Yeah, the whole thing is kind of a mess, but I think it was made a lot worse by terminal and application developers that didn't understand how the system works. If people who wrote their own terminal emulators (say gnome-terminal) had bothered to maintain and distribute their own termcaps along with their software rather than saying, "well, it's kinda like xterm", that probably would have avoided a lot of the confusion. (There are other issues, too, and I don't remember all of them, but I remember one of the ViM developers had a huge rant about it once when somebody was asking about 256 color support.) As with many things in *nix, it was a passable solution on a small scale that just never scaled up, and nobody ever bothered to figure out a better way.
Regarding the backspace thing, apparently sometime in the last 10 years or so, everyone got tired of arguing over whether ^H or ^? were supposed to be delete or backspace and made both of them backspace. Some other character([~033 ?) is typically used for delete now. I'm not quite sure how to fix that on systems that don't recognize the new delete code, but that may give you some more information to help you track it down.
You kind of missed the point. This guy's job isn't building routers and securing LANs from haX0rs. There is an organization that comes up with the best practices that you mention, and they have vendors for hardware and software. That was already the case at least as far back as '97, when I did a summer job at Boeing. If you read the things that he says he is involved in, as well as where ha comments about being "out of his lane", it sounds like his job has very little to do with network security. Instead, he talks about how the Armed services interact with other people online, and how those interactions can affect the outcomes of their work in "meatspace". As the Air Force and Army have very different roles in meatspace, it only makes sense that the actions that they might take in cyberspace to effect those goals could differ as well.
I've been using the same ViM color scheme since my first programming job 10 years ago, 8 xterm colors (+bold), light on dark. I can't imagine that the 8 xterm colors are the most ideal, but I've tried evaluating new ones many times since, and nothing ever looks right to me, or really seems to make my eyes feel any better. (That's not strictly true. About 3 years ago, I developed a high color version of my original color scheme that "squished" the previous theme into about half of the HSV spectrum, so the new colors are all greens, blues, and purples, with the color relationships still the same-ish. But I still prefer the old low color version for some languages.)
I've found that there are a lot of other factors that have a much higher impact than my color scheme.
1) Monitor quality. For years I used a beast of a 21" monitor from NEC, now replaced by a Dell 24". Both are excellent monitors, and the NEC might even be worth the back problems I'm sure it gave me. 2) Font. I've spent far more time searching for the perfect font than for the perfect color scheme. In fact I eventually went so far as to make my own. I've noticed that my font size has gone up a bit over time as well - No more nexus for me. In general, I've moved from primarily pixel fonts - great for fitting a lot on the screen while still being readable - to ClearType fonts, which I find much easier to look at for long periods of time. (One of my primary motivations for creating my own font was because I had a hard time finding a monospace font that still looked good at lower point sizes.) Some of my other favorites (since I'm not willing to subject mine to public scrutiny just yet) are Consolas and "Envy Code R". Andale Mono and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono get an honorable mention. 3) Lighting. There is a lot to be said here, and much of it has already been said. But IMO, above all else, indirect lighting is king. 4) and finally, Blink!
You really should only force t_Co=256 if you are actually using a 256 color terminal. Doing it in.vimrc is not really a good idea, because ViM doesn't really know what kind of terminal you are using (or more appropriately, you're telling ViM to ignore what it thinks you are using.) If you are doing most of your work over a remote connection (and if you aren't, why not use gvim?), you really never know what kind of terminal you are going to end up logging in some day, and if for some reason you find yourself on an 8 color terminal (say gnome-terminal from debian-stable) or heaven forbid, a monochrome terminal, it may take you a while to figure out what went wrong and how to correct it. Of course, the "right" way to do it is rather difficult, and may not be worth the effort depending on your setup, but it involves making sure that you have up to date terminfo (or termcap?) entries and the correct value set for $TERM, and... I'll stop there before I put anyone to sleep.
There's plenty of info out there if you Google around a bit, but the short version is that your terminfo should be all right if you have a remotely recent Linux / BSD, so you mostly have to worry about setting your TERM variable to something that is known to have 256 color capability, typically xterm-256color. Of course, you can't just set that in your.bashrc for the same reason that you shouldn't set it in your.vimrc... You see why I said this was complicated.
What you need to do... You know what? Fuck it. Just leave t_Co=256 in your.vimrc, and you'll probably be fine.
The three major free ones that I know of are AVG, Avast! and Avira. I used (and recommended) AVG until a little over a year ago, when I finally got sick of some of the changes that they made when their new version came out. Of the other two (I forget which is which now) one of them seemed ridiculously crippled, and the other would through up and endless stream of nagware to upgrade to the pay version.
At one time, AOL offered a free AOL branded version of Kaspersky, which I used for about a year before my license ran out. By that time, AOL had dropped Kaspersky in favor of McAfee, which I won't touch with a 10 foot pole. I think also Google offers a free version of Norton... which I wouldn't touch with a 10 meter pole.
Anyway, after my AOL/Kaspersky installation expired, I fought for about a week with trying out various different free options and finally bit the bullet and paid the $30/year for ESET's NOD32. Well worth it. No nags, completely unobtrusive, updates frequently (but again, unobtrusively) and I have never once noticed an impact on system performance. Alternatively, based on my experience with AOL's branded version, Kaspersky seems to be a solid product, but I've never used the full version. It's a little more expensive than NOD32, but supposedly easier to set up for people who are not so technically inclined.
Anyway, to sum up, the free options that I am aware of are AVG, Avast!, Avira, AOL/McAfee, and possibly Google/Norton. But honestly, if you have the $40 laying around, you'll easily save yourself $40 worth of frustration by going with NOD32.
Unfortunately for your little rant, broadband does have a very specific definition. 356k DSL is broadband. (I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think ISDN qualifies as well.) But it is amusing to listen to the FCC and various others who seem to think that they can legislate the laws of nature that govern signal transmission to make some sort of a political point.
Honestly, I don't see how some arbitrary number makes a difference anyway, whether it is 56k, 200k, or 100MBit. No matter what number you pick, you'll have some agency posting numbers that say X% have it and Y% don't, and there will be hand wringing on both sides, and the people who don't have it will either complain that they can't get it where they live or say they don't need it and people who do have it will complain that it doesn't matter because we still are falling behind country Z...
All that is to say, it wouldn't change a damn thing.
What matters to most people is not whether their connection hits some arbitrary number, but whether your connection is fast enough to do what you want to do. I have Cable at home, and I couldn't even tell you how fast it is. Haven't got a clue. I suppose I could probably sample my download speeds over the course of a few days and calculate it, if I really cared, but I haven't. What matters to me is that it's never been too slow for anything that I want to do.
Honestly I think that the article makes a good point, and that is that the price of Internet access is more important to most people than the speed. It drives me crazy that even in a well populated area, I can't get broadband Internet for under $50/month, or even any Internet at all for under about $30/month. (I have no interest in having a land line for any purpose other than Internet access, so I include the cost of a phone line in the cost for dial-up or DSL, if those numbers look high to anyone.) I'd happily give up a good chunk of my "broadband" speed if it were available for half the price I am currently paying, and before I started working primarily from home, I would have considered dial-up if it were more around the $10 range.
While I realize that we also lag quite a bit behind the rest of the world in that category as well, I really wish that people would focus more on that aspect of internet access rather than how many Megabits they can squeeze out. That affects a significantly larger portion of the public.
Last Year communists killed 34 hard working Americans, but germs kill over 25 million people. Your home much like America is constantly under attack from germs. And we all know that germs cause Dislexia and Lepracy. Thank goodness there's Blox.
Blox sends germs running like refugees, just add a few tablespoons to your childs bath, and put them in the tub. Presto, that tingling sensation is germs dying. Now your child has rosy red skin and is 100% germ free. That means little Jimmy won't catch a cold or ask difficult questions about reproduction. It's even great for Rover's breath. Now he's sleeping peacefully, free from germs. Blox is endorsed by the society for cleaner America. It uses a patented formula by the Pentagon for use in the field, now avaliable for your home.
Some germs hate acid, some germs hate bleach, Blox kills indescrimitly.
He didn't say he failed at CS, only that he didn't want to do it for a living.
Besides, in my experience, good programmers rarely make good project managers - the skill sets are very different. Of course, a lot of it depends on the corporate environment. My previous job was one of the few employers I had that distinguished between managing people and managing projects, which I think is a very useful position. The person who I reported to was another programmer, but he had his own projects to work on, and his primary role as a manager was merely to keep track of what everyone was working on and make sure no projects were overstaffed or understaffed. There was a whole separate team of project managers, most of whom had little or no technical experience, whose job was to coordinate between teams, communicate with clients, and basically do everything that they could to make sure the programmers spend their time programming rather than dealing with other distractions. After six months at a new position, I'm realizing just how sorely I miss having a decent project manager to work with, so I'm not constantly being dragged into pointless client calls by some sales drone or answering the same question a dozen times.
In short, managing is a skill, just like programming is a skill, and some people are good at it and some are not. Talent with one does not necessarily translate to talent with the other. It's nice to have people who are good at both, but given the choice I'd work for a good manager over a good programmer any day. But having a manager with a good technical background is definitely a plus. If this guy has people skills, I'd say it's definitely a good way to put his degree to use.
Boxed wine doesn't have to be bad. It just has a bad reputation because for a long time, only really cheap wines were sold in boxes. The advantage of boxed wine is that it will stay good for a lot longer after it's opened, and the packaging is more economical. My wife and I started drinking Black Box a while ago. It's about the same quality as what we drank before, it's slightly cheaper, and it lasts a lot longer because we don't feel the need to finish off the bottle. We still keep a couple of bottles around for when we think that we will finish of the whole thing in one night, but if we just want a glass with dinner, we tend to stick to the box. (Well, before she was pregnant, anyway. There's not a whole lot of wine drinking going on at our house anymore.)
I've spent far more time playing the past two games than I care to admit. (Honestly my first reaction when I saw the headline was "Well, there goes another year of my life") At least in the game the skulls actually look like scrollbars. Even after you pointed that out, it still took me a second or two to figure out where the scroller was - it looks like part of the border, not a scrollbar. F-ing awful interface...
Out of curiosity, how did you even get through the age entry? I just tried it now, and the only years in the pulldown menu were 2001-2008. Entering 2001 wouldn't let me in, I suspect the same is true for the rest. Why in the world anyone uses option menus to enter a birthdate is beyond me, but this seems even stupider than usual.
While I'm not as into as some people that I know, I do enjoy both playing and watching golf. Even so, I don't remember ever watching or playing a game of golf that I would consider "nail-biting".
The whole thing would only be able to answer to some very simple questions like "did the words XYZ appear in the conversation ? or did ABC appear in the conversation ?" - with a rather bad success rate if those words are long and complex enough - which hardly makes it enough to obtain personal information or otherwise efficiently spy on someone.
Yes but presumably if you know that a certain phrase appears in an encrypted conversation, and when it occurs, that could allow an attacker to use a known-plaintext attack to discover the rest of your conversation. It seems to be the case with crypto systems that any attack no matter how small often leads to larger attacks.
From the information that I've been able to track down, the issue is not with your font setup so much as with your monitor setup. It seems that in some configurations, Firefox (or perhaps X?) can not correctly determine the DPI of your display. If the calculated DPI is significantly larger than your actual DPI, any fonts measured in points will be absurdly large. It seems to mostly happen with multiple monitor setups, switching back and forth between a laptop display and external display, or running under VMWare.
Normally I'd chalk it up as an X issue, except that so far I've only noticed it in Firefox, and all of the bug reports I've seen discussing the issue only mention FF3.
My wife and I both have Steelcase "Think" chairs. (http://steelcase.com/na/think_products.aspx?f=11845) They are about as adjustable as an Aeron, more comfortable (at least in my opinion), and a little bit cheaper. (If I remember correctly - we got ours at a substantial discount, but I think they list around $750.) Also, for the environmentally minded, they are designed to be disassembled and all of the pieces reused or recycled. I highly recommend it. It is easily the best chair that I have ever sat in.
Other suggestions... The Aeron is of course always popular. Herman Miller also sells a couple of less expensive but slightly less infinitely adjustable chairs that are worth looking into. I looked at a Celle before I got my Steelcase, and I liked it, but I couldn't seem to get it adjusted quite right for my body. The guy at the store said he got that a lot from taller customers, and unlike the Aeron, it doesn't come in different sizes. If you're under 6' or so, and you like the Aeron but don't want to spend the money , check out the Celle. I think the Mirra is another less expensive option, but I didn't care for it as much. The guy at the store we were at said that for whatever reason, he noticed that males tend to prefer the Celle, while females tend to prefer the Mirra.
Regarding exercise balls and kneeling chairs, I know people have a variety of opinions on them, but the general consensus I've heard from people who actually study ergonomics is that they are not a good idea if you typically spend more than an hour or so at a time sitting at your desk. Their main selling point becomes their biggest drawback after you've been sitting for a while - you're basically constantly working your back muscles. From an ergonomic standpoint, you ideally want to be taking the strain off those muscles as much as possible while still keeping your neck and back in a natural position. If you want to get an exercise ball in addition to a regular chair and sit on it for an hour or two a day, that is probably a better option than sitting on a ball all the time. For the original poster in the article, I would avoid going this route unless your husband has explicitly expressed interest in one.
I like the awesomebar because I remember titles and portions of links about 85% of the time. The awesomebar helps me out with this.
Well, as I said, I'm still a bit on the fence about this. I think I find it annoying now just because I'm used to the way FF2 matches what i type in, so the results I get in FF3 seem unpredictable to me. I assume as I become more familiar with it, the results it returns will start to become more predictable. It also looks a little less cluttered after the Ubuntu update I just installed (which is claiming to be 3.0?)
Maybe getting in the habit of double-clicking the part of the URL you want to change would work better for you?
That's what I've been doing forever. But in FF3, double clicking anywhere in the URL bar selects the entire thing, which as I said leaves no efficient way (that I can discover) to select just part of a URL.
I've been using Firefox 3 on my linux partition since I upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy a few months ago. Honestly, I've found the new version to be more of an annoyance than anything else, although it's been hard for me to figure out how many of these annoyances were due to Firefox itself, and how many were due to Ubuntu.
1) Font rendering problems. Any font sizes specified in points were about 2-3 times the size they were supposed to be relative to anything else on the page. I eventually figured out that to fix this I had to manually set layout.css.dpi in about:config.
2) It feels significantly more sluggish than 2.0, although this has gradually been getting better lately. Maybe by the time it's actually released they will have this all worked out.
3) URL bar #1: I do find the new algorithm of the "awesomebar" to be annoying, although I can see how it might be a better experience once I get used to it. I'm going to hold off judgement on this until I've had a bit more time to get used to it, but regardless of the sorting matching algorithm, it just looks way too cluttered.
4) URL bar #2: They have changed the selection behavior in the URL bar to always select the entire url. There doesn't seem to be any way to quickly select a single portion of the URL for example to change from http://games.slashdot.org/ to http://hardware.slashdot.org/. I have found this to be the single most annoying feature of the new Firefox by far. In fact that alone is probably enough to keep me from upgrading on my other computers.
While none of these annoyances by themselves are deal breakers, I have yet to notice any changes (from an end-user standpoint - I understand the rendering engine has been significantly improved, which is great, but doesn't really help me all that much) that really make me want to upgrade.
I live in Boulder Colorado. Last I checked that doesn't fall into any of the regions you mentioned. Until I started a new job working from home this spring, I biked to work probably about 3 days out of 4 or 3 days out of 5. Even during the winter I was able to ride my bike to my office about as often as not. (Admittedly it does help that the city is really good about plowing bike paths. We've joked in my neighborhood that we need to get designated bike lanes on the main street in our subdivision so it will actually get plowed.) The key for my wife and I was that when we bought our house, we still shared a single car, as we had just moved from Chicago. We realized that it was worth spending $50k more on a house that was in an area that would allow us to continue to live with a single car- i.e. close enough to my work to ride my bike, and close enough to a bus stop for her to take the bus.
So, if you live by yourself then yes, riding your bike probably won't allow you to give up your car (at least in the U.S.), but if you have a family, and you realize that there is added value to living in a place that doesn't require your family to own as many cars, riding your bike can definitely allow you to give up a car.
Of course, my wife and I did recently buy a second car, but that had more to do with our Corolla's inadequacy for various outdoor activities than with our commuting habits. We still have one car sitting at home in the driveway every day.
Based on that information, it seems that small cars are involved in more fatalities because they are driven more often.
I don't have the link anymore, but I have also seen a table that broke it out by individual vehicle model. In terms of fatal accidents per million passenger miles, you are just as likely to be killed in a Ford Explorer as you are in a Toyota Corolla, and you are three times as likely to kill somebody else.
Sit that 2008 Toyota Camry next to a 1980 Toyota Camry and tell me again that 500kg weight difference comes entirely from added safety features. Same with the Honda Civic. I drive a 2004 Corolla, and compared to a Corolla made 10 years earlier, it doesn't even look like its in the same vehicle class. This trend appears across almost the entire market, although the imports tend to be far worse about it than the American companies. Toyota in particular seems to like to keep names around for cars that are nothing at all like their predecessors (Exhibit A: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Toyota_Land_Cruiser_yellow_vl.jpg -> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/2008_Toyota_Land_Cruiser.jpg ) while it seems most American car companies are all too happy to kill off an old name when they move to a new design.
No, the headline is not misleading. The person who wrote the article linked to is indeed not a scientist, but the article is discussing scientific research done by others. At least two of the "Scientists" referred to in the headline are clearly named in the summary: "The results surprised Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA, scientists involved in analyzing the NASA satellite data." The article also mentions (unfortunately without giving much further information) a recent report supported by 32,000 other scientists, so while he is certainly pushing a contrary position, it is not just "one man".
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Yeah, the whole thing is kind of a mess, but I think it was made a lot worse by terminal and application developers that didn't understand how the system works. If people who wrote their own terminal emulators (say gnome-terminal) had bothered to maintain and distribute their own termcaps along with their software rather than saying, "well, it's kinda like xterm", that probably would have avoided a lot of the confusion. (There are other issues, too, and I don't remember all of them, but I remember one of the ViM developers had a huge rant about it once when somebody was asking about 256 color support.) As with many things in *nix, it was a passable solution on a small scale that just never scaled up, and nobody ever bothered to figure out a better way.
Regarding the backspace thing, apparently sometime in the last 10 years or so, everyone got tired of arguing over whether ^H or ^? were supposed to be delete or backspace and made both of them backspace. Some other character([~033 ?) is typically used for delete now. I'm not quite sure how to fix that on systems that don't recognize the new delete code, but that may give you some more information to help you track it down.
You kind of missed the point. This guy's job isn't building routers and securing LANs from haX0rs. There is an organization that comes up with the best practices that you mention, and they have vendors for hardware and software. That was already the case at least as far back as '97, when I did a summer job at Boeing. If you read the things that he says he is involved in, as well as where ha comments about being "out of his lane", it sounds like his job has very little to do with network security. Instead, he talks about how the Armed services interact with other people online, and how those interactions can affect the outcomes of their work in "meatspace". As the Air Force and Army have very different roles in meatspace, it only makes sense that the actions that they might take in cyberspace to effect those goals could differ as well.
I've been using the same ViM color scheme since my first programming job 10 years ago, 8 xterm colors (+bold), light on dark. I can't imagine that the 8 xterm colors are the most ideal, but I've tried evaluating new ones many times since, and nothing ever looks right to me, or really seems to make my eyes feel any better. (That's not strictly true. About 3 years ago, I developed a high color version of my original color scheme that "squished" the previous theme into about half of the HSV spectrum, so the new colors are all greens, blues, and purples, with the color relationships still the same-ish. But I still prefer the old low color version for some languages.)
I've found that there are a lot of other factors that have a much higher impact than my color scheme.
1) Monitor quality. For years I used a beast of a 21" monitor from NEC, now replaced by a Dell 24". Both are excellent monitors, and the NEC might even be worth the back problems I'm sure it gave me.
2) Font. I've spent far more time searching for the perfect font than for the perfect color scheme. In fact I eventually went so far as to make my own. I've noticed that my font size has gone up a bit over time as well - No more nexus for me. In general, I've moved from primarily pixel fonts - great for fitting a lot on the screen while still being readable - to ClearType fonts, which I find much easier to look at for long periods of time. (One of my primary motivations for creating my own font was because I had a hard time finding a monospace font that still looked good at lower point sizes.) Some of my other favorites (since I'm not willing to subject mine to public scrutiny just yet) are Consolas and "Envy Code R". Andale Mono and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono get an honorable mention.
3) Lighting. There is a lot to be said here, and much of it has already been said. But IMO, above all else, indirect lighting is king.
4) and finally, Blink!
You really should only force t_Co=256 if you are actually using a 256 color terminal. Doing it in .vimrc is not really a good idea, because ViM doesn't really know what kind of terminal you are using (or more appropriately, you're telling ViM to ignore what it thinks you are using.) If you are doing most of your work over a remote connection (and if you aren't, why not use gvim?), you really never know what kind of terminal you are going to end up logging in some day, and if for some reason you find yourself on an 8 color terminal (say gnome-terminal from debian-stable) or heaven forbid, a monochrome terminal, it may take you a while to figure out what went wrong and how to correct it. Of course, the "right" way to do it is rather difficult, and may not be worth the effort depending on your setup, but it involves making sure that you have up to date terminfo (or termcap?) entries and the correct value set for $TERM, and... I'll stop there before I put anyone to sleep.
There's plenty of info out there if you Google around a bit, but the short version is that your terminfo should be all right if you have a remotely recent Linux / BSD, so you mostly have to worry about setting your TERM variable to something that is known to have 256 color capability, typically xterm-256color. Of course, you can't just set that in your .bashrc for the same reason that you shouldn't set it in your .vimrc... You see why I said this was complicated.
What you need to do... You know what? Fuck it. Just leave t_Co=256 in your .vimrc, and you'll probably be fine.
The three major free ones that I know of are AVG, Avast! and Avira. I used (and recommended) AVG until a little over a year ago, when I finally got sick of some of the changes that they made when their new version came out. Of the other two (I forget which is which now) one of them seemed ridiculously crippled, and the other would through up and endless stream of nagware to upgrade to the pay version.
At one time, AOL offered a free AOL branded version of Kaspersky, which I used for about a year before my license ran out. By that time, AOL had dropped Kaspersky in favor of McAfee, which I won't touch with a 10 foot pole. I think also Google offers a free version of Norton... which I wouldn't touch with a 10 meter pole.
Anyway, after my AOL/Kaspersky installation expired, I fought for about a week with trying out various different free options and finally bit the bullet and paid the $30/year for ESET's NOD32. Well worth it. No nags, completely unobtrusive, updates frequently (but again, unobtrusively) and I have never once noticed an impact on system performance. Alternatively, based on my experience with AOL's branded version, Kaspersky seems to be a solid product, but I've never used the full version. It's a little more expensive than NOD32, but supposedly easier to set up for people who are not so technically inclined.
Anyway, to sum up, the free options that I am aware of are AVG, Avast!, Avira, AOL/McAfee, and possibly Google/Norton. But honestly, if you have the $40 laying around, you'll easily save yourself $40 worth of frustration by going with NOD32.
Unfortunately for your little rant, broadband does have a very specific definition. 356k DSL is broadband. (I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think ISDN qualifies as well.) But it is amusing to listen to the FCC and various others who seem to think that they can legislate the laws of nature that govern signal transmission to make some sort of a political point.
Honestly, I don't see how some arbitrary number makes a difference anyway, whether it is 56k, 200k, or 100MBit. No matter what number you pick, you'll have some agency posting numbers that say X% have it and Y% don't, and there will be hand wringing on both sides, and the people who don't have it will either complain that they can't get it where they live or say they don't need it and people who do have it will complain that it doesn't matter because we still are falling behind country Z...
All that is to say, it wouldn't change a damn thing.
What matters to most people is not whether their connection hits some arbitrary number, but whether your connection is fast enough to do what you want to do. I have Cable at home, and I couldn't even tell you how fast it is. Haven't got a clue. I suppose I could probably sample my download speeds over the course of a few days and calculate it, if I really cared, but I haven't. What matters to me is that it's never been too slow for anything that I want to do.
Honestly I think that the article makes a good point, and that is that the price of Internet access is more important to most people than the speed. It drives me crazy that even in a well populated area, I can't get broadband Internet for under $50/month, or even any Internet at all for under about $30/month. (I have no interest in having a land line for any purpose other than Internet access, so I include the cost of a phone line in the cost for dial-up or DSL, if those numbers look high to anyone.) I'd happily give up a good chunk of my "broadband" speed if it were available for half the price I am currently paying, and before I started working primarily from home, I would have considered dial-up if it were more around the $10 range.
While I realize that we also lag quite a bit behind the rest of the world in that category as well, I really wish that people would focus more on that aspect of internet access rather than how many Megabits they can squeeze out. That affects a significantly larger portion of the public.
Crap. And all this time, I thought he said "snakes on an aeroplane."
Germs are running scared.
Last Year communists killed 34 hard working Americans, but germs kill over 25 million people. Your home much like America is constantly under attack from germs. And we all know that germs cause Dislexia and Lepracy. Thank goodness there's Blox.
Blox sends germs running like refugees, just add a few tablespoons to your childs bath, and put them in the tub. Presto, that tingling sensation is germs dying. Now your child has rosy red skin and is 100% germ free. That means little Jimmy won't catch a cold or ask difficult questions about reproduction. It's even great for Rover's breath. Now he's sleeping peacefully, free from germs. Blox is endorsed by the society for cleaner America. It uses a patented formula by the Pentagon for use in the field, now avaliable for your home.
Some germs hate acid, some germs hate bleach, Blox kills indescrimitly.
He didn't say he failed at CS, only that he didn't want to do it for a living.
Besides, in my experience, good programmers rarely make good project managers - the skill sets are very different. Of course, a lot of it depends on the corporate environment. My previous job was one of the few employers I had that distinguished between managing people and managing projects, which I think is a very useful position. The person who I reported to was another programmer, but he had his own projects to work on, and his primary role as a manager was merely to keep track of what everyone was working on and make sure no projects were overstaffed or understaffed. There was a whole separate team of project managers, most of whom had little or no technical experience, whose job was to coordinate between teams, communicate with clients, and basically do everything that they could to make sure the programmers spend their time programming rather than dealing with other distractions. After six months at a new position, I'm realizing just how sorely I miss having a decent project manager to work with, so I'm not constantly being dragged into pointless client calls by some sales drone or answering the same question a dozen times.
In short, managing is a skill, just like programming is a skill, and some people are good at it and some are not. Talent with one does not necessarily translate to talent with the other. It's nice to have people who are good at both, but given the choice I'd work for a good manager over a good programmer any day. But having a manager with a good technical background is definitely a plus. If this guy has people skills, I'd say it's definitely a good way to put his degree to use.
Maybe they just don't think that you paid them enough for them to listen to you...
Boxed wine doesn't have to be bad. It just has a bad reputation because for a long time, only really cheap wines were sold in boxes. The advantage of boxed wine is that it will stay good for a lot longer after it's opened, and the packaging is more economical. My wife and I started drinking Black Box a while ago. It's about the same quality as what we drank before, it's slightly cheaper, and it lasts a lot longer because we don't feel the need to finish off the bottle. We still keep a couple of bottles around for when we think that we will finish of the whole thing in one night, but if we just want a glass with dinner, we tend to stick to the box. (Well, before she was pregnant, anyway. There's not a whole lot of wine drinking going on at our house anymore.)
I've spent far more time playing the past two games than I care to admit. (Honestly my first reaction when I saw the headline was "Well, there goes another year of my life") At least in the game the skulls actually look like scrollbars. Even after you pointed that out, it still took me a second or two to figure out where the scroller was - it looks like part of the border, not a scrollbar. F-ing awful interface...
Out of curiosity, how did you even get through the age entry? I just tried it now, and the only years in the pulldown menu were 2001-2008. Entering 2001 wouldn't let me in, I suspect the same is true for the rest. Why in the world anyone uses option menus to enter a birthdate is beyond me, but this seems even stupider than usual.
While I'm not as into as some people that I know, I do enjoy both playing and watching golf. Even so, I don't remember ever watching or playing a game of golf that I would consider "nail-biting".
No, you don't get it. By watching in HD you can actually watch the grass grow while watching the golf game, so you get double the enjoyment.
Yes but presumably if you know that a certain phrase appears in an encrypted conversation, and when it occurs, that could allow an attacker to use a known-plaintext attack to discover the rest of your conversation. It seems to be the case with crypto systems that any attack no matter how small often leads to larger attacks.
From the information that I've been able to track down, the issue is not with your font setup so much as with your monitor setup. It seems that in some configurations, Firefox (or perhaps X?) can not correctly determine the DPI of your display. If the calculated DPI is significantly larger than your actual DPI, any fonts measured in points will be absurdly large. It seems to mostly happen with multiple monitor setups, switching back and forth between a laptop display and external display, or running under VMWare.
Normally I'd chalk it up as an X issue, except that so far I've only noticed it in Firefox, and all of the bug reports I've seen discussing the issue only mention FF3.
My wife and I both have Steelcase "Think" chairs. (http://steelcase.com/na/think_products.aspx?f=11845) They are about as adjustable as an Aeron, more comfortable (at least in my opinion), and a little bit cheaper. (If I remember correctly - we got ours at a substantial discount, but I think they list around $750.) Also, for the environmentally minded, they are designed to be disassembled and all of the pieces reused or recycled. I highly recommend it. It is easily the best chair that I have ever sat in.
Other suggestions... The Aeron is of course always popular. Herman Miller also sells a couple of less expensive but slightly less infinitely adjustable chairs that are worth looking into. I looked at a Celle before I got my Steelcase, and I liked it, but I couldn't seem to get it adjusted quite right for my body. The guy at the store said he got that a lot from taller customers, and unlike the Aeron, it doesn't come in different sizes. If you're under 6' or so, and you like the Aeron but don't want to spend the money , check out the Celle. I think the Mirra is another less expensive option, but I didn't care for it as much. The guy at the store we were at said that for whatever reason, he noticed that males tend to prefer the Celle, while females tend to prefer the Mirra.
Regarding exercise balls and kneeling chairs, I know people have a variety of opinions on them, but the general consensus I've heard from people who actually study ergonomics is that they are not a good idea if you typically spend more than an hour or so at a time sitting at your desk. Their main selling point becomes their biggest drawback after you've been sitting for a while - you're basically constantly working your back muscles. From an ergonomic standpoint, you ideally want to be taking the strain off those muscles as much as possible while still keeping your neck and back in a natural position. If you want to get an exercise ball in addition to a regular chair and sit on it for an hour or two a day, that is probably a better option than sitting on a ball all the time. For the original poster in the article, I would avoid going this route unless your husband has explicitly expressed interest in one.
Well, as I said, I'm still a bit on the fence about this. I think I find it annoying now just because I'm used to the way FF2 matches what i type in, so the results I get in FF3 seem unpredictable to me. I assume as I become more familiar with it, the results it returns will start to become more predictable. It also looks a little less cluttered after the Ubuntu update I just installed (which is claiming to be 3.0?)
That's what I've been doing forever. But in FF3, double clicking anywhere in the URL bar selects the entire thing, which as I said leaves no efficient way (that I can discover) to select just part of a URL.
I've been using Firefox 3 on my linux partition since I upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy a few months ago. Honestly, I've found the new version to be more of an annoyance than anything else, although it's been hard for me to figure out how many of these annoyances were due to Firefox itself, and how many were due to Ubuntu.
1) Font rendering problems. Any font sizes specified in points were about 2-3 times the size they were supposed to be relative to anything else on the page. I eventually figured out that to fix this I had to manually set layout.css.dpi in about:config.
2) It feels significantly more sluggish than 2.0, although this has gradually been getting better lately. Maybe by the time it's actually released they will have this all worked out.
3) URL bar #1: I do find the new algorithm of the "awesomebar" to be annoying, although I can see how it might be a better experience once I get used to it. I'm going to hold off judgement on this until I've had a bit more time to get used to it, but regardless of the sorting matching algorithm, it just looks way too cluttered.
4) URL bar #2: They have changed the selection behavior in the URL bar to always select the entire url. There doesn't seem to be any way to quickly select a single portion of the URL for example to change from http://games.slashdot.org/ to http://hardware.slashdot.org/. I have found this to be the single most annoying feature of the new Firefox by far. In fact that alone is probably enough to keep me from upgrading on my other computers.
While none of these annoyances by themselves are deal breakers, I have yet to notice any changes (from an end-user standpoint - I understand the rendering engine has been significantly improved, which is great, but doesn't really help me all that much) that really make me want to upgrade.
I live in Boulder Colorado. Last I checked that doesn't fall into any of the regions you mentioned. Until I started a new job working from home this spring, I biked to work probably about 3 days out of 4 or 3 days out of 5. Even during the winter I was able to ride my bike to my office about as often as not. (Admittedly it does help that the city is really good about plowing bike paths. We've joked in my neighborhood that we need to get designated bike lanes on the main street in our subdivision so it will actually get plowed.) The key for my wife and I was that when we bought our house, we still shared a single car, as we had just moved from Chicago. We realized that it was worth spending $50k more on a house that was in an area that would allow us to continue to live with a single car- i.e. close enough to my work to ride my bike, and close enough to a bus stop for her to take the bus.
So, if you live by yourself then yes, riding your bike probably won't allow you to give up your car (at least in the U.S.), but if you have a family, and you realize that there is added value to living in a place that doesn't require your family to own as many cars, riding your bike can definitely allow you to give up a car.
Of course, my wife and I did recently buy a second car, but that had more to do with our Corolla's inadequacy for various outdoor activities than with our commuting habits. We still have one car sitting at home in the driveway every day.
Duke Nukem is 3D Realms, not id.
What's interesting is that when you adjust the numbers for how many miles are driven, rather than how many cars are on the road, the difference between passenger cars and light trucks all but disappears: http://www.bts.gov/publications/transportation_statistics_annual_report/2005/html/appendix_b/html/table_03_03.html
Based on that information, it seems that small cars are involved in more fatalities because they are driven more often.
I don't have the link anymore, but I have also seen a table that broke it out by individual vehicle model. In terms of fatal accidents per million passenger miles, you are just as likely to be killed in a Ford Explorer as you are in a Toyota Corolla, and you are three times as likely to kill somebody else.
Sit that 2008 Toyota Camry next to a 1980 Toyota Camry and tell me again that 500kg weight difference comes entirely from added safety features. Same with the Honda Civic. I drive a 2004 Corolla, and compared to a Corolla made 10 years earlier, it doesn't even look like its in the same vehicle class. This trend appears across almost the entire market, although the imports tend to be far worse about it than the American companies. Toyota in particular seems to like to keep names around for cars that are nothing at all like their predecessors (Exhibit A: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Toyota_Land_Cruiser_yellow_vl.jpg -> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/2008_Toyota_Land_Cruiser.jpg ) while it seems most American car companies are all too happy to kill off an old name when they move to a new design.
No, the headline is not misleading. The person who wrote the article linked to is indeed not a scientist, but the article is discussing scientific research done by others. At least two of the "Scientists" referred to in the headline are clearly named in the summary: "The results surprised Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA, scientists involved in analyzing the NASA satellite data." The article also mentions (unfortunately without giving much further information) a recent report supported by 32,000 other scientists, so while he is certainly pushing a contrary position, it is not just "one man".