This new version of Chrome should be yet another reason for Mozilla to collectively shit its pants in fear.
Good. I hope they become irrelevant, simply due to what their attitude towards Opera users was ten years ago - and especially the attitude of Asa Dotzler, one of the most horrible trolls ever to have existed on the internet.
Soon enough, Mozilla will drop to Opera's market share. I'm going to laugh, oh how I'm going to laugh!
And then I'm going to start hoping that Opera falls from 2% to 0%, because they had an incredible browser and fucked it up exactly like Firefox did, by chromifying it entirely and alienating their decade-long users. Did they gain market share by making a Chrome clone? Nope. Quite the opposite.
Still, in the age of Gmail, it's hard to think anyone would be dealing with Exchange, unless they're in a company, which then gets Outlook with no cost to the employee.
Looks great, but the free version only supports 1 account... That's good enough for a random person, but your average IT power user has at least three email accounts to handle...
State broadcast means little to nothing. You're paying for it - let other people see it. In return, you get to see all of THEIR stuff. You specifically mention that the BBC is not the only state sponsored broadcast in Europe - you'll get all of their stuff too.
You forgot about one tiny problem:
Language.
Someone in the UK can't understand, dunno, Bulgarian, but an average Bulgarian does understand English very well.
On top of that, and no offense to Bulgarians, whatever their TV produces is nowhere near the quality of BBC shows. Nothing in Europe is that good.
I've been avoiding GOG for purchases simply because their downloader was/is horrible. I had a Witcher update that required me to download the entire game install all over again in multiple installer files. No proper launcher, no proper game library, just a mess.
I do. The bulb in my bathroom has been going strong for almost 12 years now. The bulb in the garage, judging by a date stamped on it, was manufactured in 1990. Still works. The bulb that is on the most, in my desk lamp, is good for about a year before I have to replace it, and I have a nagging feeling it's only because of poor quality of the thingamajig you screw the bulb in (can't be too tight, can't be too loose).
Cree isn't available for purchase here. If I order bulbs from the US (which is where they only seem to be available), it'll come down to at least ~$30 per bulb, including shipping, import taxes, customs and VAT. Return on investment would be 5+ years, if the bulb even lives that long.
As for the evil house-burning bulb I purchased, it was $10 and it was German. Not cheap, not Chinese. Maybe it was a defective sample, but it would have burst into flames soon. That's a risk I'm not willing to take again.
An incandescent runs on 220V. An LED has to have a whole bunch of AC/DC electronics stuffed into a very small volume, which is just begging for trouble.
I'd trust LEDs if I had a proper power converter somewhere and 5V wiring in the house for the light fixtures. However, I don't, and I won't, so incandescents are the way to go. They're still available for purchase, so when they truly start to be phased out due to EU laws, I'll buy a couple of hundred to last me a lifetime, for the price of 2 (two) imported Cree bulbs...
One thing to consider is total cost of ownership, and over the lifetime of an LED, you would have bought somewhere between 30 and 100 incandescent bulbs.
How? My incandescents last 7-8 years on average. I've had some last 20 years, and I've had some die in a year, but the average seems to be closer to a decade.
If you are using incandescent bulbs, and you replace your most-commonly-used ones with LED bulbs, you will save enough money on electricity to pay for the new bulbs within a reasonable time.
As usual, It Depends (tm).
I bought a $10 (at the current exchange rate) LED bulb for my desk lamp, and figured it'll pay itself off in 15-16 months.
After 3 months, the bulb was dead. I was in an adjacent room when I realized the light had gone out, and went to check it out. The first thing that greeted me was the smell of burned electronics. The second thing happened when I tried to unscrew the bulb and got burned by the heat. Took about 15 minutes for the defective bulb to cool down to room temperature.
The seller didn't want to honor the warranty. I said the bulb was in a desk lamp, they said "ah, but it should have been pointing upwards" (?!). I was legally entitled to getting a replacement through EU laws (no questions asked during the first six months), but they were out of replacements, so I just said "screw it, too much time spent on this shit" and went back to incandescents.
The cat also immediately went back to sleep below a brand new $0.5 incandescent, whereas she'd been avoiding the LED (no heat).
Bottom line, I lost $10 and had I not have been home when the lamp was turned on, the house would have burned down. I'll stick to incandescents until I die, thank you very much. When they fail, nothing can ever go wrong. Saving electricity vs. charred remains of what used to be your home is a no-brainer.
On an online credit card purchase you get a OTP token generated for that transaction? How is it implemented? Do you need to be logged in to your bank to have access to a generator or some kind of app on your phone?
It depends.
You can get a physical key fob, some new fancy credit cards include a small display and a keypad, or you can get a phone app to generate the token. All are PIN-protected.
Can't login to e-banking without a token, can't do anything inside it without a different token (called APPLI-2 here, whereas the OTP is APPLI-1).
My bank has an additional layer of security for when you purchase online. When you purchase with the credit card it spawns a page that comes from my bank. I gave it a personal statement that it uses to show that it is real - ie "Your wife's favourite food is potato chips" and then it asks for a password. If I give the correct password the transaction will go through.
Password?
Like, really?
Please don't tell me your bank account uses a password, instead of OTP tokens...?!
If I have it, and you don't, and it's very sensitive, then you'll have to supply me with a written and stamped document, signed by multiple Important People (tm), which states that it's okay to give you the data, and also specifies how I'm going to give you the data. I also need to be cleared from issues on your end. Maybe your network is hacked. The data is safe with me; how do I know it'll be safe with you? I need to be waived first.
"Europe" isn't just five countries, just as "Asia" isn't China and Japan only. India is having a really big WP surge, Brazil (listed above at 3.8% WP) too; carriers are currently pushing it like crazy, and if you were at the World Cup, you could have seen a lot of Lumias around, nowhere near what the data is suggesting. Their largest bank just released a WP app, due to a big uptick in WP sales. Similar in Argentina, if a couple friends are to be trusted - a lot of people are switching from low-end Androids to low-end Windows Phones.
The problem with various marketshare figures is that it often uses data from US services, mostly ad companies.
Sadly for them, Android beat them to the punch for "Affordable smartphone OS", while apple beat them to the punch for "Luxury smartphone OS". This leaves microsoft scrambling for marketshare in the smartphone space.
So what's going to happen when WP hits 30% in Asia and South America? It's on its way there. In several European countries, WP is at ~12-14%. Windows 10 is going to make central phone management easier; want to guess what's going to happen with tens of millions of various employees being issued official company phones?
WP is going to continue to grow, and iOS is going to continue to fall, until it becomes an irrelevant quirk.
Having a US-centric view on reality isn't a very good thing.
Easily. You can't install Windows on a new computer without buying it. You only have a free upgrade for a year after the release; after that, you pay for the upgrade.
The customer-product thing was kind of a jab at Google, I think.
If I write a random article about a Windows 10 license costing eleventy bajillion dollars, and it gets posted to Slashdot, are you going to believe it?
We announced that a free upgrade for Windows 10 will be made available to customers running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 who upgrade in the first year after launch.*
This is more than a one-time upgrade: once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device â" at no additional charge.
Microsoft is perfectly clear about this.
The article is wrong, the summary is wrong, and whoever decided to post something that links to Mashable's random interpretations should be fired.
There are people using XP today, because it's "good enough" and "doesn't warrant spending money on an upgrade" - especially since the upgrade is Windows 8 with its stupid Metro UI.
With the return of the Start menu and general improvements, I can easily see a lot of Windows 7/8 users upgrading. I've just had a chat with a friend who insists that Windows 7 is the best ever (which I agree with), and she said she'll be upgrading to Windows 10, because it's free. 8 was a clusterfuck that had a price tag.
I'm not a native English speaker:) Regardless of that, the quote is from "Pulp Fiction".
I'm not going to read a random article that someone pulled out of his ass, when major tech sites on the internet are maintaining actual live blogs, and Microsoft is happily streaming the event.
Don't read articles and random interpretations. There are actual quotes posted online, as well as photos of presentation slides.
Slashdot Mirror
This new version of Chrome should be yet another reason for Mozilla to collectively shit its pants in fear.
Good. I hope they become irrelevant, simply due to what their attitude towards Opera users was ten years ago - and especially the attitude of Asa Dotzler, one of the most horrible trolls ever to have existed on the internet.
Soon enough, Mozilla will drop to Opera's market share. I'm going to laugh, oh how I'm going to laugh!
And then I'm going to start hoping that Opera falls from 2% to 0%, because they had an incredible browser and fucked it up exactly like Firefox did, by chromifying it entirely and alienating their decade-long users. Did they gain market share by making a Chrome clone? Nope. Quite the opposite.
Ah, two accounts isn't that bad :)
Still, in the age of Gmail, it's hard to think anyone would be dealing with Exchange, unless they're in a company, which then gets Outlook with no cost to the employee.
Looks great, but the free version only supports 1 account... That's good enough for a random person, but your average IT power user has at least three email accounts to handle...
I installed the latest Opera and was surprised
So was everyone who used the pre-chromed Opera.
I'm still on Opera 12. Nothing can replace it just yet.
State broadcast means little to nothing. You're paying for it - let other people see it. In return, you get to see all of THEIR stuff. You specifically mention that the BBC is not the only state sponsored broadcast in Europe - you'll get all of their stuff too.
You forgot about one tiny problem:
Language.
Someone in the UK can't understand, dunno, Bulgarian, but an average Bulgarian does understand English very well.
On top of that, and no offense to Bulgarians, whatever their TV produces is nowhere near the quality of BBC shows. Nothing in Europe is that good.
... and parent's post is exactly why websites need to proactively publish comments, instead of being retroactive, or doing nothing at all.
I've been avoiding GOG for purchases simply because their downloader was/is horrible. I had a Witcher update that required me to download the entire game install all over again in multiple installer files. No proper launcher, no proper game library, just a mess.
Maybe it's time to look into GOG again.
I do. The bulb in my bathroom has been going strong for almost 12 years now. The bulb in the garage, judging by a date stamped on it, was manufactured in 1990. Still works. The bulb that is on the most, in my desk lamp, is good for about a year before I have to replace it, and I have a nagging feeling it's only because of poor quality of the thingamajig you screw the bulb in (can't be too tight, can't be too loose).
Cree isn't available for purchase here. If I order bulbs from the US (which is where they only seem to be available), it'll come down to at least ~$30 per bulb, including shipping, import taxes, customs and VAT. Return on investment would be 5+ years, if the bulb even lives that long.
As for the evil house-burning bulb I purchased, it was $10 and it was German. Not cheap, not Chinese. Maybe it was a defective sample, but it would have burst into flames soon. That's a risk I'm not willing to take again.
An incandescent runs on 220V. An LED has to have a whole bunch of AC/DC electronics stuffed into a very small volume, which is just begging for trouble.
I'd trust LEDs if I had a proper power converter somewhere and 5V wiring in the house for the light fixtures. However, I don't, and I won't, so incandescents are the way to go. They're still available for purchase, so when they truly start to be phased out due to EU laws, I'll buy a couple of hundred to last me a lifetime, for the price of 2 (two) imported Cree bulbs...
One thing to consider is total cost of ownership, and over the lifetime of an LED, you would have bought somewhere between 30 and 100 incandescent bulbs.
How? My incandescents last 7-8 years on average. I've had some last 20 years, and I've had some die in a year, but the average seems to be closer to a decade.
If you are using incandescent bulbs, and you replace your most-commonly-used ones with LED bulbs, you will save enough money on electricity to pay for the new bulbs within a reasonable time.
As usual, It Depends (tm).
I bought a $10 (at the current exchange rate) LED bulb for my desk lamp, and figured it'll pay itself off in 15-16 months.
After 3 months, the bulb was dead. I was in an adjacent room when I realized the light had gone out, and went to check it out. The first thing that greeted me was the smell of burned electronics. The second thing happened when I tried to unscrew the bulb and got burned by the heat. Took about 15 minutes for the defective bulb to cool down to room temperature.
The seller didn't want to honor the warranty. I said the bulb was in a desk lamp, they said "ah, but it should have been pointing upwards" (?!). I was legally entitled to getting a replacement through EU laws (no questions asked during the first six months), but they were out of replacements, so I just said "screw it, too much time spent on this shit" and went back to incandescents.
The cat also immediately went back to sleep below a brand new $0.5 incandescent, whereas she'd been avoiding the LED (no heat).
Bottom line, I lost $10 and had I not have been home when the lamp was turned on, the house would have burned down. I'll stick to incandescents until I die, thank you very much. When they fail, nothing can ever go wrong. Saving electricity vs. charred remains of what used to be your home is a no-brainer.
On an online credit card purchase you get a OTP token generated for that transaction? How is it implemented? Do you need to be logged in to your bank to have access to a generator or some kind of app on your phone?
It depends.
You can get a physical key fob, some new fancy credit cards include a small display and a keypad, or you can get a phone app to generate the token. All are PIN-protected.
Can't login to e-banking without a token, can't do anything inside it without a different token (called APPLI-2 here, whereas the OTP is APPLI-1).
My bank has an additional layer of security for when you purchase online. When you purchase with the credit card it spawns a page that comes from my bank. I gave it a personal statement that it uses to show that it is real - ie "Your wife's favourite food is potato chips" and then it asks for a password. If I give the correct password the transaction will go through.
Password?
Like, really?
Please don't tell me your bank account uses a password, instead of OTP tokens...?!
Jesus christ...
I should send you very sensitive information?
If I have it, and you don't, and it's very sensitive, then you'll have to supply me with a written and stamped document, signed by multiple Important People (tm), which states that it's okay to give you the data, and also specifies how I'm going to give you the data. I also need to be cleared from issues on your end. Maybe your network is hacked. The data is safe with me; how do I know it'll be safe with you? I need to be waived first.
Papers, please.
Spacebar is messed up, no arrow keys, no function keys, no insert/delete, no home/end/pgup/pgdn.
It's horrible.
I've never seen a keyboard worse than this one. There have been various satanic malformations, but even those had a normal fucking spacebar.
Would people be willing to pay for such a browser?
I would pay for Vivaldi, if it had all the features of pre-Blink Opera with a Blink rendering engine. I'd pay $50 for it, happily.
Because there is NOTHING I can upgrade to from Opera 12.17.
"Europe" isn't just five countries, just as "Asia" isn't China and Japan only. India is having a really big WP surge, Brazil (listed above at 3.8% WP) too; carriers are currently pushing it like crazy, and if you were at the World Cup, you could have seen a lot of Lumias around, nowhere near what the data is suggesting. Their largest bank just released a WP app, due to a big uptick in WP sales. Similar in Argentina, if a couple friends are to be trusted - a lot of people are switching from low-end Androids to low-end Windows Phones.
The problem with various marketshare figures is that it often uses data from US services, mostly ad companies.
Sadly for them, Android beat them to the punch for "Affordable smartphone OS", while apple beat them to the punch for "Luxury smartphone OS". This leaves microsoft scrambling for marketshare in the smartphone space.
So what's going to happen when WP hits 30% in Asia and South America? It's on its way there. In several European countries, WP is at ~12-14%. Windows 10 is going to make central phone management easier; want to guess what's going to happen with tens of millions of various employees being issued official company phones?
WP is going to continue to grow, and iOS is going to continue to fall, until it becomes an irrelevant quirk.
Having a US-centric view on reality isn't a very good thing.
Easily. You can't install Windows on a new computer without buying it. You only have a free upgrade for a year after the release; after that, you pay for the upgrade.
The customer-product thing was kind of a jab at Google, I think.
If I write a random article about a Windows 10 license costing eleventy bajillion dollars, and it gets posted to Slashdot, are you going to believe it?
No, absolutely not.
http://blogs.windows.com/blogg...
We announced that a free upgrade for Windows 10 will be made available to customers running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 who upgrade in the first year after launch.*
This is more than a one-time upgrade: once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device â" at no additional charge.
Microsoft is perfectly clear about this.
The article is wrong, the summary is wrong, and whoever decided to post something that links to Mashable's random interpretations should be fired.
There are people using XP today, because it's "good enough" and "doesn't warrant spending money on an upgrade" - especially since the upgrade is Windows 8 with its stupid Metro UI.
With the return of the Start menu and general improvements, I can easily see a lot of Windows 7/8 users upgrading. I've just had a chat with a friend who insists that Windows 7 is the best ever (which I agree with), and she said she'll be upgrading to Windows 10, because it's free. 8 was a clusterfuck that had a price tag.
Don't underestimate the value of free :)
I'm not a native English speaker :) Regardless of that, the quote is from "Pulp Fiction".
I'm not going to read a random article that someone pulled out of his ass, when major tech sites on the internet are maintaining actual live blogs, and Microsoft is happily streaming the event.
Don't read articles and random interpretations. There are actual quotes posted online, as well as photos of presentation slides.
And now it will be free for a year, because they want people to move off Windows 7, lest it not become the new "it's good enough" XP.
Myerson's quote from the presentation: "People care about their privacy. So do we. You are our customer, not our product."