Dunno what the original poster has but I have a 1600 sq foot house. basement first floor and second floor. 795 sqft rectangular foot print. My wifi access point on the first floor gets a horrid signal in the basement (especially near the corners). My wifi router in the basement doesn't reach the top floor corners.

This is specific to the 5ghz bandwidth which I use exclusively.

Yes, custom antennas might help, but wifi routers are cheap (just for reference I have an Asus rt-n56u and a buffalo wzr-hp-ag300h).

House is built in 1946. There are many situations where a single wifi access point doesn't work, even when you'd think it might.

I've forgotten the WPA passphrases on two of my relatives wifi networks and of course since I set it up for them they never had a clue. Fortunately, the unencrypted networkmanager files were there and made it super easy for me to tell them what their passphrases were :)

OR more appropriately, wifi isn't 1st choice for security.

The article wasn't clear on how people "found" sweetie. But I have to say that without further info, the "possibly believing" part is stretching it.

This is the internet. That girl is very obviously CG. How many people have randomly had fun with computer AIs?
I recall the old MUD'ing days and Zork games asking to do stupid sexual things just to get a laugh out of you and your friends sometimes.

Modern day version = Siri. How many silly youtube videos have you seen of people asking Siri to do stupid sexual things.

Just because the CG is of what appears to be a 10 year old girl doesn't mean people aren't going to revert to the same silly behavior just to see what happens, especially if they KNOW it's CG and figure hey, it can't hurt.

In AC's defense:
Phone vs. laptop vs. big wall-mounted monitor seems an important distinction; the 10-foot view really is different.
That was in the slashdot article itself (not the linked article).

I chose to make my post because I thought it needed to be explicitly answered :)

The average smartphone has a 720p screen with a pixel density well above 200 now. In the context of this discussion, why can't an average panel that is generally within 12-24"s of your face (desktop or laptop) not have the same requirements?

Sure, there exists laptops today that do. But those laptops don't provide you with alot of choice (both are walled gardens, yeah yeah yeah, I know you can install other things on them etc etc etc, but that's not the point here).

That said, I know this is coming. We're seeing more and more high resolution ultrabooks/laptops. So when I say come back and talk to me again, it's very likely by the end of the year :).

Come back and talk to me again when the average laptop and desktop screen hits high density PPI :)

Being able to fire at any time doesn't mean that employees do it.
I live and work in Minnesota and companies here do RIFs (reduction in force) all the time with severance payouts. If they can get people to leave on their own, that's one less severance package to pay. There are plenty of good reasons why companies pay out severance even if they don't have to. But if they can get away with paying out less than they have to, great.

Yup, this is it.
Whenever a company needs to cut jobs via layoffs, things like this allow them to take advantage of attrition without having to pay severance.

Yes, Linus gave Nvidia the middle finger, and from a certain perspective it was for a good reason, but from another perspective, it's just "ranting".

Nvidia has insisted on closed source proprietary drivers. Does this mean the drivers are crap? Nope, it just makes it very difficult for the open source community to troubleshoot/support them.

ATI/AMD is in the same boat. They have proprietary drivers. Arguably, Nvidia drivers are better. In my experience the ATI/AMD drivers tend to have more bugs. They also have a tendency to release support for a new xorg-server well after the server has been released, thus forcing those of us on the bleeding edge to wait. On the otherhand, they help support the open source drivers, which is great. But, the open source drivers lag behind, so if you're a gamer and dual boot to Windows and have a great ATI/AMD card, it may not work properly under the Linux open source drivers or with a bleeding edge distro with the latest and greatest xorg-server.

Otherwise, if you want "gamer-grade" graphics, you basically have a choice between Nvidia and ATI/AMD. Both have their tradeoffs.

If you don't care about gamer-grade graphics cards, Intel drivers are open source, well maintained, and the new sandy bridge and ivy bridge graphics are more than good enough for almost anything but gaming (they're okay for low to mid-low end gaming but that's about it).

My solution is a thinkpad w520 with optimus graphics. I use optimus graphics under windows when I want to game (quadro 2000m) and use the integrated intel graphics for linux with bbswitch to disable the nvidia gpu so my battery life doesn't suck. But it really does boil down to, do you want to game? If so, you have no choice but a proprietary driver or not-up-to-snuff open source driver. If not, stick with onboard Intel. Decent graphics performance and much better battery life than most discrete solutions.

I used to work for a hearing aid company in IT.
The most expensive programmable digital hearing aid with all the options topped out at around $1200. That's the cost to the hearing care professional. So yeah, that hearing aid would turn around and sell for at least 3 to 4 times that.

Also, the company had an extended warranty that we sold to the hearing care professional. Most of them don't turn around and sell that to the customer. Instead, they pay for it themselves and then when a customer brings a hearing aid back they sent it to us for free to fix and they charged the customer for it. It seemed like quite a nice racket. Especially when you consider they also charge for the hearing checkup, fitting, and all of that other usual crap above and beyond what the hearing aid itself cost.

I'm not sure what the rest of the medical device industry looks like, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was fairly similar. I know the markup on my glasses frames is pretty crazy.

I agree with most of what you say, about things being better remembered than they actually were. I was an avid comic book collector as a kid and teenager, and over the past decade have re-collected all the comics from those days and re-reading them is more for nostalgia than anything else.

That said, this is exactly why x-men first class succeeded. They paid lip service to the overall theme which is pretty much archetypal (mutants = [insert your oppressed minority here]) and basic archetypal relationship between certain characters (prof x and magneto being yin and yang).

But beyond that, they brought in characters that most outside of the avid fans really don't know alot about and re-imagined them in a way that made it both fresh and new, and yet for those of us who have been x-men fans for decades, it was enough that we were able to connect them, accept the differences and enjoy them.

I for one really liked x-men: first class. it wasn't X2 good, but it was still an awesome movie. I'm also willing to accept non-earth-616-canon depictions of characters.

If you had taken a little more time to do some research you would have found that the Sun DS product you linked to (now called Oracle DS EE) is a rebranding of the Sun DS 7.0. This is not OpenDS. OpenDS was slated to be the next generation replacement for the Sun DS . While OpenDS has not been officially canned, the project has had significant setbacks with developers leaving or being let go and commits to it have slowed down considerably since Oracle took over.

And same thing with OpenSSO. Had you done a little bit of research you would have found that Oracle has removed all downloads for the OpenSSO product leaving only the source code, which yes, for an open source project, that is the guts, but Oracle dismantling the downloads and effectively no longer supporting the previous downloads is the same as killing the project.

I don't consider this a slashvertisement. I consider this a very good commentary on the strengths of open source, the bumpy road of the Oracle purchase of Sun, and a good example of how a good product can continue on with it's open source roots and succeed without having to compromise on those open source roots.

How was the parent modded insightful?

I graduated from college 10+ years ago, and yeah, two semesters of English may have been the norm, but that doesn't mean that foreign students don't need dictionaries. Hell, half of my professors and TAs barely spoke English and nearly needed translators (in some cases the TAs WERE the translators).

With technology the way it's gotten, I can totally understand internet connected devices being used as the norm for translation now.

I'm a little disappointed at the somewhat narrow view of language and the world that alot of people seem to have.

Stan Lee did the same. His contract with Marvel gives him 10% of the profits for various Marvel comics characters such as Spider-Man. He won his lawsuit in 2005 for the first spider-man movie because Marvel Entertainment claimed that the 10% was after production and "distribution" costs. I understand production costs, but the article here basically describes the scam behind "distirbution" costs.