...often when I write in english I will mis-use a verb tense or write a sentence in spanish structure and not english structure. Word is decent at detecting this and suggesting I move around some words.
My advice: Use extreme caution. I have completely given up on Word's grammar checker, because the only error it could find consistently was my use of "which" when I should have said "that". When it suggested a structural change in one of my sentences, the suggested change almost always changed the underlying meaning of the sentence, especially when Word was complaining about passive voice or noun-verb correspondence. (Incidentally, it never once actually caught me with a noun-verb correspondence error.)
I wish I could give a couple of examples, but I don't have Word here at home; on this machine I still use my old copy of WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.:)
I remember getting vaccinated in the 1960's (yes, I'm that old) and they used some sort of air gun that shot the vaccination through the skin.
That thing HURT!
From TFA: "Because the MicroJet's source of power is electrical rather than mechanical, its range of control is continuous, allowing a far higher level of customization than the jet injectors used today."
What I remember about the ones used in school vaccinations back in the '60s and '70s was that they used compressed gas, and that the burst pressure was difficult to keep tuned for minimum pain. I had some that hurt like hell, and some that just felt like a friendly punch on the arm. One tale (possibly apocryphal) told of a kid who got his vaccination right after they changed CO2 (or whatever) tanks: the nurse forgot to throttle back the injector and blew the dosage halfway through the kid's arm. Ouch. Panicked evacuation of the cafetorium ensued.
Hopefully, the MicroJet will indeed achieve the kind of control we saw with McCoy's hypospray.
...than it is to try and bridge a 15 year old machine that ran from 5 1/2" floppies...
<pedantic>Wow, where did you find a 5-1/2" floppy drive? Will it read my old 5-1/4" floppies?</pedantic>
But you make a very good point, in general: It is much easier to keep everything up to date together than to bring mail in from 15-year-old systems. Of course, if I followed that philosophy with everything, then my answer for the current poll would have been much less interesting.
Huh? Google didn't do the right thing. They skirted blame by saying it was done "inadvertently."...Google has demonstrated this week that it is no saint.
Did any of you self-righteous goons actually search for the "cloaked" Adwords page yourself? If you had, you'd have seen that when the page came up in Google's search listing, the listing did not give the "friendly" title of "Why do traffic estimates for my Ad group differ etc." that Google would have wanted you to see.
Instead the listing title showed a meaningless garble of phrases - "traffic estimate, traffic estimator, traffic tool, estimate traffic, blah blah blah". To me, this certainly looks like an unintended, "inadvertent" result.
I for one am perfectly willing to believe Google's claim that "We inadvertently showed additional information on product support pages to both Google's site search crawler and Google's main web crawler." Why shouldn't I? There are honest people left in the world. Are honest mistakes not allowed any more?
I don't really see any harm or ethical violations. The people simply found out information ahead of time that harmed no one.
So cheating on your wife is ethical, so long as she never gets hurt? You can sleep around all you want, as long as your wife never finds out and you never bring any diseases home and your girlfriends never go Fatal Attraction?
Ethics isn't about who gets hurt. Ethics is about doing the right thing the right way--
even when you don't have to.
I've lied, I've cheated, I've stolen in my life. But the longer I've lived, the more I've realized I had a responsibility to do what was right, even when I knew I could get away with cheating. That's the point, not whether anyone gets hurt.
Now I have kids, and I'm trying to be an example for them to follow. I hear other people complain about their kids, and I wonder, "Why the hell do you expect your kids to follow your rules, when every time they get in the car with you they see you running red lights and breaking the speed limit?"
These poor impatient kids broke a fundamental rule of honest dealing. Harvard is doing the right thing.
For the last time, System Restore and NTBackup are different programs for different purposes. Telling people that System Restore is junk and they should only use NTBackup is a disservice to the Win XP community.
Oh, wait, that's the other redundant and repetitive poster I saw today. Sorry.
And if you're very, very lucky, all your programs/games/utilities will work as a non-Administrator user. Very few apps are designed to run as non-Administrator even today...
Bollocks. The only time I ever run as Administrator--at home or at work--is when I'm installing, uninstalling, or getting at secure data on another machine, and I quit using "Run As" altogether because it screwed up so often. None of my users ever run as Administrator. We have several third-party apps, all of which can be run as User or Power User (although we do have one idiot app that uses DCOM, and tells you to use dcomcnfg to give everybody Full Control over a bunch of settings).
And no, I haven't gone around tweaking security settings in the registry or giving everybody Full Control of C:\Windows.
True enough, the user experience overall has improved quite a bit. Fifteen years ago, my experience was spending half an afternoon watching PKZIP compress files so I could get a few more patients into the database on our 80MB hard drive. Now I manipulate ZIP files directly from Windows Explorer, almost transparently.
Fifteen years ago, true 3D design was the preserve of major manufacturers and movie studios only, and required special dedicated hardware; now you can download free software for 3D design that runs on any reasonably powerful system.
But think: If Windows didn't spend so much horsepower catering to idiots (while blocking reasonably intelligent people from doing what they want), how much more would we be able to do by now?
Yes. I've currently got it on two 433MHz systems, with either 256MB or 384MB RAM. It's not fast, but it's not tragically slow, either; about like Windows for Workgroups ran on a 386. And as much as I loathe WIndows, I must say XP's amazingly stable. One of those two old systems now handles the backups for our entire corporate network, because it never, ever crashes.
That's what's always mystified me about Windows: They don't seem to dedicate anything to making sure the system will respond quickly to the user. The first time I saw Windows XP, in a store display, all I did was right-click on the desktop to see if the popup menu had changed much. To my surprise, on an otherwise idle system, it took a good 30 seconds for the desktop popup menu even to appear. Yecchhh.
Only a small portion of code bloat is actually useful features. But it is more related to marketing/review checkbox features -- features that are not really used, but it is added only because it can be shown as being there for marketing.
Extra features != added load. In a well-constructed system, "checkbox features" are in a library somewhere, and don't load until a user actually requests them. As TFA says, spell checkers and grammar checkers drag down execution, but not if the user turns them off.
MS Word has innumerable weird formatting and graphics features, but since I never use them, the most they should ever affect me is an insignificant increase in program startup time. On the other hand, the WYSIWYG display probably warms up my CPU a bit, doing things like apparently recalculating the page count of the entire document every time I type a new line.
But I think most users these days would consider the WYSIWYG display a requirement in a word processor, not a "checkbox feature" or "code bloat".
Dell has had a wildly varied price structure for years. I'm sure this is one of the reasons I always found dell.com such a hard site to navigate - to make it as difficult as possible to create exactly the same computer under two different sections, then compare the prices.
As the posting and TFA indicate, the easiest way to check their price practices is to look at components, rather than whole systems. We replaced my wife's teeny hard drive a year ago, and saved about $40 by going through the Small Business branch, even though the exact part# was available through other branches.
(Our other experience with Dell was that even when we got a price quote on a full system from them, they refused to honor it, bumping the price up by $100 three days later. Have not trusted them since.)
Passwords are less about keeping people out and more about making people accountable.
Yeah, and then your boss does something stupid (and unethical) like installing Spector Pro with keylogging. Suddenly not only are all your personal internet passwords compromised (imagine your boss posting idiotic comments on slashdot in your name), but your work password is recorded (in comparatively plain text) in a database, ripe for theft.
And why do so many companies set the passwords their employees use to log on? Knowing her own password, my wife can predict dozens of other passwords around her very large company. If anyone other than the employee knows his password, then you can't prove that it was the employee who logged on and wiped out the server. Nor can the employee tell when the system administrator has reset his password to get access to his account for some reason.
I had a prolonged argument with one of the managers of my company about passwords; he wanted me to give him a written list of every user's password (including mine). Thankfully, he finally quit and took his dumb ass to another company.
Besides, as someone pointed out elsewhere, after 18 months in stir we probably wouldn't even recognize, much less understand, most of the topics on Slashdot.
Of course, that wouldn't stop the deeply childish ones from posting comments anyway.
Which means most slashdotters basically have a get out of jail free card.
Well, according to this poll from a while back, no more than 24% of slashdotters could be considered "teens." Is ScentCone implying that the longer we read Slashdot, the more childish we become?
Thank you for the clarification! The Matted Widescreen link above happened to point to something I could check for myself: John Cleese' nude scene in A Fish Called Wanda. My DVD is FS/WS double-sided, and I've compared the shots; sure enough, in the FS version you see him wearing a pair of shorts. I saw Wanda in the theater and I'm sure I'd have noticed such an obvious editing gaffe, so indeed the "butchered" version appears to be more true to the theatrical release.
Open frame filming would also explain a peculiarity I've noticed in my FS/WS copy of The Fifth Element (Columbia/Tristar, not MGM). The FS version has definitely been trimmed on the sides, but in at least some shots, the FS frame is noticeably taller than the WS frame. Apparently in creating the FS version, the studio picked shots in which they could maintain more of the original width by adding cropped areas from the full frame. Notably, I've not found any of these expanded FS frames in effects shots, only in relatively effects-free interior shots.
On the other hand, what happened to Terminator 3 (Warner)? I don't have a FS version, but my WS DVD seems to have less picture top-and-bottom than I saw in the theater. For instance, near the beginning when John Connor drops a beer bottle off a bridge, the bottle bounces off something out of frame before falling in the water. It looks distinctly peculiar, and I don't remember such a distracting moment in the theater. Can somebody check if their FS version shows a girder or something (not that that would prove anything)?
This is probably redundant, but the settlement offers "a new
MGM DVD from a list of 325 titles," not, "an honestly-packaged copy of the purchased DVD." The 325 replacement titles aren't listed anywhere I've found. There's no guarantee that you can get a replacement copy of The Princess Bride or The Last Waltz.
In fact, the list of affected DVDs has 550 titles on it, not 325. MGM is probably taking this opportunity to clear their warehouses of titles that even Amazon can't move. And if you can get the exact title you originally bought, I don't see any reason they couldn't give you exactly the same version you already have, as long as the packaging is no longer "deceptive".
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see how long I can keep this signature for
<pedantic>Let's see for how long I can keep this signature</pedantic>
...often when I write in english I will mis-use a verb tense or write a sentence in spanish structure and not english structure. Word is decent at detecting this and suggesting I move around some words.
:)
My advice: Use extreme caution. I have completely given up on Word's grammar checker, because the only error it could find consistently was my use of "which" when I should have said "that". When it suggested a structural change in one of my sentences, the suggested change almost always changed the underlying meaning of the sentence, especially when Word was complaining about passive voice or noun-verb correspondence. (Incidentally, it never once actually caught me with a noun-verb correspondence error.)
I wish I could give a couple of examples, but I don't have Word here at home; on this machine I still use my old copy of WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
I remember getting vaccinated in the 1960's (yes, I'm that old) and they used some sort of air gun that shot the vaccination through the skin. That thing HURT!
From TFA: "Because the MicroJet's source of power is electrical rather than mechanical, its range of control is continuous, allowing a far higher level of customization than the jet injectors used today."
What I remember about the ones used in school vaccinations back in the '60s and '70s was that they used compressed gas, and that the burst pressure was difficult to keep tuned for minimum pain. I had some that hurt like hell, and some that just felt like a friendly punch on the arm. One tale (possibly apocryphal) told of a kid who got his vaccination right after they changed CO2 (or whatever) tanks: the nurse forgot to throttle back the injector and blew the dosage halfway through the kid's arm. Ouch. Panicked evacuation of the cafetorium ensued.
Hopefully, the MicroJet will indeed achieve the kind of control we saw with McCoy's hypospray.
But you make a very good point, in general: It is much easier to keep everything up to date together than to bring mail in from 15-year-old systems. Of course, if I followed that philosophy with everything, then my answer for the current poll would have been much less interesting.
Instead the listing title showed a meaningless garble of phrases - "traffic estimate, traffic estimator, traffic tool, estimate traffic, blah blah blah". To me, this certainly looks like an unintended, "inadvertent" result.
I for one am perfectly willing to believe Google's claim that "We inadvertently showed additional information on product support pages to both Google's site search crawler and Google's main web crawler." Why shouldn't I? There are honest people left in the world. Are honest mistakes not allowed any more?
So cheating on your wife is ethical, so long as she never gets hurt? You can sleep around all you want, as long as your wife never finds out and you never bring any diseases home and your girlfriends never go Fatal Attraction?
Ethics isn't about who gets hurt. Ethics is about doing the right thing the right way-- I've lied, I've cheated, I've stolen in my life. But the longer I've lived, the more I've realized I had a responsibility to do what was right, even when I knew I could get away with cheating. That's the point, not whether anyone gets hurt.
Now I have kids, and I'm trying to be an example for them to follow. I hear other people complain about their kids, and I wonder, "Why the hell do you expect your kids to follow your rules, when every time they get in the car with you they see you running red lights and breaking the speed limit?"
These poor impatient kids broke a fundamental rule of honest dealing. Harvard is doing the right thing.
It looks like one of the cute little ghosts from the old Super Mario 64.
Colin:
For the last time, System Restore and NTBackup are different programs for different purposes. Telling people that System Restore is junk and they should only use NTBackup is a disservice to the Win XP community.
Oh, wait, that's the other redundant and repetitive poster I saw today. Sorry.
I try to keep a minimum of apps on my computer, uninstall what I'm not using and limit my internet connection time.
;-)
Since I see you commenting on almost every topic I ever read, you must not have time for much but Slashdot.
And if you're very, very lucky, all your programs/games/utilities will work as a non-Administrator user. Very few apps are designed to run as non-Administrator even today...
Bollocks. The only time I ever run as Administrator--at home or at work--is when I'm installing, uninstalling, or getting at secure data on another machine, and I quit using "Run As" altogether because it screwed up so often. None of my users ever run as Administrator. We have several third-party apps, all of which can be run as User or Power User (although we do have one idiot app that uses DCOM, and tells you to use dcomcnfg to give everybody Full Control over a bunch of settings).
And no, I haven't gone around tweaking security settings in the registry or giving everybody Full Control of C:\Windows.
How many people would offer beer to a mechanic before he fixes their brakes on their car before and while he does the work?
Beer, no, but I once got a new clutch put in for a quart of Evan Williams. (Worked great.)
True enough, the user experience overall has improved quite a bit. Fifteen years ago, my experience was spending half an afternoon watching PKZIP compress files so I could get a few more patients into the database on our 80MB hard drive. Now I manipulate ZIP files directly from Windows Explorer, almost transparently.
Fifteen years ago, true 3D design was the preserve of major manufacturers and movie studios only, and required special dedicated hardware; now you can download free software for 3D design that runs on any reasonably powerful system.
But think: If Windows didn't spend so much horsepower catering to idiots (while blocking reasonably intelligent people from doing what they want), how much more would we be able to do by now?
Yeah, that oughta shut 'em up.
Will XP even install on a 500MHz system?
Yes. I've currently got it on two 433MHz systems, with either 256MB or 384MB RAM. It's not fast, but it's not tragically slow, either; about like Windows for Workgroups ran on a 386. And as much as I loathe WIndows, I must say XP's amazingly stable. One of those two old systems now handles the backups for our entire corporate network, because it never, ever crashes.
That's what's always mystified me about Windows: They don't seem to dedicate anything to making sure the system will respond quickly to the user. The first time I saw Windows XP, in a store display, all I did was right-click on the desktop to see if the popup menu had changed much. To my surprise, on an otherwise idle system, it took a good 30 seconds for the desktop popup menu even to appear. Yecchhh.
Only a small portion of code bloat is actually useful features. But it is more related to marketing/review checkbox features -- features that are not really used, but it is added only because it can be shown as being there for marketing.
Extra features != added load. In a well-constructed system, "checkbox features" are in a library somewhere, and don't load until a user actually requests them. As TFA says, spell checkers and grammar checkers drag down execution, but not if the user turns them off.
MS Word has innumerable weird formatting and graphics features, but since I never use them, the most they should ever affect me is an insignificant increase in program startup time. On the other hand, the WYSIWYG display probably warms up my CPU a bit, doing things like apparently recalculating the page count of the entire document every time I type a new line.
But I think most users these days would consider the WYSIWYG display a requirement in a word processor, not a "checkbox feature" or "code bloat".
Glacial?
Dell has had a wildly varied price structure for years. I'm sure this is one of the reasons I always found dell.com such a hard site to navigate - to make it as difficult as possible to create exactly the same computer under two different sections, then compare the prices.
As the posting and TFA indicate, the easiest way to check their price practices is to look at components, rather than whole systems. We replaced my wife's teeny hard drive a year ago, and saved about $40 by going through the Small Business branch, even though the exact part# was available through other branches.
(Our other experience with Dell was that even when we got a price quote on a full system from them, they refused to honor it, bumping the price up by $100 three days later. Have not trusted them since.)
Yeah, and then your boss does something stupid (and unethical) like installing Spector Pro with keylogging. Suddenly not only are all your personal internet passwords compromised (imagine your boss posting idiotic comments on slashdot in your name), but your work password is recorded (in comparatively plain text) in a database, ripe for theft.
And why do so many companies set the passwords their employees use to log on? Knowing her own password, my wife can predict dozens of other passwords around her very large company. If anyone other than the employee knows his password, then you can't prove that it was the employee who logged on and wiped out the server. Nor can the employee tell when the system administrator has reset his password to get access to his account for some reason.
I had a prolonged argument with one of the managers of my company about passwords; he wanted me to give him a written list of every user's password (including mine). Thankfully, he finally quit and took his dumb ass to another company.With any luck, next is "Too lazy to type."
Besides, as someone pointed out elsewhere, after 18 months in stir we probably wouldn't even recognize, much less understand, most of the topics on Slashdot.
Of course, that wouldn't stop the deeply childish ones from posting comments anyway.
Which means most slashdotters basically have a get out of jail free card.
Well, according to this poll from a while back, no more than 24% of slashdotters could be considered "teens." Is ScentCone implying that the longer we read Slashdot, the more childish we become?
Not that I'm saying he'd be wrong, mind you. . .
Thank you for the clarification! The Matted Widescreen link above happened to point to something I could check for myself: John Cleese' nude scene in A Fish Called Wanda. My DVD is FS/WS double-sided, and I've compared the shots; sure enough, in the FS version you see him wearing a pair of shorts. I saw Wanda in the theater and I'm sure I'd have noticed such an obvious editing gaffe, so indeed the "butchered" version appears to be more true to the theatrical release.
Open frame filming would also explain a peculiarity I've noticed in my FS/WS copy of The Fifth Element (Columbia/Tristar, not MGM). The FS version has definitely been trimmed on the sides, but in at least some shots, the FS frame is noticeably taller than the WS frame. Apparently in creating the FS version, the studio picked shots in which they could maintain more of the original width by adding cropped areas from the full frame. Notably, I've not found any of these expanded FS frames in effects shots, only in relatively effects-free interior shots.
On the other hand, what happened to Terminator 3 (Warner)? I don't have a FS version, but my WS DVD seems to have less picture top-and-bottom than I saw in the theater. For instance, near the beginning when John Connor drops a beer bottle off a bridge, the bottle bounces off something out of frame before falling in the water. It looks distinctly peculiar, and I don't remember such a distracting moment in the theater. Can somebody check if their FS version shows a girder or something (not that that would prove anything)?
This is probably redundant, but the settlement offers "a new MGM DVD from a list of 325 titles," not, "an honestly-packaged copy of the purchased DVD." The 325 replacement titles aren't listed anywhere I've found. There's no guarantee that you can get a replacement copy of The Princess Bride or The Last Waltz.
In fact, the list of affected DVDs has 550 titles on it, not 325. MGM is probably taking this opportunity to clear their warehouses of titles that even Amazon can't move. And if you can get the exact title you originally bought, I don't see any reason they couldn't give you exactly the same version you already have, as long as the packaging is no longer "deceptive".
VIIV -> "V Isn't IV" -> "Pentium 5 Isn't Pentium 4"