We knew that Internet Explorer was dead.
We knew a successor was coming.
We just didn’t know the official name, beyond the “Project Spartan” placeholder.
Now we do: Microsoft’s new browser is called Microsoft Edge.
Just announced at the company’s build conference, Edge will be the primary/default browser built into Windows 10.
Details are still light on of what’s unique to Edge, but here’s what we know:
- It has built-in Cortana support.
- It has built-in reader, note-taking and sharing features.
- The design focuses on simplicity and minimalism.
- The rendering engine is called EdgeHTML.
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Norway’s Minister of Culture announced this week that a national FM-radio switch off will commence in 2017, allowing the country to complete its transition over to digital radio. It’s the end of an era. |
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Originally Posted by EveryMac
The Apple Macintosh Portable features a 16 MHz 68HC000 processor, 1 MB of RAM, a 1.44 MB floppy disk drive and the option of a 40 MB hard drive in a boxy portable case with a 9.8" monochrome active-matrix display.
The Portable often was referred to as the "luggable" because it weighed nearly 16 pounds, but nevertheless, it still was a significant advance toward truly portable "laptop" or "notebook" computers. |
After the usual rabid anticipation, Apple today released FCP X 10.2 along with companion updates to Motion and Compressor. The UI has been subtly updated for Yosemite and there are some great new features; beautiful 3D text, the ability to save effects applied to clips – including grades – as custom presets, new and improved keyframeable masks, Library level Smart Collections, improved key framing performance, 4-Up Scope viewer, and a lot more.
I’ll look at the new stuff in a moment, but as someone who uses FCP X regularly, the most exciting and flat out impressive part of this update for me is it’s performance… summed up in the usual vague “bug fixes and performance improvements” part of the release notes. In my view, here’s what it should say:“This Version of X Feels Like a New App”
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Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji. Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging "savages" and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger. |
The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution. He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. |
The soldiers knelt down behind a mud-brick wall. Then Morlock tossed a grenade toward Mudin, using the wall as cover. As the grenade exploded, he and Holmes opened fire, shooting the boy repeatedly at close range with an M4 carbine and a machine gun. Mudin buckled, went down face first onto the ground. His cap toppled off. A pool of blood congealed by his head. |
Mitchell did not order his men to render aid to Mudin, whom he believed might still be alive, and possibly a threat. Instead, he ordered Staff Sgt. Kris Sprague to "make sure" the boy was dead. Sprague raised his rifle and fired twice. |
To identify the body, the soldiers fetched the village elder who had been speaking to the officers that morning. But by tragic coincidence, the elder turned out to be the father of the slain boy. His moment of grief-stricken recognition, when he saw his son lying in a pool of blood, was later recounted in the flat prose of an official Army report. "The father was very upset," the report noted. |
the soldiers began taking photographs of themselves celebrating their kill. Holding a cigarette rakishly in one hand, Holmes posed for the camera with Mudin's bloody and half-naked corpse, grabbing the boy's head by the hair as if it were a trophy deer. |
After the killing, the soldiers involved in Mudin's death were not disciplined or punished in any way. Emboldened, the platoon went on a shooting spree over the next four months that claimed the lives of at least three more innocent civilians. When the killings finally became public last summer, the Army moved aggressively to frame the incidents as the work of a "rogue unit" operating completely on its own, without the knowledge of its superiors. |
But a review of internal Army records and investigative files obtained by Rolling Stone, including dozens of interviews with members of Bravo Company compiled by military investigators, indicates that the dozen infantrymen being portrayed as members of a secretive "kill team" were operating out in the open, in plain view of the rest of the company. Far from being clandestine, as the Pentagon has implied, the murders of civilians were common knowledge among the unit and understood to be illegal by "pretty much the whole platoon," according to one soldier who complained about them. Staged killings were an open topic of conversation, and at least one soldier from another battalion in the 3,800-man Stryker Brigade participated in attacks on unarmed civilians. "The platoon has a reputation," a whistle-blower named Pfc. Justin Stoner told the Army Criminal Investigation Command. "They have had a lot of practice staging killings and getting away with it." |
Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos – an effort that reached the highest levels of both governments. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and President Hamid Karzai were reportedly briefed on the photos as early as May, and the military launched a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib. |
By suppressing the photos, however, the Army may also have been trying to keep secret evidence that the killings of civilians went beyond a few men in 3rd Platoon. |
The members of Bravo Company began to talk incessantly about killing Afghans as they went about their daily chores, got stoned or relaxed over a game of Warhammer. One idea, proposed half in jest, was to throw candy out of a Stryker vehicle as they drove through a village and shoot the children who came running to pick up the sweets. According to one soldier, they also talked about a second scenario in which they "would throw candy out in front and in the rear of the Stryker; the Stryker would then run the children over." Another elaborate plan involved waiting for an IED attack, then using the explosion as an excuse to kill civilians. That way, the soldiers reasoned, "you could shoot anyone in the general area and get away with it." |
Sci Fi: And the next logical step is...no more local storage and OSXI "Terminator" only netbootable from Apple servers. Apps only per online Appstore subscription. Users without Internet/ IPv6 addresses will do jail time. The use of alternate DNSes will be outlawed. Sale and possession of local storage will be illegal as well. On iOS only "LiveWatches","LivePhones", "LivePads", "LivePods" and "LiveCars" remain, without local storage, only a WiFi link. All services have to be paid for by subscription. E.g.: playing a song on or watching a movie on iTunes means paying royalties, "LiveCars" pay per mileage. Give or take about 2025, all of this may be true and normal. Just call it "one more thing". Maybe this sounds like Sci Fi, but IT technically, this is already possible. "Long live progress!" How's that, trendwatchers? Anyhow, seems like a good way to bypass Moore's law: every computer back to time sharing; your computing device a terminal of a global supercomputer owned by a multinational. Personal Computer history in reverse. Long live "the Internet of things", hurrah! |
"It was beautiful up until fracking started," said Nielle Hawkwood. Nielle and Howard Hawkwood say their ranch outside Cochrane, Alta., northwest of Calgary, hasn't been the same since 2009, when fracking began. Water started tasting strange and cows began to die off in large numbers. Instead of an average of two to three cows per year, they were losing closer to 20. By the spring of 2011, Nielle Hawkwood noticed her hair falling out in clumps every spring. They had their soil tested and found a three-fold increase in the amount of chlorine, nitrogen and phosphorus. The testing also showed a large increase in the concentration of strontium and uranium. The Hawkwoods blame fracking. |
In a March 2015 study in the Journal of Environmental Science and Health, researchers took six-hour average measurements of air pollution instead of the traditional 24-hour averages. They found pollution levels tend to spike at certain times of the day and under certain weather conditions, which previous studies had ignored. The study found that the closer people live to drilling sites and other gas production facilities, the more likely they are to exhibit symptoms of toxic exposure. The study was based on observed conditions in Washington County, Pa., population 28,000, using emissions reports from nearby fracking sites and weather conditions over 14 months. The researchers also compared illness reports to the weather conditions and time of day. They found that residents living in the area would have 300 toxic-level exposures, more than enough to account for the reported illnesses. The most common health effects reported for residents living near fracking sites include shortness of breath, coughing, chronic fatigue and skin burning. |
...even in Texas, where Big Oil reigns supreme, there are concerns. Last year, the Lubbock Board of Health released a report focusing on the human health impacts of air and water pollution as a result of fracking. It found that volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, associated with fracking could be linked to increased rates of leukemia and possible fetal abnormalities. VOCs, chemicals found naturally in oil and gas, are also used to fracture wells. They include benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylene. The report found at six sites, 15 of 17 measurements of benzene alone were exceeding the allowable limit of one part per million for 15 minutes of exposure. The wells were giving off 200 times that. Through examining more than 100,000 births between 1996 and 2009 in rural Colorado, the report concluded that babies born within a high concentration of wells saw a 30 per cent increase in congenital heart disease. |
"On a new machine, I reinstall all apps that do not come with the machine." |
Then I start fresh, including email, contacts, importing files, whatever, etc." |
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