Yeah, I think Facebook tried that with their early iOS app (or at least they said it was "HTML5"), but I believe a few years ago they rewrote it to be "native." Not sure if they've gone back or what (or just hybridized), but both it and especially Messenger keep changing more than you'd expect for a typical app.

The description of "hot code push" sounds like something Facebook and Messenger are doing on iOS. They both change the location of buttons (and occasionally some functionality)--like moving the Messages icon in the Facebook app to the top left and replacing it with a useless Marketplace icon--without needing to submit a new app, among other continual and usually annoying changes in Messenger itself. (Or at least the change isn't obviously correlated with a new app version; they don't write real changelogs, instead using a generic "we continually update this app" nonsense, and the app continues to function like it did before...until one day when it doesn't.)

I'm sure there are potentially malicious uses of hot code push rather than just annoying ones like certain apps seem to be doing, but if it makes them stop doing it too, I'll be happy enough.

Umm, Safari, anyone? I guess that's probably true if we ignore Safari, but that would be like ignoring IE on Windows. (This makes a bit more sense in the context of TFA, from which the editor and/or submitter carelessly plagiarized this paragraph, as the article as a whole is talking about Safari's recent 13% decline on macOS...but you think someone might have read this before posting.)

Really? I read the article and looked for additional information elsewhere (because the article is lacking) and it looks like it's taking the "Metro" ideas even farther, with lack of window borders and and no discrete title bars. Some vast spaces of solid color have disappeared, but only because they're apparently encouraging the use of photos (e.g., as the main "background" image in an app) instead. This doesn't look better to me.

Are you this paranoid about your smartphone, too? You say it's different, but an iPhone has pretty good mics ("Hey, Siri" can also hear me from across the room) and I'm sure there are comparable Androids. Sure, it won't listen unless you meet the conditions and enable the feature, but neither will Alexa--as far as we know about both if we trust the manufacturer as yo do for the phone. You can always unplug (or turn off with a "smart plug" so you don't have to physically do it, assuming you trust those) the Alexa device when you're not using it, but 99% of what I say when I'm at home is "turn off the lights" or to play Pandora, so it doesn't really bother me.

Look, I know it's not cool to read the article, but...from TFA: "In [the preferences pane], users can schedule Night Shift to come on at sunset and turn off at sunrise or set a custom Night Shift schedule." The manual toggle is just one way you can activate it.

Since it's only listening for specific "wake words" and this processing must be done on the device itself, I imagine it's easier for them to code a few specific wake words into the firmware (and perhaps not even possible to do much more; I'm not sure we know much about its hardware)--everything else you speak afterwards (and, so they say, only this speech) is sent to AWS or whatnot where there's a lot more processing power, which I imagine that allowing the user to configure an arbitrary word would also take.

You're aware that Google Voice is not a voice-based software assistant, right? If we need to compare it to something, I guess it's kind of like iMessage, except that's only part of the story (and it's been around for longer).

I don't see any reason it shouldn't work. It encodes pitch (you really can't avoid that if you're encoding speech, which will include "voiced" sounds that have a fundamental frequency), and some casual reading about how it encodes suggest that it captures more specific information in the lower frequencies than in the higher ones, which also matches how our (logarithmic) perception of frequency works. That being said, the English sample I heard doesn't sound fantastic: think of a phone conversation in which /f/ is difficult to distinguish from /s/, which I suspect has to do with the high frequencies being either cut off or difficult to distinguish in terms of amplitude (/f/ is a bit weaker in general, and I think most of its noise is concentrated above the frequencies that aren't heard over the phone--don't quote me on this). So, I suspect the listener will have to do some work regardless of language, but there is nothing English-specific here.

As of Windows 7 (maybe Vista--I wouldn't know), it can. There is a checkbox labeled "Include subfolders" right under the text field where you specify the path to search. If they are Dell drivers as you mention, you might want to make sure they're not just EXEs, which you'll need to extract so Windows can find the INF files it scours for matches.

Uh, no, you're thinking of PPI on displays. Even cheap printers can usually handle at least 300x300 DPI. Most laser printers I've seen default to 600x600, and even ones marketed for home use are often capable of at least 1200 in at least one dimension. Many inkjets also are able to increase their DPI for "high quality" or photo printing.

Let's take an average computer monitor, however--say a 22" monitor with 1680x1050 resolution. This gives about 90 PPI (or DPI as it's more often called here, even though some would argue that is not the correct term for displays). Early computer displays were often about 72 PPI, which is where your figure comes from (though Microsoft used 96 DPI for reasons beyond the scope of my explanation). Now, Apple's "Retina" and other high-DPI displays are on the market for both desktops and mobile devices, with PPI often in the 200s or 300s--closer to print.

The difference people perceive is most certainly related to pixel density and not to better backlighting. While a better backlight might help with increasing contrast, if you compare high-DPI vs. "regular" displays side-by-side, I think you'll find the difference clear--as if this even needs to be explained given that your description of printed text is egregiously incorrect. (For added fun, turn off font smoothing and compare--half the reason people think text looks decent at all on a 90-ish DPI monitor is font smoothing, usually in the form of subpixel rendering on LCDs.)

Well, Outlook 2007 didn't have the ribbon interface in the main UI, so no wonder you couldn't find it there. ;)

That's fine--it's just not what Apple means when a product becomes "obsolete," which is a term they use to denote hardware for which they will no longer supply official parts for repair, generally those that were discontinued more than 7 years ago (or 5 for "vintage" products, which means almost the same thing except that there are still parts available in certain circumstances). In many cases their software/OS updates still support these machines, and you're obviously welcome to keep using them as long as you want in any case (though I'd personally avoid putting anything without recent updates on the Internet).

This was disappointing for me, as well, though I knew it before I bought my Thunderbolt dock. I'm pretty sure you could technically make it work with only one cable in the laptop if you bought another Thunderbolt dock and plugged it in to your existing Thunderbolt dock, but I didn't want to spend twice as much money as the already expensive dock cost. (Every once in a while, I'll think about replacing my dual displays with a single larger one of 27" or more, but I'm still not sure about that.)

This is about Austin, not San Francisco.