And here India is thinking that spending $4 billion or so will get it a nationwide fibre network. No wonder what has been done so far doesn't actually work properly. I feel sorry for the people that are going to have to be using this for lack of another choice.
I only bring it up because I've been working with Israelis on my unrelated-to-the-government fibre network in India - and I still can't fathom the amount of money it's going to cost me over the next decade or so to do that, but I'm sure it'll be more than $4 billion - you know - if I want it done properly.
Travel Insurance. Trusted Travellers cards. An APEC card. Flying proper airlines. Being a silver/gold/platinum member of Star Alliance/One World/$AIRLINE_OF_CHOICE. These can all greatly improve your air travel experience.
The laws in commonwealth countries are **mostly** sane about this. It's the countries with large amounts of passenger traffic where there is the potential for extremely bad precedents to be set where travellers have to worry... Ahem... USA, India, China.
If I'm not mistaken Ryan Air also has smaller cabin-bag size allowances. True or false, I've never flown Ryan Air and by the sounds of it, I wouldn't want to.
Yes, I recently had a discussion with a journalist about this. Same journo once interviewed O'Leary and recounted to me how he [O'Leary] is a complete and utter twat.
No citation, but if you feel like looking up one of the animated episodes of Dilbert, there is a scene in 1x09 "The Knack" where he gives Loud Howard instructions to subnet an IP address and it explodes. Then he fixes a microwave and it zaps another cow-irker to death.
I'll take your advice on the EcoGreen drives and see what I can find (couldn't find them in India, may have to resort to Europe or the US as I'll be on both continents over the next couple of weeks)... but the BDs... maybe not - simply *because* I travel, and GB for GB, they're kinda heavy (not great for travelling)... and living in India, keeping them out of heat is... not the easiest (so not great for storing, either... at least unless I store them in the server room, but that would defeat the purpose of having them ready to access "at will").
I suppose maybe having 2 copies (1 on BD, 1 on HDD) might be a good compromise so that I can keep the BDs in the server room and the HDDs on my person... which seems to be what you've suggested... hence... yeah, I'll probably do that. Combine with having my boot drive as an SSD (so it's fast but data is easily replaceable) and I... neato. Problem "solved". Sort of. I guess. Thanks.
Calling a call centre is like playing darts with a blindfold - you never know which region you're calling. One day you're speaking to someone in Mumbai, the next day in Hyderabad, the next day in Chennai and the day after that in Kolkata.
None of them speak the same language, and depending on the region you end up talking to, they may or may not speak Hindi, but working in a call centre they probably speak English, though often not well (there's no guarantee on a candidate's spoken language, and the tests aren't... shall we say... comprehensive... *IF* the tests even exist), and probably as a second or third language, because anyone who was educated in an English medium school **probably** doesn't have such a "menial" job (unless they're the manager... it would be a real shot to the family's pride if they were just an average call-centre peon).
Of course, these workers also don't really get paid enough to improve their English - not that the quality of the English education is very good anyway (taught by people with equally thick accents, but just older, giving an almost automatic right to the "Sir-ji" title).
My ex could have just about passed herself off as a Brit but she was born and raised here in Mumbai and educated in an English medium school by a bunch of Catholic nuns.
So English, then. Or Hinglish or Tamglish (local slang hybrid-ish mutations of English and a regional language)
Otherwise it depends how you define what a "major language" is. Marathi has 80-million odd speakers but there isn't even a Google-translate option for that yet, while Finnish has all of 6 million and that's well taken care of.
Living in Mumbai, I've gotten used to Hinglish and Marathi. Hindi is useful in Delhi. But I personally find South Indians (mostly Tamils) a little difficult to understand.
They're fine if you use them - don't let the different "alphabets" scare you.
To be honest, Hindi is an ugly language, and with India being as it is (a big melting pot of languages, cultures and cuisines), each major city has it's own preference - Bangalore (Kannada), Chennai (Tamil), Kolkata (Bengali), Hyderabad (Telugu), Mumbai (Marathi) and so on - and they all have their own "alphabets" too, so in reality, Hindi may really be impractical.
Russian is relatively easy, and Cyrillic only has 36-odd characters to learn (plus some infrequently used ones), but the vocab can be a pain because some of the words are... complicated... to pronounce for a native English speaker.
Arabic is somewhat OK because a surprising amount of English (and related languages) derives from it, but I'm not 100% certain how useful it would be for a programmer. Then you have the question of which style of Arabic to choose? Do you choose Eastern? Western? Egyptian?
Mandarin with the simplified-Chinese character set might prove valuable if you can get your head around inflections (as they can change the meaning of the sentence). I only have limited exposure to it (haven't pursued Mandarin so much yet), but I reckon it should get you by with most Chinese and Taiwanese while the simplified "alphabet" tends to be the one in use on the mainland.
At the end of the day, I'd suggest you try all 4 (maybe with software or some free web resources) and see which ones stick and/or interest you most, after which I'd suggest classes.
Interestingly, I'm having problems with both brands at the moment. About 4 years ago I switched almost exclusively from Seagate to WD but as of this moment I have 3 out of 3 of my personal collection of 1 & 2TB WD disks sitting in cold-storage awaiting recovery along with what was my last remaining Seagate 1TB disk (that actually came out of an external case I'd purchased, so I didn't have a choice of HDD manufacturer)... and 4 Seagate 250/320GB disks that have been waiting for recovery for about 2 years now but which I'm less worried about now.
All 3 of the aforementioned WD disks failed after 9-12 months (3 or 5 year warranties I can't remember, but I need to get the data off them before I RMA them) so now all bets on hard-drives are off, and right now I'm trying to find better ways of storing my large media (but my small/important documents are mirrored on 8 USB devices and 3 cloud-based backup services) before I decide whether to bother with another mechanical disk or just buy the biggest baddest SSD I can find - or maybe a bunch of MicroSD cards as they're decent enough value right now.
Come to India - the world's premier corruption-free destination!! [1][2][3]
[1] Side-effects may include gastrointestinal and breathing difficulties [2] Corruption level relative to Somalia, North Korea, Afghanistan [3] According to a poll of 543 "randomly" sampled individuals
If our beer was as bad as yours, we wouldn't want to drink it either.
We have a joke down under (and down under down under): Q: What's the difference between American beer and sex in a canoe? A: Nothing. They're both f*ing close to water.
But yeah... we reckon less than 2 dozen a day is practically teetotalling.
[be sure to take the above content with the humour with which it was intended]
Use whatever is best for the job. And who has only one email address these days anyway?
I can fully appreciate and understand the privacy concerns about $webmail_provider putting in advertising and all that stuff, but I still use it anyway -- for non-critical mail (that is to say, mostly newsletters, email digests and whatnot, some of which contain some form of advertising anyway). Why should *I* store the latest copy of an email from CNET or Light Reading or Slashdot or whatever myself when I can let the Google store it? It's non-important and being public information, I couldn't give a toss if Google wants to scan it for advertising.
Gmail's interface is also rather extensible, all things considered (like Thunderbird... how about that?) and I've got all sorts of little helpers installed on mine to make it less clunky and/or a bit more desktop-client-like.
As for *important* (business, mostly) email, the business has it's own server. We run Dovecot for IMAP. POP3 is not allowed. Every client we have (Desktop, Symbian, Android, iOs) all seem to connect to it fine with SSL.
For those in the business who *need* webmail, we have Roundcube with an OWA-like theme, IIRC. Otherwise, the default install is Thunderbird for a few simple reasons:
1. Multiple Identities - we couldn't get this working nicely on Outlook (for those using Windows)... and by nicely, I mean at all... without paying... and why should I pay for something that both Gmail and Thunderbird offer for free (and work on any platform, not just Windows)?
2. Portability - I can move from Windows to Linux to Mac and vice versa and/or upgrade my machine and all I need to do is copy the profile directory from the old machine to the new and voila, I don't have to set anything up - all my accounts, filters, add-ons and everything else are just there, waiting for me. It also makes deploying stuff easier when we get new users because then all we need to change are the mailbox credentials and they're up and running with the same things as everyone else (Same with Firefox, even though most of us use Chrome which Google syncs most of anyway, Firefox portability isn't easy to match from what I can ascertain).
3. I appreciate people who want to use mutt/pine as their email client, but really... it's not the most user-friendly interface unless you're already familiar with a CLI and have SSH access. For joe-blow office drone, mutt and whatnot just isn't practical. If, hypothetically, someone in the organization specifically wanted to use mutt, we wouldn't stop them, but they would have to make a case for wanting SSH access... and someone who wants SSH but who isn't employed as a technical person might have a hard time doing that.
4. It's been a long time since I tried any of the other clients (Kmail, Pegasus, Eudora) but... there's probably a good reason for it. Evolution just didn't do it for me, and that it's the default in many Linux distros annoys me and that getting rid of it basically is impossible without $package_manager wanting to remove Gnome in it's entirety as well (which some of us use).
5. We write our emails in plain-text by default. We have a little html in our signatures but it's just a couple of links.
6. Familiarity. Thunderbird is relatively familiar to even new recruits - it looks a bit like Outlook used to, which may or may not be a good thing, but, in either case, getting new people up to speed doesn't take too much time.
Those are all I can think of at the moment, but basically the moral of the story is, if you separate out your mail sufficiently there's no reason you can't take advantage of webmail providers for newsletters and non-critical stuff, and keep the private mail, well, private, using your client of choice. We like Thunderbird, you might not. It's a matter of taste. But we have managed to keep our systems open (as in with mostly FOSS), relatively secure, relatively extensible and relatively easy to deploy, all without sacrifice (as far as we know, anyway - correct me if I'm wrong).
It may not be as complete as you want but I use multiple identities for the same email address, coupled with the "correct identity" addon (automatically switches the from: to the correct identity if one exists)... works for me because the number of identities I have is basically static but if you want it to be dynamic, this might not work for you... and on that note, if you *do* find a solution, give me a yell.
Don't mock lynx/links. It's saved my ass on multiple occasions when something has made the GUI unresponsive (usually something running under WINE) and the only alternative is to go to tty2, fire up $BROWSER to quickly find the solution of reference the command if I can't remember the exact syntax of whatever I want to run... better than taking the pussy's way out and just running 'sudo reboot'... the only thing that annoys me about it is the continual questions about cookies but that's probably just something I haven't turned off out of laziness.
Slashdot Mirror
No seriously. I can't figure out why this is making me giggle so much. But it is. So thank you.
On that note, is it me, or is advertising in the USA EXTREMELY BUY NOW FUCKING ORDER TODAY OBNOXIOUS!?!?!?!
As a recent visitor to your United States of so on and so forth... this. Exactly this.
Also, I found Verizon 4G LTE is pretty shit. At least in Chicago.
Something for the dads is way better than astrology? Oh wait, wrong show... I'm thinking of Craic Dealer.
Depending on your elevation... go below sea-level and try to boil water at 100 C
You must have really big thumbs and feet... and a low tolerance for heat.
And where does the barleycorn fit in?
Achtung! Inn zee Gerrmanny, efferreesing hass too bee preesais!!
Ach, bliss.
And here India is thinking that spending $4 billion or so will get it a nationwide fibre network. No wonder what has been done so far doesn't actually work properly. I feel sorry for the people that are going to have to be using this for lack of another choice.
I only bring it up because I've been working with Israelis on my unrelated-to-the-government fibre network in India - and I still can't fathom the amount of money it's going to cost me over the next decade or so to do that, but I'm sure it'll be more than $4 billion - you know - if I want it done properly.
Travel Insurance. Trusted Travellers cards. An APEC card. Flying proper airlines. Being a silver/gold/platinum member of Star Alliance/One World/$AIRLINE_OF_CHOICE. These can all greatly improve your air travel experience.
The laws in commonwealth countries are **mostly** sane about this. It's the countries with large amounts of passenger traffic where there is the potential for extremely bad precedents to be set where travellers have to worry... Ahem... USA, India, China.
If I'm not mistaken Ryan Air also has smaller cabin-bag size allowances. True or false, I've never flown Ryan Air and by the sounds of it, I wouldn't want to.
Yes, I recently had a discussion with a journalist about this. Same journo once interviewed O'Leary and recounted to me how he [O'Leary] is a complete and utter twat.
...there's no reason it couldn't happen though.
No citation, but if you feel like looking up one of the animated episodes of Dilbert, there is a scene in 1x09 "The Knack" where he gives Loud Howard instructions to subnet an IP address and it explodes. Then he fixes a microwave and it zaps another cow-irker to death.
Oh how I wish that could happen IRL (sometimes).
Or sometimes you'll place your trust in someone else to handle your car appropriately, and then this happens: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/index.aspx?page=article§id=2&contentid=201211242012112403425622670b26bda&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
I'll take your advice on the EcoGreen drives and see what I can find (couldn't find them in India, may have to resort to Europe or the US as I'll be on both continents over the next couple of weeks)... but the BDs... maybe not - simply *because* I travel, and GB for GB, they're kinda heavy (not great for travelling)... and living in India, keeping them out of heat is... not the easiest (so not great for storing, either... at least unless I store them in the server room, but that would defeat the purpose of having them ready to access "at will").
I suppose maybe having 2 copies (1 on BD, 1 on HDD) might be a good compromise so that I can keep the BDs in the server room and the HDDs on my person... which seems to be what you've suggested... hence... yeah, I'll probably do that. Combine with having my boot drive as an SSD (so it's fast but data is easily replaceable) and I... neato. Problem "solved". Sort of. I guess. Thanks.
No problems here typing in Cyrillic with ibus.
Calling a call centre is like playing darts with a blindfold - you never know which region you're calling. One day you're speaking to someone in Mumbai, the next day in Hyderabad, the next day in Chennai and the day after that in Kolkata.
None of them speak the same language, and depending on the region you end up talking to, they may or may not speak Hindi, but working in a call centre they probably speak English, though often not well (there's no guarantee on a candidate's spoken language, and the tests aren't... shall we say... comprehensive... *IF* the tests even exist), and probably as a second or third language, because anyone who was educated in an English medium school **probably** doesn't have such a "menial" job (unless they're the manager... it would be a real shot to the family's pride if they were just an average call-centre peon).
Of course, these workers also don't really get paid enough to improve their English - not that the quality of the English education is very good anyway (taught by people with equally thick accents, but just older, giving an almost automatic right to the "Sir-ji" title).
My ex could have just about passed herself off as a Brit but she was born and raised here in Mumbai and educated in an English medium school by a bunch of Catholic nuns.
So English, then. Or Hinglish or Tamglish (local slang hybrid-ish mutations of English and a regional language)
Otherwise it depends how you define what a "major language" is. Marathi has 80-million odd speakers but there isn't even a Google-translate option for that yet, while Finnish has all of 6 million and that's well taken care of.
Living in Mumbai, I've gotten used to Hinglish and Marathi. Hindi is useful in Delhi. But I personally find South Indians (mostly Tamils) a little difficult to understand.
There's no such thing as "Chinese" either. Mandarin and Cantonese being the two major languages but they're not really alike.
They're fine if you use them - don't let the different "alphabets" scare you.
To be honest, Hindi is an ugly language, and with India being as it is (a big melting pot of languages, cultures and cuisines), each major city has it's own preference - Bangalore (Kannada), Chennai (Tamil), Kolkata (Bengali), Hyderabad (Telugu), Mumbai (Marathi) and so on - and they all have their own "alphabets" too, so in reality, Hindi may really be impractical.
Russian is relatively easy, and Cyrillic only has 36-odd characters to learn (plus some infrequently used ones), but the vocab can be a pain because some of the words are... complicated... to pronounce for a native English speaker.
Arabic is somewhat OK because a surprising amount of English (and related languages) derives from it, but I'm not 100% certain how useful it would be for a programmer. Then you have the question of which style of Arabic to choose? Do you choose Eastern? Western? Egyptian?
Mandarin with the simplified-Chinese character set might prove valuable if you can get your head around inflections (as they can change the meaning of the sentence). I only have limited exposure to it (haven't pursued Mandarin so much yet), but I reckon it should get you by with most Chinese and Taiwanese while the simplified "alphabet" tends to be the one in use on the mainland.
At the end of the day, I'd suggest you try all 4 (maybe with software or some free web resources) and see which ones stick and/or interest you most, after which I'd suggest classes.
Interestingly, I'm having problems with both brands at the moment. About 4 years ago I switched almost exclusively from Seagate to WD but as of this moment I have 3 out of 3 of my personal collection of 1 & 2TB WD disks sitting in cold-storage awaiting recovery along with what was my last remaining Seagate 1TB disk (that actually came out of an external case I'd purchased, so I didn't have a choice of HDD manufacturer)... and 4 Seagate 250/320GB disks that have been waiting for recovery for about 2 years now but which I'm less worried about now.
All 3 of the aforementioned WD disks failed after 9-12 months (3 or 5 year warranties I can't remember, but I need to get the data off them before I RMA them) so now all bets on hard-drives are off, and right now I'm trying to find better ways of storing my large media (but my small/important documents are mirrored on 8 USB devices and 3 cloud-based backup services) before I decide whether to bother with another mechanical disk or just buy the biggest baddest SSD I can find - or maybe a bunch of MicroSD cards as they're decent enough value right now.
Bad luck? Perhaps. But still annoying.
Come to India - the world's premier corruption-free destination!! [1][2][3]
[1] Side-effects may include gastrointestinal and breathing difficulties
[2] Corruption level relative to Somalia, North Korea, Afghanistan
[3] According to a poll of 543 "randomly" sampled individuals
If our beer was as bad as yours, we wouldn't want to drink it either.
We have a joke down under (and down under down under):
Q: What's the difference between American beer and sex in a canoe?
A: Nothing. They're both f*ing close to water.
But yeah... we reckon less than 2 dozen a day is practically teetotalling.
[be sure to take the above content with the humour with which it was intended]
Use whatever is best for the job. And who has only one email address these days anyway?
I can fully appreciate and understand the privacy concerns about $webmail_provider putting in advertising and all that stuff, but I still use it anyway -- for non-critical mail (that is to say, mostly newsletters, email digests and whatnot, some of which contain some form of advertising anyway). Why should *I* store the latest copy of an email from CNET or Light Reading or Slashdot or whatever myself when I can let the Google store it? It's non-important and being public information, I couldn't give a toss if Google wants to scan it for advertising.
Gmail's interface is also rather extensible, all things considered (like Thunderbird... how about that?) and I've got all sorts of little helpers installed on mine to make it less clunky and/or a bit more desktop-client-like.
As for *important* (business, mostly) email, the business has it's own server. We run Dovecot for IMAP. POP3 is not allowed. Every client we have (Desktop, Symbian, Android, iOs) all seem to connect to it fine with SSL.
For those in the business who *need* webmail, we have Roundcube with an OWA-like theme, IIRC. Otherwise, the default install is Thunderbird for a few simple reasons:
1. Multiple Identities - we couldn't get this working nicely on Outlook (for those using Windows)... and by nicely, I mean at all... without paying... and why should I pay for something that both Gmail and Thunderbird offer for free (and work on any platform, not just Windows)?
2. Portability - I can move from Windows to Linux to Mac and vice versa and/or upgrade my machine and all I need to do is copy the profile directory from the old machine to the new and voila, I don't have to set anything up - all my accounts, filters, add-ons and everything else are just there, waiting for me. It also makes deploying stuff easier when we get new users because then all we need to change are the mailbox credentials and they're up and running with the same things as everyone else (Same with Firefox, even though most of us use Chrome which Google syncs most of anyway, Firefox portability isn't easy to match from what I can ascertain).
3. I appreciate people who want to use mutt/pine as their email client, but really... it's not the most user-friendly interface unless you're already familiar with a CLI and have SSH access. For joe-blow office drone, mutt and whatnot just isn't practical. If, hypothetically, someone in the organization specifically wanted to use mutt, we wouldn't stop them, but they would have to make a case for wanting SSH access... and someone who wants SSH but who isn't employed as a technical person might have a hard time doing that.
4. It's been a long time since I tried any of the other clients (Kmail, Pegasus, Eudora) but... there's probably a good reason for it. Evolution just didn't do it for me, and that it's the default in many Linux distros annoys me and that getting rid of it basically is impossible without $package_manager wanting to remove Gnome in it's entirety as well (which some of us use).
5. We write our emails in plain-text by default. We have a little html in our signatures but it's just a couple of links.
6. Familiarity. Thunderbird is relatively familiar to even new recruits - it looks a bit like Outlook used to, which may or may not be a good thing, but, in either case, getting new people up to speed doesn't take too much time.
Those are all I can think of at the moment, but basically the moral of the story is, if you separate out your mail sufficiently there's no reason you can't take advantage of webmail providers for newsletters and non-critical stuff, and keep the private mail, well, private, using your client of choice. We like Thunderbird, you might not. It's a matter of taste. But we have managed to keep our systems open (as in with mostly FOSS), relatively secure, relatively extensible and relatively easy to deploy, all without sacrifice (as far as we know, anyway - correct me if I'm wrong).
It may not be as complete as you want but I use multiple identities for the same email address, coupled with the "correct identity" addon (automatically switches the from: to the correct identity if one exists)... works for me because the number of identities I have is basically static but if you want it to be dynamic, this might not work for you... and on that note, if you *do* find a solution, give me a yell.
Don't mock lynx/links. It's saved my ass on multiple occasions when something has made the GUI unresponsive (usually something running under WINE) and the only alternative is to go to tty2, fire up $BROWSER to quickly find the solution of reference the command if I can't remember the exact syntax of whatever I want to run... better than taking the pussy's way out and just running 'sudo reboot'... the only thing that annoys me about it is the continual questions about cookies but that's probably just something I haven't turned off out of laziness.