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.

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).

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.

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'?