Would it really offer more charging opportunities for mobile users in coffee shops who are today hamstrung by how many outlets are available?
I just carry around a short $5.00 extension cord with the slots for plugs. That way, even if someone has plugged into every last available outlet, I can just ask them to swap in my extension cord so we can both get power. Nobody's said "no" yet. And it's probably more efficient than wireless recharging.
It's good that you've figured out what you need to be productive in your work.
Just out of curiousity, in your treatment, have you seen any social workers rather than psychologists/psychiatrists? In my experience, they often have a very practical approach dealing with problems and can often help with developing coping and adaptation strategies.
Maybe you can look into one of those office-sharing groups - that way you're going to an office to do your freelance work and won't have all the distractions of being at home.
The changes are beginning with things like Coursera and Udacity. The problem is this... as a hiring manager, how are you going to compare two applicants, one who has a degree with coursework in machine learning, and another who has taken all the machine learning courses available for free on Coursera and Udacity? Which one will even get past the HR screening process?
If someone complains about being uncomfortable with another passenger, they should be invited to leave the plane and take another flight. Otherwise this is too easy to abuse.
I'm uncomfortable being wedged between two large people or being near a crying baby. Can I just complain that they all seem suspicious and I'm uncomfortable so I can get the row to myself?
I work in the US and once just happened to be at the office at 3:00am to pick up some stuff because I couldn't sleep. The phone rang and I saw it was an internal to the company number, but from overseas. So I answered it. It was a co-worker from South Africa and he didn't pause or seem surprised that I was at my desk at 3:00am. It was really strange.
On the other hand, I had a colleague in Europe who often scheduled 7:30 AM meetings to call me. I'm not a morning person and am often up/working at midnight. So I told him to call me at home when he got to the office in the morning instead. It took a few times of doing that before he really realized that I was actually much more awake and productive that way.
So for me, I actually like working odd hours to accommodate my non-US colleagues. But even at the global company I work at, I think I'm an exception in this.
One thing that really helped me keep time-zones straight was to install xearth (http://hewgill.com/xearth/) as my desktop background and set it up so I could see the pattern of day and night moving across my computer all day. It really helped internalize things like "it's 4:00pm, so Japan will be coming online soon".
I keep a notepad on the window sill by my shower. For some reason, I'll often get the flash of inspiration for how to solve some problem I'm working on while I'm in the shower. I suspect it could be the calming "noise" of a shower that cuts out most other sounds or maybe the menial tasks and that while you're showering, you can't really do anything else.
That's still not as nice as dreaming up new software in bed.
Oh no. I wish it were that easy. However they want the changes they make in A to show up in their reports. But they want the reports to match B 100%. But B is the "system of record" and cannot be refreshed from A. They're conflicting and mutually exclusive requirements... and they don't seem to understand that.
I have this history in the organization of doing difficult and amazing things. I joke about the whole, "the difficult I'll do right now, the impossible will take a little while", but I think they take it seriously. I just wish they paid me like I was able to do the impossible.
We want system A to get data from system B and do the same calculations so a report from A matches B 100%. We also want to be able to change the data in system A after it comes from B... but the reports still need to match 100%.
This isn't even in the realm of NP-complete... it's just plain impossible.
A non-machine learning method would entail specifying a set of reactions for the set of inputs. If A then B, and if C then D... the hardcoding the relationships between the inputs and outputs. Machine learning, on the other hand, involves the computer program going through a pile of data and determing the relationships between inputs and outputs.
This problem is probably well suited to the technique because there are so many possible inputs and many nuanced outputs. In that situation, it's difficult if not impoossible to construct a programatic flow-chart that will perform well.
There's tons of material on the web now to help teach about these methods, like Coursera.com's courses in AI, Machine Learning, and even Probabalistic Graphical Models..
Arthur C. Clarke's book, "The Hammer of God" was about this exact topic. It featured all kinds of neat furistic technology, like making a huge detonation in the solar system to emit a huge burst of EM radiation to find dark asteroids, and trying to put a mass driver on an asteroid to nudge it off course. It also had a great depiction of a lunar marathon.
All in all, I thought it was a pretty enjoyable read.
I'm sorry. When you wrote, "ALL glucose is filtered out by the kidneys. 100% of it.", I thought you meant that all glucose in the entire digestion process gets filtered by the kidneys, and I inferred that you were saying that the kidneys were needed to enable the cells in the body to consume glucose.
However, that didn't fit a all with the little I know about the digestive processes.
So based on what you've said, is it right that any cell in the body can take in glucose, per the transport mechanism? But that any glucose that happens to make it to the kidneys will be completely filtered out and no longer be available to the body?
>We closed 16 of our Starbucks that couldn't turn a profit and you'd have to be insane to drink coffee from McDonalds, DD or 7-11 given the other choices.
Insane? Or maybe just not care about having a "premium coffee experience". A lot of people are happy with the coffee at say McDonalds... it's fast, hot, and quite a bit cheaper than coffee from a coffee house. Is it gourmet? No... Is it good? To them it is.
It's just like how many people like Coors Light... they sell a ton of it! Now I personally prefer one of the many fine microbrews in the Pacific Northwest. However my best friend really prefers Coors Light and given the choice between that something locally crafted, she orders a Coors Light (and she's tried a lot of others). I don't like it much myself, but who am I to tell her that she's wrong or insane to like it? Isn't it enough that she likes what she likes and I like something different?
I was surprised to read that even some glucose gets filtered out in the kidneys. Is this a significant amount? I wonder if this could account for how some people eat a lot and never seem to gain weight. They're ingesting the calories, but then expelling some of them as waste?
You make some good points. However consider your "retraining" statement, then look at Windows 8 vs Windows XP. I work at a Fortune 100, and they still deploy new machines downgraded to Windows XP. They're just starting to use Windows 7 and that's because it breaks a lot of things to make that change. Moving from XP to 7, and from Office 2003 to Office 2010 requires massive retraining - so Microsoft no longer has an advantage in saying "you won't have to retrain".
The funny thing about Apple having lost the business sector, it's edging its way back in. In half the meetings I go, people are asking how they can see this or that on their iPads. Our IT department has no choice but to support it.
One strategy to overcome the problem of investment in custom applications is virtualization. WINE may suck for a lot of apps, but full virtualziation works great and many "old school" apps can be delivered via citrix. Once you do that, then everyone with their shiny new ipads can still run all the old software they had before. In fact I manage an app that's delivered this way. As long as they have an OS that the citrix client runs on, then they can use the app I manage (Access 2007 on SQL 2008).
So while more and more of the business users are using iPads or whatevers, more and more apps are being run through systems like citrix or being refactored as web apps.
Now, as a "hacker" I generally like desktops because of all the things you can do with them. But even so, my last 3 "computers" have been laptops/netbooks. But then what do you call the NAS I installed? It runs Linux (or BSD) and is essentially a special-purpose computer. And the media device for getting Netflix and streaming media off my NAS is is just another special-purpose computer. As I'm starting a graduate science program, I am already thinking about how my next "large computer" will be something I will build myself and install in the garage - and I'll access it remotely with my laptop, netbook, or even phone.
The desktop will still be around for a while, but it's a market that will continue to decline. For their computing needs people (and businesses) will be turning more and more to mobile devices and purpose-built computers. Businesses will also have server class machines.
Think about what most people do on computers and there's no longer a need to be chained to a desk in the back room to do those things.
Microsoft will be around even longer than the desktop and you'll still have a job. Indeed while I don't agree with their past business practices I still use some of their products. In fact I have Windows XP running in a virtual computer as I type, so that I can run Office 2007 to do the things that require that. It doesn't even matter what my host OS (it happens to be Linux) because those kinds of details will be come less and less relevant.
However it seems clear to me the that the desktop as a common way of doing computing, is on the way out. It had a good run. I just hope kids in 10 years have a way to experiment with building and modifying their own computing power like I did.
The problem is the whole "Desktop PC" market is becoming marginalized. Mobile devices are where a majority of computing dollars are going (in the consumer world).
Computers used to be huge and had a whole room dedicated to merely running them. Desktops revolutionized that, but the computer still lived in a specific room and you had to go to that room to do your computing (office or wherever).
The whole idea of going to a specific room to do your computer is going away; at least for average people. Microsoft will be marginalized if it tries to stay in that market, regardless of what it does there.
As an anecdote, my best friend and I both bought the same model of laptop computer a few years ago. I finally had to buy a new one and asked her if she wanted me to try to upgrade her old one (I'm much more of a power-user than she is). She said "sure", but that it really didn't matter that much because she doesn't use her computer much any more because she does everything on her phone now.
I love Linux and have been using it for years, but grabbing up more userbase in the desktop market won't account for much.
I'd be happy I could get one at all. One of the "suppliers" listed doesn't show "US" on "where are you from". The other, while it shows it can ship to the US, and even says they have them available* at the top of the page, it only shows availability: 0 next to to the "buy" button.
I suspect when I'm finally able to get one, it will come with Duke Nukem' Forever on the SD card.
Backup seems to be one of those things people don't learn until they've learned it the hard way.
After my unrecoverable hard-drive crash, I set up a NAS with RAID that my computer backs up to every night (incrementals daily and full every 7 days). I then backup that NAS every couple months to an external USB drive that I store in another building.
The key there, though, is it go and try to do a restore from your backup every now and then to make sure you can. There are few things worse than feeling secure in your backup process only to find it was not running correctly all along - or that you can't actually restore all your data from the process after all.
I was doing some side work for a professor I worked with that was a traffic manual for our state Department of Transportation. I turned out being about 450 pages, with tons of pictures, charts, tables, etc, you name it... and we were required to do it in MS Word.
The thing is, if you do it right, you can make Word work for all that. But you have to have the discipline to use the styles correctly and you have to especially diligent when pasting material from another document. I found it was much safer to paste as text, then reapply formatting - even if it was from a document with the same style structure.
With carefully labeling and stylizing things, I was able to get the table of contents, table of figures, table of tables and table of something else to work.
The problem is, Word makes it really easy to make it look like you've used styles when all you've really done is apply formatting to a chunk of text. It just looks like Heading2, but is really normal text you've made bold and larger - and like you said, it won't show up in the auto-generated Table of Contents.
And if you have to collaborate with other writers... ouch!
I wanted to try Latex, but since we had to turn in a word document in the end, I wasn't sure there was any way to easily make that conversion.
I used to work at a university computer lab and my boss prided himself in writing one-line scripts that would do a complete task.
He'd then invoke something that opened up an xterm in each of the 20 of the old sun sparc stations we had in the lab, then he'd proceed to right-click (to paste) the commands in all 20 of them.
I just got a netbook and installed Linux Mint on it - and it does things the way I like them, nearly out of the box. Though it also has the problem of non-persistent messages from Thunderbird.
I'll give gnome3 another look when I'm itching to change distros again.
I too am in a world where I there are things I HAVE to do in Windows, but I really prefer working in a Linux environment (especially when I find one I really like).
I used to dual-boot as well, but after a harddrive crash a couple years ago, I re-evaluated my set up and discovered VirtualBox. Virtualization had come a long way since I had last checked. So now I run strictly in Linux and have VBox virtual computers to run Windows XP and Windows 7 in as needed. I even managed to take an old work laptop and virtualized an image of its harddrive so I no longer have to carry a computer back and forth for work.
The nice thing with the virtual computing is you can easily back up the whole computer by just copying the virtual hard disk somewhere. You can also set up your windows working environment on another computer by just coping the virtual harddrive file and making a new virtual computer there.
VirtualBox also has pretty decent integration with the host computer (you can map directories on the host as drives on the guest) so it makes things pretty seamless. It's also the only way I can use my canon scanner, since there are no Linux drivers that work for it... and the same with my old Creative Zen mp3 player and iPod.
It might be worth looking into when you get a break from your dissertation.
I'm going back to grad school as well and since I'll be taking transit and biking, I got a netbook for my work at school. I tried Linux Mint on it and it's been a real pleasure to use... very few complaints, and I think those are more of an Acer issue than a Linux one. I don't dual boot on my home computer, but I did set up the netbook to dual boot into Windows 7... in case I really needed a native Windows 7, but I haven't needed it so far.
I just not as young and carefree as I used to be. Like you, I don't have as much time to trick-out my computer to get it just so... I just want it to work reliably.
I haven't written a bash script in ages and just with all the things I have going on, I haven't had time to come up with a script like yours. I did a simple one that uses xrandr to force back to a 1920x1080 mode, but I had no idea how to check to see if it's docked (though my laptop isn't docked to a docking station - I just keep the lid closed with a usb keyboard and mouse). I'll give your script a try.
I agree, the strength of linux is its flexibility -- if you know where to tweak. But sometimes figuring that out is non-trivial and I just don't have the free time I used to have.
Thank you, again, for sharing your script. I've been settling for systems that mostly work the way I want... this gives me the ability to force the ones that I might like better to work for me.
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Would it really offer more charging opportunities for mobile users in coffee shops who are today hamstrung by how many outlets are available?
I just carry around a short $5.00 extension cord with the slots for plugs. That way, even if someone has plugged into every last available outlet, I can just ask them to swap in my extension cord so we can both get power. Nobody's said "no" yet. And it's probably more efficient than wireless recharging.
It's good that you've figured out what you need to be productive in your work.
Just out of curiousity, in your treatment, have you seen any social workers rather than psychologists/psychiatrists? In my experience, they often have a very practical approach dealing with problems and can often help with developing coping and adaptation strategies.
Maybe you can look into one of those office-sharing groups - that way you're going to an office to do your freelance work and won't have all the distractions of being at home.
The changes are beginning with things like Coursera and Udacity. The problem is this... as a hiring manager, how are you going to compare two applicants, one who has a degree with coursework in machine learning, and another who has taken all the machine learning courses available for free on Coursera and Udacity? Which one will even get past the HR screening process?
If someone complains about being uncomfortable with another passenger, they should be invited to leave the plane and take another flight. Otherwise this is too easy to abuse.
I'm uncomfortable being wedged between two large people or being near a crying baby. Can I just complain that they all seem suspicious and I'm uncomfortable so I can get the row to myself?
I'm still using the same HP48G calculator I bought 18 years ago. I just have to replace the batteries every couple of years.
Out of my computer equipment box I think there is a keyboard that still works. None of my laptops have lasted close to that long.
I suppose calculators might be disposable but they tend to last a very long time.
I work in the US and once just happened to be at the office at 3:00am to pick up some stuff because I couldn't sleep. The phone rang and I saw it was an internal to the company number, but from overseas. So I answered it. It was a co-worker from South Africa and he didn't pause or seem surprised that I was at my desk at 3:00am. It was really strange.
On the other hand, I had a colleague in Europe who often scheduled 7:30 AM meetings to call me. I'm not a morning person and am often up/working at midnight. So I told him to call me at home when he got to the office in the morning instead. It took a few times of doing that before he really realized that I was actually much more awake and productive that way.
So for me, I actually like working odd hours to accommodate my non-US colleagues. But even at the global company I work at, I think I'm an exception in this.
One thing that really helped me keep time-zones straight was to install xearth (http://hewgill.com/xearth/) as my desktop background and set it up so I could see the pattern of day and night moving across my computer all day. It really helped internalize things like "it's 4:00pm, so Japan will be coming online soon".
I keep a notepad on the window sill by my shower. For some reason, I'll often get the flash of inspiration for how to solve some problem I'm working on while I'm in the shower. I suspect it could be the calming "noise" of a shower that cuts out most other sounds or maybe the menial tasks and that while you're showering, you can't really do anything else.
That's still not as nice as dreaming up new software in bed.
Oh no. I wish it were that easy. However they want the changes they make in A to show up in their reports. But they want the reports to match B 100%. But B is the "system of record" and cannot be refreshed from A. They're conflicting and mutually exclusive requirements... and they don't seem to understand that.
I have this history in the organization of doing difficult and amazing things. I joke about the whole, "the difficult I'll do right now, the impossible will take a little while", but I think they take it seriously. I just wish they paid me like I was able to do the impossible.
I get impossible requests like this:
We want system A to get data from system B and do the same calculations so a report from A matches B 100%. We also want to be able to change the data in system A after it comes from B... but the reports still need to match 100%.
This isn't even in the realm of NP-complete... it's just plain impossible.
A non-machine learning method would entail specifying a set of reactions for the set of inputs. If A then B, and if C then D... the hardcoding the relationships between the inputs and outputs. Machine learning, on the other hand, involves the computer program going through a pile of data and determing the relationships between inputs and outputs.
This problem is probably well suited to the technique because there are so many possible inputs and many nuanced outputs. In that situation, it's difficult if not impoossible to construct a programatic flow-chart that will perform well.
There's tons of material on the web now to help teach about these methods, like Coursera.com's courses in AI, Machine Learning, and even Probabalistic Graphical Models..
Arthur C. Clarke's book, "The Hammer of God" was about this exact topic. It featured all kinds of neat furistic technology, like making a huge detonation in the solar system to emit a huge burst of EM radiation to find dark asteroids, and trying to put a mass driver on an asteroid to nudge it off course. It also had a great depiction of a lunar marathon.
All in all, I thought it was a pretty enjoyable read.
I'm sorry. When you wrote, "ALL glucose is filtered out by the kidneys. 100% of it.", I thought you meant that all glucose in the entire digestion process gets filtered by the kidneys, and I inferred that you were saying that the kidneys were needed to enable the cells in the body to consume glucose.
However, that didn't fit a all with the little I know about the digestive processes.
So based on what you've said, is it right that any cell in the body can take in glucose, per the transport mechanism? But that any glucose that happens to make it to the kidneys will be completely filtered out and no longer be available to the body?
That's interesting. I was under the impression that pretty much any cell in your body can take up glucose as an energy source.
Does this mean that before your body can use glucose that your kidneys have to process it first?
>We closed 16 of our Starbucks that couldn't turn a profit and you'd have to be insane to drink coffee from McDonalds, DD or 7-11 given the other choices.
Insane? Or maybe just not care about having a "premium coffee experience". A lot of people are happy with the coffee at say McDonalds... it's fast, hot, and quite a bit cheaper than coffee from a coffee house. Is it gourmet? No... Is it good? To them it is.
It's just like how many people like Coors Light... they sell a ton of it! Now I personally prefer one of the many fine microbrews in the Pacific Northwest. However my best friend really prefers Coors Light and given the choice between that something locally crafted, she orders a Coors Light (and she's tried a lot of others). I don't like it much myself, but who am I to tell her that she's wrong or insane to like it? Isn't it enough that she likes what she likes and I like something different?
I was surprised to read that even some glucose gets filtered out in the kidneys. Is this a significant amount? I wonder if this could account for how some people eat a lot and never seem to gain weight. They're ingesting the calories, but then expelling some of them as waste?
You make some good points. However consider your "retraining" statement, then look at Windows 8 vs Windows XP. I work at a Fortune 100, and they still deploy new machines downgraded to Windows XP. They're just starting to use Windows 7 and that's because it breaks a lot of things to make that change. Moving from XP to 7, and from Office 2003 to Office 2010 requires massive retraining - so Microsoft no longer has an advantage in saying "you won't have to retrain".
The funny thing about Apple having lost the business sector, it's edging its way back in. In half the meetings I go, people are asking how they can see this or that on their iPads. Our IT department has no choice but to support it.
One strategy to overcome the problem of investment in custom applications is virtualization. WINE may suck for a lot of apps, but full virtualziation works great and many "old school" apps can be delivered via citrix. Once you do that, then everyone with their shiny new ipads can still run all the old software they had before. In fact I manage an app that's delivered this way. As long as they have an OS that the citrix client runs on, then they can use the app I manage (Access 2007 on SQL 2008).
So while more and more of the business users are using iPads or whatevers, more and more apps are being run through systems like citrix or being refactored as web apps.
Now, as a "hacker" I generally like desktops because of all the things you can do with them. But even so, my last 3 "computers" have been laptops/netbooks. But then what do you call the NAS I installed? It runs Linux (or BSD) and is essentially a special-purpose computer. And the media device for getting Netflix and streaming media off my NAS is is just another special-purpose computer. As I'm starting a graduate science program, I am already thinking about how my next "large computer" will be something I will build myself and install in the garage - and I'll access it remotely with my laptop, netbook, or even phone.
The desktop will still be around for a while, but it's a market that will continue to decline. For their computing needs people (and businesses) will be turning more and more to mobile devices and purpose-built computers. Businesses will also have server class machines.
Think about what most people do on computers and there's no longer a need to be chained to a desk in the back room to do those things.
Microsoft will be around even longer than the desktop and you'll still have a job. Indeed while I don't agree with their past business practices I still use some of their products. In fact I have Windows XP running in a virtual computer as I type, so that I can run Office 2007 to do the things that require that. It doesn't even matter what my host OS (it happens to be Linux) because those kinds of details will be come less and less relevant.
However it seems clear to me the that the desktop as a common way of doing computing, is on the way out. It had a good run. I just hope kids in 10 years have a way to experiment with building and modifying their own computing power like I did.
The problem is the whole "Desktop PC" market is becoming marginalized. Mobile devices are where a majority of computing dollars are going (in the consumer world).
Computers used to be huge and had a whole room dedicated to merely running them. Desktops revolutionized that, but the computer still lived in a specific room and you had to go to that room to do your computing (office or wherever).
The whole idea of going to a specific room to do your computer is going away; at least for average people. Microsoft will be marginalized if it tries to stay in that market, regardless of what it does there.
As an anecdote, my best friend and I both bought the same model of laptop computer a few years ago. I finally had to buy a new one and asked her if she wanted me to try to upgrade her old one (I'm much more of a power-user than she is). She said "sure", but that it really didn't matter that much because she doesn't use her computer much any more because she does everything on her phone now.
I love Linux and have been using it for years, but grabbing up more userbase in the desktop market won't account for much.
I'd be happy I could get one at all. One of the "suppliers" listed doesn't show "US" on "where are you from". The other, while it shows it can ship to the US, and even says they have them available* at the top of the page, it only shows availability: 0 next to to the "buy" button.
I suspect when I'm finally able to get one, it will come with Duke Nukem' Forever on the SD card.
Backup seems to be one of those things people don't learn until they've learned it the hard way.
After my unrecoverable hard-drive crash, I set up a NAS with RAID that my computer backs up to every night (incrementals daily and full every 7 days). I then backup that NAS every couple months to an external USB drive that I store in another building.
The key there, though, is it go and try to do a restore from your backup every now and then to make sure you can. There are few things worse than feeling secure in your backup process only to find it was not running correctly all along - or that you can't actually restore all your data from the process after all.
I was doing some side work for a professor I worked with that was a traffic manual for our state Department of Transportation. I turned out being about 450 pages, with tons of pictures, charts, tables, etc, you name it... and we were required to do it in MS Word.
The thing is, if you do it right, you can make Word work for all that. But you have to have the discipline to use the styles correctly and you have to especially diligent when pasting material from another document. I found it was much safer to paste as text, then reapply formatting - even if it was from a document with the same style structure.
With carefully labeling and stylizing things, I was able to get the table of contents, table of figures, table of tables and table of something else to work.
The problem is, Word makes it really easy to make it look like you've used styles when all you've really done is apply formatting to a chunk of text. It just looks like Heading2, but is really normal text you've made bold and larger - and like you said, it won't show up in the auto-generated Table of Contents.
And if you have to collaborate with other writers... ouch!
I wanted to try Latex, but since we had to turn in a word document in the end, I wasn't sure there was any way to easily make that conversion.
I used to work at a university computer lab and my boss prided himself in writing one-line scripts that would do a complete task.
He'd then invoke something that opened up an xterm in each of the 20 of the old sun sparc stations we had in the lab, then he'd proceed to right-click (to paste) the commands in all 20 of them.
It was fun to watch him work.
Awesome, thank you!
For mine, it's here: /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state
cat
but that give me an "open" or "closed" to work with.
I really appreciate your help!
I just got a netbook and installed Linux Mint on it - and it does things the way I like them, nearly out of the box. Though it also has the problem of non-persistent messages from Thunderbird.
I'll give gnome3 another look when I'm itching to change distros again.
I too am in a world where I there are things I HAVE to do in Windows, but I really prefer working in a Linux environment (especially when I find one I really like).
I used to dual-boot as well, but after a harddrive crash a couple years ago, I re-evaluated my set up and discovered VirtualBox. Virtualization had come a long way since I had last checked. So now I run strictly in Linux and have VBox virtual computers to run Windows XP and Windows 7 in as needed. I even managed to take an old work laptop and virtualized an image of its harddrive so I no longer have to carry a computer back and forth for work.
The nice thing with the virtual computing is you can easily back up the whole computer by just copying the virtual hard disk somewhere. You can also set up your windows working environment on another computer by just coping the virtual harddrive file and making a new virtual computer there.
VirtualBox also has pretty decent integration with the host computer (you can map directories on the host as drives on the guest) so it makes things pretty seamless. It's also the only way I can use my canon scanner, since there are no Linux drivers that work for it... and the same with my old Creative Zen mp3 player and iPod.
It might be worth looking into when you get a break from your dissertation.
I'm going back to grad school as well and since I'll be taking transit and biking, I got a netbook for my work at school. I tried Linux Mint on it and it's been a real pleasure to use... very few complaints, and I think those are more of an Acer issue than a Linux one. I don't dual boot on my home computer, but I did set up the netbook to dual boot into Windows 7... in case I really needed a native Windows 7, but I haven't needed it so far.
I just not as young and carefree as I used to be. Like you, I don't have as much time to trick-out my computer to get it just so... I just want it to work reliably.
Thank you.
I haven't written a bash script in ages and just with all the things I have going on, I haven't had time to come up with a script like yours. I did a simple one that uses xrandr to force back to a 1920x1080 mode, but I had no idea how to check to see if it's docked (though my laptop isn't docked to a docking station - I just keep the lid closed with a usb keyboard and mouse). I'll give your script a try.
I agree, the strength of linux is its flexibility -- if you know where to tweak. But sometimes figuring that out is non-trivial and I just don't have the free time I used to have.
Thank you, again, for sharing your script. I've been settling for systems that mostly work the way I want... this gives me the ability to force the ones that I might like better to work for me.