The geek trying to be clever.... The subscription is for a local install of the full MS Office suite + online storage and other extras
The point is that I, and I suspect most consumers, do not need or use anything but the word processor of an office suite.
The sales figures you quote only goes to show that people buy into stuff like Office 365 because they do not understand what they actually need or what it actually consists of; it just sounds like a good idea and they have seen it advertised on TV. Microsoft advertising and FUD over the years have created the idea in many people's minds that IT won't work without MS software - ie a PC won't work without Windows, and they can't write anything without the latest version of Office installed on it.
I even have a 20 year-old copy of WordPerfect that I recently installed in a Win98 VM under Linux in order to retrieve some documents I wrote back then (I was writing a family history). Even that would fulfil all my word processing needs, but in fact I use LibreOffice these days.
We don't need more average or low-end hobbyists writing software.... When these amateurs try to write code in any sort of a business or professional setting, it usually ends up being the IT department or professional software developers who get to maintain the crap code in the end
I did not think this is about writing enterprise software. Where I work the system is so locked down that you could not write anything yourself anyway. Even before it was locked down, there was no way that IT would have taken over code not written outside their Dept.
When personal computers first came out they were all about the user programming it themselves. I still have some old handbooks that came with computers then (they were well written) and they were straight on to programming (in BASIC, or OPL in the case of the Psion hand-held I once had). These were easy and satisfying languages to use for what they were intended. For eg the Psion I wrote programs to keep score in Scrabble, "throw" dice, keep track of my bank balance, and such like. That is what this is about.
I've always thought it amusing that the Europeans chide us over gun ownership, yet it seems infinitely easier to get military grade weapons and materials over there
I am European, and, sorry, I would not have a clue how to get hold of such weapons.
They fired five RPG-7 rounds at the Superphenix when it was still under construction in 1982.
RPG-7 rounds, which did...nothing
GP did not say that they did. If it is the incident I am thinking of, I understand that they aimed at an open door, and one actually went in. It was a workshop door and the rocket hit a lathe. I expect it made more mess than damage.
I don't suppose the guy expected to cause much damage, but rather wanted to make some point. To me it makes the point that it is extremely difficult to damage a power station and that there are some nutters around (sorry, that's two points), but I don't think that is what he intended.
Those of us who are driven primarily by a quest for knowledge and understanding, by contrast, usually behave confidently when we're confident, and when we aren't, we take the time to learn enough to become confident.
I was agreeing with you (you seemed to be describing my Brother-in-Law) until then. I am confident that I am capable about things in my own field(s) but I gather that I do not show it. People have to know me well (like the guys I work with) before they realise that. I also have a strong drive to increase my knowledge.
But thinking you can "take the time to learn" about areas in which we do not have the confidence/knowledge is a delusion. The totality of knowledge is vast*. I know nothing about music, and as a teen I decided it could stay that way (having seen how music can eat up some people's lives). You will never see me express an opinion about music.
* Confident new graduate: "I would estimate that I know 10% of all knowledge." Wise old man: "OK, tell me what 10% of the World's population did yesterday."
If you've ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you'll be familiar with David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell.
I've never heard about David Dunning nor of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I'm pretty sure I don't need to know.
If everyone who has heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect is "familiar with David Dunning", then his Christmas card list must be an epic. Why am I not on it then?
Ugh - I've ridden on a rear-facing train seat twice in my life...... the deeply disconcerting experience of traveling rapidly with absolutely no idea what's in front of you
So you can see what is ahead of the train if you face forwards? You must be the driver.
In what neck of the woods is that ? Do the locos you see burn logs and have big conical funnels ? Try upping that by a factor of 3 or 4 for elsewhere.
In the UK, it staggers me how many people are quite ignorant about railways, having either never been on a train in their life, or only on a preserved "heritage" line doing about 20 mph. The only time they see a railway is when driving over a level crossing and it does not help that the road sign for an ungated one of those still depicts an ancient steam loco.
The military and corporate planes have had rear facing passenger seats for ages.... I can't find anything substantial to back up your claim.
Following your "Parent" link, the claim you refer to seems to be this:-
It would be an interesting experiment to have rear facing seats, but have the displays inside make it seem like you're going forward.
I think you missed the part after the comma. The military aircraft I have been in certainly did not have panels with displays like we were going the opposite direction to what we were. In fact they did not have any interior decor whatsoever:-)
Yes, I always have to sit in a front facing seat in a train otherwise I get motion sickness.
An old etiquette on trains is for the ladies to face backwards and gentlemen to face forwards. I guess it dates right back to the 1840's when passengers sat in open wagons and the forward facing ones got soot in their eyes.
In the UK, many commuter trains and much of the London Underground have longitudinal seating, just one row each side facing inwards and the rest of the area for standing.
Obstructing VIN = Violation of the law, possible Ticket.
Sufficient probable cause for police to force entry into the vehicle to investigate.
That explains something. I am in the UK and have an American car. The VIN is visible in the windscreen, the first car I have ever known like that, and it puzzled me why. I thought perhaps to save opening the bonnet (sorry, hood) to quote it when ordering spare parts?
Perhaps because, in the USA, don't you physically change the licence plate every year? In the UK the licence plate is permanent and is all that the police nornally need to know. You could physically and illegally change the number plate for a false one, but so you could change my VIN in the windscreen - only looks like a strip of metal stamped with the characters.
we have loads of tragedies from car accidents--... but the American public doesn't care because we love to pretend we're race car drivers.
No, it is because people would soon get bored if every road accident received as much coverage as, say, someone killed in a mountaineering accident (not to mention how voluminous the coverage would need to be). Generally, public reaction goes up exponetially with the number of people killed at the same time. In the UK, a railway accident that kills 10 people (about the number killed every day on the road) will get national headline coverage for about a week; but one person killed in a road accident will just get a few column inches in a local paper.
Another reason is that people hate the idea of being killed by an entity rather than by another person. They think being killed by another person driving a car is in some way "democratic", whereas being killed by a train, lift, ship, crane is not. Or put another way, when they read of a road accident they believe that if they were there (either as culprit of victim) they could have influenced it differently, whereas they know that in a train accident they could not have done.
130 million car commuters in the US spend an average of 280hrs/year driving to and from work. That's $1.2 trillion dollars per year at median salary and another $2.6 trillion dollars frozen in vehicles that sit parked for 8hrs/ day.
So what would be different with self-driving cars? Come on, give it some spin!
and another $2.6 trillion dollars frozen in vehicles that sit parked for 8hrs/ day.
1. Trains don't go everywhere. You still need trucks to get things from the train station to the warehouse.
2. Who said anything about subsidizing anything?
1) I am in the UK where trains used to go within about 5 miles of just about everywhere except in the Scottish Highlands, and the railways operated local delivery trucks for the doorstep delivery of goods. Places that warehoused, produced, or consumed bulk stuff were located near to railways and had their own sidings for loading. There were vastly fewer trucks on the road, and what there were were quite small. Roads were pleasant places for people living by them, children playing in them (yes), cyclists using them, horse riders using them, and motorists using them.
The system worked well until the railways were all but crippled by poor maintenance by the ends of both WW1&2 (co-inciding with the knock-down sales of ex-army trucks to de-mobbed soldiers setting up road haulage companies), followed by nearly all but the railway main lines and main stations being closed in the 1960's.
2) Trucks are subsidised in the UK by paying vastly less in road tax than would be proportional to the road wear they cause, the distance they travel and the strength to which bridges need to be built. They are subsided by the road tax on cars, especially ones like my wife's, who only drives about 600 miles a year.
If I'm driving a normal car and my brakes fail to operate properly and causes an accident, am I liable or is the car manufacturer?
If it is a design fault, the manufacturer. However, the application of brakes is vastly simpler both in concept, and their physical implementation, than an entirely automated car. Just consider that the brakes of an automated car responding to an "Apply" command is just a small sub-set of what the whole automation would be.
For one thing, the car/brake manufacturer is not involved in the decision of when to brake, and that is the hardest part to arrange.
I miss the days when Slashdot tagged microsoft stories with the gates of borg graphic
So do I. The picture of Gates was like he was in his 30's and I once suggested that they update it with him looking older with greying hair, as the company was likewise no longer the bright young thing that many people supposed it to be.
With Gates virtually gone, what icon should there be instead of the bland MS trademark (for which I am suprised MS do not sue/. like : these takedowns) ? I suggest the Titanic, or King Kong (nothing to do with Balmer of course).
Android is based on Linux, you could also mention Google is ripping of every people who donated their time and code to the system for free.
Google maintain Android. The Android software is free for anyone to use and to sell loaded into hardware. Only if you want to attach the trademark "Andoid" to it do you have to pay Google a licence fee; is that what you mean by "ripping off"?.
As for people "donating their time and code" to the Linux ecosystem, I do that myself in a small way. Feel free to use it, I don't mind. That is the point.
[the value of g is] handy to know but not essential to [memorise] since it can easily be looked up or measured. A physics teacher who sets up a gravity problem and expects students to know the value of 'g' from memory, is doing it wrong.
It that a joke? We are meant to set an experiment to measure g every time we need to know it? Like pi it is one of the constants that anyone in enginering really does need to know off the top of their head. It comes into calculations all the time (remember, you are talking about physics being taught here). Not just in an engineering career either. I used it yesterday in working out some stresses for a DiY job I am doing.
Compared with the thousands of things I had to memorise as part of "learning" French and German languages at school (a complete and utter waste of time and stress), learning a few physical constants is a breeze.
two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their combined mass and the distance between them.. the force is ~9.8m/s
LoL ! Someone else has already commented on your misunderstanding of gravity and what a force is. Sounds like you even missed the principle of the matter, which is even more important than the value of the constant.
Slashdot Mirror
Subscription? To a.... word processor
The geek trying to be clever. ... The subscription is for a local install of the full MS Office suite + online storage and other extras
The point is that I, and I suspect most consumers, do not need or use anything but the word processor of an office suite.
The sales figures you quote only goes to show that people buy into stuff like Office 365 because they do not understand what they actually need or what it actually consists of; it just sounds like a good idea and they have seen it advertised on TV. Microsoft advertising and FUD over the years have created the idea in many people's minds that IT won't work without MS software - ie a PC won't work without Windows, and they can't write anything without the latest version of Office installed on it.
I even have a 20 year-old copy of WordPerfect that I recently installed in a Win98 VM under Linux in order to retrieve some documents I wrote back then (I was writing a family history). Even that would fulfil all my word processing needs, but in fact I use LibreOffice these days.
Fuck off
We don't need more average or low-end hobbyists writing software. ... When these amateurs try to write code in any sort of a business or professional setting, it usually ends up being the IT department or professional software developers who get to maintain the crap code in the end
I did not think this is about writing enterprise software. Where I work the system is so locked down that you could not write anything yourself anyway. Even before it was locked down, there was no way that IT would have taken over code not written outside their Dept.
When personal computers first came out they were all about the user programming it themselves. I still have some old handbooks that came with computers then (they were well written) and they were straight on to programming (in BASIC, or OPL in the case of the Psion hand-held I once had). These were easy and satisfying languages to use for what they were intended. For eg the Psion I wrote programs to keep score in Scrabble, "throw" dice, keep track of my bank balance, and such like. That is what this is about.
I've always thought it amusing that the Europeans chide us over gun ownership, yet it seems infinitely easier to get military grade weapons and materials over there
I am European, and, sorry, I would not have a clue how to get hold of such weapons.
They fired five RPG-7 rounds at the Superphenix when it was still under construction in 1982.
RPG-7 rounds, which did...nothing
GP did not say that they did. If it is the incident I am thinking of, I understand that they aimed at an open door, and one actually went in. It was a workshop door and the rocket hit a lathe. I expect it made more mess than damage.
I don't suppose the guy expected to cause much damage, but rather wanted to make some point. To me it makes the point that it is extremely difficult to damage a power station and that there are some nutters around (sorry, that's two points), but I don't think that is what he intended.
What a co-incidence - you are describing where I work! Who are you?
Those of us who are driven primarily by a quest for knowledge and understanding, by contrast, usually behave confidently when we're confident, and when we aren't, we take the time to learn enough to become confident.
I was agreeing with you (you seemed to be describing my Brother-in-Law) until then. I am confident that I am capable about things in my own field(s) but I gather that I do not show it. People have to know me well (like the guys I work with) before they realise that. I also have a strong drive to increase my knowledge.
: "I would estimate that I know 10% of all knowledge." : "OK, tell me what 10% of the World's population did yesterday."
But thinking you can "take the time to learn" about areas in which we do not have the confidence/knowledge is a delusion. The totality of knowledge is vast*. I know nothing about music, and as a teen I decided it could stay that way (having seen how music can eat up some people's lives). You will never see me express an opinion about music.
* Confident new graduate
Wise old man
I've never heard about David Dunning nor of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I'm pretty sure I don't need to know.
If everyone who has heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect is "familiar with David Dunning", then his Christmas card list must be an epic. Why am I not on it then?
This would explain why nerdy and geeky men typically hook up with Asian women.
..and here was I foolishly thinking it was because the Asian women in question were hot.
Nerdy men get hot women? I think that this thread has taken a wrong turning somewhere.
Ugh - I've ridden on a rear-facing train seat twice in my life ... ... the deeply disconcerting experience of traveling rapidly with absolutely no idea what's in front of you
So you can see what is ahead of the train if you face forwards? You must be the driver.
...... But trains top out at 50MPH or so ...
In what neck of the woods is that ? Do the locos you see burn logs and have big conical funnels ? Try upping that by a factor of 3 or 4 for elsewhere.
In the UK, it staggers me how many people are quite ignorant about railways, having either never been on a train in their life, or only on a preserved "heritage" line doing about 20 mph. The only time they see a railway is when driving over a level crossing and it does not help that the road sign for an ungated one of those still depicts an ancient steam loco.
The military and corporate planes have had rear facing passenger seats for ages. ... I can't find anything substantial to back up your claim.
Following your "Parent" link, the claim you refer to seems to be this :-
It would be an interesting experiment to have rear facing seats, but have the displays inside make it seem like you're going forward.
I think you missed the part after the comma. The military aircraft I have been in certainly did not have panels with displays like we were going the opposite direction to what we were. In fact they did not have any interior decor whatsoever :-)
Yes, I always have to sit in a front facing seat in a train otherwise I get motion sickness.
An old etiquette on trains is for the ladies to face backwards and gentlemen to face forwards. I guess it dates right back to the 1840's when passengers sat in open wagons and the forward facing ones got soot in their eyes.
In the UK, many commuter trains and much of the London Underground have longitudinal seating, just one row each side facing inwards and the rest of the area for standing.
Keep your VIN number covered up.
Obstructing VIN = Violation of the law, possible Ticket.
Sufficient probable cause for police to force entry into the vehicle to investigate.
That explains something. I am in the UK and have an American car. The VIN is visible in the windscreen, the first car I have ever known like that, and it puzzled me why. I thought perhaps to save opening the bonnet (sorry, hood) to quote it when ordering spare parts?
Perhaps because, in the USA, don't you physically change the licence plate every year? In the UK the licence plate is permanent and is all that the police nornally need to know. You could physically and illegally change the number plate for a false one, but so you could change my VIN in the windscreen - only looks like a strip of metal stamped with the characters.
Locks keep honest people honest. They barely slow down a professional.
Yes, but there are a lot of potential thieves who fall between those ends of the spectrum.
we have loads of tragedies from car accidents--... but the American public doesn't care because we love to pretend we're race car drivers.
No, it is because people would soon get bored if every road accident received as much coverage as, say, someone killed in a mountaineering accident (not to mention how voluminous the coverage would need to be). Generally, public reaction goes up exponetially with the number of people killed at the same time. In the UK, a railway accident that kills 10 people (about the number killed every day on the road) will get national headline coverage for about a week; but one person killed in a road accident will just get a few column inches in a local paper.
Another reason is that people hate the idea of being killed by an entity rather than by another person. They think being killed by another person driving a car is in some way "democratic", whereas being killed by a train, lift, ship, crane is not. Or put another way, when they read of a road accident they believe that if they were there (either as culprit of victim) they could have influenced it differently, whereas they know that in a train accident they could not have done.
2023, not 2013
Something like this would, of course, never happen in the code controlling these cars.
130 million car commuters in the US spend an average of 280hrs/year driving to and from work. That's $1.2 trillion dollars per year at median salary and another $2.6 trillion dollars frozen in vehicles that sit parked for 8hrs/ day.
So what would be different with self-driving cars? Come on, give it some spin!
and another $2.6 trillion dollars frozen in vehicles that sit parked for 8hrs/ day.
Their commutes take 8 hours each way?
1. Trains don't go everywhere. You still need trucks to get things from the train station to the warehouse.
2. Who said anything about subsidizing anything?
1) I am in the UK where trains used to go within about 5 miles of just about everywhere except in the Scottish Highlands, and the railways operated local delivery trucks for the doorstep delivery of goods. Places that warehoused, produced, or consumed bulk stuff were located near to railways and had their own sidings for loading. There were vastly fewer trucks on the road, and what there were were quite small. Roads were pleasant places for people living by them, children playing in them (yes), cyclists using them, horse riders using them, and motorists using them.
The system worked well until the railways were all but crippled by poor maintenance by the ends of both WW1&2 (co-inciding with the knock-down sales of ex-army trucks to de-mobbed soldiers setting up road haulage companies), followed by nearly all but the railway main lines and main stations being closed in the 1960's.
2) Trucks are subsidised in the UK by paying vastly less in road tax than would be proportional to the road wear they cause, the distance they travel and the strength to which bridges need to be built. They are subsided by the road tax on cars, especially ones like my wife's, who only drives about 600 miles a year.
The sensors required for a SDC should not cost much when mass produced, and the money saved on insurance will likely more than compensate for that.
Thanks for the laugh.
Insurance companies take any technical change whatsoever as an excuse to raise premiums.
If I'm driving a normal car and my brakes fail to operate properly and causes an accident, am I liable or is the car manufacturer?
If it is a design fault, the manufacturer. However, the application of brakes is vastly simpler both in concept, and their physical implementation, than an entirely automated car. Just consider that the brakes of an automated car responding to an "Apply" command is just a small sub-set of what the whole automation would be.
For one thing, the car/brake manufacturer is not involved in the decision of when to brake, and that is the hardest part to arrange.
I miss the days when Slashdot tagged microsoft stories with the gates of borg graphic
So do I. The picture of Gates was like he was in his 30's and I once suggested that they update it with him looking older with greying hair, as the company was likewise no longer the bright young thing that many people supposed it to be.
/. like : these takedowns) ? I suggest the Titanic, or King Kong (nothing to do with Balmer of course).
With Gates virtually gone, what icon should there be instead of the bland MS trademark (for which I am suprised MS do not sue
Android is based on Linux, you could also mention Google is ripping of every people who donated their time and code to the system for free.
Google maintain Android. The Android software is free for anyone to use and to sell loaded into hardware. Only if you want to attach the trademark "Andoid" to it do you have to pay Google a licence fee; is that what you mean by "ripping off"?.
As for people "donating their time and code" to the Linux ecosystem, I do that myself in a small way. Feel free to use it, I don't mind. That is the point.
Wait, so you're saying Surface isn't good for watching cat videos?
No, he is saying that Surface is excellent for cat videos :-
Now, they cater to people watching cat videos. At the moment, there is no device close to the Surface Pro for this purpose.
I shall take his word for it.
[the value of g is] handy to know but not essential to [memorise] since it can easily be looked up or measured. A physics teacher who sets up a gravity problem and expects students to know the value of 'g' from memory, is doing it wrong.
It that a joke? We are meant to set an experiment to measure g every time we need to know it? Like pi it is one of the constants that anyone in enginering really does need to know off the top of their head. It comes into calculations all the time (remember, you are talking about physics being taught here). Not just in an engineering career either. I used it yesterday in working out some stresses for a DiY job I am doing.
Compared with the thousands of things I had to memorise as part of "learning" French and German languages at school (a complete and utter waste of time and stress), learning a few physical constants is a breeze.
two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their combined mass and the distance between them .. the force is ~9.8m/s
LoL ! Someone else has already commented on your misunderstanding of gravity and what a force is. Sounds like you even missed the principle of the matter, which is even more important than the value of the constant.