When everybody listens to MP3s. I have not trained my ear to hear MP3 distortion/artifacts because I don't want to hear them every time I listen to music. But I am sure even with my poor hearing (childhood ear infections) I can learn to hear them. It is kind of like seeing the two wires on Sony Trinitron monitors. The guy showing me them asked if I really wanted to see them because I would then be aware of them most of the time. He was correct I did start seeing them all the time.
High fidelity or high definition audio is now a fetish with 99.9% of audio being reproduced as MP3 audio streams. I even see Iphones plugged in million dollar PA systems for background music.
I smile when I hear people argue the importance of 4K video when so much video is watched on a computer monitor or smart phone.
I buy a lot of small "maker" electronics from china. Many items that cost a buck or so with free shipping to the US. I dont see how the Chinese postal service is paying fair rates to the post office considering the price of a 1oz letter is $0.50 and for a 1oz package is $3.50. The USPS is definitely loosing money on each package delivery from China.
I am part of the trade imbalance with China. I buy things from China for typically 20%-40% of the US price. Typically with free shipping. Delivery takes longer. Typically 2-3 weeks. But if I am not in a hurry, the wait is worth the savings.
I would rather pay micro payments than have my personal data sold to advertisers and data harvesting companies. Micro payments on the order of what advertisers pay to show me an ad.
Did they walk into a bar? I am waiting for your punch line. I don't think anyone is moving to the coal fields for a coal job. The coal industry only added 8,000 jobs in 2017 based on preliminary Bureau of Labor Statistics figures in December. Not exactly a huge number of jobs.
Two features neither Mac or Windows have: No focus follows mouse. No pick and stuff. I learned to use pick and stuff back in the Sun Tools days. Pre X11. Two mouse clicks and I am done. Highlight the text. One click. Move mouse to second window and stuff the text. Second click. Copy and paste. Highlight the text, one click. Copy the text, a second click or a keyboard short cut. Select the next window, a third click. Then paste the text a fourth click or a second keyboard short cut. All the work arounds I found were close. But they were not as simple as pick and stuff.
Who needs to hack into anything when we are installing home automation devices like Amazon Alexa Echo and Google Home that stream audio to the cloud. In the case of the Echo its 16bit, 16KHz audio with a sophisticated microphone array that can determine the direction of the conversation. Both Google and Amazon are proud of their voice recognition capabilities.
How do you know it is only sending audio when you talk to it? Blinking LEDs? See discussion about software control of indicator LEDs.
You don't actually own the hearing aids, you license them. I discovered this when my father died and I wanted to have his $2K each hearing aids refitted for me. I was flatly told by the audiologist that he could not do that because the manufacturer did not allow it.
I wound up giving them to a charity that provided hearing aids for the disadvantaged.
"DevOps was invented as a way to unite developers and IT operations (system administrators) to help them find a common ground."
This quote got it right. But there are problems:
Companies want to sell a product. Right, "I want buy a hundred units of teamwork please."
Devs quite often see it as a way to bypass Operations: "We will automate everything so we won't need any pesky sysadmins."
Ops are often in charge of NO: "No thank you. We don't trust development and our way works just fine."
Tool chains and other tools are useful, but they are not the main focus of DevOps.
The most important feature of DevOps is team building (IMHO): Getting Dev and Ops to work together Getting Dev and Ops to trust each other
BTW, it really is DevQaOps: QA is a critical member of the team. They write the automated tests that give Dev immediate feedback about problems. Automated test give Ops the confidence that when they deploy new code the site is not going go down. There may be problems but they will be minor. Not show stoppers that make the site stop working.
The main problem I see with RJ.5 is that if you have a row of tightly spaced connectors you will need a tool like a pen cap or paper clip to depress the locking tab without risking depressing other locking tabs.
Even with my fat fingers I can press a single RJ-45 latch in a row of connectors.
Living in a modern society where we have multiple ways to prove who we are when asked we loose sight of one of the basic problems refugees face: being able to prove who they are and what country they come from.
For a refugee who is having a hard time proving who they are, privacy concerns are a moot point. An iris scan that can give them food in store like food distribution center is far better than waiting in line and hoping there will be food available when the get to the head of the line.
This is very similar to one of the problems homeless people face here in the US.
No need to ask. I know that she, like 99.9% of all women would gladly put some limits on how she expresses herself if that meant reducing the vitriol and hate she gets on a frequent basis.
You are obviously a guy. Guys do not understand how women look at personal safety. A woman's personal safety is something she is aware of ALL the time. I call this a woman's safety tape. Sometimes it is in the distant background like when she is at home protected by locked doors. But during the day when she is out in public she is probably continuously evaluating her personal safety. Most of the time it is to say she "I am safe at this moment". But she probably regularly goes on high alert aware of her surroundings, who she is talking to, checking her actions and words, Keeping an escape plan in the back of her mind.
In general men have no concept of a woman's sense of personal safety. I only actively think about my personal safety when I go into a "bad" area, a dark alley, or am being actively confronted. I generally do not think about walking down the street or being in a public place. When a man gets a death threat or a rape threat, he can laugh it off because because he is a man. It is probably not a real threat. For a woman on the other hand it all threats are serious and real threats. Women get killed, raped, hurt every day. Just look at the news.
If you doubt me, ask your women friends, your sisters, your wife/girlfriend, your mother. Does she think about her safety: At a bar or public event? Waiting in line? Waiting for a bus or train? Walking down the street? Shopping? At work with the guy(s) that harass her?
So to answer your question: My daughter would gladly trade some limits on how she can express herself if it limits the rape threats, death threats, hateful comments she receives.
Internet trolls have not been able to control their urges to hurt random innocent people. Make no mistake about it. The rape and death threats, the bulling, really do hurt people.
Twitter has finally gotten enough feed back from their customer base that trolling, bulling and other forms of online harassment are unacceptable. I am please that they are trying to do something about it. They will probably make some missteps. But they will make twitter better for most people and immensely better for a few people who are the target of the attacks.
If you don't like twitter trying to mildly enforce some simple rules of social decency and common courtesy, then go find some other free service and spew your vitriol there. That way the larger community can ignore you.
I have no sympathy because my adult daughter received her first rape threat when she was 11 when she posted a comment to a gamer forum. Just call me a California liberal but social decency and common courtesy make the world a better palace to live despite what Trump spews.
Mr asshole, please keep your spell checking fascism comments to yourself. As someone who has struggled all my 50+ years of my life with spelling and writing, I know how shaming your "helpful" comments are. Rather than helping they are more likely to shut the writer down. Silencing their voice. To include profanity in your "helpful" comment you double down on silencing their voice. So next time keep your unhelpful comments to yourself. If you really can't control your impulses, then please leave the profanity out. Your "Not fucking hard, is it?" turned a questionable "helpful" comment into a shaming insult.
I used to read and contribute comments to slash dot. But the comments have become predictable pro-privacy, pro-freedom, pro-opensource, ra, ra, ra, anti-establishment and largely anti-government. Post a different point of view than the heard and you get modded down. I got tired of the same old points of view and the echos. Intelligent argument enlightens. Well it used to.
I have also gotten tired of the misogynistic gamer gate crap when there is an article about sexual harassment or women's experience in the technical/gaming world. Boys explaining that the complaints are always the women's fault and that they should just get a thicker skin.
So I like the articles, but rarely read the comments.
It will be sad to see Slashdot decline more. I guess it is time to move on and let a new generation pickup the reigns with new sites and new media.
I am an aficionado of dead tree technology. I find reading long documents online is very tiring. That is why I prefer dead tree technology.
Dead tree technology has many benefits: It never needs to be recharged. It is very portable. Just toss it into your bag. No cords or power supply. It is very easy to share with some one. Just hand the book to them. It has a very user friendly user indexing system called "dog ear".
Simply fold a corner of a page over and you can find your place again. It is very easy to make notes with a pen or yellow highlighter technology.
But only if it is your own book. Character image resolution is excellent. No "jaggies" in the font. Reading a book has a great tactile feel.
Holding it in your hands, turning the pages.
The only drawback is that it requires an external light source. Sunshine can be great to read by.
Yes, I do like reading using my "dead tree" technology. The only problem is that in a decade or two, children will be asking me about my odd hand held device. Do I really never have to charge it? How can I use it if it does not connect to the Internet? What if I have a question or want to text my friends? Do I really need a different one for each book I want to read?
Ah, another aficionado of dead tree technology. I find reading long documents online is very tiring. That is why I prefer using dead tree technology by printing the document.
Dead tree technology has many benefits: It never needs to be recharged. It is very portable. Just toss it into your bag. No cords or power supply. It is very easy to share with some one. Just hand the book to them. Remember to put your name in it. It has a very user friendly user indexing system called "dog ear". Simply fold a corner of a page over and you can find your place again. It is very easy to make notes with a pen or yellow highlighter technology. But only if it is your own book. Character image resolution is excellent. No "jaggies" in the font. Reading a book has a great tactile feel. Holding it in your hands, turning the pages.
The only drawback is that it requires an external light source. Sunshine and daylight are great to read by but indoor lights work just as well. Even a flashlight under the bed covers.
Yes, I do like reading using my "dead tree" technology. The only problem is that in a decade or two, children will be asking me about my odd hand held device. Do I really never have to charge it? How can I use it if it does not connect to the Internet? What if I have a question or want to text my friends? Do I really need a different one for each book I want to read?
My father, Jack Harker, was a very senior manager at IBM. He was Director of the San Jose [IBM] Labs in the 70's and 80's. He was also one of the quiet giants of the disk drive industry convincing IBM upper management to develop thin film disk heads and the original Winchester technology.
Jack loved to tell how in high level presentations when lots of figures and projections were being put up on the screen and the numbers didn't seem right, he would reach over and pull out his old 16" ivory K&E slide rule from his college days. The younger managers and engineers who had not seen him do this before would be flabbergasted, quite often offering to get him a calculator. He did this for two reasons. The first was to flummox the presenters and push them out of their comfort zone. The second was that he found a slide rule with its logarithmic scales was very useful for visually looking at growth projections. A quick look to see if the numbers actually made sense. Knowing my dad, I think the first reason was why he kept doing it. He enjoyed the looks of disbelief he got. Even more so after he quickly verified the numbers.
The Republican Presidential field is a demolition derby. Nobody is coming out unscathed. Boahner is retiring at the top of his game. He will have averted his second government shutdown, probably with Democratic help. The shutdown will come with the debit ceiling crisis in December. He enters the spring primary season at the right time, 3 months before June, fresh and ready to run. He presents himself as an honest broker. Someone willing to work with the Democrats to pass legislation. Rank and file moderate Republicans and swing voters can vote for him as a conservative who gets the job done. He kept the lights on twice. In November he runs as a centrist. Someone who can work with both parties. His only black marks are he cries in public and his orange tan. He would give Hillary a run for her money.
What's scary for me as a bleeding heart liberal, is that he would not be a bad choice. Unlike W or the race to the bottom of the current gang of candidates.
These can not be very good cables because they lack the direction arrow that the Belden audiophile Ethernet cables have (had?). This was so you would know which way to plug them in. Packets flow from hub/switch to the device.
And if you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you. It is orange and you will make your money back in picture postcard royalties.
Last week I found that my IPv6 address was blocked as a spam IP by Comcast. I have had IP addresses blocked in the past so I did some digging and found the Comcast form you fill out to unblock an IP address and filled it out. When I tried to submit my IPv6 address the form reported that it was a malformed IP address. The form only accepts IPv4 dotted quad addresses.
Just one of the many minor issues facing IPv6 adoption.
I know in my town the local paper carries pictures of the high school games. How is this significantly different than the student taking the pictures? Yes, I know, a press pass and an official newspaper. It would be interesting to hear why the principal thinks this students pictures are different?
Slashdot Mirror
When everybody listens to MP3s. I have not trained my ear to hear MP3 distortion/artifacts because I don't want to hear them every time I listen to music. But I am sure even with my poor hearing (childhood ear infections) I can learn to hear them. It is kind of like seeing the two wires on Sony Trinitron monitors. The guy showing me them asked if I really wanted to see them because I would then be aware of them most of the time. He was correct I did start seeing them all the time.
High fidelity or high definition audio is now a fetish with 99.9% of audio being reproduced as MP3 audio streams. I even see Iphones plugged in million dollar PA systems for background music.
I smile when I hear people argue the importance of 4K video when so much video is watched on a computer monitor or smart phone.
I buy a lot of small "maker" electronics from china. Many items that cost a buck or so with free shipping to the US. I dont see how the Chinese postal service is paying fair rates to the post office considering the price of a 1oz letter is $0.50 and for a 1oz package is $3.50. The USPS is definitely loosing money on each package delivery from China.
I am part of the trade imbalance with China. I buy things from China for typically 20%-40% of the US price. Typically with free shipping. Delivery takes longer. Typically 2-3 weeks. But if I am not in a hurry, the wait is worth the savings.
I would rather pay micro payments than have my personal data sold to advertisers and data harvesting companies. Micro payments on the order of what advertisers pay to show me an ad.
Can I get hired based on EQ? I have both 31 band graphic EQ and fully parametric 5 band EQ along with a high-pass filter.
Did they walk into a bar? I am waiting for your punch line. I don't think anyone is moving to the coal fields for a coal job. The coal industry only added 8,000 jobs in 2017 based on preliminary Bureau of Labor Statistics figures in December. Not exactly a huge number of jobs.
Two features neither Mac or Windows have:
No focus follows mouse.
No pick and stuff.
I learned to use pick and stuff back in the Sun Tools days. Pre X11. Two mouse clicks and I am done. Highlight the text. One click. Move mouse to second window and stuff the text. Second click.
Copy and paste. Highlight the text, one click. Copy the text, a second click or a keyboard short cut. Select the next window, a third click. Then paste the text a fourth click or a second keyboard short cut. All the work arounds I found were close. But they were not as simple as pick and stuff.
Who needs to hack into anything when we are installing home automation devices like Amazon Alexa Echo and Google Home that stream audio to the cloud. In the case of the Echo its 16bit, 16KHz audio with a sophisticated microphone array that can determine the direction of the conversation. Both Google and Amazon are proud of their voice recognition capabilities.
How do you know it is only sending audio when you talk to it? Blinking LEDs? See discussion about software control of indicator LEDs.
You don't actually own the hearing aids, you license them. I discovered this when my father died and I wanted to have his $2K each hearing aids refitted for me. I was flatly told by the audiologist that he could not do that because the manufacturer did not allow it.
I wound up giving them to a charity that provided hearing aids for the disadvantaged.
What more does she need to know all about Russia.
Same thing with climate change.
She sees snow in Alaska so she knows climate change is not real.
What more do we need to know?
"DevOps was invented as a way to unite developers and IT operations (system administrators) to help them find a common ground."
This quote got it right. But there are problems:
Companies want to sell a product.
Right, "I want buy a hundred units of teamwork please."
Devs quite often see it as a way to bypass Operations:
"We will automate everything so we won't need any pesky sysadmins."
Ops are often in charge of NO:
"No thank you. We don't trust development and our way works just fine."
Tool chains and other tools are useful, but they are not the main focus of DevOps.
The most important feature of DevOps is team building (IMHO):
Getting Dev and Ops to work together
Getting Dev and Ops to trust each other
BTW, it really is DevQaOps:
QA is a critical member of the team. They write the automated tests that give Dev immediate feedback about problems. Automated test give Ops the confidence that when they deploy new code the site is not going go down. There may be problems but they will be minor. Not show stoppers that make the site stop working.
The main problem I see with RJ.5 is that if you have a row of tightly spaced connectors you will need a tool like a pen cap or paper clip to depress the locking tab without risking depressing other locking tabs.
Even with my fat fingers I can press a single RJ-45 latch in a row of connectors.
Living in a modern society where we have multiple ways to prove who we are when asked we loose sight of one of the basic problems refugees face: being able to prove who they are and what country they come from.
For a refugee who is having a hard time proving who they are, privacy concerns are a moot point. An iris scan that can give them food in store like food distribution center is far better than waiting in line and hoping there will be food available when the get to the head of the line.
This is very similar to one of the problems homeless people face here in the US.
RLH
No need to ask. I know that she, like 99.9% of all women would gladly put some limits on how she expresses herself if that meant reducing the vitriol and hate she gets on a frequent basis.
You are obviously a guy. Guys do not understand how women look at personal safety. A woman's personal safety is something she is aware of ALL the time. I call this a woman's safety tape. Sometimes it is in the distant background like when she is at home protected by locked doors. But during the day when she is out in public she is probably continuously evaluating her personal safety. Most of the time it is to say she "I am safe at this moment". But she probably regularly goes on high alert aware of her surroundings, who she is talking to, checking her actions and words, Keeping an escape plan in the back of her mind.
In general men have no concept of a woman's sense of personal safety. I only actively think about my personal safety when I go into a "bad" area, a dark alley, or am being actively confronted. I generally do not think about walking down the street or being in a public place. When a man gets a death threat or a rape threat, he can laugh it off because because he is a man. It is probably not a real threat. For a woman on the other hand it all threats are serious and real threats. Women get killed, raped, hurt every day. Just look at the news.
If you doubt me, ask your women friends, your sisters, your wife/girlfriend, your mother. Does she think about her safety: At a bar or public event? Waiting in line? Waiting for a bus or train? Walking down the street? Shopping? At work with the guy(s) that harass her?
So to answer your question: My daughter would gladly trade some limits on how she can express herself if it limits the rape threats, death threats, hateful comments she receives.
Women: comments please?
RLH
Internet trolls have not been able to control their urges to hurt random innocent people. Make no mistake about it. The rape and death threats, the bulling, really do hurt people.
Twitter has finally gotten enough feed back from their customer base that trolling, bulling and other forms of online harassment are unacceptable. I am please that they are trying to do something about it. They will probably make some missteps. But they will make twitter better for most people and immensely better for a few people who are the target of the attacks.
If you don't like twitter trying to mildly enforce some simple rules of social decency and common courtesy, then go find some other free service and spew your vitriol there. That way the larger community can ignore you.
I have no sympathy because my adult daughter received her first rape threat when she was 11 when she posted a comment to a gamer forum. Just call me a California liberal but social decency and common courtesy make the world a better palace to live despite what Trump spews.
RLH
Mr asshole, please keep your spell checking fascism comments to yourself. As someone who has struggled all my 50+ years of my life with spelling and writing, I know how shaming your "helpful" comments are. Rather than helping they are more likely to shut the writer down. Silencing their voice. To include profanity in your "helpful" comment you double down on silencing their voice. So next time keep your unhelpful comments to yourself. If you really can't control your impulses, then please leave the profanity out. Your "Not fucking hard, is it?" turned a questionable "helpful" comment into a shaming insult.
RLH
I used to read and contribute comments to slash dot. But the comments have become predictable pro-privacy, pro-freedom, pro-opensource, ra, ra, ra, anti-establishment and largely anti-government. Post a different point of view than the heard and you get modded down. I got tired of the same old points of view and the echos. Intelligent argument enlightens. Well it used to.
I have also gotten tired of the misogynistic gamer gate crap when there is an article about sexual harassment or women's experience in the technical/gaming world. Boys explaining that the complaints are always the women's fault and that they should just get a thicker skin.
So I like the articles, but rarely read the comments.
It will be sad to see Slashdot decline more. I guess it is time to move on and let a new generation pickup the reigns with new sites and new media.
An old gray beard UNIX/Linux Sysadmin
RLH
I scan B&W pages of historical manuals I have (SunOS 1.1, not Solaris). What would you recommend for grayscale and why?
RLH
I am an aficionado of dead tree technology. I find reading long documents online is very tiring. That is why I prefer dead tree technology.
Dead tree technology has many benefits:
It never needs to be recharged.
It is very portable. Just toss it into your bag. No cords or power supply.
It is very easy to share with some one. Just hand the book to them.
It has a very user friendly user indexing system called "dog ear".
Simply fold a corner of a page over and you can find your place again.
It is very easy to make notes with a pen or yellow highlighter technology.
But only if it is your own book.
Character image resolution is excellent. No "jaggies" in the font.
Reading a book has a great tactile feel.
Holding it in your hands, turning the pages.
The only drawback is that it requires an external light source. Sunshine can be great to read by.
Yes, I do like reading using my "dead tree" technology. The only problem is that in a decade or two, children will be asking me about my odd hand held device. Do I really never have to charge it? How can I use it if it does not connect to the Internet? What if I have a question or want to text my friends? Do I really need a different one for each book I want to read?
Apologies for this being off topic.
RLH
Ah, another aficionado of dead tree technology. I find reading long documents online is very tiring. That is why I prefer using dead tree technology by printing the document.
Dead tree technology has many benefits:
It never needs to be recharged.
It is very portable. Just toss it into your bag. No cords or power supply.
It is very easy to share with some one. Just hand the book to them. Remember to put your name in it.
It has a very user friendly user indexing system called "dog ear".
Simply fold a corner of a page over and you can find your place again.
It is very easy to make notes with a pen or yellow highlighter technology. But only if it is your own book.
Character image resolution is excellent. No "jaggies" in the font.
Reading a book has a great tactile feel.
Holding it in your hands, turning the pages.
The only drawback is that it requires an external light source. Sunshine and daylight are great to read by but indoor lights work just as well. Even a flashlight under the bed covers.
Yes, I do like reading using my "dead tree" technology. The only problem is that in a decade or two, children will be asking me about my odd hand held device. Do I really never have to charge it? How can I use it if it does not connect to the Internet? What if I have a question or want to text my friends? Do I really need a different one for each book I want to read?
Apologies for this being off topic.
RLH
My father, Jack Harker, was a very senior manager at IBM. He was Director of the San Jose [IBM] Labs in the 70's and 80's. He was also one of the quiet giants of the disk drive industry convincing IBM upper management to develop thin film disk heads and the original Winchester technology.
Jack loved to tell how in high level presentations when lots of figures and projections were being put up on the screen and the numbers didn't seem right, he would reach over and pull out his old 16" ivory K&E slide rule from his college days. The younger managers and engineers who had not seen him do this before would be flabbergasted, quite often offering to get him a calculator. He did this for two reasons. The first was to flummox the presenters and push them out of their comfort zone. The second was that he found a slide rule with its logarithmic scales was very useful for visually looking at growth projections. A quick look to see if the numbers actually made sense. Knowing my dad, I think the first reason was why he kept doing it. He enjoyed the looks of disbelief he got. Even more so after he quickly verified the numbers.
I sure do miss him.
The Republican Presidential field is a demolition derby. Nobody is coming out unscathed. Boahner is retiring at the top of his game. He will have averted his second government shutdown, probably with Democratic help. The shutdown will come with the debit ceiling crisis in December.
He enters the spring primary season at the right time, 3 months before June, fresh and ready to run. He presents himself as an honest broker. Someone willing to work with the Democrats to pass legislation. Rank and file moderate Republicans and swing voters can vote for him as a conservative who gets the job done. He kept the lights on twice. In November he runs as a centrist. Someone who can work with both parties. His only black marks are he cries in public and his orange tan. He would give Hillary a run for her money.
What's scary for me as a bleeding heart liberal, is that he would not be a bad choice. Unlike W or the race to the bottom of the current gang of candidates.
What does an out of work laser do?
Light up the night sky?
Send a message to Alpha Centauri?
Flash incinerate your pop corn?
These can not be very good cables because they lack the direction arrow that the Belden audiophile Ethernet cables have (had?). This was so you would know which way to plug them in. Packets flow from hub/switch to the device.
And if you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you.
It is orange and you will make your money back in picture postcard royalties.
Last week I found that my IPv6 address was blocked as a spam IP by Comcast. I have had IP addresses blocked in the past so I did some digging and found the Comcast form you fill out to unblock an IP address and filled it out. When I tried to submit my IPv6 address the form reported that it was a malformed IP address. The form only accepts IPv4 dotted quad addresses.
Just one of the many minor issues facing IPv6 adoption.
I know in my town the local paper carries pictures of the high school games. How is this significantly different than the student taking the pictures? Yes, I know, a press pass and an official newspaper. It would be interesting to hear why the principal thinks this students pictures are different?
RLH