We have skimmer problems in my area... my usual cautions were to 1) never use a debit card so if I got ripped off I wouldn't be out money while I wait on resolution, and 2) always use a pump within easy view of the station employees, the thought being the ones farther away and out of view would be the most likely hit by skimmers.

And then some stations began supporting mobile payments through Google / Apple / Samsung Pay... no card to skim and no PIN for a camera to pick up, so I mostly go to those now. The exception is Costco Gasoline given the price is so much lower, but if that's out of the way I stick to the set of mobile payment-supporting pumps.

Both Nexus 5x's in my family bootlooped, but LG fixed both with a relatively quick turnaround. Annoying and disruptive problem sure, but they fixed it way past the official warranty period. If anything, this increased my confidence in LG because I know if some widespread issue like that happens they will likely fix it.

That said, I didn't have enough confidence to put official Oreo on it... I moved my Nexus 5x to Lineage as soon as I got the phone back. But the other one in the family has been running fine on official release since getting it back.

I suppose I can now box my 3G phone hoard of "backup" phones for electronics recycling. I wonder how this will affect MVNOs, and the many 3G phones activated on those that sell service on Verizon's network? I have one on PagePlus for the few times I don't think I'll have usable T-Mobile access.

Early Android podcasts listeners may recall Google Listen, a podcast playback app. They deprecated that, so I moved to BeyondPod. I also recall the loss of Google Reader and having to move elsewhere for that. Aside fro core apps (email/Calendar) I have a hard time taking up a new Google tool and becoming reliant on it knowing Google giveth and Google taketh away.

Years ago I started assigning a keyboard shortcut to Snipping Tool, which allows you to do pretty much everything they are describing. Copies to clipboard, or you can save in a couple of formats. And... annotate! (at least with highlighting and lines, would be good if they added text).

Rt-click Snipping Tool icon, in start menu, Open File Location, get Properties in shortcut, define a shortcut key combo.

One other nice thing with Snipping Tool is you can define a capture delay. So if you want to screen-cap a menu option that would otherwise lose focus and disappear by hitting a key sequence, you can set Snipping Tool to fire at a set time delay so you can mouse through and get it looking like you want before the screen capture hits.

You can select the area of the screen to capture, no more capturing everything, pasting into Paint, and cropping.

This "Innovation" has been around since at least Windows 7.

The eternal battle of password complexity hardship vs having 87% of your users' passwords on the latest "most common password" list.

How about taking it out of the hands of users? Find the largest dictionary available in the chosen language of the user, select two or three words from it, randomize which of those start or end with a capital letter, and random selection of a special character in-between them. Complexity attained, difficulty in selecting one gone.

Downsides include how to securely communicate this to a user. If it is shown on a screen it can be over-the-shoulder-checked, if it is sent via email then a hacked email account will supply passwords. Users can usually control the former, in the case of latter the user probably has a whole additional list of problems. But is something that assigns a password of a strength appropriate to the system being accessed better than the two extremes?

I really wish companies wouldn't re-use terms that were common for some other major product or service in, say, the last 100 years. Every time I see these NVIDIA news posts I think "woot, finally get to use Pascal again, er... oh."

I know, get off my lawn, etc etc.

Just the other day I was considering what storage level of Nexus 5x to plan on getting. I usually default to getting the max-storage model and paying whatever the extra is. But on my last couple of phones I realized I mostly stream my music, and automatically cloud-save photos/videos and later cloud-view them. The phone I'm using now (a OnePlus One running Cyanogenmod) has 64GB storage but I'm only using 6GB, and that's with a small subset of my music locally-stored in case I'm offline.

This is in the Android world and I don't know if the old days of having to synchronize your entire library to an i-device are gone, but I think a side-story is maybe you don't need huge amounts of local storage anymore.

It should be noted that a CMMI maturity level designation is not a certification. It may help to have some CMMI appraisal team experience to understand it (I do), but the designation is the result of an organization's self-assessment based on an appraisal model (SCAMPI) developed by SEI/CMMI Institute. When a company claims a certain maturity level, CMMI Institute does not say "we certify this organization (or organizational unit) is CMMI maturity level n." CMMI Institute says "based on our review of the result forwarded by the organization, a result approved by a certified CMMI lead appraiser, we conclude the organization appears to have correctly followed the SCAMPI method and met the standards the organization's appraisal team agrees they did."

An organizational unit is not CMMI-certified by an external certifying authority, it is appraised based on work of a mostly-internal appraisal team (usual exception is the appraisal team leader, a certified individual not employed by the appraised organization in my experience). I don't blame anyone for being confused on the "certification" label... I see it all the time. The title of the /. article itself incorrectly uses the term.

My concern with CMMI is not the procedures and practices themselves, I think they are brilliant if implemented and the organization is resourced to handle it while not tripping up development teams. My concern is in self-assessment, that an inherent conflict of interest exists for the members of an appraisal team employed by the company they are appraising. A company that spends a lot of money preparing for and conducting a valid appraisal it expects a positive result for. But an accredited lead appraiser (again, not an employee of the appraised company in my experience) is not going to keep that distinction for long if they pass through insufficient/bogus appraisals, and that is supposed to be the check on self-assessment risks.

So it isn't the same as PMI, which gives a four hour exam to produce a quantitative, evidenced pass-fail score for a project manager and puts their stamp on a certification that the candidate knows the material with required proficiency and has met other work experience requirements. It is more nuanced and really comes down to how much you trust a given self-assessment.

+1, I installed tt-rss on my Web server too shortly after the announcement. I didn't care out the Google Reader interface itself, just the aggregation so all my Android devices are synchronized.

Still isn't perfect yet, but usable.

You already listed all the failures of the IT department, recognized from middle management to the CEO. The buck stops at leadership... whether he's the smartest guy on the planet or incompetent, a leadership change seems to be in order.

Put another way, what will some other gauge of his competence will add to what is known?

You don't usually "upgrade" from 500GB to 2.5GB of data for $10 a month.

Verizon was much cooler, they chopped your unlimited data down to a 2GB cap for FREE when you "upgraded" your phone! T-Mobile sucks!

What about Kirk from re-image, and wasn't Sulu a captain? I'm not even counting Spock, just thinking bridge captains that played major roles. Yeah Sulu didn't play a major role as a bridge captain but certainly played a rather large role up to that point.

I can think of no better way to inspire under-performers in a growing company than to jettison the worker who has been a superhero to date in a small company. This article is baffling to me and I don't understand why the author thinks dealing with super-performers should be different based on the company size. And the premise that it is unreasonable for the guy who constantly pulls backsides of others out of the fire to become a little irritated is odd.

Just so I have this straight, in order to drop the "jerk" suffix, a super-achieving worker who fills in for people when they are on vacation or sick, does not take vacation himself because the company is so reliant on his performance, and probably isn't getting credit for how many times he saved his coworkers must a) always be cheerful, and b) not speak up when he believes management is heading in directions that will increase reliance on said worker and make life even more difficult.

Basically the mind is cutting the heart out of a company, when both need to recognize each other's strengths and capitalize on them instead of picking a "winner".

I call BS, link to a 1TB hybrid drive for $2 to $3 USD.