I wouldn't mind a single device that could be used for both business and personal use, but it would need additional hardware features... such as dual sim cards (a lot of the Chinese phones already have this) and probably dual removable memory, and removable cameras and other recording devices (though a lot of businesses have yielded on restrictions of some of those things lately, if only because it's almost impossible to get a phone without a built-in camera and even bluetooth these days.)
But this would be pretty useful to let the work side stay locked down and encrypted, and having the personal side relatively open for third-party applications (which, while still a risk if inappropriately used to discuss proprietary business, can really help business productivity... e.g. Google Maps Mobile and the like).
I bought the Logitech G25 wheel for GT4 a while back and really enjoyed it (even though it doesn't support the H-shift). The realism is pretty good as long as you stay on the pavement.
The only PC sim I've found that was comparable to Gran Turismo is Live 4 Speed 2. I've tried a few other titles such as GRID, Dirt, and one of the recent Need for Speed things, but all of those felt pretty much like arcade racers... the cars would kinda slush back and forth on the road, but don't really feel connected to the steering wheel. Admittedly it took a bit of tuning in GT and L4S2 to get the handling to feel right, but it's not like I didn't try to tune the other games.
The arcade Ferrari F355 on "Simulation" mode was also pretty good, I played one at Dave & Buster's just before I decided to shell out for the G25. It actually feels quite a bit better than the G25 wheel and stick, plus I felt that it was much easier to feel and control drifts in the F355 than any of the cars I've played in GT4.
Anyway, I'm somewhat eagerly awaiting GT5 to be released and maybe the price of the PS3 to come down again.
Anyone have any luck with steering wheels on more "open environment" games, like GTA4 or Midnight Club? I really hate being confined to the linear "racing tube" in most serious racing sims. The physics of those games are a bit over the top hollywood / cartoony, but those are the tradeoffs you need to make sometimes, I suppose. The only "arcade racer" I've taken a liking to has been the Burnout series, just because it's the only one that has made all of the wacky crashes and explosions fun. Sometimes I feel nostalgic for Test Drive 3 or Stunt Driver, back in the day...
I'd also like to recommend EuroTruck Simulator as a decent driving sim that I've tested with the Logitech G25. It was a bit shallow, but one of the very few recent games I've seen that has somewhat serious "real world" driving scenarios with lots of traffic and traffic laws you need to follow and interesting physics, and stuff.
I've always found it safer to try to keep up with traffic. After all, it's better to be safe than right! (of course, a corollary to that is it's better to be a lucky driver than a good driver)
Driving is safer when everyone's going about the same speed and spread out as far apart from each other as practical. Passing should be done briskly and deliberately... no one should really drive side-by-side because that closes off their ability to swerve. Sometimes I'll check and keep count of how many cars have passed me vs. how many I've passed. If the ratio is around 1:1 and maybe not more than 9:1 (let the 10% of people driving faster than me set off the speed traps) then I'm in good shape.
In Germany it's against the law to pass on the right, but they take driving very seriously. If we could convince people to not drive slow in the left lane, we could do it here too, but a lot of those people are trying to be self-righteous and "teach other people a lesson" in a confrontational manner. I try to avoid confrontations on the road (identify the a**holes and put as much distance between you and them as possible). In which case I would argue it's safer to carefully pass those people on the right if only to get yourself out of that situation.
I always thought the speed limits were set somewhat low to account for old^H^H^HFloridian people with slower reaction times.;) During wet weather I do increase my following distance. But of course during really bad weather with low visibility I would actually drive slower... same logic as "don't overdrive your headlights".
I do pay close attention to the yellow cautionary speed limit signs. I might still add 10mph to them if I'm in a car under good conditions, but pretty much follow them to the letter if it's wet or if I'm in an SUV or other vehicle with challenged handling. I do find it funny (and indicative of my point) that sometimes out in the country you'll be on a road with a 55mph posted speed limit, and then come up to a curve with a 55mph cautionary yellow speed sign.
Anyway, you're welcome on my lawn anytime (just mind the dog poop):>
Meh, I've never run into any jerk cops. But I've heard it has a lot to do with the way you talk and behave once you get pulled over.
Pretty much, I never argue, try to make truthful explanations without trying to make excuses, and take my warning or citation. If there's any arguing worth doing, save it (and any GPS or evidence or whatever) for later when you can take it to traffic court (which you usually win if the cop doesn't show up, or sometimes they'll knock down your charge/points somewhat if you have a smidgen of a case or agree to take remedial training).
Also anything you can do to put the cop at ease helps them become less nervous. I've had a DC cop friend tell me a good way to prepare is to turn your inside lights on, get your license and registration out on the dashboard (so you don't have to make any sudden moves towards places you might have a concealed weapon), make sure you and your passengers have their seatbelts on, and simply sit there and wait with both hands on the wheel.
As far as MD cops go, I've found I would get pulled over much, much more near Ocean City than anywhere else (once just for having a headlight out). So pay much more attention to the speed limits near party towns, where they often have to maintain a large police force to deal with drunks over spring break.
Step 1: get friendly with the IT department, so they don't have a problem with me doing step 2
Step 2: Install a "real" 64-bit OS on my work laptop, and then have IT help me reinstall their locked-down corporate build of WinXP in a VM.
It works pretty well, since I get control over the bare-metal bits for development and stuff, but still have a fully corporate-policy-compliant VM to check email and work on office docs and run IE6 for all the corporate crap.
Sorry, sounds a bit pointless to make that kind of argument just to knock down your speeding charge.
The way I see it, speed limits are set such that the posted speed limit is generally about 10mph slower than what most sane people (say, maybe a decade past puberty) would drive if left to their own devices.
Thus, everyone in this area (I'm from MD) pretty much tends to drive at least 10mph over the speed limit all the time anyway. It also helps that you don't get any points if you're doing less than 10mph over the posted limit. Most of the speed cameras are set to go off above that threshold too. So it's kind of a nice grace zone... no one gets a ticket for going "only" 5mph over the limit. They generally let you go up to 10mph over the limit for free... generally.
The flip side is that the police can pretty much pull people over whenever they feel like it for exceeding the posted speed limit, so they still can pretty much go about their racial profiling or needing to meet their ticket quota or raise funds for the county. So it works out pretty well for them.
The really corrupt police, say, in Thailand, will also pull you over for driving too slow, if you look like you have enough money to pay them a bribe on the spot.
In the corporate world, a lot of core training / timecard / expense "webapps" got hard coded to only work properly on IE6. So a lot of big companies (like the past 2 I've worked for) are still stuck with IE6 as their default browser because they didn't bother making their contractors adhere to web standards.
Microsoft's proprietary lock-in strategy was so effective that people can't even upgrade cleanly to their newer stuff:P
I've started getting international charges to my US credit card from Optus, despite never having done any business with them. I've disputed the fraudulent charges (pretty much my first in years) with my CC company, and while they say that they'll refund the money to me, I still haven't seen it in my statement. The first was for $50AUS back in August and recently another charge for $200AUS last month.
I looked at the Optus website, but I was kinda afraid of contacting them about it for fear of revealing more information about myself, thinking it might be better to let my CC company handle it. Will try to get them to block further international charges from Australia, but if it happens again I'm reporting the CC stolen:P
Just wondering what my chances are of getting this cleared up with Optus, or if I should treat them like internet crooks >:P
I just upgraded my Eee901 to the current eeebuntu standard this weekend and was pretty impressed. They have compositing working on the desktop and it's pretty slick.
Add the Chromium nightly repository to your/etc/apt/sources.list and you have Chrome running as well. With the virtual desktop, it's pretty easy to run it in full screen on one display and slide back and forth to the other desktop apps as well.
I'll have to go home later and time the boot / suspend / resume, though.
True, true... I suppose you could run the services in a virtual machine or some other kind of sandbox. Might help avoid having to set up yet another box.
Yeah, I was doing samba CIFS transfers between wired hosts on the NAT side of the router to my server out in the DMZ, and was only getting 2MB/s (~16Mbps, not far from the 20Mbps bottleneck for the WRT54G on the linked chart). This versus 6-10MB/s (~80Mbps) between two hosts on the DMZ gigabit switch.
Meh, less cost isn't always better. The main environmentalist claim is "look at the externalized costs".
Yeah, it would be interesting to convince Japan to try spend the energy trying to reign in the pile of waste swirling around in the Pacific, and feed it to their plasma incinerators or something.
Yeah, I saw the Penn & Teller BS episode on recycling too. And I'd still rather expend the extra energy to recycle, the same as I'd rather spend the extra energy to clean my house once in a while. I think people and civilizations can be evaluated by the quality of their waste byproducts.
Anyway, as far as the climate change argument goes, I'd say the burden of proof for "hey, we ought to get something in the legislature to provide incentives for better efficiency" is a lot different from "hey, my industrial and consumer waste makes negligible impact on the environment". We've just been running under the assumption of the latter for a long, long time.
That said, legislature and policy is seldom driven by proof, but mostly panic and maybe a brief window of retrospect. So I can understand why the science community is so confused.
Hey, looks like you hit the nail on the head. The data on the Linksys WRT54G (all the way at the bottom!) looks pretty much right on with what I'm seeing on my home router.
The homebrew approach has plenty of other potential benefits worth mentioning... You could set up a transparent proxy... which could help speed things up even more (after all, the/rest/ of the internet may still bottleneck), or let you prank your roommates / leechers, or merely help you find who's using up all your bandwidth (hah, good luck trying!). If you're running a 24x7 server, minus while make that the NAT gateway, as well as serving files from its RAID, running mythtv or some other DVR backend, etc.
Hmm, I have one of those, running HyperWRT... I can't manage to go over 2MB/s between the internal LAN and the WAN, though. On the same LAN, my hosts usually push 6-10MB/s between each other.
My ISP gives me a couple of static IPs, though... so I put my main box (and any other hosts I want good performance on) on a GigE switch connected directly to the 15Mbps uplink... the NAT router is just for all of the rest of the lazy wifi laptops and older wired boxes who just deal with the slower performance.
Seems like the burden of proof should fall on the polluters and not the environmentalists. I find it hard to believe a bunch of people who are arguing for greater efficiency and less waste need to be put on the defensive. But that's politics as usual, I suppose.
How many people can the environment comfortably sustain? We all need resources as input, and have waste products as output... should we reward people for using less, or penalize people for using much more than others?
But really, the only way to find out for sure is to stress the system until it breaks.
It would be nice to preemptively address the problem before we destroy our livelihood, but politically the naysayers will always whine about not getting the resources they're entitled to - it's in their best interests. So just like every pollution problem we've had in the past, we won't really get legislative action until something bad happens and people die. We just have to hope it won't be as catastrophic. Maybe at best we could convince polluters to be responsible to pay into a fund to fix future damages... so they kinda get a short term reward for subjecting us to risk.
I feel like the current fixation on CO2 emissions is kind of silly... it's a good simplification to help focus our efforts on sustainable energy sources as opposed to burning fossil fuels, but the AGW crowd has attacked that simplification, instilling a fair dose of FUD.
Anyway, the optimist in me hopes the US / China / etc. can sort of get in line with some of the other cultures (Japanese, German) who just approach things like recycling and increased efficiency as a no-brainer... why even argue? But the pessimist in me is investing in real estate in Alaska:P
But really, how hard is it to maintain multiple personas online?
I have a consumer persona, with one set of amazon / ebay / email accounts, who likes to buy computer stuff, and gets a lot of relevant ads for computer stuff which he doesn't mind seeing (as opposed to beer or tampons).
I have a paranoid persona, who uses a different wired computer just to check his financial accounts and do his taxes and always encrypts everything.
And of course the anonymous persona, who likes to read about anarchism and the Quran and, uh, natural art, and send flames and stuff through anonymized services.
I suppose there's time to do a friends and family persona, kinda like Dexter, with a facebook account and a personal email account and flickr and fluff.
Computers are cheap, dammit. And multiple personalities aren't all that difficult to keep separate. And it probably also helps google inflate their eyeballs stats, and if law enforcement/really really/ wanted to, they might be able to connect the dots, but then I would have already have committed some horrible crime to be under such investigation:P
that period about 8 years ago when there was so much excitement about Linux displacing Windows, completely ignoring Windows' insurmountable lock-in factor.
Ha ha, that's funny because in the corporate world not even Microsoft has been able to overcome Windows' insurmountable lock-in factor. The past two big companies I've worked for are/still/ stuck with WinXP and IE6, because... well... Vista. But also because all of their on-line training and a lot of the timecard and expense report crap they've paid for only works "properly" under IE6.
As someone who likes computers, I'm just glad there really haven't been any complete losers (well, maybe except SCO). The competition lately has been great, and I like playing with Linux, Windows, and Macs, these new PDA/smartphone OSes, and whatever else seems unique and interesting.
The eeePC 901 I got for my wife failed prematurely, but that's because she always left it next to the bed and accidentally stepped on it one morning. We've still been using it with the cracked LCD, the kids thought it was neat that there was a big spider watching their movies with them.
Finally found a replacement LCD part for about $60 shipped, it should arrive any day now... Kinda feels wrong when I could get an entire eeePC's worth of spare parts for about $220:P
All the little lock tabs on my RJ-45 ethernet jacks have broken off, so my network cables typically separate with minimum effort.
Magsafe had to be an Apple invention, though... since the older power plugs that came with them were way more fragile than any other laptop I've used. I've had to buy 2 replacement power supplies for my wife's old ibook already, and even now I still can't get power to it through the bent-up connector. It's a shame because it'd make a decent "Ken Burns effect" photo frame if I could power it up again, but I don't want to throw any more money at it:P
It's funny that it was considered a "bloated eye-candy" wm back in the day and a "sleek and fast" wm today:P
e16 is still my favorite WM, though I'm currently back to using WindowMaker at the moment because I managed to break e16 while tweaking the NeXTstep-ish theme to make it darker.
There are several features I like from e16 that have been very difficult to find elsewhere:
* compositing works : drop shadows, semi-transparent gnome-terminal, and semi-transparent window movements look great and work fast. Sure Beryl / Compiz can do more, but they also eventually crap out on my system with video memory corruption. (Nvidia 8800GT)
* desktop pager : shows a miniature version of all my virtual desktops, complete with realtime updating thumbnails (when compositing is enabled). Even with compositing disabled, it can still update the window thumbnails every few seconds. The old Gnome 1.4.x pager was the only other thing I've seen that did this, but they removed it from current pagers, along with the ability to reposition windows around on screen.
* virtual desktop vs. virtual workspace : I tend to stick with just swapping virtual desktops, but the expanded workspace sliding is interesting.
* virtual desktop sliding : it's fun to grab the deskbar and partially expose the apps on the desktop one layer down. I just wish the first desktop was the "top" desktop instead of the "bottom" one.
* shaped window decorations : makes for some interesting themes, though I don't really play with them all that much. Someday...
I've been really excited about some other useful features Rasterman had blogged about, such as putting per-process CPU / RAM / Disk / Net stats in the titlebar of windows and things like that.
Word, bro'. I'm still using WindowMaker at this moment, since I managed to bjork-up my e16 NeXT-ish theme while trying to make it darker. It was much much easier to apply good-looking WindowMaker themes (but of course it's much simpler).
There are actually a few features from WindowMaker that I really wish other WMs would adopt...
I love the way you can name the virtual desktops, and the desktop names flash on the screen when you switch. This, in combination with the desktop-specific launchers attached to the desktop clip really help assign virtual desktops to different functional tasks (I usually have "Web", "Graphics", "Work", and "Root" desktops defined) and keep those kinds of applications on each space.
The dockapps were also a neat idea, but I've more or less eventually replaced all of them with a single instance of gkrellm.
Are you talking about e16 ? Compositing and GL work fine in it (I'm using the release packaged in Debian). I'm actually quite surprised that people don't list it as one of the compositing window managers like Beryl / Compiz.
It doesn't have as many extra features as Beryl / Compiz, but it has the few I care about... namely - composited drop shadows, true-translucent backgrounds in gnome-terminal, translucent window movement, and composited miniature windows in the pager.
It's actually been much more stable than Beryl on my system... eventually Beryl seems to exhaust the video memory and I get lots of video corruption, which seldom happens under the e16 compositor. It's also pretty easy to turn compositing on and off when I want more GPU resources dedicated to an OpenGL app or game.
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I wouldn't mind a single device that could be used for both business and personal use, but it would need additional hardware features... such as dual sim cards (a lot of the Chinese phones already have this) and probably dual removable memory, and removable cameras and other recording devices (though a lot of businesses have yielded on restrictions of some of those things lately, if only because it's almost impossible to get a phone without a built-in camera and even bluetooth these days.)
But this would be pretty useful to let the work side stay locked down and encrypted, and having the personal side relatively open for third-party applications (which, while still a risk if inappropriately used to discuss proprietary business, can really help business productivity ... e.g. Google Maps Mobile and the like).
What, haven't heard of the new physicalization trend yet?
I bought the Logitech G25 wheel for GT4 a while back and really enjoyed it (even though it doesn't support the H-shift). The realism is pretty good as long as you stay on the pavement.
The only PC sim I've found that was comparable to Gran Turismo is Live 4 Speed 2. I've tried a few other titles such as GRID, Dirt, and one of the recent Need for Speed things, but all of those felt pretty much like arcade racers... the cars would kinda slush back and forth on the road, but don't really feel connected to the steering wheel. Admittedly it took a bit of tuning in GT and L4S2 to get the handling to feel right, but it's not like I didn't try to tune the other games.
The arcade Ferrari F355 on "Simulation" mode was also pretty good, I played one at Dave & Buster's just before I decided to shell out for the G25. It actually feels quite a bit better than the G25 wheel and stick, plus I felt that it was much easier to feel and control drifts in the F355 than any of the cars I've played in GT4.
Anyway, I'm somewhat eagerly awaiting GT5 to be released and maybe the price of the PS3 to come down again.
Anyone have any luck with steering wheels on more "open environment" games, like GTA4 or Midnight Club? I really hate being confined to the linear "racing tube" in most serious racing sims. The physics of those games are a bit over the top hollywood / cartoony, but those are the tradeoffs you need to make sometimes, I suppose. The only "arcade racer" I've taken a liking to has been the Burnout series, just because it's the only one that has made all of the wacky crashes and explosions fun. Sometimes I feel nostalgic for Test Drive 3 or Stunt Driver, back in the day...
I'd also like to recommend EuroTruck Simulator as a decent driving sim that I've tested with the Logitech G25. It was a bit shallow, but one of the very few recent games I've seen that has somewhat serious "real world" driving scenarios with lots of traffic and traffic laws you need to follow and interesting physics, and stuff.
Good day kind sir!
I've always found it safer to try to keep up with traffic. After all, it's better to be safe than right! (of course, a corollary to that is it's better to be a lucky driver than a good driver)
Driving is safer when everyone's going about the same speed and spread out as far apart from each other as practical. Passing should be done briskly and deliberately... no one should really drive side-by-side because that closes off their ability to swerve. Sometimes I'll check and keep count of how many cars have passed me vs. how many I've passed. If the ratio is around 1:1 and maybe not more than 9:1 (let the 10% of people driving faster than me set off the speed traps) then I'm in good shape.
In Germany it's against the law to pass on the right, but they take driving very seriously. If we could convince people to not drive slow in the left lane, we could do it here too, but a lot of those people are trying to be self-righteous and "teach other people a lesson" in a confrontational manner. I try to avoid confrontations on the road (identify the a**holes and put as much distance between you and them as possible). In which case I would argue it's safer to carefully pass those people on the right if only to get yourself out of that situation.
I always thought the speed limits were set somewhat low to account for old^H^H^HFloridian people with slower reaction times. ;) During wet weather I do increase my following distance. But of course during really bad weather with low visibility I would actually drive slower... same logic as "don't overdrive your headlights".
I do pay close attention to the yellow cautionary speed limit signs. I might still add 10mph to them if I'm in a car under good conditions, but pretty much follow them to the letter if it's wet or if I'm in an SUV or other vehicle with challenged handling. I do find it funny (and indicative of my point) that sometimes out in the country you'll be on a road with a 55mph posted speed limit, and then come up to a curve with a 55mph cautionary yellow speed sign.
Anyway, you're welcome on my lawn anytime (just mind the dog poop) :>
Meh, I've never run into any jerk cops. But I've heard it has a lot to do with the way you talk and behave once you get pulled over.
Pretty much, I never argue, try to make truthful explanations without trying to make excuses, and take my warning or citation. If there's any arguing worth doing, save it (and any GPS or evidence or whatever) for later when you can take it to traffic court (which you usually win if the cop doesn't show up, or sometimes they'll knock down your charge/points somewhat if you have a smidgen of a case or agree to take remedial training).
Also anything you can do to put the cop at ease helps them become less nervous. I've had a DC cop friend tell me a good way to prepare is to turn your inside lights on, get your license and registration out on the dashboard (so you don't have to make any sudden moves towards places you might have a concealed weapon), make sure you and your passengers have their seatbelts on, and simply sit there and wait with both hands on the wheel.
As far as MD cops go, I've found I would get pulled over much, much more near Ocean City than anywhere else (once just for having a headlight out). So pay much more attention to the speed limits near party towns, where they often have to maintain a large police force to deal with drunks over spring break.
Heh, that's pretty much what I've been doing.
Step 1: get friendly with the IT department, so they don't have a problem with me doing step 2
Step 2: Install a "real" 64-bit OS on my work laptop, and then have IT help me reinstall their locked-down corporate build of WinXP in a VM.
It works pretty well, since I get control over the bare-metal bits for development and stuff, but still have a fully corporate-policy-compliant VM to check email and work on office docs and run IE6 for all the corporate crap.
Sorry, sounds a bit pointless to make that kind of argument just to knock down your speeding charge.
The way I see it, speed limits are set such that the posted speed limit is generally about 10mph slower than what most sane people (say, maybe a decade past puberty) would drive if left to their own devices.
Thus, everyone in this area (I'm from MD) pretty much tends to drive at least 10mph over the speed limit all the time anyway. It also helps that you don't get any points if you're doing less than 10mph over the posted limit. Most of the speed cameras are set to go off above that threshold too. So it's kind of a nice grace zone... no one gets a ticket for going "only" 5mph over the limit. They generally let you go up to 10mph over the limit for free... generally.
The flip side is that the police can pretty much pull people over whenever they feel like it for exceeding the posted speed limit, so they still can pretty much go about their racial profiling or needing to meet their ticket quota or raise funds for the county. So it works out pretty well for them.
The really corrupt police, say, in Thailand, will also pull you over for driving too slow, if you look like you have enough money to pay them a bribe on the spot.
In the corporate world, a lot of core training / timecard / expense "webapps" got hard coded to only work properly on IE6. So a lot of big companies (like the past 2 I've worked for) are still stuck with IE6 as their default browser because they didn't bother making their contractors adhere to web standards.
Microsoft's proprietary lock-in strategy was so effective that people can't even upgrade cleanly to their newer stuff :P
I get all my news exclusively from reading fark comments (so I'm getting a kick out of these replies).
By the way, you have one of my all time favourite /. sigs (along with the "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" guy)
Are they legitimate?
I've started getting international charges to my US credit card from Optus, despite never having done any business with them. I've disputed the fraudulent charges (pretty much my first in years) with my CC company, and while they say that they'll refund the money to me, I still haven't seen it in my statement. The first was for $50AUS back in August and recently another charge for $200AUS last month.
I looked at the Optus website, but I was kinda afraid of contacting them about it for fear of revealing more information about myself, thinking it might be better to let my CC company handle it. Will try to get them to block further international charges from Australia, but if it happens again I'm reporting the CC stolen :P
Just wondering what my chances are of getting this cleared up with Optus, or if I should treat them like internet crooks >:P
Ha, Firefox and Explorer stopped responding the first time I opened this thread, so I'm getting a kick, etc.
Anyway, thanks for reminding me that I need to invest in a bunch of RAM for my home server so I can move most of the services into VMs :P
I just upgraded my Eee901 to the current eeebuntu standard this weekend and was pretty impressed. They have compositing working on the desktop and it's pretty slick.
Add the Chromium nightly repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list and you have Chrome running as well. With the virtual desktop, it's pretty easy to run it in full screen on one display and slide back and forth to the other desktop apps as well.
I'll have to go home later and time the boot / suspend / resume, though.
I only wish Google Maps Mobile ran on it.
True, true... I suppose you could run the services in a virtual machine or some other kind of sandbox. Might help avoid having to set up yet another box.
Yeah, I was doing samba CIFS transfers between wired hosts on the NAT side of the router to my server out in the DMZ, and was only getting 2MB/s (~16Mbps, not far from the 20Mbps bottleneck for the WRT54G on the linked chart). This versus 6-10MB/s (~80Mbps) between two hosts on the DMZ gigabit switch.
Meh, less cost isn't always better. The main environmentalist claim is "look at the externalized costs".
Yeah, it would be interesting to convince Japan to try spend the energy trying to reign in the pile of waste swirling around in the Pacific, and feed it to their plasma incinerators or something.
Yeah, I saw the Penn & Teller BS episode on recycling too. And I'd still rather expend the extra energy to recycle, the same as I'd rather spend the extra energy to clean my house once in a while. I think people and civilizations can be evaluated by the quality of their waste byproducts.
Anyway, as far as the climate change argument goes, I'd say the burden of proof for "hey, we ought to get something in the legislature to provide incentives for better efficiency" is a lot different from "hey, my industrial and consumer waste makes negligible impact on the environment". We've just been running under the assumption of the latter for a long, long time.
That said, legislature and policy is seldom driven by proof, but mostly panic and maybe a brief window of retrospect. So I can understand why the science community is so confused.
Hey, looks like you hit the nail on the head. The data on the Linksys WRT54G (all the way at the bottom!) looks pretty much right on with what I'm seeing on my home router.
The homebrew approach has plenty of other potential benefits worth mentioning... You could set up a transparent proxy... which could help speed things up even more (after all, the /rest/ of the internet may still bottleneck), or let you prank your roommates / leechers, or merely help you find who's using up all your bandwidth (hah, good luck trying!). If you're running a 24x7 server, minus while make that the NAT gateway, as well as serving files from its RAID, running mythtv or some other DVR backend, etc.
Hmm, I have one of those, running HyperWRT... I can't manage to go over 2MB/s between the internal LAN and the WAN, though. On the same LAN, my hosts usually push 6-10MB/s between each other.
My ISP gives me a couple of static IPs, though... so I put my main box (and any other hosts I want good performance on) on a GigE switch connected directly to the 15Mbps uplink... the NAT router is just for all of the rest of the lazy wifi laptops and older wired boxes who just deal with the slower performance.
Seems like the burden of proof should fall on the polluters and not the environmentalists. I find it hard to believe a bunch of people who are arguing for greater efficiency and less waste need to be put on the defensive. But that's politics as usual, I suppose.
How many people can the environment comfortably sustain? We all need resources as input, and have waste products as output... should we reward people for using less, or penalize people for using much more than others?
But really, the only way to find out for sure is to stress the system until it breaks.
It would be nice to preemptively address the problem before we destroy our livelihood, but politically the naysayers will always whine about not getting the resources they're entitled to - it's in their best interests. So just like every pollution problem we've had in the past, we won't really get legislative action until something bad happens and people die. We just have to hope it won't be as catastrophic. Maybe at best we could convince polluters to be responsible to pay into a fund to fix future damages... so they kinda get a short term reward for subjecting us to risk.
I feel like the current fixation on CO2 emissions is kind of silly... it's a good simplification to help focus our efforts on sustainable energy sources as opposed to burning fossil fuels, but the AGW crowd has attacked that simplification, instilling a fair dose of FUD.
Anyway, the optimist in me hopes the US / China / etc. can sort of get in line with some of the other cultures (Japanese, German) who just approach things like recycling and increased efficiency as a no-brainer... why even argue? But the pessimist in me is investing in real estate in Alaska :P
But really, how hard is it to maintain multiple personas online?
I have a consumer persona, with one set of amazon / ebay / email accounts, who likes to buy computer stuff, and gets a lot of relevant ads for computer stuff which he doesn't mind seeing (as opposed to beer or tampons).
I have a paranoid persona, who uses a different wired computer just to check his financial accounts and do his taxes and always encrypts everything.
And of course the anonymous persona, who likes to read about anarchism and the Quran and, uh, natural art, and send flames and stuff through anonymized services.
I suppose there's time to do a friends and family persona, kinda like Dexter, with a facebook account and a personal email account and flickr and fluff.
Computers are cheap, dammit. And multiple personalities aren't all that difficult to keep separate. And it probably also helps google inflate their eyeballs stats, and if law enforcement /really really/ wanted to, they might be able to connect the dots, but then I would have already have committed some horrible crime to be under such investigation :P
that period about 8 years ago when there was so much excitement about Linux displacing Windows, completely ignoring Windows' insurmountable lock-in factor.
Ha ha, that's funny because in the corporate world not even Microsoft has been able to overcome Windows' insurmountable lock-in factor. The past two big companies I've worked for are /still/ stuck with WinXP and IE6, because... well... Vista. But also because all of their on-line training and a lot of the timecard and expense report crap they've paid for only works "properly" under IE6.
As someone who likes computers, I'm just glad there really haven't been any complete losers (well, maybe except SCO). The competition lately has been great, and I like playing with Linux, Windows, and Macs, these new PDA/smartphone OSes, and whatever else seems unique and interesting.
The eeePC 901 I got for my wife failed prematurely, but that's because she always left it next to the bed and accidentally stepped on it one morning. We've still been using it with the cracked LCD, the kids thought it was neat that there was a big spider watching their movies with them.
Finally found a replacement LCD part for about $60 shipped, it should arrive any day now... Kinda feels wrong when I could get an entire eeePC's worth of spare parts for about $220 :P
All the little lock tabs on my RJ-45 ethernet jacks have broken off, so my network cables typically separate with minimum effort.
Magsafe had to be an Apple invention, though... since the older power plugs that came with them were way more fragile than any other laptop I've used. I've had to buy 2 replacement power supplies for my wife's old ibook already, and even now I still can't get power to it through the bent-up connector. It's a shame because it'd make a decent "Ken Burns effect" photo frame if I could power it up again, but I don't want to throw any more money at it :P
It's funny that it was considered a "bloated eye-candy" wm back in the day and a "sleek and fast" wm today :P
e16 is still my favorite WM, though I'm currently back to using WindowMaker at the moment because I managed to break e16 while tweaking the NeXTstep-ish theme to make it darker.
There are several features I like from e16 that have been very difficult to find elsewhere:
* compositing works : drop shadows, semi-transparent gnome-terminal, and semi-transparent window movements look great and work fast. Sure Beryl / Compiz can do more, but they also eventually crap out on my system with video memory corruption. (Nvidia 8800GT)
* desktop pager : shows a miniature version of all my virtual desktops, complete with realtime updating thumbnails (when compositing is enabled). Even with compositing disabled, it can still update the window thumbnails every few seconds. The old Gnome 1.4.x pager was the only other thing I've seen that did this, but they removed it from current pagers, along with the ability to reposition windows around on screen.
* virtual desktop vs. virtual workspace : I tend to stick with just swapping virtual desktops, but the expanded workspace sliding is interesting.
* virtual desktop sliding : it's fun to grab the deskbar and partially expose the apps on the desktop one layer down. I just wish the first desktop was the "top" desktop instead of the "bottom" one.
* shaped window decorations : makes for some interesting themes, though I don't really play with them all that much. Someday...
I've been really excited about some other useful features Rasterman had blogged about, such as putting per-process CPU / RAM / Disk / Net stats in the titlebar of windows and things like that.
Word, bro'. I'm still using WindowMaker at this moment, since I managed to bjork-up my e16 NeXT-ish theme while trying to make it darker. It was much much easier to apply good-looking WindowMaker themes (but of course it's much simpler).
There are actually a few features from WindowMaker that I really wish other WMs would adopt...
I love the way you can name the virtual desktops, and the desktop names flash on the screen when you switch. This, in combination with the desktop-specific launchers attached to the desktop clip really help assign virtual desktops to different functional tasks (I usually have "Web", "Graphics", "Work", and "Root" desktops defined) and keep those kinds of applications on each space.
The dockapps were also a neat idea, but I've more or less eventually replaced all of them with a single instance of gkrellm.
Are you talking about e16 ? Compositing and GL work fine in it (I'm using the release packaged in Debian). I'm actually quite surprised that people don't list it as one of the compositing window managers like Beryl / Compiz.
It doesn't have as many extra features as Beryl / Compiz, but it has the few I care about... namely - composited drop shadows, true-translucent backgrounds in gnome-terminal, translucent window movement, and composited miniature windows in the pager.
It's actually been much more stable than Beryl on my system... eventually Beryl seems to exhaust the video memory and I get lots of video corruption, which seldom happens under the e16 compositor. It's also pretty easy to turn compositing on and off when I want more GPU resources dedicated to an OpenGL app or game.