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Comment FAIL (Score 2) 112

You can get more stuff done with Facebook than any other tool that we know of

I know of one tool that I - and many, many others - can get shittons of work done with: concentration. Think about / work at a problem. Tinker. Fail, wrong direction, try again. Think, work, tinker. Only necessary precondition: no distractions. Works great. Tiring ? Hell, yeah. Rewarding ? Fuck, yeah.

Comment Similar thing happened to me (Score 1) 1

As a soldier, I was once involved in riot control in a remote African country. One riot involved me kicking through the window glass of a battered car in order to free the panicked woman inside. That was in 1989. In 2004, a shard of glass worked its way through the skin of my calf. Completely painlessly, mind you; after a couple of weeks, I could gently draw it out between finger and thumb.

Comment Re:I live in Austria, first thing I hear about thi (Score 4, Informative) 292

You are wrongly informed, did not search deeply enough, or maybe simply don't read German ? A team of Austrian archeologists is preparing to start digging, as soon as the weather allows it, i.e. as soon as precipitation and hydrology levels are so low as to let them work without danger of being suddenly flooded. Here in Austria, this would typically be from the end of April to the beginning of November.

Comment Re:I actually live here (Score 2) 292

Sounds like an idea. It would, however, entail to break the law by getting into the complex in this place. ( Pic featured in this Wikipedia article, in German. ), as well as, literally, walking over a certain public feeling of decency, as this place is a memorial to so many victims from nearby concentration camp Mauthausen, who were forced to work an die here.

Comment I actually live here (Score 5, Interesting) 292

And St. Georgen-an-der-Gusen is about a good hour's drive away. I'll certainly visit the place once it is opened up for the public. It is quite amazing what lengths the Nazis went to in order to shelter their weapons production from Allied bombing. Just outside the town I now live in, the Nazis dug out an existing cave complex, which had been a gypsum mine up to WO II, until the volume was large enough to facilitate a complete HE162 jet fighter production line.

Submission + - How We'll Program 1000 Cores - and Get Linus Ranting, Again (highscalability.com) 1

vikingpower writes: For us developers, 2015 got kick-started, mentally, by a Linus Torvald rant about parallel computing being a bunch of crock. Although Linus' rants are deservedly famous for the political incorrectness and ( often ) for their insight, it may be that Linus has overseen Gustafson's Law, which states that parallelization becomes more efficient with larger problem sizes viz. with larger data sets. Back in 2012, the High Scalability blog already ran a post pointing towards new ways to think about parallel computing, especially the ideas of David Ungar, who thinks in the direction of lock-less computing of intermediary, possibly faulty results that are updated often. At the end of this year, we may be thinking differently about parallel server-side computing than we do today.

Comment MX Blue is made for people who really type (Score 1) 190

I type on two computers:

- my ThinkPad laptop, which I carry with me around all of Europe and give courses with. I have a Storm CM Mech keyboard that I also lug around, in my suitcase, and always hook up to it. Not only does it draw attention, people also express amazement at how fast and precisely one can type with it. I don't care that it is a gaming keyboard. It is nearly impossible to destroy, can be taken apart because of the aluminium cover fixed with screws, and has Cherry MX red switches for fantastic tactile feedback.

- my Fujitsu Celsius workstation, for when I am at home. There is a Razer Black Widow with Cherry MX blue switches hooked up to it. I can type for an entire day and not grow tired of the loud clickety-click. Of course, that is something not to burden your colleagues with - but then again, the Celsius is in my private work room, at home ( I am independent ).

Going back to the rubber-dome keyboards most people use, when I occasionally must use someone else's computer, e.g. during a course to quickly correct something, feels horrible: mushy, imprecise. Yes, mechanical keyboards have a certain cost, here ( in Central Europe ) about € 70 for a Storm CM Mech to € 120 for a new Black Widow. So what - they'll last me for years, and years, and years. I can guarantee you: once you make the move to a mechanical keyboard, you'll never look back.

Comment The most mesmerizing is not the video itself (Score 1) 75

...but the text under it:

New video recorded during the return of NASA’s Orion through Earth’s atmosphere this month provides a taste of the intense conditions the spacecraft and the astronauts it carries will endure when they return from deep space destinations on the journey to Mars.

NASA is quietly, but openly, talking about going to Mars. It means I will be over 60 years old when they finally do it. But I will be there to watch the launch, and will be cheering and crying when they land on Mars. My parents saw the first man walking on the moon, via TV, and barely understood what they say. We *will* understand what we'll see. We will.

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