Recover its real value? You think the value of stocks at the peak of the bubble in 1929 was real? It was real in the sense that people would pay that much for the stocks, but it wasn't real in the sense that the stock price accurately represented the value of companies. You could buy a slice of toast for a million dollars, but that wouldn't make the slice of toast worth a million dollars, it would make you a doofus for paying far too much for a slice of toast.
As opposed to all those wise people like me who lived well within our means and invested in stocks (!) and earned negative real returns on savings accounts? Yeah, that worked out real well for us, didn't it.
The value of your stocks may have gone down, but if you haven't sold them you've lost nothing. If they are worth more than when you bought them but less than they were a year ago, you've made a profit. I doubt you were complaining when the value of your portfolio was being artificially inflated in the bubble.
"food debit style card" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Some people in the UK still call their state benefits a Giro (a kind of cheque you can cash at the post office), even though it gets paid directly into your bank account these days.
It's far more complex than it should be in 10.4 (and pretty easy in 10.5), but in many years of Mac use that is by far the most unpleasant and complex process I've come across. Finding one thing that's easy on *nix and hard on an old version of OS X is far from the whole story.
Your Google-fu is extremely weak. You admitted you now know the term "short name". This utility is the second hit on Google for "mac change short name".
Most users of Linux on non-x86 platforms should be twitching violently from reading that quote.
Worse than that, I suspect both of them will be twitching violently.
Actually, I do run Linux on ARM, but not on a desktop machine. Linux is a tiny market and desktop Linux on anything but x86 is so vanishingly small a market that no big company is going to give a shit. The only exceptions are likely to be platforms like the Nokia Internet Tablets, smartphones and set-top-boxes where big cash up front and the promise of millions of units shipped makes it worthwhile. If you're running Linux on an old iBook I wouldn't hold your breath.
I might add, I utterly hated OS X when I first used it too. I thought it was a dumbed-down, stupid piece of crap. It took about a week of daily use till I stopped despising it, started learning to trust it and began to see the benefits. O'Reilly's "Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks" and "Missing Manual" books helped; I expect there are Leopard versions. I had the incentive of having spent a chunk of cash on a Mac of my own to get over the hump though. It is different and different is bad till you get used to it. It only took about three months of using it on my laptop till I just didn't want to use my Windows and Linux boxes unless I had to.
Nowadays, I get pissed off with any other OS within seconds. They're all just so damn happy to tell me the great things they are doing for me - "I found a wireless network, aren't I great?" "Bluetooth file reception is enabled, in case you forgot." "You know that icon you put on the desktop? It's STILL THERE!!11onethousandonehundredandeleven!!!!!!!". I don't just mean Windows, Ubuntu and Xandros (which I used for a few days with my new Eee) do it too.
Just editing/etc/passwd in Debian messed things up for me, the GUI tools got confused. That was changing UID rather than name though, I generally spell my own name right first time, every time;)
Anyway, assuming you run Leopard, right-click on the username in the Account Management pane in System Preferences and select Advanced Options. For previous versions I don't know, it might be the same or perhaps you use NetInfo Manager, but I'm sure the answer is only a web search away.
I worked as a contractor for a good few years. No reason at all is fine, but some reasons are illegal. They can't get rid of you for being black, for example. Even if you were a contractor and your contact said "you agree to be sacked for being black" it would still be illegal. On a practical level it would be really hard for a contractor to prove that there was a reason and that reason was illegal, but that doesn't change the principle. Even contractors have some rights.
There isn't much choice but to spend a reasonable amount of time tweaking Gentoo, or at least keeping it up to date (which does sometimes require tweaking). If you don't update regularly you end up having to spend hours fixing portage yourself, at least that was my experience when I last used it a couple of years ago. Perhaps it's better now and a box you've not powered up for six months can be brought up to date with less than two days compiling, interspersed with a couple of hours of fixing portage.
There were big strides in OS X performance from 10 to 10.3, but that's more about the earliest versions being crappy than about the later versions being great. 10.3 to 10.4 was a bit better, but I didn't notice any difference when going from 10.4 to 10.5. Now it seems to be a case of more features without a slowdown, which is good, but not as good as more features and more speed. Hey! That cake I ate yesterday has gone!
They are pitching the statistics to imply that the newer releases are slower due to bloat in the distribution or something similar.
They're not implying, you're inferring.
However, if it is due to security patches in the kernel and elsewhere, it is something that is beyond the control of the Ubuntu packagers.
Which version of an upstream package Ubuntu decides to include is fully in their control. Previous versions of software often get the same security patches as the latest version and Debian have demonstrated that it's possible to maintain older versions and backport security fixes.
Where are any measurements that look at where performance was lost? Running just the distros does nothing to isolate what got slower. Trying different kernels and different X servers would at least show an attempt at understanding what's going on. Why didn't they compare at least one Ubuntu version with a similar Fedora version, let alone Kubuntu or xubuntu?
The subject of TFA is "Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 Benchmarks: Is Ubuntu Getting Slower?" and it answers that question. If the title was "Is Ubuntu Slower Than Other Distributions?" or "Why is Ubuntu Getting Slower?" you might have a point, but those were not the subject of the article. The article does exactly what it says on the tin, if you were expecting something else that's your problem. If you want to see the results of some further tests why don't you go and do them?
Secondly, Ubuntu is made up of packages that are their own, and packages that are Debian's. Ubuntu picks the important stuff (Linux, GCC, Xorg, GNOME versions), but the rest (50+%) of the software is simply imported from Debian.
The fact that they choose to simply import a load of Debian packages is still their choice. I'm not saying it's a bad choice, but it's their choice, their decision, their responsibility. You can't pass the blame upstream when it's Ubuntu who decides what they are going to use. Nobody held a gun to their heads and forced them to select packages that way. Ubuntu consists of precisely what they decided to include in the distribution, even if they don't take a great deal of care in selecting some of the packages.
You seem to think they aren't responsible for what goes into their distribution and that's just not the case. If Ubuntu is getting worse it's because Ubuntu chose to include worse software. It's certainly nobody else's fault.
I'm probably biased because I have a Mac, so I know that easy-to-use and powerful aren't as mutually exclusive as you seem to think. I'm no idiot, but I like an idiot-proof interface because it requires so little effort on my part. Provided the idiot-proof interface does the right thing (which OS X almost always does) and you can go under the hood if you need to (which you can with OS X) I see it only as a win. Idiot-proof lets me concentrate on what I want to do with the machine, rather than the things I have to do to the machine.
Spotlight doesn't stop me organising my files. The nice interface for setting up an SMB share doesn't stop me using NFS. The simple and friendly user management console doesn't stop me matching up UIDs across my *nix systems. The simple firewall interface doesn't stop me writing my own arbitrarily complex ruleset. Automator doesn't stop me writing Bash scripts. Time Machine doesn't stop me using version control for my code and rsync for backups. One click to set up a web server doesn't stop me using mod_obscure_feature with Apache.
In other words, Ubuntus' not getting slower. The software that Ubuntu bundles is getting slower.
Ubuntu (Canonical) pick what goes into Ubuntu. Older versions of everything Ubuntu bundles are still available, there is nothing forcing them to use a new version if it sucks donkey balls.
You might want to check out nLite, which makes it easy to customise XP installations. You can remove the bloat, slipstream drivers and patches, run fully unattended installs etc. AFAIK under the hood it uses the tools Microsoft provide for corporate sysadmins and the like, but with a more user-friendly interface and useful defaults. Very popular with the Windows-loving section of the Netbook community and great for VM installs.
You're right in that it was brittle use of tabs rather than a table which caused the problem. The problem with using correct formatting is that the document will typically be read using Word. That means headers and footers will be light grey, hard to read and more difficult for an recruitment agent to edit (to remove your contact details, add their logo etc.). Tables you intended to be invisible when printed will have ugly lines round them. Anything not in Word's dictionary will be underlined in red, even if it's spelt correctly. Any sentence Word thinks is grammatically incorrect will be underlined in green, even if it is in fact grammatically correct. A document which is semantically marked up and uses correct layout principles is more flexible and robust, but it looks worse when you click on the attachment and it fires up Word. Your CV ends up looking worse than that of someone who did everything wrong. It sucks, but so does being unemployed.
Where I am going is that, at the same time I was doing pograming, there were students in my Biology and Environmental classes pulling off modules for Word/Excel and PPT that were giving the same total number of credits as I was getting for busting my arse off learning how to write object-orientated programs.
I have no problem with learning how to use Excel/Word/PowerPoint to its fullest, but to achieve university points for demonstrating how to point and click is absurd.
Word and PowerPoint are of course simple enough for the basics, but you can use VBA to do some clever and difficult stuff with them. Excel spreadsheets can be monstrously complex and getting the best out of Excel for analysing scientific data or doing complex accounting involves a damn sight more than "point and click". Of course whether or not the courses you refer to cover that kind of material I don't know.
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I figured you meant inflation-adjusted, but that doesn't change my point.
Recover its real value? You think the value of stocks at the peak of the bubble in 1929 was real? It was real in the sense that people would pay that much for the stocks, but it wasn't real in the sense that the stock price accurately represented the value of companies. You could buy a slice of toast for a million dollars, but that wouldn't make the slice of toast worth a million dollars, it would make you a doofus for paying far too much for a slice of toast.
Doh! I should have written "you would still make a profit if you sold them now".
The value of your stocks may have gone down, but if you haven't sold them you've lost nothing. If they are worth more than when you bought them but less than they were a year ago, you've made a profit. I doubt you were complaining when the value of your portfolio was being artificially inflated in the bubble.
"food debit style card" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Some people in the UK still call their state benefits a Giro (a kind of cheque you can cash at the post office), even though it gets paid directly into your bank account these days.
It's far more complex than it should be in 10.4 (and pretty easy in 10.5), but in many years of Mac use that is by far the most unpleasant and complex process I've come across. Finding one thing that's easy on *nix and hard on an old version of OS X is far from the whole story.
Your Google-fu is extremely weak. You admitted you now know the term "short name". This utility is the second hit on Google for "mac change short name".
I guess that's why I wrote "The only exceptions are likely to be platforms like the Nokia Internet Tablets, smartphones and set-top-boxes [...]".
Worse than that, I suspect both of them will be twitching violently.
Actually, I do run Linux on ARM, but not on a desktop machine. Linux is a tiny market and desktop Linux on anything but x86 is so vanishingly small a market that no big company is going to give a shit. The only exceptions are likely to be platforms like the Nokia Internet Tablets, smartphones and set-top-boxes where big cash up front and the promise of millions of units shipped makes it worthwhile. If you're running Linux on an old iBook I wouldn't hold your breath.
I might add, I utterly hated OS X when I first used it too. I thought it was a dumbed-down, stupid piece of crap. It took about a week of daily use till I stopped despising it, started learning to trust it and began to see the benefits. O'Reilly's "Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks" and "Missing Manual" books helped; I expect there are Leopard versions. I had the incentive of having spent a chunk of cash on a Mac of my own to get over the hump though. It is different and different is bad till you get used to it. It only took about three months of using it on my laptop till I just didn't want to use my Windows and Linux boxes unless I had to.
Nowadays, I get pissed off with any other OS within seconds. They're all just so damn happy to tell me the great things they are doing for me - "I found a wireless network, aren't I great?" "Bluetooth file reception is enabled, in case you forgot." "You know that icon you put on the desktop? It's STILL THERE!!11onethousandonehundredandeleven!!!!!!!". I don't just mean Windows, Ubuntu and Xandros (which I used for a few days with my new Eee) do it too.
Just editing /etc/passwd in Debian messed things up for me, the GUI tools got confused. That was changing UID rather than name though, I generally spell my own name right first time, every time ;)
Anyway, assuming you run Leopard, right-click on the username in the Account Management pane in System Preferences and select Advanced Options. For previous versions I don't know, it might be the same or perhaps you use NetInfo Manager, but I'm sure the answer is only a web search away.
The clue is in the name. You are not a person, you are a resource.
The Razr name has been used for a few different models covering just about every market and network on the planet.
I worked as a contractor for a good few years. No reason at all is fine, but some reasons are illegal. They can't get rid of you for being black, for example. Even if you were a contractor and your contact said "you agree to be sacked for being black" it would still be illegal. On a practical level it would be really hard for a contractor to prove that there was a reason and that reason was illegal, but that doesn't change the principle. Even contractors have some rights.
There isn't much choice but to spend a reasonable amount of time tweaking Gentoo, or at least keeping it up to date (which does sometimes require tweaking). If you don't update regularly you end up having to spend hours fixing portage yourself, at least that was my experience when I last used it a couple of years ago. Perhaps it's better now and a box you've not powered up for six months can be brought up to date with less than two days compiling, interspersed with a couple of hours of fixing portage.
There were big strides in OS X performance from 10 to 10.3, but that's more about the earliest versions being crappy than about the later versions being great. 10.3 to 10.4 was a bit better, but I didn't notice any difference when going from 10.4 to 10.5. Now it seems to be a case of more features without a slowdown, which is good, but not as good as more features and more speed. Hey! That cake I ate yesterday has gone!
They're not implying, you're inferring.
Which version of an upstream package Ubuntu decides to include is fully in their control. Previous versions of software often get the same security patches as the latest version and Debian have demonstrated that it's possible to maintain older versions and backport security fixes.
The subject of TFA is "Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 Benchmarks: Is Ubuntu Getting Slower?" and it answers that question. If the title was "Is Ubuntu Slower Than Other Distributions?" or "Why is Ubuntu Getting Slower?" you might have a point, but those were not the subject of the article. The article does exactly what it says on the tin, if you were expecting something else that's your problem. If you want to see the results of some further tests why don't you go and do them?
The fact that they choose to simply import a load of Debian packages is still their choice. I'm not saying it's a bad choice, but it's their choice, their decision, their responsibility. You can't pass the blame upstream when it's Ubuntu who decides what they are going to use. Nobody held a gun to their heads and forced them to select packages that way. Ubuntu consists of precisely what they decided to include in the distribution, even if they don't take a great deal of care in selecting some of the packages.
You seem to think they aren't responsible for what goes into their distribution and that's just not the case. If Ubuntu is getting worse it's because Ubuntu chose to include worse software. It's certainly nobody else's fault.
I'm probably biased because I have a Mac, so I know that easy-to-use and powerful aren't as mutually exclusive as you seem to think. I'm no idiot, but I like an idiot-proof interface because it requires so little effort on my part. Provided the idiot-proof interface does the right thing (which OS X almost always does) and you can go under the hood if you need to (which you can with OS X) I see it only as a win. Idiot-proof lets me concentrate on what I want to do with the machine, rather than the things I have to do to the machine.
Spotlight doesn't stop me organising my files. The nice interface for setting up an SMB share doesn't stop me using NFS. The simple and friendly user management console doesn't stop me matching up UIDs across my *nix systems. The simple firewall interface doesn't stop me writing my own arbitrarily complex ruleset. Automator doesn't stop me writing Bash scripts. Time Machine doesn't stop me using version control for my code and rsync for backups. One click to set up a web server doesn't stop me using mod_obscure_feature with Apache.
Ubuntu (Canonical) pick what goes into Ubuntu. Older versions of everything Ubuntu bundles are still available, there is nothing forcing them to use a new version if it sucks donkey balls.
You might want to check out nLite, which makes it easy to customise XP installations. You can remove the bloat, slipstream drivers and patches, run fully unattended installs etc. AFAIK under the hood it uses the tools Microsoft provide for corporate sysadmins and the like, but with a more user-friendly interface and useful defaults. Very popular with the Windows-loving section of the Netbook community and great for VM installs.
You're right in that it was brittle use of tabs rather than a table which caused the problem. The problem with using correct formatting is that the document will typically be read using Word. That means headers and footers will be light grey, hard to read and more difficult for an recruitment agent to edit (to remove your contact details, add their logo etc.). Tables you intended to be invisible when printed will have ugly lines round them. Anything not in Word's dictionary will be underlined in red, even if it's spelt correctly. Any sentence Word thinks is grammatically incorrect will be underlined in green, even if it is in fact grammatically correct. A document which is semantically marked up and uses correct layout principles is more flexible and robust, but it looks worse when you click on the attachment and it fires up Word. Your CV ends up looking worse than that of someone who did everything wrong. It sucks, but so does being unemployed.
You must have some pretty weak employment laws where you live.
Word and PowerPoint are of course simple enough for the basics, but you can use VBA to do some clever and difficult stuff with them. Excel spreadsheets can be monstrously complex and getting the best out of Excel for analysing scientific data or doing complex accounting involves a damn sight more than "point and click". Of course whether or not the courses you refer to cover that kind of material I don't know.