Apple hasn't charged for OS X since Mavericks. Then they charged before Mavericks:

• 10.0 "Cheetah": $0
  I don't think there was a price as it was the first OS X to be installed on new machines.
• 10.1 "Puma": $129
• 10.2 "Jaguar": $129
• 10.3 "Panther": $129
• 10.4 "Tiger": $129
• 10.5 "Leopard": $129
• 10.6 "Snow Leopard": $29
• 10.7 "Lion": $29
• 10.8 "Mountain Lion": $19
• 10.9 "Mavericks": $0
• 10.10 "Yosemite": $0

He had Lasik and they messed up, but it was partly due to a pre-existing issue he had with his eyes. Now he has to take some medicine & eye drops every day.

Nope. While I agree that skeumorphism may have gone too far in previous designs, the shift to flat UI takes away from functionality sometimes. I want to clearly tell if something is touchable/clickable as opposed to nonfunctional text/graphics. All I can say is that it's not quite as bad as Metro/Modern. But that's not saying much.

I love how pretty much every country has come to the same conclusion: We can bypass our own laws if we have someone else do it for us.

There's nothing surprising in this. Most countries hire consultants and advisors from the same international legal/accounting firms, who themselves have been trained in the same schools of thought, and often the same universities. The international ascendancy is mostly a mono-culture.

See, the thing is, you're reading that I actually need .docx, which I haven't actually said anywhere

No I caught that, but decided to making the point that docx (actually the harder HR requirement to meet) is still a very low practical barrier.

But mate, cheers for the MS Office sales pitch.

By providing 3 ways to avoid buying it altogether? and one final way that costs less than a premium coffee?? Yeah... Microsoft is paying me well to shill for them, LAMO. :p

This one also works.

This is one won't get you laughed at like the ones in the list.

Most of which is not done by the surgeon. I've worked a lot with surgeons, and can assure you they are used to having other people do almost everything but surgery for them.

Surgeons are the equivalent of the "master programmer" team, which is a now mostly-obsolete team structure where there is one (or a very small number) of expert coders surrounded by a larger group of admin/build/whatever types who make sure the master programmer has nothing to do but code. It works on certain problems, but unlike surgery, the scope of what we expect software developers to do has grown far beyond what one person can handle in almost all interesting cases (I say this as a team of one who does everything from firmware to UI, but it is on a very narrowly defined embedded application that I've worked extremely hard to keep more-or-less within scope for a single very senior person.)

First off, what we can or cannot imagine has absolutely nothing to do with what is or is not real, so it isn't clear why you're bringing this up. Three hundred years of knowing what is real through publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference had demonstrated that the pre-scientific "method" of "imagining what might be the case and then reasoning from it" is a hiding to nowhere, knowledge-wise.

That said, as it happens I can imagine such an alternative history. One simple way of doing it is to have an intelligent species that evolved somewhat more quickly than we did on a planet formed in very short order after the supernova that birthed it exploded. Such a planet would have a good deal more 235U in the mix, making light-water moderated natural uranium nuclear reactors possible (of the kind that existed on Earth in at least one location 2 billion years ago).

An intelligent species on such a planet would likely never go down the hydro-carbon-fuels path, but would be all-nuclear, all-the-time from a very early stage of technological development (one presumes that in such an environment they would be evolved for somewhat higher radiation-tolerance than most terrestrial species.) As such, no hydrocarbon pollution would be evident.

Now, to be clear, I am not saying any of this is true. Merely that I can imagine it. There are quite possibly any number of subtle issues that make such a scenario impossible, and the failure of philosophy (knowing by imaging) tells us that we will be very hard-pressed to find them. But you asked for an imagining, and there one is.

and being financially challenged I'm doing the work from LIbre Office.

Ok, so your "financially challenged". I can accept that.

And lets suppose you need your resume in DOCX format as part of the application process. What do you do?

We're trying to do it on the cheap so...

a) Do you really not have a single friend, family member, or neighbor who has office who would be willing to allow you to load your ODF resume, clean it up, and save it as docx? Really? Not a single one?

b) Employment offices - around here there are all manner of taxpayer funded, and volunteer organizations to help people get jobs -- they provide resume assistance, job boards, etc... surely someone there can take your file and help you get a clean DOCX version.

c) Grace period. ok, you have no friends and there are no support mechanisms out there for you to lean on. There are plenty of versions that will run for 30 days grace period before they insist on activating. Several don't even require a key to be input during install. Download a VLA ISO via a torrent site and install it, get your DOCX and remove it. Don't even need cracks.

d) ok, you have no friends, no employment support groups, and you feel even taking advantage of the free grace period is too close to piracy for your strong sense of ethics. $7 bucks a month gets you office 365 personal edition. That's pretty cheap for a legal and DIY option. Skip a meal and haul a bag of aluminum cans to the recycler and you've got MS Office for few weeks, more than enough time to get a resume in order.

Not to be disrespectful to your or your current position, but I'm skeptical you really can't get a reasonable docx version of your resume that easily.

So you don't have $120 to drop on Office Home and Student right now, despite it being an "investment" in getting a job... but really ... you don't know anybody who has a copy who will help you out? Nevermind the other options I listed.

As for PDF... sheesh that's even easier. Assuming your word processor doesn't have the capability built in, or your operating system via the pritner subsystem. (OSX can save to PDF natively, as can Linux if you set it up. And there are several free PDF printer drivers for windows as well.)

But even if all that is too complicated or esoteric there are plenty of online document convertor websites that will take your document and give you a download link to a pdf version. Just google "word to pdf"... even a newbie can manage that or will at the very least know someone who can help them with that.

Getting stronger is subjective. If you analyze their performance, here's what you see: two divisions make up the majority of their revenue and profit. It appears to be Windows and Office. That is the same as 20 years ago.

• Division Gross Margin (% or revenue)
• Devices and Consumer Licensing: 93.8%
• Computing and Gaming Hardware: 1.25%
• Phone Hardware: 2.72%
• Devices and Consumer Other: 23:72%
• Commercial Licensing: 91.75%
• Commercial Other: 30.54%

However when it comes to hardware, MS barely makes any profit.

No. In fact it's absurdly difficult to reliably create reproducible builds.

Yes and no. Yes, absolutely, its absurdly difficult to create identical binaries, for the reasons you mentioned.

But you can pretty reasonably get close enough to make manual inspection of the differences easy enough. And as you said the differences are usually filepaths, hostnames, timestamps etc so one can identify the difference as benign pretty easily.

That's not good enough for general build reproducibility, but for one off code to binary verifications of key pieces its reasonable.

AC isn't about transmission easy, it is all about transformers and mechanical systems.

I guess it would be more correct to say that AC is easier to transmit *because* of the relative simplicity of transformers at the end points.

I know nothing about electricity

So you figured you'd post your suggestion on /. instead of attempting even the most cursory self-directed research. Gotcha. Laziness for the win.

Is it just that we're so used to designing electronics etc. to use AC, or are there other benefits?

Its easier to transmit long distances, at high voltages.
Its trivial to step up and down to different voltage levels via transformers. The equivalent in DC is not simple.

Mechanical AC generators are simpler and cheaper to build and maintain. And nearly all electicity is generated from mechanical sources (turbines).

Hydro and tidal are water driven turbines. Coal, wood, biomass (methane), natural gas, nuclear, even geothermal electricity are all "steam driving turbine" eleciticity generators, wind is an air driven turbine.

That leaves solar, which IS DC. Worldwide, like 0.2% of electricy is from solar.

Batteries too, are DC, but are charged nearly exclusively from AC sources.

then why not put effort into designing AC sources of electricity?

I guess so. I mean, only 99.8% of electricity comes from AC sources. Just imagine what they could do if they put some effort into designing some AC sources, right? :p

Erm...

"Effective 2014-06-18 Freecode is no longer being updated (content may be stale)"

Or were you making a joke that just whooshed by me?