Linux has the right idea when it comes to GUIs. You can just choose whatever style you like best. You can have a dock if you want or a taskbar or multiple taskbars in various locations. You can change nearly everything about the GUI. Since everyone has different taste the best solution is customization, and that's precisely what Microsoft does not allow.
While I enjoy having customization options, I'm pretty sure that learning curve for using something is significantly smaller than learning to use something and then learning to customize it. Many people just want to learn to do x, and once they learn how to do it, that's the only method they will ever use. (I used to tell relatives that they can get to previous program with alt-tab, but it was futile. I think that the only customization most users ever do is changing the background.)
Nope, you put in 1000 votes for your side in a box that was from "opponent's territory". If they discard the box, you win. If they count your votes, you win.
I must admit that I didn't consider this. Of course, there's also a problem of scale, if you do this in several places, the risk to get caught increases. (And if you actually could do this, it might actually be safer to put in votes for your opponent to discredit them.) I think/hope that this is in practice impossible in large scale.[*]
There's no tracking, so nobody can ever know which are valid and which are not. There are many times in the US where more votes ended up in a box than the sum of elligible voters for that area, and it apparently isn't considered that big of a deal.
If each of the voting areas were to be given an unique (or at least there should be several variations) stamp (and stamp colour) at random (in a sealed package), each of the ballots could be stamped with it when placed in the box. If you have people from all/most (or in your(?) case two) parties present from the opening of the seal to the end of counting, wouldn't this at least increase the difficulty of tampering with the votes?
[*] Random musings:
A thought arises: If there are two candidates that are very different (or at least different enough) from each other and both have nearly 50% of the votes and only one is chosen. Is democracy actually working at this point?
To successfully stuff a ballot box you need to remove an equivalent amount of votes from the box (and ideally they should be ballots of your opponent). Otherwise the number of ballots doesn't match the amount of ballots put it. Or you need to change the whole box (with appropriate number of ballots inside). In either case, you have physical stuff that must be moved and destroyed in several voting locations. Sounds pretty risky.
I think you are forgetting the scale. There are quite many paper ballots in many locations, watched by several people... (So lot's of physical items you need to make disappear, in different conditions.)
The miscounting also detects if there is a big difference in counted voters in an area and the amount of ballots. (Of course, you could change that too, but that still increases the difficulty)
it just seems silly to me, to complain about extra information; 35% is also pretty damned low.
The extra information does not make sense. It's like (not quite, but close enough) saying that only x% of couples are considering to have children within 5 years. If you factor out the most common 1 child within this period, the child producing rate drops under y%.
Why is 'super-loyal buyers' a group that shouldn't be counted? Should we remove 'super-unloyals' also?
Does not possessing a driving license physically prevent you from driving a motorised vehicle skilfully and safely? Of course not. That is entirely down to training, experience, temperament and habit.
[...]
What is the purpose of a driving license? To identify you as the operator of a motorised vehicle and as a permission slip to use the public highways.
[...]
There are some activities that are inherently hazardous (eg driving, shooting), for which there is not a *legal* requirement but more one of common sense; that you are insured against incidents.
Yeah well, in my country, the driving license guarantees that the driver has passed the driving test (and so has some basic driving skills, training, experience and habits) and is thus less likely to be a hazardous driver.
The nice thing is that fixed lenses (generally) produce better images than zoom lenses. I'm waiting for articles with some comparison images, should be interesting.
Taking a lower resolution picture just resizes the image. To super sample with a fixed sensor array like in a camera, you'd need to take multiple pictures, either building one larger image and then sizing it down (hope you have a steady hand) or taking multiple pictures over time and laying those on top of each other (hope your subject doesn't move).
The "dedicated hardware" is just some piece of shit DSP that tries to voodoo away the noise. It's gaussian blur + unsharp mask on a chip.
You know, the default output size is 5MP. What do you think happens when you size a fixed size 38MP (depending on the aspect ratio) to 5MP? Why yes, I believe you will have several samples for a single pixel. And guess what the dsp does. It voodoos away the noise by shrinking the image down from those (extra) samples. (The separate chip is needed because the processing power limitations of mobile chipsets (at least at the design time. I think this is about to change)).
Zooming by throwing some of the samples away is not ideal, but it does allow zooming without need to upscale the image, which is nice. Especially if you are taking a video.
Yes, but you will also lose the possibility to zoom by selecting a specific area of the sensor for the final 5MP image. Of course you will get less oversampling, and finally only the actual pixels, but at least there's no digital zoom involved.
My current (HP) printer worked on Windows 7 directly. I think I did later install drivers from HP though, to see what's new in them, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend them. I like the printer, I don't like the HP software. (And the installer was huge, and the update was even bigger (and still required the original installation))
Also, you could round up or down to 5 cents at the cashier. So that would be $0.02 extra in your grocery bill. It's not like the shown prices (in many places) in the States include the taxes anyway.
If suddenly there were no pennies the entire world would play the Office Space Game of "which way can I pocket the difference to my own benefit."
In Finland we don't have the 1 and 2 cent coins in use. (The made some, basically for collectors, when we started to use Euros though.)
If you pay by card (credit or debit), the price will be the sum of the price tags of the products you've collected (and the amount of taxes can be seen on the receipt), if you pay in cash, the sum will be rounded to the nearest.05. There's really nothing to pocket.
Yep, by US standards the conditions at the Foxconn factories are pretty lousy, but compared to the alternatives *over there*, the factory work is a gravy train.
I don't like the relativistic 'gravy train' argument. You could argument anything when stated like that. "Compared to dying of hunger..."
I'm (mostly) with him with this one, as the GP at that point 'proves' that the workers aren't unhappy with a single picture of a smiling girl. Considering the suicides, it is kind of a low blow in itself.
And yes, I'm sure having a job there is better than not having one. Still, I feel that western device makers should have western conditions for their workers.
Well, the learning curve is much lower for the ribbon than the menus. I had some trouble getting used to it, especially with the proofreading tools. On the other hand, my mother a few years ago told me that she 'really liked the new Windows', as she now understood how to use text styles and so on... So I wouldn't call it a disaster, but having an option to use the old layout would have been nice. (I don't know if one exists, and personally don't really miss it, except when unsuccessful in trying to locate some specific function I remember being in a specific drop down...)
The 'guestimation' strategy fails at question 5 that has two answers that are very close to each other ($203.00 and $208.80). However, my mathematical instincts tell me that 203.00 is an unlikely outcome when multiplying with 29. I used a calculator to confirm my guess (as allowed by the test).
I calculated the hourly rate and found out that the last digit is not zero.
Here's an even more fun fact: passenger rail subsidies are 40 TIMES that of commercial aviation subsidies, on a per-passenger-mile basis. We pay a LOT of money to move people by train, compared to moving people via airplanes...
Which is easy to understand as you don't really have train passengers. Quick googling gives me 30 million train passengers a year, against 750 million airline passengers. After a bit more googling, I got the train passengers for Finland: Around 60 million train passengers a year. When you don't have an infrastructure you won't have users either and it will be more expensive. Considering the energy cost of moving stuff through air, I'm pretty sure that you are paying a LOT of money by moving people via airplanes.. (And yes, I realize that United States is huge. But apparently you somehow manage to create roads between the cities, the rails aren't all that much more difficult)
How about "robot follows predetermined path in 3.921 seconds", since the "solving" part is obviously done between the mapping segment and the actual "race".
You didn't watch the mapping video, did you? Seemed to me that the robot finished mapping and took the shortest route home. Obviously.
When I leave work, I hit the power button and the computer starts sleeping. When I come back I hit it again and I'm back to speed in a few seconds. I do a boot after windows updates (and/or when I want the centralized updates) and go drink coffee in the meanwhile. So no, I don't have problems with long boot times.
Never seen an "Access Hard disk" prompt. Then again, I skipped Vista completely. Almost changed to using Ubuntu on my desktop, but then I actually enjoyed using 7. Now using OpenSUSE in a virtual machine for my Linux needs.
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In fact the patent doesn't hide that there are similar designs. [...] If design is so obvious then why is it that no one has done this before Apple?
Perhaps, because the other companies haven't been dicks. (Sorry, coudn't resist)
Linux has the right idea when it comes to GUIs. You can just choose whatever style you like best. You can have a dock if you want or a taskbar or multiple taskbars in various locations. You can change nearly everything about the GUI. Since everyone has different taste the best solution is customization, and that's precisely what Microsoft does not allow.
While I enjoy having customization options, I'm pretty sure that learning curve for using something is significantly smaller than learning to use something and then learning to customize it. Many people just want to learn to do x, and once they learn how to do it, that's the only method they will ever use. (I used to tell relatives that they can get to previous program with alt-tab, but it was futile. I think that the only customization most users ever do is changing the background.)
Nope, you put in 1000 votes for your side in a box that was from "opponent's territory". If they discard the box, you win. If they count your votes, you win.
I must admit that I didn't consider this. Of course, there's also a problem of scale, if you do this in several places, the risk to get caught increases. (And if you actually could do this, it might actually be safer to put in votes for your opponent to discredit them.) I think/hope that this is in practice impossible in large scale.[*]
There's no tracking, so nobody can ever know which are valid and which are not. There are many times in the US where more votes ended up in a box than the sum of elligible voters for that area, and it apparently isn't considered that big of a deal.
If each of the voting areas were to be given an unique (or at least there should be several variations) stamp (and stamp colour) at random (in a sealed package), each of the ballots could be stamped with it when placed in the box. If you have people from all/most (or in your(?) case two) parties present from the opening of the seal to the end of counting, wouldn't this at least increase the difficulty of tampering with the votes?
[*] Random musings: A thought arises: If there are two candidates that are very different (or at least different enough) from each other and both have nearly 50% of the votes and only one is chosen. Is democracy actually working at this point?
To successfully stuff a ballot box you need to remove an equivalent amount of votes from the box (and ideally they should be ballots of your opponent). Otherwise the number of ballots doesn't match the amount of ballots put it. Or you need to change the whole box (with appropriate number of ballots inside). In either case, you have physical stuff that must be moved and destroyed in several voting locations. Sounds pretty risky.
I think you are forgetting that we cannot have a recount
I don't understand. We (in my country) have a recount by default.
I think you are forgetting the scale. There are quite many paper ballots in many locations, watched by several people... (So lot's of physical items you need to make disappear, in different conditions.)
The miscounting also detects if there is a big difference in counted voters in an area and the amount of ballots. (Of course, you could change that too, but that still increases the difficulty)
it just seems silly to me, to complain about extra information; 35% is also pretty damned low.
The extra information does not make sense. It's like (not quite, but close enough) saying that only x% of couples are considering to have children within 5 years. If you factor out the most common 1 child within this period, the child producing rate drops under y%.
Why is 'super-loyal buyers' a group that shouldn't be counted? Should we remove 'super-unloyals' also?
Does not possessing a driving license physically prevent you from driving a motorised vehicle skilfully and safely? Of course not. That is entirely down to training, experience, temperament and habit.
[...]
What is the purpose of a driving license? To identify you as the operator of a motorised vehicle and as a permission slip to use the public highways.
[...]
There are some activities that are inherently hazardous (eg driving, shooting), for which there is not a *legal* requirement but more one of common sense; that you are insured against incidents.
Yeah well, in my country, the driving license guarantees that the driver has passed the driving test (and so has some basic driving skills, training, experience and habits) and is thus less likely to be a hazardous driver.
The nice thing is that fixed lenses (generally) produce better images than zoom lenses. I'm waiting for articles with some comparison images, should be interesting.
Taking a lower resolution picture just resizes the image. To super sample with a fixed sensor array like in a camera, you'd need to take multiple pictures, either building one larger image and then sizing it down (hope you have a steady hand) or taking multiple pictures over time and laying those on top of each other (hope your subject doesn't move).
The "dedicated hardware" is just some piece of shit DSP that tries to voodoo away the noise. It's gaussian blur + unsharp mask on a chip.
Mmm. I read the white paper.
You know, the default output size is 5MP. What do you think happens when you size a fixed size 38MP (depending on the aspect ratio) to 5MP? Why yes, I believe you will have several samples for a single pixel. And guess what the dsp does. It voodoos away the noise by shrinking the image down from those (extra) samples. (The separate chip is needed because the processing power limitations of mobile chipsets (at least at the design time. I think this is about to change)).
Zooming by throwing some of the samples away is not ideal, but it does allow zooming without need to upscale the image, which is nice. Especially if you are taking a video.
Yes, but you will also lose the possibility to zoom by selecting a specific area of the sensor for the final 5MP image. Of course you will get less oversampling, and finally only the actual pixels, but at least there's no digital zoom involved.
My current (HP) printer worked on Windows 7 directly. I think I did later install drivers from HP though, to see what's new in them, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend them. I like the printer, I don't like the HP software. (And the installer was huge, and the update was even bigger (and still required the original installation))
Also, you could round up or down to 5 cents at the cashier. So that would be $0.02 extra in your grocery bill. It's not like the shown prices (in many places) in the States include the taxes anyway.
If suddenly there were no pennies the entire world would play the Office Space Game of "which way can I pocket the difference to my own benefit."
In Finland we don't have the 1 and 2 cent coins in use. (The made some, basically for collectors, when we started to use Euros though.)
If you pay by card (credit or debit), the price will be the sum of the price tags of the products you've collected (and the amount of taxes can be seen on the receipt), if you pay in cash, the sum will be rounded to the nearest .05. There's really nothing to pocket.
Yep, by US standards the conditions at the Foxconn factories are pretty lousy, but compared to the alternatives *over there*, the factory work is a gravy train.
I don't like the relativistic 'gravy train' argument. You could argument anything when stated like that. "Compared to dying of hunger ..."
It's not the pic of the suicide that irked me
it's the comment "Look how happy he is"
If that guy wants to make a point, just makes it.
I'm (mostly) with him with this one, as the GP at that point 'proves' that the workers aren't unhappy with a single picture of a smiling girl. Considering the suicides, it is kind of a low blow in itself. And yes, I'm sure having a job there is better than not having one. Still, I feel that western device makers should have western conditions for their workers.
Well, the learning curve is much lower for the ribbon than the menus. I had some trouble getting used to it, especially with the proofreading tools. On the other hand, my mother a few years ago told me that she 'really liked the new Windows', as she now understood how to use text styles and so on... So I wouldn't call it a disaster, but having an option to use the old layout would have been nice. (I don't know if one exists, and personally don't really miss it, except when unsuccessful in trying to locate some specific function I remember being in a specific drop down...)
The 'guestimation' strategy fails at question 5 that has two answers that are very close to each other ($203.00 and $208.80). However, my mathematical instincts tell me that 203.00 is an unlikely outcome when multiplying with 29. I used a calculator to confirm my guess (as allowed by the test).
I calculated the hourly rate and found out that the last digit is not zero.
Here's an even more fun fact: passenger rail subsidies are 40 TIMES that of commercial aviation subsidies, on a per-passenger-mile basis. We pay a LOT of money to move people by train, compared to moving people via airplanes...
Which is easy to understand as you don't really have train passengers. Quick googling gives me 30 million train passengers a year, against 750 million airline passengers. After a bit more googling, I got the train passengers for Finland: Around 60 million train passengers a year. When you don't have an infrastructure you won't have users either and it will be more expensive. Considering the energy cost of moving stuff through air, I'm pretty sure that you are paying a LOT of money by moving people via airplanes.. (And yes, I realize that United States is huge. But apparently you somehow manage to create roads between the cities, the rails aren't all that much more difficult)
How about "robot follows predetermined path in 3.921 seconds", since the "solving" part is obviously done between the mapping segment and the actual "race".
You didn't watch the mapping video, did you? Seemed to me that the robot finished mapping and took the shortest route home. Obviously.
Wait, I can finally tell my mother?
And what the hell is processor degradation? "without the processor degradation and battery life cost of the format in use on other devices"
When I leave work, I hit the power button and the computer starts sleeping. When I come back I hit it again and I'm back to speed in a few seconds. I do a boot after windows updates (and/or when I want the centralized updates) and go drink coffee in the meanwhile. So no, I don't have problems with long boot times.
Never seen an "Access Hard disk" prompt. Then again, I skipped Vista completely. Almost changed to using Ubuntu on my desktop, but then I actually enjoyed using 7. Now using OpenSUSE in a virtual machine for my Linux needs.
How exactly does that matter?