RTFA. "If this is your first time using the service, Square will email you a link to its service, where you’ll be asked to enter your debit-card information."
The pre-ribbon Word also had hundreds of commands that weren't put on menus.
Are you saying that you believe the ribbon is harder to explore than menus? (I can maybe see that if you don't want to hover over items to read the tooltip and instead want the text of the option visible straight away).
Or are you saying that you believe that less functionality is effectively discoverable now via the ribbon than used to be through menus? (I find that doubtful, given how telemetry-guided the team was this time).
Or are you saying that you just disagree with what functionality they chose to expose to explorers now vs before? (again, given all the telemetry-guidance, I find this hard to believe).
Ridiculous complaint. The ribbon IS a hierarchical menu system just like the old one, still has on-screen-highlighted keyboard shortcuts just like the old one.
Your complaint boils down to "I learnt where things were arranged in the old hierarchy and so they should never ever change."
One easy answer is for easyDNS to say "We have not investigated whether they are violating our terms of service, and have no plan to investigate. We note that the terms of service grant us the RIGHT but not the OBLIGATION to revoke service for a violation of our terms of service."
Another easy answer, as you say, is for easyDNS to write back and say "we have investigated the matter but have not been able to determine whether the owners of the site are engaged in copyright infringement. If a court finds them to have engaged in copyright infringement, we will take that as a clear determination."
We request that you review your processes to see if you provide a service for the identified domain(s). If so, we would ask you to review the terms and conditions on the basis of which that service is provided and withdraw or suspend the service if you are satisfied that the terms and conditions have been breached
And the police helpfully highlight the relevant line from EasyDNS terms of service:
easyDNS Terms of Service: easyDNS reserves the right to revoke any or all services associated with a domain or user account, for policy abuses. What constitutes a policy abuse is at the sole discretion of easyDNS and includes (but is not limited to) the following:... copyright infringement...
But now the easyDNS got on his drama-queen high horse. Here's what he wrote:
Who decides what is illegal? What makes somebody a criminal? Given that the subtext of the request contains a threat to refer the matter to ICANN if we don't play along, this is a non-trivial question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to "some guy on the internet" sending emails
Well the answer's clear. From his own terms of service, HE is the one who decides whether easyDNS should terminate service, at his discretion. Not a court. The police's request was solely that easyDNS should themselves determine whether this user had breached their own terms of service.
All my life I've been a single-screen developer. Maybe it's an age thing since I was developing back on ZX Spectrum and BBC with their single small screens back in the '80s. Surface has greater resolution than any laptop I've ever used, and at age 40 my eyes are still good enough to appreciate the resolution.
I've been using a tablet (Surface Pro) for the past four months for all my professional work -- coding (I'm a compiler-author on the VB and C# compilers), Photoshop, Powerpoint, Word.
It's a joy to use. I still have my old thinkpad laptop but abandoned it completely in favor of the SurfacePro. I use the stylus for much of my powerpoint and Photoshop work, and I use touch for a lot of Visual Studio and Word and WindowsExplorer work since it's easier and more precise than a trackpad. The screen size is fine for me - I've always been a "single app open maximized" sort of developer. The type-cover is fine for coding, but I do get a bit frustrated at the function-keys and Home/End/PgUp/PgDown.
Oh, and of course I also use it for photos and websurfing.
Loss of brain function isn't a normal part of healthy ageing - it's the symptom of a DISEASE (usually alzheimers that affects 50%+ of 80 yr olds) and will eventually be cured through medicine like other diseases.
It is NEVER treason to expose government wrongdoing or unconstitutional behavior. It is NEVER treason to expose government coverups or lies. It is NEVER treason to disclose programmes that should have had proper congressional or public oversight but didn't. Everything so far disclosed has fallen into the above categories. If ever disclosing one of these wrongdoings or unconstitutional behaviors or coverups has put an operative or operation in jeopardy - then the blame rests solely on the shoulders of whoever perpetrated that cover up. Otherwise, any wrongdoing could be hushed up simply by entangling it with something else.
At least, that's my view as a Snowden and Manning supporter
This isn't a "latest twist in the NSA saga". It's a transparent PR fluff piece.
Obviously the PR division at the NSA figured out a plan to trivialize the revelations. John DeLong at his press conference comes out with "Oh yes, once or twice in the past decade we have broken the rules, but it's been for lighthearded laughable trivial matters like LOVEINT. Ha ha ha, what a joke. My bad. We're all good now, right?"
Of course the media will lap this up. And it distracts attention from the real systematic unconstitutional behavior of the NSA, and the fact that the NSA's overseers themselves believe their oversight to be inadequate.
Computer science was changing every bit as fast in 1992 as today.
I didn't use books for lectures. I turned up to the lecture, and took notes, and then studied from my notes plus the handouts given to us by the lecturers.
I didn't use books for actually DOING the homework; just for getting the questions. Each week the TA would assign us homework problems, either giving us a printout or photocopy, or directing us to a book that contained the question. Each college library had its own copy of the books; our library kept them in a small area that you couldn't remove them from. Just one book was enough for the ten students/year in our college.
Look, all this was easy given how my university was set up and how its courses were taught. There are better (cheaper, easier, fairer) ways of doing it than how US universities do it.
I've always wondered how something can be racist if it is true.
There are a variety of old sayings I've heard about this, along these lines... "The best place to hide a lie is inside the truth". "Heed not the word of a demon even though it speak the truth".
You asked how can something be racist if it's true. The main answer I think is selective reporting. Imagine a hypothetical town in which black and white people live 50/50, and imagine that mugged are committed 50/50 by the two groups, but the town newspaper always says "The perpetrator was a white male in his 30s" for white perpetrators and "The perpetrator was a male in his 30s" for black perpetrators. The newspaper only ever tells the truth, but it's racist and creates an impression of more crime by white people than black..
About two months ago I switched to using my SurfacePro as my sole work machine (I'm a compiler developer on Microsoft's VisualStudio team). And I switched to using one as my sole home machine (for mobile app development, browsing, drawing various home-improvement plans using the Pen, web-browsing, powering my home theater).
I love it! It's plenty fast enough for my dev work. It's light enough to sling into my backpack for the cycle to work. It's neat to take to meetings. Even my wife, a die-hard Apple user, has started instinctively trying to touch the screen on her MacBook Pro after getting used to it on my SurfacePro.
The SurfacePro's touch screen is obviously great with the pen (for drawing plans for home-improvement projects, carpentry, garden remodeling &c). Also for business use (annotating Powerpoints and PDFs). But what surprised me is that I've come to prefer using finger-touch for lots of my programming development work - using it to navigate folders, or adjust properties of files, or scroll through source code.
Also, in those cases where an app has a functional Metro touch version (chiefly Lync and Mail) I've come to prefer those to the mouse+keyboard versions.
I totally experienced your (3). There's a "healthy raw-food vegan" restaurant near where we live which makes delicious Tiramisu. We'd always assumed it was healthy as well as delicious because of where it comes from. We bought the recipe, made it, felt very proud of making such a healthy delicious dish. A while later we entered the raw ingredients into Livestrong's "MyPlate" and got an incredible figure of 700 calories per portion, most of it fat. Wow.
I can scan barcode for just about anything that has one (it sometimes doesn't find odd things I might purchase in, say, an Asian Grocery).
How many people have diets that fit into this "scan barcode" thing? Doesn't it require that you fall into a "industrialized food" diet, full of prepackaged stuff? Here's my diet from yesterday. I haven't been able to find any app that makes it convenient to type in...
Most of the dishes we make from scratch, from items we bought in bulk, with things like butter and olive oil and salt added to taste. That means it's a pain to look everything up by name on the computer, a pain to weigh out the amounts of everything we make, a pain to type those amounts in, and a pain to figure out how much of each serving dish I took vs how much my wife took.
BREAKFAST: rolled oats cooked in a saucepan for the whole family, cooked with some mixture of milk and water by my wife, of which I take a portion size that seems right and add currants to taste. [I can find the calorie values for oats, water, currants, but don't have a clue how much I consumed]
LUNCH: my wife prepared a sandwich of rye bread with herring fillets from ikea and a bit of spreadable cheese, then a bag with chopped up carrots from our CSA-box (Community Supported Agriculture), and two unusually small pears, and a peach. [I can find calorie values for bread, but not for individual pieces of fish, and my wife didn't weigh out the cheese, and I have no idea how many carrots I ate].
DINNER: a bunch of swiss chard including stems, cooked in some olive oil, then flambe'd with whiskey, then adding more oil or vinegar or salt to taste, shared amongst the family where we don't all measure it. Some boiled rice which again I didn't weigh. A CSA lettuce with some cornichons and olives thrown in, mixed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, to taste, and divided amongst the family. A slice of the apple crumble that my wife cooked last night, not from recipe.
??? Of course there's custom hardware at the other end. The iphone cable requires custom hardware that (1) has the right sized port, (2) has the circuitry that does something with the signal it gets (except in the case of audio).
The point stands. Video, audio and control can certainly be done over USB. There's no *NEED* for the iphone cable.
I use my Surface Pro primarily for development work (I'm a developer on the VB/C# compiler team at Microsoft). In fact, since I got it two months ago, it has become my sole development machine, replacing my previous Thinkpad laptop.
Why do I prefer the Surface Pro over an ultraportable? It's smaller, and more portable. I like going into meetings with such a tiny device. I like being able to fold the keyboard underneath it and look solely at the screen. It's lighter on my back when I cycle to work. It fits more easily into my airplane luggage. I use it in tablet mode a fair bit without the keyboard - I've found the Metro versions of Lync (with touch), Skype (with touch) and OneNote (with a pen) to be nicer to use than the desktop versions. Being able to sketch diagrams with the pen has made for nice presentation slides, and I've used it also to draw planning diagrams for my DIY work.
Likewise, perhaps throwing in a formula or some symbols with subscripts would be stylistically optimal, but because these things are harder to type in Word than in LaTeX, I might not bother ($x_2$ is more natural for me to type than ctrl-i x ctrl-i ctrl-= 2 ctrl-=, and with LaTeX you don't have the problem that if in later editing you later try to insert a comma after it, Word wants to subscript the comma).
Have you tried equations in Word? Since 2010, you type them in "linear" mode. So if you wanted x with "2" subscript then you'd write
x_2
It doesn't have macro support, so it won't be good for recreating domain-specific notation, but it's fine for normal notation. You'll also find that for equations like "T_2" looks better in Word than in TeX/LaTeX because Word kerns based on which quadrant of the glyph is being subscripted - so you don't have to do manual kerning.
I've been using Pro as my sole development machine for six weeks, with the TypeCover. (I'm a dev on the MS VisualStudio team)
It works GREAT!
I've abandoned for good my previous ThinkPad laptop. The new surface pro is easier to take around wherever I go to develop (home, office, cafe). The touch screen is making everything easier than a touchpad, even easier than the track pad on my wife's Macbook Pro. Worse than a mouse for some tasks, better for others.
For my dev work, I only use the Surface screen. I guess at age 38 my eyesight's still good enough.
I connect up to a big-screen in conference rooms. Sometimes the conference room has a mini-display-port which plugs in fine to the surface directly. Sometimes the conference room only has VGA, so I use the surface pro's VGA adapter, which also works fine.
What I have to say is that the touch-screen is AWESOME on a laptop form-factor. I'll be using Windows FileExplorer and I'll be able to tap icons (rather than using the touch-pad or having to plug in a mouse). Actually I prefer tapping to mouse. I also like putting my hand to the right of the screen and using my thumb to scroll.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? You say that Ars and Wired run paid shill articles? That's quite an accusation.
RTFA. "If this is your first time using the service, Square will email you a link to its service, where you’ll be asked to enter your debit-card information."
The pre-ribbon Word also had hundreds of commands that weren't put on menus.
Are you saying that you believe the ribbon is harder to explore than menus? (I can maybe see that if you don't want to hover over items to read the tooltip and instead want the text of the option visible straight away).
Or are you saying that you believe that less functionality is effectively discoverable now via the ribbon than used to be through menus? (I find that doubtful, given how telemetry-guided the team was this time).
Or are you saying that you just disagree with what functionality they chose to expose to explorers now vs before? (again, given all the telemetry-guidance, I find this hard to believe).
Ridiculous complaint. The ribbon IS a hierarchical menu system just like the old one, still has on-screen-highlighted keyboard shortcuts just like the old one.
Your complaint boils down to "I learnt where things were arranged in the old hierarchy and so they should never ever change."
One easy answer is for easyDNS to say "We have not investigated whether they are violating our terms of service, and have no plan to investigate. We note that the terms of service grant us the RIGHT but not the OBLIGATION to revoke service for a violation of our terms of service."
Another easy answer, as you say, is for easyDNS to write back and say "we have investigated the matter but have not been able to determine whether the owners of the site are engaged in copyright infringement. If a court finds them to have engaged in copyright infringement, we will take that as a clear determination."
Read the actual police request. It says:
We request that you review your processes to see if you provide a service for the identified domain(s). If so, we would ask you to review the terms and conditions on the basis of which that service is provided and withdraw or suspend the service if you are satisfied that the terms and conditions have been breached
And the police helpfully highlight the relevant line from EasyDNS terms of service:
easyDNS Terms of Service: easyDNS reserves the right to revoke any or all services associated with a domain or user account, for policy abuses. What constitutes a policy abuse is at the sole discretion of easyDNS and includes (but is not limited to) the following: ... copyright infringement ...
But now the easyDNS got on his drama-queen high horse. Here's what he wrote:
Who decides what is illegal? What makes somebody a criminal? Given that the subtext of the request contains a threat to refer the matter to ICANN if we don't play along, this is a non-trivial question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to "some guy on the internet" sending emails
Well the answer's clear. From his own terms of service, HE is the one who decides whether easyDNS should terminate service, at his discretion. Not a court. The police's request was solely that easyDNS should themselves determine whether this user had breached their own terms of service.
All my life I've been a single-screen developer. Maybe it's an age thing since I was developing back on ZX Spectrum and BBC with their single small screens back in the '80s. Surface has greater resolution than any laptop I've ever used, and at age 40 my eyes are still good enough to appreciate the resolution.
I do use less white space than most other devs :)
I've been using a tablet (Surface Pro) for the past four months for all my professional work -- coding (I'm a compiler-author on the VB and C# compilers), Photoshop, Powerpoint, Word.
It's a joy to use. I still have my old thinkpad laptop but abandoned it completely in favor of the SurfacePro. I use the stylus for much of my powerpoint and Photoshop work, and I use touch for a lot of Visual Studio and Word and WindowsExplorer work since it's easier and more precise than a trackpad. The screen size is fine for me - I've always been a "single app open maximized" sort of developer. The type-cover is fine for coding, but I do get a bit frustrated at the function-keys and Home/End/PgUp/PgDown.
Oh, and of course I also use it for photos and websurfing.
Loss of brain function isn't a normal part of healthy ageing - it's the symptom of a DISEASE (usually alzheimers that affects 50%+ of 80 yr olds) and will eventually be cured through medicine like other diseases.
It is NEVER treason to expose government wrongdoing or unconstitutional behavior. It is NEVER treason to expose government coverups or lies. It is NEVER treason to disclose programmes that should have had proper congressional or public oversight but didn't. Everything so far disclosed has fallen into the above categories. If ever disclosing one of these wrongdoings or unconstitutional behaviors or coverups has put an operative or operation in jeopardy - then the blame rests solely on the shoulders of whoever perpetrated that cover up. Otherwise, any wrongdoing could be hushed up simply by entangling it with something else.
At least, that's my view as a Snowden and Manning supporter
This isn't a "latest twist in the NSA saga". It's a transparent PR fluff piece.
Obviously the PR division at the NSA figured out a plan to trivialize the revelations. John DeLong at his press conference comes out with "Oh yes, once or twice in the past decade we have broken the rules, but it's been for lighthearded laughable trivial matters like LOVEINT. Ha ha ha, what a joke. My bad. We're all good now, right?"
Of course the media will lap this up. And it distracts attention from the real systematic unconstitutional behavior of the NSA, and the fact that the NSA's overseers themselves believe their oversight to be inadequate.
Computer science was changing every bit as fast in 1992 as today.
I didn't use books for lectures. I turned up to the lecture, and took notes, and then studied from my notes plus the handouts given to us by the lecturers.
I didn't use books for actually DOING the homework; just for getting the questions. Each week the TA would assign us homework problems, either giving us a printout or photocopy, or directing us to a book that contained the question. Each college library had its own copy of the books; our library kept them in a small area that you couldn't remove them from. Just one book was enough for the ten students/year in our college.
Look, all this was easy given how my university was set up and how its courses were taught. There are better (cheaper, easier, fairer) ways of doing it than how US universities do it.
i don't remember a time when i could refrain from spending hundreds of dollars on textbooks because they were all free at the library.
I do! Spent a total of $50 on books for my entire college degree (1992-1995, Computer Science, University of Cambridge, England).
I've always wondered how something can be racist if it is true.
There are a variety of old sayings I've heard about this, along these lines... "The best place to hide a lie is inside the truth". "Heed not the word of a demon even though it speak the truth".
You asked how can something be racist if it's true. The main answer I think is selective reporting. Imagine a hypothetical town in which black and white people live 50/50, and imagine that mugged are committed 50/50 by the two groups, but the town newspaper always says "The perpetrator was a white male in his 30s" for white perpetrators and "The perpetrator was a male in his 30s" for black perpetrators. The newspaper only ever tells the truth, but it's racist and creates an impression of more crime by white people than black..
Here's a good deconstruction of an AP article that told the truth but was sexist.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/08/02/jennifer_rosoff_s_death_and_the_associated_press_s_sexist_reporting_of_it.html
Same principle. Quoting from the article: "You may accuse me of overreacting, but the minor details that journalists choose to include or exclude from their reporting are one of many subtle ways that oppressive gender norms are perpetuated."
I have a SurfacePro and love it.
About two months ago I switched to using my SurfacePro as my sole work machine (I'm a compiler developer on Microsoft's VisualStudio team). And I switched to using one as my sole home machine (for mobile app development, browsing, drawing various home-improvement plans using the Pen, web-browsing, powering my home theater).
I love it! It's plenty fast enough for my dev work. It's light enough to sling into my backpack for the cycle to work. It's neat to take to meetings. Even my wife, a die-hard Apple user, has started instinctively trying to touch the screen on her MacBook Pro after getting used to it on my SurfacePro.
The SurfacePro's touch screen is obviously great with the pen (for drawing plans for home-improvement projects, carpentry, garden remodeling &c). Also for business use (annotating Powerpoints and PDFs). But what surprised me is that I've come to prefer using finger-touch for lots of my programming development work - using it to navigate folders, or adjust properties of files, or scroll through source code.
Also, in those cases where an app has a functional Metro touch version (chiefly Lync and Mail) I've come to prefer those to the mouse+keyboard versions.
I totally experienced your (3). There's a "healthy raw-food vegan" restaurant near where we live which makes delicious Tiramisu. We'd always assumed it was healthy as well as delicious because of where it comes from. We bought the recipe, made it, felt very proud of making such a healthy delicious dish. A while later we entered the raw ingredients into Livestrong's "MyPlate" and got an incredible figure of 700 calories per portion, most of it fat. Wow.
:) I am. I never realized I ate such predictable foods!
I can scan barcode for just about anything that has one (it sometimes doesn't find odd things I might purchase in, say, an Asian Grocery).
How many people have diets that fit into this "scan barcode" thing? Doesn't it require that you fall into a "industrialized food" diet, full of prepackaged stuff? Here's my diet from yesterday. I haven't been able to find any app that makes it convenient to type in...
Most of the dishes we make from scratch, from items we bought in bulk, with things like butter and olive oil and salt added to taste. That means it's a pain to look everything up by name on the computer, a pain to weigh out the amounts of everything we make, a pain to type those amounts in, and a pain to figure out how much of each serving dish I took vs how much my wife took.
BREAKFAST: rolled oats cooked in a saucepan for the whole family, cooked with some mixture of milk and water by my wife, of which I take a portion size that seems right and add currants to taste. [I can find the calorie values for oats, water, currants, but don't have a clue how much I consumed]
LUNCH: my wife prepared a sandwich of rye bread with herring fillets from ikea and a bit of spreadable cheese, then a bag with chopped up carrots from our CSA-box (Community Supported Agriculture), and two unusually small pears, and a peach. [I can find calorie values for bread, but not for individual pieces of fish, and my wife didn't weigh out the cheese, and I have no idea how many carrots I ate].
DINNER: a bunch of swiss chard including stems, cooked in some olive oil, then flambe'd with whiskey, then adding more oil or vinegar or salt to taste, shared amongst the family where we don't all measure it. Some boiled rice which again I didn't weigh. A CSA lettuce with some cornichons and olives thrown in, mixed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, to taste, and divided amongst the family. A slice of the apple crumble that my wife cooked last night, not from recipe.
??? Of course there's custom hardware at the other end. The iphone cable requires custom hardware that (1) has the right sized port, (2) has the circuitry that does something with the signal it gets (except in the case of audio).
The point stands. Video, audio and control can certainly be done over USB. There's no *NEED* for the iphone cable.
I use my Surface Pro primarily for development work (I'm a developer on the VB/C# compiler team at Microsoft). In fact, since I got it two months ago, it has become my sole development machine, replacing my previous Thinkpad laptop.
Why do I prefer the Surface Pro over an ultraportable? It's smaller, and more portable. I like going into meetings with such a tiny device. I like being able to fold the keyboard underneath it and look solely at the screen. It's lighter on my back when I cycle to work. It fits more easily into my airplane luggage. I use it in tablet mode a fair bit without the keyboard - I've found the Metro versions of Lync (with touch), Skype (with touch) and OneNote (with a pen) to be nicer to use than the desktop versions. Being able to sketch diagrams with the pen has made for nice presentation slides, and I've used it also to draw planning diagrams for my DIY work.
Video over USB:
http://www.everythingusb.com/targus-usb-3.0-dual-video-adapter-21477.html
Audio over USB:
http://hifimediy.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=107
Controls over USB:
http://www.amazon.com/Griffin-Technology-NA16029-Multimedia-Controller/dp/B003VWU2WA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375463450&sr=8-1&keywords=usb+volume+control
Are you distinguishing that from all the devices that do audio, video and controls over USB?
Likewise, perhaps throwing in a formula or some symbols with subscripts would be stylistically optimal, but because these things are harder to type in Word than in LaTeX, I might not bother ($x_2$ is more natural for me to type than ctrl-i x ctrl-i ctrl-= 2 ctrl-=, and with LaTeX you don't have the problem that if in later editing you later try to insert a comma after it, Word wants to subscript the comma).
Have you tried equations in Word? Since 2010, you type them in "linear" mode. So if you wanted x with "2" subscript then you'd write
x_2
It doesn't have macro support, so it won't be good for recreating domain-specific notation, but it's fine for normal notation. You'll also find that for equations like "T_2" looks better in Word than in TeX/LaTeX because Word kerns based on which quadrant of the glyph is being subscripted - so you don't have to do manual kerning.
I've been using Pro as my sole development machine for six weeks, with the TypeCover. (I'm a dev on the MS VisualStudio team)
It works GREAT!
I've abandoned for good my previous ThinkPad laptop. The new surface pro is easier to take around wherever I go to develop (home, office, cafe). The touch screen is making everything easier than a touchpad, even easier than the track pad on my wife's Macbook Pro. Worse than a mouse for some tasks, better for others.
For my dev work, I only use the Surface screen. I guess at age 38 my eyesight's still good enough.
I connect up to a big-screen in conference rooms. Sometimes the conference room has a mini-display-port which plugs in fine to the surface directly. Sometimes the conference room only has VGA, so I use the surface pro's VGA adapter, which also works fine.
What I have to say is that the touch-screen is AWESOME on a laptop form-factor. I'll be using Windows FileExplorer and I'll be able to tap icons (rather than using the touch-pad or having to plug in a mouse). Actually I prefer tapping to mouse. I also like putting my hand to the right of the screen and using my thumb to scroll.