Apple’s Direct X: What is Metal and Why is it Important?

Did You Know? Among knitters there is a widespread belief in a superstitious phenomenon known as the “Sweater Curse”: a belief that if the knitter gives a hand-made sweater to a significant other it will lead to a breakup; in a 2005 survey, 15 percent of hobby knitters said they had directly experienced it and 41 percent took the superstition seriously. Geek Trivia The Best Selling Vehicle In The World Is The? Honda Civic → Toyota Corolla → Ford F-150 → Volkswagen Jetta → Advertisement Download System Administration & Security - Salary & Skills Report Diverse and rapidly changing, network administration and security is the backbone of the 21st century workplace. What are the essential skills of the modern sysadmin? Does it pay to specialize, or go polyglot? Which tech is the overwhelming top pick in the world of configuration management? Click here to download Thoughts from the Geek Welcome to hell: Apple vs Google vs Facebook and the slow death of the web You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we’re really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of collateral damage. The rise of Adblock will push more and more publishers either over the edge into shutting down, or push them into the arms of Apple News and Facebook or into apps on the iPhone or Android. Rather than have a presence on the web, where most of their ads are being blocked, why not publish as Instant Articles in Facebook and collect the money from the unblockable ads that Facebook provides? Or Apple News? This is a world where Facebook has way too much power. Content cannot exist unless somebody has the time to build it, and those people that work so hard to write the articles that you read deserve to eat too. They deserve to earn a good living. And that means somebody has to pay them. Since nobody wants to pay subscriptions to every website, or any website, that means somebody is going to have to view the ads that pay the salaries for the writers. If you want free content, you are eventually going to see ads one way or the other. When the content moves to Facebook, those who block ads have nobody to blame but themselves. Of course this analysis doesn’t even take into account all of the technology to combat adblocking that most of you don’t even know exists. It’s trivial to bypass adblock and display ads anyway — our little Comic Sans experiment which I hacked together in 10 minutes was flawed, but illustrated the point. Ads can either be proxied directly from other unblockable sources, or they can be integrated into the HTML directly. Single-origin trackers could easily be built and integrated into web pages so that you never even realized you were being tracked. Adblock is just like Fight Club and Usenet. The first rule is to stop talking about Adblock, because you’re going to ruin the party for the people that really want to block ads. When it’s just on the fringes, nobody cares, but when it becomes an epidemic, sites are going to fight back, or die. On a side note, Facebook doesn’t have any tracking scripts. Because all of Facebook tracks every single tiny thing you do. Facebook *is* a tracking script. Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Natural Search A Natural Search (a.k.a. Organic Search, Unpaid Search) is one where the results obtained are based on the natural indexing of websites, blogs, etc. by a search engine rather than results obtained through paid advertising or “editorial changes” made by the search engine being used. What We're Reading from Around the Web Porsche takes aim at Tesla with new 300-mile range Mission E [ArsTechnica] Google Is 2 Billion Lines of Code—And It's All in One Place [Wired] NASA just released a cache of 149 new images of Pluto Audi's e-tron quattro electric SUV: 310 mile range, arrives in 2018 [ArsTechnica] Sharp is selling the world's first 8K TV next month for $133,000 [The Verge] Does Canned Food Ever Really Go Bad? Olive Garden resurrects $100 all-you-can-eat pass How to Find Section Breaks in a Word Document Section breaks in Word allow you to break up your document into sections and format each section differently. When you create a new document there is only one section by default, but you can add different types of section breaks as needed. Read This Article → How to Configure Folder Options in Windows 10 There’s a lot here that’s recognizable from Window OS variants running all the way back to 95, but as with many of the other standard Windows features, 10 has taken an old horse and coded an array of new tricks stashed in its toolkit. Read This Article → How to Use CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray Discs on a Computer Without a Disc Drive Physical disc drives are going the way of the dodo. Modern laptops — and even many modern desktop PCs — are dropping disc drives. If you still have discs with software, music, videos, or anything else on them, there are still ways to use them. Read This Article → Apple's Direct X: What is Metal and Why is it Important? You might have heard Apple mention Metal in recent keynote addresses, so we thought we might take a moment to explain what Metal is, and what it will do for graphics rendering on Apple computers. Read This Article → How to Boost Your Freelancing Career With These Helpful Websites According to a recent report released by the Freelancer’s Union, in 2015 there are approximately 53 million people in the United States who count freelancing as a part (or the core) of their working resume. Thanks to the power of the Internet, the task of telecommuting has almost become second nature to our economy, and allows those who want to forge their own path to either do what they love for a living, or at least pull in a little spare cash on the side of their ordinary 9-5. Read This Article → How to Monitor Your USB Device Power Usage and Output Worried your USB charger is under performing or out of spec? Think you’re not getting the real charge time out of that new power bank you bought? If you’re willing to geek-out a little then you can test your USB devices to see if they’re up to snuff. Read This Article → How to Share Your Exact Physical Location With Family and Friends Thanks to modern smartphones, it’s possible to know where your family members and friends are at all times. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have their own solutions for sharing your pinpoint location in real time. Read This Article → Advertisement Download Web Development & Design - Salary & Skills Report It's one of the fastest moving fields in tech - discover what thousands of real web developers think of the state of the industry in 2015. Is Angular all-powerful, or is its throne in danger? How much more valuable is it to go full-stack? What are the best companies to work for if you're starting out in your field? Click here to download