That's my point, the newer NVidia chips are defective here. The 940MX didn't hijack the external ports to save ¢2 on the BOM of a $2K machine

(my i7 is the gen 7, yours is probably gen 6 based on its being matched with the 940MX, plus Lenovo didn't see fit to sell the proper T460p with the real quad core i7 around here (France) — I'd have gone ugly machine (lenovo) if it was in the race at all, but it wasn't. Buying out of state is/was a no-no in this case (keyboard layout, warranty, tax status [work machine], etc.).

(next time, ... I'll see what the market delivers, but will probably be more willing to trade raw performance for less clunk. Still weeping my 2012 Samsung 900, it's a shame they exited the market. Still a notch above today's zenbooks in terms of form factor and finish.

The damn NVidia "optimus" laptops without hardware mux.

My laptop (2017 Gigabyte Aero 14W) has an nvidia GTX 1060 that I never use (the i7's internal GPU is perfectly adequate to run IDEA IntelliJ, YouTube's videos, and GNOME's desktop animation at QHD 2560x1440p. PLENTY ADEQUATE). So I never, ever waste 25+W running the damn nvidia chip, except for ONE thing: enabling the external outputs.

Yep, if I want to display something on a beamer, I must run "intel-virtual-output -f" in a clunky shell away.

Older laptops/chips at least had the good grace of having a real HDMI multiplexer on the external outputs, now it must be blitted through the nvidia chip.

Fuck you, NVidia. Fuck you again.

(and yes, Gigabyte, you failed. If you sold the same machine without the nvidia chip, even at the exact same price, I'd have bought it without hesitation. But yours was the only 14" option with a real (really quad-core) i7 and ability to have 32 GiB of RAM, under 2kg, this winter).

AVE is a blend of TGV and ICE depending on the stock vintage

Good points about other languages such as Python, Ruby and Groovy - none of those languages is as popular as PHP, but they are harder to get started with than PHP, and perhaps as a result are generally chosen by more experienced programmers.

These smaller communities of more experienced programmers do seem more likely to create and choose a dominant framework - while Django is not the only Python framework, it is by far the most popular, with the most addon modules.

PHP isn't a completely bad language, but it does have a lot of problems that drive many experienced programmers to other languages. And the sheer number of frameworks in PHP is a huge problem.

Generally a strong framework without a single commercial backer is best - a strong core team of developers is more resilient to future decisions and competition than a single company whose strategy decisions can alter the future of a framework.

There's already terminology for this, though not 'single word'

- long = high latency
- fat = high throughput

So a satellite connection would be a 'long thin pipe' usually, while a VDSL2 or fibre connection would be 'short fat'.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth-delay_product for background - as you probably know, the product of bandwidth (throughput) and delay is also the amount of data buffered in the connection.

I listened to Sugata Mitra talk for an hour about his approach, and his story is quite true. Listen to his TED talks before you are so quick to say he's wrong.

Or use AnyDVD (for Windows PCs and HTPCs) - it dynamically filters out the crap on DVDs so you can skip right to watching the movie. Doesn't require you to rip the DVD first.

For Mac, try the free Zevo ZFS from Greenbytes: http://www.getgreenbytes.com/ZEVO

For Windows, if you are willing to use NTFS on an iSCSI volume hosted on ZFS by a FreeBSD NAS, you could still benefit from the checksumming provided by ZFS. See the comments by 3dinfluence here: http://serverfault.com/a/122408/79266

Or you could run a ZFS NAS in a FreeBSD VM on Windows, of course, and use it via SMB from Windows.

LVM has some issues of its own, and requires careful setup to avoid data loss. Also its snapshots are quite buggy and slow. See http://serverfault.com/questions/279571/lvm-dangers-and-caveats/279577#279577 for details.

The most important page on any site is the About page - people arrive with little clue on what your site or program is about, so it's incredibly valuable to provide the About page. Just a few paragraphs written without assuming previous knowledge is enough.

Yes, this is really junk science, but I believe there are other studies that show similar results - see http://stereopsis.com/flux/research.html for a list, including links to the full papers (the site is for F.Lux which I really recommend to adjust colour temperature to get more sleep, for Windows, Mac and Linux, and jailbroken iOS).

F.lux is great, works on Windows, Mac and (jailbroken) iOS. One of the downsides of iOS devices as e-readers is that you have to jailbreak to get f.lux installed and not change your sleep cycle.

There's also XFlux, but I use Redshift too on Linux - http://www.ubuntu-inside.me/2009/03/flux-better-lighting-for-your-computer.html

[[http://stereopsis.com/flux/ios.html Now on iOS]] for jailbroken devices - see [[iPhone]] for jailbreaking.

Discussion: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=5347&p=1

Blue light in morning resets circadian cycle: http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2006/0201-waking_up_teens.htm

Tie-in to SAD and phase advance or delay associated with depression: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060501113832.htm

I have tried CrashPlan a couple of times on Windows and Linux, and had to give up. It would either fail to connect, or make very slow progress. It's not my broadband, since Mozy (Windows and Mac only) is fine. I also found that on Linux it would really hammer the system when backing up (4GB dual-core system) so it was barely usable.

Possibly CrashPlan's cloud service is the problem, but I'm not very impressed with the software.

For Linux and Mac backups, it's worth using something like rsnapshot, which is rsync-based and works very well to back up over 1 TB of data. It doesn't do block-level incremental backup, and it makes complete copies of files (rsync plus hard links) but it works incredibly well without writing shell scripts. It can do hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups, and has automatic retention i.e. purges the oldest backups in a predictable way (say after 6 months or 5 years).

rsnapshot works well for Linux and (I believe) for Mac, as long as you don't need fully bootable backups, and it should work really well for photos as 99% of them won't change after being created.

rsnapshot is very similar in concept to Time Machine on Mac, but without the nice GUI (in fact, without any GUI). Your files end up in a big file tree and can be restored with any file-copy tool.

http://rsnapshot.org/

"Our motorways have cameras over every lane which track the numberplate"

Not quite true - not all motorways have these gantries with cameras over every lane, but it's true that automatic number plate recognition cameras are located alongside every motorway at least, and on major roads, in town centres, etc, and this feeds into a national database to enable the police to track any car for whatever reason (not just uninsured/banned drivers or car theft - in a few cases, demonstrators have been tracked via this system and stopped). See my other post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2727483&cid=39387461

These gantries do often have speed cameras as well, and in some cases there are average speed cameras.

Many petrol (gas) stations in the UK already have these CCTV cameras to catch people driving off without paying.

The interesting part about this story is the mission creep and data unification - once the CCTVs are in place for company reasons, the government creates another application of the data for its own reasons. Not a new story - once the data exists somewhere, the drive to get access to it is much stronger.

This all helps to turn the UK into probably the most surveilled country in the world... see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8159141.stm for stats from 2009.

This petrol station initiative is probably tying into the nationwide UK network of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras in town centrese and virtually all major roads (not just motorways/freeways, but every "A road" too). Usually painted blue and on high poles, these capture and OCR the license plate of every vehicle that goes past. This feeds into a centralised data centre for queries, data mining, and real time alerts, for both criminal and terrorist investigations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK