This is dangerous. This is very very dangerous. We openly acknowledge that those in charge have been fucking it up royal. But the media circus has convinced everyone that "my guy isn't the problem....
Not entirely -- the problem is that only a minority of people vote. Most of those who do are not the 89% who disapprove.
How do you think CA LOST legalizing same-sex marriage, when other states won? CA was thought to be a bell-weather state, and the mormons spent huge amounts of money to influence the "low-education" conservative voters to vote against it "en masse"... While they bought the election, in CA, it still passed elsewhere and by US-constitutional law, is likely valid in CA now as well.
Why do you think conservatives are against good public schools?
[blockquote]GMail scans and extract the meaning of the communication... they are extracting, saving, using and building a database of meaningful content from your email...[/blockquote] ---- It depends on what algorithm they are using, but if it is a Bayesian type analysis, they aren't extracting meaning, but a mathematical pattern which correlate to certain subjects that trigger ads.
You can see this type of behavior in results and it doesn't show much in the way of intelligence or actually finding "meaning", any more than looking for 2+2 and giving 4.
Pattern recognition is a machine level, non-thinking action -- that can be correlated, statistically (another numeric formula w/probabilities) to give formulaic outputs that can be used to trigger ads.
You don't understand -- the prison industry is a growth industry fueled by owners like Dick Cheney, who aren't about to let one of their biggest "feeds" into their system become "legal". The US prison industry is one of the few that continues to grow despite[due to] budget cuts and bad economic conditions. It grows during good times, and grows even faster during bad times.
On top of this, there is the move toward privatization where profits can really be had as economies of scale increase and provided "benefits" are cut below ethical levels, but still passing "official" guidelines (which are set by those making money by cutting them).
It's also a way of creating a new "underclass". With racism coming under constant harassment, some women making more than men, children's work restricted, a new class of low-wage slave laborers is needed. Those with prison records get to face all sorts of legal discrimination in housing and employment. It's a ripe market for development!
Happy OpenSuSE users? Ha! W/the switch to away from initd to a windows systemservicesd that takes over the HW operations of other daemons in preparation for licenses tied to your HW config as on windows? Yeah, real happy.
"Maybe I'm being naive, but where is the problem with this arrangement? "
What you are talking about -- phone subsidies, is primarily, dealt with via "early cancellation penalties". Carriers also check your credit before "advancing you" the cost of a phone to verify that you are an acceptable credit risk.
Phone locking allows companies like Verizon to lock out features of the phone. Example: not being able to transfer [music] files from my computer to the device.
My phone had the capability to transfer music files over USB, but Verizon locked out this ability, to encourage me to use "air time" and "data minutes" to download my own music to the device as well as paying per-song charges at the time.
Then comes the issue of being able to take my phone with me -- AFTER any contractual-obligation period, to a new carrier. This was (and with lock-in, still is) doesn't allow me to use a phone I've, *long since*, paid for.
Phone locking has little to nothing to do with something that is already dealt with via early cancellation penalties and Obama didn't ask that early cancellation penalties be abolished.
Phone locking disallows consumers bringing their own device to a network (presuming the device is network compatible) and is used to artificially inflate the costs of services and features long after any contractual-obligation period.
Top tax rate for corporations is less than that of individuals in the US by about 20%.
So yeah, it should be cheaper for corporations to supply products than individual tax payers. So why isn't?
You statement is loaded with an assumption that people don't pay taxes -- they do. It's the corporations that have lower tax rates, yet have many rights as people including owning many politicians.
So if it is easier for corporations to be cheaper, why aren't they?
Um... there is an assumption that one would disassociate all the atoms in the body in this disintegration -- but disintegration isn't an exact synonym for disassociation. If you think of items taking up a certain amount of space / mole (6.02x10^23 "things") -- gasses are fairly similar, so converting water to 2xH2+O2 would take up a large amount of space -- i.e. big explosion. That was never the case in a phaser set to disintegrate (or vaporize -- which is a closer synonym to disassociate).
Instead, it would be more efficient to annihilate part of the matter to power the conversion and ensure that there was no left over matter to expand in the space as well as converting no MORE matter than necessary to do the job, so no excess energy is released. A miniature computer in the phaser would likely do the trick.
With E=mass x light^2, only a tiny amount of the body's mass would need to be converted to energy to power the whole reaction.
3*10^8 squared, = 9 * 10^16. A gigajoule = 10^9 joules. So, we'd only need 10^(-7)* of the mass units... ?? grams? kg? moles? But that's an awfully small amount. The phaser just has to control the fusion conversion. Considering in the star-trek era, fusion was considered an old tech, I would guess they'd have it fairly well controllable.
(forgive any math errors, as I didn't look everything up, but hopefully people get the general idea)....
Welcome to living in a society with free *speech*.
Was you kid physically bullied? No. Where they even teased by classmates (in this case, unknown)? Absent any provable damage other than the "feeling" you get when you go to a theater and watch a movie where all the kids in the movie are killed by the end in the movie, you think scary things should be grounds for action against the scary thing?
Um...where do you draw the line: Generally, when there is actual damage.
The other coefficients are only a little more difficult. To find them we can use a trick discovered by Fourier. Suppose we multiply both sides of Eq. (50.2) by some harmonic functionâ"say by $\cos7\omega t$. We have then \begin{alignat}{2} f(t)\cdot\cos7\omega t &= a_0\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + a_1\cos\hphantom{1}\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &&+ b_1\sin\hphantom{1}\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + a_2\cos2\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &&+ b_2\sin2\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + \dotsb &&+ \dotsb\notag\\ &\quad + a_7\cos7\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &&+ b_7\sin7\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ \label{Eq:I:50:4} &\quad + \dotsb &&+ \dotsb \end{alignat}
The summary also said they explored failures under warrantee. Have 80GB SSD's even been around as long as a 5-yr-warrantee HD?
How do the SSD's stack up in failures/GB?
Face it, at 98.5% failure rate and 6-8 drives = 1 HD, we are talking, um... 98.5**6 - 98.5**8 = 91.3% - 88.6% chance of NO failure, or 8.7-11.4% chance of failing in a shorter warrantee period for the same amount of disk space or 50-100% higher.
Not when they are given government permission to be a monopoly provider in area, nor when they are given common carrier status. They've been given exclusive rights in various areas by the government -- now they want to abuse those rights to make more money.
@readin: I see your point,... it would be like calling Chinese, Japanese and Korean the same because they shared the same Chinese symbols. Er -- strike that original statement...my bad.;-)
Anon wrote: "And I assume you mean "Chinese characters" instead of "kanji." Kanji refers to the Chinese characters that were adopted by the Japanese."
I look too much at Japanese. I thought Kanji mean Chinese character/word? But that's looking at it from a Japanese viewpoint, I supposed. It was your calling that to my attention that started me thinking how language, especially in this case, existed before the importing of the writing system and how Imperialistic the previous way I had learned it could possible sound.
Reprogramming the biased way you were taught knowledge as a child is so interesting as it uncovers biases in what or how you were taught. Not that either might not be true from a particular point of view, thought I see CJK more as separate, and that makes it easier how the earlier invention of a writing system that can be adapted to local needs can be a tool for both unification and Colonialism.
I still find the difference between syllabic-and-conceptual languages from the alphabetic languages to be fascinating. It's hard to imagine one's brain working in a different system and how that would introduce it's own biases on a more primary level than the information we were taught.
Anon quoted: "The Wikipedia article takes a neutral approach and calls them "varieties of Chinese [wikipedia.org].
Many of those languages are mutually intelligible if they are written down. China has long had a history of a dialect problem -- with the pronunciation of the national language being different from town to town.
They don't call it a different language, because it is the same alphabet...they just can't understand the various non-standard pronunciations used for the same kanji.
@ 1000 emails/day, that's 15000 seconds processing time, or over 4 hours. That seems a bit excessive, but being having your email delayed a cumulative 4+ hours/day.
And move all of the silicon valley employees out of the valley to hot-inland locations? Sure they can move the buildings, but they can't move the interactive mind-share that only goes on in a reasonably large urban area with weather that is conducive to outdoor activities much of the year.
If people have to stay indoors, they will be isolated and there will be less of the creativity spawning interactions between engineers of different companies.
Google would never have been as successful as it is today if it had been in Redmond. Think about how many companies buy each other and merge -- and think about how well MS's purchase of skype has paid off.
From San Francisco to Malibu, much of the CA coast is classic Mediterranean climate. Cross that with good access for mobilizing goods (people included) in and out of the area and you are reproducing the environment that spawned much of western civilization.
If the weather conditions get too far from idea, that climate might start looking like Seattle, if it goes wet, or if hotter like the Tigress, Euphrates and Nile river valleys that are now desserts due to over development and deforesting.
Who knows -- maybe Bush's sale of many coastal old-growth forests off the NW coast will eventually dry the climate up north and Silicon Valley will HAVE to move northward to maintain it's climate, but that's likely, at least a century away.
Just because someone has a token CoB title doesn't mean they really do much of anything or influence anything (doesn't mean opposite either).
My impression is Bill has been off doing his own thing outside of MS, -- the company rather markedly changed directions and operations after Bill left. I haven't seen a reversal.
As to your idea that the was "out of the blue"... there has been talk of him stepping down on the MSforums for the past few years.
If he was fired, why would ask him to stay on until they find a replacement? You are jumping to conclusions.
The linux core developers have built their reputation on ignoring anyone's advice/input. They have done well, but their process for allowing necessarily disruptive changes into the kernel is frightfully closed.
I, myself, suggested / pointed out security problems, only to be ignored and have 0-day exploits released a few weeks later. If I was seeing the problems, it was likely others were too -- and they were. I was told I didn't know what I was talking about.
I also suggested a login-user-id for user-tracking (implemented 6 years later as an audit id) and suggested going to a 64-bit word size for block-offsets (was told it would kill performance in the kernel and would never happen -- about 3-4 years before their backs were to the wall and were forced to do so on a much accelerated and uncomfortable-for-all schedule.
They rarely think *ahead* and tend to be *reactive* in development rather than pro-active. They fact that Linus has been a rigid task/whip master, a loyal core, has allowed him to push hard-enough to be good in the "reactive" role -- but that development mode burns people out. The last great innovative change that went into the kernel was the O1 scheduler and the auto-grouping of tasks for the CFQ.
Now I see a reactive focus on increasing parallelization for multi-cpu's while not giving as much thought to how those increases need to have infrastructure to support 100-way parallelism (you can't have 100 writers on a 100-core intel cpu (they have such a beast w/each running at 1GHz) going to any disk subsystem other than a 400-disk RAID10, that can use that type of CPU parallelism...oh well...
They ARE better than the alternatives... feels like a US presidential election -- where you vote for one guy who isn't so great, because the alternative is much worse.
IMO, you are wrong on 2 counts. 1) in thinking that bill gates still has any position of influence in the company; and 2) thinking he shouldn't (at all).
Bill Gates was NOT a saint, by any measure (no matter how much he "philanthropicizes" after the fact, much of his gains are ill-gotten to begin with (MS did bad things during his tenure). BUT -- he appeared to be the only visionary in the company in upper management.
Several of his plans fell through -- many of those failed in *execution*, something had begun turning over to Ballmer long before his retirement. Ballmer is business oriented only. Ballmer would be happy being the next IBM that is the backbone of companies everywhere and never having another consumer customer -- they want and want and don't pay nearly as well as corporations can be bilked.
Bill had more (anyone would have more than Ballmer) focus on appealing to consumers while still supplying the staples needed by business. His surface, which Ballmer killed, MS home-server -- another flop.
Win8 was Ballmer's parting "gift" -- getting rid of the desktop that caters to personal computer users -- and converting it into a large button filled panel that would be perfect for limiting flexibility and allowing companies to create single-task appliances that can be used by children.
Gates wasn't a saint -- but he was orders of magnitude better than Ballmer for the PC-market.
Sure, my esteemed colleague, has never engaged in child abuse, or he would have been prosecuted, we all know this, but how clean is his past?
So emacs involves more double-key combos than VI and that's implicated in increased incidence of RSI, but hey, lets not make this about Emacs vs. VI... right? (not that I would agree with the underlying premise to to what, I am sure, all would recognize, as a complete lack of bias on my part.;-) *cough*
I agree with the above.. note taking on a computer helped my class grades alot. Even in non-CS classes, like a French language class, I'd spend spare time in the class (and outside) typing in the vocabulary for the following week and having it given to me on a random answer quiz that it would keep re-drilling on the wrong ones.
I had it for the main test require fill in the blank -- which means I had to get the spelling and accents correct. If I didn't get it, I was told the right answer, and later given the same question again to see if I remembered.
It worked GREAT! up until the vocab lists became longer than I could type in / week...;-(... But 1200 words+ / week was a bit much... if it had been my only class! -- yeah those were NEW words. The test could drill me just on old words, but also had the ability to fold in words from all or selected previous weeks.
--- Also on computer -- I can do handwriting and drawing....Drawing might be useful.. but handwriting.
My notes were always "write-only"... I had such trouble reading my own writing that it made them next to useless as a study aid.
I could touch type considerably faster than I wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
Not entirely -- the problem is that only a minority of people vote. Most of those who do are not the 89% who disapprove.
How do you think CA LOST legalizing same-sex marriage, when other states won? CA was thought to be a bell-weather state, and the mormons spent huge amounts of money to influence the "low-education" conservative voters to vote against it "en masse"... While they bought the election, in CA, it still passed elsewhere and by US-constitutional law, is likely valid in CA now as well.
Why do you think conservatives are against good public schools?
They just did. They closed the US Gvnmt.
Now if only it would stay closed.
I propose we have a constitutional convention now, quick, why the old government is officially shut-down.
[blockquote]GMail scans and extract the meaning of the communication ... they are extracting, saving, using and building a database of meaningful content from your email ...[/blockquote]
----
It depends on what algorithm they are using, but if it is a Bayesian type analysis, they aren't extracting meaning, but a mathematical pattern which correlate to certain subjects that trigger ads.
You can see this type of behavior in results and it doesn't show much in the way of intelligence or actually finding "meaning", any more than looking for 2+2 and giving 4.
Pattern recognition is a machine level, non-thinking action -- that can be correlated, statistically (another numeric formula w/probabilities) to give formulaic outputs that can be used to trigger ads.
That isn't the same as deciphering meaning.
You don't think MOST of the NSA's scanning is automated?
Just because it is automated, doesn't mean they don't pick out information they want and act on it.
How is this different than if a human scanned it?
You don't understand -- the prison industry is a growth industry fueled by owners like Dick Cheney, who aren't about to let one of their biggest "feeds" into their system become "legal". The US prison industry is one of the few that continues to grow despite[due to] budget cuts and bad economic conditions. It grows during good times, and grows even faster during bad times.
On top of this, there is the move toward privatization where profits can really be had as economies of scale increase and provided "benefits" are cut below ethical levels, but still passing "official" guidelines (which are set by those making money by cutting them).
It's also a way of creating a new "underclass". With racism coming under constant harassment, some women making more than men, children's work restricted, a new class of low-wage slave laborers is needed. Those with prison records get to face all sorts of legal discrimination in housing and employment. It's a ripe market for development!
Happy OpenSuSE users? Ha! W/the switch to away from initd to a windows systemservicesd that takes over the HW operations of other daemons in preparation for licenses tied to your HW config as on windows? Yeah, real happy.
"Maybe I'm being naive, but where is the problem with this arrangement? "
What you are talking about -- phone subsidies, is primarily, dealt with via "early cancellation penalties". Carriers also check your credit before "advancing you" the cost of a phone to verify that you are an acceptable credit risk.
Phone locking allows companies like Verizon to lock out features of the phone. Example: not being able to transfer [music] files from my computer to the device.
My phone had the capability to transfer music files over USB, but Verizon locked out this ability, to encourage me to use "air time" and "data minutes" to download my own music to the device as well as paying per-song charges at the time.
Then comes the issue of being able to take my phone with me -- AFTER any contractual-obligation period, to a new carrier. This was (and with lock-in, still is) doesn't allow me to use a phone I've, *long since*, paid for.
Phone locking has little to nothing to do with something that is already dealt with via early cancellation penalties and Obama didn't ask that early cancellation penalties be abolished.
Phone locking disallows consumers bringing their own device to a network (presuming the device is network compatible) and is used to artificially inflate the costs of services and features long after any contractual-obligation period.
Top tax rate for corporations is less than that of individuals in the US by about 20%.
So yeah, it should be cheaper for corporations to supply products than individual tax payers.
So why isn't?
You statement is loaded with an assumption that people don't pay taxes -- they do. It's the corporations that have lower tax rates, yet have many rights as people including owning many politicians.
So if it is easier for corporations to be cheaper, why aren't they?
Um... there is an assumption that one would disassociate all the atoms in the body in this disintegration -- but disintegration isn't an exact synonym for disassociation. If you think of items taking up a certain amount of space / mole (6.02x10^23 "things") -- gasses are fairly similar, so converting water to 2xH2+O2 would take up a large amount of space -- i.e. big explosion. That was never the case in a phaser set to disintegrate (or vaporize -- which is a closer synonym to disassociate).
Instead, it would be more efficient to annihilate part of the matter to power the conversion and ensure that there was no left over matter to expand in the space as well as converting no MORE matter than necessary to do the job, so no excess energy is released. A miniature computer in the phaser would likely do the trick.
With E=mass x light^2, only a tiny amount of the body's mass would need to be converted to energy to power the whole reaction.
3*10^8 squared, = 9 * 10^16. A gigajoule = 10^9 joules. So, we'd only
need 10^(-7)* of the mass units... ?? grams? kg? moles? But that's
an awfully small amount. The phaser just has to control the fusion conversion. Considering in the star-trek era, fusion was considered an old tech, I would guess they'd have it fairly well controllable.
(forgive any math errors, as I didn't look everything up, but hopefully people get the general idea)....
Welcome to living in a society with free *speech*.
Was you kid physically bullied? No. Where they even teased by classmates (in this case, unknown)?
Absent any provable damage other than the "feeling" you get when you go to a theater and watch a movie where all the kids in the movie are killed by the end in the movie, you think scary things should be grounds for action against the scary thing?
Um...where do you draw the line: Generally, when there is actual damage.
I wanted to vote yours insightful, but wanted to respond to next,
so +Insightful.
This is conversion to HTML?
The other coefficients are only a little more difficult. To find them we can use a trick discovered by Fourier. Suppose we multiply both sides of Eq. (50.2) by some harmonic functionâ"say by $\cos7\omega t$. We have then \begin{alignat}{2} f(t)\cdot\cos7\omega t &= a_0\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + a_1\cos\hphantom{1}\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &&+ b_1\sin\hphantom{1}\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + a_2\cos2\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &&+ b_2\sin2\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + \dotsb &&+ \dotsb\notag\\ &\quad + a_7\cos7\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &&+ b_7\sin7\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ \label{Eq:I:50:4} &\quad + \dotsb &&+ \dotsb \end{alignat}
???
Looks more like LateX than HTML...
The summary also said they explored failures under warrantee. Have 80GB SSD's even been around as long as a 5-yr-warrantee HD?
How do the SSD's stack up in failures/GB?
Face it, at 98.5% failure rate and 6-8 drives = 1 HD, we are talking,
um... 98.5**6 - 98.5**8 = 91.3% - 88.6% chance of NO failure, or
8.7-11.4% chance of failing in a shorter warrantee period for the same
amount of disk space or 50-100% higher.
Not when they are given government permission to be a monopoly provider in area, nor when they are given common carrier status. They've been given exclusive rights in various areas by the government -- now they want to abuse those rights to make more money.
That needs to be viewed as an attempted at theft.
@readin: I see your point, ... it would be like calling Chinese, Japanese and Korean the same because they shared the same Chinese symbols. Er -- strike that original statement...my bad. ;-)
Anon wrote: "And I assume you mean "Chinese characters" instead of "kanji." Kanji refers to the Chinese characters that were adopted by the Japanese."
I look too much at Japanese. I thought Kanji mean Chinese character/word? But that's looking at it from a Japanese viewpoint, I supposed. It was your calling that to my attention that started me thinking how language, especially in this case, existed before the importing of the writing system and how Imperialistic the previous way I had learned it could possible sound.
Reprogramming the biased way you were taught knowledge as a child is so interesting as it uncovers biases in what or how you were taught. Not that either might not be true from a particular point of view, thought I see CJK more as separate, and that makes it easier how the earlier invention of a writing system that can be adapted to local needs can be a tool for both unification and Colonialism.
I still find the difference between syllabic-and-conceptual languages from the alphabetic languages to be fascinating. It's hard to imagine one's brain working in a different system and how that would introduce it's own biases on a more primary level than the information we were taught.
Anon quoted: "The Wikipedia article takes a neutral approach and calls them "varieties of Chinese [wikipedia.org].
Probably the safest approach.
Many of those languages are mutually intelligible if they are written down.
China has long had a history of a dialect problem -- with the pronunciation of the national language being different from town to town.
They don't call it a different language, because it is the same alphabet...they just can't understand the various non-standard pronunciations used for the same kanji.
@ 1000 emails/day, that's 15000 seconds processing time, or over 4 hours. That seems a bit excessive, but being having your email delayed a cumulative 4+ hours/day.
So machines might replace drudge work that employs people in
mindless jobs? What do you think allowed civilization to ban slavery on a wide scale.
Think of all the slaves "out of work", or after them, remember all the serfs, servants and share-croppers that are now largely out of work.
Technology creates more opportunities to profit from less exploitation of inferior resources.
Transitions are a bitch (ex: USA Civil War et al).
And move all of the silicon valley employees out of the valley to hot-inland locations? Sure they can move the buildings, but they can't move the interactive mind-share that only goes on in a reasonably large urban area with weather that is conducive to outdoor activities much of the year.
If people have to stay indoors, they will be isolated and there will be less of the creativity spawning interactions between engineers of different companies.
Google would never have been as successful as it is today if it had been in Redmond. Think about how many companies buy each other and merge -- and think about how well MS's purchase of skype has paid off.
From San Francisco to Malibu, much of the CA coast is classic Mediterranean climate. Cross that with good access for mobilizing goods (people included) in and out of the area and you are reproducing the environment that spawned much of western civilization.
If the weather conditions get too far from idea, that climate might start looking like Seattle, if it goes wet, or if hotter like the Tigress, Euphrates and Nile river valleys that are now desserts due to over development and deforesting.
Who knows -- maybe Bush's sale of many coastal old-growth forests off the NW coast will eventually dry the climate up north and Silicon Valley will HAVE to move northward to maintain it's climate, but that's likely, at least a century away.
Just because someone has a token CoB title doesn't mean they really do much of anything or influence anything (doesn't mean opposite either).
My impression is Bill has been off doing his own thing outside of
MS, -- the company rather markedly changed directions and operations
after Bill left. I haven't seen a reversal.
As to your idea that the was "out of the blue"... there has been talk of him stepping down on the MSforums for the past few years.
If he was fired, why would ask him to stay on until they find a replacement? You are jumping to conclusions.
The linux core developers have built their reputation on ignoring anyone's advice/input. They have done well, but their process for allowing necessarily disruptive changes into the kernel is frightfully closed.
I, myself, suggested / pointed out security problems, only to be ignored and have 0-day exploits released a few weeks later. If I was seeing the problems, it was likely others were too -- and they were. I was told I didn't know what I was talking about.
I also suggested a login-user-id for user-tracking (implemented 6 years later as an audit id) and suggested going to a 64-bit word size for block-offsets (was told it would kill performance in the kernel and would never happen -- about 3-4 years before their backs were to the wall and were forced to do so on a much accelerated and uncomfortable-for-all schedule.
They rarely think *ahead* and tend to be *reactive* in development rather than pro-active. They fact that Linus has been a rigid task/whip master, a loyal core, has allowed him to push hard-enough to be good in the "reactive" role -- but that development mode burns people out. The last
great innovative change that went into the kernel was the O1 scheduler and the auto-grouping of tasks for the CFQ.
Now I see a reactive focus on increasing parallelization for multi-cpu's while not giving as much thought to how those increases need to have infrastructure to support 100-way parallelism (you can't have 100 writers on a 100-core intel cpu (they have such a beast w/each running at
1GHz) going to any disk subsystem other than a 400-disk RAID10, that can use that type of CPU parallelism...oh well...
They ARE better than the alternatives... feels like a US presidential election -- where you vote for one guy who isn't so great, because the alternative is much worse.
Oi.
IMO, you are wrong on 2 counts.
1) in thinking that bill gates still has any position of influence in the company; and
2) thinking he shouldn't (at all).
Bill Gates was NOT a saint, by any measure (no matter how much he "philanthropicizes" after the fact, much of his gains are ill-gotten to begin with (MS did bad things during his tenure). BUT -- he appeared to be the only visionary in the company in upper management.
Several of his plans fell through -- many of those failed in *execution*, something had begun turning over to Ballmer long before his retirement. Ballmer is business oriented only. Ballmer would be happy being the next IBM that is the backbone of companies everywhere and never having another consumer customer -- they want and want and don't pay nearly as well as corporations can be bilked.
Bill had more (anyone would have more than Ballmer) focus on appealing to consumers while still supplying the staples needed by business. His surface, which Ballmer killed, MS home-server -- another flop.
Win8 was Ballmer's parting "gift" -- getting rid of the desktop that caters to personal computer users -- and converting it into a large button filled panel that would be perfect for limiting flexibility and allowing companies to create single-task appliances that can be used by children.
Gates wasn't a saint -- but he was orders of magnitude better than Ballmer for the PC-market.
Standard argumentation technique.
Sure, my esteemed colleague, has never engaged in child abuse, or he would have been prosecuted, we all know this, but how clean is his past?
So emacs involves more double-key combos than VI and that's implicated ;-)
in increased incidence of RSI, but hey, lets not make this about Emacs vs.
VI... right? (not that I would agree with the underlying premise to to what, I am sure, all would recognize, as a complete lack of bias on my part.
*cough*
I agree with the above .. note taking on a computer helped my class grades alot. Even in non-CS classes, like a French language class, I'd
spend spare time in the class (and outside) typing in the vocabulary for the following week and having it given to me on a random answer quiz that it would keep re-drilling on the wrong ones.
I had it for the main test require fill in the blank -- which means I had to get the spelling and accents correct. If I didn't get it, I was told the right answer, and later given the same question again to see if I remembered.
It worked GREAT! up until the vocab lists became longer than I could type in / week...;-(... But 1200 words+ / week was a bit much... if it had been
my only class! -- yeah those were NEW words. The test could drill me just on old words, but also had the ability to fold in words from all or selected previous weeks.
---
Also on computer -- I can do handwriting and drawing....Drawing
might be useful.. but handwriting.
My notes were always "write-only"... I had such trouble reading my own writing that it made them next to useless as a study aid.
I could touch type considerably faster than I wrote.
peer to peer, or is it peerISP-CIA-ISPpeer
Encryption? like HTTPS? that was just said to be insecure?