FileMakerFeller

IIRC, RDP was developed from the open source X-windows tool (I think Citrix licensed the code to Microsoft, who further developed it). You used to be able to get X11 clients for the Mac but I haven't looked for one in years.

As I understand it, VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is simply sending the contents of the screen across the network - screen sharing. This can work pretty well over a fast enough connection, but the only way to improve the speed is to drop the colour fidelity. RDP, on the other hand, leverages the native OS frameworks - on the remote machine, the GUI primitives ("draw a window at these coordinates, with this content") are tracked, sent across the network to the local machine, translated if necessary, and executed. User interaction is transmitted as events ("Mouse down at these coordinates") from the local machine to the remote one. By reducing things to instructions rather than results you get a much more efficient compression of the data that needs to travel across the network, resulting in improved performance. You still have to wait for data-intensive items, like images or videos, but overall it is much, much quicker and more responsive than screen sharing.

tht said:

My 2013 iMac 27 is still humming along. It's the family computer. It's unsupported now, and it's probably one problem away from total replacement.

To replace it, I would like to have a ~30" display, 8 TB of storage, and capability to add more storage years down the road. When you keep every single picture and video taken, it adds up! A small headless desktop where I can add 2 3.5" HDD would be great on top of the builtin storage. Yes, I probably need to invest in a little computer as a file server one of these days.

The Apple Silicon iMac better come quick!

My main problem with laptops is that they can get hot. I hate the feeling of typing on hot keys, and my work issued MBP15 gets hot while attached to an external monitor. I want this problem to go away, so if Apple puts the SoC in the back of the laptop display, it would be so worth it for me. As the M1 models show. Well, really, as the iPad Pro shows, Apple can put a lot of computing power in a very small and thin package, 6 mm thick only. Do it, Apple. As a plus, it would let them play around with the keyboard, add more battery, etc.

A laptop with a low profile hot swappable mechanical keyboard would be interesting. They'll have prestige things like a folding display laptop, but just your simple and functional laptop that has a keyboard that is always cool to the touch and noiseless has its attractions too.

You can get very cheap external storage via USB 3.0 or USB-C now. There's another article on AI showing a WD 10TB drive on sale at Amazon for < US$155 - a smidge over US$15 per TB! It is separately powered, so you can keep it turned on all the time or power it up only when you need it. It's slower than an internal drive would be, but not by much - and if you want to watch a video then it's plenty fast enough. The only time drive speed matters to me is when I'm copying files, and even then it's only for multi-gigabyte files like videos or those rare occasions when I need to do a full backup of my internal drive. I've been very happy relying on external drives for at least five years now - they have the added benefit of being easy to store in a different location than my main machine, just in case.

It depends on your use case and your habits, but my recommendation is to use external drives rather than trying to mount them inside the case of the computer you use. With rare exceptions, you simply don't have the time to work with everything stored on your internal drive every day - you can't watch more than about 7.5TB of video (at 4k resolution) in a day, and that's assuming you do nothing else in a 24-hour period! So move the bulk of it to external storage and save the internal drive for what you're working on right now. Think of it like clothing - you can only wear one outfit at a time, so you maintain external storage for everything you like to wear and choose from that as needed. They key is that if you want something, it needs to be readily available; I've found that external drives are just as convenient as a dedicated server and minimal extra hassle over internal drives.

StrangeDays said:

EsquireCats said:

Let's take a quick moment to note that serial liar Heinemeier Hansson immediately took to social media to push a conspiracy theory as to why the bill wasn't brought to vote.
He's also the type that thinks liars being cut out of public discourse is censorship and not people being tired of his b/s

Yeah Hansson is a total tool for the reasons you mentioned. He's rich & bored, so he has to find non-troversies to publicly complain about to keep himself entertained and relevant.

Oh. So the fact he has a reputation for clear thinking and very solid development work is irrelevant now? Remember that this is the guy behind Ruby on Rails, who championed choosing good defaults instead of allowing for customisation of everything ("convention over configuration") and has consistently pushed for better development practices and workplace improvements for the past twenty years or so.

He's not always right, but none of us are. Remember that he's from a different society than the US (he's from Denmark) and, as an elite programmer, has an ego boosted by his impressive accomplishments. Try to examine his complaints for flaws rather than defaulting to an ad hominem attack.

A certain S. P. Jobs was also viewed as a liar and a trouble-maker. What if he too had taken to Twitter to express his dislikes?

dewme said:

This is a product category that I've searched (in vain) for a solution to for a very long time. When I go to a meeting I always like to jot down notes, draw diagrams, etc., in an unobtrusive way. I know that plenty of people have no problem bringing a notebook computer or a tablet to a meeting, but I've noticed that at least some of those who do so appear to be disconnected from the conversation and interaction - probably because they are "multitasking" during the meeting.

Okay, I get it. But since I'm there I want to focus as much of my attention on the meeting and have found that simply writing notes/diagrams in a steno pad or quadrille notebook works okay and is my go-to solution. I'll also take pictures of the whiteboard and have found Microsoft's Lens app pretty good for that purpose. However, once the meeting is over I usually find myself plugged into something else, like another meeting, so if I don't capture my notes and thoughts with the triggers/bullets from the steno pad, and after going to a couple more meetings or working on a hot issue, the ability and my desire to go back and capture my meeting notes and thoughts to an easier to retrieve format goes away. These types of scenarios are probably one primary use case for the product reviewed in this article.

I've tried a few other capture methods, including the ancient Cross Pen company's CrossPad device (it sucked), smart whiteboards, smart pens, iPad+stylus, iPad+Apple Pencil, etc., and nothing ever "sticks" with me because it never seems natural (not tactile), it involves transcription or extra steps, it's clumsy, it can't handle my 2nd grader handwriting legibility that naturally occurs when I write on glass (with finger, stylus, or Apple Pencil) - and the expected hideous OCR performance that results from it, or it's simply more effort than just keeping a pile of filled out steno pads around forever and hoping my brain can rehydrate the thoughts/questions in my head when I scribbled on the pad.

I don't currently have a pressing need for this type of product, but I still feel that it is an unfilled need and something worth trying to solve. Whether this product is able to deliver something that finally hits the mark is yet to be determined. I think Apple's iPad handwriting recognition (Scribble) is pretty amazing, but writing on an iPad still doesn't feel natural enough for me to want to use it for more than a demo or signing a credit card receipt on an iPhone at the Apple Store.

I found the LiveScribe products did a good job, back when I was taking paper notes. Nowadays I make audio recordings and cough or tap my fingers when the discussion reaches something particularly relevant - if I'm able to participate, I'll use a key phrase such as "So to summarise what we've just discussed..." You can get the recordings transcribed pretty cheaply with AWS and the results are usually excellent, you have timestamps that you can match against any pictures you took and since I use Mac and iPhone just about everything ends up in iCloud for access from anywhere. I still take pen and paper so that I can quickly sketch something if I need to share or develop an idea, but I can easily take photos of anything drawn (by any participant) at the end, and the timestamps give me an easy way to associate things with an event.

22july2013 said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

trinko said:

Aside from Congressional lack of information the basic problem is that Section 230 is being misused.

The intent was that if FB Twitter et al content neutral platforms, like the phone company, and didn't censor anything other than criminal acts, child porn etc, they couldn't be held liable for the content.

That makes sense.

The problem is that FB Twitter etc have become publishers who censor information that disagrees with their ideological agenda.  Given that's the case they should no more be immune to lawsuits about their content than the NYT is.  If the NYT were to publish a letter that said that I was a Nazi I could sue them and collect a fortune. But with the current policy FB can publish a comment calling me a Nazi and face no potential liability.

I'm more concerned with FB Twitter et al censoring information and using bogus fact checkers than I am about radicals, either Antifa or the Capital rioters, using them.  Hence I want FB and Twitter to face real legal liabilities for their viewpoint based censorship.

If silencing voices they don't like, but which aren't calling for criminal activity like the Capitol riot, starts to cost the Tech Titans hundreds of millions of dollars we can only hope that they will return to being content neutral platforms that only censor calls for criminal activity.

The bolded in no way makes a venue a publisher. For instance, AppleInsider is liable for content that we publish under the masthead.

What you folks say here in the forums, as long as we have a good faith moderation effort, we are not responsible for. If we chose to moderate the forums by an idealogical agenda, that STILL doesn't make us a publisher of what THE USER says in the forums.

If you want to convince the supreme court that companies don't have first amendment rights and overturn three decades of precedent, hey, go ahead, because that's what it's going to take to force an ideologically neutral standpoint. But until they don't have those rights, they may moderate as they see fit.

And, the proposals for 230 reform that both parties have put forth? It will mandate MORE moderation, not LESS. Anything even remotely questionable or in the slightest bit untrue will need to be purged. 

Generally I'm on your side, Mike, but if you aren't liable for content that's not under your masthead, then why do you need section 230 to absolve you of responsibility for user contributions? It makes no sense. If you aren't guilty then you don't need extra legal protection.

The rule is that a company _is_ liable for anything published under their masthead, but Section 230 grants an exception: if you make a good faith effort to moderate what users post, your company _will be_ exempt from prosecution for that content. What company staff post, the company is liable for.

If you have a blank wall that you "donate" to local graffiti artists, and one of those artists puts up something that is extremely offensive and/or illegal (in contravention to the rules you laid out up front), where does the blame lie? It's with the tagger, not the owner of the wall. The owner of the wall may have enabled the tagger to apply their artistic expression, but they did that for every tagger who followed the rules too. The owner of the wall then has a personal choice about whether or not they allow the material in question to remain viewable - if they do, they face consequences from the majority; if they don't, they face consequences from the minority. But if the material is illegal, it must be removed. At this point, what liability is there for the owner of the wall? Section 230 says, none - the owner acted in good faith and is thus immune from legal repercussions. But if the owner of the wall fails to remove the illegal content, the owner becomes jointly liable for the illegal act.

Societal repercussions are beyond the remit of the law, to the extent that those repercussions are themselves legal. So overall, Section 230 is legislation that provides a common-sense balance between fostering discussion (and commerce!) online and engagement in illegal acts.

There are legal scholars who say there are flaws with Section 230; I am not qualified to offer an opinion there. But without Section 230 the WWW as we know it would not exist.

Right now it seems like Congress is trying to legislate protection for their own speech and regulation for everyone else's. I'm not a US citizen, so to some extent I am not affected by this, but it will set a global precedent that I think should be avoided. Again, societal repercussions are beyond the remit of the law. A citizen should be free to call out what they view as unconscionable acts, and the accused should have a right to reply. The bigger problem is that "the masses" are easily swayed, and as humans we tend to believe what we hear or see first - curtailing the freedom of speech in an attempt to mitigate the effects of foolhardy, malevolent or otherwise harmful ideas has been shown to result in worse outcomes than maintaining the status quo. The road to Hell, after all, is paved with good intentions.

It is better overall to educate and train people to overcome their natural tendencies and use their critical thinking skills, allowing truly beneficial ideas to become widespread and thus improve society for all. This will make the job of politicians harder, and they are naturally trying to avoid that outcome (as any of us would). In the end, the only advantage the citizens of a country have over its government is numerical superiority. This situation demands that politicians be made aware of their impending step into disaster by rushing through legislation, and the only way to do that is by having many people repeatedly and continuously tell them that they are being dunderheads for considering this nonsense. The joy of the modern world is that we now have many avenues by which we can make our opinions known; I am sure a quick Google search will reveal many ways to amplify the impact of an individual by automating some of the more popular online tools.