Category Archives: Uncategorized
They’re just upside-down flamingos
Or perhaps upside-down ice cream treats in the process of melting. No, there’s no way around it, no way to sugar coat it, they’re middle fingers.
That’s right, Windows 10 is the first to incorporate middle-finger emojis.
They’ve been in the Unicode standard since 2014, however companies have been understandably hesitant to include them in their apps. The standard, incidentally, allows among other things, for new emoji symbols to be included in the ecosystem.
For now, only Microsoft has them included, and you can only use them in their new Edge browser, and only then if you copy and paste them, so their implementation is severely limited. I expect that will change in the near future, since based on comment sections from news sites and YouTube, many people could just post the finger instead and make essentially the same comment. Plus, we already have this, how much worse can a middle finger be?
If you’re interested in some of the other new additions as well as changes, you can take a look at the Windows 10 emoji changelog at Emojipedia (yes, there is such a thing).
My Windows 10 upgrade experience
Overall, it went quite smoothly. I expected some problems, but at this early hour everything seems to be working very well, with only some minor feature-based quibbles. No fatal problems, and everything (so far) is running not just smoothly, it appears to be much faster overall.
In fact, the only real issue I encountered was is301.com itself going down for an hour!
The process took about an hour to go fully from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, which is much faster than I expected. The Windows 10 beta that I mentioned in class I was running in a virtual machine on a Mac could take hours to upgrade, but this was very efficient.
The call to ban autonomous weapons grows louder
One more time!
I’m not big on banning things, unless they pose a public hazard. For example, when people drinking and driving became a problem, we had to ban it. Same for texting and driving. We do that to protect society at large.
Lately, however, there has been a vocal call by many (MANY) in the sciences, including over 1000 Artificial Intelligence researchers, developers and scientists, along with Steve Wozniak, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk, to ban autonomous weapons. Those are weapons that could seek out targets and kill them without the involvement of a human operator. They would, for all intents and purposes, be deciding who will live and who will die and doing it all on their own.
Digital art from your mouse
See the image up above? That interesting piece of art is actually the result of a tiny program, IOGraph, that tracks mouse movements and converts them into a graphic visualization. Just download it, double-click the program icon and let it run in the background, no install necessary. The above graphic is from one day of computer use on my laptop, with the lines being mouse movements and the circles indicating when the mouse was at rest and for how long. I don’t think the colors are relevant but I’m not certain. You can make your own digital art, and the resulting images – which are titled with how long you used the program – are in HD resolution (1920 x 1080) which is usually large enough to use as wallpaper.
Uh, Hm. Well…
I’m not even sure what to say about the you-know-what-storm that could happen from this. It turns out that Ashley Madison, a site set up for people who are looking to have an affair, has been hacked and 37 million(!) names, credit card details, emails, even…well let’s just say people can upload not-suitable-for-public photos, and narratives about what they are looking for that should probably never see the light of day, have all been stolen. Irony on top of irony for a website that claims it is 100 percent secure; something we will learn in class is impossible.
Firefox, a nifty trick, and alternative browsers
I usually post this exact article after a discussion of memory and memory leaks, especially the one that plagued (although doesn’t any more) FireFox.
Last week in class we talked about the nasty memory leak that has plagued the Firefox browser for years. We learned that ‘memory leak’ is a misnomer because it happens when a program doesn’t release the memory it was using when you close it down. It’s because of that that I moved to what I felt has been the best browser for a long time, Opera. You can read all about the browser in this post I made a long time ago. I was also a fan of the Pale Moon browser, which is the Firefox browser only without the developer tools and therefore without the resultant memory leaks.
Microsoft releases free, cloud-based anti-child pornography tool
One of the most insidious, vile crimes that could be committed is one against a child. Unfortunately, the Internet serves as a breeding ground for those who would do harm to them, and what’s described in the title is about as sick as it be.
With the millions of pictures uploaded to sites like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and all the others, how can those services and others ensure that nothing of the sort is posted to their servers? How do they maintain their reputation and their quality while still allowing freedom and flexibility in what people upload without violating laws or human decency?
So Netflix seems to be doing OK
I don’t know how many of you remember this, but a few years ago there was a big debacle when Netflix wanted to separate out its streaming and disc delivery services, and to be fair the Qwikster name by which it would do so was a bad choice. It barely worked for SpongeBob, it would never work for Netflix.
You see, what happened was, Netflix allowed for people to have an account that included both delivering DVDs and streaming, however they wanted to split those services into two separate things. That’s completely understandable, however clumsy name aside, it would also require re-registering two accounts with them and include a price hike as well.
Good
Of all the annoyances of using PCs, both Windows-based and Mac, the one that drives me the most insane is dealing with Adobe’s Flash. Flash is the platform that allows everything from video to banner ads to display embedded in a webpage, so if you’ve ever had a video start playing, or a banner ad proclaiming “Swat the fly and win an iPad!” or vicious, malicious software installed on your PC, well, you have Flash to thank for that.
New logos for Microsoft Edge and Logitech
Both of which are bad. In case you haven’t guessed, this will be dripping with my opinion. I always say I don’t inject opinion into these posts, and then this happens. Feel free to disagree in the comments!
As you may know, in the upcoming release of Windows 10, Internet Explorer is being replaced with Microsoft’s Edge browser. That brings many changes including the end of support for Silverlight, and a completely redone rendering engine that hopefully makes the browser very lightweight, and…a new logo.
As you may know, I have been beta-testing Windows 10 on the fast-track, using a virtual machine on a Mac. I know that sounds like a lot, but the first linked post will tell you all about it.
