The article simply confirms what I have suspected for quite some time since moving to the US and I failed to be surprised.
As a result, I can't be bothered to press the "door close" button, despite my wife urging me to press it.
I miss buttons which actually work:
One of the best thing about the "door close" button in countries where they actually work is that many of them can be used to ignore floors which wasn't requested by the passengers of the lift... Especially useful when it is filled to capacity with everyone wanting to go down to the lobby where it would be pointless for the lift to stop on every floor on the way when no additional passengers can get on. Simply hold the door close button and it would continue without stopping until it gets to the requested floor.
Back in the 1990s a Taiwanese manufacturer, Clevo, made "kit" laptops so that OEMs can pick and choose which parts they want for their laptops.
These laptops were incredibly easy to assemble and disassemble. As an OEM, you can choose what kind of screen and what resolution/size, what motherboard, what cpu, what kind of battery, choose between trackpad, mini trackball or trackpoint... It also made it somewhat easy for people to upgrade their laptop. Even a choice of docking station all the way up to sophisticated docking stations which can have PCI/ISA cards installed.
Computers just aren't as customizable nowadays.
Re:It's not like the royal family has any privacy!
on
The Queen Joins Facebook
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's not like the royal family has any privacy left anyway, so, unlike the rest of us, there's no real reason for her not to join facebook!:)
The Royal Family has never had any real privacy to speak of... that is one of the prices that they pay for being The Royal Family.
Besides, the Queen sent her first email back in 1976... before much of the Slashdot audience was even born.
When I am using public WiFi, I tend to SSH-tunnel to my proxy at home for web browsing, It usually makes for a better browsing experience too because DNS on public WiFi usually sucks and the compression over SSH means that most web pages loads quicker.
Most computer science students take the subject because they finish high school and think "what career pays well?".
I know a few people who work in education and sadly, those students make up the overwhelming majority of today's CS students. They also tend to have exceedingly unrealistic expectations too...
Re:Because they are huge and have tons of cash
on
Why Microsoft?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Never having worked at Microsoft, I couldn't comment about them.
Having worked at Google, I can comment about them: MacBooks are perhaps the single, most popular, laptop. iPhones are very common with perhaps the only reason why there are a lot of Google phones is because people got them for free as their Christmas bonus/gift. I would say that iPhones are probably the most popular personal phones which employees actually paid for.
Not everything is completely open at Google, except maybe most of the source code. Like any large corporation, some individuals have carved out their personal empires along with all the associated politics...
There is an option in the Blizzard downloader to turn off the download bandwidth limit.... I use that option and I regularly max out my download bandwidth without any significant change to my upload.
(note - this is my own personal experience and opinion... not the opinion of my employer, yadda, yadda, yadda)
It was obvious, even at that time, that Saddam was playing a shell game in order to create the perception of strength for both his country's civilians and his neighbours. By maintaining the illusion of strength, the Iraqi population was less likely to revolt and he would make Syria and Iran less likely to consider invading. He also had to maintain the illusion to prevent Kuwait from resuming their directional drilling scheme which sparked the whole 1990 Gulf War.
The fact is that the first Gulf War left Iraq hugely weakened and Saddam did not want to look weak.
It was clear from a very early time in the second Gulf War that Saddam did not have even half as much resources as he had at the start of the first Gulf War. The UN sanctions did work: He was not able to rebuild the military technology he had before.
Not that he had much military tech before - his efforts to clone and mass produce replenishments to his US-supplied chemical weapons was largely a bust. Allied forces in both wars suffered more health complications from the anti nerve-agent and other anti chemical and biological agents than they did from anything Saddam threw at them.
Ok... I cannot vote legally as I am not legally entitled to vote.
I am not willing to stoop so low to start breaking laws because the criminals in this country would beat me with their experience and they don't like the competition.
Apparently Senators Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein are quickly drafting a special amendment that says the law wouldn't apply to "websites that serve as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents."
Hmm... So does it mean that a website, hosted in the USA, which is serving as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents, such as secret North Korea documents, would not be protected and so some N.Korean dissident who leaked that information could have their identity revealed by the US Govt at the request of the N.Korean Govt?
Unfortunately, in the USA, they have legalised monopolies so that the consumer has no choice of electricity, water, waste, natural gas, cable TV and land-line telephone companies. They must accept whoever has purchased the rights to supply their area.
If there was choice in energy provider and each energy provider were to publish the CO2 per KW/h, it would be easier to make environmentally conscious decisions and the free market can provide.
The ability to attach unrelated rider bills to other bills is nonsense and should not be allowed.
I would vote for anyone who would fight to end that nonsense. Unfortunately, I have no voice as I am a legal alien in America and therefore cannot vote. It seems that politicians only want to listen to voters: US citizens and undocumented aliens, apparently.
I was thinking of having protest signs printed with the words "No taxation without representation" at the last election but I doubt if anyone would get the reference.
OS/2 fast shutdown from version 2.0 onwards, which can also be triggered by Ctrl-Alt-Del, closes all applications and kills applications which don't close immediately without asking the user.
When I wanted to shutdown the computer quickly and cleanly, I used to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and then when the machine was rebooted into the BIOS POST, I would turn off the power.
The CO2 emission numbers would be misleading for battery electric and plug-in hybrids because it only states the tailpipe emissions.
Example... A battery-electric vehicle may use 34 KW/h of electricity per 100 miles. According to official data, in the USA, about 0.6 Kg of CO2 is emitted for every KW/h of electricity consumed. So for every 100 miles, about 20 Kg of CO2 is released into the atmosphere. So the data should state that 200g of CO2 is emitted per mile, not the 0g it currently states.
Ignoring other sources of CO2 emission and only looking at tailpipe emissions are misleading for technology which does not have a tailpipe. For example, a battery electric vehicle which uses 40 KW/h of electricity per 100 miles would release more CO2 into the atmosphere than many small gasoline vehicles.
There are basically two kinds of ink used in inkjet printers. Solvent-based and water-based.
Solvent-based inks are generally used for the kind of inkjet printers where some resistive element heats up the ink to make a tiny bubble of gas to push out the ink. Water-based inks are typically used where some mechanical device is used to push out the ink, such as a piezoelectric element. Since the majority of printers are of the resistive variety, most third-party inks are solvent based.
Epson printers are of the piezoelectric variety and using the wrong kind of ink can cause permanent damage to the print head. Solvents and acids attack the piezoelectric elements. The solvents also dry up quicker and clog the nozzles. A new piezoelectric print head usually can be purchased for the more expensive Epson printers but they are somewhat pricey.
Years ago, I examined some cheap off-brand Epson ink replacements and the ink was the same kind of solvent ink used for other ink jets. When you get the better off-brand cartridges, some did have the right kind of ink but the price difference meant it was pointless to buy them because the real Epson cartridges was practically the same price. The _only_ time where the off-brand made sense for Epson was the printer mods which used 1 pint bottles with silicone pipes for the ink but I doubt that a typical user would ever need to print that much.
Good old CGA graphics... 4 colours on a 320x200 display and you didn't get much choice in the colours.
The best graphics for a game I have seen on CGA was the game MoonBugs... Which memory says actually displayed 8 colours at a slightly lower resolution 160x50 (or something like that). It opened my eyes to hacking the CRTC and developing custom non-standard video modes.
The schools/universities that I went to used the same books year after year until they go out of print. In one case, the professor decided that there was no current in-print book which was adequate for the course and successfully managed to get the author's permission to distribute photocopies of the out of print book to his class.
I could have sold all my textbooks to the following year's class but for some subjects, I opted to keep them for myself. I wasn't the first owner for all my textbooks either.
What got me interested in methane for vehicle fuel was reading an old reprint where some farmer in England was capturing gas from the waste from his pigs in order to fuel his personal vehicle during WW2. It makes sense to recycle every part of our waste instead of extracting more fossil fuels.
Don't forget that a false rape allegation practically ruined Craig Charles television career for several years... and forced a hiatus of the popular Red Dwarf series (of which he plays a lead character) for years.
If victims of rape get anonymity in England, the accused should be given the same consideration.
Bring back the educational BBC TV programmes on computing/programming. Heck, just do reruns and bring back the old BBC Model B. Kids will learn far more from that than they ever will at schools today.
I have never taken any computing subject at school because of how boring they are. I learnt a lot just by experimenting by myself, buying books, magazines and watching TV. Once upon a time, one used to be able to get great information from magazines and terrestrial television but nowadays, they don't get any more technical than discussing font size and if a case mod with LEDs will make the computer perform better. Pioneering stuff was done years ago on TV, like encouraging people to hack their TVs and pipe the audio to the cassette audio-in on their home computers to try to download a program. It was fun stuff.
Not doing any computing classes at school didn't put a crimp in my career... except perhaps that I never learned to touch-type properly.
Meh, at least practically none of the natural gas comes from outside of North America.
Although, I wish that people would take biogas more seriously. A lot of human activities create a lot of methane which is allowed to escape to the atmosphere. Potential biogas sources could include landfills, man-made reservoirs (from hydroelectric and water-diversion projects), waste processing, recycling... etc.
In California, where something like 90% of electricity is generated from burning natural gas, electric vehicles in California would essentially be running on natural gas.
The Honda Civic GX, which runs exclusively on natural gas, gets about 200 mile range (my average is around 210 miles per full tank), refuels at a station in under 5 minutes and cuts out the middle man in the "using natural gas for locomotion" scheme.
And it has been available for years. Mine is 2 years old but there are GXs out there which are 6 years old and more. One of the little side benefits is that they are White HOV sticker eligible so they can drive in the carpool lanes in California until 2015.
I think the biggest reason for the low adoption of this vehicle is that the engine is rated at only 113hp so it's no muscle-car. But if you have driven around in Southern California and seen the traffic jams, 99% of people could have their 200+hp vehicle engines replaced with 20hp lawnmower engines and not notice any difference in their commute.
If true, someone at Dell could end up having a friendly conversation with someone from the FBI.
If it was only exposure of private data (pictures) then Dell may have gotten away with a just a civil resolution. If it is true that the tech extorted a laptop, then it becomes a criminal case. People can go to jail.
This could become quite costly to Dell in terms of goodwill if proven that someone representing them extorted material goods from one of their own customers.
Slashdot Mirror
The article simply confirms what I have suspected for quite some time since moving to the US and I failed to be surprised.
As a result, I can't be bothered to press the "door close" button, despite my wife urging me to press it.
I miss buttons which actually work:
One of the best thing about the "door close" button in countries where they actually work is that many of them can be used to ignore floors which wasn't requested by the passengers of the lift... Especially useful when it is filled to capacity with everyone wanting to go down to the lobby where it would be pointless for the lift to stop on every floor on the way when no additional passengers can get on. Simply hold the door close button and it would continue without stopping until it gets to the requested floor.
Back in the 1990s a Taiwanese manufacturer, Clevo, made "kit" laptops so that OEMs can pick and choose which parts they want for their laptops.
These laptops were incredibly easy to assemble and disassemble. As an OEM, you can choose what kind of screen and what resolution/size, what motherboard, what cpu, what kind of battery, choose between trackpad, mini trackball or trackpoint... It also made it somewhat easy for people to upgrade their laptop. Even a choice of docking station all the way up to sophisticated docking stations which can have PCI/ISA cards installed.
Computers just aren't as customizable nowadays.
It's not like the royal family has any privacy left anyway, so, unlike the rest of us, there's no real reason for her not to join facebook! :)
The Royal Family has never had any real privacy to speak of... that is one of the prices that they pay for being The Royal Family.
Besides, the Queen sent her first email back in 1976 ... before much of the Slashdot audience was even born.
When I am using public WiFi, I tend to SSH-tunnel to my proxy at home for web browsing,
It usually makes for a better browsing experience too because DNS on public WiFi usually sucks and the compression over SSH means that most web pages loads quicker.
I know a few people who work in education and sadly, those students make up the overwhelming majority of today's CS students. They also tend to have exceedingly unrealistic expectations too...
Never having worked at Microsoft, I couldn't comment about them.
Having worked at Google, I can comment about them: MacBooks are perhaps the single, most popular, laptop. iPhones are very common with perhaps the only reason why there are a lot of Google phones is because people got them for free as their Christmas bonus/gift. I would say that iPhones are probably the most popular personal phones which employees actually paid for.
Not everything is completely open at Google, except maybe most of the source code. Like any large corporation, some individuals have carved out their personal empires along with all the associated politics...
There is an option in the Blizzard downloader to turn off the download bandwidth limit.... I use that option and I regularly max out my download bandwidth without any significant change to my upload.
(note - this is my own personal experience and opinion... not the opinion of my employer, yadda, yadda, yadda)
It was obvious, even at that time, that Saddam was playing a shell game in order to create the perception of strength for both his country's civilians and his neighbours. By maintaining the illusion of strength, the Iraqi population was less likely to revolt and he would make Syria and Iran less likely to consider invading. He also had to maintain the illusion to prevent Kuwait from resuming their directional drilling scheme which sparked the whole 1990 Gulf War.
The fact is that the first Gulf War left Iraq hugely weakened and Saddam did not want to look weak.
It was clear from a very early time in the second Gulf War that Saddam did not have even half as much resources as he had at the start of the first Gulf War. The UN sanctions did work: He was not able to rebuild the military technology he had before.
Not that he had much military tech before - his efforts to clone and mass produce replenishments to his US-supplied chemical weapons was largely a bust. Allied forces in both wars suffered more health complications from the anti nerve-agent and other anti chemical and biological agents than they did from anything Saddam threw at them.
They don't appear to change the doodle often when connecting via IPv6.
Meh.
Ok... I cannot vote legally as I am not legally entitled to vote.
I am not willing to stoop so low to start breaking laws because the criminals in this country would beat me with their experience and they don't like the competition.
Hmm... So does it mean that a website, hosted in the USA, which is serving as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents, such as secret North Korea documents, would not be protected and so some N.Korean dissident who leaked that information could have their identity revealed by the US Govt at the request of the N.Korean Govt?
Nice.
I would like it if there was choice.
Unfortunately, in the USA, they have legalised monopolies so that the consumer has no choice of electricity, water, waste, natural gas, cable TV and land-line telephone companies. They must accept whoever has purchased the rights to supply their area.
If there was choice in energy provider and each energy provider were to publish the CO2 per KW/h, it would be easier to make environmentally conscious decisions and the free market can provide.
Alas, the US is not a free market economy.
The ability to attach unrelated rider bills to other bills is nonsense and should not be allowed.
I would vote for anyone who would fight to end that nonsense. Unfortunately, I have no voice as I am a legal alien in America and therefore cannot vote. It seems that politicians only want to listen to voters: US citizens and undocumented aliens, apparently.
I was thinking of having protest signs printed with the words "No taxation without representation" at the last election but I doubt if anyone would get the reference.
OS/2 fast shutdown from version 2.0 onwards, which can also be triggered by Ctrl-Alt-Del, closes all applications and kills applications which don't close immediately without asking the user.
When I wanted to shutdown the computer quickly and cleanly, I used to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and then when the machine was rebooted into the BIOS POST, I would turn off the power.
The CO2 emission numbers would be misleading for battery electric and plug-in hybrids because it only states the tailpipe emissions.
Example... A battery-electric vehicle may use 34 KW/h of electricity per 100 miles. According to official data, in the USA, about 0.6 Kg of CO2 is emitted for every KW/h of electricity consumed. So for every 100 miles, about 20 Kg of CO2 is released into the atmosphere. So the data should state that 200g of CO2 is emitted per mile, not the 0g it currently states.
Ignoring other sources of CO2 emission and only looking at tailpipe emissions are misleading for technology which does not have a tailpipe. For example, a battery electric vehicle which uses 40 KW/h of electricity per 100 miles would release more CO2 into the atmosphere than many small gasoline vehicles.
There are basically two kinds of ink used in inkjet printers. Solvent-based and water-based.
Solvent-based inks are generally used for the kind of inkjet printers where some resistive element heats up the ink to make a tiny bubble of gas to push out the ink. Water-based inks are typically used where some mechanical device is used to push out the ink, such as a piezoelectric element. Since the majority of printers are of the resistive variety, most third-party inks are solvent based.
Epson printers are of the piezoelectric variety and using the wrong kind of ink can cause permanent damage to the print head. Solvents and acids attack the piezoelectric elements. The solvents also dry up quicker and clog the nozzles. A new piezoelectric print head usually can be purchased for the more expensive Epson printers but they are somewhat pricey.
Years ago, I examined some cheap off-brand Epson ink replacements and the ink was the same kind of solvent ink used for other ink jets. When you get the better off-brand cartridges, some did have the right kind of ink but the price difference meant it was pointless to buy them because the real Epson cartridges was practically the same price. The _only_ time where the off-brand made sense for Epson was the printer mods which used 1 pint bottles with silicone pipes for the ink but I doubt that a typical user would ever need to print that much.
Good old CGA graphics... 4 colours on a 320x200 display and you didn't get much choice in the colours.
The best graphics for a game I have seen on CGA was the game MoonBugs... Which memory says actually displayed 8 colours at a slightly lower resolution 160x50 (or something like that). It opened my eyes to hacking the CRTC and developing custom non-standard video modes.
Good fun.
Must be the schools that you went to.
The schools/universities that I went to used the same books year after year until they go out of print. In one case, the professor decided that there was no current in-print book which was adequate for the course and successfully managed to get the author's permission to distribute photocopies of the out of print book to his class.
I could have sold all my textbooks to the following year's class but for some subjects, I opted to keep them for myself. I wasn't the first owner for all my textbooks either.
What got me interested in methane for vehicle fuel was reading an old reprint where some farmer in England was capturing gas from the waste from his pigs in order to fuel his personal vehicle during WW2.
It makes sense to recycle every part of our waste instead of extracting more fossil fuels.
Don't forget that a false rape allegation practically ruined Craig Charles television career for several years... and forced a hiatus of the popular Red Dwarf series (of which he plays a lead character) for years.
If victims of rape get anonymity in England, the accused should be given the same consideration.
Bring back the educational BBC TV programmes on computing/programming.
Heck, just do reruns and bring back the old BBC Model B. Kids will learn far more from that than they ever will at schools today.
I have never taken any computing subject at school because of how boring they are. I learnt a lot just by experimenting by myself, buying books, magazines and watching TV. Once upon a time, one used to be able to get great information from magazines and terrestrial television but nowadays, they don't get any more technical than discussing font size and if a case mod with LEDs will make the computer perform better. Pioneering stuff was done years ago on TV, like encouraging people to hack their TVs and pipe the audio to the cassette audio-in on their home computers to try to download a program. It was fun stuff.
Not doing any computing classes at school didn't put a crimp in my career... except perhaps that I never learned to touch-type properly.
Didn't the OpenSolaris effort have problems because they were always waiting on Sun to compile certain libc binaries for them?
Is this resolved in Illumos or is there still a binary blob issue?
Meh, at least practically none of the natural gas comes from outside of North America.
Although, I wish that people would take biogas more seriously. A lot of human activities create a lot of methane which is allowed to escape to the atmosphere. Potential biogas sources could include landfills, man-made reservoirs (from hydroelectric and water-diversion projects), waste processing, recycling... etc.
Or even a Civic GX...
In California, where something like 90% of electricity is generated from burning natural gas, electric vehicles in California would essentially be running on natural gas.
The Honda Civic GX, which runs exclusively on natural gas, gets about 200 mile range (my average is around 210 miles per full tank), refuels at a station in under 5 minutes and cuts out the middle man in the "using natural gas for locomotion" scheme.
And it has been available for years. Mine is 2 years old but there are GXs out there which are 6 years old and more. One of the little side benefits is that they are White HOV sticker eligible so they can drive in the carpool lanes in California until 2015.
I think the biggest reason for the low adoption of this vehicle is that the engine is rated at only 113hp so it's no muscle-car. But if you have driven around in Southern California and seen the traffic jams, 99% of people could have their 200+hp vehicle engines replaced with 20hp lawnmower engines and not notice any difference in their commute.
If true, someone at Dell could end up having a friendly conversation with someone from the FBI.
If it was only exposure of private data (pictures) then Dell may have gotten away with a just a civil resolution. If it is true that the tech extorted a laptop, then it becomes a criminal case. People can go to jail.
This could become quite costly to Dell in terms of goodwill if proven that someone representing them extorted material goods from one of their own customers.