Lots of sites simply won't work properly if you don't accept their cookies. But clearing them is fine; and as for doubleclick, all of their servers are blocked in my hosts file. I don't need any connections from them at all.
Given that I'm not that keen on participating in Google's data-mining projects, I am underwhelmed by Google Voice offerings. Skype (despite its various failings) offers a comprehensive voice (and video if you want it) or chat connection that is independent of your browser, and thus is to an extent more or less insulated from your other online habits. Skype can be swallowed up by pretty much anyone other than Google (so long as those services remain intact) and I'll be content.
Also not entirely true: sometimes you are left with that nice little spinning beachball (tastefully) following the cursor around, but which no "magic" key-sequence manages to kill, so you are forced to hold down that nice (tasteful) little (|) button to power the damn thing off.
I sort of prefer the simpler Unixy "kernel panic" message that you only see in the syslogs. If the machine is going to crash and burn anyway, it's probably preferable if it just does it quickly rather than attempting to lull you into a notion that all your work is not lost...
Far out. If I had an Android phone, I wouldn't be too keen to let crap like newsletters or advertising swallow up my limited traffic allowance. I would only use it for my lower-traffic inboxes.
The trick, seriously, is to not make your subject too long or too short.
Another trick is to be careful of to whom you give your most "important" email addresses. In my case, I now have just five addresses, allocated to different fields of activity, so they are easily kept sorted. Then just use Thunderbird (or Apple's Mail client, or whatever takes your fancy) to pull mail from all of those addresses with the click of a single button.
Spreading your mail thus over several inboxes is an easy way of sorting stuff into approximate categories that are easy to scan with nothing more awesome than the power of the naked human eyeball.
Whether or not it makes sense, there is absolutely no point in attempting to regulate what marketroids do by means of legislation. There are really only two options:
(1) Kill all marketroids. (My preferred option, but unfortunately not supported by our legal system.)
(2) Make it impossible for them to track you, i.e. manually clearing cookies/history and using whatever browser extensions or hosts file entries that make you happy. User education is the key here; far too many users are woefully ill-equipped to survive in a modern online environment. There seems to be a totally misguided expectation that because you are using a computer in your own home that you are somehow insulated from the nasties that get perpetrated in the world "out there".
The HP calculators are made to a much higher standard...
Although I loved the clicky keys on my HP48G+, (not to mention that lovely fat "Enter" button just where the index finger falls) and am quite happy with RPN, the quality was skin deep. The machine went into spasms of denial if anyone looked at it sideways, and such antics cost me grades in examinations in my undergrad university course.
I treated the disease by selling off the HP and buying a TI-89. The build quality of the latter is vastly inferior, but the device is much faster and more functional, and reliability is rock-solid. Oh, and the myth about RPN requiring less keystrokes is pretty much just that: a myth (though I freely admit RPN is a great way of processing calculations "on the fly").
And, to be fair, the buttons on my TI-89 were a bit overly snugly fitted, so they used to be a bit rough on the keystroke until I attacked the housing with a jeweller's file. The TI-89 just does not have anywhere near as good a keypad as the HP48* series.
I have a TI-89 and used to have an HP48G+ (which despite its many advantages proved to be just too prone to failure), and have found that both tend to be dropped much more often when they are not being used. So a decent padded case like that shown here makes a hell of a difference. I have used (and abused) a case like this for 8 years, and my calculator is still working fine.
I know exactly how I would have felt as a kid (even though that would have been inconceivably long ago for most readers) if I had discovered I was being observed any or all moments:
I would have taken steps to disable it. A blanket over the camera, and/or cables being snipped. Whatever works. Such a "persistent solution" is an intrusion. For instance, although I love Skype, I do not need my camera displaying my deshabille or the state of my house to the world. (Actually, the camera on my laptop has a discreet little piece of insulating tape obscuring the lens.)
I don't know about you guys, but on my desktop systems I don't have an unmanagable bottleneck with my external devices, since they are mostly for backups; my main issue seems to be at the interface between the motherboard and internal drives. This is where LightPeak is starting to look attractive (provided that the cables aren't too expensive) - especially since it is (supposed to be) a replacement for PCIE as well. However, I guess I'll have to wait a while for it to become available for Linux...:-|
How is their decision to stay in a religiously themed communal housing structure any different (from the standpoint of the cultural norm) from your decision to avoid sunlight and social interactions, and to live in your mother's basement collecting manga, video game paraphernalia, and a super huge collection of raunchy porn locked away on an encrypted filesystem?
Maybe it's got something to do with a diet of anything other than Twinkies?
My immediate reaction to the title of the submission: "Nuns Donate Their Brains to Alzheimer's Research" was to say "they might as well. Their brains aren't useful for anything else".
Noise cancelling headphones won't do you much good at home unless you're under a flight-path or next to a railway line or main road. They are very good at letting human voices come through. I have a good pair of NC cans, but I now only use them on planes or (very rarely) buses.
If you want quiet or silence, you need ear-muffs and/or really good ear-plugs.
I have two or three friends who refuse to carry a cellphone (and definitely not through any financial constraint, since the worst offender is a multi-millionaire), but who always seem to think it's OK to make it my problem to maintain contact for social arrangements. An insistence on all communication being via email seems roughly equivalent to notifying you that all "arrangements must be submitted in triplicate to our lawyers to be forwarded to our client via his secretary". Needless to say, I get a bit cranky at this attitude. I was a slow adopter of cellphones (my first device was bought in 2001), but since such usage is now close to 100% in the "Western" world, a refusal to move with the times is punishing one's friends - assuming they exist.
Incidentally, I have considered setting an email filter for the rich luddite I mentioned earlier: something along the lines of "Traffic from your IP address block is suspended: please submit your message via avian carrier."
And a proper phone conversation requires input from two people simultaneously, rather than one person being able to go and do some work while the other person thinks and types up a response.
...Which is where SMS steps in. Sure, it's not always free, but in a world where a majority of people still don't have smartphones and/or are not tied to their desktop/laptop computer day and night, SMS is a perfectly convenient means of conveying a message that doesn't really need an immediate (or indeed any) reply.
Of course it does. Otherwise you would die, since your heart, lungs and other organs would not be getting the signals they need to perform their functions.
Having said that, I do find it therapeutic to "switch off" for periods of time - by which I mean simply closing my eyes and going into what I call "no-time", letting my mind go blank. I find this comes quite naturally, but I guess varieties of meditation techniques should have more or less the same effect for those to whom it doesn't.
The advantage of this over sleep is that you don't have that "groggy phase" on waking up, when all you want to do is go back to sleep.
Even so, storing loot in shoe-boxes is not the action one would expect of an innocent man. But that aside, Apple could have made things a hell of a lot easier for themselves and everybody else by being less secretive about their products and getting them tested in the real world - by people, not robots with rubber hands.
I don't see what difference replacing OSX with iOS makes.
Uh, Slashdot is supposed to be "news for nerds". You're in the wrong place. OS X is a handy platform for those who want a *nix box with a common set of command-line shells to choose from (bash, csh, ksh, sh, tcsh and zsh all come included by default) and all the other standard BSD tools, in a package that also happens to do media-consumption activities quite well.
Note, I'm not buying into Apple or FOSS zealotry here; I'm primarily a Linux user, but OS X is good at what it does, and iOS does not fill that gap (unless, I'm told, you jailbreak the device).
You are obviously too young to remember how we used to rest our beer glasses and coffee mugs in mid-air with nothing more than casual use of the power of our minds. The invention of these "table" things just made the activity obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of sites simply won't work properly if you don't accept their cookies. But clearing them is fine; and as for doubleclick, all of their servers are blocked in my hosts file. I don't need any connections from them at all.
Given that I'm not that keen on participating in Google's data-mining projects, I am underwhelmed by Google Voice offerings. Skype (despite its various failings) offers a comprehensive voice (and video if you want it) or chat connection that is independent of your browser, and thus is to an extent more or less insulated from your other online habits. Skype can be swallowed up by pretty much anyone other than Google (so long as those services remain intact) and I'll be content.
Also not entirely true: sometimes you are left with that nice little spinning beachball (tastefully) following the cursor around, but which no "magic" key-sequence manages to kill, so you are forced to hold down that nice (tasteful) little (|) button to power the damn thing off.
I sort of prefer the simpler Unixy "kernel panic" message that you only see in the syslogs. If the machine is going to crash and burn anyway, it's probably preferable if it just does it quickly rather than attempting to lull you into a notion that all your work is not lost...
I've tried to explain the benefits of good subjects to both of them, but they give me that 10,000 mile stare like I'm speaking Klingon or something.
That sounds like a candidate for a suitable (fake) "bounce" message. Maybe something like this...
"Attention Will Robinson! Your email has been intercepted by a lameness filter. Please try supplying an apposite subject line."
Far out. If I had an Android phone, I wouldn't be too keen to let crap like newsletters or advertising swallow up my limited traffic allowance. I would only use it for my lower-traffic inboxes.
The trick, seriously, is to not make your subject too long or too short.
Another trick is to be careful of to whom you give your most "important" email addresses. In my case, I now have just five addresses, allocated to different fields of activity, so they are easily kept sorted. Then just use Thunderbird (or Apple's Mail client, or whatever takes your fancy) to pull mail from all of those addresses with the click of a single button.
Spreading your mail thus over several inboxes is an easy way of sorting stuff into approximate categories that are easy to scan with nothing more awesome than the power of the naked human eyeball.
Whether or not it makes sense, there is absolutely no point in attempting to regulate what marketroids do by means of legislation. There are really only two options:
(1) Kill all marketroids. (My preferred option, but unfortunately not supported by our legal system.)
(2) Make it impossible for them to track you, i.e. manually clearing cookies/history and using whatever browser extensions or hosts file entries that make you happy. User education is the key here; far too many users are woefully ill-equipped to survive in a modern online environment. There seems to be a totally misguided expectation that because you are using a computer in your own home that you are somehow insulated from the nasties that get perpetrated in the world "out there".
Or switch to LILO
You insensitive clod. Some of us never switched from LILO in the first place...
The HP calculators are made to a much higher standard...
Although I loved the clicky keys on my HP48G+, (not to mention that lovely fat "Enter" button just where the index finger falls) and am quite happy with RPN, the quality was skin deep. The machine went into spasms of denial if anyone looked at it sideways, and such antics cost me grades in examinations in my undergrad university course.
I treated the disease by selling off the HP and buying a TI-89. The build quality of the latter is vastly inferior, but the device is much faster and more functional, and reliability is rock-solid. Oh, and the myth about RPN requiring less keystrokes is pretty much just that: a myth (though I freely admit RPN is a great way of processing calculations "on the fly").
And, to be fair, the buttons on my TI-89 were a bit overly snugly fitted, so they used to be a bit rough on the keystroke until I attacked the housing with a jeweller's file. The TI-89 just does not have anywhere near as good a keypad as the HP48* series.
I have a TI-89 and used to have an HP48G+ (which despite its many advantages proved to be just too prone to failure), and have found that both tend to be dropped much more often when they are not being used. So a decent padded case like that shown here makes a hell of a difference. I have used (and abused) a case like this for 8 years, and my calculator is still working fine.
I know exactly how I would have felt as a kid (even though that would have been inconceivably long ago for most readers) if I had discovered I was being observed any or all moments:
I would have taken steps to disable it. A blanket over the camera, and/or cables being snipped. Whatever works. Such a "persistent solution" is an intrusion. For instance, although I love Skype, I do not need my camera displaying my deshabille or the state of my house to the world. (Actually, the camera on my laptop has a discreet little piece of insulating tape obscuring the lens.)
I don't know about you guys, but on my desktop systems I don't have an unmanagable bottleneck with my external devices, since they are mostly for backups; my main issue seems to be at the interface between the motherboard and internal drives. This is where LightPeak is starting to look attractive (provided that the cables aren't too expensive) - especially since it is (supposed to be) a replacement for PCIE as well. However, I guess I'll have to wait a while for it to become available for Linux... :-|
How is their decision to stay in a religiously themed communal housing structure any different (from the standpoint of the cultural norm) from your decision to avoid sunlight and social interactions, and to live in your mother's basement collecting manga, video game paraphernalia, and a super huge collection of raunchy porn locked away on an encrypted filesystem?
Maybe it's got something to do with a diet of anything other than Twinkies?
Heh. Penguin rules, I guess. :-|
My immediate reaction to the title of the submission: "Nuns Donate Their Brains to Alzheimer's Research" was to say "they might as well. Their brains aren't useful for anything else".
No, it's an OS for guys that read it, chuckled, and carried on regardless because there is (still) nothing better.
Noise cancelling headphones won't do you much good at home unless you're under a flight-path or next to a railway line or main road. They are very good at letting human voices come through. I have a good pair of NC cans, but I now only use them on planes or (very rarely) buses.
If you want quiet or silence, you need ear-muffs and/or really good ear-plugs.
I have two or three friends who refuse to carry a cellphone (and definitely not through any financial constraint, since the worst offender is a multi-millionaire), but who always seem to think it's OK to make it my problem to maintain contact for social arrangements. An insistence on all communication being via email seems roughly equivalent to notifying you that all "arrangements must be submitted in triplicate to our lawyers to be forwarded to our client via his secretary". Needless to say, I get a bit cranky at this attitude. I was a slow adopter of cellphones (my first device was bought in 2001), but since such usage is now close to 100% in the "Western" world, a refusal to move with the times is punishing one's friends - assuming they exist.
Incidentally, I have considered setting an email filter for the rich luddite I mentioned earlier: something along the lines of "Traffic from your IP address block is suspended: please submit your message via avian carrier."
And a proper phone conversation requires input from two people simultaneously, rather than one person being able to go and do some work while the other person thinks and types up a response.
...Which is where SMS steps in. Sure, it's not always free, but in a world where a majority of people still don't have smartphones and/or are not tied to their desktop/laptop computer day and night, SMS is a perfectly convenient means of conveying a message that doesn't really need an immediate (or indeed any) reply.
...and think of reasons to be happy.
...
Something like this?
Cheddar cheese and pickle, the Vincent motorsickle
Slap and tickle
Woody Allen, Dali, Dimitri and Pasquale
balabalabala and Volare
Something nice to study, phoning up a buddy
Being in my nuddy
Saying hokey-dokey, singalonga Smokey
Coming out of chokey
John Coltrane's soprano, Adi Celentano
Bonar Colleano
(Citation)
The brain continues working during the sleep.
Of course it does. Otherwise you would die, since your heart, lungs and other organs would not be getting the signals they need to perform their functions.
Having said that, I do find it therapeutic to "switch off" for periods of time - by which I mean simply closing my eyes and going into what I call "no-time", letting my mind go blank. I find this comes quite naturally, but I guess varieties of meditation techniques should have more or less the same effect for those to whom it doesn't.
The advantage of this over sleep is that you don't have that "groggy phase" on waking up, when all you want to do is go back to sleep.
Even so, storing loot in shoe-boxes is not the action one would expect of an innocent man. But that aside, Apple could have made things a hell of a lot easier for themselves and everybody else by being less secretive about their products and getting them tested in the real world - by people, not robots with rubber hands.
I don't see what difference replacing OSX with iOS makes.
Uh, Slashdot is supposed to be "news for nerds". You're in the wrong place. OS X is a handy platform for those who want a *nix box with a common set of command-line shells to choose from (bash, csh, ksh, sh, tcsh and zsh all come included by default) and all the other standard BSD tools, in a package that also happens to do media-consumption activities quite well.
Note, I'm not buying into Apple or FOSS zealotry here; I'm primarily a Linux user, but OS X is good at what it does, and iOS does not fill that gap (unless, I'm told, you jailbreak the device).
You are obviously too young to remember how we used to rest our beer glasses and coffee mugs in mid-air with nothing more than casual use of the power of our minds. The invention of these "table" things just made the activity obsolete.
:-D
Now get off my lawn.
Whatever happened to Twitter? Maybe got bored with his posts being automatically modded down to -1...