Math? Math is fun. Naming things? Very entertaining. Designing a complicated algorithm? It's what I live for.
Had you asked me twenty years ago what was the hardest thing about programming, I'd say, interfacing with non-technical management, for a variety of reasons.
As me today, and I'd say offshore infrastructure admin. Doing my job is fun. Somehow convincing someone else with few communication skills and little training to do their job so I can do mine, that's probably the hardest part today.
Not the answer you may be looking for, but the difficulty of the problem at hand is generally under your control. A balky environment managed by an undertrained call center is not. That's where the real pain originates.
Except it was reported by the news and caught on video, and there were followups.
It isn't necessary to prove that people who are not on government assistance do or do not commit fraud in significant numbers; that's out of band for this discussion (but would make an interesting discussion in itself). Because, the whole of the question was, could one have a reasonable suspicion that there could be widespread fraud in the welfare system. (I don't think I actually made that claim, but it's an interesting question to ask.) I submit that of the people in that particular walmart who were on government assistance, an obviously high percentage jumped at the chance to commit fraud when they had the chance. Although this is not legal proof, it is an interesting indicator. Again, that people not on government assistance might have done the same thing (I wouldn't have) was not the question.
Sadly not an option if there aren't Windows 7 drivers for your hardware.
Is that really an issue? When I upgraded from XP to 7, the only thing I had to leave behind was an old scanner. And scanners are, like, $49 on Amazon.
If you upgrade to Win 7 Pro, which includes the Win XP compatibility features, there are very few issues. Even where there aren't Win7 drivers, Vista drivers will often work.
Even my copy of Office 2000 and my ancient video capture card worked on Win7.
>> what's funny is that you actually think that, businesses don't care. in reality the actual functional difference between 7 and 8 from a user's perspective is simply the replacement of the start menu with the start screen. if you spend any significant amount of time in the start menu on 7 you're clearly doing something wrong anyway.
If by "businesses" you mean quickbooks for a hotdog stand, then I guess so. But if you're talking Enterprise, then yes, they very much do care. This is why businesses will skip an entire release (Vista, for instance) if there is a perception of potential roll-out issues. An extra few minutes a day struggling with a new OS isn't significant at home -- but with 20,000 users, it becomes a serious issue.
It's important to remember, regular employees are typically not computer geeks. They use computers for specific purposes, and find no joy in learning the ins and outs of a new interface. To them, the OS is just something that loads the applications they need to do their jobs. If 98SE was still supported, it'd still be on people's desks. (Win98 *is* still being used in embedded applications.)
Windows 8 is enough different that retraining is a significant issue, an issue that increases with installed base. Enterprise customers are just now migrating from XP to Win7, and 7 is a small leap, a hop really, from XP. Crossing the chasm to 8 is out of the question, at least in its current form. If 8.11 (I like that name) restores the Win7 look and feel, it significantly increases the chances of Enterprise adoption. (Similarly, some Enterprise customers are just now moving from Server 2003 to Server 2008, and have no interest in 2012.)
This, I think, was the major mistake with Win8. In the effort to achieve the dual goals of conforming to the "single codebase" philosophy and being seen as a player in the tablet marketplace, Microsoft created an OS that Enterprise customers could not accept. I wouldn't be surprised at all if another release or two down the road Win8 was (or could be made to be) identical to Win7 in look and feel. But, that would mean that Microsoft decided to give in and do something practical. They may instead just double down on their "touch screen interface on non-touch computers" concept. That would be entertaining.
On the other hand, this may all be part of a cunning plan. Given that Microsoft recognizes that Enterprise customers tend to skip every other release, they could be writing off Win8 in the enterprise and using this opportunity to try to capture as much of the touch marketplace as they can, deciding to worry about the replacement for Win7 Enterprise Edition further down the road. It'll be interesting to see what shakes out.
"trust but verify" is a good idea in many areas -- relationships, law, security -- not just science. But it's especially important in areas where published results establish precedent and serves as the basis of new results. Else we end up with baggage that hampers future efforts. It's not just a matter of saying "oops, those results are invalid", we also have to ask "ok, what other research has those results affected, and how does invalidation change things?"
upgrading to 8.1 is something one does in self-defense. It's not really optional, if you want to keep some shred of your sanity. (Which means, Microsoft should really have charged for it.)
No, hang on. Electric vehicle batteries are typically very high current but *low* voltage. Not enough voltage, in fact, to overcome the natural resistance of the human body. With a good conductive path, the high current can cause bad things to happen (like extreme heat, fire, smoke) but you are in no danger of getting shocked to death.
This is one of the things TV/movies often get wrong and it's crept into our tribal knowledge -- that the type of batteries you find in cars can shock you to death. It's not true, for very basic, ohm's law type reasons.
It *is* true that rescue workers approach hybrids cautiously. This is partly because of the fire danger (*not* electrocution danger) but also because the car's motive force could still be "live", even though the engine is not running. It's hard for rescue workers to tell if a hybrid is truly "off" as they attempt to rescue the passengers.
Agreed, with the understanding that capacitors and batteries are different things with different manufacturing and operational characteristics. But sure, there's probably some parallels.
That's not a bad idea at all. Two questions, though: (1) How does this affect accidents, specifically willingness of emergency crews to pry open a crunched car body to extract you, and (2), how does this affect the cost and/or practicality of replacing the batteries when they inevitably begin to wear out?
All that schpeal about how they can decrypt your messages, but this gets a single sentance at the end: "Users' AppleID passwords also are sent in clear text to the Apple servers."? Would that pe the same AppleID that is tied to a credit card, so you can buy things in the Apple store?
That Apple can read your messages is not at all supriseing, THIS tidbit is shocking!
Yep. I just bought the entire Grateful Dead catalog on your credit card. Thanks!
> It's proof that dogs will eat anything regardless of whether it will make them sick or not. Or whether it is edible or not.
Yes. We've often said that this particular dog will eat something just on the off chance it might be food.
> And before anyone makes a crack about how dumb dogs are, I'll note that plenty of humans do the same thing: ingest something, get sick, recover, and ingest the thing that made them sick in the first place.
...that chocolate is addictive. Lacking mice, I used my dog as a test subject. I put my closed fist in front of him with a few chocolate chips inside, and he drooled all over it. Now, everyone knows that chocolate makes dogs sick. (Methylxanthine poisoning.) So the fact that he really really wanted to eat it is observable proof that chocolate is addicting. I mean hello -- highly attractive, bad for you, quod ita sit. Stay. Heel. Stop slobbering.
All I need to do is couch this in flamboyant, headline-ready terms, and the networks will eat it up. So to speak.
So, a more valid test would be to smear the rice cakes with lard-based vanilla-frosting-like substance, dump chocolate syrup on it, and put *that* on one side of the maze.
I think WTF is, the kids doing the "study" knew exactly what kind of phrases to use to make it highly likely that news sources would run with the story. It's kinda like a news outlet version of a "mail forward".
In fact, this could be an entertaining game, if it isn't already. Produce some bogus datum, wrap it in the kind of buzzwords news outlets find irresistible, and see what national news agencies fall for it.
> The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture."
Hey, I happen to like rice cakes. They're nice and crunchy, and they taste good. With a little cinnamon. And powdered sugar. And peanut butter. And then drenched with maple syrup.
Yes, the diet is coming along fine, why do you ask?
Slashdot Mirror
Rats. Crusades. Trade.
They had Silk in freaking Budapesht, Kiev, Oslo, Bruges, Orleans, Stuttgart and Florence. How isolated do you think the world was?
I think the point was, it's not the distance, it's the speed and frequency.
Math? Math is fun. Naming things? Very entertaining. Designing a complicated algorithm? It's what I live for.
Had you asked me twenty years ago what was the hardest thing about programming, I'd say, interfacing with non-technical management, for a variety of reasons.
As me today, and I'd say offshore infrastructure admin. Doing my job is fun. Somehow convincing someone else with few communication skills and little training to do their job so I can do mine, that's probably the hardest part today.
Not the answer you may be looking for, but the difficulty of the problem at hand is generally under your control. A balky environment managed by an undertrained call center is not. That's where the real pain originates.
Except it was reported by the news and caught on video, and there were followups.
It isn't necessary to prove that people who are not on government assistance do or do not commit fraud in significant numbers; that's out of band for this discussion (but would make an interesting discussion in itself). Because, the whole of the question was, could one have a reasonable suspicion that there could be widespread fraud in the welfare system. (I don't think I actually made that claim, but it's an interesting question to ask.) I submit that of the people in that particular walmart who were on government assistance, an obviously high percentage jumped at the chance to commit fraud when they had the chance. Although this is not legal proof, it is an interesting indicator. Again, that people not on government assistance might have done the same thing (I wouldn't have) was not the question.
So how far back do you verify?
If I am working on gravity theory, do I need to verify everything since newton?
Didn't Einstein? Newton's theories worked as gross approximations, but there proved to be a lot more going on there than he envisioned.
Sadly not an option if there aren't Windows 7 drivers for your hardware.
Is that really an issue? When I upgraded from XP to 7, the only thing I had to leave behind was an old scanner. And scanners are, like, $49 on Amazon.
If you upgrade to Win 7 Pro, which includes the Win XP compatibility features, there are very few issues. Even where there aren't Win7 drivers, Vista drivers will often work.
Even my copy of Office 2000 and my ancient video capture card worked on Win7.
>> EVERY business is laughing at MS.
>> what's funny is that you actually think that, businesses don't care. in reality the actual functional difference between 7 and 8 from a user's perspective is simply the replacement of the start menu with the start screen. if you spend any significant amount of time in the start menu on 7 you're clearly doing something wrong anyway.
If by "businesses" you mean quickbooks for a hotdog stand, then I guess so. But if you're talking Enterprise, then yes, they very much do care. This is why businesses will skip an entire release (Vista, for instance) if there is a perception of potential roll-out issues. An extra few minutes a day struggling with a new OS isn't significant at home -- but with 20,000 users, it becomes a serious issue.
It's important to remember, regular employees are typically not computer geeks. They use computers for specific purposes, and find no joy in learning the ins and outs of a new interface. To them, the OS is just something that loads the applications they need to do their jobs. If 98SE was still supported, it'd still be on people's desks. (Win98 *is* still being used in embedded applications.)
Windows 8 is enough different that retraining is a significant issue, an issue that increases with installed base. Enterprise customers are just now migrating from XP to Win7, and 7 is a small leap, a hop really, from XP. Crossing the chasm to 8 is out of the question, at least in its current form. If 8.11 (I like that name) restores the Win7 look and feel, it significantly increases the chances of Enterprise adoption. (Similarly, some Enterprise customers are just now moving from Server 2003 to Server 2008, and have no interest in 2012.)
This, I think, was the major mistake with Win8. In the effort to achieve the dual goals of conforming to the "single codebase" philosophy and being seen as a player in the tablet marketplace, Microsoft created an OS that Enterprise customers could not accept. I wouldn't be surprised at all if another release or two down the road Win8 was (or could be made to be) identical to Win7 in look and feel. But, that would mean that Microsoft decided to give in and do something practical. They may instead just double down on their "touch screen interface on non-touch computers" concept. That would be entertaining.
On the other hand, this may all be part of a cunning plan. Given that Microsoft recognizes that Enterprise customers tend to skip every other release, they could be writing off Win8 in the enterprise and using this opportunity to try to capture as much of the touch marketplace as they can, deciding to worry about the replacement for Win7 Enterprise Edition further down the road. It'll be interesting to see what shakes out.
"trust but verify" is a good idea in many areas -- relationships, law, security -- not just science. But it's especially important in areas where published results establish precedent and serves as the basis of new results. Else we end up with baggage that hampers future efforts. It's not just a matter of saying "oops, those results are invalid", we also have to ask "ok, what other research has those results affected, and how does invalidation change things?"
> and then write about it
Tweet during the act.
upgrading to 8.1 is something one does in self-defense. It's not really optional, if you want to keep some shred of your sanity. (Which means, Microsoft should really have charged for it.)
You should at least upgrade to 98SE. Just sayin'.
The local bottle deposit machines (at three different chains) still, in 2013, display the Windows 98 splash screen at boot.
No, hang on. Electric vehicle batteries are typically very high current but *low* voltage. Not enough voltage, in fact, to overcome the natural resistance of the human body. With a good conductive path, the high current can cause bad things to happen (like extreme heat, fire, smoke) but you are in no danger of getting shocked to death.
This is one of the things TV/movies often get wrong and it's crept into our tribal knowledge -- that the type of batteries you find in cars can shock you to death. It's not true, for very basic, ohm's law type reasons.
It *is* true that rescue workers approach hybrids cautiously. This is partly because of the fire danger (*not* electrocution danger) but also because the car's motive force could still be "live", even though the engine is not running. It's hard for rescue workers to tell if a hybrid is truly "off" as they attempt to rescue the passengers.
Agreed, with the understanding that capacitors and batteries are different things with different manufacturing and operational characteristics. But sure, there's probably some parallels.
That's not a bad idea at all. Two questions, though: (1) How does this affect accidents, specifically willingness of emergency crews to pry open a crunched car body to extract you, and (2), how does this affect the cost and/or practicality of replacing the batteries when they inevitably begin to wear out?
All that schpeal about how they can decrypt your messages, but this gets a single sentance at the end: "Users' AppleID passwords also are sent in clear text to the Apple servers."? Would that pe the same AppleID that is tied to a credit card, so you can buy things in the Apple store?
That Apple can read your messages is not at all supriseing, THIS tidbit is shocking!
Yep. I just bought the entire Grateful Dead catalog on your credit card. Thanks!
> It's proof that dogs will eat anything regardless of whether it will make them sick or not. Or whether it is edible or not.
Yes. We've often said that this particular dog will eat something just on the off chance it might be food.
> And before anyone makes a crack about how dumb dogs are, I'll note that plenty of humans do the same thing: ingest something, get sick, recover, and ingest the thing that made them sick in the first place.
I'm impressed that you chose not to post this anonymously.
All I need to do is couch this in flamboyant, headline-ready terms, and the networks will eat it up. So to speak.
"woof".
So, a more valid test would be to smear the rice cakes with lard-based vanilla-frosting-like substance, dump chocolate syrup on it, and put *that* on one side of the maze.
Mod up.
I think WTF is, the kids doing the "study" knew exactly what kind of phrases to use to make it highly likely that news sources would run with the story. It's kinda like a news outlet version of a "mail forward".
In fact, this could be an entertaining game, if it isn't already. Produce some bogus datum, wrap it in the kind of buzzwords news outlets find irresistible, and see what national news agencies fall for it.
> The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture."
Hey, I happen to like rice cakes. They're nice and crunchy, and they taste good. With a little cinnamon. And powdered sugar. And peanut butter. And then drenched with maple syrup.
Yes, the diet is coming along fine, why do you ask?
Sorry, this seems to be too much like the government's claim that we have too much freedom.
That works for me.
> Two words: Government shutdown.
Well, we may get this. (What we have now is not a shutdown; it's a tantrum.)