I'm pretty sure the ability to create a real, physical object based on a series of 1s and 0s in a file is worthy of being called an invention. Sure, you could consider it an "improvement" on the printing press, but things like the MakerBot are really something unique on their own.
Back when I was a phone grunt, I first started out by doing homework. Then they said no, no home work allowed. No reading any more either. So I switched to doodling. I, too, got hit with the "skill limit" warning because my doodles were too good. Then they forbade drawing entirely for anyone. I switched to origami for a long time - just something to keep my hands busy - and when they told me to stop with the origami, I finally quit. I have no regrets.
These days, many call centers are actually distributed, so unless your supervisor is monitoring you with a web cam, they really can't tell what you're doing in your home office. I think that might finally be the end of that particularly vile variation of micro-management.
Did I get first post? I never even check that sort of thing. I just know that if a story has no comments on it yet, that's probably a lie and proclaiming "first post!" is going to either get me nuked to oblivion or make me look like a fool. So I don't.
Actually, AdBlock crashed yesterday too! (In addition to all the regularly schedule dying Chrome pages.) I was rather amused by suddenly seeing advertisements in places I hadn't realized they existed, like on right sidebar of Facebook.
Eh, I have 16 GB on my primary system so that's not an issue. I'm on the much lower end Thinkpad right now, however, with only 4GB of RAM, and I'm not really noticing any performance hit.
I keep getting nasty "page has stopped responding" on everything from Facebook to Gmail. I keep hoping the flurry of updates they're sending out will fix it. This just started in the last week or two and it's getting quite frustrating. Hopefully the Google guys are getting the crash reports I keep filing...
Hopefully this speeds up Firefox considerably. I stopped using it because it was so much slower than Chrome at some basic tasks. But considering Chrome is incredibly unstable on Windows 8, I'm willing to give Firefox another chance.
Awwwwww dangit. I, too, usually tossed twenty bucks at the Humble Bundles even if I didn't want to play the games. But if they're including games with DRM, that's right out of the question.
I'm in Georgia. Many small merchants here charge a 25 cent fee on any credit card purchase under $5, because they still have to eat the fee from Visa/Mastercard and for a $1 purchase, they'd make no profit. Or even better, one take-out restaurant gives you a 5% discount when you pay with cash. I expect more retailers will go along with a similar things in other states where this is now legal.
On the other hand, merchants will probably eat the fee for very large purchases still. You can't expect someone to pay for a $1000 car repair in cash. Also, store-brand credit cards better not charge this fee. I have a Macy's card because I got 20% off my Christmas shopping last fall, but I'd happily cancel it and cut it up if they want to add on an extra fee for using it, instead.
One of our clients found this out the hard way. They switched to a cloud based app, and even with a fiber connection they still have a lot of slowness and downtime. Why? Because the cloud provider was too damn greedy and signed too many clients up at once, and they just don't have the infrastructure on THEIR end to handle it. We're in negotiations to try to get a locally hosted version of the app, if it is at all possible, so we don't get unhappy emails every five minutes that the cloud app is being "slow."
They also incorrectly state that plant viruses commonly infect animals, which is not true. Plant viruses do frequently use insects as their vectors, but it's farm more common that any given bacteria will infect both a plant and animal alike than it is a virus. The insects who carry the viruses are generally not affected. Similarly, a human who ingests a cauliflower infected with the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus is probably not going to notice the difference.
The problem is that any new program will be commissioned by and paid for by Republicans. That means everything that can be outsourced will be, and we all know what the quality control on outsourced code is like.
Even if they did manage to come up with a brilliant GotV system, they are a dying party. Those under 30 went 2/3 for Obama this election. Conservatives have lost the moral war on gay marriage and they're not doing themselves any favor on other subjects, like rape and abortion. As for the economy, they need to stop pandering to their fellow rich white guys and recognize that consumers are the real "job creators" - not the investors who shove all their extra earnings into tax shelters abroad.
That's also why bad writing hits us so hard. Skilled writers make the spoken and internal dialog of their characters flow naturally, observing and showing the story as it unfolds before them. Unskilled writers stuff words and thoughts into their characters mouths and minds to simply tell the story.
The silver is worn/chipped off on mine where I rest my thumb, but it hasn't broken yet. I do sometimes hit one of the extra keys when I don't intend to, accidentally backspacing, but that's all user error.
Yep, everyone is different. I've found the split keyboards to be difficult, but I use a "comfort curve" that has the letters swooped down in an arc slightly, and found that works for me.
I had to switch to an ergo mouse. Nothing else fixed my wrist pain - not exercise balls, not a wrist brace, not an ergo keyboard. I've been using the Vertical Mouse 4 but I think any ergo mouse can offer improvement. Just find one that's comfortable and works.
Our BES server was retired last year. First it was turned into a temporary camera server, until we decided a Win7 desktop with a good video card could handle it better. Then it was turned into some weird printer app server for a while, until we decided that a desktop could handle that better too. We thought about virtualizing it, just in case someone ever wanted to get a Blackberry again, then we realized how dumb that was and decommissioned it for good.
A shame, it was one of the least temperamental servers we had.
I've been arguing that we're fighting this battle the wrong way. I think you should have any kind of weapon you want - assault, semi automatic, hundred round magazine, hardened steel katana, whatever - provided you have purchased the appropriate lockable storage unit to match it. The tragedy of Sandy Hook could have been prevented if the mother had had her guns stored properly. Modern day gun safes include biometric finger printer readers that open in seconds but are tough to crack unless you're the actual owner.
Tyranny is the crap going on in Syria right now, where the government is indiscriminately blasting civilian neighborhoods in retaliation for assisting rebels. 150 civilians are dying daily there because of attacks from government forces.
There is a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now, including here in the US, but very little falls under the formal realm of tyranny. When the Army sets fire to your home because your neighbor is printing magazine clips from a 3D printer, you have the right to start calling it tyranny.
Lots of folks were not aware that you could change your Office Assistant to something a lot less annoying. I changed mine to the ginger cat, who did the normal office suggestions, but then when idle batted a ball of yarn around the screen or took a nap. There was also a puppy and a globe. I found the kitty to be much less annoying, probably because it's hard for an animated cat to be condescending.
If it's just counting the number of sips, it's not distinguishing between a long drink or a short drink. Twenty sips of a Long Island Iced Tea is much more potent than twenty sips of a glass of wine or a beer. And shots are tossing back an ounce or more of alcohol in one giant "sip" - when they've been diluted into a mixed drink, that one sip easily turns into ten.
These crystals aren't heat sinks. The MIT lab is creating a "heat" that is actually just really fast sound. This can then be manipulated with their special thermocrystals. Now, if they can create a way to turn normal waste heat into this "fast sound" heat, we'll open up a wealth of practical applications.
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I'm pretty sure the ability to create a real, physical object based on a series of 1s and 0s in a file is worthy of being called an invention. Sure, you could consider it an "improvement" on the printing press, but things like the MakerBot are really something unique on their own.
Back when I was a phone grunt, I first started out by doing homework. Then they said no, no home work allowed. No reading any more either. So I switched to doodling. I, too, got hit with the "skill limit" warning because my doodles were too good. Then they forbade drawing entirely for anyone. I switched to origami for a long time - just something to keep my hands busy - and when they told me to stop with the origami, I finally quit. I have no regrets.
These days, many call centers are actually distributed, so unless your supervisor is monitoring you with a web cam, they really can't tell what you're doing in your home office. I think that might finally be the end of that particularly vile variation of micro-management.
Did I get first post? I never even check that sort of thing. I just know that if a story has no comments on it yet, that's probably a lie and proclaiming "first post!" is going to either get me nuked to oblivion or make me look like a fool. So I don't.
Actually, AdBlock crashed yesterday too! (In addition to all the regularly schedule dying Chrome pages.) I was rather amused by suddenly seeing advertisements in places I hadn't realized they existed, like on right sidebar of Facebook.
Eh, I have 16 GB on my primary system so that's not an issue. I'm on the much lower end Thinkpad right now, however, with only 4GB of RAM, and I'm not really noticing any performance hit.
I keep getting nasty "page has stopped responding" on everything from Facebook to Gmail. I keep hoping the flurry of updates they're sending out will fix it. This just started in the last week or two and it's getting quite frustrating. Hopefully the Google guys are getting the crash reports I keep filing...
Hopefully this speeds up Firefox considerably. I stopped using it because it was so much slower than Chrome at some basic tasks. But considering Chrome is incredibly unstable on Windows 8, I'm willing to give Firefox another chance.
Awwwwww dangit. I, too, usually tossed twenty bucks at the Humble Bundles even if I didn't want to play the games. But if they're including games with DRM, that's right out of the question.
And SE didn't listen, and FFXIV flopped. At least for the 2.0 reboot they are taking that kind of feedback much more seriously.
Or so I heard on NPR this morning. They're probably salivating at the prospects right now.
I'm in Georgia. Many small merchants here charge a 25 cent fee on any credit card purchase under $5, because they still have to eat the fee from Visa/Mastercard and for a $1 purchase, they'd make no profit. Or even better, one take-out restaurant gives you a 5% discount when you pay with cash. I expect more retailers will go along with a similar things in other states where this is now legal.
On the other hand, merchants will probably eat the fee for very large purchases still. You can't expect someone to pay for a $1000 car repair in cash. Also, store-brand credit cards better not charge this fee. I have a Macy's card because I got 20% off my Christmas shopping last fall, but I'd happily cancel it and cut it up if they want to add on an extra fee for using it, instead.
One of our clients found this out the hard way. They switched to a cloud based app, and even with a fiber connection they still have a lot of slowness and downtime. Why? Because the cloud provider was too damn greedy and signed too many clients up at once, and they just don't have the infrastructure on THEIR end to handle it. We're in negotiations to try to get a locally hosted version of the app, if it is at all possible, so we don't get unhappy emails every five minutes that the cloud app is being "slow."
They also incorrectly state that plant viruses commonly infect animals, which is not true. Plant viruses do frequently use insects as their vectors, but it's farm more common that any given bacteria will infect both a plant and animal alike than it is a virus. The insects who carry the viruses are generally not affected. Similarly, a human who ingests a cauliflower infected with the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus is probably not going to notice the difference.
The problem is that any new program will be commissioned by and paid for by Republicans. That means everything that can be outsourced will be, and we all know what the quality control on outsourced code is like.
Even if they did manage to come up with a brilliant GotV system, they are a dying party. Those under 30 went 2/3 for Obama this election. Conservatives have lost the moral war on gay marriage and they're not doing themselves any favor on other subjects, like rape and abortion. As for the economy, they need to stop pandering to their fellow rich white guys and recognize that consumers are the real "job creators" - not the investors who shove all their extra earnings into tax shelters abroad.
That's also why bad writing hits us so hard. Skilled writers make the spoken and internal dialog of their characters flow naturally, observing and showing the story as it unfolds before them. Unskilled writers stuff words and thoughts into their characters mouths and minds to simply tell the story.
Now they need to fix the Catalyst driver to stop crashing on Windows 8. This is getting annoying, especially the BDOD that pop up every other day.
The silver is worn/chipped off on mine where I rest my thumb, but it hasn't broken yet. I do sometimes hit one of the extra keys when I don't intend to, accidentally backspacing, but that's all user error.
Yep, everyone is different. I've found the split keyboards to be difficult, but I use a "comfort curve" that has the letters swooped down in an arc slightly, and found that works for me.
I had to switch to an ergo mouse. Nothing else fixed my wrist pain - not exercise balls, not a wrist brace, not an ergo keyboard. I've been using the Vertical Mouse 4 but I think any ergo mouse can offer improvement. Just find one that's comfortable and works.
Our BES server was retired last year. First it was turned into a temporary camera server, until we decided a Win7 desktop with a good video card could handle it better. Then it was turned into some weird printer app server for a while, until we decided that a desktop could handle that better too. We thought about virtualizing it, just in case someone ever wanted to get a Blackberry again, then we realized how dumb that was and decommissioned it for good.
A shame, it was one of the least temperamental servers we had.
I've been arguing that we're fighting this battle the wrong way. I think you should have any kind of weapon you want - assault, semi automatic, hundred round magazine, hardened steel katana, whatever - provided you have purchased the appropriate lockable storage unit to match it. The tragedy of Sandy Hook could have been prevented if the mother had had her guns stored properly. Modern day gun safes include biometric finger printer readers that open in seconds but are tough to crack unless you're the actual owner.
Tyranny is the crap going on in Syria right now, where the government is indiscriminately blasting civilian neighborhoods in retaliation for assisting rebels. 150 civilians are dying daily there because of attacks from government forces.
There is a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now, including here in the US, but very little falls under the formal realm of tyranny. When the Army sets fire to your home because your neighbor is printing magazine clips from a 3D printer, you have the right to start calling it tyranny.
Lots of folks were not aware that you could change your Office Assistant to something a lot less annoying. I changed mine to the ginger cat, who did the normal office suggestions, but then when idle batted a ball of yarn around the screen or took a nap. There was also a puppy and a globe. I found the kitty to be much less annoying, probably because it's hard for an animated cat to be condescending.
If it's just counting the number of sips, it's not distinguishing between a long drink or a short drink. Twenty sips of a Long Island Iced Tea is much more potent than twenty sips of a glass of wine or a beer. And shots are tossing back an ounce or more of alcohol in one giant "sip" - when they've been diluted into a mixed drink, that one sip easily turns into ten.
These crystals aren't heat sinks. The MIT lab is creating a "heat" that is actually just really fast sound. This can then be manipulated with their special thermocrystals. Now, if they can create a way to turn normal waste heat into this "fast sound" heat, we'll open up a wealth of practical applications.