linkman

Here's one thing that doesn't suck about the Apple TV Siri remote: battery life. I use mine a moderate amount and I just charged it for the first time. I started using it 18 months ago. And it was nice to obtain battery warnings instead of the usual "Why isn't my remote working? Is it the battery?"

dewme said:

ITGUYINSD said:

So the multi-core results were 50% faster in the i7 which has 100% more cores?  Why aren't the results closer to 100% faster?

What if someone could clone 3 more of you to do your job. Keep in mind that everything that you need to do your job, like an office, a desk, a box of tools, a computer, the car you drive to work, etc., now has to be shared by you and your 3 clones. Do you think your job would get done 4 times faster? 

Definitely not. https://i.stack.imgur.com/Uh7JP.gif

Someone at my wife's school had a big problem when they attempted to use Zoom the first time for class online recently. One of the students (with malicious intent) published the meeting ID a few days earlier on some social media platform inviting anyone to crash the meeting and it snowballed -- something like 1000 undesirables joined the meeting and were extremely disruptive. The teacher had to end the meeting and that classroom session was effectively cancelled.

That event was not so much a Zoom security failure but an overall design point that is missing. I imagine what is needed are unique user invites -- the unique ID can only be used by a single Zoom userid. It would be additional overhead for the meeting organizer but it would enhance meeting confidentiality. I can't think of any other decent solutions that don't require something like VPN access which would be tough to get working for a diverse set of middle/high school students that use a variety of devices. Any other ideas out there?

I wonder why an iPad was not used for the return monitor? With a larger screen it would have better visibility than an iPhone. I imagine that there could be other aspects such as convenience, redundancy, etc. that could outweigh that benefit.

Eric_WVGG said:

substance said:

I've long argued that Apple needed their entry level laptop to come in at under $1K and stay there.  Not only does this latest MacBook Air update achieve that mark, with a retina display and 256GB SSD hard drive there isn't much reason left to upgrade it. 

My one concern is the fact that this (along with all of Apple's entry-level products) only comes with 8GB of RAM.  That seems like a bottleneck to me compared to everything else that comes built-in.  Am I correct that 8GB of RAM isn't much for even basic tasks you would expect to do on a laptop these days?

I agree very much. The old "toilet seat" iBook did a lot to enable "switchers." $1000 is the sweet spot.

I disagree re: RAM, in fact I think it matters less than ever. 8gb is plenty for web + word processing + spreadsheets. Given the fast virtual memory performance of SSDs, I think you'd even find 4gb mostly usable unless you're a web tab fiend or use iCloud a lot.

I have to use Chrome at work (on a Windows-only machine). 8 GB is barely enough even with only a few tabs open. I constantly have to manage memory on it so performance doesn't go down the tubes. Considering how poor a job that most developers do with creating applications that are efficient it is quite necessary to have a minimum of 8 GB and preferably 16+ GB for future-proofing if the RAM cannot be upgraded. Part of the blame with inefficiency lies with the software environments -- I have run across a lot of Visual Basic programs that do very little, take 1 GB of RAM, need 2 GB of install space, plus the environment needed to run them requires a gigantic amount of disk space.    

I'm running Chrome on my Mac right now with two tabs open -- 522 MB of RAM in use. Looking at Safari right now and it's not much better.