So what you are saying is that the above linked web site has got it wrong. as for the is and are the use of a single entity requires the singular and the use of the plural demands are
The herd is coming this way but so are the wilder-beasts that make up that herd.
To form the possessive you use an apostrophe and you generally don't use apostrophes for plurals.
I know I am slapdash in my use of English and I used to be worse. I would go as so far as to say I wasn't taught English, she only considered English literature as a subject to be taught not language.
You normally have more interesting things to post about, maybe Slashdot is no longer as interesting as it used to be. The posts seem to getting more predictable. Take it easy, stressing over little things is bad for your health.
HTC made a few, my Old HTC Universal while having a keyboard doesn't need a keyboard it has a flip screen so you can use it like a mini laptop or closed like any other touch screen device (640x480 resistive). There were others without the keyboard. MDAIII springs to mind
If you loaded open Moko on to the sd card you also had slide to unlock you dragged a key to a lock. The focus at XDA developers used to be pretty much putting Linux on smart phones running Windows Mobile and hard work it was too, HTC had no interest in helping the Dev's getting the hardware working.
There is a term Affordance which is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. Simply put a button on a screen looks like button so the user is clued in that it is something that can be pressed. It doesn't always work very well even in the real world (e.g. a door which has a handle which suggests you would pull the door towards you when actually it should be pushed).
for digital examples on this "page" there is a slider which indicates i can move up and down the page and is currently showing the middle of the page. Even the blank box which cues that I can write in here to make this comment.
skeuomorphic is quite closely related it is intended to provide affordance to make it easier for the user to use. The one theme I noticed running through the Wikipedia article was that it tended to be that objects that were skeuomorphic were cheaper imitations of the real thing and the word that springs to mind is tacky cheap imitations. The trouble with some of the digital versions are that they are intended to give the pretence of a more luxurious real world object. It's no real surprise that Apple products are tending to engage in more of this, to differentiate it's products from the more utilitarian windows products.
If you have three books one leather bound the one a standard paperback and one a paperback printed to have the appearance of a leather cover even though the information is the same, the users perceptions are different. Which is better the leather bound is better made the standard paperback does the job and the third is quite tacky or cheesy. There are a lot of chinese made products which use the third format which is probably why we have the phrase cheap chinese knockoff.
Utility can be elegant and clean, it can also be particularly ugly or beautiful too. The use of a metaphor can be very good at providing affordance, A bookshelf metaphor is obviously a bookshelf The problem comes when the metaphor too closely follows the original design including it's drawbacks If the visual representation of the book was the spine then titles would be printed side ways and be hard to read, of course you could put the bookshelf on it's side... The alternative of book covers facing out isn't that much better if you have more than a dozen books since you then need to scroll the bookcase and your metaphor is broken.
A much nicer interface is the coverflow which lets you visualise and manipulate faster ideally you could use filtering like a text box to allow you to whizz through to the section you want. There should be other filters though in the case of books you might be looking for C++ or romance novels. Cover flow doesn't seem to have filtering. It also doesn't really have a real world equivalent.
This is slightly unexpected I initially thought a bookshelf was a good example of a good skeuomorphic design and it isn't. it's a really bad design and cover flow can actually be better if implemented well. The utilitarian design of a listbox of some sort also sucks as it gives equal rank to all the items without a visual cue.
It seems both extremes are , extreme.
Slavishly following a real-world metaphor is a problem if you are implementing functionality badly. Rotating knobs are a really bad idea on a computer screen. Especially on a laptop which doesn't have a scroll wheel. Rather sadly I've just found that if i run my finger up and down the right side of my Track-pad it acts as a scroll wheel. (ok hands up everybody who just tried it and found yours does the same).
The Utilitarian approach isn't always the best either, it can lead to an ugly and sometimes inefficient design so that is something to consider. I think Developers have a tendency to ignore the V in MVC. I think Apple is right to consider the appearance of a design especially when the design is used by people for pleasure. Windows tends to have a utilitarian approach, and more recently some bad design keys, that authoritarian corporate ap
When considering the use of an apostrophe, possession involves of and for. Consider a notice outside a golf club: Captainâ(TM)s parking space. The captain doesnâ(TM)t own the space; it is a parking space for the captain.
In the case of this carâ(TM)s colour is too bright the car doesnâ(TM)t own the colour; it is the colour of the car.
Another example is menâ(TM)s clothing or menâ(TM)s wear. It is clothing for men.
Using these guidelines I don't feel so bad about my usage. I believe that American English and British English have a few differences in usage. What may be correct in one, may not be in the other. In an International forum the differences should be tolerable. Besides McGrew isn't there a better target for your vitriol;)
Ink jet technology isn't dying its just the end of the worst inkjets ever.
There are decent Inkjet printers around although pretty much all have the ink tax, It might not be too long before critical patents will expire allowing more companies to enter the market and supply the Ink-jets we want to buy.
Personally my printing needs are met by a mono laser and a multifunction hp psc2175 inkjet both networked to an iomega Iconnect Nas running debian (the Iconnect is superb value once you have debian installed it uses just 5 watts) With debian I can use the scanner over the network which is handy. I don't really use the Ink-jet for printing much but unlike many inkjets when you replace the cartridge you replace the print heads so it can survive infrequent use. My laser is the real work horse. The HP is mainly a copier and scanner for me. If I want good colour photo prints I just go to one of the many places which offer the service. I also don't print every shot I take and will usually do some work to the pictures I want at home first.
Anyway I doubt anyone will miss Lexmark inkjets, Thou I must admit i might struggle to find a modern printer which works better for me than that old HP.
I have heard they make reasonable Laser printers. However their inkjets are cheap to buy very expensive to run and not that reliable, and do not as memory serves support Linux in any way, I think it is different with the laser printers.
On the positive side the extinction of Lexmark inkjet's is coming non too soon. It may improve the situation with Dell Printers which I believe were rebadged Lexmarks.
It should be one less barrier to the adoption of Linux, for the average joe. A dual boot option is much more appealing when all the hardware just works and generally faster than in Windows. Ok not for everyone I know but it is a big negative when people find their printer isn't going to work in Linux.
Apart from Lexmarks soon to be redundant employee's I can not imagine anyone regretting the demise of the Lexmark inkjet
Seems rather silly to me, it is a licence, or it isn't If it is then it can be used for as long as people see fit to use it. Creating another licence minus the bits that some people think are not suitable for their needs is fine too. The original licence is still there and can be used. Licence your work as you see fit. It's your work and you choose how it should be distributed.
It seems a bit weasley to attempt to piggy back a different licence on the back of an existing widely known and widely used successful one. It always seems to be someone other than the author of the licensed work, who wants more favourable terms. It's a bit different with gpl v2 and gpl v3 in that with v2 it is possible to do an end run around the principles of GPL licensing.
Show me the end run around the principles of cc licensing and how the proposed changes will protect the authors copyrights better than the existing version and then I can see a reason to change so far i'm unconvinced.
Forward planning, if there was any intention to encrypt the BBC there would be decryption modules or at least a space for one on the freeview boxes. Unlike Sky where encryption increases revenue for the BBC it would lower revenue.
Making the BBC freely available should be good for me, but sadly even though I can receive the BBC via satellite I rarely watch their channels. The Olympics was an exception and particularly absurd since I could watch the BBC tv channels but was region banned from Olympic content on their website.
I don't really know what the differences are between gnome3 and cinnamon, but I'm good to go with cinnamon. it does what it should do let me run applications the dynamic desktop feature is handy. As many desktops as i need at the time. Unity was really annoying as it basically was one desktop but looking at different corners. and also that stupid dockbar on the left especially annoying makes launching apps a pain in the backside.
The only thing i found awkward with cinnamon was that the default layout pretty much is ideal changing things round just caused usability problems. such as put window close button on the left and your likely to hit the hot corner for the desktop overview.
I tried using docky on an old version of mint that was annoying in that it would insist on getting in the way everytime i wanted to say type a comment on slashdot when the comment box was at the bottom of the browser page. So far i've no complaints with cinnamon, other than the insistence icons should be light green. that is mint for you and it's also mint that doesn't want google (or to be fair bing) used for search. I like Google for search and the Mint dev's have made it awkward intentionally I understand why but it's not what I want.
I'm hoping that there will be a few clear posts on why people don't like gnome 3. It becomes pointless reading comments that just say gnome3 sux. I'm not a kde fan largely because i found it slow to respond and when it did it would give me 3 of everything as i'd clicked too many times. Windows 7 is horrible the added bloatware on my exwifes new laptop is disgusting from being turned on for the first time it started shouting how it was fecked up with this and that error. Pre-installed snake oil sales men really is that what most people have to endure?
One good thing mentioned in the article recent documents is one of the best places to start from. I used to say open calc then find the last spreadsheet i had been working on and then load that. recent docs does that in one go. The only bug I have found is an inability for a launcher to launch on the screen I start it on. say i start calc on screen2 and switch to screen 1 to say read a bit of slashdot while it is loading it insists on jumping in front of my browser and on the wrong screen.
Skype also seems to have a new annoying feature in that it will insist in jumping to the front as soon as the person i am talking with says anything. which is annoying if i am composing a reply or reading what they said via google translate. I then find i'm typing in the wrong box...
There is very little in the way of subsidy , being blind reduces the licence fee and i think there is a provision for pensioners. Other than that there are fines and imprisonment as alternatives to paying.
One issue, often stated, with bundling into general taxation is that it would probably lead to the government deciding what is or isn't acceptable to broadcast, especially when it is something which shows the government in a poor light.
It would make sense for the BBC to encrypt their channels and eliminate most of the thorny issues concerning licensing. Since if you want to watch the content you would need to pay for a card to decrypt it. Unfortunately the BBC knows that the revenue base would shrink dramatically. It would also put an end to most of Europe having free access to the BBC via satellite. Interesting to the note the contrast between Britain and Ireland in broadcasting to it's neighbours, There is a certain propaganda value to pushing British Culture to foreign parts one not shared by the more neutral Irish.
Ireland already does encrypt it's channels delivered by satellite, you need to access them via a subscription to Sky TV or use Digital Terrestrial TV *. Either way you will not be able to view outside of Ireland, to be honest you wouldn't be missing much other than Fair City, and Irish News and Sport. The bulk of the broadcasts are from UK, Australia and the USA, and are widely available anyway.
Ireland still has the curse of TV licensing and since digital terrestrial isn't encrypted an excuse to carry on with it into the future.
* Analog TV shuts off in Ireland in a few months time.
There are at least a couple of ways of providing health care essentially public and private health care. Public health care is usually funded by tax in one way or another and the money raised is spent to provide the health care.
In a private healthcare system the money is raised via premiums with a percentage going into providing health care and the rest as returns for the share holders. With no shareholders to reward public healthcare should be cheaper,
in actual fact since everyone pays into the public health care system in proportion to their means the end result is that everyone is covered and able to access health care.
Compared to a private system where Health Care is determined mostly by your income which results in a situation where many people have no access to health care.
Sadly a consequence of illness is usually a lowering of income which means you will likely reach a point where you can no longer afford to pay for private healthcare. So you have a strange situation where only healthy people can afford to pay for health care they do not need being as they are healthy, but when they become ill they then lose access to the health care they do need at that point due to being unable to work to pay the premiums.
Evidence that the state takes better care of me than me? I guess the fact that I am alive and relatively healthy instead of dying on the 18th of july 2009 is reasonable evidence that the state does take good care of me. I couldn't have paid for the treatment that got me through my heart attack I just didn't have the money and who would loan it to me since there was a 1 in 4 chance i would be dead within the following year, even after treatment. Thing is thou I have paid into the system for most of my adult life, I gave blood regularly until my health disqualified me too. There is something to be said for a life long relationship with my healthcare provider. Your Insurance company may have only been getting a few years payments from you when you need the services you have been paying for.
yes I do have a relationship with a business and it doesn't make me a cent, the thing it does do is keep me active and doing something useful. Maybe you think I would be better to sit on the couch watching daytime tv waiting to die.
Your final question yes I do expect a Healthcare professional to have reasons beyond their pay check for doing the job they do. I would hazard a guess most Health Care professionals would be offended that you think so low of them. Trouble is with the private health care businesses is the underlying reason is to make a profit, before the welfare of the people who need the services provided. Which is why you get news stories like the one this morning where after an unannounced inspection of a private care home for the elderly it was found that residents hadn't even been bathed in over a month, and that was the least of the neglect that came to light.
You seem to have confused your value as a human being as being measured by your income at some point you will realise that is a very empty measure. As people we are born, we live, and we die, Between being born and dying we have the opportunity to make a difference to the world maybe not a big difference but to know that you brought some good into the world is some comfort before you leave it.
Why would you want a drug without a prescription? Ok some people want to get high but others maybe it is just the cost.
I have to take around 9 drugs everyday for the rest of my life currently the cost is subsidised but if it wasn't I might well find this Doctor saving me a fortune, To be frank I go to my GP for a signature for a prescription decided by specialists at the Hospital 6 of these are unlikely to change as I don't see the cardiac specialist any more.
I can only sympathise with American's without Health Insurance who are being held captive by a system which exists first and foremost to make a profit from illness. Admittedly the drugs supplied could be fake as in not containing what they are supposed to contain but if you can't afford the drugs you need to keep you alive by the "Legal" route, it is a risk that you could be forced to take.
It is probably worth pointing out A-levels are courses offered to 16 -19 year olds (in general and in a school) after the first round of qualifications at 16vand are a pre-requisite to studying at Degree Level, The performance at A-level is what will determine which courses and University these students will be offered. Note there are alternatives to A-levels which tend to be offered at colleges rather than schools.
I get the impression that people think these students are already studying Maths and Science Degree's, but they are not and could choose to enter any number of Degree courses, In many different fields. Unfortunately A-level subjects tend to be restricted to core subjects such as Math's Physics Chemistry and Biology for potential Bsc students potential BA students tend towards studying the Humanities. The trouble with A-levels is that many schools will not have enough students to be able to support more diverse A-Levels Which is why the alternative is going to a college which draws on a larger area for it's students.
I don't know if this makes me exceptional but if I look at feedback of a seller. I don't care about the positive feedback it is the negative or neutral feedback which interests me most.
We all hope for a smooth and satisfactory transaction but it is always better to get an idea of what happens when things do go wrong.
rounding corners is an aid to manufacturing and safety sharp edges cause cuts. In AutoCad and CAM pretty much every design will have radiused (rounded corners). If your moulding the materials need to flow and a sharp edge isn't going to work very well. Internal Corners also are bad essentially they are a notch and stresses are concentrated into the corner, this promotes cracking. Rounded Corners are an essential and fundamental part of engineering.
yes your correct, my mistake sorry about that i thought it was 600 million. The first link gives the population as 313 million and some. Still doesn't invalidate the figures thou.
You are being rather silly, there are a rather significant number of Americans, 600 million or so which is a rather large pool in which to find talented atheletes, compared with other countries where populations are smaller you would expect a larger proportion of medals.
http://www.medalspercapita.com/ is interesting when you break down medals against the population size you find the USA at 49th place and Ireland at 22nd and the UK at 23rd.
with Gold medals the USA rises to 28th place UK is 11th and Ireland is 23rd going by GDP USA was 66th
Health wise thou you really don't want to be Mexican.
So more directly on topic you cannot compare the health and fitness of a nation just on the number of medals won. New Zealand seems to be one of the healthiest places to live if your white and English speaking.
What a crock! There are area's which you could be taking a risk using open source software, Accounting is probably one area where you could be taking a risk.
why would you need exchange for a restaurant? You probably want a.com for the business for advertising and a professional looking email address.
Document formatting is not really an issue when most documents are for your internal use. As for acrobat whats the problem with printing to pdf or even scanning to pdf?
You probably don't need the expense of photoshop, logo's will be best produced as vector graphics, rather than bitmap you will always need to scale them. Web size will not look good in print.
Openbravo is a possible for your POS,the backend software can be tricky (if you need it?) Credit card processing can be a thorny issue but you can opt out using the credit card terminals separate to the POS. You pay a lot for POS that can handle credit cards securely. Spreadsheets can be useful for working out costs and margins. Probably in year 2 you will want to do things differently but year one is trying not to lose too much money while building up your business. Internet advertising is useful but don't advertise too far from your location. You pay for the clicks so make sure that you are not advertising to people who wouldn't be a customer not many people will travel further than a taxi ride to a restaurant.
Finally are you really sure you want to do this, you are likely to lose friends and get divorced and maybe go bankrupt. It pays to have limited liability If the company goes under you don't want to lose your house.
I'm not American so there is little reason for me to know much American History, much that I do know is gleaned from old Cowboy movies. I would hazard a guess most Americans probably have an idea who General Custer was and largely for the same reasons but maybe not, as there is far more choice of TV to watch on a Sunday afternoon these days.
I admit I had no love of "History" at school and neither do most people. Really all you are really saying is that most people have an Interest in contemporary culture, more so than relatively ancient history.
While you have presented is that people are guessing wrongly at dates, It probably wasn't phrased as did the American Civil War take place before America gained its Independence. Logically it couldn't have occurred in that order.
So the only reasonable inference is that most people are ignorant of things that have no interest to them. Maybe the survey asked people who don't even hold a passport, for people who have not really travelled the TSA do an excellent job. There is also the fact that almost everybody takes some pride in their country and as part of it the TSA must do a grand job of things surely.:)
To be honest I like good coffee, so you're right but for the wrong reasons.
It doesn't make financial sense paying for coffee by card the retailer pays a transaction fee and a percentage for processing the card and your bank probably charges you for using the card.
Granted profit margins are huge on coffee sales but for most small purchases it can cost the retailer to sell to you when the payment is plastic
I am quite uneasy about all this gps tracking and logging which is going on these days? Sure it's just a coffee in this case but do you really want everything logged and recorded? How long before your inbox is getting spammed with we notice you haven't been in starbucks for a while here's a voucher to super size your coffee on your next visit. Should there be records of your movements associations and purchases.
Facebook has gotten ever more intrusive, especially with timeline they are recording where you go and who you meet up with.
Your smartphone will tag your location with gps when you take a photo in the exif information (firefox has an extension to read the exif and locate it on a map for you). I noticed facebook strips the exif data from photographs but facebook is still likely to retain it for their own purposes and of course facebook will turn over everything it has to the Police should they so request.
I'm all for using technology when it is useful to the user, but this constant casual surveillance is beginning to get more than a little creepy. You don't have to live in Syria to find a goverment who will use technology against you given the opportunity.
I know it is undemocratic but I really like the house of Lords, hereditary peers especially. They owe nothing to nobody and have proven time and time again to be the only barrier to government excess.
They say what they think and that makes a difference. I don't even have an issue with the clergy since they are at least principled can you say the same for a retired politician who's been bought and sold their whole career?
True not all android software is built purely using the VM. That doesn't preclude compiling for x86 or using the NDK to compile for x86.
It's also worth considering that while running Linux implies x86 as a target it can be one of several flavours of ARM, after all I run debian on an Iomega Iconnect (and is considerably improved over the stock firmware) and that is an arm cpu. Perhaps surprisingly it is possible to run a later version of Gimp for example, on the Iconnect than is available in the distro on my netbook.
Ubuntu for Android is an interesting proposition too, perhaps easier to achieve than android for ubuntu. It will mean buying new hardware at some point thou.
I'm getting old so learning new languages seems to be a lot harder than it once was. I started learning Polish 10 years ago and I am fairly competent enough to converse with Polish friends. I let rooms to Poles in my home which really helped me learn to learn a language well you must use it.
The hard thing about learning languages is building a vocabulary getting those words into your brain and usable. My favourite aid is cuebrain I use it on android but it is available on Iphone and windows mobile. It is a flashcard system and fairly open there are a lot of language pairs available and you can add your own cuecards. It isn't limited to languages for example chemical elements was easy to create mapping symbol to name.
Cuebrain (optionally) uses svox voices to speak the words, I bought hungarian and english so I can listen to as well as read the words. It could as easily be phrases. You can also compete against other users, trying to speed up to climb the rankings can become addictive. most card sets can be completed in around a minute or less once you are familiar with the set. so it's something you can do to kill time. Obviously you need to learn grammar and sentence structure and inflection too and unfortunately that can be a bit dry i use ebooks for that. Also Google translate is very useful especially when conversing over the internet. Of course google translate isn't perfect but with the drilling exercises more and more words will come to have meaning.
Someone posted that different languages give you the ability to think differently and concepts can be easier in one language over another and that I would say is true.
It would be interesting to find out what proportion of Slashdot users are multilingual I would have thought a majority can program to some extent and human languages are a natural extension to programming languages. I would think most of us have the aptitude and the intelligence to be quite successful at developing the capacity of our brains to think and be more creative.
Funny how it is always the people who speak just one language who cannot see the advantage in speaking more than one:)
People who have some ethics when it comes to software. If I wanted to pirate software I would be running Windows.
My main platforms I use can be divided into Linux and Android and while I have not found software I would want to buy to run on Linux, there is a good deal available for Android which I can and do buy.
I would like to see at some point Android software running natively on my Linux desktop. Android is after all a VM similar to java so why not? Linux users do not necessarily see a need to buy software because often that need is met by a free alternative. However where there isn't a free alternative and or a paid version that works well, then it will have a market.
Jellybean has one feature which i think is a mistake and that is locking down to a single device. I don't have a problem with buying software I do have a problem when I get told where and when I can use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me apologise for the lack of apostrophes as slashdot ate them.
http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/page4.html
So what you are saying is that the above linked web site has got it wrong.
as for the is and are the use of a single entity requires the singular
and the use of the plural demands are
The herd is coming this way but so are the wilder-beasts that make up that herd.
To form the possessive you use an apostrophe and you generally don't use apostrophes for plurals.
http://www.eng-lang.co.uk/apostrophe_rules.htm
I know I am slapdash in my use of English and I used to be worse. I would go as so far as to say I wasn't taught English, she only considered English literature as a subject to be taught not language.
You normally have more interesting things to post about, maybe Slashdot is no longer as interesting as it used to be. The posts seem to getting more predictable. Take it easy, stressing over little things is bad for your health.
HTC made a few, my Old HTC Universal while having a keyboard doesn't need a keyboard it has a flip screen so you can use it like a mini laptop or closed like any other touch screen device (640x480 resistive). There were others without the keyboard. MDAIII springs to mind
If you loaded open Moko on to the sd card you also had slide to unlock you dragged a key to a lock. The focus at XDA developers used to be pretty much putting Linux on smart phones running Windows Mobile and hard work it was too, HTC had no interest in helping the Dev's getting the hardware working.
There is a term Affordance which is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. Simply put a button on a screen looks like button so the user is clued in that it is something that can be pressed. It doesn't always work very well even in the real world (e.g. a door which has a handle which suggests you would pull the door towards you when actually it should be pushed).
for digital examples on this "page" there is a slider which indicates i can move up and down the page and is currently showing the middle of the page. Even the blank box which cues that I can write in here to make this comment.
skeuomorphic is quite closely related it is intended to provide affordance to make it easier for the user to use.
The one theme I noticed running through the Wikipedia article was that it tended to be that objects that were skeuomorphic were cheaper imitations of the real thing and the word that springs to mind is tacky cheap imitations. The trouble with some of the digital versions are that they are intended to give the pretence of a more luxurious real world object. It's no real surprise that Apple products are tending to engage in more of this, to differentiate it's products from the more utilitarian windows products.
If you have three books one leather bound the one a standard paperback and one a paperback printed to have the appearance of a leather cover even though the information is the same, the users perceptions are different. Which is better the leather bound is better made the standard paperback does the job and the third is quite tacky or cheesy. There are a lot of chinese made products which use the third format which is probably why we have the phrase cheap chinese knockoff.
Utility can be elegant and clean, it can also be particularly ugly or beautiful too. The use of a metaphor can be very good at providing affordance, A bookshelf metaphor is obviously a bookshelf The problem comes when the metaphor too closely follows the original design including it's drawbacks If the visual representation of the book was the spine then titles would be printed side ways and be hard to read, of course you could put the bookshelf on it's side. .. The alternative of book covers facing out isn't that much better if you have more than a dozen books since you then need to scroll the bookcase and your metaphor is broken.
A much nicer interface is the coverflow which lets you visualise and manipulate faster ideally you could use filtering like a text box to allow you to whizz through to the section you want. There should be other filters though in the case of books you might be looking for C++ or romance novels. Cover flow doesn't seem to have filtering. It also doesn't really have a real world equivalent.
This is slightly unexpected I initially thought a bookshelf was a good example of a good skeuomorphic design and it isn't. it's a really bad design and cover flow can actually be better if implemented well. The utilitarian design of a listbox of some sort also sucks as it gives equal rank to all the items without a visual cue.
It seems both extremes are , extreme.
Slavishly following a real-world metaphor is a problem if you are implementing functionality badly. Rotating knobs are a really bad idea on a computer screen. Especially on a laptop which doesn't have a scroll wheel.
Rather sadly I've just found that if i run my finger up and down the right side of my Track-pad it acts as a scroll wheel. (ok hands up everybody who just tried it and found yours does the same).
The Utilitarian approach isn't always the best either, it can lead to an ugly and sometimes inefficient design so that is something to consider. I think Developers have a tendency to ignore the V in MVC. I think Apple is right to consider the appearance of a design especially when the design is used by people for pleasure. Windows tends to have a utilitarian approach, and more recently some bad design keys, that authoritarian corporate ap
not really helpful at all to be honest.
Taking the last point first it's the extinction that is coming (one extinction not many )
from http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/page4.html
Can an inanimate object own something?
When considering the use of an apostrophe, possession involves of and for. Consider a notice outside a golf club: Captainâ(TM)s parking space. The captain doesnâ(TM)t own the space; it is a parking space for the captain.
In the case of this carâ(TM)s colour is too bright the car doesnâ(TM)t own the colour; it is the colour of the car.
Another example is menâ(TM)s clothing or menâ(TM)s wear. It is clothing for men.
Using these guidelines I don't feel so bad about my usage. I believe that American English and British English have a few differences in usage. What may be correct in one, may not be in the other. In an International forum the differences should be tolerable. Besides McGrew isn't there a better target for your vitriol ;)
Ink jet technology isn't dying its just the end of the worst inkjets ever.
There are decent Inkjet printers around although pretty much all have the ink tax, It might not be too long before critical patents will expire allowing more companies to enter the market and supply the Ink-jets we want to buy.
Personally my printing needs are met by a mono laser and a multifunction hp psc2175 inkjet both networked to an iomega Iconnect Nas running debian (the Iconnect is superb value once you have debian installed it uses just 5 watts)
With debian I can use the scanner over the network which is handy. I don't really use the Ink-jet for printing much but unlike many inkjets when you replace the cartridge you replace the print heads so it can survive infrequent use. My laser is the real work horse. The HP is mainly a copier and scanner for me. If I want good colour photo prints I just go to one of the many places which offer the service. I also don't print every shot I take and will usually do some work to the pictures I want at home first.
Anyway I doubt anyone will miss Lexmark inkjets, Thou I must admit i might struggle to find a modern printer which works better for me than that old HP.
I have heard they make reasonable Laser printers.
However their inkjets are cheap to buy very expensive to run and not that reliable, and do not as memory serves support Linux in any way, I think it is different with the laser printers.
On the positive side the extinction of Lexmark inkjet's is coming non too soon. It may improve the situation with Dell Printers which I believe were rebadged Lexmarks.
It should be one less barrier to the adoption of Linux, for the average joe. A dual boot option is much more appealing when all the hardware just works and generally faster than in Windows. Ok not for everyone I know but it is a big negative when people find their printer isn't going to work in Linux.
Apart from Lexmarks soon to be redundant employee's I can not imagine anyone regretting the demise of the Lexmark inkjet
Seems rather silly to me, it is a licence, or it isn't If it is then it can be used for as long as people see fit to use it.
Creating another licence minus the bits that some people think are not suitable for their needs is fine too. The original licence is still there and can be used. Licence your work as you see fit. It's your work and you choose how it should be distributed.
It seems a bit weasley to attempt to piggy back a different licence on the back of an existing widely known and widely used successful one. It always seems to be someone other than the author of the licensed work, who wants more favourable terms. It's a bit different with gpl v2 and gpl v3 in that with v2 it is possible to do an end run around the principles of GPL licensing.
Show me the end run around the principles of cc licensing and how the proposed changes will protect the authors copyrights better than the existing version and then I can see a reason to change so far i'm unconvinced.
Forward planning, if there was any intention to encrypt the BBC there would be decryption modules or at least a space for one on the freeview boxes. Unlike Sky where encryption increases revenue for the BBC it would lower revenue.
Making the BBC freely available should be good for me, but sadly even though I can receive the BBC via satellite I rarely watch their channels. The Olympics was an exception and particularly absurd since I could watch the BBC tv channels but was region banned from Olympic content on their website.
I don't really know what the differences are between gnome3 and cinnamon, but I'm good to go with cinnamon.
it does what it should do let me run applications the dynamic desktop feature is handy. As many desktops as i need at the time. Unity was really annoying as it basically was one desktop but looking at different corners.
and also that stupid dockbar on the left especially annoying makes launching apps a pain in the backside.
The only thing i found awkward with cinnamon was that the default layout pretty much is ideal changing things round just caused usability problems. such as put window close button on the left and your likely to hit the hot corner for the desktop overview.
I tried using docky on an old version of mint that was annoying in that it would insist on getting in the way everytime i wanted to say type a comment on slashdot when the comment box was at the bottom of the browser page. So far i've no complaints with cinnamon, other than the insistence icons should be light green.
that is mint for you and it's also mint that doesn't want google (or to be fair bing) used for search. I like Google for search and the Mint dev's have made it awkward intentionally I understand why but it's not what I want.
I'm hoping that there will be a few clear posts on why people don't like gnome 3. It becomes pointless reading comments that just say gnome3 sux. I'm not a kde fan largely because i found it slow to respond and when it did it would give me 3 of everything as i'd clicked too many times. Windows 7 is horrible the added bloatware on my exwifes new laptop is disgusting from being turned on for the first time it started shouting how it was fecked up with this and that error. Pre-installed snake oil sales men really is that what most people have to endure?
One good thing mentioned in the article recent documents is one of the best places to start from. I used to say open calc then find the last spreadsheet i had been working on and then load that. recent docs does that in one go. The only bug I have found is an inability for a launcher to launch on the screen I start it on. say i start calc on screen2 and switch to screen 1 to say read a bit of slashdot while it is loading it insists on jumping in front of my browser and on the wrong screen.
Skype also seems to have a new annoying feature in that it will insist in jumping to the front as soon as the person i am talking with says anything. which is annoying if i am composing a reply or reading what they said via google translate. I then find i'm typing in the wrong box...
There is very little in the way of subsidy , being blind reduces the licence fee and i think there is a provision for pensioners. Other than that there are fines and imprisonment as alternatives to paying.
One issue, often stated, with bundling into general taxation is that it would probably lead to the government deciding what is or isn't acceptable to broadcast, especially when it is something which shows the government in a poor light.
It would make sense for the BBC to encrypt their channels and eliminate most of the thorny issues concerning licensing. Since if you want to watch the content you would need to pay for a card to decrypt it. Unfortunately the BBC knows that the revenue base would shrink dramatically. It would also put an end to most of Europe having free access to the BBC via satellite. Interesting to the note the contrast between Britain and Ireland in broadcasting to it's neighbours, There is a certain propaganda value to pushing British Culture to foreign parts one not shared by the more neutral Irish.
Ireland already does encrypt it's channels delivered by satellite, you need to access them via a subscription to Sky TV or use Digital Terrestrial TV *. Either way you will not be able to view outside of Ireland, to be honest you wouldn't be missing much other than Fair City, and Irish News and Sport. The bulk of the broadcasts are from UK, Australia and the USA, and are widely available anyway.
Ireland still has the curse of TV licensing and since digital terrestrial isn't encrypted an excuse to carry on with it into the future.
* Analog TV shuts off in Ireland in a few months time.
There are at least a couple of ways of providing health care essentially public and private health care.
Public health care is usually funded by tax in one way or another and the money raised is spent to provide the health care.
In a private healthcare system the money is raised via premiums with a percentage going into providing health care and the rest as returns for the share holders. With no shareholders to reward public healthcare should be cheaper,
in actual fact since everyone pays into the public health care system in proportion to their means the end result is that everyone is covered and able to access health care.
Compared to a private system where Health Care is determined mostly by your income which results in a situation where many people have no access to health care.
Sadly a consequence of illness is usually a lowering of income which means you will likely reach a point where you can no longer afford to pay for private healthcare. So you have a strange situation where only healthy people can afford to pay for health care they do not need being as they are healthy, but when they become ill they then lose access to the health care they do need at that point due to being unable to work to pay the premiums.
Evidence that the state takes better care of me than me? I guess the fact that I am alive and relatively healthy instead of dying on the 18th of july 2009 is reasonable evidence that the state does take good care of me. I couldn't have paid for the treatment that got me through my heart attack I just didn't have the money and who would loan it to me since there was a 1 in 4 chance i would be dead within the following year, even after treatment. Thing is thou I have paid into the system for most of my adult life, I gave blood regularly until my health disqualified me too. There is something to be said for a life long relationship with my healthcare provider. Your Insurance company may have only been getting a few years payments from you when you need the services you have been paying for.
yes I do have a relationship with a business and it doesn't make me a cent, the thing it does do is keep me active and doing something useful. Maybe you think I would be better to sit on the couch watching daytime tv waiting to die.
Your final question yes I do expect a Healthcare professional to have reasons beyond their pay check for doing the job they do. I would hazard a guess most Health Care professionals would be offended that you think so low of them. Trouble is with the private health care businesses is the underlying reason is to make a profit, before the welfare of the people who need the services provided. Which is why you get news stories like the one this morning where after an unannounced inspection of a private care home for the elderly it was found that residents hadn't even been bathed in over a month, and that was the least of the neglect that came to light.
You seem to have confused your value as a human being as being measured by your income at some point you will realise that is a very empty measure. As people we are born, we live, and we die, Between being born and dying we have the opportunity to make a difference to the world maybe not a big difference but to know that you brought some good into the world is some comfort before you leave it.
Why would you want a drug without a prescription? Ok some people want to get high but others maybe it is just the cost.
I have to take around 9 drugs everyday for the rest of my life currently the cost is subsidised but if it wasn't I might well find this Doctor saving me a fortune, To be frank I go to my GP for a signature for a prescription decided by specialists at the Hospital 6 of these are unlikely to change as I don't see the cardiac specialist any more.
I can only sympathise with American's without Health Insurance who are being held captive by a system which exists first and foremost to make a profit from illness. Admittedly the drugs supplied could be fake as in not containing what they are supposed to contain but if you can't afford the drugs you need to keep you alive by the "Legal" route, it is a risk that you could be forced to take.
It is probably worth pointing out A-levels are courses offered to 16 -19 year olds (in general and in a school) after the first round of qualifications at 16vand are a pre-requisite to studying at Degree Level, The performance at A-level is what will determine which courses and University these students will be offered. Note there are alternatives to A-levels which tend to be offered at colleges rather than schools.
I get the impression that people think these students are already studying Maths and Science Degree's, but they are not and could choose to enter any number of Degree courses, In many different fields.
Unfortunately A-level subjects tend to be restricted to core subjects such as Math's Physics Chemistry and Biology for potential Bsc students potential BA students tend towards studying the Humanities. The trouble with A-levels is that many schools will not have enough students to be able to support more diverse A-Levels Which is why the alternative is going to a college which draws on a larger area for it's students.
I don't know if this makes me exceptional but if I look at feedback of a seller. I don't care about the positive feedback it is the negative or neutral feedback which interests me most.
We all hope for a smooth and satisfactory transaction but it is always better to get an idea of what happens when things do go wrong.
rounding corners is an aid to manufacturing and safety sharp edges cause cuts.
In AutoCad and CAM pretty much every design will have radiused (rounded corners).
If your moulding the materials need to flow and a sharp edge isn't going to work very well. Internal Corners also are bad essentially they are a notch and stresses are concentrated into the corner, this promotes cracking.
Rounded Corners are an essential and fundamental part of engineering.
yes your correct, my mistake sorry about that i thought it was 600 million. The first link gives the population as 313 million and some. Still doesn't invalidate the figures thou.
You are being rather silly, there are a rather significant number of Americans, 600 million or so which is a rather large pool in which to find talented atheletes, compared with other countries where populations are smaller you would expect a larger proportion of medals.
http://www.medalspercapita.com/ is interesting when you break down medals against the population size you find the USA at 49th place and Ireland at 22nd and the UK at 23rd.
with Gold medals the USA rises to 28th place UK is 11th and Ireland is 23rd going by GDP USA was 66th
In terms of obesity the USA ranks No 1 http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity 30.6%
followed by Mexico and the UK thou to be fair positions 2 - 9 only are relatively close 18 - 24%
Health wise thou you really don't want to be Mexican.
So more directly on topic you cannot compare the health and fitness of a nation just on the number of medals won. New Zealand seems to be one of the healthiest places to live if your white and English speaking.
What a crock!
There are area's which you could be taking a risk using open source software, Accounting is probably one area where you could be taking a risk.
why would you need exchange for a restaurant? You probably want a .com for the business for advertising and a professional looking email address.
Document formatting is not really an issue when most documents are for your internal use. As for acrobat whats the problem with printing to pdf or even scanning to pdf?
You probably don't need the expense of photoshop, logo's will be best produced as vector graphics, rather than bitmap you will always need to scale them. Web size will not look good in print.
Openbravo is a possible for your POS ,the backend software can be tricky (if you need it?) Credit card processing can be a thorny issue but you can opt out using the credit card terminals separate to the POS. You pay a lot for POS that can handle credit cards securely. Spreadsheets can be useful for working out costs and margins.
Probably in year 2 you will want to do things differently but year one is trying not to lose too much money while building up your business. Internet advertising is useful but don't advertise too far from your location. You pay for the clicks so make sure that you are not advertising to people who wouldn't be a customer not many people will travel further than a taxi ride to a restaurant.
Finally are you really sure you want to do this, you are likely to lose friends and get divorced and maybe go bankrupt. It pays to have limited liability If the company goes under you don't want to lose your house.
I'm not American so there is little reason for me to know much American History, much that I do know is gleaned from old Cowboy movies. I would hazard a guess most Americans probably have an idea who General Custer was and largely for the same reasons but maybe not, as there is far more choice of TV to watch on a Sunday afternoon these days.
I admit I had no love of "History" at school and neither do most people. Really all you are really saying is that most people have an Interest in contemporary culture, more so than relatively ancient history.
While you have presented is that people are guessing wrongly at dates, It probably wasn't phrased as did the American Civil War take place before America gained its Independence. Logically it couldn't have occurred in that order.
So the only reasonable inference is that most people are ignorant of things that have no interest to them. Maybe the survey asked people who don't even hold a passport, for people who have not really travelled the TSA do an excellent job. There is also the fact that almost everybody takes some pride in their country and as part of it the TSA must do a grand job of things surely. :)
To be honest I like good coffee, so you're right but for the wrong reasons.
It doesn't make financial sense paying for coffee by card the retailer pays a transaction fee and a percentage for processing the card and your bank probably charges you for using the card.
Granted profit margins are huge on coffee sales but for most small purchases it can cost the retailer to sell to you when the payment is plastic
I am quite uneasy about all this gps tracking and logging which is going on these days?
Sure it's just a coffee in this case but do you really want everything logged and recorded?
How long before your inbox is getting spammed with we notice you haven't been in starbucks for a while here's a voucher to super size your coffee on your next visit. Should there be records of your movements associations and purchases.
Facebook has gotten ever more intrusive, especially with timeline they are recording where you go and who you meet up with.
Your smartphone will tag your location with gps when you take a photo in the exif information (firefox has an extension to read the exif and locate it on a map for you). I noticed facebook strips the exif data from photographs but facebook is still likely to retain it for their own purposes and of course facebook will turn over everything it has to the Police should they so request.
I'm all for using technology when it is useful to the user, but this constant casual surveillance is beginning to get more than a little creepy. You don't have to live in Syria to find a goverment who will use technology against you given the opportunity.
I know it is undemocratic but I really like the house of Lords, hereditary peers especially. They owe nothing to nobody and have proven time and time again to be the only barrier to government excess.
They say what they think and that makes a difference. I don't even have an issue with the clergy since they are at least principled can you say the same for a retired politician who's been bought and sold their whole career?
True not all android software is built purely using the VM. That doesn't preclude compiling for x86 or using the NDK to compile for x86.
It's also worth considering that while running Linux implies x86 as a target it can be one of several flavours of ARM, after all I run debian on an Iomega Iconnect (and is considerably improved over the stock firmware) and that is an arm cpu. Perhaps surprisingly it is possible to run a later version of Gimp for example, on the Iconnect than is available in the distro on my netbook.
Ubuntu for Android is an interesting proposition too, perhaps easier to achieve than android for ubuntu. It will mean buying new hardware at some point thou.
I'm getting old so learning new languages seems to be a lot harder than it once was. I started learning Polish 10 years ago and I am fairly competent enough to converse with Polish friends. I let rooms to Poles in my home which really helped me learn to learn a language well you must use it.
The hard thing about learning languages is building a vocabulary getting those words into your brain and usable. My favourite aid is cuebrain I use it on android but it is available on Iphone and windows mobile. It is a flashcard system and fairly open there are a lot of language pairs available and you can add your own cuecards. It isn't limited to languages for example chemical elements was easy to create mapping symbol to name.
Cuebrain (optionally) uses svox voices to speak the words, I bought hungarian and english so I can listen to as well as read the words. It could as easily be phrases. You can also compete against other users, trying to speed up to climb the rankings can become addictive.
most card sets can be completed in around a minute or less once you are familiar with the set.
so it's something you can do to kill time.
Obviously you need to learn grammar and sentence structure and inflection too and unfortunately that can be a bit dry i use ebooks for that. Also Google translate is very useful especially when conversing over the internet. Of course google translate isn't perfect but with the drilling exercises more and more words will come to have meaning.
Someone posted that different languages give you the ability to think differently and concepts can be easier in one language over another and that I would say is true.
It would be interesting to find out what proportion of Slashdot users are multilingual I would have thought a majority can program to some extent and human languages are a natural extension to programming languages. I would think most of us have the aptitude and the intelligence to be quite successful at developing the capacity of our brains to think and be more creative.
Funny how it is always the people who speak just one language who cannot see the advantage in speaking more than one :)
People who have some ethics when it comes to software. If I wanted to pirate software I would be running Windows.
My main platforms I use can be divided into Linux and Android and while I have not found software I would want to buy to run on Linux, there is a good deal available for Android which I can and do buy.
I would like to see at some point Android software running natively on my Linux desktop.
Android is after all a VM similar to java so why not? Linux users do not necessarily see a need to buy software because often that need is met by a free alternative. However where there isn't a free alternative and or a paid version that works well, then it will have a market.
Jellybean has one feature which i think is a mistake and that is locking down to a single device. I don't have a problem with buying software I do have a problem when I get told where and when I can use it.