I switched to qBittorent a couple years ago. When uTorrent started bundling Conduit (which hijacks browser homepages and search engines) that was it, I was done. You shouldn't have to carefully examine every page of the install dialog to make sure you're not accidentally installing malware. Adobe falls in this category trying to install McAfee shit when you're just trying to update their unsecure Flash plugin.
I'm sure you should change these settings at your own risk. But it was worth the risk to me.
Ads I could deal with (disabling). The problem is going to upgrade to a new version (when offered), you have to be extremely careful when installing to disable all the shitware. What broke it for me was missing the checkbox for conduit once. Conduit hijacks your home page and search engine, and is very difficult to remove. That was it. I stopped using uTorrent after that. Currently I use qBittorrent.
It's irritating enough to deal with the useless bundled shitware during installation, it's even more irritating to have to carefully opt out of everything when installing an upgrade. Adobe Flash / Reader, and Java are bad at that as well.
The more "PC" like my mobile devices get, the happier I am. A Surface Pro is far more in-line with the wants and needs of the average user than is a Kindle Fire or an iPad. I would hope that this would extend in mobile phones as well. They're one of the few companies with an offering that could make me give up my BlackBerry.
The computer in my pocket should be a computer. Android, while popular here, can't even handle simple task-switching.
Speak for yourself. The average user wants a device that "just works". Something one can pull out of a pocket or back, press a button and have it do what they need done (looking something up on the internet, read the message from their grandmother, see their next meeting, what have you. A technical user might want to have the power of installing Adobe Flash or tweaking their registry to allow focus-follows-mouse or three versions of Firefox or an ssh client or vim or what have you.
If I want the power of a PC, I use a laptop or desktop. I want my phone to just work and not require constant maintenance.
Indeed. Remember "back in the day" when a Personal computer was a complicated, almost workstation like machine requiring high maintenance, but very powerful. As well there were "home computers" which were less powerful, but much easier to use: Slide the program cartridge in, turn it on, have fun.
Eventually home computers disappeared, and every Luddite and their mother had a PC. Then the calls started flooding in. The inability to do basic tasks, being easily tricked by malware, etc.
Mobile platforms bring back simple, straight forward approach that many users need. For many people all they need to be able to do is surf the web, check their email, and check facebook. Platforms such as iOS and Android excel at this. All the better for those users to use those machines, as long as higher performance PC's (Windows/OSX/Linux) exist for heavy lifting.
More and more on trips I pack my Android tablet and leave my laptop at home. Easier to fire up at the airport departure lounge, on the plane to watch a movie, or in the hotel: laptops usually involve hauling out all the accessories, cords, wait for it to boot, etc, while a tablet will immediately wake from sleep and sip battery. Smartphones also excel at being able to last all day on a charge, yet alert you instantly when you have a new email or other notification. That said I'd be at a loss without my i5 desktop at home.
the almost-death of Blackberry may help Microsoft somewhat here. Microsoft's strongest market is basically "business", mostly traditional business that isn't "hip" enough to be using Apple products. People who want nice Exchange integration, connections with Office 365, etc. Previously that market was totally sewn up by Blackberry, but as they're collapsing Microsoft might grab some of that market.
My very large company is very conservative IT wise. We just migrated from Windows XP to Windows 7 at the end of last year, migrated from Office XP to Office 2010 the year before and migrated from IE to Firefox as an "officially approved browser for external use" the year before (IE 6 continuing to be used for internal applications until Win7).
A couple years ago the mobility platform was revisited. Previously only high ranking executives had Blackberry as smartphones and the rest of us had dumbphones. After the change we all had our choice of iPhone or Android, and could get our mail/ calendar synced on it. Blackberry was no longer an option.
Our company is an example of Blackberry's core user base and we fled. Good luck Microsoft or Blackberry trying to capture that.
No, it's still up-to-date. 10.3 added only 4.3 support and 10.3.1 didn't change that. Even if we assume that it's 4.3.1 support, that's a year and a half old release and 2 versions behind current Android. In what universe does that not imply it only supports "older" Android?
Due to "Fragmentation" in Android, where many users are stuck using phones that can't upgrade to a newer OS, many apps are developed to support a number of older OS's, so a large number are still supported on 4.3.
I bought a cheap generic USB-MIDI cable to hook my ancient keyboard to my PC, something like this: http://www.amazon.com/VicTsing... and it worked no problem (without having to install any drivers).
There's also a generic USB printer class (USB-LPT cables use this in addition to real USB printers), yet for some reason there is not really a generic USB-RS232 class, so you have the choice of Prolific 2303, CH340, and FTDI FT232RL. All others are usually fake clones of these. And then you have FTDI coming out with driver updates that intentionally brick fake chips, and Prolific releasing new drivers that refuse to run old chips on Windows 8 (yet a Windows 7 driver can be patched to work on Windows 8).
There is "USB communications device class", but it isn't implemented in the same generic manner as USB mass storage.
There wasn't really a legacy software advantage for x86 in the Mac arena either.
Indirectly there was: either bootcamp or Parallels. If people were tempted to move from Windows, this let them still run essential applications that were Windows only, with excellent performance (as compared to previous full emulation products). By being able to still run Windows applications at full speed, this removed compatibility as a reason to not buy a MAc
Use old ms-dos era program called laplink, or other such programs. Limit to say 19200 or at best 38400, taking roughly 22-12 hours for worst-case file by file copy. dosbox on newer machine could be used.
-Use LPT port on machine, connect to cross over LPT cable on USB->LPT adapter, use laplink or other such program. dosbox or other on newmachine should do, use again laplink or other such software. May not be 100% compatible with all USB->LPT adapters.
I've yet to see a USB-LPT adapter that can be used for ANYTHING other than a printer. 2 way data over LPT plays some serious tricks, so this is a non-starter.
I recommended Fastlynx and null modem cable elsewhere, as I think it's the best solution (especially speed over parralel cable), however I have done "phone line between the modems" before. No need for ATX3:
Get a serial null modem cable. You can use a USB-serial converter on a modern PC if you want. USB-LPT converters will not work. They are only for printers. 2 way data transfer won't work at all. Sewell sells packages with Serial and LPT null modem cables with the software.
It can run anything from DOS to Windows 8 64 bit. There's a built in function to send the server program to a DOS machine over serial (using DOS MODE and CTTY commands), without using floppy or CD.
Run the server on the DOS machine, connect on a modern Windows machine, and you can copy the whole HDD over.
Sewell even has Windows versions of Interlnk. You can mount a 2GB FAT16 disk image on your modern PC, and have it show up as a drive on your antique machine.
I actually disagree. Writing things down or recording them is great, because we forget. I always thought it was a little nuts to go to events and spend them taking pictures, videos, etc. BE there, don't be the videographer. As time has gone by, though, I've come to realize if I had all those artifacts to refresh my memory over the years, I'd remember them a lot better.
I try as best I can to strike a balance. I try to focus on the experience first, and photos/videos second. I try to take quick snapshots that don't take me long, and I try to capture quick videos to capture the moment, not vlogs. It is amazing to go back through the "roll" of photos from trips gone by, one by one, and to have emotions and memories come flooding back as you relive the trip.
Honestly for all the talk of trying to preserve your entire library of 245,346 photos for great great grand children, I'm the only one that gets the flood of memories viewing them. Most people would be bored beyond a few strategic photos of my life.
Depending on how she is as a person, this may or may not be something to consider...
Set up a mailserver for her and your wife. You may very well have your own domain and mail already. But just ask some friends to help to ensure this will last a long time.
This approach sounds overly complicated and very likely to result in failure (server failure, changed email address, etc).
A simpler approach would be letters in envelopes with "open on" dates. Give to her mother to release as time passes.
Some bicyclists are good, have proper lane discipline, signal, obay lights / signs, others don't. Some of the worst cyclists I have ever seen:
-At a signalized crosswalk on a 6 lane road. All four lanes came to a stop for the pedestrian who had activated the overhead flashing lights (eg: it was obvious all traffic had stopped for a pedestrian). I was in the curb lane on the ped's destination side of the road. She was in front of my car and I happened to notice in my right mirror Lance Armstrong coming up the gutter at full speed, oblivious to the overhead flashing lights, and lineup of stopped cars. I sounded the horn, which startled the pedestrian, but cause her to stop and not step in front of the bike. I should have had the passenger deploy their door.
-One 3 way stop I used to go through a lot. Curb lane was RIGHT TURN ONLY, inside lane was straight lane. Bicycles would continuously run the stop sign going straight in the gutter of the curb lane. WTF? How can bicycles complain about being hooked if they pass turning traffic in a turn only lane that all have their signals on? The vehicles don't expect someone to be passing illegally like this. If they want to pass going straight, they should split the lanes. Bikes talk about "taking the lane". I started "taking the gutter" at this and other intersections. Driving as close to the curb as possible to prevent bikes from trying to pass when I'm trying to turn right.
-Amsterdam, land of the bicycle, at a major intersection pedestrians had a green light. A big sea of pedestrians were crossing the road, when suddenly perpendicular to the pedestrians a bike was going against the signal, ringing his bell "DING DING DING DING" plowing through pedestrians that had the right of way.
To me, carefully crossing against a signal (slow, look, proceed), and driving on the sidewalk aren't as bad as this. Unfortunately there's a lot of bad apples that give the few good bicyclists a bad name. I will respect bicyclists if they respect other people.
So a dedicated GPS unit is ok (I mean shit, they actually sell them as standalone devices intended to be used while driving,) but using my phone for the same purpose is not?
Fuck you. With a red hot iron poker in the ass.
Generally "Cellphone use while driving laws" will specify that devices like GPS (and a phone used as a GPS) must be in a mount. This reduces the fumbling to hold it, and can put the device in your line of sight, so a quick glance over to see the distance to turn, is a lot quicker than looking down at your lap. Further, in some cases for the laws, or at least in recommendations / manuals, you're only supposed to program your destination or otherwise configure the device, while the vehicle is stationary.
Except that in cities we have this concept of "keep right* except when passing." There is room for travel in both directions. If there isn't room, the obstruction is on one person's side, or the other person's side. The person on the side of the obstruction is expected to wait. Some people, mostly youngsters, haven't figured this out. But it is actually somewhat rare. Most of the people will sort themselves to the correct lane if you force them to. You're not in "their" way if you're on the right side of the sidewalk.
* Some locations use a different side than this.
Some people find this keep right except to pass on a sidewalk a strange concept... I think it's even in our motor vehicle act. Even on a sparsely populated suburban sidewalk I keep to the right edge so if a runner or a faster walker comes up behind me, I'm predictable and they can pass with ease. It irritates me to see slow walkers erratically walking all over the sidewalk making it difficult to pass.
Sometimes people will walk two abreast, which is fine, but if you saw an oncoming walker you think you'd go single file. A surprising number of people (not just youngsters) fail to do this. I don't bowl them down, but I just keep walking till I'm a step from them, stop, then let them negotiate the fact that they can't just walk straight.
In Canada, we've been Chip & Pin for at least 5 years ago. I was actually surprised when I was down in the states and had to grab some socks from Walmart. When I swiped my card (which I'm used to in the states) instead it had me insert it and do the usual chip & pin.
The contactless is for small, quick transactions. Buying coffee, a pack of gum, whatever. While Chip & Pin is more secure, it's also significantly slower. So, to move a lot of people through the line quickly, they do the paypass thing. When you have the lunch rush at Timmies, you need to move people quickly.;)
I'm Canadian and found the same thing when I went to Walmart in the US in June. In one case I used a self checkout and was instructed to insert the card after swiping. In the second case it was through a regular cash, I swiped the card, then the cashier walked all the way around, grabbed the card and inserted it, instead of saying "please insert your card". Now when traveling in the US I default to inserting my chip at Walmart.
In Canada the Walmart POS machines say "Swipe or insert card". In the US it just said "Swipe card", so there was no reason to believe it was actually chip enabled.
Travel tip to the US: If you're at a pay at the pump in the US, and it asks for your ZIP code, do the following: Take the 3 numbers from your postal code, add 2 zeros: A2B 3C4 becomes: 23400 http://www.mastercard.ca/educa...
To entertain everyone with the ever popular car analogies, a car has a steering wheel, two or three pedals and a dashboard with a more or less common way to display what you want. The designs changed over time, but that's fairly constant. Why? Because it's been tried and proven as useful and intuitive, and people all over the globe know how to deal with this. It works. It works great. You don't see car manufacturers try to come up with, I don't know, a HOTAS setup for cars. ..
No. You do see them doing that. HVAC gets frigged up at a moment's notice. In my opinion, the ideal car HVAC control is three knobs, and three buttons: Fan, Hot/cold mixer (not thermostat), vent direction (face, floor, defrost); A/C, Rear defrost, recirc. Very simple to operate. Crank everything full clockwise for max defrost power.
On my circa 2010 Ford they removed the third knob (vent direction) and replaced it with a wall of buttons. So it isn't immediately intuitive by feel if it's on defrost, or floor. If you press the button twice it will go back to what it was before. What value does any of this functionality give?
"Automatic climate control" has been around for a while. I find it doesn't balance fan vs. temperature the same way I would. Sometimes in very humid weather I want max CFM of temperate air. I have to override the "automatic" system, defeating the purpose.
Now there's completely non-tactile, touch screen HVAC systems where you have to compete with the radio to control HVAC. This isn't just high end luxury, but moderately priced mid sized sedans. More and more in these configurations I notice there's a one hard-key shortcut to max A/C, and max defrost (crucial if your window starts fogging or icing over while driving), so they admit they are needlessly complex to operate while moving.
And the old standby: The cable operated parking / emergency brake has given way to an electronic switch. And in most cars I've had, when the power locks are hit, there's still a manual switch that can be operated. That seems gone now too.
The choice of name of the Start button was poor, but the idea that a single button on one corner of the screen would give the user access to nearly every kind of function on the computer was not a bad one. Apple did it with the Apple menu. When the Start Menu was created, Microsoft's Windows Logo was not obviously a window, it was so stylized, so simply putting the icon by itself on the button wouldn't have helped those doing tech support explain to users how to get to that menu.
This was actually a problem in Office 2007. There was an Office logo "orb" that many users thought was a decoration. It was replaced with "File" menu / ribbon tab in Office 2010.
Reading that blog in more detail, I think I understand what they are doing. "Supported lifetime of the device" *probably* means that the license will be tied to the hardware and will not be transferable. Perhaps they will generally make licenses super-cheap, but not transferable? Or perhaps they will go subscription-only on new devices.
"IT'S A TRAP!" may be appropriate here. We will find out for sure soon enough.
"super-cheap but not transferable" is something they've been doing for a long time with OEM licenses.
Pretty much - most corporations have just barely (as in 2-3 years ago at most) updated from XP to Windows 7.
Our company just completed Windows 7 rollout 2-3 weeks ago. All managed workstations had to be migrated by the end of 2014.
There's still special purpose PC's floating around with XP, but by and large the company is considered migrated... If you looked at everything, we still have special purpose DOS PC's around. . .
The Galaxy S3 was released in 2008 (before Windows 7 was released) yet can be upgraded to 4.4.2 (admittedly limited by carriers pushing updates out for some models) which was released a year after Windows 8.1 came out. If Microsoft was giving people free upgrades to the latest OS for 7 years then maybe you'd have something to shame Google for.
What phone are you actually talking about? Galaxy SIII was released May 2012 and is upgradable to 4.4.2.
Galaxy S was released March 2010 and 2.3 Gingerbread was the last supported version.
Looking at the Nexus phones (which Google has a vested interest in providing updates longer): Nexus One was released in January 2010 and stopped support at 2.3 Nexus S was released December 2010 and ends support with 4.1 Jelly Bean Galaxy Nexus was released November 2011 and ends support with 4.3 Jelly Bean
If you want to relive your youth you can try these days by first finding two computers with modems.
No need to hook them up to a phone line, just run a phone cord between the two (works every time I did it) for the poor man's null modem.
On one computer type ATD on the other type ATA.
On Linux, it is gaining great marketshare in the Smartphone realm! We passed the year of the Linux Cellphone years ago! However apparently it doesn't count because of the atrocious GNU frontend isn't used.
I want to like Linux, I really do. However I think if it were a more centralized development there may be less duplication of effort, and more effort spent moving forward. Maybe more like Free-BSD / PC-BSD, however that has it's own problems (not near the marketshare of Linux, so even less support). Other problems with Linux include WorksForME, RTFM, Hey it's free what do you expect, and YouHaveTheSourceFixItYourself when you try to get help.
UI keeps trying to reinvent itself to solve questions no-one asked, and make Metro look good. Speaking of answering unsolved questions: PulseAudio. Lets just split off and duplicate effort that's already out there!
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I switched to qBittorent a couple years ago. When uTorrent started bundling Conduit (which hijacks browser homepages and search engines) that was it, I was done. You shouldn't have to carefully examine every page of the install dialog to make sure you're not accidentally installing malware. Adobe falls in this category trying to install McAfee shit when you're just trying to update their unsecure Flash plugin.
Ads? What ads? Am I the only one who messes with settings?
Options->Preferences->Advanced
offers.left_rail_offer_enabled=false
offers.sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled=false
I'm sure you should change these settings at your own risk. But it was worth the risk to me.
Ads I could deal with (disabling). The problem is going to upgrade to a new version (when offered), you have to be extremely careful when installing to disable all the shitware. What broke it for me was missing the checkbox for conduit once. Conduit hijacks your home page and search engine, and is very difficult to remove. That was it. I stopped using uTorrent after that. Currently I use qBittorrent.
It's irritating enough to deal with the useless bundled shitware during installation, it's even more irritating to have to carefully opt out of everything when installing an upgrade. Adobe Flash / Reader, and Java are bad at that as well.
Which is exactly what people don't want.
Speak for yourself.
The more "PC" like my mobile devices get, the happier I am. A Surface Pro is far more in-line with the wants and needs of the average user than is a Kindle Fire or an iPad. I would hope that this would extend in mobile phones as well. They're one of the few companies with an offering that could make me give up my BlackBerry.
The computer in my pocket should be a computer. Android, while popular here, can't even handle simple task-switching.
Speak for yourself. The average user wants a device that "just works". Something one can pull out of a pocket or back, press a button and have it do what they need done (looking something up on the internet, read the message from their grandmother, see their next meeting, what have you. A technical user might want to have the power of installing Adobe Flash or tweaking their registry to allow focus-follows-mouse or three versions of Firefox or an ssh client or vim or what have you.
If I want the power of a PC, I use a laptop or desktop. I want my phone to just work and not require constant maintenance.
Indeed. Remember "back in the day" when a Personal computer was a complicated, almost workstation like machine requiring high maintenance, but very powerful. As well there were "home computers" which were less powerful, but much easier to use: Slide the program cartridge in, turn it on, have fun.
Eventually home computers disappeared, and every Luddite and their mother had a PC. Then the calls started flooding in. The inability to do basic tasks, being easily tricked by malware, etc.
Mobile platforms bring back simple, straight forward approach that many users need. For many people all they need to be able to do is surf the web, check their email, and check facebook. Platforms such as iOS and Android excel at this. All the better for those users to use those machines, as long as higher performance PC's (Windows/OSX/Linux) exist for heavy lifting.
More and more on trips I pack my Android tablet and leave my laptop at home. Easier to fire up at the airport departure lounge, on the plane to watch a movie, or in the hotel: laptops usually involve hauling out all the accessories, cords, wait for it to boot, etc, while a tablet will immediately wake from sleep and sip battery. Smartphones also excel at being able to last all day on a charge, yet alert you instantly when you have a new email or other notification. That said I'd be at a loss without my i5 desktop at home.
the almost-death of Blackberry may help Microsoft somewhat here. Microsoft's strongest market is basically "business", mostly traditional business that isn't "hip" enough to be using Apple products. People who want nice Exchange integration, connections with Office 365, etc. Previously that market was totally sewn up by Blackberry, but as they're collapsing Microsoft might grab some of that market.
My very large company is very conservative IT wise. We just migrated from Windows XP to Windows 7 at the end of last year, migrated from Office XP to Office 2010 the year before and migrated from IE to Firefox as an "officially approved browser for external use" the year before (IE 6 continuing to be used for internal applications until Win7).
A couple years ago the mobility platform was revisited. Previously only high ranking executives had Blackberry as smartphones and the rest of us had dumbphones. After the change we all had our choice of iPhone or Android, and could get our mail/ calendar synced on it. Blackberry was no longer an option.
Our company is an example of Blackberry's core user base and we fled. Good luck Microsoft or Blackberry trying to capture that.
No, it's still up-to-date. 10.3 added only 4.3 support and 10.3.1 didn't change that. Even if we assume that it's 4.3.1 support, that's a year and a half old release and 2 versions behind current Android. In what universe does that not imply it only supports "older" Android?
Due to "Fragmentation" in Android, where many users are stuck using phones that can't upgrade to a newer OS, many apps are developed to support a number of older OS's, so a large number are still supported on 4.3.
Just about all USB midi keyboards/controllers are cross platform.
Indeed, like Mass Storage Devices, there's a generic USB MIDI class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
I bought a cheap generic USB-MIDI cable to hook my ancient keyboard to my PC, something like this: http://www.amazon.com/VicTsing... and it worked no problem (without having to install any drivers).
There's also a generic USB printer class (USB-LPT cables use this in addition to real USB printers), yet for some reason there is not really a generic USB-RS232 class, so you have the choice of Prolific 2303, CH340, and FTDI FT232RL. All others are usually fake clones of these. And then you have FTDI coming out with driver updates that intentionally brick fake chips, and Prolific releasing new drivers that refuse to run old chips on Windows 8 (yet a Windows 7 driver can be patched to work on Windows 8).
There is "USB communications device class", but it isn't implemented in the same generic manner as USB mass storage.
There wasn't really a legacy software advantage for x86 in the Mac arena either.
Indirectly there was: either bootcamp or Parallels. If people were tempted to move from Windows, this let them still run essential applications that were Windows only, with excellent performance (as compared to previous full emulation products). By being able to still run Windows applications at full speed, this removed compatibility as a reason to not buy a MAc
Use old ms-dos era program called laplink, or other such programs. Limit to say 19200 or at best 38400, taking roughly 22-12 hours for worst-case file by file copy. dosbox on newer machine could be used.
-Use LPT port on machine, connect to cross over LPT cable on USB->LPT adapter, use laplink or other such program. dosbox or other on newmachine should do, use again laplink or other such software. May not be 100% compatible with all USB->LPT adapters.
I've yet to see a USB-LPT adapter that can be used for ANYTHING other than a printer. 2 way data over LPT plays some serious tricks, so this is a non-starter.
Instead of Laplink I use FastLynx:
https://sewelldirect.com/fastL...
It is compatible from DOS to Windows 8 64 bit (with USB-serial, or hardware LPT port)
Did it all the time; going from memory...
I go for the dead simple, zip up all the files from the source
Run a phone wire between the computerers, with the terminal call one from one (IIRC you have to disable dialtone check use ATX3 then ATD555)
and on the other manual answer (ATA)
you migh have to do half duplex (local echo) on the terminals IIR this was the quickest route for no fuss local communication
once connected use the upload/download options on the terminals to start the file trnasfer
then look on it in a few hours, it will just churn away till it's finished.
It may be slow but it will complete as expected, and there is no special hardware, program or data cost.
look at the bottom of this article on my machine to machine notes -
http://www.portcommodore.com/d...
I recommended Fastlynx and null modem cable elsewhere, as I think it's the best solution (especially speed over parralel cable), however I have done "phone line between the modems" before. No need for ATX3:
ATD on one machine
ATA on the other.
Fastlynx:
https://sewelldirect.com/fastL...
Get a serial null modem cable. You can use a USB-serial converter on a modern PC if you want. USB-LPT converters will not work. They are only for printers. 2 way data transfer won't work at all. Sewell sells packages with Serial and LPT null modem cables with the software.
It can run anything from DOS to Windows 8 64 bit. There's a built in function to send the server program to a DOS machine over serial (using DOS MODE and CTTY commands), without using floppy or CD.
Run the server on the DOS machine, connect on a modern Windows machine, and you can copy the whole HDD over.
Sewell even has Windows versions of Interlnk. You can mount a 2GB FAT16 disk image on your modern PC, and have it show up as a drive on your antique machine.
I actually disagree. Writing things down or recording them is great, because we forget. I always thought it was a little nuts to go to events and spend them taking pictures, videos, etc. BE there, don't be the videographer. As time has gone by, though, I've come to realize if I had all those artifacts to refresh my memory over the years, I'd remember them a lot better.
I try as best I can to strike a balance. I try to focus on the experience first, and photos/videos second. I try to take quick snapshots that don't take me long, and I try to capture quick videos to capture the moment, not vlogs. It is amazing to go back through the "roll" of photos from trips gone by, one by one, and to have emotions and memories come flooding back as you relive the trip.
Honestly for all the talk of trying to preserve your entire library of 245,346 photos for great great grand children, I'm the only one that gets the flood of memories viewing them. Most people would be bored beyond a few strategic photos of my life.
Depending on how she is as a person, this may or may not be something to consider...
Set up a mailserver for her and your wife. You may very well have your own domain and mail already. But just ask some friends to help to ensure this will last a long time.
This approach sounds overly complicated and very likely to result in failure (server failure, changed email address, etc).
A simpler approach would be letters in envelopes with "open on" dates. Give to her mother to release as time passes.
What are you saying? Please elaborate.
Some bicyclists are good, have proper lane discipline, signal, obay lights / signs, others don't. Some of the worst cyclists I have ever seen:
-At a signalized crosswalk on a 6 lane road. All four lanes came to a stop for the pedestrian who had activated the overhead flashing lights (eg: it was obvious all traffic had stopped for a pedestrian). I was in the curb lane on the ped's destination side of the road. She was in front of my car and I happened to notice in my right mirror Lance Armstrong coming up the gutter at full speed, oblivious to the overhead flashing lights, and lineup of stopped cars. I sounded the horn, which startled the pedestrian, but cause her to stop and not step in front of the bike. I should have had the passenger deploy their door.
-One 3 way stop I used to go through a lot. Curb lane was RIGHT TURN ONLY, inside lane was straight lane. Bicycles would continuously run the stop sign going straight in the gutter of the curb lane. WTF? How can bicycles complain about being hooked if they pass turning traffic in a turn only lane that all have their signals on? The vehicles don't expect someone to be passing illegally like this. If they want to pass going straight, they should split the lanes. Bikes talk about "taking the lane". I started "taking the gutter" at this and other intersections. Driving as close to the curb as possible to prevent bikes from trying to pass when I'm trying to turn right.
-Amsterdam, land of the bicycle, at a major intersection pedestrians had a green light. A big sea of pedestrians were crossing the road, when suddenly perpendicular to the pedestrians a bike was going against the signal, ringing his bell "DING DING DING DING" plowing through pedestrians that had the right of way.
To me, carefully crossing against a signal (slow, look, proceed), and driving on the sidewalk aren't as bad as this. Unfortunately there's a lot of bad apples that give the few good bicyclists a bad name. I will respect bicyclists if they respect other people.
So a dedicated GPS unit is ok (I mean shit, they actually sell them as standalone devices intended to be used while driving,) but using my phone for the same purpose is not?
Fuck you. With a red hot iron poker in the ass.
Generally "Cellphone use while driving laws" will specify that devices like GPS (and a phone used as a GPS) must be in a mount. This reduces the fumbling to hold it, and can put the device in your line of sight, so a quick glance over to see the distance to turn, is a lot quicker than looking down at your lap. Further, in some cases for the laws, or at least in recommendations / manuals, you're only supposed to program your destination or otherwise configure the device, while the vehicle is stationary.
Except that in cities we have this concept of "keep right* except when passing." There is room for travel in both directions. If there isn't room, the obstruction is on one person's side, or the other person's side. The person on the side of the obstruction is expected to wait. Some people, mostly youngsters, haven't figured this out. But it is actually somewhat rare. Most of the people will sort themselves to the correct lane if you force them to. You're not in "their" way if you're on the right side of the sidewalk.
* Some locations use a different side than this.
Some people find this keep right except to pass on a sidewalk a strange concept... I think it's even in our motor vehicle act. Even on a sparsely populated suburban sidewalk I keep to the right edge so if a runner or a faster walker comes up behind me, I'm predictable and they can pass with ease. It irritates me to see slow walkers erratically walking all over the sidewalk making it difficult to pass.
Sometimes people will walk two abreast, which is fine, but if you saw an oncoming walker you think you'd go single file. A surprising number of people (not just youngsters) fail to do this. I don't bowl them down, but I just keep walking till I'm a step from them, stop, then let them negotiate the fact that they can't just walk straight.
In Canada, we've been Chip & Pin for at least 5 years ago. I was actually surprised when I was down in the states and had to grab some socks from Walmart. When I swiped my card (which I'm used to in the states) instead it had me insert it and do the usual chip & pin.
The contactless is for small, quick transactions. Buying coffee, a pack of gum, whatever. While Chip & Pin is more secure, it's also significantly slower. So, to move a lot of people through the line quickly, they do the paypass thing. When you have the lunch rush at Timmies, you need to move people quickly. ;)
I'm Canadian and found the same thing when I went to Walmart in the US in June. In one case I used a self checkout and was instructed to insert the card after swiping. In the second case it was through a regular cash, I swiped the card, then the cashier walked all the way around, grabbed the card and inserted it, instead of saying "please insert your card". Now when traveling in the US I default to inserting my chip at Walmart.
In Canada the Walmart POS machines say "Swipe or insert card". In the US it just said "Swipe card", so there was no reason to believe it was actually chip enabled.
Travel tip to the US: If you're at a pay at the pump in the US, and it asks for your ZIP code, do the following: Take the 3 numbers from your postal code, add 2 zeros: A2B 3C4 becomes: 23400 http://www.mastercard.ca/educa...
Shame the walls are already up
http://build.slashdot.org/story/15/02/02/0419234/the-cool-brick-can-cool-off-an-entire-room-using-nothing-but-water
A swamp cooler that produces high humidity? Just what you want in a data center.
To entertain everyone with the ever popular car analogies, a car has a steering wheel, two or three pedals and a dashboard with a more or less common way to display what you want. The designs changed over time, but that's fairly constant. Why? Because it's been tried and proven as useful and intuitive, and people all over the globe know how to deal with this. It works. It works great. You don't see car manufacturers try to come up with, I don't know, a HOTAS setup for cars. . .
No. You do see them doing that. HVAC gets frigged up at a moment's notice. In my opinion, the ideal car HVAC control is three knobs, and three buttons: Fan, Hot/cold mixer (not thermostat), vent direction (face, floor, defrost); A/C, Rear defrost, recirc. Very simple to operate. Crank everything full clockwise for max defrost power.
On my circa 2010 Ford they removed the third knob (vent direction) and replaced it with a wall of buttons. So it isn't immediately intuitive by feel if it's on defrost, or floor. If you press the button twice it will go back to what it was before. What value does any of this functionality give?
"Automatic climate control" has been around for a while. I find it doesn't balance fan vs. temperature the same way I would. Sometimes in very humid weather I want max CFM of temperate air. I have to override the "automatic" system, defeating the purpose.
Now there's completely non-tactile, touch screen HVAC systems where you have to compete with the radio to control HVAC. This isn't just high end luxury, but moderately priced mid sized sedans. More and more in these configurations I notice there's a one hard-key shortcut to max A/C, and max defrost (crucial if your window starts fogging or icing over while driving), so they admit they are needlessly complex to operate while moving.
And the old standby: The cable operated parking / emergency brake has given way to an electronic switch. And in most cars I've had, when the power locks are hit, there's still a manual switch that can be operated. That seems gone now too.
The choice of name of the Start button was poor, but the idea that a single button on one corner of the screen would give the user access to nearly every kind of function on the computer was not a bad one. Apple did it with the Apple menu. When the Start Menu was created, Microsoft's Windows Logo was not obviously a window, it was so stylized, so simply putting the icon by itself on the button wouldn't have helped those doing tech support explain to users how to get to that menu.
This was actually a problem in Office 2007. There was an Office logo "orb" that many users thought was a decoration. It was replaced with "File" menu / ribbon tab in Office 2010.
Back in my day upside down smiley faces were used by left handed people.
Better image your PC after installing Windows 10.
Reading that blog in more detail, I think I understand what they are doing. "Supported lifetime of the device" *probably* means that the license will be tied to the hardware and will not be transferable. Perhaps they will generally make licenses super-cheap, but not transferable? Or perhaps they will go subscription-only on new devices.
"IT'S A TRAP!" may be appropriate here. We will find out for sure soon enough.
"super-cheap but not transferable" is something they've been doing for a long time with OEM licenses.
Pretty much - most corporations have just barely (as in 2-3 years ago at most) updated from XP to Windows 7.
Our company just completed Windows 7 rollout 2-3 weeks ago. All managed workstations had to be migrated by the end of 2014.
There's still special purpose PC's floating around with XP, but by and large the company is considered migrated... If you looked at everything, we still have special purpose DOS PC's around. . .
The Galaxy S3 was released in 2008 (before Windows 7 was released) yet can be upgraded to 4.4.2 (admittedly limited by carriers pushing updates out for some models) which was released a year after Windows 8.1 came out. If Microsoft was giving people free upgrades to the latest OS for 7 years then maybe you'd have something to shame Google for.
What phone are you actually talking about? Galaxy SIII was released May 2012 and is upgradable to 4.4.2.
Galaxy S was released March 2010 and 2.3 Gingerbread was the last supported version.
Looking at the Nexus phones (which Google has a vested interest in providing updates longer):
Nexus One was released in January 2010 and stopped support at 2.3
Nexus S was released December 2010 and ends support with 4.1 Jelly Bean
Galaxy Nexus was released November 2011 and ends support with 4.3 Jelly Bean
If you want to relive your youth you can try these days by first finding two computers with modems.
No need to hook them up to a phone line, just run a phone cord between the two (works every time I did it) for the poor man's null modem.
On one computer type ATD on the other type ATA.
On Linux, it is gaining great marketshare in the Smartphone realm! We passed the year of the Linux Cellphone years ago! However apparently it doesn't count because of the atrocious GNU frontend isn't used.
I want to like Linux, I really do. However I think if it were a more centralized development there may be less duplication of effort, and more effort spent moving forward. Maybe more like Free-BSD / PC-BSD, however that has it's own problems (not near the marketshare of Linux, so even less support). Other problems with Linux include WorksForME, RTFM, Hey it's free what do you expect, and YouHaveTheSourceFixItYourself when you try to get help.
UI keeps trying to reinvent itself to solve questions no-one asked, and make Metro look good. Speaking of answering unsolved questions: PulseAudio. Lets just split off and duplicate effort that's already out there!
Unstable kernel ABI/API.
Oooo! But it has wobbly windows!