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Comment It's come to this... (Score 4, Interesting) 56

They will literally *pay you* to use their browser.

It's extremely funny right at the moment, as Slashdot's sidebar that shows historical stories showed one from ... 2004, I want to say, that read "Microsoft says Firefox not a threat to IE" or something similar.

It would be amusing if Microsoft wasn't doing so much infuriating crap with Windows.

Comment Re:Market Research (Score 3, Insightful) 42

There are people out there who use an iPad (or a Galaxy S Ultra Tab) as a daily driver. As few as you might think, but they do exist.

I like having an iPad Pro for those times when I use it, but I use my laptop for 95% of my computing. It's a nice-to-have, and I really only have one because my work allows me the opportunity.

Comment Re:Never turn an Apple product off (Score 1) 171

Apple Silicon machines (our district has hundreds of them deployed) are great because they *do* have pretty good uptime. But they develop weird quirks that a reboot does cure. 9/10 times if a teacher says something is acting up that isn't a crash or file corruption, and it's something I've never heard of, a reboot fixes it.

Comment Re:speed increase up to 2x (Score 2) 19

Likewise. My M1 Pro 16" is the best computer I've ever used. It has it's quirks, but for something basically representing the best of the first generation of M1-based desktop computing... it's pretty stellar. As long as you're not trying to game on it.

Also, fuck Parallels hard. Used it for awhile but I'd rather be able to buy it outright. Tired of subscription-based bullshit. VMWare Fusion works well enough, not nearly as fast, but it's not nearly as annoying.

Comment Microsoft's Continual Meddling (Score 2) 132

Ran into this last night, trying to download Chrome on an (admittedly waaaayyy too) old machine that was already chugging. Every time I tried to go to the Chrome download site in Edge it'd time out, so I tried using IE - it would go to the download site, complain that it was too old, and then auto-close IE and try to open Edge again. Literally all I wanted to do was download the executable.

Probably should just look into another alternative (or just run 7) on something that old, but yeah, it doesn't help when Microsoft won't even let you do what you're trying to do and throws you down a path you're trying to avoid because it causes an even bigger performance bottleneck.

Comment This guy really took a paragraph to say: (Score 1) 190

>Using my pattern-matching eyes and lots of caffeine, I have analyzed more than 100,000 papers since 2014 and found apparent image duplication in 4,800 and similar evidence of error, cheating or other ethical problems in an additional 1,700. I've reported 2,500 of these to their journals' editors and — after learning the hard way that journals often do not respond to these cases — posted many of those papers along with 3,500 more to PubPeer, a website where scientific literature is discussed in public....

"This looks shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels and seeing quite a few shops in my time."

Comment Re:Boo hoo. (Score 2) 223

>The flimsy part, which is the actual male part with is in the open, whereas it's hidden inside a receptacle for USB-C.

I'd much rather have to replace a "flimsy" Lightning cord that got broken, than a USB-C connector or an entire phone because it broke. That's what's nice about Lightning is that the connector doesn't have the terminals on a protrusion that can break.

Data Storage

Small Dongle Brings the HDD Clicking Back To SSDs In Retro PCs (hackaday.com) 117

Longtime Slashdot reader root_42 writes: Remember the clicking sounds of spinning hard disks? One "problem" with retro computing is that we replace those disks with compact flash, SD cards or even SSDs. Those do not make any noises that you can hear under usual circumstances, which is partly nice because the computer becomes quieter, but also irritating because sometimes you can't tell if the computer has crashed or is still working. This little device fixes that issue! It's called the HDD Clicker and it's a very unique little gadget. "An ATtiny and a few support components ride on a small PCB along with a piezoelectric speaker," describes Hackaday. "The dongle connects to the hard drive activity light, which triggers a series of clicks from the speaker that sound remarkably like a hard drive heading seeking tracks."

A demo of the device can be viewed at 7:09, with a full defragmentation at 13:11.

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