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Yearly Archives: 2015

Rest in Peace Ian Murdock, Founder of Debian Linux

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Ian Murdock, the person that founded the Debian Linux distrobution of Linux, and the creator of the apt-get program has passed away at the age of 42.  It is a sad day when a person that has made a popular distro of Linux passes away.  I use Ubuntu as my primary distro, which is based on Debian, and has worked very well for me over the last several years.

As of now, the cause of his death is unknown, his twitter account announced that he’d be commiting suicide, though some people believe that his account was hacked.  The account has been deleted since the tweet was posted.ianmurdock_suicide

To read more on this, click on this link.  You can also click here to view a webcache of his tweet.  It’s worded very … strangely.  I can see why people are thinking that the account was hacked, though it’s a possibility that he did also make it himself as well.

There are some more… interesting tweets from him as well, click here to read about them.  Evidently he had a run-in with some angry police, ended up in the hospital and ended up having to post bail for ‘assulting a police officer’.  This story keeps on getting stranger and stranger.

This isn’t a very nice to end the year, hopefully there will be better news coming soon.

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HTC Vive delayed because of ‘A very, very big technological breakthrough’

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I was waiting for the Vive to become available during this season, but it was recently pushed back, they are now saying that the Vive will be released in April of 2016.  It’s a bit saddening that people have to wait for a longer time before they can recieve the first ‘Consumer Ready’ VR Headsets.  On the up side, it’ll mean that this spring should be very … interesting.  According to the Vive Unbound developers in Beijing, CEO Cher Wang has revealed that the Valve team and she made ‘a very, very big technological breakthrough’ for the headset.  Evidently, the breakthrough was so large that they decided to redo their design of the Vive headset with the new features applied.

In the end, I’m looking forward to what the new headsets will be like.  From what they’re saying, the new ‘Breakthrough’ will be revealed this year at CES.  At least the vive still has a release date set, unlike the Oculus, which should ship sometime in Q1 of 2016.  That gives them a fairly wide set of release dates, though I think that it’ll be released around the same time as the Vive.

The future will be very interesting in my opinion.

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EVE: Valkyrie to come with Oculus Rift Preorders

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I think that this is some interesting news, I’d prefer a game that allows more exploration, like Elite: Dangerous, but this game does look very nice.  I’m certain that I’ll be preordering the Oculus CV1 once the preorders become available.  The Oculus DK2 is a very nice device, I’m sure that the CV1 will be even funner to play with.

Oh, and here’s a look at what EVE: Valkyrie  in spring of this year:

I don’t play EVE Online, though it does look like an interesting game, maybe I should take a look at it sometime.  I am looking forward to flying through space again in VR, it’s been a while since I played Elite: Dangerous, Maybe I should check if they got the game running on the Oculus SDK 0.7 or 0.8 yet…

On another note, I’m finishing my new build, I’m waiting on one expansion card, once that arrives, I’ll be able to finish the build and start trying it out.  It should be much faster than my current machine, as it uses a m.2 samsung ssd, which is a very tiny device.  Those drives allow over 2 Gigibyte transfer speeds, so programs should load very quickly.

Well, that’s all for now.  Have a nice day.

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Google and NASA: Quantum computer is 100 million times faster than normal PC

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Well, this was an interesing peice of news that I came across today, Google and NASA have been working with quantum computing, and have made a computer that’s ‘100 million times faster’ than a normal PC, though it’s only useful for some very specific purposes right now.

I for one am looking forward to what this could mean in the world of computing in the future.  If quantum computers like Google and NASAs D-Wave can start to do more standardized tasks, and be shrunk down like modern computers have, I’m sure that the entire industry would change relativity quickly.  I’m also wondering what ‘Normal PC’ they’re comparing their quantum computer too, though when you’re running ‘100 million times faster’ than a normal one, you can have quite the range for specs on the ‘normal pc’.  If you want to read more on this subject, click here to read more.

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Microsoft has released the first major update to Windows 10

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I already have applied the update to all but one of my Windows 10 machines, and I can say that this update has returned a feature that I really wanted to have back.  Window border colors are back, of course you could have had them in the offical release of Windows 10 before, but it required some messing around with system files, and was generally a bit too difficult to re-add a minimal level of customization.  I really wish that they’d add a simple way to customize the OS a bit more without special software, but at least they’ve returned some level of that.  Also Microsoft has brought in some more ways for Businesses to manage Windows 10 machines.  Thanks to the new ‘Universal Apps’ it has become a bit more difficult to manage Windows 8/8.1/10 as there aren’t as many controls put on those for IT Admins to work with.  I hope to see more of these features rolled out in the future.

Here’s Microsofts’ blog post about the new upgrade: http://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/11/12/first-major-update-for-windows-10-available-today/

In other news, it sounds like Microsoft released a botched windows update to Windows 7/8/8.1 machines on Tuesday.  I haven’t seen anything come of it yet myself… From what I’ve read, a large number of people on Reddit appear to have been having issues with MS Outlook, and network logins since the update was applied on their machines.  I hope that MS fixes those issues quickly, and that this doesn’t become the norm for older versions of Windows.

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Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void

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Well, it’s finally been released, I find it strange that I randomly found it at Target, I thought that it’d be a little while longer, but its already here.  I’m looking forward to a chance to play it, along with Fallout 4.  Also, most of you will already know this, but Fallout 4 was released yesterday too.

Also I’m planning to build a new computer in the near future, there might be a new post about that soon.  For now, have a nice day, and that you had a nice Veterans Day as well.

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Microsoft is planning on reducing Onedrive Storage limits

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Well, here’s another post about Microsoft doing … strange things.  They really did seem to be on an upswing during the Windows 10 Tech previews, but now…

Microsoft is going to remove the unlimited storage for Office 365 users, reducing it to 1TB of storage, Which could be a decent idea, some people will put a lot up if they get that ability, but they are also reducing free storage. Their free storage will be dropping from 15GB to 5 GB, and they’re removing the 15 GB bonus for using OneDrive for your ‘Camera Roll’.  From what they’re saying all of those will take effect in 2016 for all users.

They’re also going to be removing their paid 100 and 200GB Plans for new users, reducing the maximum one to 50 GB.  People who are currently on the 200 and 100GB Plans will be able to keep their storage.  Which is good, I guess.

It’s possible that they’re having issues with making a profit off of OneDrive, similar to Canonicals’ Ubuntu One cloud file storage which shut down back in 2014 which appears to be because it didn’t make enough money.  This is also a good reason against using cloud storage, as it could just go away at any time. From what I’ve heard in the past, some cloud storage have providers just vanished.  For now, I’m going to stick with my ownCloud, which I can run off of my own server, which I have full control over.  I’ve also been hearing some people talking about ‘Syncthing‘, which I might take a look at soon as well.

That’s it for today, have a nice day.

If you want to read more about the changes to OneDrive, you can read it on the OneDrive Blog.

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Windows 10 will be a ‘Reccomended’ update in 2016

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A few days ago, another article about those random Windows 10 Autoupdates came up, this time saying that there was a mistake which caused some peoples machines to upgrade to Windows 10.  From what they’re saying it did need some level of human interaction before the machine would restart to do the upgrade.  Now they’re saying that at some point next year they’re going to change it from ‘Optional’ to ‘Reccomended’, which will cause machines that have Windows Update set up with the default settings to download and attempt to install Windows 10.  They say that it’ll still need the owner of the machine to click through a few prompts first.  Part of me wonders if they’ll set Windows 10 to be an important or critical update before their ‘upgrade for free during the first year’ time is over, it looks like they may go that way… I wonder how many people would get angry if they did that.

Here’s some other interesting articles that I’ve found on this subject…

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/10/29/making-it-easier-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/windows-10-will-be-made-an-automatic-recommended-update-early-next-year/

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/windows-10-upgrade-installing-automatically-on-some-windows-7-8-systems/

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