nivla

I find it interesting how this show up the day after I had to call the customer service to clarify an interest fee on my account that din't make sense. So here is what happened, I got hit with a $12.xx monthly interest on a $2000ish purchase which I made less than 30 days ago and hasn't shown up on my previous statement. For clarification, my current APR on the card is 5.99%.

It took me two reps and two accounts managers to learn how these things are calculated:

1) Interests are daily compounded.

2) Interests are not calculated on actual balance but on the average daily balance.

3) If you don't pay your statement balance in full by the end of the month, you lose your grace period for future purchases and interest would start accruing as soon as the transactions goes through. To reset this it would require you to make two full statement payments in a row.

4) If you purchase something and return it and the return takes a few days to process, you would still pay interest on for those days.

The rep and the first account manager that spoke to weirdly dint have the basic understanding of interest rates. She argued that the $12 interest was on the $2000 for 4 days at the rate of 5.99%. Funny enough, she still din't find anything odd when I pointed out that it would mean, by the end of the year, I would pay $1095 ie. > 50% of the principal in interest!

Anyways the second rep was knowledgeable enough to explain it.

Similarly the word mango comes from the Malayalam word māṅṅa (pronounced: "manga"). The European traders mispronounced them into the now known mango.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango#Etymology

I guess I wasn't clear. I dint claim Microsoft made them, just that it came exclusively with the Lumia phones. If I recall correctly, back then if you searched for it in the store using a non-lumia phone, you wouldn't even find it listed.

I have heard this statement so many times and I feel it doesn't justify the truth. Here are some counter points. Nokia came back into my view when they started launching the Lumia phones. It was slick, fast and solid phones with amazing camera. Any mention of Nokia here on HN and Reddit before that was met with DOA as the top comment. When they started releasing the Lumia phones, the tune started to switch to "if they made an android phone, I would totally buy!". Remember the whole silly fiasco with even Siri calling Lumia 900 the best phone in the market? [1]

I think Microsoft gave it a premiere spot with Windows Mobile which would have otherwise gone unnoticeable in the Android market. Despite me jumping ship from Windows Phone, I still believe Windows Mobile was one of the best (*subjective) of all mobile OSes. Its extremely fast, less resource hog and well designed (flatness before it got trendy). Given the stereotypes about Windows OS, the mobile OS seemed nothing like it. Heck, I bought a $15 Lumia phone from Best buy and it seems like a $200 buttery smooth phone.

Lumia also had good set of apps, which created an amazing group of loyal buyers. Offline GPS - You could download the maps for the entire world on your phone. Offline Radio - Download the entire mix radio to you phone and use it where you went. Camera Apps - Nokia cinematography, Live Images, Selfie, Panorama.

However, I do believe that Microsoft's Nokia buyout was a stupid idea. Nokia was amazing at advertising, viral marketing and creating a brand loyalty. Microsoft however sucks at both advertisements and marketing but they seem to be very good at pissing off even their loyal followers.

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/255508/siri_says_nokia_lumia_...

In this thread a lot of people don't understand the meaning of monopoly and assumes a monopoly is only synonymous with the companies they hate. It has more to do with having a dominant control over a market and abusing that dominant position to own advantage. Google has pulled a lot of stunts in the past that clearly defines this. Remember the only way to have pictures on your search listing was to link your blog/site with Google+? A result with an image next to it had better clicks that the one without. Next was the shopping fiasco: The shopping results that shows up on the top had barely anything to do with ranking, instead it was a set of sponsored listing that was paid for by companies. Hmm the blending out the background of the ads with the rest of the results is another story of its own.

Although my primary search engine is still Google (like the majority here), I still don't agree nor do I encourage the direction Google is taking with their search engine.

I rather no company patent them than any do-no-evil company. Besides why do you think they won't use/abuse it? The whole point of spending so much ridiculous amount of money on a patent is to get exclusive rights to be the only one to use it. Isn't competition better than stagnation by a single company?

>Honestly, say what you will about Google, but I can't imagine them ever threatening another software company with software patents.

That is a naive fanboy outlook towards a company. Its a well known fact that Google bought Motorola only for the patents. Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft. Although I still believe it is the game that is flawed and not the players. Google has also done things that could hold back the Windows Phone ecosystem. However, none of that should discount how much Google has contributed to betterment of the web just like Facebook or Microsoft. Open-Source is open source, the only thing that matters is license here and it is as liberal as it could get MIT.

Ya that I too agree with this, pretty much all applications can now deal with \n just fine. Having CR LF (2 Bytes) is not only wasting storage space but also wasting bandwidth when transmitting.

While at it, I also wish if Linux distros could get done with case sensitiveness in filenames. Is there any advantage to allowing both Filename.ext and filename.ext? The only time I seen this is when a malware is trying to stay hidden. Also some naming conventions would be nice, when you can have any character including '/' and '.' as a filename, it gets annoying to deal with them in a cli.

You are also paying for the Oculus hardware while having no recourse to privacy even if you wanted. I am not saying Windows 10 doesn't have privacy issues, but when compared to Facebook's approach, it is far better.

Well to be fair, you are not paying to use Win 10 and also its a free upgrade. On the bright side, unlike FB, you can actually install 3rd party apps and setup firewall to gain that privacy back.

A car that has an app, a car that can be remotely updated, and a car that has all communication running through the same BUS, may be susceptible to remote break in without requiring any sort of physical access. Now the firmware may require signature verification to be patched, however in this case all we need is to corrupt the existing firmware or atleast make it seem like we had access to it in order to trigger an auto-downgrade.

Regardless, even under your logic an auto-downgrade without a user's input is completely unwarranted for.

> Elon Musk != Tesla

He is the CEO, he is responsible for the actions of his employees that are work related. Under the same guise, he shouldn't receive praises for anything everyone else under him does either.

Wouldn't that be worse security wise? Say if there is an exploit in the wild. The customer upgrades it to the latest version. Now all the bad guy has to do is to mess around with the firmware enough to trick the system into downgrading to the exploitable version.

Is it similar to what hololens is trying to achieve here: [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/aThCr0PsyuA?t=1m7s

I am perfectly fine downloading an external application to write an image the sd card just like I am perfectly fine in using "apt-get install" for any application that doesn't come bundled with Ubuntu/Raspbian. If 99.9% of your users aren't going to use a feature why bother bundling it? If there was no effective way of doing this on Windows then I can understand the reasoning behind your statement. However, that is not the case so am sorry but this comes off as pissy person trying hard to find a reason.

To be fair the side ads were the least noticed by me. There were times when I even confused the top ad with the actual search result.

Slightly off topic but has anyone noticed the new side loading ads on a youtube video? I keep accidentally clicking on them when moving the slider. It passes through all ad blockers and obstructs part of the playing video.

Yes and you can also run Lua, Javascript, Arduino/C on it.

However I thought there was already a micropython firmware for it [1]. What extra does this kickstarter bring in?

[1] https://learn.adafruit.com/building-and-running-micropython-...

>"cyber-attacks and security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products and services that could reduce revenue or lead to liability" should be at the top of the list.

Could you point out any program or OS that could guarantee neither of these? Based on what I have seen all major OSes and programs have these issue regardless of whether it is closed source or open source.

Besides how do expect them to quantify such unforeseeable events on their accounting statements?

Ya just like "M$" did a terrible job with the acquisition of Halo. Infact you can even count their entire fanbase on your fingers. Besides $2.5 Billion that was paid to acquire Minecraft is just pocket change for MS to drop and forget about it. /s

I am getting tired of these baseless comments whenever article about X shows up. Where X=Google/MS/Apple/FB etc.

Because it drains your phone's battery rather quickly and when travelling finding a charging port can be difficult. Also for networks like T-mobile, you have a separate data cap (much lower ~ 500mb) when using the hotspot option.

Meanwhile in Georgia which used to have one of the best electric vehicle tax credits in the nation has decided to not only gotten rid of it but now requires everyone to pay a $200 tax annually for owning one. [1]

In a way this is understandable since road tax comes from gasoline sale and electric vehicles don't require gas. However I wonder how they will treat something like Chevy Volt that can run on both electricity and gas.

[1] http://www.govtech.com/state/Georgia-Slams-Brakes-on-Electri...

I wish if most surface devices came with the option for 4G/LTE. Heck even a GPS sensor would come in handy when mapping. Not sure why but MS chooses to ignore having these basic features even on their expensive line of Surface products.

That said, does anyone know any universal 3G/4G/LTE dongle? Almost everything I found is made exclusive to a specific carrier. How come cheap tablets come with a universal data capability and yet no usb dongles?

If I recall correctly, Apple let you chose the one provider you want without requesting a separate sim from each. This instead lets you use multiple providers using a single sim and hops to best one as they becomes available. Its much similar to Google-Fi in practice.

Amazon's referral values always ends with "-20" and is usually placed under the parameter "tag". OPs link doesn't have any referral attached to it. For those who aren't familiar with Amazon's links, it may be hard to figure out how to detach it while still keeping it valid.

>when I was reading their blog I quickly started to feel like they go off half-cocked too often.

While I am a fan of EFF and the work they do, I too have started to notice this recently. The title of articles have become borderline click-bait and sometimes conveniently omits vital information that may help better understand the issue. The most recent one is "Stupid Patent of the Month: Microsoft’s Design Patent on a Slider" [1] [2] which surprisingly is a lawsuit on a whole lot more than just sliders.

However on this issue I am kind of split. I agree with both EFF and T-mobile. As for T-mobile, BingeOn is optional and can be disabled anytime with just a click, so it does little to nothing to hurt customers and cannot effectively be called throttling. As for EFF, they have the right to be worried that this may set a precedent for bigger control over your data in the future.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/stupid-patent-month-mi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10802413

Hasn't this been discussed multiple times? Microsoft tends to backup your key because the majority base doesn't understand how encryption works. When an average person thinks of passwords, they think there is a way to reset it. Good luck explaining to your grandma why all her favorite photos disappeared when she forgot the password.

I think for an average Joe this seems like a good strategy. With the defaults being off if the computer is stolen, all of their data and identity are stolen with it. This atleast acts like a door for an otherwise open house. Advanced users can use another encryption or do what the article suggests to not sent the key to Microsoft.

Keeping aside the stupidity of the patent, it does seems like Coral made their Wordperfect look a lot similar to Microsoft Word.[1][2]

[1] http://www.wordperfect.com/static/img/content/products/wp_ho...

[2] http://www.wordperfect.com/us/product/corel-office-software/

That is not a sound logic. If Apple invests X in R&D where X is greater than revenue, it does not mean every Iphone/Ipad/Mac was sold on a loss. It just means they spend more than they made.

Actually Microsoft has a patent on something similar [1]. It uses Kinect to sense your mood before delivering an appropriate ad.

[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2012/happy-sad-microsoft-system-targ...