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The digital video recorder has been around for quite a while now and it revolutionized home media. The way we watch TV completely changed when we no longer had to pop in a blank tape and manually plan our recordings. Now we just set a show to record whenever it happens to be on.

Sling has been rolling out a cloud DVR over the past couple of months, and I've been using it since it arrived -- so, around two months or so. I'd like to give you a bit of the ups and downs from my experience.

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With the future of Ubuntu uncertain, and with Canonical abandoning the Unity desktop environment, now is a great time to try Linux Mint. Since it has Ubuntu as a base, but instead uses Mate or Cinnamon -- environments with a future -- it should be an easy transition for users of Canonical's Linux-based operating system.

Today, the upcoming version of Linux Mint, 18.2 "Sonya," achieves BETA release. It is based on Ubuntu 16.04 and uses Linux kernel 4.8. You can download either the Mate or Cinnamon ISOs now. Yeah, its a pre-release operating system so you should proceed with caution, but historically, these BETA releases have proven quite stable -- you will probably be fine.

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"Don’t reinvent the wheel", the idiom cautions us. It’s a phrase that seems wise on the surface, a reminder not to spend time creating something that already exists. Too often, however, the idiom has been deployed as an admonition, a warning to not upset the way things are, even when those things are outmoded or just plain wrong. Creative engineering minds, thankfully, generally ignore that kind of advice or we would all still try to get around on wooden rims and spokes. Wheels -- and many other things -- do frequently need to be reinvented to take advantage of advances in technology and changes in customer needs.

Technology companies are at such a moment of inflection now. Even as they invested in monolithic applications, they have had to shoulder the limitations imposed by the size of their code and their inability to handle independent scaling. Many now understand that they will need to transition from a monolithic application to a microservices architecture in order to better position themselves for future growth and product development. A microservices architecture offers greater global accessibility and enhanced functionality for customers. It makes it possible to iterate new features and improvements as they naturally occur and creates a flexible platform for the integration of future products and features.

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Amazon is slashing the price of a Prime subscription for US customers in receipt of government assistance. Customers with an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card are eligible to have their monthly subscription discounted from $10.99 to $5.99.

There are no restrictions on the cheaper Prime subscriptions, and it includes Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Reading, Prime Photos and free shipping just like its full-price counterpart, but Amazon points out that EBT cannot be used to pay for membership.

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The launch date for the OnePlus 5 has officially been announced. The big day is June 20, and the latest flagship will be revealed online after an exciting teaser campaign, but there are also 10 pop-up events taking place around the world.

This time around, OnePlus is referring to its upcoming smartphone as "our next flagship phone," with no reference to it being a "flagship killer" as has been the case in the past. While details keep trickling out about the OnePlus 5, in announcing the launch date, OnePlus is giving little more away other than suggesting the importance of the camera by saying: "Focus on what matters."

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Security researchers have warned that more dangerous malware has been released from the recent NSA dump that resulted in the WannaCry ransomware outbreak.

Experts at Secarma have revealed that the attack could be hiding another malicious package, which could be as dangerous as WannaCry.

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DigitalOcean, the cloud platform for software developers is launching a free Cloud Firewalls service to reduce the potential attack surface.

Developers can deploy the service quickly without installing or configuring any software, and are able to define what ports are visible on their cloud servers -- known as Droplets -- to minimize risk.

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With businesses under pressure to secure their data and control who accesses it, there’s increased demand for visibility into where information is going.

Information security company Globalscape is launching a a new reporting platform called EFT Insight. This uses a combination of business and operational intelligence to ensure information exchanges are functioning properly and securely, alerting network administrators to any conditions that could compromise security or violate service level agreements.

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In its quest to make its laptops smaller, lighter and faster, Apple has made modern MacBooks harder -- if not impossible -- to upgrade. Take my mid-2013 MacBook Air for example. It comes with an SSD design for which there are only a handful of aftermarket options around -- and the cost of buying new storage may be higher than what my laptop is now worth. Some newer MacBooks are even worse though, leaving no such option on the table.

TarDisk is a very interesting alternative to the replacement route. It fits into the SD card slot and can be used either as an external drive, that you would not even know is there, or as combined storage. In the "Pear" mode, as TarDisk calls it, the internal drive and the TarDisk are merged, giving you a single drive with their combined capacity to play with. And, unlike a replacement drive, it does not put your warranty at risk.

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With growing numbers of data breaches and increasing pressure from regulations like GDPR, companies need to enact stricter security policies.

Object and cloud storage specialist Scality is addressing this with the launch of Scality RING7, a new software-defined, multi-site file system and object storage solution.

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Kodi has really hit it big in the past couple of years. While the home theater software is great for playing local content, its rise in popularity is largely down to Kodi's support for third-party add-ons that make it possible to stream any audio and video, including the latest blockbuster movies and TV shows.

The process for installing third-party add-ons varies depending on the add-on, but assuming you’re running Kodi 17 Krypton (or later), we'll show you the easiest way to install all of the most popular ones.

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Google has developed an educational program with the aim of helping children make better use of the internet. It's a drive to "help kids learn how to be smart, positive and kind online, just like we teach them to be offline" and it's called Be Internet Awesome.

Pavni Diwanji, vice president of Engineering For Kids and Families at Google says: "We need to provide guidance as they learn to make their own smart decisions online." The program has been developed with a number of key online safety experts and includes an educational game called Interland.

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Businesses around the world are failing to benefit enough from so-called "digital transformation" ideas due to a lack of effective leadership.

That's according to a new survey from Wipro Digital has found a major shortfall in terms of progress in embracing new technologies and business processes in the workforce, despite the promise of huge investment in these areas.

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Stress at work is on the rise and it’s driven by factors both inside and outside the workplace according to a new study of 1,000 US office staff.

The report by online learning company Udemy reveals the number one stress factor outside of work is the current political climate (50 percent), while inside it's the fear of losing jobs to AI or new technology (43 percent).

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Google has started to push out updates to the latest version of its web browser -- Chrome 59 for Windows, Linux and macOS. The update includes a number of important security fixes, but also sees the arrival of Google's Material Design on the desktop.

The Material look is one that will be very familiar to Android users, as well as anyone who uses Google's various online services. But Google is not quite ready to give its desktop browser a full makeover yet.

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