OK, I haven't RTFA'ed, but the summary here makes no mention of the price of e-books, which is hugely relevant considering that an e-book cartel has been caught price-fixing! My classic example of e-book overpricing was the e-book version of hugely-selling Steve Job biography, which turned out to be more expensive than the hardback. How can any bookseller justify that situation - it *surely* costs more to ship a hardback (this price diff was on Amazon) than an e-book?
I did eventually buy an e-reader once the Nook Simple Touch hit 29 pounds here in the UK and it's quite hackable (runs an old Android that you can root/install apps on), but I ended up putting Droidfish on it and playing chess (it's really a rather good dedicated chess handheld:-) ) and using my Nexus 7 for document reading.
Good luck on finding some of those sports covered fully live on the BBC. Only half the F1 races in a season are shown live on the BBC any more (the half they don't show, they have highlights of qualifying and the race hours later). "Soccer" matches (aka Premier League) aren't shown live at all on the BBC - they have highlights shown in the evening (MOTD/MOTD 2 shows). There's only limited rugby on the BBC as well.
The BBC are weak on most sports, though they do cover world championships for swimming, athletics (Diamond League too) and skiing (though Ski Sunday is an appalling effort now - more apres-ski than actual racing). Sadly, in the UK, it's Sky who dominate most sports coverage (and charge a *lot* for it), though BT have muscled in with football and rugby recently.
Considering this is an optional app that you have to download (rather than being baked into an Android release), what does it offer that loads of similar free apps on the Google Play store have offered for years now (OK, apart from the fact that it's an app from Google of course)?
I'd have been more impressed if this had come with the Android 4.3 release to be honest and might actually be one of the very few pre-installed Android apps that could be justify being uninstallable.
I'm in the UK and I can pretty well guarantee that virtually all non-IT people in the UK have never heard of "National Sysadmin Day" (or "Secretaries Day" for that matter). Is there any country other than the US that's heard of it amongst non-IT people? I'm raising all this because the article doesn't mention which countries honour it, so by default that means more than just the US to me. Please don't use "National" in an article title if it means just the US.
You'd be surprised how many CMS's store many absolute URLs (with base URL being the same) rather than relative ones in their DB - it's not just Wordpress! There's a useful generic search and replace tool that I've used successfully a fair number of times (not just on Wordpress) to replace URLs when moving a site from dev to staging to live. Just remember to delete it immediately after use (the more paranoid amongst you would put the PHP script in an.htaccess protected area or at the very least put it in your Web tree with a random filename).
There is absolutely no excuse for sloppy CMS coding that puts absolute URLs everywhere when relative ones would work just as well. A DB for a CMS should have its top-level URL present *once* in some config table, not thousands of times. Just dump out a populated Wordpress DB and grep its SQL for the top level URL if you don't believe me.
They've fixed a few annoyances in Anaconda in F19 Alpha including actually offering MATE as a desktop option (F18 never showed it in Anaconda - you had to know to groupinstall it later on). Still no package version numbers or install time remaining when the packages are being installed though - both blatantly obvious requirements!
The Anaconda interface is still LUDICROUSLY SHOUTY (yes, much of it is fully capitalised and even adds bolding on top of that!) and the custom disk partitioning still needs further work. It has a nasty mixture of size units (yes, it's possible to see K, MB and GB all on the same screen) and the option - if it exists - to "use all remaining space on device" when creating a new partition (which you're surely almost always going to need?) didn't jump out at me.
I'm using tvheadend for a backend (on a beefy desktop PC with TV cards, SSD and TBs of storage) and an Acer Revo 3710 (a "little atom based box") with XBMC on Ubuntu 12.04. No problems with hardware acceleration (uses Nvidia ION 2) once I installed the proprietary nvidia-current driver or sending 5.1 audio to my 5.1 setup (obviously use the Sound section in Ubuntu's system settings to test the audio before doing the same in XBMC's audio settings). It should be noted that everything is connected HDMI (Revo -> receiver-> plasma TV) and I was worried HDMI audio might not work, but it seems to be fine.
My only beef with XBMC on my setup is that it can hang at "exit points" periodically (either stopping a video/live TV stream from playing or trying to exit XBMC completely).
It should be noted here that I don't watch movies on Youtube - it's about the last place I'd think of looking! I tend to watch local or LAN-networked files from a DVD or Blu Ray rip - any streamed video is useless IMHO (it buffers unless your connection is perfect and can't picture search FF/REW or even position jump at decent speeds),
Google Doodles like this do rub me up the wrong way. For a start, the person concerned is often an obscure one (or at least obscure outside the US - the US-centric doodles end up on Google UK, where they probably don't belong). OK, Adams isn't obscure because of Hitchhikers', but an awful lot of Doodle people are.
Secondly, if they're going to choose to celebrate someone's life, do it on a rounded number of years either since their death or birth. Not "161st birthday of <insert_obscure_Hungarian_physicist_here>". In this case, why wasn't the 60th year since Adams' birth celebrated last year, rather than the 61st this year?
And, finally, I must take massive umbrage with the Google tooltip that says "Douglas Adams' 61st birthday". I'm sorry, but once someone dies, they can no longer have birthdays after their death. It should be "61st anniversary of his birth", but I guess that's too long and not so catchy. I now call them "deathdays" when Google does this:-)
Sorry, I have no sympathy for someone who was responsible for GNOME 3. As for whingeing about incompatibility of distros, just stick with one for bleeding sake! In my case, it's CentOS 6 (though Fedora 18 with MATE looks OK, it's just that Anaconda is so wretched on it) - 10 years of updates (more than Mac OS X), GNOME 2 (the best thing to come out of GNOME), System V initscripts (not the pain that is systemd) and the glory of GRUB 1 (10 times easier to manage than GRUB 2).
It's a rock solid setup that I think is the best "professional" Linux desktop out there today, which is why I use it both at home and work. Yes, I dual boot with Windows, but only to play games of course. Steam on Linux might knock that on the head once they get 1,000+ games rather than 100 or so they have now.
I use Firefox Beta on Android myself, but I do throw in some useful add-ons of course. Now it has click-to-play, Flashblock is less important (yes, I sideload Flash for the sites that need it), but I do install Adblock Plus to keep myself sane. Another obviously useful add-on on an Android tablet is Phony - set it to be "desktop Firefox" and you get the full desktop versions of all sites rather than some half-baked mobile version.
Whilst Firefox isn't any better or worse than Chrome on the desktop, I do think it provides a better browsing experience than Chrome in Android, particularly on a tablet. And, yes, Firefox Sync is handy (but Chrome has something similar anyway). Also note that Safe Browsing that alerts about malware is now standard on Android Firefox - I'm not sure, but I believe no other Android browser has that as standard.
It may be slightly off-topic, but I wonder if some of the red light camera tickets are because traffic lights are set in "dumb" mode a lot of the time? Where I live, for many years the lights wouldn't react to traffic at all and be put on set intervals, which is infuriating because you sit at a red light and there is no change at all, despite no perpendicular traffic for 20-30 seconds. I bet a few drivers get fed up and (safely) jump the red light because of this!
In my home town, they experimented with a smarter program for a while and it was a great success - lights would change to red either when they hit a fixed time on green *or* when there had been a few (maybe 5) seconds since the last vehicle had crossed the sensors (with probably a minimum green time of something like 10 seconds). It was so successful, the idiots in charge of them switched it back to a fixed time on green now and you are waiting - I kid you not - up to a minute on red (especially if someone presses the pedestrian button), with up to half of that minute spent with little or no traffic crossing your path.
Because you have servers you installed 5.X on a few years back and are still in service. Hence, 5.9 is most welcome for those and a lot easier and less risky than trying any sort of upgrade to 6.X. In fact, Red Hat/CentOS specifically warn *against* trying any sort of warm upgrade between major OS releases because of the high likelihood of borkage.
Probably the best way to upgrade to 6.X is to get new boxes, set them up like the old 5.X boxes (import any data from the old boxes obviously) but with 6.X instead of 5.X and test it like crazy until you're happy it can take over the old 5.X box. You might well have to do this as a "big bang" upgrade of your dev, staging and live environments in turn (i.e. all completed in a fairly short period - but long enough to be certain things are working in 6.X) if active development is taking place on the old 5.X setup.
Once 6.X is all bedded in and working, the old 5.X boxes can either be retired or if they're still in warranty, re-purposed for another project using 6.X (i.e. you'd wipe them and put 6.X on them), though be warned that they will fall out of warranty much faster, so I wouldn't recommend anything critical on the re-purposed boxes.
It always perplexed me why the standard XBMC release has taken 12 major versions spread over a decade before the media centre software included any support for TV viewing/recording at all. From what I can see, pretty well every other media centre software supports that, so to miss it out for so long made it hard to recommend XBMC to people who wanted a single setup for all their media needs.
Yes, I know the Live TV/PVR functionality was available as an extra install prior to XBMC 12 and I must give a shout out to Pulse-Eight here, who nicely packaged up XBMC with the Live TV/PVR stuff included for pre-12 versions, though of course I guess they won't be needed for version 12 onwards now.
However, the fact that you had to go outside of xbmc.org for what many might think should be core functionality probably meant that not a lot of people have considered XBMC as a replacement for their DVR until this version 12 release. Personally, I use tvheadend for my backend which is turning out to be quite a slick Web interface (though I wish it had guided wizards to make the setup flow more obvious). I still think Web interfaces are the way to go for initial setup and EPG use - it allows you to use any Net-connected device to manage your PVR setup.
I submitted this flaw to Slashdot in late 2011 (with a one word search term I believe!) and it never appeared in any story. I did post up about the story rejection on OSNews a few months later.
If I could find out how to search for old Slashdot submissions I would do, but I can't see anything in my Slashdot account settings/profile that lets me see all the atempted submissions I made.
A couple of years ago, phones with replaceable batteries (let's ignore Apple phones here for a minute) were actually quite common and if you are going somewhere where you can't mains charge (or charge off another device, which is an obvious trick, but you may need the right cable), then a charged spare battery makes some sense.
Fast forward to now and most new (non-Apple) phones have sealed batteries, which is quite deplorable because it's a trick to make your phone "disposable" at the end of your contract (i.e. it dies or get poor at charging/holding charge just as your contract is about to expire). So the correct tip was "either carry a spare battery or if you phone has a sealed battery, carry a second charged device and a cable to charge between the two". A shame the OP missed that obvious point.
As for the godawful clamp arrangement, I can see the one on the bookself crippling you as you walk past it without a tablet attached. It looks terrible - you may as well glue a tablet case/sleeve to an anglepoise lamp:-)
And as for the third one, what geek has actual workout equipment? I thought the most exercise Slashdot readers get is bending over to get the next Coke can out of the fridge:-)
I can understand tablets replacing e-book readers (and this double-sided one does both normal LCD and e-ink, though quite why a phone needs that rather than a tablet is anyone's guess), but when I looked whether to join the e-book revolution, I was appalled by the price of them! They are often the same and - shockingly - even more expensive than the equivalent hardback book!
The classic example was the #1 bestseller - Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography. When that was selling like hot cakes, it actually more expensive to buy it as an e-book than the already-expensive hardback. That one example put me off e-books hugely.
Basically, you're saying that *all* games consoles make no sense compared to your smartphone. Tell that that to the massive number of households with game consoles that shell out a fortune for games. There's clearly a market for devices permanently hooked to the TV to play games. They don't need to be portable (though ironically the Ouya is probably the most portable of the lot).
What I'd really like to see is something like CyanogenMod 10 port to it to open up to Google Play. I think the Ouya won't fail because of the idea of it being hooked up to a TV with a controller. It'll fail if they keep it locked down to a proprietary store with no way of playing the games from Google Play (or Amazon App Store if you must). Devs aren't going to magically put all their games on Ouya's store when there's a much bigger market on Google Play.
One minor note - at least XBMC is being developed for the Ouya, but that's mainly because it's being ported to Android anyway and will no doubt officially turn up on Google Play at some point.
We use beefier PowerEdges at work and one major thing I like about them is that - like the t110-2 you linked to - you can order them with no OS! If you're intending to run Linux and don't need hand-holding, installing the OS yourself is a good idea. The only thing to be wary about PowerEdges is that I've never known any of them to be silent.
Now you might get lucky and the t110-2 is quiet or silent, but whenever I see "server" and "Dell" together, it's an excuse to have the noisiest system fans in the universe, since they're expecting you to put them in a server room and not in an office (open plan or otherwise).
I've got a couple of PCs with the Asus P8Z68-V LX running 64-bit CentOS 6.3 and/or Ubuntu 12.04 without any issues at all. Newegg has them for $80 and they support 32GB RAM, SATA 3, USB 3 and have decent onboard graphics (with plenty of slots for beefier cards). I don't see anything in this price range that a) works 100% with Linux and b) has good specs like this MB.
One nice thing - the BIOS is dead easy to upgrade - none of this Windows-only (or DOS-on-a-floppy!) rubbish: there's a built in filestore navigator in the BIOS and it picks up a.ROM file off a USB stick without any problems. And, yes, Asus do BIOS updates even for MBs like these which aren't that new or anywhere near the top of their range.
It should be noted that it's an LGA 1155/Z68 MB, which may or may not work with Ivy Bridge CPUs (I used a "lowly" i7 2600 Sandy Bridge in mine). I'm sure there must be an Asus equivalent to this MB that does.
I have many of the Gerry Anderson DVD box sets and I think the best two series he did were Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (easily the best puppet show he did - way better than Thunderbirds) and Space: 1999 (OK, you have to ignore most of Season 2 of that, but it did have Catherine Schell as eye candy to compensate).
He didn't do too well with Space Precinct (Gary Ewing as a non-drunk cop?:-) ) and the CGI version of Captain Scarlet was awful (and even stole a whole episode from another sci-fi series!), but at least he tried to keep the UK sci-fi light alive when we've all had in recent years is the truly cringeful Primeval, a less than stellar return of Red Dwarf and the highly variable Doctor Who reboot.
Automatic porn blocking is wrong on so many levels. Firstly, it should be opt-in so "concerned parents" are probably the only ones using it. Secondly, it's very likely to block non-porn sites as false positives and yet there will never be a porn list you can check publicly check against (because a) it'll be a good source for your porn bookmarks and b) it's done in "secret" to avoid a rival org taking the list and putting it in their porn filter list for free). Thirdly, it *will* be use as stepping stone to block other types of non-porn material in the future.
To most of the general public, the obvious steps are:
1. Provide an easy way to opt-in (presumably there's a block password supplied) and, equally importantly (e.g. kids leave or reach adult age), opt back out again. 2. Once opted-in, you should be able to report blocked URLs as being false positives (i.e. the block page should simply have a button to report it, perhaps with your block password needed to stop kids trying to unblock it). Each reported false positive should be put on a checklist sorted in most reports per URL order and then manually checked in sorted order by whoever maintains the list and appropriately whitelisted if necessary (anything in a grey area should be put aside for discussion in regular meetings of an independent panel, so that guidelines on what consistutes porn - and those guidelines should absolutely be public - can be refined). 3. If they want to expand blocking categories in the future, those new categories (which I reckon will include gambling) should also be opt-in only.
The lift (UK speak for elevator) I have at work is reasonably sensible - there's only 4 floors in the building, so it tends to keep one lift on the ground floor and one on the 4th floor when idle. However, I had a few fun things happen:
* All the lights went out in the lift as I was travelling in it, but it did get to the right floor and open the door. * The computerised voice announced "floor five" one day, which is creepy when I got off at the top (4th) floor! * The lift voice frequently says "please mind the doors" and then does nothing for 5 seconds before repeating the phrase again and only then begins closing the doors! Other times, it'll start closing the doors as soon you press the button and half-way through the closing it then pipes up "please mind the doors". * I've had the alarm test for the building go while I've been in the lift and the voice announced "fireman has taken control of the lift and it's returning to the ground floor", which at least it duly did.
I think the only thing I would say is regularly unpleasant is that the lifts we have are quite small and I suspect several of our staff avoid them because of claustrophobia (it's easy to avoid them if there's only 4 floors of course).
Here in the UK, we dropped the one pound note in 1984, a year after introducing a rather stubby (small, but thick and heavy) one pound coin. We even brought in a 2 pound coin in 1998 too. It shoiuld also be noted that UK ATMs have had a policy for a while of not stocking 5 pound notes (so the amounts you are offered by default are in multiples of 10 pounds), so the 5 pound notes in circulation are quite tatty now (I can't remember the last time I saw a new-ish 5 pound note!), though some banks have decided to reverse that decision recently.
The UK coin situation in terms of diameter is very inconsistent now - here's the order from smallest to largest diameter:
5p, 1p, 20p , 1 pound, 10p, 2p (!), 50p, 2 pounds
I guess that's what you get when you redesign coins at random times like the Royal Mint seems to do. As for notes, they too seem to get random redesign (and on rare occasions such as the 5 pound note, even the dimensions can change!), which is either because the Governor of the Bank of England has become bored with which 19th century celebs are on the designs or because the latest colour photocopiers have beaten their design security.
So to sum it up, UK coins are inconsistently sized and, like notes, are occasionally redesigned too. Must be a nightmare having to reprogram automatic vending machines every few years!
I've always thought laptops were a poor buy really - the cost and compromises you have to make never seem to give you as good a deal as you can with a desktop. For example, it's hard to get a lot of RAM in them (2 SODIMM slots seem to be the limit), many of them still come with HDDs when the cost of SSDs has been dropping like a stone, you can't change the screen (plugging into an external one is the only way around the often poor screens), the screen resolutions are often low (a $1549 laptop has only 1366x768 res?), trackpads are often awful (external mouse usually needed), the keyboards are cramped and they're often too heavy to do much more than move them around the house.
When I bought my last laptop, I actually just made it a desktop replacement for a year - wired mouse, keyboard and external screen stuck on one desk. If I could have switched it on with the lid closed, I'd have never even had to open the lid to use it:-)
I've got to question how much coding work the average Linux developer does on the move to justify a $1549 laptop rather than a much higher spec'ed desktop. I spent the same here in the UK (which has prices about 20% higher than the US typically) on a whitebox i7 machine with 32GB RAM, 256GB SATA 3 SSD, 3TB HDD and a 24" 1920x1080 monitor with 64-bit CentOS 6.3. A spec that handily beats almost all of the laptop's specs by a wide margin in a much more comfortable environment (full sized keyboard, mouse and screen) for development. I've got various portable devices (laptops, netbooks, tablets) and I've *never* developed on any of them whilst on the move. Also note that I bet either that dev laptop doesn't get a UK release or when it does it won't be much short of 1549 *pounds* in the UK:-(
If I were going to buy a laptop nowadays, I'd probably go for a touchscreen one and use it as a games playing/media consumption/Web surfing device. And if it needs to go out of the house, that'll be a tablet instead (Nexus 7 for high portability or Nexus 10 just for the screen:-) ). I really can't see how you can do serious development on anything other than either a desktop or a laptop attached to external superior devices like I said I did for a year.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I haven't RTFA'ed, but the summary here makes no mention of the price of e-books, which is hugely relevant considering that an e-book cartel has been caught price-fixing! My classic example of e-book overpricing was the e-book version of hugely-selling Steve Job biography, which turned out to be more expensive than the hardback. How can any bookseller justify that situation - it *surely* costs more to ship a hardback (this price diff was on Amazon) than an e-book?
I did eventually buy an e-reader once the Nook Simple Touch hit 29 pounds here in the UK and it's quite hackable (runs an old Android that you can root/install apps on), but I ended up putting Droidfish on it and playing chess (it's really a rather good dedicated chess handheld :-) ) and using my Nexus 7 for document reading.
Good luck on finding some of those sports covered fully live on the BBC. Only half the F1 races in a season are shown live on the BBC any more (the half they don't show, they have highlights of qualifying and the race hours later). "Soccer" matches (aka Premier League) aren't shown live at all on the BBC - they have highlights shown in the evening (MOTD/MOTD 2 shows). There's only limited rugby on the BBC as well.
The BBC are weak on most sports, though they do cover world championships for swimming, athletics (Diamond League too) and skiing (though Ski Sunday is an appalling effort now - more apres-ski than actual racing). Sadly, in the UK, it's Sky who dominate most sports coverage (and charge a *lot* for it), though BT have muscled in with football and rugby recently.
Considering this is an optional app that you have to download (rather than being baked into an Android release), what does it offer that loads of similar free apps on the Google Play store have offered for years now (OK, apart from the fact that it's an app from Google of course)?
I'd have been more impressed if this had come with the Android 4.3 release to be honest and might actually be one of the very few pre-installed Android apps that could be justify being uninstallable.
I'm in the UK and I can pretty well guarantee that virtually all non-IT people in the UK have never heard of "National Sysadmin Day" (or "Secretaries Day" for that matter). Is there any country other than the US that's heard of it amongst non-IT people? I'm raising all this because the article doesn't mention which countries honour it, so by default that means more than just the US to me. Please don't use "National" in an article title if it means just the US.
You'd be surprised how many CMS's store many absolute URLs (with base URL being the same) rather than relative ones in their DB - it's not just Wordpress! There's a useful generic search and replace tool that I've used successfully a fair number of times (not just on Wordpress) to replace URLs when moving a site from dev to staging to live. Just remember to delete it immediately after use (the more paranoid amongst you would put the PHP script in an .htaccess protected area or at the very least put it in your Web tree with a random filename).
There is absolutely no excuse for sloppy CMS coding that puts absolute URLs everywhere when relative ones would work just as well. A DB for a CMS should have its top-level URL present *once* in some config table, not thousands of times. Just dump out a populated Wordpress DB and grep its SQL for the top level URL if you don't believe me.
They've fixed a few annoyances in Anaconda in F19 Alpha including actually offering MATE as a desktop option (F18 never showed it in Anaconda - you had to know to groupinstall it later on). Still no package version numbers or install time remaining when the packages are being installed though - both blatantly obvious requirements!
The Anaconda interface is still LUDICROUSLY SHOUTY (yes, much of it is fully capitalised and even adds bolding on top of that!) and the custom disk partitioning still needs further work. It has a nasty mixture of size units (yes, it's possible to see K, MB and GB all on the same screen) and the option - if it exists - to "use all remaining space on device" when creating a new partition (which you're surely almost always going to need?) didn't jump out at me.
I'm using tvheadend for a backend (on a beefy desktop PC with TV cards, SSD and TBs of storage) and an Acer Revo 3710 (a "little atom based box") with XBMC on Ubuntu 12.04. No problems with hardware acceleration (uses Nvidia ION 2) once I installed the proprietary nvidia-current driver or sending 5.1 audio to my 5.1 setup (obviously use the Sound section in Ubuntu's system settings to test the audio before doing the same in XBMC's audio settings). It should be noted that everything is connected HDMI (Revo -> receiver-> plasma TV) and I was worried HDMI audio might not work, but it seems to be fine.
My only beef with XBMC on my setup is that it can hang at "exit points" periodically (either stopping a video/live TV stream from playing or trying to exit XBMC completely).
It should be noted here that I don't watch movies on Youtube - it's about the last place I'd think of looking! I tend to watch local or LAN-networked files from a DVD or Blu Ray rip - any streamed video is useless IMHO (it buffers unless your connection is perfect and can't picture search FF/REW or even position jump at decent speeds),
Google Doodles like this do rub me up the wrong way. For a start, the person concerned is often an obscure one (or at least obscure outside the US - the US-centric doodles end up on Google UK, where they probably don't belong). OK, Adams isn't obscure because of Hitchhikers', but an awful lot of Doodle people are.
Secondly, if they're going to choose to celebrate someone's life, do it on a rounded number of years either since their death or birth. Not "161st birthday of <insert_obscure_Hungarian_physicist_here>". In this case, why wasn't the 60th year since Adams' birth celebrated last year, rather than the 61st this year?
And, finally, I must take massive umbrage with the Google tooltip that says "Douglas Adams' 61st birthday". I'm sorry, but once someone dies, they can no longer have birthdays after their death. It should be "61st anniversary of his birth", but I guess that's too long and not so catchy. I now call them "deathdays" when Google does this :-)
Now get off my lawn!
Sorry, I have no sympathy for someone who was responsible for GNOME 3. As for whingeing about incompatibility of distros, just stick with one for bleeding sake! In my case, it's CentOS 6 (though Fedora 18 with MATE looks OK, it's just that Anaconda is so wretched on it) - 10 years of updates (more than Mac OS X), GNOME 2 (the best thing to come out of GNOME), System V initscripts (not the pain that is systemd) and the glory of GRUB 1 (10 times easier to manage than GRUB 2).
It's a rock solid setup that I think is the best "professional" Linux desktop out there today, which is why I use it both at home and work. Yes, I dual boot with Windows, but only to play games of course. Steam on Linux might knock that on the head once they get 1,000+ games rather than 100 or so they have now.
I use Firefox Beta on Android myself, but I do throw in some useful add-ons of course. Now it has click-to-play, Flashblock is less important (yes, I sideload Flash for the sites that need it), but I do install Adblock Plus to keep myself sane. Another obviously useful add-on on an Android tablet is Phony - set it to be "desktop Firefox" and you get the full desktop versions of all sites rather than some half-baked mobile version.
Whilst Firefox isn't any better or worse than Chrome on the desktop, I do think it provides a better browsing experience than Chrome in Android, particularly on a tablet. And, yes, Firefox Sync is handy (but Chrome has something similar anyway). Also note that Safe Browsing that alerts about malware is now standard on Android Firefox - I'm not sure, but I believe no other Android browser has that as standard.
It may be slightly off-topic, but I wonder if some of the red light camera tickets are because traffic lights are set in "dumb" mode a lot of the time? Where I live, for many years the lights wouldn't react to traffic at all and be put on set intervals, which is infuriating because you sit at a red light and there is no change at all, despite no perpendicular traffic for 20-30 seconds. I bet a few drivers get fed up and (safely) jump the red light because of this!
In my home town, they experimented with a smarter program for a while and it was a great success - lights would change to red either when they hit a fixed time on green *or* when there had been a few (maybe 5) seconds since the last vehicle had crossed the sensors (with probably a minimum green time of something like 10 seconds). It was so successful, the idiots in charge of them switched it back to a fixed time on green now and you are waiting - I kid you not - up to a minute on red (especially if someone presses the pedestrian button), with up to half of that minute spent with little or no traffic crossing your path.
Because you have servers you installed 5.X on a few years back and are still in service. Hence, 5.9 is most welcome for those and a lot easier and less risky than trying any sort of upgrade to 6.X. In fact, Red Hat/CentOS specifically warn *against* trying any sort of warm upgrade between major OS releases because of the high likelihood of borkage.
Probably the best way to upgrade to 6.X is to get new boxes, set them up like the old 5.X boxes (import any data from the old boxes obviously) but with 6.X instead of 5.X and test it like crazy until you're happy it can take over the old 5.X box. You might well have to do this as a "big bang" upgrade of your dev, staging and live environments in turn (i.e. all completed in a fairly short period - but long enough to be certain things are working in 6.X) if active development is taking place on the old 5.X setup.
Once 6.X is all bedded in and working, the old 5.X boxes can either be retired or if they're still in warranty, re-purposed for another project using 6.X (i.e. you'd wipe them and put 6.X on them), though be warned that they will fall out of warranty much faster, so I wouldn't recommend anything critical on the re-purposed boxes.
It always perplexed me why the standard XBMC release has taken 12 major versions spread over a decade before the media centre software included any support for TV viewing/recording at all. From what I can see, pretty well every other media centre software supports that, so to miss it out for so long made it hard to recommend XBMC to people who wanted a single setup for all their media needs.
Yes, I know the Live TV/PVR functionality was available as an extra install prior to XBMC 12 and I must give a shout out to Pulse-Eight here, who nicely packaged up XBMC with the Live TV/PVR stuff included for pre-12 versions, though of course I guess they won't be needed for version 12 onwards now.
However, the fact that you had to go outside of xbmc.org for what many might think should be core functionality probably meant that not a lot of people have considered XBMC as a replacement for their DVR until this version 12 release. Personally, I use tvheadend for my backend which is turning out to be quite a slick Web interface (though I wish it had guided wizards to make the setup flow more obvious). I still think Web interfaces are the way to go for initial setup and EPG use - it allows you to use any Net-connected device to manage your PVR setup.
I submitted this flaw to Slashdot in late 2011 (with a one word search term I believe!) and it never appeared in any story. I did post up about the story rejection on OSNews a few months later.
If I could find out how to search for old Slashdot submissions I would do, but I can't see anything in my Slashdot account settings/profile that lets me see all the atempted submissions I made.
A couple of years ago, phones with replaceable batteries (let's ignore Apple phones here for a minute) were actually quite common and if you are going somewhere where you can't mains charge (or charge off another device, which is an obvious trick, but you may need the right cable), then a charged spare battery makes some sense.
Fast forward to now and most new (non-Apple) phones have sealed batteries, which is quite deplorable because it's a trick to make your phone "disposable" at the end of your contract (i.e. it dies or get poor at charging/holding charge just as your contract is about to expire). So the correct tip was "either carry a spare battery or if you phone has a sealed battery, carry a second charged device and a cable to charge between the two". A shame the OP missed that obvious point.
As for the godawful clamp arrangement, I can see the one on the bookself crippling you as you walk past it without a tablet attached. It looks terrible - you may as well glue a tablet case/sleeve to an anglepoise lamp :-)
And as for the third one, what geek has actual workout equipment? I thought the most exercise Slashdot readers get is bending over to get the next Coke can out of the fridge :-)
Er, I use a non-WebKit browser - Firefox Beta - on Android (on my Nexus 7) and I do three things to make it actually nice to surf:
1. Side-load the Flash Player apk - yes, you can officially download it despite not being on Google Play any more.
2. Install the Phony extension and set it to Desktop Firefox mode (because you want desktop versions of sites on tablets, not the mobile versions).
3. Install the Adblock Plus extension.
This gives you the best Android tablet browser experience by some considerable distance (and probably a lot better than any iOS browser can manage).
I can understand tablets replacing e-book readers (and this double-sided one does both normal LCD and e-ink, though quite why a phone needs that rather than a tablet is anyone's guess), but when I looked whether to join the e-book revolution, I was appalled by the price of them! They are often the same and - shockingly - even more expensive than the equivalent hardback book!
The classic example was the #1 bestseller - Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography. When that was selling like hot cakes, it actually more expensive to buy it as an e-book than the already-expensive hardback. That one example put me off e-books hugely.
Basically, you're saying that *all* games consoles make no sense compared to your smartphone. Tell that that to the massive number of households with game consoles that shell out a fortune for games. There's clearly a market for devices permanently hooked to the TV to play games. They don't need to be portable (though ironically the Ouya is probably the most portable of the lot).
What I'd really like to see is something like CyanogenMod 10 port to it to open up to Google Play. I think the Ouya won't fail because of the idea of it being hooked up to a TV with a controller. It'll fail if they keep it locked down to a proprietary store with no way of playing the games from Google Play (or Amazon App Store if you must). Devs aren't going to magically put all their games on Ouya's store when there's a much bigger market on Google Play.
One minor note - at least XBMC is being developed for the Ouya, but that's mainly because it's being ported to Android anyway and will no doubt officially turn up on Google Play at some point.
We use beefier PowerEdges at work and one major thing I like about them is that - like the t110-2 you linked to - you can order them with no OS! If you're intending to run Linux and don't need hand-holding, installing the OS yourself is a good idea. The only thing to be wary about PowerEdges is that I've never known any of them to be silent.
Now you might get lucky and the t110-2 is quiet or silent, but whenever I see "server" and "Dell" together, it's an excuse to have the noisiest system fans in the universe, since they're expecting you to put them in a server room and not in an office (open plan or otherwise).
I've got a couple of PCs with the Asus P8Z68-V LX running 64-bit CentOS 6.3 and/or Ubuntu 12.04 without any issues at all. Newegg has them for $80 and they support 32GB RAM, SATA 3, USB 3 and have decent onboard graphics (with plenty of slots for beefier cards). I don't see anything in this price range that a) works 100% with Linux and b) has good specs like this MB.
One nice thing - the BIOS is dead easy to upgrade - none of this Windows-only (or DOS-on-a-floppy!) rubbish: there's a built in filestore navigator in the BIOS and it picks up a .ROM file off a USB stick without any problems. And, yes, Asus do BIOS updates even for MBs like these which aren't that new or anywhere near the top of their range.
It should be noted that it's an LGA 1155/Z68 MB, which may or may not work with Ivy Bridge CPUs (I used a "lowly" i7 2600 Sandy Bridge in mine). I'm sure there must be an Asus equivalent to this MB that does.
I have many of the Gerry Anderson DVD box sets and I think the best two series he did were Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (easily the best puppet show he did - way better than Thunderbirds) and Space: 1999 (OK, you have to ignore most of Season 2 of that, but it did have Catherine Schell as eye candy to compensate).
He didn't do too well with Space Precinct (Gary Ewing as a non-drunk cop? :-) ) and the CGI version of Captain Scarlet was awful (and even stole a whole episode from another sci-fi series!), but at least he tried to keep the UK sci-fi light alive when we've all had in recent years is the truly cringeful Primeval, a less than stellar return of Red Dwarf and the highly variable Doctor Who reboot.
Automatic porn blocking is wrong on so many levels. Firstly, it should be opt-in so "concerned parents" are probably the only ones using it. Secondly, it's very likely to block non-porn sites as false positives and yet there will never be a porn list you can check publicly check against (because a) it'll be a good source for your porn bookmarks and b) it's done in "secret" to avoid a rival org taking the list and putting it in their porn filter list for free). Thirdly, it *will* be use as stepping stone to block other types of non-porn material in the future.
To most of the general public, the obvious steps are:
1. Provide an easy way to opt-in (presumably there's a block password supplied) and, equally importantly (e.g. kids leave or reach adult age), opt back out again.
2. Once opted-in, you should be able to report blocked URLs as being false positives (i.e. the block page should simply have a button to report it, perhaps with your block password needed to stop kids trying to unblock it). Each reported false positive should be put on a checklist sorted in most reports per URL order and then manually checked in sorted order by whoever maintains the list and appropriately whitelisted if necessary (anything in a grey area should be put aside for discussion in regular meetings of an independent panel, so that guidelines on what consistutes porn - and those guidelines should absolutely be public - can be refined).
3. If they want to expand blocking categories in the future, those new categories (which I reckon will include gambling) should also be opt-in only.
The lift (UK speak for elevator) I have at work is reasonably sensible - there's only 4 floors in the building, so it tends to keep one lift on the ground floor and one on the 4th floor when idle. However, I had a few fun things happen:
* All the lights went out in the lift as I was travelling in it, but it did get to the right floor and open the door.
* The computerised voice announced "floor five" one day, which is creepy when I got off at the top (4th) floor!
* The lift voice frequently says "please mind the doors" and then does nothing for 5 seconds before repeating the phrase again and only then begins closing the doors! Other times, it'll start closing the doors as soon you press the button and half-way through the closing it then pipes up "please mind the doors".
* I've had the alarm test for the building go while I've been in the lift and the voice announced "fireman has taken control of the lift and it's returning to the ground floor", which at least it duly did.
I think the only thing I would say is regularly unpleasant is that the lifts we have are quite small and I suspect several of our staff avoid them because of claustrophobia (it's easy to avoid them if there's only 4 floors of course).
Here in the UK, we dropped the one pound note in 1984, a year after introducing a rather stubby (small, but thick and heavy) one pound coin. We even brought in a 2 pound coin in 1998 too. It shoiuld also be noted that UK ATMs have had a policy for a while of not stocking 5 pound notes (so the amounts you are offered by default are in multiples of 10 pounds), so the 5 pound notes in circulation are quite tatty now (I can't remember the last time I saw a new-ish 5 pound note!), though some banks have decided to reverse that decision recently.
The UK coin situation in terms of diameter is very inconsistent now - here's the order from smallest to largest diameter:
5p, 1p, 20p , 1 pound, 10p, 2p (!), 50p, 2 pounds
I guess that's what you get when you redesign coins at random times like the Royal Mint seems to do. As for notes, they too seem to get random redesign (and on rare occasions such as the 5 pound note, even the dimensions can change!), which is either because the Governor of the Bank of England has become bored with which 19th century celebs are on the designs or because the latest colour photocopiers have beaten their design security.
So to sum it up, UK coins are inconsistently sized and, like notes, are occasionally redesigned too. Must be a nightmare having to reprogram automatic vending machines every few years!
I've always thought laptops were a poor buy really - the cost and compromises you have to make never seem to give you as good a deal as you can with a desktop. For example, it's hard to get a lot of RAM in them (2 SODIMM slots seem to be the limit), many of them still come with HDDs when the cost of SSDs has been dropping like a stone, you can't change the screen (plugging into an external one is the only way around the often poor screens), the screen resolutions are often low (a $1549 laptop has only 1366x768 res?), trackpads are often awful (external mouse usually needed), the keyboards are cramped and they're often too heavy to do much more than move them around the house.
When I bought my last laptop, I actually just made it a desktop replacement for a year - wired mouse, keyboard and external screen stuck on one desk. If I could have switched it on with the lid closed, I'd have never even had to open the lid to use it :-)
I've got to question how much coding work the average Linux developer does on the move to justify a $1549 laptop rather than a much higher spec'ed desktop. I spent the same here in the UK (which has prices about 20% higher than the US typically) on a whitebox i7 machine with 32GB RAM, 256GB SATA 3 SSD, 3TB HDD and a 24" 1920x1080 monitor with 64-bit CentOS 6.3. A spec that handily beats almost all of the laptop's specs by a wide margin in a much more comfortable environment (full sized keyboard, mouse and screen) for development. I've got various portable devices (laptops, netbooks, tablets) and I've *never* developed on any of them whilst on the move. Also note that I bet either that dev laptop doesn't get a UK release or when it does it won't be much short of 1549 *pounds* in the UK :-(
If I were going to buy a laptop nowadays, I'd probably go for a touchscreen one and use it as a games playing/media consumption/Web surfing device. And if it needs to go out of the house, that'll be a tablet instead (Nexus 7 for high portability or Nexus 10 just for the screen :-) ). I really can't see how you can do serious development on anything other than either a desktop or a laptop attached to external superior devices like I said I did for a year.