... I'd like to know what percentage of users ticked "yes" to : 'do you want to enroll in the customer experience improvement program?' My hunch is that such a group suffers from two defects:
1. It's self selecting, and selection is based practically on a positive view of Microsoft products;
2.it might be too small to be representative of the whole, and no data on enrollment is available in the article.
moreover, the article says:
"[...]The data collected by Microsoft also show that people are becoming more familiar with the new features over time, says Larson-Green. She previously led a redesign of the Microsoft Office interface that, in 2007, replaced text-based menus with a more visual “ribbon interface,” an initially controversial change that is now widely accepted as an example of good design. “Two days to two weeks is what we used to say in Office, and it’s similar in Windows 8,” she says.
So my quick summary: Microsoft wants me to believe that a group, selected according to criteria and methods that would have my statistics professor at the University screaming that I am a confounded moron, is right in believing that windows 8 does not have a usability problem, and therefore I am also a confounded moron because I use windows 7 with the XP menus. Ah, I did not mention that there's no word on how would I use touch on my installed screen base, which does not have a touch interface.
it might be that the security is good NOW, but that this results are good enough that they do not want to risk decryption in a distant future..I recall a slashdot discussion about Key cryptoanalysis which was in a way scary, about how good new rigs using video cards are.
I am curious of what is the point of an unmanned space plane? There's nobody on it, so why make the return trip? The ability to fly down must compromise the design for everything else to some degree.
It might just be that the RESULTS from the sensors are so far ahead of the curve, that the DoD doesn't want to broadcast them in any shape or form. Or, security of military channel data have been compromised to some degree. Or, just a message to the Chinese, who have tested antisatellite weapons in the past, that their "dark period" in that case is not measured in weeks, even if they disrupt communications between the satellites and earth. It might be like the B2 Spirit: there might be only 20 of them, but if your bosses control a country spanning 5 time zones and want an early warning system capable of defeating it, start to print money now. Because you do not have enough of it.
Where are the damned bureaucrats when we need them? You can definitely count on the EU, we even gathered our best bureacrats and placed them in one spot to concentrate their paperwork-producing powers.
Begging your pardon, it's untrue. we gathered our best bureaucrats in TWO places, Strasbourg and Brouxelles. According to, guess what, a committee, cutting one would save about 180 mln EUR a year. I am also guilty, in my original post, of not having put in fat salaries for the committee members. Nothing like an entitlement to make a problem into an eternal problem, see also the common agricultural policy. Personally, I think that any entity willing to have two capital cities and spend half its budget on a sector representing less than 5% of its gross domestic products is fit to be tied. But then, it's just silly me.
Instead of opposing it and then caving in, The western world could rip a page off the dictatorships' book: "the proposal has merit, but it has to be studied thoroughly: We could form a committee with,oh, all the countries in the world, chaired by a non aligned country, Tuvalu [internet domain: *.tv], and wait until they come with a legal and technical proposal behind which a qualified majority, for example enough countries representing 95% of world population and internet domains, gathering at least 85% of the number of countries involved, could be found. Do you mind if we of the ole US of A get represented by all the 50 states individually? We know for a fast that Canada wants to do likewise, and to be fair, all the European countries have a vote each, so it would only be fair..... See you in 3.100 AD, ok? Of course, if some technical advance has taken hold in the meantime, the whole process has to be restarted."
It looks to me that bunching all of those vendors in one bundle is a bit risquè. In effect, some of them are selling something that they do not own.
...mmmmm, where to begin? This is Slashdot, so let's start with Microsoft. I never saw, read of heard about a suicide that lasted longer, unless the Dynosaurs killed themselves using farts to start a climate change. XP is still dominating their cash cows, and lo and behold, the serfs have fought back: "yes, come back when you REALLY will cut support. Line up over there, if we really want to retrain the whole workforce, we might as well go for open source + service contracts.....unless you offer us upgrades to windows SEVEN for 4.99$ per seat.". Final Nail in the coffin: price raises, obviously; why let a good opportunity to be LESS competitive go by?
Google, the smartest of them all: it's selling dearly to people things that they really do not own, mindspace. the gadgetry is very good, I do use calendar syncing, but I never entered via the browser since I set it up, and I use thunderbird + lightning as a client; anybody cares to bet on what will happen if all of a sudden the calendar utility ceases to be free and/or interoperable? I do think that at the Mozilla foundation they have a stock of Champagne bottles, in case it happens.
and now, the Apple of my eye. My teen daughter is quite taken by the Ipad, and it's the most expensive toy she has ever received. but "retina display"? "iphone 5"? "Siri"? it's becoming an organized religion: you have to believe, because if you approach with rationality, you get cold feet. Seriously, I know I am fifty, but looking at a puny display I cannot SEE the high definition.
But the biggest pun of all is "the government". Get serious, the only thing the governments are interested in is a." are there taxes to be had?" and b. " will these bozos provide us with private data, backdoors, snooping facilities if we ask?"
"Problem is it's their new design philosophy is completely different from what people have come to expect. For instance, Windows 8 Metro apps are to scroll horizontal instead of vertical. (unless it's a phone app then it's vertical). Tool bars are supposed to go off screen until you use some kind of mouse/keyboard/touch gesture. Don't include functionality in your app that can be done by another app via contracts. And that is going to through a lot of people who aren't creative types, especially businesses. Most people get into their routine and don't want change. And the fact it's going to be a while, if ever, before existing applications update to this new design guidelines. So it's going to be a disjointed experience between old and new for a couple years."
At our company, which has well over 30,000 PCs deployed, >90% of our systems are still on Windows XP. Who are you kidding? Who is Microsoft kidding? If it ain't broke, don't upgrade it
And before the bleeding edge fanboys... hell, before the slightly-bruised-edge fanboys get up in arms about whatever technical features there are that makes Win 7 a superior OS than XP (and I'm sure there are numerous examples), most organizations of our size suffer from the "Battlestar 78" problem. Our IT environment can only move forward as fast as the slowest mission-critical legacy app. When your biz ops/reg compliance/contractual obligs depend on a niche application that is not yet certified for IE 8, then the revenue-creating side of the company doesn't want to hear squat about group policy optimizations, memory management, or whatever.
I am not a programmer or an IT guy, I am only a power user...the kind of guy that remember spending the 80s squabbling to get the latest and greatest, the 90s fine tuning whatever was coming, and the 2000 trying to keep still and not be noticed when IT got round to changing computers... "yes, officer, I guarantee that my PC has been upgraded last week." Now I am a partner in a small company, we have win xp, and do not care to upgrade. why should I? we have one Win 7 machine, and it works just fine, now that it has the XP theme, but we'd have to erace everything, do a fresh install of win 7, reinstall everything....just to reach where we were. I think that the most utterly moronic thing that MS did in recent years was not putting in place something that allowed a smooth and hassle free upgrade from win XP to win 7. That would have paid in spades, more than sinking money in Nokia and windows 8. MS is no.seven or eight to the smart phone race, in order of appearance, and lower down in importance.
moreover, what I find strikingly funny is the idea of using touchscreens in an office environment...that's even more stupid. it's slower and less precise than a mouse, and less versatile than a keyboard, and it's absolutely trashed by the Keyboard plus mouse combination. The military have lots of environments in which usability is literally life or death, and their LCD panels have buttons on the sides. no touch screen sir, you cover what you're looking at!
come to think of it, nobody asked why Apple, who has historically imposed a price premium on its hardware, has never ever toyed with touchscreens on the mac...
So your country celebrates a religious holiday, but in no way recognizes it's for religious purposes and no one gets upset? Where do you live, because what you said makes no sense.
I am from Italy, and that's not news here. Remember, Christmas was placed next to the winter solstice because, from time immemorial, humanity in the northern reaches has celebrated a kind of potlatch to salute the arrival of the new season. For the Christian clergy in Roman times, it was dated to supercede Saturnalia , but any search on google may throw up the odd solstice festivity much earlier. As in all things, Geography beats History, 1 - nil.
[Imperial commando]:" this is the cover story:"Additionally, the lasers could be combined to generate a super laser that would shoot into space, similar to the combined laser effect of the Death Star in the Star Wars trilogy, though the goal is to study particles in space, not annihilate planets.""
Why should it strike me as news? Anyone who still has Microsoft after they issued excel 5 was angling for trouble. Ballmer is the man of the missed opportunities, but the balance sheet model was skewed from the start. If anyone troubled to check the balance sheet these past years, he'd have noted that MS made big fanfare of stock buybacks: after all, its market position meant it was a big net cash machine, and investments in its sector of adequate size, and no antitrust considerations, are a bit thin on the ground. So where to put the money, if not in the company itself? the troubling bit is they put it in the manager's coffers; the issued shares where options granted to employees, and in many years they covered two thirds of the buybacks. So no net increase in Earning per share, thank you. If the shareholders had been less index funds or tech fanatics, they would have pestered the company years back and insisted of a special dividend, like 40 bucks per share, with a big chunk of debt injected in the company. from then on, only cash dividends, no buybacks.
I do wonder how a car built to the same downgraded specs would cost. I always come away with the impression that all these contraptions, driven by a pint-size diesel engine, would do 200 km/litre, cost half the price of the electric version, and on a total life accounting probably be as environmentally friendly not to notice the difference. And remember, a well thought out diesel engine is good for 300.000 km, my car has 130.000, and a cousin of mine's is ticking after 500.000.
As always, tough, it's apples and oranges: a combustion engine driven contraption like this
a. would never get any authorization for the public sale, b. "we want you to get Euro NCAP certification", c. would be shunned as a curiosity without a future.
I never, ever saw an "apples to apples" comparison, or serious feasibility study. For example, here in Italy, a local regulation practically prohibits linking your garage electrical system to your house in a condo: what do I do if I want an electric car? Either this regulation is a piece of crap, which I suspect, or the govvies think that I should not keep a refrigerator in a garage eventually subject to flooding, but that I can keep expensive rare earth batteries with nary a problem. Chemistry 101 , anyone?
[...] So, in country like Italy disposing of garbage is a costly problem and it is not unlikely that the government would be happy to pay.
About the cost of moving oil, well if you import your oil from Saudi, then it is cheaper to import rubbish from Italy. If oil comes from Norway via pipes probably not, but oil i definetely more expansive than garbage
I beg to disagree. Garbage producing countries are paying to get rid of the thing, including transport costs. I do not see the Saudis paying the swedes to get rid of the oil which is staining the inside of the oil wells. In the end the Swedes are only selling a service: how to part morons from their money. Luckily, now there's an economic crisis, so we're starting incinerating plants over here in italy too. Pity is, they're owned and/or controlled by the municipalities, so none of those will use garbage from outside their administrative area: plants are built too small, etc.etc., so as a country the problem will remain.
No they won't. I live in a mountain area, where there are a number of hydro plant, and the spillway is always a section/bypass, with nothing impeding the passage of water, which is lower that the height of the dam, and if necessary, with an open conduit built to prevent erosion. In this photo, the building in the foreground houses the dam controls, the steel gate you see controls the level, and the spill access is to your right, further up lake, and has an unimpeded passage to a concrete spillway that reaches down to about 200 meters down from the dam itself. there are also one or two concrete pools to slow the flow at the end of the spillway.
[...]"Reactor buildings not meant to handle the high humidity"
Is he REALLY implying that any human being, not previously subject to brain surgery, would build anything involving High pressure water and superheated steam confined in a building in a manner not suited to exposure to moisture? because if that's the case, I have just the right entirely-made-of-sugar bathtub for his expensive condo.
The argument is probably that they're less afraid of CIA/NSA backdoors then Chinese backdoors.
Considering the history, I'd say that fear is quite a bit unwarranted, both are about equally scary, at least at the moment. [...]
No. It's like the Soviet Union of old. Western government are rightfully scared, because most of the research and technology work is still done in the traditional institutions in western society, and those billions of dollars in research money would go down the drain.The Russian secrete services are still active, probably because of that. It happened in reverse....a few centuries back, when a monk brought back from China the silkworm, which was considered by the Chinese a trade secret. Also, most of our economy's infrastructure is internet based, and you cannot scare people about Cyberattacks and then disregard the hardware aspect. Many sane people, if explained the situation this way, would utter "..And you waited until NOW to tell me?!?!?", and go crash some Chinese solar panels.
Moreover, it's not called "the hermit kingdom for nothing, and Huawei exists at the behest of an unelected elite wichi is scared by its own people, and that limits political speech in any way possible, remember the great wall of China. Having said that, other goverments disregard the risk, not because it's not there, but because as an information gathering machine it's too blunt to be of much use, and most of it would not be actionable in democratic societies.
The problem isn't whether or not it's "easy to use".
The problem is that it's designed to be easy to use on tablets and tablets are rubbish for doing real work. On desktop machines... it's crap.
That fails to explain why a three-year-old has no problems using it... on a standard desktop PC. Like what the summary describes.
Two things. First, a three year old doesn't have to unlearn years of expectations of a system acting a certain way. Second, what a three year old is trying to accomplish on a PC might be just slightly different from the purposes of a typical business user.
You all miss the point. in the corporate environment, you'd want to have all the three years old doing the same thing, and probably a difficult thing as well, which is totally unrelated to the interface, like pricing exotic options, or doing the engineering calculations for a bridge or a skyscraper. So changing the interface is not useless, is wasteful. [Steve Ballmer]:" look guys, we've one-upped apple with our easier interface. We've slapped on our new smartphone the very same interface of Mattel's toy phones! All the three year old kids will know how to use it, and we'll have lock in for a generation!!! Any smarter, and we'd glow in the dark!" Oh yeah? and why would I spend time on that? I am not doing serious jobs on my smartphone anyway! I want my Win7 back!!!
Google isn't reading the newssites. The general public is reading the newssites.
Google is helping them by sending more readers. They really think that they get that service for free?
Are they really that dense?
I expect Google to flip that switch off when the law is passed.
Yes. Or at least, they have a "politician solution", let me amplify. the content providers talking heads go to their IT department and say "Google is making a killing selling ads on news searches in which we're in. I want some of that money coming our way!"..."Well, we could make a free abstract, and put the articles behind a paywall."...."No. if the abstract is good, the article won't be bought, and if it's lousy, the article won't be bought. And I want to sell Yearly subscriptions, not case-by-case articles; my shareholders value them more."......"I do not have any solution then."..
US fork:"Fine, I am off to the golf course then."
French fork:."Fine. I'll go to the minister and see what we can do".
Now the minister has two course of action available: send these people off saying "it's the economy, stupid", or.....
"Wait a minute. If it does not work, the only people damaged, in a sense, are these people clamouring for it in my anteroom. They'd hardly come calling out in public that it was my fault, because A. they'd asked for it in the first place, and B. this measure is a gross distortion of objective realities, but they had it wrong first, and any French minister knows that no public figure will EVER admit that a plan of his was botched from the start, let alone someone as public as a newspaper editor. And who knows, maybe there will be some money coming the government's way."
And yet, it definitively should. MM games, FTP online games are all well and good, and for now they are mostly played on MS based environments. but their stranglehold on office application is gone, in the sense that people stick to MS office for compatibility , not features or availability. In fact, few things spread terror through the realm than the words " We at Microsoft intend to improve the consumer experience in MS office". My God, not another interface hassle, please!!!! So, gaming is important ; if they make viable for Steam to build its own environment, they will. I play some World of tanks, and I do not think that it would be an impossible task for the to design a non microsoft interface. So, I use Firefox and Thunderbird, which are cross platform; office I can do without and migrate to Open office or something like that; what's holding me there....apart from gaming.
My pc works perfectly well on win XP. as of now I see no reason to buy a new one. provided that no one builds a good PC gaming platform, my cut off date for changing my PC is the end to sales of Windows 7, which has become a perfectly good PC environment. The only better way for MS and Ballmer to commit suicide would be to accelerate that date.
I seem to remember that this contraption was used in the John Wayne film "The Green Berets", and since it was way before special effects, I suspect it was really a person being snatched off the ground.
So those 94 percent of people find no practical use in Microsoft products?
I am one of those guys using Office, and I'm old enough to remember using Lotus 1-2-3. Then, office was a real gamechanger. Now it's a commodity, most of the people using it would just as well use open office. They're not changing it because a) retraining b) admin tools.
As much as the cloud paradigma can be attractive to Microsoft, in their shoes I'd be wary: anybody can enter that market provided that it has given you a login and password ( Facebook document repository?), and they are not asking people for a yearly fee. I'd probably put up ads saying "Microsoft: your documents are REALLY yours", promise to give out free document viewers for eternity with a facility to copy them to newer versions, and to never mess with the program menus and shortcuts, and stick to the personal PC model like it was a mix between a young Gloria Swanson and Adriana Lima.
"Microsoft: we can do without a modem.... can you?" looks like a catchy phrase to me.
Notice how very few of the correlations that turn up are statistically significant? That should tell you something: a statistically significant correlation (and if you're looking at a bunch of possible correlations at once, your bar for significance should be pretty high) usually does mean there's some kind of causal relationship somewhere, whether it's A causing B, B causing A, or some unmeasured C causing both.
what you just said is an assumption, which is why you collect statistics: to find out if an assumption is valid or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you recall what primitive people do to witches?
--
Aside:
"Stupidity common more hydrogen than. It you combat. Not try! Hard think, or not think!" - Sensei Yoda
That's not even close to Yoda-speak. "More common than hydrogen, stupidity is. Combat it, you must. Think, or think not, there is no 'try'."
Yes. They ask their consultant, Sir Bedivere, questions about their density.
For both linux gamers!
1. It's self selecting, and selection is based practically on a positive view of Microsoft products;
2.it might be too small to be representative of the whole, and no data on enrollment is available in the article.
moreover, the article says:
"[...]The data collected by Microsoft also show that people are becoming more familiar with the new features over time, says Larson-Green. She previously led a redesign of the Microsoft Office interface that, in 2007, replaced text-based menus with a more visual “ribbon interface,” an initially controversial change that is now widely accepted as an example of good design. “Two days to two weeks is what we used to say in Office, and it’s similar in Windows 8,” she says.
So my quick summary: Microsoft wants me to believe that a group, selected according to criteria and methods that would have my statistics professor at the University screaming that I am a confounded moron, is right in believing that windows 8 does not have a usability problem, and therefore I am also a confounded moron because I use windows 7 with the XP menus. Ah, I did not mention that there's no word on how would I use touch on my installed screen base, which does not have a touch interface.
it might be that the security is good NOW, but that this results are good enough that they do not want to risk decryption in a distant future..I recall a slashdot discussion about Key cryptoanalysis which was in a way scary, about how good new rigs using video cards are.
I am curious of what is the point of an unmanned space plane? There's nobody on it, so why make the return trip? The ability to fly down must compromise the design for everything else to some degree.
It might just be that the RESULTS from the sensors are so far ahead of the curve, that the DoD doesn't want to broadcast them in any shape or form. Or, security of military channel data have been compromised to some degree. Or, just a message to the Chinese, who have tested antisatellite weapons in the past, that their "dark period" in that case is not measured in weeks, even if they disrupt communications between the satellites and earth.
It might be like the B2 Spirit: there might be only 20 of them, but if your bosses control a country spanning 5 time zones and want an early warning system capable of defeating it, start to print money now. Because you do not have enough of it.
Where are the damned bureaucrats when we need them? You can definitely count on the EU, we even gathered our best bureacrats and placed them in one spot to concentrate their paperwork-producing powers.
Begging your pardon, it's untrue. we gathered our best bureaucrats in TWO places, Strasbourg and Brouxelles. According to, guess what, a committee, cutting one would save about 180 mln EUR a year. I am also guilty, in my original post, of not having put in fat salaries for the committee members. Nothing like an entitlement to make a problem into an eternal problem, see also the common agricultural policy.
Personally, I think that any entity willing to have two capital cities and spend half its budget on a sector representing less than 5% of its gross domestic products is fit to be tied. But then, it's just silly me.
Instead of opposing it and then caving in, The western world could rip a page off the dictatorships' book: "the proposal has merit, but it has to be studied thoroughly: We could form a committee with ,oh, all the countries in the world, chaired by a non aligned country, Tuvalu [internet domain: *.tv], and wait until they come with a legal and technical proposal behind which a qualified majority, for example enough countries representing 95% of world population and internet domains, gathering at least 85% of the number of countries involved, could be found. Do you mind if we of the ole US of A get represented by all the 50 states individually? We know for a fast that Canada wants to do likewise, and to be fair, all the European countries have a vote each, so it would only be fair..... See you in 3.100 AD, ok? Of course, if some technical advance has taken hold in the meantime, the whole process has to be restarted."
It looks to me that bunching all of those vendors in one bundle is a bit risquè. In effect, some of them are selling something that they do not own.
...mmmmm, where to begin? This is Slashdot, so let's start with Microsoft. I never saw, read of heard about a suicide that lasted longer, unless the Dynosaurs killed themselves using farts to start a climate change. XP is still dominating their cash cows, and lo and behold, the serfs have fought back: "yes, come back when you REALLY will cut support. Line up over there, if we really want to retrain the whole workforce, we might as well go for open source + service contracts.....unless you offer us upgrades to windows SEVEN for 4.99$ per seat.". Final Nail in the coffin: price raises, obviously; why let a good opportunity to be LESS competitive go by?
Google, the smartest of them all: it's selling dearly to people things that they really do not own, mindspace. the gadgetry is very good, I do use calendar syncing, but I never entered via the browser since I set it up, and I use thunderbird + lightning as a client; anybody cares to bet on what will happen if all of a sudden the calendar utility ceases to be free and/or interoperable? I do think that at the Mozilla foundation they have a stock of Champagne bottles, in case it happens.
and now, the Apple of my eye. My teen daughter is quite taken by the Ipad, and it's the most expensive toy she has ever received. but "retina display"? "iphone 5"? "Siri"? it's becoming an organized religion: you have to believe, because if you approach with rationality, you get cold feet. Seriously, I know I am fifty, but looking at a puny display I cannot SEE the high definition.
But the biggest pun of all is "the government". Get serious, the only thing the governments are interested in is a." are there taxes to be had?" and b. " will these bozos provide us with private data, backdoors, snooping facilities if we ask?"
[...]
"Problem is it's their new design philosophy is completely different from what people have come to expect. For instance, Windows 8 Metro apps are to scroll horizontal instead of vertical. (unless it's a phone app then it's vertical). Tool bars are supposed to go off screen until you use some kind of mouse/keyboard/touch gesture. Don't include functionality in your app that can be done by another app via contracts. And that is going to through a lot of people who aren't creative types, especially businesses. Most people get into their routine and don't want change. And the fact it's going to be a while, if ever, before existing applications update to this new design guidelines. So it's going to be a disjointed experience between old and new for a couple years."
Great. Microsoft is convinced that Betamax won.
At our company, which has well over 30,000 PCs deployed, >90% of our systems are still on Windows XP. Who are you kidding? Who is Microsoft kidding? If it ain't broke, don't upgrade it
And before the bleeding edge fanboys... hell, before the slightly-bruised-edge fanboys get up in arms about whatever technical features there are that makes Win 7 a superior OS than XP (and I'm sure there are numerous examples), most organizations of our size suffer from the "Battlestar 78" problem. Our IT environment can only move forward as fast as the slowest mission-critical legacy app. When your biz ops/reg compliance/contractual obligs depend on a niche application that is not yet certified for IE 8, then the revenue-creating side of the company doesn't want to hear squat about group policy optimizations, memory management, or whatever.
I am not a programmer or an IT guy, I am only a power user...the kind of guy that remember spending the 80s squabbling to get the latest and greatest, the 90s fine tuning whatever was coming, and the 2000 trying to keep still and not be noticed when IT got round to changing computers... "yes, officer, I guarantee that my PC has been upgraded last week."
Now I am a partner in a small company, we have win xp, and do not care to upgrade. why should I? we have one Win 7 machine, and it works just fine, now that it has the XP theme, but we'd have to erace everything, do a fresh install of win 7, reinstall everything....just to reach where we were. I think that the most utterly moronic thing that MS did in recent years was not putting in place something that allowed a smooth and hassle free upgrade from win XP to win 7. That would have paid in spades, more than sinking money in Nokia and windows 8. MS is no.seven or eight to the smart phone race, in order of appearance, and lower down in importance.
moreover, what I find strikingly funny is the idea of using touchscreens in an office environment...that's even more stupid. it's slower and less precise than a mouse, and less versatile than a keyboard, and it's absolutely trashed by the Keyboard plus mouse combination. The military have lots of environments in which usability is literally life or death, and their LCD panels have buttons on the sides. no touch screen sir, you cover what you're looking at!
come to think of it, nobody asked why Apple, who has historically imposed a price premium on its hardware, has never ever toyed with touchscreens on the mac...
So your country celebrates a religious holiday, but in no way recognizes it's for religious purposes and no one gets upset? Where do you live, because what you said makes no sense.
I am from Italy, and that's not news here. Remember, Christmas was placed next to the winter solstice because, from time immemorial, humanity in the northern reaches has celebrated a kind of potlatch to salute the arrival of the new season. For the Christian clergy in Roman times, it was dated to supercede Saturnalia , but any search on google may throw up the odd solstice festivity much earlier. As in all things, Geography beats History, 1 - nil.
[Imperial commando]:" this is the cover story:"Additionally, the lasers could be combined to generate a super laser that would shoot into space, similar to the combined laser effect of the Death Star in the Star Wars trilogy, though the goal is to study particles in space, not annihilate planets.""
Why should it strike me as news? Anyone who still has Microsoft after they issued excel 5 was angling for trouble. Ballmer is the man of the missed opportunities, but the balance sheet model was skewed from the start.
If anyone troubled to check the balance sheet these past years, he'd have noted that MS made big fanfare of stock buybacks: after all, its market position meant it was a big net cash machine, and investments in its sector of adequate size, and no antitrust considerations, are a bit thin on the ground. So where to put the money, if not in the company itself? the troubling bit is they put it in the manager's coffers; the issued shares where options granted to employees, and in many years they covered two thirds of the buybacks. So no net increase in Earning per share, thank you.
If the shareholders had been less index funds or tech fanatics, they would have pestered the company years back and insisted of a special dividend, like 40 bucks per share, with a big chunk of debt injected in the company. from then on, only cash dividends, no buybacks.
I do wonder how a car built to the same downgraded specs would cost. I always come away with the impression that all these contraptions, driven by a pint-size diesel engine, would do 200 km/litre, cost half the price of the electric version, and on a total life accounting probably be as environmentally friendly not to notice the difference. And remember, a well thought out diesel engine is good for 300.000 km, my car has 130.000, and a cousin of mine's is ticking after 500.000.
As always, tough, it's apples and oranges: a combustion engine driven contraption like this
a. would never get any authorization for the public sale,
b. "we want you to get Euro NCAP certification",
c. would be shunned as a curiosity without a future.
I never, ever saw an "apples to apples" comparison, or serious feasibility study. For example, here in Italy, a local regulation practically prohibits linking your garage electrical system to your house in a condo: what do I do if I want an electric car? Either this regulation is a piece of crap, which I suspect, or the govvies think that I should not keep a refrigerator in a garage eventually subject to flooding, but that I can keep expensive rare earth batteries with nary a problem. Chemistry 101 , anyone?
[...] So, in country like Italy disposing of garbage is a costly problem and it is not unlikely that the government would be happy to pay.
About the cost of moving oil, well if you import your oil from Saudi, then it is cheaper to import rubbish from Italy. If oil comes from Norway via pipes probably not, but oil i definetely more expansive than garbage
I beg to disagree. Garbage producing countries are paying to get rid of the thing, including transport costs. I do not see the Saudis paying the swedes to get rid of the oil which is staining the inside of the oil wells. In the end the Swedes are only selling a service: how to part morons from their money. Luckily, now there's an economic crisis, so we're starting incinerating plants over here in italy too.
Pity is, they're owned and/or controlled by the municipalities, so none of those will use garbage from outside their administrative area: plants are built too small, etc.etc., so as a country the problem will remain.
That's when you open the spillway
No they won't. I live in a mountain area, where there are a number of hydro plant, and the spillway is always a section/bypass, with nothing impeding the passage of water, which is lower that the height of the dam, and if necessary, with an open conduit built to prevent erosion.
In this photo, the building in the foreground houses the dam controls, the steel gate you see controls the level, and the spill access is to your right, further up lake, and has an unimpeded passage to a concrete spillway that reaches down to about 200 meters down from the dam itself. there are also one or two concrete pools to slow the flow at the end of the spillway.
[...]"Reactor buildings not meant to handle the high humidity"
Is he REALLY implying that any human being, not previously subject to brain surgery, would build anything involving High pressure water and superheated steam confined in a building in a manner not suited to exposure to moisture? because if that's the case, I have just the right entirely-made-of-sugar bathtub for his expensive condo.
The argument is probably that they're less afraid of CIA/NSA backdoors then Chinese backdoors.
Considering the history, I'd say that fear is quite a bit unwarranted, both are about equally scary, at least at the moment. [...]
No.
It's like the Soviet Union of old. Western government are rightfully scared, because most of the research and technology work is still done in the traditional institutions in western society, and those billions of dollars in research money would go down the drain.The Russian secrete services are still active, probably because of that. It happened in reverse....a few centuries back, when a monk brought back from China the silkworm, which was considered by the Chinese a trade secret.
Also, most of our economy's infrastructure is internet based, and you cannot scare people about Cyberattacks and then disregard the hardware aspect. Many sane people, if explained the situation this way, would utter "..And you waited until NOW to tell me?!?!?", and go crash some Chinese solar panels.
Moreover, it's not called "the hermit kingdom for nothing, and Huawei exists at the behest of an unelected elite wichi is scared by its own people, and that limits political speech in any way possible, remember the great wall of China.
Having said that, other goverments disregard the risk, not because it's not there, but because as an information gathering machine it's too blunt to be of much use, and most of it would not be actionable in democratic societies.
The problem isn't whether or not it's "easy to use".
The problem is that it's designed to be easy to use on tablets and tablets are rubbish for doing real work. On desktop machines ... it's crap.
That fails to explain why a three-year-old has no problems using it ... on a standard desktop PC. Like what the summary describes.
Two things. First, a three year old doesn't have to unlearn years of expectations of a system acting a certain way. Second, what a three year old is trying to accomplish on a PC might be just slightly different from the purposes of a typical business user.
You all miss the point. in the corporate environment, you'd want to have all the three years old doing the same thing, and probably a difficult thing as well, which is totally unrelated to the interface, like pricing exotic options, or doing the engineering calculations for a bridge or a skyscraper. So changing the interface is not useless, is wasteful.
[Steve Ballmer]:" look guys, we've one-upped apple with our easier interface. We've slapped on our new smartphone the very same interface of Mattel's toy phones! All the three year old kids will know how to use it, and we'll have lock in for a generation!!! Any smarter, and we'd glow in the dark!"
Oh yeah? and why would I spend time on that? I am not doing serious jobs on my smartphone anyway! I want my Win7 back!!!
After all, that was their core competency.
no. It was toilet paper.
Google isn't reading the newssites. The general public is reading the newssites.
Google is helping them by sending more readers. They really think that they get that service for free?
Are they really that dense?
I expect Google to flip that switch off when the law is passed.
Yes. Or at least, they have a "politician solution", let me amplify. ..."Well, we could make a free abstract, and put the articles behind a paywall." ...."No. if the abstract is good, the article won't be bought, and if it's lousy, the article won't be bought. And I want to sell Yearly subscriptions, not case-by-case articles; my shareholders value them more."......"I do not have any solution then."..
the content providers talking heads go to their IT department and say "Google is making a killing selling ads on news searches in which we're in. I want some of that money coming our way!"
US fork:"Fine, I am off to the golf course then."
French fork:."Fine. I'll go to the minister and see what we can do".
Now the minister has two course of action available: send these people off saying "it's the economy, stupid", or.....
"Wait a minute. If it does not work, the only people damaged, in a sense, are these people clamouring for it in my anteroom. They'd hardly come calling out in public that it was my fault, because A. they'd asked for it in the first place, and B. this measure is a gross distortion of objective realities, but they had it wrong first, and any French minister knows that no public figure will EVER admit that a plan of his was botched from the start, let alone someone as public as a newspaper editor. And who knows, maybe there will be some money coming the government's way."
[...]
Microsoft doesn't care about pc gamers.
And yet, it definitively should. MM games, FTP online games are all well and good, and for now they are mostly played on MS based environments. but their stranglehold on office application is gone, in the sense that people stick to MS office for compatibility , not features or availability. In fact, few things spread terror through the realm than the words " We at Microsoft intend to improve the consumer experience in MS office". My God, not another interface hassle, please!!!!
So, gaming is important ; if they make viable for Steam to build its own environment, they will.
I play some World of tanks, and I do not think that it would be an impossible task for the to design a non microsoft interface. So, I use Firefox and Thunderbird, which are cross platform; office I can do without and migrate to Open office or something like that; what's holding me there....apart from gaming.
My pc works perfectly well on win XP. as of now I see no reason to buy a new one. provided that no one builds a good PC gaming platform, my cut off date for changing my PC is the end to sales of Windows 7, which has become a perfectly good PC environment. The only better way for MS and Ballmer to commit suicide would be to accelerate that date.
I seem to remember that this contraption was used in the John Wayne film "The Green Berets", and since it was way before special effects, I suspect it was really a person being snatched off the ground.
Uh...what? Granted, this is from 2010, but it hasn't changed much:
"Worldwide, 500 million customers use Office. Office's marketshare has held steady at 94 percent for years according to market research firm Gartner. The next closest competitor, Adobe has a mere 4 percent of the market. " http://www.dailytech.com/Office+2010+to+Launch+Today+Microsoft+Owns+94+Percent+of+the+Market/article18360.htm
So those 94 percent of people find no practical use in Microsoft products?
I am one of those guys using Office, and I'm old enough to remember using Lotus 1-2-3. Then, office was a real gamechanger. Now it's a commodity, most of the people using it would just as well use open office. They're not changing it because a) retraining b) admin tools.
As much as the cloud paradigma can be attractive to Microsoft, in their shoes I'd be wary: anybody can enter that market provided that it has given you a login and password ( Facebook document repository?), and they are not asking people for a yearly fee. I'd probably put up ads saying "Microsoft: your documents are REALLY yours", promise to give out free document viewers for eternity with a facility to copy them to newer versions, and to never mess with the program menus and shortcuts, and stick to the personal PC model like it was a mix between a young Gloria Swanson and Adriana Lima.
"Microsoft: we can do without a modem.... can you?" looks like a catchy phrase to me.
Notice how very few of the correlations that turn up are statistically significant? That should tell you something: a statistically significant correlation (and if you're looking at a bunch of possible correlations at once, your bar for significance should be pretty high) usually does mean there's some kind of causal relationship somewhere, whether it's A causing B, B causing A, or some unmeasured C causing both.
what you just said is an assumption, which is why you collect statistics: to find out if an assumption is valid or not.