Windows 7 support is iffy, but I've gotten it to work on X99 boards with some drives (Plextor in my case). I couldn't get either Samsung or Plextor drives to boot Windows 7 in a ThinkPad T450 though.
Yes, they're fast. They're also REALLY warm. They're downright uncomfortable to touch with a finger after they're been on for a while. Keep that in mind if you are thinking about sticking in your laptop.
I've been putting m.2 drives in ThinkPads for a year. I've seen them in various flavors of 2014 and later Ultrabook models and of course you can always get a SATA or SAS adapter.
I have customers using them for point of sale in their restaurants. The Surfaces were cheaper than the POS terminals the vendor was pushing, the ordering system is web based and didn't require anything special and all of the printing and card swipe stuff they already owned just worked.
Original Surfaces (the RT version) also shipped with a full copy of MS Office and never had any sort of Malware issues (or games), so they are/were decent choices for actual productivity with a minimal management requirement. The philosophy behind the Surface is substantially different from the way most people see tablets. They were never meant to be media consumption devices and in fact that's something they're oddly bad at being.
The first time I played an MP3, my 486 sputtered and couldn't manage an unbroken audio stream. The first time I played a DVD, I needed a dedicated daughterboard to handle decoding.
Right now, HEVC needs decent hardware and encoding takes a good long while. But it does play back fine on everything I have sitting around, going back to 3rd generation Core i CPUs, even with just Intel graphics. The i3 NUC in my living room doesn't have any problem with it at all. My STBs can't do it, but I can hand transcoding off to Plex and then they're fine as well. Given another year and everybody well catch or surpass Amazon's FireTV and have support for it as well. At that point, just like MP3s, MPEG2 and x.264, we'll be back to taking hardware support for granted.
That old i7 is in benchmark terms competitive with current i3 CPUs. I don't think of current i3s as slow and I don't think of five year old i7s as slow either. I upgraded to a 5960k last December because I actually do enough video encoding to keep it fed, but if I'm not stealing Blu-Rays there's no subjective difference from that monster to a the i7-980 it replaced.
Businesses will buy expensive phones if they do the things they need and support integration and management with the systems they already use. You really need third party tools to manage iOS and Android's all rely on Google Apps and have weird holes in their capabilities (e.g. device backup is a PITA). If the argument is for getting phones for middle managers who aren't important enough to demand an iphone and exemption from IT policies, having policy-based management that's already built into your enterprise directory system is probably a decent argument. I'm thinking this is more of a push to eat what's left of RIM's market.
Microsoft's Surface devices may to a certain extent be a "showing of the flag" rather than a highly competitive design. I support Surfaces in my organization and I think they're pretty great, but I say that with the understanding that they're as much a nudge to wider portable PC hardware manufacturers and to engage Apple in a certain amount of one-upmanship as they are compelling devices. It's a radical sort of product that can be made to serve in a wide variety of situations and putting them out in the world may be providing the impetus for improvements in other portable hardware.
OK, but what's the killer application that Android or iOS users that Windows Mobile has to get them to put the emulator/run-time on their devices in the first place? What makes anyone think that Apple would allow such an application to exist in its app store?
Point of order: You can actually install Amazon App store apps through the Amazon (Store) app that IS available via Google Play. And yes I know that is a horrible sentence to parse. I think you do still have to have "third party sources" turned on for your Android device, but the Amazon App store is not 100% required.
Apple doesn't offer access to its content for non-Apple set top boxes and it doesn't offer even an option of non-Apple hardware for much of anything, but people still eat Apple's shit with a smile on their face.
I own most of the major STB devices aside from Apple's, but in my opinion the larger, not-Stick FireTV is the best of breed option. It works with services I'd actually want to use. It's responsive in its UI and can be used for light gaming. It's open enough to support non-Amazon apps if you're willing to sideload them. If Amazon wants to push its position in that market,I think I'm OK with that.
If Google really wants to push the issue, killing Amazon's API key for Youtube access on FireTV devices would probably be a strong bargaining chip, but having used both Chromecast and Nexus Player as well as Google TV hardware, I think STB devices are still an afterthought and besides, there are still plenty of places to buy them.
Safari isn't downloading the file to the device if it's being put into Dropbox et al, is it? And if that data doesn't belong in the cloud? If the device doesn't immediately have a viewer, the device can't interact with it, however useful it might be to have on local storage.
I think you misunderstand the definition of the word "arbitrary."
> Why the F**** o you even want filesystem access? Wouldn't it be nice to not have to deal with all of that BS?
My organization has a couple VIPs who want to use iOS as primary computing devices, which required an almost complete change in the way some data is handled, all for want of the ability to store some data they'd be able to download with a web browser on any other platform.
I also think it's nice to be able to segregate personal and business data instead of lumping everything together. In addition to missing the concept of end-user access to directories, it also still doesn't have multi-user support. iOS treats data as an undifferentiated lump, which is particularly awesome when you get to see somebody's Hedonism II vacation memories mixed in with photos of in-process construction projects or something (fortunately, that wasn't someone who worked for my company, but it sure did liven up that particular meeting).
> You've been able to do that since iOS 5 or 6, as long as you have an App that will handle the content you want to download, or a storage app that will let you manage and browse arbitrary content (See Dropbox, Documents, etc.)
The keyword here is arbitrary. Dropbox supports a lot of data formats but arbitrary it is not.
Dropbox for iOS won't handle arbitrary content, only content for which it and/or the device has a viewer. Why would you want to copy arbitrary content to an iOS device? Because it has multiple gigabytes of potentially encrypted flash storage, maybe? To keep something that doesn't belong in cloud storage out of cloud storage and on a thing that users are unlikely to lose, break, wash or allow to leave their grubby hands for even a single moment.
> Last time I checked, you don't need to use iTunes for anything other than transferring music & movies. You don't even need it to activate the device...
You CAN need it to copy data on and off the device and assign it to apps, particularly if that data is not directly accessible from the web somehow. This is particularly obnoxious if you have apps that handle the same sorts of data but won't talk to each other. Maybe they both support Dropbox. Maybe.
To be fair, you also weren't using any special capabilities of your fruit to do that, either. It was a dumb terminal from the moment the VPN connection was negotiated. I can exactly the same tasks you just described on anything with a reasonably high resolution screen and a functional 3G or 802.11 connection, even a Palm or WinCE device.
It's a perfectly rational proposition to hate iOS from having to actually use it. Missing filesystem access, not having lower case keys on the keyboard (until today, actually), being unable to download arbitrary content using a web browser, being forced to use a media player for system management tasks etc. It's pretty bad when your OS compares unfavorably to Windows RT.
I believe the only requirement to review an app on the Play Store is a Google account. I say that because I don't have a Google+ account and Google keeps telling me (as recently as last week, in fact) I have to have one to leave developer feedback.
I can't believe that the first dozen posts aren't all variations on "9 inches of fury just like my dick!" Yup, that's low hanging fruit. Just like my dick.
I don't mind if the download process is gated to user authentication, but I'm troubled at using online authentication for rights management for single player, offline games. GoG.com will let me redownload my media over if I ever lose the file and doesn't force me to use some weirdo client wrapper/launcher/DRM thing just to make games go, but IMO the over-reliance PC gaming has placed on Steam is a serious miscalculation on the part of gamers and developers everywhere.
I was on a 19.2 dialup connection when Half-Life 2 was released. The "special edition DVD" version of Half-Life 2 that I paid $70 for also didn't have anything on it but a Steam installer and a bunch of artwork. As I recall the total install size was five or six GB, but that would have required weeks of connections and reconnections to obtain on the link I had available.
And as a related issue, who is making a true SFF power supply big enough to handle that card plus a gaming-class CPU? A lot of "ITX" rigs are built using configured mini-towers (e.g. the Bitfenix Prodigy), but if I wanted to throw one of those in a vanilla case like an Apex MI-08 or Antec ISK-150, their PSUs would die approximately 10 seconds after I fired up Crysis or whatever it is that kids are playing these days.
I have a clone of the system drive and database system from when I replaced the drives. It's one of those deals where the people who own the damned thing fear change. I have daily snapshots from the DB so I'm probably just fine migrating it, but the customer doesn't want anything about that machine (it's an IBM pedestal server from ~1993. A 75MHz Pentium I think) to change.
I did swap out the SCSI card and drives in 2009 and again in 2013 and at this point I'm just just waiting for something to properly break so I can have that machine bronzed or something.
One of my customers still has a Netware 3.12 machine. I'm the third person to be responsible for it. The last two guys are both retired now. I got the gig based on being the youngest person the company could find who actually knows Netware. It runs their ordering/job cost/inventory systems and whatever files or reports it makes can actually be used by their relatively modern accounting software.
Another guy I do work for has a System/38 machine in his office. I have no earthly idea what he does with it since he's a primarily a studio photographer, but I have seen him accessing it through a terminal session. My best guess is that it has something to do with his home-made film printing system. He was an engineer for a while and his place is full of cool stuff.
I've also been in law offices where secretaries were still using Windows 3.1 as recently as 2013, but in that case I'm pretty sure it was just the lawyers in question being just THAT cheap.
For certain music genres, third party tags will be flatly incorrect even from an authoritative source. Classical music and Jazz need to use more tags than are typically supplied by download and streaming services and what tags are used are often applied incorrectly. Streaming and online stores ironically make more work for me than just ripping a goddamned CD and typing everything in myself.
Google's on screen keyboard properly displays the case of characters based on the state of the shift key. Apple's keyboard is kind of an unpolished insult to the concept of literacy. There's plenty of stuff I don't like about Google's applications but none of it is as unforgivable as that.
Every ISP I've seen that blocked port 25 did allow traffic to third party servers on 465 and 587. Why are you so hung up on sending via unsecured SMTP?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe someone will make an M.2 to Infiniband adapter.
Windows 7 support is iffy, but I've gotten it to work on X99 boards with some drives (Plextor in my case). I couldn't get either Samsung or Plextor drives to boot Windows 7 in a ThinkPad T450 though.
Yes, they're fast. They're also REALLY warm. They're downright uncomfortable to touch with a finger after they're been on for a while. Keep that in mind if you are thinking about sticking in your laptop.
I've been putting m.2 drives in ThinkPads for a year. I've seen them in various flavors of 2014 and later Ultrabook models and of course you can always get a SATA or SAS adapter.
I have customers using them for point of sale in their restaurants. The Surfaces were cheaper than the POS terminals the vendor was pushing, the ordering system is web based and didn't require anything special and all of the printing and card swipe stuff they already owned just worked.
Original Surfaces (the RT version) also shipped with a full copy of MS Office and never had any sort of Malware issues (or games), so they are/were decent choices for actual productivity with a minimal management requirement. The philosophy behind the Surface is substantially different from the way most people see tablets. They were never meant to be media consumption devices and in fact that's something they're oddly bad at being.
The first time I played an MP3, my 486 sputtered and couldn't manage an unbroken audio stream. The first time I played a DVD, I needed a dedicated daughterboard to handle decoding.
Right now, HEVC needs decent hardware and encoding takes a good long while. But it does play back fine on everything I have sitting around, going back to 3rd generation Core i CPUs, even with just Intel graphics. The i3 NUC in my living room doesn't have any problem with it at all. My STBs can't do it, but I can hand transcoding off to Plex and then they're fine as well. Given another year and everybody well catch or surpass Amazon's FireTV and have support for it as well. At that point, just like MP3s, MPEG2 and x.264, we'll be back to taking hardware support for granted.
That old i7 is in benchmark terms competitive with current i3 CPUs. I don't think of current i3s as slow and I don't think of five year old i7s as slow either. I upgraded to a 5960k last December because I actually do enough video encoding to keep it fed, but if I'm not stealing Blu-Rays there's no subjective difference from that monster to a the i7-980 it replaced.
Businesses will buy expensive phones if they do the things they need and support integration and management with the systems they already use. You really need third party tools to manage iOS and Android's all rely on Google Apps and have weird holes in their capabilities (e.g. device backup is a PITA). If the argument is for getting phones for middle managers who aren't important enough to demand an iphone and exemption from IT policies, having policy-based management that's already built into your enterprise directory system is probably a decent argument. I'm thinking this is more of a push to eat what's left of RIM's market.
Microsoft's Surface devices may to a certain extent be a "showing of the flag" rather than a highly competitive design. I support Surfaces in my organization and I think they're pretty great, but I say that with the understanding that they're as much a nudge to wider portable PC hardware manufacturers and to engage Apple in a certain amount of one-upmanship as they are compelling devices. It's a radical sort of product that can be made to serve in a wide variety of situations and putting them out in the world may be providing the impetus for improvements in other portable hardware.
OK, but what's the killer application that Android or iOS users that Windows Mobile has to get them to put the emulator/run-time on their devices in the first place? What makes anyone think that Apple would allow such an application to exist in its app store?
Point of order: You can actually install Amazon App store apps through the Amazon (Store) app that IS available via Google Play. And yes I know that is a horrible sentence to parse. I think you do still have to have "third party sources" turned on for your Android device, but the Amazon App store is not 100% required.
Apple doesn't offer access to its content for non-Apple set top boxes and it doesn't offer even an option of non-Apple hardware for much of anything, but people still eat Apple's shit with a smile on their face.
I own most of the major STB devices aside from Apple's, but in my opinion the larger, not-Stick FireTV is the best of breed option. It works with services I'd actually want to use. It's responsive in its UI and can be used for light gaming. It's open enough to support non-Amazon apps if you're willing to sideload them. If Amazon wants to push its position in that market,I think I'm OK with that.
If Google really wants to push the issue, killing Amazon's API key for Youtube access on FireTV devices would probably be a strong bargaining chip, but having used both Chromecast and Nexus Player as well as Google TV hardware, I think STB devices are still an afterthought and besides, there are still plenty of places to buy them.
There's always Palemoon, which I think forked far enough back that it's missing all the stuff I'd currently call bullshit.
Safari isn't downloading the file to the device if it's being put into Dropbox et al, is it? And if that data doesn't belong in the cloud? If the device doesn't immediately have a viewer, the device can't interact with it, however useful it might be to have on local storage.
I think you misunderstand the definition of the word "arbitrary."
> Why the F**** o you even want filesystem access? Wouldn't it be nice to not have to deal with all of that BS?
My organization has a couple VIPs who want to use iOS as primary computing devices, which required an almost complete change in the way some data is handled, all for want of the ability to store some data they'd be able to download with a web browser on any other platform.
I also think it's nice to be able to segregate personal and business data instead of lumping
everything together. In addition to missing the concept of end-user access to directories, it also still doesn't have multi-user support. iOS treats data as an undifferentiated lump, which is particularly awesome when you get to see somebody's Hedonism II vacation memories mixed in with photos of in-process construction projects or something (fortunately, that wasn't someone who worked for my company, but it sure did liven up that particular meeting).
> You've been able to do that since iOS 5 or 6, as long as you have an App that will handle the content you want to download, or a storage app that will let you manage and browse arbitrary content (See Dropbox, Documents, etc.)
The keyword here is arbitrary. Dropbox supports a lot of data formats but arbitrary it is not.
Dropbox for iOS won't handle arbitrary content, only content for which it and/or the device has a viewer. Why would you want to copy arbitrary content to an iOS device? Because it has multiple gigabytes of potentially encrypted flash storage, maybe? To keep something that doesn't belong in cloud storage out of cloud storage and on a thing that users are unlikely to lose, break, wash or allow to leave their grubby hands for even a single moment.
> Last time I checked, you don't need to use iTunes for anything other than transferring music & movies. You don't even need it to activate the device...
You CAN need it to copy data on and off the device and assign it to apps, particularly if that data is not directly accessible from the web somehow. This is particularly obnoxious if you have apps that handle the same sorts of data but won't talk to each other. Maybe they both support Dropbox. Maybe.
To be fair, you also weren't using any special capabilities of your fruit to do that, either. It was a dumb terminal from the moment the VPN connection was negotiated. I can exactly the same tasks you just described on anything with a reasonably high resolution screen and a functional 3G or 802.11 connection, even a Palm or WinCE device.
Where does the "just works" part come in?
It's a perfectly rational proposition to hate iOS from having to actually use it. Missing filesystem access, not having lower case keys on the keyboard (until today, actually), being unable to download arbitrary content using a web browser, being forced to use a media player for system management tasks etc. It's pretty bad when your OS compares unfavorably to Windows RT.
I believe the only requirement to review an app on the Play Store is a Google account. I say that because I don't have a Google+ account and Google keeps telling me (as recently as last week, in fact) I have to have one to leave developer feedback.
I can't believe that the first dozen posts aren't all variations on "9 inches of fury just like my dick!"
Yup, that's low hanging fruit. Just like my dick.
Is this what trolling feels like?
I don't mind if the download process is gated to user authentication, but I'm troubled at using online authentication for rights management for single player, offline games. GoG.com will let me redownload my media over if I ever lose the file and doesn't force me to use some weirdo client wrapper/launcher/DRM thing just to make games go, but IMO the over-reliance PC gaming has placed on Steam is a serious miscalculation on the part of gamers and developers everywhere.
I was on a 19.2 dialup connection when Half-Life 2 was released. The "special edition DVD" version of Half-Life 2 that I paid $70 for also didn't have anything on it but a Steam installer and a bunch of artwork. As I recall the total install size was five or six GB, but that would have required weeks of connections and reconnections to obtain on the link I had available.
I've still never played Half-Life 2.
And as a related issue, who is making a true SFF power supply big enough to handle that card plus a gaming-class CPU? A lot of "ITX" rigs are built using configured mini-towers (e.g. the Bitfenix Prodigy), but if I wanted to throw one of those in a vanilla case like an Apex MI-08 or Antec ISK-150, their PSUs would die approximately 10 seconds after I fired up Crysis or whatever it is that kids are playing these days.
I have a clone of the system drive and database system from when I replaced the drives. It's one of those deals where the people who own the damned thing fear change. I have daily snapshots from the DB so I'm probably just fine migrating it, but the customer doesn't want anything about that machine (it's an IBM pedestal server from ~1993. A 75MHz Pentium I think) to change.
I did swap out the SCSI card and drives in 2009 and again in 2013 and at this point I'm just just waiting for something to properly break so I can have that machine bronzed or something.
One of my customers still has a Netware 3.12 machine. I'm the third person to be responsible for it. The last two guys are both retired now. I got the gig based on being the youngest person the company could find who actually knows Netware. It runs their ordering/job cost/inventory systems and whatever files or reports it makes can actually be used by their relatively modern accounting software.
Another guy I do work for has a System/38 machine in his office. I have no earthly idea what he does with it since he's a primarily a studio photographer, but I have seen him accessing it through a terminal session. My best guess is that it has something to do with his home-made film printing system. He was an engineer for a while and his place is full of cool stuff.
I've also been in law offices where secretaries were still using Windows 3.1 as recently as 2013, but in that case I'm pretty sure it was just the lawyers in question being just THAT cheap.
For what it's worth, Powershell on Windows is actually pretty nice.
For certain music genres, third party tags will be flatly incorrect even from an authoritative source. Classical music and Jazz need to use more tags than are typically supplied by download and streaming services and what tags are used are often applied incorrectly. Streaming and online stores ironically make more work for me than just ripping a goddamned CD and typing everything in myself.
Google's on screen keyboard properly displays the case of characters based on the state of the shift key. Apple's keyboard is kind of an unpolished insult to the concept of literacy. There's plenty of stuff I don't like about Google's applications but none of it is as unforgivable as that.
Every ISP I've seen that blocked port 25 did allow traffic to third party servers on 465 and 587. Why are you so hung up on sending via unsecured SMTP?