Impress is quite usable; I've created presentations with it before. One particularly useful feature was the ability to export as PDF--that way, I could present on a computer that had only Adobe Reader. (It includes slide transitions and everything and is by default set to open in full-screen mode. It's really nifty.) The only bad thing is that, at least a few years ago (and probably still today), OO.o comes with only two templates, both of which are incredibly ugly (the default is black and white Arial; the other is some ugly purple or blue and yellow crazyness).
Luckily, you can import templates from PowerPoint, which I have done a few times when I wanted something that actually looked good. Of course, most of those aren't good, either, but there are many that are. And, of course, this doesn't matter for the unfortunately large number of people who might as well not use a template in the first place because all they do is change fonts and colors all over the place (you know, the same people who haven't discovered styles in Word or OO.o Writer).
not to mention the agony of riding to work in business-acceptable clothes in a humid 90F+ - yikes.
Pack a pair of clothes and commute in something lighter--it's what I do in the summer. Bonus points if there are showers, but I don't have them (at work, I mean!) and imagine most places don't, either.
The ability to read, or surf the web, or watch a movie/TV show durring my commute would be wonderful. Almost like getting a free hour everyday. 52 * 5 * 1 = 250 free hours a year.
I can do this already--it's called taking the bus.
But, I can completely understand where you're coming from; I've lived places where the only option to get to work was to drive (although that was when I was in high school, lived with my parents, and worked a few towns away). I'm happy I don't anymore, although now I usually just ride my bike instead of taking the bus--faster, more convenient, and a good way to get part of my workout in and commute at the same time.:)
It's bad enough Mac users still have to install MS Office because it won't really interoperate with things like iWork or open office....
Unfortuantely, MS Office for the Mac doesn't really interoperate with MS Office for Windows, either. The new version is supposed to be better, but I haven't tried it out yet...
...just a guy who happens to be part of the W3C stating his personal opinion. There is no official press release or publication on the W3C site itself--and, for that matter, not even any on this guy's personal web page or Twitter feed (when did he even say this?).
This summary (and the first article link in it, which parts of the summary copied verbatim without attribution) is incorrect. This is not OO.o declaring their independence; LibreOffice is a fork. It may or may not catch on. Oracle, in charge of the current OO.o project, may or may not actually pay attention or care.
I was going to try to compare this to Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, but I couldn't: that was at least started and hosted by (a couple people at) Mozilla and happened to catch their attention and be made their primary focus; Oracle has nothing to do with this, and I find it unlikely that they will care. Additionally, their goals were different: Firefox was mostly to eliminate bloat; this is to make OO.o "free-er," including plugins. I guess they do have one thing in common, which is that they are both attempts to re-take control of a project from a corporate overlord who pushed the product according to their desires for their product; in one case, Netscape, in this case, Sun/Oracle.
Still, the summary is misleading. Visit their web page and find out what they really are; do yourself a favor and don't read the incorrectly summarized article or obviously-not-written-by-someone-who-knows-anything-about-software article.
...remembering to do it yourself is the best option. I'm not going to tell you how to manage your finances, but if you can go so much as three months without knowing any of your account history, it probably isn't that valuable to you. I recommend keeping a running ledger (JGnash2 can do it for you, and it has pre-defined queries you can run on it in ways that will far exceed a simple MySQL database unless you categorize your transations--which, given your rate of downloading, is fairly unlikely).
Or, as others have suggested, set a reminder for yourself, if nothing else.
"Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.
Uhh... or, you know, standard Arabic numerals used in most (all?) Western languages.
Unless they're trying to say that "programming code" replaces letters with numbers. Sad to say, I don't really think you'll get very far calling C0ns0l3.Wr1t3L1n3("H3110 w0r1d!").
Friction itself a force; therefore, you can measure it in Newtons (or poundals or your unit of choice). However, most non-physicists (that's me!...so correct me if I'm wrong, by the way) run into the coefficient of friction far more frequently. This number (usually represented by the Greek letter mu) is just a ratio, so there are no units. (This probably explains the confusion in the first place.)
On second thought, maybe that's how they wrote it in the article but perhaps on the actual test they did something else, like a giant box where it was clear you were supposed to fill in the blank.
And if they didn't, it sounds like that would have avoided both problems I talked about (the "what are variables?" and the "what do these parentheses mean?" problems)-assuming they knew how to fill in the blank.
I'm from the UK, is 4+3+2=( )+2 a commonly used / commonly understood way of presenting the problem in the US?
It sure isn't. I wonder if notational trickery isn't part of the problem, not a lack of understanding. (TFA doesn't say if there were directions, like "Solve for the missing quantity in parentheses" or something like that.) I bet more people would have understood if they used something like x. Maybe they were trying to avoid "scary" variables for middle schoolers, but that's actually exactly when I remember learning what they were--if not, the year before.
I'm in the late 20s/early 30s bracket, the gen who grew up having to fiddle with DOS just to get games to run.
All the techs @ work (I'm not counting desktop and helpdesk lol, poor sods) had this ingrained in their upbringing.
The kids coming in who had click and install gaming have noticeably poorer troubleshooting skills, and in particular shy away from command line and text files.
I'm in my early 20's, but for all practical computer-related purposes, I'm in my late--let's just say we didn't upgrade to Windows 95 until about 1999, so before that for me it was Windows 3.11 and lots of DOS. I'm always surprised when people at work (I'm in IT) don't know how to use the command line--I was genuinely shocked when I handed one of them a DOS boot CD with a (DOS-runnable) BIOS update EXE on it and they didn't know how. I think at leat cd and dir should be in everyone's basic vocabulary who claims to be a geek.
In fact, even where the command line was never part of the operating system's heritage (like OS X), I still find it useful. (OK, that's a lie, it is part of OS X's heritage, but it's not part of the Mac's in general, and certainly normal users never had or will have to use it.)
Or if you're in the war of 2 spaces vs. 4 spaces, why not use 3 spaces?
I had a professor who did and insisted we did too, except files he sent us always had mixtures of real spaces and tabs. I still have painful memories of that class.
Use LaTeX (especially if you're typing technical things), then you won't have to worry about it. Type what you mean, and let the typesetter and styles handle the details.
(I should note that if have a period followed by space that isn't a new sentence or a or a period following a capital letter that is, in which case you'll need to mark up the period with \ or @ to let it know, but these are generally fringe cases.)
I would just like to clarify that by "turning traffic," I clearly meant other vehicles turning, not the bus. I thought my example made it clear, but the fact that few of the commenters who reliped to me worries me. I hope you pay attention to bikes in either designated bike lanes or to either one of your sides before you make turns on a road in your car! (And cyclists, this is yet another reason, besdies the pedestrians, not to ride on the sidewalk, where this problem is even more exaggerated since you are less visible.)
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Impress is quite usable; I've created presentations with it before. One particularly useful feature was the ability to export as PDF--that way, I could present on a computer that had only Adobe Reader. (It includes slide transitions and everything and is by default set to open in full-screen mode. It's really nifty.) The only bad thing is that, at least a few years ago (and probably still today), OO.o comes with only two templates, both of which are incredibly ugly (the default is black and white Arial; the other is some ugly purple or blue and yellow crazyness).
Luckily, you can import templates from PowerPoint, which I have done a few times when I wanted something that actually looked good. Of course, most of those aren't good, either, but there are many that are. And, of course, this doesn't matter for the unfortunately large number of people who might as well not use a template in the first place because all they do is change fonts and colors all over the place (you know, the same people who haven't discovered styles in Word or OO.o Writer).
not to mention the agony of riding to work in business-acceptable clothes in a humid 90F+ - yikes.
Pack a pair of clothes and commute in something lighter--it's what I do in the summer. Bonus points if there are showers, but I don't have them (at work, I mean!) and imagine most places don't, either.
The ability to read, or surf the web, or watch a movie/TV show durring my commute would be wonderful. Almost like getting a free hour everyday. 52 * 5 * 1 = 250 free hours a year.
I can do this already--it's called taking the bus.
But, I can completely understand where you're coming from; I've lived places where the only option to get to work was to drive (although that was when I was in high school, lived with my parents, and worked a few towns away). I'm happy I don't anymore, although now I usually just ride my bike instead of taking the bus--faster, more convenient, and a good way to get part of my workout in and commute at the same time. :)
It's bad enough Mac users still have to install MS Office because it won't really interoperate with things like iWork or open office....
Unfortuantely, MS Office for the Mac doesn't really interoperate with MS Office for Windows, either. The new version is supposed to be better, but I haven't tried it out yet...
...just a guy who happens to be part of the W3C stating his personal opinion. There is no official press release or publication on the W3C site itself--and, for that matter, not even any on this guy's personal web page or Twitter feed (when did he even say this?).
This summary (and the first article link in it, which parts of the summary copied verbatim without attribution) is incorrect. This is not OO.o declaring their independence; LibreOffice is a fork. It may or may not catch on. Oracle, in charge of the current OO.o project, may or may not actually pay attention or care.
I was going to try to compare this to Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, but I couldn't: that was at least started and hosted by (a couple people at) Mozilla and happened to catch their attention and be made their primary focus; Oracle has nothing to do with this, and I find it unlikely that they will care. Additionally, their goals were different: Firefox was mostly to eliminate bloat; this is to make OO.o "free-er," including plugins. I guess they do have one thing in common, which is that they are both attempts to re-take control of a project from a corporate overlord who pushed the product according to their desires for their product; in one case, Netscape, in this case, Sun/Oracle.
Still, the summary is misleading. Visit their web page and find out what they really are; do yourself a favor and don't read the incorrectly summarized article or obviously-not-written-by-someone-who-knows-anything-about-software article.
...remembering to do it yourself is the best option. I'm not going to tell you how to manage your finances, but if you can go so much as three months without knowing any of your account history, it probably isn't that valuable to you. I recommend keeping a running ledger (JGnash2 can do it for you, and it has pre-defined queries you can run on it in ways that will far exceed a simple MySQL database unless you categorize your transations--which, given your rate of downloading, is fairly unlikely).
Or, as others have suggested, set a reminder for yourself, if nothing else.
Any reasion for the version-number bloat? I mean, I guess it looks a bit cooler next to IE 8, but I don't really think people are that naive.
Are we specifically referring to dos, or just the concept of cli file manager?
No. File Manager was a GUI program included with Windows 3.x (and still included as EXE only up to Windows Me).
feature that debuted in the Amazon Kindle and was then removed
No, it wasn't. It was disabled on select books if and only if the publisher specificially demanded it.
You could buy a cross country railroad for that kind of money!
Finally, some standard units instead of all this USD nonsense!
From TFA:
"Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.
Uhh ... or, you know, standard Arabic numerals used in most (all?) Western languages.
Unless they're trying to say that "programming code" replaces letters with numbers. Sad to say, I don't really think you'll get very far calling C0ns0l3.Wr1t3L1n3("H3110 w0r1d!").
or another title+table+paragraph in Word?
Yer documentin' it wrong.
Aside: What is the unit of measure for friction?
Friction itself a force; therefore, you can measure it in Newtons (or poundals or your unit of choice). However, most non-physicists (that's me! ...so correct me if I'm wrong, by the way) run into the coefficient of friction far more frequently. This number (usually represented by the Greek letter mu) is just a ratio, so there are no units. (This probably explains the confusion in the first place.)
On second thought, maybe that's how they wrote it in the article but perhaps on the actual test they did something else, like a giant box where it was clear you were supposed to fill in the blank.
And if they didn't, it sounds like that would have avoided both problems I talked about (the "what are variables?" and the "what do these parentheses mean?" problems)-assuming they knew how to fill in the blank.
I'm from the UK, is 4+3+2=( )+2 a commonly used / commonly understood way of presenting the problem in the US?
It sure isn't. I wonder if notational trickery isn't part of the problem, not a lack of understanding. (TFA doesn't say if there were directions, like "Solve for the missing quantity in parentheses" or something like that.) I bet more people would have understood if they used something like x. Maybe they were trying to avoid "scary" variables for middle schoolers, but that's actually exactly when I remember learning what they were--if not, the year before.
While I realize it's probably just an error on the summary-writer's part, it's still true.
I'm in the late 20s/early 30s bracket, the gen who grew up having to fiddle with DOS just to get games to run. All the techs @ work (I'm not counting desktop and helpdesk lol, poor sods) had this ingrained in their upbringing. The kids coming in who had click and install gaming have noticeably poorer troubleshooting skills, and in particular shy away from command line and text files.
I'm in my early 20's, but for all practical computer-related purposes, I'm in my late--let's just say we didn't upgrade to Windows 95 until about 1999, so before that for me it was Windows 3.11 and lots of DOS. I'm always surprised when people at work (I'm in IT) don't know how to use the command line--I was genuinely shocked when I handed one of them a DOS boot CD with a (DOS-runnable) BIOS update EXE on it and they didn't know how. I think at leat cd and dir should be in everyone's basic vocabulary who claims to be a geek.
In fact, even where the command line was never part of the operating system's heritage (like OS X), I still find it useful. (OK, that's a lie, it is part of OS X's heritage, but it's not part of the Mac's in general, and certainly normal users never had or will have to use it.)
100 million dental X-rays? Can't we use some standard unit, like Libraries of Congress?
Unfortunately, some of our assignments were Python scripts, so that strategy would not have worked. :)
Due to the large variation of widths in characters
I'm clearly missing something: weren't they all monospaced?
a line feed followed by a carriage return.
Actually, it's a carriage return followed by a line feed. ;-)
Or if you're in the war of 2 spaces vs. 4 spaces, why not use 3 spaces?
I had a professor who did and insisted we did too, except files he sent us always had mixtures of real spaces and tabs. I still have painful memories of that class.
Use LaTeX (especially if you're typing technical things), then you won't have to worry about it. Type what you mean, and let the typesetter and styles handle the details.
(I should note that if have a period followed by space that isn't a new sentence or a or a period following a capital letter that is, in which case you'll need to mark up the period with \ or @ to let it know, but these are generally fringe cases.)
I would just like to clarify that by "turning traffic," I clearly meant other vehicles turning, not the bus. I thought my example made it clear, but the fact that few of the commenters who reliped to me worries me. I hope you pay attention to bikes in either designated bike lanes or to either one of your sides before you make turns on a road in your car! (And cyclists, this is yet another reason, besdies the pedestrians, not to ride on the sidewalk, where this problem is even more exaggerated since you are less visible.)