Why would they even try to leverage them selves with weapons instead of diplomacy?
Ans: because it is an extremely effective way to acquire power and influence - in that respect it is very similar to terrorism, or other ways of fulfilling your goals through violence.
Countries (all countries, even yours and mine) do it because it works so well - until some fool doesn't think the other guy is serious and then all hell breaks loose.
Frequently the risk involved in testing for a condition, such as taking biopsies from peoples' hearts carry a measurable risk - but produce little or no actionable information.
In litigious countries (read: USA) they are more often than not carried out as a CYA exercise, rather than for the benefit of the patient. This is an area where "best practice" - meaning perform all possible diagnostics, has run wild.
All the surfing breaks, coffee breaks, ciggy breaks, comfort breaks and lunch don't leave much time to actually achieve anything. Though it's good to know that if I did have time, I'd be so much more effective.
Anyway, gotta go, it's nearly time for another break.
A combination of being careful who I give an email address to and the widespread use of disposable addresses means I hardly ever get to see any SPAM, at all.
I run my own domain and have about 130 email addresses. Usually I just create a new one for new uses (different hobbies, different interests). Every website that asks for an address gets a disposable one, rather than a "proper" address. The consequence of these small and quick precautions means that last week I saw 8 SPAM emails, from a total of all the personal email, forums and *wanted* stuff of over 600 emails. Occasionally I find a trusted address gets an unexpected and unwelcome flurry of emails - it then gets deleted and a new one set up. Friends and family addresses are sacrosanct.
I simply don't understand how or why people only ever have 1 email address and give it out unconditionally to anyone who asks for it. How can people live like that?
>quote>everything that was good about KDE, thrown it in the bin,
Well it is a hobby for the open source authors, not a job. So you can't really blame them for goofing around and doing the things they get satisfaction from, rather than taking a professional approach of requirements, design, debugging, support, documentation and optimisations.
previews and thumbnails are turned off - I was wrong when I said "out of the box" installation, as I turned these features off right after installation as it was far too slow.
It does list the number of files in sub-directories, which is not configurable through the preferences dialog (or if it is, I've missed it).
These desktops are so bloated with useless features that the choice is for the least-bad, not the best.
To give an example, Gnome's file browser takes 5 seconds on my home PC (Athlon, 2GHz, 3GB) to list a 161 entry directory. A virtualised W2K instance on the same box takes less than 1 second to list the same directory - even though it's running in a VM and has to go through SAMBA on the host to access the directory. When doing this, I took precautions to ensure no entries were cached on either instance.
Whether that's due to a mis-configuration on my part (tho' the Ubuntu installation is simply "out of the box", no tweaks) or because the browser is badly written and poorly designed, I don't know.
What I do know is that this effect is not limited to the file broswer and is a severe demotivator for using Linux - or recommending it to others.
Lose the bloat, remove 50% of the features, optimise the code, THEN talk about which desktop is best.
Start to prioritise the things that are important to you and dump the rest. Turn down requests (unless it's from the boss), Stop answering the phone and replying to email (again unless it's the boss) and focus on one thing at a time.
Oh yes, leave the coffee. it does you no good, just increases anxiety. if you can't go a day without a fix, you need help, not more caffeine.
Running VMs means having enough RAM to host them. Without this, your setup will be severely limited to one or maybe two VMs. Once you have 3GB or better look at your disk space. Assume 10 - 20GB for each VM instance and get yourself a 1TB drive. That way you'll have plenty of headroom to create new versions, take snapshots and build databases.
Forget screamingly fast video - that's not what virtualisation is about (and probably won't be supported as a virtual device, anyway). Likewise you won't need anything more than a basic audio implementation.
Given that you won't be playing games on any of your VMs, processing power will be less of an issue - just make sure you have enough grunt to get Vista loaded.
I run VirtualBox on a 2GHz/3GB Athlon and that's fine for a couple of VMs
On the one hand it lists entire countries: Finland, Japan, Romania, Taiwan and then gives separate entries to two places a few miles apart - one of which doesn't even exist on any maps. Silicon Valley is a warm, cuddly name dreamed up by the pundits in the 80's - it's not a place, any more than the Bermuda Triangle is.
Luckily, this list is merely someone's opinion and therefore not worth a damn.
The last U.R. I bought was about $4. They're commodity items so it's reasonably to have a few of them around. Compare that with a smartphone. Yes, it might ultimately be more flexible, but if you have to spend 10 seconds navigating (and making mistakes) through the menu system, compared with 1/2 second to click the third button down on the left, there's no chance that a GUI will win.
This article just doesn't understand how normal people respond to a user interface. If it's not simple and self-evident it will meet very real, and genuine, resistance - and for very valid reasons. Learn why your remote is so good - because you can see exactly what's available in one glance, not through multiple, inconsistent and poorly designed menus. Now go and make a phone (smart of otherwise) that has one button per function. It'll be bigger, but perhaps then the designers will then only include the functions people actually want.
one of the most popular science fiction shows in recent history.
I gave up on it many years ago - somewhere during season 2, having only watched it sporadically until then. In the end boredom with the plot, lack of engagement with the characters - except the cylons, I really hope they "won". a complete lack credibility with the science and finally the realisation that it didn't really have a story to tell, meant that I found better things to do. That it was popular, even in it's own mind, is a bigger criticism with the other programmes that purport to be SF, than of this rather lame, self-indulgent and overly long show.
What was it's biggest or possibly only contribution? frak
In a commercial operation, you'll need familiarity with the IDE they use, the libraries they specify (which will depend on the O/S, the type of application: finance, data-mining, games, scientific etc.), change-control, revision control, debugging tools, testing methodologies, documentation standards (ok, that one's deprecated for OSS projects),
The good thing is, that no-one will expect you to be know the exact combinations of all of these, that their particular company uses. You'll spend the first 6 months getting the hang of it all, until you become more that dead-weight to your employer.
Your best bet is to make sure you know the principles behind each of these toolsets, so you won't have a dumb expression when they come up at interview. Your biggest asset at interview, will be to have shown initiative (and not have a criminal record) and willingness to learn - rather than know all the intracacies of a particular language. That's what the "2 years experience" job ads. are for
It also gives the impression that scientists who are coerced into doing an experiment, or who live in a totalitarian regime, will get different results from those in "free" societies.
A good indicator of naive science is anthropomorphising it. Talking of H+ ions "liking" negatively charged ions, or "wanting" to bond with them.
Similarly, imbuing inanimate objects with human properties is a catchy way of persuading non-scientists (and by extension, the media) to engage, but it gives a completely wrong view of the world.
That release of linux bears as much resemblance to the stuff running today as W3.1 does to Vista. There's nothing to be gained from drawing parallels between the two, so celebrating v1.0 as the "birth" of Linux, as people understand Linux today, is bogus.
Anyhow, the first usable releases, such as the one I started on: 0.96 came out a couple of years earlier
'cept these guys are not scientists - they're 90% entertainers and 10% engineers. They don't do experiments (despite what the shows might say), they produce demonstrations where the main criterion is to have an outcome that is "camera friendly".
I can tell they don't do any science as none of their work is every repeated - they do something once, then call that the result. They usually know beforehand what the outcome will be. They never account for all the variables in a situation and almost never produce numerical answers.
While it's entertaining enough (apart from the loud, grating guy and the other one with the dumb facial hair), don't let anyone persuade you that it's what scientists do.
It mostly involves attending meetings to try and get funding for your next year, or your research students (they're the people who actually *do* the work) or that piece of equipment you want/need. To do this you have to sell your case and make it appear better, more cost-effective, likely to bring credit, than all the other scientists who are after the same money and are therefore trying to discredit your proposal.
When you're not doing that, you are desperately trying to find a new angle on old data to write a paper for publication. You need to do this in order to keep your reputation (and therefore pay and ability to get funding) hot. Once written, you'll spend more time trying to get it published somewhere, or peer-reviewing some other guy's paper.
Almost never will you get into the lab, and even when you do most of your time will be spent setting up, calibrating, tweaking, debugging and modifying your equipment. The chances of you making a discovery that will be named after you are infinitesimally small, as all the good ones are already taken. Even then, you'll probably be dead before anyone recognises the contribution you have made - or the true value of your work.
You best bet, if you want your children to become successful scientists, is to teach them how to stay awake in meetings, diss their colleagues while appearing to be friendly, engaging in office politics, learning to recognise who to scmooze and kiss up to and marketing old ideas with a new spin - every year for the rest of their careers.
Find the "clock speed" that the game needs to win against a particular person say, 50% of the time. Call that the gamers "clock speed" or gaming intelligence.
Once you have that, you could start giving games meaningful measures of difficulty: such as "This game is suited to players with a GI greater than 80"
It would then be interesting, if not useful, to see how people's G.I. varied, and if their GIs correlated (or negatively correlated) to any other metric, such as SAT scores. Even better, you could determine people's personalities by how their GI changed with different types of game.
You never know, this might put the social "sciences" on the brink of coming up with objective, measurable and relevant data
All these things do is detect agitation, arousal, stress, illness, ambient climate, backache, annoyance and occasionally lies.
Any of these external factors could be caused by any number of reasons - most of which are present in spades at an airport. Maybe the first place to use them would be on the contractors who will make the money from selling this turkey to the government:
The UK has a policy of not hypothecating it's tax revenue. In laymans terms that means that all the tax that's collected goes into one big pot. It is then down to the treasury to allocate monies to various government departments as it sees fit. (If you think this means the treasury actually controls the money and therefore the country, you'd be right).
The result is there's no clear distinction, possible between a stream of governemnt income and an expenditure. If they wanted to spend more on fighting knife crime, they could do it now - it's just that something else would take a cut (pardon the pun). Likewise, the extra revenue from videogame taxes could just as well be spent financing another illegal war somewhere.
It's cold up there and a chunk of ice colliding with a satellite will do just as much damage as a chunk of other debris.
Why wasn't it blindingly obvious to the proposer of this scheme that you can't clear space debris by sending more up there?
(it sounds like the sort of daft logic that unscrupulous financiers use to persuade the gullible that you can clear your debts by consolidating your loans - duh!)
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Why would they even try to leverage them selves with weapons instead of diplomacy?
Ans: because it is an extremely effective way to acquire power and influence - in that respect it is very similar to terrorism, or other ways of fulfilling your goals through violence.
Countries (all countries, even yours and mine) do it because it works so well - until some fool doesn't think the other guy is serious and then all hell breaks loose.
In litigious countries (read: USA) they are more often than not carried out as a CYA exercise, rather than for the benefit of the patient. This is an area where "best practice" - meaning perform all possible diagnostics, has run wild.
Anyway, gotta go, it's nearly time for another break.
I run my own domain and have about 130 email addresses. Usually I just create a new one for new uses (different hobbies, different interests). Every website that asks for an address gets a disposable one, rather than a "proper" address. The consequence of these small and quick precautions means that last week I saw 8 SPAM emails, from a total of all the personal email, forums and *wanted* stuff of over 600 emails. Occasionally I find a trusted address gets an unexpected and unwelcome flurry of emails - it then gets deleted and a new one set up. Friends and family addresses are sacrosanct.
I simply don't understand how or why people only ever have 1 email address and give it out unconditionally to anyone who asks for it. How can people live like that?
Well it is a hobby for the open source authors, not a job. So you can't really blame them for goofing around and doing the things they get satisfaction from, rather than taking a professional approach of requirements, design, debugging, support, documentation and optimisations.
Is Gnome providing more stastics, previews, etc?
previews and thumbnails are turned off - I was wrong when I said "out of the box" installation, as I turned these features off right after installation as it was far too slow. It does list the number of files in sub-directories, which is not configurable through the preferences dialog (or if it is, I've missed it).
To give an example, Gnome's file browser takes 5 seconds on my home PC (Athlon, 2GHz, 3GB) to list a 161 entry directory. A virtualised W2K instance on the same box takes less than 1 second to list the same directory - even though it's running in a VM and has to go through SAMBA on the host to access the directory. When doing this, I took precautions to ensure no entries were cached on either instance.
Whether that's due to a mis-configuration on my part (tho' the Ubuntu installation is simply "out of the box", no tweaks) or because the browser is badly written and poorly designed, I don't know.
What I do know is that this effect is not limited to the file broswer and is a severe demotivator for using Linux - or recommending it to others.
Lose the bloat, remove 50% of the features, optimise the code, THEN talk about which desktop is best.
Oh yes, leave the coffee. it does you no good, just increases anxiety. if you can't go a day without a fix, you need help, not more caffeine.
Forget screamingly fast video - that's not what virtualisation is about (and probably won't be supported as a virtual device, anyway). Likewise you won't need anything more than a basic audio implementation.
Given that you won't be playing games on any of your VMs, processing power will be less of an issue - just make sure you have enough grunt to get Vista loaded.
I run VirtualBox on a 2GHz/3GB Athlon and that's fine for a couple of VMs
Luckily, this list is merely someone's opinion and therefore not worth a damn.
This article just doesn't understand how normal people respond to a user interface. If it's not simple and self-evident it will meet very real, and genuine, resistance - and for very valid reasons. Learn why your remote is so good - because you can see exactly what's available in one glance, not through multiple, inconsistent and poorly designed menus. Now go and make a phone (smart of otherwise) that has one button per function. It'll be bigger, but perhaps then the designers will then only include the functions people actually want.
one of the most popular science fiction shows in recent history.
I gave up on it many years ago - somewhere during season 2, having only watched it sporadically until then. In the end boredom with the plot, lack of engagement with the characters - except the cylons, I really hope they "won". a complete lack credibility with the science and finally the realisation that it didn't really have a story to tell, meant that I found better things to do. That it was popular, even in it's own mind, is a bigger criticism with the other programmes that purport to be SF, than of this rather lame, self-indulgent and overly long show.
What was it's biggest or possibly only contribution? frak
The good thing is, that no-one will expect you to be know the exact combinations of all of these, that their particular company uses. You'll spend the first 6 months getting the hang of it all, until you become more that dead-weight to your employer.
Your best bet is to make sure you know the principles behind each of these toolsets, so you won't have a dumb expression when they come up at interview. Your biggest asset at interview, will be to have shown initiative (and not have a criminal record) and willingness to learn - rather than know all the intracacies of a particular language. That's what the "2 years experience" job ads. are for
Now that would be something worth measuring.
Similarly, imbuing inanimate objects with human properties is a catchy way of persuading non-scientists (and by extension, the media) to engage, but it gives a completely wrong view of the world.
Bad science, don't do it again.
just some superficial eye-candy to suck the processor cycles away from useful work
Anyhow, the first usable releases, such as the one I started on: 0.96 came out a couple of years earlier
I can tell they don't do any science as none of their work is every repeated - they do something once, then call that the result. They usually know beforehand what the outcome will be. They never account for all the variables in a situation and almost never produce numerical answers.
While it's entertaining enough (apart from the loud, grating guy and the other one with the dumb facial hair), don't let anyone persuade you that it's what scientists do.
But don't show them the success rate for graduates applying for science jobs
When you're not doing that, you are desperately trying to find a new angle on old data to write a paper for publication. You need to do this in order to keep your reputation (and therefore pay and ability to get funding) hot. Once written, you'll spend more time trying to get it published somewhere, or peer-reviewing some other guy's paper.
Almost never will you get into the lab, and even when you do most of your time will be spent setting up, calibrating, tweaking, debugging and modifying your equipment. The chances of you making a discovery that will be named after you are infinitesimally small, as all the good ones are already taken. Even then, you'll probably be dead before anyone recognises the contribution you have made - or the true value of your work.
You best bet, if you want your children to become successful scientists, is to teach them how to stay awake in meetings, diss their colleagues while appearing to be friendly, engaging in office politics, learning to recognise who to scmooze and kiss up to and marketing old ideas with a new spin - every year for the rest of their careers.
Once you have that, you could start giving games meaningful measures of difficulty: such as "This game is suited to players with a GI greater than 80"
It would then be interesting, if not useful, to see how people's G.I. varied, and if their GIs correlated (or negatively correlated) to any other metric, such as SAT scores. Even better, you could determine people's personalities by how their GI changed with different types of game.
You never know, this might put the social "sciences" on the brink of coming up with objective, measurable and relevant data
is to get bats into space, so they can colonise the universe.
Any of these external factors could be caused by any number of reasons - most of which are present in spades at an airport. Maybe the first place to use them would be on the contractors who will make the money from selling this turkey to the government:
Question: "does it work?"
Detected answer: "no of course not"
The result is there's no clear distinction, possible between a stream of governemnt income and an expenditure. If they wanted to spend more on fighting knife crime, they could do it now - it's just that something else would take a cut (pardon the pun). Likewise, the extra revenue from videogame taxes could just as well be spent financing another illegal war somewhere.
Why wasn't it blindingly obvious to the proposer of this scheme that you can't clear space debris by sending more up there?
(it sounds like the sort of daft logic that unscrupulous financiers use to persuade the gullible that you can clear your debts by consolidating your loans - duh!)