I am still using the old Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro from 1999 both at home and at work through the PS/2 connector event thought it has USB also. I used the original Microsoft Natural Keyboard from 1994 before that but I had to switch it for some reason or another and that one had the old large AT connector on it. My next one is most likely going to be the 4000 or 7000 model depending on which one I find when one of these breaks.
I still have the Elite version of the keyboard given to me by a friend as a backup for my media center PC when I need to fix the thing after Linux goes nuts on it once in a blue moon or thrice a decade.
Ergonomics
I like the ergonomic split angle design and the convex shape of the key plane with a nice wide wrist rest and natural angle for my wrists towards my forearms and elbows which rest on the arm-rests. It just seems natural towards the body's posture versus trying to bend your wrists outwards to type. I'm a wide shouldered person at over 6-feet tall who lifts weights and has developed shoulders with thick forearms and upper arms so having some space and being able to spread my arms away from my body to type is a must.
Cleaning
I clean this keyboard twice or thrice a decade also whenever it gets disgusting enough or in case something gets spilled into it, which is so rare after so many years of developing muscle memory of avoiding drinks on the right side of the keyboard where the mouse is and most of the movements take place. Drinks and water only on the left side has worked for me for 3-decades of keyboard usage.
Mechanical vs Membrane
I've been following up and reading stories on the trend of mechanical keyboards with their cherry keys of different colors and resistance levels and better controllers that prevented key ghosting and allows more keys to be pressed at the same time and I didn't care for any of that marketing hog-wash even through I used to play fast twitch FPS games back in the old days of Doom, Quake 1 & 3, and all the modern shooters.
I've had co-workers exalt the benefits to me of mechanical switches over membranes and the amazing original IBM Model M keyboard design but I don't see or feel the benefits. It seems like just another fad and skipped it. All of those keyboards also lacked an ergonomical angled split design and were designed for WASD games whereas I'm an ESDF gamer for the movement keys.
IBM Model M
I used the original IBM Model M in my youth at libraries or in school and I did not like it because of the height of the keys, concave slope of the key plane, the force required to depress the keys, and the very loud and annoying clacking sound that the keys made. Also the gap between the keys and the housing was so large that it sucked dirt and debris in so easily.
I'm not sure why people like it but then again the fad of the Hipsters liking old stuff just because it's old so that they can be unique unicorns that are misunderstood about their coolness due to rarity is also something that I don't get nor understand, I'm guess I'm too old after my 4-decades here.
Perhaps a year ago I stopped using YouTube because I started getting pushed those long 30-second non-skippable ads for every single video I was trying to play. Now they're trying to push 6-second ads that are non-skippable on mobile phones. Too bad I won't see them since I stopped using their service.
As a matter of fact I even uninstalled Google news and weather app from my Android phone today because it stopped using my Firefox with ad blocker to present the news stories and instead started using the built-in webkit Chrome browser with all the ads and automatic video play enabled.
It's not surprising that there are no Adblock plugin for the Chrome browser on the mobile Android platform knowing that Google is just giving out their OS to be a delivery method for their increasingly more annoying advertising.
As this trend continues to create more annoying and embedded advertisements the more I'm starting to move away from Google and there services and the platform.
Too many providers and ISPs are going back to the old Bell model of leasing the equipment to the user for huge markups like they used to do with telephones. For example AT&T U-Verse ADSL or VDSL modems can only be leased from the company at what is now $7 per month, when it was $4 originally, and it is soon going to $9 a month I've been told.
This is the same scam that the Bell companies did with telephone leases by inching up costs until you pay hundreds for the same piece of equipment.
You cannot purchase a DSL modem/router/gateway from the carrier nor from a store either since the service authenticates the equipment to make sure that it is the leased one and only authorizes it to work.
What a scam and where's the FCC for the rest of us who have no choice to choose!
These systems that require payment for favorable treatment and faster pass-through security checkpoints are akin to soft-corruption since they cost money to attain such elevated status. Their value is questionable and the procedure and process to pass-through is a bureaucratic joke without elevating security in any way. My in-person interview was getting a glace by a TSA employee and being asked my name. (Speaking as a Global Entry and TSA PreCheck holder.)
The projects that IBM was hired to do and provide their software products and service expertise have been a colossal failure. I have no idea why they are keep getting called back for more software purchases and service requests but I think that there is some stuff going on with previous leadership being ex-IBM employees and back-room deals going on. The hands-on implementers that they provide are not very good and their escalation people can't resolve issue that are happening with their own software products. The experts that they deffer to are in foreign countries and there are problems there also.
I've worked with IBM xSeries Intel compatible server hardware since around the turn of the century when they were trying to go after Compaq/Hewlett-Packard's business share in finance world and frankly their hardware was sub-par, even to Dell at that point in time. Things are slightly better now but there are still weird and unexplained issues with Lenovo/IBM hardware servers and blade systems now. Dell always was to be a less-expensive and more stable hardware platform if you couldn't afford the HP premium pricing for stuff that just worked reliably.
As a 20-year veteran SysAdmin/DevOps/BlueCollarITJanitor I find that certs are useful when they are used as a fundamental building block for building basic knowledge in a specific vendor's way of implementing their technical solution.
As an example, I cut my teeth on MCSE NT 4.0 (could have taken NT 3.51 certs at the time but stupidly skilled those to jump ahead) as a late teenager but the structured organization of the learning materials with the courses and books taught me Microsoft's ideologies and reasons for implementing and using their OS and their BackOffice (...BackOrifice at the time, kek) products and how that specific vendor wanted their stuff configured and working together. For example, the Network Essentials (aka. TCP/IP) test was useful in understanding how Microsoft implemented IPv4 in their OS and how the features of DNS, DHCP, WINS, Routing, etc. were done and could be used to build a good foundation for the network infrastructure correctly.
Now I find that after reading or skimming through some vendor's product instructions and finger-fucking the product's GUI/CLI/API to get it to do what I want it to do I'd like to find the time to sit down and read the actual vendor provided training materials to learn the product from the vendor's idealistic perspective, but alas I can't seem to find/make the self-motivation to go through the study and cert process since this day and age I just go and poke my fingers into some other product's innards to see all the gooey insides such as their APIs and database schema. One of these days I tell myself I'll go back and update my MCSE certs to whatever the new one is... any year now and get those Cisco, VMware, F5, whatever certs... For now it's finger-fucking my keyboard in PowerShell to get at the API of the next victim... err, solution.
Never had any of these "social" site profiles nor even any firm presence since the dial-up BBS days since none of them would make me any more sociable or charismatic since I'm a boring geeky nerd that only hangs out with other boring anti-social people. Instead I reach out of the people that I still keep in touch over direct communications methods or in-person and when I need to organize or attend a group even I send direct invitations or get them directly without broadcasting them publicly. Seems to work just fine and it's more direct and personal to keep in touch. Other people show up and disappear from my life if we don't communicate directly and that's normal part of life, the ones that keep reaching out to you or you to them mean something more and those relationships last longer.
Judging from what I hear and I've seen about social media it seems like a waste of valuable personal time on mundane and boring things that people end up posting and others end up reading. If something is important enough for you to hear someone will tell you about it the next time you actually communicate with them directly.
Chase Visa Freedom sent me one of those chipped credit cards a month after I thought about asking for it for upcoming trip to Europe on vacation.
The instructions that came with it said that there is no pin code for the card and that it still comes with the magmatic strip and can be used normally like that. So it appears that the presence of the chip is only for compatibility and compliance with a new standard not actual security since it falls back to the insecure magmatic strip or even less secure numbers or legacy's embossed raised numbers for carbon copy. The RFID contactless feature is now gone also.
In the popular car analogy meme for this site, using the chip is like pressing the car door open button on your wireless car key fob; but you could also use the physical key to open the door normally, or why bother when the car is unlocked in the first place since the embossed card number is easily stolen and can be used to charge online, still without even the name or CCV2 on some merchant plugins.
I feel that the chip might be used against the consumers and merchants since when it becomes compromised or copied the card company will shift the blame to them claiming that the physical cards must have been present since their infallible security chip is uncopiable.
I've always been disappointed in Dice.com since it's so full of slimy recruiting firms and even slimier head-hungers offering low-paying contracts. It's so full of Indian firms that it resembles a tech call-center from India and I don't bother anymore to list my resume there since I'll be flooded with worthless contracts in cities that I have no interest in working with. These worthless recruiters don't bother reading your profile or requirements (Perm-Only, Local Area Only) and just spam e-mail and call you with keyword matching crap short-term and low-paying contracts from cities across the nation that you have no interest in working in or moving to. Half the time I can't understand their thick Indian accents either and I wouldn't bother working with them if they can't even communicate well enough with them.
Information and informational service boundaries are slowly softening and breaking down since the Internet has made access to information ubiquitous and due to that you're able to consume or create content and reach a multinational audience easily. Some goes for providing information services such as web commerce, development services, or systems administration across the Internet. You can do those types of jobs that don't require any physical access or presence in an Internet virtual environment.
Some places such as New York State are riding that Internet telecommuting band-wagon by taxing income from telecommuting done to a New York based business with a state and city tax as high as 12.7%. So those borders do come into play, and not even national ones, state and city ones too want a piece of the Internet action.
Otherwise try to move any physical resources or objects across national boundaries and you'll be smacked down by a slew of import and export regulations, tariffs, and taxes on national, regional, state, county, and city levels when moving physical objects around. Those aren't changing anytime soon for physical resources that are required to get those virtual resources and services working.
Amazon Echo - Living room idea finally realized.
on
Amazon's Echo Chamber
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So a year or two my friends and I were sitting in the living room and us geeks of course see something playing on my XBMC Media Center and we need to a reference to it from some movie we're watching. I go, why can't I just talk to my media center box to read me the synopsis of it from WikiPedia or Google or something so we know what the movie is talking about. My friends go we can do that with the Android phones and ask them but they are stupid so they will do the search for you but you have to read the long article.
Now there Amazon Echo device does exactly what we wanted to do is to have a Star Trek like experience of asking, "Computer, what is a Widget?" and we would get an answer. I just wish that Google made one or some other company so that we could have more generalized and generic access to many online sources of info instead of being locked into the Amazon Cloud of Fog.
Anyway, I requested a pre-order for it and we'll see if I qualify. I'd like to be able to just talk to my computer and get info back that it too cumbersome to search for.
Correction, HardOCP instead of HardOCZ, caught my own error since I was posting about OCZ Vertex product failures.
Also, I am guessing that Anand's "retirement" is more like "cashing-in" on the site. Good time to make money and run!
Commodity hardware reviews are dying out since they are getting less relevant to people. My machine is 5-years old and still going strong after 2-SDD upgrades and 3-video card upgrades. No need to replace the whole thing and upgrade anymore since my computer is running idle the vast majority of time.
SSDs were the last great upgrade for computers ever since the whole CPU and RAM and Video Card wars were decided and settled.
Next upgrade will most likely be when 4K displays become common place with the next Windows 9 OS that scales things correctly for them and video hardware that can support it well without performance issues. That'll be another 2-years or so and then I'll look at replacing my computer's insides since it looks like ATX cases and 750W power supplies are here to stay and quite enough.
Read the site since the beginning every time I needed an upgrade for components ever since Tom's Hardware sold out to its sponsors.
Anand and his writers were great and they changed the way that computer reviews were done online versus in magazine print in PC Magazine or Boot / Maximum PC.
His recommendation of OCZ products at every revision of the Vertex line of products deserves a black eye on his legacy though since the reports of failures of every Vertex line 1 through 4 were coming out consistently just a few months after release on sites like Newegg, HardOCZ, ExtremeSystems, Amazon, Overclokers, etc. Anand keep awarding Editors Choices to OCZ regardless of the volumes of failures.
He admonished Intel for their firmware bugs correctly but then white washed OCZ failures but back tracked and started mentioning their failures after it became common knowledge in the hardware circles.
Still he leaves a legacy for legitimate and notable online journalism that changed online reviews and reporting by legitimizing it and receiving sponsorship from manufacturers.
FYI, that Amazon link is mine, I put it into the post that way and now I realize that it looks too professional, as if it's some kind of an Advertisement / Slashvertisement injection by Slashdot / Dice Holdings Inc. It's not, I write posts like this with links and price references in USD. Sorry, for any anger it might cause.
Same issue as the poster, dying batteries with pretty thick bulges from LiPo expansion on a 4-year old HTC phone. Same dillema searching for reputable products, found Anker batteries and bought 2 of them. Very happy with their performance. Tested them with a LiPo hobby charger using a charge-discharge-charge cycle and the mAh rating on them came within the advertised 95-97% value. Batteries still work great after over 1-year of usage.
I love their universal battery charger with the sliding battery terminals that do polarity auto-detection. I can charge all kind of different batteries in it since many phones now don't have separate battery charger cradles.
Or it comes free if you buy 2 battery packs from Anker, or at least mine did a year ago since I can't find it bundled with anything anymore.
Yes, the STALKER game series including the mods are worthy of multiple replays because it's like watching a great old movie that you once saw except that playing these games you get the same sense of emotional reminiscence but the experience changes every single time you play them, especially if you apply some of the better mods to them like the ones that you mentioned.
I sometimes like to fire up these old games and go wondering around the game areas again just for the nostalgic effects just to see and feel the old areas in the games. No other games that I have played have had such a long lasting effect on me than these games.
I also grew up in Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain so the architecture, environments, personalities, vegetation, and atmosphere all remind me of my childhood. Couple that with my current involvement in real-steel military weapons and Airsoft weapons along with participating in MilSim operations in urban and forested areas and these STALKER games reinforce those old memories even more because they are even more relevant with new experiences.
Great game series. High recommended from an old PC game player.
I'll see about scheduling a trip out there to Chernobyl since it's just next-door to my old home country on my next time in Europe.
The STALKER PC game series is my favorite single-player first person shooter type series of all time. The spooky atmosphere created in the game is just fantastic when you play the game in a darkened room at night. I would highly recommend the games to everyone.
The book A Roadside Picnic is also pretty good giving you a nice emotional ride of what it's like be a Stalker and to go into the zone. The old black and white movie Stalker is somewhat good in giving you some background about the Zone but it's nothing to the atmosphere that you feel in the games when you play.
A while back I living in NYC and doing IT full-time in NJ while also consulting with a home-office business. This required me to file US Federal, New York State, New Jersey State, and New York City taxes, including all the complex forms for self-employment, business income and expenses, depreciation and amortization of property, etc.
I created a complex Excel spreadsheet with a master tab that has 156 lines of calculations representing every line and field in all the forms that I had to file that were calculated dynamically from multiple pivot tables in tabs that were consolidated from other tabs that were the source of income, personal & business expenses, car, house, and tax tables.
I would update the master tab according to this year's tax code changes in the instruction manuals for the forms and update every line with the current year's additions or formula changes. Then I populated the tables with values from my W2, 1099's, and utilities, bills, receipts, expenses, and then entered this year's tax table information. The spreadsheet would automatically calculate my taxes and all the lines of all the forms.
At the end I filled-out the PDF versions of the forms and saved them. Then I used TaxSlayer.com to enter my values and use that web site to cross-check my numbers then file electronically.
One year I found that TaxSlayer.com's web site had an addition/subtraction error in their forms that calculated the hold-over value incorrectly and reported it to them to fix it and to the IRS since it caused a minor error on my taxes.
Another year NYS taxation department sent me a case complaint that I deducted an incorrect amount of NYC city taxes from my state taxes and I fought them and won the case by showing them a canceled check of paid NYC city taxes for my self-employed business and they reversed the case so I won against "The Tax Man".
No accountants needed, no tax software needed, you just need patience and arithmetic with some simple Excel formulas thrown in. Best part of the dynamic calculations is that when I want to forecast my taxes I can change some numbers on some of the tables and see the whole thing change after recalculating.
Still, US taxes needed to be simplified and be more evenly spread out and fair to everyone. eFile should not be necessary as the IRS should use your income info anyway from various sources and send you a letter stating that the correct taxes were withheld every year from your income automatically. Difficult taxes haven't helped anyone in rebelling against the IRS or simplifying the tax code we've seen, only have created a tax software filing lobby spending millions on keeping taxes difficult. After taxes, let's go after the legal and court system complexities.
These Keurig machines showed up in all of our break rooms at work all of a sudden without an announcement and no coffee pods. A few employees went out and bought their own pods of coffee and some bought the little tea filters also.
Keurig must be doing a huge push-out across corporate offices to get these machines in so that they could make money on the retail side by having the employees buy the pods.
Now version 2.0 has chipped pods. Sounds like HP and Epson and inkjet printer cartridges. The same old we'll make money on the consumable business models like razor blades.
Glad that I don't drink coffee, it's an occasional tea for me and mostly just plain water.
I like the cleaner beta look because it's cleaner and easier to read. I like the box structure to the stories and the comments.
I wish the story descriptions were not truncated on the main page and instead all the text was visible. I also wish that the comment font size was just slightly larger by default, but the story font size is large and that's fine.
Had an OCZ power supply start failing with random computer crashes due to +12V bus causing dips due to load and 3 out of 4 purchased SSD OCZ Vertex 1 and Agility 1 drives failed with bad sectors and unreadable data.
I still have one of their still shrink wrapped and unpacked OCZ Vertex 1 40GB drives that nobody wanted to buy on eBay twice it was listed that I don't dare curse anyone with so it just sits in my closet. Will have to take it out of it's misery one day and shoot it or something but I certainly won't trust one bit of data to it.
Good bye OCZ! Wish I never met you!
PS: Shame on you computer review sites (AnandTech.com, TomsHardware.com, etc.) for hyping up their products and paying only lip service to the reliability issues and dissatisfied customers.
(I feel like I just posted the same thing yesterday and last month about OCZ.)
Be aware of even reputable web sites for hardware reviews because they'll keep recommending the newest and fastest hardware since speed is easily quantifiable and testable but will completely ignore the difficult to quantify things like reliability, customer support, warranty service, etc.
One example that's relevant to recent Slashdot stories is how all the top review web sites raved about OCZ for years and the speed and low price and only paid a little attention to the huge failure rates, terrible customer service, and overall dissatisfaction of the users of the products.
How many years of reading about amazing OCZ Vertex 1, 2, 3, 4 reviews and high recommendations and now we see that OCZ is nearly bankrupt due to the crap they were selling and the review sites were helping them all along just to be on their preferred reviewer lists so that they could get pre-release hardware to test with buggy firmware and crappy chips.
I've been using the Qi charger pad below and it works great. It solved the problem of plugging the Google Nexus 7 Gen2 into a cable then having to remember to turn the plug upside down for the Kindle Paperwhite since the MicroUSB socket is installed backwards on it.
Also my son can take the tablet off the charger and put it back on without having to fiddle with plugging the cable in since he's too young to do that yet. Kids friendly!
So I started using TaxSlayer.com because they offer cheap $9.95 federal filing and a discounted state filing and supported multi-state filing. Everything was great and it was a nice web interface, detailed access to the actual forms and good questions asked.
I am familiar with the tax forms enough to do my own semi-complicated taxes for a full time job and a side-business sole-proprietorship that includes complex self-employment schedules and amortization and appreciation of equipment purchases, entertainment expenses, and business usage of your home and car. I would do my own taxes on a custom mulit-sheet and pivot-driven Excel spreadsheet that I created and updated to comply with each year's forms and then fill out my own PDF forms before I would go online to transfer my information to allow me to do e-file. I filed my forms through the online service but afterwards I noticed that a figure wasn't correct on the PDF produced by the online service.
I noticed that my numbers for the carry-over yearly loss of income for my business would not add-up between my own forms and TaxSlayer.com forms. I investigated my spreadsheet, re-checked my PDFs and the instructions, and re-calculated the values and always came up with my own numbers being correct but the online numbers being wrong. After calling IRS to clarify the situation and also TaxSlayer.com's support I realized that the online service had an obvious error where they added instead of subtracted the last-year's carry over numbers.
I informed the online service so they could fix it and informed IRS that my forms had an error and filed a 1040X correction amendment.
Turns out that the IRS didn't really care that this error could affect a decent number of TaxSlayer.com users and the support people from TaxSlayer.com didn't really care about the error and reversal of arithmetic in their forms.
Also getting access to past taxes on the online service start costing you money unless you were smart enough to save your filed PDFs and keep them. Trying to re-do your last year's taxes costs money also.
Basically e-File service is nice and saves you paper and stamps and gives you fast direct deposit or withdrawal of your tax returns. They make errors with taxes and charge you for past access to your own data.
I don't really trust the online service with my data but with such a massive amount of it already being out there available on the web and located in commercial databases such as people search engines and public legal search web sites this is just another one on the pile for hackers to get at.
My taxes are easier to file online electronically so I take advantage of that instead of trying to do it the paper and stamp way.
Every single SSD benchmark web site has been singing praises over the OCZ SSDs for years now and I fell for the bait a bit like everyone else because OCZ's costs per GB were the lowest while performance the highest. I already bought an Intel X25-M 80GB G1 drive and have been happy with it but I recommended these drives to friends who were cash strapped as HDD replacements only to have 3 out of 4 OCZ Vertex 1's and 2's fail within a year and pissed off friends.
I still have one OCZ 40GB sitting in a box unopened that I don't wish to use for anything at all. Might have to take it out and shoot it because nobody on eBay wanted to buy it.
One PBX running Linux Asterisk for a company that I helped out started failing and corrupting their OS drive and they sent me the whole box. Luckily it was usable enough that I was able to buy an Intel V-25X 40GB SSD and do a disk copy while skipping errors and trash that OCZ Vertex 40GB. Then do a whole distro-upgrade that over-wrote pretty much the whole OS and all the corrupted packages and files but kept the config files that were uncorrupted intact saving their PBX server. Lucked out with that one.
I had an OCZ 750VA power supply that was reviewed and touted as the best of that review but after a few years my computer started experiencing strange errors, crashes, freezes, and I narrowed them down to the +12V rail instability and drops. Turned out that all the plugs were on a single 12V shared rail and the components and capacitors in the power supply must have been crap so they were wearing out and dropping voltage during load spikes. Replaced it with a Corsair HX750 modular power supply and have been happy and stable on a new system since for twice the number of years as that OCZ power supply.
Intel SSD Forever...?
Coincidentally, when I was searching for a new SSD I was thinking that the industry matured but when I looked at the recently past price and performance leader the Samsung 840 there were way too many negative posts on various retailer and forums regarding these drives failing without warning. Seemed like a similar situation to what I saw with OCZ.
I don't like paying the huge premiums for Intel SSD but it turns out that they are what I have been buying for 3 generations now, G1 40 & 80GB, G2 40GB & 80GB, G3 335 240GB. I don't know if this trend is going to end in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
I am still using the old Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro from 1999 both at home and at work through the PS/2 connector event thought it has USB also. I used the original Microsoft Natural Keyboard from 1994 before that but I had to switch it for some reason or another and that one had the old large AT connector on it. My next one is most likely going to be the 4000 or 7000 model depending on which one I find when one of these breaks.
I still have the Elite version of the keyboard given to me by a friend as a backup for my media center PC when I need to fix the thing after Linux goes nuts on it once in a blue moon or thrice a decade.
Ergonomics
I like the ergonomic split angle design and the convex shape of the key plane with a nice wide wrist rest and natural angle for my wrists towards my forearms and elbows which rest on the arm-rests. It just seems natural towards the body's posture versus trying to bend your wrists outwards to type. I'm a wide shouldered person at over 6-feet tall who lifts weights and has developed shoulders with thick forearms and upper arms so having some space and being able to spread my arms away from my body to type is a must.
Cleaning
I clean this keyboard twice or thrice a decade also whenever it gets disgusting enough or in case something gets spilled into it, which is so rare after so many years of developing muscle memory of avoiding drinks on the right side of the keyboard where the mouse is and most of the movements take place. Drinks and water only on the left side has worked for me for 3-decades of keyboard usage.
Mechanical vs Membrane
I've been following up and reading stories on the trend of mechanical keyboards with their cherry keys of different colors and resistance levels and better controllers that prevented key ghosting and allows more keys to be pressed at the same time and I didn't care for any of that marketing hog-wash even through I used to play fast twitch FPS games back in the old days of Doom, Quake 1 & 3, and all the modern shooters.
I've had co-workers exalt the benefits to me of mechanical switches over membranes and the amazing original IBM Model M keyboard design but I don't see or feel the benefits. It seems like just another fad and skipped it. All of those keyboards also lacked an ergonomical angled split design and were designed for WASD games whereas I'm an ESDF gamer for the movement keys.
IBM Model M
I used the original IBM Model M in my youth at libraries or in school and I did not like it because of the height of the keys, concave slope of the key plane, the force required to depress the keys, and the very loud and annoying clacking sound that the keys made. Also the gap between the keys and the housing was so large that it sucked dirt and debris in so easily.
I'm not sure why people like it but then again the fad of the Hipsters liking old stuff just because it's old so that they can be unique unicorns that are misunderstood about their coolness due to rarity is also something that I don't get nor understand, I'm guess I'm too old after my 4-decades here.
Perhaps a year ago I stopped using YouTube because I started getting pushed those long 30-second non-skippable ads for every single video I was trying to play. Now they're trying to push 6-second ads that are non-skippable on mobile phones. Too bad I won't see them since I stopped using their service.
As a matter of fact I even uninstalled Google news and weather app from my Android phone today because it stopped using my Firefox with ad blocker to present the news stories and instead started using the built-in webkit Chrome browser with all the ads and automatic video play enabled.
It's not surprising that there are no Adblock plugin for the Chrome browser on the mobile Android platform knowing that Google is just giving out their OS to be a delivery method for their increasingly more annoying advertising.
As this trend continues to create more annoying and embedded advertisements the more I'm starting to move away from Google and there services and the platform.
Too many providers and ISPs are going back to the old Bell model of leasing the equipment to the user for huge markups like they used to do with telephones. For example AT&T U-Verse ADSL or VDSL modems can only be leased from the company at what is now $7 per month, when it was $4 originally, and it is soon going to $9 a month I've been told.
This is the same scam that the Bell companies did with telephone leases by inching up costs until you pay hundreds for the same piece of equipment.
You cannot purchase a DSL modem/router/gateway from the carrier nor from a store either since the service authenticates the equipment to make sure that it is the leased one and only authorizes it to work.
What a scam and where's the FCC for the rest of us who have no choice to choose!
These systems that require payment for favorable treatment and faster pass-through security checkpoints are akin to soft-corruption since they cost money to attain such elevated status. Their value is questionable and the procedure and process to pass-through is a bureaucratic joke without elevating security in any way. My in-person interview was getting a glace by a TSA employee and being asked my name. (Speaking as a Global Entry and TSA PreCheck holder.)
The projects that IBM was hired to do and provide their software products and service expertise have been a colossal failure. I have no idea why they are keep getting called back for more software purchases and service requests but I think that there is some stuff going on with previous leadership being ex-IBM employees and back-room deals going on. The hands-on implementers that they provide are not very good and their escalation people can't resolve issue that are happening with their own software products. The experts that they deffer to are in foreign countries and there are problems there also.
I've worked with IBM xSeries Intel compatible server hardware since around the turn of the century when they were trying to go after Compaq/Hewlett-Packard's business share in finance world and frankly their hardware was sub-par, even to Dell at that point in time. Things are slightly better now but there are still weird and unexplained issues with Lenovo/IBM hardware servers and blade systems now. Dell always was to be a less-expensive and more stable hardware platform if you couldn't afford the HP premium pricing for stuff that just worked reliably.
As a 20-year veteran SysAdmin/DevOps/BlueCollarITJanitor I find that certs are useful when they are used as a fundamental building block for building basic knowledge in a specific vendor's way of implementing their technical solution.
As an example, I cut my teeth on MCSE NT 4.0 (could have taken NT 3.51 certs at the time but stupidly skilled those to jump ahead) as a late teenager but the structured organization of the learning materials with the courses and books taught me Microsoft's ideologies and reasons for implementing and using their OS and their BackOffice (...BackOrifice at the time, kek) products and how that specific vendor wanted their stuff configured and working together. For example, the Network Essentials (aka. TCP/IP) test was useful in understanding how Microsoft implemented IPv4 in their OS and how the features of DNS, DHCP, WINS, Routing, etc. were done and could be used to build a good foundation for the network infrastructure correctly.
Now I find that after reading or skimming through some vendor's product instructions and finger-fucking the product's GUI/CLI/API to get it to do what I want it to do I'd like to find the time to sit down and read the actual vendor provided training materials to learn the product from the vendor's idealistic perspective, but alas I can't seem to find/make the self-motivation to go through the study and cert process since this day and age I just go and poke my fingers into some other product's innards to see all the gooey insides such as their APIs and database schema. One of these days I tell myself I'll go back and update my MCSE certs to whatever the new one is... any year now and get those Cisco, VMware, F5, whatever certs... For now it's finger-fucking my keyboard in PowerShell to get at the API of the next victim... err, solution.
Never had any of these "social" site profiles nor even any firm presence since the dial-up BBS days since none of them would make me any more sociable or charismatic since I'm a boring geeky nerd that only hangs out with other boring anti-social people. Instead I reach out of the people that I still keep in touch over direct communications methods or in-person and when I need to organize or attend a group even I send direct invitations or get them directly without broadcasting them publicly. Seems to work just fine and it's more direct and personal to keep in touch. Other people show up and disappear from my life if we don't communicate directly and that's normal part of life, the ones that keep reaching out to you or you to them mean something more and those relationships last longer.
Judging from what I hear and I've seen about social media it seems like a waste of valuable personal time on mundane and boring things that people end up posting and others end up reading. If something is important enough for you to hear someone will tell you about it the next time you actually communicate with them directly.
Old Codger Signing Off... +++...ATH...
Chase Visa Freedom sent me one of those chipped credit cards a month after I thought about asking for it for upcoming trip to Europe on vacation.
The instructions that came with it said that there is no pin code for the card and that it still comes with the magmatic strip and can be used normally like that. So it appears that the presence of the chip is only for compatibility and compliance with a new standard not actual security since it falls back to the insecure magmatic strip or even less secure numbers or legacy's embossed raised numbers for carbon copy. The RFID contactless feature is now gone also.
In the popular car analogy meme for this site, using the chip is like pressing the car door open button on your wireless car key fob; but you could also use the physical key to open the door normally, or why bother when the car is unlocked in the first place since the embossed card number is easily stolen and can be used to charge online, still without even the name or CCV2 on some merchant plugins.
I feel that the chip might be used against the consumers and merchants since when it becomes compromised or copied the card company will shift the blame to them claiming that the physical cards must have been present since their infallible security chip is uncopiable.
I've always been disappointed in Dice.com since it's so full of slimy recruiting firms and even slimier head-hungers offering low-paying contracts. It's so full of Indian firms that it resembles a tech call-center from India and I don't bother anymore to list my resume there since I'll be flooded with worthless contracts in cities that I have no interest in working with. These worthless recruiters don't bother reading your profile or requirements (Perm-Only, Local Area Only) and just spam e-mail and call you with keyword matching crap short-term and low-paying contracts from cities across the nation that you have no interest in working in or moving to. Half the time I can't understand their thick Indian accents either and I wouldn't bother working with them if they can't even communicate well enough with them.
Dice.com is the slums of Tech Recruiting.
Information and informational service boundaries are slowly softening and breaking down since the Internet has made access to information ubiquitous and due to that you're able to consume or create content and reach a multinational audience easily. Some goes for providing information services such as web commerce, development services, or systems administration across the Internet. You can do those types of jobs that don't require any physical access or presence in an Internet virtual environment.
Some places such as New York State are riding that Internet telecommuting band-wagon by taxing income from telecommuting done to a New York based business with a state and city tax as high as 12.7%. So those borders do come into play, and not even national ones, state and city ones too want a piece of the Internet action.
Otherwise try to move any physical resources or objects across national boundaries and you'll be smacked down by a slew of import and export regulations, tariffs, and taxes on national, regional, state, county, and city levels when moving physical objects around. Those aren't changing anytime soon for physical resources that are required to get those virtual resources and services working.
So a year or two my friends and I were sitting in the living room and us geeks of course see something playing on my XBMC Media Center and we need to a reference to it from some movie we're watching. I go, why can't I just talk to my media center box to read me the synopsis of it from WikiPedia or Google or something so we know what the movie is talking about. My friends go we can do that with the Android phones and ask them but they are stupid so they will do the search for you but you have to read the long article.
Now there Amazon Echo device does exactly what we wanted to do is to have a Star Trek like experience of asking, "Computer, what is a Widget?" and we would get an answer. I just wish that Google made one or some other company so that we could have more generalized and generic access to many online sources of info instead of being locked into the Amazon Cloud of Fog.
Anyway, I requested a pre-order for it and we'll see if I qualify. I'd like to be able to just talk to my computer and get info back that it too cumbersome to search for.
Correction, HardOCP instead of HardOCZ, caught my own error since I was posting about OCZ Vertex product failures.
Also, I am guessing that Anand's "retirement" is more like "cashing-in" on the site. Good time to make money and run!
Commodity hardware reviews are dying out since they are getting less relevant to people. My machine is 5-years old and still going strong after 2-SDD upgrades and 3-video card upgrades. No need to replace the whole thing and upgrade anymore since my computer is running idle the vast majority of time.
SSDs were the last great upgrade for computers ever since the whole CPU and RAM and Video Card wars were decided and settled.
Next upgrade will most likely be when 4K displays become common place with the next Windows 9 OS that scales things correctly for them and video hardware that can support it well without performance issues. That'll be another 2-years or so and then I'll look at replacing my computer's insides since it looks like ATX cases and 750W power supplies are here to stay and quite enough.
Read the site since the beginning every time I needed an upgrade for components ever since Tom's Hardware sold out to its sponsors.
Anand and his writers were great and they changed the way that computer reviews were done online versus in magazine print in PC Magazine or Boot / Maximum PC.
His recommendation of OCZ products at every revision of the Vertex line of products deserves a black eye on his legacy though since the reports of failures of every Vertex line 1 through 4 were coming out consistently just a few months after release on sites like Newegg, HardOCZ, ExtremeSystems, Amazon, Overclokers, etc. Anand keep awarding Editors Choices to OCZ regardless of the volumes of failures.
He admonished Intel for their firmware bugs correctly but then white washed OCZ failures but back tracked and started mentioning their failures after it became common knowledge in the hardware circles.
Still he leaves a legacy for legitimate and notable online journalism that changed online reviews and reporting by legitimizing it and receiving sponsorship from manufacturers.
FYI, that Amazon link is mine, I put it into the post that way and now I realize that it looks too professional, as if it's some kind of an Advertisement / Slashvertisement injection by Slashdot / Dice Holdings Inc. It's not, I write posts like this with links and price references in USD. Sorry, for any anger it might cause.
Same issue as the poster, dying batteries with pretty thick bulges from LiPo expansion on a 4-year old HTC phone. Same dillema searching for reputable products, found Anker batteries and bought 2 of them. Very happy with their performance. Tested them with a LiPo hobby charger using a charge-discharge-charge cycle and the mAh rating on them came within the advertised 95-97% value. Batteries still work great after over 1-year of usage.
Anker Universal Cell Phone Battery Charger - $9.99 USD @ Amazon
I love their universal battery charger with the sliding battery terminals that do polarity auto-detection. I can charge all kind of different batteries in it since many phones now don't have separate battery charger cradles.
Or it comes free if you buy 2 battery packs from Anker, or at least mine did a year ago since I can't find it bundled with anything anymore.
Yes, the STALKER game series including the mods are worthy of multiple replays because it's like watching a great old movie that you once saw except that playing these games you get the same sense of emotional reminiscence but the experience changes every single time you play them, especially if you apply some of the better mods to them like the ones that you mentioned.
I sometimes like to fire up these old games and go wondering around the game areas again just for the nostalgic effects just to see and feel the old areas in the games. No other games that I have played have had such a long lasting effect on me than these games.
I also grew up in Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain so the architecture, environments, personalities, vegetation, and atmosphere all remind me of my childhood. Couple that with my current involvement in real-steel military weapons and Airsoft weapons along with participating in MilSim operations in urban and forested areas and these STALKER games reinforce those old memories even more because they are even more relevant with new experiences.
Great game series. High recommended from an old PC game player.
I'll see about scheduling a trip out there to Chernobyl since it's just next-door to my old home country on my next time in Europe.
The STALKER PC game series is my favorite single-player first person shooter type series of all time. The spooky atmosphere created in the game is just fantastic when you play the game in a darkened room at night. I would highly recommend the games to everyone.
The book A Roadside Picnic is also pretty good giving you a nice emotional ride of what it's like be a Stalker and to go into the zone. The old black and white movie Stalker is somewhat good in giving you some background about the Zone but it's nothing to the atmosphere that you feel in the games when you play.
STALKER Game Website
Stalker Wiki
Also be sure to check out these mods:
STALKER - Shadow of Chernobyl
Oblivion Lost 2.2.1 for 1.0005 - Forum Thread
Supermod Pack v2.4 and Patches
STALKER - Clear Sky
The Faction War v3.7
A while back I living in NYC and doing IT full-time in NJ while also consulting with a home-office business. This required me to file US Federal, New York State, New Jersey State, and New York City taxes, including all the complex forms for self-employment, business income and expenses, depreciation and amortization of property, etc.
I created a complex Excel spreadsheet with a master tab that has 156 lines of calculations representing every line and field in all the forms that I had to file that were calculated dynamically from multiple pivot tables in tabs that were consolidated from other tabs that were the source of income, personal & business expenses, car, house, and tax tables.
I would update the master tab according to this year's tax code changes in the instruction manuals for the forms and update every line with the current year's additions or formula changes. Then I populated the tables with values from my W2, 1099's, and utilities, bills, receipts, expenses, and then entered this year's tax table information. The spreadsheet would automatically calculate my taxes and all the lines of all the forms.
At the end I filled-out the PDF versions of the forms and saved them. Then I used TaxSlayer.com to enter my values and use that web site to cross-check my numbers then file electronically.
One year I found that TaxSlayer.com's web site had an addition/subtraction error in their forms that calculated the hold-over value incorrectly and reported it to them to fix it and to the IRS since it caused a minor error on my taxes.
Another year NYS taxation department sent me a case complaint that I deducted an incorrect amount of NYC city taxes from my state taxes and I fought them and won the case by showing them a canceled check of paid NYC city taxes for my self-employed business and they reversed the case so I won against "The Tax Man".
No accountants needed, no tax software needed, you just need patience and arithmetic with some simple Excel formulas thrown in. Best part of the dynamic calculations is that when I want to forecast my taxes I can change some numbers on some of the tables and see the whole thing change after recalculating.
Still, US taxes needed to be simplified and be more evenly spread out and fair to everyone. eFile should not be necessary as the IRS should use your income info anyway from various sources and send you a letter stating that the correct taxes were withheld every year from your income automatically. Difficult taxes haven't helped anyone in rebelling against the IRS or simplifying the tax code we've seen, only have created a tax software filing lobby spending millions on keeping taxes difficult. After taxes, let's go after the legal and court system complexities.
These Keurig machines showed up in all of our break rooms at work all of a sudden without an announcement and no coffee pods. A few employees went out and bought their own pods of coffee and some bought the little tea filters also.
Keurig must be doing a huge push-out across corporate offices to get these machines in so that they could make money on the retail side by having the employees buy the pods.
Now version 2.0 has chipped pods. Sounds like HP and Epson and inkjet printer cartridges. The same old we'll make money on the consumable business models like razor blades.
Glad that I don't drink coffee, it's an occasional tea for me and mostly just plain water.
I like the cleaner beta look because it's cleaner and easier to read. I like the box structure to the stories and the comments.
I wish the story descriptions were not truncated on the main page and instead all the text was visible. I also wish that the comment font size was just slightly larger by default, but the story font size is large and that's fine.
Had an OCZ power supply start failing with random computer crashes due to +12V bus causing dips due to load and 3 out of 4 purchased SSD OCZ Vertex 1 and Agility 1 drives failed with bad sectors and unreadable data.
I still have one of their still shrink wrapped and unpacked OCZ Vertex 1 40GB drives that nobody wanted to buy on eBay twice it was listed that I don't dare curse anyone with so it just sits in my closet. Will have to take it out of it's misery one day and shoot it or something but I certainly won't trust one bit of data to it.
Good bye OCZ! Wish I never met you!
PS: Shame on you computer review sites (AnandTech.com, TomsHardware.com, etc.) for hyping up their products and paying only lip service to the reliability issues and dissatisfied customers.
(I feel like I just posted the same thing yesterday and last month about OCZ.)
Be aware of even reputable web sites for hardware reviews because they'll keep recommending the newest and fastest hardware since speed is easily quantifiable and testable but will completely ignore the difficult to quantify things like reliability, customer support, warranty service, etc.
One example that's relevant to recent Slashdot stories is how all the top review web sites raved about OCZ for years and the speed and low price and only paid a little attention to the huge failure rates, terrible customer service, and overall dissatisfaction of the users of the products.
How many years of reading about amazing OCZ Vertex 1, 2, 3, 4 reviews and high recommendations and now we see that OCZ is nearly bankrupt due to the crap they were selling and the review sites were helping them all along just to be on their preferred reviewer lists so that they could get pre-release hardware to test with buggy firmware and crappy chips.
I've been using the Qi charger pad below and it works great. It solved the problem of plugging the Google Nexus 7 Gen2 into a cable then having to remember to turn the plug upside down for the Kindle Paperwhite since the MicroUSB socket is installed backwards on it.
Also my son can take the tablet off the charger and put it back on without having to fiddle with plugging the cable in since he's too young to do that yet. Kids friendly!
DigiYes Ultra-thin Black QI Wireless Charger Compatible with LG Google Nexus 4 / Optimus Vu II / Nokia Lumia 920 - Amazon Prime - $28.38
So I started using TaxSlayer.com because they offer cheap $9.95 federal filing and a discounted state filing and supported multi-state filing. Everything was great and it was a nice web interface, detailed access to the actual forms and good questions asked.
I am familiar with the tax forms enough to do my own semi-complicated taxes for a full time job and a side-business sole-proprietorship that includes complex self-employment schedules and amortization and appreciation of equipment purchases, entertainment expenses, and business usage of your home and car. I would do my own taxes on a custom mulit-sheet and pivot-driven Excel spreadsheet that I created and updated to comply with each year's forms and then fill out my own PDF forms before I would go online to transfer my information to allow me to do e-file. I filed my forms through the online service but afterwards I noticed that a figure wasn't correct on the PDF produced by the online service.
I noticed that my numbers for the carry-over yearly loss of income for my business would not add-up between my own forms and TaxSlayer.com forms. I investigated my spreadsheet, re-checked my PDFs and the instructions, and re-calculated the values and always came up with my own numbers being correct but the online numbers being wrong. After calling IRS to clarify the situation and also TaxSlayer.com's support I realized that the online service had an obvious error where they added instead of subtracted the last-year's carry over numbers.
I informed the online service so they could fix it and informed IRS that my forms had an error and filed a 1040X correction amendment.
Turns out that the IRS didn't really care that this error could affect a decent number of TaxSlayer.com users and the support people from TaxSlayer.com didn't really care about the error and reversal of arithmetic in their forms.
Also getting access to past taxes on the online service start costing you money unless you were smart enough to save your filed PDFs and keep them. Trying to re-do your last year's taxes costs money also.
Basically e-File service is nice and saves you paper and stamps and gives you fast direct deposit or withdrawal of your tax returns. They make errors with taxes and charge you for past access to your own data.
I don't really trust the online service with my data but with such a massive amount of it already being out there available on the web and located in commercial databases such as people search engines and public legal search web sites this is just another one on the pile for hackers to get at.
My taxes are easier to file online electronically so I take advantage of that instead of trying to do it the paper and stamp way.
Every single SSD benchmark web site has been singing praises over the OCZ SSDs for years now and I fell for the bait a bit like everyone else because OCZ's costs per GB were the lowest while performance the highest. I already bought an Intel X25-M 80GB G1 drive and have been happy with it but I recommended these drives to friends who were cash strapped as HDD replacements only to have 3 out of 4 OCZ Vertex 1's and 2's fail within a year and pissed off friends.
I still have one OCZ 40GB sitting in a box unopened that I don't wish to use for anything at all. Might have to take it out and shoot it because nobody on eBay wanted to buy it.
One PBX running Linux Asterisk for a company that I helped out started failing and corrupting their OS drive and they sent me the whole box. Luckily it was usable enough that I was able to buy an Intel V-25X 40GB SSD and do a disk copy while skipping errors and trash that OCZ Vertex 40GB. Then do a whole distro-upgrade that over-wrote pretty much the whole OS and all the corrupted packages and files but kept the config files that were uncorrupted intact saving their PBX server. Lucked out with that one.
I had an OCZ 750VA power supply that was reviewed and touted as the best of that review but after a few years my computer started experiencing strange errors, crashes, freezes, and I narrowed them down to the +12V rail instability and drops. Turned out that all the plugs were on a single 12V shared rail and the components and capacitors in the power supply must have been crap so they were wearing out and dropping voltage during load spikes. Replaced it with a Corsair HX750 modular power supply and have been happy and stable on a new system since for twice the number of years as that OCZ power supply.
Intel SSD Forever...?
Coincidentally, when I was searching for a new SSD I was thinking that the industry matured but when I looked at the recently past price and performance leader the Samsung 840 there were way too many negative posts on various retailer and forums regarding these drives failing without warning. Seemed like a similar situation to what I saw with OCZ.
I don't like paying the huge premiums for Intel SSD but it turns out that they are what I have been buying for 3 generations now, G1 40 & 80GB, G2 40GB & 80GB, G3 335 240GB. I don't know if this trend is going to end in the future.