Nope. Nope. Nope. You give it your credentials, and it seems their servers connect to the servers vs your device itself. No thank you, not leaving credentials on a 3rd party server. MS Outlook app for iOS and Android did the same thing.
They kept consistently putting them in my mailbox and raise the red "return" flag to avoid going up my 300ft driveway. This is illegal. Also problematic when the POST OFFICE picks up your item before you're able to revive it, as they should because red flags up and it's in the box. Then Post Office DEMANDS shipping fee to turn your item to you. Happened to me. Consistantly complained to Amazon Customer Support that they are NOT to go to mailbox and should be delivered TO THE HOUSE up the Driveway just like UPS, FedEx and other services do. I literally have security footage of the driver not even stopping and tossing two packages out the window on Sunday morning, half in the road at the bottom of my driveway. It rained. Packages got soaked. LUCKILY they were plastic wrapped inside the packages so they were safe. Complained to Amazon again, I doubt anything will be done.
There are a few nice drivers, that rent UHaul Vans and wear reflective vests that drive up and hand deliver packages that are professional. But majority of the drivers are lazy looking to get paid and dont care. They get paid in "Blocks" ex you can a set price to delivered a set packages that should take you X amount of time by their estimate. If you deliver it faster, by chucking shit out the window, you can then pick up more routes and make more money per hour effectively. Thats what these people are doing,
My DL4100 NAS died this past weekend. Just the controller. Array, drives, data all fine. Controller just died 3mo after warranty ended. Luckily it used a standard container for the RAID5 set, and EXT4 so I was able to hook all 4 drives up to a system and drag the data off.
I stopped using NewEgg over 9mo ago. So at least I'm not affected.
As a Connecticut resident who got screwed over by NewEgg releasing false data to the State of Connecticut, when they were also NOT legally obligated to I stopped using them. Ex our tax friendly state in it's endless quest to absolutely ruin any resident of the state and tax them to death decided to purse gathering Sales Tax / "Use Tax" data from NewEgg back around January 2018. They had done this to other sites and online merchants on their quest to collect money. They would petition the vendor with a legally scary letter, telling them to hand over all purchase history for the last 5 years for every Connecticut resident over to the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services, our tax office essentially. Most told them to go pound sand as there was no legal authority for them to do this or request this information from the online vendors and CT couldn't do anything about it.
NewEgg. NewEgg, they just handed the data over. The state then had my ENTIRE purchase history. They did this WITHOUT any consumer notification. It was only AFTER the CT DRS processed the data and sent out Use Tax bills to NewEgg customers did they fess up on releasing the data. This wouldn't be a problem, as technically the Use Tax is owed, however the way they collected the data was flat out illegal. Both from a consumer protection and legal point of view. The bigger issue though THEY ABSOLUTELY messed up the data dumps. For example, 2014 I had made several thousand of dollars of purchases. ONE was made on my account, with a friend's credit card. He got a bill from the CT DRS for my entire 2014 purchase history. Then the data I got for 2016 owed taxes included items that I had used out of state friends credit cards for, and had shipped to them. No use tax was owed. Yet I had the bill. The CT DRS being the CT DRS left you no legal way to challenge this. You could call the number, and talk to someone (which me and several friends tried) who essentially told you to just pay it over and over despite it being wrong and incorrect data. In the end I paid it because it was only a few hundred dollar discrepancy and the consequences and repercussions of having a Tax Bill paid late were too large and would have made a bigger hole to crawl out of given how uncooperative the state was. I still blame NewEgg for giving them data.
Anyway, anyone who still uses NewEgg should have already known how NewEgg cares not the slightest about their customers privacy or information. It's absolutely NO surprise to me this happened, and is only further proof to drop them and not order from them again.
I have my own RSS aggregator for news. However, I primarily use my Facebook account to like companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and other interesting companies I like to find out about new products, watch cool videos they may publish, and sometimes see news they publish I may miss in my RSS feed. So, without this, I'm not less likely to know what SpaceX and Tesla are doing excpept negative news stories now posting how behind Tesla is on Model3 orders. Overall this will be bad for the company in terms of exposure, as that's how Tesla got it's real following. Alientating much of their base.
I honestly hold absolutely nothing about Facebook in the last week to two weeks newsworthy or surprising given I've known for years friends email and contacts were being stolen via SPAM I would get on my email account, and thus made sure all apps got privileges revoked, and minimized my exposure. You're stupid to know assume your data on facebook was NOT being mined. Not a game changer for me.
I had the original Pebble watch from Kickstarter, and Pebble Time Steel from Kickstarter. My favorite watches. I had the Pebble Time Steel 2 on Pre-order on Kickstarter when it was canceled. I will absolutely NEVER buy a Fitbit product again due to the way they ripped apart Pebble.
Understandably, Pebble was in trouble and was going bankrupt. Legally Fitbit had every right to do what they did, and maximize profits. However the way they bought only Pebble's IP, and hired on it's Developers, not taking on the company itself, was just a dick move. People who bought a BRAND NEW Pebble 2, Pebble Round, or any other pebble the DAY before the announcement LOST their warranty and ALL SUPPORT, despite Fitbit making it seem like they took over the company. I for one had my vibration motor for notifications die just a few days after the announcement, despite being under 1 year old, I was stuck. Likewise Pebble had all the leg work done for the Pebble Time Steel 2 watch, that IS the Fitbit Ionic in 95% of the features, including Tooling, design, software.. they could have just released it. Pebble was also HUGE and had inlays into retail and big online stores. Fitbit could have EASILY utilized the branding and name.. but chose the cheap way out. I feel like another company could have easily come in and actually done right and kept the brand going. Instead they let themselves be cannibalized by Fitbit.
I use TinyTinyRSS https://tt-rss.org/ . I have it setup on a small shared hosting plan I have with a Let's Encrypt SSL for security. I have a cron job that runs and checks for git updates and processing them updating it to the latest rolling release, as well as running every 5-10 minutes to check for new feeds. They have an AMAZING mobile app that even has offline support. Very handy when I was on a 5-hour flight the other day to download all feeds and stories and read later on the plane. If you have a shared hosting account available to you, this is the way. It has options for logins, even multiple users. The app will save your user/password if you'd like. This is also how I came and found this article. I used Feedly in the past but found TTS much easier to use and did not rely on ANY 3rd party services. After being burned by Google Reader, I felt this was a must.
Uber, because it's the only ride sharing / taxi app/service that I know will always work. Both Uber and Lyft has slim offerings in my area. There are a dozen or so cars within a hour of me on both services now, both are a 20+ minute wait for pickup.
That being said, I only used Uber for the first time (despite having an account for almost a year as a just in case thing) the other day. I was on vacation in a popular vacation spot, and an emergency came up and I had to get home earlier than planned and was able to get a Uber to drive me 3 hours home from a hotel at 1:30am. From click to pickup was just over 3 minutes. Lyft had 0 cars nearby and wouldn't even let me request it. And the local taxi service I called before to compare couldn't guarantee me an out of state drive that late and would need to check with drivers first since usually those are scheduled ahead of time. Uber has the biggest offering and is in more places, which is why I use it. If Lyft or other services grew, and could guarantee me a ride at 1:30am like that in an emergency, I would use it too but it's not there yet.
Bank of America and Microsoft demo'd a dapp built on Etherium the other week, and some of the 86+ companies added to the EEA today already have functional / testing functional uses for blockchain within their enterprises.
Etherium is not just money. If you see it as such you're blind. Ether is the gas used for Etherium transactions to power the network and power it for corporate and global use. This site is a shadow of its former self, it seems there's less and less people that truly appreciate emerging techs on here.
You don't need the entire blockchain downloaded for Etherium or Bitcoin to work. That's only if you want a "Full Node" client. You can run Wallet apps on your system such as Jaxx, or use a Hardware wallet such as Ledge Nano, or a Paper Wallet via MyEtherWallet.com. For Etherium you can use browser plugins for dapps as well. Bandwith is a few kb and small download for the app.
I have been holding Ether since February and have been accumulating other ERC20 tokens (Golem, Gnosis, etc) that also run on the Etherium Blockchain. Back when I read Microsoft, Intel, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, The U.N., and tons of other Fin-Tech companies were getting in, I was intrigued and immediately converted the majority of my Bitcoin holdings over to Ether after dealing with VERY slow transaction times with Bitcoin and being fed up with it and the thread of a Bitcoin hard fork. Never looking back. Instant payment, low fees, backed by MAJOR tech and finance companies.
This is the reason we upgraded ALL our workstations (about 200-250 workstations between two sites) to SSD's about two years back. We calculated the time it takes for a system to boot, assuming once a day, time lost while they get coffee / etc waiting for it to boot, and time during the day spent waiting for things to load. The ROI for us on these purchases was less than a year with time lost taken into account. Let alone moral/frustration issues.
We also have done away with ordering bare minimal system. Everything we order has the latest generation i5 Quad Core or better (i7 Quad Cores or Xeons) for users that do CAD work. Back in 2009-2011 during the downturn, that his us hard, we had to buy a lot of lower end systems to replace dead hardware, and we felt the effects of it for years with users being frustrated.
Sounds like all the more reason to switch over to payment in either Bitcoin or Either. Bitcoin first, however Either is generalized as more business friendly, with contracts and such being allowed. Dell, NewEgg, Overstock, and several other online vendors use it as a zero-cost alternative already for digital transactions. No PayPal fees, no credit card processing fees. Digital cash. Also works great for sending people money.
This. I just switched to Plain Text. Thats for the help! I read articles a lot via RSS but hardly comment or visit the site directly anymore.
Ah I remember those Pentium 4 Mobile's as well. I worked on a few of those at my old job, cleaning up dried out thermal paste and gunked up giant fans that were in those laptops.
The K8's also weren't bad. I almost switched then but kept a Socket 478 1.6ghz P4 for a while. Wish I went K8 then though, would have had DDR memory instead of more expensive PC133 at the time.
Well you don't need to know the generation name, it's the first number of the model number. I never refer to them as Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, etc.. just "2nd gen" "3rd gen" etc. And it's pretty easy, U is low power, K is unlocked multiplier, then m3, m5 and m7 are the new lower power variants for the 7th gen CPU's instead of using the U designation. And like you said if you need more info, a quick Google away with Ark. AMD has nothing like it. i have to look up reviews to see that their current high end CPU's are like 3-4 years old.
Driver's weren't the issue. Both had had their fair share of driver issues (nVidia drivers supporting new games in SLI were THE WORST, it took 1.5+ months to play the latest Battlefield and COD titles in SLI, let alone with any stability). These were just flat out dead GPU's with no overclocking. I found the manufacturers for most nVidia chipset cards do not clock fan speeds properly and the GPU's would get excessively hot. Running a game for an hour would overheat them and I'd get artifacts and game crashes until they cooled up. I used MSI's AfterBurner software to ramp up the GPU Temp / Fan Speed curve so it would ramp up the fan speed MUCH sooner and got stability. I would only activate the profiles when gaming though due to excessive sound from the fans. My guess is running them with stock fan speeds most of the time caused GPU failure or perhaps heated up the solder and the GPU or even VRAM became dislodged as a reflow with a heat gun fixed one for a bit.
I was a BIG AMD fan back in the Athlon 64 Days. I had a Athlon 64 X2 3400+ 939, later upgrading to a AMD FX-60 CPU in the same socket. Those were the brief days where AMD performance beat out Intels on multi-core systems. However once the i7 series came out, Intel was back on top again. I had i7 920, now a i7 4700K and will be getting i7 7700K once they released. Yes the Intel CPU's are more, but cost per performance is well worth it especially considering I upgrade every 3-4 years.
As far as AMD goes, I had a ATI/AMD Rage 128, Radeon 7000, Radeon-All-In-Wonder 8500DV, then switched to nVidia with a 7900GT, that failed on me, then a 8800GTS, that failed one me, then GTX 275, that failed one me and stupid me got dual GTX 570's in SLI. SLI never works right especially with new releases. Coupled with my fail rate of nVidia chipset cards, I went with a AMD R9 290 which was reasonable price for a video card with top performance. Still have it and still play most games I have on high settings no problem. No plans to uprgade, but when I do for Desktop systems I will be keeping with good luck AMD. For laptops, I've gone nVidia just because they have better graphics switching than AMD currently between integrated and dedicated.
They have my business with video cards, but CPU's they have a long way to go to get me to consider them performance wise. I can't even tell what their newest CPU's are. Intel makes it easy, i3 Basic, i5 mid range i7 high end. and models are easy where in WXYZ, W= generation, XYZ high numbers are faster within the generation. AMD with Their FM2 and AM3+ cores I cant tell whats low end and whats high end easy enough.
I backed the original Pebble, then later the Pebble Time Steel. I had backed the Pebble Time 2, and I am HIGHLY disappointed with both Pebble and Fitbit for not honoring those pledges. Even with degraded support or updates, I would have loved to have what I paid for. And shame on Fitbit for not honoring support or warranty for the company they are buying. The worst of it is there are users with BRAND NEW Pebble 2 devices, only days old, that now have no warranty and no support period.
What's even worse is that there are no other comparable smart watches. I'm one of the few that love smart watches, despite the current trend and downfall of many of them, as I've owned them going back to Calculator Watches, then Fossil Abacus PalmOS 4.x watch, and many others. I tried a Android Wear watch but grew dissatisfied with it as the battery on both those and Apple watches in most cases do not even last a full day and are now *always on* display like ePaper watches are.
I tried a Fitbit way back, as a health monitoring before they added step counters into Pebble. I hated it, and got it returned after the device stopped working a month or two later. This only solidifies my opinion of "Never again Fitbit"
I've been a avid Plex user for almost 2 years now. A bit over a year ago I bought a storage array NAS just for dedicated Plex storage, and built a i5 media center system that acts as Plex server and a few other things so I don't have to leave a power hungry gaming desktop on all the time. Previous to that I only kept some content on disk, and backed up media to CD's, then DVD, then Bluray. Combined, I have somewhere north of 2.5TB of content. Charter in my area offers only 60mbit/4mbit service, with 150mbit/5mbit service as a $50 upgrade. That's over 150hours to upload A week straight. Then content, when I add it, has to be uploaded. It makes no sense to download content, only to upload it, to stream/download it again. With GoPro 4K 60dps footage I have taking up SEVERAL gigs, it's just way too much to upload to Amazon, let alone upload the small trimmed down clips I want to YouTube sometimes. Maybe in the future, if ISP's in my area decide to offer actual upload speeds. As it stands if I download at 60mbit, 50-75% of my upload bandwidth is spent in just TCP acknowledgements and overhead. And symmetrical business speed is offered via Fiber only here at costs of $500+/mo.
Here here. $30 Roku, plus a PC you already have on 24x7 + Plex. I have mine running on a PC i made for my media center. It has Plex Server, Plex Client, and a few things like game emulators on it I use. I storage all my media on a WD DL4100 NAS array. Depending on your media size you can do simular NAS array setup or do local storage. They have Plex for just about every device now. It plays nice and fast local, and will stream and convert to lower bitrate and resolution over WAN.
I have my old phone/tablet in a Hale Dreamer dock. http://haledevices.com/product...
It provides a easy to press "Shut the hell up I'm awake I'm awake" button as well as volume and brightness dials.
Likewise.. its an old Galaxy Tab 2 7". If it died, it wouldn't be the worst thing.
I forgot in between I actually ran an Archos Home Connect 35. It ran Android 2.2.1. Had a decent speaker. Alas the small battery (so your alarm would still go off if you lost power) decided to expand and bloat and break the plastic housing. Threw it off soon after I took it apart and realized the battery was about to pop.
I had one of these back in 2010-2011 or so. First device I actually ran Netflix on. Chumby was a brand of "Smart" internet ready smart alarm clocks. They had basic functions, and 3rd party apps you could install such as Netflix, or different clock faces, etc. Very long end devices. Sony used the Chumby OS and made their own branded versions of these clocks, Sony Dash. I ditched mine back in 2013-2014 or so once I saw a post somewhere showing Sony was discontinueing the platform. I knew it was a matter of time until they killed the services and I was not risking this. Instead I set up a old Android tablet to use as a alarm clock. Works well.
Unfortunately it's relitively hard to open up the XBox One to replace the drive. Some have done so, and managed to clone the drive to a larger drive and gotten it to work. I took the easy route, as I have maybe 8 games and my 500gb drive was full. I got a Collective Minds Media Hub http://www.collectiveminds.ca/... (Also on Amazon). It snaps on to the end of the XBox One, making it appear as if it's part of the console, and gives you three front USB 3.0 ports for wired Controllers, Charging, whatever. The top feature, it contains a 2.5" Enclosure. I threw a 2TB 2.5" drive in there. I have it formatted to use as a system drive for games. I keep all my games on it, for archive, and keep the games I play at the time on my internal drive.
A cheaper USB 3.0 external drive will work fine.
Point being though, the article is correct, that 500gb for launch with games being REQUIRED to be installed to the drive is not enough, when 8 games, and reserved OS space, can fill it up.
To add to this, the WD NAS allows off site replication with another WD NAS that you setup elsewhere. Copying and transfer files to a new version of a NAS if you replace it later on as well.
For storage, I have a 4 bay WD NAS, DL4100. Populated with 4x4TB drives in RAID5. Store all my photos and video on there. I have a 8TB USB Seagate Archive v2 Drive attached to it that I plug in once in a while to back it up to. The RAID5 helps with hardware failure, but backing up to the USB drive guarantees if it somehow gets deleted I'm good. WD has "recycle bin" like feature, but I never trust it. The WD NAS has DLNA and Media Server capabilities to stream to many TV's that have it built in. Synology also has a few models that are comparable as well. Whatever model you get check storage transfer speeds and get something that can max out giabit, copying a 1080p video file can take a while if it's a long video at slow speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Nope. Nope. You give it your credentials, and it seems their servers connect to the servers vs your device itself. No thank you, not leaving credentials on a 3rd party server. MS Outlook app for iOS and Android did the same thing.
I'd settle for them getting to my house.
They kept consistently putting them in my mailbox and raise the red "return" flag to avoid going up my 300ft driveway. This is illegal. Also problematic when the POST OFFICE picks up your item before you're able to revive it, as they should because red flags up and it's in the box. Then Post Office DEMANDS shipping fee to turn your item to you. Happened to me. Consistantly complained to Amazon Customer Support that they are NOT to go to mailbox and should be delivered TO THE HOUSE up the Driveway just like UPS, FedEx and other services do. I literally have security footage of the driver not even stopping and tossing two packages out the window on Sunday morning, half in the road at the bottom of my driveway. It rained. Packages got soaked. LUCKILY they were plastic wrapped inside the packages so they were safe. Complained to Amazon again, I doubt anything will be done.
There are a few nice drivers, that rent UHaul Vans and wear reflective vests that drive up and hand deliver packages that are professional. But majority of the drivers are lazy looking to get paid and dont care. They get paid in "Blocks" ex you can a set price to delivered a set packages that should take you X amount of time by their estimate. If you deliver it faster, by chucking shit out the window, you can then pick up more routes and make more money per hour effectively. Thats what these people are doing,
My DL4100 NAS died this past weekend. Just the controller. Array, drives, data all fine. Controller just died 3mo after warranty ended. Luckily it used a standard container for the RAID5 set, and EXT4 so I was able to hook all 4 drives up to a system and drag the data off.
Synology DS918+ now.
I stopped using NewEgg over 9mo ago. So at least I'm not affected.
As a Connecticut resident who got screwed over by NewEgg releasing false data to the State of Connecticut, when they were also NOT legally obligated to I stopped using them. Ex our tax friendly state in it's endless quest to absolutely ruin any resident of the state and tax them to death decided to purse gathering Sales Tax / "Use Tax" data from NewEgg back around January 2018. They had done this to other sites and online merchants on their quest to collect money. They would petition the vendor with a legally scary letter, telling them to hand over all purchase history for the last 5 years for every Connecticut resident over to the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services, our tax office essentially. Most told them to go pound sand as there was no legal authority for them to do this or request this information from the online vendors and CT couldn't do anything about it.
NewEgg. NewEgg, they just handed the data over. The state then had my ENTIRE purchase history. They did this WITHOUT any consumer notification. It was only AFTER the CT DRS processed the data and sent out Use Tax bills to NewEgg customers did they fess up on releasing the data. This wouldn't be a problem, as technically the Use Tax is owed, however the way they collected the data was flat out illegal. Both from a consumer protection and legal point of view. The bigger issue though THEY ABSOLUTELY messed up the data dumps. For example, 2014 I had made several thousand of dollars of purchases. ONE was made on my account, with a friend's credit card. He got a bill from the CT DRS for my entire 2014 purchase history. Then the data I got for 2016 owed taxes included items that I had used out of state friends credit cards for, and had shipped to them. No use tax was owed. Yet I had the bill. The CT DRS being the CT DRS left you no legal way to challenge this. You could call the number, and talk to someone (which me and several friends tried) who essentially told you to just pay it over and over despite it being wrong and incorrect data. In the end I paid it because it was only a few hundred dollar discrepancy and the consequences and repercussions of having a Tax Bill paid late were too large and would have made a bigger hole to crawl out of given how uncooperative the state was. I still blame NewEgg for giving them data.
Anyway, anyone who still uses NewEgg should have already known how NewEgg cares not the slightest about their customers privacy or information. It's absolutely NO surprise to me this happened, and is only further proof to drop them and not order from them again.
I have my own RSS aggregator for news. However, I primarily use my Facebook account to like companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and other interesting companies I like to find out about new products, watch cool videos they may publish, and sometimes see news they publish I may miss in my RSS feed. So, without this, I'm not less likely to know what SpaceX and Tesla are doing excpept negative news stories now posting how behind Tesla is on Model3 orders. Overall this will be bad for the company in terms of exposure, as that's how Tesla got it's real following. Alientating much of their base.
I honestly hold absolutely nothing about Facebook in the last week to two weeks newsworthy or surprising given I've known for years friends email and contacts were being stolen via SPAM I would get on my email account, and thus made sure all apps got privileges revoked, and minimized my exposure. You're stupid to know assume your data on facebook was NOT being mined. Not a game changer for me.
I had the original Pebble watch from Kickstarter, and Pebble Time Steel from Kickstarter. My favorite watches. I had the Pebble Time Steel 2 on Pre-order on Kickstarter when it was canceled. I will absolutely NEVER buy a Fitbit product again due to the way they ripped apart Pebble.
Understandably, Pebble was in trouble and was going bankrupt. Legally Fitbit had every right to do what they did, and maximize profits. However the way they bought only Pebble's IP, and hired on it's Developers, not taking on the company itself, was just a dick move. People who bought a BRAND NEW Pebble 2, Pebble Round, or any other pebble the DAY before the announcement LOST their warranty and ALL SUPPORT, despite Fitbit making it seem like they took over the company. I for one had my vibration motor for notifications die just a few days after the announcement, despite being under 1 year old, I was stuck. Likewise Pebble had all the leg work done for the Pebble Time Steel 2 watch, that IS the Fitbit Ionic in 95% of the features, including Tooling, design, software.. they could have just released it. Pebble was also HUGE and had inlays into retail and big online stores. Fitbit could have EASILY utilized the branding and name.. but chose the cheap way out. I feel like another company could have easily come in and actually done right and kept the brand going. Instead they let themselves be cannibalized by Fitbit.
I use TinyTinyRSS https://tt-rss.org/ . I have it setup on a small shared hosting plan I have with a Let's Encrypt SSL for security. I have a cron job that runs and checks for git updates and processing them updating it to the latest rolling release, as well as running every 5-10 minutes to check for new feeds. They have an AMAZING mobile app that even has offline support. Very handy when I was on a 5-hour flight the other day to download all feeds and stories and read later on the plane. If you have a shared hosting account available to you, this is the way. It has options for logins, even multiple users. The app will save your user/password if you'd like. This is also how I came and found this article. I used Feedly in the past but found TTS much easier to use and did not rely on ANY 3rd party services. After being burned by Google Reader, I felt this was a must.
Uber, because it's the only ride sharing / taxi app/service that I know will always work. Both Uber and Lyft has slim offerings in my area. There are a dozen or so cars within a hour of me on both services now, both are a 20+ minute wait for pickup.
That being said, I only used Uber for the first time (despite having an account for almost a year as a just in case thing) the other day. I was on vacation in a popular vacation spot, and an emergency came up and I had to get home earlier than planned and was able to get a Uber to drive me 3 hours home from a hotel at 1:30am. From click to pickup was just over 3 minutes. Lyft had 0 cars nearby and wouldn't even let me request it. And the local taxi service I called before to compare couldn't guarantee me an out of state drive that late and would need to check with drivers first since usually those are scheduled ahead of time. Uber has the biggest offering and is in more places, which is why I use it. If Lyft or other services grew, and could guarantee me a ride at 1:30am like that in an emergency, I would use it too but it's not there yet.
Bank of America and Microsoft demo'd a dapp built on Etherium the other week, and some of the 86+ companies added to the EEA today already have functional / testing functional uses for blockchain within their enterprises.
Etherium is not just money. If you see it as such you're blind. Ether is the gas used for Etherium transactions to power the network and power it for corporate and global use. This site is a shadow of its former self, it seems there's less and less people that truly appreciate emerging techs on here.
You don't need the entire blockchain downloaded for Etherium or Bitcoin to work. That's only if you want a "Full Node" client. You can run Wallet apps on your system such as Jaxx, or use a Hardware wallet such as Ledge Nano, or a Paper Wallet via MyEtherWallet.com. For Etherium you can use browser plugins for dapps as well. Bandwith is a few kb and small download for the app.
I have been holding Ether since February and have been accumulating other ERC20 tokens (Golem, Gnosis, etc) that also run on the Etherium Blockchain. Back when I read Microsoft, Intel, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, The U.N., and tons of other Fin-Tech companies were getting in, I was intrigued and immediately converted the majority of my Bitcoin holdings over to Ether after dealing with VERY slow transaction times with Bitcoin and being fed up with it and the thread of a Bitcoin hard fork. Never looking back. Instant payment, low fees, backed by MAJOR tech and finance companies.
This is the reason we upgraded ALL our workstations (about 200-250 workstations between two sites) to SSD's about two years back. We calculated the time it takes for a system to boot, assuming once a day, time lost while they get coffee / etc waiting for it to boot, and time during the day spent waiting for things to load. The ROI for us on these purchases was less than a year with time lost taken into account. Let alone moral/frustration issues.
We also have done away with ordering bare minimal system. Everything we order has the latest generation i5 Quad Core or better (i7 Quad Cores or Xeons) for users that do CAD work. Back in 2009-2011 during the downturn, that his us hard, we had to buy a lot of lower end systems to replace dead hardware, and we felt the effects of it for years with users being frustrated.
Sounds like all the more reason to switch over to payment in either Bitcoin or Either. Bitcoin first, however Either is generalized as more business friendly, with contracts and such being allowed. Dell, NewEgg, Overstock, and several other online vendors use it as a zero-cost alternative already for digital transactions. No PayPal fees, no credit card processing fees. Digital cash. Also works great for sending people money.
This. I just switched to Plain Text. Thats for the help! I read articles a lot via RSS but hardly comment or visit the site directly anymore.
Ah I remember those Pentium 4 Mobile's as well. I worked on a few of those at my old job, cleaning up dried out thermal paste and gunked up giant fans that were in those laptops.
The K8's also weren't bad. I almost switched then but kept a Socket 478 1.6ghz P4 for a while. Wish I went K8 then though, would have had DDR memory instead of more expensive PC133 at the time.
Well you don't need to know the generation name, it's the first number of the model number. I never refer to them as Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, etc.. just "2nd gen" "3rd gen" etc. And it's pretty easy, U is low power, K is unlocked multiplier, then m3, m5 and m7 are the new lower power variants for the 7th gen CPU's instead of using the U designation. And like you said if you need more info, a quick Google away with Ark. AMD has nothing like it. i have to look up reviews to see that their current high end CPU's are like 3-4 years old.
Driver's weren't the issue. Both had had their fair share of driver issues (nVidia drivers supporting new games in SLI were THE WORST, it took 1.5+ months to play the latest Battlefield and COD titles in SLI, let alone with any stability). These were just flat out dead GPU's with no overclocking. I found the manufacturers for most nVidia chipset cards do not clock fan speeds properly and the GPU's would get excessively hot. Running a game for an hour would overheat them and I'd get artifacts and game crashes until they cooled up. I used MSI's AfterBurner software to ramp up the GPU Temp / Fan Speed curve so it would ramp up the fan speed MUCH sooner and got stability. I would only activate the profiles when gaming though due to excessive sound from the fans. My guess is running them with stock fan speeds most of the time caused GPU failure or perhaps heated up the solder and the GPU or even VRAM became dislodged as a reflow with a heat gun fixed one for a bit.
I was a BIG AMD fan back in the Athlon 64 Days. I had a Athlon 64 X2 3400+ 939, later upgrading to a AMD FX-60 CPU in the same socket. Those were the brief days where AMD performance beat out Intels on multi-core systems. However once the i7 series came out, Intel was back on top again. I had i7 920, now a i7 4700K and will be getting i7 7700K once they released. Yes the Intel CPU's are more, but cost per performance is well worth it especially considering I upgrade every 3-4 years. As far as AMD goes, I had a ATI/AMD Rage 128, Radeon 7000, Radeon-All-In-Wonder 8500DV, then switched to nVidia with a 7900GT, that failed on me, then a 8800GTS, that failed one me, then GTX 275, that failed one me and stupid me got dual GTX 570's in SLI. SLI never works right especially with new releases. Coupled with my fail rate of nVidia chipset cards, I went with a AMD R9 290 which was reasonable price for a video card with top performance. Still have it and still play most games I have on high settings no problem. No plans to uprgade, but when I do for Desktop systems I will be keeping with good luck AMD. For laptops, I've gone nVidia just because they have better graphics switching than AMD currently between integrated and dedicated. They have my business with video cards, but CPU's they have a long way to go to get me to consider them performance wise. I can't even tell what their newest CPU's are. Intel makes it easy, i3 Basic, i5 mid range i7 high end. and models are easy where in WXYZ, W= generation, XYZ high numbers are faster within the generation. AMD with Their FM2 and AM3+ cores I cant tell whats low end and whats high end easy enough.
I backed the original Pebble, then later the Pebble Time Steel. I had backed the Pebble Time 2, and I am HIGHLY disappointed with both Pebble and Fitbit for not honoring those pledges. Even with degraded support or updates, I would have loved to have what I paid for. And shame on Fitbit for not honoring support or warranty for the company they are buying. The worst of it is there are users with BRAND NEW Pebble 2 devices, only days old, that now have no warranty and no support period. What's even worse is that there are no other comparable smart watches. I'm one of the few that love smart watches, despite the current trend and downfall of many of them, as I've owned them going back to Calculator Watches, then Fossil Abacus PalmOS 4.x watch, and many others. I tried a Android Wear watch but grew dissatisfied with it as the battery on both those and Apple watches in most cases do not even last a full day and are now *always on* display like ePaper watches are. I tried a Fitbit way back, as a health monitoring before they added step counters into Pebble. I hated it, and got it returned after the device stopped working a month or two later. This only solidifies my opinion of "Never again Fitbit"
I've been a avid Plex user for almost 2 years now. A bit over a year ago I bought a storage array NAS just for dedicated Plex storage, and built a i5 media center system that acts as Plex server and a few other things so I don't have to leave a power hungry gaming desktop on all the time. Previous to that I only kept some content on disk, and backed up media to CD's, then DVD, then Bluray. Combined, I have somewhere north of 2.5TB of content. Charter in my area offers only 60mbit/4mbit service, with 150mbit/5mbit service as a $50 upgrade. That's over 150hours to upload A week straight. Then content, when I add it, has to be uploaded. It makes no sense to download content, only to upload it, to stream/download it again. With GoPro 4K 60dps footage I have taking up SEVERAL gigs, it's just way too much to upload to Amazon, let alone upload the small trimmed down clips I want to YouTube sometimes. Maybe in the future, if ISP's in my area decide to offer actual upload speeds. As it stands if I download at 60mbit, 50-75% of my upload bandwidth is spent in just TCP acknowledgements and overhead. And symmetrical business speed is offered via Fiber only here at costs of $500+/mo.
Here here. $30 Roku, plus a PC you already have on 24x7 + Plex. I have mine running on a PC i made for my media center. It has Plex Server, Plex Client, and a few things like game emulators on it I use. I storage all my media on a WD DL4100 NAS array. Depending on your media size you can do simular NAS array setup or do local storage. They have Plex for just about every device now. It plays nice and fast local, and will stream and convert to lower bitrate and resolution over WAN.
I have my old phone/tablet in a Hale Dreamer dock. http://haledevices.com/product... It provides a easy to press "Shut the hell up I'm awake I'm awake" button as well as volume and brightness dials. Likewise.. its an old Galaxy Tab 2 7". If it died, it wouldn't be the worst thing. I forgot in between I actually ran an Archos Home Connect 35. It ran Android 2.2.1. Had a decent speaker. Alas the small battery (so your alarm would still go off if you lost power) decided to expand and bloat and break the plastic housing. Threw it off soon after I took it apart and realized the battery was about to pop.
I had one of these back in 2010-2011 or so. First device I actually ran Netflix on. Chumby was a brand of "Smart" internet ready smart alarm clocks. They had basic functions, and 3rd party apps you could install such as Netflix, or different clock faces, etc. Very long end devices. Sony used the Chumby OS and made their own branded versions of these clocks, Sony Dash. I ditched mine back in 2013-2014 or so once I saw a post somewhere showing Sony was discontinueing the platform. I knew it was a matter of time until they killed the services and I was not risking this. Instead I set up a old Android tablet to use as a alarm clock. Works well.
Unfortunately it's relitively hard to open up the XBox One to replace the drive. Some have done so, and managed to clone the drive to a larger drive and gotten it to work. I took the easy route, as I have maybe 8 games and my 500gb drive was full. I got a Collective Minds Media Hub http://www.collectiveminds.ca/... (Also on Amazon). It snaps on to the end of the XBox One, making it appear as if it's part of the console, and gives you three front USB 3.0 ports for wired Controllers, Charging, whatever. The top feature, it contains a 2.5" Enclosure. I threw a 2TB 2.5" drive in there. I have it formatted to use as a system drive for games. I keep all my games on it, for archive, and keep the games I play at the time on my internal drive. A cheaper USB 3.0 external drive will work fine. Point being though, the article is correct, that 500gb for launch with games being REQUIRED to be installed to the drive is not enough, when 8 games, and reserved OS space, can fill it up.
To add to this, the WD NAS allows off site replication with another WD NAS that you setup elsewhere. Copying and transfer files to a new version of a NAS if you replace it later on as well.
For storage, I have a 4 bay WD NAS, DL4100. Populated with 4x4TB drives in RAID5. Store all my photos and video on there. I have a 8TB USB Seagate Archive v2 Drive attached to it that I plug in once in a while to back it up to. The RAID5 helps with hardware failure, but backing up to the USB drive guarantees if it somehow gets deleted I'm good. WD has "recycle bin" like feature, but I never trust it. The WD NAS has DLNA and Media Server capabilities to stream to many TV's that have it built in. Synology also has a few models that are comparable as well. Whatever model you get check storage transfer speeds and get something that can max out giabit, copying a 1080p video file can take a while if it's a long video at slow speeds.