And you're from Texas; the one state in the union with lots of real bullshit and very little figurative bullshit. We wonder what disease has afflicted the US whose cure is in the Texas water supply.
Scary, isn't it? I really don't know how it snowballed this far without any public outcry whatsoever.
Easy. You keep sending Democrats to Congress. If you want a real education, look up who proposed and who passed these laws. It wasn't Republicans.
There's an interesting delusion on/. and most of the US media about the roles played by federal politicians. From up here in Canada it looks not just a little comical. The most interesting case of cognitive dissonance: The primary author of the Patriot Act is your new Vice President. Chew on that for a while. What can you do but laugh?
Police Capt. George Seranko isn't doing any more interviews. The laughter was getting annoying, and he's not sure what "doofus" means, but he doesn't think it's a term of endearment.
The thing that really impresses me about this is that you were able to con all the involved people into believing that this was something unique to Open Office and couldn't be done with Word.
All those authors and nobody knew that Word has always had a "Master Document feature" or how to use Help?
You probably have the "Free vs Expensive" arrow pointing in the wrong direction.
"Free" is sticking with a product suite that is doing the job for you. "Expensive" is upgrading or rolling out a whole new office suite (planning, imaging, installation, configuration, conversion), along with the added user support that you'll need during and after transition. If anyone uses Visio, you'll have to keep it — there's no OSS equivalent. If they embed Visio diagrams in other documents, you're SOL; Open Office can't do that. Then there's the Excel Analysis Tools. Calc is laughable and Gnumeric is not quite there (but close).
Unless there's an urgent need for a capability that's not in Office 2000 but is in Open Office, and there's no reasonable workaround, your best option is to do nothing.
Number crunching is useful, but it remains only one of many management tools and it doesn't matter whether you are using your fingers, a spreadsheet or SPSS. It's vital to have a clear understanding of the relevance and scope of the results.
John's young, so I suppose we can forgive his limited view of history.
Before there were CFOs there were VPs of Finance--every one an accountant.
Before there were spreadsheets, there were financial accounting programs, software for costing and forecasting. There were languages like APL that manipulated arrays of data. These were used by the accountants on the VP Finance's staff.
It's not the accountants that were empowered by the spreadsheet, but the folks in operations: marketing and facilities and manufacturing. The accountants always had numbers to crunch and lots of compute power to crunch them.
Unfortunately, that doesn't make as good a kvetch. He's right about one thing though...the current financial collapse is due to financial decision makers (mostly accountants) putting too much faith in a calculation that can be done on a spreadsheet. Value at Risk was the "gold standard" measure of a portfolio which turned out to be a trap for the unwary. This included most of Wall Street with the possible exception of Goldman Sachs.
The responsibility for effective communication is with the speaker, not the listener.
"Read my whole message, wander off into my parenthetical comments without losing track of my main message, if I have one, and carefully mine the message for information I think you need to have. If you don't get it the first time, read it over again as many times as needed to get my point". Why? "Because I'm important and your time isn't." I don't think so.
One paragraph is all I get to convince the reader that I have something to say. One bad paragraph is all that's needed to send them away. This is stuff I learned in elementary school. They called it "English Composition". It isn't rocket surgery.
Top posting puts my message in the most convenient spot. If my reader isn't familiar with the topic, they'll go to the end and read up, but that tends to be rare. Top posting optimizes the interface for the 90% case. We're talking about email, not usenet.
When a lot of users royally screw up like this, the problem is either poor training or the design of the tool they are using. This was not just one ignorant user. Based on the dozen or so email packages I've used, I'd hang this one on the designers.
No sane user wants to send a message to everyone on the network by mistake. A user interface that makes it easy is just badly designed. A good design by default:
Requires the user to respond in a non-trivial way to a message like "Send reply to all 2386 members of the California Staff list?". Clicking OK is not sufficient. The dialog should get more aggressive as the size of the list grows.
Replies to a distribution list via Bcc for all except the sender of the replied-to message.
Does not send any automated replies to messages recieved on a distribution list.
Provides a per-message option to add a list of recipients at the bottom of the message.
For deliberately collaborative lists, provides a distribution list optional property to bypass all of the above and make all replies to the whole list.
If your normal business communications are anything like this rambling, unfocused, hard-to-read, post of yours, I can understand why the CEO and COO didn't get the message.
I shudder to even think of what your code commenting looks like. Do we get to find out what you had for lunch on the day you wrote a particular bit of code?
What everyone seems to be missing is that the NASA source did not say that the addition of a J-2X doubles the chance that a J-2X will fail; He/she said that it doubles the chance that something will fail. That's either moronic or deliberately misleading.
Every spacecraft has thousands of failure modes. Looking at this design, the failure of a J-2X is a long way down the risk curve and adding an extra one is unlikely to change the "chance that something will fail" by more than a very small fraction.
I don't know what NASA's current standard is for mean launches between failures for a component, but I'll wager addition of a single component doesn't impact the overall risk in less than three zeros.
The article's illustration includes an astonishing statement regarding the two J-2X engines: "NASA says the extra engine doubles the chance that something will fail". Wow! Applying that logic would really simplify most of our jobs. RAID? Don't waste your money; all those extra disks just increase the odds of failure.
Whoever said that leaves us with a conundrum: Does he actually believe it, in which case his academic credentials should be subjected to very close scrutiny? Or is he lying deliberately in order to protect NASA's ability to concentrate on maximizing headcount and budget, in which case someone should fire him?
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
You have to play with it. As with APL you'll either love it or hate it.
If you like the idea of a language that includes relational tables as a primitive data type, that extends most operators to do the right thing when you feed them vectors and matrices, that has linear regression and equation solving built-in, you'll probably like R.
It wasn't interesting enough to get my attention at the time, but didn't Apple do without Jobs for a while a few years ago? What happened then is probably a fair prediction of what would happen now.
What colour is the sky where you people live? Do the math.
If you were to house all of the world's population in single-family homes, on generous suburban lots (North American standard approximately 30m*40m), four to a house, allowing space for services and infrastructure, they'd occupy a space about three times the size of Texas (700,000 sq.km.), leaving the rest of the planet for agriculture and manufacturing.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a cleverly crafted example of word salad, or is it a Google translation?
Chuckle. Does anyone else remember the same inane arguments about the difference between a "compiler" and a "translator"?
And you're from Texas; the one state in the union with lots of real bullshit and very little figurative bullshit. We wonder what disease has afflicted the US whose cure is in the Texas water supply.
Scary, isn't it? I really don't know how it snowballed this far without any public outcry whatsoever.
Easy. You keep sending Democrats to Congress. If you want a real education, look up who proposed and who passed these laws. It wasn't Republicans.
There's an interesting delusion on /. and most of the US media about the roles played by federal politicians. From up here in Canada it looks not just a little comical. The most interesting case of cognitive dissonance: The primary author of the Patriot Act is your new Vice President. Chew on that for a while. What can you do but laugh?
Police Capt. George Seranko isn't doing any more interviews. The laughter was getting annoying, and he's not sure what "doofus" means, but he doesn't think it's a term of endearment.
The thing that really impresses me about this is that you were able to con all the involved people into believing that this was something unique to Open Office and couldn't be done with Word.
All those authors and nobody knew that Word has always had a "Master Document feature" or how to use Help?
You probably have the "Free vs Expensive" arrow pointing in the wrong direction.
"Free" is sticking with a product suite that is doing the job for you. "Expensive" is upgrading or rolling out a whole new office suite (planning, imaging, installation, configuration, conversion), along with the added user support that you'll need during and after transition. If anyone uses Visio, you'll have to keep it — there's no OSS equivalent. If they embed Visio diagrams in other documents, you're SOL; Open Office can't do that. Then there's the Excel Analysis Tools. Calc is laughable and Gnumeric is not quite there (but close).
Unless there's an urgent need for a capability that's not in Office 2000 but is in Open Office, and there's no reasonable workaround, your best option is to do nothing.
They probably did the wise thing: Find the best software and then buy the hardware that runs it.
There's really good ballistics software for the Palm, so I'd guess the IPod app is superlative.
Wow! An orgy of self-rightious political correctness. Can I play too?
Pool your minutes with other students, minimize redundant messages. Where you are, big shipboard events, etc only have to be posted once.
Put everything on a thumb drive ready for upload to your favourite social network and borrow online time when you hit port.
Focus on the purpose of the cruise and use your minutes for emergencies.
Agreed
Number crunching is useful, but it remains only one of many management tools and it doesn't matter whether you are using your fingers, a spreadsheet or SPSS. It's vital to have a clear understanding of the relevance and scope of the results.
John's young, so I suppose we can forgive his limited view of history.
Before there were CFOs there were VPs of Finance--every one an accountant.
Before there were spreadsheets, there were financial accounting programs, software for costing and forecasting. There were languages like APL that manipulated arrays of data. These were used by the accountants on the VP Finance's staff.
It's not the accountants that were empowered by the spreadsheet, but the folks in operations: marketing and facilities and manufacturing. The accountants always had numbers to crunch and lots of compute power to crunch them.
Unfortunately, that doesn't make as good a kvetch. He's right about one thing though...the current financial collapse is due to financial decision makers (mostly accountants) putting too much faith in a calculation that can be done on a spreadsheet. Value at Risk was the "gold standard" measure of a portfolio which turned out to be a trap for the unwary. This included most of Wall Street with the possible exception of Goldman Sachs.
The responsibility for effective communication is with the speaker, not the listener.
"Read my whole message, wander off into my parenthetical comments without losing track of my main message, if I have one, and carefully mine the message for information I think you need to have. If you don't get it the first time, read it over again as many times as needed to get my point". Why? "Because I'm important and your time isn't." I don't think so.
One paragraph is all I get to convince the reader that I have something to say. One bad paragraph is all that's needed to send them away. This is stuff I learned in elementary school. They called it "English Composition". It isn't rocket surgery.
Top posting puts my message in the most convenient spot. If my reader isn't familiar with the topic, they'll go to the end and read up, but that tends to be rare. Top posting optimizes the interface for the 90% case. We're talking about email, not usenet.
When a lot of users royally screw up like this, the problem is either poor training or the design of the tool they are using. This was not just one ignorant user. Based on the dozen or so email packages I've used, I'd hang this one on the designers.
No sane user wants to send a message to everyone on the network by mistake. A user interface that makes it easy is just badly designed. A good design by default:
If your normal business communications are anything like this rambling, unfocused, hard-to-read, post of yours, I can understand why the CEO and COO didn't get the message.
I shudder to even think of what your code commenting looks like. Do we get to find out what you had for lunch on the day you wrote a particular bit of code?
What everyone seems to be missing is that the NASA source did not say that the addition of a J-2X doubles the chance that a J-2X will fail; He/she said that it doubles the chance that something will fail. That's either moronic or deliberately misleading.
Every spacecraft has thousands of failure modes. Looking at this design, the failure of a J-2X is a long way down the risk curve and adding an extra one is unlikely to change the "chance that something will fail" by more than a very small fraction.
I don't know what NASA's current standard is for mean launches between failures for a component, but I'll wager addition of a single component doesn't impact the overall risk in less than three zeros.
A sizable Jewish population (~10%) lived in the area for decades (centuries?) alongside the Arabs with no problems.
Look up "dhimmi".
Because they were our nazis.
The article's illustration includes an astonishing statement regarding the two J-2X engines: "NASA says the extra engine doubles the chance that something will fail". Wow! Applying that logic would really simplify most of our jobs. RAID? Don't waste your money; all those extra disks just increase the odds of failure.
Whoever said that leaves us with a conundrum: Does he actually believe it, in which case his academic credentials should be subjected to very close scrutiny? Or is he lying deliberately in order to protect NASA's ability to concentrate on maximizing headcount and budget, in which case someone should fire him?
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
You have to play with it. As with APL you'll either love it or hate it.
If you like the idea of a language that includes relational tables as a primitive data type, that extends most operators to do the right thing when you feed them vectors and matrices, that has linear regression and equation solving built-in, you'll probably like R.
Go somewhere that caters to coin collectors and buy a bunch of 2" zip-lok bags. You can write on the bag with a ball point or marker.
It wasn't interesting enough to get my attention at the time, but didn't Apple do without Jobs for a while a few years ago? What happened then is probably a fair prediction of what would happen now.
Is anyone here old enough to remember?
And what do you do with the last 0.25%?
What colour is the sky where you people live? Do the math.
If you were to house all of the world's population in single-family homes, on generous suburban lots (North American standard approximately 30m*40m), four to a house, allowing space for services and infrastructure, they'd occupy a space about three times the size of Texas (700,000 sq.km.), leaving the rest of the planet for agriculture and manufacturing.
We have not begun to occupy this planet.
RTFA. That is, in fact, the reaction of most of the scientists who responded to this survey.