Nor is it the case that everybody is or will be or should be happy.
Why not? Why can't everyone be happy, or at least content and unafraid of what tomorrow is going to bring? Why do you think fear, suffering, anguish and unhappiness is necessary?
In the western world, we have the capital, technology and manpower to let literally every single human being on the earth live a comfortable life. Maybe not one in outright luxury, but at least decently-fed, clothed, housed and safe. But instead we insist on concentrating this enormous wealth in the hands of a very small group of people who have grown so jaded that they can't even appreciate the lives of insane luxury they lead, so they just want more more more.
Why is suffering necessary, when we have the means to end it?
You "HURF DURF FREEEEEDOM!" types are so cute when you get agitated:-)
A fully free market cannot work unless people act rationally. As long as people do not act rationally 100% of the time, there will be a need for rules and regulations, otherwise it turns into "dog eat dog" very quickly.
The very core principle of libertarianism is "every man for himself", which quickly becomes "fuck you, got mine". So yes, it is perfectly in line with the libertarian mindset to sell blatantly overpriced goods by false advertising, to naive people who don't know any better.
The most insane idea (which is held by Ron Paul, among others), is that we should abolish all regulations on pollution and environmental controls. If people downstream get sick, they can just sue, right? Because no environmental effect was ever subtle and long-term, right? Increased cancer risk for generations would never happen, right?
Once you enter the real world where you can't just do what you want nilly-willy without caring about consequences, we can have an enlightened and fruitful discussion. Until then, feel free to wallow in your fantasy of a world where grown-ups can't tell you what to do, and you can eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.
Oh wow, I certainly struck a randroid nerve there, didn't I?
The spirit of the free market is that every player is 100% informed and rational, and will therefore make the best possible decisions to their own benefit. Because everyone is 100% informed and rational, everyone acts in their own best interest, and everyone is happy.
To everyone living in the real world, it is blatantly obvious that this will never work in real life. No one is 100% informed and everyone acts irrationally to a certain degree. Marketers know this, and they exploit the hell out of it, including to sell $10 cables for 1000 times more than they're worth.
I don't live in the US, so I don't vote in your corrupt two-party system. I vote in my own country's fucked up system, thank you very much.
And yes, I am in fact a marxist. You should read up on what that means. I recommend starting with Thomas Piketty's brilliant book "Capital in the 21st century".
Speakers, listening room and good quality recordings are by far the most important parts. Everything else is irrelevant as long as it meets some very basic performance parameters, which basically everything these days does. It's literally a question of differences that can only be measured on very sensitive measuring equipment, and is completely inaudible to the human ear, even under ideal conditions.
Ironically, it is often exotically-constructed expensive audiophile products that fail to adhere to basic performance parameters, such as Ayre's idiotic no-feedback amplifiers.
With speakers, there are definite diminishing returns once you get beyond a couple thousand dollars for 99,9% of use cases. For recordings, well-mastered CD-quality audio is all you'll ever need (or surround mixes of equivalent quality, of course). But when it comes to acoustic treatment of the listening room, there is a hell of a lot you can do. Acoustics are so hard to get completely right.
I would buy brightly-colored cables. It makes it a lot easier to keep tabs on which patch cables go to specific devices. Yellow is the NAS, orange is the printer, gray is the Xbox, blue is the PC and white (because it goes along the baseboards) is the router. Very convenient.
The only benefits CST trackballs have is that they are reasonably rugged, and that it is impossible to remove the ball itself without disassembling the casing. Both are obvious benefits when it comes to users with limited motor skills.
In every other case, they're completely inferior in ergonomics. Because of the bearings, they are very much biased towards X and Y movements, diagonal movements tend to wander and feel stiffer than straight up/down or left/right. Completely inferior to a trackball with "floating" ruby bearing, like what Logitech and Kensington use.
I've been using a Kensington Slimblade trackball for a while, and I honestly consider it one of the best pointing devices ever made. The scroll function takes a little while to get used to, but it's probably the best implementation of a scroll "wheel" on any trackball.
Out of the box on Linux, the top left button is middle click and the top right is "back". I switch these and add a nice acceleration curve with a custom XInput config. It allows minute movements while retaining the ability to flick right across my 2560x1440 monitor in one finger movement.
The first line sets the acceleration curve, the second sets polynomial acceleration, the third adds deceleration at low speeds and the fourth remaps the buttons. All of the possible tweaks are detailed here: http://www.x.org/wiki/Developm...
I am continually annoyed that Windows does not let me set per-device acceleration settings, when it is relatively easy on *nix systems with a bit of tweaking.
It took a hell of a long time for USB keyboards to be actually usable on x86 PCs. For the longest time, BIOS configuration and boot loader interaction was impossible, since the keyboard wouldn't be initialized until you hit the actual OS. Keyboards with built-in USB hubs were the worst.
I'm mostly into kettlebells and olympic lifting myself, but I'll definitely second the statement that the first couple of months are absolutely amazing. Your endorphin levels will be through the roof, it feels so good.
I've been branching out into trying some yoga/mobility classes as well. That shit is tough.
The surfing, jiu-jitsu fighting, globetrotting etc. founder of my martial arts/crossfit club is a geek. The scoring system we use for competitions is something he cooked up in an afternoon. We also have an MMA fighter who's a banker and a surprisingly large amount of our members are university students. Psychology, medicine, and a couple of law students too.
In fact, may people in Germany are classified as "working poor", since even their full-time job is not enough to earn them a living wage, they have to receive welfare payments as well.
People get bent totally out of line about the alleged violence against women, which literally only exists in the game because you can be violent against anyone, the game itself doesn't discriminate at all. At one point you can save a woman from baby boomer cultist cannibals as one character, while as another character you can kidnap people and deliver them to said cannibals. But never any single women, it's always either a couple or a man. Rockstar knew what lines couldn't be crossed, and they stayed within them.
On the other hand, there is a horribly graphic torture scene including teeth-pulling, electric shock and threats of being burned alive. But apparently that wasn't enough to get the game banned, completely untrue allegations had to be made up instead.
I work for a Danish IPTV provider, and we do the same thing. Everything is recorded and kept for at least 7 days, so our customers can watch whenever they want. It's proven to be extremely popular.
It would have to be severely nasty inside said gas tank for that to even happen. Most gas tanks are absolutely spotless inside, even when pulled from 30-40 year old cars killed by rust. They only start to rust inside if you let them sit for a long time, and on modern cars that's not a problem either, since all gas tanks are either plastic-lined, painted inside or all plastic.
Unless you have a bad habit of always filling up in the middle of sandstorms, you'll never had a problem with crud in the tank of a modern car, unless it was deliberately put there.
AFAIK, most cars have a reserve quantity that goes below the gauge's calibrated "empty" level. I'd suppose it's to allow for a few extra miles once you hit E but may just be to motivate you to fill up again before you put all the crud/water/etc that is at the bottom of the tank once you get near empty.
How do you think fuel is drained from a tank? By a floating pump that sips from the top or something? Do you imagine it works like when you're gulping down a mug of beer, that the fuel is tipped off from the top?
All fuel tanks are drained from the bottom all the time, otherwise any capacity below the level of the fuel pump's intake would be completely wasted. Any crud on the bottom of the tank will be caught by the fuel filter. Absorbed water isn't a huge problem unless it exceeds a certain level. I know diesel cars have water separators on the fuel feed lines, I assume newer gasoline cars work the same way (since modern gasoline contains ethanol, which tends to absorb moisture.)
It's exactly the same reason why it's bullshit advising people to never fill at a gas station that's currently having its tanks filled. Firstly, the pump pickups are obviously at the bottom to access the full capacity of the tanks. Secondly, modern subterranean tanks have internal bladders, so there's no rust of rust or crud.
The Lenovo Thinkpad 11e Chromebook and the Dell Chromebook 11 are semi-rugged designs for educational use, with rubberized corners, spillproof keyboards and that sort of thing. The Lenovo even comes with a decent IPS display in the touchscreen-equipped version. They're slightly more expensive than "normal" Chromebooks, but not hugely so.
The touchpad on my Acer Chromebook 13 is actually surprisingly nice to use. It's very responsive, and it recognizes two-finger/three-finger taps (for right click and middle click, respectively) extremely well. It has much better recognition of two-finger drag to scroll, much better than any Windows laptop I've used.
The only slight niggle I have is that the acceleration curve is slightly 'off' from what I'm used to, but that's just a matter of muscle memory.
While I still think the Kensington Slimblade trackball is the greatest pointing device ever made (so good, I bought 3!), fitting a pool ball-sized trackball into a laptop will never happen, and a good touchpad is the best alternative.
No, if a 16:9 monitor is 1600x900, a 4:3 monitor with equivalent vertical resolution would be 1200x900.
I completely agree that 16:9 monitors with too low resolution are annoying. 1920x1080 really is the minimum for single screen setups and 2560x1440 is so much nicer. 3840x2160 is obviously even better. Once you get decent vertical resolution, the widescreen format makes sense.
And personally, I work with both. At home I have a single 27" 2560x1440 monitor, which is great for what I do at home, ie. web surfing, watching movies and playing games. At work I have a 20" 1600x1200 and a 22" 1680x1050, which works really well for monitoring, email/calendaring.
I could easily do all of my work tasks on a single 27" widescreen instead, but my dual monitor setup would be less than ideal for my home use.
So buy a 4K/UHD display and regard it as two 1920x2160 portrait-mode displays? There are plenty of options, even up to 39" before you get into TVs, and then the sky's the limit.
Aspect ratio fanaticism is nothing but neo-luddism.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh right, another little thing.
Nor is it the case that everybody is or will be or should be happy.
Why not? Why can't everyone be happy, or at least content and unafraid of what tomorrow is going to bring? Why do you think fear, suffering, anguish and unhappiness is necessary?
In the western world, we have the capital, technology and manpower to let literally every single human being on the earth live a comfortable life. Maybe not one in outright luxury, but at least decently-fed, clothed, housed and safe. But instead we insist on concentrating this enormous wealth in the hands of a very small group of people who have grown so jaded that they can't even appreciate the lives of insane luxury they lead, so they just want more more more.
Why is suffering necessary, when we have the means to end it?
You "HURF DURF FREEEEEDOM!" types are so cute when you get agitated :-)
A fully free market cannot work unless people act rationally. As long as people do not act rationally 100% of the time, there will be a need for rules and regulations, otherwise it turns into "dog eat dog" very quickly.
The very core principle of libertarianism is "every man for himself", which quickly becomes "fuck you, got mine". So yes, it is perfectly in line with the libertarian mindset to sell blatantly overpriced goods by false advertising, to naive people who don't know any better.
The most insane idea (which is held by Ron Paul, among others), is that we should abolish all regulations on pollution and environmental controls. If people downstream get sick, they can just sue, right? Because no environmental effect was ever subtle and long-term, right? Increased cancer risk for generations would never happen, right?
Once you enter the real world where you can't just do what you want nilly-willy without caring about consequences, we can have an enlightened and fruitful discussion. Until then, feel free to wallow in your fantasy of a world where grown-ups can't tell you what to do, and you can eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.
Oh wow, I certainly struck a randroid nerve there, didn't I?
The spirit of the free market is that every player is 100% informed and rational, and will therefore make the best possible decisions to their own benefit. Because everyone is 100% informed and rational, everyone acts in their own best interest, and everyone is happy.
To everyone living in the real world, it is blatantly obvious that this will never work in real life. No one is 100% informed and everyone acts irrationally to a certain degree. Marketers know this, and they exploit the hell out of it, including to sell $10 cables for 1000 times more than they're worth.
I don't live in the US, so I don't vote in your corrupt two-party system. I vote in my own country's fucked up system, thank you very much.
And yes, I am in fact a marxist. You should read up on what that means. I recommend starting with Thomas Piketty's brilliant book "Capital in the 21st century".
Because the cable that came with it is gray. Good point, though :-)
Speakers, listening room and good quality recordings are by far the most important parts. Everything else is irrelevant as long as it meets some very basic performance parameters, which basically everything these days does. It's literally a question of differences that can only be measured on very sensitive measuring equipment, and is completely inaudible to the human ear, even under ideal conditions.
Ironically, it is often exotically-constructed expensive audiophile products that fail to adhere to basic performance parameters, such as Ayre's idiotic no-feedback amplifiers.
With speakers, there are definite diminishing returns once you get beyond a couple thousand dollars for 99,9% of use cases. For recordings, well-mastered CD-quality audio is all you'll ever need (or surround mixes of equivalent quality, of course). But when it comes to acoustic treatment of the listening room, there is a hell of a lot you can do. Acoustics are so hard to get completely right.
Yes, and the profit margin is gigantic.
Welcome to wet dream of any Free Market libertarian.
I would buy brightly-colored cables. It makes it a lot easier to keep tabs on which patch cables go to specific devices. Yellow is the NAS, orange is the printer, gray is the Xbox, blue is the PC and white (because it goes along the baseboards) is the router. Very convenient.
The only benefits CST trackballs have is that they are reasonably rugged, and that it is impossible to remove the ball itself without disassembling the casing. Both are obvious benefits when it comes to users with limited motor skills.
In every other case, they're completely inferior in ergonomics. Because of the bearings, they are very much biased towards X and Y movements, diagonal movements tend to wander and feel stiffer than straight up/down or left/right. Completely inferior to a trackball with "floating" ruby bearing, like what Logitech and Kensington use.
I've been using a Kensington Slimblade trackball for a while, and I honestly consider it one of the best pointing devices ever made. The scroll function takes a little while to get used to, but it's probably the best implementation of a scroll "wheel" on any trackball.
Out of the box on Linux, the top left button is middle click and the top right is "back". I switch these and add a nice acceleration curve with a custom XInput config. It allows minute movements while retaining the ability to flick right across my 2560x1440 monitor in one finger movement.
The config is as follows:
/usr/bin/xinput set-ptr-feedback "Kensington Kensington Slimblade Trackball" 0 18 10 &
/usr/bin/xinput --set-prop "Kensington Kensington Slimblade Trackball" "Device Accel Profile" 2 &
/usr/bin/xinput --set-prop "Kensington Kensington Slimblade Trackball" "Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration" 3 &
/usr/bin/xinput set-button-map "Kensington Kensington Slimblade Trackball" 1 8 3 4 5 6 7 2 9 10 11 12
The first line sets the acceleration curve, the second sets polynomial acceleration, the third adds deceleration at low speeds and the fourth remaps the buttons. All of the possible tweaks are detailed here: http://www.x.org/wiki/Developm...
I am continually annoyed that Windows does not let me set per-device acceleration settings, when it is relatively easy on *nix systems with a bit of tweaking.
It took a hell of a long time for USB keyboards to be actually usable on x86 PCs. For the longest time, BIOS configuration and boot loader interaction was impossible, since the keyboard wouldn't be initialized until you hit the actual OS. Keyboards with built-in USB hubs were the worst.
I'm mostly into kettlebells and olympic lifting myself, but I'll definitely second the statement that the first couple of months are absolutely amazing. Your endorphin levels will be through the roof, it feels so good.
I've been branching out into trying some yoga/mobility classes as well. That shit is tough.
The surfing, jiu-jitsu fighting, globetrotting etc. founder of my martial arts/crossfit club is a geek. The scoring system we use for competitions is something he cooked up in an afternoon. We also have an MMA fighter who's a banker and a surprisingly large amount of our members are university students. Psychology, medicine, and a couple of law students too.
In fact, may people in Germany are classified as "working poor", since even their full-time job is not enough to earn them a living wage, they have to receive welfare payments as well.
People get bent totally out of line about the alleged violence against women, which literally only exists in the game because you can be violent against anyone, the game itself doesn't discriminate at all. At one point you can save a woman from baby boomer cultist cannibals as one character, while as another character you can kidnap people and deliver them to said cannibals. But never any single women, it's always either a couple or a man. Rockstar knew what lines couldn't be crossed, and they stayed within them.
On the other hand, there is a horribly graphic torture scene including teeth-pulling, electric shock and threats of being burned alive. But apparently that wasn't enough to get the game banned, completely untrue allegations had to be made up instead.
I work for a Danish IPTV provider, and we do the same thing. Everything is recorded and kept for at least 7 days, so our customers can watch whenever they want. It's proven to be extremely popular.
It would have to be severely nasty inside said gas tank for that to even happen. Most gas tanks are absolutely spotless inside, even when pulled from 30-40 year old cars killed by rust. They only start to rust inside if you let them sit for a long time, and on modern cars that's not a problem either, since all gas tanks are either plastic-lined, painted inside or all plastic.
Unless you have a bad habit of always filling up in the middle of sandstorms, you'll never had a problem with crud in the tank of a modern car, unless it was deliberately put there.
AFAIK, most cars have a reserve quantity that goes below the gauge's calibrated "empty" level. I'd suppose it's to allow for a few extra miles once you hit E but may just be to motivate you to fill up again before you put all the crud/water/etc that is at the bottom of the tank once you get near empty.
How do you think fuel is drained from a tank? By a floating pump that sips from the top or something? Do you imagine it works like when you're gulping down a mug of beer, that the fuel is tipped off from the top?
All fuel tanks are drained from the bottom all the time, otherwise any capacity below the level of the fuel pump's intake would be completely wasted. Any crud on the bottom of the tank will be caught by the fuel filter. Absorbed water isn't a huge problem unless it exceeds a certain level. I know diesel cars have water separators on the fuel feed lines, I assume newer gasoline cars work the same way (since modern gasoline contains ethanol, which tends to absorb moisture.)
It's exactly the same reason why it's bullshit advising people to never fill at a gas station that's currently having its tanks filled. Firstly, the pump pickups are obviously at the bottom to access the full capacity of the tanks. Secondly, modern subterranean tanks have internal bladders, so there's no rust of rust or crud.
The Lenovo Thinkpad 11e Chromebook and the Dell Chromebook 11 are semi-rugged designs for educational use, with rubberized corners, spillproof keyboards and that sort of thing. The Lenovo even comes with a decent IPS display in the touchscreen-equipped version. They're slightly more expensive than "normal" Chromebooks, but not hugely so.
The touchpad on my Acer Chromebook 13 is actually surprisingly nice to use. It's very responsive, and it recognizes two-finger/three-finger taps (for right click and middle click, respectively) extremely well. It has much better recognition of two-finger drag to scroll, much better than any Windows laptop I've used.
The only slight niggle I have is that the acceleration curve is slightly 'off' from what I'm used to, but that's just a matter of muscle memory.
While I still think the Kensington Slimblade trackball is the greatest pointing device ever made (so good, I bought 3!), fitting a pool ball-sized trackball into a laptop will never happen, and a good touchpad is the best alternative.
If Emacs is our reference implementation of a good UI, good luck.
No, if a 16:9 monitor is 1600x900, a 4:3 monitor with equivalent vertical resolution would be 1200x900.
I completely agree that 16:9 monitors with too low resolution are annoying. 1920x1080 really is the minimum for single screen setups and 2560x1440 is so much nicer. 3840x2160 is obviously even better. Once you get decent vertical resolution, the widescreen format makes sense.
And personally, I work with both. At home I have a single 27" 2560x1440 monitor, which is great for what I do at home, ie. web surfing, watching movies and playing games. At work I have a 20" 1600x1200 and a 22" 1680x1050, which works really well for monitoring, email/calendaring.
I could easily do all of my work tasks on a single 27" widescreen instead, but my dual monitor setup would be less than ideal for my home use.
So buy a 4K/UHD display and regard it as two 1920x2160 portrait-mode displays? There are plenty of options, even up to 39" before you get into TVs, and then the sky's the limit.
Aspect ratio fanaticism is nothing but neo-luddism.
Clearly you've never actually met the average European man. What do you think Europe is, some kind of continent-sized Castro District?
A 31.5" 4K/UHD 3840x2160 monitor hits ~140dpi and fits pretty well within your size constraints.
WA displays are simply too wide. And in portrait orientation, they are too narrow.
Don't think of them as widescreen displays. Think of them as two portrait-mode displays side-by-side with no annoying bezel.
For instance, with a 2560x1440 monitor, I have two 1280x1440 portrait-mode monitors built into one monitor. It's brilliant.