I've worked in IT support for about a decade and a half now and the move from CRT to TFT is an absolute godsend.
My personal favourite was when someone wanted their PC under their monitor to save desk space - you had to lift 50-odd lbs of monitor and then brace it with one hand to slide the desktop underneath cos' there was no way the desktop would slide into place with the monitor resting on the top.
When we migrated to TFT's I wrecked my back for about a week lifting all the old monitors as we got rid of them but the pain was worth it to never see those b4stards again...
"law enforcement officers and an attorney claiming to represent the privately-owned plantation near Ehrhardt tried to stop the aircraft from flying.
"It didn't work; what SHARK was doing was perfectly legal," Hindi said in a news release. "Once they knew nothing was going to stop us, the shooting stopped and the cars lined up to leave."
TRIED. If launching the drone was against the law then do you not think that the law enforcement officers would have just arrested them as soon as they tried to launch? And shooting at something you don't like the look of because it's over your property is legal where you come from? I assume there are no civil flights, police helicopters, air ambulances, kites...
Gunnery Chief: [as the character enters the Citadel] This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferris slug, feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an everest class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3% of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means- Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's first law?
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going til it hits something. That can be a ship. Or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your targets. That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it". This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Chung: Sir, yes sir!
It's incredibly useful in UV-lit nightclubs - where everyone else can't see sh1t you can see clearly, hence avoiding any awkward moments when the lights come on and you think "Oh dear Glub what was I kissing?"
Of course it does nothing for beer goggles - if that's the problem all you can hope for is the defensive reaction of brewer's droop...
I think Mass Effect 2 got the cutscenes just right - especially with the ability to influence how they played out. A big problem with excessive cutscenes is that the behaviour of characters in the cutscene is locked to the game designers' pre-determined idea of the character and very often breaks immersion. Well done cutscenes add to your experience of "being" the character, poorly done ones detract.
FFX was a particularly egregious example, in the first hour or so of play you literally get about 10 mins of "direct drive" - that is usually walking from one zone to another. That's way too many cutscenes and just stopped my housemate even bothering to play it.
Another of my bugbears with cutscenes is "cutscene queens". Characters who are undiluted awesome in the cutscene when the party meets them, and are then mediocre when you actually get to play them.
What we're saying here is that the system has adjusted to the new situation and found a secondary stable position. That's great. But we can't rely on that happening again. This is like having an important circuit fail and a previously unknown back-up kick in. Hooray we're saved... but do we really want to be betting if there's a back-up to the back-up?
And then your house gets raided because you've been naughty enough to download an episode of Glee. Under forensic examination your main data drive seems to have 45Gb of deleted pr0n, some of it CP.
Suddenly you're in a whole new world of hurt that involves trying to prove to a justice system that goes for the simplest possible answer that you didn't put it there...
We use Dell 1907 monitors in a lot of the offices here. About once a week I have to "fix a broken monitor" where someone adjusting the monitor has clipped the Input button with their thumb while moving it and switched the monitor to looking for input on the DVI port...
In the UK if you encrypt your hard drive with a randomly generated key that is never displayed on screen so there is no way you could possibly know it you can still be ordered to hand over the key with penalties of jail for not doing so. Even though there is no way for you to know the key. The court can literally order you to do something physically impossible with the threat of deprivation of liberty if you do not. That is the true level of the idiocy of these laws.
An extreme case, sure but history has shown us that government will push any power they are allowed to gather to the extremes (All the while wailing that they don't have enough power)
I recently bought Dead Space 2 on the 360 second hand - the manual has an activation key for online content. I haven't tried it yet but I betting that it's now tied to the account logged in at the time it was used. That made me think - is the next step of "bundled DLC enhancements" going to tie in to your accounts. You buy a game, install it and pull down the DLC and enjoy. Your wife/flatmate/sibling then logs into their account and finds that the version they can play is effectively a crippleware ad for the game and to get the full thing they'll have to either play as you or buy a second copy...
I have as a test put an unprotected Windows box on the 'net to see what happened. Usually it's about 1/2 hr before it's port scanned and an hour before it's been rooted. That's it - that's your window of security.
"Ireland : No you don't, you're fired, and further more companies like the RIAA are hereby considered terrorists by law and should be made a part of the peace process and given unelected positions in government even if they don't repudiate the armed struggle"
TFTFY
It's fair to say that the tobacco companies probably feel under continuous assault nowadays so are going to fight any legislation aimed their way. Even seemingly harmless things turn out to be the thin end of a painful wedge.
I'm not saying that tobacco companies are innocent but it's interesting how _everybody_ feels qualified to take a swipe at them and regularly does. In the UK we often have headlines about how smokers cost the NHS huge sums - some guesstimates range as high as £5 billion. That's a huge amount of money and a serious drain on central coffers.
Except for the fact that smokers paid (roughly) £10.5 billion in tax in the UK last year. That means for every pound they used up, they put in 2. If the government decides to not put that money into the NHS (and paying for that bill is one of the reasons they use to explain their putting up tobacco taxes every year) then it's not the smokers' fault.
And no, I'm not a smoker, I'm an ex-smoker. I just hate lies and lazy statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked in IT support for about a decade and a half now and the move from CRT to TFT is an absolute godsend.
My personal favourite was when someone wanted their PC under their monitor to save desk space - you had to lift 50-odd lbs of monitor and then brace it with one hand to slide the desktop underneath cos' there was no way the desktop would slide into place with the monitor resting on the top.
When we migrated to TFT's I wrecked my back for about a week lifting all the old monitors as we got rid of them but the pain was worth it to never see those b4stards again...
Obligatory XKCD reference -
http://xkcd.com/598/
This isn't Schrodingers' Hunt. The simple act of observing it doesn't impede or change it in any way.
"law enforcement officers and an attorney claiming to represent the privately-owned plantation near Ehrhardt tried to stop the aircraft from flying.
"It didn't work; what SHARK was doing was perfectly legal," Hindi said in a news release. "Once they knew nothing was going to stop us, the shooting stopped and the cars lined up to leave."
TRIED. If launching the drone was against the law then do you not think that the law enforcement officers would have just arrested them as soon as they tried to launch? And shooting at something you don't like the look of because it's over your property is legal where you come from? I assume there are no civil flights, police helicopters, air ambulances, kites...
Gunnery Chief: [as the character enters the Citadel] This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferris slug, feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an everest class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3% of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means- Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's first law?
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going til it hits something. That can be a ship. Or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your targets. That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it". This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Chung: Sir, yes sir!
Yet in another story an educator gets in trouble for trying to give the kids extra protein...
Gorramn legacy support...
Sure they did - RIAA gave it to them.
It's incredibly useful in UV-lit nightclubs - where everyone else can't see sh1t you can see clearly, hence avoiding any awkward moments when the lights come on and you think "Oh dear Glub what was I kissing?"
Of course it does nothing for beer goggles - if that's the problem all you can hope for is the defensive reaction of brewer's droop...
I think Mass Effect 2 got the cutscenes just right - especially with the ability to influence how they played out. A big problem with excessive cutscenes is that the behaviour of characters in the cutscene is locked to the game designers' pre-determined idea of the character and very often breaks immersion. Well done cutscenes add to your experience of "being" the character, poorly done ones detract.
FFX was a particularly egregious example, in the first hour or so of play you literally get about 10 mins of "direct drive" - that is usually walking from one zone to another. That's way too many cutscenes and just stopped my housemate even bothering to play it.
Another of my bugbears with cutscenes is "cutscene queens". Characters who are undiluted awesome in the cutscene when the party meets them, and are then mediocre when you actually get to play them.
Combine that with an electric shock security system and we might just have a tamper-proof phone.
Or the latest sex toy for the seriously jaded...
What we're saying here is that the system has adjusted to the new situation and found a secondary stable position. That's great. But we can't rely on that happening again. This is like having an important circuit fail and a previously unknown back-up kick in. Hooray we're saved... but do we really want to be betting if there's a back-up to the back-up?
And then your house gets raided because you've been naughty enough to download an episode of Glee. Under forensic examination your main data drive seems to have 45Gb of deleted pr0n, some of it CP.
Suddenly you're in a whole new world of hurt that involves trying to prove to a justice system that goes for the simplest possible answer that you didn't put it there...
Leaving the basement, washing and going to a club might help with that. You can't expect progress without effort - a goal is just a direction.
5 1/4's would survive that treatment if you placed the holes properly.
I had a user who was used to Macs post a CD between the blanking plates on the two 5 1/4" bays on a Compaq...
We use Dell 1907 monitors in a lot of the offices here. About once a week I have to "fix a broken monitor" where someone adjusting the monitor has clipped the Input button with their thumb while moving it and switched the monitor to looking for input on the DVI port...
In the UK if you encrypt your hard drive with a randomly generated key that is never displayed on screen so there is no way you could possibly know it you can still be ordered to hand over the key with penalties of jail for not doing so. Even though there is no way for you to know the key. The court can literally order you to do something physically impossible with the threat of deprivation of liberty if you do not. That is the true level of the idiocy of these laws.
An extreme case, sure but history has shown us that government will push any power they are allowed to gather to the extremes (All the while wailing that they don't have enough power)
I recently bought Dead Space 2 on the 360 second hand - the manual has an activation key for online content. I haven't tried it yet but I betting that it's now tied to the account logged in at the time it was used. That made me think - is the next step of "bundled DLC enhancements" going to tie in to your accounts. You buy a game, install it and pull down the DLC and enjoy. Your wife/flatmate/sibling then logs into their account and finds that the version they can play is effectively a crippleware ad for the game and to get the full thing they'll have to either play as you or buy a second copy...
I have as a test put an unprotected Windows box on the 'net to see what happened. Usually it's about 1/2 hr before it's port scanned and an hour before it's been rooted. That's it - that's your window of security.
"Ireland : No you don't, you're fired, and further more companies like the RIAA are hereby considered terrorists by law and should be made a part of the peace process and given unelected positions in government even if they don't repudiate the armed struggle"
TFTFY
It's fair to say that the tobacco companies probably feel under continuous assault nowadays so are going to fight any legislation aimed their way. Even seemingly harmless things turn out to be the thin end of a painful wedge.
I'm not saying that tobacco companies are innocent but it's interesting how _everybody_ feels qualified to take a swipe at them and regularly does. In the UK we often have headlines about how smokers cost the NHS huge sums - some guesstimates range as high as £5 billion. That's a huge amount of money and a serious drain on central coffers.
Except for the fact that smokers paid (roughly) £10.5 billion in tax in the UK last year. That means for every pound they used up, they put in 2. If the government decides to not put that money into the NHS (and paying for that bill is one of the reasons they use to explain their putting up tobacco taxes every year) then it's not the smokers' fault.
And no, I'm not a smoker, I'm an ex-smoker. I just hate lies and lazy statistics.
"Not after we demonstrate the capabilities of this SOPA act."
TFTFY (Though I'm not sure even the Empire would stoop so low...)
Well, Jobs is dead. Ms Class had better sleep with one eye open...
"You do some things with friends, you do some more things with wife :)" ;->
You obviously don't have the kinds of friends that we do...