I'm not sure why though. The new Civic is very good to drive - the Type-R has one of the best engines about, the 2.2CDTi is one of the very best in sensible engines and all models have good handling. The S2000 is a scream and one of the cars that always tops owner satisfaction charts, the NSX was a proper supercar. None of it ever seems to have improved their image though.
Not true throughout Europe. In the UK tax is the same on both, but the increased efficiency of a diesel engine more than makes up for the higher price of diesel.
It's very difficult to do buying new, and part of the reason I've never actually bought a brand new car. When I got my last car, I made trips to a couple of dealers, and sorted out the details of the car and the options and the price.
Then when it came down to payment, they weren't willing to do the offer they had been talking about, other than if I took out their finance or hire purchase deals. Turns out a lot of the £1000 off, £1000 cashback deals are only available if you're paying them a few thousand in interest to make up for it.
By the time I'd figured out the real cost, I was left wondering why a new car is worth twice as much as one three years old. And I decided that to me it just wasn't.
What a load of rubbish. Lots of banks are struggling to improve their liquidity at the moment - deposits from general banking customers are a good way to acheieve this. My standard savings account is paying 5.3% at the moment, and I've got money in a 6-month fixed rate bond offered at 6.76%. I had thought that was a good rate but a couple months later other banks were offering 10% to try and entice savers.
You can prove the thermometer's superiority in your sleep no doubt. It's superior - everyone knows it, why bother continuing that bit of the argument? But we don't have thermometer records from thousands of years ago.
What you will find is people looking at recent coral growth and seeing the effects of recorded conditions over that time period (when we did have thermometers!). You'll find people testing the effects of controlled atmospheric conditions on ice cores. You can then start to use these results to extrapolate back to older specimens and deduce the conditions that would have caused the results.
And there is decades of literature: scientists find matching results from different sources and strengthen both sets of data. Someone finds another data set that disagrees. People write papers about the disagreement. Other people find new data that can be gleamed from new analysis techniques. Yet more people see how another result can explain why this result doesn't quite match. Bit by bit the results converge on a more accurate picture of what has happened.
Growth rate of coral is one data point. You can also look at ice cores, tree rings, stalactites, isotope analysis of rocks. And sediments can refer to all kinds of interesting information, both organic and inorganic in nature.
You might be able to cast doubt on coral growth rings, but when everything is pointing in the same direction, you've got to pay attention to the most obvious reason for that.
It's an interesting parallel with anything where you base a conclusion off a simulation. But with climate science there are very significant differences.
With our own planet we have reasonable records of how conditions changed in the past and the results of that. We've got extremely detailed recording of the current situation and the recent past. We've got firmly established science showing why those changes would cause those results. The world's climate is a little chaotic and the simulations match that state of affairs.
When modelling planetary discs, we're nowhere near as sure of the physics. We can only get decent observations of our own solar system, and there isn't a disc of dust to observe. Even the best telescopes can barely see the discs of dust around stars. We could barely detect our own solar system around another star, let alone watch it form.
I know a lot of countries don't really seem to have 'tabloid' news in the same style as the UK. It's bascially news stuffed full of gossip, opinion and humour. Think Fox news, but more extreme and without the pretence of neutrality.
The Inquirer is not and never has been fair and balanced. It's the only IT tabloid news I know of though. The Register has moved (a little) upmarket since Mike Magee et al left for the Inquirer.
Oh come on - they're asked to show a dream PC and they've come up with a mini and modern Cray-2 - fits the bill perfectly. It's a concept PC - having some interesting ideas, not making people think yeah that's practical. I don't want a BMW with a flexible rubber 'skin' but I think it's a good concept.
And the speech is just a English accent - a real one! (many British actors on American TV have to learn the English accent generally used on TV). I have similar difficulty understanding a Texas drawl.
I have written a Sudoku solver, and it is very rare that this solution ever needs to be employed. I didn't find any in puzzle books or newspapers that required guesses. Although a quick google search turned up a few nasties.
The guess and check algorithm you are talking about is definitely pretty boring, but also takes a lot of CPU time. A decent algorithm that can solve most Sudokus by logic is a lot more interesting.
It's very rare that I have found the need to guess in a Sudoku. I've never seen a printed one in a newspaper where that was necessary - even the 'diabolical' ones.
Certainly I've made mistakes on some, and a couple of times I've run out of ideas and had to make a guess, but on running it through my own program, it's got the solution without taking guesses.
There is a good online solver at http://www.sudokusolver.co.uk/ that explains how it solves any Sudoku that you enter. This has a couple more methods to try than my own solver program, but a lot less than some. I've seen all kinds of complicated algorithms, but I think many of them are never required if you've properly applied the simpler ones.
That's an excellent point, which I've not seen made elsewhere.
I work in a small company of about 60, with 1 proper IT person. We have Windows, Linux (various distros), AIX, Solaris, HPUX, Tru-64, OpenVMS and even older stuff. But 50 of my colleagues are full-time software engineers so can sort out the problems themselves. The sole IT person handles stuff mainly for the admin staff and is not overworked even at the 60:1 ratio.
I have done some management reports in Excel that set up custom menus etc. to look at first glance like a full application instead of just an Excel spreadsheet. It used VBA macros to turn off a whole load of the standard menu and status bars and generally made a bit of a mess of Excel if you opened the document and then killed the Excel process.
For one customer, this caused enormous problems, because a user kept killing the process as their standard way of closing the reports. They kept calling their IT team to fix Excel. We were never called about it until one day an IT person realised the reports were Excel in disguise. I just told them to close the reports normally and Excel is automatically switched back to it's usual state.
I do second-line support for some of our customers, and the worst case is when you have people who aren't really computer users, but have to use a PC as part of their job. I've seen ratios of workers to informal IT support staff (classed generally as the operations team) down as low as 3:1. This is generally when we have brought in a computerised system to replace a manual one, and the ratio doesn't stay that bad, but I have also seen approximately the submitters 7:1 ratio being required.
They changed something pretty serious with the networking stack in Vista, and it seems to have had pretty serious consequences for a lot of people. I have had a bunch of problems with audio and networking on my home desktop PC. When SP1 didn't fix it, I went back to XP.
I very temporarily used Vista on my HTPC, but it wasn't able to do a decent job of streaming videos over the network. They stuttered horribly, but oculd play fine from the hard disc. I got rid of Vista after one day on that machine.
I've just found Vista doesn't quite work, and don't use it at all anymore.
I'm not entirely sure if you're being serious here but I've also had this idea in the past. A lot of cities have a tram network around the centre that shares ground with normal roads.
It doesn't seem like an insurmountable challenge to be able to join and leave a tram network. I'd love the 22 miles of motorway on my way to work to be automated and high speed.
I'm not sure what would happen to fuel economy at the high speeds though. If everything is computer controlled, could you drive the cars close enough to effectively slipstream everyone?
A bit of a late reply now, but I guess the worry is that people won't move away from the coast. For instance, New York is at sea level. Along with a lot of the major cities in just about every country in the world.
No one will abandon them - it would be incredibly costly to just rebuild New York a few metres up of where it is. Bigger and better flood defences will be built instead. But that is also going to be incredibly costly, and make half the world's cities vulnerable to a disaster such as happened in New Orleans.
The science says definitively it is real and it is a problem - the melting icecaps will raise sea levels and flood a lot of coastal cities.
An interesting question though is whether it's a problem for us or the planet. Certainly the planet has been a lot warmer than it is now and the world didn't end. It's really our fixed infrastructure that will suffer if sea levels change.
Actually they are excellent at one area of customer service that I think really matters. Their flights are almost always on time. If you're not there 40 minutes before departure, you're not going to be on the plane.
I've been on one of their flights where we boarded at the allotted 40 minutes before departure, taxied off to the runway 20 minutes before departure and were in the air 5 minutes early.
With other airlines I've got away with checking in a bit too late, and once I think delayed a plane by a few minutes - I was last on and they closed the door and taxied away as soon as I boarded. Don't think that would happen with Ryanair, and actually I think that's a good thing.
Some of this is very true, I was explicitly choosing an extreme example to make a point.
However Vim IS extremely easy to use as measured by how long it takes me to do stuff. Occasionally you end up typing stuff like qqyypCtrl-Aq28@q in a very natural way and then sit back and realise that's 30 lines of repetitive code written in an instant.
With Eclipse you'd have been sat there hitting the paste key a lot of times and then going back through incrementing numbers and it would have taken a minute or so.
But equally, it's changing back with Vista's bootup scripts being some funny binary stuff instead of a text boot.ini file.
IIS7 looks to have reasonable usability when I have used it at work (for ASP pages). Unfortunately for MS I'm too used to the config files for Apache and I've found that XAMPP provides a great vanilla installation for the Apache / MySQL / PHP stack
I'm not sure I agree with this, but there is a definite confusion in most people's minds between easy to use and easy to learn.
Vim is incredibly difficult to learn, but is actually very easy to use if you can learn it. A lot of programmers using an editor for extended amounts of time have found this to be the case.
The problem with Microsoft stuff is that it's pretty easy to pick up and use. But once you've learnt how to do it, you often want command line tools to start scripting and batching work. Generally with MS, and to a lesser extent Apple, you find you can't do that.
Excel is the only Microsoft software I've used where I found it did everything I wanted as a power user. I think it's one of the very few examples of something both easy to learn and easy to use.
I think the statistic is true in England, as Scotland is very strongly pro-Labour. But that is a little beside the point anyway.
The Labour vote was only 35% of the vote, while the Conservatives got 32%. A vote that close should have given us a government that reflected the balance of opinion in the country.
Instead, the system here returned them to power with an absolute majority - 356 of 646 seats, or 55%. Additionally, the majority of MPs are badgered into following the party line. Which has meant the leaders of the government can continue forcing just about whatever they want through parliament and not much can be done about it.
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I'm not sure why though. The new Civic is very good to drive - the Type-R has one of the best engines about, the 2.2CDTi is one of the very best in sensible engines and all models have good handling. The S2000 is a scream and one of the cars that always tops owner satisfaction charts, the NSX was a proper supercar. None of it ever seems to have improved their image though.
Not true throughout Europe. In the UK tax is the same on both, but the increased efficiency of a diesel engine more than makes up for the higher price of diesel.
It's very difficult to do buying new, and part of the reason I've never actually bought a brand new car. When I got my last car, I made trips to a couple of dealers, and sorted out the details of the car and the options and the price.
Then when it came down to payment, they weren't willing to do the offer they had been talking about, other than if I took out their finance or hire purchase deals. Turns out a lot of the £1000 off, £1000 cashback deals are only available if you're paying them a few thousand in interest to make up for it.
By the time I'd figured out the real cost, I was left wondering why a new car is worth twice as much as one three years old. And I decided that to me it just wasn't.
What a load of rubbish. Lots of banks are struggling to improve their liquidity at the moment - deposits from general banking customers are a good way to acheieve this. My standard savings account is paying 5.3% at the moment, and I've got money in a 6-month fixed rate bond offered at 6.76%. I had thought that was a good rate but a couple months later other banks were offering 10% to try and entice savers.
Not in the UK though. The normal Civics over here look great IMHO, but unfortunately the hybrid is the US design Civic, which unfortunately is fugly.
You can prove the thermometer's superiority in your sleep no doubt. It's superior - everyone knows it, why bother continuing that bit of the argument? But we don't have thermometer records from thousands of years ago.
What you will find is people looking at recent coral growth and seeing the effects of recorded conditions over that time period (when we did have thermometers!). You'll find people testing the effects of controlled atmospheric conditions on ice cores. You can then start to use these results to extrapolate back to older specimens and deduce the conditions that would have caused the results.
And there is decades of literature: scientists find matching results from different sources and strengthen both sets of data. Someone finds another data set that disagrees. People write papers about the disagreement. Other people find new data that can be gleamed from new analysis techniques. Yet more people see how another result can explain why this result doesn't quite match. Bit by bit the results converge on a more accurate picture of what has happened.
Growth rate of coral is one data point. You can also look at ice cores, tree rings, stalactites, isotope analysis of rocks. And sediments can refer to all kinds of interesting information, both organic and inorganic in nature.
You might be able to cast doubt on coral growth rings, but when everything is pointing in the same direction, you've got to pay attention to the most obvious reason for that.
It's an interesting parallel with anything where you base a conclusion off a simulation. But with climate science there are very significant differences.
With our own planet we have reasonable records of how conditions changed in the past and the results of that. We've got extremely detailed recording of the current situation and the recent past. We've got firmly established science showing why those changes would cause those results. The world's climate is a little chaotic and the simulations match that state of affairs.
When modelling planetary discs, we're nowhere near as sure of the physics. We can only get decent observations of our own solar system, and there isn't a disc of dust to observe. Even the best telescopes can barely see the discs of dust around stars. We could barely detect our own solar system around another star, let alone watch it form.
I know a lot of countries don't really seem to have 'tabloid' news in the same style as the UK. It's bascially news stuffed full of gossip, opinion and humour. Think Fox news, but more extreme and without the pretence of neutrality.
The Inquirer is not and never has been fair and balanced. It's the only IT tabloid news I know of though. The Register has moved (a little) upmarket since Mike Magee et al left for the Inquirer.
Oh come on - they're asked to show a dream PC and they've come up with a mini and modern Cray-2 - fits the bill perfectly. It's a concept PC - having some interesting ideas, not making people think yeah that's practical. I don't want a BMW with a flexible rubber 'skin' but I think it's a good concept.
And the speech is just a English accent - a real one! (many British actors on American TV have to learn the English accent generally used on TV). I have similar difficulty understanding a Texas drawl.
Yeah but at least it would be in a few pieces after the explosion when the coolant was topped up with tap water.
I have written a Sudoku solver, and it is very rare that this solution ever needs to be employed. I didn't find any in puzzle books or newspapers that required guesses. Although a quick google search turned up a few nasties.
The guess and check algorithm you are talking about is definitely pretty boring, but also takes a lot of CPU time. A decent algorithm that can solve most Sudokus by logic is a lot more interesting.
It's very rare that I have found the need to guess in a Sudoku. I've never seen a printed one in a newspaper where that was necessary - even the 'diabolical' ones.
Certainly I've made mistakes on some, and a couple of times I've run out of ideas and had to make a guess, but on running it through my own program, it's got the solution without taking guesses.
There is a good online solver at http://www.sudokusolver.co.uk/ that explains how it solves any Sudoku that you enter. This has a couple more methods to try than my own solver program, but a lot less than some. I've seen all kinds of complicated algorithms, but I think many of them are never required if you've properly applied the simpler ones.
For a real challenge, this page has a number of grids that couldn't be solved using a proper algorithm (other than guess and check):
http://www.sudokusolver.co.uk/grids_nologic.html
That's an excellent point, which I've not seen made elsewhere.
I work in a small company of about 60, with 1 proper IT person. We have Windows, Linux (various distros), AIX, Solaris, HPUX, Tru-64, OpenVMS and even older stuff. But 50 of my colleagues are full-time software engineers so can sort out the problems themselves. The sole IT person handles stuff mainly for the admin staff and is not overworked even at the 60:1 ratio.
I have done some management reports in Excel that set up custom menus etc. to look at first glance like a full application instead of just an Excel spreadsheet. It used VBA macros to turn off a whole load of the standard menu and status bars and generally made a bit of a mess of Excel if you opened the document and then killed the Excel process.
For one customer, this caused enormous problems, because a user kept killing the process as their standard way of closing the reports. They kept calling their IT team to fix Excel. We were never called about it until one day an IT person realised the reports were Excel in disguise. I just told them to close the reports normally and Excel is automatically switched back to it's usual state.
I do second-line support for some of our customers, and the worst case is when you have people who aren't really computer users, but have to use a PC as part of their job. I've seen ratios of workers to informal IT support staff (classed generally as the operations team) down as low as 3:1. This is generally when we have brought in a computerised system to replace a manual one, and the ratio doesn't stay that bad, but I have also seen approximately the submitters 7:1 ratio being required.
They changed something pretty serious with the networking stack in Vista, and it seems to have had pretty serious consequences for a lot of people. I have had a bunch of problems with audio and networking on my home desktop PC. When SP1 didn't fix it, I went back to XP.
I very temporarily used Vista on my HTPC, but it wasn't able to do a decent job of streaming videos over the network. They stuttered horribly, but oculd play fine from the hard disc. I got rid of Vista after one day on that machine.
I've just found Vista doesn't quite work, and don't use it at all anymore.
I'm not entirely sure if you're being serious here but I've also had this idea in the past. A lot of cities have a tram network around the centre that shares ground with normal roads.
It doesn't seem like an insurmountable challenge to be able to join and leave a tram network. I'd love the 22 miles of motorway on my way to work to be automated and high speed.
I'm not sure what would happen to fuel economy at the high speeds though. If everything is computer controlled, could you drive the cars close enough to effectively slipstream everyone?
A bit of a late reply now, but I guess the worry is that people won't move away from the coast. For instance, New York is at sea level. Along with a lot of the major cities in just about every country in the world.
No one will abandon them - it would be incredibly costly to just rebuild New York a few metres up of where it is. Bigger and better flood defences will be built instead. But that is also going to be incredibly costly, and make half the world's cities vulnerable to a disaster such as happened in New Orleans.
The science says definitively it is real and it is a problem - the melting icecaps will raise sea levels and flood a lot of coastal cities.
An interesting question though is whether it's a problem for us or the planet. Certainly the planet has been a lot warmer than it is now and the world didn't end. It's really our fixed infrastructure that will suffer if sea levels change.
That's still a profit, which is more than can be said for many airlines.
Actually they are excellent at one area of customer service that I think really matters. Their flights are almost always on time. If you're not there 40 minutes before departure, you're not going to be on the plane.
I've been on one of their flights where we boarded at the allotted 40 minutes before departure, taxied off to the runway 20 minutes before departure and were in the air 5 minutes early.
With other airlines I've got away with checking in a bit too late, and once I think delayed a plane by a few minutes - I was last on and they closed the door and taxied away as soon as I boarded. Don't think that would happen with Ryanair, and actually I think that's a good thing.
Some of this is very true, I was explicitly choosing an extreme example to make a point.
However Vim IS extremely easy to use as measured by how long it takes me to do stuff. Occasionally you end up typing stuff like qqyypCtrl-Aq28@q in a very natural way and then sit back and realise that's 30 lines of repetitive code written in an instant.
With Eclipse you'd have been sat there hitting the paste key a lot of times and then going back through incrementing numbers and it would have taken a minute or so.
But equally, it's changing back with Vista's bootup scripts being some funny binary stuff instead of a text boot.ini file.
IIS7 looks to have reasonable usability when I have used it at work (for ASP pages). Unfortunately for MS I'm too used to the config files for Apache and I've found that XAMPP provides a great vanilla installation for the Apache / MySQL / PHP stack
I'm not sure I agree with this, but there is a definite confusion in most people's minds between easy to use and easy to learn.
Vim is incredibly difficult to learn, but is actually very easy to use if you can learn it. A lot of programmers using an editor for extended amounts of time have found this to be the case.
The problem with Microsoft stuff is that it's pretty easy to pick up and use. But once you've learnt how to do it, you often want command line tools to start scripting and batching work. Generally with MS, and to a lesser extent Apple, you find you can't do that.
Excel is the only Microsoft software I've used where I found it did everything I wanted as a power user. I think it's one of the very few examples of something both easy to learn and easy to use.
Right on the front page right now is another article where Sprint's early termination fees have been ruled illegal.
I think the statistic is true in England, as Scotland is very strongly pro-Labour. But that is a little beside the point anyway.
The Labour vote was only 35% of the vote, while the Conservatives got 32%. A vote that close should have given us a government that reflected the balance of opinion in the country.
Instead, the system here returned them to power with an absolute majority - 356 of 646 seats, or 55%. Additionally, the majority of MPs are badgered into following the party line. Which has meant the leaders of the government can continue forcing just about whatever they want through parliament and not much can be done about it.