I'm sure we'll hear a lot of political ideology in today's comments, but I just wanted to remind folks that S&P reputation isn't that stellar. S&P and Moody's used mathematical models to rate mortgage backed securities as safe as governmental bonds back in 2007. Then about 90% of those bonds were then rerated as junk bonds which forced a large sell off.
Only because the bank deliberately gamed the system to hide the fact that they were lending way beyond the Basel rules. Don't blame the ratings agencies or the governments - it's all the greedy bankers' fault.
The real purpose for Google putting everything into one entry box is that everything you type gets turned into a search, and therefore gets sent to Google
I'm a keyboarder rather than a mouser so I know C-L takes me to the address bar with autocomplete from history and bookmarks, C-K to search. C-L plus a few letters is a lot faster than a bookmarks menu. C-T,C-K is probably one of my most used key combos. Either way, they can hide the bar when not in use as long as I can get there via a handy shortcut.
I have absolutely no idea what that is supposed to mean. Anyway, I've recently switch to Chrome now that it's got adblock, flashblock and copy link text.
So then why did I think that I'm the only real sentient human being when I was a kid? I grew out of that somehow, am I autistic deep down or are my survival instincts just extremely poor?
Lack of a 'theory of mind' probably puts you down the/. end of the autistic spectrum.
I used to visit the US fairly regularly.... once every two years or so. Nowadays it's about last on my list, simply because of the aggravation involved in setting up the trip, getting the necessary documentation, undergoing the various intrusive security procedures and the like. It's simply not worth the trouble.
Same here. And I won't even transit through the US because of the hassle.
I usually pass my books on to charity shops after I've read them. I guess they'll lose out in the ebook age. I've never understood why some people hang on to every work of fiction they've ever read. I read an article recently (sorry no cite) of someone who uses the ebook for preference but also buys a hard copy for their bookshelves. Does not compute.
Most computer users I come across need 4 applications: an internet browser, a pdf viewer, a program that can open word and a program that can open excel files. I haven't seen a Linux desktop that doesn't provide these out of the box in the past few years.
So, what is missing from getting Linux to the masses? 1. retail distribution channels (walmart, dell,...) 2. marketing presence 3. easy to use, consolidated app store with a way for users to actually pay for stuff
Google could easily fix all 3 of those issues; why hasn't it yet?... ChromeOS. Expect a solid windows competitor in the next few years.
How about a desk-top OS that can't play DVDs without you figuring out what extra stuff you need to install and who's audio is a complicated mess? Ubuntu is a great achievement but it's still not there yet.
Perhaps we are stuck here for a reason, and perhaps this is an opportunity for all of us to start working out our issues and learn to live together with reasonable differences.
I figured this out a while back. The computer running our simluation is only big enough to cope with a space the size of the near solar system. The whole lightspeed thing is an artificial construct of the simulated physics to keep us in place - like a video game with locked boundaries. All the rest is the imagination of a far space landscape designer.
In Japan they have a cool solution: the escalator ends up having two lines. The people on the left keep walking, and those on the right stand. I guess for that to become a custom you'd need escalators that are typically crowded, which most in the US are not.
Speaking of stairs and escalators, England really needs to catch up on this one. When I was riding the train there I kept having little old ladies ask me to carry their luggage for them up the stairs. I can't imagine what wheelchaired people do.
On the London Underground we have signs telling people to stand on the right. We don't have much patience with the bloody tourists who stand on the left or who put their damned luggage in the way.
I'm an occasional "recent changes patroller" and I don't really care how many false positives cluebot gets in anonymous edits. It's too busy weeding out the thousands of "Bob is gay" and "I like pie" edits. Why they still allow anonymous "editors", I really don't know.
I've only been out of college for a few years, but it's more than enough experience in IT to know that I don't want to do it for the rest of my life.
I've been a software engineer for 30 years and when it's good there is no better job - the day flies by as you're totally absorbed in problem solving or coding flow. If I didn't do it as a job, I'd do it as a hobby. A hobby with pay - what's not to like? Of course, it's not all a bed of roses but what job is? In a way, it's a vocation and if you don't actually like software, well you're in the wrong job.
Little glitches like this just reenforce the idea that Google is not a safe pair of hands for confidential data. We just had a memo at work saying that Google docs was not suitable for confidential data and they are cutting off all access to the site. Now, I don't know the rights and wrongs of that decision but I guess Google are losing the battle for the confidence of system administrators.
Where the definition of 'terrorist cell' is up to the authorities, and in this case means 'animal rights activist'. It could mean anything according to this corrupt, overbearing government.
Animal terrorists are a red herring. In Britain 3% of the population is Muslim. A poll in 2007 found that 13% of Muslims aged 16 to 24 "admire organisations like al-Qa'eda that are prepared to fight the West". [*] This is a real enemy within and the police need special powers to deal with them.
Woo! I'm one of eleven! (A better question is, how many people, myself included, like the ribbon interface better than the terrible tangle that was the menu system?)
The menus were a mess but after about 10 yearrs of using Word you got to know where everything was. Then they moved nearly everything which annoyed the hell out of me at first. Now I understand the ribbon and am even sort of warming to it.
An aquaintance of mine was hit by this today, he only ran Skype ever with his wife and daughter -- it seems hard to imagine how bad guys got ahold of his address, unless perhaps somebody downloaded the whole database.
And the wife and daughter don't have other contacts? I guess this is just a standard address book trojan - six degrees of separation and all that.
In fact racial profiling for terrorists would work quite well in the U.S. and E.U. People just aren't interested in risking their lives to hurt you, unless their religious.
Don't forget the Shoe Bomber - not an Arab nor Asian and with a ethnic English name. Now, religious profiling would be a different matter...
Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distro with all the codecs & drivers you should need for desktop use, it's worth checking out!
Yeah, I'm not falling for that one again. Downloaded, installed, still won't play DVDs because of missing codec.
Linux on the desk top will always be "jam tomorrow". Always the next distro.
Bridge engineers don't say things like that. They don't put that "hack something unsafe together" option out there on the table, and neither should we.
I think one of the biggest problems in our industry is accountability. The engineer would never put the unsafe option on the table, because the engineer knows he'll loose his license and go to prison if the bridge collapses. With software, on the other hand, we just expect our customers to deal with the fact that it fails, and we behave accordingly - and unprofessionally.
Like most things in life, it boils down to money. The vast majority of programmers are in the wrong line of work and are only in it for the cash. There is just too much demand for software and not enough supply of good software engineers.
it can play DVD movies out of the box. I gave up trying to get it to work.
it has decent fonts. Crappy rough fonts are not good enough.
wifi works out of the box. Again, I gave up.
My time is precious. I have installed and used a variety of *nixes over the past 20 years and still have not seen a seriour contender on the home desktop. Linux will always be playing catch-up with the latest M$ offering.
Talk about immediate environmental impact. WAKE UP people - wind farms take energy directly out of a very complex self-regulating system. Let's see how long it takes the greenies to realise this is NOT a long term solution.
Back of envelope estimates from some figures off Wikipedia: Energy reaching earth from sun = 170,000 TW Say 2% converted to wind = 3,400 TW One estimate of theoretical potential for wind power = 72 TW (which is 40 times the current electricity use.) So if we covered the planet with turbines we might manage to take 2% out of the total wind energy. Is that going to change the weather?
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I'm sure we'll hear a lot of political ideology in today's comments, but I just wanted to remind folks that S&P reputation isn't that stellar. S&P and Moody's used mathematical models to rate mortgage backed securities as safe as governmental bonds back in 2007. Then about 90% of those bonds were then rerated as junk bonds which forced a large sell off.
Only because the bank deliberately gamed the system to hide the fact that they were lending way beyond the Basel rules. Don't blame the ratings agencies or the governments - it's all the greedy bankers' fault.
The real purpose for Google putting everything into one entry box is that everything you type gets turned into a search, and therefore gets sent to Google
I'm a keyboarder rather than a mouser so I know C-L takes me to the address bar with autocomplete from history and bookmarks, C-K to search. C-L plus a few letters is a lot faster than a bookmarks menu. C-T,C-K is probably one of my most used key combos. Either way, they can hide the bar when not in use as long as I can get there via a handy shortcut.
Is FF becoming the Gillette of the UI?
I have absolutely no idea what that is supposed to mean. Anyway, I've recently switch to Chrome now that it's got adblock, flashblock and copy link text.
So then why did I think that I'm the only real sentient human being when I was a kid? I grew out of that somehow, am I autistic deep down or are my survival instincts just extremely poor?
Lack of a 'theory of mind' probably puts you down the /. end of the autistic spectrum.
I used to visit the US fairly regularly .... once every two years or so. Nowadays it's about last on my list, simply because of the aggravation involved in setting up the trip, getting the necessary documentation, undergoing the various intrusive security procedures and the like. It's simply not worth the trouble.
Same here. And I won't even transit through the US because of the hassle.
I usually pass my books on to charity shops after I've read them. I guess they'll lose out in the ebook age. I've never understood why some people hang on to every work of fiction they've ever read. I read an article recently (sorry no cite) of someone who uses the ebook for preference but also buys a hard copy for their bookshelves. Does not compute.
That's $60 billion total per year. Not just from Google but from every American business using these tax loopholes (Microsoft and Facebook included).
And that could keep the Afghan war going for, like, 5 months. Why should they pay big taxes to a government that'll just throw it away?
Most computer users I come across need 4 applications: an internet browser, a pdf viewer, a program that can open word and a program that can open excel files. I haven't seen a Linux desktop that doesn't provide these out of the box in the past few years.
So, what is missing from getting Linux to the masses? ...)
1. retail distribution channels (walmart, dell,
2. marketing presence
3. easy to use, consolidated app store with a way for users to actually pay for stuff
Google could easily fix all 3 of those issues; why hasn't it yet? ... ChromeOS. Expect a solid windows competitor in the next few years.
How about a desk-top OS that can't play DVDs without you figuring out what extra stuff you need to install and who's audio is a complicated mess? Ubuntu is a great achievement but it's still not there yet.
So 2+2 really is 5?
Yes, for sufficiently large values of 2.
Perhaps we are stuck here for a reason, and perhaps this is an opportunity for all of us to start working out our issues and learn to live together with reasonable differences.
I figured this out a while back. The computer running our simluation is only big enough to cope with a space the size of the near solar system. The whole lightspeed thing is an artificial construct of the simulated physics to keep us in place - like a video game with locked boundaries. All the rest is the imagination of a far space landscape designer.
In Japan they have a cool solution: the escalator ends up having two lines. The people on the left keep walking, and those on the right stand. I guess for that to become a custom you'd need escalators that are typically crowded, which most in the US are not.
Speaking of stairs and escalators, England really needs to catch up on this one. When I was riding the train there I kept having little old ladies ask me to carry their luggage for them up the stairs. I can't imagine what wheelchaired people do.
On the London Underground we have signs telling people to stand on the right. We don't have much patience with the bloody tourists who stand on the left or who put their damned luggage in the way.
Link give 403 forbidden.
I'm an occasional "recent changes patroller" and I don't really care how many false positives cluebot gets in anonymous edits. It's too busy weeding out the thousands of "Bob is gay" and "I like pie" edits. Why they still allow anonymous "editors", I really don't know.
I've only been out of college for a few years, but it's more than enough experience in IT to know that I don't want to do it for the rest of my life.
I've been a software engineer for 30 years and when it's good there is no better job - the day flies by as you're totally absorbed in problem solving or coding flow. If I didn't do it as a job, I'd do it as a hobby. A hobby with pay - what's not to like? Of course, it's not all a bed of roses but what job is? In a way, it's a vocation and if you don't actually like software, well you're in the wrong job.
Little glitches like this just reenforce the idea that Google is not a safe pair of hands for confidential data. We just had a memo at work saying that Google docs was not suitable for confidential data and they are cutting off all access to the site. Now, I don't know the rights and wrongs of that decision but I guess Google are losing the battle for the confidence of system administrators.
Where the definition of 'terrorist cell' is up to the authorities, and in this case means 'animal rights activist'. It could mean anything according to this corrupt, overbearing government.
Animal terrorists are a red herring. In Britain 3% of the population is Muslim. A poll in 2007 found that 13% of Muslims aged 16 to 24 "admire organisations like al-Qa'eda that are prepared to fight the West". [*] This is a real enemy within and the police need special powers to deal with them.
Woo! I'm one of eleven! (A better question is, how many people, myself included, like the ribbon interface better than the terrible tangle that was the menu system?)
The menus were a mess but after about 10 yearrs of using Word you got to know where everything was. Then they moved nearly everything which annoyed the hell out of me at first. Now I understand the ribbon and am even sort of warming to it.
Has anyone actually found the damn report?
As somebody above helpfully said, there's a copy here. Fairly thin stuff, sweeping generalisations etc.
It's shameful neo-Ludditism.
Quite right too. We don't want any of this newfangled neo-Ludditism. Let's stick to good old-fashioned Luddism that we know and understand.
And the wife and daughter don't have other contacts? I guess this is just a standard address book trojan - six degrees of separation and all that.
Don't forget the Shoe Bomber - not an Arab nor Asian and with a ethnic English name. Now, religious profiling would be a different matter ...
Yeah, I'm not falling for that one again. Downloaded, installed, still won't play DVDs because of missing codec. Linux on the desk top will always be "jam tomorrow". Always the next distro.
I think one of the biggest problems in our industry is accountability. The engineer would never put the unsafe option on the table, because the engineer knows he'll loose his license and go to prison if the bridge collapses. With software, on the other hand, we just expect our customers to deal with the fact that it fails, and we behave accordingly - and unprofessionally.
Like most things in life, it boils down to money. The vast majority of programmers are in the wrong line of work and are only in it for the cash. There is just too much demand for software and not enough supply of good software engineers.
- it can play DVD movies out of the box. I gave up trying to get it to work.
- it has decent fonts. Crappy rough fonts are not good enough.
- wifi works out of the box. Again, I gave up.
My time is precious. I have installed and used a variety of *nixes over the past 20 years and still have not seen a seriour contender on the home desktop. Linux will always be playing catch-up with the latest M$ offering.Back of envelope estimates from some figures off Wikipedia:
Energy reaching earth from sun = 170,000 TW
Say 2% converted to wind = 3,400 TW
One estimate of theoretical potential for wind power = 72 TW (which is 40 times the current electricity use.)
So if we covered the planet with turbines we might manage to take 2% out of the total wind energy. Is that going to change the weather?