I agree. Microsoft, Apple, and Google have the ability to modify user behavior without much downside. The rest of us are better off making the user experience as fast, efficient, and simple as possible.
By coincidence, I just put a 301 redirect on my personal site to go from www.xpda.com to xpda.com two days ago. If I could only get ctrl-enter to submit https://domain.com instead of http://www.domain.com in Firefox, I'd be happy. (There was a bug that prevented this last time I checked.)
"In 2015, we stepped up our efforts to fight phishing sites, blocking nearly 7,000 sites as a result." One of the 7000 "phishing sites" they blocked was a page on my personal site (http://xpda.com/f18ebay/) that has been there more than 10 years and has nothing to do with phishing. It's not an important or high-traffic page, but it was irritating nonetheless to be falsely accused by Google and, as a result, a several other web institutions.
I'd settle for a universal shortcut key that activates the hamburger menu, just like the F1 key is used for Help. Ohh no... someone killed F1 AND Help when I wasn't paying attention!!!
For the longest time there was no way to disable that stupid F1 shortcut in MTGO. This was a problem because you were pressing F2 ("pass priority") on a more or less constant basis. If you slipped... up popped the tremendously annoying help page in your web browser.
This is true, and is often overlooked. Many startups are internally funded, and grow through profits. These companies are typically more conservative in their business strategies, because people tend to have less risk tolerance with their own money, because there are no outside investors pushing for accelerated growth, and sometimes because of more limited finances.
Advances in desktop CPU speed have been minimal over the past few years. If I could get a reasonably priced PC that's 50% faster than my two-year-old system, I'd buy it today. Instead, the best performance gain for me is a PCIe SSD.
Exactly. My 4 year old desktop PC with an Intel sandy bridge CPU, which i added an SSD to a year ago, is perfectly fine for day to day work.
energy efficiency since i purchased my computer has improved greatly, but i have no reason for a more efficient CPU, its still performing fast enough for all desktop applications and has no battery.
Don't feel bad about your system not being as efficient as newer models. The carbon footprint of manufacturing it dwarfs that of its lifetime electricity usage, so scrapping it for a more efficient machine would be a false environmental economy. Better to make maximum usage of that sunk environmental cost.
I have a 2008 Mac Pro that I keep at work (I didn't like the company-issued computer, so brought in my own), and a 2009 Mac Pro at home.
I've upgraded them both to SSD, added USB3 via PCIe [1], and bumped the memory up to 32 GB in the 2009. I mistimed [2] the memory updates on the 2008 so only got that up to 12 GB or 18 GB (I don't remember which).
Neither of these machines shows any signs of needing replacement.
If I used them for gaming perhaps things would be different. Now that I think about it, all of my purchases of machines to run Windows over the last 15 years were because I wanted better gaming performance.
[2] Memory prices often follow a U shaped curve, starting out high when a new speed of memory is introduced, then falling as that new speed becomes mainstream. Then something faster and incompatible comes out, and as that becomes mainstream production goes down on the older item, and prices rise.
For example, current prices at macsales.com of 4x8GB in various technologies for Mac Pro:
$290 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC Used in 2013 Mac Pro
$200 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Used in 2010-2012 Mac Pro
$195 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC Used in 2009 Mac Pro
$780 800 MHz DDR2 ECC Used in 2008 Mac Pro
I'm even finding this with laptops now. I bought a high-end laptop a couple of years ago and it seems that a new one today at the same price wouldn't make a lot of difference to my day-to-day usage.
So I bought 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD drive. I only come close to the RAM usage when running multiple virtual box instances, I don't use all the disk and it's fast, and my battery still lasts about 10 hours.
My 6-year-old PC finally carked it over the past few weeks. About to go pick up my new whitebox in 30 minutes...
Interestingly, before this 6-year-old PC, I'd been upgrading every 2 years, but I haven't felt the performance pinch since (okay, some games were a bit pinchy with what used to be a good card, but otherwise no)
Same here. I have a Nehalem 2.8GHz, overclocked (press-button overclocking on the motherboard, I don't have time to mess around with that anymore), and it is perfectly fine for everyday work. The only reasons I'm considering upgrading are video games and to be able to go to 64GB of RAM (and that's only because I want to throw a lot of virtual machines at my problems).
The title is taken verbatim from the link. I agree it's a bit misleading, but I'm finding it hard to come up with a better one. I'm open to suggestions :)
Wastewater injection wells, contrary to popular press, are not used primarily for the disposal of fracking fluid or other drilling waste products. Produced water is, by far, the largest component going into wastewater injection wells.
When you get oil and gas out of the ground, a lot of salt water comes with it. Sometimes, especially in Oklahoma, there can be 10 times as much water as oil. This "produced water" is used for injection into other wells to displace oil, but there's enough left over to require wastewater injection wells for its disposal.
There's one guy on youtube who claims Bach's squiggles underneath each piece title in the original WTC manuscript actually represents an ideal tuning system for that piece.
I thought that was a crackpot theory, but then he played some pieces in their respective individual tuning systems on a harpsichord, and they sounded absolutely amazing, better than well tempered (or equal obviously). So who knows!
Traditionally (recent tradition), each note in the upper couple of octaves of a piano have been tuned slightly higher because it's supposed to sound better. Electronic pianos and other instruments don't seem to be tuned this way, so acoustic pianos are now being tuned this way less often.
By coincidence, I just put a 301 redirect on my personal site to go from www.xpda.com to xpda.com two days ago. If I could only get ctrl-enter to submit https://domain.com instead of http://www.domain.com in Firefox, I'd be happy. (There was a bug that prevented this last time I checked.)