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http://i.imgur.com/EEr1G.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/7SwCq.jpg

Looking at the currency conversion chart over the last 5 years (note axis doesn't start at 0) you can see that MS is getting less dollar or Euro for each £1 GBP in income. The chart appears to show an initially fairly steady exchange giving, for every £1, around abouts $2 or €1.30, which has since dropped to around $1.60 (down 25%) or €1.20 (down 8%).

Now look at the second chart on that link. We can see that over the 10 year period the 8% drop in the amount of Euros being obtained for £1 GBP does look like a sustained currency difference. MS presumably has some European division, probably the one in low-tax Ireland, looking at their figures and sure enough UK sales are looking down over the long term due to currency fluctuations.

Do I buy that? Nope. MS is a US company and all financial reporting that matters is in USD. I'd bet even all internal reporting that matters is in USD, so I doubt this is some internal bureaucracy mishap. Looking at both charts combined, i.e. 2002 - 2012, the pound has been up for a while but now back around where it was. Keep going back if you like, the interactive chart is here. $1.60 for a £1 looks to be about the typical value.

Price rises are justified by unfavourable exchange rate movements. Prices increase in UK because of Stirling:Euro, prices rise in Europe because of Euro:dollar. It's always one way. They're never justifying a price cut on the back of favourable movements. I'm not just cynical about MS specifically, it's quarterly reporting. Gains are considered favourably for the quarter but then basically considered in the bank and there's a new baseline for next quarter. They're never really considered temporary, soon as it falls back it's a problem that needs addressed.

While I'm here I'll note the low value of the pound is largely an intentional effort by the government to entice foreign investment.

I should also note that what TFA should really have done is taken the actual pricing faced by customers in each area and made the comparison. It's possible the UK price was discounted all along (very surprising and against the norm if so however). For whatever reason, they didn't, and I don't have that info to provide it myself.

And my picture omits everything from December to the present day, in which Elop has done nothing to drag NOK out of the sewer. Let's see what has happened since January 1.

http://i.imgur.com/PgNFG.png

Source: Yahoo Finance NOK

Go cry more

Fact: NOK is circling the drain and Elop thinks that suing companies will stem the flow of this river of red ink. Sorry, but lawsuits take more time than actual innovation and even then, they do not take care of the core problems with a company. Nokia is a dead company walking.

--
BMO

>I see this as good evidence that Nokia is completely controlled by Microsoft.

Ya think?

This is like SCO vs. World+Dog complete with failing company that's drowning itself in a 5 gallon pail at the direction of (mis) management. Except this time around, the backing of Microsoft is more blatant. They are no longer under Sherman Antitrust supervision. They have carte blanche to do what they want until someone says stop.

http://i.imgur.com/f2yqU.jpg

--
BMO

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DerivativeTeam/Derivatives

Oh look, Mint is on that list. I'm not running a Ubuntu official distro either, but my browser agent shows as: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0.

Why? Because the distro I have installed, while it maintains its own repos for modern software, is based on Ubuntu LTS and doesn't bother building their own packages for anything that's actively maintained in the Ubu repos. There's nothing to be gained from duplicating work like that, and my distro of choice is in the top 20 on Distrowatch. I would lay odds that a fair number of other distributions do the same thing, which artificially inflates the numbers for Ubuntu.

If you want to help somebody choose a distro, ask them where they're coming from. I usually suggest either gnome or KDE as a first Linux UI, because it's familiar, though I personally prefer e17 by a very wide margin (and e17 can be made to look/behave like either gnome or KDE). Once you know where they're coming from (to help pick which DE), ask what they want to do with the system. With those two pieces of information it's fairly easy to find a distro that will work for them. Consult here, if you need suggestions: http://i.imgur.com/jy1BF.png :)

My reaction

Organic Pineapple vs Store Pineapple, my favorite grocery story to tell.

Both have the same picked date printed on the attached label, came from the same location.

The organic one rotted in 4 days. Crown unsavable.

"Regular" one died in roughly three weeks, and the crown produced this wonderful plant. Both fruit were roughly the same shade of yellow/green (regular one maybe a tad darker.)

Also, the 'organic' pineapple? Size of my fist.

Regular? My head.

I'll stick with Dole, thanks.

I think I can sum up your argument with this:
http://i.imgur.com/5Nad9.jpg

They've released a few screenshots demonstrating the cleaner, lighter typeface and refined iconography.

There are problems with MOND indeed. Take a look at the predicted power spectrum of matter: http://i.imgur.com/Ouwin.png
Here the Cold Dark Matter model fits experimental results exactly, while MOND is way off.
(Stolen from http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.1320v1 which is a good review of CDM vs MOND.)

I am, right this second, looking at a page on my company's SP site with Safari on a Mac. It's a basic spreadsheet-like page. I click "Actions" -> "Export to Spreadsheet" and I'm told "To export a list, you must have a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible application." So, I save the page as HTML, open it in an editor, strip out everything but the main <table>, clean up the code just a bit (remove IMG tags, etc.) and drag it onto the Excel icon in my dock and guess what? IT OPENS.

Fun fact #1: You know how a basic HTML table looks pretty much like a spreadsheet? Excel can open HTML files that contain tables. It's actually quite good and supports a lot of formatting: bold, ital, centering, rowspan & colspan, fonts, text sizes, etc. Even background colors in TDs.

Fun fact #2: It is TRIVIAL to make a PHP/MySQL site "export" to Excel. Just make sure it's nothing but a table and add ONE LINE to the top of your page:

header("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel");

And yet MS won't let me export this page unless I'm running Windows. See? There it is: basic, simple, core functionality that doesn't work on a Mac, for no good reason. FUCK SHAREPOINT.

Yeah, evolution... http://i.imgur.com/avgcv.jpg

I also think we should do something, even without 100% perfect knowledge, since acting is better than not if the theory is correct.

Then lets accelerate research on fusion power. It seems perfectly doable, with little downside, even if AGW isn't a problem.

Incidentally there are some good scientists that say AGW isn't a serious problem.

Here's a link for you. Is "microsoft.com" a good enough source? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx

"Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 supports several commonly used Web browsers. This article describes different levels of Web browser support [emphasis mine], browser compatibility for published sites, and how ActiveX controls affect features... SharePoint Server 2010 supports several commonly used Web browsers. However, certain Web browsers might cause some SharePoint Server 2010 functionality to be downgraded, limited, or available only through alternative steps."

There's more to the world than just IE and Firefox on Windows. I work in a large publishing company (1,000s of employees) and we're close to 50% Mac overall. (And it's about 90% in design, production, etc.--you know, the departments that actually make what the company sells.) There is a LOT of key stuff in SP that doesn't work, or doesn't work well, on a Mac.

And in other news, here's how MS thinks Wiki software (and HTML in general) should work.
http://imgur.com/IaHTb
1) The whole point of Wikis is that you can edit them WITHOUT knowing HTML -- just use *, #, etc.
2) <strong> and <b> tags?!?!? <font> tags in 2012? Makes me want to shoot myself in the back of the head... twice.

I almost won a distance competition in Boy's Brigade in elementary school with this design. It was just a piece of paper crumpled up as tight as I could squeeze it (I think I stepped on it a couple times too) and thrown as hard as possible. The guy who came in second of course argued that it wasn't an airplane. I got some kind of award, though it might have been some kind of "outside the box" award.

My favorite is still "by the end of this year, Santorum will be on the lips of every young Republican"

sure it would look like the Star Trek Enterprise on the outside but once you get inside it then it will be like any other Las Vegas casino = full of slot machines, roulette wheels, blackjack tables etc...etc...etc... which would ruin the whole thing

http://i.imgur.com/kezWj.jpg

The OLPC project was always one step near the infamous "Bibles for Haiti" project - a condescending view that an "easy answer", one which is easily mass-manufactured will miraculously solve a hard social problem. That the OLPC-ers are technocratic instead of theocratic makes little difference with regards to the efficiency of the approach. What *should* have been sent are *teachers*, but it's much, much harder to send teachers into the wilderness when they are already so lowly regarded in the western world.

It's Java, as shown in this screenshot.

The main female human (Ashley) isn't ugly any more.

What?!
http://i.imgur.com/YRC7J.jpg

It might actually be even stranger than the normal Streisand-related backfiring; there's a theory floating around that EA are actually deliberately exploiting the increased publicity of this to divert attention away from the fact that they're an utter bunch of assholes in many other ways. No idea whether it's true or not, but seemed worth mentioning.

yes its true, they are an utter bunch of assholes in many other ways.

It might actually be even stranger than the normal Streisand-related backfiring; there's a theory floating around that EA are actually deliberately exploiting the increased publicity of this to divert attention away from the fact that they're an utter bunch of assholes in many other ways. No idea whether it's true or not, but seemed worth mentioning.

Obligatory umwelt.

Oh, I forgot this: Mass Effect Explains Everything.

http://i.imgur.com/ZEXd2.png

The Kindle screen cracks quite easily, a small amount of pressure on the corners of the screen will cause it to crack. Fortunately, Amazon will replace it for free if it is under warranty.

Evidence

It really doesn't take much to break an eink screen.

I welcome this technology.

I've broken 4 Kindle screens, always by packing it in my luggage and discovering the cracked screen immediately after boarding a flight. The screen is so fragile, just by applying a small amount pressure on the screen it will break.

This is my most recent one: http://i.imgur.com/Q6GtV.jpg

I NEED this. Amazon, can you hear me?? Please please please put this on the Kindle.

That is all.

Not sure why I've stuck with FF, really. They broke the menu bar in FF4 (on Win7 at least), and still haven't fixed it... and it's a glaringly obvious bug

What a mess... (I know, the menu bar is disabled by default... but some people like familiar, standard UI elements!). Yes, I could switch to Chrome like the rest of the world, but I'm a little opposed to Google having so much control over the browser, as well as the rest of the web...

I tried it, and the report only goes back 1 month. Doesn't show much at all.
http://i.imgur.com/dEZW3.jpg

On the window of a Game store in Ireland: http://i.imgur.com/BQ8iD.jpg

Yeah, it's always been a favorite of mine. Along with...ehh, practically every other strip he or Gary Larson ever made... :)

Oh, and one more for the road.

verbing weirds language

–Bill Watterson

there's your politics http://i.imgur.com/mSTMD.jpg

This info graphic sums it up pretty well I think:
http://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg

Amplitube, what a piece of crap. Came with my Tracktion sotware. Pure garbage.

And no, my built-in mics are just fine. Software for tuning typically doesn't come with a Harmonic Graph to see what's distorting the signal to the mic.

Luckily, there's free stuff that's old and still works with Windows 7 - Like this one.

You could get into the Mini Assembler the same way on an Apple //e.

Here's a screenshot I just made of a DOS based Apple II emulator running in DOSBox.

http://i.imgur.com/6Y5c1.png

As far back as I can remember, any extension that interacts with the page does so by editing the actual page. Sometimes in specific ways that are unique to certain extensions.

I figured this out, funnily enough, by using *{display:block} on a page that absolutely destroyed it, and for some reason displayed source code of the page to me... (don't ask me why I done that)
And this happens across 2 separate CSS insertion scripts, and versions as far back as last spring I think, webkit just buckles with that statement for some reason.
And during this, I noticed some script and CSS in the page that came from certain extensions.

Here is an example on the No FTL Neutrinos article. Why webkit, whyyy
Admittedly it could a Chrome(ium) error. I'm never installing Safari ever again to find out, holy painful browser, I'd sooner use IE again.

so that article links to a list of 9 good albums, one of which is Nirvana's Nevermind. note: the 2011 remaster is smashed to the wall, and, iirc, you could even hear clipping: http://i.imgur.com/i0Vag.png

First, here is an image from SDO today where I have highlighted not one but 2 giant triangles that are starting to form a third larger triangle. Clearly this is the Triforce of legend and when the third triangle appears Gannon shall reawaken.
http://imgur.com/bAIkb

Pinkie Pie Earns $60K At Pwn2Own With Three Chromium 0-Day Exploits

Oh, sure, we're laughing now... but this should be a wake-up call.

While at first glance they seem almost indistinguishable from us, there is actually a vital difference between Ponies and ourselves—educational systems.

Pony schools are far more intense than ours, especially in the maths and sciences. If you're familiar with the so-called "math" taught in our primary schools, you will agree that this image is disturbing. Young fillies (and colts, though their society is strongly gender-biased) are also taught a tremendous work ethic and social responsibility virtually from birth; in fact, they are expected to demonstrate exceptional talent and plan a career even before they reach adolescence. Furthermore, Ponies are even taught to take responsibility for the world around them. Their town, their environment...hell, the Sun, Moon and skies might as well be in their charge. They possess a drive that we fail to instill in our own children.

None of this is particularly surprising when you consider that Equestria is an autocratic state whose leader has a singular fixation on education. While our leaders focus on populism and pork, Equestria sinks more and more resources into teaching even while its infrastructure and government services seem positively primitive.

What does this mean for us? In the short term we'll continue to maintain our dominance in industry, but farther out...simply put, we're fucked. While our children fall farther and father behind, their foals dash ahead. They're already pumping out incredible individuals and technologies that defy belief. I fully expect that the first footprints on Mars...will be hoofprints. But that's not the worst of it. In the next decade, a pony will likely take your job. Soon they'll be running our entire country.

I know what you're thinking right now: "Oh my god...Ponies, rule?". But the answer is yes, and I can't put too fine a point on it: It's only a matter of time before Ponies totally and completely rule everything. That is—unless you do something about it today. Write to your representatives. Tell them unless we all want to start singing Pony anthems, they can no longer claim to be strong on education while cutting budgets and shirking responsibility.

Tell them that starting tomorrow, their actions must match their words.

Tell them they must stop this hippocracy.

they are becoming just as evil as Apple or Microsoft, hopefully enough people at google jump ship and start new search engines and services to give google some competition.
http://i.imgur.com/5to2k.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/WuaVN.jpg

it is a shame isn't it!!?

http://i.imgur.com/VJrE5.jpg

I used to spend a lot of time evaluating new languages. Now I just use this handy flowchart.

http://i.imgur.com/RaZt7.png

I suggest setting this setting. It will load the tab only when you click the tab itself, making loading a lot faster (and this only works only when you restore tabs on the first launch).

I saw this article after I made this little infographic this morning and it made me laugh a bit. http://imgur.com/Vg5MT

If this shot isn't almost a direct copy of "The Patriot" then I'm a monkey's uncle. The British on the road below, the hero with the high ground, tomahawk at the ready. Please.

I'm an expert on the Windows UX. This diagram nicely illustrates the core functionality of Windows 8.

Welcome to the Metro experience