I was right there with you until I got my MacBook Air. Apple has really nailed the touchpad. It's far better than any other touchpad I've ever used. The trackpoint is good, but the touchpad done right is great. I haven't had a chance to use the force touch thing yet, but it seems to be an incremental improvement by the clear leader.

That said, the Mac keyboard is a distinct step down from the ThinkPad keyboard. If Lenovo could license the Mac touchpad, or Mac would license the ThinkPad keyboard, they would have my credit card on day 1.

Anyone remember this classic? It Came from the Desert

I've used FTDI products for *years* and with just a very few exceptions have had zero issues with compatibility and performance. They are my number one supplier of USB to serial chips, and I still don't have any issues recommending them. Their drivers are very stable, and they work hard to make them for every platform. If they want to go after the counterfeiters, more power to them. Filing a lawsuit against a small shell company selling back-room chips pretending to be FTDI chips won't do any good. Brick a thousand shitty chips and things might change.

Like the electric company, yes, you should strive for 100% uptime. But that should be a footnote in your report. The main report should show how you have leveraged IT to lower costs in other areas, make the company more efficient, and you've improved the customer experience in a meaningful way. Stop thinking your job is to keep the computers running. Start thinking your job is to help the company run better.

What have you done outside IT today?

For this particular use case scenario, it would be better to skip the EBS disks and use ephemeral disks with instances that are spawned purely for the build and test, check their results back into the build system, and self-destruct. You could even request spot instances since the workload isn't particularly time dependent.

You're right, if Amazon goes down, you're down without much recourse. But if you've designed your system to use instances that are launched on demand, you just launch them in a different availability zone and/or region. The odds that *every* Amazon datacenter goes down at the same time are extremely low.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mttyoaspa7U

Wish granted.

I would have just taken my shoes off and thrown them in one direction.

That's brilliant.

The whole debate over who's language is better is really a moot issue. Javascript can be coded faster than C in many cases because of its' relaxed syntax and foundation primitives. C winds up running faster (all things being equal) in most cases, with a few exceptions where the Javascript RT can optimize better. In the end, you just have to use the best tool for the job.

I was just in a hotel last week and had put my laptop in the room safe. I entered my 6 digit code and locked the safe. Two days later, I tried to open it and it wouldn't take my pin. I called the hotel staff and a maintenance guy came to my room with a small 10-key pad that had an LCD display. He plugged an RJ45 cable into a port on the bottom of the locking device, entered 2468#, then 1357#, and the safe opened. After it was open, it flashed LO-BAT, so that explains why it lost my combination.

If it's as easy as having one of those pin pads, why even have the safe in the room?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxwacom/forums/forum/236871/topic/4686734

The Wacom Inkling shows up as a drive with WPI files on it. It should work just fine in Linux since the heavy lifting is all done on the pen. And I didn't spend very long looking either.

The firmware thing was what caused me to start recommending other server manufacturers. The Sun hardware was actually really nice, well designed, and very stable. The ILOM was great since it was so tightly integrated with the hardware and yet completely out of band, and was included with the server at no real additional cost.

Then Oracle bought Sun and turned off firmware support unless you had an active support contract. That was a big *fuck you* to everyone who bought a bunch of Sun hardware and only kept support on a few critial units. I know firmware updates aren't free to make, but that's the price of good customer service.

Oracle, you've lost my business.

I thought the same thing. I would imagine they already had equipment to deal with 35mm film, and it was easier to transfer it to 35mm to feed that equipment rather than retrofitting the equipment to take a larger source.

I'm surprised they MANUALLY advanced each frame through the little shutter contraption. Don't any of these guys have a bag of Legos they could automate that process with???

YouTube has a much better video than the one linked in the article that contains the process they went through and talks about the capture and projection intended by the inventor.

You don't buy Cisco because of the features, you buy Cisco because of TAC. At 2:30 AM when you have 96 phone lines down, the call center opens in 3 hours, and you're getting call supervision with no voice traffic, you call TAC. I got an engineer out of their Sydney office on the phone in 14 minutes, and we had the problem resolved within an hour. (It was a telco provisioning problem.) Having someone on hand to support a problem 24 hours a day, and a supply chain that can send a part out in 4 hours is a safety net worth paying for.