Next time it comes up, search for "Two Knotty Boys" - some fairly simple instructional videos on the rope thing. It's quite easy to get the hang of the basics!
A clear example is worth a ton of official documentation. Someone has to read the real documentation, but for most of us, most of the time, finding an example where someone has done something similar is all we need. I'll often start with an example, then backtrack over the official documents to make sure I understand how the example is working and whether it's a "good" example - i.e whether it's using the API/function/whatever correctly. If it's complex, I'll try to cross reference several different examples from different sites.
The one single thing that would improve most official documentation is a clear, worked example of what's being documented, to indicate the best practice for that particular function.
I ran Linux on my PC, exclusively, in the late 90s. I installed Slackware from a stack of floppies, battled X config files to get a gui working and then, around 2000, spent an entire weekend trying to get my first ADSL connection working.
These days I spend 90% of my personal computer time editing photographs and doing web design. I need Photoshop, I need colour calibration tools that work and I need a decent text editor. Both OSX and Windows provide all I need, and I have no need to spend my free time on Linux. It's just not the fun it used to be - for me. I understand the impulse to tinker, but it's not for me any more.
It's not about being anti Linux, or a shill. It's just a different point of view.
The sync is the point though, otherwise you might as well just use a local note app.
I use it for random technical notes, pointers to useful howtos, command line snippets I want to remember, ideas for my blog... nothing that requires much in the way of security. I like that I can write the notes at work and have them on my home PC, or jot an idea on my phone while I'm out and expand on it when I'm front of the keyboard. I was looking for a note app that let me organise notes into folders with a bit of markup. I'm sure plenty of them exist, but the sync is the killer feature for me.
Yes, to maintain my geek card I know I could use text files in a dropbox synced folder structure, or hack something together with some kind of rsync, but sometimes it's just easier to use a nice GUI app that just works.
I liked my HTC One S until the latest update (Sense 4+).
For some reason they've seen fit to cripple the camera application so that the lowest resolution is 2048x1536. Lowest. So much for taking quick snaps to email to people. Nope, got to upload them now to edit later or get an app to resize them first.
Otherwise it's a great phone. The X was a bit too bulky for my taste, and I prefer the sense homescreen navigation to the - what I assume is stock Android - way my Nexus 7 does it. Battery lasts at least a couple of days for my usage (getting a bit wound up by the constant reminders telling me I don't have the powersave option on, though - I don't need it so stop nagging me!)
I'll take security issues with a slight pinch of salt - today it's HTC, tomorrow it'll be Samsung, then Apple - the risk is going to be there with all of them.
I actually knew of an old mainframe system that had to be switched off for an hour when the clocks went back so that it didn't get confused and try to log the same time twice.
I take arty (yes, that kind of arty) pictures as a hobby. Luckily my name is quite common, so a google search turns up loads of other people with the same name, so I'd be quite hard to track down even though I publish under my own name (to be honest, I'm at a stage in my career when if someone doesn't want to employ me because of my hobbies, I don't want to work for them).
Second, it was much easier to fence GPS navigation devices in glove boxes than spend the time to rip out the car stereo.
Which is why I'd like satnav to be a much cheaper option on new cars. Built in, so it's no use in other cars in the same way that stereos are - controls on the steering column, that kind of thing.
So much easier than dealing with the stupid suction cup on the windscreen, but for some reason (UK at least) a £100 satnav suddenly becomes a £700+ add-on if you want it built in. It's changing, but slowly, and I hope it will follow the model of stereos and become pretty much standard kit.
Of course, GPS phones that act as satnavs might be another way thefts based on the expectation of a GPS in the glovebox die away - most people can't be bothered to take their satnav when they leave the car, but if the screen mount is for a phone it's fairly obvious they will take that with them when they leave the car.
I'm in the UK and I tend to think in terms of celsius for low temperatures and fahrenheit for high temperatures - i.e, if it's close to or below 0 it's cold (thinking in celsius), and if it's in the 80s or 90s it's hot. I think it's the appeal of zero for freezing, coupled with the still common use of fahrenheit in the media to report hot weather.
I've played with Docs, but never used it for anything serious. The thing is, it's so easy to have the best of both worlds - mature, local software, stored in the cloud. Why bother with a purely cloud based solution?
For my personal use, I use Open Office, but it could just as easily be Word. Doesn't matter for the point I'm making. The documents get stored in a directory I sync with Dropbox. I could just as easily swap in another cloud storage provider - Google, MS, whatever - so I'm not tied in to one vendor and I always have a local copy anyway.
OK, so I have to install Open Office on every machine I use, but I guess that's the advantage of free over paid software.
Wouldn't you program a driverless car to not break the law? If it's breaking the law as much as everyone else, there's a problem, but it should be at least theoretically possible to program a car incapable of breaking the law, or does so only to prevent a crash, in which case, most cops wouldn't issue a ticket.
The last point is a good one - sometimes it's necessary to break the law in order to prevent something worse happening, or even just to drive safely. For example, if you start to overtake a slower vehicle, but halfway through the maneuver another vehicle pulls out into your path from the oncoming traffic, the safest option might be to put your foot down, get past quickly and pull back in. Driverless cars would need to know how to, and be capable of, making informed decisions as to when to break the law.
I don't know in what kind of organization you work, but in most large companies you can't go about hiring people without following the official process. Many times when I had good candidates in my network I had to tell them to send their resume to HR - event trying to get them together with the hiring manager for a coffee would possibly jeopardize their application.
In the UK it's quite common for companies to offer bonuses to staff for introducing suitable candidates in order to get recommendations. If I introduce someone who is taken on and gets through the six month probation period, I get a four figure bonus (the first figure is quite small, admittedly!). I think that's partly because it's a lot cheaper than using agencies, who typically charge a high percentage of the first year's salary.
I've been using it for a couple of days and most of my reponses to the changes have been "I can live without that" - I keep finding things that were handy but don't seem to exist any more (I say seem to, I might be wrong, I'm still exploring)
I keep hitting the left most icon on my taskbar by mistake when I want to launch an application. I'm trying the new launcher, but one feature I miss from the start menu is the ability for each application to have it's own submenu - of recently opened items, recently visited websites, or whatever. I don't see the equivalent functionality anywhere in the new interface.
I want to give it a fair shot before I go for a third party launcher, but so far my impression is that it'll do, but it's lacking features I took for granted.
You use them in the Desktop space so having to go to Metro to launch them is dumb.
I hate pinning applications to the taskbar. I want the taskbar to show me what programs are running, not what ones are available to run, and if I mix and match it's not obvious what's open and what isn't.
Because, the problems people talk about in Windows 8 are about as important to being able to drive the car as is the color of it, or where the headlight switch/knob is.
More like the indicators being in a different place - something you use far more often. I keep launching Internet Explorer by mistake because I go to hit the start menu and it isn't there - the first icon on the taskbar is there instead.
I've actually gone back to shortcuts to applications on the desktop to launch applications rather than drop out to the new start screen or clutter up the taskbar with pinned applications.
I'm also not keen on the new Metro versions of apps - take Skype for example. I want it in a window, so I can see the person I'm talking to in the top corner of the screen while looking at the document/website we're both talking about in another window. I can do that for now using the old Windows version, but for how much longer?
That's all I use it for, and as I've been on there for years I won't have to pay... yet.
If I did, I'd still use it. It works and I'm happy with it. I would, however, start making use of the other features like drive, simply on the grounds that since I'm paying for it anyway, why not? Which in turn would use more of their resources than - as you say - a couple of extra MX records on top of a standard gmail account.
In general sickness up to a few days is usually self certified - you only need the note after, what, about 5 days? I can understand it being a tighter restriction in this case though.
I agree with the attitude towards employees, and where I work it's no problem working from home if you're in that "not feeling too bad but probably highly contagious" stage of a cold.
Not sure if it's law yet, but there's a move in the UK, maybe driven by the EU, to allow you to reclaim holiday days if you're sick on your holiday time.
So take a day off as vacation, but get sick and you maybe able to convert it to a sick day, and keep the holiday entitlement for some other time. To me, that one sounds overly generous and open to abuse.
I hope Firefox does thrive. It seems to be the best browser for web developers. I use several plugins to assist in debugging websites (Firebug and Firesizer for example), and the ability to view image info is also handy - Chrome, by default, does not make that easy.
It's possible that similar functionality is available for Chrome, but it's also nice to have one lean browser for real browsing, and a plug-in laden one for web development. IE I only use when I want to see what it breaks, although to be fair IE9 now does a much better job at rendering things the same way as Firefox and Chrome.
Anyway, I still find Firefox useful and hope it has a future. At this point in time, I can't see the lack of a 64bit version being a major drawback.
I guess surviving childhood was hard, so those that did were genetically stronger and more likely to live a long life. These days, in the west, surviving childhood is easy, so allowing weaker adults who might not live as long.
The stats thing mentioned by the GP is one of my pet peeves, and as he points out, life expectancy of those who reach adulthood hasn't changed all that much. Hell, didn't the bible even refer to "three score years and ten" as a reasonable age? That is, when it had got past the Old Testament nonsense of living for hundreds of years!
So only those who can afford to stand the losses can afford to sue? Let's say I sue Random MegaCorp for some reason. They decide to put a dozen highly paid lawyers on it, run up tens of thousands of costs and I lose - perhaps because I can only afford one crummy guy straight out of law school, rather than down to the merits of my case. If they win, I'm bankrupt. If I win, my costs are peanuts.
I'd like to see a system whereby I can limit their costs to match mine - if I choose to pay one guy, or represent myself, they are not allowed to spend a penny more. If they want to spend more, they have to fund my side to match - it's their choice, then, but they wouldn't be able to claim those costs back.
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He does, just in a different way.
Next time it comes up, search for "Two Knotty Boys" - some fairly simple instructional videos on the rope thing. It's quite easy to get the hang of the basics!
Spot on.
A clear example is worth a ton of official documentation. Someone has to read the real documentation, but for most of us, most of the time, finding an example where someone has done something similar is all we need. I'll often start with an example, then backtrack over the official documents to make sure I understand how the example is working and whether it's a "good" example - i.e whether it's using the API/function/whatever correctly. If it's complex, I'll try to cross reference several different examples from different sites.
The one single thing that would improve most official documentation is a clear, worked example of what's being documented, to indicate the best practice for that particular function.
Exactly.
I ran Linux on my PC, exclusively, in the late 90s. I installed Slackware from a stack of floppies, battled X config files to get a gui working and then, around 2000, spent an entire weekend trying to get my first ADSL connection working.
These days I spend 90% of my personal computer time editing photographs and doing web design. I need Photoshop, I need colour calibration tools that work and I need a decent text editor. Both OSX and Windows provide all I need, and I have no need to spend my free time on Linux. It's just not the fun it used to be - for me. I understand the impulse to tinker, but it's not for me any more.
It's not about being anti Linux, or a shill. It's just a different point of view.
The sync is the point though, otherwise you might as well just use a local note app.
I use it for random technical notes, pointers to useful howtos, command line snippets I want to remember, ideas for my blog... nothing that requires much in the way of security. I like that I can write the notes at work and have them on my home PC, or jot an idea on my phone while I'm out and expand on it when I'm front of the keyboard. I was looking for a note app that let me organise notes into folders with a bit of markup. I'm sure plenty of them exist, but the sync is the killer feature for me.
Yes, to maintain my geek card I know I could use text files in a dropbox synced folder structure, or hack something together with some kind of rsync, but sometimes it's just easier to use a nice GUI app that just works.
For some reason they've seen fit to cripple the camera application so that the lowest resolution is 2048x1536. Lowest. So much for taking quick snaps to email to people. Nope, got to upload them now to edit later or get an app to resize them first.
Otherwise it's a great phone. The X was a bit too bulky for my taste, and I prefer the sense homescreen navigation to the - what I assume is stock Android - way my Nexus 7 does it. Battery lasts at least a couple of days for my usage (getting a bit wound up by the constant reminders telling me I don't have the powersave option on, though - I don't need it so stop nagging me!)
I'll take security issues with a slight pinch of salt - today it's HTC, tomorrow it'll be Samsung, then Apple - the risk is going to be there with all of them.
Lucky you. I have this personality here that keeps women away.
I actually knew of an old mainframe system that had to be switched off for an hour when the clocks went back so that it didn't get confused and try to log the same time twice.
I take arty (yes, that kind of arty) pictures as a hobby. Luckily my name is quite common, so a google search turns up loads of other people with the same name, so I'd be quite hard to track down even though I publish under my own name (to be honest, I'm at a stage in my career when if someone doesn't want to employ me because of my hobbies, I don't want to work for them).
Second, it was much easier to fence GPS navigation devices in glove boxes than spend the time to rip out the car stereo.
Which is why I'd like satnav to be a much cheaper option on new cars. Built in, so it's no use in other cars in the same way that stereos are - controls on the steering column, that kind of thing.
So much easier than dealing with the stupid suction cup on the windscreen, but for some reason (UK at least) a £100 satnav suddenly becomes a £700+ add-on if you want it built in. It's changing, but slowly, and I hope it will follow the model of stereos and become pretty much standard kit.
Of course, GPS phones that act as satnavs might be another way thefts based on the expectation of a GPS in the glovebox die away - most people can't be bothered to take their satnav when they leave the car, but if the screen mount is for a phone it's fairly obvious they will take that with them when they leave the car.
I'm in the UK and I tend to think in terms of celsius for low temperatures and fahrenheit for high temperatures - i.e, if it's close to or below 0 it's cold (thinking in celsius), and if it's in the 80s or 90s it's hot. I think it's the appeal of zero for freezing, coupled with the still common use of fahrenheit in the media to report hot weather.
I've played with Docs, but never used it for anything serious. The thing is, it's so easy to have the best of both worlds - mature, local software, stored in the cloud. Why bother with a purely cloud based solution?
For my personal use, I use Open Office, but it could just as easily be Word. Doesn't matter for the point I'm making. The documents get stored in a directory I sync with Dropbox. I could just as easily swap in another cloud storage provider - Google, MS, whatever - so I'm not tied in to one vendor and I always have a local copy anyway.
OK, so I have to install Open Office on every machine I use, but I guess that's the advantage of free over paid software.
Wouldn't you program a driverless car to not break the law? If it's breaking the law as much as everyone else, there's a problem, but it should be at least theoretically possible to program a car incapable of breaking the law, or does so only to prevent a crash, in which case, most cops wouldn't issue a ticket.
The last point is a good one - sometimes it's necessary to break the law in order to prevent something worse happening, or even just to drive safely. For example, if you start to overtake a slower vehicle, but halfway through the maneuver another vehicle pulls out into your path from the oncoming traffic, the safest option might be to put your foot down, get past quickly and pull back in. Driverless cars would need to know how to, and be capable of, making informed decisions as to when to break the law.
I don't know in what kind of organization you work, but in most large companies you can't go about hiring people without following the official process. Many times when I had good candidates in my network I had to tell them to send their resume to HR - event trying to get them together with the hiring manager for a coffee would possibly jeopardize their application.
In the UK it's quite common for companies to offer bonuses to staff for introducing suitable candidates in order to get recommendations. If I introduce someone who is taken on and gets through the six month probation period, I get a four figure bonus (the first figure is quite small, admittedly!). I think that's partly because it's a lot cheaper than using agencies, who typically charge a high percentage of the first year's salary.
I've been using it for a couple of days and most of my reponses to the changes have been "I can live without that" - I keep finding things that were handy but don't seem to exist any more (I say seem to, I might be wrong, I'm still exploring)
I keep hitting the left most icon on my taskbar by mistake when I want to launch an application. I'm trying the new launcher, but one feature I miss from the start menu is the ability for each application to have it's own submenu - of recently opened items, recently visited websites, or whatever. I don't see the equivalent functionality anywhere in the new interface.
I want to give it a fair shot before I go for a third party launcher, but so far my impression is that it'll do, but it's lacking features I took for granted.
You're both idiots. Pin them to the Taskbar.
You use them in the Desktop space so having to go to Metro to launch them is dumb.
I hate pinning applications to the taskbar. I want the taskbar to show me what programs are running, not what ones are available to run, and if I mix and match it's not obvious what's open and what isn't.
Because, the problems people talk about in Windows 8 are about as important to being able to drive the car as is the color of it, or where the headlight switch/knob is.
More like the indicators being in a different place - something you use far more often. I keep launching Internet Explorer by mistake because I go to hit the start menu and it isn't there - the first icon on the taskbar is there instead.
I've actually gone back to shortcuts to applications on the desktop to launch applications rather than drop out to the new start screen or clutter up the taskbar with pinned applications.
I'm also not keen on the new Metro versions of apps - take Skype for example. I want it in a window, so I can see the person I'm talking to in the top corner of the screen while looking at the document/website we're both talking about in another window. I can do that for now using the old Windows version, but for how much longer?
That's all I use it for, and as I've been on there for years I won't have to pay... yet.
If I did, I'd still use it. It works and I'm happy with it. I would, however, start making use of the other features like drive, simply on the grounds that since I'm paying for it anyway, why not? Which in turn would use more of their resources than - as you say - a couple of extra MX records on top of a standard gmail account.
In general sickness up to a few days is usually self certified - you only need the note after, what, about 5 days? I can understand it being a tighter restriction in this case though.
I agree with the attitude towards employees, and where I work it's no problem working from home if you're in that "not feeling too bad but probably highly contagious" stage of a cold.
Not sure if it's law yet, but there's a move in the UK, maybe driven by the EU, to allow you to reclaim holiday days if you're sick on your holiday time. So take a day off as vacation, but get sick and you maybe able to convert it to a sick day, and keep the holiday entitlement for some other time. To me, that one sounds overly generous and open to abuse.
I hope Firefox does thrive. It seems to be the best browser for web developers. I use several plugins to assist in debugging websites (Firebug and Firesizer for example), and the ability to view image info is also handy - Chrome, by default, does not make that easy.
It's possible that similar functionality is available for Chrome, but it's also nice to have one lean browser for real browsing, and a plug-in laden one for web development. IE I only use when I want to see what it breaks, although to be fair IE9 now does a much better job at rendering things the same way as Firefox and Chrome.
Anyway, I still find Firefox useful and hope it has a future. At this point in time, I can't see the lack of a 64bit version being a major drawback.
The marriages were often political, though, so it's not clear whether they were actually consummated.
I guess surviving childhood was hard, so those that did were genetically stronger and more likely to live a long life. These days, in the west, surviving childhood is easy, so allowing weaker adults who might not live as long.
The stats thing mentioned by the GP is one of my pet peeves, and as he points out, life expectancy of those who reach adulthood hasn't changed all that much. Hell, didn't the bible even refer to "three score years and ten" as a reasonable age? That is, when it had got past the Old Testament nonsense of living for hundreds of years!
Just not purple unless you want to incur the wrath of Cadbury.
So only those who can afford to stand the losses can afford to sue? Let's say I sue Random MegaCorp for some reason. They decide to put a dozen highly paid lawyers on it, run up tens of thousands of costs and I lose - perhaps because I can only afford one crummy guy straight out of law school, rather than down to the merits of my case. If they win, I'm bankrupt. If I win, my costs are peanuts.
I'd like to see a system whereby I can limit their costs to match mine - if I choose to pay one guy, or represent myself, they are not allowed to spend a penny more. If they want to spend more, they have to fund my side to match - it's their choice, then, but they wouldn't be able to claim those costs back.