I use a Wii to watch netflix. It connects to the TV just fine. The controller is a litte bouncy, though, when you're too far from the TV. My wife has Parkinson's, so this is a bit of an issue, but she can still manage to use it from the opposite corner of the room, where she likes to sit.
And an added benefit is that she uses WiiFit and similar games. Some of them are excellent balance exercises. Others involve the large body movements that seem to be good as slowing the progression of the disease.
I've used an Asus Transformer with an HDMI cable to play anime from Crunchyroll on the TV. Works fine, but I have to get close to the TV to use the Transformer's touch screen.
I don't know whether the Wii does closed-captioning or subtitling.
Crunchyroll always does English subtitles -- the audio is all Japanese.
I managed to get to a shelter. That made a huge difference. Getting to a place where there was heat was essential. I remember looking out of one of the shelter's windows, and seeing ice everywhere. Crystal trees. It was beautiful. But it was austere beauty, deadly to be stranded in.
When the electricity came back I managed to be one of the first to get the plumbers in, as well as nine kilowatts of electric heaters. They managed to get the regular heating on after disconnecting two busted radiators. But it took ages before the hose was warm. I came down with hypothermia. If I had known the symptoms, I would have gotten out of there earlier. In case you need to know, before you die, you start t feel warm again, even though you are still cold. I was actually fooled into taking my coat off. I did finish a fair amount of clean-up but when I got back to my sister-in-law's apartment (they got electricity before we did) I had trouble walking I was so cold. It took me all night to get warm again.
I arrived at the airport, which was powered with emergency power, and tried calling my wife on my cellphone. Apparently cell phones still worked at the airport, because I reached my wife, who turned out to be at an emergency shelter at the hospital, which also had some kind of emergency power (she's a doctor there).
The first I really knew about the ice storm was in the newsreels on the flight from Heathrow, where I say huge hydro towers falling over one after another like dominos.
I lieved in Montreal during that blackout. The weather was fine that evening. I turned the power off on my computer (in case the power came on flaky) and went for a walk. A block or so away there was someone who had decided to sit on hos porch with a guitar. Several of us gathered around to listen. Much later I went to bed. In the dark, natch. It wasn't much of a problem for me, no.
But if it has been longer, and in midwinter, it would have been a problem.
Come to think of it, I've lived through such an event, too.
The ice storm of 1998. I missed the actual storm (I was in Oxford at the time), but I came home to the aftermath.The 9 centimetres of ice on everything had made power lines too heavy to support themselves, and the long-distance lines were out. I came home to a dark city. I called my wife from the airport on arrival (the phone system was still working -- there was still some power, but it had been directed to essential services, such as phones and hospitals.). The family had been forced out of the house by intense cold -- although we had an oil furnace, it turned out that the actual thermostat and burner used electricity to ignite the oil. Useless.
We were out of the house in an emergency shelter at a local hospital.
Now that was for a power outage of about ten days in the city. Electricity workers from the entire continent were flown in to repair the electrical systems. Some parts of Quebec were without power for about a month -- effectively evacuated into emergency shelters of various kinds.
I'm not sure the shelter system would have been sustainable for the six months expected from a serious solar storm. That one in 1989 was tiny compared with the one in 1859. Another one like the 1859 one could well occur this century. And we wouldn't be able to fly specialized emergency workers in from the whole continent. Every place will have its own problems to deal with.
Back in 1859 our technology was much less vulnerable. It's different now, and we should be trying to design such vulnerabilities out or our infrastructure as we continue to upgrade it in a relentless adoption of newer and newer technologies.
It's not just a nine-hour problem we may have to deal with.
Which is why, whenever I file a bug report, I make a point of asking what information I should provide that might help diagnose a problem. In case the developer is as clueless about responding to users as the typical user is about responding to developers.
Go to a bookstore. Browse to your heart's content. No one worries that you're secretly making copies while you browse. You can read any page you like. You're not limited to reading the first eight pages, which contain only front matter. Pick the books you'd like to read. Take them to the cashier. Tell them you'd like toe ebook version and hand over your ebook reader and some cash. They plug it in, and Lo, the book appears on your machine.
Why doesn't anyone think of doing it this way? I'd even pay a premium for the service of being able to browse freely while choosing what I want to buy.
I believe it was Heisenberg that formulated QM as infinite matrices, rather than waves. And Schroedinger came up with Schroedinger's equation, which is a partial differential wave function.
Then Dirac came on the scene and formulated it all with abstract infinite-dimensional linear spaces, and pointed out that, depending on the coordinate systems you used on those spaces, you could get either Heisenberg's formulation or Schroedinger's.
Let Tim Gurney have a look at How To Design Programs, which is free to download and cheap on paper.
It teaches Scheme, which is an easy way to get a toe in the programming door, and you *can* subsequently do really awesome things with it, not just make trivial games.
There's a huge difference between suppressing comments because they point out real flaws in software, and suppressing them because they say the software sucks big ones.
The second kind of comment is not useful.
Unless, of course the purpose of the software is to blow instead of suck -- then it's a bug,
the source code can only tell what the code does. It cannot tell you what it is intended to do. It cannot tell you which apparent features are really bugs.
Slashdot Mirror
I get books on my kobo ereader. The local libraries will lend ebooks for it, too. And I can adjust the print size as large as I want.
-- hendrik
I use a Wii to watch netflix. It connects to the TV just fine. The controller is a litte bouncy, though, when you're too far from the TV. My wife has Parkinson's, so this is a bit of an issue, but she can still manage to use it from the opposite corner of the room, where she likes to sit.
And an added benefit is that she uses WiiFit and similar games. Some of them are excellent balance exercises. Others involve the large body movements that seem to be good as slowing the progression of the disease.
I've used an Asus Transformer with an HDMI cable to play anime from Crunchyroll on the TV. Works fine, but I have to get close to the TV to use the Transformer's touch screen.
I don't know whether the Wii does closed-captioning or subtitling.
Crunchyroll always does English subtitles -- the audio is all Japanese.
-- hendrik
I managed to get to a shelter. That made a huge difference. Getting to a place where there was heat was essential. I remember looking out of one of the shelter's windows, and seeing ice everywhere. Crystal trees. It was beautiful. But it was austere beauty, deadly to be stranded in.
When the electricity came back I managed to be one of the first to get the plumbers in, as well as nine kilowatts of electric heaters. They managed to get the regular heating on after disconnecting two busted radiators. But it took ages before the hose was warm. I came down with hypothermia. If I had known the symptoms, I would have gotten out of there earlier. In case you need to know, before you die, you start t feel warm again, even though you are still cold. I was actually fooled into taking my coat off. I did finish a fair amount of clean-up but when I got back to my sister-in-law's apartment (they got electricity before we did) I had trouble walking I was so cold. It took me all night to get warm again.
I arrived at the airport, which was powered with emergency power, and tried calling my wife on my cellphone. Apparently cell phones still worked at the airport, because I reached my wife, who turned out to be at an emergency shelter at the hospital, which also had some kind of emergency power (she's a doctor there).
The first I really knew about the ice storm was in the newsreels on the flight from Heathrow, where I say huge hydro towers falling over one after another like dominos.
-- hendrik
Sounds like you had basic necessities, such as heat. Without that my place became unlivable.
And did you have a huge stock of nonspoiling food? Or did you have the miracle of an accessible functinoing groceryy store?
-- hendrik
I lieved in Montreal during that blackout. The weather was fine that evening. I turned the power off on my computer (in case the power came on flaky) and went for a walk. A block or so away there was someone who had decided to sit on hos porch with a guitar. Several of us gathered around to listen.
Much later I went to bed. In the dark, natch.
It wasn't much of a problem for me, no.
But if it has been longer, and in midwinter, it would have been a problem.
Come to think of it, I've lived through such an event, too.
The ice storm of 1998. I missed the actual storm (I was in Oxford at the time), but I came home to the aftermath.The 9 centimetres of ice on everything had made power lines too heavy to support themselves, and the long-distance lines were out. I came home to a dark city. I called my wife from the airport on arrival (the phone system was still working -- there was still some power, but it had been directed to essential services, such as phones and hospitals.). The family had been forced out of the house by intense cold -- although we had an oil furnace, it turned out that the actual thermostat and burner used electricity to ignite the oil. Useless.
We were out of the house in an emergency shelter at a local hospital.
Now that was for a power outage of about ten days in the city. Electricity workers from the entire continent were flown in to repair the electrical systems. Some parts of Quebec were without power for about a month -- effectively evacuated into emergency shelters of various kinds.
I'm not sure the shelter system would have been sustainable for the six months expected from a serious solar storm. That one in 1989 was tiny compared with the one in 1859. Another one like the 1859 one could well occur this century. And we wouldn't be able to fly specialized emergency workers in from the whole continent. Every place will have its own problems to deal with.
Back in 1859 our technology was much less vulnerable. It's different now, and we should be trying to design such vulnerabilities out or our infrastructure as we continue to upgrade it in a relentless adoption of newer and newer technologies.
It's not just a nine-hour problem we may have to deal with.
-- hendrik
Users will do things the devellopers never dreamed of, because no develpoer can have the level of ignorance of the software that the user has.
-- hendrik
It may or may not be a fair request, but it's only useful if the developer tells the user what information he needs and how to go about getting it.
-- hendrik
Which is why, whenever I file a bug report, I make a point of asking what information I should provide that might help diagnose a problem. In case the developer is as clueless about responding to users as the typical user is about responding to developers.
-- hendrik
The big question which the original article doesn't address is:
Does SuSE expect the owner of the machine to specify the top-level signing keys? Or does it expect Microsoft's to be frozen into the hardware?
I've been using that symbol for decades as a hand-written abbreviation for "Thursday". Similarly for Tuesday.
Google may not even have been aware that the FBI was passing information on to the NSA.
I've heard that Austin's motto is "Help Keep Austin Weird!" I don't know whether that was a joke or for real? I'd like to hear from someone who knows.
-- hendrik
The internet is more like an ocean than a highway, anyway. Complete with surfers and pirates.
-- hendrik
Go to a bookstore. Browse to your heart's content. No one worries that you're secretly making copies while you browse. You can read any page you like. You're not limited to reading the first eight pages, which contain only front matter. Pick the books you'd like to read. Take them to the cashier. Tell them you'd like toe ebook version and hand over your ebook reader and some cash. They plug it in, and Lo, the book appears on your machine.
Why doesn't anyone think of doing it this way? I'd even pay a premium for the service of being able to browse freely while choosing what I want to buy.
I believe it was Heisenberg that formulated QM as infinite matrices, rather than waves. And Schroedinger came up with Schroedinger's equation, which is a partial differential wave function.
Then Dirac came on the scene and formulated it all with abstract infinite-dimensional linear spaces, and pointed out that, depending on the coordinate systems you used on those spaces, you could get either Heisenberg's formulation or Schroedinger's.
Let Tim Gurney have a look at How To Design Programs, which is free to download and cheap on paper.
It teaches Scheme, which is an easy way to get a toe in the programming door, and you *can* subsequently do really awesome things with it, not just make trivial games.
See http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/
-- hendrik
Any chance Zebra mussels would do as well? We got lots of them\.
That could even be a routine part of code review. The programmer gets the documentation, and gets to say, "That's not what I meant at all...."
Etc., etc.
There's a huge difference between suppressing comments because they point out real flaws in software, and suppressing them because they say the software sucks big ones.
The second kind of comment is not useful.
Unless, of course the purpose of the software is to blow instead of suck -- then it's a bug,
the source code can only tell what the code does. It cannot tell you what it is intended to do. It cannot tell you which apparent features are really bugs.
says my son.
Read Rivelli's book on Loop Quantum Gravity. Then explaiin it to the rest of us.
I use Windows XP to download and (alas!) custom-encrypt epubs.
I have no interest in buying a new machine just for this purpose.
I might try going to emulation, keepng a clean copy oof the entire system from which to start every time.
If that doesn't work I might decide to buy only DRM-free books from the likes of TOR or Baen.
Thanks for the clarification.
-- hendrik