ok. Here's some data points... I live in Canada. Alberta actually. Have lived here for 35 years and as such, plenty of opportunity to show up in emergency wards...
Over the last dozen years, things have become bad. This summer, I broke my finger. Snapped the bone clean off near the joint. Drove to emerg. About 12 other people in the waiting room. After 6 hours of sitting, the only person who spoke to me was an administrative clerk who took down my information. I had to go interrupt someone to get an ice pack. I wasn't allowed to eat in case I got called in and they needed to operate. Finally, they called me in to an open bed. Sit for another hour. A doctor comes around and says "your finger is probably broken. Follow the blue line, get an X-ray and come back." 6 minutes later, I've returned; my x-ray done. By this time, the bone guy has gone off shift. Sit in the waiting room another 6 hours. More ice packs. Still not allowed to eat. Another bone guy just finished 6 hours doing surgery and is now doing rounds to talk to people in emergency with broken bones... So I go in. Wait another 2 hours until he gets around to me. By this point, I haven't eaten in the 14 hours since I got there nor the 4 hours prior to when I broke my finger. I _finally_ get seen. The guy looks at my x-ray and says "yup, your finger is broken. We'll schedule you in for surgery. Come back tomorrow at 13:00 (now only about 12 hours away). They tape a splint on my finger and I'm gone... Total attention by medical staff: about 8 minutes. Total waiting time: 14 hours. The next day, I show up for 13:00 for my surgery. I wait 2 hours, go in... 30 minutes later, I emerge with 2 pins and a splint. If someone had chosen to use their brain and said "ok, his finger is likely broken so lets get him in for an X-ray before the bone guy comes down next", I could have avoided at least one iteration. If someone else had used their brain and said "gee, that finger is flopping around like an injured seal. Lets get him an x-ray and book him for surgery tomorrow", I could have freed up a seat and been home inside of an hour...
This isn't abnormal. Last spring, I went to the hospital because my heart was beating at 240 bpm for no apparent reason and had been doing so for 40 minutes. I sat in the waiting room for almost 8 hours before someone even spoke to me (besides the admitting clerk)... By that point, it had gone back to normal and the ECG had nothing intelligent to say. I got to go home, none the wiser. It's happened a few more times since then and I'm no closer to understanding what the problem is. Through experimentation, I've determined I need to cut caffeine out of my diet and I've missed at least 2 recurrences of it.
Things are slightly better at the Children's hospital though... We're usually in and out of there in under 6 hours (active 8 year old boy who likes to play outside a lot.)
I've been using myth practically forever... I have a sizable mythbackend downstairs hooked up to two cable boxes on firewire and Myth fails fairly regularly with a bug that's filed and that I've tried fixing to no avail... I also have 2 frontends which are Mac Mini's running Ubuntu... I call myself an experienced mythtv user. The problem is, MythTV does a lot of things fairly well, but nothing really awesome... The thing it does best, in my opinion, is recording, scheduling, commercial flagging and other DVR sort of functions. As a frontend, it's doomed... Other things are better. Unfortunately, there's no happy-go-lucky streaming protocol so you can use non-MythTV Frontends on a MythTV backend.. Sure, you can buy uPNP boxes to view video, but then you can't take advantage of commercial skip. If someone extended uPNP so you could stream recordings and do commercial skip, we wouldn't have to use mythtv's frontend and mythtv.org could concentrate on making a bitchin DVR.
I understand the economics of consumer broadband. I've run an ISP before. I've leased dedicated lines and peered with other ISP's, etc. The fact that I can get 7mbps or so from my ISP (shaw.ca) for $40/month is nothing short of a miracle to me. What does Shaw do? They tell me that I can move a maximum of 60GB/month of traffic. It's not a hard limit; I occasionally exceed that by up to 20% or so. The only time they've complained to me is when I hit 140GB due to a few torrents that suddenly became popular and I was away from my desktop on business for a couple of weeks. I now adjust my torrent speeds so that I can easily stay within my allotment. If I want greater allotment, I can pay them more. I like that when I really want to download something, I can get it at almost 800KB/sec. I just mind how much I move overall. $40/month is good value for that.
I use dd-wrt and find the interface good enough for everything I've tried to do with it... But I've been thinking that this stuff would get more wide-spread attention if end-users could have various scenarios auto-configured for them. ie: I want a firewall but I also want to provide an open access point while protecting my home network from anonymous users. I want to restrict anonymous users to 100kb/sec of bandwidth. I want my security cameras to be blocked from talking to the outside world.. blah blah blah... none of this "WDS" "VLAN" "DMZ" "QoS" "WPA2" unless you're in expert mode.
We (the global 'we') had a chance to stop conflicker before this version came about; by working with the registrars and/or root nameservers; pre-emptively invalidating each of the algorithmically generated domain names on a day by day basis; preventing cornfucker from updating itself or receiving instructions on how to proceed. The authors noticed that we could do that and before we could think of it, modified it so that once we did think of it; it would be too late....
I clearly must not understand the intricacies of this....
My fantasy (because I won't be affected by this) is that once the owners of the botnet are sufficiently happy with their market-share, will instruct cornfucker to encrypt all files on everyone's PC and then wait for the moneh to start rolling in....
I want an interactive digital photoframe... It sits there in the kitchen flipping photos from our gallery until you touch the display and it transitions to a dashboard with the current weather, maybe some stocks, etc... Maybe an iTunes widget for the remote speakers... Touch the mail icon and I can quickly check my mail. Touch the browser icon and it goes to a pre-set homepage containing links to our security camera or family recipes...
Are you listening Apple?
I was a self-taught hacker kid in the late 70's.. I took a year of comp-sci but did poorly because I spent all my time hacking 4.2BSD instead of doing my math... Talking to my uncle-in-law, who was a programmer, he said "A degree shows that you can be taught. Experience shows that you can be employed.". I've kept that little sentiment in the back of my mind and over the years, I've seen lots of people with Bsc's and Msc's in computer science who were almost completely unemployable. 25 years later, I still don't have a degree and it's hurt me a bit in larger corporations with short sighted HR departments but I recently ended up at a company that could not, would not hire me full time due to HR policy, but really did need my services. So they hired me on contract for almost twice what I'd be making as an employee (gross); and they're laying off some of my co-workers while simultaneously extending my contract. I won't get severance if I get laid off, but I'm saving up my cash in lieu of the possibility I'll find myself out of work. I have over a years worth of money in the bank, and at the beginning of my second 1-year contract... If you don't get the degree, it will still be possible if you're competent and a team player; but it will be a longer road...
"Well, your next applicant will probably work real hard, and put in lots of overtime to solve your problems. I can typically solve the same problems without staying late."
...except I'd walk out before I answered the question. Life's too short to deal with smarmy middle-managers...
that's what I mean... "xrandr is awesome, if not fully integrated"... On a Mac, I don't have to 'just write a script'. Have a quick google for 'bluetooth keyboard ubuntu'. All the results you get are variants of 'install bluez-utils, hack these 10 files, push this, restart that, tail this file, do the hokey pokey'... I have a Mac Mini with an Apple bluetooth keyboard. It's one of my mythfrontends running Ubuntu (because Mythdora and Knoppmyth wouldn't install on it) and after about 4 hours of googling and dicking around, I finally had the keyboard working.. Then it disappeared never to be recognized again... Of course, it does "just work" under OS X... Yeah, maybe it works now in Itsy Iguana or whatever... Last time I tried was 6 mos ago..
The Mac is just a tool. Just like my wife's car. It does what she needs it to do. It's turnkey. She doesn't care what it looks like. My car is a project; I enjoy hacking it... I don't enjoy hacking my desktop. I just want it to work so I can get my work done.
iTerm is your friend. It does FFM while you're in iTerm. You can even type in a partially obscured window; which I do all the time. Sure, the rest of your OSX apps aren't FFM but they don't use multiple windows like your terminal app; and you can cmd-tab and cmd-` through them... I actually use my mouse less on OSX than I do on X.
Why? All the reasons you've heard before... I like it when stuff 'just works'. I develop embedded systems. I write device drivers and other kernel code for various open sores operating systems. That means I spend lots of my time in terminal windows, pouring over datasheets, staring at PCI analyzer output, etc... I have a number of monitors, at least one is in horizontal mode (for mail, web, pdfs, etc) and the other in vertical mode (for editor windows). I can just as easily work on my macbook at a customer site, plugged into one of their extra monitors. When I'm done there, I can close the lid, go to another customer site, or into a meeting room, open the lid and have my desktop automatically resize. I can then plug into a projector to review some code, and have my desktop automatically resize again without restarting xorg...
I have linux boxes at home, I have *BSD boxes at home, I have colocated *BSD boxes around the world for other personal endeavors. I have a fairly extensive MythTV/Zoneminder network at home as well. So I'm not your average Mac weenie... To me, the mac is just a decent portal to all the other Unixy boxes I maintain. I've tried using a Linux desktop on a day to day basis and I've found it just too painful... Ever try getting a bluetooth keyboard working on Ubuntu? It doesn't "just work"; or at least not 6 months ago. It might now... But that's my point... Linux is always improving, but it never does everything I want, when I want it... And yes, I know, "patches welcome"... I contribute plenty to open-source. I can contribute more in my area of specialty and I can do it better sitting in front of a Mac. When I want to relax and watch TV, I don't want to have to hack MythTV to do it. I just want to plunk my fat ass on the couch and be entertained.
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I have an 8800 based card that died. It's in a Shuttle in one of my mythfrontends... It was running 24/7 for maybe a year. There, that's at least one data point. Lets string 'em up...
Personally, I just replaced the shuttle with a MacMini running Debian and mythfrontend... Works great and is quieter.
+ is a bad delimiter. Many web-forms don't accept email addresses with '+' in the username portion. Attempts to educate webmasters to the information in the relevant RFC's is usually met with silence or worse... I did manage to get a FOAF to fix dell.com though.
imagine a world full of computers with SSD's instead of spinning platters sitting idle all night long... Wonder what impact that will make to power consumption overall... How many people really have their OSes set to spin down disks when not in use?
I've been on an Aeron for about 5 years. I've also had a 'ball' for a few years. I tend to alternate between them depending on how I'm feeling or what sort of work I'm doing... I contract, so I sit in a lot of different chairs which is why I've chosen an Aeron for my home office... However, I can only tell you what _I_ like in a chair, not what your husband likes in a chair...
I like the posture that the ball enforces, but I hate that I can't easily lean back, put my feet up, and dig into a big datasheet.
I like the webbing on the Aeron. I also like the mechanics. The arms are a little sub-optimal... The aeron collects dust like crazy..
I hate office chairs where the seat and the back recline as one unit. I also hate office chairs where the seat doesn't recline along with the back but rather stays in position or simply slides forward... I like the Aeron here where the seat reclines as a ratio of the back. That's a feature that is important to me. Other people hate that.
In summary, if you're going to buy your husband a chair, make sure it's returnable and make sure wherever you buy it from, has a good selection.
I guess everyone has their optimal livingroom setup but I can't imagine why one would care about the size of the backend.. The backend has a bunch of tuners, a bunch of disk, and makes lots of noise.
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Over the last dozen years, things have become bad. This summer, I broke my finger. Snapped the bone clean off near the joint. Drove to emerg. About 12 other people in the waiting room. After 6 hours of sitting, the only person who spoke to me was an administrative clerk who took down my information. I had to go interrupt someone to get an ice pack. I wasn't allowed to eat in case I got called in and they needed to operate. Finally, they called me in to an open bed. Sit for another hour. A doctor comes around and says "your finger is probably broken. Follow the blue line, get an X-ray and come back." 6 minutes later, I've returned; my x-ray done. By this time, the bone guy has gone off shift. Sit in the waiting room another 6 hours. More ice packs. Still not allowed to eat. Another bone guy just finished 6 hours doing surgery and is now doing rounds to talk to people in emergency with broken bones... So I go in. Wait another 2 hours until he gets around to me. By this point, I haven't eaten in the 14 hours since I got there nor the 4 hours prior to when I broke my finger. I _finally_ get seen. The guy looks at my x-ray and says "yup, your finger is broken. We'll schedule you in for surgery. Come back tomorrow at 13:00 (now only about 12 hours away). They tape a splint on my finger and I'm gone... Total attention by medical staff: about 8 minutes. Total waiting time: 14 hours. The next day, I show up for 13:00 for my surgery. I wait 2 hours, go in... 30 minutes later, I emerge with 2 pins and a splint. If someone had chosen to use their brain and said "ok, his finger is likely broken so lets get him in for an X-ray before the bone guy comes down next", I could have avoided at least one iteration. If someone else had used their brain and said "gee, that finger is flopping around like an injured seal. Lets get him an x-ray and book him for surgery tomorrow", I could have freed up a seat and been home inside of an hour...
This isn't abnormal. Last spring, I went to the hospital because my heart was beating at 240 bpm for no apparent reason and had been doing so for 40 minutes. I sat in the waiting room for almost 8 hours before someone even spoke to me (besides the admitting clerk)... By that point, it had gone back to normal and the ECG had nothing intelligent to say. I got to go home, none the wiser. It's happened a few more times since then and I'm no closer to understanding what the problem is. Through experimentation, I've determined I need to cut caffeine out of my diet and I've missed at least 2 recurrences of it.
Things are slightly better at the Children's hospital though... We're usually in and out of there in under 6 hours (active 8 year old boy who likes to play outside a lot.)
I've been using myth practically forever... I have a sizable mythbackend downstairs hooked up to two cable boxes on firewire and Myth fails fairly regularly with a bug that's filed and that I've tried fixing to no avail... I also have 2 frontends which are Mac Mini's running Ubuntu... I call myself an experienced mythtv user. The problem is, MythTV does a lot of things fairly well, but nothing really awesome... The thing it does best, in my opinion, is recording, scheduling, commercial flagging and other DVR sort of functions. As a frontend, it's doomed... Other things are better. Unfortunately, there's no happy-go-lucky streaming protocol so you can use non-MythTV Frontends on a MythTV backend.. Sure, you can buy uPNP boxes to view video, but then you can't take advantage of commercial skip. If someone extended uPNP so you could stream recordings and do commercial skip, we wouldn't have to use mythtv's frontend and mythtv.org could concentrate on making a bitchin DVR.
bitchin' electric wheelchair dudes.. I gotta friend who'll love this thing...
"Dad! Dinosaurs died millions of years before humans lived."
and for "How long does it take the earth to go around the sun?" he says "a few years.. no wait, 1 year."
Go Canadian Education system.
I understand the economics of consumer broadband. I've run an ISP before. I've leased dedicated lines and peered with other ISP's, etc. The fact that I can get 7mbps or so from my ISP (shaw.ca) for $40/month is nothing short of a miracle to me. What does Shaw do? They tell me that I can move a maximum of 60GB/month of traffic. It's not a hard limit; I occasionally exceed that by up to 20% or so. The only time they've complained to me is when I hit 140GB due to a few torrents that suddenly became popular and I was away from my desktop on business for a couple of weeks. I now adjust my torrent speeds so that I can easily stay within my allotment. If I want greater allotment, I can pay them more. I like that when I really want to download something, I can get it at almost 800KB/sec. I just mind how much I move overall. $40/month is good value for that.
I use dd-wrt and find the interface good enough for everything I've tried to do with it... But I've been thinking that this stuff would get more wide-spread attention if end-users could have various scenarios auto-configured for them. ie: I want a firewall but I also want to provide an open access point while protecting my home network from anonymous users. I want to restrict anonymous users to 100kb/sec of bandwidth. I want my security cameras to be blocked from talking to the outside world .. blah blah blah... none of this "WDS" "VLAN" "DMZ" "QoS" "WPA2" unless you're in expert mode.
I clearly must not understand the intricacies of this....
My fantasy (because I won't be affected by this) is that once the owners of the botnet are sufficiently happy with their market-share, will instruct cornfucker to encrypt all files on everyone's PC and then wait for the moneh to start rolling in....
I want an interactive digital photoframe ... It sits there in the kitchen flipping photos from our gallery until you touch the display and it transitions to a dashboard with the current weather, maybe some stocks, etc... Maybe an iTunes widget for the remote speakers... Touch the mail icon and I can quickly check my mail. Touch the browser icon and it goes to a pre-set homepage containing links to our security camera or family recipes...
Are you listening Apple?
Godwin's law.. If anyone had tried to mention Hitler in a forum back then, all discussion would have stopped.
I was a self-taught hacker kid in the late 70's.. I took a year of comp-sci but did poorly because I spent all my time hacking 4.2BSD instead of doing my math... Talking to my uncle-in-law, who was a programmer, he said "A degree shows that you can be taught. Experience shows that you can be employed.". I've kept that little sentiment in the back of my mind and over the years, I've seen lots of people with Bsc's and Msc's in computer science who were almost completely unemployable. 25 years later, I still don't have a degree and it's hurt me a bit in larger corporations with short sighted HR departments but I recently ended up at a company that could not, would not hire me full time due to HR policy, but really did need my services. So they hired me on contract for almost twice what I'd be making as an employee (gross); and they're laying off some of my co-workers while simultaneously extending my contract. I won't get severance if I get laid off, but I'm saving up my cash in lieu of the possibility I'll find myself out of work. I have over a years worth of money in the bank, and at the beginning of my second 1-year contract... If you don't get the degree, it will still be possible if you're competent and a team player; but it will be a longer road...
"Well, your next applicant will probably work real hard, and put in lots of overtime to solve your problems. I can typically solve the same problems without staying late."
that's what I mean... "xrandr is awesome, if not fully integrated"... On a Mac, I don't have to 'just write a script'. Have a quick google for 'bluetooth keyboard ubuntu'. All the results you get are variants of 'install bluez-utils, hack these 10 files, push this, restart that, tail this file, do the hokey pokey'... I have a Mac Mini with an Apple bluetooth keyboard. It's one of my mythfrontends running Ubuntu (because Mythdora and Knoppmyth wouldn't install on it) and after about 4 hours of googling and dicking around, I finally had the keyboard working.. Then it disappeared never to be recognized again... Of course, it does "just work" under OS X... Yeah, maybe it works now in Itsy Iguana or whatever... Last time I tried was 6 mos ago.. The Mac is just a tool. Just like my wife's car. It does what she needs it to do. It's turnkey. She doesn't care what it looks like. My car is a project; I enjoy hacking it... I don't enjoy hacking my desktop. I just want it to work so I can get my work done.
iTerm is your friend. It does FFM while you're in iTerm. You can even type in a partially obscured window; which I do all the time. Sure, the rest of your OSX apps aren't FFM but they don't use multiple windows like your terminal app; and you can cmd-tab and cmd-` through them... I actually use my mouse less on OSX than I do on X.
I have linux boxes at home, I have *BSD boxes at home, I have colocated *BSD boxes around the world for other personal endeavors. I have a fairly extensive MythTV/Zoneminder network at home as well. So I'm not your average Mac weenie... To me, the mac is just a decent portal to all the other Unixy boxes I maintain. I've tried using a Linux desktop on a day to day basis and I've found it just too painful... Ever try getting a bluetooth keyboard working on Ubuntu? It doesn't "just work"; or at least not 6 months ago. It might now... But that's my point... Linux is always improving, but it never does everything I want, when I want it... And yes, I know, "patches welcome"... I contribute plenty to open-source. I can contribute more in my area of specialty and I can do it better sitting in front of a Mac. When I want to relax and watch TV, I don't want to have to hack MythTV to do it. I just want to plunk my fat ass on the couch and be entertained.
That joke's not dead... It's pining for the fjords...
If you are being paid to interpret this captcha, we will pay $1104 USD for aid in the arrest of spammers. Please contact _some email address_ and if your information helps us arrest your employers, we will pay you $1104 USD.
How much money could a person be paid to rat out their spammer-employer? [ ]
I thought it was a tape drive. You could get the error on an Aegis or Domain/OS box by typing "stcode 22009".
65 miles per imperial gallon == 54 miles per US gallon. Do we have any idea what units the article is talking about?
Personally, I just replaced the shuttle with a MacMini running Debian and mythfrontend... Works great and is quieter.
+ is a bad delimiter. Many web-forms don't accept email addresses with '+' in the username portion. Attempts to educate webmasters to the information in the relevant RFC's is usually met with silence or worse... I did manage to get a FOAF to fix dell.com though.
I can't wait for the very first webcam on the moon; to see a live earthrise, etc ...
imagine a world full of computers with SSD's instead of spinning platters sitting idle all night long... Wonder what impact that will make to power consumption overall... How many people really have their OSes set to spin down disks when not in use?
if he plays music at his stampede breakfast, make sure you confirm that artist royalties are being paid.
I like the posture that the ball enforces, but I hate that I can't easily lean back, put my feet up, and dig into a big datasheet.
I like the webbing on the Aeron. I also like the mechanics. The arms are a little sub-optimal... The aeron collects dust like crazy..
I hate office chairs where the seat and the back recline as one unit. I also hate office chairs where the seat doesn't recline along with the back but rather stays in position or simply slides forward... I like the Aeron here where the seat reclines as a ratio of the back. That's a feature that is important to me. Other people hate that.
In summary, if you're going to buy your husband a chair, make sure it's returnable and make sure wherever you buy it from, has a good selection.
I guess everyone has their optimal livingroom setup but I can't imagine why one would care about the size of the backend.. The backend has a bunch of tuners, a bunch of disk, and makes lots of noise.