Compatibility issues is not something I've seen. The whiteboards we use (Hitachi Starboards at our end, some Sharp at one of the other locations, and I'm not sure about the rest of the company) are input devices, windows treats them as a tablet device nothing more. They are glorified projectors with pen input.

Any collaboration software which will allow shared drawing on a single canvas works on these boards. Sure you get extra features if you use a specific manufacturer's own software like quick changing colours by tapping the side of the board, but ultimately that's minor and you may even get better features by not using their software.

Ultimately though the compatibility issue shouldn't really come into play at all since we are talking about one company with distributed teams. I would be very surprised if they don't standardize on a common vendor anyway.

Yes because the problem of the interface changing in Gnome 3 is made all the more better by completely changing to a different desktop environment.

Sorry but in the context of this thread, choice is not a forte of Linux. Especially when we're talking about dumb users, double especially since those dumb users will take whatever default options they are given, and triple especially since the most popular of the user friendly distributions doesn't give you an easy way of switching to another DE which sparked a whole bloody fork of that distribution (Mint) and even that fork has 4 different downloads for whichever DE you want and the "normal" way of changing the DE is to install a whole different OS.

No, in terms of the end user the Windows experience has been far more consistent than Linux will ever be BECAUSE of choice.

Actually I think it may be the opposite. Saunas are not really places for relaxation. Your heart rate is high and when you do it like the Finns you will shock your body quite severely with long warm up periods, sudden humidity spike then a sudden temperature drop outside in a cold shower, or rolling naked in the snow.

You Finns throw water on the stove.... at the very end. GP is right, even in Finnland. If you go to any spa or professionally run sauna you'll have a humidity between 10-40%. The Finnish sauna involves heating the room, then circulating the air out of it (critical on the second sitting to get the humidity down), then reheating to around 90C. You then sit in this room for about 10 min with a low humidity. After the 10min is over you throw water on the stove which instantly brings the humidity to around 90%. That burning sensation is humid heat which the body would not be able to stand for very long. Then someone will usually aerate the room with their towel. The high humidity, temperature and moving air will make most people think like they are dying though in reality at this point the temperature will have dropped by well over 10degC.

GP is right. At 80% humidity at 90C you wouldn't last very long.

I wasn't saying go to another industry, I was saying increase industry output. Computers can't think. People think. Sometimes the best people to run automated production lines are those who used to do it manually. I've seen this first hand at several food plants (a cannery and two baked goods manufacturer) which were automated to reduce costs. Turned out costs stayed the same, the number of people employed stayed the same, and output doubled.

Nonesense. Quality depends on what you pay for it. I want to see any manual worker on a Ford model T production line produce the same kind of consistent and quality components that a modern CNC line cranks out. For that matter I would like to see some of those labourers attempt to even build some of the components we now effortlessly spit out from the end of a machine.

You want quality? Pay for it, but don't pretend that it comes from old gurus hands instead of robotic assisted manufacture.

And the thing wrong in your post which others have not already pointed out is that many phones come with the ability to add a wireless coil of choice already, even older phones like the 3 generations old Galaxy S3 which has a pair of contacts right above the battery. That isn't even taking into account phones like the HTC One which has had wireless charging since its early models.

The interesting part about waiting to flip the switch is the "why" part. Why would you flip the switch? To install new firmware of course. Why flash firmware on the HDD? Because you have a problem with the current one.

This results in a few scenarios:

1. The malware is hyper advanced and automatically updates to infect the latest firmware.
2. The malware fails as soon as the user updates the latest firmware.
3. The malware completely overwrites the new firmware with the result that the user may attempt to re-flash or even send the drive back because the problem isn't fixed by the firmware that isn't currently installed because of the malware.

For this attack to work we're looking at malware of rather insane sophistication in which case I highly doubt I'm the target.

Yes we could concoct an elaborate scheme involving some deep firmware hacks on people's harddrive which is highly hardware dependent.

Or you could just send the people a phishing email.

I know which I would be doing if I were going after the millions of dumb users out there.

Increase manufacturing of course.

The wonderful thing about freeing up human resources is they can go on to do other things. Yes it's not perfect but the reality is people have been saying x technology will destroy the workforce since manufacturing at scale began, and the reality has been that as people have been replaced, manufacturing has become cheaper and as a result we tend to manufacture more.

Cheers, thanks for replying.

I must say the change this time is being handled very well compared to beta.

In case you need any further information here's a screenshot of what I'm seeing

Screen resolution is 1440x2160 and because of the small HDPI screen I browse with a 150% zoom on Chrome.
Of note is the topics bar already runs off the screen on the right but the main content is squished into just the standard browser width.

While I think the new layout is much better than beta, it has broken my normal Slashdot reading experience.
I was reading using Google Chrome on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3.... vertically. I tend to browse a lot of news vertically. This limits the vertical screen resolution.

The old slashdot layout imposed a minimum screen width and would provide a horizontal scrollbar which allowed me to see the stories without a sidebar visible.
The new slashdot layout locks into the screen resolution such that the stories on my screen appear to be about 3cm wide fitting about 4 words per line, and the right sidebar is a cool 12cm wide full of useless stuff (for reading purposes anyway).

Can slashdot please impose a minimum width on the container that contains the main content?

Problem is 100% reproducible on all browsers. Simply change the width of the window to around 650px. i.e. open up two browser windows side by side and the front page goes to heck.

Those bits of communication that only come through face to face can be substituted by more technology. Someone in a teleconference doesn't need to read my facial expression when drawing if I then say "Wow, holdup, I don't understand." There's a whole different method of communication when it comes to having an effective meeting that isn't face to face. Things like going around the table person to person and addressing each person individually, asking for confirmation of something being understood, not assuming that someone knows something etc. There's nothing magical about a face-to-face meeting that can't be communicated via a telephone using a different method. You said it yourself, it takes longer, but as soon as you include travel it is actually far more efficient.

Spend $5k on sending each person to a business communications class, and an how to run an effective meeting class. Then save yourself $50k / year on flights.

This. I use electronic whiteboards at work. The ability to share a session in the software is great. It works just like a real whiteboard except with more features and the ability for people in distributed locations to write on the same board in the same meeting is well worth it.

That was a trick question right? If the other side also has a digital whiteboard then they can scribble on the same image.

Slightly typically works out to be about 50-70% depending on geology. The lionshare of the cost of trenching is the labour with only a small part being engineering, and approvals (this assumes you own the rights to the land or otherwise have approvals to dig, if you don't then disregard this post).

But really the problem with fibre is rarely ever any of the things you list. Typically it is an excavator which digs up fibre and causes an outage. You don't get fire in underground systems which don't generate heat, corrosion is effectively a non issue, rodents shouldn't have access when things are direct buried and the network is typically out of the elements.

Outages are typically man made, though it's not common for metal thieves to pull out a fibre trunk. This one is a bit new.