This is how departmental IT is done. Or, at least, it's how it *should* be done. I spent less than $25K on these TWO computers [Emphasis mine]
He says, right there, that there are two of them. Oh, sure, the rest of the time he's referring to the purchase in the singular sense, but if he's doing it right, he's treating both the live system and its spare as a singular entity anyway.
Sure. That way, you can have deep discharges (and associated wear) on TWO giant battery arrays instead of just one. As if buying and disposing of this stuff wasn't already an issue, now your battery waste per mile is multiplied by 2! Horray!
If I were a restaurant owner, I'm looking at the dollars and cents, but also the pain-in-the-ass of it all, but not some grandiose "big picture." If it's less hassle for me to burn my fryer oil for electricity than to turn the back dock into a fuel depot, then so be it.
Is there an easy way to totally preclude GRUB or LILO or whatever from allowing single-user mode? What about Knoppix? If I, Joe Above-Average Deskmonkey, had a locked-down Linux box on my desk, I'm afraid that the temptation to go ahead and fuck with it anyway on a lazy Wednesday afternoon would be great indeed.
And, sure, it'd be a policy violation. I might be even be fired for it. But I'm still going to do it. How easily will your Fat-Ass net detect and correct my mucking about?
A relative of mine successfully lobbied the local city council to ban garbage collection before 8 AM. She swore, up and down, that she could feel the garbage trucks emptying dumpsters at a hospital four blocks away, and that it would consistently awaken her. Her theory was that with bedrock being very near to the surface in that neighborhood, both her house and the hospital were on the same limestone slab.
Of course, this same person used to unplug her refrigerator at night, because it'd wake her up when it would turn in the middle of night. I've heard this fridge. It was quiet.
She's a little crazy. And, obviously, she's a schoolteacher.
But, perhaps, you could come up with an equally crazy story, and solve your garbage collection problem. It wouldn't help the environment at all (garbage trucks run at 4:00AM because the streets are calmest at that hour, so route takes less time), but you'd be able to sleep in for another few hours . . .
Doubt it. It's been at least two years since I bought that player, and given that it seemed to be a Wal-Mart exclusive, I'd be really surprised if it's still available.
As another poster suggested, though: The player I used before that was a Philips model. It was more money (about $90), but it was a little fancier and a couple of years prior to the RCA that I had. It also worked fine with whatever media, as long as I stuffed it onto disc first (it had no support for USB or flash).
IIRC, it had some nomenclature on the box which said something like "Plays everything!@#$!!!!!", and as far as I could tell, that was pretty much accurate. I'd expect current Philips models with that make similar claims to perform similarly.
I used to have low-end RCA DVD player. It upscaled to 1080i via HDMI, it played random DIVX and MPEG movies from flash, and it worked well with every TV I ever connected it to. Video quality was good -- I kept it around until I got a PS3 and wanted to decrease the number of components next to the TV.
Back in the day (a decade or so ago), I was the first kid on the block with an 8x Plextor SCSI CD burner. It was the fastest available at the time, aside from one released by Smart and Friendly just a few weeks earlier.
In the beginning, media was indeed a problem. A lot of blanks were still branded for 2x, most of them were 4x, and only a few were actually rated at 8x. Some had real issues, others seemed to work ok. After a semi-intensive study of different media, I found that silver (yes, silver - not aluminum) TDK Certified+ seemed to work the best in general. I had the impression at the time that such trial-and-error sessions were common at the time.
As time moved on, media improved, as did the firmware on the drive. Eventually, within a year or two of folks improving their CD-R chemistry and Plextor improving the firmware, the situation improved enough that I was able to buy whatever blanks were cheapest at Wal-Mart. Things always worked very well, and I never bothered much with burning below 8x.
Now: I can go back and read these decade-old disks, and they still work fine. I don't bother very often (after all, who wants to use an old backup of 98SE, or OS/2 Warp Connect Blue?), but whenever I do, things are good.
I forked over a couple of crappy PS3 games around Christmas to Gamestop for pennies on the dollar, and I didn't think much about them wanting a driver's license.
But now that I have some reason to suspect that this stuff ends up in the LEADS database, I'm really no longer interested in doing business with them again.
Thanks for the insight. I really don't need or want my transaction history available to any cop with a laptop.
And let's not forget the obvious part, here: Akamai is already done. It works. It is the most efficient way we have (network-wise) to broadcast video across the current[1] Internet. Reinventing that wheel, and probably doing it badly, isn't going to save a dime.
[1]: I've been waiting for eons for multicast IP to become a reality for the general population, but it seems unlikely to happen any time soon.
It was Sunday -- the last day of the hamfest. Nobody wanted that terminal for a dollar. Had I not bought it and loudly thrown it away, it would've been dropped quietly into a dumpster somewhere to die alone. But, alas, I did rescue it from its sure fate, and lo, by trashing it in front of a crowd, I gave it new life.
I did that terminal a favor. The kittens are fine.
When I reinstall Windows XP or Vista and need to install updates for testing client projects, I need to activate Windows; This requires a 20-minute call to the Activation hotline each time.
[...]
Every time I have to call Microsoft about anything, or any time they ever call me, I rip the rep a new one about the activation scheme.
Gee. Maybe if you weren't spending so much time being a dickhead, your activation calls wouldn't take twenty minutes each.
I, too, have activated my share of Windows installs by phone, and it's not very painful at all. There's a few things to remember:
1. It's faster and easier to use the phone keypad than it is to speak the numbers into their voice recognition system. Just start mashing it out in DTMF, and it'll work. 2. If you have to talk to a rep, be polite. Just state why you're installing Windows, that it's the only copy with that key in use as far as you know, and move on. This also works for transferring OEM copies from dead freebie machines onto new machines: Just take down the model and serial number/service tag when you call, and tell them you've replaced the motherboard. 3. The rep doesn't care. They're not paid enough to care. They're only there to fill out a form on a computer screen, and read a string of numbers to you. Bitching at a Microsoft Activation rep about Microsoft Activation is like bitching at the meter reader after a power outage -- you're barking up the wrong tree.
Off-topic, young techie story: I was on IRC once, a decade or so ago, and a friend there was opining that it'd be so much more fun to write code if he could just do it on a real VT100, or at least on a monitor that had a VT100 logo on it. A year or so later, I found a DEC VT100 in good condition at the Dayton Hamvention fleemarket for $1.
He said it worked fine. I said I didn't care if it worked, and that I was only interested in the logo. I offered him $5, if he'd just let me pry off the logo. He refused, and was insistent that I take the entire terminal for $1 or nothing at all. So I gave him a dollar, and took the whole thing.
But it was heavy, and I wasn't about to carry it around all day. So I walked over to the nearest trash can, pried the logo off with my knife, and announced to the crowd my intention: Take this genuine DEC VT100, for free, or it goes into the trash. People looked. They listened. But here's the thing: Nobody wanted the free gear. I pleaded with folks to PLEASE take this free historic artifact, but they wouldn't do it.
So, I tossed it into the trash barrel. It landed with a dull thud on top of a mountain of discarded plastic bottles and small electronics. And then, everything changed: In mere seconds, Old Techies swarmed upon it like flies on shit to rescue it from its grave.
As long as it was merely free, the item had no value. But once it was trash, it was worth having.
Retail Windows XP needs a few added drivers to behave properly on my Inspiron 6000i laptop. But retail Vista installs and works. The Windows 7 beta installs and works.
I upgrade a bunch of drivers to manufacturer-supplied ones, anyway: I like Realtek's sound driver better than the one which comes with Windows (though the laptop doesn't even have a Realtek chip in it). I like intel's WiFi management tools better than those included with Windows. There's a lot of great functionality in the ATI Catalyst drivers which isn't present in the default drivers under Vista and 7. I also prefer Dell's more recent Glidepoint drivers to the default in Windows, since it gives me separate settings for the Bluetooth mouse and the built-in trackpad.
But, all of this is optional. I don't need to upgrade anything to get Windows Vista or 7 to install and work properly on this machine. The SD card slot works. The modem works. The Ethernet adapter works. The WiFi card works. The video card works (with DirectX). Suspend, resume, and hibernate work. The Cardbus slot works. Battery monitoring works. Bluetooth works. USB-to-RS232 adapters work. USB sound adapters work. My networked HP printer works. The touchpad works. Firewire works. The media buttons on the front edge of the machine work. And every now and then, Windows Update tells me that there's a newer driver for one or more of these things available to be installed without pain.
I'm pretty unimpressed by OP's claims that none of this is possible. I have a lot more trouble getting Ubuntu to behave on this box than I do recent versions of Windows, and that's not because of lack of experience. Back in the day, I used to download new XFree86 sources and painstakingly compile them on my Slackware-equipped 486, and sort out library and kernel dependencies by hand -- I can make Ubuntu work. Likewise, I can make everything listed above work just fine in any modern Linux distribution. But Windows works better (yes, I said it), without any help from me.
I've read from computer monitors in dark rooms, at length, since I was 10. I'm 29 now.
I am very nearsighted, but so were almost all of the people in my bloodline before me (along with my siblings, who were never afflicted with a computer addiction), and my prescription hasn't changed much in over a decade. Otherwise, my vision is A-OK, though I've always been a little sensitive to bright sun or fluorescent light (even before I knew computers).
My range of focus is good, I have good depth perception, excellent peripheral vision, excellent color perception, and so on. When I was doing textmode Linux 12 years ago, I used SVGATextMode to get tiny little fonts on the screen (something like 132x50) on a 15" CRT, and I currently shop for displays with the highest available resolution at a given size. My 15.4" laptop has a 1920x1200 display and was selected primarily based on the availability of such a high-resolution screen, and I elect even then to use fonts which most folks find to be positively inscrutable.
I do tend to keep my monitors adjusted so that they are relatively dark. My definition of "dark" has shifted down the Lumens scale a bit in a white-background GUI world than it was in a white-on-black DOS and UNIX world, but still.
Back on topic: I've been reading books with backlit Palm Pilots in bed for ages. I really prefer the soft, green electroluminescent backlight on my old Handspring Visor to the much fancier and higher-resolution color display on my recently-deceased Palm Zire 71, because it is darker. I think that a good, soft, even book light on a Kindle would also suit me well, if powering the thing were straight-forward and it were possible to download books from Project Gutenberg.
I do take breaks every few minutes to focus on something else far away, to exercise the muscles in my eyes. (I also vary my posture and keyboard position a lot, in part as a conscious effort to prevent RSI, and none of the typing positions I use are "proper," on purpose.)
Throughout my life, I've had various people swear up and down that spending such great lengths of time in front of a computer monitor would destroy my vision. The more insightful-sounding of these folks further submit that using really small print is even worse. And I'm probably long overdue for real RSI symptoms, but I don't really have any that ever last more than a few minutes (I find that driving long distances is far more stressful on my hands and wrists than using a computer ever was).
But I just don't see any evidence, in my case, to support the notion that looking at a computer monitor in a dark room is bad for my eyes. Would you care to elaborate more on the evils of backlit displays?
CDs bought in the store are made with lasers: The glass master is made with a laser. And if improvements to accuracy are to be made by changing the wavelength, I'd say it would say that it would be at the glass master stage where there would be the most effect.
Further, TFA (which you neglected to read) talks about releasing some 60 titles using this newish process. It's obviously not all about home recording.
And mastering houses aren't concerned with speed. They're deep into the funky voodoo of slow, methodical, and reliable. The better ones are almost certainly still burning with carefully-maintained 8x Yamaha and Plextor SCSI drives, and probably even then at rates no greater than 2x or 4x, on carefully-chosen media.
And even if it were: Faster burns, lower error rate? Jesus, man. We'd be burning them faster for years now, with either red or infrared lasers, if the fucking discs didn't distort from centripetal force to the point of being unusable at somewhere around 52x. And it should be obvious, but: Changing the color of the laser doesn't make the disc spin any faster.
Do you apply this much guesswork in other aspects of your daily life?
And speaking of stupid plugs, in my universe s-video, the worse plug of all, would not exist. Damn that plug is stupid.
It's not just [mini] DIN connectors which suffer this way, though those (ALL OF THEM) are an abomination: A round connector with no purpose in being round. There's a few other round connectors that I run into from time to time which are equally difficult to orient: Multi-pin Hirose connectors come to mind immediately. Most folks these days know Hirose's connectors by their proliferation of neat, small, reliable, good, snap-ring U.FL coaxial connectors on WiFi radios. I, however, know them because of their tiny, difficult-to-orient, and easily-damaged 3- or 4- pin that frequent wireless lapel microphones. I've replaced more than my share of mangled Hirose microphone connectors.
If a connector is to be round, it ought to be either be capable of orienting in any direction, or at least have some positive reason for being round. The Amphenol-sourced connectors on the engine harness of my 1995 BMW are predominantly round, and are a little hard to line up, but they include a slick-as-hell and infallible twist-lock mechanism which more than makes up for their orientation difficulty, and which makes removal a breeze. I far prefer it to, say, GM's standard connectors, which (although more waterproof) involve locking plastic tab and a certain amount of prayer and the blood of a chicken during disassembly (lest the tab be broken off).
The coaxial DC plug is a good design, in modern implementations. Dell has commonly extended it on their laptops with an additional center pin (for data, presumably), and that seems to work just fine, but there's no good reason why a similar connector couldn't be extended to carry power, two grounds, and two data lines. Or, with the addition of a soft-but-positive-lock retention mechanism, data(s), power, ground(s), and audio/video.
Sometimes I think I should go ahead and draw such a thing up on paper and submit a patent for it, but then I look at my bank account and realize that there's no way I could afford to do so.....
But I digress. I guess I'd rather see a single, monolithic, SCART-like (but orientation-flexible) connector on mobile devices, than any confluence (or even standardized spacing) of various and sundry connectors.
If an adjustment in the market is to be made, I, for one, hope that it is the last one we'll endure for the foreseeable future.
Mail is bloody simple these days. I know the Poweredge 2950 pretty well, and it's a good box. It's no surprise, to me, that it's able to keep up with large attachments and 2,000 mailboxes. Our mail server is a tired old 2.4GHz P4 HT box, purposefully scratch built with a Tyan motherboard and other good parts, with software RAID 1, and it works fine for our dozens-of-users. I even do full-text searches of my (huge, disorganized) inbox with Dovecot and Thunderbird, and it's pretty fast.
I really don't know why these folks think this should be a problem.
No. As opposed to a (non-average) hetero teenage male gamer, who runs around saying "I LOVE PUSSY!", or "I'm God's gift to women. Behold my cock!" It's one thing to be open about one's sexual orientation (whatever it is), and another thing entirely to embellish it to the point of irritation.
The lesbians that I, personally, know (and know of) are pretty quiet about the whole thing, just as I am about my own sexuality. Same thing with the gay folks that I consider friends. But just because I'm accepting, doesn't mean that I invite loud proclamations of anyone's sexuality into my life. I'd rather treat people based on their treatment of me, non-sexually, than on boisterous claims of their sexual preference, or worse, the depth of a man's throat or the length of a girl's tongue.
Those things aren't important to me. And the converse is also true: Even as a hetero male who definitely enjoys a good blow job[1], especially one that employs the exquisite feel of the tonsils and the soft palette, I'd really care not to know how deep a girl's throat is, or how long a man's tongue is -- especially in a gaming environment.
What this has to do with Xbox Live bans, I'm not sure, but I'm just trying to reiterate OP's point, which you took to such an extreme that it seems that you've lost it entirely.
[1]: This statement might be offensive to some. And, if this were a family-oriented service like Xbox Live, I'd expect repercussions for it. But it's Slashdot, so: *shrug* If it offends you, then I guess my point is thus validated.
Slashdot Mirror
Insightful? How about: Illiterate.
To wit:
This is how departmental IT is done. Or, at least, it's how it *should* be done. I spent less than $25K on these TWO computers [Emphasis mine]
He says, right there, that there are two of them. Oh, sure, the rest of the time he's referring to the purchase in the singular sense, but if he's doing it right, he's treating both the live system and its spare as a singular entity anyway.
Please learn to read before flaming. Thanks!
When I hit that barrier on my old machines, I install Linux, which really just doesn't give a shit about BIOS limitations.
Sure. That way, you can have deep discharges (and associated wear) on TWO giant battery arrays instead of just one. As if buying and disposing of this stuff wasn't already an issue, now your battery waste per mile is multiplied by 2! Horray!
Right, sure, but:
If I were a restaurant owner, I'm looking at the dollars and cents, but also the pain-in-the-ass of it all, but not some grandiose "big picture." If it's less hassle for me to burn my fryer oil for electricity than to turn the back dock into a fuel depot, then so be it.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but thanks for the suggestions. Hopefully it'll be helpful for someone.
I believe that the CAT5 device you speak of is better described as a LART. More information and example usage here.
Is there an easy way to totally preclude GRUB or LILO or whatever from allowing single-user mode? What about Knoppix? If I, Joe Above-Average Deskmonkey, had a locked-down Linux box on my desk, I'm afraid that the temptation to go ahead and fuck with it anyway on a lazy Wednesday afternoon would be great indeed.
And, sure, it'd be a policy violation. I might be even be fired for it. But I'm still going to do it. How easily will your Fat-Ass net detect and correct my mucking about?
Let's treat the symptom, then.
A relative of mine successfully lobbied the local city council to ban garbage collection before 8 AM. She swore, up and down, that she could feel the garbage trucks emptying dumpsters at a hospital four blocks away, and that it would consistently awaken her. Her theory was that with bedrock being very near to the surface in that neighborhood, both her house and the hospital were on the same limestone slab.
Of course, this same person used to unplug her refrigerator at night, because it'd wake her up when it would turn in the middle of night. I've heard this fridge. It was quiet.
She's a little crazy. And, obviously, she's a schoolteacher.
But, perhaps, you could come up with an equally crazy story, and solve your garbage collection problem. It wouldn't help the environment at all (garbage trucks run at 4:00AM because the streets are calmest at that hour, so route takes less time), but you'd be able to sleep in for another few hours . . .
Doubt it. It's been at least two years since I bought that player, and given that it seemed to be a Wal-Mart exclusive, I'd be really surprised if it's still available.
As another poster suggested, though: The player I used before that was a Philips model. It was more money (about $90), but it was a little fancier and a couple of years prior to the RCA that I had. It also worked fine with whatever media, as long as I stuffed it onto disc first (it had no support for USB or flash).
IIRC, it had some nomenclature on the box which said something like "Plays everything!@#$!!!!!", and as far as I could tell, that was pretty much accurate. I'd expect current Philips models with that make similar claims to perform similarly.
Good luck!
Bah.
I used to have low-end RCA DVD player. It upscaled to 1080i via HDMI, it played random DIVX and MPEG movies from flash, and it worked well with every TV I ever connected it to. Video quality was good -- I kept it around until I got a PS3 and wanted to decrease the number of components next to the TV.
It was $50 at Wal-Mart.
It doesn't have to be high-end.
Luck?
Back in the day (a decade or so ago), I was the first kid on the block with an 8x Plextor SCSI CD burner. It was the fastest available at the time, aside from one released by Smart and Friendly just a few weeks earlier.
In the beginning, media was indeed a problem. A lot of blanks were still branded for 2x, most of them were 4x, and only a few were actually rated at 8x. Some had real issues, others seemed to work ok. After a semi-intensive study of different media, I found that silver (yes, silver - not aluminum) TDK Certified+ seemed to work the best in general. I had the impression at the time that such trial-and-error sessions were common at the time.
As time moved on, media improved, as did the firmware on the drive. Eventually, within a year or two of folks improving their CD-R chemistry and Plextor improving the firmware, the situation improved enough that I was able to buy whatever blanks were cheapest at Wal-Mart. Things always worked very well, and I never bothered much with burning below 8x.
Now: I can go back and read these decade-old disks, and they still work fine. I don't bother very often (after all, who wants to use an old backup of 98SE, or OS/2 Warp Connect Blue?), but whenever I do, things are good.
I'm really not sure what the problem is.
I forked over a couple of crappy PS3 games around Christmas to Gamestop for pennies on the dollar, and I didn't think much about them wanting a driver's license.
But now that I have some reason to suspect that this stuff ends up in the LEADS database, I'm really no longer interested in doing business with them again.
Thanks for the insight. I really don't need or want my transaction history available to any cop with a laptop.
And let's not forget the obvious part, here: Akamai is already done. It works. It is the most efficient way we have (network-wise) to broadcast video across the current[1] Internet. Reinventing that wheel, and probably doing it badly, isn't going to save a dime.
[1]: I've been waiting for eons for multicast IP to become a reality for the general population, but it seems unlikely to happen any time soon.
Dude,
It was Sunday -- the last day of the hamfest. Nobody wanted that terminal for a dollar. Had I not bought it and loudly thrown it away, it would've been dropped quietly into a dumpster somewhere to die alone. But, alas, I did rescue it from its sure fate, and lo, by trashing it in front of a crowd, I gave it new life.
I did that terminal a favor. The kittens are fine.
When I reinstall Windows XP or Vista and need to install updates for testing client projects, I need to activate Windows; This requires a 20-minute call to the Activation hotline each time.
[...]
Every time I have to call Microsoft about anything, or any time they ever call me, I rip the rep a new one about the activation scheme.
Gee. Maybe if you weren't spending so much time being a dickhead, your activation calls wouldn't take twenty minutes each.
I, too, have activated my share of Windows installs by phone, and it's not very painful at all. There's a few things to remember:
1. It's faster and easier to use the phone keypad than it is to speak the numbers into their voice recognition system. Just start mashing it out in DTMF, and it'll work.
2. If you have to talk to a rep, be polite. Just state why you're installing Windows, that it's the only copy with that key in use as far as you know, and move on. This also works for transferring OEM copies from dead freebie machines onto new machines: Just take down the model and serial number/service tag when you call, and tell them you've replaced the motherboard.
3. The rep doesn't care. They're not paid enough to care. They're only there to fill out a form on a computer screen, and read a string of numbers to you. Bitching at a Microsoft Activation rep about Microsoft Activation is like bitching at the meter reader after a power outage -- you're barking up the wrong tree.
Could be.
Off-topic, young techie story: I was on IRC once, a decade or so ago, and a friend there was opining that it'd be so much more fun to write code if he could just do it on a real VT100, or at least on a monitor that had a VT100 logo on it. A year or so later, I found a DEC VT100 in good condition at the Dayton Hamvention fleemarket for $1.
He said it worked fine. I said I didn't care if it worked, and that I was only interested in the logo. I offered him $5, if he'd just let me pry off the logo. He refused, and was insistent that I take the entire terminal for $1 or nothing at all. So I gave him a dollar, and took the whole thing.
But it was heavy, and I wasn't about to carry it around all day. So I walked over to the nearest trash can, pried the logo off with my knife, and announced to the crowd my intention: Take this genuine DEC VT100, for free, or it goes into the trash. People looked. They listened. But here's the thing: Nobody wanted the free gear. I pleaded with folks to PLEASE take this free historic artifact, but they wouldn't do it.
So, I tossed it into the trash barrel. It landed with a dull thud on top of a mountain of discarded plastic bottles and small electronics. And then, everything changed: In mere seconds, Old Techies swarmed upon it like flies on shit to rescue it from its grave.
As long as it was merely free, the item had no value. But once it was trash, it was worth having.
Totally bizarre.
There's a world of difference between "shatter" and "so unstable it doesn't work anymore."
General consensus is that Windows 7 is the service pack. What was your point, again?
I hear you. Here's an opposite scenario:
Retail Windows XP needs a few added drivers to behave properly on my Inspiron 6000i laptop. But retail Vista installs and works. The Windows 7 beta installs and works.
I upgrade a bunch of drivers to manufacturer-supplied ones, anyway: I like Realtek's sound driver better than the one which comes with Windows (though the laptop doesn't even have a Realtek chip in it). I like intel's WiFi management tools better than those included with Windows. There's a lot of great functionality in the ATI Catalyst drivers which isn't present in the default drivers under Vista and 7. I also prefer Dell's more recent Glidepoint drivers to the default in Windows, since it gives me separate settings for the Bluetooth mouse and the built-in trackpad.
But, all of this is optional. I don't need to upgrade anything to get Windows Vista or 7 to install and work properly on this machine. The SD card slot works. The modem works. The Ethernet adapter works. The WiFi card works. The video card works (with DirectX). Suspend, resume, and hibernate work. The Cardbus slot works. Battery monitoring works. Bluetooth works. USB-to-RS232 adapters work. USB sound adapters work. My networked HP printer works. The touchpad works. Firewire works. The media buttons on the front edge of the machine work. And every now and then, Windows Update tells me that there's a newer driver for one or more of these things available to be installed without pain.
I'm pretty unimpressed by OP's claims that none of this is possible. I have a lot more trouble getting Ubuntu to behave on this box than I do recent versions of Windows, and that's not because of lack of experience. Back in the day, I used to download new XFree86 sources and painstakingly compile them on my Slackware-equipped 486, and sort out library and kernel dependencies by hand -- I can make Ubuntu work. Likewise, I can make everything listed above work just fine in any modern Linux distribution. But Windows works better (yes, I said it), without any help from me.
*shrug*
I've read from computer monitors in dark rooms, at length, since I was 10. I'm 29 now.
I am very nearsighted, but so were almost all of the people in my bloodline before me (along with my siblings, who were never afflicted with a computer addiction), and my prescription hasn't changed much in over a decade. Otherwise, my vision is A-OK, though I've always been a little sensitive to bright sun or fluorescent light (even before I knew computers).
My range of focus is good, I have good depth perception, excellent peripheral vision, excellent color perception, and so on. When I was doing textmode Linux 12 years ago, I used SVGATextMode to get tiny little fonts on the screen (something like 132x50) on a 15" CRT, and I currently shop for displays with the highest available resolution at a given size. My 15.4" laptop has a 1920x1200 display and was selected primarily based on the availability of such a high-resolution screen, and I elect even then to use fonts which most folks find to be positively inscrutable.
I do tend to keep my monitors adjusted so that they are relatively dark. My definition of "dark" has shifted down the Lumens scale a bit in a white-background GUI world than it was in a white-on-black DOS and UNIX world, but still.
Back on topic: I've been reading books with backlit Palm Pilots in bed for ages. I really prefer the soft, green electroluminescent backlight on my old Handspring Visor to the much fancier and higher-resolution color display on my recently-deceased Palm Zire 71, because it is darker. I think that a good, soft, even book light on a Kindle would also suit me well, if powering the thing were straight-forward and it were possible to download books from Project Gutenberg.
I do take breaks every few minutes to focus on something else far away, to exercise the muscles in my eyes. (I also vary my posture and keyboard position a lot, in part as a conscious effort to prevent RSI, and none of the typing positions I use are "proper," on purpose.)
Throughout my life, I've had various people swear up and down that spending such great lengths of time in front of a computer monitor would destroy my vision. The more insightful-sounding of these folks further submit that using really small print is even worse. And I'm probably long overdue for real RSI symptoms, but I don't really have any that ever last more than a few minutes (I find that driving long distances is far more stressful on my hands and wrists than using a computer ever was).
But I just don't see any evidence, in my case, to support the notion that looking at a computer monitor in a dark room is bad for my eyes. Would you care to elaborate more on the evils of backlit displays?
No. In my world, fax machines exist to put bike messengers out of work. And SMTP exists to put fax machines out of work.
CDs bought in the store are made with lasers: The glass master is made with a laser. And if improvements to accuracy are to be made by changing the wavelength, I'd say it would say that it would be at the glass master stage where there would be the most effect.
Further, TFA (which you neglected to read) talks about releasing some 60 titles using this newish process. It's obviously not all about home recording.
And mastering houses aren't concerned with speed. They're deep into the funky voodoo of slow, methodical, and reliable. The better ones are almost certainly still burning with carefully-maintained 8x Yamaha and Plextor SCSI drives, and probably even then at rates no greater than 2x or 4x, on carefully-chosen media.
And even if it were: Faster burns, lower error rate? Jesus, man. We'd be burning them faster for years now, with either red or infrared lasers, if the fucking discs didn't distort from centripetal force to the point of being unusable at somewhere around 52x. And it should be obvious, but: Changing the color of the laser doesn't make the disc spin any faster.
Do you apply this much guesswork in other aspects of your daily life?
And speaking of stupid plugs, in my universe s-video, the worse plug of all, would not exist. Damn that plug is stupid.
It's not just [mini] DIN connectors which suffer this way, though those (ALL OF THEM) are an abomination: A round connector with no purpose in being round. There's a few other round connectors that I run into from time to time which are equally difficult to orient: Multi-pin Hirose connectors come to mind immediately. Most folks these days know Hirose's connectors by their proliferation of neat, small, reliable, good, snap-ring U.FL coaxial connectors on WiFi radios. I, however, know them because of their tiny, difficult-to-orient, and easily-damaged 3- or 4- pin that frequent wireless lapel microphones. I've replaced more than my share of mangled Hirose microphone connectors.
If a connector is to be round, it ought to be either be capable of orienting in any direction, or at least have some positive reason for being round. The Amphenol-sourced connectors on the engine harness of my 1995 BMW are predominantly round, and are a little hard to line up, but they include a slick-as-hell and infallible twist-lock mechanism which more than makes up for their orientation difficulty, and which makes removal a breeze. I far prefer it to, say, GM's standard connectors, which (although more waterproof) involve locking plastic tab and a certain amount of prayer and the blood of a chicken during disassembly (lest the tab be broken off).
The coaxial DC plug is a good design, in modern implementations. Dell has commonly extended it on their laptops with an additional center pin (for data, presumably), and that seems to work just fine, but there's no good reason why a similar connector couldn't be extended to carry power, two grounds, and two data lines. Or, with the addition of a soft-but-positive-lock retention mechanism, data(s), power, ground(s), and audio/video.
Sometimes I think I should go ahead and draw such a thing up on paper and submit a patent for it, but then I look at my bank account and realize that there's no way I could afford to do so.....
But I digress. I guess I'd rather see a single, monolithic, SCART-like (but orientation-flexible) connector on mobile devices, than any confluence (or even standardized spacing) of various and sundry connectors.
If an adjustment in the market is to be made, I, for one, hope that it is the last one we'll endure for the foreseeable future.
*nod*
Mail is bloody simple these days. I know the Poweredge 2950 pretty well, and it's a good box. It's no surprise, to me, that it's able to keep up with large attachments and 2,000 mailboxes. Our mail server is a tired old 2.4GHz P4 HT box, purposefully scratch built with a Tyan motherboard and other good parts, with software RAID 1, and it works fine for our dozens-of-users. I even do full-text searches of my (huge, disorganized) inbox with Dovecot and Thunderbird, and it's pretty fast.
I really don't know why these folks think this should be a problem.
No. As opposed to a (non-average) hetero teenage male gamer, who runs around saying "I LOVE PUSSY!", or "I'm God's gift to women. Behold my cock!" It's one thing to be open about one's sexual orientation (whatever it is), and another thing entirely to embellish it to the point of irritation.
The lesbians that I, personally, know (and know of) are pretty quiet about the whole thing, just as I am about my own sexuality. Same thing with the gay folks that I consider friends. But just because I'm accepting, doesn't mean that I invite loud proclamations of anyone's sexuality into my life. I'd rather treat people based on their treatment of me, non-sexually, than on boisterous claims of their sexual preference, or worse, the depth of a man's throat or the length of a girl's tongue.
Those things aren't important to me. And the converse is also true: Even as a hetero male who definitely enjoys a good blow job[1], especially one that employs the exquisite feel of the tonsils and the soft palette, I'd really care not to know how deep a girl's throat is, or how long a man's tongue is -- especially in a gaming environment.
What this has to do with Xbox Live bans, I'm not sure, but I'm just trying to reiterate OP's point, which you took to such an extreme that it seems that you've lost it entirely.
[1]: This statement might be offensive to some. And, if this were a family-oriented service like Xbox Live, I'd expect repercussions for it. But it's Slashdot, so: *shrug* If it offends you, then I guess my point is thus validated.
(I browse the web with w3m, which delegates the task of filling text boxes to an editor of my choice)
Masochist.