lowededwookie

AppleInsider said:

Retailers and consumers in the region are inured to another contactless solution in eftpos, a card-based system that does not charge usage fees. Credit card payment processors, on the other hand, charge fees for each transaction, which in New Zealand runs at an average 1.7 percent for credit cards and 1 percent for debit cards, the report said. 

Actually incorrect.

Most EFTPOS cards here in New Zealand are Debit Cards and it is only debit or credit cards that are accepted by contactless payment systems. These debit cards are either MasterCard or Visa.

EFTPOS is a different system altogether and predates debit cards but all debit cards can be used as EFTPOS cards. However, there is a new initiative on the part of EFTPOS to support EFTPOS over the internet which acts in the same way as a debit card but does not need the backing of Visa and MasterCard.

Damn, I missed the part that says AR apps won’t work on iPhone 6/6 Plus.

That PLNR app is just what I’ve been looking for for a while

blurpbleepbloop said:

harrykatsaros said:

Things not mentioned:

- should have emphasised the 2436x1125 resolution -  the best resolution in the business. I know Samsung claims the Note has a resolution of 2960x1440 but that's not exactly the case. Samsung by default turns down the resolution to 2220x1080 (which means the iPhone has a better resolution in real life use).

You mention several good points - but regarding the screen - I'll suspend judgement until I can try a unit in person BUT I do have to think back a few years ago when Phil Schiller (correctly, IMO) derided Samsung for putting out a very high resolution/dpi display saying that the higher resolution was marketed as a positive for the user but in going well beyond 300 ppi they provided the user with indistinguishable "improved" images yet put a real extra burden on the graphics subsystem.  I have to wonder why this evidently will be different for the iPhone X.  Our defacto answer would be, because Apple does stuff the right way - but in this case I'd like a bit more detail and explaination.

I suspect it's because back then Metal2 didn't exist. Also Samsung (nor Apple for that matter) didn't have custom designed GPUs that could handle the needed power to display the graphics properly. Nor did they have a 64bit super computer processor. Technology has moved very quickly from when Phil made that quote and so his comments don't stack up now. :-)

ireland said:

I really want a dedicated Apple Podcasts app on macOS. De-bloat her.

Love how they begin to remove bloat and the first two comments are complaints. Ha.

Why a separate app for podcasts? Seems like adding more apps to macOS which kind of has the opposite effect to debloating everything. You're just moving the problem from one place to another.

on that line of thinking though I'd rather see Preview disappear and rolled into iBooks so that PDFs are read directly in iBooks but add Previews annotation functionality.

Soli said:

lowededwookie said:

Soli said:

Is it too much to ask that every modernized country use the same three 3-digit code for calling emergency services?

America wanted to be different to England which is also the reason why America drives on the right hand side of the road.

We'll talk again when America accepts the internationally recognised dd(d)-mm(m)-(yy)yy format instead of it's inane mm(m)-dd(d)-(yy)yy format

  

I've heard such stories before but I've never seen any evidence to back up an entire nation's decision for policy change based on some pettiness against the UK, especially when there are so many other things in common, evidence that US English is close to colonial English than British English is today, and more reasonable explanations, like dialing 9 first on a rotary phone would limit accidental dials, but then using the number 1 for the next two would help speed up the calls to emergency services. This also unsubstantiated but it at least sounds like a reasonable explanation based around utility.

Actually the 999 thing (here in New Zealand it's 111) has to do with the old phone systems. 999 or 111 are the most opposite end of the old rotary dial phones to the start position. By using these numbers it creates a timespan that the old systems could recognise so you didn't get a misdial. Here in New Zealand when we went to push button tone phones people were pressing 111 too fast and it would misdial every time because the phone system couldn't pick up the tone correctly. We had a campaign called "Think 1-go-1-go-1" to alleviate the issue. Not so much an issue now though. At one stage New Zealand's Telecom had to add 911 to the emergency service numbers thanks to the popularity of William Shatner's 911 in the '90s and people were dialling 911 instead of 111 and getting failed calls.

America might like to think that their version of English is the closest to colonial English but truthfully there is no such thing. The reason British English uses "colour" instead of "color" has to do with the fact that much of the words in English are taken from French and Spanish as a result of conquests. So by dropping these letters America actually makes themselves further from colonial English than modern British English. Also English is a constantly changing language so there literally is no right or wrong English. English itself is such a mongrel language that to believe in a standardised English is a bit of a misbelief. I mean you've got a Germanic language using words from French, Spanish, Hindi/Gujurati/etc, Latin, Greek, Mandarin, African, and basically any other language that England came into contact with with their own conquests that you can't actually say English has a standard. Even within England there are different forms of English and different ways of using words that getting pedantic about grammar and spelling is a fool's errand. Hell, we still use in some form words that were made up by William Shakespeare so English literally contains made up words and people get all up in arms about how to properly use them? Fool's Errand indeed.