The main drawback of the cheapest models is the lack of the "quadpacer" pulse every 30 seconds, but a solution for that is simple: put an old-style clock with a second hand on the wall in your bathroom (bonus if it's also visible from the shower) and use that to do 15/30 second divisions moving around your mouth.

I advised one client on a .org to simply go ahead and register for 9 years out - it's not a huge amount of money, and my suspicion about what's going to happen to pricing once the VCs are in control makes $100 now seem like a good plan.

If Edge is available as a cross-platform Chromium-based browser with available cross-platform adblocking software (e.g. the port of uBlock Origin available for the current version) then it may get some love, because it'll be a large enough target/user base on Windows to be worth developing for and Linux can get the benefit of that.

Sure there's Brave, Chromium, etc. but once Chrome switches to Manifest V3 and ad-blockers as an oh-so-unfortunate side effect get crippled in Chrome, will development fragment?

Wasn't the red dot on the "i" in ThinkPad used as an illuminated indicator at various times?

If nothing else, as an indicator of on/off status if it's lit, but I think there was some generation that used it as a "breathing" sleep indicator similar to what Apple's done in the past.

But hey, if they eliminate all other options for archiving messages maybe they can get everyone to finally move to Wave! Oh wait, no, Buzz! Um, Allo! Oh, wait, Hangouts! Er, Duo? Talk?

Screw it. I'll just use Signal and maybe remember to archive my messages out of there every once in a while, or just use WhatsApp and depend on Facebook to Never Forget Anything.

I've talked to medical offices that wanted to use Slack for internal chat and had to tell them they couldn't, because the ONLY version of it that qualifies under HIPAA is the (I believe self-hosted) "Enterprise Grid" version - the same version specifically noted in the article as the only one that meets Microsoft's security requirements.

For the other things on the list, Kaspersky? The same AV software that's basically banned from all US Government computers over espionage concerns? Why would anyone care if Microsoft used that, it's not like the US Government is a significant Microsoft customer, right?

Amazon AWS? Why TF would anyone be OK with paying a competitor for hosting when you sell a directly competing product? Would anyone be surprised if AT&T had a policy of "We don't purchase business cell service from Verizon."?

And for Grammarly, again it's document security concerns. Third party plugins accessing everything in documents and webpages, does Grammarly do all of its processing locally or is there a cloud component?

What a flippin' non-story.

Does Microsoft's OneDrive client do the same thing on iPhones? Has seemed to work pretty solidly on an Android device - dumping to OneDrive obviously, but that syncs to a folder on the desktop(s).

I also like that it allows built-in locking capabilities such that I'm required to use a fingerprint to get into the app. On Dropbox I had to lock that using a separate phone feature, then they pulled the "only syncs with up to 3 devices" bit (using a free account, because their paid plans really don't fit my needs).

Microsoft wants people using and developing on Windows. There remains a ton of that in business environments and for traditional desktop software, but MS lost a lot of mental market share for development of browser-based apps and for server-side development, because a ton of that was being done on Macs. The frontend work could be done on anything (in part because it's all going to have to run in browsers on anything), but a lot of the toolchain for backend development went to Macs because they were running *nix (fine, BSD, whatever) under the hood and the environment was similar to where that software was going to be deployed.

Sure you *can* run Ruby, Python, whatever on a Windows box for development purposes, but for a long time (particularly in the XP days) that made you a blue monkey.

As for the financial side and closed-source products like Windows and Office, most companies aren't concerned about the cost of those - they're concerned about the *value*. Microsoft sells a bunch of subscription services in Office365. Know how much those cost? Less than 1/160th of the monthly cost of employing the people using them. It's absolutely possible to go with other options (LibreOffice, GSuite, Softmaker Office, etc.) but when you dig down to it the savings of doing so may not be that much bigger than the different costs of doing so.

The way Amazon combines products by UPC and allows sourcing from any random schmoe who opens an account with them and claims to have product means that it's effectively worthless as a place to purchase. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, you'll get legit product, but you have to operate all the time as if whatever you get will be counterfeit or defective.

I still buy some things through Amazon these days, but it's basically only products that are either very unlikely to be counterfeited (e.g. a printer) or where I don't really care (e.g. plastic collar stays). These days I'd never purchase anything both easily counterfeited and where that mattered.

To use in training sessions at clients as to the danger of "found" USB keys. I figure bringing in a "trash" obsolete PC that needs to go to recycling anyway and frying it in front of a group of office staff may make an impression, particularly if I manage a model that smokes nicely.

People are focusing on the economics of this for a pizza place, and that's the wrong way to go.

A ton of delivery cost is "last mile" (not literally, basically from the facility to the door). This is talking about dividing that into two pieces - "to the door" from a mobile landing platform so basically the last 30-100 feet and "to the platform" which is most of that so-called last mile. The Platform As A Service driver or vehicle doesn't have to cover all that range back to the facility - just the quarter mile to the next delivery in the area.

Viability for this is going to depend on density of deliveries, but you actually see a variation of it with UPS for holiday deliveries when they switch to having a driver with a truck full of packages plus 1-2 runners who actually take things to the doors. If you think of that UPS truck as a platform constantly being refilled by drones, you have what he's getting at.

I can't help but feel that Oracle has gone out of its way to make the whole end of life for Java 8 and changes in licensing going forward as complex and confusing as possible, and given that it's Oracle I have to feel like it's intentional - probably in hopes of being able to extract usage fees from any commercial users who keep installing updates.

It notes first/last, birthdate, location (as provided by the user for their profile), gender along with username, email and password hashes.

After changing my password and signing in, checking my profile shows that none of those are filled except username, email and (presumably) password hash, and I'm 99% sure (it was based on a pattern since I was going to be entering it on multiple devices and since I frankly don't *care* about the security of my 500px account) I've not used that specific password anywhere else.

For just about any website or company out there, you need to operate as if this *will* happen. Even Google and Facebook could have breaches expose some data - they put a lot of effort and expense into security, but they're also big targets including for state actors (e.g. the NSA monitoring back in 2013ish that resulted in Google putting a lot more internal security in place). Use a password manager and unique passwords, don't provide more information than the minimum required to use the service, etc.

One of the Firefox for Android developers confirmed that they're using their own built-in libpng (with a link to its place in the source), so Firefox is likely unaffected. I didn't check separately on Firefox Focus, but I suspect it shares much of the code base.

I saw a reference to Chrome also having its own built-in PNG code (how could it not given its 51+MB download size?) but don't have the same details on it.

This mostly leaves email, messaging and social media as likely vectors for a malicious PNG.

Name maybe, assuming it wasn't already provided elsewhere. Age and gender? They can probably get that almost as reliably and more usefully via datamining/machine learning from the mass of data.