orbitingpluto

The battery lasted about three hours with heavy use. Standby life was about one week as well. (I still use a perma-docked n800 with 64GB storage Canola to listen to rsync'ed audiobooks.)

I would seriously avoid using the browser, especially with Flash on that device at this point. Also I believe there's only a DoS CVE for SSH.

With the OTG USB, they're still a cheaper alternative to lots of Raspberry Pi projects.

I had a carrier locked phone that one day demanded that I log into Facebook. It would repeatedly launch and I ended up having to flash the phone. Drove me nuts.

I believe that people tend to be more forgiving when it comes to comedians and actors, simply because they have an emotional attachment, "to the time they spent with them". Simply put, they have a different context in which to remember him. Robin Williams is the quintessential example of this. I remember Mork through so much of his entire catalogue of work. I am currently writing this on Debian Jesse. That's "my time" and that is part of Ian Murdock's legacy.

Shouldn't text-to-speech fall under an accessibility feature? Computers have had the ability to do text to speech for decades. The quality of the computer voice should not be an issue unless the voice is designed to mimic a specific human voice. The argument that voices are no longer robotic falls short, as there is no, "this sucks" legal requirement for accessibility features.

I believe I have made a similar argument about hearing aids here. If a hearing aid alters/filters sound and "rebroadcasts" it so that the person can hear you'd have to be spawn of the devil to argue that this constitutes copyright infringement.

Twitter is a one to many communications platform, not a one to one platform.

The analogy holds because Twitter is 1:N, not 1:1. They are publishing information to a large amount of people that people use to educate and inform themselves.

And I already stated that doing this for every Twitter user is slimy. But retaining the record of how a politician has communicated with the public? That's in the public interest.

Again, think back thirty years to a scenario where a politician misspeaks on the news. No network would ever deny a request for a tape or transcript of a news program based solely whether the politician wants his statement to disappear. Everyone will agree that scraping and highlighting all deleted tweets is distasteful and slimy, but we're talking about politicians here. (Not that they're slimy, but that they exert an undue amount of power over the average bloke. Public interest, democracy, and all that.)

Think back thirty years. Imagine if ABC or CBS could demand that the New York Times not publish statements made by a politician on the nightly news or aggregate information about the political stances of a representative.

So do you have ActiveX running on Chrome?

When you're running on a tablet do you prefer to use Chrome over Edge?

I don't have to always switch either, but neither do I feel compelled to pigeon-hole my experience into a single browser.

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

This issue is why I don't use Selenium (in Windows) with anything but Firefox. A forced upgrade can render your boardroom demo non-functional moments before you have to give it.

Use the best tool for the job. I use Google Chrome for Googly things. I use Edge/IE for Microsofty things, and I use FF for the actual web. When javascript/Flash/HTML5 video in FF is too slow, I use Chromium.

I have a Skype subscription and I consistently receive complaints on the other end of the line. Skype worked well from 2007-2010 on Nokia N8x0 devices and Windows.

It's been god-awful since then. I think I've had one acceptable call. As for my point, eBay and Microsoft truly slaughtered Skype.

The article reminds me of how math textbooks/topics are labelled:

  Elementary Differential Equations (third year math)
  Elementary Symbolic Dynamics (grad-level)

Again, no aid was done for these toilets. Seriously, get the point. A team was sent to check out the crappers for the sole sake of the comfort of a senior official in CIDA. CIDA employee was complaining about it. Yikes.

I'm going to counter with the fact that the CIDA worker thought that this was a complete waste of resources. Sending a team of people to look at how pretty the toilets are is ridiculous. If you can't see that, please don't oversee any charity money.

And I never said it was a doctor. And it wasn't. Just an official taking a tour.

My antecdote about corruption in Haiti.

Went to a friend's wedding in 2007. One of the guests worked at CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency). I asked the guest as many questions as I could. There was a preliminary research trip before a Canadian official made her visit to Haiti. The purpose? To geolocate and photograph the facilities. And when I say facilities, think toilets. Making sure the white Canadian could poo-poo comfortably counted as aid.

Sure Haiti is incredibly corrupt, I remember that one of the ex-president's (Not Aristide) was head of the local kidnapping ring in Port Au Prince. But that's just small stuff. America and Canada use Haiti like it's their own toilet and want it to remain that way, in spite of the intentions of a select few and the limited posturing to the contrary.

One of the most disturbing things for me is to look at Hispaniola on Google Maps. The Dominican Replublic is lush and green. Haiti is a greyed out ####-hole.

I could go on and on, but reading up on an actual humanitarian in the region, Dr Paul Farmer, and his publications is a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Farmer

They do.

The "National Do Not Call List" can be useful in Canada.

Paypal may only contact you if you've requested info in the past 6 months or used their service in the past 18 months.

If they call, you can demand that you be put onto their internal Do Not Call list. They must honour that and you can make a complaint if they do not.

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/info_sht/t1031.htm

Let's go reduction ad absurdum with this:

Imagine that this also applies to medical equipment and that you do not own your own mechanical heart beating in your chest. Furthermore, only franchised doctors will be allowed the encryption key to tweak your heart settings.

Will the company that provided you with your heart reserve the right to terminate the software license, and consequently your life, at will? Will they be allowed to stop tweaks of the software that could save your life? Will the unfranchised paramedic be legally forced to not save your life because to do otherwise would result in a DMCA violation?

Another point is that what if everything goes to hell? What if all of our tools are worthless as soon as communication infrastructure goes down? Imagine having the landscape littered with machines so productive as to easily end oncoming starvation while we pull plows with our bare hands. Short term gain for long term misery.

...but not parabolic microphones.

I noticed that Google Play plays at 320kbps while Spotify plays at 128kbps (or lower). I don't splurge on $200+ headphones so I don't notice a quality difference, but I suppose some people can.

Google Play can be murderous to a data plan, but they also allow you to upload your own music. I don't think Taylor Swift is on a Google Play subscription either, but you can upload your mp3 and then have it available to you.

Well in the 80s, the term was latchkey kid. There was a bit of a stigma to being one in Stepfordish suburbia, as it meant either both parents had to work (and therefor you were poor) or you were the product of a broken home.

I have used BeOS 5 & HaikuOS as my no distraction operating systems. It can't do much, but it has a text editor, c compiler, and a web browser that is sufficient for most documentation and Safari.

It always runs quite fast compared to a lightweight Linux distro.

The most productive environment I've ever used is Gnome 2 using Compiz. It was incredibly easy to flip between windows. Compiz has since been abandoned and only the most die-hard fans try to fudge it into working on modern systems. I gave up after Debian Squeeze and just started using tmux instead. I felt that Linux was losing it's way after that.

Eventually I stumbled across Cinnamon (and/or Mate) with hotcorners and tmux. It doesn't have the previous configurability but it's still pretty good.

The reason people held onto XP for so long was that it just worked well and it was consistent. Many of the Linux GUI people should take that to heart. Instead they always seem to try to be in catchup or trying to surpass Windows. Gnome 3 and KDE 3+ have been so very unwieldy, resource hungry, or lacking in features. They've been the Windows 8 equivalent of the Linux desktop.

Even to this day, most people don't like the Metro style interface (unless they are playing with it on a phone). I'm blown away by how difficult it is becoming to use Windows. I will go into the Metro style settings and see that a configuration option is not present and then have to go into the good ol' control panel. Or vice versa. I'm getting increasingly drawn towards using Powershell by default so I don't have to backtrack.

Windows has been trying to force new "UI paradigms" to sell more copies of Windows. Linux should realize it doesn't need to adopt the new and flashy... unless it really is an improvement.

And modern electronics shops now are packed with dedicated hobbyists.... small but loyal clientele. Radio Shack has always overreached.

I have been using the Windows 10 preview to play around with Powershell 5. Up until the 9926 build it was a big improvement.

The 9926 build is the first I've noticed that the started Windows 7 "Search Program and Files" has been replaced with "Search the computer and web". Apparently you can't turn it off. I could not find a group policy or regedit tweak to turn it off. A Microsoft support article said you cannot, period. Everything you do is a search. This default behaviour, even in Ubuntu, was what helped me switch distros.

The problem with this default behaviour is that it won't fly in corporate and government environments. Any place that does a security audit will have to redo a security audit every single time a new system is placed onto their network.

Microsoft seems to be moving towards the trend of easy use rather than productivity.

Trying to make a child's first impression of computing being tied to Windows makes sense. But aren't there going to be issues with blatantly monitoring kids like this?

Horrible life lesson. Saved by my own laziness.

An easy hack for disabling many of these additional "features" is just to overload the port by forwarding it to a non-used IP:port.

This is only really useful for the Internet side of things for standard manufacturer's firmware or if you're using WRT.

For new routers, this is standard practice for me until a WRT option becomes available. Sometimes you can't, I remember not being able to overload something on a Linksys EA6500.

The Bigend trilogy is my favourite. I was actually hoping for another novel in the series. Something along how everything inevitably goes to hell when Bigend has his finger on the pulse of everything and the rest of the world has to "grind the rivets down on their Levi's" to get out from under his thumb.

Efficiency in LaTeX vs Word always depends on what you are doing. At one job I was using bash, Powershell, pdftk and LaTeX to extract data from PDFs, VLookup using Powershell, and then annotate the PDF with the result using LaTeX transparencies (remember to run twice). Really simple stuff. It was a shit task to do before it was scripted with LaTeX. (five hours of mind numbing work vs 15 minutes of run time, plus it gave me a window of time for a coffee run). Use the right tool for the job, which in my case, turned out to be a Rube-Goldberg machine.

arebop, why aren't you looking for the worst in people like the rest of us?

Frankly I remember playing with qbasic/basic and being put off by how unwieldy it all was. Kudos to any kid that makes anything in basic.

I didn't become interested in programming until I managed to get a copy of Modula-II off of a BBS.

So now having eczema qualifies you to be in contempt of court?