I was surprised that Snapchat wasn't more popular, but you can see Twitter has been in decline since 2013, and Instagram is showing lots of growth (I guess lots of people want to take what improvements we made with digital imaging, and have shitty filters that look like crappy cameras, while they take selfies of their duck-face and their crappy food.
I have an account that I created so I could log into a site that required an account linked to a social network.
Only found a couple actual uses for it: -Play by play updates from things like a utility or DOT during a storm -Bleeding edge breaking news. Once the city was on lockdown because there was a gunman on the loose. There were updates on that, and rumours when they caught him, then the Police posted on their Twitter that they caught him. This was long before a news release.
Other time sensitive matters. Once in the middle of the Christmas parade there was an unexpected huge gap. A quick check on twitter showed that there was a medical emergency further down the street, and indicated when it was going again.
That's about it. Extreme time sensitive, bleeding edge information. It's useless as a crappy substitute for an RSS feeder, or to find out what Justin Bieber is thinking.
I also don't understand Vines. Seems like Youtube for people with no attention span.
I ran a kill-a-watt behind my surge protector. The surge protector had the following: Nintendo DS charger, Nintendo DSi charger. Nintendo DS Lite charger. Proprietary cell phone charger. Mini USB charger. Micro USB charger.
After a week, these alleged "vampire" devices had consumed a flat fucking 0.00 kWh. The idea that we need to do something about these "vampires" is ridiculous and a prime example of "penny wise, pound foolish".
So true. Most small switch mode power supplies (like phone chargers) use such negligible power it's not worth unplugging. Actual linear power supplies (big heavy transformer blocks) are different. As are things like TVs and Cable boxes that have high power "Standby" modes.
Heating (if electric) and air conditioning are normally the largest power draws. Then there is large appliances, like water heaters, electric clothes dryers, electric range / cooking appliances, then things like lights, then TVs / Computers, then things like cell phone chargers get lost in the noise below microwaves on standby.
And its supposed to record all your shows while you're not home switched off and unplugged right? Most all stbs today have an auto off set by default if its not set you can set it up yourself.
The last time I put a power meter on a set top box, the difference in power between "On", and "standby" was negligible. They were huge power hogs, even when "off".
Of course you can't just switch off the power bar or unplug them. In addition to missing any recordings, they can take a long time after a power cycle to be ready, if they re-download the programming guide, etc.
One of the most time consuming parts of a short journey is getting the passenger doors aligned with the port-side gangways. Unlike airports, it's not the gangways that move to the plane, it's the vessel that must align with the portside. Sometimes the portside gangway can move up or down, but many times, the crew have to tie down these mini gangways with ropes when the tides and ballast tanks aren't enough. It takes several minutes of maneuvering to get the ship aligned with the dockside, sometimes even having to reverse and try again, especially in heavy swells. If they could get GPS down to several inches, combined with the sideways movement that many catamarans have, docking could be done automatically.
Maybe they'd have better luck with the starboard side.
I don't really use a photo manager, just folders of photos sorted by year, then by month / event. That way they are completely platform agnostic. I still have my photos from the turn of the century Windows 98 days easily accessible.
To replace the awful Windows photo viewer, I use JPEGView.
You have to manually install it (eg: extract it to a folder in Program files, Right click a Jpg, and "Open with- choose default", then navigate to JPEGView, then remember the association.
For basic photo viewing it's dead simple. It loads automatically in full screen, left and right arrows navigate through the folder, and up/down (temporarily) rotate. It will also honour EXIF rotation tags, and F2 will quickly show EXIF data.
The big thing is it's FAST. When scrolling through a folder files load in no time.
When I eyeball the January 2016 browser market share stats, it looks like Firefox is now at or just under 7% of the browser market. That's across all versions on all platforms!
IE 11 alone has almost as many users as Firefox does in total. The same goes for iOS Safari 9.2. Hell, even Opera Mini almost has more users than Firefox does! Desktop Chrome 47 has over 3 times as many users as Firefox does in total. Chrome for Android 47 has 2.5 times as many users.
These numbers should be scaring the living shit out of Mozilla. They should be in a constant state of panic right now. Firefox is getting decimated.
Maybe Mozilla doesn't realize it, but Firefox is the only product they have left that has any sort of a user base. Seamonkey, Thunderbird and Persona have been left to flounder. Firefox OS was a massive disaster, maybe even worse than GNOME 3 was. Rust and Servo are dead end projects. Bugzilla is a relic.
Why the fuck will anyone, especially the big players in the game, give a damn about what Mozilla thinks or wants? Mozilla already has so little influence. Soon enough Firefox will have so few users that nobody will give a fuck about it or its users, which in turn means that Mozilla will lose whatever small amount of influence it does have left.
It's fucking insane how Mozilla isn't reacting to this. It's fucking insane! It's like they're nearing the edge of a cliff, but they're running faster and faster!
I don't want Mozilla as an organization to vanish. They play such an important role in keeping the web free and open. Yet they also seem to be so intent on destroying themselves! Please, Mozilla, wake up! Please, Mozilla! PLEASE! Stop ruining Firefox! Stop making yourself irrelevant! Please, Mozilla! Please stop it!
I currently only use Firefox for a couple of specialty plugins, or extensions, and I use an outdated version at work as that's required by IT. Otherwise I use Chrome. That said I agree with you, I don't want them to die. I don't want a Webkit monoculture with a sprinkle of IE. It's bad enough that we already lost Opera. More players and more options is good for the user!
True. The only safe ways of installing it are: -Portable install -Ninite -Disable internet access / set dummy proxy during install. It will skip past all the "offers" tabs.
The code is not overwritten, but the code is not expecting *all* variable store data to be wiped, and may go down impossible paths.
If this becomes a standard test case, then you'll see firmware get more resilient to this over time.
Bricking a motherboard due to a bad firmware flash has been a serious concern for a long time (due to power-cut, or a bad floppy, or whatever). Support for any sort of backup firmware has always been sporadic. So I won't hold my breath.
I question the benefit of UEFI ever. I understand the intention is to remove limitations resulting from trying to use 1980's based BIOS code 35 years later, but I don't see it solving more problems than it causes. About the only thing I've come up with is allowing boot volumes greater than 2TB, since it allows GPT partitioned disks.
As to why you would run it, for better or worse you may find fewer and fewer systems with Legacy boot mode. Especially with Secureboot
Try pricing out any Professional tool or Software. AutoCAD is $1,680/year, Adobe CC is $700 / year. It's not like every desktop in the government is going to have this software.
The projector may have the ports, but are cables run to the podium? Even if the projector is replaced, if the new projector has a VGA port, and most computers (especially business grade) have VGA port, what's to gain by replacing the cable?
At work they replaced the projectors in one of the conference rooms. They have a VGA cable run to the desktop, and then an HDMI cable with mini-display port adapter if you wish to connect your laptop, because none of the laptops ship with an HDMI port. Some older ones shipped with a display port, but there's no adapter provided.
I've seen several times where something must be wrong with the HDMI setup, and people end up unplugging VGA from the desktop, and plugging it into their laptop.
The quality starts to get crappy at 1080p, and with crappy cables, but VGA seems to still be a surprisingly good-enough "just works" solution.
At home my Haswell i5 has onboard 4600 graphics, and I get three ports: HDMI, DVI, and VGA. If I want three monitors I use VGA on the third. I also use VGA when I want to hook it up to the TV in the other room because the VGA extension cord was so cheap.
The Verge may be right, but they are totally apple fanboys who jump at any opportunity to make fun of the competition.
I would agree, but Windows Phone is not now nor ever was competition for Apple. The company that is competition for Apple's bread and butter market however, is a totally different story:
As much as people like to dump on Windows Phone, or Blackberry, the shrinking of the smartphone market to only 2 major players is a bad thing. More competition is good in trying to keep all vendors on their feet, and there are certainly things WP and BB do better than iOS or Android.
Nexus is Google's flagship phone, and since Google is directly involved, they want the crapware free experience, and relatively long support period.
The moment you start looking at OEMs, it goes downhill.
Take the Samsung SIII. It was Samsungs flagship phone at one point, and sold in high numbers.
Released May 29, 2012, in most markets the last official version is 4.3 JellyBean, with limited markets / unofficial support for 4.4.4 Kitkat. Kitkat was released October 31, 2013, and Lollipop November 12, 2014. So you're topping out on 1.5 years on a flagship phone.
The moment you look at bargain android phones, even new, they are usually outdated when you buy them.
Apple, as much as I hate them, usually has a predictable support life. For sale from carriers, you will usually only see N,N-1, and N-2 models. Right now that is 6S, 6, and 5S. The current iOS (9.2.1) supports back to 4S (a phone released October 2011).
However, there is support for Linux, Android and iOS, which will probably be the primary targets
There are probably plenty of customer who would choose this over Xeon for datacenters which do not need to serve a win MS-centric market
How many people use iOS in a datacenter? How many people use iOS on third party hardware?
On Linux you'd still get better hardware/software support on x86, and better performance/ dollar, or performance per watt.
I could certainly see this maybe in embedded applications, and maybe networking appliances (like a storage server, or maybe a web server). But I think it will be a few years still before you see a big foothold of ARM based CPUs in general purpose servers.
I can't give a citation to this, but I did read something to this effect before: The mind / eye is calibrated for color temperature vs light intensity. They share a linear relationship (maybe not linear but you get the idea. Higher intensity = higher color temperature).
Going 200 years ago, before electric light, at the brightest point in the day (noon) the color temperature is 6000K+. At sunrise/ sunset (when the intensity low) it is 1850K. A candle or fire would be 1700K at an extremely low intensity.
So a low intensity light at a high color temperature "looks wrong". For example a 6000K LED light dimmed to minimum, where an incandescent light might be down close to 1700K.
Now we have artificial light of any intensity and color. I prefer 2700K LED and CFL lights for home, but can understand people that like a higher temperature, as long as all the bulbs match, and they have a high light intensity. Likewise in an office there is usually more Lumens per square foot than at home, so a 4000K, 5000K, or even 6000K light looks less out of place.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read a couple of articles recently form good sources that predict #Twitter is dying. True? I can only hope so.
I've found Google trends to be a good indicator of popularity.
Twitter vs Snapchat vs Instagram
I was surprised that Snapchat wasn't more popular, but you can see Twitter has been in decline since 2013, and Instagram is showing lots of growth (I guess lots of people want to take what improvements we made with digital imaging, and have shitty filters that look like crappy cameras, while they take selfies of their duck-face and their crappy food.
You can see Slashdot has been on a loooong decline into irrelevance
I have an account that I created so I could log into a site that required an account linked to a social network.
Only found a couple actual uses for it:
-Play by play updates from things like a utility or DOT during a storm
-Bleeding edge breaking news. Once the city was on lockdown because there was a gunman on the loose. There were updates on that, and rumours when they caught him, then the Police posted on their Twitter that they caught him. This was long before a news release.
Other time sensitive matters. Once in the middle of the Christmas parade there was an unexpected huge gap. A quick check on twitter showed that there was a medical emergency further down the street, and indicated when it was going again.
That's about it. Extreme time sensitive, bleeding edge information. It's useless as a crappy substitute for an RSS feeder, or to find out what Justin Bieber is thinking.
I also don't understand Vines. Seems like Youtube for people with no attention span.
I ran a kill-a-watt behind my surge protector. The surge protector had the following:
Nintendo DS charger, Nintendo DSi charger. Nintendo DS Lite charger. Proprietary cell phone charger. Mini USB charger. Micro USB charger.
After a week, these alleged "vampire" devices had consumed a flat fucking 0.00 kWh. The idea that we need to do something about these "vampires" is ridiculous and a prime example of "penny wise, pound foolish".
So true. Most small switch mode power supplies (like phone chargers) use such negligible power it's not worth unplugging. Actual linear power supplies (big heavy transformer blocks) are different. As are things like TVs and Cable boxes that have high power "Standby" modes.
Heating (if electric) and air conditioning are normally the largest power draws. Then there is large appliances, like water heaters, electric clothes dryers, electric range / cooking appliances, then things like lights, then TVs / Computers, then things like cell phone chargers get lost in the noise below microwaves on standby.
And its supposed to record all your shows while you're not home switched off and unplugged right? Most all stbs today have an auto off set by default if its not set you can set it up yourself.
The last time I put a power meter on a set top box, the difference in power between "On", and "standby" was negligible. They were huge power hogs, even when "off".
Of course you can't just switch off the power bar or unplug them. In addition to missing any recordings, they can take a long time after a power cycle to be ready, if they re-download the programming guide, etc.
so the real hack was the email account not twitter?
Exactly. If it was a "simple Password reset" it would have been:
Security question: What's your favorite band?
Answer: The Beatles.
How would you deal with continental drift? North America and Eurasia are moving apart by 2.5 cm per year.
At the very least this could be used to tare or zero the readings from a local survey monument.
Whats funny is the inch is officially defined as 25.4 mm. Dual scale measuring tape confirms this at multiples, as does using a unit converter
One of the most time consuming parts of a short journey is getting the passenger doors aligned with the port-side gangways. Unlike airports, it's not the gangways that move to the plane, it's the vessel that must align with the portside. Sometimes the portside gangway can move up or down, but many times, the crew have to tie down these mini gangways with ropes when the tides and ballast tanks aren't enough. It takes several minutes of maneuvering to get the ship aligned with the dockside, sometimes even having to reverse and try again, especially in heavy swells. If they could get GPS down to several inches, combined with the sideways movement that many catamarans have, docking could be done automatically.
Maybe they'd have better luck with the starboard side.
I don't really use a photo manager, just folders of photos sorted by year, then by month / event. That way they are completely platform agnostic. I still have my photos from the turn of the century Windows 98 days easily accessible.
To replace the awful Windows photo viewer, I use JPEGView.
You have to manually install it (eg: extract it to a folder in Program files, Right click a Jpg, and "Open with- choose default", then navigate to JPEGView, then remember the association.
For basic photo viewing it's dead simple. It loads automatically in full screen, left and right arrows navigate through the folder, and up/down (temporarily) rotate. It will also honour EXIF rotation tags, and F2 will quickly show EXIF data.
The big thing is it's FAST. When scrolling through a folder files load in no time.
You could either destroy it using physical force, or they can allow the ATA Secure Erase command to still function.
When I eyeball the January 2016 browser market share stats, it looks like Firefox is now at or just under 7% of the browser market. That's across all versions on all platforms!
IE 11 alone has almost as many users as Firefox does in total. The same goes for iOS Safari 9.2. Hell, even Opera Mini almost has more users than Firefox does! Desktop Chrome 47 has over 3 times as many users as Firefox does in total. Chrome for Android 47 has 2.5 times as many users.
These numbers should be scaring the living shit out of Mozilla. They should be in a constant state of panic right now. Firefox is getting decimated.
Maybe Mozilla doesn't realize it, but Firefox is the only product they have left that has any sort of a user base. Seamonkey, Thunderbird and Persona have been left to flounder. Firefox OS was a massive disaster, maybe even worse than GNOME 3 was. Rust and Servo are dead end projects. Bugzilla is a relic.
Why the fuck will anyone, especially the big players in the game, give a damn about what Mozilla thinks or wants? Mozilla already has so little influence. Soon enough Firefox will have so few users that nobody will give a fuck about it or its users, which in turn means that Mozilla will lose whatever small amount of influence it does have left.
It's fucking insane how Mozilla isn't reacting to this. It's fucking insane! It's like they're nearing the edge of a cliff, but they're running faster and faster!
I don't want Mozilla as an organization to vanish. They play such an important role in keeping the web free and open. Yet they also seem to be so intent on destroying themselves! Please, Mozilla, wake up! Please, Mozilla! PLEASE! Stop ruining Firefox! Stop making yourself irrelevant! Please, Mozilla! Please stop it!
I currently only use Firefox for a couple of specialty plugins, or extensions, and I use an outdated version at work as that's required by IT. Otherwise I use Chrome. That said I agree with you, I don't want them to die. I don't want a Webkit monoculture with a sprinkle of IE. It's bad enough that we already lost Opera. More players and more options is good for the user!
I always try to answer the house number photos incorrectly if possible. For example if it's a 6, but could pass for an 8, I'll answer 8.
I assume their algorithm shows the same image to a number of people and take the consensus.
True. The only safe ways of installing it are:
-Portable install
-Ninite
-Disable internet access / set dummy proxy during install. It will skip past all the "offers" tabs.
Only if you're surfing online with them.
Likewise stats don't count embedded or industrial applications.
Reports of Windows "Phoning home" started with XP and product activation. Back in '95 days Internet access wasn't even assumed.
The code is not overwritten, but the code is not expecting *all* variable store data to be wiped, and may go down impossible paths.
If this becomes a standard test case, then you'll see firmware get more resilient to this over time.
Bricking a motherboard due to a bad firmware flash has been a serious concern for a long time (due to power-cut, or a bad floppy, or whatever). Support for any sort of backup firmware has always been sporadic. So I won't hold my breath.
TCPA is alive and well in the form of TPM
I question the benefit of UEFI ever. I understand the intention is to remove limitations resulting from trying to use 1980's based BIOS code 35 years later, but I don't see it solving more problems than it causes. About the only thing I've come up with is allowing boot volumes greater than 2TB, since it allows GPT partitioned disks.
As to why you would run it, for better or worse you may find fewer and fewer systems with Legacy boot mode. Especially with Secureboot
Try pricing out any Professional tool or Software. AutoCAD is $1,680/year, Adobe CC is $700 / year. It's not like every desktop in the government is going to have this software.
The projector may have the ports, but are cables run to the podium? Even if the projector is replaced, if the new projector has a VGA port, and most computers (especially business grade) have VGA port, what's to gain by replacing the cable?
At work they replaced the projectors in one of the conference rooms. They have a VGA cable run to the desktop, and then an HDMI cable with mini-display port adapter if you wish to connect your laptop, because none of the laptops ship with an HDMI port. Some older ones shipped with a display port, but there's no adapter provided.
I've seen several times where something must be wrong with the HDMI setup, and people end up unplugging VGA from the desktop, and plugging it into their laptop.
The quality starts to get crappy at 1080p, and with crappy cables, but VGA seems to still be a surprisingly good-enough "just works" solution.
At home my Haswell i5 has onboard 4600 graphics, and I get three ports: HDMI, DVI, and VGA. If I want three monitors I use VGA on the third. I also use VGA when I want to hook it up to the TV in the other room because the VGA extension cord was so cheap.
The Verge may be right, but they are totally apple fanboys who jump at any opportunity to make fun of the competition.
I would agree, but Windows Phone is not now nor ever was competition for Apple. The company that is competition for Apple's bread and butter market however, is a totally different story:
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-g...
As much as people like to dump on Windows Phone, or Blackberry, the shrinking of the smartphone market to only 2 major players is a bad thing. More competition is good in trying to keep all vendors on their feet, and there are certainly things WP and BB do better than iOS or Android.
Nexus is Google's flagship phone, and since Google is directly involved, they want the crapware free experience, and relatively long support period.
The moment you start looking at OEMs, it goes downhill.
Take the Samsung SIII. It was Samsungs flagship phone at one point, and sold in high numbers.
Released May 29, 2012, in most markets the last official version is 4.3 JellyBean, with limited markets / unofficial support for 4.4.4 Kitkat.
Kitkat was released October 31, 2013, and Lollipop November 12, 2014. So you're topping out on 1.5 years on a flagship phone.
The moment you look at bargain android phones, even new, they are usually outdated when you buy them.
Apple, as much as I hate them, usually has a predictable support life. For sale from carriers, you will usually only see N,N-1, and N-2 models. Right now that is 6S, 6, and 5S. The current iOS (9.2.1) supports back to 4S (a phone released October 2011).
I think more importantly they are a mass-marketed co-processor, which benefits from volume sales, so the unit cost is fairly low.
However, there is support for Linux, Android and iOS, which will probably be the primary targets
There are probably plenty of customer who would choose this over Xeon for datacenters which do not need to serve a win MS-centric market
How many people use iOS in a datacenter? How many people use iOS on third party hardware?
On Linux you'd still get better hardware/software support on x86, and better performance/ dollar, or performance per watt.
I could certainly see this maybe in embedded applications, and maybe networking appliances (like a storage server, or maybe a web server). But I think it will be a few years still before you see a big foothold of ARM based CPUs in general purpose servers.
Server 2012R2 has an arm port and has hyper-v too.
Is there any proof of this outside of internal Microsoft test versions? As far as I can tell the failed tablet OS, Windows RT, is the closest.
I can't give a citation to this, but I did read something to this effect before: The mind / eye is calibrated for color temperature vs light intensity. They share a linear relationship (maybe not linear but you get the idea. Higher intensity = higher color temperature).
Going 200 years ago, before electric light, at the brightest point in the day (noon) the color temperature is 6000K+. At sunrise/ sunset (when the intensity low) it is 1850K. A candle or fire would be 1700K at an extremely low intensity.
So a low intensity light at a high color temperature "looks wrong". For example a 6000K LED light dimmed to minimum, where an incandescent light might be down close to 1700K.
Now we have artificial light of any intensity and color. I prefer 2700K LED and CFL lights for home, but can understand people that like a higher temperature, as long as all the bulbs match, and they have a high light intensity. Likewise in an office there is usually more Lumens per square foot than at home, so a 4000K, 5000K, or even 6000K light looks less out of place.