So please stop with that "neutral vs bias" nonsense.
OK, that suits me fine.
Until a few weeks ago, I had a MacBook that suited my requirements quite well when the heavy lifting capabilities of my (Linux-based) desktop machine were not required. I don't give a flying fuck about any religion regarding Apple, I just like to have a *nix-y environment to work in from the command-line (when the mood takes me) and a GUI that works when I feel like being a drone with a rodent or trackpad.
That MacBook has now died messily, and I am disinclined to spend much on a replacement. In the next day or two, I anticipate that I will be buying an Asus U31F-11YR-RX132V machine (a compact and lightweight machine easily available from local bricks-and-mortar shops) , on which I intend to set up an implementation of Arch linux. I'll add a post here if I hit any roadblocks.
The Hindenburg "disaster" to which you allude only killed 36% of the aircraft's occupants. To me, that seems a pretty good survival rate, given that a 747 hitting any obstacle very rarely results in a mortality rate of less than 100%.
He might as well be. Ditto, the individuals involved in busting the creeps.
Has anyone here read any of that "pastebin" material? It reads like what I can only imagine is bad fan-fiction of the most egregious sort. It is nothing short of pitiful.
Hmmm. I would suggest that the Nullarbor isn't really a desert. It is a plain, but of course that's not really the same thing. As it happens, I drove across it last summer, and the vegetation was quite lush, especially by comparison with the "real" Australian deserts such as the Simpson or Gibson. Oh, and while I'm being a pedantic prick, Eris was a goddess.
I read all/. at -1 because one never knows if something will get stomped into the ground because it is a dissenting opinion that has some merit...
So do I, but over the last year or so, I have considered revising that policy, owing to the vast quantity of mindless dreck that finds its way through. Truth be told, I have considered filtering at "1", which would have excluded posts such as yours, but would have included most that could be bothered logging in.
When your stuffed animals get robbed, technically it was you that got robbed.
Who is going to rob a stuffed animal? I don't know about you, but my teddy-bears have even fewer possessions than I do, and certainly less money. (Though, to be honest, I have never succeeded in converting my net lack of wealth to teddy-bear money.)
As well as being the only party that wants to know about you if you're under 30 and have no kids...
From what I've seen anecdotally, the Greens have picked up a lot of support from the over-60s who have had enough of being shafted by both of the major parties. Plus, of course, they also seem to be able to claim a vote from the rare one or two middle-aged individuals who are able to muster a quorum of neurons on election day.
IMO they were caught out with too much detail and are now backpedalling
Well, the current government isn't exactly running on a tide of voter popularity at the moment (or ever, for that matter, in this electoral term), and it needs the margin percentages to crawl out of the single-digits. Of course, they could always consider the option of taking a stand on something worthwhile to differentiate themselves in some way from the opposition, but that doesn't seem likely to happen.
Mouse you should just get a normal one that isn't too large.
I guess that's another area where you just have to see what works for you.
My favoured instrument is the Logitech Cordless Trackman Wheel. I think Logitech abandoned trackballs for a few years since this product was introduced, but they seem to have had second thoughts and reintroduced the line.
If you like it, you'll probably never need to replace it, since the thing is so damn ruggedly built. I've had mine for years, and there are no signs of wear on it at all. It would be hopeless (I imagine) for gaming, but for any kind of office work (especially where your desk is crowded), it is IMO incomparable.
Standing is good, but standing still for long periods of time is really hard on your back, knees and ankles. I no longer work in a cube farm, and I am on my feet in an active job where I pretty much don't get to sit down or stand still at all over the entire working day, except during my (short) breaks. I find this *much* less stressful and painful than one hour at a standing workstation.
I still have a Microsoft Natural Elite keyboard from 1998 that has survived any number of complete changes of other hardware in my home desktop system. I was a little surprised when googling for the link just now to find MS seem to still be selling them. I don't care for any MS software that I can think of offhand, but some of the hardware sold under their name rocks.
...but i think it would be easier to get one of those than to convince all the tech companies to make their PDF manuals for smaller screens.
Now that I'm no longer a student, this is less important to me, but I would have really appreciated being able to carry around my biochemistry and molecular biology textbooks on an e-reader when I was an undergrad. Those damn books were fucking heavy.
But 3 years down the track, the technology is only just getting there for this kind of publication. Diagrams in this kind of textbook are heavily (and indispensably) reliant on colour, and my eyesight would need to be better than it is to cope with small page formats.
Nowadays, though, since I only have to refer to these texts occasionally, I would be content with a nice reader for novels...
My wife has a Sony PRS-650 reader, and it is fucking awesome. I want one. However, my Sony/Ericsson phone sucks big-time, and I'm going to get rid of it as soon as I can afford it.
It is indeed pretty hefty (as is any office suite), but I imagine it would most likely be pared down for handheld use. I find it hard to even imagine anyone trying to use the more complex features in any meaningful way on a phone, or possibly even on a tablet device. But a decent document viewer is definitely much needed.
Right. The Open/LibreOffice developers have gone to some trouble to make their suite pretty much idiot-proof. But I guess the trouble, as they say, with that is that idiots are becoming so ingenious...:-|
I wouldn't disagree, but I have just realised that I have been reading this thread thus far without gaining the slightest understanding of why this topic has appeared on Slashdot. It's hardly "news for nerds".
Gatwick airport here in the UK is in the process of implementing this. Ostensibly to enable them to provide services such as expedited check-in and to notify you when to go the gates...
Why bother insulting anyone's intelligence with such a ridiculous and obvious lie? Most people provide a phone number when they book their flights, so a simple option here would be to SMS their messages at the appropriate time. It would be better if they just said nothing at all than come out with that sort of crap.
It's a long walk to New Zealand. Hope you can hold your breath.
I guess there are Australians who might be tempted to suggest to certain American tourists that they could always wind up the windows on their VW Kombi and head East...;-)
Don't you also have an issue with incompatible power supplies? Australian supply is typically around 240V/50Hz, same as the UK, whereas I understand power in the US is supplied at 120V/60Hz.
It starts with the anonymous herd, and ends with the individual when they become interesting.
It does indeed, but there's no point in anybody getting indignant about it. Facebook's policies have been well known for some time, so nobody can claim ignorance. There is, of course, a very simple solution:
This has exactly zero to do with the question asked in TFS.
Exactly.
And the answer to that question, from my experience, is "yes, this is quite common". As to whether one could say it's the norm possibly depends on the kind of shop you're talking about.
My first computing job (back in the late '70s) was at a shop that offered bureau services run on a Burroughs B3700 mainframe. A lot of my software tools were already 5 years past their release date, and it wasn't uncommon for me to have to patch binaries directly when the Fortran, assembly or COBOL source had either been lost or had already diverged significantly from its associated code. Back then we just saw this as a fact of life and got on with it.
Unless I happened to be the sysop or one of the keypunch ops, I didn't even have a dumb terminal to input my code. Most of my work was written on 80-column coding sheets with a strange stylus-like wooden instrument with graphite in the middle. (Or if our patches were small, we used a 10-button card punch.) Our offices were thus a lot quieter than modern counterparts.
The good thing about this was that it kept your problem-solving skills honed, which I would consider vastly more important than having the very latest toys to play with.
I actually meant the separate gadget, IIRC the "Magic" trackpad. Until recently I had a handed-down Macbook which I quite liked, but not enough, now it is dead (and very much so) for me to replace it with another Apple device. I actually prefer working with Linux boxes, so I'll keep doing so. However, the trackpad was a nice component.
This is why I still like POP mail. I am quite often roaming around in areas where I only have a tenuous wireless dongle connection (but at least it's not dialup), so I find it quite useful to just use a local search in whatever email client I happen to be using. In fact, sometimes I don't even do that: occasionally it's quicker to just grep -ri -B 5 -A 5 $WHATEVER_TEXT in my mbox directory.
After all, I haven't run out of disk space in years.
Slashdot Mirror
So please stop with that "neutral vs bias" nonsense.
OK, that suits me fine.
Until a few weeks ago, I had a MacBook that suited my requirements quite well when the heavy lifting capabilities of my (Linux-based) desktop machine were not required. I don't give a flying fuck about any religion regarding Apple, I just like to have a *nix-y environment to work in from the command-line (when the mood takes me) and a GUI that works when I feel like being a drone with a rodent or trackpad.
That MacBook has now died messily, and I am disinclined to spend much on a replacement. In the next day or two, I anticipate that I will be buying an Asus U31F-11YR-RX132V machine (a compact and lightweight machine easily available from local bricks-and-mortar shops) , on which I intend to set up an implementation of Arch linux. I'll add a post here if I hit any roadblocks.
Oh the humanity...
The Hindenburg "disaster" to which you allude only killed 36% of the aircraft's occupants. To me, that seems a pretty good survival rate, given that a 747 hitting any obstacle very rarely results in a mortality rate of less than 100%.
He might as well be. Ditto, the individuals involved in busting the creeps.
Has anyone here read any of that "pastebin" material? It reads like what I can only imagine is bad fan-fiction of the most egregious sort. It is nothing short of pitiful.
That's pretty much a gross exaggeration of battery consumption.
Not by very much. I have a Sony/Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro which struggles to maintain useful charge for much more than a day with a new battery.
Hmmm. I would suggest that the Nullarbor isn't really a desert. It is a plain, but of course that's not really the same thing. As it happens, I drove across it last summer, and the vegetation was quite lush, especially by comparison with the "real" Australian deserts such as the Simpson or Gibson. Oh, and while I'm being a pedantic prick, Eris was a goddess.
I read all /. at -1 because one never knows if something will get stomped into the ground because it is a dissenting opinion that has some merit...
So do I, but over the last year or so, I have considered revising that policy, owing to the vast quantity of mindless dreck that finds its way through. Truth be told, I have considered filtering at "1", which would have excluded posts such as yours, but would have included most that could be bothered logging in.
When your stuffed animals get robbed, technically it was you that got robbed.
Who is going to rob a stuffed animal? I don't know about you, but my teddy-bears have even fewer possessions than I do, and certainly less money. (Though, to be honest, I have never succeeded in converting my net lack of wealth to teddy-bear money.)
As well as being the only party that wants to know about you if you're under 30 and have no kids...
From what I've seen anecdotally, the Greens have picked up a lot of support from the over-60s who have had enough of being shafted by both of the major parties. Plus, of course, they also seem to be able to claim a vote from the rare one or two middle-aged individuals who are able to muster a quorum of neurons on election day.
IMO they were caught out with too much detail and are now backpedalling
Well, the current government isn't exactly running on a tide of voter popularity at the moment (or ever, for that matter, in this electoral term), and it needs the margin percentages to crawl out of the single-digits. Of course, they could always consider the option of taking a stand on something worthwhile to differentiate themselves in some way from the opposition, but that doesn't seem likely to happen.
Mouse you should just get a normal one that isn't too large.
I guess that's another area where you just have to see what works for you.
My favoured instrument is the Logitech Cordless Trackman Wheel. I think Logitech abandoned trackballs for a few years since this product was introduced, but they seem to have had second thoughts and reintroduced the line.
If you like it, you'll probably never need to replace it, since the thing is so damn ruggedly built. I've had mine for years, and there are no signs of wear on it at all. It would be hopeless (I imagine) for gaming, but for any kind of office work (especially where your desk is crowded), it is IMO incomparable.
Standing is good, but standing still for long periods of time is really hard on your back, knees and ankles. I no longer work in a cube farm, and I am on my feet in an active job where I pretty much don't get to sit down or stand still at all over the entire working day, except during my (short) breaks. I find this *much* less stressful and painful than one hour at a standing workstation.
I still have a Microsoft Natural Elite keyboard from 1998 that has survived any number of complete changes of other hardware in my home desktop system. I was a little surprised when googling for the link just now to find MS seem to still be selling them. I don't care for any MS software that I can think of offhand, but some of the hardware sold under their name rocks.
...but i think it would be easier to get one of those than to convince all the tech companies to make their PDF manuals for smaller screens.
Now that I'm no longer a student, this is less important to me, but I would have really appreciated being able to carry around my biochemistry and molecular biology textbooks on an e-reader when I was an undergrad. Those damn books were fucking heavy.
But 3 years down the track, the technology is only just getting there for this kind of publication. Diagrams in this kind of textbook are heavily (and indispensably) reliant on colour, and my eyesight would need to be better than it is to cope with small page formats.
Nowadays, though, since I only have to refer to these texts occasionally, I would be content with a nice reader for novels...
My wife has a Sony PRS-650 reader, and it is fucking awesome. I want one. However, my Sony/Ericsson phone sucks big-time, and I'm going to get rid of it as soon as I can afford it.
It is indeed pretty hefty (as is any office suite), but I imagine it would most likely be pared down for handheld use. I find it hard to even imagine anyone trying to use the more complex features in any meaningful way on a phone, or possibly even on a tablet device. But a decent document viewer is definitely much needed.
Challenging interface.
Right. The Open/LibreOffice developers have gone to some trouble to make their suite pretty much idiot-proof. But I guess the trouble, as they say, with that is that idiots are becoming so ingenious... :-|
7 year old girls, or worse boys? I am going to report that...
As a matter of interest, why is it worse to abuse a boy than a girl?
I wouldn't disagree, but I have just realised that I have been reading this thread thus far without gaining the slightest understanding of why this topic has appeared on Slashdot. It's hardly "news for nerds".
Gatwick airport here in the UK is in the process of implementing this. Ostensibly to enable them to provide services such as expedited check-in and to notify you when to go the gates...
Why bother insulting anyone's intelligence with such a ridiculous and obvious lie? Most people provide a phone number when they book their flights, so a simple option here would be to SMS their messages at the appropriate time. It would be better if they just said nothing at all than come out with that sort of crap.
It's a long walk to New Zealand. Hope you can hold your breath.
I guess there are Australians who might be tempted to suggest to certain American tourists that they could always wind up the windows on their VW Kombi and head East... ;-)
Don't you also have an issue with incompatible power supplies? Australian supply is typically around 240V/50Hz, same as the UK, whereas I understand power in the US is supplied at 120V/60Hz.
It starts with the anonymous herd, and ends with the individual when they become interesting.
It does indeed, but there's no point in anybody getting indignant about it. Facebook's policies have been well known for some time, so nobody can claim ignorance. There is, of course, a very simple solution:
Don't give your personal information to Facebook.
This has exactly zero to do with the question asked in TFS.
Exactly.
And the answer to that question, from my experience, is "yes, this is quite common". As to whether one could say it's the norm possibly depends on the kind of shop you're talking about.
My first computing job (back in the late '70s) was at a shop that offered bureau services run on a Burroughs B3700 mainframe. A lot of my software tools were already 5 years past their release date, and it wasn't uncommon for me to have to patch binaries directly when the Fortran, assembly or COBOL source had either been lost or had already diverged significantly from its associated code. Back then we just saw this as a fact of life and got on with it.
Unless I happened to be the sysop or one of the keypunch ops, I didn't even have a dumb terminal to input my code. Most of my work was written on 80-column coding sheets with a strange stylus-like wooden instrument with graphite in the middle. (Or if our patches were small, we used a 10-button card punch.) Our offices were thus a lot quieter than modern counterparts.
The good thing about this was that it kept your problem-solving skills honed, which I would consider vastly more important than having the very latest toys to play with.
I actually meant the separate gadget, IIRC the "Magic" trackpad. Until recently I had a handed-down Macbook which I quite liked, but not enough, now it is dead (and very much so) for me to replace it with another Apple device. I actually prefer working with Linux boxes, so I'll keep doing so. However, the trackpad was a nice component.
This is why I still like POP mail. I am quite often roaming around in areas where I only have a tenuous wireless dongle connection (but at least it's not dialup), so I find it quite useful to just use a local search in whatever email client I happen to be using. In fact, sometimes I don't even do that: occasionally it's quicker to just grep -ri -B 5 -A 5 $WHATEVER_TEXT in my mbox directory.
After all, I haven't run out of disk space in years.