Well, you might need to explain what astroturfing is Astroturfing is where a special interest tries to create the impression of grassroots support. That may be through paying shills to post a lot on message boards with posts that support your position, it may be through dodgy polls or it may be through other means.
Good thing that the ribbon takes up the exact same amount of space as the old toolbars and menu did, then If you actually look at the pics you will see that the margin adjusters are visible in one but not the other. That may be a sensible change to defaults but it's not directly related to the ribbon thing.
Once we take that into account the ribbon is slightly bigger than the default menus/toolbars but seems to give direct access to far less stuff.
Also if you are short on screen space you can optimise. Turn off the margin bars and put the toolbars on one row (you may lose some buttons this way but word is pretty good at removing the leat important ones first) and the old system takes up a lot less space. Afaict there is no way to reduce the space the ribbon takes up.
Personally I quite liked the office assistant (though I have to say I preffered most of the other choices of assistant to clippy ), it was something that brigtened up an otherwise pretty dull task.
Actually, on a modern car, with the exception of park and lower gears (which most people STILL don't understand), on an automatic transmission, they don't have control over the shifting anyway. Afaict this varies a lot depending on where you live. Here in the UK the vast majority of vehicles still have manual gearboxes. Afaict this is driven by two things. Firstly people beleive they are more economical. Secondly if you ever want to be able to drive a manual you have to learn and take your test on one.
But afaict there is a lot more difference in control layout between a model T and a modern manual than between a modern manual and a modern automatic.
Firstly the high speed link isn't fiber it's still twisted pair based (though with seperate pairs for each direction)
IIRC the A (what you plug into the computer) has the extra contacts burried at the back of the plug allowing compatibility in both connections. The B does have indeed the extra connections above.
So you can use your superspeed device with your existing computer using the cable that comes with the USB3 device but you can't use the cable that comes with your USB3 device to connect a USB2 device.
The superspeed mini connector appears to be superspeed only, i'm not sure how that interacts with backwards compatibility.
IME, older software that has been battered by attackers (like BIND or sendmail) is a lot less likely to have critical unpatched vulnerabilities because it's been around so long. Since C doesn't do any bounds checking automatically the onus is on the projects coding style and auditing requirements to minimise the chance of things getting written where they shouldn't. If you fail to do this you are likely to end up with an almost never ending stream of buffer overflow bugs. Even after many years they will keep getting found.
IIRC the other big problem with sendmail is that it does almost everything as root. So if there was a vulnerability it didn't just impact the mail system it lead to a rooted box. More modern mailservers (e.g. postfix) tend to do as little as possible as root.
Indeed but IMO a class action settlement is not really going to solve much. this settlement could easilly end up giving google a monopoly or nesr monopoly (particulally if there is another similar lawsuit that goes to the end and rules against the clone of google books)
Personally I don't think class actions should be allowed to be settled at all but if they are going to be the implications of those settlements need to be carefully considered (as it seems this one is being) before approval.
What this really needs is either a sufficiantly high court to rule it if fair use (as IIRC google claimed in thier defense) or legislation explicitly dealing with orphaned works.
It would surprise me to find that the kernel still fits on a floppy disk though. The standard debian 486 kernel plus the floppy module (the core of the installer and the CD/network modules were on further floppies, the rest of the modules could then be fetched from CD or network) did until etch but doesn't anymore. I strongly suspect it's still possible to build a custom kernel that fits on a floppy though.
Agreed. But their thinking is probably that good sales people are good sales people no matter what they sell. I'm not a sales person, so I don't really know if that is true or not, but my thinking is that it is not. My guess is it would be true for some but not for others. Afaict being good at sales requires you to either have a passion for the product or to be able to pretend that you do.
I suspect MS is hoping that the managers they recruit will be able to tell one from the other.
I have a team of rather technical 20 somethings report to me and I am surprised how much they resort to paper and pen. Likewise the students at school still carry them and still write notes. IMO the big problem is that afaict noone has yet come up with a good way of quickly "typing" anything other than plain text.
Equations are a PITA to enter. Selecting templates from menus and filling in the blanks is horribly clunky as is writing in a code like tex.
A similar thing can be said for diagrams, I can scribble down a readable (though not pretty) diagram WAY quicker than I can do one in a computerised drawing package.
I don't think either of these use cases needs needs cursive though. Printing is more than adequate for the small amounts of text involved.
particularly after it has been photocopied or scanned once. One problem is that many photocopiers are set up by default for reproducing printed text. As such they tend to apply a hard threshold to the document. Anything lighter becomes pure white anything darker becomes pure black. This tends to make handwriting far less legible.
If you do have to photocopy or scan handwriting the results are likely to be much better if you use greyscale.
power required is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the source and destination. It's actually worse than that
You are reffering the free space model. That is what they teach you at undergraduate level but it only really applies in certain situations (basically situations where there are no reflections)
Another model is the plane-earth model, this assumes a single perfect reflection from the (flat) ground that introduces a phase inversion. This causes destructive interference and you end up with an inverse fourth power law.
IIRC reality in an outdoor environment with lots of reflections the path loss exponent tends to be somewhere between inverse square and inverse fourth power.
They can make deals with publishers, that is not a problem.
The problem is the case of "orphaned" (I'm not sure how strictly they are defining orphaned but other posts here imply it's not particularly strict) works, some body has through a class action sued Google on behalf of them. In a class action settlement the lawyers who brought the case essentially get to negotiate on behalf of the class and are trying to use this power to grant Google a settlement that lets them reproduce orphaned works.
The problem is that without a proper judgement on this lawsuit anyone else who wants to enter the market is in a bind. They could go down the same route Google has gone and hope for a friendly plaintiff but there is no guarantee that a friendly plaintiff will get there before some group who plans to see the case through to the end. If the new scanner than loses that case then it would likely set a precedent and Google really would be left with a monopoly on orphaned works.
note that being a british site those figures will be in miles per imperial gallon. So the 76.3 (which is the "combined" figure, urban is lower, extra-urban is higher). Converting to US gallons gives us a figure of 63.5 MPG.
Also different countries will have different testing rules so figures from different countries are not directly comparable even when you get the units right.
Also, screens have got a lot bigger than they used to be, and bigger screens mean more electricity everything else being equal And then there is the whole widescreen issue, almost all modern sets are widescreens and that basically means some area at the edge of the screen is filled with "fluff" (they can't put anything important in that area since a lot of people still have 4:3 TVs) which means to get the same effective viewing size you have to buy a bigger TV.
Energy Star requires power consumption of less than 1 watt in standby to qualify. Wasn't there a scandal that came up on slashdot not long ago (I don't remember exactly when but within the last year) where sets with the energy star logo actually had a much higher average standby consumption than the energy star measurements due to powering up the tuner for EPG updates?
France accomplished this by building a large number of nuclear power plants. I'm not going to go into the whole debate over nuclear waste and everything, because that's getting way off topic. It can also be provided by a clean and cheap source like hydroelectric. Hydro can be broadly split into two categories based on whether or not it uses a dam.
Conventional dam based hydro is a dream for grid operators (since they can take the energy more or less whenever they want it and at very short notice). Unfortunately the dams are very expensive to build initially, tend to silt up to some extent and there are a limited number of sites which are both technically suitable and can be acquired in a reasonable manner. The result is that dam based hydro makes up a declining proportion of electricity supply in the west (in china they just do it and screw the people living on the land they are going to flood)
Hydro without dams can be installed with less disruption to the local environment (so it's easier to find sites) but suffers from the same problem as solar and wind, namely that it's output profile is tied directly to the flow profile of the river (which is in turn tied indirectly to the weather). Financially this makes the electricity it generates less valuable. Practically this means that solar/wind/dam free hydro can't replace conventional generation without extremely expensive storage mechanisms.
Question. Since I've never had one single flying lesson in my life, would you say I was stupid if I got into a Learjet, only to crash and burn? Or, if someone who had never been in a tractor trailer decided to jump in and drive one - would he be stupid when he drove it off the side of a mountain? Yeah but then I'd expect it to be obvious to most people that planes and road vehicles are dangerous and that most people will have been told that it is illegal to drive them without proper licensing.
Only the braindead can be unaware of the risks of downloading executables from untrusted sites. The problem is that even when they hear that they lack the knowledge/experience to understand that clicking yes to those warning dialog boxes is equivalent to downloading and running an executable (or even what it means to download and run an executable), that adverts even from "trusted" sites are not to be trusted (thanks to the wide use of advertising networks who don't check up on their advertisers) or that the pop-up that claims to be a virus scan isn't really one. Afaict at least around here the education system does not (or at least didn't when I went through it) teach the stuff you need to stay safe on the internet.
While some malware does rely on security holes and/or bad design descisions in windows a significant proportion of malware is spread through social engineering/user stupidity (see for example the fake virus scan adverts). Short of forcing all software to be approved (see the iphone/ipod touch app store for the downsides of that approach) there isn't a lot that can be done about this. Some malware does both of course.
Umm that convention seems to put restrictions on shipping waste off to other countries but doesn't seem to say anything about what countries can do with thier own waste internally.
Look how eagerly Mac developers transitioned to x86 when the PPC architecture was phased out. Funny, I remember many of the big software vendors taking thier sweet time doing it, and that was with the only OS-X hardware vendor making it clear that they were not only introducing intel machines but they were dropping PPC ones.
Lukilly for apple the combination of a good emulator and the fact that they made quite a jump up in CPU power when they switched smoothed over the transition.
I've got a newsflash for you, but the big name manufacturers are the ones who created the inudstry standards, and they certainly stick to them. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, i've certainly seen plenty of big brand machines over the years that are very different from either ATX or BTX and/or are based on them but have riser card arrangements that mean you need a specific arragement of slots or have weird connectors (for example the PSU connector on an optiplex I opened recently is far smaller than a standard one)
One of the best case formats out there is BTX, the layout greatly improves airflow while at the same time reducing case size in most applciations significantly, all without sacrificing power like other designs. Yet the only people who make boards for it are the big name manufacturers, because hobbyists aren't interested, for some reason. It's a chicken and egg thing, while most hobbyists/whitebox vendors use ATX that is what manufacturers will sell them. And while most manufacturers sell mostly ATX that is what hobbyists/whitebox vendors are most likely to pick.
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Well, you might need to explain what astroturfing is
Astroturfing is where a special interest tries to create the impression of grassroots support. That may be through paying shills to post a lot on message boards with posts that support your position, it may be through dodgy polls or it may be through other means.
Good thing that the ribbon takes up the exact same amount of space as the old toolbars and menu did, then
If you actually look at the pics you will see that the margin adjusters are visible in one but not the other. That may be a sensible change to defaults but it's not directly related to the ribbon thing.
Once we take that into account the ribbon is slightly bigger than the default menus/toolbars but seems to give direct access to far less stuff.
Also if you are short on screen space you can optimise. Turn off the margin bars and put the toolbars on one row (you may lose some buttons this way but word is pretty good at removing the leat important ones first) and the old system takes up a lot less space. Afaict there is no way to reduce the space the ribbon takes up.
Personally I quite liked the office assistant (though I have to say I preffered most of the other choices of assistant to clippy ), it was something that brigtened up an otherwise pretty dull task.
Actually, on a modern car, with the exception of park and lower gears (which most people STILL don't understand), on an automatic transmission, they don't have control over the shifting anyway.
Afaict this varies a lot depending on where you live. Here in the UK the vast majority of vehicles still have manual gearboxes. Afaict this is driven by two things. Firstly people beleive they are more economical. Secondly if you ever want to be able to drive a manual you have to learn and take your test on one.
But afaict there is a lot more difference in control layout between a model T and a modern manual than between a modern manual and a modern automatic.
Firstly the high speed link isn't fiber it's still twisted pair based (though with seperate pairs for each direction)
IIRC the A (what you plug into the computer) has the extra contacts burried at the back of the plug allowing compatibility in both connections. The B does have indeed the extra connections above.
So you can use your superspeed device with your existing computer using the cable that comes with the USB3 device but you can't use the cable that comes with your USB3 device to connect a USB2 device.
The superspeed mini connector appears to be superspeed only, i'm not sure how that interacts with backwards compatibility.
IME, older software that has been battered by attackers (like BIND or sendmail) is a lot less likely to have critical unpatched vulnerabilities because it's been around so long.
Since C doesn't do any bounds checking automatically the onus is on the projects coding style and auditing requirements to minimise the chance of things getting written where they shouldn't. If you fail to do this you are likely to end up with an almost never ending stream of buffer overflow bugs. Even after many years they will keep getting found.
IIRC the other big problem with sendmail is that it does almost everything as root. So if there was a vulnerability it didn't just impact the mail system it lead to a rooted box. More modern mailservers (e.g. postfix) tend to do as little as possible as root.
As does flash, java, acrobat, etc.
Microsoft does not sell Word 2000
They don't sell it directly but IIRC they do sell volume licenses with downgrade rights to it.
Indeed but IMO a class action settlement is not really going to solve much. this settlement could easilly end up giving google a monopoly or nesr monopoly (particulally if there is another similar lawsuit that goes to the end and rules against the clone of google books)
Personally I don't think class actions should be allowed to be settled at all but if they are going to be the implications of those settlements need to be carefully considered (as it seems this one is being) before approval.
What this really needs is either a sufficiantly high court to rule it if fair use (as IIRC google claimed in thier defense) or legislation explicitly dealing with orphaned works.
It would surprise me to find that the kernel still fits on a floppy disk though.
The standard debian 486 kernel plus the floppy module (the core of the installer and the CD/network modules were on further floppies, the rest of the modules could then be fetched from CD or network) did until etch but doesn't anymore. I strongly suspect it's still possible to build a custom kernel that fits on a floppy though.
Agreed. But their thinking is probably that good sales people are good sales people no matter what they sell. I'm not a sales person, so I don't really know if that is true or not, but my thinking is that it is not.
My guess is it would be true for some but not for others. Afaict being good at sales requires you to either have a passion for the product or to be able to pretend that you do.
I suspect MS is hoping that the managers they recruit will be able to tell one from the other.
I have a team of rather technical 20 somethings report to me and I am surprised how much they resort to paper and pen. Likewise the students at school still carry them and still write notes.
IMO the big problem is that afaict noone has yet come up with a good way of quickly "typing" anything other than plain text.
Equations are a PITA to enter. Selecting templates from menus and filling in the blanks is horribly clunky as is writing in a code like tex.
A similar thing can be said for diagrams, I can scribble down a readable (though not pretty) diagram WAY quicker than I can do one in a computerised drawing package.
I don't think either of these use cases needs needs cursive though. Printing is more than adequate for the small amounts of text involved.
particularly after it has been photocopied or scanned once.
One problem is that many photocopiers are set up by default for reproducing printed text. As such they tend to apply a hard threshold to the document. Anything lighter becomes pure white anything darker becomes pure black. This tends to make handwriting far less legible.
If you do have to photocopy or scan handwriting the results are likely to be much better if you use greyscale.
power required is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the source and destination.
It's actually worse than that
You are reffering the free space model. That is what they teach you at undergraduate level but it only really applies in certain situations (basically situations where there are no reflections)
Another model is the plane-earth model, this assumes a single perfect reflection from the (flat) ground that introduces a phase inversion. This causes destructive interference and you end up with an inverse fourth power law.
IIRC reality in an outdoor environment with lots of reflections the path loss exponent tends to be somewhere between inverse square and inverse fourth power.
Interesting but that article is about it's use with leaded solder, are you aware of any similar moves in the lead-free commercial sector?
They can make deals with publishers, that is not a problem.
The problem is the case of "orphaned" (I'm not sure how strictly they are defining orphaned but other posts here imply it's not particularly strict) works, some body has through a class action sued Google on behalf of them. In a class action settlement the lawyers who brought the case essentially get to negotiate on behalf of the class and are trying to use this power to grant Google a settlement that lets them reproduce orphaned works.
The problem is that without a proper judgement on this lawsuit anyone else who wants to enter the market is in a bind. They could go down the same route Google has gone and hope for a friendly plaintiff but there is no guarantee that a friendly plaintiff will get there before some group who plans to see the case through to the end. If the new scanner than loses that case then it would likely set a precedent and Google really would be left with a monopoly on orphaned works.
note that being a british site those figures will be in miles per imperial gallon. So the 76.3 (which is the "combined" figure, urban is lower, extra-urban is higher). Converting to US gallons gives us a figure of 63.5 MPG.
Also different countries will have different testing rules so figures from different countries are not directly comparable even when you get the units right.
Also, screens have got a lot bigger than they used to be, and bigger screens mean more electricity everything else being equal
And then there is the whole widescreen issue, almost all modern sets are widescreens and that basically means some area at the edge of the screen is filled with "fluff" (they can't put anything important in that area since a lot of people still have 4:3 TVs) which means to get the same effective viewing size you have to buy a bigger TV.
Energy Star requires power consumption of less than 1 watt in standby to qualify.
Wasn't there a scandal that came up on slashdot not long ago (I don't remember exactly when but within the last year) where sets with the energy star logo actually had a much higher average standby consumption than the energy star measurements due to powering up the tuner for EPG updates?
France accomplished this by building a large number of nuclear power plants. I'm not going to go into the whole debate over nuclear waste and everything, because that's getting way off topic. It can also be provided by a clean and cheap source like hydroelectric.
Hydro can be broadly split into two categories based on whether or not it uses a dam.
Conventional dam based hydro is a dream for grid operators (since they can take the energy more or less whenever they want it and at very short notice). Unfortunately the dams are very expensive to build initially, tend to silt up to some extent and there are a limited number of sites which are both technically suitable and can be acquired in a reasonable manner. The result is that dam based hydro makes up a declining proportion of electricity supply in the west (in china they just do it and screw the people living on the land they are going to flood)
Hydro without dams can be installed with less disruption to the local environment (so it's easier to find sites) but suffers from the same problem as solar and wind, namely that it's output profile is tied directly to the flow profile of the river (which is in turn tied indirectly to the weather). Financially this makes the electricity it generates less valuable. Practically this means that solar/wind/dam free hydro can't replace conventional generation without extremely expensive storage mechanisms.
Question. Since I've never had one single flying lesson in my life, would you say I was stupid if I got into a Learjet, only to crash and burn? Or, if someone who had never been in a tractor trailer decided to jump in and drive one - would he be stupid when he drove it off the side of a mountain?
Yeah but then I'd expect it to be obvious to most people that planes and road vehicles are dangerous and that most people will have been told that it is illegal to drive them without proper licensing.
Only the braindead can be unaware of the risks of downloading executables from untrusted sites.
The problem is that even when they hear that they lack the knowledge/experience to understand that clicking yes to those warning dialog boxes is equivalent to downloading and running an executable (or even what it means to download and run an executable), that adverts even from "trusted" sites are not to be trusted (thanks to the wide use of advertising networks who don't check up on their advertisers) or that the pop-up that claims to be a virus scan isn't really one. Afaict at least around here the education system does not (or at least didn't when I went through it) teach the stuff you need to stay safe on the internet.
While some malware does rely on security holes and/or bad design descisions in windows a significant proportion of malware is spread through social engineering/user stupidity (see for example the fake virus scan adverts). Short of forcing all software to be approved (see the iphone/ipod touch app store for the downsides of that approach) there isn't a lot that can be done about this. Some malware does both of course.
Umm that convention seems to put restrictions on shipping waste off to other countries but doesn't seem to say anything about what countries can do with thier own waste internally.
Look how eagerly Mac developers transitioned to x86 when the PPC architecture was phased out.
Funny, I remember many of the big software vendors taking thier sweet time doing it, and that was with the only OS-X hardware vendor making it clear that they were not only introducing intel machines but they were dropping PPC ones.
Lukilly for apple the combination of a good emulator and the fact that they made quite a jump up in CPU power when they switched smoothed over the transition.
I've got a newsflash for you, but the big name manufacturers are the ones who created the inudstry standards, and they certainly stick to them.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, i've certainly seen plenty of big brand machines over the years that are very different from either ATX or BTX and/or are based on them but have riser card arrangements that mean you need a specific arragement of slots or have weird connectors (for example the PSU connector on an optiplex I opened recently is far smaller than a standard one)
One of the best case formats out there is BTX, the layout greatly improves airflow while at the same time reducing case size in most applciations significantly, all without sacrificing power like other designs. Yet the only people who make boards for it are the big name manufacturers, because hobbyists aren't interested, for some reason.
It's a chicken and egg thing, while most hobbyists/whitebox vendors use ATX that is what manufacturers will sell them. And while most manufacturers sell mostly ATX that is what hobbyists/whitebox vendors are most likely to pick.