No, in Britain we prefer the singular - "the Government is", "Microsoft is", with exception for football teams "Chelsea United are" and the Police "the Police are".
The rest of Europe doesn't speak English, so I don't know about them.
But, yeah, having said all that, I'd second your suggestion to the grandparent.
Unless I am reading the date wrong... this was stolen over three weeks ago
OT: (not that there was much of a T going on in the first place): While I find YYYY-MM-DD a bit strange (I prefer DD-MM-YYYY myself, being English), I have to accept that it is the most logical and easiest to use from the point of view of sorting by date etc.
Trouble is, I have the opposite problem in real life: I have now problem finding the last ten documents or so that I've been working on, but if I want to find something from a couple of weeks ago, it's a real pain if I can't remember where I put it. And I'm bad at filing stuff in any sort of systematic way, so it's often a PITA.
Maybe your idea would be useful to me if I could rewind somehow and take a look at what my desktop looked like an a certain date in the past, showing all the files and stuff I was using most round that time.
Hey, I didn't know about the statusbar thing. Thanks!
If anyone here at work asks me how I can justify spending so much time on Slashdot, I'll show tyhem your post and trell them that it's actually increases my productivity. It just looks as though I'm wasting time.
VBA for Excel is very slow, but the figures you quote suggest that something is wrong in addition to the inherent slowness of the product. Have you checked the code doing the lookup? It might have been written badly.
One bottleneck that often happen in VBA for Excel routines is that the application tries to keep the screen refreshed while the routine is crunching, which slows things right down. If it's not there already, you should get a big improvement in speed by putting
application.screenupdating = false
at the beginning of the routine, and
application.screenupdating = true
at the end, which will mean that the screen will freeze when you start the routine, and only redraw once it's all finished.
I'm guessing that you've never tried to create a table in Microsoft Word. Yeah, it might seem a bit daft, but at least Excel won't randomly change your text styles, automatically adjust the margins so that half the table is off the paper, insert page breaks through the middle of rows, etc, etc, etc.
If I want a decent table in a Word document I have in the past been driven to embed an Excel file in it.
How do you work that out? a circumference of 25,000 miles gives us a radius of 3,978 miles. Go a mile up, and the effective radius is 3,979 miles, which gives us a circumference of...
Uh, yeah, that's why he said it would take two and a half hours. The distance covered in two and a half hours at 5,000 mph is left as an excercise for the reader.
Yeah, I think I saw a guy using this technology. At the time, I just assumed that he was one of those psychotic homeless people.
Still not sure what the shopping trolley full of old newspapers was for, though.
Seriously, though, it's bad enough with these new hands-free sets for people's mobiles. Time was, you see a guy walking along conducting a one-sdied conversation with the voices that only he can hear, and you know to give him a wide berth. Now they're everywhere.
Seriously, I have *never* heard anyone, from any point on the political spectrum, suggest this as being a good idea.
Look at our attitude to Europe: We're totally cacking our trousers at the thought of becoming sucked into a federal Europe and being made to eat garlic.
Now I know that many anti-Europeans here would prefer closer ties to the US than to Europe, but even those people would agree that one of the advantages of siding with the US rather than Europe is precisely that there is no chance of it threatening our sovereignity. Not officially, anyway.
English people don't talk about it much, but I think that, if you scratch the surface, there is in most people here a complete aversion to the idea of giving up power to any higher authority. We're the ones who take over other countries, not the other way round - the last time anyone invaded England was 938 years ago, and we're still a bit pissed off about it.
drink turkey
Whoops, my mistake. Conjures up a pretty horrible image, too. Oh, and I'm not a "new world" person - just using US examples in deference to our transatlantic overlords.
I know you were probably joking about guinness and st patricks day
No, I wasn't. It seriously pisses me off.
other brands of irish stout are free to do the same thing as well.
Yeah, just like other operating systems are free to bundle their own proprietary-format media players with their products as well. Point is, this wouldn't make much difference, because in 99% of the market's mind, there is no other OS but Windows, just as to 99% of the market's mind there is no other stout but Guinness, and St. Patrick is Its prophet.
When any one brand has that much of a market share, the concept of consumer choice becomes purely theoretical.
Please name one European company which has a worldwide monopoly.
Guinness.
Guinness has a near-monopoly on Irish Stout, and I for one do not welcome our St-Paddy's-day-hijacking overlords. I cannot understand how a day of national celebration came to be synonymous in people's minds with a particular brand of beer. It's like renaming July 4 "Miller Time" or something, or saying that every thanksgiving you have to drink a certain brand of turkey.
I'm all for the ritualistic drinking of large amounts of beer, but next St. Patrick's day let's go for the Murphy's or the Beamish and try to break the evil Guinness stranglehold.
How the heck does one fit a laptop in a body cavity (no goatse links, please)?
But how would looking up someone's arse be an appropriate response to a suspicion that they were attempting to avoid paying duty on a piece of computer equipment?
Or were you implying that they'd just do it to piss the guy off?
You know, sometimes I type a comment, click preview, reread it, and then decide that it's really not worth posting. You got to treat that "submit" button with respect, dude.
In the UK, if the lease on a property expires, ownership reverts to the owner of the freehold of that property, which may be the Queen, or may be someone else. Although it's true that a lot of stuff in London is owned by the Crown or the estates of the various royals/aristocrats, it's misleading to imply that their status regarding this aspect of the property market is in anyway special. I know people who own the freeholds of leased houses in London, and they're not the Queen. However, this doesn't in practice mean that the owners of the freehold get the whole house if they wait it out long enough, because I think they're obliged by law to offer the leaseholder the option to renew the lease "at a reasonable price".
And what does that tell us? Using the same maths, there is a 99% likelihood that the internet will last for between 45 days and 4,950 years - but it's just clever arithmetic, isn't it?
I, too, was "invented" 25 years ago. Do the same probablities apply to me?
My point, I guess, is that you have to use some actual data if you want to make any sort of prediction.
Yeah, but it's like buying a house with a hundred-year lease. You might only plan to live in it for twenty years, but when you come to sell it, the depreciation in value from a hundred-year lease to an eighty-year lease is far less than that from a thirty-year lease to a ten-year lease. So, if you're buying a resaleable domain name, say www.shopping.com or www.computer.com or whatever, then yeah, I'd say a hundred-year contract would be worth it. It's the closest you can get to owning a particular domain outright, forever.
Having said that, I can't imagine that people will access web sites in fifty years (if there's even anything that still exists that's remotely analagous to a website by then) by typing text into an address bar. I don't know what they'll be doing instead, but I get the feeling that owning a cool domain name will be about as valuable as having the rights to a particularly catchy morse code callsign would be now.
I started Infinite Jest, then left my copy in a restaurant, and couldn't be bothered to go back and pick it up.
I realised that I had read >150 pages and I still hadn't met a character about whom I could bring myself to care what happened to them. Which is, IMHO, a bad thing.
Yeah, okay, but my point wasn't really so much that Arnie's a bad politician (I don't follow US domestic politics closely enough to know), but that the main reason guys such as Arnie or Reagan get voted in is because they're famous movie stars rather than any political ability, which shows that the US electorate (and others, I'm not saying the US electorate is exceptionally stupid) votes for people for pretty superficial reasons, and that such voting patterns are not, despite what the great-grandparent post implied, solely the preserve of the young.
For example, I read somewhere that every presidential election has been won by the taller candidate, at least since you had that guy in the wheelchair.
If more people could take criticisms and/or corrections in as cheerful a manner as you, sir, then Slashdot would be a far more pleasant place. I thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
as a country we are pushy and not always subtle
Heh. And there was me thinking that you Americans didn't do ironic understatement.
No, in Britain we prefer the singular - "the Government is", "Microsoft is", with exception for football teams "Chelsea United are" and the Police "the Police are".
The rest of Europe doesn't speak English, so I don't know about them.
But, yeah, having said all that, I'd second your suggestion to the grandparent.
No, he said:
... this was stolen over three weeks ago
Unless I am reading the date wrong
OT: (not that there was much of a T going on in the first place): While I find YYYY-MM-DD a bit strange (I prefer DD-MM-YYYY myself, being English), I have to accept that it is the most logical and easiest to use from the point of view of sorting by date etc.
Trouble is, I have the opposite problem in real life: I have now problem finding the last ten documents or so that I've been working on, but if I want to find something from a couple of weeks ago, it's a real pain if I can't remember where I put it. And I'm bad at filing stuff in any sort of systematic way, so it's often a PITA.
Maybe your idea would be useful to me if I could rewind somehow and take a look at what my desktop looked like an a certain date in the past, showing all the files and stuff I was using most round that time.
Hey, I didn't know about the statusbar thing. Thanks!
If anyone here at work asks me how I can justify spending so much time on Slashdot, I'll show tyhem your post and trell them that it's actually increases my productivity. It just looks as though I'm wasting time.
VBA for Excel is very slow, but the figures you quote suggest that something is wrong in addition to the inherent slowness of the product. Have you checked the code doing the lookup? It might have been written badly.
One bottleneck that often happen in VBA for Excel routines is that the application tries to keep the screen refreshed while the routine is crunching, which slows things right down. If it's not there already, you should get a big improvement in speed by putting
application.screenupdating = false
at the beginning of the routine, and
application.screenupdating = true
at the end, which will mean that the screen will freeze when you start the routine, and only redraw once it's all finished.
I'm guessing that you've never tried to create a table in Microsoft Word. Yeah, it might seem a bit daft, but at least Excel won't randomly change your text styles, automatically adjust the margins so that half the table is off the paper, insert page breaks through the middle of rows, etc, etc, etc.
If I want a decent table in a Word document I have in the past been driven to embed an Excel file in it.
31,000 miles?
How do you work that out? a circumference of 25,000 miles gives us a radius of 3,978 miles. Go a mile up, and the effective radius is 3,979 miles, which gives us a circumference of...
25,006 miles. Not much of a difference.
Uh, yeah, that's why he said it would take two and a half hours. The distance covered in two and a half hours at 5,000 mph is left as an excercise for the reader.
Yeah, I think I saw a guy using this technology. At the time, I just assumed that he was one of those psychotic homeless people.
Still not sure what the shopping trolley full of old newspapers was for, though.
Seriously, though, it's bad enough with these new hands-free sets for people's mobiles. Time was, you see a guy walking along conducting a one-sdied conversation with the voices that only he can hear, and you know to give him a wide berth. Now they're everywhere.
Speaking as a Brit:
<resounding> NO!! </resounding>
Seriously, I have *never* heard anyone, from any point on the political spectrum, suggest this as being a good idea.
Look at our attitude to Europe: We're totally cacking our trousers at the thought of becoming sucked into a federal Europe and being made to eat garlic.
Now I know that many anti-Europeans here would prefer closer ties to the US than to Europe, but even those people would agree that one of the advantages of siding with the US rather than Europe is precisely that there is no chance of it threatening our sovereignity. Not officially, anyway.
English people don't talk about it much, but I think that, if you scratch the surface, there is in most people here a complete aversion to the idea of giving up power to any higher authority. We're the ones who take over other countries, not the other way round - the last time anyone invaded England was 938 years ago, and we're still a bit pissed off about it.
drink turkey
Whoops, my mistake. Conjures up a pretty horrible image, too. Oh, and I'm not a "new world" person - just using US examples in deference to our transatlantic overlords.
I know you were probably joking about guinness and st patricks day
No, I wasn't. It seriously pisses me off.
other brands of irish stout are free to do the same thing as well.
Yeah, just like other operating systems are free to bundle their own proprietary-format media players with their products as well. Point is, this wouldn't make much difference, because in 99% of the market's mind, there is no other OS but Windows, just as to 99% of the market's mind there is no other stout but Guinness, and St. Patrick is Its prophet.
When any one brand has that much of a market share, the concept of consumer choice becomes purely theoretical.
Please name one European company which has a worldwide monopoly.
Guinness.
Guinness has a near-monopoly on Irish Stout, and I for one do not welcome our St-Paddy's-day-hijacking overlords. I cannot understand how a day of national celebration came to be synonymous in people's minds with a particular brand of beer. It's like renaming July 4 "Miller Time" or something, or saying that every thanksgiving you have to drink a certain brand of turkey.
I'm all for the ritualistic drinking of large amounts of beer, but next St. Patrick's day let's go for the Murphy's or the Beamish and try to break the evil Guinness stranglehold.
No, wrong on both counts, I'm afraid. But I'll take your comment as a compliment on my ability to make stuff up and sound convincing ;)
How the heck does one fit a laptop in a body cavity (no goatse links, please)?
But how would looking up someone's arse be an appropriate response to a suspicion that they were attempting to avoid paying duty on a piece of computer equipment?
Or were you implying that they'd just do it to piss the guy off?
You know, sometimes I type a comment, click preview, reread it, and then decide that it's really not worth posting. You got to treat that "submit" button with respect, dude.
In the UK, if the lease on a property expires, ownership reverts to the owner of the freehold of that property, which may be the Queen, or may be someone else.
Although it's true that a lot of stuff in London is owned by the Crown or the estates of the various royals/aristocrats, it's misleading to imply that their status regarding this aspect of the property market is in anyway special. I know people who own the freeholds of leased houses in London, and they're not the Queen.
However, this doesn't in practice mean that the owners of the freehold get the whole house if they wait it out long enough, because I think they're obliged by law to offer the leaseholder the option to renew the lease "at a reasonable price".
And what does that tell us? Using the same maths, there is a 99% likelihood that the internet will last for between 45 days and 4,950 years - but it's just clever arithmetic, isn't it?
I, too, was "invented" 25 years ago. Do the same probablities apply to me?
My point, I guess, is that you have to use some actual data if you want to make any sort of prediction.
Yeah, but it's like buying a house with a hundred-year lease. You might only plan to live in it for twenty years, but when you come to sell it, the depreciation in value from a hundred-year lease to an eighty-year lease is far less than that from a thirty-year lease to a ten-year lease. So, if you're buying a resaleable domain name, say www.shopping.com or www.computer.com or whatever, then yeah, I'd say a hundred-year contract would be worth it. It's the closest you can get to owning a particular domain outright, forever.
Having said that, I can't imagine that people will access web sites in fifty years (if there's even anything that still exists that's remotely analagous to a website by then) by typing text into an address bar. I don't know what they'll be doing instead, but I get the feeling that owning a cool domain name will be about as valuable as having the rights to a particularly catchy morse code callsign would be now.
What I don't get is, if these "dinosaurs" have been extinct for millions of years, how does anyone know what they were called?
I reckon that these paleontologist guys are just making these names up.
No, the moral of the satory is: don't leave the house in your underwear.
Did you know that the kid who delivered that line was none other than Elijah Wood, who played Frodo?
You did? Oh. Sorry.
I started Infinite Jest, then left my copy in a restaurant, and couldn't be bothered to go back and pick it up.
I realised that I had read >150 pages and I still hadn't met a character about whom I could bring myself to care what happened to them. Which is, IMHO, a bad thing.
Yeah, okay, but my point wasn't really so much that Arnie's a bad politician (I don't follow US domestic politics closely enough to know), but that the main reason guys such as Arnie or Reagan get voted in is because they're famous movie stars rather than any political ability, which shows that the US electorate (and others, I'm not saying the US electorate is exceptionally stupid) votes for people for pretty superficial reasons, and that such voting patterns are not, despite what the great-grandparent post implied, solely the preserve of the young.
For example, I read somewhere that every presidential election has been won by the taller candidate, at least since you had that guy in the wheelchair.
If more people could take criticisms and/or corrections in as cheerful a manner as you, sir, then Slashdot would be a far more pleasant place. I thank you.