Most of my friends have iphones and have icloud or imessage or iwhatever its icalled... I can send free texts to them and it doesn't cost me to get texts from them... I borrowed a Nexus4 from a friend for a few weeks and I much prefer it except for the $0.20/text message I have to pay my provider or pay them an extra $7.00/month for "unlimited text messaging"....
There's no way I will convince them to all install gropeme or some equivalent free texting app.. It just isn't going to happen.
A prognosis of 'gifted' is not to be confused with 'developing early'... Sure, my 'gifted' son appeared to develop early but his brain works differently and that is what is being assessed... His reading/writing/arithmetic was tested for sure, but those results are only a small part of the overall scoring... He was 99th percentile for reading/writing/comprehension but tested low for working memory and processing speed... A non-gifted individual will do better than my son at discovering a pattern in a long sequence of symbols, for example... Or will do better at word problems.. Even though my son could read and divine symbolic meaning from adult novels when he was 6, he still has trouble with word problems in math because as he's reading them, his brain explodes with the many possibilities that are emerging as each sentence progresses and has trouble sorting out the important parts of the problem... This is what is measured when they test for giftedness...Gifted children each have different strengths and weaknesses; they're not to be confused with the pop culture vision of a child prodigy... I actually with there were a different word other than 'gifted' because that word carries a lot of misconception...
I'm not a psychologist, just a parent who's been submerged in this...
My son was having trouble in his neighborhood school. The teachers/principal told us there was something wrong, likely ADHD or Aspergers... Broke our heart to be told this in a 5 minute 'parent teacher interview'... Anyway, after a psych-ed assessment, it turned out he just needed a gifted program possibly with some mild ADHD... The neighborhood school told us "Great! We'll just give him harder work. That'll keep him busy." but they already weren't dealing with his bullies, just brushing it off, and as we learned more about the gifted affliction, we understood that 'more and harder work' is not what he needed. He needed to be taught how his brain worked, how his brain was wired to learn in order to be successful as an adult... This is something that neither I nor his mother had when we were kids...
Anyway, the school board has a gifted program but they want _only_ gifted children and since his psych-ed report used the evil "ADHD" term, they rejected him... We found another school here (a Charter school, not private, still publicly funded, but more like an R&D sort of school) that catered to kids with multiple issues, including giftedness... Unfortunately, there were only 2 spots in his grade and more than 50 applicants... Coupled with a move to a new campus, an extra 25 spots opened up so my son got in. He's now in his second year there and this program has made a huge difference in his life... His first day at his new school, he came home and said "Mom! I've met my people!"... He has a ton of friends at school, and is beginning to understand how his brain is wired... His teachers are giving him very successful coping strategies, and have imparted terrific insights to us about how to help him be successful... This has changed the trajectory of his life...
I can't imagine where we'd be were it not for this school... If we had been denied entrance, I dread think what state he'd be in...
I feel for the parents of these 4700 children, many of whom will not get the help they need...
I have a number of televisions, TYVM. Complete with XBMC, Sickbeard, Couch Potato, and IceFilms... I'm not a luddite, I'm just not a social-networking idiot.
I still don't have a LI account (nor facebook nor twitter, nor g+)... I'm being told that being on LinkedIn is more or less obligatory if I want to have a reasonable chance of not being ignored by a hiring manager or HR drone. I'm being told this by colleagues and friends, a few of whom are hiring managers. I've been operating under the assumption that my reputation is enough to get me hired (as has been the case for at least 25 years) but what I'm hearing now is that if I don't show up on LinkedIn, my resume gets tossed.. I'm offended by the very idea and like to console myself that I probably don't want to work for anyone who filters resumes this way... Unfortunately, I'm approaching my sunset years and may not be able to afford to restrict my employment opportunities should I suddenly find myself unemployed.
I thought there was some sort of protocol that says "when a passenger gets off the plain, their luggage must also get off the plane"? If so, that would mean they'd have to completely undo the flight and then redo it when it was ready to go...
It may surprise you to know that the various military contractors of the world have figured out how to get around the whole "EMP" thing... Sure, an EMP still has a very brief effect, but sensitive equipment is not ruined; it simply restarts. Google "Nuclear Event Detector". Here's one: "Maxwell HSN1000"
Some of my fondest work-related memories are the times where I flew on-site and worked into the wee hours of the morning with my co-workers (some of whom also flew in)... 2 weeks of intense productivity pulling off herculean tasks while at the same time, all going out for meals/drinks, laughing, joking around...
I don't think I could do it fulltime but in brief bursts, those are the days I remember having the greatest creativity and productivity...
My son believes that squirrels leave messages for him in his mailbox. He wants to believe it so badly that he refuses to acknowledge that it could be me doing it, or a workman that I cajoled into doing it for me. One day it will occur to him that it was me but until then, he's entitled to his little fantasy.
It's too bad someone didn't own up to it though. Those pranks seem to have affected your adult ability to think critically.
I used to head state-side a couple times a year. Haven't been for at least 7 years now. There are huge parts of Canada that I have yet to explore so the only reason I have to head down to the US is to visit friends.. Thankfully, they're also eager to leave the US so they come to visit me.
The US has turned shooting itself in the foot into an olympic sport.
I watched a youtube video a while back from a leading researcher who outlined their methods of data collection and analysis. In the video he plotted atmospheric methane levels and showed how methane was steadily increasing until the collapse of the soviet union at which point levels fell dramatically. The explanation offered was that at that time, the gas pipelines to europe had become privately owned forcing accountants to discover that "gas in" was way less than "gas out" at the other end so there was a big campaign to fix the many pipeline leaks that were ignored during communist rule.
I shudder to think how many other gas pipelines around the world are leaking...
I'm ok with the time-limited trial; say 30 days. I download the odd piece of time-limited trialware to solve a one-off problem and then if it looks like I'm going to need it more, I'll buy it. Or if I'm using the product to make money (like my billing/invoicing software) then I'll try it out and buy it if it will do everything I want. I can get activation codes for my billing software but it's adding value to my business so I don't mind spending $40 on it.
But don't artificially restrict what the software can do. Make it fully functional until a certain day... Sure, people will keep reinstalling new eval versions but if they want to do that once a month, it's up to them...
Yes, you keep spending all your time at work. And don't socialize with your friends or co-workers who might talk about The Walking Dead or Dexter at lunch... You just sit at your desk and munch on your salad while you work really hard; then you go home and code up a storm before bedtime..
The rest of us will maybe go out with friends, maybe play some Ultimate or go for a bike ride and then perhaps watch a bit of TV before bedtime...
Pirate sites show you what's popular on TV with the average user who is knowledgeable enough to know how to pirate TV shows; or their girlfriends/wives. It doesn't tell you what the general public wants to watch. None of my son's grandparents/aunts/uncles would fall into that category. My plumber wouldn't; my finish carpenter wouldn't, my drywaller doesn't even have e-mail, my friend the lawyer is also right-out, my doctor is not represented... Many people are not represented in your statistics... On the upside, Firefly would probably not have been cancelled.
Your job as a contractor is customer satisfaction within the bounds of the law. I've had long projects that I've completed or come close to completing, and then been asked to instrument a hand-off to a junior member. I've been paid to mentor the junior member and been called in to solve problems that were over his/her head with him/her watching while I solved the problems, answering questions as they ask. In at least one situation, the handoff was to free me up for a new project the customer was just about to start. They wanted me off the mostly complete project so I could start the next. In one other situation, the junior that I mentored eventually left that company, went to a new job, and then recommended me for some contract work at his new company.
People aren't stupid, they know when you're being a dick; even if you're being professional about it.
X10 does sort of work, but I have a _lot_ of X10 stuff, almost all of it sitting in a closet... Despite what you might think, range is a problem... Plus there's bridging across your two 120VAC sides, limited unit numbers, and bi-directional doesn't work all that well. I inherited all this X-10 stuff including a thermostat, water sensors, motion sensors, handheld remotes, key fobs, repeaters, bridges, filters, telephone voice interface, lamp modules, appliance modules, socket modules, and best of all, an LCD based protocol analyzer (tcpdump for X-10)... The latter item is what I base my opinion on that X-10 is not truly meant to be relied on... The reason I inherited it was the previous owner finally got fed up and bought real home automation. I've been using the X10 stuff sparingly, to solve specific small non-critical problems.
Admittedly not a lot of people want this but.... We have a place out in the forest... Sometimes when we arrive, it's late at night and it's _dark_ out there... I mean, if it's overcast and the middle of the winter, you can't see _anything_... So we have a yard light that I control remotely via crappy unreliable X-10.. The house is already internet connected via cellphone so I have various scripts on my webserver to let me control things like the thermostat and the X10 yard light. yeah; you could keep the car headlights on until you can get up to the door, unlock it, and turn the lights on.. The remotely controllable yard light also works well in conjunction with the security camera.. Infrared mode doesn't work all that well.
No, not life changing but a small matter of convenience.
Not quite 'sickness', but my aunt lives on the side of a large hill overlooking a pretty valley... Her balcony used to be a nice place to sit and relax. Now her down-hill neighbor (approximately 2km away) has a wind turbine in his yard and the low frequency periodic noise from it has transformed her balcony into an annoying place to be and she can no longer sleep with the windows open. She's not claiming sickness, she's merely claiming annoyance..
I have an iphone4. Had an iphone 1st gen that I bought used from a friend before that. My next phone will probably be an Android phone. But I've tried various and sundry Androids from work. The thing that has consistently killed it for me is battery life. With my current usage, I get about 6 days on my iphone. I go to my cabin on weekends and stick the phone in a cradle where it charges and acts as a hotspot. On Sunday afternoon I go back home. I don't charge my phone during the week. When I get to the cabin on Saturday morning, I'm at about 20% battery.
Out of all the Androids I've tried from work, with my existing SIM, and with my usual usage pattern, I'm hard pressed to get 2 days of battery. (Motorola Atrix2, GS2, GS3).
My iphone 2G still works fine and still has reasonable battery life. Probably because I didn't charge it every night when I was using it. Lithium batteries are limited by charge cycles. If you charge every night instead of once a week, you are drastically reducing the overall life span of the battery.. Which is good because iphone batteries are not easy to replace or impossible to replace (I've never had to bother).
There are small usability things that annoy me about Android but there are similar annoyances with my iphone. I can learn to cope. But I don't want to have to put my phone in a charger every night and I can't be bothered to check the screen all the time to see whether it needs charging.
> BTW when KDE hangs waiting for a network resource you can usually still Control+Alt+Function to a login prompt instead of rebooting.
Not when this laptop hangs. That was one of the first things I tried, in addition to c-a-backspace... The network stack won't even recover after layer-1 reappears... It has no NFS mounts or exports which could also possibly explain the problem.
I have lots of instances of "linux just works" except when it doesn't. There are many exceptions.
I've been using Unix since before X11. I hack linux kernels for a living. I have to have a linux desktop at work. I have lots of linux machines at home and colocated. I'm not "new to this"... But the amount of stuff that doesn't work is appalling. Sure, lots of stuff does 'just work', but the amount of stuff that breaks from release to release is embarassing. Bluetooth keyboard support worked in 9.04, broke in 9.10, worked sporadically through 10.x and 11.x, and then started working again at 12.04 and still works on 12.10. However, the audio on my toshiba laptop stopped working when I went from 12.04 to 12.10. My Dell Optiplex 970 running Kubuntu 12.10 works great until someone reboots the Cisco switch that is providing it with network connectivity at which point the whole desktop locks up and I have to power cycle it. Can't even ssh in after the network re-appears... I know it's still more or less 'alive' because the disk light occasionally blinks... Another 12.04 machine I have has a wired interface and a wireless interface. I want _both_ of them to come up and I want the wireless to be the default route. I couldn't figure out how to make wicd actually do it and could only make nmcli do it from rc.local... Sure, there may be a 'correct' way to do that, but it's not immediately obvious to me... Lets not even get started on HDMI Audio... But I spend way more time f'ing around with Linux to beat it into submission vs. my OS-X desktop at home that "just works" for everything I need it to do.
I tried hard to offend everyone... I hope I succeeded.
I have a small bit of property up north. A dozen acres of forest in central Alberta. My land hasn't had a forest fire in at least 85 years based on the age of some downed trees this winter. As I walk through my forest, I see a _lot_ of dry and rotting ladder fuel (dead trees leaning on living trees). My job for the summer is to wander around with a chain saw cutting and bucking all the ladder fuel and increase the rotting of the many logs laying down... The forest has been beaten back away from the house about 50 feet all around but we still worry about a forest fire taking it all out. I know we're a summer lightning strike away from complete decimation... Suddenly that tree-lined driveway is not looking so picturesque. In light of this news, it just means drier summers and more temperate winters...
There are shows my wife likes to watch that are not available via bittorrent or usenet. I'm in Canuckistan so I can't use Hulu or get them directly from PBS or History Channel or whatever... Messing around with a VPN is not my idea of entertainment.
Antiques Roadshow US Antiques Roadshow UK (ok, I can get this from thebox) Who Do You Think You Are This Old House
Sure, they might be crap shows but my wife likes them and I like her.
Everything _I_ watch I get via Sickbeard. So we still pay for cable. Unfortunately, the cableco knows this so if we cancel cable, they unbundle the rest of our services and we only save about $4.00/month over what we're paying now _with_ cable.
Plus, I use the cable bill to explain to my young child that we are still paying for all the content; I am just choosing to download it in a different format... Soon he's going to be old enough to know it's a copout...
Slashdot Mirror
Most of my friends have iphones and have icloud or imessage or iwhatever its icalled ... I can send free texts to them and it doesn't cost me to get texts from them... I borrowed a Nexus4 from a friend for a few weeks and I much prefer it except for the $0.20/text message I have to pay my provider or pay them an extra $7.00/month for "unlimited text messaging"....
There's no way I will convince them to all install gropeme or some equivalent free texting app.. It just isn't going to happen.
"When lawyers take Viagra they get taller ..."
- Bowser and Blue
A prognosis of 'gifted' is not to be confused with 'developing early'... Sure, my 'gifted' son appeared to develop early but his brain works differently and that is what is being assessed... His reading/writing/arithmetic was tested for sure, but those results are only a small part of the overall scoring... He was 99th percentile for reading/writing/comprehension but tested low for working memory and processing speed... A non-gifted individual will do better than my son at discovering a pattern in a long sequence of symbols, for example... Or will do better at word problems.. Even though my son could read and divine symbolic meaning from adult novels when he was 6, he still has trouble with word problems in math because as he's reading them, his brain explodes with the many possibilities that are emerging as each sentence progresses and has trouble sorting out the important parts of the problem... This is what is measured when they test for giftedness...Gifted children each have different strengths and weaknesses; they're not to be confused with the pop culture vision of a child prodigy... I actually with there were a different word other than 'gifted' because that word carries a lot of misconception...
I'm not a psychologist, just a parent who's been submerged in this...
My son was having trouble in his neighborhood school. The teachers/principal told us there was something wrong, likely ADHD or Aspergers... Broke our heart to be told this in a 5 minute 'parent teacher interview'... Anyway, after a psych-ed assessment, it turned out he just needed a gifted program possibly with some mild ADHD... The neighborhood school told us "Great! We'll just give him harder work. That'll keep him busy." but they already weren't dealing with his bullies, just brushing it off, and as we learned more about the gifted affliction, we understood that 'more and harder work' is not what he needed. He needed to be taught how his brain worked, how his brain was wired to learn in order to be successful as an adult... This is something that neither I nor his mother had when we were kids...
Anyway, the school board has a gifted program but they want _only_ gifted children and since his psych-ed report used the evil "ADHD" term, they rejected him... We found another school here (a Charter school, not private, still publicly funded, but more like an R&D sort of school) that catered to kids with multiple issues, including giftedness... Unfortunately, there were only 2 spots in his grade and more than 50 applicants... Coupled with a move to a new campus, an extra 25 spots opened up so my son got in. He's now in his second year there and this program has made a huge difference in his life... His first day at his new school, he came home and said "Mom! I've met my people!" ... He has a ton of friends at school, and is beginning to understand how his brain is wired... His teachers are giving him very successful coping strategies, and have imparted terrific insights to us about how to help him be successful... This has changed the trajectory of his life...
I can't imagine where we'd be were it not for this school... If we had been denied entrance, I dread think what state he'd be in...
I feel for the parents of these 4700 children, many of whom will not get the help they need...
I have a number of televisions, TYVM. Complete with XBMC, Sickbeard, Couch Potato, and IceFilms... I'm not a luddite, I'm just not a social-networking idiot.
I still don't have a LI account (nor facebook nor twitter, nor g+)... I'm being told that being on LinkedIn is more or less obligatory if I want to have a reasonable chance of not being ignored by a hiring manager or HR drone. I'm being told this by colleagues and friends, a few of whom are hiring managers. I've been operating under the assumption that my reputation is enough to get me hired (as has been the case for at least 25 years) but what I'm hearing now is that if I don't show up on LinkedIn, my resume gets tossed.. I'm offended by the very idea and like to console myself that I probably don't want to work for anyone who filters resumes this way... Unfortunately, I'm approaching my sunset years and may not be able to afford to restrict my employment opportunities should I suddenly find myself unemployed.
I thought there was some sort of protocol that says "when a passenger gets off the plain, their luggage must also get off the plane"? If so, that would mean they'd have to completely undo the flight and then redo it when it was ready to go...
Not sure about this.
It may surprise you to know that the various military contractors of the world have figured out how to get around the whole "EMP" thing... Sure, an EMP still has a very brief effect, but sensitive equipment is not ruined; it simply restarts. Google "Nuclear Event Detector". Here's one: "Maxwell HSN1000"
Some of my fondest work-related memories are the times where I flew on-site and worked into the wee hours of the morning with my co-workers (some of whom also flew in)... 2 weeks of intense productivity pulling off herculean tasks while at the same time, all going out for meals/drinks, laughing, joking around...
I don't think I could do it fulltime but in brief bursts, those are the days I remember having the greatest creativity and productivity...
You were had.
My son believes that squirrels leave messages for him in his mailbox. He wants to believe it so badly that he refuses to acknowledge that it could be me doing it, or a workman that I cajoled into doing it for me. One day it will occur to him that it was me but until then, he's entitled to his little fantasy.
It's too bad someone didn't own up to it though. Those pranks seem to have affected your adult ability to think critically.
This. A thousand times this.
I used to head state-side a couple times a year. Haven't been for at least 7 years now. There are huge parts of Canada that I have yet to explore so the only reason I have to head down to the US is to visit friends.. Thankfully, they're also eager to leave the US so they come to visit me.
The US has turned shooting itself in the foot into an olympic sport.
Telus has admitted that it stores text messages for '30 days' for diagnostic purposes... That's not "briefly", in my opinion.
I watched a youtube video a while back from a leading researcher who outlined their methods of data collection and analysis. In the video he plotted atmospheric methane levels and showed how methane was steadily increasing until the collapse of the soviet union at which point levels fell dramatically. The explanation offered was that at that time, the gas pipelines to europe had become privately owned forcing accountants to discover that "gas in" was way less than "gas out" at the other end so there was a big campaign to fix the many pipeline leaks that were ignored during communist rule.
I shudder to think how many other gas pipelines around the world are leaking...
I'm ok with the time-limited trial; say 30 days. I download the odd piece of time-limited trialware to solve a one-off problem and then if it looks like I'm going to need it more, I'll buy it. Or if I'm using the product to make money (like my billing/invoicing software) then I'll try it out and buy it if it will do everything I want. I can get activation codes for my billing software but it's adding value to my business so I don't mind spending $40 on it.
But don't artificially restrict what the software can do. Make it fully functional until a certain day... Sure, people will keep reinstalling new eval versions but if they want to do that once a month, it's up to them...
Yes, you keep spending all your time at work. And don't socialize with your friends or co-workers who might talk about The Walking Dead or Dexter at lunch... You just sit at your desk and munch on your salad while you work really hard; then you go home and code up a storm before bedtime..
The rest of us will maybe go out with friends, maybe play some Ultimate or go for a bike ride and then perhaps watch a bit of TV before bedtime...
Pirate sites show you what's popular on TV with the average user who is knowledgeable enough to know how to pirate TV shows; or their girlfriends/wives. It doesn't tell you what the general public wants to watch. None of my son's grandparents/aunts/uncles would fall into that category. My plumber wouldn't; my finish carpenter wouldn't, my drywaller doesn't even have e-mail, my friend the lawyer is also right-out, my doctor is not represented... Many people are not represented in your statistics... On the upside, Firefly would probably not have been cancelled.
Your job as a contractor is customer satisfaction within the bounds of the law. I've had long projects that I've completed or come close to completing, and then been asked to instrument a hand-off to a junior member. I've been paid to mentor the junior member and been called in to solve problems that were over his/her head with him/her watching while I solved the problems, answering questions as they ask. In at least one situation, the handoff was to free me up for a new project the customer was just about to start. They wanted me off the mostly complete project so I could start the next. In one other situation, the junior that I mentored eventually left that company, went to a new job, and then recommended me for some contract work at his new company.
People aren't stupid, they know when you're being a dick; even if you're being professional about it.
X10 does sort of work, but I have a _lot_ of X10 stuff, almost all of it sitting in a closet... Despite what you might think, range is a problem... Plus there's bridging across your two 120VAC sides, limited unit numbers, and bi-directional doesn't work all that well. I inherited all this X-10 stuff including a thermostat, water sensors, motion sensors, handheld remotes, key fobs, repeaters, bridges, filters, telephone voice interface, lamp modules, appliance modules, socket modules, and best of all, an LCD based protocol analyzer (tcpdump for X-10) ... The latter item is what I base my opinion on that X-10 is not truly meant to be relied on... The reason I inherited it was the previous owner finally got fed up and bought real home automation. I've been using the X10 stuff sparingly, to solve specific small non-critical problems.
Admittedly not a lot of people want this but .... We have a place out in the forest... Sometimes when we arrive, it's late at night and it's _dark_ out there... I mean, if it's overcast and the middle of the winter, you can't see _anything_... So we have a yard light that I control remotely via crappy unreliable X-10.. The house is already internet connected via cellphone so I have various scripts on my webserver to let me control things like the thermostat and the X10 yard light. yeah; you could keep the car headlights on until you can get up to the door, unlock it, and turn the lights on.. The remotely controllable yard light also works well in conjunction with the security camera.. Infrared mode doesn't work all that well.
No, not life changing but a small matter of convenience.
Not quite 'sickness', but my aunt lives on the side of a large hill overlooking a pretty valley... Her balcony used to be a nice place to sit and relax. Now her down-hill neighbor (approximately 2km away) has a wind turbine in his yard and the low frequency periodic noise from it has transformed her balcony into an annoying place to be and she can no longer sleep with the windows open. She's not claiming sickness, she's merely claiming annoyance..
Not everyone is like you.
I have an iphone4. Had an iphone 1st gen that I bought used from a friend before that. My next phone will probably be an Android phone. But I've tried various and sundry Androids from work. The thing that has consistently killed it for me is battery life. With my current usage, I get about 6 days on my iphone. I go to my cabin on weekends and stick the phone in a cradle where it charges and acts as a hotspot. On Sunday afternoon I go back home. I don't charge my phone during the week. When I get to the cabin on Saturday morning, I'm at about 20% battery.
Out of all the Androids I've tried from work, with my existing SIM, and with my usual usage pattern, I'm hard pressed to get 2 days of battery. (Motorola Atrix2, GS2, GS3).
My iphone 2G still works fine and still has reasonable battery life. Probably because I didn't charge it every night when I was using it. Lithium batteries are limited by charge cycles. If you charge every night instead of once a week, you are drastically reducing the overall life span of the battery.. Which is good because iphone batteries are not easy to replace or impossible to replace (I've never had to bother).
There are small usability things that annoy me about Android but there are similar annoyances with my iphone. I can learn to cope. But I don't want to have to put my phone in a charger every night and I can't be bothered to check the screen all the time to see whether it needs charging.
> BTW when KDE hangs waiting for a network resource you can usually still Control+Alt+Function to a login prompt instead of rebooting.
Not when this laptop hangs. That was one of the first things I tried, in addition to c-a-backspace... The network stack won't even recover after layer-1 reappears... It has no NFS mounts or exports which could also possibly explain the problem.
I have lots of instances of "linux just works" except when it doesn't. There are many exceptions.
I've been using Unix since before X11. I hack linux kernels for a living. I have to have a linux desktop at work. I have lots of linux machines at home and colocated. I'm not "new to this"... But the amount of stuff that doesn't work is appalling. Sure, lots of stuff does 'just work', but the amount of stuff that breaks from release to release is embarassing. Bluetooth keyboard support worked in 9.04, broke in 9.10, worked sporadically through 10.x and 11.x, and then started working again at 12.04 and still works on 12.10. However, the audio on my toshiba laptop stopped working when I went from 12.04 to 12.10. My Dell Optiplex 970 running Kubuntu 12.10 works great until someone reboots the Cisco switch that is providing it with network connectivity at which point the whole desktop locks up and I have to power cycle it. Can't even ssh in after the network re-appears... I know it's still more or less 'alive' because the disk light occasionally blinks... Another 12.04 machine I have has a wired interface and a wireless interface. I want _both_ of them to come up and I want the wireless to be the default route. I couldn't figure out how to make wicd actually do it and could only make nmcli do it from rc.local... Sure, there may be a 'correct' way to do that, but it's not immediately obvious to me... Lets not even get started on HDMI Audio... But I spend way more time f'ing around with Linux to beat it into submission vs. my OS-X desktop at home that "just works" for everything I need it to do.
I tried hard to offend everyone... I hope I succeeded.
I have a small bit of property up north. A dozen acres of forest in central Alberta. My land hasn't had a forest fire in at least 85 years based on the age of some downed trees this winter. As I walk through my forest, I see a _lot_ of dry and rotting ladder fuel (dead trees leaning on living trees). My job for the summer is to wander around with a chain saw cutting and bucking all the ladder fuel and increase the rotting of the many logs laying down... The forest has been beaten back away from the house about 50 feet all around but we still worry about a forest fire taking it all out. I know we're a summer lightning strike away from complete decimation... Suddenly that tree-lined driveway is not looking so picturesque. In light of this news, it just means drier summers and more temperate winters...
There are shows my wife likes to watch that are not available via bittorrent or usenet. I'm in Canuckistan so I can't use Hulu or get them directly from PBS or History Channel or whatever... Messing around with a VPN is not my idea of entertainment.
Antiques Roadshow US
Antiques Roadshow UK (ok, I can get this from thebox)
Who Do You Think You Are
This Old House
Sure, they might be crap shows but my wife likes them and I like her.
Everything _I_ watch I get via Sickbeard. So we still pay for cable. Unfortunately, the cableco knows this so if we cancel cable, they unbundle the rest of our services and we only save about $4.00/month over what we're paying now _with_ cable.
Plus, I use the cable bill to explain to my young child that we are still paying for all the content; I am just choosing to download it in a different format... Soon he's going to be old enough to know it's a copout...