15.36 or 16...
I do not care, I want one for my server!
896 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"Schools are supposed to teach kids stuff."
Obviously. But are basic good manners one of them? Sure they can help with that, specially in the "interacting with lots of people" kind of situations, but good parents/family should probably be the ones doing most of that otherwise. The blaming of schools for the lack of simple human interaction skills sometimes goes too far, methinks.
Unintelligible, or maybe I'm being slow due to Friday. So, why the hell did the cat have an SD card on its collar? How does that have anything to do with catching the guy?
It makes you wonder: if I have to go elsewhere to understand what happened, why read The Register in the first place? Damn lazy writers...
Agree with what you said there, but I do not think either "consumers" or "businesses" care about "Microsoft's dirty business practices", really. They use that stuff as an amoral tool, they have little choice in what to use, and could care less about the details of how that particular sausage was made. They don't even look for that info to begin with. Guys like you and me and I suppose most El Reg readers are the people who read these stories and know these things. Some of us do care -- but end up having to use the "evil stuff", whomever made it, anyway since their job demands it. But the populace out there? They just use whatever they need to and go home and don't (nor want to) think about it.
Hm... I suspect they use the implicit assumption that disease and poverty are solvable by technical means. Disease, in some cases (but not most), is indeed waiting for "technical" solutions. Poverty, on the other hand, is a purely socio-political problem, and no matter how much tech you throw at it, it will still be a problem until there is the real will to solve it. Resources are not lacking.
Now, is it reasonable to expect that a digital super-intelligence of some kind will manage to somehow convince humanity to end poverty and (most) diseases? Depends on your answer to the questions: are people rational enough? Are people good enough?
People seem to like very saturated, high contrast pictures. I see the same phenomenon in photography. After my photographer friends pass their shots through Lightroom, for example, they come out supersaturated and very sharply contrasted, I've noticed. That's always gets plenty of oohs and aahs -- and since I was sometimes there when the shot was taken, I know that the sunset looked nothing like that to the naked eye...
"[interface] sufficiently extreme that users had difficulty using apps and navigating the operating system"
Still seems to be the case, at least from my admittedly anecdotal evidence. I hadn't seen Windows 8 until about a month ago, when I went to a scientific conference where the laptop that was being used to feed the projector was running W8. Or maybe 8.1, don't know. Either way, it had that accursed tile interface.
What kind of surprised me was that everyone but one or two guys in the audience seemed to be baffled by the thing. Considering that it has been out for a couple of years, I had expected more people would be familiar with that. But whenever people accidentally fell out of PowerPoint, they would have no clue what to do to get somewhere familiar. Not even the "AV support guy" who was there seemed comfortable in it -- and the guy from the audience who knew would tell them from the back where to click. It would be funny if it hadn't been annoying.
Well, nearly. Even they have differences. Much fewer than two non-identical-twin siblings, of course, but they are not guaranteed to be identical. Examples:
Bruder, C. E. G. et al. Phenotypically concordant and discordant monozygotic twins display different DNA copy-number-variation profiles. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 82, 763–771 (2008).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18304490
Maiti, S., Kumar, K. H. B. G., Castellani, C. A., O’Reilly, R. & Singh, S. M. Ontogenetic De Novo Copy Number Variations (CNVs) as a Source of Genetic Individuality: Studies on Two Families with MZD Twins for Schizophrenia. Plos One 6, e17125 (2011).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21399695
Also, each gene can code for quite a few different proteins, due to various processes, starting with alternative splicing and taking off from there. Really cool stuff.
I'm also running 14.04 (LibreOffice 4.2.7.2) but in my system pressing the left Alt then iof (with or without shift, just in case) just brings down the insert, format, and file menus in quick succession. Pressing the right Alt then iof just gives alternative characters). Am I doing it the wrong way?
"What if you're a bit mad, like me, and keep your watch running a couple of minutes fast so you don't miss the bus, tram, train, boat or whatever?"
Problem is, besides being a bit mad, I'm also an adaptive bastard. So I got used to my watch being fast -- oh, that's OK, the watch is a few minutes fast, I've got time... Famous last words.
Well, the non-Retina iPad mini is much inferior hardware compared to the Nexus 7 (2013 and up), at least in my book. Starting with the screen, but much else too. So it would not be surprising if the prices were similar, obviously. But when both of them were new... The mini was grossly overpriced -- or the Nexus 7 2 grossly subsidized, if you wish...
Well, all nice and good, up to a certain extent. Otherwise, we get to a point where it is silly. Or, as a couple of complexity boffins said quite a few years ago now, "Don't model bulldozers with quarks". Now, finding that sweet spot is the real problem...
"I thought most non-Americans would be familiar with it via Warner Brothers' Yosemite Sam"
There are many people in the world who do not speak English as first language. And at least in mine the cartoon/movie characters usually do not have their original names, or even close. For example, if you do a literal translation of Bugs Bunny's name from my country's version of the cartoon back to English, you'd have "Long leg".
Before living in the US, I used to think that Yosemite rimed with mite...
Seriously? Unless you really need (it could happen, rarely) an app that is iOS only, that's a silly way of wasting money. Oh, right, the much better tablet that cost almost half this price that I bought a year ago does not have "that" logo on the back, so it is no good.
Er... no. Read again:
"the total slab market world-wide bounced 41.5 per cent year-on-year, those emblazoned with a certain fruit fell 9.2 per cent"
So, while growth is slowing down overall, Apple's share is getting smaller. For a while now, so not sure why the surprise. And no wonder. I for example bought a much better tablet for much less money than the equivalent Apple one would cost. So apart from people who are bound to the platform by some specific app that is critical and not available elsewhere, why pay more? Also, as people learn that they use tablets for surfing the Web and little else, as someone said, why again pay more? Status?
Source code. That's the thing. Software companies should be forced to release to the public domain any code that they stop supporting, so others can do so if there is demand for such service.
What do you say, the new OS is mostly old code? Well, if that's such a problem then why (rhetorical question) release a new version at all and kill the older one? If the new thing is so much more advanced and different, and not just some cosmetic crap sprinkled with a few worthy performance/security patches, why care about the old code, right?
I can't believe none of my fellow lusophones has added our contribution to such worthy linguistic matter. I can't believe it's even closer to butter either, but that's a different pet peeve. Either way, Camões' language deserves better! And the World Cup is upon us, so you need to know what to say over here, or at least to your telly when your favorite footballer scores nicely.
First of all, the literal translation of "mutt's nuts" wouldn't have the British meaning here in Brazil, at least in the regions I am familiar with (the country is huge and there are very strange idioms and sayings in other regions that are not intelligible in others, so who knows...). But fret not, we do have an equivalent genital-based expression to provide; a very naughty language, (Braz.) Portuguese.
The literal translation could be "as bolas do cão" (the dog's balls, where ão is a sound that is allegedly exclusive from Portuguese, and sounds sort of like what you get if you say "uh" followed by a deep "mmm", quickly and very nasally). If you don't want to wrestle with the damn ão, you can use "cachorro", which is another word for dog, but that would make the saying much less snappy, admittedly. Also, if you want to keep the mutt (as in "of mixed-breed") element in the saying, use "vira-lata" (literally "turn-can", a dog who lives in the streets messing with trash cans to get food).
We have other ways to refer to the gonads, so you could also use "o saco" (the sac, scrotum) or
"os ovos" (the eggs) instead of "as bolas". I never promised it would be easy, or even less that it would be succinct. Not my style.
Now, the genital-based expression I promised earlier is "do caralho" (where "lho" is like the Italian "glio", i.e. something like "ly-oh" said quickly in English). It is somewhat NSFW (although we're not very shy with the swearing down here, and you might be surprised with what you can hear at work), and it literally means "of the cock", but not of the avian kind, obviously. When a Brazilian says something is "do caralho!", or the shortened version, "duca!", pronounced doo-kah, streess on the doo, as in booing, it means... it's the mutt's nuts. The species of the owner of the "caralho" is not specified here, but the meaning is still the same.
Assuming the numbers are even correct to begin with. Color me cynic, but they are coming from a site called wmpoweruser (originally, from a "mobile payment company", done who knows how and subjected to who knows what inherent biases). Looks like an ad (hot on the heels of iPhone, really?). Genetic fallacy? Maybe, but I'd rather see something more substantial before drawing any conclusions.
From the little I have learned of the physics and dynamics of this, I seem to recall that weathering of the carbon from the atmosphere takes several hundreds of thousands of years. So, unless we invent an efficient way to scrub it off the air, things won't improve a bit EVEN if we do quit being stupid right now and stop using that tiny atmosphere of ours as a rubbish dump.
It seems to be widespread, then. My graphic designer friends all rant about all the "for-exposure" work they get offered to perform. You know: "I don't have the budget right now, but if this business takes off hundreds, maybe thousands of people will see your work. All you need is to design this logo/flier/website/whatever for me". Amazingly enough, some designers must still believe that is a good deal.