I'm with you on this one. The New York Times and several other organizations occasionally have news that I'm interested in, but dammit I am *not* signing up for an account for each possible source of news at even a few dollars a year. It's WAY too much hassle.
I use Google as my aggregation service, and chances are there are dozens of good stories out there, and I very rarely run into a case when two stores on my home page are from the same news source. As soon as I see "Registration Required" in the summary, I skip the link, because I'll have to go through signing up for yet another account on yet another site, and remember yet another set of credentials for the 4 computers I use regularly. "Let's see, the East Noob Gazette, have I signed up for them yet? What was my username on that? What was my password? Oh, it's been 16 months since I've read an article there so my subscription ran out months ago, better pay them another $5 to read this article or keep clicking links until I hit on one that my subscription is still good for.."
I'm perfectly willing to pay for good content, but I don't have a single news source I can use for everything I'm interested in. I'm completely unwilling to feed virtual dimes into hundreds of virtual parking meters every month. It would leave me with precious little time to actually, you know, READ THE DAMNED NEWS.
Google, for example, could set up a paywall tied to my existing Google account. For $X a month, I get all the news I can fit into my eyeballs, or something like a penny an article I click on, whatever. At the end of the month, Google tallies up the money I've spent, looks at what news outlets I visited through their access to the news content paywalls, takes a profit for themselves, and divvies the remaining proceeds along according to some formula I don't even care about. I've paid, and I've got my news, and the news outlets get their money.
But I also want a button that says "this article sucked big time. I want my money back for it." After a few negative votes on an author I want all future news from that author to be marked as "suspected crap" or vanish completely from my newsfeed so I don't pay that hack's dreck ever again.
I'd also be interested in a button that allows me to mark "favored" news sources. Reading about Herbie being cut down in the Denver Post just didn't do it for me. I live 30 miles from him, fercrissake. The local papers covered his history in a lot more depth, but for some reason the Denver Post was the primary search result for this story. If there are multiple versions of a story, I want to prefer the original source article, and if there are multiple sources I want the one located closest to me because chances are they'll add some information of local interest to me.
For this, I'd pay. Gladly. I'll even throw in a few extra for all that on a Blackberry app.:)
You're paying $45 for the "new delivery medium", but that's not paying for any news to go with it unless they stated that in your contract. News is paid for by subscriptions and/or advertising. What you're paying for in your internet connection is the dead-tree equivalent of reams of blank paper. It's up to you to find something to fill that paper. No one else is obligated to give you anything to fill it.
Digital content should be somewhat less expensive than the dead tree counterpart, but unless you can convince your ISP to give some of your subscription fee to the company you get your news from (or, if it's the same company, tell the ISP division to send some bucks over to the news division), you aren't paying a dime for news, and they don't owe you anything, because you haven't paid them for anything.
You can feel justified to get free news all you want, it's a free country (*), but your sense of entitlement does not constitute an obligation on someone else's part.
(*): Free as in free speech, not as in free stuff.
My company offers sit/stand workstations as one of the options for configuring our cubicles. The stations are placed at a height were it's fairly comfortable to stand (and we get fatigue mats if we want) and we are also issued a tall chair. I tend to sit most of the time anyway, but I occasionally stand for a half day or so.
I find it less clausorphobic than sitting down in the cubicle. There are a half-dozen of us who have chosen sit/stands, and despite the loss of privacy we all like them.
1. Intranets and corporate applications don't really value browser independence, because their audiences are captive and their desktops are controlled. 2. IE6 was in the days of Microsoft toolkits that wrote shitloads of code that only ran on IE6. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" 3. Most companies that run an intranet don't run a large Internet site, and/or they are run by different divisions, frequently on different platforms. 4. Most vendors don't give a shit about portability, they want to code something for the customer FAST, that runs, get their money, and get the hell out.
Once a few critical apps or an Intranet are out there based on IE6, they aren't really all that easy to upgrade. You can't just import them into a magic tool and make the Microsoft gungy stuff go away, you have to recode. And that costs money. Money many major corporations would rather spend on details like shipping stuff to their customers and other trite irrelevancies.
"If it ain't broke" is a serious business case. Maybe not a correct one long-term, but...
Re:And we're trusting you because....
on
Hiding From Google
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My thoughts exactly. It's free, so he's gotta be paying for it somehow, right? Or is he a known philanthropist who has a long track record of protecting privacy? Nope, didn't think so.
In olden days when I was a young IT pup, IT was generally considered to be a subsidiary of Finance, which made sense at the time since most computing was done to crunch numbers, so we worked for the number crunchers. Later, as IT evolved, it tended to stay under Finance because people who do inscrutable things are just seen as similar in the eyes of management. This led to serious conflicts as, say, order entry or inventory management wanted changes but all fell subservient to IT's overlords in Finance. Finance, understandably, didn't want to spend their budget supporting other department's goals.
Eventually, IT started either being broken out into subgroups and living with their business areas as scattered fiefdoms, or centralized and moved up the management chain so the CFO and CIO were on the same level. As this happens, managing the IT teams becomes a unique challenge, because IT is in so many ways integrated into all aspects of a company in ways that other organizations simply aren't. So you either have (potentially well-managed and aligned) fiefdoms that use different platforms that can't talk to each other, or you have a group that tries to meet everyone's needs with as few discrete solutions as possible and, at best, succeed partly at satisfying everyone.
Money spent on IT is almost always considered "lost revenue", and a holdback from the old Finance days of IT is that every department needs to justify its existence. Thus the chargeback model was born. So concepts like charging rent for floor space (forcing managers to vacate space that will never be occupied to save their "rent" costs, and cramming their people into spaces too small for them to work effectively) or finding a profit model for IT (forcing managers to forgo any systems changes that didn't actually save measurable amounts of money, even if the ideas really would help in the longer term) were born to try and force the idea of efficiency into each department.
Once you do that, you will always find that you can get a specific task done in the short term by hiring someone who can just solve the problem at hand without being bothered by all the consequences like incompatibility with existing processes and systems, long-term support costs, etc.
You'll also almost always find it's cheaper to do a crappy job on your project now while your expense code is on the line, and leave the cleanup to future projects who have to deal with it and spend more money to use what you've built (but it's on THEIR expense code).
Plus, of course, IT itself is given very finite resources at most companies (which is appropriate) and has to fulfill specific goals of the company to "earn" those resources (which is also appropriate).
But there's generally a lack of appreciation for the benefits that creative IT can bring to a company, so few companies give their IT staff much in the way of leeway to explore new technologies (outside those mentioned in CIO magazine and implemented "right away" with little input as to whether it's the right solution for any actual problem the company is facing, or even what the solution is meant to do, and most of those are explored by a consultant anyway).
As General Relativity tells us, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, and the closer you get to the speed of light the more energy you need. I'm a civilian, so I don't usually have to obey generals, but this Relativity dude seems to speak with some authority, so I'll listen to him.
Anyway, it's also pretty inherently obvious that theoretically infinite amounts of information can be kept perfectly still with no energy expended. You just need a stable medium.
It stands to reason, therefore, that there is an inverse relationship between the speed of an object and the amount of information that may be carried on that object with a given energy input.
As a thread accelerates, the amount of useful information that can be put on it decreases. Eventually, it reaches a velocity called the "speed of blight" where the number of informationless posts like this one exceeds those with useful information.
Also, as objects move, they are affected by exterior forces, such as chaotic movement, gravity wells, etc, and that effect is proportional to the amount of force applied, and inversely proportional to the speed of the object being affected. This is why a troll (known to hang out at gravity wells, and may in fact cause them) can have a more diversionary effect on a thread when it has yet to gain velocity - the troll's black hole has more mass relative to the velocity of the thread. As the thread reaches speed, the troll can (at best) tear a small chunk off the thread and scatter it, because the thread is moving too quickly but also lacks the information necessary to maintain its integrity any more.
Am I the only one who looked at the "onetorulethemall" tag and couldn't decide whether it was a Tolkien reference, or a reference to the fact that I would have to buy something (go to the Mall) for this new port?
Not that it matters, I only have one device in my house with an HDMI connector. It's the new computer I just built. But my 24 inch monitor uses the VGA port, so the HDMI is covered up with the little plastic dustcover to keep it from getting dirty, just in case I ever decide to use it. Same with the digital video plug. The analog port easily supports 1080p output, and every frame looks like a work of art. Why would I want to spend more? I have audio out, and I have Ethernet. Just on separate cables, which works just fine for me.
This isn't for long tours any more than an electric-only car is for long tours. Something like this is designed for commuters who are looking at daily rides of 30-50 miles, I suspect.
I have a 30-mile roundtrip that is largely hilly, so my commute is about an hour each way, or two hours a day. Even after I've commuted on the ride all summer, I can only maintain about 17mph average speed given the terrain. With a family at home, choosing between 40 minutes a day in the car and 120 minutes a day on the cycle is tough. If I could increase my speed to the point where I'm completing each way in 45 minutes (which would be about 20mph) I'd be happy. If I could sustain 25mph on average, I'd be thrilled.
I've also got a couple of uphills with no breakdown lane and an uphill blind curve. Pumping up those at 8mph is just dangerous, because cars close on me at 50-55mph and don't seem me until they are 30-40 feet behind me. Every little bit of speed I can maintain up those spots means more reaction time for the cars coming around the curve, and less likelihood they'll get impatient and go around me with oncoming traffic.
1. I have a set of waterproof pannier bags that fit on a rack over my rear wheel. The whole rig cost about $100 or maybe a little less. Both pannier bags are actually heavy drybags like I use when kayaking, so they're waterproof and very rugged. There's enough room for a change of clothes and a few other sundries on one side, and my laptop and a few other things on the other. The weight certainly slows me down, and it makes a big difference on my 15-mile one way commute, but I can easily carry whatever I need to, even in the rain, without worrying about it. Another bonus - the bags are bright orange with white reflectors on them, so they've extremely visible.
When I get to work, the bags just clip off the bike rack in a couple of seconds and I carry them in.
I also have a little underseat "trunk" that has my repair gear and my rear light is affixed to that, so I can remove my headlamp, cyclocomputer, and "trunk" and throw all three in one of the panniers. That way, nothing of value is left on the bicycle itself, and the bike is a $300 Specialized el cheapo courier bike, so I'm not much of a target for theft.
2. Last summer, I drove my car to work on Monday with the bike on the back and all the gear I needed for a week in the trunk. Then I rode my bike back and forth and left the car at work, and drove the car home Friday. I only had to carry in my meals for each day. The advantage is that I can use my car to get to meetings across town, etc. This is not a good idea in some areas, and not all employers are happy with it, but it works out well for me. It also allowed me to have a serious repair kit on both sides of my commute. Plus, if the weather turns REALLY bad, I can drive the car home.
My workplace has decent shower facilities. We don't have lockers here at work, but I found that a couple of pins will hang my towel in my cubicle and it dries pretty well, and a plastic bag keeps my dirty clothes from getting too smelly at work.
I also bought a towel that is about the same color as the cube walls so it doesn't really get noticed by the Cubicle Gestapo. So at least I don't need to haul a towel back and forth.:)
Yes, I use Hummingbird (still Hummingbird at our shop, we haven't upgraded it in a while). But the IBM iSeries Access emulator also uses the same.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that SysRq and CLT-ALT-DEL are both system interrupts, and not "just keypresses", so intercepting them is harder. After all, in many operating systems, if I wanted to send CTRL-ALT-DEL to a remote and pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL in my VNC client, my local system's operating system would intercept that keypress, interrupt my remote access application, assert control, and do whatever it's supposed to do (show task manager, reboot the system, launch all nuclear missiles at Moscow, whatever). My VNC application would never be presented with that keypress, and might not even be running as a result of it.
So for low-level interrupts, a lot of software designers probably would much prefer to capture a "normal" keypress and simulate the low-level interrupt on the remote system, rather than going through the hassle and issues of intercepting the interrupt in their application.
And that's all well and good. The last thing you want, if your LOCAL system becomes unresponsive, is to lose access to an important low-level key sequence.
Lenovo already brought us such indispensable important keys like one to turn on a reading lamp on your computer (I'm still trying to figure out what to do with it because... well, ya know, the screen comes with its own light),
The "reading lamp" as you call it is probably one of my favorite features on my Thinkpad T61. But you may never have tried to use your Thinkpad in a low-light situation, like trying to support an application crash at 3AM while trying not to wake anyone else in the house by turning on a lot of lights (for example).
It's not a reading light, it's a keyboard light. And, though I'd much prefer an actual backlit keyboard, I think the keyboard light is a gift from the computer gods themselves. I wish I had something similar for my desktop machine, and I'm seriously considering a little LED to light up my keyboard at night.
The volume controls are somewhat less useful, but again at the 3AM supporting systems at home thing, it's nice to be able to mash a single key to make all the bleeps, sweeps and squeeps of normal desktop applications all fall silent at once. Waking my 7-year-old is very distracting when I'm working on a problem.
Actually, I've been using a lot of 3270 emulators on various operating systems since Windows 3.11, and I have yet to see a single one that actually uses the physical SysRq key to mean SysRq. The old DOS ones did, but anything in Windows really can't, because SysRq causes a local interrupt that's harder to intercept. It's easier for emulator programmers to capture a less invasive keypress and simulate SysRq over the 3270 stream.
My current 3270 emulator uses CTRL-ESC to emulate SysRq. I've seen a few others used as well. Actually, since the ESC key is meaningless over the 3270 screen, ESC itself is the ATTN/ClearError/ClearBuffer key.
It's rather like the problem some operating systems have when using a remote desktop (VNC, Remote Control, etc). If you press CTRL-ALT-DEL, the emulator generally can't send that to the remote session because CTRL-ALT-DEL just caused a priority OS interrupt on the local machine and, depending on how your local OS handles CTRL-ALT-DEL, it may be rebooting.:)
So most remote control software has a little button or control that says "send CTRL-ALT-DEL to remote".
For Ubuntu and its variants, you can install the dontzap package and then run a simple command (sudo dontzap -- disable) and you're back to having CTRL-ALT-Backspace.
You can also edit your xorg.conf and setting "DontZap" to "false" in the "ServerFlags" section, if you don't like installing a package to do something this trivial. But the package is easier for most. I'm assuming the xorg.conf edit would work in pretty much anything running x.org, though.
This doesn't help with all of the magic SysRq functions in x.org, but at least you get the "restart X" three finger salute back.
Agreed. My Lenovo T61, which I love dearly in every other way (especially the little keyboard light, which I'm amazed more companies don't do), drives me bonkers with the CTRL key not being lower-left. They could have put the CTRL key in the normal spot, had a smaller Fn and Win key between, then a normal ALT key to the right of those two.
But, hey, at least they got the positioning of INS-DEL HOME-END and PgUP-PgDown in a nice 6-key block on the upper right, like the Keyboard Gods intended. I'll give them credit for that.
Teknikally, any words with "c" kould be replased with "s" or "k" depending on which prounsiation of the letter you are using. If we kould kompletely eliminate konfusing letters like that, it would make our words easier to pronounse.
Then again, it kould be harder to program in sea or sea++, or to identify a P-See from a Mak. But we kould kope, I suspekt.
The folks who work on KDE would love to see this, because their spelling of everything now makes sense, except Konkeror of kourse.
So there's two letters we kould kompletely eliminate.
"Z" is also similar to "s" in pronounsiation, so we kould probably drop it and have little konfusion. There'd be a little, but it would be klose to sero.
Three letters eliminated with no losses to clarity of the language. Suksess!
Since Lenovo is remapping the PrintScreen function to be an alternate of the Insert key, you'll still have print screen.
There's a picture of the keyboard in the article, and it does seem relatively well laid-out. Page-up and page-down look a tad clumsy, but are logically placed in relation to the arrow keys at least.
I think my biggest objection would be the reintroduction of the chiclet keys, but then again I suppose those are easier to seal and clean, so I guess there's a good argument for them. I just hope for Lenovo's sake they haven't screwed up the keyboard play and made the chiclets feel like the old mushtastic keys on the TRS-80, which is the last time I dealt with chiclets and I hated them.
What I don't understand is, if they have the "fn" key there anyway, why not remap SysRq to Fn-Tab, or Fn-Tilde, or something? Of course, then they'd have the problem that most of the "magic SysRq functions" in Linux are done with normal keys and having Fn pushed to get to SysRq could mess with that, I suppose.
I still use a 3270 emulator every day, and I'd be totally screwed without that function.
Fortunately I can remap the SysRq function to anything I want on the emulator. In fact, the emulator uses SHIFT-ESC for the SysRq function by default. The actual SysRq key can be mapped, but isn't actually used for anything in the default keymap.
No, but there's something creepy about it being a television show that wants the soon-to-be-deceased subject. I mean, it's not really that it won't be an interesting experiment, it's that it'll be done on TV.
I just hope the "TV show" isn't something like "Big Brother", where one of the contestants will now die on the show and be mummified and kept in the house. Though given "reality" TV shows in their current state, I wouldn't be terribly surprised.
The claim was that they pre-charged it using WiFi. Of course, they could have assembled the unit with a fully-charged battery to start with, and not *technically* have been lying.
Actually, you could probably charge your Blackberry continuously on these. Just get 365 of them, and 500 WiFi routers.
Would that count as a beowulf cluster, or just a clusterfuck?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you on this one. The New York Times and several other organizations occasionally have news that I'm interested in, but dammit I am *not* signing up for an account for each possible source of news at even a few dollars a year. It's WAY too much hassle.
I use Google as my aggregation service, and chances are there are dozens of good stories out there, and I very rarely run into a case when two stores on my home page are from the same news source. As soon as I see "Registration Required" in the summary, I skip the link, because I'll have to go through signing up for yet another account on yet another site, and remember yet another set of credentials for the 4 computers I use regularly. "Let's see, the East Noob Gazette, have I signed up for them yet? What was my username on that? What was my password? Oh, it's been 16 months since I've read an article there so my subscription ran out months ago, better pay them another $5 to read this article or keep clicking links until I hit on one that my subscription is still good for.."
I'm perfectly willing to pay for good content, but I don't have a single news source I can use for everything I'm interested in. I'm completely unwilling to feed virtual dimes into hundreds of virtual parking meters every month. It would leave me with precious little time to actually, you know, READ THE DAMNED NEWS.
Google, for example, could set up a paywall tied to my existing Google account. For $X a month, I get all the news I can fit into my eyeballs, or something like a penny an article I click on, whatever. At the end of the month, Google tallies up the money I've spent, looks at what news outlets I visited through their access to the news content paywalls, takes a profit for themselves, and divvies the remaining proceeds along according to some formula I don't even care about. I've paid, and I've got my news, and the news outlets get their money.
But I also want a button that says "this article sucked big time. I want my money back for it." After a few negative votes on an author I want all future news from that author to be marked as "suspected crap" or vanish completely from my newsfeed so I don't pay that hack's dreck ever again.
I'd also be interested in a button that allows me to mark "favored" news sources. Reading about Herbie being cut down in the Denver Post just didn't do it for me. I live 30 miles from him, fercrissake. The local papers covered his history in a lot more depth, but for some reason the Denver Post was the primary search result for this story. If there are multiple versions of a story, I want to prefer the original source article, and if there are multiple sources I want the one located closest to me because chances are they'll add some information of local interest to me.
For this, I'd pay. Gladly. I'll even throw in a few extra for all that on a Blackberry app. :)
You're paying $45 for the "new delivery medium", but that's not paying for any news to go with it unless they stated that in your contract. News is paid for by subscriptions and/or advertising. What you're paying for in your internet connection is the dead-tree equivalent of reams of blank paper. It's up to you to find something to fill that paper. No one else is obligated to give you anything to fill it.
Digital content should be somewhat less expensive than the dead tree counterpart, but unless you can convince your ISP to give some of your subscription fee to the company you get your news from (or, if it's the same company, tell the ISP division to send some bucks over to the news division), you aren't paying a dime for news, and they don't owe you anything, because you haven't paid them for anything.
You can feel justified to get free news all you want, it's a free country (*), but your sense of entitlement does not constitute an obligation on someone else's part.
(*): Free as in free speech, not as in free stuff.
My company offers sit/stand workstations as one of the options for configuring our cubicles. The stations are placed at a height were it's fairly comfortable to stand (and we get fatigue mats if we want) and we are also issued a tall chair. I tend to sit most of the time anyway, but I occasionally stand for a half day or so.
I find it less clausorphobic than sitting down in the cubicle. There are a half-dozen of us who have chosen sit/stands, and despite the loss of privacy we all like them.
Yes, but recall that:
1. Intranets and corporate applications don't really value browser independence, because their audiences are captive and their desktops are controlled.
2. IE6 was in the days of Microsoft toolkits that wrote shitloads of code that only ran on IE6. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"
3. Most companies that run an intranet don't run a large Internet site, and/or they are run by different divisions, frequently on different platforms.
4. Most vendors don't give a shit about portability, they want to code something for the customer FAST, that runs, get their money, and get the hell out.
Once a few critical apps or an Intranet are out there based on IE6, they aren't really all that easy to upgrade. You can't just import them into a magic tool and make the Microsoft gungy stuff go away, you have to recode. And that costs money. Money many major corporations would rather spend on details like shipping stuff to their customers and other trite irrelevancies.
"If it ain't broke" is a serious business case. Maybe not a correct one long-term, but...
My thoughts exactly. It's free, so he's gotta be paying for it somehow, right? Or is he a known philanthropist who has a long track record of protecting privacy? Nope, didn't think so.
Godwin's Law falls under the general rule of major gravity wells. It sucks.
In olden days when I was a young IT pup, IT was generally considered to be a subsidiary of Finance, which made sense at the time since most computing was done to crunch numbers, so we worked for the number crunchers. Later, as IT evolved, it tended to stay under Finance because people who do inscrutable things are just seen as similar in the eyes of management. This led to serious conflicts as, say, order entry or inventory management wanted changes but all fell subservient to IT's overlords in Finance. Finance, understandably, didn't want to spend their budget supporting other department's goals.
Eventually, IT started either being broken out into subgroups and living with their business areas as scattered fiefdoms, or centralized and moved up the management chain so the CFO and CIO were on the same level. As this happens, managing the IT teams becomes a unique challenge, because IT is in so many ways integrated into all aspects of a company in ways that other organizations simply aren't. So you either have (potentially well-managed and aligned) fiefdoms that use different platforms that can't talk to each other, or you have a group that tries to meet everyone's needs with as few discrete solutions as possible and, at best, succeed partly at satisfying everyone.
Money spent on IT is almost always considered "lost revenue", and a holdback from the old Finance days of IT is that every department needs to justify its existence. Thus the chargeback model was born. So concepts like charging rent for floor space (forcing managers to vacate space that will never be occupied to save their "rent" costs, and cramming their people into spaces too small for them to work effectively) or finding a profit model for IT (forcing managers to forgo any systems changes that didn't actually save measurable amounts of money, even if the ideas really would help in the longer term) were born to try and force the idea of efficiency into each department.
Once you do that, you will always find that you can get a specific task done in the short term by hiring someone who can just solve the problem at hand without being bothered by all the consequences like incompatibility with existing processes and systems, long-term support costs, etc.
You'll also almost always find it's cheaper to do a crappy job on your project now while your expense code is on the line, and leave the cleanup to future projects who have to deal with it and spend more money to use what you've built (but it's on THEIR expense code).
Plus, of course, IT itself is given very finite resources at most companies (which is appropriate) and has to fulfill specific goals of the company to "earn" those resources (which is also appropriate).
But there's generally a lack of appreciation for the benefits that creative IT can bring to a company, so few companies give their IT staff much in the way of leeway to explore new technologies (outside those mentioned in CIO magazine and implemented "right away" with little input as to whether it's the right solution for any actual problem the company is facing, or even what the solution is meant to do, and most of those are explored by a consultant anyway).
As General Relativity tells us, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, and the closer you get to the speed of light the more energy you need. I'm a civilian, so I don't usually have to obey generals, but this Relativity dude seems to speak with some authority, so I'll listen to him.
Anyway, it's also pretty inherently obvious that theoretically infinite amounts of information can be kept perfectly still with no energy expended. You just need a stable medium.
It stands to reason, therefore, that there is an inverse relationship between the speed of an object and the amount of information that may be carried on that object with a given energy input.
As a thread accelerates, the amount of useful information that can be put on it decreases. Eventually, it reaches a velocity called the "speed of blight" where the number of informationless posts like this one exceeds those with useful information.
Also, as objects move, they are affected by exterior forces, such as chaotic movement, gravity wells, etc, and that effect is proportional to the amount of force applied, and inversely proportional to the speed of the object being affected. This is why a troll (known to hang out at gravity wells, and may in fact cause them) can have a more diversionary effect on a thread when it has yet to gain velocity - the troll's black hole has more mass relative to the velocity of the thread. As the thread reaches speed, the troll can (at best) tear a small chunk off the thread and scatter it, because the thread is moving too quickly but also lacks the information necessary to maintain its integrity any more.
Am I the only one who looked at the "onetorulethemall" tag and couldn't decide whether it was a Tolkien reference, or a reference to the fact that I would have to buy something (go to the Mall) for this new port?
Not that it matters, I only have one device in my house with an HDMI connector. It's the new computer I just built. But my 24 inch monitor uses the VGA port, so the HDMI is covered up with the little plastic dustcover to keep it from getting dirty, just in case I ever decide to use it. Same with the digital video plug. The analog port easily supports 1080p output, and every frame looks like a work of art. Why would I want to spend more? I have audio out, and I have Ethernet. Just on separate cables, which works just fine for me.
This isn't for long tours any more than an electric-only car is for long tours. Something like this is designed for commuters who are looking at daily rides of 30-50 miles, I suspect.
I have a 30-mile roundtrip that is largely hilly, so my commute is about an hour each way, or two hours a day. Even after I've commuted on the ride all summer, I can only maintain about 17mph average speed given the terrain. With a family at home, choosing between 40 minutes a day in the car and 120 minutes a day on the cycle is tough. If I could increase my speed to the point where I'm completing each way in 45 minutes (which would be about 20mph) I'd be happy. If I could sustain 25mph on average, I'd be thrilled.
I've also got a couple of uphills with no breakdown lane and an uphill blind curve. Pumping up those at 8mph is just dangerous, because cars close on me at 50-55mph and don't seem me until they are 30-40 feet behind me. Every little bit of speed I can maintain up those spots means more reaction time for the cars coming around the curve, and less likelihood they'll get impatient and go around me with oncoming traffic.
I solved that two ways:
1. I have a set of waterproof pannier bags that fit on a rack over my rear wheel. The whole rig cost about $100 or maybe a little less. Both pannier bags are actually heavy drybags like I use when kayaking, so they're waterproof and very rugged. There's enough room for a change of clothes and a few other sundries on one side, and my laptop and a few other things on the other. The weight certainly slows me down, and it makes a big difference on my 15-mile one way commute, but I can easily carry whatever I need to, even in the rain, without worrying about it. Another bonus - the bags are bright orange with white reflectors on them, so they've extremely visible.
When I get to work, the bags just clip off the bike rack in a couple of seconds and I carry them in.
I also have a little underseat "trunk" that has my repair gear and my rear light is affixed to that, so I can remove my headlamp, cyclocomputer, and "trunk" and throw all three in one of the panniers. That way, nothing of value is left on the bicycle itself, and the bike is a $300 Specialized el cheapo courier bike, so I'm not much of a target for theft.
2. Last summer, I drove my car to work on Monday with the bike on the back and all the gear I needed for a week in the trunk. Then I rode my bike back and forth and left the car at work, and drove the car home Friday. I only had to carry in my meals for each day. The advantage is that I can use my car to get to meetings across town, etc. This is not a good idea in some areas, and not all employers are happy with it, but it works out well for me. It also allowed me to have a serious repair kit on both sides of my commute. Plus, if the weather turns REALLY bad, I can drive the car home.
My workplace has decent shower facilities. We don't have lockers here at work, but I found that a couple of pins will hang my towel in my cubicle and it dries pretty well, and a plastic bag keeps my dirty clothes from getting too smelly at work.
I also bought a towel that is about the same color as the cube walls so it doesn't really get noticed by the Cubicle Gestapo. So at least I don't need to haul a towel back and forth. :)
Nope, that can't be it. There aren't any exclamation points.
Two countries go in, one come out.
I'm not all that confident of the outcome, though...
Dude, they already know about it. Count on it. They're GOOGLE, fer crissake... :)
"I love it when a LAN comes together."
Yes, I use Hummingbird (still Hummingbird at our shop, we haven't upgraded it in a while). But the IBM iSeries Access emulator also uses the same.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that SysRq and CLT-ALT-DEL are both system interrupts, and not "just keypresses", so intercepting them is harder. After all, in many operating systems, if I wanted to send CTRL-ALT-DEL to a remote and pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL in my VNC client, my local system's operating system would intercept that keypress, interrupt my remote access application, assert control, and do whatever it's supposed to do (show task manager, reboot the system, launch all nuclear missiles at Moscow, whatever). My VNC application would never be presented with that keypress, and might not even be running as a result of it.
So for low-level interrupts, a lot of software designers probably would much prefer to capture a "normal" keypress and simulate the low-level interrupt on the remote system, rather than going through the hassle and issues of intercepting the interrupt in their application.
And that's all well and good. The last thing you want, if your LOCAL system becomes unresponsive, is to lose access to an important low-level key sequence.
Lenovo already brought us such indispensable important keys like one to turn on a reading lamp on your computer (I'm still trying to figure out what to do with it because... well, ya know, the screen comes with its own light),
The "reading lamp" as you call it is probably one of my favorite features on my Thinkpad T61. But you may never have tried to use your Thinkpad in a low-light situation, like trying to support an application crash at 3AM while trying not to wake anyone else in the house by turning on a lot of lights (for example).
It's not a reading light, it's a keyboard light. And, though I'd much prefer an actual backlit keyboard, I think the keyboard light is a gift from the computer gods themselves. I wish I had something similar for my desktop machine, and I'm seriously considering a little LED to light up my keyboard at night.
The volume controls are somewhat less useful, but again at the 3AM supporting systems at home thing, it's nice to be able to mash a single key to make all the bleeps, sweeps and squeeps of normal desktop applications all fall silent at once. Waking my 7-year-old is very distracting when I'm working on a problem.
Actually, I've been using a lot of 3270 emulators on various operating systems since Windows 3.11, and I have yet to see a single one that actually uses the physical SysRq key to mean SysRq. The old DOS ones did, but anything in Windows really can't, because SysRq causes a local interrupt that's harder to intercept. It's easier for emulator programmers to capture a less invasive keypress and simulate SysRq over the 3270 stream.
My current 3270 emulator uses CTRL-ESC to emulate SysRq. I've seen a few others used as well. Actually, since the ESC key is meaningless over the 3270 screen, ESC itself is the ATTN/ClearError/ClearBuffer key.
It's rather like the problem some operating systems have when using a remote desktop (VNC, Remote Control, etc). If you press CTRL-ALT-DEL, the emulator generally can't send that to the remote session because CTRL-ALT-DEL just caused a priority OS interrupt on the local machine and, depending on how your local OS handles CTRL-ALT-DEL, it may be rebooting. :)
So most remote control software has a little button or control that says "send CTRL-ALT-DEL to remote".
For Ubuntu and its variants, you can install the dontzap package and then run a simple command (sudo dontzap -- disable) and you're back to having CTRL-ALT-Backspace.
You can also edit your xorg.conf and setting "DontZap" to "false" in the "ServerFlags" section, if you don't like installing a package to do something this trivial. But the package is easier for most. I'm assuming the xorg.conf edit would work in pretty much anything running x.org, though.
This doesn't help with all of the magic SysRq functions in x.org, but at least you get the "restart X" three finger salute back.
Agreed. My Lenovo T61, which I love dearly in every other way (especially the little keyboard light, which I'm amazed more companies don't do), drives me bonkers with the CTRL key not being lower-left. They could have put the CTRL key in the normal spot, had a smaller Fn and Win key between, then a normal ALT key to the right of those two.
But, hey, at least they got the positioning of INS-DEL HOME-END and PgUP-PgDown in a nice 6-key block on the upper right, like the Keyboard Gods intended. I'll give them credit for that.
Teknikally, any words with "c" kould be replased with "s" or "k" depending on which prounsiation of the letter you are using. If we kould kompletely eliminate konfusing letters like that, it would make our words easier to pronounse.
Then again, it kould be harder to program in sea or sea++, or to identify a P-See from a Mak. But we kould kope, I suspekt.
The folks who work on KDE would love to see this, because their spelling of everything now makes sense, except Konkeror of kourse.
So there's two letters we kould kompletely eliminate.
"Z" is also similar to "s" in pronounsiation, so we kould probably drop it and have little konfusion. There'd be a little, but it would be klose to sero.
Three letters eliminated with no losses to clarity of the language. Suksess!
Since Lenovo is remapping the PrintScreen function to be an alternate of the Insert key, you'll still have print screen.
There's a picture of the keyboard in the article, and it does seem relatively well laid-out. Page-up and page-down look a tad clumsy, but are logically placed in relation to the arrow keys at least.
I think my biggest objection would be the reintroduction of the chiclet keys, but then again I suppose those are easier to seal and clean, so I guess there's a good argument for them. I just hope for Lenovo's sake they haven't screwed up the keyboard play and made the chiclets feel like the old mushtastic keys on the TRS-80, which is the last time I dealt with chiclets and I hated them.
What I don't understand is, if they have the "fn" key there anyway, why not remap SysRq to Fn-Tab, or Fn-Tilde, or something? Of course, then they'd have the problem that most of the "magic SysRq functions" in Linux are done with normal keys and having Fn pushed to get to SysRq could mess with that, I suppose.
I still use a 3270 emulator every day, and I'd be totally screwed without that function.
Fortunately I can remap the SysRq function to anything I want on the emulator. In fact, the emulator uses SHIFT-ESC for the SysRq function by default. The actual SysRq key can be mapped, but isn't actually used for anything in the default keymap.
No, but there's something creepy about it being a television show that wants the soon-to-be-deceased subject. I mean, it's not really that it won't be an interesting experiment, it's that it'll be done on TV.
I just hope the "TV show" isn't something like "Big Brother", where one of the contestants will now die on the show and be mummified and kept in the house. Though given "reality" TV shows in their current state, I wouldn't be terribly surprised.
The claim was that they pre-charged it using WiFi. Of course, they could have assembled the unit with a fully-charged battery to start with, and not *technically* have been lying.
Actually, you could probably charge your Blackberry continuously on these. Just get 365 of them, and 500 WiFi routers.
Would that count as a beowulf cluster, or just a clusterfuck?