Everybody that knows his history agrees that you have to skip every second release of Windows. Windows 8 is not going to do much, but I don't really think MS is expecting it to. It is just an experiment to see how the home users will like it. If the home users like the new interface, and Windows 9 comes with Metro while MS drops support for Windows 7, then we can talk about how big a bet the new version of Windows is. As enterprises still haven't recovered the costs from moving to Windows 7 they will definitely not move to something new (even if the exact same interface is in place) as long as tech-support is offered. MS definitely knows this.
And, in my workplace, nobody likes the idea of an app-store either. Some people wanted to get a company iPad to show off at exhibitions (practically just to show potential partners our company's PR-presentation) and had to go through a lot of hassle in order be allowed to buy one. Our IT's problem was that the app-store opens up many security holes that can be used to steal confidential information (I don't know how this should work, but that is what they said). So if Win 8 comes with similar app-store "features" then that will just add to the reasons (or the excuses) for not upgrading.
Why do you think that a tablet/ebook-reader will be better than old-fashioned paper books? Especially if you don't travel much, I don't see any reason for having such a gadget (other, of course, than the joy of having a gadget). I also don't travel much (although definitely more than a lot of people) so I never had to carry more than one small paperback around to keep me company in the plane or the train (and I don't have to worry about it being charged, stolen, dropped down, sat on, having liquids spilled on it, etc).
Gadgets are good, but none is perfect in my opinion (paper books are also not perfect, by the way). I don't think that buying a gadget will somehow make you read more. Reading appetite comes from content not format. I have read great books in both paper and electronic form (even using a netbook, which is definitely not a good option). I have also dropped reading crappy books in both formats as well.
So the question should be: "I want to read more, What should I read?". If you insist on going electronic, as others pointed out above, the choice between a tablet and an ebook-reader can be better made based on what kind of books you will be reading (E-ink for black text on white background, i.e. novels, and tablet for graphic-rich colored books).
On a more serious tone, and as others pointed out above, you should have provided us with more clues. Relocating is an issue with lots of variables that vary strongly in each case. Having said that, all tips that one can give you can only be vague/anecdotal at best. Here are mine: 1. I am Greek working in Germany for 7 years now. Whether you can feel safe economically here strongly depends on who you work for. I work for a large chemical company (>15.000 employes worldwide) and can't complain. However, we now hire only if we explicitly need to fill a vacant place. 2. My Greek family and friends from my school/university years are all over the globe: Germany, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Brazil, UK. Those that are still in Greece plan to go away. However, this should come as no surprise. Greeks always had the tendency to migrate (also for no apparent reason) and this can only be enhanced by an economic crisis. 3. Strangely, some friends that were in USA came back (before the crisis broke out). Personal reasons also came into play, but it seemed that the conditions in the USA were not overwhelmingly good so as to encourage their stay. 4. In Australia you first need to get a well paying job in order to qualify for a visa. You can't go there looking for a job as many would imagine. This is likely to be valid for other countries as well.
Because often a BIOS tweak is needed to boot from the DVD. Either because the boot order needs to be changed, or because some safety setting needs to be turned off to allow booting from anything other than the OS partition. Many users would be overwhelmed by a task like this. Plus the fact that playing a game would mean having to reboot, which is a major pain in the ass.
he would have had Seldon (in yet another prequel) speak of the Second Empire as a strange attractor
For the record, a prequel to the story as it stands would have to be before the "Prelude to Foundation". At that time, Seldon didn't even know that the First Empire was dying, so the Second Empire cannot even get mentioned.
I don't know what the frak is happening to software these days but it's making me take a hard look at whether it's worth dealing with the technical issues of linux.
Heck, it it gets any worse, I'll start learning how to write hardware drivers.
automatic table of contents, templates for cover pages
Yawn. LaTeX. Plus, every humble ASCII-editor has spell-checking features. Except notepad.
dynamically-created diagrams
You mean like, dynamically created while the Fortran simulation runs in the background?
theme-based formatting when I paste in content from other sources.
You mean like when I press ctrl+V and freak out on the broken formatting that gets pasted together with my text? And like when I have to paste the text to an ASCII-editor to get rid of the formatting metadata and then ctrl+X/ctrl+V back to Word/Outlook to just paste some freakin' text?
I like that as a programmer I can use VBA to further extend the apps whenever I need to with a little bit of code hunting.
Ah, yes. I always rejoice when I see my VBA code broken after an Office update. I haven't touched that sluggish pile of crap called VBA for years. One of my students did and regretted within the week.
And an intermission! Here are the pros: 1. You can go to the toilet 2. You can comment on the film with your buddies, which is a no-no during the play. 3. You can go to the lobby and get yourself a treat (pun intended) 4. You can stretch your legs if the seats are crappy/you have a bad back etc. 5. This is a matter of personal taste: I liked how some directors planned the film's layout in order to accommodate an intermission. Stanley Kubrick pops to mind. Here are the cons: 1. You get to hear crappy intermission music for 10 minutes.
If your astronauts bite the dust, so does your mission. If you start saving on safety measures and something goes wrong, it will probably mean that you will also lose the transport vehicle along with all the equipment that the astronauts were supposed to use/deploy on their mission. Killing the astronauts is merely a corollary, albeit a tragic one. If you rig everything up so that the mission can go on in case of e.g. just a life-support equipment malfunction, then you would surely be on the cheaper side if you sent an unmanned mission in the first place.
Besides, I can surely imagine that the life of an astronaut is worth a lot of money, even if we neglect the value of human life per se. The life of an astronaut on the ground is worth, I would say, as much as his education and training, which is probably the most expensive a human being can receive in our culture. The life of an astronaut in space is all that, plus every dollar spent to manufacture every bit of equipment that he/she is carrying with him/her, because if he/she dies during the mission all that will just be a pile of junk in space. To that you may also want to add the cost of the next mission that will be sent to do what the first one didn't manage. And if you are still so stubborn and choose the cheapo life-support system to save a few bucks (compared to the total cost), you will have to factor in the cost of the next mission, and the next, and the next... In the end all that matters is "we spent X billion $ to manage Y". The more missions you spend on trying, the higher X will be.
In another tone, I don't really understand why it "doesn't count" to send unmanned missions in our stead. To the people that say that "we haven't been on mars", I just reply, "I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords".
I totally agree. When everyone on earth suddenly decides to take a swim all at the same time, the sea level will rise and drown us all! This wasn't a problem 2000 years ago, due to the smaller population.
You are right in every aspect, but you also have to factor in that this is was merely a student project. It serves extraordinary well as proof of concept. Now someone (perhaps MS?) needs to focus on it and improve it by making it able to translate the actual sign language gestures. If fingerspelling is possible, the jump to sign language should be not that hard.
Nobody said that Wikipedia is the ultimate source of information. But it has become a pretty damn good starting point, especially when compared to other encyclopedias. "Authoritative" sources are rarely encyclopedic. When the information you need becomes more specific, then you start looking in e.g. peer reviewed journals etc.
Yet the experts neglected putting up pictures showing e.g. how this material actually looks like, although, I am sure, their hard drives must be full of data. And I'm totally not interested in the soccer ball structure, this is the first thing you will see anywhere (just make a Google image-search). The Wikipedia article promptly displays a picture of C60 in crystalline form, a picture of C60 in solution and a SEM picture of fullerite. All pictures I can use in my own works, provided that I follow the instructions of their very permissive licenses. And if I want to be scientific about it, I can always follow the pictures back to the source and cite that directly. And don't even get me started on the Wikipedia article on "Buckminsterfullerene" which offers even more data, including CAS number, and material properties in the "infobox" that has its own citations (a lot of which are also found in my own bookmarks anyway). I'll take rich, traceable information over the dry words of some expert any day of the week.
Sorry, my post is slightly off-topic, but I found this remarkably interesting.
Britannica: Blunt text, almost no pictures, broken into 5 pages, the last two of which are junk. Surrounded by links that claim to be "relevant" (the 3 links on some dudes that are probably working on the topic are, I would say, quite irrelevant if someone wants to learn more on fullerenes and the ones on "carbon" and "cluster" are way too elementary to be of any use) and massive header/footer with yet more junk links. No citations in the article, the "Bibliography" section only lets you submit a publication for consideration without providing any information on what has already been considered and their "Citations" section is about how to cite their own article!
The Wikipedia article on the other hand, is on a single page, with lots of pictures, one of which is animated. There is a far more granular Table of Contents than in Britannica, with a discreet pane on "Nanomaterials" high up (offering elementary knowledge, even a "in popular culture" link) and a footer on "Allotropes of carbon" (offering more in-depth information). Translations in 30+ languages are to be found on the left. And there are 58 citations, a discussion page, 5 "further reading" links that are actually relevant and 10 or so external links, which can be directly translated into traffic that Wikipedia is generously streaming to 3rd party cites.
I have taken Wikipedia for granted for so long. I am SO donating next time.
how did you do your work on a 32 bit win xp machine but now need a 64 bit os?
I didn't. I used a 32bit XP box for Office-work and internet browsing and I logged in to a 64bit SUSE sever via PuTTY for doing serious work. But then I bought a 6-core desktop computer with 24 GB RAM and, of course, I just couldn't let the IT people just slap their 32bit Win7 image on it. It would just beat the purpose of having such a machine.
The company that I work for (non-IT) just decided to upgrade from WinXP to Win7, but they are still sticking with 32bit! What an insane decision. This means the lease of more than 10.000 brand new computers that will stubbornly cling to the past by refusing to make the step to 64bit. I had to raise my voice significantly, explicitly stating that I will not be able to do my work unless I get a 64bit machine with a 64bit OS (which is true). I finally got it, but I guess the folk down at the IT department all know my name and hate me for not sticking with the rules.
In stock investing terms R&D is supposed to increase your revenue and cash flow. Thus if I invest 10 USD in R&D I should get at least a return of 10 USD. Anything below that means that the company is throwing money out the window.
Uh, no. In fact, your "stock investing terms" are quite sickening.
R&D is pretty much a black hole when it comes to money, but it is still an investment. Your are actually investing in the company's long-term future. You are investing in the possibility of being the leader in a product or market that doesn't exist yet (it eludes me how you expect R&D to pay for itself if there is no product and/or market). In the R&D you are looking for the product that will be your cash-cow in 10-20 years time. It may also be that you are trying to enter a market by making a product cheaper and/or better, but it will still not pay back for itself, just because even if your R&D is 100% successful, once they hit a home-run the product will be passed on to the engineering department and the R&D will get busy with the next thing. You will never see any money coming back from the R&D. Your revenue and cash flow have nothing to do with R&D. Disclaimer: some very large companies have "engineering R&D" departments that do aim in increasing your revenue, but this is no real R&D, because they occupy themselves with the improvement of your e.g. manufacturing line and their research is not that low-level.
I am not familiar with Microsoft's R&D, but the worst thing that can happen to an R&D is when the company's leaders lack vision. Then you actually do have a bunch of people in the R&D department playing around with this and that without concentrating their efforts. And, of course, it is improbable that something big will come out of this, even in the long term.
Your rule #3 is interesting. I haven't thought of that one. I was playing around with a solver, that when logic runs out falls back to trial and error (not brute force, it starts from boxes that only have 2 possible numbers etc.). I read further down in the comments that recursion is the key to this, so I will try this next.
Of course, this is just a hobby project, so it will take a while before it is complete.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody that knows his history agrees that you have to skip every second release of Windows. Windows 8 is not going to do much, but I don't really think MS is expecting it to. It is just an experiment to see how the home users will like it. If the home users like the new interface, and Windows 9 comes with Metro while MS drops support for Windows 7, then we can talk about how big a bet the new version of Windows is. As enterprises still haven't recovered the costs from moving to Windows 7 they will definitely not move to something new (even if the exact same interface is in place) as long as tech-support is offered. MS definitely knows this.
And, in my workplace, nobody likes the idea of an app-store either. Some people wanted to get a company iPad to show off at exhibitions (practically just to show potential partners our company's PR-presentation) and had to go through a lot of hassle in order be allowed to buy one. Our IT's problem was that the app-store opens up many security holes that can be used to steal confidential information (I don't know how this should work, but that is what they said). So if Win 8 comes with similar app-store "features" then that will just add to the reasons (or the excuses) for not upgrading.
Why do you think that a tablet/ebook-reader will be better than old-fashioned paper books? Especially if you don't travel much, I don't see any reason for having such a gadget (other, of course, than the joy of having a gadget). I also don't travel much (although definitely more than a lot of people) so I never had to carry more than one small paperback around to keep me company in the plane or the train (and I don't have to worry about it being charged, stolen, dropped down, sat on, having liquids spilled on it, etc).
Gadgets are good, but none is perfect in my opinion (paper books are also not perfect, by the way). I don't think that buying a gadget will somehow make you read more. Reading appetite comes from content not format. I have read great books in both paper and electronic form (even using a netbook, which is definitely not a good option). I have also dropped reading crappy books in both formats as well.
So the question should be: "I want to read more, What should I read?". If you insist on going electronic, as others pointed out above, the choice between a tablet and an ebook-reader can be better made based on what kind of books you will be reading (E-ink for black text on white background, i.e. novels, and tablet for graphic-rich colored books).
Giorgo, is that you?
On a more serious tone, and as others pointed out above, you should have provided us with more clues. Relocating is an issue with lots of variables that vary strongly in each case. Having said that, all tips that one can give you can only be vague/anecdotal at best. Here are mine:
1. I am Greek working in Germany for 7 years now. Whether you can feel safe economically here strongly depends on who you work for. I work for a large chemical company (>15.000 employes worldwide) and can't complain. However, we now hire only if we explicitly need to fill a vacant place.
2. My Greek family and friends from my school/university years are all over the globe: Germany, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Brazil, UK. Those that are still in Greece plan to go away. However, this should come as no surprise. Greeks always had the tendency to migrate (also for no apparent reason) and this can only be enhanced by an economic crisis.
3. Strangely, some friends that were in USA came back (before the crisis broke out). Personal reasons also came into play, but it seemed that the conditions in the USA were not overwhelmingly good so as to encourage their stay.
4. In Australia you first need to get a well paying job in order to qualify for a visa. You can't go there looking for a job as many would imagine. This is likely to be valid for other countries as well.
My 2 cents.
Not to speak of multi-touch apples...
Because often a BIOS tweak is needed to boot from the DVD. Either because the boot order needs to be changed, or because some safety setting needs to be turned off to allow booting from anything other than the OS partition. Many users would be overwhelmed by a task like this. Plus the fact that playing a game would mean having to reboot, which is a major pain in the ass.
Having said that, I would welcome such a product.
he would have had Seldon (in yet another prequel) speak of the Second Empire as a strange attractor
For the record, a prequel to the story as it stands would have to be before the "Prelude to Foundation". At that time, Seldon didn't even know that the First Empire was dying, so the Second Empire cannot even get mentioned.
I don't know what the frak is happening to software these days but it's making me take a hard look at whether it's worth dealing with the technical issues of linux.
Heck, it it gets any worse, I'll start learning how to write hardware drivers.
its all on a little UI button
...and now you know why I can use VIM better than Word.
Now get off my lawn.
automatic table of contents, templates for cover pages
Yawn. LaTeX. Plus, every humble ASCII-editor has spell-checking features. Except notepad.
dynamically-created diagrams
You mean like, dynamically created while the Fortran simulation runs in the background?
theme-based formatting when I paste in content from other sources.
You mean like when I press ctrl+V and freak out on the broken formatting that gets pasted together with my text? And like when I have to paste the text to an ASCII-editor to get rid of the formatting metadata and then ctrl+X/ctrl+V back to Word/Outlook to just paste some freakin' text?
I like that as a programmer I can use VBA to further extend the apps whenever I need to with a little bit of code hunting.
Ah, yes. I always rejoice when I see my VBA code broken after an Office update. I haven't touched that sluggish pile of crap called VBA for years. One of my students did and regretted within the week.
Here's your typewriter. I'll take Office 2013.
No I think I'll pass on both. I'll take VIM.
The ribbon is a rock solid interface
bing is awesome
Are you high? Or just trolling?
And an intermission! Here are the pros:
1. You can go to the toilet
2. You can comment on the film with your buddies, which is a no-no during the play.
3. You can go to the lobby and get yourself a treat (pun intended)
4. You can stretch your legs if the seats are crappy/you have a bad back etc.
5. This is a matter of personal taste: I liked how some directors planned the film's layout in order to accommodate an intermission. Stanley Kubrick pops to mind.
Here are the cons:
1. You get to hear crappy intermission music for 10 minutes.
So, why did the intermission die?
If your astronauts bite the dust, so does your mission. If you start saving on safety measures and something goes wrong, it will probably mean that you will also lose the transport vehicle along with all the equipment that the astronauts were supposed to use/deploy on their mission. Killing the astronauts is merely a corollary, albeit a tragic one. If you rig everything up so that the mission can go on in case of e.g. just a life-support equipment malfunction, then you would surely be on the cheaper side if you sent an unmanned mission in the first place.
Besides, I can surely imagine that the life of an astronaut is worth a lot of money, even if we neglect the value of human life per se. The life of an astronaut on the ground is worth, I would say, as much as his education and training, which is probably the most expensive a human being can receive in our culture. The life of an astronaut in space is all that, plus every dollar spent to manufacture every bit of equipment that he/she is carrying with him/her, because if he/she dies during the mission all that will just be a pile of junk in space. To that you may also want to add the cost of the next mission that will be sent to do what the first one didn't manage. And if you are still so stubborn and choose the cheapo life-support system to save a few bucks (compared to the total cost), you will have to factor in the cost of the next mission, and the next, and the next... In the end all that matters is "we spent X billion $ to manage Y". The more missions you spend on trying, the higher X will be.
In another tone, I don't really understand why it "doesn't count" to send unmanned missions in our stead. To the people that say that "we haven't been on mars", I just reply, "I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords".
I totally agree. When everyone on earth suddenly decides to take a swim all at the same time, the sea level will rise and drown us all! This wasn't a problem 2000 years ago, due to the smaller population.
You are right in every aspect, but you also have to factor in that this is was merely a student project. It serves extraordinary well as proof of concept. Now someone (perhaps MS?) needs to focus on it and improve it by making it able to translate the actual sign language gestures. If fingerspelling is possible, the jump to sign language should be not that hard.
Nobody said that Wikipedia is the ultimate source of information. But it has become a pretty damn good starting point, especially when compared to other encyclopedias. "Authoritative" sources are rarely encyclopedic. When the information you need becomes more specific, then you start looking in e.g. peer reviewed journals etc.
Yet the experts neglected putting up pictures showing e.g. how this material actually looks like, although, I am sure, their hard drives must be full of data. And I'm totally not interested in the soccer ball structure, this is the first thing you will see anywhere (just make a Google image-search). The Wikipedia article promptly displays a picture of C60 in crystalline form, a picture of C60 in solution and a SEM picture of fullerite. All pictures I can use in my own works, provided that I follow the instructions of their very permissive licenses. And if I want to be scientific about it, I can always follow the pictures back to the source and cite that directly. And don't even get me started on the Wikipedia article on "Buckminsterfullerene" which offers even more data, including CAS number, and material properties in the "infobox" that has its own citations (a lot of which are also found in my own bookmarks anyway). I'll take rich, traceable information over the dry words of some expert any day of the week.
Sorry, my post is slightly off-topic, but I found this remarkably interesting.
Britannica: Blunt text, almost no pictures, broken into 5 pages, the last two of which are junk. Surrounded by links that claim to be "relevant" (the 3 links on some dudes that are probably working on the topic are, I would say, quite irrelevant if someone wants to learn more on fullerenes and the ones on "carbon" and "cluster" are way too elementary to be of any use) and massive header/footer with yet more junk links. No citations in the article, the "Bibliography" section only lets you submit a publication for consideration without providing any information on what has already been considered and their "Citations" section is about how to cite their own article!
The Wikipedia article on the other hand, is on a single page, with lots of pictures, one of which is animated. There is a far more granular Table of Contents than in Britannica, with a discreet pane on "Nanomaterials" high up (offering elementary knowledge, even a "in popular culture" link) and a footer on "Allotropes of carbon" (offering more in-depth information). Translations in 30+ languages are to be found on the left. And there are 58 citations, a discussion page, 5 "further reading" links that are actually relevant and 10 or so external links, which can be directly translated into traffic that Wikipedia is generously streaming to 3rd party cites.
I have taken Wikipedia for granted for so long. I am SO donating next time.
how did you do your work on a 32 bit win xp machine but now need a 64 bit os?
I didn't. I used a 32bit XP box for Office-work and internet browsing and I logged in to a 64bit SUSE sever via PuTTY for doing serious work. But then I bought a 6-core desktop computer with 24 GB RAM and, of course, I just couldn't let the IT people just slap their 32bit Win7 image on it. It would just beat the purpose of having such a machine.
The company that I work for (non-IT) just decided to upgrade from WinXP to Win7, but they are still sticking with 32bit! What an insane decision. This means the lease of more than 10.000 brand new computers that will stubbornly cling to the past by refusing to make the step to 64bit. I had to raise my voice significantly, explicitly stating that I will not be able to do my work unless I get a 64bit machine with a 64bit OS (which is true). I finally got it, but I guess the folk down at the IT department all know my name and hate me for not sticking with the rules.
In stock investing terms R&D is supposed to increase your revenue and cash flow. Thus if I invest 10 USD in R&D I should get at least a return of 10 USD. Anything below that means that the company is throwing money out the window.
Uh, no. In fact, your "stock investing terms" are quite sickening.
R&D is pretty much a black hole when it comes to money, but it is still an investment. Your are actually investing in the company's long-term future. You are investing in the possibility of being the leader in a product or market that doesn't exist yet (it eludes me how you expect R&D to pay for itself if there is no product and/or market). In the R&D you are looking for the product that will be your cash-cow in 10-20 years time. It may also be that you are trying to enter a market by making a product cheaper and/or better, but it will still not pay back for itself, just because even if your R&D is 100% successful, once they hit a home-run the product will be passed on to the engineering department and the R&D will get busy with the next thing. You will never see any money coming back from the R&D. Your revenue and cash flow have nothing to do with R&D. Disclaimer: some very large companies have "engineering R&D" departments that do aim in increasing your revenue, but this is no real R&D, because they occupy themselves with the improvement of your e.g. manufacturing line and their research is not that low-level.
I am not familiar with Microsoft's R&D, but the worst thing that can happen to an R&D is when the company's leaders lack vision. Then you actually do have a bunch of people in the R&D department playing around with this and that without concentrating their efforts. And, of course, it is improbable that something big will come out of this, even in the long term.
The ironic thing would be to produce the stickers in China and then export them in USA to be glued on American products.
The sticker would then read "Made in USA" with a smaller "Made in China" under it. That will surely cause another Slashdot article.
Funny that you mention this.
I just bought a Ford made in Cologne, Germany.
Thanks for the feedback.
Your rule #3 is interesting. I haven't thought of that one. I was playing around with a solver, that when logic runs out falls back to trial and error (not brute force, it starts from boxes that only have 2 possible numbers etc.). I read further down in the comments that recursion is the key to this, so I will try this next.
Of course, this is just a hobby project, so it will take a while before it is complete.
source, or it didn't happen!
Does it also make guesses that are several levels deep? I found the bookkeeping involved rather overwhelming.
Can you post code?