Yeah, god forbid I waste one of my 10 USB ports on something. Better save it for, umm, what exactly?
Yes, I'm familiar with 3.5mm plugs, that's what my speakers are plugged into. They don't have a plug to chain a headset, so I use a USB headset instead of having to swap cables.
Linux was my full-time OS starting in 2002 (Gentoo for about 8 years, then bouncing between Fedora, Mint and Crunchbang). About four months ago I switched my main PC to Windows 7. I actually like it, enough to keep using it. When my laptop finally needed replacing, I went with an SP3 which has been quite nice (Windows 8's interface actually makes sense on a tablet whereas I hate it on desktops/laptops).
Linux-the-OS is still mostly nice. Linux-the-userland reached its zenith about four years ago and has been declining in quality ever since. I found myself spending more and more time dealing with issues stemming from buggy applications and shoddy drivers, enough that it felt like I was back in 2008 again. NetworkManager loses all my VPN passwords, my USB headset doesn't work properly, video driver quality is getting worse instead of better, Flash somehow manages to keep getting worse, even though you'd think that wouldn't be possible at this point, etc.
Windows 7, meanwhile, just works. The biggest gripe I've had so far is the continued lack of support in Explorer for long paths, which causes issues for my nodejs projects (given that their module dependency system has all the sophistication of a high school midterm project). I can work around that easily enough, though. I'm not a twenty-something with time to kill anymore, I can't spend three days tracking down why my USB headset stops outputting sound when the system volume drops below 20% (unless I launch Virtualbox, at which point it magically works again). I like tinkering when time permits, but nowadays I want my system to just work. Linux doesn't do that right now. I still love the OS, but it is no longer practical for me to use it.
I used to be rabidly anti-DRM, but my mindset has mellowed somewhat and is similar to your's now. When I'm buying a game for $5 in a steam sale, more often than not it is a game I'm not likely to ever replay. Same with digital purchases on XBL. The games I know I'll replay (Baldur's Gate, IWD, Mass Effect, etc) I have physical discs for or have purchased through GOG.
DRM is perfectly fine for something you only want to play once and can get at rental prices.
You could get gas $1.00/gal in Georgia in the early 90's. Georgia was the cheap state in that area, so when driving north from Florida you always timed your stop so that your first fillup was across the Georgia line.
Long periods of sitting have been known to be dangerous for a while. However, long periods of standing aren't necessarily better. Yes, we didn't evolve to sit in chairs all day, but we also didn't evolve to spend all day standing rigidly upright either. Varicose veins, knee damage, etc are all real issues with people who stand around all day.
This is another one of those cases where we collectively go: "A is bad. Therefore, !A is good." Then a decade or two later we realize that the new extreme is just as bad as the old one and that the happy reality is in the middle (a mix of sitting, standing and moving, with regular transitions) where it always is.
PulseAudio still can't handle USB headsets properly. I had a bitch of a time getting mine to work at all, and it still won't play volume below 20%. It also still crashes more than any other service on my machine. NetworkManager has this ungodly habit of forgetting/losing access to all of my VPN passwords at seemingly random intervals. This has been happening for over a year with more than one distro.
They are both far more stable than they were many years ago, but in both cases they only just border on being usable.
Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?
Sometimes you don't want to carry a $400 phone around when the risk of damage is high (though given how often my friends crack their iPhone screens, standing still in a carpeted room is apparently dangerous). I wouldn't go for a bike ride or a hike with an expensive phone in my pocket given the risk of breaking it, but I don't give a damn if my $40 no-brand MP3 player breaks out on the trail.
Real admins have macros. Every headshot triggers a script that creates a new account from a list (automatically built from incoming ticket contents of course).
Not all accounts are created directly by the user. Half the systems I work with on a daily basis have no signup feature. Accounts are created by site admins. The most common way I see this handled is for the site to generate an OTP and send it via email to the user.
(1) What specifically is bullshit? That your taste buds become desensitized when consuming a liter of high-sugar soda every day for years? That carrots are sweet? That you don't taste the (comparably low) sugar in a carrot after consuming lots of high-sugar drinks?
(2) Could you name some of these myriad fruits? I know that dried fruits are typically high in sugar (though also eaten in much smaller quantities), but that's about it. A quick search doesn't turn up a single fruit that I'd find in a typical grocery store outside of the few dried varieties that can even match the 26g of sugar per 8oz serving of Dr. Pepper (and I'm being generous in calling a serving 8oz instead of a 12oz can), let alone surpass it.
A couple years ago I decided to give up refined sugar in general for a few months, particularly soda (like any good dev, I consumed more than my share of the stuff). After 3 months without, I drank a Dr. Pepper (my favorite) and it was disgusting. Tasted like a mouthful of sugar. Amazing how much you become desensitized to sugar, and the same holds for salt.
The real surprise was one day when I discovered that carrots are actually sweet. They just don't seem that way when you consume a metric ton of refined sugar every week. That really made me start wondering just how badly my perception of foods had been corrupted over the years.
Two less-common changes that make a noticeable difference are using software to change the spin profile of the CPU fan and boost the standby time for the drives so they spin down faster when unused. Once I had done all the usual tricks (silent rear case fan, PSU that is rated as being a quiet model, etc), I still saw a noticeable difference by tweaking those settings.
Never realized how much I hate whirring fans until I had a setup that allowed me to not hear them.
C2D processors are definitely still viable. My main development machine until earlier this year was an E8400 with an SSD for several years. I only mothballed it because I decided to combine my dev and gaming PCs into one, so the better specs from the gaming PC became my daily driver.
Mobo: ASRock B85M Pro4 CPU: Core i3-4150 RAM: 16GB DDR3 Video Card: Geforce 750 Ti PSU: Corsair CX430 Drives: Samsung 840 Evo (250GB) and Samsung 850 Evo (250GB) Case: Some cheap case OS: Windows 7
The best part of this is that after tweaking the fan controls and drive standby settings, the machine runs almost silent. You can just barely pick up a hum when sitting at the desk, more than a couple feet away you can't hear anything.
Not sure how I feel about running Windows 7 as my main OS after 15 years as a Linux guy, but it has been acceptable so far.
If you're that paranoid, run separate instances. One that you use online for purchases and downloads only, then copy the Steamapps subfolder for your game over to your offline-gaming instance. No achievements, no gameplay tracking, etc. An inconvenience, sure, but a fairly minor one.
I do this to keeps games sync'ed between my gaming PC and my laptop for traveling, but IIRC there's nothing that'll prevent you from having two copies of Steam installed on one PC.
Love their keyboards. My only complaint is the white color gets discolored pretty quickly with heavy use. I really prefer black keyboards for this reason.
Agreed on the Apple keyboards. I use the wired one with the numpad both at home and at work (to much ribbing from my coworkers given my dislike of Apple products in general) and love it. I've tried a few different mechanicals and they've never lived up to the hype.
Not always. My alarm clock doesn't. The time displays in my kitchen don't. The clock in my car doesn't. Even some software doesn't. Ever used an in-house corporate scheduling app that has some piece of shit homebrew datetime library and doesn't properly account for DST when sending out meeting invites? I have, it causes problems. I've seen mail servers block all logins because the local clock didn't adjust for DST and the one-hour difference in times is triggering clock skew errors for everyone.
Hell, my android phone sometimes can't figure out what time zone I'm in. Multiple times, I've been sitting here in Florida, nowhere even remotely close to the next zone, and watched my phone repeatedly switch back and forth between Eastern and Central.
in a perfect world, technology would just figure it out. But it doesn't, not reliably enough that we can completely ignore the change.
7. When diagnosing any computer output by reading an endless stream of slowly scrolling text, hackers never need to reference a line that has already gone off the screen.
The larger the frontal surface area of the vessel, the harder it is to control. Wave motion and tidal forces become more pronounced as the vessel gets wider, making it harder to hold position.
This "barge" isn't a standard cargo hauler, though. You can see a photo of it at the link below. It was definitely custom-built for this purpose. http://www.spacex.com/sites/sp...
Sure they do. AMD has had hybrid graphics for years, and both Catalyst and the open-source driver have had support for quite some time. I've used laptops that had AMD's hybrid setup and it was far simpler to set up.
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Yeah, god forbid I waste one of my 10 USB ports on something. Better save it for, umm, what exactly?
Yes, I'm familiar with 3.5mm plugs, that's what my speakers are plugged into. They don't have a plug to chain a headset, so I use a USB headset instead of having to swap cables.
I've had a somewhat similar experience.
Linux was my full-time OS starting in 2002 (Gentoo for about 8 years, then bouncing between Fedora, Mint and Crunchbang). About four months ago I switched my main PC to Windows 7. I actually like it, enough to keep using it. When my laptop finally needed replacing, I went with an SP3 which has been quite nice (Windows 8's interface actually makes sense on a tablet whereas I hate it on desktops/laptops).
Linux-the-OS is still mostly nice. Linux-the-userland reached its zenith about four years ago and has been declining in quality ever since. I found myself spending more and more time dealing with issues stemming from buggy applications and shoddy drivers, enough that it felt like I was back in 2008 again. NetworkManager loses all my VPN passwords, my USB headset doesn't work properly, video driver quality is getting worse instead of better, Flash somehow manages to keep getting worse, even though you'd think that wouldn't be possible at this point, etc.
Windows 7, meanwhile, just works. The biggest gripe I've had so far is the continued lack of support in Explorer for long paths, which causes issues for my nodejs projects (given that their module dependency system has all the sophistication of a high school midterm project). I can work around that easily enough, though. I'm not a twenty-something with time to kill anymore, I can't spend three days tracking down why my USB headset stops outputting sound when the system volume drops below 20% (unless I launch Virtualbox, at which point it magically works again). I like tinkering when time permits, but nowadays I want my system to just work. Linux doesn't do that right now. I still love the OS, but it is no longer practical for me to use it.
I used to be rabidly anti-DRM, but my mindset has mellowed somewhat and is similar to your's now. When I'm buying a game for $5 in a steam sale, more often than not it is a game I'm not likely to ever replay. Same with digital purchases on XBL. The games I know I'll replay (Baldur's Gate, IWD, Mass Effect, etc) I have physical discs for or have purchased through GOG.
DRM is perfectly fine for something you only want to play once and can get at rental prices.
Err, should have read "less than $1.00/gal".
You could get gas $1.00/gal in Georgia in the early 90's. Georgia was the cheap state in that area, so when driving north from Florida you always timed your stop so that your first fillup was across the Georgia line.
I get false positives regularly. Usually the "confirm your email address" messages from services whose sign-up processes are stuck in 2010.
Long periods of sitting have been known to be dangerous for a while. However, long periods of standing aren't necessarily better. Yes, we didn't evolve to sit in chairs all day, but we also didn't evolve to spend all day standing rigidly upright either. Varicose veins, knee damage, etc are all real issues with people who stand around all day.
This is another one of those cases where we collectively go: "A is bad. Therefore, !A is good." Then a decade or two later we realize that the new extreme is just as bad as the old one and that the happy reality is in the middle (a mix of sitting, standing and moving, with regular transitions) where it always is.
PulseAudio still can't handle USB headsets properly. I had a bitch of a time getting mine to work at all, and it still won't play volume below 20%. It also still crashes more than any other service on my machine.
NetworkManager has this ungodly habit of forgetting/losing access to all of my VPN passwords at seemingly random intervals. This has been happening for over a year with more than one distro.
They are both far more stable than they were many years ago, but in both cases they only just border on being usable.
Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?
Sometimes you don't want to carry a $400 phone around when the risk of damage is high (though given how often my friends crack their iPhone screens, standing still in a carpeted room is apparently dangerous). I wouldn't go for a bike ride or a hike with an expensive phone in my pocket given the risk of breaking it, but I don't give a damn if my $40 no-brand MP3 player breaks out on the trail.
Real admins have macros. Every headshot triggers a script that creates a new account from a list (automatically built from incoming ticket contents of course).
Not all accounts are created directly by the user. Half the systems I work with on a daily basis have no signup feature. Accounts are created by site admins. The most common way I see this handled is for the site to generate an OTP and send it via email to the user.
(1) What specifically is bullshit? That your taste buds become desensitized when consuming a liter of high-sugar soda every day for years? That carrots are sweet? That you don't taste the (comparably low) sugar in a carrot after consuming lots of high-sugar drinks?
(2) Could you name some of these myriad fruits? I know that dried fruits are typically high in sugar (though also eaten in much smaller quantities), but that's about it. A quick search doesn't turn up a single fruit that I'd find in a typical grocery store outside of the few dried varieties that can even match the 26g of sugar per 8oz serving of Dr. Pepper (and I'm being generous in calling a serving 8oz instead of a 12oz can), let alone surpass it.
A couple years ago I decided to give up refined sugar in general for a few months, particularly soda (like any good dev, I consumed more than my share of the stuff). After 3 months without, I drank a Dr. Pepper (my favorite) and it was disgusting. Tasted like a mouthful of sugar. Amazing how much you become desensitized to sugar, and the same holds for salt.
The real surprise was one day when I discovered that carrots are actually sweet. They just don't seem that way when you consume a metric ton of refined sugar every week. That really made me start wondering just how badly my perception of foods had been corrupted over the years.
Two less-common changes that make a noticeable difference are using software to change the spin profile of the CPU fan and boost the standby time for the drives so they spin down faster when unused. Once I had done all the usual tricks (silent rear case fan, PSU that is rated as being a quiet model, etc), I still saw a noticeable difference by tweaking those settings.
Never realized how much I hate whirring fans until I had a setup that allowed me to not hear them.
C2D processors are definitely still viable. My main development machine until earlier this year was an E8400 with an SSD for several years. I only mothballed it because I decided to combine my dev and gaming PCs into one, so the better specs from the gaming PC became my daily driver.
Mobo: ASRock B85M Pro4
CPU: Core i3-4150
RAM: 16GB DDR3
Video Card: Geforce 750 Ti
PSU: Corsair CX430
Drives: Samsung 840 Evo (250GB) and Samsung 850 Evo (250GB)
Case: Some cheap case
OS: Windows 7
The best part of this is that after tweaking the fan controls and drive standby settings, the machine runs almost silent. You can just barely pick up a hum when sitting at the desk, more than a couple feet away you can't hear anything.
Not sure how I feel about running Windows 7 as my main OS after 15 years as a Linux guy, but it has been acceptable so far.
If you're that paranoid, run separate instances. One that you use online for purchases and downloads only, then copy the Steamapps subfolder for your game over to your offline-gaming instance. No achievements, no gameplay tracking, etc. An inconvenience, sure, but a fairly minor one.
I do this to keeps games sync'ed between my gaming PC and my laptop for traveling, but IIRC there's nothing that'll prevent you from having two copies of Steam installed on one PC.
Love their keyboards. My only complaint is the white color gets discolored pretty quickly with heavy use. I really prefer black keyboards for this reason.
Agreed on the Apple keyboards. I use the wired one with the numpad both at home and at work (to much ribbing from my coworkers given my dislike of Apple products in general) and love it. I've tried a few different mechanicals and they've never lived up to the hype.
Not always. My alarm clock doesn't. The time displays in my kitchen don't. The clock in my car doesn't. Even some software doesn't. Ever used an in-house corporate scheduling app that has some piece of shit homebrew datetime library and doesn't properly account for DST when sending out meeting invites? I have, it causes problems. I've seen mail servers block all logins because the local clock didn't adjust for DST and the one-hour difference in times is triggering clock skew errors for everyone.
Hell, my android phone sometimes can't figure out what time zone I'm in. Multiple times, I've been sitting here in Florida, nowhere even remotely close to the next zone, and watched my phone repeatedly switch back and forth between Eastern and Central.
in a perfect world, technology would just figure it out. But it doesn't, not reliably enough that we can completely ignore the change.
Obligatory BOFH reference:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
7. When diagnosing any computer output by reading an endless stream of slowly scrolling text, hackers never need to reference a line that has already gone off the screen.
I thought that was more of the whole "all teen and tween asian girls are alt" trope.
The larger the frontal surface area of the vessel, the harder it is to control. Wave motion and tidal forces become more pronounced as the vessel gets wider, making it harder to hold position.
This "barge" isn't a standard cargo hauler, though. You can see a photo of it at the link below. It was definitely custom-built for this purpose.
http://www.spacex.com/sites/sp...
Sure they do. AMD has had hybrid graphics for years, and both Catalyst and the open-source driver have had support for quite some time. I've used laptops that had AMD's hybrid setup and it was far simpler to set up.