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Comment Re:I miss work (Score 1) 404

by MikeS2k (#33750962) Attached to: My Job Is..

Seconded. I find it takes about 4 or so months until I'm comfortable enough to show up to work without the "heart in chest" sensation. Once I'm settled in, I'm fine. It's the whole process of going through the interviews, being the "new guy", meeting many new faces to be daunting enough for me to not answer the phone when the prospective bosses phone up.
I was unemployed for about a year - either not bothering to apply for jobs, or working up the courage to send off my application only to claim unavailability when the interview phone call came. I decided I needed to get over my fears and applied to work in a high school. Been there over three years now.

Comment Re:32" + 15" LCDs (Score 1) 375

by MikeS2k (#33043932) Attached to: How Big Is Your Primary Display?

I bought a cheap 32" 1080p LCD TV for use as my primary display and I'm happy with it so far; the main things I've had:

using VGA output sucks - I never really noticed a difference between VGA and DVI on my 22" LCD, but on this 32" LCD the colours are washed out and the text a little blurred (you see this most with red text). Using a DVI - HDMI adapter with a HDMI lead is fine. This could be VGA itself or just an issue with my cheap 32" panel.

The pixel size is fine for me, but even at 1080p resolutions in games Anti-Aliasing is still needed.

I run mine with a DPI of about 125 (as opposed to Windows's standard 90dpi) so I've upped the font size a little.
The rational for getting a HDTV was that it was practically as cheap as the cheapest 26-27" 1080p monitors were - so I opted to just go for a 32" HDTV.
I have bad eyes (bad eyes at 24 years old!) and I get headaches, I find the further away I sit from a display the better.
A few other users wonder how I can even use a display and font sizes so large. I wonder the same when I sit at their 19" displays set with tiny little fonts.

I also bought a wall-mounting kit, but the kit I have is meant for standard monitors - a standard VESA mount will not fit a HDTV as the HDTV mount holes are spaced much further apart. (you can actually tilt a vesa mount sideways and use the two top holes on the HDTV to bolt onto it... but I don't fancy having my display falling off of my wall) Bit of a dumb mistake to make on my part. :)

You will need to buy a specific HDTV mount.
Education

Lower Merion School District Update 367

Posted by kdawson from the someone-to-watch-over-me dept.
Mike_EE_U_of_I and jargon82 were among a number of readers who sent an update on the Lower Merion School District webcam spying case (see Related Stories for our discussions of the affair over the last couple of months). The school had originally stated that capturing laptop photos in students' homes had only happened 42 times. It turns out what they meant was that there were 42 instances when they began intensive surveillance on the suspected stolen computers. This consisted of (among other things) transmitting a picture from the laptop's webcam every 15 minutes. This may have gone on for weeks. In total, it appears that there were thousands of photos. One of the key administrators involved has been answering all questions about the program by invoking the Fifth Amendment.
The Almighty Buck

Record-Breaking Black Friday For eBay's PayPal 115

Posted by Soulskill from the conspicuous-consumption dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "eBay's PayPal division reported that PayPal processed 20 percent more transactions on Black Friday compared to last year. PayPal didn't release the total payment volume, but claimed that its Payflow Gateway system processes nearly a quarter of e-commerce, while its direct sales numbers reflect 12 percent of all e-commerce. In general, reports from a number of e-tailers and retailers indicated that consumers spent more on Black Friday than in 2008, when the United States was in the midst of a recession. However, it's still unclear whether shoppers bought more on Black Friday, when they could expect a discount on what usually is one of the busiest days in the holiday season, or whether the pattern will continue. In 2008, shoppers stopped buying in early December, a shock that the US economy felt well into 2009." How did your Black Friday turn out? Did you wait in endless lines and contribute to the trampling deaths of fellow shoppers, sit at home and help take down your favorite online retailer's servers, or eschew the process altogether?
Handhelds

Modded UX490 UMPC Shows Off Years of Community Development 75

Posted by timothy from the soldered-on-a-new-warranty-too dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The community at www.MicroPCTalk.com have spent the last few years devising all sorts of mods and tweaks for the Sony VAIO UX-series UMPC. Now they've thrown nearly all of their major breakthroughs into one machine. Using the latest UX model (UX490) as the base, the original SSD has been swapped for a speedy 128GB SSD, the CPU has been unsoldered from the mobo and replaced with a Core 2 Duo U7700 (making this probably the smallest computer to use said CPU). The original EDGE module has been removed, and carefully put in its place is an E169 Huawei terminal which provides up to 7.2mbps 3G (HSDPA), voice and texting. On top of this, the unit quad-boots Mac OS X, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP (and the Huawei terminal works under Mac OS X as well)."
The Internet

Pirate Bay Shuts Down Tracker, Switches To Distributed Hash Table 327

Posted by timothy from the look-at-our-semi-clean-hands dept.
think_nix writes "The Pirate Bay has shut down their BitTorrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using Distributed Hash Table to distribute the torrents. The Pirate Bay Blog states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The Local reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of TPB's owners, and may decide the outcome of the case."

Comment Re:One flaw (Score 1) 316

by MikeS2k (#29951948) Attached to: An Inbox Is Not a Glove Compartment

I was an ordinary helpdesk drone and I had access to all of my customers e-mails. I worked for a large UK DSL ISP.
Infact, I would semi-regularly have customers phoning me up asking me to read out their e-mails, as if I was some sort of human "speaking clock".

"Do I have any e-mails from 'sonnyjim'? Oh, could you read it out to me? See, I'm not at my computer and sonnyjim is my son who's in Australia..."

I would do so if I was happy with the customers identity.
I don't recall anyone ever abusing this facility. From what I saw, the contents of every mailbox I went into wouldn't make riveting reading - it's not all "carry on" affairs in there. We had better things to do, like browsing BBC news and reading Slashdot.
Businesses

Nothing To Fear But Fearlessness Itself? 660

Posted by Soulskill from the now-that-halloween-is-over dept.
theodp writes "In a post last August, Robert X. Cringely voiced fears that Goldman Sachs and others were not so much evil as 'clueless about the implications of their work,' leaving it up to the government to fix any mess they leave behind. 'But what if government runs out of options,' worried Cringely. 'Our economic policy doesn't imagine it, nor does our foreign policy, because superpowers don't acknowledge weakness.' And now his fears are echoed in a WSJ opinion piece by Peggy Noonan titled 'We're Governed by Callous Children.' She writes, 'We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists — they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.' With apologies to FDR, do we have nothing to fear but fearlessness itself?"
Games

Blizzcon 2009 Wrap-Up 297

Posted by Soulskill from the this-post-is-not-available-over-LAN dept.

Last year's Blizzcon was tremendously popular. So much so that their servers were unable to handle the strain of fans competing for 15,000 available tickets. This year, Blizzard was more prepared; they made an additional 5,000 tickets available and set up a queue so that the transaction servers weren't overwhelmed. CEO Mike Morhaime said during the keynote address that if you weren't able to get into the queue within 30 seconds of its opening, the tickets were sold out before your turn came. Tens of thousands more chose to order the pay-per-view coverage, demonstrating the extraordinary enthusiasm felt for Blizzard's games. Their presentations didn't disappoint. Read on for details on the status of StarCraft II, Diablo III, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and the new Battle.net. It's divided into sections by game in case you're only interested in one or two of them.
IBM

IBM, Other Multinationals "Detaching" From the US 812

Posted by kdawson from the hear-the-weather's-fine-in-dubai dept.
theodp writes "If you're brilliant, work really hard, and earn a world-class doctorate from a US university, IBM has a job for you at one of its US research sites — as a 'complementary worker' (as this 1996 piece defined the then-emerging term). But be prepared to ship out to India or China after you've soaked up knowledge for 13 months as a 'long-term supplemental worker.' Newsweek sketches some of the bigger picture, reporting that IBM, HP, Accenture, and others are finding it profitable to detach from the United States (even patenting the process). 'IBM is one of the multinationals that propelled America to the apex of its power, and it is now emblematic of the process of creative destruction pushing America to a new, less dominant, and less comfortable position.'"
Censorship

Woman With Police-Monitoring Blog Arrested 847

Posted by Soulskill from the there-are-better-hobbies dept.
Kris Thalamus writes "The Washington Post reports that a Virginia woman is being held in custody by police who allege that information she posted on her blog puts members of the Jefferson area drug enforcement task force at risk. 'In a nearly year-long barrage of blog posts, she published snapshots she took in public of many or most of the task force's officers; detailed their comings and goings by following them in her car; mused about their habits and looks; hinted that she may have had a personal relationship with one of them; and, in one instance, reported that she had tipped off a local newspaper about their movements. Predictably, this annoyed law enforcement officials, who, it's fair to guess, comprised much of her readership before her arrest. But what seems to have sent them over the edge — and skewed their judgment — is Ms. Strom's decision to post the name and address of one of the officers with a street-view photo of his house. All this information was publicly available, including the photograph, which Ms. Strom gleaned from municipal records.'"
Microsoft

US Court Tells Microsoft To Stop Selling Word 403

Posted by Soulskill from the somebody's-not-having-a-good-day dept.
oranghutan writes "A judge in a Texas court has given Microsoft 60 days to comply with an order to stop selling Word products in their existing state as the result of a patent infringement suit filed by i4i. According to the injunction, Microsoft is forbidden from selling Word products that let people create XML documents, which both the 2003 and 2007 versions let you do. Michael Cherry, an analyst quoted in the article, said, 'It's going to take a long time for this kind of thing to get sorted out.' Few believe the injunction will actually stop Word from being sold because there are ways of working around it. In early 2009, a jury in the Texas court ordered Microsoft to pay i4i $200 million for infringing on the patent. ZDNet has a look at the patent itself, saying it 'sounds a bit generic.'"
Music

Opera Being Composed On Twitter 99

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the how-to-jump-the-shark dept.
musefrog writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK's Royal Opera House is to stage an opera created through social networking site Twitter. 'Members of the public have been invited to submit their 'tweets' online — messages of up to 140 characters — which will form the new libretto.The first scene of the as-yet-untitled work has already been completed and features a man who has been kidnapped by a group of birds. Excerpts will be performed at the Royal Opera House in September.' I'm personally looking forward to lots of idiotic net memes and inane emo ramblings being trilled out by aging sopranos."

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