Facebook users can now go live directly from their desktops using their webcams and also broadcast gameplay from their computers. According to a Facebook blog post on Wednesday, Facebook live on desktops was earlier available for pages only, but now the status update composer will feature a Live button also.
Facebook also added a new feature that makes it easy to use streaming software or external hardware when going live from a computer. “With this update, people can seamlessly share their screens, insert graphics, switch cameras, or use professional equipment in Facebook Live videos,” the social media giant said.
With this update, it is easier to stream your PC gameplay to friends and followers and engage with them while you play. “Opening up on desktop takes Facebook Live beyond Twitter and Periscope’s options, and brings it into competition with longer-running services like YouTube,” TechCrunch reported.
The report quoted Facebook as saying that the desktop streaming could be useful for activities like Q&As and vlogging where holding phone in hand could be inconvenient. “While the content on Live might not be great yet, and there’s been some troubling broadcasts of violence that Facebook promises it’s working to prevent, it’s still early for the medium,” the report added.
Publish date: March 23, 2017 12:57 pm| Modified date: March 23, 2017 12:57 pm
The newest announcement from Google reveals support for Firebase Cloud Messaging service to desktop and mobile web. This expands Firebase’s reach, which was earlier limited to Android and iOS. The service lets developers send push notifications for their app to the user’s device.
This has been made possible by the new Javascript Library which supports Chrome on desktop and mobile, Opera on mobile and Firefox on desktop.
“The technical aspect of web notifications is just a start. In order to make the most out of web notifications, you need to engage your users with the right content in the right manner. Check out our “What Makes a Good Notification?” post for best practices on notification content and “Best Practices for Push Notifications Permissions UX” post for tips on interacting with Web users to get permission for sending notifications,” a Google blogpost reads.
Talking about its partner, Alibaba Express, the blogpost says that the latter saw 178 percent higher conversation on implementing Firebase Cloud Messaging. “We were unable to find any effective solution for notifications until we found FCM. It is the best solution because of its rich features, stable performance, and easy deployment,” said Zou Yu, Director of Alibaba.com Mobile.
Microsoft announced that it has completed work on its Desktop Bridge, which is a software utility designed to port applications from older versions of Windows to Windows 10. Although the Desktop Bridge has several important features, it may negatively impact software performance overall.
The Desktop Bridge And UWP
Although porting software to Windows 10’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is a key feature of the Desktop Bridge, it actually contains several other tools to aid software developers. For the first time, you will be able to use the Linux Bash command on Windows. Software developers will also be able to share code with each other using a tool called Xamarin.
Of course, the real star of the show is Project Centennial, which is the desktop app converter. It can analyze older Windows applications and port them to the UWP. The tool also allows you to configure the software to work with Cortana, Windows Live tiles, and other Windows 10 features.
“Working in parallel with Microsoft, we are making it easy for our customers to transition their existing InstallShield MSI projects to build Universal Windows Platform and Windows Server App packages. InstallShield is the only product that enables developers to test their apps for compatibility with the Desktop Bridge and WSAs – saving countless hours of time, effort and investigative work,” said Maureen Polte, Vice President of Product Management at Flexera Software.
Once the software has been ported to the UWP, it can be uploaded to the Windows Store and used on essentially any device that supports the UWP. This technically includes the Xbox One, but it is likely that developers will need to make additional changes to their software in order to be fully functional on the game console.
Although the new tool set will be helpful to software developers, this won’t change much if you don’t dabble in code. Microsoft announced that several programs including Evernote, Arduino IDE, doubleTwist, PhotoScape, Magix Movie Edit Pro, Virtual Robotics Kit, Relab, SQL Pro, Voya Media, Predicted Desire, and korAccount have been ported using the Desktop Bridge and will launch with official Windows 10 support within the next few days.
Most of these programs already work fine on Windows 10, though. We briefly tested PhotoScape, Magix Movie Edit Pro, Voya Media, and KorAccount using the Windows 7/8.1 installation packages and were able to get all of them except Voya Media to work without issue on a Windows 10 notebook. Some programs like Voya Media have now been ported with the Desktop Bridge, but it is unlikely you will notice many new apps on PCs running Windows 10.
Should We Really Rely On The UWP?
Although it is always helpful to have an abundance of applications available, and the Desktop Bridge will certainly be an asset to software developers and end-users alike, we should keep in mind that use of this software could negatively impact our computing experience in some cases..
Software that is carefully optimized for a single device is essentially always able to operate more efficiently. When software is not optimized well, it can cripple performance. Anyone that has purchased a new PC game in the last several years knows this all too well.
By using a semi-automated process to port software to a platform designed for multiple hardware configurations, there is a significant likelihood that we’ll see instances of degraded software performance. It is hard to judge how much this may affect performance, but it is still something to bear in mind as the UWP evolves.
The Desktop Bridge is available now for Microsoft’s Windows 10 from the Windows Store
The dreaded “Please wait while Windows configures Microsoft Office” message can be a real drag, but fortunately there are fixes available.
The most frustrating part of this particular issue is that it’s so difficult to diagnose exactly what the problem is. However, one of these techniques should get you the answers that you’re looking for. Follow each process in the order that they’re listed here, and you’ll be closer to getting Microsoft Office back in action, so you can get on with the project at hand.
Repair Microsoft Office
If it seems that your installation of Microsoft Office has been corrupted or otherwise damaged, your first port of call should be the repair function. The process will check for common issues and could potentially fix the problem automatically, so it’s a great starting point.How to Repair or Recover Data from a Corrupted PDF FileHow to Repair or Recover Data from a Corrupted PDF FileAny file type can get corrupted. If you don't back up your data, finding out something broke can be a nightmare. Here, we're looking specifically at PDF recovery.READ MORE
Open the Control Panel and navigate to Programs > Programs and Features. Scroll through the list of software that’s installed on your computer and find your installation of Microsoft Office.
Right-click the entry and select Change. At this point, you’ll be asked whether you want to carry out a Quick Repair or an Online Repair. A Quick Repair will fix most issues, so try that before you move onto an Online Repair.
If the process doesn’t work, then you can move onto some of the more in-depth fixes below.
Activate the Windows Search Service
One common cause of the stuck configuration dialog is a situation where the 32-bit version of Microsoft Office is installed to a 64-bit version of Windows. If this is the case, the message presented to the user will reference 64-bit components.
Happily, the fix for this problem is relatively straightforward. To get started, close any instance of the Office program that you’re trying to open up and then head to the Control Panel. Navigate toPrograms > Programs and Features and then click Turn Windows features on or off.
Sometimes the configuration message can hang as a result of third-party add-ins. By starting Microsoft Office in safe mode and circumventing these additional components, you can determine whether or not this is the case.
To activate safe mode, search for your desired Office program using the search bar, then hold CTRLas you click on it. The following message will appear:
Click Yes and see whether the program opens as normal. If it does, then you can disable the add-ins you have installed individually to find out which one is causing problems.
Disabling Add-ins
Head to File > Options and navigate to the Add-ins section. Make sure that the drop-down menu is set to COM Add-ins and then click the Go… button beside it.
We can use the Run dialog to input commands that tweak the way that Windows programs are initialized. By doing so, we can work around whatever is causing the program to hang on the configuration message.
To open a Run dialog, press Windows key + R. Alternatively, you can just type “run” into the search bar.
First, try entering the following string into the field:
Here are some switches that you can enter into a Run dialog in order to sniff out problems with Microsoft Office:
winword /r — Resets Word’s registry values to their defaults.
winword /m — Prevents Word from loading macros.
winword /a — Prevents Word from loading its add-ins.
If you’re not working with Word, you can replace winword with excel for Excel and powerpnt for PowerPoint. Alternatively, you could write out the location of each program’s .exe file on the drive.
Do you know another fix for when Windows gets stuck configuring software? Or do you have a particular situation related to this error that you need help with? Either way, head to the comments section below to start the conversation!
We kicked off our Best PC Builds feature last year and showcased what the Tom’s Hardware community could assemble within defined budgets and build scenarios. Not only did it let our forum members show off their skills at picking hardware for new PCs, it also gave novice PC builders a resource filled with quality computer components to choose from.
But the computer industry never sits still. While little has changed in the CPU world since we first published the Best PC Builds guide, the entire GPU market has been re-energized by a new wave of graphics processors.
The GPUs from AMD and Nvidia (Polaris and Pascal, respectively) contain numerous improvements, including architectural enhancements, the move to 14/16 nm FinFET transistor technology, and support for faster memory technologies, like GDDR5X and 8 GHz GDDR5.
These graphics processors are also fairly inexpensive, which has also forced the industry to drop the price on previous generation graphics hardware to keep it competitive and relevant.
In other words, the new GPUs introduce sufficient changes in performance and price that it’s now time to revisit all of our Best PC Builds.
Build submissions do not have to use one of these new GPUs, but in several places the latest offerings will dictate some changes, while price reductions on older hardware should give users more options on budget-oriented builds, including some wiggle room on other components.
We will accept build submissions until August 19. All builds must be submitted in one of the forum sections linked to below. We won’t consider builds that go over the budget. Please note that all parts must be selected from Amazon or Newegg, and must not include any limited-time pricing offers or rebates.
We talked about the emerging entry-level NVMe SSD category in the Patriot Hellfire review and Samsung 960 EVO Preview (with the OEM PM961). Today we go straight to ground zero with the Intel 600p that puts entry-level NVMe at our fingertips.
The Intel 600p's low price made immediate waves when online retailers first posted the new SSDs. The 900p retails for significantly less than other shipping NVMe SSDs, and at the time of writing, there have been several glowing reviews of the entry-level NVMe SSD that fanned the flames. It appears the 600p is steadily moving to cult-like status in some circles, but this is not a resurrection of the Celeron 300A.
There are always trade-offs with any entry-level product, and it's important to find which corners the manufacturer cut. The Intel 600p and the 6000p (it's professional cousin with vPro and full disk encryption) both have significantly lower performance than other NVMe SSDs. Lower performance is the kind of attribute that many will point to as the reason why the drive is so cheap. Sadly, performance wasn't the only sacrifice Intel made to deliver the low price point. We dove a little deeper into the details, especially the endurance restrictions, and came away feeling like Intel cut the 600p in half. Before we get to that, let's look at how the 600p came to be.
Intel and Micron, who jointly produce NAND in the IMFT partnership, established a relationship with Silicon Motion, Inc., a third-party SSD controller vendor. SMI secured design wins with its low-cost, low-power 4-channel SSD controllers. The SM2260 is SMI's first high-performance 8-channel controller, and it is only the second controller designed specifically for IMFT's 1st generation 3D NAND.
Micron has a close working relationship with Marvell, and the company uses its Dean 4-channel controller for the Crucial MX300 mainstream class SSD. The two companies continue to collaborate, but SMI's low-cost controllers power many of Crucial's entry-level SSDs.
Intel's predicament is a little more complicated. For several years, we all thought of Intel as an SSD controller company, which is a perception that dates back to the company's first SSD products. What we didn't know was that LSI Corporation, a fabless semiconductor vendor, handled the hardware design (later SandForce, too) while Intel contributed the firmware. Intel and LSI mingled together publicly with SandForce products until LSI CEO Abhi Talwalkar sold the company to Avago, and Intel's controller design house went with it.
In recent years, Avago acquired several companies and radically increased the price of existing products - some have increased by as much as four times. Avago continues to design SSD controllers, but Intel transitioned to SMI for its latest SSDs.
The 600p uses the SMI SM2260 controller in tandem with Intel firmware. By no means did either company plan to make the 600p the first entry-level NVMe SSD. The 600p was designed to be a premium product to take on Samsung's ever-increasing line of high-performance M.2 NVMe SSDs.Micron canceled the TX3 (with 3D MLC) when the combination of the SMI controller and IMFT flash failed to deliver high performance, but Intel forged ahead with its first entry-level NVMe SSD.
Warranty And Endurance
All four Intel 600p SSDs ship with a five-year warranty and have the same 72-terabyte TBW endurance rating. The TBW rating means the drive can only absorb up to 72TB of data during its lifetime. This is only the second time we've encountered an entire product series that employs a blanket TBW rating. To put this into perspective, the 128GB OCZ VX500 from a recent review also features a 72 TBW rating, but the 1TB VX500 offers up to 592 TBW. 72TB of data writes may or may not sound like a lot to you, but this is a very low endurance rating compared to other 1TB SSDs.
How Intel's consumer SSDs expire once you surpass the endurance threshold is troubling. In an almost over-zealous move to protect user data, Intel instituted a feature on many of its existing SSDs that automatically switches it to a read-only mode once you surpass the endurance threshold (measured via the MWI SMART attribute). Surprisingly, the read-only state only lasts for a single boot cycle. After reboot, the SSD "locks" itself (which means you cannot access the data) to protect the user from any data loss due to the weakened flash. The operating system typically generates error notifications when an SSD switches into a read-only mode, so most users will restart without being aware that the SSD will be inaccessible upon the next reboot. The process to recover the data is unclear.
Higher-capacity SSDs provide more endurance than smaller models. It is a well-documented fact that most flash can easily outlast the endurance ratings, and Intel is probably erring on the side of caution with the low endurance ratings on its 1TB SSDs. In either case, the 600p's blanket endurance rating may impose a somewhat unneeded restriction on the potentially more-endurant high capacity 1TB SSDs. The Intel 335 Series famously used this technique, but in contrast, the 240GB 335 model delivered 10x the endurance of the new 600p NVMe SSD before retiring itself. We reached out to Intel to verify if the 600p also has this feature, but have yet to receive a response. (EDIT: Intel confirmed the nature of the endurance limit and provided an official response outlining the recovery procedure).
The 600p doesn't utilize a direct-to-die write scheme, so the first write goes to the SLC buffer before the controller flushes it to the TLC area for "long term" storage. This process doubles write amplification, thus magnifying the discouraging endurance situation.
Intel plans to bring the 600p to market in four capacities. The 128GB, 256GB and 512GB products are shipping now, but the 1TB model will enter the market later in 2016. Intel wrote the firmware for the SM2260 controller and paired it with 384Gbit 3D NAND flash running in 3-bit per cell (TLC) mode. Intel was only able to fit three NAND flash packages on the 600p due to the size constraints of the M.2 2280 single-sided form factor. As a result, the 8-channel controller only operates in 6-channel mode.
The odd 384Gbit (48GB) NAND die leads to somewhat exotic capacity points. We've already explored those with the MX300 that ships in 275GB, 525GB, 1050GB and 2TB capacities. Instead of choosing the same path, Intel adhered to standard sizes and rolled the extra capacity into a dedicated SLC cache area. The larger-than-normal SLC buffers should deliver exemplary performance, but that isn't always the case.
The 600p supports an internal AES 256-bit hardware encryption engine but does not support accelerated eDrive or other encryption services in Windows. For those features, you need the up-scale Pro 6000p model that also uses vPro encryption technology. In the SanDisk X400 review, we stated that companies should stop producing separate models for encrypted disks, and we still stand by that line of thought. At least Intel has a separate product line name to specify the encrypted models, unlike the X400.
Performance
The Intel 600p delivers better-than-SATA performance, which is a new marketing tagline for the next progression beyond hard-disk-replacement. Performance scales as the capacity increases, but the numbers are so far apart that we need to pick them apart by capacity rather than make blanket statements.
The 600p series uses a fixed-capacity SLC buffer that increases in size with each leap in capacity. The SSD writes incoming data to the SLC-programmed buffer to decrease media wear and increase performance. The 600p does not use a direct-to-die algorithm, which bypasses the SLC cache when the buffer is full like most other SSDs. As a result, when the buffer is full the incoming data must wait while the SSD expunges existing cached data. The "up to" performance is a measurement of the SLC buffer speed, and if you need to write data that exceeds the size of the buffer the performance will fluctuate. We'll explore that characteristic in our tests.
The 600p 128GB tackles sequential reads at 770 MB/s, but the sequential write performance is only 450 MB/s (less than most mainstream SATA 6Gb/s products). Intel spec’d the random performance at up to 35,000/91,000 read/write IOPS, and it has a 4GB SLC buffer.
The 600p 512GB increases sequential read performance up to 1,775 MB/s. The sequential write performance also increases to a peak of 560 MB/s, which is the same rating we often see attached to premium SATA 6Gb/s SSDs. The random performance is 128,000 IOPS for both reads and writes, and the 512GB has a spacious 17GB SLC buffer.
Pricing And Accessories
The 600p is cheap compared to other NVMe SSDs on the market. The series debuted with low MSRPs, but if you shop around, it's possible to find even lower prices. Newegg has the 128GB in stock at $66. The 256GB model shows up at $110 and the 512GB at $199. Amazon has the 512GB at $166.
The Intel 600p works with Intel's SSD Toolbox software, but the Toolbox doesn't support all of the features yet. The media wear-out indicator doesn't work, nor does the Optimize feature. Intel updated the software on 6/21/2016. The 600p also doesn't have an Intel NVMe driver. We suspect the performance will increase slightly with a custom NVMe driver for Windows. The embedded Windows NVMe driver works with the 600p, and that is what we used for testing.
Intel SSD owners also gain access to the company's data migration software that will clone the data from an existing drive to a new SSD. At the time of writing, the supported hardware list does not list the 600p as a compatible product, but we expect that to update in November 2016 (per the fine print at the bottom of the product brief).
Packaging
Intel assumes retail shoppers will know what the "SSD6" branding means on the front of the retail package. The back of the box features more information, but there are very few details about the 600p series (the one you are buying). The description reads:
"6 Series Added Boost For Better Responsiveness"
Given our findings, maybe Intel doesn't want you to know too much about this product other than the fact it is cheap. This is where things get really sticky. The Intel SSD 600p product page doesn't list any endurance ratings and neither does the official product brief. As a computer hardware journalist, I learned the thing to look for is what the company doesn't tell you. If you want to find the full specifications list for the 600p, you need to look at the ARK pages, which reveal the low endurance rating.
A paper manual ships with the drive and outlines the installation procedure and the warranty terms.
A Closer Look
The drive is a simple design with a controller, DRAM and NAND packages. The 256GB and 512GB drive look identical and are the two we have in-house for testing. Both models use three NAND flash packages on one side. Samsung, and other M.2 2280 products from other companies, use two NAND packages on one side, but Intel managed to fit more in the same footprint. The three NAND packages allow the SMI controller to run in 6-channel mode while most other M.2 controllers run in 4-channel mode.
