Actually, applying the mother-in-law test (my mother in law), it would appear that people think that Google is the internet.
Most people can't be bothered, partly because they're hard to understand, partly because of all the crapware and crippleware available on a default install of windows, and partly because they can't be bothered.
Not that I know about Weatherbug, but It seems to me that with a little bit of perl, WWW::Mechanize and WWW::Mechanize::Shell, maybe a bit of greping through some binary data (if Weatherbug reports through an ActiveX thingy) would enable you to get your weather data without using IE. Should only take a couple of hours, unless Weatherbug is really broken.
Anyone relying on Excel for real statistical work is brain damaged. If it's your management, I'd put them out of their misery. If you need it to integrate it with excel, integrate it with somethingelse.
My cohort, (W2K + Orifice2K3) seem to be pretty unhappy. But maybe that's because they've foisted a a managed desktop on a bunch of academics who are now all using their laptops. How stupid is that.
One interesting thing about google is that thier tech was developed in-house. As far as I remember, pretty much all of Microsoft's core have been bought from other compaines.
Now that's a little better. That's a nice exposition as far as it goes. However, you are still missing the point. As my uncle (who is in the services for oil companies business) has pointed out to me as often as he gets the chance, the opportinities for developing sustainable (think lasting as long or longer than the Balinese farming systems 10^3 to 10^5 years) energy systems has been squandered. With the political will, and time on our side, these problems could be solved. Many commentators think that time might still just be on our side. Many are also becoming not so sure. I am tempted to make comment about the brokenness of the american political system here comment here, but I will restrain myself, just.
I guess I meant to be as rude as I felt nescessary. But thanks for the reply. As I said, sustainability should be our primary concern here.
I used to have that problem. Then I said to myself, "Slowly quit being so good at solving Microsoft problems and keep solving Linux problems!" The problem went away a few months later!
It was more instant for me. I went from "I'll have a look at that if you want", to "Sorry, I'm a mac|unix guy. I don't know anything about Windows". Problem solved, instantly.
Because everything from refrigeration of antibiotics to high-yield/acre farming and the treatment of potable water involves energy consumption.
And <sarcasm>obviously the incredibly inefficient way that we use energy is a core requirement for our economic prosperity.</sarcasm>. I don't want to be excessively rude, but many people really need to get their heads out of thier arses on this matter. From your post, it appears that your head may only be partially inserted.
What do you mean during petrol shortage. Prices won't be going down significantly until demand drops. Here is a good explaination of the problems with oil supply and energy exploration more generally.
What kind of circumstances do you think will cause a drop in demand significant enough to cause petrol prices to drop to the levels they were at the turn of the century?
I'm of the school of thought that a computer program is generally better than a spreadsheet for all but the simplest tasks. And people say that perl is hard to maintain.
First of all it is embedded in popular culture that the dark ages were times of superstition and religion. This is refuted by modern historians. Have a google search for yourself and find out. The term "dark ages" when used today by modern historians bespeaks that we really don't have much information about the early middle ages. That is all.
Maybe they recorded all their data on media that became obsolete, or did not degrage gracefully.
Re:Make this guy science editor at the Gaurdian.
on
Bad Science in the Press
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sometimes, the big two (N and S) prone to publishing for political (we must suck up to this Author) reasons. New Scientist, by virtue of being a more general - don't need a graduate degree to be able to read a broad range of it's content - publication is more resistant to these kinds of problems
Or you can outsource to somewhere the cost of living is extremely cheap, like Cambodia. It's a labour intensive job. I use admin staff when I want this stuff done, but it's not my money I'm paying them with...
I thought that the traditional way was to give them the test, collect them up, and throw all the papers down the stairs. Then the ones that fall furthest get the highest mark. Easy, and works for all non-practical subjects and some practical ones.
Recently she's been bringing home assertions from the chief techie techer which are manifestly wrong: "We've got to teach microsoft products because that's what kids are exposed to in the work force"(it's very easy to demolish that one). "Viruses exist on other platforms but they're most common on windows because it's the most popular" (and Windows security systems have been designed by the marketing department) etc. etc.
It's difficult to change these entrenched attitudes, as the're mainly based on superstition. You've just got to
My best advice is start fishing computers out of skips / identify under utilised assets and start doing useful things with them. This way, you start subverting any windows/microsoft only policies that exist. Start carting around an iBook and do all your work from that. Preferably from transparent terminals. Then you can see who is more engaged with your viewpoint.
And replace the NT server by stealth. Preferably with a recycled machine.
As this is a organization we are talking about and not file names, we we should be using reg-ex rather than wildcards...So dare I suggest \w*AA\
Good point. With regex notation, we can simultaneously match the ??AA and related organisation names, and other appropriate strings like "craven dinosaurs who can't see out of their current business model".
It was kind of obvious to me that microsoft was about removing value from their os when after using apple 2s and sinclair spectrums for a while, I got hold of a DOS computer, as a 13 year old or so. "What can I do with this then?". Answer: Not much. They haven't changed much since then, apart from adding the underhand tricks to promote lock-in.
The circle the text paradigm in preview doesn't work that well compared to the highlighter pen paradigm in Acrobat unfortunately. I use highlighting to make it easier to scan complex text (scientific reports mainly).
I wish preview did cut it, because it's so much faster.
On my mac, I am totally dependent on pdfs to help me deal with the research literature wot I have got. I use Adobe Acrobat to do detailed annotations of documents, take notes and link to my bibliographic database. Sometimes this gets slow as molasses due to poor software engineering by either parties hand.
On the other hand, when I want to have a quick squizz at a pdf to see if there's anything relevant there, I use the super fast and efficient Preview application. If Preview had better annotatin facilities [hint hint], I wou'dn't use Acrobat at all.
Earlier today, I needed a powerpoint thingamy transferred from a windows machine to machine to a mac (without office). It would have been a lot less painful if W$$do$s had native PDF support.
Microsoft made their monopoly and their money by taking the personal computer, removing value from it, and then selling that removed value back to the consumer at high cost. I wish more people understood this.
Interesting anecdote. Here's mine:
I'm not even a full time nerd. About 60% of my time is being a nerd, about 40% a scientist ATM. I had to install apache, mod-perl and a stack of additional software for some content management stuff I'm working on the other day.
After 20 minutes during which I had to choose a password, set an IP address manually type apt-get [something] a couple of times, I had a fully functional system working out of the box. How long would the equivalent process taken with W2K3? I don't know, I don't do windows. It saves me a lot of time.
Yeah, It's incredibly useful. That and many journal articles being on line, and being able to store them in a database in a container a fraction of the size of the amount of paper the same number of articles would take up: "You can't grep dead trees".
However for consolidated knowledge, you can't beat books.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, Maypole and Catalyst.
Actually, applying the mother-in-law test (my mother in law), it would appear that people think that Google is the internet.
Most people can't be bothered, partly because they're hard to understand, partly because of all the crapware and crippleware available on a default install of windows, and partly because they can't be bothered.
Not that I know about Weatherbug, but It seems to me that with a little bit of perl, WWW::Mechanize and WWW::Mechanize::Shell, maybe a bit of greping through some binary data (if Weatherbug reports through an ActiveX thingy) would enable you to get your weather data without using IE. Should only take a couple of hours, unless Weatherbug is really broken.
Anyone relying on Excel for real statistical work is brain damaged. If it's your management, I'd put them out of their misery. If you need it to integrate it with excel, integrate it with something else.
My cohort, (W2K + Orifice2K3) seem to be pretty unhappy. But maybe that's because they've foisted a a managed desktop on a bunch of academics who are now all using their laptops. How stupid is that.
It looks like a Harry Potter spoiler.
That's why I always pop \usepackage{fullpage} in my preamble. Or if that doesn't work, manually set the margins.
One interesting thing about google is that thier tech was developed in-house. As far as I remember, pretty much all of Microsoft's core have been bought from other compaines.
Now that's a little better. That's a nice exposition as far as it goes. However, you are still missing the point. As my uncle (who is in the services for oil companies business) has pointed out to me as often as he gets the chance, the opportinities for developing sustainable (think lasting as long or longer than the Balinese farming systems 10^3 to 10^5 years) energy systems has been squandered. With the political will, and time on our side, these problems could be solved. Many commentators think that time might still just be on our side. Many are also becoming not so sure. I am tempted to make comment about the brokenness of the american political system here comment here, but I will restrain myself, just.
I guess I meant to be as rude as I felt nescessary. But thanks for the reply. As I said, sustainability should be our primary concern here.
It was more instant for me. I went from "I'll have a look at that if you want", to "Sorry, I'm a mac|unix guy. I don't know anything about Windows". Problem solved, instantly.
And <sarcasm>obviously the incredibly inefficient way that we use energy is a core requirement for our economic prosperity.</sarcasm>. I don't want to be excessively rude, but many people really need to get their heads out of thier arses on this matter. From your post, it appears that your head may only be partially inserted.
What do you mean during petrol shortage. Prices won't be going down significantly until demand drops. Here is a good explaination of the problems with oil supply and energy exploration more generally.
What kind of circumstances do you think will cause a drop in demand significant enough to cause petrol prices to drop to the levels they were at the turn of the century?
I'm of the school of thought that a computer program is generally better than a spreadsheet for all but the simplest tasks. And people say that perl is hard to maintain.
Maybe they recorded all their data on media that became obsolete, or did not degrage gracefully.
Sometimes, the big two (N and S) prone to publishing for political (we must suck up to this Author) reasons. New Scientist, by virtue of being a more general - don't need a graduate degree to be able to read a broad range of it's content - publication is more resistant to these kinds of problems
Or you can outsource to somewhere the cost of living is extremely cheap, like Cambodia. It's a labour intensive job. I use admin staff when I want this stuff done, but it's not my money I'm paying them with...
I thought that the traditional way was to give them the test, collect them up, and throw all the papers down the stairs. Then the ones that fall furthest get the highest mark. Easy, and works for all non-practical subjects and some practical ones.
Recently she's been bringing home assertions from the chief techie techer which are manifestly wrong: "We've got to teach microsoft products because that's what kids are exposed to in the work force"(it's very easy to demolish that one). "Viruses exist on other platforms but they're most common on windows because it's the most popular" (and Windows security systems have been designed by the marketing department) etc. etc.
It's difficult to change these entrenched attitudes, as the're mainly based on superstition. You've just got to
My best advice is start fishing computers out of skips / identify under utilised assets and start doing useful things with them. This way, you start subverting any windows/microsoft only policies that exist. Start carting around an iBook and do all your work from that. Preferably from transparent terminals. Then you can see who is more engaged with your viewpoint.
And replace the NT server by stealth. Preferably with a recycled machine.
It was kind of obvious to me that microsoft was about removing value from their os when after using apple 2s and sinclair spectrums for a while, I got hold of a DOS computer, as a 13 year old or so. "What can I do with this then?". Answer: Not much. They haven't changed much since then, apart from adding the underhand tricks to promote lock-in.
The circle the text paradigm in preview doesn't work that well compared to the highlighter pen paradigm in Acrobat unfortunately. I use highlighting to make it easier to scan complex text (scientific reports mainly).
I wish preview did cut it, because it's so much faster.
On my mac, I am totally dependent on pdfs to help me deal with the research literature wot I have got. I use Adobe Acrobat to do detailed annotations of documents, take notes and link to my bibliographic database. Sometimes this gets slow as molasses due to poor software engineering by either parties hand.
On the other hand, when I want to have a quick squizz at a pdf to see if there's anything relevant there, I use the super fast and efficient Preview application. If Preview had better annotatin facilities [hint hint], I wou'dn't use Acrobat at all.
Earlier today, I needed a powerpoint thingamy transferred from a windows machine to machine to a mac (without office). It would have been a lot less painful if W$$do$s had native PDF support.
Microsoft made their monopoly and their money by taking the personal computer, removing value from it, and then selling that removed value back to the consumer at high cost. I wish more people understood this.
Interesting anecdote. Here's mine: I'm not even a full time nerd. About 60% of my time is being a nerd, about 40% a scientist ATM. I had to install apache, mod-perl and a stack of additional software for some content management stuff I'm working on the other day. After 20 minutes during which I had to choose a password, set an IP address manually type apt-get [something] a couple of times, I had a fully functional system working out of the box. How long would the equivalent process taken with W2K3? I don't know, I don't do windows. It saves me a lot of time.
Yeah, It's incredibly useful. That and many journal articles being on line, and being able to store them in a database in a container a fraction of the size of the amount of paper the same number of articles would take up: "You can't grep dead trees".
However for consolidated knowledge, you can't beat books.