> I'd be even extremely gratefull if someone could point me to a way to set the brightness in 'smaller steps' than is currently possible with Fn+Up/Down.
Try sunglasses. But note that polarized ones might give you problems with LCDs.
Well there are a fair number of extra "standards" that might be useful for WiFi, in addition to the one I was talking about (a standard so that guest users can have secure WiFi at Starbucks/Hyatt/BK/etc, without having to somehow enter passwords for each site - just like users can have secure https connections to websites without having to enter passphrases).
For example: a standard for users to find out more information about the wifi service they are connecting to (T&C and perhaps other services available, or even a donation page). I've suggested something like https://here/ or http://here/. But that requires the reservation of the.here TLD for special use ala RFC1918 IP addresses, I've actually tried getting the ICANN to do that but they seem to be more interested in creating "Yet Another Dot Com"s). Once you have something like a.here TLD you could have defacto standards for controlling airconditioners, jukeboxes, getting menus in restaurants and ordering stuff. All without forcing a http redirection like nocatauth and having users remember different domains for each place they go to if they want to come back to the "starting page".
1) One other difference is the image/light from many screens tends to flicker.
Many CRTs will flicker - the refresh rate is typically from 60-85Hz. The LCD panel backlight might also flicker a bit too. I'm not sure about the OLED tech.
For the people who say you can't see the difference, just wave your hand in front of the screen. Then go out in daylight and wave your hand. Notice a difference?
Alternatively, look at the screen from the side of your eye - for many people the image will not appear to be as "stable" or "steady" as a wall.
2) For a lot of display tech, the blacks aren't very black, so to have a high contrast ratio they make the whites much brighter and that could hurt your eyes more (compare the brightness of your display's whites with the brightness of a piece of white paper held up next to it).
Apparently with OLEDs the blacks should be much blacker than LCD blacks. But I suspect they're still going to be blindingly bright.
Anyway, you could try turning the brightness down so that the standard white on your display is no brighter than the white on a sheet of paper. Alternatively change the colour scheme so that the "text background whites" aren't so bright - make them a darker grey.
I've got my brightness set to 10 out of 100, and the text bankground white is still brighter than white paper lit by the flourescent lamps above. 100/100 is really too bright:).
There's not going to be a big difference between a photon flung straight into your eyes and one that's reflected off something.
A red photon of X wavelength of the same energy will still be perceived the same whether it was reflected or not.
Now the difference could be in the spectrum.
The light from LEDs or CRT phosphors are more likely to be rather "narrow band" in spectrum. Basically the colours are created by having 3 narrow "mountains" of differing heights corresponding to Red, Green and Blue.
Whereas white light (or light from blackbody sources) reflecting off various stuff is more likely to generate wider "mountains".
I'm not sure if this will cause a perceivable difference in the generated image on screens. But I'm pretty sure there's a difference if you use the light for illuminating stuff e.g. a very narrow band red pigment lit by a real white light source will appear red, but could appear black under "white" light that's generated by red+green+blue LEDs (which is one of the reasons why white LED flashlights use phosphors).
Anyway the last I used it, when I try to save an email draft while working on it, it closes the draft. The KDE people seem to think that just because I want to save my work it means that I want to close it too.
It should probably be fixed by now, but what it shows to me is how seriously they value their users work - not seriously enough.
As it is, I'm going to have to assume that most apps are NOT written sensibly.
FWIW, so far my windows, Linux and *BSD machines have not crashed on me for months:). But back when I was using Opensuse 10.x, it did lock up on me a few times, maybe it was an interaction with vmware GSX (which I was running on it).
More likely it just stops the damaged cells from committing suicide.
Any increase in cancer rates shouldn't be a big problem for mice, since most mice have a max lifespan of 2-3 years anyway.
That said, not all damaged cells would end up as cancer, or even nonmalignant tumours. They could just be different from normal in a nonlethal or "big problem" way.
If that's the case then does that mean that if copying the NPG/MPAA/RIAA stuff is hard, requires a great deal of skill and is a creative process, that automatically makes it a new work protected by copyright law?
Or somehow that's only true if you steal from the public?
Note that in my opinion it's stealing from the public if the public effectively no longer has free access to works that should be in the public domain[1]. Whereas it's copying if the company still has free access to its own originals/copies.
[1] You have to pay a fee to view the public domain work, and you aren't allowed to take pictures, and you can't take pictures of the owner's pictures, or make copies of them.
One problem with sharing WiFi is there doesn't seem to be an _easy_ way to do it so that your guest's traffic is secure from another guest.
I believe that if you use a passphrase that's shared, you need to figure out a way to get the passphrase to the users. But IIRC all the users sharing that passphrase can in theory decrypt each other's stuff.
For protection against that, you need to do something like create a dummy WPA account. But you'd still have the problem of getting the credentials to the users. Perhaps Windows+OSX+Desktop Linux could get together and standardize on something by default.
Yeah, and some of us just bother about the content/post and not the messenger, much less their gender or sexual orientation (or whether they're a Slashdot "Friend" or "Foe").
If the content is incorrect, then some correction is fine or even a rebuke if it appears to be very sloppy work. If it is flameworthy then flame away;). If it is good but scored poorly, then it gets a "Mod Parent Up!".
If you believe in the usual reincarnation stuff, _logically_ they should be further up on the ladder of enlightenment.
After all I'm pretty sure they don't experience cravings for as many things as humans do and thus experience less suffering.
Given a few more rebirth cycles they might end up as viruses which crave even less. If they keep on that path they'll achieve Nirvana (or at least an exit from Samsara).
So I doubt they'd mind that much. If you have no mind it doesn't matter;).
> Still pretty annoying but as you say you can usually recover by killing and restarting X.
a) If you are a "Desktop Linux" user running actual Desktop applications, that means you lose most of your unsaved work (if there is a way to not lose the unsaved work, please let me know). b) If you use X as just a way to run screen/vi/emacs and browsers, then you are less affected.
Basically if I let my mom/uncle/aunt use "Desktop Linux" and X locks up, it's effectively as bad as a BSOD for them.
Saying X freezing is not a problem since you can usually recover by killing and restarting it is like saying that Windows 95 is stable as long as you regularly shutdown/exit to dos and type win to restart it[1].
[1] you could actually do that in the old days of Win 95:).
> The shuttle was originally conceived as a cheap way to get to orbit
I'm not sure about that. It's hard (impossible?) for the shuttle to be cheaper at doing what the simpler rockets can do - e.g. send stuff to orbit and leave them there.
But what the shuttle can do that "normal" space rockets can't is bring satellites (and any other fairly big stuff) _from_ orbit back down to earth intact. This was (is?) probably an important requirement. Given that requirement, the shuttle doesn't look so ridiculous.
The reusable = cheap seems to be more of a cover story. Given current tech, reusable = re-entry heat shielding, extra weight and complexity = very expensive.
Note that in legal terms a Company is different from a Cooperative, even though a Cooperative could also be considered a group of people working towards a shared goal.
But I have XP in "classic mode", MenuShowDelay set to 1 (you can download TweakUI from Microsoft which allows you to change this and many other things with a more friendly interface than using the registry editor) and I also have
Which might help a bit in making things more snappy.
The other thing is the latest version of Kubuntu somehow annoyed me enough so that I wiped it and installed Ubuntu (gnome) instead. I had always preferred KDE to gnome, till now. It felt like the KDE bunch were trying to make their latest KDE as annoying as Vista. I suppose it's just not to my taste.
Of course not. They're firing 5000 employees in _anticipation_ of a decline in revenues and downturns are always good excuses to get rid of excess staff that hopefully a company doesn't need.
Very many companies use economic downturns as an excuse to slash jobs worldwide, even if they are doing OK and can actually be profitable keeping those jobs.
Go look at the figures. They declared a net income of USD4 billion for the _quarter_ (3 months ending Dec 2008) on the same day they declared they were slashing 5000 jobs.
Maybe Microsoft were paying each of those 5000 people USD3.2 million a year on average (USD800k a quarter), but I doubt it.
They're not experiencing financial difficulties. They're anticipating them. Whether or not they will encounter them is a different matter.
They're like a rich man cutting down expenditure "just in case". Not like someone in debt and having to live on bread and water.
If you still don't see the difference I'm not sure how to better explain it.
Slashdot Mirror
The blacks should be blacker, but I'm suspecting the OLED whites would be blindingly bright.
So you're going to have many digit contrast ratios that the marketing and advertising people are going to love.
> I'd be even extremely gratefull if someone could point me to a way to set the brightness in 'smaller steps' than is currently possible with Fn+Up/Down.
Try sunglasses. But note that polarized ones might give you problems with LCDs.
Well there are a fair number of extra "standards" that might be useful for WiFi, in addition to the one I was talking about (a standard so that guest users can have secure WiFi at Starbucks/Hyatt/BK/etc, without having to somehow enter passwords for each site - just like users can have secure https connections to websites without having to enter passphrases).
.here TLD for special use ala RFC1918 IP addresses, I've actually tried getting the ICANN to do that but they seem to be more interested in creating "Yet Another Dot Com"s). Once you have something like a .here TLD you could have defacto standards for controlling airconditioners, jukeboxes, getting menus in restaurants and ordering stuff. All without forcing a http redirection like nocatauth and having users remember different domains for each place they go to if they want to come back to the "starting page".
For example: a standard for users to find out more information about the wifi service they are connecting to (T&C and perhaps other services available, or even a donation page). I've suggested something like https://here/ or http://here/. But that requires the reservation of the
WiFi is so much crappier than it could be.
1) One other difference is the image/light from many screens tends to flicker.
:).
Many CRTs will flicker - the refresh rate is typically from 60-85Hz. The LCD panel backlight might also flicker a bit too. I'm not sure about the OLED tech.
For the people who say you can't see the difference, just wave your hand in front of the screen. Then go out in daylight and wave your hand. Notice a difference?
Alternatively, look at the screen from the side of your eye - for many people the image will not appear to be as "stable" or "steady" as a wall.
2) For a lot of display tech, the blacks aren't very black, so to have a high contrast ratio they make the whites much brighter and that could hurt your eyes more (compare the brightness of your display's whites with the brightness of a piece of white paper held up next to it).
Apparently with OLEDs the blacks should be much blacker than LCD blacks. But I suspect they're still going to be blindingly bright.
Anyway, you could try turning the brightness down so that the standard white on your display is no brighter than the white on a sheet of paper. Alternatively change the colour scheme so that the "text background whites" aren't so bright - make them a darker grey.
I've got my brightness set to 10 out of 100, and the text bankground white is still brighter than white paper lit by the flourescent lamps above. 100/100 is really too bright
There's not going to be a big difference between a photon flung straight into your eyes and one that's reflected off something.
A red photon of X wavelength of the same energy will still be perceived the same whether it was reflected or not.
Now the difference could be in the spectrum.
The light from LEDs or CRT phosphors are more likely to be rather "narrow band" in spectrum. Basically the colours are created by having 3 narrow "mountains" of differing heights corresponding to Red, Green and Blue.
Whereas white light (or light from blackbody sources) reflecting off various stuff is more likely to generate wider "mountains".
I'm not sure if this will cause a perceivable difference in the generated image on screens. But I'm pretty sure there's a difference if you use the light for illuminating stuff e.g. a very narrow band red pigment lit by a real white light source will appear red, but could appear black under "white" light that's generated by red+green+blue LEDs (which is one of the reasons why white LED flashlights use phosphors).
Has that Google Streetview van passed by your place yet?
:).
If they haven't maybe you should plan something extra special for them
I suspect kmail/kontakt does autosave periodically, but apparently it's broken in some way: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-bugs-dist&m=122605713921371&w=2
Anyway the last I used it, when I try to save an email draft while working on it, it closes the draft. The KDE people seem to think that just because I want to save my work it means that I want to close it too.
Then there's Openoffice:
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10604&hilit=autosave
It should probably be fixed by now, but what it shows to me is how seriously they value their users work - not seriously enough.
As it is, I'm going to have to assume that most apps are NOT written sensibly.
FWIW, so far my windows, Linux and *BSD machines have not crashed on me for months :). But back when I was using Opensuse 10.x, it did lock up on me a few times, maybe it was an interaction with vmware GSX (which I was running on it).
Probably not.
More likely it just stops the damaged cells from committing suicide.
Any increase in cancer rates shouldn't be a big problem for mice, since most mice have a max lifespan of 2-3 years anyway.
That said, not all damaged cells would end up as cancer, or even nonmalignant tumours. They could just be different from normal in a nonlethal or "big problem" way.
If that's the case then does that mean that if copying the NPG/MPAA/RIAA stuff is hard, requires a great deal of skill and is a creative process, that automatically makes it a new work protected by copyright law?
Or somehow that's only true if you steal from the public?
Note that in my opinion it's stealing from the public if the public effectively no longer has free access to works that should be in the public domain[1].
Whereas it's copying if the company still has free access to its own originals/copies.
[1] You have to pay a fee to view the public domain work, and you aren't allowed to take pictures, and you can't take pictures of the owner's pictures, or make copies of them.
One problem with sharing WiFi is there doesn't seem to be an _easy_ way to do it so that your guest's traffic is secure from another guest.
I believe that if you use a passphrase that's shared, you need to figure out a way to get the passphrase to the users. But IIRC all the users sharing that passphrase can in theory decrypt each other's stuff.
For protection against that, you need to do something like create a dummy WPA account. But you'd still have the problem of getting the credentials to the users. Perhaps Windows+OSX+Desktop Linux could get together and standardize on something by default.
Maybe she doesn't get the respect others do because when she's wrong she doesn't admit it (or realize it even when people attempt to correct her).
Heck if she's actually right she should link to the relevant cabbage regulations, then we can learn something...
FWIW snopes did link to a pdf about US cabbage standards which is about 3 pages and has a fair number of words.
Yeah, and some of us just bother about the content/post and not the messenger, much less their gender or sexual orientation (or whether they're a Slashdot "Friend" or "Foe").
;).
If the content is incorrect, then some correction is fine or even a rebuke if it appears to be very sloppy work.
If it is flameworthy then flame away
If it is good but scored poorly, then it gets a "Mod Parent Up!".
There are also strategic "national security" reasons. For instance if there's a big war, you would want to still be able to produce your own food.
;).
;).
If you have lots of land and do away with your farms, you can't just restart them up instantly.
FWIW, the USA does protect military manufacturing jobs
If you're a small city state with no land for farms, just don't start any wars, and hope nobody bothers to take over your itsy bitsy country
If everyone died tomorrow there'd be fewer fatalities in the long run. :)
Seriously though they did kind of do it the MS-DOS way.
By default OpenBSD has very few network services enabled.
Which is why I consider that particular claim rather worthless.
FWIW, OpenBSD's process isn't that great:
http://www.matasano.com/log/720/openbsds-amusing-handling-of-remote-kernel-overflow/
Theo de Raadt's main focus appears to be making sure that he is right (or looks right). Making things better takes second place to that.
I personally prefer the Postgresql process. There's a lot less unnecessary/counterproductive flaming with the Postgresql process.
If you believe in the usual reincarnation stuff, _logically_ they should be further up on the ladder of enlightenment.
;).
After all I'm pretty sure they don't experience cravings for as many things as humans do and thus experience less suffering.
Given a few more rebirth cycles they might end up as viruses which crave even less. If they keep on that path they'll achieve Nirvana (or at least an exit from Samsara).
So I doubt they'd mind that much. If you have no mind it doesn't matter
> Still pretty annoying but as you say you can usually recover by killing and restarting X.
:).
a) If you are a "Desktop Linux" user running actual Desktop applications, that means you lose most of your unsaved work (if there is a way to not lose the unsaved work, please let me know).
b) If you use X as just a way to run screen/vi/emacs and browsers, then you are less affected.
Basically if I let my mom/uncle/aunt use "Desktop Linux" and X locks up, it's effectively as bad as a BSOD for them.
Saying X freezing is not a problem since you can usually recover by killing and restarting it is like saying that Windows 95 is stable as long as you regularly shutdown/exit to dos and type win to restart it[1].
[1] you could actually do that in the old days of Win 95
> The shuttle was originally conceived as a cheap way to get to orbit
I'm not sure about that. It's hard (impossible?) for the shuttle to be cheaper at doing what the simpler rockets can do - e.g. send stuff to orbit and leave them there.
But what the shuttle can do that "normal" space rockets can't is bring satellites (and any other fairly big stuff) _from_ orbit back down to earth intact. This was (is?) probably an important requirement. Given that requirement, the shuttle doesn't look so ridiculous.
The reusable = cheap seems to be more of a cover story. Given current tech, reusable = re-entry heat shielding, extra weight and complexity = very expensive.
Add "Democratic" to the name for that Extra Touch of Class.
I am not a drunk law school student but here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person#Examples
Note that in legal terms a Company is different from a Cooperative, even though a Cooperative could also be considered a group of people working towards a shared goal.
Sure but large nonmilitary ships already have had tech like this years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Mary_2#Power_plant_and_propulsion_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel-electric_and_gas
But is it really the patched kernel you are running, or are you still running the old kernel?
What does uname -a tell you before and after the patch/update?
So far all the Linux distros I have used required a reboot for kernel updates to take effect.
What distro and kernel are you using?
I find my XP+SP3 setup snappier than Kubuntu.
But I have XP in "classic mode", MenuShowDelay set to 1 (you can download TweakUI from Microsoft which allows you to change this and many other things with a more friendly interface than using the registry editor) and I also have
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001
Which might help a bit in making things more snappy.
The other thing is the latest version of Kubuntu somehow annoyed me enough so that I wiped it and installed Ubuntu (gnome) instead. I had always preferred KDE to gnome, till now. It felt like the KDE bunch were trying to make their latest KDE as annoying as Vista. I suppose it's just not to my taste.
Of course not. They're firing 5000 employees in _anticipation_ of a decline in revenues and downturns are always good excuses to get rid of excess staff that hopefully a company doesn't need.
Very many companies use economic downturns as an excuse to slash jobs worldwide, even if they are doing OK and can actually be profitable keeping those jobs.
Go look at the figures. They declared a net income of USD4 billion for the _quarter_ (3 months ending Dec 2008) on the same day they declared they were slashing 5000 jobs.
Maybe Microsoft were paying each of those 5000 people USD3.2 million a year on average (USD800k a quarter), but I doubt it.
They're not experiencing financial difficulties. They're anticipating them. Whether or not they will encounter them is a different matter.
They're like a rich man cutting down expenditure "just in case". Not like someone in debt and having to live on bread and water.
If you still don't see the difference I'm not sure how to better explain it.
Their ex-staff might have financial difficulties, but I don't see anything in that link that shows that Microsoft has financial difficulties.
So far they don't look like they're hurting.
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY09/earn_rel_q2_09.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/default.mspx
If that's considered "financial difficulty" I wouldn't mind having more of that.
Maybe on July 23 they might declare a loss against all odds...