Then they're doing it too much.

It takes about 45 seconds for my desktop to come up from a cold boot to login screen, and I have not yet sprung for an SSD. This is long enough to be mildly annoying, but not nearly long enough to get up and do something else. My laptop takes more like three minutes, but it's a 1.6 GHz E-350 (2 cores). It's still not a huge problem because the desktop just gets put in Sleep mode and the laptop runs continuously (I have several services running on it 24/7 in addition to using it to drive a TV). The laptop typically gets rebooted once or twice a month, and the desktop about once a week unless I'm screwing with it in some manner.

Admittedly painful is the startup time of my Aspire One (especially on battery power), but that is almost relegated to the level of "toy PC" these days.

I don't window-shop Newegg to buy from Amazon. I use Amazon to sanity-check Newegg's prices, true, but Newegg doesn't have to be the absolute cheapest option. (There is quite a bit of stuff Newegg simply doesn't have, though.)

Of course, it helps that I live less than thirty miles from two Newegg warehouses, and stuff I order usually shows up in two days (and without having the crap beaten out of it as sometimes happens with cross-country shipments).

Apparently the problems always seem to arise when one of the cockpit crew steps out to use the restroom.

What if they never had to do that again?

Add another lavatory accessible only from inside the cockpit. Fit it with a negative pressure design so air continually flows into it, never out, and there won't be an odor problem.

Thank you greatly. I'd been going nuts trying to figure out why I couldn't find it anywhere!

There was something called "OtherMouse" which did precisely this. You got a red cursor for your second device (mirrored if desired), in addition to the usual black one. Oddly, it seems to have vanished.

If they're willing to invest a day or two memorizing enough about the vendor's product to pass for sales reps, they're still perfectly employable. The problem isn't with attractive people staffing the booths, it's with attractive but functionally useless people staffing the booths.

When I went to Winter NAMM back in 2010 or 2011 (can't remember any more), very few booths had "booth babes". There were plenty of women there who knew what they were selling, and some of them dressed up for the occasion while others did not. (Some of the guys wore suits while others wore cutoffs and sandals, too.) Nobody had a problem with this.

That would be my simple defining line. If they know enough to answer questions helpfully, they're legitimate employees no matter how they're dressed or which gender they are. If they don't, then they're hangers-on in some capacity. This is not necessarily a problem, but hangers-on should not be used as eyecandy. If the vendor's kids are milling around, and dressed up in an eye-catching way, this is not a problem. It makes some level of sense that they'd be there, even if they don't really know the business aspect. What should be deemed a problem is hiring random people specifically for the event solely because they're good looking. If they're both good looking and adequately trainable as to be decent sales reps, more power to them.

In other news, Ni!SA (formerly NASA) has cancelled their plans for a mission to cut down the tallest tree in the forest with a herring, in favor of a mission to acquire a shrubbery and return it for study.

There's no point trying to guess what employers will want by the time you get done spending anywhere from four to ten years chasing down the education they think you need for that job.

You'll never be the Purple Squirrel,
You'll never even see one.
'Cause I can tell you anyhow,
They'd rather H1B one.

This may affect the way we think about the people who have been swatted while using Twitch. Maybe they didn't even give away their personal information, but had it extracted at another time, behind their backs, and held until someone felt like causing them the most possible trouble.

The raw bandwidth available for transfers isn't doubled, it's quadrupled. PCIe 3.0 is twice as fast as PCIe 2.0, channel for channel, so the bandwidth would have doubled even if they had not added two more channels. They doubled it in two different ways at the same time.

That said, the old flash was probably not being that badly constricted by the older standard, and the current generation is only capable of twice the throughput. However, adding even more bandwidth than that is a nice bit of future-proofing and quite welcome.

Dvorak.

aoeuidhtns-

Which would be right out.

You should be aiming this question at forums where people do nothing but ponder keyboards all day, such as the above mentioned Geekhack and Deskthority.

I personally use a Cherry G86 series keyboard. It's pretty nice as rubber domes go, has a width equal to or less than that of any tenkeyless (without actually having to be tenkeyless), and has loads of programmable keys.

If you want something with a nice tactile feel that isn't loud, turn your eye toward something with Topre switches, such as Realforce. They don't come cheap, but they have garnered praise from many keyboard snobs. Basically they're about as good as rubber domes get, which is why you'll pay a mechanical keyboard price for them. I believe Cooler Master even offers a version with Cherry MX compatible stems, if you're into customizing your keys.