Tag: brides-cond

Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box

Gone, but not forgotten. For the longest time, one of the things that people liked to poke fun at in Windows was a dialog box used to add fonts to the system. The rarely used dialog used Windows 3.1-era icons and fonts, even in Windows Vista, making it a weird anachronism. Microsoft tidied up that bit of Windows legacy in Windows 7 by removing the box entirely, but other relics remain. One of the most annoying is the environment variables dialog. This box hasn’t been updated for what feels like millennia, and it’s cramped and awkward to use as a result. Environment variables can be lengthy, and they almost never fit in the current dialog. This is particularly acute for one of the most important variables, PATH. The PATH variable stores the names of all the directories that the system should search when hunting for executables, and many applications and development tools like to add their directories to the PATH. It quickly gets unwieldy. The current annoying dialog. And unlike the add font dialog, which people only ever looked at just to point and laugh—it was rarely used to actually install fonts—the environment variables box is actually useful, as it’s the easiest and best way of changing Windows environment variables. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box

Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

The songwriter who co-wrote Megan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” alleged on Tuesday that he only cleared $5,679 from over 178 million streams of the song on Spotify. (credit: YouTube ) A Tuesday copyright roundtable discussion, hosted by Nashville’s Belmont University and led by the House Judiciary Committee, opened with one of the past year’s most successful songwriters announcing just how little money he’d made from over 178 million streams of a song he co-wrote: $5,679. That means Nashville songwriter Kevin Kadine, the co-writer of the hit 2014 Megan Trainor song “All About That Bass,” made close to $31.90 for every million streams. According to a report by The Tenneseean , Kadine didn’t clarify to the roundtable’s five members of the House of Representatives exactly how the songwriting proceeds were split between himself and Trainor (who shared songwriting credits on “Bass”), but he did allege that the average streaming-service payout for a song’s songwriting team is roughly $90 per million streams. “That’s as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career, and number one in 78 countries,” Kadine said. “But you’re making $5,600. How do you feed your family?” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

Backblaze to sell cloud storage for a quarter the price of Azure, Amazon S3

Online backup provider Backblaze is branching out today with a new business: an infrastructure-as-a-service-style cloud storage API that’s going head to head with Amazon’s S3, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud Storage. But where those services charge 2¢ or more per gigabyte per month, Backblaze is pricing its service at just half a cent per gigabyte per month. Backblaze’s business is cheap storage. We’ve written about the company’s hard disk reliability data a few times over the years ; the company has found that regular consumer hard drives are more than up to the demands of providing cloud storage, though there is substantial variation between the different manufacturers and models. Backblaze has designed (and documented ) its storage hardware for the lowest possible cost, using software to provide the necessary protection against failures. It currently has more than 150 petabytes of storage. This low-cost storage means that the company can offer its $5/month unlimited size backup plan profitably. Now the company plans to sell that same cheap storage to developers. Its new B2 product is very much in the same vein as Amazon’s S3: cloud storage with an API that can be used to build a range of other applications. And the price difference is significant. Amazon S3’s cheapest online storage—reduced redundancy, for customers storing more than 5 petabytes—costs 2.2¢ per gigabyte per month. Backblaze’s B2 storage costs 0.5¢ per gigabyte per month, with the first 10GB free. This is cheaper even than Amazon’s Glacier and Google’s Nearline storage, at 1¢ per gigabyte per month, neither of which supports immediate access to data. Bandwidth costs are the same; inbound bandwidth is free, outbound is charged at 5¢ per gigabyte. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Backblaze to sell cloud storage for a quarter the price of Azure, Amazon S3

Valve hits a Linux landmark—1,500 games available on Steam

A few months after Valve officially launched Steam for Linux in 2013, Gabe Newell gave his LinuxCon keynote crowd a bit of music for their ears. “It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming,” the Valve head-man said. “It’s sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope.”  Linux gaming was by no means a new endeavor, but 2013 stands as a major year for the open-source platform’s gaming prospects with Valve announcing Linux-based Steam Machines and the arrival of SteamOS . When we looked at the state of Linux gaming after its 12-month Valve anniversary, we found  nearly 1,000 professional, commercially distributed games  available as of February 2015. But this weekend there’s an even bigger numeric milestone to celebrate according to the Linux site  Phoronix —1,500 Linux titles are currently available through Steam. Phoronix notes Steam has been adding roughly 100 Linux titles per month throughout the summer. And while the total number of Steam Linux offerings still pales in comparison to competing platforms—Phoronix cites Windows at 6,464 games and OS X at 2,323—the statistical growth in such a short period of time is undeniable. Anecdotal evidence supporting Steam’s Linux gaming growth looks rosy as well. The five most popular Linux titles for Steam include major developer offerings like  Counter-Strike: Global Offensive  and  Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordo r (the rest of the top five according to Phoronix includes ARK: Survival Evolved , Team Fortress 2 , and Dota 2).  And this summer, a small indie game called Don’t Be Patchman   even became the first Linux-exclusive launch on Steam. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Valve hits a Linux landmark—1,500 games available on Steam

Google Glass now “Project Aura,” ex-Amazon Fire Phone employees hired

Some men wearing Google Glass. Glass Collective The Google Glass team is  still  alive inside of Google. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the group has a new name, “Project Aura,” and has recently picked up a few engineers from Amazon. That’s “Project Aura,” not to be confused with ” Project Ara ,” another struggling group inside Google that’s trying to build a modular smartphone. “Project Aura” seems to still have all of the previous Google Glass management in place. Ivy Ross, former chief marketing officer of Art.com, is still leading the project. She still reports to Tony Fadell, the CEO of Nest. This group is all part of Google Glass’ “reboot” team. They’re charged with taking the original version of Google’s face-mounted computer and turning it into something appealing; we’ve yet to see a product from this revamped group. According to the report, the group has been hiring engineers, software developers, and project managers from Amazon’s Lab126, a hardware division that was most recently responsible for the Amazon Fire Phone. After the Fire Phone flopped, Amazon fired “dozens” from the Lab126 group, and Google swooped in to pick up some new employees. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Glass now “Project Aura,” ex-Amazon Fire Phone employees hired

Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

Getting companies’ names to show up higher in search engine results is the field of the lucrative business known as search engine optimization, or SEO. There’s a range of SEO practices, from “white hat” ones that are endorsed by search engines, to “black hat” practices that, while they may not be illegal, violate search engine rules. Now Google is taking a rare legal action against one Southern California SEO company it says went too far and broke the law. In its complaint (PDF) , Google says that Tustin, California-based Local Lighthouse has bombarded consumers with “incessant, unsolicited automated telephone calls” since mid-2014, making “false guarantees of first-page placement in Google search results.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

Here’s why you can’t delete native iOS apps from your iPhone

Megan Geuss If you’re an iOS user, you may have a junk folder on your device full of rarely used, native apps from Apple. Banishing them to their own cluster is just about the only course of action since these apps cannot be deleted. Now, we know more about why that’s the case: in an interview with Buzzfeed, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that deleting native apps would essentially cause a domino effect in other programs on the device, possibly breaking things elsewhere in iOS. “There are some apps that are linked to something else on the iPhone,” Cook told Buzzfeed . “If they were to be removed, they might cause issues elsewhere on the phone.” While Cook didn’t detail which preinstalled apps were linked to other functions, he went on to say that not every app is connected in this way. Eventually, Apple may allow some native apps to be deleted. “Over time, I think with the ones that aren’t like that, we’ll figure out a way [for you to remove them]. … It’s not that we want to suck up your real estate.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Here’s why you can’t delete native iOS apps from your iPhone

Bitcoin cyberextortionists are blackmailing banks, corporations

A number of large UK corporations and institutions, such as Lloyds Bank and BAE systems, have reported a “marked increase” in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from the Bitcoin extortionist group DD4BC, which has been operational since last year . The increased aggressions appears concurrent with reports from other organisations. A cybersecurity case study released by Akamai identified 114 DD4BC attacks against the company’s customers since April 2015, with 41 cases taking place in June alone. In comparison, there were only 5 attacks in January and February 2015. “The latest attacks—focused primarily on the financial service industry—involved new strategies and tactics intended to harass, extort and ultimately embarrass the victim publicly,” said Akamai Security Division executive Stuart Scholly in a press release. 58% of DD4BC’s targets are financial institutions, according to Akamai. The group begins with ransom emails that state their demands, which vary anywhere between 1 and 100 bitcoins (about £160 to £16,000), a deadline for compliance, and warning of a “small, demonstrative attack.” Should the victim prove uncooperative, the figure is raised and a more forceful show of force is made. This technique is particularly effective against financial institutions as DD4BC threatens to publicise their attacks, negating the institution’s reputation and trustworthiness. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin cyberextortionists are blackmailing banks, corporations

Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade

Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet’s DNS servers should enable access. A few days ago, TorrentFreak reported that the Oslo District Court had sided with several Hollywood studios and domestic Norwegian rights holders in a case that sought to block a number of sites, including The Pirate Bay, Viooz, and ExtraTorrent. The court ordered that the country’s major ISPs, including Telia, TeliaSonera, NextGenTel, and Altibox, must block the sites. The Norwegian Pirate Party, as you can probably imagine, isn’t happy with the court-ordered block. In response, it has set up an unblocked DNS server—dns.piratpartiet.no—and a website that shows you how to change your DNS server settings on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade

Man who helped code highly destructive financial malware pleads guilty

The Latvian man accused of helping create the Gozi virus, which United States prosecutors dubbed ” one of the most financially destructive computer viruses in history ,” has pleaded guilty. As the original indictment stated : “The Gozi Virus has caused, at a minimum, millions of dollars in losses.” According to Reuters , Deniss Calovskis made the admission in federal court in Manhattan on Friday. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Man who helped code highly destructive financial malware pleads guilty