That is all very interesting, but all I want to know is how I can use this to get a ride on my neighbours' WiFi...

You could waste many hours calculating how much it would cost (equipment, maintenance, support calls, unsatisfied customers, risk of legal actions, etc.). After spending a lot of time on this, you could most probably demonstrate it's a bad business idea.

But why bother? I'm sure you have more interesting things to do than writing a memo to explain in detail why a stupid idea is stupid.

It is also pretty obviously a bad idea from an "ethical" point of view. You don't have to spend hours doing boring research to explain that. You can just explain it.

Maybe most of the board will understand it straight away (if they didn't already when one of them suggested it). If not, then you don't want to work for these people.

So after explaining to them why you think it is a bad idea, just say you will not help implement it because you feel it's not ethically acceptable. If most of the board people are smart, they will appreciate your clear point of view. If not, they will show you the door, and you will be grateful for being forced to leave these idiots.

Could it be that a single idiot on the board came up with the idea, and that the rest of the board didn't want to discuss it and just asked you to "write a memo" to get rid of the subject?

I selected "other", because I can't compare what I have now (Unity) to the others. For the others, I have either not tried them at all, or a long time ago so they may be very different now, or not long enough to have an opinion. For example, Knoppix has some desktop which is neither KDE nor Gnome. But I only needed that Knoppix disk a couple of times, so cannot have an opinion.

But I tend to mostly use a file manager, and applications. So the Desktop environment doesn't matter so much. Windows always have minimize/maximize/close buttons. I don't care much if they are on the left or on the right side of the title bar.

I use Midnight Commander a lot in Terminal. (And on Windows, Total Commander of course).

In Ubuntu, I use Krusader a lot. I don't like it, but it's what comes closest to Total Commander (all the others are just lacking too many features).

I have tried most file managers, but if someone has tried many desktop environments and has a comparison, that would probably interesting. Especially since I need to replace my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop, and have to decide if the next one will still be Ubuntu, or Mint, or plain Debian or something else, and then decide which Desktop environment I want with that.

Someone please mod parent up...

I have actually read that "Director's Rules" pdf, and dont' see how it would prevent equipment upgrades to allow faster Internet.

What I see in the pdf, is that working on or installing equipment on public property requires a permit, and it lists what documents must be provided to get the permit (like a plan with street names, etc).

I sure hope every city in the world has similar rules. What is the problem? What did I miss? And what do republicans have to do with that? Aren't they against any rules other than those of The Market?

Indeed, it started as a two men shop at least, and definitely more than 9 years ago.

They may have fine SSDs, but the ones I bought to add to 2 mac minis were ridiculously slow for SSDs. Around 80 MBps read/write according to BlackMagic's disk speed test. Not faster than the original normal drive that came with the machines. In one of the Mac minis, I replaced the OWC with a Samsung, and it's much faster (I forgot how much, but certainly over 120 MBps).

So in conclusion, yes, SSD may improve performance, but only if they are fast SSDs. Some aren't and won't make a big difference. (and when they fail, they tend to do so without warning and completely, so be sure to always have backups).

Thanks, but that is actually not the same. Your single line does an "OR" with the searches. I use multiple greps to achieve "AND". ("search1.*search2" would not work either, failing to find them in a different order like in "...search2 ... search1").

plain text file in a Truecrypt volume, and little scripts to query/add to the file. It used to be batch scripts when I used Windows. Now I use bash in Linux, which should also work on Mac. The "t" script is to mount the Truecrypt volume if needed.

$ cat `which p`
#!/bin/bash
[ -d /media/truecrypt1 ] || t on

# accept up to 3 arguments, and filter on all 3
if [ -z "$2" ]; then
        grep -ni "$1" /media/truecrypt1/p
else
        grep -ni "$1" /media/truecrypt1/p | grep -i "$2" | grep -i "$3"
fi

$ cat `which padd`
#!/bin/bash
[ -d /media/truecrypt1 ] || t on
echo `date +%F` " $@" >>/media/truecrypt1/p

The trouble is that with the methods en vogue among this young generation of terrorists (blowing themselves up), they can hardly accumulatae any experience. That is, if they survived training...

You are obviously not one of the people who needs to work with these videos, but I'm still interested in learning which "21st century cross platform container format" you would recommend, that anyone and their uncle is able to open (without calling me on the phone first).

I don't like QT much either, but what else can play back ProRes and H264, move frame-by-frame (including backwards), and display timecode and frame numbers?

My question is unrelated to wikimedia, but this seems like the right place to discuss the alternatives to h264/mp4.

I often have to encode videos to send to a few people. Most are computer-illiterate, and it needs to "just work". So I use H264 in Quicktime .mov, because most users have Macs, and those who have Windows definitely have Quicktime installed. I guess .m4v might also work as a container, except it doesn't have a timecode track.

But for the codec, is there a realistic alternative to H264 today? A format which can fit a feature-length HD movie in high quality in a file under 4GB so that it fits on any USB stick including FAT32, and that anyone can read?