Most Commented Technology Blogs (217)

20 years ago I had a computer monitor go bad while under warrantee.
I returned it to the manufacturer's repair center and rather than wait for the repair, I was offered a refurbished unit they could ship the same day.
Not knowing what refurbished meant (exactly) the manager said all their new monitors go through a 24 hour burn-in test. Unfortunately, a small percent fail in the field. Those are repaired and returned.
The refurbished units not only get repaired, they go through extensive testing to find out what caused the problem in the first place.

Electronic components usually have a manufacturer's tolerance of 10% on resistors and diodes that are allowed to pass their standards for specifications. In the chance too many components are close to being out of tolerance (yet still acceptable) other components in the circuitry may fail due to the tolerance.

Guitarists may test out a few different amplifiers and pick one that sounds better. While they are wired with parts that pass standards, there are some that all the parts are ideally 'on the money' and exactly in tolerance.

I took that monitor he offered and used it for many years until it was time for something larger.

I've been shopping for a cellphone. My phone is maxed out on the SD memory with more than 5,000 photos and videos. I do monthly backups and purge old photos no longer needed. It's roughly 4 or 5 years old and the battery won't make it a whole day.
New models are around $1,200 and one drawback to many is you cannot add/extend memory as they don't have a slot for SD memory.
Samsung is offering 'refreshed' models that are a few years old. They have been thoroughly checked out, new batteries installed and screens, cases replaced if they have signs of wear. The operating systems are updated, unlocked and serial number with ID's are all new. One year warranty (same as a new phone) included. Priced about half of a new phone.

Some of the other models have dropped off the sales page and no longer available. Rather than risk the model I want to disappear, I made the purchase and expected it to arrive in 10 days or less.

I'll be cloning my old phone to the new phone and a few hours of updating apps and passwords should get me into another phone for a few more years.

Friday... 6pm and I'm unable to get any YouTube videos to play.
Checking my bandwidth connection and 3 sites confirmed I'm getting downloads greater than 50mbps.
C'mon YouTube, I've got some new helicopter gear and need to see a few setup tutorials.
It's dinner time... people get off the internet!

What do y'all make of it? I think it's a scheme to try and stop more people waking up and questioning what's going on in the world. The Metaverse, in essence, is a virtual world which can be manipulated by those running it to present any set of ideas they wish. The goal seems to be to get more people invested in and plugged in to this metaverse. But why would this be? A control mechanism i think is the obvious answer (outside of obvious profit motives) - offer people a virtual 'safe space' where they don't have to worry about that big nasty (REAL) world, and where they'll be told everything they want to hear. Is it based in reality? No! Of course not! But if the reality is rife with corruption on the part of various people currently running it, wouldn't it make sense for those people to want to stop a mass awakening lest they be actually held accountable?? Yes, i think that is the point.

Tell me what YOU think

A number of technological traits will drive smart-domestic generation well past what’s available on keep cabinets nowadays. innovations in synthetic intelligence, as an example, stand to upend almost the whole thing in our lives, inclusive of our houses. you would possibly already be the use of some sort of AI-powered voice-assistant device to get the modern news or weather forecast every morning. however inside the smart home of the future, the ones AI structures ought to function the mind for whole homes, getting to know about citizens and coordinating and automating all in their various smart gadgets. IoT employer Crestron, as an instance, is operating on software that tracks someone’s habits, like which tune they need to listen inside the morning or which lights they want to be on at a certain time of day. Then, as soon as it gets the hold of a user’s preferences, it automatically plays simply the right playlists or dims the lighting fixtures before bedtime. “That’s sincerely the following evolutionary step in proper automation,” says John Clancy, head of Crestron’s residential commercial enterprise.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – AI has the potential to both benefit and harm the U.S. in unknown and unimagined ways but Congress has hardly any experts on the rapidly developing technology, lawmakers told Fox News.

"AI is going to help us in many ways. It can also kill us," Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat said. "As a recovering computer science major, my understanding of AI on a scale of one to 10 is about a five. There's a lot I don't know."

Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis said: "We've got a long way to go before we have any sense of its true capabilities and understanding what people like Elon Musk see as its capabilities going forward. I put my knowledge on a scale of one to 10 at about a 1.5."

Musk and more than 1,000 others called for an immediate pause on "giant AI experiments" last month, warning the rapidly developing sector may pose security threats. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman disagreed, saying pausing development is not an optimal way to address the issue.

AI "has the potential of civilizational destruction," Musk told Fox News' Tucker Carlson this week. He said if the industry is left unregulated, the consequences could be dangerous.

"I don't think Congress is prepared intellectually and resource-wise" to regulate AI, Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat, told Fox News. "There's no doubt that AI is going to be highly consequential."

"I don't want to say the Congress knows nothing," Takano continued. "Staff has been going to briefings on AI."

Read more:

US Withholds Licensure From US Companies & Lets ChiComs Produce The Technology ...


The story was 1st Broken a day ago by NPR ...

What The Freakin' HELL?!?!

Different than my previous blog about a flying car, a quad copter is a large-scale drone with sufficient lift to carry a person and not be flown remotely.
Toyota has a SkyDrive prototype and claim to be the first. That's not accurate as other companies have been testing prototypes for several years.

Only good for 5 to 10 minute flights, it's far from being practical.

People are online... and it looks like all systems are up!

.....they highlight in unusual colors, but won't open. Rest of CS seems OK. Must be what the CS big house looks like. Well, who deserves it more than I? I'll be careful never to bend over to pick up soap in the open pod showers. Adios, friends.

This is for young people who weren't around when there was no such thing as online anything. The personal computer wasn't even invented yet. Oh, there were computers, but you needed a forklift to move them and a college degree to be allowed near one. There was no Google or any other search engine. If you needed to research anything you looked it up in an encyclopedia, or went to the library for a book on the subject. libraries were very popular, everybody had a library card.

If you wanted to buy something from a distant company, you called them on the phone at a number you got from an ad in a magazine or newspaper or on TV. Maybe they would send the item COD or you had to mail them a check before they shipped the item.
There were no dating sites. If you wanted to meet somebody, you either went to a bar, cruised around looking for someone waiting for a bus and offering a ride or a friend introduced you to a sibling or a friend. There were also "Lonely Hearts clubs" you could join. It was a painstaking process but at least you weren't spinning your wheels on someone from a different hemisphere or getting fleeced by scammers from Nigeria or Ghana.
There was no email. If you wanted to write to someone, you either wrote or typed a letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and brought it to the post office to mail it. If it was going very far away you could send it Airmail for extra postage or it would be transported by train or steamship if it was going across the ocean. It could take a week or longer for a letter to go cross country by regular mail.

There were no online games. If you felt like playing a card game you got out the deck of cards and played with another person(s) or played solitaire. Same with any other kind of game. Or you could go to a bar where they may have had a console with a game called PONG which was just bouncing a ball back & forth on a TV screen with a paddle you controlled with a knob.