This is silly. I'm an Indian (country with largest penetration of mobile phones, primarily GSM) and I can reasonably say that a large majority of the population knows exactly what a SIM card is.
Phones here are not appliances that you buy from the carrier. The device and the service are properly decoupled enough that people know the difference.
I too, like many of you find their policies a little strange. Where the entire business world practices reducing prices of older products and replacing them with superior products at old or even slightly higher price points one must wonder the reasoning behind their, "newer must be cheaper than older" strategy where they do not pass on the benefit of the older hardware to the customers.
If an existing customer reads that page, and this thread there's just one thing that they will immediately deduce. Existing customers are being used as a subsidizing agent to capture new audience. Which, again is quite strange. In a game theoretic way, this drives the point to existing customers that it is beneficial to not be loyal to the service (i.e. cancel/re-order).
If they reduced cost on older hardware while introducing newer one, they could also list those up for sale. Surely people on a budget or people who don't need a Xeon will simply settle for an older Atom at a cheaper price. This also allows OVH to retain and milk the box till its ROI is hopefully achieved.
Au contraire, I've found underground parking lots to be cool. Much cooler than their above ground cousins.
You see, I live in a country that gets very hot during summers. The ambient goes to 45 easily. And the only sensible solution is to park some place where the sun rays cannot (a) directly hit your car because that would cause the car to become uncomfortably hot (b) cannot be reflected through to your car via multiple other surfaces (e.g. other cars, walls, etc).
The underground section of the parking lots perfectly suit this criteria, even though it's technically the same building with under-and-over ground parking facilities. If you're wondering where I'm talking about, it's the parking lot at the Bahrain City Center. (One can hope that very few people residing in Bahrain read hackernews, and my supposedly secret strategy doesn't leak out to everyone).
What I could do would be to take actual thermometric readings over the course of this summer for underground vs. above-ground parking spots.
Well, now that you mention it, yes. When it became around 3-5 cards per stack it was quicker to use insertion sort. I found out, that like computers, it's ultimately a tradeoff between desk space(RAM) and stack iteration (CPU) by me.
I haven't tried radix sort - I'll go try it today and see how well I do. Nope, I don't do selection sort either, since it's quicker to perform insertion sort when stack size gets manageable.
I'm not a fan of biometrics (I have a fingerprint reader on my laptop) because you can't change your password once it's stolen.
The "Log-in with your iPhone?" could be coupled with some kind of non-biometric authentication and that would be better. But honestly, two-factor with strong passwords are more than enough. The dismal security scenario is mostly cultural, not technological.
I'm not much into the clearances part, only the buying side.
You need to submit the type test reports and submittals to the Energy Board and then they approve the equipment. This takes around a month or so. Once you've got the parts, you can install it and then a government certified technician/engineer is required to be present when you energize it.
I'm working in the industrial power sector in the Middle East. With zero work experience in India, I'd love to be informed the process of how both private and government entities acquire equipment and clearances for medium and high voltage application. Basically, how bureaucratic is the process actually?
Phones here are not appliances that you buy from the carrier. The device and the service are properly decoupled enough that people know the difference.