I'm betting some cat knocked it there.

I rarely see it on my Windows PC or my Linux Laptop. I do see it all the bloody time on my iPad and Android Phone.

And it's not just that trick. I go to a site on my iPad and start reading an article and all of a sudden there's an ad taking up the entire screen and not giving me an option to close the ad short of closing the browser.

I'd have to say that fully 2/3rds of the articles I want to read don't get read by me since I'm denied access to them thanks to the ads.

And I'm just loving (sarcasm dripping) the fact that so many sites out there nag you about the fact that we're using an ad blocker. Well gee, if the ads were what they used to be, banner ads on the top and sides without pulling all sorts of fuckery, maybe we'd not use them.

Cases in point. The banner ad that forms in the middle of the screen and blocks what you're there to read. The ads that can't load at the same damn time and jump the text back to the beginning of the article so you have to scroll to find your place...only to have ANOTHER ONE pulling the same bullshit. Or there are the ads that change the position of the screen in random directions so when you are trying to click on a link, it jumps to making you click on the ad instead.

There are companies that I stopped using their products because they've annoyed me to no end as a result of their shenanigans. After one night of TV watching and listening to my Google Home looking up information on the Whopper over and over and over again...I've given up on using the damn thing and stopped giving BK my patronage.

I know they want to be creative in how they market their product, but with me and many other people...they're going to find that they'll face a backlash where people avoid them.

That's all well and good that they have a lower power demand.

It however does not change the fact that Edge is a browser that wants to do everything but can't do any one thing well. The damn thing wants to be my primary PDF viewer and I've yet to have one single PDF file load in it either from a web page or from a local file. I'm also quite annoyed with the fact that it gets all pouty when you want to make something else your primary handler of a function that it wants to have control of. It begged me when I wanted to make Adobe my PDF viewer, and it pleaded when I set Opera as my browser.

And even now, any time I go to a Microsoft page it gives me that sad puppy dog look saying that I should give it another chance.

You know the look. The sad puppy that's all alone in the world...at midnight, in the cold, it's raining, on its birthday, and a larger dog stole his birthday bone.

The problem with this way of thinking is that once the device is one generation out, Apple will not fix the device. They'll only sell you a replacement.

Case in point. Shattered my iPad Air screen a while back. Took it to Apple and they said that they don't repair screens for anything but what they're selling on the floor. MEANING...that if I had an iPad Air 2...they would have replaced the screen.

They did offer to sell me a replacement iPad Air for twice as much as the local Zagg kiosk would charge to replace the screen and $75 more than one would have cost me on Ebay.

I do see your point about security...but what do you do when the iPhone 8 comes out and they won't touch the 7 with a 12-metre cattle prod?

...It'll be the last time I use Chrome.

They recently took away my ability to hit backspace to go back a page. Now I have to use Alt+another key to do what I took just one to do. I had to install an extension to put that feature back.

Now mind you, I can understand why most people don't use those features. But then again they're not the same sort of users as I am. As others are. There are people who will open dozens of tabs to compare things or to have multiple sources of information available. Then when it's no longer needed...we close the other tabs and call it a job done.

For example. I'll look at a dozen sites to provide references for things that I say on discussion forums. Once I'm done with my post and I no longer need those tabs and want to go and look at another discussion topic, I'll "close other tabs" and go on my way.

I'd hate to have to click over and over and over when there is a simple way to do it.

The only thing that will keep me with Chrome is if someone creates an extension to put back what Chrome takes away.

iCloud is Apple's version of cloud storage.

Google Drive is Google's

How in the name of Satan's sweaty jock strap is Google responsible for some problem with Apple's cloud? What am I missing here?

Honestly I can not complain about the update.

I haven't seen any of the improvements (I use a Bluetooth keyboard so I don't see the predictive keyboard that often) but on the flip side I haven't seen anything bad as a result.

The only problem that I've had to date was the Kindle Software not running properly. If I was in the middle of a book it would crash and I could load it again and read the book. However since they did their update to be iOS 8 compatible...that problem vanished.

I really haven't noticed anything positive or negative as a result of the update.

So...can't complain.

They're still worth the investment under certain circumstances.

The first one is the obvious one. The onboard sound fails or there is a problem with it. In my case I had to buy a cheap card since for some reason, the onboard sound wasn't compatible with Windows. It would play sound, but the line-input and the mic-inputs wouldn't work at all. At least under Windows. Under Ubuntu it worked fine, but the drivers from the manufacturer's website were rejected by Windows and the built-in ones only ran the sound output to the speakers.

Since I needed it to all work (was using a chat program when I was playing WoW), I had to buy an inexpensive sound card and disable the onboard to fix the problem.

The second one is also obvious. If you're doing something with audio on a professional level. Things like mixing or sound processing.

The third is a little less obvious and one of the reason that I want a high-end card. Since I don't buy Cable Television, I have a media-PC running things. It's the hub for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, as well as my Blu-Ray/DVD player. Since it's the hub of my multimedia system, I want it to run through some decent speakers and get reasonable sound. Since I'm in the IT industry, I can get a set of 7.1 speakers and a Creative Labs card for less than I could get a decent surround system at Walmart, Target or Best Buy.

This is similar to all those people who show quicker learning times for learning how to fly after playing Microsoft Flight Simulator. There are a number of studies being done in the Air Force where high-end machines equipped with MSFS and a planes that match the ones that are used for actual in-air and simulator practice and they're noticing that the students that spend the time "gaming" are quicker to learn cockpit instrumentation locations, how to read the instruments and how to operate the controls.

It's a leg up over someone who goes in never having any sort of practice before entering flight school.

So it's not surprising. Some of those Wii party games require a pretty precise set of motions to achieve the game objectives. Which is again very similar to what they have to do once they get their hands on the laproscope controls and the additional practice gives them a leg up on someone going in bline with no practice on remote, precision movements.

They ought to start thinking on how to incorporate such game-like training into any training program that would benefit from such practice.

No really. I am.

Far too often we focus on the crime and the criminal and don't care one toss for rehabilitation or reintegration into society. Kevin managed to do something stupid 18 years ago, got his ass busted for it, paid his debt to society and now is taking his talents and managed to find a legit and legal way to utilize them.

Good on ya mate.

So I'm OK with this. He turned his life around and instead of sitting on his ass and complaining how unfair life is that he got caught, he kept his nose clean, got past his probation (which denied him access to computers), pulled himself up by his bootstraps and made something positive out of the situation.

Whether or not his company is competent to handle that sort of job? Well that's on him and the staff he has hired.

The bulk of my data is stored on redundant, external hard drives. Actually they're normally internal drives but I have the USB to HDD adapter...so they're as good as. Also I have a Media Center/Fileserver PC that has the third copy of all the important data. One of the drives is in a safe deposit box at the bank.

But while the data is on a couple of drives, I also have some of the data I'm actively using on several other sources.

Music for example is stored on the two drives but at the same time they're on my PC, my Wife's PC, the Media Center/Fileserrver PC and the laptop as well as a pair of iPod Classics.

Works in progress are saved on flash drives as well as on Google Drive. This gives me the advantage of working on them regardless of my access. I could be on a trip, have the taxi back over my laptop case, go and buy another one, access WiFi and I'm back in business once I've DL'd OpenOffice and the Google Drive for PC.

Then too I also have my PC's imaged on to DVD so I can do quick restores (important when kids DL viruses). 15 minutes to restore the image, another hour to pull data from the server PC or from the disks themselves...and I'm back in business.

This didn't come from any level of paranoia or anything. I just had the habit of keeping my data drives from older PC's that were retired. After a while I decided to consolidate them into a pair of 2TB drives that I had a coupon for.

First of all, unless the cell phone is being provided by my company I feel no obligation to do any work from it (apart from being available to be reached when I'm on call or in an emergency). So unless they provide the phone or subsidize my wireless bill...they're putting a phone in my desk.

Secondly I work in a hospital. We configure the patient call system and the heart monitors to ring to the assigned nurse's handset phone (which is an extension of the PBX system). So going phone-free would be a hardship to our facility.

We may be trending that way but I don't think that the end of the PBX Office Phone network is nigh

If passwords are getting cracked so quickly these days, what then is the answer? Authenticators are all well and good, but I don't have room on my keychain for one for Blizzard (I know about and have the one for my iPhone), one for Amazon, one for PayPal and eBay, one for Gmail, etc and so forth.

What would be a viable solution then?

Last year I succumbed to Facebook's nagging and I finally opted to raise my security to the HTTPS setting. Largely to shut it the @#$% up.

Nagging was worse than ad-supported software.

However once I did that my troubles began. None of the games I played would run under the HTTPS and instructed me to drop back to the HTTP security. However once I did that, Facebook was nagging me "Did I really want to do that?" and "Are you certain that this is wise? The higher security is better to protect your identity".

After several attempts I gave it up and left it at the HTTPS setting. Haven'y played a Facebook game or ran a Facebook app since.

So my question is...what's going to happen to all the people who are addicted to all the apps and games? Will they *finally* run under the higher security setting? Or are we going to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth as people start going into withdrawal when they can't check on their farms to see if they got the magical macguffin of the week?

[I didn't notice that my comp was logged off of my account and posted it as an anon-coward]

It's been so long now that I honestly forgot what it is supposed to be. I mean I now know what it is thanks to the comments here and some research on my own, but all I can remember from the first time they announced it's creation was I was so disappointed that all I could see is a webpage with vague promises and platitudes and an email update feature that was not working. So from then till now, I honestly forgot what it was supposed to be.

For that matter I even forgot the name.