thingie

It is not a buffer as such. Once the application holding the primary selection quits, you can't get the selected text, it doesn't exist anymore in any way. It doesn't get stored. In fact, you're just telling your application which content should it provide, when asked for the selection (not that it couldn't provide anything it likes).

Clipboard selection gets copied to a clipboard application and is accessible as long as you don't overwrite it (or even then, if you have more sophisticated clipboard app).

I wonder how many people didn't bother to show up at the election rooms because their vote wouldn't mean anything. Being pro-Romney in a strong "blue" state or pro-Obama in the "red" one.

No, what I admire most isn't the office itself, though it's quite nice, it's the location. I can imagine that you can, for example, get some nice restaurants and few other option to get a real food within a walking distance.

From my window, I can see just three freeways tightly surrounding this place-less office park from each side. And I am hungry, right now, there are just two ugly canteens that close by 2 PM anyway. It makes me feel desperate. Hunger is not nice.

Yes, they do. (Well, of course that something has to happen, but it doesn't have to be human-related interaction.)

http://www.viennatimes.at/news/General_News/2012-08-26/28744...

I have mac user walking around in the office and asking me what kind of a desktop environment is it, being genuinely (positively) surprised that it is actually GNOME desktop on Linux. Well. And I have other Linux desktop users (like Xfce or something even more 'geeky', even TWM) that are genuinely surprise that I can just plug in another display and have it work without touching the command line (not that I can't use CLI xrandr, but why would I).

It doesn't really matter that much, if your city wasn't destroyed during the war, it was destroyed during the 70's or 80's (in a process continuing to this day) when the communists governments decided to ruin every larger town in a same manner as the Americans did 20 years before them, massive tear-downs, urban freeways (right through the city center, see Prague), uniform large scale housing projects on the periphery. Admittedly, the scale was not that large, but it was the same kind of destruction.

Krakow's greater center is just gorgeous, I really loved it. But it was a similar experience, to a certain degree, as well. On a train from Katowice, the first sight was something called "Krakow Business Park", disgusting office park, a place that doesn't belong anywhere, I work in a similar project and it is almost the same. Glass blocks surrounded by an endless parking lot. Then some recent suburban development, complete clusterfuck under all circumstances. And looking from Kazimierz across Wisla, what I saw on the other bank was also very disappointing. Or this https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-dO_Cw7ayCQk/Tx2LuPNmF0I/A..., seen right from the castle Wawel. And this was not built by the soviet engineers. Not much has changed after 1989. Maybe nothing at all.

This sums it all. You don't need a war. http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/4967/houstons-cars-...

He means that his 24-70 zoom lens has the maximum aperture of f/2.8 at all focal lengths from 24 to 70. Cheaper lens would get to, say, f/3.5 at 24, but at 70, you wouldn't get more than f/5.6, for example. So you can't set it to 70mm and f/3.5, even though you can set it to 24 and f/3.5, because it can't physically do that. Of course you can set it to f/13 or even more, that's easy to do with an ordinary lens. There are some funnier lenses (mirror lenses, for example) that have fixed apertures. It's f/8 and you can't do anything about it, because there is no mechanism that would allow you to cover more or less of space before the sensor (film).

On the other hand, I was confused and disappointed that the lighting slider in the simulation doesn't do anything (well, it shows an icon, for a while, couldn't it just dim/lighten the scene a bit?).

The most common advice for them would be to get a prime lens. Especially in this simulation that offers both distance and focal length setting (which are, for this scene and 18-55mm focal length, mostly interchangeable), I'd like to have it. It'd also allow you to go (cheaply) to f/1.8 or f/1.4, which would be much better to illustrate the effect that aperture has on the depth of field. With a common f/3.5:5.6 kit lens and APS-C sensor, you won't get a shallow DOF and nice out-of-focus background easily, and that could be frustrating to a beginner. Especially when you learn to do it in this simulation.

On most DSLRs, I believe, you have to press a DOF-preview button (whatever it's called), instead, it remains wide open making it easier/possible to accurately focus using the viewfinder. Focus is what I miss most in this simulator, it leaves out a very important part of taking of the picture…

And of course, there is virtually no way to reflect the ISO or shutter speed setting, using the optical viewfinder. Not a bad idea to "simulate" here as well, because it's not funny to shoot in the aperture-first mode and forget to reset ISO from some ridiculously high value that you had to use yesterday in the evening.

It's not just a clock, but an ever changing installation that will always need the labor of those men constantly rebuilding it, to keep "running". I find it quite interesting, as an idea. Implementation could be better, I guess, but it provokes some interesting associations and thoughts. Which is, I think, one of the definition of art. To capture an idea or emotion, to reproduce and communicate an experience. Not just a picture.

Of course, it's valid to say that it doesn't work for you, or even that it can't work for anyone, because it's plain stupid. Like so many garbage art out there.

Well, it has few bugs. Or, perhaps, it wasn't meant to be used outside of the US. Compare this:

http://maps.stamen.com/toner/#17/49.19512/16.60929

http://osm.org/go/0Jv1v7aY4-

(I guess I could just fork it and try to fix it, but I'm not sure how. I wish there was a tileset that wouldn't give so much prominence to the roads, but rather to the aspects that matter in the city. Important buildings and landmarks, foot-only pathways, public transit lines. Freeway is just an obstacle.)

This is actually quite sad. When you try to explain downsides of the open plan office in noncontroversial terms and as rationally as possible, you get ignored. You get positive response, universal agreement, but nothing actually changes. When you use some speech figures to emphasize what your message, you get discarded with nitpicking like this. Nothing happens either.

And nothing will ever happen, it's a bad environment, but it's easy to set up, cheap and common everywhere. It still get the job done, though badly. You try to find a job with something better, but then you just chose to live with it, because it'd require different, worse sacrifices. That in turn sends a signal that it's in fact ok and working office plan. Is there a way out? I'd like to see a blogpost with this title, actually answering the question (preferably with something else than no).

Multithreading would be a great feature, working with an editor where the whole UI tends to block itself on some network (tramp or via sshfs/nfs) operations is unpleasant. It's also a sign of its age. I also miss, for example, UI localization. You can, of course, have everything hardcoded in English, but it's a limitation. Well, whole UI is dated. In (g)vim you can have nice pop-up code-completion, in emacs, it's not that nice. The UI is very dated, sadly.

Is there some kind of how to that'd say 'buy this single device (that is actually widely available at retail for a reasonable price), install it in this way and you will have something to play with'?

I use tramp as well, but can't say I like it. Blocking whole UI because of network problems, leaving garbage in the shell history on the machines I'm connecting to, getting confused (and hung-up) by different prompts. It's nice, but too volatile.

UI is the easy part. The listings that are accurate, honest and up to date are hard. Do you want to become a real estate company as well, hire your own agents, pick up the phones, take customers for the visits and so on? Or you need to provide a service that these companies (and some landlords, perhaps) want to use, in the right way.

Why would they give you out the exact address? A competing real estate company (not one, three, more) would immediately contact the landlord and offer him a better deal. Why would you list the price correctly, if you can hide some additional fees in the comment, stay 'technically' correct and look more attractive in the search?

I work on a service like this, we are quite rich (well, as a company, I'm just an employee), but we really can't do what you want. I'd like to, I don't like to use the service much, it's not bad itself, but it doesn't help you from dealing with the real estate agents and if I say that they are all liars and frauds, I'm not exaggerating at all.

(But we're in eastern Europe, things are perhaps different in America.)

Well, a camera that can't take the picture you want is as useless as the one sitting at home. And iPhone may be, in some cases, a camera that simply can't do what you want. It's a cellphone. Of course, you won't carry a DSLR camera with you all the time, and even that isn't enough, think about lenses, flash, tripod… but iPhone won't magically replace all that, when you actually need it.

Well, there isn't much of a passenger traffic to the Russia and back, there are facilities to handle the freight, it's an EU border (implying long legal procedures regardless of a transport mode) and the roads there aren't very good (in comparison). Baltic states and Finland lack connections to the rest of EU and again, it's mostly freight only. So it doesn't harm rail transport that much. Less obvious, but much worse problem is that there are incompatible axle loads and clearances, russian carriages are heavier and wider. Too much for the most of standard gauge lines.

Much funnier example of a country with multiple railway gauges is Spain. There are three widely used gauges…

Well, on the recently upgraded lines, there is an up to date system (bi-directional automatic block with cab signalling, not ETCS, yet, only GSM-R on the main lines), but of course, modernization is very slow indeed. Traffic density is hard to manage not because the signalling is deficient, but because various cost cuts that creates stupid bottlenecks (like not using grade separation at crucial junctions, or, also quite popular, not using switches that allow higher speeds to the diverging track).

(And we even got our own FRA-like nonsense: noise limits that demand to build a kilometre long, three meters high noise barriers for a single farm nearby the line in the forest…)

Czech republic, but you could, of course, see the same thing in Germany or Poland.

And of course, there are more frequent accidents on the lines that are equipped with only basic signalling. This year, a DMU hit shunting freight and one elderly woman died. But not because the DMU was badly damaged (I even think it's already back in the service), but because she wasn't sitting (the train barely left the station). I don't think that being in a heavier unit would help her. (Now, the line is being equipped with something that looks like ERTMS Regional, but... it's not. Another national standard...)

And yes, there are quite frequent problems with signalling failures crippling whole lines for hours (not causing crashes, at least). Almost like we can't have a thunderstorm without some failure.

I'm used to see 10 trains on an electrified railway line an hour in each direction, some of them very light EMUs, longer locomotive-hauled passenger trains and heavy freight (ok, heavy is ~2000 tons). With the last deadly accident with a passenger train hitting the freight (and falling from the bridge after that) in... 1970.

Modern suburban and regional {D,E}MUs are generally becoming more like trams or light rail vehicles in their design and, sadly, even interior. Lighter seats and so on. It's a general trend in Europe as well.

FRA as such isn't the problem. See, every European country has its own railway regulatory office, which is perfectly fine, but there is simply so little unification between the different countries, that international railway traffic between various EU countries is so painful, that it simply cannot stand in competition with the road freight. You can easily load your cargo on a truck and move it from Bulgaria to Scotland, but it's incredibly painful to do that on rail.

There are tons of various signalling systems, there are multiple electrification systems (even in a single country), there are different norms everywhere, various load gauges, available railway clearances… it's a HUGE mess. And it's expensive.

Some progress is being made, but of course, it doesn't get so easily through. ETCS (European Train Control System) is being developed and very slowly deployed, but only very slowly, it's expensive to equip a locomotive with it (more so than to put a multiple national signalling systems there) and you can use it on only very few lines. And you will never fix everything. Like, you are not going to rebuild every railway line in the UK to the continental clearance. Won't happen.

So, I don't think there is a problem in having a federal reguatory agency. The problem is that it's dysfunctional and nobody really cares. But not having anything like that is bad as well.

No, of course not. Window compositing is a huge usability feature. It made me switch from xmonad to Gnome 3, because it just feels so much faster and responsive. Also, live miniatures are almost necessary (at least for me) while dealing with 5 terminal windows and another 6 emacs frames. And you lose nothing (well, ok, you do, in some cases it can be slower, take few more resources and so on, but that's the case with only some apps, not general). Making compositing and using accelerated video HW the norm is a step forward, not an unhealthy trend.

So I use emacs with viper and it's great. I have no idea how to really edit text in emacs without vi mode and I can't open a file in vim without :q and running it again with a different argument. Yet I can edit text vi style and use superior (to vim) and convenient emacs features like modes, tramp, buffer management, org-mode…

Well, if our local transit company has a GPS module in every its vehicle on a route and can watch all of them nearly real-time ("nearly" is something like updates every 30 seconds), and we are in Eastern Europe, then any transit authority can. There is no need to "crowdsource" it.

On the other hand, they aren't very good in communicating the information they have. The best thing we have is this: http://idsjmk.jrbrno.cz/ and Google Maps.

There are another problems that are not mentioned at all in the article. Service irregularities, either planned or not. There are frequent tram track repairs, street closures… So, what changes are there on my route, if any? Was the stop that I'm planning to get on moved behind the corner? Where exactly can I get on? And exactly means exactly, cellphone GPS can't tell you decisively if you are at the right side of the road, for example. And that is a crucial difference if you are planning to get on a bus.

And what if I'm waiting for a tram, and there was an accident somewhere and all the trams are delayed. What now? Was a reserve bus dispatched to replace it? When will it arrive? And where, if it's a segregated tramway and the bus can't use the stop?

What? When I bought a new laptop (few months ago) which came with W7 too, it took it about an hour (on the first run) to install some vendor (HP) crapware, randomly popping up old-fashioned term windows running a lot of text, before I could use it, anyhow; it ended up with some… something. I didn't even know how to connect to my wifi, there were two very different (both in appearance and behavior) widgets for that, fighting each other. The interface was, on the first sight, very polished and rather nice, but after first few minutes, I started to spot things that looked like leftovers from Windows 98, most likely, they were. To actually do something, I had to download some 3rd parties software packages, none of them really fitted into the W7 environment. Three completely different fileselectors on the screen at one time? W7 problem too, obviously.

Well, I'm not making definite conclusions from what I saw, it was just something like 4 hours and I bought the laptop to use with Linux anyway, so I didn't really want to use Windows even if I liked them more than I actually did. But I really tried to approach it without prejudices and bias. And I really think that it's stuck in 1990's. 20 years before OS X and now even Gnome 3. Hey, it was even worse than Android!

Is there some concept of money that doesn't (almost) directly link money to debt? (so money wouldn't be completely worthless without debt)

Good. No problem.

On the other hand, typing anything in the activities overlay is very painful. I do it only by a mistake, because it's sooo slow, not only for the first time, but always. So is switching from Windows to Applications.