-based phone as a replacement, but I figured that would happen later rather than sooner with Verizon given how they like to take their time qualifying new phones (i.e. removing features), so I paid the early termination fee to jump-ship to T-Mobile. With this agreement, it seems even less likely we'll see an Android phone on their network. Even if we did, it'd be amusing to see how they'd try to make MS Live Search the default search engine for it.

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