1) Own a 3D printer of sufficient quality to make a workable part.
2) Buy all the business parts of the gun. The barrel, bolt, bolt carrier, firing pin, buffer, gas tube, trigger and assembly, fire selector, hammer, etc, etc,.
3) Assemble said gun from scratch.
You CANNOT print a whole gun and will NEVER be able to unless we get metal 3D printers that can make high strength parts. An AR-15 barrel and chamber must survive peak forces of 63,000 PSI. 3D printers can't extrude materials that can take anything near that.
All people are printing now is the lower receiver, and maybe some of the ergonomics stuff like grips and hand guards. This shit is not intensive, nor expensive, to make.
The only notable thing about the lower for an AR-15 variant is that it is the serialized part and this legally the firearm. However that law could be changed, if needed, and then you'd be SOL.
This is in no way, shape, or form a script kidde operation. It is just making AR-15 lowers, something people have done forever. The only reason some geeks are obsessed with it is because they don't understand materials science and think that this means you can print a whole gun.
If the issue was attention (it isn't) then why do they allow people to continue reading books and magazines? There's no difference between reading a novel on paper and reading it on a Kindle, attention wise.
Know why? Because that NOT the reason. That bullshit reason gets repeated online but it has nothing to do with anything. The reason for the electronics ban is one of "We've always done this and don't want to admit that we are wrong about it."
This is why so many people, including the FCC, are on them about it. They have NO REASON for a ban just on electronics. If they could truly interfere with a plane's operation, they'd be banned entirely and not only that we'd be redesigning planes since it would be easy to make a directed antenna for use on the ground to take planes out of the sky, invisibly.
I'm completely ok if the rule is "Everything has to go away during takeoff and landing, you must give your full attention to the staff." Ok, fine. I don't think it is useful, but I'll roll with it. However they are 100% ok with books, magazines, all that shit that is just as distracting as an electronic device but it is somehow ok.
The rule is based in nothing but bullshit. It is not because of distraction, it is because "We've always done it this way and can't admit we are wrong."
The Windows world has an awful lot of video editors you can get your hands on of all ranges. Personally, I'd spend a bit more and get Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 12, which runs you a bit under $40 from Amazon. It has a better interface, more features, and is quite stable in my experience.
I like the Kickstarter concept and I've Kickstarted a number of games but you either have to offer something that isn't available, or something that is in some way better. Having tried OpenShot as one of many I tried in a failed attempt to find a good video editor for Linux, I am not interested. Windows has better products.
It is not the big secret people think it is. Many institutions, including research universities, have a copy. They have a program specially for governments, the Government Security Program.
I mean do you really think the NSA, one of the most institutionally paranoid places there is, would allow Windows to be used if they couldn't audit it? Not hardly.
So if China wants it, I'm sure they have it. I think this is more of a "We have to have our own thing since China Strong!" and crap like that. China seems to have ego issues about not having home grown stuff (they aren't they only country that does) and wants to have their own everything. However turns out they aren't always equipped to develop it from scratch, so they often start with something else.
Similar to their "Loongson" microprocessor. It was to be a Chinese CPU, home grown and all that. In actuality they ripped off, and then later licensed, the MIPS architecture and it is a MIPS64 based chip running at 1GHz on a 65nm process.
This sounds similar. "Hey we want an OS, but writing one from scratch is a ton of work and we don't really have enough of the skillset around to do it well. So let's get a Linux distro to start on, and then make it our 'own'."
You don't actually need to jailbreak an Android phone, they are already jailbroken. You just go and press a button to allow applications from sources other than the Google Play store. It will warn you that you may face hacking, doom, whatever but it will then allow you to install applications from any source you like. You can download them off the web, you can get other application stores, like Amazon's, whatever you want. Rooting is if you want full control of your device. You are right that some devices are very locked down and hard to root. However it really isn't comparable, since they are all more or less jailbroken.
The main reason to jailbreak iPhone is to get access to non-Apple applications. That is just not necessary on Android.
Usually if a company hires someone cheap n' incompetent to replace you because you cost too much, you'll find future work in fixing what they break. If you were a dick about it an the company feels you tried to screw them, they'll look for someone else. However if you did what you were asked and did it well, they may hire you back.
Remember as a contractor you are not an employee, but you are always a future contract hire if they like your work.
For one, credit card companies have no trouble lending to people can easily repay debt. While they like interest, they don't mind just getting fees. I always pay off my credit cards, since I am in a financial situation that makes that feasible for me to do, I don't carry a balance, and yet I have tons of credit, and get offers for more all the time. While they may not make a ton on me, it is extremely low risk and that makes them happy. There's a big market for low-risk loans. Have a look at the US Treasuries market if you want to see the biggest.
Also in terms of people paying interest they certainly like that, but they still seek out those who are good credit risk, meaning they can probably repay the debt. They do not want defaults, those are expensive. Hence people with poor credit risk end up paying a lot in interest, or just can't get it.
Intel's C/C++ and FORTRAN compilers are exceedingly efficient at vectorization, and are of course updated to use their new instructions. Does take a bit for software to be compiled using it, but you can see some real gains in a lot of things without special work.
I also think people who do GPGPU get a little over focused on it and think it is the solution to all problems. You find that some things like, say, graphics rendering, are extremely fast on the stream processors that make up a modern GPU. However you find other things not so much, they can even be slower. Intel CPUs are very good as mixed tasks, and the better vector units only make that more true.
If you have to run a really old OS on a new system, you often find that while there's no drivers, the default ones work fine. The "standard VGA" driver works ok for display and so on.
There's also the minor issue of 2000 being unsupported (meaning unpatched) and almost 14 years old.
I don't think companies should have to support everything forever, but MS and PC makers like Dell do a pretty good job with older and newer stuff.
We had to install Windows XP on some newer Lenovo systems, for temporary project. It worked surprisingly well. These were Sandy Bridge Core i5 systems, with Intel graphics, and Realtek NICs. We were able to get graphics, sound, and network all working without a problem. It wasn't as easy as setting up Windows 7, which they were designed for, but it worked. While these are exactly latest hardware, they're not all that old.
Also, as you say, it is quite different between not actively supporting something, and actively stopping it from working. Apple not only has extremely short support cycles, they only support to previous OS versions, and their OS release cycle is pretty quick, but they'll then go and actively stop old OSes from working on new hardware.
Microsoft support its OSes for a minimum of 10 years from release. That's pretty good, and far longer than Apple. PC makers generally doing okay job of supporting older OSes on their PCs at least for a good while.
I have no doubt that windows XP support is going to become fairly hard to come by for new hardware quite soon. This is because it is falling out of support in 2014. However, it's rather hard to hate on a company for "only" supporting something for 13 years.
What's even more amusing is that it was moderated up as "informative." I fail to see how something can be informative when it is pure fantasy. It's also somewhat ridiculous fantasy for anyone who knows law enforcement, as they'd know that the marshals service are actually the ones who protect federal judges.
While I'm certainly not a fan of many of the recent more authoritarian changes the US has undergone, the paranoid ramblings that come out of some people on Slashdot are quite ridiculous.
What's even funnier is that this ruling is actually a partial win for the federal government. The District Court that heard the appeal, threw out the search. The Ninth Circuit reversed that, saying the search was reasonable based off of all of the evidence. However they impose some limits upon future searches by saying that simple encryption is not enough reason for search. Also they left open the possibility for a case-by-case review of searches by the courts.
I like how tripe like this gets moderated up as insightful. It is nothing of the sort. If you go and read the actual decision, which you can easily find, and other people have linked to you will see that indeed it was just a normal person. It gets rather tiring to see this continual whining on Slashdot that is completely unfounded and gets moderated up as "insightful."
If you wanted to criticize this decision, there are some legitimate grounds. It still allows for quite wide latitude in searches at the border. For that matter the conviction in this case was upheld. The court ruled that the search was reasonable, just that it would not have been in more narrow circumstances. However rather than read the actual decision, you decided to simply spout off.
Attention moderators: Something is not insightful simply because it is a narrative you agree with. Please do at least a minimal amount of research to see if a comment is actually insightful. It is rather hard for something to be both insightful and wrong at the same time.
Well for better or for worse being denied tenure IS like being fired. I mean while you're not technically fired simply because you are denied tenure, it's basically a message to get out. The only professors you generally see stay around that are not tenured, are ones that are nontenure track. Some positions, like research assistant professors, are not tenure-track. No matter how long they work, tenure is not something they will receive. However in a tenure-track position, being denied tenure is more or less a kiss of death. If the department simply isn't sure yet they'll normally extend your time, neither granting nor denying tenure. When they flat-out deny tenure, that normally means they want you gone.
Tenure is not something, at this point, that is just occasionally granted to the best professors. It is basically something assumed for most regular professorships. You either get tenure, or you go work somewhere else.
I work for university, and I have never seen a professor that was denied tenure stick around. They have all left nearly immediately afterwards. There is a reason for that. It is a convenient way to get rid of a professor that, for whatever reason, the department, college, university, whatever doesn't like.
It's also gotten to be a bigger issue these days because of the connected nature of the world. Back in the day, you really didn't have to worry about a time zone other than your own.Maybe the neighboring time zone or two, but that's it. However now, with our interconnected world, it's not uncommon to need to communicate with people in all kinds of time zones. Heck, just playing video games, you can encounter people from all over the world. As such, it becomes much more important to know what time it is in different areas of the world. Daylight savings time just messes that up. I also really fail to see the utility in this day and age given that we have electric lighting and that it's not hard for us to simply change our schedule rather than changing the clocks.
DST is a relic of a bygone era. We really should just get rid of it.
We should just use standard time as standard time. Seriously, it is nice living in a place that doesn't adjust. It is always UTC -7 here. Playing with the clocks is silly. If we want to get up earlier or later part of the year, just do that.
Also I really question if an hour either way makes any economic difference at all.
As Wikipedia likes to say [citation needed]. I can full well understand wanting a good keyboard, but I'd need some actual evidence that high activation force means good. Cherry switches can do a nice mechanical action with a positive bump AND low activation force.
Also you may want to be a little careful. Perhaps your body is structured such that no form of RSI will ever affect you, but probably not. Most people have a threshold where repetitive motion in an unergonomic form will cause a problem at some point. If you spend all your time typing and do so on a straight, high force, clickey keyboard, well you may discover that you no longer have that option later in life. You'll get some pain and numbness, then it'll get worse, then you'll start to lose range of motion and so on and it'll get worse, and worse until you either deal with it, or you are disabled.
Ergonomics aren't about "coddling", as though if you just toughened up and dealt wit it things would get better, they are about preventing problems. You ignore proper ergonomics at your own risk.
I'd suggest you pick up Dr. Emil Pascarelli's book "Repetitive Strain Injury" and educate yourself on it if you do indeed type "all day, every day" as you say. It is good information, and has several pages of references to journal articles on the subject.
My concern with good keyboards, desks, chairs, etc is not if I can be an "effective" typist by whatever artificial standard you've set in your head. It is if I can continue to use computers regularly for my whole career without becoming disabled. I already have had the problems of basic RSI so it is something I'm quite aware of. You should get yourself aware of it, given that your use sounds pretty intense, and deal with it BEFORE it is a problem.
Or, you can try and be a tough guy, and then end up at 40 or 50 crying because you can't work, have difficulty lifting a cup to your mouth, etc (it really can get that bad) because you thought you knew the One True Way(tm) to be a typist.
You want low activation force on an ergonomic keyboard. Hence rubber dome, low force cherry switches, scissor switches, that sort of thing. High force click switches are bad for ergonomic because of how hard you have to punch the keys. They may be "geek cool" but ergonomic they are not.
If you want a mechanical ergonomic keyboard look at Kinesis or TrulyErgo. Personally I like Kinesis' Freestyle 2, though it is not mechanical switches.
They are all low force switches though, since that is what is good for ergonomics.
The US created a real nation. All the states joined, subservient to the federal government, and for all time (the civil war was over the issue of if you cold leave, answer is you can't). The states gave up their rights to act as independent actors in terms of diplomacy, war, and so on.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It is kinda a union, but the countries still retail independence. This can lead to problems simply in things like the Greece situation where a country can set economic policy, but not currency policy. There is some unification, but it is far short of a nation.
I could very well see the idea of the European nations unifying in to a larger country, but that isn't what the EU is or where it is going.
Valve is as profitable as they are because of Steam. They act as middlemen, selling games. They also provide little in the way of support on it so costs are low.
That's fine and all, but doesn't work unless you can get in that niche. That's also why the Windows Store scares them so much: They have little outside of their store. Most game companies don't care much, they make their money on games, their DD service is somewhat secondary. For Valve, Steam is where all the money is and if someone else takes it, they are in trouble.
It allows them to play around with their development, take as much time as they want, and all that jazz, but that doesn't work if you have to make money on the games to keep the doors open.
Is Seagate doesn't offer any consumer SSDs. Go to your favourite retailer and look for SSDs. You'll see Intel, Samsung, Crucial, OCZ, Corsair, and so on including a bunch of brands you've probably never heard of. What you won't see is Seagate. They do make SSDs, but only enterprise level drives, the kind of stuff that someone like Dell buys and rebrands to sell to you for servers.
So what the fuck do they think they are going to do here? If they keep on the current track, they are in for a major shrink in business. There is a growing market for SSDs in the consumer arena, but they are not going to buy high priced SAS SSDs designed for heavy write loads.
It really surprised me how completely HDD manufacturers seem to have missed the boat on SSDs. They'd be natural companies for people to buy from, already known names in storage, but they've been really pokey. Seagate only does enterprise stuff, WD tried a consumer drive for a bit but it was over priced and underperforming and they've cut it.
They have a limited time to sort this shit out and get a good lineup of consumer and enterprise SSDs, or they'll find themselves being squeezed out of the market by all the new players.
Particularly not to satisfy a prima-donna mobile developer who thinks that everyone should do things his way because he's so smart. Extra particularly since you aren't someone I have to support. I'll keep doing things the way the university wants me to, the way they pay me to, you can do whatever makes you happy. I will, however, comment on Slashdot when I see something of interest to me and relevant to my experience. Given that I do run a data center, I just might know a little about the issues one faces.
The question is what does the colo company do when they have a problem. So your little mini dies, how long does it take them to get it fixed? Can they recover your data? How long does that take? If you care about the availability of your server, then how your colo company deals with shit is very much your concern.
Also I'm thinking from the perspective of someone who would run something like a colo. I am thinking of what their DR plan is, what they do when things break. Some of them may not have thought this through and may be in for a bad time when problems happen.
See I can give people who use micro-USB a bit of a pass. You are using a standard that doesn't have enough pins/BW/whatever for HDMI. Fine, that is the price you pay for using a standard (though as you noted it can be extended as Samsung did). However Apple's is fully custom. They made their own connector. So why the issue? Why was it not designed properly in the first place? They could have, they just didn't.
They were trying to insist we use their preferred tool, rather than the one we know how to use.
You are pretty typical for a web developer who has no experience in a managed environment. You think that you are a special snowflake and that you should have what you want. Doesn't work that way.
One-off solutions are a big problem, they are what ends up taking lots of time, lots of resources, lots of support. They are the 5% that takes 95% of time. That's fine if you want a bigass IT group, but if you want just a few people, well then things have to be streamlined.
So let's ask what's more reasonable: That an IT group either trains or hires someone on Mac administration, purchases Mac hardware, and associated software to make it integrate with other systems, and so on for one website, or that the web developers write their code for the web platform that all the other stuff runs on?
Slashdot Mirror
You still have to:
1) Own a 3D printer of sufficient quality to make a workable part.
2) Buy all the business parts of the gun. The barrel, bolt, bolt carrier, firing pin, buffer, gas tube, trigger and assembly, fire selector, hammer, etc, etc,.
3) Assemble said gun from scratch.
You CANNOT print a whole gun and will NEVER be able to unless we get metal 3D printers that can make high strength parts. An AR-15 barrel and chamber must survive peak forces of 63,000 PSI. 3D printers can't extrude materials that can take anything near that.
All people are printing now is the lower receiver, and maybe some of the ergonomics stuff like grips and hand guards. This shit is not intensive, nor expensive, to make.
The only notable thing about the lower for an AR-15 variant is that it is the serialized part and this legally the firearm. However that law could be changed, if needed, and then you'd be SOL.
This is in no way, shape, or form a script kidde operation. It is just making AR-15 lowers, something people have done forever. The only reason some geeks are obsessed with it is because they don't understand materials science and think that this means you can print a whole gun.
I have seen no proposition of any non-metal material that could replace a barrel. The stress is too great.
If the issue was attention (it isn't) then why do they allow people to continue reading books and magazines? There's no difference between reading a novel on paper and reading it on a Kindle, attention wise.
Know why? Because that NOT the reason. That bullshit reason gets repeated online but it has nothing to do with anything. The reason for the electronics ban is one of "We've always done this and don't want to admit that we are wrong about it."
This is why so many people, including the FCC, are on them about it. They have NO REASON for a ban just on electronics. If they could truly interfere with a plane's operation, they'd be banned entirely and not only that we'd be redesigning planes since it would be easy to make a directed antenna for use on the ground to take planes out of the sky, invisibly.
This is just the FAA being stupid and stubborn.
I'm completely ok if the rule is "Everything has to go away during takeoff and landing, you must give your full attention to the staff." Ok, fine. I don't think it is useful, but I'll roll with it. However they are 100% ok with books, magazines, all that shit that is just as distracting as an electronic device but it is somehow ok.
The rule is based in nothing but bullshit. It is not because of distraction, it is because "We've always done it this way and can't admit we are wrong."
The Windows world has an awful lot of video editors you can get your hands on of all ranges. Personally, I'd spend a bit more and get Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 12, which runs you a bit under $40 from Amazon. It has a better interface, more features, and is quite stable in my experience.
I like the Kickstarter concept and I've Kickstarted a number of games but you either have to offer something that isn't available, or something that is in some way better. Having tried OpenShot as one of many I tried in a failed attempt to find a good video editor for Linux, I am not interested. Windows has better products.
It is not the big secret people think it is. Many institutions, including research universities, have a copy. They have a program specially for governments, the Government Security Program.
I mean do you really think the NSA, one of the most institutionally paranoid places there is, would allow Windows to be used if they couldn't audit it? Not hardly.
MS's page on that kind of thing is here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx
So if China wants it, I'm sure they have it. I think this is more of a "We have to have our own thing since China Strong!" and crap like that. China seems to have ego issues about not having home grown stuff (they aren't they only country that does) and wants to have their own everything. However turns out they aren't always equipped to develop it from scratch, so they often start with something else.
Similar to their "Loongson" microprocessor. It was to be a Chinese CPU, home grown and all that. In actuality they ripped off, and then later licensed, the MIPS architecture and it is a MIPS64 based chip running at 1GHz on a 65nm process.
This sounds similar. "Hey we want an OS, but writing one from scratch is a ton of work and we don't really have enough of the skillset around to do it well. So let's get a Linux distro to start on, and then make it our 'own'."
You don't actually need to jailbreak an Android phone, they are already jailbroken. You just go and press a button to allow applications from sources other than the Google Play store. It will warn you that you may face hacking, doom, whatever but it will then allow you to install applications from any source you like. You can download them off the web, you can get other application stores, like Amazon's, whatever you want. Rooting is if you want full control of your device. You are right that some devices are very locked down and hard to root. However it really isn't comparable, since they are all more or less jailbroken.
The main reason to jailbreak iPhone is to get access to non-Apple applications. That is just not necessary on Android.
Usually if a company hires someone cheap n' incompetent to replace you because you cost too much, you'll find future work in fixing what they break. If you were a dick about it an the company feels you tried to screw them, they'll look for someone else. However if you did what you were asked and did it well, they may hire you back.
Remember as a contractor you are not an employee, but you are always a future contract hire if they like your work.
For one, credit card companies have no trouble lending to people can easily repay debt. While they like interest, they don't mind just getting fees. I always pay off my credit cards, since I am in a financial situation that makes that feasible for me to do, I don't carry a balance, and yet I have tons of credit, and get offers for more all the time. While they may not make a ton on me, it is extremely low risk and that makes them happy. There's a big market for low-risk loans. Have a look at the US Treasuries market if you want to see the biggest.
Also in terms of people paying interest they certainly like that, but they still seek out those who are good credit risk, meaning they can probably repay the debt. They do not want defaults, those are expensive. Hence people with poor credit risk end up paying a lot in interest, or just can't get it.
Intel's C/C++ and FORTRAN compilers are exceedingly efficient at vectorization, and are of course updated to use their new instructions. Does take a bit for software to be compiled using it, but you can see some real gains in a lot of things without special work.
I also think people who do GPGPU get a little over focused on it and think it is the solution to all problems. You find that some things like, say, graphics rendering, are extremely fast on the stream processors that make up a modern GPU. However you find other things not so much, they can even be slower. Intel CPUs are very good as mixed tasks, and the better vector units only make that more true.
If you have to run a really old OS on a new system, you often find that while there's no drivers, the default ones work fine. The "standard VGA" driver works ok for display and so on.
There's also the minor issue of 2000 being unsupported (meaning unpatched) and almost 14 years old.
I don't think companies should have to support everything forever, but MS and PC makers like Dell do a pretty good job with older and newer stuff.
We had to install Windows XP on some newer Lenovo systems, for temporary project. It worked surprisingly well. These were Sandy Bridge Core i5 systems, with Intel graphics, and Realtek NICs. We were able to get graphics, sound, and network all working without a problem. It wasn't as easy as setting up Windows 7, which they were designed for, but it worked. While these are exactly latest hardware, they're not all that old.
Also, as you say, it is quite different between not actively supporting something, and actively stopping it from working. Apple not only has extremely short support cycles, they only support to previous OS versions, and their OS release cycle is pretty quick, but they'll then go and actively stop old OSes from working on new hardware.
Microsoft support its OSes for a minimum of 10 years from release. That's pretty good, and far longer than Apple. PC makers generally doing okay job of supporting older OSes on their PCs at least for a good while.
I have no doubt that windows XP support is going to become fairly hard to come by for new hardware quite soon. This is because it is falling out of support in 2014. However, it's rather hard to hate on a company for "only" supporting something for 13 years.
What's even more amusing is that it was moderated up as "informative." I fail to see how something can be informative when it is pure fantasy. It's also somewhat ridiculous fantasy for anyone who knows law enforcement, as they'd know that the marshals service are actually the ones who protect federal judges.
While I'm certainly not a fan of many of the recent more authoritarian changes the US has undergone, the paranoid ramblings that come out of some people on Slashdot are quite ridiculous.
What's even funnier is that this ruling is actually a partial win for the federal government. The District Court that heard the appeal, threw out the search. The Ninth Circuit reversed that, saying the search was reasonable based off of all of the evidence. However they impose some limits upon future searches by saying that simple encryption is not enough reason for search. Also they left open the possibility for a case-by-case review of searches by the courts.
I like how tripe like this gets moderated up as insightful. It is nothing of the sort. If you go and read the actual decision, which you can easily find, and other people have linked to you will see that indeed it was just a normal person. It gets rather tiring to see this continual whining on Slashdot that is completely unfounded and gets moderated up as "insightful."
If you wanted to criticize this decision, there are some legitimate grounds. It still allows for quite wide latitude in searches at the border. For that matter the conviction in this case was upheld. The court ruled that the search was reasonable, just that it would not have been in more narrow circumstances. However rather than read the actual decision, you decided to simply spout off.
Attention moderators: Something is not insightful simply because it is a narrative you agree with. Please do at least a minimal amount of research to see if a comment is actually insightful. It is rather hard for something to be both insightful and wrong at the same time.
http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2013/03/08/09-10139.pdf
Well for better or for worse being denied tenure IS like being fired. I mean while you're not technically fired simply because you are denied tenure, it's basically a message to get out. The only professors you generally see stay around that are not tenured, are ones that are nontenure track. Some positions, like research assistant professors, are not tenure-track. No matter how long they work, tenure is not something they will receive. However in a tenure-track position, being denied tenure is more or less a kiss of death. If the department simply isn't sure yet they'll normally extend your time, neither granting nor denying tenure. When they flat-out deny tenure, that normally means they want you gone.
Tenure is not something, at this point, that is just occasionally granted to the best professors. It is basically something assumed for most regular professorships. You either get tenure, or you go work somewhere else.
I work for university, and I have never seen a professor that was denied tenure stick around. They have all left nearly immediately afterwards. There is a reason for that. It is a convenient way to get rid of a professor that, for whatever reason, the department, college, university, whatever doesn't like.
It's also gotten to be a bigger issue these days because of the connected nature of the world. Back in the day, you really didn't have to worry about a time zone other than your own.Maybe the neighboring time zone or two, but that's it. However now, with our interconnected world, it's not uncommon to need to communicate with people in all kinds of time zones. Heck, just playing video games, you can encounter people from all over the world. As such, it becomes much more important to know what time it is in different areas of the world. Daylight savings time just messes that up. I also really fail to see the utility in this day and age given that we have electric lighting and that it's not hard for us to simply change our schedule rather than changing the clocks.
DST is a relic of a bygone era. We really should just get rid of it.
We should just use standard time as standard time. Seriously, it is nice living in a place that doesn't adjust. It is always UTC -7 here. Playing with the clocks is silly. If we want to get up earlier or later part of the year, just do that.
Also I really question if an hour either way makes any economic difference at all.
As Wikipedia likes to say [citation needed]. I can full well understand wanting a good keyboard, but I'd need some actual evidence that high activation force means good. Cherry switches can do a nice mechanical action with a positive bump AND low activation force.
Also you may want to be a little careful. Perhaps your body is structured such that no form of RSI will ever affect you, but probably not. Most people have a threshold where repetitive motion in an unergonomic form will cause a problem at some point. If you spend all your time typing and do so on a straight, high force, clickey keyboard, well you may discover that you no longer have that option later in life. You'll get some pain and numbness, then it'll get worse, then you'll start to lose range of motion and so on and it'll get worse, and worse until you either deal with it, or you are disabled.
Ergonomics aren't about "coddling", as though if you just toughened up and dealt wit it things would get better, they are about preventing problems. You ignore proper ergonomics at your own risk.
I'd suggest you pick up Dr. Emil Pascarelli's book "Repetitive Strain Injury" and educate yourself on it if you do indeed type "all day, every day" as you say. It is good information, and has several pages of references to journal articles on the subject.
My concern with good keyboards, desks, chairs, etc is not if I can be an "effective" typist by whatever artificial standard you've set in your head. It is if I can continue to use computers regularly for my whole career without becoming disabled. I already have had the problems of basic RSI so it is something I'm quite aware of. You should get yourself aware of it, given that your use sounds pretty intense, and deal with it BEFORE it is a problem.
Or, you can try and be a tough guy, and then end up at 40 or 50 crying because you can't work, have difficulty lifting a cup to your mouth, etc (it really can get that bad) because you thought you knew the One True Way(tm) to be a typist.
You want low activation force on an ergonomic keyboard. Hence rubber dome, low force cherry switches, scissor switches, that sort of thing. High force click switches are bad for ergonomic because of how hard you have to punch the keys. They may be "geek cool" but ergonomic they are not.
If you want a mechanical ergonomic keyboard look at Kinesis or TrulyErgo. Personally I like Kinesis' Freestyle 2, though it is not mechanical switches.
They are all low force switches though, since that is what is good for ergonomics.
The US created a real nation. All the states joined, subservient to the federal government, and for all time (the civil war was over the issue of if you cold leave, answer is you can't). The states gave up their rights to act as independent actors in terms of diplomacy, war, and so on.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It is kinda a union, but the countries still retail independence. This can lead to problems simply in things like the Greece situation where a country can set economic policy, but not currency policy. There is some unification, but it is far short of a nation.
I could very well see the idea of the European nations unifying in to a larger country, but that isn't what the EU is or where it is going.
Valve is as profitable as they are because of Steam. They act as middlemen, selling games. They also provide little in the way of support on it so costs are low.
That's fine and all, but doesn't work unless you can get in that niche. That's also why the Windows Store scares them so much: They have little outside of their store. Most game companies don't care much, they make their money on games, their DD service is somewhat secondary. For Valve, Steam is where all the money is and if someone else takes it, they are in trouble.
It allows them to play around with their development, take as much time as they want, and all that jazz, but that doesn't work if you have to make money on the games to keep the doors open.
Is Seagate doesn't offer any consumer SSDs. Go to your favourite retailer and look for SSDs. You'll see Intel, Samsung, Crucial, OCZ, Corsair, and so on including a bunch of brands you've probably never heard of. What you won't see is Seagate. They do make SSDs, but only enterprise level drives, the kind of stuff that someone like Dell buys and rebrands to sell to you for servers.
So what the fuck do they think they are going to do here? If they keep on the current track, they are in for a major shrink in business. There is a growing market for SSDs in the consumer arena, but they are not going to buy high priced SAS SSDs designed for heavy write loads.
It really surprised me how completely HDD manufacturers seem to have missed the boat on SSDs. They'd be natural companies for people to buy from, already known names in storage, but they've been really pokey. Seagate only does enterprise stuff, WD tried a consumer drive for a bit but it was over priced and underperforming and they've cut it.
They have a limited time to sort this shit out and get a good lineup of consumer and enterprise SSDs, or they'll find themselves being squeezed out of the market by all the new players.
Particularly not to satisfy a prima-donna mobile developer who thinks that everyone should do things his way because he's so smart. Extra particularly since you aren't someone I have to support. I'll keep doing things the way the university wants me to, the way they pay me to, you can do whatever makes you happy. I will, however, comment on Slashdot when I see something of interest to me and relevant to my experience. Given that I do run a data center, I just might know a little about the issues one faces.
The question is what does the colo company do when they have a problem. So your little mini dies, how long does it take them to get it fixed? Can they recover your data? How long does that take? If you care about the availability of your server, then how your colo company deals with shit is very much your concern.
Also I'm thinking from the perspective of someone who would run something like a colo. I am thinking of what their DR plan is, what they do when things break. Some of them may not have thought this through and may be in for a bad time when problems happen.
See I can give people who use micro-USB a bit of a pass. You are using a standard that doesn't have enough pins/BW/whatever for HDMI. Fine, that is the price you pay for using a standard (though as you noted it can be extended as Samsung did). However Apple's is fully custom. They made their own connector. So why the issue? Why was it not designed properly in the first place? They could have, they just didn't.
They were trying to insist we use their preferred tool, rather than the one we know how to use.
You are pretty typical for a web developer who has no experience in a managed environment. You think that you are a special snowflake and that you should have what you want. Doesn't work that way.
One-off solutions are a big problem, they are what ends up taking lots of time, lots of resources, lots of support. They are the 5% that takes 95% of time. That's fine if you want a bigass IT group, but if you want just a few people, well then things have to be streamlined.
So let's ask what's more reasonable: That an IT group either trains or hires someone on Mac administration, purchases Mac hardware, and associated software to make it integrate with other systems, and so on for one website, or that the web developers write their code for the web platform that all the other stuff runs on?