...and there wasn't the extra dross that taints Google's results...
Indeed, my recent impressions of Google is that it has been dropping the ball in the same way as AltaVista did over a decade ago. I'm hoping that Google has the incentive (it certainly has the resources) to pick up its game, otherwise it might end up in the same graveyard.
With Bing you can still hone obscure queries with booleans and such, that Google only respects to a degree.
This is possibly true, but my frustration with Bing (which seems to increase every time I try it) is that most results are blocked by the third-party elements of my fairly extensive hosts file. Now of course, I know I can always disable that, and on occasions I have done so, with results that are usually irrelevant to my query.
This leaves the impression that having painted itself into a corner of irrelevance, Microsoft seems to be compounding the worthlessness of its search engine by throwing in its lot with known advertisers and distributors of malware.
But StarOffice is still based on OpenOffice (with additional proprietary features).
Actually, it's the other way around. OpenOffice is based on StarOffice, with the proprietary stuff stripped out. I'm guessing that releasing the code might have been a strategy for Sun to get development done without having to pay for it, but I think I read somewhere that Sun still contributes development resources to OOo.
One thing faster than the speed of light is the frequency with which Facebook changes its privacy policy to suck in the unwary. (Units deliberately left undefined.)
This is true. However, I have a suspicion it might not do so for long. I am reminded of Applixware (I think it was called), a commercial office suite available for Linux back in the late '90s. Although at the time Linux was poorly supplied with useful office suites, Applixware got little traction, and was essentially wiped out when Sun started distributing StarOffice for free.
Until then, I had made do with legacy free releases of WordPerfect and with the various Gnome office programs which were of rather variable quality. (Abiword was a godawful POS, while Gnumeric was actually quite powerful and useful.)
Q: I've heard OpenOffice discussed on Slashdot before, so why not this?
A: Because OpenOffice is an open-source, collaborative project that no-one has to pay for.
As an aside, this Softmaker product probably needs a serious amount of advertising to generate any kind of traction in the Linux market. Until today, I had never heard of it, and I've been using Linux for something like 15 years. I would suppose that it might appeal to new users of Linux who are accustomed to having to pay for any software they find useful, but I can't see it appealing to older hands.
Provided that it fits into the existing security framework & other policies for auditing, yes.
On the other hand, if you own your own phone, you get to decide how you use it. You are not obliged to answer it at any time of the day or night on the PHB's whim, and you are not subject to corporate restrictions on what you use the bandwidth for.
Some people find it necessary to carry their work around like a parasite on their backs, but IMO life is better when I can leave work on my desk and come back to it when I'm ready.
A physics professor at my university said "Maths is an auxiliary science to physics."
Interesting. I had a physics professor who insisted that physics is mathematics. Given that Stephen Hawking was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for some 30 years, he might have had a point.
Yes, but the discussion is about "increasing" size of meals in artistic representations. Leonardo shows us very few dishes in his painting. Furthermore, he obviously has no interest in biblical scholarship, since the Passover Seder is supposed to involve unleavened bread. The bread rolls we see in his painting seem unusually (though not impossibly) plump for something produced without the assistance of yeast.
If you want to build a botnet do you go for the 35 people who like hirsute midget and bald donkey porn, or do you go for the couple million people who casually visit FoxNews and the NYT?
Hey! What about those of us wo are into albino ostrich porn? (Currently zero Google hits: obviously I'll have to invent it...)
Leonardo's Last Supper is not exactly what most of us would describe as a pig-out. We see about one bread roll for each disciple and two or three dishes of what looks like some undetermined Indian takeaway, washed down with a few glasses of red wine. Big deal.
Never again Creative, you got my last dollar many years ago.
I too bought my last Creative card (an Audigy 2 ZS) many years ago, but it is so damn good, I'm still using it although my computers have changed several times. Given a tendency for motherboard manufacturers to provide ever fewer PCI slots, I wouldn't be surprised if I have to change my soundcard one day, purely because there's no hole for it any more.
No, there is no such thing as an USB gprs/3g modem with GPS. It makes no business sense whatsoever for manufacturers of devices to include GPS.
Furthermore, lots of countries outside the US have no requirement for GPS chipsets to be added to phones, so there are plenty of devices that don't have them.
The investigator learned how to do it by watching Jurassic Park over and over.
Heh. He could have got it from anywhere. Like you see on all of those CSI or NCIS shows, you only have to rattle QWERTYUIOP into a keyboard and you get a blinking display on a big plasma screen saying "MATCH FOUND".
Maybe the guy was just tired of all this freedom. I find it difficult to imagine that one can get to be the boss of a Mafia gang by being stupid - at least not for long.
I won't say "Get off my lawn!" but there was a time when ASCII art was regarded by the cognoscenti as totally cool. I remember having an ASCII rendering of the Mona Lisa on 14/11" fanfold on the wall of my machine room back in the '70s...
Finding a way to compile and transfer Kermit to such an ancient system would take some serious archeological research...
No it wouldn't. Well, no more than 5 minutes' worth of research.
Kermit was a well established data transfer protocol during the heyday (such as it was) of Xenix. I remember there were definitely binaries of kermit that ran quite happily under Xenix, but since Kermit was (and presumably still is) standard ANSI C, there should be no difficulty in compiling the program to run on Xenix.
Kermit was ubiquitous across many platforms because of its ability to transfer individual files with a minimum of hassle. Transferring whole directories was less reliable, and if there was an opion, UUCP was the preferred channel.
That's a bit scary. I haven't come across an IE-only bank since 2000, when my sister came over from the UK and had to deal with one of the banks here in Australia (which has, I am told, subsequently cleaned up its act). It infuriated me then, but there is even less excuse now. But at least nobody expects us to use Netscape 4 any more...
People who are both stupid enough to install Adobe Reader...
Whatever one may think about the Adobe PDF reader, it does make a much better job of rendering a lot of files, particularly those created from paper documents scanned at an insufficient DPI resolution. Too many educational institutions are guilty of this particular misdemeanour. I know there are lots of alternatives to the Adobe offering, but occasionally they just don't cut it.
In other news math may not lie but people still can...
Usually (in science at least) it's not even a matter of lying. Part of the problem is that the multi-headed monster that statistics has become has a tendency to lead people to over-use numerical "answers" vomited up by stats packages, without really understanding what they are for, or how to interpret them.
Statistics are very useful for predicting certain things, but all too often they are submitted as "proof" of a given condition, which is dangerous. Sometimes we need to throw away statistics and start applying common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Did I mentionned[sic] OS/2 had it too... ?
;-)
No, but you might remember that OS/2 was only half of an operating system.
I just tried the same thing. First result, "Why are Mac's So Expensive?".
:-P
Maybe their search algorithm is geared to select the most grammatically incorrect result.
I'm a PC and Bing was my idea.
You just reminded me that when I was a teenager, and Microsoft was as yet unconceived, PC was usually read as "Pretentious Crap(head)"...
...and there wasn't the extra dross that taints Google's results...
Indeed, my recent impressions of Google is that it has been dropping the ball in the same way as AltaVista did over a decade ago. I'm hoping that Google has the incentive (it certainly has the resources) to pick up its game, otherwise it might end up in the same graveyard.
With Bing you can still hone obscure queries with booleans and such, that Google only respects to a degree.
This is possibly true, but my frustration with Bing (which seems to increase every time I try it) is that most results are blocked by the third-party elements of my fairly extensive hosts file. Now of course, I know I can always disable that, and on occasions I have done so, with results that are usually irrelevant to my query.
This leaves the impression that having painted itself into a corner of irrelevance, Microsoft seems to be compounding the worthlessness of its search engine by throwing in its lot with known advertisers and distributors of malware.
But StarOffice is still based on OpenOffice (with additional proprietary features).
Actually, it's the other way around. OpenOffice is based on StarOffice, with the proprietary stuff stripped out. I'm guessing that releasing the code might have been a strategy for Sun to get development done without having to pay for it, but I think I read somewhere that Sun still contributes development resources to OOo.
One thing faster than the speed of light is the frequency with which Facebook changes its privacy policy to suck in the unwary. (Units deliberately left undefined.)
Therefore, it competes in a different market.
This is true. However, I have a suspicion it might not do so for long. I am reminded of Applixware (I think it was called), a commercial office suite available for Linux back in the late '90s. Although at the time Linux was poorly supplied with useful office suites, Applixware got little traction, and was essentially wiped out when Sun started distributing StarOffice for free.
Until then, I had made do with legacy free releases of WordPerfect and with the various Gnome office programs which were of rather variable quality. (Abiword was a godawful POS, while Gnumeric was actually quite powerful and useful.)
Q: I've heard OpenOffice discussed on Slashdot before, so why not this?
A: Because OpenOffice is an open-source, collaborative project that no-one has to pay for.
As an aside, this Softmaker product probably needs a serious amount of advertising to generate any kind of traction in the Linux market. Until today, I had never heard of it, and I've been using Linux for something like 15 years. I would suppose that it might appeal to new users of Linux who are accustomed to having to pay for any software they find useful, but I can't see it appealing to older hands.
Provided that it fits into the existing security framework & other policies for auditing, yes.
On the other hand, if you own your own phone, you get to decide how you use it. You are not obliged to answer it at any time of the day or night on the PHB's whim, and you are not subject to corporate restrictions on what you use the bandwidth for.
Some people find it necessary to carry their work around like a parasite on their backs, but IMO life is better when I can leave work on my desk and come back to it when I'm ready.
A physics professor at my university said "Maths is an auxiliary science to physics."
Interesting. I had a physics professor who insisted that physics is mathematics. Given that Stephen Hawking was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for some 30 years, he might have had a point.
Yes, but the discussion is about "increasing" size of meals in artistic representations. Leonardo shows us very few dishes in his painting. Furthermore, he obviously has no interest in biblical scholarship, since the Passover Seder is supposed to involve unleavened bread. The bread rolls we see in his painting seem unusually (though not impossibly) plump for something produced without the assistance of yeast.
If you want to build a botnet do you go for the 35 people who like hirsute midget and bald donkey porn, or do you go for the couple million people who casually visit FoxNews and the NYT?
Hey! What about those of us wo are into albino ostrich porn? (Currently zero Google hits: obviously I'll have to invent it...)
Leonardo's Last Supper is not exactly what most of us would describe as a pig-out. We see about one bread roll for each disciple and two or three dishes of what looks like some undetermined Indian takeaway, washed down with a few glasses of red wine. Big deal.
Never again Creative, you got my last dollar many years ago.
I too bought my last Creative card (an Audigy 2 ZS) many years ago, but it is so damn good, I'm still using it although my computers have changed several times. Given a tendency for motherboard manufacturers to provide ever fewer PCI slots, I wouldn't be surprised if I have to change my soundcard one day, purely because there's no hole for it any more.
No, there is no such thing as an USB gprs/3g modem with GPS. It makes no business sense whatsoever for manufacturers of devices to include GPS.
Furthermore, lots of countries outside the US have no requirement for GPS chipsets to be added to phones, so there are plenty of devices that don't have them.
The investigator learned how to do it by watching Jurassic Park over and over.
Heh. He could have got it from anywhere. Like you see on all of those CSI or NCIS shows, you only have to rattle QWERTYUIOP into a keyboard and you get a blinking display on a big plasma screen saying "MATCH FOUND".
Maybe the guy was just tired of all this freedom. I find it difficult to imagine that one can get to be the boss of a Mafia gang by being stupid - at least not for long.
...lolcats turn 42.
I won't say "Get off my lawn!" but there was a time when ASCII art was regarded by the cognoscenti as totally cool. I remember having an ASCII rendering of the Mona Lisa on 14/11" fanfold on the wall of my machine room back in the '70s...
Finding a way to compile and transfer Kermit to such an ancient system would take some serious archeological research...
No it wouldn't. Well, no more than 5 minutes' worth of research.
Kermit was a well established data transfer protocol during the heyday (such as it was) of Xenix. I remember there were definitely binaries of kermit that ran quite happily under Xenix, but since Kermit was (and presumably still is) standard ANSI C, there should be no difficulty in compiling the program to run on Xenix.
Kermit was ubiquitous across many platforms because of its ability to transfer individual files with a minimum of hassle. Transferring whole directories was less reliable, and if there was an opion, UUCP was the preferred channel.
Having a little virtual machine for those cases helps.
Why not just spoof your user-agent?
That's a bit scary. I haven't come across an IE-only bank since 2000, when my sister came over from the UK and had to deal with one of the banks here in Australia (which has, I am told, subsequently cleaned up its act). It infuriated me then, but there is even less excuse now. But at least nobody expects us to use Netscape 4 any more...
There is someone, somewhere that would likely fix it and recompile.
If you had taken the trouble to read the fine (and brief) article, you would be aware that the fix is already available in the release candidates.
People who are both stupid enough to install Adobe Reader...
Whatever one may think about the Adobe PDF reader, it does make a much better job of rendering a lot of files, particularly those created from paper documents scanned at an insufficient DPI resolution. Too many educational institutions are guilty of this particular misdemeanour. I know there are lots of alternatives to the Adobe offering, but occasionally they just don't cut it.
In other news math may not lie but people still can...
Usually (in science at least) it's not even a matter of lying. Part of the problem is that the multi-headed monster that statistics has become has a tendency to lead people to over-use numerical "answers" vomited up by stats packages, without really understanding what they are for, or how to interpret them.
Statistics are very useful for predicting certain things, but all too often they are submitted as "proof" of a given condition, which is dangerous. Sometimes we need to throw away statistics and start applying common sense.