The only people I know who use the Caps Lock Key are AOLers.
Remapped to escape, originally when my escape key got broken on my old thinkpad, but it's much handier having esc on the home row, got rid of my rsi.
On my current laptop (HP nc2400), my "Up" key is broken, so I've remapped the "menu" key as up, strange how quickly you get used to it. It allows me to scroll up and down by rocking my hand, in a more natural position than keys directly above/below, which seems gentler on the wrist.
If I paid for my meal and they tell me they ran out of whatever it is that I ordered, and they won't refund my money? yeah, I'd be a little pissed too.
So would I, and apparently she should have been given a refund.
Perhaps she was kicking up a stink about wanting nuggets, and the response was mis-reported Perhaps in McDonalds, there's no refund option on the till, and if your float is down, you'll get fired, and a manager that could authorise it wasn't available Perhaps it's just bad training Perhaps the story was misreported
However calling 911 seems a little strange -- but there was a crime in progress. A McDonalds employee had stolen money from the customer. Theft is theft, no matter if it's $1 or $100,000
That happened long before 9/11 -- it was officially a response to Irish republican terrorism
To American funded Irish republican terrorism. The bins were removed after Warrington in 1993 -- where American funded Irish republican terrorists blew up a bin in a town centre, outside a McDonalds, the day before mothers day. Then when people were fleeing away, blew another bomb up in the direction they were fleeing. American funded Irish republican terrorists murdered two innocent children on that day.
One of the boys fathers, Colin Parry, later shook hands with Gerry Adams. It'd be like a 9/11 victim shaking hands with Osama bin Laden.
The BBC is both producer and distributer. Maybe it should be split into "BBC TV" and "BBC Production"?
Something like "BBC Studios and Post Production Ltd".
After Dirac leading to a Windows only iPlayer I think we can dismiss their 'research' department.
Highfield (spit) was the one that pushed the crappy P2P windows program. After Brandon Butterworth and the rest of R&D showed how easy a flash version was, it took over 95% of the market in a few weeks. The crappy p2p download program was discontinued last year.
The license could pay basic infrastructure costs for "BBC TV" running the distribution infrastructure (transmitters, etc).
Red Bee, Crown Castle, Astra. The BBC doesn't do any distribution.
This would mean tax payers money isn't being sucked abroad for rubbish reality tv shows.
You and I consider them to be rubbish. Millions don't. You and I may consider Horizon to be good. Millions don't.
Most of the money goes into "BBC Production". This produces content as per their remit.
It does, although the BBC has to buy a (large) set amount of programs from independent companies like Hat Trick.
This then goes to to "BBC TV" and is played for free, or is licensed to foreign TV stations.
Perhaps via BBC Worldwide?
As soon as it is broadcast it is then put up for free on the BBC torrent site unrestricted. It is not even worth blocking foreign IPs, getting more private worldwide viewers will put pressure on other TV stations to license the content from the BBC.
Which would reduce the amount of money the BBC from worldwide, and scupper the production of things like "Life", or any natural history programs.
Just food for thought, I am sure there may be problems with this I haven't thought of.
I suspect that open source will continue to be better at systems & infrastructure stuff (where the target audience is programmers or other nerds) than user-facing apps. Nerds aren't good at writing software for non-nerds.
One TV advertised app for the iphone is an ability to work out how to split a restaurant bill. People actually pay for a limited-function calculator, when they have a more useful one already on the phone!
I concur - GP you're being ripped off! It used to be that the instant transfers (SWIFT or CHAPS) were costly, but if you are willing to wait a few days you could just send money to another account
Nowadays normal, freem electronic bank transfers from a normal, free, uk current account, takes about 2 hours between banks.
Actually it would really suck if Windows had just one Microsoft verified "app store" where everything is controlled like with iPhone.
Yes it would, and in this would I would add the google repository, and perhaps the apple repository. Anyone could set up a repository (same as you can with debian), and sign their packages, but if they got compromised, or let crap in, then I'd be wary of using them in the future.
The problem with the iphone appstore is there's only one. You cant add a competitors.
Lastly, Canonical has been getting uncomfortably cozy with tying in pay-for services into the OS, either theirs or 3rd parties. I was shocked when I logged into a 9.x machine and got a welcome message that pushed their statistical monitoring "service".
I was similarly shocked when I logged onto a sun box, which had cost over $30k, and found it dribbling
Our ubuntu netboot config file installs the basic server. This doesn't even come with ssh-server! We had a few indispensable utilities by default (like sshd) and we're good to go in 20 minutes.
Dunno if it was just really tame and didn't register (it takes a while for me to work out who's who), but did anyone in the UK see this scene (on sky One)? Where was it? If I remember rightly, they beamed down from the Hammond, went to the gateroom, failed the experiment, went to dinner, got attacked?
Here is how a trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles would actually work for this train.
First of all it's going to be a high-profile target for terrorists. So, expect check-in situations exactly like the airport.
Just like the London Underground, which is a target for terrorists? There are ticket barriers though.
- Drive 30 minutes minimum to get to train station.
Depends where you are, my work is a hell of a lot closer to the city's train station than the airports.
- Ride bus from train station parking lot to terminal. 15 minutes
- Check-in/security check/board time (just like an airport terminal). 60 minutes minimum.
Even Eurostar, which has passport checks, and is a bigger "target", with the fact it goes under 30 miles of see, has a minimum check-in of 30 minute (10 for first class)
- Travel high speed to Los Angeles (approximately 440 miles). 120 minutes or two hours.
- Gather bags checked, you don't think they are going to let your average family going to disneyland carry big bags onto a passenger car now do you? 30 minutes.
Whyever not?
- Ride rental car shuttle bus to rental car location (includes wait time for shuttle bus). 30 minutes.
- Drive to Disneyland (or where-ever else in the Los Angeles area). Assume 30 minutes.
Total elapsed time is 315 minutes if my math is right. Or 5 and 1/4 hours. And this assumes there are no intermediate train stops along the way. Do you really think the train will pass by the largest city in the SF Bay area of CA (San Jose) without stopping? I don't think so, therefore add some station time.
Eurostar adds about 5 minutes per stop.
Time to drive a car from San Francisco to Disneyland (which I have done many times) is about 6.5 hours.
So, what have you saved? About an hour of time.
No, real timings based on real high speed rail in backwards countries like the UK 1) Get to st pancras -- 45 minutes from suburbs, 30 minutes from anywhere in the city. Tube or taxi.
2) Check in, 30 minutes
3) Travel to Disneyland Paris -- 2h30
4) Disembark and get to park gate -- 10 minutes.
Total time, under 4 hours. You'll be lucky to get to Dover by then if you're driving, and if you go by plane you'll still be in the air.
A fast train is pie-in-the sky thinking. It's not going to solve anything.
It's not meant to solve the problem of getting fat tourists to disneyland for cheap. It's meant to solve the problem of getting buisnessmen to and from a nearby city for a lunchtime meeting, without losing any time being away from a phone or laptop (with power).
Just fly larger aircraft. An airbus A340 seats up to 800 and will do the same trip in 75 fewer minutes.
No, it wont.
Save the billions spent on the proposed rail line and add a runway or two to the necessary airports at a much lower price.
There is plenty of airspace and capacity, use it properly.
Here's a little tail about the realities of high speed rail vs air. Two people need to get to Brussels for 9AM GMT.
A) Depart house at 05:30 B) Depart house at 05:45
A) Arrive Heathrow at 06:00 B) Arrive St Pancras at 06:30
A) Checked in and security at 06:50 B) On train reading paper at 07:10
A) Board plane at 07:30 B) Finish breakfast and paper at 07:45
A) Land in Brussels at 08:45 B) Fix issue back in the office via VPN at 09:00
A) Leave airport at 09:15 B) Arrive Brussels at 09:30
A) Arrive office at 10:00 B) Arrive office at 09:50
High speed rail 25 minutes faster. The plane doesn't have any fully productive time, but breakfast on the plane might just about work. The train has 1:30 productive time and another 30 minutes of no mobile signal.
Total cost of trip, booked 12 hours earlier A) £450 return B) £80 return
There's a real problem reaching San Francisco. There's no good right of way for high speed rail. The I-5 route to Sacramento looks OK, but reaching Oakland or San Francisco looks tough.
In London, they built a 12 mile long tunnel from neat the terminus out to the industrial wastelands of the east.
especially in cooking, who wants to deal with 1.25ml of oregano, and 0.625ml of freshly ground black pepper. And people claim the US system is messed up
Yeah, and I just had to use 0.527925978 pints of milk.
For instance, if it's down the street, you would be mad not to stick it on a external drive and walk.
Depends on how quickly the data should get there, and how valuable my time is. I could spend half an hour copying to an external hard drive, walking down the road, and copying it to the target server, or I could spend 30 seconds doing "cp bigfile.zip/mnt/server2", and getting on with something useful. The copy may take 12 hours, but if the data doesn't need to be there until next month, does it matter?
Essentially yes. When our primary file server was a NetApp that was on a service contract, the way were notified of a disk failure was that someone from the loading dock would come in and hand us a disk drive that arrived via overnight FedEx or a same day courier, depending upon when the failure had happened. Our job was to go to the filer, pull out the drive with the red light, and pop in the new drive (which arrived already installed in the drive tray.) The new drive would automatically become a hot spare without operator intervention.
On our HP servers we have onsite spares. Detect the drive has failed (nagios goes red), walk to server, replace drive, buy new spare.
For our sun servers, we have a gold support contract. We phone up Sun, and if we're lucky we get an idiotic engineer turn up within a few hours. Assuming there's a spare drive in London, which there wasn't last time. They replace the drive and watch the light blink lots, which requires just as much manpower on our end, takes longer, but does save the cost of a replacement drive.
By the time drives are no longer available, we have replaced the system.
Well, speaking from unfortunate real life experience with ZFS... block checksums are great, but when (not if) the filesystem gets corrupted and you have no (zero, none, SOL, so sorry) tools to repair it, your data is just as gone.
My team's project hasn't received any errors on our zfs file system, we run a scrub every week, but in testing bit flips on disks, we found that zfs would report the error and fix it by rebuilding from the raid, however in the case of a file system crash, that's why we have a backup server.
Sun have had to fix one of our projects twice, the second time they had some better tools, still not to the point of fsck though, however zfs seems fine for redux.
"Why did you wear those funny-looking things on your heads when you were riding bikes?"
What, baseball caps? Keeps the sun out of your eyes. Beanies? Keeps your head warm.
If you're on about the polystyrene cups that some people wear, I assume they're better at keeping you warm? There's no safety benefit, and in many cases they'll cause more damage.
The problem is, a third party service is required to spread the information. In the UK, there are at least 10 different websites, where you can search, book and print anything you could possibly need (including a bus service or a taxi at the destination), and if you're on the move already, you can just send an SMS, and they'll text you back with the information you need.
Well if you're looking at the booking side, there's two -- trainline and webtis.
Yes, themacboz had a (free) iphone app offering the information -- after all, it's just the informaiton on the various websites.
After the TOCs figured out they could make money, they shut it down, and launched their own at £5. Customers weren't impressed.
As one person on that page put it, "This strikes me as Ryanair marketing". I can't think of a worse insult.
you'd still be reaching for one when I ask you what 3752*6243 would be.
I'd know it would be abaout 24,000,000, as I got in the habit to estimate in the years before calculators were allowed. I'd then put it in a calculator and get one of these numbers, depending on what buttons were sticky, what base it was in, etc
2197536 23423736 356245110 0.6 (you get my drift)
Sadly you see people at the supermarket asking each other if 12 for £5.60 is cheaper than 9 for £4.20
the last few years, I have started feeling very, very sorry for teachers..
While I started to feel sorry for teachers in the last year or so of high school, it really hit home when my friends started becoming teachers. Of course schools now are much worse than 10 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The only people I know who use the Caps Lock Key are AOLers.
Remapped to escape, originally when my escape key got broken on my old thinkpad, but it's much handier having esc on the home row, got rid of my rsi.
On my current laptop (HP nc2400), my "Up" key is broken, so I've remapped the "menu" key as up, strange how quickly you get used to it. It allows me to scroll up and down by rocking my hand, in a more natural position than keys directly above/below, which seems gentler on the wrist.
If I paid for my meal and they tell me they ran out of whatever it is that I ordered, and they won't refund my money? yeah, I'd be a little pissed too.
So would I, and apparently she should have been given a refund.
Perhaps she was kicking up a stink about wanting nuggets, and the response was mis-reported
Perhaps in McDonalds, there's no refund option on the till, and if your float is down, you'll get fired, and a manager that could authorise it wasn't available
Perhaps it's just bad training
Perhaps the story was misreported
However calling 911 seems a little strange -- but there was a crime in progress. A McDonalds employee had stolen money from the customer. Theft is theft, no matter if it's $1 or $100,000
i'm sure slashdot crowd could come up with ways to transform majority of everyday items into weapons,
Bottle of duty free. Plenty of people die in bar fights with broken bottles.
Fortunately air-side prices are so high that terrorists would be unable to afford to buy one.
In Glasgow Central you have to throw your rubbish on the floor, and someone sweeps it up.
No, in Glasgow, and anywhere there isn't a bin, you take your rubbish home with you.
That happened long before 9/11 -- it was officially a response to Irish republican terrorism
To American funded Irish republican terrorism. The bins were removed after Warrington in 1993 -- where American funded Irish republican terrorists blew up a bin in a town centre, outside a McDonalds, the day before mothers day. Then when people were fleeing away, blew another bomb up in the direction they were fleeing. American funded Irish republican terrorists murdered two innocent children on that day.
One of the boys fathers, Colin Parry, later shook hands with Gerry Adams. It'd be like a 9/11 victim shaking hands with Osama bin Laden.
The BBC is both producer and distributer. Maybe it should be split into "BBC TV" and "BBC Production"?
Something like "BBC Studios and Post Production Ltd".
After Dirac leading to a Windows only iPlayer I think we can dismiss their 'research' department.
Highfield (spit) was the one that pushed the crappy P2P windows program. After Brandon Butterworth and the rest of R&D showed how easy a flash version was, it took over 95% of the market in a few weeks. The crappy p2p download program was discontinued last year.
The license could pay basic infrastructure costs for "BBC TV" running the distribution infrastructure (transmitters, etc).
Red Bee, Crown Castle, Astra. The BBC doesn't do any distribution.
This would mean tax payers money isn't being sucked abroad for rubbish reality tv shows.
You and I consider them to be rubbish. Millions don't. You and I may consider Horizon to be good. Millions don't.
Most of the money goes into "BBC Production". This produces content as per their remit.
It does, although the BBC has to buy a (large) set amount of programs from independent companies like Hat Trick.
This then goes to to "BBC TV" and is played for free, or is licensed to foreign TV stations.
Perhaps via BBC Worldwide?
As soon as it is broadcast it is then put up for free on the BBC torrent site unrestricted. It is not even worth blocking foreign IPs, getting more private worldwide viewers will put pressure on other TV stations to license the content from the BBC.
Which would reduce the amount of money the BBC from worldwide, and scupper the production of things like "Life", or any natural history programs.
Just food for thought, I am sure there may be problems with this I haven't thought of.
Millions.
I suspect that open source will continue to be better at systems & infrastructure stuff (where the target audience is programmers or other nerds) than user-facing apps. Nerds aren't good at writing software for non-nerds.
One TV advertised app for the iphone is an ability to work out how to split a restaurant bill. People actually pay for a limited-function calculator, when they have a more useful one already on the phone!
I concur - GP you're being ripped off! It used to be that the instant transfers (SWIFT or CHAPS) were costly, but if you are willing to wait a few days you could just send money to another account
Nowadays normal, freem electronic bank transfers from a normal, free, uk current account, takes about 2 hours between banks.
Sending money to Europe is longer, and costs.
Actually it would really suck if Windows had just one Microsoft verified "app store" where everything is controlled like with iPhone.
Yes it would, and in this would I would add the google repository, and perhaps the apple repository. Anyone could set up a repository (same as you can with debian), and sign their packages, but if they got compromised, or let crap in, then I'd be wary of using them in the future.
The problem with the iphone appstore is there's only one. You cant add a competitors.
I pay for X Factor by fast-forwarding through ads
Despite never watching xfactor, I pay for it by buying products that are advertised.
Lastly, Canonical has been getting uncomfortably cozy with tying in pay-for services into the OS, either theirs or 3rd parties. I was shocked when I logged into a 9.x machine and got a welcome message that pushed their statistical monitoring "service".
I was similarly shocked when I logged onto a sun box, which had cost over $30k, and found it dribbling
Our ubuntu netboot config file installs the basic server. This doesn't even come with ssh-server! We had a few indispensable utilities by default (like sshd) and we're good to go in 20 minutes.
Very good point. I've run out of gas twice
Once is unlucky. Twice is incompetent.
Dunno if it was just really tame and didn't register (it takes a while for me to work out who's who), but did anyone in the UK see this scene (on sky One)? Where was it? If I remember rightly, they beamed down from the Hammond, went to the gateroom, failed the experiment, went to dinner, got attacked?
Or was it a flashback?
So the high-speed train goes 220 MPH. Big deal.
Hell of a lot quicker than a car
Here is how a trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles would actually work for this train.
First of all it's going to be a high-profile target for terrorists. So, expect check-in situations exactly like the airport.
Just like the London Underground, which is a target for terrorists? There are ticket barriers though.
- Drive 30 minutes minimum to get to train station.
Depends where you are, my work is a hell of a lot closer to the city's train station than the airports.
- Ride bus from train station parking lot to terminal. 15 minutes
- Check-in/security check/board time (just like an airport terminal). 60 minutes minimum.
Even Eurostar, which has passport checks, and is a bigger "target", with the fact it goes under 30 miles of see, has a minimum check-in of 30 minute (10 for first class)
- Travel high speed to Los Angeles (approximately 440 miles). 120 minutes or two hours.
- Gather bags checked, you don't think they are going to let your average family going to disneyland carry big bags onto a passenger car now do you? 30 minutes.
Whyever not?
- Ride rental car shuttle bus to rental car location (includes wait time for shuttle bus). 30 minutes.
- Drive to Disneyland (or where-ever else in the Los Angeles area). Assume 30 minutes.
Total elapsed time is 315 minutes if my math is right. Or 5 and 1/4 hours. And this assumes there are no intermediate train stops along the way. Do you really think the train will pass by the largest city in the SF Bay area of CA (San Jose) without stopping? I don't think so, therefore add some station time.
Eurostar adds about 5 minutes per stop.
Time to drive a car from San Francisco to Disneyland (which I have done many times) is about 6.5 hours.
So, what have you saved? About an hour of time.
No, real timings based on real high speed rail in backwards countries like the UK
1) Get to st pancras -- 45 minutes from suburbs, 30 minutes from anywhere in the city. Tube or taxi.
2) Check in, 30 minutes
3) Travel to Disneyland Paris -- 2h30
4) Disembark and get to park gate -- 10 minutes.
Total time, under 4 hours. You'll be lucky to get to Dover by then if you're driving, and if you go by plane you'll still be in the air.
A fast train is pie-in-the sky thinking. It's not going to solve anything.
It's not meant to solve the problem of getting fat tourists to disneyland for cheap. It's meant to solve the problem of getting buisnessmen to and from a nearby city for a lunchtime meeting, without losing any time being away from a phone or laptop (with power).
Just fly larger aircraft. An airbus A340 seats up to 800 and will do the same trip in 75 fewer minutes.
No, it wont.
Save the billions spent on the proposed rail line and add a runway or two to the necessary airports at a much lower price.
There is plenty of airspace and capacity, use it properly.
Here's a little tail about the realities of high speed rail vs air. Two people need to get to Brussels for 9AM GMT.
A) Depart house at 05:30
B) Depart house at 05:45
A) Arrive Heathrow at 06:00
B) Arrive St Pancras at 06:30
A) Checked in and security at 06:50
B) On train reading paper at 07:10
A) Board plane at 07:30
B) Finish breakfast and paper at 07:45
A) Land in Brussels at 08:45
B) Fix issue back in the office via VPN at 09:00
A) Leave airport at 09:15
B) Arrive Brussels at 09:30
A) Arrive office at 10:00
B) Arrive office at 09:50
High speed rail 25 minutes faster. The plane doesn't have any fully productive time, but breakfast on the plane might just about work. The train has 1:30 productive time and another 30 minutes of no mobile signal.
Total cost of trip, booked 12 hours earlier
A) £450 return
B) £80 return
There's a real problem reaching San Francisco. There's no good right of way for high speed rail. The I-5 route to Sacramento looks OK, but reaching Oakland or San Francisco looks tough.
In London, they built a 12 mile long tunnel from neat the terminus out to the industrial wastelands of the east.
especially in cooking, who wants to deal with 1.25ml of oregano, and 0.625ml of freshly ground black pepper. And people claim the US system is messed up
Yeah, and I just had to use 0.527925978 pints of milk.
For instance, if it's down the street, you would be mad not to stick it on a external drive and walk.
Depends on how quickly the data should get there, and how valuable my time is. I could spend half an hour copying to an external hard drive, walking down the road, and copying it to the target server, or I could spend 30 seconds doing "cp bigfile.zip /mnt/server2", and getting on with something useful. The copy may take 12 hours, but if the data doesn't need to be there until next month, does it matter?
Essentially yes. When our primary file server was a NetApp that was on a service contract, the way were notified of a disk failure was that someone from the loading dock would come in and hand us a disk drive that arrived via overnight FedEx or a same day courier, depending upon when the failure had happened. Our job was to go to the filer, pull out the drive with the red light, and pop in the new drive (which arrived already installed in the drive tray.) The new drive would automatically become a hot spare without operator intervention.
On our HP servers we have onsite spares. Detect the drive has failed (nagios goes red), walk to server, replace drive, buy new spare.
For our sun servers, we have a gold support contract. We phone up Sun, and if we're lucky we get an idiotic engineer turn up within a few hours. Assuming there's a spare drive in London, which there wasn't last time. They replace the drive and watch the light blink lots, which requires just as much manpower on our end, takes longer, but does save the cost of a replacement drive.
By the time drives are no longer available, we have replaced the system.
Well, speaking from unfortunate real life experience with ZFS ... block checksums are great, but when (not if) the filesystem gets corrupted and you have no (zero, none, SOL, so sorry) tools to repair it, your data is just as gone.
My team's project hasn't received any errors on our zfs file system, we run a scrub every week, but in testing bit flips on disks, we found that zfs would report the error and fix it by rebuilding from the raid, however in the case of a file system crash, that's why we have a backup server.
Sun have had to fix one of our projects twice, the second time they had some better tools, still not to the point of fsck though, however zfs seems fine for redux.
http://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof13/Bird-Redux.pdf
"Why did you wear those funny-looking things on your heads when you were riding bikes?"
What, baseball caps? Keeps the sun out of your eyes. Beanies? Keeps your head warm.
If you're on about the polystyrene cups that some people wear, I assume they're better at keeping you warm? There's no safety benefit, and in many cases they'll cause more damage.
The problem is, a third party service is required to spread the information. In the UK, there are at least 10 different websites, where you can search, book and print anything you could possibly need (including a bus service or a taxi at the destination), and if you're on the move already, you can just send an SMS, and they'll text you back with the information you need.
Well if you're looking at the booking side, there's two -- trainline and webtis.
Yes, themacboz had a (free) iphone app offering the information -- after all, it's just the informaiton on the various websites.
After the TOCs figured out they could make money, they shut it down, and launched their own at £5. Customers weren't impressed.
As one person on that page put it, "This strikes me as Ryanair marketing". I can't think of a worse insult.
Springfield probably wouldn't be noteworthy had Lincoln not spent most of his life here;
The Kwik-e-mart is surely worth an article on it's own.
Oh yes, it's got one. If the convienience store does, obviously the town will
you'd still be reaching for one when I ask you what 3752*6243 would be.
I'd know it would be abaout 24,000,000, as I got in the habit to estimate in the years before calculators were allowed. I'd then put it in a calculator and get one of these numbers, depending on what buttons were sticky, what base it was in, etc
2197536
23423736
356245110
0.6
(you get my drift)
Sadly you see people at the supermarket asking each other if 12 for £5.60 is cheaper than 9 for £4.20
the last few years, I have started feeling very, very sorry for teachers..
While I started to feel sorry for teachers in the last year or so of high school, it really hit home when my friends started becoming teachers. Of course schools now are much worse than 10 years ago.
Didn't he say: "Bad news, nobody, the super collider super exploded...". You had also better hand it over.
Super-collider? I just met her!