That's awesome. I'm glad Windows caught up finally. How about Linux, was I at least right about that part?
Nope. Linux has had multi-touch and gesture support at least as long as Windows and perhaps longer. I will concede here that Apple were first to market here, but they haven't really done anything terribly interesting with the technology since.
Google is changing. Well, in truth Alphabet is changing; they want to compete more directly with Apple with their own "Halo" device. The previous Nexus devices (I had a few that I loved) were cheap... but they were also cheap in the sense they were plastic and never top-tier hardware. These new devices are true flagship devices... though the memory is a bit smaller than I might expect in a modern flagship (4GB when many manufacturers are looking at 6)... though with a pretty fat CPU to keep up with it.
For my part, I pre-ordered Pixels for myself and my girlfriend yesterday. My phone is getting pretty long in the tooth (first-gen Moto X) so it's time... and honestly the price while higher than I might've liked isn't too much of a hardship for someone who's been into unlocked phones for years. I haven't been on a contract with a carrier since my iPhone 3GS (long time ago now)... I'm much happier buying unlocked.
Seriously, there's really no competing products beyond OneNote.
I was an Evernote subscriber up until recently; I simply found that the functionality was too easily duplicated in OneNote; Evernote literally provided me zero advantages.
Now, my history is I have always been an open-source fan, run Linux since the early pre-1.0 kernel days, and ran Apple Macs for years before finally migrating back to Windows about 2 years ago. Mostly I did that because of work, but I had gotten a Surface Pro about 4 years ago or thereabouts that I absolutely fell in love with for a portable, simple computer with which I could also do some awesome note-taking with the stylus. This includes drawings on the screen when I need to (which in my job these days is often).
When my Surface Pro got long in the tooth I moved to a Dell Venue 11 Pro, which is what I'm typing this response on. As well as being a really good tablet, it also has an extremely good keyboard if you get the accessory keyboard with the integrated battery. It also has the advantage of giving me runtimes on battery that are just insane and I have never come close to killing both batteries (though I have drained the battery once or twice in tablet-only mode). At this point I have dozens of OneNote notebooks, many of which are archive/reference... but the new active ones are synced to all my devices at once. That means that when I get home to my nice big desktop machine, I can bring up those notes without even thinking about it; no saving to a Dropbox-alike solution, the notes are just there. And I can slide them off to a second screen I'm using for reference material while I work on the action items from those notes on my nice comfortable desktop. Meanwhile my Venue sits quietly on its charger waiting to be taken out again.
Now, there definitely are times OneNote is not ideal. I don't use it for very personal notes... the stuff I don't want synced to a Microsoft-owned cloud (or anyone's cloud come to think of it). For that I have my OwnCloud server with OwnNote. While it doesn't do the hand-written notes, I do have an OwnNote client on my phone so I can tap in quick notes or reference notes I have stored there. I can also hit it up easily at my private URL to quickly get some notes entered... but even I admit it's not as slick as OneNote. Now, having said that since I also have the OwnCloud client on my laptop, I can create text notes in the "Notes" folder in my OwnCloud on my local machine and they also become notes... so there are multiple ways to skin that cat.
So one-size-fits-all? No... but OneNote is good enough for almost everything, and for those few corner cases I find OneNote doesn't work, OwnNote works perfectly. These two tools have become the things I use every day and mean I'm not constantly losing paper notes (my old method).
Having said all that, I DO carry an old paper notebook around as well just in case I'm ever in a place I have no power or access to a computer/phone (VERY rarely, but it happens). If that happens, I whip out the paper notebook and write a quick note... and if I want to digitize it I can either transcribe it later, usually into OneNote so I can translate over diagrams as well.
If you're running Debian on an embedded system then you're doing it wrong anyway. Debian has never been tuned for embedded, and a properly tuned embedded system is more likely to be compiled from source or INCREDIBLY minimal packaging. In addition I can't imagine running systemd on embedded systems as it's a bit heavy for systems with slow CPUs and small memory spaces.
Hell, a basic Redhat / CENTOS install is better tuned for embedded than Debian, and that's not saying much.
Kind of misses the point that Hinkley Point C is a boondoggle. I've been following it for a while since I'm actually a fan of nuclear power as well as renewables... and if you're interested there's a great summary about it here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It doesn't hurt that Robert Llewellyn was Kryten in Red Dwarf...
No, parent poster is right; it's fake. Just watch carefully. I did and noticed way too many incongruous or inconsistent moments. For example there's a moment when you see the hoverboard turn to the right with the pilot on top... the pilot literally doesn't move. It's quite obvious this is a jet-powered quad drone with a mannequin on top. At other times I suspect a crane, and the footage is very carefully cut and cropped to not show it.
Seriously, the video is crap. I am not a pro and I could probably put together something close to it using Premiere. Hell, even shooting the footage I can think of a dozen different ways to actually get the footage that don't involve a working hoverboard... could probably put the entire thing together in about a week on a budget of less than $5K if I rope some of my friends into the scam.
Just watch... they'll fire off an Indiegogo or Kickstarter based on the footage, raise loads of money and then pull a "Coolest Cooler" where they suddenly claim they need more money... and more money... and more money... and then vanish. While Coolest haven't done that yet, I predict that's what's going to happen. It's not hard to hide investments and file bankruptcy... yeah, it's fraud but some people only care about making money.
Oh, and since when has "horsepower" been a measure of jet power? Yeah, the whole thing just reeks of scam.
Except that this is still within spitting distance of two tickets to a movie plus snacks at the ridiculous theatre prices. And there are people (myself included) who have put a pretty decent investment into a home system that's more comfortable and in many ways better than a theatre system (you can control the volume yourself to start, pause the movie when you need a bio break etc.)
On the flip side, I DO enjoy actually going to a theatre to watch a movie... and yes I enjoy new releases on occasion. I think this might be a service I will use because (a) I can afford it and (b) sometimes my girlfriend and I would rather sit home and watch a movie. Invite a couple of friends over for a "first watch" party and all of a sudden that $50 seems pretty damned cheap. In fact, I think I'd probably do that at least once a month.
I know this is not a great data point, but I have a 3 year old Moto X that is running sterling service on CM12.1 and you CAN put 13 on it if you're willing to take a hit in the stability department. Mine works great, is small (4.7") and reliable. I flash a new nightly onto it about once every week or two when I feel like it and I've had only one or two buggy releases that made me a little frustrated.
Having said all that, support for 13 is bad on this device and yes I probably will get a new phone this year... but my needs and wants are about the same as yours in that I don't want a 5.5" monster screen device... I just need something that's dependable with a "big enough" screen that I can read on when I want to. For me the 4.7" screen is a sweet spot I really like and am having a lot of difficulty finding a replacement. Right now the favourite seems to be the OnePlus X at 5"... but it's lack of support for certain US bands is a bit worrying when outside of major cities. Having said that, I rarely travel much outside of major cities and when I do I'm rarely using LTE anyway... I've almost always had my phones drop to 3G out in the country anyway:)
+1 to this... I have no mod points or I'd give it. Other solutions include having a home server or NAS you can dump bulk data to for archival storage. This is what I do, and have Windows File History set up to back up to that NAS as well.
That depends a lot on your use cases. I will preface this by saying I'm part of the target market here because I have already spoken with my dollars and have a laptop with an external GPU box; specifically an Alienware 15 with the Graphics Amp.
a- Increased complexity? Sure, and there's no doubt that there will be teething troubles with drivers. I know I had them early on because of effectively having three GPU's (integrated Intel, integrated GTX-970m and external GTX-980). However I think what AMD is aiming for here is a portable system that would only have two when "docked" and one when mobile.
b- I am still quite happy with the solution I'm running... the CPU isn't the bottleneck on the games I play and I love the fact I can upgrade my GPU when I'm ready to.
c- Agreed, but why overthink it? Yes, Dell's solution on the AW is proprietary, but technically the external GPU connection is just PCIe. That works great because you can use the same GPU that you use in a desktop today. I think AW's solution is actually pretty elegant, though dual GPU capability would be nice... but then my CPU probably would become a bottlneck:)
d- Yes, portability of a laptop is important... but for what purposes do you typically move your laptop? Mine moves when I take it somewhere I want to work.... rarely do I game anywhere other than at home so a powerful GPU on the road is mostly irrelevant. Having said all that, I also own a tablet (Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140) which is actually my go-to for a portable system so I rarely really use my AW for work at a coffee shop or the like. However, it is nice that when I am traveling for work (about one week a month) I can pack up my AW15 with my Venue Pro and I have my entire work and "home" systems with me. That way if I choose I can game in my hotel room or while delayed at an airport. Sure the GPU in the laptop isn't as powerful as the one I have at home, but it's also driving a less high res display (HD as opposed to 4K) that's smaller so I don't really notice the detail reduction.
Solutions already exist to the problem from Alienware and MSI... AMD's solution here is OK on paper but requires yet another connector on a laptop which most manufacturers are moving away from. Using TB3 is an OK solution too, but we will hit a limit at some point as GPUs continue to grow.
At the end of the day though, AMD's solution is all about extra revenue. They want to be able to sell two versions of the same GPU; one that's external and pluggable and one that's PCIe. Personally I prefer the AW and MSI solutions because they leverage already existing standards and I can go buy any PCIe GPU I like. So far just over a year in and I'm quite happy with the GTX-980 but will probably look to upgrade in the next year or so... that will extend the lifespan of my laptop because CPU just isn't much of a bottleneck.
This is true as far as it goes, but misses the point that the GPU connection at that point is PCI-E. You can pick and choose your GPU in the Dell/Alienware solution and it works really well. Yes, the connector is proprietary, but that's because there were no standards for external, pluggable PCI-E.
For the record, I have an Alienware 15 that is my primary box and I love it. I have the external box (Amplifier) with a GTX-980 in it right now for heavy lifting on games. It's really nice when I'm on the road to be able to still play games with the integrated GTX-970m, but then play my heavy games at home on the amp. In addition, it acts like a dock of sorts with 4 USB sockets in the back... so I have a good keyboard, gaming mouse and Logitech G13 attached permanently to it. I do wish it had integrated gig-e but I can understand why they didn't do that.
My girlfriend is still rocking an Alienware M11xR2. That damned thing is a tank and I've generally found Alienware laptops to be really well engineered and built. Last year I moved back from OSX to Windows by replacing my Macbook Pro with an Alienware 15. Point is; the M11xR2 is an 11 inch laptop that really lasts... I think it's around 6 years old now?
I absolutely love it and it's traveled quite extensively with me. Dell's most recent commercial ultrabooks are also really well made. My work gives me a Latitude E7240 (12 inch) and it's also been incredibly reliable. Takes a beating and is moved around all the time since I work on the road. Yeah, the case has picked up scratches and scuffs mostly from being slipped in and out of a backpack, and occasionally having stuff put on top of it... but almost 2 years in and so far it's rock solid. The screen resolution is pretty crap though, but it's workable.
If you want to go really serious there are also ruggedized laptops and tablets in the 11-12 inch size range. At work we recently demoed the Latitude 12 Rugged Tablet (also Dell) and while it's technically semi-rugged rather than truly rugged, that makes it highly portable and I doubt normal usage would cause it to even flinch.
Mostly because people wanted more than Btrieve and file services in their servers. They wanted web servers and more crucially a GUI. In addition, the surge in popularity of TCP/IP as a protocol of choice due to the Internet caught Novell off-guard who were still betting on IPX/SPX as their default protocol. All of this resulted in Netware 5, which frankly alienated a lot of those who worked on Netware for a living (I was a CNE way back in those days). I hated 5... the GUI was buggy and slow, but still Novell tried to push you to use it for various functions (thankfully if you didn't absolutely need it you didn't have to have it running) but the writing was on the wall. They really screwed the pooch with 5 trying to make it all compete with Windows NT instead of focusing on what Netware did really well.
In addition, the licensing became problematic for companies who all of a sudden were buying lots of servers, and it took until 6.0 before Novell decided to switch to a more logical per-user licensing model. But by then it was really too late. Windows had the market share because everyone was using it on the desktop... many figured why not also use it in the datacenter? Novell had no desktop equivalent so particularly for smaller business with little or no support, Windows NT/2000 became an obvious choice for a server.
OES was the last gasp of Netware and was actually pretty good, but by that point it was pretty much irrelevant. You're right though; it was the rock at the core of the network for many... and I loved working on it. I suspect my experience with Novell is why I transitioned so easily to UNIX and its variants as my preferred server platform to work with... but even back then I knew Windows would nail the market.
A fan? No. But I can definitely be considered one who respects the platform.
My work phone is a Lumia 830. Honestly had I not gotten it for work I probably would never have bought a Windows phone. However, I quickly found myself quite impressed with the platform. Let's deal with a few negative comments, shall we?
- "There are no apps". Technically untrue... there are apps. No, there's no Tinder app or the latest or greatest games but you do have a pretty basic suite of apps that works really well. On a daily basis I use mail, calendar and the phone apps. There's an app for Concur I use for my expenses, and IE on WP is actually pretty decent. Beyond that, I have a messaging app, Skype and OneNote... and when I'm sitting waiting for something there's the News app that works really well. What more do I really need? For traveling I have Uber and Yelp. And that's about it. I don't care about most of the other apps... I even uninstalled the default Facebook app because I don't care about Facebook.
- "The app drawer is a wall of text". Yes, that's definitely true and is definitely a negative of the phone. However, note how many apps I actually use on this thing? They are all pinned to my start page where they can be resized and reordered as I see fit, and they all fit in that first screen with no issues. A little customization and you may never see the app drawer again... hell I can't remember the last time I opened it.
- "The flat UI sucks". Well that's a matter of taste. On my Android phone, icons often get lost in the shuffle because quite frankly my app drawer looks incredibly busy. And discoverability isn't helped when every few weeks some app changes its icon to something completely different. Have you never wondered why so many icon themes for Android try to neutralize the colour palette and make it less garish?
There are many others but I won't go into it... and no, the WP interface isn't for everyone. As I noted above my personal phone is still Android (CM12 at the moment) because I like to hack my phone and do stuff with it... but my Windows Phone does exactly what I need it to do and no more. I am definitely not a Microsoft fanboy but in some ways I find it easier to get stuff done with WP than I do with iPhone or Android... the phrase "It just works" applies nicely to WP but I don't feel it applies to either of the other big players. WP gets out of my way and lets me get to my data.
Now, are there things I would like? Sure... I'd love an OwnCloud client so I can attach to my files more easily. OneDrive integration is nice but I don't like OneDrive. Having my OneNote notebooks on the go is great; many of them are hand written notes on my Venue 11 Pro Tablet and being able to bring them up on my phone for reference is actually really cool. Exchange integration is obviously fantastic, and I really do like the more simplistic UI. Battery life is amazing on this phone... I get 2 days without a charge quite often... and I'm using it a lot. So there are one or two apps I could stand to have that I just don't... but since it's a nice-to-have and not a need, I fail to really care. At the moment I just have a script on my home PC that copies my most recent critical documents from my OwnCloud to my OneDrive... I have long since realized that a file more than a month old is archived so my script keeps only files less than a month old synced with my OneDrive. Since I'm not editing them on my OneDrive and just referring to them it works out really well and only needs a one-way sync!
I can also say the build quality is better than most of my previous phones, too. My Android phone has been dropped once and then replaced because it broke (insurance, thankfully!), but my Lumia has been dropped frequently enough that the metal of the case is a bit chipped... but the glass has remained unaffected and the phone itself works great.
This. I do this too using S3CMD. You can upload to S3 more easily than Glacier... so far a command-line based Glacier client is sorely lacking. Still, I upload to S3 and then have my S3 data set to archive to Glacier after 24 hours which it does automatically. That means the only files that are in S3 are the most recently changed or new.
Like you I have a script that locally encrypts with my own private key before upload. That private key I keep in my Owncloud.
Become your own provider; set up your own IMAP server either in-house or on a cheap hosted solution like Linode then import your data. If you want to get really complex then use scripting with S3CMD or some other tool so you can now back it all up to S3, then configure your S3 to archive to Glacier after 24 hours or so. Yeah, that means some costs but there are ways of mitigating that too.
One possibility is have a server at home with all your mail... make it a VM or a PM... whatever. Import the data through IMAP and it's all available.
I went one step further and grabbed Zimbra which has a MySQL metadata database. Gives me a nice web GUI and really good search capabilities. Stores my mail going back almost 20 years and does it in ~20GB of hard drive space. You can use your own imagination to figure out securing it and stuff like that.
Of course, there are myriad options. Mailarchiva is really solid too with fantastic search... I've used it at a few small companies for mail archiving and it's brilliant. It all depends (a) how much work you're willing/able to put in, (b) how much money you want to spend and (c) how much functionality you really need. I like my Zimbra setup because it's nominally free (I already have the server, so spinning up a Zimbra VM is effectively zero cost) and gives me loads of functionality. I have an OpenVPN network for my private computers so I can access the IMAP ports, and I have the web interface published on a private web server so I can use it at machines that aren't mine... though typically I don't need to do that because I nearly always have a laptop with me and can use my phone in a pinch.
Functionally there's not a lot of need, though the database search features of Exchange are kind of nice.
Myself, I actually use Zimbra which is open source and free for personal use. I have that in a VM on my home server and connect using IMAP and when on the road I can still access it via the web. It uses Postfix for email on the back end with a MySQL database that contains all the mail metadata. Yeah, Zimbra uses Java heavily which kind of sucks but it's really not too bad. As of today I have email going back to 1998 or so in my Zimbra archive and the entire VM eats up ~20GB of hard drive space give or take. It's also still a live email server so I receive new mail all the time. For a client I can use any IMAP client I like or hit up the web interface. I can even use Z-Push (also open-source) to connect it up to my phone using ActiveSync if I choose, though in truth I managed to break that about a year ago and just haven't gotten around to fixing it yet.
I don't publish any IMAP ports on the public Internet BTW... there are in fact zero open ports on that system... technically. I have an OpenVPN network set up among my personal computers, and if I'm not on a personal computer I have my own web server on a Linode that uses NGINX to proxy back to my Zimbra server across that tunnel. The SMTP data coming in hits a Mailcleaner VM that I have set up as well that does all my mail filtering before being passed to Zimbra.
Is this all overkill? Oh hell yes; but I do this sort of stuff for fun anyway and doing all of this taught me a bunch of skills. Bonus; on another VM I also host OwnCloud that's proxied through NGINX in the same way as Zimbra is so I have ~300GB of data I can selectively sync to my various computers... and I host email and OwnCloud for my son and girlfriend as well. Backups are all done through s3cmd to push the data to S3 where my S3 account is set to archive to Glacier after 24 hours. I think my entire backup of critical data costs me maybe $10 a month... then I pay $20 for my Linode. But all of that is sunk cost anyway because I'm using it for other stuff anyway. Plus, there's the learning aspect which is really valuable to me.
It's not got so much to do with cash as it does have to do with the upper management at a corporation. I've seen this play out a LOT of times recently.
First, the CEO gets a Surface Pro because he thinks he needs it. No, his use case doesn't really support it, but the IT department buys it because the CEO says he wants it. The CIO, CFO and COO all see the CEO carrying a Surface Pro and then they decide they need one too because they want to be just like him. Granted in some cases they actually do use them (the COO is often one I see properly using a Surface Pro in a meeting... ironically it's rarely the CIO). Then the managers below them decide they want them and IT is forced to buy them and so on.
Now, the average user gets forced into a Surface Pro because IT wants to standardize. It makes deployment, repair and imaging a lot easier if you have lots and lots of the same computer. Updates pushed out to their users become simpler as well and so on... it's a trickle down effect but yes to the average user in a company it DOES tend to look like IT is forcing it because they want to.
On a side note, it's worth noting that IT departments aren't necessarily flush with cash but aren't really all that poor either. Yes, most consumer grade laptops are cheap, but a company with its head screwed on straight never bought these anyway. I've rarely seen corporations spend less than $1500 on a laptop for any users because they go with larger memory, faster CPUs (mostly because of all the security software they need to install to be compliant with the corporation), then they buy 3 or 5 years of support instead of the 1 year that your sub-$1K laptops come with. Consumer grade laptops do NOT last very long in the hands of salesmen for example... trust me I've seen plenty of examples of companies who end up spending more on their consumer-grade replacements over 3 years than they would've spent on a good business-grade laptop in the first place.
Surfaces are really well made and reliable. They are business-grade and are priced as such.
Tell that to all the schools and corporations I work with on a daily basis who are buying Surface Pro and Surface Books by the truckload. They are perhaps the hottest selling single item I've seen in years on the client side.
I'm glad I don't get paid on client though... the margins on that stuff are shit.
When I drove a 1960 Dodge, I put cheap lead substitute into my engine to protect the valves. Why are aviators so special that they can't use lead substitute? Tolulene? Isooctane?
Because that stuff acts differently in different engines. A car engine is very different from an airplane engine despite the cosmetic similarity. Typically they are very large bore cylinders with a really low operating RPM (they produce peak power very low on the rpm range and don't rev as high as a car engine). This means the physics of intake and exhaust are VERY different which means the same solution won't necessarily work for both. It's also worth bearing in mind that the mean intake temperature on an airplane is significantly lower and leaner (less oxygen) than a car due to altitude.
It's also worth noting that aviators aren't "special"... rather they're aware of the fact that an engine failure is a much more serious problem in a single-engine plane than in a car... one that can kill you and does frequently. Since this also extends to piston-powered helicopters an engine failure becomes very likely to kill you. One can't really blame aviators for being conservative about what they do with their engines:)
And then Dell's software re-enables it, or reinstalls it if you delete it. And if you remove the software that does the reinstall and ever factory-reset your PC, it in turn gets reinstalled. It's like malware, except that it's from a commercial vendor.
Definitely a real dumbass move on Dell's part, but this happens in all big companies; someone thinks they're doing a really great thing by simplifying some process without giving any thought to the security ramifications.
1. Go to your Services... either run "services.msc", "compmgmt.msc" or "Open Services" from Task Manager. 2. Stop the Dell Foundation Service 3. Browse to c:\Program Files\Dell\Dell Foundation Services directory and delete the Dell.Foundation.Agent.Plugins.eDell.dll file 4. Launch Certificate Manager by running "certmgr.msc" 5. Browse to "Trusted Root Certificates \ Certificates" 6. Locate the eDellRoot certificate and delete it. 7. Restart your Dell Foundation Services. Voila... doesn't come back after a reboot.
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Well.. not until now... no...
That's awesome. I'm glad Windows caught up finally. How about Linux, was I at least right about that part?
Nope. Linux has had multi-touch and gesture support at least as long as Windows and perhaps longer. I will concede here that Apple were first to market here, but they haven't really done anything terribly interesting with the technology since.
Google is changing. Well, in truth Alphabet is changing; they want to compete more directly with Apple with their own "Halo" device. The previous Nexus devices (I had a few that I loved) were cheap... but they were also cheap in the sense they were plastic and never top-tier hardware. These new devices are true flagship devices... though the memory is a bit smaller than I might expect in a modern flagship (4GB when many manufacturers are looking at 6)... though with a pretty fat CPU to keep up with it.
For my part, I pre-ordered Pixels for myself and my girlfriend yesterday. My phone is getting pretty long in the tooth (first-gen Moto X) so it's time... and honestly the price while higher than I might've liked isn't too much of a hardship for someone who's been into unlocked phones for years. I haven't been on a contract with a carrier since my iPhone 3GS (long time ago now)... I'm much happier buying unlocked.
Seriously, there's really no competing products beyond OneNote.
I was an Evernote subscriber up until recently; I simply found that the functionality was too easily duplicated in OneNote; Evernote literally provided me zero advantages.
Now, my history is I have always been an open-source fan, run Linux since the early pre-1.0 kernel days, and ran Apple Macs for years before finally migrating back to Windows about 2 years ago. Mostly I did that because of work, but I had gotten a Surface Pro about 4 years ago or thereabouts that I absolutely fell in love with for a portable, simple computer with which I could also do some awesome note-taking with the stylus. This includes drawings on the screen when I need to (which in my job these days is often).
When my Surface Pro got long in the tooth I moved to a Dell Venue 11 Pro, which is what I'm typing this response on. As well as being a really good tablet, it also has an extremely good keyboard if you get the accessory keyboard with the integrated battery. It also has the advantage of giving me runtimes on battery that are just insane and I have never come close to killing both batteries (though I have drained the battery once or twice in tablet-only mode). At this point I have dozens of OneNote notebooks, many of which are archive/reference... but the new active ones are synced to all my devices at once. That means that when I get home to my nice big desktop machine, I can bring up those notes without even thinking about it; no saving to a Dropbox-alike solution, the notes are just there. And I can slide them off to a second screen I'm using for reference material while I work on the action items from those notes on my nice comfortable desktop. Meanwhile my Venue sits quietly on its charger waiting to be taken out again.
Now, there definitely are times OneNote is not ideal. I don't use it for very personal notes... the stuff I don't want synced to a Microsoft-owned cloud (or anyone's cloud come to think of it). For that I have my OwnCloud server with OwnNote. While it doesn't do the hand-written notes, I do have an OwnNote client on my phone so I can tap in quick notes or reference notes I have stored there. I can also hit it up easily at my private URL to quickly get some notes entered... but even I admit it's not as slick as OneNote. Now, having said that since I also have the OwnCloud client on my laptop, I can create text notes in the "Notes" folder in my OwnCloud on my local machine and they also become notes... so there are multiple ways to skin that cat.
So one-size-fits-all? No... but OneNote is good enough for almost everything, and for those few corner cases I find OneNote doesn't work, OwnNote works perfectly. These two tools have become the things I use every day and mean I'm not constantly losing paper notes (my old method).
Having said all that, I DO carry an old paper notebook around as well just in case I'm ever in a place I have no power or access to a computer/phone (VERY rarely, but it happens). If that happens, I whip out the paper notebook and write a quick note... and if I want to digitize it I can either transcribe it later, usually into OneNote so I can translate over diagrams as well.
If you're running Debian on an embedded system then you're doing it wrong anyway. Debian has never been tuned for embedded, and a properly tuned embedded system is more likely to be compiled from source or INCREDIBLY minimal packaging. In addition I can't imagine running systemd on embedded systems as it's a bit heavy for systems with slow CPUs and small memory spaces.
Hell, a basic Redhat / CENTOS install is better tuned for embedded than Debian, and that's not saying much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Kind of misses the point that Hinkley Point C is a boondoggle. I've been following it for a while since I'm actually a fan of nuclear power as well as renewables... and if you're interested there's a great summary about it here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It doesn't hurt that Robert Llewellyn was Kryten in Red Dwarf...
No, parent poster is right; it's fake. Just watch carefully. I did and noticed way too many incongruous or inconsistent moments. For example there's a moment when you see the hoverboard turn to the right with the pilot on top... the pilot literally doesn't move. It's quite obvious this is a jet-powered quad drone with a mannequin on top. At other times I suspect a crane, and the footage is very carefully cut and cropped to not show it.
Seriously, the video is crap. I am not a pro and I could probably put together something close to it using Premiere. Hell, even shooting the footage I can think of a dozen different ways to actually get the footage that don't involve a working hoverboard... could probably put the entire thing together in about a week on a budget of less than $5K if I rope some of my friends into the scam.
Just watch... they'll fire off an Indiegogo or Kickstarter based on the footage, raise loads of money and then pull a "Coolest Cooler" where they suddenly claim they need more money... and more money... and more money... and then vanish. While Coolest haven't done that yet, I predict that's what's going to happen. It's not hard to hide investments and file bankruptcy... yeah, it's fraud but some people only care about making money.
Oh, and since when has "horsepower" been a measure of jet power? Yeah, the whole thing just reeks of scam.
Except that this is still within spitting distance of two tickets to a movie plus snacks at the ridiculous theatre prices. And there are people (myself included) who have put a pretty decent investment into a home system that's more comfortable and in many ways better than a theatre system (you can control the volume yourself to start, pause the movie when you need a bio break etc.)
On the flip side, I DO enjoy actually going to a theatre to watch a movie... and yes I enjoy new releases on occasion. I think this might be a service I will use because (a) I can afford it and (b) sometimes my girlfriend and I would rather sit home and watch a movie. Invite a couple of friends over for a "first watch" party and all of a sudden that $50 seems pretty damned cheap. In fact, I think I'd probably do that at least once a month.
As I understand it, yes; Dell has replaced the Broadcom with an Intel in the Sputnik models.
Sorely tempted to get one myself :)
I know this is not a great data point, but I have a 3 year old Moto X that is running sterling service on CM12.1 and you CAN put 13 on it if you're willing to take a hit in the stability department. Mine works great, is small (4.7") and reliable. I flash a new nightly onto it about once every week or two when I feel like it and I've had only one or two buggy releases that made me a little frustrated.
Having said all that, support for 13 is bad on this device and yes I probably will get a new phone this year... but my needs and wants are about the same as yours in that I don't want a 5.5" monster screen device... I just need something that's dependable with a "big enough" screen that I can read on when I want to. For me the 4.7" screen is a sweet spot I really like and am having a lot of difficulty finding a replacement. Right now the favourite seems to be the OnePlus X at 5"... but it's lack of support for certain US bands is a bit worrying when outside of major cities. Having said that, I rarely travel much outside of major cities and when I do I'm rarely using LTE anyway... I've almost always had my phones drop to 3G out in the country anyway :)
+1 to this... I have no mod points or I'd give it. Other solutions include having a home server or NAS you can dump bulk data to for archival storage. This is what I do, and have Windows File History set up to back up to that NAS as well.
That depends a lot on your use cases. I will preface this by saying I'm part of the target market here because I have already spoken with my dollars and have a laptop with an external GPU box; specifically an Alienware 15 with the Graphics Amp.
a- Increased complexity? Sure, and there's no doubt that there will be teething troubles with drivers. I know I had them early on because of effectively having three GPU's (integrated Intel, integrated GTX-970m and external GTX-980). However I think what AMD is aiming for here is a portable system that would only have two when "docked" and one when mobile.
b- I am still quite happy with the solution I'm running... the CPU isn't the bottleneck on the games I play and I love the fact I can upgrade my GPU when I'm ready to.
c- Agreed, but why overthink it? Yes, Dell's solution on the AW is proprietary, but technically the external GPU connection is just PCIe. That works great because you can use the same GPU that you use in a desktop today. I think AW's solution is actually pretty elegant, though dual GPU capability would be nice... but then my CPU probably would become a bottlneck :)
d- Yes, portability of a laptop is important... but for what purposes do you typically move your laptop? Mine moves when I take it somewhere I want to work.... rarely do I game anywhere other than at home so a powerful GPU on the road is mostly irrelevant. Having said all that, I also own a tablet (Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140) which is actually my go-to for a portable system so I rarely really use my AW for work at a coffee shop or the like. However, it is nice that when I am traveling for work (about one week a month) I can pack up my AW15 with my Venue Pro and I have my entire work and "home" systems with me. That way if I choose I can game in my hotel room or while delayed at an airport. Sure the GPU in the laptop isn't as powerful as the one I have at home, but it's also driving a less high res display (HD as opposed to 4K) that's smaller so I don't really notice the detail reduction.
Solutions already exist to the problem from Alienware and MSI... AMD's solution here is OK on paper but requires yet another connector on a laptop which most manufacturers are moving away from. Using TB3 is an OK solution too, but we will hit a limit at some point as GPUs continue to grow.
At the end of the day though, AMD's solution is all about extra revenue. They want to be able to sell two versions of the same GPU; one that's external and pluggable and one that's PCIe. Personally I prefer the AW and MSI solutions because they leverage already existing standards and I can go buy any PCIe GPU I like. So far just over a year in and I'm quite happy with the GTX-980 but will probably look to upgrade in the next year or so... that will extend the lifespan of my laptop because CPU just isn't much of a bottleneck.
This is true as far as it goes, but misses the point that the GPU connection at that point is PCI-E. You can pick and choose your GPU in the Dell/Alienware solution and it works really well. Yes, the connector is proprietary, but that's because there were no standards for external, pluggable PCI-E.
For the record, I have an Alienware 15 that is my primary box and I love it. I have the external box (Amplifier) with a GTX-980 in it right now for heavy lifting on games. It's really nice when I'm on the road to be able to still play games with the integrated GTX-970m, but then play my heavy games at home on the amp. In addition, it acts like a dock of sorts with 4 USB sockets in the back... so I have a good keyboard, gaming mouse and Logitech G13 attached permanently to it. I do wish it had integrated gig-e but I can understand why they didn't do that.
My girlfriend is still rocking an Alienware M11xR2. That damned thing is a tank and I've generally found Alienware laptops to be really well engineered and built. Last year I moved back from OSX to Windows by replacing my Macbook Pro with an Alienware 15. Point is; the M11xR2 is an 11 inch laptop that really lasts... I think it's around 6 years old now?
I absolutely love it and it's traveled quite extensively with me. Dell's most recent commercial ultrabooks are also really well made. My work gives me a Latitude E7240 (12 inch) and it's also been incredibly reliable. Takes a beating and is moved around all the time since I work on the road. Yeah, the case has picked up scratches and scuffs mostly from being slipped in and out of a backpack, and occasionally having stuff put on top of it... but almost 2 years in and so far it's rock solid. The screen resolution is pretty crap though, but it's workable.
If you want to go really serious there are also ruggedized laptops and tablets in the 11-12 inch size range. At work we recently demoed the Latitude 12 Rugged Tablet (also Dell) and while it's technically semi-rugged rather than truly rugged, that makes it highly portable and I doubt normal usage would cause it to even flinch.
Mostly because people wanted more than Btrieve and file services in their servers. They wanted web servers and more crucially a GUI. In addition, the surge in popularity of TCP/IP as a protocol of choice due to the Internet caught Novell off-guard who were still betting on IPX/SPX as their default protocol. All of this resulted in Netware 5, which frankly alienated a lot of those who worked on Netware for a living (I was a CNE way back in those days). I hated 5... the GUI was buggy and slow, but still Novell tried to push you to use it for various functions (thankfully if you didn't absolutely need it you didn't have to have it running) but the writing was on the wall. They really screwed the pooch with 5 trying to make it all compete with Windows NT instead of focusing on what Netware did really well.
In addition, the licensing became problematic for companies who all of a sudden were buying lots of servers, and it took until 6.0 before Novell decided to switch to a more logical per-user licensing model. But by then it was really too late. Windows had the market share because everyone was using it on the desktop... many figured why not also use it in the datacenter? Novell had no desktop equivalent so particularly for smaller business with little or no support, Windows NT/2000 became an obvious choice for a server.
OES was the last gasp of Netware and was actually pretty good, but by that point it was pretty much irrelevant. You're right though; it was the rock at the core of the network for many... and I loved working on it. I suspect my experience with Novell is why I transitioned so easily to UNIX and its variants as my preferred server platform to work with... but even back then I knew Windows would nail the market.
Drop me an email. This user name at nodecaf dot net. I'll be more than happy to share the script with you :)
A fan? No. But I can definitely be considered one who respects the platform.
My work phone is a Lumia 830. Honestly had I not gotten it for work I probably would never have bought a Windows phone. However, I quickly found myself quite impressed with the platform. Let's deal with a few negative comments, shall we?
- "There are no apps". Technically untrue... there are apps. No, there's no Tinder app or the latest or greatest games but you do have a pretty basic suite of apps that works really well. On a daily basis I use mail, calendar and the phone apps. There's an app for Concur I use for my expenses, and IE on WP is actually pretty decent. Beyond that, I have a messaging app, Skype and OneNote... and when I'm sitting waiting for something there's the News app that works really well. What more do I really need? For traveling I have Uber and Yelp. And that's about it. I don't care about most of the other apps... I even uninstalled the default Facebook app because I don't care about Facebook.
- "The app drawer is a wall of text". Yes, that's definitely true and is definitely a negative of the phone. However, note how many apps I actually use on this thing? They are all pinned to my start page where they can be resized and reordered as I see fit, and they all fit in that first screen with no issues. A little customization and you may never see the app drawer again... hell I can't remember the last time I opened it.
- "The flat UI sucks". Well that's a matter of taste. On my Android phone, icons often get lost in the shuffle because quite frankly my app drawer looks incredibly busy. And discoverability isn't helped when every few weeks some app changes its icon to something completely different. Have you never wondered why so many icon themes for Android try to neutralize the colour palette and make it less garish?
There are many others but I won't go into it... and no, the WP interface isn't for everyone. As I noted above my personal phone is still Android (CM12 at the moment) because I like to hack my phone and do stuff with it... but my Windows Phone does exactly what I need it to do and no more. I am definitely not a Microsoft fanboy but in some ways I find it easier to get stuff done with WP than I do with iPhone or Android... the phrase "It just works" applies nicely to WP but I don't feel it applies to either of the other big players. WP gets out of my way and lets me get to my data.
Now, are there things I would like? Sure... I'd love an OwnCloud client so I can attach to my files more easily. OneDrive integration is nice but I don't like OneDrive. Having my OneNote notebooks on the go is great; many of them are hand written notes on my Venue 11 Pro Tablet and being able to bring them up on my phone for reference is actually really cool. Exchange integration is obviously fantastic, and I really do like the more simplistic UI. Battery life is amazing on this phone... I get 2 days without a charge quite often... and I'm using it a lot. So there are one or two apps I could stand to have that I just don't... but since it's a nice-to-have and not a need, I fail to really care. At the moment I just have a script on my home PC that copies my most recent critical documents from my OwnCloud to my OneDrive... I have long since realized that a file more than a month old is archived so my script keeps only files less than a month old synced with my OneDrive. Since I'm not editing them on my OneDrive and just referring to them it works out really well and only needs a one-way sync!
I can also say the build quality is better than most of my previous phones, too. My Android phone has been dropped once and then replaced because it broke (insurance, thankfully!), but my Lumia has been dropped frequently enough that the metal of the case is a bit chipped... but the glass has remained unaffected and the phone itself works great.
This. I do this too using S3CMD. You can upload to S3 more easily than Glacier... so far a command-line based Glacier client is sorely lacking. Still, I upload to S3 and then have my S3 data set to archive to Glacier after 24 hours which it does automatically. That means the only files that are in S3 are the most recently changed or new.
Like you I have a script that locally encrypts with my own private key before upload. That private key I keep in my Owncloud.
Become your own provider; set up your own IMAP server either in-house or on a cheap hosted solution like Linode then import your data. If you want to get really complex then use scripting with S3CMD or some other tool so you can now back it all up to S3, then configure your S3 to archive to Glacier after 24 hours or so. Yeah, that means some costs but there are ways of mitigating that too.
One possibility is have a server at home with all your mail... make it a VM or a PM... whatever. Import the data through IMAP and it's all available.
I went one step further and grabbed Zimbra which has a MySQL metadata database. Gives me a nice web GUI and really good search capabilities. Stores my mail going back almost 20 years and does it in ~20GB of hard drive space. You can use your own imagination to figure out securing it and stuff like that.
Of course, there are myriad options. Mailarchiva is really solid too with fantastic search... I've used it at a few small companies for mail archiving and it's brilliant. It all depends (a) how much work you're willing/able to put in, (b) how much money you want to spend and (c) how much functionality you really need. I like my Zimbra setup because it's nominally free (I already have the server, so spinning up a Zimbra VM is effectively zero cost) and gives me loads of functionality. I have an OpenVPN network for my private computers so I can access the IMAP ports, and I have the web interface published on a private web server so I can use it at machines that aren't mine... though typically I don't need to do that because I nearly always have a laptop with me and can use my phone in a pinch.
Functionally there's not a lot of need, though the database search features of Exchange are kind of nice.
Myself, I actually use Zimbra which is open source and free for personal use. I have that in a VM on my home server and connect using IMAP and when on the road I can still access it via the web. It uses Postfix for email on the back end with a MySQL database that contains all the mail metadata. Yeah, Zimbra uses Java heavily which kind of sucks but it's really not too bad. As of today I have email going back to 1998 or so in my Zimbra archive and the entire VM eats up ~20GB of hard drive space give or take. It's also still a live email server so I receive new mail all the time. For a client I can use any IMAP client I like or hit up the web interface. I can even use Z-Push (also open-source) to connect it up to my phone using ActiveSync if I choose, though in truth I managed to break that about a year ago and just haven't gotten around to fixing it yet.
I don't publish any IMAP ports on the public Internet BTW... there are in fact zero open ports on that system... technically. I have an OpenVPN network set up among my personal computers, and if I'm not on a personal computer I have my own web server on a Linode that uses NGINX to proxy back to my Zimbra server across that tunnel. The SMTP data coming in hits a Mailcleaner VM that I have set up as well that does all my mail filtering before being passed to Zimbra.
Is this all overkill? Oh hell yes; but I do this sort of stuff for fun anyway and doing all of this taught me a bunch of skills. Bonus; on another VM I also host OwnCloud that's proxied through NGINX in the same way as Zimbra is so I have ~300GB of data I can selectively sync to my various computers... and I host email and OwnCloud for my son and girlfriend as well. Backups are all done through s3cmd to push the data to S3 where my S3 account is set to archive to Glacier after 24 hours. I think my entire backup of critical data costs me maybe $10 a month... then I pay $20 for my Linode. But all of that is sunk cost anyway because I'm using it for other stuff anyway. Plus, there's the learning aspect which is really valuable to me.
It's not got so much to do with cash as it does have to do with the upper management at a corporation. I've seen this play out a LOT of times recently.
First, the CEO gets a Surface Pro because he thinks he needs it. No, his use case doesn't really support it, but the IT department buys it because the CEO says he wants it. The CIO, CFO and COO all see the CEO carrying a Surface Pro and then they decide they need one too because they want to be just like him. Granted in some cases they actually do use them (the COO is often one I see properly using a Surface Pro in a meeting... ironically it's rarely the CIO). Then the managers below them decide they want them and IT is forced to buy them and so on.
Now, the average user gets forced into a Surface Pro because IT wants to standardize. It makes deployment, repair and imaging a lot easier if you have lots and lots of the same computer. Updates pushed out to their users become simpler as well and so on... it's a trickle down effect but yes to the average user in a company it DOES tend to look like IT is forcing it because they want to.
On a side note, it's worth noting that IT departments aren't necessarily flush with cash but aren't really all that poor either. Yes, most consumer grade laptops are cheap, but a company with its head screwed on straight never bought these anyway. I've rarely seen corporations spend less than $1500 on a laptop for any users because they go with larger memory, faster CPUs (mostly because of all the security software they need to install to be compliant with the corporation), then they buy 3 or 5 years of support instead of the 1 year that your sub-$1K laptops come with. Consumer grade laptops do NOT last very long in the hands of salesmen for example... trust me I've seen plenty of examples of companies who end up spending more on their consumer-grade replacements over 3 years than they would've spent on a good business-grade laptop in the first place.
Surfaces are really well made and reliable. They are business-grade and are priced as such.
Tell that to all the schools and corporations I work with on a daily basis who are buying Surface Pro and Surface Books by the truckload. They are perhaps the hottest selling single item I've seen in years on the client side.
I'm glad I don't get paid on client though... the margins on that stuff are shit.
When I drove a 1960 Dodge, I put cheap lead substitute into my engine to protect the valves. Why are aviators so special that they can't use lead substitute? Tolulene? Isooctane?
Because that stuff acts differently in different engines. A car engine is very different from an airplane engine despite the cosmetic similarity. Typically they are very large bore cylinders with a really low operating RPM (they produce peak power very low on the rpm range and don't rev as high as a car engine). This means the physics of intake and exhaust are VERY different which means the same solution won't necessarily work for both. It's also worth bearing in mind that the mean intake temperature on an airplane is significantly lower and leaner (less oxygen) than a car due to altitude.
It's also worth noting that aviators aren't "special"... rather they're aware of the fact that an engine failure is a much more serious problem in a single-engine plane than in a car... one that can kill you and does frequently. Since this also extends to piston-powered helicopters an engine failure becomes very likely to kill you. One can't really blame aviators for being conservative about what they do with their engines :)
And then Dell's software re-enables it, or reinstalls it if you delete it. And if you remove the software that does the reinstall and ever factory-reset your PC, it in turn gets reinstalled. It's like malware, except that it's from a commercial vendor.
Unless you... you know... follow the instructions Dell provided to remove it properly or get the update that fixes this bug.
Definitely a real dumbass move on Dell's part, but this happens in all big companies; someone thinks they're doing a really great thing by simplifying some process without giving any thought to the security ramifications.
1. Go to your Services... either run "services.msc", "compmgmt.msc" or "Open Services" from Task Manager.
2. Stop the Dell Foundation Service
3. Browse to c:\Program Files\Dell\Dell Foundation Services directory and delete the Dell.Foundation.Agent.Plugins.eDell.dll file
4. Launch Certificate Manager by running "certmgr.msc"
5. Browse to "Trusted Root Certificates \ Certificates"
6. Locate the eDellRoot certificate and delete it.
7. Restart your Dell Foundation Services. Voila... doesn't come back after a reboot.