Posts by Not_The_Droids 52 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Oct 2011
But the little box as well. TWC has gone digital for most channels, so every TV requires a small box (Cisco DTA), but some TVs get the big box (traditional cable box/DVR). They charge $2.50/mo for each small box (about the size of a Roku), and $10 a month for the big one.
I am so sick of the games I have to play with TWC - calling them and asking to change 'packages' every year to keep my bill under $150/mo. Otherwise they jump it to the $180 range.
I have a Synology 214se, a lower end version of the 214. I use it for pictures, movies, and general file storage. I've been quite happy with it, especially for the price (about $150, disks are extra, I used a pair of 3TB's). Firmware updates are still happening, and there are quite a few applications that can be loaded on it.
Speed is not a factor for me, but quiet and power consumption are. It's nearly silent. It also goes to sleep after about half an hour - disks spin down, and it goes to just a single blue light. But it does wake up quickly when prodded over the network, and then the files are promptly available again.
The Synology sits in my attic (it's air conditioned space), attached to a UPS. I set it and forget it.
I'm on Cyanogenmod 12.1 Nightlies on my Oneplus, and it was "supposedly" patched some time last week or so. I have been updating on Fridays. Also by running TK Gapps, I can minimize the Google bloatware to just what I want installed - no Hangouts, no Books, Movies, blah blah blah. See https://plus.google.com/+CyanogenMod/posts
It was not that long ago that I was reading articles about Loscher, and how he took the reins of a scandal-riddled bribery-corrupted Siemens corporation and was looking to turn things around in a positive way. He swept through senior management and began to right many wrongs. Now a few years later.... there he goes, under the bus. One reason why CEO pay is high... when the times are good, they're good. When they go bad - it's the bus wheels for you, my boy.
The big news here isn't that 61% launched a TIFKAM app less than once per day... but that it implies that 39% launched a TIFKAM app once or more a day. To a marketdroid, that's a number that will be on the upswing. Just wait until we have 45%! 50%! wOOT wOOT! The glass isn't 61% empty... it's 39% full.
No really, I don't live on another planet.
Never heard of a computer killing their operator. Or getting your hair caught in a computer ending up in a video on Youtube. Lathes, on the other hand, can be quite vindictive if mistreated...
I have two... An old South Bend, and a newer Grizzly. So I suppose my shop is a proper "workshop", but I don't do as much work as I'd like out there these days. Oddly enough, my shop has no IT kit in it, but I'm working on that (about to put up a tower to pass a network connection via radios from the house to the shop).
Saw an article that mentioned that Pinterest is something like 94% (or 97%?) female users. I know my wife, and a number of her friends, are users, but I don't know any guys that are. They pin pictures for one another, my wife gets artsy-craftsy ideas from there (the loft bed I built for my daughter came from a picture my wife saw on Pinterest). No real use for guys though.
My wife has been happily using Office '97 for many years (still using it today). While Powerpoint feels a bit long in the tooth, and she doesn't use Access or Excel, Word 97 does all she needs to do - unless she needs to open a .docx or convert to PDF, and then she'll lean on conversion programs.
Not very pleasant, especially for the good looking princesses who probably get chatted up at least 20 times a day by dorks like me. Jasmine and Kim Possible were quite cute last time I went to WDW... Wife doesn't appreciate that either, BTW.
We have the chairs issue at work... any chair labeled a "Manager's Chair" on the box is unacceptable for normal workers.
We also have a phones issue at work. Majority of employees are only allowed an analog handset with a LED voice mail light. Digital phones (with displays) are reserved for managers and above. Caller ID is not available at all (company does not subscribe to it from the telco).
Coffee is free, but I've heard rumors that may change in the future.
Desks with overhangs are reserved for higher-ups as well.
We weren't a rich family, so we couldn't afford a C64. I did talk the parents in to buying me a Vic-20 though. That's how I worked on my programming skills... guess that $99 investment back in 1984 or so did pay off eventually. I still have the VIC-20, tried to power it up last year. Alas, the power supply was completely dead (and epoxy filled, so no troubleshooting available), and after figuring out an alternative, the video did not come up. Poor thing...
I agree, Glocks are ugly guns, but my 27 is about the biggest gun my smallish frame can conceal. I lust after an elegantly machined full sized 1911 in .45 cal, but think "what practicality is it? I can't carry that monster.". My G27 isn't anything I want to show off (like said 1911 would be)... but for cost, reliability, simplicity, weight, and available aftermarket accessories... it's hard to beat an ugly Glock.
I had a PPK at one time (traded it away)... it tended to jam a lot, but that may have been the ammo I was feeding it.
Seeing all this US vs UK gun argument...
I'm currently reading Churchill's book series on WWII (fascinating read, I'm on book 4 of 6). Seems that in the late 1930s / early 1940s, GB was begging for every firearm they could get their hands on, because of the seemingly imminent German invasion (which, fortunately, never happened, because of the Air Force superiority). Part of me wonders - what happened to those millions of firearms that were shipped to GB in the 1940s and distributed to protect against invasion? Were they collected up? (I somehow doubt the answer is in book 6.)
Black helicopters, because we have plenty of those around here too...
MythTV? I was a heavy MythTV user until earlier this year... Would the layering of the software upon a standard PC hardware platform exempt it from the steamroller, or would its features encumber it and make an open source project a target? I used an Athlon 3200 with a Happauge tuner card.
So, if the Republicans can't have their convention while a storm is going on, what should they be doing? Hanging around Louisiana in a bucket brigade? News flash, life goes on, even during natural disasters. Life is not all about Louisiana. Not everyone can join in the fun and try to "help" those who are stuck on their roofs in a flood (aka "not having enough common sense to realize that they built their house in a flood zone and should have GTFO while they had the chance"). Honestly, at this point I have little sympathy for anyone who was unprepared for this. You live in southern Louisiana, possibly even below sea level. You KNOW what is going to happen. It WILL happen again.
Life goes on. Mod me down, I don't care, but the world will keep spinning.
My son's of this minecraft generation. He'd play for days straight if we let him. The saving grace of that game (for me) is that it allows you to run your own server. I set up a VM on my machine, taught him how to do remote desktop, poked a port in the router, and said "there ya go". He's now admin of his 'own server' for him and a few buddies, and he's got it running pretty well. So he's not just playing a game, he's learning how to run a box. Little steps...
Of course, now he wants me to move it to a real box with lots of RAM... Thankfully I don't have any nearby elevator shafts, large safes, or raised floor rooms... he's a bit of a PFY right now, but one day...
One morning, as I was taking my Galaxy S2 off the charger, it was quite warm and the battery was at 10% - after charging overnight! How could it be that I purchased a complete piece of junk like this? How dare it get hot, and how dare the battery not charge on a 2 month old phone?
Well, as it turns out, I'd left my security camera software running, and it had been streaming video (behind the locked screen) all night (on WiFi). Streaming video chewed through the battery and caused the CPU to warm up.
I have a feeling that a lot of these are growing pain problems; getting used to how the apps are handled on the devices. Leave a CPU intensive program running, and duh... it's going to get warm.
The Board of Directors for the company I work for was issued iPads to "cut down on paperwork".
3 months later they were back to distributing binders for board meetings. Seems the directors couldn't be bothered to figure out how their shiny-shinies really could work for them in meetings. So the company purchased 30 iPads for naught, but the directors got new toys.
"They could always talk to Microsoft to make sure SQLServer is up to the job for Itanium."
Somehow, I think that Windows isn't the primary platform we're talking about here. We've purchased a number of Itanium boxes running VMS. They can run UNIX as well. Oracle has databases for both OS's. How much effort would it take to port SQL Server to VMS? Probably more than MS would want to exert.
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