Wireless mice that take disposable batteries just plain suck... IMHO.

Mice of that category do everything they can to lower battery consumption: lower scanning speeds, lower transmit power, various sleep states, and so on. Every one of those compromises, however appropriate they may be for the application at hand, makes for a less enjoyable experience.

Rechargeable wireless mice.... they don't make those trade offs because they're not concerned with squeezing out every last possible second of battery life. You'll get better transmit distance, quicker response, and most importantly, an overall better experience that doesn't involve running out of fresh batteries.

For the absolute best coverage, Logitech has some models that come with an extra battery pack that you can pop out of the mouse and into a receptacle on the dock so you don't ever "run out" if you forget to charge the mouse. Personally speaking though, I bought a bunch of MX5000 desktop kits (Bluetooth mouse + keyboard) when they went on clearance, and just keep one on the dock and one on my desk, and switch them out when the one I'm using dies.

It seems to me that he's blunt frequently because he's probably one of the busiest developers alive.

If people were given awards for "keeping up" with email, he'd probably be in the hall of fame :P

I wouldn't dispute any of that, either, to be honest. Here's the crux of the problem: limits on data usage of periods larger than one second will destroy the evolutionary path that the internet has tread since its inception. There is a class of products and services that cannot exist today because bandwidth isn't high enough. If we set usage caps on today's connection based on today's bandwidth, by the time things catch up, we simply won't have the usage available to us to make these products and services viable once their existence becomes merely possible.

If we had set usage caps back in the 56k days, like Verizon Wireless did with their mobile data caps, then we would be in the asinine situation of having enough bandwidth to stream HD video all over the place while blowing through our usage plan on a 240p YouTube video.

AT&T is a good example. If I wanted to pay by the megabyte, it would cost me just shy of $19,000 per month to make 100% utilization of my HSPA+ connection. If I had LTE, that would be in the millions.

I'm disgusted by the fact that ISPs are trying to sell me on the bandwidth and then turning right back around and arguing that I'm merely paying for a connection, and actually using the thing costs extra. It's like they see underutilized switches as an asset that loses money.

I've often wondered if anyone's written up a guide on how to game that. I'm guessing that tunneling all of your traffic through an SSL VPN and then running the reset shenanigans might make that particularly easy...

I would have gone with "Campaigning for Public Office," but yours works too.

Buy a couple of USB battery packs on Amazon. 10-12 AH should last you a couple days, so just swap them out from your vehicle once a day.

Or buy a deep cycle battery and take it with you, then charge it when you get home.

The Internet is in the air in much of the US, popular campgrounds included. Some of them even have WiFi.

Go to Google Maps and zoom in on your location. The city itself should be enough. Click on the Link button and copy the link. Open that link in a new tab, and you should get the lat/long coords of your map's center to show up in the search field.

Woah, woah, slow down there. We don't want to be too hasty.

Camping shifts the circadian-health median of the entire team toward an objectively "better" state. It can be said that camping raises the overall health and quality of life for everyone.

Teamkilling on the other hand is a zero-sum game. The troll's erection grows proportionally to everyone else's level of discontent, with total hardness tipping the very edges of the Mohs scale when the voice chat explodes in rage.

As far as I'm aware, the "File History" feature in Windows 8 will do this, and it's much more granular than what was sort of "built in" by the "Previous Versions" tab on a file or folder's properties. However with it set up properly, even the "Previous Versions" feature that dates back to at least Vista (if not XP SP3, I don't recall off hand) will provide you with exactly what you're asking for though: browseable point-in-time snapshots of your files/folders.

One of the things that piqued my interest in MS Data Protection Manager was that it would keep 15-minute snapshots of "covered" systems, both servers and workstations, and those snapshot backups snapped directly into the "previous versions" tab on the files. It allowed our users to recover old copies of things often enough at the site we deployed it at. It was still a pain in the ass product though... :P

You're absolutely right, but that's a difference in software. While it's definitely possible for Intel and Microsoft and others to bring the hardware around as a way of delivering that software into the tablet platform itself, cost-competitive hardware that makes this possible doesn't even exist yet. The gap can always be closed in the other direction. I think the iPad is proof of that!

I have to admit that vPro feels more like a line item than a feature. By that, I mean that I've never encountered anything that's leveraged vPro to make my life easier as a SysAdmin. Now I've got a machine with vPro built in and I haven't the slightest clue what I could do to at least play with it.... I should get out more :D

vPro was ironically one of the features of this Helix that inched me closer to deciding to purchase it, though it wasn't vPro explicitly. Someone on the Xen-Users mailing list made a note that every machine he'd looked at recently that had VT-d capability also had vPro. The Helix's marketing materials certainly made a strong point about vPro capability, and a phone call to Lenovo helped me dig up the proper technical documentation to determine that the Helix does have VT-d support in its BIOS, Chipset, and Processor.

...really? Even on a Wi-Fi-only machine like the Helix? That's.... wow that's useful. I want that kind of stuff on my own machines... especially the fleet of immediate-family-owned computers that are more trouble to support than any enterprise machine I've been paid to lay my hands on :P

The reason I wanted VT-d support has to do with a bit of an epiphany that I had recently about the role of hypervisors in modern computing... I expect them to ultimately replace or supersede the role of firmware in pretty much every system we use. Xen, particularly with the existence of its XenARM branch, is moving this way. VT-d and AMD-Vi can facilitate this already---albeit not with the degree of reliability that enterprise standards require... yet---and more compliance with standards like SR- and MR-IOV will bring this to its full potential.

To illustrate, take the allure of VDI: Independent systems for each user, centrally managed with the ability to leverage datacenter-grade high availability and fault tolerance... but still subject to the same delivery restrictions of thin-client computing. Latency and bandwidth choke out the potential for true high-performance usage, and while server-grade processors pack extreme density per rack-unit of space, they lack the single-threaded performance of even modest desktop-grade chips. If instead of delivering only the video output, when a client connects we migrate the whole kit and caboodle directly to the machine in question and simply wholesale-expose the entire PCI bus to the guest OS. When the user shuts down or disconnects, we disconnect the PCI bus, and save state or migrate back into the datacenter instead.

Extending this to home computer use, I could migrate all of my machines off to my server instead of having to leave my desktop powered up all the time to get the functionality that I want. I could "lock" my desktop, "unlock" my Helix, and bam: I'm literally using the same computer. You or I might migrate to a local server, but one could see the average person migrating an OS into an AWS datacenter.

The allure is more grand for the case of ARM and Android. Lock your phone, throw it in a garbage disposal, whatever, then unlock your tablet: you're using the exact same OS that just "flew" over the WiFi, out of your pocket, and into the tablet.

I'm on a long tangent. Point is, it's a hell of a time to be a nerd :)

Sorry... the point I'm making is that the real competition for Microsoft is the tablet itself. Excellent attempts to shoehorn the Windows on Intel platform into the tablet form factor have been done, and some of them such as the Surface Pro and the ThinkPad Helix have done a really good job at it given the constraints of the technology itself---the bound of which is mostly the Intel chips themselves.

The fact that my Helix has an Intel chip in it is enough for me to want it as the device that fits my needs as a tablet---aided greatly by the fact that it actually IS a tablet. With the catalogs of apps available on iOS and Android being so comprehensive, the benefit of the Helix's or Surface's pedigree doesn't shine as bright as it would have even a year ago. That benefit of course is that I can run damn near anything on it if I need to, "Full Windows" included. If that benefit itself becomes wholly irrelevant by the time Windows becomes cost-competitive in the tablet platform, then its market in that platform will cease to exist.

I'm typing this from a ThinkPad Helix, which I decided to purchase as I felt it offered me a little bit more of what I was looking for than the Surface Pro did. It's definitely got its faults, but it's worth pointing out that they're Lenovo's faults rather than anything to do with Windows.

It's the right product for me, but the thing holding it back is---of course---the price. Microsoft has a huge advantage with x86 being on their side, but unless they can get the platform down to a price that's competitive with other products in the same market, at the rate things are going that advantage provided by the platform itself will likely evaporate as other platforms' app catalogs close the gap and render the advantage of "being Wintel" completely moot.

That's not to say that we're not at least halfway there already. An iPad is a paradoxically capable device in a world that Microsoft has ruled for decades on compatibility and ubiquity alone, especially given the limitations of the hardware and form factor itself.

I should probably add: I've been running the D-Link for 3 or 4 years now.