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User: Stormbringer

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  1. Mine does. I run TrinityDE; USB drives show up as icons on the desktop. When I context-click "Safely Remove", the system syncs and unmounts the drive if there's no busy-connection holding it open. The drive's icon disappearing from the desktop is my signal that the drive is cleanly unmounted and safe to pull out.

  2. Next on Google Maps Apps Add 'Mario Kart' Feature (wlwt.com) · · Score: 1

    I can't wait for the pod races on the fourth of May.

  3. And, if we were dealing with an infrared emitter, they'd be right. We're not. We're dealing with something with roughly the same penetration as a microwave oven.

  4. Mother (Nature), please, I'd rather do it myself.

  5. > a highly resistant form of CRE typically found outside the United States

    You mean, WAS typically found outside the USA. How many people did she pass this on to before she took to her bed?

  6. Not only cybercriminals, either. on Scammers Bite Chrome Users With Forgotten 2014 Bug (betanews.com) · · Score: 1

    Care to try to explain how all those links to kiddie-porn sites got on your computer in a courtroom?

  7. Re:shut up before you kill us all on Neil deGrasse Tyson Says It's 'Very Likely' The Universe Is A Simulation (extremetech.com) · · Score: 1

    Isn't that what The Game is about?

    btw I just lost the game.

  8. "Taxation without representation" -- where have I heard that before?

  9. Re:"and time runs backward as well as forward." on Quantum Theory Experiment Said to Prove "Spooky" Interactions (economist.com) · · Score: 1

    Nah, it's ten days early.

  10. Not Turning Them Off Here on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Organize Your Virtual Desktops? · · Score: 2

    > Having to close and reopen tools forces you to cut down on context switching. At least for me, that helps productivity.

    Good for you. For me, it guarantees that thoughts will be dropped before they can fully form, so it's deadly to productivity.

    Maybe it's the fact that I don't always have control over context-switching. I don't control when somebody shows up in my face with a demand for attention; pushing what I've been doing aside, with all the contextual cues I can marshal, by switching to another desktop to bring up the tooling needed to service the interrupt, means a much greater chance that I can go back and resume what I was doing, without backtracking (or, worse, working through a context crash to retrace my own thinking up to where I left off).

    The times when I do have control over context switching are often when vagrant thoughts coalesce suddenly into ideas which are potentially valuable but irrelevant to my current effort. I want those ideas securely noted somewhere appropriate (even if it's just in a loose-notes catcher) and dismissed quickly so I can resume the task I'm trying to keep my focus on. I keep text windows open on other desktops partly so I can bring up a notes editor for that. Sometimes those ideas need a quick look at my filesystem; I keep ytree poised in those text windows for that

    Then there's the full-screen shuffle. I remember my Windows days, when I had to minimize and iconize and shuffle things out of the way to get a clear view of a browser or other Internet tool. These days, there's IM, an etherape viewport on my LAN, another browser pointed at intranet tools, and all of them maximized because bringing them up to full size takes too long when I need to respond to a situation. I couldn't do that on one desktop, in fact I use 8, and often fill them all (though some assignments, like 2 for synaptic, are reservations so my habits know where to put things so I don't need to consciously think about it).

    Single desktop discipline works for you and your work habits. It's needless frustration for me and mine.

  11. Trace reactance, too. on Hand-Drawn and Inkjet Printed Circuits for the Masses (Video) · · Score: 1

    Just because the R in RC is distributed like this doesn't mean it's not real. All of the usual board-level capacitances are real, too, so long traces simply won't carry fast clocked signals cleanly.

  12. End Corporate Personhood first. on Lessig Launches a Super PAC To End All Super PACs · · Score: 1

    Corporations aren't people, they're machines owned and steered by people: vehicles. My car doesn't have citizenship and neither should my corporation.

  13. Congratulations, Marissa. on Yahoo DMARC Implementation Breaks Most Mailing Lists · · Score: 1

    In your quest to 'revitalize' your user-base by throwing out the loyal veterans, you pissed off people who have been members since eGroups and OneList by throwing that purple-abomination Neo web-interface at them... but still they refused to go away, they just relied more heavily on their 90's-style mail clients for access.

    This strikes at the heart of that persistence. I do believe you've found a way to get rid of your remaining loyalists. Well done.

  14. TDE, the one you'll probably love on OpenSUSE To Offer Rolling Release KDE Experience · · Score: 1

    I loved KDE 3.5, and would spend weeks customizing everything to look exactly like I wanted.
    It worked perfectly, I had all the right applications and buttons at the right place.

    Then you should be quite happy with the Trinity desktop, which is the KDE-approved and-assisted maintenance/improvement fork of KDE 3.5.10. I am. They're up to 3.5.13.2 now, with release 3.5.14 in the works.

  15. Re:Megalomanic on New Unix Implementation Turns 30 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Are you saying he should have released it under an Autistic License?

  16. But is there something to this? on Ask Slashdot: When Is the User Experience Too Good? · · Score: 1

    No.

    What business are you in -- product development or behavior modification? Hint: one of those is good for your bottom line; indulging in the other is deleterious to it.

    If you're concerned about inadvertent consequences, make sure there are adequate warnings. After that, you're done.

  17. Re:theres more than one type of transistor on Magnetic Transistor Could Cut Power Consumption and Make Chips Reprogrammable · · Score: 2

    Sorry, I couldn't let this pass uncommented. Yeah, yeah, -1 Pedantic.

    "one that requires voltage to keep it on, one that requires voltage to keep it off (P channel vs N channel FET's),"

    The ones that need a voltage to stay on are enhancement-mode MOSFETs. The ones that need a voltage to stay off are depletion-mode FETs, either MOSFET or JFET. All of those come in N- and P-channel flavors. They're symmetrical other than for P-type having less mobility. (And thus being more tolerant of dirty processes, which is why MOS IC technology started out with P-channel. 17 volts across a chip just to get it to light up... Ugh...)

    About those magnetic transistors... Lately DARPA's been making noises about 'destructible' logic. If all you have to do to deconfigure an FPLA beyond recovery is swipe a strong magnet across it... Is that what this is about?

  18. Do they really want to open this can of worms? on The Copyright Battle Over Custom-Built Batmobiles · · Score: 2

    By the same argument, the studios like Warner are liable for every time they depict an existing vehicle. Do they have proof of licensing from the auto makers for showing a VW bug or a Mustang? How about some guy's tricked-out bike? And they've got deeper pockets to hit than some guy in a garage.

  19. Re:Correlation != Causation on New Study Links Caffeinated Coffee To Vision Loss · · Score: 1

    Nahhh, read it again: as long as the sun doesn't have one (or, if it does, it's not naked), you're all right.

  20. This summer I hear the drumming on EU Commissioner Reveals He Will Ignore Any Rejection of ACTA · · Score: 1

    Four dead in Ohio

  21. Of course the water's rising there! on U.S. East Coast a Hotspot of Sea-Level Rise · · Score: 1

    It's all the runoff from the BosWash.

  22. Re:how many more before we address the on Another Unreleased iPhone Lost by Employee In a Bar · · Score: 1

    It's okay, it's only Apple's CIDR.

  23. Why are we still calling these people DHS? on DHS Creating Database of Secret Watchlists · · Score: 1

    We should call them 'Stasi' and have done, as that's obviously what they're trying to be.

  24. Start by dropping back to dialup. on Ask Slashdot: Living Without Internet At-Home Access? · · Score: 2

    I've been through this, a few years back when our DSL took a hit and I had to keep our connectivity up anyway.

    Living with a slow 56k modem link between your LAN and the Internet will:

    - give you a reversible foretaste of what you're planning. Don't like dialup? You'll hate cold-turkey so much that you might not be at all productive.

    - highlight your Internet time-waster habits, because the waits for those pages to load will become obvious. This is called "rubbing your nose in it". For anything that's not essential, you *will* find better things to do, or more efficient variants on the familiar. Setting your mail-lists to daily-digest, for instance.

    - make it obvious what Internet resources you'll have difficulty doing without. Keep a log of the ones you keep going back to anyway: they're your reasons not to give it all up.

    - change some of your Internet habits right there, because there is no instant gratification, instead you have to wait for everything to finishing downloading. You can dovetail some tasks into those waits, such as, getting a cup of coffee while Google News loads, or doing the laundry while waiting for all the new-format Slashdot comments to be visible, or going shopping while a YouTube video is being sucked in for local replay. You'll get impatient and get off your ass just to keep some momentum going because the Internet isn't doing it for you anymore.

    You'll get used to prefetching bulky things you really want on hand, and using LAN storage to make it available for browsing. wget will get a lot of scripted use, particularly the "wget -c" option, because it can take most of week to get a CD ISO in. You'll learn to use local tooling to replace online stuff that isn't always there. Early on, for example, I set up a local wiki and a web calendar, to be visible to every machine on the LAN. Then I wrote CGI tooling to fill in my specific blanks. YMMV.

    You will likely do a lot of scripting to automate fetching in things you really want or really need, and transferring out your responses. A cron'd mail-check every 5 minutes will keep up a dialup link that idles-out in 15 minutes. This might include bringing the link up in the wee hours to do downloads when nobody's likely to phone, and dropping it again, ready or not, when the phone line needs to have a phone ready for use.

    Dialup will have you looking at your computer less as a source of consumed entertainment and more as a creative workspace. If that's what you're after, dropping to 56k might be enough.

       

  25. Re:Modern browser on retro OS? on Retro Browser War: IE6 Vs. Netscape In 2011 · · Score: 1

    The most recent Firefox you can use day to day on win98se is 2.0.0.19. Firefox 2.0.0.20 will install and run, but, in at least one ancient install I have to pamper, it won't run the next time you boot the machine without removal and reinstallation; you only get one good run per install (so make it good).