Comment Re:Let me be the first to say. (Score 3, Funny) 117
Did he have a ticket?
Did he have a ticket?
Wow, cool story. Still, the cynic in me wonders if that manager was fired because he didn't manage to take both of your passports
Ha, thanks, awesome insight coming from "Ungrounded Lightning"!
On some of the systems we put a neutral current eliminator to try to "fix" the 60Hz buzz coming off of improperly grounded computers. I think it was overkill for what we were doing, because by that point we had given up trying to use internal audio cards for some of our rackmount computers and were using SoundBlaster Live! USB audio dongles where we couldn't use digital audio, which made most of our system noise problems go away. But it would be nice to have an affordable NCE for some applications, like being able to run amplified speakers from my phone or laptop while they're charging.
In my car I get alternator noise if I try to charge my phone while it's playing music to the aux input. I can make it go away by using a Qi wireless charger instead of plugging in the USB directly... with the added bonus that I'm not fiddling with trying to plug my phone in while I'm driving. Another way to make the alternator noise go away is paradoxically plugging an inverter into the accessory port and using a standard 120V AC wall wart USB charger with the phone. (shrug). Next car will probably have a bluetooth head unit, which I'm sure brings on another set of annoyances.
Heh, I used to do multi-conference room / theater AV integration for large defense companies. The number 1 problem was always audio.
1. Test. Test test test. You can get almost any cheap thing working well if you bother to test and tune everything BEFORE the meeting. The most expensive thing can fail for silly reasons if you don't bother to test everything BEFORE the meeting (usually because some executive schlupp dials into both the audio bridge and VTC MCU at the last minute). Then freeze the configuration. Yeah, good luck freezing the configuration with engineers and tinkerers running around.
2. POTS sucks. Maybe some telephony devices are able to negotiate better than 8kHz 8-bit audio sampling if their codecs match up, but you're better off going with something with VTC-quality audio using H323. Most VoIP teleconferencing lines don't bother trying to beat POTS audio quality. So even if you have a nice Polycom phone that does good AEC and NC, you're still going to strain to hear what's going on.
3. Speakerphones suck. Most of them don't bother doing good AEC and NC. Get a good bluetooth or USB headset. Gaming teamspeak headsets are relatively cheap. As long as it's digital, so they don't introduce any analog amp noise from the system.
4. PC/laptop microphones suck. I don't know why no one bothers to test them to the same level as your average cheap dumbphone speakerphone. They pick up all kinds of system electrical noise, and rely on software to do any AEC or NC, which adds more latency. About a quarter of the people in our daily standup have laptop microphone fails on Google Hangouts or Skype each day. Most end up dialing back in from their smartphone when that happens.
Anyway, all that said, our current standup room setup consists of a Google Hangouts room on a permanently-fixed Mac mini with a $50 "Blue Snowball USB Condenser Microphone" and Logitech USB camera attached to it (the USB audio coming in from the Logitech camera was deemed insufficient, even for the small room we had it in.). For remote participants, I've had good experiences with extended use of the $200+ Jabra PRO 9470 Mono Wireless Headset, which is switchable between PC and POTS/VoIP phone use, but a simpler/cheaper bluetooth headset would probably work just as well paired with smartphone/PC.
And set up an echo server for everyone to test their setups. https://support.google.com/cha... . Or at least go to http://www.onlinemictest.com/ or something. Did I mention you should test?
I'm also looking forward to someday playing with Amazon's Echo thingy someday, since for $200 it seems to have a lot of the technical audio features of more expensive audio conferencing systems:
http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo/
assuming it will be able to act as a simple bluetooth speakerphone instead of only for all of the other AI junk they're cramming into it.
Oh, looks like I skimmed some other summary of this WSJ article from 3/1 that made it sound more definite
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hi...
Yes, this. Actually, we already have that right now. Minecraft for XBox is already full of licensed DLC for XBox, Dr. Who, etc.
http://www.cinemablend.com/gam...
Minecraft as a cash cow is complete, there's no need to do any more development. It's all business dealings from here on out.
Some Slashdotter put it best a few months back... "Microsoft didn't buy a game, they bought a generation"
Oh, she just uses her own domain, which someone registered for her the week before she was sworn in as Sec of State. clintonemail.com
whois clintonemail.com | grep "Registrant Name"
Registrant Name: PERFECT PRIVACY, LLC
Hey, LOOK everybody, Clinton supports PRIVACY rights from the prying eyes of the NSA!
nmap clintonemail.com
Starting Nmap 6.47 ( http://nmap.org/ ) at 2015-03-03 07:50 PST
Nmap scan report for clintonemail.com (208.91.197.27)
Host is up (0.083s latency).
Not shown: 996 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
53/tcp open domain
80/tcp open http
554/tcp open rtsp
7070/tcp open realserver
curl -vi clintonemail.com
Well, if anybody else in government did this, they'd get fired, lose their pension, and possibly face criminal charges.
When the people at the highest levels of power decide that the law doesn't apply to them, nothing at all happens.
So, on behalf of the rest of the world
This has nothing to do with her politics. If Bush or Cheney had done this, we'd want them prosecuted as well.
Laws which are selectively applied are crap. Assholes in power who believe the law doesn't apply to them need to be punished.
These laws exist so there is a public record of activities, not some place where you can sidestep that and conduct business elsewhere away from oversight.
So you're saying Clinton should maybe be fined for something other than violating recordkeeping policy?
On March 6, 2007, Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements, and two counts of perjury. He was acquitted on one count of making false statements. He was not charged for revealing Plame's CIA status. His sentence included a $250,000 fine, 30 months in prison and two years of probation. On July 2, 2007, President George W. Bush commuted Libby's sentence, removing the jail term but leaving in place the fine and probation, calling the sentence "excessive."[43][44] In a subsequent press conference, on July 12, 2007, Bush noted, "...the Scooter Libby decision was, I thought, a fair and balanced decision."
(from the Valerie Plame wikipedia article)
Just out of curiosity, what email systems does she use? Hopefully not Yahoo mail, that was the one that the Alaska governess had gotten hacked with, right?
I assume her official US government email would have been similar to the system I used while working for a DoD contractor: Outlook / Exchange, where you had to use your smartcard + PIN to encrypt or at least digitally sign every email sent, and there was a 50MB limit on your server-side inbox, 2MB limit on attachments, and no zip files or Office documents or anything else the virus scanner couldn't recognize. And accidentally hitting Ctrl-Enter-Enter would automagically send your mail off prematurely unless you were permitted to change that option.
This seems indicative of sense that the rules do not apply to me.
Nobody who would vote for Hillary Clinton will care about things like this. There might be some hoopla on Twitter and Fox News for a few days, and then there will be some stragglers like with Benghazi, but it will mostly fade out of the mainstream media within a few hours from now.
Plus, they've known that Clinton's been doing this since the Benghazi investigation, when Clinton staffers rifled through those personal email accounts to provide 50,000 messages for the investigation team. That this issue makes headline news now, the day after she officially announces her presidential election campaign, is pure politics to control the narrative.
Yeah, not really possible to put politics aside for the moment, since that's exactly what this is.
I would put down Java as a good language for learning how to do OOP stuff in the most verbose way possible. But at least it works as documented, and is well-documented. I find myself spending less time fighting the compiler and obscure memory allocation problems, and more time fighting the shear volume of code. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Otherwise, I think I'd have more fun doing something in Python, with some modules implemented in C++ to optimize the performance-critical parts.
If a subordinate asks you a pertinent question, look at him as if he had lost his senses. When he looks down, paraphrase the question back at him.